Untangle
On Untangle, the podcast from the meditation company Muse, host Patricia Karpas and Matt explore how psychedelics and a contemplative practice can support each other, including why Matt, long a frustrated meditator, only learned what stillness felt like after a psychedelic experience.
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Episode summary
On Untangle, the podcast from the meditation company Muse, host Patricia Karpas talks with Matt about how psychedelics and a contemplative practice can support each other. He offers something that lands well with a mindfulness audience, that he was a frustrated meditator before his first psychedelic experience, unable to quiet the running narration in his head, and that the medicine showed him what that pause could feel like. He tells the story of the guided psilocybin session that reconnected him with his late mother and reordered his life, and frames these substances as catalysts rather than cures, the thing that, in his case, finally opened the door to a steady meditation practice.
Patricia asks about the book, which Matt edited and partly wrote as an anthology. He describes choosing contributors with deep firsthand and research knowledge of particular medicines, having each chapter medically reviewed, and bringing in a foreword from a physician who has worked with these substances for decades. He spends time on integration, the work that follows a session, describing how a therapist helps him hold onto what he glimpsed, and how daily practices like meditation and journaling keep an insight from fading once ordinary life resumes. He returns often to a shift from a scarcity mindset toward a felt sense of abundance.
The two move through the medicines themselves. Matt covers the MDMA results for treatment-resistant PTSD, explains that these are occasional sessions paired with therapy, unlike a daily pill, and walks through ibogaine for opioid dependence with its real cardiac risk, ayahuasca, and ketamine as the only legal option. He is especially warm on end-of-life care, describing how psilocybin can ease the depression and anxiety of a terminal diagnosis and bring a family closer, something he wishes had been available during his own mother's final days. He urges careful screening with any provider and points to the pharmacist Ben Malcolm for a neutral read on drug interactions.
Some of the most personal moments concern his family. Matt recounts bringing his teenage son to a retreat as a helper, where the two shared a moment in which he told the boy he was doing his best as a father, and where his son later thanked the group for how much more emotionally available his dad had become. He talks candidly about his upbringing, a Catholic mother and Jewish father, his father's alcoholism, and years he spent trying to earn a kind of love that those around him could not always give. The thread that holds it together is the one he keeps returning to, that he is enough as he is, and that this is something he now feels rather than merely knows.