Perhaps this is a bit of my problem...

Maybe I read too much Lovecraft or have seen too many X-files or something but so far my experiences have been very cold/analytical....

...maybe *I* am just too cold/analytical...(I'm willing to except this aspect) ...But...
my experiences have not been of a warm embracing nature....so far it has felt alot like going to the dentist....it sucks but it has to be done....invasive/sterile/necessary

BTW...I hate going to the dentist....or any other doctor

I think a1pha hit the nail on the head at the beginning: if you're not scared, there might be something wrong. Overcoming that fear was a big part of smoking spice for me...

Have you made changa yet? As the others have said, harmalas somewhere in the equation might help.

You might want to try ayahuasca if you're set on getting over this, even if it was just a small dose, or a caapi-only one. Harmala experiences are both wonderful in and of themselves, and they really put spice in perspective.

I always get butterflies before I journey, its a good sign IMO, shows respect for such a powerful molecule. What I do find helps alot is to pre dose with say 15mg, just to test the waters Once my body and mind are reminded that their is not much to be scared of then il blast off with my dosage.

I need about 30 minutes to calm down (meditation, breathing), then onto the...


...and only then a bigger dose.

I have only smoked 6-7 times now always a just enough to get open eye hallucinations and closed eyes fractals. colours patterns etc but I am scared of taking a high dose - not sure why- for me the experiences so far have been like going to a weird cinema and watching all the above for a few minutes. The day will come soon Im pretty sure where i will just go for it, dambn it I want to see the machine elves !!

In my experience harmalas help me to calm down perfectly. 30min after I took harmalas I meditate about 10 min and the anxiety disappears. Only then I pick up my GVG and if any anxiety comes back I do more breathing exercise normally few deep in and out and I am good to go.

Its ok if you still feel this is not the right time. Just don't do it. There is always time to start later or some other day. There is no need to force this.I believe if you use Spice disrespectfully you may get bed experience. Its also a good lesson I learned also

I don't have much experience smoking spice, but I have taken a lot of oral brews and completely understand. I suppose I am more of the pre-flight jitters type. Once it's in my blood and I'm experiencing her in full force, I wonder why I was so nervous in the first place. On my most recent journey, I saw a white light flashing and it felt as though she was trying to pull me out of my body, but I just couldn't follow her. Maybe next time. I find it best to always treat your entheogens with respect.

Hello,

Thanks again for all the replies. I feel better and might try subling harmalas.

I made one batch of simple changa. I liked it-the taste was great. But it didn't seem differnt from my crystal form and it went fast.

I like light ayahuasca. Vine makes me trip over 60 grams. I seldom add any more than light chacruna or chali. I do drink caapi only. Love it and how it combines with weed.

Ive seen death and given birth. Both seemed more intense/scary than this. Not sure why Im so controlled by this.

A high enough dose of DMT is scary. How could seemingly being explosively confronted with a highly advanced awareness face to face and then some not be? Sure, it goes away, but there's always the initial freaky realization that W H O A this is seriously happening somehow. Of course, fear is just a silly human emotion.... with a high enough dose, I found that all those things I thought I knew, including emotions, were so far gone away in the past detached and didn't even matter because I had become this new flow. You can react however you want. Some completely give in give up let go surrender which is cool...it does what it wants...I like the way it moves me, it speaks to me with a motion I could only ever articulate with hit this.

If you want to know, you have to just smoke it. Being on another psychedelic is a good way to go in, like LSDMT, or 4-HO-DMT+NNDMT. You just set yourself up like a soft statue and perform the little algorithms that get you to the other side and it leaves its eerie conscious engine-like imprint on the memory fields of whatever it is that you are, growing.

Good posts on here, sorry if I repeat something already said but: Yes, fear is normal. In fact, I think everyone whom I smoke with also shares this common fear. It's anxiety of loss of control and fear of the unknown. Totally, TOTALLY common and understood by many. The thing is though, and to a lesser extent this isn't always true, but if you are having trouble breaking through it's probably related to one of two things:

1) Low quality DMT, bad extraction, or something along these lines.
2) Your not ready.

I'm more prone to go with number two. I would even be willing to say that the majority of peoples problems is number 2. In fact, I can almost guarantee that's the issue. Very often, in fact, I will be sharing a session with someone and while I will have an amazing, totally spiritual breakthrough and realization, the person(s) with me often times have bad, negative or no experience at all, sometimes even if they smoke more than me! How? It's because they are not ready.

I believe (100%) that the DMT experience is a conscious energy. Rather its an external entity or just my own self, I am not sure. However, that is besides the point. The point is, that the energy can sense where to take you. So, if your not ready, then it's not going to take you. In fact, if your not ready, chances are when you try and blast off, what will happen is that the molecule will try and make you aware of what it is that is holding you back. It might come as a pressure in your body, it might come as a feeling, an emotion, a visual or even an understanding.

When I first started, there were many obstacles I had to go through to get to where I am now. It wasn't just first time go sort of deal, though many people have this conception. And, for many people they probably can just smoke and go, but that's because they can handle it. Chances are, if you are not prepaired, and it takes you to the furthest extreme known to hyperspace, you would likely explode.

How do I know your not ready? Because you have fear. Fear, while it's useful, will inevitably hold you back. Now, I get fears from time to time of smoking if I haven't smoked in quite a while and it's like a "new" feeling. So, what I usually do to get around this, is I smoke small bits and somewhat ramp my experience up. Rather than having not smoked for a few weeks or a month and suddenly smoke a huge bowl, just take it slow and let yourself adjust to the feeling a little to loosen up the tension and then go for a big one.

Regardless, the key thing here to remember is that YOU WILL BE OK! You wont die, you wont get hurt, nothing will hurt you.. It's all in your head. Don't let it fool you.

This resonates well with me....my (so far) most in depth XP was very much like this...I was a sort of soft statue....I was *there* in all 5 senses but without locomotion/will/control - my same 3 entities were present and seemed to take delight in squirting something in my eye and poking me in the ear...sorry to say my initial perspective was sort of like school yard kids picking on a retard (I was the retard LoL).

I (much) later saw an episode of..."Medicine Men Gone Wild"....LoL....but....a deep forest I believe african(?) pigmy tribe's method of diagnosis was to put drops in the eyes of doctor, mother, and child....sort of changed my perspective a bit.

**I do use changa**...easiest, most reliable method IMO...the above XP was a caapi leaf infused...in fact most my XP's were....doesn't seem to help calm...but can't see it having the time to react in that fashion
...I like the 30 min tea prior to liftoff idea....perhaps that may help.

I don't want to force it...in fact I've tried to sorta put it out of mind....but the...curiosity...if you will, lingers......I feel increasingly drawn but still am apprehensive.

The other BIG point....the 15mg starter dose....My so far most ENJOYABLE XP was a very small dose....not breakthrough, just watching the mandala...I just felt good about the whole situation....after pre-flight that is....and in truth DID want more...every other time I've practically run away from my apparatus.
I just didn't want to make it...recreational....and be disrespectful I guess.

One final...unrelated...statement...Carlos Castenada in the Don Jaun series often spoke of "Little Smoke"....I always assumed a mushroom blend....Perhaps more likely a Changa blend?....EVEN including some MM? ...For the stalwart of heart maybe

This is absolutely opposite to SWIM's experience. When she first started working with DMT, she followed Erowid's old recommendations of 60mgs as a medium-strong dose. Each time she would vaporize, she would breakthrough and it would be way way too much. The fear built each time, to the point she habituated a panic response to even packing the bowl. The fear never stopped her from breaking through, with a large enough dose.

Edit: Also, where have you ever seen reports of "low-quality" DMT preventing breakthroughs? I have been here a long time and have never seen a single one. I've seen some of people breaking through on obviously tainted DMT, like containing blue from adulterated solvent.

I do recrystalize. Its white and looks high quliaty. Completely different from the pic on erowid.

Maybe I should just say I have fear. How can I ever be ready? First time I had sex I was scared. I was scared when my dad died. I was scared when I gave birth. I was a little scared when I first smoked DMT. Now I'm really scared. Seems like I'm never really ready. But its my life and must be lived. I'm not sure fear and ready can always go together or fear and not ready.I feel like a brave coward alot.

This place is wonderful. Other newbies should go to the chat-its full of smart chemists, weird poets and funny people.

Oh!Happy Thanksgiving get togethers to the Americans.

At your service

I understand, and can relate.... But, I think there might be a little confusion. When we say fear of smoking, is it really fear? I don't think so, I think what we are talking about is anxiety. Fear prevents you from experiencing change, it's like an internal mechanism in place that prevents a person from going further. It's a safety switch that allows us to move at our own pace.

Anxiety on the other hand, is a type of excitement we get by experiencing change in an unknown direction. Anxiety can quickly turn into fear, if you fear you have gone too far, past the point you are comfortable with. Usually, once someone reaches that breaking point of where their anxiety turns to fear, the experience sort of stops and you beging to come down, however since you pushed yourself to the brink of your own internal limits you interpret that experience as a breakthrough. Because you are literally breaking through a layer of fear.

So, in a sense, fear is also essential to breaking through because if you had no fear, then what would you be breaking through? But, the process in which we breakthrough is a process of anxiety leading to our fears. Once we confront the fear and see it in this form we then have two options, hide and wait for it to pass (bad experience) or confront it and break through it (good experience).

Fear, is also a very vague word. It can have many meanings, and it encompasses all negative feelings. So, with that in mind, fear comes in many shapes and many forms all unique to each individual person. A fear might be something as simple as realizing there is a god and something as extreme as being afraid to lose our lives. If you are afraid to die, like all of us, then when you go through the experience of dying you will be liberating yourself from that fear, which is why I believe the most common effect of DMT is the experience that one is dying. We must breakthrough these fears, in order to achieve that sense of liberation from our fears.

We see things in reality molded around our fears, because rather than confront our fears, we try and deceive ourselves into repressing them instead. What this does, is prevent's us from experiencing things. We might have a fear of heights, so rather than overcoming that fear we instead make sure we never have to fly, we never have to be on a second story, we never are above X amount of feet and so on. We create limits and restrictions around ourselves to shelter ourselves from what we fear. Think I am off on a tangent?

Well, why do you think that psychedelics are schedule one narcotic? Why do you think we suppressed the matriarchal system? Why do we have organized religions? Why is the number one highest economic stimulus war? Why do we create trouble and problems in our own lives when we could easily take the other path? Why? Because the easy path that we know is the right path has something along it that we are in fear of, and rather than confront that fear we actually create a whole new totally messed up unnatural path for ourselves in order to ensure that we don't have to confront that fear.

We all do it, every single one of it, and we have been doing it since the dawn of civilization. This fear has become a part of our logical lives and rather we admit to it or not it is and always has been there. The question is, what will we do once we realize that the path we created for ourselves will never lead us to where we want to be, and the only path that will ever take us where we want is the path in which we must confront all of our fears?

So, to cut this short, you must truly understand that this whole experience of life is a tool to liberate your consciousness from material and transcend physicality. It's like we are trapped in this world, and our goal is to get out of here. In this reality we must go through steps of discovering ourselves, so that when it is time to actually do the liberation, we can experience it in every aspect. It's like growing up, you slowly get more of an understanding of reality and eventually get to a point where you go out into the world on your own, but we don't just push young children out in the world alone, we make sure they are prepared. Just like that, these experiences in life do the same things to our souls, it prepares it for the time in which it must grow up and move on to the next part of the greater experience which is death.

Phew... Long message...

everytime I come back here I'm so happy with what I read.

this is helping me. I hadn't... smelled that smell in years. Suddenly I'm at the Fox in Oakland at YouKnowWho getting hotboxed and my first instinct is (escape)
It's one thing when you do it, when you know it's coming. but when it just started out of nowhere it really incensed me, (I can't believe this just happens here, like this.)
even at almost no-dose it's like a complete reality check on everything.

the anxiety and the love are the frictionless forces swallowing eachother as they grow..
I never mixed it with the tea... maybe that is some lubrication to lose this friction.

A simple prayer "help me, heal me, teach me" will express your intentions. Communicate that you are afraid and you will be healed.
Letting go is the hardest part. You will learn in time.

Im terrified of it in a sense.. but our relationship is very mutual . Once the vapor slides through your system and after the shakes we always have a wonderful time together

i also recomend meditation prior to the sacred ritual or even better just being out and breathing fresh air

What a wonderful chance to explain the best we can of what happens to each of us..i beleave the fear so many speak of is respect.. I want you to know i have free climbed mountains, i have rode bulls, i have jumped out of air plains. i have done underwater cave diving. and luckly much more.. i get the same feeling as all of you do.. even with all the crazy things i have done.. nothing and i mean nothing has ever shook me to my foundations like spice!!! my ego death blew my mind... i believe spice is a teacher that demands great respect.. even at my ego death!! just before it showed it to me. It made me all of a sudden aware of my heart beat. It let me hear it soooo clear! then like one loud drum bang! It stopped and then ripped me to shreads... For what felt like forever<3 Then give me back my life.. and to say it changed me is in understatment! but i can imho say im soo truly greatful for the lession.. you see the things i have done.. And i can say with great respect and much love!! You are the bravest spirits i have had the pleasure to know were alive... spice is a teacher let it teach<3 give it the respect it deserves. know its love...oden