I wanted to thank everyone who signed up for this newsletter and/or personally reached out to me after my first newsletter. I am excited to announce that our doors opened Monday, October 4th, and we are seeing our first patients!
I don’t want to overwhelm you with newsletters, and yet I am excited about this new endeavor and I have a lot to share. (Again, if you don’t want to receive these emails, no problem! You can unsubscribe below.)
Over the last 7 years I have been closely following the renaissance of using psychedelic medicines to help with depression, anxiety, OCD, PTSD, addiction, existential distress and end-of-life care. These diagnoses share a similar experiential quality: a stuck, habitual, and painful repetition of thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories and behaviors. The repetitive and stuck nature of these experiences can be described as a narrowing or constriction of consciousness. This narrowing diminishes our openness and curiosity to the entirety of our experience, and limits our experiential and emotional flexibility. This is why I believe that consciousness medicine is a more precise description of what is currently referred to as psychedelic medicine. Consciousness medicines heal us by amplifying our consciousness in order to explore what is present in our consciousness rather than restrict it (which is often the goal of antidepressant medications, ie., to suppress unwanted feelings).
Love is not a gated-community
I learned this phrase from hospice provider/teacher Frank Otaseski. It speaks to the endgame of consciousness medicine. How can we open to and bear witness to all aspects of our inner experience without exclusion? How do we radically accept ourselves, forgive ourselves, and ultimately love ourselves without pushing anything away or dissociating from our experience? How can we live our lives without a self-critical ‘yardstick’ that we measure ourselves against? Of course we continue to be discerning, but ultimately healing requires self-compassion, self-acceptance and self-forgiveness.
When held in a safe and present container, consciousness medicine can rapidly open you to all parts of your inner world and support greater self-acceptance and healthy self-love. When we approach our depressed, anxious, obsessive, fearful, traumatized, addictive parts with compassion, curiosity, courage and clarity, and then integrate them, we begin to heal and become whole again. Consciousness medicine points us in that direction, and with the help of the trained integration psychotherapist on our team, Martha McCord, LMFT, you can sustain those changes and root them in daily experience.
With deep gratitude,
Ian Luepker, Michelle Bienick & Martha McCord