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.
The Himba, Heart Fields, and MDMA
Geral T. Blanchard • December 16, 2021
Indigenous people, with their minds quieted living close to Nature, have noticed subtle energy fields in the atmosphere, especially when humans and animals converge.
For example, the Himba of Namibia have long observed this phenomenon. They describe it like a clear bubble that surrounds each person. It holds and transmits energy. And when one person who is very calm approaches another person who is slightly agitated, the two bubbles can touch, converge as one, and the calm emotion soon pervades the whole. Calm wins out.
The remote Himba, who are constantly outdoors, experience life and its nuances more fully than people closed off in buildings while playing with their electrically charged forms of technology, their modern meaning-making and decision making devices. When you ask Hadza Bushmen of Tanzania – who still reside on the land as gatherers and hunters just like they have done for tens of thousands of years -- where their communication with others comes from, they may point to their heart, whereas a New Yorker may point to their head. It is only from the heart that we can “see” things immediately and correctly. And for Westerners, one way to shut off mind clutter and return to the heart is with MDMA, what is known among its adherents as “heart medicine.” Amazingly, it reintroduces people to inherent primal abilities that, upon their return, feel anciently familiar.
In an MDMA treatment a sacred “love triangle” is formed when professional healers carefully position their bodies, pointing their calm and loving heart energy in the direction of the patient’s upper torso as if forming a triangle. Soon a download of felt information occurs between patient and healers. When it is detected by the patient’s most intuitive organ, the heart, it stills and warms indicating a corrective healing is underway.
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While we know there are three brains inside each human – the intestinal, heart, and cranial – each one is an electrical energy producer connected to the others. What is of special interest is how the heart brain can produce an electromagnetic field that is 5,000 times stronger than the upper brain’s ability, energy that can be detected by sensitive scientific instruments up to 10 feet away. It is strongest within 18 inches which suggests much about the salience of human physical and therefore electrical intimacy, especially during a treatment.
When two energy heart fields come together as one, there are various words used to describe the event. Heart aesthesis, entrainment, and resonance refer to the moments of touch – tactile or energetically – when the soul essence of two people meet and mingle for common good.
Heart entrainment is natural throughout the animal world. To understand its significance among humans, ask any woman who has breastfed her newborn child about the powerful emotional connection that she felt during those moments. Some mothers even report seeing energy fields when the two become one, noting lights and auras. During such tender moments of bonding oxytocin is released, as also happens when MDMA is ingested, what has come to be known as the “heart medicine.”
Approximately 60 percent of heart cells are neural cells, which connect to specific centers of the upper brain (regions involved with emotional memories, sensory experience, and meaningmaking) creating a direct and unmediated flow of information. Yet the heart has a unique mind all of its own. It extends outside the human body. Researchers at HeartMath now believe it even has predictive abilities that can forewarn us of impending dangers. It is the brain of immediate perception, processing information faster than the upper brain can do. The heart is so much more than just a blood pumping organ.
When the heart sends a meaning filled message to the upper brain, it rarely comes in a string of words, but it can be comprehended deeply. That is why I believe many individuals, during MDMA treatments, emphatically say things like, “I know this to be true, a fact, it’s realer than real.”
I refer to this type of event as a knowing in a similar way as the Zuni of the American Southwest have long described intuitive ways of receiving and understanding instructive information from nontraditional sources. They got it; they still get it!
Heart aesthesis moves us from a rational and linear orientation in this rather stunted and mechanized world, to one in which the unique perceptions and emotions are not only noticed but strengthened. This way of perceiving allows us to feel things more intensely and clearly. We can get in touch with the soulfulness of the world that constantly wants to reweave us back into the fabric of life. And with the help of MDMA, often entangled foreign threads of our upper brain are cast off because they were not our way of perceiving life, rather the result of contamination by an abusive figure, maybe an emotional vampire or narcissist.
Under the healing influence of MDMA, when primal forms of seeing and comprehension can occur, it is common to see persons instinctively shaping or adjusting their energy field using their hands, particularly above the heart like they are working with something very malleable. The hands are repeatedly in motion. Sometimes their hands are open and extended upward as if a major energetic download from the universe is occurring. It likely is!
With heart aesthesis a strong unifying dynamism arises. Patients are entwined into the natural tapestry of “all our relations,” or what the Lakota Indians refer to as mitakayue oyasin. There is a blending of soul essences between people, other animals, plants, and even elemental life forces such as water or stone. All living systems work this way; they are alive with spirit and in relationship. They constitute life promoting energy originating from the same divine source, which makes us all, some might say, sacred cosmic twins. This heart driven process unifies humans with the world around them, and this is very important in a world filled with trauma and tribalism.
MDMA seems to help the body and its three brains reorganize themselves, regaining a sense of calm and harmony. And as Navajo and Hopi shamans have long taught, healing only occurs after harmonious connections with the entire world have been restored. When we cultivate this deep and often lasting connection with our heart, and the hearts of those around us, we revitalize the middle brain’s abilities of acute perception and cognition. With it the longstanding atrophy of our senses is slowed and the oldest way of being and understanding the universe and our place in it is accelerated. And with that resultant equilibrium comes peace and healing.
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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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