Sex-positive, scientific psychonaut saying “Salutations, Steemit!”

(As promised) Salutations, Steemit! 

I am so happy to be introducing my blog to the community! I am a psychonaut scientist with passion for improving healthcare practices and education about healthy sexuality and I hope that through educating our community, we can do away with harmful stigmas that impede progress. 

That’s a pretty loaded introduction statement, so let me break this down into bite-size pieces.  

 I am a psychonaut…

 A “psychonaut” is a term, combining Greek roots “psych” (mind) and “naut” (sailor), for a person that uses altered states of consciousness to analyze and address our sensory perceptions and how we understand them. I, personally, have achieved this with the use of psychedelic substances, however this type of exploration may also include hypnosis, lucid dreaming, or deprivation of the senses, of sleep, of nutrients to assist in reaching states of trance or meditation. I hope to engage a community that participates in such activities to share anecdotal experience of such exploration, as well as much-needed [research](https://www.maps.org) to assist unfamiliar community members in making informed choices about maintaining good mental hygiene and the means to do so. I especially hope to support a community that connects experienced psychonauts with communities that are beginning to show the most promise for therapeutic psychedelic treatment including people with PTSD, anxiety, addictions.  

 *One of the first publicly announced recipients of an approx. $1M in crypto from the Pineapple Fund, MAPS is working toward “a world where psychedelics and marijuana are safely and legally available for beneficial uses, and where research is governed by rigorous scientific evaluation of their risks and benefits.”* 

  ...scientist...

I consider this not to be a role, but more of a filter through which I interact with reality. In a similar manner to calling yourself a “skeptic”(I’m one of those too!), identifying as a scientist says that regardless of what I thought I knew about a given topic, I have to be ready to toss it all out. This sounds like an easy task, however sneaky psychological biases make it **much** harder to practice. I will employ a scientific approach to my blog and will provide resources to assist anyone seeking to research the topics further to draw their own conclusions.

  …with passion for improving healthcare practices…

 I am a certified speech-language pathologist that provides service to my community by helping the adult population manage changes in communication, cognition, and swallowing function.

Source

This field is the perfect storm of my favorite subjects in school: language arts (I like learning big words and I took grammar WAY too seriously for any “typical” child), anatomy and physiology (more on that in the next point ;) ), and psychology. It is a profession with which people are generally unfamiliar, until they or someone they know needs us. As I said, I found this field to be the perfect fit for my personal academic interests, but the field and industry are far from perfect.  I want to highlight applications for the blockchain that are being developed for the global healthcare industry. I would also like to share promising research in the field of speech-language pathology (SLP), however will keep this to a minimum unless I can stir up an interested community. 

  …and education about healthy sexuality...

Sex is ingrained in human nature and that is a part I don’t want to miss out on! I was raised within a religious household that vilified the exploration sexuality—sexual contact was only for procreation and procreation was to create more “followers”; it was the reason for our physical existence. I dealt with a lot of internal struggle with my physical urges and learned association with shame. And most unfortunately, my situation is not unique. Sexuality is often considered as an indulgence with no additional value beyond pleasure, but science shows us that just isn’t so! I want to share how a healthy sex life can be celebrated and shared in a respectful, scientifically accurate way to help encourage safe practices as well as wider adoption of self-love or partner (s)explorations.

  Source Since 1947, the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University has been the “trusted source for critical issues in sexuality, gender, and reproduction.”

I am aware that this type of material is not part of every steemit users’ desired content. I hope that a focus on science as well as the creativity that sexuality thrives from will be a good interface for unfamiliar readers to explore the topic without excessively graphic material. I will be diligent with utilizing the NSFW tag, as I do plan on providing visuals that may include but is not exclusive to videos, images or artistic representations of anatomy or sexual acts. I believe that with utilization of the settings tab to choose your preference about NSFW posts will be sufficient for making sure that you only see the content that you wish to.

  …and I hope that through educating our community, we can do away with harmful stigmas that impede progress.

The accessibility of information that we have in our current times is unrivaled, however we have been fighting a battle with intentional misinformation that harms large communities for the gains of a few. I appreciate the value blockchain provides to information dissemination in that we will be held to acknowledge our previous statements and verify these exchanges. This renews the importance of considering what message we about to communicate to another user, another person like you. When we address our own biases and own errors, we are able to learn from and be more aware of these biases around us.  

@thedreamsteem aims to be a blog of open-minded exploration of how adopting a skeptic, scientific, sex positive, holistic outlook on health and existence can be beneficial for global adoption, particularly on the cusp of our blockchain revoltion! Do you also share identical, polar opposite (or somewhere-in-between) views on these topics? Comment about them early and often and share with the others that make their way into the community. We all do best to challenge any new concepts posed prior to adopting or rejecting them, so respect for all views shared is expected.

  And remember, the steem work makes the dream work! ;*