About ten years ago, on an October night, I paced around and lay curled on my bedroom floor until dawn, certain that God had cursed me, and that my life was ruined. It was the worst bad trip I’ve ever had. But in the way that matters most, it was also the best.
The standard explanation for a bad trip is dose, mindset, or setting. I got all three wrong that night, but they also don’t cover everything that came up. Some of it was the world’s suffering, which most of us are educated not to recognize or feel. Then there was how I read it. The only map I had (as a Canadian raised completely non-religious) was unconsciousnly inherited: a God above who judges. That reading was cultural, though much of the content of the experience was also personal. The cultural and the personal matter equally, and they often come tangled together. Whether a night like that breaks someone or opens them depends a lot on who and what’s there to help them make sense of it.
The Night God Cursed Me
I was alone, exploring consciousness as I had been since the summer of my seventeenth year on this bewildering Earth. I’d taken 500 micrograms of LSD, two and a half times what the Johns Hopkins safety guidelines treat as a high dose, and then smoked a bowl of cannabis to push further. I was expecting the transcendent bliss I had become accustomed to after months of pleasant psychedelic explorations and mystical experiences.
What came instead was the world’s suffering.
War, famine, illness, addiction — all of it, and with it the conviction that I was responsible, that I had ruined my own life and somehow the world along with it. Between pacing my room, full of anxiety, and lying on the floor in the fetal position empty of any hope, I watched my family grieve what I thought was my death, while the people I looked up to mocked me from above.
Then the visions got darker. I was at the bottom of an infinitely deep abyss, surrounded by children who kept trying to climb out and kept falling back. I didn’t even try to climb out as I cried from existential hopelessness in a filthy, infected pit. A ladder to heaven appeared and vanished the moment I reached for it. A book opened in front of me and its pages turned by themselves, where I understood that I was being tested by a God I didn’t know, and failing the test. At the end of it I felt a finger touch my forehead. That was the verdict. I was cursed.
For a stretch of the night after that, I fought the urge to end my life. I held on by watching my breath and thinking about what my death would do to my mother. I said goodbye to the people I love, but kept fighting, resisting the urge to commit an irreversible act. Somewhere in that fight, Christ appeared as a saviour of the torment, and Buddha as a teacher of self-liberation.
Near dawn, too exhausted to keep fighting, I knelt and prayed to the God I believed had cursed me. Something let go, and for the first time all night I felt myself dissolve into the infinite. Soon after, I heard a voice say, “this is what you are” as I silently gazed around my bedroom with life rushing back into a body I had half given up on. The sun came up. I felt cleansed, purified, and grateful for life and for the natural world in a way I hadn’t been before.
My mind was empty, but serene. My heart was broken, but open.
The Odds on a Bad Trip
In 2016, researchers at Johns Hopkins published a survey of 1,993 people, each describing the worst bad trip they’d ever had on psilocybin mushrooms. Thirty-nine percent ranked it among the five most challenging experiences of their lives. Eighty-four percent said they’d benefited from it. Those groups have to overlap, which means hundreds of people went through one of the hardest experiences of their lives and came out better for it.
I belong in that overlap, and I know how close I came to the survey’s other numbers.
Eleven percent of respondents had put themselves or someone else at risk of physical harm. Among those whose trip lay more than a year behind them, 7.6 percent had sought treatment for lasting symptoms, and the authors recorded three attempted suicides. The risk of harm rose with dose, with the length of the experience, and wherever physical comfort and social support were missing. Longer ordeals were linked to smaller lasting gains. A retrospective survey shows associations and can’t establish causes, but my dark night had nearly every risk factor on the list. I was lucky, but luck is a poor plan. And meaning does not cancel harm.
What I lacked most that night is what the research keeps coming back to. In their safety guidelines for psychedelic research, Johnson, Richards, and Griffiths describe spending at least eight hours with each volunteer before a session and keeping at least two sitters in the room throughout. When fear arrives, the first response is reassurance and a steady presence, down to holding someone’s hand. By the time the guidelines were published, they had given high doses to 54 volunteers, and reassurance alone had settled every episode of acute distress. I spent most of a night finding out what happens without it.
Set and setting, taken seriously, describe an ecology: the preparation a person brings, the people present, the story available for making sense of what happens, and the life waiting afterward. Mine was a small bedroom, a dose I had no business taking, and no one.
What Surfaces Belongs to the Culture Too
The first thing that broke over me that night had little to do with me as an individuated self. It was the suffering of the world: visions, sensations, and thoughts that came from far beyond my personal history. Since then, I’ve come to think of bad trips as cultural as much as personal.
Neuroscience offers part of an explanation for why the world’s suffering could emerge as open- and closed-eye visions. In their REBUS model, short for relaxed beliefs under psychedelics, Robin Carhart-Harris and Karl Friston describe a brain that is always predicting the world from its deepest assumptions, and they propose that psychedelics loosen those assumptions, so that what those predictions usually filter out can get through. Some of the deepest of those assumptions concern what or who we are and our relationship to the world. For many people, loosening them feels like the self dissolving. I didn’t get there until the very end. I spent the night fighting, terrified by intense visions that came faster than I could take them in, and what I went through was closer to a soul quest than an ego death: a descent, a trial, a verdict, and, much later, a return.
I absorbed those assumptions about the self from the culture I grew up in, the way most people do. Whatever doesn’t fit the individualistic and dualistic cultural narrative gets swept under the rug: mystical experiences of unity, grief for a damaged living world, dread about death and meaning, a longing for belonging that our industrial-growth society fails to meet. When a psychedelic relaxes that cultural upkeep, all of it can arrive quite abruptly, with no warning that it was there. For anyone whose sense of self and safety rests on control and separation, that flood can feel like annihilation. The fear is the person’s own, but a good deal of what they’re afraid of was handed to them.
The Curse That Wasn’t Mine
A decade and two degrees later, what strikes me is that nearly every image from that night came out of an unconscious inheritance. The ladder to heaven is Jacob’s ladder from Genesis. The book with pages turning on their own is the book of judgment in Revelation, where the dead are judged by what is written about them. The finger is the finger of God that wrote the law on stone tablets in Exodus, the same finger Michelangelo painted reaching toward Adam. The abyss is the bottomless pit, for the fallen angels. Even the plot was inherited: a judging God above and outside the world, a trial, a soul found wanting, a crushing sentence passed on one individual.
The darkness that night had a force no secular idea could account for, and a form that was unmistakably religious. Judgment by a transcendent God above, a ruling on a single soul, guilt as the measure of a life: those came from the Abrahamic structures that shaped the culture my ancestors existed in. I’d had zero religious education, which is the point. The saviours were more mixed. Christ belonged to the same inheritance as the curse. The Buddha could have come from growing up in China, or from the books on Buddhism I’d been reading the summer before. He could also have come from somewhere deeper in my consciousness.
Those Abrahamic structures also set humans apart from the rest of creation. In 1967 the historian Lynn White Jr. argued in Science that Western Christianity was the most anthropocentric religion the world had seen, and that its separation of humanity from nature lay at the roots of the ecological crisis. His thesis is still argued over, and the Abrahamic traditions are far wider than any one reading of Genesis. Still, it describes the cosmology that judged me that night. It had a God above, a world below, and a hell much further down.
The same Christian tradition that supplied the curse also held the way through it. John of the Cross, the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic, described a dark night of the soul in which a person feels abandoned by God and tastes something like the pains of hell, including profound existential hopelessness and meaninglessness. But he ultimately understood that process as purification. The religious studies scholar Christopher Bache argued that John’s dark night closely parallels the hardest experiences Stanislav Grof documented in LSD therapy, and that psychedelics can speed up the same purification at the cost of a harsher passage. When I knelt and prayed to the God I believed had cursed me, I was doing something those mystics would have recognized. I surrendered inside the very framework that had condemned me. Grof had a name for the point I had reached: “cosmic bottom.”
Encounters With Darkness
None of this explains the darkness away. It runs through the cultural and the personal alike, and in some difficult experiences it arrives as an encounter: presences that feel malevolent, imagery of demons and hell, a conviction of evil so immediate it seems to come from outside the person altogether. People who come back from these rarely talk about grief. They talk about meeting something. When that finger touched my forehead, something judged me, and it had the full weight of a presence.
When Johnson, Richards, and Griffiths set out the forms a bad trip can take, they listed troubling thoughts or feelings about ultimate evil forces alongside frightening illusions and painful thoughts about one’s own life. Their guidance for a volunteer who meets a demon or monster is to approach it, even to ask why it has appeared, instead of trying to flee.
Traditions with long experience of these plants treat such forces as a hazard of the work. Luis Eduardo Luna and, later, Stephan Beyer documented the practice of the vegetalistas, the mestizo plant healers of the Peruvian Amazon. In that practice, healers and sorcerers alike employ virotes, magical darts, while a healer’s songs, the icaros, protect as well as heal. Protection is a key part of the process.
No survey can settle questions about what these presences are. Depth psychology reads them as the psyche’s own disowned material taking form. Many of the traditions that have worked with these plants regard them as beings in their own right. I don’t know which ontological framing is true. I do know such encounters can’t be explained away through a single lens — culture, neuroscience, psychology, religion — without failing to provide an adequate explanation. Because it runs through the universal and the personal at once, a response that treats it as only one or the other leaves room to spare.
Christina and Stanislav Grof called crises like this spiritual emergencies, a phrase that plays on emergence, and argued that they can carry developmental meaning while being severely destabilizing. David Lukoff later mapped the overlap between mystical experiences with psychotic features and psychotic disorders with mystical features, and telling the two apart takes careful judgment. Persistent paranoia, psychotic symptoms that outlast the acute effects, severe mood instability, and any risk of self-harm call for clinical care. The research guidelines exclude anyone with a personal or family history of psychotic disorders for a reason. If my wish to die had outlasted that night, prayer and meditation would not have been enough.
The Ecology Around the Experience
Dose belongs in the ecology too. Transformation is not proportional to intensity. I took an irresponsible dose, alone, and the night nearly cost me my life. The practical side of all this, from preparation to responding in the moment, is covered at How to Use Psychedelics, Psygaia’s free and evolving psychedelic education and harm-reduction resource.
The widest part of the ecology is the culture. Emilia Sanabria and Luís Fernando Tófoli, who study psychedelic practice in South America, observe that in the Brazilian ayahuasca religions, among them Santo Daime and União do Vegetal, formal integration is by no means the rule, and a relational, collective network of care often does that work instead. They locate the difference between those settings and the contemporary West in how continuous the experience is with everyday social life and with the cosmology of the surrounding society. Where a community already has a place for a living world and a self embedded within it, an experience of self-dissolution and ecological belonging has somewhere to go. Where it doesn’t, the same experience becomes an anomaly, and the person carries it alone. I had no such network. I had a bedroom floor and a dentist appointment the next day.
Somewhere to Land
Integration decides whether a reorganization benefits or harms a person. Without it, what opened during the experience can linger as anxiety, confusion, or a floating unease.
Most integration on offer is aimed at the individual. Sanabria and Tófoli note that integration services concentrate on the person at the expense of the social and environmental conditions that produce distress, and that they are increasingly packaged as checklists and sold as services. The Psygaia Framework I developed at the University of Ottawa changes the guiding question: where clinical integration asks what an experience meant to the person who had it, the framework asks what it demands of a life embedded in a larger community of life.
Where an experience disclosed a felt kinship with the living world, giving it somewhere to land means regular time outdoors, attention to what was shown about belonging and responsibility, stewardship of place, shared with other people, and a second look at habits of consumption. Where it brought an encounter with darkness, it means people who can understand what happened without dismissing it or explaining it away through a single lens, a practice that restores footing when the memory returns, and clinical care where the fear does not pass.
An experience also needs time, and its intensity does not settle the truth of what it seemed to show. It took me years of religious study and yogic and Buddhist practice to transform my understanding of that dark night: from damnation, to redemption, to formlessness. The conviction that God had cursed me was as vivid as anything I have ever felt. Fortunately, what remains true today, over a decade later, is the empty-clear mind and the broken-open heart.
A bad trip is usually read as a verdict on the dose, the setting, or the person who had it. I took mine as a verdict from God. Some bad trips are accurate reports instead, of grief for a living world tearing itself apart through us, of a psychospiritual darkness beyond comprehension, and often of both at once. Integration is the slow work of building places for both to land and take root through a continually evolving process of embodied sense-making. A culture with more of them would have less buried for a difficult experience to find, and more help for what was never buried at all.
Ecological integration guidance is available through Psygaia’s guides.
Sources
Bache, C. M. (1991). Mysticism and psychedelics: The case of the dark night. Journal of Religion and Health, 30(3), 215–236.
Belleau, L. (2025). The Psygaia Framework: Integration as Reconnection.
Beyer, S. V. (2009). Singing to the plants: A guide to mestizo shamanism in the upper Amazon. University of New Mexico Press.
Carbonaro, T. M., Bradstreet, M. P., Barrett, F. S., MacLean, K. A., Jesse, R., Johnson, M. W., & Griffiths, R. R. (2016). Survey study of challenging experiences after ingesting psilocybin mushrooms: Acute and enduring positive and negative consequences. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 30(12), 1268–1278. doi:10.1177/0269881116662634
Carhart-Harris, R. L., & Friston, K. J. (2019). REBUS and the anarchic brain: Toward a unified model of the brain action of psychedelics. Pharmacological Reviews, 71(3), 316–344. doi:10.1124/pr.118.017160
Grof, S. (2008). LSD psychotherapy: The healing potential of psychedelic medicine (4th ed.). Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.
Grof, S., & Grof, C. (Eds.). (1989). Spiritual emergency: When personal transformation becomes a crisis. Jeremy P. Tarcher.
Johnson, M. W., Richards, W. A., & Griffiths, R. R. (2008). Human hallucinogen research: Guidelines for safety. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 22(6), 603–620. doi:10.1177/0269881108093587
Lukoff, D. (1985). The diagnosis of mystical experiences with psychotic features. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 17(2), 155–181.
Luna, L. E. (1986). Vegetalismo: Shamanism among the mestizo population of the Peruvian Amazon. Almqvist & Wiksell International.
Sanabria, E., & Tófoli, L. F. (2025). Integration or commodification? A critical review of individual-centered approaches in psychedelic healing. Journal of Psychedelic Studies, 9(3), 202–211. doi:10.1556/2054.2024.00411
White, L., Jr. (1967). The historical roots of our ecologic crisis. Science, 155(3767), 1203–1207. doi:10.1126/science.155.3767.1203
