In this episode, Andria, a therapist based in Vancouver, speaks about her first 5-MeO-DMT experience in 2021 and the sessions that followed. She describes feeling a clear pull toward the work despite not having prior guided psychedelic experience, and moving forward based on intuition and trust in the referral that connected her to it.

She shares how her background as a therapist shaped the way she entered the experience. Andria also describes being accustomed to holding space for others, and what it was like to shift into being the one inside the process. In her words, this involved navigating control, trust, and letting go within the sessions themselves.

Andria describes her experiences as unfolding across multiple sessions rather than being contained to a single moment. Some are described as subtle, others more direct, and she speaks to how each session met her in a different way depending on where she was at the time.

Andria also speaks about working one-to-one with the same guide and returning for multiple sessions, and how that continuity and setting supported her engagement with the process.

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chad charles is a practitioner, educator, and mentor specializing in 5-MeO-DMT. Since 2016, he has worked exclusively in this field, developing a practice-based understanding of these experiences through direct facilitation, practitioner training, and ongoing research. He works one-on-one with individuals in therapy-assisted contexts, supports people around the world through integration calls, and guides practitioners through mentorship and training. A large, detailed body of documented sessions since 2020 informs targeted research initiatives, with a focus on clarity, precision, and lived data. His private practice operates in Toronto and Montreal. Learn more at chadcharles.net

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Timestamped Summary

00:00 – Introduction to Andria’s 5-MeO-DMT journey

02:00 – Her background as a therapist specializing in EMDR and somatic work

04:00 – Working beyond cognition: healing through the body and energy

05:30 – Her first 5-MeO-DMT session in 2021

06:30 – Physical releases, observing consciousness, and energetic purging

08:00 – Understanding the “observer” state and equanimity

10:00 – Spiritual practice, meditation, and emotional detachment

12:00 – Intensity, blocked energy, and nervous system release

13:30 – Reactivations and integration after the first session

15:00 – Why she returned for a second session years later

16:00 – A radically different second experience: from darkness to rebirth

17:30 – Encountering “the void” and wanting to stop the process

18:30 – Emotional aftermath, integration support, and post-session lows

20:00 – Why guidance and relational safety matter in psychedelic work

22:00 – Vulnerability, trust, and the therapeutic container

24:00 – Why this became some of the most important work of her life

27:00 – Lasting changes: observer consciousness, self-compassion, and resilience

28:30 – Supporting others through psychedelic integration work

30:00 – Living with epilepsy and shifting her relationship to epilepsy and medication

34:00 – Reflections on long-term psychedelic integration and closing thoughts

Naran describes returning to 5-MeO-DMT with chad after a previous experience (with someone else in a less-than-supportive container) left him terrified of both the medicine and life itself. That early experience initiated a two year journey of constant fear, panic, disregulation. Even hearing the medicine mentioned could send him into panic, yet he knew that avoiding it was not resolving what had been opened.

Naran reflects on the original experience as ending in an overwhelming contraction despite it being a profound state of liberation. He says that contrast was deeply destabilising and the facilitator was not able to hold him adequately. For roughly two years he lived with reactivations, fear, and a sense of being hunted by something he could not escape. Although he had tools and resources, he says that although they soothed him, they did not resolve what remained unfinished.

What allowed him to return to the medicine was a different context: a gentler, more gradual approach, one-on-one contact, time with the facilitator, and a stronger sense of safety and connection. He describes the first session with chad as giving him courage, and the second as the real crossing—meeting the fear, feeling it fully, and finding safety within it. He says that the completion accomplished in that process was due to a softening, a growing trust, and the sense that he could finally stop.

He now speaks about fear as a teacher that calls him forward rather than something to avoid. That shift shapes how he works with others: with empathy, with safety, and with a willingness to stay with whatever is happening. He says the return to 5 with chad taught him the power to relax into intensity, to soften reactions, and to gently unravel contractions rather than turn away from them.

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chad charles is a practitioner, educator, and mentor specializing in 5-MeO-DMT. Since 2016, he has worked exclusively in this field, developing a practice-based understanding of these experiences through direct facilitation, practitioner training, and ongoing research. He works one-on-one with individuals in therapy-assisted contexts, supports people around the world through integration calls, and guides practitioners through mentorship and training. A large, detailed body of documented sessions since 2020 informs targeted research initiatives, with a focus on clarity, precision, and lived data. His private practice operates in Toronto and Montreal. Learn more at chadcharles.net

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Timestamps:

0:00 Introduction to Naran
1:41 Retreats, breathwork, and one-on-one work
3:26 Returning to 5-MeO-DMT after fear
5:00 Freedom, contraction, and destabilization
6:48 Forgetting his name and coming back to limitation
9:29 Two years of fear and reactivations
11:49 A gentler approach and saying yes again
14:00 Why one-on-one support mattered
16:23 Second session: from the shore into the depths
18:49 Crossing the fear and finding safety
20:57 Fear as teacher, softening, and guide work
29:42 Can going back be the remedy?

In this episode, chad speaks with Carly Rae about the 5-MeO-DMT sessions they did together beginning in 2018, and how those experiences fit into the larger arc of her life. Carly Rae now lives in northern British Columbia with her partner, where they have bought 80 acres and are building a retreat centre. Her work has expanded into women’s health and equine therapy, and she describes her current life as something she could not previously have imagined for herself.

Looking back, Carly Rae says she first came to this work during one of the hardest periods of her life, in the aftermath of a highly publicized tragedy that involved her brother. She describes her initial intention as wanting to “rewire” her brain after experiencing depression and suicidal ideation for the first time. Rather than bringing immediate relief, her first 5-MeO-DMT session (also her first guided psychedelic session) opened a much harder process. She says it brought patterns and repressed memories to the surface and that life became more difficult afterward. Even so, she sees that difficulty as necessary.

Over time, she says the multiple sessions helped remove layers of amnesia, and bring her into contact with both deeply personal material and broader patterns of repression and violation. She describes the early sessions as feeling like she was being forced into submission, while later sessions showed her that the same experience did not have to come through terror and intensity but rather surrender. She speaks about learning that the same medicine, over time, could also be experienced through bliss, and about choosing not to return to the same old patterns of being “hammered by life.”

Carly Rae also reflects on the importance for her of doing this work privately with a man. She says the sessions were deeply vulnerable and intimate, and that being held by a man through such intense experiences helped reshape how she relates to and trusts the masculine. She connects this directly to material around sexual abuse that surfaced in the process. Eight years later, she says the words “all is well” have stayed with her throughout everything, and that 5-MeO-DMT remains one of the greatest gifts in helping free her mind and soul.

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chad charles is a practitioner, educator, and mentor specializing in 5-MeO-DMT. Since 2016, he has worked exclusively in this field, developing a practice-based understanding of these experiences through direct facilitation, practitioner training, and ongoing research. He works one-on-one with individuals in therapy-assisted contexts, supports people around the world through integration calls, and guides practitioners through mentorship and training. A large, detailed body of documented sessions since 2020 informs targeted research initiatives, with a focus on clarity, precision, and lived data. His private practice operates in Toronto and Montreal. Learn more at chadcharles.net

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Timestamps:

0:00 Introduction & Carly’s Life Today

0:53 Building a Retreat Centre in Northern BC

2:21 First Guided Psychedelic Session

3:34 The Bus Crash & Intention to “Rewire”

4:38 The First Session: Everything Gets Harder

6:14 “All Is Well” & Thinking She Was Dying

8:20 Choosing to Return & Face What Surfaced

10:52 From Submission to Surrender

12:55 Repression, God, and Expression

15:18 Thawing Consciousness Over Years

20:34 Medicine, Humility, and the Ego

24:14 Trust, Intimacy, and Being Held by a Man

30:23 A Message for People Considering This Work

In this episode, chad speaks with YZ about her first 5-MeO-DMT experience. Despite prior work with meditation retreats and other psychedelics, she found those insights did not last. What remained was an intuitive pull toward a different kind of encounter—one grounded a contemporary context, and one-to-one support.

YZ reflects on her hesitation around traditional medicine settings, particularly the tension between lineage, tourism, and authenticity. She was drawn instead to an individualized format, where the presence of the guide became central the experience. For her, that relational support allowed something deeper to unfold—something she could not access in a group setting.

She describes the session as profoundly paradoxical: both terrifying and deeply peaceful. Through the metaphor of an ice cube melting into water, she captures the shift from a rigid sense of self to something more fluid and expansive—losing form, but not essence.

In the aftermath, YZ speaks to a lasting change in how she relates to herself and the world. What had once been conceptual became directly experienced. She describes less judgment, greater fluidity, and a new baseline in daily life—framing the experience not as an endpoint, but as the beginning of an ongoing process.

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chad charles is a practitioner, educator, and mentor specializing in 5-MeO-DMT. Since 2016, he has worked exclusively in this field, developing a practice-based understanding of these experiences through direct facilitation, practitioner training, and ongoing research. He works one-on-one with individuals in therapy-assisted contexts, supports people around the world through integration calls, and guides practitioners through mentorship and training. A large, detailed body of documented sessions since 2020 informs targeted research initiatives, with a focus on clarity, precision, and lived data. His private practice operates in Toronto and Montreal. Learn more at chadcharles.net

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Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction & How YZ Chose 5-MeO-DMT

04:44 From Traditional Lineages to Modern Containers

07:35 Power of One-on-One Guidance & Support

10:23 Paradox of Terror and Infinite Love

14:55 Seeing Love in Everything After the Session

18:06 Actualization of Prior Spiritual Work & Behavioral Shifts

23:13 Self-Love as Love for All That Exists Within You

25:44 The Ice Cube Metaphor: Identity Melting into Vastness

29:44 Bravery, Empowerment, and Deeper Truth

32:18 Sharing the Ineffable & Guidance for Others

35:50 An Ongoing, Never-Ending Journey