Art by Laurent Glass

Surrender is imminent but what are we surrendering to? Let us come back to this overly used term in healing, Spiritual and Psychedelic Medicines circles.

The holy grail of healing is NOT ego dissolution — I am going to keep this concept out of the conversation because I feel that it has no place in any form of self-improvement processes as promoted widely among healing trends. The holy grail of healing is NOT enlightenment either — it is “endarkment” (etymology credit — Reda Rackley). We cling to the idea of love and light and a deep desire to transcend the human limitation of physical reality, desperately seeking shortcuts, desperately trying to intellectualise the process, desperately trying to escape the “body” because we are desperately wanting to escape the pain and the suffering of being in a human body (understandably) yet, continually crashing down into deeper suffering. The holy grail of healing is endarkment, and endarkment is the process of returning to the body — our home.

The breaking of the illusion to enter into a higher order of consciousness is a process of reconnecting to the body — as we reconnect to the body we also return to the mundane, the mundane is where we are rooted and safe. We return to the wisdom, tap into the integrity of the body and begin to cultivate deeper self-awareness, appreciation, humility, compassion, strengthened intuition, clairvoyance, self-agency, and autonomy. We begin to experience life through the lens of alignment, and inner congruency and restore our relationship with ourselves — for me, this is an internal “surrender” that impacts the perceived outer world.

The breaking of the delusion depends on our understanding of our ability to inhibit our body, it depends on letting go of the romantic fantasies of healing, rapid transformation, and overnight change. There’s no such a thing as healing to begin with as the way we imagine it but by becoming aware of our internal world and re-learning to tap into our raw, primal non-linguistic intelligence that carries the potential to override environmental conditioning, trauma responses, compulsions, adaptations and dysfunctional behaviours. We cannot be naive in times like this, we need to become smarter and take ownership of what we are NOT willing to feel and accept.

“When you win the antagonist inside, you will no longer have to meet them outside. The antagonist will disappear from your world. Only then you will be able to survive and escape the surveillance of invisible guardians, vigilant snipers (antagonists) that you yourself have put in place and that you alone will be able to evade to enter roles of a higher order.”

~ Elio D’anna

The intellect is not our ally in transformational politics just because it’s very challenging to negotiate with such sophisticated survival surveillance systems we have built internally to survive in early life — we must get the body onboard. The capacity of the healthy nervous system is directly connected to the cognitive processes which means, when we become unshakeable within our nervous (body) system we are also unshakable within our thinking processes and resources will no longer come from the outside but directly from within.

To conclude, self-improvement is an inside job that requires surrender to our body, requires letting go of the intellectual constructs over time, slowly learning to trust our internal landscape as our home, and knowing that soma is the pathway to reconciliation and resolution that can offer closure to infinite layers of suffering, fear and lack.

It is also human to avoid the body as the ultimate manifestation of a highly sophisticated physical organism experiencing the phenomenon of being human. Dissociating from the body helps avoid pain but it is the pain that becomes our outlet, our opportunity to reconnect, paradoxically. It is the pain that moves us towards seeking in the first place, it’s meant to be our initiation — rites of passage not a process of annihilation.

And we get it, coming home to the body is not ideal for many of us because there is so much at stake! Hence why some of us take more psychedelic medicines to avoid coming home in case there are relationships at risk due to the result of years of investment in trauma entanglements, trauma bonds and codependency. The coming home process impacts relationships because we interact very differently when we operate from the inner congruency, it impacts the way we eat, the way we sleep, the way we work, the way we make money, the way we live, the way we hold space in the world, the way we raise our kids, the way we treat our parents — so much is at stake!

So let us begin the new year differently and turn to medicines to actually improve our lives not run away from them. Let us invest in kinship, accountability, community, openness, transparency, humility, vulnerability, radical acceptance and joy.

Happy New Year 💫

Love and Courage

#psychedelictheraphy #microdosing #somatichealing #newyear #reflections