How can I use my trips to help in sober life?

There is a term that has been making its way from the Psychological text books to mainstream society and those trendy self-help books (though it's often misrepresented in the self-help books). The term is, "Mindfulness." It's perhaps the polar opposite of mindlessness. Mindfulness is best known in association with Ellen Langer, a Psychology Professor at Harvard University. She conducted a now famous study that nearly every introductory or psych 101 student has read or heard about. It involves the use of a copy machine/xerox machine. Langer had confederates on her research team get in lines to use the copier and ask one of three questions.

1. Can I cut in front of you because I'm very late for an important Job Interview?

2. Can I cut in front of you because I want to make a copy?

3. Can I cut in front of you?

Langer found that there was nearly no stastistical difference between the response to questions 1 and 2. (Those were "Yes you can cut in front of me"). Question 3 had a very low "yes" rate.

She concluded that people aren't actually attending to the entire statement. Most likely, she hypothesized, people are listening to the sentence until they hear the word "because," after that a majority of the test subjects seemed to stop listening and answered "yes" to even those that asked to cut in line "because [they] want to make a copy."

What does this mean? It means we need to be mindful, try to combat what comes naturally, fill in the blanks before we hear/them see them. Pay attention to what is going on. A majority of our day is spent on auto-pilot.

What does this mean for incorporating trips into our sober lives?

First of all sobriety should constitute the majority of our lives. In this time we should try to be mindful of the revelations and insights we may have uncovered while tripping. Don't continue on autopilot because your Trips will have been for nothing but mental exercise/excursion/vacation. Note, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. But If you're reading this, then you've probably subscribed to or are interested in the psychedelic experience influencing and helping people live mentally healthier lives.

The Psychedelic experience often shows us the inner workings of our psyche. If you're even half interested in psychology and are familiar with experiments, theory, and philosophy you probably become hyperaware of these theories in your experience with psychedelics. One often gains insight into how their cognitive processes work, emotional connectedness to themselves, others, and the emotional charge that words have. The key is to be mindful of these insights into your psyche and apply them to your daily life and analyze past events in the cotext of your psychological revelations. This requires remembering and being mindful of those revelations. This means that applying the trip experience to everyday life requires three components, the trip experience, sobriety, and mindfulness. The hardest part about integrating trip experiences into daily lives is the mindfulness part. We have to be aware of factors that provoke responses that we think could be improved upon and have worked out through a psychedelic experience. This requires being mindful of the factors themselves and using the mental energy to elicit a different or desired response. Integrating change into everyday life is hard, psychedelics will give you the information to change but it will not give you the mechanism to do so. That mechanism is dependent upon you and mindfulness. This is however entirely different than some anectdotes that speak about MDMA therapy, regarding trauamtic events. If you're expecting the quite of global change that a person most often undergoes through MDMA therapy regarding traumatic events that impede daily life.

Discuss at The Shroomery BB