The short version: This is my 2019 Psychedelics Today podcast conversation about Salvia divinorum. We talk less about pharmacology and more about what the research suggests regarding consciousness, embodiment, and the relationships people form with plants and substances. It’s a discussion of research and ideas, not clinical or safety advice.
A researcher spends years studying one unusual plant and comes away with more questions about relationship, to substances, to the body, to other people, than about the plant’s chemistry alone.
That’s roughly where I landed, and it’s what I got to talk about when I joined Psychedelics Today in 2019. Here I am talking about Salvia divinorum again, this time on a podcast. We discussed my research findings and what they might have to do with consciousness, embodiment, and the ways in which we create relationships with plants and substances.
What we actually talked about
Two things, and neither of them is pharmacology.
That the interesting question about Salvia is not what it does to you, but what you’re doing with it. Most drug research treats a substance as a cause and a person as an outcome. Years of studying one unusual plant left me more interested in the relationship: what someone expects, what they’re looking for, what they do with what happened. That’s an awkward thing to put in a study design, and I think it’s where most of the meaning is.
That the body is where this gets decided. Salvia’s effects are strongly physical, and a lot of what people describe is about losing the usual sense of where they end and the room begins. Interoception, the sense of your own internal state, turns out to be central rather than incidental. It’s also the thread that connects this research to what I do now as a therapist, which otherwise looks like a career change.
If you’d rather start with the science, how salvinorin A works, why its dissociation-like effects are different from other psychedelics, and what the research does and doesn’t support, that all lives in my main piece on Salvia divinorum in psychotherapy.
Curious about working together? Get in touch.
Peter H. Addy, PhD, LPC, LMHC is a Portland-based licensed psychotherapist specializing in psychedelic-informed and harm-reduction psychotherapy, ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, and chronic pain. His research background includes postdoctoral work at Yale School of Medicine on psychedelic substances. Learn more about my practice →
