Below is an excerpt from my new book "Facilitation : A Framework for Psychoactive Exploration and Healing" by Julian Palmer
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from the end of Chapter 13, “The Presence of Self Work”
There are many things facilitators can do that can distract people from their own inner work. To my mind, TOO MUCH focus on ceremony, singing songs or dancing also doesn’t allow people to go that deep. Again, you really need to give people space to face their own challenges and find a way to both sit with their pain and then also to deal with it. As the facilitator, you should know what it is like to feel stuck with yourself with no way out, as a fuck-up drenched in your own shit, shamed and full of mess, strife, and bad life choices (which, of course, we all have). People so often forget that these medicines very often bring up what is not working for us.
If everything is working out fine while we are “journeying,” then we’re not truly facing our problems at their root. It can be challenging to admit one’s weaknesses, faults, and deficiencies, but if we can do so and not deny them, a sense of self-acceptance and self-love can come into the picture. To my mind, we need to be clear about our own weaknesses so that we can become more secure in ourselves. As facilitators, if we are all puffed up and appear totally with it and sorted, this can be triggering to people, as they see this attitude in the world commonly, and it looks like denial. People also may then become unconsciously resentful and may begin to be triggered in counterproductive ways. People who put themselves up on a pedestal must deal with inevitably falling off it, also. People can begin to idealize you as a father or mother figure they never had. We are better off being in a space of showing up in our weaknesses, being honest about them, and making fun of ourselves.
You really do want to be disarming people, rather than appearing like some mighty, immovable rock. Society generally rewards people who APPEAR solid, rather than the people who admit inner inconsistencies. Security must come from within; it cannot be faked, and security comes from truly “knowing oneself.” But that security is multifaceted. It should mean that we have a good idea of how we appear to others and the kinds of things they may think about us. We should also largely know what people find challenging about interacting with us, what people may like and dislike about us, and have come to terms with that.
A lot of people are not integrated within themselves; most people have this huge array of personal history they haven’t accounted for or processed. This is why “the wounded healer” is often the best healer—as they can empathize with how “fucked up” people can be and have compassion for others. Sometimes it might be worth remembering that many of the people we are working with are new to even truly looking at themselves. It is worth reflecting on your own personal process—what it was like for you to face this expandedness, and to remember how long it took for you to integrate this new spaciousness and what you found challenging in that process. It is worth keeping in mind how messy and discombobulated you felt—how confronting and perhaps embarrassing it was to begin to confront all of this personal material. How difficult it may have been to acknowledge the transpersonal truth and how ontologically challenging it was to also recognize this wonder and what it was like to become entranced by the visions and lure of apparent spiritual knowledge.
We also have to generally account for people’s different belief systems and approaches to life. After a time, we begin to understand patterns in people and recognize how they will respond. But in general, the people who are willing to do this work are of a different level than the average person on the street, as they are largely willing to face up to reality. We need to give people credit, support, and encouragement, and realize how difficult it can be to confront the paradoxes and inconsistencies within. One of my helpers would often say to people, “You’re doing so well!” to encourage them.
I think it is true that these medicines can help us to understand what self-work is, and what truly facing up to reality in all its facets can be. The plants can also guide you to change your relating to your own patterns, so processes of self-work you do in the medicine space can be enlivened in your daily life.
For many people, how they have constructed themselves in relation to their environment—as a personality, as a mind, an ego, or a psyche—is all that they have. It is their sense of identity that they rabidly hold onto. We cannot underestimate how confronting and terrifying this “ego death” is for many people. We cannot underestimate that feeling of being in the abyss and the feeling of being about to go mad. We cannot underestimate how confronting it is to have one’s views about reality and life shattered. It is very difficult to give up so many illusions and ideas that we might have had. It is not easy to realize how programmed we all are, and how wrong and backwards so many things are that we ourselves may have subscribed to. It is hard to give up identities when, throughout your life, you have felt that these identities represent who you really are. Change doesn’t come easily to many people, and there are good reasons for that.
We cannot underestimate how hard it is for people to truly “get their arse kicked.” It is ten times more humiliating than one of your parents dressing you down, as you generally cannot protest at all. Admitting where you are wrong is often necessary for growth, but there is not very much in our society that facilitates a process where this type of change can occur.
We also cannot underestimate just how difficult it is for your average person to deal with their shadow—and with the entities that affect them with dark and crazy thoughts, which they generally are unwilling to share and acknowledge. This is the loneliness of much of the populace. They themselves are often acting against themselves and other people, and may want to change, but cannot. Some people are caught up in circumstances, whole careers, or businesses involving many others, where they may be causing more harm than good. Some people have been caught up in cults, where they may have been complicit in the abuse and mistreatment of others. We cannot underestimate the karma of people’s lies and deceptions, or how they judge and condemn themselves. We cannot underestimate the well of self-hatred, doubt, and insecurity that many people face on a daily basis, all the while trying to present a brave face to the world. We cannot underestimate people’s suffering—or the shock of being in shock, in a state of numbness, unable or unwilling to feel the extent of how damaged, denuded, and confused their internal landscape truly is.
Again and again, we just need to come back to realizing that we cannot know all that much about what people are going through—in their experience or in their lives. Over time, we can begin to understand the general flavor and tenor of most people’s experiences and processes, but the best thing we can do is to give them space, offer them a gentle ear, and allow their own intelligence—and the medicine—to bring them back to increased alignment with themselves.
Ayahuasca understands that some people need to be seduced. She’ll give some people rapturous, cosmic, blissful experiences for maybe the first few times, and then after a while, the deep, dark work of investigating the shadow will begin. But if these people were given the raw deep work to begin with in their first experiences, they would have run away and never come back. Some other people need to get results first off. They need to go right into their trauma, and they might have a difficult journey, but they will get incredible results, and be ready to go back in, willingly.
Being human is often difficult. Not everyone is up to the challenge, it seems. These medicines give people a chance to change and transform, but they are in no way a panacea for human life. Most of the people who say they are some sort of spiritual shortcut just don’t have much experience with them. As if the presumed “destination” were just around the corner and easy to reach with a bit of psychotropic assistance.
There are many modalities, techniques, and processes that some people will need to combine with psychedelic medicine in order to truly get results. A foundation of profound self-reflection is something that must come from within. Through the use of psychedelic medicine, not everyone is going to magically transform into someone whose conduct is appropriate, kind or even sane. The individual must be embedded within their own patient self-awareness and self-work, on all levels of their being—physical, spiritual, emotional, and mental—if they truly do desire positive transformation.
