Prepare, Then Integrate and Retool Yourself

Psychedelics challenge us, enchant us, and open us to new worlds of healing and joy. And then there’s the other side, where they may terrify us, leave us adrift between two worlds, or just plain disappoint us. A psychedelic is not a medication like Aspirin or an antibiotic, with a predictable dose-dependent effect, but a medicine for the soul, where have experiences and then absorb them afterwards, rendering new sense, new meaning and new perspectives in your life. But a lot of that work is up to you.

In the time after the medicine your brain enters a ‘critical period’ of flexibility where for a matter of days, up to months, it temporarily regains the pliability of youth. During this window period, you have a chance to install the beliefs and values you really believe in, rather than the annoying ones that linger as bad habits of the mind. So for instance, you might want to trust people more — or at least give them a fighting chance of being let in — and after the medicine is an opportunity to have a conversation with the side of you that clenches up and closes down, where you can coax it to wake up to today’s realities rather than compulsively say no to everything. If you are seeing the world through a darkened lens, after the medicine is when you can clean the gunk off your psychological glasses and respond to the world with more wisdom and judgement — a state of spiritually informed realism.

So, there is much to do after we take the medicine, but our culture is not well grounded in that work; we either turn it into a medical enterprise or borrow wholesale from indigenous cultures that have totally different meaning systems to our own. Psychedelics wake us up to the soul’s journey, what C.G. Jung called the process of individuation, and what spiritual, philosophical and artistic traditions have been engaged in since time immemorial.  This exploration of our being brings us to new perspectives that get at our sense of purpose in this world, something beyond the checklists and diagnoses that are the stuff of mental health repair. It’s a mystical experience in a material world.

I am a psychotherapist, and I’ve been working with psychedelics since 2003, long before the current Psychedelic Renaissance made them such a trend. I can work with you in preparing for your journey and setting an intention, or at least having an idea of what you would like to have happen for yourself. And afterwards we can integrate the experience using holistic psychotherapy that mimics, or even reawakens the experience itself, as you go inside yourself, explore your remaining barriers to change, and help install new beliefs and attitudes that, moving forward, will become part of who you are.

Here’s What We Can Do:         

• ·       If you are just exploring the idea of a psychedelic, weigh the pros and cons of whether or not it’s something for you

  ·      Join the Disintegration Psychedelic Support Group (Tuesday nights at 7:00 Eastern Time, $30)

• Help prepare for a psychedelic experience

  ·       Process it afterwards and install new habits and attitudes, perhaps even a new way of life

• ·       If you had a difficult journey, help bring you back to earth and reground

• And if you wish, we can go into long-term holistic psychotherapy beyond the term of the medicine