0:00:00.3 Natasha Lannerd: And if you really want to make a shift in your life, you have got to cultivate that witness, that part of you that is always coming from a place of compassion and curiosity, nonjudgmental, it’s not about ragging on yourself, it’s about being endlessly curious with what’s going on in your own mind.
0:00:26.5 Natasha Lannerd: Hey, I’m April Pride, your host on The High Guide Podcast. This is a show for women who have an open and curious mind, and this is a show all about women changing their lives, thanks to altered states. You just heard from Natasha Lannerd, our high guide who this season is teaching us to cultivate the witness while we’re in an altered state of consciousness so that we can replace judgment and shame with curiosity and compassion. Have you ever wondered, “How do I avoid a bad trip?” An obvious but oft overlooked reason our trips can go “bad” is how our bodies show up for us in this vulnerable state. So we’ll talk about the physical component of a trip for sure. Another way to steer clear of the drugs doing you dirty or staying in a playful space during a trip is conjuring up a healthy dose of curiosity versus attaching judgment to what will inevitably come up.
0:01:22.1 April Pride: On this episode, it’s time to journey with our sister trippers, finally. We are gonna get into listening to each of our sister trippers share how their trips began, and in individual follow-up episodes, you’ll hear the extended dialogue between Natasha, our high guide, and each woman as she integrates her experience after taking two grams of psilocybin mushrooms. But before we get into the trippy part, remember to stay to the almost end for our trip tips and remain after I sign off because we’ll end every episode this season with a 10-minute excerpt from one of the high guide’s very own guided psychedelic audio journeys produced in partnership with Patch Works.
0:02:06.7 April Pride: All the sounds you’ll hear throughout this episode are sampled from A High Guide’s Journey number three, featured in Episode 28 of this podcast. And I chose this audio because its title is exactly the energy I hope that you bring to your psychedelic journey: Tripping to Trust Your Gut. So find a quiet spot, put on some headphones and listen to this short sample with a simple intention of telling yourself that you trust yourself because confidence can be cultivated. And speaking of cultivating, that which will serve us best, this brings us to our word of the week, and by word, I mean more of a phrase, which is cultivating the witness. You’ve heard me talk about this throughout our previous episodes, and if I were to set an intention for our, dear listeners, journey together this season, it is to make sure that when we finish here, each of you can appreciate the importance of this practice in your psychedelic experiences and IRL. Rather than paraphrase or cut this crucial principle short, I went straight to the source of such wisdom of cultivating the witness, Ram Das. The following are his words taken directly from his website, which I’ve linked to in the show notes for this episode.
0:03:26.3 April Pride: So I’m quoting here. “One way to get free of attachment is to cultivate the witness consciousness, to become a neutral observer of your own life. The witness placed inside you is simple awareness, the part of you that is aware of everything, just noticing, watching, not judging, just being present, being here now.” He wrote a book about that too. “The witness… ” I’m still quoting. “The witness is actually another level of consciousness. The witness coexists alongside your normal consciousness as another layer of awareness, as the part of you that is awakening. Humans have this unique ability to be in two states of consciousness at once. Witnessing yourself is like directing the beam of a flashlight back at itself. In any experience, sensory, emotional or conceptual, there’s the experience, the sensory or emotional or thought data, and there’s your awareness of it. That’s the witness, the awareness. And you can cultivate that awareness in the garden of your being.” I’m still quoting. [chuckle] He continues, “The witness is your awareness of your own thoughts, feelings and emotions.”
0:04:41.3 April Pride: “Witnessing is like waking up in the morning and then looking in the mirror and noticing yourself, not judging or criticizing, just neutrally, observing the quality of being awake. The process of stepping back takes you out of being submerged in your experiences and thoughts and sensory input and into self-awareness. Along with that self-awareness comes the subtle joy of just being here alive, enjoying being present in this moment. Eventually floating in the subjective awareness, the objects of awareness dissolve and you’ll be able to come into the spiritual self, the “atman”, which is pure consciousness, joy, compassion, the one. The witness is your centering device. It guides the work you do on yourself. Once you understand that, there is a place in you that is not attached. You can extricate yourself from attachments. Pretty much everything we notice in the universe is a reflection of our attachments.”
0:05:44.7 April Pride: I included that entire, it’s the entire webpage, [chuckle] because this is the point of this season, learning to understand why we are the way that we are and not judge ourselves for being that way. If after these wise words from Ram Dass, you’re still like, “But April, what does this mean? How does this play out in real life?” sister tripper Adelia Carrillo offers a perfect example of what it looks like to attach negative emotions to our behavior and how that can affect our experiences while under the influence.
0:06:23.3 Adelia Carillo: I had a journey the other weekend with my partner, and I think it was like I felt like everything I tried to do didn’t work out. I tried to make sure we had snacks. I tried to do all these things and the snacks ended up not being done right or whatever… I don’t know, it was just like everything… So I guess it’s just, how do you reel yourself… I mean do you reel yourself back in for something like this, or do you just allow yourself to kinda go through those emotions? If let’s say I do these setups and it doesn’t work out and it starts to bring me down that path, do I just allow myself to kind of connect and say, “Why do I care so much that it’s almost like letting go of that… ” I don’t know. It was just an interesting thing I ran into.
0:07:08.4 Natasha Lannerd: Well, this is the thing that I think is so amazing about these experiences, and the more you do them, the more you’re gonna be aware of this is cultivating that witness within yourself.
0:07:18.5 April Pride: And Natasha continues by explaining how we’re conditioned to define the things that happen in our lives.
0:07:25.0 Natasha Lannerd: Well, and I think so much of our culture, it’s all… It has really been predicated around straitjacketing it. Right? Like, “Oh, I feel grief, I gotta tie this buddy up,” or “Oh, I feel joy, I gotta really get it together.” And in an opportunity like this, with psychedelic experience, it’s the exact opposite. By feeling something fully, giving it a 100% of your attention, it just opens the door for death that you would not get otherwise. And something I spend a lot of time in contemplation with is around cultivating the witness in yourself. Like can you give yourself that awareness of just witnessing, not judging, not attaching, just full witnessing? And it can be very, very rewarding and incredibly powerful in my personal experiences and the experiences that I’ve seen with other people too.
0:08:24.6 April Pride: The language that Natasha uses in her self-talk when she’s in a witness state is very matter-of-fact.
0:08:32.6 Natasha Lannerd: I know that that’s not who I am in the core. I’m just experiencing this right now. And I’m not gonna judge it. I’m just gonna let it unfold, see what it has to show me.
0:08:41.8 April Pride: Natasha further explains the difference between witnessing and fixating.
0:08:46.8 Natasha Lannerd: If you can take that mentality of that level of presence into a psychedelic experience, that’s how you get stuff out of it because you don’t get caught up in the content. That’s the breaking through. If you would lay on a mat for five hours and replay the most horrible things that have ever happened to you before until you return to some point of sobriety, that’s not breaking through because you’re not able to get anything… You’re not able to learn anything. You’re not able to glean any insight from it ’cause you’re so caught up in your loop.
0:09:17.4 April Pride: Does that make sense? To know what is true and allow yourself to be consumed by the horrors of it, re-living a trauma for instance, isn’t the most compassionate or effective way for us to move forward. We’re stuck in a loop. It reminds me of a scene from Fantastic Fungi, legendary mushroom cultivator and advocate Paul Stamets relays his psilocybin trip while in high school that cured him of his stutter. While tripping, he asked himself something to the effect of, “Why do you do that? You really should stop doing that.” It doesn’t say it in a way that’s judgmental, he just matter-of-factly, “You should really stop doing that.” And the reason he wanna just stop doing that was because there was a girl that he liked that he really wanted to talk to her. He came out of this trip having shed his lifelong stutter. He didn’t stay in the loop of all the ways his stutter had held him back and forward trip of how it would always do so, and then spiral on what a life with a stutter will look like. He got curious and he cared himself. Just as Natasha has explained in this series, the point of integration in cultivating the witness is to allow us to tap into the healer within.
0:10:27.7 April Pride: This is the only way it happens. We decide when, and trips take our ego offline long enough to assign new thinking to our old shit. In a previous episode, number 44, Growth Mindset Tripping, we discussed the ways in which mental training can lead to emotional strength. This doesn’t ceased being important the day of your planned trip. Keeping your mindset strong and clear is important on the day of your journey. Since Lalin and Maria are intending to commune with their ancestors, Natasha offers this advice:
0:11:01.9 Natasha Lannerd: You begin your day with your ancestors. When you’re drinking your coffee in the morning, that would be when I really invite them in and really start to form that connection and… I think one of the things that I personally do, which can be kind of helpful in these types of scenarios, is like, “Show me… How will I know that you’re here or whatever?” like inviting them to make their presence known in a loving and gentle way. And then from there, obviously, as you prepare yourself for your ceremony, then that energy is already in the mix and they can kind of help guide you, and then you have an opportunity also too to really open up that channel and touch down into that connection in a deeper way.
0:11:44.8 April Pride: Although Maria’s plan was to take her dose in the afternoon, she committed the entire day upon waking to her set and setting.
0:11:52.6 Maria: I’ll run you through the day, ’cause I think it was just really important for me to go into it with a very… Obviously an open mind, but being really mindful of my headspace the whole day, so waking up, doing a good work out, treating myself to a delicious breakfast that I cooked and all the while just kinda taking my time and not rushing through my day.
0:12:17.0 Maria: And then I went to get flowers and everything to build the altar as you’d suggested. And yeah, it was really nice ’cause I find that I tend to rush through my day and that’s something that I really wanted to work through. So being incredibly mindful that day helped just keep me in a very calm, even-keeled space, and then yeah putting the altar together was really relaxing, meditative. And I chose to take the medicine during the day, around 2:30 PM, just ’cause I wanted that afternoon sun, I wanted to go on a walk.
0:12:55.8 April Pride: Remember what we discussed in the previous episode on setting. You can start your trip outdoors, then retire inside when your thoughts and energy want to turn inward.
0:13:06.7 Maria: The playlist you made me, I’m like…
0:13:11.7 Maria: That was just, I think, the best part, ’cause I ended up spending the majority of my experience kind of like laying in bed with my eyes closed, just listening to the music, and where during that time it’s just… It’s crazy how with your eyes closed, it’s almost like you’re seeing dreams or you’re feeling emotions that you’ve never felt or… There was one song in particular, and this is gonna sound wacky, but it had very mythical vibes to it, and almost like, I think the way and what I was kind of seeing was being like on a viking ship and I was just kind of like Viking captain, red-headed, like… [chuckle] But in terms of the imagery, I could see being on a boat and the water rushing through and feeling the kind of wind, like the gusts of wind, and I think it was more like the feeling of being on a quest, I guess, was just really present. I have to say that water is definitely something that comes up a lot when I’m going on these journeys, especially when I’m, with eyes closed, I just feel this movement, and yeah, also the breeze, like that happens often.
0:14:33.8 Natasha Lannerd: Beautiful.
0:14:34.9 Maria: Yeah.
0:14:36.2 Natasha Lannerd: So I’m curious if you would be open to it, of elaborating a little bit more about what came up you were saying in this Viking imagery.
0:14:45.4 April Pride: Although we’ll listen to more about Viking Maria and the significance of symbolism and imagery related to water and wind that she experienced during her trip, you’ll have to tune in to her integration episode coming up later this season. For now, Maria’s trip continues.
0:15:02.9 Maria: Yeah, [chuckle] I was working through issues with my son, we had a tumultuous relationship. Yeah, it was… With the son, that was more of like a feeling. I never actually saw the son, but like…
0:15:15.1 Natasha Lannerd: I was gonna say, “Do you have a child?”
0:15:16.3 Maria: No. [chuckle]
0:15:17.6 Natasha Lannerd: Okay.
0:15:19.5 April Pride: When I heard this, I was so thrilled to have it on tape because one day, Maria will probably have a son. Natasha offered this on Maria, not actually seeing her “son”.
0:15:31.0 Natasha Lannerd: As it’s not necessarily a scene… A scene sense experience doesn’t mean you can’t have a sensory experience otherwise.
0:15:39.1 April Pride: This same sentiment applies to communing with our ancestors. The definition of spirit is the non-physical part of a person, which is the seat of emotions and character, the soul. As we know, you cannot see what is not physically there, but that doesn’t mean you’re not aware of its essence, which is defined as the intrinsic nature or indispensable quality of something, especially something abstract that determines its character. You may recall that communing with ancestors was the intention set by both Maria, who you just heard from, and you’ll hear more about that in her integration episode, our other sister tripper, Lalin, was looking to do the same.
0:16:18.7 Lalin: My intention was just to connect on a spiritual level, to be open to any messages that my ancestors may have for me or to seek any guidance, also to feel whatever feelings could possibly come up. I was in Greenville, which is surrounded by redwoods, and I could see the redwoods out my window and that was just amazing feeling the energy. I went outside and saw a bajillion stars ’cause it was totally dark.
0:16:58.5 April Pride: Like Maria, Lalin split the time of her psychedelic journey between indoors and outside. Also, like Maria, she set up an altar.
0:17:08.6 Lalin: I set up an altar with flowers, a cup of water. I did have a couple of candles…
0:17:18.0 April Pride: Tsk, tsk, Lalin.
0:17:23.2 Lalin: I took the shrooms. I did do the Lemon Tek.
0:17:27.1 April Pride: For those of you wondering what the Lemon Tek is, listen to episode 43 in this podcast for ways you can prepare the psilocybin mushrooms to dial in the potency and onset. I can so relate to the fumbles Lalin shares with us in the following.
0:17:43.5 Lalin: I forgot the grinder, so there was… [chuckle] I just try to cut them up as small as I could. So I was a little nervous about that, figuring that, “Okay, I don’t know if I’m doing this right. I don’t know if it’s gonna be effective.” There were a few little stumbles along the way, but…
0:18:04.7 Natasha Lannerd: That’s what makes it fun.
0:18:06.9 Lalin: Right? So yeah, and then I lost some of the… I was like trying to… Yeah, I don’t need to go into the details, but… So there’s just some stumbles. I ended up chewing, just eating them after I drank the juice ’cause I just wasn’t sure if I had… I don’t know. I just wasn’t sure. And then I forgot my gingered chews.
0:18:34.0 April Pride: Going back to what Adelia shared earlier in this episode, and the intention I’ve set for us this season, witness, just witness the fact that the grinder didn’t make it. Shit happens, like shrooms that taste like shit stuck in your teeth, but hey, this is not the time to attach emotions of failing, being a failure and forever doomed to fail. We all know how spilled milk and lost grinders can end in our lives never amounting to anything, at least not with us at the helm. Okay, the gingered chews though, witnessing the fact that you forgot them and showing your self-compassion for a mistake doesn’t mean you’ll skirt the physical consequences, their presence was intended to avoid. Lalin unfortunately succumbed to shroom stomach.
0:19:25.5 Lalin: It was a bit of a discomfort in the beginning, and I just allowed myself to rest, and I laid in bed and I actually couldn’t even really listen to music, I just laid in silence, [laughter] just like laid there and kind of observed my thoughts coming in and out, and next thing I know, I think over some time, that’s when I could start to feel the effects coming on, noticing things that are beyond where it’s… In my… Behind my eyeballs. [chuckle] These like some images. I did get a sense of feeling a little underwater in a good way, and then… But because of also some of the bodily sensations, I resorted to singing, which I probably would have done anyway, but that kind of helped me to feel better, so I would just sing and, I sing acapella for a while, and I sung about this healing and…
0:20:47.1 Lalin: Yeah, basically healing myself. And there actually unexpectedly, there was a piano, a keyboard in the room. So I also just ended up playing around on the keyboard and singing, just whatever came to mind, I interjected with lots of strange moans because it’s just like the feelings of the waves just felt a lot from my body. It wasn’t even a visually intense or anything, it’s just yeah, just intense in the body. When I was starting the trip, I knew that I wanted to listen to someone named So Anne who is a Haitian voodoo Singer, and I didn’t know what exactly… And I happened to have Spotify on my computer, so I just opened Spotify. There was one album, and the first song was called ‘Marasa’, which symbolizes twins in the Haitian pantheon of the spirits, the lua. So my mom is a twin, and I have lots of twins on my maternal side, and so it’s believed that when you have twins in your family, that part of the spirits that you serve are the divine twins. My mom’s twin passed away many, many years ago, before I even had a chance to meet him, he was in Haiti, but I felt… It was a way to really connect with him. I could feel a sense that I hadn’t really felt before, I just…
0:22:47.9 Lalin: All of a sudden, I could feel that he has been with me, that he has been helping support me, and so I just felt the channeling of that healing energy, and I played the song probably a 100 times, I just had it on repeat singing to the Marasa just really thinking about the blessings in my life and how… And the healing in my life and how they’ve really been a part of that, and that’s when I fell asleep too, I had my speaker in my bed and just I crawled up beside it, and just listened to the magnificence of the drumming and the singing and yeah, after I just felt really comforted, really held, and other things came up just around… Just taking care of myself and how to keep healing, how to keep fostering my communication with the Earth and I think feeling unwell made me think about just making sure that I’m taking good care of myself and eating right and doing all these things, but the only thing that comes to mind is, I do wonder if the discomfort has to be a part of it, I know I forgot my ginger chews. And maybe it is, maybe it is a part of the process. And that’s maybe just life that you can’t fully have one thing without the other.
0:24:45.8 April Pride: As you might imagine, Natasha knows a thing or two about the meaning behind Lalin’s physical discomfort, which we’ll hear her address in Lalin’s upcoming integration episode. For the purposes of better understanding our body and our trip, Natasha has this to say.
0:25:03.3 Natasha Lannerd: When we get into these very elevated altered states, that the physical discomfort is sometimes a reminder of just the basics of humanity, you have a body, that doesn’t mean that it’s not uncomfortable. Other part too that I’ve witnessed in my experiences holding space for other people, is that sometimes physical discomfort is a sign or a symbol or a calling or an urge to move some energy.
0:25:34.3 April Pride: As we learned in the first episode this season, in addition to facilitating sacred plant ceremonies Natasha is a certified breathwork facilitator. She explains how our breath can help us stay calm while tripping.
0:25:46.8 Natasha Lannerd: I really think that breath work is such a powerful tool, and it is a subtle magic until it’s not subtle, it’s incredibly powerful, it’s just not the type of in your face power, the thing that people necessarily associate with that. And I can’t really think of a better tool. The more aware we are of our breath, because that’s the presence thing, like breathing is an automatic bodily function, as long as you’re alive, you’re breathing, but that doesn’t mean that you are present of your breath. And also too, when you think about it just from a pure science perspective, like the nerves that activate the parasympathetic nervous system are lower in the lung, that’s why when you breathe deeply, you feel calm, is because it’s hitting all of those nerves and allowing you to reset your nervous system into that rest and digest, having the ability to realize that a lot of what we’re experienced and could easily be remedied by simply being aware of and taking some level of presence in our breath. It becomes very powerful.
0:27:01.5 April Pride: Speaking of very powerful, you may recall from episode 44 that our final sister tripper Adelia is working through the emotional pain of the challenges she and her partner are facing trying to conceive a child. Trust me, this is definitely a powerful trip that started off simply as planned.
0:27:21.8 Adelia Carillo: So I set up my office, I made it like a whole little thing, I got pillows, coloring books, all the things that I think I would want for that time period, and I got a great playlist. And I took the recommended dosage, so it was golden teachers, the two grams.
0:27:41.6 April Pride: And then…
0:27:43.9 Adelia Carillo: Wow. Is the first thing that I gotta say is just, Wow, I have not experienced anything like that, but it’s like a crazy story of what all went down. I think I’ll just go into it.
0:27:58.5 Natasha Lannerd: Yeah, so let’s start with what happened and then we’ll go into the part of the meaning of it?
0:28:04.6 April Pride: In Adelia’s integration episode, she and Natasha go into the meaning of it, but on this episode, we get to hear the, this shit only happens when you’re high specifics. Take it away Adelia.
0:28:18.8 Adelia Carillo: I went through so much, I went, I cried tears of grief and just sadness and just like through all the loss that have come over the years, it just… I was able to just let it go in a different way than I haven’t been before, I wasn’t able to, and so that was just… It was amazing, and then I would go into these different kind of peaks, so it would be a little bit the sadness, just crying, letting it all out, and then it would be filled with just like beauty and love, and the tears would be happy, and then there were waves again, to where it would just be like I was overcome with just, I guess sexuality, just empowered embodied within my body that it was just the craziest thing, it was just… I kept saying, I’m no longer afraid of the what the future might hold for with my pregnancy stuff, just because it has been such an up and down and filled with loss that I was just more of a… I’m confident now with my body, I’m in love with my body, just all these things that were happening, so this is all going on in my office, my partner took mushrooms as well, he had a different strain.
0:29:37.8 Adelia Carillo: Apparently, after that, I go in there and he’s like, “I don’t know what you were doing”, he’s like, “but your energy”, he’s like, “I felt the walls shaking.” He’s like, “You are powerful. You are powerful. And I’m like, “What? What happened?” So he could feel some sort of energy, he literally had this whole moment where when I think I was over here thinking about pregnancy and my body and everything, and he actually was in that moment where he felt like he was being reborn, he went into the bathtub and he was like, I felt like I was in… He was the baby. It was so weird, we had no idea we were talking about… We were both thinking of anything around that realm of things, and he was thinking of it that way, and I was going through it, it was crazy. I needed it. [chuckle] Just that whole having the conversation with you before and putting it in my mind of just listening to my body, you know, not with my head wanted at the time, just my body really allowed me to just have a completely different experience than I’ve felt before it lasted longer and…
0:30:48.5 Adelia Carillo: But also two, I have not taken a… I haven’t taken two grams before, I’ve done about 1.5, so it was larger, so I’m like, “Okay, that makes sense. Why it was longer?” No, it was just… Honestly, I just felt like the biggest… The other part that I just felt really powerful was just the empowerment, I just felt like I could become a little bit of good energy out there to share with others while I’m here kind of thing, and so I ended up texting a bunch of my girlfriends some like little sentence that was just an empowering sentence, to honor themselves kind of thing, I’m like, “Oh my gosh, I don’t know why I did it.” But it was just those little things of just filling all the emotions, allowing to feel empowered, allowing to feel very beautiful and allowing to feel even the pain, it was… Yeah. I went through a lot.
0:31:42.5 April Pride: Adelia definitely went through a lot of things. Yes, the kind of things that, like I said, only happen when you’re high, all trips include going through a lot of things, so how do you keep track of what arises while you’re tripping?
0:31:58.1 April Pride: Maria was also curious about this and addressed it with Natasha during her intake.
0:32:03.8 Maria: I have a question if, obviously, during the whole experience, sometimes it would be hard to journal some stuff, I’m sure if words come out, I can write stuff down, but would you recommend after the experience and I feel more settled and within my body, should I kind of jot down what I went through so that in our integration set session, I can go through that.
0:32:23.7 Natasha Lannerd: So one of the things for me personally, when I am journeying, I always have my journal next to me, it doesn’t… I don’t write sentences because one of the things you just wanna be mindful of is you don’t want to hyper-engage the cognitive mind in this because you kinda shut the experience down, so usually what comes to me in these experiences and what is helpful… Exactly what you’re saying. Words, [0:32:49.2] ____ and maybe if it’s just a phrase or something like that, and then I will just go through and just kind of dump them out as they come through. And then one of the things that you could do it at the end of the night.
0:33:00.8 Natasha Lannerd: I think the other thing too is looking at it fresh thing in the morning and being like, Alright, what was really sticky out of all of this stuff you’re like, What are these themes that… Looking at this from a fresh eye, I feel like had a particular depth… The other thing that can be helpful with doing that too, is it allows more of the experience to unfold in the dreamscape.
0:33:19.5 April Pride: Like Natasha I too keep a journal handy when a journey. To say that what I’ve recorded on the page is chicken scratch about sums it up. Yes, they’re words that I use to help guide my integration, but often, like Adelia, I find that I’m reminding myself to connect with a person who’s come up on the page will be a name, and usually that’s enough to urge me to reach out. I don’t always remember the specifics of what came up during the trip related to this person, but a simple, “Hey, I was thinking about you during a very rare moment of hyper-focused intentionality, and I just wanted you to know… That has all the makings of a powerful message that connects deeply with someone you care about, I know when friends have shared this with me, when I’ve jumped into their thoughts while tripping, “Hey surprise”, it’s usually attached to well wishes and warm emotions. The other thing that my notes include is stuff that was shrouded in urgency and emotion, but in reflection the next day, I felt more ‘huh’ about my transcription in at least one case, something that seemed mundane and ‘meh’ proved significant in the months that followed.
0:34:30.7 April Pride: And I attribute this to the medicine reminding me that intuition is often about small thoughts and to not dismiss how we feel about something, that’s a little as say, “Should I stay in this hotel, or should I stay in an Airbnb?” If your gut says to Airbnb it, then you show up and the host has a book on the coffee table that inspires a current creative project. This is how intuition works, and do you know how I feel about tripping? It has been a vital modality in both fostering and affirming how much I can and do trust myself and my decisions. Since we’ll begin moving into each sister trippers integration next week. Let’s close out this episode with trip tips that outline the questions, the three main phases of tripping entail, intention setting, journeying and integration. Natasha is gonna set this up for us.
0:35:28.7 Natasha Lannerd: And so the intentionality is really what focuses a whole range from our body to our mind, to our soul, to whatever is like… What are we doing? Like let’s say my intention, my intention is to feel a greater connection to the essence that is beyond my human form. Okay, that’s what I’m doing here. Okay, so then the how? How am I gonna do that? I am going to set up a beautiful place in my home, that is comfortable, that is warm, that is say, and I am going to, for the next four hours dedicate myself to the experience that unfolds from taking whatever medicine it may be. So I got my why why am I doing this? I got my how, how am I gonna do it? And then really the integration is the what… What came up?
0:36:26.4 April Pride: Okay, to repeat, our trip tips, we start out setting an intention to answer the question, “What are we doing”, then we move into the psychedelic journey itself, and this is the modality that answers, how am I gonna do that? By tripping. And lastly, integration is the time to reflect on our time under the influence, what came up? Before signing off with Lalin and Natasha shared these final words.
0:36:54.6 Natasha Lannerd: The one last thing I will say to you, that I say to everyone that I work with is that in the realm of infinite possibilities… Anything is possible, right? Yeah, that magic, that you’re talking about is real.
0:37:10.0 April Pride: These are words to listen to, write on a piece of paper, and add to your altar, recite as your mantra in the days preceding your trip, and as a daily affirmation. I’m gonna repeat it, in the realm of infinite possibilities, anything is possible. Magic is real. Thank you for listening to this episode of the High Guide. I’m your host, April Pride. Please tune in next week when we meet our three sister trippers, as they prepare for their psychedelic journey. Please check out our website, thehigh.guide for more information on the high guide and for this episode show notes. And remember to rate and review the show on Apple Podcast, give us a heart on Spotify. It really does help more people find the show. I leave you with a 10-minute sample from the High Guide site audio series. You’re listening to the Psychedelic audio journey number three, featured in Episode 28 and produced in partnership with Patchworks. See you on the other side.
