In my conversation with Liz Lilley, she mentioned that the conversation surrounding psychedelics has progressed to the point where we can now speak more freely:
Community is formed around the experience, and we can now bring our experience back into the community without feeling ostracised.
This point about not feeling ostracised is hugely important to integrating the experience of a psychedelic crisis, as we are able to feel validated in this discomfort and potentially situate our experience within a wider shared narrative. This feeling of belonging and community is essential to the psychedelic experience, and we might need to focus more on what we can do to build community where we might lack the types of containers in Western culture for these kinds of experiences.
But is there an art to this creation of community? The author Charles H. Vogl has provided some principles for creating healthy communities which strive to support one another, share their passions, and achieve personal growth. Some of these principles include the boundary between members and outsiders, the activities that mark a new member, rituals or the things we do that have meaning, a place set aside to find our community, the stories we share that allow others and ourselves to know our values, symbols that represent ideas that are important to us, and inner rings to provide paths to growth as we participate.
These kinds of principles might be well-suited to communal experiences that have been embedded in some examples of indigenous consumption of psychedelics. It could also be that restrictions surrounding access to psychedelic plants and fungi in the West have created a separation, where our experiences become more about the individual experiences rather than the community. Not being able to talk about these experiences for fear of being seen as a criminal makes the whole thing a lot worse, and engaging in something akin to a ceremony or ritual without the necessary integration can be difficult. The shock we might experience after a psychedelic crisis could create barriers to integration, which might include overwhelm and floods of emotions, feeling disconnected from reality, experiencing distortions in insight, or rushing back into our daily lives.
Going straight back into work, for example, might be too much, where we’re attempting to squeeze our consciousness back into a neat box after it’s been expanded. Being in a state of psychedelic awe, whether that be positive or negative, isn’t easy to integrate when our consensus reality might feel like the total opposite. Integration in this sense takes time, and it might require things like rest or proper food, which can sometimes be a challenge in Western culture.
Integration already exists in indigenous cultures, with a reliance on communal, group, and family networks, the use of spiritual beliefs and traditions, and the inclusion of folk healers or shamans. The mind, body, community, spirit, and nature tend to be seen as a unified entity, where daily life, spirituality, and the consumption of plant medicines aren’t seen as being separate.
The emergence of psychedelic integration circles and services in the West is certainly promising, with examples in my home country of the UK, such as the Institute of Psychedelic Psychotherapy, which provides a database of counsellors and psychotherapists that offer support for integrating psychedelic experiences. There are also local community groups such as Brighton Psychedelics, which is facilitated by a small interdisciplinary team of psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychotherapeutic counsellors. With current restrictions in places such as the UK creating barriers for more cultural and community-based engagement with psychedelics, the need to provide safe containers for integrating these kinds of experiences is more vital than ever.
Organisations such as the Zendo Project and The Fireside Project in the USA provide peer support for challenging psychedelic experiences, with The Fireside Project even having a hotline to call for immediate support. The looser restrictions in the USA can certainly allow for more of this support without fear of incrimination, and I’m sure we’ll start to see more of these kinds of organisations and spaces being established in the near future as other countries become more lenient towards psychedelics.
Being seen and accepted can allow our body and mind to properly metabolise the experience, where we might be able to integrate this in relation to others in our community and attune ourselves to the wider collective narrative. This idea of relational attunement might resonate with those in long-term relationships, where the idea of coregulating our nervous systems comes into play (and I’m sure anyone who’s gone through a breakup will understand the difficulties of having to then do all that regulation by yourself).
Certain indigenous approaches to healing within the wider context of community, such as those of Aboriginal Australians, can show us how important growing up in a community is to overall health and wellbeing. The individual and the community cannot be separated, and families should therefore be involved in the healing process, with care being an important dimension for all ages. The overall health of Aboriginal communities involves many interconnected dimensions of health, consisting of the mental, physical, spiritual, and emotional, with the connected domains of autonomy, empowerment and recognition; family and community; culture, spirituality and identity; country; basic needs; work, roles and responsibilities; education; physical health; and mental health.
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