First in this post, let me briefly address some risks of psychedelics. Medically, if taken commonsensically, in a safe set and setting and as long as there are no medical contraindications – these risks are very small. For example see this academic article.

There is a great organisation founded by Jules Evans which assists people who have had bad psychedelic experiences.

As practitioners, my husband and I frequently offer assistance to such people. Often, they are victims of the occidental madness of self-professed psychedelic shamans who have spent a little time in the jungle and have become true believers in their own power. There are some who have been victims of inappropriate advances by ‘space holders’, or have simply not received the support they needed after extremely challenging experiences. Or, of course, people who have used psychedelics illegally, in their own space, but without any preparation, or intention, or guidance, and things have gone wrong.

However, even if the space has been well held, with good preparation and intention, the Western world has been taught a materialist paradigm for hundreds of years. In the past 20 years there has been a big move away from materialism, into idealist or pan-psychist paradigms, which were always at the root of the Perennial Philosophies. But psychedelics often lead people into mystical and spiritual experiences, sometimes involving other dimensions, deities, Gods, aliens and fairies. A real peak behind the veil. So, if you have had no spiritual or religious beliefs and have lived through the filter of a purely rational and materialistic paradigm, and then a psychedelic experience suddenly introduces you to talking trees and animals, human/animistic hybrids, angels, demons, or other worlds that seem somehow hyper-real, what do you do?

Recent research talks about the lack of any real sociological or psychological framework in the Western world for what people experience during a psychedelic trip. For instance  and

Stan Grof has written about this at length and in an excellent article he introduces a number of categories where what is happening to someone could be interpreted as a spiritual emergence, or a spiritual emergency.  We are of course seeking the former, but after a psychedelic experience, if we discuss our experience with somebody in our circle of friends, family etc who is completely against “drugs” they may interpret it as an emergency, and try to get us institutionalised and medicalised, which can potentially turn it into the latter.

Grof writes: One of the most important implications of the research of holotropic states is the realization that many of the conditions, which are currently diagnosed as psychotic and indiscriminately treated by suppressive medication, are actually difficult stages of a radical personality transformation and of spiritual opening. If they are correctly understood and supported, these psychospiritual crises can result in emotional and psychosomatic healing, remarkable psychological transformation, and consciousness evolution.

This is why it is vitally important for people who have undergone a psychedelic experience, to integrate it into their lives afterwards, but, as mentioned with some discretion. Either talking to a therapist who understands what you have experienced without labelling or judging, or within a specific psychedelic integration group. The key is not to share with those who do not have a healthy frame of reference and will not understand.

 Let me finish with another quote from Grof. It is, therefore, in the interest of all of us to find ways of bringing spirituality back into our individual and collective life. This would have to include not only theoretical recognition of spirituality as a vital aspect of existence, but also encouragement and social sanctioning of activities that mediate experiential access to spiritual dimensions of reality. And an important part of this effort would have to be development of an appropriate support system for people undergoing crises of spiritual opening, which would make it possible to utilize the positive potential of these states.