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[Music] do you want to hear about all my bad trips i thought you would so in this episode i'm going to share all the worst trips that i've had on psychedelics and i'm going to do a bit of introspection here for myself and also for you as to what is really going on inside of a bad trip what causes them also perhaps how to deal with them and also how to avoid them for yourself so it should go without saying that if you're going to be a serious psychonaut and you're going to be doing a lot of trips 50 trips 100 trips or more in your life you're necessarily going to have some bad trips what are called bad trips now are they really bad i mean it's all relative it all depends once you come out of them and you look at them back in retrospect then they're not going to look so bad and in fact you might be very grateful for them and thankful for them because they will teach you valuable lessons just like in life you can have horrific situations happen to you in life this happens all the time to people bankruptcies divorces children dying health conditions cancers and [Music] all sorts of of stuff like this that you would not wish upon yourself and you maybe even wouldn't wish upon your enemies because it's so bad but then in retrospect you look at it and you say i mean yeah it was i would not do it again if i had the choice but it's made me who i am and there were profound lessons that i learned and that something very important would be lost if life was just all positivity and rainbows and butterflies and all goodness and none of the hard stuff all right so let's get into it overall i would say i've been blessed not to have that many bad trips but i can definitely think of at least a couple and really more like probably five or ten at least two that were really traumatic we might say and problematic and then maybe upwards towards ten that were difficult and i wouldn't want to relive those experiences and so we have we have a sort of a gradation of scale of how bad troops can get and i don't think i've experienced the worst of the bad trips that are possible and the reason that is is because from the very beginning i've told you guys that i'm very careful with how i've used psychedelics in the past i treat them very seriously i understand the potential for how bad the trips can get and that's precisely why i'm so careful with them and i make sure that my doses aren't too high and so on but you know even if you're very careful if you trip a lot eventually something will go sideways you'll take too much you'll get too cocky and then bad stuff will happen so anyways the first bad trip that i had was on mushrooms it was on four grams of mushrooms and the way that this one came about was that i this was when i was first starting psychedelics i started with mushrooms and i took two grams of mushrooms and i loved it so much it was so amazing that i decided that in the next few days or in the next week i'm going to do more i'm going to do 4 grams and my goal was that i'm going to go from from 2 grams to four grams to six grams to eight grams like i wanted to work my way up to to really high doses back then i didn't really understand what i was getting into not fully and so i doubled my dose from two to four grams and i didn't quite understand that that was not just going to double the potency of the trip it ended up like quadrupling the potency of the trip and so what happened was that i took it i remember it was coming up usually takes about 30 minutes for the mushrooms to kick in and they were kicking in around the 30 minute mark and then i i noticed that it was kicking in so strong that i started to get this sense in my mind like oh man i don't want it to be this strong it's getting too strong to the point where it's uncomfortable now and then it was getting even stronger than that and so the come up was coming up and i was i was noticing how strong it is and i just my mind started sort of started to want to go back i wanted to like press the undo button and i started to tell myself things like uh i wish i didn't take these mushrooms today i don't feel like tripping today but of course it's too late so one of the lessons when you're doing psychedelics that will help you to avoid bad trips is that when you're going into a trip make sure that you're really engaged with what's going to happen that your mind is not elsewhere that you're not thinking that you would rather be somewhere else doing something else like make sure that you've set aside the entire day you're not in any kind of rush there's nothing else on your mind no other kind of business that you're worried about so you can fully go to the trip and you have to almost be how would i put it you have to be sort of morally prepared to deal with what's going to arise because difficult things can arise and sometimes i'm just in a mood where i don't want to deal with difficult things so if i'm in if i'm in that kind of mood i shouldn't be tripping because the trip could bring up difficult things and i also have to be in a mood to contemplate and i also have to be in a mood where i'm not bored or tired of tripping because i tripped just recently and that was sort of a problem with this particular mushroom trip is that not enough time passed between the first time that i did it and then the second time that i'm now taking four grams i think it was only like a week that passed the problem was not the tolerance that wasn't the problem the problem is that usually the way it works for me is that i take a psychedelic insights arise and lessons and revelations and then i have to ponder those and mold them over and integrate them and that can take anywhere from a few days to weeks to months to even a year or more to integrate all that and if i didn't chew thoroughly digest all of that material and then i go trip again then it can feel like it's it's too much too fast and it's too soon it's almost like i would i won't i would almost liken it to having sex if you're having loss of sex then at some point you have so much sex that you even become disinterested in the sex but simply because you're in the habit of it and maybe your partner wants it and maybe you've been having sex a few times like a every day for a few days in a row maybe by the third or fourth day it's almost like you want to go do something else because you're just you're tired of it you're sick of it you need that space so that it can become special again you don't want it to be just this habitual thing that you do every single day like a robot then the joy of sex is lost if you have sex every single day for a month you're gonna be so sick of sex now this is difficult for many people who struggle getting sex this is difficult for many people to actually believe that that's true some of you are listening to this and thinking like leo no i don't believe you if i could have sex every day for a month i would be thrilled that would be heaven but uh if you actually do that you'll realize that no it's not heaven it gets monotonous and you actually start to regret it because you overdo it likewise with food you i mean if you eat the same food too much too many days in a row and you overfill yourself by the fourth or fifth day you're gonna be sick of it you're gonna need a break so it's just like that with psychedelics except with psychedelics you need even longer periods of time for a break at least a week maybe two weeks maybe a couple months is usually what i find is what i need so that then when i come back now i'm i'm really ready you have to be sort of thirsty for it right it can't just be like oh yeah i could trip today or maybe i could not that's not a good reason to trip a good reason to trip is like i wake up in the morning and i i sort of just introspect and i remember like you know i haven't tripped for a few months and now i'm really feeling like i'm ready for more like i really want it i'm i'm excited i want to explore i want to explore the psychedelic train that's when it's a good day to trip now when it's a bad day to trip is when you wake up and you're like uh yeah i sho i told myself i would trip today but i don't kind of feel like it i would rather just slack off and watch tv or i would rather just be online looking at videos and stuff and just i want to have an easy day but i told myself i would trip so i'm gonna force myself to trip that's already starting off on the wrong foot and that's sort of how i started this mushroom trip is on that kind of wrong foot and so i immediately regretted it and i wanted to to back out of it but of course you can't back out of it and then it was a very high dose i'm also very sensitive to psychedelics so it's a very high dose for me probably what is four grams for me might be 8 grams for the average person and so it came on really strong and my entire visual field was just completely getting twisted up and melting and going all crazy and since these were some of my earliest trips i didn't have a lot of good experience in terms of how how twisted consciousness can get and so what happened was this combination of me wanting to break out of it but i couldn't so then i said well it's gonna last like three hours it's usually about how long a solid mushroom trip lasts for about three hours and i said well i'll just tough it out for three hours but see that was already the wrong attitude if you're going in there trying to tough something out you're already in a attitude of resistance not an attitude of openness and curiosity not a passion or eagerness to explore to contemplate anything and so what happened was that this trip was sort of forced upon me i was resisting it i wish it would stop but it couldn't so i was just kind of begrudgingly going along and um and it just kept getting stronger and stronger to the point where i started to go into a state of what i would call madness this was my first experience of madness the madness of consciousness and so i started going down these twisted rabbit holes of consciousness and infinite mind where i started having these um what at the time seemed like insane insights and visions like i would um start to imagine that i am all the dinosaurs that used to exist which of course is true you are all the dinosaurs you imagined all the dinosaurs but this was my first time starting to realize that i am all the dinosaurs that i imagined all the dinosaurs and it was very twisted then i went into all sorts of other rabbit holes and it felt like i was losing my mind and when you get stuck in one of these rabbit holes especially on mushrooms because they're very twisty you stop even believing that you're going to come out of these rabbit holes and so the deepest rabbit hole i went down was just this rabbit hole of imagining myself completely losing my mind and not being able to undo it and then so then i sort of went into this fantasy that i lost my mind and that i lost it permanently and then i would never come out and that would basically be like a an old man sitting in a wheelchair drooling uh because i lost my mind and my family would have to like take care of me that was that was sort of the the deepest part of that rabbit hole and um it felt like pure madness and because of that i was able to develop an empathy for people who actually experienced true madness people insane asylums and so forth but of course then the trip ended and i came back but it left me quite psychologically traumatized not physically but just psychologically it shook me it showed me just how powerful psychedelics can be i didn't i mean i read bad trip reports in the past before taking that trip but there's a big difference between just being told what a bad trip is and then actually living through on yourself and then you appreciate just how powerful these substances are and so that trip was actually very foundational for me in my psychonaut journeys because what it taught me is it taught me to deeply respect mushrooms and all psychedelics by extension and so after the trip passed i spent that day just sitting sort of curled up in a ball on the floor just sort of contemplating what the [ __ ] just happened to me and trying to make sense of it and i really couldn't make sense of it but i asked myself like okay so what's the lesson here what was this trying to teach me and it was very clear that the purpose of this trip was to teach me that as i'm going into psychedelics deeper in the future this was like an early shot across the bow that god gave me that these are not tools to be trifled with like you have to really respect the substance really respect the dosage don't get cocky don't think that you're going to be able to handle heroic dose don't trip when you're not feeling like tripping like make sure you're really following the right protocol and being extra careful and you're not doing it from an egoic place you're not doing it for for like a sort of artificial macho reason because in my mind back then i thought like well i would do two grams of mushrooms then four grams then six grams then eight grams and i was going to work up to like 20 grams of mushrooms that was that was my egotistical sort of idea of what i'm going to be doing over the next few months and so i was quickly disabused of that notion that's not the proper way to trip see that was a sort of a preconceived plan that i had in my mind whereas really the proper way to trip is that you trip one trip at a time and you don't think too far ahead in terms of what is the next trip going to be how much should i take there's no preset dosages you have to adjust and you have to be fluid and you have to be willing to improvise so you trip then you integrate the lessons from the trip based on the lessons that you got you ask yourself when should i trip again and maybe your intuition will tell you in four months then that's how long it's gonna take or maybe your intuition tells you i'm going to trip the next day okay maybe that's correct because there's something you didn't get and you need to trip immediately to get some more insight or clarity on that point and if that's the case then that's the case then you trip the next day right so it can be very variable and you got to be fluid enough to improvise and to to work with that so that was that bad trip and that bad trip my first one is what saved me from having many more bad trips in the future i still had a few bad trips i'm going to tell you about here in a minute but i could have had a lot more had i not had that that difficult one really early on which taught me that lesson and i really truly learned that lesson deeply because you know what the greatest teacher is suffering suffering exists for a reason it exists because it can be extremely effective at teaching you lessons that you wouldn't otherwise learn deep pain physical and emotional teaches you lessons very quickly you touch a hot stove and then you probably will never touch one again in your life because you'll integrate that lesson so deeply because it was so painful and that's what happened to me with this mushroom trip ever since i'm i'm very careful with mushrooms especially because i know how twisted they can be the next bad trip that i had was with five amio dmt and there were there were multiple bad trips i had with five mio so let me discuss that so the first and probably scariest trip i had on five it was the very first time i tried it i snorted a small amount of it just to test maybe 10 milligrams or 50 i think it was 15 milligrams actually just to test what it was going to be like because it was a totally new substance and i knew how powerful it was from everything i read so i took it and then i was shocked at how quickly it came on it came on in about five minutes and my consciousness was starting to transform in such a radical way such an impossible way there was such an expansion of consciousness that also i immediately started to regret that i did this and then my mind went into sort of a panic mode i al i actually this is the closest i've come in my life to a panic attack i'm not a panicky person i'm not an anxious person i'm usually very calm and chill but in this case my heart started beating fast i could feel it i could hear it and that wasn't so much a physical response to the 5meo it was just that my mind was starting to as the trip was coming on it was so radical in its nature that my mind started to paint these these sort of nightmare scenarios of where this is gonna go because i had no idea where i was gonna go and i was like in my mind i'm like well where is this going like is it gonna go this place or this place or this awful place or even this more awful place and so it was like that and after a few minutes of that i realized like [ __ ] i i just want to go back to how i was i want to go back to my original sober state because this could go in some weird direction that i don't want it to go and and that just fed in because you see the whole problem with psychedelics is that what they reveal to you is they reveal to you that reality is your own imagination you're projecting and constructing reality now in your sober state you're not taking responsibility for that and your consciousness is so crystallized and solidified that thoughts you think don't manifest in the material world but when you're in a loosened more fluid state from psychedelics then your thoughts start to manifest in the material world and that can be freaky especially if you're thinking bad thoughts so if you start thinking that oh [ __ ] this trip is going to go bad it's going to go in a sideways direction that's exactly what's going to tend to manifest it's going to become a self-fulfilling prophecy so to trip well you need to be in a positive good state of mind and you also need to have a certain control over your own thought process so that you don't think into negative territory and you can train yourself to do this but it takes a while of tripping to to sort of learn to surf atop the ways of waves of consciousness that these psychedelics produce and so at this early stage in my psychonaut journeys i didn't yet know how to do that or learn how to do that and so i had sort of a mini panic attack and this was not even a large dose mostly the reason it was such a negative trip for me is just because my mind started to run wild with negative images of where this trip will go and the trip didn't even end up lasting very long it only lasted like 20 minutes and if i hadn't thought all those negative thoughts it would have it would have been fine if i just kind of accepted it surrendered to it and just explored it and was curious about it and open to it but i was starting to close down i was starting to resist it and that's when you typically would have a bad trip is when you start to resist what's being shown to you or when you get the idea that you want to go back to how you were 10 minutes ago but you can't because it's taking you in a forward direction you can't go back when you're just starting your trip because the majority of it is still ahead of you so anyways that that spooked me and it almost spooked me to the point where i didn't want to do 5meo again but a few days later of course i knew logically that i had to go back and redo 5mu again because that was just a little test dose anyways it wasn't the real deal and that i didn't get the full picture of what five amigo dmt was i knew that that was just sort of an entry point and it was an awkward entry point and i got off on the wrong foot but that doesn't mean i should stop doing 5mm gmt that would be a mistake and that was exactly correct i intuited that a lot of people if they would have had that first initial bad reaction they would have said oh to hell with this i'm never doing five emo again it sucks it doesn't feel good it's scary it's terrible well you have to recognize that that can easily just be an ego defense mechanism you see your ego will construct all sorts of stories and excuses for why you shouldn't do a nice solid dose of 5mu tmt your ego knows this is this is the end so it's going to invent all sorts of excuses uh i've seen a lot of friends and other people who take one dose of five meow dmt and they don't really have a good experience on that initial dose because it's so weird and alien it's hard to really appreciate and enjoy it your first time just like when you're trying a strange foreign cuisine the first time you try it you're not gonna like it it takes actually a few tries of some new foreign cuisine to develop an appreciation for it have you noticed that so it's like that with five million dmt and anyways so i went back for a second dose and that went much better even though it was higher it actually went better because i was i was now more prepared for what was to come and i was just willing to surrender to it more and then the third dose was also a bad trip but for different reasons so let me talk about that and that was the highest dose of 5mm that i've done which was 30 milligrams so i basically worked up from from 15 to 20. well there's a there was a 25 and then i went to 30. so that was the fourth trip the 30 was i would say my most traumatic 5 meal experience simply because at that dose given my level of sensitivity to that substance and to all psychedelics what happened was that i became so ridiculously conscious that it was a frightening terrifying level of consciousness but beyond the physical fright of it i mean the the psychological fright of it there was there was actually a physical reaction uh so what happened was that my neurological system was overwhelmed by the intensity of the infinite consciousness that i was experiencing to the point where i had a physical reaction where like this energy shot through my entire body you might call it kundalini energy and it shot out of my fingers and out of my fingertips it wasn't a visible energy it was um you couldn't see anything if you were looking at me but there was such a powerful explosion opening up from my heart and through all my limbs and through the entire nervous system um that it felt like my nervous system was overloaded like taking a light bulb and connecting it to a lightning bolt imagine what happens if you do that so it was just way too much of a dose and this was the moment where i first realized god i didn't even realize myself as god i just realized that god existed this was the first time i realized that god existed so basically i discovered god at the peak of this trip and it was so shocking and so awesome and terrifying all at the same time and also so loving and beautiful at the same time that it was too much for my mind and for my body to physically contain and so there was this sort of a negative overloading of energy in my body that was discharged through my fingertips it actually left scars and peeling of the skin on my fingertips for months that lasted for months took months for that to heal and um and it was such a shocking revelation of infinity that it would take me about a year to be able to integrate it and to feel like i'm ready to trip again so i didn't trip for basically a year and i was frightened from tripping because it was just too much and also i didn't understand exactly what it was that i experienced i experienced infinity i knew that much but there's so much depth to what infinity is and your mind is trying to figure out what it is and how to pin it down and how to make sense of it and what does it mean what does infinity mean it took me a good year of just contemplating that thinking about it mulling it over until i felt like i was ready to go back for more and when i did go back for more i lowered my doses and i hadn't done 30 milligrams ever since because it's just too much it physically overwhelms the body and i think it actually will damage the nervous system if you do it at those quantities at least for me so i call that a bad trip but i mean it was one of the most powerful and most important experiences i've ever had in my life the first time you discover god that is the most that is one of the most important experiences you'll ever have i mean it's it's remarkable it's unbelievable it's magical but it's also terrifying so it's a double-edged sword and so in my mind with this trip i don't even consider it a bad trip i consider it traumatizing but it was absolutely necessary and crucial to my development and i wouldn't i wouldn't change it for anything it was such an important trip for me and now the trauma has been integrated and worked through and it's gone so it's not like i'm living with that trauma i'm long over it um it took me about a year or two to get over it and i did and now it's fine other bad trips that i had i had a bad trip on lsd there's a strange phenomenon i've noticed with psychedelics where sometimes you take a psychedelic and it doesn't work exactly like it normally does i don't know why maybe it's because of some medicine i was taking or some supplement that i was taking that week i don't know or maybe it's just a fluke luck or something in my psychology but sometimes i take a psychedelic and it doesn't go normally it goes sideways what i call going sideways when a trip goes sideways for some reason it feels like the psychedelic is acting on you in a bit of it like a sinister way for whatever reason it's kind of sinister and you start getting kind of dark thoughts it almost feels malevolent rather than benevolent and usually i can tell very early into a trip when it's going into that sinister territory for whatever reason i don't know the reason but it's going in that sinister territory and i find that i'm not able to control it like if it wants to go in that direction it's going to go in that direction and even though i want it to go in a more benevolent direction if i try to push it towards the benevolent direction it still keeps going in the sinister direction and so that's what happened in this lsd trip and uh i just started having thoughts that didn't feel like they were my own it felt like i was out of character for myself because usually i'm pretty positive optimistic person i tend to think along certain lines of thought but in this trip my mind just started to kind of go haywire into some weird alien direction i don't know why i was having weird thoughts that were just uncharacteristic of of me and i didn't like where those thoughts were going and i didn't feel like i really had much control over them and again it felt like the trip was sort of forcing itself on me and then i wanted out of the trip but of course i couldn't get out so what i did was i started to use a little trick that i like to use when i'm in a bad trip situation is i try to change the setting and this is a great trick that you can try to use just to sort of reboot your mind and reboot your mood and your emotional system you can actually shift your state by moving your body physically dancing to some music or in this case just changing rooms so that's what i did i went from the living room to the bathroom thought well maybe that will change things and it can because your living room has a different mood than your bathroom like if your living room starts to feel sinister you can go to your bathroom turn on the lights make it very bright and then maybe those bright lights and whatever you see in the bathroom will cheer you up it's amazing how just how simple something like that can can be and you can actually see this in children like with babies and small children maybe a child starts to cry have you seen this a baby starts crying and for some silly reason someone stole the baby's toy or maybe somebody accidentally bumped into the baby now the baby's crying and the baby can get stuck in that frame of mind they can just keep crying and crying and crying and crying for the next 30 minutes but what you can do is you can you can shift the baby's attention to something else you can crack a joke you can literally take the baby you can cuddle the baby you can take it in a different room you can turn the lights on and off you can you know you can stick your tongue out you can make some funny some funny like uh facial gestures and whatever and the baby's attention could shift out of that negative spiral of bad mood because it's thinking about the bad thing that just happened to it a minute ago but if you shift its attention to something new something funny something weird whatever grab its attention just shift it away then uh it's remarkable the baby can start laughing and giggling as though the bad thing a minute ago didn't even happen the baby just forgets about it and so very much on psychedelics you can use this trick on yourself sometimes it'll work not always will it work because you are a little bit more sophisticated than a baby and you have a little bit more stickiness to your mind so anyways you know like i went to the bathroom or just like i laid on the floor looking at the carpet things like that and eventually i decided to go outside so that's like the biggest shift you could make if you're tripping indoors and you're having a bad trip indoors after you try all the different rooms and you try all that stuff and it doesn't make you pop out of your bad mood and negative thought spirals go outside because outside will be a very significant shift so i went outside and i was in the sun basking in the sun looking at the trees and a lot of times that will shift your state and your mood but in this case it didn't so i was still having my bad trip outside and there were some people walking around outside looking at me not that they really saw anything different about me but um kind of made me paranoid and self-conscious but i i was just outside and i knew that at that point i knew that well i've exhausted all my options for trying to you know trick myself out of this bad trip and so i won't be able to do it so i just i gotta tough it out and so that's what i did i just toughed it out um it didn't feel very good for an hour or two and then i i came back inside at some point i laid on the carpet i was kind of in misery on the carpet for 30 minutes or so and then just something clicked and i popped out of it popped out of the bad mood and then from then on it was all easy and nice and to this day i still i can't really understand why that mood was there why my mind was going into these sinister directions it's just how it was and that's what will happen sometimes to you so be prepared for that and so what do you do in that situation well you can try to manipulate your trips in order to get them to go in the direction you want but if your manipulations fail you have to accept that and just resign yourself to wherever the trip is taking you in general you don't want to over manipulate your trips because if you get too manipulative with them that's you imposing your ego too much on what consciousness wants to show you and then that's going to lead to more and more resistance so at some point when the resistance becomes too high the manipulation becomes too high you have to remember to tell yourself like okay why am i even manipulating all this let me just experience the badness of it nothing wrong with experiencing some badness remind yourself of that um and then usually as soon as you kind of do that then it's all downhill from there because a lot of the bad part of the bad trip is just the anticipation of how bad it's going to get more so than how bad it really is it's that old saying of you know the only thing you have to fear is fear itself and that's sort of a lot of what a bad trip is is mostly you anticipating something negative and that anticipation is itself the worst part of the whole experience so that happened to me let's see what other bad trips that i have i had one very difficult trip on for aco dmt i haven't talked much about that i plugged some for eco dmt it wasn't a large quantity it was a very small quantity it was maybe 10 milligrams or so and for some reason it hit me so hard and the problem with that trip is that you know sometimes i'll do a trip where i'm deliberately planning to go very deep and i'm taking a a relatively high dose and i know i'm taking a relatively high ghost because i'm ready to go deep other times i take a trip where i'm just like testing a new substance and it's a mild dose and i'm just doing it for tester's sake just to see how it is so that in the future when i trip on it i can you know adjust the dose properly so i can do a nice deep proper trip so that's what i was planning with this trip with foreign dmt i took the smallest dose that i would normally take just 10 milligrams and i was expecting it to be mild and easy but what shocked me was that even at 10 milligrams when plugging it it was so freaking powerful that it completely took me by surprise and i really really wasn't in the mood to trip that deep but of course it was too late so i was in it and there was no going back and so i just had to i just had to deal with it and um for echo dmt what does it feel like it feels very similar to mushrooms it's pretty twisted you get a lot of visual hallucinations on it very wavy the whole room becomes very wavy and it's very fantastical like you can you can dream some crazy stuff on foreign at least i can and so um i had some sort of shocking insights about the fact that everything is imaginary and just how imaginary everything is i started to realize that my entire past is imaginary my childhood is imaginary and this was some some of the first times that i started to realize that and it was quite difficult to integrate but still thanks to my experience with mushrooms that first time that i talked about my first bad trip with mushrooms i was able to deal with this bad trip better than i did with my first mushroom bed trip and uh it didn't traumatize me as much it didn't scare me as much because i knew that you know i've already been through some bad trips in the past and that gives me confidence that i can weather this new storm that is coming and so that's also a nice benefit of having some bad trips in your experienced base because you can then trust yourself to be able to handle it especially if you've handled previous bad trips relatively well then you you trust that you can also survive this you know this too shall pass it's that old saying and so that was foreign and um to this day i haven't done foreign dmt again just because i like i really respect that substance it's way more powerful than it seems and part of the problem with foreign dmt is that when i was going into it from the trip reports that i've read i always read a bunch of trip reports before i try a new substance because i want to get a sense of you know what am i getting myself into here how serious is this going to be most of the trip reports for foreign tmt they said oh it's just like mushrooms and i said well if it's just like mushrooms i've already done that so i'm ready for it can't be that bad and i'm going to do a very low dose of it and so the expectations that i had were incorrect maybe that's how it works for other people but it certainly doesn't work that way for me with foreign it's more serious than mushrooms and it's way more potent than mushrooms even at 10 milligrams so um maybe for me for uh 10 milligrams of foreign is equivalent to three to four grams of of mushrooms i would estimate but i would say it's even a little bit more serious mushroom's a little bit more playful whereas four echo dmt is more serious for me it's not a it's definitely not a recreational psychedelic for me whereas some people will talk about it in a recreational way so that threw me off a little bit so another lesson that i learned from that experience and from other experiences of other substances is that just because other people are talking about a psychedelic in a recreational manner and they say oh this psychedelic is good for partying or oh yeah it's it's easy there's not a lot of mind [ __ ] to this one you can't rely on that maybe it'll go that way but what i noticed for me is that a lot of psychedelics that people claim to be just like party drugs or recreational or just kind of like light and fun you can be social on them and stuff and you can have sex on them and stuff like that for me it's not like that for me it's much more existential maybe it's because of my genetics maybe it's because of the way my mind works i don't know maybe a combination of both probably so nowadays if i was trying a new substance i would be much more skeptical and i would err on the side of presuming that the substance is not going to be a recreational substance but it's going to be serious basically every new substance i approach as though it's going to be a very serious substance because it's better to over overestimate than it is to underestimate these things so that's a lesson that i learned that helps me now to avoid bad trips other bad trips that i've had uh the worst chemical that i've ever taken you want to hear what that one is so um i've talked in the past my experiences with dpt it's a beautiful visionary psychedelic very powerful so to be careful with it of course i've talked about five meow dmt but then i tried a new research chemical called 5meodpt and i was thinking like well 5mu dmt is amazing and dpt is amazing so isn't it logical that if you combine 5meodmt and dpt into 5meodpt that that should be pretty amazing right that's what i thought that's what i was hoping for so i try a bit of it like 10 milligrams and this is the most horrible chemical i've ever put in my body it's definitely psychedelic but the problem with it is is that it feels almost like a toxin or a poison coursing through your nervous system it doesn't feel pleasant at all your thoughts become discombobulated when you turn your head it feels like there's something broken in your spine and in your in the in the brain stem like every time you turn your head it almost feels like there's weird uh like electrical signals that are being sent through your spinal column but that they're sort of like malfiring and malfunctioning you can feel the toxic effects of of this chemical coursing through your brain and your heart starts beating in an irregular fashion so it's it's obviously not healthy for you but the only way you can know that is by first trying it so i was trying it blind i had no idea what it was going to be like and there weren't any good trip reports to read about this substance because it's it's a rare substance that almost nobody has ever tried before so you're not going to get reliable data on it by reading reports and and so it felt like i poisoned myself and it was very uncomfortable but at the same time it also did expand my consciousness a little bit but it expanded in such an uncomfortable and kind of twisted and dysfunctional way where it almost felt like i was a broken human like imagine if somebody hit you in the head with a baseball bat not enough to kill you and not enough to knock you unconscious but to the point where like you're you're half [ __ ] and you're stumbling around and you can you can turn your head and look around and balance but you're not thinking straight your memories aren't co coherence you're not able to strength together coherent thoughts you're not able to use your logical mind the way that you would normally or even the way that you might on a on a traditional psychedelic like lsd or mushrooms it's just it feels like your whole brain is is misfiring and miss working and so i sat there in this uncomfortable state for a couple hours and i was wondering like well how long is this going to last you know 5 meo dmt doesn't last very long it only lasts about 60 minutes when you plug it and dpt lasts longer it can last three to four hours and so i was wondering well is this thing going to last more like 60 minutes or more like four hours because i don't want four hours of this well sure enough it lasted like five hours uh and so it was a kind of kind of a miserable uncomfortable five hours or so it was it was a lot more persistent than i had hoped but it was mostly bad simply from a physical perspective it didn't really take me into any kind of like madness territory where i was losing my mind or having nightmares and hallucinations i didn't get very much of that because it was a small dose i'm sure if i took a large dose of it it would but then of course the body discomfort would have been even worse um i was concerned a bit about how my heart was beating in an irregular manner and about the way that my head like every time i was turning my head it felt like something was broken inside my my spine and brain stem and that did concern me but also i wasn't really panicked it wasn't like a super bad trip i wasn't panicked i knew that it would pass so i just kind of just sat there on the couch resigned myself to this discomfort and told myself well this is it's going to pass it's okay um even if it's a little bit toxic you know it's it'll be fine and so after about five hours it passed i went back to normal and everything's been fine it didn't harm my health or anything like that so but uh that's definitely one you should not take of all the psychedelics i've tried i highly advise you not to experiment with five meow dpt horrible horrible chemical it just it just feels wrong to take it at least that's how it is for me maybe for some of you it will work but you know i wouldn't i wouldn't risk it stay away from that one um let's see other bad trips that i've had oh yeah this probably brings me to the last set of bad trips that i'll describe which is dmt classic nndmt i'm extremely sensitive to dmt like ridiculously ridiculously sensitive to even tiny quantities of dmt it sends me into infinite consciousness that is so profound that it's horrifying and shocking it it's too much to handle really so i started experimenting with deep dmt uh vaping it and the problem with dmt is that it doesn't plug very well it doesn't work orally very well without something like harmala extract that i didn't want to eat so anyways i was vaping it and with vaping it especially i was i was i was a noob with the vaping process so i was just teaching myself how to vape which is difficult because with plugging you can put 10 milligrams into your syringe and plug 10 milligrams or 20 milligrams and you know you're getting exactly 20 milligrams when you do that vaping is much more imprecise especially if your technique is not really dialed in you can vape even if you're using something like a glass vapor genie which i've actually used i've used what is considered to be the best pipe for vaping dmt so i use the glass vapor genie but it's still not that easy to use and what ends up happening is that you you vaporize the dmt you suck it in through this glass pipe but the sides of the glass pipe they're cold and they conden they they collect and condense the the vapor any vapor that touches the glass basically attaches to the glass and crystallizes all along the glass of the pipe and so what you're actually sucking into your lungs is a portion of the quantity that you put into the pipe and also you usually don't vaporize the entire quantity but some portion of it so it's a portion of a portion that you're getting so you're not really sure how much you're getting each time you take a toke of this pipe and moreover it very much depends on how you're using your lungs to inhale the dmt because if you take a shallow inhale it could feel like you didn't really get much and you can just feel threshold effects from the same dose as if you take you know you take the same dose but this time you inhale very deeply like deep into your lungs and you're going to get a powerful blast of that [ __ ] it'll you'll get a break through those so the difference between a threshold dose and a breakthrough dose for me sucking on this pipe is uh it's very tricky to get that just right and so it's easy to under do it under do it under do it and then you say okay [ __ ] i'm gonna put more in there you put more in there then you take one big hit and then you overdo it by accident so it's hard to dial that in and you really never know exactly how much you're sucking in every time and it also depends how long you hold it you suck it in and then you hold it you try to hold it for as long as you can the longer you hold it the more powerful it's going to be because as soon as you exhale you're actually going to be exhaling dmt crystals if you didn't absorb it all into your lungs which can take 20 to 30 seconds so as i was experimenting with all that using trial and error you know making a bunch of mistakes um i took a couple of really big hits of that dmt and man it just it sends me into such a profound state of of infinite consciousness and it's it's so it's so loving like it's got so much love to it especially dmt for me it's just like it's pure love pure [ __ ] love you're you're basically inhaling love and i inhale so much of this love that it just it my entire visual field sort of started twisting in on itself into four-dimensional five-dimensional shapes that are completely mind-boggling and out of this world and it's just it's a terrifying degree of love and so uh overall dmd is amazing i love it but if i take too much of it i just get pummeled by this crippling degree of love that my body and mind can barely contain and it it almost drives me into a suicidal state where it's so loving and so beautiful that it makes me want to kill myself and of course that could be dangerous so so any time that you're taking psychedelics and they bring you to a point where you start getting suicidal thoughts for whatever reasons whether you're depressed or it could be the opposite because you're so happy and you're so loving you're so filled with love that you don't even care if you live anymore that's what it does to me um that's when you know you've taken too much and you're in dangerous territory and actually one of the most paradoxical things about love you think of well leo how can love be bad it sounds like you're describing a good trip like why are you being such a [ __ ] why don't you just accept the love and enjoy it why are you making it so difficult well i guarantee that if you experience these degrees of love that i'm talking about ever in your life um it you're actually going to find it traumatizing it's going to traumatize you imagine so much love it's traumatic it's hard for us to imagine that because we think that trauma has to be bad stuff trauma can only be pain and suffering well that's usually the case but weird things happen when you take dmt or other psychedelics you know things turn inside out and so yeah you can experience so much love and bliss that it actually becomes counterproductive and it becomes painful and you actually want it to stop because it's too much so that was difficult and then of course there's a lot to integrate after that it comes with many very twisted and mind [ __ ] insights that you have to integrate after you come back so anyways with with dmt what i learned is be very careful with your vaping technique like very very very careful because because also the other problem with vaping is that vaping hits you so hard and so fast compared to plugging or oral administration it hits you so fast within like 30 seconds you go from 0 to 60 in 30 seconds and there's no way to control it you're not even going to have time to run outside the way you would with lsd or mushrooms you can go outside you can go into a different room maybe you can turn on some fun music and dance you can turn on a youtube video some comedy and watch it and maybe you can even find a video online of somebody talking to you trying to talk you down from your negative thoughts you can't do that within 30 seconds of vaping that dmt first of all that dmt it hits your lungs so hard that it takes you like a minute just to recover because you you inhale it and then it's stinging your lungs for about 30 seconds you have to hold it for 30 seconds just to absorb it all but that 30 seconds is already enough to to get you to near the peak of this trip and by the time you exhale you're already like you're so zoned out from normal reality after those 30 seconds you're not gonna have time to run to a different room or to change your mood or to think different thoughts like you are [ __ ] flying off into a different universe and that can be terrifying and it's the rate and speed at which it happens is so fast that that in of itself makes it more terrifying because there's less room there for you to maneuver to manipulate to calm yourself down to talk yourself out of something to even give yourself encouragement and give yourself a little pep talk you know like ordinarily on mushrooms or lsd you could say well i've had bad trips in the past this is just me another one like that i can i can stomach it and get through it and see that already took 30 seconds just to explain that to myself in this time i'd already be in an infinite sort of like a dmt headspace it just the the speed at which it happens itself can be terrifying so anyways what i learned there is you know be very careful with with vaping i wouldn't vape dmt if there was a better method to take it now you can try farmalaska ayahuasca that kind of stuff but then you get into the problems of vomiting i don't really like that um i've tried plugging it it doesn't really work well plugged you need very very large dosages to plug it so it's very wasteful of your substance you also need to plug it alongside with something like harmala a maui and so that's not ideal so anyways with emt i learned to be more careful and and also honestly i haven't done very much dmt after that because i wouldn't say i'm traumatized by it but i am i have a very healthy caution and respect for it like i know how [ __ ] powerful it is so i treat it like a bottle of nitroglycerin that's my attitude towards cmt it's like nitroglycerin um and in general i i recommend that attitude towards any psychedelic that you're about to take you should have some trepidation before you take it sometimes people say leo you know i'm about to take a psychedelic and i have something a little bit of anxiety is that wrong should i not take it then so here's my thoughts on that i think it's actually very important that you do have some pre-trip anxiety i call it pre-trip anxiety pre-trip anxiety means that you're about to take a psychedelic you're committed to taking it you know you're going to take it but you're a little nervous the reason that is because you're thinking back to other times in the past you've taken it and maybe you you remember some bad trips and you remember how powerful it can be and so you have a healthy respect for it in the same way that if you were in the same room as a wild lion you would be very careful in that room with every step you took you would be very careful you'd keep your eyes dead on that lion and you'd walk on your tiptoes very carefully towards the door or the window all the while looking at that lion to make sure that you don't make any kind of wrong move until you get out that door so that's the approach you should take with psychedelics and you would actually be in a state of adrenaline and anxiety with that line in that room because you got to be able to to jump through that window you got to be able to haul ass out of there in case that line starts moving towards you right you got to think really fast and that's that's perfectly healthy in that situation what would be dysfunctional is if you were in that room with that line and you were just behaving normally and chilling out as though it was all fine and dandy that would be the dysfunction well likewise with psychedelics if you are just like dumping scoops of psychedelics into your pipe with reckless abandon just like a happy idiot thinking that oh everything is fine i don't got to worry about anything you're not nervous even a little bit that tells me you don't understand the power of what you're dealing with so for me even when i hold a psychedelic in my hand the whole mood changes it it does feel like i'm holding a bottle of nitroglycerin it's a volatile substance if i drop this bottle it's going to explode it's going to kill me that's my attitude and with the psychedelic i have that same kind of very serious attitude where it's like there's enough psychedelic in this little bag to kill me if i take one too many scoops of this stuff it could kill me and so i have that respect going in and i have a little bit of anxiety now it's not a panic attack it's not full-blown fear and it's not a paranoia where i start fantasizing about all the horrible [ __ ] that's about to happen to me after i take this because if i was doing that then that would result in a very bad trip so it's not like that i have positive expectations so i'm in general uh i try to hold the psychedelic as a benevolent force or substance it's a benevolent thing that's going to help me but at the same time i know how powerful it is and i know that if i take too much of it it's going to turn sour very quickly so it's benevolent in the right dosages done in the right ways in the right settings when it's done very responsibly then it's benevolent and so it's like that in the same way that if you were devoutly religious you would go into a church and you would pray at the altar of the church and there would be a figure there of the virgin mary or christ or whoever you pray to buddha or some vishnu deity or whatever you would be praying at the altar to this idol and you would have a almost irrational reverence for this idol you wouldn't just sit there in front of the the virgin mary statue if you were a true christian and you would treat it just like any other object you wouldn't treat it as though it was just like a glass of water or if it was a statue of a horse you give special importance to that virgin mary statue you actually believe that that is like a sacred object you don't spit on it you don't curse in front of it you you treat it with reverence well that's my attitude towards psychedelics and there's a very good reason for this there's a practical reason it's not just a fantasy in my own mind it's it is a little bit of a fantasy and i know it's a little bit of a fantasy that i'm sort of putting the psychedelic on this little bit of a sacred pedestal but i do that for a good reason because it's extremely powerful in what it'll do to your consciousness and it deserves that respect and as soon as you drop that level of respect you're going to start to use it irresponsibly and it'll bite you in the ass so i've learned that just from experience that's what that's what all of my bad trips have taught me in a nutshell so there you go those are probably the most memorable bad trips that i've had maybe i've had a few others that are mildly bad but i've probably even forgotten about them now i'd have to go through all my memory banks to remember them all that gives you a good uh sampling of what of what this stuff is like and uh i should warn you though that oh hold on i did forget one i i gotta tell you about the salvia i actually have i have a old episode on my blog which talks about my salvia trip so i won't go into it in too much detail but uh yeah salvia also was uh was a very one of the most challenging trips that i took and i took a very little i took a threshold dose of saudi i also vaped it vaped a threshold dose of salvia which i i don't recommend you do salvia is a very dangerous psychedelic it's actually a deliriant um it's so alien and so [ __ ] twisted that i took a little hit of it just to test it out and already i felt the power of it it was so alien it felt like an alien force a sinister alien force was just um taking over my entire visual field and the way that it affected me was so weird because it only affected half my visual field so half my visual field you know how the the left hemisphere is cross wired with the right arm and the right visual field and then the the right hemisphere is cross wired with the left visual field and the left arm you have this kind of weird wiring in the in the human organism so when i vaped some of this salvia for some reason it hit one of my hemispheres more than the others and so one of my visual field was basically going into infinity and the other half of my visual field was totally normal and it was going deeper and deeper into this roiling infinity and it felt like i was getting sucked into this hole of infinity um and i lost i started losing all sense of of self even at a uh like at a profound biographical level so i couldn't even remember memories of my childhood anymore that's how profound this degree of no self was salvia gave me one of the deepest no-self experiences that i've ever had and i've had no self-experiences without psychedelics i've had them on various kinds of psychedelics but what's so remarkable about salvia is that it just temporarily it wipes away all sense of self to the point where you can't even understand what it means to be human you're sitting here you still look like a human but you don't think of yourself as a human and you can't even remember what it's like to be a human and you can't even remember that you ever were a human that's how [ __ ] weird it is and then you even start to forget your own name you start to forget where you came from like ordinarily you know if i ask you where did you come from you say well i was born on a planet in the 21st century to a mother and father in this country i had a brother and a sister something like that well when you smoke the salvia all that flies out the window you can't even remember that [ __ ] anymore and it doesn't even make sense you try to think like brother brother what is a brother and you start thinking about a brother i have i have a brother and you and then the idea of having a brother doesn't even make sense anymore it just simply doesn't compute in your mind that can be pretty terrifying and the idea that you're that you're located on a planet earth in the middle of a in the middle of a star system somewhere um this also doesn't compute anymore in fact you can't even remember uh the building that you're in because like you're sitting in a room and right now you're assuming that this room is part of a house your house wherever you are and and this is outside in some neighborhood whatever well all of that gets wiped away such that you're sitting in this room you're sitting in your house you smoke this salvia but you don't know where this room is located you don't even know that it's a room per se that it's part of a house you don't know what the outside of your house looks like because that's been wiped away because it's just called concepts and images in your mind all that's wiped away and so you're sitting here in this room but you're it feels so foreign to you you don't even know that it's your room for all you know you could be in some stranger's house at that moment and that was just a threshold dose so i immediately realized how powerful this [ __ ] thing is and i was i was spooked by it pretty good and i've never gone back since uh to try more i don't really have a desire to to go down that rabbit hole because it's gonna be i can tell it's to be terrifying like you can you can completely freak yourself out with salvia if you're not careful so don't do it it's my advice so anyways let's wrap up here some final thoughts on bad trips first of all you should know that everything i've described up up to this point is nowhere near how bad a bad trip can get they can get way way worse than this so don't think that this is as bad as it gets in a sense these are mild bad trips that i'm describing and the reason that is is because i've been very careful and responsible and even so i got myself into a little bit of trouble but overall i've been very careful most people aren't this careful they're sloppy and when you get sloppy then you can have way worse trips than this so let that be a warning to you the biggest thing you can do to avoid bad trips is lower your doses treat your substance with respect and reverence don't trip too frequently that's actually another thing i forgot to mention is that i did have difficulty and certain kinds of bad trips when i was doing my 30-day 5-meow dmt retreat i did a period where i did 5-mm dmt every single day for 30 days i published a video about that in the past go check that out but anyways um that was problematic because i was doing it on a very fixed schedule because i wanted to make sure i did 30 days in a row i wasn't even able to complete the full 30 days i only did about 28 days because by the 28th day i was tripping without even needing to take psychedelic i was just tripping 24 7. i couldn't even sleep i couldn't fall asleep because in my sleep i was tripping i was tripping non-stop there was so much fiber meal in my system so um what started happening in maybe the last five days of that 30-day retreat is that i was going into such deep levels of consciousness that i was starting to lose my sense of reality and groundedness into this what we call consensus material reality i stopped being able to sleep and it really felt like i was losing touch with the world losing touch with people with humanity with my family and i felt like there was nobody that i could turn to for help because i was losing touch with even the idea of somebody who could help me at that point and it was very very challenging but hey it was a 30-day challenge i was doing that for a specific reason it was like a scientific test that i was running to see you know how far can you really push this so what i discovered is basically that you can push it very far and when you push it that far and you do it too much like that you will become so ungrounded that it can become dangerous to your life to your health and to your sanity you will start to lose your mind you won't be able to sleep properly and other problems can result so another important thing you should avoid is tripping too frequently don't be tripping on a daily basis that's a very bad idea and a clear sign that you're starting to misuse psychedelics give yourself plenty of time to integrate between trips and if it takes you three months to integrate between trips then give it three months that's what you need so be flexible be adaptable be fluid with how you go about it and remember that you can try to manipulate your state if you're in a bad mood you can turn on some happy music listen to it that could help but ultimately don't be too afraid of bad trips either because that in itself will create bad trips if you're afraid of bad trips your attitude should be if there's going to be a difficult trip it's okay i've handled them in the past i can handle them again as long as i'm following protocol responsibly i'm not taking too much i know that it's going to last for a few hours i'm going to come out of it it's fine and basically just give yourself a pep talk reassure yourself when you're in the middle of a bad trip that this will only last for a few hours it's going to pass you're going to come back to normal because in the worst trips your mind will try to trick you that you're never coming back to normal and if you buy into that trick then you will get panicky and afraid and you might do stupid things and also as a final warning watch yourself physically as you're taking psychedelics to make sure that you're not being physically irresponsible what i mean by that is that if you're taking psychedelics and they make you lose control of your body where your body starts doing dysfunctional or unhealthy or dangerous things and you're not able to control it that is a clear sign that you gotta lower your dose or take time off or change your substance it's very important that you retain motor control of your body and you don't lose that so for example if you take a large dose of dmt and then you start punching holes in the wall of your house because you can't control yourself you're so out of control you're filled with so much anger or whatever that tells you that you're in dangerous territory because when you lose control of your body which means that you could punch somebody you could jump off a rooftop you could run outside naked you could stick your hand in the stove you could cut yourself with a knife you could shoot yourself with a gun these sorts of things if you feel like you're losing control to the point where you cannot comfortably prevent yourself from doing these things because you're so compulsive that if you see a knife you feel the need to grab it and to play with it and you can't stop yourself that is a clear sign that you're in dangerous territory and you need to stop or dial back because if you keep doing that eventually something's going to go wrong and you're going to harm yourself physically or you're going to harm somebody else physically so those are my bad trips if you have some of yours feel free to post them down below or come check out the forum and post your trip reports on the forums one of my favorite things to do on the forum on the actualized forum is to read y'all's trip reports some some of the ultra's reports are very entertaining and and interesting and even enlightening so come share those stories or if you want to read other people's stories come come read stories use the search function on the forum and you can find lots of different trip reports that folks have submitted over the years and other than that i recommend you trip safe trip responsibly trip at moderate dosages and if you do that then psychedelics can revolutionize your life but if you're going to be sloppy and irresponsible and immature then don't do psychedelics at all because you will destroy your life i'm not kidding you will destroy your life if you treat these things like a toy so you've been warned you