What is the Best Psychedelic for Eating Disorder Recovery?
Is there a recommended plant medicine or psychedelic for eating disorder recovery?
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Psychedelics and plant medicines are “non-specific amplifiers”, meaning that whatever is at the forefront of our mind, or whatever is holding the strongest emotional charge at that moment, often comes up to the surface during a psychedelic experience.
Whatever arises may be in our conscious awareness, or maybe it is deep within our subconscious but impacts our actions, reaction, and decisions without us even realizing it (this is how trauma works).
Additionally, psychedelics and plant medicine are able to also work in a transdiagnostic way.
This means that they can attend to and shine light on eating disorder behaviours, addiction, OCD tendencies, ruminating thought patterns, depression, anxiety, any kind of maladaptive control pattern, or chronic illnesses because they go to the root of where these behaviours and adaptations developed, rather than putting a band aid over the symptoms. This root can go back before we were even born, shining light on generational patterns and traumas.
With this overview, it seems then that any psychedelic could be supportive to catalyze an individual on their recovery path. However, the main question is, which medicine do you feel most drawn towards?
Why do you feel drawn to this plant? What is fueling the desire to journey with the specific medicine?
Which sacred plant medicine do you feel in resonance with?
Where is your curiosity leading you?
Where is your inner compass pointing you towards?
How can you make space within yourself to drop from your head and into your body, and hear what is the most aligned path for your highest healing?
This process asks us to look within and trust ourselves that what we are drawn to is right for us. Of course, we can receive input and guidance from others, but ultimately this is a process of trusting the core self, the voice within, and that sometimes strange yet magical intuitive pull.
It is trusting in the unknown. It is trusting the body’s wisdom. Being in this process is representative of what eating disorder recovery is about as a whole!
Each medicine has their own “personality” and their own ways of working with individuals, allowing different parts within the psyche to be opened and worked with. Some people are attracted to a certain medicine because the plant medicine’s energy is speaking to the energetic signature of that person.
No medicine is better than the other. They are just different. And each and every journey will be different, even if you sit with the same medicine multiple times.
Sometimes we need a certain medicine for a certain moment or period in our lives to move through a particular chapter, and then we feel pulled to another kind of psychedelic (or pulled to no medicine at all).
what plant medicine can best support eating disorder recovery?
For those who are in early phases of recovery, working with a medicine that doesn't a require specific diet/dieta is important to consider. If you know (aka deeply know) that you are in a fragile place in your recovery, it can be triggering to restrict your diet for a plant medicine ceremony/journey. Please be mindful and honest with where you are, what you have capacity for, and what your intentions are for working with plant medicine. Sometimes it’s better to place the importance on maintaining stability with food and your well-being/mental health than on a pre-ceremony diet.
This means that perhaps exploring altered healing states with psilocybin (magic mushrooms) or MDMA, rather than Ayahuasca or Iboga. Again, this is very much according to the individual.
Mushrooms and MDMA can support us in feeling the interconnectedness with life, play, and openness. These two medicines do not require a strict diet.
Ayahuasca can aid in helping us release traumas and clear any old physical, emotional, mental, and energetic space.
Iboga can catalyze a break in the habitual and addictive eating disorder patterns.
There are many psychedelics and plant medicines that can support disordered eating recovery. it depends on where you are in your healing journey, your physical health condition, and what medicine you feel called to at this time.
It is also important to consider dose, who will support you (ie. guide/shaman/facilitator/friend), and the space you will be journeying in.
These factors impact the relationship you will have with the medicine itself in the actual psychedelic experience.
For non-psychoactive medicines, cacao medicine is gentle and soft, and can help people open the heart and feel more enlivened. Hapé (rapé), a snuff made out of sacred tobacco and tree ash, helps with grounding and lengthening the body, supporting individuals to stand their power and take up space in dignified ways. These two medicines represent sacred feminine and masculine plants and when combined can help unify and balance the yin and yang within, bringing a sense of wholeness and integration to the system which is so important in eating disorder recovery. Including medicinal mushrooms, like lions mane, reishi, and chaga with cacao or a microdose of psilocybin may also be supportive for the physical, mental, and emotional body in eating disorder recovery.
Trust that the whatever medicine you feel drawn towards, granted you have done the necessary research, clarified intentions, and are prioritizing your physical, mental, and emotional safety, you will receive what you are needing in the moment to uncover, discover, and recover yourself.
Psychedelics do not cure or act like a magic pill.
They enhance our vision and awareness on the places that we cannot see ourselves. They highlight aspects of ourselves we have forgotten or repressed, and give us a chance to see things in a new way. Plant medicine take us to the root of where the eating disorder stemmed form and with this new knowing we can start to direct our lives differently.
As such when the journey ends, the ceremony of life begins, and as part of the integration process, we can meet ourselves each day armed with new insights and deeper presence.
When combined with other healing modalities like talk therapy, somatic therapy, dance and art therapy, as well as when supported by another, like a coach, therapist, counsellor, or mentor on a long-term and regular basis, the old thought patterns and internalised beliefs can be chipped away and worked through, creating fresh opportunities and greater space for a more inspired and aligned blueprint to be imprinted into the psyche.
Psychedelics help us to learn about ourselves through an embodied understanding: this experiential understanding gets into our cells and nervous system. The whole body, including the mind, are unlearning and learning new ways of being. With the support of plant medicines, individuals can believe and feel on a full body and cellular level that they love themselves - perhaps for the first time. This can be forgotten over time, but it can always be remembered because it's in the cellular memory.
Each medicine in their own way, can also remind us of us the bigger web that that we are connected to; we are part of this unified existence and that we all have a part and role to play. And we all deserve to be here. This is so important for people with eating disorder who often feel separate from the world and society, like they don’t belong, or deserve to be here. Plant medicine remind us that there is support and holding all around us and that we are worthy to receive the goodness and love that is already here.
Unlike what diet culture wants us to believe, the answers are inside of us.
Psychedelics are not an external cure, they catalyze us to look inwards; healing is internal journey. Psychedelics can show us the way, but they won’t do the healing for us.
The medicine that we seek are within. We are our own guides for our own healing and transformation.