in this video I'm going to speak very openly about my psychedelic use but I want to be really careful to make sure that people don't think I'm promoting psychedelics in any shape or form of course there's a lot of research out there that shows that psychedelics can be in incredibly effective when used medically in a controlled safe setting with a fully trained professional but I have to point out that psychedelic laws in various different countries are all very different and in many countries psychedelics are still incredibly illegal and be aware of the laws also be
aware of your own psychological health because psychedelics are not safe for everyone to take and also people can have I don't like to say bad trips um but people can have quite extreme negative emotional reactions when they're on psychedelics if they're with a very safe guy they can be guided away from those negative emotions when I've delivered siloc iban assisted therapy I've been able to very easily guide people back to safety if they've had extreme anxiety or any extreme shame or negative emotions that they would have perhaps found hard to get away from if they
weren't with a very safe person or a guide who knew what to do however people are not in a safe setting and they're not with someone who's properly trained in administering silos Ian assisted therapy then often people can be left with these very difficult emotions that can come up and they are left with that and it becomes quite traumatic experience another thing thing to mention is that some people's brains are just not capable of handling psychedelics and I've come across people who have experienced psychosis after psychedelic use so it's important to point out that people's
some people's brains are just not strong enough or not suitable for psychedelic so although I've had incredibly positive POS life transforming experiences from psychedelic use which I'm now speaking very openly about psychedelics are not for everyone so be warned don't go to some random Shaman you really need to be looking for someone who is actually completely trained and qualified and has really good ethics actually so you know it's better if someone is a medical professional or a psychological professional and is part of a a recognized body with a code of ethics because often I find
people who are administering psychedelics and they have no training in relation to confidentiality and often I've come across after care just being completely neglected so be very careful if you're considering doing psychedelics do your research look for credible organizations who are administering psychedelics safely in a controlled setting a year and a half ago I gave up alcohol and I made a video on my reasons why I gave up alcohol but actually didn't really go into what what influenced me to give up alcohol so I grew up in Ireland and when you're from Ireland you pretty
much grow up knowing that alcohol is going to be part of your social life but then actually in my 30s I never really questioned why I drank alcohol it just seemed to be something that happened very automatically in social situations and I never really stood back and questioned it until I started to see a very different way of being and this was in 2018 when I was in Holland and I was invited to a party and this party had a lot of super successful people a lot of tech people some really smart people people who
were I who I perceived as being very kind and people who are making a real impact in the world now I grew up in a family where my dad was actually a policeman so I grew up with the belief that drugs were bad because my beliefs about any kind kind of drugs were that they weren't very good for us they would lead to problems they would cause problems with mental health perhaps cause problems in the brain obviously I was already a very wellestablished psychologist at this point so mental health and maintaining positive mental health was
of so much importance to me so I had never considered taking any substances apart from alcohol which of course is a drug and a social lubricant so I found myself in 2018 at this party in the Netherlands where there was all these incredible people and they seemed to be bonding so closely with one another and I felt on the outside of that that I wasn't quite connecting to these people I was drinking alcohol at the party because I didn't know any different and every other social situation that was a party like event in my entire
life I had always drank alcohol and all of a sudden I was catapulted into this social social situation where no one else was using alcohol and everyone else seemed to be connecting on a much deeper level to me I was like there's some really smart successful kind people here and they are taking drugs and the whole thing completely it was very confusing for me because I was like why would these kind impactful people why would they be taking something that's bad and it led me to you know maybe question things a bit more and think
about whether all drugs are bad or actually if there's may be a difference between some drugs and others I also was very struck by the fact that I was not connecting with people on the level that other people were at this party and I kind of at that point in my life I never really found myself struggling so hard to connect with people in Social situation than I did on that occasion but I really noticed people were on a very different level to me so as I said I didn't jump on the bandwagon and I
didn't and just you know try to fit in by taking substances but I was curious and I was like this is very interesting magic mushrooms are legal but not not magic mushrooms it's actually the Truffle part of a mushroom which has the same psychedelic um ingredient so people were were taking truffles we were taking that because it was socially acceptable to take that and it was leading people to be able to connect on this very deep level and I was very curious about it cuz I was like okay I've never been in a situation before
in my life where so many people are on drugs and they're being so positive they're being so kind they're hugging each other they're deep in connection and I was just on the peripheral looking in and being like the only way I know to socialize is to use alcohol and and that wasn't to say that I was someone who would get drunk I mean occasionally I would drink a little bit too much and you know be a a merry drunk but actually how I would normally operate in a social situation was have between one to three
drinks and that was enough of a social lubricant for me to be able to you know get on well with people in social situations and navigate social situations quite well so it was an unusual experience for me and I think that then led me to actually be curious about uh silos cybin magic mushrooms so I have a company in in Amsterdam in Holland um so I was spending more time in Holland around this period of time and then that led me to try um at some point later I ended up trying with a friend syosin
magic mushrooms on they completely legal in Amsterdam and it was in a recreational situation and we had loads of fun everything was really good and it was it was a really fun experience which then led me to actually feel quite differently about certain types of substances particularly psychedelics and then I started to realize that actually with psychedelics are probably very different to other types of drugs so you know really whs apart and then actually started to research things and I started to look at well what is the probability that someone's going to die when taking
psychedelics and how what's the probability of becoming addicted and then comparing it to drugs such as cocaine and crack and heroin and I start to realize that like their worlds apart of course you can actually if you take enough magic mushrooms you can actually die but it would be almost impossible to consume the amount that you would need for it to cause a death in someone like because it's such a large quantity so I started to see that actually okay this is very interesting very unlikely to kill you and very unlikely to become addictive although
actually in recent times where I'm now actually very immersed in siloy research and I'm around a lot of people who using pyin um medically I have actually also come across misuse of psybin and I've come across people who become emotionally dependent on silos cybin which I'll go into a little bit more later on in the video so then I started to um see that actually okay this is a very interesting way of altering your Consciousness compared to alcohol and that alcohol actually makes people not very conscious is very very different to syoc cybin there was
one situation in my life that I had deeply suppressed that was very troubling to me and that hadn't work worked through it doesn't actually sound like a big trauma it's more like the minor te trauma so minor te trauma is something that upsets someone distresses someone to think about but if you share it with another person it might not sound like a big deal so we're not talking about like war zone or muggings or something that is you know horrific but something that actually has a big emotional impact on someone and there was this thing
in my life that I hadn't worked through at the time and I had I can't believe how successful I had been at suppressing it it was something that was deeply upsetting for me to think about to the point I never never thought about it on a daily basis and I had successfully suppressed it so deep into my mind that it just didn't come up on a daily basis and it was never going to come up I didn't talk about it I didn't mention it it was just something that was not really I didn't look at
it and then the second time that I took magic mushrooms recreationally when I was distracted and I was having a great time with my friends everything was good but then I went to bed and my head hit the pillow and this thing that I had suppressed came up and I feel that I was forced to think about it so then I thought that was quite interesting because actually I had had this great time using magic mushrooms recreationally in a country where it was completely legal to do so but that the magic mushrooms were not letting
me hide from something very painful that I'd held deep with inside so I was like interesting so this is not like alcohol because you can drink alcohol every weekend or like couple of nights a week and it's not confronting you with your deepest darkest pain whereas mushrooms yes you can maybe use it recreationally although I have strong thoughts about that which I'll share in in in a moment but um but actually even if you use it recreationally if you've got stuff that you haven't worked through it kind of just forces you to go there so
that's what led me to then take up on the opportunity to actually use siloc cybin medically so I was still in Holland and I had the opportunity with a very experienced guide and a very knowledgeable guide to participate in a siloy and assisted Therapy Group session where about 12 of us came together to work on whatever we wanted to release and let go of from our life and um whatever we wanted to let in so it was a very specific ceremony that we participated in some of these people I knew better than other people and
when I had the opportunity to do this ceremony we had some time during the day to write down what we wanted to work on and I remember I was basically thinking okay there's a lot of people here I'm probably not going to go with my deepest darkest thing that could create a lot of Shame that's kind of scary how about I just pick something kind of surface level kind of superficial that could be a bit beneficial but let's not go to the deepest darkest thing because I'm not ready and that feels terrifying and then I
thought about it and I thought well it seems like a good opportunity because it wasn't all the time I was being invited to actually be a part of a silos cybin assisted Therapy Group session with an amazing guide and in the end although I was quite anxious I was like okay let's just go for it and let's just work on this one thing in my life that was coming up anyway when I had used syoc cybin recreationally so I was quite apprehensive quite nervous and I knew it was going to cause me a lot of
distress a lot of tears and a lot of pain to address this issue but we had the silus Ivan assisted therapy session and we all um went into the middle of the circle and said what we wanted to work on and straight away a lot of pain was brought up for me and then we went into respective for about 2 hours we lay on the grass and eyes closed blindfold and you're just listening to music as you're processing whatever you have to process and all my pain related to this one topic came up and I'm
just crying and boiling my eyes out on the lying on the grass for hours but I was very comfortable doing so so all of a sudden the distress that I had actually feared releasing became very comfortable for me to release and I was okay with it although I did feel like I was the worst person in the ceremony and the most distressed and the most traumatized even though it wasn't an obviously traumatic thing that I was working on it was just something that was very painful for me and I released all this emotion and 2
hours later I stand up after the ceremony and I feel great and it's gone and the issue had been released so far to the extent that I then felt I could be proactive in my life in addressing that issue further and taking positive steps that I never would have been able to take before so I achieved all of this positive release and it was so beneficial for me to be able to have the opportunity to use silos cin to help me with um it was an area related to grief and I really grieved during that
ceremony and I also started to learn after the ceremony that actually silus iban when you take silos ibin your altered state of consciousness or my altered state of consciousness was very interesting compared to alcohol because when you achieve or when I achieve an altered state of of Consciousness from alcohol it can go in a few different directions so I guess the first glass of alcohol you kind of you know for me with my overactive mind because I have ADHD it kind of lets some of the thoughts go but I get a bit clouded from the
present moment so there's kind of pros and cons there maybe a calmer mind but a bit distant from being present and I've never really healed with alcohol I can't say any time in my life that I've drunk alcohol I've felt healed permanently or that I've um had any kind of cognitive restructuring or any type of neuroplastic thing has happened so then as I started to have these experiences with silos cybin I started to realize that it actually just seemed like a better State of Consciousness because you end up being guided to look and go quite
deep um you're guided to really feel quite painful emotions and release them you get the opportunity to rethink things and really step outside your normal way of thinking and think much bigger picture and and have new thoughts about things and become a lot more open-minded fast forward to 2022 I finally came to this point in my life where I just started to look at the altered state of consciousness that's brought about by alcohol in a very different way and I started to think wait I've been using alcohol since I was about 16 years old and
I've been drinking it all this time it's not the most positive altered state of consciousness when you compare it to certain psychedelics so actually do I really need this in my life and how much benefit is it actually giving me socially and while I was when I was much younger I absolutely needed it as a social lubricant I needed it to shut off some of my social anxiety I needed it to help me feel more confident but because I'd actually worked on myself a lot worked on a lot of issues that I had I realized
that alcohol was not really doing doing anything for me in social situations and that it probably wasn't the best altered state of consciousness that I could achieve but I didn't know if I could give it up or not because I'm Irish and it's so conditioned in me and it's just deeply ingrained in the cultures I've lived in both the UK and Ireland that when we go into a social situation we drink alcohol so I gave up alcohol a year and a half ago I didn't know how I would do I didn't know how it would
be but as soon as I gave it up I didn't miss anything about it and I realized that actually it just wasn't an altered state of consciousness that I enjoyed anymore and then I realized that actually silos cybin was something that I preferred to use only medically so I stopped using silos cybin recreationally in countries where it's legal and I realized that actually I prefer it just for ceremonial medicinal purposes um and quite infrequently as well because actually I've seen with some people they become dependent on psilocybin because it's so good at actually making people
feel better that if people achieve good results on working with working on their trauma with siloc cybin they sometimes then become dependent on it and they start using it to help with other negative emotions on a regular basis so actually while a lot of people will tell you that soloc is not addictive I've actually seen a number of people become dependent on siloc cybin and rather than working through emotions properly while they're sober they go to silos cybin too often and this is where silos cybin use comes with a warning that actually yes it's very
good to use it for stuff that's happened in the past that you haven't been able to work through but if you have a fight with your friend last week and it's still troubling you today you shouldn't go and start using siloc cybin to try and get over it it's actually much better to try and process those emotions yourself otherwise what we start to see is a psybin dependency and not many people are are talking about that so I don't want to sound like I'm promoting siloc cybin it can be very useful to help overcome trauma
that you otherwise can't overcome but don't use it too often because actually you do desensitize to it you build a tolerance and then it's not going to be as powerful when you want to use it medically I also no longer believe in using soloc cybin Recreation Al because recreationally it's again it's kind of like misusing the substance because it's such a powerful medicinal substance um it also means that people might use it too regularly and then it's not as powerful when they want to use it medically um it's also we're very sensitive to energy other
people's energy when we take siloc ibin so if you're around the wrong people or people who've quite who carrying quite heavy or negative energy you will feel very sensitive to that and often people people when they take salus Ian and they think it's going to be a great thing recre recreationally they actually just want to go sit by a tree or sit by a lake and be by themsel because they're so sensitive to other people's energy and actually people seem to feel very suited being around nature when they've taken silos ibin so silos ibin use
comes with lots of warnings um psychedelics are not for everyone psychedelics can bring on psychosis in some people people need to be really careful about certain conditions that they have um certain complex mental mental illness that people carry means that they might not be good candidates for psychedelics there's also a lot of shamans out there who offer psychedelics but then don't actually have the proper knowledge and experience to administer them safely and there's been a lot of situations where I have heard of or witnessed or um had information about where people have used psychedelics and
then they haven't had the right after care so then they haven't been able to integrate the messages that they've received from psychedelics and therefore they end up being quite confused about the information that they've received or the thinking processes that they've gone through while under the influence of psychedelics so I think we have a long way to go in relation to helping make psychedelics be really safe to actually be able to give people access to use them in a very you know safe and responsible and ethical way um there's no clear Universal guidelines that are
Global although there's certain organizations that are better than others in relation to trying to help people take psychedelics in a very safe way and also an important thing to mention is that the work that I ended up doing and the the aha moment the the light bulb moment of waight alcohol no longer has a place in my life anymore was not this didn't come up during ayos cybin assist the therapy session or while I was under the influence of silos ibin the work happened afterwards for me it was many years after first using silos ibin
that I gradually came to the conclusion that I could distance myself from alcohol or I kind of actually another way of saying it is just alcohol left my life I didn't really feel like I was giving up anything I've had no Cravings I've had no temptation and I actually do have a glass of red wine with a meal occasionally because I like the taste of it and I drink it very slowly but it's not something that comes to mind that often and it's not every time I go out to dinner with friends or anything like
that so I still have very small quantities of alcohol but for me it has to be so small that I'm actually not really noticing any type of effect from alcohol and it only takes a glass and a half for me to actually feel like I'm drunk these days a final thing to mention about siloc iin is that it pretty much is serotonin it activates a subset of Serotonin receptors and this is what brings about the neuroplasticity that we receive from taking silos ibin so in relation to my pyin experiences I would have to say that
yeah my brain became incredibly neuroplastic I was very set in my ways particularly with my alcohol use previously and there were certain things that I couldn't even conceptualized such as the idea that social situations would be great without alcohol like that just wasn't in my mind I had very limiting beliefs about alcohol that like I couldn't have fun without it I wouldn't be very interesting without it in social situations I would be limiting social situations and that it would kind of make my life worse if I was without it so I was rigid in my
thinking and I would say that Silas ibin gave me great neuroplasticity in relation to opening my mind in relation to my alcohol use and starting to see that actually things could be very different and helping me see a very different perspective on my behavior with alcohol and that actually I could enjoy life or I could enjoy social situations even more without alcohol and that's not a way of thinking that I probably would have been able to reach if I hadn't used syosin of course syosin has influenced me in lots of other ways which I'll talk
about in other videos um but for now I just wanted to share the story about how I came to give up alcohol and how it was a gradual thing of actually using silos ibin mostly medically that has helped me get to this place if you have any questions about anything that I've spoken about in this video you can leave comments below and if you've liked this video and want to see more of my content please subscribe to my channel
