PLEASE NOTE: This is a minimally-edited transcript that originates from a program that uses AI.
Anita Rao 0:00
This is Embodied. Our show about sex, relationships and health. I'm Anita Rao. Travel with me back in time to the 1960s and 70s. The counterculture era is in full swing.
Archive Newscast 0:20
Seven young and earnest protesters burned draft cards on the steps of a Boston courthouse. A group of high school boys set upon them with fists.
Archive Woodstock Audio 0:30
Half a million young people can get together and have three days of fun and music and have nothing but fun and music.
Anita Rao 0:41
The Beatles have dropped Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band anti Vietnam War protesters are burning draft cards in the street, and psychologist Timothy Leary has issued a now famous call to an entire generation.
Timothy Leary Clip 0:55
I have three things to say to young people who are growing up in a psychedelic world, turn on, tune in and drop out.
Anita Rao 1:12
One of those young people was Abbie Rosner.
Abbie Rosner 1:16
I grew up in DC in the 1970s and that was a time where the city was really awash with drugs,
Anita Rao 1:24
and like many of her peers, she tuned in.
Abbie Rosner 1:28
Probably the most memorable experience that I can share with you was doing mushrooms back when I was in college in my 20s, and I remember this moment of looking at the trunk of a tree and seeing the life force just coursing through it, I think that we were open to just about everything, you know, I feel like it was kind of like a tabula rasa, you know, everything was kind of New,
Anita Rao 2:00
But it wasn't long before a new call drowned a lot of that out the screeching sounds of adult responsibilities.
Abbie Rosner 2:10
I think, like a whole lot of other baby boomers in my cohort, we got married, had kids, and put all the drugs away, we switched it out for a glass of wine in the evening. And so, you know, for decades, I didn't do any drugs at all.
Anita Rao 2:26
Abbie said, for decades, because she did eventually come back to psychedelics nearly 40 years later. And when she did, she became part of a growing phenomenon older adults returning to the psychedelic drugs of their youth with very different hopes and under very different circumstances, with more of their lives in the rear view mirror, could a psychedelic trip help guide their next chapter in life? Today, we'll hear about what those baby boomers are looking for and how their revelations could have a ripple effect for younger generations.
So back to Abbie and how a return to psychedelics started with a marijuana high
Abbie Rosner 3:13
When I was in my late 50s, my kids were grown, my marriage had ended, and I met a new friend who liked to smoke pot, and all of a sudden it was this, this rediscovery of cannabis. And at that point in my life, I'd had a belly full of life experience I loved, I'd lost, I'd grieved, and I found that cannabis really helped me to reflect on this place in my life with just really deep meaning. But another part of it was that when I would smoke pot in older age, I felt like it connected me to this, like, kind of an essential part of who I am, this part of my being that had been hibernating for decades, and that was a really, kind of a wonderful discovery.
Anita Rao 4:04
What was that? Can you describe that part of your being that you felt more connected to?
Abbie Rosner 4:08
Well, I'm essentially a really joyful person, and that had just gotten kind of buried, and I found that I just would love to smoke pot or eat a gummy and put music on and dance and just feel, you know, I felt like it was my young self, but I wasn't young anymore. I don't I didn't want to be young anymore. It was like the pleasure of youth, but rounded out by the maturity of older life.
Anita Rao 4:35
So you were going through this experience, but you're also a writer. So your writer brain was activated and was thinking about how many other people are going through this similar thing, how many people of my generation are rediscovering their memories and their relationships with drugs of their youth, as you began to kind of think about this beyond your experience, what questions were emerging for you?
Abbie Rosner 7:32
Yeah. Depression and they and all of a sudden, they had this perspective shift of embracing the life that they had left. And, you know, I was reading those studies, and I thought to myself, you know, every one of us has a terminal condition, why wait until you're at death's door to have one of these transformative experiences?
Anita Rao 10:18
And this was Abbie's a-ha moment. She knew that the fear of death wasn't unique to people with terminal illnesses. There were echoes of this anxiety in her entire generation. So what if a psychedelic experience could unlock a new mindset about aging?
Abbie Rosner 10:39
I think people still raise an eyebrow when they see, you know, the granny with a joint. You know, that kind of idea. There's that feeling that older adults aren't cool and that they're, you know, just like old fashioned. So to me, the real challenge that my Boomer generation has is to look at this really ageist, death phobic attitudes that we have in our society and revision that with our use of psychedelics and expand our consciousness to understand that older age can actually be, instead of being a time of decline and irrelevance, that it's actually can be a time of growth and healing and joy and fulfillment and intimacy and self exploration. Older age has always been a time of spiritual deepening in societies and throughout history, and we've kind of lost that in our consumer, commercial, materialistic world.
Anita Rao 11:36
We'll join Abbie on her search for new stories about aging from other older folks using psychedelics. You're listening to embodied from North Carolina public radio, a broadcast service of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. You can also hear embodied as a podcast, follow and subscribe on your platform of choice. We'll be right back. This is embodied. I'm Anita Rao. Humans have been cultivating knowledge about psychedelics for 1000s of years. Some indigenous cultures integrate psychedelic medicine into rituals, ceremonies and everyday practice, and those substances are often left in the care of elder folks who have the wisdom and experience to guide their use. But indigenous elders might not be the first people you think of when you hear the term psychedelics, and that's due in part to the influence of Western medicine.
Abbie Rosner 12:34
When we go back to the period of the 1940s there was a lot of interest in the pharmaceutical industry to go down to other parts of the world to try to find traditional medicines and to exploit them or to use them to develop modern drugs.
Anita Rao 12:51
That's writer Abbie Rosner. We've been talking with her about psychedelic use among baby boomers, a generation that grew up in the counterculture era and is now returning to psychedelics to experience aging in a new way. And we wanted to get some context on how we got to this moment
Abbie Rosner 13:09
The use of psilocybin. Psilocybin mushrooms, they were taken from a woman in Mexico, a woman named Maria Sabina, an American mycologist under not exactly honest pretenses, ended up getting samples of psilocybin and brought them back to Albert Hoffman, who was a pharmaceutical researcher at Sandoz pharmaceuticals, and he gave them the sample at the mushrooms. And Hoffman ended up synthesizing the psilocybin, and then that's how they started to use it for pharmaceutical purposes.
Anita Rao 13:46
Psilocybin extraction methods and therapeutic practices were patented in the US, but that research stalled in the 60s and 70s, when psychedelics were criminalized and then mostly made illegal. So many folks of Abby's generation largely encountered psychedelics in a recreational context. Abby told us her story of experiencing them in this era as a young person, and now we're turning to her work on a book called elder revolution, psychedelics and the new counterculture of aging. Abby doesn't know exactly how big this cohort of older folks experimenting with psychedelics is but anecdotally, she has had no trouble finding people who want to talk to her about their psychedelic experiences in older adulthood. One theme that's emerged in these conversations is how psychedelics can help people with end of life anxiety.
Abbie Rosner 14:39
I had a very interesting conversation with a couple who are in their 80s, and both of them had experienced the death of their parents, and they were very determined that they wanted to die differently. And so they ended up going to a psilocybin retreat center in Jamaica, and. And the woman had an experience of seeing her husband as a skeleton, wow, in her psychedelic journey, and it was terrifying for her, but she also felt that, you know, having that experience and going through that experience, she felt like she could actually tolerate and survive and, you know, get over the fact that if he pre deceased her and the husband, his experience was very different. He just enjoyed the love in the Communitas that he shared with the group. In that experience, it wasn't so much the journey itself, but it was really the connection with the community of the other participants in the retreat that he found so moving, and that's actually consistent with a study that recently came out where they compared the experiences of older adults and younger adults in psychedelic ceremonial settings, and they found that for the older adults, it was really the community experience that was a predictor of better outcomes more than The actual psychedelic experience itself.
Anita Rao 16:01
Oh, that's interesting. So having someone or multiple people there kind of bearing witness to what you're going through.
Abbie Rosner 16:07
Yes, exactly. It's a very deep shared experience. And for a lot of people, that's really the takeaway.
Anita Rao 16:13
I'm curious what it is about these kind of encounters with death or with the potential of dying during a psychedelic experience that leads to transformation after the experience is over. Like, what is it that helps bridge that connection?
Abbie Rosner 16:32
Well, I had a beautiful conversation with a woman in her 70s, and she described a psilocybin journey that she did right after having a breast biopsy, and she said it was a beautiful fall day, and she was overcome with this feeling that the autumn, the beautiful autumn season, was kind of a metaphor for her, where she was in later life. And she was filled with gratitude. She had this overwhelming experience of gratitude, and she understood that death is just a part of life. It's just an inevitable conclusion. And she felt completely at peace with that. One of the experiences that I'm hearing with older adults that I talk to is that when you have these experiences of awe, of losing yourself into this transcendent beauty, love, this feeling of interconnectedness, and you lose your sense of yourself. You lose a connection to your stories, your narratives, your dramas, and you're embraced in this wonderful feeling of just being held in something infinite. And you realize that even then, when you give up all those connections and you lose all those contacts with yourself, there's some part of you that still remains that's still looking at this mystery. And I think that that helps people really reframe did, for me, reframe their understanding of what happens to us when we die.
Anita Rao 18:00
So we've been talking about the potential to encounter all the potential to think differently about death, but one of the other really striking findings in some of the research into psychedelics and cognitive function is that they can change the brain in ways that help you build new pathways. We often associate the end of Age or the end of life as a time when people are set in their ways they're going to do things the way they've always done them. But the research is indicating that might not actually be true. Tell me about that.
Abbie Rosner 18:35
Well, there's something called neuroplasticity. It's kind of the holy grail of drug developers, it's this idea that our brains can actually generate new connections, and I think they're seeing that in the brain scans of people that are have taken psilocybin or LSD or another psychedelic compound. I think that there's also an understanding that these experiences open us to a critical learning period like the kind that we have as infants, where we are able to basically learn new experiences and new gain new knowledge and understandings in a very enhanced way.
Anita Rao 19:15
You have heard from some older adults who've said that psychedelic experiences help them get out of habits in their romantic relationships. Can you tell me about the conversation you had with psychotherapist Charlie winniger?
Abbie Rosner 19:27
Okay, so Charlie and his wife, Shelly, are a beautiful example of how intentional work with a psychedelic compound. In their case, MDMA has really brought them to this beautiful romantic and intimate time in their lives. They're both in their 70s. They're in their second marriages, and they call their use of MDMA their super glue for their relationship. That's one of the surprising things that or not, it's not so much surprising as heartening things that I'm finding in a lot of my interviews with old. Adults is how these experiences are really opening them up to intimacy and joy and physical healing, even non sexual, physical healing that's so fulfilling for them in their older age,
Anita Rao 20:14
In terms of this idea of brain plasticity and kind of changing the pathways and the ways that you do things. What are any stories that come to mind of folks who have noticed some profound shifts in their personality or in their orientation to the world after a psychedelic experience?
Abbie Rosner 20:37
Well, there's a woman who I spoke with. She's in her 60s, and she had a life experience with a lot of alcohol to basically numb herself, she said, so she wouldn't feel anything. And then she happened to have a guided psychedelic experience. And she described having soulgasms, you know, she had this, just this incredible experience of awe. But then, as she was doing more of this work with these medicines, these childhood trauma started to arise, and so she ended up working with a underground therapist who specialized in working with trauma. And she said that, you know, with each one of these sessions that she had, and they were incredibly painful and and difficult and challenging, but after each session, she felt like she just reconnected to a part of herself that had just been cut off. And she said that now in her in her late 60s, she has a sense of herself that she has never had before.
Anita Rao 21:33
It's interesting to hear you say that, because what actually led us to wanting to do this conversation was a deep dive into the science around awe and presence and how to kind of get more in your body, to notice small moments of day to day life, and seeing that psychedelics was very often a pathway that people mentioned to help them just kind of turn back toward themselves, and that seems like a theme that comes up so much in the stories that you are sharing and that other folks have shared with you. How do you feel like this journey into psychedelics has helped you shift other awe oriented habits in your own life.
Abbie Rosner 22:21
Well, I think that one of the telling things is that you mentioned brain research and the brain and everything. And I always feel like the focus on the brain is kind of missing a point here, because, you know, I talk to people, and almost invariably, they talk about their hearts, and I know that for me, these are very heart centered experiences. They're visceral, they're feelings that we feel in our bodies. We have a body memory of them, and that's why they're so profound. It's not a thought, it's a feeling. And I think that that's part of why they're so moving for us, and why they're so potentially transformative.
Anita Rao 22:57
I think that's also what makes them hard to talk about, in some ways, because you hear people, there's a lot about the experience that seems like it's hard to actually translate into words, like the words that we use to talk to each other or share with each other. So what is the challenge of that for you as a writer, to kind of talk about something that, in many ways, is so ineffable?
Abbie Rosner 23:19
Well, here's kind of the paradox. For one thing, as a writer, I found that at least in this project, I try to keep my mouth shut and let other people say what they what they say, because they say that these experiences are ineffable, but people are very, very creative and clever about the way that they describe and I love hearing what they have to say. So like this soulgasm Or the there is a man who a wonderful man. He was had his first psychedelic experience at 79 and he said that he was encompassed with such a feeling of love at the cellular level. And when he tried to describe it, he called it u, M, G, he said it was universe mushrooms, God, I love that. And then there was just this one guy who just said this was like the most holy shit of holy shit moments. Just so people really do find a way to express their feeling. And one of the things that's really important to note is that they really want to share their experiences with people that have had similar experiences, who can understand where they're coming from. So you know somebody who has this profound psychedelic experience they come home, and if their family, you know their their partner or their their spouse, doesn't understand where they're coming from. It's a really lonely feeling. So one of the potentials that I see for older adults, one of the really, really promising areas, is to create communities where older adults can journey together and support each other and be a support network for each other as they go into older age. Because I feel like our society. Society does not really offer that many opportunities for that kind of community, and as we know isolation, loneliness, alienation, these are tremendous problems in the older adult population. And I'd like to see our generation of baby boomers be proactive and do something about how we're going to age in a much more meaningful, supportive, productive, fulfilling way than previous generations.
Anita Rao 25:27
You mentioned that that person you were talking about before they wanted to die differently than how they had seen their elders die. And I want to bring you back to your personal story for a second, you are a caretaker for your mom, who is in her 90s. I'm curious about what it's been like to do all of this research and think through this while being her caretaker. What kind of feelings are coming up for you?
Abbie Rosner 25:55
Well, it's truly very poignant to be with my mother at this time in her life and and there's a lot of beauty. And I feel like this theme of finding peace and joy in nature is something that's very profound for her, as her perspectives and her life is becoming diminished and smaller, she still gets tremendous, tremendous joy from being out in nature, and we share that together. It's a beautiful, beautiful place that we enjoy together. So I think that my own experiences of the awe in of nature and hers as a woman who never had a psychedelic experience are a beautiful point of connection for us both.
Anita Rao 26:40
How did she respond to you, deciding to embark on this journey, personally again?
Abbie Rosner 26:46
Well, I think that, you know, my whole family, I'm the only one in the family that is interested in this particular area, and I think they all are a little bemused, and, you know, they support me. But my mother, yeah, she thinks it's just fine
Anita Rao 27:02
Have your psychedelic experiences helped you prepare for her death in any ways.
Abbie Rosner 27:08
I think absolutely I hope that I can be with her and help her transition when the time comes. And you know this time of life, there's so much poignancy and so much meaning and depth. And I think to escort my mother out of this world will be a highlight of my life.
Anita Rao 27:28
You describe this sense of poignancy, this sense of awe. And I'm curious about older adults in your life who are witnessing you do this and you share this, who maybe aren't there to the place of curiosity, there may be more in a place of fear. How do you respond to kind of fear that people have around what it could mean for their physical body to go through something like this?
Abbie Rosner 27:55
Well, I would never want to convince or try to persuade anyone who doesn't come to these experiences with a real curiosity. I don't feel like that's my mandate that said I am writing a book that's going to be focused on older adults and their explorations with psychedelics. So I what I really like to do is just destigmatize this whole issue. There's a lot of fears, and there's a lot of you know, reasons to be cautious. There are physical there's psychological risks that are associated with these experiences. There are other risks. There are risks of working with an unethical facilitator. So there's, there are a number of things that older adults definitely need to do their due diligence in their research about before even going near a psychedelic experience.
Anita Rao 28:46
So what do we know right now scientifically about psychedelics in a therapeutic and medical context?
Abbie Rosner 28:56
Well, there's two psychedelic drugs right now. They're pretty far along in the pipeline, and that psilocybin is one, and that's for treating treatment resistant depression. And then there's MDMA, which is also known as ecstasy, and that's used for treating Complex PTSD. So both of them are pretty far along. And there are also other studies, actually quite a few studies that are looking at psilocybin and other psychedelics for different conditions, and particularly related to older adults. They're looking at depression related to Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, and treating other neurodegenerative conditions. But I just need to clarify that it's going to take years before these treatments are going to be popularly available. And I think a lot of older adults really don't feel like they can wait.
Anita Rao 29:50
Don't feel like they can wait. In what sense tell me about a story you've heard, for example.
Abbie Rosner 29:54
Well, I think that the idea that somebody will be able to go and have psychedelic assist. Therapy and have it reimbursed by their insurance company is a long way off. And there are people that say, you know, I'm in my 60s, in my 70s, I want to have these experiences now, and I'm going to investigate and see what kind of opportunities I can have to to find those experience and they're actually quite resourceful in that regard.
Anita Rao 30:23
Are there certain psychedelic drugs that are better suited for older folks?
Abbie Rosner 30:27
Well, I wouldn't want to opine on that. I think that psilocybin is relatively well tolerated. MDMA may be less so, because it can elevate heart rates, so can psilocybin to a degree. I think that any older adult that wants to have these experiences should talk with their health care providers about it before they do. I'd also like to mention that there are other non drug ways to get into a psychedelic state. Even certain kinds of breath work can get you into a bona fide psychedelic experience. And I also talked to a woman in her 70s who managed to get out of a very deep depression in a sound ceremony with cannabis. So you don't need to necessarily use a traditional psychedelic to have one of these transcendent and healing experiences.
Anita Rao 31:22
We're going to dig more into this question of access in just a bit, and hear Abbie's predictions for how psychedelic use could shape our broader cultural beliefs about aging. We'll also talk with someone who assists older folks on their psychedelic trips with ketamine. That's just ahead, and as always, you can follow everything we're doing here at embodied on Tiktok and Instagram. Our handle is at embodied W UNC. You can hear the podcast version of the show by following embodied on your platform of choice. We'll be right back. This is embodied. I'm Anita Rao. Today we're talking about psychedelic use among aging adults with writer Abbie Rosner. Abbie started looking into this phenomenon after her own impactful mushroom trip in her 60s, and she's been collecting powerful stories of how psychedelic drugs help folks embrace awe, change long standing behaviors and reconnect to lost parts of their identities. But psychedelics are still illegal under federal law in the US, unless you're using them in a controlled medical setting or clinical trial, and that has a profound impact on who is able to access these substances and how here's Abbie again.
Abbie Rosner 32:40
This touches on one of the big issues that plagues the emerging psychedelic field, which is issues of access, because a facilitated underground psychedelic experience is going to run you a couple $1,000 and that excludes a lot of people that said, I grew my own mushrooms for pennies, but again, I didn't have a facilitator, and that's something that most people are going to want to have. So there is that cost, but one of the more promising developments now in terms of access is that in Oregon and Colorado now there are state regulated psilocybin programs where you can go and you can have a psilocybin experience with lab tested psilocybin with a licensed facilitator, and that is, I think, a game changer for older adults.
Anita Rao 33:35
We've been talking a lot about death and dying and how psychedelics could potentially shift our approach. What are you hearing from other end of life care workers like death doulas and people in palliative care about their thoughts on psychedelics?
Abbie Rosner 33:54
Well, I think there's a huge interest among death doulas and death practitioners for working with psychedelics, and certainly they're working with ketamine. Now ketamine is the one legal. It's not exactly a psychedelic. It's more dissociative, but it's, you know, will definitely give you very, very profoundly altered state of consciousness. So those, I think, death doulas, are working with that now a lot. It's a wonderful tool for that use. And I I know that there are studies now looking into palliative care to offering psychedelics in palliative care and hospice care context. So hopefully that there'll be some growing acceptance of that
Anita Rao 34:33
What kind of generational transmission of wisdom is happening between folks in your generation, like baby boomers and those of younger generations, like Millennials around psychedelics. In this moment,
Abbie Rosner 34:47
I'd like to see our generation really show the younger generations that aging, it's not a disgrace, it's not a terrible thing. It's actually this joyful, amazing time of life. And the people that I'm interviewing, one after the other telling me, you know, this is really the happiest time of my life, and it's because they're doing the work. They're doing the exploration, the things that they didn't have time to do in their normal adult life, you know, was pursuing careers and and doing, you know, taking care of all the responsibilities they've had. I've talked to older adults who've told me, you know, now, finally, after all this, you know, all the responsibilities that I had, I can finally allow this part of myself to, you know, to just be free and to express itself. You know, I talked to a woman in her late 70s. She had, in her psilocybin journey, she had this insight that she'd spent her whole adult life putting other people on pedestals, and she decided that she wanted to be a stand up comic. Wow. And so now she's a, you know, she she's 80, and she's doing stand up comedy and reveling in life. So I think that if we can show the younger generations that this is really what kind of the reward for a you know, for life fully lived, then what a wonderful contribution that can be.
Anita Rao 36:10
I have heard you talk before about a dream that you have of creating collective spaces for older folks to experience psychedelics together. I would love for you to leave us with a picture of what that would look like, invite us into that dream.
Abbie Rosner 36:26
Well, I have this is truly something that I've been thinking about for a long time, and it's this idea that we could create, like psychedelic elder circles. And this would be something that would just be available to anybody. It'd be it'd be like a model for creating groups. And the groups would come together. They'd have to be in physical proximity, but they would come together periodically, maybe once a week or once a month, and study together and meditate together and do community service together and care for each other and journey together, and that the cohesion and the the unity that would be created with these groups would escort and serve These older adults through the end of their days.
Anita Rao 37:24
I love that. I hope you're able to make that dream a reality.
Abbie Rosner 37:29
I sure am going to work very hard to try to make that happen.
Anita Rao 37:34
Abbie Rosner, thank you so much for your work, your writing, your research, and for this conversation. Thank you. Abby's dream for psychedelic community spaces speaks to a theme in her research, the importance of approaching a psychedelic experience with intention, but not every person has the tools or knowledge to prepare for that experience. This is where the work of a facilitator comes in.
Dr. Crystal Dawn 38:04
My main responsibility is to create a safe, nurturing environment where older adults or adults feel supported and cared for during their journey.
Anita Rao 38:16
That's Dr. Crystal Dawn. She's a physician who was board certified in family medicine as part of her practice, she hosts wellness retreats, offers breath work sessions and provides ketamine assisted therapy.
Dr. Crystal Dawn 38:30
Ketamine can open doors to deep emotional processing, and my role is to hold space, to hold space, physically to hold space, emotionally, to hold space. Spiritually, I bring intention and ceremony to transform a clinical space into something sacred and meaningful, and this might include thoughtful touches like soft lighting or candles, music, gentle aroma therapy, or an altar with meaningful objects that help to ground the experience, I personalize it with the beliefs and things that the individual holds sacred. And by infusing the space with this type of care in this type of reverence, I help clients feel that this is not just a clinical experience or a medical procedure, but a profound opportunity for healing, for reflection and for transformation.
Anita Rao 39:35
Crystal has experienced this transformation on a personal level. More than a decade ago, she had her first ceremonial psychedelic experience
Dr. Crystal Dawn 39:43
Back in 2008 I found my way down to Peru, and I participated in some plant medicine journeys there in the jungle with shamans who. Had ancestral lineage with plant medicines that are indigenous to that area. And I want to say that there was a, what I would call a glimpses beyond the veil.
Anita Rao 40:15
At this time, Crystal was still in her mid 40s, but those glimpses gave her a new perspective on some of the concerns she'd been having about death and aging.
Dr. Crystal Dawn 40:24
It isn't necessarily about aging itself, but the sense of running out of time to fully live my purpose. There's a quiet urgency within me that I share my gifts, that I have healed relationships and to create a life that is meaningful, that leaves this planet better than I found it. It's less about fearing the end, but more about feeling that I hadn't truly begun in certain ways in the psychedelic journey, I felt this go, I was dissolving into something much larger than myself, like I was part of the infinite of the time was slow, and I want to say that it feels as if it softened my fear of death, my concerns about death, because I realized that I am not just this body or just this life, and it helped me see that getting older and dying are natural transitions and not something to fear.
Anita Rao 41:32
Now, at 62 crystal sits with other adults during their psychedelic experiences and supports their physical and emotional needs. This work requires careful preparation.
Dr. Crystal Dawn 41:43
So there is an intake that happens. In the intake, we do a discovery. What is it that they would like to get out of a ketamine ceremony, a wellness screen and a medication to make sure that there's no conflict of interest using the ketamine with whatever health challenges they might have or medication that they're on. We go through their social history and their emotional history, and also we go through their lifestyle. So there's an opportunity to prepare themselves for the ketamine journey. For example, I asked them to abstain from alcohol, maybe abstain from cannabis, to spend time in nature, to abstain from perhaps the news or even drama, just to kind of create a pretty Zen, less stressful environment. So during the ceremony itself, I invite them to let go of their thoughts and their thought process and to do their best to stay out of thoughts, to stay out of words. I am right there next to them, holding their hand, if necessary, a gentle hand on their shoulder, but rarely do we go into words unless it is necessary. We usually go with non verbal like we have signals that they want me to hold their hand or if they want to touch on their shoulder, or something of that sort. It is after the ceremony that we have an opportunity to connect through words. There has been so many, oh, transformations that I have witnessed. It is hard to choose one. What comes to mind first is a gentleman who was 70 years old, and he had been carrying this grief for years, loss of a loved relationship, and also parts of himself that he felt that he had neglected, that he had not prioritized during his life, and now he was coming to what he perceived as nearing the end of his life. He said that he felt as if he was able to, for the first time, to look at something that brought him great pain, and he looked at it during the ketamine journey. He looked at it with no feeling at all. He was able, for the first time, to remove himself from the emotionality behind it and just examine it without being triggered by it. And in this session, I witnessed him finally allowing himself the opportunity to cry, to feel, to let go. And he reported to me that this weight that he had carried for decades suddenly dissolved and he came back for his next session with a sense of healing and a sense of peace.
Anita Rao 44:50
Crystal is able to do psychedelic assisted therapy because ketamine is legal in the US, though tightly regulated, but she takes special care to educate her clients about. Mind altering substances and their benefits, particularly when she's working with older people of color, who may be more skeptical of psychedelic drug use.
Dr. Crystal Dawn 45:09
So I myself am a woman of color, so my presence, in and of itself, seems to be comforting to other individuals of color. Also for people of color, a lot of the older ones grew up during that war on drugs. And so as a result, I often find that a lot of older adults of color have a knee jerk that this is bad, you know, this is a drug. This isn't real. And so some compassion, some explaining that plant medicines and substances like ketamine have been used in indigenous cultures for years and years. There's Ayahuasca in South America and Boga in Africa and psilocybin and Mexico, and there was no addiction. It's only in this modern society, with its emphasis on capitalism and materialism and, you know, loss of connection to one's purpose, to one's gifts, we see that drug addiction is even a thing, also tying it into ancestral work. For some of us, we need to acknowledge that our ancestors struggled quite a bit and passed down, you know, a lot of their wounding onto us, but they also passed down even more so their strength and their love and their resilience, and so refocusing on that through the altar, through bringing that into one of our intentions as we move into the ceremony in one powerful ceremony, I felt connected to the generations that came before me. I felt their struggle, I felt their strength, I felt their presence. I felt them within me. I felt them within my children and my children's children, and it reminded me that I'm part of a lineage and that getting older is not about losing but it's about caring for their wisdom, their strength, their gifts as they nourish me in my younger years in this life. So it helped me to bring more honor to them, and it helped me to become more comfortable with also transitioning one day soon into being an ancestor as well.
Anita Rao 48:01
A big thanks to Dr. Crystal Dawn for sharing her thoughts with us to end this week's show, we appreciate you. You can find out more about everyone featured today at our website, embodiedwunc.org. You can also find all episodes of embodied the radio show there and links to subscribe to our weekly podcast. We're also on social media. We're on Instagram and Tiktok at @embodiedWUNC. Today's episode was produced by Kaia Findlay and edited by Amanda Magnus. Nina Scott is our intern and Jenni Lawson is our technical director. Quilla wrote our theme music. This program is recorded at the American Tobacco Historic District. North Carolina Public Radio is a broadcast service of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Until next time, I'm Anita Rao, taking on the taboo with you.