Modern Wisdom - #494 - Dr Martin Polanco & Michael Higgs - How Does Psychedelic Treatment Work For PTSD?

Episode Date: July 2, 2022

Martin Polanco is Founder of The Mission Within and a Veteran Mental Health Advocate and Michael Higgs was Command Master Chief of a Navy SEAL team and is Director of Operations at The Mission Within. For a very long time, once soldiers have finished in war, their battles have often continued back home. Both active and retired veterans suffer with childhood traumas, life traumas, divorces, opioid addiction, family issues, Traumatic Brain Injuries, deaths of team members, chronic pain injuries and long term inflammation. Martin and Michael believe that psychedelics are an important potential solution to give suffering veterans another shot at a functional life. Expect to learn how iboga rewires the brain in 12 hours, why Michael held a gun to his head after being out of the seals for two years, the insane pressure placed on Special Forces operators by themselves, what happened when Michael ate 20g of mushrooms on a Native Indian reservation, how to sign up to Martin's current studies which he needs volunteers for and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get £250 discount on Eight Sleep products at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 2 weeks free access to Wondrium by going to https://www.wondrium.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 20% discount on the highest quality CBD Products from Pure Sport at https://bit.ly/cbdwisdom (use code: MW20) Extra Stuff: Check out Martin & Michael's website - https://missionwithin.org/  If you want to sign up to The Mission Within's medical trials - https://missionwithin.org/gold-star/  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to this show. My guests today are Martin Palanco, who's the founder of the Mission Within and a veteran mental health advocate and Michael Higgs, who was command master chief of a Navy SEAL team and is director of operations at the Mission Within. For a long time, once soldiers who have finished in war, their battles have often continued back home. Both active and retired veterans suffer with childhood traumas, life traumas, divorces, opioid addiction, family issues, traumatic brain injuries, deaths of team members, chronic pain injuries, and long-term inflammation. Martin and Michael believe that psychedelics

are an important potential solution to give suffering veterans another shot at a functional life. Today, expect to learn how Iboga rewires the brain in 12 hours. Why Michael held a gun to his head after being out of the seals for two years? The insane pressure placed on special forces operators by themselves. What happened when Michael ate 20 grams of mushrooms on a native Indian reservation? How to sign up for Martin's current studies, which he needs volunteers for, and much more.

This is a conversation I think you're going to see a lot more of the coming years with athletes coming out of sports like American football and rugby and boxing, needing therapy to help them with traumatic brain injuries and CTE, and with the reams and reams of service men and women that also need help with whether it be psychological, spiritual or physical issues that they've accumulated whilst keeping their country safe. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Martin Palanco and Michael Higgs. Give me the story of how you guys first met. So we met in context of treatment with psychedelics.

So I was running a program for special operations guys called the Mission Within. And we had been working with veterans since 2015, and I had treated some of Michael's or punky's friends. So he was trying to refer another buddy, and I don't wanna get too much into the details because their concern is just medical information but I'll let punky really dive into how far and how deep he was to go. Yeah pretty much a more gene said it was two years ago, four years out of my retirement and

I was in school and I was finally the train of life finally caught up with me. And I had reached out to Marjana to help another friend of mine to get into a program that I had heard about from a bunch of other friends, but didn't really know too much about it. It was a psychedelic program. It came around at just the right time for me and it just right time for my friend as well. Then I've been involved with a Martina for sense. What do you mean when you say that the train of life had come around?

Yeah, for me, you know, it was the 30 years in the SEAL teams, you know, and then normal, I say the normal life traumas that we all have that would kind of run away from, like we're always moving target until light catches up with us. So, you know, childhood traumas is a kid, and then life traumas is a young adult, two divorces had a spouse addicted to opioids, living in that kind of tumultuous world, a daughter addicted opioids as well,

for time during the big opioid epidemic, at the same time the work kicked off, so I was like fighting, I felt like I was kind of fighting on two different fronts at the same time. Then a bunch of losses overseas, a friends, and then a bunch of moral injury, then a bunch of blast centers to my noggin, and then masking all that with pain pills and psychotropic and everything else, just trying to keep the wheels turning and keep myself moving forward. And eventually, just kind of all caught up with me.

Were you trying to medicate while you were still in the teams to keep you moving forward while you were working? Yeah, a lot of it was pain management. Then a lot of it was just my cognitive ability was just severely declining over time. I was a breeder during the civil teams and sniper, then just a bunch of blast injuries from training after combat. I was starting to suffer memory loss, you know, mass up my grains, and then just the frustrations that come with that, you know, trying to

mask it and cover it up and kind of move through life. And then, more top of all the other daily things that I was struggling with, holding the home front and then showing up to work with a smile on my face. So, I am ready to go. Like we all do. And then I got out and retired at the end of 2016, went off to grad school, was going to school at USC. And then I had four more of my friends passed away

and the team said that I had another close, two close friends got blown up in Syria. And at that time, when that happened, that was just my catalyst for just meltdown. I agree. I do think that most people that have got problems whatever that's going on at home or personally or medically

have to put a smile on and go to work, but the risks of most people's jobs are not quite as dramatic as somebody that's doing Overwatch as a sniper or breaching the door so that everybody else goes in. So there is a total extra level of pressure, I suppose, to do that. So there is a total extra level of pressure, I suppose, to do that. How would you categorize the atmosphere generally in the armed forces around difficulties with injuries from the past, with emotional traumas from the past at the moment? Yeah, as far as the injuries go, it's interesting, at least in our community. I remember when I was going to like the Naval Hospital and it was full of people trying to get out of work so they're all hanging around the hospital, right? And then in the spec ops community, you don't go to the doctor because you don't want to

lose time at work. You want to work. And because if you're absent for work, you may lose that spot. It's the same as playing on the sports team. So everyone was always masking pain, masking injuries as long as they could. So that just kind of looked better. Now if they needed health, they always got it. And then as far as the mental health aspect of it, it was just always just kind of a fine line, but you know, we're always told, hey, you know, the medical professionals

are here to help you, but there was always just this fear like, hey, how much do I share before I get grounded for taking off line? So, you know, you answer the questions and the questions are always yes and to a point and then it's no no no no no no and can I get back in the game right? So the help was always available to us. Hardly anyone really fully took advantage of it just I think it at a fear of just getting sidelined. Yeah, so you have some slightly contradictory incentives here. slightly contradictory incentives here. The guys don't want to have themselves taken out of action because it's their job, it's their duty, they feel competent at it. For a lot of people, it's probably their sense of meaning in life as well. And you've got, I guess, this tension between the two. You've

got on one hand, I need to look after my health. I need to make sure that I'm not so far gone that I basically can't do my job anymore. But you're talking about a group of people that have been trained to be able to put up with severe levels of discomfort for extended periods of time. I mean, that you've selected for a group of people, I imagine that are going to be able to tamp down their emotions and swallow that discomfort, whether it be physical or emotional for a pretty good period. Yeah, it was super interesting too, you know, because, you know, I was laughed, you know, everyone's like, on the steel team,

they don't expect cops like you guys are always so close. They almost shit about each other, because everyone keeps up the veil, even as close as you are, there's still a degree of separation between the true you and, you know, and which are the face that you're putting out to your friends.

So maybe people know kind of maybe what's going on here, you know, you're putting out to your friends. So maybe people know what's going on in your mental life, your dating life and stuff like that. But as far as stuff, there's really deep stuff. No one's going to share the underbelly, right? They're just not going to expose that. Do you think it's possible for somebody in the seals to develop that kind of a relationship or do you think that that would be so antagonistic to the sort of way that they need to show up to the atmosphere within the team itself. Is it possible to be able to be that open and still be effective as a member of the team that's maybe seeing death and destruction every day? Yeah, I maybe, but I think it would have to be really broad on so early in the pipeline, right?

So that's ingrained it's institutionalized to where that trust factor is really there. You know, no one wants to feel that they're holding anybody back. I think that's the big thing. And then, you know, no one wants to be looked upon as weak or not being able to handle things, you know, if you can't handle your life at home, can you handle life overseas, right? And all that kind of goes together. So, yeah, that's a really good question. I'm not really sure what the answer to that is yet. I've spoken to a guy called BT Urala, who is a buddy of mine for three and a bit years. He started the veteran sports league and he was injured, tried to save one of his legs during an IED attack and for a very long time was battling backward and forward with that

couple of suicide attempts. And the savior that he had out the other side of that was the fact that he actually went for amputation Now I didn't realize that if you go for elective amputation They make you wait. I want to say six months maybe or a year because they want to ensure that this is I mean you can't there's no command and Z on this you can't undo this particular Surgery so they need to make sure that you're well done in that way But even with him who wasn't in a he wasn't a seal, he was just an infantryman. Even he was talking about this strange balance between

what you need to show forward facing the expectation around you. I think the conversation certainly over the last 15 to 20 years seems to have developed a lot more than you know, go back a hundred years calling it shell shot, go back to Vietnam and people coming home and having very very low levels of support. The really sort of interesting pervasive thing here is that it's not about the facilities not being there. It's not even so much anymore about the cultural norms not being, it's to do with something that's quite internal to the individuals themselves and the sense of expectation and the desire to show up and perform for the team. I guess one of the problems there is that's even more scalable, right? That's even more deeply seated, you know, how are you going to pull that out of somebody?

You can offer all of the treatments and support and courses that you want, but how do you actually begin to get somebody to to make that decision to reach out for help? So I mean, when it comes to you, what? There have to be a day upon which you woke up and realized, right, I have to make a change here that I cannot continue to go like this. What was that point? Yeah, I mean, for me, it was after it was actually after a tire because I remember probably the last maybe four or five years of my active duty service, I was struggling. And I was command mastery of a seal team too, you know, in a pretty high level listed leader running programs and pretty well respected, like, all right, in a pretty high level, you know, listed leader running programs in

pretty well respected, like, all right, how do I maintain this reputation? Because your reputation is such a small unit, it's so critical, right? That's how you get promoted, that's how you get selected, all the other things that kind of go on with that. So, there's a lot of pride at it, and we all know that pride's the double edge sword, right? Yeah, but it wasn't until after it was really when my friend really started having his breakdown and started bringing up a lot of stuff with me that my emotions and memories and everything just kind of caught off with me. It was past the point of my handling at myself. It's like, hey, I need some help now.

I mean, I was suicidal the time when I called routine, and I'd been there once before too. So I was like, all right, I know where this is going to lead very quickly, but it took me a very long time to get there. Martin, what's the beginning of your story of how you start to get yourself involved in this world? So, that was back 1999. I was trying to help a family member. I was in medical school at the time and she was dealing with a cocaine addiction. And we had tried all the western

approaches, you know what was usually recommended, which is a 12 steps rehab, you know, threats kicking her out of the house, but nobody, nothing seems to stick with her, like nothing was working. So I had always had an interest in psychedelics, you know, starting as a teenager. And so I knew that there was something that could potentially help her, and I was aware of Ivegan, Zed and Washa documentary. So I looked it up online and I took it to see a provider. And I began to still pretty obscure, but back then it was even more obscure. There was not a lot of data. There was some research going on at the island of St.

Kitts. And there was one provider that I found that would help her. So I took her and it was really remarkable to see the pre and the post. So she was the denial that cocaine was a problem because she had actually started with an eating disorder and the cocaine, you know, took away the hunger. So it was a solution. And oftentimes when people fall into addiction, they're self-medicating either depression or anxiety. So the drug serves a purpose. And I think that's often missed when people look at addiction, they just view it as a moral failing or a certain weakness,

but there's always something underneath it, which is generally trauma. So having that experience of me witnessing her going through this process and the very next day having this deep understanding of her addiction and the need to move away from it was striking because there's nothing in Western medicine that one single treatment can give you that perspective. So I stuck in my mind, started my training in eye surgery. I was going to become an awful monologist, but I could never get that out of my head that there was a treatment that could help addiction.

So I took a year off and started having anving, clinic back in 2000 in Mexico City. ran that program for a number of years until 2015. When I met some veterans that were using hair on and then they reported their PTSD was gone. So I was again intrigued because there's nothing that we have in our arsenal that actually cures PTSD. We have treatments to mitigate it to numb symptoms, but to address it at a core level where the person no longer meets a diagnostic criteria with a single treatment is pretty unheard of. So I started seeing more veterans

and it just took off after I treated a few seals. They're a very tight-knit community, so they started referring to their friends and that just started growing. 2020-2021 was super busy years and obviously COVID had something to do with it because people are struggling. And yeah, that takes us to now, which is a program that is just growing over the years. I think to now, which is a program that is just growing over the years. You saw an increase in the number of veterans suffering with PTSD during COVID.

I think it was too full. I think it was the fact that Jim's closed. So they didn't have that outlet of the physical exercise, the social isolation being stuck at home, with the family. It's very challenging sometimes. Along with greater awareness, that psychedelics are a good option for addressing what I consider the core injury and so that special operations community, which is my ultramarine brain injury.

So it's not even the PTSD. I would say every single operator that has gone through their training has been exposed to multiple blasts injuries. And it doesn't mean an IED, it could be shooting a mortar, being close to rockets, opening doors with explosives. Even repetitive gunfire will cause a certain overpressure wave that can rattle the brain in a way where it's not designed to be, you know, chuken and this can cause inflammation, this can cause formal dysregulation. And over time, sometimes years, this manifests with anger and some of the depression anxiety. So we

look at it as a biological injury, not so much merely stress or depression or anxiety. There's something going on physically in the brain of these guys. Does that predispose people to whatever's classified as PTSD now? Is that laying some sort of biological foundation that a psychological construction can be built on top of? Definitely, and then there's also the childhood stuff. So a lot of the guys that come through,

they come from troubled backgrounds or broken homes and it's pretty common, I think that people gravitate towards the military because they want more structure. They want that kind of external source discipline. So there is the complex PTSD, which is childhood trauma and push them on express. And then obviously the brain injury is laying kind of-to-off field for people to then get further traumatized and display even more symptoms. And then the ways of coping with it are also problematic because oftentimes it resorts to alcohol and alcohol is inflammatory so it makes the brain injured worse. So it's this kind of cycle of repeated

insults the brain which can lead to pretty bad outcomes. A lot of the guys that were treating are suicidal when they come in. I suppose one of the particularly brutal things as well about being an ex-special forces operative that suicidal is your intimately familiar with lethal violence too and it's not good to be able to be great at killing when the person that you're looking at potentially harming is yourself and I remember hearing a while ago, I think this is true, that women commit suicide more than men, but women actually try to take their life more than men. It's just that men are better with lethal force, so they're more successful at taking their life more successful. Yeah, which is, I mean, that statistic is, it kind of changed a lot of what I thought about how we should

be dealing with and treating suicide. I don't really know what that means. It means that more women are getting themselves to the stage where they consider killing themselves. Yeah, very, very, that's just such an interesting start. So if we were to try and create an avatar of a very common sort of ex-special forces, soldier, patient that comes through the doors of your clinic, what would that person look like? What would their age be? What would they present as? What would the state texture of their mind be like? What would that avatar be? So from a demographic standpoint,

we're looking at 30 to 40 year olds. The majority of the guys were treating our post-9-11 veterans. So they've served in Iraq and Afghanistan. I think the SEAL community has, I don't know if it's self-selected, but it's mostly white men. I don't know how to self-select it, but it's mostly white men. They're generally type A, like very, like they're overachievers, they're elite performers.

In terms of the issues that they're dealing with, there's this thing called operator syndrome now was characterized by researchers and Chris crew. And he looked at this complex symptomatology and presentation that they have and it includes hormone dysregulation, family issues, insomnia, anger, sleep issues. We see a lot of sleep apnea as well. Obviously depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress, traumatic brain injury, chronic pain. And all these things are interrelated. So when somebody has chronic pain, it wakes them up at night and then if you're not sleeping, then they're not sleeping by itself as a type of

brain injury. So getting to sleep under control is one of the most important things. Then obviously like the diet that we have in the West is not helpful and a lot of the psychopharmaceuticals that they get prescribed actually make things worse. I mean, I've treated guys that were on 13 different medications. So first, we have to get them off of the medications and that by itself is a process because anytime you're tapering off a medication,

you're gonna get the opposite effect. So if you've been on Xanax for a number of years, when you get off it, you'll have even worse anxiety. So it's definitely a process. And I'm sure Pon Punky can add to more of the psychographic of the patients. Yeah, it's been interesting. So when I went through, I was 50,

I was 52. But it was a lot of my peers. I mean, when I walked in the room, we treated six clients a week and I walked room, and I know four of them, right, they're my peers. Right? And they're like, oh, you too? Yeah, man, me too.

But yeah, the demographic is just pretty much everybody in there. And just like Martín said, we know we're all high performance, it's high performance environment. I was on 12 different medications when I came down. Psychotropic pain meds, antidepressants, antides, eye-hate pills, just all sorts of these concoctions to deal with whatever the how I had going on. And interesting enough, I'm off every single one of those except for my blood pressure meds. To include my sleep meds, I go to bed at clock, I wake up at 6 in the morning, I sleep,

and I've got sleep at me, and I, years and years was zero sleep. But you have the demographic, it's 30 to 50, and typically because it's the guys, you know, we typically, the post-service veterans, they're coming in, so they've already either retired or they separate it early, so, you know, you're looking at, you know, probably 60% of guys, they're 20 to 30 year veterans, and then the rest,

it's separated early. It's a big swat. Can you explain the experience of going through the doors of that treatment center for the first time, Punky? Yeah, it's terrifying. It's funny. I laugh, yeah, you got a bunch of frog men going down, Navy Seals, you know, getting in a van to go do drugs.

I've never even heard of before, we're all terrified. I was never terrified or ever seen. I was never terrified ever in my life. But what were we terrified of was ourselves, right? What the medicine's gonna show us. So, no, I had reached out to my team for a friend of mine and got in touch with him. And then he hooked me up for a medical screen. So I got screened medically. Then I got lined with a coach for my preparation training, which is key to all of this.

What does that look like? What's the preparation training look like? What's the preparation training look like? Yes, I had zero experience with any, you know, recreational farmer college or psychedelics and all this high school and college. So with the coach really walked me through my co-synthesia, it was just like, hey, here's what the medicine can do. Here's what they can't unlock. Here's how you navigate this space when you're in it. Here's how you navigate this space when you're in it. Here's how to build your frame, your intention, and spice, or expectation. So you don't set yourself up for failure going into medicine.

And here's how you navigate the medicine when you're in it. And then, hey, here's what's going to come up afterwards. Here's what can't come up afterwards. And here's how we work through this. That was key. And then I got screened medically, went down. And here's how we worked through this. That was key. And then I got screened medically, went down. I got my heart checked out, did some labs and stuff

and I was, and then I had to take off all those crazy meds that I was already on. And then went down. Now, the way we run the retreat and the same thing is when I went through, we have six clients per weekend. So we're in down, met up with our therapist, and our coach, there's a therapist down there, trauma therapist.

There's veteran coaches that are down there, typically from the speck ops community. So they're peers, you know, helping the guys through. Then there's a cook down there, it's also working in the space forever. Then there's the organic medical staff for the clinic. So, so we got down to the house, working in the space forever. Then there's your organic medical staff for the clinic. So we got down to the house.

We did a bunch of preparation work when we got there. Again, everyone sharing their story. Hey, who's you in the zoo here? How do we get here? And it was interesting because we're going around the circle of telling stories. And here's guys that I know and that knew me. And this is the first of any of us

have ever heard the other guy's story. Wow, oh, wow, I didn't know that about you. Like, I'm sorry, I didn't know that about you. Um, yeah, then later that night we got the EKG's done and some more lab work done. And then we did a little fire ceremony, we kind of walked through our intentions, we burned, and we wrote down our intentions for us to receive from the medicine, and then we wanted to get out of our lives, which for me was, well, the story is almost the same, right? Shame, anger, guilt, pain, anguish, all that stuff. Hey, and then we burned that in a small fire ceremony, and then we took the medicine, the medicine we took is a avogaine from the above root. This case is in coformed. It's an isolate. So we took that and then went upstairs and

lay there. It seemed like for two days because there's only like an hour awaiting for the medicine to kick in. And talk to me about your someone that hasn't played around with psychedelics beforehand. You are at a particular point in your life where things have got pretty intense. You've needed to reach out for help. You've had this built up. Now obviously the preparation and the counseling will have tried to calm you down, but you're not going to be able to get away from the fact that I've just taken something. It's inside of me. There's no going back. What's that one hour before everything kicks in? What does that feel like?

I think the hour was shorter than the fact of the time that I had to fill in my hand staring at it, right? Like, am I gonna take this one? It's just a red-throw of the blue-throw, right? And now it's just like fuck it. What have I got to lose? You know, three or two weeks ago I was adding gun to my head. So I screwed this. So I took the pill. And then just lay there waiting. And obviously the anticipation, and even the weeks going into it, you know, stuff starts to come up. The medicine works before you're ever even in the medicine. And just starts on the earth and things. So it was really kind of beautiful. even in the medicine and just starts on everything. So it was really kind of beautiful. In my medicine journey played out very interestingly

for me. So in the silk teams, I did a lot of targeting and just hunting people down. We used a program in the silk teams called Palantir. It's a link diagram program, it's all I call is an effective stuff. So to get to X, I made the go here, but I need to find this person first and this person this person

And I actually did that with me all the way through my life So it would bring up people and flash them on my face. It was like oh, that's my mother That's my father that's this person But it would keep going until I recognize them at a certain age and then it took me back into their life And it should play out their life and then it brought it back to our intersect and then it played that forward. So I got to see, you know, kind of where my abuse has happened as a kid, but also help play that for my parents

and other stuff. And then other people that came into my lives, same thing for overseas, out of a bunch of situations that happened, it just kind of kept playing the form. It's like, plays for you a million different ways. It's all gonna turn out the same. So by the end of that journey, I kind of came out.

I was just like, we just complete understanding and reconciliation. So I got to basically relive my entire life over again without the emotion of test right. And it was powerful. I remember I just woke up, I cried. I was like, I had a million people to apologize to, and a million people to forgive.

And the fact that I wanted to forgive people was huge because that was a huge anchor, right? And then, you know, I came out of the medicine fairly early and the morning other guys came out a little bit later in the day. How long is the duration of the trip? It's a good. Yeah. That 10 to 12 hours went. And then you're out typically by roughly the noon the next day.

So there's a really peak. There's a peak period of time where you're really deep in the medicine that slowly starts to wane off. It is a stabulent. So you're not really sleeping because your brain is just remapping itself and it's working all night. And when I came out too, I felt like I was going to put a vacuum cleaner in my brain like it was still. It was finally quiet. I've always had monkey mind and chatter, you know, the noise that's always in there.

And it was just completely quiet, which was very eerie and scary at the same time. And peace will play at the same time, it was nice to have. And then the other guy's kinda came out a little bit later in the day. Some people have rough ugly journeys. Mine was rough, but it wasn't painful for me to say, it was just very teaching. Some people had very joyous journeys.

Some people had very lost in space in journeys. So everyone's journeys is extremely different. It's interesting too. Same medicines and actually some of the same traumas going into it, but the journeys play out entirely entirely for everybody. And then that night, we did some more integration work, pretty smoke that day, Abigail and Jury taxing on the body, it's extremely draining.

And then we did prep work for Sunday morning, we did five MOTMT, which is from the Stein Desert Road. So people call it the the god molecule the spirit molecule Super powerful medicine always laugh like who figured these things out like Bunch of kids go in the desert. They found a coat to the cooked over fire and they talked to god I mean had this a sing-play out But it's a beautiful, beautiful medicine. And if you look back into history too, the toad and the mushrooms, like in all these artifacts all over the world.

So that medicine, the way I like to explain it is, you know, where they are really digging to a lot of cerebral memory and just unearthed stuff. The pieve is a very powerful emotional medicine. It goes in and just uners all these, I like to just say suppressed emotions and you're talking a lifetime of suppressed emotions. Happiness, pain, sadness, guilt, anger, shame, all that stuff has a voice to it. It causes damage. If you let it, it'll get there. It comes out. And if you let it, then it'll get there. It comes out and Just someone outside the room. It can sound like there's health risk. We're going in there and Murder death kill or Chuck E. Cheese birthday party or complete joy or the Super Bowl depending upon what's going on To the guy or girl that's there was laying there and just expelling all this energy and it's emotionally used to come out.

And on the other side of that is ego dissolution and just complete connectivity right back to yourself again. I fought my medicine. It was too much love for me. I just received this blood dose of love and I didn't want it. I couldn't handle it. I fought it. And then I tried to get back into it.

I couldn't get back in. And then I thought I failed as he couldn't handle it, I fought it. And then I tried to get back into it, I couldn't get back in. And then I thought I failed, as he couldn't do it. And I remember I was talking to my coach at the time, and she was like, now you felt it, you saw it, yeah I did. So you just go, well, you can get there again. So after I left after that weekend for me, it's like, all right, I know it's on the other side of this curtain.

And I'm just going to continue to do my work and get there. So it's about three, four months later that I finally broke all the way through with a different medicine, with the intent of just allowing myself to surrender. Give in. But I'd already, the heavy lifting, I'd already done. The big boulderer already been moved right from Out of the way when I was down Mexico

Other guys and grow the other guys with me had just these beautiful spiritual journeys And then some again, we're dark. You know, everyone's journey is just complete and unique some people have beautiful Avagaine journeys and and Harbor five hemieo journeys and sometimes this flipped over the other way around. But eventually in the weeks after it just kind of all sorts of plans, you start to get these downloads and everything just kind of falls right back in line.

So it all doesn't happen right in the medicine. It's what happens after that. And if I had not had my coach Cynthia work with me at the time, I could have easily just kind of gone in the self-destructive mode of like, Hey, I fucked this up. I felt this. I didn't do it right. I wasted these people's time and all that. It wasn't the case at all. So that was a huge win for me. Yeah, just a beautiful, a beautiful medicine pairing and just the container, the mission within it, it's set down, it was just so powerful. Like, you gotta, a bunch of guys have come in,

a bunch of alpha males, but we're entirely just extremely scared at the time. But they set the right container, it just helped us navigate through that space. What was the medication that you used the after four months? What was the different thing that you used that time? After that, I have going out to a reservation out here in San Diego and I've done a very heavy psilocybin dose with the Indians out here. But heavy psilocybin dose. do you know how much it was and got the thing got through there 20 grams. Sorry. 20 years. Okay. What, can you try and explain what's going on in the brain that's causing this particular restructuring? Why that combination of Iboge and 5 Meo and how is it that there's

obviously something functional that happens or something physical that happens, but then there's also something psychological, something emotional, maybe even something spiritual. How does all of this work together? Yeah, not you hit it right on the nail on the head, which is that there's a physiological changes. There is psychological changes and there's also a spiritual effect of these compounds. From a physiological standpoint, I think Gain is not considered a clean drug in that it doesn't affect one single receptor. So Ida Gain effects about 50 different neuroreceptors.

So it's working on many levels on the open allergic system, on serotonin, on the opioid receptors. It's increasing communication between both chemistures. It's helping stimulate neurogenesis, so it elevates levels of EDNF and GDNF, which is brain derived neurotropic factor and gliodeuripin atropic factor. So there's new brain cells being grown. And then from a psychological standpoint, the IVGN is a shadow work. So it allows a person to deal with unprocessed trauma, like unfinished business, things

that they've been avoiding, childhood stuff that they might have repressed. A lot of the trauma that we have is pre-verbal, so it happens before the age of five. And because the language centers in the brain are not developed, it doesn't get encoded in language. So there's no way to access it just through psychotherapy because you're trying to use a semantic framing to access things that are like visionary, almost like they're just energetic patterns that are encoded. So with the navigate journey, because you're gaining this perspective and seeing yourself

as a child and you're floating in the room, some like this observer standpoint from Buddhism where you're just objectively observing without the emotional pain of the memory, so you don't get retraumatized, but you are now an adult, so you're seeing it through the eyes of an adult, and you're able to then re-contextualize what happened to that child and understand it better from a different perspective. Many times, you know, we blame our parents for things they did or they didn't do, but we don't realize like what they were dealing with at the time or the trauma that they had. So being able to see it in that kind of broader swath of like their history as well,

leads to a lot of forgiveness and understanding. But it's not easy because you're confronted with opportunities. You've missed people you've heard and just, you've missed, people you've heard, and just ways that we've shown up in relationship with other people that we're not kind of in our in alignment with our highest self. Sometimes you're even shown how you were perceived by that person through their own eyes. It's almost like you're in the back of their head seeing yourself, like how you reacted to things they did. So a lot of people, you know, they wanna go home and fix relationships right away, but we tell them to just take some time

because the person might not be able to, the person you hurt might not be able to receive that information. So a lot of shadow work with the IVG and then the 5MEO is very different because it's more of the mystical experience, so the sense of oneness, of unity, of connection, people report being in the presence of God, feeling that they've gone to heaven, almost in recognizing themselves as divine beings. So going from the shadow work and these difficult experiences to then the 5MEO is a very healing process

because some of the stuff that the adding in shows you that she's harder to integrate because it might not even be your stuff. It could be just the pain of the planet, you know, factory farms or war or things that are happening that we might not be aware of, but it shows you that. And then the 5MEO just blows it all away. It shows you that everything is, it should be, and you know, that everything is perfect, and in your control. From a physiological standpoint, the fibromyalgia reduces inflammation, and when you have a brain injury that is related to plastic exposure, when you have a mild traumatic brain injury, and you are able to reduce inflammation,

the brain can heal itself. So the neurogenesis from the IVGain and the reduced inflammation for the 5-A-Me-O go perfectly hand in hand. So there's a synergistic effect. They're also working on different neuro-transmitter systems. And like Ponky was saying, the experience itself might be 30% of the healing, but the integration of the experience is 70%. It's what you do with it. It's the meditation, the yoga, the ice bats, you know, regular coaching sessions, you know, relying on your therapist and really taking advantage of the resources that are available.

And this is a lifelong process. It's not, you know, one month, three months. It's for the rest of your life, you really have to work on yourself to maintain these benefits. If you don't, then the experience can fade after three months. Bunky, did you do your eye-begin, your five-me-yo, and then your psilocybin? And was that pharmacologically, was that the lion's share of the work that needed to be done? No, you know, I like to say it's pilling the onion, right? I didn't get here in one day,

and I'm not going to get out of this in one day either. But what I got from that one week in in Mexico was enough to really move the needle in a significant way. I got there, it allowed me to get to the X, which therapy was never getting me to. But even though I got to the X, there's still more stuff that kept coming up. As I was, there's more, there's more of these more. So you know, subsequent medicine journeys for me have been able to help me work through that. So typically I do all my work and if I get to a sticking point that I can't get any further

with all the right things that I'm doing and with my coach and with my therapist and sometimes I lean in the medicine. Sometimes it shows me more, you know, I get more, more downloads or I get more insight. Sometimes there's nothing to see. Sometimes I just need to offload some energy or just some built up stuff that just needs to go away. But I don't do much, I've been touched as psychedelics, it's all spending year now. So that first year was pretty heavy for me and just peeling back that onion as fast as I could. And then too, they kind of kept

falling in front of me like, right at the right time, like I would just bump into someone that knew somebody and I would go experience another modality, because all these medicines have just such a different energy to them. But it was the right medicine for me at the right time. And yeah, they're just entirely different. Um, I think I had zero practice going in when I met Martina. I couldn't meditate. I had zero mindfulness practice. I had, I had no, any good practice whatsoever other than throwing weights around.

That was it. Okay. So, uh, myself, care, myself understanding was was to a point that's almost zero. It's entirely different now, just the way that I move through life. What is the reason for working with... Martin, do you work with anything else other than I began in 5MERA? Are those the two that you work with mostly? So we've been working mostly with I began in 5ibomeo and we've done a few retreats with Solosibons or with mushrooms. And these have mainly been for the spouses of veterans

that are also experienced trauma just by you know being in that community and also living living with them and going through the process of grieving and loss because they've had so much death. So yeah, we have retreats for slow-sciven and for heavy game. What's the reason for not using peyote or for not using non-5MEO? Yeah, so there's obviously benefits to say a peyote journey or an IOSCA journey. I think with IOSCA, you have to be trained in that lineage and I don't feel qualified

to administer that. We are partnered with a nonprofit called Heroicarch project that runs IOSCA retreats. So we generally just refer people to them if they want to do work with IOSCA. The POD is a little bit challenging because of sustainability issues, so it's hard to promote a compound which is sacred to Native Americans and which is running out because it takes so many years to mature. So mostly when people want to try a mescaline, I would direct them to some Pedro, which has very similar effects in this, which a lot more common.

What about Ketamine, what about MDMA? I've seen a lot of talk about that as treatment for PTSD as well. Yeah, Kenamine is wonderful as a kind of short-term like staunchly bleeding type of intervention when somebody's suicidal. We can refer them to a Kenamine provider in the US because it's the one second Alec that's already legal. So you can find itider in the US because it's the one second Alec that's already legal. So you can find it everywhere in the US. From the inmates, a bit problematic because it's not legal and Mexico. So I began in five a.m. you know, are legal.

They were never scheduled. So they're basically not recognized by Mexican law as being compounds of abuse. Well, with Silasiva, it falls into more of a gray area where it can be used ceremoniously if used by indigenous people and indigenous contacts. Other countries like Jamaica, they're very open about psilocybin. So we are setting up a retreat center there which is going to be mainly for military families. So spouses and adult children, but also for female veterans that are dealing with sexual trauma,

which we have to separate the men from the women because of that oftentimes of the perpetrators were other people in the military. What is the current legality around this in America at the moment? If you're somebody that's been in the US special forces, you simply can't get this this in America at the moment, if you're somebody that's been in the US special forces, you simply can't get this legally in America, I'm guessing. Only can I mean, can we, can we done legally?

What, what, what Punky was referring to of Native American reservations, there is a dispensation there that is, that there's tribal sovereignty. So there's the Native American church, there's also Somai Ousca churches that have these exemptions. But mostly the work has to happen under FDA-approved trials. And there are a few, there's something called expanded access, where they've proven to the FDA that these convents are effective, specifically MDMA and

cell assignments. So now that there's a possibility to start offering it more widely, but it's still very limited and small. Most sites only get five slots. So it's difficult. So most people are traveling, they're going to go to different different locales overseas where these things are legal What is the potential usefulness of this for people who? Don't have super strong PTSD. It sounds like a lot of people may have had trauma that has been ingrained Before they can even remember it certainly before they they can semantically put it into words. So is there a case to be made that far more people than just veterans perhaps might need this?

I would say they don't need it, but they would definitely, most people have trauma that they haven't processed. There's just things that they might not be aware of. There is some evidence that microdosing can help with creativity and just be a better option for people of an adderol. So it does have some elements of increasing human performance and making people more empathetic, more connected to themselves, more aware, better in relationships.

Just nicer humans. It makes me think how many people at the moment, we've got a pandemic of anxiety of people being very, very concerned about their mental health at the moment. And you can lay this at the feet of social media if you want, but there's a lot of other things, I think, that are contributing to this increases in single-parent households, higher levels of uncertainty about life paths for the future, lack of connection to religion, lack of connection to your local community. You know, the list is pretty endless of the grand narratives that have collapsed so that people now feel a little bit atomized.

I'm just wondering how much of that, you know, how much a therapeutic session of something like I I began could perhaps help them. Yeah, probably, I mean, I would recommend I give somebody's going to try psychedelics. I would actually start with breathwork or with flotation therapy and then move to try psychedelics. I would actually start with breath work or with flotation therapy and then move on to psychedelics. And then not the psychedelics. I'm again, this is, you know, like the big gun is the most diverse of experiences.

So there's some psychological challenges that can bring up, but also there's some physical risks. It can affect your heart rate. It can cause arrhythmias in combination with other drugs, so it's definitely delicate. I am lost on 5 and me, it can be hard to integrate, so when people ask me where they should start once they want to do a psychedelic journey, ketamine is probably the easiest entry point because it's short, it can be manageable, you can titrate the dose fairly carefully, and then mushrooms would be the next one.

So I do think that for the wider population that is dealing with this kind of this sense of disconnection and there's a lot of, you know, causes to it. I think we're disconnected from each other, we're disconnected from nature, very few people find meaning in their jobs. So having community, especially if it's like guided through a trained facilitator and there is psychedelic type practice could be transformative for us as a society. Well, in an ideal world, we would be able to fix

the cause of the problem, rather than finding a solution to it on the other side, right? At the moment, we are retrospectively going back and then trying to... Okay, something went wrong, let's go and fix it. It would be much better for nothing to have gone wrong in the first place. You mentioned there about the fact that I've again particularly can be quite challenging. Are there any issues of dissociation, of psychosis, of people having onset of schizophrenia or any issues like that that come about

due to people taking the medicine. We haven't run into that, but we screen people carefully. There's definitely people that shouldn't take psychedelics. So when somebody is manic, it can make them more manic. So that's one contraindication. The people are not in touch with reality if there's kids are frenic, if they're hearing voices. It's also not a good time to be taping psychedelics, as well as some drugs that are contraindicated. So we haven't had issues with

eye-begin. I've seen some people that have trouble integrating five-any-one when used on its own, and that's why it's so important to have a coach or a therapist that is well versed in the medicine that is checking in with you afterwards. Because sometimes it's as simple as getting grounded, like eating food, taking a warm shower or getting a massage. But when you're not aware of this and you're having these like reactivations, these flashbacks of a 5MEO journey, people like they don't sleep, they don't eat, and then that by itself makes them spin out. So it's definitely something that's happening

in the community. I've also seen it with Ayahuasca, where people come back and they're just not the same for months afterwards. What's next for you then, Punky, in terms of your personal journey of recovery, of moving forward. I mean, just how much have you managed to undo with the therapeutic and medicinal solutions that you've looked at? That's a good question. You know, so I probably took a year of really just diving in. I just kept moving the needle, right?

And, you know, I finally, I remember how I hit one medicine journey where there was no more trauma. It was just done. It was just me finally meeting my young self, and I got to walk my young self back through, you know, the happy stages of my life by the dark stages. And that was an interesting journey, and I would just just woke up and I was like, okay, we're done. We're moving forward now.

Uh-huh. But it's really, it's like, it's controlling the things that you can control, right? And focusing on those things that you can control. So can I control my sleep? Yeah. Can I control my thought patterns? Yes. Can I control what goes into my mind?

What goes into my ears? What goes into my mouth? Yeah, I can. So I'm focused on that and just being very mindful. Stuff comes up still, but now in my head of it, like I recognize it, and I'm able to sit with it now and vice-reacting to it. And then I can just really kind of dive into it. So it's been an interesting journey on this side of the equation by where I was before. And now I have this huge community of guys and girls who are on this side of, I like to say, on this side of medicine

that I can talk to, you know? That are my peers, you know, my wife, my friends, you know, my coach, I'm a coach now as well. And it's just been my relationships are entirely different. They're very much more intimate and more open and authentic with all my friends. So there's no more bail like this is what you get, this is me, there's no hiding anything. So I don't have, I don't feel I'm ever at risk to ever go down that path again.

Will I, you know, dive into the medicines more? If something comes up, I feel I need to, or I'm curious about it. Yeah, but I don't lean on them. Another question for me is not something I chase. I'm not a, I'm not a psycho, not for me, it was healing, it wasn't about expanding consciousness. So I got that part out of the way and I'm just trying to live my best life right now, but I can't and just give back to others. What is, if there's some people that are in the special forces or perhaps looking to come out pretty soon and are thinking that sounds an awful lot like the situation that I am in the situation that you were in is now what they're feeling What would you want to say to them? Reach out. Yeah, that's a funny thing

Every client we have down there in myself included, we're never self-referred. Someone else brought them. They've re-ferred them, right? So someone else threw a light foring out for that person. So we're not self-arresting. We're not asking for help. And that's not a pride. It's out of fear.

It's out of shame. It's out of, also, to things. So really, it's just knowing that you have a community of brothers and sisters that will help you if you reach out. It's the same in any aspect of life. If you ask for help, somebody will help you. You just have to ask. And we've got a beautiful community that's been in this space for a long time.

You know, it was on a ground for a long time. Everyone's slowly coming to the surface now, because we're not helping anybody by staying underground. We're just not doing it. The momentum is already moving forward. So I think the narrative's changing, so it's safe to be in this space now. You know, and maybe in some work environments, it may not be. But it's getting more and more

excited, accepted. And it's safer than what we've been doing, which is taking this, this, this pharmacologist, you know, this, these medicines that we're taking, they were actually compounding the issues that we already had. But the big ones just ask for help, reach out, come to us, come to someone. We're not ever telling anybody to come to us. We're not the only retreat out there. We're one of the few that specializes in treating veterans, and we're run by veterans. But just yeah, ask for help. What was your process of starting to become a facilitator

or an assistant with the organization? Yeah, Marcee did reach out and he goes, hey, we got a big group coming down here. You wanted to help out. You want to go, yeah, I'll drive the truck. I'll wash the dishes, I'll clean the towels and walk guys to the bathroom. And it started just like that and just holding space for guys.

And then I think when you and I started this conversation, I said, yeah, I walked in the room and there's six guys. I know four of them. It was just more and more and more of that. I was like, damn, I know all these guys. And so that really kind of shifted, you know, my mission to, hey, these are my people. I wanted to go down. Initially, I think I probably jumped into soon, trying to help. I hadn't done a lot of my own work. You go from a non-feeling, non-carrying guy to being completely busted white, open and being an empath and taking on everything. I need to back out of the space for a bit. And, uh, but no, it was really healing because then I got to really learn, um,

you know, I think we kind of go through life thinking our trauma is so unique to us that no one's going to understand it. And then you hear all these guys and girls story and if there's two of them that are exactly the same, if not three and trauma is trauma, right? No matter when it happens or how it happens, still trauma, it's something that got you and allowed you to get in your own way and stopped you from moving, you know, your full potential. So it got into that and then got serious about it.

So it took a psyched up integration coaching course. Really dove into that, started coaching after the sessions and now I go down with the facilitator on a coach. I manage the operations down there. And it's, I just love the work. Where can people go if they want to find out more about what it is that you guys do and the process of everything? It is our website is missionwithin.org. And then we're also funded by nonprofits, so the SEAL Future Fund, or if you

SEALFESTERFoundation.org, Herok Hearts Project, and the Hope Project.org. They fund, we're probably 60, I think think 60, about 70% donor funded for the clients who can come down and then the rest are self-made. Is this available for anybody worldwide or are you only taking people from the US? No, we take everybody. We're very pretty heavy on veterans, but nationality goes, it doesn't really matter. Martin, anything to add before we finish up for a day?

We're recruiting for a study that we have going on. So this is a Gold Star study. This is Women.Losment in combat or to mental health issues. So information is on the website and they would be coming to UT at Austin getting their brain scan and then going to retreat. Coming back to the US getting another brain scan. So we want to see what the effects of psilocybin are on prolonged brief as well as five MEO. And this would be separate groups. So yeah, if you want to get the word out on that study because I think it's important to also help the widows of men who have served.

What's the website again for that? Missionwithin.org. Gentlemen, I very much appreciate the stuff that you're doing. I think that it's long overdue to try and give people that have served their country and put their bodies and their minds on the line to keep everybody else safe and free. The fact that you go through all of the sacrifices and then potentially come home to suffer more, feels particularly unfair. So I really really applaud the work that you're doing. It's incredibly inspiring and long-made continuing.