Redefining Eating Disorder Recovery With The Support of Psychedelics
As someone who has navigated the depths of an eating disorder, I have had a tendency to become rigid.
Predictability, certainty and wanting to know can easily become the prison from which I live.
I often need to consciously choose to break down these hardened walls to keep practicing how to move with the inevitable flows of life with trust and surrender.
Over the years I have had to find ways to shake up my inner snow globe to disrupt any rigidity that may have hardened in my body, heart and mind.
Through psychedelics and plant medicine journeys, traveling around the world, intuitive dance practices, and listening to the always-in-motion movements of my body, I’ve been curious about exploring ways to shake up my well-trodden neural pathways, widen my perspectives, and let go of the familiar shore.
This is what eating disorder recovery is about.
Eating disorder recovery is a gradual letting go of what provides a sense of certainty and ground and learning how to navigate the inherent groundlessness of life.
For people with disordered eating or eating disorders, there is usually a history of trauma which means an overwhelming, uncontrollable experience occurred where there wasn’t enough support or containment to make sense of such a big event. This results in a scared and dysregulated nervous system, where the body is holding and suppressing big, undigested emotions from the scary event.
These stored survival energies accumulate and become toxic to the body. This is the point when we see chronic illness, depression, anxiety, addiction, and eating disorders develop.
The body starts to be a scary place to inhabit, filled with big emotions. Living with these emotions takes a lot of energy, and so we inevitably find ways to avoid meeting these emotions as a way to keep living.
By implementing eating disorder-related behaviours, we are trying to continue living life in ways that feel manageable by cutting off from the body through living from the neck up, restricting, calorie counting, dieting, weighing oneself, body checking, bingeing, or purging etc.
However, the more we cut off from the body, the more we continue looping in dysregulation and the deeper the rigid grooves go.
As such, eating disorder recovery is a combination of working through these stuck trauma energies by connecting directly with the body, and building of sustainable and healthy resources that can help us move through the moments where we feel like we are being pummeled by the waves.
Through all of this, it is the body, as our ultimate resource, that provides ground for us we can stand on as the waves crash against the shore.
The body’s innate intelligence humbly resides in the here-now and its signals and cues are what provides us with a sense of self and guides our actions.
The clearer we can hear and trust our body, the easier it becomes to flow down the middle of the river that is life, without being thrown around by the waves.
The healing potentials of plant medicines for eating disorders lies in their capacity to support this process of repatterning how we relate to our bodies in the present moment, and how we inhabit the ever-changing moments of life.
Psychedelics and plant medicine Bring An expansion of our awareness, acceptance that things are always changing realignment of what we truly care about and value, and a deepening into our unique embodiment.
When we combine psychedelic preparation support that focuses on connecting to the body, learning about the wiring of our own nervous system, establishing grounding resources and tools, and dedicating time to lean into an inspired intention, we can step into the journey space equipped and ready to face the inevitable: the great unknown, the Great Mystery, the void, raw life force energy, Source itself.
The better prepared and well-practiced we are before the journey begins, the easier it is to ride the inevitable waves of change and emotions (energies in motion) that occur when we embark on a journey with plant medicine.
The mysterious beauty of plant medicines is that they help us move from a state of narrow focus and rigid thinking to a wider and more flexible way of thinking, leading to an expansion of our awareness.
We can see and think bigger, enable to gain fresh perspective and insights.
With this wider lens, we are reminded of the fundamental nature of life: everything is always in motion and always changing.
Seeing these ebbs and flows helps us be more at ease with our emotional landscape and gives the eating disorder part that wants predictability soften.
As things soften and the layers of hardness fall away, we meet the more vulnerable parts of ourselves - we reconnect with our heart space. By residing in our hearts, we remember what our soul - not the eating disorder - truly cares about and value.
By aligning with these deeper values, we open up to living our authentic expression, following internal cues rather than marching to external rules dictated by societal conditioning.
As this begins take root, we start to feel more at home in our own skin. We deepen into our embodiment.
How we feel on the inside matches congruently with how we express ourselves to the outside. Relating to ourselves from the inside out feels innately nourishing and energizing.
We discover it’s possible to trust the body and for the body to trust us.
From this place of trust, we can surrender and let go, releasing expectations and assumptions. From this open state, we experience and discover so much more.
Indeed, eating disorder recovery is a journey of discovery. We never end up in the same place from when we began this work.
The eating disorder recovery journey is more than recovery. It is a journey of discovery. This makes it a highly transformative path to walk.
The word “recover” comes from the Latin word “recuperare” which means “a return to health after illness, injury or misfortune.” It has links to “getting back or regaining a normal state of mind, health or strength.”
The idea that an eating disorder is a “disorder” is inherently pathologizing. It indicates that someone is abnormal or sick. From my perspective, “eating disorders” are intelligent strategies that attempt to bring a sense of regulation to a nervous system that is deeply afraid and in a state of protection. For many, this strategy is the only one they have access to or know.
Let us then remember that the language we use carries a frequency. And the current language that we use to describe eating disorders is what keeps us stuck and put the blame on the individual rather than looking at the deeper layers of illness which lie in the foundations of our societal constructs and frames.
And psychedelics are here in a big way to expand our understanding of what eating disorders are, the language we use to describe things, and they offer tools on how to think and feel more creatively.
And let’s be honest, when we walk the eating disorder recovery path, we never truly return to “normal”, nor do we come back to the place where we began.
We don’t recover.
We transform.
When we expand our definitions of eating disorders, what else is possible? And plant medicines and psychedelics are helping us widen our frames of embodied cognition to envision a new understanding of disordered eating and recovery realities.
Expanding our definition of what an eating disorder is allows us to listen to those who navigating their relationship with food and body with more curiosity and open presence.
Redefining an eating disorder and choosing a different word to describe it changes how we look at it. It shifts how we engage with people who are navigating disordered eating - and impacts how we choose to treat it.
This is needed more than ever as we see more and more people struggling with being at home their own skin - particularly post-Covid - where our collective sense of belonging is in question, whilst the familiar cycles of our Earth home shift.
With the highest prevalence of death than any other mental health issue, traditional treatment as we currently know it as is no longer enough. This points to a deep and urgent need for an expansion of how we understand eating disorders, how we engage with them, and how we relate to folks who are navigating disordered eating.
This is why we are seeing more people curious about the potentials of psychedelics to support the healing of eating disorders.
Plant medicine and psychedelics shift the focus from behavioural change by going to the deepest roots from which the food and body behaviours developed.
Plant medicine are powerful allies in helping us shift our perspective and widen our lenses, illuminating our perceptions, beliefs and assumptions. Plant medicines give us an opportunity to clarify how we choose to relate to eating disorders by going beyond the narrow definitions amd limited symptomology, expanding our perception.
Plant medicine gives us greater cognitive flexibility, stretching our beliefs, and shifting our perspective so we rediscover our personal body story and envision our unique pathway of healing.
Plant medicines shift us out of the narrow and tight focus that the eating disorder holds, softens the rigid reality from the residue of trauma, regulates the nervous system so we can move out of a survival somatic organization.
When our soma shifts from survival to inner safety and embodied alignment, we naturally expand our creative potential that leads us to see, believe and embody a life where the eating disorder no longer needs to exist. This is where transformation occurs.
How might psychedelics expand our understanding of eating disorders and treatment by opening up our inner windows of perceptions?
If eating disorders may not only be about coping or control, what else might they be trying to communicate, resolve, protect or balance?
How might reframing and expanding our understanding of eating disorders change our self-imposed beliefs and as such, expand our very reality?
In what ways have you experienced plant medicine support you in your healing journey? Have they supported you in shifting the focus and widening the vantage point? If yes, how so?
How can psychedelics co-create a new way forward, helping us uncover and discover how our soul wants to be nourished?
We expand into the unknown and discover places within ourselves that we could have imagined at the start of the recovery journey.
We grow and transform beyond, evolving into more of our embodied alignment. This is the alignment of the body-mind, where our beliefs and values are congruent with how we show up and interact with the world around us.
The process of discovery requires a lot of curiosity and openness, and kind-hearted support to let go of the old (enter plant medicines to guide this process).
Along the way, we will certainly recover the parts of ourselves that have been cast away for years (and sometimes generations), but through discovering new ways of being with and relating to our body, sensations and feelings in sustainable and healthy ways, we integrate these fragmented parts back to wholeness.
These new ways of relating to ourselves (influenced also by our language and frames of reference) are grounded in compassion, where we have the capacity to let go of the old and step into the unknown, allowing for embodied self-discovery to lay a fertile soil of transformation to blossom.
“Eating disorder recovery” is one of self-discovery where we embark on a journey aligning with our knowing of who we truly are and courageously embodying that deep remembrance.
And when the actual psychedelic journey ends, we tend to watering these seeds in the integration process, continuing to nurture our inner garden and tending to the path of our transformation.