In my work as a facilitator and guide for 5-MeO-DMT, clients sometimes ask me what 5-MeO-DMT feels like. When I started this work, I avoided answering this question directly because I didn't want to color or otherwise influence their experience on the medicine. All earth medicine is so intimate, so personal, and so integral to the person who takes it, and 5meo is no exception. However, over time my perspective has changed. One metaphor that fits the psychedelic experience is that of medicine as a mirror: when we each gaze into it, looking for something external, we end up seeing only ourselves, though at first we don’t always recognize ourselves looking back at us. Rather than telling you what you will find, which only you can possibly find out for yourself, my aim here will be to direct your attention toward the mirror itself. My hope is that in doing so you will be able to see yourself more clearly in it.
Though it is easy to mistake what we see in the mirror for the mirror itself, there are some things that can be said about this mirror, about the special way that 5-MeO-DMT reflects ourselves back at us. At this point, my partner Helena and I have served nearly 100 clients in deep intimate dives in our private retreats, and many in group ceremonies too, both high-dose in our weekend group retreats and low-dose in our community sound baths. In total, working with our team, we've served and had the privilege of witnessing over 600 people journey with 5-MeO-DMT. We’ve also developed our own relationship with the medicine over the years, exploring it with different intentions, at different dosages, and at different points in our personal processes. And humbly, I’d like to offer a few words about this sacred mirror that we work with, based on what I have experienced firsthand and heard from our clients.
Felt sense rather than visuals
One place to start is to point out that this mirror is not overwhelmingly visual (here the mirror metaphor begins to break down). Unlike some other earth medicines that can take us through brightly colored fractal patterns, rich landscapes, and encounters with entities, 5-MeO-DMT is not predominantly a visual experience. For some people, the visual field is blank, and for others it can have a vague dreamlike quality. For those who strongly associate psychedelics with visual hallucinations, this lack of visual content can be quite surprising.
Instead, the perception that does come through is far richer than visual experience allows. We are given an experience of being ourselves fully. In vision, we are confined to the paradigm of subject and object, seer and seen. But in the 5-MeO-DMT experience, the dichotomy of subject and object begins to collapse, and we are able to glimpse a unity of perceptions. We get to feel what it is like to be ourselves, feeling sensation and emotions in their full rawness and intimacy. There is a felt sense, a deep knowing. We are given the opportunity to feel ourselves in a way that feels both new and deeply familiar.
The 5-MeO-DMT experience when smoked has the quality of being shot out of a cannon. The experience comes on within seconds, the peak lasts under 10 minutes, and you're back to baseline 30-45 minutes later. Subjectively, it feels like you're there (inside yourself) before you know it, and your perspective on yourself and the world have radically shifted.
Low doses (1-2mg)
The way that 5meo reflects us back at ourselves is also dose dependent. The lower doses, say around 1-2mg smoked, are, for most people, predominated by physical sensations and energetic awareness. There can be a sense of energy moving through the body, or being pent up and blocked in certain areas. Sometimes the movement focuses on the primary energy centers of the chakras, and sometimes it focuses on the location of a trauma, whether in this life or ancestral. We have had African-American clients discover (and release) the energetic blockage around the ankles at the locations where their ancestors were forced to wear shackles.
Medium doses (4-7mg)
As the dosage increases into the mid-ranges of 4-7mg, the experience becomes much more all-encompassing. Whereas at the lower doses we are able to maintain a sense of being who we ordinarily are having these non-ordinary perceptions, as the dose increases, our sense of who we are begins to become challenged. In my own experience, I often experience this as layers of my identity being pulled away. Those layers are all the things that we confuse ourselves into thinking that we cannot exist without–the stories we have about ourselves, the pain we carry, our beliefs–and in that few seconds, all that is peeled away like the layers of an onion.
At these medium doses, we often get left mid-onion. Perhaps there are too many layers for the dose that we took, or one layer feels particularly sticky. Our clients find themselves in places of deep grief, or deep despairing, or deep rage. I have often felt a tender vulnerability of my heart, a bittersweet pain and ache that is both subtle but all-encompassing. Sometimes there’s a fundamental fear of annihilation as if saying “I cannot let this piece go for without this my world will end.” But as we sit with those strong emotions, beyond all rationality and customary limits on our ability to feel, they begin to metabolize. The energy trapped in them has an opportunity to transform and loosen the armor around ourselves. What in one moment was a terror too great to fathom, at the next moment we may laugh like a child at what we were so afraid of a moment ago.
High doses (8-12mg+) and the "full release"
As we persist with the process of peeling the onion, either through repeated visits at the same dose or higher doses that bring more energy into the peeling process, we may sometimes get to a very still and very simple place in the center of our heart, and at the same time, at the center of the heart of the universe. I have experienced this place as the oceanic well of love from which everything emanates. That beyond all the shells and boundaries, there is nothing left but ourselves, and that we are nothing different than the totality of all of existence.
This experience is known as the "full release"—the full release of identity, ego, control. When we are no longer holding on, our energetic channels are fully open and the full energy of source washes through us. Some people describe this state as oneness, or in the negative as non-duality. For some the word love best points at it: the principle that melds and unites what seems irreconcilable. As I was returning from a 16mg deep dive into a source, I found myself repeating endlessly and in awe "love, love, love." For others the word is God: a name for ultimate reality. Each of us bring the words that we know in trying to give a name to something that feels unnamable.
Practical gifts of the medicine
Though I have accessed this place of source on the medicine many times, I don't think any words fully do it justice. But rather than trying to put the ineffable into words, the real gift of this medicine, as I see it, is the practical gift of showing us how to be a little bit simpler and more connected to our heart every day. This isn’t a medicine of moralizing life lessons or stern to-dos. It won’t whip your life in order for fear of punishment. Instead, it’s the most direct no-nonsense tool I know for coming into direct felt-sense contact with who we fundamentally are, and helping us shed and metabolize anything that stands in the way of that clear knowing. At the lower doses it’s a gentle reminder, a re-orientation toward the most basic things that we as busy-minded monkeys are so often apt to forget. At the higher doses it brings an incredible and incisive force of clarity stripping away everything that is not us and leaving us face to face with ourselves.
I have deep gratitude personally for this medicine, for the clarity it has brought me, and it is a deep honour to be doing this work serving this medicine to others. I see this work as sacred, and approach it with the greatest reverence, care, and love. And that in itself has been its own practice and teacher for me.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is 5-MeO-DMT a visual experience?
Unlike N,N-DMT and other psychedelics known for vivid fractal patterns and entity encounters, 5-MeO-DMT is not predominantly visual. Some people see nothing at all; others describe a vague dreamlike quality. The experience is better described as a felt sense—a deep, intimate knowing of yourself that goes beyond what visual perception can offer.
How long does a 5-MeO-DMT experience last?
When smoked, the experience comes on within seconds. The peak typically lasts under 10 minutes, and most people return to baseline within 30-45 minutes. Despite the short duration, the experience can feel timeless and the shifts in perspective often stay with people long after.
What is a full release on 5-MeO-DMT?
A full release refers to the complete letting go of identity, ego, and control. When this happens, people often describe an experience of oneness, non-duality, or profound love—a sense that the boundaries between self and everything else have dissolved. Not every session produces a full release, and that is not what everyone needs. When we work with journeyers, we touch base between doses and incrementally increase the dosage as safety and preparedness allow to bring them the experience that is most helpful to meeting their intentions.
What is the difference between 5-MeO-DMT and DMT?
Despite the similar names, 5-MeO-DMT and N,N-DMT are very different molecules that produce very different experiences. N,N-DMT is known for vivid visual hallucinations and entity encounters, while 5-MeO-DMT is a deeply somatic, felt-sense experience focused on self-contact and ego dissolution. We have a full comparison of 5-MeO-DMT vs DMT that explores the differences in depth.
Learn more
We have a full page on What Is 5-MeO-DMT?, which dives deeper into the medicine's history, subjective effects, clinical research, and contraindications. You can also learn more about the difference between 5-MeO-DMT vs N,N-DMT, in our in-depth breakdown of these two similarly named but radically different molecules. To learn more about journeying with us, see Self Contact Retreat, our weekend small group retreat, and Personal Passage Retreat, our private deep dives by appointment.
