The Community Healing Model: Psychedelic Medicine is Simply Incomplete Without It
In all of the healing work that I have done, I’ve come to know that there is one facet of plant medicine work that simply stands in a league of its own. And it is all rooted in one truth: we are wounded in relationship and we heal in relationship. Healing in community has a power that is hard to really understand until you’re in a room with people and feel the shedding of layers of pain in the bodies of the present individuals. There are many reasons why this happens, as far as I can tell and here are a few:
1.) We all have our own stories and in those stories we have implicit assumptions and beliefs that we take for granted. When we get together with a group of people we can rub off on one another and, like potatoes in a sack of potatoes as they rub the dirt off of one another, we learn how our stories hold us back. As others share their stories, we see ourselves reflected in the story tellers, and our stories in theirs. From this place we can see ourselves outside of our own narrative, and it makes our story workable to the extent that we can allow it to become more loving, generous, kind, compassionate, etc.. By doing so, we make our bodies a more caring place for our souls to rest.
2.) Our nervous systems are interconnected and we benefit when we’re able to be supported in our activation and our sensitivities. Trauma becomes encoded in the body not necessarily explicitly when something traumatic happens but when a traumatic event occurs AND there is no integration or repair. When we have a loving container around us and we’re able to be held in our trauma, we learn that our bodies are actually more safe than the trauma would have us think. This is when we’re able to do the repair work that is necessary to heal trauma and make our bodies a safer place.
3.) We all have our own embodied truths and accessing these truths makes us more dynamic beings as we surrender the control of our lives to the superior intelligence of the body. Feeling the way others embody their truths invites us to do the same. Additionally, when we allow ourselves to feel our bodies to the fullest extent possible, we get to know ourselves in an intimate level that can only come from feeling our experience. And often, having an external role model show us what that feels like, can be the codes we need to sense body freedom.
All of this can be done in one on one settings, as I do with my clients, yet to be in a room with others offers a level of healing that can only be generated in community.
