Healing through the holy trinity of mind, body, and spirit

I spent the first several years of my mental health journey working at the level of the intellect through psychoanalysis. It was very beneficial because it met me where I was -- stuck in my head. If someone tried to talk to me about more spiritual or esoteric stuff at that time, I (i.e., my highly protective and rigid ego) would have shrugged it off as "woo" nonsense.

I was wrong.

Eventually, I felt called to psychedelic medicine after feeling stuck with psychoanalysis. Analyzing my childhood and my habitual patterns of thought and behavior had reached its beneficial limit.

Psychedelic medicine arrested my ego defenses and allowed me to go beyond what traditional psychoanalysis was capable of. Significant trauma processing took place thanks to a few magical plants. They also initiated a spiritual experience, marking the transition from a mental health journey to a spiritual calling.

The journey continued from there. Although psychoanalysis and plant medicine had resolved many sources of internal suffering, fundamentally shifted my sense of self, and set me on a new path, there was more emptying to do. My nervous system maintained a record of childhood traumas that I hadn't yet processed, deepening my search until it led me to somatics and the essential role of the body in the process of healing and transformation.

Psychoanalysis started the process and provided a map to explore. Plant medicine broke through the ego and allowed me to go deeper into mind and soul. Now, it was time to tap into the genius of the body and allow it to express all the powerful emotions that remained stuck in it.

Breathwork, somatic experiencing, and TRE (trauma release exercises) are now my medicine. Each time I'm able to find a way to release old anger and grief, which had remained stored in my body for decades, healing ensues. My entire body goes through a reset. A softening follows. The racing heart that's common with cPTSD has slowly lessened. Acute panic attacks are gone. Chronic back, neck, and jaw pain, which is the somatic record of anger and grief, are showing signs of possible resolution.

I am now on the other side of the planet for three months of intensive breathwork training. I want to explore my body's wisdom more deeply and allow it to express incomplete cycles of fight-or-flight that I have held onto for over thirty years.

The holy trinity of body, mind, and spirit is true. The deepest sense of release and finding one's way back home to one's true self can only be done by combining all three. Modern medicine in Western cultures unfortunately idolizes one -- the mind. The body and spirit are overlooked and minimized to elevate the mind above all else. Our approach to medicine is a microcosm of the more significant problem: the elevation of ego at the cost of the other two essential parts of a human.

To heal ourselves is to bring the trinity back into union. This is true not only for the individual but also for civilization.