The Wisdom of Sacred Plant Medicine for Eating Disorder Recovery
Sacred earth medicines and other psychedelics show you what is happening to you, allow you to see and to experience consciously what is normally unconscious.
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This is the wisdom of plant medicine: they illuminate the unseen, and once we see the unseen, we can no longer unsee it.
An eating disorder keeps pain, stress, and trauma suppressed, numbed, and hidden and out sight through various food and body strategies, such as restriction, over-exercising, purging, or eating past fullness.
As such, when we enter into a psychedelic experience, we must remember that we will very likely encounter aspects of ourselves that we have repressed, forgotten, or ignored.
It is therefore important that foundational preparation work has been laid so that the protectors, managers, and other defending parts have been acknowledged and feel heard, so that they can feel safe to soften and put down their walls and amour.
That means that when the unseen, hidden, or ignored aspects of the psyche are revealed and illuminated in a psychedelic journey (or even when microdosing), there is enough robust grounding, nervous system capacity, and psychological flexibility to hold whatever comes up - because sound preparation work has already been done.
Approaching Eating Disorder Recovery with the Wisdom of Sacred Plant Medicine Offers Us the Potential To:
Hold ourselves in a way that supports our healing, whereby we embody the felt sense of dignity, self-acceptance, and wholeness.
Illuminate our purpose and re-contextualize our place in the world.
Open our hearts and remember that our healing ripples out, positively impacting the collective.
Acknowledge how the disordered eating strategies were needed at a challenging time that supported our survival.
Widen our capacity to be with the full spectrum of sensations, emotions, and internal thought processes through empowering self-regulation tools.
Dispel doubts and fears, and question the validity of self-limiting beliefs, including those related to food, weight, and body.
Activate gratitude and self-compassion towards ourselves and to the greater world around us.
Widen our perspective from a narrow, rigid focus, to an open mind and heart, restoring our connection in the web of life.
Move from external rules to internal cues, and attuning to our intuition.
Embrace and nurture the inner child and other fragmented parts of ourselves.
Shift our focus into the present moment and to trust its unfolding, releasing the grip of control.
Reconnect with our inherent worth and true belonging, and believe in our capacity to give and receive love.
Remember who you truly are.
Just as important as the preparation work is to support and deepen the psychedelic journey, integration after the experience is vital. Integration is all about taking the downloads and insights from the plant medicine experience and weaving into the fabric of everyday life.
The euphoria from such an inner journey is not eternal.
Maintaining an open heart,
Weaving the insights into the fabric of daily life,
Navigating moments of trigger and challenge with humility and curiosity,
Practicing developing a coherent nervous system that allows for natural impulses to release, sound, movement and expression to come through,
Reclaiming our space that we deserve and are worthy to take up,
And embodying the energetic frequencies of our authentically aligned expression, is the work we are required to do.
The integration work is to regulate our nervous system and state of mind, and recall and practice feelings of love - and whatever else we aspire to embody and experience more in our lives - in our hearts again, as experienced during the psychedelic journey.
A plant medicine experience brings us closer to the places we have avoided so that we can integrate the fragmented parts within us back into wholeness.
This leads to greater peace and trust in our bodies as we start to learn that we can hold both the darkness and light within our vessels and come out the other side, transformed and whole. As such, we embody the medicine we have been seeking all along.