46. Coming Out of the Psychedelic Closet: Emotional Self-Improvement & Spiritual Healing

It's time to come clean: I have been self-medicating with psychedelic drugs for over a decade — essentially my entire adult life.

It started in college, first just "recreationally" and because I had a strong interest in altered states of consciousness. After a handful of deeply spiritual experiences that I was wholly unprepared for, I started to take psychedelics more seriously as "soul medicine."

Over the years, I developed an intentional ritual practice for myself that incorporated LSD, yoga, meditation, and nature immersion. A few times a year, I would spend a weekend out in the woods under the influence of psychedelics, carefully deconstructing and reconstructing my mind while cultivating loving energetic exchanges with the other-than-human spirits residing on the land.

This practice has been integral to my development as a fully formed adult human animal, enabling me to achieve emotional self-improvement and spiritual healing at a level that I never thought possible before I experienced it. Psychedelics have informed all aspects of my art (as a musician and writer), my spirituality, and my lifestyle.

I have never exactly tried to hide my appreciation for psychedelics, but in this episode I am speaking openly and candidly for the first time about my personal experiences with some of these powerful medicinal substances -- primarily LSD, psilocybin and cannabis, but also Salvia divinorum and DMT -- across 14 years and at least 50 sessions.

I try my best to describe the state of mind that psychedelics facilitate, and the therapeutic benefits that I stumbled upon through years of trial and error before "psychedelic therapy" was a topic that anybody was taking seriously.

I believe our culture is ready for a psychedelic renaissance, in which we finally learn to acknowledge and respect the gifts that psychedelic drugs offer us -- both in the healing of mental illness and in the overall improvement of emotional and spiritual wellbeing.

Now more than ever, I believe it is of the utmost importance for people like me, who've seen immense benefits through the (admittedly irresponsible) use of psychedelics to step up and share our accounts, so that we might normalize these drugs the same way that cannabis is currently being normalized.

Prohibition will come to an end, but it's going to take a serious upswing in popular opinion and public momentum before that day arrives. I offer my personal experiences here as yet another resounding voice of praise in the growing chorus of psychedelic advocates from all walks of life. I invite the rest of you to sing out with us!