Psychedelics can catalyze our inner healing intelligence. To tap into this potential, practitioners must skillfully create safe conditions for spiritual emergence, guiding clients toward greater wholeness. The promise of psychedelics comes with heightened responsibilities, demanding integrity from practitioners dealing with non-ordinary states of consciousness.
Developed by Richard Schwartz, Internal Family Systems (IFS) has deep roots in ancient shamanic practices (like Chöd) and provides practitioners with a scaffold to navigate and explore the internal realms of individuals, creating a natural alignment between IFS and psychedelic care. The IFS model contributes to strengthening the therapeutic relationship, averting system overload, ensuring consent at every step, and emphasizing integration as a critical step in the process.
In addition, IFS embraces our natural multiplicity. By working with our various parts, practitioners establish the ability to navigate expanded states, providing crucial support for psychedelic medicine work. This connection to spirituality establishes a foundation for exploring transformative approaches to the culture of care.
During this panel conversation, we explored the power of IFS in supporting practitioners to facilitate extraordinary states of consciousness and deepen the lasting impact of a client's psychedelic experience. Hosted by Mina Samuels, a Learning Facilitator in the Psychedelic Practitioner Core Training, our panel included IFS experts Heather Smith, founder of The Moxie School®, and Guthrie Sayen, PhD, a global trainer in Internal Family Systems.
While this event aimed to share insights from research and experiences, it was not designed to offer clinical or therapeutic guidelines or advice.
Our panelists explored a variety of nuanced topics. Here are five key insights from the panel discussion:
- Both Are Paths to Awakening: Psychedelics have long been used as a path to awakening. In IFS, the path to awakening is a process of clearing the obstacles to our access to what IFS calls the Self—our inner divinity, our whole and indestructible Buddha nature, which each of us carries within us. Our Self is always available to us. Our work is to allow the parts of ourselves that obstruct our access to soften back.
- IFS In and of Itself Elicits an Altered State: When we do parts work, the experience acts on us as a half step in the direction of a psychedelic experience. When people turn inward to get to know their parts, it takes them into the imaginal world of the subconscious. This journey into our unconscious prepares them to approach psychedelic experiences with openness, allowing and curiosity toward whatever comes up. IFS helps people build the scaffolding for internal exploration.
- IFS is a Harm Reduction Tool: As the IFS practitioner works toward healing their own internal system, they gain more access to Self, which enables them to come to their healing work with others cleaner and clearer, more able to be present to support another’s internal healing process. This is one of the key elements of harm reduction.
- Multiplicity Naturally Arises with MDMA: Researchers have noticed that parts language arises spontaneously in a high percentage of MDMA experiences. Additionally, 5-MeO-DMT at low doses may also complement and enhance IFS.
- IFS is Shamanic: In a sense, IFS is shamanism wrapped in Western clothing. It is shamanic work offered in a palatable, clinical way for Western people. There are profound parallels between soul retrieval, power retrieval, and coming back into the truth of who we are. IFS works in the imaginal realm, as does shamanism. The work is akin to a trance state, where the rules change, and you can do things in the imaginal realm that you can't normally do.
