Psychedelics as "Transgressive Agents of Liberation" with Valeria McCarroll

In this episode, Brooke Lavelle is joined by Dr. Valeria McCarroll, psychedelic educator, speaker, and guide, for a discussion of her essay, “Transgressive Agents of Liberation: Psychedelics and Pluriversality,” which appears in The Arrow Journal’s issue, The Power of the Pluriverse.From the essay:“What role do psychedelics play in the face of global cataclysm? Today, psychedelics are undergoing a resurgence of interest for their capacities to treat and address trauma, addiction, depression, as well as a host of other potential applications currently being explored. The use of psychedelics, however, can be traced much further back than contemporary applications for mental health. There are thousands of years of practice and wisdom that come from indigenous use throughout human history. While psychedelics are broadly understood as non-specific amplifiers of consciousness, to those engaged in hospicing modernity—the craft of holding space for the collapse of unsustainable systems while nurturing conditions for more regenerative ways of being, in pleasure activism, or in soul midwifery, they are perhaps better understood as transgressive agents of liberation.To transgress is to go beyond the prescribed borders of something. Transgressions are, in the words of feminist scholar bell hooks, “a movement against and beyond boundaries.” In her visionary pedagogy of education as a liberatory practice, hooks encourages us to “open our minds and hearts so that we can know beyond the boundaries of what is acceptable, so that we can think and rethink, so that we can create new visions.” Transgression is, in this way, an essential practice for a thriving pluriverse–a world in which multiple ways of being, thinking, and relating are honored and co-exist.Where do psychedelics fit in? Psychedelics transgress our ego boundaries. As a psychic container, the ego generates a story of separation, creating a sense of distinction between self and the world. What we think of as ourselves, our normative experience of consciousness, is a limited experience, an orientation to what comprises the real constituted through a story of separation. Psychedelics, as transgressive agents, disrupt the containing aspect of the ego and its separation-based narrative. It is one of the reasons people seek them out: for the experience of ego-dissolution, of mystical union with a nondual divine. It is also part of where their healing potential lies: beyond ego dissolution there can be an experience of profound interconnectivity. In this way, the dissolving of the ego can be likened to the rending of the perceptual veils that color our experience of the world with “I am.”Subsuming of our sense of selfhood can fundamentally challenge our assumptions about who and what we are. This experience can be deeply healing if one is entrenched within an ego-structure scaffolded around intergenerational trauma, collective and cultural paradigms of oppression, or personal wounding. At the same time, when the lenses of our perception are altered and the borders of our normative consciousness transgressed, one finds oneself thrust into a series of questions about what constitutes “the real.” These questions hold the potential to open our minds, bodies, hearts, and spirits to a multiverse of possibilities.”Precisely! is a reader-supported publication. To read the full essay and access our digital Arrow archives, consider becoming a paid subscriber.Valeria McCarroll, Ph.D., LMFT is a psychedelic educator, writer, and speaker. Formally trained as a guide in expanded states of consciousness, she teaches critical courses on psychedelic humanities to students at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Her background includes licensure as a marriage and family therapist, a doctorate in psychology, a certificate in psychedelic therapies and research, as well as thousands of hours of study and practice in a variety of therapeutic and spiritual traditions. Having been in the field of psychedelic work for over a decade, Valeria has developed and taught curriculum for the training of psychedelic guides, as well as having served as a consultant in the synthesis of ethical codes and navigating rupture and repair processes. Her interests lie at the intersection of nondual wisdom traditions, somatics, psychedelics, and social and transformative justice. You can find her at valeriamccarroll.com and somadelics.comDownload & read her most recent article, "Mysticizing Medicine: incorporating nondualism into the training of psychedelic guides" This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thearrowjournal.substack.com/subscribe