What if birth is the oldest psychedelic experience there is?

My guest this week, Karissa Bollinger, is a birth educator, a guide for altered states, and the creator of Wave Work. She’s spent years preparing women for both psychedelic journeys and birth, and she kept noticing it was the same work.

We talk about why birth can be a “good trip” or a “bad trip,” and how that might shape postpartum more than we realize. We also get into why the word “contraction” may be setting women up to brace against pain. And we cover what psychedelic research has taught us about preparation and integration, and why it applies far beyond the medicine itself.

We end on a question science hasn’t answered yet: what is actually happening chemically in the altered state of birth?

Find Karissa at @wavework.birthing, try her free portal practice or get her whole birth rehearsal method at wavework.

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Do psychedelics distort reality, or do they loosen the filters that normally shape what we perceive? In this episode, we explore the neuroscience of consciousness, predictive processing, psychedelic perception, DMT entity experiences, mystical and traditional altered states, and the limits of ordinary waking awareness. We also follow the stranger historical side of consciousness research, including MKULTRA, remote viewing, the Gateway Process, and declassified U.S. government experiments. Along the way, we separate established neuroscience from theory and speculation to ask a much bigger question: how much of reality are our brains actually capable of seeing?

The full episode transcript, study citations and companion guide is available on Substack.

Support the show

For more from me beyond the podcast, come hang out on Between Mind & Body on Substack, where I share full podcast transcripts and deeper companion content, essays, physician-created guides, emerging research, and the questions medicine has not quite answered yet.

Substack: Between Mind & Body
Instagram: @drmaryella
LinkedIn: Mary Ella Wood, DO, ABOIM

If you enjoyed this episode, subscribing, sharing it with a friend, or leaving a review helps more than you know.

Send us Fan Mail

What happens between the moment women notice something and the moment medicine decides it is real?

In June 2026, women all over the internet started asking the same question: what happened to our periods?

That strange collective conversation sent me down a much bigger rabbit hole into menstrual cycles, the moon, women’s intuition, midwives and witches, unexplained infertility, and the long history of women noticing things before science had an answer for them.

In this episode, we explore:

• The menstrual mystery of June 2026 and what heat, light, seasonality, and even solar activity might (or might not) have had to do with it
• How observation becomes scientific evidence
• Why women’s bodies are rhythmic, even though medicine often studies them as static
• Whether women’s periods really sync
• Menstrual cycles and the moon
• How menstruation went from sacred and powerful to impure, pathological, and something women were expected to hide
• Midwives, women healers, herbal medicine, ergot, LSD, and the ancient roots hiding inside modern medicine
• What science can tell us about women’s intuition, interoception, pregnancy, and maternal knowing (and what it still can’t)
• How the witch became a symbol of dangerous female knowledge, and why she still matters
• Unexplained infertility and the important difference between there is no explanation and we haven’t found the explanation yet

The full episode transcript, citations and companion guide is available on Substack.

Support the show

For more from me beyond the podcast, come hang out on Between Mind & Body on Substack, where I share full podcast transcripts and deeper companion content, essays, physician-created guides, emerging research, and the questions medicine has not quite answered yet.

Substack: Between Mind & Body
Instagram: @drmaryella
LinkedIn: Mary Ella Wood, DO, ABOIM

If you enjoyed this episode, subscribing, sharing it with a friend, or leaving a review helps more than you know.