027: Sacred Plant Retreats with Maxwell Wieland of Munay Medicine in Peru, Part 2

This is Entheogen. Talk about tools for generating the divine within.

Today is February 21, 2016, and we are discussing Sacred Plant Retreats with our guest, Maxwell Wieland of Munay Medicine in Peru.

Find the notes and links for this and other episodes at EntheogenShow.com. Sign up to receive an email when we release a new episode. Follow us @EntheogenShow on Twitter and like EntheogenShow on FaceBook. Thanks for listening.

Topics:

• Munay Medicine – what’s the vision, how does a retreat work, what do they offer?
• The 10-day Retreat
• “La Dieta” – lifestyle more than diet.
• Yoga as adjunct therapy to plant medicine.
• Yoga class as track meet? Yoga more as philosophy than merely athleticism.
• Reconsidering “traditional” use of ayahuasca in a long historical context.
• Alchemist? E.g., extraction of alkaloids.
• The duality of the ego. “I just sleighed my ego.”
• “Avoid the dreaded underdose. Dose high. Dose healthy.”

026: Sacred Plant Retreats with Maxwell Wieland of Munay Medicine in Peru, Part 1

This is Entheogen. Talk about tools for generating the divine within.

Today is February 21, 2016, and we are discussing Sacred Plant Retreats with our guest, Maxwell Wieland of Munay Medicine in Peru.

Find the notes and links for this and other episodes at EntheogenShow.com. Sign up to receive an email when we release a new episode. Follow us @EntheogenShow on Twitter and like EntheogenShow on FaceBook. Thanks for listening.

Topics:

• Max has been in a working relationship with wachuma (san pedro), ayahuasca, changa (dmt), psilocybin mushrooms, iboga, morning glories, salvia, and other plant entheogens for a decade.
• How did Munay Medicine come to be?
• What is a typical stay like?
• Munay is in the Sacred Valley of Peru, a wonderful location with a number of retreat centers, convenient to Machu Picchu and other sacred sites.
• San Pedro vs. Peyote, the sustainability and eco-friendliness of San Pedro – can grow up to a meter per growing season. Can be propagated easily.
• The word wachuma translates to “removing the head” (wach- meaning “remove” and -uma meaning “head”) which metaphorically might mean the death of the ego. The word comes from Quechua, the language of the indigenous culture of the same name in the central Andes.
• As Maxwell told us, “The name San Pedro was an adaptation that came as a result of Catholic contact via Spanish conquistadors.” This is fascinatingly similar to the Bwiti tribe in Gabon who use ibogaine in a syncretic Christian-tribal tradition; it seems that part of the Andean adaptation to missionary influence was to rename this sacred plant after Saint Peter, implying that the entheogenic cactus holds the keys to the gates of heaven just as its new namesake, Saint Peter, is said to do.
• “Breaking open the Head”, Daniel Pinchbeck’s book about his initiation with the Bwiti (using Ibogaine).
• Max shares some of his backstory including trouble related to the illegality of plant medicine in the United States, which led to his moving to Peru.
• San Pedro “Jeff Bridges” variety: Trichocereus bridgesii

Also, please check out this link from last show's guest, Kirk Rutter: Psychedelic Science Org UK – "Psychedelics could be for psychiatry what the microscope is for biology or the telescope for astronomy."

025: Psychedelic Medicine Trials with Participant Kirk Rutter

This is Entheogen. Talk about tools for generating the divine within.

Today is February 28, 2016, and we are discussing Psychedelic Medicine Trials with a participant in a recent psilocybin study, Kirk Rutter.

Find the notes and links for this and other episodes at EntheogenShow.com. Sign up to receive an email when we release a new episode. Follow us @EntheogenShow on Twitter and like EntheogenShow on FaceBook. Thanks for listening.

Special thanks to our guest on today’s show, Kirk Rutter, who offers listeners a rare glimpse of what it’s like to participate in a psychedelic medicine trial. Kirk worked with Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, David Erritzoe (who sat in on the sessions), Prof. David Nutt (who oversaw the project), and Mark Bolstridge at the Imperial College of London, studying the impact of psilocybin on depression.

Topics:

• Kirk shares a bit of background about why he sought out this study

• The screening process

• Kirk’s prior experience (none) and opinion of psychedelics before the study

• No interaction with the other participants during the trials, meeting these automatic allies after the conclusion of the trials.

• The benefit of the “dry run” of set and setting a week ahead of time. Compare this protocol to the DMT studies by Strassman – demonstrates the importance of a comfortable setting.

• Kirk offers the term “psychedelic turbulence”, and the analogy of taking off in a plane: passing through the clouds, there may be some turbulence, and then once you reach a certain height it becomes calm.

• Sanskrit text flashing in the darkness, faint geometrics, jewels, golden structures…

• Describing the session room: niceties like ambient laser lights, aroma machine, candles, fresh flowers.

• The music in the room. The care given to the playlist. The importance of the playlist as part of the protocol.

• Psychedelic lacrymation.

• The “psychedelic yawn”.

• We all share our deep cries.

• Using music to help embed the experience.

• The roles of David, Robin, and Mark and how they factored into the experience.

• Robin: “one of the nicest people I’ve ever met.”

• We all don’t like the zoo. (E.g. “Meerkats basking under sunlamps.”)

• Kirk’s experience of seeing “an Indian god ‘look in on me’ like a parent looking over a baby's crib”

• Kevin’s experience seeing the same deity as Kirk: Ganesh, the "remover of obstacles", the "God of wisdom, knowledge and new beginnings". He sounds like a good totem to have through the 25mg experience”

• Chanting, meditating

Check out Kirk’s blog for a first person description of what it’s like to participate in modern psychedelic research, including videos from your accommodations at the Imperial College campus in London.

022: Response to A New Understanding: The Science of Psilocybin

This is Entheogen. Talk about tools for generating the divine within.

Today is January 7, 2016, and we are discussing A New Understanding: The Science of Psilocybin.

Find the notes and links for this and other episodes at EntheogenShow.com. Sign up to receive an email when we release a new episode. Follow us @EntheogenShow on Twitter and like EntheogenShow on FaceBook. Thanks for listening.

We discussed this film and interviewed its producer, Robert Barnhart back in August 2015 before the film’s release. Since then, the film has been released and you can rent or buy it on online. We’ve all had a chance to watch it again and we wanted to reflect on our impressions of the film.

We’ll start with a quote from Alex Grey:

"A New Understanding: The Science of Psilocybin puts an original face on psychedelics. Not the typical faces in the media of delusional drop-outs associated with drugs, but the faces of normal Americans, some suffering from the final stages of terminal cancer. After one dose of psilocybin the face of joy, relief and peace is nothing short of miraculous. A medical mystical miracle is in our midst, and this film beautifully describes the facts! Bravo to Robert Barnhart and all the production team, the courageous chemists, doctors and patients who are helping our society re-evaluate Psilocybin as a medicine for the Soul." ~Alex Grey

Hofmann discovered LSD, creating the modern psychedelic movement; not many people know he also isolated and synthesized psilocybin, the active compound in magic mushrooms.

Shutting down of research. Schedule 1. “No medicinal value, addictive”

Kevin purports that Maria Sabina had given Albert Hofmann an “academic boner” over his successful synthesis of the active alkaloid in her magic mushrooms, psilocybin.

“Throughout history, people have been able to have this mystical experience. The drug is a reliable way of getting one, but it's not about the drug, it's about the experience.” - Anthony Bossis

Ann Levy’s son’s eulogy for her

How does the experience help you confront death?

“We’re all star stuff.” - Carl Sagan

Bill Richards: 6 basic categories of a "core religious experience":
1. Unity
2. Transcendence of time and space
3. Noetic / intuitive knowledge
4. Sense of sacredness / awesomeness
5. Deeply felt positive mood / joy / peace / love
6. Ineffability / paradoxicality (difficult to put into words)

Psilocybin and LSD as aphrodisiacs

Why not? Why can’t we provide the relief these treatments offer?

Brad: “word.”

Wikipedia: List of Schedule I drugs and Schedule II drugs

Rent or buy the film on Vimeo

When you rent you can also watch DMT The Spirit Molecule

The film’s website has a convenient “who’s who” of psychedelic researchers on the participants tab, with names, titles and photos, and a short bio when clicked

013: Interview with Robert J. Barnhart about his new film, A New Understanding: The Science of Psilocybin

This is Entheogen. We talk about tools for generating the divine within. It's August 21, 2015. We're talking about A New Understanding: The Science of Psilocybin with Robert J. Barnhart.

We are honored to be joined by Robert J. Barnhart, producer of A New Understanding: The Science of Psilocybin.

For historical context, we review the groundwork laid in the 1980's by organizations such as the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) and Heffter Research Institute. Robert serves on the Boards of Directors of both organizations.

Basic research began as early as the 1940's and continued through the '50's and '60's, until Nixon's Drug Control Act of 1970 when the highly promising research was extinguished. In the words of Roland Griffiths, "Can you think of another area of science regarded as so dangerous and taboo that all research gets shut down for decades? It’s unprecedented in modern science."

Only as recently as in the last decade, thanks entirely to private fundraising by organizations like MAPS and Heffter, researchers have completed Phase I and Phase II studies. Plans for Phase III trials are on the horizon, and by some predictions, entheogens like psilocybin could be rescheduled to Schedule II (from Schedule I) perhaps as soon as 2020.

At $10/pill an effective one-time-dose treatment like an entheogen might not be economically feasible or lucrative enough for today's pharmaceutical companies to pursue taking to market. But what about regular, ongoing "microdosing" of something like LSD? And moreover, the potentially vast application of entheogens toward the "betterment of well people" (in the words of Bob Jesse) would seem to be highly interesting to a pharmaceutical company.

In addition to supporting MAPS and Heffter, Robert recommends the Beckley Foundation in England. Also, write to Congress and talk to people about your own entheogenic experiences.

Bonus: Robert recounts the story of how his would-be high school film project about the psychedelic experience may have serendipitously inspired his new film.

For more about the studies, check out Anthroposophia: A different kind of love story: One woman's psilocybin experience by Sandy Lundahl.

Thanks again to Robert Barnhart for joining us. Stay tuned for the release of A New Understanding: The Science of Psilocybin.