Using Cannabis as a Psychedelic Integration Tool with Nancy Rassbach

Today, we’d like to introduce you to a client who has been working with us intermittently since her first psychedelic experience back in December 2021 with our very own founder, Jimmy Nguyen.

At nearly 82, Nancy believes she is finally becoming the person she truly wants to be. This “beautiful and meaningful” chapter of her life began with that initial journey and has continued to the present day, supported primarily by intentional cannabis use.

Nancy had never been much into spirituality, describing herself as “on the atheist side of agnostic.” But after a 50-year career as a software engineer and raising three beautiful, successful children, she was drawn to the idea that psychedelics might show her something entirely new.

Widowed 14 years ago, Nancy is now married to her third husband, who has walked this healing path right alongside her. Together, they share a love for tandem bicycling, a reflection of their shared path.

Nancy started as a client but stayed as a friend, and now she’d like to share her story in hopes of helping others find the healing they’ve been searching for. As you’ll soon learn, transformation didn’t happen overnight. 

Intentional psychedelic use is just one piece of a much broader healing journey that never truly ends, but simply evolves. Here, we get a glimpse into the tools that have anchored her growth: exercise, true commitment, and what she fondly calls “stoned journaling.”

This article is inspired by our insightful podcast episode hosted by Psychedelic Passage co-founder, Jimmy Nguyen, which you can listen to on all streaming platforms.

“I don’t need a spell to foresee the future; I am going to make it happen.” — Philippa Gregory, The Lady of the Rivers

The Beginning of a New Era

The First Macrodose Experience

Being born in the 1940s, Nancy witnessed first-hand the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s, but being a new wife and mother, there was no time to experiment when she had responsibilities to her family. 

After she retired, she knew it was her time, psychedelics being a new horizon to explore. As a tandem bike rider, world explorer, avid bridge player, and stoned granny, it’s not surprising that to her, psychedelics felt like an exciting adventure. 

She did have intentions, though, although they weren’t addressed quite like she thought they would be. She describes having a desire to explore psychedelics to deal with various problems in her life, such as a consistent cough with no physical explanation and marital problems, to name a couple. 

The cough didn’t go away, and her marital problems weren’t solved overnight, but the biggest takeaway from her first psilocybin macrodose with Jimmy was that it gave her the ability to imagine what heaven may be like. 

Before her first psychedelic experience, she truly didn’t think “heaven” was possible, but now? She says she has an idea. It’s given her the feeling that there’s something more important to life than just the day-to-day.

It has also given her the feeling that there’s a larger consciousness out there that she’ll still be a part of when her physical body no longer exists. 

“I remember for the first time being aware of something outside the reality I had always seen. It was as though the mushrooms just suspended that logical, judgmental part of my mind, and I could see ‘reality.’” — Nancy Rassbach

Her experience wasn’t random; it actually mirrors results that we’ve seen in modern research.  For example, Griffiths et al. (2006) found that psilocybin increases measures of mystical experiences. 

The seven domains of mystical experiences that have been cross-culturally validated and are used to measure mystical-type experiences in religious contexts, and now psychedelic contexts, are as follows:

• Internal unity (pure awareness; a merging with ultimate reality)
• External unity (unity of all things; all things are alive; all is one)
• Transcendence of time and space
• Ineffability and paradoxicality (claim of difficulty in describing the experience in words)
• Sense of sacredness (awe)

• Noetic quality (claim of intuitive knowledge of ultimate reality)

• Deeply felt positive mood (joy, peace, and love)

Not only does psilocybin (and other psychedelics) increase measures of mystical experience, but the study volunteers “rated the psilocybin experience as having substantial personal meaning and spiritual significance and attributed to the experience sustained positive changes in attitudes and behavior consistent with changes rated by community observers.”

This newfound outlook on life helped perpetuate Nancy’s healing journey, as she suddenly felt a deeper connection to life and the universe than she had ever felt before. 

Continued Integration and Healing 

She had a few consequent macrodose experiences which were illuminating and insightful; however, these deep, meaningful psychedelic experiences still did not solve most of her problems.  

Her cough remained, and her marital problems continued. She and her husband began seeing a psychedelic-informed marriage counselor to navigate their issues and to possibly incorporate psychedelic healing into their shared path. 

As it turned out, their therapist was a Zen Buddhist whose approach spanned both traditional psychology and spiritual exploration. Under his guidance, Nancy was introduced to meditation – a tool that intertwined with her reflective practices and provided a structured framework for her daily life.

Now working on a memoir, Nancy recently began transcribing the journals she has kept since 2021. 

The transcription process itself triggered a new wave of healing as she viewed her timeline from a distance, with a fresh perspective. Revisiting old content can actually be a helpful form of integration in itself, as we learned in “Why Psychedelic Healing is Nonlinear.”

She noticed the first mention of her cannabis-assisted journaling sessions in her entries from early 2025, noting how effective they were for generating insights about her life and how she was able to achieve the same conducive state she felt with psilocybin, except it wasn’t as intense and was a bit more controllable.

Fast-forward to early 2026, and those insights culminated in a breakthrough for her marriage. This was the moment in her “stoned journaling” where she clearly identified her role in their marital issues, realized what she could do to resolve them, and learned how to invite her husband into that transformative space without trying to control or change him. Suddenly she felt like she had finally found her “Happily Ever After.”

“I think that there’s many people who feel like if I’m growing on a certain path and trajectory, then my partner has to meet me there or my partner has to catch up, or who’s ahead or who’s doing more work or who’s doing less work. And I see people get tripped up in that all the time, but what I kind of notice with you (Nancy) and some of the email exchanges that we’ve had back and forth is almost just allowing each person to just be where they’re at and trusting that each person will show up to their own process. And so there’s the individual experience, and then there’s a collective of what you’re doing together.” — Jimmy Nguyen to Nancy Rassbach

Coincidentally, it wasn’t until the beginning of 2026 that her husband began his own microdose journey, but maybe we’ll save that story for a different time. 

In our interview with Nancy, Jimmy shared the unique opportunity he was given to meet Nancy’s husband, Rick. 

With Rick being a veteran who served in the Vietnam War, and Jimmy being the child of Vietnamese refugees from the very same war, it was a special sort of healing experience to be able to come into conversation with someone with their own set of traumas and challenges resulting from that time in history.

Recommended Reading: Psychedelics and the Path to Deeper Relationships

Cannabis-Assisted Journaling: The Ultimate Integration Tool?

Nancy didn’t jump right into “stoned journaling”; she journaled and meditated for a while with little success, but that didn’t stop her from continuing the practice, hoping she would finally have the kind of meditation experience everyone raved about. 

It wasn’t until she thought, “What if I do it stoned?” that she began to connect with these practices.

Actually, if she were to give one piece of advice to anyone looking to start stoned journaling and meditation, she recommends doing it sober first, as it was the “aha!” moment of finally experiencing what she had been trying to accomplish with meditation all along when she decided to try it stoned that made such a big impact. 

Journaling didn’t solve her problems, nor did a few macrodoses or a marriage counselor. It was committing to a routine over the years, finding the right container, tools, and support, and honing in on practices that elevated her integration process. That’s what made the biggest impact on her life.

Once again, her experience aligns with research findings, particularly those of Earleywine et al. (2021). Their survey found that “high doses of cannabis can create subjective effects comparable to those identified in trials of psilocybin that precede relief from cancer-related distress, treatment-resistant depression, alcohol problems, and cigarette dependence.” 

This means that her intentions for psychedelic use weren’t fulfilled until years of hard work and commitment. 

She took the process seriously, but not in a way that was detrimental to her healing. She allowed for grace and didn’t give up when the results weren’t what she expected. She attributes her improvement to her discipline, sticking to a routine for 5 years now. 

What is Nancy’s Process? 

After a few macrodose ceremonies, consistent inner work, intermittent support from Jimmy, and very helpful support from her therapist, she finally fell into a routine that feels genuinely helpful in making progress in life and in her marriage. 

Twice a week, she starts by eating a 10mg THC gummy. After 30-45 minutes, she starts to feel it and turns on her music: Sunny Mornings album by Peder B. Helland. 

It’s the same album every time, meant to recreate the same container and make it easier to relax into a meditative state; however, she doesn’t restart it. Instead, she picks up where she left off in her last meditation and even notes that the music’s flow often mirrors her emotions. 

She sits down and journals for a while, using cannabis as a way to connect with a deeper, better version of herself. Her routine follows the natural, biphasic flow of a cannabis experience. 

Typically, it may start with racing thoughts, mind-wandering, and the occasional epiphany as the THC in one’s system activates the amygdala (Rey et al., 2012). 

She used journaling to get all her thoughts out of her head and onto paper. This helps quiet her mind in preparation for the later meditation.

When she’s done journaling and the second phase of the cannabis experience begins, marked by physical relaxation and mental stillness due to the leveling out of THC in the brain, she then turns to meditation, finding that lying slightly reclined was the best posture to allow her body to relax completely (Phan et al., 2008).

Going into this meditative state, she’s able to recreate the psychedelic experience and get in touch with the universe, as she puts it. 

What does being in an altered state of consciousness do for Nancy exactly? She describes it as giving her the ability to connect with a better “self,” one that aligns with her values, keeps a level head, and can offer fresh perspectives. 

She can see who she wants to be and who she can be, but it also allows her to let go of negative ways of thinking. She describes it as a combination of the authentic “you” shining through, while barriers like ego or anxiety come down. 

Wrapping Up: The Power of the Ponder

How often do you just think? No phone, no person to talk to, just sit and ponder the things that you’re working on in your life, the problems you are currently navigating, the things you want to change, or the things you aren’t sure about?

I do my best pondering while taking long drives; Nancy does her best pondering with a cannabis gummy, a journal, music, and meditation. 

At this point in her life, I truly wonder just how much time Nancy has spent pondering by simply giving thorough, quiet, and serious consideration to a topic. 

You really can’t understand the power of pondering unless you’ve seen for yourself the insights, epiphanies, and creative ideas that can arise seemingly out of nowhere, just from mulling the idea around in your head for a while.

Just try quieting your mind for 30 minutes, you may be surprised what happens when you just sit and exist for a while. 

The macrodose started everything, but it was Nancy who perpetuated her own healing and ensured her own deep integration. Through this process, she fell into a routine that has elevated her healing, allowed her to connect with a better version of herself, and given her insights into the problems she faces in life.

Of all the things she sought to address with psychedelics, they were rarely addressed. Instead, she received unexpected things, but by balancing expectations with openness to the unknown, she was able to benefit from each experience.

One of the first questions Jimmy asked Nancy, as she pondered how she felt about her “stoned journaling,” was whether it was enhancing a practice or aiding an escape.

Being honest with yourself is the name of the game with intentional psychedelic use and any real healing, and after an honest review, it was quite clear that Nancy was using cannabis as an enhancement tool and not an escape mechanism. 

Once she came to that conclusion, she was able to let go of any hesitancy she felt over the possibility that she was just chasing peak experiences. 

As she works on her memoir and her marriage, she still finds time for the simpler pleasures, like tandem bicycling with her husband, traveling, and simply enjoying this era of her life. Her only hope in sharing her story is that it may help others on their own journeys, as other humans helped her along the way.