My practice and life are quite different from yours, but I still appreciate hearing about your experience. I'm more into strong oral doses once a month.
I'd like to hear how you manage your practice and everyday life. I guess family and your highly structured (disciplined) approach help you to stay grounded.
How about a powerful, mind-shattering dose and coming back to this reality? What helped you the most to maintain everyday use?
You sound sane and coherent, so I guess you're doing it the right way for you. In my case, I agree with
@blig-blug and would need a stable, mindful base first of all.
We're all so different and somehow the same. Apes are strange creatures, and our minds are infinitely fascinating.
I have not done oral DMT ever. It is something that interests me, as does DMTx, I would love to try both, but they have not been in the cards. As I mentioned before, time is always the great enemy, so longer trips are difficult.
As for managing the day to day, I should mention that I do this in the very early morning, before anybody in the house wakes. I go into the basement family room. I purposefully set asdide 30-60 minutes just for me, just for this. I do not ever go past 6am. If for some reason I don't think I will be able to finish in time, I skip a day. Being pressed for time is never a good entry point. Immediately after, I do my morning routine, the basics; shower, teeth, all that shiz. Usually as I am on the can, I do my 1st verbal journal recording. Immediate recollections. No details, on purpose. I note launch and puff times, amounts, large scale memories, emotions and any somatics. Any ''details'' I leave out for a reason. then, after the morning stuff, I will re-read my report, and allow my mind to access any other large scale info. I note it. I then get to the tasks of getting the family up, prepping the lunches and all that good stuff. This is grounding exercise numero uno of the day. Nothing like arguing ''tuna or ham sandwich???'' to set you back on the straight and narrow!! ahahah When I am in the car on my way to work, I then journal my details. not before. And I purposefully leave out any and all ''meaning'', I am not interested in meaning, but in phenomenology. What did I actually see, hear, feel, etc., In what order, where in the journey etc. It is usually during the drive that I will get the AI to compare and contrast todays experience with the database; any themes recurring, any 1st time experiences, any open question from past journal entries that have been answered, adressed, contradicted etc, this is the part i really use AI for. If during that time I have an idea for a post of a chapter of the book, I will then work on it in the car, bouncing ideas off of GPT in voice mode, often I put it in /redman mode which makes it look for counter-argumants to anything I say. I want to have holes punched in my ideas. I will have it check the literature as well for any studies relating to my subject of the day, etc. This is my creative time. Alone in the car.
I tend to then go about my day, without giving too much thought to the morning session. If there are insights to integrate, they pop up on their own, I do not chase them. My work is very demanding, so I don't have time to 'linger' on my trip all day. On my way home, sometimes I will have GPT re-read me all the mornings content, sometimes I just blast some drum and bas at ludicrous levels and enjoy the ride. I go on vibe. After work, is the regular family routine again, food, homework, showers, taxiing to basketball etc. All this keeps me very tied to reality as well. Encouraging your kids with screams of 'Defense, take that ball away, take that ball away, defeeeeense'' keeps you right in the'' this is real'' zone. Grounding routine number 2. I meditate for a good half hour at night, before going to bed, when evertyone else is off to their rooms. It is this meditation in which I try and revisit, from entry to exit, my entire trip. This is the last journal entry of the day, if I have anything to add.
Now, the business.....My large doses, I do not do that alone. So I will usually, on those days, not drink or smoke anything., I tend to eat more veg on those days as well. I go to my friend's house for the full boat trips. We go in in shifts. Either him or me 1st, no set pattern. I sit for him, he sits for me. Sometimes, if we are doing big trips followed by repeated top ups and state returns, we will both be in at once, but only after we know the state has settled for the other, and we are safe to both go in. We each have our own rigs, so there is no passing anything around while deemzed. For large doses, sometimes if we are one after the other, I will let out the occasional word or idea, and my buddy notes it. It may be something like 'Grey corridor'' or ''Place holder entity on my back right'' or 'collapse at upper exhibit, coherence gate adjacent, missed the transition'' these shout outs are usually the 1st bits I will add to the journal. For large trips, the insights are usually not as clear cut as with the morning sessions, but with practice I can now usually recall 80-90% of the trip in detail. I still have some issues remembering the exact entry posture, or that precise moment I go from 'here' to 'there', what I call 'the blink', it is one of the things I am currently working on. Recall of that exact moment is mercurial at best. I am using finger postions in an attempt to add a somatic recall aspect. Still working on that....Not there yet
Now my large doses are not as 'scheduled' as my daily. I tend to go in when I feel called, or when I have specific practices from my daily sessions that I want to test in the full field experience. or when I just have a free night, which is not all the time! I would say that these days, it is around once every couple of weeks. The large trips also fuel the daily sessions' content. and vice versa, the morning sessions train for the big runs. They act together. A lot of content from the big trips come back in the dailies, and allow me to more fully digest them. The daily sessions are a way to more fully integrate the big ones. I have a saying ''Notice what changed on Tuesday, not what you saw on Saturday.'' I work with what actually happened in the trip, and place my focus on integration afterwards, not what I saw, but how it is living in me right now.
I have never had any issues with losing my grounding, or derealization, or losing touch with reality. Whatever words you prefer.
So really, for me, thedaily sessions are a form of meditation. A daily, deep, and very fulfilling meditation. My big runs, like you all, can be powerful, insightful, religious, intense,....but they are rarely difficult anymore. I can navigate the space better.
I don't know if that answered your question. if not, lemme know.
Q