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 - Rest as Self-Compassion
Geral T. Blanchard • October 30, 2022
If a person was emotionally neglected as a child, or psychologically abused over their life-span, it would not be surprising to find their self-respect to be tenuous.
It may be difficult to conceptualize what healthy self-love looks like in a culture like ours, one that is so narcissistic.
As Tricia Hersey suggests in her book Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto, it is difficult to be kind to ourselves by simply resting as that can feel indefensible in a culture that is so fast-paced, capitalistic, and performance oriented. For many of us, we can only conceive of ourselves as worthwhile if there is enough evidence – accomplishments and/or wealth – to support the conclusion.
Personal value, all too often, is conflated with work output. And when we rest, it is frequently done with the intent of readying ourselves for more work, which translates to more profit, and more social acceptance. So who, or what, is driving this self-abuse?
Hersey is the founder of what she calls The Nap Ministry. She strongly believes that, like a political movement, we must become more uncompliant and resist unwelcome and unsupportive pressures – whether from family, culture, or even ourselves – that keep us performing, producing, and working our bodies until they collapse on us. As I was pithily counseled after a long period of massive work production (“serving”) and marathon running (“recreation”), “Death will be Nature’s way of telling you to slow down.” After physically collapsing, I understood the message, sorta.
Hersey’s words: “Stand up for yourself by laying down,” especially before your body makes the decision in the absence of guidance from your mind. A migraine may be the first big clue that you are operating under someone else’s set of rules. Hersey advises us to reclaim our inner authority, our personal sense of agency.
Planned resting is regenerative, not just for the lower body, but the brain as well.
Danes tend to promote this healthy habit with a notion called hygge. They believe there comes a time after incessantly serving others that our time must come. This Danish concept suggests the dogma encompassing laziness can be hazardous to our health as it can propel us into a work frenzy.
After an MDMA treatment (or three) patients often speak of inhabiting a new internal atmosphere. A more comfortable space in their mind, in their thinking. It comes after reflecting on well-established life patterns and unexamined relationship influences. The healing process allows a heart generative expansion that can lead to the conclusion: I am entitled to a little more hygge and self-care.
I have warm memories of such moments after working several long and challenging days in Sweden. One is of ending workdays with a long and relaxing sauna. Another time it involved a “forest bath,” a hike when I encountered a regal moose, and feeling quite contented, returned to my brother’s home to start a fire and jointly prepare some fish stew of cod and salmon. I found all of it to be healing and restorative, yet I noted how disinclined I was to maintain similar hygge upon returning home to Wyoming. It was if I needed a fellow conspirator’s approval in the resistance. We must personally and internally seize permission to be who we truly are with far less deference, far less acquiescence.
One salient goal of an MDMA treatment is to examine our lifestyle. With it comes a reflection on the dogmatic rules that propelled us onto this unhealthy path, a path of personal infidelity. And if the MDMA ceremony had some honoring rituals – chocolate bath, candles burning, prayerfulness, massage, and a feast afterward – part of the essential medicine, the medicine that walks, is received outside of a capsule.
Connie Zweig, in
The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul, summarized a patient’s experience after intensive psychotherapeutic treatment. She wrote: “Paula saw that caregiving contains many pairs of opposites that, at times, feel like they were pulling her apart: doing/being, obligation/choice, resisting/accepting, dependent/independent, and especially self/other. Eventually, she learned to recognize when she moved into one side and fell into identification with it. Slowly, she expanded to hold the tension of these opposites and to witness them from a broader vantage point.” That is “the way of it” when we stop, get off the crazy train, and self-examine.
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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.
“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.