Plant Medicine
How connected are you to your true self? Would you like to learn more about your self, your mind and even your life purpose? Would you like to learn more about medicinal psilocybin and other medicinal adaptogens? Being better connected to yourself can improve your own life as well as those close to you. It can bring you a sense of purpose, identity, and fulfilment, empathy, a release from ego and fear. If you work on improving your self-connection, you can escape harmful patterns and start making your life and the world around you a brighter and more meaningful place. The psychedelic renaissance offers us this new opportunity. Psychedelic experiences have been shown to renew our sense of purpose, understand ourselves more deeply, and help us work through our own traumas. Opening up your creative pathways, increasing empathy and connectivity to nature and those around you is the baseline of what you can experience through a safe medicinal psilocybin micro dose. This can be an experience with as little as a non-psychoactive micro dose, to a full psychedelic journey. Could a guided psilocybin ceremony help you rediscover self-connection?
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Psilocybin Assisted Treatment
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Here's our psilocybin-assisted treatment guide for everything you need to know for healing. Discover the magic behind the mushrooms.
What is Psilocybin?
Psilocybin is found in over 200 species of mushrooms. When psilocybin is ingested, it is rapidly metabolized to psilocin. It is psilocin that activates receptors in the brain to induce visionary effects. Both psilocybin and psilocin can be synthesized in a laboratory.
Psilocybin is an indole alkaloid that bears a strong resemblance to serotonin. An indole is an aromatic double-ring system containing a nitrogen atom in the five-membered ring, which is fused to a benzene ring. A tryptamine is an indole molecule with an ethylamine group attached to carbon 3 of the 5-membered ring.
Furthermore, psilocin is a high affinity partial agonist that activates the serotonin 5-HT2A receptor (<40% activation). Psilocin binds to other types of serotonin receptors too, but ultimately, the hallucinogenic effects are due to activation of the 5-HT2A receptor. Other classical psychedelics bind to this same receptor.
What is Psilocybin Assisted Treatment?
Psilocybin-assisted treatment involves ingesting psilocybin while exploring a specific, previously-set intention, with the goal of healing and transformation. There are three distinct therapy phases: preparation, the acute psychedelic experience, and integration. The non-psychedelic elements of this approach are essential for both effectiveness and safety.
Various approaches to preparation have been developed, from diet to psychotherapy. Participants will typically attend a talk-therapy or intake session with a guide who will support you during the psychedelic session. Safety and rapport is developed during this time, and the nature of the individual’s struggles are explored.
The guide will prepare the participant for the psychedelic session in a number of ways, with a particular emphasis on curiosity, and ways to remain open to challenging experiences (“If you see a door, go through it”; “If you meet something scary, walk towards it and ask, ‘what do you have to teach me?’”). While challenging experiences are considered by many who work in the field to be integral to the therapeutic and personal benefits that follow, the so called ‘bad trip’ is often borne out of an attempt to avoid the experience, and can be mitigated by an open and trusting approach.
During the psilocybin session, ‘set’ and ‘setting’ are considered paramount. ‘Set’ refers to mindset. Mindset is a complex mix of more transient phenomena like expectation and mood, and more enduring phenomena like personality and past experience. ‘Setting’ refers to the context or environment in which the session takes place, including basic factors like the comfort and aesthetic quality of the room, and more complex factors like the quality of the relationship with the guide and the mood they help to set.
The patient can sit or lie on a couch, is often encouraged to wear a sleep mask to go inwards, and at times listen to a carefully selected playlist of music. Oral ingestion of psilocybin is the route of administration in clinical settings. The participant ingests a dose (low: 10 mg, medium: 20 mg, high: 30 mg or above) at the start of the session. The psilocybin effects generally last 3-6 hours but the therapeutic session will last for 6 to 8 hours.
Attentive but usually silent, the guide is supporting the emerging process, offering assistance and guidance if needed. In addition to listening and responding to the participant when they speak, the guide offer little analysis of the material but may ask questions for the person to reflect on what is coming up for them.
Immediately after the psilocybin session and in the following days, a process of integration is facilitated by the guide. During these conversations, the person has the opportunity to process, make sense of, and give meaningful expression to their psychedelic experience.
A common therapeutic approach during psychedelic sessions is to be non-directive.
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Preparation:
In these first preparation sessions, the guide and client get to know each other and form a trusting relationship, so the client can feel supported and at ease during the psilocybin session.
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The psilocybin session:
The client lies down on a bed in a comfortable room, designed specifically for the session. They receive a dose of psilocybin in oral form. During the experience, patients listen to a specially designed music playlist and wear an eye mask, to help them focus internally. The psilocybin experience typically lasts 6-8 hours. A guide is present throughout the session to hold space for the client.
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Integration:
Clients are encouraged to discuss their experiences of the psilocybin session. The goal is for clients, with guidance from their guide, to generate their own insights and ideas from the experience to change unhelpful emotional and behavioural patterns.
How Guided Psychedelic Treatment Works
A crucial part of the psychedelic therapy experience is trusting the professional(s) you're working with. If the trust isn’t there, it will prove to be a major obstacle when doing the work.
While each professional may come to their practice with a different training background or approach, they all ultimately have the same intention: to help the client on the right path to self discovery and healing.
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A Guide’s Experience is Paramount
Set and setting —your mind-frame, and held space or location— are important factors to consider when engaging with psychedelic treatment, and in all cases, guidance is equally paramount. Journeying into this type of treatment requires the direction of someone with experience, otherwise there’s high potential for things to go sideways, fast.
An experienced guide can help determine the direction in which the medication is going to evolve and unfold within the patient.
When a person with experience in this area has more tools, they'll help you develop your intentions, which is super useful because like everything else, where the intention is and how you come into this experience will make all the difference in what you get out of it.
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At The Elevated Wellness Company, experienced guides are able to give a client the support and direction needed throughout their psilocybin therapy experience, should challenging emotions or insights come out of their sessions, which sometimes happens.
If you run into some emotional difficulty, an experienced guide who has helped people in a situation like this before will make a difference between a healing session and a terrible session.
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