In this episode transcript of the Psychedelic Passage podcast, Kayse Gehret talks about microdosing mushrooms for healing with our co-founders Jimmy Nguyen and Nicholas Levich. Psychedelic medicines are now commonly being used for not only large dose experiences, but for their microdosing benefits as well. In this episode, our hosts have a conversation about all-things-microdosing.
Kayse talks about having founded Micro-dosing for Healing as a way to heal alongside our human collective. Psychedelics are very supportive tools for individual change, and when taken in community, they can help us heal each other and health our earth together.
How are world events causing this sudden global interest in earth medicine, and how do these medicines help us reconnect with our intuition? They’ll explain how sub-perceptual doses of psychedelic mushrooms facilitate the processing of difficult emotions by loosening our internal resistance to change.
Why has it been so difficult to study microdosing, and could science ever really quantify such an intrapersonal event? Later, our hosts will discuss why at the start of a microdosing regimen, emotions may get more challenging to face before they can truly dissolve and be released.
They’ll offer advice on how to prepare for psilocybin microdosing experiences, while providing information on the benefits of self-regulating your nervous system.
Episode 15 – Kayse Gehret Talks About Microdosing For Healing
Nick: Welcome to the Psychedelic Passage podcast. My name is Nick Levich, and I’m here with my fellow host, Jimmy Nguyen, thanks for joining us today. This week, we have a very special guest on our podcast by the name of Kayse Gehret. Kayse is a nature-based healing artist, author, and founder based in Northern California. With over 25 years of experience in the healing arts.
Today, Kayse leads Micro-dosing for Healing, a nationwide virtual community around earth medicine practice, as well as the best practices healing community, a global collective of diverse healing artists and health professionals brought together for learning strategy, growth, collaboration, and visioning new healing models for the future. So welcome, Kayse, we’re really glad to have you on today.
Kayse: Hi, guys, happy to be here.
Nick: For those of you that have been listening to the podcast for a while, you may know that one of the topics we have not addressed in depth yet is specifically micro-dosing, and micro-dosing of psilocybin in particular.
And part of the reason was, we wanted to have Kayse on, who is officially an expert in the micro-dosing realm. And so we want to dive deep into micro-dosing for anyone that’s interested in this practice for healing, productivity, creativity, whatever it is, that may be piquing your interest around microdosing.
Jimmy: Yeah, one of the interesting things about micro-dosing for healing, which is Kayse’s program, is that it’s rooted in community. It’s group-oriented, it’s a virtual community. I believe you had mentioned that you have six-week containers, six-month containers.
Kayse, I wonder what has been the takeaways from setting group containers around microdosing as opposed to one-on-one micro-dose coaching as opposed to self-starting and DIY microdosing, how has that been for you?
Kayse: Yeah, thank you so much, that’s a great question. So, I started out one-on-one coaching, as a lot of people do.
When I created the course, I wasn’t sure how it would be, were people ready to share this experience to be with each other in their vulnerability, in their practice, and share the details. And I found very quickly, it was a resounding, yes. So, I found that and really believe that the mushrooms want us together.
That’s part of what’s happening right now, the impulse of healing collectively that we’re having right now is the mushrooms really want us to be together and sharing in the experience, it’s why we do this work to have it impact our real day-to-day lives and relationships.
So, what better way to practice than to be in community and practicing in real-time in our daily lives. So, yeah, right now we have people all over the United States, in our last group open it up to international students for the first time. And our age range is 19 to 91. [laughs]
Nick: Wow.
Kayse: And we’ve had about over 400 people at this point through the program. So, yeah, it’s beautiful, and the relationships that develop in the deepening.
I will say having had the experience, we’ve had enough people now to see the difference in transformation and the arc of healing that takes place between if you’re doing this by yourself, versus if you’re doing this in a closed container, intentionally with other people. It’s just so much more focused and so much more pronounced. In part, I think, because of the magic of being together.
Jimmy: Yeah, we could probably have like a whole episode about community. I mean, it’s a very integral part of this whole process. And I could actually probably go off about the whole thing about how there’s this collective kind of thing. It’s how mycelium works.
It’s like this network and then it’s the fruiting body that comes from there. And we have a similar age range by the way of clientele as well between psychedelic passage and micro-dosing for healing.
One of the questions that comes up for me when we are doing discovery calls with psychedelic curious folks is, they have questions on substance, they have questions on what was micro-dosing for me is, a large dose experience for me?
Undoubtedly, you probably run across the same thing. What would you share with folks who are exploring micro-dosing in the broader perspective of using psychedelics for healing?
Microdosing For Healing: A Framework
Kayse: Mm-hmm. That’s a great question. A great point. There’s so much information out there even compared to just five years ago. And so people come in often very, very overwhelmed and not even knowing where to start because they’ve listened to so many podcasts and they’ve read all the books, and they’ve watched the documentaries.
A lot of the questions are, “Which medicine is for me? I don’t even know where to start.” We were joking recently on one of our calls that we need to develop like a psychedelic concierge [laughs] sorts to help people, introduce them to the process.
So, I do think taking the time to do some research is really good because that will– it’s really based on your intuition, so much of what medicine is going to be right for you. The people who tend to come to me are– we work with mushroom medicine in our community.
And so people find that the mushrooms keep calling them and keep calling them and it’s almost unmistakable that they’re drawn to mushrooms by the time they reach out to me. But when people who come in oftentimes, they’re like, I don’t know where to begin.
And that’s when microdosing is a really, really beautiful place to begin at the outset because it will get you back in touch with your intuition. If you don’t know where to start, oftentimes, the process of microdosing will help you touch back into your intuition and then you take it from there.
Jimmy: Yeah, thank you for that. I’ll add that, it’s really contextual to what’s going on in your life. I think that for some folks there is this level of maybe wanting to expedite or prioritize their experience, or maybe some folks have a sense of desperation.
And so I’ve been using this analogy on, well, what’s the right tool, a bulldozer or a chisel? And so, for some folks, a bulldozer doesn’t work. Let’s say you have kids, let’s say you have a full-time job, let’s say your life is very busy, that’s where I see the potential for microdosing.
In addition to taking it a step at a time and starting your relationship with the medicine and really to what I’m hearing from you is unlocking your inner intuition which we use this phrase of really accessing your inner healer so that makes a lot of sense for me.
Kayse: Yeah. For some people, it’s not even starting the relationship with the medicine right away. People who come in a place of desperation, oftentimes they start the medicine practice of first regulating their nervous system and doing some personal work to get themselves in a place where they are ready for the medicine work.
I think that’s the big shift we’re in right now is we’re so indoctrinated into this, the medication. Separating out and recreating, re-envisioning what earth medicine is, compared to what pharmaceutical medicine is, you’re not coming to it from a place to be fixed.
Like we do with pharma meds. So, that’s a lot of the foundation lane that we do is shifting that mindset that this is more of a participatory relationship.
Psychedelics at The Intersection of a Cultural Shift
Nick: Do you have people that join your community and maybe aren’t even ready to start micro-dosing yet? Like they want to see what other people’s experiences are and maybe like, dip a toe in the water before they actually commit themselves?
Kayse: Absolutely, yeah, that’s a great analogy. They do, it’s rare now, at the beginning, a year and a half ago, it was more common. Since this growing tide of people being really, really, ready.
There’s a growing level of commitment of people really ready to commit to change, transformation, healing, that I have not experienced in my career yet. So that’s really exciting.
Nick: Which says a lot because you’ve been doing this for a long time.
Kayse: Yeah. Coming up on 27 years now.
Jimmy: Wow.
Kayse: So, it’s been really beautiful to watch to witness this sea change happening.
Nick: It’s a quarter of a century. No, big deal. [Kayse laughs] No big deal. That’s a shorter amount of time.
Kayse: Exactly, yeah.
Nick: So, why do you think that this increased interest in what we’ll call alternative healing, holistic healing, earth medicine, what’s causing from your perspective the tides to shift here?
Kayse: Wow, so many things, but I think it runs parallel to everything else we’re seeing in the collective is we, as a human species are a little bit of procrastinators [laughs] it’s our tendency to kind of wait till the last minute of things.
Jimmy: Yup.
Kayse: So, even if we haven’t been conscious of it, we have gone off the path for a while now, with our relationship with the planet, with our relationship to each other, with our relationship with ourselves. And so now we’re getting close to hitting the wall of all the things that we have been doing. We can’t run away from that anymore. There’s no more distractions we can do.
There is no more medications we can take, there’s no app that’s going to save us, we need to save ourselves. And we’re all kind of collectively running up to this moment in time right now where we can embrace it, we can go into the future in resistance, but we’re all coming to that awareness now–[crosstalk]
Jimmy: Yeah. I hear that there’s this coming to this crossroads, but also I hear underneath the layer of your response there that there’s the shifting of values on what’s important.
I’m seeing that also in the COVID era, the pandemic era where like, “Oh, surprise, mental health is actually important.” And it’s okay now to have a therapist, and it’s okay now to not have it all figured out and some of those things.
I’m curious, there’s a lot of information out there now about micro-dosing then there was previously, and what I hear is a lot of like the potential benefit, the potential healing whether it’s from trauma, whether it’s from disruptive habit, whether it’s even from a self-actualizing and performance standpoint.
Do you have some common themes of folks who work with you across micro-dosing? What are the most prevalent ones that you encounter?
Common Themes in Microdosing
Kayse: Mm-hmm, absolutely. When people come in, they identify their intentions and what’s calling them to practice. It’s been really equal, which was surprising to me.
People identify physical healing, emotional, spiritual nature, connection, mental health reasons, and it’s been about equal, what people are coming for, certainly, emotional mental health is on most people’s checklist, especially post-pandemic.
And it’s really beautiful to see that even with the group setting, even if you come in with the intention of say physical healing alone, you’re going to get to experience all the other benefits and witness all the other benefits in your peers. So, even if you come in for the mental benefits, you’re also going to get the heart opening, the spiritual discovery, the mental health benefits along the way.
Jimmy: I have something here. I really want to get your opinion on this. We’re in this era where everybody is anglicizing psychedelics, there’s almost this halo effect from the people who want to promote this from a legislative standpoint, they’re talking about benefits, they’re talking about, “Oh, 20 years of therapy” in one large dose session.
It’s very clear, at least Nick and I work that, it’s not linear like that. I ran into some situations with clients where they actually start microdosing, and I want to talk about the specific in the context of micro-dosing. So, I want to get your thoughts here.
But it’s mostly folks who are trying to alleviate a mental health issue or a trauma-related issue or something where there’s pain and suffering there. And they start micro-dosing, they’re like, actually, it’s making it worse.
“I’m not feeling these benefits that I was promised,” in whatever podcast or whatever, Netflix, documentary and whatnot. Do you encounter that as well? I have my opinions about this but I’d love to hear from you about that.
Kayse: Expectations.
[laughter]
Kayse: Yes. [crosstalk] -expectations.
Nick: It’s the most used word on this podcast.
Jimmy: Probably. [laughs] Yeah, we see an expectation of psychedelic– [crosstalk] yeah.
Kayse: Absolutely, yes. And part of the reason, Jimmy, in these headlines, the media, there’s a vested interest often in these headlines that people are selling a product or marketing their company when they’re sharing these things, but they’re not telling the whole story, of course.
And so, absolutely. I think that is the big difference between healing in the way that we are moving into versus the healing systems that we’re moving away from, which is the numbing, quelling, suppressing, toward feeling, regulating, dealing with facing things.
And so that’s especially with mushrooms will clarify. They do not hide, they do not suppress, you will see the truth. One of my students called it “mushrooms feel like big honesty.”
[laughter]
Kayse: They show you and so-
Jimmy: I like that.
Kayse: -we really need to nestle. I think it’s important whether we’re micro-dosing or journeying to have it nestled in an experience of teaching you how to hold and regulate emotions because that’s one of the big gifts, and we’re not taught that by our society, we’re not taught that in our healing systems.
But as we become more in touch and self-aware with our emotions, simultaneously learning to regulate our emotions and have mastery over emotions, that’s one of the greatest skills we can learn in this era. And one of the greatest skills that we can, as parents, as colleagues, as bosses, as friends, model for other people.
Nick: Which is worth noting because we literally just spent our whole last podcast talking largely about emotional regulation and how sometimes people feel worse before they feel better.
Jimmy: I tell folks, you have to give yourself permission to express every color of your rainbow as well, which includes the stuff that we try to avoid or push away or have less of. What tangible things do you offer to somebody who is walking into these expecting benefits, wanting that immediate healing?
Or maybe somebody who starts to experience the exacerbation of some of these more challenging feelings and emotions, and they’re like, “Micro-dosing is not for me, I’m going to give up,” like, what do you share with folks? [crosstalk]
Managing Expectations For Microdosing
Kayse: Well, part of the group setting in and of itself really, really helps that because when you’re one-on-one and doing this alone, and you’re not having all the benefits that you read about, you’re like, “Am I doing this wrong?” Or, “The mushrooms aren’t working.”
But if you’re doing it in a group, you can really, really see, we have an intensive immersion program going on right now. and there’s 25 people, and in that, those 25 people, you see the range of people. There are some people that are experiencing all the gifts and the benefits, they’re more productive, they’re like cleaning out their garage that they’ve been putting out.
They’re doing all the things that you read about. Then there’s about 20% to 30% of people who are having big grief come up for release. They’re having a lot of fatigue come up. They’re having some irritability and crankiness comes up.
When we can see that, we see that all of it as completely normal and part of the process, and very frequently we need to go through those phases of irritation, grief, they come up so that we can face them, be curious about them and released so that we can get to the gifts on the other side, which are the clarity of emotion, which is emotional mastery, regulation, intuition, creativity, focus, those things are there for us always.
But in the release of those denser emotions, that’s how we access those gifts. So, by holding each other in a space of community, you really can see that they’re all welcome and inviting them all into the process.
We, as a society, especially here in the United States have a really, really, hard time with grief. Grief is up for so many people right now. And part of what is holding us down is suppressed grief, it’s really uncomfortable for people to express grief.
People have a really hard time holding grief in another person. Anger is okay for a lot of people, [chuckles] as we see, but a lot of people are really, really, uncomfortable with grief. So, I think, as Jimmy said, embracing the full spectrum of our humanity is a really important pathway to our healing.
Jimmy: What I’m hearing you say is that if you’re going to be engaging with psychedelics, regardless of whether it’s micro-dosing or a large dose, be ready for your sh** to come up.
Kayse: Oh, yeah.
[laughter]
Kayse: Yeah, and I think too, it’s made a big difference how much work people have done prior to. I am an anomaly in the field in that I didn’t experiment with psychedelics until I was age 40, which is very, very unusual.
But I’m grateful for that, in that. When you’re very young, you’re already destabilized. You might not know.
[laughter]
Nick: Like ‘I don’t even know who I am’.
Kayse: [chuckles] Right. When you are already destabilized and trying to figure out who you are, and you haven’t done a whole lot of personal work and shadow work because you haven’t been around that long.
Or you may have not done a lot of work with your childhood things, then you layer psychedelics onto that, it can be really, really, destabilizing versus people who have laid a very long foundation of preparation, intentionally or not.
I’ve seen amazing, amazing– I could go on and on about the people I work with that are in their 70s that have had a 40-50-year contemplative practice, or meditation practice, and they’ve never used psychedelics in their life. But because they have laid this incredible foundation and preparation, their experience when they do meet the medicine is just extraordinary and very, very unusual.
Nick: It’s like jet fuel on the fire.
Kayse: Exactly.
Jimmy: Yeah. And then people’s processes are different and have different levels of depth and different lengths of time in their life. The older clients are actually my favorite, knowing that they have way more social programming and conditioning to overcome.
But I think there’s something about reaching those later stages of your life that I’ve been really grateful to witness that, that kind of puts things in perspective a little bit for them.
And so, it’s a little bit of a non-dualistic thinking, “Yes, there’s a lot more social programming to be done,” but also the conversation of mortality, the impact of their lives, and the legacy that they want to leave is also really, really present. Yeah.
Kayse: Yeah. We experimented. So, about a year or so into our program, there were enough people that had a beautiful relationship with mushrooms develop. And then they got curious and confident to go further. And so they started experimenting with what we called “initiatory doses.”
So maybe not a high-dose journey experience, but somewhere in between. What was really fascinating is the people that had been micro-dosing intentionally and also doing personal work along the way in community, their experience was so unusual in that they needed much lower doses, so people were journeying on very small doses of mushrooms comparatively.
And also, they just had a lot less fear and resistance in the journey process itself. So, again, I think there’s a lot to be said, it’s just the way it developed here, which is just our weird human thing is to go straight to the extreme. We have a tendency to do that and all things.
But if we back up a little and really, really, look at the– if we’re going to journey, say an year from now, let me put myself on the path of preparation starting today, with nervous system regulation, with shadow work, with community work, with all the things, and the medicine is just one part of the process that will ultimately lead to a really, really, rich, deep experience later on.
The Inner Work That Accompanies Microdosing
Nick: Yeah. This brings something up for me, which is, because we live in the western world, I think people equate micro-dosing to taking their prescription supplement, vitamin, whatever that’s going to make them feel better. They don’t have to do anything.
They just have to take the pill. And so clearly, what you’re highlighting is that that’s not enough, and we know that based on our work with clients, too.
And so my question is when you get someone that comes into your container that thinks what it’s really about is just taking the dose itself. What do you have to educate these people on? What are you teaching them to help with emotional regulation?
Most people don’t even know what shadow work is. So, what’s the accompanying toolkit that goes along with this micro-dosing protocol?
Kayse: We are adjacent to their medicine experience. We teach people to grow their own medicines within the course, which is an important part of the process, I think. It’s very different than going to pick up your prescription at the drugstore versus growing a sentient being that you’re going to be in a relationship with.
And then we also have a course that accompanies us, but with the group and community, we get together on a weekly basis with the group. And we also do educational things. So you learn all of the micro-dosing things, but you also do personal development work along the way. So, that is the beautiful place where microdosing can be so subtle, not always, but often.
And it’s oftentimes the other people in our life or its circumstances that reveal to us how much change is actually happening to us. So, if we are working on aspects of ourselves simultaneously to the ritual of medicine practice, that inspires us to be part of the process versus the passive recipients of a pill.
Jimmy: Yeah. I mean, it’s like any type of progress where if you’re looking every day, you’re like, “I don’t notice me getting better at this thing,” or, “I don’t notice my body changing, I don’t notice all that.” But then you look back over a course of six months or a year, you’re like, “Oh, something is different. How did that happen?”
I also, to reinforce what Nick is sharing, is that our society views, that bigger is better, that you always want to go for the value size meal, and you always want to do these things. And so there’s somewhat of a have a false setup that micro-dosing is somehow inferior to large-dose experiences.
One of the ways that I describe it is that there are two lanes on the same highway and that there is this express lane, for some, there’s that. And then there is the slower lane, but it really depends on your destination, it really depends on how much time you got, it really depends on where you’re going.
And if you try to break past the speed limits, let’s say, then that can also be really detrimental and just halt your process as well. And so what do you share with folks, Kayse, who are interested in micro-dosing? For our audience here, who are thinking about microdosing on their own, they’re just focused on, “How do I get my dosage right” and whatnot. What do you share with folks?
What are the main things that you want to tell our audience and the world that you think would help folks approach micro-dosing from a more impactful standpoint?
How to Maximize the Benefits of Microdosing
Kayse: Yeah. Thank you for that question. I think, in the beginning, it’s very, very easy for people to over-intellectualize the process, they get very, very hung up on their dose and tweaking their dose and exacting the dose, it keeps people in their head.
Part of the process of working with earth medicines is to get us into our heart, get us back into our body and our spirit, and get out of our heads so much, so really encouraging people to make this a full body integrated experience into your life, not just an intellectual process, again, like a pill.
I think we’ve gotten so far away from our instinctual selves, that’s part of the process as well. So, it’s nice to want to learn all the things and collect a bunch of knowledge. You can take every microdosing course out on the internet right now, and it’s not going to touch the embodied experience of the process that you will get moving through your own personal experience with the medicine.
Jimmy: I share with folks, this is a process beyond the mind, your mind is already doing what it needs to do, probably to the point where you’re suffering from.
Your mind is already doing what it needs to do to an extreme where your negative self-thoughts and your whatever, that’s already working. So, I really hear you there. What else comes up for you in the exploration of that question I posed?
Kayse: I think, now, because it is becoming much more mainstream. We just had a huge uptick, again, with media coverage and documentaries, and more and more books coming out all the time.
So I think as it mainstream, it continues to reinforce that old paradigm, as medicine or science, needing to validate. If VCs are investing in this, it means it’s validated or if scientific reports come out, it means it’s validated.
And I come back with like, nature does not need our validation. We need to flip the script and it’s time for us humans to start taking ourselves to nature and validating our worth on the planet to nature. We’ve been here for a blip of time, and so that’s fine.
If we need to feel safe or something is worthy, put our frameworks on it. But to me, that’s part of what nature is trying to so generously share with us is that nature’s wisdom has been here far longer. And as long as we measure our experience, by our human standards, we’re going to continue to fall short in the true context of why these medicines are here right now.
Jimmy: I know Nick has a question, but I just want to say, you keep preaching, sister. That’s some good stuff there. We need to shout that from the rooftops.
Finding Stability in Polarity
Nick: No, it’s true. I mean, Jimmy and I talk about this all the time. We don’t need science to tell us this stuff works. And I think that’s the benefit of what you’re doing, Kayse, is the community piece.
People see firsthand that it works, even when their personal experience may not reflect it, because they’re sorting through all the gunk that’s in the way of the emotional target that they actually seek.
And so I actually see that as a major benefit to being in a container like that because if I’m having this experience of extreme grief, and someone else is like, “I’m on cloud nine, I’ve never been this happy.” And it’s the question is like, “How do we hold both?” And we live in a society where it’s always either or, either or, either or, and this is like. “Yes, it’s this, and it’s that, it’s both of them.”
Kayse: Absolutely. And that’s the Jedi skill of our time. Right?
Nick: Right.
Kayse: If we can learn how to do that and hold those polarities simultaneously, at the same time, there’s no greater skill for resiliency to manage the moments we’re stepping into in these coming years. So to be able to hold both, like you said, is huge.
The other thing I say to people who are, “waiting for the science,” it’s really, really, difficult, and I wish more people would speak to this research.
It’s really, really, hard to research micro-dosing, even compared to higher dose journeys, which the majority of the research is on because when you are researching something in the traditional scientific framework, you have to have the control, and which you can do.
You can put someone in a room and control the conditions for eight hours, reasonably. You can’t do that when you’re studying and micro-dosing. You can’t control all the variables in a person’s life on a day-to-day. So even the most “rigorous research study” is still not going to be a true reflection because again, you’re weighing human experience, you’re measuring human emotion.
There’s always going to be variables when you’re studying micro-dosing, “What happened at work that day?” “I was in an argument with my spouse this morning.” “My kid had a tough time today.” All of these variables are going to play into people’s responses when you’re measuring micro-dosing and anything that’s a daily practice.
As much as when people say, “I’m waiting for the science to affirm that this practice is okay.” That’s fine and everyone needs to make that decision for themselves. But where we are as a society and where we are as a planet, I think more and more people are realizing we don’t have time for that. [laughs]
Nick: Well, science also has limitations. I think all three of us here can agree that science is never going to be able to fully explain the sentience or the inherent intelligence or the magic part of the psilocybin experience.
Regardless of whether it’s low or high dose because it transcends the mind, it transcends human language, like how are we going to distill that into some sort of report? I don’t think we’re ever going to get the full picture through science.
Jimmy: Yeah, I think for some folks, it’s this idea that if it’s not quantifiable and if it’s not measurable, then it doesn’t exist. And there are so many examples in the world where that refutes that idea. So, I really hear you there. As we get towards the end of our episode here, Kayse, can you talk a little bit more about your programs?
I know we touched upon there being a six-week container or a six-month container, there’s this virtual group community component, sounds like there is this somewhat self-resourcing component, but what would you like to share about your micro-dose program offerings that would be helpful for people to learn more about your services.
Kayse: Yeah, thank you. You did a good job covering most of it.
Jimmy: I’ll look forward to being a paid spokesman to your program. [laughs]
Kayse: I welcome that. Yeah, it’s exactly right, we have a six-week immersive experience. So, that’s with a fixed closed container group. So, that’s great for people who are really, really, ready to– are very committed to their own healing path, development.
And knows we do seasonally because there are a small fixed number of people, then we have a larger program that’s a six-month container that people can join anytime. That is a larger group.
And part of what that experiences so special is that we have people that are always just beginning their process. And then we have people who have been in it for a year and a half, two years now. They really function as mentors at this point.
So, it’s very inspiring for the new people to be able to look ahead, especially when people are going through the thick of personal change and having a lot of big emotion come up is there’s people there that have been exactly where they were a year ago, that can speak to them, and really inspire them and go, “Gosh, when I was moving through this, I didn’t realize how much I was changing.
But now looking back a year ago, I am unrecognizable to myself. I am so much more me and my life is so much more aligned a year later.” So, yeah, that’s exactly it. So, yeah, we do a course we do at all of them have a community aspect. Coaching, being able to witness each other and be witnessed is a big part of the microdosing experience.
Jimmy: That’s just medicine in itself to be seen and validated and witnessed in your process, realizing, “Oh, it’s not just me, you don’t have to sit here and do it alone.” Just really grateful for what you do for folks.
How to Choose a Microdosing Protocol
Nick: One of the questions that I have given that you are in this group container is, are all of your participants following the same micro-dosing protocol? Or is everyone on their own kind of intuitive protocol because this is one of the things that Jimmy and I get a lot is like, “Well, do I do the Stamets one, do I do the Fadiman one? Do I do it intuitively? What do I do?” People want like a formula.
Kayse: Absolutely. [laughs] Yes, again, there’s that edge that we’re at right now, a lot of times when I ask people, “Well, what is your intuition telling you?” And they’re like, “Kayse, my intuition hasn’t spoken to me in a decade.” [laughs] We’ll start with some–
Jimmy: I need some answers here if you could provide them real quick, that will be great.
[laughter]
Kayse: Exactly. And they get there. But honestly it does take some time for some people to touch back in with their intuition.
So, yes, we typically start with a protocol, we let people decide, again, if they lean just naturally lean toward one, our community, and I personally have always lean toward more the Stamets protocol because we work exclusively with mushrooms and plant medicines.
We tend to do a four-three or a five-two. I have found far and away most people really, really, enjoy that and tend to stick with that, when they begin with that. Sometimes people, later on, experiment and find their own rhythm. But a big part of the process from the start is really teaching people that the goal of micro-dosing is to not have to micro-dose.
When they heal, this is them, the medicines helping you touch back in yourself, but it’s you that’s doing the healing. So, all of the gains that you have, the experiences that you have are yours to keep.
It’s not something that the medicine is providing for you that you have to maintain over time. So, the goal isn’t to have this consistent, holding pattern that especially people who come in on antidepressants are used to that mindset.
This is more describing your medicine path is going to be a nonlinear, ever-evolving, ever-deepening process that will hopefully continue on for the rest of your life that’s not predicated on you taking the medicine every day.
In fact, you’ll get to the point where you’re not micro-dosing or participating physically with the medicine for months or years at a time. But that doesn’t mean you’re not connected to the medicine every second.
Jimmy: And for those who are wondering just to provide some context when Kayse’s talking about the Stamets stack that typically is psilocybin, usually with a combination of Lion’s Mane, and then also niacin, which I believe is B6.
And then when she’s chatting about four-three and five-two, those are four days on, and then three days off or five days on two days off. I’ve seen four-three, kind of also equate to every other day as well. I’ve seen, four days in a row, and then three days off, and it’s so dependent.
I mean, I also have folks somebody just shared with me that, yeah, actually two dosages a day split up was actually the key and the secret for them. So, yeah, thank you for that knowledge.
Nick: One, thing that I want to make clear to everyone, and Kayse touched on this, it’s just that my rule of thumb when people are like, “I’m confused on the protocols, what do I do?” I’m like, “You can do whatever works for you. My golden rule is in any seven-day period, just have two days off. However you want to orient that is fine, but in any seven-day period, two days off.”
Jimmy: Yeah, that’s great. Well, Kayse, thank you so much for joining us here. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. I hope that all of our listeners and viewers are getting some benefit from this as well. Where can they find you? Can you share your website and socials, things like that?
Kayse: Yeah, absolutely, I’m easy to find online. I’m just under my name Kayse Gehret on all the social platforms and our microdosing community is at microdosingforhealing.com. And you’re welcome to sign up.
We have a 90-minute introductory workshop right there that answers all of the frequently asked questions of beginners, so we definitely invite beginners. We also increasingly welcome people who are interested in journeying and how to incorporate and prepare for their journey with micro-dosing.
Nick: Beautiful.
Kayse: Thanks for having me.
Nick: Yeah. Our pleasure, thank you so much for your time and your presence. Thank you all for joining and tuning in today. As you guys know, you can download every single episode of the Psychedelic Podcast.
They’re available on Apple Podcast, Amazon, Spotify, IHeartRadio,wherever else you may stream your podcast. If you like the show, we’d really appreciate it if you rate and review us, so other people can have help finding us. And we look forward to speaking with you guys’ again next week.
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Of course, many questions may still be lingering in your mind about psychedelic journeys and their benefits. In that case, head on over to our resources page for more insightful articles, like this one. Well friends, that’s all we have for today. As always, safe and mindful journeying!
