Unofficial Vital Student ‘Zine
Notes from Vital Psychedelic Training class of ‘23
Revenge of the Shadow
The Shadow’s back! Plus sidekicks Golden Shadow, Collective Shadow, Cultural Shadow, Anti-Shadow…
Just when you thought it was safe to step into the sunshine – the Shadow’s back! With its sidekicks Golden Shadow, Collective Shadow, Cultural Shadow, Anti-Shadow and your Anima alone knows what else…
‘Memorabilia’ by Luna Ikuta showing at Wavelength: A Momentary Spring, Beijing Times Art Museum China till 1 July
Thought integrating ‘the parts of you that you’re most ashamed of and keep hidden’ was the trickiest part of Jungian shadow work?
You may be unsurprised to learn that the cycles are just beginning.
There’s the ‘golden shadow’.
This includes the silver linings that inevitably accompany the regular shadow’s negative traits.
Plus perhaps more importantly the agreeable and positive aspects that we’ve smothered. We might suppress compassionate urges to appear indifferent (hard and cool in other words).
"We take the collective shadow and make it our own”
Sounds reasonably clear-cut.
Yet be wary of discriminating between the golden shadow and the murky, original one. “The ‘positive vibes only’ culture is anti-shadow,” says says Jungian analyst Dr Ido Cohen, lecturing in Vital’s shadow work lecture series, "what might be happening that oppresses the shadow?”
That’ll be ‘the collective shadow’. It’s the one who also nailed Christ to the cross, and willingly elects dictators. "We take the collective shadow and make it our own,” Dr Cohen expands.
“We can absorb the collective shadow, or become numb to it,” adds Dr Portal. Likewise we might celebrate our outsider status; just as psychonaut heads like to do. Should we attempt union? Or consolidate independence?
“What does integration look like?” says Dr Ido Cohen, “Moving away from these systems and creating something new? Or is it taking pieces of the experience and carrying forth?”
British christian ecologist Paul Kingsnorth has a stark view on navigating shadow work. ‘Sacrifice and surrender are at the heart of faiths,’ he points out, ‘Nobody wants this. But maybe it’s what we have to do?’
Serving up more Integration articles here on New Psychonaut:
Heoric Doses of Reality
Peak existence is the new peak experience, says 5-MEO DMT expert Dr Malin Vedøy Uthaug.
Peak existence is the new peak experience, says 5-MEO DMT expert Dr Malin Vedøy Uthaug
By Trulee Hall from ‘Plays on Foreplays’, at Rusha & Co, Los Angeles, February 4 till March 11, 2023
The strictest lesson psychedelics taught me, is that they themselves are not important. It’s lived experience that is.
I don’t mean a Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers existence. (Although I am all for that too, especially as part of some ‘path of excess leading to the palace of wisdom’ thing). I mean stuff like Dr Malin Vedøy Uthaug does.
The 5-MEO DMT research maven took up free diving while stuck in, y’know, Egypt during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I believe our society has emotional constipation. We need to get that shit out”
This helped over come her fear of deep open water – ‘thalassophobia’ – and since she’s set two free diving records in her native Norway.
“I believe our society has emotional constipation. We need to get that shit out,” says the firebrand, who’s swift to remind us that “different diets lead to a different psychedelic experience,” certainly according to plant medicine purists.
This is felt on the material plane: “Putting the body back into the equation, is the way forward,” Dr Uthaug claims.
This could mean bioenergetic therapy to encourage consciousness ‘integration’ on a physical level. Or… actually doing things as opposed to just talking about them.
“Changes need to be actively translated into your life,” says Dr Uthaug… which admittedly is likely to mean unexpected challenges, hard truths, and personal growth generally earned the hard way as per usual.
“In the light of day, insights are about lifestyle”
The trip is only part of the healing. You do the rest with the actions you undertake. That the mushroom or whatever told you to do.
“A more holistic framework is what I’d love to see going forward, here in the space,” says Dr Uthaug, “Take an exaggerated example: when an addict take a psychedelic, they realise, oh, I shouldn't be taking this substance anymore because it fucks me up, right? And so in the light of day, insights are about lifestyle.”
Trip for me babe… trip for you?
One week in the jungle and your relationship might never be the same…
After a fortnight in the jungle, your relationships might never be the same
Soheila Sokhanvari, The Gift, from the exhibition Rebel Rebel at The Barbican, London till 22 Feb 2023
“I’ve a feeling we’re inadvertently harming a lot of family members. If your partner goes for a two week ayahuasca retreat in the jungle, your life is going to change.”
Thus warned Dr Adele Lafrance in her lecture to Vital students about how feedback from the frontlines is informing psychedelic therapy.
And the emotion-focussed therapy expert told the Vital cohort that things can get even more cluster-fucked than that, once psychedelic rhetoric sets in.
“The concept of blame in psychedelic work is very delicate and potentially dangerous,” she says in her quietly subversive style, “there’s that fundamental belief that ‘we are all one’ and ‘inner conflict is related to outer conflict’.”
Transcendent resolutions usually only happen in retreat brochures. “Healing can be disruptive,” points out the self-declared ‘steward for reality’ – “We don’t want to throw anyone under the bus.”
If handled correctly, “Holding the healing for the patient’s chosen, natural environment can encourage positive effects, lessen negatives, and evolve relationships,” says Dr Lafrance, improving key connections for the benefit of all concerned.
“Neuroscience supports the healing power of supportive caregiver-loved one reactions,” she continues, encouraging “Working at letting go of blame narratives and fantasy as a tool, in particular those involving our primary caregivers… as for some reason, at this stage of evolution, humans are strongly affected by the context of attachment relationships.”
Psychedelic culture, its rhetoric at least, is infamous for butting up against reality: from free love to not doing any washing up in the hippy commune and the ‘all conflict is bad, mmm-kay?’ notion referred to by Dr Lafrance above.
“It’s a skill to hold space for absent family members”
And patient-voyagers often come crashing back down to Earth when they head back to the all-too-real environment of the office, family dinner table, or marriage bed.
“As a field we need to think how we’re managing systemic stress,” says the working doctor, “If we foster asymmetry of growth by only treating one person, it can have worse outcomes for the client – breakdown of a marriage, for example. There is a high chance of getting divorced, when if we treated both the relationship could have thrived.”
MDMA-assisted couples’ therapy is still a few years off. What can psychedelic therapists do to keep ‘systems’ like couples and families in union till then?
“It’s a skill to hold space for absent family members. And it can be an especially complex skill to deeply validate the client’s experience while still honouring the family member,” advises Dr Lafrance.
“We don’t want to throw anyone under the bus”
She’s a specialist in Emotion Focussed Therapy (EFT) which has its own branch for next of kin, Emotion Focussed Family Therapy (EFFT).
During Zoom lectures, “I normally have my hibiscus behind me,” says the congenial clinical psychologist, with no further explanation of her favourite flora’s current whereabouts, “I normally point at it while I say this; a client’s lineage makes up the whole plant. So, an example of what I might say [about their family] is, ‘Yes, they were not able – not didn’t care, or didn’t try. Let’s cultivate these experiences, so you can be the first flower in your family lineage to bloom.”
Cod spirituality around ‘respecting the ancestors’ is best kept in mind, rather than hectored at the client. "We don’t have to tell the patient, but it’s important for us to remember the cultural, religious and social influences that changed the directory of their lives.”
Here in the UK, family members have a legal right to a ‘needs assessment’ that can provide additional support, and a study on Multiple disassociation disorder (MDD) Dr Lafrance is consulting for here in Europe involves the family. “This could be a formal process during screening [in the USA] as things get legal, especially if they are under-resourced or unaware,” she says.
Those of us who are wary of social services padding about our home, or feel their help may be superfluous, might also find ourselves cast in a role of responsibility, where certain emotions are unwelcome.
And personally, I’ve seen more women presenting at services usually associated with men, like anger management (see the Kardashian sisters for a celeb example). It’s connected to a sense of overwhelment, usually from satisfying others’ needs before one’s own.
“We don’t want people to taint our experience when it’s so fresh, raw and vulnerable. So we tell the family that they can’t expect to hear all about it”
Says Dr Lafrance, “There are gender differences, unfortunately, that are still true you know, in terms of how we have been culturally conditioned to connect with emotions. Men still struggle more with sadness, fear and shame. Women, because of cultural conditioning, and socio-political movements meant to suppress female assertion, still struggle with healthy anger. So that's why I use this dichotomy: ‘Which one is true for you?’ Because it's not always gender specific, especially as we continue to evolve as a culture around questions related to gender roles.”
The respected clinical psychologist also recommends discretion around any potent visions and insights voyagers may’ve enjoyed. “At the end of the session we’ll ask the client what they feel comfortable sharing that doesn’t compromise them, their needs, or their integrity, but is still informed by what a couple might need. We don’t want other people to taint an experience when it’s so fresh, raw and vulnerable. So we tell the family that they can’t expect to hear all about it.” Bear in mind that sharing you spoke to an omnipotent mushroom counts for that.
What if, like myself, you sometimes get carried away with the notion that everyone in your family would benefit from a little medicine work?
“When I was in the jungle what came up over and over again was – you have to be in touch with reality”
In the post-lecture question and answer session, I asked Dr Lafrance how not to share too much with friends and family: “Yeah, in fact, that would be another point of direct intervention, actually. So thank you for bringing that up,” she replied, “If someone in the context of the ceremony, you know, or session says, like, ‘Oh my gosh, I wish my parents would do this, I wish my brother would do that, I wish my sister…’ then I will ask them to look more deeply into that.”
Doing so might enable the patient to “Release themselves, and release that person from, you know, having to be at the same stage of healing,” says Dr Lafrance, “Release self first, release other second. And if that comes up in integration sessions, I would do it the same way – like, ‘Yeah, check in with the part of you that is longing for that. Let's see what it needs. Let's see what it says’.”
Dr Lafrance can certainly tell you what the Grandmother Spirit had to say about her own familial ins-and-outs, during a lengthy ayauasca retreat.
“When I was in the jungle, that was one of the things that came up over and over again – like, you have to be in touch with reality.”
Which is probably a better tip than ‘You must respect the ancestors.’ But like anything genuinely helpful, it’s not easy to take on board.
“They are limited in their capacities,” she explains, “And it's not because they don't love you. It's not because they desperately want you to be different, that you're not going to be able to get what you're looking for. And so where else you're gonna get it? Inside. And I cried many tears over that, you know, sprawled out on the earth outside of the maloca. Like, not wanting that to be true.”
Transcendental family systems
Ready for ceremonies with you, mum and dad, the grandparents plus your kids and even the dog?
Ready for ceremonies with mum and dad, the grandparents plus your kids and even the dog?
Shanthi Chandrase, ‘Neural Introspection’
Tribal gatherings could be on the cards for all the clan.
Phase one tests showed microdoses of LSD did no statistical harm to Alzheimer’s sufferers.
“LSD’s complex pharmacology works on so many different 5-HT receptors,” 17 to be exact, “that it impairs several of the various functions that lead to Alzheimer’s Disease,” says Vital neuroscience lecturer Dr Charles Nichols.
Testing LSD on Alzheimer’s patients is an adaptation described as “surreal” in the post-lecture discussion by a psychiatrist studying on Vital.
Corresponding tests in the UK are taking place around Liskeard in an idyllic corner of Cornwall, England. Phase one tests for safety have indicated no harm using microdoses of up to 20ug.
There was however a noticeable increase in ‘psychotic episodes’ amongst the placebo group. Suppress your giggles triggered by thoughts of oldies on an LSD placebo turning up at the health centre convinced they’ve seen a pink elephant.
“Psychedelic protocols with children will happen”
Sounds like the elders can join in the ancestor ceremony; as befits them.
So can the younger generation.
“Absolutely there's a place for effective and safe psychedelic therapy in younger people,” said Dr Ben Sessa in the Q&A after his Vital lecture back in the Therapy module.
“I have seen too many teenagers lose the battle to mental disorder and kill themselves in my career,” continued Dr Sessa in fine style, “I have no doubt that psychedelic protocols with children will happen.”
It’s on already in fact. "MAPS are currently leading the pack in terms of MDMA for PTSD, are going to be doing PTSD research in initially teenagers 14 to 17 then younger age group 11-14, and then possibly six to six to 11,” says Dr Sessa.
And mum? She can feel really special down at the ceremony.
“Hormone replacement therapy significantly increases 5-HT2A expression”
Charles’ is admired for his ‘animal models’. Not a collection of balsa wood dinosaurs that adorn his lab windowsill; rats bred to be especially sensitive to psychometric testing. This sensitive rat pack is mostly female, which has led Charles’ team to discern a key detail for menopausal psychedelic voyagers.
“Oestrogen, and hormone replacement therapy significantly increase 5-HT2a expression,” he reveals, “So we have to optimise women and men differently.”
To test for depression whether treated with psilocybin, ketamine or SSRIs, rats are usually challenged to swim across a small basin of water towards an exit duct. Paddling around searching around for the way out is known as ‘active coping’ and therefore healthy. Zoning out in the middle of the water awaiting your watery end ‘cos what’s the point anyway? is ‘passive coping’, and bad news of course.
Plus with dogs and cats taking Prozac and other SSRIs it can’t be long before your favourite furry fellow sentient beings are in a higher state of consciousness too.
Fun for all the family.
Botanic therapy
Wasiwaska is Dr Luis Eduardo Luna’s psychedelic nature reserve. Gardening just got even more quietly inspirational.
Wasiwaska in Brazil is Dr Luna’s psychedelic nature reserve
Hummingbird babies nesting on Dr Luis Eduardo Luna’s Wasiwaska nature reserve
Gardening just got even more quietly inspirational.
Among Dr Luis Eduardo Luna’s itemised tips for for the Western psychedelic therapy sector presented in his Vital lecture is: ‘Experience the medicines among beautiful, dedicated surroundings.’
Another recommendation is to grow the plants and fungi locally, plus grant patients access, “So they can spend time in the forest feeling the presence of non-human persons. There is healing from contact with the forest itself.” Specimens should be kept around at least, so “People have direct perception of them.”
Wasiwaska is Dr Luna’s psychedelic nature reserve, retreat and research centre on a far corner of Santa Caterina island, Brazil’s answer to Ibiza. Artist Alex Gray, Cosmic Serpent author Jeremy Narby, writers Graham Hancock and Sue Blackmore, plus DMT pioneer Dr Rick ‘The Strass’ Strassman are among the luminaries on Wasiwaska’s advisory board.
Dr Luna, who was born on Santa Caterina is not the only local ecologist; an initiative to reintroduce oysters to the ecosystem has proved stunningly successful.
This El Jardin de la Ciencia (scientific garden) was founded in 1996 while Dr Luna was teaching at nearby San Catarina University. It boasts extensive ethnobotanical gardens, a psychedelic library, and study facilities plus guest rooms. It is the culmination of several other attempts that Dr Luna didn’t let phase him.
Distinctive brugmansia aurea flowers at Wasiwaska
Dr Luna showcased the garden in a speech titled The Wasiwaska Ethnobotanical Garden in Southern Brazil: A Chronicle at Exeter University (where he is an associate research fellow) for its Transdisciplinary Research Colloquium on Psychedelics in July.
The enclave is home to miles of ayahuasca vines, fifty-plus chacruna plants, capi, yagé, plus even more exotic DMT-containing plants like the distinctive brugmansia aurea, which flowers near constantly and produces “an intoxicating scent, that at night is overpowering. Its leaves vary in length like a key. A spider living inside the flowers changes colour accordingly; the bees are interacting with the spiders, getting some sort of effect. Perhaps it’s possible to make psychotropic honey.”
Ayahuasca flowers at Wasiwaska
Dr Luna and Anna tap sap from the psychoactive vines and drink it as a syrup. DMT-containing Cohaba trees, which Christopher Columbus turned down and took tobacco home instead, are also in situ. Non-native plants like Polynesian kava-kava, Tabernaemontana catharinensis a South American plant with similar effects to iboga, and peyote – which has been grafted on to San Pedro so it grows much quicker – have been cautiously introduced.
Permaculture innovations like clitora plants, which sport vibrant flowers and invigorate clay soil, support the ecosystem. Living alongside are the hummingbirds, bees and spiders one would expect in the wild. The garden is mostly curated by Dr Luna’s wife Anna, who recently introduced marmoset monkeys. These headed straight for the Cohoba trees that were part of their ecosystem, taking resin in morning and evening. The monkeys climbed other DMT-rich plants that weren’t part of their natural environment and did the same.
“My first teacher, Don Emilio,” about whom Dr Luna made probably the first ayahuasca documentary Don Emilio and his Little Doctors in 1984, “told me everything is full of life, of spirit,” he reminds us.
See what’s on at Wasiwaska via wasiwaska.org
Where social services are the new gods
Atheists need answers from their insights too. So do jedis. And children in care.
Integration
Atheists need answers from their insights too. So do jedis. And children in care
OMA studio for Prada
How do you explain a mystical psychedelic vision to a devotee of science?
“There’s no magic to being a good humanist,” says Psychedelic Renaissance author Dr Ben Sessa who’s likely to have doled out some unconditional love in his time working as an addiction specialist, “kindness and compassion straddle all religions.”
Though “I'm not a particularly spiritual person” he says, like most other Brits – hundreds of thousands of whom answer ‘Jedi’, referring to the mystic order from the Star Wars movies, when asked if they are religious in national census forms. Others enter ‘heavy metal’.
But the religious-style ‘peak experience’ is considered so key to treating addicts that ‘giving yourself over to a higher power’ has a whole step (number four if I remember rightly) in the 12-step program. Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) founder Bill ‘W’ Wilson was apparently thinking of exactly the non-denominational spirit of psychedelics when he coined the non-denominational ‘higher power’.
“The psychedelic community puts itself out there as open and free, but they’re dogmatic about some things”
Wilson’s inspiration, the philosopher William James thought that only religion was powerful enough to wrest a mind away from the demon drink. But so could LSD, which Wilson was treated with and espoused until AA pharisees put the kibosh on it.
“There's no magic lost in psychedelics by just being a good humanist. Kindness and compassion straddle all religions”
My Vital colleague Christine Caldwell of Diaspora retreat centre in Treasure Beach, Jamaica spoke about her scientific framing of peak experience in our study group. “Quantum mechanics teaches us that what we think of as our physical bodies and brains is just a slower frequency or vibration of the energy from which all the universe is made,” she posits. “And entanglement, created through the explosion of the Big Bang from which all energy in our universe was born, dictates there can be no separation within that field. Not only does entanglement dictate we exist as an evolution of the primordial soup in our connectedness, it also means what affects one can instantaneously affect another in an eternal dance.”
That’s some solid ammo for the committed atheists. Mirroring the patient’s own beliefs is the goal in MDMA-AT though, and they could range from ‘lapsed high elf’ to devout Neo-Satanist.
“Patients are equally likely to talk about Social Services as they are chakras”
Normalising the peak experience on the patient’s own terms, like Dr Sessa avoided by not imparting his neurological frame on his patient who asked ‘Is this what love feels like?’ is key to its comprehensive integration.
“I use universal language, meeting the patient where they are,” explains Sessa, “It comes down to: ‘What are your relationships with others? How are you getting on with people? Do your children like you? Have you got a job? Does your girlfriend like you? Are you a law abiding citizen that spreads love and kindness?’”
The ebullient Sessa says therapists must be happy to go down a rabbit hole of any choosing: “If my patient wants to talk about Kundalini and chakras, I'll do that till the cows come home. But they’re equally likely to speak about getting their kids out of Social Services care.”
We must be careful not to weave a new narrative of disapproval, insisting our own prejudices take the place of those we hold in contempt, insists the man who literally wrote the book on the Psychedelic Renaissance. “The psychedelic community puts itself out there as being so open and free, but they’re so dogmatic about some things” he says in response to evangelical mysticism on behalf of the space.
As above, so below
A fungus using K to clear parasites could connect the mental and physical elements of many diseases.
Integration
A fungus using K to clear parasites could hold the secret to the brain-body disease connection
Bacteria operating in fracal patterns observed by the late Dr Eschel Ben-Jacob
Pochonia Chlamydosporia is a fungus recently discovered to use ketamine for flushing parasites out of its host plant’s roots.
Discovered and hyped only recently, there are two eyebrow-raising elements to this.
Firstly ketamine is a ‘designer drug’, or as elite space commando and neuroscientist Andrew Gallimore wrote on Twitter, “a perfect example of a purely synthetic molecule. The arylcyclohexylamines, of which ketamine is the prototypic example, are a product entirely of the human mind... Oh wait…”
Did the fungus get hold of it via the mycelial network? Is biology categorisable to the extent that a substance arrived at in lab tests can be naturally occurring but not yet discovered? Or did the Reality Switch Technologies Gallimore writes about come into play, somehow?
Some ketamine killing parasitic worm eggs
Secondly: Pochonia Chlamydosporia uses ketamine as an anti-microbial agent. A robust two-parter in Psychedelic Science Review dug out a 1987 study where ketamine did a great job killing bacterial heart lining infections in rabbits – and stopped the rabies virus breeding in rats.
In 2002 ketamine was tested against market antibiotics and crushed Staphylococcus aureus, a common opportunistic bacteria that causes all kinds of nastiness, from pimples and impetigo to MRSA and pneumonia… and has become 80% resistant to antibiotics since penicillin was invented in 1943.
The 2020 report from the un-putdownable Parasites & Vectors journal tested ketamine against agricultural anti-wormer ivermectin, which used to be advertised on TV back in the West Country to give you an idea of how widespread its farming use is. Ketamine performed equally well.
But what has actually captured the imaginations of many in the space is that this means ketamine counts as a ‘plant medicine’. I eagerly await the complex mythologies, concept albums, groundbreaking scientific discoveries, artistic genres, philosophical insights, and bespoke geometric fabric designs that shall surely now emerge from the ketamine subculture, such as it currently is.
Each ‘Zine features the most mind-blowing bits I scrawled down during each of Vital’s exclusive live lectures by the finest minds in the space. Browse them by issue or go straight to the introductions with lecturer details.
And search by the topics: Traditional and Modern Approaches, Therapy, Space Holding, Medical and Clinical, and Integration. Funnies at the end too.