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 Fundamental Teachings
Geral T. Blanchard • November 4, 2022
You are your medicine. You are your doctor.
Perhaps for years you have been looking in all the wrong places for healing medicine, what shamans prefer to call living in harmony.
MDMA prefers to make only a few house calls. After that you are on your own, so you don’t become dependent on external chemicals for happiness. Along comes the realization that, “I am the chairman of my own wellbeing.” Some of the entheogens and empathogens awaken divine powers already residing within us. That is the medicine’s fundamental teaching. If we don’t get that message and live it, there may be an eternal quest for ingesting and titrating just the “right” amounts of “this and that,” plant and chemical cocktails, which presumably can assure an unruffled existence through life’s travails.
Kathleen Harrison, in Visionary Plant Consciousness wrote, “When you invoke its medicine [ayahuasca] without even necessarily touching or finding the plant, it has become your deep ally. At that point you have access to the spirit of the medicine.” Dance with its spirit and you may never lose it. A good sign that this ability still rests within you is when you recall previously ingesting an entheogen and noting that within five minutes you feel like you are on another journey. This time, you started your own engine, not the medicine. With this recognition, it may not be necessary to rely on some external agent to jumpstart a spiritual journey.
The medicine takes up residence in your being, in your soul. It can develop a strong and secure mind. It may also be that it provides a split, or shared, consciousness that can be dialed up or toned down at will, a shapeshifting of sorts. This is similar to the experience of animal guardians. Once
coessence has been established with another critter, we can summon our medicinal and animal allies at will. At that point we are in the driver’s seat of our lives, not reliant on external magic as now the internal
sacred magic is accessible. That’s empowering.
You become magic, not in supernatural ways, but a super natural variety. This is quite the opposite of trauma’s sequelae of powerlessness, hopelessness, helplessness, and despair.
To reactivate the medicinal experience, a major chemical blast, or even microdosing, may not be necessary. Sometimes it’s as simple as going inward and reimagining the prior healing experience. To set that process in motion, repeat the rituals that preceded your medicinal ceremony. Regularly replay or sing the music associated with the treatment. Read literature that resonated with you at that time. All of this may reawaken memories and shift your mood (”feelbacks”) with increasing speed and alacrity over time. As Mandaza Kandemwa, a Shona water spirits shaman would say, “Practice, my dear.”
Persons suffering from addiction engage in external referenting. This is the tendency to rely on aids from outside sources, like drugs, for internal peace. When interiority supplants this tendency, it is called recovery. For instance an alcoholic is rarely told to periodically drink a light beer to jumpstart his recovery. His “stash” is no longer comprised of drugs or alcohol; it now is made up of internalized skills, and abilities, not just substances or intense activities. That is the difference between being grounded, and being high.
What lives inside each of us following a sacred treatment ceremony is the spirit of the medicine and the spirit of our animal allies. With proper care and feeding of these life forces, we can wear a modest yet confidant smile knowing that life is back under our control. Then the external focus is on how we can give back to the world – sacred reciprocity.
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“The Creator dwells in the Seventh Direction, at the center of the universe, which is everywhere and within each person.”
- Black Elk
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Additional Reading:
Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction by Judith Grisel, Ph.D.
Chasing the Scream by Johann Hari
Lost Connections by Johann Hari
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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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.