The Mind-Body Connection, MDMA, and Chronic Pain
This September The Embody Lab’s One-Day Summit is focusing on Plant Medicine and Psychedlic Assisted Therapies. In this One-Day Summit we’ll shine a light on the use of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy and, through discussions with leaders in this re-emerging field of healing and therapy, explore the different medicines and their applications for healing, counseling, psychology, and activism.
One of our One-Day Summit presenters, Dr Devon Christie joined Dr Will Siu to discuss the Mind-Body Connection, MDMA, and chronic pain and they have kindly shared this episode with us. We hope you enjoy it!
They talk about chronic pain: how it overlaps strongly with PTSD, why MDMA is the best candidate for success in treating it, and how we can retrain the brain and shift our relationship in how we experience pain. And they talk about how psychedelics are great tools but also a risk for retraumatization: If the movement for access to these medicines outpaces both the science and the amount of people trained in helping someone work through an experience, could we be creating even more trauma?
And they discuss the mind-body connection: how implicit memories and lack of touch and reciprocal engagement can lead to a developing brain not learning how to manage pain; the concept of learned response looping, how to complete a survival impulse in an organized way, and the optimal arousal zone; how oppression and religious or cultural judgement changes one’s relationship with their body; and how learning more about the fascia could be the key toward understanding how the body’s different systems influence each other.
“Even in modern medicine, when people get sick, you can almost see this philosophical orientation of: ‘The body is not to be trusted; I’ve been betrayed by my body.’ There’s a lot of fear people have towards their bodies, which I think is perpetuated in how Western medicine holds things in general (not necessarily intentionally, but through the legacy of time), whereas in my post-graduate learnings and forays into somatics and trauma and functional medicine, it’s like: Actually, the mind-body split is false, and every single moment, my felt experience is informing my cognitive processes and my thoughts and vice-versa. And so I think where this then brings us, in terms of pain management, is needing to really acknowledge this as true and start to really empower people back into trusting the wisdom of their bodies.”
