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: Healer and Attendant Roles
Geral T. Blanchard • Nov 30, 2021
How healers engage with actively involved patients (healing partners) during an MDMA treatment
The starting point is to understand the difference between curing and healing. From the Latin, curing means to remedy, or get rid of an ailment. Healing, coming from the Anglo-Saxon word haelen – to make whole – and can be defined as restoring health or returning a person to harmony, much like Navajo shamans do in sacred ceremony. Healing is remembered wellness. Curing can be heavily laden with impersonal techniques whereas healing implies caring about someone, suggesting a level of compassionate concern or loving presence that is held within ethical parameters. Healers surround the healing partner with intentions oriented to the needs of their greatest good.
One of my earliest mentors, psychiatrist Jonas Robitscher, wrote: “Good therapy is an engagement of two people that leaves both changed; if only one changes therapy has been a failure.” That too is one of the core principles guiding MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, particularly when embedded in an indigenous inspired ceremony. What happens between the healers and the healing partner constitutes an ecosystem of sorts with energy transfer that heals all involved.
This approach implies healers must be in touch with their inner spirit, the soul. Being calm, centered, and remaining humble in the knowledge that while this subtle-energy field plays a vital role in the change process, it is the universal healing field, potentiated by three people working together that amplifies the vibratory, and therefore, the healing intensity. The healers create scaffolding, an exoskeleton of borrowed strength that the patient absorbs, finding it supportive and uplifting.
Centering begins with a focus on the heart, the intuitive middle brain. When the patient, therapist, and attendant are all in synchrony with heartfelt loving intentions a resonance, cross-connection, or communion is established. Three people in sync are the equivalent of at least six people in the room elevating each other to a new level of consciousness and health. Resonance is built into our DNA and the easiest way to access it is through the heart chakra. This energy vortex is thought to be connected to Mother Earth’s pulse. And this bodily region seems to translate feelings, attitudes, and beliefs into electrical waves (vibrations). natural reaction to this entrainment process results in the patient (and the healers) bouncing back to a more still place of harmony, balance, and integration.
In this regard, mathematician Arthur Eddington challenged our thinking by positing: “We used to think that if we knew one, we knew two, because one and one are two. We are finding that we must learn a great deal more about and.”
Healers seek sentience, that is, we feel our way into the patient’s condition using intuition and knowings -- not perceiving solely with the mind but from a multisensory state. This involves detecting, like radar, subtle non-languaged cues and knowledge from the healing partner’s vital-energy field. This inherited native language allows for a profound understanding, melding together shared insights deep within all of us. When the psychotherapist and attendant are very serene and unruffled, like in a mild but alert trance, no matter what comes up there is an “effortless effort” that allows them to acquire a transpersonal connection. In other words, they go beyond the limits of just one person’s identity. This profound deep process requires the patient’s trust and have the willingness to engage themselves in their own healing process – awakening their inner healer while in intimate tandem with compassionate caregivers.
"The research community and indigenous communities agree that a guide who has never experienced a psychedelic will lack the ability to understand, empathize, or have rapport with participants.”
~ Mark Haden in Manual for Psychedelic Guides
Using quantum physics terminology, one might see this as entanglement, and not just between three people during an MDMA treatment, but as part of an information field so vast and interconnected it is difficult to conceptualize. During a 2015 NPR interview, a physicist by the name of Adam Frank, clarified: “Right now, at this very moment, you are submerged in an invisible sea of information. Thoughts, ideas, ambitions, and instructions—they are whispering past and through you on waves of modulated electromagnetic energy. From wireless internet to satellite TV you are bathed in an endless stream of purposeful intentional signals. And it’s not just you. From Earth’s surface out to geosynchronous orbit, 22,000 miles overhead, the whole planet glows with information made manifest in light – actual light, as in radio waves, microwaves, and so on. But does all that mean Earth is thinking? Does that mean it’s awake? Maybe it’s time to consider the noosphere*.”
*********
Manual for Psychedelic Guides by Mark Hayden
A Healer’s Journey to Intuitive Knowing by Dolores Krieger
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.