Hey everyone. Hope everyone is having a good day and feeling positive about yourself!

I wanted to open a discussion about expectations that I (and many others maybe as well) set about results or experiences we're "supposed" to have from mushrooms and other psychedelics. I tend to trip a few times a year as a sort of therapy. I find that it helps me balance out my mood and improve my confidence significantly for a few months after a trip.

One of the things I still tend to struggle with when going in to a new trip is trying to temper my expectations for it. I don't want to put too much pressure on myself that this is going to work (or that it has to work) to help me stay in good health. I think this is why I try to downplay the effects for myself when I can so there is less pressure for the trip itself. Since I feel like additional stress and pressure will negatively affect the trip.

Does anyone else experience anything similar to this? How do you deal with it?

On another note, I find when I'm coming into a trip one of the first thoughts I always have is "Is this what its supposed to feel like"? Then I go down the rabbit hole of "What is 'supposed to' mean, anyway? Who is the one behind this 'supposed to'?" It is very strange but also predictable for me now. Like my mind always happens to go there first. Anyway, thought I would share. Happy Friday!

After the Mullvad fiasco I decided to stop using VPNs all together, since port forwarding is always going to be a problem on all of them, if you read the reasons why Mullvad had to shut down that service.

There is a better way using i2p which conceals your IP and makes it impossible for anyone to know what or if you're downloading at all! No DMCA notices, no problem.

I wrote this small guide to another comment and figured I'd share it in its own post since I'm seeing so many people ask for VPN recommendations.

So there are 2 main implementations of i2p. First is the main Dev’s Java client here https://geti2p.net/en/download

The other is i2pd, which is C++.

I use the Java one personally but both would work. Someone posted back on reddit a guide on /r/i2p for qbittorrent, which is what I use now for this too. The guide was shared as a public torrent you can download with this info hash: 3f1d51095f9b116739172c1bced149acf2b10692

Use that hash with any of the various public trackers and you should be able to download that guide.

But if you just want a basic setup, that Java client comes with i2psnark, which is a Bittorrent client already setup.

The only other thing you want to do is go and search the biggest tracker for stuff, which is called PaTracker, Postman’s tracker. http://tracker2.postman.i2p, only accessible from i2p itself, which you’ll need to have setup and running first to view.

This tracker needs more seeders and uploaders in general, and by improving those things service for everyone is better. So the more the merrier.

Thanks! Feel free to ask any questions, there also might be other people who use i2p now for torrenting. I'm sure they'll help too.

Psychedelics are a broad class of drugs defined by their ability to induce an altered state of consciousness. These drugs have been used for millennia in both spiritual and medicinal contexts, and a number of recent clinical successes have spurred a renewed interest in developing psychedelic therapies. Nevertheless, a unifying mechanism that can account for these shared phenomenological and therapeutic properties remains unknown. Here we demonstrate in mice that the ability to reopen the social reward learning critical period is a shared property across psychedelic drugs. Notably, the time course of critical period reopening is proportional to the duration of acute subjective effects reported in humans. Furthermore, the ability to reinstate social reward learning in adulthood is paralleled by metaplastic restoration of oxytocin-mediated long-term depression in the nucleus accumbens. Finally, identification of differentially expressed genes in the ‘open state’ versus the ‘closed state’ provides evidence that reorganization of the extracellular matrix is a common downstream mechanism underlying psychedelic drug-mediated critical period reopening. Together these results have important implications for the implementation of psychedelics in clinical practice, as well as the design of novel compounds for the treatment of neuropsychiatric disease.

It was one of the wildest experiences I've ever gone through in my life. I didn't just lose myself, but I became other people. I completely believed I was someone else with their memories, etc. Thinking back on it, It was incredible and a little scary at the same time.

What experiences have you had?

We're seeing psychedelics become more and more popular amongst psychologists and other professionals for treatment of depression and anxiety specifically under supervision in many states.