A Stand of Acacias

I remember standing in the backyard at 16, watching a stand of acacia trees. Every leaf was turning in the wind. I was not just observing them; I was present as them. My body and the ground, the trees and the air, there was no separation.

This was not an idea. It was a direct experience. A non-dual state where perception dissolved boundaries and widened into presence. That moment created a deep curiosity in me. Yet there was none to talk to about this. I wanted to understand what had happened. It led me into psychology, philosophy, and disciplines of transcendence such as Zen. I wanted to know how consciousness itself could open to such states and what this meant for human life. What could consciousness grant us if we explored?

Methods, States, and Pathways

Human beings have always sought non-ordinary states of consciousness. From ancient rituals in the Amazon, to the sweat lodges of North America, to Zen practice and modern explorations in micro-dosing, cultures have found ways to step beyond the ordinary. Psychedelics and breathwork are not the states themselves. They are methods, doorways and pathways. What they open are fields of experience already within us and beyond us.

In my own journey, illness and moments hard to breathe through bronchitis in childhood had me feel the edge of life. Those experiences forced me to confront the body’s fragility and gave me early somatic awareness. Later, in adulthood, I witnessed transpersonal moment in holotropic sessions again: birthing a child on a dirt floor, drowning with a leg trapped under a log in a river, experiences beyond my biographical life but where life itself felt both raw and transcendent. On the cusp between and beyond. As a breathwork practitioner, I have seen clients release body armouring held for decades, sometimes so profoundly that one woman no longer needed glasses she had worn since youth. Alexander Lowen and Wilhelm Reich spoke of this: how the body carries the armouring of psyche, and how release can restore vitality. Talk at the surface wasn’t enough. These moment needed to be met, re-embodied and the fragments left behind, carried through and integrated.

These experiences illustrate that non-ordinary states are not abstract. They are lived. They shape the even evolve the nervous system, the psyche, and the body. They give us glimpses of the intelligence already within and moving through us.

Control and Exploration

Society calls psychedelic substances “controlled substances.” But what is controlled are people, not substances. They’ve been there as a part of nature before our imposition of rules on them. Substances themselves are neutral; it is the context, meaning, and worldview that shape their role.

Current modern culture tends to reduce and confine. It makes things fit labels and provide an illusion of management. Psychedelic substances are labelled either as dangerous “drugs” or as potential pharmaceuticals. Both framings attempt to eliminate risk. Yet risk cannot be eliminated without losing transformation itself. Its antithetical to exploration and being any kind of pioneer or leader. To be out in front is to be on the edge of the known and the unknown. Psychedelics, as Stanislav Grof noted, are non-specific amplifiers. They magnify what is deep present in the psyche. To lead our own integration and evolution for wholeness.

A dozen people given the same medicine in the same conditions will each have a different journey. Some may meet shadow. Others, trauma. Some will meet archetypes or transpersonal knowing. And behind these arises a unitive realisation: that our current perspective is not all there is. There is more to who we are.

Risk is a critical part of the path. Without risk there is no discovery. Over-control undermines creativity, play, and transcendence. True transformation requires real courage. There is no sanitising it. It asks us to enter paradox, to meet shadow, to allow ourselves to be reshaped. If we refuse to go in, we cannot find out.

“The attainment of wholeness requires one to stake one’s whole being. Nothing less will do; there can be no easier conditions, no substitutes, no compromises.”
— C.G. Jung, CW 12, § 433

This control mirrors our modern relationship with nature. Industrialised farming seeks control and yet yields deplete. On the other hand, a partnership with natural systems yields abundance and renewal. Psychedelic work and breathwork invite the same paradigm: stewardship and participation with deeper forces rather than single faceted domination.

States, Medicine, Guides, and the Unconscious

Traditional cultures regard plant medicines as teachers. Ayahuasca, peyote, psilocybin are not seen as inert. They are seen as beings with intelligence. Participants enter relationship with them. Whether actual or symbolic, I can’t definitively say, …and the stance and effect is important. To be directly relating with non ordinary states and their experiences to shift context and perspective.

This is the shamans boon. the practice of meeting the transcendent is to touch the wisdom and to return it to the individual or tribe as a, usually sacred, path to take, to practice and integrate. 

This resonates with Jung’s method of active imagination. In hypnagogic states he engaged inner figures not as fantasies but as presences with meaning and wisdom to impart (The Red Book, 2009). Non-ordinary states work similarly. Archetypes arise, voices are heard, images carry instruction, whole body immersion leaves an impression far beyond a ‘good idea’ or a hack. Sometimes the medicine itself appears as a guide.

Healing comes through such embodied yet immersive, whole self, relationship. we are changed. Fundamentally. The psyche reveals where it is incomplete and offer a path. Like the body, it seeks regeneration. Scars are not flaws but signs of new wholeness. Non-ordinary states remind us that even trauma holds gifts waiting to be integrated as wisdom, capacity or context.

Shadow, Multiplicity, and Paradox

Non-ordinary states often bring shadow to light. Pain, grief, anger, shame, all surface. Yet alongside them comes paradox:

“I am broken, and I am whole.”
“I grieve, and I feel beauty.”
“I rage, and I forgive.”

This capacity to hold multiplicity is profoundly healing. Psychodynamic traditions see the psyche as a constellation of parts. Psychedelics and breathwork allow these parts to be seen, heard, and woven into wholeness. The task is not to erase shadow but to integrate it. Healing is wounds woven into life.

Breathwork and the Inner Intelligence

When psychedelics were forced underground in the 1970s, Grof and Christina Grof developed Holotropic Breath-work. Through accelerated breathing, evocative music, and guided support, breath-work evokes non-ordinary states very comparable to psychedelic substances.

I trained in this method in an experiential residential setting where sessions occurred daily for four months. It was an intense 2 or 3 sessions per day, each 3-4 hours long. As breather, facilitator, and guide, I encountered deep transpersonal experiences that changed me and how I thought, functioned and lived for decades. The psyche revealed itself not as a closed system but as a vast unfolding multidimensional intelligence. Like the body healing a wound, the psyche knows how to heal when given the conditions. The role of the guide is not to impose but to create and meet this generous space and trust the unfolding.

These insights remain the foundation of my work. Breath-work and psychedelics do not create transformation. They catalyse it. Transformation comes from the cosmos within.

Critical Periods and Cultural Inflection

Research shows that psychedelics can reopen critical periods of development, windows where the brain is highly plastic and learning is rapid (Hensch, 2005; Nardou et al., 2019). For adults, this means that long-standing patterns, even trauma, can be revised and reframed to be a part of a greater understanding.

But psychedelic substances are also in their own cultural critical period. How we frame them now will determine their role for the next generations. Will they be reduced to commodified products? Or held as catalysts for renewal, service, and cultural evolution?

Leadership is required. Stewardship is required. Frames must be created that honour psychedelic substances not only as therapies but as pathways of integration and cultural depth. At least breath-work offers an access independent of social regulation. Breathe into that.

From State to Stage

States are not enough. Mystical union, archetypal visions, overwhelming love, …these experiences fade. Without integration, they remain as memories. With integration, they become stages of development, durable shifts in worldview and being.

Integration means practices, rituals, community, and service. It means embodiment. Without it, we risk inflation, mistaking glimpses for permanent awakening. With it, non-ordinary states plant seeds of long-term growth: greater wisdom, discernment, self-love, forgiveness, connectedness.

Unitive Intelligence

Our culture privileges control and analysis. Psychedelics interrupt this dominance. They soften the default mode network, loosen rigid identities, and invite unitive intelligence (Carhart-Harris & Friston, 2019).

This is not abstract. It is felt as belonging. To body. To community. To nature. To cosmos. It is the recognition that scars are not damage but completeness. That life regenerates. That we are part of a larger field of intelligence.

The metaphor here is simple. When we grow, the clothes of our old worldview no longer fit. It is not a failure; our new need is exposed and it is growth calling us into new form.

Leadership and Cultural Evolution

As an integral leadership practitioner, I do not see non-ordinary states as isolated therapies. They are catalysts for leadership and cultural evolution. They expand perspectives. They invite paradox and systemic thinking. They dissolve the illusion of separation.

The task of leadership is to hold these experiences in ways that integrate science, spirituality, therapy, and culture. To resist reductionism. To ensure that the renaissance of psychedelics is not another consumer wave but a cultural deepening.

Conclusion

The search for non-ordinary states is not pathology. It is participation. Animals too seek them: dolphins with pufferfish, reindeer with mushrooms, lemurs with caterpillars. Humanity’s pursuit of these states is part of our evolutionary unfolding.

As psychedelics re-enter mainstream culture, the question is not only how individuals heal but how societies integrate. Will they be reduced, commodified, controlled? Or will they be honoured as pathways of wholeness and collective renewal?

Their teaching is clear: psyche and body regenerate. Nobody is ultimately broken. Scars are not signs of failure but of completeness. Non-ordinary states invite us to risk, to integrate, and to live more fully in the intelligence of life.

The task is not only to glimpse the light. It is to embody it. To weave wounds into wisdom. To stand as leaders in the regenerative unfolding of our world.

References

Carhart-Harris, R. L., & Friston, K. J. (2019). REBUS and the Anarchic Brain: Toward a unified model of the brain action of psychedelics. Pharmacological Reviews, 71(3), 316–344.
Griffiths, R. R., Richards, W. A., McCann, U., & Jesse, R. (2016). Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 30(12), 1181–1197.
Hensch, T. K. (2005). Critical period plasticity in local cortical circuits. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 6(11), 877–888.
Jung, C. G. (2009). The Red Book: Liber Novus. New York: W. W. Norton.
Nardou, R., et al. (2019). Oxytocin-dependent reopening of a social reward learning critical period with MDMA. Nature, 569, 116–120.
Schwartz, R. (1995). Internal Family Systems Therapy. Guilford Press.