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Welcome to Tricycle Day. We’re the psychedelics newsletter that’s like your granny’s house. No matter how long you’ve been away, you’re always welcome back. And you’re leaving with a Werther’s and a pinch on the cheek. 🍬

Otto Maier doesn’t care for cliché lessons or trite takeaways, tied all nice n' tidy with a bow. Mostly because, 9 times out of 10, they’re an act. Instead, he helps people integrate their encounters with 5-MeO-DMT, using a phenomenological interviewing technique that honors the ever-unfolding mystery of the experience.

We asked Otto about the unique challenges of integrating 5-MeO-DMT, how people can re-enter the medicine state with this method, and why focusing on being rather than doing is the key to post-psychedelic transformation.

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How did you find yourself becoming a psychedelic integration specialist?

I have the same story as everyone else in terms of psychedelics. It was ayahuasca for me that saved my life. From that experience, I felt an organic sense of reciprocity, like how can I give back to the thing that offered me so much? The people who ran the center I went to said, "you can volunteer, you can clean buckets, you can greet people at the door," and I was like, "great, this is awesome."

While I was working at that space, the staff psychologist really saw me and recognized my potential. I was obsessively studying Jung and Krishnamurti at the time, and I'd spent some time in India. I had all this passion and some skill, but I didn't see it in myself yet. He was a transpersonal psychologist, and he told me, "I feel like integration would be something that you'd be really good at." He basically sponsored me to go through a program to learn how to integrate.

The program didn't teach me much to be honest, but it gave me the insight that I'd actually been cultivating these skills all along and this could be a way for me to more effectively give back. From there, he offered me a position helping people integrate. I spent some years doing that and studying under him. It happened quite organically, I'd say.

What do you see as the biggest challenges for people integrating 5-MeO-DMT experiences, and how do you help them through those?

I think the main difficulty with five specifically is that it doesn't have a lot of explicit content. Five has a lot of implicit memory. You are fundamentally changed on a sub-perceptual or sub-cognitive level. With ayahuasca, there's a lot of image, memory, narrative, and meaning-making happening almost immediately. With five, there's none of that. There's a profound sense of sensation that is very intense, and it’s hard to explicitly name what's different.

What that forces people to do is somaticize the process, which bypasses a lot of cognitive structures. It's very confronting. What I notice, though, is it forces people to integrate. Someone will have an intention, go through a journey, come back, and feel very different, but they'll have a new anxiety in their body. That symptom is typically directly related to their growth process. When you get out of alignment with your process, it’s as if the body says, "no, we can't go back." You can't not listen to it, or else you’ll get new symptoms.

Another common challenge is that our cultural structure as Westerners, particularly Americans, works in the opposite direction of medicine. Medicine typically offers us an opportunity to live in a way that's more aligned with our soul, whereas our culture is more aligned with ego values and desires. We're a product of our environment, so if you're doing all this work in nature, and then consistently coming back to an environment with a misaligned value system, you're swimming upstream.

You work with a lot of different modalities, but phenomenological interviewing seems unique. What exactly is this approach, and when does it make sense to apply it?

Most psychedelic integration tools are essentially just therapy tools. They're great, but they lack the mystery and intimacy with direct experience of something beyond our normal everyday way of being. Therapy doesn't hold enough reverence for how different an altered state of consciousness can be and how big it is to integrate something like samadhi.

With phenomenological interviewing, we're allowing the experience itself to inform the integration. We're letting the quality of the direct experience manifest in its vivid detail, and using tools to amplify it and re-engage with it, as opposed to interpreting it. It's like, "Take me step by step through what happened when you took the pipe and inhaled.” “Sure, first everything started to dissolve." Then, "What's it like when everything dissolves?" "Well, I noticed everything became bigger and lighter. I noticed my heart drop down..."

You're honoring the intelligence of the experience as opposed to asking, "What did I learn? What can I take away?". It's not this conquesting, cognitive approach. It's letting the experience itself continue to be rich, informative material.

You have to be careful using this method, especially with five, because people will go right back fully into their experience. Once you do five and play around with that, you realize it's in your tissues forever. The approach brings the power and spirit of the experience into the room with you, and you can start to dialogue or be in relationship with it.

Can someone practice phenomenological interviewing on their own through journaling or self-inquiry, or do you need a guide for it to be effective?

It's better if you have a guide, just because it's hard to be in the medicine and hold the space for yourself at the same time. I've done both, and I've preferred having a guide because I could fully surrender. For folks who’ve had difficult experiences or are dealing with complex or acute trauma, definitely have a guide. Using this interviewing method can be very intense.

What's helpful is to have a guide who’s skilled in titration—someone who’s able to notice when you're at the edge of your capacity and back it off, get you to a place of resource, and then return to the experience. That can be so healing for people who've had difficult or overwhelming psychedelic experiences, to allow the charge to fully metabolize.

If you do want to try it on your own, first set up a ritual container. Put your phone on silent, close the door, set the space with incense and lights. Approach the process with the same reverence as the original ceremony. Bring a purge bucket, get everything you need, and put the ceremony music back on. Take a few moments to get into a meditative, hypnagogic state through breath or body awareness. Start with an image to slowly invite back the memory.

I always take people to just before the ceremony and then walk them through the steps. Once the pipe hits their lips, that's when people's bodies start to shift. At that point, if you just loosen your inhibition and allow the energy in your body to do its thing, you'll elaborate the whole process. Just stay with it.

For integration specialists who are just starting out, what's one misconception about integration work that you'd like to clear up?

My opinion is that integration work is more effective when it's done through the lens of being rather than doing. People come into integration thinking, "I have to integrate this experience. I have to take the lessons and apply them," as if they're already in a position where they've got the message, made the meaning, and are now just needing to do something about it.

I find that's rarely the case. The paint's still wet. You haven't created all the meaning yet, or even fully metabolized the experience. You're still in process. It’s best to withhold your meaning-making and storytelling until more of that emotional, psychological, somatic material can open. By practicing and revisiting direct experience, you start to actually change your perception in real time.

I think that's what integration is. "Wow, I'm feeling the oneness again right now, and I'm with you." That's space holding; that's integration. Can I drop back into that liminal space? And as that liminal space elaborates, can I feel the perception shift in my body right now, without a drug? That to me is potent integration, versus, "That already happened, I already figured it out, I already know." There's no perception shift, no visceral experience. Integration is a shift in being, perceiving, and feeling, not an idea about change.

Want more from Otto?

Drop into his free integration circles, find him at Tandava Retreats and F.I.V.E., or join his upcoming course on phenomenological interviewing for psychedelic integration.

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DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice. The use, possession, and distribution of psychedelic drugs are illegal in most countries and may result in criminal prosecution.