Personally, I have never felt like I needed to do two consecutive psilocybin trips in a row, one right after the other, but both John and Naing Naing have had really good results using this strategy. So I want to talk about when and why you might take a full dose of psilocybin (take a moderately high dose for the first trip) and then a second full dose (which should usually be less, but in rare cases more) 4-6 hours after you begin trip #1.
I’ve never felt like I needed to do two consecutive psilocybin trips in part because I have always arrived at a manageable destination emotionally at the end of my trips. Lydian has had the same experience. For us, four to six hours of tripping is enough for us to release what we need to release and then arrive at some form of coherence. But for the men in our family, there’s a lot of resistance at times to the material that comes up on the trip. Both of the men, John and Naing Naing, have bigger issues that they’ve had to work on like physical and sexual abuse and when there’s resistance to the material, it can sometimes be valuable to continue tripping so as to wear down your own resistance to it a bit.
That being said though, it’s important to have a Trip Sitter if you’re going to do a second psilocybin trip. This person will need to check in with you at the end of the first trip to make sure that you’ve fully returned and that you’re not overly trippy when you begin trip number two. The psilocybin Trip Sitter will be cognizant of the time of day when you took your first psilocybin dose, the actual dose you took, and they’ll know when it’s safe for you to take a second dose (and the proper dose for you to take on that second trip). If you’re doing two consecutive psilocybin trips, you should also spend 30 minutes to an hour doing a bit of integration with the Trip Sitter and come up with a direction and Intention for your second trip.
There are sacred medicines like Ayahuasca, San Pedro, or Iboga that produce trips that last a lot longer than psilocybin trips and to some extent, the sheer length of these trips can play a big role in their healing effects. Iboga weedles into your psyche over the course of 30 hours into the deepest layers of your mental constructs to reweave the most primal aspects of the personality. It can help people overcome issues like personality disorders or attachment disorders that are rooted in deep patterns from childhood neglect or other issues. Ayahuasca is a medicine, in contrast, that can tell you what other medicines you need in order to heal your mind or your body. It can even help you find a lost child under certain conditions. San Pedro is a medicine for working out relationship issues and it lends itself to long conversations with other people in lower doses, giving people the opportunity to work out differences that seem unresolveable in relationships. But psilocybin is the go-to medicine for releasing trauma. It offers the benefit of being a short-trip and mushrooms are friendly. They reference the natural world easily during trips which is accessible to everyone. If you’re the type of person who is afraid of jumping into trauma-work by taking Ayahuasca or Iboga, consider doing two consecutive psilocybin trips instead with someone who can help you take the right dose at the right time for trip #2.
The left-brain – the part of your mind that loves to hear it’s own voice – is the part of you that might resist certain types of trauma-work. It sits through mushroom trips, particularly trips that involve doses that are too low, assessing the veracity of right-brain experiences. The left-brain is essential though and it needs to be on-boarded into right-brain experiences in order for trauma-work to be successful. We need the left-brain support if we want for the right-brain to be able to own-up to negative past experiences and just release them. But for some people, the left-brain is really resistant to allowing this release to happen. The judgemental left-brain sometimes stands guard to prevent us from accepting what we’ve lived through and what it felt like. The left-brain does, however, get tired of having to stand guard over a psilocybin process and sometimes doing two trips consecutively can provide a window of opportunity to release something that has been stuck for decades. The left-brain is prone to getting caught up in details and mundane things when forced to stay in the Psilocybin Universe long enough. For those who go into trauma-release psilocybin trips with resistance and spend an hour or more just breaking down internal walls, doing a second trip right away is way is another way to get around having to spend all that time peeling away at that resistance. The resistance has already been dismantled. You just continue on into deeper aspects of the trauma on the second consecutive trip.
Set and setting is really important using this two-trip paradigm. People who do two trips should be familiar with mushrooms already. You don’t have to be an expert on psilocybin, but you should have some experience already working with psilocybin to release trauma. Often, a third trip needs to be scheduled for just 1-2 days later, but it depends on the material. There are times, in trauma-work, when it can be beneficial to “stay close to the mushrooms” (or more aptly, the Mushroom World) in order to change your personal view of Reality in a more lasting way. Integration is important once you get your footing with the material that has been cleared of past trauma and negative habits though too. For most people in the developed world who are over the age of 18 years, a full-trip every 3-4 days is necessary for about 6 months to overcome the major, serious traumas that have changed your life trajectory in negative ways and go back to a baselines state of feeling happy and okay with the world on a normal day-to-day basis. For younger people, teens, psilocybin trips can be used as a rite-of-passage. Psilocybin for teens can help kids with both physical and emotional health issues though and a lot of today’s teens do need this kind of medicine to reconnect the mind to the body.
On that note, we usually work with other types of sacred medicines in people (including teens and tweens) with serious physical health issues during the time of the winter solstice because where we live, this is a very dry season and the kidneys sometimes struggle a bit to keep up with the extra uric acid produced when people are taking mushrooms. Though psilocybin can be really valuable as part of a protocol for physical healing, we’re always mindful of this uric acid issue in regard to the kidneys and what the kidneys are working to accomplish given each person’s specific biology.
But getting back to the topic at hand, John has done four two-trip experiences. At least two of these experiences involved something that he called his “Suicide Self” – a part of him that was always ready to kill him (commit suicide) should things not go his way. John was not, by definition, depressed, despite the presence of this Suicide Self, but prior to working on himself actively with psilocybin, he regularly had this voice in his head that would check in regarding his worth and whether or not he was worthy of continuing to live. At least twice, he took one full dose of psilocybin and arrived back to the real world with the Suicide Self still strongly intact which was uncomfortable and…depressing (though John never was and never became clinically depressed). He felt scared about having this Suicide Self so close to the surface as he was working to release it using psilocybin. So he went out and did two consecutive trips twice (four trips total) in one week to release the trauma associated with this part of him. Since that time, he has often commented to me that he’s very grateful to not have to deal with that suicidal voice in his head anymore.
John and Naing Naing have both speculated that having a suicidal voice is part of being a man in today’s world. A suicidal voice in one’s head (without accompanying depression) might also be a part of some women’s experience too. But psilocybin can be used to get rid of suicidal thoughts…however, if you open that Pandora’s box, be sure to have someone in your life who’s knowledgeable about psilocybin who can keep you grounded until you get through all of the material that tethers that Suicidal Self to your day-to-day mental processes. Don’t expect for one trip to be enough to unlock everything in your past, trauma-wise, that made it necessary for you to install a self-destruct button into your life.
Naing Naing has also gone out to do two consecutive trips to get through material around being seen by his family as nothing more than a potential source of money. At a young age, (14 years) he was put into the father-position as the youngest brother in his family and expected to provide for 14 other people in Myanmar, including his parents. He was never supposed to marry or have his own kids. At age 10, he worked with his mom selling flowers while his dad was at home drunk. So this pattern runs deep and it’s painful, so he resisted it until he did two trips consecutively. Actually, his sequence began with a full-trip in the evening the night before (after which he was angry, illogical, and belligerent) followed the next day by two moderately high doses of psilocybin throughout the day (with John as his Trip Sitter) so as not to resist the material. These trips yielded a lot of crying (something that Naing Naing resists with all of his might) and realizations about his relationship with loved ones. Yet another two trips helped him consolidate this pattern into something meaningful – he was able to see his family story and why his family can only see him as a source of money. Those additional trips helped him see that he didn’t cause the pattern and that his family members still love him even though they’re still heavily embedded in the pattern of love-for-money.
Some people can obtain psilocybin online even though they have trouble accessing other types of sacred medicines and that makes psilocybin into a really important tool. And psilocybin is a straightforward trauma-informed therapy in comparison to other medicines that often involve a purge or a big time committment. Psilocybin does, however, produce different effects depending on your mind-set as you go into the trip. In other words, you can’t take psilocybin like it’s some kind of Wisdom Pill. You have to want…to INTEND to accomplish a specific goal and then you have to be able to open yourself to what the mushrooms have to say. This is an active process because psilocybin is not just a “medicine” but another reality. If you enter that reality with humble respect and an open mind, something new will happen. If you enter with fear, the fear has to be stripped away first, which takes time and it alters the trajectory of the trip. If you enter with the intent (unstated or stated) to avoid your toxic material, those defense have to be stripped away first before you can get around your own obstacles. In any case, how you use psilocybin, the set, the setting, and your own personal defenses and obstacles that you’ve constructed inside your own psyche can sometimes be better managed by wearing yourself down with two consecutive trips. If you go into a recreational mushroom trip with zero intention to work on yourself, it’s unlikely that trauma-work will happen by accident, especially if you socialize with others on the trip. A mushroom trip that you do at home alone, or in special facility-setting, on the other hand, with the express intention to clean out the deepest darkest corners of your Inner Space, can be like taking 100 pounds of weight off your back. It can be life-changing.
Click here for more information about psilocybin trip sitting online or contact us to schedule health coaching and online trauma-informed therapies. For more information send us an email at info@medicinassagradas.com.