<title></title>
	
	<style type="text/css">
		@page { size: 8.5in 11in; margin: 0.79in }
		h1 { margin-bottom: 0.08in; background: transparent; page-break-after: avoid }
		h1.western { font-family: "Liberation Serif", serif; font-size: 24pt; font-weight: bold }
		h1.cjk { font-family: "SimSun"; font-size: 24pt; font-weight: bold }
		h1.ctl { font-family: "Lucida Sans"; font-size: 24pt; font-weight: bold }
		p { line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0.1in; background: transparent }
		a:visited { color: #00b9eb; so-language: zxx; text-decoration: none }
		a:link { color: #000080; so-language: zxx; text-decoration: underline }
		strong { font-weight: bold }
	</style>


“Beyond
the power of psychedelics to be used for healing, fixing, and
treatment... 
there is a space for coaching, but nobody is
talking about it.”
―
Yannick
Jacob
 



In Part I of this series we distinguish therapy from coaching. The
two are related and both are in a constant state of change. Like
fraternal twins, therapy and coaching come from the same egg
fertilized by different ideas. Their differences exist more in
practice than in theory. In the next part, we’ll consider how each
applies to the use of psychedelics.
In the current legal environment, where psychedelics remain
largely illegal, only the therapeutic approach has the authority to
claim psychedelic substances as a child of its own. Historically, it
has no right to.
<h1 class="western" align="center">The
20th
Century</h1>
Psychedelics are being appropriated for psychotherapy. They’re
effective for helping people deal with PTSD, addiction, and
depression. Limiting psychedelics to therapy is like using Formula
One race cars as farm tractors. Beyond returning 1% of the population
to the work-a-day grind, psychedelics have the power to transform
everyone into something better.
The attitude of clinical psychologists is that psychedelics are
drugs that help diagnosed conditions. They should be scientifically
tested, understood, and made available. We have several generations
of patients trained to “follow the science” and take whatever
“the doctors” order. Although the covid-19 crisis has made it
clear that few understand science and, ironically, it’s
administrators and corporations who give the orders, not doctors.
Clinical psychology has a limited understanding of the mind, and
psychedelics were not developed or traditionally used in the context
of psychology. These substances may or may not be effective in
addressing the issues of which psychology is concerned. Given
psychology’s immaturity, poor methods, and shortsightedness I feel
the most important uses of psychedelics are being overlooked.

“The potential of the psychedelic drugs to provide access to the
interior universe, is, I believe, their most valuable property.” 
—
Shasa Shulgin, psychopharmacologist
This is not the first time that psychedelics were recognized for
their mind altering power. In the 1950s and 60s the CIA conducted
unethical LSD experiments running the gamut from voyeurism to murder
in an effort to find state, military, and intelligence gathering uses
for LSD.
Before being fired for indiscriminate experimentation with
psychedelics, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were psychology
professors at Harvard. Leary went on as a leader in the 1960s
counterculture movement. Alpert, renamed Ram Dass, rebranded himself
as a Hindu mystic.
Research into psychedelics was just starting in the 1960s. The
effects of psychedelics on mental conditions was weakly understood
mostly because the psychology of mental conditions was weakly
understood. While the use of psychedelics has been seen in cultures
since history began, their use was religious, ceremonial, and
holistic. They were not used for psychological purposes because the
psychology we know today, and the diagnoses that define it, didn’t
exist (Sessa, 2007).
Lacking sufficient evidence or a strong constituency, psychedelics
were not able to contradict their political characterization as
dangerous drugs and they were all effectively swept underground
following the passage of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970.
The act was neither aimed at controlling substances or protecting
anyone but rather marginalizing and criminalizing Richard Nixon’s
main opponents who, at the time, were Blacks and young people. At
this it was a spectacular success, incarcerating huge numbers and
creating a self-perpetuating industry of prisons and law enforcement,
not to mention a thriving underground business for providing illegal
drugs.
Stan and Christina Grof, early researchers in LSD psychotherapy,
turned their attention to anxiety in terminal patients as this
constituency represented no threat to the status quo or the medical
establishment. Their breathwork protocols, which used no chemicals at
all, kept a small flame burning by focusing attention on the
traditional, nondiagnostic, ecstatic experience associated with
psychedelics.
As research and experimentation were disallowed, there was no way
to counteract the fallacy that psychedelics were dangerous and
useless. And while there was much evidence that psychedelics
contributed to positive health, this was not evidence of the allowed
sort, and only such disallowed evidence was given credibility. It was
a Catch 22 that persisted for over 30 years.

In a 2018 article titled “The influence of therapists’ first-hand
experience with psychedelics on psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy
research and therapist training”, the authors Elizabeth Nielson and
Jeffrey Guss say, “Self-experimentation with psychedelic compounds
by researchers and therapists played an important and largely
undocumented role in the psychedelic therapy and research of the
European and North American psychiatric mainstream from the 1950s
through the early 1970s. Often cited by researchers as the very
source of inspiration to study psychedelics in the first place, there
was a substantial concern that the first-hand experience had
contaminated the objectivity of the researchers.”
<h1 class="western" align="center">The
21st
Century</h1>
In the early 2000s the first small trials were done applying
psychedelics to the diagnostic mental disorders of anxiety,
depression, trauma, and addiction (Carhart-Harris, 2017). These small
studies had little statistical import but the therapeutic effects
were unprecedented. One use of a psychedelic substance in controlled
conditions was doubling or tripling the success rate of previous
therapies that took months and cost thousands of dollars. The only
thing that had changed was the lowering of the prohibition against
finding out the truth.
An overdue confluence of circumstances has led to today’s
revival of psychedelics. First, the “crisis” in mental health
accompanying the novel recognition of mental illnesses that have been
with us all along. Second, the failure of pharmaceuticals to remedy
these illnesses coupled with the expectation, fueled by the exploding
profits of the pharmaceutical industry, that drugs are the solution.
Third, a renaissance in neurological imaging, genetics, and
neurochemistry that has opened new lines of research. And fourth, the
emergence of an affluent, white constituency with the money and power
to legalize solutions that could be valuable to them.
In the famous “Good Friday Experiment” of 1962 ten divinity
students participated in a religious mass while under the influence
of psilocybin and ten, who constituted the control group, had the
experience with no substance. Nine of the ten who took psilocybin had
a genuine spiritual encounter compared to one in the control group.
This general result has been reconfirmed many times yet psilocybin
remains illegal today. Medical exemptions are available to use
psilocybin in the treatment of a few psychological illnesses, but no
exemptions are available for genuine spiritual encounters, personal
growth, or religious ceremony.
<h1 class="western" align="center">Coaching</h1>
Coaching had a rocky start 50
years ago. It was first proposed as “positive psychology” by
those who argued therapy was too focused on what wasn’t working
right and not focused enough on improving what was. The “positive”
in positive psychology was not to make positive but to be positive.
As early as the 1920s Gestalt psychology emphasized the whole
person rather than reducing the mind to separate parts and abilities.
The suggestion was to see issues and interactions in their full,
interacting form in the present. Starting in the 1940s Fritz and
Laura Perls developed Gestalt Therapy in a forward-looking, group
context. They included popular cultural themes like science, youth
culture, Eastern religion and experimental theater, and in so doing
reflected a “new age” approach.
Carl Rogers admonished therapists to listen to, follow along with,
and learn from their clients. He advocated sincerity, acceptance, and
understanding. He said, “Therapists need to be able to be
responsively attuned to their clients and to understand them
emotionally as well as cognitively.” Rogers was saying follow the
client, rather than lead the client.
The ideas of Rogers or Perls were not unprecedented, but
respecting clients in all respects was. This cut against the grain of
Freudian regression and behavioral retraining and, for that reason,
Rogers was poorly received in his day. Today he’s considered the
most influential psychologist of all time.
By the 1960s clinical psychology was in great demand. Academic
psychologists wanted only PhDs to be therapists but there were not
enough to fill demand and practicing psychologists rebelled. The
ranks of the American Psychological Association (AMA) broke in 1978
and a lower tier of practitioners, clinical therapists, was created.
This lowered the field’s scientific credentials, but it raised the
number of practitioners and broadened their range (Cautin, 2009).
As a result, in the late 70s and early 80s therapists, counselors,
and social workers were being certified like conscripts. The Rogerian
edicts of “listen to the client, follow the client, respect the
client” was the new algorithm. This was being overlaid on the old
paradigm of, “the client is sick, disabled, and needs therapy.”
The two paradigms are still overlaid in therapist training today.
As the value of enhancing a person’s abilities was recognized as
separate from addressing dysfunction, positive psychology began to
break away from therapy. As this happened, people recognized that
cognitive skills, because they are verbal, rational, and intentional,
are more easily taught both to practitioners and clients. 

A decreasing emphasis on past trauma and addictive behaviors
enabled a program to emerge that avoided dealing with or even
recognizing trauma, habit, and dysfunctional behavior. This largely
pragmatic approach, stripped of remediation and diagnosis, has
developed into the confidence affirming approach we call coaching.
Moving from concept to marketing is typical of how psychology
evolves. This is similar to how trends in art and design evolve and,
at its best, psychology is an art. The new doesn’t replace the old
because there is no test of which design is correct. Expectations of
success are often self-fulfilling. What’s entrenched is marinated
in what’s popular and new amalgams emerge, some of which are
practical and others are ridiculous. In psychology, the Gold Standard
is all too often whatever generates the most gold.
<h1 class="western" align="center">Therapy</h1>
Psychedelics come in varying strengths and effects on the
dissociative, hallucinogenic, euphoric, and empathogenic spectra.
There are different ways to approach and prepare for the experience
as well as different forms of guidance and support.
Although still new—it’s hardly even legal in most places—many
therapeutic variations are being proposed. These range from
administering psychedelics with supervision but no therapy, to
extensive preparation and unlimited support.
Protocols are being invented by practitioners many of whom have no
experience with psychedelics, other cultures, or positive psychology.
A sizable minority believe the salutary effects of psychedelics are
entirely mechanical but most would not know the difference because
the frontier between what’s pharmacological and what’s
psychological is only starting to be explored.

“Perhaps the most interesting effects of the psychedelic
experience as far as psychiatrists are concerned are those that can
be used to facilitate the psychotherapeutic experience. LSD,
psilocybin and newer drugs like MDMA have the ability to improve the
depth and speed of psychotherapy.” 
— Ben Sessa, MD
(2007)
In Part II of this series we’ll contrast therapy and coaching
and how these apply to psychedelics. Coaching stands as a more
generally appropriate approach to psychedelics, but it’s
application in this context has not been invented. We’ll invent it.
<h1 class="western" align="center">References</h1>
Carhart-Harris, R. L., and Goodwin, G. M. (2017, Oct). The
therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs: past, present, and
future, Neuropsychopharmacology. 42(11): 2105–2113. doi:
10.1038/npp.2017.84 
<a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5603818/">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5603818/</a>
Cautin, R. L. (2009). The founding of the Association for
Psychological Science: Part 1. Dialectical tensions within organized
psychology. Perspectives on Psychological Science. 4(3):211-223.
<a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6924.2009.01120.x">https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6924.2009.01120.x</a>
Nielson, E. M., and Guss, J. (2018). The influence of therapists’
first-hand experience with psychedelics on psychedelic-assisted
psychotherapy research and therapist training, Journal of
Psychedelic Studies 2(2), pp. 64–73. doi: 10.1556/2054.2018.009
 
<a href="https://akjournals.com/view/journals/2054/2/2/article-p64.xml">https://akjournals.com/view/journals/2054/2/2/article-p64.xml</a>
Sessa, B. (2007, Oct). From sacred plants to psychotherapy: the
history and re-emergence of psychedelics in medicine, J of
European College of Neuropsychopharmacology, 17.
DOI:10.1016/S0924-977X(07)70278-X 
<a href="https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/docs/default-source/members/sigs/spirituality-spsig/ben-sessa-from-sacred-plants-to-psychotherapy.pdf">https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/docs/default-source/members/sigs/spirituality-spsig/ben-sessa-from-sacred-plants-to-psychotherapy.pdf</a>
<hr>


To subscribe to this newsletter, click on
<a href="https://www.mindstrengthbalance.com/landing-learning/newsletter-subscriber/">Newsletter-Subscribe</a>.

Psychedelic-Assisted  Coaching, Part I

<title></title>
	
	<style type="text/css">
		@page { size: 8.5in 11in; margin: 0.79in }
		h2 { margin-top: 0.14in; margin-bottom: 0.08in; background: transparent; page-break-after: avoid }
		h2.western { font-family: "Liberation Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 16pt; font-weight: bold }
		h2.cjk { font-family: "PingFang SC"; font-size: 16pt; font-weight: bold }
		h2.ctl { font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; font-size: 16pt; font-weight: bold }
		p { line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0.1in; background: transparent }
		a:visited { color: #800000; so-language: zxx; text-decoration: underline }
		a:link { color: #000080; text-decoration: underline }
	</style>


“I miss what I already
have, and I surround myself with things that are missing.” 
—
Jonathan Safran Foer,
novelist
How might you see a color
you can’t see, or describe to another person a color they can’t
see? This question comes up from time to time when we talk about
things we cannot find the words for. It’s a reference to blind
spots and how we move into new territory. 

The question is central to
understanding consciousness and mental health but, naturally, we
don’t have the words to talk about what we cannot see. Instead, we
talk about the methods we use: methods to see, think, and act better
or differently; methods of mental health, performance, and power. We
talk about leaders, workers, students, and teachers, but these are
all diversions from the real question, which is how we achieve
something new.
Dichotomies help us
understand differences using contrast and distinction. When we’re
trying to understand conflicts, we look for some measure of
difference. Without differences, there can’t be change.
Everyone, including myself,
struggles with growth and change. The alternative is stasis. We
normally avoid stasis by living in a changing world, and this makes
us appear responsive and alive. But we deceive ourselves because
being responsive does not mean that we’re alive. Everything is
responsive, whether it’s alive or not. 

When we get old and our
world slows down and stops changing, most old people stop changing
too. They become inert, and we recognize this as an early form of
dementia. You don’t have to be old to create a static world, and
you don’t have to have dementia to cease growing. 

Most of my clients, to their
credit, are working to grow faster than their environment is
changing. They’re trying to guide the changes in their environment
and control how they’re changing in it. They’re trying to find
words for things they cannot see.
<h2 class="western" align="center">Life and Learning</h2>
At root, learning is close
to life. All things change, but living things learn. We could say
that to be alive is to learn, but we no better understand learning
than we understand life. Defining one in terms of the other is a
tautology, by which I mean we understand neither.
One of my great annoyances
is teaching. If you see learning as the process of life and change,
then what is teaching? At best, teaching is facilitating. It is the
provision of what sustains change. At worst, teaching limits by
constricting change. Our most familiar form of teaching happens in
schools, which is teaching’s worst form. Its best form comes
through “life lessons” and other natural processes, which are
distinguished by their authentic complexity. These are the best
teachings.
The reason we have schooling
is that it’s easy and works toward greater integration. School
integrates people in exchange for their insight, autonomy, and human
potential. This is the social contract: society will help provide for
you if you work to sustain society. You do that by exchanging your
life’s potential in the service of conformity in thought, action,
and social stability.
There is an unrecognized,
negative side effect to learning, thinking, and acting according to
expectations. When you act according to expectations, you don’t
learn who you are, and you don’t learn how to think. You don’t
develop a good sense of things that exist outside of the container
you’ve been taught to see.
This all happens before
you’re old enough to know what’s going on. Your ability to think
and see, as well as your ability to imagine, develop before and
during your adolescence. Your mind is most pliable before you can see
yourself separately from your parents, and clearly enough to develop
your own worldview. At this stage, your family is your primary
learning environment, although society desires to control what you
think.
Schools focus our thinking,
and they do this by posing problems that limit our thoughts. The
situations that foster our growth and insight come from our social
and natural environments. The larger our social and natural
environments, the more we’ll learn. These environments are
different from school because they don’t ask simple questions,
don’t offer clear answers, and always show us things we have
neither the words nor thoughts to understand.
 Schools
show us things we can see and point out their details. That’s how
teaching works. The social and natural worlds show us things we
cannot see in all their detail, and that’s how learning works. You
don’t learn in school; you are trained. You learn in environments
that change and respond to you in ways that go beyond what you can
see.
<h2 class="western" align="center">Relationships</h2>
All things are
relationships. We only know anything in terms of the interactions
between things. This is so fundamental as not to mean anything, so
it’s more useful to say that our most important learning situations
are our personal relationships. Everything else is skills
acquisition. 

Learning skills is a process
that changes us, but it’s not a particularly intelligent process.
Certainly, skills take brain power and attention, but learning skills
is within the power of anyone who can maintain focus. 

Relationships require more
than focus. You are dragged forward in a relationship with another
person and, if you can’t keep up, you must escape or be dragged
under. Ideally, relationships prosper, but that’s not the norm. In
a world of change, growth, and conflict, relationships present these
dynamic elements all mashed together.
I’ve come to look at my
counseling work as relationship work. In some cases, the relationship
between partners is the focus of our work, but mostly I’m working
with one person’s relationships. 

Where there’s support,
there’s mutual understanding, and where there is conflict, there’s
a lack of understanding. Which brings me back to the question of how
do you truly “see” another?
The sight people need, which
would more accurately be called insight, is the understanding of what
gives them purpose, meaning, and nurturance. We might call this love,
since that word plays a key role and remains undefined.
On the other hand, bundling
everything you need to understand about purpose, meaning, and
nurturance into a single word makes it incomprehensible. The question
is, how to break this concept down into understandable parts without
it collapsing into conceptual rubble?
<h2 class="western" align="center">Meaning</h2>
Meaning is based on value.
You find your meaning by identifying what’s meaningful to you and
recognizing your role in these things, people, or issues. For me,
what’s meaningful is family and my authentic relationships. 

Unfortunately, most of my
family members don’t recognize me as one of their most meaningful
relationships. This is typical in families, especially in Western
culture, where families are weak. 

This weakness can provide a
safe separation. Many of the family traumas I deal with result from
family relationships that should have remained separate. In those
cases, I tell my clients they must separate from these relationships.


Family relationships can
rarely be fixed. They might be moderated or tolerated, but fixing a
relationship can only be done with the consent of all involved, and
others are rarely at the same point that you are. I struggle to
follow this advice myself. The trouble is that family brings
commitments, and these commitments play a large role in one’s
purpose.
I have come to find meaning
in the relationships I have with the people I work with. That’s
mostly my clients, but also the ghosts of people in my field. I feel
meaningfully involved with issues that were important to people who
came before me and who I may have never met. I know them vicariously
through our shared goals in science. 

I think of Paul Dirac, who
said, “My life has been a failure.” This despite all he
accomplished. I keep this in mind as I work on topics that are
important to him. I never met Dirac, but he was the brother-in-law of
my mentor Eugene Wigner.
<h2 class="western" align="center">Purpose</h2>
You assign purpose to your
meaningful goals. If being a responsible parent gives you meaning,
then being successful in this role is your purpose. I also find
meaning in providing value to my clients. If they didn’t value me,
I wouldn’t work with them, but then they probably wouldn’t hire
me.
Two other purposes are
developing for me. One is what I can achieve in science, the other is
what I can achieve in personal relationships. These are ideas that
are still developing.
I find scientific questions
interesting, and I’ve lately felt something like a spiritual
obligation to pursue this work. If I understand something important
that others don’t, then I feel obliged to present what I see for
our general benefit. I feel I’m providing support to other people
who, like myself, struggle with false teachings.
I sometimes tell my clients
that their struggles will benefit many, mostly those with whom
they’re enmeshed. A person who regains a sense of clarity despite
past trauma is setting an example for everyone who’s been similarly
traumatized. They’re also clearing, cleansing, or removing the
power used against them. 

The 16th century poet George
Herbert said, “Living well is the best revenge.” But it’s much
more than revenge. It’s both a redemption from your role in the ill
fates you suffered, and an act that disperses such clouds of ill fate
that could plague others in the future. Your life’s work is always
bigger than you.
<h2 class="western" align="center">Nurturance</h2>
We deserve support. It is
not weak to want to be connected to others. At the same time, it’s
not weak to refuse connection with people who do not respect or
nurture you. It is possible that you are the only person who can
fully understand and accept yourself. Even so, we can find purpose in
nurturing others and being in relationships that nurture us.
There are co-dependent and
co-creative relationships. There are negative and positive needs for
nurturance. It’s hard for most people to see the difference between
their negative and positive needs, because doing so requires
recognizing your weaknesses. 

A negative form of
nurturance is parasitic. You are getting what you need at another
person’s expense. This is negative even if the other person
willingly sacrifices themselves to meet your needs. The key is
whether your nurturance is helping or harming another.
Negative nurturance is easy
to recognize, but it can be hard to avoid. If what another person
needs is to reject or demean you, then the positive thing to do is to
separate yourself from them. This is difficult if you’re in love or
attached to them. 

To let yourself be
parasitized in order to feel nurtured is co-dependent. It does not
serve you, nor them, nor is it a positive role model for anyone else.
Co-dependent relationships set negative role models for everyone.
Positive nurturance begins
as something you have for yourself. Once you know how to provide
meaning and purpose for yourself, then this is the standard to judge
what another is offering you. We are often told to love ourselves,
and this is what it means.
It does not mean we should
provide for ourselves all the love we need. Rather, it means that by
having love for ourselves, we recognize a positive relationship with
another. If you cannot recognize, support, or achieve a co-creative
relationship, then you do not know what it means to love yourself.
<h2 class="western" align="center">Love</h2>
The most important things we
need to learn are the things we cannot see. How do we learn about
such things?
If we’re truly and
irremediably blind to something, then we cannot understand it in a
straightforward way. We either need to find a crack in our wall of
blindness, or discover a new kind of learning.
Blind people have learned to
“see” with their ears by developing something like sonar. Sighted
people don’t do this and, possibly, cannot. It may require a
rewiring of our optical cortex. They don’t learn to see, but they
learn to navigate and spatially orient themselves. Their “sound
sight” does not give them colors and it cannot discern what is too
far away to hear, but it can discern objects in their immediate
surroundings almost as well as sighted people.
If you have a troubled
relationship, it probably involves a lack of insight. Where do you
find the sight for something you cannot see?
I suspect the first thing
you must do, as my psychic healer friend Wendy tells me, is to grow
larger in order to see more. For Wendy, this expansion is in the
heart space, her words for a realm of psychic insight. Referring to
“psychic insight” isn’t going to tell most people where to
look. Telling people to look where they cannot see doesn’t help.
We don’t know what a color
would look like that we cannot see, but we do know the limits of the
colors we can see. To see a larger heart space, or any space you
cannot see, start by recognizing the limits of what you can see.
Then, recognize that there is more.
You cannot know what this
more is in the same way you’re accustomed to knowing things. You
have to adopt a different way of knowing. Then, try to adapt it to
the area where your sight ends.
This, incidentally, brings
me back to physics because, while we live in a world of three spatial
dimensions, there are subatomic objects that have one-dimensional
properties. That is, they exist in only one dimension and do not
exist in three. 

This is an interesting
inversion of the problem of learning to see more. It’s especially
interesting because all subatomic particles have this property. Like
it or not, the world is not three-dimensional!
In the realm of
relationships, to understand how a relationship could be deeper,
consider how other relationships could be stronger. This could mean
your relationship with yourself, or with nature, God, or silence. For
me, it also means my relationship with reality.
When I work with clients, I
like to take them on hypnotic journeys to new places. When we reach a
place they can no longer recognize, or in which they can no longer
see, I tell them, “Good, that’s the place to start.”

<hr>


To subscribe to this newsletter, click on
<a href="https://www.mindstrengthbalance.com/landing-learning/newsletter-subscriber/">Newsletter-Subscribe</a>

Seeing the Other

<title></title>
	
	<style type="text/css">
		@page { size: 8.5in 11in; margin: 0.79in }
		h1 { margin-bottom: 0.08in; background: transparent; page-break-after: avoid }
		h1.western { font-family: "Liberation Serif", serif; font-size: 24pt; font-weight: bold }
		h1.cjk { font-family: "SimSun"; font-size: 24pt; font-weight: bold }
		h1.ctl { font-family: "Lucida Sans"; font-size: 24pt; font-weight: bold }
		p { line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0.1in; background: transparent }
		a:visited { color: #00b9eb; so-language: zxx; text-decoration: none }
		a:link { color: #000080; so-language: zxx; text-decoration: underline }
	</style>


“The
greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.”
―
Michel
de Montaigne
 


<h1 class="western" align="center">Significant Change</h1>
Inspiration is the motivation for significant change. Significant
change is change you do not otherwise know how to make unless
inspired. You need to be inspired in order to make significant
change. 

Not all circumstances require significant change, and even for
those that do a small change can be the right kind of change to start
with. These days, I’m thinking along the lines of disruption.
Significant changes are disruptive. Psychonauts are ready for
disruptive change. Insignificant change is not disruptive. Most
people in business or family circumstances are searching for
nondisruptive change.
Significant change involves unknowns. You may see it first as
attractive or unattractive depending on what’s motivating you.
Usually greater attractions or repulsions arise in the process of
considering this kind of change, or when you get closer to it. One
expects disruptive change to require an investment and some risk. 

Most people expect non-disruptive change to be inexpensive and low
risk. To the extent you are risk averse you will be disruption averse
and, as a consequence, less likely to engage, attract, accept, or
involve yourself with significant change.
A group can’t be inspired and a group can’t be inspiring.
Groups provide motivation and direction. I hope that those in this
group can find the inspiration they need, but they may not need
inspiration, they may only need motivation. Think change as a
two-step process: first you find motivation, then you find
inspiration.
<h1 class="western" align="center">The
Psychedelic Experience</h1>
There are psychedelic chemicals and there are psychedelic
experiences. Ingesting the chemicals triggers the experiences, but
you can have the experiences without the chemicals.
Chemicals induce generally similar kinds of experiences in
different people, but each person's experience is unique. As with a
ride in an amusement park, the scope, range, and duration of your
experience will be set by the chemical, though each person’s
sensitivity will differ.
The psychedelic experience you manifest yourself, without the use
of chemicals, is a matter of skill and practice, but such experiences
are definitely possible and they can be just as extreme and life
changing. There are many ways to generate your own psychedelic
experiences and different kinds of psychedelic experiences. One part
of the skill is knowing how to generate them, and another part of the
skill lies in learning how to integrate them.
Regardless of their origin, psychedelic experiences involve the
same components and the same opportunities. They consist of the
components of your mind, and they offer the opportunity to rebuild,
rearrange, or reinvent yourself. Whatever their origin, they are
disruptive.
Preparing for a psychedelic experience is preparing for
disruption. This is quite different from how one prepares to execute
a plan, engage in a project, or achieve a goal. You can have a plan,
project, or goal, and one of the techniques encourages this, but
achieving them cannot be your main objective. If you do have goals,
then your objective will be to test them not complete them.
Whether you do or do not have a plan or goal the psychedelic
experience will enlarge you, add new forces, and bring forward new
voices from inside you. Your goal is to make room for a larger
experience. To make these new energies welcome and to stabilize
yourself so that you are not upset by their appearance. You want to
find in yourself the kind of flexibility that will enable you to
become a larger person who is able to incorporate in yourself some of
these energies when the experience is over.
If you imagine yourself as a boat and the psychedelic experience
as a storm, then preparing for the experience involves carefully
going throughout your boat and making sure everything is secure and
prepared. If you have a goal, then you’ll want to clarify that goal
but your overriding goal will always be preservation. 

Unlike a storm at sea, the psychedelic experience will bring
novelty. It may bring gifts and it may bring things that you don’t
want. The only object in surviving a storm is to come out of it the
same as you went into it. In contrast, surviving a psychedelic
experience is to expect transformation. You don’t want to come out
the same, you want to come out better. 

<h1 class="western" align="center">Five
Points for Change</h1>
The game is finding the lines along which the problem separates.
You want parts that are independent enough to think about separately.
Being reductive means separating things that are not really separate
in order to better understand how each part works. You can also work
to improve each part separately.
At any point, you can reconnect the parts to work with the whole,
or take them apart again. It’s just like meditation: separate your
thoughts, explore your thoughts, put them back together again.
It is usually the case that your initial attempts at breaking the
problem down fail because you haven’t separated things right. You
find yourself working with thoughts and feelings that are too
interconnected to have any independence, and when this is the case,
you quickly sense conflicts and complexities.
You can break things down in ways that are specific to your life
and we naturally do this. Here, I want a general way to break things
down that will apply to everyone. Because this system is more general
it is less familiar. It’s not the way you naturally think of
yourself. It’s like an old map that describes the psychological
terrain of your life before you subdivided your life into issues,
peoples, and personalities.
There are several ways to break these five points into two groups,
either according to mind and body, or active and passive, or
conscious and unconscious. First consider the five groups; then we’ll
consider them from different perspectives.

Conscious Mind

The conscious mind is your identity, volition, and thoughts. This
is often verbal and reasonable though it also experiences fear and
emotion. It feels like your conscious mind has free will even though
you don’t know where this free will is coming from.

Unconscious Mind
The unconscious mind consists of your habits, preconceptions, and
reflex actions. Your unconscious is reactive and these reactions are
built into you. You can change the actions of your unconscious mind
if you work on them ahead of time, but, in the moment, you are
subject to them and react according to their direction.

Subconscious Mind
The subconscious is the machinery that exists below your conscious
mind. It consists of your memories and associations, your genetic
predisposition, your heritage, and your lower and higher powers such
as they are. Some people channel their subconscious through nonverbal
expression. Others dissociate from their subconscious so that
direction from their subconscious emerges to take them over through
attitudes, actions, and moods they can’t control. And still
others—perhaps most of us most of the time — are unaware of their
subconscious and behave as if it didn’t exist.

Assertive body
Your assertive body is your active, physical body and its actions
represent the things it needs and does: all the organs, the joints
and muscles, and the skills you’ve built into them. This would
include your ability to perform in art, music, or athletics, or, more
modestly, how you do or don’t exercise.
Your mind is not separate from your body. In considering it
separately, we accept that there are connections between the two.
Your assertive body is your need for movement, action, food, and
comfort and there are mental aspects to these physical needs.
For the purpose of finding stability, we’re thinking of the
active body as system that has certain needs and responds to certain
forces. Accommodating the active body means improving the tone and
comfort of these systems. It means being attentive to your physical
needs and maintaining a mental connection with the pains and
pleasures of your body.
Receptive body
The receptive body is the important and elusive middle ground
between the cerebral and the physical. It is your resting state of
focus, attention, frequency, and resonance. It is the currents in
your body and the pulse in each of your systems. I think our
receptive body is our most pervasive, ever present, subtle,
accessible, and overlooked aspect of ourselves. 

Just as the atom is mostly empty space and our body is 60% water,
similarly, most of our consciousness resides in our receptive body.
It is the tension that holds every aspect of you together. It is your
ready and relaxed awareness, the ground on which your consciousness
is built.
<h1 class="western" align="center">Grounding</h1>
Grounding sounds simple because it involves doing very little, but
it is a difficult goal because everything it requires must be in
place before you attempt it. Being grounded is like running a well
tuned machine. If the machine is well tuned, then there’s nothing
required except to run it. If the machine is not well tuned, then
every out of tune component must be adjusted and, in a highly
interconnected system such as us, that could mean all the systems.
The purpose of the five points for change is the proposal that
each of these five points must be grounded and ready for change. Any
goal or objective that you have must involve each of these five
systems. They all must be prepared and you must have some awareness
of each of them.
This is not to say that you must be a master of all aspects of
yourself, rather that you must have a connection to all aspects of
yourself. And most likely, whatever aspect to which you are poorly
connected will make its presence known in a psychedelic experience.
Because we have begun with a verbal approach, the first step is to
verbally understand the five points for change. Each of these points
has some story in the context of each of the others. That is, there
is a conscious story that can be told about each point, and we have
started that. Each point has its own integrity and one can view
oneself from each of the five points.
For example, if the five points represent your whole self, then
there is a view of your whole self that will emerge from your
subconscious. You will meet this in your dreams. There is a view of
your whole self that exists in your body. You will meet this in
intense physical activity that overwhelms your other senses. This is
called being “in the zone” and it happens in situations of
extreme activity and concentration.
Your conscious mind is designed to be the coordinator. It isn’t
especially insightful or well-connected to these other four points,
but it is connected to each and it is the most connected with your
environment. It is the most effective of the five in predicting the
near-term future and, as such, it offers you the greatest protection
in a threatening world.
Your conscious mind is not the best coordinator of change. Its
primary task is stability and protection both of which are contrary
to change. The kind of grounding that you need for change will not be
what your conscious mind prefers, and this is why you need to develop
a greater connection to the other points of change.
We are effectively doing a form of yoga that is designed for, or
can be seen from each of these points. Consider these five “yogas”
as separate practices, each designed to increase flexibility,
strength, and balance.
Mindfulness is balancing and
attuning your conscious mind,

Regression is reviewing situations that led to your
unconscious programming,

Dreaming is exploring and inviting your subconscious to
participate,

Exercise enables you to increase your physical body’s
flexibility and endurance,

Neural training enables you to improve, balance, and tune your
passive body.
Grounding yourself for a psychedelic experience involves preparing
each of these five aspects for change. That means improving each and
improving the connections between them. The psychedelic experience
is, in its essence, a release of your conscious control and a direct
and democratic encounter with all of these systems simultaneously.

<hr>


To subscribe to this newsletter, click on
<a href="https://www.mindstrengthbalance.com/landing-learning/newsletter-subscriber/">Newsletter-Subscribe</a>

Lincoln Stoller • Therapist

Psychedelic-Assisted Coaching, Part I

Seeing the Other

Preparing for a Psychedelic Experience: Grounding