Psychedelics and Eating Disorder Recovery: What To Expect
If you are looking to sacred plant medicine or psychedelics to support your eating disorder recovery, it is possible that you may experience being challenged on your worldviews, the way you relate to your body, the beliefs around how you perceive yourself, and your place here on this Earth.
*
*
*
The process of disentangling from an eating disorder can be shocking, painful, and uncomfortable. Many years, decades, and generations of undoing often needs to be faced, and it is to these places inside of ourselves where plant medicine can take us.
These shifts in beliefs may also bring up grief and sadness in seeing from a new perspective, the years (and possibly generations) of how our bodies have been spoken to, punished, hurt, rejected, betrayal, perpetrated, and abandoned.
These shifts in how you view your body may be healing and liberating and positively change the ways in which you treat your body and accept other people and their bodies (aka #droppingoutofdietculture).
It can also bring up anger in seeing the oppressive reality of diet and fitness culture with fresh eyes.
Plant medicine or psychedelics support this undoing by reopening a window of brain development – one in which the brain is more plastic. When there is greater plasticity, there’s more potential to generate new patterns of thought and behaviour. This is called “neuroplasticity” and refers to the ways in which the body’s ability to change, heal, grow, and relearn.
For people navigating eating disorder recovery and the tight rules of diet culture, supporting the process of generating more flexibility and plasticity, allows for:
A softening of rigid food rituals,
A reduction in ruminating food and body thoughts and negative self-talk,
A release of punishing guilt-driven restriction (and subsequent pendulum swing to bingeing which leads to more guilt, shame, and restriction), and
An increased capacity to with one’s feelings, to be more in one’s own body, tracking sensations, emotions, and impulses in the present moment.
Plant medicine experiences often allow people to access emotions that are usually too intense to process – and for people with eating disorders, feeling the feels is one of the toughest aspects of recovery.
Many people don’t want to get physically big because they don’t want to face big emotions.
Psychedelics and eating disorder recovery: anything is possible
When in a psychedelic experience however, one may experience a rainbow of emotion, insight, wonder, awe, fear, disgust, shame, grief, connection, loneliness, love, and compassion, as it relates to the eating disorder, but it often extends much deeper and wider than that.
It can be empowering to come out the other side of the journey having felt so much and to have not been totally swallowed by the emotion.
This can offer evidence to an individual that they can feel and are not numb or robots, and they have the strength and the softness to feel the real and raw sensation of the present moment.
Good preparation with the help of a coach or guide prior to the psychedelic journey, can really support the process of being able to face and hold bigger feelings in a journey, ultimately increasing one’s capacity in everyday life. To access my free download on how to prepare of a macro or micro plant medicine ceremony for people in eating disorder recovery, head here. I go in-depth into what preparation can look like, and how it can deepen the journey experience as well as the integration thereafter.
What transpires in a journey can be further unpacked in integration sessions and can catalyze individuals into the next chapter of healing their relationship with food, their bodies, and everything else that the food symbolises.
These medicines take us to these places so we can begin a new template of relating with your bodies; a relationship with greater kindness, forgiveness and acceptance.
In starting to make peace with living in the homes that house us in every moment, with each breath, our bodies become a safe haven. There is a felt sense of belonging: embodied belonging. The cells remember and know on a body level that all parts of you belong and are worthy to be here.
From this inner residing, we treat those around us with more groundedness, generosity and grace, including humans, nature and elemental beings.
We acknowledge.
We listen.
We attend.
We take care.
In the process of this clearly seeing, unlearning, metamorphizing, and transforming our relationship with our bodies, we are also healing our relationship with this greater body that nourishes us: the body of the Mother Earth.
And this is where plant medicine takes us: to ground back into this reality, on this Earth, where we all belong, and to take care of this great body that sustains all life.
Photo by Kristopher Roller on Unsplash