Reintroduction & Reboot

Expanding and exploring

Hello again!

Over a year ago I started this newsletter with a lot of excitement and enthusiasm, and then that energy went… in different directions. Scattered to the winds.

It’s been an interesting and creative year. We’ve planted thousands of trees, been through another calving season, and are getting ready to rip on lots of farm infrastructure projects.

Altered States of Context, Brian Pilecki’s and my pod on psychedelics & psychotherapy , had some great highs this year, including interviews with Steve Hayes and Ros Watts. I became president of the Illinois Psychedelic Society and have been working with a team of fantastic folks to get our psychedelic reform bill in front of the Illinois State legislature. We think we’ll have our bill on the floor next session.

The curveball that came across the plate this year that I did NOT expect was an encounter with a group of fine folks referring to themselves as “Doomer Optimists”.

To understand what this means, why it struck me this year, and what it has to do with psychedelics and this particular newsletter, we’re going to have to back up a bit. Please indulge me for a bit of personal history to help explain.

As I’ve written here last year, my family, all of us former vegetarians, started raising beef cattle 5 years ago. So, how does a psychedelically inclined, hippie-coded, former vegetarian psychotherapist end up ranching cattle in the middle of rural America? What’s the thread that ties these things together? How is this not just chaos?

Well, it kind of is at times, which is why I’ve sometimes been referred to as a “Tornado”. Creating the conditions for healthy order to emerge is often very difficult, especially when unhealthy patterns are firmly entrenched. It’s difficult to do as a psychotherapist with my clients, it’s difficult to do on the farm, it’s difficult to do with a family and a home, and, most poignantly, it’s difficult to do between my own two ears.

It’s a pretty wild and confusing world for a lot of people. This has been the case for some time, obviously accelerated tremendously in 2020 and hasn’t really slowed down since. People increasingly do not see the world in ways compatible with one another. We’re having a harder time denying a gnawing awareness of our vulnerability to nature, something we’d erroneously come to believe we’d transcended. Many systems we depend on- political, economic, social- seem wobbly, and appear poised to come apart.

Whatever glue that has been holding everything together seems to have surpassed its usable life.

So, are we fucked, or is there hope? I increasingly think that the answer to both questions is yes, and it’s been enormously helpful in helping me to make sense of my life and to weave together the threads that have previously seemed to clash, or at least failed to match.

In my professional role, I generally practice something called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. It’s a wonderful approach to working with suffering that spends a good bit of time, as the name implies, working with acceptance. Acceptance is, more or less, a willingness to be present and engage with what IS. Most of us spend a good deal of time intentionally NOT doing this. We’d very much rather things be different. This leads to blind denial of ACTUAL problems and a frantic attempt to paper over them with dysfunctional fixes and/or a persistent malaise or hopelessness that anything will ever be different.

Acceptance, by contrast, is active. When we practice it, we affirmatively look our situation in the eye and cease deluding ourselves about it. Crucially, however, this does not mean we resign ourselves to it, either. When we stop avoiding it, procrastinating it, making excuses about it, blaming others about it or cringe in fear from it we can engage with it, tinker with it, play with it, and more or less perform trial and error.

I think the problems we face as a people now are profound. I think that the social and ecological changes wrought by 2 centuries of rapidly escalating fossil fuel usage have created a precarity that leaves us with a great deal of uncertainty regarding the future and only vastly diminished social structures to support us through it. It’s not good, and the ecological crises are at least matched if not exceeded by growing social ones.

This is hard to look at and accept. And, if one is too gaze very deeply into the online self-reinforcing doom loop, it can create a pervasive and nigh unshakable sense of doomerism. However, we MUSTN’T stop there.

We also mustn’t wait for someone else to do something. This is an insidious practice of non-acceptance that assumes its not MY problem, it’s someone else’s, and I’m going to vote for someone else to fix it. I’m sorry, the problem belongs to all of us, as does the responsibility to engage with it.

So, what to DO?

That’s the question. And that’s the intended purpose of the newsletter going forward. I’ll still focus on psychedelic experience & therapy, because I think it’s an important aid to this very process. I’ve often referred to psychedelics as “conceptual solvents” because as they temporarily disable our normal language function, they offer a reprieve from our habitual perception and understanding of the world.

When we no longer filter experience through what we expect to see, we see more clearly what IS. Psychedelic experiences can allow us to see very clearly things that are typically obscured by layer after layer of experience and conditioning. Seeing clearly is a cause and an effect of acceptance. You cannot accept something you can’t see, and once you DO accept something your vision is less clouded by the compulsion to avoid seeing it.

Psychedelics can be a powerful catalyst for change, on various scales. The story doesn’t end there, and it’s why I need to expand the scope of the newsletter. Change how, and change what? I don’t think we get an answer to those questions easily. I don’t think we get an answer to those questions without opening our hearts and looking-without illusion-at the things we love most, and get clear about how to serve those things.

So that’s what I’m going to write about here. Psychedelics, change and values in the context of cultural and ecological flux. I’m not exactly sure where the newsletter will end up going, which seems appropriate to the subject matter. What I commit to is anchoring the writing in my honest truth, my own perspective, and an ongoing attempt to answer the questions: how do we make sense of all of this, and what should we do?