In the past, I was one of those people who would just cut loved ones out of my life forever if they wronged me for any reason. I was good at putting people into exile for various reasons but I didn’t really like what I was doing. The more people I put into exile, the more I found that I was also in exile. Psilocybin (as well as Ayahuasca, San Pedro, Sapito, Sananga, and a number of other sacred medicines all helped me to stop having such a black-and-white approach to relationships. Psilocybin, in particular, helped me find a middle ground in my relationships, particularly with people in my family.
Click here to buy psilocybin in the United States.
When my husband, daughter, and I lived in the U.S., we didn’t have a lot of options as far as “ways to heal the family”. Our parents on both sides of the family did things wrong. I don’t want to list off the wrongs because some of them are petty and some are pretty damning. And it doesn’t matter. All of the wrongs dealt to us by our parents were dealt because our families, like the branches of a tree carry this weight of ancestral trauma that ends up being acted out by the youngest members of the family — the adult children. This thought comes from Constellations Therapy, which was developed by Bert Hellinger (Lydi and I are both certified in Constellations Therapy). So let me tell you a bit about Constellations first, to give you a sense of what this type of therapy attempts to do.
There are certain stories about TRAUMA that families never put into words. Ancestral trauma in a family, after all, is defined by the fact that it is some event that was too horrible for words. Example would be the death of a child, divorce, or extreme poverty. Yet, these ancestral traumas and the story of what happened is so important that it must be told. If the story isn’t told, the wisdom of the family tree is lost because Wisdom comes from surviving and overcoming trauma. Wisdom is lost and the pain lives on through the youngest members of the tree. So this ancestral energy lives in us and compels us until we, as the youngest members on the tree, ACT OUT THE STORY OF WHAT HAPPENED in order to release the energy of it.
A family tree is made up of roots, the current children and babies, the trunk of the tree (which represents man and woman unified), and then the branches which represent grandparents, great-grandparents, etc. Dead ancestors are located at the top of the tree with the leaves of the tree as the oldest of the ancestors who have not yet released their traumatic stories such that the leaves can fall, go back into the earth, and fertilize the roots. It doesn’t matter if you want to think about the ancestors as entities that are alive in another realm that’s close to earth and the human realm of our daily lives, or if you want to think of the tree as a metaphor where the tree is more like the story of the family for many generations and the energy of that story as something that “lives” in us. Some people prefer to use DNA and the idea of vibrations to think about this material, but in any case, most people resonate with the idea of a family tree. So if the leaves of the tree can’t fall (if the story of what happened — the trauma — can’t be released), or if the branches of the tree are too heavy or not balanced, it threatens the trunk of the tree. Everything about the tree has to be oriented toward keeping the trunk and the roots of the tree healthy and thriving or else the entire rest of the tree gets sick and weak. Even the ancestors roll over in their graves, so to speak, when the family tree, the people who are alive right now, are not properly connected and relatively harmonious. A trunk (adult children) that is trying to exile themselves from the rest of the tree is weak and in pain. Parents who exile themselves from children are similarly weak and in pain. Constellations Therapy involves a literal “acting out” of familial pain and ancestral trauma so that the story can be SEEN rather than TOLD (as there are no words yet or the trauma and the pain). The goal is to reunify and harmonize THE FAMILY TREE.
I love Constellations Therapy, but one of the problems with Constellations Therapy, as a practice, is that you have to find a Constellations Therapist who can FEEL the story. This is hard work and in an ideal version of this type of therapy, a group of people, strangers to the client, in fact, gather to stand in circle. In today’s world, finding a group of people to gather on behalf of another person is hard to do. It’s cost prohibitive and also, just difficult to find people who are geared toward solving relationship issues as a priority and an interest. The client, in this ideal scenario involving a group, labels each of these strangers who are standing in this circle as one of their relatives with which they have issues. The circle itself is called The Knowing Field. The client then positions each of the strangers as representatives for their relatives and the client then takes a seat outside of the circle. These people, the representatives, who know nothing about the client or their family members, or the ancestral trauma that led to problems in the current family, then FEEL like they need to move around into different positions.
Bert Hellinger was a priest who developed the Constellations Therapy system in order to work with his congregation even when he didn’t speak the language of the people where he’d been stationed. He worked in Africa and in Asia, as I recall and he developed this system out of a need, but he was skillful in interpreting the results as the strangers, the representatives of people’s family members, moved around inside The Knowing Field. He would watch and then intuit the story of what happened. Some of his material is really controversial. All of it is powerful.
But while Bert Hellinger was really skilled and he became, with time, knowledgeable about what different movements within The Knowing Field represented, his students were not and are not always as skilled as he was. And there’s a movement in Constellations Therapy right now where people try to do the work using computer simulations and where the therapist by themselves intuits all of the material for the entire family. That’s really difficult to do and most therapists fail at it which just adds to family toxicity. I’ve had constellations therapists have ME try to feel the pain from all of my own ancestors in order to intuit my own familial conundrums. The yield on that type of therapy is low if not in the negative zone.
But constellations CAN be done using psilocybin and a couple of people or, better yet, a group of people. In some cases, a microdose or even half of a full dose of psilocybin is enough to help people intuitively tune in, on a deep level, to strong feelings and stories, which manifest as body positioning in relation to other representatives inside The Knowing Field. If you’re in a situation where you’re alone in your family, in exile but you’re higher up in the tree, above the trunk (in other words, if you’re the parent of an adult child), you can even do this work solo, but you may have to do a number of trips to get the material that’s necessary to be able to repair your family dynamic. For adult children estranged from parents, it’s important to recognize that you can’t make changes for the older generation. You can attempt to release ancestral traumas, that can lighten the load enough for yourself to be able to reconnect to parents though, albeit with boundaries intact that are otherwise easily breached. Only the older generations can actually repair relationships between the various parts of the tree. In other words, you can only work on the people and relationships involving those who are younger than you or the about the same age. Essentially, the reason why older generations have to do the work on actual relationship repair (versus just working on yourself and your own boundaries) is because younger adults should NEVER “dance the dance of the Older Ones”. In order to do repair work on relationships and dysfunctional patterns in a family, you have to be able to feel and actually move or dance the dance of the person with whom you are in conflict. ADULT children should never dance the dance of their parents because adult children have to come up with their own “dance” for their lives. You don’t want to dance your parents negative patterns into yourself.
Working Alone to Repair The Family Tree
The last mushroom trip that I did began with intense anxiety. Several ancestors and dead relatives stepped into my energy field so that I could feel their story. Feeling the story of another person is something that we all have the ability to do and in fact, many of us feel another person’s story before we even know any facts about that person or about what that person actually has to say. The energy of another living person is something that most of us can feel and even “read” up to a point (it gets better with practice), but our own trauma and energetic blocks create warps in our ability to feel another person’s story. Blocks usually have to do with trauma or with parts of our culture (e.g. family culture, religious culture, ethnic culture) that we aren’t willing to work past usually due to fear.
On the last trip that I did, I had already “felt” many other people’s stories, but this trip had to do with a son-in-law and my step-daughter who were both estranged at that time. And suddenly, mid-trip, I felt myself as a part of my husband’s family tree for the first time in my life. At this moment, I realized that I had never felt like I was a part of my husband’s tree. I actually felt like I was part of a tree. Also, I felt deeply accepted by this tree in this way that made me aware of how I had, prior to that moment, felt deeply rejected for my entire adult life. I literally felt like I was a part of a tree that was made up of people (a family tree, but also a tree with a trunk, bark, and leaves). I felt the wind that moved this tree and how the tree could compel me or other people on the tree to go in a particular life direction (or not).
The words “firsts and seconds” began repeating over and over in my head. I understood this to mean that the ancestry was made up of a pattern of first and second wives, husbands, daughters and sons. While the “first” was always “bad” according to the pattern, the “second” had to go into exile and not be a part of the tree at all. I was, in fact, my husband’s second wife so this made sense to me and I went through a long list of other family members that I knew about in his family who had been either first or second to check the pattern. Based on what I knew and had seen in my own experience with my husband’s family, the pattern held true in most of the family units, but I had to assume that there were couples, like John’s grandparents, for example, who had no second wife or husband in the family, but who likely had some other love interest who played the same role secretly perhaps. I can’t prove this, but it makes sense, and by and large this pattern held true for most of the couples in the near past of his family.
The pattern of “firsts and seconds” was something that had developed for lack of other resources from nature to restore a healthy, normal pattern in the family after the family members experienced a series of severe traumas. My husband’s family were Germans from Russia so they had experienced the feeling of being refugees – they felt at times as though there was no safe place for them to exist on earth. This was a trauma that led to more trauma in a spiral that evolved into this pattern of “firsts and seconds”. In order to restore a pattern to the family to help the tree become healthy again, radical changes were needed and trauma would have to be released from the system.
How to Heal from Toxic Relationships
Releasing trauma from a family and from the ancestry is nearly impossible (though not totally impossible) without the sacred medicines. But with the sacred medicines, almost any kind of relationship healing is possible. Constellations Therapy is the only type of therapy that I know about to heal relationships, but you have to find a therapist who is literally psychic and able to talk to the dead in order to make it work. I love Constellations Therapy, but there aren’t a lot of great therapists out there and you can do a lot of damage if you aren’t a great Constellations Therapist. On the other hand, working with the sacred medicines, either in the context of The Knowing Field and Constellations Therapy, or even as just a regular human being who wants to make positive changes in a family environment, you can make radical, miraculous changes for the good of the entire family.
Though the sacred medicines will not help a person manipulate another person (and in fact, my sense of it is that if you try to do something negative that you might end up with something negative that falls on your own shoulders times 3), they can help you change patterns of behavior that are toxic such that you can open up space to heal a toxic relationship. This “space opening” is like opening a hole in a woodwind instrument to play new notes that have not been possible before — notes that would squeak or squawk or go mute — and to resonate with the spiritual winds that blow in from another person’s energy field. Opening a space between you and another person to heal a toxic relationship often begins with one person’s efforts to quietly resonate with the other person. Most of us have woodwind instruments that are clogged up by trauma – these “instruments” (our chakras) barely admit any air through our energy field at all. But as we release the moldy yuck that clogs up the Kundalini and allow some of that energy to flow from body to mind and mind to body (which is our normal state of human existence), suddenly, new possibilities emerge in terms of our relationships with other people.
In intimate relationships, a pattern of wronging and taking by one person fits neatly with patterns of being wronged and always giving by another person. The pattern exists between the two people. The pattern is NOT about the people themselves, whether they’re good or bad or right or wrong, but rather a dance that the two people are doing to try to heal something that might be problematic for each party as a result of personal and ancestral trauma. It can be incredibly difficult to see the “dance” while you’re also doing the dance so sacred medicines help us “stop the world”, take a breath and step outside of ourselves to see.
When one person loves another person, the love usually has to do with one person’s acknowledgement of the other person’s essence, not the dance that that person is doing. Mutual love is an acknowledgement of one another’s essence as something beautiful and attractive. But our essence doesn’t always inform the dance that we do in our lives and what notes we play as our “song”.
I’ve worked with a lot of people who were involved in so-called “toxic” relationships, but who felt this strong, persistent love for the other person they were with. Separation is excruciating for both parties despite the toxic patterns in their relationship. Society’s answer to this problem is to separate permanently and create a strategy of exile and avoidance. But love is more complicated than that and this strategy only creates more trauma. The idea that love is something that we choose to feel is so at odds with the human experience of trying to find love. People search for love, but finding it is one of the greatest challenges that we face. And then, when we find love, if we don’t like the song and dance that the person we love is doing with us, we’re encouraged to just give up on the relationship.
Finding love is about feeling the essence of someone else as it mixes with our essence. Being in love is about learning the song and dance of another person. Mature love in intimate relationships, in contrast, is a willingness to rework the song and dance, and come up with a unique dance that’s worthy of being passed down in some way to the younger generation. The dance always involves compromise and a willingness to sync up. Some couples pass the dance down to biological children while others pass it down through some type of work that they do in the world. In any case, trauma causes us to lose sync and be out of step with the present moment. We end up in a vortex of the past or we dissociate and try to escape into planning for the future.
The love between two people is a part of the dance that might be toxic according to society’s standards. But though society has certain useful guidelines regarding how to manage relationships, some of those guidelines contribute to the toxicity of our human relationships. Society is a self-serving entity, after all, that has become less and less human and more and more mechanized over time. The more mechanized society and community becomes, the less we can seek help from those who surround us to resolve issues we confront with the people we love. A mechanized society seeks to make humans into a part of a machine. But human beings are not machines.
The tragedy of words is that they are often experienced as “rules” by the mind. The mind loves the neat and tidy idea of rules, but our human Selves are magical and “wild” and we can do so much more and be so much more than what the rules say are possible. Our human bodies are designed to FEEL. When we feel and allow feelings to pass through, into our conscious awareness, we can name the feeling and the feeling then goes away. But if we try to resist feelings, they get stuck in our bodies. If we don’t have time to acknowledge consciously that we have a feeling, the feelings get sticky and immobile. So when we talk about how to heal a toxic relationship, we also have to open up to the idea that we don’t know how to do it with our minds. The mind, which is something that Lydian and I refer to as the left-brain, is the logical, rule-oriented, idealist. But the body, or the “right-brain” is the wild part of us that can survive a flood or an earthquake. This is the part of us that’s creative and animal-like, but very survival oriented. Psilocybin allows us to suspend the rigid concepts about relationships in the mind in order to arrive at new solutions and new ways of being in the world with those we love by opening the left-brain logic up to the real, down-to-earth felt experience of the right-brain / body.
The answer to healing a toxic relationship is something that comes from the felt sense of our physical human bodies and the technology of these “high-tech human suits” that our spirits wear while we live on earth. The high-tech human suit is all about emotions and the connection that we have to other human beings. It is this high-tech human suit that makes it possible for Aborigines in Australia to communicate using telepathy. It’s this high-tech human suit that people in the Amazon used to find, for example, a group of children who had gotten lost in the rainforest after a plane crash (you can read about this amazing story here). In order to heal a toxic relationship, we have to release trauma from the high-tech human suit so that the “wild” felt sense of the body can communicate clearly with the rule-oriented mind. We have to heal ourselves. Then, we can begin to FEEL the other person. And with those feelings that come from the other person, we can download information about how to heal. The mind on psilocybin is primed to listen to the body and stopped judging the emotions that we feel in our relationships (which is where psilocybin integration therapy is useful). Love is about feeling, after all, and feeling happens in the body.
If you feel like you’re going in circles in trying to heal a broken relationship, psilocybin can open up a path out of that circle so that you can stop looping and find actual solutions that you haven’t thought about yet to re-connect.
Most people who are truly motivated can solve serious relationship problems, even problems that involve cheating, violence, alcoholism or drug addiction, or a lack of commitment using psilocybin. These are relationship problems that are viewed as very black-and-white as so-called “deal-breakers”, but, when people love each other, these “deal-breakers” actually break us as individuals when we try to separate ourselves from someone we truly love. Often, people who try to get rid of toxic relationships find themselves in new relationships several years later that have identical problems as the ones they just got out of. This may sound bleak, but it’s actually just a manifestation of life-purpose. If you find yourself in toxic relationships over and over again, psilocybin (and the other sacred medicines) can help you see how to overcome this problem. You’re supposed to overcome it — that’s what life purpose IS. It is not your life purpose to experience pain in your relationships. Rather, it’s your life purpose to figure out how to overcome the pattern so that you can experience JOY.
I’m not advocating for people in violent, abusive relationships to stick around and allow their partners to abuse them, but rather to find safety and then take a step outside of the cultural prescriptions and acknowledge that perhaps there’s another way to approach the problem. Psilocybin, Ayahuasca, Sapito and other sacred medicines are an incredibly rich resource in terms of problem resolution in relationships. A person who is in an abusive situation will have to separate themselves physically from the situation, but then the work begins. A person who chooses this strategy can take psilocybin mushrooms with openness to the possibilities and sit with their broken heart, knowing that the message is going to give them some new resource that will probably be surprising, if not downright miraculous. I’m not talking about doing just one trip though. It can take months of doing full trips twice a week plus microdosing to open your own mind far enough to let actual solutions pass into your conscious awareness.
This work to heal from toxic relationships involves ourselves as individuals first. We release our trauma first. As the trauma is released, our minds open. We begin to feel and suddenly, our ability to “see” in a new way develops. As the mind opens, new possibilities enter into the paradigm. These new possibilities are usually surprising and not what the client expects. Psilocybin mushrooms specifically advocate on behalf of love, but they do so with a gentle touch, like the careful and systematic dismantling of a bomb. Many people understand, after they work with psilocybin through several trips, that they had become alienated from themselves and that this alienation from the self is one reason why they are having serious relationship problems. Anyone who chooses to work with psilocybin for relationships needs to realize that there is a process that will likely involve more than just one trip for toxic relationships with entrenched negative patterns. To undertake a psilocybin YEAR (or at least 3 months of regular trips and also microdosing) is often necessary, but well worth it for people who want to overcome a toxic relationship pattern or patterns and reconnect after estrangement or exile, without the worry that the same dysfunctions will lead to separation again in the future.
As people undertake a psilocybin year (or any period of psilocybin use that allows long-term, permanent changes in their thinking to evolve naturally through the process), they fix life problems that contribute in odd and surprising ways to toxic relationships. Taking psilocybin long-term is like reconnecting into Nature. Nature is THE resource from which everything in the world comes – every food item, every clothing item, every home, every medicine, and every physical object that we could want comes originally from nature. As we reconnect into the matrix of nature, we become aware of resources that we’re blind to as a result of trauma and an inability to feel or reconnect TO OURSELVES. We become reconnected first and foremost to our Selves as powerful, wild beings that are here on earth to do more than just survive. We’re here to experience joy and to figure out how to overcome our problems despite all odds, not just bunker down and succumb to them.
I have been the exiled daughter. I have been the exiled daughter-in-law. I have also been the estranged mother-in-law and the estranged step-mother and step-mother-in-law. Right now, at the current moment, I play none of these toxic roles anymore. I am not estranged and I am not in exile. And I thank psilocybin and all of the other sacred medicines, along with Constellations Therapy as a model for healing for being reconnected with the people I love.
How We Work with Relationship Issues
If you’re struggling with relationship issues and you’re willing to work to overcome trauma in order to reconnect, Lydian and I can help. We use Constellations Therapy as a model and we work with a variety of sacred medicines to help people overcome blocks. In couples, for example, who have lies or secrets between them, addiction issues, alcoholism, mental illness, abuse, or other issues, we suggest different sacred medicines and a path back to healing. We work in-person with people at our facility in Mexico, but we also offer online packages and we do work with people through Zoom and other video-calling software. We work with people all over the world, and we work with all races, and religions, as well as sexual orientations and we can help you access sacred medicines in your country-of-origin that we’re familiar with if psilocybin is not legal there.
Typically, we begin our work with clients by scheduling a health coaching appointment through our sister-site AlivenHealthy.com. If you’re interested in coming to Mexico to work with us in-person, this health coaching call will help you and us if we’re all a good fit for this type of work. For those who wish to work with us online only, the health coaching call will help us get an idea for your set, setting, and schedule and then come up with a path to follow to help you get your relationships and familial connections back into a state of harmony.
Contact us now at info@medicinassagradas.com for information about how to buy psilocybin and online psilocybin integration therapy.