Just over a year ago, I wrote about the power of community to support psychedelic journeys. It’s well established that psychedelic experiences are characterized by a sense of connectedness, but sharing that journey with others can enhance those feelings. Community is fundamental to indigenous psychedelic healing, and it’s fundamental to the ACER integration program.
Group psychedelic integration
Two recent research articles move the discussion forward. The first, ‘(Dis)connectedness, Suicidality and Group Psychedelic Therapies‘ (McAlpine & Blackburne), notes that social disconnectedness is a significant risk factor for suicidal thoughts or behaviours. They consider the “potent synergy“ of psychedelic group therapy and suggest that “such a collective space … has the potential to not only awaken a renewed awareness of social support but also to establish a sturdy framework of communal care”.
The second one takes a different route but comes to the same conclusion. ‘Psychedelics and neonihilism – connectedness in a meaningless world’ (Plesa and Petranker) highlights the tension between the “contemporary neoliberal” context most of us live in and the connectedness at the heart of psychedelic healing. The predominant psychological model reinforces this neoliberal ideology because it’s “based on the individual as self-contained, as atomic – a self which fashions itself as separate from the other” (Bhatia, 2020). Plesa and Petranker suggest that psychedelic group psychotherapy could help us overcome modern experiences of meaninglessness. It may offer “a collective confrontation of meaninglessness as a radical departure from individualizing therapeutic practices that further reinforce neoliberal forms of individualization, responsibilization, competition and self-governance”.
Back in the 1860s, a Russian psychologist called Ivan Sechenov noted the existence of an “obscure muscular sense” at the border of consciousness. He was probably the first to suggest that bodily sensations might be significant, but no one paid much attention. It wasn’t until 1907 that Charles Scott Sherrington named this internal sense ‘interoception’, finally giving a name to our ability to sense bodily signals like heartbeat, breath, thirst, hunger and muscle tension.
Although we’ve known about interoception for over 100 years, research into this powerful ‘sixth sense’ has taken off in the last few decades. Why the sudden interest? It’s become increasingly apparent that interoception is fundamental to emotional regulation and can play a crucial role in our wellbeing.
Interoception feeds a vast amount of information to the brain: While most of that input will remain outside conscious awareness, it all significantly impacts our emotional state and thinking. We all differ in how intensely we experience emotions, and the research suggests that this might be due to individual differences in interoception. People with greater interoceptive awareness tend to feel emotions more intensely, are more empathic and are better at emotional regulation. Conversely, research links a lack of interoceptive awareness with emotional disorders. In summary, listening through your body can enhance your emotional life and mental health.
So how can you learn to listen to your body? I asked Jennifer Tantia, a Somatic Psychotherapist and Dance Movement therapist. Many years ago, Jennifer “went on a quest” to find the answer to a vital question: “How am I going to teach people how to get into their bodies?” Jennifer explains that the body is “a gateway between consciousness and unconsciousness”, and she talks us through ways we can learn the path through that gateway. The key is to “really pay attention, start listening through [your] body”. You need to let go and be open to listening and receiving information “outside of what you think you know”. Meditation, dance, and Focusing can all help develop your interoceptive awareness; perhaps unsurprisingly, these three are embodied pathways of connection.
Mindful breathing and body scan meditation are especially valuable to developing your interoceptive awareness, and mindful movement can also help. Jennifer talks about a form of dance movement therapy called Authentic Movement: “It’s like putting your brain in the back seat and putting your body in the driver’s seat, and you really are in a different state where your body is moving”.
My conversion with Jennifer goes deep, and we identify presence as an underlying theme. You have to be fully present to listen through your body. Jennifer notes that it underpins meditation, nature connection and psychedelic experience. As our conversation ends, Jennifer emphasizes the importance of practice.
“You can’t just do it once and get it. It’s a practice; it’s tolerating your own frustration, it’s letting yourself be surprised until everything is a surprise. And that’s presence, right, and it’s worth the effort to practice”.
Learning to listen through your body takes time – and you need to keep practising – but the reward is no less than becoming fully human.
Western culture has a curious habit of rediscovering what’s already known. Typically, spirituality comes to a profound understanding first, and a philosopher gets it next. Sometime later, psychology catches up, and neuroscience finally ‘discovers’ it with a brain scan.
Cutting-edge neuroscience has found that the brains of social species like mice, bats and humans tend to synchronise, creating what neuroscientist Thalia Wheatley describes as “a single überbrain that isn’t reducible to the sum of its parts”. Like when oxygen and hydrogen combine to make water, what emerges is qualitatively different.
The researchers studied what happens when two people create a story together. Starting with the prompt “A group of children encounters aliens”, each person took turns to tell the next part of the tale. Caitlyn and Lorie set their account in a strange landscape, and during one of her turns, Caitlyn told of how the ground started to rise up beneath the feet of the children. A moment later, Lorie took her turn, saying that “It felt like the creature took a breath.” This is exactly where Caitlyn planned to take the story: the kids were walking on the alien itself. Caitlyn felt that they “were on the same page”, while the research neuroscientist concluded that this was synchrony at work.
I’m always pleased when new research upsets the myth of an enclosed, Cartesian individual, but social psychologists came to a similar conclusion a while ago. Take, for example, the phenomenon of ’emotional contagion’. You may have noticed how the mood of people you’re with impacts your own, how we tend to unconsciously ‘catch’ other people’s moods. You may also be familiar with the ‘contact high’ phenomenon, where simply sitting with someone on a psychedelic journey makes you feel like you’ve taken the substance too. Although this goes against the Western model of the enclosed individual, the evidence for this kind of connectedness is overwhelming.
Decades before psychologists came to this realisation, a few philosophers grasped that we are profoundly interconnected. In 1945 Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote:
“as the parts of my body together compromise a system, so my body and the other’s are one whole, two sides of one and the same phenomenon, and the anonymous existence of which my body is the ever-renewed trace henceforth inhabits both bodies simultaneously.” (1962)
Each of us is woven into the rich tapestry of existence. As the philosopher of consciousness, Christian de Quincey wrote:
“We are constituted by webs of interconnection. Relationship comes first, and we emerge as more or less distinct centres within the vast and complex networks that surround us” (2005).
The spiritual traditions knew this long ago, and Zen Buddhist Monk Thich Nhat Hanh echoed the wisdom of the ancients when he said, “We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness.”
Can psychedelic experiences enhance our connection to nature? So far, the evidence is a resounding ‘yes’, and some philosophers suggest that careful administration of psychedelics could be a valuable way to catalyse the development of environmental virtues (Kirkham & Letheby. 2022).
‘Nature connectedness’ is much more than simply spending time in the park: It measures how strongly a person identifies with nature and can be defined as a sense of ‘oneness with the natural world’ (Mayer and Frantz, 2004). Nature connectedness is very beneficial for humans; it helps give our lives a deeper sense of meaning and supports personal growth. People who deeply appreciate our connection to the wider natural world are more likely to protect it. So nature connectedness isn’t just good for us; it’s good for the planet.
I often saw evidence of a deeper nature connection in my work on psilocybin retreats, and that’s been backed up by the research (Gandy et al., 2020). There’s some evidence that psilocybin is especially powerful in this regard and can elicit robust and sustained increases in nature connectedness (Forstmann et al., 2003). Psychedelic experiences and nature connection are woven together like threads in a tapestry. The weave is tight, but I’ll tease out a few of those threads.
Both psychedelic experience and nature connection can catalyse feelings of awe and increase our capacity for mindfulness. Many Indigenous peoples use psychedelics as a sacrament. In most cases, they are animists with a profound respect for the more-than-human world. Robert Greenway is a pioneer ecopsychologist who used to take people on ‘wilderness’ treks. After many years of leading these adventures, Greenway concluded that extended time in nature could engender an altered state that closely parallels the psychedelic experience. There are several aspects to this altered state, but fundamentally it involves “feelings of expansion or reconnection”, which Greenway unhesitatingly describes as “spiritual” (Greenway, 1995). (See The Wilderness Effect).
A pattern is emerging in this tapestry; connectedness. In my recent interview with Sam Gandy, he suggested that we can see “connectedness itself being a fundamentally interconnected or interwoven construct” and that cultivating nature connectedness can deepen connectedness to self, others and the wider world (Embodied Pathways).
It’s quite common for people to have mystical experiences while using psychedelics, and nature mysticism is ancient and global. Are they the same? It seems so: Feelings of interconnectedness, unity, sacredness, and a transcendence of time and space characterise mystical experiences emerging from both psychedelics and nature connection.
“To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour”.
William Blake, Auguries of Innocence
I would quote Blake’s words in the introduction to the nature connection exercise I used to lead at psychedelic retreats. They are a perfect example of nature mysticism and could also speak of aspects of the psychedelic experience.
The conversation about psychedelics and nature connectedness is ongoing and may be crucial in these times of climate crisis. If you’d like an accessible deep dive into this fascinating subject, listen to my interview with Sam Gandy on Embodied Pathways.
I’ve been very involved in work and research on psychedelics over the last year or so. I’ve mentioned psychedelics in a few of my posts here, but I wanted to flag up a couple of presentations. The first is online next week: I’m talking about Sacred Ecology: The Psychedelic Connection at the Embodied Spirituality event.
Back in 1996, I wrote Sacred Ecology. Now, nearly 30 years on, I’ll be exploring that territory through a psychedelic lens. Psychedelic experiences can be profoundly spiritual, often inducing mystical experiences. What does this tell us about the power of awe, nature connection and the future of therapy?
I started working as a Facilitator on psychedelic retreats in The Netherlands last year. This involved spending hours supporting people on their psychedelic journeys as well as helping them to prepare for and integrate the experience. Nature connection is widely recommended for psychedelic preparation and integration and as this is a particular interest of mine, I’ve begun to develop and refine this approach. In this presentation at the University of Exeter, I talk about the work I’ve done on psychedelic retreats and explain how we might apply ecotherapy to integration.
Last year I gave a presentation on ‘Embodied Imagination and New Animism’ at a seminar organised by The Alain Daniélou Foundation. I was inspired by this topic and took the opportunity to develop my presentation into an article for Transcultural Dialogues, the journal of the Foundation. I had more space to develop my ideas and my article – Embodied Knowing, Imagination and New Animism – took my thoughts in a new direction. I begin with a critique of the disenchanted world of Modernity, the dominant worldview of the Global North. Such critiques are common, especially as we face the growing climate emergency, for this is the worldview which has ushered in the Anthropocene Epoch.
Some of those seeking an alternative turned to animism for inspiration. David Abram is a good example. David spoke at the same seminar I attended, so while I drew from his work for inspiration, I needed to take a fresh perspective on animism. My PhD research into embodied knowing (2008) has proved to be a deep well of inspiration, and again it nurtured my thinking. I mentioned animism in my thesis, noting a relationship between embodiment and animism but I didn’t follow the thread. Curiously, animism kept cropping up in my subsequent work. The spirit of animism was stalking me, appearing like a shadow glimpsed in the forest that vanishes when the sun emerges from the clouds. Animism features in Embodied Eco-Paganism (2013) and crops up again in The Knowing Body: Eco-Paganism as an Embodying Practice (2016). It’s also a theme in my conversation with the improvisational movement artist Stephanie Gottlob (2022). But in all these previous engagements with animism, I’d missed a profound insight: “Animism isn’t about what is believed but how the world is experienced”.
The idea that animism is a belief system comes from Edward Tylor, an anthropologist working in late 19th century England. Tylor invented the term ‘animism’ to describe a ‘primitive’ type of religion, a childish and mistaken worldview that confused inanimate matter with living beings. Tylor couldn’t have got it more wrong: what he called ‘animism’ isn’t a primitive religion and certainly isn’t confused! Most importantly, animism isn’t about what you believe; it’s about how you relate to the world. Tim Ingold characterizes animism as “a condition of being alive to the world, characterized by a heightened sensitivity and responsiveness, in perception and action, to an environment that is always in flux” (2006).
I concluded that it “can best be understood as an embodied way of knowing that underpins how people live practically in the world; hunting, farming, navigating etc.” (Harris, 2023). Once we grasp that animism is an embodied way of knowing, our perspective shifts 180 degrees. Tylor wasn’t capable of understanding animism because he was blinkered by the intellectual framework of 19th-century England. There’s a lot to value in that tradition, but like any viewpoint it’s restricted, which brings us back to my critique of Modernity. My main issue with Modernity is that it believes it’s the only framework that can make sense of the world, so it literally can’t see any aspect of reality that doesn’t fit within its confines.
Animism helps illuminate many of the themes I’ve explored in this blog: ecopsychology, ecosomatics, embodied ecology, the power of place, psychedelics, activism and more. It offers a powerful alternative to Modernity and if we can drop into an embodied animist way of knowing we may yet find our way through the Anthropocene.
There are dozens of different approaches to psychotherapy. My bookshelves overflow onto the floor with books about ACT, CBT, ecotherapy, Gestalt, psychoanalysis and more. But are all these approaches just the decoration on the cake?
Not long after completing my initial training in psychotherapy, I became aware that most other therapists had been taught specific approaches to many of the most common mental health challenges. They’d done modules on what we call ‘presenting issues’ like bereavement, anxiety, depression and whatever else. I felt somewhat confused, as my extensive training – a Masters degree and then Focusing-Oriented Therapy – hadn’t covered any of that. We’d considered some of the key approaches, but in each case highlighting their limitations and the danger of a theoretical ‘frame up’; fitting the client’s unique experience into the frame of a theory.
Keen to be a better therapist, I started to learn about all the things I thought I’d missed. I learnt about the techniques I might use to help with specific presenting issues. Then I ‘caught up’ on classic CBT and some of the newer approaches that have emerged from it. But the curious thing is I don’t use techniques very much and I’m beginning to suspect that my original training had it right all along: Psychotherapy isn’t about doing but simply being. What I remember most from my training are the hours we spent in group work and the years of personal therapy. We were being developed as people rather than taught techniques because theory, though fascinating, is just the icing on the cake.
To a large extent, the research backs this up. The Dodo bird hypothesis claims that all bona fide therapeutic approaches have much the same outcomes: “Everybody has won and all must have prizes,” just as the dodo insisted in Alice in Wonderland (Wampold et. al 1997). In fact, the therapeutic relationship is more important than the approach we use: It’s more about who you are than what you do.
Given all that, I’m wondering about the constant flow of new approaches. Almost every month I hear about some new technique which will transform my therapeutic work and will give my clients a unique healing experience. Do I need to sign up for the latest course or would I be better off spending more time just developing my capacity to be present?
I recently gave a presentation on ‘Embodied Imagination and New Animism’. I explored my usual themes, but from a different angle and concluded that imagination can open the Western mind to a deeper awareness of the animated world.
As part of my preparation, I read Allan Frater’s Waking Dreams: Imagination in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life, which combines theoretical chapters with practical exercises. While the theoretical chapters were helpful for the presentation, it’s the practical exercises that prompted this post.
I’d just finished his chapter about the Waking Dream Walk and remembered that I needed to get some groceries. I decided it was a good moment to take a break from studying and get some shopping in.
It started as I was walking to the supermarket; the clouds loomed, dark and mysterious over the roof of the nearby University building, which had a distinctly mythic look. The trees were unquestionably watching my progress. I smiled. ‘It’s working then!’
Back home, what struck me was how quickly and dramatically my awareness can shift. I didn’t deliberately try the Waking Dream Walk on the way to the supermarket; it just slipped in. Evolutionary psychologist Bruce Charlton suggests that animism is “spontaneous, the ‘natural’ way of thinking for humans”. It takes “sustained, prolonged and pervasive formal education to ‘overwrite’ animistic thinking with the rationalistic objectivity typical of the modern world” (2002).
We’ve benefited enormously from such rationalistic objectivity: Thanks to a vaccine, I barely noticed a recent close encounter with Covid. But Max Weber suggests that such progress comes at a cost. Science tends to describe the world through a “process of disenchantment” that banishes “mysterious incalculable forces”. Weber claimed that meaning and value must also be relinquished in such a scientific worldview: “the belief that there is such a thing as the ‘meaning’ of the universe” must inevitably “die out at its very roots” (1962 [1917]).
Animism and science seem to be in opposition, but if we step back from an ‘either/or’ approach, there’s space for both. The pioneering work of Barbara McClintock is a classic example. McClintock won a Nobel Prize for her pioneering research on the genetics of maize. She came to such profound understanding by becoming “part of the system” and developing an intimate “feel for the organism” (Keller). McClintock didn’t think of herself as an animist, but arguably the same quality of relationship with the more-than-human informs her work.
Imagination is a fundamental part of McClintock’s genius. As the philosopher Peter Strawson notes, this kind of imagination is involved in activities ranging from a “scientist seeing a pattern in phenomena which has never been seen before … to Blake seeing eternity in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower” (1974).
What if Weber was wrong? Maybe animism need not be opposed to scientific objectivity: Perhaps imagination, a fundamental way of knowing that informs them both, can open a fruitful dialogue.
I woke up this morning thinking about my 2008 PhD research (Harris). I spent months living on a road protest site and I recalled how bonding that was. And then it dawned on me; I’d missed a fundamental aspect of the research; the power of community. Living together and working to save the land from a road project united us in a deep and powerful way; it created an embodied connection. That brought to mind an online psychedelic integration meeting I was in last week. Over 50 people came together for ten days of psychedelic training and experiences, and one of the key themes that emerged from our first integration meeting was the power of the community we’d created: There were even suggestions that it was more important than the psychedelic experience itself.
A pattern suddenly appeared, like seeing saltwater suddenly crystalize as it reaches a critical point of saturation: the liminal space of protest camps, communitas and millennia of human experience all highlight the power of community. I’d completely missed that in my PhD thesis – written fifteen years ago – because it’s so obvious. It’s like the imaginary fish who doesn’t notice water because it’s all around. While this is an exciting revelation, it’s a huge subject and will slow down work on the book I’m writing on the embodied pathways of connection. For now, I’ll just highlight a few of the threads I’m following.
Community is fundamental to indigenous healing and “the traditional use of psychoactive plants can help to enhance it” (Ona, Berrada & Bouso, 2021). Despite the importance of community for psychedelic work, it’s frequently lacking in recent approaches. Jules Evans said it well: “At the moment, psychedelics offer a very modern sort of religion – long on ‘experience’, short on community. That risks exacerbating the loneliness and isolation that cause a lot of our suffering in the first place” (Evans, 2021).
However, the ACER model of integration created by Ros Watts has community at its heart: “It is this collective aspect that, although proven to be of great benefit to overall wellbeing, is often missing from the Western model of healing” (https://acerintegration.com/). Ros is ahead of the game: She recognized the central role of community early on and made it the foundation of her work. This is a radical move in the Global North, where the psychedelic substance is typically the star of the show.
Maureen O’Hara and John Wood observed some extraordinary experiences in the person-centered ‘conscious communities’ they studied. They found that individual participants often became “deeply attuned to themselves as individual centers of consciousness” and “interpersonally attuned to each other in an ‘I-Thou’ relationship”. Yet at the same time everyone was “attuned to the group as a whole entity”. People tapped into “deeper levels of empathy and intuition”, accessing “extraordinary” levels of perception “that went beyond ordinary Western ways of knowing”. Members of these communities “frequently attained spiritual trance states usually achieved only after decades of meditative practice”. There seems to be the kind of expansion of individual consciousness “beyond individual ego-boundaries” (2005) that I’ve modelled using the cognitive iceberg.
A 2021 research paper on psychedelic communitas concluded that we may need “to question some of the fundamental cultural assumptions from, and into which psychedelic therapies are emerging – so that psychedelic treatments may not merely remain a “chemical holiday” … but instead, foster meaningful connections within relationships and communities” (Kettner, et. al. 2021)
The profound power of community highlights a tension within psychedelic research. The Western psychological approach typically studies an individual’s psychedelic journey in a clinical setting. This is rooted in a psychology “based on the individual as self-contained, as atomic – a self which fashions itself as separate from the other” (Bhatia, 2020).
But this idea is deeply flawed and psychedelic research is widening the cracks. Sometime soon there may be a crisis, a paradigm shift driven by new scientific evidence. The notion of the autonomous individual, so precious to the ideology of the Global North, will become exposed as nothing more than a hollow ideological myth.
Gautama Buddha spent most of his time in nature. He taught in nature, meditated in nature and, most importantly, became enlightened in nature. So how come most mediation today happens indoors? We’re missing something crucial and in my interview with Claire Thompson – author of Mindfulness and the Natural World and The Art of Mindful Birdwatching – we begin to unpack what’s so special about practising mindfulness in nature.
Research from the University of Derby suggests that simply being in nature is enough to produce a more mindful state (Richardson and Hallam, 2013). Claire’s experience helps explain why that might be:
“there’s something about being outdoors in nature that holds us within our own bodies a little bit more, because it’s stimulating our bodies with natural scents and sounds and sights. It’s almost like that’s what our bodies evolved to experience or to be taking in, in terms of a sensory experience. I guess to be put back into that environment can feel quite holding for people, because it holds us within our own physical experience a little bit more, which actually naturally takes us out of the narratives of our mind and our thinking and into the body”.
Our human minds label and judge in a way that nature doesn’t: Nature just is and makes no assessment or allowances. That provides a space where you can be whoever you are without labels. Claire found that facilitating mindfulness workshops in nature had a significant impact on the participant’s experience:
“It felt like being in nature opened people up and because of the lack of judgement in that space it felt like people were more able to be themselves and more able to trust that whatever experience they were having, it was okay and opened up a curiosity about their experience in a way that perhaps in some of the indoor spaces where I’d practiced mindfulness, for example, I didn’t feel the same thing. It didn’t feel like the same thing happened, or there was just something – maybe an authenticity about it as well, like people feeling allowed to be themselves more when they’re out in the wild or out in touch with the natural world”.
That can be profoundly liberating and can help to free us from our habitual attachment to the ‘self’. Our intuition – that the self is an identifiable thing, a unique and irreducible nugget of selfhood – is simply wrong; neuroscience and mindfulness agree on that. It’s not that you don’t exist! Of course you do, but the self is a process, not an object. Calling myself ‘Adrian’ helps maintain the illusion, but my ‘self’ is more like a verb than a noun: ‘I’ am the process of ‘selfing’ that extends beyond the envelope of skin around my body. John Danvers writes of how “[m]indful mediation enables us to experience the self as a process that extends out into the world”. (2016; 164).
Tucker’s Pool, Lydford Gorge, Devon
Mindfulness practice facilitates the experience of awe and that powerful emotion has been very significant for Claire.
“It’s an experience of going beyond myself, as in beyond my sense of being a separate self and being taken into something that is greater than that, and connects me to something bigger”.
The experience of awe can reveal that we are, in truth, part of “a dynamic web of interdependence” (Macy, 2007; 32). In the industrial North, it’s very easy to forget that, but the longing for connection doesn’t go away. Claire describes how the feeling of awe can feel:
“… like a longing for a connection that I’ve lost, or, arguably, we’ve lost. And in those moments of awe you get a glimpse of reconnecting with that. And there’s a sense of abundance that comes with that feeling. … a feeling of generosity and more openness to others and more creativity, and kind of takes you out of that kind of fixed separate sense of self, which sometimes can keep us a little bit stuck”.
We tend to think of ‘enlightenment’ as an event that happens to a few special individuals, but it’s not that simple. Perhaps it makes more sense to think of enlightenment as an experience anyone can taste for a moment. Claire suggests that enlightenment comes in “those moments of connection to something greater where our sense of self disappears or it feels like our sense of separate self disappears”. That resonates with me. I’ve certainly had moments like that and even though they quickly pass, you are changed forever. Crucially, these experiences of deep connection happen “in our day to day lives – you don’t have to be in the middle of a beautiful rain forest in Cuba, it could just be with somebody you love, or it could just be on the way to work noticing something that kind of takes you out of yourself or a piece of music that you’re really taken by.”
These sacred moments can come to anyone. At the time – and in our faltering attempts to articulate them – they seem otherworldly: “It feels otherworldly, but it’s also very human”.
