After eight years in the field of youth work and drug and alcohol counselling, Jost Sauer completed a Bachelor of Health Science (Acupuncture). He has been working as an acupuncturist since 1991 and lectured in traditional Chinese medicine for a decade at the Australian College of Natural Medicine in Brisbane. Jost also holds a Diploma in Oriental Massage (Tui-Na), certificates in Structural Balancing and Sports Injury Management, and undertakes ongoing studies in Body–Mind therapies. His interest in spirituality led to decades of research and training in spiritual healing under a master. Jost believes in ‘silent teaching’ and has spent over twenty years building his chi and spiritual awareness via a daily three-hour practice. He has conducted public seminars on traditional Chinese medicine, run meditation and chi workshops since 1992 and he is a regular contributor to health journals. Currently working as a therapist, Jost draws upon his acupuncture expertise, his years of intensive spiritual training and a life lived in harmony with the chi cycle. His treatments incorporate esoteric acupuncture to allow access to heightened levels of being.

JOST SAUER

First published in 2009

Copyright © Jost Sauer 2009

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

Inspired Living, an imprint of
Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Sauer, Jost.

Drug repair that works : how to reclaim your health, happiness and highs / Jost Sauer.

978 1 74175 178 9 (pbk.)

eISBN 978 1 74176 186 3

Drug addiction--Treatment. Drug abuse. Drug withdrawal symptoms.

616.8606

Text Design by Lisa White
Set in 11.5/16pt Minion by Midland Typesetters, Australia

DEDICATION

Dedicated to Joachim Wagner (died 06/07/90), my best friend who
introduced me to the magic realms, and to Sri Bhai Sahib Kirpal Singh Ji Gill
who showed me the real magic and a path to never-ending highs.

NOTE ON TRADITIONAL CHINESE MEDICINE

In traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) the word ‘organs’ refers to an organ system, not the anatomical organ as understood in western medicine. The convention is to capitalise when referring to an organ in the Chinese context. For ease of reading, we are not applying this convention, nor the convention of discussing pairs of organs in the singular.

DISCLAIMER

The information presented is the opinion of the author. If you wish to make health and lifestyle changes it is recommended that you do so under professional supervision. The author does not hold responsibility for any actions taken based on contents.

*All names have been changed to protect people’s privacy.

CONTENTS

Introduction

PART I: A NEW APPROACH TO DRUGS

1 Discovering Drugs

2 Using Drugs

3 A New Approach to Recovery

4 Speed, Creativity and Self-Development

5 Understanding Psychedelic Experiences

6 Your Body Type and Family Baggage

PART II: GIVING UP DRUGS

7 How People Give Up Drugs

8 How Not to Give Up Drugs

9 The Unasked Questions

10 Marijuana, Chaos and Order

11 Marijuana and Addiction

12 Understanding Speed

PART III: HOW NOT TO LIVE AFTER DRUGS

13 Saying Yes, Again

14 Down and Out

15 No Man’s Land

PART IV: HOW TO LIVE AFTER DRUGS

16 Post-Drug Highs and Lows

17 Engaging with Cravings

18 Handling Post-Drug Vagueness

19 Ecstasy and Spirituality

20 Too Good Too Quick

PART V: RECREATIONAL DRUGS AND THE HUMAN SPIRIT

21 Drugs and the Dark Side

22 The Lower Realms

23 Magic Mushrooms

24 Drugs and Spiritual Invasion

PART VI: DRUGS AND PSYCHOSIS

25 Psychosis

26 Psychosis and Suppressed Issues

27 Psychosis, Chaos and Logic

28 Overcoming Psychosis

29 Psychosis and Violence

30 Ice, Sex and Violence

PART VII: A NEW TAKE ON PSYCHOSIS

31 Seeing Psychosis Differently

32 Turning Pain into Love

33 Marijuana, Psychosis and Delusions

34 Psychosis and Personal Growth

35 Processing Psychosis

PART VIII: POST-DRUG HIGH

36 Recapturing the Dream

37 Other Dimensions

38 A Doorway to the Future

39 The Post-Drug High Program

Endnotes

INTRODUCTION

Like it or not we are in the middle of a drug epidemic. What most people don’t understand is that the ‘drug problem’ isn’t confined to youth or the homeless. I see everything from amphetamine-addicted suburban mums and dope-dealing grannies, to pill-popping kids, many of whom think drugs are a natural part of life. Often medicated since primary school for attention deficit disorder or depression, and brought up on junk food, these teenage clients have already been living the life of a junkie for years. Drugs are also a daily reality for countless corporate employees, from lawyers to business executives. These high-achievers with fast cars and sharp suits are speed, cocaine and sometimes heroin users. Drugs make them feel powerful, fearless and able to work tirelessly for hours on end. They ‘manage’ their habit by exercising, eating well and maintaining a tan, but eventually the side-effects become unmanageable. Other clients are old hippies, still seeking spirituality and psychedelic experiences through drugs. I also see endless clients addicted to prescription medications: sleeping pills, antidepressants and the like.

It has been estimated that $400 billion a year is spent worldwide on recreational drugs, which represents eight percent of all international trade, about the same as tourism and the oil industry.¹ The common belief that youth or lower socioeconomic groups are the drug market cannot be true, because they simply don’t have enough money. New research indicates that the fastest growing population of drug users in the US are white and middle-aged.² It seems the majority of drug users now are decent, respectable people who, despite their choice of intoxicants, earn a living and meet their responsibilities.

The illicit drug business is booming. The US is in the grip of a massive speed (methamphetamine) epidemic. Russia recently reported millions of drug addicts, and a new wave of cocaine abuse is spreading through Europe. In a recent book on heroin use in Britain, the author noted that in the city he worked in, heroin addicition had become such a mass phenomenon that the local city council was forced to send letters to each household asking them not to put used needles in their garbage bags.³ There has even been a major revival in the use of magic mushrooms.⁴ An American survey revealed an eleven percent increase in the use of ecstasy amongst school students.⁵ Hundreds of millions of people consume cannabis and its use is increasing at a rate faster than that of other drugs.⁶ A new amphetamine epidemic is currently sweeping Southeast Asia, with an estimated 18 million people using the drug.⁷ As the young, increasingly westernised populations of China and India get on board the recreational drug wagon, the outcome will be globally devastating.

My many years as a therapist working with those struggling with drug dependency, as well as my own extensive drug experiences, have made me aware of the limitations of our current approach to drug issues, the inadequacy of many of our rehabilitation methods, and why, with the best intentions in the world, so many people continue to ‘fall off the wagon’. The simple truth is that drugs can make you feel a whole lot better than you normally feel in everyday life—they can give you confidence, inspiration, a tangible sense of freedom and power, love and excitement. To assist those struggling with drugs, these aspects need to be acknowledged. Telling someone who has just had the most orgasmic experience possible that drugs are no good is laughable, because they know otherwise. Talk to any teenager who is using, and see what they have to say about current drug campaigns.

Alongside the euphoria that comes with drug use, there is also fear, frustration, anger, paranoia and violence. No matter how special the early drug experiences are, they can never be sustained. Over time it takes higher and higher doses of a drug to achieve less and less. Users find themselves in limbo—some part of them knows they’re never going to reclaim their early highs, but at the same time the thought of going back to the mundane world is unbearable.

We have to present new and more effective programs and show people they can regain their health and passion for living, achieve their dreams, and continue to experience the highs after drugs. To do this, they need an integrated program that deals with their mental, physical and emotional needs, as well as those of their spirit, because drugs allow people to glimpse what the human spirit is capable of. This is the basis of the program I offer readers, alongside a collection of experiences, both personal and those of clients, to give them a detailed sense of the journey ahead.

My approach is informed by the astoundingly accurate insights traditional Chinese medicine offers those suffering mental, physical, emotional and spiritual depletion due to drug use. When I work with my clients we begin by building up the massively depleted organs, the source of much of the anger, confusion and even violence experienced by long-term users. As drugs use our life force (chi) to fuel each drug high, we also work on their daily routine, a straightforward diet that is nourishing and satisfying, bringing structure to their days, and also exercise to get their life force building again.

Many of those wanting to break their habit are consumed with guilt and shame, and too often families, friends and rehab clinics feed a person’s sense of worthlessness. Regrettable experiences do happen on drugs, and users don’t need others to tell them this. Too often the guilt and shame are so encompassing they fail to focus on the many valuable insights about themselves, their ideal relationships, their passions and the world that they may have gained on their journey. It is these insights that can help catapult people forward, because the best post-drug lives are about creating new ways of living and seeing, not about recreating an unsatisfactory past. You can use alcohol or drugs and live without being true to yourself, but once you give them up you can’t.

When we dare to look deeper, whole new approaches become apparent. That is why I have devoted an entire section of this book to drug psychosis, for example. There is so much about psychosis we don’t understand: we simply medicate it. However, treating the effects of drug abuse with other drugs is a short-term solution. Psychosis is much more logical than it seems. In traditional Chinese medicine, which developed over thousands of years of observation, there are very clear physical reasons why drug users hear voices or experience hallucinations. When a person’s organ imbalances are corrected, the psychosis goes. An examination of their psychosis can also provide clues to the person’s life mission.

It is these and other successful approaches I offer readers, so they can heal and create a new life. Written for users and their families, and for those working in drug recovery, Drug Repair that Works is a practical guide that deals with the complete picture, from where anger and confusion come from and why raw foods drain depleted bodies, to how to experience ongoing highs without drugs.

PART I:

A NEW APPROACH TO DRUGS

1  DISCOVERING DRUGS

My love affair with mood- and mind-altering substances began at fourteen. I would regularly take handfuls of my parent’s tranquillisers and blissfully drift between worlds. At sixteen I discovered hashish and truly altered states. It launched me on the ride of a lifetime. LSD, magic mushrooms, mescaline, cocaine, heroin and amphetamines whipped me to the outer reaches of the universe or drew me into the depths of my soul. I thought the adventure would never end but it did, and badly. Speed addiction led to alcoholism and finally suicidal depression. Convinced that I’d done something wrong and wracked with guilt, I began working with drug-addicted youth in the social services. I thought helping others would make me feel better about myself, but eight years later I still felt just as bad.

Something needed to change. I went off to college to study traditional Chinese medicine, I became an acupuncturist and emerged with a shiny new version of myself. Determined no one was ever to find out about my drug past, I presented myself as a caring professional treating ‘normal’ disorders. When I opened my clinic everything went according to plan. Many of my patients were recreational drug users, but they came to me for acupuncture not drug issues, so I didn’t have to go back into that anarchic territory. Then one day my past walked in the door and my life changed.

REDISCOVERING DRUGS

Jules was in his early twenties, very thin with heavily tattooed arms and legs, and a sore shoulder. I could tell he was a heavy drug user. He had a hunched body, too-pale skin, darkened teeth and the active but absent eyes of a speed user. Emotionally, he was highly wired and negative. Everything that was wrong in his life was someone else’s fault. The speed was destroying his emotional outlook, health and spirit.

Despite my resolve to hide my past and my previous failures in helping drug addicts, I felt an overwhelming urge to do something about this so I launched into the session by talking openly of my experience with speed. I told him how much I had used, what side-effects it had and what caused them according to traditional Chinese medicine. Jules was stunned by my approach—as I was—but once he understood my past was far worse than his, he also saw that I couldn’t be shocked, and the truth about his shoulder came out. He had been on a three-day binge that ended with a police chase and Jules falling off a high fence. Like the street kids I had worked with years ago, every second word was a four-letter one.

Jules was a classic example of everything I had run away from, but the strange thing was, I really enjoyed our interaction. I had never imagined this could happen. When I left youth work, I was totally disillusioned with the recovery scene. The people working in the system knew nothing about drugs or what it felt like to be without them when you were dependent. On my last project with addicted youth, the funding body expected my clients to be off drugs and back to normal within a certain period of time, but some of them had been addicts for years: they had never had a job, or even a glimpse of what society would call a normal life. They didn’t want to stop drugs. Our programs were not working and no one knew why. There were no alternative programs to offer my clients either.

I had my own issues to deal with as well. Although I tried to look professional, underneath I suspected the real me was still a hopeless addict incapable of rational thought or action. All that speed, as methamphetamine is usually referred to, had shaken my confidence in my own mental processes. For years my mind had felt like a box of firecrackers which could go off at a moment’s notice. Random thoughts and ideas would explode within me, leaving a burned-out shell and drifting ashes. As one firecracker can set all the others off, if I was with another crazy drug user I could easily become that way as well.

This frequently happened when I was with the street kids. I’d fall back into the drug mind-set and involuntarily behave like one of them, laughing and carrying on about drugs in an inappropriate manner. They loved it but it didn’t help them and I couldn’t get my professional distance back. But now here I was sitting opposite Jules, a lit firecracker, and there was no sign of the fear, confusion and weakness that would usually have hit me by now in this therapeutic situation.

NEW APPROACHES

It took me a moment to register that this major shift was due to my discovery of traditional Chinese medicine. When I was in youth work it was all about psychology. We were supposed to find out what went wrong to make our clients take drugs, and then talk them through solutions. They were supposed to counter their drug cravings with positive thoughts. If it was that easy, I could have saved myself years of cravings and depression just by thinking positively.

But traditional Chinese medicine had given me a new set of tools to work with that I knew would be effective for drug users. In traditional Chinese medicine, psychology and medicine are one. The focus is on the body, as it is through the body that we engage with physical reality. The body executes our dreams, desires and ideas.

If your body, or more specifically your organs, are depleted and destroyed by drugs or any other factor, you won’t be able to process mental concepts. You won’t believe affirmations or positive thinking. So to make change you need to start by rebuilding your depleted body.

Our organs are far more amazing than we imagine. While they have a range of physical functions, they also have spiritual and emotional functions. If the organs are operating at optimum level you will feel great physically, spiritually and emotionally. Jules was using speed because he wanted to feel good. Speed makes you feel very, very good, because it artificially enhances the ability of your organs to function. High on speed, you feel immortal, exhilarated and euphoric.

Each organ is connected with a different emotion. The lungs are connected with freedom and spontaneity. If they operate at peak level you can embrace change, let go of the past and see an exciting future. The heart generates feelings of love, inspiration and joy. The liver is connected with happiness and inner energy (chi) flow. A healthy spleen gives you a strong sense of boundaries and allows you to trust people and want to communicate with them. The kidneys provide willpower and fearlessness. If you put all this together it provides an insight into how a speed high feels. It is also an insight into how we should all feel without speed.

Unfortunately, constantly forcing the organs to work at this level with drugs is damaging, so in between the great highs you begin to feel terrible. By the time I quit drugs, my organs were no longer healthy and were not able to generate positive feelings. Due to depleted lungs I was overwhelmed with loss and grief. My heart made me feel depressed. My liver left me angry and frustrated. My spleen filled me with confusion and paranoia, and my kidneys made me feel fearful and weak. At this point you tend to take more drugs so all the bad feelings go away, but it just makes everything worse because you are depleting your organs even more. This was the emotional territory that Jules was heading into.

The healing of our organs allows resolution of emotional issues.

When you are feeling angry, bitter, frustrated, paranoid, empty and confused from drug use, you can talk to counsellors, psychologists or psychiatrists until the cows come home but unless you restore health to your organs, things will not change. I knew this from my own experience. I had been in a much worse state than Jules. He was still able to interact with people. Towards the end of my speed-taking days I couldn’t talk to anyone, let alone look them in the eye. By committing to a lifestyle that would heal my organs, my emotions eventually became more positive. Gradually I found myself feeling more optimistic about life and wanting to interact with people. But I had no idea that I could achieve such emotional balance; that I would be able to speak about my drug use without turning into a psychological mess.

REIGNITING THE AFFAIR

I finished the session with Jules by giving him acupuncture to alleviate his shoulder pain. Then I wrote a program for him to develop strength and health. I suggested he have as many warm cooked meals as possible and a good amount of protein as drug users are usually protein deficient. Ideally he would add nutritional supplements as well. His exercise program included some strectching as soon as he woke, followed with endurance work and weights. I also directed him to a local tai-chi school to learn about his own inner energy (chi) flow. All of this would help him understand what the drugs were doing and how to continue the journey of discovery without drugs.

He left in an optimistic state and I did too. That night I actually went home excited and inspired. It was the first day I felt truly fulfilled since I had given up drugs. I felt alive again. Part of this was the realisation that my experiences with drugs, my recovery, and my intimate knowledge of traditional Chinese medicine could be used to help others.

The consultation with Jules reignited my unfinished affair with drugs. It made me see that I still had a passion for altered states. If I combined that with my passion for traditional Chinese medicine I could work with my two favourite things and help people. Over the next few months Jules’ life improved dramatically. It was one of the most rewarding cases I had had since starting work as a therapist.

2   USING DRUGS

By building my organs and cultivating my inner energy (chi) my whole life changed. The gradual improvement in my lungs meant I could start to accept my past. This is important because otherwise you can get caught up in permanent regret and blame. As my heart became healthier, my depression was replaced with excitement and I felt inspired about life again. A healthier liver meant I was no longer frustrated, bitter and stuck. I now had strong direction in life, my energy flowed and I experienced happiness. Because of my improved spleen function, I had boundaries. I was clear about who I was and what my purpose in life was and I wanted to bond with people again. By healing my kidneys I had the willpower to set goals and conquer the fear of starting new projects. Healthy kidneys also provided me with a sense of having ‘deep roots’ in life.

COMING CLEAN

My improved organ function explained my sudden desire to engage with Jules and share what I knew about drugs, even though he reminded me of my painful past. Now that my organs were healthy, I could speak about the crazy escapades of my drug past but keep my feet firmly planted on the ground.

After Jules, I started to attract more clients with drug issues. The more open I was about my past, the more open they were and the more successful the outcomes. Then I began lecturing at a college of natural medicine, and wrote my first book Higher and Higher in which I admitted my drug past. In one fell swoop I went from keeping my past buried to making it public. It was the best thing I ever did. Making sure the decent folk never found out who I really was had been exhausting. Being able to be myself was such a relief.

In body–mind medicine, therapy is considered to be a two-way process. You attract what you are to deal with. I was getting a very strong message to use my drug past, because now all my patients wanted help with drug issues.

THE DRUG-USING DEMOGRAPHIC

Initially I treated a lot of young hard-drug users. They dabbled in crime and lived outside the rules of society. In a way I picked up where I had left off years before in youth work but, as I was now getting positive results, it resolved some of my past failure issues.

Ex-hippies who had become successful business people were the next group. Now approaching middle-age, they had become part of the establishment they once fought against. Many couldn’t stop smoking marijuana because it was the only way they could keep in touch with past dreams and recapture the feelings of magic and mystery they’d once had. But marijuana wasn’t delivering the goods anymore. Instead they were becoming increasingly frustrated and cynical about life. You can’t rely on drugs to keep delivering the dream. Drugs are temporary and you need to find a permanent method of putting the magic back into life.

I also treated many of the ‘ecstasy generation’—people in their twenties and early thirties. Environmentally conscious and compassionate, they longed for spiritual fulfilment and a psychedelic element in their lives. Ecstasy provided them with instant and powerful experiences of this. I also saw professional business people who used drugs, including speed and cocaine, as performance enhancers.

My clients were all using different drugs for different reasons, so a common aspect of my treatment was identifying what the drug delivered for each individual and working out other means of meeting this need. If you are going to take a drug away, you need to replace it with something that can fulfil its role or the person will return to the drug.

Another group of clients I see are teenage drug users, fifteen- or sixteen-year-olds who have often been taking drugs since they were ten or eleven. These are normal school children from normal families trying to give up drugs at the age I discovered drugs. When asked why they use drugs they generally shrug and say, ‘Everybody does it.’ When we talk about what they like about drugs, they refer to fantasy computer games or books. They want to be in that world. When parents, teachers or other adults tell them it is just a dream, they use marijuana, ecstasy or other drugs to try to make it reality.

Most of these young clients have been to counsellors or doctors prior to seeing me. These professionals focused on where the child had gone wrong, but maybe our generation are the ones who ‘went wrong’. We were supposed to have changed the world. In the 1960s and 70s hallucinogenic drugs showed us this was possible. We saw what a magical place the world could be. We felt brotherhood and love. We didn’t follow up on what the drugs had shown us, though. We didn’t make it real. Eventually our visions went but the drug-taking stayed. We contributed to an environment in which young people would turn to drugs to feed their souls.

GROUP MEMORY

According to biologist Rupert Sheldrake, if a lot of people start doing, thinking or practising something different, new patterns of behaviour can spread faster than would otherwise be possible. Laboratory experiments have shown that if rats of a particular breed learn a new trick in one location, rats of that breed are able to learn the same trick faster in other locations without any obvious communication between the groups.¹ Mainstream science cannot explain this phenomenon.

In Sheldrake’s theory, each individual contributes to the collective memory of their species, and modifies the group memory or morphic field. The next generation born into that modified field then adopts the new behaviour without having to learn it.² These fields apply to all aspects of our lives, even intelligence. Sheldrake points out that our IQ has been steadily rising as each successive generation absorbs learning from past generations. I wonder whether the drug-taking that began in the 1960s formed a morphic field—or powerful group mind-set—that contributed to the subsequent boom in recreational drug use.

The rave phenomenon of the 1980s, fuelled by the drug ecstasy, is now considered the largest youth movement in Britain’s history.³ As with the hippies before them, many of its followers have continued using drugs. Now the next generation of drug users, the young teenagers, have appeared. Younger again and more numerous than the ravers, they view drug use as something ‘everyone does’. They also say ‘drugs make sense of everything’. My friends and I rejected the values and limitations of the material world when we took drugs, but we didn’t do it to make sense of anything. This is a new development.

If there is a morphic field for intelligence, perhaps there is also a morphic field for consciousness. While young people are born into an environment in which drug-taking is normal, they also seem to have inherited the expanded consciousness drugs introduced to previous generations. The world of magic, creativity, freedom and excitement that they expect to be living in was the world we all imagined and talked about back in the 1960s. Maybe drugs ‘make sense of everything’ for these kids because drugs allow them to feel they are living in that world. Perhaps if we had changed the world and set up societies based on love and equality, they wouldn’t need drugs.

Then again, perhaps changing the world wasn’t our responsibility. If people take drugs to feel magic, expansion, creativity and freedom, and if these states ‘make sense’, the solution to the drug problem is to change our inner worlds. If we had done this after we took drugs, we would have created a very different morphic field for the following generations. The good news is that it is not too late to do this. In traditional Chinese medicine it is said that we see the world through our organs. Our organs can deliver everything drugs can, even ‘make the world different’ and much, much more.

3   A NEW APPROACH TO RECOVERY

Being immersed in the drug world again made me aware of how different current recreational drug use is from that of the 1960s counter-culture. The drugs are more powerful. Post-drug symptoms are manifesting much more quickly than in the past. I see clients now, like Jules, who within a year or so of hard drug use have the side-effects that it took me many years to develop.

Attitudes towards drug use have also changed significantly. The majority of clients I see have no interest in feeling guilty for taking drugs and don’t relate to recovery programs based on that concept. Many come out of rehab and go straight back to drugs. They need a new non-judgemental recovery model expressed in a language that they can relate to. This model must address body, mind and spirit, because drugs affect us on all these levels.

I could never accept the idea that the effects of recreational drugs are due to alterations in brain chemistry. Scientists locate the mind in the brain, but there is no research which conclusively shows the higher levels of the mind—thoughts, feelings and rich subconscious elements—are located in brain tissue.¹ Explaining the blissful euphoria and bonding of ecstasy, the multidimensional tripping of LSD and the feelings of immortality you get from speed as alterations in brain chemistry does not make sense. When you are in those states you feel it in the body. In traditional Chinese medicine the emotions and higher levels of mind are housed in the body, in the organs. Each of the organs has a physical presence but also an immaterial presence. It has an invisible field around it. I believe most drug damage occurs on this non-material or astral body. A special form of acupuncture, combined with spiritual training, allows repairs to be made on this level of our being.

THE MAGIC OF TRADITIONAL CHINESE MEDICINE

Drugs create non-ordinary states of consciousness that are mystical or transcendental. Traditional Chinese medicine can acknowledge these states because it grew out of early Chinese alchemy, which aimed to understand the formation and workings of the cosmos.² Traditional Chinese medicine continued to develop over four thousand years. There was no separation of body and mind, and no rejection of spirit.

In traditional Chinese medicine, spirit plays as important a role as body or mind. There are acupunture points that are specifically used to open a person to spiritual awareness.³ All illness also has spiritual implications. The therapeutic tool is chi, our invisible life force. Chi is also the basic substance from which the cosmos is made. The ancient Chinese scholars described it as very minute particles in continuous motion. They also described it as the motive force in the transformation of things.⁴ This means in traditional Chinese medicine everything can change, everything can be transformed.

There are 361 acupuncture points on our body and these are like doorways that direct life force or chi into our internal organs. The acupuncture points also link us to the external universe. In some schools of thought, there is a connection between acupuncture points and different planets, constellations and even the ley lines—the lines of energy—that cross the earth.⁵ Practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine can draw the life force from heaven and earth and use it to help heal the patient. Traditional Chinese medicine is poetic, simple, complex and practical all at once.

RECAPTURING PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCES THROUGH BODYWORK

Traditional Chinese medicine is also subtle, and it aims at preventing sickness. The idea is to have treatment regularly to maintain health and improve longevity. But westerners wait until they are ill before seeking help, then they expect instant results. Pharmaceutical drugs deliver this, but with traditional Chinese medicine it may take longer.

Drug users are accustomed to instant highs and instant change, so as clients of mine they needed a profound experience of change in the first session. To achieve this I added bodywork, a technique of working with the body to go straight to the core of deep-seated blockages. Basically, it allows you to engage with the psychology of the person without the need for lengthy conversations. In bodywork you use your fingertips or knuckles to push along the limbs in the direction of the energy flow. It is a powerful technique and creates a real sense of change.

I combined this technique with acupuncture on the points that allow clients to enter a dream-like state while fully conscious. This frees deep-seated issues and allows them to come to the person’s conscious mind. As the person is in an altered state and distanced from daily life, they can experience and process feelings in a state of total acceptance. Feelings that might be too painful or difficult to put into words could arise, be resolved and dissolve. The client can also have dream-like images and visions streaming through their mind. People often describe seeing themselves in other times and places in different bodies. Many would get off the massage table thinking they had had a drug flashback.

LETTING GO OF JUDGEMENT

Drug users are a unique kind of client. For them therapy isn’t just about releasing stored pain, because daily life keeps adding more pain. They have to face constant negativity about their drug use from families, friends and the media. Everything you hear about drugs is negative. Even if you have given up drugs, it still feels as if every bad drug story is about you.

This was brought home to me recently when I watched a reality television program in which a cameraman followed addicts of the drug ice, an intense crystalline form of methamphetamine. They were in a desperate state. Their teeth were rotting and they were seriously delusional. They were filmed obsessively sorting through rubbish bins, living in squalor and picking at their open sores.

I could barely watch the show because it made me so uncomfortable—not because of the content, but because this type of programming holds drug users up to public condemnation. After seeing that show I had feelings of low self-esteem and hopelessness that I couldn’t shake. I realised it had taken me right back to how I had felt as a drug user: a leper and an outcast. My reaction caught me by surprise. I hadn’t used drugs for decades but, like most drug users who have been demonised, I must still have been carrying remnants of guilt and shame. It was hard to regain my equilibrium and sense of self-worth. I could only imagine how bad current drug users would have felt watching that footage. I believe this sort of media coverage drives drug users further into drug use and destruction. It feeds a negative cycle.

The majority of my clients are initially hesitant to speak openly about their drug use even when they know that I too was a heavy user. Most assumed that I would either be making them admit that they had done something wrong or that I would probe them to find out what had gone wrong to make them take drugs in the first place, as this was the way health practitioners had treated them in the past. This was also what had happened to me.

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