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 and Our Relationship with Emotions, part 1
Geral T. Blanchard • Jun 26, 2022
MDMA is understood as a relational medicine. It cultivates and then nourishes new ways of perceiving, understanding, and integrating relationships.
That includes relationships with people, your past, other animals, elements, the spirit world, your purpose, and your emotions.
Once a strong emotion – perhaps long associated with a crisis or trauma – shows up, we are inclined to allow it to take us captive. We get stuck in its dense and dark energy. We become it. And when that is allowed to happen, say “goodbye” to insight and inspiration. Once in its full grip, we are cut off from the normal flow of life, a flow that wants to take us forward, enlighten us, and evolve us.
If we are flexible and momentarily shrewd, we just might sit with a strong emotion and mindfully wonder, “What might it teach me about myself?” Not teach me something about a damn perpetrator that I’ve always been pissed off with, but, gently, how can it lead me to a greater understanding of myself and my relationship with an ultimately benevolent universe. Can it lead me back to me? Is it like a wakeup call?
So the goal is to momentarily relax into the discomfort, seeing it from a 35,000 foot high perspective, trying to understand how big and menacing it really is as I fly over Nebraska far, far below. At that point in time and space I may recognize emotions are invisible, and how I am being very reactive to invisible things of my own creation. Somebody else simply triggered it after somebody else triggered them, and on and on it goes. Do I want to be swept away in a chain reactions? Who should I blame -- anyone? Where, instead, could I concentrate my focus?
Landing in Oklahoma City (ugh!, more trauma) I am left to respond and not just react. From a heightened level of consciousness I have thrust into the role of observer. From such a posture, it is too small, too convenient, or maybe even too lazy, to cast myself in a story of past victimhood. Ultimately, what I do with life either liberates me or imprisons me in negative emotional states.
So I enter my mind’s machinations – ta-dah! It note how it reactively does its thing, working overtime in an effort to heroically protect me. It does the best it can with its left brain constructs -- a dichotomous black and white, right and wrong, comparative, and judgmental perspective to most everything – all of which creates an emotional ouch. And it can ruminate and obsess for me too. “Please,” I say to ego, “take a break my friend, you’re working way too hard at this.”
The mind is the invisible ego we can’t see; the brain is the physical biocomputer that gets most of the blame, you know, for being “broken” or in some way “damaged” (thank you DSM). Truth is “ouch happens,” but a continuation of suffering is optional; it depends on where we place our focus.
When we formulate a new relationship with our mind -- a creation not always in complete cahoots with the left brain -- freedom from negative emotional impacts is achievable. That new rapport involves pausing and then observing from a self-created distance, like from an elevated platform, or from our seat on the plane.
When we simply notice emotions there is less inclination to wear them and become them. They simply are what they are: fleeting invisible concoctions of our mind and its friend, left brain.
Now, should we choose to be gentler with ourselves and dis-identify from being so vastly different from “others,” the groundwork is laid to be more forgiving of those “others,” in fact, to connect with the Vast Self. That’s a right brain function. From a 35,000 foot perspective, it’s really hard to see “others” in strictly negative and disconnected terms, let alone as big and powerful victimizing monsters, or as a comedian once called them, “reptiles with bad hairdos.”
So the “heavenwork” leads to the groundwork. Maybe that is why Creator (or was it Boeing?) made airplanes, so we could see things more clearly and not have a crash landing after feeling some seemingly outer turbulence. It’s usually not something outer, some external force that is as problematic, as much as it is our inner turmoil, what we are so emotionally attached to – ya know, our old story.
When we are flying across the Atlantic we can’t, in a grumpy or fearful mood, demand that the pilot stop the flight and let us off. I’m a victim; I didn’t ask for a middle seat next to an inebriated talker! The lesson is to sit with the emotion, learn from it, ride it out, and land being a little more enlightened. As author Penache Desai suggests, perhaps each unpleasant (and pleasant) situation carries the potential to enlarge us. Like a strong wind on a stormy day, depending how a pilot wants to work with it, she has two choices: stay grounded and frustrated, or approach the wind head-on and us its energy for uplift.
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“You cannot escape yourself, no matter how hard you try. The only option is to end your resistance [to existence].”
and
“When you oppose someone, it is an energy within yourself that you are opposing. When your 'buttons get pushed,' it is because the buttons are there in the first place.”
- Penache Desai in
You Are Enough
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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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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?”
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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.
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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.
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