PsychedSubstance going through rough times, childhood trauma

[Jodistrict]

17 hours ago, OBEler said:

@Jodistrict which plant Did He use? 

He didn’t mention specific names but generally referred to 1) “plantas medicinales de desintoxicación” (detoxificataion plants) and 2) “plantas de poder” (power plants).   In the jungles, there are numerous powerful plant medicines that westerners haven’t even heard of.  He said that in his training he forgot his name and past history.   The plants possess you and become your teachers.  He did mention one plant called “clave ayahuasca” which teaches you to lucid dream.    

[OBEler]

@Alex_R as far as I know He has reached deep insights about reality "everything is living consciousness and I am that somehow" or his video why he quit dmt because he realized his family doesnt exists somehow and this is scary for him because he loves them. 

Here is an update by the way :

 

Edited December 22, 2021 by OBEler

[knakoo]

On 22/12/2021 at 0:00 AM, Carl-Richard said:

To expand on my previous response, being sober is something that can be refined and mastered, in the sense that the benefits you get from it puts you off wanting to take any mind-altering substances.

This idea goes hand-in-hand with physical health, emotional mastery and spiritual growth. The overarching concepts that unites these three realms are "vitality" and "resilience", or "internal regulatory capacity": your ability to tackle stress and control your internal and external environment. This is the goal of all therapy, all psychedelic drugs, all meditation.

Hedonic drugs are external regulators, and once you get dependent on them, you ride the hedonic-adaptive slide all the way to the bottom until you discontinue use either voluntarily or by force, either intermittently ("tolerance break") or permanently (when you overdose on heroin at 27). How severe this process is depends on your internal regulatory capacity, which is controlled by the amount of trauma you have, your genes, your cognitive-emotional style etc. To maximize regulatory capacity means to heal trauma, recognize your genetic predispositions and learning healthy cognitive-emotional regulative patterns, i.e. physical health, emotional mastery and spiritual growth.

Once your vitality and resilience is maximized, you're turned off by any type of non-essential external regulators, because your internal state allows for a much more refined state of consciousness (more meaningful, more resourceful, more blissful). Hedonic bliss is not the same as existential bliss, at least not in the long run. One is self-contained, self-improving and organic, the other is dependent, degenerative and synthetic.

@Consilience

How do you define sober ?

What if someone takes a medicinal mushroom daily like reishi/shiitake/maitake ? These mushrooms are great for general health but also have a subtle effect on mood and consciousness. So is that problematic ?

On 22/12/2021 at 0:00 AM, Carl-Richard said:

Hedonic drugs are external regulators, and once you get dependent on them, you ride the hedonic-adaptive slide all the way to the bottom until you discontinue use

This is true for hedonic drugs, but what about substances that have proven long term benefits, but also alter consciousness in a subtle way  ? In those cases you have short term benefits while taking them, but also long term benefits even if you stop using them. Medicinal mushrooms enter this category, but also micro doses of psychedelics it seems. So where do you draw the line ? What would be your argument against using such substances ? 

[Carl-Richard]

2 hours ago, knakoo said:

How do you define sober ?

What if someone takes a medicinal mushroom daily like reishi/shiitake/maitake ? These mushrooms are great for general health but also have a subtle effect on mood and consciousness. So is that problematic ?

Being sober means you only consume what is essential. I'll define drugs as non-essential substances that produce a pronounced pharmacological effect. You have essential amino acids, fats, minerals and vitamins etc., which all have pronounced downstream pharmacological effects, but which are required for optimal, organic functioning of the system. However, it's possible to consume an unbalanced amount of those, and this goes back to the aspect of physical health (healthy, balanced diet). Once you start going outside what is merely essential, you're into medicinal territory, which has its place if you for example get sick, but it's generally not for daily consumption (unless you have some incurable chronic ailments where you decide that the positives outweigh the negatives).

 

2 hours ago, knakoo said:

This is true for hedonic drugs, but what about substances that have proven long term benefits, but also alter consciousness in a subtle way  ? In those cases you have short term benefits while taking them, but also long term benefits even if you stop using them. Medicinal mushrooms enter this category, but also micro doses of psychedelics it seems. So where do you draw the line ? What would be your argument against using such substances ? 

There are some atypical non-essential substances that complicates things. For example, the way I view psychedelics is that they can increase resilience and vitality over time given the right conditions. Sometimes the conditions just aren't right (like with our friend Adam), or maybe there are no current visible signs of progress at that moment (not all growth is linear or determinable within a specific time horizon). Psychedelics also have an atypical pharmacological profile and are non-addictive, so they don't easily fall under the category of hedonic drugs. Other non-essential substances with less pronounced psychoactive effects like polyphenolic phytochemicals also seem to be beneficial for health, but some are also detrimental.

It's also possible that we lose some of the bigger picture by taking the analytical lens of pharmacology and looking at single compounds. For example, polyphenols often come from fruits, and a fruit is a whole package deal. There is lots of complexity there that we can't unpack analytically but which we can only test for ourselves. An important point here is that all of our bodies are different. This is generally my advice for optimizing resilience and vitality: find out what works best for you: what does your body like to eat? It's also not just about diet: generally learn to listen to how your body responds to different stimuli, both short-term and more crucially long-term. Let the intelligence of your body be your guide.

[Leo Gura]

1 hour ago, Carl-Richard said:

Being sober means you only consume what is essential.

By this definition psychedelics are sober

[Carl-Richard]

2 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

By this definition psychedelics are sober

 

[Flint]

On 21/12/2021 at 0:43 PM, Leo Gura said:

It's crucial that you are able to be happy sober. Don't use drugs to boost your mood. Psychedelics are NOT for boosting your mood, they are for insight. Observe this important distinction.

I would imagine that if you use psychedelics to solve some deep underlying problem and to do deep inner work which in return boosts your mood by default, then it's okay ?

Psychedelics can be crazy good for growth so much that anything else feels like a complete waste of time sometimes. So there on paper I'm sometimes afraid of being "addicted" to them in terms of wanting to always use that tool to grow even more and really relying on it. But then, we use tools like a very sharp knife for cooking, and no one has ever been addicted to using knifes to cut vegetables while if you have to cut them manually, you would suffer a bit because it's just not practical or that efficient.

[Human Mint]

On 22/12/2021 at 0:10 AM, Carl-Richard said:

Hehe thanks  I might make an own thread on vitality and resilience (and internal regulation). They're powerful holistic concepts from the psychological literature.

It would be great

[Human Mint]

I think you need vitality and resilience in order to grow out of trauma, otherwise one is stuck in it. It is the tool. But i have a really poor relationship with those moods

[Carl-Richard]

17 minutes ago, Human Mint said:

I think you need vitality and resilience in order to grow out of trauma, otherwise one is stuck in it. It is the tool.

That is where therapy comes in.

[yetineti]

On 12/21/2021 at 1:47 PM, Carl-Richard said:

Based on what you're saying, unless you're microdosing the stuff, I don't see how you're not constantly high. I'm saying this as an ex-stoner who has had both his mind completely deleted from it on multiple occasions and has used it merely as a morning coffee. The difference comes from how often you use it (or maybe people are just extremely different).

@Carl-Richard  What do you mean, ‘mind deleted from it.’ 
 

I am i daily user, struggling to love myself, and think I may be experiencing this delete thing.

what’d you mean?

 

 

[Carl-Richard]

19 minutes ago, mw711 said:

@Carl-Richard  What do you mean, ‘mind deleted from it.’ 
 

I am i daily user, struggling to love myself, and think I may be experiencing this delete thing.

what’d you mean?

That was just a fancy way of describing getting so stoned that you're completely useless as a human being. It's one of those times where you come back from a long break and get sent into another dimension.

The thing you're describing just sounds like the general deterioation of cognition that happens when you're a full-time weed couch potato: hyper-prolactin state, inflammation and no resilience-inducing stimuli (controlled exposure to stressors): fapping to porn all the time, overeating shitty food, smoke damaging your respiratory and circulatory system, no physical exercise, no mentally stimulating activities.

[Human Mint]

4 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

That is where therapy comes in.

Yeah doing that next week, first time. I've been procrastinating that one quite a lot.

Edited December 24, 2021 by Human Mint

[yetineti]

@Carl-Richard yeah, thats where I’m at. not all of it but most. Feels horrible

[Carl-Richard]

10 minutes ago, mw711 said:

@Carl-Richard yeah, thats where I’m at. not all of it but most. Feels horrible

The reason I could list all of those things and it struck you in some way is because I've been there myself. For me, the only way out was spiritual awakening, cutting out lies and establishing a trajectory of growth on multiple levels.

[yetineti]

@Carl-Richard yeah struggling with the trajectory of growth. Been face slapped by a lot of awakenings and honestly kinda paranoid from that + weed. 
 

I have a lot of trauma to burn through. Stuff that didn’t have to be my problem but is not to be ignored how it has been. Family shit, etc.

[Mafortu]

On 12/21/2021 at 4:41 PM, Leo Gura said:

Adam seems similar to CG Kid:

Thanks for this video, I just binged this and along some of his videos and the recent ones on his secondary blog channel and his journey has been an excellent one. Very useful for me.

[OBEler]

@Mafortu sorry I dont find his second Blog channel, can you link it to me? 

Sounds interesting