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 Wolf Spirit
Geral T. Blanchard • Dec 29, 2021
Some “graduates” of this relational medicine have had meaningful experiences with animals including Dog and Wolf, our second cousins after the other primates.
Our bond with canus lupus goes back, way back. While we have been on the planet for at least 3 – 5 million years, Wolf has been around for about 1 million, 750,000 years on this continent. We became close friends long ago and started living aside each “other.” Then our lifestyle became agricultural and, as a result, humans started isolating from the natural world that once was immediate.
In a fascinating book by Teo Alfero, The Wolf Connection, he contends that the connecting force known as Wolf is part of a collective global awareness and Wolf consciousness remains omnipresent. It is an omniconsciousness. And as one of our closest animal allies, Wolf, remains tightly entwined with us at some level. So, if you have felt coessence with Wolf during or after MDMA treatment, read on.
Wolf tacitly communicated to Teo (a knowing) that some of us are not humans anymore, we are just a self-created identity. The suggestion is we have lost rootedness not only to our complete selves, but to our animal relatives as well. The inward focused energy of individuality has cut us off from some of our original cohorts. Doing technology hasn’t fixed things either, it has only widened the gap between fellow human beings and other animal beings.
A medicine man once said: “If you resist any energy it will chase you.” Yet, if we raise our level of consciousness and shed heavy self-focused energy, our everlasting connection to Wolf (think quantum entanglement) can continue at a more conscious level. Then Wolf can catch up to us and we may rejoin the animal pack world of connectivity. The enlarged consciousness you may have felt during an MDMA treatment hinted at this possibility.
Humans are really into what the can see, touch, manipulate, and possess. The subtle intuitive voices of Nature get quieted even more as we become increasingly tribal, even distancing ourselves from each other while wondering, “Why am I so unhappy.”
Indigenous science speaks to the relatedness to all things, Wolf included.
If we are to thrive as a species, humans must bring forth something other than self-absorption. Humbly mingling with all other creatures is part of the answer.
Tuvans, an indigenous people of Asia, hold the belief that Wolf has a changeable nature and the power to converse with humans without using words; Teo knows that concept well. So, as we become aware of the isolating qualities of ego during a treatment, is it any surprise that you may suddenly and unexpectedly howl like Wolf? Does this suggest a primal knowing of your social roots, a call to/from the pack? The “Call of the Wild?”
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Teo operates an adolescent behavioral treatment program in California where he attempts to connect young people with the spirit of captive (ugh!) Wolf. Despite their mutual legal confinement, Wolf and the kids work well together, they help each other coevolve. In tandem they bring out the best in each “other.”
Ensconced in treatment rituals troubled youth grow in ways they could not have occurred in an L. A. apartment. As author Lynne McTaggart, author of The Bond, taught us, partaking in rituals helps us attach to participants. During rituals, people are disposed to relinquish some of their divorcing boundaries and can be transformed by reawakening interpersonal and interspecies bonds. McTaggart has written, “The world essentially operates, not through the activity of individual things, but in connection with them…in the space between things.”
Teo has repeatedly traveled to Wyoming to commune with Wolf in a wilderness setting. There he met Kira Cassidy, a wildlife biologist with the Yellowstone Wolf Project. They watched Wolf in packs readying themselves for a big collective howl. Kira likens this activity to a ritualistic bonding experience that has been practiced for millennia by tribal hunting or war parties, and in modern days by sport teams (e.g., Timberwolves and Jaguars) and their fans. Together Teo and Kira concluded these howling rituals may be a demonstration that Wolf, and perhaps humans too, have memories that were not directly taught by our living Elders. Instead, this harkening back to group bonding activities is stored in our collective genes; it is a collective memory. And during an MDMA experience, especially one that is preceded by social rituals, a larger consciousness, a sense of ancient ancestral unity, can come alive in us. Our task, thereafter, is to keep this primal energy’s reemergence buzzing thru regular reenactments. Teo was reminded by one of his teachers, Carol Tiggs, to “Never forget that the vast majority of consciousness is nonhuman.” That, she concluded, “is an energetic fact.”
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“Once our true nature is reclaimed and freed, our capabilities can make us truly magical beings, with the power to manifest and achieve anything imaginable. Our creative life force will no longer be at the service of the insecure self-reflection or ego, but in alignment with the cosmic flow of purpose and intent.”
- Teo Alfero in The Wolf Connection
“During the performance of a group ritual, personal fears and doubts are shared as a group, which has a calming effect. Engaging in ritual also has a profound impact on the hormone expression of all participants, which results in physiological, immunological, and behavioral changes. Ultimately, this helps to create cooperative relationships within complex societies.”
- Caitlin O,Connell, Ph.D., in
Wild Rituals: 10 Lessons Animals Can Teach Us about Connection, Community, and Ourselves
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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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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.”
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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.
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