Last summer I had a psychadelic-assisted therapy session with MDMA and a guide (along with integration session after the main experience). It was one of the more powerful experiences of my life, and has led to sustained positive change in my life.
The experience itself was at a hotel room I had booked. For just under six hours, I lay on the bed with an eye mask and headphones playing instrumental music picked by my guide. MDMA is commonly known as a party drug but under different settings and with different intentions, it had the power to turn to yourself examine yourself and your life in a state of love free of the fear and anxiety that we often feel in life. At least for me, this produced clarifying insights about myself and my life which have persisted long after the session.
Very excited to see progress being made for the use of MDMA to treat PTSD, and hopefully a broader class of people beyond that.
I did something similar with mushrooms some 15 years ago. Laid in the bed, run some nice shamanic music on endless loop, crawled under blanket, closed my eyes and experienced completely out-of-world experience, dissolving into mist of atoms, swirling in the music, and at the end re-composing myself and my senses atom by atom.
At the very end it was even spiritual, which is funny since I am say agnostic and didn't have any form of religious upbringing. This experience didn't change that, in fact it reinforced my opinion on religions and religious matters.
I know its a different type of drug and effect, but I think generally drugs give more inner insight when taken alone (or controlled uninterrupted env which crowd of people is definitely not).
Using mushrooms or MDMA as a late-night party/social drug seems increasingly crazy as I get older. With a close friend or partner or even alone they are a really meaningful experience, with a tranquil comedown. It almost feels wasteful to burn through them late into the night dancing to electronic music and then being completely wrecked the next day, I guess I enjoyed it when I was 19.
Nice. Thank you for sharing. I was just talking to someone about this, this past week.
I think most people (mentally stable people) should try psychedelics at least once in their lives. The people who need to do it the most are the people in positions of power. (Political leaders, CEOs, etc.)
Yes, that’s right. The guide was available if I needed anything but other than using the bathroom once a few hours in I just laid there.
I should note that everyone’s journeys are different, and even for a single person no journey will be the same as the last. But my experience at least demonstrated the power of MDMA to serve as a healing substance when used with a particular intention and in a particular setting. The preparation work prior to the experience as well as the integration work following the experience are also incredibly important for it to have a long-lasting effect.
Yeah, that's the approach I'm hearing the most positive reviews about - Taking it alone and leaving the therapist to talk about it after, hence the integration
Also see this account of MDMA helping someone with aspergers: [1]
In this case there wasn't even any music, and it still helped them.
That said, music is usually quite important in psychedelic therapy, and I've heard it said (by Mendel Kaelen, a neuroscientist who studied LSD's and music's effect on the brain) that "psychedelic therapy can be conceptualized as form of music therapy, but a drug-assisted or drug-enhanced form of music therapy."
The experience itself was at a hotel room I had booked. For just under six hours, I lay on the bed with an eye mask and headphones playing instrumental music picked by my guide. MDMA is commonly known as a party drug but under different settings and with different intentions, it had the power to turn to yourself examine yourself and your life in a state of love free of the fear and anxiety that we often feel in life. At least for me, this produced clarifying insights about myself and my life which have persisted long after the session.
Very excited to see progress being made for the use of MDMA to treat PTSD, and hopefully a broader class of people beyond that.