Psychological Flexibility and Psychedelic Therapy

This was originally published on EntheoNation. It’s been said in a number of different ways, perhaps for as long as psychedelics have been around: …

Psychological Flexibility and Psychedelic Therapy

————- “We teach flexibility over rigid Ness.”

Lately, many people have been pondering the notion that mental issues and mental disorders Are brought about due to A fixed set of ideas of how things are supposed to be.

The most rigid of these ideas is what we know of as identity. The mechanism is not often easily understood, simply because we as human beings tend to consolidate this sense of self, this “I” as indeed “me” which is the locus whereby thoughts, emotions, and actions coalesce necessarily.

It is from this center of self, so to speak, from which then we assume to be able to negotiate or somehow compensate for what the world gives us. In essence, we are constantly reifying the notion that there is a self as opposed to the world, and so if something isn’t going correctly it’s either something that is wrong with me, or something that is wrong with the world.

The newer kind of approach breaks from this fixed ontological ideal.

At first, we tend to approach it from the outside. We tend not to approach from this “fixed center”. Because typically human beings are pretty much locked into this notion of real truth. And so millimeter by millimeter, layer by layer, we tend to try and work from the outside in to hopefully allow the “dysfunction” or the “issue” to resolve itself fundamentally, which is to say that the “innermost self” will flex a little bit, will change a little bit of it substance such that the issue will lessen or go away.

Upon the action of psychedelics, it seems this rigid fixed center might be more readily available and open to an understanding of itself that is less concrete, less attached to other aspects it encounters and draws into its orbit in order to create identity.

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