Soul Recovery
This is the introduction to my recent book Soul Recovery, which you can download for free here.
Introduction
In my book Yoga & Plant Medicine (2019), I proposed yoga as a much-needed complementary practice to the therapeutic use of psychedelics and plant medicines, mainly because I’d personally experienced so much benefit in combining the two modalities. As I wrote then, my yoga practice helped me prepare for and integrate my plant medicine experiences, and my plant medicine experiences helped me go deeper into my yoga practice.
Perhaps I was a little naive in thinking that other folks might be willing to take up a daily practice and stick with it for a number of years (let alone a lifetime). After working with hundreds of people in my counseling practice over the past 8 years and teaching hundreds, if not thousands, of yoga classes in the same period, I can confidently (though admittedly with some sadness) say that it’s a rare person who is willing to dedicate themselves to a home yoga practice that includes the disciplines of asana (postures), pranayama (breathwork), chanting and meditation — all essential ingredients of a yoga practice that actually works the way it’s meant to.
Taking a posture class a few times a week and maybe doing a little pranayama here and there, you’ll certainly experience some benefits, but it won’t be the radically transformative practice that it’s meant to be.
It seems that modern psychedelic practitioners and psychedelic-assisted therapy patients are much more interested in understanding themselves psychologically rather than engaging in (admittedly esoteric) practices that affect transformation through somewhat mysterious means. I shouldn’t be surprised — we are, after all, living in a psychological, rather than mythological or theological age. Carl Jung observed that when the myths of Western culture began to fade they were replaced with psychology. Psychology is a modern mythology, with its own pantheon of gods (psychopathologies), origin stories (childhood trauma, chemical imbalances), holy books (the diagnostic manuals and psychology texts) and sacraments (psycho-pharmaceuticals).
The psychology myth has clearly taken root in our culture. There is more psychological information available to the mainstream public than ever before. Even the very young people I meet have a fairly sophisticated understanding of complex psychological concepts, much more so than even a couple decades ago. This is no doubt due to a proliferation of Instagram therapists and a vast archive of YouTube lectures on psychology and psychology-related topics. But knowledge alone doesn’t lead to transformation. You still need to do something to effect change. You have to put theory into practice.
Me demonstrating an advanced posture for Srivatsa Ramaswami, who is the longest standing student of T. Krishnamacharya (Los Angeles 2014)
It was only through countless hours of daily practice that I began to understand that the stories of yoga — told through strange and mysterious images of the chakras, inner deities, energy channels in the body and knots in the heart — were myths that were meant to explain, or at least point toward, the otherwise ineffable experience of profound biological and psychological changes the practices catalyze. As Jung explains, “[Myth] gives the ultimately unimaginable religious experience a form in which to express itself…” (Letters Vol. II, p 482-488)
Likewise, the revelations and radical shifts in perception I experienced through my work with psychedelics and plant medicines were impossible to rationalize without relying on irrational explanations. But try as I might, I just couldn’t fully integrate myself into the mythologies of the traditions I was engaging with. The Santo Daime, a syncretic Brazilian religion with Christian roots, is the first place I encountered ayahuasca, which they use as a holy sacrament in place of wine and bread.
The Daime (as it’s fondly called by its devotees) developed in the early 20th century after a black rubber tapper encountered indigenous ayahuasqueros in the Northwestern Amazon.
Me and Debbie after a special Daime ceremony in the desert (2016)
It offers a rich and beautiful savior myth that positions the ayahuasca vine as the “Second Coming” that will awaken the Christ Consciousness in all who imbibe it, bringing about a global “New Jerusalem” of peace, love and harmony. I could get down with that, but my budding religious devotion was continually thwarted by the old-school patriarchal Christian ideas that permeate the hymns that you sing throughout the hours-long Daime ceremonies. I just couldn’t give in to the idea of a righteous and punishing father figure in the sky to whom we constantly have to pay penance for the “original sin” of being born. Reinforcing that old story, while at the same time drinking a brew that radically opens your mind, seems like one step forward, two thousand steps back.
So, after a few years, I stopped going to the Daime ceremonies and took a break from ayahuasca. I went deeper into my yoga practice and study, and focused on teaching and traveling. In 2016 I published my first book Harmonic Movement, which was an attempt to strip away the myths surrounding yoga and give people the straight goods in a clear and succinct method.
I thought that if I focused on methodology rather than mythology it might inspire others to “just do it” and learn how yoga works to effect change through their direct, unfiltered experience — avoiding the fanciful ideas and images that often lead to spiritual materialism and bypassing rather than actual transformation.
The book and the method-focused practice videos I made around that time never really took off like I hoped they would, largely because, I think, people want a mythology. People love a good story. We are, after all, the myth-making monkeys.
In 2017 I heard the call of ayahuasca once again. This time I wanted to meet it in its natural environment, the Amazon. So I found a gig teaching yoga at an ayahuasca retreat center in Peru called The Temple of The Way of Light. I probably would have been put off by the name of the place had I not met the new Director of Integration at one of my yoga workshops in Vancouver. She had trained with Dr. Gabor Maté, who’s work in the field of trauma and addiction I respected. We vibed, and most importantly, the teaching gig would give me the opportunity to work directly with Shipibo healers, whose gorgeous healing songs I’d been listening to for years. As a lifelong musician, the quality of music in a ceremony can make it or break it for me. The thought of sitting for hours in a highly sensitized state of awareness with canned music or terrible singers terrified me way more than the possibilities of shamanic dismemberment, demonic possession or ego-death.
Hanging out at my tambo in the Amazon. (2017)
Down in the Peruvian Amazon I had some truly incredible experiences, but when I looked into the prevalent mythologies for some insight and understanding of what was happening, it was more confusing than enlightening.
The Western facilitators had their own ideas of what ayahuasca is and how it works and, as I discovered, there were conflicting myths amongst the indigenous groups that worked with ayahuasca. Was ayahuasca a goddess, or the union of male and female principles? Was it a “plant teacher” or a tool that awakened the “inner teacher”? Were the insights I received “downloaded” from somewhere “out there” or were they “uploads” from somewhere deep inside? Unlike the Santo Daime, there wasn’t even a clear myth for me to wrestle with. It was all up for grabs.
One thing that became clear to me during my time in the Amazon is that yoga and the plant medicine shamanism of South America share some key elements in their way of addressing physical and psychological illness and relieving existential suffering. Writing Yoga & Plant Medicine in 2019 helped me to work out and integrate some of the ideas I had about how these two traditions complement and support each other, but I was still left with the question of why they worked — no doubt a curse of my modern Western mind. Why couldn’t I just accept that these practices “just work”? Jungian analyst and author James Hollis told me once that we are the “monkeys who ask why?” and, I think that big three-letter question is what the primal urge to mythologize seeks to answer.
Myths are our attempt to make sense of the world and provide answers to the big questions: Who am I really? What does this all mean? When did this all begin? Where do we go after we die? Why are we here?
As I write this, I realize that these are the same questions I was taught to ask when writing a report back in sixth grade: Who? What? When? Where? Why?. I suppose all religions can be traced back to the moment when a mystic comes down from the mountaintop (or out of the jungle) to give a report of their religious experience to the tribe. All religions offer answers to the “5 Ws” through their own myths, which I think of as the field reports of the mystical explorers.
But what happens when the cultural myths that used to unite us and ease our existential angst fade away, only to be replaced by science, technology and entertainment? Out of all the big questions, science can never offer a good answer to the biggest one: Why?
Even the all-powerful modern religion of Science falls short when it comes to a good origin story — the cornerstone of any good mythology. As Rupert Sheldrake once wrote, “It’s almost as if science said, ‘Give me one free miracle, and from there the entire thing will proceed with a seamless, causal explanation.’” Technology and entertainment further reinforce the meaning-deprived myths of modern culture and distract us from the fact that life’s biggest and most concerning questions remain unanswered.
Just as I’d returned to things that I explored earlier in life when I was looking for answers to my midlife existential crisis, namely yoga and psychedelics, my search for a myth that could help me make sense of everything those practices allowed me to experience lead me back to the work of Carl Jung.
I’d first tried to read Jung in an early phase of spiritual seeking during my late teens and early twenties, but his writing went way over my head at the time and I put it aside. He always said that his work was meant for people in the second half of life, so I probably just didn’t need it yet or hadn’t had enough life experience for it to feel relevant.
I found my way back to his work through his students and spiritual descendants, particularly Joseph Campbell, James Hillman, Marion Woodman, James Hollis, Thomas Moore and Robert Moore. I consider them revered teachers and elders who further developed Jung’s ideas and devoted themselves to helping us, through depth psychology, find a Western mythology that is relevant to the spirit (and struggles) of our times. I’ll be drawing on their vast bodies of work throughout this book, plucking out some gems that will hopefully guide us on our exploration of the intersection of depth psychology, shamanism and psychedelics.
What is Depth Psychology?
Everyone’s work that I’ve mentioned could be considered to fall under the broad banner of depth psychology. The qualifier “depth” is required in order to distinguish it from the relative superficiality of the “scientifically validated” cognitive-behavioral approaches that are more widely accepted by mainstream medicine.
It’s telling that cognitive-behavioral therapy’s efficacy is usually measured against the use of psycho-pharmaceuticals, because both approaches tend to treat symptoms rather than underlying causes. Getting to the root of suffering is the domain of depth psychological approaches as well as yoga and shamanism — traditions that are usually dismissed as spiritual New Age nonsense by the rational-materialist mainstream. Again, we come up against the division between science and spirituality, a gap that Jung tried to bridge with his psychology, which has been called a modern “science of the soul.”
It wasn’t until I encountered depth psychology that I found a framework that could hold all of the strange, wonderful and sometimes terrifying events I’d experienced through my yoga and shamanic practices. It offered coherent maps and models that helped me better understand myself (Who am I, really?) the cause of my suffering (How did I get here?) and the way in which my mystical experiences, somatic practices and psychedelic use offered a way out of my crisis and into a more fulfilling, satisfying life (Where am I going?).
Carl Gustav Jung, with the twinkle in his eye that Alan Watts remarked on
The depth psychology tradition begins not just with Jung but goes back to his spiritual ancestors Freud, Nietzsche and Goethe, to the Medieval alchemists, and before them to the Gnostics and Ancient Greek philosophers Heraclitus and Plato. As I uncovered this lineage, it gave me the sense that we did indeed have an unbroken Western spiritual tradition to draw from and guide us on our way forward. I no longer felt adrift in a sea of meaningless suffering with no way out.
Depth psychology has provided me with a psychological grounding to support and make sense of all of my wild and untethered ecstatic experiences. In short, it has given me a frame in which I can weave a personal mythology that helps me wrestle with life’s big questions. And this is really the driving purpose behind this little book — to offer others who are looking to shamanic practices and psychedelics for healing and transformation some raw material with which they can begin to shape their own personal myth.
I hope that it also inspires the therapists, counselors and coaches who support folks working with psychedelics and other shamanic practices for healing to venture beyond the de rigeur cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy and spiritually-neutered, scientifically-validated approaches that currently permeate the psychedelic space. I want to encourage them to go deeper into their own spiritual practice and broaden their understanding in order to meet their clients were they’re at when they emerge from such expansive and paradigm-shifting experiences.
What is Shamanism?
Before venturing any further, let me address another term that I and other writers use throughout this book. The word “shamanism” is a contentious one and has been met with accusations of cultural appropriation directed toward modern practitioners of the so-called “shamanic arts.” I’ve wrestled with this term myself, but have come to an understanding that has allowed me to embrace it, finding no better alternative.
The word “shaman” can be traced to Russian and German anthropologists in the 17th century and is most-likely derived from the Tungus word šaman, meaning “one who sees.” Even this etymology has been contested by famed religious scholar Mircea Eliade who noted that the Sanskrit word śramana, designating a wandering monk or holy figure, had spread to many Central Asian languages along with Buddhism and could be the ultimate origin of the Tungusic word (Shamanism, Arkana Books, p. 495).
Whatever it’s murky origins, it’s from this word that we get the term shamanism. Rather than get mired in an etymological debate, I suggest that we accept shamanism as an English word that describes a wide range of practices across multiple cultures, just as we use the Latin-derived word religion to describe “a social-cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that relates humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements” (Merriam-Webster). In many cases, the words religion and shamanism can be used interchangeably, but to me, what distinguishes shamanism from religion is that it is concerned primarily with diagnosing and healing physical and psychological illness through what Eliade called “techniques of ecstasy.” The practice of shamanic healing in tribal society was traditionally carried out by a shaman, who was known by many names depending on the culture.
With the (re?)introduction of shamanic practice to Western culture by anthropologists in the early 20th century and the psychedelic revolution of the sixties, through to the development of Core Shamanism by Michael Harner in the 80s, up to the current psychedelic revival, modern non-tribal people have been given access extraordinary ecstatic states of consciousness through the ingestion of plant medicines and shamanic drumming. This leads us to ask the question, “Does this mean that everyone can be a shaman?”
The root teacher of my yoga lineage Tirumalai Krishnamacharya apparently said, “Anyone who calls himself a yogi is not a yogi.” He recognized that the title Yogi wasn’t something that could be self-appointed, but rather, it’s an honorific that is bestowed by one’s teacher or community in recognition of the practitioner’s attainment of certain qualities. This is why I call myself a “yoga practitioner” rather than “yogi.”
Me at home drumming and dreaming under my favourite cedar tree
Following this, I propose that we reserve the title “shaman” for those who serve the function of healer in an actual community where they live and can be held accountable — rather than the pseudo communities of the traveling “shaman” that are united only by their inclusion on an email list and occasional participation in a weekend ritual.
The rest of us who practice the techniques derived from shamanism can, I think, safely call ourselves “shamanic practitioners.” The ethics surrounding where we get our shamanic techniques and substances and how we engage with them is a whole other topic that I don’t wish to concern myself with here. Let me just say that I think it’s the responsibility of every individual Western practitioner who wasn’t born into an authentic shamanic lineage to wrestle with the issues of misappropriation, spiritual extraction, commodification and commercialization, and ultimately come to their own conclusions.
Perhaps by examining the parallels between Western depth psychology and shamanism we might find our way toward a Western tradition that is inspired by non-Western traditions without stealing and profiting from them. It may be a far-reaching hope but, whether we like it or not, Westerners are desperately seeking alternatives to the modern medical and psychotherapeutic models we’ve inherited, so we might as well try to steer things in the right direction by looking to our own spiritual ancestors like Jung, Campbell, Hillman and other depth psychologists.
“For any individual to construct a mature spirituality, it may be necessary to sort through the ruins of many great traditions, East and West, for they all have great wisdom embodied in their stories and exemplary figures. In the end, “the modern” is a person who understands that, for good or ill, the responsibility for spirituality has shifted from tribal religion to the shoulders of the individual.
While this is an enormous freedom, indeed a privilege — a proffering of dignity to the human soul — it is also an intolerable burden for many. Such a person then has to ask what accords with his or her inner reality and reject what may speak to others but not to him or her. Never in recorded history has there been such a mythological crisis for so many; never in human history have so many been free to decide their path and what constitutes authority to them.”
(James Hollis, Living an Examined Life)
