Welcome to 30 Days of Psychedelics!

I have recently gotten a bit obsessed / addicted to 30 day challenges. Since the start of Corona, I have completed the following:

• 30 days of cold showers 
• 3x 30 days of yoga (thanks Adrienne!)
• 30 day digital detox
• 30 days of speaking to a new person
• 30 days of no alcohol
• 30 days of no smoking weed
• 30 days of both no alcohol & smoking weed

I love the 30 day challenge and have decided to go for my biggest and most daring yet. Writing and publishing an article on Maps Of The Mind for 30 days in a row.

From the 1st to the 30th July, I will publish a new article here each and every day, on the theme of psychedelics.

The prospect of this is quite scary to me and I know it will be a stretch experience. It feels edgy, and that is why I’d like to take it on. One of my personal growth heroes and mentors (if I can call someone that who I’ve never met?) Steve Pavlina introduced me to this idea that a good growth challenge should feel a little scary, like its almost out of reach, for it to be a real stretch goal. And I have to agree. It also makes life exciting.

So this is an orientation and introduction post to my 30 days of Psychedelics, what I’m calling PSYJuly.

If you were hoping this was going to be a blog series about someone taking psychedelics for 30 days in a row, well sorry to disappoint, though I hope it will be as enlightening and mind expanding as that would be, whilst also being slightly more practical and more sanity prevailing and reality holding for myself.

Intentions

Upon embarking a new course of learning or growth, I like to set intentions. This is something that I’ve picked up from psychedelic work, the Power Of Awareness Mindfulness Course I am nearing completion of, and Steve’s Pavlina’s Character Sculpting course which I started in January this year. So I have decided to take the opportunity of this post to write out my intentions and to share them with you.

My intentions for PsyJuly are:

• to cultivate and embrace the experimenter/explorer mindset and overcome debilitating perfectionism.
• to be pushed to think differently about how I create
• to evolve my relationship with and how I tap in to inspiration, channel it, and express it in the outer world as form that can be shared with others.
• to develop a clearer flow from inception of an idea to expression of it

In the long term, this will enable me to publish more frequently and share more, thus creating more ripples and having a larger positive influence on the world.  If I am able to share more, this will enable me to do more of my original intention when creating Maps of the Mind:

to share my experiences, to pass on ideas and resources that I enjoy or have been useful to me, and to share my thoughts, some of which I hope can inspire others.

To that I’d like to now add:
and have a positive influence on the world.

To those intentions I’d like to add:

• to explore my own thoughts on the topic of Psychedelics. After years in and around the psychedelic world/community and approaching a decade of personal practice, it will be a great chance for me to assess where I’m at on my journey.
• to present myself and my thoughts without over-editing. To use the challenge and awkward feelings I encounter as a practice in openness and honesty.

The challenge won’t enable me to get in to my over editing ways. So, prepare to see a rawer, unedited version of John!

The rules of the game

To publish one post each and every day for 30 consecutive days,
on the theme of Psychedelics.

Day 1 : July 1st.
Day 30 : July 30th.

Click publish on each post by midnight CET time.

That’s it. The rules outside of this are loose. The post could be:
a text post, a video post, an audio post, a post linking to other resources, a list post etc. There is no lower word limit (generation of words is not something I need to work on); the key is clicking ‘publish’ each and every day. I am allowed to create more than one post per day and save them for other days so I can have a day off. I may also use previously written but as yet unpublished material that is knocking around on my computer. Guest posts are also fine, so long as I write some kind of intro or outro for it myself.

What to expect / What I’d Like to Cover

My Experience as:

• a psychedelic practitioner
• a guide/facilitator
• a retreat organiser

Tips & Practical Info:

• How to make the most of sessions
• Mindset
• Tools
• Session/Protocol creation
• DIY Resources
• Preparation
• Navigation
• Integration
• Supporting Practices
• Magic in psychedelic practice (AKA psychology, consciousness hacking, self programming, de-conditioning and re-conditioning)
• Ritual
• Non-psychedelic consciousness enhancers

My Thoughts & Perspective on

• How psychedelics play in to change on individual and collective level
• Their role in our species development at this time; psycho / activism, problem solving (collectively we are facing some pretty huge problems at this time), community building.
• The psychedelic movement and its shadow side

My Favourite & Recommended Psychedelic Things

• Books
• Films
• Influencers/figures
• Articles
• Music
• Websites
• Resources

…and potential for many more. Let’s see how much of that I can cover!

Psychedelics are something that I feel I could write and explore forever about, so the potential for ideas is not something I am worried about at all. Ideas are not something I am short of and writers block, in the sense of not knowing what to write, is never an issue. My block, or greatest Resistance, is my over-perfectionism, which can at times lead to an unhealthy obsessiveness. So this is the challenge and block that I am focused on overcoming.

I hope you will join me on this journey and hopefully in the process glean some insight, useful information… and enjoy the ride. I am excited! If you know of someone else who may enjoy, please share and I hope that this can spark some debate and continue to push the psychedelic movement forwards. I also invite you to speak about psychedelics a little more during the upcoming month, with whoever you like. I hope that this series will be able to provide some fuel for those conversations.

Perhaps you have one final question….

Why Psychedelics?

I’ll answer that tomorrow 😉 See you then!