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 Ceremony and Ritual: What's that all about?
Geral T. Blanchard • Jan 19, 2022
In FDA clinical trials, the medicine is often administered in a slightly mechanical fashion. The approach is very similar, patient to patient.
But always you will don an eye mask, put head phones on, and an attendant will sit next to you and offer a comforting hand, after which you swallow a capsule of 125 mg pure, research grade MDMA.
When an indigenous-influenced approach is used (some call it shamanic) there is more pomp, pageantry, theatre, and solemnity over the entire day of ceremony. Within the over-arching ceremony some highly stylized activities occur, what we call rituals.
The ceremony suggests this is not an average day, not a normal event. The rituals, which are often traditional or even ancient in nature, are like guideposts that lead and transport you along a well-traveled path. Ceremony implies what is happening is a “big deal.” Rituals provide the “how to” part of the change process. Together they marry to manifest a sacredness, a sacrality, to what is occurring. Ceremony and ritual create a protective shell, or an exoskeleton, that safely carries you through what otherwise could be imagined as a foreboding healing process.
So, it can be concluded that clinical settings offer safety and professionalism. Indigenous ceremonies and rituals are similar, but they are embedded in age-old processes and are far more personalized. And Indigenous-based approaches are experiential, patients help develop and implement large parts of the treatment’s style, spirit, and organization adding individual meaning to the event (ceremony) and to the activities in them (rituals). In other words, with patient participation, there is more “buy-in” and, therefore, a greater chance of the desired outcome. Along with the therapist they become choreographers and carpenters of rituals. Instead of someone else being totally responsible for the outcome of treatment, personal involvement boils down to designing their self-care program. And this is very important, especially after trauma when things were done to you, not for you, not with you. Now you are empowered to care for yourself.
Rituals that include vigorous activity – drumming, singing, dancing, shaking, howling – can dislodge long held body tension and localized cellular memories. This is quite different than just walking into a clinic and laying down. Physical activities play a large part in setting change in motion; passivity does not.
This nugget is worth remembering:
How a treatment is administered -- in other words, how a healing ritual is constructed and conducted – is far more important than the capsule that is swallowed. When you add meaning to the over-arching ceremony, you are on your way.
In one of my earlier works, Ancient Ways: Indigenous Healing Innovations for the 21st Century, I developed a long laundry list of benefits that rituals add to any healing endeavor, a few of which follow: They…
- invite participation
- stress the importance of the event by adding a sense of the sacred
- move us from the ordinary to what is really salient
- diminish uncertainty in fearful times
- bring order to chaotic times
- add trust to what is unfolding
- foster entry into altered states
- chart a proven course to take
- add something experiential to prior words and language
- set the stage for the mysterious and the magical
- potentiate the power of the medicine
- legitimize the ceremony
- help to momentarily suspend disbelief by trusting an established procedure.
Examples of rituals within, or after, an MDMA healing ceremony can include:
- fire rituals
- cleansing baths -- chocolate, floral, herbal, etc.
- invoking, or calling in the ancestors (of all types)
- smudging with incense or plants
- reciprocity rituals, giving to Pachamama before receiving
- chanting and dancing
- prayer, poetry, or readings
- greeting the Seven Directions
- arranging an altar
- feasting in community
If we go beyond the medicinal, and into the numinous and spiritual, ancient healers have noted how additional dimensions open up and significant change occurs.
**********
James Roose-Evans, in Passages of the Soul, wrote: “A true ritual will always take one beyond and deeper than words, for words are but symbols of a deeper reality.”
“For the Dagara [West African tribe], ritual is, above all else, the yardstick by which people measure their state of connection with the hidden ancestral realm, with which the entire community is genetically connected.”
- Malidoma Some'
*********
Additional Reading:
Ritual: Power, Healing, and Community by Malidoma Some'
Wild Rituals: 10 Lessons Animals Teach Us about Connection, Community, and Ourselves by Caitlin O’Connel, Ph.D.
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.