..or am I stretching the model? My wife sometimes accuses me of projecting wisdom onto IFS that she feels was never there, that I should give myself more credit for the way I interpret the model. It is a wonderful dynamic between the two of us, she is a master at detecting how a model is being misused while I seem to instinctively focus more on the power and potential of an approach. I’m often unaware I do that, so I am glad she can point this out. This has led to some inspir

In the psychedelic community a common advice is to: turn towards your demons, rather than away from them. Generally this is not bad advice at all and I have guided many people who reported how helpful it was when they did this. Still, this advice never sat very well with me. The other day one of my therapists helped me get in touch with a deep, quite existential fear. I could almost see it, but not quite. It was not much more than an intuition of a great, familiar fear, somew

The film maker Dave Hills filmed me telling a story for a small group of people who are about to have a psychedelic experience and the idea of the story is to help them navigate their own upcoming adventure. You can simply watch the video at the end of the article but I wanted to also, perhaps more completely, organise my thoughts on paper for you to read. This story is based on Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, which is a kind of blueprint that underlies hero’s adventure sto

The dragon is the symbolic challenge that the hero must face in order to be granted the precious treasure that it guards in Joseph Campbell's heroes journey. The idea of the heroes journey has helped me understand the psychedelic experience and its role in our lives and our healing processes a lot. It inspired me to offer you a little gift that may help you along on your own heroes journey. In psychedelic therapy they sometimes say that the music is the hidden therapist in th

My take on the psychedelic Heroes Journey.

Though psychedelic substances are notorious for their impressively wide range of effects, it seems the mystical or blissful ones attract...

When I was 26 I had just finished quite a few years of studying physics and I found myself in a position to make a choice: find work as...

Though I have lived almost all my life in the Netherlands I have lived abroad for a few years as a child. When I was 10 years old we...

Comparing psychedelic experiences to a trip to another country. By Coen de Koning.

Psychedelics are sometimes compared to mirrors. And I feel there is something to that comparison. Having a mirror in your home for the...