What Does Salvia Smell Like?

Guest Bio:

Peter and Erin interview Anna Rickman, Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer of Wavepaths. Wavepaths is a company that focuses on creating music and sounds to enhance psychedelic therapy and act as a therapy in and of itself.

In This Episode…

Anna shares the story of how some challenging times through her youth led her to seek out therapy, which in turn guided her to an experience with ayahuasca. After a handful of sessions with the plant medicine, she notes that a switch seemed to flip both in relation to her mental health and the role music can play in a psychedelic assisted therapy, which led her to co-found Wavepaths along with Dr. Mendel Kaelen, one of the early pioneers in the space who created many of the playlists in the early psilocybin studies.

Peter, Erin, and Anna also discuss the concept of experience as medicine, and how Wavepaths is creating their own adaptive and generative music for psychedelic and MDMA assisted therapy. Anna shares her tips for creating a playlist for a trip outside of a clinical setting, and the characteristics of music that make it so impactful and therapeutic.

Dr. Ryan Westrum is a psychedelics integration therapist based in Minneapolis, MN. He is the co-author, alongside Dr. Jay Dufrechou, of The Psychedelics Integration Handbook, which has received significant attention and circulation since its publication in late 2019. The Handbook contains countless strategies, frameworks, and models for the work of psychedelic integration, which has become one of the most prominent points of discussion in psychedelic conversations of late. In this interview, we hear more from Dr. Westrum about the process of integration, the pitfalls of psychedelic work, and how we can avoid the traps of “spiritual bypassing” by coming to terms with our shadows.

Thanks for taking the time to talk, Dr. Westrum. Let’s start with some basics. What is integration, and what does it mean to be a psychedelic integration therapist?

Integration is making the psychedelic experience practical. We can go to Mars and see the galaxies and transcend into union with spiritual identities, but if we are unable to bring it back into our practical life, we are not going to be able to function. I think a large aspect of integration, specifically with psychedelic medicines, is the opportunity to walk with it in your world. It’s not just how many yoga classes you do, but incrementally building rituals that bring in a sense of wholeness.

Integration is a going toward, an evolution of. That might mean it meanders. We might be walking and realizing we should be eating better. But if that does not register to you, there is no value in it. Integration is not forcing yourself into some objective state. I want you to subjectively make integration your own.

A psychedelic integration therapist is not an underground therapist. There might be people identifying as underground therapists, and I appreciate the courage that they have, but an integration therapist is someone who helps with intention setting and preparation before and who helps process psychedelic experiences after, all while offering support at any given level. In my imagined version, it’s a classical therapist who specifically understands the territory of the experience so they can relate without judgment and help bring the person back.

I will be a broken record on the value of being able to walk with it. If you are unable to know your ZIP Code or what your phone number is, you are not psychedelically integrating, because we are still on this big rock moving toward something. A psychedelic integration therapist asks, “What are you going to use this for?” and “How are you going to implement it into your life?”

A psychedelic integration therapist does not administer medicine. But are there legal concerns in being so open about helping someone integrate or prepare for a psychedelic experience?

I feel safe about having this conversation publicly because it’s harm reduction. I talk directly to parents about teaching their kids what is right and what is wrong with psychedelics. I am not advocating for the illicit use of these compounds. I want to give psycho-education around it.

With my license, I am qualified to talk about consequences. I look at it not only as a harm reduction model, but as consequential, no different than if a couple is looking to get divorced. I ask, “What is the outcome if you stay together, and what is the outcome if you divorce?” Same with psychedelics. We play through the whole cartography of outcomes and potentials.

What are some of the biggest misconceptions you hear about integration?

One of the biggest myths is that it is a passive exercise. Integration does not symbolically just transfer into I had this experience so now I benefitted and can use it. There’s a lot of what I call “digesting” of the experience that integration is needed for. That’s not passive. We are working toward, and we are working within.

Another misconception is that it stops—that there’s a qualified time period when we are integrating, and there’s a qualified time period when we are ready to go on to the next thing. It’s not as simple as Starting Points A, B, and C. We need to qualify that it is ever-organically moving.

People often say, “Well, I’ve integrated that”—say a proverbial trauma, or recollection from childhood. But nothing is ever gone. That’s one of the biggest misnomers. Psychedelics are not the magic pill that will make it disappear. With active integration, it will soften, but it’s not going to go anywhere. I’m sorry to be the grim reaper of psychedelic integration, but it’s an active process. If you forget that, it starts to become a problem.

I think that touches on one of the bigger misnomers about psychedelics in general. It seems the media attention has energized a perspective that one psychedelic experience can release things forever. Like the ayahuasca purge—I will encounter this demon inside me, this addiction, and I will get it out. You point to the fact that psychedelics catalyze an ongoing process.

I would definitely say there’s room for synchronistic coincidences in ceremonial situations, such as the ayahuascapurge, that give more bandwidth that can lead to cathartic experiences where it’s like, “Now the addiction’s gone.” But from my experience of doing this for fifteen years, I have witnessed that if someone has suicidal ideation or alcoholism for twenty years, there’s going to be a need for a gradual process to release all the layers of demons.

And I think this builds a kind of reverence for the human being. There’s an ownership of your life and your biographical story. If you think you are going to forget the person that died of cancer, or forget your history of abuse, you are not owning who you are as a human being and what’s created you to be this beautiful spirit. It’s leaning into that Jungian shadow element, where accepting your shadow is necessary to be whole.

Rather than trying to cut off the shadow.

Right.

That brings up one of my interests: spiritual bypassing, which feels related to shadow and has important manifestations in this psychedelic field. Would you describe that term and how you see it manifest in psychedelic journeys?

I love that you’re interested in that topic, because I think right now we are facing the conundrum of whether psychedelics will be the spontaneous catalyst introducing us to a longer process, or the catalyst for us to bypass doing the work. Unfortunately, depression leans into we want to get rid of it, where we don’t want to look at or work on our darkness or nihilistic behaviors. We just want to exile them.

When you talk about it as it relates to clients in this office, they end up not wanting to take the hard look. They don’t want to look at where the shadow comes from, what the nuances are. I don’t want to call spiritual bypassing a cop out, but it’s where integration hits a brick wall.

A theme will come up multiple times with clients. They’ll say, “I’m seeing the same thing. Self-hatred. Self-obsession. Control and power.” I’ll ask them, “What are you doing outside of these sessions to look at those, as Stan Grof calls them, COEXs (condensed experiences)?” They’ll say, “Well… nothing.” And I’ll say, “That’s where the integration process is.”

What are your thoughts?

I suppose that it’s hard to look at our shadows. Like you explain in your book, the shadow contains those parts of ourselves we cannot talk comfortably about. But it’s always here. I think the work of integration takes a constant reevaluation of our perspective of ourselves, a continual willingness to be radically honest and recognize subconscious trends. I feel like spiritual bypassing can occur through returning excessively to the psychedelic state and not doing the work of integration.

A hundred and fifty percent. And ultimately, that’s my goal, personally: as much as I would love a Huxley experience of taking LSD before I die, it would be really pleasurable to get my psyche, soul, and spirit prepared without any of this. Isn’t that the nuance you are exploring with your spiritual bypassing education? Is it the Zen Buddhist who has been meditating for a hundred years and then tries psychedelics and learns something new, or is it the psychonaut who ends up transcending to Zen Buddhism? It’s a koan that’s unanswerable. It’s a combination of both. It’s parallel processing.

I had an experience of this where I ate some mushrooms seeking clarity on a challenging emotional situation that kept manifesting. But that emotional situation just amplified in the psychedelic state. It was like I was getting beat over the head with the message, “You know what to do. You haven’t been meditating. You haven’t been setting intentions. You don’t need these mushrooms right now.”

Right. I think they are sacraments, but they will also tell you to step away. Like what Alan Watts says—if you get the message, hang up the phone.

For smokers, the next cigarette starts as you are putting out the one you’re smoking. It’s not that you are chain-smoking, but rather that the cycle begins again. You have your nicotine fix, and the cravings are gone, but slowly, like a fog on a night-darkened street, they come creeping back up. Soon enough, you’re surrounded: the fog has slipped into your bones, and the only way to dispel the cold is to have another smoke. As you stub that one out, the cycle begins again.

That’s the nature of addiction: whether it’s chemical or cultural, addiction is always there, lurking and ready to be let back in. There is a certain cruel symmetry to its nature, and for the addict, a certain inevitability. That’s why some people are worried that for every positive action — the proven usage of psychedelic substances to treat addiction — there will be a negative reaction; in this case, the possibility that the psychedelics themselves will be addictive, and you’ll be trading one monster for the next. Understanding why this is a small possibility gets us to the nature of psychedelics, and of addiction itself.

Psychedelic Drugs Are Non-Addictive in the Traditional Sense

Psychedelic drugs, including ayahuasca, psilocybin, and LSD, are generally not considered to be addictive in the medical sense. That is, though they influence the mind directly, they don’t alter the chemistry of the brain. Other addictive substances do. Addiction is when a substance triggers a positive sensation in the limbic system, the network of nerves in the brain. The brain gets a “reward” for your actions. When that sensation fades, the brain starts to mimic what is essentially “hunger” for that sensation. While this doesn’t happen the first time you try a substance, the enjoyment of the feeling often leads people to trying it again and again, and then the brain starts to get used to it.

When this happens, the brain begins to demand more of it, but it also makes it harder to reach the stage where the hunger can be sated. What’s important to remember is that during this the brain is actively colonized by the addiction. It roars in and bulls itself around, making demands, and crowding out other pleasure, which is why so often addicts stop being interested in other activities. They only want — they only need — that reward to stop the craving.

That’s one of the reasons why psychedelic substances work so well in treating addiction, because they let a person break down their reality tunnels and take back control over their mind. But they do not have the same makeup as opiates, nicotine, or alcohol, or even intense and addictive activities like gambling or sex or danger. There is no shot to the limbic system, and so there isn’t a chemical addiction. But getting into why some people are addicted, and others aren’t, reveals the slight but real danger of psychedelic addictions.

The Cultural Roots of Addiction

In an essay for Medium, Derek Beres talks about how friends of his are as committed to a “psychedelic lifestyle” as the most devout religious fanatic is to their text. Everything in their lives revolved around it. Their personality, their activities, their conversation, and their goals became subsumed to something outside of their bodies and minds. In behavior, if not in chemistry, they were addicts

It’s important to understand this phenomenon from a cultural view, and to do that, it helps to take a look back at history and the long-standing false assumption that Native Americans are genetically predisposed to alcoholism. Missionaries, soldiers, and traders in the Great Lakes region during French colonization all spoke of indigenous people’s propensity toward alcoholism. They either thought it was a scourge or a great way to control the natives (or both). But no one seemed to ask the question of why? After all, they had been using mind-altering substances (including many of the drugs we use today) for centuries, and they had managed to build great cultures without falling into widespread addiction. It wasn’t just because much of what they used was non-addictive, although that played a role. It had to do with the destruction of their culture.

The famous “Rat Park” studies showed that addiction didn’t happen because people were addicts, even though that was the ideology that dominated our poor attempts at treatment. There was a reason why people would turn to substances, and as was the case with Huron, Iroquois, and others, a dislocation and sense of cultural drift played a huge role. There were many reasons why the use of narcotics exploded in the 1960s, but the tectonic cultural shiftsplayed a huge role (instead of the other way around).

When a sense of self — in which culture and society plays a large role — is broken, it’s easy to look for a way to fix that. Many people turn to substances in an attempt to ward off what ails them, and that leads to addiction. It starts as cultural, but then becomes chemical.

In an interesting way, though, addiction doesn’t always have to be chemical. It can come from having any one thing define who you are, from having something essentially colonize your way of life. Think of the man who refuses to leave his house on Sunday because he has to watch every game, or the collector who won’t stop driving around the country until they have every issue of a comic book. Dr. Gabor Mate, renowned for treating addiction patients with ayahuasca, has spoken of his addiction to classical music. All of these “addictions” change the way a person interacts with the world.
That’s why it is important, when using psychedelics for therapy, to work with trained and compassionate professionals. Psychedelics can help open your mind, and free you from the curse of addiction, but you don’t want to replace one personality-thief with another. With care, and with help, they won’t, and instead can help you free yourself from the colonizers of your mind.

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