Think, Feel, Explore...
Wild Wonderings
Hello folks,
Just a note to say that writing blog articles has taken a back seat since mid-2020 as I am focusing on psychedelic psychotherapy, course development and delivery. Thanks for your interest, and I hope you enjoy some of my articles from the past below…noting that a lot of time has past, the world has changed, I have changed, and so on…
When was the last time you went on an adventure? When was the last time you gathered a few essential belongings, put your affairs in order, and left home to visit new and distant lands? Adventure - inward or outward - means leaving the comfort and safety of home and taking ourselves into new and unknown territory in search of new experiences, growth and learning. The overall aim and intention of the preparation sessions is that by the time the participant takes the medicine, they feel safe and comfortable, familiar with their guides, and well prepared to navigate whatever experiences may arise.
At this stage, most legal psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy takes place as a part of a research trial. Australia’s first psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy trial began in 2020, and none have yet been completed.
It may be a long road, but my hope is that in the not too distant future, we in the West will have developed a powerful, evidence-based and coherent healing modality with psychedelic medicine at its core. I suspect in turn that this process will fundamentally alter our sense of what the psyche is, and how it can be healed.
It’s not hard to recognise an elder or a sage in the old stories. They usually come with easily identifiable white whiskers. Or live in an adobe hut on the edge of the village full of pots and poultices. They move slowly, and seem to move about the place not entirely entangled in the daily goings on, as though they’re seeing things the rest of us aren’t, or perhaps attending to a quiet inner voice.
How do we identify these people in the modern world? Do they come with a Cert IV in sagacity, having met all the aims and objectives, and attained all the necessary competencies? If such a certificate existed, would we pay it any mind? Should we?
Each week I am contacted by one or more people looking to undergo psychedelic psychotherapy. In general they have been suffering for quite some time, have tried working with psychologists, used anti-depressants or anxiolytics, but to little avail. They have heard about psychedelics, and see a potential antidote to their “stuck-ness”.
It took me over ten years to stop feeling apologetic for the intimate connection I felt with the natural world. Since then I have actively developed and nurtured it. In this vein I spent three years completing a Research Masters - exploring and articulating the experience of being alone with nature. Trusting more deeply in that experience that in philosophy or science. I now confidently recognize that it is not me, but the culture, that is confused.
When two people form a couple, they also unwittingly form a kind of unintentional community of these intra-psychic street kids. And, once the honeymoon is over, all of these parts make themselves felt. Sometimes they hook into each other unhelpfully. Perhaps one of your parts withdraws from contact for fear of hurt, and this activates the part of me that is terrified of abandonment. Before long we find ourselves in difficult interactions - activated, angry, scared, defensive, or resentful. We are often stunned and confused by our own feelings or the words of our partners.
In one way, eco-psychology is the result of psychology trying to grapple with this “belated concern for the fate of the planet”. As we shall see, until recently, Western psychology has been strangely silent about the natural world that gave rise to it.
So what is eco-psychology? We might say that it is an ecologically informed psychology. As a field, it asks the question, “What would psychology look like if it were grounded in an ecological perspective?”
