Psychedelic Medicine and Somatic Sexual Wellness

Emerging…. I feel bedraggled and vulnerably newborn, as I emerge from a week in ceremony. A small group of great souls came together, to explore a potential weave of somatic sexual wellness with psychedelic medicines. We all arrived as experienced spaceholders – all courageous, seasoned explorers of expanded dimensions of our personal and interpersonal neuroendocrine systems. We all already knew how to delight in difference, and tend to rupture with repair. We all were already oriented by our own trustworthy longings – for deep pleasure, and profound ecstasy.
Within this unique blend of lovership and leadership – a gathering that had never been before and will never be again – something extraordinary emerged. The molecules conspired. The rhythm of the biosphere found expression in hearts, breath, imagination and co-creation. Death and life made love within and around us, as they do in forest, soil, cells, souls, skin…. We found a path of ever-deepening differentiation within evermore unity. We each and all could shine, and reflect each other’s shining. Extraordinary experiences got woven with everyday frustrations, trauma triggers and ongoing commitment to care. As I reflect and rest, I feel as if I am resourced by many embodied experiences of life as it is meant to be. I find myself incubating mysterious, impossible new dreams.
For me, Eros is our sacred well, our inmost core. Psychedelics weave us into conscious connection with the web of life and death; we feel wanted and welcome. So the intersection of somatic sexual wellness and psychedelic medicines can be a place of powerful magic – but also of grave danger, and potential for major misattunements. Combining them is not for the under-resourced, inexperienced, or faint-of-heart. If this is a weave that calls to you, I hope you go carefully, finding your very own pace of trust, with those great souls who are your precious companions. I’d love to learn what you discover. Because I’m going to stay, and work and play at this intersection. For all the messiness and challenge, it also feels profoundly right….

Empathogens: The Science and the Magic

In this free video on the science and magic of empathogens, I share from my own experience with psychedelic medicines including MDMA, 3MMC and related molecules. I have concerns with the conversations we now find everywhere on drug-assisted therapies, and drug legalization. I have some science to share. These medicines light up both the serotonin and dopamine systems in our brains and bodies, so we feel both passion and peace, at the same time. The wonderful thing is that we don’t actually need drugs to find this. These molecular messengers are part of every being in the biosphere, and the neuroendocrine systems within and between us. How can we use empathogens in ways that help us belong to this global network of our true belonging? Instead, these medicines are getting mobilized to help people tolerate intolerable systems. Are we going to keep our trauma treatments confined to the very paradigms that created all this awful, ongoing trauma in the first place?

Empathogens activate – and help calibrate – the neuroendocrine system humans share with all of life. We can also do this with breath, sound, movement, imagination and touch. We can co-create new methods and practices for integrating medicine work into social
change work.

MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, as practiced in the MAPS model, is not trauma-informed
in several ways, including:

  • Using a “consent” model instead of “empowered choice and voice” to guide
    practitioners’ touch
  • Using a cookie-cutter approach to dose and protocol
  • Unquestioned paradigms for social belonging that do harm

Trauma-Informed Psychedelics

What would a trauma-informed practice of psychedelic medicine look like?

Though my years working as a sacred intimate and teacher of somatic sexual wellness, I walked with many people who had experienced profound trauma. I had my own personal journey through the traumas of sexual violence to a life that is rich with love and ecstasy. And so I understand something of the science, and the magic, of how neuroendocrine systems get recalibrated by rapture.

In an experience of profound trauma, people experience dissociative self-abandonment. We stop receiving messages from the vagus nerve that monitors our inner state. Our souls leave our bodies; we die before we die. Consciously or unconsciously, people healing from trauma often want to experience dissociative self-abandonment again – but differently – while experiencing pleasure, choice and agency. It makes so much sense, that traumatized people come looking for healing through ecstatic experiences of psychedelics, or sexual healing. Ecstasy is a form of self-abandonment (the etymology of ecstasy = ex-stasis, “standing outside the self”). Through erotic experiences of orgasm, or through the ecstasy of profound psychedelic experiences, we can feel self-abandonment while we feel efficacy, and relational support, instead of in the agonies of our lonely traumas.

Yes it makes sense, BUT the essence of trauma-informed practice is titration. We carefully introduce experiences, in tiny amounts, while growing capacity. Having a trauma-informed approach means moving at the pace of embodied trust. A too-fast approach can trigger increased dysregulation, flashbacks, mental splitting and emotional precarity. Titration works WITH the body’s defense systems, honouring them, and listening. We wait, until the body – not just the mind – wants more.

Yes, we can collapse the body’s autonomic defense systems with huge experiences of ecstasy, just as we can with awful agonies. Most offerings of psychedelic medicine seem to embrace this path, promising to address PTSD and unprocessed trauma with large-dose experiences of psychedelics. I hear nothing about building somatic capacity, with titration and integration.

Premature ecstatic experiences will feel profound, but they are unlikely to be integrated into long-term change. At worst, they can actively retraumatize. When I first entered the world of sexual healing two decades ago, it was full of similar promises and practices. But we learned – and we integrated new understandings about the neurobiology of trauma, as they emerged. We need to be trauma-informed, if we are to avoid doing harm. Whenever there is unprocessed or ongoing trauma, people need practice listening to the body’s truths. We need titrated experiences of just-enough ecstasy, to align our lives with ecstatic rhythms. We need embodied practice choosing too much or too little, and then feeling empowered and supported to try again, and find what feels just right.

Whether I’m working with the erotic, or with psychedelics, I want to support people in feeling empowered choice and voice. I want them growing their embodied self-trust, and capacity for discerning trust-worthiness in others. This takes actual, embodied practice.

Practice Dying

There are times of the year, times of life, and times like this moment in the history of the biosphere when the when the veil between life and death grows thin. Transitions between life and death get slippery. Ghosts and ancestors come out to guide us. Scary monsters suddenly emerge, and interspecies transformations can delight us. This season – and Halloween, Samhain, the Day of the Dead – remind me to take time to deepen into my personal commitment to practice dying.

As they say, what we resist, persists. We live in a culture that fiercely resists dying, as it busily manifests more and more of it. Around the world there is so much suffering and death. Climate chaos and social chaos threaten all our lives, and the whole biosphere. What we accept, transforms. Perhaps a practice of integrating conscious dying into our living can empower us.

Two years ago, I was feeling very fragile, and struggling for breath. I was diagnosed as having a chronic, terminal lung disease, which meant I had just a short time to live. The diagnosis was later reversed and I am fine now. But during the time when my own death felt very imminent, I felt called to meet with a psychedelic medicine called 5meO-DMT. 5meO-DMT is a powerful medicine that has been described as “the God-dess molecule,” and said to offer short experiences of dying.

A day spent in the guide’s studio began with a gentle introduction to the medicine, called a “Handshake,” followed by a deeper dive called a “Hug.” In a final round, called a “Rebirth” dose, I felt myself die into a transpersonal realm where there was no more me, and no more us. For 30 minutes of timeless time, there was only Chaos, non-being and nothingness. Chaos can be explained by quantum physics, and Chaos theory, but my language is erotic embodiment, and so I will just say Chaos felt like post-orgasmic bliss. Before the beginning of time, out beyond ideas, Chaos is peace seeded with mystery; there are strange attractors and glowing points of light. Chaos is a deep well of ongoing emergence, from which the never-before can suddenly come into being. In the silence of non-being and nothingness, we don’t know how or whether we’ll begin again. What if we rest and savour, as we let our stories fall silent? We might even meet each other in this field beyond ideas, and encourage the emergence of the otherwise impossible!

This past weekend I was thrilled by attending Toad School, where “the Dharmacist” Trina Nguyen and her partner Lucy offer generous teachings and guidance for those who want to explore with 5meO-DMT. They have a counternormative, anticapitalist framework, and a world-transforming vision. I am feeling resourced and excited about integrating the medicine into my death-preparation practices, along with lots of experiences of “la petite mort” aka post-orgasmic bliss.

Presence with Suffering

I understand how, in the shock of trauma, there is a moment when hyperactivated nervous systems reach a zenith of panic. Suddenly, we experience a dorsal-vagal drop. We abandon our selves. It is as if there is no more separate self to inhabit. We have no ground beneath our feet. There are no boundaries. There is no mind. We exit the storyline of linear time. We cannot act on our own behalf, flee, fight or cry for help. Heartbeat and breath slow down. Awareness of agony is dimmed. We half-die, before we die. Through dissociative self-abandonment, we escape being present with suffering.

It is so merciful that, in the immediacy of trauma, we half-die before we die. But what a loss, if we survive without integrating our traumas, because then we live half-dead, numbed and atomized. Everyone has their own story. For me, there was a violent assault by a stranger, when I was 9 months old, along with a sustained experience of family violence. Dissociative self-abandonment mercifully truncated my suffering. But without context, companionship and culture to hold me so I could mend, dissociation became a lifelong neuroendocrine habit. Like so many others, in a world where trauma and neglect are ordinary and untended, my biorhythms got muted. My body and soul contracted and collapsed; my neuroendocrine system cycled within constraints that kept me from the extremes of feeling fully. Agonies were dimmed, along with ecstasies. I could not be present with suffering.

Last weekend I found context and support enough to come all the way home to my body again. In the arms of lover earth, with the help of psychedelic medicine, somatic sexual wellness, a well-guided temple of courageous companions, and a life full of loving friends, I finally laid still and remembered my infant body being helpless, violated and overwhelmed. I could feel my own embodied kinship with the suffering of lover earth, and all the many beings suffering upon it. I could be present with suffering, because I know I am not alone.

We each have a singular story of suffering, and we belong to a biosphere where there is so much suffering. By knowing we are not alone in it, we can each learn to hold our own in it. Together, we can be present with suffering; we can make it our own.

There is an actual neuroendocrine experience of embodied unity, and we can weave it. Loving relationships, counternormative understandings, somatic practices and psychedelic medicines all help unite us in the experience of embodied love. In love, over time, we can ease out of our atomizing contractions and isolating collapses. We can reach back in time, to hold the suffering of human and more-than-human ancestors. We can reach forward in time, to hold the suffering of generations to come. Together, we can discern the nested rhythms. Extremes of agony and ecstasy can be held, with embodied presence, inside of long arcs of subtle arousal, sustained support, and gentle peace.