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Updated Jun 11, 2026 · Affirmology_PlantMedicineJourney_Research_v1.md
Research brief for Affirmology. Surveying the structural patterns, durations, voice/music choices, and protocol logic of audio products designed to accompany altered-state work. Each section closes with notes on what transfers cleanly to chart-derived personalization.
Before going retreat-by-retreat, it helps to name the shared skeleton. Almost every audio container for non-ordinary states descends from the same lineage: Helen Bonny and Walter Pahnke's 1972 paper "The Use of Music in Psychedelic (LSD) Psychotherapy," which mapped a six-phase music structure that has been quietly rebuilt in nearly every modern protocol.
The six phases are:
Bill Richards built the Johns Hopkins psilocybin playlist on this skeleton starting in 1999. Mendel Kaelen built the Imperial College psilocybin-depression playlists on it. The MAPS Set A and Set B for MDMA-PTSD trials follow the same arc with more world and new-age textures during the peak. The Mindbloom session structure compresses it into 60 minutes of core listening plus 30 minutes of integration ambient. East Forest stretches it across five hours. Stan Grof shapes a three-hour Holotropic breathwork set around essentially the same emotional curve.
Why this matters for Affirmology. Any chart-derived journey product should likely default to this arc. The chart can re-color each phase (which archetype speaks during onset, which life theme surfaces at peak, which planetary tone leads the return) without needing to reinvent the container shape. Users in the psychedelic and integration world already have this curve in their nervous systems.
Sources: Inside the Johns Hopkins Psilocybin Playlist, Music programming for psilocybin-assisted therapy (Frontiers), Crafting Psychedelic Playlists (Maps of the Mind).
Ayahuasca centers tend to wrap ceremony in a long preparation tail (4 weeks typical) and a long integration tail (3 months typical). Audio sits inside that scaffolding as guided meditations, recorded teachings, and curated music. The ceremony itself is sung live by the curanderos, so the audio products live around the edges.
Preparation and integration program authored by Dr. Clancy Cavnar. Bundled with a one-year Soltara Plus membership delivered through the Nectara integration platform. Content includes:
Structurally, Soltara treats the audio as one stream inside a broader ecology of journaling, group work, and 1:1 coaching. There's no single "preparation audio" - there's a year of supporting content the participant rotates through.
Sources: Soltara Integration FAQ, Soltara + Nectara Plant Medicine Integration Program.
Rythmia's RLife App is the most app-native of the ayahuasca centers. It has a clear three-act structure:
The lengths are not published but cluster around 20-40 minute guided sessions, consistent with the broader retreat industry pattern.
Source: Rythmia Ayahuasca Retreat Guide.
Twenty years of Shipibo lineage. Their integration program is among the most content-heavy:
The 12-week structure is the dominant pattern at the legacy centers. Three months matches the integration window therapists generally cite as the most plastic for behavior change after a ceremony.
Sources: Temple Integration Program, Temple Resources.
9-day and 11-day retreats with ceremonies every other night. Workshops, meditation, and yoga on the off-days serve as live integration. Post-retreat support is delivered through optional online sessions rather than a packaged audio curriculum.
Source: Spirit Vine 9-Day Retreat.
Not a single creator, but a reference frame. The Mazatec velada is the ancestral container: an all-night ceremony from sunset to dawn in a candlelit circle, with the curandera ingesting twice the dose participants take. María Sabina chanted in "wise language" - a continuous flow of sacred chants and prayers in Mazatec. The structural takeaway for audio design is the all-night vocal continuity. There is no silence in a velada. The chanting voice is the container.
Modern psilocybin retreats that invoke this lineage (Bold Embrace, various Oaxaca-based projects) typically run shorter ceremonies (4-6 hours) but preserve the principle that an unbroken human voice is the holding structure.
Sources: Niños Santos of Oaxaca (Arkana), Niños Santos, Psilocybin Mushrooms (Chacruna).
This is the most documented modality. The lineage is roughly: Helen Bonny → Bill Richards (Johns Hopkins) → Mendel Kaelen (Imperial College) → East Forest, Jon Hopkins, Beckley Retreats, Synthesis.
Six-segment structure mapped to the six Bonny phases, totaling six to seven hours. Available on Spotify and Tidal. Designed around the dosing window: roughly 1 hour onset, 4-5 hours active, 1 hour return. Music is largely classical and choral with deliberate avoidance of recognizable English lyrics. Richards' construction principle: "music as container, not content."
Source: Inside the Johns Hopkins Psilocybin Playlist, Bill Richards on the Perfect Psilocybin Playlist (Beatrice Society).
Now in its third iteration. The second version is widely cited as Kaelen's strongest. The third is designed for both psilocybin and MDMA sessions, more gentle than the first two. Kaelen's research demonstrated that music quality predicted therapeutic outcomes more strongly than drug intensity - coining the phrase "the hidden therapist." Length: 5-8 hours. Heavy on neoclassical and ambient.
Source: Imperial College Playlist v1.3 on YouTube, The Hidden Therapist (PMC).
Five hours, thirteen tracks, fully connected. Track lengths range from 10:27 to 37:46. The compositional shape is the ceremony arc. Track sequence:
The track names themselves are a story arc: arrival, opening, deepening, dissolution, integration, return. East Forest has since released Vol. II ("IN") and a documentary soundtrack. The Journey Toolkit at explore.musicformushrooms.com bundles 9 hours of curated soundtracks, breathwork, yoga nidra, guided meditation, intention-setting checklists, and integration journal prompts - the most complete "kit" template publicly available for this kind of work.
Sources: Music for Mushrooms Vol. I on Bandcamp, East Forest Journey Toolkit, East Forest interview, Psychedelics Today.
The cleaner, shorter, more concentrated artist-driven companion. Nine tracks, 63 minutes 25 seconds. Closes with a Ram Dass and East Forest spoken-word collaboration ("Sit Around The Fire"). Track shape:
The arc is explicit in titles: welcome, descent (into the caves), opening, depth, ascending, arriving, integration through wisdom voice. Tracks 2-4 form a 19-minute peak suite, mirroring the Bonny "long peak" principle.
Source: Music for Psychedelic Therapy on Wikipedia.
Three-phase program - Prepare, Immerse, Integrate, Grow - wrapped around two 6-hour psilocybin ceremonies. Music is woven through every phase:
Sources: Beckley Retreats Program, The Role of Music in Psychedelic Retreats (Beckley).
Three online preparation group sessions, 5-day in-person immersion, three online integration group sessions. Audio is not the primary delivery vehicle here - the Synthesis model is heavy on live group facilitation. The Immersion Program Manual is the printed companion.
Source: Synthesis Immersion Retreat.
Ketamine is the most "scaled" altered-state modality, with several at-home telemedicine companies running tens of thousands of sessions. The audio designs are correspondingly more app-native than ayahuasca or psilocybin retreats.
Six-session initial course, sessions spaced 1-2 weeks apart. Each session:
Music design principles Mindbloom publishes explicitly:
Music library is built by licensed music therapists. The app personalizes which playlist plays based on the user's chosen focus topic (anxiety, depression, grief, self-worth, etc.).
Sources: Mindbloom Program, Choosing the Right Music for Your Session, Ketamine Therapy Week by Week.
Musicologist-designed curated playlists. Notable collaboration with British DJ Akira the Don for "Nue Life Vol. 1," exploring boundaries of pop, hip-hop, indie, and dance - a softer-edge alternative to the pure-ambient default. Their program also includes voice journals, mood tracking, integration groups, and health coaching as core components.
Source: Nue Life - The Influence of Music in Ketamine Therapy.
Patient-chosen playlist by intention category: classical, slow binaural beats, ambient. The patient retains control on their phone - can pause or skip during the session. This is a different philosophy than Mindbloom's auto-curated model.
Source: Innerwell - How to Prepare for Your Ketamine Experience.
(Now part of Numinus.) Less publicly documented audio design, but uses the same general ascent-peak-return arc with a heavier in-clinic component.
MAPS published official music playlists in 2015 (Set A and Set B) and updated them in 2021 for the Phase 3 PTSD trials. Both sets follow the Bonny arc but lean more world-music and new-age than the Hopkins / Imperial psilocybin playlists. The MDMA peak phase is longer and warmer.
Session structure:
Lykos Therapeutics (the rebrand of MAPS PBC) continues this protocol toward regulatory submission.
Sources: Music for MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy (MAPS), MDMA-Assisted Therapy for PTSD (MAPS), MAPS Music for MDMA Set A (Spotify).
The drumming-journey lineage. These are the oldest and most structurally simple audios - and they map cleanly onto a chart-derived journey product because they are minimal containers, not complete experiences.
The classic. The recordings:
Structure: a single drum, single-headed round frame, struck at approximately 5 beats per second for the duration. Both recordings end with a fast callback rhythm to bring the journeyer back. The simplicity is the point - Harner's argument was that the drum tempo entrains theta brainwaves, and additional sonic content interferes with the inner experience.
Available on Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, and free on the FSS site.
Sources: Foundation for Shamanic Studies - Journeywork Audio, Harner Shamanic Drumming page.
Beginner's Guide to Shamanic Journeying (Sounds True) bundles:
This three-tier length structure (short / medium / long) maps to skill level. Ingerman's "Shamanic Visioning Music: Taiko Drum Journeys" and "The Spirit of Healing" (with Byron Metcalf) use three 25-minute tracks each, each with a specific intention - e.g., cleansing the past, dreaming the life you want, merging with a star.
Source: Sandra Ingerman - Beginner's Guide to Shamanic Journeying, The Spirit of Healing.
Featured alongside Ingerman in "Awakening to the Spirit World" (Sounds True), which includes mp3 drumming tracks across these traditions.
Bridges shamanic drumming and Holotropic-style breathwork music. His work is the most cinematically produced in this category:
Source: Byron Metcalf Discography.
The most clinically validated audio format for nervous-system regulation. The structure has been remarkably stable for 70 years.
Stages of a classical Satyananda Yoga Nidra session, in order:
Typical length: 30-45 minutes.
Source: Yoga Nidra - Authentic Practice of Swami Satyananda (Bihar).
The 10-step adaptation used by the US Army and VA for PTSD. Endorsed by the US Army Surgeon General in 2010 after research at Walter Reed and the Washington VA. The 10 steps:
The trauma-sensitive innovation is Step 3, the Inner Resource - a somatically grounded sense of safety the practitioner returns to whenever overwhelm appears. This is what makes iRest deployable with combat veterans where standard yoga nidra would be too destabilizing.
Typical length: 20-45 minutes.
Sources: iRest Institute - The 10 Step Protocol, Richard Miller (Wikipedia), iRest Program for Healing PTSD.
A music set must be 2.5 to 3 hours for the experience to qualify as Holotropic Breathwork. The session is divided into three roughly hour-long phases, with no gaps between tracks (all DJ-mixed seamlessly):
Rules: No English lyrics (any other language is fine), seamless transitions, music as "non-specific amplifier" (Grof's term) - never to guide, only to deepen what the inner healer is already moving toward. Grof Transpersonal Training runs a six-day course called "Music and Transcendence" specifically to teach the curation craft.
Sources: Music Selection Guide for Effective Holotropic Breathwork Sessions, Holotropic Breathwork Music Guide (Grof Academy).
Originally taught without evocative music. A series of ten one-on-one sessions of 1-2 hours each. Sessions begin and end with nose breathing; mouth breathing in the middle accesses emotional content. The core technique: continuous, connected breathing - full belly-and-chest inhale, relaxed exhale, no pause.
Modern Orr-lineage practitioners have added live sound healing (crystal bowls, vocals, Tibetan bowls, medicine drum) - a recent departure from the original silent protocol.
Source: The Leonard Orr Method of Rebirthing Breathwork.
Author of "Psychedelic Integration: Psychotherapy for Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness" (2022). Founder of the ICEERS Support Center for psychedelic crisis intervention (since 2013). Lead faculty at the ICEERS Academy Integration Training - an online course teaching practitioners how to design and implement integration protocols. Aixalá is a certified Holotropic Breathwork facilitator, which colors the training toward music-rich protocols.
Source: ICEERS Integration Training.
Clinical psychologist, MAPS clinical investigator for MDMA-assisted therapy for eating disorders, Imperial College collaborator for psilocybin-anorexia. Developed emotion-focused family therapy for use with psychedelic medicine. Audio presence is largely podcast-based (Psychedelic Therapy Podcast, Voices of Esalen, Real Health Radio) rather than packaged audio products.
Source: Dr. Adele Lafrance - Trainings and Workshops.
Somatic Experiencing practitioner focused on nervous system regulation and trauma. Hosts the Body-First Healing Podcast as her primary audio output. Her work is the body-first counterpart to cognitive integration: tuning into sensation, regulating the autonomic state, building a felt sense of safety.
Source: Body-First Healing Podcast.
The neuroscientist whose Entropic Brain Hypothesis underwrites much of the music-as-medicine framing. Psychedelics elevate entropy in the brain; the default mode network - the "orchestra conductor" - collapses; high-entropy mental states open. Carhart-Harris's framing gives the music-design field its theoretical floor: container music reduces drift in a brain that has lost its default rails.
Source: The Entropic Brain (PMC).
The bridge between psychedelic therapy and contemporary music therapy. Developed GIM after LSD was prohibited in 1970. A GIM session opens with a preliminary conversation (mood and intention check), proceeds to a guided relaxation, then plays a curated classical music program while the client speaks their imagery aloud and the therapist reflects. Bonny's six-phase LSD music map (1972, with Walter Pahnke) seeded every modern playlist.
Source: Bonny Method GIM (Frontiers).
Reading across all eight modalities, the patterns that repeat - and that translate well to Affirmology's chart-input model - are these:
The six-phase arc is the universal scaffold. Any "journey" audio Affirmology builds should default to: pre-onset, onset, ascent, peak, post-peak, return. The chart determines the colors of each phase, not the phase structure itself.
Length tiers cluster at predictable points. 20-30 minutes (yoga nidra / shamanic short journey), 45 minutes (iRest / extended nidra), 60-90 minutes (ketamine session), 2.5-3 hours (Holotropic / MDMA active), 5-8 hours (full psilocybin / ayahuasca). Affirmology's product ladder can map naturally onto this hierarchy: a daily 20-min, a weekly 45-min, a monthly 90-min, a quarterly 3-hour, a milestone full-day.
Voice continuity matters at the deep end. The Mazatec velada principle - unbroken human voice as container - generalizes. East Forest's tracks blur together. Holotropic sets are DJ-mixed seamlessly. Affirmology audio should err toward unbroken voice / music continuity in long-form, never silence-then-restart.
Sankalpa / Heartfelt Longing / Intention is the front door. Yoga nidra plants a sankalpa in step 2 and repeats it near the end. iRest does the same in steps 1-2 and again in step 10. Ayahuasca centers teach intention-setting as the first preparation skill. A chart-derived journey can plant a chart-informed sankalpa - a one-line intention sourced from the user's nodal axis, life purpose Gene Key, or Sun-Moon synthesis - and return to it as the closing seal.
Inner Resource is the safety floor. iRest's most important innovation. For a chart-driven product, the Inner Resource could be derived from the user's strongest grounding archetype - Saturn placement, Earth gates in Human Design, or natal 4th house.
Pairs of opposites is a chart-native exercise. Yoga nidra's pairs (hot/cold, heavy/light, joy/sorrow) map directly onto astrological polarities (Sun-Moon, Ascendant-Descendant, MC-IC, north node-south node). A chart-derived nidra could use the user's actual axes as the pairs explored.
Music as container, not content. Every research-validated playlist (Hopkins, Imperial, MAPS) avoids recognizable lyrics and recognizable melody. The same constraint applies to chart-derived audio meant for journey work: the language should be evocative but non-specific enough that the listener projects their own experience into it.
Pre-journey priming is real. Beckley sends users their ceremony playlist weeks in advance. The nervous system needs prior exposure to the sonic palette to surrender into it. A chart-derived "preparation" audio (delivered 1-4 weeks ahead) is a natural product upsell to a longer "journey" audio.
Three-act preparation / immersion / integration is the standard wrapper. 4 weeks before, the event itself, 6-13 weeks after. Affirmology can structure journey products in this wrapper: a Prep audio (1x), the Journey audio (1x), and an Integration series (weekly for 6-13 weeks). The integration series benefits most from chart variation - different astrological themes can carry each week.
Callbacks and returns are non-negotiable. Harner's fast drum callback. Holotropic Hour 3 sacred chant. Hopkins "welcome back" segment. iRest's step 10 reflection. Any Affirmology journey audio should have a clearly engineered re-entry - never end on the peak.