Archives for Jun,2021

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Psychedelic Integration and Consciousness (Studies)

Psychedelic Medicine and  Integration by Robert Krause, DNP APRN-BC 

Psychedelics are experiencing a resurgence after almost half a century of prohibition since the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 made, among other classes of drugs, Schedule I, illegal to own or possess or use clinically, which made it very difficult to study. Schedule I drugs have no medical therapeutic value and are considered dangerous and addictive.

What’s very interesting is that the majority of psychedelic medicines have medicinal value (that was known and reported in medical journals at the time), are comparatively safe, and are not habit forming.

More people are using various psychedelics in both legal and underground contexts. The Wild West that this creates is a place where there are widely varying experiences, offering greatly differing opportunities to properly integrate the profound and sometimes troubling experience that people come away with.

To understand this, a recent hypothesis, described The Entropic Brain, has been proposed by Robin Carhart-Harris, et al. They argue that a chief function of psychedelic medications is to move people from lower states of entropy, such as depression, trauma, and OCD, to higher states of entropy. It is common for people in low entropy states to think the same things repeatedly and have vastly reduced quality and variety of experiences in life.

As our brains become more stimulated by the medicines, our minds become more flexible.

We see possibilities that were previously obscure and hope where there seemed to have been none. We enter into what might be called “flow states,” or states of peak performance. During these states, our minds are flexible, open, and creative. Another factor that is known is that most psychedelics increase a compound called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) that I often describe as fertilizer for our dendrites.

Basically, BDNF promotes new neural connections that are reinforced by our behaviors. So the period of integration after a psychedelic experience is incredibly important because it is in this period that lasting healing and new life patterns can be created and reinforced.

When we are not properly prepared for these experiences or when the setting of the experience is not well planned, the experience can be difficult or troubling.

When we do not properly integrate these experiences, at the very least, we lose the opportunity to make the most of the experience; and at the worst, we can find ourselves floating without previous world view in question and no place to land. Fortunately, there are therapists who specialize today in integration therapy for people who have had these experiences.

Also, training in such things as yoga, meditation, Buddhism, Tantra, world mythologies, and the study of the nature of consciousness can be quite helpful to begin to understand the profound experience that the journeyer had and put it into context.

There are legal and currently available medications that fall into the overall categories of “psychedelic” experiences or consciousness medicine, where licensed and trained professionals can assist one in preparing for going on and recovering from these experiences. Still, it is important also to know that these experiences are not for everyone.

There are some whose medical or psychological condition would preclude the safe use of many of these. This is another reason to consult a trained and licensed professional before embarking on a journey of this magnitude.

Imagine if you were to plan a trip to Mount Everest, or to the Amazon jungle, wouldn’t you want a guide who knew the way? A guide who knew how to get you there and back in one piece? Someone who knew the dangers to avoid and the sublime places to see?

About Robert Krause

Robert Krause, DNP, APRN-BC is Visiting Faculty at the Graduate Institute and a former faculty lecturer in the GEPN program at the Yale School of Nursing where he worked for the past 20 years. He has extensive experience in teaching including having taught courses at Western CT State University, Quinnipiac University, and the Yale School of Nursing. He coordinated the GEPN Clinical Psychiatric Nursing experience as well as lectured for Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing and a professional issues course. His research has involved using yoga, meditation, and other practices to decrease aggression in-patient psychiatric populations. Currently, he researches the use of Psilocybin for depression and also maintains a private psychiatric practice treating most major psychiatric conditions with therapy and pharmacology.

 

If you are interested in Psychedelic Medicine and learn more about Robert Krause and his career as a nurse, tune in to his interview below: 

 

 

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PRIDE – Honoring Authenticity in a Rapidly Changing Culture

 

Pride – Welcoming Authenticity in a Rapidly Changing Culture

One hallmark of an education with The Graduate Institute is how students, cohorts, and faculty learn and grow together, including exploring and developing each of our authentic selves.
For more than twenty years, TGI has been about holistic and transformative education. None of us exists in a vacuum, we are all parts of communities, families, and tribes, and we all live in societies.
We honor all growth trajectories wherever we are in the journey and we want to make sure all members of our community feel welcomed and celebrated and acknowledged, whether they are in the majority or in a traditionally marginalized position in society.
We believe that it is important to honor and recognize all of our authentic expressions of ourselves.
This month we honor our LGBTQ+ siblings by writing about Pride.

 

Around the world, the LGBTQ+ community and their loved ones — families, friends, coworkers — are hosting events, gathering together (virtually and in-person), and celebrating all expressions of community.

When folks gather they gather for many reasons. Pride is several things: a protest, a memorial, and a celebration.

Pride is Protest. When folks in the LGBTQ+ community express their authentic selves they live a life of protest — protesting the impact of societal norms that reinforce heteronormativity, harmful masculinity, and patriarchy. The lives of our LGBTQ+ siblings invite all of us to examine our own beliefs.

Pride is Memorial. We memorialize the past so we don’t forget what has happened to our siblings. We remember those lost in the violence of hate crimes, the silencing of transgender voices, the impact of the HIV/AIDS crisis on communities. We remember those who are not safe and are in harm’s way every day simply because they are living out a life they know and believe to be true and real.

Pride is Celebration. Together we celebrate the fullness of humanness in gender expression, romantic inclination and sexual orientation. It is both the grandeur of a parade and the simplicity of a rainbow patch on a jacket; it is that flag outside a church, and the ability to hold hands in public; all without fear, and all with joy.

All of us are on a journey of discovery, growth, and becoming.

 

Ubuntu is an African term that describes a new vision of humanity. Here is how Nobel Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu describes Ubuntu:

“It is the essence of being human. It speaks of the fact that my humanity is caught up and is inextricably bound up in yours. I am human because I belong. It speaks about wholeness, it speaks about compassion. A person with Ubuntu is welcoming, hospitable, warm and generous, willing to share. Such people are open and available to others, willing to be vulnerable, affirming of others, do not feel threatened that others are able and good, for they have a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that they belong in a greater whole. They know that they are diminished when others are humiliated, diminished when others are oppressed, diminished when others are treated as if they were less than who they are. The quality of Ubuntu gives people resilience, enabling them to survive and emerge still human despite all efforts to dehumanize them.”

My humanity is caught up and is inextricably bound up in yours. I am human because I belong.
-Desmond Tutu

Let us live, feel and be together in Ubuntu.

Bruce Cryer, President  & Carrie E. Neal, Chief Operating Officer

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Let us live, feel and be together in Ubuntu. Let us celebrate Juneteenth!

Dear TGI Community –  let us celebrate Juneteenth and honor freedom! 

Today marks the first celebration of Juneteenth – the anniversary of the day that the Emancipation Proclamation reached the last U.S. state under confederate control to bring freedom to enslaved Africans.

We know the story of America is violent, hopeful, aspirational and complicated.

The Graduate Institute fosters holistic thinking and perspectives that help our community develop capacity together so we can hold multiple perspectives, build empathy, and live with ambiguity.

We learn and grow together both in the classroom, as well as with our families, our work colleagues, and in our home communities.

As we join with our Black siblings in remembrance and celebration today, we focus on freedom and hope.

 

Juneteenth band. Photograph by Grace Murray Stephenson of celebrations in Eastwoods Park, Austin, 1900.

It took two years for the Union army to reach all of the confederate states and declare liberation for the enslaved Africans there. Freedom wasn’t immediate, and relief wasn’t guaranteed. We know the history of African slavery in this country is traumatic, and African Americans, and Black Americans continue to be marginalized across all sectors of society. And yet, there was celebration in the streets.

That year and in the 156 years since, Juneteenth celebrations are a recognition of hope for a future that was different from the present, and are, in themselves, an act of resistance.

Today we remember together the pain and the suffering. And today we celebrate freedom and liberating futures.

Ubuntu is an African term that describes a new vision of humanity.

Here is how Nobel Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu describes Ubuntu:
 

“It is the essence of being human. It speaks of the fact that my humanity is caught up and is inextricably bound up in yours. I am human because I belong. It speaks about wholeness, it speaks about compassion. A person with Ubuntu is welcoming, hospitable, warm and generous, willing to share. Such people are open and available to others, willing to be vulnerable, affirming of others, do not feel threatened that others are able and good, for they have a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that they belong in a greater whole. They know that they are diminished when others are humiliated, diminished when others are oppressed, diminished when others are treated as if they were less than who they are. The quality of Ubuntu gives people resilience, enabling them to survive and emerge still human despite all efforts to dehumanize them.”

We encourage you to learn more about Black liberation in the U.S. by engaging with this reading list from the New York Public Library, Schomburg Center, for adults, and this one for kids and teens.

You can read scholarly articles, curated by the Journal Storage Digital Library, here.

Let us live, feel and be together in Ubuntu.

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