MDMA solo (Kindle highlights)

Using a ‘therapist’ to conduct an MDMA session is like using a stableboy to maintain a jet airplane.
This example playlist largely avoids music with lyrics—although it does include some as the session progresses. As a general rule, it is better to use music that cannot be misinterpreted, or is directive or distracting. Hence the bulk of our example playlist is made of music without singing. That said, we have found it very empowering and transformational to include some songs with lyrics towards the end of a session. Songs with lyrics can be healing, particularly if those songs speak to universal human values.
During this preparatory phase, the solo-traveller takes a week, or more, to consider the session. This allows time for relevant traumatic material to organize itself in the subconscious mind in anticipation of release.
We also suggest that your sessions are scheduled to begin around sunrise. There are two reasons for this: The first is that the rising of the sun is a symbolically potent parallel to your own journey. The second is that sessions which begin in the morning will typically end before sunset.
For your first few MDMA sessions, The Castalia Foundation suggests one dose of MDMA in the 75-120mg range, followed by a second dose, 80 minutes later, in the 40-60mg range. This second dose is commonly referred to as a ‘booster’ dose and can sustain the efects of the MDMA for a longer length of time.
It is often more effective to begin a session sat upright in a meditative posture and then to choose, later in the session, what position best suits processing of the traumatic material as it arises. You may change position several times during a session, stretch, pace, dance, or even run on the spot.
The most important considerations are solitude, privacy, peace, and quiet.
The most important thing is that you feel safe, comfortable, and away from people.
We also strongly advise you to write a note to yourself before the session and display it prominently in the room. This note should read something like, "You can do this. Trust yourself. I love you. Everything will be okay."
It is critical, on the morning of an MDMA session, to eat a light, simple breakfast—porridge, for example. It is also advisable to make at least three fresh-fruit smoothies (approx. 300ml each); a light snack (for half-way through the session); and dinner (for afterwards). Consuming these three smoothies at intervals during your MDMA Solo session will minimize the chance of a ‘comedown’ after the efects of the MDMA have worn of. The smoothies can be drunk at approximately two-hour intervals as the session progresses. Dinner can include a fruit salad as dessert. You can also supplement after the session with a standard multivitamin pill.
While we encourage every reader to do their own research, The Castalia Foundation has found that MDMA, at doses below 300mg (in three or more tapered-doses over a single session) does not cause perceptible long-term negative side efects in the human population. In fact, quite the opposite.
More typically, two low doses (75-120mg, first-dose; 60mg second-dose) can be used very effectively in solo sessions without the need for additional, or tapered, dosing.
In summary: Do not expect any single MDMA session to improve your general sense of wellbeing. Sometimes the opposite can happen. However, over several sessions you should notice an upwardly-trending improvement in your sense of calm and connection with the world and other people.
Prepare for the eventuality that you may feel extremely drained and tired after processing difficult material. Try to relate to yourself in these moments as you would to a child: Give yourself healthy food; stay hydrated; get to bed at sunset; and remind yourself that the process has its moments of setback but overall it is worth the journey.
Integrating an MDMA session is as important as the session itself. Integration is an opportunity to work through previously denied emotions and to establish a new sense of personal wholeness.
Walking, swimming, meditation, yoga, drawing, journalling or playing music are all possible means by which to integrate material from an MDMA session.
We have, however, observed great results in those who take long, quiet walks in nature, especially around a lake, and set an intention to use this time to integrate their MDMA session.
After observing hundreds of MDMA sessions, and listening to the reports of solo-travellers, The Castalia Foundation has determined that an initial session frequency of once every two months is a good starting point.
There is a simple way to determine whether you have authentically defused the full extent of your trauma: Keep running solo MDMA sessions at respectful intervals until no traumatic biographical material arises in the session. To use a metaphor: The well is dry when no more water comes up in the bucket.
A psychedelic (meaning ‘soul-revealing’ or ‘mind-manifesting’) medicine allows you to examine your existing inner landscape and, with practice and determination, to re-program it. This is easier said than done.
We are all, in fact, human biocomputers—very complex, intelligent, programmable neurobiological robots.
Those who hurt us most profoundly in early-life will typically become internalized in our psyche. These internalized versions of those who hurt us in the physical world will then attack us internally before we are attacked externally, so that can avoid external pain. This is a protective mechanism adopted by the human nervous system: To anticipate the external abuser, and take evasive action.
A sustained re-sculpting of habitual behaviour can, with milder trauma, be induced by a regular meditation or yoga practice. However, very often, a stronger, more reliable de-patterning and re-imprinting agent is required. For this purpose The Castalia Foundation has seen great success in those who choose to microdose LSD (10-30ug) biweekly in the interim between MDMA sessions.
Depression is, most often, a learned adaptation to adverse childhood experience. We are taught, as children, to push down the parts of ourselves that cry out in pain.
Many of us learned to lock-away parts of ourselves at various stages of our childhood, or adult life. This is a basic protective feature that appears to have been built into the human nervous system. It is a means of closing the floodgates, or tripping the circuit-breaker, on experience that threatened to totally overwhelm the nervous system. Were this full affect to be felt at the time of the trauma, it would have threatened the ongoing survival of the organism—you.
The survivor must teach themselves to release feeling where they have been trained as children to retain it. They must learn to express pain and anger where they have been taught to depress it. They must discover how to connect where they have been taught to isolate. This list could go on. The essential point being that healing from deep trauma often requires a total reversal of all habitual psycho-emotional functioning in a person.
The most important aspect of a solo-MDMA journey is to give your subconscious mind freedom to excavate, express, and process any underlying material. What is subconscious is inherently beyond conventional awareness. A quirk of this situation is that you can never really plan for, or anticipate, precisely what will arise in a session.
This active depression of traumatic effect is exhausting and debilitating. MDMA, however, can allow you to uncover the primary cause of this learned-adaptation and release the pain of the inciting incident.
At times, during a session, dancing or singing may be necessary epiphenomena indicating that you are healthily expressing and processing a traumatic effect-storm. While, on other occasions, dancing and singing may be a means of revelling in the temporary euphoria of the MDMA and avoiding the deeper traumatic material.
The committed solo-MDMA traveller must, then, ask themselves when using MDMA, "Am I running towards the traumatic material, and my fear, or am I running away from it? Am I using this remarkable medicine in a safe and respectful context where I feel free to express a full range of emotions, and confront my deepest fears; or am I using it to distract myself?"
Many solo-travellers have reported that writing down a list of questions before an MDMA solo-session can help to focus the healing journey. These questions can be written down in the weeks leading up to a session, or on the day of the session itself.
You might, for example ask, “What was I like as a child?” Or: “How did my mother relate to me?". Or: “What was school like?” In essence, you are playing the role of a traditional psychoanalyst: Asking yourself relevant questions which serve to reveal more information about the causes of your everyday distress or anxiety.
The benefit of writing questions is to re-focus sessions when you feel that material is being actively avoided, or that distractions have waylaid the healing process.
Looking at old photographs of yourself, your friends, and your family, can be extremely useful during early work in solo-MDMA sessions. This method involves bringing photographs—most often from a family photo album—into a solo-MDMA session and using these photographs as a stimulus to provoke thoughts, feelings and recollections. Photographs of childhood seem to be the most provocative and stimulate the most substantial breakthroughs.
Sometimes it is enough to bring two or three photographs into a session and use these as a basis for meditation and exploration. On other occasions, an entire album can be used as the focus of a session.
Typically, one or two solo-sessions with a photo-album is enough.
The task, then, for many adults, is to re-establish contact with the body. To re-associate feeling with movement and thought with action. Yoga, for the purposes of MDMA Solo work, can be summarized as the process of reconnecting with your body, and the ongoing practice of maintaining that connection.
For the purposes of using yoga in combination with MDMA therapy, you might find that stretching and moving during a session helps you to move through a difficult memory, or to release previously trapped traumatic-affect during somatic-abreaction. A somatic-abreaction is defined as an energetic release from the body that was constrained or restricted during the time at which a significant trauma occurred.
The best approach is to let your body do what it needs to do and stay out of the way. Obviously, caution is advised: No abreaction should threaten your safety and wellbeing, nor should it harm another person or damage the room you are in.
Equally, if you have no formal background in yoga, you may simply wish to move and stretch the body in whatever way feels natural and instinctive during an MDMA session. The key is to trust your body and to experiment.
Again, alcohol, caffeine and other drugs can either be entirely eliminated from your life immediately (or as soon as safely possible).
Almost everyone on Earth at this point in history is fractured and dissociated. Those who are clinically described as multiple-personality simply exhibit the most strong and visible symptoms of a condition that is universal in our broken social landscape.
We are, as humans in the early 21st Century, a global community of split-personalitied, trauma-survivors who spend large amounts of our time denying, covering up or ignoring the gaping contradictions and inconsistencies in what we claim is a whole and integral ‘person’— me.
The first time the human mind encounters a certain type of trauma, a category for that type of experience appears to be created in the mind.
Rather than ignoring, or counter-attacking these aspects of yourself, The Castalia Foundation recommends that you open a dialogue with them. You are effectively involved in a hostage negotiation with internalized protector-persecutor introjects. These introjects are part of you, and, deep-down, these aspects of the psyche want acceptance; even acknowledgement that they have done their part to protect you but are no longer needed.
The Castalia Foundation has found that the strongest indicator of a person's success in self-healing with MDMA is their tolerance for things to feel temporarily worse before they get a lot, lot better.
Are you taking MDMA to connect and heal yourself; to confront pain and shadow, and to bring light into yourself and the world around you. Or are you seeking temporary bliss; an escape? Provided your heart steps with each beat closer towards the child within, we see no reason to fear MDMA.