The case for m-session

I built m-session after a solo MDMA session opened things up for me. It had been years since I had touched psychedelics, and the distance made the contrast sharp. I could feel how much had quietly calcified: assumptions about myself, my relationships, what I thought I already understood. MDMA quieted the filters that normally make it so hard to see life for what it is, with acceptance and appreciation. It also made me realize how much I was leaving to chance.

During that session, I found myself wishing for more structure. I was writing in a notebook, which is always valuable, but the process felt scattered. Random thoughts, half-formed reflections, no sense of arc or progression. I wanted a timeline at the very least, something that could keep track of how far into the experience I was and suggest what might be worth trying next. When I looked for something like that, it didn’t exist. I had come to value certain meditation apps in my daily life, tools that were intelligent and well-designed and treated the user as an adult. I wanted something like that for MDMA.

I have over seven years of experience working in psychology, my own long history with these substances, and a background in the creative field. m-session grew out of that intersection, working in collaboration with AI (Claude Opus 4.5) on research, design, and coding. All therapeutic content is reviewed and validated against primary sources. My hope is that m-session grows into a true community project, with many contributors, and that it becomes genuinely useful for anyone who wants to bring intention and structure to their MDMA practice.

If you’re reading this and feel like you can help in any way, please do. You can test the app and send feedback, contribute code, or support us financially. Since the project is still early, probably the most useful thing you can do is just spread the word.

Good luck, I love you.

- dasloops

Most apps are designed to hold your attention. This one is designed to let go of it. The central design challenge of m-session is that the person using it is in an altered state of consciousness, possibly at the most emotionally open and vulnerable point in their session. Every decision follows from that constraint.

The visual language is deliberately flat. There are no gradients, no shadows, no depth cues. Where animation exists, it is minimal and monochromatic, rendered in the single accent color that runs through the chosen theme. The interface is meant to feel like an open notebook: a calm, stable surface you can engage with or set down without consequence. Typography is kept to two fonts throughout, a monospace for body text and a serif for headings, and text is minimal per screen. If something can’t be read comfortably in a few seconds by someone with dilated pupils, it gets broken up or cut.

Each mode, light and dark, is built around a single accent color: orange in light, purple in dark. The user can also customize their own accent color to suit their preference. The accent is used sparingly to guide the eye toward interactive elements and important cues without creating visual noise. The palette is otherwise muted and neutral. During an MDMA session, pupils dilate significantly and light sensitivity becomes a real consideration. Both modes are designed as complete, intentional experiences.

Audio is treated as a primary modality. The app’s guided meditations use a high-quality AI voice generated through ElevenLabs and fine-tuned for meditation, with synchronized text display so the user can close their eyes, lie back, and be guided without needing to look at a screen. Many of these are duration-adjustable: extending the length doesn’t add more content, it intelligently increases the silence between voice prompts, giving the user more time to settle into each step and do the work being asked of them at their own pace.

The user can close the app mid-session and reopen it hours later to find everything exactly where they left it. State is saved continuously and silently. The app should feel as reliable and undemanding as a physical object, something you can pick up, use, and put down without thinking about whether it will remember where you were.

The app is also fully compatible with using a physical journal. Every journal prompt can be progressed through without typing anything into the app. If the user chooses to work this way, the app still saves timestamps for each prompt, so they can cross-reference their notebook entries during the integration period and maintain a clear record of when each reflection occurred.

Screens are sequenced to minimize decision-making. Journal prompts are open-ended rather than prescriptive. Choice selections never gate progression. If a screen offers options, skipping is always one of them. The underlying principle is that the person in the session knows what they need better than the app does, especially in an altered state where inner signals are amplified and the last thing you want is an interface arguing with your instincts.

The app is mobile-first, works fully offline, and requires no account or signup. It’s built as a Progressive Web App (PWA) rather than a native app, in part because an app like this has little chance of approval in the current app store regulatory environment. These aren’t just privacy features. They’re UX decisions rooted in the context of use. The goal is for the app to feel like a seamless, ambient guide during a session, present when you reach for it, invisible when you don’t. The user should be grounded in their space, not in their phone, and free to focus entirely on the work in front of them.