05 April 2024
Music Centered Psychedelic Integration
An Introduction by Matt Baldwin LMFT and Dr. Mark Shortt
MAPS Bulletin: Volume XXXIV Number 1 • 2024
The idea for Music Centered Psychedelic Integration (MCPI) came about through the slow accumulation of insights and practical ideas based on our clinical training and practice from 2017 up to the present. We found that in our psychedelic psychotherapy training, music was at times emphasized as a supremely important aspect of this modality, while at others, it was also referenced as somehow secondary; a kind of adjunct to the power of the psychedelic medicine itself. This notion of music being secondary ran counter to an instinct that we both held from the very beginning of our acquaintance with the process of psychedelic therapy. Conversely, we had always suspected that music was just as important to the process of psychedelic healing as the medicine itself: that the music and medicine amplify one another, leading to a synergistic potential for personal transformation beyond which either could achieve alone.
Our work providing ketamine assisted psychotherapy has confirmed this. This came via the recognition of the importance of effective music selection and song sequencing for psychedelic experiences. We found that if we did this well for our patients, they reported deeper experiences and better outcomes for symptom reduction after their psychedelic sessions. Of course, psychedelic medicine offers so much more than symptom management but these effects were dramatic and measurable evidence of the power of correctly facilitated musical psychedelic experiences.
This led to having our patients begin to re-listen to certain tracks from a playlist that had been used in one of their prior psychedelic sessions. We were familiar with discussions within the psychedelic psychotherapy community about how it can be useful to listen back to certain songs that had been used in previous active drug sessions. We found that doing this with consistency – a process that we dubbed Integrative Relistening – was an incredibly powerful and immediate way to reconnect the journeyer’s awareness back to the deeper insights and meaning of the psychedelic experience. This aligned with our own history of personal experiences, in which we noticed the distinct tendency for a song to become imbued with an uncanny power or emotive significance when it had been encountered in a deep psychedelic state. All subsequent experiences of that song seemed to immediately provide a vivid evocation of the moments of expanded consciousness associated with that song.
This mirrors our understanding of the notion of psychedelic integration, which is the ability to stay connected to the state-specific shifts in consciousness in the weeks and months after the active psychedelic session. We found that repeated listening achieved this outcome with remarkable impact. Additionally, we began to explore the possibilities of deep listening sessions conducted before the active psychedelic session – what we call Preparatory Prelistening – and found that these pre-drug sessions have the power to help familiarize the journeyer with the experiential process of a musically facilitated inner journey while, at the same time, helping to provide a kind of check-in or perspective on what is occurring at deeper levels of the journeyer’s psyche. What arises in these sessions often acts as a helpful form of preparation for approaching psychedelic sessions and can help clarify the process of formulating intentions for growth and healing.
From there we began to formalize the MCPI protocol into a series of steps – what we call the Integrative Listening Protocols – that are meant to support and deepen all phases of psychedelic treatment. These protocols, described in detail in subsequent chapters, are based on our work with ketamine, to which MCPI is particularly well suited, due to the manageable duration of ketamine sessions. We also provide effective protocols for the use of MCPI with other longer acting psychedelic medicines, group and individual therapy models and how to run remote telehealth MCPI sessions, with considerations for safety and construction of strong therapeutic containers.
Essentially, our process is one of deeper engagement with music by going back to it again and again. We have become fond of saying:
When in doubt, return to the music.
The listening sessions that occur before and after the active psychedelic experience are not considered as merely pleasant or interesting things to do. In MCPI these activities are viewed as foundational practices.
Perhaps certain people – the more musically preoccupied among us – will be better suited to treatment with MCPI, or at least they may be the ones who are most enthusiastic about initially exploring it. In our experience, all those who work with the MCPI protocol have been able to use it as a system that provides an uncommonly strong framework for psychedelic integration. We have consistently found that when music is thoughtfully combined with the correct psychedelic medicine, it is able to turn just about anybody into what is known as a deep listener, that rare kind of person who has powerful visionary and transformative emotional experiences simply from listening closely to a piece of music.
While the listening protocols stand on their own as a systematic and comprehensive clinical approach, they are also supported by a set of values that arise from our backgrounds as musicians and obsessive music explorers – to the extent that our shared musical histories, at times, seem to us to be the most important part of our training. To this end, we try to ensure that our perspective contains reasonable guidelines for working with audio technology and maintaining sound quality as important setting factors for psychedelic practice. Additionally, we honor and support the existence of musical cultures that give rise to the musics used in psychedelic sessions, thinking of this as the ground from which our practice emerges. In general we are interested in the potential of what happens when music cultural events bring people together in vivo to share profound experiences with one another. This is something that we, as a society whose social experiences are increasingly digitally mediated, cannot afford to lose touch with.
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Finally, we are interested in the cultivation of personal musical knowledge and taste as vitally important aspects of psychedelic practice, our ideal of which involves something similar to the cultures of musical sharing that have existed amongst underground practitioners during the many decades of prohibition. Psychedelic clinical practice has become specialized to the extent that, at this point, there are certain clients who seek us out not just because of our approach to listening but, just as importantly, for our musical taste and the experiences that we can facilitate thereby [1]. A proliferation of taste options in the psychedelic world will better serve the needs of the various peoples seeking treatment and will probably end up confirming a suspicion that we have long held: specifically that there is no single music that is most appropriate for psychedelic work. As with all things psychedelic, the deeply structured message seems to have to do with infinite diversity.
The ideas presented here represent our endeavor to create something closer to a total approach to music within the context of psychedelic psychotherapy. It is our hope that this approach to methodology leads to many strong clinical outcomes as a result of its being more broadly used to facilitate deep musical psychedelic experiences. It will also almost certainly lead everyone involved–both clients and facilitators–down the starry pathway to becoming the kind of people who spend more of their life within a transformative flow of music.
Fundamentally, our approach is based on a simple idea: listen to more music throughout the entire process of psychedelic assisted psychotherapy. But simple ideas, in their rigorous application, can reveal their potential for great depth. We have found this to be the case with MCPI and believe that it is an extraordinarily powerful way to integrate psychedelic experiences. Ultimately, we think of our work as a kind of correction, a re-centering and reconnection with a flow of deeply healing musical psychedelic experience that has been waiting for us all along. We simply needed to recognize what had been in front of us the entire time.
References
[1] A sample of our musical taste can be had in our recent publication, 49 Albums For Music Centered Psychedelic Integration (Baldwin, M., Shortt, M. 2024)
Matt Baldwin, LMFT
Matt Baldwin LMFT is a musician and psychotherapist specialized in providing ketamine assisted psychotherapy. He is a 2017 graduate of the Certificate in Psychedelic Assisted Psychotherapy & Research program at The California Institute of Integral Studies and has received ketamine-specific training via Field Trip Health. He has a special interest in music used to support psychedelic experiences and was previously the Director of The Psychedelic Music Therapy Forum at The Chacruna Institute For Psychedelic Plant Medicines. Along with Dr Mark Shortt he is the creator of Music Centered Psychedelic Integration.
Dr. Mark Shortt
Dr. Mark Shortt is a musician and integrative physician who has been in the psychedelic medicine space since 2010 and practicing clinically with ketamine since 2018. He is a 2019 graduate of the Certificate in Psychedelic Assisted Psychotherapy & Research program at The California Institute of Integral Studies and has received additional training from The Ketamine Training Center and The Integrative Psychiatry Institute. Along with Matt Baldwin LMFT he is the creator of Music Centered Psychedelic Integration.