We’re less than one month away from our first Psychedelic Salon of the new year, and today’s podcast drop features one of the guests who will be at Town Hall Seattle on February 5th discussing Psychedelics and Aging.
Journalist Abbie Rosner and I have charted a similar path - working first in cannabis before following our curiosity to psychedelics. Her work in the latter has culminated in a book to be released this July - Psychedelics in the Counterculture of Aging - that serves two purposes: 1) catching Boomers up on psychedelics in the 21st century and 2) sharing the stories of 36 elders who have each worked with psychedelics to address the range of realities that one may face after age 65.
Enjoy our conversation, and please share with an elder in your life who may benefit from Abbie’s work and wisdom.
Take care,
April
Episode Summary
What happens when psychedelic experiences arrive later in life—after careers, caregiving, grief, and loss have already shaped the nervous system? In this episode, April Pride sits down with journalist and author Abbie Rosner to explore psychedelics and aging through the lens of elderhood, meaning-making, and maturity. Rather than framing psychedelics as a return to youth, this conversation looks at how these experiences can land differently for older adults—bringing reflection, perspective, and emotional capacity rather than novelty or intensity. Together, April and Abbie discuss research on end-of-life anxiety, lived experiences of grief and joy, and why preparation, support, and integration matter more than peak experiences. This episode offers a grounded, harm-reduction–oriented exploration of what psychedelics may offer later in life—without hype, pressure, or promises.
🔵 Key Takeaways
Psychedelics often land differently later in life because the nervous system carries decades of lived experience.
Elderhood is not decline—it’s integration of youth, age, wisdom, and impermanence.
Research on psychedelics and end-of-life anxiety points to increased emotional capacity, not the elimination of grief or fear.
Challenging experiences are not uncommon, but preparation and support can reduce long-term difficulty.
Community becomes increasingly important for integration, care, and meaning as we age.
🔵 Timestamps
[00:00] Why psychedelics and aging require a different conversation
[02:30] Abbie Rosner’s journey into psychedelics later in life
[05:30] Seniors vs. elders and why language matters
[07:15] Elderhood as integration, not decline
[11:25] Meaning making, mortality, and end-of-life research
[14:20] What older adults seek from psychedelic experiences
[21:00] Harm reduction, challenging experiences, and safety
[26:00] Preparation pathways: legal, underground, and supported options
[29:00] Psychedelics, grief, and emotional release
[33:00] Community, mutual care, and aging with intention
[36:50] Integration over intensity: closing reflections
🔵 Guests
Abbie Rosner is a journalist and author focused on psychedelics and aging, and elderhood. Her forthcoming book explores how psychedelic experiences intersect with meaning-making, grief, and community later in life.
Follow Abbie Rosner: Elderevolution | Substack — abbierosner.substack.com | Instagram — ELDEREVOLUTION
🔵 Additional Resources
Women in the Wild application - Looking for an IRL microdose/low-dose psilocybin experience in Seattle with other women? Applications are open for February and March gatherings.
Psychedelics & Seniors | Thursday, February 5, 2026
Learn how psychedelics may play a meaningful role in helping older adults navigate aging, existential distress, end-of-life anxiety, and unresolved trauma.
🔵 Transcript
[00:00:00] April Pride, host: Hey, this is April, and this show SetSet discusses psychedelics. It’s intended for audiences 21 and over. Also, I’m not a medical expert. If you are looking to engage with psychedelic substances, please consult your physician before doing so.
The morning I recorded this episode, I was on a walk with a friend, although it was raining here in Seattle.
She asked me who I was interviewing, and when I began to explain the work of today’s guest, Abbie Rosner—who is a journalist and author interested in psychedelics and aging, and elderhood—I notice myself slowing down and choosing my words carefully. Because I don’t know this topic personally. I am aging, but I am just about to reach the halfway point rather than having fewer years ahead of me than behind.
If I spend much of my time in an altered state and reflection at this point in my life, I cannot imagine what that will become with more years and more learning on which to reflect. Today’s conversation is about psychedelics and aging and what happens when people encounter these medicines later in life, after careers and caregiving.
Marriages, grief, and loss have already shaped our psyche and our nervous system. This conversation is educational. It’s not medical advice. We’ll talk about research, lived experience, and uncertainty without instructions, dosing, or promises. Psychedelics are powerful.
Harm reduction matters: context matters, preparation matters, and integration matters. What we’re really exploring here is meaning, and more specifically meaning making, and what changes when time itself becomes visible.
Abbie will be a guest at our next psychedelic salon at Town Hall Seattle on February 5th. She’ll be joined by Dr. Emily Winton, a naturopathic physician and integrative mental health specialist, and documentary filmmaker Scott Wright.
For more information and to grab tickets to join us live or to stream the salon, check out the link in today’s show notes. As Abbie begins sharing her story, I want you to notice something. She doesn’t frame psychedelics as a return to youth. She frames them as something that landed differently because of age—and that distinction matters, especially for psychedelic integration later in life.
I would love for you to familiarize the audience with how you came to write about psychedelics and older adults?
[00:02:33] Abbie Rosner, ELDEREVOLUTION: Okay, that’s a great topic and a great question. I bring my own personal experience because I consider myself the consummate boomer exploring psychedelics.
I was born in 1958 and grew up in the seventies. I smoked a lot of pot and dropped acid, then put it all behind. I finished college, got married, had kids, and lived this straight life. Alcohol—the glass of wine—was my drug preference.
When I got to my mid fifties, my marriage was ending, and my kids were grown. I rediscovered cannabis and found that my relationship to it was very different as an older adult. I’d been meditating for many years.
I experienced all kinds of things in life, and I found that life experience really grounded me as I was exploring these expanded states of consciousness. On my 60th birthday, the book How to Change Your Mind—Michael Pollan—How to Change Your Mind was a birthday present.
When I read that book, I thought: if psychedelics are so effective—he wrote about the clinical trials, psilocybin therapy for people with existential distress over their terminal cancer diagnosis—I thought, we all have a terminal diagnosis, and as we get older, we become more aware of our mortality.
If this can help, why wait until you’re at death’s door? Maybe we can move up the advantages of these experiences and have them earlier on so that they can impact the way we live later in life. That was my theory, and I decided to see if that was really a thing.
I started to do research for my book. I quickly discovered that it truly is a thing, and that there is a whole swath of older adults—people in their fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties—that are exploring psychedelics.
Documenting that phenomenon was what got me started in this.
[00:04:31] April Pride, host: What I hear in Abbie’s story isn’t nostalgia. It’s regulation by midlife. The nervous system has data. It’s tracked disappointment, responsibility, rupture, repair. So when someone encounters an expanded state later in life, it’s not happening in a blank body. It’s happening in a system that already knows impermanence—and that changes the experience.
I connect with how you found yourself here because I too find myself here based on my own personal journey and curiosity. It’s a lucky place to find ourselves.
[00:05:03] Abbie Rosner, ELDEREVOLUTION: absolutely.
[00:05:03] April Pride, host: I am curious—seniors versus elders. I find myself not knowing how to label people—my parents’ generation. My mom was born in 57. I don’t wanna call you boomers because now that has such a negative connotation.
Although I think we’ve flipped it on its head and it’s fun now. But seniors versus elders—how do you see that distinction for older adults?
[00:05:31] Abbie Rosner, ELDEREVOLUTION: That’s really an interesting point. It points to this position that our generation—and I guess I don’t have any other name to call it other than boomers—we’re entering older age now. We’re the generation that came of age in the sixties and seventies, and now we’re in our sixties and seventies, entering older age in a society that doesn’t make much place for us. The messages we get are anti-aging, death phobic.
There’s no concept of what it is to be an elder offered in our society. The tendency for us, as the generation that revolutionized youth, is that we’re imprinted with our youthful identities. And it’s really so much a part of who we are.
We’re experiencing this kind of dissonance between youthful self images and our aging bodies.
What psychedelics offer us is this: we don’t have to choose between being young and being old. We can connect with our joyful, youthful selves and experience the awe and wonder of children.
And we can also have profound pleasures of young adulthood. We can temper it all with the wisdom and maturity of lives fully lived. That to me is what an elder is—somebody who incorporates all of those identities. The beauty of what we’re discovering now is that being an elder is the culmination of everything you’ve experienced in your life.
You don’t have to put away your young self or disregard that you’re aging. We have such negative feelings about what it is to be aging, and I feel like that’s unfortunate—that really we can embrace that. It’s just an inevitable and beautiful phase of life.
[00:07:15] April Pride, host: This is where psychedelics and aging and elderhood intersect. Our culture hasn’t really named—We don’t have a shared language for elderhood in the west. We have anti-aging, we have still young, we have don’t let it show elderhood. It isn’t decline, it’s integration.
Holding youth and age in the same body without forcing one to disappear. That’s not a mindset shift—that’s a nervous system shift.
I’m gonna be 50 in March. For the last decade, as soon as we turned 40, everyone started poo-pooing the fact that we were getting older. And I found that to be very frustrating because they weren’t speaking for me. It seemed like they were aging themselves by seeing themselves as a person that was aging.
If you were thinking about aging in terms of your attitude, your access to internal thoughts and feelings—but that is not how our society sees aging. It’s not a gift. It’s something you’re constantly fighting against.
I try to be compassionate for people that have invested so much in how they look up to that point. To see that start to not serve them in the same way must be very terrifying.
At the same time—what did you think was gonna happen?
[00:08:36] Abbie Rosner, ELDEREVOLUTION: These are laws of nature. When you get into a good expanded state, with psilocybin mushrooms or whatever, you understand that this is the way of the world.
This is the natural order of things. Everything arises and blooms and passes. Embracing the impermanence of life instead of resisting it is a hallmark of elderhood—or healthy living in general.
[00:09:01] April Pride, host: As a person who is a child of people in the generation ahead of me, I had a journey this weekend.
I took two grams of psilocybin, and—
It’s hard to surrender to what you cannot change for the people who are older than you. That you would really like for them to be able to see their potential, to embrace their potential, to know that it’s not too late. And so to see someone like you who is like, with two arms, I’m here—I’m embracing it—is amazing.
And when I was reading the piece that you shared with me that will go live on Substack, and that I’ll link to in the show notes, it occurred to me that there is this opportunity that your generation has to almost create initiation rites with psychedelics for Western society perhaps.
So how do you see that—being able to shape how my generation uses psychedelics to move into my next phase of life?
I love that you mentioned the rites of passage because one of my original ideas for the book I was writing was to talk about these experiences as rites of passage into elderhood.
What I was realizing was that it wasn’t like one rite of passage that you do and all of a sudden, okay, now I’m an elder. It was an ongoing exploration—ongoing opportunities to explore elderhood—and you continue to evolve through your elderhood just like you evolve through the other stages of your life.
In terms of the gift you mentioned for my generation, it’s also a gift for the generations that follow. We can offer the younger generations a much more healthy, positive role model for what later life is.
I talk about how we’re the generation maligned for all the awful things that happened on our watch. But if we can offer the younger generations a more positive model for aging, that would be a beautiful gift.
I hope with my book that I can normalize for older adults the idea that you can explore these experiences—something very special to offer at this time of life.
One of the things that you and I connected on was meaning making, right? That is one of the things that can come through when you’re working with psychedelics. Can you talk a little bit more about what meaning making is?
[00:11:25] Abbie Rosner, ELDEREVOLUTION: I encountered this concept of meaning making when reading about the trials of psychedelic assisted therapy with people experiencing end of life distress. This experience of finding meaning is very helpful later in life.
[00:11:38] April Pride, host: When Abbie talks about meaning making, she’s touching on something we do see in research. Clinical trials with psilocybin for end of life distress show changes in how people relate to fear, identity, and mortality. The studies don’t claim psychedelics remove grief or fear.
They suggest something more subtle. People report being able to hold those experiences without being overwhelmed. That’s not transcendence. It’s capacity.
My personal hope is that as I age, I will have a greater capacity to hold emotions and experiences on which I reflect with curiosity and without judgment. That capacity really matters when you are trying to make sense of it all.
[00:12:32] Abbie Rosner, ELDEREVOLUTION: I wanted to deconstruct—what does that actually mean? What does it look like to find meaning later in life?
For my book, I interviewed about 36 older adults about their psychedelic experiences, and there were many expressions of meaning making.
It really helped people understand the narrative of their personal histories. They could understand: the person that hurt me so horribly when I was a child—actually, they didn’t know what they were doing; they were just living out their own trauma.
There was a lot of healing that came in their own personal stories. People later in life, after you finish your career and after your kids are grown—when you’d have these experiences—it opened a space for expressing their true inner voices.
Who really am I in this life?
They have an opportunity to explore those parts of themselves that have been subdued for decades. That offered a lot of meaning in terms of understanding themselves.
On a larger spiritual level, the meaning was not just of themselves as an individual, but as part of this cosmic enormity. You’re at once everything and nothing, embraced in love and awe.
Those experiences give an additional layer of meaning, especially later in life as we approach the big mystery of what happens when we die.
And I think that having that foretaste—what is it like to surrender your ego and submit to this larger experience—could be considered a trial run for dying. Both from the individual storytelling and the larger spiritual aspect, these experiences can offer us meaning later in life.
[00:14:20] April Pride, host: Of the 36 people that you interviewed, was there a universal part of their personality they were suppressing? Was it creativity or sexuality—or did it vary? I’m curious if there are themes that you pulled out.
Abbie Rosner, ELDEREVOLUTION: I love that question. Thank you so much for asking. One of the themes I did find—not that they were suppressing, but that was common in most of them—was that they self-defined as seekers.
These are people that have pretty much been asking questions their whole lives—asking the bigger questions. When you get to your fifties, sixties, and seventies, your life becomes simplified because the trajectory of whatever has been occupying you has shifted.
Then you have an opportunity to attend to these larger questions. For some people the question was, how do I wanna live my life?
There are people who carried horrendous levels of pain and trauma. One of the things that I heard over and over again was: if not now, when? Do I wanna live another day bearing this pain—if there’s something that maybe can help me to resolve it?
Another theme that came up was: how can I live more authentically, and what am I suppressing? Creativity, sexuality?
Am I gonna live my whole life because I had sexual trauma as a child—am I gonna live my whole life without experiencing joyful intimacy?
If I have an opportunity to expand my consciousness with this kind of work, and really take this on—the motivations, I think, are many. But I think it’s really a moment of truth that we come to later life, which is: how do I wanna live my remaining years?
Now I have the time, I have the resources, the curiosity, the courage, the maturity. So I think that’s really what’s happening.
And what I’d like to bring up, if it’s okay with you, is the topic we talked about—this historic moment with the crossing of paths between the aging boomer generation and the psychedelic renaissance.
So what I see is this: this boomer generation, or the generation that came of age in the sixties and seventies—we were exposed to drugs even if we did them or didn’t do them. They were there, they were everywhere in the zeitgeist.
We may have experienced them recklessly, for fun, or not at all. But as a culture, we weren’t ready to benefit from what these experiences can offer.
At the same time, psychedelics were being examined as medicines. They were being examined in popular culture. But there wasn’t really a maturity or an understanding of how to work with these very potent medicines.
The counterculture blew up. The war on drugs happened. The boomers went about their lives. We forgot all those medicines, and 50 years went by.
As we lived our lives, we had our experiences. In parallel, the psychedelic medical research track started to really develop.
What we’ve discovered now is that we have more understanding of how to use these medicines safely and meaningfully. We know from clinical trials there are protocols for preparation and integration, and for supportive settings.
We know they are being studied in relation to depression, end of life anxiety, PTSD. They’re now coming back into the mainstream, about to get FDA approval.
Strongly established underground, and with a real appreciation of these medicines in a cultural context—recognizing that these are medicines that have roots in Indigenous cultures and that they are sacred medicines—we’ve got this mature understanding of the medicines.
We’ve got the boomers coming into later life in a society that isn’t answering their spiritual needs, and so they’re coming together, creating this historic opportunity—which is what I see as really we’re on the cusp of having this beautiful encounter.
So that’s what I’m seeing right now, which I find very exciting. And the fact that your generation has such large numbers—exactly. There’s millions of us.
I don’t believe that this is ever gonna be a mass movement. I think it’s always gonna be a niche phenomenon because most people are fine with going on with their lives.
It’s the seekers—the people that are saying, wait, isn’t there something more? They’re the ones that are gonna be searching this out. But most people are comfortable with their status quo.
I totally agree with that. I think there comes a time when people in my generation—their parents pass away, their spouse might pass away—the things that have kept them making decisions that make other people feel comfortable fall away.
It isn’t until later in life that they feel like they can finally start becoming a seeker and ask questions.
If this dialogue weren’t happening, they wouldn’t know where to go—or even know that they could find themselves.
I do think there is this gift of: it’s never too late. And you can do it above board, right? And that makes a lot of people feel better and safer.
I think that there is probably, for the generations behind boomers, more opportunity for them to find themselves because of this opening.
The boomers were trailblazers in youth, coming up with this revolutionary new youth culture. And I think there are trailblazers now in forging this new elderhood. Yeah—and may the generations behind us have an easier path because of it.
Totally. One of the questions that I actually—when I was on my walk this morning—I was explaining that your generation has less resistance to psychedelics. And that is, I think, because there was progress on the academic side and on the clinical research side up until Nixon declared the war on drugs.
In fact, Bill W of Alcoholics Anonymous famously did over a hundred trips of acid. That’s right. And then that’s actually why he’s found sobriety, is what is the thinking. Then it was taken away.
And it’s just like today—my sons are teenagers. You can’t fool them. They see it all happening. And you all saw that too with the Vietnam War.
And all of a sudden drugs are bad. They’re studying them at Harvard with incredible results. There is a thinking portion of your generation that is: wait a second—why was that taken away?
Yes, there was medical research that was happening between—let’s say he declared war on drugs like 1969 maybe. Yeah, 71.
In the mid eighties they started researching again, but it wasn’t very easy to get a DEA exemption. I think it’s probably people in your generation that fought to research it again because they were like, wait—we were just getting started here.
I’m thinking of Charles Grob—he picked up the mantle and said we have to continue the work we were doing.
What makes our generation more receptive—I don’t know if it’s really the case because it’s hard to talk about the boomer generation as a monolith. There’s billions and there’s obviously all kinds of variations.
I think the war on drugs really did a job on us. I think that image of the fried egg—your brain on drugs—was really hard to shake.
I feel like the biggest resistance we’re able to overcome now is the fear of the bad trip. Older adults, every time I talk to somebody my generation, and they’ll say, oh, what are you writing? I go, oh, I’m writing a book about psychedelics and aging.
Either they’ll blanch—like, just go, whoa, drugs—or else they’ll go, oh my God, tell me more.
This concern over the bad trip—I think the fact that we can point to the understanding that with proper set and setting, with following protocols informed by clinical trials, and with harm reduction, including preparation and integration, people can approach this with more safety and support.
April Pride, host: I’d like to pause here because this is where harm reduction language really matters. Research suggests that challenging psychedelic experiences are not rare. In fact, the number is somewhere between one and five.
Psychedelic experiences can be challenging, taking a year or more to unwind from, make sense of, and integrate. And the data shows that women are more likely to have a challenging experience—we believe this is a result of our hormones.
Older adults may experience fewer long-term difficulties not because psychedelics are “safer with age,” but because they often approach the experience with safety in mind—preparation, intention, support, and integration tend to be stronger.
That doesn’t erase risk. It contextualizes it, and it reminds us that healing isn’t about avoiding difficulty. It’s about having enough support to move through it. We could really learn something from our elders on this one.
One in five people have a challenging experience.
[00:23:41] Abbie Rosner, ELDEREVOLUTION: Now, challenging experience doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a bad trip. I’m not saying that people don’t have challenging experiences.
What I’m saying is that the outcome—that you’re gonna have serious psychological problems afterwards—is gonna be an issue.
I’ve read one study and there seems to be some signs that older adults are less susceptible to having extended problems because we’re more intentional.
If you work at creating a safe setting, prepare yourself, and work with a facilitator—you do everything that you need to do to have a safe experience.
Yes. Obviously if somebody has a latent psychotic episode, that can trigger it for sure. But in general, people can do their own risk-benefit assessment. I think that the risk, if you follow the guidelines and protocols, is manageable.
[00:24:33] April Pride, host: I agree with you in that people equate a bad trip with their brain never coming back. Exactly. And it’s true—underlying psychotic ailment, or an undiagnosed psychotic disorder—that you could potentially not come back from that.
But I think once you get into later life, you would know if that exists.
[00:24:59] Abbie Rosner, ELDEREVOLUTION: The thing about older adults is that they can make their own decisions. They can do the research, they can learn everything that they wanna learn, and then they can decide if this is a risk that they wanna take or not.
So I think it’s an entirely different story for teenagers or young people. But here we’re talking about people that are looking at the next decade or two or three of their lives.
If they want to do something that entails some risk but could potentially give a lot of benefits, then at least they should be able to have the information so they can make an informed decision.
[00:25:34] April Pride, host: That is such an important distinction. I’ve never heard anybody bring up managing your money. The younger you are, the more risks you can take. But there’s an inverse correlation in this case—the older you are, you’re like, why wouldn’t I take a risk on this?
[00:25:47] Abbie Rosner, ELDEREVOLUTION: Absolutely. In the medical space, they’re really understanding that psilocybin, particularly in a controlled setting, has a high safety profile—so yes.
[00:26:01] April Pride, host: What are some of the ways that you’ve seen people prepare for engaging with psychedelic substances? Which medicines are you seeing people gravitate toward for psychedelic integration later in life?
[00:26:13] Abbie Rosner, ELDEREVOLUTION: The surveys of overall psychedelic use in the American population show that psilocybin is the most popular one. And I’d say that’s the case for older adults. It’s the easiest on the body, the mind.
For older adults, MDMA comes in second. MDMA is more problematic because of the cardiovascular issues that can be raised with it. So that’s, I think, also popular—but for older adults that have heart issues, they really need to do their due diligence and speak to their healthcare providers.
What was the second part of the question? It was: how are people preparing?
So there’s a whole gamut of ways that people are preparing—growing their own mushrooms and doing it themselves, to working with underground facilitators, to working with therapists and facilitators.
A lot of people are working with professionals who— that’s their skillset—helping people prepare and work with psychedelic medicines.
Now, I would say that, in my opinion, the options Colorado and Oregon offer for state-regulated, legal, facilitated psilocybin experiences—I think for many older adults are an ideal option.
A lot of older adults—they don’t know how to navigate the underground. They don’t want to navigate the underground. They don’t wanna do something illegal. A lot of people say, I don’t wanna break the law.
So they can go to Oregon or Colorado and have a facilitated experience with psilocybin in a completely legal context.
State legal framework is gonna be enough to allow that. I think those are really good options.
Some people, if they have the means, go to Jamaica, to a retreat center. At the retreat center they’ll prepare them for the experience—definitely in a structured setting—where a lot of the people I interviewed prepared for their experiences.
[00:28:09] April Pride, host: I would imagine that’s one of the reasons why older adults are not having the numbers of challenging experiences, right? Because they are choosing to be supported.
[00:28:20] Abbie Rosner, ELDEREVOLUTION: It’s a function of maturity. We were reckless in our youth, and now we’re more intentional—a skill that we developed after a lot of hard knocks.
[00:28:29] April Pride, host: Yes. I see that in my own choices—you become more careful about what you do. There’s more self love there.
[00:28:38] Abbie Rosner, ELDEREVOLUTION: Exactly. You’ve seen so many things come wrong. You do know it can happen to you. I think that desire that people have to go deeper and to really experience something larger in life happens in older age.
I think that’s why a lot of these people are willing to assume some element of risk so they can experience something that’s really meaningful.
[00:29:06] April Pride, host: One of the topics that I think is driving people to psychedelics is grief. And grief applies to so many things—how sometimes we deny our grief for decades.
So I’m imagining that older adults confront grief when they’re under the influence. How are you seeing people navigate that? What’s the integration like after they finally allow themselves to acknowledge that there was something painful that happened in their life?
[00:29:41] Abbie Rosner, ELDEREVOLUTION: I’ve heard that in a number of people that I interviewed—this encounter with grief.
There was a man in his seventies, and he said one of his purposes for one of his journeys was he wanted to experience grief because he said, I’ve had so much loss in my life. I’ve never been able to cry, never been able to experience grief.
He wanted that to happen, and it didn’t happen. I asked him, did you cry? He said, no. But then afterwards he wrote to me and said, in fact I did cry—but it was tears of joy.
Some of the other people that I interviewed talked about weeping for hours—just opening the floodgates of grief to weep and cry and mourn.
One gentleman told me about how he called it encountering Our Lady of Sorrows. He was a man who grew up Catholic. He said, I spent my journey with Our Lady of Sorrows. I just made room for her. That was his beautiful experience.
When you have these experiences, they’re very cathartic.
[00:30:43] April Pride, host: Grief shows up again and again when we talk about psychedelics and grief, especially later in life. For women, grief has been deferred, contained, postponed in service of everyone else. Sometimes that’s the case—maybe most of the time that’s the case.
What I appreciate here is the permission Abbie gives grief to move without needing a storyline.
From a nervous system perspective, grief isn’t pathology—it’s discharge. And when grief finally has space, joy often isn’t far behind. At least I’m counting on that. Not because we earned it, but because the system can finally breathe.
[00:31:23] Abbie Rosner, ELDEREVOLUTION: I can just say from my own experience, one of my journeys I grieved the whole time. I just sobbed and cried. As I got up from my crying, I started to dance, and I had this realization.
It was one of these profound realizations that grief and joy are in the same—I’m holding grief and joy together in my hands. That there are two sides of the same coin. You don’t have one without the other.
It was such a beautiful realization and stays with me to this moment.
This is the world that we live as humans—there’s grief and there’s joy. You can’t have one without the other.
When you quit resisting grief and make place for it, then you are really living life fully. And I think that’s really one of the opportunities that elders can appreciate.
[00:32:10] April Pride, host: The amount that you will allow grief to hold its place in your heart, that same capacity is how much you have to allow joy to take its place.
[00:32:19] Abbie Rosner, ELDEREVOLUTION: I think that’s the beauty of what these medicines offer—particularly psilocybin. It really allows the feelings, the insights, these fundamental truths to be expressed—
[00:32:35] April Pride, host: Whether or not you’re happy with them.
[00:32:37] Abbie Rosner, ELDEREVOLUTION: We don’t need to be happy all the time. When you’re an elder, you understand that there are losses and everything changes. You lose things—your youth, your loved ones, your job.
But at the same time, there’s things you gain. It’s just a balancing act.
[00:32:53] April Pride, host: What is something that you’ve gained that has surprised you with your relationship with psychedelics and your elderhood?
[00:33:02] Abbie Rosner, ELDEREVOLUTION: I thank you for that question. I found my tribe.
[00:33:07] April Pride, host: Community becomes non-optional as we age for women, especially after decades of caregiving, emotional labor, and coordination. There’s often a quiet question underneath all of this—who holds me?
Now what I hear Abbie naming is not psychedelic community as an identity, but as infrastructure: mutual care, shared meaning, people who know your story and they don’t judge you for it.
[00:33:31] Abbie Rosner, ELDEREVOLUTION: I feel like I have really found the people who are open-hearted, who are willing to connect in really meaningful ways. And that’s just been a joy.
I think that what that touches on is a point very important for me as I look at the whole picture of psychedelics later in life—the aspect of community.
These experiences done in community—which is the way they’ve traditionally been done throughout history—can build very meaningful connections between individuals.
As we go into later life, community becomes more and more important—not only psychologically, but also logistically.
We’re looking at issues of caregiving for older adults. The institutions that people have relied on forever aren’t necessarily gonna be around for us.
And I feel like we’re going to need to create communities of mutual care that are gonna take care of each other as we get older—take care of ourselves logistically, emotionally, socially.
And so I feel like there’s a real opportunity here. It’s one of the things that I’m gonna be exploring—how to create communities of older adults who study, meditate, journey, do community service together, and care for each other through later life.
[00:34:51] April Pride, host: Is that showing up in your life?
[00:34:53] Abbie Rosner, ELDEREVOLUTION: That’s a vision that I have. It’s something that I wanna create. Once the book is out, I wanna really start to create this idea of a model of these communities that’s replicable.
[00:35:03] April Pride, host: Before we conclude, this book that you’ve mentioned—what’s the name of it? When’s it coming out? What are some of the highlights that people can expect?
[00:35:12] Abbie Rosner, ELDEREVOLUTION: Book is called Psychedelics in the Counterculture of Aging, and it’ll be available in bookstores in July.
There are two parts to the book. The first part I explain to boomers what’s happened in the field of psychedelics for the last 50 years.
I talk about the developments in the research and the guidelines for harm reduction, including preparation and integration, and avenues of access.
The second part of the book is more of an exploration of what these experiences offer us in older age.
I illustrate accounts from people I interviewed. I divide the chapters into healing our psyches, connecting to our authentic selves, experiencing love and forgiveness, connecting to spirit, connecting to our ancestors, experiencing intimacy and pleasure, and practicing letting go.
The last chapter concludes with this vision of psychedelics for creating community. The stories—the people’s accounts—are the beating heart of the book.
They’re real, authentic, candid, vulnerable. Anybody who reads this book will come away with a grounded and nuanced understanding of what these experiences offer later in life.
[00:36:23] April Pride, host: How did you find your subjects?
[00:36:25] Abbie Rosner, ELDEREVOLUTION: It wasn’t hard. I’ve been writing about psychedelics in older adults for a couple years in different magazines.
People would reach out to me and I kept their names, so I just said, would you be willing to be interviewed for my book? They said yes.
I also joined a community of underground facilitators in this area—it’s a professional network—and I told them about the book and they referred clients to me.
[00:36:56] April Pride, host: Thank you for sharing that. I will make sure that your Substack is linked in the show notes.
Before we close, I wanna name a few grounding truths. Preparation matters. Support matters. Integration matters more than the experience itself.
Psychedelics are not shortcuts. They don’t replace therapy. Community—or time and intensity—especially later in life, is not a requirement for insight.
Sometimes what changes us most is not what happens in the experience, but how we live afterward.
This conversation stays with me because it doesn’t rush toward answers. It respects aging as a real psychological and physiological transition—not something to fix or outrun.
If this episode stirred something in you, I invite reflection, not necessarily action.
What does elderhood mean in your body? What feels unfinished? What no longer needs to be carried alone?
