If you’ve just recently had a great experience on LSD, mushrooms, DMT, or any other psychedelic, chances are, you’re itching to do it again. I know this was true for me after my first experience with LSD. Truthfully though, it’s best to wait a while – at least 3-6 months.
If this really isn’t the answer you were wanting you hear, you can do psychedelics again after two weeks and get the full effects. I’ve done this, and technically you’ll be fine if you do. If you don’t wait at least two weeks, you’ll be risking burning out your brain chemistry and not feeling the full effects of whatever you take.
Why you should wait longer
I touched on this in a previous post:
Terrance McKenna, who I would say is a well-known “prophet” of DMT and mushrooms said that he felt like he was doing a lot if he had two trips per year. If a person says DMT is their favorite drug, and you ask them when the last time they did it was, you might get an answer like “1967.” These substances are so powerful and consciousness-altering that it can take months, years, or even a lifetime to fully process and understand what you saw, experienced, and felt in a 45 second DMT trip or an 6 hour acid trip.
If you’re doing full doses of psychedelics more than a few times year, it’s worth seriously contemplating why. Without fully realizing it, you may be using your brain as sort of an amusement park. This is a normal thing, especially in college situations, but you must truly understand that your brain is something to be treated with extreme respect. In this life, it’s really all you have.
When planning how often to do psychedelics, here are some things to consider and think about honestly:
- Why do you want to do it again? If the answer is that you loved the feeling of oneness, sense of spirituality, and connectedness to all beings that you felt while tripping, understand that you can have those feelings constantly by just working to integrate them into your overall outlook on life. Work on being less judgemental, less close minded to ideas and experiences, more open, and more present in the here and now. If you’re honest with yourself and the reason is just to have fun, I would seriously recommend that you wait. Psychedelics are powerful substances used for spiritual purposes for thousands of years – they’re different than coke or molly in this sense – and they should be treated with respect.
- Have you really integrated and understood all that you felt, saw, and experienced during your last trip? If it’s only been a few weeks, I can say that honestly, the answer is probably no. One single trip can give you a wealth of information, ideas, and new perspectives that will serve as food for thought for a lifetime, and it’s really good to take your time with working to understand the trip. Doing this will will not only make you a wiser, deeper person, but it will help prepare you for subsequent trips that you do have.
- What’s the rush? If you’re looking for them, you’ll have opportunities to do psychedelics for your entire life (they are not obscure substances), so why do you feel the need to do them again right now? For me, psychedelics opened the world of spirituality to me, and I wanted to experience more right away. I didn’t even want to wait two weeks! Truthfully, there is so much spiritual work and learning to be done without tripping. If you’re craving more spiritual understanding, I would suggest reading the Bhagavad Gita while you wait. It’s is a classic of Indian spirituality that is an amazing accompaniment to psychedelics. The link above is not an affiliate link, it just happens to be the copy that I have and really enjoyed. Another fascinating, wonderful book to read is Autobiography of a Yogi, which will really open up your understanding of what kind of “tripping” is possible without even having to take psychedelics. I would recommend reading these books even before your first trip, but now is a great time to read them too.
Truthfully, many people do psychedelics way more often than they really should, and if you do the work to fully understand what you experienced, you won’t feel the need to trip again so soon. I understand that this probably isn’t what you want to hear, but I’m speaking from experience, with your best interest at heart.
Here are some other things that will help quench your thirst for tripping and make the wait easier:
- Explore spirituality in depth. If you like reading, The Bhagavad Gita, Autobiography of a Yogi, The Kybalion, and The Hermetica are all spiritual books that changed my life (again, these aren’t affiliate links, just links to the copies that I have and like). If you’re not much of a reader, try listening to Terrance McKenna videos on YouTube – he talks a lot about life, spirituality, and psychedelics in an entertaining way that will help you understand more about your experience. Explore tarot, astrology, meditation, yoga, and other spiritual disciplines until you find something that resonates with you. There is so much out there to learn.
- Create more. If you’re a natural artist or musician, have at it. If you’ve never really been as artistic, try exploring that side of yourself: try drawing or painting, taking a pottery class, learning to sew, or even picking flowers outside and making arrangements with them. What you do doesn’t need to be “pretty,” it just needs to be an expression of you. Ideally, do something that requires using your body and your hands as well as your mind, so that the feeling of expression is more full.
- Spend more time in nature. I’ve only been camping a few times in my life, but every time I have, it’s been the closest thing I can compare to tripping. After walking trails in the forest all day, I’ve felt so alive and also had some extremely trippy dreams when I started to fall asleep. If you do go camping, make sure it’s safe. In your daily life, you can simply go outside in your backyard or at parks and observe nature. Observe the way an ant crawls along a leaf, the appearance of a flower bud, the patterns of bark on trees, and the shapes of the clouds. Once you start looking at it closely, you’ll realize that the world around you is so beautiful and also extremely psychedelic.
- Listen to more music. Explore new genres and time periods of music, especially the original 1960s and 70s psychedelic music. The Beatles’ psychedelic period (such as the “Magical Mystery Tour album”) is a great place to start, and you’ll get a great feeling of community because you finally know exactly what the lyrics are about!
- Work to understand yourself better. Truly, any of the above things will help you do this, but there are a few things I would specifically recommend:
- Try to get back in touch with the things you loved as a child, because this was a time when your subconscious mind was more at the helm. In my case, I loved drawing, going outside, and riding my bike. If you loved horses as a child, try finding a way to get involved with horses again. If you loved playing video games, try to get ahold of your old console and all-time favorite games.
- Take the free Myers-Briggs personality type test, which is typically very accurate and will help you understand more about why you do the things you do.
- If you like astrology, get an interpretation of your natal chart. I recommend 13 signs astrology and am happy to do an interpretation for you. When I first did this, it really helped me understand myself and my life path on a deep level.
- Start writing down your dreams and working to understand them. Dreams are totally subconscious, so they are very close to tripping and can tell you a lot about what’s going on with you on a deep level. I am also happy to help you interpret your dreams.
Notice that each of five things I’ve listed above have a few things in common: they emphasize direct experience, present moment awareness, and creativity or appreciation of creativity. These are all significant elements of tripping that we tend to miss out on in daily life.
xoxo,
Olivia