We are each the captain of our own ships (our lives.) At our most integrated, each of us is a wise, compassionate, thoughtful, intuitive, capable Self. It is this Self that is able to make our best decisions. We also have innumerable parts that have come into existence throughout our lives—many showed up early in childhood. These parts perform self-protective roles, but when any of them take over the ship, things don’t tend to go well.

A sample of protected parts you might find in yourself:

• Judgmental part            • People-pleasing part

• Isolating part                  • Lazy part

• Controlling part             • Defensive part

• Perfectionist part

All these parts have come to life to protect us from something—some painful vulnerability we experienced in our history. But if we continue to allow the reactive parts rather than Self to make our decisions, we tend to experience more pain rather than less. 

Internal Family Systems allows us to get some distance from the parts, stop believing that their way is the right way, start bringing compassion to them for the well-intentioned role they have had in our lives, and re-assert our Self as the decision-maker of our lives.

Researchers say that it takes seconds, minutes or even hours for our emotions and thoughts to react to an experience, but our body registers things in milliseconds.

It is also said that we take negative experiences into our bodies and nervous systems immediately, but it takes 11 seconds (the length of 3 breaths) to integrate a positive moment.

Our bodies register our experiences in a non-judgmental way. Our thoughts analyze, our emotions react, but our bodies just feel and hold what is happening to us. If we allow our attention to drift down to our body’s sensations, those sensations move through relatively quickly. If, however, we don’t attend to what is happening in our bodies, and we instead use our thoughts to judge or our emotions to react, an experience can get stuck in our bodies, and over the years of our lives, those experiences build up inside us.

Somatic processing allows us to bypass our judgments, aversions, wishes and expectations for things to be otherwise. It allows us to step back from our emotions and observe rather than act on them. And it allows the sensation to either simply move through and dissipate or to give us insight as to what the pain is about and how to work with it.

I call this tool a road map. It maps what motivates us, how we perceive the world, what we value, and what habits and patterns we tend to rely on. It also shows us many paths to loosening up our habits of reactivity which lead to more freedom, love and peace.

I recommend taking the test here www.enneagraminstitute.com. However, it is significantly more important that you read about the top three types you score highest in because unlike most tests that tell you what you are, YOU are the expert about YOU and therefore, YOU are the only one who knows what type you are. It is so tempting to assume the test is right. It seems that no matter how many times I say this, people assume the test is right! But unless you yourself decide which type you are, it’s possible that you will be reading someone else’s road map instead of the one made for you! The test will help you narrow it down. Please read more about the top three types you score highest in as the process of determining your type for yourself is a valuable journey of self-discovery in and of itself.

I am available to help people figure out their types via a phone call or zoom appointment.

More and more research is being done around the therapeutic use of psychedelics in treating trauma and depression. The only legal medicine that’s currently available in the US for this purpose is Ketamine.

The experience is a dissociative one, where the journeyer becomes immersed in a gradual separation from typical ego defenses. In that state, they are more open to letting go of old beliefs and experiencing truths that they can integrate in the days and weeks following. One word for this is neuroplasticity, where the brain has decreased activity in the Default Neural Network which arms us with our predictable and habitual reactions to life and allows us to open to new ideas and perspectives.

As with all psychedelic experiences when used therapeutically, preparation and integration of those new ideas and perspectives are paramount to long-term healing. All KAP sessions are bookended by sessions for intention-setting and exploring the meaning of the journey for purposes of lasting shifts. For more information about KAP, feel free to contact me.

Whether we attain expanded states of consciousness through meditation, breathwork, silent retreats, out of body experiences, plant medicines or other modalities, the power of change comes from creating an optimal mindset before the experience and a longer process of integration afterwards.

Preparation involves opening our hearts and minds to the experience of surrender, releasing fears, setting intentions, relaxing habitual reactivity in our daily lives, and welcoming in the next stage of our development.

Integration involves identifying the nuggets of wisdom, insight or healing that have come from an expanded state and finding ways to access those in day-to-day life. Different practices work for different people and we can explore ways that work best for you.

I may recommend writing exercises to do between our sessions. Often, writing gives us access to subconscious material that we cannot get at through thinking. I will offer prompts that are relevant to the areas of your life you are working with. They are timed writings, usually 5-10 min followed by a reflective writing. The reflective writing involves re-reading what you just wrote and then jotting down a few sentences about how it felt or what you noticed when you read what you’ve written.