Healing with Psychedelics
Table of Contents
Inner Healing Intelligence
The ACER Model
The Collective Unconscious
Spiritual Emergence
Shadow Work
Transpersonal Psychology
Psychedelics have tremendous healing potential for those who can commit to prepare for and integrate the psychedelic experience.
Around the world and throughout time, psychedelics have been used by people as sacrament and medicine. Now, scientific research is proving the therapeutic and spiritual efficacy of psychedelics when used in appropriate contexts. As means to explore and learn from unconscious material through inner work, enable innate therapeutic biological mechanisms through an inner healing intelligence, and occasion spiritual experience through an enhanced sense of meaning, psychedelics show promise of helping many people heal trauma and find more wellbeing.
If correctly understood and supported, these psychospiritual crises can result in emotional and psychosomatic healing, remarkable psychological changes, and consciousness evolution.
— Stanislav Grof
Inner Healing Intelligence
Recognition of one’s inner healing intelligence is encouraged when healing with psychedelics.
According to the Shipibo tradition, all life forms, from cells to planets, are directed by a conscious force towards a state of health and wholeness. This mysterious intelligence is said to flourish in a context of complete safety and support.
When you cut or scratch your body, or break a bone, what causes healing? Other than providing the suitable circumstances for healing to occur by applying antibiotics, a band aid or a cast, you are not doing anything to heal the damaged body. For the most part, the damaged body heals itself, and with the right circumstances, so does the damaged consciousness.
The body initiates a remarkably complex healing process and always spontaneously attempts to move towards healing. By adopting a mindset which includes awareness of the inner healing intelligence, the voyageur is preparing their internal set, and is ready to face any potential difficulties that may arise over the course of the psychedelic journey.
Consciousness naturally flourishes when the necessary conditions, such as safe and supportive environment, are present. Accessing the inner healing intelligence is a process of honouring and expressing strength and compassion towards oneself, while approaching the psychedelic journey from a place beyond ego, which may include mental chatter and a victim narrative.
Consciousness knows how to heal itself, so let it do its thing. Surrender yourself to the experience. Don’t impose your ego onto the experience, and don’t try to rationalize the healing process while it is occurring. The psychedelic state is beyond the rational mind, the ego, and your control.
It is the deliberate cultivation of new habits, a process requiring sober discipline and sustained effort, that endows psychedelic experiences with any enduring significance.
— Louis Belleau
The ACER Model
The ACER Model was designed by Rosalind Watts, a psychologist researching the application of psilocybin for depression in clinical settings.
ACER stands for Accept, Connect, Embody, Restore.
Accept
Connect
Embody
Restore
The wound is the place where the Light enters you.
— Rumi