Microdosing Q&A
Happy New Year everyone! I recently had the privilege to teach Microdosing for VITAL, Psychedelics Today’s premier year-long immersive facilitator program - students from all over the globe who will be working in a variety of capacities: integration therapists, coaches and guides - and bringing the potential of psychedelic healing forward in a safe, intentional way.
During our class the students asked a number of fantastic questions, and I thought it’d be fun to share some of our Q&A with you today - enjoy!
Q: “How can we incorporate spirituality into our practices in an acceptable way?”
A: When I coach guides, therapists and healing artists in our mastermind, the #1 thing I encourage them to do is DISCOVER & BE THEMSELVES - be genuine, authentic and allow the medicine to guide and inform the unique way you will support people in microdosing and psychedelic practice. The more YOU are truly you, the more perfectly aligned clients will be able to find you and your colleagues will be able to refer to you. The old, out-dated consumer models of care that instruct us to compete for customers and try to be “all things to all people” will soon be extinct. We are here to be of service & support our aligned clients - not all clients - and the more we learn to express, promote and share our practices in a way that is true to who we are, the less friction and dissonance we’ll feel. The spiritual guidance & gifts I’ve received from medicine practice and microdosing are profound, and I’d be doing nature (and my clients!) a huge disservice if I didn’t make that guidance an inherent part of working with me. While it took my own professional growth & confidence to get here, today I’m entirely at ease channeling energy & spirit-wisdom and harnessing it to support my clients. Is that going to be accepted & welcomed by all current Earthlings? Definitely not! But the more personally appreciative and expressive I’ve grown about these gifts, the more completely aligned clients come to me precisely because of these gifts! Don’t hide your gifts in an effort to fit in with outdated notions of what health care professionals must look & act like - trust me: more warmth, more humanity, more spiritual connection, and genuine care are exactly what many people are seeking.
Q: “Among my journey clients, I notice that older people have a shorter “window of plasticity and openness” after a journey, whereas younger people tend to have a longer window. Is this a pattern we can expect to see with microdosing, too?”
A: Generally speaking, yes! But with some exceptions… Among my older clients (age 70s-90s) I’ve noticed they generally benefit from higher doses than younger people when microdosing; this is especially true for my male clients in this age bracket. My witnessing & intuition tells me that the more systematic, repetitive and rigid someone’s brain and cognition are (looping, ruminating, complaining, telling the same stories over & over again, repetitive habits & hobbies) the more narrow & fixed our brains become. Think of a pond frozen over with many, many feet of ice, versus a younger, more pliable and bendy brain that has just a thin layer of fissured ice over it. The pond or brain with the thickened ice is going to take much more force (or medicine) to break up the rigidity, whereas the other can access greater flow and connection with less intervention. So while it’s generally true the older the brain = thicker ice, I’ve found incredible exceptions working with older individuals who come with a lifetime of contemplative, somatic and artistic/creative practice. From nature’s perspective, this is completely logical! The more we keep our brains and spirits open and malleable - through travel, novel stimuli, diverse activities and learning, listening to others, empathy & creative endeavors - the more youthful & plastic our brains remain. I’ve worked with many 70+ year old people who have had amazing, transformative experiences on a teeny tiny microdose protocol, and all of them are healers, artists, & longtime contemplative practitioners who have nurtured their creativity throughout their lives. I believe in the future (and, that is, very soon) that microdosing will be adopted and embraced openly as a lifestyle practice to prevent brain deterioration and help keep our nervous systems young, pliable, vibrant and healthy.
Q: “You advocate for us to provide ‘continuous containers of care’ for our clients, but how do we do that without burning out or getting overwhelmed?”
A: When I see claims about microdosing that conflict with what I’ve witnessed and experienced with clients first-hand, it’s typically because the person making the claim isn’t actually working with people in a way that would inform realistic answers. When we make claims (or, rather guesses) based on research, hypotheticals or comparisons to pharmaceutical drugs - or we make claims about a person’s microdosing experience based on a one hour, one-time consultation - these don’t provide people with an accurate portrayal of real-world practice. This is not the fault of the practitioner - rather, it’s due to the limitations inherent while operating in western medical frameworks of driving billable hours, 15-minute appointments, and impersonal, transactional relationships.
We have found meaningful success, life-changing results AND rich professional learning about real-world microdosing by embracing continuous models of care and group containers for microdosing practice. The group aspect turbo-charges the results one would receive as an individual while simultaneously protecting the energy of the facilitator — group work is win-win for both the clients and the practitioner… lowering burn-out, reducing work hours and promoting vastly improved work-life balance. Longer 1:1 containers modeled on coaching - with retainers of investment - yield far deeper and more profound results than one-off, inconsistent therapy models of billable hours while simultaneously supporting the work of the facilitator in a more sustainable way.
Providing a ‘continuous container of care’ does not mean being accessible and available to your clients 24/7 - instead, these models are all about personal empowerment: inviting people to take self-responsibility for their health and an opportunity to become a partner in their own healing (as well as the healing of others.) Under the current bill-by-the-hour individual frameworks, healing artists, clinicians and medical professionals will be crushed under the weight of the public’s need for support - novel, continuous and participatory models of care are both profoundly more effective AND sustainable - they are the future of healing.
Q: “There are well-known microdosing resources out there that seem to claim certainty over aspects of practice. For example, there are organizations and books that tell us to use a person’s bodyweight as the primary factor in recommending their dose, but you’re telling us you haven’t found that to be a reliable factor in dosing. How can we learn how to support people with microdosing if there is still so much that is unknown?”
A: Humans have a very human-y tendency to manufacture certainty where none exists - for some, it serves an agenda, for others, it creates an artificial sense of safety in an increasingly destabilized world.
False certainty is often more profitable and simplistic than truth-telling - so it’s to be expected there will be no shortage of “experts” claiming authority or promoting easy answers in the realm of microdosing, too. When offering guidance, sharing research or forming opinions, I prefer to take a slow, curious, middle-ground approach and allow for a variety of realities before landing on my own perspective. What my community and clients experience with microdosing may very well be different than what another guide’s clients will experience. And that diversity of experience only becomes problematic when we wed ourselves exclusively to “our way” or elevate one person’s perspective as “the right way.”
Also keep in mind that some aspects of practice - like dosing and protocols - are nearly impossible to standardize, so sometimes we need to come up with standards that are artificial approximations for the sake of delivering services at scale. For example, it’s far easier and more simplistic to say to someone “If you weigh 180 pounds, take this many milligrams of microdose” versus taking the time to discuss and assess that same person’s level of self-awareness, spiritual development, trauma history, attachment to their identity, emotional intelligence, mental age, level of gratitude, sensitivity and humility - factors that I have witnessed IRL to be deeply helpful in guiding someone’s dose. So, out of necessity & given the shortcomings of our current health frameworks, we will sometimes use inaccurate or unreliable standards solely because they are simplistic enough to standardize… But the reality is many of the factors around healing & microdosing are much more nuanced, personal, unique and require human connection to help guide with accuracy.
How can we solve for this?? How can we best expand & enhance our knowledge about microdosing? Personalized, thoughtful and human intake processes. Opportunities for Apprenticeship. Knowing & being in community with our colleagues. Developing close, supportive & trusted referral relationships with other professionals. Having the confidence to admit we don’t have all the answers. Distinguishing our opinion from fact (remembering that just because a scientist gives an opinion doesn’t mean it’s a scientific fact.) Getting in the room together and learning from each other’s perspectives and client experiences. Asking the question: does this person actually work with real humans and speak from a body of work, or are they courting attention and proliferating unfounded & ungrounded opinions?
Entheogenic medicines gift us the opportunity to transform our healing, our energy and our relationship to self & other - as we expand, learn and grow, they will also teach us how to hold them with the same expansiveness, novelty, integrity and wisdom.
To listen to my episode with Psychedelic’s Today co-founder Kyle Buller, please click HERE.
To learn more about Psychedelics Today’s VITAL Program, please click HERE.
To learn more about our Microdosing Programs & Community, please click HERE.
To learn more about our Microdosing Mastermind & Apprenticeship Professional Program, please click HERE.
