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Swyfty Swyf said:
To each his own.

I think I would set myself up for a bad trip by following all that advice, much less involve someone else in a bunch of flaky customs.

If things get too intense, I just try to remind myself that I am safe.

I am not about to call out to the "angels."

That might freak me out worse.

I am not knocking anything you wish to practice, and I thank you for sharing this stuff, but this sounds like something Dharma's parents would do!

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nightbringer said:
all it took to talk my girlfriend into trying entheogens was explaining to her that everything she heard about them in the past was propaganda. I have my "Introduction to Psychedelic Studies" class taught by Dr. Thomas Roberts that I took last year to thank for having so much sound, scientific, and convincing info about psychedelics. Once she knew that there was nothing to fear, she was more than willing to partake.

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It has become glaringly apparent to me that using the phrase "talk into" was a very very poor choice of words!  I haven't writtten much for so long that when I do, all of the stuff that swirls around in my head comes out in print like sometimes.  I had no idea such courses were available!  That is so cool!  I plan to take my aged ass back to school in the next year or so...nursing or biochem (I want to learn EVERYTHING!), I'll keep an eye out for similar offerings.

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Swyfty Swyf said:

I just wanted to voice that there are more light-hearted approaches to intoducing people to psychedelics, who feel inclined to partake.

Plenty of people have had first trips that went just fine without talking to mushrooms, taking epsom salt baths, and seeking positive energy from religious symbols.

If you are so open to "being able to see from more than one perspective," then why are you so defensive about my post?

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polantis said:
I shroomed with my GF once, (her first time) and I guess me being 'the experienced' one, I was focussing on making sure she had a good trip. All good until the shrooms smacked me across the face and I had a really rough come up.
After that it was great. We had a blast just watching 'Milkdrop' and listening to tunes.

<snipped>
I highly suggest LOT's of pillows on the floor when tripping with your partner.

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I've heard a lot about Milkdrop, I definitely want to check it out once I get real interwebs (long story).  This seems to support my own experiences that redirecting attention to something beautiful (esp moving light) can help stabilize an experience.

Pillows, YES!

So, was she gung ho and all about tripping with you?  What was the process like to get to that point?

Swfty, it's exactly situations like that which my former partner found himself in, that made him decide to never initiate a new sexual relationship with an otherwise non-romantic partner, on psychedelics.  It's actually one of the very few ideas about structured trips, that I found useful enough to incorporate into my own bs.

In this culture, many of us have been so fucked up about sex and violence and boundaries and are often so deeply wounded, that in the psychedelic experience, it is so very easy to continue a pattern in such a way as to cause maximum damage because we are so wide open.

For men, circumcision is usually the first experience where sex and violence meet.  It is a brutal experience, and if you really think about it...a baby, brand new to the world that only knows sensation, being cut and mutilated where he has the most nerve endings in his whole body?  Youch.  It imprints in the body and mind significantly.

If the first sexual experience for anyone is one where there is an imbalance of power, rape, a difference in maturity, even very rough, rigid or anxious handling of our genitals by our caregivers, then that also imprints on our body as what sex is supposed to be.

Children who are sexually abused get confusing messages like, "this is happening to you because i love you and you are special but i'll kill you if you tell", or, "it's your JOB to service me whether you like it or not" or "you're only valuable and only get positive attention from me if i can exploit you sexually" and the list of conflicting messages goes on and on and on.
It's absolute crazymaking stuff, and it is stunning how skillfully we can unconsciously recreate imprinted traumatic experiences while on psychedelics. 

Driving all of that, is the birth imprint...when a baby is born into bright light, getting hit, jostled and jerked around, pain, air forcefully sucked from it's lungs, paraded around the room and weighed and all kinds of other stuff before making it's way to Mom, that leaves a profound imprint on the limbic system, that the Universe Is a Scary Place. 

(Love and nurturing can overcome ANY trauma, though...conscious re-imprinting is possible as well.  Psychedelics are wonderful for creating "imprint vulnerability".)

It took me nearly five years of regular dosing with a former partner, having bad trip after bad trip, thinking I was doing something wrong and it will certainly get better this time....before I really awakened to the fact that I was continually recreating abusive experiences of my father.  My partner is a very very kind and compassionate, loving man, but on LSD, our woundedness dovetailed in such a way that I just brought out the absolutely worst in him, and made the decision to shift the nature of our relationship.

Please forgive what may seem like rambling....making peace with the enemies in my head, building my integrity,  and clearing out my crap using entheogens is a passion of mine

Since I have been through so much, and have some clarity about the inner workings of some of these experiences, I feel the need to share what I've learned.  So many of us walk around fucking confused as hell....and I think that it's important to be aware of contributing factors that our culture generally denies and has been ignorant of.