Reclaiming the Sacred Self: Healing Religious Trauma Through Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness
A Clinical and Somatic Perspective
Disclaimer:
This article describes a personal healing experience for educational purposes. It is not a recommendation to use psilocybin or any psychedelic substance outside of legally sanctioned and professionally supervised settings. Individuals with a history of trauma or psychiatric vulnerability should only engage in psychedelic-assisted therapy under clinical guidance.
The Psychological Impact of Growing Up in a Rigid Religious Environment
I was raised in a highly structured Orthodox Jewish environment. From early childhood, my emotional, behavioral, and relational development was shaped by:
Strict behavioral codes
Dietary and sexual restrictions
Continuous religious study and monitoring
High stakes around purity, obedience, and moral correctness
In these systems, identity and self-worth are externally defined. Behavior, thoughts, and even bodily autonomy can become regulated in the name of spiritual alignment. For many, including myself, this leads to an internalized belief:
“My belonging depends on my compliance.”
When the developing self learns that love, safety, and identity are conditional, the nervous system adapts by heightening vigilance and suppressing desires, impulses, and authentic emotional expression.
Leaving this system later in life — during medical training — was not experienced as freedom.
It was experienced as a loss of orientation:
Loss of community
Loss of identity
Loss of a worldview that gave meaning
Loss of the relationship to the divine that once felt intimate
This is what we clinically recognize as a religious or spiritual trauma, a rupture to one’s internal experience of safety, belonging, and self-definition. The trauma is not just from the strictness or rules themselves, it’s from the loss of the relational world that once provided identity, safety, belonging, and meaning. When belief dissolves or a person leaves the community, the nervous system loses its orientation point, and that rupture — the sudden absence of connection, coherence, and grounding — is what becomes the wound.
Why Non-Ordinary States Can Be Corrective
Years later, I entered a psilocybin session in a supportive, therapeutic context. The intention was not to “find God” or recreate religious meaning. It was simply to meet myself where I could not access myself before.
Psilocybin, like ketamine, can temporarily soften ego defenses, the psychological structures that protect us from overwhelming emotional material. When the defensive layers loosen, the individual may access:
Emotion that was previously too threatening to feel
A wider sense of self than the conditioned identity
A more direct experience of awareness rather than self-judgment
In my case, what emerged was a state of non-separation, an experience often referred to as oneness or ego dissolution. This is not a belief. It is a somatic shift in how the self is organized:
The inner critic quiets.
The nervous system relaxes its need to monitor.
Awareness expands without resistance.
This state allowed me to encounter something that I later recognized in the core of Jewish mysticism, Vedanta, and contemplative traditions:
The sacred is not external. It is inherent.
Not something to earn.
Not something to deserve.
Not something to perform.
Something already present in the experience of being alive.
Reframing Practices Once Felt as Oppressive
After this, many of the religious practices I once experienced as restrictive revealed their psychophysiological function:
Prayer is a form of rhythmic breath-attention (meditation).
Study is structured focus (cognitive stabilization and learning).
Fasting increases interoceptive sensitivity and has health benefits.
Ritual regulates the nervous system through repetition and predictability.
Shabbat is essentially a structured interruption of constant stimulus and productivity.
Keeping kosher becomes a practice of mindful eating and interoceptive awareness.
These can be supportive when chosen consciously, and harmful when enforced through fear. The trauma was not in the practices themselves. The trauma was in being told my belonging depended on them. The psilocybin experience restored choice, and in doing so, restored dignity.
Somatic Integration: The Core of Healing
The most meaningful shift was not conceptual.
It was embodied:
The breath became safe again.
The body became inhabitable again.
The self could exist without needing to justify itself.
Clinically, this is autonomic regulation, the nervous system returning to a baseline of safety, rather than defense.
Holiness, in this context, became the experience of belonging to myself again.
Not to an institution.
Not to a belief system.
Not to a role.
But to my own breath, my own presence, my own being.
This is what many individuals seek in ketamine treatment as well: not new beliefs, but a new relationship to themselves.
Where This Leads Moving Forward
I did not return to religious observance. But I did reclaim the part of me that longed for connection, wonder, and meaning.
This led naturally toward:
Contemplative psychology
Somatic therapy approaches
Yogic breath and movement practices
Ram Dass and Advaita Vedanta’s non-dual frameworks
Meditation as a nervous system intervention
The work became not about believing something different, but about learning to feel without fear.
Conclusion
Healing from religious trauma is not about rejecting the past. It is restoring the capacity to live from self-belonging rather than self-surveillance. Non-ordinary states, whether accessed through ketamine-assisted therapy, breathwork, or meditation, can help reestablish this connection. But the true healing occurs in integration:
Relearning safety in the body
Allowing emotional experience without collapse
Choosing meaning rather than inheriting it
This is the return to the sacred self.
