Veteran Healing From PTSD with Psilocybin and Stellate Ganglion Blocks || Lauren Feringa

Meet Lauren ‘Lolo’ Feringa

Lauren “Lolo” Feringa is a Veteran how has been able to heal from PTSD with the use of stellate ganglion blockers (SGBs) and micro dosing with magic mushrooms. Lolo is now educating the use of these medicines to treat veterans all over the nation through her nonprofit Hippie and a Veteran Foundation.

Once you know and remember what ‘right’ feels like,
you can work with other modalities – like psychedelics.
When you work that in,
you can literally start healing yourself,
healing your brain,
healing your body.

-Lolo

Watch: Combatting PTSD: A Veteran’s Journey with Psilocybin Therapy

Watch The Full Interview

What are Stellate Ganglion Blocks (SGBs)?

My name is Lauren Lolo Faringa. I am the director of Hippie and a veteran foundation, a 501 C3 that guides veterans towards alternative PTSD therapies. Some of the alternative therapies that we push people towards, or at least introduce them to, are psychedelics like psilocybin and stellate ganglion blocks.

So a stellate ganglion block is a little injection that goes into a gland on the side of your neck and they just shoot rapivocaine, which is just like another lidocaine. So it’s nontoxic. Iit blocks your nervous system off, basically shuts your fight or flight response off for 24 hours. And it gives your body the ability, or it helps your body to take a break so that you can kind of start catching up, making sense of what’s going on in your body. It separates the body issues and the autonomic nervous system problems that’s firing on, and it just shuts it off. And the next day you wake up, it comes back on, but it’s not on high. And once you know and remember what right feels like, you can work with other modalities like psychedelics. And you work that in and you’re able to start literally healing your body, healing your brain, healing your body. I had injuries, pain, chronic pain, all over my body. I’ve gotten most of it tempered down now.

How do you combine stellate ganglion blocks and psychedelics?

I have a protocol that I recommend. So there’s providers that do these specifically for PTSD and they do them with the proper technique. You get a right and a left side. Some people respond to one side better, and I don’t think it’s worth not trying both sides when we’re talking about people that are suicidal, which are the people I work with. Let’s hit everything, knock the whole nervous system out. You can’t do them within 24 hours of each other or else you’ll close off your throat.

But then you can incorporate microdosing like I do like three months of psilocybin daily micro dosing schedule between 10 and 60 milligrams based on the person’s medications and body and nervous system. We incorporate other things like skull cap teas that really help bring down the nervous system, and cannabis for night terrors.

Are there contraindications with Stellate Ganglion Blocks?

So SGBs are a chronic pain shot, so they help with blood flow throughout the body, optical nerves, all your nerves, all over your body. They can help with circulation, which is why they help with conditions like Raynaud’s. So if you have possible blood clots or something, I think that would be something that you’d want to talk with your doctor about. But other than that, it’s just an anesthetic, a local anesthetic.

How can the medical model and the psychedelic model come together?

I love the juxtaposition of our foundation’s name. It’s like hippie and a veteran. It’s the juxtaposition of these different things coexisting in the same space. I love intersectionality, and that is what we can do with these medicines.

We can pair SGBs with patients with PTSD,, a first world medicine through a regular physician, providing these along with psychedelics as a therapy with community practitioners, and personal at home microdosing. They do pair very, very well and it really sets a patient up and opens them up for therapy, whereas so many of us become just unresponsive to therapy because these walls are up.

There’s a physical problem happening within our bodies and these medications and these therapies can put it down. But with that, we have to understand that. We also have to respect where these medicines are coming from and respect what they’re doing and respect the connection to everything around us that they’re doing for us. And that’s a part of the healing.

Nature is healing and we need to marry those with first world medicine. The separation is what’s causing a problem within our medical system right now.

How is Hippie And a Veteran Foundation helping Veterans heal?

So a major part of what we do is just putting information out there andletting veterans know that they can actually do these things, like giving people permission, letting them see that the stuff actually works. We have a template that we give out to veterans so that they can request through a community care provider, through the VA. So we’re able right now to get that part partially covered in some circumstances, but even that is a struggle. But we’re going to make it work. It’s going to happen one of these days.

But the same way that we can do that, we can do the exact same thing with community practitioners that are already here, already saving lives and already providing therapy to our community within the psychedelic world. And I just think maybe the VA doesn’t understand the power within the people that we have to help heal each other.

How are you using politics to bring awareness to Veteran care?

So I’m putting in a congressional to make a case here in the state of Washington of the treatment, first of all, that veterans are receiving. And with that, I’m also hoping to get the ear of Patty Murray to speak with her about the pairing of psychedelics and SGBs. Washington state has mushrooms. They’re all about to grow right now. They’re all about to grow everywhere because it just had the first rain. We’re about to have medicine all over the state and it happens every single year. Nature provides and we need to let people know.

I know that there’s this demystification that we must do, and I’m hoping that this case that I’m putting in, or request that I’m putting in for a review of the VA here can help open up that conversation about the necessity and urgency. But we are also hoping to apply for direct grants through the VA. There is a Fox grant that I really hope and pray they’ll accept our application for. They are giving out money to organizations that are helping veterans in different holistic areas. I don’t see why they wouldn’t give one of their largest nonprofits with a giant following some money to help heal some of our little hippie veterans out there.

So that’s my big goal for the year. I’m also writing a bill with a bunch of other amazing people. And we are going to decriminalize plant medicine in the state of Washington.

If plant medicine was decriminalized in Washington State, how would this help Veterans?

Oh, well, this is the thing. There’s legalization bills. I actually tried to work on some of them. I was thrown out for requesting respect for veterans and people of color in legalization psychedelic bills in the state.

It’s not cool on that side. It’s not kosher. And they’re thinking their model is. Legalization bills are profit bills. They’re profit structures which we need for the VA. I absolutely get that 100%. But if a patient can’t take micro dosing home, what’s the point? If the patient is criminalized for holding the same medicine that they’re being prescribed by a VA physician, that’s control. That’s not healing. That’s not how this works.

I work with people in distress. I’ve worked with organizations, and I work with suicide prevention and support suicide prevention in the state of Washington.

Why is decriminalization important?

Decriminalization is for the patient and legalization is for the practitioners, the clinical practitioners that are working within the medical system we currently have. You’re asking us to take our medicine and give our medicine that our ancestors have been using. All of us.

We all have entheogens from different continents that we were all on. This is our medicine. And you’re asking us to. You’ve been criminalizing us. You’ve been throwing us in jail, my grandfather included, way back when, before the war on drugs even began. We’re doing all this stuff and then you’re going to take our medicine and colonize it within only a legalization system. And that’s just not right. Nature grows out of the ground. You don’t have criminalized tomatoes out here. That’s silly. And most tomatoes don’t just grow naturally everywhere. Mushrooms actually do.

The Earth is popping up medicine to help us in the time that we need it so bad. That is why decriminalization is important, because also, legalization bills will not happen for years and years and years after implementation. We have people right now that are dying again. I’m going to bring sad things in here, but I had two friends from high school that died this last summer, and I know that they both suffered from addiction and chronic pain. And I know my last friend that just died and was laid to rest this week, died from an overdose. He had been reaching out to me, talking to me about plant medicine, and I couldn’t do anything about it because I would have been criminalized. But now I have dead friends and that’s everywhere. That’s happening to all of us. It’s not just in the veteran community.

That’s why decriminalization is so important. We have to be able to just help our people. We’re grown ups. We know how to do this.

How is Hippie and a Veteran building bridges with the medical community?

I mean, I talk with therapists that are working within the VA doing research as well. They are doing research up and down in other places. There are people trying to do this. There are good people within the medical community that also have so much respect for where these medicines are coming from. And for the practitioners that have kept these alive in our cultures for generations and thousands of years, and they have extraordinary respect for the indigenous people here. And I think that’s a very big, important place to start, just because plant medicine isn’t about gimme, gimme, gimme. It’s a community thing. It’s not an ownership thing.

How important is integration with psychedelics and SGBs?

The first time I ever did mushrooms, like I said, then I went to basic training. That wasn’t really the best integration space to have done something like that. Or taking mushrooms and going out recreationally. Yes, you will get the physical great, amazing effects that you get. You’re going to get a boost in your serotonin. You’re going to have your nervous system calm down for a while and you’re going to have some better sleep. But if you’re not taking that time to deal with the introspection, you’re not doing the right work. When you’re taking the medicine, you’re wanting to straighten out the synapses in your brain. And the integrating, working with therapy, writing. We have people that do photography as their therapy afterwards. And those are all we’re not telling therapy and therapists that we don’t want that stuff around. We need them. That’s extraordinarily important. So the integration portion is just as important as just taking the medicine as well.

How did you first come across Stellate Ganglion Blocks?

So I was scared to go in after I had my son. I didn’t want to go in there. I was afraid that they would take my kid away from me in therapy. They had previously told me that they were going to report my mom for spanking me. So I had stopped going to therapy. I don’t know, telling me, I’m a BIPOC woman, telling me that you’re going to report my mother just seemed like just an absolute act of violence. So I didn’t want to go. I was terrified. I already have trauma with being ripped away from parents. And hen my husband was like, stop, let’s just microdose. So he brought me ground mushrooms and I started microdosing on Sundays just because I was scared to even put anything in my body at that point.

The paranoia. I couldn’t even I couldn’t even leave the house. I was having horrible agoraphobia. It was just so bad. I was so suicidal. But I couldn’t do it because I had this beautiful kid. And I’m like, I don’t want anyone else to mother my kid. Like, screw that. Everything my family’s gone through, heck no. I’m going to be here for this kid. So I started the micro dosing. It was really helpful and I was only doing it once a week. I think that if I had started doing it every day, I would have felt safer. But I was breastfeeding and I was really scared at that time. Then I saw a 60 Minutes interview about SGBs and right away I was like, they can turn your fight or flight response off. What? Why haven’t they done this? That’s the problem. That’s what PTSD is. It is your fight or flight response triggering your brain and causing flashbacks in your brain and in your body. So why aren’t they doing this for us? Luckily, I was in Long Beach at the time because I wanted to give birth to my son, where my family is from. So because I happened to be there, I happened to be in that VA, just randomly in this one year in my life, they happened to be doing SGB research out of the Long Beach VA. Then I walked in, I begged for it, and they told me no.

So I called every number I could find. But after two weeks, I finally found the research department and I asked them if they could help me, and they said, Absolutely. Then they got me in to talk and they were like, yeah, we’re going to get this for you. We’re going to call you with the next available date. And they gave me July 16, which was a decade anniversary of the first loss that I had in Iraq.

So, ten years out, I finally got relief and it felt like I could see better. My pain went away. The doctors had to hold me down on the table because I was like, what just happened? The lights got lighter. It felt like everything just fell off. All the weight. It felt like I had been carrying so much and it was just gone in an instant. And then after that, I continued microdosing and I continued getting SGBs and had to pay out of pocket. And the VA wasn’t going to help because I had to move. I moved back home to be with my mom. I needed to heal. My body had been so wrecked by them allowing my body to get like that. And I say that the VA allowed my body to get like that because we know that women experience extraordinary levels of PTSD symptoms if you have PTSD, post, postpartum, and they just let that happen to me. S I went home and I healed, started our foundation. And that’s where I am today.

What would you say to a veteran who is in a dark place right now?

20 milligrams of ground psilocybin mushrooms can help you sleep tonight. Just do it. Don’t wait, don’t wait, don’t wait. Do it today. And if you have friends, tell them. And if you don’t know how and you’re scared, go to my website. We have all the information out there. We have other people’s books, we have articles that helped me get back on track, that helped me feel safe about taking psilocybin as a breastfeeding mother. Honestly, I would never take anything else, ever. The other options aren’t safe enough for my child.

The military and the VA has known what psychedelics could do for us since the 60s and they’ve been letting us suffer all this time. And now that we have all this research that MAPS has done, all the anecdotal evidence, we have all of these healed people, why aren’t we getting it? And since we’re not getting it, I’m going back to work for the government to show them what healing with SGBs and psychedelics can do.

Where can people find out more about Hippie and a Veteran?

Our website is www.hippieandaveteran.com, and then we’re on Facebook, Instagram, and I’m also over on TikTok. And then I think on Twitter, I’m hippie and a vet, but I don’t do Twitter. I’m too old for that. You guys can send messages through social media and you can send me messages through my website