Dhru Purohit Show - How Magic Mushrooms Change The Brain, Help Us Heal from the Past, and Become Kinder, Happier Human Beings with Dr. Ellen Vora

Episode Date: January 26, 2023

This episode is brought to you by Mitopure, BiOptimizers, and InsideTracker. Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru sits down with Dr. Ellen Vora to talk about the power of psychedelics in healing from traumatic experiences and unlocking deeper meaning and purpose in life. Dhru and Ellen talk about the difference between psychedelics and antidepressants and why psychedelics may be a safer option for long-term relief by getting to the actual root cause of the pain. They also discuss how race and culture play into our beliefs about humans and why everyone deserves a seat at the table to feel loved and accepted as they are. Dr. Ellen Vora is a board-certified psychiatrist, acupuncturist, yoga teacher, and author of The Anatomy of Anxiety. Dr. Vora received her BA from Yale University and her MD from Columbia University. She takes a Functional Medicine approach to mental health, considering the whole person and addressing imbalance at the root. In this episode, Dhru and Dr. Vora dive into:  -Using psychedelics for treating depression (2:13) -The “chemical imbalance” theory and the pitfalls of prescription antidepressants (9:24) -How psychedelics can help broaden perspective and relieve anxiety (28:25) -Dr. Ellen Vora’s psychedelic experience with psilocybin (39:33) -How to prepare, interpret, and integrate lessons from ceremonies (48:08) -How psychedelics can help you access and release deep emotional pain (55:49) -Awakening to familiar patterns and unlearning them (1:05:24) -Looking at life through the lens of other cultures (1:19:51) -Approaching psychedelics with reverence and surrendering to the bigger picture (1:48:41) Also mentioned in this episode: -The Anatomy of Anxiety For more on Dr. Ellen Vora, follow her on Instagram @ellenvoramd, Facebook @ellenvoramd, YouTube @ellenvoramd, or through her website, https://www.ellenvora.com. Mitopure is the first and only clinically tested pure form of a natural gut metabolite called urolithin A that clears damaged mitochondria away from our cells and supports the growth of new, healthy mitochondria. Head on over to https://www.timelinenutrition.com/dhru for 10% off. Magnesium Breakthrough really stands out from the other magnesium supplements out there. BiOptimizers is offering my community 10% off plus special gift with purchase, so just head over to https://www.magbreakthrough.com/dhru with code DHRU10. InsideTracker provides detailed nutrition and lifestyle guidance based on your individual needs. Right now, they’re offering my podcast community 20% off. Just go to https://www.insidetracker.com/DHRU to get your discount and try it out for yourself. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Psychedelics are not just tools for treating trauma. They're agents for making spirituality palatable to our starving Western world. What role can psychedelics play in our individual healing journey? And could they be a useful tool to help our larger society heal from tribalism, negativity, and this pervasive hatred for our fellow human being, which seems to be so popular today, but is actually so damaging to us. society. Welcome to the Drew Proet podcast. Each week we explore the inner workings of the brain and the body with one of the brightest minds in wellness, medicine, and mindset. This week's guest is

board certified psychiatrist Dr. Ellen Vora, and she's here to talk to us about how psychedelics are one powerful tool in her toolbox of healing. Not that they are a right fit for everyone, and Dr. Vora talks more about this on the podcast, but for some people, psychedelics can play a major part in their evolution of healing from trauma, loss, PTSD, and even fear of death. Dr. Vora herself goes deep in today's podcast about her healing journey of exploring the world of psychedelics, specifically ayahuasca and psilocybin, and what those experience were like for her. Now, a little bit more about Dr. Vora. She's a board certified psychiatrist, acupuncturist, yoga teacher, and the author of The Anatomy of Anxiety.

She takes a functional medicine approach to mental health, considering the whole person and addressing the imbalance at the root level. Dr. Vora received her Bachelor of Arts from Yale University and her MD from Columbia University. If you've been curious about the topic of psychedelics, today's interview is a fantastic opportunity to learn more, even if you don't have any immediate plans to experience them firsthand. And be sure to stick around for the full podcast.

Dr. Vora and I get into a spicy back and forward, a healthy but spicy back and forth at the end of the interview where we tackle a lot of the hot button social topics of today and most importantly how psychedelics could be a major part of our society's healing journey stay tuned dr ellivora welcome back to the podcast it's a pleasure to have you here i want to jump right into things by taking a quote that i read inside of your book and it kind of like knock my socks off a little bit and it's a it's a follow-up to our last conversation where we said we're going to talk about psychedelics. So I'm going to read the quote for you, and I'd love you to talk a little bit about it. So from your book, under the right circumstances,

I tend to think that psilocybin is a more effective antidepressant than even prozac. Coming from a psychiatrist, that's like a big statement. Talk to us more about that and why you wrote that. Psychedelics seem to be about as effective as antidepressants at their best. But the conversation around antidepressant efficacy is a complicated one. And we know that for mild to moderate depression, they don't seem to separate from placebo. For severe depression, they do. So that's interesting. Are they just placebo? Or is it actually something that requires more severe symptoms to see the effect? We know that if you're medicating so many people, maybe about 15% of people are actually getting a benefit from their medicine. And so it's a very complicated conversation. So even to say that

psychedelics are as good as antidepressants isn't that strong of an endorsement. But the fact that our conventional treatments are leaving so many people unsatisfactorily supported, people are not getting better in a satisfactory way right now with our conventional treatments. So it has our field in crisis. We need more tools. We need more ways of supporting people. And we look to the psychedelics. And I think that the psychedelics, part of the ways that they work, it rhymes with our current treatments. We know that they're active on serotonergic receptors in the brain. These are the 5HT2A receptors. So that's an echo of what we're trying to do with conventional medication.

And then some of it is a departure from what we're already doing. We know with substances like ketamine that there's an increase in brain-derived neurotrophic factor, B-DNF, which increases neuroplasticity and neurogenesis. And that's interesting. I mean, that's a very psychobabble way of saying that the brain can change. It can grow. It can adapt. And after a treatment, you have this window of increased neuroplasticity

when you might say, you know, get more of a high-yield benefit from psychotherapy or from other behavioral interventions. But I think that, you know, we can look at some of the other biolasticity. biologic bases for why psychedelics are beneficial to mental health. But to me, what's much more interesting is something called the mystical experience hypothesis. And it basically shows us that the degree to which you have a so-called mystical experience in a psychedelic ceremony, where it's a peak life experience and you experience a state of awe, that that actually correlates with the positive effect. That correlates with the antidepressant effect, not only

how effective it is, but even how enduring that effect is. And that gets really interesting, because that's not how our conventional medications work. No one's going on an SSRI and saying, well, I grappled with a state of awe and wonder at the universe and at human existence, and that's why I'm feeling less depressed. So to me, these medicines, the psychedelic medicines, they work in ways that are similar to our current treatments, but they also work in ways that are completely different, and that's a little bit more interesting to me, because I think our field is in crisis. We need to be thinking differently. And in the words of my colleague Will Sue, he says, psychedelics are not just tools for treating trauma. They're agents for making spirituality

palatable to our starving Western world. You know, what's really interesting is, and thank you for sharing all those things. You know, there's a lot of layers in what you shared. One, you're telling people it's not a magic bullet. Number two, you're sharing about how it sort of fits in the toolbox of things. And I actually have a follow-up question about that toolbox before we go into your experience and a little bit more about what you've written and seen with your patients. I think partly for the last few years, every year we see more and more that maybe SSRIs aren't working as well. And there's more data that comes out. And there's more clinicians. We were chit-chatting a little bit before the podcast started, clinicians like Chris Palmer at Harvard who are kind of feeling, and you did the same thing in your book, that like actually maybe it works really well in the beginning and then it doesn't work that well.

And now there's the understanding that maybe that some people, more research is needed there, actually long term, long term again, not we're not talking about short term, long term uses of these prescription drugs, SSRIs, actually could be damaging the mitochondria, which could make it harder to heal. so they could be making people worse off. So there's more openness that's coming into the world of psychedelics. You are really good at making sure that people understand that should be a tempered openness, right? Here's what we know. Here's what we don't know.

And more research is needed. And more is coming out all the time that maybe SSRIs aren't working as well as we should. So I think that is, would you feel like it's an accurate statement or would you push back at all? No, it's absolutely accurate. And I think that, you know, it's something so beautiful. about your podcast, your listeners, is that like you're taking this functional medicine lens on all of this. And what we already know, just by virtue of the fact that we're looking at things through that functional medicine lens, is that conventional medicine, for all its heroics that can save someone from a car accident, from a heart attack,

it's always symptom suppression. It's always reactive. It's never root cause resolution. And the classic example is heartburn, where, you know, if you have heartburn and you go see a conventional dock, they say, well, you know, there's stomach acid, irritating your esophagus, let's give you this antacid and stop the production of stomach acid. Problem solved. But is the problem solved? You know, all you've done is suppress the symptom, place a band-aid, whereas functional medicine would say, well, what's at the root here? What's causing this? There's clearly some kind of intra-abdominal pressure that's pushing up on the stomach acid and making it leak into the esophagus. What's at the root of that? Is there obesity? Is there pregnancy? Is there Cbo or small intestinal bacterial overgrowth? And then you start to dig deeper

if it's SIBO, what can we do about that? And then the irony is that the treatment that you would use in conventional medicine and ant acid is going to exacerbate something like SIBO. By suppressing stomach acid, you've lost one of your frontline armies for addressing the ingestion of excessive bacteria. And so this is so typical in conventional medicine from a place that's well-meaning and well-intentioned. We're trying to help people feel better. and someone comes to us and they say, I'm symptomatic in this way, whether it's heartburn or depression or anxiety. And we say, take this pill and it's going to suppress your symptoms and you're going to feel

better. You'll be a happy camper. I'll feel like a good doctor. But I think that a very unsettling realization that conventional doctors are slowly coming around to is sometimes those treatments that were suppressing symptoms and helping people feel better in the short term are actually exacerbating the very problem that caused those symptoms in the long term. And that happens with anacids, and I think Chris Palmer's revolutionary ideas and take on this

is helping us see that might be happening with psychiatric medications as well. And I think he explained that so well in your podcast that part of why psychiatric medications might seem to improve symptoms initially is a mitochondrial effect, is basically quieting some of those cells that are making someone symptomatic, but in the long term, perhaps damaging those cells, which I don't think is supporting someone's mental health in the long term. Have you ever come across a book, Anatomy of an Epidemic, Robert Whitaker? Yes, yes. It was basically written off as conspiracy theory when it came out.

I think it was in like the 90s or the early 2000s. I can't remember exactly. Yeah, early 2000s, I think. And, you know, we had Robert on the podcast. He was gracious enough to come a few months ago. And it's just so interesting. Of course, any book that's written such a long time ago is going to have gaps in knowledge, etc.

But largely the themes that he was talking about continued every single year to be panned out. He was one of the first people in a book. And he's a background, I believe, is a reporter, investigative journalist who originally went on the journey to talk about how SSRIs were these miracle drugs. He wanted to do a profile. And in this process of writing a profile and really sort of investigating some of these statements, he went to a lot of the researchers that were involved in the original drug development, and he was like, okay, great. So these, basically, so explain to me this chemical imbalance theory,

that SSRIs fix a chemical imbalance, and that's the reason why people are depressed. Once you have that chemical imbalance gone through drugs, everything is cool. And those scientists and researchers themselves are saying, well, that's not actually true, right? There are some, there are benefits that are there and we still believe in the drugs, but this whole chemical balance thing is incorrect. And that became the norm and that was out there. And just this past year, there was the UK researchers. Mark Horowitz. Sorry, you say the name? Mark Horowitz, yeah. In the Journal of Molecular Biology. Yeah, a big paper that made waves, building on the foundation that Robert has been talking about for years, and you need both, right? You need both of those things. Coming out and saying, could you summarize

what we learn from that paper? Yeah, so Mark Horowitz and his team, they're in the UK. He published an umbrella review of all of the evidence on the monoamine or serotonin basis for depression. And it's really a pretty airtight analysis. Vast amounts of data went into this. They did this in such a methodical, responsible way. And it basically shows there is no basis for this so-called serotonin theory of depression. And I've gotten a lot of DMs on Instagram in response to this. that people saying to me, what does this mean for me? Does this mean I should go off my meds? And I feel the

need to almost like pause for a moment because what we're doing here is we're attacking a sacred cow. And this was a hard one journey for us to slowly chip away at the stigma around mental health for people to do that battle within themselves of admitting they need help of picking up the phone and reaching out to someone and finally finding a psychiatrist who takes their insurance, who's taking new patients where there's a good fit, getting on medication, getting treatment. It's a whole journey. It's a whole journey. And it's always, you know, people working really hard to try to help themselves, to try to feel better. And so for us to kind of call into question the foundation of what it means to get help and to treat mental health and to say, well,

there is no serotonergic basis for depression and while these meds aren't actually effective, I recognize how disheartening even, you know, that can make someone despair. And I want to say, first. I'm a psychiatrist. This is my job. I prescribe medication. I have some patients on medication. I am not dogmatically anti-farmma. But I do think that we owe it to everyone struggling with mental health to have a much more nuanced conversation, to have much more informed consent upfront around here are the benefits, here are the costs, here's the real efficacy, so that people can just make informed decisions about how to support their mental health. And we have up until now been offering this very limited menu.

We've said, okay, you have mental health issues. Well, what's that? That's a genetic chemical imbalance. It's your destiny. But don't worry. We have a pill to fix that. You're broken. It's not your fault.

But by the way, when we tell people that something is not their fault in all aspects of life, in a way we're robbing them of their power to change it. It's such a tricky nuance topic because I do think that we hold everyone back when we disempower them when we say you we have this idea of basically saying mental health is high tech it's neuroscience it's neurotransmitters you need an MD you need to be a neuroscientist with a PhD to understand this you need an MD to write your prescription we disempower people with their mental health and I think that that's actually been doing people a disservice that we need to come back to a view of mental health is actually quite low tech that the brain generally works

well. And it requires certain inputs, and it requires us to not irritate the system, to get out of the way in certain ways. And in modern life, we've got all the wrong inputs and all this irritating factors. And we've basically given our brains a set of circumstances that manifest as staggering numbers of people struggling with mental health. And that's exactly what we see. But the reason this is so sensitive is that when we say your mental health is something that you can do for yourself. It's low-tech. It comes down to diet and lifestyle. I always mean that as a message of hope and a message of empowerment. But I recognize at this point, it's often perceived as ablest, as denying the systemic factors that make people have different degrees of access to the things

we can do to support ourselves. So I think it's really important to establish that, first of all, like most of what I recommend, most of what actually supports our mental health is free. It's not being marketed to us because nobody stands to make money if we go to bed earlier where we take 30 seconds to do a breathing exercise when we wake up in the middle of the night. Sunshine is free and making sure we get sunshine into our eyes first thing in the morning. It doesn't cost a thing. I even think eating real food in the grand scheme over the course of our lives is actually the cheaper proposition. And there are a lot of ways to eat real food more affordably.

But as they say, you pay at the farm or you pay at the pharmacy. And when it comes to the cost of having medical problems and disability and the impact on our ability to carry out our jobs, I think that that upfront effort into keeping ourselves well is actually the more affordable prospect. But I also want to be really real around the fact that, you know, I say this from a place of privilege. I have designed my life around accessing practices that can support my mental health and physical health, and it's not always accessible to people, but I don't think that's a reason

to shut the conversation down entirely, because we need to let everyone know you do what you can. And even if you can't do everything, start somewhere. Maybe it's an earlier bedtime, maybe it's a breathing exercise, maybe it's a walk after dinner, but you start wherever you can. You don't need to feel defeated if you can't do the whole thing soup to nuts. You do whatever is accessible to you. And so I'm just kind of building back against all of these. these different caveats as we attack the sacred cow of this is how people treat their mental health,

it's not to stigmatize psychiatric medications. It's certainly not to stigmatize mental health issues to begin with. We have finally made progress there. Let's not backtrack on any of that. But I think that we're ready for the next level of this conversation, which is if meds are working for you, great. And if you are one of the millions of people for whom meds haven't been sufficiently effective and helpful, don't despair. There's a different path for you. Absolutely. And I want to go back to something that I shared.

What I said, you know, if we rob people of the fact that something is their fault, what I really meant is if we rob people of the fact that something is their responsibility. And responsibility is not blame. Responsibility is not shame. It's not any of those things. Responsibility is like, hey, actually, you can do something about it. That's the law of responsibility. If I can do something about it, that means that I can influence the decision.

And you're right, it is a nuanced conversation that's there. And we don't want it to swing one way or another. Sometimes the conversation around privilege is also without the understanding that all innovation in life, look at the history of indoor plumbing, which has arguably and just like sewage, modern sewage and indoor plumbing has saved so many millions of lives, has done so much to impact our longevity as a speed. in the last 100 years or so, well, when indoor plumbing first came, it was for the wealthy. It was for the people that could afford it. It was in the cities. Well, then what happens after that? Well, like a lot of things, innovation comes in. The cost is made cheaper. We find better mechanisms. That information is shared throughout the world. More people slowly, slowly, slowly get access. And yes, there's still plenty of people that are out there in the world that still don't have access to those things.

but if we didn't appreciate the fact that innovation was a huge part of that, and we never want to stop that innovation cycle, sometimes I feel like the wellness world unfairly gets criticism for, there's fair criticism in plenty of aspects that are there, things being taken out of context, nuance not being appreciated, but sometimes the wellness world gets criticism for the fact that like, hey, this is not accessible to everybody. Yeah.

Guess what? Cars were not accessible to everybody for a long period of time. education is not accessible to everybody for a long period of time. So we want to understand that we both have access to it. There's other people that don't have access to it for a lot of different reasons that are there. And we want to champion the benefits of this. And then also, with our other hand, fight for everybody to get access to it. And that's where I feel like now you have a full 360 approach that's there.

I think about it through the trajectory of my own career. And there was a phase when I was just seeing so many patients. in a day back to back to back to back and I was actually desperately you know perhaps against my better judgment trying to incorporate a functional medicine approach in that context and in that model and it was exhausting and I didn't have any time to stop and reflect and I didn't have time with patients or to explain the diet and lifestyle modifications and I had to actually really change how I practice psychiatry in order to tinker in order to be innovative and to have space between patients to think, okay, what's really going on here? What makes this person tick? What will

actually move the needle? And I think that there is a very valid criticism around the sort of, there's a lot to criticize about the wellness world, but in many ways the fact that this is less accessible medicine, I think there are a lot of people that are tinkering right now, but I think we're at the precipice of basically an eruption of, and it turns out this is behavioral modifications that will change your mental and physical health, and it's accessible and it's free. Absolutely. And I think the larger point, before I want to come back to this idea of mystical, mystical, what did you call it exactly?

You said mystical experience hypothesis. Mystical experience hypothesis, because you wrote something really beautiful about that. But before I go into that, the last thing I wanted to say on this topic is that this is also a larger theme of like, you know, you mentioned you're not anti-farma. And I think that we don't want to be anti-anything. Yeah. Right? We want to get out of all the tribalism.

We want to not be anti-anything and have the courage, especially for people that listen this podcast and especially me as a host. There's been so many times my mind has been changed. Even in small ways and in big ways over the years, I used to be a hardcore, like, believe that everybody should be vegan and that's the best approach. You know, I wasn't out there on the street with like signs and stuff, but I was pretty close to that. And there's been so many times when Facebook.

with new evidence that I had to change my mind and the humble beauty that comes along with it to say, hey, actually, I thought that that was the best approach. And now I'm seeing something in a different light. And I think after you've done that enough time, and I guess that's the wisdom that comes slowly as you age, having turned 40 this year, is you also realize that there's no usefulness in being anti-anything. You want to fight on a regular basis to pull yourself out of any tribal identities, right, which is different than community, people who want you to believe that it's either, you know, it's us versus them or the classic sort of George Bush line, you know, you're either with us or you're against us, which every community has that, right?

Dietary communities have that, religious communities have that. So you want to fight to pull yourself out of that and try to see things for what they are. And I think that's part of the reason that was really interested to explore this concept of psychedelics with you. And you've been so courageous to talk about how you've had experiences with it. And I want to read a little quote that is a perfect segue into the next part of the conversation. And this again is from your book, which is fantastic. Can you share the title again? The anatomy of anxiety. Anatomy of anxiety. There's a bunch of stuff inside of there that goes way beyond our traditional understanding of a lot of wellness books that have covered anxiety. In particular, there's a whole

chapter in there. And if we have time, we might touch on a little bit of specifically the relationship that women have to anxiety and the unique health challenges they go through because of their anatomy and the stress that our modern life places on that. And I felt like the way you tackled that in this book, it's like I had not seen that done in exactly that way on the topic of anxiety. So I just want to give you some appreciation on that note. Okay, now to the quote that I want to read from you from your book. This is you talking about psychedelics and these mystical experiences. for a few hours during the psychedelic ceremony, you get a glimpse of another reality, which can take the pressure off of this one.

It's humbling and freeing to see beyond logic that there is more to life than our material existence. And perhaps it's not all up to us. Talk to us more about that quote. Are you writing about your firsthand experiences, which you've heard from patients? Tell us about that. Yeah, I mean, both. And, you know, my legal firsthand experience. of course. I think that the way, the premise of the book is separating anxiety into these two

types, where the first type is avoidable anxiety, false anxiety. It's based in the physical body. And to me, the revolutionary takeaway there is that a lot of our anxiety is based in the physical body. It's very in alignment with Chris Palmer's views around a kind of metabolic, mitochondrial, elegant, single solution to describe all of this, that something's off in the physical body, and that's creating mental health, which blows us out of this paradigm that we've had, which is that mental health exists from the neck up and it's your brain chemistry. That's probably a downstream effect of all of these upstream causes, like mitochondrial changes, like a stress response in the body.

That's the first half of the book. The second half of the book is true anxiety. It's not avoidable. It's purposeful anxiety. It's not something to pathologize. It's not something to play mist or fix it around. It's really something to get still and listen to and let it help us get. back into alignment, course correct in our lives. And the ultimate, let's say problem and true

anxiety is this human experience, this experience that's ultimately very vulnerable and fragile. Existential anxiety. If you will, it's the inherent vulnerability of knowing that we're going to lose the people that we love and we're going to die. And I'm like, I'm happy to be over here in the Mr. Fixit space of avoidable anxiety and be like, oh, you're too anxious, let's keep your blood sugar stable, let's decrease caffeine, let's prioritize better sleep, let's support your mitochondrial health. But over here, it's like, well, what if someone comes to me and says, well, how about the fact that at some point I might suffer, I might lose the people that I love most in life? My parents are going to die one day. Yeah. I am reflecting on my own mortality.

Yeah. And that's actually the entree, right? That's actually the main event of what we're doing here in this human experience. So we need to grapple with that. And I grew up in the 1980s, 1990s, in the suburbs of New York City. And where I grew up, what was cool was atheism. You know, some people, I know many people grew up almost feeling like organized religion was that was what was kind of imposed on them. I actually feel like atheism was imposed on me. To be skeptical, that was a virtue. And it's all atoms. It's all science. Yeah. And so I went with that because I was for a really long time into performing being objective and being rational and being rationalized sort of self-loathing misogyny, actually I realize

now. But I've merged from that and recognized that that wasn't a satisfactory explanation for me. And what brings me a lot more meaning in my life, but what also feels more true is that something vastly beyond our comprehension is occurring here. And psychedelic ceremonies actually really help corroborate, even galvanize that view for me. And it does feel like they pull the curtain back and show you a glimpse of the fact that this material reality that we hold as fact and the only truth is not the only truth. In the Indian tradition and the Vedic tradition, they have this this word, it's called Maya.

Yeah. Maya is the veil of illusion. Yeah. And when you are first becoming aware of Maya, it's this little filter that nobody can see, but it is constantly around us, that when you rip these little holes in the fabric of reality and you start to see a little bit beyond that, there's a glimpse that there's something so much bigger than us. Yeah.

And we've had Dr. Roland Griffiths on the podcast, one of the top researchers in the space of psychedelic, specifically psilocybin with a lot of his work with smoking cessation, cancer, and people who have severe fear of death. And one of the things that he put out there in his work at John Hopkins was actually it's a survey. It's called a mystical questions survey. Yeah. This is his work.

Yeah. Yeah. And he's able to quantify. And one of the things that came back is that people who've had these psychedelic experiences, largely, sure, there's like, I think the survey showed from our interview about 8% or like around 8% of people have a bad trip, which we'll talk about a little bit more. Often because it's not legal right now, it's using the context of parting situation and people combining it with all that things. There's a lot of reasons why people could have a bad trip. I'd love to ask you about that. But the people that had a good trip, which is everybody else, a good journey, they reported

it as being one of the top mystical experiences in their life up there with the birth of a child or some beautiful recognition and moment of awe. And really a lot of that comes from the sense of the oneness that's there. Call it consciousness, call it energy, call it if some people feel that God is the right word for them call it anywhere that you want to, but the sense that that thing is in everybody and it's inside of us and it's all the same. Was that something that you experienced? Yeah. And I'm so glad you brought up the concept of Maya, which as per usual, Indian culture was into something long before it was cool. And if you know, you know, sort of in a physics perspective, this table between

us, solid wood, like if you really were looking at... on a molecular analysis level, this is mostly space. Yeah, 99% space. And it's just probability, really, that we don't just move our hand right through it. And it's bananas. But in many ways, it just further supports this idea of let's not hold quite so fast and dogmatically to what we accept as truth. And that mystical experience, part of that can be explained with a neuroscience perspective

that the default mode network goes through some changes. in a psychedelic ceremony. And this is where we hang out in our brain when we're not actively engaged in a task. When we're just idle, we future trip, which is such a hallmark of anxiety, or we dwell on the past, which is a hallmark of depression, a little oversimplified schematic, but I think there's truth to that. And when we are in ceremony, in many ways that default mode network quiets down. and it seems to correlate with a dissolution of our narrow sense of ourselves as separate,

and it does allow us to connect to what's ultimately actually a more accurate conclusion, which is that we're interconnected. And I think that this relates to anxiety because that fundamental problem of true anxiety of, well, what about the fact that I'm going to die? if we take a strictly material interpretation of this existence, then death is kind of the worst case scenario. That's a pretty cold and absolute loss. And it makes sense then to have medical anxiety, to be hypochondriical, to basically always think,

like, oh, God, I better go get a scan, I better anticipate this problem, I better not let my child go and do this potentially risky thing. Why wouldn't we make our lives smaller, which is an attribute of certain anxiety? conditions because we're trying to stave off that worst case scenario. But if you can peel back that veil and have a glimpse into the fact that perhaps something vastly beyond our comprehension is occurring here, perhaps it actually has some divine order to it, I think it softens the edge, it makes loss feel a little bit less absolute. For me personally, it gives the vicissitudes of my life more meaning. I can spin more of a resilient narrative.

when bad shit happens. And it also, I find, gives me some connection to a feeling of trust and surrender rather than living in resistance to reality. And a big foundation of so much of the ways we struggle with our mental health is resistance to reality as it is. And so when we go into ceremony, the fact that it can be a peak mystical experience gives us a through line to a feeling of trust and surrender. And I think that is a pretty potent salve to a lot of what ails us. I think another beautiful thing that comes from that, and that's so well said, is you go from belief to knowing. You know, there's something interesting about belief, and I know this is an interesting topic for a lot of people. Some people feel that their life is based on belief,

and they feel very proud of that. Great. Amazing for you. I think there's belief, the idea that like I believe in X, Y, and Z, right? And then there's a knowingness. A knowingness is like, you know. And it's just this feeling inside of you. We all have it in different aspects of our life where it's almost like if you can believe something, you can unbelieve it. Right?

But once you know something, you can't unknow it. And this knowingness of this glimpse of interconnectedness, it's like, okay, I may not have the words in my human form in this dimension to be able to explain it. Very similar to how people have near-death experiences and some of the things that they see. And we've had on a gentleman from the University of Virginia. I'm blanking on his name right now. But he is a medical doctor who's a researcher in near-death experiences. And he said that, you know, we can't always put these. experiences into words, but people come back with the sense of knowingness that there's something

so much greater that's out there. And it lasts. That's the other aspect. The same thing with much of the data, at least that we have right now, with the psychedelic ceremonies, is that it's fascinating to me that this isn't just a blip in time or it's something that you feel for a little bit. But on average, a lot of people report back that this feeling lasted for quite some time. Do you feel at all comfortable? You touched on it a little bit on our last podcast, but do you feel comfortable to go into a little bit more detail? I know that you did ayahuasca at one point in time, but then you also had a mushroom journey. Is that right as well? Yeah. Do you feel comfortable to go into, let's start off with one of those, like the mushroom journey? Like, walk us through

that because there are some people that are listening and their minds are starting to open up a little bit. They're like, okay, I'm hearing more about this. This is interesting, especially in the context of hearing about SSRIs, how it fits in the tool of the toolbox. And they're also just trying understand like, okay, like what is this? How did this go? Like what are some of the practicalities? Where were you? And yeah. So would you feel comfortable to walk us through that a little bit more? Yeah, we can go into all this. And I also want to just say something in response to what you just said about that knowing. Because, you know, it loops back to what we're talking about with not being anti-anything and sort of when we hold on to dogma.

And just as if you had asked me five years ago, are you anti-farmia, at that point, I might have been a little bit more anti-farmia. But now I'm a little more than 10 years in practice. Life has kicked me in the teeth sufficiently that I'm not really dogmatically married to any view on anything. I've had enough patients now where the holistic approach just wasn't the ticket. And for them, you know, a little bit of Louvox for OCD, the keys to the kingdom. And so I think similarly, with that mystical experience, with that knowing, It's really important to point out this is not to proselytize. If I feel an experience in a ceremony and I feel like I know something, I have that no edict sense,

this is my truth. It's my truth. And it doesn't mean I know what's true for someone else. It doesn't need to be forced on anybody. No. You don't need to be putting up billboards to try to convince people to change their mind. Standing in the subway, handing out pamphlets. Or even not change their mind.

It doesn't have to be a push either which way. And I appreciate you mention that. And I mean, I think that's the. the beauty of this kind of medicine, in many ways, it opens up more questions than it answers. And so I think that there's an expansion here. I feel like I get more and more of a noetic sense of what's possible, though I still have my skepticism. I still have my doubts.

But I don't feel like I'll ever fully understand the full thing. I feel like that, you have to wait until you die and you get to go to the room where they're like, okay, here were the answers. You know, it turns out Beyonce was God. You know, like, I look forward to that moment. And if that moment doesn't happen, then there's your answer. But I think that with ceremonies, so I've worked with this medicine for a long time now, and there's no one thing. And, you know, two different ceremonies, completely different, two different moments in one ceremony, completely different.

And I hate it when people don't answer a question, you know, say, like, it depends. are, but I can't help but have this little voice in my ear right now. Before my first ever ceremony, the person who was sort of in the role of not quite a shaman, but really supporting and facilitating my experience, he told me very little of what to expect. He told me that Beatles concept of like, go downstream, you know, like don't resist it and don't necessarily try to take the steering wheel. But he didn't want to tell. me what to expect. And even backing up a little bit, because again, just so everybody's aware,

right? Specifically in the context of magic mushroom psilocybin, it's still considered a class a drug. Yes. Right. It's not legal in the United States. There's many pockets where it's essentially decriminalized. Nobody's going to come after you, you know, for it, unless if you're being egregious or you're, you know, profiteering or other stuff, but, you know, it's illegal. So this is all just to be known. Sometimes people go overseas. There are legal centers in Europe that are out there. We can put a link to a couple of those that are there and you can find them online. And then a lot of times people will go to places again that it's decriminalized where they can go and have an experience. So for you, not asking to mention anybody's name or anything, but how did you even

come across the person that would be willing to take you on your journey? I find that a lot of people that's just trusted recommendation from one person to another. Was that your experience? Was that your experience? Unfortunately, yeah, at this point, it really is a word of the mouth, a word of mouth process, because we don't have a database because people can't be above board about this. As you mentioned, there are places in the United States where it's quasi-legalized, it's really just been decriminalized in places like Oakland, like the state of Oregon at this point, Denver, Colorado. And then we have countries around the world, like the Netherlands, Jamaica, ayahuasca, in Brazil, and in Peru, and Costa Rica. So there are places to go to have a legal experience.

critically, you know, you both want word of mouth and someone with integrity and a good reputation. But I think more than anything, you also need to do a gut check for yourself. And one person could be the right facilitator for somebody else, but not the right facilitator for you. And so this is always a journey about empowering you to trust your own instincts on this. Can I add one more thing to that? Yeah.

The other thing is that just like when people get into anything, any aspect, they get into a sports team and then they're like all about that sports team. They get into a new skin care routine. This product like changed their lives, right? The natural tendency is even in wellness, people are taking us up. This thing changed my life. You know, same thing is in the case of psychedelics. Yeah.

That people, I've noticed over the years, and for a long time, I've been well aware of this world, but I just consciously chose not to have an experience. I wasn't drawn towards it and I wasn't drawn against it. It was just like, okay, great, I'm just taking in information. One of the things that turned me off is I would meet a lot of people who are like, this thing changed my life. I'm so much more spiritual. And some people even going as far as maybe throwing in words like enlightened and other stuff. And I'm like sitting back and just listening.

No judgment. And I'm like, okay, this is interesting. Oh, okay, cool. All right. Wow. This person is having a hard time balancing their checkbook or they're having, you know, things can make a profound effect in your life. They can be super meaningful. and it also doesn't mean that everything changes.

And I like to look for individuals that give me an honest answer about any experience they have. When they put something on a pedestal or on the opposite, they want to take something down, it's kind of like that age old quote. It's always funny when you're like, it's that age old quote and you forget that quote. It's like when you blame something, praise. and blame. Praise is putting something on a pedestal that it doesn't deserve. It's different than gratitude.

It's different than acknowledgement. And blame is giving things too much negative energy for something they don't deserve. Praise and blame are both the same. So I want to find somebody who will tell me in all aspects of life, especially in this category, how something was genuinely meaningful them. What was their experience like? and also what changed, but also what didn't change. Yeah.

And that's okay. It's okay to not have everything change in your life. And it's okay that something can make a difference for you. And still, there's some parts of you that you're still working on. So that's the other caveat that I want to answer, that I want to add into the mix. I love that age old adage of whatever it is. Like praise and blame also both give too much power to the thing being evaluated there. So here's what I really think is true, is that in terms of these medicines changing somebody's life.

I mean, sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. I think very frequently they change our view of life. And I think that is related to that Will Sue idea that we're spiritually starved. I think if we were already accessing states of peak spirituality, mysticism, ecstasy, rapture regularly, if that was part of our weekly routine, I think that these actually would be less eye-opening. But for right now in this moment, we've had a swing away from gathering and worship. we've kind of swung more towards we're isolated, we're skeptical. And so I think that this is opening that back up to us, gathering and community in the name of seeking, asking the bigger questions, being in worship and being in rapture.

I think that 10% of the benefit is in the peak experience, in the ceremony when you're working with the medicine. But if you want this to change your life, 90% of that comes from the integration. And you can go to Peru. So talk about that. There are some people that are listening that are actually not even sure what integration means. So talk about the different stages, you know, somebody may be preparing for a ceremony, the ceremony, and then integration. Yeah. Like what are all those stages and kind of how do they live together and why do you say that 90% of the benefit is the integration?

Yeah. So let's say the stages are preparation, which is a little bit what to expect and a little bit like how do you eat on that day and what kind of comfortable loose clothing should you wear. But it's also about encouraging you to set an intention. and to really bring reverence to this experience, but try to focus the energy a little bit. And spoiler alert, often the ceremony seems to have nothing to do with the intention we come in with. But even more spoiler alert, actually, it always ends up answering the question indirectly. This medicine is like, okay, you want that? All right, I'm going to give you what you really need.

It answers questions much the way I do on a podcast. So then, so preparation is. Can I add one more thing to that? Yeah. So I shared with you that I have a few family members that I'm taking on. an experience that's coming up soon. Won't get into more details, but it's all along these topics that are here. And on the preparation side, it's also interesting that part of the preparation that has been

shared with everyone and that I've shared based on the experiences that I've had is also cutting down stimulants and information overload. That goes from alcohol. Our group is not really a drinking group. But also caffeine, like winding down like a week before the journey. on caffeine to the place where ideally you're not having caffeine a few days before. And not just physical stimulants, and obviously caffeine is a drug, but also information stimulants.

Winding down on the news, that was a big component that was shared in. Like, lessening information that is there for the sake of information. Now, it doesn't mean that you can't watch a movie. It doesn't mean that you can't read something. You can't listen to a podcast. But being intentional with the information that you consume. And the interesting thing about that is that, first of all, I believe in those things just like, I mean, I have caffeine every day. So, but I think it's good to take a break from these stimulants, right?

And it's almost like that seems to do something magical where it lets your baseline self come to the surface. Any thoughts on that? I think that. I mean, I think that when your physiology is being pinballed side to side, that will influence your experience, and I think the sort of day residue, the content that's on your mind coming in will influence your experience. And that's not all inherently bad, but I think a washout of some of that can just create a real openness to medicine, take me where I need to go. Yeah. And I think that, yeah, go ahead. Oh, no, sorry. Go ahead. You please.

I think that there is also something to be said for just that preparation is taking it seriously. It's honoring this medicine. It's showing up with reverence. It's kind of being a student that shows up to class and says like, you know, like here's my notebook and my textbook and here's my pencil. I'm ready. And I think that it changes our readiness to learn. So I think just witnessing ourselves commit to making certain sacrifices and changes in the lead up helps us not just slouch our way into this, but show up really reverent and open. And then there's the experience itself, and we can talk about a bad trip in a second. But as I mentioned a moment ago, integration, I think that that's really where if we're going to have any impactful transformation, if we're

going to move the needle in our lives, it happens in the integration. And that's ideally, you know, it can be some degree of journaling, but ideally also working with some psychedelically informed coach or therapist who can help you elicit from your experience, from your ceremony, the takeaways that you then need to have some kind of reminder and accountability that you're building it into your life. If you have a takeaway of here's how I want to show up differently in relationships, here's how I want to show up differently to myself, here are changes I want to make, here's a way I want to get back into alignment in my life. You can have that aha moment and then you can go back to your life and just fall into all your old habits. That's what's most likely.

Even though you're like, whoa, that experience changed my life. If you don't work at it, it's not going to make a difference. So you have to be in some kind of structured integration, I think, to get the most benefit. And that's where little by little you start to build in these insights and make them material changes in your life. And that's where I think this medicine can be really life-changing. Do you want to share anything more about your actual journey and then in the integration, just, you know, any things that are not too personal for you that to kind of personalize this and give a little bit of story to some of the things and the phases that you shared about? Sure. Let's talk about two things. I mean, one is what comes to my mind initially was one of my first ayahuasca ceremonies. My mom passed away about seven years ago. And I remember being in ceremony. And for whatever reason, for me, that ceremony was a funeral. It was like a redo of the funeral. And it was one where I experienced it as community coming.

together largely in celebration and joy, not sort of stiff, standoff sadness, and most of all witness and holding. And I pictured my dad, you know, it was a pipe dream for me. It still is, like, that he could be in a ceremony like this and feel so witnessed in what he had in his relationship with my mom and to feel so held by a community that says, we really see you. you, we really saw your partner. We really see that. We celebrate it and we feel this loss with you. But it also was an experience of music and dancing and joy. And I just remember coming away from that and just thinking, like, that's a funeral. So just to put a little timeline to that, your mom passed away and then how much longer was later was the ceremony that you went through? In this case,

you're talking about ayahuasca. Yeah, I think that was about four years later. So in that four years, you know, your body's feeling a lot of things, right? The body keeps score. You're going through emotions. You're processing things. Things are coming up for you. And if I'm hearing you, and please correct me if I'm wrong, when you later, after your mom's passing and, you know, my condolences to your family, we've talked about this a little bit before and she sounds like an incredible woman, when you later went and did this ceremony, even though you were there, probably with a separate group of people than your family, right? Yeah.

That helped you process, see, and truly honor your mom's life and legacy and what it meant to you in a way that I'm sure the funeral was beautiful, but something different was happening there. Is that what I'm hearing? That's right. And I think what you're getting at, like there was a resolution in my body. There was this unresolved, unmet need for those four years. I think even further down that vein, grief. I am not hesitant to grieve.

When my mom passed away, I pretty much took the summer off. I was pregnant at the time. And I was just a full-time griever. I grieved enormously and really let my tears flow, let the emotions flow. And I really thought I grieved properly until my first psychedelic ceremony. Wow. And then I thought, oh, Nelly, you know, that was the tip of the iceberg. And I don't say this as a bad thing at all.

I actually experience the poignant feeling of grief and the tears that come with that as exquisite. It connects, obviously, to something sad, to loss to something painful. But I feel like the moving of grief, that energy, to me, it is just a very, it's a cover of the song of love. You know, it's not a negative experience for me. It's exquisite. And in psychedelic ceremonies, I've accessed much deeper layers of grief. And that's part of why I find it to be so helpful for a lot of my patients with complex grief, with unresolved grief, with unresolved trauma. I find that these ceremonies can help them soften in their heart, can help them move through deeper layers of their grief, and that that actually leaves them lighter afterward. And there's something that gets resolved. in that process. Sometimes our body, our brain, our heart sets up protection mechanisms because in the moment it may not have the capacity to feel something. When you look at that experience in this true funeral that was a celebration, and I truly

mean that always, it's the grief, it's the joy, it's the pain, it's all the things that were there, not just for you, but really the woman that your mom was, right, in her legacy, do you think in that four years since her passing and probably the time being, I don't know, I don't remember exactly what was happening with your mom. Was it sudden? Was there a health journey that she was on? It was sudden. So on top of that, the shock of it being sudden, do you think that there was something that your body wasn't allowing you to feel because it didn't have the capacity in that time? And then something like a psychedelic journey, an ayahuasca journey created the right space for it to unfold? Like, how do you think about what was there that came to fruition that wasn't?

Was it being suppressed? Was it, yeah, as a psychiatrist, as a human being? Yeah. How do you think about that that you couldn't access or weren't feeling in those four years? It's a good question. You know, I think a part of me actually even, the initial thing that rushes to the surface is almost defensiveness of like, but I'm not emotion phobic and I'm a psychiatrist and I have a supportive partner and we go into our feelings and our emotions readily.

So I was thinking, like, I didn't have blocks to this. And yet I accessed, you know, all these deeper layers and ceremony. So probably to some extent just functioning in modern life. I'm sure we are always defended against going deeper. But I also just want to credit the medicine as, and I don't think psychedelics are the only path here. I think meditation works. I think certain forms of holotropic breath work for this. I think music works for this. It's really just that's been a medicine that's worked for me to, open a portal to something deeper. And probably I'm guessing, I'd love to hear your thoughts about this too. As a physician, as a businesswoman, as an author, as a wife, as a mom, you wear a lot of identities. And what's interesting about a ceremony, were you the only one there, meaning like your husband wasn't there? Nobody else, like meaning your friends, you had maybe had friends or other people, or was your partner there with you? It's an interesting question. Well, first I'm just hung up on, dear God, am I a businesswoman?

I don't think so, but maybe I am. The thing is, I think that it's interesting you ask that, because I've done ceremonies in a lot of different settings. And often it's in a group setting. And often even the community part of that is a critical piece of it. Where I first experienced ayahuasca was in the Umbanda tradition. And it's an Afro-Brazilian tradition. And the community piece is central. It's integral to the experience.

You create this circuit of energy at a certain point in the ceremony and you're holding hands and you're dancing in a circle. So it's really such a pro-social stamp to put on a community to say in this altered state, in this heightened state, we are going to seal in that we're all interconnected and that we keep each other, we influence each other's energy and experience. So that was a beautiful experience for me, but probably the deepest I've ever gone was a time when I worked with a facilitator and had just a solo ceremony. And it might have been the only time that I was the only person in a space in ceremony. And it was very freeing because I could have

this feeling of I can laugh as loud as I want to. I can cry as hard as I need to. I was making sounds that were approximating natural childbirth, you know, and I could for once feel like this doesn't have to affect anybody else's experience. Yeah, and I guess that's what I was alluding to. Yeah. We have reasons that nature has built into our DNA encode and then moms on top of that, women, but moms in general, they're constantly thinking about other people. Yes. And probably a lot of that's societal. And then a lot of that's hardwired too. We're trying to figure out what the percentage is. It's different for different people. But they're constantly thinking about other people. They're, you know, worry other. So you can't even let yourself fully access that level until maybe you're a little bit out of

That doesn't mean that everybody has to go do psychedelics. It could even mean that a weekend away with the girls, right? Like, you know, something ecstatic dance that's in a different setting, a retreat, something that allows you to sort of feel what you want to feel. Many years ago, we had two of my friends, two naturopathic doctors, Dr. Judy Hanosa and Afruz de Mary, Dr. Afruz de Mary, they did a women's wellness summit. It was a follow-up to an event that we had done, but it was exclusively for women. My mom went and my sisters went.

And it was so beautiful. My mom got in front of the group and shared some personal things about her life and grieving of her father's passing and what that opened up for her. And first of all, the fact that she did that in front of a group, she often would say and self-identify as being scared of public speaking. But then the fact that she was willing to be vulnerable enough to like crying for everybody and like let those emotions. both happy tears, sad tears, all above, it really took her being out of her normal context to be able to explore and deepen that. I think that's one of the beautiful things about the retreats or journeys that people design that both take advantage of the plant medicines, regardless of what we're doing, ayahuasca, mushrooms,

etc., other things, but also to do it in an environment that allows people to let go of a little bit of control and release this need to constantly be worried about other people and be a little selfish for once and kind of go into what journey they need to have. And I think there's a cultural conversation to be had even around the word selfish, right? And I think that we have a lot of conditioning that women especially are put through throughout their lives that basically say, here's what's expected of you, here's what's positively reinforced in your behavior. It's to be constantly other oriented and self-sacrificing. And I think that it's a beautiful thing to be thinking about others. It's a beautiful thing to be attuned to others' needs. But I think that it just

needs to be balanced with recognizing our own needs, recognizing our worthiness of having our needs met, and protecting our own energy. And I even would make the case that there's something ever so slightly selfish about forever self-sacrificing and then ending up really burned out and resentful of the people in our lives. And I think that that's where people end up a lot of the time. And so there's some- Selfishness, how like not acknowledging our selfishness can lead to like martyrdom. Yeah. And it's never done from a place of selfishness, right? But it ends up effectively being really different from your philosophy and your spirit of how you want to show up for others.

So whether, you know, some people are amenable to the, your needs matter, and that's just good enough. They can accept that their needs inherently matter and they don't need that extra layer of justification. But for someone who's like, no, no, no, no, no, I'm going to always sacrifice for others. I do end up kind of pushing this other angle, which is that even with the regard for others' well-being, your needs matter. And you cannot give endlessly. and you'll end up pouring all, everything out of your cup, and you'll actually become this bottomless pit of need. And so it ends up effectively being really contrary to the philosophy of being oriented towards other people's needs. So I just think we're all responsible for balancing, forgiving when we can give joyfully, forgiving when it's really needed of us, but also protecting our own need and our energy.

I think before we fully depart from the psychedelic conversation, I feel the need to, come back to the problem of the so-called bad trip. Yeah. Before you get into that, could I ask you a couple more questions? Definitely. Just on the topic of, so you were talking about integration. And so what were some of the things that happened after you had your experience, whether you want to talk about ayahuasca, and then I have one more follow-up question about

that, whether you're talking about psilocybin, what were some of the things that you think happened well that allowed you to make. make meaning of that situation. Like, what were the things that happened in the integration that allowed for that on even a practical level? Like, did you take, how much time did you take before you went back into the quote unquote real world? Did you, yeah, so if you could fill in some of that, that'd be great.

Yeah. So, well, let me sort of reinforce this point by an example of when I did it wrong. So the first time I went to Brazil and had several. back-to-back ayosca ceremonies. And I came back to New York and life is so nonstop, get back into life, you know, watching my daughter, going to work, seeing patience and all of my old dynamics with my partner. When I first got back from Brazil, I was like, this changes everything, you know, this changed my life, that cliche. And then it was probably about a week, week and a half later that my husband and I got back into one of our old ruts and patterns and dynamics and we're in a fight.

and he joked, if I can curse. He joked like, you know, you go to Brazil and do ayahuasca for a week and you're still an asshole. And, you know, and we, it really helped us actually like laugh about it in that moment. But it, you know, one minute I was saying, this changes everything. And the next minute, we were back in exactly our same dynamic. And so that really highlighted the fact that I needed to put to paper, here were the takeaways, and here's what I want to change.

And here's how I'm going to start going about. doing that. And then to have somebody, a partner, a therapist, help keep me accountable with that. And so at this point now, when we do ceremonies, it's much more structured. There's more of a formalized process around that. And we come back to the learnings and really try to strengthen those takeaways and not lose that benefit. And it's also a beautiful thing that we come back to our family because actually I feel like it's easier to go be a monk in India and just sit under a tree and like you're not dealing with any friction you don't have a wife you don't have a husband you don't have kids sure everybody thinks they're enlightened in that sort of situation right but it's that

old romdas quote you know you think you're so enlightened go spend a weekend with your family yeah and in a good way our family and our partners and there are times where we're being an asshole right there's times where we're not thinking things through or we're triggered by something or we're making somebody the source of our pain when we're really just frustrated with ourselves because something didn't go well that day. And that's part of being human, right? And also being part of human is recognizing it,

apologizing for it, trying to do better next time. So it's nice that we have family around us to be able to call us out, gently call us up, hopefully sometimes as well too. And I think that you can have profound experiences and also revert back to your pattern. But it's that catching that seems to be a big part of the work of like, oh, wow, I reverted back to my pattern.

And every time you get better and better at catching yourself and you don't stay in that pattern longer, regardless of whether that insight comes from psychedelics, whether it comes from reading a book, going to an event, a conference, watching something meaningful that changed your life. You're just trying to shorten the time that you're in that default mode network. You know, I want to put a little image here on the screen. And I'll send it to you, Patrick, to put it on there. but this is a map that Roland Griffiths had talked about in our podcast previously. And it's the default neural network, which sometimes people call the ego. And it's a byproduct of sort of all of our experiences, traumas, other stuff, the way that we're used to kind of thinking in the world, the way that our neurons map in our mind based on our life experiences. And there's plenty that we just don't know about it.

And then I think in this case that diagram is from somebody's experience on psilocybin. And I think in his studies, they were doing one gram of pure psilocybin through like this medically assisted program. So that's what we're seeing on here. And now all of a sudden you see all these neurons that are communicating with each other that previously weren't. I think when people, even if you're somebody who doesn't think about the mystical side, I like to think of it as like our entire life, our brain is sort of in survival mode and it's trying to figure out why is this happening to me why is the world this way when things don't work out how am i a part of it where other people are part of it and that's how we get into a lot of these identities these tribal identities just out of sheer

survival we get good at that the same way that if you just skied down the mountain going one route that route would have a really strong um path carved into the mountain and everything else would be harder to ski around. So when you want to be compassionate and you fight with your partner, it's tough because you're skiing through something that doesn't have a path. And then you take something like psilocybin, but again, it can happen from other things, breathing exercises, ecstatic dance, whatever.

And now all these pathways that previously you didn't see are illuminated and you kind of see the least path of resistance to go down through them. So you can. And there's a little bit of a destruction of the ego in that environment. Now, if our ego was fully destroyed forever, that'd be problematic too, because we live in the physical world. And we need a little ego to survive and have boundaries and make sure that we take care of our obligations and things. And when we return back to our world, we might be a little bit at our default neural network, but there's a little visibility that, oh, I could ski over there. Yeah.

And I've gone down that pathway before. Or I could ski over there. And that's kind of how I've learned over the years to my version of kind of like, why do we have ego and how can things like psychedelics make it a little bit easier for us to branch out of the restrictive pathways that life has imposed upon us? I think it's because they're in pathogens often and they allow us to do the shadow work undefended and comfortably. Psychedelics are you saying. Yeah. Because I think if you think about like the skiing down the mountain in that same. path, those deep grooves, that path formed for us in childhood. And it's a set of defenses and coping strategies and adaptations to a set of circumstances. I see it in real time with my daughter. She's seven.

And she, her survival depends on her attachment to me, my partner. And we are the way we are. And she has attuned to and intuitive like, well, here's who I need to be to preserve that attachment. and, you know, you can see in a rupture between a mother and a child, like, on some level, it's a matter of life or death to that child. It's very anxiety-provoking to experience rupture. And it's a beautiful act of a parent to kind of figure out how do we repair after this rupture. But she's developing her groove down the mountain in this moment. And it's a set of defenses. And then you get to adulthood, and those defenses serve you to more or lesser degree through your life.

But sometimes they're limitations. Sometimes something that was adaptive in childhood becomes maladaptive, especially if you were in chaos, if there was trauma, then you're really in a survival mode. And those adaptations are just pure survival. And that does become maladaptive if you're lucky enough to be in a moment of calm where things are copacetic again. But then you have all of these boundaries built up

and you're kind of on lockdown and not able to experience everything that this human experience has to offer. So I think that the reason psychedelics can be helpful with this is that in ceremony, shadow work, the idea of looking at the ways we're assholes, the ways that we are closed off, our attachment patterns, are these, the human experience of having our desires and our appetites and having our selfishness, all of this, it's so shameful and uncomfortable to look at any of that. You know, we go into, into a stress response. We get heated. We get, we sweat. We're like, I don't want to think about that. I want to look at that. And there's something about these medicines that softens that experience.

I think partly, and this is a little bit more of a spiritual way of looking at it, but I often will feel some kind of benevolent presence of divine love in ceremony. And it's like this ultimate purist parental love, the ideal form of that. And when you truly are held by unconditional love, it's really safe to be you in all of your flaws. And I find that in ceremony, in that bath of that unconditional divine love, I can say, okay, here's how I suck. And it's not so threatening to my ego. It's not so threatening to my survival. It actually is not necessarily comfortable, but it's approachable. And then you can actually chip away at some of those. blocks we have to our shadow and then the next time we're skiing down the mountain say

whoo I'm going to take this totally different path we're not stuck in that one path of all of our ego and our defenses and our old out-of-date coping strategies anymore that's so well said I love that here's how I suck and it's also the beauty of like here's the beauty in that right here's the beauty in that like I was just you know a lot of times when people go on these journeys they think back to like a lot of their formative experiences in their in their childhood because those sort of help orient our brain. And you have this idea in a sense, a friend was sharing this with me like my entire life I got so rewarded for being the golden child. I was the good little girl who always got praise for doing everything right, not speaking too much, you know, not speaking too little,

always greeting people in the right way, getting straight A's, doing all that. And then when it came time for me to step into, you know, being a woman and creating my own life and getting married. And I had this idea for like a business and I want to do something different, even though I had a medical degree. All of a sudden, in everybody's eyes, I was no longer the good little girl. You're throwing your life away. And my entire sense of who I was growing up was fighting against that. Like, you're not going to be loved if you're not the good little girl anymore.

You have to listen to people that are there. You have to listen to your parents. You have to do that. And then that person having a journey experience. and then all these things opening up of like, wow, I want to hold that little girl who was previously me. People call that sometimes inner child. I don't know why. That word sometimes bugs me a little bit, but I get it, right? I just want to find a different word for it, right? That child inside of you, you're holding them and you're like, I get why you did it all. And I want to say, like,

I love you through the whole process. Like, you were just doing the best that you could. You have that deep compassion the same way that a grandparent would have that when they see a grandchild, Right? Yeah. It's almost like that grandparent energy. It's uncomplicated love. It's uncomplicated love. A different phrase for it might be, secure the child.

Like go into that moment where that child has coping strategies and is figuring out what's acceptable of me and having to betray certain things that are true of them to get by. And you secure that child. You say you're safe. You are inherently lovable. You're infinitely lovable and unconditionally and completely exactly as you are. Your full truth. I want to anticipate one thing because the.

words I chose to use in that moment, like when you're at that peak of shadow work, it's like, here are the ways that I suck. That's helpful shadow work for me. But my shadow side, for whatever reason, I came into this world with a little bit more of a phenotypically masculine tendency, which is basically like the confidence of a mediocre white male. That's kind of more how I go out of balance. And a lot of my patients, a lot of people in my life, I think a more phenotypically feminine response is actually, I suck so much. And so their depths. You're saying that women have a tendency to be critical on itself already. Right. So that phrasing that might work for you might be different for them. Yes. If you're already coming to this work from a place of unworthiness, of feeling

unlovable, of feeling deeply flawed, then that peak moment of shadow work is not at all. Actually, here's how I suck. It's actually, here is my divine loveability. Here's how I'm perfect, exactly as I am. And so we're really different in what we need to feel in that moment when we're finally just with the truth of the matter. And so, you know, everyone just kind of needs to figure out where do you need to go when you're undefended. Well, something funny that I just want to go on record about, because I know your husband's Indian, right? I'm Indian too. I don't know how many other Indian men you've met, but Indian men that grow up in America who were like, you know, just the culture put so much favoritism of our boys.

I think that they have, and especially, you know, their families coming with a lot of education and on average, I think Indian families and South Asian families have like one of the highest income ratio. There are a lot of highly privileged Indian young men. I could say that as I was one growing up. So I don't want to just put it all white people, white men. There's plenty of Indian and my wife is Persian and Persian men also, as I've been told for my wife and her mother, have a little bit of that too. So I want to make sure we put that around a little bit to all the communities that are deserving of it.

That point is well met. And man, I mean, we could record a whole episode that would never be publishable. I don't know. It could be publishable. I have a lot of nuanced thoughts about that. It could be a fun thing to get into one day. I feel very lucky to have a multi-culte existence because I am myself a mutt, a blend of Judaism and kind of like, atheistic Presbyterianism and to marry an Indian man and to get this inside glimpse into his

family and his culture. To me, it's such an exploration of, it's like an anthropologic experiment of just understanding like how do cultures figure it out? You know, how do they promote pro-social behaviors? How do they, you know, get everyone to, what do they prioritize as a culture? And it helps me understand my own culture. It helps me kind of understand what makes my husband tick. And it's a beautiful thing to just get more and more exposure to different ways of doing things. And when it's our own culture, we just accept that's the way the world works. That's always how it is. And you get a glimpse into a different approach. And you're like, no, that's a completely different operating system. Yeah. And when it's our own culture, and this is also the beauty of against psychedelics,

taking you beyond sort of your beliefs, right? We also, going back to the idea of praise and blame, we can either become ethnocentric. America is the greatest. You know, we've never done anything wrong. Yeah. You know, that kind of component, which other countries have that too, right? Other countries can have that. Other cultures can have that as well.

And you can also become too heavy on the blame side. You think that, oh, our society is the only one in the world that, you know, has issues with racism or color of the skin or has its own problems. When the more worldly you get and the more cultures you see, you see fundamentally, this is not about, this is just human nature. Yeah. And how do then we, understanding that there are, this is human nature, how do we help call people up and not focus too much on calling people out? Yeah.

Because when it's universal and when you see that really the biggest thing around the world is more like classism, there's an empathy for even your own culture and then other cultures. And now again, we're stepping out of tribalism. It's not us versus them. It's not left versus right. It's an understanding that, wow, no, we need to do better as society, but it's all of us, right? It's all of us. And I'm not just going to put the blame on one thing or another or men or women.

And not that there aren't themes, you know, and I feel comfortable to talk about this with you because I know you think about these topics a lot. But it takes us beyond such a zoomed-in lens that is our little corner of the world. And there's so much more to the world than just our little space that we're we're in end, there's still a lot of problems that we need to get a chance to address. You had a beautiful interview with Gabor Mate and sort of the idea of blame. It's like if you really try to take that to its full logical extent, like there's never firm ground to stand on because we can say, you know, why am I the way I am?

Well, here was my traumatic upbringing, but why was it traumatic? And, you know, sometimes it's an active nature and sometimes it's that parents had their own traumatic upbringing. and they had their own unresolved wounds and so on and so forth. And so you really can never just comfortably say, that person behaved badly and end of story, they're dead to me, they're terrible. Very rarely is someone really just purely bad. It's always wounded people trying to do their best.

For sure. And we're all, you know, we're flawed. We're doing our lousy best. It's lousy a lot of the time. I think that, you know, the United States, we're reckoning with our problems. problems. And it's kicking up dust at the construction site. You know, things are very messy, but there's something to be said for the fact that we are excavating. We are finally doing that work as a

culture. And so we have a rotten foundation, but we are at least digging it up right now. And I guess, you know, I know this isn't the topic of this, but I also feel like when you understand history through the lens of what people were experiencing then, it's like you know, kind of going back to the topic of not being anti-anything, right? This has shown up a lot in the topic of like energy crisis that we're having in the world, right? For a long time, we were so anti-nuclear because of all of our feelings and thoughts. When you add up the total number of people that have ever died from a nuclear accident, it's like less than, you know, a few hundred people, even with Chernobyl and things like that.

Maybe less than a thousand people. I look at the exact number, but it's a low number. Yeah. And because we got so dogmatic as a, as a, as a culture and even the environmental movement, we shunned this thing for such a long time that could have been managed the right way, a part of the equation. Doesn't mean that it's a whole thing. Just like you said, like, I don't throw SSRIs completely out.

I've seen firsthand that there's some people that they wouldn't do this. They couldn't do that. They couldn't eat a diet that way or they tried that and it didn't work for them. So I guess I'm all bringing this up. in the sense of like, I don't know if our foundation is rotten. If our foundation is rotten and America is the place where immigrants can come and make something for themselves and contribute to the society, I think that at our core, all of humanity has a shadow. Yeah. You know, if people think America's rotten, like look at the caste system in India. Yeah. For years,

and I'm an individual that comes from the Brahmin background, for those that don't know, that was the top of the caste system. And there's a long history. of the Brahman's for I'm sure a lot of the good that was brought in to basically withhold education from other people. You know, from a young age, if you were born into a family that was considered an untouchable, you could not pursue education. You could not rise up the class ranking. You couldn't do things like that. And it was a part of a protection mechanism. I'm sure there might be some noble reasons that's whoever thought of the caste system in the beginning, wanted to do some good stuff. So there is that in all.

all the societies, not that this is all sides, you know, everybody's, you know, equally and things there. But I just want to make sure we don't lose side of the shadow that's in all societies there. And the understanding, just like we give understanding to our parents and our family for the hurt that they might have caused us, but they did the best, right? You do the best that you can with the consciousness that you have and you can still hold people responsible, right? You can still hold them responsible say, hey, that's not good, you know, to not say that LGBT community deserves rights. Like, that's like fucked up. Like, we need to do better. And this is how it needs to look. But I'm going to love you still, maybe from a distance, and understand that if I grew up in this

household in the South that thought this way, that lived this way, that did all these things, I probably would end up with the same belief system that you did. And again, coming back to psychedelics is that I kind of feel like I want all the disclaimers to be out there and you did such a great job at the beginning of this interview. I can't wait for a time that this is legal and that people can have the experiences to burst their bubble of beliefs in every category and see something different that they never saw before and see the humanity in others that their tribal beliefs just never gave them the opportunity to see. To see that humanity in women, to see that humanity in men, to see that humanity in people who, you know, we were talking about the homelessness crisis here in Los Angeles for people who on the streets, for people on the streets who are addicted to drugs who can't control their behavior and the empathy that comes with that situation.

Like humanity for everybody and I really actually feel super excited that, you know, one day that that is more accessible for folks that are out there. Thinking out loud. And please, share anything you want to, push back on anything I said, go into anything that you want to. That's the beautiful of long format, right? Right. I didn't bring you here to agree with me in any aspects. No, if we're up for this, like, thinking out loud, you've just got me thinking about

something. And I feel like there, here's the fundamental tension. I'm going to use this as an analogy. It might end up being the wrong analogy. The solution, obviously, is every single human being. gets to be recognized in their full humanity. And yet, part of the reason that's not simple is that I'm thinking back to, here's the two analogies to try to build this case.

One is that I used to be vegetarian, then vegan, and then little by little, the springs of the machine of my body just started popping out left and right. And I didn't feel good anymore. I started developing autoimmune markers, and I had to be. bad skin and I had joint pain and ocular migraines and PCOS and I couldn't poop to save my life. And part of what helped me build back my health was eating animals. Even though I felt a strong, ethical feeling around, don't slaughter animals for my pleasure or my health.

But then I was in no position to help anybody as a physician because I was not well myself. And I started eating animals again and I felt better. and I do this in conflict, but I encourage my patients to consume animal products, even though I still have not fully made peace of the idea of slaughtering animals for our food. But I don't feel like we have a full solution to get those bioavailable nutrients and everything that seems to build the blood in the Chinese medicine sense, just what seems to create human vitality so that we can carry out our Dharma and do what we're here to do without slaughter.

And I think back to this Michael Pollan documentary a long time ago, not the How to Change Your Mind one recently, but a while ago about food, I think in the wake of Omnibur's dilemma, where he phrased it as something like, you know, throughout time immemorial, everyone's like, what's for dinner? And then everyone's like, who's making dinner?

And the answer has always been somebody else. Because nobody actually wants to be the one stuck with the drudgery of chopping the garlic and chopping the onion. And that really, you know, caught me off guard. And I think that the tricky thing about giving everybody their full humanity is that people who have leisure don't want to lose their leisure and anybody with leisure, it's almost always existing on the backs of somebody else without leisure. And I really see this with, I mean, this can go very far, I'm very deep, but a very straightforward example is just moms. and I think about the fact that we're in a cultural reckoning around emotional labor in the household. And it's like we all just take on these roles and we do it without questioning, without thinking, without complaining, but increasingly questioning and complaining is like, here are the millions of things I do and it doesn't necessarily feel fair.

But I'm just going to do them because it's what's expected of me and because I just in the inertia of doing them. But it's, I think that where we have to get to is when it's not fair, we need to rebalance the score a bit. But that usually means somebody's losing leisure. And that doesn't die hard. It doesn't die hard. And it's a super important topic. And the way that we get through complicated, nuanced, super important topics that are there is we want to make sure that we have advocates on the journey. because those are the same people

that are going to help us solve this situation. We need the business environment to change. If we, in the process of solving something that is built on the backs of labor of like women in this example, if we throw somebody else in the bus, we end up losing the same people that we need the conversation on, whoever it is, the business community, men as a whole group that are out there, anybody, anybody that other women

that sort of promote work culture and not hard enough, And I think that there is a balanced way to be able to say, hey, listen, I don't think that the conversation that women are not working hard enough in this exact way. You know, Kim Kardashian got some flack for that earlier this year. She said a statement out there. In the context of not acknowledging that you're in a different situation, I don't think it's helpful. Hey, I'm all about that. I'm all about criticism in a way that's like direct. And here's why it's not helpful.

Here's the component. By the way, help us do better. become our ally invitation. That doesn't mean that she's going to accept it. Doesn't mean that anybody's going to accept it. I think it's when we think that the way to move forward, and this goes in anything, even the health debates that are out there,

is we need to throw somebody else under the bus or make them lesser them. That's when I think we lose the humanity. Anytime we have to make somebody lesser of a human being, especially a group of people instead of an individual, there's plenty of bad behavior. We should call out individual people, we should say like look that's not great behavior like that's unacceptable and by the way there's plenty of men that are actually those allies and want to do a different you know set up want to have a different ally so want to create a different environment so I think that that is the growing up of humanity right this is all the this is my even just empathy for humanity and even me as a person I used to look at things so black and white yeah this is right this is wrong and the more that I went down the process and the more that I lived life just like you're talking about the more clinical experience

that you had and getting older and seeing what works and what doesn't work, you see, oh, actually this might be a slightly easier path that's better for everyone that actually gets the results that it needs. And it's something that needs to constantly be discussed. Nobody has the answer in the right way. But I think part of it is that we're going to need more interdependence than we've ever had before if we're really going to get to these resolutions. Controversial thought. Please. Maybe we edit this out. Maybe I come to regret saying this, but that Kim Kardashian thing, which I think I'm familiar with, she said something like, the problem is nobody wants to work anymore or something like that. Everyone's lazy.

And, you know, listeners at home are kind of like, like, I feel so unseen and unwitnessed because my 24 hours in the day are not the same as your 24 hours. And, you know, you have help. Someone is doing your dishes. Someone's watching after your kids. Someone is doing it. So, like, you have more time and you have more leisure and you basically can work hard more easily. And, And so to not feel seen and witnessed in your struggle is so aggravating. And I know I feel that when I listen to what I somewhat affectionately call Bro Wellness Podcasts. And I do, I listen a lot.

This is where I'm getting my free education all the time. But when someone's saying like, I control my macros and I wake up and I do my seven hour morning routine, I'm just thinking like, you're not a mom. Like you don't have anybody depending on you. You're not running from thing to thing. You have this spaciousness in your life that I don't have. And on some level, I don't really blame them, but I do feel unseen and unwitnessed. And it's a little aggravating.

But I think that that is actually the surface story. And I think there's a deeper story, whether it's Kim Kardashian or Bro Wellness Podcasts or whatever the case may be, when someone is saying, do this hard thing, we want something to blame. We want a reason to be able to say, that's invalid. And so we say, well, you're saying this from a place of privilege, and therefore the statement is invalid. And I think we just, as the growing up of humanity is happening right here and now, and it's kind of happening like on the internet in an interesting way. It's happening in this

podcast. We're having this podcast. We are going to get more and more comfortable with the gray area and more and more comfortable with the both and that this woman is saying this from a position of privilege and she doesn't fully understand and she's not caveating and witnessing all and, you know, acknowledging all the ways that people don't have the same 24 hours in the day that she has. and yet there might be validity to her statement. And I don't really have a strong opinion about whether or not people are lazy or hardworking. I live in New York. People are. But I think that where it's where I think that when I'm coming forth with ideas around a holistic approach to mental health, a criticism I'll often get, I can tell.

I'll say like your mental health is not high tech. It's not something out of your hands. It's low tech and you can feel hopeful and you can feel empowered. And there are things you can do for yourself today to improve your mental health. And I'm thinking like, that's a swell message. Who wouldn't want that message? But I get pushback. And I think some of that push back and I'll see how people push back.

They'll say, well, it's coming from you with these sets of circumstances and therefore the message is invalid. And just to be clear, people are saying that basically you're a white woman, right? Is that what you mean when you say these set of circumstances? With privilege or that is ablest. You're a doctor. You're coming from New York. And that's why what they're saying from the outside is that that's why it doesn't hold the weight. Yes.

Or it's an ablest message or it's stigmatizing medication or things like that. People will basically find something to point to and say, this is why this is an invalid message. But I think the truer story underneath is that it's actually an uncomfortable message. Partly because it feels a little insulting and a little true. triggering to be told your mental health is in your own hands. On some level, it's empowering, but on another level, it's overwhelming. It feels a little blammy. Like you're saying that my problems are my fault. On another level, it feels like we feel exposed. You know, there was the meme for a while of, I'm going to take this stupid walk for my stupid mental health.

And I feel like what's so interesting about that meme is that we're sitting at home, eating processed foods, binging on Netflix, do them scrolling on Instagram, and we're miserable. And someone's like, take a walk. And the first thing we say is, fuck you. Like, no, I don't, like, that's not going to help anything. My problems are heavier than that. They're bigger than that. Don't trivialize my depression or my anxiety by telling me I should just take a walk. We push back and say, that's not a big enough or a high tech enough solution for how big my problems are. And we think, if it was so simple, I should have done that 10 years ago. So it's a really uncomfortable truth to grapple with. But then when we take the walk, we feel better. And that's where I think the deeper story

is that it's uncomfortable to get some of these messages. We look to shoot it down by invalidating the person making the message, but it's actually preventing us from taking on useful truths. Yeah. And it's part of the growing up of humanity that we're letting go of that. And people are realizing that that's not beneficial because so many people who don't have those views are speaking up. I'm seeing more people speak up who have layered and nuanced views more than the history that I've ever seen before. And it's actually really beautiful and it's courageous, but more people speaking up is a beautiful thing. And I've been even doing it on my podcast. There'd be guests that I'd have previously that would have a very strong take about some topic or another. And my lived

experience is different. Not that I'm trying to change your mind, but I say, well, if you're talking about this thing that's related to minorities, well, I'm a minority in this country. Yes, sure, I'm a man and you could say this, you can say that, but here's my experience. I'm just giving you another part of the equation because it might broaden your perspective a little bit. You know, there was, and I think that, you know, what you're talking about is really challenging the sense of identity, right? When you put out a message of power and empowerment, you are also pushing against somebody's identity. People spend a lot of time developing their identity

and then they hold onto that identity, which goes back to this tribal idea. I'm a sufferer of chronic disease. I'm a sufferer of anxiety. Don't try to take my anxiety away because that is my sense of identity. You know, there was this thing, just because it plays right into this topic here

and something you said, during the pandemic and with people having really useful conversation around inequalities, injustice in the world, racial injustice. There also was, you know, a step into a category of what I would call identity, if I don't speak out against a group that I perceive in some way I'm not being an ally in the process, right? And with anything, there's always good that comes with it and there's stuff that goes a little too far this way. one of the articles that got published by a friend of mine right and you know not a close friend but a friend that was there was an attack on uh i think the exact title uh i'll be paraphrase it so that actually

you know i don't put my friend on blast but it was basically um white women have co-opted yoga right and something about how they've stolen that from Indians right and this was written by somebody who was South Asian, Indian herself. And I remember reading that and I read the whole thing before I had any sort of judgment one way or another about it. And again, I'm not here to pick political arguments or other stuff. I'm actually trying to help us and share my own stories of stepping out of tribalism and stepping into loving each other more. And again, all this is in the context of what tools can help us do that, which is a big part of today's conversation. growing up I would go to India often like every couple years every you know few years we'd go to

India we'd spend time in India we travel India we went all over India I've been on many what are called Yathras which are called pilgrimages where you go to very different holy sites have been to some of the poorest states and cities and spent time there my grandparents were really big on service and they would donate money to a lot of different ashrongs we would go to those ashrans we would volunteer you know when you're a kid you hate it because you're sleeping on the floor there's like beds are hard as rock you don't have a pillow and and there's like mosquitoes everywhere and you're like pooping in a hole and you're just like what the fuck is this right later on I saw like wow this like completely changed my life perspective and just how privileged I am as a human being

to even be born in the western world right compared to what is going on in this country where there's extreme properties and as I got older and I myself started to have some interest in yoga I would talk about it with family members over there. And in India, there's a long history of Branaayam, right? Like breathing yoga, right? Like breathing and breathing exercise and things. And often, a lot of times it'd be older people. But you would never find ever a physical yoga class, right? You'd never find a yoga class where people were doing sort of these physical moves. Yes, that originated in India. And like a lot of things, you know, life is very tricky about how the message becomes popular.

One of the things that's happened in America is with yoga, becoming so popular here. And again, yes, it tends to be the people that are in the most financially flexible opportunity of life have money to be able to spend disposable income. And sure, that was a lot of white women who are naturally already into wellness. And they became advocates of this. And they became teachers. And they started putting it out there. And it wasn't just them.

It was anybody in that class that did. it. And America, in a way, really made yoga popular. And as I started going back to India and seeing it there, I started seeing classes opening up in the wealthiest of neighborhoods that are there. And now a different group of people had access to it. So how can you attack a core sense of what made yoga popular? Well, you can. Anybody can do anything. But you're missing the boat any time you get too caught up in one simple thing without understanding how history itself has played into this aspect. So on behalf of, you know, you know, minorities that might have been criticizing you or even other white women that might have said, like, how can you speak up about this

in general? I understand where they're coming from. I have compassion my heart for it. But I'm so thankful that you and anybody else that is privileged enough to have the time to, you know, you spend all this money and effort and energy and having a medical degree. And now you're writing a book and you're talking about things that people might have told you years ago that would have been suicide to your career. And just like you, there's plenty of other doctors and teachers and healers that are out there. And guess what? The world needs more of them, not less of them. And the world needs more of them to speak up. And I have compassion for everybody who has a different point of view that's out there. But I hope that we can all go beyond our tribalism to really do what's needed.

and what's needed is that there's a lot of people that are suffering. Who the fuck cares where the message comes from? Those people need help. If you can help them, hats off to you. So that's my stump speech. I can't run for president because I wasn't born in this country, but I can at least share my thoughts on this podcast. Here's amusing on that.

So I love everything you just said. And I think that, you know, for the most part, I actually think that like there's some form of poetry called like pastiche or something, right? It's like sampling and hip-hop. It's like always the taking art or something that some human somewhere has created and then incorporating it and building upon that.

And I generally think that's kind of a good aspect of what we're all doing here collectively. But we do now call out when it's cultural appropriation or if somebody's profiting on what is ultimately like a different culture's idea. Which sometimes is true and sometimes is not true. Sometimes it's true. By the way, Indians as a whole,

and I'm talking to a ton of them, they love when people dress up in Indian garb. I don't even see these funny videos, but there's not been one done with the Indian community, but there's one that's done in the Latin American and Mexican community, right? With this guy, where's a sombrero? And it's funny, right? But he goes around and he goes to a bunch of, you know, white people,

men and women and says like, you know, I think it was on a college campus. It's like, hey, is this, I don't know if he says this racist or, hey, is this cultural appropriation? They're like, yeah. Are you, wait, are you Hispanic? Are you Mexican? Are you this or that?

He's like, no. And they're like, yeah, it totally is. It's this. It's this. He goes to the part of town like that is primarily, in that instance, was Mexicans, right? But Latin Americans. And he's going around. He's like, hey, what do you think about some real?

They're like, we love it. Right. They go to this other person. They're like, what do you think of this? It's like, oh, that's great. It's like, hey, is this racist that I'm wearing this thing? And they're like, no, why would it be that way? Right.

So I think that there are times where there is. And there's times where it isn't. And that's all that gray area that has to be navigated based on the situation. And the spirit of it matters. And even someone who's, you know, quote unquote, profiting from something that's, you know, could be defined as cultural appropriation, sometimes in a very exploitative way. And in other times, this is someone who said, whoa, I discovered yoga and it changed my life. And now I'm a yoga teacher.

I want this to be everything that I do and I want to spread this gospel and influence other people and let other people benefit from this is that profiting from cultural appropriation. arguably, but it's also someone finding their purpose and wanting to help others. I don't think it is. You know, I don't think it is. The question is, you know, who says that, you know, I guess that's the part, and this is the discussion. You know, the first and foremost, what I want people to do, more of these discussions. You're going to share something that's going to broaden my point of you. Yeah. And the thing is, is that we're so focused on the appropriation, we forget the fact that less than, you know, 0.001% of people, and obviously

way more people know about the word yoga, how many people are actually practicing in their day to day, right? We need more people to get the message out in any way that we possibly can, right? And just because if that person was Indian, now all of a sudden it's okay, I have issues with that because some of the whitest people that I know growing up were other Indian people. people who wanted nothing to do with their culture, right? We have a term for it, right? Maybe you've heard it from your husband. It's called ABCD, American-born, confused Dacey, right? On that same place, even though I grew up in Kenya. And my family is fourth generation Kenyan, right? My grandfather,

from my mom's side, God bless his soul and his experiences in life that led him to this place, he was one of the most racist people that I knew growing up, right? So I want to be so careful that we don't lose sight of the individual. And that's why I know you're saying that the intentions and the spirit matters. But if we take the label of who they are on the surface and we use that for the identity of how we're going to group them, it always becomes a little bit tricky. Yep. To me, this actually connects back to an aspect of psychedelics. So let's take it all back. The reason why we're here. Here's the part I think that we're missing. When I said like the spirit matters, I think that we have culturally gotten away from the habit of acknowledging

our ancestors, right? Like we're not thinking back to what contributed to us, what we're built on, what we stand on. And I think that the spirit of all of these different things that we like to call out and we say it's not good, like when it's done, with the appropriate amount of respect and reverence, it usually doesn't, you know, it doesn't leave a bad taste in our mouth. And I think that that's where we're missing is, we're missing that reverence in how we approach things. Sacredness. We make everything gross. You know, we're like, let's let's put ayahuasca in a can and drink it at Coachella. You know, it's like we, we lose the reverence for things. And I'm not saying we have to be so reactionary and traditional and things

have to stay the way they are, I just think we need to acknowledge and bring reverence to things. And this comes back to psychedelics partly because, you know, we haven't come fully back around to the idea of a bad trip, and this isn't fully tying up that string. But when you enter into a ceremony, that early initial stage, I find is often, this is a too, it's not a granular enough term, but it's slightly unpleasant. It's like sometimes I feel anxious or I feel a little bit of like an oh shit feeling or your stomach is off or you just feel shaky or nauseous or you're just like, why did I do this? You feel yourself slipping down a ledge and you're like, what was I thinking? Now I'm past the point of no return. This is happening and I almost want to dig my heels in and

not go fully forward with this. There's a feeling of resistance. I have come to reframe that for myself. that when you go into a ceremony, this will not be everyone's truth. This is just my truth. I think you are going and you will be in the presence of the divine. And by the way, we always are. But it's in a way that we can access and it becomes more tangible in ceremony. And you're going to go be with the divine and you don't waltz in there casually. You enter with reverence.

and a little bit of an oh shit feeling, because it is kind of a big deal. And I think that where we get the spirit wrong with all these things is that I think we just need like a little bit more respect and reverence as we come to all of these practices. Yoga as it was traditionally practiced in India, it's not perfect. It has its own funky history. But I think that there's something really to revere about that. and, you know, when it just ends up being like a power yoga class that's supposed to give you a better butt, you know, I think we've missed the reverence and it doesn't mean we don't benefit from it. You know, you mentioned something earlier, which was that the power of and and or, right? And getting out of that, you know, there's a gentleman Gary Vaynerchuk, you know, got to know him over the years a little bit, you know, not even an acquaintance, but met him a few times.

one of the things I love that he says is that we want to go beyond you know red and blue and really life is about purple oh yeah right in all aspects of life and so part of that is and or and I think another part of that is adding in the word maybe yeah maybe right maybe if somebody wants a better but and and they don't have to know all the proper pronunciations of the Sanskrit words that are part of yoga and they're just trying to make it because they're a busy mom and they're trying to take care of their kids and they're fighting for that one hour a week. Yeah.

The more we zoom into everybody's individual journey, the more that everything starts to become okay. This is beautiful. Right? Because everything is connected to everything. And that's the one hour a week that they can try to put a little bit attention themselves. And they don't have the time to maybe understand the full history of yoga or understand the places that it comes from.

And they're working on learning Italian for a summer trip that they're trying to plan for their family and their plate is too full. Like, can you not have, not. you, can we not all have so much compassion for that person in their situation? Right. And there's sometimes where it comes with somebody is, somebody's opportunity is at the expense of somebody else, right? And even that can be discussed, right?

In context. And there's ways to bring it up. And we even can throw in a word maybe in that because there's a lot of areas in life that even the idea that it's a, you know, a zero-sum game. Yeah. There's a lot of layers to that, right, where we need to get a chance to kind of look into it and see, is that the truth? Okay, in this aspect it is?

In this aspect, it may not be. And let's focus on that aspect, right? I just want more discussion on it. And I think that from the yoga perspective, I guess I'm qualified to be able to talk about it, even though I don't do yoga regularly because I'm from this background. I can have an opinion on it. I'm okay with that person wanting to feel a little bit more fit, even if they don't know the history and everything. If we knew all the history of every single generation before us and we had the

sacredness for all of it, that would also be all consuming, right? It's like almost being born with the awareness of all your past lives. You know, in the Indian tradition we believe in sort of reincarnation. And there's a reason why we don't remember every single past life. It'd be too burdensome. You'd come into this life and you wouldn't be able to live your own experiences. And we all want to hold each other to the highest level. We want to do better. We want to look out for the people that don't have access to things. We want to understand that we need to use innovation in its best capacity and fight for access to more individuals.

And that that takes time. You know, that takes time. And yet we can still all be advocates for that process. Let me say two things for response to this. We can go on as long as we want, by the way. As long form. So one thing is that I do think it's worth pointing out that part of the reason we are so polarized and so tribal and so.

boxed into our identities and reactive, if somebody says something that we perceive as a dog whistle that represents that they're in the other identity, it relates to social media, which uniquely with character limits, with the non-accountability, which allows our animal instinct to just let loose with our relational aggression in a way that we don't feel accountable for. And even the fact that the algorithm favors that we stay in our echo chamber and favors controversy. So if a post says something that lacks nuance that's, you know, so falsifiable and everyone's going to get angry about that, then they're going to be long comments about it. Everyone's going to be angry and they're going to be commenting.

And that will get more eyeballs on it. And so we right now live in this weird, freaky world that I think in is kind of an unhappy accident happens to promote more hyper-polarization. It sort of systematically takes us away from the long-form, nuanced, maybe conversation. the purple conversations, that word may be, I actually think kind of wraps a lot of what we've been talking about up with a bow because on the one hand with medicine right now with that paper that came out over the summer by Mark Horowitz that's saying there is no serotonin theory of depression. That's not based in the evidence. That was always marketing. That was how Soloft commercials

in the 90s told us a story about why this pill will help with their depression. And when we're saying When a patient comes to me and says, you know, here's been my experience. And it flies in the face of what I was taught in medical school. It flies in the face of what the rigor of academic medicine and evidence-based physicians tell me, here's what is fact. When it's not something I read in a textbook, I know that in my training kind of had me start saying things like, well, there's no evidence for that. A total invalidation of a patient's subjective experience. that's what we would do. That's like the cool way to talk in academic medicine. And what I've had to learn myself as a weirdy, like more off the deep end witchy practitioner is maybe that everybody

comes to me with their unique subjective experience. And sometimes my job is to help them reframe or not give so much weight to everything that they think, to not believe everything they think. But oftentimes I think my role is to say maybe and to let their experience change my understanding of what's possible. And I think with psychedelics, part of the reason this is beautiful medicine is that that ultimate problem of true anxiety, the one that says at the very end of the day, we die and we lose the people that we love. And that is a cold, hard reality. And why wouldn't we feel anxious knowing that that's at the end of the tunnel? For me and for me and for many of my patients, psychedelics speak to the question of some greater meaning vastly beyond my

comprehension. And they just suggest to me, maybe. And that brings me immense comfort. It's well said. Thank you for sharing that. I hope for a world of more maybes. I hope for a world of more ands and oars instead of this or that or left or right or, you know, this kind of thing. it's really our highest potential, not just as individuals, but as species too, to put and really develop more empathy. You know, the Dalai Lama has this quote because in the Buddhist tradition, they also believe in reincarnation. Right. And he says, you know, be kind to everyone. You never know who was your mother in like a past life.

Yeah. Right. Paraphrasing there, but it's something like that. And regardless of people, you know, whatever they're believing. beliefs are, even if you don't believe that or have any sort of sense of that or you have a more traditional view of the things, just that knowingness that whatever creator, if you believe in God or a creator, create us all. So how do we want to interact with each other? And if you are more on the everything is science and neurons and atoms, wouldn't the world be a much better place

if we've fought for empathy and actually reserved? a lot more of our, you know, there is violence in the world. There are people that are so hurt that they hurt other people, right? It's a small percentage of humanity, but that's out there in the world that propagate violence and do things on people who are less able to fend for themselves. Okay, great. Let's put our attention on that category because that's not most of the world. Most of the world is good human beings who,

regardless of their political beliefs and their worldview or their lack of education or what they've had exposure to or haven't had exposure to, they just want to do right by them and their families. They want to provide for their families. So let's extend more empathy in the world for those individuals and help them see a perspective that we've lived in our life, but also be open to their perspective that could show us something different. And maybe for those people that are listening, psychedelics could also be part of that journey. This has been a great conversation.

I'm so glad we went all the twists and turns. And I really appreciate you being able to open up, not just about your own journey with psychedelics, but also to get into these other aspects, there's her modern cultural conversations that everybody's trying to navigate and sort of figure out. And I truly believe that when you have friends in your life that have different views and perspective of the world

because of what they look like and where they grew up and how they thought about things and what they read and go through, and you have beautiful discussions back and forth, everybody becomes a better person for it, right? Even if you walk away and you still have your own opinions and beliefs, there's some little rip in the Maya,

the veil of illusion, that now I have to believe makes us all a better person. So Dr. Alainvora, thank you for coming on the podcast. How do people find out about you, keep in touch with you, and of course pick up a copy of your great book that's out there? Sure. I'm most active on Instagram.

I'm at Ellenvora, MD, and my book is The Anatomy of Anxiety. And thank you, Instagram and social media for putting out all the great content in the world, right? There's a lot of greatness that comes along with it. I wouldn't have known about you if it wasn't for social media in some capacity. And really functional medicine as a whole has spread so much because of social media. So I always want to make sure that we see the good inside of that too because there's so many people that would have had access that would have not.

When I was first starting my health journey, I had to go to the natural food store that was in my small town, college town. And they had like 13 books on the shelf. Right? Not even my library. There was no Amazon. dot com even at that time when I first started reading all these things so I have to believe that the free flow of information while it comes with a lot of challenges is getting the best voices to the top and it's something that we're going to have to navigate as humanity there's a lot of problems

we got to fix but the fact that people have access to you and this conversation in long format just makes me smile so thank you again for being on here true thank you for facilitating excellent conversations I'm honored to be here