EP. 69 | Jennifer Chesak: The Psilocybin Handbook For Women, Part 2

Motherhood & Magic Mushrooms

????Thank you to our sponsor, OF LIKE MINDS, a trusted source for Seattle psilocybin.????

PART 2 of 3 with guest Jennifer Chesak, author of the recently published The Psilocybin Handbook for Women. In this episode of The High Guide, host April Pride engages in a heartfelt and open conversation with guest Jennifer Chesak, delving into the world of motherhood and psilocybin. Jennifer offers a fresh, raw, and authentic perspective that resonates with all women concerning motherhood in every way. From the highs to the lows, this episode leaves no stone unturned.

After listening to this episode, you'll have a better understanding of:

• Explore the nuances of consent in intimate relationships, how to communicate effectively, and the importance of enthusiastic and ongoing agreement.

• Learn how to identify, communicate, and respect personal boundaries, fostering healthier connections and enhancing overall well-being.
• Gain insights into navigating challenging discussions around sex and boundaries with partners, fostering mutual understanding and growth.
• Discover how increasing your knowledge about sexual health, consent, and boundaries can increase confidence, better decision-making, and more fulfilling relationships.

EPISODE GUESTS & RESOURCES + TRANSCRIPT BELOW.

GUESTS

Jennifer Chesak is an award-winning freelance science and medical journalist, editor, and fact-checker based in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work has appeared in Washington Post, Prevention, Verywell, Healthline, Health, Greatist, Real Simple, Better Homes and Gardens, The Daily Beast, Sleep.com, B*tch, and more. Her coverage focuses on chronic health issues, medical rights, healthcare, harm reduction, and the scientific evidence around health and wellness trends, including cannabis and psychedelics.

Jennifer earned her master of science in Journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill. She currently teaches copyediting, technical writing, and media studies in the publishing program at Belmont University, leads various workshops at the literary nonprofit The Porch, and serves as the managing editor for the literary magazine SHIFT. In her free time, Jennifer, who is originally from North Dakota, can be found covered in mud out on a trail run or in her garden.

RESOURCES

Purchase The Psilocybin Handbook for Women here

TRANSCRIPT

Hi everyone, welcome to The High Guide Podcast. Welcome back to another episode all about women changing their lives thanks to psilocybin. Once again we are joined by Jennifer Chesak, the author of "The Psilocybin Handbook for Women," for the second episode in this 3-part series inspired by her book.?

In this installment, Jennifer and I dive into parenting and psilocybin. How does psilocybin support the ever more complicated lives of women who are mothers - or want to be??

As we navigate the nuanced landscapes of motherhood and psilocybin, we invite you to open your hearts and minds to this timely topic. I also invite you to join Jennifer and me in Seattle on November 15 for a live Q&A thanks to our show sponsor Of Like Minds. More information is available in the show notes of this episode.?

0:30:26.7 April Pride, host: We talked about estrogen, we've talked about the impact that that can have on your psilocybin experience, it seems like women... I don't know, our lives are rolled by our hormones and our cycle, and one of... And the cycle of that birth and I guess death, but thinking about women as mothers and using psilocybin to address some of the more heartbreaking parts of that lived experience. If you lose a child as a result of miscarriage or postpartum for reasons, and women using psilocybin to help deal with that, because that…

0:33:00.1 JC: So taking that silence is a good idea. You don't have to, but it's just something to consider. But yeah, going back to motherhood and some of these things that can also be very isolating, you mentioned miscarriage or postpartum depression, or even losing a child in that postpartum period, all of these things are so devastating to women, and they're not openly, they're often not openly talked about so as a society, we're silent about these things and people are just dealing with these things in their own solitude essentially, and we shouldn't do that to people, we should be talking about these things.

0:33:42.0 JC: But Mama Daila Michael said that she's worked with several people who have either had a miscarriage or are dealing with some other type of situation like postpartum depression or just grief in general, and she said, You know, yeah, psilocybin is not going to fix everything, it's not going to be this magical cure for these things, however, if you do the work, with psilocybin in terms of doing a journey and then integration afterwards, it can be highly beneficial, and I think we're seeing this already just in terms of grief in general, that we're seeing some research come out about how it can be helpful with grief, it was for me, I've only dealt with Pet Loss recently, and I have lost some friends as well, but it was super beneficial to explore my grief during a psilocybin session, so again, not a magic cure, even though it says magic mushrooms, but certainly, if we are doing the work again with integration afterwards, there's some potential there for some serious help, I think.

0:34:45.6 April Pride, host: Yeah, because the ways that we are dealing with grief that have been approved for us to deal with grief in some way, meaning it's just easier and in drinking being one of those ways or prescribed benzos, which the rate of women drinking has increased significantly, which your book brought to my attention, I hadn't realized and I'll follow up in the episode with those exact numbers, but also I had known that the amount of Benzodiazepines are often prescribed by men, male doctors to women, and often times those male doctors are general practitioners and they're not mental health specialists at all, and so they're saying that after the opioid epidemic, that Benzos are the next issue that we will be facing, and now that we know that women have been prescribed at a much higher rate than men, and we've now got alcohol on the rise among women, it's just so timely that we're talking about these alternatives that there is no history of abuse potential like psilocybin.

0:36:09.3 JC: Psilocybin, no, yeah, there's no real history of that at all.

0:36:12.6 April Pride, host: Yeah, but it is hard people to wrap their mind around the fact that I'm gonna take a drug to get off of my drugs, because it's all been so packaged, it's been packaged so backwards and incorrect for so long that to think that the thing that we can go and buy at the local grocery store is what's bad for us, but the stuff that has been, I guess personify, my little mushrooms and people eyes rolling back and it's all trippy trippy. That's gonna be what saves us, it's what I read in the book about stigma, and obviously I've been talking about women in stigma, choosing cannabis since 2015. I have found that there's less stigma in terms of my conversations around women choosing psilocybin rather than cannabis. Have you experienced that??

0:37:10.5 JC: I'm not sure, I feel like people are still having this stigma around all drugs in general, and so I think psilocybin is part of that, and I do talk about in the book, I talk about people weaponizing women's children essentially against them. I interviewed Hillary Agro, she's an Anthropologist. She's getting her PhD in that, and she looked into this extensively, and she's had her own experience where somebody reported her to Child Protective Services, the Department of that in Canada, 'cause she lives in Canada and... Because she's very open about, "Hey, I'm a drug user, and hey, we all are. If you're drinking caffeine you're a drug user... Right" and that does help you raise stigma when we talk about that.

0:38:03.7 JC: But she openly identifies as a drug user for her ADHD medication, and someone reported her and she had to go through this whole investigatory process about whether or not she was fit to be a mother, and that directly harmed her because it created even more stress for her as a parent. And she was really struggling with that and it was very scary. Again, she acknowledges that she had a lot of resources to help her with that, whereas a lot of people don't disproportionately affects people of color, that they might get reported and things like that so psilocybin...

0:38:39.0 JC: So yeah, I think there's still a lot of stigma. What I hope happens is that as we have more of these open conversations about psilocybin, about cannabis and things like that, that there's more understanding that we can continue to talk about this, we can be open about this, and the more that we are, the better, better off we are in terms of all of that, now that's easy for me to say, I don't have kids, no one's going to take them away from me, but it is a real thing that people have to consider, even though psilocybin is not going to make you addicted to it... And we can use psilocybin in very safe controlled ways that aren't affecting the kids that we're caring for and things like that.

0:39:24.6 April Pride, host: Yeah, you can tell me if you wanna leave this in the interview or not, but I find it interesting that you live in a place that is definitely not decriminalized even... Right, and you are just writing about these things, you are saying that you've had your own experiences, but you are not continuing with them, and I understand how careful we need to be... How does it feel... I live in Seattle, North America's largest decriminalized city. Right, so I feel very supported here. And what has been the reaction from your community, and you're probably in a bit of a bubble anyway, but still you live in the southeast, and you don't live in a place where it's, like I said, even decriminalized. So yeah, I'm curious what things are like there??

0:40:09.4 JC: So yeah, it's a challenge here, obviously, we don't even have legal, weed essentially in Tennessee.

0:40:17.6 April Pride, host: Yeah right.

0:40:17.6 JC: Which is just absolutely ridiculous. So it's funny that my husband at this very moment, is getting me weed at a dispensary in Illinois where it is legal because I rely on that medication for sleep and migraine prevention, and he went because I'm too busy, so it is a challenge with the legal system that we have... And I am a strong advocate for, we need to just decriminalize all drugs, and I know that sounds radical it's something that Hilary Agro, whom I mentioned earlier, she's a big advocate for as well, and the reason for that is when we criminalize something, all it does is create harm and secrecy, so if we are... The reason that we have all of this fentanyl out there is really because if people were just using heroin we would have less overdoses, but heroine's illegal fentanyl is much easier to transport, even though it's illegal... It's easy to transport, easy to sell, and we can even go back and look at the era of prohibition, it wasn't... So people prohibited booze, and what did that result in a bunch of moonshine that was really harmful to people, and so if we just de-criminalize drugs and openly talk about them.

0:41:44.7 JC: Then we can have safe conversations about that in terms of what are the safe practices, how can I assure that the product that I'm getting is exactly what I ordered that... Or what I want to take, what I want to ingest. But when we are so secret about it And criminalizing it, people can't have a safe experience, I shouldn't say they can't have this experience, but that safe experience is challenged quite a bit.

0:42:12.0 April Pride, host: Right, and even just getting safe information, yeah, or knowing what is real, and is the person that's telling me I'm gonna feel this way and I should do it this way, is their lived experience similar to mine, am I gonna get the same outcome because we're going in with the same mindset there, there's such a need for people who can benefit from one another because they do have a shared life experience to find one another and to be able to talk about these things freely, but I think that's right. That's where the concern for legalities comes in. Yeah, we started... I mentioned we started hosting these events in Seattle, and this Tuesday was the second one, we had one two weeks before that, and I don't know, I guess I thought that there were people meeting up all the time doing this underground. Apparently, no now, that people are really, really searching for groups where they can openly discuss this and get more information and also just find like-minded people, so that they feel like they're on the right path for themselves and that they've got support in that, so... Yeah, I think that de-criminalizing this so people will just feel like they can even talk about it without [0:43:21.7] ____.

0:43:21.9 JC: Right All the hush hush, and I think that's such a valuable part of the experience, is that discussion afterwards with like-minded people who've maybe gone through a journey, had some similar experiences, understand the constructs of what went on, because when you start describing your own journey, which I do in chapter one of the book, well I've been talking about that experience just in general circles with people who have not tried psilocybin. I feel like I sound extremely woo-woo and there's nothing against woo-woo, but I'm very scientific, and so people will look at me like, but you're a science gen is what one of my friends call me.

0:44:01.2 April Pride, host: Science gen.

0:44:02.1 JC: Right and so Do I sound insane? When I'm talking about, these things that happened during my journey, and so when you can share that with someone else who's also gone on a journey, even though their trip is completely different, they understand that wow factor those mystical experiences that you've had and they can help you navigate that.

0:44:23.1 April Pride, host: Okay, this brings me into a part of your book that I think is really important, which is there's research with cancer patients, and after six months, 80% of them still had significantly increased.

0:44:34.9 April Pride, host: Lifestyle outcomes, and again, we can get into all the specifics of the data but what you point out is that the larger doses and the mystical experiences that were invoked by those are credited with having an impact on those long-lasting positive experiences, because I feel like it's microdosing that people are really putting in the bucket of therapeutic. And if you do more, you go bigger, this is just for fun. And I think it's really critical that people understand that when you consume a large amount of psilocybin and you have an experience that's close to all or is all inducing, that that also can be quite life-changing.

0:45:23.6 JC: Yeah.?

0:45:24.3 April Pride, host: Right??

0:45:25.5 JC: And I do think that, I think a trip is a really kind of... It's not required, but I think that is where a lot of benefit comes from is doing the journey, the deeper journey it doesn't have to be a heroic dose, but maybe just kind of a medium or a large dose to have that trip experience in a safe, contained way, can be highly beneficial because you will get some of those mystical aspects, this idea of what we talk about in terms of ego death, which can sound really scary, but it doesn't have to be, it's not like everyone loses their sense of self, it's more that you can... You lose that sense of, "Oh, I'm so focused on me that I forget that I'm part of this big beautiful universe," and that could be so mystical and highly beneficial, and that idea of oceanic boundless-ness, where you feel very much at one with nature or perhaps animals that are around you, or creatures that are around you or trees, and again, here I'm sounding all woo, but that feeling is incredibly valuable to understand that you're not alone in this world, and one of the mystical aspects of my journey was feeling this sense that I was connected by a thread of light to everyone I know and love, who I know, loves and cares for me and supports me back, and feeling that sensation was...

0:46:49.3 JC: So it was one of the most profound things I have ever experienced, and I've carried it with me and talked about it to these friends who I felt this connection to, and they're like, "I feel that too, right now, talking to you." It's a really cool thing very valuable I highly recommend it.

0:47:09.9 April Pride, host: So the look on your face, if people are just listening, yeah definitely it's an experience, it obviously, it was touching. And most people say That psychedelic experiences rank in the top three of their life... Right.