How Psychedelics Work: Inner Healing & Brilliant Sanity
After individuals journey with psychedelics, they often say they feel “refreshed,” “rejuvenated,” and “reconnected”.
There’s something interesting about all of those “re’s”, e.g., RE-juvenated. They suggest that the journeyer used to feel something positive, then they didn’t, and now they do again.
It’s as if psychedelics have reintroduced them. How do psychedelics work in this way?
We provide a therapeutic explanation in this article, through a Contemplative Psychotherapy lens that includes Inner Healing, Brilliant Sanity, and OAC: Openness, Awareness, and Compassion.
Here are the highlights:
We naturally heal from emotional suffering (i.e. “Inner Healing”). However, psychological obstacles block this process.
Psychedelics remove obstacles and catalyze our healing.
This healing helps us recognize our innate wisdom, awareness, and love - known as “Brilliant Sanity” in Buddhist psychology.
When we explore our Brilliant Sanity, we keep ourselves healthy, mitigate the influence of future psychological obstacles and allow the natural flow of our Inner Healing.
What is ‘Inner Healing’?
Call to mind the last time you were sick. Did you climb into bed and curl up under the covers?
You may have done so without even realizing it. The human body will default to a horizontal fetal position when it needs to rest and recover. Each of us once grew in our mother’s wombs in this posture. Throughout our lives, we return to the fetal pose to heal.
Humans are hard-wired to heal and this happens on psychological and spiritual levels, just as it does physical. After we feel hurt, let down, or traumatized, we naturally move through emotional processing to emerge re-grounded and at peace on the other end.
We call this our ‘Inner Healing’.
But we may find our emotional healing thwarted. Afterall, many of us feel the weight of our anxiety, depression, or trauma for years. Why is that?
One of the main reasons why we fail to heal emotional wounds is that obstacles get in our way. They interrupt our natural healing processes, slow them down, or inhibit them altogether.
Obstacles take on many forms. Here are few examples:
Trauma from childhood
Daily malaise and lack of connection
Internal narratives about a lack of self-worth
While these barriers disrupt healing, there’s something we can do about it. Practices like physical movement, mindfulness, and psychedelics can diminish or remove these psychological blockers.
Via psychedelics or other means, we can create the conditions for obstacle-removal, which lets the natural flow of our Inner Healing resume.
Psychedelics And Inner Healing
Psychedelics don’t transform you or give you magic powers. They don’t add to your life or give you something special.
What they can do is help remove unhealthy things.
Psychedelics loosen the grip of rigid, unhealthy thought patterns. They help us shed our unwanted baggage, and with a lightened load, we can climb out of emotional ruts.
When psychedelics remove obstacles, a natural process of Inner Healing unfolds. This opening often leads us to a sense of wholeness that was within us all along, just difficult to recognize.
It’s as if psychedelics remind us of our goodness and help us realize things like:
“You are wise and loving.”
“You are more than your pain.”
“You are enough, just as you are.”
Our innate goodness and natural healing go hand-in-hand. Next section shows how.
Psychedelics And Brilliant Sanity
Contemplative therapists refer to our innate goodness as “Brilliant Sanity.”
(And as convenient as it would be, we won’t abbreviate this ‘BS’ - cause it’s not! It’s real and it’s within you right now.)
Brilliant Sanity is built from tenets of Buddhism psychology:
Humans are fundamentally good
Goodness includes wisdom, awareness, and kindness.
We all have inherent, natural dignity and wisdom. What leads to ‘bad’ things is suffering. When we suffer, we become misaligned with our Brilliant Sanity and fall out of touch with our natural wisdom, awareness, and love.
When we go through our natural inner healing processes, we can more easily access our Brilliant Sanity.
With a felt sense of openness, awareness, and compassion (abbreviated ‘OAC’), we can appreciate our goodness in both meaningful and mundane events. Some examples include:
Moments of clarity and present mindedness
Recognizing the beauty of nature
Forgiving our enemies
There’s a positive feedback loop at work here: our innate goodness (Brilliant Sanity) primes us for natural healing (Inner Healing), by its own virtue and the elimination of psychological distress (removal of barriers).
Put simply: the more good things we do (Brilliant Sanity), the easier it is to do more good things (Inner Healing) - this feels really good psychologically (removal of barriers).
Living Fully With Brilliant Sanity
Brilliant Sanity helps us stay grounded, healthy, and sane - if you’ll forgive the reflexive property.
And before we lose ourselves in abstraction, let’s explore how to actually engage with Brilliant Sanity and cultivate its power within us.
Recall the concepts introduced in the previous section: Openness, Awareness, and Compassion (OAC). Broadly speaking, if you want to develop your Brilliant Sanity, try to meet life experiences with more openness, awareness, and compassion.
If something bad happens at work, you might ask:
Can I stay open to how this will impact me, positively or negatively?
Am I aware of how I feel? How others feel?
How can I act with compassion and relieve my suffering and the suffering of others?
One of the best ways to expand one’s OAC is through mindfulness activities, like meditation, reflection, and journaling.
As an exercise, follow these journaling prompts to build up your OAC:
Openness:
When are you most open to experience, able to accommodate any and all feelings, events, actions?
When are you able to experience without judgment?
When are you open to all of your feelings, thoughts, and perceptions?
Awareness:
While staying open, when are you most clearly aware?
When can you see clearly without biases or judgments?
When can you simply recognize the activity of the mind?
Compassion:
With a cultivated sense of openness and clarity, when do you wish for the alleviation of suffering for yourself and others?
When do you find it easy to care for others?
When can you become aware of a compassion that is already present for you?
To supplement your journaling, I highly recommend that you meditate or practice mindfulness beforehand. Activities that draw our attention to the present moment, can help us feel the steady energy of our OAC. It’s always there, we just need to recognize it.
