Geral Blanchard, LPC, is a psychotherapist who is university trained in psychology and anthropology. Formerly of Wyoming and currently residing in Iowa, Geral travels the world in search of ancient secrets that can augment the art and science of healing. From Western neuroscience to Amazonian shamanism, he has developed an understanding of how to combine old and new healing strategies to optimize recovery, whether from psychological or physical maladies.
MDMA and Hope
Geral T. Blanchard • December 30, 2021
When people go in search of a legitimate MDMA-psychotherapy assisted provider, it is usually during a time of crisis. A traumatic event may precede the treatment and seemingly dash all hope of a happy life.
To grasp hope for a pleasant future individuals must first find a way to disentangle themselves from the tentacles of hurt, sadness, and despair. That may seem onerous at first but that is where MDMA fits in.
The medicine doesn’t change any of what happened. It doesn’t result in a loss of memory. MDMA does not distort the truth of one’s experiences. In fact, it acts like a clarifying truth detector amidst depression. And that’s important because thinking is often distorted during depressive episodes. At those times we are naturally predisposed to draw conclusions from our last big life events, especially negative ones, and extrapolate exaggerated conclusions elsewhere using a broad brush. It is common to transpose dark energy onto the rest of our world experiences -- past, present, and future. That’s how a major depression works. When, however, heavy energy (hucha) is vacated with a push from MDMA, there is room for a lighter vibratory energy to enter our psyche (sami).
In The Power of Grace, author David Richo refers to a special voice of wisdom that flows through us. This seed of hope comes from what he refers to as a “mother energy” that is already planted within us. The “within” is part of the transcendent that gives us strength; it is that part of us that is both human and Divine. Richo also suggests there is a storehouse of grace and hope to be discovered after difficult times with the help of these built-in powers. It is the gift dimension of life residing in us.
As Walt Whitman wrote: “I am larger, better than I thought, I did not know I held so much goodness. I am large, I contain multitudes.” This innate strength is a goodness that we can bestow on ourselves with the help of a medicinal releasing process.
During an MDMA session the voice of goodness moves through us, often without words, but with heart expanding knowings matched with love. This offers a truth that cannot be taught, only received from Divine Source. It is always there awaiting a wakeup call. This, after all, may be the point of trauma -- to take us to a higher level of existence.
Once we discover the power within and invite it to guide us through tragedy and pain, the result is hope. This trust in ourselves to surmount any difficulty is really a trust in our true nature, our interbeing, the conviction that we are interconnected parts of a wise Mother Nature that sides with life. She’s “got our back.”
Ideas of fate, luck, or God’s plan for us are not very helpful in challenging times. Hope, on the other hand, develops when we have an unobstructed vision of corroborated prospects. Hope is a new vision – often kick-started by MDMA – that transcends what we have heretofore been unable to imagine, understand, and reach.
A mature spiritual alternative, as Richo suggests, recognizes that pain and suffering may not have a meaning or reason, but they do offer a function in life to take us to a new condition. As I wrote in Transcending Trauma, when we become the meaning makers of our lives big things begin to happen. Or, as Benjamin Franklin wrote, “The things that hurt us instruct us.”
And then there is the challenging notion of Norma Fischer, in the Buddhist book, All the Rage. She advices us, particularly in times of negative emotions to “abandon” hope. Fischer believes that hope usually means rejecting the moment at hand. Hope is presented as a form of cowardice when we refuse to explore what is going on now and long for something more pleasant in the future. We deny what is.
Few people have instructed and inspired me more in life than the wise anthropologist and mythologist, Joseph Campbell. He challenged me to stay open to the possibility that when people explore the “horribles” of life, gifts likely will await them. Campbell called this process the Hero’s Journey, a very scary time in life when a person must, with trust and hope, forge a new path through uncharted territory, taking a road less traveled.
Importantly, Campbell gave us this lesson: “We have not even to risk this adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us, the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And when we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; when we had thought it necessary to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outwards, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone we shall be one with the world.”
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Additional Reading:
A Dose of Hope by Dr. Dan Engle and Alex Young
Other Topics
Basics of MDMA
Rituals and Ceremony
Brain and MDMA
Trauma
Heart
Energy Movement
Quantum Physics
Native Cosmologies
Nature
Spirituality/Enlightenment
Kogi Tribe
Books written by Geral T. Blanchard
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In recent years psychotherapists have become increasingly aware of the risk of transmitting trauma intergenerationally. By examining the impact of the Holocaust, or the experiences of Native Americans who were systematically abused by colonizers including the Catholic Church, it becomes obvious that indirect passage of depression, despair, anxiety, and damaged self-regard are but a few of the ancestral legacies of uninterrupted abuse. If, however, trauma can be passed from generation to generation without direct experience, could it also be possible for the reverse to happen?
Just as we have started to witness the reality of individual post-traumatic growth (PTG) – not just bouncing back after trauma but bouncing forward – could we entertain the concept of intergenerational growth (IG) – in other words, thriving from generation to generation?
There can be two levels at which trauma is processed. The first tier may be a time of quiet denial or the dissociation of nearly all thoughts of how painful the past was. The body feels it, but the mind does not speak it. On the second level a person awakens to the entirety of it, often an unpredicted and sudden onslaught of previously suppressed details with extensive associated pain. When trauma is reconstituted at the second level it often happens unwillingly. A person may be swept away by an awakening that seems very ugly. It feels like too much to absorb in its entirety. The result is often to feel afraid, even shattered – at first. Now with everything out in the open, what must be done with it?
At the second level of awareness, it is almost impossible to go on pretending that everything is fine. No longer can the visuals and emotions be kept submerged. One wonders, “Damn it, will I ever get better?”
Traumatized persons, with their pervasive pain, typically seek mood altering experiences. This can include ascetic restrictions, hedonistic over-eating, chemical dependency, sexual dependency, sexual anorexia or celibacy, romance addiction, relationship dependency, compulsive gambling, TV or movie binging, rock climbing, auto racing, reliance on antidepressants and/or antianxiety medications, religious addiction, and so much more that can serve to pacify, distract, and avoid unpleasant thoughts and feelings. By thrill-seeking, the higher the risks being engaged, the greater mood alteration one can experience. It’s a big dopamine splash and more.
These are the adult versions of childhood thumb sucking, according to Dr. Harvey Milkman, the author of Craving for Ecstasy (the feeling of ecstasy, not the drug). Harvey pointedly said, “Growing up consists of finding the right substitute for your thumb.”
There are many emotional reactions to a drug-free spiritual awakening experience and a ceremonial MDMA journey. While this article focuses on empathy – both the feeling and the cognitive component – it is obvious to those who have awakened from a spiritual emergency that a variety of related emotions arise.
It is one thing to imagine how another person feels. Psychopaths, despite what the general public believes, are very good at empathy on an intellectual level. Even criminal psychopaths can put themselves in another person’s position and understand their perspective. It is bigger, better, and far healthier when empathy, in its deepest sense, allows us to “feel with” other people by recognizing a sense of oneness with them, what’s called unity consciousness. To hurt others would be to hurt ourselves.
It’s impossible to talk about projection without incorporating a discussion about Sigmund Freud and Donald Trump. In this article I will skip Donald but throw in a little Carl Jung. Freud, of course, named several distinctive defense measures – reality distorting strategies to keep us safe. Two of the big ones are displacement and projection.
First, a definition of projection: This is evident when an individual attributes their own unacceptable impulses onto others. For example, a person might accuse others of engaging in thievery when, in fact, they are swindling money from their employer. Some of the behaviors and thoughts we are most ashamed of could be called shadows. We can see them first in other people before we can “call them out” in ourselves. We are defending against humiliation and mortification lest we be exposed.
Does this empathogen work in a similar manner as psychedelics, blasting us off to a sudden and dramatic awakening of the mind and soul? Not necessarily. Much like massive stress, psychedelics and MDMA can knock people off an unhealthy path and offer them an entirely different trajectory, but there is a lot of arduous individual work that must follow the use of these propellants.
So, could it be concluded that MDMA is a transcendent spiritual event -- a chemical event, or perhaps a neurological experience? By themselves, both seem unlikely. They can change activity in the brain, but enlightenment comes from hard work before and after their use. Entheogens and empathogens likely have a catalytic but not a primary casual effect in awakening.
Many events in life can change us, some in profound ways, others somewhat superficially. Some positively, some negatively. Some temporarily, some permanently. Let’s break it down.
With the “help” of psychology and the diagnoses of PTSD and C-PTSD, an entire trauma industry has developed. Much help has been delivered and, unfortunately, in many instances the assigned labels stick like glue and there can be difficulty relinquishing the newly imposed identity of “breakage.”
Many life events are transformative:
Many great minds have come out of India. Like countless spelling bee champions, Mahatma Gandhi, and Aurobindo Ghose who later took on the name of Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo became a highly regarded spiritual teacher and author in the twentieth century. His main insight was that what many humans experience during altered or higher states of consciousness are glimpses of the future of evolution. And, he contended, one day these states of expansion will be normal for the whole human race.
Countless numbers of people are seeking the unity consciousness that MDMA can offer. It can make them feel bigger. And more deeply connected and powerful. Like many billions of tiny ants inching a fourteen-wheeler up a hill, every tiny bit of effort pulls the big rig along. Similarly, each one of the eight billion or so people residing on our planet today may, via a combined assemblage of singular efforts, raise their individual consciousness, while tugging the entire race forward.
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John Nelson, in Healing the Split, refers to a fleeting or ephemeral sense of a higher purpose, not fully conceptualized, but compellingly near the heart. It holds answers to life’s pain but isn’t quite within our grasp…at least until the dark clouds engulf us. Then, with great staying power and inexperience matched with trust, a spiritual emergence nears surface awareness. And it always happens, as psychiatrist Stan Groff defined it, around the time of a blurry spiritual emergency.