First, a warm welcome to my new subscribers who found me through Instagram and asked for my Golden Light practice. If it never reached you, here is the simple 2-minute version I’ve been practicing in the hospital and in rehab for the past several weeks.

You’re joining me at an interesting time.

Five weeks ago, I was enjoying the most privileged of lives. My marriage was thriving, my children were healthy, and at 87 I was doing aerobics seven days a week and lifting weights three days a week.

Everything was coasting, and I was living every single day in what I can only call beatific gratitude.

Then, without warning, life smacked me right in the face.

It turned out that what looked at first like a worn-out right knee was actually a life-threatening bacterial infection – Staphylococcus aureus – that had settled into the joint.

In a single afternoon, I went from total independence to non-ambulatory. I was taken from my home in an ambulance for an immediate surgery at a nearby hospital to clear out the infection, and then helicoptered to Stanford Medical Center for a second major surgery to clear out more of the infection and install a brand-new knee.

For days I lay there with medicines going in and out of my body, watching my leg bloat up with edema, and experiencing massive amounts of pain.

Now I am home, in bed, with my darling wife, Jolee, taking care of me like an angel. I have had a great deal of quiet time to reflect on what it feels like when the doctor suddenly becomes the patient – and what actually carries a person through a season like this.

And for the fourth time in my life, I’m learning how to walk. I learned how to walk as a baby. I learned how to walk after I was run over by a Winnebago and both my legs were crushed. I learned how to walk after my first knee replacement, and I’m going to learn to walk after this knee replacement.

I intend to transmit the lessons of my own healing journey to all of my readers and viewers who wish to consciously direct their own healing process.

Below are the four practices that have made all the difference for me over the past few weeks.

Healing Practice #1. Partnering with the body’s healing from within

When your body is fighting off a serious infection and recovering from surgery, the doctors and the antibiotics are doing essential work on the outside.

What can your mind do on the inside to help them?

When you lie in bed consumed by fear and anxiety, your brain floods your bloodstream with chronic cortisol and stress hormones. The alarm never turns off, and that constant state of emergency wears down the very immune system and cellular repair machinery your body needs to mend.

We still do not know every mechanism of how the mind influences recovery, but there are decades of research showing that patients who actively direct their mental state – maintaining calm, expectation, and a determination to get stronger – give their bodies a very different chemical environment in which to heal.

Whenever I have broken bones in my life, I have closed my eyes and pictured golden strands circling the injury, binding it back together.

So throughout this ordeal, I have used the Golden Light exercise I learned at the Esalen Institute more than sixty years ago.

I sit or lie quietly, close my eyes, and let warm golden light fill my head, then travel down my neck, my shoulders, my arms, through my chest and stomach, and right down into my operated leg. Does it replace the surgeon or the antibiotics? Of course not. What it does is take my body out of alarm mode so my immune system and my tissues can do their job in peace.

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Healing Practice #2. Refusing to let the mind predict the future

A hospital room gets very quiet at three in the morning. When you are hurting and weakened, your mind wants to run ahead into next week or next month and predict terrible things.

Yet I have had virtually no anxiety through this entire experience. Even in moments when I knew the infection was life-threatening, I was not scared – because I refused to go into the future and predict my death. In the present moment, there was only the breath I was taking and gratitude for being alive.

First, I used conscious abdominal breathing to keep my emotions steady. Put your left hand over your belly button and your right hand on your chest, and breathe in slowly so only your left hand moves out. Nice and easy does it.

Second, whenever my mind tried to pull me into dark predictions about tomorrow, I started counting numbers slowly in my head: one, two, three, four, five.

If a worry tried to push in, I pushed it right back out and returned to the count. You do not have to debate a frightening thought in the dark. You just take the microphone away from it.

Healing Practice #3. Choosing my attitude from within

Nobody in eleven years of university – a bachelor’s, a master’s, and a doctorate in clinical psychology – ever taught me that my attitude belonged to me.

No external circumstance gets to decide my attitude. Not the infection, not the pain in my right leg, not the hospital room. Every morning before the day begins, I select the attitude I am going to bring to the hours ahead. And any time I feel it slipping in the slightest during the day, I reset it on the spot.

Healing Practice #4. Gratitude, family, and the medicine of connection

Mastering your own mind does not mean doing life alone. The most important thing this month reinforced for me is what it means to have family involved when something serious happens. Without Jolee, Sarana, Evacheska, Aaron, Kathleen, and the rest of my family stepping in and getting me to the right place at the right time, I might not be writing this letter to you today.

And you helped too.

Sending notes out to you and reading your replies while I go through this has been a genuine piece of medicine for me. Connection is a free medicine; when you connect with another human being, it breaks down isolation, alienation, and loneliness on the spot.

So today, please do not just send someone a text message with little fonts on a screen. Pick up the telephone and call a friend. Let them hear your tone of voice. Let them hear your laughter.

Let them hear the voice of your soul.

How to build the reflex before life smacks you

All of the tools I have described here are free. You do not need to buy anything from me to use them; I share them in my videos on Instagram, and I have put short, free PDF guides to each one on my website.

Here is the only catch I have seen across sixty-five years of clinical practice: knowing about a tool is not the same thing as having the skill when a crisis hits.

When life smacks you in the face in a single afternoon, or when you wake up at three in the morning with your heart pounding, you do not rise to the level of an idea you agreed with once. You fall back on whatever you have practiced enough times that your nervous system does it automatically.

Instead of a traditional fifty-minute therapy hour once a week, my method is built on tiny repetitions while the weather is calm: thirty to sixty seconds, five or ten times a day. That is five minutes a day, and over a year it adds up to 3,650 repetitions – until quieting anxiety, shutting off a 3 a.m. loop, and resetting your mood become second nature.

Just before I was hospitalized, I had finished recording the complete skill-training program where I walk you through that entire progression step by step. It is called The Golden Reset – 18 short video lessons spread across 5 modules (plus 5 bonus lessons, guided practice audios, and a workbook). Because the whole program was recorded before my hospitalization, you do not have to wait until I am back on my feet to begin.

I have shared one of the core lessons on the course page so you can watch it for free today. Start there, and practice it once tonight while the room is quiet.

Watch “The 3 a.m. Mind” (Free Lesson)

If you’d like the full course, there are three ways to get it:

Join the Golden Circle, $295 a year. The complete Golden Reset course, my Sunday members-only letters, and a 30-minute private consultation with me as soon as I’m back on my feet.

Join the Golden Circle

Or become an annual member, $80 a year, by November 15. Through November 15, annual membership includes the full Golden Reset course along with a new series of Sunday members-only letters. While my podcast is on hold, I will be putting that time into writing and answering the many questions I receive each week from my Instagram community.

Join for $80 a year

Or get the course on its own for $65, discounted until November 15. I am discounting it because there may be some kinks to work out and I want your feedback. After next week, the price goes up to $95.

Get the course for $65

Golden light,
Dr. Richard Louis Miller.

The 10 Commitments

Available for pre-order soon.

“You have a maintenance manual for your car. Maybe one for your refrigerator. But do you have a health maintenance manual for yourself? Most people don’t.”
– From the introduction to The 10 Commitments

Read the 1st chapter

A Health Maintenance Manual for Living with Purpose, Grace, and Vitality
A practical guide to the daily commitments that support a life of purpose, health, and vitality – drawing on nearly nine decades of life and more than sixty-five years of clinical practice to make the work concrete and usable.

Advance endorsements

“Dr. Richard Miller’s The Ten Commitments is a vital, masterfully crafted guide for anyone seeking to cultivate true vitality, purpose, and grace in their daily life.”

— Robin Carhart-Harris, PhD, Ralph Metzner Distinguished Professor of Neurology, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of California San Francisco

“Richard Miller and I share a lifelong commitment to practicing health. In The 10 Commitments, he brings that dedication to the page through personal stories and simple practices readers can make their own. His affection for life comes through.”

— Christopher Hobbs, PhD, herbalist, mycologist, and author of Christopher Hobbs’s Medicinal Mushrooms

“Richard Miller is living proof of what I have spent my career advocating: how we age is far more within our hands than we might think. The 10 Commitments turns a remarkable life into ten practices readers can begin today.”

— Maddy Dychtwald, co-founder and president of Age Wave; author of Ageless Aging

“Aging well is about more than longevity. It is about vitality, purpose, connection, and remaining open to awe. The 10 Commitments is an inspiring, practical guide to doing just that.”

— Michael Amster, MD, physician and co-author of The Power of Awe

“The 10 Commitments is a practical, engaging guide to living with greater energy, balance, and wisdom. Drawing on a lifetime of experience and memorable stories, Richard Miller offers accessible ways to care for our minds, bodies, and emotional well-being with intention and compassion.”

— Kristin Neff, PhD, author of Self-Compassion and Fierce Self-Compassion

My Other Books

• The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines

• Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear

• Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out

• Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)

• Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances

• Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Some of you have been wondering whether these tools I’ve been offering really work in everyday life.

Do they reduce anxiety?

Do they help calm your emotions?

Can I really “choose my mood” even when everything around me seems to be going wrong?

Well, let me tell you what I’ve been doing from a hospital bed.

Earlier this month, after many decades of loyal service, my right knee gave out. I went to the emergency room, and what followed was a succession of hospitals and procedures – then a fever, and blood pressure that went as high as two hundred.

I was eventually airlifted from Fort Bragg, California to Stanford Medical Center, where my knee was urgently replaced.

In just a few weeks, I went from total independence and exercising every day to needing help with almost everything. Every little movement has been painful. There have been moments when I thought I was facing death.

What have I been doing to stabilize?

First, conscious breathing, just like I teach you.

Second, I direct my mind. I use the Golden Light to create beautiful visual images. I count numbers to give my mind something to do when it wants to run ahead and predict terrible things.

Third, I keep setting my attitude. When I notice it slipping, I reset it. I bring myself back to the moment I’m in, grateful to be alive and grateful to be sharing this experience with you.

As I shared recently in a video (which over 750,000 of you have now watched), every moment – no matter how tough – is better than no moment at all:

I am grateful for the outpouring of love and support from our Mind Body Health & Politics community. I want to show my appreciation by getting back to the work of sharing these tools.

Before all this happened, my team and I had just finished putting the pieces in place for two projects I’ve been preparing for you: a self-paced video course called The Golden Reset, and my forthcoming book, The 10 Commitments – a health maintenance manual for living with resilience.

We have manuals for our cars and refrigerators. Where is the maintenance manual for us? What are we doing each day to maintain our bodies, our emotional state, and our connections with other people?

Those questions have become very immediate for me here in the hospital.

Some would say that I should take this time to ease up on my practice and focus only on recovery.

But for me, keeping forward momentum – however slow or halting – has always been part of my recovery. Because these lessons are already recorded, and the book already written, my team will begin rolling both projects out to you while I remain in rehab.

Stay tuned.

For now, take a few easy, conscious breaths. And make one of those phone calls I keep encouraging you to make. Call a friend instead of sending a text. I’ve been grateful for every opportunity to connect with you.

Golden light,
Dr. Richard Louis Miller

P.S. If you would like to be an early beta-tester of my Golden Reset course, please reply to this email and my producer will follow up with details.

Join beta group

The 10 Commitments

“You have a maintenance manual for your car. Maybe one for your refrigerator. But do you have a health maintenance manual for yourself? Most people don’t.”
– From the introduction to The 10 Commitments

Read the 1st chapter

A Health Maintenance Manual for Living with Purpose, Grace, and VitalityA practical guide to the daily commitments that support a life of purpose, health, and vitality – drawing on nearly nine decades of life and more than sixty-five years of clinical practice to make the work concrete and usable.

Advance endorsements

“Dr. Richard Miller’s The Ten Commitments is a vital, masterfully crafted guide for anyone seeking to cultivate true vitality, purpose, and grace in their daily life.”

— Robin Carhart-Harris, PhD, Ralph Metzner Distinguished Professor of Neurology, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of California San Francisco

“Richard Miller and I share a lifelong commitment to practicing health. In The 10 Commitments, he brings that dedication to the page through personal stories and simple practices readers can make their own. His affection for life comes through.”

— Christopher Hobbs, PhD, herbalist, mycologist, and author of Christopher Hobbs’s Medicinal Mushrooms

“Doctor Richard Louis Miller has a lot of wise things to say about not just surviving, but thriving in these latter years of our one precious life. For those smart enough to listen, you’ll be much happier for it. Read this book men and women and you will have a plethora of take aways, a water fall of cascading droplets which taken as an aggregate sum become a calm lake of opportunity.”

— Charles Durrett, AIA, cohousing architect and author of The Senior Cohousing Handbook

“Richard Miller is living proof of what I have spent my career advocating: how we age is far more within our hands than we might think. The 10 Commitments turns a remarkable life into ten practices readers can begin today.”

— Maddy Dychtwald, co-founder and president of Age Wave; author of Ageless Aging

“Aging well is about more than longevity. It is about vitality, purpose, connection, and remaining open to awe. The 10 Commitments is an inspiring, practical guide to doing just that.”

— Michael Amster, MD, physician and co-author of The Power of Awe

“The 10 Commitments is a practical, engaging guide to living with greater energy, balance, and wisdom. Drawing on a lifetime of experience and memorable stories, Richard Miller offers accessible ways to care for our minds, bodies, and emotional well-being with intention and compassion.”

— Kristin Neff, PhD, author of Self-Compassion and Fierce Self-Compassion

My Other Books

• Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear

• Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out

• Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)

• Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances

• Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

• Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking

Les Jensen could laugh and joke, but he could not get angry. His father was a World War II veteran, jovial most of the time, who could turn to rage in a flash.

Les learned as a boy that showing anger put the whole household at risk.

By 35, Les was working in television and enjoying his life. He was also, in his words, a doormat, and he had no idea.

Les hosts the New Human Living podcast. He had me on his show earlier this year… this time I asked the questions.

I wanted to hear what happened the day his psychiatrist said, “Show me your anger.”

I invite you to listen to our conversation.

You can find Les and his books at newhumanliving.com.

Below, a practice for taking the pressure off.

Golden light,

Dr. Richard Louis Miller

Forthcoming New Book

Resources mentioned

• Les Jensen — newhumanliving.com | Books

• Richard on Les’s show: The Adverse Effects & Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines with Dr. Richard Louis Miller (New Human Living)

My Latest Book

The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines was recently reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies. I was honored by it. Read the review here.

Order Here

A few words from the front of the book:

Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.

— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

Putting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.

— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco

It’s the fifth book in my series on psychedelic medicine. You can find it on Amazon.

My Other Books

• Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear

• Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out

• Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)

• Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances

• Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

• Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking

Roughly one woman in ten has polycystic ovary syndrome, (PCOS), and most of the women who have it do not know it. There is no single test for it because it is diagnosed by ruling everything else out.

Our guest, Céline Hovette, is a Naturopath in Northern France who works with women on their hormonal health. Her new book is Take Control of Your PCOS.

I invited Céline to Mind Body Health & Politics to learn what PCOS is, what its symptoms are, and what a woman can do about it day to day.

I invite you to listen to our conversation, and to share it with a woman you think might have this condition.

Below, a practice I learned at a health exam forty years ago and have given my patients ever since.

Golden light,

Dr. Richard Louis Miller

Forthcoming New Book

Resources mentioned

• Céline Hovette — celinehovette.com | Take Control of Your PCOS

My Latest Book

The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines was recently reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies. I was honored by it. Read the review here.

Order Here

A few words from the front of the book:

Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.

— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

Putting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.

— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco

It’s the fifth book in my series on psychedelic medicine. You can find it on Amazon.

My Other Books

• Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear

• Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out

• Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)

• Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances

• Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

• Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking

Is there still value in knocking on a stranger’s door?

I put that question to our guest, Zee Cohen-Sanchez. She left graduate school in 2016 to work on the Bernie Sanders campaign, ran half of the paid field program on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s first campaign, and now leads National Ground Game, which organizes young voters on college campuses.

I am not a Democrat, and I am not a Republican, but I invited Zee to Mind Body Health & Politics because she believes change comes from people talking to people, so do I. After all, we are tribal animals.

I invite you to listen to our conversation.

Her organization is at nationalgroundgame.com.

Below, a practice for making contact with the people around you.

Golden light,

Dr. Richard Louis Miller

Forthcoming New Book

Resources mentioned

• National Ground Game — nationalgroundgame.com

• The campus tour — unfuckamericatour.com

My Latest Book

The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines was recently reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies. I was honored by it. Read the review here.

Order Here

A few words from the front of the book:

Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.

— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

Putting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.

— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco

It’s the fifth book in my series on psychedelic medicine. You can find it on Amazon.

My Other Books

• Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear

• Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out

• Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)

• Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances

• Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

• Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking

Can a person who once drank a fifth a day ever have a drink on a Saturday night?

For most of my career the answer from religion, the law, and my own profession was no. You were either clean or you were using. There was no gray.

Our guest, Dr. Andrew Tatarsky, has spent forty years working in the gray. He is a clinical psychologist in New York who developed Integrative Harm Reduction Psychotherapy.

I invited Andrew back to Mind Body Health & Politics to put that question to him. He also tells the story of an 89-year-old woman who came to him wanting to cut back her drinking, and what happened in three sessions.

I invite you to listen to our conversation.

His book and trainings are at andrewtatarsky.com.

Below, a practice for the moment between the urge and the act.

Golden light,

Dr. Richard Louis Miller

Forthcoming New Book

Resources mentioned

• Andrew Tatarsky — andrewtatarsky.com | Training | Harm Reduction Psychotherapy

• InnerMost, New York — Casey Paleos, MD, co-founder and chief medical officer: innermost.one

• Alan Marlatt — “compassionate pragmatism” (12:07); E. M. Jellinek — the disease-model progression chart (18:11)

My Latest Book

The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines was recently reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies. I was honored by it. Read the review here.

Order Here

A few words from the front of the book:

Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.

— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

Putting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.

— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco

It’s the fifth book in my series on psychedelic medicine. You can find it on Amazon.

My Other Books

• Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear

• Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out

• Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)

• Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances

• Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

• Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking

Salvia Divinorum, a psychedelic substance, is a sage which grows in the shade and can easily thrive as a houseplant. It is legal in California.

Our guest, Christopher Solomon, has worked with Salvia for more than a decade.

I invited Christopher to Mind Body Health & Politics to learn about growing, harvesting, preparing, administering and experiencing this legal, non-addicting psychedelic substance.

I invite you to listen to our most educational conversation.

His tools and a free 20-minute consultation are available at salviahealings.com.

Below, a practice to learn the important skill of witnessing. Our guest says Salvia enhances witnessing.

Golden light,

Dr. Richard Louis Miller

Forthcoming New Book

Resources mentioned

• Christopher Solomon — salviahealings.com | Store (pipe, practice sets) | Free 20-minute consultation | Somatic Salvia Network

• Doss, M. K. et al., “The Acute Effects of the Atypical Dissociative Hallucinogen Salvinorin A on Functional Connectivity in the Human Brain,” Scientific Reports, 2 Oct 2020 — nature.com | Johns Hopkins press release

• Johnson, M. W., MacLean, K. A., Reissig, C. J., Prisinzano, T. E., Griffiths, R. R., “Human psychopharmacology and dose-effects of salvinorin A,” Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 2011 — PubMed

My Latest Book

The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines was recently reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies. I was honored by it. Read the review here.

Order Here

A few words from the front of the book:

Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.

— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

Putting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.

— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco

It’s the fifth book in my series on psychedelic medicine. You can find it on Amazon.

My Other Books

• Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear

• Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out

• Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)

• Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances

• Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

• Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking

Heather A. Lee, LCSW, is one of the first licensed psychedelic-assisted psychotherapists in the country, and most of her clients are women, sixty and over. She has been on Mind Body Health & Politics previously and most recently, to talk about her book, The Psilocybin Sessions.

This time she came with news. She is selling her house near Boulder, Colorado and moving to Peaks Island, Maine, a town with a population of only nine hundred.

I believe human beings are tribal animals. We live healthiest in small groups, where we know one another by face, if not by name. Heather is about to find out how long it takes to learn nine hundred new faces.

On a recent psilocybin journey, she said the mushrooms got a little cheeky with her.

This October she is leading two retreats in the Azores, the Portuguese islands four and a half hours from Boston, where the ferns stand as tall as she, and the moss is so deep you feel you are floating. People take a small dose of psilocybin and then spend the day in the forest, lying on the moss with a magnifying glass, or doing breath work on black volcanic sand to the sound of the surf.

I know something about taking people into nature to heal. In 1972, I created a nature preserve and health sanctuary at Wilbur Hot Springs in northern California, and for forty-eight years I was its owner and chief caretaker.

Nature is prescription grade medicine, RxN. Somewhere along the way we came to see ourselves as living on the planet rather than as part of it. When we separate ourselves from nature and live in cement, it is not healthy for us.

I asked her about adverse effects, which is the subject of my latest book, The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines.

The adverse effects she has seen is in people who have a hard journey and then go silent, skip the integration, and stop returning her calls. Out of about four hundred clients it happened three times.

I invite you to listen to the whole conversation.

Heather’s retreats and her book are at heatheralee.com. Below, a small practice you can do without a mushroom.

Golden light,

Dr. Richard Louis Miller

Forthcoming New Book

Resources mentioned

• Heather A. Lee, The Psilocybin Sessions (Modern Wisdom Press, 2025) | heatheralee.com

• Return, Remember & Rewild — Azores retreats (Oct 13–18 sold out; Oct 26–31, 2026; Apr 2027 dates listed)

My Latest Book

The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines was recently reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies. I was honored by it. Read the review here.

Order Here

A few words from the front of the book:

Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.

— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

Putting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.

— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco

It’s the fifth book in my series on psychedelic medicine. You can find it on Amazon.

My Other Books

• Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear

• Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out

• Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)

• Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances

• Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

• Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking

I’ve had various forms of skin cancer many times, including a modular melanoma five years ago that had the potential to kill me within six weeks. In a five minute video I will tell you exactly how it happened, and how you can avoid it.

Golden light,

Dr. Richard Louis Miller

Forthcoming New Book

On the Yoga Mat with My Daughter Sarana

My daughter Sarana teaches yoga between Berkeley and Haines, Alaska, and I couldn’t be prouder of the practice she’s built. Her fall retreats are already full, but her weekly online classes are open now: Sunday Mandala, Tuesday Foam Roller, and a Wednesday series, all recorded and available for a month if you can’t join live.

New retreat dates open this spring for anyone hoping to practice with her in person.

Find the schedule and sign up at saranayoga.com.

My Latest Book

The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines was recently reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies. I was honored by it. Read the review here.

Order Here

A few words from the front of the book:

Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.

— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

Putting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.

— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco

It’s the fifth book in my series on psychedelic medicine. You can find it on Amazon.

My Other Books

• Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear

• Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out

• Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)

• Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances

• Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

• Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking

Gabriela Rosa joined me from Sydney, Australia to talk about fertility. She only treats one kind of patient now: couples who’ve been trying to get pregnant for two years or more, or who’ve been through IVF that didn’t take.

She told me about a woman who’d been trying to get pregnant for nineteen years and was ready to stop. She wanted one honest last attempt, and a few months later, she was naturally pregnant for the first time in her life. It happened again with the next couple like her, so Gabriela went back to Harvard to find out why, and tracked seven years and 544 of her own patients.

In most of medicine, a doctor asks about your symptoms so they know what to test for. In fertility, it works backward. You get diagnosed the moment a clock runs out. Try for a year, no baby, and you’re labeled “infertile.” Then if four tests come back fine — clear tubes, ovulation, a uterus, sperm — you’re told it’s unexplained. Nobody looked any further.

Gabriela had a leaking toilet in her own bathroom. Three plumbers resealed it and it kept leaking. When she came back from vacation and showered, the floor bubbled up. The toilet was never the problem, it was her shower’s waterproofing that was failing.

“I could reseal that toilet a hundred million times and I was still going to have the problem,” she said.

That’s what she sees in her practice, over and over. Insulin resistance nobody tested for, because it isn’t diabetes yet. Sperm quality nobody checked, because the workup stopped at the woman — even though the man is half the equation. Cycle after cycle of the same fix, because nobody traced where the leak was actually coming from.

Gabriela and I agree the advice couples get at the start is wrong. They’re told, try for a few months and you’ll be pregnant. She’d rather tell people the truth: for some of you it’s three weeks, for some of you it’s twelve years, and nobody can tell you which on day one.

Please listen to the full conversation when you get a chance. Below, a small practice for finding your own leak.

Golden light,

Dr. Richard Louis Miller

Forthcoming New Book

My daughter Evacheska is hosting a conversation I think many of you will want to be part of.

More people are having psychedelic and plant medicine experiences, through retreats, ceremonies, and guided journeys. The experience itself gets all the attention. What almost nobody addresses is what comes after: whether it becomes part of a person’s life, or slowly becomes a story they tell at dinner.

Evacheska is a somatic and psychotherapeutic practitioner in New York. She’ll be joined by Jennifer Byxbee, founder of CAP Therapy NYC and a licensed psychotherapist with over 20 years of clinical experience. Together they’ll discuss what actually happens during these experiences, physiologically and psychologically, and what genuine integration support looks like afterward.

Live on Zoom, Tuesday August 26, 7:00 PM EST. Open to everyone, and questions are welcome. 2 CE contact hours available for NY State licensed clinicians (LCSWs, LMHCs, LPs, LCATs).

Register Here

Resources mentioned

• Gabriela Rosa, Fertility Breakthrough: Overcoming Infertility and Recurrent Miscarriage When Other Treatments Have Failed (2019)

• fertilitybreakthrough.com | The Rosa Institute

My Latest Book

The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines was recently reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies. I was honored by it. Read the review here.

Order Here

A few words from the front of the book:

Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.

— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

Putting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.

— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco

It’s the fifth book in my series on psychedelic medicine. You can find it on Amazon.

My Other Books

• Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear

• Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out

• Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)

• Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances

• Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

• Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking

I was back on Jock Putney’s show, The Pathway to Peak Performance, this week, and we spent the hour discussing isolation, loneliness and alienation.

I opened by naming it plainly: 30-40% of America is isolated, alienated, and lonely, and the antidote is to care more about each other.

We talked through the practices I keep coming back to in these letters: calling people vs texting, introducing yourself to people you see in daily life, and how much of our overeating (over 70% overweight or obese) is really emotional medicine.

Then I gave him something new I’ve just started trying.

“Waving at stop signs. You come to a four-way stop, you can just wave and say hello. It’s safe. You don’t get out of your car… I’ve been doing it. And guess what? Most everybody waves back and smiles.”

We can all create little gestures which make real contact with other people.

I invite you to join us for the entire stimulating conversation. Below, a small practice to connect with those around you.

Watch Here

Golden light,

Dr. Richard Louis Miller

My daughter Evacheska is hosting a conversation I think many of you will want to be part of.

More people are having psychedelic and plant medicine experiences, through retreats, ceremonies, and guided journeys. The experience itself gets all the attention. What almost nobody addresses is what comes after: whether it becomes part of a person’s life, or slowly becomes a story they tell at dinner.

Evacheska is a somatic and psychotherapeutic practitioner in New York. She’ll be joined by Jennifer Byxbee, founder of CAP Therapy NYC and a licensed psychotherapist with over 20 years of clinical experience. Together they’ll discuss what actually happens during these experiences, physiologically and psychologically, and what genuine integration support looks like afterward.

Live on Zoom, Tuesday August 26, 7:00 PM EST. Open to everyone, and questions are welcome. 2 CE contact hours available for NY State licensed clinicians (LCSWs, LMHCs, LPs, LCATs).

Register Here

My New Book

The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines was recently reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies. I was honored by it. Read the review here.

Order Here

A few words from the front of the book:

Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.

— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

Putting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.

— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco

It’s the fifth book in my series on psychedelic medicine. You can find it on Amazon.

My Other Books

• Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear

• Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out

• Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)

• Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances

• Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

• Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking

Maybe as many as thirty to forty percent of us are living with isolation, alienation, and loneliness, most of it unnamed. In six minutes I talk about why, then give you the two things I actually do about it. No course, no pitch — just what works.

One more thing, while we’re on the subject: I sat down last week with Charles Durrett on his show, This is Cohousing, to talk about exactly this.

“When you come upon a stranger on the road, be kind to them — because they’re going through what you’re going through.”

That’s Cicero, and it’s stuck with me since. What would it be like if, when we came to a four-way stop in our cars, we just took a second to wave at the other person?

Listen Here

Golden light,

Dr. Richard Louis Miller

My daughter Evacheska is hosting a conversation I think many of you will want to be part of.

More people are having psychedelic and plant medicine experiences, through retreats, ceremonies, and guided journeys. The experience itself gets all the attention. What almost nobody addresses is what comes after: whether it becomes part of a person’s life, or slowly becomes a story they tell at dinner.

Evacheska is a somatic and psychotherapeutic practitioner in New York. She’ll be joined by Jennifer Byxbee, founder of CAP Therapy NYC and a licensed psychotherapist with over 20 years of clinical experience. Together they’ll discuss what actually happens during these experiences, physiologically and psychologically, and what genuine integration support looks like afterward.

Live on Zoom, Tuesday August 26, 7:00 PM EST. Open to everyone, and questions are welcome. 2 CE contact hours available for NY State licensed clinicians (LCSWs, LMHCs, LPs, LCATs).

Register Here

My New Book

The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines was recently reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies. I was honored by it. Read the review here.

Order Here

A few words from the front of the book:

Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.

— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

Putting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.

— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco

It’s the fifth book in my series on psychedelic medicine. You can find it on Amazon.

My Other Books

• Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear

• Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out

• Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)

• Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances

• Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

• Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking

Dr. Bruce Lipton was with me here on Mind Body Health and Politics years ago, before many of you had ever heard the word “epigenetics.” Now it’s almost a household word. Bruce is here again, and this time around we spent most of the hour on a single idea: ninety-five percent of what runs your life was not written by you.

Bruce says the brain is a computer, and it arrives with no programs installed. From about three months before you’re born through roughly age seven, you’re recording everything you experience—your parents, your community, what a body is supposed to do—without the conscious mind in the room to argue with any of it. By his estimate, those recordings run about ninety-five percent of your adult life. The part of you that thinks it’s deciding things is mostly watching a program play.

I’ve been telling people for years that the mind wants to be the boss, and that until you learn to tell it otherwise, it will act like one. Bruce provided me with a mechanism underneath that.

One of the programs installed in us very early is what old is supposed to look like. As a child, watch enough people fall apart as they age, as if on a schedule, and some part of you signs up to fall apart on schedule too.

Acting your age is dangerous.

The bigger program Bruce wants rewritten isn’t personal—it’s the one Darwin gave us. His forthcoming book, Beyond Darwin, argues that “survival of the fittest” was never the whole story, and that cooperation, not survivalist competition, is what actually carried us here.

I invite you to join us for the entire stimulating conversation. Below, a small practice for finding one of your own programs.

Golden light,

Dr. Richard Louis Miller

Resources mentioned

• Bruce H. Lipton, The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter & Miracles (Hay House, 10th Anniversary Edition)

• Bruce H. Lipton, PhD & Patricia King, Beyond Darwin: How Epigenetics, Quantum Science, and Cooperation Shape Humanity’s Future (BenBella Books, August 2026)

My New Book

The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines was recently reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies. I was honored by it. Read the review here.

Order Here

A few words from the front of the book:

Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.

— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

Putting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.

— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco

It’s the fifth book in my series on psychedelic medicine. You can find it on Amazon.

My Other Books

• Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear

• Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out

• Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)

• Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances

• Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

• Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking

I read an article recently about young men who order a pizza, stay home, watch pornography, and masturbate instead of going out and finding a date. It is easier. However, DIY is feeding an epidemic of isolation, alienation, and loneliness.

I put that observation to Diana Richardson, a Swiss expert on human sexuality with over fifty years of experience.

In the early twentieth century, fewer than ten percent of women had sex before marriage — ninety percent of brides were virgins. Over the past hundred years, those numbers have reversed. We fought hard for that freedom in the counterculture revolution of the 1960s, which I’m delighted to say I was part of.

But now, by several measures, young people are having less sex than any generation in memory. Diana’s response surprised me: she said the amount of sex was never really the problem.

“It’s really the how of sex,” she told me.

Her work argues that most of what we call sex is mechanical and goal-driven, aimed at a finish line, and that racing for the finish line is exactly what disconnects people from their own bodies and from each other.

Diana’s own path started at thirty-two, when she began asking blunt questions about her own body and writing down what she found. Fifty years and eight books later — Slow Sex, Tantric Sex for Men, Tantric Orgasm for Women among them — more than 15,000 couples have gone through her seven-day Making Love Retreat in Europe. She has just finished building a self-paced online version — find her work at rekindle.love, rekindletantra.com, and loveforcouples.com, and follow her at facebook.com/learnlivinglove.

Please listen to our conversation. Below it, a small practice built on the idea Diana kept returning to: slow down, and the rest follows.

Golden light,

Dr. Richard Louis Miller

Resources mentioned

• Diana Richardson, Tantric Sex for Lovers (Destiny Books) — the boxed collection of Slow Sex, Tantric Sex for Men, Tantric Orgasm for Women

• Diana Richardson, The Heart of Tantric Sex (John Hunt Publishing/O Books, 2003)

  rekindle.love — Diana’s site, books, and the self-paced online Making Love Retreat

• Rekindle Intimacy: The Living Love Symposium — 4-day online gathering Diana is hosting Sept 17–20, 2026

• Diana Richardson’s first RLM appearance, “The Power of Slow Sex” (aired March 2022)

My New Book

The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines was recently reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies. I was honored by it. Read the review here.

Order Here

A few words from the front of the book:

Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.

— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

Putting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.

— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco

It’s the fifth book in my series on psychedelic medicine. You can find it on Amazon.

My Other Books

• Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear

• Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out

• Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)

• Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances

• Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

• Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking

Joshua White spent over a decade as a city attorney in San Francisco before he left the law to build something the psychedelic community didn’t have.

He founded Fireside Project, an anonymous support line for anyone in the middle of a psychedelic experience, or anyone still sorting out one they had years ago.

Joshua researched psychedelics and kept seeing the same four gaps: not enough support, not enough diversity among providers, not enough hands-on training, and almost no data on why some trips heal and others hurt. A support line staffed by volunteers could work on all four at once. The first month, Fireside took about a hundred calls. Last month it took more than 1,300.

I asked him who answered the phone. No hard qualifications, he said. Volunteers ask themselves one question: if I were tripping, or if the person I love most in the world were tripping, would I want this person on the other end of the line? Anyone who clears that bar trains for fifty hours and commits to a year on the same weekly shift.

“Someone who doesn’t have any kind of agenda about what type of experience you should have, but rather someone who’s just there to be human with you.” - Joshua White

The way I conceptualize a “bad trip” is that something has escaped the box it got pushed into years ago. Old fear, old shame, whatever the mind couldn’t hold at the time. Joshua’s volunteers don’t say bad trip. They say challenging, and they stay on the phone while a person turns toward it instead of running.

Fireside is sitting on roughly forty thousand anonymized calls now, and it’s using that archive to train the next generation of psychedelic therapists through a simulation tool called Lucy, already in use with researchers at Mount Sinai and in a New Mexico psilocybin study. Calls are stripped of anything identifying first, and the data never leaves the organization.

Running Fireside seven days a week for four years nearly broke Joshua, until an ibogaine journey got him to slow down. I told him what a patient taught me decades ago. Take care of yourself and you’ll have more to give. Keep going the way you’re going, and you’ll get sick, or die young. I’ve never forgotten it, and I’m not done repeating it to him.

Please listen to our conversation. Just below it you’ll find a small practice built on the same idea he now lives by.

Golden light,

Dr. Richard Louis Miller

Resources mentioned

• Fireside Project — free, anonymous psychedelic peer support | donate | app (iOS/Google Play)

• Lucy — Fireside’s psychedelic-therapist training simulator, used at Mount Sinai and in a New Mexico psilocybin-for-PTSD study

My New Book

The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines was recently reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies. I was honored by it. Read the review here.

Order Here

A few words from the front of the book:

Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.

— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

Putting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.

— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco

It’s the fifth book in my series on psychedelic medicine. You can find it on Amazon.

My Other Books

• Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking

• Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear

• Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out

• Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances

• Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

• Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)

For half a century, the biggest business in my county, Mendocino, was functioning outside of federal law. Marijuana.

Charlie Harris, a British historian from Oxford’s Global History of Capitalism Project, who put in his seasons as a marijuana trimmer here on our North Coast, has memorialized that history. His new book, Mendo, published in June by Counterpoint Press, tells how Mendocino County went from logging and fishing to the cannabis capital of the Americas, known as the Emerald Triangle. Charlie was recently on Mind Body Health & Politics, where he told me things about my own neighborhood that were delightfully new.

The Mendocino story begins with the young people of the 1960s Back to the Land movement, who came north to live off the cheap land, and learned, as one ex-commune member put it, that “we couldn’t grow gasoline.” The one crop the hippies could grow became the county’s currency, marijuana — people paid rent with it, bought food with it, and had their cars fixed with it. And when the loggers’ sawmills closed and hundreds of logging families were suddenly out of work, many of them went into the business alongside the hippies they had long been feuding with. The rednecks joined the hippies, and they all became hipnecks.

Then came Reagan’s helicopters. The Campaign Against Marijuana Planting (CAMP) was at the time the largest domestic law-enforcement operation in the country. Charlie’s exhaustive research indicated that CAMP turned a profit every single year it flew — the raids kept what they seized, and asset forfeiture itself was invented right here in Mendocino County.

Every plant the government cut down simply made the rest worth more, and prices rocketed. But eventually marijuana legalization accomplished what forty years of helicopters could not: a pound that brought $5,000 in the eighties now sells for under $500. However, as I reminded Charlie, you still don’t pay $500/pound for garlic.

I started coming to Mendocino County in 1975 and experienced much of this story happening around me. Many of my patients were in the marijuana business. And so I had inside information.

Charlie also left me with a genuine health concern about what today’s high-potency products are doing to us — I will let him tell you that part himself.

Please listen to our conversation, and just below, I offer a brief health practice drawn from what Charlie did for Mendocino County. If you want the whole story, Mendo is available from Counterpoint, Amazon, and your local bookstore. Charlie asks that you try the independent first.

Golden light,

Dr. Richard Louis Miller

Resources mentioned

• Charlie Harris, Mendo: How an Unlikely Group of Rebels Turned Cannabis into California’s Cash Crop (Counterpoint Press, June 23, 2026) | Amazon | Author page

• Mind, Body, Health & Politics archive — mindbodyhealthpolitics.org (20 years, open source)

My New Book

The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines was recently reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies. I was honored by it. Read the review here.

Order Here

A few words from the front of the book:

Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.

— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

Putting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.

— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco

It’s the fifth book in my series on psychedelic medicine. You can find it on Amazon.

My Other Books

• Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking

• Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear

• Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out

• Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances

• Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

• Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)

A lonely person types their worries into a machine at three in the morning, and the machine answers them kindly. Is that really helpful, or is it harmful? My answer is that it is both, and the difference between the two is what I want to talk about today.

Let me start with the name, artificial intelligence, because I think the name is inappropriate.

Not artificial intelligence. Accumulated Intelligence.

We have taken the intelligence humanity has gathered across all of time, every fact and formula and sentence we could collect, and pressed it onto a small chip. We call that “artificial intelligence.” Bah, humbug. Artificial means phony, fake, not real. This Intelligence is the real thing: the accumulated knowledge of our whole species in one place. So I would ask you to hear those two letters differently. Not artificial. Accumulated. Accumulated Intelligence.

Once you see it for what it is, you stop being afraid of it, and you stop expecting too much of it. It is a tool. A magnificent one. But a tool.

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What it does well

I will give AI real credit, because credit is due. A person who is anxious at two in the morning used to have nowhere to turn until business hours. Now there is something on the other end of the line, every hour of every day, that never gets tired, never sighs, and will answer the same question the tenth time as patiently as the first. A great many anxious people are terrified of being a burden, and to them that patience is no small thing. When your thoughts are a tangle, AI can lay them out in a row so you can look at them. It can hand you, in plain language, information that used to sit locked in textbooks. I am glad it exists.

And AI can remind you that you are the boss of your mind. I have spent much of my life on this one idea: the mind is a tool. The hammer is a tool, the automobile is a tool, the toaster is a tool, the computer is a tool, and so is your own mind. Your mind is not the boss. You are. I spent eleven years in college, and nobody in all those classrooms taught me how to control my own mind. Think about that. We wrote down everything except how to run the instrument that wrote it all down. AI can hand you every textbook I ever studied, and the job of running your own mind will still be yours.

What AI cannot do

AI is not a friend, and it cannot become one, and the trouble starts the moment a person treats it as one.

Human beings are tribal animals. We were built, over a very long time, to heal in the presence of one another. The cure for loneliness is not information about loneliness, however gently the machine phrases it. The cure is another human being who knows your name and is glad you walked in the door. A screen cannot give you that, because there is no one behind it who will miss you when you are gone.

Benjamin Franklin knew this. He spent his life accumulating knowledge—he founded America’s first lending library so a whole city could share in it—and the same man built himself a small weekly club of friends, the Junto, and kept it going for decades. For twenty years I ran a club modeled on Franklin’s in Fort Bragg: every Thursday morning, the same faces around the same table. All that accumulated knowledge, and the great collector of it still needed a room with other human beings in it. So do I. So do you.

My worry is not that Accumulated Intelligence gives bad advice. Often the advice is excellent. My concern is that AI is so easy to talk to that a person lets it take the place of real contact: the phone call, the visit, the friend across the table. AI asks nothing of you. A friend asks you to show up, and that showing up is part of the cure for all that ails us.

Let AI send you toward people

I am not trying to frighten you off AI. I simply want to keep AI in its proper place, as a tool. Ask it to explain something you do not understand. Ask it to help you make a plan. Let it remind you to do your abdominal breathing, or to sit with the visualization of your Golden Light. For those jobs it is excellent.

But let AI send you toward people, not away from them. If you find yourself facing anxiety that won’t quiet down, a difficult relationship, uncertainty about your next chapter, or an experience that has left you feeling emotionally or spiritually unsettled, remember that you do not have to work through it alone. Sometimes information is enough. Sometimes what you need is another human being who can sit with you, listen carefully, and help you find your own way forward. That has been the privilege of my work for many decades.

That is the test. If your time with AI ends with you reaching out to another person, it did its job. If it ends with you reaching for AI again tomorrow instead of a person, you have quietly handed your authority to your tool.

AI is a tool, and you are the boss of the tool, the same as you are the boss of your own mind. Use it for what it is good for, and do not ask it for the one thing it cannot give, human contact.

Golden Light,

Dr. Richard Louis Miller

P.S. I am curious: what do you use AI for, and what have you decided you will not use it for? Hit reply and tell me. I read every response. And if you’re looking for more personal guidance with anxiety, relationships, life transitions, or making sense of difficult experiences, you can learn more about working with me below.

P.P.S. I recently sat down with Les Jensen on his New Human Living podcast to talk about my new book, The Adverse Effects & Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines — what these medicines can do, what they cannot, and how to weigh the risks honestly.

Listen Here

My New Book

The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines was recently reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies. I was honored by it. Read the review here.

Order Now

A few words from the front of the book:

Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.

— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

Putting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.

— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco

It’s the fifth book in my series on psychedelic medicine. You can find it on Amazon.

My Other Books

• Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking

• Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear

• Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out

• Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances

• Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

• Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)

Abbie Rosner is a journalist who spent the last several years interviewing thirty-six older adults — most in their sixties, seventies, and eighties — about psychedelic experiences they had quietly, on their own, outside any clinic. Her book, Psychedelics and the Counterculture of Aging, is published now by Park Street Press, and I admired her work enough to write its endorsement back in January, before we ever met. When we finally sat down on the program, what we talked about was not really psychedelics at all. It was aging.

I am 87. When I sit down or lie down, I do not feel any different than I did at 19. My spirit does not seem to have aged; my body certainly has. That is the puzzle I put to Abbie.

I have all of me in me

The culture tells us to refuse aging: stay young, buy the next serum. Abbie’s elders were doing something the longevity industry cannot sell. They were turning the other way and going inward. What I have been calling inner space travel for sixty-five years. For a long time I told people at parties I was a travel agent, because the word psychologist made them back away.

When asked her thirty-six elders what these experiences gave them, the same discovery kept surfacing: they still contained every age they had ever been.

"It's not like, I was a child and now I'm old. It's, I have all of me in me. I can access my child. I can access my groovy, movement-loving teenager."

The body had aged. The person inside it had not been left behind. Abbie is careful about who this work is for, and so am I because not everyone is a candidate, and as she put it, “if it’s not calling you, it’s not for you.”

Abbie and I had one honest disagreement. Her foreword, by my longtime friend Dr. Julie Holland, refers to herself near 60 as an elder. I wrote to Julie: I loved the foreword, but I think 60 is middle age. She wrote back, “If 60 is middle age, that means I’m going for 120, and I think that’s a bit of a stretch.” I laughed, and I held my ground. I do not consider myself elderly at 87. The number matters less than your relationship to your own inner life.

We’re going to need each other as we age

We return often on this program to one idea: the antidote to the loneliness of later life is connection. Abbie brought me something concrete for it - Elder Vision Circles, small cohorts of eight or ten older adults who spend four months together reading, meditating, and doing service in their community, then keep meeting and caring for one another through the end of their days.

"We've created the antidote to the alienation and the loneliness, because we're going to need each other as we age."

I told her on the air that I want to see somebody build it. The medicines Abbie writes about, used well, only open a door. Connection is what walks you through it.

Please listen to our conversation, and just below, I have a small practice for you this week, the smallest version of that same idea.

Golden light,

Dr. Richard Louis Miller

In this episode — Journalist Abbie Rosner spent several years interviewing thirty-six older adults about psychedelic experiences they had quietly, outside the clinic. She and Richard talk about elderhood, conscious aging, what changes when these medicines meet a long life rather than a young one, a disagreement over when “elder” begins, and her pilot vision for small, committed cohorts of older adults. Her book, Psychedelics and the Counterculture of Aging, is published (July 7, 2026) by Park Street Press.

Guest: Abbie Rosner - journalist; author of Psychedelics and the Counterculture of Aging (Park Street Press, July 7, 2026, foreword by Dr. Julie Holland). Writes The ELDEREVOLUTION on Substack and a Next Avenue column.

Chapters

• 00:00 — The epidemic of isolation

• 01:45 — Conscious aging: what’s on Abbie’s mind

• 05:28 — What aging actually is: body vs. spirit

• 10:14 — The opportunity of older life: going inward

• 12:24 — The fragility question: screening older adults

• 15:34 — How older adults approach psychedelics today

• 20:00 — Who is drawn to this work: seekers

• 21:20 — “Am I an elder at 60?”: the Julie Holland exchange

• 27:04 — Inside the book: 36 interviews and a book tour

• 33:11 — Elder Vision Circles

• 38:44 — Close

Resources mentioned

• Abbie Rosner, Psychedelics and the Counterculture of Aging (Park Street Press, July 7, 2026) | Amazon | abbierosner.com |The ELDEREVOLUTION (Substack)

• Julie Holland, Good Chemistry (HarperWave, 2020) | drholland.com

Further reading

Richard's recent conversation with Dr. Ellen Langer, Your Mind Creates Your Reality, speaks to the same territory from the mind-body side—how attention and expectation shape aging.

My New Book

The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines was recently reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies. I was honored by it. Read the review here.

Pre-Order

A few words from the front of the book:

Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.

— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

Putting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.

— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco

It’s the fifth book in my series on psychedelic medicine. You can find it on Amazon.

My Other Books

• Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking

• Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear

• Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out

• Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances

• Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

• Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)

There is a tension in the air in this country that I have not felt in my eighty-seven years. Fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, children — everyone is uneasy. They feel it walking down the street, and even when they cannot name it, they know it’s there.

We also have the data substantiating my feeling: a new Cato Institute survey, done with Morning Consult ahead of this 250th Fourth of July, found that nearly half of Americans — forty-six percent — didn’t know what the Fourth of July commemorates, and fifty-six percent worry the country could stop being free within fifty years. And yet the same survey found that eighty-six percent of us are grateful to be Americans, and seventy percent believe the founding principles still matter. We love the thing; we have forgotten what the thing is.

Meanwhile, thirty to forty percent of the country report anxiety or depression, and more than seventy percent are living paycheck to paycheck. Some of us are frightened of the climate and of nuclear weapons; some of us are frightened because of the color of our skin, our religion, or our sexuality; some of us are frightened of our own government. Our fears point in different directions, and the politicians and their anointed media have used our fears to set us against one another — and way too many of us have forgotten that we are all Americans.

I want to step back from the noise and say something that took me a long life to see clearly: what we are living through is, on the surface, a fight between the political right and the political left. But the real fight is older and bigger, and it runs right down the middle of the human animal.

For almost all of recorded history, the people of the earth signed on to be led — by a pharaoh, a king, a dictator — and the many were ruled by one. In ancient Egypt, a tiny few at the top ran everything, and nearly ninety-nine percent lived and died serving them. That arrangement, in one costume or another, held for thousands of years. People were born into their position in life. This is how it is, this is how it should be, and this is how we live.

Then the Enlightenment thinkers — Locke, Hume, Franklin, Jefferson, and others — put a new idea into the air, and a group of farmers and printers and merchants picked it up: we can rule ourselves, write our own rules, and call that the rule of law instead of the rule of the king. The American founders rebelled against England — the largest army and the greatest empire in the world — and against the Pope himself, for kings ruled by divine right, and created a democracy and a republic. That took some doing. It wasn’t clean, either: a country that shouted liberty also screamed slavery, owned women, and acted like a bully on the block, including the slaughter of millions of Native Americans. I say this not to run my country down, but because a fairy tale won’t help us understand the choice in front of us.

Here is what I believe, and I probably will not live to see it. We are headed for a world government — not because anyone votes for it, but because of a pattern that repeats at every scale of human life: caves to villages to towns to countries, and now countries pulling together, the way Europe did to create the EU. Where power is the rule, the large eat the small, and that momentum ends, on its own, in one government over the whole earth.

So the question is not whether there will be world rule, but what kind. Will it be one person at the top ruling by force, the way the pharaohs did, with most of the human race as wage slaves below them? Or will it be something closer to what those American farmers and printers reached for: a rule of law that treats food, water, shelter, education, and healthcare as basic human rights?

That is the division at the core of our species, and it is the one we in America now face as we go to the polls in November.

Do we want to be a world of citizens, or a world of subjects?

Happy 250th birthday, America.

Golden Light,

Dr. Richard Louis Miller

My New Book

The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicineswas recently reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies. I was honored by it. Read the review here.

Pre-Order

A few words from the front of the book:

Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.

— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

Putting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.

— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco

It’s the fifth book in my series on psychedelic medicine. You can find it on Amazon.

My Other Books

• Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking

• Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear

• Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out

• Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances

• Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

• Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)

If you have ever told yourself to just stop worrying and watched it not work, here is why: willpower was never built for the job.

I sat down with Dr. Jud Brewer, a neuroscientist at Brown University who trained as an addiction psychiatrist at Yale. His TED talk on breaking habits has been watched close to forty million times, and his book Unwinding Anxiety spent weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. His thesis is that anxiety behaves like a habit, not a disease.

Jud found this first with smokers. Every habit, anxiety included, runs on the same loop: a trigger, a behavior, a reward. A restless feeling shows up. You worry, because worrying feels like doing something. The worry gives you a flicker of control, and that flicker is the reward that trains your mind to start the loop again, sooner, next time. Fighting the loop does not loosen it. Fighting it feeds it.

So instead of telling smokers to use willpower, Jud told them to keep smoking — and to pay close attention while they did. The taste. The smell. The feeling in the chest. They started coming back and telling him, “Doc, how did I not notice this before? These cigarettes taste like crap.”

Nothing about the cigarette had changed. Their attention had. That shift produced five times the quit rate of the standard treatment.

He turned the same move on anxiety. When the restless feeling shows up, the worried mind asks, “NO — is this going to last all day, is something terrible about to happen?”

Jud’s instruction is to flip the NO to WHAT.

“What is this feeling, exactly? Where do I feel it in my body?”

That turn, from running away to looking closely, loosens the loop.

I have been telling patients some version of this for most of my career: the mind is a tool you use, not a boss you obey. I did not expect to hear it back from a scientist with an fMRI scanner. But Jud said it almost word for word, unprompted:

“I would say it’s probably one of, if not the most important skills to learn. Because if we don’t have control of our minds, if we don’t train our minds so that we can control them, they’re going to control us, and things don’t end well when that’s the case.”

He has the data behind it, too. In a randomized controlled trial of his Unwinding Anxiety program, anxiety dropped sixty-seven percent in people with generalized anxiety disorder, against fourteen percent for usual care.

Curiosity Will Conquer Fear Even More Than Bravery Will

There is a practice below this letter for the next time the buzzing starts. But the idea underneath it is the one I want you to keep. Jud closed our conversation with a line from the Irish poet James Stevens:

“Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will.”

If anxiety is fear of the future, that is the whole instruction. Get curious about the feeling instead of fighting it, and the feeling loses its grip.

Jud writes his own newsletter, Inside the Curious Mind, if you want more from him directly.

Food for thought.

Golden light,

Dr. Richard Louis Miller

In this episode — Dr. Jud Brewer, a Brown University neuroscientist and Yale-trained addiction psychiatrist, joins Richard to lay out a habit-loop model of anxiety. From his own residency panic attacks to the smoking-cessation work that produced five times the standard quit rate, to a randomized trial of his anxiety program, the throughline is one mechanism: pay attention to what a behavior actually does, and the brain stops finding it rewarding. We close on a thirty-second practice for the next time anxiety shows up.

Guest: Dr. Jud Brewer — Director of Research and Innovation, Brown University Mindfulness Center. Author of The Craving Mind (Yale University Press, 2017), Unwinding Anxiety (Avery, 2021, New York Times bestseller), and The Hunger Habit (Avery, 2024). His TED talk has roughly 40 million views combined. More at drjud.com.

Chapters

• 00:00 — Opening: the epidemic of anxiety and depression

• 01:56 — Jud’s own anxiety story

• 06:46 — Choosing mindfulness as a career in 2006

• 11:38 — Coke Enders and the academic-hazing pattern

• 15:10 — Reinforcement learning: pay attention as you smoke

• 20:28 — The anxiety habit loop

• 23:28 — The default mode network and the posterior cingulate cortex

• 25:49 — The mind is a tool, not the boss

• 29:46 — Richard’s Vipassana origin with Goldstein and Kornfield

• 31:07 — Conscious breathing and five-finger breathing

• 32:42 — Anxiety travels in clusters

• 34:40 — If these tools work, why are we prescribing

• 36:42 — Could this be taught in high schools

• 38:19 — Going Beyond Anxiety: the AI-paired digital therapeutic

• 41:52 — Mid-episode break

• 43:32 — Curiosity will conquer fear: flip the NO to WHAT

• 45:27 — Feelings are just feelings

• 47:15 — Off-air closing

Choice quotes

“I would say it’s probably one of, if not the most important skills to learn...”
— Dr. Jud Brewer, 30:47

“Here’s the most important thing I never learned in medical school. This goes back to the Borkovec paper, which is that anxiety could be driven like a habit through negative reinforcement.”
— Dr. Jud Brewer, 20:43

“We actually got a 67 percent reduction in anxiety in people with generalized anxiety disorder. This was relative to 14 percent in the usual-care group...”
— Dr. Jud Brewer, 38:29 (Caveat: this is the Unwinding Anxiety RCT, Roy et al. 2021/JMIR 2022, N=65 — distinct from the 5x smoking-cessation figure above; don’t conflate.)

“Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will.”
— James Stevens, quoted by Dr. Jud Brewer, 45:14

“I detoxed 1,500 people in a 10-year period, and never had to hospitalize a single one, and never had an adverse effect.”
— Dr. Richard Louis Miller, 11:57 (The Coke Enders/Wilbur Hot Springs detox story — referenced on-air, not unpacked; full version is a standalone piece.)

Resources mentioned

• drjud.com — Jud’s hub

• Unwinding Anxiety (book) and app

• The Craving Mind (Yale UP, 2017)

• The Hunger Habit (Avery, 2024)

• TED talk: “A Simple Way to Break a Bad Habit”

• Inside the Curious Mind — Jud’s Substack

• @dr.jud on Instagram

Further reading

Richard’s recent conversation with journalist Robert Whitaker touches the same territory from the medication side (link the episode page once it’s live — Brewer referenced recognizing the same pattern in his own patients when Whitaker came up on-air).

My New Book

The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines was recently reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies. I was honored by it. Read the review here.

Pre-Order

A few words from the front of the book:

Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.

— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

Putting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.

— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco

It’s the fifth book in my series on psychedelic medicine. You can find it on Amazon.

My Other Books

• Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking

• Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear

• Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out

• Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances

• Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

• Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)