Expansive States

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EXPANSIVE STATES / JOURNAL

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Bookshelf

The reading behind the writing.

After MDMA changed what I thought was possible, I read something like ninety books. I wanted the research, but also the accounts that made it feel human. These are books I’d put into a friend’s hands, with a few words about where each one might take you.

Browse the shelf

MDMA & experience
Trauma & parts work
Science & consciousness
Preparation & integration
History & culture
Research & support

Anne Other

After MDMA, I wanted to know whether anyone else had felt anything like it. These firsthand accounts gave the research a human dimension: people describing old pain becoming approachable, sometimes after years of trying. I kept recognizing things I had struggled to put into words. Read it for that inside view, alongside the clinical evidence.

TRUST SURRENDER RECEIVE

Alexander Beiner

This book helped widen my question from how we heal to how we live together. Beiner explores psychedelics in relation to climate, political division, and the industry growing around them. It is an ambitious, questioning read about what expanded consciousness might ask of us once we return to the world.

THE BIGGER PICTURE

Dan Engle with Alex Young

Engle uses a fictional patient’s conversations to make MDMA-assisted therapy more imaginable. What might someone bring into the room? What could preparation, trust, and follow-up involve? Read it for that narrative view of the process, with the current MDMA research guide beside it. A fictional outcome cannot tell us what an individual treatment will achieve.

A DOSE OF HOPE

Richard C. Schwartz

Part of you wants closeness. Another part is already planning the escape. Schwartz gives that familiar contradiction a language through Internal Family Systems, or IFS. His invitation is to become curious about the jobs these parts are doing. A useful starting point for exploring inner conflict with less hostility toward yourself.

NO BAD PARTS

Pete Walker · From Surviving to Thriving

Walker writes about the inner critic, emotional flashbacks, grief, and the effects of growing up without enough care. For readers who recognize themselves here, naming a pattern can change the questions they ask about it. This is the everyday side of the shelf: understanding what still hurts and finding ways to respond.

COMPLEX PTSD

Bessel van der Kolk

Trauma reaches into pleasure, attention, relationships, and the experience of inhabiting a body. Van der Kolk follows those effects through clinical stories and a range of approaches to recovery. The book opens a larger conversation about what feeling better involves, including the ability to participate in life and connect with other people.

THE BODY KEEPS THE SCORE

Frank Anderson

A deeper look at Internal Family Systems for readers who want to understand how the model approaches complex trauma. Anderson combines case examples, neuroscience, and personal reflection. Read it alongside No Bad Parts to explore why apparently contradictory responses can make sense in the life of the person carrying them.

TRANSCENDING TRAUMA

John Bradshaw

The family rules we absorbed can outlive the household: what to hide, what to need, who to become. Bradshaw approaches that inheritance through inner-child work, stories, and reflective exercises. His central question connects with this site’s interest in possibility: which old roles are we still living, and what might become available beyond them?

HOMECOMING

Michael Pollan

A good place to begin if psychedelics intrigue you and you want more than enthusiasm. Pollan follows the science and history, then brings his own experiences into the investigation. The pleasure is watching a skeptical, curious mind discover how much it has yet to understand.

HOW TO CHANGE YOUR MIND

William A. Richards

What do we do with an experience that feels more real than ordinary life? Richards brings psychedelic research into conversation with religious experience, mortality, and meaning. This is a companion for the questions that can remain after the intensity passes. It takes the sacred seriously while giving us plenty to think about.

SACRED KNOWLEDGE

Shelby Hartman & Madison Margolin

A colorful way into a subject that can feel bewildering from the outside. The guide introduces different substances and the experiences around them, then widens the view to Indigenous traditions, industry ethics, and collective responsibility. That larger context matters: exploring consciousness also brings us into relationship with a world beyond ourselves.

THE DOUBLEBLIND GUIDE TO PSYCHEDELICS

Edited by Graham Hancock

An unruly conversation about consciousness, creativity, spirituality, and the world we share. The contributors offer different, sometimes speculative, ways of understanding psychedelic experience. I want room for questions this large on the shelf, with the freedom to consider an idea, test it, disagree with it, or leave it unresolved.

THE DIVINE SPARK

Tara Brach

Wanting to change can become another reason to be hard on ourselves. Brach brings Buddhist teachings and meditation to shame, fear, and the feeling of never being enough. A thoughtful companion to integration, especially when the next question is how to meet your present life with kindness while still wanting something different.

RADICAL ACCEPTANCE

Ram Dass

Ram Dass moves from psychedelic exploration toward spiritual practice, with illustrated pages that make the book an experience of its own. Presence, identity, love, the strange fact of being here at all. It opens a question I keep returning to: how does a glimpse of connection become part of the way we live?

BE HERE NOW

James Nestor

Nestor follows breathing through research, history, and his own experiments. The appeal is the curiosity he brings to something so ordinary that it disappears from our attention. It connects with the somatic side of this work, while leaving an important distinction to explore: everyday breathing practices and intensive breathwork are not interchangeable.

BREATH

Ernest Kurtz & Katherine Ketcham

A book about being human without first becoming exceptional at it. Stories from spiritual traditions and recovery explore limits, vulnerability, and the need for other people. It belongs beside the accounts of extraordinary experiences because the life we return to will still contain mistakes, uncertainty, and things we cannot do alone.

THE SPIRITUALITY OF IMPERFECTION

James Fadiman

Fadiman asks us to look at everything around an experience: intention, environment, the person offering support, and what happens afterward. His 2011 guide ranges from spiritual inquiry to creativity and problem-solving. It is a useful window into the field’s earlier thinking, best read with newer research beside it.

THE PSYCHEDELIC EXPLORER’S GUIDE

Alexander & Ann Shulgin

Chemistry and intimacy share the page in the Shulgins’ account of a life spent exploring the mind. The personal story sits alongside a technical record of compounds and reported experiences. It brings human curiosity into the history of psychedelics, including the possibility that a synthetic substance could open something deeply meaningful.

PIHKAL

Alexander & Ann Shulgin

The Shulgins continue the story into tryptamines, combining their personal world with an extensive chemical reference. Together with PiHKAL, it offers a view of psychedelic exploration before today’s clinical revival. These are historical records of inquiry and experience, worth reading with attention to the difference between an observation and an established therapeutic finding.

TIHKAL

Brian C. Muraresku

Muraresku investigates whether psychoactive preparations played a role in ancient religious rites. The possibility changes the questions we bring to the history of spiritual experience. His argument invites close reading: archaeological findings, textual clues, and the larger story built around them do not all carry the same certainty.

THE IMMORTALITY KEY



Read the research

Primary studies referenced in the writing. Findings apply to the people, conditions, and forms of support studied; a promising result is the beginning of further questions.

MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD
Mitchell et al. · Nature Medicine · 2023. A randomized phase 3 trial in 104 adults; both groups received therapy.

Psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression
Goodwin et al. · New England Journal of Medicine · 2022. A randomized phase 2 trial in 233 adults with psychological support and a three-week primary endpoint.

5-MeO-DMT and treatment-resistant depression
Cubała et al. · JAMA Psychiatry · 2026. A randomized trial of synthetic GH001 in 81 adults, with a seven-day controlled period.

Support & harm reduction

DanceSafe
Drug-checking education, reagent kits, and fentanyl test strips. Start with current instructions and the limits of each tool: reagents cannot establish purity, and an expected result does not mean a substance is safe.

Fireside Project
Psychedelic peer support for people navigating experiences and their aftermath. Visit the organization for current availability and contact details.

Zendo Project
Peer-support education and care at participating events, grounded in a compassionate approach to difficult experiences.

MAPS Integration Station
Resources from MAPS, a research and advocacy nonprofit, with integration frameworks and reflective exercises for considering how an experience relates to the rest of your life.

Back to the shelf index

Preparation, altered states & integration

I offer preparation, altered-state work, and integration. We begin with your history and what you hope might change, including the support that has already helped. Depending on what we agree is useful, our work may involve breathwork, somatic practices, or returning to something that emerged in an experience. We consider how it connects with the life you’re living now.

WORK WITH CLAIRE