Trip Sitting: the Art and Science of Holding Psychedelic Space by Julian Vayne

Readers of my various writings will almost certainly be the kind of people who are familiar with Julian’s work. Over the decades, he has successfully cultivated a clear, engaging and approachable style of writing about esoteric topics, shuffled together in inspiring new ways. This book is no exception. 

It is a book whose time has come. Although psychedelics are still illegal in many countries, including the stupid and backward UK, many people use them. (As David Nutt's 2009 report on the objective harmfulness of a range of recreational drugs showed, mushrooms are massively less dangerous than alcohol. Of course, Prof Nutt was sacked for revealing actual truths about drugs; truth was considered to be 'sending the wrong message'). 

People use psychedelics for a variety of reasons and goals, and this book is about inward-focused practice, the eyes-closed, music-on-headphones kind of trip. Julian sets the scene, discussing the venue, the construction and use of playlists, and, crucially, the metaphors that are presented to the tripper: it's not all trauma recovery, ok? Then the ethics of the sitter, the appropriateness of ritual gestures and pre-trip preparation, with examples of questionnaires and preparatory letters. 


Some techniques for empathizing with the tripper are familiar from Connected Breathwork, such as unobtrusively pacing the client's breathing patterns. This was one of the things that made me realise that sitting a CBW client was a transpersonal space, and of course this applies to trip sitting too. 

There are some nice turns of phrase. One I particularly like is: 'the perfect is the enemy of the good.' And 'trip envy’: Yes! remember that every journey is unique, and may have far more going on than you initially thought. 

There’s some great advice about how to gain sitter experience by going to festivals and volunteering in the tricky trips tent. 

The suggestion that the traveller might wish to relax with a film at the end of a trip, a film with 'ambient, beautiful … content' reminded me of the few months in my youth when I'd take acid every Saturday, often ending up at a good friend's place for the late night season of Hammer horror films. I learned a lot about archetypal patterns in film on those crazy nights, though it was years before I could articulate them. 

Buy this book if you have any interest in the human art of trip sitting. 




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