I’ve been thinking about intensity, in the awful intensity of these times. I wonder if there’s any wisdom in what I’ve learned.
Many years ago, when I was training, intensity was our method. We were taught to push fast into powerful altered states. Such states are actually quite easy to generate — through breath, touch, emotional activation, group process. They feel powerful, transformative, compelling.
Indeed, the neuroscience we later learned revealed that experiences of companioned, purposeful intensity can reopen neural learning windows. They can melt rigid identity, destabilize the trance of normal, and make the impossible feel possible. In the context of a loving community of practice devoted to personal and social liberation, many of us found our way to profound healing and well-being.
But—I see right-wing demagogues and irresponsible gurus employing these same tactics. The neuroendocrine states that emerge with companioned, purposeful intensity make people vulnerable to entrainment with charismatic authority. We become highly suggestible. The risk of retraumatization and boundary violations increases. This isn’t incidental — it’s structural.
Psychedelics are certainly not necessary to access these altered neuroendocrine states. But when they get added to the mix, these vulnerabilities get instant and amplified.
Does this mean we must avoid high-intensity experiences in order to stay safe, and defend against all trauma triggers? I see left-wing collectives and careful teachers of trauma preaching this path. And as much as I have learned from concepts like “Window of Tolerance” and “secure attachment,” I observe that such understandings and practices can keep us cowering in a very constricted part of our nervous systems.
What I learned, instead, was we can be guided into better relationship with intensity through a path of trauma-aware ecstasy.
The word ecstasy comes from the Greek ekstasis — stepping outside the fixed. We move beyond the small defended self and feel held in a wider field of mystery and transpersonal belonging.
Sometimes ecstasy arrives as vivid, hallucinatory experiences of unity with all that is. But often it comes quietly — a deepened breath, a widening of perception, a felt sense of interbeing that is intimate rather than cosmic. Big, loud, long ecstatic states are not inherently more transformative than small and subtle ones. Volume and velocity don’t mean salience. A trauma survivor’s peak experience of shyly asking for wanted touch is as ecstatic as someone else’s thirty-minute orgasm.
Some people have nervous systems that genuinely thrive at higher amplitudes and frequencies of intensity. For them, deep activation, edge-work, and sustained charge are enlivening. For others, the same conditions are dysregulating. The question is whether a peak experience of intensity can be held within a rhythm that supports joy, satisfaction, integration, agency, and belonging.
We grow nervous-system capacity by exploring ecstasy in non-habitual ways. That might mean lingering in enoughness and discovering quieter paths to ecstasy, or spending time in amplified aliveness and courageous edge-walking. When learning unfolds at the pace of trust — with a just-right blend of challenge and support — we flourish.
A rhythm of escalation → peak intensity → crash entrains us to a stimulation–burnout cycle — a boom–bust pattern that ultimately poisons sacred ceremony. Contraction from the non-ordinary consciousness that unfolds with companioned, purposeful intensity confines our souls and societies to mediocrities.
Ecstasy is how intense peak experiences exist within a rhythm:
ecstasy → satisfaction → integration → deepened belonging → renewed longing, with expanded capacity for ecstasy.
This rhythm aligns us with the oscillating systems that shape the cosmos: neural firing, cardiac variability, ecological cycles, cosmic microwave background rhythms. It is a recalibration to the pulse of the universe.