In Beige we look inside ourselves for our truth. In Purple we start to let the truth of others in as well. Just about all of my major work has happened in a group process like HAI. And HAI workshops revolve around group shares. People stand up in front of the group (usually stark naked) and are lovingly encouraged to share from the most vulnerable, authentic place they can find within themselves. Quite often people are inspired to stand up after having a breakthrough during one of the exercises. Or maybe they are moved to share their most painful secret. There is something incredibly beautiful about sharing your deepest, naked Truth in front of a circle of sacred witnesses. A circle that holds all of you in love. This group support helped me to get to my deeper places. Helped me get clearer about what was really going on for me. When I stood up sometimes it was like something was speaking through me. Afterwards I would sit down and run through what I just said because it was what I most needed to hear.
Getting to the truth of the matter can be hard and scary. We tend to resist. We conspire within ourselves to not know. And there are good reasons! This work if done incorrectly is not safe. Unless we can be compassionate and non-violent with all that we discover it actually might be a good idea to not let ourselves consciously know. But that conspiracy blocks the healing that needs to happen. This is not something we can fix ourselves. We need help. Medicine Guides start with MDMA because it calms the hyper vigilant amygdala that is protecting us. It allows traumatic memories to surface. The ones that have been too hard to deal with up to now. Trauma memories are different than normal memories in that they get “stuck”. People relive their war incident or car accident as if it had happened just a moment ago. Now they get the opportunity to work through these memories with their therapist and convert them to more normal memories. Trauma never goes away, but you can shift and transform it to a healthier place. And even if you don’t have full on trauma, almost all of us have places of such deep shame or anguish that we can’t stand to go there. The key thing is that this work needs to be done with a therapist, and ideally group support as well. Just taking molly at a rave is not going to do it.
Even if you don’t have full on trauma, to do the deeper healing work you must first form an unusually deep bond with your therapist (and/or group). MDMA helps with that as well. Besides calming the amygdala, MDMA also turns up oxytocin, the love hormone, to open our hearts wide enough to be fully compassionate with ourselves. It lets us view our past mistakes with more forgiveness then we maybe normally muster. And it lets us form an unusually trusting bond with our guide. We need that bond because the next part of the journey can be weird and very hard. We need a guide to help us safely get there.
Plant (eg. mushrooms, san pedro, ayahuasca) medicine trips are all about getting to the deeper Truth of the matter. Sometimes we need to really open ourselves to the universe in a really vulnerable way before we can get to the heart of it. Find out what is really going on with us. And when we finally get there we can no longer stay in that old story that is not serving. We no longer can pretend we are asleep and not aware. Plant medicine is especially good for that. The trick is to find a way to make it safe. We can really hurt ourselves if we are not careful. And that is where the therapist (and/or group) come in. They provide the container of love. They are the ones reminding you that you are loved if you wander too far away.
At Findhorn I did a week long workshop that taught us a very powerful way of thinking — that what you don’t like in others is what you don’t like in yourself. It works the other way too; that which you love in others is that which you love in yourself. So basically people are another kind of mirror to look into. Some people resist this teaching, but I encourage you to stay curious. There is a deep truth to be found here. It may not always be true, but it is a very useful starting point when you notice you have a strong resistance towards someone. On the final day of the Findhorn workshop we went out into a field, formed circles, and shared our deepest resistances to everyone in the workshop. We shared things normally you would never share. It was really hard! Telling someone you had gotten close to, what you really, truly didn’t like about them is so hard. We had to frame it as “I really don’t like X about you which reveals that I don’t like X about myself”. One man confessed to me that he found me particularly ugly — he couldn’t get past all those deep, pitted acne scars on my face, and that meant he considered himself ugly. Later at dinner some people in the group checked in with me to see how I felt about that. No one reassured me that I wasn’t ugly. So there it finally was. How did I feel about this? I felt a mix of things of course, but there was a surprising amount of relief. Finally! Now we are getting to the truth of the matter.
I had been getting lots and lots of rejections while dating. What was wrong with me? Why was I getting all these rejections? And it made for a self-fulfilling, downward cycle. Because I was getting rejected so much I was a nervous wreck on first dates so that all by itself could cause a rejection which made me even more of a nervous wreck the next time. And all this time I just blamed myself for not being a good enough dater. It wasn’t just that. This was a truth that I had been desperately avoiding. But all those huge acne cysts had left deep pitted scars. I really was ugly.
One woman I dated for a while was overweight and not conventionally pretty. I liked her though and thought we had promise, but then I asked her if our looks were roughly the same. I confess I secretly thought I was maybe a little more attractive than her, but her answer was very definite — “Oh! I’m much more attractive than you!” Really? Ouch. No way! So I ended up rejecting her without ever telling her why. Only later did I realize why I had acted that way. So yes I was in fact getting a lot of rejections but the truth of the matter was that in my desperate attempt to protect myself I also was doing a lot of rejecting too. And all that rejecting of both others and myself was what really causing me problems. Time to get more mindful about that