With his long hair, sleeve tattoos, and t-shirt-and-jeans style, Benjamin Forest doesn’t look like a military officer. But that’s exactly who he was before becoming a psychedelic coach, speaker, and author. He served on active duty from 1994 to 2019 as a commander, Pentagon staffer, program manager, academic instructor, and a variety of other roles.
After 25 years of service, including deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, Forest had a psychological crisis on active duty, abruptly ending his career and almost his life. Among other labels, he was diagnosed with treatment-resistant depression.
But there was one treatment that worked for him: psychedelics.
After an instantly life-changing experience with magic mushrooms, Forest decided to devote the rest of his life to “helping others heal, love, and live more fully through psychedelics.” This includes coaching, teaching, advocacy, and now… publishing Trip of a Lifetime, “a book that tried to capture everything I’ve learned about the medicine that might be helpful to others.”
The book itself is a trip: memoir / self-help / spiritual manifesto hybrid of Michael Pollan, Brené Brown, and Mark Manson prose that shouldn’t work as well as it does. It turns out to be an ideal companion to anyone approaching psychedelics for healing and growth.
Forest says, “I wrote this book for someone who is curious about psychedelic healing and how it works. This book is your experienced friend who wants to guide you through the journey. This book wants you to feel safe, seen, and sacred as you embark on what could be a life-changing transformation.”
An Actual Guide to Psychedelic Transformation
Although it waxes poetic and spiritual at times, Trip of a Lifetime is surprisingly practical. The author assumes minimal psychedelic knowledge and walks the reader through the three stages of a psychedelic journey: preparation (before the trip), navigation (during the trip), and integration (after the trip).
Anchoring the book are the Ten Invitations of Psychedelia, which can be thought of as “best practices” when approaching psychedelics:
- Be the hero.
- Proclaim your intention.
- Heal in connection.
- Enter the cave.
- Open your heart.
- Live your elixir.
- Love yourself shamelessly.
- Embrace your imagination.
- Savor the aliveness.
- Surrender to everything.
Chapter titles like “Live Your Elixir” and “Surrender to Everything” read more like spiritual directives than clinical frameworks. But Forest grounds each in lived experience rather than theory. He speaks from the trenches of trauma and the peaks of awakening with equal clarity.
The Coach’s Voice and the Poet’s Touch
Trip of a Lifetime openly embraces its self-help style and structure, but for a book of that genre… it has its literary moments.
From the preface: “Holding space for such psychological revolutions is a raw, messy, and vulnerable business. I wouldn’t have it any other way. This is the bloody landscape where the battle for emotional freedom takes place. It’s where we learn to heal, love, and live. My life’s calling, which includes coaching others, writing this book, and publicly sharing the lessons I’ve learned, is helping my brothers and sisters to traverse this sacred battlefield.”
Then after some such poetry, it’s off to journaling prompts, integration questions, or insights from his coaching practice.
Essential Reading for Newcomers
For those considering psychedelics, this book should be essential reading. While much of the advice (“surrender”) and concepts (“intention”) in Trip of the Lifetime are familiar to those already in psychedelic spaces, the book is still worth a read, given its elegant structure, engaging voice, and memorable quotes.
Trip of a Lifetime: The Psychedelic Guide to Healing, Loving, and Living is out now. Learn more here.
