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Kyle Buller: Death, Psychedelics and Holotropic States

Medicine for These Times with Beth Weinstein
Medicine for These Times with Beth Weinstein
Episode • Jun 1, 2021 • 1h 7m

Kyle Buller is the Co-Founder and Director of Training and Clinical Education of Psychedelics Today, an online media and education platform exploring the therapeutic potential of psychedelics.

Kyle's interest in exploring non-ordinary states of consciousness began at the age of 16 when he suffered a traumatic snowboarding accident. After this near-death experience, Kyle’s life changed dramatically. Kyle subsequently earned his B.A. in Transpersonal Psychology from Burlington College, where he focused on studying the healing potential of non-ordinary states of consciousness by exploring shamanism, Reiki, local medicinal plants and plant medicine, Holotropic Breathwork, and psychedelic psychotherapy. Kyle has been studying Dreamshadow Transpersonal breathwork with Lenny and Elizabeth since October 2010.

Kyle earned his M.S. in clinical mental health counseling with an emphasis in somatic psychology from Prescott College. Kyle’s clinical background in mental health consists of working with at-risk teenagers in crisis and with individuals experiencing an early episode of psychosis and providing counseling to undergraduate/graduate students in a university setting.

Topics discussed on this episode...

  • Kyle's incredible story of how a near death experience as a teenager ultimately led him to psychedelics
  • Kyle's psycho-spiritual struggles coming back to the mundane after his near death experience
  • How a psilocybin experience at age 19 helped provide some answers and inspired Kyle to formally study non-ordinary states of consciousness during his university years
  • The influence of Stanislav Grof's work on the healing potential of psychedelics and holotropic breathwork
  • How Psychedelics Today got started and created some of the first online resources for integration, both thorough the podcast and online courses
  • The challenge that because we don't live in a culture that provides a framework for transformative psychedelic experiences, there's a tendency for people to get so inspired that they rush into work as a facilitator, coach, etc. before sufficiently integrating their own experiences
  • The shadow side of people rushing into psychedelic entrepreneurship
  • Issues around scaling psychedelic assisted therapies – what happens when you create a more capitalistic model of mental health which may lack preparation and integration support and safe containers for people experiences of both spiritual emergence and 'spiritual emergency'?
  • Psychedelics and death – do we need to wait until the end of out lives to develop a relationship with our death, or can psychedelics help us?
  • The importance of being in alignment - we have no idea when our time is going to come
  • How somatic work plays into psychedelic integration
  • The seed metaphor of integration: bringing the seed of insight back and planting and tending to it as it grows towards the light of the sun
  • Psychedelics as disruptive technologies that are disrupting the way we view mental health and mental healthcare

Resources

psychedelicstoday.com
settingsunwellness.com

In-depth interview with Kyle about his near death experience on The Thought Room Podcast with Hallie Rose

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