In this soulful and story-rich episode, April Pride welcomes Sand Symes, a guide with decades of experience guiding women through psychedelic journeys. Together, they explore how feminine energy—when supported by plant medicine like psilocybin, cannabis, and MDMA—can become a powerful portal to emotional liberation and embodied truth. Through lived experience and clinical wisdom, Sand unpacks why traditional therapy often falls short for women and how sacred psychedelics offer a different kind of transformation—rooted in intuition, ancestry, and nervous system recalibration. If you’ve ever wondered what it looks like to prepare for a journey as a woman, or why psilocybin healing feels so personal, this conversation will meet you where you are.
🔵 Key Takeaways
Feminine energy healing with psychedelics helps women release outdated stories embedded in their nervous systems.
Sand Symes shares her journey from social work to sacred medicine, working with psilocybin, cannabis, and MDMA.
Psychedelics help rewire trauma responses and open a deeper connection to ancestral and intuitive wisdom.
The power of preparation and integration: true healing begins before and continues long after the journey.
These medicines invite sovereignty, not escapism—women reclaim their truth through presence and self-compassion.
🔵 Timestamps
[03:05] Meet Sand Symes: seer, social worker, medicine woman
[04:38] Her first sacred experience with cannabis and the journey beyond alcohol
[06:30] Lessons from ayahuasca, San Pedro, and the fairies of Ireland
[09:00] Psilocybin’s unique invitation to direct inner navigation
[11:29] A quick medicine breakdown: vines, cacti, fungi, synthetics
[12:29] MDMA and the source question: what is natural healing?
[14:24] April and Sand reflect on MDMA as a gateway to embodied emotion
[16:16] Sand’s framework for preparing women for psychedelic healing
[18:00] From social work to soul work—breaking the intergenerational cycle
[20:00] What happens when a woman finally sees her own beauty
[22:52] Closing thoughts on trauma, truth, and trusting the journey
🔵 Featured Guest
Sand Symes
🔵 Additional Resources
SetSet Blog: “The Science and Safety of Microdosing Mushrooms for Women”
SetSet Blog: “Cannabis Strain Families”
🎙️ SetSet Podcast: Ep. 84 “MDMA for Connection and Healing”
🎙️ SetSet Podcast: Ep. 80 “Psilocybin Mushroom Dosing 101”
🎙️ SetSet Podcast: Ep. 76 “Cannabis Microdosing for Women”
🎙️ SetSet Podcast: Ep. 71 “Psychedelic Therapy for Trauma”
Substack: “How to Choose a Psychedelic for Therapy”
How did you find your way into feminine energy work—or are you just starting to explore it? What would you want a guide like Sand to know about you before your journey? 👇 Let’s talk about it in the comments after the transcript below.
🔵 Transcript
[00:03] April Pride:
Hey, this is April, and this show, Set Set Show, discusses cannabis, psychedelics, and altered states of consciousness generally. It's intended for audiences 21 and over. Also, I am not a medical expert. If you are looking to engage with psychedelic substances, please consult your physician before doing so. hi it's april pride your host on set set show the episode you're about to listen to was recorded before set set announced our upcoming psychedelic salon and given that the topic of today's episode is about women i want to make sure that our seattle listeners know about this incredible opportunity to join me live on monday april 7th at Town Hall Seattle where we are going to explore [Feminine Energy Healing with Psychedelics]. During the 75-Minute Salon, we'll dive into how [psychedelic therapy for women] might address health challenges unique to women, like menopause, autoimmune disorders, and reproductive-related depression, and anxiety. We'll also unpack the latest research on how hormonal cycles can influence [psychedelic experiences] and treatment outcomes. Whether you're curious about using [plant medicine for women] to support your well-being or you want to better understand their potential in women's health, this conversation will offer science-backed insights and compassionate perspectives. Seats are limited, so grab your tickets now at townhallseattle.org for Monday, April 7th at 7.30 p.m. Let's reimagine women's health together. Thank you, and please enjoy listening to my conversation with Sand Symes. Today, I'm joined by Sand Symes, an extraordinary [plant medicine] guide who works deeply with [Feminine Energy Healing with Psychedelics] to facilitate healing journeys. In this first part of our conversation, Sand and I discuss the unique role of [sacred feminine and plant medicine] and how [psychedelic therapy for women] can help us [reconnect with intuition] and uncover profound self-awareness. Throughout our chat, Sand shares her experiences guiding women through [psilocybin healing journeys] that embrace their inner strength. 50% of all people who engage with [psychedelics] to support this awareness choose to work with psilocybin. If you're interested in exploring the potential of [psilocybin healing journey], follow the link in the show notes for this episode to access the Ultimate Psilocybin Guide, a comprehensive clinician-backed resource available in PDF and audio download exclusively through SetSet. And remember, if you enjoyed today's episode, please subscribe to rate and review Set Set Show. It really does help more people find this important harm reduction education. Let's dive in with Sand Symes and explore the healing power of [Feminine Energy Healing with Psychedelics]. I'd like to start with if you want to introduce yourself and your work and then the [plant medicine] that you do work with.
[03:05] Sand Symes:
My name, of course, is Sand Symes. I'm a modern medicine woman. I am a psychedelic guide. I am a former social worker, so very much grounded in things like internal family systems and childhood cycles and our ancestral lineages and relationships. And our parents or our caregivers, I'm very deeply seeped in the past to understand what my present life is looking at and how I'm going to deal with that for the future. I am a seer with meaning as a six, seven year old little girl, I could see energies and shapes. I could see ancestors. I could see cosmic beings. And then that very quickly disappeared when adults around me thought that was too weird and shut that down very quickly and very brutally. And then came back when I was 29 years old through the power of [plant medicine for women], opened up that capillary again. And I also work as a women's empowerment coach and mentor. I am a shamanic practitioner of 22 years and I've been sitting with the power and the sacredness of [Feminine Energy Healing with Psychedelics] for over two decades.
[04:19] April Pride:
Thank you. And I have met Sand in person and her energy is, it's really nice to be around. So the [plant medicine] is in you. And what [plant medicine] do you work with? And did you come to one specific perspective? [plant medicine] and then that led you to others?
[04:38] Sand Symes:
Great question. My first meet with a sacred [plant medicine for women] was with cannabis when I was in college, which I think is a very popular and common route for many of us. And with cannabis, what I enjoyed about meeting her and the pronoun her for all of Pachimama's [plant medicine for women]. So when I met her, when I met cannabis, I really enjoyed how she made me feel because I have a lot of energy, a lot of burn energy, a lot of fire energy. I can move very quickly. So she was my first [plant medicine] that taught me how to slow down. So I really, I'd never felt my body. And I was like 16 when I first ingested it. [cannabis for feminine energy] — I'd never felt my body as relaxed and open as I did when I first ingested cannabis and I stayed with that [plant medicine] for a couple of years and then I forgot about it. I started on life like many other people do and then alcohol became a big part of my life at that point. In my late teens, especially in the UK, it's a huge drinking culture in our young people. So alcohol took over. And in the wisdom keeper of my 59 years around the sun now, for me personally, alcohol doesn't work well with my system at all. But the [plant medicine for women] works beautifully with my system. And why was I reaching for alcohol? It was for confidence. It was for inspiration. It was to fit in. It was all those things that in my early days I was looking for that kind of substance to move me and transport me. What I learned with my very first [ayahuasca] medicine journey, which was 21 years ago in Amsterdam, which I'll never forget. In that journey, the mother, [ayahuasca], the mother, as many of your listeners know, when I met her, it was like meeting the ultimate sacred grandmother in the darkest of dark and the lightest of light. She scared me so much. And yet there was a deep impulse inside of me that I wanted to sit and understand what I thought I was understanding her. And after many journeys later, I realized the inquiry, the sacred mirror was she was inviting me to understand myself. Over a period of 16 years, I sat with [ayahuasca] in the jungles of Ecuador and Peru and sat with some incredible [plant medicine] teachers, as well as the beautiful medicine men and women of the Ecuadorian Peruvian rainforests that sit with this [plant medicine for women]. I also sat with [ayahuasca] in various parts of the world and beautiful teachers who really had the sacredness of this [plant medicine] come to fruition. And then one of my [plant medicine] sisters and friends and teachers and mentors, my dear Peruvian [plant medicine] woman, who I was just sharing with you April before our call, I apprenticed with her for 16 years with the [plant medicine for women] of [Huachuma], which can be known also as [San Pedro], which is the cactus. And understanding that [plant medicine], a very different [plant medicine], but also transported me to find out all the different pieces and parts of me. So my inquiry, my dance, my learning, the biggest teachers in most of my years in [Feminine Energy Healing with Psychedelics] have been [ayahuasca] and [Huachuma]. When I met the [plant medicine] of [psilocybin], which was about nine years ago, I was blown away at the different journey that [psilocybin healing journey] opened up for me. It was the first time that I'd felt that I was sitting more and more in a controlled seat of the experience and moving into the places where I wanted to go to do the deepest work. And with the other [plant medicine], I'd felt that I was completely out of control for a long time until I started to understand the [plant medicine] and get taught by the teachers how to use the [plant medicine] in a particular way. And one of my first journeys with [psilocybin] was, one of my intentions was, how can I be with this [plant medicine] and share this with the world as we want to? When deep inside of my womb, I was terrified in my physical body of the legislation system that is keeping us small and keeping this [plant medicine for women] away from our humanity. And the depth of the roar that was inside of me of the pain of that was...So my teacher inside of that particular [psilocybin healing journey] is the queen of the fairies, which might sound really woo-woo to some of your listeners. And she took me to my birthright of Ireland and took me on this journey of understanding and seeing how [psilocybin] and [mushroom] has been in that land, which is my ancestral land, forever — the famous tales and the myths and the legends of the leprechaun sitting on top of a toadstool with the rainbow. The pot of gold was never about money or a pot of gold of financial success. It's your birthright of understanding a deeper truth of who we are. And that birthright is the gold, is your awakening, is that higher consciousness that emboldened me with that [psilocybin healing journey], which was beautiful. So I work with [psilocybin], and I also was introduced eight years ago to the [plant medicine] MDMA. Non-plant-based, as we know, not earth-based, very much a synthetic. And I have been in and out of my own internal debate of this [MDMA emotional healing] and the gift that it is to our humanity. And my downloads in all of my [Feminine Energy Healing with Psychedelics] in this inquiry have been, where do you think — like when MDMA has spoken to me — where do you think I came from? The downloads from this complexity of these chemical components, where do you think I came from? I came from source. I came from, and then we can fill in the blank, I came from life itself. I came from pure consciousness. I came from the existence, which is exactly the same source, where [ayahuasca] and [Huachuma] and [mushrooms] come from — that same intelligence that is feeding and serving and informing our humanity — partner with this incredible intelligence. So with all of that said, in 21 years, I've got a culmination of the three [plant medicine]s I work with: [psilocybin], [cannabis], and [MDMA emotional healing]. I do not work with [ayahuasca]. I don't work obviously with [San Pedro] or DMT. I don't work with those [plant medicine]s.
[11:29] April Pride:
Right. Meaning you don't facilitate journeys for others, but you participate and ingest the [plant medicine] for yourself at various times. Yes. Yes, I do. Thank you for that rundown. I just want a quick recap. So for people that don't understand, [ayahuasca] is a combination of two vines. I wanted to make the distinction between the fact that [San Pedro] is, it's cactus, right? So you've got vines, you have cacti. And then, of course, [psilocybin] comes from fungi. And that's a mushroom in the cap and stem. Then [MDMA] is always going to be synthesized. But is the original chemistry — it's synthesized from a blueprint of sassafras, which is a flower, I believe. So there's some nature in there. It does come from source. Yeah. I don't know. I don't think if you consume sassafras, you're going to get exactly the same effect.
[12:29] Sand Symes:
Let's be grateful for that, that the partnership — which is all of this [Feminine Energy Healing with Psychedelics] — is partnering with an intelligence that is… we can argue it's greater than the intelligence that we are most operating from in everyday life. But what it does is it meets our deepest blueprint of our intelligence. We are source. We are this intelligence. And we have been covered over and buried. And all of that intelligence has been stuffed down. And we could wax lyrically for several decades, you and I, April, on that topic alone. But that… has these [plant medicine for women], the power and the sacredness of the power is the sacredness of these [plant medicine]s. And [MDMA emotional healing], I put [MDMA] in that exact same category. The work that I've done with myself — always working with myself first, I am my first client — and working with the clients that I've worked with, it's mind blowing what is available in terms of the deepest possible change that we can make as humans on this planet. And I also am very aware, and I'm cautious when I say that, is it's not everybody is going to walk through that door and that gateway, and that's okay, because we were given free will. We were given choice. But I hope that people educate themselves around these topics. And that's why I — April, I love you. I love what you're doing. And this podcast is educating us a little bit more because we have been indoctrinated with the dogma that we don't use the word [plant medicine]. We use the word drugs. When we talk about any of these — whether it's [ayahuasca] — it's a drug. And in my world, I'm so against any word being called drug around these [plant medicine for women]. A [plant medicine] at its very definition helps to move our humanity — the human pain — into the light in some shape or form.
[14:24] April Pride:
It certainly does that. I was thinking [MDMA emotional healing] was, aside from [cannabis for feminine energy], which is a weed technically, right? As we're going through the [plant medicine for women] kingdom. So [MDMA emotional healing] was, aside from [cannabis for feminine energy], was my first psychedelic. And yeah, I guess actually [psilocybin healing journey] was, but the one that changed my life was [MDMA emotional healing]. Yeah. Yeah. And I feel grateful that found me in my twenties and it certainly isn't, it was not pure at that time. And I wasn't, I didn't have a source that was probably really a good source. Didn't have to because fentanyl wasn't in the picture really, but I understand why you connected with it. Yeah. Even though you've connected with lots of hallucinogens and sacred nature, I understand why. You made an exception. Really? Yeah. So how have you seen women in particular Because you and I are here because we've used these [plant medicine for women] and we've seen our life change for the better. So how are you facilitating women, shepherding them through to you give them the... I, full disclosure, I'm going to be working with Sand at the end of this month and she will be working with me facilitating an experience. And we'll have intake interviews leading up to that [plant medicine] journey and then after. And so there's a lot of preparation and there's a lot of integration. You get to know these people. So how do you prepare people for what you know is about to happen and leave it open so that they are in charge of their journey? The tension there is interesting to me.
[16:16] Sand Symes:
It's a great question, April. It was a dance. I lean very heavily into 35 years of working with women, not in [plant medicine], but working with women from my dad is a social worker. So working with women in prisons, working with women with substance misuse and domestic violence and eating disorders and all of the ways that walking on this earth in a body that is calcified and in a cage, this is when I get moved to my core. And for most of it, it's but for the grace of God go I. The saying there is the women that I had the honor and the privilege and still do have the honor and privilege of working with some of our most marginalized community groups because of where they were born. A zip code defines people. Color of skin defines people. Ability versus disability defines people. And so the belief of the story that all of us carry inside, how crippling those stories can be, that will define the dance that woman will take for some of them, for some of us for the rest of our life. And so as a social worker, I was constantly a loud voice on behalf of the marginalized groups that didn't feel that they had a voice. And I was angry at the systems that didn't support the women that I was supporting in a way that I felt that they could be supported. The background of that, including my own background, my own story of my own physical abuse in my own family, verbal abuse, very angry father, mother that couldn't stand up to that dominant male in our family. And I love my father. He's passed. He passed over a decade ago. But that's what took me into the [Feminine Energy Healing with Psychedelics] ceremonies in the first place, was to understand the psyche of the masculine male inside a male body, to understand where that power over comes from so that I could meet it in the field. So I wasn't going to spend the rest of my life either as a victim of my own circumstances or carrying really toxic stories, which really led me to not trusting men for decades. So those stories are so deeply wired inside of us from whatever start we had in life. So I lean into that experience and I've worked with thousands of women right across the spectrum and CEOs and visionaries and leaders of their field. When I met [plant medicine] for the first time and realized I could work with woman, with [plant medicine]. I started to see the incredible potential of the moment when a woman meets herself, sees the stories that she's been living in as stories and not as truth anymore. And with the [plant medicine], as we know, it starts to move the neuroplasticity of the [plant medicine], meaning she starts to see the stories for what they are, that it's a story and not true. Her brain and her nervous system, then her physiology starts to work in a newer truth. If the story isn't that... And what would be the new story that we could start to claim fully? Not just a happy clapping mantra that is out there. A lot of the manifestation like, oh, just say, I am beautiful. I am beautiful. I am beautiful over and over in a mirror. And one day you might believe it. For most of us, that will never. Why? Because literally our physical body is working against us. It's not the mental process. It's the physiology because that story is so deeply wired. Our nervous system is finding evidence constantly of finding I am ugly or I'm not worthy. I'm not good enough. And when we really understand the benevolence and the power and the majesty of these [plant medicine for women], when I sit, the first time I sat with woman and she looked at herself in a mirror, like I was laid through the [plant medicine] and saw the deepest truth, not just her beauty of her physical beauty, but her inner landscape of that beauty that the radiance of her. And she started to speak to herself and the little girls that are inside. I do a lot of work with internal family systems and different frameworks from my social work background in this work. I was blown away by seeing a woman going for her soul retrieval so masterfully, so powerfully, so clearly that as long as she kept doing that, she kept the new story alive inside of her after that day of [plant medicine], then she's got a chance to truly change the depth of the narrative of her story that is running through the marrow of her bones in her nervous system, in her existence of who she thought herself to be. The cage gets open. The woman sees the truth of who she is. She feels it. She can purge and release in all sorts of different beautiful ways that of a story that is no longer true and then she claims it's the sovereignty it's her birthright to see and feel and know herself of the sovereignty of who she really is and that just I was blown away and of course the first place I went was why the hell did I not know about the power of these [plant medicine for women] all those years ago when I was a social worker that was literally banging my head against the proverbial brick wall. It's almost like it's so calcified, it's almost impossible that we're going to break the intergenerational trauma that keeps us in these calcified cages. So that is the power of the [plant medicine]. And from that moment, that was it. I'm giving my life to this work now because there is no... For me, talk therapy, which I do talk therapy. I go in and out of therapy. I've got a great therapist. She's more of a coach with me these days. So I'm not dismissing any part of our healing modalities that are out there. I really am not. When talk therapy takes us to a certain point, the [plant medicine for women] takes us to the next point. For me, my belief from my own witnessing in my own life is and the life of hundreds of women now at these [plant medicine for women], seeing their life change beyond what they were able to access in some of the other modalities that are more legally available on this planet.
[22:52] April Pride:
Not surprised. And you also have to be ready for it too, right? Thank you for joining us for today's show. I'm April, and I'll be back the next installment of Set Set Show, where we cover everything you need to have a safe, supported, [psychedelic experience for women] in the wild. If you're starting to think about holiday gifts, Set Set has you covered. For the stoners and psychonauts on your list, Set Set's Psychedelic Cards, a card game to enhance connection and exploration during altered states. Go to GetSetSet.com, that's G-E-T-S-E-T-S-E-T.com, and get one deck of cards for free when you purchase two decks. Enter the number 3, F-O-R, the number 2, at checkout, that's 3-F-O-R-2 at GetSetSet.com.
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