Mindfully High

by John Selby

This book and accompanying free mobile app will provide you with professional insight and hands-on guidance so that your cannabis explorations and mindfulness breaks are enjoyable, worry-free, and inspiration-loaded. The sensory, emotional, mental and spiritual awakenings stimulated by smoking marijuana can definitely be maximized, and confusion and worry put aside, through approaching the cannabis experience via these new mindfulness methods.

“The inner experience induced when you smoke marijuana is at least 50% psychological. This means that the way you approach the herb
will strongly determine your high experience.”

Humphrey Osmond MD, former head of the New Jersey Neuropsychiatric Institute’s Bureau Of Research In Neurology & Psychiatry

The downside of marijuana is that it’s far too easy to lose one’s rational center while high¬ – to become irresponsible and drift away from the real world, temporarily unable to function normally. In the opposite direction, a major positive side-effect of mindfulness meditation is that it helps us be more responsible, present-focused, alert and conscious. So – what if we bring the upsides of both marijuana and meditation into a unified experience?

In this book and MindfullyHigh App, you’ll gain access to an effortless way to merge the best of both worlds - staying positively-focused, mindful and responsive while high, and also tapping fully into the wonderful inner experience that’s unique to marijuana.

The guided programs in this book and App can be used both when getting high, and equally when pausing for a short-form mindfulness practice without cannabis. Perhaps at work or as a morning wake-up process you’ll want to turn on the App for non-grass mindfulness guidance, and in the evenings you can include cannabis in the process. It’s always your choice.

It’s of course just fine to use marijuana without any meditative dimension at all. But there’s a lot of wisdom in making sure you have a safe positive environment and mindset during a cannabis experience. The MindfullyHigh book and App will help you do just this.

As mentioned above, this book and App are for both cannabis and non-cannabis mindfulness support.

With For many people using this book and app along with grass, you’ll read for information, and then get high and watch one of the 24 six-minute MindfullyHigh App programs, plus enjoy all the other dimensions of the App, such as the Guided Experiences and the Slide Show.

For The book and App also work perfectly well without any cannabis ingestion. You can read the written discussions of mindfulness, and then watch one of the 24 daily ‘short-form mindfulness meditation’ programs ... and then close your eyes to go deeper into a meditation session.

This book and App are of course for anyone taking marijuana for medical purposes who seek guidance to make their cannabis experience safe, positive and effectual. Especially for senior citizens who’re approaching the cannabis high for the first time, this App will actively reduce apprehension and boost positive effects.

Many retired people, trying grass for the first time, seek a trustworthy guide as they finally get to explore the cannabis experience. Most baby-boomers weren’t in the hippie movement of the 60s and 70s, they had a job and family and couldn’t risk exploring the marijuana muse. Now, as Boomers retire, they have both the time, opportunity, and desire to relax into fun times getting high. At home and in retirement communities, this book and MindfullyHigh App will prove of value.

We have the tools at hand to be both high and responsible at the same time – this book explains how to accomplish this challenge, and reap the many health and pleasure benefits of approaching marijuana mindfully.

260 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 13, 2018

About the author

I was lucky enough to grow up on a cattle ranch in Ojai California, and I still feel deeply grounded in country life. Then at 16 I spent a remarkable exchange-student year living in the bustling city of Durban, South Africa. Ever since, I've felt an integral part of the world community.

Then I went off to Princeton , mostly to satisfy my mother and grandparents. I received a great education, especially in English literature and history - but majored in Psychology, and ended up doing early EEG brain research for NIH studying the cognitive dynamics of meditation and psychedelics. I was my eating club's token cowboy, and fenced on Princeton's varsity team.

Rather than going to Vietnam, an unjust war which I opposed strongly, I went to the San Francisco Theological Seminary and became a Presbyterian minister (my family's faith) and a spiritual therapist. But my driving interest in Buddhist meditation, and my budding friendship with the philosopher Alan Watts, led me away from church work.

Instead I went to L.A. and participated in the American Film Institute's early internship program, studying screenwriting for several years, getting a film agent (Reese Halsey) and working in Hollywood. But there was little interest in my spiritually-grounded screenplays, so I attended the Radix Institute for Integral Therapy, finished my grad work and then worked as a therapist in San Luis Obispo.

All along, I was also developing a cowboy/jazz band with my brother, and working on my fiction and song-writing, A bit bored with the life of a therapist, I headed way down to Guatemala to spend a year at Lago Atitlan, writing songs, researching shamanic practices, and writing my first published book, Powerpoint (Warner). Barely escaping death in Guatemala, I spent almost a year up on my parents' new ranch in Idaho. On a whim I accepted a lecture/seminar tour in Europe - I went for 3 weeks and stayed for 7 remarkable years.

They loved me in West Berlin in the mid-eighties, and I set up a thriving therapy practice, wrote 2 dozen self-help books for the German market - and met my wife Birgitta, who I've been together with ever since. Moving to Switzerland, Birgitta and I developed a new idea (for then) called the self-help cassettebook (100 pages of text leading to an embedded cassette with audio guidance). We sold the concept to a major publisher there, and spent the next 4 years producing 24 cassettebooks. During that time we moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, then Santa Barbara, then over to Kauai - where we raised our two sons. After the hurricane, we hand-built a sugar shack and lived a quiet country life, writing more books, producing self-help audio and video content, and briefly heading an early online therapy company called BrightMind.

But Kauai was a hard place to advance a writing career, even though we made lots of breakthroughs guiding people in meditation and emotional growth via audio/video support.
In 2010 we moved to our current home in Santa Cruz, where we attempted to interject short-form mindfulness meditation into the Microsoft community, then shifted to Plantronics where we co-produced several at-work mindfulness apps. Realizing the need for professional guidance in the rapidly-expanding cannabis community, we then raised capital and developed the Mindfully High program which includes the Cannabis For Couples book and audiobook, and the High Together App.

I've spent most of my adult life developing a fiction style and genre that's only now matured into serious English literature - it's just taken me that long to realize my deeper vision in fiction. I'm blessed with a great film agent who's shopping the miniseries in Hollywood, so I seem to have come full circle. Right now I' m also helping authors to manifest and publish their books, while continuing to develop new audio and video programs to expand the High Together App. I look forward to your perspective on both my fiction and nonfiction writing!