Ten years ago my jaw unbuckled while listening to a friend recount the narrative of his birth. It was the late 70’s, and so, naturally, as his mother’s belly began contracting, she placed a hit of acid on her tongue and ambled down toward the beach. Following an eight-hour labor, she gave birth to a boy as the psychedelic sunset. Though this story has stayed with me as a bizarre and mystifying sort of heroine’s legend, this article is not about giving birth while tripping. But my interests in the birth process and the entheogenic experience are deeply intertwined, and have been integrated in recent years through an immersion in both realms.
Following an eight-year full-time career as a birth doula, and years of working with entheogenic plants, connecting the myriad parallels between the act of giving birth and the psychedelic experience was something that unfurled naturally over time. Childbirth, like the soul encounter that can be experienced in an altered state, is an extraordinarily primal rite of passage: a point-of-no-return event that leaves one irrevocably changed. Ego identity is shaken from its foundations by the transformation into archetypal mother, and with it, emotional pillars of strength normally relied upon in times of duress may provide merely a thread of support, while praying for escape or to make it out alive may be the only thing one can do to hang on through the pain or discomfort. Does any of this sound familiar?
I vividly recall my experiences imbibing the entheogen Ayahuasca’s sickly sweet brew, the physical symptoms of which remind me of the purging experienced in labor – nausea, vomiting, clearing of the bowels, weeping – and the sometimes trepidation in changing position for fear the experience becomes more challenging to cope with. Breathing through contractions, a practice highly utilized in labor, has at times served as my singular lifeline to a physical body on earth while holographing through manifold dimensions of reality.
So, too, is the holy symbiosis of surrender and freedom from attachment necessary in the birth and entheogenic experience, releasing control over the physical body and yielding to sometimes unnerving sensations. In labor, fighting or tensing against contractions often exacerbates pain, whereas allowing the sensorial waves is a way to ride the experience with a greater sense of ease. So, too, must our physical reality surrender to the highs and lows of the psychedelic journey, as well as our minds. Countless women, in the calm of the postpartum bedroom, have recounted the alarming thoughts that engulfed them at points during their labors: “When will this be over? What if this never ends and I am stuck here forever?” Have such thoughts not glimmered across the skies of countless psychedelic voyages, bringing with them celestial terrors or ecstatic glee?
And then there is simply the particularly potent nature of these sister experiences – the stimulation of physical and emotional pain or difficulty, pleasure or bliss, sensory inputs blending and mixing together, newly emerging consciousness, identity transformation – all of which are, for lack of more fitting verbiage, intense. How might these experiences be linked, not only in the ways they unfold, but also in our approach to supporting them?
In the early 20th century, when the act of birth was relocated from the four-poster featherbed to the hospital maternity ward, newly founded medical knowledge was superimposed over the centuries-long wisdom of the midwife, and birthing women were no longer tended to physically or emotionally by their care providers. Under these newer, more “safe and sanitary” conditions, women gave birth under sedation, babies pulled into the light via sterile instrumentation, mothers waking some hours later to cries from nurseries on adjacent floors.
In the early 70’s, a new movement in childbirth began with a small group of school-bus-dwelling Tennessee hippies on a commune called The Farm that for the next thirty years would spread across the nation, influencing a healthcare model that reinstated the role of the midwife. But by the early-80’s, with the vast majority of women still birthing in hospitals, the need was great for emotional support throughout the birthing process, and so was born the role of the doula.
Doulas provide physical, emotional, and informational support to families before, during and after childbirth. They help prepare couples for the birth experience, discussing hopes and desires, fears and concerns, and offering pain-coping measures for navigating the experience. Doulas are then present at the birth in a coaching capacity, and provide physical and emotional postpartum follow-up care in processing and integrating the birth.
The integration of the (rite of passage) birth experience may be the most critical element in ensuring the continued emotional health of a new mother. Research has demonstrated that it is not the events of a mother’s labor that will linger in her memory, but the way she interprets the experience herself. From the outside, one might assess that a mother has had a swift, smooth, uneventful labor, and praise her afterwards for being so calm and efficient in her delivery. On the contrary, this same mother may have experienced the birth as overwhelming, agonizing, or as terrifyingly out of control – even traumatizing. Without a space for mothers to tell their stories to a professional who is experienced in childbirth and trained to help work through potential emotional distress in the postpartum period, mothers may have a difficult time integrating the intensity of the experience – as well as their identity transformation. There is a unique need for these types of professionals (doulas, midwives, therapists, healers) who can reassure new mothers that their feelings are normal, that they are not alone, and that there are ample resources for further therapeutic support.
The best possible outcomes following a birth experience involve emotional integration, and so it begs the question: Is there also a need for such care surrounding the intensity of the entheogenic experience? Might we benefit, deeply, profoundly, from a seasoned, professionally trained companion who could take our needs for emotional and spiritual preparation seriously, walking us through the physical and emotional landscapes of the psychedelic passage, bearing witness to intentions and desires for transformation, and offering tools to help best navigate our way? So, too, might a spiritual doula to help during the “postpartum” period following an entheogenic transformation assist us in integrating the experience, as well as providing further resources for support and/or therapeutic follow-up?
An emerging Bay Area 501c3, ERIE (Entheogenic Research Integration and Education), aims to make this kind of care a reality. Even though well over 30 million people in the United States have had a personal psychedelic experience (Krebs & Johansen, 2013), existing research organizations are focused on academic and medical research outcomes. ERIE is currently one of the only organizations exploring ways to maximize the personal and societal benefits emerging from entheogenic insights within a community of professionals and peers. A new certificate program for community members, healers, and professionals is being designed that will offer training and specialized skills to those wishing to assist participants of entheogenic encounters in integrating their experiences. The ERIE community envisions a gathering place, “a supportive community and a growing body of knowledge for all who have been touched by entheogenic experiences and wish to explore scholarship, education, and dialogue to integrate entheogenic wisdom into daily life.” Over the last four years they have organized over 125 education and integration events, recently premiered an intriguing podcast series, and are currently in the process of a major crowd funding campaign to acquire a permanent location and establish programming. (Learn more about ERIE and donate here.)
Humans have been consuming entheogenic plants in order to attain transformational experiences for millennia. Indigenous societies with centuries of plant wisdom, traditionally carried through shamans and healers, have practiced unique approaches to ceremonial integration that differ greatly from those currently available following an entheogenic experience in the United States. Each month, an estimated 1500 ayahuasca experiences occur in circles in the Greater Bay Area alone, and this does not take into account other entheogenic substances such as psilocybin (mushrooms), ibogaine, synthetically derived DMT, and others.
Following most of these experiences, participants are largely left on their own in figuring out how to integrate transformational knowledge or insights. A new way forward via the emerging work of ERIE and others may prove us closer than we’ve ever been to Western society’s support of the use of entheogenic wisdom. In this way we might relocate psychedelics from the realm of the recreational to that of the transformational, forging a future ahead that’s as technicolor as the psychedelic sun on the horizon.
Rebecca has been a birth doula for nearly a decade. She served on the Board of Directors at PALS Doulas in Seattle, WA, the first doula certifying organization in the nation. She currently attends the Integral Counseling Psychology master’s program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where she plans to earn additional certification in Psychedelic Therapies and Research.