A trip rule. Face the fear
In most of psychadelic therapies patients will face a fear that they are trying to rework
"If you feel like you’re “dying, melting, dissolving, exploding, going crazy etc.—go ahead,” embrace it: “Climb staircases, open doors, explore paths, fly over landscapes.” And if you confront anything frightening, “look the monster in the eye and move towards it. . . . Dig in your heels; ask, ‘What are you doing in my mind?’ Or, ‘What can I learn from you?’ Look for the darkest corner in the basement, and shine your light there.” This training may help explain why the darker experiences that sometimes accompany the recreational use of psychedelics have not surfaced in the N.Y.U. and Hopkins trials.
– excerpt quoted in The Trip Treatment by Michael Pollan "from from a set of “flight instructions” prepared by Bill Richards, a Baltimore psychologist who worked with Stanislav Grof during the nineteen-seventies and now trains a new generation of psychedelic therapists. The document is a summary of the experience accumulated from managing thousands of psychedelic sessions" –
The difference between reveletion on psychadelics
Pollan examples
One women who had successfully go through treatment of ovarian cancer. Afterwards she was paralyzed with fear that it will come back. On her psychedelics session she scanned her body and saw a dark cloud under her chest. It wasn't cancer. It was her fear. Her therapist said she heard that she screamed: get the fuck out of here. After the treatment her fear was gone. She said that she understood that she cannot control cancer but she can control her fear.
Psychedelic treatment helped one women get rid of an auto immune disease. In her session she recalled an accident from her early childhood that she repressed from her memory – she was raped. After the sessions her auto-immune disease was gone. Some speculate that auto-immune response might be a body punishing itself.
Epiphanies on psychedelic treatment has the authority of stone tablets from mount Sinai
Michael Pollan: It seemed so implausible to me that a single experience caused by a molecule, right, ingested in your body could transform your outlook on something as profound as death. That's-- that's kind of amazing.
Anderson Cooper: The kind of things that cancer patients were saying, like, "I touched the face of God." You were skeptical about when you hear phrases like that?
Michael Pollan: Yeah. Or, "Love is the most important thing in the universe." When someone tells me that I'm just like, "yeah, okay."
Anderson Cooper: So you don't go for some of the phrases that are used?
Michael Pollan: No. It gives me the willies as a writer. And I really struggled with that cause during one of my experiences I came to the earth-shattering conclusion that love is the most important thing in the universe. But it's, that's Hallmark card stuff, right? … And it's where you connect what happens in your life to the story of who you are.
Anderson Cooper: We all develop a story over time about what our past was like and who we are.
Michael Pollan: Right. Yeah, what kind of person we are. How we react. And the fact is that interesting things happen when the self goes quiet in the brain, including this rewiring that happens. ... I did have this experience of seeing my ego-- burst into-- a little cloud of Post-It notes. I know it sounds crazy. ... Maybe the ego is one character among many in your mind. And you don't necessarily have to listen to that voice that's chattering at you and criticizing you and telling you what to do. And that's very freeing