I don't have any evidence of this but I stronly suspect that doing regular meditation will reduce the chance of bad trips or atleast let you deal with them much better. I'm saying this in case someone decides to experiment with DMT or other halucinogens, you should seriously consider trying meditation as a prerequisite.
Just general health is a good prerequisite. I always liked to have a center/grounding focus for a trip if it starts to go off kilter. Back in High school I would use my world of warcraft character alot. That definitely seems dumb and not at all spiritual on reflection, but it would help ground me and lighten the mood (also he was a badass warrior so it was just cool to think about).
'The Mind Illuminated' by Culadasa aka John Yates is an excellent guide.
It takes you gently through 10 stages, from just beginning all the way up to Enlightenment (for some definition of Enlightenment). It thoroughly covers all bases without any mumbo jumbo.
It does however require you to ramp up your practice to at least an hour daily if you want to make the most of it. Personally I found this a little daunting at first, but now that I 'get it' I am actually really motivated to put in the time and I am getting a lot out of it.
The Mindful Geek (http://a.co/egwKvoo) could be a good starting point for the HN crowd. I'm about halfway through it and I enjoy the no-frills explanations of various meditation techniques.
In my experience, the most difficult part is keeping the practice in my daily routine. Just like with exercise, it's easier to absorb it into your lifestyle if you have a coach or a group of people with which you regularly train.
My reasoning: The idea of energy in the body is a very general concept that many different traditions have discovered independently (prana and qi are examples). Most people scoff at the concept but if you progress far in yoga or martial arts the metaphor makes sense and from a western perspective cells need energy to do their thing and that energy requires oxygen, nutrition and blood flow or some means of travel. The better your bodily awareness the more you can feel if a part of your body is cut off from the flow of energy.
Anyway to make a long story short nadishodana is a meditation practice designed to clean the "nadis" or energy channels in the body. Any psychadelic will greatly improve your bodily awareness to the point you will hallucinate vision of your energy flow. Ayahuasca especially helps with cleaning your body and breaking blocks in the energy flow, the more it has to clean the more you will need to change and the "trip" will be more hardcore.
I base this line of reasoning on anecdotal experience with using microdoses of psychadelics along with meditation to treat swelling after exercise and from having tried Ayahuasca and DMT before.
Are you accounting for confirmation bias in your anecdotal experiences?
There is no "western" perspective, there is only reality and falsehoods. Whilst I am a proponent of meditation and mental health, I don't think prana or qi exist as real physical entities in the real world because their presence has not been detected in reproducible, controlled settings.
There are many religions in the world, all of them false when scrutinized through the lens of science and reason. The whole concept of life energy is not grounded in reality based on the available evidence (or lack of evidence).
When I say western perspective I'm talking about the words I'm using not some different world... i.e. "cells need nutrition" ... but in meditation I feel a lot of the progress is changing your understanding of what it means to breathe. I kept (unwillingly) redefining the word until it had essentially became synonymous with the concept of "running lines of energy" (to whichever body part I wish to breath into).
Ultimately these words (prana, life energy, qi) are just metaphors to assist you with your own bodily awareness (so they are subjective) and maybe if you are some expert these metaphors can work for deciphering the body of someone else but trying to relate them to some object is not going to work. What I wish to say is that I don't consider these concepts to be objective truths in the same way I don't consider stories to be objective truths. However it does not impede my ability to learn from them.
Objective science is great for physics and is constantly improving our understanding of the human body as a machine but as individuals living in these machines we must also conduct our own subjective science, experimenting with our behavior to find how best to care for our unique body, mind and soul (a dubious concept at best but I like the rhythm of naming all three).
There is no "subjective science". I am very passionate about science and have a problem with anyone trying to construe something that is not science as science. Science is evidence based reasoning. Anything else is not science, call it whatever you want.
I don't want to push you towards any specific practice, but I'd highly encourage you to find the time to do a full retreat that gets you away from your daily routine, computing devices and other distractions. The first retreat I did was almost 2 weeks and I felt palpable withdrawal symptoms until the end of the 4th day when I started to become more calm and able to focus on the meditation. Not everyone feels similar, but I'd recommend against anything one week or shorter because I feel it doesn't give you the time to get in the right headspace to experience the benefits of meditation.
Shorter retreats can be beneficial to experienced meditators who practice on a regular basis and can make the most of a quick, intense period of meditation. But for beginners, it's not enough time to shake you free of your life and let you truly focus.
Shell out some money for a mindfulness course instead for a more professional, guided course instead of apps. We bought some CDs from our instructor (in our native language) as well and ripped them to MP3 residing on our mobile devices. So we don't have to resort to suboptimal apps, which have privacy implications. YMMV really.
a lot of apps are helpful to get you started, but a general example of meditation is being comfortable in good posture while focusing on deep, slow, and calm breaths.
The main goal of meditation is to think of absolutely nothing, and focus in the present.
I always have heard the goal of meditation is not to 'think of nothing' but if a thought enters your mind observe it and let it pass. By 'trying to not think of anything' you are actually thinking of doing just that.
Correct, the way to deal with thoughts and emotions during mindfulness or meditation is non-judgmental acceptance, not with opposing, denying, fighting.
Interestingly, I've been reading that traumatic/bad trips are actually the most healing because they often reveal inner, subconscious struggles and repressed feelings that haven't been adequately dealt with.
There is potential for healing, yes. But what comes up needs to be integrated and dealt with appropriately .. if not, it can mess up things quite a bit.
> doing regular meditation will reduce the chance of bad trips or at least let you deal with them much better.
Perhaps, but meditation as it is often practiced by lay people is one of convenience. That is, this is pleasant, I'll sit for an hour, but not more, because that would become unpleasant (to my knees and back). I don't think this kind of practice does anything to prepare you for the rigors of deep psychedelic experience, where control and choice go completely out the window whether you like it or not.
A one week meditation retreat, with 14 1-hour sittings per day, however (i.e. Vipasana, Zen, etc. style retreats), that will help for sure, though I suspect none but meditation masters can emerge unscathed from the psychedelic deep dive.
