Psychedelics Can Help People In Eating Disorder Recovery Establish Self-Trust
Eating disorder recovery is learning how to trust in ourselves - and this is the essence of plant medicine and psychedelics teachings.
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Trust. This is probably the word that I hear the most with clients and when I speak to other people who are also in recovery.
So often, I hear my 1:1 clients as well as those attend my Eating Disorder Recovery Support Groups say something along the following:
I want to trust my body.
I want to trust my hunger and fullness cues.
I want to listen to and trust what my body desires to eat in this moment.
I want to trust the rest.
I want to trust my voice and express my wants and needs.
I want to trust that I'm ok and enough even if I don't do all the things.
I want to trust that I won't be forgotten or alone.
I want to trust in my relationships that love me, that I can receive their love.
I want to trust myself enough to let go.
Which one of these sentences resonate with you the most?
In a world of diet culture where we are told that we can't trust our inner cues and instead have to rely on external rules, it can feel challenging to lean into trust.
However, trust is what forms the basis of our intuition, interoceptive awareness, inner wisdom, and transformation.
Plant medicines are powerful allies in supporting us to practice how to trust. And trust, like most things, is something we can cultivate through practice and over time get better at.
With the support of plant medicine and psychedelics, we journey quite literally in the space of non-ground, whereby all of the rigidly held ideas, beliefs, and constructs begin to degrade.
As a flooding of serotonin system occurs, the default mode network diminishes in activity, and "the story of me" and the concepts that we have about the world flattens and no longer sits at the top of the hierarchy.
In this liminality of a psychedelic journey, without anything to hold onto, we are left with the inevitable: to lean into and begin trusting the ground within which is our unshakeable, ever-present essential nature.
This essence is not based on what we've achieved or how we look. To trust in this, is to trust in our inherent enoughness and goodness that also present in all beings.
As our small story of self no longer takes front and center, this then gives space for a different kind of information to emerge. This information is the body's communication, signals, cues, and messages that can begin to rise up in the clear field of our awareness. This is our intuition: the body's deep knowing and wisdom.
It can be hard to trust this inner voice especially in a distracted diet culture world, but when we become quiet, slow down, and drop in, this voice floats up to be heard. Psychedelics help us enter more of a trance-like state whereby our mind chatter can quieten, we have more access to pausing and witnessing, and subconsious material which is housed in the body has room to reveal itself to us.
The body often carries answers to questions that the rational mind doesn't even know how to ask.
With the support of the psychedelic journey, preparation and integration, the more we can intentionally practice trust, and naturally the less we need to rely on the eating disorder.
Trusting ourselves on this essential level means that we can rely less on the eating disorder. When we can root into ourselves in this deep way, we don’t have to rely on something external and outside of us to provide us with a sense of meaning and value.
And I’m sure many of you who have experienced the depths of an eating disorder may be able to recognize a moment where you believed that an eating disorder felt part of your identity.
I know I have. In the early years of struggling with an eating disorder, I remember thinking that I couldn't imagine myself without it. I had forgotten who I was without the eating disorder. It felt like it me.
And then in one of my first group psychedelic ceremony, I realized the eating disorder was something I was holding onto really tightly, but it wasn't inside of me. I could put the eating disorder down if I wanted to.
In that psychedelic journey, it was the first time I realized on an embodied level that the eating disorder wasn't me and as such, it was something I could separate from.
With the support of plant medicine, I began to see that the story of "I am someone with an eating disorder" was from a time in the past and started to hold less grip. My attachment to “my” eating disorder was becoming less and less relevant. I also started to question whether this belief was one that I wanted to keep reinforcing and telling myself.
In psychedelic journey space, the concrete sense of self is disrupted and story of who we think we are degrades.
With brain in a hyper-connected, entropic state, there is space for new associations and perspectives to curiously arise. Additionally, we are more sensitive to sensory input and signals from the body, impacting how we sense ourselves and ourselves in the world.
We can start to see the reasons why we attached to the eating disorder and why we felt the need to hold onto it so tightly. Usually when we are in a process like this, in an altered state with psychedelics, there is access to self-compassion and loving attention so we can explore these roots and reasons with a great degree of kindness to ourselves. This is super helpful as you can imagine! In the psychedelic journey, we might also be able to practice what it could be like to loosen our grip around these stories and identity constructs.
Psychedelics offer us directions to reimagine, reconstruct, and reconnect to a more aligned embodiment that reflects this deeper nature of being.
Underneath the eating disorder, who are we truly?
This question is what plant medicines support us in uncovering, discovering, recovering - and trusting.
I have personally been investigating this question over the 16 years of uncovering and discovering myself through my own eating disorder recovery journey - with the support of plant medicines.
Recovery has required me reconnect with my body by slowing down, listening, and doing the work that actually brings to closer to being in my body.
I have learnt that crossing thresholds from the known into the unknown is the work, with each day bringing micro moments to practice leaning into liminality with greater trust, resilience and curiosity.
It has been a journey that has brought me back to relearning the signals of my body and thereby stepping more and more into my authentic rhythm with life.
Recovery has been about giving myself permission let more of life in, which includes everything from grief to love and all that is in between. And through that, for my soul to feel nourished by this expansion that is experienced through the body, the senses, physical sensations and emotions.
Through this embodied expansion, my vision and mind has broadened, allowing me to see new possibilities and connections. This flexible and more open perception has brought greater creativity to my life that has directly resulted in my healing.
I have allowed more of myself to be seen in this process as I let go of the rigid need to know, get it perfect, or shape myself into someone else’s expectation of who I should be.
Recovery has brought me back to the deep remembrance of what I am part of: which is that I am inherently interconnected with the greater body of the Earth.
Eating disorder recovery has for me been a journey back to the Mother, to learn from her cycles and rhythms of birth, death and rebirth, and to expand my awareness to all that I am intimately connected to and thus influence.
And when I nourish my own body in ways that feel inspiring, aligned and meaningful for me, I am nourishing the greater whole.
My recovery is not just for me - it ripples out and touches the lives of many other beings. This interconnection brings great motivation, courage and trust to keep walking the path of authentic embodiment.