A shaman, a ferryman, a doctor, a midwife. A trip-sitter is similar to all of them — similar, but not identical, because their task doesn’t involve a myth or an oar or a prescription-pad, but very simply, a trusting relationship.

A trip-sitter is a person who guides and supports the taker of a psychedelic drug. As far as the drug is concerned, the trip-sitter can be richly experienced or completely oblivious; they can partake alongside or observe from a distance. None of these conditions are essential: the only essential condition is their facilitation of the psychedelic experience.

As a potential…

You’re Deserving Of Love — Just As You Are

Life can take you to the ugliest of places and most dire of circumstances, torment and humiliate you endlessly, leave you paralyzed and struck with grief and indignancy and confusion. Life can do a most impressive thing, which is to leave you disdainful of life itself, contemptuous of every breath and heartbeat which takes you further along its path. Life can appear as a disease, as a most painful and unfortunate condition, so that even when you direct your gaze towards the world-at-large, you can only see it as a fluke, as an embarrassing mistake in need of correction, and…

We want to be ourselves, we want to love ourselves, we want to improve ourselves — despite the fact that we sometimes can’t help ourselves.

What is this ‘self’ that we’re so preoccupied with? We know that psychological growth involves a healthier and more appropriate relationship with ourselves. But what exactly that ‘self’ is remains elusive, obscure, and almost mystical.

In this article, we’ll read about the self as understood in psychology as the ego. Then, we’ll transition into talking about the self as a transcendental subject, using Buddhism as our guide. …

Your pet gets sick, nears the end of its life, and becomes severely debilitated. It limps, it moans, it struggles to see. You look at it one day and finally decide: it’s time to put it down.

To put down a pet isn’t literal, of course: it’s a euphemism for killing it. But the phrase is nonetheless a descriptive one. Cradling its head in their hand, the veterinarian injects the animal with a lethal dose of sedative. It becomes limp, and losing the support of its legs, falls lifeless to the table. It has physically been put down.

Now, we…

As a young boy in Columbus, Indiana, I attended an elementary school called ABC Stewart. Last night, having been primed for nostalgia by some Thanksgiving-inspired reminiscing, my family and I went through old boxes in a storage room, where we came across the school’s 2004 yearbook.

The cover features a number of crudely-sexed stick figures of various colors, presumably a signal of the school’s multiculturalism, and not an entirely unwarranted one: my sister and I were one of three first-generation Syrian families there.

On the first page we encounter the founder, matriarch, and principal of the school, Merry Charmichael, whose…

Hunter S. Thompson’s second book, The Rum Diary, remained unpublished for most of his lifetime. But more than half a century after it was written, the novel was adapted into a film starring his long-time friend Johnny Depp, who portrayed its protagonist and Thompson’s literary alter-ego, Paul Kemp.

The film adaptation was a poetic triumph for the late Thompson, who wrote the book as a struggling 22-year-old writer. …

As part of my job at an optometry clinic, I run patients through a series of tests which screen for common ocular and visual disorders and provide the doctor with important information prior to the eye exam.

This routine has become proceduralized, enough so that I can have a relatively coherent conversation while running and documenting all the tests, and yet there are two distinct situations which rise above the mundane and give me an opportunity to pause and reflect.

Stereo #9: a striking display of subconscious knowledge

The image of the world given by each of the two eyes is slightly different than the other. The brain…

What is the quintessentially human endeavor? To face the most terrifying parts of yourself, striving towards truth and goodness of spirit, and at the end of a long journey of self-discovery, to be able to lead others through theirs. To find, in the particulars of one’s own suffering, something of the universally human, and to convey that insight to the world.

This has been the life led by psychologist Marsha Linehan, and the product of her labors has been dialectical behavioral therapy, one of the most thoroughly evidenced forms of talk therapy. …