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 - The Third Session and Spirituality
Geral T. Blanchard • October 31, 2022
Often patients find their third session as being more otherworldly or cosmic in nature.
While the first two are heavy on intrapersonal and interpersonal relationships, the final treatment can strengthen or restore relationships with the earth, other animal relatives, and supportive energy fields in the universe.
In October 2022, the Nobel Peace Prize for Physics was awarded to three scientists who discovered and confirmed what has long been a contention of quantum physics, namely entanglement. Once we have an emotionally or energetically charged connection with any life form, molecules begin to vibrate in unison and they reach a high level of coherence. It is like two become one no matter how far apart they are, which is nonlocality. The connections cause what was once a singular unit to now operate in tandem with their “dance partner.” And the unbroken union allows for communication instantaneously, faster than the speed of sound or light.
What is called the field is like a vast continuum of fluctuating energy charges between people or things. Years ago we may have called this kind of connectivity to be ESP. It was too wishy-washy to be believed, until now. It was harder to understand that the universe exists in some vast here that represents all points of space and time at a single moment. Life exists in a field as one enormous present. If that is the underlying nature of the universe, then the insights that sometimes arise in the third treatment are really a homecoming of sorts.
This energy signature that impacts us on a personal level can be given the moniker Spider Woman, a healing grandmother star figure common in Native American culture. In Christian communities it may be Jesus or Mother Mary making their presence known to us, particularly in ominous, high energy moments. Upon reconnection to the higher vibratory fields that surround us, sudden surges of energy may be the felt presence of a greater coherence with all life forms. On a smaller scale, experienced shamans can raise their own energy levels in a healing session and pass it on to less organized recipients. We are talking about collective consciousness or unity consciousness. It is a one-mindedness that enlarges us and comforts us – heals us to our original condition.
Ann Yusim in Fulfilled, explained: “When two systems vibrate at the same frequency, they are said to be in resonance. When two systems are in resonance, the total energy of the system [field] is greater than its parts. The system with the higher vibrational frequency at the onset causes the other systems to sync up or
entrain with it.”
Ancient peoples have been intimately sensitized to Mother Earth’s signals, monitoring them and joining them during contemplative states and group rituals.
Sacred locations – high points, waterfalls, mounds, medicine wheels, etc. – had a felt quality to them. Energy was palpable. It is as if the location holds an elevated level of dynamism.
From my experience with the Achuar tribe of the Ecuadorian Amazon – the consummate dream culture – we assembled every morning before sunrise to vomit together and share our dreams of the night before. This wasn’t simply a storytelling time. In dreams they connect with their ancestors and the rest of the universe. An individual dreamer is unassumingly a conduit for an arriving dream with the responsibility to inform community members of its details. A dream is composed of shared thoughts, borrowed thoughts, collective ideas -- it is reality. Their waking life is a falsehood. A dream is prophetic of what is to come, including guidance for healings based on information drawn down into the quieted human mind from the overarching field of information.
Lynne McTaggart in her book, The Field, wrote about altered views of the world and the potential they can give rise to: “People are more likely to succeed [or heal], instead of believing in a distinction between themselves and the world, and seeing individual people and things as isolated and divisible, [if] they viewed everything as a connected continuum of interrelations -- and also if they understood that there were other ways to communicate than through the usual channels.” This is one of the potential attributes of MDMA, if we step aside and allow our inner map to guide us home.
**********
“The aim is not to eliminate one way of knowing in favor of another; the aim in an ultimate sense is an integral understanding of the universe grounded in both the scientific empirical detail and in our primordial poetic vision of the cosmos.”
- Brian Swimme, in The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos: Humanity and the New Story
“Clairvoyance isn’t a mind-to-mind thing, like reading people’s thoughts, it lets us see a much larger pattern of existence.” - Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, in Extraordinary Knowing
“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.” - E.E. Cummings
*********
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
More Articles
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.