3 Tools To Help You Prepare For, Enhance, And Integrate Your Next Psychedelic Trip

The drugs themselves may still be federally illegal, but demand for all things psychedelic has increased dramatically over the last five years, creating a rich environment for ancillary goods and services.

From integration journals to specialized courses and apps that will track your psychedelic-assisted therapy sessions, there is no shortage of products and offerings to support journeyers through the psychedelic experience. Here are three different tools that could be used to prepare for, enhance, and integrate your next psychedelic trip.

Lumenate, the app that uses the flashlight on your phone to induce altered states

If you’ve never had a psychedelic experience before, the idea of being in an altered state for several hours might seem daunting. Thanks to the founders of the Lumenate app, you can now induce an altered state using something you carry around in your pocket: your smartphone.

When engineers Jay Conlon and Tom Galea quit their jobs designing future concept vehicles at Jaguar Land Rover, they set out to use their skills to build something meaningful. “We really wanted to focus in and look at how we could help people go and grow through personal growth cycles, and we became fascinated by this idea of exploring your mind,” says Conlon.

“We saw that if we could safely, scientifically, and accessibly create a tool that would help people explore their minds, that it could potentially be a valuable product to a lot of people.”

The two spent significant time studying altered states and technologies that could help facilitate them until they found one that stood out: sensory entrainment. Sensory entrainment is when a sensory input—say, a flashing light—causes neurons in the brain to fire in response. If the input is repeated, the neurons will adjust and synchronize to the rhythm of the input.

Conlon and Galea discovered that by influencing the rhythm of neurons, the brain can be guided into a desired state. They leveraged this technology to build an app that uses the flashlight on a smartphone in conjunction with unique voice-guided soundtracks to induce altered states. Psychedelic psychotherapists from Imperial College London helped Conlon and Galea to write the scripts, which explore themes around relaxation, better sleep, and internal exploration. The Lumenate app also includes a journal feature where users can take notes after completing a session.

The engineers opted to build the technology into an app so that it could be accessible for everyone, according to Galea: “Accessibility is one of the fundamental struggles we see within the world of exploring your own mind, whether that’s meditation, which may take years and years to get to a position where you’re able to effectively practice, or the psychedelic psychotherapy world, where it's either illegal or prohibitively expensive for an awful lot of people.”

Lumenate is in collaboration with researchers at Freie Universität Berlin and Imperial College London to explore the neural mechanisms underlying the app’s functionality as an easy way to induce a semi-psychedelic altered state of consciousness. If you plan on giving it a try, expect kaleidoscopic closed-eye visuals and feelings of increased relaxation and insightfulness.

Magi Ancestral, nootropic supplements based on a secret Zoroastrian elixir

Inspired by a secret Zoroastrian elixir derived from sacred plant medicine, the two founders of a nootropic supplement brand have created a line of products to help facilitate meditation, lucid dreaming, better sleep, and neuroprotection.

When Shauheen Etminan, Ph.D. and Jonathan Lu founded Magi Ancestral Supplements, they wanted to understand the legacy plant medicine of their Eastern ancestors, the Zoroastrian Priests of Ancient Persia and the Doaist Shamans of Imperial China. They began “a pharmacological search into the past” with the intention of developing a modern-day equivalent, according to Etminan.

“Zoroastrianism is a non-Abrahamic religion and it’s all about ethics, and more importantly, about mental health. It’s a religion that relates to a state of mind,” he adds. Some of the states of mind described in ancient Zoroastrian texts “were induced by a mixture of chemical compounds called haoma, which was taken ritualistically, and only by elites,” says Etminan.

The ingredients in this ancient elixir have long remained a mystery. With a background in plant extraction and pharmaceutical drug development, the Magi team set out to determine which plants may have been present in the ritualistic brew and landed on espand, also known as Syrian rue (Peganum harmala). This sacred plant has a high concentration of active alkaloids known as beta-carbolines, a class of naturally occurring, unscheduled organic compounds with psychoactive and neuroprotective properties.

Beta-carbolines are monoamine oxidase inhibitors, or MAOIs, meaning they inhibit the production of a chemical in the body called monoamine oxidase. This chemical removes neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine from the brain. This can be problematic for people suffering from mental health conditions such as depression, who already experience low levels of these neurotransmitters. (This is why MAOIs are sometimes used to treat depression.)

To create supplements safe for regular consumption, Etminan and Lu’s team extracted and purified espand’s beta-carbolines and removed any associated toxic compounds. Then they tested the supplements on willing volunteers, using brain scans to observe which networks were being activated.

Among Magi’s line of supplements, each one delivers what Etminan calls either a microdose or “minidose” of beta-carbolines, for a mild experience that he says can help “slow down the monkey mind” during a meditation, bring about more vivid dreams, and even improve one’s sleep. For obvious reasons, Magi can’t recommend the use of its supplements with psilocybin, but that hasn’t stopped more experienced psychonauts like Paul Austin from giving it a try. (Read about his experience here.)

Enosis, VR technology for experiential psychedelic integration

When psychedelic researchers Agnieszka Sekula and Dr. Prash Puspanathan began studying psychedelic-assisted therapy, they made a very astute observation: the scalable therapeutic model of treatment is not optimal, and the optimal therapeutic model—one they believe requires therapy to be more experiential—is not scalable.

“With psychedelic therapy, you have just one psychedelic experience that you use to try and generate a whole bunch of material. Then you take all of that and you try and process it back into a cognitive talk therapy framework, rather than turning the entire process into an experience, which we take as the ultimate model,” says Puspanathan, a medical doctor and former neuropsychiatry fellow at The Alfred Hospital in Melbourne.

He and Sekula, a scientist with background in biomedical engineering and medical imaging, founded Enosis Therapeutics with the goal of making psychedelic-assisted therapy “more emotional and embodied” by turning it into an experience, rather than a conversation, using virtual reality.

“Psychedelic therapy unfortunately has been squeezed into the pre-existing therapeutic framework that is very talk therapy-based, and it’s very cognitive and analytical,” says Sekula.

“It was the specific properties of the immersive experience that led us to believe that VR might be a good candidate to provide support for the psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy framework.”

By exposing users to VR scenarios throughout the therapeutic process, the therapy also becomes part of the psychedelic experience, she says. “We’re expanding the psychedelic experience, so it’s not just the dosing session, but also the preparation and integration sessions, providing cohesion and unifying all the sessions which, at the moment, exist in silos.”

Using a VR headset loaded with one of Enosis’ four products, a user is guided through different interactive landscapes. AnchoringVR, for example, is a platform that allows a user to record, revisit, and listen to insights from their journey using their own voice.

“One of the critical functions of the scenario is to essentially serve as a multi-sensory canvas onto which patients can express themselves, but also to record insights permanently, so they have what we call a memory library of their psychedelic session,” says Sekula.

While Enosis’ VR products were inspired by psychedelic-assisted therapy, Puspanathan says he hopes to see their technology used in other therapeutic settings, too.

“We see this as a psychotherapeutic tool, and we would like to see it being used by different psychotherapists who work with different frameworks,” he says. “We believe that tech can play a role in making the experiential model more scalable.”

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