How to Help Someone Having a Bad Trip

Life is a Festival #113: Solocast

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I am always available for psychedelic service. When I am called to serve, there’s nowhere I’d rather be than sitting calmly beside someone going through the challenging journey known colloquially as a "bad trip."

I recently had the opportunity to offer psychedelic peer support, also called "trip sitting," at a party. Although I’ve covered trip sitting before in episodes with Sara Gael of MAPS’ Zendo Project and the TeaFaerie, a legendary tripsitter, I thought it would be instructive to share a story of my firsthand experience of offering peer support in the wild.

If you’d like to learn more about trip sitting, I highly recommend the Zendo Project which offers trainings, and the Fireside Project, the first ever psychedelic peer support hotline (dial 62-FIRESIDE). If you’d like to hear more about my own background and the history of psychedelic peer support, check out the article I wrote about Zendo and trip sitting back in 2015 called I Did Psychedelic First Aid at a Festival in Costa Rica.

May we all have opportunities to serve and be served. The psyche you calm… may be your own.