🫠 Ask a Guide Anything

Welcome to Tricycle Day. We’re the psychedelics newsletter that’s about to blow. Brace yourself for some projectile content. 🤢 

We love to assign hard times a deeper meaning.

Breakups are a lesson in boundaries. Layoffs are a blessing in disguise. Awkward haircuts are *ahem* a shedding of the old self. 

Barfing isn’t as easy to reframe. Unless it happens mid-ceremony, of course, in which case it gets promoted to purging.

Now suddenly, your breakfast going bye-bye is a sacred rite… right?

For today’s newsletter, we asked our network of licensed psilocybin facilitators: Is purging a sign the medicine is “working” or just a physical side effect?

Here’s where they landed.

Netflix doesn’t bring the heat like this.

We just watched Curandera, an award-winning, 37-minute documentary with over 2 million views.

The film follows Tatiana Aya Tupinambá from a childhood marked by violence to the jungle, where she studies with an Ashaninka teacher and becomes an ayahuasca healer.

It’s got it all. Plant dietas, icaro instructions, even an over-the-shoulder look at how the medicine is made.

The best part is, you can actually meet Tatiana if you like. She's the lead spiritual guide at Nekawa, whose founders are hosting a live Q&A tomorrow, Oct 24.

Some nausea can be explained with basic biology. Melinda Halpern clocks the unromantic kind: “If it occurs in the first 90 minutes or so I attribute that to the digestive system and the mushrooms. Sometimes they are hard for people to digest.” Her fix is to lemon tek (i.e., soak the mushrooms in lemon juice), which can speed up onset. 

The best defense against a rough stomach starts before the dose. Lora Benson has a game plan: “To keep physical discomfort from derailing the experience, it is common practice to screen for a history of motion sickness and proactively use raw ginger or ginger shots.”

If prep falls short, Monica Ramunda says the answer isn’t to tough it out: “I don’t see a benefit in asking them to simply endure it. I think we need to address that discomfort with appropriate care and support.”

Now don’t expect an attaboy for throwing up. Kate Schroeder says it’s really not essential: “A person can have an extraordinarily meaningful psychedelic experience without purging at all, and vomiting doesn’t necessarily mean that some deeper psychological process has occurred.” 

But that may depend on who you ask. Clayton Ickes offers the counterpoint: “In certain traditions the purge has a central place in the healing mechanism of plant medicine. In modern psychedelic research it’s sometimes looked at as an unfortunate side effect to be treated.”

A good facilitator, then, starts by listening, not dictating. Monica never jumps to conclusions: “I’m open to exploring what an experience means to a client, without assuming their nausea means they have something they ‘need to release.’”

If meaning is subjective (it is), here’s a wild idea. Perhaps the person who lived it should get first crack at making sense of it. Masha Steiner-Renoir found her answer on her own: “I’ve had a purge where I knew, without anyone telling me, that what I was releasing was resentment.”

Others find meaning in visuals. Terry Turner has heard multiple reports of “visions of dark things leaving the body during the purging process and a sense of psychological release.” His conclusion is that purging is “whatever one experiences it to be.” 

At the end of the day, we don’t have to pick either/or. Amy Charlesworth goes with both/and: “Ultimately, I think it’s important that we make room for both perspectives: the physiological explanation and the cultural and spiritual significance that purging has held for generations.”

When we posed this question to our facilitators, most of them equated “purging” to vomiting.

But the human body is no one-trick pony. Have you seen what this bad boy can do?

For instance, Azalea Montaño-Kemp once told us Mazatec healers working with mushrooms count yawning, crying, and laughing as purging. And Victoria Wueschner has seen a similar range with 5-MeO-DMT. She adds intense vibration to the list.  

Then there’s ayahuasca, where vomiting gets all the attention. But diarrhea can happen too. (Talk about a cathartic release.)  

Whatever the medicine, purging looks different for different people. So, sure, prepare for what could come, but remember a session isn’t judged by its most dramatic moment.

Except if you sneeze three times in a row. That definitely means your spirit guides are gossiping about you.

Reply to this email to shoot your shot. If it’s a juicy one, we may select it for a future issue.

That’s all for today, Cyclists! Whenever you’re ready, here’s how we can help.

Forwarded this email? Subscribe here.

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.