Know Thyself - E151 - Alberto Villoldo: What Shamans Know About Healing & The Human Journey (That We’ve Forgotten)

Episode Date: June 24, 2025

In this episode, medical anthropologist and shamanic teacher Dr. Alberto Villoldo shares the healing wisdom he’s uncovered through decades of studying with indigenous healers in the Amazon and Andes. He breaks down the core principles of energy medicine, neuroplasticity, and self-healing—and how we can integrate ancient shamanic practices into modern life. This conversation offers a practical guide for anyone seeking to reconnect with nature, unlock inner resilience, and live in alignment with their true path.Own Your Health with Function Health.Use Code KNOWTHYSELF100 for $100 off your membership:https://www.functionhealth.com/a/know-thyselfTry MUDWTR & Get Up to 43% off + a free frother:https://mudwtr.com/knowthyselfAndrés Book Recs: https://www.knowthyself.one/books___________0:00 Intro1:46 How He Began His Shamanic Path8:32 Beyond Knowledge, Cultivating Wisdom 11:55 Knowing The "Self"15:11 Studying with Indigenous Healers 19:51 Our Ability to Heal Ourselves: Resiliency & Neurplasticity 25:04 Cultivating Vitality in a Nutrient-Depleted World27:14 Ad: Own Your Health with Function Health30:20 The Reality of Voodoo Practices34:20 Working with the Energy Body & Chakras41:00 Humanity’s Era of Change46:25 The Medicine Wheel: A Map for Awakening52:40 Synchronicity is Real. Here's How to Spot it55:34 Ad: Start Your Morning Right with Mudwtr 56:48 Finding Our Dharma, Living in the Flow1:02:25 Healing at the Psycho-Somatic Level1:08:45 Practices to Strengthen Your Connection to Nature1:13:25 Coming to Peace with Death1:17:50 Benefits & Pitfalls of Plant Medicine1:24:39 How to Step Into This1:28:15 Acquiring Spiritual Gifts & Recalling Your Dreams1:30:57 Conclusion___________Episode Resources: https://thefourwinds.comhttps://www.instagram.com/albertovilloldo_thefourwinds/https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/https://www.youtube.com/@knowthyselfpodcasthttps://www.knowthyself.oneListen to the show:Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4bZMq9lApple: https://apple.co/4iATICX

For the shamans, the invisible world is where everything is happening. Early on in my academic life, I slowly began to understand that we don't have a health care system. We have a disease care system. And the idea of the shamans is not to heal cancer or heart disease or dementia, but to prevent them. I had contact with an indigenous group that were prophecy keepers. What they were doing was working with the luminous energy field that organizes your health as well as your experiences in the world. And I can do a little demo with you if you want to have an experience of this.

Once you put your cup down, and I'm going to come over to where you are. There's an effortless quality to being in the flow of your own journey. The minute you begin to participate with those natural dynamics, then you step into the divine place and to say, hey, you know,

you are also a creator. It's an act of courage, but life will keep bringing you to it until you say yes one day. And I think that that's what we can all do. We're all called to do that. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Know They Self podcast.

Our guest today is a medical anthropologist and psychologists who many years ago left the halls of academia to study alternative healing shamanic practices in the Amazon and Andes. And since then, for the past decade, he's been supporting people by being a bridge between neuroscience, psychology, and healing, mind, body, spirit coming into full, total alignment Alberto Violdo. Thank you for being here. So good to be with you. I would love to start and set the stage a bit

with some of your background and a bit of your story. I'm just curious, as you were kind of steeped in academia, what really pulled you to explore the shamanic path more? I was born in Cuba, raised in Cuba until I was nine. And right before we left,

there was war. There was a rebellion going on. And we lived near the airport. They were bombing in the airport. and I was underneath the bed for nights and nights at a time. And what I didn't realize is that part of myself has stayed underneath that bed for 40 years. And I did a lot of psychotherapy around it

and trauma and talking therapy. And it wasn't until I started studying the shamans and I did a soul recovery, a soul retrieval, that I found this little boy that could trust and that could laugh and that could smile and have a good time. So that's really compelled me. It was my mid-20s, early, late-20s, compelled me to become a student of the shamans,

to learn what they do, not just to study them like we do in the Western world, which is we studied them like they were an object. We objectify it so we can study it, putting under the microscope. But the shamanic traditions are feminine, they're participatory. You can't just look at them and dissect them.

you've got to immerse yourself in them. So it was largely in part of your own healing journey that pulled you into the bath? It was part of my own healing journey and early on in my academic life I directed a small brain laboratory at San Francisco State University in the biology department.

But when I was six and seven years old, I could see dead people like many kids can. You know, I could see Uncle Lewis that left and I'd say to my mother, he's coming for his wife, and she said, don't talk about those things. And I shut it down until one day in the biology lab, 10 o'clock at night, everything dark,

and I was in the brain lab. So I was surrounded by 200 brains. And I'm taking some notes and some testing we were doing on endorphins and producing your brain endorphins. And I look up at the other room. There are five beings like luminescent beings, directly underneath their brains. And I could hear one of them inside my head say,

is this the place of judgment? And I was so dumbfound that. I said, no, this is room 403 in the biology department. They thought that I was some kind of angel because I had a white lab coat on. And then I realized that how biased are Western sciences, how it needs to objectify,

it's colonialistic science. You know, if you can't explain it, measure it, it doesn't exist. And whereas for the shamans, the invisible world is where everything is happening. And everything in the visible world and the material world originates from there. So they dedicated themselves to mapping the invisible world. And not only mapping, they were cartographers of the soul. And the geography they were interested in was the geography of the journey beyond death and what is it that determines whether we have a destiny in this world and how can we shift that?

So there is a lot to unpack from the indigenous shaman view of the self-healing, mind, body, timelines, destiny, all these things I'm looking forward to unpacking with you. You mentioned how the Western medical system very much so uses top-down logic and reasoning to be able to quantify changes, which is, of course, very useful and has many incredible applications. and also is inherently limited if we're only going to explore practices that could be sort of empirically, you know, qualified with data. So what was it that you fundamentally found lacking in the Western medical system? Well, I slowly began to understand that we don't have a health care system.

In America, we have a disease care system. And that's what doctors get trained in. They get trained on treating diseases. And then in the Amazon, one old woman said to me one time, Alberto, illnesses do not exist. Diseases don't exist. Sick people exist, but illnesses don't exist. There's just a combination of different symptoms that your people in the West try to call a disease that they need to treat.

You need to treat the person and not the illness. And the idea of the shamans is not to heal cancer or heart disease or dementia, but to prevent them. In fact, the shaman lives very well if the village is healthy. the minute they start getting sick, he gets fired. I've heard you speak to one in five people, I believe in the States have dementia, and the diseases to the same degree and same type are not quite found in those places, correct? Yeah, in the Amazon, I was originally funded by Big Swiss Pharma because I was one of the few anthropologists kind of crazy enough to be in the Amazon

when there was a lot of revolution happening in the Amazon. in Peru, particularly. And they wanted to discover the next great cure for heart disease or dementia was the big one, Alzheimer's. Because one out of two people by the age of 85 will have diagnosable Alzheimer's in the West. That means one of us is scripted to, of course, neither one of us is going to do it because we eat right. And we live right, we forgive, we love and laugh.

but they were interested in what were the shamans doing to have zero dementia, zero. And it turned out what they were doing was working with the energy field, with the luminous energy field that surrounds the physical body and that organizes your health as well as your experiences in the world. And see, the main task of the shamans was to protect the wisdom of the village first. And the wisdom of the village was stored in the minds of the elders. And there was no writing in any of the Americas. There were no books to store the wisdom. And it was stored in the brains, the minds of the old people. Imagine if you forgot how to make fire or how to make a

hulk or where the animals went, it would be a problem. So they set out to protect the minds of of the elders. And it turned out that when they protected their brains, they also protected their heart and they also prevented cancer. Like you mentioned in the West, we have this very Cartesian way of splitting all of these, like the mind and the body and the spirit, if we even include the latter, you know, and when you speak about working with the energy field and working as treating the person which is sick instead of the various thousands of, you know, diseases that we can label. I'm intrigued with the difference in how you differentiate and delineate between knowledge and what we can learn about the body, how we can, you know, again, quantify certain things

versus the noses of the body and working with the energy field at more subtle realms that we can't intellectually sort of deduce as easily, you know. Yeah, yeah, it's hard to quantify that, but it is quantifiable. The Germans are doing a really good job, and the Russians are doing that, working with the biofield, measuring it and coming up with devices. See, Western medicine is the best medicine in the world, the best for trauma. So if you're bit by a snake, don't go see a shaman, go to the ER, and then go see your shaman to find out why the snake bitch you in the first place. Yeah. You know, and in the indigenous traditions, and I don't want to embellish the indigenous.

many flaws and faults, but there's an ancient wisdom that we can recover. These were the builders of Machu Picchu, you know, and pyramids in the Yucatan and mapping the stars. And what they understood was that you were not a product of the past only, which we assume in medicine that you're product of your genes. You know, what runs in your family? You go to your doctor and she'll ask you, well, tell me what runs, what does your parents and grandparents die from? you're not only a product that the family stories, the drama, the family dramas,

from our childhood of the past, we can be the product of the future, that the future can actually reach back like a giant hand and propel us and take us to a place of exceptional health and exceptional creativity. And right now, exceptional design of the future, because we're designing the future in an unprecedented way. Right now, with all of the crisis, and opportunities that we're facing from AI to conflict, you know? How do you design a future?

You can't repair it, build it up from the past, you know? Yeah, well, first off, I appreciate you acknowledging the both upsides of the gifts, but also the shortcomings of both the eastern and the Western view of a view of things, right? Because it's easy to romanticize, you know, one over the other, but they both bear amazing fruits in different capacities. Look, we can't become Indians, you know, it's impossible, who we live in the Western world. We're Westerners.

But we can take the knowledge, and in the indigenous societies, they differentiate between information and knowledge or wisdom. Information is facts or knowing that water's age to O. Wisdom is being able to make a rain. Information is having a diagnosis. Wisdom is being able to heal, not by fixing what went wrong,

but by selecting a healed destiny for someone. also. I'm looking forward to how we can select that destiny for ourselves. Fundamentally, how do you really view and how is the indigenous perspective on the self? Because I think we have this very separate notion, again, in the Western mind of who we are. And we forget the vast connected field. We forget how the flora and fauna that live in and around us and the nature that we're connected to, never separate from. And so what in your purpose? perspective, what do you see the totality of the self? Yeah, that's a really good question, because the totality of the self that we perceive is the measurable. You know, you've got nice body temperature,

97.5 degrees. You have, you know, I'm just getting over a cold. So we perceive these things and we want to medicate them or make them better. Indeed, invisible world is a realm that is timeless. You're outside of ordinary time. And we know this from, we call it the quantum field. We know the quantum field is non-local to time or to space. And we know the other quality of the quantum field is that there's no agent, there's no doer, but things happen. So the operant principle, there is intentionality. So those are the two keys here. Break free from time and have an intention that is bigger than you are. So much of your work has been also guiding and creating space for people to experience the vastness of their self. It's easy to have an intellectual idea of a self

that's beyond space and time and that is quantum entangled with past versions and future destiny and all these things. But when someone comes into deep stillness and actually experiences in taste their true nature, it's transformative on contact. Totally. Absolutely. And this gets us into where you find the know-dice-s carved on top of a... Delphi? Yeah, in Delphi. Because this was the one psychedelic and the experience that you would have in your life. You would prepare for that. And the topic was to die before you died. To die before you died because you didn't want to save that final journey into infinity for your last breath.

You know, you wanted to find the maps. And now while you still have a body to come back to. And that was part of the initiations that would lead you to not a place of having more information or more factual knowledge or more data. We're not data driven anymore, but into what the Greeks called noses. Nosis means direct learning, tapping into the hard drive of the cosmos.

Not that you know everything, but that you know the all. And then you can apply it to anything. So you become a skilled navigator through life and not simply accumulating more facts and more information. you had nois, deep, profound, knowingness of the totality. I know you've been privileged to be with many amazing, incredible masters and shamans throughout time.

You spoke how through oral tradition for over 500 years in certain traditions, that these practices have been carried and passed along. I would love for you to share a bit of how you came into that, how they trusted you, and yeah, we'll come after. Yeah, that's a really good story, actually, because I had contact with an indigenous group that were prophecy keepers, that it had no contact with the West.

I was the first American anthropologist to have contact with them. They lived at high mountain tops, and they were the keepers of a prophecy, but also more than the prophecy of the processes to become a new human, homolumous. And when I first went to their village, These were the poorest Indians in the Americas.

They wanted no contact with the white. They welcomed me as a great healer. And that's because I took some Western medication with me. Because even though they had no contact with the West, they had contact with other Indians who had been exposed to, you know, there were babies with big distended bellies. And we had great antibiotics that work really.

There was one medicine woman that said to her husband, who was a renowned shaman, said, look at this boy. His medicine works so much better than yours, one day. So basically I was taking some painkillers, taking some supplements for the babies, for the children, because they were not getting it fully in mother's milk. And then I was welcomed. And then I went into the second layer of depth. It took me 10 years to do that.

because at the first I thought very superficially, wow, this is an amazing wisdom tradition. How do we translate this to the West? And then they said, you've got to learn it first. So I had to do my vision quest. I had to do work in the Amazon with the medicine plants. I had to face fear. And understand that fear,

and especially the fear of dying, is the source of all disease. because it, today I know the brain chemistry because you know you get caught in a fight or flight loop which happens, fight, flight, freeze is the sequence and you start producing the brain chemicals, the adrenaline and cortisol that are deadly that create psychosomatic disease.

And the ultimate fear, of course, that triggers fight or flight is the fear of your mortality of your death. part of the big longevity movement that's happening now in America and the world is to try to offset this understanding that the mortality rate is still 100%. And that can be scary when you apply it to you. So the basis of my training at that point was to face fear and become friends with it,

and invite death to the dinner table. One of the medicine women, he said, you like girls so much. You think of death as a lover. Death has to be your lover. Because out of death comes life. It's the cycles, the great cycles. Your skin cells die every six days.

You know, my new book grow a new brain. You grow a whole new brain every 22 days, an entirely new brain. So we live with death. and if we be friended, then we can kick up to the higher brain where we're not producing the stress molecules, but the bliss molecules. We begin producing the endogenous psychedelics. I love how you really so eloquently bridge how these ancient healing wisdom traditions

and emerging sciences through neuroplasticity and epigenetics are not two separate things, but there are two ways of looking at the same. thing. And when you speak to how our body is constantly renewing itself and the person seven years from today is not the same person. There's this old philosophical axiom of, you know, you take a ship and you take each wooden plank apart one by one and start replacing it with new ones. And by the time you replace a whole new ship, you're going to start again. Yeah, start again. And is it the same ship? You know, it brings in questions about what is the self and the ephemeral nature of self and our

our mind and body. But it does bring into, you know, question here the possibility to completely rewrite our life, our vitality, and how we can really serve the world because we have the ability to change and transform at any given moment. So I would love for you to explore the conciliency between the emerging sciences and epigenetics, neuroplasticity, and our ability to heal. Yeah, resilience is really the key. So the goals for longevity, basically, Basically, the first rule of longevity is don't do anything stupid. You know, don't die young, all right? And then you've got to really find a harmonic engagement with your environment,

not just with the supplements you're taking, with nature, with the sun, with sunlight, with how you breathe, and with where your food comes from. I used to bless my food, you know. I don't do that anymore. I used my food to bless me. So, and this is the keys that comes so naturally to indigenous. people because they are nature. And we are too. You know, we are all indigenous, all of us in this planet. And we're all natural. You know, it's not animals out there and we're not animals. We're

animals. We're biological beings. And if we can commune and be part of this great chain of life and life, extraordinary, the knowledge that grows within you. And it's interesting because to us, brain is, the mind is in the brain, but for so many of the indigenous people around the world, Himalayas, the Americas, the mind is in the heart. We've forgotten the intelligence of the heart. Yeah, we have. What, from that perspective in those traditions, do you think is most important to, to be reminded of about that?

Epigenetics and neuroplasticity. Those are the keys right there. So part of the problem we have. is that there's a religious movement in America that's very dangerous. And we have to be careful with, and it's called modern science. Materialism. Yeah, everybody's addicted. It's the scientific, and it turns out that half of the articles published in the Lancet

and the New England Journal of Medicine are bogus. And this is what their chief editors wrote in an editorial. Half of the science were guiding our lives with his bogus is not legitimate. And we have to become our own chief scientist. And the best way to approach that is after this experience of noses, where then you understand what epigenetics is about. Epigenetics is choreographing this orchestra of genetic expression. And you can silence genes, 2,000 genes that create disease in 24 hours

by eating your own homemade broccoli sprouts. Incredible epigenetic modifier. but everything you eat actually and everything you feel, every emotion is epigenetically influencing your, is influencing your genetic expression. And the neuroplasticity, again, we have to remember we are neuronal creatures, you know, that the heart has a brain, 100 million neurons, the gut has a huge brain, and they're all these creatures, all of nature is living inside you. So if we can bring the gut, the heart, and the brain in harmony with each other,

and it turns out that there's a neurochemical that does that, which is called serotonin. And serotonin is produced in your gut from triptophan, which is commonly in foods. But today we've been breeding foods for sweetness, whereas 100 years ago, foods had four times the triptophan content. Triptofan is turned into serotonin. The first job is to help you digest, to move food through your gut. The second job is to work its way up through your vagus nerve into your brain and to repair your hippocampus. And the hippocampus is where learning happens.

It's what gets damaged with dementia and with Alzheimer's. Serotonin repairs the hippocampus. That's why you have the SSRIs, very popular medication, that flood your brain with serotonin. And then if you can quiet the brain, going to stillness, the pineal will begin to take serotonin and turn it into melatonin. So you can sleep. Or so you can sleep and rest. Many people sleep and don't rest. And then if you got that covered, then the pineal will take serotonin and add a couple of methyl groups to it.

Remember, serotonin is a tryptamine and turned it into dye-2, dye-methyl, triptamine, which in the jungle they call ayahuasca, and which is produced especially when you're born, when you make love, and when you die, so you can take your consciousness with you. It can't be any coincidence that those three moments, the moment of creation, the moment of entering this plane, the moment of leaving it, both are coincided with the pharmacological release internally of DMT. Totally. But you've got to have the precursors. Yeah.

So then what would you say are the lowest hanging fruit to be able to cultivate those precursors in our body? Because we can work from the energetic level, the biological level, the neurological level. The nutrient density in our food is so much less than what it used to be. That's just one example. And so where do we go from here? Look, the easiest way is to rely on some supplements. Like I buy powdered tryptophan and I put it in my smoothie in the morning. Don't put too much because you'll get a little bit of a tummy ache.

Or 5HTP, you can take it in the evening. Again, three cursors for a tryptophan. But the problem is that if your gut is broken, taking antibiotic, you're not going to be able to manufacture serotonin. You don't have the bugs to do that. How important do you think like doing blood work and seeing deficiencies and whatnot? I know a mutual friend Mark Hyman has function health, which I've loved working with recently.

Well, yeah, what's the efficacy? Like the importance of getting under the hood in that aspect? I think that if you can get, I love function. And Mark and I have worked together for many, many decades. He's been to the Amazon with me a bunch of times and to Chile. And we've done programs together bringing cutting-edge medicine and the energy medicine of the shamans. So that's important info, but then you've got to take those lab reports and feed it into chat GPT

and say, give me an analysis of how I'm doing. What are my weak spots? Because a doctor will say, oh, your blood sugar levels are good, you know, and you have, your lead levels are fine, your aluminum a little bit high, your mercury. No, you want to know how it all works together. You know, you don't go to the car shop and say, how is my left tire working. You want to know how all of it is working together. And today, the AI engines can give you an amazing analysis if you feed that data to them.

And then you have to be sure that you don't think that that's the only reality. Yeah. Hey, guys, quick one. It just so happened to work out perfectly with the timing of this conversation with Alberto. If you're serious about understanding what's happening on the inside of your body, function health is the platform I trust and choose because they offer over 160 advanced lab tests, which is way more than your average checkup, and you get to see all of your results tracked over time in one secure platform. It's recommended by folks like Dr. Mark Hyman and Andrew Huberman,

and after getting my labs done with them, I can understand why. The lab visits are quick and convenient at more than 2,000 locations nationwide. The membership is just $4.99 a year, which is just $1.37 a day, and you get your insights from top doctors based on your unique results. There's no supplement upsells or pharma pitches, just pure, unbiased health data. Knowing what's happening inside your body is important for living with vitality, no matter your age or where you're at in your health journey. If you want to take ownership of your health, check out Function. The first 1,000 of you listeners will get a $100 credit towards membership.

just go to functionhealth.com backslash know thyself or use code know theyself 100 to get started. I hope you enjoy. Good luck. Back to the episode. So much of your work is kind of working at the core root. And as the saying goes, the formless informs the form. There are many more, a big sea of invisible forces that are working in and around and through us. And working with the energy body is,

is one example of working with things at the, kind of the source code level, if you will. Absolutely. Because, of course, it's important to look under the hood and work with the blood and the biology, and it's so easy to just go either or one or the other, right? You've got to do it all. Luckily, we have those tools like function health, you know.

We have labs, we have NDI, and we need to get the information, but then we need to not get wedded to the information and create a holistic, a integrated, plan. And I think something that's important to keep in mind here is that we're not a lab report. We're not your blood sugar level. You're not your creatine level. You're not, that's liver, you know, kidney phlegic, you're not your liver enzymes. You're a living miracle. And when I was seeing patients privately here in L.A., they were coming to my office with a big file full of

of diagnoses. I wanted to know what was wrong, but before that I wanted them to really understand that they're not a liver function test. They're not a cancer. They are a living miracle. And if I could get them to entertain that idea, then miracles would happen. Because reality really is not that fixed, you know, it's not that granular. But I'll tell you where I learned about the field, the energy Field. I have my research sponsored by a foundation many years ago, my late 20s. And they called me up and they said, you know, we need a junior anthropologist in Haiti for a voodoo study we're doing.

And I said, I don't know anything about voodoo. You know, my expertise is the upper Amazon. They say, yeah, we know. We're looking at your grant proposal right now. I said, when do you need me in Haiti? So the following week I was in Haiti and I got the junior anthropology stuff which was going house to house

finding how many children but I got to speak with one of the voodoo priests and voodoo is an amazing healing practice from Africa. Amazing healing practice. But like all energy healing it depends on the intent of the practitioner. So I asked the voodoo priest, I said,

how do you hurt someone? We don't hurt people. Well, when somebody, somebody's harming one of your people, how do you bring balance? It's easy. We take the rattle and we call their energy body to come to us when they're sleeping, and we look at their energy body and we find if there are any dark balls of energy. And then we just tap it, give it a little bit of energy,

and a month later, their immune system will collapse. And I go, wow, that's pretty intense. because it's like double-clicking on a program in an app in your desktop, right? Suddenly. And it's not that that dark energy was an imprint for heart disease. That was simply dark energy that was going to try to work its way out of the body to the weakest organ. So it could have manifested in any number of symptoms. I said, well, how do you heal?

He said, it's the same way. We called their energy body to come, and then we scan it. and we see this dark mass of energy in China, they call it Stale Chi, and we pull it out through one of the chakras. So it doesn't have to work its way out through the body. Oh, fantastic. I learned more about healing in that one week trip in Haiti than I had in the last 10 years before in the Amazon.

If I read correctly, at first you had some skepticism and they proved it to you in a sense. Oh, they did, yeah. with your own, like you wanted them to work on you essentially to see if it was real? Yeah, yeah. I told the senior anthropologist, stuff is all in your head.

You know, if you believe in it, you're doomed. If you don't, nothing can happen to you. And he said, you want to bet $100? I said, yeah, which is a lot of money for a graduate student. And we did, and we agreed that the following Saturday, the voodoo priest was going to give me a lesson. And I'm feeling great on first. I'm with friends having a glass of wine and dinner. Saturday. I'm throwing up. I think I've got a

parasite on the floor. I already had my appendix out so it couldn't be. And I was retching and convulsing and the phone rings and it's a call from Haiti. You said, are you feeling anything? We're working on you right now. I said, yeah, give him another $20 to reverse what he's doing. So this stuff works. It's an expensive lesson, but you got the message. I got the message, you know, save me a lot of personal pain. Yeah. And the idea is that as you go through your own healing process, you don't have to bump into it in reality.

You don't have to marry it or work for a person that, you know, that represents your on-heal parts. I feel like my disposition is a bit similar to yours and where I don't really believe anything. Like I come to know it experientially and that becomes true for me. but unless I work with somebody, you know, hand in hand, for example, like I have years back within like a really amazing Chinese medicine healer. And when you feel heat coming into your body from somebody's hand, even at a distance,

you start to question, okay, either I'm losing it or this is real and reality is not as I've, you know, yet to believe up to this point. Yeah. Reality and belief don't go together very well. the minute you're wedded to your beliefs you're going to be running into them in the world. And that's the key in terms of working with your energy body. And I can do a little demo with you

if you want to have an experience of this. So once you put your cup down and I'm going to come over to where you are and if I've seen this before, let's do some muscle testing. Once you put your arm out. Yeah, we can do that one. Okay.

And I'm going to pull this. push down and I want you to resist. Don't let me push down. Do both, both of them together like this so you can be stronger. All right. Don't let me push down. Okay. Wow.

You're really strong. Work out? That's a little bit. Okay. And now I'm going to work on your meridian system. Okay. Your acupuncture meridian system with your permission. Okay.

We have three of meridians in either side of the chest and I'm just interfering with the flow. Let me test your strength again. Okay. A little higher? Yep. Okay. Was it different there? It was a little bit of it.

Yeah, I felt like a little bit of weaker. Let's try now with a chakra. Okay. So let me just repair this because I don't want you. Sure. Not being able to sleep tonight. Okay. Okay.

Let me test your energy now. A little higher? Resist. You're bulletproof. I cannot. I mean, this is why martial artists work on each other energetically remotely, before they engage in any kind of contact. They're working on their field.

But you have tremendous integrity in your field. Thanks. Yeah. I could not get a... Usually, you know, when I'm on camera, I want to make sure that this works, but... Yeah, no, I think it's... It's so interesting when you, again,

work at something at the more fundamental essence. And so if somebody wants to practice and experience something like this more on their daily life, and they want to work with their own energy field. Of course, people are familiar with the biological systems and the neural correlates, a lot of things that kind of communicate

from the energy fields to the physical body. But if people want to work with the energy, the raw energy, what's an example or something that people can explore? Well, you know, the best thing is to begin with the chakras. And people ask me, do shamans have chakras? I thought chakras were Hindu. And I say to them, do Africans have livers? I thought livers were European.

And the chakras are part of your luminous anatomy. And today we understand how chakras were made. Chakra means a wheeled in Sanskrit, and their seers could look at the energy field, and they saw these circles spinning, these wheels spinning, seven of them. And they call them chakras. But a chakras created when you have an endocrine gland

and a nerve bundle on top of it. So what would be an example of physiologically? Your seventh chakra, your pineal gland, endocrine gland, hormones. And these are the two communication systems in the body, the timus, the genitone. So always a hormone gland and a nerve plexus. The nerve is electrical communication very rapid. The hormone is slow, feelings, moods. When you're working with the chakras, you're working with the information.

systems in the body. And you can begin with that as a practice to do at home is to, everything in our universe spins in a clockwise direction. We live in a clockwise universe. So you can balance your chakras. You know, I have a 102-year-old mother. She had COVID about two months ago. And I checked her chakras using a pendulum remotely. You can do this remotely or do it on yourself with a pendulum and then move your hands from one chakra to the other. I checked her chakras and the lower four chakras were kind of a mess. And so I separated them, spun them. And that afternoon she started complaining to the staff saying, I don't have COVID. Get me out of this place. full of people that are dying at 102.

So what happens when we have a health crisis is frequently our energy system will go out of balance. And if we can restore harmony in the system, it can then readjust itself at a higher level than it was before. So you don't just repair, you actually upgrade. And this has been beautifully described by the people that are studying complexity.

You know, how can you a system that's out of equilibrium? And if you have a small coherent island within that system, it can upgrade the entire system. And that's the work that we need to do today as shamans, as modern shamans, is create these islands of coherence in this time of great chaos so we can take that leap, not just fix things, but take that leap.

Yeah, those emergent self-organizing systems that build. Ilya, Pidigogine, I don't, yeah, that got the Nobel Prize for identifying these systems in 1977. Yeah, chemists, brilliant chemists. But we're, according to the shamans I work with, they say that before we were born, we were all gathered in a great green field. and a very big angel came out and said,

you know, it's going to be a very challenging time on earth. It's going to be war, there's going to be famine, there's going to be violence, there's going to be AI, who wants to come? And we all volunteered. We wanted to be part of the solution. And that's why we recognized each other so readily because we've been together before. And we've come here to help to dream a new world into being.

That's our primary task. To do that, you have to be healthy, right? We tend to have this very linear notion of time and reality. And I know various different cultures and traditions have different views on what time is and the time and the moment we currently find ourselves in. According to that incant tradition, correct, in the perspective of the homolumous,

I would love to get your perspective on time and what age this is. Yeah. Well, in India, they say, say this is the Kali Yuga, the era of Kali of renewal. And the Andes, they call it the Pachakuti, the turning over of the earth, the restoring balance to the earth, which is never easy, you know. In fact, Pachacuti refers to putting a plow in the earth and turning the earth over.

Interesting thing about the Andean conception is very much like quantum physics, because Pacha doesn't mean earth. It means space, it means space time. It can be used to refer to Earth as well, but it's about turning over space and time. The notion is that time doesn't fly only like an arrow, that the arrow of time, which we subscribe to in the West, is functional, it works.

It's not the only kind of time. There's the kind of time that turns like a wheel, or the figure-8s and pretzels back onto itself, or you can influence events that occurred in the past, or you can nudge destiny in a particular direction. And the idea is to drop in between the moments to step into infinity, which we're going to do at the end of our lives anyway, so we might as well get some training.

And within infinity is before things are born. The Tao, the Tao says, fix things before they're born. Somaji is here. Change the concept, change the belief, structure. change the model. And in these times where everybody's terrified about bad people using AI and even more terrified about bad AI's, this is a tremendous time of opportunity

where we need to really examine the limiting beliefs that we have and be able to step into a new relationship with intelligence that works on a completely different kind of time that ours does. But in the shamanic notion, you can influence events that occurred in the past. You can influence destiny. You can do a destiny retrieval

and not only a soul retrieval, which is going to the past along someone's timeline. You can follow that timeline into the future. See, the way a timeline works is like a rope, like a golden rope. And here in the present, you have all of these threads that are possibilities. And the possibility we may want, if we're going through a health crisis,

may not be a very probable one. But as long as it's permissible, you can summon the energies and the wisdom to help shift the timeline to align with your new state of health or with the world that we want to have our children be born into. It can feel extremely frightening with everything that you see pop up on the news day in and day out. And I think it's important to have the micro perspective of what we can do to serve locally in our communities in that way. And then also it's helpful to understand from a macro perspective the time that we're in.

And I know, again, through these different indigenous perspectives like the Mayans who had various different types calendars for different lengths of periods of time. Yeah, the Mayans have 23 calendars. Yeah, it's fascinating to see the overlap, too, of what people say about this time and particularly leading up to 2030. Yeah, you know, the Anian perspective is one of tremendous, it's very optimistic. We got to get rid of this dystopian future, you know. Forget about that.

You can't be part of it if you're already subscribed to the worst-case scenario. So we got to get rid of that notion and know that we're in the midst of huge, extraordinary, extraordinary change. And that part of what we can do individually is future track. See, this is what the shamans did all the time. If you were a shaman in the coast, you were a medicine woman, you had to lead the fishermen to where the fish were going to be the next morning. If you were a medicine man in the mountains,

you had to lead the hunters to where the buffalo is going to be the next day. If you got there and there were fresh buffalo prints, you got fired. You had the future track. And today, the fabric of time and reality is so malleable that we can future track dates of extraordinary health, that we can anchor into our timeline in the future so we can increase the resilience of our systems in the face of all of the assaults that we're getting in the food, the water we drink, the air we breathe. that. So yes, to do that, we have to do what the Tao says, fix things before they're born.

Could you help walk somebody new to this through the medicine wheel and the directions and how they correlate to our psychology and spirituality? That's a big topic. In three minutes or less, for sure. Maybe we can do a little bit of an overview and then we can dive into different things we want. So the medicine wheel is a map. It's a vehicle, actually. But it's a three-dimensional map of how you can become the homolumulus, of how you can re-inform your biology,

how you can be informed directly by nature and not need to optimize your immunity by getting sick, which is how we normally, when we get a cold, we'll never get that cold again. Well, what if we could download the codes from the field that would train our own immune system? But the medicine wheel has four steps that are described by four power animals.

The serpent, the jaguar, the hummingbird, and the eagle or the condor. The way of the serpent is shedding the past the way you shed your skin, which is all at once. And it requires understanding that what happened to you is just the story. This is an interesting approach to trauma. Trauma is not what happened to you.

Trauma is the story you wrap around it. And then when you understand that you don't, you're not the story. You can be the storyteller. Then healing is accelerated. And so that's, that's point number one. Then after, and the serpent also returns you to the mother. So you can have your belly on the belly of the mother, the belly of the earth, returning, the return to the mother, the return to the goddess, to the feminine, to Pachamama. She's the, she wants us to be well. Once we take those steps, and this is what I do professionally today, I train modern

shamans and we used, my wife and I use the medicine wheel as the training tool. Then you go to the Jaguar in the West. Jaguar medicine is about becoming fearless. It doesn't mean that you don't get afraid ever. It means you're not trapped in the grip of fear. You're not living in fight or flight. You can chill. Jaguar medicine is about daring to go into those hidden places

that we don't want to look at and finding what's there and bringing it to consciousness and to awareness. Jaguar medicine is about not no longer being an earth parasite, but becoming an earth keeper. Because the jaguar is at the top of the food chain has no enemies, no predators. So jaguar medicine is really important today because we step beyond death. And the initiation in that part, that step is that you journey, you die before you die. We spoke about that earlier. And then you go into the hummingbird.

and hummingbird medicine is about the epic journey because hummingbirds migrate from Brazil to Canada and they're not even made for flight you know they're not sitting around saying there are no flowers to suck on until we get to Cuba and I'm too overweight, I'm too skinny I don't have enough time, enough money, enough sleep. No, they go, they say yes to the calling from spirit

and that's a hard one, that's a tough one. had my calling from spirit when my children were little. And I kept saying to God, but my kids are little, you know, I need to teach at the university. I need a job. How am I going to say? I was using my kids as an excuse with God, you know. And we need to, we're at the point today when it's essential that we say yes to our great hero's journey. Because in our culture, we're encouraged to be in the victim's journey, medicating ourselves, talking about what's wrong with us, ongoing therapy, there's nothing more boring than being with a 50-year-old who's still dealing with mommy, daddy issues. Like, come on, you know, there's more to life. Hummingbird medicine and saying yes to the

great calling, even without having enough money, enough time, enough resources, enough knowledge, saying yes, that act of saying yes becomes an act of power that the universe really supports at that time. And then the fourth step is eagle medicine. And eagles have,

eagle medicine has no obstacles. They just fly a little bit higher. So you don't keep bumping into obstacles. You just learn to rise above them. You learn to have to open your inner vision so you can see with clarity

not only the invisible world that becomes open to you but you can see more mundane things like you can see when somebody's lying to you which is really blatantly obvious but we don't want to see it and to be able to awaken that medicine that power

you first have to be willing to see everything about yourself and that's terrifying your beauty your horribleness your viciousness, your, and all of the things that we project onto others, including our beauty and our great power. That's fascinating that we can also be terrified, not just of our own perceived inadequacies, but also the power of our light.

It can be terrifying, eh? Yeah, it's absolutely terrifying. We keep looking for what our purpose is and our purposes to be terrified and to find it. and create it and not just wait until you get the handwriting on the wall, but you co-create that your meaning and your purpose with spirit. And you can, you have free options. So from working with those from the serpent to the jaguar to the hummingbird to the eagle, which by the way, I mentioned to you, I was talking to my neighbor who did a healing session with you

when he was young and your clinic in Santa Monica, right after we mentioned your name in Eagle swooped down right next to us. Flew like maybe two feet from the ground. Really? I was like, well, there's Alberto. You know, it's the universe begins speaking to you and you move out of the realm of logic, which is founded on cost and effect causality,

and you move into synchronicity, what Carl Jung calls synchronicity. I wanted to ask you about this, because I'm curious how you delineate, like as you raise your sensitivity, you start to experience more of these, what you might say is coincidences, synchronicities. At the same time,

it can be easy to fall into the notion every time you see 11-11 on your microwave that you think God is speaking to you. Who knows, maybe it is, maybe, you know, but how do you discern, I guess, your connection to life's messages that are around you and what you're labeling on top of

I suppose your surroundings, top down, bottom up. Yeah, yeah, that's a really good question because you don't, every time you see 444, you don't want to go, I'm really cool, you know, guys, paying special attention to me. And that's narcissistic, that's getting into the trap. And that's happening all the time, by the way. And then they're the bigger synchronicity. And you want to eventually have the kind of synchronicity

where you one day sit down and meditate, envisioning peace in the world, then it happens. Because synchronicities are invitations, they're non-causal events. And the minute you begin to participate with those natural dynamics of non-c causal relationships, then you step into the divine place,

into the God place, and to say, hey, you know, you are also a creator, a co-creator. What do you want to create? Would you say that as you grow on your journey, you're actually experiencing more of those synchronistic experiences are coming into your life or your ability to pay attention to them and become aware of them is increased? You know, they're really good feedback when you get them and you go, God, I'm in alignment

with things, but then you get a dry spell. And life is testing you're saying, can you create synchronicity? Can you become the synchronicity, not just wait for external events, become that sacred synchronicity that can be empowering your mission here on the earth. But we have to be careful. We don't get seduced and deluded easily. And it has to be in service to a greater hole than you. Hey, fam.

One thing that brings me a sense of ease and joy in my life, like I hope this episode is bringing you is my morning ritual. Having healthy habits in the morning that build the foundation for steady energy throughout the rest of the day is a major key. And for me, every day I start with shrooms. Not the psychedelic kind, but through a coffee alternative, like the ones in mudwater, where their blend contains adaptogenic mushrooms like Lions Main to support focus, chaga and Rishi to support your immune system. And for me, drinking something like cacao instead of coffee in the morning is a win, and I rarely go without it. If you don't know, Mudwater is 100% organic, non-GMO, gluten-free, sugar-free, and vegan. I absolutely love the company.

My buddy, Shane, is the founder, and I know how much intention they put into their creations. If you want to give them a try out, you can go to mudwater.com slash know-they-self and grab your starter kit, which looks like this. Right now, our community gets an exclusive deal, which is up to 43% off your entire order, plus a free rechargeable frother and even free shipping. Again, that's up to 43% off at M-U-D-W-T-R.com forward slash know-thyself. I hope that you enjoy. It's interesting what happens when you devote your life in a direction that is greater than you and what becomes available to you.

It feels like as we live and it's spoken of throughout various different scriptures about living in alignment with our Dharma and how when you protect your purpose and your Dharma, it protects you, and you are given what you're needed in a sense. So have you come to experience that in your own life? Yeah, it's, you know, for a long time, I was motivated by rebellion. I wanted to prove to show my peers that these people that they dismissed, the indigenous people, they said, why do you want to study them? They can't even read or write, which means you're illiterate,

and if you're illiterate, you're stupid. How can you be stupid and still build pyramids? Cities in the clouds like Machu Picchu. Our Western science is very dismissive of the ancient traditions, and that's a colonialistic attitude that's prevalent in Western science. But from that period in my life, I was still operating from my karma. I was still, I was in battle mode. You know, I'm going to show you how wrong you are.

And then I went into Dharma, and in Dharma, it became effortless. There's an effortless quality to being in the flow of your own journey, where there's no, there's no efforting required. There's a lot of work. But efforting is trying to ban reality to fit your needs, and then you're arguing with reality, and you're going to end up losing always, you know. Yeah. the awakened state doesn't mean you sit inert in a cave somewhere,

although you might want to do that too, but that your action isn't being fueled from your own sense of egocentricity. Like you're doing what you ought to do in any given moment and what needs to be done, which is then you're responding to life instead of just continually reacting to your own neuroses. And confusing that for reality too. So one of the teachings of hummingbird medicine is called non-doing. but witnessing how things happen as soon as you stop being the doer.

In the South, another one of the practices is that things stop happening to you and they begin happening for you. And you go, oh, what a gift. How can I turn this diagnosis into a gift? And then that becomes your quest. So they're great gifts in the medicine traditions, and it works at four different levels. So we've talked about the medicine wheel, serpent,

jaguar, hummingbird. Eagle, it talks about four levels of reality. The first one is the serpent level and the language of that level is molecules, brain chemistry, body chemistry, physical. So the second level, which is jaguar, is the emotional, the mind. And we know the mind influences the body.

and the language of that level is conversational language. And it's interesting that every one of us has an inner dialogue going all the time. And one of the purposes of mantra is to quiet this inner dialogue because the very first neural circuits of language happened on survival circuits. Because we didn't say, hey, Andre, how was your day today? No, tiger. Oh. So, and it still operates at that lower brain level,

which is scripting our reality in a very limited way. So we've become masters of the mind. How do you quiet the mind without struggling with it? And the, and then the level above it, a hummingbird is the level of what we would call the soul. The soul informs the mind that informs the body, and the level of the soul is, without words. There's no language, spoken language. Maybe a little poetry. Rumi maybe could go there,

but... And then the level above that, which is the level of ego, is pure energy. So you've got to work at all four of these levels. You've got to change your diet and exercise more. You've got to find quiet and peace in your mind and practice forgiveness. And then at the soul level, you've got to... Every breath you take. The meditation you get at that level, is a breathing practice. And it goes like this. When I inhale, I go, I am. And hopefully the very last breath you take,

you can attach the I am to it. You know, the breath will be gone, but I am will remain there. And then at the level of the energetic, you understand that everything in the scene and the unseen world is composed of energy strands that organize themselves in a particular form that have a name for a short time

and that we need to interact at all levels. You can't just be stuck at this energetic void of emptiness because that's denying reality. That's where you were born here. You know, there's no chocolate in the spirit world. They're born here to have an experience of being embodied. Yeah. We spoke to working with the physical version,

reality of the Russian doll, so to speak. Is there anything you'd like to add about the psycho-emotional component of disease, illness, struggle that we experience in the denser level physiologically. Again, it is something that I think Western maybe medicine is starting to catch up to, but sees them as very split things. And so when you look at healing an individual, of course, we can do the blood work, eat the right foods, all the things.

Yet there are these subconscious programs, fears, things that we have. and resolved within us that have the physiological correlates and consequences. And so what do you think about healing from at that level and the importance of it? I think it's essential. You know, my view is that every illness doesn't have an 80% psychosomatic component. It has 100% psychosomatic component that's expressing symptoms now through the body. and if you treat the symptoms without treating the root cause, it doesn't matter how much you change your diet

and how much you need to get to find that place of forgiveness and then gratitude. So it goes in that order. The first thing is you believe that things have been done to you and you want to forgive the people that did it. Very liberating. And then the next step is you want to be grateful to them or be grateful to life for having offered you a disloyal. lesson. And one of my students asked me, why should I be grateful to this relative that violated me

and abused me sexually? I said, not to him, but to life. And what are the gifts that you receive? What did you learn from those terrible experiences that you hope will never happen again? So there you know the things happen for you, not to you. And I practice gratitude. That's the only practice, ultimately, really, at the level of hummingbird. I think as you explore reality in these different ways, I've definitely, and I'm sure many people who are listening to this podcast by virtue of alignment, have gone through periods of more existential inquiry about what life is, who I am, what do I make of this life, and you have an interesting distinction between destiny and fate, and I would love for you

to just explore your perspective on that. and, yeah, claiming certain timelines in our life. And for somebody that's listening to this episode right now, that, of course, wants to make the most of their life, die before they die, and live in a harmonious state that leads to a certain fate. What would you... Yeah, this is a really fine separation

between destiny and fate, and the sense here's that fate has been preordained for you, by your family dynamics, by your genetics, by your skin color. Fate has been preordidim. Whereas destiny, you get to select. Now, the Greeks were not too convinced that you had such a thing as destiny. They said there were the three fates. One of them cut the wool of it, the thread,

the other one cut the thread, and the other one wove the cloth of your life. I think it was Cleto that cut cord of your life. longevity, and now there's a new set of genes that have been found called the Cleto genes, which are the longevity genes, appropriate name. But the shamanic perspective is that you do have a choice to craft a destiny. And to do that, you need to finish the process of rebelling against the family you were born into, the things that happened to you, because at that point it becomes a distraction.

prior to that it becomes a necessary exploration of how you were wounded and how you were hurt. And at the point of crafting a destiny, if you continue doing that, it's a distraction from your destiny. You're still going to be in the hands of fate. And that requires a statement of intent of saying this is what I am choosing to do even without having enough information about where there's right for me or not. So you take a stand and you decide the kind of people you want to be with and you clean up the friendships that are not leading you to be in your best and your pious self. And you're going to lose a lot of friends because a lot of them were convenience friends. And you may even go through a dark night of the soul, a period of wondering who am I?

Why am I doing this? It was, you know, that marriage that I was in was not the best, but at least, you know, it's the story of when the Israelites left Egypt and Moses was saying, come on, we got to leave Egypt. He said, well, you know, it's not much of a life, but at least we get a couple weeks holiday a year. We're building pyramids for the pharaoh. So, you know, you no longer tolerate the things that compromise your integrity or your sense of wholeness or being. Despite what the apparent cost is going to be here. It's an act of courage,

but life will keep bringing you to it until you say yes one day. It does seem that way that we will experience lessons repeatedly until we, in essence, past the test, you know. You keep repeating the grade until you... Yeah. Yeah.

That message of dying before you die and being on the sincere path of self, Self-realization means that you need to confront all of those parts of you that are tied to old paradigms and stories that are no longer serving. It can be quite frightening in the moment when you are identified with a part of yourself in that context. And I'm just wondering, what have you seen really support people and yourself on the path of letting go of those versions of identity that are no longer serving?

Yeah. That's, you know, at my age, I've had the chance to coach a number of people and myself as well, which I don't recommend. I recommend that if you get a coach, get somebody else who can help you. You're your own worst coach. I love the French description of an orgasm. You know, they call it the little death, le petit mort. And this is, and when you go through that little death, it is,

It's orgasmic. I mean, you have this heavenly, it's not a genital, it's this heavenly celestial laugh that comes out of. And nothing's changed. Everything is the same, but nothing, but nothing's changed. But everything is different. So it's more readily available to us than we'd like to think. We believe we have to struggle to make our way to become enlightened

or become self-realized. and when in the shamani traditions, all it takes is a yes. Yes. And you live in a state of yes. In fact, they have a word for it called Ain'i. And Aini in the Ketua language means reciprocity. You have a reciprocal relationship with nature, with your partner, with life. Life supports you.

You support life. But the other translation of Aini means yes. You live in a state of yes. to wait for spirit to ask you if you're ready for, no, you say yes before you get asked. And to live in that state of yes, it's a discipline, it's a practice. It's not saying it once, but saying it to every moment, every opportunity that you have. You say, yes, this is for my highest and the highest good in my journey. Yeah, it's such a persistent delusion that we place a future state of being being more worth our presence and a more ideal place. Not that we can't strive for

better surroundings or experience, but the owning our current moment and challenges with presence, I feel like allows us to actually move through them and get the lesson and pass the grade like you were speaking to. But it's become difficult in a culture, society, familiar, you know, growing up through a family and education system that really is in so many ways calcifying us into a small perceived version of self and have very much so lost connection to the nature around us and within us. And as we want to say yes to life and live in that reciprocity with nature, I would love to just some perspectives from you on really practical things and practices people can apply in their life to remember their connection to nature.

Yeah, well, you can't really forget it ever. Because you eat, you poop, you breathe, you don't, you can't. So know that you are nature and then walk, don't go for a walk with your cell phone. You know, leave it at home. Connect to nature. Connect with what's your environment. And connect with people, make eye contact with them. Touch someone, you know, discreetly.

but have some contact with them. So those are all practices that can be very viable and powerful. What I would recommend the most, and I like that you use that word calcified, you know, because if you have calcium in your body that's designed to be going to your bones, but instead of going into your arteries, it's in the wrong place, you know.

And we do that because we don't have enough vitamin K2. K2 transport calcium from blood vessels to bones so you don't get osteoporosis. And we get calcified when we don't transport the wisdom that's offered to us to its destination. When we try to hoard it or we try to limit it or we try to decipher it too quickly, you know, we suffer in the West from premature evaluation. You know, we want to make sense of this too quickly. You wake up in the morning, you've got a fresh dream and you want to, What's it saying to me?

Hold it. You know, go back to bed, hug the pillow. Look at it from the four levels, not just the literal level, but from your emotional, every part of you, of that dream is a part of you. From Hummingbird, what is the sacred message? And then invite that practice of nosis. But to get to that, you need to be comfortable with the fact that death is, our constant companion.

You mentioned earlier how our fear of death is at the root of all disease. Personally, it's a topic I'm exploring a lot right now. Also, I know we have a mutual friend, said guru, who just came out with a book about death as well. So it's in the field right now, you know, for me, I think it's so powerful, the contemplation about our own mortality

and what that means about bringing presents to life and to truly live this life. It feels like we're so often under the presumption that we're just going to live forever. And we take for granted our current moment. Is there any other thought you have there on how death and life are on the same side of one coin? And by embracing, you know, death in many different forms through old versions of ourselves to the physiological level, we can unlock our true vitality and true life. you know, there's a way that people used to die

before they started dying in hospitals. And there was a wonderful article published in the New England Journal Medicine written, co-authored by 800 nurses about this way of dying, which is voluntarily stopping eating and drinking. And if you do that, if you stop eating and drinking, you can die at home. Today we understand what the body,

goes through, you don't eat, you don't drink, you start burning your own body fat, you go into ketosis, you get alert, you get bright. And the nurses report that out of a scale at 10, this style of dying that anybody can do is an 8, in 8 and a 9, versus the way we've seen our loved ones die. And we all have parents or loved ones that are getting older and that, you know, they are precariously. balance in this, how do you turn the end of your life over to the medical system when it hasn't been fair to you the rest of your life? It's not going to save you now. And one of the things that all of these nurses point out is that when you do that dying practice, which is the way people

used to die, you stop eating, drinking, but the body still begins to burn this body fat. You get very lucid. And then you have a moment that they call, I forget what I call it. Terminal lucidity? Terminal lucidity. Yeah. And terminal lucidity, one out of three people experienced that, which is that, you know, mom has come back and she recognizes me and is talking to everybody and remembering her youth.

And it'll last for a few hours or sometimes a couple of days. And then people make the mistake of saying, you know, mom is getting better. Let's see what medical intervention. And it's called terminal lucidity because it happens right before death. And it happens, of course, when we start burning fat for fuel for three or four days. And when we get a rush of DMT, dimethyptomy, in ayahuasca, and your pineal gland and your brain, and you suddenly understand life.

So this is why getting to that place through your practice, which could be meditation or even intermittent fasting to turn on your fat burning engines. and then practicing a stillness practice that can allow for you to see through the veil of death. It's fascinating how in those cases where even somebody with immense Alzheimer's or dementia and terminal lucidity kicks in and it's perfect clarity and recall and memory.

A broken brain. That's a trip. Isn't it? Yeah, it's amazing. So we have to be able to have access to that experience, not the last couple of days of your life, but today, that's what you want to cultivate, is that non-terminal lucidity,

that present moment lucidity, and have a little taste of it and have the, and have that become a source of self-guidance. Yeah. I think it's a point of guidance that we've largely lost in the modern world is our allies in the plant and animal kingdom and returning to our true nature. And I would love to just explore it a bit more with you.

We went through the medicine wheel earlier a little bit through the animal kingdom and whatnot. And I know so much of your practice and also in the indigenous shaman practices as well, working with various plant medicines. Yeah, I'm curious about what your thoughts are and the efficacy of these in the right context and the right set, in the right setting

with the right teachers and the right guidance to be able to experience and remember that state. Yeah. You know, I write about this in my new book, Grow New Brain. And what I do today is to train modern shamans that know the visible and the invisible world. And the plant medicine has always played a very important part in all of the Native American traditions, except the ones that used vision quest or dark retreats, for example, which were triggering the endogenous production of your own psychedelics in your brain. You know, psilocybin is a methylated dopamine.

Ayahuasca is identical to serotonin. Why did God give us, you know, receptor sites for all of these amazing plants? And it's because they have been catalytic of evolution. And today as we're approaching this evolutionary quandary that we're in, where we need to take a quantum leap, I think that so many, I know more planned medicine ceremony is happening in L.A. than I do in the Amazon. Because they're everywhere in London, in L.A. and in Berlin. So we're looking for it. We're looking for it.

And we don't have the endogenous support, which is what we need to do as well. the supplement with the 5HDP with the triptophan so you don't just have, you know, you had dinner with the goddess two days ago and you can't remember anything. So you can integrate it. What I tell people is we have to wake up and then we have to grow up and then we have to show up. Amazon presents Jeff versus Taco Truck Salsa, whether it's Verde, Roja, or the orange one. For Jeff, trying any salsa is like playing Russian roulette with a flame thrower. Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon and stocked up on antacids, ginger tea, and milk.

Habaniero? More like Habinier, yes. Save the everyday with Amazon. There's something else here now. Something new. From exclusively on Paramount Plus, it's the series Stephen King calls Scarious Hell. Everything here is impossible, but it's also real. Sci-Fi vision calls it the best show streaming right now. We're running out of time and we still don't know the rules. Don't miss what the movie blog calls something you need to watch.

Saving those children is how we all go home. From Binge All Episodes exclusively on Paramount Plus. Yeah, I did a whole episode on Ken Wilbur's framework with also in Dr. John Churchill's. He added and makes space for the fuck up. You know, when we fall short on that process as well. Totally. Yeah. And that's going to be intermittent.

You know, between each one of these steps. To love yourself, the spider yourself. Yeah, yeah. But that process of growing up and waking up and growing up and showing up really does require the integration process because our life is so much of the path of awareness, a growth of awareness and that integration of that. And where the westernized, in certain cases, appropriated versions of plant medicine ceremonies can go wrong is it's a roller coaster ride to get high and not the right setting, integrate it into your being and use it as a catalyst because awareness is great, right? And we can gain buckets of awareness.

Why, it's not enough? Huh? It's not enough. So, yeah, I just love for you to speak to the importance of that. I'll tell you how I'm microdosing now. and a microdosing with ayahuasca. But it's a very diluted ayahuasca, at homeopathic dosage.

Like subperceptual? Like, do you even notice, really? You don't notice anything, but it trains, it uptrains your energy field, and it catalyzes the endogenous production. So this is like a DLM at the 50,000, one, you know, it's nothing. There's nothing chemical there any longer,

but there's the imprint, energetic imprint. I mean, microdosing other things are wonderful. They're very insightful, creative processes. But for me, the DMT and the relationship to serotonin, I think is really critical because serotonin and DMT are ubiquitous in the planned kingdom and in the animal kingdom. This is the spirit molecule for all forms of life. Rocks are the only ones that don't have it.

So why did the great spirit select this particular molecule And as I do this homeopathic dosing, my luminous body recognizes the instructions. I get the code. And I think that the plant, the ayahuasca in particular has really taken over the planet. I think it's fantastic that the plant is everywhere. We don't have the training.

When I first did ayahuasca, I had to fast for two weeks and do special cleanses. You know, we go Friday night. We don't prepare for it, but we need to find how we can prepare for each one of us individually. What intentionality do you bring? How do you support your brain with the omega-3 so you can then integrate it, carry it home with you?

And we have the science. We know how to do it, you know? That's the beauty of it. Do you feel that as you grow and raise your own sensitivity, your reliance on exogenous catalysts for these states are lessened in terms of how much you're required. And you have the ability to at will and through your practices, endogenously create these states.

Totally. Yeah. Absolutely. I think that, you know, people ask me, do you meditate, Alberto? I said, yeah, I meditate. All do you meditate for? I got it down to about 23 hours a day. You know, you come into the state of communion with all life.

it's not high, you're not watching the table melt in front of you you're not seeing power animals in the jungle which is amazing when you become a jaguar you're going to the jungle but you're in harmonious engagement and I think that that's what we can all do

we're all called to do that amazing well listen I mean I think the way that you are able to be a bridge and have been for so long integrating these different perspectives from the psychological to the spiritual to the biological is is really needed right now more than ever because as you spoke to this time of emerging homoluminesus we need these wisdom keepers and

teachers to be a bridge for the coming together and cohesion of these different understandings and perspectives because we're so identified with one perspective being right over the other instead of acknowledging how they're all interplayed into one big play, you know. And homoluminesus is you and I and every one of our viewers. And the first step is yes, yes. Say yes, not maybe or maybe when I get a good night's sleep. No, yes. You step into yes, into that I need, that right relationship with all of nature and life.

Well, thank you for having me in your, program. Yeah. It's been a pleasure to have dance with you with all these topics. Yeah. Yeah. It's my favorite thing ever. So I just love getting to dive deep around all these and it's a pleasure to be connected with you. And we'll link down also your new book down in the description for people to stay connected with you. I also just want to open the floor for any last thoughts you have around anything. Maybe feel like we haven't covered, also where people can

stay connected with you towards the end. But is there anything else that you'd like to share? So the one thought that it's been haunting me personally is saying yes is a start and continuing to say yes, but what am I saying yes to? You know, what am I saying yes to me? Am I giving myself blanket permission to do anything I want? Or how can I best be of service to all creatures in this planet? to the forest, to the, and it's a big unknown.

Some days I wake up with crystal clear clarity, and some days I'm just going, you know, this is just too confusing. I have no idea what I'm doing or why I'm doing it, but I'm going to do it anyway. So it's a befuddling, bewildering time, and I really want to encourage our viewers to, stick with it because it's going to get more interesting. It's not going to get calmer or less bewildering. It's going to get more interesting. And we need each other. We need to be in community

with each other. We're not doing this alone. This is not personal enlightenment. Maybe a version, there will be some of that as well, but this is a pivotal, amazing time for humanity for all life forms in the earth. That's never occurred. Wow, what a privilege to be alive for that. And it's perfectly natural and normal to be totally confused. Stay with that too. Honor that. Yeah, that's, I think, a really awesome note to end on too because we're turning that sort of compassion back into our own journey, whether it's the highs, the lows, the times where it's yeses, times where it's noes, and we're confused or we have clarity. It's all included on the path. Somebody asked me the other day, well, what happens after you transcend yourself, you know,

the lower s self or the big s self. So, well, the first thing you need to do is get rid of the S, you know. You're left with elf, which are these magical creatures from northern Europe, the elves, you know. Want to get over yourself? Drop the S and step into your magic and to the ancestral magic. Yeah. One last note I want to ask is just because it was provoked is as you do that, you start to gain access to what were once latent faculties and gifts that come online,

both in your ability to share, communicate, serve, but then also faculties in terms of becoming a multi-sensory human being. This is noses. Noses is not just knowing intellectually. It's becoming, it's acquiring these superpowers. I did a book, a translation of the original book on shamanism, which are the yoga sutras of Patanjali, beautiful book, did a shamanic version of that. And they have a whole section dedicated to the powers and faculties that are awakened

as a result of you being committed to be part of a co-creative process. Extraordinary. Powers, abilities beyond your wildest dreams. And part of it means that you need to begin to go back to your dreaming. that dreaming we do while we sleep. And I'm going to share a dreaming technique because in your dreams, you're not so bonded to the biological,

your consciousness can expand. If you take a small glass of water, not this big, but a small glass and hold it and instruct your body mind that when I wake up, I'm going to drink half of this glass now. And when I wake up, I'll drink the other half, and my dreams will come back to me. And then you drink half, a small amount. And then in the morning you wake up and drink the other half,

and you find after a week or two that your dreams will begin to come back. And then the next step is to do the same practice, but drink the other half of the glass inside a dream. So you look for that glass of water and you find it and you drink and you wake up inside the dream. You're lucid dreaming. And then the third step is that when you are having a big, business lunch or meeting with friends and they serve water in a restaurant, that sip of water

that you have and you wake up inside this dream. Layers upon layers in reality. Yeah. That's a powerful practice and also water being the perfect vessel for that catalyst. Yeah. Yeah. Well, is there any other thoughts you have on the importance of recalling and decoding our dream world? I think that we're being spoken to and guided by the invisible world right now through these times. But we need to be able to recall our dreams or learn deep meditation practice so we can do it in a waking state.

So much easier to do it in your dreams. And we have luminous beings, ancient shamans, Buddhhas that are training us from the invisible world because we don't have much time. You know, we have a decade maybe or two. To create a new human. What a ride. Yeah, what a ride.

It's a fun time to be alive. Yeah, it's a great time. I wouldn't trade it for anything else. Alberto, thank you so much, man. Thank you so much, Andre. Yeah, it's a pleasure. Truly an honor to have you here. Anywhere else you'd like to point people

in terms of social media website? Yeah, my website is leiforwins.com and we have a shamanic monastery that we run in Chile. which I can send you information on. It's called Los Lobos, the Wolves, Sanctuary. That sounds awesome. Yeah, come visit us sometime.

I would love to. Yeah, that would be fun. I'd love to have you. Thank you so much. Well, everybody, I appreciate you. Thanks for coming on this journey of knowing yourself. And let us know in which way is this episode and the conversation today evoke something within you and maybe a nosis. And until next time, be well.