The Hard Work of Psychedelic Therapy – part 3

“These days, when I knock on the doors of the Tryptamine Palace, I am no longer greeted with unconditional love, but instead, I am reminded of the responsibility that comes with ultimate knowledge: an undeniable responsibility to myself, to my tribe, to my species, to my planet.”
-James Oroc

You made your intentions. You prepared your mindset and the space in which you embarked on a psychedelic journey, perhaps with a responsible sitter or therapist, and emerged safely. You engaged with pain and trauma and expanded your mind and connection to the world. That’s it, you’re done. Right?

If only it were that easy. As tremendously powerful as the experience can be, it is merely the beginning: the hardest and most important work happens after.

Rarely, in my experience, has the real intent of a journey been revealed whilst in an altered state of consciousness, though this does occasionally happen. More often than not it may take days, weeks, even months to churn over the lessons before the final message is revealed.

The medicine and our unconscious mind are in the driver’s seat during a journey; they show us what we need to be shown, if we are willing and able to receive it. Sometimes that aligns with our intentions and sometimes it does not. The things that are normally hidden from us in normal states will find a way to surface whether we choose them or not.

In the days after visiting other realms of consciousness there is often a lingering physical and spiritual sensation of emotional impact, of having been through something immensely powerful. Depending on how painful or enlightening the day before was, there can be urgency, relief, amazement, bewilderment, excitement…any of a myriad of combined psychological states.

In the bright light of morning we now begin the long work of categorising, understanding, and processing. Abstract, even cryptic, symbols need to be interpreted before they can be understood.

You may have met spirits or creatures of fantastical origin. These avatars are aspects of parts of you; shadows of the past or constructs of sub-personalities or archetypes. They usually come with a purpose, with something to say.

You may have found yourself without physical form, a creature of pure consciousness, wandering incorporeally through a universe entirely unlike the one your body inhabits. Worlds may be ideas and galaxies vast, spinning constructs of pure emotion. You may see the essential nature of Buddhahood or encounter love as a tangible thing.

You may observe silently as parts of you assume form and character and play out a scene before your eyes, speaking roles with thought and feeling. No matter the flavour of the experiences, they all contain valuable and vital information for you to take back to the waking world.

No part of your experience is a stranger. Everything that showed up in your journey rose from the depths of your own psyche and hidden corners of your humanity. The medicine takes you down into your own cellar, where packed boxes and unsorted, cluttered shelves are filled with the memories, events, and symbolism of our lives. Because it all comes from you, only you have the ability to decipher the hidden meanings and deep import of what was revealed to you.

Looking at what was unpacked from your basement can be confusing. We can so completely forget something that it seems unfamiliar at first. Other, more familiar, things can take on a new significance or be connected to other parts of your life in new and meaningful ways. Unmet needs from childhood, trauma and injury, grief over a loved one, all with the hope of healing hidden underneath, may rise out of your personal Pandora’s Box.

The next day is as important as the day of the journey. Hopefully you can take the time to calmly and quietly reflect on the experience; this is the beginning of integration.

Integration, as I discussed in Part I, is what happens when an experience is processed and taken into the psyche. Integration transforms a memory into a part of who you are as a person.

Walking back through your psychedelic journey it will be important to be present and honest with yourself as you engage the memories. You may have gone through a tremendous amount the day before. It can be easy to project labels and meanings that aren’t yours onto something. If you had a flying experience, you want to try and feel what this actually means to you and not label it with some canned idea you’ve read in a book or website. Be receptive to the true import and content of what you were telling yourself.

This sounds very easy but it can be exceptionally difficult. Being honest with ourselves, especially when doing so opens us up to aspects of our inner lives that make us uncomfortable, is a truly challenging act. Western philosophy has trained us since our earliest days to not acknowledge our shadow, to view entirely normal aspects of humanity as ‘negative’ or ‘bad.’

Don’t cry. You shouldn’t get angry. Jealousy makes you a small person. Don’t worry, be happy.

Part of the post-journey work is putting aside this terribly unhealthy training. Anger, grief, jealousy, these are all natural, normal emotions. To deny them is to deny a part of ourselves, to judge ourselves as wrong for merely being human. When we encounter these feelings they may be hiding the key to our happiness underneath.

For decades I felt rage. Not mere anger but an inexhaustible conflagration of hatred and violence. When it rose, my gut would knot and seize upon itself. I was terrified of what I might do were I to ever give it free rein. I was ashamed of my anger and felt that it made me weak and wrong. Good people don’t get angry.

The truth is, my rage was important to me. It was my ally, my loyal soldier. It came from being dehumanised by my father. Among other things, anger is the emotion of injustice. In that role it seeks to serve us and keep us safe.

Once I was able to meet my rage with open arms and embrace it for the wounded part of me it was, the rage diminished and eventually dissipated. I am now able to experience anger in a much healthier way. I don’t judge it when it arises, I allow it to be and acknowledge that it is telling me that something is wrong. Being angry is entirely normal and, as long as we express it in non-destructive ways, it is healthy and life-affirming.

The same is true for sadness, grief, envy, shame, etc. These are messages from our inner self and they have important things to tell is. Hiding from or ignoring them only leaves them unattended to, waiting to come out at a later time.

A friend has been going through a terribly painful breakup. He and his wife of many years are living apart and he is devastated. At one point he bemoaned how sad he was and wished he didn’t have to feel that way. I talked frankly with him about how sadness is real and valid, how it needs to be expressed and felt. We don’t want to be sad, it can be a hopeless and empty time, but as another friend has said- ‘sadness it the energy the soul expends to heal itself.’

There is another message below the sense of loss. My friend’s deep sadness comes from a place of tremendous joy and love. He loves his wife intensely and his sadness is commensurate with the happiness they once felt together. From a certain perspective, one that is admittedly not easy to see when we are suffering, we can look at sadness and grief as celebrations of the beautiful moments we have had in life.

We may have been submerged in a sea of sorrows during our journey and now we have to make a conscious choice to re-engage with the sadness. We now have to face the difficulties we unboxed, in the clear light of morning without the help of the medicine.

This turning toward instead of away can be a daunting challenge but is necessary if we are to understand our wounds. It goes against instinct and social training to turn towards these emotional states and engage them. Like any other skill, it will come with time. My experience has paralleled many other’s that I’ve spoken with: we are able to go deeper and more openly with each successive journey. We learn over time that the feelings are merely unpleasant for a while; they don’t actually hurt us. Experiencing them is almost always a necessary step on the path to healing.

The amount of pain I encounter on a journey is often commensurate with the relief and healing I am able to achieve afterward.

Before the journey, talk to people who have gone through this work. No two stories are alike but you will be able to pick up on the common threads. Know that you might come out of the journey with potent and possibly disturbing emotions. It will be hard, but so is anything that’s worth doing as the old saying goes.

Feelings are real but they aren’t necessarily true. Feelings are a psychological response to simple or complex stimuli. My feelings of inadequacy, inferiority, and worthlessness were a response to the chronic abuse I received from my father. Those feelings were very real and they impacted my life in significant ways. They also provided a doorway through which I could access my trauma. It took a lot of work, both with and without the medicine, in order to get to the place where I truly understood these feelings are not true.

We humans are emotional creatures. These very real feelings are powerful influences on us and we tend to avoid ones we dislike. Two million years ago this was a survival mechanism: being cold can kill us so we learned how to control fire and warm ourselves at night. In some ways we have to fight one part of our evolution to embrace another.

A circle of support will be a helpful resource in processing your journey. I have been extremely fortunate to have found a community of experienced people, including several therapists who facilitate others and engage in their own work, that have allowed me to safely and confidently face my wounds. I do not think there has been anything more valuable to me than being able to share with friends who truly understand. I don’t need to explain things because they intimately understand the process and the horrors that brought us to it. Being surrounded by those who ‘get it’ has made a world of difference.

An initiated community may also be very useful to help you work with your journey and find your way along the thicketed and overgrown path to your personal truth.

If you are looking for such a community, web sites such as meetup.com or the various social media sites may have groups doing this work in your area.

One of the more challenging, yet very common aspects, to this work is what I’ll call, with a wry smile, ‘getting over yourself’. The modern world is very ego-driven. We are brought up to focus on our external lives- our career, our education, our income. Me, me, me, and me. And hey now, don’t forget about me.

Sometimes the messages we receive are unpleasant to this part of the psyche. We may find out that our motives have not always been purely altruistic or that we have been hurtful when we tried to be helpful. Fear and cruelty, hatred and rage; the things we unbox can be very uncomfortable to process. For many of us, the default response may be denial or avoidance. Yet these things must be processed if we are to move through and past them.

I’ve physically squirmed with embarrassment, shame, and even disgust when I’ve reached into one of my boxes and pulled my hand out holding something from my past that felt wriggly and slimy. This, too, is a part of who I am. We all have slimy and smelly things in the boxes in our cellars. A major part of getting over one’s self is being able to admit to having these aspects of self that the outside world has told us to deny.

Psychedelic-assisted therapy has an intrinsic aptitude for this. Evidence demonstrates that psychedelics increase a sense of connectedness, something I can anecdotally confirm¹. A sense of connectedness to others, to the planet, to the universe, creates a further sense of humility and grace- key components to success when working with our unwanted shadows.

An ego-based worldview creates the illusion that we live as an island, disconnected from everything and everyone, within the absolute barrier of our skin. Connectedness, however, allows us to see behind the curtain and realise that we play an infinitesimal, yet vital and relevant, role in a vast tapestry of entirely interdependent and interwoven components.  To paraphrase Alan Watts- a blade of grass could not exist without the Universe, but the Universe could not exist without all the blades of grass that make up the Universe.

It is simultaneously humbling and empowering. You realise that you are no more special than anyone else, but that we are all equally special; every one of us a wondrous and temporary example of the cosmos experiencing itself.

I, and everyone I know who does this work, have had similar experiences of this increased sense of connection. A recent journey is still percolating in my subconscious and the primary message is adding to my sense of connectedness.

As I look around the public space I am in at this moment I can see dozens of people: young children to the elderly, multiple genders, skin of nearly every hue the human complexion is capable of. In my past I would have seen them as OTHER, as NOT ME, and therefore different, strange, and alien. Now I feel kinship and understand we are all just parts of a larger organism, a greater system which is itself a part of a greater system.

This path has challenged my preconceptions and it has been and will continue to be a struggle as I peel away layer after layer of my past. So much of what I was brought up to believe is shallow and truncated, devoid of life and light. Money, jobs, careers, pretty baubles, and social status are all substitutes for the things that truly nourish and validate us- connection, love, and community.

This work is hard, excruciating at times, yet it has brought more beauty and peace into my life than I ever could have guessed.

 

References

1- Carhart-Harris, R., Erritzoe, D., Heiken, E., Kaelen, M., & Watts, R. (2018). Psychedelics and connectedness. Psychopharmacology. 235(2):547-550