078 | Support for Navigating Challenging Psychedelic Experiences w/ Jules Evans
“We need to learn to accept and also cherish the mundane. The mundane and the ordinary and the non ecstatic is also important.”
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What is a challenging psychedelic experience? It turns out that it’s incredibly subjective. What one person finds challenging or bad, another may see as a growth opportunity.
But the current rhetoric around psychedelics presents them as mostly always good, positive, healing and helpful experiences. Jules Evans is dedicated to shining a light on the harms, challenges and dangers of psychedelics.
In this episode, Jules’ takes us through the most common post-trip challenges and offer support for those navigating these challenges. These include but are not limited to: Derealization and depersonalization, post-ecstatic blues, and alienation. We also have a fascinating conversation around sense making, when psychedelics ignite an existential paradigm shift, and over-dogmatism when interpreting psychedelic experiences.
Topics Covered:
Jules’ traumatic encounter with psychedelics
The good and bad of ecstatic experiences
How we relate to ecstatic experiences
Are challenging trips really always the most valuable?
What constitutes a “challenging” or “bad” trip?
Possible predictive factors for challenging experiences with psychedelics
Derealization and depersonalization after psychedelic experiences
Dealing with “post-ecstatic blues” after peak experiences
Alienation and lack of connection after psychedelic experiences
When psychedelics ignite an existential shift
Over-certainty and over-dogmatism when interpreting psychedelic experiences
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“Psychedelics can increase people’s sense of meaning and union with the cosmos. But they can also increase people’s sense of existential confusion.”
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Things Mentioned in This Episode
Show Links:
“Johns Hopkins said 84% of people who’ve had a challenging psychedelic experience felt it was ultimately healing.
That’s great, but don’t forget that means 16% did not feel it was ultimately healing, did not feel they grew from it. ”
Where to Find Jules Evans:
About Jules Evans:
I’M A WRITER, HISTORIAN OF IDEAS AND PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHER, INTERESTED IN IDEAS AND PRACTICES WHICH HELP BEINGS SUFFER LESS AND FLOURISH MORE.
YOU CAN EMAIL ME AT JULES@PHILOSOPHYFORLIFE.ORG
I’m now leading the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project - researching psychedelic harm reduction, ethics and integration. We’re currently researching post-trip difficulties and what helps people deal with them. Find out more here.
My first book, Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations, explored how people are rediscovering ancient Greek and Roman philosophies and how Greek philosophy (partiularly Stoicism) inspired Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). It’s since been published in 19 countries and was a Times book of the year. My second book, The Art of Losing Control, explored how people find ecstatic experiences in modern western culture. It was published in the UK in May 2017, and in the US in September 2017, and has also been published in Holland, Spain, Russia and Italy. In 2019 I published a little book on ayahuasca tourism, called Holiday From the Self. In 2020, I co-edited with Dr Tim Read a book on spiritual emergencies called Breaking Open: Finding a Way Through Spiritual Emergency.
Jules' Website
Ecstatic Integration Newsletter
JULES@PHILOSOPHYFORLIFE.ORG
Looking for a professional coach to support you on your psychedelic path?
Look no further! Along with being the host of the Modern Psychedelics Podcast, Lana is a 3x certified professional coach who works with people on the psychedelic path.
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[00:00:00]
Lana Pribic: Hello, everyone. I'm here with Jules Evans. Welcome to the show Jules. It's so lovely to have you here today.
Jules Evans: Thank you, Lana. Thank you for having me.
Lana Pribic: . And thanks for taking time out of your very busy schedule, pushing out much content and articles every week to speak with us and share share what you have learned about psychedelics in this space with us today.
So before we really dive into the juicy stuff, can you please introduce yourself to our audience and maybe just touch on what inspired you to bring your attention to like the dark side, the risks, the challenges within the psychedelic space.
Jules Evans: Sure. I am a writer researcher and a journalist. So for the last particularly the last 15 years I've been writing about mental health, um, psychology, philosophy and spirituality. That all started because when I was a teenager, I was doing lots of psychedelics in the mid [00:01:00] 1990s.
aNd I had some amazing experiences and had some bad experiences, so I and my friends we're very in , the rave scene and we saw our fair share of both good and bad type experiences, and I certainly saw friends getting harmed by psychedelic drugs and other drugs and and I also experienced harm after a couple of bad trips I ended up developing convulsions, and Post traumatic stress disorder and social anxiety, and in my 20s really, throughout university and all the way through my 20s, I was trying to recover from that.
And basically having to figure out for myself how to recover, how to get better, how to put myself back together. And that, just it was an unnecessarily long and painful process. So I'm motivated by the desire to reduce that recovery process by others and to help people who might [00:02:00] be in difficulty, mental health difficulty, especially.
Connected to psychedelics and so that's led to a lot of what I've produced. So my first book was about how people use ancient Greek philosophy, particularly stoicism in modern life. And that was because stoicism and cognitive therapy was really helpful to me in my early 20s, in the first step of recovering from social anxiety, panic attacks, that kind of thing.
The first book was called Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations. My second book was called The Art of Losing Control. And I wrote about ecstatic experiences in that. And their place in modern Western culture. When are they healing for us? When are they harmful?
And again, that was because I was interested in both the good and bad of ecstatic experiences. And really, that book was arguing that we should be open to ecstatic experiences in Western culture. They can be [00:03:00] meaningful, they can be healing. However, I try to be balanced and say ecstatic experiences aren't always healing.
There are various ways that they can be harmful for people as well. Cultures have known this for millennia. If you think about ancient Greek culture, they knew that Dionysus, the god of ecstasy, was not always nice and safe. There's a play by Euripides, the Greek playwright, called The Bacchae, about the followers of Dionysus.
And in that play, King Pentheus tries to banish Dionysus, tries to banish ecstasy, ecstatic experiences from his kingdom and he ends up being torn apart by the followers of Dionysus. So they understood that these are not totally safe experiences. What I argue in that book is that Western culture has a problematic Attitudes to ecstatic experiences on the whole in the [00:04:00] mainstream, there's still a bit like that sounds weird.
That sounds dangerous. That sounds crazy or stupid. That can be the mainstream attitudes to ecstatic experiences, but in subcultures, like in psychedelic culture, like an ecstatic Christian culture, like a new age culture, we can go the other way a bit too much. Spiritual experiences, ecstatic experiences are always amazing.
They're always incredible. They're always improving. They're safe. They're wonderful. They're, and we should get as many of them as possible. And really, they're the goal. So how do we find a balance between that aversion to the ecstatic and a kind of fetishization of the ecstatic? And then just very quickly, finally, in the last two years, I've started this thing called the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project.
And that is a research project and we produce academic research on psychedelic harms and on harm [00:05:00] reduction, because we felt there was a lack of research on the ways that psychedelics can harm us, and that the public conversation now on psychedelics has shifted to incredibly positive, which is okay, that's good, because it probably was too far the other way in the kind of 70s and 80s. But there was a lack of conversation and of publication about psychedelic harms.
Lana Pribic: Yeah, we're really going to focus on your recent work and those challenging experiences so that listeners can learn a little bit about that and how to navigate that. But there's something that you said that I just have to follow the thread on here before we get into that. You mentioned this idea of going too far.
In one extreme. So either ecstatic experiences are, undesirable and bad and should not be sought or like going in the other extreme of that is the goal of life and let's get as many as possible. What are you learning about finding that balance? How do we find that balance? And [00:06:00] what does that look like?
Jules Evans: Yeah. Okay. How we can find that balance? Yeah I'm very interested in that question. And one of the things I've thought is that as a culture, we need to improve what I call our ecstatic literacy, which is our cultural literacy in ecstatic experiences. We lost that literacy. Because of the enlightenment and the modern secular culture, we just rather dismissed ecstatic experiences and we lost our guides, our maps, our cultural wisdom about them.
We are now trying to reintegrate these experiences. But, they've gone from very marginal to a bit more common in the 60s and now a bit more common now, maybe a lot more like the number of Americans who do psychedelics has quadrupled in 10 years. But yeah, we don't have cultural literacy.
What does that mean? It [00:07:00] means we're just not very sophisticated in how we relate to them. Maybe something, we have as a kind of mystical type experience, but that might be completely beyond our framework. Bewildered by it. We're actually doing a paper at the moment about existential confusion after psychedelic experiences.
Some person who's 20 or 30 or 40 and they have some bizarre experience, entities speaking to them, they can't really remember it afterwards, and they're just like, how do I make sense of that in my life, which is completely different? Or let's say we have an ecstatic experience in the presence of someone else.
A healer, a teacher, a guru, and we think this person must be an enlightened being because I had such a special experience. So I must, I can trust them completely. I should follow them and believe everything they say. That's an unsophisticated way of interpreting your ecstatic experience. Or let's say [00:08:00] you have an ecstatic experience and you receive a message on it.
How do you relate to that message? Is it 100 percent reliable and true? Are there different ways you might be able to interpret that message as a symbol, as a metaphor, or is it the literal truth? All of this is about literacy, cultural sophistication, and that takes time. That takes decades and centuries.
to redevelop. And we're just starting. I was at Psychedelic Science, the big conference in Denver, MAPS's big conference. And there was a panel on, psychedelics and religion. And the guy stood up and said Hi, I run a psychedelic church. We've got hundreds of followers.
And we're really not sure about kind of metaphysics. What kind of metaphysics should we have? Like, how do we make sense of these experiences? And he put this question to professor Roland Griffiths, probably the leading psychedelic research. And he was like, [00:09:00] Oh, that's way beyond my expertise. I don't know.
So how do we make sense of these experiences individually and culturally? So this is a big topic.
Lana Pribic: Yeah. So it sounds like asking that question of how do we find balance has only led to more questions that we're still answering. Yeah.
Jules Evans: Yeah. Oh yeah. It's going to take decades, centuries.
Lana Pribic: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In terms of the, the work you're doing with challenging experiences, I kind of want to start that with two common, sentiments that are often heard in the psychedelic space and get your thoughts on it. So we often hear this idea that there are no bad trips, only challenging trips, and that the challenging trips are the most valuable.
What are your thoughts on that?
Jules Evans: It's entirely subjective. [00:10:00] That may be true for some people but it's also true that some people have experiences that they feel harmed them and and made their life harder. For example, I interview people and, it turns up in our research as well, who develop. Persistent derealization after psychedelics.
Dissociation things feel unreal. Their mind and body get stuck in a certain kind of defense mechanism, and they're not sure how to get out of that. And they try everything to stop these experiences of derealization. They might try, EMDR, meditation, exercise, antidepressants.
They might try psychedelics again. And it's just, there's very little understanding of derealization yet. We don't know how to treat it yet. And they, now, they may still feel they grow in a way [00:11:00] from having to go through this such a difficult experience for years. In the same way that someone dealing with cancer might feel, they've grown through it, but they wouldn't choose to go through it again.
Any intense adversity. Yes, of course you can grow through it. If you lose your family, you can grow through that. If you get paralyzed in a car crash, you can grow through that, but that doesn't mean you'd necessarily choose it. To happen again, my life became harder because of my kind of bad trips. I did grow from that.
But in some ways I lost capacities that didn't come back. It changed me in fundamental ways. And in ways that I wouldn't have chosen before. And would I choose now? It's hard to say. You become who you are. Like, you're I don't regret my life, but it became harder because of psychedelics.[00:12:00] sO just to encapsulate, that's probably true for some people, and it's also true that some people who have very difficult, who have difficulties after trips, it can be helpful to some of them to decide, I'm going to see this as a growth process, rather than just think, Oh man, I've fucked myself up. However, it's not for us, other people to say to that person, Hey, just see this as a growth process.
Because that can feel invalidating and glib and belittling for people in the spiritual community or the psychedelic community to say, Hey, what's the medicine trying to teach you? Hey, maybe you're just not listening to what the medicine tells you. That's not helpful. It might be true that kind of frame is helpful, but they have to come to it themselves.
What their friends and loved ones and people in the community can say is [00:13:00] yeah, that sucks. that like? That sounds really hard. And I'm really sorry about that. And, these medicines, these drugs are not for everyone. And some people do feel harmed by them and let's listen to their experience to try to help people better.
Lana Pribic: Yeah. Yeah. I love the way you put that, that like, there are no bad trips, only challenging ones. Yes, that can be true for a lot of people, but for some people, it really isn't true. And it does not validate their experience and it does not validate where they're at. So it really depends on like, where are we at in our lives and how are we looking at things?
Jules Evans: Yes, exactly. And this is important for peer groups and integration, people working in integration and people working in psychedelics. Just to be aware of what is helpful? What is helpful for this person to hear? And the kind of the first thing is just to listen and people, [00:14:00] because we ask people what do they find helpful feeling supported, feeling listened to, hearing similar stories.
of Difficulties and difficulties that maybe lasted a while, um, some people are helped by the frame of Hey, see, this is a spiritual emergency and some people are not. So there's just, there's a variety of people out there and the variety of kind of perspectives they choose for that difficult.
Lana Pribic: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I love that. And for me, when I hear like a challenging experience as a life coach with a lot of this, like forward momentum growth oriented energy, like there's no problems. There's only like opportunities for growth. That is my frame of reference. That's how I approach life.
So for someone like me, when I hear the word challenge, , it's not necessarily a bad thing, right? It's not necessarily something to avoid or turn away from. , I'm curious, like what does constitute a challenging [00:15:00] psychedelic experience?
Jules Evans: oNe of the difficult things about this field is that there are different terms and those terms tend to be Can be somewhat loaded. They are put forward by people with different kind of perspectives on psychedelics. Even the term psychedelic is a loaded term, invented by people, Aldous Huxley and Humphrey Osmond, who were very into psychedelics.
But there's the term bad trip. And sometimes people have said to us, the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project, why don't you just say bad trip? bEcause some people might use that, I had a bad trip, I had a bummer trip, but it's not for me to label your experiences essentially bad. That's a bit too, that's a, that's maybe you can choose that label. It's not for me to challenging experience, challenging psychedelic experience. That was put forward by the Johns [00:16:00] Hopkins research lab who are on the whole very, quite pro psychedelics and their spiritual and therapeutic potential.
And some people like the term challenging psychedelic experience. We were, fine with having that as our kind of title, but we should be aware that's a bit loaded too. Because the implication is, hey, it's challenges, but you'll work through it. But in the paper that introduced that term, challenging psychedelic experience, Johns Hopkins said 84 percent of people who've had a challenging psychedelic experience felt it was ultimately healing.
That's great, but don't forget that means 16 percent did not feel it was ultimately healing, did not feel they grew from it. Some of those people might then go and seek therapy or support or coaching. And Let's listen to them too.
Lana Pribic: So is that the 16 percent that you're focused on and you're wanting to bring a light to?
Jules Evans: In fact, we, [00:17:00] the research we've done, we did a big survey and we asked people, have you had difficulties lasting longer than a day after a psychedelic experience? Can you tell us what those difficulties were and what you found helpful in dealing with them? And we got 608 responses from people, um, of whom 1 5th, uh, said their difficulties lasted longer than a year, and 1, 6th said their difficulties lasted longer than three years.
Actually, we got a whole range within our group as well. A lot of them said they felt this was ultimately healing both. You know what I mean? Because actually it's always changing. Your attitude to difficulties in your life is dynamic. You could look back on something that happened in your childhood. Sometimes you're like, when it's really raw, you feel, God, I wish that didn't happen to me.
[00:18:00] Other times you think, oh, that made me who I am today. It changes day by day.
Lana Pribic: Yeah, that's why it's so hard to study this. It's so subjective. It's absolutely subjective. Like I just returned from a 5 MEO DMT experience for the first time about 3 weeks ago when I had the whole like reactivations and, waking up in my sleep. In the middle of my sleep and my mouth was open as if I was still in ceremony and screaming and I'm sure for many people that would be very frightening, but just like for me, I really was able to see it as part of the process and to trust the process and to trust my body and to, trust.
So would I label that as difficult? I don't know if I would. I would label it as simply a part of the process. So yeah, this is all just so subjective and just really depends on like the frame that we are coming from the view that we are seeing the situation through.
Jules Evans: That's exactly right. And that's true of everything in life. [00:19:00] And it's particularly true of these kinds of unusual experiences, because for some people they wouldn't be unusual. If you're a Shipibo in the Amazon, none of this is unusual. This is very normal. But if you're, Joe six pack or whatever they call it in the in, in the Americas.
This might be very unusual and a mystical experience might be very unusual. And some of this, some of these unusual experiences may be welcome and wanted, and some might not. This is even true of something like hallucination, persistent perception disorder, or is it hallucination, perception, persistent disorder?
Anyway, HPPD, which is basically continued visuals. After in the weeks or months or years after psychedelic experience, that could be like you look at the wall and it starts to breathe or you look at a carpet and it starts to move like this or you get visual snow. Some people seem to get this after psychedelics. [00:20:00] And some people find it really disturbing, and others find it less disturbing.
Lana Pribic: Yeah.
Jules Evans: Yeah whether something is experienced as adverse is subjective and depends and can change over time. It's the same with things like derealization. Some people seek derealization through meditation. They want to learn to see this reality as somewhat unreal. Other people do not expect it and are like, What the hell is this?
I feel like I'm in a computer game now.
Lana Pribic: Yes. Yes. Yeah. That's so interesting. I'm curious. Have you either noticed or found some sort of connection correlation between bad or challenging experiences and the amount of experience one has with psychedelics? Because I would assume that the more experience we have, the more we're willing to embrace the challenges, but that's totally my personal bias.
Jules Evans: It's not something[00:21:00] we didn't draw firm conclusions on that yet. bUt the papers that have made some conclusions, some early kind of possible hypotheses, there was a paper from Imperial that looked, Imperial College London, that looked at extended difficulties of about 25 people who experienced difficulties lasting days, weeks, months. And they thought that they suggested there was a correlation with age that younger people were more likely to have these kinds of extended difficulties.
Another study, the global ayahuasca survey of 11, 000 people found people were more likely to have adverse experiences on ayahuasca according to age at that time of their first experience if they were older, but new to psychedelics. It was more jarring for them, I think, is the suggestion, the possible [00:22:00] hypothesis. The Canadian psychedelic survey, that suggested that if you do psychedelics a lot more prone to both very intensely positive psychedelic experiences and intensely negative psychedelic experiences. aNd I asked the authors, why might that be? Is there a group of people who go higher and lower the one of the authors suggested to me, it may be that there's just a group of people who do lots of psychedelic experiences.
And if you do lots of psychedelic experiences, you're rolling the dice more. So you're going to get more sixes and you're going to get more ones. So it's just probability. So there are some people who just do psychedelics a lot, and they will probably have more intensely positive experiences and more intensely negative experiences.
So we're, we're trying to figure out the predictive factors. For, [00:23:00] intensely hard trips and difficulties beyond trips. But actually, we're at an early stage with that, Lana.
Lana Pribic: yEah, it's definitely something fascinating to think about, isn't it?
Jules Evans: Yeah,
Lana Pribic: Yeah. Yeah. I saw there was a paper that you released and it listed out several, challenges, several different challenges. I was wondering if we could maybe spend some time just going through each of those, what you know about them.
And even if you are aware of any ways that Yeah. Help people to deal or cope with them. The first one you've already mentioned was derealization. What is that?
Jules Evans: iN Europe, it's sometimes, it's been called by different things. It's sometimes called now derealization and depersonalization disorder. It's a kind of dissociative disorder, which seems to happen to people sometimes in response to traumatic events. And what it can feel like [00:24:00] is suddenly reality feels a bit unreal.
You feel a bit separated from reality, like you're looking at it through a glass maybe. Or like you're in a dream, or like you're in a computer game. You can feel detached also from yourself, from your body. People use phrases like, I felt I wasn't really there. I was in a dream. I felt untethered from my body.
I felt fragmented. So it's this kind of dissociation from your ordinary self and your ordinary reality. anD it can be triggered by traumatic events like childhood abuse, like, uh, or, or, or abuse later in life. Car crashes but also by cannabis quite often and by psychedelics sometimes.
Yeah, and so it was one of the most common extended difficulties in our survey, um, 15 percent of our survey said they reported [00:25:00] symptoms like derealization and depersonalization. That doesn't mean 15 percent of people who take psychedelics experience it. It's 15 percent of our data set, which is people who have difficulties lasting longer than a day.
So what that means is it's one of one of the most common types of extended difficulty. But it would probably be much smaller than that, like maybe 2 to 3 percent of total um, psychonauts. But it does seem one of these difficulties that can last a while. I've interviewed people who have had derealization for years.
Two people who I interviewed who had it, have had it for four years, uh, since their first kind of big psychedelic experience. So hard, a lady, she's a kind of Turkish American entrepreneur. She went to do an ayahuasca retreat because she had some depression and anxiety for a long time that she wanted to try and [00:26:00] cure.
And since then she's had persistent derealization. She's I've tried everything and I feel like I might have to learn how to live with this. It's, yeah. What helps? I asked the kind of one of the world experts on derealization. They're like we don't really know yet.
The recommended treatment is cognitive behavioral therapy to learn to accept the symptoms so that when you feel, oh, this feels unreal, you just go, okay, I'm not going to panic about this. This doesn't, this isn't unsafe, I could, I'm just experiencing this, it will pass, that kind of thing.
There may be, we may work out more things, maybe, there are programs as well you can find online for people who experience derealization. They may work for some people. Somatic experiencing may work, may help people feel more in their bodies. [00:27:00] I can tell you that Meditation doesn't seem always helpful for people in derealization because they're already a bit,
Lana Pribic: That makes
Jules Evans: Spinning out.
Yeah. And a bit detached.
Lana Pribic: where you need to be tethered and grounded rather than ascending.
Jules Evans: Yes, I think so. But we're still learning. There hasn't been a single paper published on derealization after psychedelics. So there's a big research gap. iN, in this field. So we're learning and we're learning from people who experience these things, what they find helpful and helpful.
Lana Pribic: Okay. All right. What about post ecstatic blues? What is that?
Jules Evans: Wow, that was that was from the first paper we published, which was on short term integration challenges after a a psilocybin retreat. So in that paper, which I co wrote with Anna Luke Kadgetis who's a researcher in Australia she interviewed people after [00:28:00] a psilocybin retreat. 30 percent of our interviewees reported challenges in the days and weeks.
after a psilocybin retreat in Holland. For all of them, it, by the way, it eventually resolved. But so there's, so there seems to be, this quite big group of people who can feel different kinds of challenges after a psychedelic retreat. Post Ecstatic Blues was the term we used for people who had an incredible experience but felt it was difficult to go back to ordinary life afterwards. And they missed that spiritual high. They were in when everything felt so meaningful, when they felt so close, maybe to the spirit or God, so open to other people, their emotions were so there and present, so alive. And then they're back in their job, they're back in the mundane world, and they feel sad. And I can certainly relate to [00:29:00] that, the kind of the low after the high.
Lana Pribic: Yeah.
Jules Evans: And, it's going back to mundane life is quite important. There's a book by Jack Kornfield, the Buddhist teacher, called After the Ecstasy of the Laundry.
Lana Pribic: Ah,
Jules Evans: we need to learn to accept and also cherish the mundane. That the mundane and the ordinary and the non ecstatic is also important.
Because otherwise, what's the risk? The risk is that we chase the highs. And try to live always in an exalted state, like Ram Dass, when he was a researcher at Harvard in psychedelics, would take LSD every day. He would try to remain in that exalted state.
So you can become what they call a kind of there's a good term for it, like a kind of ecstasy addict.
And in fact, in a [00:30:00] recently published survey of Norwegian psychonauts, the Norwegian Psychedelic Survey, 50 percent of them reported craving for psychedelic experiences. So they want to get back there into the magic kingdom. They want to always be in the magic kingdom. And this, you can see that there are risks there.
Risks of spiritual bypass, risk of becoming a space cadet.
Lana Pribic: Yeah. Oh, I love that one. I love that one. And I feel like it's really also relevant within the rave community, within rave culture, just like having these amazing peak experiences on ecstasy, on whatever you're doing, the music, the community, all of it. And then, yeah, going back to work. And it reminds me also, I love that after the ecstasy, the laundry, I'm definitely going to read that.
But also reminds me of um, Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure you've heard uh, before enlightenment, chop wood, carry [00:31:00] water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. Yeah.
Jules Evans: Yeah Zen culture is very good. That's a Zen saying and Zen Buddhism is very good at not making too big a deal of special experiences. If you ever done a Vipassana retreat, they say it's a kind of Buddhist. It's not Zen. It's actually another type of Buddhism. You're taught on it.
You might have a very painful experience. Just observe it with equanimity or you might have an experience of rapture. Just observe it with equanimity. Don't get too hung up on any experience. They're all temporary.
Lana Pribic: Yeah. Everything's just an experience, kind of neutralizing the highs and lows. That's really, that's my goal in life. Yeah. Just living
Jules Evans: I mean, It sounds, that sounds maybe a bit a bit cold to some people. Like I was I was a Christian briefly with my search and I joined a kind of ecstatic [00:32:00] Christian church. And in, in charismatic Christianity, There's a big emphasis on Holy Spirit encounters.
Trance states, when you're flooded with the Holy Spirit and you're super high. But I saw in Christian culture a similar risk. People are then they get down. They're like, where's God gone? Oh, I'm in a, I'm in a dry phase. Oh, I need to get back that Holy Spirit feeling.
It becomes bipolar, maxing out the highs and then I'm down, I'm dry, where's God, yeah, that's what this kind of balance is about enjoying the quiet moments.
Lana Pribic: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah yeah, I'm loving this conversation because it's really just bringing to light how complex it is to actually work with psychedelics, experience these altered states of consciousness, and then, yeah, live the life that we are living here on earth and do the things we, we got to do. [00:33:00] And it's making me even more passionate about, about being in the space.
Jules Evans: Good.
Lana Pribic: Yeah, what about alienation and lack of connection? I feel like that's another really common one that people experience, if not the most common that I've seen.
Jules Evans: Yeah in our second paper on extended difficulties after psychedelics, um, again, one of the top five most common types of difficulty was social disconnection. Which is basically you have a very powerful experience could be intensely positive or intensely negative, and then you feel like who could understand this, could my friends or family or loved ones or my, people at work, could they understand this?
This feels, off the usual cultural map, uh, and that can feel very lonely that that can make you feel we think of psychedelics as increasing connections, they can sometimes increase [00:34:00] this feeling of disconnection. Also, by the way, you may be part of psychedelic culture, but you have a difficult experience.
And you feel oh, but everyone only talks about the positive experiences. Because if you have a positive experience, you're much more likely to get up on a stage and talk about it. But the hard experiences, you might feel, oh, if I talk about this, will I harm the movement?
Lana Pribic: Yeah.
Jules Evans: Uh, Or is this about my own weakness?
You don't want to, if you have a really positive experience, yeah, hey, I met God, I downloaded the Akashic Records, but if, I've, I felt like I was going crazy, that's a bit more vulnerable to talk about. So sometimes people don't. We, I've interviewed people for our studies who've said, you're the first person I've ever spoken to about this, and this happened maybe in the 80s. So that's 40 years of never talking about an experience, which they felt changed them. And also sometimes a powerful spiritual experience, ecstatic experience, psychedelic experience [00:35:00] can really change people and it can start them on a journey to a different sense of their self.
and a different sense of reality. We can call this a kind of existential shift or an ontological shift, like a shift to like maybe a more spiritual world. It's not always easy. That shift can take months or years and it can be, it can have, that journey can be, have moments where you feel very alone or lost. you might be shifting, for example, from one worldview to another, or from one social group to another, or from one set of relationships to another. And it can feel like from one skin, one identity to another. So there are going to be moments on that shift which are going to feel hard, and I've lost my old beliefs, I've lost my old friends that I [00:36:00] used to just hang out with and just talk about whatever.
Maybe I've lost a relationship I was in. And, but I haven't yet found my new people, my new beliefs. So that relates to social disconnection, but also to another difficulty that people reported, which is existential confusion. Psychedelics. can increase people's sense of meaning and union with the cosmos.
Ah, finally I get it. But they can also increase people's sense of existential confusion. What does this mean? How do I make sense of this?
Lana Pribic: Yeah.
Jules Evans: How do I make sense of the universe? Quite a few people report that. Probably if you're, if you work as a coach in this space, some people will come to you with that.
This happened to me. How do I make sense of that? I thought I was in hell. Is that real? All these kinds of questions, and they're not easy to answer. 'cause these are not just therapy questions. If [00:37:00] someone says, I saw entities and now I don't know if entities are real.
Or, I saw a demon and I've never really thought of demons before, I had this demon encounter. How do I make sense of that? These are not straightforward questions to answer for that person or for their. tHerapist or coach.
Lana Pribic: Yeah. Yeah. At the end of the day, it really is only for the person who had the experience to answer those questions. I try to be very careful to, yeah, even on my podcast and my show, if I'm sharing about my experience, I try to be very careful to, say this is my experience. This is my story.
This is my journey. Is going to be very different from yours and,
Jules Evans: Right.
Lana Pribic: yeah, I'm really passionate about like sense making and how we make sense of our experiences and I call them like narrative neutral spaces going to a retreat and not being bombarded with certain narratives or sense making and like really just bringing it back to yourself for you to [00:38:00] find the meaning in that.
Jules Evans: I think that is completely appropriate. If you are a coach or therapist, or even a kind of retreat center, this kind of Neutrality, but along with kind of sympathy and regard and support what's helpful for you. This is true. It also brings challenges as well. Like in a different form of society, you have a religious society with a shared religious culture and a shared religious interpretation of ecstatic experiences.
So that if you have a demon encounter. They say, oh, okay, we know what that demon was. That was Beelzebub, and this is the spell, and this is the prayer you use, and you use these kind of amulets. And maybe go on a pilgrimage to to this place and go, okay, great. Or if you're in a Muslim culture, okay, that was a gin and we know what to do.
You need to have a do this [00:39:00] particular czar ritual for three days. And that will exercise the chin. Now you have a person like someone I interviewed, they said, I had this demon encounter. I didn't think anyone else has ever encountered, that I've come across this particular demon. I don't know what it is.
What do I do about it? anD so that's more lonely, right? Than if you are an Ethiopian woman and they're like, oh, that's a djinn. No problem, we'll call in the djinn people. We got this. Happened to your neighbor a couple of years ago. So we are in a pluralist culture where we have a wide variety of interpretations about these kinds of experiences.
For some people, that's just mental illness. For other people, that's a spirit and that really exists. For Christians, that's a demon. For new age people, that's, I don't know. That's a UFO or something like that. That is the joy and challenge of being in a pluralist [00:40:00] culture. Is that to some extent, much more than a thousand years ago.
We have to make our minds up for ourselves as individuals.
Lana Pribic: It's hard. It's hard for a lot of people to do that.
Jules Evans: It's hard, but it's also liberating because you don't have a priest saying, Oh, Lana, you're a demon or whatever. You've got a demon within you. You better adhere to our official interpretation of your experience or we're going to burn you. So it's nice not to be in that kind of culture anymore.
Where,
Lana Pribic: Yeah.
Jules Evans: because it was, these were kind of experiences were extremely policed before in say, medieval Europe. If you had an ecstatic experience and spoke about it, it was risky. You could either be condemned as possessed by a demon. You could become like Joan of Arc, but that had its risks as well.
Or you just thought of as a crazy person. So now it's less risky, [00:41:00] particularly for women, to, to be able to talk about ecstatic experiences they have.
Lana Pribic: Yeah. Yeah. Gosh, what was I going to say on that? iT really is I always say Our spirituality, our ecstatic experiences, our altered state experiences they really are like, mine are between me and me. Yours are between you and you like, they're, I don't really see it as being like.
One truth. And even if there is one truth, I don't know how I don't see how any human could possibly ever understand. That's why the way I see it. And again, this is my framing and my perspective. We really are on our own kind of journey to understand these experiences that honestly, sometimes can't really fully be understood.
And sometimes the work is in accepting that sometimes it can't fully be understood.
Jules Evans: Sure. That seems [00:42:00] totally a wise position. And there's a whole tradition of that in Western mysticism, which is like, you can't fully understand some of these experiences, and you can't fully put them into words. And that's because we're encountering reality bigger than our sensemaking. And so that is flexible and humble and wise to say, yeah, like sometimes You can't grasp everything.
You can't comprehend these experiences. So that sounds totally wise to me. The other thing is, yeah, beware not beware, I don't know, but let's be aware of over certainty and over dogmatism in some of our sources for interpreting these experiences. That could be like religious or spiritual.
, like you have an unusual experience and you go, what does this mean? There will be certain [00:43:00] sources that will be eager and confident with their authority to label your experiences.
Jules Evans: And that can be helpful, but let's be a bit aware that can be, for example, a religious or spiritual group can say. We know what your experience means. It points to this. It proves our theory.
Lana Pribic: Right?
Jules Evans: helpful to you. yoU might be like, oh, yeah, great, that makes sense for me, and I'm comfortable with this framework, so I'm gonna become a Christian, or a Shaman, or a Muslim.
That's fine. That is okay but or it might not be helpful to you, and you'll be like, no, that doesn't actually, um, totally make sense, my experience. It's the same with science. The type of authority, like a paper comes out, or a scientist, or a psychiatrist, or a researcher. Let me tell you about your experience.
And that could be helpful. You may be experiencing panic attacks or derealization. A psychiatrist who says, I've been studying this for 20 years, this is what I know. That could be helpful to you. [00:44:00] But, beware over certainty as well. Because we are still learning, this research is young. And it's also interesting to think about, What you said, I really agree with you that this is between us and our whatever, the mystery, these kinds of experiences.
Beware of authorities who would come between you and that. However, what are good forms of community? Because the advantages of medieval Christian culture is you all shared a map, you all shared an idea of the goal, you all shared common values, we are not in that world anymore, and that can be lonely.
So what are the forms of community that we can evolve in our pluralist culture to support us without necessarily putting us in a straitjacket of dogma?
Lana Pribic: that's a great question. Yeah, I love that. And I [00:45:00] trust, I hope that we are figuring that out right now in the psychedelic space and as a society that is seemingly in some ways increasing their level of consciousness at the greater level. And I say that very skeptically because I'm not sure I fully believe it, but yeah, I hope we're finding our way to that.
Jules Evans: Who knows if we're getting More conscious, but these kinds of experiences do seem to be happening more often, like people are doing more psychedelics. There is some data that people are having more mystical type experiences. We do need to collectively develop our kind of cultural maturity, and that includes creating spaces which provide support and community. But [00:46:00] necessarily forcing us to sign up to too strict a set of dogma because that fits the kind of community that fits with our very individualist culture, in short, and there are there are possible precedents. William James was an American philosopher and psychologist, and he wrote a great book called The Varieties of Religious Experience. He was a pluralist. He coined the phrase multiverse, I think. He believed that there are possibly multiple different religious truths and possibly multiple universes that we go to these experiences.
Lana Pribic: Yeah.
Jules Evans: So his book is all about the variety of these experiences and the variety of ways you interpret them.
His thinking had some inspiration onto Alcoholics Anonymous. Which is a support group where people connect to an idea of a higher power, [00:47:00] but they are left to make sense of that how they wish. And some might believe it is God, but for some people, God, they interpret that as like G O D, a group of drunks, is the joke, right?
Or ah, the group, that's my higher power. tHere are multiple ways to interpret the idea of something beyond yourself. So that is one example of a group that finds, that provides support and community, but with some flexibility over dogma. Another is a place like Esalen, the kind of growth center.
One of their mantras is, we hold our dogmas lightly. It's where people can go for, expanded experiences. Without getting pushed into a cult, where you have to follow this leader, you have to follow this dogma, you have to eat in this way, you have to have sex in this way, which is what can sometimes happen in new age communities.[00:48:00]
Lana Pribic: Yeah. That's that's really good points. And yeah, there's like all these other challenging experiences that you've outlined. Lack of support, mood fluctuations, spiritual bypassing and escapism, which my listeners know all about, because I've talked about that before, and I wish we had time to go through all of them, but I have just one final question for you before I let you go today and it's something that, yeah, I've really been sitting with since I Realize I was going to interview you.
It's this idea of when we look at these challenging experiences, right? Obviously, the hope is to make them less frequent or to make them less bad. sO that people can gain more from their psychedelic experiences. How much do you think that these challenging experiences can be managed or lowered through preparation?
Things like. mentally preparing selecting an ethical guide, having [00:49:00] integration support lined up, I think there's this phenomenon of also doing psychedelics really casually and maybe going too fast too soon before someone's really ready to blast their consciousness wide open in that way.
Yeah, so how much do you think that these challenges can be managed through the prep work?
Jules Evans: Yeah, I do. I do think that's the case. I think that some of these challenges and difficulties after psychedelic experiences can probably be avoided. Because there was, people didn't prepare properly, or they went to a place which turned out not to be safe, or, they were in a context, which wasn't ideal.
Or maybe they did a very high dose on their own and they didn't have support there to help them when they got into a loop, a mental loop. So that's not to blame people because our whole culture is figuring [00:50:00] out, how to deal with these experiences. But, yeah, I think maybe some of these things could be avoided, um, altogether but also and then. We're all still learning about if you're having a difficulties during a trip, what might be helpful in the middle of the trip as well. Um, Certain kind of practices, having people around you, that kind of thing. And then afterwards I think these extended difficulties don't have to last for so long.
If we knew more about them, if there was proper support, if therapists had better training about, how to support people there, if there were more peer support groups. Thanks. For people to talk to, like the Fireside Project, which I should mention there's a few of these kind of peer support groups, but not many. sO if there was more of a safety net, a cultural safety net for people who get into difficulties during and after psychedelic experiences, I [00:51:00] think some of this suffering could be reduced in intensity and duration. but this is still never going to be a totally safe sport. This is still going to be like diving or climbing.
Like it's going to be amazing. And there will be accidents.
Lana Pribic: Yeah.
Jules Evans: and some of those, will be like people just go to difficult places that they weren't expecting, and it'll be difficult for them, maybe for some time. Plus, there'll be kinds of harms and abuses. We haven't spoken about that, but, uh, unfortunately, this field where people have very powerful experiences and they're in vulnerable, suggestible states, uh, attracts either people who are incompetent, But want to want to be healers or who are predatory and like the power of being able to put people in very suggestible states where they may come out and say, wow, what incredible healer you are.
You're [00:52:00] amazing. You're like a kind of Jesus. That happens. So there's, so people are going to get, still going to get harmed. I know cases of people in, in, like, the most professional clinical trials, and they still had bad reactions, and, they had, they needed a lot of support for weeks afterwards, so they wouldn't kill themselves. So that's even in clinical trials. So these things will happen. And yeah we can keep trying to learn about them, but this will never be completely safe. anD that's just how it is. You wouldn't expect something that can change your life in one experience to be completely safe.
Lana Pribic: Yeah. Yeah. I love the the way that you called it psychedelics and extreme sport. I love that. That's such a great metaphor. I've never thought of it that way. So good. Can you tell us a little bit about the challenging psychedelic [00:53:00] experiences project that you're working on?
Jules Evans: Yeah, sure. The website is challenging, psychedelic experiences.com. wE produce academic research published in academic journals on types of extended difficulties, particularly after psychedelics and what people find helpful in dealing with them. we've published 2 papers so far. We've got more in the pipeline.
Our next paper will be on what people say they find helpful in dealing with extended difficulties. We're also doing a paper on people who report existential confusion after psychedelics. We've got some other papers lined up for next year. We try to inform kind of policy, therapy, support, so that people know what kinds of difficulties people experience and what might be helpful for them.
And then we also have a newsletter, ecstaticintegration. org, which writes about, particularly about psychedelics, psychedelic harm [00:54:00] reduction, psychedelic ethics. Sometimes about things that are happening in the underground that are not always safe, ethical. But I think particularly about, kinds of, yeah, just forms of psychedelic harm, and we try to be productive and helpful not just going, Oh, this is happening, but what might prevent this happening again?
It's critical, but we try to be helpfully critical.
Lana Pribic: Yeah. I subscribe to your sub stack. I love it. I read everyone. I highly recommend people subscribe and check it out. And yeah, thank you so much for the work that you're doing. Where can people get in touch with you, support you, or just learn more about you?
Jules Evans: Yeah they can follow our work@ecstaticintegration.org. And yeah, we also have challenging psychedelic experiences.com if there are people listening to this who've had difficulties or, after [00:55:00] psychedelics, maybe they're still dealing with, um, or loved ones that have they can get in touch with us.
We're not a therapy organization, but we can point them to some. I could also just say that there's also the fireside project. They have a support line that people can call either during difficult trips or afterwards if they're still dealing with difficulties. Likewise, there's a. An NGO called ICEERS, I C E R S, they have a support center which offers free support for people who have difficulties after psychedelics.
If you've experienced psychedelic abuse, there's an organization called the Shine Collective. which has a support group for people who've experienced psychedelic abuse. And then there are also therapists and integration experts who specialize in people who've had difficult experiences supporting them.
We can help put people in touch with them as well.
Lana Pribic: Amazing. Amazing. Thanks again for sharing with us. This was [00:56:00] such a rich conversation that I know the listeners are going to love. And yeah, wishing you all the best as you go forth with your work.
Jules Evans: Thank you very much, Lana.
