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For Veterans by Veterans. Discover and execute on the most important mission of your life. Join host, Mike Bledsoe, as he delves into transformative journeys, exploring the challenges and triumphs of transitioning from military to civilian life. Through compelling stories and expert insights, we uncover the keys to personal growth, resilience, and purposeful living.
Mike Bledsoe (00:00)
Welcome to the mission after podcast where we help veterans discover and execute on their next mission. I'm your host, Mike Bledsoe. And today's show is a bit different because there is no guest. Our show today is the first module in our micro dosing course inside of our free community platform. If you want to check out the whole course, you can go over to the mission after .org. you can check out the free course. You can join the community that you can chat.
There will be a requirement to prove that you are a veteran, so you have to request access and go from there. I also want to mention that we're launching our new cohort for our 90 -day program. Once you get into the platform, you'll be able to request access to that as well. So make sure to go over to the missionafter .org to check that out. And now you get to check out the first module for the microdosing course. I hope you enjoy.
Mike Bledsoe (00:52)
Welcome to the mission after microdosing course. I'm your guide, Mike Bledsoe. I put this course together because I get a ton of questions from veterans all the time about psychedelics and microdosing and all sorts of things because the word is getting around that these things can be really, really beneficial. So I'm going to kick this off with a story about how I got into psilocybin mushrooms. There's going to be many points in the story that you can learn something for yourself. This is something
that happened for me back in 2013. So this is 11 years ago now. And so it was just the beginning. So I want to tell you a little story. It's going to point out some key points and it all starts off with a mushroom journey in a dog park in Memphis, Tennessee. Very unlikely place for a transformative experience to happen. And it occurred for me. Now some things to notice and to note here.
is that I was really set up for success in a lot of different ways. Most people's first time with mushrooms involves a party, drinking beer, or they're at a festival around a bunch of different people and they consume some mushrooms and they have a quote unquote bad experience, really a challenging experience. And those are the stories that usually keep people from trying out silicide mushrooms. And I totally get
I got out in 2005 and between 2005 and 2013, I had no interest in doing anything other than drinking alcohol and taking, smoking some cannabis here and there. Everything else was a no way for me. And so, um, and I got out in 05 in 2007, I opened a CrossFit gym and in 2012 I started a podcast. Now on paper I had achieved some success.
I was a successful CrossFit gym owner. I made enough money to buy a house. I had started a podcast and had gained a lot of notoriety in the CrossFit space. So I was married, had the house, I had all these things. On paper, it looked like I was a veteran who had done really well for himself. But I was eight years into this experience of being a veteran and I still had a lot of dissatisfaction. I thought to myself, this really just be it? And so in an attempt to...
make myself feel better and to enjoy life more, I just kept achieving. And I imagine for yourself and for lot of other veterans, it's like achieve, achieve, achieve, and then I'll feel happy. I'll experience peace. And it just wasn't happening for me. in an attempt to achieve more, I had purchased a ticket to a marketing conference in Chicago, Illinois. was $7 ,000. It was the last $7 ,000 that I had.
Even though I was making money, wasn't making that kind of money. So I go to this marketing conference and I go, you know what? I'm going to get something out of here that's going to really help me in my business. And I did. I learned a lot there that helped me in my business that allowed me to make a lot more money. But the more important thing I got there was it was day three and I'm a straight A student. And so I'm always able to learn and understand and pride myself on that. And on day three of this conference, we did an empathy exercise, which is not a thinking.
cognitive exercise and I was partnered up with somebody and I failed miserably I just drew blanks and blanks and blanks after that exercise I left the conference room and I went to my hotel room and I didn't return back to the conference the rest of the day even though I'd spent all that money on it it had really taken a toll on me I went and watched a movie and I go you know what now that this empathy stuff is over I don't really need that anyway I went back to the conference and I learned more now at this conference I was really fortunate because
there was this really subtle psychedelic theme that triggered me to go, hey, maybe I should eat some mushrooms when I get home. And I had heard some podcasts where some well -known entrepreneurs had talked about the benefits of mushrooms. And so I go, okay, if they're successful in business, then I can eat some mushrooms and maybe it'll make me successful in business too. I get two and a half grams of what's called golden teacher mushrooms. I get two and a half grams.
I consume them. go to a dog park. It's a really big dog park. I'm on top of this hill. I lay out. I've got my business journal. I got my journal from the conference and my, my thought was I'm going to take these mushrooms and then I'm going to open up this journal and then all the business stuff that I learned last week is going to make more sense to me. I'm going to know exactly what to do with it. So I take the mushrooms. I got lucky in that I met, I had met a psychedelic, musician and I put on his playlist cause I said, well, why not laid out.
a blanket and the mushrooms started to kick in. Now, I never opened the journal that day. It was really funny. I never opened the journal that day. I laid in the park, I listened to music and I started to experience joy and bliss at a level I had never experienced before. And so I pulled two lessons out of this particular experience that are extremely notable. Maybe three.
But the first thing that happened during the experience is I'm laying in the field and I'm looking up at the sky and all of sudden the whole sky goes fractal and it goes into geometric patterns. And I go, wow, this is just really incredible. It was just awe inspiring. And then moments later, the entire world fell down inside of my own body, inside of my own head. And I realized in that moment I had this experience. It's experiential.
It's one thing to tell you this and for you to get it cognitively. It's another thing to have the experience of the whole world falling in. And I was realizing that moment that everything that I was perceiving out in the world was actually an interpretation of my senses and I had a real life experience of, I'm not actually touching this world in the way that I think I am. I'm experiencing in a different way. And I started to realize that what, how I saw the world.
was different than the world was actually existing. And then I had a filter in place. I also realized in that moment that I was a hundred percent responsible for what I'm creating in my world. Now that may seem a little crazy because a lot of times we want to point the finger at other people for, creating the world that we live in. But this level of personal responsibility is what's necessary to make real deep, long lasting change. And I had this moment, I go,
the point in my life I'm in right now is a product of every choice I've made up until this point. That's it. Personal responsibility. As much as I want to blame my parents or blame somebody else or some situation, the reality is this moment was primarily constructed by my choices up until this point. And it just landed in a really big way in that moment. So
That realization gave me a lot of hope. gave me a lot of inspiration. I go, if the choices that I made are the ones that got me here, all I've got to do is make new choices to get me somewhere else. And so I realized that and that brought me a lot of joy and I cried and it was really happy and really inspired to go home and make those changes. The second thing that happened, the second big lesson that happened for me is I'm sitting the
after I had peaked on this mushroom experience, I'm sitting at the top of this hill and people are starting, it's a Tuesday afternoon, people are starting to get off of work and they get off of work and they're bringing their dogs to the dog park. And I'm imagining that these dogs have been inside their house or they've been in a kennel or they've been without human connection all day. And now their humans have gone home, they picked up their dogs and they take them to the dog park. But the problem is,
They're on their phone, they're talking to somebody else, they're barely paying attention to the dog. They're on their phone and throwing the stick and all this. The dog is still not getting their undivided attention. And I'm sitting on top of this hill and I'm getting angry. I'm getting angry with the people that are bringing their dogs. I go, don't you know that these dogs have been kept inside and now you're not giving them your full attention. I had a lot of empathy for the dogs. I was like, my gosh, this is an experience I had never had before. Empathy was coming online. This thing I had learned.
or I tried to learn, didn't think I was learning in the conference, now started to land for me. And then I noticed, my gosh, I bring my dog to this dog park and I do the same thing. And I realized, I am just as a fault as the people that are here in this dog park right now. And I felt a level of sadness. I went from anger to feeling sad that I do the same thing. And then I realized,
I do the same thing to my mother. I do the same thing to my clients in the gym. I do the same thing to my wife. I am not giving anyone my undivided attention. I'm not listening to them. I am literally waiting for someone to stop talking so I can tell them everything that I know. Until this point, I thought that if people disagreed with me, they didn't understand they were stupid, whatever it was.
That was the world that I was living in. So I really couldn't hear what other people had to tell me unless they, I felt that they agreed with me first. And so it really landed me in that moment. I'm crying. I'm really sad. And then I got to move into a place of joy because I realized, you know what? I can make a new choice starting right now. All right. That was super motivating. I can make a new choice right now and I can go home and I can start listening to
And after the suicide mushrooms had, you know, worn off to a degree, I lived a half mile from the park. I jumped in my Jeep and I go home and my wife gets off work and she comes home and I start asking her questions about her day. Within a few minutes, she starts crying. I didn't tell her anything about what had happened that day. She starts crying. And the reason she started crying is because this was the first time I had actually sat down and really
listen to her. Normally I might ask her how her day was going and then start ranting about my own day or interjecting in some way instead of actually being curious, actually wanting to experience her world and empathize with her. So these are two really big lessons I got out of that first mushroom experience. I was really fortunate because a lot of people don't get that their first time. There's a key point on why I was able to have that experience. I'm going to share that with you as
Now that night I went home, when I was home, I was really scared that this, this suicide mushroom experience, the mushrooms were going to wear off. I was going to wake up in the morning and I was going to be the old Mike that had, it was pre dog park. But when I woke up the next morning, that wasn't true. I was still curious about other people. I had become permanently empathetic. I had reached a new level.
emotionally, my emotional development had begun in that moment. That was just the start. And the big takeaway I want to share with you here is a lot of people do eat mushrooms, but they don't learn much in their mushroom experience. And the key point here is I had gone to a business marketing development program the week before that had a lot of personal development.
Embedded in it that empathy exercise was a personal development exercise So I had been primed I call it priming I had been primed perfectly to learn the lesson of empathy there were also conversations at the conference about taking 100 % responsibility and so because I was primed with these lessons and I was open and I was Desiring to learn more and I had gone out to a place where I
in isolation, I was able to be by myself, feel safe out in this field, and, had the intention of getting something out of experience. That's what allowed that to happen. Most people are using psychedelics or using mushrooms in an unconscious manner or unintentional manner. They don't have, they go, this will just make me feel better. But you really need to get primed and get primed by people who know what they're talking about and know how to prime you in the right.
And that's exactly what I got to experience at that conference. So I got lucky. I got lucky in a lot of ways and that I did it right the first time. Most people do not do it right the first time and they end up having a less than desirable experience or they don't feel like much of anything happened at all. So it's important that we couple personal development work with the use of psychedelics.
Most people are only using psychedelics and they lean on it and they have to keep going back to psychedelics over and over and over again in order to have the transformation that they're experiencing. But I'm a big fan of being able to harvest a single experience to the greatest degree. And we do that by priming and we do that by integration as well. Because I had a background in health and fitness and I understood training, I was able to adapt those same principles of learning how to squat and deadlift and do pull ups.
to how I was operating in my own mind. Now, this wasn't the end of my journey. I didn't have the big one, aha, and then just stop there. I kept experimenting with mushrooms. This is 2013, so I didn't have, there weren't a lot of resources out there. I didn't know anyone else that was really doing it, aside from the guy that I had gotten the mushrooms from, and he was really good, but he was limited. He hadn't done a lot of personal development. And so,
It's really important that you get that point because as you're going through this course, we're going to be covering aspects of micro dosing, the use of psilocybin mushrooms and really small doses and sub perceptual doses. I'm not, I tell you that story about a macro dose. That's like a bigger dose to have a really large insight, to have a big realization. That's really, really valuable. But I imagine for, and I don't recommend people do that on their own the way that I did it. I recommend that you do
with somebody who has a lot of experience. a lot of times in the meantime, people are also, they may have some fear around mushrooms. And here's the thing is if we microdose, if we take something between 0 .08 and 0 .15 grams of mushrooms at a time, it'll be either subperceptible or things just might seem a little bit brighter. All right. And so the benefits of these mushrooms is that they get into your system and they make
you may have heard the term more neuroplastic, your ability to change how you think goes up, not just the day of, but the days following. And so it increases things like BDNF, certain neurotransmitters in the brain that are responsible for learning new ways of being, new ways of doing things. It's good for skill development as well. And so in this course, we're going to be covering all that. And in microdoses, instead of having a huge shift all at once,
we're going to talk about how to have small shifts over time so it's less disruptive to your life and you can have incremental changes to how you're feeling. Now we've had clients that started microdosing protocols that the first day chronic pain in their hip vanished. You know, there were somebody who was training a lot and their hip was always bothering them, which was leading to lower back pain. First day of microdosing went away. Now I'm not promising it's gonna make chronic pain go away, but the mind and the body are one.
We like to dissect them up into one or the other, but the truth is it's just one whole system. And that's why when you take something for your body, it impacts the mind. And so my recommendation is, and I'm going to remind you this throughout the course, my recommendation is, is to get the most out of microdosing is to be microdosing while you're participating in some personal development course. And that's one reason we have our 90 day mentorship program here at the mission after.
I recommend that coupling these two things would be really beneficial to you. Now, if you want to simply microdose and do some journaling or do some other personal development program or practice meditation, great. You don't have to do our program, but I recommend that you're doing something outside of just taking some pills or some chocolates or wherever it is that you're going to get your microdosing materials from, which we're going to get into this course. Whatever you're doing.
coupled that with an intention of improving some area of your life. So in this course, we're going to talk about the legal aspects, things to consider with that. we're going to talk about how to make micro doses. We're going to talk about how to take them, how frequently to take them, how much to take of them. You're going to know exactly how to micro dose and we're going to have different micro dosing protocols based on your such your particular situation. What is it?
wanting to achieve. whatever your intention is, there's going to be a different type of protocol for that intention. So, uh, I really appreciate you sticking around, hearing my personal story with Silicide Mushrooms. That was just the beginning. It's been 11 years where I've been progressively getting into other psychedelic medicines, learning all sorts of new tools. And I promise you for everything that I suggest or teach you, there's probably 10 things that I'm leaving out because I tried it and it just didn't.
work as well. Either it didn't work at all or it didn't work as well. I'm only giving you the best stuff that I've found over the last 11 years of digging deep into personal development, hiring coaches and enrolling in leadership development programs. half of the stuff I do is psychedelic. The other half has been things that are non -psychedelic and that's a huge benefit here. So thanks for joining us for this course. I look forward to hearing your feedback. You have access.
to the community so you can have conversations, ask questions, and I recommend going all the way through the course. I'm try to make it as digestible and easy as possible. And if you have recommendations on how we can make it better, just drop it into the school community chat and we'll do our best to make those changes for you. See you in the next chapter.
Mike Bledsoe (19:46)
If you enjoyed that story, if you enjoyed that first module of the course, make sure to go over to themissionafter .org and ask to join the community. It's free and you can get access to the full microdosing course there.