m-session notes

We recently added two long-form guided meditations to the m-session library. Both are around 30 minutes, audio-guided with two voice options, and designed for the peak phase of a session. They represent two very different approaches to inner work, and they’re both among the deepest activities in the app.

Metta Heart

Metta, often translated as loving-kindness, is one of the oldest meditation practices in Buddhist tradition. The classical Theravada approach, codified in Buddhaghosa’s Visuddhimagga in the 5th century, progresses through categories of people: first yourself, then a benefactor, a friend, a neutral person, a difficult person, and finally all beings. You silently repeat phrases like “may you be happy, may you be free from suffering” at each stage, gradually expanding the circle of who you’re willing to wish well.

Metta Heart draws on this tradition but synthesizes it with two other streams. The first is somatic. Rather than treating metta as a purely mental intention, the meditation anchors it in the body. You guide the breath into the heart center, feel for whatever warmth or sensation is there, and let it radiate physically through the chest, the limbs, the skin. Under MDMA, where the body is already unusually vivid and available, this somatic dimension makes the practice tangible in a way that purely phrase-based metta sometimes isn’t. The second stream is contemplative and non-dual. After the traditional progression from self to another to all beings, the meditation moves into territory that most loving-kindness practices don’t enter: dissolving the boundary between sender and receiver. The one who is offering love and the love itself become harder to distinguish. This is where the meditation gets genuinely deep, and where MDMA’s capacity to thin the sense of a separate self meets contemplative ground that normally takes years of practice to reach.

The phrases we use are “May I be well. May I feel deep love. May I be filled with light.” That last one may seem a bit unusual or nonsensical (what does it actually mean to be filled with light?), but this wording is drawing on ideas of Rob Burbea and other Jhana practitioners who use imagery to make it easier for somatic sensations to arise — the feeling of Piti in the body. The meditation makes clear that these are seeds, not scripture, and if different words carry more meaning, you’re encouraged to use those.

The House of Jung

Carl Jung believed the unconscious communicates through images, not arguments. His concept of archetypes — recurring symbolic patterns that appear across cultures and throughout human history — was rooted in the observation that the psyche organizes itself around certain fundamental structures: the shadow (what we’ve disowned), the anima or animus (the contrasexual dimension of the self), the wise figure, the descent and return. Jung’s method of active imagination invited people to engage these images directly, to enter a kind of waking dream and let the unconscious populate it with whatever needed to be seen.

Hanscarl Leuner, a German psychiatrist working at the University of Göttingen in the 1950s, took this idea further. He developed a clinical method he called Psycholytic Therapy, combining guided mental imagery with low-dose hallucinogens to help patients access preconscious material that talk therapy alone couldn’t reach. He founded the European Medical Society for Psycholytic Therapy in 1961 and published extensively on the patterns he observed: that when you give the unconscious a narrative scaffold and reduce the mind’s usual defenses, the material that emerges is remarkably consistent and therapeutically meaningful. After hallucinogens were prohibited across Europe, Leuner adapted his approach into what he called Guided Affective Imagery, a non-pharmacological method that preserved the same principles. You provide the architecture of a scene, and the patient’s unconscious fills in every significant detail.

The House of Jung is built directly on this lineage. It’s a complete guided imagery journey: arrival at a house on the coast at dusk, exploration of its rooms, the discovery of a childhood bedroom, a hidden door, a spiral descent into the depths beneath the house, an encounter with a shadowy figure, an offering, and a return through a renewed greenhouse to dawn over the ocean. The meditation doesn’t tell you what the house looks like, what the figure is, or what you feel. It provides the scaffolding and trusts the unconscious to do what it does. Under MDMA, where the fear response that normally censors unconscious material is softened, this projective capacity is heightened. People see things they wouldn’t ordinarily let themselves see, and they can stay with what they find rather than flinching away. The descent-and-return structure maps to what Jung called individuation: meeting the parts of yourself that have been kept underground, offering them something, and carrying what you’ve found back into the light.

Both meditations are available now in the module library. If you try either of them during a session, we’d genuinely like to hear what the experience was like.

When I tell people I’m building a guided meditation app for MDMA sessions, I can usually see the confusion before they say anything. The assumption is that someone on MDMA would be too high to follow a meditation. That they’d be hallucinating, or too scattered, or too far gone to do anything structured.

It’s a reasonable assumption if you think of MDMA as a classical psychedelic. But most would actually put MDMA into a category of its own. Some refer to it as an empathogen, a portmanteau meaning “to generate empathy,” and others as an entactogen, derived from the Latin entacto meaning to touch something inside or interior to the self. It doesn’t dissolve your sense of self or warp your perception of reality. Most people who take it at a therapeutic dose report the opposite: that their thinking becomes clearer, not cloudier. That they can see themselves and their lives with a kind of honest, undefended lucidity that is normally very hard to access.

The research backs this up. A 2024 cross-over study in the American Journal of Psychiatry compared MDMA directly against LSD and found that cognitive and perceptual lucidity remain fully intact under MDMA. A meta-analysis the same year confirmed the pattern: psychedelics impair attention and executive function during use, while MDMA leaves both unaffected. The capacities that meditation depends on — sustained attention, the ability to follow instructions, honest self-observation — are not only preserved under MDMA but often feel enhanced.

That combination of clarity and emotional openness is what makes the pairing so effective. The body becomes more available. Tension you didn’t know you were carrying becomes obvious. The felt sense — a concept from Gendlin’s Focusing that many people struggle to locate sober — often becomes immediately accessible. At the same time, the defensive filter that usually intercepts difficult material before you can really look at it quiets down. The MAPS treatment manual describes this as an “internal awareness that even painful feelings that arise are an important part of the therapeutic process.” Meditation provides the container for that awareness. It gives the openness a direction rather than letting it dissipate as a pleasant but formless feeling.

There’s also a specific overlap between loving-kindness meditation and MDMA’s empathogenic effects, with recent papers in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies (2025) and Pharmacological Reports (2023) both pointing to shared mechanisms around empathy and self-compassion. The warmth that metta practitioners spend years learning to cultivate often arrives within minutes under MDMA. The meditation gives that warmth somewhere to go and builds that “muscle” to make it more easily accessible.

This convergence is central to how m-session is built. The guided meditations in the app are designed for a state where the body and mind are unusually receptive, and they form the backbone of the session experience. The research on this synergy is still early, but the foundation is strong and the lived experience of people who have combined the two consistently points in the same direction.

My own experience is that MDMA allows me to really slow down and experience moment by moment what is most important to me, whether that’s feeling love, feeling something in my body, or going deeper into my mind. I wouldn’t describe it as being high. More as being more in touch. Meditation is the practice that helps me stay there.

—dasloops