Psychedelics, Integration, Addiction & Light Therapy w/ Gina Boyd
Show notes
Gina Marie Boyd is back.
Gina does psychedelic integration and is finishing a PhD in transpersonal counseling. She is also a recovering addict who used every day for twenty years, ran a company into the ground, nearly overdosed, and got sober in 2017 as an experiment to see what would happen. That combination is why this conversation goes where it goes.
Her argument is that the trip is not the healing. The research is starting to say the same thing: what makes a psychedelic experience therapeutic isn’t the experience, it’s what you decide it meant afterward. Which means a weekend in the jungle and a flight home is not a treatment plan. She’s blunt about what she sees instead — people drinking ayahuasca a hundred times and calling it medicine, people in recovery relapsing under the cover of healing, and abuse at retreat centers that she thinks women in particular need to know about.
So she mostly doesn’t use psychedelics with clients. She uses a lamp. It’s called the Lucia light, built by a neurologist and a psychiatrist in Austria, and you lie under it with your eyes closed while it flickers. People report colors, shapes, sacred geometry, and sometimes a full psychedelic-scale experience. On the EEG the everyday mental noise drops and everything underneath it comes up. A consciousness researcher at the University of Sussex is now using the same lamp to study how the brain builds reality in the first place. And you can drive home afterward.
We get into our own difficult trips, which were both bad in instructive ways. Gina’s sorrow that felt too big to be her own, and the threshold she refused to walk through. Mine, which happened when I was postpartum and probably shouldn’t have happened at all.
And then it turns into something we weren’t expecting: five months without drinking, what you do when you realize all your fun was attached to the drinking, and why Zach says believing in any of this takes more courage than deciding none of it is real.
A note before you listen: there’s honest talk in here about addiction, recovery, sexual assault and pregnancy loss. Take care of yourself.
Listen to our first episode with Gina on integrative health if you haven't yet.
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