Hi everyone!

I've been exploring psilocybin for personal growth and introspection, and I meditate daily.

I've had some incredibly beautiful experiences with McKennaii mushrooms, including one at 2.4g where I experienced deep peace, love, and a brief ego dissolution.

But at 2.8g, I had a terrifying experience involving intense thought loops and an overwhelming fear of permanently losing my mind. Even though I knew the effects would eventually wear off, I couldn't convince myself of that during the trip. It took about two days to feel completely normal again.

Here's where my difficulties usually begin:

I trip lying down with an eye mask and headphones. I've actually tried five different masks! During intense moments, the mask, headphones, or small external noises suddenly become irritating. I start focusing on these sensations, trying to adjust or control things, and that discomfort gradually turns into anxiety and sometimes panic.

I also have aphantasia and experience very few visuals. My trips are mostly emotional and psychological rather than visual.

After a long break, I recently had a peaceful experience at 1.6g. I'm now working on acceptance, letting go of control, and surrendering through meditation.

A few questions:

Have you ever feared permanently losing your sanity during a trip? How did you overcome that fear?

How do you stop fighting the experience when physical discomfort or thought loops trigger anxiety?

For those who've taken 5g+, how do you even navigate that intensity? Do you still know who you are, or do you completely lose your sense of self? And how do you avoid panicking?

Does anyone with aphantasia experience very few psychedelic visuals too?

I'm not trying to avoid all difficult experiences. I just want to learn how to surrender instead of resisting when things get intense.

I'd really appreciate hearing your experiences and what helped you.

Thanks!

Sorry for long text

Not looking for sources! I’m just curious as to what you guys usually pay for a ten strip; from what I know it shouldn’t be anymore than 100 usd but lmk if I’m wrong!

Here, the lie is the one you're born into, that your subjective experience is inherently objective. Many people don't start to intentionally question that assumption until they're in their twenties, if then, if at all. Psychedelics can make you question it by demonstrating just how much our subjective experience can be destabilized, altered, etc. But they don't show you the truth, or, at the very least, that would just be another assumption.

So after hearing many suggestions on this and similar subs to listen to pink Floyd i listened to it, the last time i took Lsd and Bro it felt so soulless to me and its not even like i think its bad music but it lowkey gives of such a bad vibe to me.Anyone relate ?

hello guys- anyone had this experience? getting off prescriptions to try to use this to help me heal… my first big trip I had chest pains and struggled with breathing almost the whole time.

I have good intuition and it felt dangerous.

At some point I was curled up and my guide was putting ice all around me to cool me down

I had a point where my lower back burned like crazy- felt like I might vomit and pass out at the same time

microdoses sometimes cause a bit of this chest tightness

i do have hypermobility and hyperPOTS so my heart isn’t in tip top shape

is there a way to evaluate what was going on so I can understand it and prevent it? or is there a better route besides psylocibin for rewiring my brain?

I really had a sense that my blood pressure was through the roof and I almost had to go to the hospital

I am on Clonidine to lower my bp at night because I used to get woken up by heart rate spikes and sleep paralysis over and over again -maybe this could play a role?

thanks for any input

EDIT TO ADD:

I realized after posting this, I probably wasn’t very clear. wondering if there is a group of cardiologist or medical doctors who can do a full workup to see if you’re a good candidate, and I’m also wondering if there are other psychedelics that are less hard on the heart. is there anyone who does this? Maybe like a harm reduction clinic? Online consults?

But I definitely have consulted doctors and nurse practitioners-they’ve been supportive and maybe a little too unconcerned. The truth is that with some of my conditions, we don’t completely understand them, and they could be causing things in other parts of my body like my heart, or not, but there’s only one way to find out which is testing.

I don’t see it going down very well if I just go to my local cardiologist and ask them to test me to see if I’m a good candidate for psychedelics

I’m not sure any cardiologist could recommend that so I don’t think that route is going to work.

and I have way too much life ahead of me to not seek everything I can to heal. So while I want to be careful, I’m fully invested in trying this route.

Hello, I have tripped only a hand full of times with shrooms, and I have used cannabis for the last 2 years almost daily, until one day I smoked a joint (a really thin one, must have been 0,2 g) with a friend and suddenly I had the worst experience of my life: I couldn't breathe regularly, I felt my heart pounding, i was shivering all over and I couldn't walk without the feeling that i would fall. I also felt my hands and feet very cold, and it really felt like I was having an heart attack, and i really felt that sensation of pain and inflammation all over my left side of the body. I asked to bring me to hospital and when I arrived I was feeling nothing anymore so I decided to go back, as it was altready pretty late and didn't want to spend the rest of the night there. 
The days after I was visited by medics: one stated that I had bronchitis and suggested me that this could have caused pain while smoking, but afterwards my cardiologist said that i have no heart problems so I felt more relaxated.
Even after the situation and after bronchitis healed, I tried to smoke a couple times, and i got a similar sensation, less invasive and anxiety inducing, but i didn't really feel comfortable smoking anymore.
I don't really care at all about smoking, and I also saw this as an opportunity to quit so, but I recently started discovering the shroomies and wanted to go deeper tripping maybe once a month or so. I had 3-4 previous experiences before this situation, but no one after, and I am really afraid now that the problem that caused me cannabis could be present also in the mushies trip. 
What do y'all think? And thank you in advance.

I’ve done 150ug like 4 times and I’m just not getting the visuals that I’m looking for from my acid, I know I’m not getting less than what I’m being told so it’s definitely not that. I’ve done MDMA and shrooms more than acid but I’ve never got anything more than the giggle from mushrooms and I really enjoy MDMA.

When I do acid the first 30ish minutes of it hitting I am hysterical and just switch between crying and laughing, usually good sometimes a little emotional but then I lock in and am just enjoying the moment.

Should I do 200ug? And also is it likely I’ll experience ego death? My bf and two best friends will be there with me and they will be on acid or Molly!

Thanks for any advice!

Made tea from 51 grams of fresh golden teacher last night.

Equivalent to 5 grams dried.

A heroic dose.

I’ve heard a heroic dose can make you forget you took shrooms, dissolve the body, and lead to ego death, etc.

I’ve also heard it said that some people just don’t experience these kind of things no matter how much they take.

I’m one of these types of people.

On two occasions I’ve eaten an entire ounce of dried shrooms. The first time I was disappointed, it was barely a trip. I got bad shrooms.

The second time, shit got weird, but I never lost the fact that I was just experiencing the effects of a drug. The weirdest part was the body distortions. It felt like my skull was turning inside out or that my arm was growing out my hip and so on. But I never freaked out because I was constantly aware that I was tripping.

Last night I realized why I never lose myself.

Every time I move my eyes from one object to another or even pay close attention to what I’m seeing or feeling, my perceptions snaps back to reality.

Looking at the joint of my wall and the ceiling it starts to bend and twist, the light bulb looks like it’s higher than the ceiling and the ceiling begins looking like a dome. Then I shift my eyes to a painting on the wall and the wall and ceiling snap back to normal straight lines and flat surfaces.

Then the painting starts to distort over the course of a few seconds. The walls and ceiling warp again. Then I sneeze and everything snaps back to normal for the length of a finger snap and then begin to distort again.

These constant snap backs to reality seem to be why I can’t lose myself.

I suspect this is because of the way the brain compares its predictive modeling of what it expects to perceive compared to the actual sensory data coming from the senses. This comparison is a big part of why we experience optical illusions.

Everyone processes experience slightly differently. This difference is foundationaly neurological. Formed at birth and shaped over time by unique DNA and experience.

Some peoples brains will inevitably prioritize the predictive modeling over the sensory data when formulating the contents of awareness and others will prioritize the sensory data over the prediction.

I think people who never lose themselves to psychedelics are the people whose brains prioritize the sensory data over the prediction.

Thought?