Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness and Psychedelic Integration with Psychologist Nigel Denning

How Did Nigel Denning Get Into Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness?

Jimmy Nguyen: I’d like to start just by hearing a little bit about your history and how you came into this work. Are you open to just sharing the highlights of the road that’s gotten you to here?

Nigel Denning: 

“I guess it kind of goes back to being a young and stupid teenager who tried psilocybin mushrooms and had an extraordinary experience that I couldn’t explain. 

I thought I was taking marijuana and then my world blew apart and something very, very different happened. 

And then a little later in the piece I met a guy called Alf Foote who was a Methodist minister, but also a communist and also a psychologist, a very interesting guy, who’d studied with Stanislav Grof, and he introduced me to holotropic breathwork. 

And with the session of hyperventilation to music, I’d had similar experiences to what I’d had in psychedelics. It kind of created this whole curiosity about how our minds work, what our minds contain, what opportunities are there. 

Then I had the pleasure about a decade later to meet Stan and worked on a series of modules around the world with him and was invited to Hans Ruedie Giger’s castle in Gruyere. He’s the inventor of the alien monster. He won the Oscar for it, but he’s a well-known artist. 

And at that retreat I got to meet Albert Hoffman and spend time with the legend and that was a really precious experience. 

We had Alex Gray and his wife come along, the great artists of Psychedelia, and so it’s been an interesting kind of personal journey and then just really out of the blue.

We had some people who were really kind of active in forging psychedelic work in Australia and lo and behold, the Australian government gave the green light about six years ago to the exploration of the clinical application of psychedelics.

I was invited into one of the first trainings for clinicians into that work, which has led to working on trials. So it’s been kind of an unexpected journey of the unfolding of psychedelics as clinical tools in Australia, but one that’s been following me my whole life. 

I wouldn’t say I’ve sought it, I think it’s sought me. I’ve kind of found myself in situations and places where this doorway opens. 

What Stan Grof used a metaphor for psychedelics, where he said psychedelics are to the study of psychology, what the microscope is to the study of biology and the telescope to the study of astronomy. It’s a tool that opens up our awareness. 

I’ve also worked in Indo-Tibetan tradition and Hindu tradition for almost the whole of those 40 years as well. And I’ve been really interested in how different cultures, indigenous cultures, eastern cultures, western culture, handle the notion of the mind, and it’s that the psychedelics open up something very, very different to our understanding that we have at the moment.”

What Sparked Nigel Denning’s Interest in Psychotherapy?

Nigel Denning:

“My sort of entry into psychotherapy was through holotropic breathwork. So that was kind of the legal way. The first holotropic session I had was breathing deeper and faster to music, supported individually, by Alf. 

I had an experience of flying like an eagle. Being conscious, having some engagement outside of my own body with this animal’s consciousness. Then I had an experience of being a small child in a European industrial city. 

Coming out of the breathing, at some strange level it felt like there was personal identification. I don’t mean literally that I believe that I was born in another body or that I was born in an eagle’s body or anything, we just don’t know enough to even hypothesize other than to say, maybe I had an active imagination. 

But what I can say is I felt different having had those experiences. I had experiences through just altering my breath that were as powerful as taking the sacred substance.”

What is Holotropic Breathwork?

There are many different types of non-ordinary states of consciousness, some of which you can do without substances, like holotropic breathwork and sensory deprivation tanks.

Nigel Denning:

“It’s parallel with the career of Stanislav Grof, and Stan was a psychiatrist working in Prague. He received a parcel from Albert Hoffman saying, ‘I’ve discovered these chemicals, they might be helpful for you in working with patients, I don’t know how.’ 

So Stan and his colleagues sampled them, and had experiences that they then built into a treatment modality which got Stan invited to Harvard to teach and then to set up a treatment facility using LSD psychotherapy for forensic and psychiatric patients up at Maryland. 

When the prohibition occurred and psychedelics were shut down, Alf was then invited down to Esalen in Big Sur on the West Coast, where he took over from Fritz Perls as scholar in residence and developed holotropic breathwork.

Holotropic breathwork is just a process of breathing deeper and faster, generally done in a group these days, paired, and individuals breathe deeper and faster to a structured music set which runs for about three hours. 

We also use some bodywork to amplify or support depending on what the needs are. There’s no structure of ‘we have to do this to someone in a non-ordinary state.’

What it is is attuning to what’s happening to that person and then providing what support we can, which came out of some of Stan’s observations at the end of long LSD sessions where he found that, for example, people would complain about a pain in their back and by just putting a little light touch on that pain, another part of the process would open up. 

Holotropic breathwork is based on Stan’s LSD psychotherapy, but using accelerated breathing as the vehicle rather than as any kind of substance. 

There was a lot of exposure to pranayamic traditions and other breathing traditions from the East because the use of breath is central to a lot of different traditions. And so it was sort of the constellation of all of that activity in Esalen that led to the generation of this model called holotropic breathwork, which is one of now many, many different modalities.”

Learn more about Stanislav Grof’s work in our article: Your Guide to Spiritual Emergencies and Psychedelics

Nigel Denning:

“They set up a hospital, a research center in Maryland. I can’t remember the name of the actual hospital, but Bill Richards was part of that team who’s still teaching psychedelic work. There are a number of them and it was a really strong research program where they had fixed term introduction, a set number of LSD sessions, which were with preparation and integration. 

A lot of what we see in the clinical trial field these days was something similar to what they were doing with LSD psychotherapy and with really strong promising results prior to the prohibition, the early 70s.”

Jimmy Nguyen: I hear you and agree that a lot of what was being pioneered at the time ended up being, I think, precursors to a lot of the foundational understanding of just how we approach therapeutic or intentional psychedelic care. 

You talked about having a container outside of the psychedelic experience with preparation and integration. One of the things that I know about holotropic breathwork is that it’s really big on basic harm reduction foundations and principles as well. We actually have a member in our facilitator network who is a breathwork practitioner and has worked alongside Stan Grof as well. 

Folks who are listening and watching this podcast know that I’m a big harm reductionist as it relates to you know psychedelic work and you know what I find fascinating about holotropic breathwork is that it seems to be a pathway that is more just more accessible to people. 

Not just legality, right? I mean obviously that’s a big part of it, but there seem to be less, let’s say, like medication contraindications for one, or I feel like the threshold of being physiologically fit for holotropic breathwork seems to be a little bit more approachable for folks. 

If you would you know take a regular Australian or American and say, ‘hey, we’re going to engage in an illicit substance, and then you’re going to have this trip for 4-6, or maybe with LSD 8-16 hours,’ versus ‘okay, we’re going to go through a breathwork session for maybe two or three hours,’ it might seem a little bit more approachable for folks. 

And at the same time, I find it very fascinating what you’re talking about with out of body experiences, with let’s say metaphysical experiences or even mystical or ecstatic experiences as well. Do you have any idea how that happens or what mechanisms behind that? 

You’re talking about how you’re coming out of these feeling different, like something’s changed. But I’m curious with you being such an expert at this, what is happening there that is causing this phenomenon?

What’s Happening in the Brain During Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness?

Nigel Denning:

“I’m just working on finalizing a book and also some articles on this topic because I’m trying to really systematically outline what’s going on.

I think at one level if we had another couple of hours I could go through it in detail, but essentially what I think we’re doing is accessing what we’re describing as a symbolic organization of mind. 

So if you think about the way humans grow, we’re born, our senses are the first thing that comes online as babies. Then our affects come online through relationship between parent and child, which is the work I do in attachment. 

But then as we move from being little animals into little humans, we start symbolising things, and we do it in very, very strong and basic ways to begin with. We experience that the adult is godlike, and things like that. 

We have these incredibly florid imaginative processes until over the course of evolution we move more into thought and language and things like that, but it’s this symbolic form that that really is in 20th century psychology. Object relations theory and Carl Jung are the only ones that really systematically look at that. 

I think what happens in non-ordinary state work is we drop something called the Default Mode Network, which is an organization of mind that sort of locks us into survival patterns. 

That’s suspended and through this symbolic register, all of these other possibilities become open to us. All the things that through life we have to filter out in order to  participate in whatever society we’re born into, all of a sudden these other things are available. 

All these opportunities to organise, all these opportunities to create dreams and to create stories and to create connections just open up. 

I don’t know if you’re familiar with that image from London from the Imperial College where they show a normal brain and then psilocybin brain, and the richness of connection, of newness and freshness. 

And I think whenever we do any kind of non-ordinary state work, that’s what we’re doing. We’re delimiting the controls of the brain and of the mind and opening up to possibility. 

That’s the lifeblood of our species, we dream something into existence. You know anyone that has a dream for something creative, for a new invention, or a new way of being or a new relationship, they start as dreams. 

And we work our way into them as felt reality, because the dream feels good to us, so we move towards it, we move towards it and we build it.

And I think psychedelics and ordinary states are all giving us some kind of opportunity to access our capacity to dream a different existence for ourselves.”

Jimmy Nguyen: I think this is a great segue to talk a little bit about integration here and we’re touching upon something that’s very important because very rightfully so, there are many people who regard psychedelic therapy as a solution to a problem. 

The problem being I’m feeling or experiencing something. I need it to stop. I need it to change. I need it to go away. And if I can have the psychedelic therapy, does it go away or does it stay? That’s a very almost limited and linear approach. It’s almost a very algorithmic approach to this. 

I think that integration can be approached in a lot of different ways. However, I do think that there are some pillars or foundational aspects to integration that I think are very important. 

So break down what you’ve learned over many decades doing this work about defining integration and what you think the most important aspects of it are. 

What Are Denning’s Philosophies Around Integration?

Nigel Denning: 

“One of the points when I started out in transpersonal psychology, one of the clear recognitions of that movement that was fed by Kent Wilbur and fed by Stan Grof and Michael Harner and Jack Kornfield, there’s a lot of different voices from very different perspectives talking into it. 

One of the things that became very, very clear to me very early on was this sort of idea of a Newtonian Cartesian mind. 

A reductive mind, a sequential mind, a mind that moves from A to B to C, being a part of an adaptation to the world based on the science of the 17th century, but one that was continuing into the 20th century. 

And yet at the start of the 20th century we had something called the Copenhagen Convention where all of the physicists got together and came up with a theory of quantum mechanics, which told us that the universe that we occupy is not the one we’re seeing with our eyes. 

So when we’re talking about integration, what we’re trying to do is, I think, open up the subjective field enough for people to have their own experience of whatever that’s happened for them, and then in their own way, according to their own biography, according to the conventions of the world around them, to eventually make sense of what they they experienced.

So that what they experience becomes a different way of subjectively experiencing both themselves, their history, their relationship, and their place in the world. Because people come in at the therapeutic level because something’s terribly constrained. 

And from the kind of the reductive materialist model, the constraint is them. You’ve got a disease, you’ve got a problem, there’s something wrong with you, this medicine will fix that and we’ll fix you. 

And there is truth to that. You know, I’m not saying that there’s no validity to it, but it’s just it’s part of the problem or part of the puzzle. 

What we’ve got when we talk about integration is how do we make sense of this experience in a way that improves the quality of my life, improves my own autonomy, my own self-mastery so that I can read myself better. I can understand myself better. It’s opening up a different way of experiencing ourselves. 

It makes it very hard, and as you rightfully point out, Jimmy, to have some kind of structured manual for integration and is actually defeating the purpose because we’re not trying to fit people into a formula, we’re trying to help them navigate their own subjectivity in a way that works.

Not just for them, but for their relatives and for their employers and for everything else they have to do in the world. Integration is about giving autonomy back to the individual’s mind. 

Often the wound comes from things that have happened to us, not who we are. And so being able to recognize and being able to move ourselves out of ‘I’m the problem’ to ‘I’ve adapted to things that have happened, and now I can see it differently.’

That requires a view from therapists that is a lot more trusting of the individual. And it links back to what Stan used to talk about, the inner healing mechanism, but he never expanded on it. 

He got it intuitively, and we saw it a lot in the breathwork, but it was never extended into a more systematic understanding of what’s being integrated into what, and that’s the work I’ve been doing for the last 20 years is just really trying to map that territory so that people can then go on their own bushwalk. 

They don’t need the map, they don’t need the guide because the terrain is now familiar to them, and I think that’s the opportunity that psychedelics offer. 

That’s the responsibility that we hold as therapists, to create this container to hold safety in and predictability through, being there and caring and but not imposing our own will, our own belief systems on particularly someone who’s just coming out of something that is a completely subjective experience.”

Recommended Reading: Why Psychedelic Healing is Nonlinear

Jimmy Nguyen: That’s the tricky part, I think, which is why I call this the bias of the healing agenda, which which I imagine happens in both psychotherapy and any intentional psychedelic or any wellness-oriented approach where there’s the goals and wishes and dreams of the individual, and then there’s also the bias and goals and dreams of the supporter or the psychotherapist who wants to get you there too. So how do we mold this so you can get to this one particular place and thing?

What’s a Facilitator’s Role in Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness?

Nigel Denning:

“That’s a really important teaching part in what I do in helping therapists. This is what Dan Siegel talks about when he talks about presence, attunement and resonance. 

That we need to be totally present to ourselves and recognize what we want to do to the other so that we can restrain that in ourselves so that we can serve the other. So we suspend our desire to fix and to help. 

I remember in a holotropic session once where this facilitator was really keen to help and support and the breather’s just breathing away and breathing away and didn’t want anything. 

They’re breathing and hours and hours have passed and this person’s so engaged and sitting there waiting to help, and finally a tear appears on the breather’s cheek. 

The facilitator just wipes the tear away with a tissue, and then when we’re sharing later, the breather’s saying that they were in the middle of a ritual where they were being inducted into adulthood through the tribe, and when the tear was wiped away, their power was wiped away, and the experience collapsed for them.

That’s the level of— we cannot know the interiority of someone’s experience. Whilst we can engage them in some conversation and different models, the real reconstructive work is when people go deep within. 

And we need to be able to be, as therapists, confident enough that we hold the container but trusting enough that the person will find what they need and we’re there if they get into trouble.

Sometimes trouble itself is part of the healing process. So it’s knowing when to intervene and how to intervene. What we teach is the absolute softest of touches to see if someone responds. 

If someone responds, if someone’s holding their hand up and you just gently touch and nothing happens you take your hand away. But if you gently touch and they respond by grabbing it, then they’re asking for something and you just provide that with as little input of your own as possible.”

Jimmy Nguyen: One of the facilitators in our network said it very eloquently, 

‘I can’t climb your mountain for you. And I actually really can’t help you climb your mountain either. You can call in, you can phone in, I can teach you the things that I know from climbing my own mountain, but this is actually your mountain to climb.’ 

And I think it’s so important for practitioners to understand this very important nuance. I’m not a psychotherapist. I work with clients psychedelically and one of the things that I tell them is at best I can only interpret from the outside of what’s happening with your experience. 

One of the things that I’m constantly asking myself is, ‘am I doing this for me or am I doing this for them?’ Or what combination is in the mix here and what ratio is appropriate at any time, because even doing something 51% for them or 50% or 49% for me or even 80-20 might not be the thing that is needed or required at the time. I wish that more folks understood this both as journeys and as therapists and practitioners.

Nigel Denning:

“What we’re asking people to do is intuitively move against their default mode network. What’s driving us to do this is an instinctive and intuitive sense that we’re doing the right thing, because we’re profoundly collaborative animals. 

The only reason we’re in world domination at the moment, however long that’s gonna last, is that we group together better than any other animal. 

We help each other build stuff, we help each other farm stuff, we help each other hunt stuff, that’s propelled us. There’s a very instinctive kind of doing with. And one of the things that I’m teaching all the time is the need to move that collaboration into awareness.

If you can skill people to be self aware and to recognize that we are interpersonal, but the more conscious we are of that, the more we can use that as an energy to move in the right direction, rather than this sort of instinctive intuitive banding together and becoming a gang or an aggressive cultural group that’s fighting another cultural group, the more we can overt collaboration, which is something that psychedelics is screaming at us. 

Most people at some point in a psychedelic series of psychedelic journeys will have experiences of connectedness. Interconnectedness, whether it’s with family, whether it’s with self, whether it’s with the species, whether it’s with the whole of the cosmos. But these ideas of connectedness are incipient aspects of our mind that we don’t bring into awareness. 

If we bring it into awareness, then all of a sudden blowing each other up and traumatizing each other becomes an act of stupidity rather than something we justify and rationalize. 

We start then to understand trauma as a problem in the way that our consciousness is integrated into our body.

So we start working with and we start helping people to raise all of these things into awareness. It’s not about doing two anymore; it’s just about supporting processes, creating trust and safety at an overt level. That’s the promise of psychedelics, as a gateway to that recognition, or one of the promises of psychedelics.”

Jimmy Nguyen: In our first conversation, you brought up this concept of being able to hold both negative and positive states meaningfully, and I think that we were talking in the context of challenging and difficult, you know, experiences. 

But I also hear you speaking about this a little bit as well that we have within our human capacity and capability to both be the offender and the one that was offended against or we both have this notion of the perpetrator and then also possibly the victim as well. Talk to me a little bit about why this is important in psychedelic work.

Why is Holding Opposing States Important in Psychedelic Work?

Nigel Denning: 

“What you’re trying to do is teach people to generate curiosity about whatever their body holds. What our culture sort of sets us up to do is move towards positive experiences and move away from negative experiences. 

So we want to forget, we want to block out, we want to pretend they don’t exist in order to be happy. And that’s just patently not possible. 

So if you can help people generate rather than looking out into the world for threat and opportunity in a kind of an aroused way, to get them curious about how they’re built, what happens inside them, to recognise negative states and positive states with similar levels of curiosity, so that they can hold the negative, not run from it, not repress it, not dissociate from it, but to actually hold it with curiosity, compassion, acceptance.

Then what happens is you give people choice because they recognise there’s crappy stuff there, can’t do anything about it, it’s happened, but I don’t want to live there. 

I want to recognise it and honor it, and I don’t want to replicate it in the next generation or in my current generation. 

But it’s there, but I choose this other way of being. I choose kindness, I choose compassion, I choose equity. I’m accepting that this other stuff is there. And so what you’re setting up is this kind of orientation towards curiosity to any phenomena that arises within.

And we know that on the other side there are people who have got our backs, people who are not going to impose their wills on us, people who are going to listen to us and help us over the period of hours and days and weeks and months gradually make sense of those experiences.

And that sense won’t necessarily come the moment the medicine wears off. It might take months to really make sense of what happens. And if we can encourage people to just be curious, then we integrate whatever we carry.”

Jimmy Nguyen: I really, really appreciate that you’re talking about this almost transmutational aspect to this work, which is how do we take our greatest sufferings and our greatest curses and things and then turn them into something else. 

What is the Three-Phase Model of Integration?

Nigel Denning: 

“This is quarter to the in-person training I do with therapists, but also we’ve put out a short online course training in this model through integrative psychology and medicine. 

When you come out of a non-ordinary state and these new neural pathways have been established, something different to the default mode network, all you want to do is capture them. 

So we offer artwork, or you just sit there and listen to someone just narrating. That’s phase one. It’s a new neural pathway, something expressive, and it just needs to be held. And that’s you know the hours after a session.

The day after the session or several hours after, then it’s narrativizing. It’s starting to tell the story about the session. So again, what you’re doing is reinforcing the new neural pathway.

Not as purely symbolic, but now you’re starting to put language around it. But it’s just language, which has been spoken around the campfire for thousands of years. 

And you listen to that. The therapist listens and holds that, maybe asking a few expanding questions or probing questions with the idea of creating a complete personal relationship with a new phenomena, with a new set of phenomena. 

And then, once the main neuroplastic processes have passed after a few days, then you start to make meaning out of the experience.

And that’s where traditional therapy might step in in more systematic ways. Or you might just do reflective thinking about what that new story means for me and my life and my relationships moving forward. 

So it’s a three-phase integration, or what we call a triphasic integration model, where we’re trying to honor new experiences, new opportunities as close to the way that we learn from infancy into adulthood.

If you think of children, you just encourage them to have the experience, then you help them use their words to talk about the experience, and then as they enter into education, you start to introduce all sorts of theories about their experiences. 

The triphasic model is really trying to honor the way that the brain takes on new experiences by creating new pathways which need to be reinforced. Gently, repetitively, with positive feedback.

Jimmy Nguyen: One of the most fascinating things for me is that the interpretation and the meaning making is ongoing. The way that you may interpret some aspect of your psychedelic experience may shift and change over time if you have more life experience or you get another piece of data or a light bulb turns on in your integration process. 

So many times I’ve had clients or I’ve talked to folks in integration, they’re like, ‘this happened and that means this, this happened and I have to quit my job now.’ And then a couple of months later something goes on and they’re like, ‘wait, well, it might not actually exactly mean that, but I’m now realizing something different.’

And you’re touching upon something that earlier in this conversation you were talking about almost this meta-cognition process. It’s not just about what you’re thinking, but it’s thinking about how you’re thinking, and then taking it probably a step further is feeling about how you’re feeling. 

It’s almost like this meta-sensing piece where it’s not just about what you’re going through, but it’s also about you observing how you’re going through it.

Nigel Denning:

“Exactly. If you think we’re built of sensations, we’re built of feelings, we’re built of images and symbols and dreams, and we’re built of language and cultural constructs and family constructs and all of these are feeding into who we are, and how we navigate the world and how we don’t choose what language we’re born into. We don’t choose what socioeconomic group we’re born into. We simply accommodate it. 

And what we’re doing when we’re opening up a gateway with something like a psychedelic is we’re opening up the perspective on all of that. We’re seeing the constructed quality of who and what we are.”

Tune into this episode on our YouTube Channel, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts if you want to hear the full conversation, including what it was like to meet Albert Hoffman, advice for anyone going through psychedelic integration, what Nigel hopes the future holds for psychedelic therapy in Australia, and more.