In the West we long ago abandoned using plant medicines, and our “alert, problem solving state of consciousness” as Graham Hancock put it, took over.

Now that we are returning to the medicines we are opening up again to states of mind that are more contemplative and receptive to the imagination. But as we are making this return, our traditions around containing the experience and putting it in a spiritual context are gone. That’s especially true for after the medicine, when most often we plunge straight back into our busy lives.

Holistic Psychotherapy is this important time. You and I work to integrate the experience so it can become more than an “amazing memory”, but a powerful resource that you can return to for new understandings and to find your spiritual/emotional bearings. Like the plant medicine itself, Holistic Psychotherapy connects with the living imagery of your mind, so that the healing and the growth keep going. It helps you:

• Tap into the imagery and the wisdom figures in your plant medicine experience so you can turn a one-time contact into a relationship of healing and growth.

• Bring in the practice of self-acceptance, an important catalyst for change.

• Heal old emotional wounds and legacy burdens that have limited and controlled you.

• Encounter and release emotional energies that are trapped or tangled inside your body.

• Recover from difficult or traumatic plant medicine experiences.

You could never say that psychedelic experiences are all sweetness and light. Some are a mixture of intense wonder and fear, and others are a pure unsullied sleigh ride in Hell. If you had a difficult experience and the memory continues to trouble you, there is work to be done around healing from the trauma. And if you came back feeling you are stuck between two worlds, you can work on that untethered feeling so you can get properly grounded and connected again. 

With plant medicine, a bad experience is not a painful one, a bad experience is one where the intended learning failed to happen. Painful and difficult experiences present us with a deep and lasting question. Medicine may confront us with the specter of death, or it challenges us to figure out if our “letting go” is to spirit or to an Imax-size projection of our own ego. The question does not get solved by our “alert, problem-solving consciousness”, but on the spiritual level where the experience took place. So you take a new magical mystery tour into your brain, altering your consciousness through intention rather than the medicine.

As one who also takes plant medicine, my mission is to help people make good use of the sacred medicine. We can let go of the pain we have inherited from the past and find our spiritual heart. If we do that, we create a new world where, as Native American people put it, we are ready to listen to the original instructions. We can live in a world where everybody, and everything, matters.