With classical conditioning, extreme ownership and the pursuit of good
intention, I awake. Early is a vague concept that does not fit with my mindset. I
am in joy. I have arrived for my day.
Leaving home, I see fellow colleagues starting their walk to work. Our community,
established close to work, has made this possible. Built on the principles set down by
the School of Bauhaus and the Pioneer Health Centre, with the belief that our
surroundings, both internal and external, have impact on the well-being of our mind
body and soul. 1 As I walk through the gardens, noticing the trees and the gregarious
order of nature, groups of people are flocking together, some with hugs and gratitude
mantras, others in laughing yoga and yet more in the silent bliss of Tai Chi.
Good mornings, silent namaste or just eye contact, is necessary for all to feel
connected. Safe in the refuge. A “palace of healing”. I have arrived at work.
At 6 am we start the first encounter group of the day. The meeting opens with
gratitude and leads to a flourishing discussion on the transformative effects of sleep
and how our grievances from the previous day, now seems distant and
inconsequential. 2 The program of learning involves a morning of either flotation,
virtual reality, exercise, gardening, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy and tea,
mushroom or cacao ceremonies. Flotation offers an opportunity to be in stillness,
through the experiences of zero gravity and ultimate sensory deprivation. Where the
mind can wander and find the focuses of the day, be them pain, struggle or
joy. 3
Those in the virtual reality group may choose to map out a goal they are working
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towards. They design what it would look like, feel like and be like; in order to
experience it in the virtual world. This has become an excellent avenue for learning
and healing for patients with apathy or depression, who find it difficult to start a task.
Similar processes also being used by others to plan exposure tasks that could
unlock their path to tolerance, acceptance and a gracious respect for their anxieties. 4
Those suffering from psychotic experiences, conceptualised by a loss of faith in their
perceptions or an inability to integrate their daily experiences of magic, coincidence
and the divine use virtual reality to attempt to explain to health professionals what
their internal world really does look like. 5
This platform may help provide a space for patients to feel comfortable to share new
information with their health professionals. By sharing the virtual experience of their
patient’s psychosis, professionals may in turn feel open enough to genuinely listen to
their patient’s difficulties. This new learning can help create a shared formulation with
which to guide gentle therapeutic work to slowly loosen and eventually challenge
their fixed beliefs. Healing is a reciprocal process with both professional and patient
leaving their safe positions of certainty that may have created conflict in the past, to
meet collaboratively together in the present. Exercise classes offer a wide range of
yogic, strength, endurance and mixed martial arts training. The aim is not
aggression, but instead to channel energy into optimal output.
To give confidence to our abilities of decisiveness, intention and action which
can and need to be trusted upon to solve the problems that we all face; in
order to heal ourselves.
Those in the nature and cultivation group have the important task of picking some of
the new medicines from the garden of plenty.
As Hippocrates said, “let thy food be thy medicine and let medicine be thy
food”.
The group works together to teach each other how we can chime in with the
symbiotic rhythms manifest in nature. By bringing nature into awareness, we can
observe the interconnectivity of different organisms and how they work together to
share the balance of life. How we can cultivate and create food and medicine, while
more is gifted to us and that we in turn should gift to the Earth and to each other, not
out of duty or with conditions, but out of mutual respect.
The different plant-based ceremonies are ways of understanding the ego drives that
have guided us towards the very difficulties we were always meant to encounter. 6 By
realising that the difficulties we face are a representation of our own internal
struggles. Understanding the habits that we have engaged in, both adaptive and
maladaptive and connecting with our experiences of childhood, can help in the
process of working through these challenges. Breakthroughs in healing have been
achieved by using the new psychedelic tools that we have re-discovered, making us
brave enough to listen to, acknowledge, bless and eventually model from those that
we like and respect.
Through the transformative experience of working through ones’ difficulties
we encourage others to think that the events that have befallen them could
only have ever happened to them. That their life was designed as a result of the
complex and still to be understood inter-relationship of their DNA, personality and
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trans-generational history; to create the very difficulties they have had to and were
meant to experience. 7 In the genuine acceptance of these processes, one may
truly be able to tolerate the past and enjoy the present as now the future
cannot hold any curse.
Mindfulness-based cognitive therapies combined with heart rate monitoring provides
feedback to link the important organs of brain and heart called cardiac coherence. 8
In the first few decades of the new millennium, some patients had found it difficult to
respond to treatments and services that had been offered.
Through openness and acceptance of new paradigms, true coherence has
been achieved by connecting mind and body together with self-awareness,
social-awareness and metacognition.
Deep reflective abilities based on this holistic mind-body-soul interconnectivity called
“Spiritual Intelligence” has helped facilitate the processing of unconsciously
repressed experiences held in the bodily ego to emancipate the soul. 9 This new
healing has been transformative for all patients with trauma related difficulties which
has now been conceptualised as underpinning all mental and physical health
problems. All these individual experiences will be followed by a brief integration
group. Working initially with peers and staff that have engaged in the same activities,
we all support each other in guided discovery to help establish immediate reflections.
For lunch, we then undertake a group communal exercise of organising and cleaning
followed by decorating, cooking, feasting and tidying up together.
Unlike the poem, “Nobody, Everybody, Anybody and Somebody”, we work in
harmony to get the important tasks completed.
Those that feel safe to do so are invited to share their experiences of the morning
with others; maybe they will choose prior acquaintances, an unfamiliar person that
the day has selected for them to meet or to openly share within informal groups.
In the afternoon, we all participate in a series of integration groups, which helps
ground some of the experiences into understanding. Focusing on the process of
transformative learning we help those willing to start their journey towards healing
and equilibrium move through their threshold, defined by their current problems.
Members are invited to think about how their assumptions of the world have been
based on their unique interpretation of their life up until today. To acknowledge that
their assumptions may have held them in a liminal space. We invite them to see if
any of the new information that they have experienced today has been troubling.
We support them to give themselves permission to voluntarily find a space of
temporary discomfort, within which they can be open, curious and non-
judgemental. If they chose to integrate this new information, maybe they will notice
that they have transformed over the process of the day. 10 They may feel less
bounded and freer, integrated and changed irreversibly in some way yet to be fully
understood. Their uncertainty does not cause confusion. It can be safety
tolerated through their internal feelings of joy.
Through the courage of experiencing, acknowledging, reflecting and eventually
expressing these thoughts, firstly to themselves and then others, we foster a safe
space of healthy discussion and learning. We encourage reflections to help cultivate
the seeds of healing that may be starting to happen within us. Refocussing attention
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briefly away from ourselves, encourages curiosity of others. We consider how our
personal experiences of healing may be affecting others and reciprocally how
their progress may be influencing us.
The close of the day celebrates the Dionysian traditions of singing and ecstatic
dancing. Work has been done. Lots to think about. Tomorrow will be a family
day for all of us. We encourage reflections on how the definition of family can be
expanded to incorporate those that we choose to spend loving time with such as
children, partners, parents, siblings or old friends. Those who have lost their
important social pillars may be introduced to new friends that they have meet
on their journey of healing. Nobody will be alone. Integration cannot happen
alone.
We break for today. Home time. It is a short walk. I have arrived at home.
References
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peckham_Experiment
2. Wood, A. M., Froh, J. J., & Geraghty, A. W. (2010). Gratitude and well-being:
A review and theoretical intergration. Clinical Psychology Review, 30,
890–905
3. Kjellgren, A., Buhrkall, H., & Norlander, T. (2010). Psychotherapeutic
Treatment in Combination with Relaxation in a Flotation Tank: Effects on
"Burn-Out Syndrome".The Qualitative Report, 15(5), 1243-1269. Retrieved
from https://nsuworks.nova.edu/tqr/vol15/iss5/12
4. Powers, M., (2008), Virtual reality exposure therapy for anxiety disorders: A
meta-analysis, Journal of Anxiety Disorders 22 (2008) 561–569
5. Carhart-Harris RL, Leech R, Hellyer PJ, Shanahan M, Feilding A,
Tagliazucchi E,Chialvo DR, and Nutt D (2014) The entropic brain: a theory of
conscious states informed by neuroimaging research with psychedelic drugs.
Front Hum Neurosci 8:20.
6. Horrobin, D. (2002) The Madness of Adam and Eve: How Schizophrenia
Shaped Humanity, UK, Transworld Publishing.
7. Van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body
in the healing of trauma. New York: Viking.
8. Delgado-Pastor et al., 2013 L.C. Delgado-Pastor, P. Perakakis, P.
Subramanya, S. Telles, J. Vila Mindfulness (Vipassana) meditation: effects on
P3b event-related potential and heart rate variability Int. J. Psychophysiol., 90
(2) (2013), pp. 207-214, 10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2013.07.006
9. Zohar, D., Marshall, I. (2001) SQ: Connecting With Our Spiritual Intelligence
10. Meyer, J. H. F. and Land, R. (2006) Overcoming Barriers to Student
Understanding: Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge, London,
Routledge.