The Inner Healing Intelligence

or how to welcome everything

Hi friends! I hope you had a wonderful Christmas, by which I mean: you kept your expectations in check and reality did not lowball, you got to wear soft pants every day, and you had at least one God Tickle, or even a full-on Golden God Moment, as Carmen used to call them. 

Please submit for review your God Tickles in the comments section (hint: not to be judged, but to amplify their signal. We need all the God Tickles we can get, even vicariously. And yes, as I repeat the phrase “God Tickle” over and over I begin to understand it sounds more like a newfangled sex toy than a totally innocent and wonderfully transcendent phrase invented by a 4-year-old to describe how God makes Herself deeply and briefly known to us…but let’s get back on track here).

God Tickles may include, but are not limited to, the shimmering feeling you get in the core of your being when: 

• Hugging your Christmas tree when no one is looking

• The dog snuggles in just right, her lumps and bumps meshing with your lumps and bumps

• Spooning your children/grandchildren/bestie/partner from behind (not recommended to do with strangers)

• You and a stranger have a moment that is a little kinder than it needed to be

• Witnessing the freshness of the morning sun, dew or frost on grass

• Witnessing the wonders of the evening, first star in the sky, moonrise

• Singing Christmas carols at the top of your lungs

• The last candle gets lit while singing Silent Night in a circle on Christmas Eve

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

You get the idea. Yes, they’re all clichés! You know what makes a cliché a cliché? It happens often enough that its truth it obvious to everybody. 

It’s a good thing when God Tickles are so cliché they can happen anywhere, anytime, and not just on a once-in-a-lifetime Christmas when all your personal stars align. We need God every day. 

Ok, enough preamble.  

A few weeks ago I had the longest intensive yet for my psychedelic program–6 days in the sub-basement ballroom of the Hyatt in the Tenderloin (yes, ironic in more ways than one). 183 mostly therapists, doctors and nurses and I learned about MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for treating PTSD. 

The evidence from the clinical trials is amazing. More than 70% of people (we’re talking combat vets, child sexual abuse survivors–seriously gnarly complex trauma, religious trauma, torture and so much more) lost their PTSD diagnosis within a year after undergoing a series of 3 MDMA sessions with accompanying preparation and integration. 86% had significant relief from symptoms. 

For the curious: we commonly think of MDMA as a party drug, but it was first used by marriage therapists as a heart-opener during sessions. MDMA undermines the amygdala (brain’s fear center), and makes it easier to have difficult conversations in a loving way. 

Now apply that to an MDMA-influenced participant in a safe therapeutic setting. It allows them to have a safe “conversation” within their own imagination with people they’ve hurt (i.e. in combat) or people who have hurt them (abuse). Even more importantly, MDMA can allow them to have a profound, heart-opening conversation with themselves, to untangle the grief and shame about what happened to them or what they did, to be overcome with self-compassion because of the action of the medicine on their brains, opening windows and doors and letting light flood in. And in many cases, once those doors and windows open, they don’t close again. 

All that is truly miraculous. You can see why I, a self-described transformation junkie, am so excited to be on this track. 

But what the medicine does is not even the best part. There’s a phrase that the four excellent teachers, who all work for this org and ran some of the clinical trials, repeated over and over: 

The Inner Healing Intelligence. 

The Inner Healing Intelligence goes by very different names in varying philosophical, religious, spiritual or therapeutic frameworks. A progressive Christian might call it the indwelling Christ or the Holy Spirit. Glennon Doyle talked in Untamed about “inner wisdom,” as in “I have learned that if I want to rise, I have to sink first. I have to search for and depend upon the voice of inner wisdom instead of voices of outer approval.”

Essentially, the “inner healing intelligence” is the part of you that always knows what’s right for you. And lest this sound selfish or narcissistic, I’d add that if it’s right for you, in the grandest sense, it’s also right for the people around you. When you can access, listen to and act upon what the inner healing intelligence knows, things get better for everyone: your kids, spouse, parents, dog, workmates, strangers. Because you are more free. 

That doesn’t mean there’s not a painful adjustment period. In any family system, people adapt to each other’s addictions, moods, trauma responses…so when one person starts functioning better (e.g. gets sober, goes to therapy, gets physically healthier) the other people in the system might freak out and try to sabotage them, because something is changing and that’s scary. They prefer the devils they know. But if everyone can just stay the course, not fleeing or fighting or freezing or fawning, if they can stay heart-open and trusting and patient and communicating, the whole family can get healthier. 

It sounds almost too simple, right? The idea that each of us, no matter how much of a mess we might feel (and be), actually has everything we need inside of us to heal from all that’s happened? That God has given each of us, as part of our factory settings, the very best medicine we need, and it’s always available? I sound like some kind of religious nut. 

If this really is true, if the Inner Healing Intelligence is there, why do we need MDMA and trained therapists to help us get to it? Well, I don’t think everyone does. But there is a LOT of noise and distraction in this world. There’s a lot of trauma and re-traumatizing shit. It’s hard to keep up! Especially when there is laundry to do and the dog to take to the vet and the emails having endless babies in your inbox! 

There’s something powerful about giving your brain a head start with the MDMA. Putting yourself in the best possible position, biochemically, to be able to access the trauma and not fight/flight/flee before it, but to open wider what therapists call “the window of tolerance,” to be able to experience those memories again and get different, more nuanced and compassionate ideas of all that you went through. 

And there’s something powerful about making time and space and intention to heal yourself as well, to say you deserve this (and everyone around you does, too), to believe that it can happen (I see you Ted Lasso!) and make intentional space for it to happen. The clinical data showed that *even people who got the placebo* had some remission from PTSD symptoms–just because of the quality of caring attention they got from not one but *2* therapists (in the MDMA trials, for a number of reasons, each participant worked with co-therapists, usually a man and a woman). 

You already know the way HOME to yourself

We trainees in that ballroom, all potential future MDMA therapists, learned what to do and what not to do. Two other phrases came up a lot: “don’t get ahead of the medicine,” meaning, let the medicine–both the MDMA and the Inner Healing Intelligence–guide the process. The therapists aren’t supposed to ask a lot of questions, or really any questions at all. We are mostly there for emotional support, to remind people to stay in their bodies and notice what is coming up in their bodies, to breathe, to keep them physically safe, and to receive everything they offer non-judgmentally and with compassion. 

Here’s some advice from the clinical trials that will work for any of us, anytime, with or without MDMA: “We encourage you to approach whatever comes up as something that’s coming up as part of your healing process. We trust that your inner healing intelligence will bring you what you need for healing and that’s much more reliable than anything you or we could figure out ahead of time with our rational minds.”

The other phrase that came up a lot was: 

Welcome everything. 

Even if it seems bad, seems hard, seems impossible, is terrifying, hurtful or threatens to undo you completely. 

Because? We might be wrong about those judgments of badness. 

The monster rearing its head is something our own imagination has invented, and it has arrived to teach us something. Don’t let it leave without blessing you, and certainly don’t turn and run because then it will have to chase you down to give you that blessing.

Welcome everything. 

Can you imagine if we lived our lives welcoming everything?

That’s easy for me to say. Life is going pretty beautifully at the moment: my kids have both gotten into college! My 25th wedding anniversary to my best friend is tomorrow! We’re flying to Baja this afternoon after church for a week of snorkeling with whale sharks, the largest fish in the sea, and eating some of the smaller fish in the sea, and sitting on the beach reading novels. 

I have all the caftans. I figure a middle-aged married lady who is starting a new sideline as a psychedelic chaplain should definitely be rocking caftans. Here’s one borrowed from my dear friend Jennifer:

Yes, things are going well atm as the kids say. And: if there’s anything I’ve learned from having a 30-year-long front row seat to human transformation but also: pain, terror, stuckness, self-loathing, bright-siding, spiritual bypassing, toxic secret-keeping and more, it’s that even people who seem happily married and whose kids got into college and who are on their way to Baja have their own shit. [Like, in my case: Even the happiest marriages are very very hard sometimes! Can I get an amen! And I was terrified and weepy for years that one of those college-bound kids was destined to a life of self-sabotage! And when both those college-bound kids leave home in less than 6 months their mother has an irrational fear that she or they will die! That’s not a metaphor! And yes whale sharks aren’t generally known to eat people but have you Seen Their Mouths?!]

Anyhow, loves, Happy New Year, or if you can’t manage that, how about a Mildly Self-Compassionate New Year, in the spirit of MDMA and all the good it is going to do for humans (coming legally to a federal government near you in 2024!). 

As I sit by the waning Christ candle on this 7th day of Christmas, and last day of the year in 2023, I’m sending up healing prayers for you. For you to become intimately acquainted with your own Inner Healing Intelligence this year, along with everybody you know, including some warmongers, presidential candidates and media personalities who will remain unnamed. 

You already know the way home. 

Christlove <3

Molly