The latest data shows 7.47 million people are waiting for routine hospital treatment.
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Category Archives: Body Optimization
Activation and Suppression: A New 60-Day Challenge
Recently I had a delightful three-hour Zoom conversation with a friend, mostly about psychedelics. One key insight – very applicable outside of psychedelics – was realizing how important it is to be cognizant of our inner suppression circuitry and to challenge it, question it, and sometimes bypass it. Lots of ideas that we generate each day are decent and workable, but our brains internally reject or dismiss them.
Think of this as the default mode network (your everyday way of thinking) defending its equilibrium. It tries to maintain the status quo, such that your future expectations are projected forward as relatively predictable extensions of your past. So you largely keep doing what you’ve been doing. And consequently, your results will fall within a certain range of predictability as well.
This keeps your life fairly stable, but it’s also limiting, holding you back from turning in different directions or powerfully pursuing stretch goals that would disrupt your old status quo.
What if your default mode network is keeping you broke? Or depressed? Or anxious? Or lonely? Or addicted? It doesn’t always work as we’d like. Stability can be nice for some, but many people really struggle with their brain’s current default mode.
Knowing that your default mode network will defend your status quo is empowering because then you can be on the lookout for its defenses kicking in, and this creates opportunities to consciously bypass them. You can use other parts of your brain to challenge the default mode network, nudging your thoughts, feelings, and actions down different pathways.
Psychedelics can help us see that more options are viable, and such substances can even rewire the default mode network, but we can also consciously strive to catch these suppressions as they arise. Note the inner objections that arise when you consider certain ideas, and lean towards implementing those ideas anyway. Be a bit like Jim Carrey’s character in the Yes Man movie, at least when you’re considering new actions that your default mode network would otherwise object to. The article Embrace the New goes into more detail on leaning into new experiences.
We don’t necessarily need more or better ideas to open up a tremendous world of abundance and possibility. We just need to suppress fewer ideas and allow more of them to flow into action and exploration. We can consciously develop more neural flexibility by becoming aware of how the default mode network operates and by challenging and redirecting some of its decisions. Deliberately override some of those default choices.
When I think about blogging about psychedelics and openly sharing what I’m learning from these explorations, I can feel my suppression circuitry objecting because this is a relatively recent exploration that’s been ramping up for me, so my default mode network isn’t fully on board with it. Internally it still generates thoughts like these:
- Your audience isn’t a match for this kind of content.
- Writing about this will scare people away.
- It’s too early; maybe wait a few years till the current psychedelics wave has grown more prominent, so more people are already into it.
- You’re not a psychedelics coach or therapist, so why are you sharing about this?
- Why not write about some safer vanilla topics instead?
- You could just keep this exploration to yourself .
- And so on…
This reminded me of how useful my 30-day challenge of generating 100 ideas per day was, back in the Fall of 2021. I became more aware of how many ideas my mind quickly rejects and how it rejects them. During that challenge I ended up implementing some of those previously rejected ideas, and they worked very well. Some were financially lucrative too.
In general I’ve benefitted greatly by challenging my default mode network repeatedly, even to the point where I’ve trained it to be more cooperative and flexible over time. For instance, by thinking of myself as an explorer, including asking questions like, “What would a personal growth explorer do here?” I got this frame pretty well embedded into my default way of thinking about life and work. I consider this superior to thinking of myself primarily as a blogger, writer, speaker, coach, etc. because the explorer frame is way more flexible. It gives me more freedom to have new experiences, and it actually fuels other aspects of my work, such as by always giving me fresh experiences from which to derive and share insights.
I’m also reminded of how easy it is to see opportunity blindness in other people and hard to see it in ourselves. You’re probably surrounded by accessible opportunities each day, yet you talk yourself out of them constantly, or your subconscious mind blocks them from even bubbling up to your conscious awareness. Especially notice the ideas that have been resurfacing now and then for years, and you keep dismissing them. What if you did the opposite for a change?
How easy is it for you to quickly act upon new ideas? If a divergent new possibility or invitation comes onto your radar, can you get yourself to explore it with ease? I like having flexible neurology that lets me quickly explore something new and promising, not recklessly or randomly but intelligently. I can quickly assess whether it seems worth exploring without having my default mode network over-suppress.
For instance, I only learned about the Psychedelic Science 2023 conference’s existence a couple weeks before it happened, and I quickly signed up and went, including doing some touristy stuff in Denver too, a city which was new to me as well. In the past when I learned about a potentially interesting and relevant conference, my default mode network would have easily talked me out of it for being too far removed from my status quo. It would have raised immediately objections regarding the time, cost, scheduling, inconvenience, doubts about the benefits, etc.
I can see that many of my best ideas were ones that I had many years prior that kept resurfacing, until I finally loosened up on objecting to them and leaned into exploring them. Exploring psychedelics was just one of many that I suppressed for years with thoughts like “Well, I don’t even know where to get anything,” until I eventually stopped suppressing and began considering it rationally.
Suppression often seems rational but frequently isn’t. Typically the default mode network’s defenses are very thin, hinting that some deep thought went into them when in reality they’re usually superficial calculations with very little substance when you look beneath the surface.
A 60-Day Activation & Suppression Challenge
To help train my brain to be more even more flexible, I’ve decided to deliberately practice this conscious activation of otherwise suppressed ideas.
Yesterday I began a new 60-day challenge of identifying at least one suppressed idea each day and implementing it instead of suppressing it. Pick something that my default mode network is trying to talk me out of, and talk myself into it and do it instead. See what happens.
Some days this will involve catching my brain in the act of suppressing an idea, and I’ll un-suppress it and do it instead. If it’s complex or can’t be done right away, I’ll aim to take some action to advance it that same day. I’ll be traveling for three weeks during this time, so I’ll need some flexibility there, but this kind of challenge fits nicely with travel, encouraging more spontaneity and flexibility.
Other days I may brainstorm some ideas first, and then I’ll identify one where my default response is to dismiss the idea as bad, and I’ll advance it instead.
I like that this is fairly simple and action-oriented but also flexible. I think it will be pretty easy for me to know if I meet this standard each day. I just have to be able to end each day with one identifiable action I took that I’d have otherwise suppressed if I wasn’t doing this challenge.
A short while after making this commitment, I had the thought to add another spin to this challenge, which is to flip it around and also catch an idea that I’d normally advance by default each day, and suppress it instead. So each day for 60 days, I will:
- Advance one suppressed-by-default idea.
- Suppress one activated-by-default idea.
This seems like a great way to practice consciously challenging and redirecting my default mode network, ideally training it to be more flexible.
Doing one of each is the minimum to check off each day, but I’ll likely do more than one of each per day.
I only began yesterday, so I’m just getting started, but I’m already noticing that this is making me more aware of how my default mode network is working. I’m noticing when ideas it allows to pass through by default versus ideas where it objects and quickly tries to suppress them, redirecting my thoughts and actions down a different pathway.
Wish me luck! 😀
Covid inquiry: Tick-box meetings with government during pandemic, says O’Neill
Former deputy first minister Michelle O’Neill was giving evidence to the Covid-19 inquiry.
Detailed map of the heart provides new insights into cardiac health and disease
In a new study, published today (12 July) in Nature, researchers have produced the most detailed and comprehensive human Heart Cell Atlas to date, including the specialised tissue of the cardiac conduction system — where the heartbeat originates.
The multi-centre team is led by the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College London, and has also presented a new drug-repurposing computational tool called Drug2cell, which can provide insights into the effects of drugs on heart rate.
This study is part of the international Human Cell Atlas* (HCA) initiative, which is mapping every cell type in the human body, to transform our understanding of health and disease, and will form the foundation for a fully integrated HCA Human Heart Cell Atlas.
Charting eight regions of the human heart, the work describes 75 different cell states including the cells of the cardiac conduction system — the group of cells responsible for the heartbeat — not understood at such a detailed level (1) in humans before. The human cardiac conduction system, the heart’s ‘wiring’, sends electrical impulses from the top to the bottom of the heart and coordinates the heartbeat.
By using spatial transcriptomics, which gives a “map” of where cells sit within a tissue, researchers were also able to understand how these cells communicate with each other for the first time. This map acts as a molecular guidebook, showing what healthy cells look like, and providing a crucial reference to understand what goes wrong in disease. The findings will help understand diseases such as those affecting the heart rhythm.
The assembly of a Human Heart Cell Atlas is key given that cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death globally. Around 20,000 electronic pacemakers are implanted each year in the UK for these disorders (2). These can be ineffective and are prone to complications and side-effects (3). Understanding the biology of the cells of the conduction system and how they differ from muscle cells paves the way to therapies to boost cardiac health and develop targeted treatments for arrhythmias.
The team also presents a new computational tool called Drug2cell. The tool can predict drug targets as well as drug side effects. It leverages single-cell profiles and the 19 million drug-target interactions in the EMBL-EBI ChEMBL database.
Unexpectedly, this tool identified that pacemaker cells express the target of certain medications, such as GLP1 drugs, which are used for diabetes and weight loss and are known to increase the heart rate as a side-effect, the mechanism of which was unclear. This study suggests that the increase in heart rate might be partly due to a direct action of these drugs on pacemaker cells, a finding the team also showed in an experimental stem cell model of pacemaker cells.
Dr James Cranley, joint first author, a cardiologist specialising in heart rhythm disorders and PhD student at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, said: “The cardiac conduction system is critical for the regular and coordinated beating of our hearts, yet the cells which make it up are poorly understood. This study sheds new light by defining the profiles of these cells, as well as the multicellular niches they inhabit. This deeper understanding opens the door to better, targeted anti-arrhythmic therapies in the future.”
Dr Kazumasa Kanemaru, joint first author and Postdoctoral Fellow in the Gene Expression Genomics team at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, said: “The mechanism of activating and suppressing pacemaker cell genes is not clear, especially in humans. This is important for improving cell therapy to facilitate the production of pacemaker cells or to prevent the excessive spontaneous firing of cells. By understanding these cells at an individual genetic level, we can potentially develop new ways to improve heart treatments.”
The study unearthed an unexpected discovery: a close relationship between conduction system cells and glial cells. Glial cells are part of the nervous system and are traditionally found in the brain. They have been explored very little in the heart. This research suggests that glial cells are in physical contact with conduction system cells and may play an important supporting role: communicating with the pacemaker cells, guiding nerve endings to them, and supporting their release of glutamate, a neurotransmitter.
Another key finding of the study is an immune structure on the heart’s outer surface. This contains plasma cells, which release antibodies into the space around the heart to prevent infection from the nearby lungs. The researchers also identified a cellular niche enriching for a hormone (4) that could be interpreted as an early warning sign of heart failure.
Dr Michela Noseda, senior Lecturer in Cardiac Molecular Pathology at the National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London, a Coordinator of the Human Cell Atlas Heart BioNetwork and a lead author, said: “We often don’t fully know what impact a new treatment will have on the heart and its electrical impulses — this can mean a drug is withdrawn or fails to make it to the market. Our team developed the Drug2cell platform to improve how we evaluate new treatments and how they can affect our hearts, and potentially other tissues too. This could provide us with an invaluable tool to identify new drugs which target specific cells, as well as help to predict any potential side-effects early on in drug development.”
Professor Metin Avkiran, Associate Medical Director at the British Heart Foundation, which part-funded the research with the German Centre for Cardiovascular Research (DZHK), said: “Using cutting-edge technologies, this research provides further intricate detail about the cells that make up specialised regions of the human heart and how those cells communicate with each other. The new findings on the heart’s electrical conduction system and its regulation are likely to open up new approaches to preventing and treating rhythm disturbances that can impair the heart’s function and may even become life-threatening.”
“International collaboration is key to scientific progress. This impactful study and other discoveries from the broader Human Cell Atlas initiative are excellent examples of what can be achieved when the international research community works together across borders. Our combined efforts can ultimately produce better outcomes for patients worldwide.”
Dr Sarah Teichmann, a senior author of the study from the Wellcome Sanger Institute and co-chair of the Human Cell Atlas Organising Committee, said: “This Heart Cell Atlas reveals cardiac microanatomy in unprecedented detail, including the cardiac conduction system that enables each heartbeat, and is a valuable reference for studying heart disease and designing potential therapeutics. An important contribution to the global Human Cell Atlas initiative, which is mapping every cell type in the body to understand health and disease, it will form the foundation for a fully integrated HCA Human Heart Cell Atlas. In addition, our suite of computational methods will help identify possibilities for repurposing existing drugs to treat diseases in other tissues.”
More information can be found at https://www.humancellatlas.org/
Global study details microplastics contamination in lakes and reservoirs
Around 14 million tons of plastic end up in the ocean every year. But that is not the only water source where plastic represents a significant intrusion.
“We found microplastics in every lake we sampled,” said Ted Harris, associate research professor for the Kansas Biological Survey & Center for Ecological Research at the University of Kansas.
“Some of these lakes you think of as clear, beautiful vacation spots. But we discovered such places to be perfect examples of the link between plastics and humans.”
Harris is one of 79 researchers belonging to the international Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network (GLEON), which examines processes and phenomena occurring in freshwater environments. Their new paper, titled “Plastic debris in lakes and reservoirs,” reveals that concentrations of plastic found in freshwater environments are actually higher than those found in so-called “garbage patches” in the ocean. The article is published in Nature.
For his role, Harris teamed with Rebecca Kessler, his former student and recent KU graduate, to test two Kansas lakes (Clinton and Perry) and the Cross Reservoir at the KU Field Station.
“That entailed us going out, tolling a net with tiny little holes in it, dragging it for about two minutes, then collecting those samples of microplastics and sending them off to (the lead researchers),” Kessler said.
The research project was designed and coordinated by the Inland Water Ecology and Management research group of the University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy (headed by Barbara Leoni and Veronica Nava). The team sampled surface waters of 38 lakes and reservoirs, distributed across gradients of geographical position and limnological attributes. It detected plastic debris in all studied lakes and reservoirs.
“This paper essentially shows the more humans, the more plastics,” Harris said. “Places like Clinton Lake are relatively low in microplastics because — while there are many animals and trees — there aren’t a lot of humans, relative to somewhere like Lake Tahoe where people are living all around it. Some of these lakes are seemingly pristine and beautiful, yet that’s where the microplastics come from.”
Harris said that many of the plastics are from something as outwardly innocuous as T-shirts.
“The simple act of people getting in swimming and having clothing that has microplastic fibers in it leads to microplastics getting everywhere,” he said.
The GLEON study cites two types of water bodies studied that are particularly vulnerable to plastic contamination: lakes and reservoirs in densely populated and urbanized areas; and those with elevated deposition areas, long water retention times and high levels of anthropogenic influence.
“When we started the study, I didn’t know a lot about microplastics versus large plastics,” Harris said.
“When this paper says ‘concentrations as much or worse than the garbage patch,’ you always think of the big bottles and stuff, but you’re not thinking of all that smaller stuff. You don’t see a huge garbage patch in Lake Tahoe, yet it’s one of the most impacted lakes when it comes to microplastics. Those are plastics you can’t really see with the naked eye, and then you get underneath a scope at 40,000x, and you see these little jagged pieces and other particles that are the same size as algae or even smaller.”
Part of Harris and Kessler’s enthusiasm for taking part in this project was to highlight a region of the U.S. that is often overlooked.
“In this study, there’s one dot in the middle of the country, and that’s our sample,” he said. “In Iowa, Missouri and Colorado, there’s this huge swath of area that has water bodies, but we often don’t get them into those massive global studies. So it was really important for me to put Kansas on the map to see and contextualize what these differences are in our lakes.”
Harris has worked at KU since 2013, where his research focuses on aquatic ecology. Kessler graduated KU in 2022 with a degree in ecology, evolutionary & organismal biology.
“The biggest takeaway from our study is that microplastics can be found in all lakes,” Kessler said. “Obviously, there are different concentrations. But they are literally everywhere. And the biggest contributing factor to these microplastics is human interaction with the lakes.”
A foundation that fits just right gives superconducting nickelates a boost
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University say they’ve found a way to make thin films of an exciting new nickel oxide superconductor that are free of extended defects.
Not only does this improve the material’s ability to conduct electricity with no loss, they said, but it also allows them to discover its true nature and properties, both in and out of the superconducting state, for the first time.
Their first look at a superconducting nickel oxide, or nickelate, that does not have defects revealed that it is more like the cuprates – which hold the world’s high-temperature record for unconventional superconductivity at normal pressures — than previously thought. For instance, when the nickelate is tweaked to optimize its superconductivity and then heated above its superconducting temperature, its resistance to the flow of electric current increases in a linear fashion, just as in cuprates.
Those striking similarities, they said, may mean these two very different materials achieve superconductivity in much the same way.
It’s the latest step in a 35-year quest to develop superconductors that can operate at close to room temperature, which would revolutionize electronics, transportation, power transmission and other technologies by allowing them to operate without energy-wasting electrical resistance.
The research team, led by Harold Hwang, director of the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES) at SLAC, described their work today in the journal Nature.
“Nickelate films are really unstable, and until now our efforts to stabilize them on top of other materials have produced defects that are like speed bumps for electrons,” said Kyuho Lee, a SIMES postdoctoral researcher who contributed to the discovery of superconductivity in nickelates four years ago and has been working on them ever since.
“These quality issues have led to many debates and open questions about nickelate properties, with research groups reporting widely varying results,” Lee said. “So eliminating the defects is a significant breakthrough. It means we can finally address the underlying physics behind these materials and behind unconventional superconductivity in general.”
Jenga chemistry and a just-right fit
The defects, which are a bit like misaligned zipper teeth, arise from the same innovative process that allowed Hwang’s team to create and stabilize a nickelate film in the first place.
They started by making a common material known as perovskite. They “doped” it to change its electrical conductivity, then exposed it to a chemical that deftly removed layers of oxygen atoms from its molecular structure, much like removing a stick from a tower of Jenga blocks. With the oxygen layers gone, the film settled into a new structure — known as an infinite-layer nickelate -that can host superconductivity.
The atomic latticework of this new structure occupied a slightly bigger surface area than the original. With this in mind, they had built the film on a foundation, or substrate, that would be a good fit for the finished, spread-out product, Lee said.
But it didn’t match the atomic lattice of the starting material, which developed defects as it tried to fit comfortably onto the substrate — and those imperfections carried through to the finished nickelate.
Hwang said it’s as if two friends of different sizes had to share a coat. If the coat fit the smaller friend perfectly, the larger one would have a hard time zipping it up. If it fit the larger friend perfectly, it would hang like a tent on the smaller one and let the cold in. An in-between size might not be the best fit for either of them, but it’s close enough to keep them both warm and happy.
That’s the solution Lee and his colleagues pursued.
In a series of meticulous experiments, they used a substrate that was like the in-between coat. The atomic structure of its surface was a close enough fit for both the starting and ending materials that the finished nickelate came out defect-free. Lee said the team is already starting to see some interesting physics in the nickelate now that the system is much cleaner.
“What this means,” Hwang said, “is that we are getting closer and closer to measuring the intrinsic properties of these materials. And by sharing the details of how to make defect-free nickelates, we hope to benefit the field as a whole.”
Researchers from Cornell University contributed to this work, which was funded by the DOE Office of Science and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation’s Emergent Phenomena in Quantum Systems Initiative.
Call for clarity over NHS role after misdiagnosis death
Emily Chesterton, who saw a physician associate twice before she died, did not know they were not a GP.
Concerns over focus on skin colour in newborn checks
A report questions the language used for some checks, including assessing whether the baby is “pink all over”.
Kylie Jenner’s Use Of TikTok’s Viral Aging Filter Sparks Negative Reactions
Twitter users are giving Kylie Jenner the side eye after she complained about her shocking results from using the viral TikTok aging filter.
“I don’t like it, I don’t like it at all,” the reality star said in a clip posted Monday on the video platform, as she watched in awe, shaking her head in disapproval after the filter applied wrinkles, sagging skin and under-eye bags to her now-25-year-old face. “No. No.”
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The TikTok aging filter, which shows a split screen of the user’s current face and an aged AI-generated image of the user with wrinkles and thinning hair, has been making the rounds across the app, appearing on videos that amassed more than 10 billion views.
After Jenner appeared startled by her results, fans began pointing out to the beauty mogul that she can afford any procedures to change her appearance if she’s unhappy with it.
“You can afford to fix it so you’ll be ok,” one user commented on the star’s post.
One user wrote, “Don’t worry you have money,” to which another person added, “That’s so true.”
Other TikTok users accused the reality star of previously undergoing cosmetic procedures.
“You have fixed it before, you can do it again!!!” one person said.
Some fans stepped into the comments section to defend “The Kardashians” star, complimenting her looks.
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“You still look good, don’t be scared to age,” one wrote.
Another dished out encouraging words, writing, “Babe u look good both ways.”
The Kylie Cosmetics founder later switched up her vibes about the photo in the comments, writing: “Jk i love her she’s cute lol 🏻”
Back in 2019, Jenner openly discussed getting fillers, but shut down rumors about plastic surgery, calling them “completely false.”
“They don’t understand what good hair and makeup and, like, fillers, can really do,” she told Paper Magazine.
The beauty influencer recently said in an interview with Hommegirls that seeing her natural features on her kids’ faces has made her more comfortable in her own skin.
“[Motherhood has] made me love myself more. I see my features in my daughter and my son now, but you know, my daughter looks like me. I get to see my beauty in her, and it’s made me love myself more for sure,” the mom of two said.
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Jenner shares her 5-year-old daughter, Stormi, and 1-year-old son, Aire Webster, with rapper ex Travis Scott.
The beauty entrepreneur also opened up about getting lip fillers, adding that she’s never regretted getting them.
“I think a big misconception about me is that I’ve had so much surgery on my face and that I was some insecure person, and I really wasn’t!” she said. “Yeah, I love full lips and wanted full lips, but growing up I was always the most confident person in the room.”
My First Two Magic Mushroom Journeys
At the end of our Denver trip for the Psychedelic Science 2023 conference (see my earlier full conference review if that interests you), I played a game at one of the afterparties and won a magic mushroom (shown below). It weighed about 3 grams. Magic mushrooms were decriminalized in Colorado last year, including for personal use and gifting but not for selling.
Saturday Night
The afterparty only went till 1am, and it wasn’t the right setting for a deep mushroom journey. I thought about my intention for this little guy and decided that for my first experience, I just wanted to energetically shake hands with the mushroom space and not do anything too deep.
I’ve had psilocybin before during a journey last November with a group of friends, but it was in the form of chocolates mixed with ayahuasca, and we took a couple other substances as well for a layered effect, run by an experienced facilitator. So up to this point I hadn’t consumed magic mushrooms separately. I know I’ll have more opportunities to explore mushrooms, so I wanted to lean into it gently – not like my first psychedelic experience of doing ayahuasca ceremonies for four back-to-back nights in Costa Rica in 2019.
We only had two more nights in Denver before returning to Vegas, so I wanted to eat about half of the dried shroom one night and half the second night, as a way of leaning into it. I wanted to have a positive experience even if it would be fairly mild given the low dosage. I had done my homework first, so I had a relatively good sense of what range of effects to expect, or so I thought.
I decided to eat about a quarter of it first, roughly 0.75g, see if I noticed anything after an hour, and then have more if all seemed good, while still at the afterparty. I was surprised that it tasted good, almost like popcorn but with the texture of a dry cracker. I’d heard that some people didn’t like the taste of magic mushrooms, but that may depend on the variety. This one was pleasant enough that my taste buds would have had no complaints about eating more of them.
During that first hour I only noticed some mild giddiness, nothing special. So I ate another 0.75g. These weights are mainly guesses, but after eating the first piece, we found a scale at the afterparty, and I was able to weigh the remainder, which helped me estimate that the whole shroom must have been about 3g total.
In case you’re wondering, I did invite Rachelle to share it with me, but she passed. It wouldn’t have been a problem to procure plenty more shrooms at this party since there was a jar on a table filled with dried shrooms as well as magic mushroom chocolates (including some labeled vegan), which seemed to be free for the taking. Playing the game with the mushroom prize wasn’t really necessary – I just did it for fun. If I wanted a more intense experience by eating more shrooms, that would have been easily attained. However, I felt that splitting those 3g across two nights would be just perfect for the kind of intro to mushroom space that I was looking for, especially while traveling.
Shortly after I ate the second mushroom piece, we walked back to our hotel, which took about 30 minutes. I still didn’t notice a very strong effect other than feeling a bit happier. Rachelle said she could see a difference when she looked into my eyes though. I found it amusing when she kept staring at me to check. I had no trouble with balance or coordination while walking back.
We arrived at the hotel without incident, and now it was close to two hours since I ate the first piece. I could feel there was the potential to have a deeper experience but that I’d have to meet it halfway. So I lied down on the couch, put on some music with my headphones, closed my eyes, and went into a meditative space to see what I could experience internally.
That was delightful all throughout. I enjoyed some lovely psychedelic visuals and sensations, not super intense but still beautiful. They were similar to the ayahuasca visuals but gentler, more electric looking, and more peaceful. I felt this gentle feminine energy communicating with me in waves, with rising intensity followed by periods of lower intensity, each cycle lasting a few minutes.
I felt like the mushroom energy was mapping out how to communicate and connect with me inside my mind. There was a consciousness to it, which grew a bit stronger as we synched up. I found it very easy to relax and surrender to the flow of the experience.
It peaked around 1:30 AM, about three hours after I ate the first piece, and I eventually went to bed at 3:15. I slept really well and had some nice visuals extending into my dreams too.
I got what I wanted from this first experience – a gentle greeting and a mild but interesting inner journey. I would have appreciated a bit more intensity, but this was a really nice, low-risk beginner experience.
Sunday Night
The next night we didn’t have any parties to attend, so I opted to have the second experience in the hotel room all the way through. We had a suite, so Rachelle could go to bed if she wanted without my keeping her up. I also started earlier this time (around 9pm).
I decided to do something different this time and opted to make mushroom tea, using the remaining 1.5g of dried mushroom. I know that consuming it this way is supposed to have a faster onset and be a bit more intense. I didn’t know how much more intense though, and 1.5g is still a relatively modest amount.
I used my fingers to crumble the mushroom into small pieces in a cup. Then I used the hotel coffee maker to make some hot water. For extra flavor, I added a chamomile teabag (no caffeine). I didn’t have any lemon, so I couldn’t use the Lemon Tek method. The high acidity of lemon (or lime) juice breaks psilocybin into the psychoactive psilocin faster than stomach acid, which makes for a more intense journey.
I let the shroom tea steep for 15 minutes while journaling about my intentions for the experience. This time I wanted to go deeper and focus on some questions. After clarifying my intentions, I drank the tea, including swallowing all of the little mushroom bits. I figured that with only 1.5g, I might as well squeeze as much out of it as possible. Our flight home wasn’t till the afternoon the next day, so I had plenty of time.
I lied down on the couch with my headphones, listening to some relaxing music. I started with native flutes, and I soon realized I didn’t like the ones that had certain nature sounds like crickets or birds. For some reasons those sounds felt too creepy to me. I flipped over to a relaxing spa music playlist, which felt like a good vibe to begin with.
After the first 15 minutes, I noticed some mild tingling in my arms, and they felt a bit lighter, but the sensation was pretty mild. During the next 15 minutes, however, the intensity ramped up fast. I sat up, and it looked the floor was rolling in waves. I wasn’t feeling good in my body at all. It felt like being deeply dizzy but without the spinning sensation, like my energy matrix was destabilizing and being pulled in chaotic directions. Is there such as thing as spirit-level dizziness? That’s sort of how it felt.
The intensity of those sensations continued to climb during the next few minutes, from mildly nauseating to that “Oh I’m definitely going to throw up” feeling. Even while I’m typing this now, I feel like my body is relieving those sensations at lower intensity.
I got off the couch opened the bedroom door, saying to Rachelle something like, “I’m probably going to be throwing up in the bathroom now, but don’t worry. I’ll be okay.” – partly to reassure myself as well. Internally I was also wondering how long these unpleasant sensations would last. I wasn’t looking forward to hours more of this.
As I flung myself to the bathroom floor in front of the toilet, I felt super nauseous but also confused. I sensed something wanted to come out, but it also felt omnidirectional, like I needed to throw up in all spherical directions at once, while my body was trying to translate that to mean up, down, or both. At the conference I had just recently learned the term “double platinum” and was hoping I wasn’t about to have that experience.
Then in a really quick shift, I suddenly sensed that this confused swirling of energy had made a decision and that it was definitely going down, not up. I shifted onto the toilet seat and purged quickly, wondering if I’d soon have to flip back around. But no. That feeling of disorientation and nausea abated even faster than the onset. Within a few minutes, I no longer felt nauseous and was actually feeling pretty good, almost euphoric. I almost couldn’t believe how quickly the nausea left me.
The speed of these shifts surprised me, but I was glad to be feeling better physically. This was still well within the first hour, so I knew there was plenty more to experience.
I asked Rachelle to sit with me on the couch for a while. I still felt a bit disoriented and wanted her energy there with me, figuring she’d be a comforting presence. I sensed that if I tried to lie down and listen to music again, I’d feel too nauseous, so I wanted to stay upright for a while.
She was happy to sit with me, which led to a very interesting experience. We sat closely on the couch next to each other, arm in arm. When I had my eyes open, the carpet still looked a bit wavy, and I began noticing a facial pattern. It wasn’t really a face – the carpet was very splotchy looking – but I noted that my mind was pattern-matching different elements to eyes, a nose, a mouth, etc. Fortunately that wasn’t too disorienting. I had the thought that my brain’s pattern-matching circuitry was becoming more flexible.
When I closed my eyes, I saw beautiful, electric, colorful, animated visuals – about 3x brighter and more intense than the night before. I preferred keeping my eyes closed since it was more captivating to observe the visuals than to look at the slightly wobbling hotel room.
The most fascinating part of this experience was what I felt internally while in contact with Rachelle. I had figured she might help to keep me feeling physically grounded, but it was almost the opposite of that. While we were touching, the sensation of touching and the sense of having a body faded away. I could still access the connection to my body but only while focusing on it directly and only with enough intensity to remind me that my body was still present on the couch. It’s similar to sensations I’ve had during deep meditation, where my body is so relaxed that I lose the physical sensations of having a body. but I can still reach back and wiggle a finger if I want to reconnect with it.
As with the deep meditation experience, I felt very safe. My focus shifted to a sensation of being a purer form of energy. Instead of sensing Rachelle as a separate presence there, there was no distinction between her energy and mine. We were melded together in a single energy form.
It wasn’t like being connected to some kind of source energy per se. It was more personal than that. I had the recognition that my energy and Rachelle’s energy were the same energy and that we were always sharing it. We were really the same being at an energetic level.
What’s also interesting is that Rachelle was focused on sending me love energy while sitting with me. Afterwards that made me wonder what might have been different if she had held different intentions – that’s something I want to explore more in the months ahead.
I kept my eyes closed most of the time and also talked with Rachelle about what I was experiencing. Even during the physically disorienting onset period, I didn’t feel anxious or fearful. I checked my pulse on my Apple Watch numerous times along the way since I was curious about that. It normally hovered around 75 BPM while sitting on the couch. The highest I saw the whole night was 81. The lowest was 49 at one point while I was feeling very nauseous in that first hour. So my heart definitely wasn’t racing. Emotionally I was calm, but that 49 reading was very low for me, and it was only for a brief time while I was feeling sick.
Rachelle continued to sit with me for around two hours. I noticed that whenever I was in physical contact with her, I immediately went into that beautiful space of energetic oneness with her, not actively sensing our bodies but just feeling like a singular energy cloud, her energy and mine being the same. In fact, there was no sense of this energy having any parts or components, like our bodies have limbs. It was a feeling of wholeness without any internal divisions.
Within that wholeness, however, I could read certain things about this energy. I could ask questions about myself or Rachelle and get an immediate sense of knowing. The energy had a very shamanic vibe about it, totally centered and present, like it was patiently holding space for our human selves and bodies. I got the sense that Rachelle was some kind of shaman herself yet pretending not to be so she could blend in with the humans. That made me wonder if that’s what we’re all doing here on some level, like there’s a part of us that’s energetically pure and whole, and we pretend to disconnect from it so we can have human adventures for a while, much like playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom for long enough to feel immersed in its world.
I think this experience also confirmed the incredibly special relationship that I’ve enjoyed with Rachelle since 2010, which has often felt like it had a timeless quality to it. We vibe so well with each other and seem ridiculously compatible. The experience of feeling like our energies were the same energy was like a more intense version of what I normally experience while hugging or cuddling with her. I feel more aware of how holding her changes the perception of my energy, making it feel very peaceful, loving, and cozy. It feels like a very natural home base to experience with another person, energetically speaking. It’s not the sensation that we’re two parts of the same whole; it’s the absence of any partitioning. When we cuddle it feels like we create a cuddle-field in which our human bodies mostly dissolve into energy, and it’s all the same energy.
During those two hours on the couch together, whenever I broke contact with Rachelle and we stopped touching for a while, that’s when I felt more grounded and present in my body and the physical environment, like now I’m back in the hotel room.
During that time I also experienced rolling waves of intensity, which grew milder over time. Sometimes there were mild waves of nausea too but not nearly as strong as during that first hour. Other times I felt of a different frequency, where I noticed the closed-eye visuals becoming more intense or changing their patterns. Sometimes I felt surges of positive energy, like the pressure one experiences before laughing. In fact, I did laugh several times during the night as way to release some of energy, which felt good.
Anyway… after those lovely two hours on the couch together, Rachelle finally went to bed, and I was in a good place to continue on my own. I turned off the lights, put on my headphones, and lied down on the couch to do more inner journeying for a couple more hours. That was a more mental experience for the rest of the night, whereby I asked and got interesting answers to many different questions – so many that I felt like I’d run out of questions by the end. Or I felt like I just didn’t have any meaningful ones left to ask on this particular night.
I also experimented with different kinds of music during this time. Slow-paced music felt a bit boring, and I found that my favorite for these final hours was trance music. I loved high-energy tracks that amped me up emotionally. I also listened to some of my favorite songs just to see what that would be like, but that aspect didn’t seem unusual, perhaps because the songs were too familiar. I still liked it though.
I finally went to bed at 2 AM, not even feeling that tired, so overall the experience was about 5 hours. I could still feel a bit of background communication going on as I drifted off to sleep, but at this point I didn’t find it necessary to consciously engage with it because I felt complete and then some.
I woke up the next day feeling very well-rested and completely normal. I like that these journeys didn’t leave me feeling depleted. I couldn’t discern any negative after-effects whatsoever.
Integration
When I returned to Vegas, I went to an integration circle the following Tuesday and shared about my recent experiences there. The feedback and questions were helpful since they invited me to do some extra reflection. I also continued to discuss the experiences with Rachelle and did some journaling as well. I find that the more I reflect upon and talk about these experiences, the more my understanding of them shifts a bit.
Overall this was a great introduction to magic mushrooms, both very positive experiences despite the disorienting and rapid onset with the mushroom tea – that really packed a punch relative to eating the shroom straight. I got what I wanted, which was to lean into building a positive, growth-oriented relationship with mushroom space. Whenever I get into something new, I like to set conscious intentions for the kind of relationship I want to develop and explore.
I like that psychedelic journeying can yield interesting insights about myself, life, and reality. Getting to connect with Rachelle in a deeper way was such a beautiful gift as well.
After a mushroom trip, the brain remains more neuro-flexible than usual for roughly two more weeks. That’s a great time for making changes because the brain is less resistant to receiving fresh input and more receptive to learning. I experienced a feeling of greater openness and flexibility during that time period. I felt more willing to say yes to divergent invitations and to entertain new ideas that I might have otherwise declined. It felt like my inner suppression circuitry had loosened up a bit, so it was easier to stretch myself more.
