“Coaching for psychedelic journeys and anomalous experiences? Why that combo?”
A psychedelic journey can often contain material that is extremely strange. You might meet dead people or non-human sentient beings, or smell colors, or feel your cells dividing. You may have visions of things from the past that you weren’t aware of before, or of future events. Your sense of time may vanish and you are left wondering if you are trapped in the experience forever. A sense of terror or hilarity may come over you for unclear reasons.
Some of the experiences may look a lot like “psychotic episodes”. You may wonder if you are going crazy or if psychotic people are the norm. Psychedelics laugh at our cultural agreements of how things are supposed to be. Don’t be surprised that you’re surprised. When you shut off your normal mentation, things are going to get very strange as a matter of course. You get to see how huge the world of potentialities is. Fairy tales, science fiction, speaking in tongues, rapture, and catatonia all make more sense after a mushroom journey.
Previously experienced paranormal events will often return in some fashion, via memory or a new experience. All of the phenomena under the category of “psychic” are not unusual. These things can happen with psilocybin, MDMA, LSD, even high dose cannabis.
I have found that all of these anomalous experiences start to become less anomalous after repeated exposure. Perhaps journeys, at least for some people, thin the veil a bit between worlds, dimensions, timelines, et cetera. What frightens a modern American may seem like a normal consequence to someone from a culture where other worlds are much nearer in everyday life.
There is a huge emphasis in the West on using psychedelics to process trauma. But there is much more to the psychedelic experience than “therapeutic effects”. Journeys aren’t just for checking off the boxes on a therapeutic treatment plan. Sometimes the really weird experiences that don’t seem to fit a modern psychological paradigm are the ones that can open us the most. They can show the possibilities that lie just out of sight, worlds that co-exist with ours, beings that want to communicate with us. Having someone to help you recognize and find value in these experiences can be very rewarding.