When Healing Gone Bad- Remember to Take care of your Nervous System

[Rafael Thundercat]

Many of you dont know but I work for 7 years as a space Holder in Plant Medicine Work and with time listening to Sharings from participants and my own difficulties I start to see that some people take the psycadelic work to ligthly and forget to care for their preparation or dont have criteria to how they choose the Setting and the Pratictioners. I was in Brasil and was invited to a ceremony with a white person and out of self respect I even spit the medicine out to not be in the effect since I knew that the ceremony would be a massive madhouse. There people getting more hurt than healed in this game of Healing. 

 

[ZenAlex]

Yeah I'm considering nervous system dysregulation as something I could be having right now. 

 

[Rafael Thundercat]

@ZenAlex We all have a little bit of it. I just came to this topic because I go to Ayahusca Ceremonies with Indigenous People, and the diffenve you see in How West people react with the plant and how Indigenous react are fully oposite. One of the reasons is because the diet and the life style indegenous live in the forest are way more balanced than our hyper-Stimulated Society. One of the goal of my daily life is to reduce more and more stress so one can live a slow, calm and balanced life. Then psycadelics work totally different in the system leading to calm steady deeper insights. 

As she say in the email she sent me : 

Shaking it out.

Biohacking the vagus nerve.

Reliving traumatic memories.

Plant medicine.

In my line of work (aka “the new traumatology”), healing is not about any of the above.

That’s not to say these things are wrong or bad, in and of themselves. They can and do work: in a specific context, within a regulated nervous system that has the CAPACITY to process them.

But this kind of “healing” can also go bad when it is used at will, within a society as profoundly dysregulated as the majority of the westernized world is today.

See, us modern humans tend to focus on getting rid of symptoms. While that might be important in some cases like acute pain from a bone fracture, a lot of our chronic symptoms are nestled deep in neurobiological and survival patterns that can’t be hunted down in a single remedy.

Therefore, I suggest you consider leaving the quick fixes aside (for now at least) and simply focus on building your capacity.

Healing and health is in your DNA. Your body wants (and deserves) to heal. It’s your birthright.

FACT: There is a right way to raise a human baby. If you didn’t get that (hint: most of us didn’t), healing will take time and commitment.

In my opinion, and many might agree with me, we've been brainwashed to believe that we don't know this stuff. But, when you remove all the junk and yuck (aka conditioning, socialization, medicalization of birth, unhealed early and developmental trauma, commercialization of “healing”) you start to realize that we do know how to nurture healthy humans, from the start.

Likewise, our bodies do know how to heal. We just have to have the capacity and the regulation on board to allow healing to happen, organically.

Where we struggle is not in a lack of resources or information in either area, it is in our amnesia to truth and what deep, systemic human and global health is all about.

But no amount of fancy regulation techniques and sparkly biohacks will re-invigorate your…OUR birthright in the present. Nor will these things help future generations to do better.

Our hurts and harms did not happen in isolation. Nor does a big, bad, scary thing impact only one part of our body and mind. A shockwave is sent to the ENTIRE system.

Therefore, to heal deeply, it’s essential to work with the entirety of our human system and how this system relates to everything around it.

ALL nervous systems on the planet are waiting for healing and regulation. They've been waiting for centuries. ⁠But shortcuts will only land us in the weeds and make the journey even longer…

So, if you're here and have started the practical work, wonderful! Keep learning and healing and regulating. ⁠