Moving From Rigidity to Flexibility: ED Recovery and Plant Medicine
How does the word “rigid” make you feel? And what happens in your body when you hear the word “flexible”?
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Two words, two different frequencies. How have these words showed up in your life?
When we think about the word flexible, it relates to being able to bend, something that is movable, having a sense of suppleness or workability. Rigidity on the other hand implies something that is fixed, something that cannot be changed. It is inflexible and unyielding.
This concept of moving from rigidity to flexibility sums up the process of eating disorder recovery and encapsulates how psychedelics and sacred plant medicine can support that transition.
Eating disorders are controlled, rigid patterns that have been picked up unconsciously during times of challenge, stress or trauma. And over the years, these behaviour patterns get refined by our unconsciousness, determining how we move through, act, and engage with ourselves and the world. Challenge, stress or trauma causes a fragmentation in the psyche, or a truncation from the whole self. Indeed, so many of us are moving through the world wounded.
trauma is like scar tissue
Many of us have experienced some kind of physical injury, for example a gash in the skin. When there is an open wound, the body heals with scar tissue by covering it up. Scar tissue is like this biological glue that the body uses to repair itself. It's not the same as skin tissue - it's a little bit less elastic, which leads to tightness and often limited movement and may even cause pain for some people. Scar tissue doesn't align itself in the same organized or symmetrical pattern as normal tissue. It also has a different composition to normal tissue with some people saying that it's weaker than normal tissue, and easier to reinjure. Scar tissue is also more pain sensitive. Scar tissue is different than normal tissue metabolically, meaning that it’s much more poorly oxygenated, nor does it receive nutrition, hydration, or fluid lubrication as well as normal tissue.
the eating disorder is the scar tissue
However, without scar tissue we could never heal and return back into the world. It is with scar tissue that the body is able to attach nerves back to nearby structures and regain function.
I personally have had my own relationship with scar tissue after having surgery when I fractured my tibia in February 2021 in a motorcycle accident. Over the course of a year, I have been finding ways to mobilize this rigid area back into a movable flexible state.
I really like how this analogy of scar tissue relates to trauma and eating disorders. We can see how trauma events cause a rupture or break in the psyche that can also lead to further physical manifestations like illness or chronic pain. To make sense of the trauma, the psyche did everything it could to cover up the wound. And usually the tools that we had to heal from the trauma time were limited. Often, there wasn't adequate support that was needed in that moment of rupture.
The psyche attempts to cover up the wound as urgently as possible. Protection is #1 priority. Metaphorical scar tissue goes in all directions as quickly possible to cover up the pain for the sake of survival. In the same way that scar tissue works in the body, the eating disorder behaviours cover up the wound (the trauma) and help us move through life even if it’s a disorderly or miscalculated. The eating disorder behaviors get the job done, so to speak. We find a way to get through life with the help of the eating disorder. Who knows where we would have been post-trauma if it weren’t for the food and body strategies that were discovered.
Over time, with the eating disorder behaviors acting as scar tissue, we become rigid and hard to the world; our armour is up for protection. And our flexibility is lost, including our softness, spontaneity and capacity to surrender.
The process of eating disorder recovery is about massaging that scar tissue, so that becomes softer and more malleable. And it's about tending to that old wound, and holding it and placing a hand on it, and acknowledging what it has gone through.
psychedelics help us tend to the hard wound and soften
Psychedelics can help us get to that softer, flexible state as part of the recovery process. People who undergo psychedelic experiences report having their minds opened (not to mention heart and body). Sacred plant medicine like Iboga, psilocybin mushrooms, or Ayahuasca can support us moving from a narrow, rigid focus, to a more open focus.
Often people state that after altering their consciousness with psychedelics, they are more open to believing in the magical form of fate, and in consciousness that connects the universe, weaving us all together across time and space. Individuals move away from a cold, impersonal, scientific narrative of the world and towards one that is filled with greater purpose, meaning and mystery.
Plant medicine can ultimately offer and provide us with a deeper understanding of our place in the world, leading us to feel more at peace with our place in this interconnected web - which is so integral in in the healing and recovery process. Indeed, so the eating disorder can represent a kind of spiritual disconnection.
Reconnecting with a greater purpose, engaging with life in a reciprocal way, and expressing gratitude are fundamental in eating disorder recovery and stepping out of diet culture.
By connecting with these unifying spiritual principles - that include accepting impermanence - can ease our suffering. The healing process can drive us to reflect upon life’s purpose and the meaning on a personal scale as well as on a universal scale simultaneously.
psychedelics on the brain: moving from rigidity to flexibility
Dr. Robin Carhartt Harris has proposed the REBUS model (Relaxed Beliefs Under pSychedelics) which explains the way in which the brain constructs our world and our sense of identity by building stories, predictions and models. These stories are adaptive because we are taking our past experience and applying it to the present (or future) moment to solve an issue or challenge.
When we have gone through trauma, this past experience starts to inform every waking moment of the present and influences our perception of the future. We get stuck in a self-perpetuating loop, where we are trying to solve problems at the same level that they were created.
Psychedelics are able to affect the process of the brain that creates these stories and making things a lot more malleable and flexible. We're able to make new connections and see things from different lenses, so that we become flexible in how we explore ourselves and our place in the world.
Indeed, trauma is not an experience that we must endure; it can a springboard for conscious choice that has the potential of catapulting us into new perceptions about ourselves, others and the world.
Many of us know how tricky and sticky eating disorders can be; it can feel like sometimes it's completely dominating our lives and sometimes it feels like it’s kept in check. But it never feels like it really gone away.
Psychedelics can support eating disorder recovery because they improve this cognitive flexibility; they open up and soften that stickiness when journeying.
There is a break in the pattern of the ruminating thoughts around the rigid rules of what to eat, not to eat, how to exercise, how to get lose weight, and all the things that go with disordered eating.
surrendering is the journey of being flexible
During the journey itself there's a huge amount of inner courage and self-compassion that is required, because the medicine may make take us to quite difficult places. And so, in those moments in the journey itself, there is a movement from rigidity to flexibility. Otherwise, as the saying goes “what resists, persists.”
When challenging things come up, we are asked to be flexible, and adapt to what is present instead of holding on and trying to control the situation.
With the support of plant medicine, we see where and how we have become rigid (the patterns are exposed in a new light), and the work to open up to life after a journey is where the practice of flexibility comes.
When we look at depression or PTSD, psychedelics can offer immediate relief. But for eating disorders it does not always go like that. We can sometimes feel worse after a journey. This because the disorder itself is threatened.
We often see a lot of ambivalence in eating disorder recovery; some people don’t want to get better. This is because giving up the disorder means the protection of the scar tissue is gone. It can feel terrifying to give up that one source of control.
Psychedelics show us that opening up that scar issue and looking at the wound is where the healing takes place. And the eating disorder doesn't like that.
However, if we choose to look at the wound (and it can be done in a very slow, titrated way) and start the layered process of healing, we don't really know what will happen, where recovery will lead us, and how our own healing process will affect the collective.
So again, we can't even get too rigid or focused on how the healing process is meant to go. Often the path of recovery will never look how we imagined it, and is perfectly imperfect. And so we are reminded that throughout this journey of recovery we are to remain flexible.
accessing our innate healing intelligence
Psychedelics and plant medicine can help us with accessing our inner healing intelligence by helping us clear the path. The inner healing intelligence is the soma’s complex and elegant organization that drives us toward wellness, that when the obstacles to healing are removed and favorable conditions are created, our entire soma is influenced and is drawn into wholeness and freedom.
When we change from the inside out, it is not just the physical structure that moves with more ease and grace but also the thoughts, stories, beliefs and emotions that live in, through, and with the body.
Recovery is a freeing up.
Recovery is embodying congruence.
Recovery is being able to adapt to situations; having a flexible nervous system that can respond to the environment, where we have choice, agency and tools to move with whatever is arising before us.
Recovery leads to greater resilience.
Recovery is connecting the body and the brain for fluid, dynamic communication.
Recovery is being able to move with the constant change.
Recovery is recognising the endless possibilities and opportunities in life and being able to go for them.
Recovery is a dance.
Recovery is opening up the pathways for our innate capacity for healing to take place.
Recovery is moving from rigidity to flexibility which is an alchemical process.
Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash