And so let's take a few couple deep breaths together to arrive,
relaxing your body,
feeling the support of the ground beneath you.
Aaron is not physically going anywhere just letting
go of whatever's next to let go of.
But she's about to go on a journey with psychedelic mushrooms. It's an albino strain
prepotent. We haven't tested for potencies.
That's Daniel mcqueen,
founder of the Center for Medicinal Mindfulness in Boulder.
We're gonna start you with a pretty light dose on most days.
Erin is a psychedelic psychotherapist here today.
She's a patient, but it also helps me understand what my clients are experiencing,
right?
So we can go into that space together.
Erin grinds the mushrooms herself,
a
sitter that makes o psilocybin teeth, but we really hold this in a ceremonial space.
Um It's bringing in not just the clinical but also
you could say the sacred a guide will be at Erin's side the whole time,
potentially for up to eight hours talking with
her about anything that comes to mind.
Studies have shown stimulating the brain with psychedelics
during therapy can help people with depression addiction,
anxiety and ptsd where traditional talk therapy has failed it's
like whatever trauma it is gets wrapped in police tape,
like do not cross stay away.
Big stop sign. Right?
And so we can't actually get into there and work on it.
So psychedelics soften those defenses, right?
They allow us to have greater flexibility inside a
cyber mushrooms. It just puts it right there. And so we prepare our clients
to the best we can, you know, of like
turn towards it, breathe through it, relax around it,
it will move through and clear.
Like we really thoroughly review every single person that comes to our clinic.
Um in order to kind of figure out if there are any contraindications present.
Doctor Elise
Power is a medical doctor at the clinic.
She makes it a point to say sessions can be extremely
tense.
Um There can be moments of joy, moments of happiness like sunshine, rainbows,
unicorns.
Um There can also be really difficult moments
and there can be entering into hell realms,
there can be sadness and grief and those are just as important,
if not more important.
So with your next inhale Aaron, I'd like you to imagine that you're
breathing this medicine all the way into the very
bottoms of your feet with her eyes closed.
Aaron begins her psychedelic journey as her guide sets the tone
it's expected.
By the end of this year, the state will require psychedelic guides to be certified.
After dozens of hours of training,
Daniel mcqueen says the guides here already go through months of training.
These are very profound experiences
in just the right word. At the right time. The skillful intervention
can be the difference between somebody spiraling out versus
somebody having the most profound experience they can.
And we left Aaron's session after about 45 minutes to give her privacy.
And how long was your journey?
Oh, gosh,
mine was longer than we expected. About seven hours.
We caught up with her a few days later,
she says this type of therapy is self care because like
other guides who listen to stories of trauma all day,
she needs a release.
Life is not the same on the other side of one of these journeys, right?
It's like there's just a deeper understanding of self.
Most recently, the center has not only been helping
people move on with the rest of their lives,
but also helping people prepare for death.
Patients with terminal illnesses have been coming
in and have been finding comfort in
what they've seen and they sometimes get a glimpse of what's beyond this life.
So for someone who's at the end of their life,
it can reduce their anxiety of what's to
come pretty substantially because they have a direct
um experience of that,
a new frontier in therapy that seems to be literally changing
minds across the country as other states consider mushroom legalization.
This type of therapy is a game changer.
It's like quantum computers versus regular computers in
some ways we're still in the infancy,
but it does something fundamentally different that space.
It's always here.
Yeah.
And this medicine will help you remember,
this type of therapy is not for everyone,
especially for people who have a history of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
The state is actually coming out with regulations at the end of this year,
that will outline a lot of things including the types of mental
health conditions that could prevent someone from this type of therapy.
If you were thinking about this therapy, do a lot of your own research,
talk to a lot of people because these medicines can be very, very powerful.
I think just taking us behind the curtain there is is a big step for many
people because you always think about it and you imagine what it might be like,
but you guys took the time to show us.
Yeah, and it's not clinical, right? It's a very casual place to be.
It's not like you go to the doctor's office and there's like that
that bed that you lay on.
It's very welcoming,
at least at this clinic and there's lots of
clinics out there and they're all very different.
So you have to do your research and find out which one works for you.
And if you
the reasons for going there and also how much does it cost?
It's something you gotta,
each clinic is different at a standard session at this clinic on their way
website, a standard session is about $3000.
Again, these things are long sessions, right?
So, like, you know, a typical therapy session can cost someone, you know,
around $100 100 and $50 200 dollars
when you have a session that goes on for hours. And then there's also the vetting,
right?
That happens, they have to talk to you interview, you make sure that you're ok to, to,
to, to go through this and this is not new science,
but it's stuff that we're gonna start to get a better
study on now as it becomes more in the main.
Yeah,
there is stigma around psychedelics for decades and a
lot of that science was delayed because of that.
But now this science is coming out, it's exploding.
Even the Veterans administration is talking about a program because, you know,
there's a lot of folks that need it there and
this is
a, this is a last resort for a lot of people where traditional methods have failed.
So a lot of people are reporting some pretty remarkable results.
All right, Jeremy, thanks. Right. Other things.