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 Your "Inner Wyoming"
Geral T. Blanchard • Apr 23, 2023
Sharon Salzberg in her 2023 book, Real Life, wrote about the inner constrictiveness and the lack of openness many people feel, particularly after an abusive or neglectful childhood, or following a hurtful experience at any age.
New Title
She opens with a story of how she went to a Houston restaurant with an acquaintance to order takeout. Her friend, Joseph Goldstein, struck up a conversation with a young man behind the counter as they waited for their food to be prepared. The employee told Joseph, somewhat passionately, how his dream was to one day move to Wyoming. When asked what he thought he would find there, the young man expounded: “Open, expansive space, a feeling of being unconfined, with peacefulness and freedom, and room to breathe.” Joseph responded, “There’s an Inner Wyoming too, you know.” The restaurant worker’s retort was, “That’s freaky,” and abruptly walked away.
Expansiveness is often the result of undergoing an altered state when an expanded consciousness can arise. For trauma patients it is a journey from suffering and oppression to freedom, from humiliation to dignity. It is about examining the burden they have been carrying and finding the freedom to lay it down. And with it comes a greater sense of meaning – what they are about and what they value. This expansiveness leaves room for a fundamentally loving heart to unfurl and steer them forward. Buddhists call it spaciousness.
The opposite of expansiveness and spaciousness is shrinkage. That is the voice of our brain’s default mode network (remember the DMN is our self-flagellating voice that is always heard in the background) which reminds us we are small and unworthy. We accept this voice in the background as true because we are the one saying it even though it is usually inaccurate.
In addition to the DMN, most of us have an inner vision that narrows our focus of attention. What goes on in our skull, our house, or our community can limit spacious thinking. It’s hard to have tunnel vision, however, in the Red Desert of Wyoming where you can see mountains 75 miles away by day and not one yard light at night. Without noise and distractions there is little choice but to go inward for reflection by day and reflect under the Milky Way for hours after sunset. It’s a whole different experience that offers a fresh perspective, experientially teaching us the importance of taking a break from the repetitious limitations of our past and present-day thinking. More than a tiny blue light screen to stare at, there is a vast and enveloping ceiling of stars to gaze into.
An MDMA journey is similar, except you are blindfolded. Nevertheless, your inner eye sees. And you travel by distance and time to faraway places and historical moments where your unfinished business dwells.
Often, what you “see” is not actually perceived in conventional ways and what you “hear” does not always come by way of sound or language. Old distortions and delusions are commonly replaced with mental clarity.
You may also find that your newly adjusted mind state is now viewed like the weather. Sticking with the Wyoming storyline, you can observe a cloudbank forming over Laramie from your vantage point in Cheyenne 50 miles away. You spot the approaching storm, figure out its trajectory, and know how to respond to the ominous threat. Analogously, when social situations trigger emotions of fear and anxiety and are spotted early, we know they too are impermanent and as the oft-used adage reminds us, “This too will pass,” just like a storm.
Joe Hutto of Lander, Wyoming, is a naturalist and lover of wide-open spaces. He is the author of The Light in High Places. In it he wrote: “Most cowboy work is done alone, and so it can be a solitary business – before daylight to after dark – providing endless opportunities for contemplation and introspection. I never met a working cowboy who did not show the inevitable signs of a thoughtful mind.”
And then there is Susan Chernak McElroy from over the mountain in Jackson Hole. In Animals as Guides for the Soul, she shared this: “I’ve learned to listen carefully when my inner buzzer goes off, because it usually means that I’m about to learn something of importance, if I listen closely and keep my mind and heart open.” So it is with MDMA. A person goes inward to the quiet, suspends disbelief, and with a hand on their warm and expanding heart, a knowing arrives. That’s your Inner Wyoming.
**********
“There are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast horizon.”
- Henry David Thoreau
*********
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
More Articles
In recent years psychotherapists have become increasingly aware of the risk of transmitting trauma intergenerationally. By examining the impact of the Holocaust, or the experiences of Native Americans who were systematically abused by colonizers including the Catholic Church, it becomes obvious that indirect passage of depression, despair, anxiety, and damaged self-regard are but a few of the ancestral legacies of uninterrupted abuse. If, however, trauma can be passed from generation to generation without direct experience, could it also be possible for the reverse to happen?
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.”
There are many emotional reactions to a drug-free spiritual awakening experience and a ceremonial MDMA journey. While this article focuses on empathy – both the feeling and the cognitive component – it is obvious to those who have awakened from a spiritual emergency that a variety of related emotions arise.
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.
Many events in life can change us, some in profound ways, others somewhat superficially. Some positively, some negatively. Some temporarily, some permanently. Let’s break it down.
With the “help” of psychology and the diagnoses of PTSD and C-PTSD, an entire trauma industry has developed. Much help has been delivered and, unfortunately, in many instances the assigned labels stick like glue and there can be difficulty relinquishing the newly imposed identity of “breakage.”
Many life events are transformative:
Many great minds have come out of India. Like countless spelling bee champions, Mahatma Gandhi, and Aurobindo Ghose who later took on the name of Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo became a highly regarded spiritual teacher and author in the twentieth century. His main insight was that what many humans experience during altered or higher states of consciousness are glimpses of the future of evolution. And, he contended, one day these states of expansion will be normal for the whole human race.
Countless numbers of people are seeking the unity consciousness that MDMA can offer. It can make them feel bigger. And more deeply connected and powerful. Like many billions of tiny ants inching a fourteen-wheeler up a hill, every tiny bit of effort pulls the big rig along. Similarly, each one of the eight billion or so people residing on our planet today may, via a combined assemblage of singular efforts, raise their individual consciousness, while tugging the entire race forward.
“Where did all the time go?” That is the ubiquitous question every patient asks after a treatment. They ingest the medicine at 9 a.m. and, after what seems like perhaps an hour or so but was actually five or six, and once the eye mask comes off there is bewilderment as to just how much time has passed. Of course, this is all built on the bedrock notion in Western culture that time is a straight line and linear manifestation. And that there is such a thing as time! Stepping out of existing paradigms, even if for a brief “time” can be eye opening while your eyes are closed.
Traditional Native American cultures have long believed that time is a circular phenomenon. Remotely like the movie Groundhog Day suggests, every day is very similar and reoccurring like the last. In indigenous worldviews, the sun rises and the sun sets, routinely; we always have a predictable reset of sorts, the start of what we call a “new day,” or what Arapahos called “sleeps,” both reflecting measurements of time.
Dark nights of the soul as Saint John of the Cross called those long, despairing periods of our life, are never easy, in fact they are usually dreadful. They are so necessarily awful and so damn long because some of us don’t do subtlety very well. If we are open to these moments, even a tiny bit, they can serve as an internally calculated and blaring wakeup call that will guide us to solace.
John Nelson, in Healing the Split, refers to a fleeting or ephemeral sense of a higher purpose, not fully conceptualized, but compellingly near the heart. It holds answers to life’s pain but isn’t quite within our grasp…at least until the dark clouds engulf us. Then, with great staying power and inexperience matched with trust, a spiritual emergence nears surface awareness. And it always happens, as psychiatrist Stan Groff defined it, around the time of a blurry spiritual emergency.