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's Deep Cleaning of the Soul
Geral T. Blanchard • June 25, 2022
Ken Wilber, a renowned spiritual author of many books, has been thought of as being too cerebral for many people to understand. Much of what he has written, however, can be easy to grasp.
For instance, he has written a three part prescription for balanced personal development: “Grow up [personal maturity], wake up [spiritual expansion], and clean up [your life, health, home, and all relationships].”
In recent years it has been heartening to see mindfulness and meditation practices reach more and more people. In a way, they can be regarded as witnessing practices, observing ourselves from a somewhat detached perspective. For some folks, however, these practices can cause them to drift into states of emotional numbness and indifference – what some might term bliss bypassing or spiritual bypassing. Upon being lifted up by mystical experiences it can mislead persons into thinking some major growth has occurred when, in fact, they were unintentionally avoiding pain by not exploring their trauma deeply. More bliss, more trauma, more bliss seeking, still trauma. So what’s missing from the healing process?
Mindfulness and meditation, can take people inward for sure. That’s good, as long as it doesn’t distract them from pain, or circumvent the process of exploring outside relationships. MDMA helps many individuals look at their internal (intrapersonal) relationship as well as the interpersonal and beyond. With the help of some momentary neurotransmitter alterations, and maybe some long term neurogenesis, most people land at a place of clearheaded empathic kindness that comforts them with regard to a traumatic past, while helping them to face reality squarely.
Deep cleaning is part of a commitment to leave no stone, no impediment to growth, unturned. It involves waking up and looking around for settled dust, mind clutter, and social muck that leaves them feeling emotionally stuck.
With many matters examined and moved out of the way, that is when folks can finally become unanchored and move beyond their past, when as Wilber would put it, they “grow up.”
Using the words of the German spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle, all of us must explore our pain body – how we have carried unresolved trauma in the mind and body. Just by mindfully noting negative and unhelpful thoughts -- perhaps the residue of trauma – the ego that is rooted in the left hemisphere of the brain is weakened. Moving to the right side of the brain, perhaps a person will feel as if they are “at one with the universe.” Many people feel awakened after this kind of very seductive bliss experience. But be careful. Don’t bypass the difficult stuff -- the painful hardships -- as healing work may just be beginning. It is imperative to immerse oneself in old and scary emotional memories, and MDMA can soften that ride. That process, when completed, can be transformative.
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Reflect for a moment of any time you have watched Eckhart Tolle speak. Did he makes sense? Quite likely. Did he help you develop personal insights? Likely he did. Did you ever see him sobbing, screaming, swearing, laughing uproariously, or tenderly nurturing himself? Not so likely. Tolle is an excellent mental gymnast but hasn’t modeled the kind of emotional vulnerability required to meet and process gripping and powerful traumatic pain. MDMA is a second level pain body treatment that works with both the right and left hemispheres of the brain.
After we have grappled with our dark side, understood or perhaps forgiven hurtful people, it may be necessary to clean a little more deeply. By that I mean perhaps we have addressed our trauma and recovery a little too superficially, and now must look at how we used those experience to justify perpetrating against others.
In some instances, it is not uncommon to exonerate people who have been directly engaged with us in hurtful ways while neglecting how our anger has been generalized toward the community surrounding us, the community from which all the hurt was spawned. In other words, there is some danger of transferring remaining anger or resentment toward an entire group of people while thinking it was enough to forgive an individual, an abuser, our ex, etc. That can signify unfinished business and the necessity for more deep cleaning.
This might indicate a need to explore symbolic organizations that have harmed us and to whom we are retuning harm. It may be a school once attended, a church we belonged to, a spiritual movement we engaged with, a political party that promised but did not deliver relief. In fact, any community of people that wasn’t there for us, perhaps betrayed us and, it seems, continues to let us down.
If any of this fits, I am suggesting a deep soul cleaning. Not just cleaning up our stories of hurtful individuals, but also looking at the way we can, without acknowledging culpability, righteously deliver pain to individuals and institutions that have not been there for us. If we continue to carry that residue inside us, it feeds the pain body and will likely interfere with our future relationships. So, let’s scrub deeply.
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“When you learn a language, it’s hard to unlearn it. Soul has learned the language of the body.”
- Saroj Aryal, Divyanjali
“The turning point in the process of growing up is when you discover the core strength within you that survives all hurt.”
- Max Lerner,
The Unfinished Country
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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.