Everything we teach now goes into art form, and this is the herb's lesson. Let us be honest about it first: for the new, or for anyone carrying stress in their life, cannabis is intense — like a second, violent birthing into the world. That intensity is not a flaw in the medicine. It is the medicine arriving. The whole teaching is what you do with it: you tame the intensity with minerals, and you ride it with music, food, culture and ground.
And say this plainly at the door: nobody here teaches getting lazy stoned. This is about enhancing your actual performance — the way athletes use it — and about deepening your appreciation of food, music, nature, beauty and each other.
My healing practice is minerals first, because minerals are the building blocks of cellular function. You cannot actually think straight, and you cannot get the benefits from cannabis, if you are deficient in minerals. Spiritual medicine does not replace mineral and vitamin nutrition — it stands on it.
Two minerals carry the onset itself: potassium and magnesium literally calm your nerves and your muscles, and both are rich in the tropical foods and fruits the herb grew up with. The electrolytes — potassium, magnesium, sodium, calcium — carry hydration, charge and nerve signal through everything the plant is about to ask of your body.
This is read properly with HTMA — hair tissue mineral analysis — which shows the last few months of your mineral story: the big four (calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium) and the ratios practitioners watch between them: calcium/magnesium (~6.7, the blood-sugar ratio), sodium/potassium (~2.5, the vitality and stress ratio), calcium/potassium (4, the thyroid ratio), and zinc/copper (8) — because minerals work in teams, and balance matters more than megadoses.
Short lessons, because the teaching should be easy to digest. The backbone of proper use is five honest questions:
Are you grounded in your life, and right with your relations? The herb amplifies the room it is taken in — a safe place and trusted people are not decoration, they are the container.
Do you carry PTSD, avoided traumas, old concerns? Cannabis makes you feel intensely at first, before you ease into relaxation. What has been avoided may surface in that first intensity — better to know it is welcome than to be ambushed by it.
Hydrated, with proper electrolytes, and well fed — with the RIGHT foods within reach. The herb can induce fasting and autophagy, and it can give you a huge appetite or make you forget to eat entirely. Both functions are useful — if the food beside you is real food.
The science of the appetite: cannabis switches on the endocannabinoid system — hunger hormones rise, smell and taste sharpen, and food becomes vivid. That is a gift only if what is on the table deserves it.
The right music, the right vibes, the right atmosphere. This is not background — for proper use it is structural. Read the music section below; the dub is load-bearing.
Are you creative? You must get through and over the "psychoactive" effects to remain productive with the actual body effects. Make, move, cook, play, build — the herb rewards a body with somewhere to go.
The intensity is also the thing you RIDE. In dub, the uptick — the offbeat skank — is the simple, measurable wall beam holding the building together. The sparsity captures your stray thoughts and pushes them back through the backbone, time and time again. That steady uptick becomes the stride. Right and left and — that's four. The uptick literally picks up your feet.
On one end, the music captures your intensity and soothes your world. The melody distracts you; the bass and the uptick keep you whole. What comes out the other side is a fuller version of yourself. A full kundalini tuning:
Music is all motion.
Cannabis helps align your body with what is good for it by activating the endocannabinoid system — the body's own balancing network, the system that also makes its own cannabis-like molecules to keep appetite, mood, pain and sleep in homeostasis. Dr Dustin Sulak — the therapeutic cannabis doctor among our colleagues — teaches much of what I know here, and his first lesson surprises people: less is more. Small doses act as a tonic that helps the body make more of its own endocannabinoids and receptors; his sensitization protocol even begins with 48 hours of abstinence before restarting at the lowest effective dose.
Overall, cannabis cannot hurt you — it slows you down and helps you appreciate life. If it disorients you, look first at the container: not in the right environment, not fully trusting the friends or family around you, not the right music to uplift, no consistent rhythm to activate the kundalini and qi gong spinal energy. The traps are mental — laziness above all — and they belong to the setting, not the plant.
Here is the beautiful proof that this system is built for motion: the "runner's high" is endocannabinoid. At a good working intensity the body raises its own anandamide — the bliss molecule, named for the Sanskrit word for bliss — and in a controlled trial, blocking opioids did not remove running euphoria while endocannabinoids rose. Ultrarunner Jenn Shelton put the athlete's case plainly: "The person who is going to win an ultra is someone who can manage their pain, not puke, and stay calm. Pot does all three." Athletes report it for recovery, enjoyment and motivation — that is the honest shape of it: this is pain, calm, focus and appreciation work, done in the right container.
And hold this straight, because the lazy-stoner story gets it backwards: you cannot take cannabis and expect to be ONLY relaxed — it fires you up either way. The old world kept the herb's warrior lineage inside our very language: the word assassin descends from the Hashishin — the hashish-takers of the old Persian mountains. The legend told of them for a thousand years is of people who took the herb and entered a state beyond fear: athletic, intense, capable of violent bursts of energy and impossible focus — the ninjas of history. Historians argue over how much of that legend is literal; the word itself is not in dispute. That is the fire folded inside the calm: the same plant that soothes your nerves can put lightning in your legs, and which of the two you meet depends on the container you build for it.
Our teaching method, for the herb and everything else: find whatever you love — and then research the possible new scientific backing for why it is good.
I will do cannabis, coffee and tobacco all in the same morning, because they complement one another. Cannabis lifts. Coffee — black — creates a leaning-toward-ketosis environment: in a small controlled study, caffeine at breakfast roughly doubled ketone production for a few hours, and caffeine measurably raises resting metabolic rate for a few hours after a cup — on the order of 80–150 extra calories a day of background burning. There is a spring in your step that equates to real calorie burning happening in the background all day. (The honest footnote: tolerance blunts the effect within days, and it is carb restriction, not coffee, that truly makes ketosis — the cup is a nudge, not the engine.)
And the black coffee will make you feel intense as all heck. It tightens your blood pressure — which is exactly what you need when you use cannabis, because cannabis does the opposite. That is the counterbalance at the heart of the trio: you want cannabis soothing your NERVES, and coffee giving you actual keto energy fuel. The lift and the ground, pulling against each other, and you walking upright between them.
Understand this about the intensity, too: the more intense you feel internally, that IS the workout — that is autophagy, the body burning and clearing under its own fire. And be precise about the training: the workout is not the building — the workout is the signal. The muscle building is the repair. You work out before the big meal, you eat all the protein after the meal, and in the repair the microtears fill in — that filling-in is where the bulking actually happens. Cannabis, coffee, work, food — in that order, the day builds itself.
And when cannabis sends you flying into a lazy spell, organic tobacco, taken respectfully, brings you back to earth — it reminds you of all the work you want to get done, and gives you the legs to actually do the work. Respect matters in the plant itself: whole-leaf tobacco is just the cured leaf, while a commercial cigarette is reconstituted tobacco with hundreds of possible additives — ammonia compounds are added to speed nicotine absorption — and it is the smoke of thousands of chemicals, not the leaf alone, that does the deep damage. This is why nicotine itself is now being studied in the longevity and biohacking world: a 2023 mouse study found low-dose nicotine restored an NAD+ pathway and protected the aging brain — in mice, which is a beginning of a question, not an answer.
Honest ground: nicotine is addictive in every form, traditional ceremonial tobacco (mapacho) is several times STRONGER in nicotine than ordinary leaf — not weaker — and ceremony uses it in small amounts for exactly that reason. Respect the plant means knowing its strength.
The culture and tradition of the herb is not decoration — it is the historical context for how your body feels. In Rastafari tradition the herb is sacrament, taken in reasoning and worship; the food beside it is ital — vital, natural, unprocessed. That is why mangoes, tropical fruits, coconut and pineapple go so well with cannabis: the culture and heritage of surviving the hot tropical sun and stressful jungle environments gave the herb its character, with the whole irie and half-time dub culture around it. The mango pairing is beloved tradition — the measured myrcene in a mango is small, so hold it as what it is: ritual, flavour and heritage that set the body right, which is itself half the medicine.
Dreadlocks are the same teaching worn on the head: not caring how your hair looks or what grows there, because you are too busy enjoying the waves and the sky to notice it or cut it. And all of it plays together — yogic, tantric, kundalini practice; sensual activation; a good massage, a good story, a good grounding place and retreat, all together — to keep your eigenvector sustained through the onset of changes as your body adjusts to the medicine at first.
This is where the beauty of a woman sparkling at the beach comes in: cannabis turns on your appreciation for sensuality — for food, for music, for nature, for beauty itself. That appreciation is not a side effect. It is the effect.
None of this was invented here. I learned directly with the mineral-balancing teachers — Dr Rick Malter, Dr Robert Selig and Rachel Neumann — I hold Rick Fischer's Mineral Mastery certification, and Dr Dustin Sulak taught me much of the cannabis side. They stand among our colleagues on the Connections page — that is where their info lives.
Copper and zinc balancing each other is the living example of the whole science: raise one carelessly and you lower the other; estrogen holds copper back in the body; the liver and bile are the exit road. This is why the work is balancing, not supplementing blindly.
The distinct metals represent planetary and otherworldly elemental forces, and they are distinct going back through history to the alchemical. In the old system of seven planetary metals, copper is Venus — her symbol ♀ is copper's own — and copper's very name carries Cyprus, her island. The Renaissance masters knew this in their hands: to bring out the gentle blues and greens, they painted with copper itself — malachite and verdigris, copper pigments, the greens in Botticelli's Birth of Venus. Copper flakes run through the old paints; the sea in that painting is Venus's own element, coloured by her metal.
And nature signs the same signature: whole families of sea creatures run on copper blood — hemocyanin, blue when it carries oxygen — the horseshoe crab, the octopus, the squid. Where our blood is iron-red, theirs is copper-blue. Kiri reads the old art with this in mind: the masters who painted Venus rising from the sea in copper greens were working inside a knowledge where metal, planet, body and colour were one system. The mineral balancing on this page and the alchemy are the same teaching at two depths: the body is built of metals, and the metals were never only chemistry.
Education, shared in a good spirit — not medical advice. Know your own body, know your local laws, start low, and keep good company.