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 as a Rite of Passage
Geral T. Blanchard • December 9, 2021
All indigenous cultures have, or once had, customary rites of passage
Rites of passage were transformational experiences, or initiations, that took individuals from one way of life to another. A rite of passage was a meaningful and community supported ceremony, with many dramatizing rituals, that served to guide and facilitate a person as they shifted into a new and more evolved way of existence.
Rites of passage invite and welcome us into new territory in a time of enhanced understanding and personal power. Such ceremonies almost always symbolize death and rebirth motifs. Some people think of it as an epochal time to be reborn, or brought into a new and healthier form.*
An MDMA or safe psilocybin ceremony is intended to create an energizing time that can lift people up to higher realms of thinking and being. As Mayans say, it is a formal time to lift one’s heart. Others might say it is to reboot them, returning to a forgotten, healing mindset that society has slowly melted away. By recapturing the lost essence of the spiritual world, including slowed and circular time, a person is reminded of his origins so that he can see his future. And in that future of personalized evolution there are new (forgotten) dimensions of reality that help us mature and see the world with greater clarity and vision, as well as to become a part of the Whole.
Rites of passage, to be effective, are preceded by a time of deprivation, like a fast. They are usually conducted away from the hubbub of a city and closer to quiet unpopulated areas, away from home and the routines of the constraining familiar. A sacred sentiment surrounds the entire event as the purpose is to foster human development and tug the world along with the aspirant’s small but integral role in the wider process. Repetitive music encourages an altered state and serves to contain the event. Rites of passage are first and foremost for the community, and after that, the individual. It is helpful to have several persons bearing witness to this event so as to sacralize it – to make it sacred and memorable.
On the individual level, these events help craft a new and larger personal identity, moving away from a puny egoic image of self-importance and accomplishment, to a more community-based personhood. They challenge an individual to risk, face fears and regrets, trusting that in the end they will be empowered by the process.
Initiations, like an MDMA ceremony, help participants find their inner core, their personal beliefs, and understand their unfolding ethics and values. At the same time, the initiation helps them learn who they were long ago. All humans must grow into a global identity, but such a huge growth surge often needs a catalyst – often this occurs following a shakeup, one I call a necessary trauma.
David Oldfield captured an important aspect of this head-to-heart ceremony. He wrote: “The [Elders] teach us that rites of passage impart a form of selfunderstanding that is felt in the heart rather than learned in the head…In ancient cultures, people understood that the wisdom of the heart is accessed by the imagination; that imagination is the thought of the heart. (my italics)” So it isn’t so important what we think as how we think; it is a process of transformation when a person moves that long distance – eighteen inches – from the head to the heart.
An important part of the completion of any hero’s sacred journey is the obligation to return home with a willingness to share with the community lessons learned while on pilgrimage. It is often referred to as the time of return and contribution. One cycle has been completed – you go from vulnerable victim to the mentor of those rising up behind you.
Your MDMA treatment is the beginning, your initiation underway. This is a process, not a moment in time, and it requires regularly feeding and fuel that come by way of ongoing rituals. Mayan shamans have borrowed the term encaminarse from the Spanish language to describe this continuing transformation. The word means “to start walking” or to “get on one’s way.” That is your guidance.
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“Once a problem is solved, its simplicity is amazing.”
- Paulo Coelho in The Pilgrimage
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* “The birth trauma, as an archetype of transformation, floods with considerable emotional effect the brief moment of loss of security and threat of death that accompanies any crisis of radical change. In the imagery of mythology and religion this birth (or more often rebirth) theme is extremely prominent; in fact, every threshold passage – not only this from the darkness of the womb to the light of the sun, but also those from childhood to adult life and from the light of the world to whatever mystery of darkness may lie beyond the portal of death – is comparable to a birth and has been ritually represented, practically everywhere, through an imagery of reentry into the womb. This is one of those mythical universals that surely merit interpretation, rather from a psychological than from an ethnological point of view.”
- Joseph Campbell in
Primitive Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume 1
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Basics of MDMA
Rituals and Ceremony
Brain and MDMA
Trauma
Heart
Energy Movement
Quantum Physics
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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.
“Where did all the time go?” That is the ubiquitous question every patient asks after a treatment. They ingest the medicine at 9 a.m. and, after what seems like perhaps an hour or so but was actually five or six, and once the eye mask comes off there is bewilderment as to just how much time has passed. Of course, this is all built on the bedrock notion in Western culture that time is a straight line and linear manifestation. And that there is such a thing as time! Stepping out of existing paradigms, even if for a brief “time” can be eye opening while your eyes are closed.
Traditional Native American cultures have long believed that time is a circular phenomenon. Remotely like the movie Groundhog Day suggests, every day is very similar and reoccurring like the last. In indigenous worldviews, the sun rises and the sun sets, routinely; we always have a predictable reset of sorts, the start of what we call a “new day,” or what Arapahos called “sleeps,” both reflecting measurements of time.
Dark nights of the soul as Saint John of the Cross called those long, despairing periods of our life, are never easy, in fact they are usually dreadful. They are so necessarily awful and so damn long because some of us don’t do subtlety very well. If we are open to these moments, even a tiny bit, they can serve as an internally calculated and blaring wakeup call that will guide us to solace.
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.