There was a time in the 70's when I assisted people who were on bad hallucinagenic drug trips to "flip" them into beautiful ones. I discovered how to do this quite by accident, from the necessity of the situation.
Here is what worked. In every case, I discovered, the person was having a bad trip not because of the trip itself but because of their resistance to it.
For example, on LSD someone might look at a painting on the wall and it might turn into a giant spider. The giant spider was not the problem, though. The fact that the person was resisting it, didn't want that giant spider to be there, was the problem.
The trick was to convince the person to come back into the present moment, usually by focusing on their breathing, and to stop offering resistance to "what-is"—to whatever was.
And the giant spider? When the person could detach from their thoughts enough to just be with whatever was there—"A giant spider? Far-out!"—then the trip would turn into something altogether different.
Because of the lack of resistance to whatever was, the trip would turn incredibly beautiful at that point.
I'm not advocating these experiences to anyone, though. There's a better way.
Much later I began to glimpse that this way of seeing things applied extremely well to life itself. I noticed that whenever I could let go of my resistance to "whatever-it-was" being the way it was, that it was as if I was living in a different world. Then I did whatever I did, but without the tension caused by resistance.
—jim sloman, 11/13/00 for Nov 13
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