Pierre Bouchard LPC

New piece is live. The Frontiers paper everyone’s been debating got me thinking about why we were so willing to take ‘the body keeps the score’ literally in the first place. Link in bio.

Diana and I felt it was time to let you all know. We’ve got a baby girl coming at the end of August. We’ve very excited.

I sat down recently with Julian Royce for an interview.

A State of Mind with Julian Royce Somatic Wisdom, Psychedelic Pitfalls, and the Art of True Healing

Nobody gave you any myths and then we gave you mushrooms.
The medicine amplifies whatever is already in the psyche. If what’s living in there is mostly optimization and self-improvement, that’s what gets amplified. Not because anyone is doing it wrong. Because that’s what the culture gave them to work with.
New piece on Substack about view, participation, and what happens when the psyche has something to meet the experience with versus when it doesn’t. We’re better dance partners when we have more material.
Link in bio.

Some new research was just published indicating that psilocybin is no more effective than SSRI’s.
Which could also could have been written at Psilocybin just as effective as SSRI’s!

But even still, trying to frame that as the standard by which to assess something like psilocybin and psychedelic therapy is just profoundly limited.

Check out my new piece on substack where I go into this.

You can get high on your own reaction to your experience.
I see it in group journeys. Someone touches something enormous and the first impulse is to share it, announce it, love on everyone in the room. Something genuinely beautiful is moving through them.
But the experience is pouring out before it’s been taken in.
A teacher of mine distinguishes between amazement and awe. Amazement is being strapped to the nose of a rocket. Awe is being inside the shuttle. Same vast territory. Different capacity to receive it.
New piece on the Substack. Link in bio.

Sometimes a piece of music, well timed, can introduce something completely new to a psyche.
New piece up on substack.
Link in bio

A woman comes into a ketamine session and starts to look like a child. The way she moves, the sounds of her voice. “My mom would make me go to my room if I was crying.”
I say: “You can be sad and I won’t leave.”
The whole architecture of her wound unfolds from one sentence.
This is the work that most practitioner trainings either skip over or actively train you away from. Insight hunting misses it. Hands-off facilitation misses it. There’s a middle ground and it requires you to let your humanity be available to you.
New on Psychedelic Artistry: “The Intervention Your Training Told You Not to Make.” On the missing experience, and what happens when you offer it.
Link in bio.

For practitioners who’ve had that sneaking suspicion mid-session. Something’s not landing here.
New piece on why psychedelics work differently for different people, and what to do about it.
Link in bio

Hi lovelies,
Three colleagues and I are offering an advanced training on holding and physical touch in psychedelic spaces. Dylan Rivard, Fortunato Perkins, Love Mercury, and I have all taught together before, and we’ve wanted to create something like this for a while.
Touch is one of the most powerful tools we have in this work. It’s also one of the trickiest to learn, because it can’t really be taught through lecture. It has to be practiced, felt, and refined through feedback.
This training is for practitioners who’ve completed foundational training and want to go deeper into the embodied, relational dimensions of the work.
Swipe through for more details. Reach out to [email protected] if you’re interested.