How psychedelics are helping people heal? The use of psychedelics to help patients recover is on the rise. It’s being used as an adjunct therapy in treatment-resistant depression and other mental illnesses.
Here is how psychedelics are helping people heal.
Psychedelics show the way: it’s in your mind.
Psychedelics are very effective in separating the patient from their fears and anxieties because they show the patient how things are.
Psychedelics focus attention on a more advanced mode of experience: that’s what we are here for.
If you suffer from depression or other mental illness, one of the biggest problems you have is that your mind is not functioning correctly. You may feel euphoric one minute but then sad or depressed the next or worse yet, anxious again. You’re stuck in a box that isn’t big enough for you and your emotions.
Psychedelics take you to a place where you can see your mind operating.
The solution to this problem is to help patients see just how the mind works, how their emotions work, and how they translate into physical and mental suffering. This is what psychedelics do, so they are so effective in treating mental illness and addiction. Patients don’t have to go through decades of unsuccessful treatment because of repeated failures even to identify the cause of their symptoms. Where therapists might have spent years taking novices out for walks through the forest and watching them trip over every root and rock, psychedelic therapy does it all in an hour or two by taking the patient beyond their normal range of experience. It is radically experiential, and that is what works.
Psychedelics lead the patient to a more meaningful life.
This is where the real work begins in healing the mind because it means helping the patient develop a sense of purpose and meaning in life. Based on their authentic feelings, not after-the-fact rationalisations about what they should have done or should do now as someone who should be feeling better by now. This requires that you see clearly how your thoughts create your experience, how your emotions create your experiences, how memories create your experiences, and how beliefs can generate positive or negative outcomes depending on how you use them. This is the real obstacle to success in therapy: it’s not just the inner demons that cause mental illness. It’s your thinking and feeling, so you must learn to master your mind and what comes out of it to create the best states of being for yourself.
Psychedelics help you find peace in a troubled mind.
Treatment-resistant depression is a problem of overwhelming anxiety, panic, stress and the inability to cope with everyday daily events that other people take for granted. These patients suffer from “leaky gut” syndrome, where their emotions leak into their bodies and minds causing them tremendous suffering. Psychedelics help unblock their chakras and thus their minds and bodies, allowing them to relax and live in a more normal state of mind. Patients usually have to be forced into treatment.
Psychedelics help end your suffering: they can’t fix it, but they can heal it.
There is no such thing as a quick fix in therapy; it’s a case of working in the patient’s best interests, which means that there is an obligation to heal them on many levels. If you think one day of curing yourself with traditional psychotherapy, it won’t happen. The work required to resolve any illness involves more than seeing clearly how your mind works because you have to reverse then the years of poor thinking and damaging feelings that caused the problem in the first place, which is the challenge that psychedelic therapy represents: dealing with the emotional psyche as opposed to just stopping your symptoms.
Psychedelics teach skills that can help you once you are back in your ordinary mind.
These range from the classical ability to observe and describe what you are doing and feeling at the moment to awareness of how you habitually react to situations, which can then be eliminated or replaced with better responses, depending on what outcome you want vs what is effective.
Psychedelics help improve your physical health.
There appears to be a strong tendency for certain psychedelics to positively affect the human body and mind, reducing anxiety, depression and pain, increasing sense of well-being, and improving mental and physical health in general, just as they help achieve a deeper connection with the self.
Psychedelics help change how you think about yourself and life in general: they can make you happier.
This is not just about how you feel but also how you think about yourself, which leads to mindfulness or meta-awareness, which is seeing your mind the way it works so that you can then use this knowledge to create the best possible state of being for yourself. This is not a quick fix; it’s a lifetime process of learning and achieving new goals as far back as childhood.
Psychedelics help make life worth living: they make your problems more interesting.
The trick with psychedelics is to realize that they don’t make you happy instantly. Over time, they satisfy you by revealing some of the mystery of life to you and how it can be lived in a more meaningful way. This is why psychedelics should never be used without supervision in a therapeutic setting: otherwise, there’s too much risk. This is a medicine, and it should be treated as such.
Psychedelic therapy works are simple if you see the patient as a whole, including the mind and the body. This means that you must learn to see straight through their symptoms, primarily if your client’s problems are rooted in reason.