The Scourge of Anxiety – Rapamycin Longevity News

Related

Share

Get liquid culture or spores and grow your own psilocybin mushrooms. Lots of books, YouTube videos & on-line resources about how to do this.




2 Likes

You need to find a proper meditation teacher – I mentioned Zen meditation as it is easily accessible and I prefer it compared to a lot of the “mindfulness” meditation that’s out there. There should be no anxiety with a properly instructed or guided meditation as there is nothing to get right or wrong – if you can breathe, you can meditate. I do think it would help anyone with anxiety – I’ve seen it work on multiple individuals with deep levels of anxiety. It rewires the brain in a way that I don’t think is possible with meds. I’m not discounting the use of meds prescribed by a professional – they can be very beneficial to certain conditions but they do come with side effects and imo don’t address the root cause. Best of luck to you.

Indeed. This is very easy and very low risk if done smartly. The risk-benefit analysis is very positive considering the potential for life-changing benefits.

I also think the need for a combining psychedelics with an experienced guide / therapist is overblown. Get a test kit and measure the psilocybin content of your mushrooms so that you know exactly how much your are taking. Start with low doses to get a feel for things, and slowly build up to infrequent, therapeutic doses in the range of 25mg psilocybin. A largish dose like this will actually trigger some anxiety during the experience, and this is normal and transient. In the weeks and months after the experience, you may find that your default mode network (the brain circuitry responsible for anxiety) has calmed down substantially. Doing a large dose like this once or twice has been shown to have durable benefits on mental health outcomes. Alternatively, many find microdosing to be helpful, but there is a lot less in the clinical literature to support it. There is a much lower risk of a difficult experience that way.

My wife tried that about six years ago. Made her own spores. It did not work out. But maybe six years later the instructions are better…

Proper teacher is the rub. I have used acupuncture for pain and there are good and not-so-good acupuncturists (even here in Manhattan). It’s as much art as science. But it is worth researching.

There has been an explosion in online vendors selling liquid culture syringes, which are much easier for a beginner to work with than spores. Basically, this is a syringe with live mycelium growing in media. Using this eliminates the need for spores to germinate and mate, cutting the time for initial growth and reducing the chances of infection.

These are technically illegal in most states, but no one seems to care enough to shut it down.

My wife is the expert here. I will ask her to re-investigate magic mushrooms.

In my family we have high histamine. It has been a serious problem for my wife and 2 of the kids. They are all very high achievers and maybe the anxiety helps? In any case when it gets away you have to get it under control. There are diets that will tell you what to eat to avoid histamine. It can be tested but there are several tests and it’s very easy to do it wrong. There is a book:Nutrient Power (heal your biochemistry and heal your brain). And there is a company that gives the tests recommended in the book and consults about the test results. Off the top of my head I think it’s Mensa Medical in Chicago.

The book is cheap and the diet isn’t too bad, you can read on the internet and probably hack your way through on the cheap. Good Luck,

Why are you averse to SSRIs and benzos?

Is not Zen the most purely mindful meditation? Please elaborate on how you define Zen versus mindfulness meditation, so that we can see the difference you may mean to emphasize clearly.



1 Like

Good question – the term mindfulness gets thrown around a lot and is used in different contexts. What I was referring to are the mindfulness folks who teach you to be mindful of what you are doing – meaning be fully paying attention to this or that – whatever it is you are doing or they are having you do (in meditation or otherwise). Zazen – Zen meditation is concerned with observing the self – i.e. the one who is being mindful. A lot of the way mindfulness is taught only reinforces the perspective of self and does not lead you to no-self. No-self is the goal of Zazen and no-self is not mindful as the term is used these days. No-self is pure awareness – pure consciousness.



1 Like

so, mindful is fully concentrating on one thing, while Zen is fully concentrating on one thing, which happens to be the self, which however does not exist? :smile::joy:
Zen for beginners is also breathing, and then it is a long path, via open monitoring, toward deep contemplation, toward a non mysterious understanding of no-self. For people with depression or anxiety, start with mindfulness and breathing, because jumping to the “darker” (profound) Zen stages unprepared might just increase anxiety, darkness, existential doom, suicidal ideation.

“ while Zen is fully concentrating on one thing, which happens to be the self, which however does not exist?” Not quite – as we say in Zen, the minute we open our mouths to describe it, we’re wrong :blush:. You are not concentrating in Zazen – quite the opposite (though we talk about concentrated mind – it is not the same as concentration in the context you presented). Most Zazen begins with following the breath so there you are correct. As far as going deeper, my belief is your mind won’t take you anywhere that you are not prepared to handle. Also, we don’t say the self doesn’t exist (this is broadly misunderstood) – it’s just that the belief that there is a permanent (persistent), abiding self (an agent) is a delusion. The liberation of no-self promotes deep gratitude and a reverence for all life – I can’t imagine it would lead to suicidal ideation but this is beyond my expertise. If you are in that sort of condition, you should be under the care of a professional – Zen is not a substitute for psychotherapy or psychiatry but it can be a useful adjunct imo. In fact, quite a lot of the students in my Sangha are therapists :wink:



2 Likes

That “the path” leads to where many cannot handle it and become depressed or religious or suicidal is a wisdom found by many a sage. Perhaps you did not go there yet?
Also, if something cannot be defined properly, if we cannot talk about it except for all attempts leading to confronting delusions, well then that thing cannot meaningfully be said to exist. That self, like the “real world” (“real” as in the seemingly counterfactual definiteness of the physical), do not exist! The illusions exist.