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: Wham, Bam, Shazam, or Nothing Much?
Geral T. Blanchard • December 27, 2022
With so many anecdotes about the dramatic experiences folks have had with entheogens and psychedelics, a person may struggle when the impact of MDMA is, for the most part, subtle or under the radar.
Does this mean it wasn’t working on/in my brain? Why wasn’t my experience more like Timothy Leary’s or the Beatle’s – Lucy in the sky with diamonds? Did I not prepare myself well enough?
Some people lay quietly for hours in a deep calm state detecting little of what may be transpiring. Being without a racing brain (a default state of anxiety) feels alien and discombobulating (a neuroscience term). And, sometimes, that can be unsettling, even frightening. When quieting occurs it can be confused with “nothing’s happening.” Quite the opposite is usually the case. Any shift in the brain state from flying with eagles, talking with a deceased ancestor, or to quietude – whether subtle or resounding -- represent change. And change is what is being sought, moving out of stuck.
I’ve noted a few patterns among patients. Those who have really relied on their left-brain to handle life’s challenges – the scientific, non-fiction types like myself – may have difficulty exiting this mode. It has been so reliably available and seemingly protective, albeit not always comforting, that to allow it to shut off is difficult and even uncomfortable, at least at first. We may be reluctant to let our guard down and see where the medicine takes us. To go to the unaccustomed place of tranquility can be disconcerting, experienced like a negative reaction to the drug.
Others may feel like they are a failure or a loser because they didn’t fly to Jupiter and back during their treatment. Or they may be discouraged that they didn’t shapeshift into a leopard. It is as if they feel inadequate because their experience wasn’t as exotic as another person’s – oh the risk of comparing.
Still others – especially those persons with rich fantasy or dream lives – seem to have a different reaction to MDMA. They see symbols (vs. facts) that guide them to unusual sites, scenes, destinations, and conclusions that seem to hold answers. While this may seem silly to a very no-nonsense grounded person, it can be awesome and spiritually uplifting for the person with more of an otherworldy makeup.
Neurogenesis can begin with a blare, or it can start subtly. It really doesn’t matter in the long run as brain alterations are most assuredly happening under the radar.
Without the wham, bam, shazam of an LSD or DMT experience, you may feel disappointed…at first. Don’t let that discourage you from continuing your psychotherapy. Therapy, during and after treatments, is routinely found to be more insightful, fruitful, and rewarding than before MDMA. This should be heartening as it is proof that YOU, not just a magic medicine, can “do the trick.”
Remember the words of Buddhist author, Jack Kornfield who said, “After enlightenment, do the laundry.” The goal is not to spend every day floating among the stars, but resolving day to day issues and annoyances.
Some of the ways I have observed patient growth comes in the way they describe their new life. They say things like:
- I seem to be more of an observer of my life, not just a reactor to people and circumstances.
- I’m more resilient and bounce back faster following disappointments.
- It’s easier to see the “story behind the story” in people’s lives – the context or threads of their life narrative.
- I took a day off from doing. I took a long, long nap and didn’t feel guilty or unproductive; I felt like my brain and the rest of my body deserved a healing break.
- I multi-task less and can sit still with improved focus.
- I’m dreaming more, or differently. The themes are shifting.
- More time is being spent in Nature, noticing with awe and wonder all the beauty surrounding me that, in the past, I missed. I literally stop and smell the roses, noting the sunsets.
- I feel healthier, fall asleep easier, and have fewer stress headaches.
- I seem to be kinder and more understanding of people in my life; they tell me so. I’m more poised and steady too.
- I’m not so inclined to hurry on to the next thing, place, or event. Much like during my treatments I can sit with things -- savor and marinate in them.
- I’m loving people better, playing a lot more.
- Recently I’ve been painting and dancing more, reading less.
- Then there are the observations of anthropologist Mircea Eliade who studied ecstatic transcendent experiences in indigenous societies. He wrote about those persons who come to an “understanding of their wings”:
“We know that among peoples the soul is conceived of as a bird. Magical flight assumes the value of an ‘escape from the body’ – that is, it translates to ecstasy, the liberation of the soul, into plastic [flexible] terms. But while the majority of human beings are changed into birds only at the moment of death, when they forsake their bodies and fly into the air, shamans, sorcerers, and ecstatics…realize ‘emergence from the body’ in this world and as often as they wish. This myth of the bird-soul contains in germ a whole metaphysics of man’s spiritual autonomy and freedom.”
Look up for Raven, Eagle, Owl, and Butterfly.
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For some, life starts to resemble the words of Izumi Shikidu:
As I am deep in thoughts of love
A firefly floats up above the stream
Is it my soul lured out of me, yearning?
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Then there are Muhammad’ words: “If I had only two loaves of bread, I would barter one for hyacinths to nourish my Soul.”
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The end result of the MDMA journey is not always how it started. Whether it starts as pensive, reflective, or convulsively powerful, the destination is almost always the same – loving peacefulness.
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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
Awakening the Healing Soul: Indigenous Wisdom for Today’s World
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Transcending Trauma
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Ancient Ethics for Today’s Healers
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Ancient Ways: Indigenous Healing Innovations for the 21st Century
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The Difficult Connection: The Therapeutic Relationship in Sex Offender Treatment
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Sexual Abuse in America
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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.