How does a microdose change a life? In this powerful conversation, April Pride returns with part two of her interview with guide Sand Symes to unpack what really happens when women begin a psychedelic microdosing protocol. From rewiring somatic patterns to clearing menopausal brain fog, this episode explores how subtle shifts lead to seismic inner changes. Sand shares her personal experience as well as insights from guiding others through emotional healing with psychedelics. Expect science-backed nuance, spiritual depth, and hard-won clarity on how to start integrating psychedelics into a sustainable practice—especially for women navigating midlife. Whether you're microdosing out of curiosity or crisis, this episode offers community and guidance on your path forward.
🔵 Key Takeaways
Microdosing can quietly interrupt deeply held somatic habits, from sugar cravings to codependent relationships.
Hormonal shifts like menopause can be softened by psychedelics—Sand describes brain fog lifting mid-protocol.
Integration isn’t optional. It's how the medicine keeps working long after the last dose.
Doing it alone? Not ideal. Community is key to meaningful psychedelic integration, especially for women.
Microdosing supports spiritual clarity, emotional regulation, and better decisions—one subtle shift at a time.
🔵 Timestamps
[01:35] Why SetSet’s psilocybin protocol helps women begin with microdosing
[03:25] Sand shares how microdosing reveals the body’s subconscious habits
[04:50] Menopausal brain fog and how microdosing restores clarity
[06:10] Breaking patterns: food, alcohol, and the somatic “valve” of wisdom
[10:00] Why the subtle intelligence of microdosing is still deeply powerful
[11:22] The lasting effects of medicine—and the role of integration
[13:00] Why most people skip integration and what happens when you do
[14:50] Sand reflects on 10 years of trying to integrate alone
[17:00] The case for community-based integration and feminine leadership
[18:45] Ancestral trauma and how one healing affects thousands
[20:15] April and Sand close with reflections on hope, healing, and how to connect
🔵 Featured Guest
Sand Symes, sandsymes.com
🔵 Additional Resources
SetSet Blog: “Psychedelic Integration for Women”
🎙️SetSet Podcast: Ep. 90 “Therapeutic Microdosing with Amy Wong”
🎙️SetSet Podcast: Ep. 80 “Psilocybin Mushroom Dosing 101”
🎙️SetSet Podcast: Ep. 43 “Psilocybin Mushroom Dosage: A Beginner’s Guide”
🎙️SetSet Podcast: Ep. 40 “Psilocybin Mushrooms 101: Effects, Dosing, and Tips”
Substack: “Why Midlife Women are Microdosing, Self-Treating, and Reclaiming Their Health”
How has microdosing affected your habits or hormones? What shifts have you noticed—or what are you hoping to change? 👇 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 [plant medicine healing], [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 integration] 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 [microdosing for women], understanding the relationship between [psychedelics] and female hormones. During the 75-minute salon, we'll dive into how [psychedelics] 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 integration] and treatment outcomes. Whether you're curious about using [psychedelics] to support your well-being or you want to better understand their potential in [women's mental health and psychedelics], 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 mental health and psychedelics] together. Thank you. And please enjoy listening to my conversation with Sand Symes. Welcome back to Set Set. In the second part of my conversation with Sand Symes, we go even deeper into her work with [plant medicine healing] and [emotional healing with psychedelics]. Sand shares her approach to creating safe spaces for women to release long held emotional blocks and the crucial role of [psychedelic integration] after a [microdosing for women] journey. We also discussed the importance of honoring feminine wisdom in the healing process and how this approach leads to profound and lasting transformation. If you haven't listened to part one of our conversation, please go back and listen to the previous episode to benefit from Sand's decades long experience as a modern medicine woman. If you're curious about starting out on your own journey with [microdosing for women], Sand often recommends that newbies begin by [microdosing for women]. and Setset is where she sends them. Why? Because Setset is the home of Microsight, our exclusive clinician-created 12-week [psilocybin protocol] that supports safe and mindful [microdosing for women]. Follow the link in the show notes to purchase the PDF download directly from Setset. Let's continue with Sand as we dive into the world of [plant medicine healing], [psychedelic integration] and the transformative power of [emotional healing with psychedelics]. One of the conversations that we had and what inspired recording all of your Not all of your knowledge, but some of your knowledge. And that is, there's so much conversation around [microdosing for women]. [Microdosing for women] is a much, much more user-friendly, approachable idea in terms of how to ingest [psychedelics] for a great portion of the population. Your response was...I don't have the exact words, but essentially you said microdosing is how you can start, how women can start to think about how their life works. be different one day right and just you don't go and meet mother Aya and the next day you train everything changes sometimes it's the microdose pill and protocol that you do for a little bit and I can't tell you how many people that I talk to that share with me that they were on They were in a place of self-exploration and tried a lot of different medicine. But at the end of the day, it was microdosing where they go, oh, I don't think I need those cigarettes anymore. It was microdosing. I was like, oh, I don't need that friend anymore. It was microdosing. It was like, why am I eating meat? It was really interesting. Yeah. Those are the people who are coming to me and they're in as much shock as I am that it was the microdosing that kind of snuck in there and you called that. So I would love to hear more about how you see how microdose is opening the door for so many people to reclaim their soul's desire.
[04:50] Sand Symes:
Yeah. This is such a great topic and conversation. I'm grateful for the [microdosing for women] conversation. As you said, April, the [plant medicine healing] world isn't for everybody. The doorway will appear. They'll be there. It isn't for everybody at all. There are other healing modalities. I'm also a breathwork teacher. Breathwork is a powerful, super powerful medicine. It's a superpower that we have. It's our breath. It's another birthright that we have. And the day, obviously the day of the medicine or an immersion, the beauty of the [microdosing for women] is you don't have to, and then I can go back to whatever, what we were talking about in the last 20 minutes. You don't have to go to Peru or Ecuador or a country of origin to take the medicine and have some life changing alterations in your life. And [microdosing for women] is proving that over and over again. And we know that the research is coming out that's really supportive. In fact, it's outrageously supportive of how many people are making life changes, a subtle change here, a subtle change there. So for [microdosing for women], for me, it is a gateway, I believe, again, especially for women. Because you can feel the medicine and it's subtle, but a woman can feel it. She knows it. What do I mean by feel it? I'll use my own example. When I'm [microdosing for women], and I've been [microdosing for women] on and off now for about two and a half years, and when I'm [microdosing for women], my [menopausal brain fog], it's like the clouds. It's like a moment of... It's like almost angelic as the clouds separate. And I start to get clarity about my work or a relationship or somebody I'm working with or one of my children. And the fogginess of the [menopausal brain fog] disappears. And I get the clarity that I can remember that I had in this body in my 30s and my 40s. I'm 59 now. So the foggy brain kind of comes sometimes with age. And [microdosing for women], it was at a time of day, if I would reach for a glass of wine and I'm not a drinker, alcohol has not impacted my life for a long time, but I could reach a very old pattern of mine. Alcohol was a big medicine, as I said, certainly in the UK and my teenage years and my twenties and [microdosing for women], it's almost like it's this voice that says, do you really want that? So I'm watching and witnessing my somatic body shape, which literally has me reaching, going for something. I find my body, I'm reaching for something. I'll go to the fridge or I'll go to the pantry where I know those gorgeous chocolate chip cookies are languishing in a cupboard. And I feel and witness my body going to the cupboard. I witness and feel my body with my hand that goes towards the chocolate chip cookie. But my body is going, nah, I don't want it. We have such old patterns that still show up somatically in a body shape. that have me really walking to a part of the kitchen, putting my arm out to open a pantry door, that those somatic shapes of my body are in action. My body is in action to go towards something that I believe a tiny part of me wants. [Microdosing for women] has a bigger voice that says, it's like the inner wisdom wise part of me that says, nah, you don't want that. And then I can walk away. So talk about slowing down the medicine's intelligence to that finite detail of witnessing the movement of literally walking my body to the old patterns that I once had that aren't serving me and getting to that moment where it was going to be part of an ingestion and a valve gets switched on with the [microdosing for women] and the intelligence of the mushroom says, you don't need that. And then it kicks into my body's own intelligence and my body's intelligence is saying, you actually don't need that. So I'm overriding very deep, old somatic patterns of where my body is taking me to those places. It's a somatic body shape that we have. We're holding a fold. We're scrolling, we're doing things, those body shapes that take us to those old toxic patterns. And there's a moment when I, for me, my own personal journey, and certainly for a lot of the women that I'm working with who are [microdosing for women], we call it a valve. The valve gets switched up. The voice of reason gets louder. The white wisdom keeper takes up more space. And in that internal landscape, there's a pause and it's, nah, you don't really need this. or enough already with the numbing out or the distraction or the disassociated somatic patterns that we all have that have been a massive part of our infrastructure in our humanity for generations. The key here is a woman gets to feel and witness the changes from her mental process, her emotional process, her physiology. And then I wrap that around with her spiritual, her spirit is alive and awake and is informing her of better choices.
[10:19] April Pride:
That is so well said, particularly when you describe the medicine in a [microdosing for women] as when the medicine is slowed down and fine-tuned to such great detail. I would never think of a [microdosing for women] in that way. I'm just like, oh, it's just, it's not fine-tuned. It's just, yes. But it doesn't mean that it isn't powerful or still, it just it acts in a different way because it's not going to bang you over the head, but it will reveal something to you and it less will. It's the same intelligence, isn't it, April? And it knows how they find you. Right.
[10:59] Sand Symes:
Size doesn't matter if we are meeting the sacredness of the medicine, meaning we're meeting the intelligence of this medicine. Whatever that dosage is can take us on a slightly different journey for sure. But the intelligence is the core, regardless of whatever the dosage is. The intelligence is right there.
[11:22] April Pride:
And the intelligence does not leave your system. So I want to talk about once you have ingested intelligence in any form of [plant medicine healing], there's an [psychedelic integration]. And the important distinction between a medicine like this and one you're prescribed by your doctor that's a pharmaceutical for the most part is that idea is that you're not taking psilocybin capsules every day for the rest of your life, right? You will not be taking them at a certain point. And that is the point. But because the medicine is in your system, you want to use that intelligence. And that is what [psychedelic integration] is, right? How are you taking what you've learned with this medicine and moving forward in your life in a way with now that you have this intelligence, both what's been revealed and now that it's in your system. So how do you encourage listeners to start to [psychedelic integration] in a way that's meaningful and also acknowledging that our lives are busy? And sometimes the step that we agreed to take was to take the medicine and maybe we saw some things. And if we really want to drill down on that, then we're more open to [psychedelic integration]. But if we're not, then [psychedelic integration] just seems like homework, I think. And it's something that people avoid. So how should we make [psychedelic integration] like the medicine? It sneaks up on you. Yeah.
[12:50] Sand Symes:
This is so great. And for the listeners, I'm sure many of them are nodding their heads and going, yep, that's me. I went to the ceremony or I ingested medicine and it was wonderful. And at that point, at that peak point in my life, I vowed I would do X, Y, Z and I would never do again ABC, right? So it's like any form of peak experience in our life. We can go to a personal development peak experience, right? And we write and we journal and we make all of these promises to ourselves and then we break them. Why? Why do we do that? And in the nicest possible way, again, with our own infrastructure of our beautiful humanity, our humanness is we are, first of all, we are innately lazy. We were always looking for shortcuts. How can I get the fastest? How can I get there? What if I shortcut this way? What if I shortcut that way? How can I get what I want with least effort and least input? And every one of us have got that somewhere in our psyche, because if you're walking on this planet as a two-legged human, that's what I mean by two-legged. If you are a human being on this planet, we have in our psyche, how can I get more or get better with least effort? So how do we know that? How do we work with that? How do we keep the incredible intelligence, as you just said so beautifully, April, alive inside of us? And after all these years of doing it the hard, the easier way, the hard way, in essence, is doing it by myself. I have not got the motivation or the inspiration or the bandwidth or the way with all to keep going by myself. I just haven't. And I've tried. Holy shit. I've really tried because I thought that was what we meant to do. And especially in the original, some of the more traditional models, of [plant medicine healing], we would go, we'd be on a diet, a little diet of various things that we weren't eating or participating in. We would have this, the most astonishing day of medicine. We would have an [psychedelic integration] circle the next day, and then we'd all go into our own lives and it's get on with it. Just keep going as your [psychedelic integration]. And so for the first 10 years of my [plant medicine healing] journey, that was my model. Doing it by myself. And I was lost, April. I was, I got lost. I got, I was, I really got lost. I was left to my own interpretations and I was young in the medicine. So I was, my ego was telling me certain things. The shadow parts of me telling me certain things. I was all over the place and believed that half of it believed that the medicine was telling me this. But over the years realized, ah, we've got all of these different parts inside of your sand who all want this voice. And perhaps half of them or most of them are nothing to do with the medicine. I didn't have a teacher at that time. I didn't have a community of people at that time that I could pick up a phone and say, I'm having these wildest dreams and these things are happening to me. Can you help me understand this? So for the first decade, I really was by myself in that [psychedelic integration] process. So I was [psychedelic integration] for 10 years the wrong way, the way that I wouldn't recommend for anybody. And yet that still is a very powerful model that is out there. So... What I would say certainly, and again, in this line of for woman, is to do it together in a community, whether that's a sisterhood or a community of beings that are on this journey with you, that you have guides. And I don't want to put the word teacher in this place because some of our most beautiful people in our community wouldn't see themselves as a teacher necessarily, but they've been working in the [plant medicine healing] world for two decades, three decades. And they have experience. It's the true wisdom keepers who have experience, who can share some of the experiences, what happened for them. And the more that we open our conversation with others and listen to other people's experiences, it starts to make more sense in our experience. So it's almost like by osmosis, we're in an incubator, learning from each other, sharing with each other. Moving with each other and is safe, then that's ultimately a safe place of expression, a safe place of being able to say this changed for me or I need support here, not understanding this part. So in any kind of community, we'd love it to be a non-hierarchical community. And yet know which wisdom keepers we can lean into who've got experience with this medicine or have been doing this for a decade and a half or 20 years here or have got this experience. It's a long way of saying [psychedelic integration] for me to sustain the changes that we come to this medicine for. I believe the only way we can do this is in community or with each other and not to do it by ourself. Really not to do it by herself, which is why I got so excited when you told me about your 10 week [psilocybin protocol] in October for, I don't know, you're going to talk about that as well. But doing that, doing a [psilocybin protocol] with [microdosing for women], with a group of people that are all in it together with different intentions, but are doing it together as a collective, the power of that. From an energetic point of view, you're creating a very powerful vortex of energy with 100 people. And then because I also work with [ancestral trauma healing], those 100 people are bringing all of the ancestral lineage into that field. So 100 physical people might be in that energetic container. But trust me, there are thousands and thousands of beings that are being supported in that work. Because when we start to make a change, all of that pastory energetically ripples back and changes our ancestral lineage and it changes the future. There used to be a powerful statement in many indigenous communities that said, when one person on this planet makes the deepest fundamental, starts to make the deepest, most fundamental change of breaking old trauma, [ancestral trauma healing] or stories or toxic wounds. It doesn't have to be trauma with a capital T, but just the old stories that we've been handed down for generations. When one person starts to break that story and break that line, it used to be we affect seven generations back and seven generations future. But that was around 30, 40 years ago. Now, with all of the research, we understand epigenetics and we understand the energetics of our infrastructure as a human being, when we start making fundamental changes, it goes right back to source when we first picked up that story of separation. And then we are changing, literally changing the trajectory of our humanity, one plant at a time.
[20:15] April Pride:
Yes. And one hopeful person at a time, right? That's why people turn to these medicines, right? They have tried other things. And this is in a lot of ways, their last hope. You want people to have a good experience and to get the most out of it. And it's through instruction by people like you who are willing to share what you've learned over the decades. So thank you so much for being here. Our guest today. I appreciate your knowledge and I would like to leave listeners with how they can find you so if they learn more about the facilitation that you do with others or the guided [ancestral trauma healing] breath work that was my first [ancestral trauma healing] breath work journey it was incredible and I did that with Sand in the last month yeah how can people find you
[21:01] Sand Symes:
They can find me with my name www.sandsymes.com they can find me there and from that place then that's a landing place they can come talk to me from there I'm on some of the social media platforms but come talk to me find read about me let people do their own homework I'd love to be in conversation with anyone that's serious about learning more. And as an educator in this field, it's beautiful to be in that position and being able to share some of our experiences, especially when people are coming into this work newly for the first time.
[21:34] April Pride:
Very good hands with you.
[21:36] Sand Symes:
Thank you very much. Thanks, April.
[21:39] April Pride:
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 integration] experience 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 three, F-O-R, the number two. At checkout, that's three, F-O-R-2 at GetSetSet.com.
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