From Trauma to Empowerment- the transformative power of MDMA assisted Psychotherapy.
Hello everyone, thank you so much for coming to my talk titled From Trauma to Empowerment- the Transformative Power of MDMA assisted Psychotherapy. It is so comforting to look around and see all of these people who I love so much, and who have supported me on this rocky journey for the past 3 years.
To tell you the truth- the past week has been hell- my mind was torturing me, I chewed off all my nails and I spent all of last week tying myself in knots, feeling the tensions in my body, the thoughts of not reading enough, not being prepared enough, the old familiar story that I am bad, unlovable, something is wrong with me. And you know what I did on Thursday? I went to a DSO show, and I took some MDMA. And you know what it did for me? It helped me drop my self- debilitating story in my mind, It allowed me to drop into my body, into this moment, and it allowed me to dance, move my body, shake off the tensions, and remember that everything I need for this presentation is already inside of me. This is the story of my true, raw, messy experience, and the medicines that have shaped my path along the way.
The truth is that I am a medicine woman. I always have been, and I always will be. Psychedelic and empathogenic (MDMA) medicines have had a tremendous impact on my path towards healing. These medicines allow me to tap into a part of myself that I don’t always have access to. And I don’t have any shame around that. Had I never done psilocybin I would still be an alcoholic to this day. Had I never done LSD I would still be angry at my father and the pain he has caused me. Had I never done MDMA I would still be living in my head, with no awareness or connection with my body and emotions.
What these medicines have done for me is given be a larger perspective to view my pain. I am able to see the emotional baggage I have carried and the meanings I have attached to my pains. And most importantly, they have enabled me to gently release and heal these pains and traumas and understand them in a greater context. What these medicines have done for thousands of years in indigenous cultures is to connect humanity with spirit. As Gabor Mate states, humanity has severed our connection with spirit, and this is the main cause of the current suffering in the world.
Breathe… Just allow yourself to be. Be in this moment. Exactly as you are, allowing it to be exactly as it is. Feel yourself drop into the flow, the natural flow of your life where you surrender, open to each experience anew without resisting or denying what is. Accepting that both pleasurable and painful experiences are a part of life. The meaning is to discover your unique truth within your heart. The truth is that we are all here with a very particular, a very specific purpose, mission, and gift for the world. In fact no one can ever replace us. We are all very unique. Our lives unfold in the ways they do in order to pave the way for us to learn the lessons and come into our highest version of ourselves. We can resist it, try to control the outcome, and stress ourselves out until we shut down because of the way we want things to go, our expectations of the ways we have been told we should want to live. In reality most of us are so disconnected from our intuitive, heart callings and body messages that we are living completely in our heads. The brain driving our body. We wonder why we have such a sick society.
We come into the world perfect and whole, with our potential completely unrealized, and to the extent to which our external environment doesn’t support our expression we begin to shut down. What happens is that as we are young, we feel things in our bodies, we act on them very naturally, and some things get shut down by our parents and care givers. Mostly things that our human created culture has deemed taboo. Things like being mean, anger, depression, sexuality, sadness. So what happens is our bodies continue to experience these very natural, human sensations, but we have received the message that we will not receive love if we are having certain experiences. What this does is makes us fear connection, from a very young age. We fear being exposed and seen for who we truly are. We are all trying to hide behind our masks when in reality we are all struggling from very similar, human emotions.
As I began to do research on this I came across the term, emotional neglect. We are all familiar with emotional abuse- deliberate threatening, shaming, humiliating, exploiting, isolating. Emotional neglect is the trauma that is created from what is not done, can go hand in hand with emotional abuse. Looking back nothing is particularly traumatic, everything was relatively peaceful, and parents have low tolerance for negative emotions and conflict. Emotional neglect is not what you see, its what you don’t see. – encouragement that didn’t happen, the comforting that wasn’t given. Loving support that wasn’t offered. Loving words that were not said. The sense of belonging that was never granted. You cant see what isn’t there, you cant remember what isn’t there. Until you see what could’ve been there, you don’t even know whats missing. Affects our ability to be authentic and intimate. Intimacy- not about sex, about seeing another person, feeling them, really listening and hearing them, understanding them. Touching the internal world. Allowing others to touch our internal world. Allowing others to feel us, see us, being understood, being heard.
This is how the brain gets programmed with a self destructive virus, and it continues as we grow up. Like a parasite, like a virus in our brain. We feed it because our culture feeds it. We create this ego, this persona of who we believe the world wants us to be and all the while our soul cries inside and is begging us to check into our hearts and bodies, crying for true, intimate, authentic experession.
If this is our “normal” baseline functioning in this society, imagine if you endured some kind of trauma as a child- abuse, neglect, sexual trauma, abandonment.. or several of the like. Now you don’t feel safe in the world. The childs body is being constantly flooded with stress hormones adrenalin and cortisol permanently altering the internal homeostasis. The child has an inability to relax and is stressed constantly. When this person grows up and tries a drug that offers them that soothing for the first time in their lives, of course they are going to go back and use it. People have a natural craving to feel high, meaningful. . As the child grows up they have a permanently high level of cortisol and low levels of endorphines. Cortisol damages the midbrain dopamine system, excess cortisol shrinks important brain centers such as the hippocampus- important for memory and the processing of emotions. This makes it difficult for us to soothe ourselves because if our parents couldn’t soothe themselves or us, we never had that circuitry develop in the brain. As an infant we have no capability to soothe themselves, we rely completely on our parents to regulate our nervous system. If our parent was stressed or addicted, or simply not present, our infant bodies are constantly having a stress response. We don’t know what soothing feels like but we know this distress doesn’t feel right either. We live our lives in constant search for soothing. As the child grows up to be an adult they have a permanent decrease in oxitocin- one of our love chemicals that is responsible for our experience of loving attachments, comfort in being social and maintaining committed relationships. Basically what this looks like is a person who is constantly living in fear, they are hypervigilant. They may have PTSD symptoms, they feel depressed, anxious, tense. The ass is tight, we don’t trust anyone in the world because everyone will hurt us. This beliefs attracts more pain into our lives and confirms our victim mentality. We aren’t grounded in the base chakra and we continue to manifest this abuse pattern in our lives. In Gabor Mate’s book realm of Hungry Ghosts he reports that nearly 100% of his heavily addicted patients went through some kind of severe trauma or abuse as children.
I am a survivor of abuse, and I learned from a very young age that my body was not a safe place and my emotions shouldn’t be trusted. When I got to college I couldn’t understand why I was in love with men who treated me terribly. We abused each other, and I drank myself into oblivion. I couldn’t consciously comprehend why I was repeating the same patterns that I hated in my father. I struggled with addiction, and I had been depressed since childhood. I found a therapist and began seeking help. I told my story a million times and learned so much about myself. Simultaneously I was doing yoga and meditating. I was feeling better on some level, but on another I would still completely spiral and lose my ground frequently. I was angry as hell and I was waking up depressed and hating being awake and alive. I was so frustrated because I was doing all this work on myself, developing self awareness, but I still felt so crappy and wanted to be alone most of the time. When I began at Naropa I would have huge, blissful openings, followed by terrifyingly low contractions into new depths of despair. With a somatic therapist I was able to allow my body to move and process some of my trauma, leaving me wrecked for days after sessions. Shifting my belief structures and values, discovering my needs and interests. Empowering my voice and body. But still waking up depressed.
This year I began receiving my own MDMA assisted therapy. It was unlike any kind of therapy I had ever gotten before. It did nothing more than to show me what I have already had all these years and what I have been trying to suppress and shut down. We are all perfect we are just covered with at least a hundred lenses imposed on us by the mainstream. Its absurd! Everyone is unique. There is no such thing as normal! This beautiful gift that is who I am is this way because it is the natural way to fulfill my purpose on the earth. These aspects I have hated about myself- being very emotional, and over the top are actually my greatest assets because as I express my vulnerable humanness to you, you feel better about your own weird humanness. The therapy involves some talking certainly, and it is massage, and movement, and voice work as well. All of the ways in which I block myself from connection become very apparent. My first session brought up all of my trust issues, I wasn’t sure if I was safe, if my boundaries would be crossed, if my therapist was going to take advantage of me. I expressed all of these concerns openly and he met me with total, unconditional Love. What I discovered in these sessions is to live life is to surrender and be in it. We remember that thinking about our life takes us out of the experience of it. We can very clearly see when we are thinking and when we are being. The medicine makes this very clear to us. When we allow ourselves to surrender to this body, this life, we feel like we are coming home to an old forgotten friend. Somewhere along the way we were taught to think through life rather than live it.. As we practice being mindful and aware we realize that we actually have a choice in every single thing we do and thought we think. In fact the ways in which we express are very powerful, especially when we are moving from the heart, with love. As we listen to our intuition and body again- dreams that we didn’t even know we had begin to be manifested through us. We stop clinging to our created story and manifested controlled reality in which we have full control of the outcome and we surrender and allow all of it to dissolve and experience life as it is right now- constantly changing. We are left as a vessel for love, for emotion, for words and movement to flow through, in exactly the authentic way that they are meant to flow through your unique body and spirit. In the beautiful manifestation that you are as a human being on planet earth. With all your unique quirks and weirdnesses. Truly we need to let go of all the ways we are limiting ourselves. Look at the ways you judge others, put up the mirror and bravely examine how you reject that part of yourself. Projecting it on someone else is an easy way to blame our problems on exterior sources. MDMA helps with this clear seeing and owning of our fragmented parts. You become present in yourself, hyper aware of any incongruence between your heart and mind, simultaneously your body is being worked and you are screaming in pain. Through working my hips I discovered how much we are shut down in our base and sexual energy centers. No wonder depression and anxiety runs so rampant- we are shut off from the strongest, most powerful life- force energy in our bodies. The earth is begging us to feel the calls of our bodies, our passions, our true callings, the messages of the heart.
Mdma floods our bodies with oxitocin, serotonin, other chemicals that help us reprogram attachment in our brain, feel relaxed and loved, safe in our bodies with our minds. We find a softness, compassion, appreciation for our bodies and the sacred temple that they are. We discover the power of every thought we think, everything we put our energy towards and everything we don’t put our energy towards. If we are working with a secure, congruent figure our traumas with attachment are gently and permanently transformed. MDMA allows people to trust a fellow human more easily, they surrender to their bodies process without judging themselves, and if they do the therapist is there to reflect unconditional love and explore whatever arises. In this space of a grounded nervous system the client can re-attach to themselves, learn how to regulate their nervous systems, and re-wire the neural pathways to allow the body to remember the feeling of love, relaxation, ecstasy. With that comes a self- compassion, seeing your story from a bigger perspective, understanding how your challenges have brought you the exact growth you need. Encouraging the body to move in whatever authentic way, modeling vocal expression, allowing for sounds that are not socially acceptable. Massaging the areas where they are clearly stuck, often people are stuck at the jaw, holding tensions, unstated resentments, anger, all in the jaw. The shoulders and hips are places of a lot of stored repressed emotions and beliefs as well. They have awareness in the moment of the thought they are thinking and not saying, and the corresponding jaw tension that is made conscious on mdma. You encourage them to express it and have unconditional acceptance of it, no matter how embarrassed they may feel about what comes up.
People come out of it feeling at home in their bodies for the first time in years, for expressing and sharing themselves authentically, they feel lighter. My personal experience is feeling of safety, a comfort in being alive, a relaxation in being exactly where I am, as I am, without needing to control the outcome and every way I am perceived. Allowing authenticity Without any need to change it. It gave me a permission to express my out there, weird self, with all my flapping and noises and energetic bursts along with emotional cycles and deep despair. What shows me that true, lasting healing has happened is that I don’t wake up depressed every day anymore. There is a lot of mystery in the process of an MDMA session, I cant say I entirely understand what happens, but I definitely know I am feeling better about life. I wake up excited for the day, and full of love to share with the world. I am able to embody myself because what I discovered through MDMA therapy is an infinite well of unconditional love. We become reconnected with the intimacy that we lost so long ago, we develop a healthy relationship with our shadow and rejected parts, we tap into a deep, cosmic trust. This medicine blows open our heart and there is no going back. Once we begin to love ourselves and move towards our highest version there is no going back to the contracted and fear driven self. The old patterns certainly resurface, and we examine them and learn from them, but we no longer victimize ourselves or blame others for them. Our awareness expands to include all aspects of ourselves, and we slowly re-integrate our rejected pieces. The medicine work offers you a compassion and love for yourself that you have always had but forgotten. It allows you to be as you are in every moment, even when it seems irrational. You develop an awareness that learns to be curious, that knows that whatever is happening is all a clue back to something that needs some healing and attention. If we are going against our greatest passion we suffer. We cant live anyone else’s prescribed life. We all live life in our own unique way and Mdma assisted therapy helps you find that heart truth and build your life in alignment with it. Through the experience of unconditional love, the felt experience of being accepted as you are- your neurons change, your brain becomes re wired, the neural pathways that weren’t developed in childhood begin to grow . A wise friend once told me that human beings are either driven by fear or by love. I find this to be true. We come into this world of fear as pure love and it is conditioned out of us. We must reconnect with our humanness again, we must inhabit our bodies and manifest miracles through them. We are infinitely powerful, we just have to remember the fact.
What if I told you that I don’t actually heal anyone? You don’t actually heal anyone. We all heal ourselves, and as a result we heal each other because we are not separate, we are all one. We have a natural tendency to heal ourselves. We have bought into the illusion of separation, ego, competition, but it is not our essential nature and state of being. We are all consciousness and consciousness is all Love, and that is a fact. Some where along the line, humans bought into the illusion that we are “bad” and need to be punished for our “bad deeds.” But in the eyes of the consciousness which is unconditional love we are all instantly forgiven for anything we may do. In the eyes of the consciousness you are simply expanding the experience of life. Consciousness doesn’t see good or bad, pain or pleasure as separate. We come into a tortured world, we torture ourselves, society is pushing the illusion onto us from all directions. But the simple truth is that we need to forgive ourselves. No one is keeping a bank of all the pain you have caused, that simply doesn’t exist. You are instantly forgiven. You can drop you baggage as soon as you want to. Forgive yourself. As you forgive yourself you shift your consciousness from one of pain and fear, and into one of unconditional love and forgiveness. When we forgive ourselves, stop punishing ourselves with pain, and choose to love- a light turns on in our soul. That light paves the way for others to find love in themselves, in whatever unique way that journey goes for them. We don’t control anything. We cant control how their journey goes, we don’t control how our journey goes. Attachment is pain and suffering. Our attachment to the way we “want” things to go, while inside everything in you is screaming for something else. What if we listened to those gut feelings rather than trying to convince ourselves why those gut feelings are wrong?
MDMA gives people a second chance, a chance to alter their maladaptive brain chemistry. How can we not offer this as a legal treatment? Isnt it our ethical resposnsibiity to treat our patients with the most effective methods available. People report feeling like they have gotten more out of 3 MDMA sessions than 40 YEARS of talks therapy! The study in boulder is finding 86% recovery from PTSD with 3 MDMA sessions. 86% recovery!!! The three year follow up of the North Carolina study has found that 83% of the participants are still recovered from PTSD 3 years later! When there are 22 veterans committing suicide each day, children silently suffering in domestic abuse circumstances. Twenty-three million Americans are currently addicted to alcohol and/or other drugs. Only one in 10 of them (2.6 million) receives the treatment they need. Endless people are taking dozens of psychotropic prescription meds with almost no relief. People everywhere trying to relieve their pain from unconscious childhood patterns. It is time for the mental health system of this country to evolve and serve the greatest good of the suffering population. It is time we stood up and spoke for these life- altering treatment options.
I believe all human beings deserve a second chance, to become empowered, to take their lives back, to get the healing they need and deserve. All humans want to feel good, we want to feel loved. All of our symptoms are our seeking for relief from pain. We live in an individualistic patriarchy, where we are all competing against each other in isolation. The world out there is driven by fear, greed, jealousy, arrogance. Humans have an instinctual drive to feel pleasure and ecstasy. Feel how it feels to be living the life you are living. If it feels good to you then you are on the right path. If you are feeling anxious or depressed, look carefully at what you are trying to push away about yourself, what doesn’t feel good? It is way easier to allow ourselves to flow and be as we are. Maybe as more of us surrender, and allow ourselves to feel we can break these trans generational patterns of disconnection from spirit, from our bodies, from our emotions and from our pain. And maybe, we humans will evolve into our highest version of unconditional Love and nurturance for ourselves and all living beings on earth. And maybe, just maybe Humanity has a chance to live in peace and harmony, with respect and love for one another and our earth mother.
Naropa University Final Thesis Presentation
Access the full video of this presentation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9U1UE_uOl24
