There's no such thing as a bad trip!

Only difficult ones.

A "bad trip" is a difficult psychedelic experience without integration. A bad trip happens when someone has a difficult psychedelic experience and the right people are not around to provide adequate support, and the tripper does not properly integrate their experience.

A difficult psychedelic experience with integration allows the person to find meaning from it, return to wholeness and move on.

The Art of Holding Space

I have cultivated inner peace and spiritual intelligence through a mosaic of healing modalities, as well as lots of the simple ingredients of time and space, mostly through traveling. Spiritual intelligence is one of the six core competencies of providing psychedelic therapy coined by Janis Phelps. This inner spaciousness I cultivated allows me to hold space for others and listen with patience and empathy.

I provided Harm Reduction services for Burning Man and Shambhala Music Festival, sitting with people through difficult psychedelic experiences. I received Harm Reduction training at Burning Man through the Zendo Project, as well as through a weekend program called Sanctuary Psycrisis based in Alberta. My holistic massage, breathwork and Hakomi training has provided me extra tools for holding space.

In addition to holding space, over the years I have guided many friends through Spiritual Awakening, providing them with wisdom and knowledge I cultivated through time spent contemplating.

The final and most important ingredient in processing a difficult psychedelic experience is integration.

What is Integration?

Integration is all about finding meaning from our experiences. Every experience results in embodied emotions and thoughts. These emotions and thoughts require processing or integration. Without this, these emotions and thoughts will linger in our mind-body, causing sensations and reactions that mostly don't serve us. Without this, a difficult experience resulting in a negative emotion or thought will become traumatizing.

Whether we know it or not, we are integrating every moment of our lives. Because every moment provides new experiences that need to be integrated so we can find meaning and move on with our lives. Every moment, even the most mundane, is integrated subconsciously. However, major experiences both good and bad take more time to integrate. In this moment, your subconscious may still be integrating something that happened years ago.

A major negative experience takes a lot of time and focused effort to integrate the associated emotions and thoughts that result from it. Many people never take the time to integrate these experiences properly, such as difficult psychedelic experiences. The result is these experiences still haunt their present reality.

Principles of Harm Reduction

Zendo Project, the primary Harm Reduction services provider for Burning Man and other festivals, has 4 Guiding Principles for Harm Reduction:

Safe Space - environmental setting that creates feeling of calm & safety

Sitting, Not Guiding - allowing one's experience to unfold, without interfering

Talk Through, Not Down - encourage one to gently connect with their inner experience & feelings instead of avoiding

Difficult is Not Necessarily Bad - as mentioned above, labeling an experience bad will result in it leaving behind trauma. By seeing every experience as an opportunity to learn a lesson, no experience is bad