Rev Left Radio - Ayahuasca w/ Joshua Kahn Russell

Episode Date: November 24, 2021

Joshua Kahn Russell returns to the show, this time to discuss - for the first time publicly -  his Ayahuasca practice that he began nearly a decade ago.  We try to give this topic the respect, integrity, cultural sensitivity, and spiritual depth that it deserves. We discuss so much, including: science, spirit, healing, cultural appropriation, trauma, capitalism, colonization, visions & hallucinations, depression, addiction, self-development, solidarity & sovereignty, forest defense, and reciprocity. Check out the first two installments of the Psychedelics and Dialectics series with Joshua here: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/joshua-kahn https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/joshua   Please donate to The Wildfire Project at https://www.wildfireproject.org/donate   www.WidlfireProject.org    Instagram: @JoshuaKahnRussell  Twitter: @JoshKahnRussell ----- Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio or make a one time donation: PayPal.me/revleft LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, we have the third installment of our ongoing sub-series with Joshua Con Russell. The series is called Dialectics and Psychedelics, and today's episode is when we really finally get into the psychedelic part of that title. The first two episodes, I really do think, are pretty important. important to listen to because it gives you a lot of crucial background into Joshua's life and his organizing and into his struggles. And in the second installment of this sub series, we dive deep into a lot of stuff that will provide solid background information for this part of the conversation. And because this is a topic that deserves to be handled with a certain sort of

care, I would probably encourage people to listen to the subseries in chronological order to get that background information. But having said that, of course, it's not mandatory. If you want to listen to this episode as a standalone episode, you absolutely can. I just think you will be missing some rather important background context for this conversation. And given its nature and it's sort of the touchy subject matter, I think Joshua himself would prefer listeners, listen to the first two installments before coming into this one. The first two installments are absolutely fascinating and wonderful. So listening to this entire subseries in chronological order is not only worth it for that, but it's just, it's really interesting sort of development through those episodes. And we're going to

continue with the subseries beyond this as well. So for future episodes and for all that context that will be needed. Listening to this sub-series in chronological order is probably more important than listening in chronological order to other sub-series we've done in the past for what it's worth. But having said that, do whatever the hell you want. But this is a really fascinating, long, deep, intricate conversation about Joshua's experiences with psychedelics, particularly his, you know, over, I think like a decade of experience, particularly with ayahuasca, In Peru, in indigenous run traditional settings and ceremonies. And it is truly, truly fascinating.

So buckle up and dive into this very intense conversation. I know many of you out there, especially if you've already liked episodes in the sub-series, will absolutely love this episode. And if you're interested in psychedelics and want to see the conversation treated with the nuance and the respect and the humility, that is so often lacking with a lot of other conversations around these topics, this is the perfect episode for you. So without further ado, here is the third installment of my sub-series with Joshua Con Russell entitled Dialectics and Psychedelics.

Enjoy. My name is Joshua Khan Russell, and I'm a social movement facilitator. Wonderful. And this is the third installment of an ongoing series we are doing with Joshua. And the series is called Dialectics and Psychedelics. And today we are definitely going to be focusing on the latter part of that title. But there's a lot we're going to discuss. And I think it's going to be really helpful up front to sort of set the table with some

important things to keep in mind for the rest of the discussion. So do you have anything you want to say up front before we dive into the details? Well, as always, just want to say how grateful I am to be doing this series with you, Brett. It's always such a pleasure. So thank you. Yeah, I've spent the last 20 years building and supporting grassroots social movements in a few overlapping sectors, primarily climate change, indigenous sovereignty, economic and racial justice and immigrant rights. And a lot of that time was running very confrontational campaigns that involved civil disobedience and nonviolent direct action, going. after banks in the fossil fuel industry as well as supporting both frontline fights as well

as doing work at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and other international arenas. And now I'm a group facilitator and I'm currently the executive director of the Wildfire Project, which works with frontline grassroots groups through experiential group processes on everything from, you know, shedding the self-limiting beliefs that emerge from trauma to strategy and skill building. I'm also a coach and I'm building a personal practice, supporting people grappling with anxiety and despair around the climate crisis, as well as doing leadership development for young movement leaders. And some of that involves guiding psychedelic journeys and supporting their integration. And I come to this conversation because plant medicines and

specifically ayahuasca, which is what we'll be talking about today, literally saved my life. I would be actually dead without this medicine. And I've been building a practice with these medicines for almost a decade. And they've been the biggest gift that I've ever received in my life. I get to experience this dimension of being human through them. And I sit in gratitude every day for it. And this series that we're doing together, dialectics and psychedelics, you know, as you said, this is the third episode. And if you listen to the first two, which I think will be linked in the show notes. Is that true? Great. It'll give you much fuller context about where I'm coming from in this conversation.

But I think the bottom line is that I came to this work with psychedelic plant medicines out of a necessity to heal. And it was through learning to heal myself that this path kept calling me. And I was very stubborn in resisting following it for a number of reasons. But despite these resistances, I continued to be called into a deeper and deeper. path of supporting healing, even though my background was more on the fighting, fighting the bad guys side of things. And that's why it's taken me nearly a decade to be comfortable talking about this medicine publicly. And this is going to be my first time talking about Ayahuasca specifically publicly with you today. And the last episode that we did together, which was about anxiety and

despair and ecological collapse, almost all of the insights that I shared in that conversation, I learned from these plant medicines directly and from ayahuasca in particular. You know, a lot of it was original wisdom, you know, the kind that humans keep repackaging and relearning and restating in different ways for different contexts, for different audiences. And I'm grateful to get to share my version of it. But also wanted to be clear that most of that came from this practice that we're going to be talking about today. And, you know, the reason why I wanted to talk about this is because we are in a right, of psychedelic use in the global north. It's being popularized in a wide variety of

worlds, including in therapeutic contexts, as well as pharmaceutical ones, as well as recreational ones. And I see a lot of non-native people in particular speaking about this stuff in ways that really lack context, both about trauma as well as about colonialism, orientation to reciprocity, as well as often lacking experience, frankly. And so for a long time, I didn't think it was my place either to talk about this stuff. But my teacher, Ricardo Amaringo, who I'll talk more about later, really challenged me. It's your responsibility to share this medicine in a good way, to share what you've learned. And so, you know, he really pushed me on that. He was like, stop being so selfish with what you've learned. So here I am. And, you know, I want to thank you to be open to this kind of

conversation. I know that the Rev. Left audience shares a lot of my own political assumptions. And I'm going to try to speak to a few different audiences here in this conversation, both people who are coming to this conversation having no experience with ceremony or spirituality or psychedelics, people who have a Western scientific materialist worldview, as well as people who do have their own spiritual practice. And I'm going to assume that we share certain political values around collective change, imperialism, capitalism, colonialism, et cetera, which is helpful. But this is such a huge topic that is so far outside of the paradigm, which most of us were raised. And in this case, I'm speaking for myself and I think you and much of the audience, that it takes some time to step out of some of the hegemonic assumptions that people might listen with. So I'm grateful you're going to be open to us taking our time with it. Part of my intention of speaking to this audience in this way is that I've come to understand that this kind of healing is, is a centerpiece of what's needed among our species right now.

And that's especially true for people within social movements, no matter your race or social location. And as I come into myself more as a healer, I think there's a reason that this medicine wants to spread at this time, right at the moment where capitalism has brought the planet to the brink, where all the systems that support life are in collapse. There are plant medicines that want to return people back to, to source, to learn how to be in balance internally in ourselves and with the material world

around us and be in right relationship to other peoples that we share this world with. And in that sense, supporting the responsible use of these medicines is, in my opinion, critical to the evolution of the species and the transition of the planet is going through. And so I want to get a lot more into that when we talk about different perspectives on cultural appropriation, how the medicine is held, et cetera. But I just hope that people interested in ayahuasca will approach it with reverence in a sense that working with this medicine, this gift, also means that it can't just be extracted for personal benefit without reciprocity for the defense of both the rainforest from which it comes and from the sovereignty of indigenous cultures that have been

the stewards of it for time immemorial. And so I want to say this is a really vulnerable conversation for me. I'm going to be direct and honest about my own experiences, which, many of which feel kind of fantastical to share. And just want to be clear that I'm only speaking for myself and from my personal experience, which is rooted in, there's a community in the Peruvian Amazon that I've been visiting almost every year for the last eight years. I've sat in a few different traditions that work with ayahuasca, but most of what I've learned comes from the Shepibo tradition, from the Shephebo people, and I'll share more about that later. But I'm certainly not trying to proselytize my own spiritual cosmology or convince anyone of any metaphysical truths in some objective sense.

But for the sake of my integrity, I do want to share a lot of what I've seen, which includes, you know, miraculous healing of everything from cancers to trauma from war to autoimmune disorders, including my own. So that's my hope of where we'll get to in this conversation. Yeah, absolutely. And there is a lot of talk, you know, just generally, about these subjects of psychedelics, but of ayahuasca specifically. I'm sure a lot of people will have heard of it probably from something like the Joe Rogan experience or whatever. And I hope that the Rev. Left audience, and I believe they do, trusts us enough to know that we will handle this topic with the nuance and the respect and the integrity that it deserves. And, you know, this is also someone in Joshua who has had these experiences and not talked about it precisely because, you know, I don't want to speak for you, but that you don't want to contribute to the sort of knee-jerk, lazy, sloppy way that so many people, particularly in the Imperial Corps, talk about this stuff. And your teacher, as you said, urged you actually to speak. So you were sort of prompted to reach out and share this information. And this is not something that you've just done once or twice.

This is not something that, you know, you have very limited experience with and are talking above your pay grade for. You've, you've had many years of experience with this. Am I correct in saying that? And do you want to frame that a little bit, flesh that frame out a little bit more? Sure. Yeah. I mean, this is when people, it's funny that you mentioned the Joe Rogan podcast, because a lot of people approach this like it's, you know, a thrill-seeking kind of experience. And it is possible to drink ayahuasca once and have a big shift in your perspective and have that be deeply important for your life.

And then maybe that's what it's there for for you. But there's also a way of working with it as a practice and a lifelong practice. And I can get more into that when we talk a little bit more about what ayahuasca actually is. But that's that's the path that I'm on. And there's also, you know, you can find other information about this that comes from the perspective of scientists or doctors. I'm not speaking with that kind of authority, let alone the authority of an ayahuasato in the Amazon, though I will share some resources so you can hear directly from some, including my teacher. I'm speaking from my lived experience in the hope that it could be useful for those who might relate to me, especially people in social movement. I also want to be clear that even though it's been almost a decade, I still consider myself

at the beginning of this path, especially with my dieters over the years, which we'll talk more about later, which is, you know, the methodology of really deeply learning the medicine. Absolutely. And I think the best way to start is just to ask the question outright, which is what exactly is ayahuasca? Yeah. Well, so to frame the answer, I also want to say, don't think of it as a drug, you know. It depends how you define that, but this isn't a conversation about drugs. It's about spirituality. It's about medicine. It's about healing. It's about the human heart. It's about the transitions of the planet. Ayahuasca is not a drug in the sense that it doesn't fit into the assumptions that most people in our culture have with that word. In many ways,

it's an antidote to that. It's an antidote to addictions, the thought forms that surround addictions, an antidote to compulsions, to dependency. This is a plant spirit that cleans you and promotes health and healing. There are dangers with it, which we'll talk about later. There's contradictions, et cetera. But ayahuasca comes from, it's the combination of two plants. So they're both from the Amazon. There's a vine that is called ayahuasca, and there is the leaf of a plant called chakruna. And some traditions mix in other plants as well, but the kind of pure ayahuasca is the mixture of these two plants. And the leaf has dimethylptamine in it, which is the psychoactive ingredients, also known as DMT. DMT is also endogenous to the human species. It's secreted by

our brains. It's part of us. It's also what gets released by our brains when we die. It's been called the spirit molecule. But when you swallow DMT, it has no effect because you have an enzyme in your stomach called monoamine oxidates, which blocks it. And so the other plant, the ayahuasca vine, has several substances in it that deactivate that specific enzyme. So, you know, it activates the alkaloid by a monoamine oxidase inhibitor. And it does it also by you have to boil it for along for many, many hours. You bring in the element of fire. You have to prepare it in a very specific way. And the result of what gets created is a substance that's pretty thick. It's pretty noxious. It can almost induce nausea upon smelling it from many feet away. It's certainly

nothing that I think a human would intuitively want to drink. It's a feat of alchemy. And the first thing to say about ayahuasca is how remarkable it was that human beings learned about it and discovered it. And there are over 80,000 plant species in the Amazon, which is half of all the plant species on the entire planet. So the fact, you know, the combination of these two, the idea that this was created by random experimentation of boiling this stuff for a day is statistically. almost impossible. And if you talk to, you know, there's a lot of different cultures that work. There's actually at least 72 completely distinct ayahuasca using cultures in the Western Amazon. So there's lots of traditions of working with this medicine in lots of different ways that are very distinct from one another. And I'll only be speaking to the one that I sit in.

But one thing that's, and they all have different creation stories about how they found ayahuasca how it came to them. But one thing they all have in common is the clarity and the assertion that the plants told them, you know, that shamans in the jungle were given this information from plant spirits about how to work with it, which of course is not believed by, you know, Western anthropologists or Western scientists. But I'll actually just read a quote here. So my teacher, Ricardo Amaringo, who is a master ayahuascero in the Shepibo tradition, he is one of the only living masters in his specific lineage. He's the person who literally saved my life who I've been working with for almost a decade. There's a book called the

ayahuasca dialogues. It was a transcription of conversations that he had with someone. And I just want to read a quote from him talking about where ayahuasca came from. He says, quote, I can tell you that the ayahuasca first appeared in the dreams and visions of the early shamans in their contacts with the natural world of the jungle. And from their relationship to the plants and nature within the Amazon, they began to receive visions. These visions told them about a specific vine in a specific part of the Amazon, the ayahuasca vine, that could be mixed with another specific plant, the chakuna leaf. And these visions told these shamans that the plants needed to be cooked in certain specific ways for a certain specific amount of time, to make a concentrate brew that will help them see. So to answer your question, it is very simple,

but you do not want to believe that this is correct. The answer is that the spirits of the jungle told the shaman where to go and where to discover the plants. The shaman found them, he cut them, cooked them, and he drank it. That is the true story of ayahuasca. It is a very simple story, but you want it to be complex. Wow. And so I love the way that he kind of antagonistically is like,

you know, he's constantly kind of making fun of scientific materialist perspectives that want to overcomplicate things. Preempting the critique, yeah. Yeah, exactly. But it's, so one of the ways to understand what ayahuasca is and how it works is that it's a purgative. And many Amazonian plant medicines are purgatives. And so what that means is that it draws down the toxins in your system, whether they be

physical, energetic, emotional, bacterial, psychological. It draws them down into your gut so that you can purge them, so that you can get them out of your body, so that you can be free of them. And that purging happens through vomiting. It happens through crying or burping or shitting or sweating, but that's part of the discomfort of an ayahuasca ceremony, which I'll get more into in a little bit. So drinking ayahuasca includes a lot of purging, a lot of releasing of stuff. And that in some ways speaks to the paradigm that it gets worked within, which in the Shepibo paradigm that I've been a student of, it's approach. It's all about cleanings. It views the human body as an ecosystem, that you are a constellation of intelligences.

Your ego and your mind has a wisdom, your heart has a wisdom, your spirit has a wisdom. You yourself are made up of all kinds of entities of the bacteria. that are that are in your stomach lining of all of these things that make you, you're not one thing. And that the human animal as an ecosystem is resilient and self-healing. But there's all this stuff that gets in the way, right? There's all the stuff that plugs up the arteries and you've got to clear and clean that stuff out in order for your body to heal properly.

And the world we live in now is particularly full of toxins. and the modern industrial world is full of all of these toxic pollutants that mess you up. And these are the sources of so many of the maladies that strike people today. So I'll speak more to that. But I want to say how complex of a medicine, ayahuasca is. It works in so many ways. So I'm going to be, by necessity, oversimplifying aspects of it, just as a little bit of an introduction here.

And I also want to say that it works differently in different traditions. It's not just, it's not like a, when I said it's not a drug in the sense that, so every time you sit in an ayahuasca ceremony, your experience is different. No two ceremonies are the same. And it depends what's going on inside of you. It depends what's up with the medicine. And what I mean by that is the medicine itself, it depends on, it depends on where the vine was gathered, it depends on how it was made, it depends on whether, how fresh it is, it

depends on where you're drinking it, it depends on your feeling when you're drinking it, your mood, what's going on inside you, that there's, which is one of the reasons that unlike some other psychedelics, you know, the idea that scientists will be able to do like double blind studies in a lab with this is kind of laughable. It's so context specific. The attitude and emotion of the person who's making it affects the medicine, which is a thing that has, when I first started drinking the medicine, I heard people claimed and sort of thought was a nice metaphor, but didn't literally believe until I experienced that to be true myself. And so it also, half of the experience of it is, is the context in which you drink it.

So it's both the location, but also the ceremony and how it's held, and the ayahuascero, the practitioner and who doctors you during it in a variety of different kinds of ways depending on the tradition. And so depending on the tradition you sit with, the medicine will work differently. And so again, I'm going to be speaking to some ways that the medicine works in my experiences. I guess I'll leave it at that. But to go back to what I was saying about it cleaning and this concept of it being a cleaner, You know, the ways that it'll clean up things that you breathe in through the air that

incorporated into your cellular structure. It'll clean out the toxic thought forms that you've learned from a society that keeps you in mental slavery. It'll clean out your anxiety. It'll clean out ancestral trauma, all of that, right? And that's why ayahuasca can heal so many things. It's not that it's just this thing that directly can heal anything. It's that the human body can heal and purge anything.

And as long as it gets this stuff out of the way. And so in my experiences down in the jungle, I've spent a lot of the people who go to the center that I go to, which we'll also talk more about later. I've seen people cure cancers, autoimmune disorders, including my own Lyme disease, addictions of all kinds, people transforming their relationship to trauma that comes from rape as well as all other kinds of violence. And one of the reasons why that is is that it's also trauma medicine. It's one of the ways that DMT is different than other psychedelics is that it allows you to literally rewire your brain away from trauma. So the like simple example of what I mean is that let's say that you were bitten by a dog when you were a kid. And it was, you know, it was a trauma meaning. And I'm using trauma in the kind of literal.

sense, meaning you experienced a sensation that was too overwhelming, too much to process. And so your body stored it and didn't fully process it at the time. And by repressing it and storing it in your body, it created a set of synaptic pathways that created an association between a dog and fear or pain. And so then now as an adult, when you see a dog, your blood pressure goes up, it releases distress hormones. And even if rationally, you don't want to be afraid of the dog, that trauma makes you afraid of the dog. And you don't want to be, but you still are, right? So your somatic response to it is that. Iwaska in a ceremony gives you the opportunity to literally go back

into that memory, forgive the dog that bit you, and reset the synaptic pathways that connects the concept of dog to the concept of pain in your mind. And one of the ways that that it heals trauma is based on, you know, the understanding that in order to let it go, in order to release trauma, you do have to feel it. You do have to let your body feel it, which is one of the reasons why ayahuasca ceremonies can be very painful. They're often, you know, you can experience a range of sensations when you're in an ayahuasca ceremony that includes a lot of discomfort. Learning to tolerate discomfort is part of the practice of ayahuasca. But it can also be difficult in the sense that it brings to the surface all the stuff that you've repressed.

And not all at once, you know, which is why it can be a lifelong practice. It really, you know, it gives you what you can handle at the time. And so one of the kind of cliches within the ayahuasca world is that, you know, every ceremony is different. And it always gives you what you need and it rarely gives you what you think. and a lot of us think we're suffering for you know we have a story about why we are the way we are and ayahuasca comes in and says no that's just a story the real reason underneath it is because of this thing you know this happened to when you were five and that's that's why you're suffering or whatever and so what it will what it can do is it can surface your trauma

and then you feel it and you feel it and it's painful and but then you can can release it, you can purge it and let it go. And so I've been in hundreds of ceremonies and have experienced so many people having really difficult experiences. And it doesn't all happen in one ceremony, which is why it's often useful if you're going to go do this deep healing work. You know, the center that I go to in the Proving Amazon, they don't let you come for less than 10 days, which is eight ceremonies, which is considered actually a very short amount of time. So depending on the trauma that you're working on, you know, you can move it through sometimes in one night, which is one of the reasons why they, you know, another cliche in the

ayahuasca world is that one night of ayahuasca is like 10,000 hours of therapy. But you, you experience, you bring it to the surface, release it. And so there's a lot of people who are like, oh my God, that ceremony was the most difficult experience of my life. And then the next day, I felt better than I've ever felt. I felt more myself than I've ever felt. I didn't even know I could experience this way of being. And that's an example of, you know, what my teacher Ricardo would say is like, yeah, you got cleaned, you know, like you got cleaned of that thing that was, you know, stuck inside you, poisoning you. And so in that way, you know, a lot of the insights that come from ayahuasca, they come at a price.

and and it can involve suffering, but also there are ceremonies that can be very beautiful and euphoric and blissful. I've had ceremonies where, you know, I had no, no spiritual life to speak of before, before I started working with this medicine. And it was, it was in ceremony that I felt one with the universe for the first time. And that is, of course, you know, a cliche that many people who try psychedelics say. But it's certainly true for me. And so it's not all pain and suffering, but nor is it a thing to be approached as a thrill-seeking experience, which is how sometimes when people read on the Internet, they, you know, especially, I think, you know, white people in the United States who might feel disconnected from spirit or at a loss of culture or whatever, they'll go to try and quote-unquote find themselves. and there are attitudes that come with that that, you know, might get in the way. There might be attitudes that exoticize or fetishize native perspectives or, you know,

that have that thrill-seeking components. But, and it is true that sometimes people will have an ayahuasca ceremony and it'll be lovely and euphoric, and that's it. You're interested in the deeper healing. This particular tradition, the Shepibo tradition, it helps you face your darkness. And that's where, in my opinion, the real healing is, you know, and it doesn't, it's not just about specific traumas. It's also just the emotional content that we suppress. So, for example, you know, I've sat next to plenty of people in ceremony who have repressed anger.

And they don't even know they're repressing their anger. And so then in the middle of ceremony, they'll get really angry. And they won't know why they're getting angry. They just get angry. So their brain puts a story on it. at the person next to them for making too much noise or they get mad at the Iowa scaredo and they're like, this guy's a, you know, like this guy's a con man and this is all bullshit or, you know, whatever. And I've seen people freak out and punch the Iowa

skato in front of them, like all kinds of stuff. And really, what they're experiencing is the anger about the neglect they felt from their father when they were a kid. But, and then letting that go the next day, like I said before, you know, they're just like, oh my God, I feel so so free. And so, you know, to just go back to the basics a little bit, because I know I'm meandering a little bit here, the experience of when you drink ayahuasca, a ceremony can last anywhere from four to eight hours usually. Sometimes it can last longer, but usually it lasts about five hours. Again, it depends on all the specifics. It depends on the kind of ceremony. It depends how many, you know, sometimes, there's some ceremonies where you drink it multiple

times within the same ceremony that obviously prolongs the experience. And it can also, you know, induce a range of sensations that humans don't experience otherwise. And so one of the other interesting parts of the practice is that, you know, if in ceremony you may experience what at first you think of as pain or discomfort, but really it's just different, you know, know, and so it challenges you to center yourself and breathe through the experience in order to ground yourself through what can often be a lot of very intense sensation. And like other psychedelics, it lifts your barriers to perception. And we can get more into some of this when we talk about kind of the more metaphysical stuff. But, you know, my personal perspective is that, how should I put

this so that the human brain is pretty limited. We're not the pinnacle of evolution. That's a very arrogant perspective. We've evolved to have five senses that perceive a tiny fraction of the reality around us. And what psychedelics in general tend to do is lift your barriers to perception so you can perceive a little bit more than what your normal waking five senses can perceive. And that means that you become open to being able to dialogue with other consciousnesses that are all around you, including plant spirits, including the plant spirits that are, that, that is, is ayahuasca. And so in ceremony, it's, it's possible to learn how to listen differently. And there are plenty of human cultures that people are taught and oriented the world where

they are open to being able to dialogue and be in communion with other consciousnesses. In this country, in the United States, we are completely, our whole paradigm is closed to that. And so we don't know how to listen mostly, most of us who are raised in this in this culture. And so one of the things that Ayahuasic can do is retrain you to learn how to listen differently. And that's something that I let's get more into the details of that. But the other couple things I'll just say about the complexity of the medicine is that, you know, it takes many, many years just to begin to learn. It demands a high degree of humility, which is why it's frustrating when, like you were saying, when you mentioned the Joe Rogan podcast and stuff,

that people, you know, have a couple of ceremonies and then feel equipped to go talk publicly about it, which is why that there's a lot of misinformation out there. It's why there's a lot of stuff on the internet that is people drawing conclusions about their experience that are more about them and their assumptions than it is about an actual experience of the medicine. Um, you know, Ricardo, my teacher says that, you know, certainly if you want to be a practitioner, he says, uh, it takes about 20 years to learn how to serve this medicine to other people. And then he, when he laughed and he says, 18, if you're smart. Um, but the point is that all ceremonies are different and, and to not, you know, universalize your own experience. And if I can just say a little bit about the, the worldview that I've learned to embrace with which I understand what this medicine even is, um, which is, uh, you know, I learned from the Shepibos. I remember the first time that I went, my friend Sergio, who is, you know, a Shepivo, Iosgero, he, and I think I actually shared this on our first

episode in this series, he used this metaphor of a spaceship. And he said, you know, he kept using the word Westerners to refer to people from Global North or people who have, you know, hegemonic assumptions from the Imperial Corps. of Empire. He said, you know, you might look at a tribe and see, see them as materially in the Stone Age. And you might compare your material advancement of your culture where you have the internet and you have spaceships that can go to the moon and compare that to the material advancement of this tribe and see just this huge vast, vast difference in advancement. He says, you need understand that's how we look at you spiritually, that we've, our cultures have been on a similar

exponential arc of developments, but we have been not focusing it in the material arena like you guys have. And so we look at you all as being in the Stone Age. And not only does that demand humility, but I think it also can help one have both a reverence for the wisdom that many cultures who've been the stewards of these medicines have without leaning into the mystical exotification or fetishization of people and just say, okay, this is a culture that has had different priorities for the last couple thousands of years. And I can be humble enough to learn from them rather than being like, oh look at these magical people or something like that or to be like super dismissive and just like that western materialist mindset where you're like this is all nonsense I have nothing to learn

they believe in silly animism and we're way beyond that you know it can take either the fetishizing or the dismissal route yeah exactly and I think you know to folks listening there's there's parts of what I'm saying even when I was talking about talking with plant spirits which I'd love to talk more about later, that, you know, you, it's okay if that doesn't make sense to you yet, but I would encourage you to suspend your disbelief for the sake of this conversation, and that because curiosity will serve you more than skepticism, not because I think anyone needs to, you know, adopt a particular way of thinking. I certainly didn't, didn't really understand how to think in this way until I had the experience of drinking this medicine. And that's part of,

you know, part of the, the spiritual system that I've, I've been a student of, is that their whole approach is that everything is experiential. It's about your direct contact with the sacred. It's about your direct contact with your own psyche and your own self and with the medicine. It's, it's distrustful of the idea of like the guru. It's, you know, there's, there are teachers and guides who hold space. In many ways, it's very much like how in, in, social movements, we look at facilitators where, you know, it's the facilitator's job to hold space to, in the kind of Paulo Frerean kind of pedagogy of the oppressed style, you know, elicit the wisdom that is, that is within people as a way of doing popular education,

rather than, you know, being the expert lecturer. It's the same kind of approach to spirituality. It's got a fundamental distrust of human beings claiming to have any spiritual knowledge. instead and certainly there's a distrust of information written down in books by humans because it's it's a belief that you know we're really undeveloped as as a species we have we have these egos that put story onto everything so everything that we know and understand is by definition sort of compromised through our own ego lens which doesn't mean that we can't learn from each other and it doesn't mean that we can't help each other along the path but anything a human can tell you is is already sort of contaminated by their ego in a sense.

And so what this practice is about is about clearing out all the other stuff and learning directly from the plants. Those are your teachers. And so the, you know, one of the many spiritual technologies within within this tradition is called a dieta. And this is a confusing term because it's actually a type of fasting, but it's sort of, you know, it's translated from Chepibo into Spanish and then sometimes Spanish into English being called a diet. And sometimes people talk about the idea of an ayahuasca diet, which is just to be clear, a different concept that is using the same word. So when people talk about an ayahuasca diet, what they're referring to is to not eat certain foods in a couple weeks before you do ceremony because those foods are contraindicated with the

medicine. And so, you know, an ayahuasca diet is to not have certain, you know, not have oil or salt or certain kinds of fats or beef or there's a whole list of things that if you clear that stuff out of your system, then you'll have a clearer experience with the medicine. But what I'm talking about is a different concept that's also called a dieta, which is in the Shepibo tradition at least, the idea of it's a certain kind of fasting where you empty yourself as much as possible. Basically, you're isolated as much as possible in the jungle. And the idea is to shed all of these attachments, to shed your titles, all the things that make up your identity that kind of get in the way of you getting to really know yourself. And so you're in isolation. You're not really

eating much food at all. If you do, you're eating a little bit of dried fish or dried plantain. And you, you know, you don't masturbate or obviously have sex. You, you don't touch other people. You don't, if you notice that you're thinking negative thoughts or you're thinking, you know, sexual thoughts, you push those out of your mind as much as you can. And the idea isn't that there, it's not like a, you know, there's not, it's not a like Judeo-Christian paradigm that says those things are bad or anything like that. It's just that they take up energy and they get in the way. And so the idea is you're retuning your entire nervous system away from the culture that

you come out of and back into the natural rhythms of the rainforest. And you empty yourself out so that you can listen and connect with a particular plant spirit. So when you do a dieta, the ayahuasero in ceremony will connect you with the, there's a whole system of plant spirits that will that that that teach you and so in ceremony um yes you drink ayahuasca but the ayahuasca will open up basically a contract between you and and a particular they call master plants a teacher plant and you spend anywhere from two weeks to a year fasting in the jungle, building your relationship with this plant spirit. And that's what a dieta is.

And that's the core of the practice in the Shepibo tradition. And so it's much more about the dieting than it is even about the ayahuasca ceremony. And there's other tools that get used. There's working with tobacco. There's working with a couple other kinds of things. But that's one example of the spiritual technologies that's like, that's their equivalent of the building of the spaceship. And, you know, another one is the Icaro, the songs that get sung, the songs that get called into being the chanting that happens during ceremony, which is like, you know, when you sit in an ayahuasca ceremony, a part of the work that happens is the ayahuasca that you're drinking, a part of it is getting doctored by the ayahuascaero, which is usually happens through the song, through the Icaro. And then a part of it is your own intention, your own breath, how you are meeting, how you're surrendering, et cetera.

And so those are just some examples of, you know, a worldview that really sees everything is conscious. And plants, plant consciousnesses as actually quite a lot more evolved than animal consciousnesses. They've been around on the planet much longer than animal consciousnesses have. And that plants have a whole spiritual world that you can learn from and tap into that and humble yourself to learn from. And that is a lot of the basis of that practice. So when I read that quotation from Ricardo earlier that said, you know, the plants told, you know, the early ayahuasca is in a vision where, you know, where ayahuasca came from, it was through that system of dieting. And I'll just say one other thing and then and then pause, which is that back to what I was saying about it, not necessarily being about having an experience or that kind of thrill-seeking behavior. Again, I don't just like for some people, it's great to sort of have one experience and that's what they need.

But when I say this is a practice, it's kind of like, you know, you wouldn't try to meditate once and then claim to know all about meditation. just from that one time. And it really struck me, sometimes I forget, like on our first episode in this series, I mentioned that I had drank ayahuasco over 150 times. And I shared the episode with a friend. And afterwards, she called me really concerned because she didn't, she wasn't in this paradigm of it being a medicine. She was really thinking of it as a drug.

And so she was, so for her, she was like, Are you okay? Are you all right? Why do you have the substance that you're, you know, like, are you becoming dependent on this? Why do you need to drink this so much? And so want to be, and I was so struck by that because that is so far outside of how I've come to understand this medicine that it took me a little while to even know what to say to her, which is to say that, you know, ayahuasca is not a substance that you can become dependent on or addicted to. as I said earlier it's it's fundamentally about shifting your relationship to even having compulsions and and it took a minute for it to sink in when she said this to me because what I wish I said is that not only is it not a dependency but it's actually a practice that's really hard to do like it takes a lot of dedication and courage to face your darkest shadows every night to feel your deepest wounds for the sake of healing and every time you do you get wiser but it comes at a cost, you know, and that this is difficult.

So this is not the kind of thing that you do for recreation or as a crutch. Most people I know feel nervous every time before drinking it because it can involve so much discomfort. So I'll pause there. There's so much more to say about it, but that might be a little bit of an introduction. Yeah, that was fascinating. And there's lots of stuff that you laid on the table that will flesh out. as we go throughout this conversation. And I really want to reiterate that concept of humility

because I think it's really important to come to a conversation like this with that humility. And if you struggle with the ability to generate humility within yourself, I always try to remind myself that the list of things I don't know is infinitely larger than the list of things that I do. And I think that's relevant here as well, especially when you're talking about other cultures and a millennia. history of a culture you have very little to any understanding of. So that's important. I love your framing of it as a spiritual technology and the sort of inversion of, you know, Western chauvinism

towards what they deem to be more primitive cultures because of the material development disparity. And then flipping that on its head and saying, well, we've actually prioritized spiritual advancements over material advancements. And so, you know, we can make. maybe learn from you how to build a spaceship, but you can learn from us many things having to do with, you know, radical introspection, spiritual connection with the natural world, etc. I do have to ask though because, you know, I've obviously had many experiences with psychedelics, mostly psilocybin and LSD, though I have once smoked DMT by itself, and obviously that's a very fleeting experience, kind of like with marijuana when you smoke it versus when

you eat it. They're two actually very different experiences. And so this combination of these two plants allows for you to eat the DMT in a way that you otherwise would never be able to because of the enzymes, as you mentioned earlier. And I'm just sort of wondering how that, if you've ever smoked it and if the eating of it, what changes? Obviously, I would assume the duration, but is there difference in intensity? Because my experience smoking it was this clytoscopic. absolutely fascinating, you know, clytoscope of colors and shapes even more intense than anything I've experienced on even very high doses of psilocybin and LSD. But I just wondering how the eating of it is different. Yeah. There's not that I'm aware of a traditional or

ceremonial tradition of smoking it. And I mentioned that because in my experience, smoking it, It's like a rubber band that gets pulled back, and it's just this flood of information all at once. And you don't have a plant spirit to guide you, and you don't have a ceremonial context with which to navigate it. And you don't have a human guide. And so lacking all these things, in my experience, it makes it almost impossible to integrate the experience. and it's so so your brain just gets flooded with all this data with all this information you know like it blew i mentioned how you know they lift your barriers to perception smoking it blows the doors of perception away and then you're in tune with all of this all of this information that that normally you're closed to um and that that in my experience like it makes sense to me that people would would have that more as a as a, like, almost recreational kind of experience of just being like, whoa, like a roller coaster. In terms, and I don't, I don't say that from a judgmental place, like that's bad or wrong or anything.

But my, I don't, in my experience, and I haven't smoked it much, but I don't see how you can do serious healing work by smoking it just for lack of lack of having any way to integrate it or make meaning of it or any guide in the spirit realm or the material realm. yeah that definitely resonates uh with my experience it was so so quick so fast it was like whoa like your bell was wrong but it's metabolized so quickly in the system that it's five to ten minutes and it's gone and uh it's just yeah just a huge flood of sort of incoherence i did i did have this weird you know this probably is more or less meaningless uh but at the very end of this clitoscope of color and geometrical shapes um there was this instance in which a figure sort of began to appear. It was like a Cthulhu type octopus entity almost. But it was in the distance. It came a little

closer and then it backed up and then it faded away as the as the quick trip itself disintegrated. And I came back to my sober mind. And I do hear this idea that people talk about with, you know, you frame it as plant spirits. Other people just talk about it as an entity. And I just always wondered, I wonder if that was something in that direction. But again, it was too fleeting and too brief for me to come to any conclusions and longer trips with like LSD or psilocybin is when I've had really mystical or revelatory or otherwise deeply introspective breakthroughs and it was precisely

the duration of the trip that allowed me to work through things that a 10 to 15 minute trip no matter how intense almost certainly would prevent so I just thought that was worth mentioning and is interesting in any case I am wondering though moving forward if you've talked about this generally. You've mentioned some of your experiences, but I was wondering if you could talk more about your specific journey into suffering and how ayahuasca acted as a healing agent in particular for you. And maybe you can also touch on how exactly it heals. Again, you've gestured towards some of these things, but I was wonder if we could drill down into the details here. Yeah. And I'd encourage folks to, you know, our first episode, I talked in

detail about how I was bedridden for three years. I had Lyme disease for 15 years and a host of other autoimmune disorders. And specifically how it was movement work that got me so sick that I had spent so long fighting these systems and repressing stuff within myself and losing access to my body's wisdom and my heart's wisdom and my spirit's wisdom. I was all cerebral all the time, all hard-nosed strategy and analysis all the time. And also, for real, the left taught me to hate myself. You know, like, I wouldn't have admitted that, but it definitely did. And the left really wounded me. And there's, you know, we, I won't go into much detail about that because we did so much on it on the first episode. But later in this conversation, I can share a little more of like, you know, what I've learned from Iowa.

which a lot of it is the antidotes to to some of the assumptions that I got ideologically from the left. But the way that I want to answer your question right now is just to share a story of how it healed my Lyme disease. So, you know, as I mentioned, I'd been bedridden for three years. I was experiencing dementia. I didn't know who I was or other people were at different periods. I was in extreme physical pain all the time. I was sleeping, you know, 19 or 20 hours a day. So I was only able to be awake for like four or five hours a day.

And in order to make it through, I was basically stoned for those four or five hours. It's just in order to be able to manage it. And I forgot what it felt like to be functional. And I'd given up, but I was like, well, I guess, I guess I'm done. I had a good run. But I really identified with the idea of being a sick person, you know. And it was liberating for a little while to, because chronic illness is so confusing and complicated. And I had so much of the like, but you don't look sick thing or the complexity of navigating.

the machinations of the medical industrial complex and how nightmarish that was for me and how weird it was that some days I would feel fine, you know? So every once in a while I'd be able like go out and hang out with people or go to events and I seems to be totally normal and people would think I was and then that was totally non-functional the next day and how, you know, Western medicine didn't have even a diagnosis that could make sense of that for me. ends. So, so once I finally got the Lyme diagnosis being, you know, saying like, I'm a sick person. I was, was, was, was a relief because what it meant was, I'm not, it's not just me

that's fucked up. I'm just not, it's not that I'm just lazy or something like that. But it was then, you know, going going down to the Amazon that I was able to release myself from that new prison that I'd built for myself, where I, I, I started to stop thinking. of myself as, you know, a sick person who'd be sick forever and see myself as a resilient healer. And there was one ceremony in particular. And I want to be clear, this didn't happen all in one night. This was like a month of work that built up to this. But I just want to give an example of what I mean when I say, like, there's trauma work that happens and there's there's a relationship to the emotional trauma that we then store in our physical body. And then

the ways that our bodies are able to manage the pathogens that come into us. Right. And so, because Lyme disease is, it's a spire keep. There's, I had bacteria in my body that were caused, that, that were causing this, this thing. And I had a ceremony where, um, I had a vision that I went back to my birth. And, uh, I was born premature, which I had never thought about much before. I wasn't born too too premature but premature enough that right after I was born I was taken from my mother right away and put into an incubator, you know, into a isolated in a box of metal and glass under fluorescent lights in complete separation from, you know, and I just never thought about it before. And then in ceremony, I saw my infant self totally in this state of acute disconnect.

and I saw the terror that my infant self was feeling from that. And I spent what felt like in the context of the vision hours just hanging out with him, hanging out with my baby's self and soothing him. And, you know, being like, yeah, your mom loves you so much. She's in the next room. If she knew that you were upset, she would be here in a second. you're going to grow up with like you know wonderful people around you like basically doing the welcoming of myself into the worlds that I didn't get to have because I was born in a cultural moment in a hospital where we don't do that in this culture where you know for so much of human history babies that have brought to the world are you know welcomed by a group of people um and after doing that I purged. I vomited into my bucket. And I saw the Lyme bacteria in the bucket. I could, I could, I could see it there. And the next day, I knew that it was gone. Like, before that, I was like, I could barely move, I could barely get out of bed. The next day I was, like, doing cartwheels and climbing trees. It was miraculous. It was, it was incredible.

And, you know, there's a lot of different ways to make meaning of that. The way that I choose to make meaning of it is that there was a birth trauma that I was unaware of that was blocking my body's ability to purge this Lyme bacteria. And with the help of the ayahuasca and the dieta that I was on and the ayahuasca that I was working with and the month of practice of fasting of creating conditions in my body and in my nervous system that were in hospitimate. to the bacteria. I was doing all of this work to allow, to get my body ready to purge it. And then the thing, the final thing that needed to happen was getting rid of this trauma. And when I did that, it all came out. Now, what I later, years later learned, I actually have been in a little bit of a relapse of

Lyme lately. And they have more sophisticated Lyme tests now. So I recently got a Lyme test. and they can show you which are the dead bacteria. And so I had 14 different species of the bacteria, 14 different kinds of the Lyme in me. And 10 were dead. And so I still have four left.

So it turns out I basically killed 10, 14th of it. But that was certainly enough to make a fundamental change in my life. And now I'm kind of back on the path trying to get rid of get rid of the rest of it um so that that's one example of one of the ways that that that it can heal um and yeah i'll pause there yeah that's absolutely fascinating um and clearly that's that's changed your life and and you mentioned some learning lessons from these these experiences more broadly i'm just curious like you know how did if you want to drill down more into these details of how it changed your life, what lessons you learn from all of this. And yeah, just take that

wherever you want to go. I'm very, very curious about it. Yeah. Gosh, there's so much. I'll just jump around to whatever comes to mind. You know, I mean, ayahuasca, for me, this, this medicine path, it brings wisdom because more than anything else, wisdom comes from healed pain. And so it has taught me to go to face the pain. I've experienced quite a lot of pain in my life. and it teaches me to not run from it. It teaches me to go into it and make friends with it. And, you know, there's – and again, I want to be clear about the context in which I'm about to say this because there's – there's ways that on the left we have a discourse of talking about oppression in a structural sense and the material forces that keep us suffering. and so everything I'm about to say is integrated into that analysis.

It's not, you know, there's a way that I think people talk about sort of inner, inner healing as if all you have to do is like, you know, kind of the toxic positivity, kind of hippie, new agey thing of just like manifest good vibes. And then so I just want to be clear that's not perspective that I'm coming from. Absolutely. But in many ways, you know, this medicine teaches, teaches, me to not be a victim. You know, it teaches me to a lot, a lot of time human beings, we spend our time in a victim perpetrator binary mentality that lives in our reptilian brains. And it means

that a lot of the time we're stuck in reaction, right? We're reacting to our circumstances. So the way that we integrate this into a political analysis is that many people, whole classes of people in patterned ways, certainly don't have control over the material circumstances that they're in in the material conditions, right? However, the spiritual work is about choosing your reaction to those circumstances, right? And, you know, or rather, let me rephrase that because reaction is not a choice. So if you're constantly in reaction mode, that means you're in this victim perpetrator binary. And I do believe that's the, logic of most activists. It's certainly the logic that I was raised in, where I came into a left

where we saw everything as good or bad, right or wrong, oppressive or liberatory. And that's rooted deeply in how we face the world. And not just on the left, but in general, it's part of how humans have evolved to, you know, responds to threat. And so it's important to realize that 90% of our beliefs and attitudes are unconscious. And all of that is rooted in our emotions. And emotions are sensations that we attach stories to. And so my friend Cordell puts it this way. When we begin to bring conscious awareness to our emotions, that's the key.

It illuminates the subconscious. It gets deeper into the root of who we are, why we do what we do, and why we experience the world the way we do. And that's how we uncover agency. And that's at the heart of my politics. You know, my organization, the Wildfire Project, talks about agency as both the awareness of choice and then the capacity to make a choice. So when we're just in reaction mode, we're not making conscious choices of how we respond to our conditions. We're just reacting.

And then that happens in the subconscious. Then we react. And then our waking mind, our egos attach a story onto it, and we think that we're in control. Right? That's how the ego works. And so the victim perpetrator mentality keeps us in a reaction that is fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. But moving into agency moves us beyond those limitations. And that's what this practice is all about for me. And that's why I keep coming back to it, is that when I sit in ceremony through overwhelming sensation, through dealing with, my deepest, darkest things, right? I'm able to be so expansive that I become so much more choiceful in how I move in my life. And as a result of that, I know my own mind very well. I know all the parts of myself that I disavowed because I grew up in a left culture that

that had a puritanical way of viewing, you know, how to be a good person in this world. And every way that didn't fit into that, I disavowed. So, for example, I disavowed my masculinity because I thought all masculinity was by definition, toxic and patriarchal. And so I was constantly disavowing that part of myself because at least the sectors of the left that I was a part of didn't have models of healthy masculinity. So we just rejected it, right? And it was through this practice that I learned to not disavow that anymore and come into what is a healthy liberatory version of my own masculinity, for example.

It taught me both, you know, so when it comes to, for example, you know, like it helped me think about my social location differently. Like I grew up on the left that taught me to understand myself as a white man completely. That's the only way I learned to define myself in growing up in a white supremacist and patriarchal. system. And I say this because I grew up in a sector of the left that actually didn't have a very good class analysis, which is why I'm focusing on race and gender. But the, so when I was, you know, a younger person, I saw myself as inherently causing harm by existing because of who I was in these systems. And then in order to do good in the world, I had to, or in order to be a good person, I had to do good work, which is why I did so much. And I was sprinting and I was

constantly organizing and constantly building these campaigns. And I didn't root myself in any inherent sense of dignity. And I didn't see myself as deeper than my social location. And Ayahuasca taught me that I am a fathomless being of spirit that's been a lot of things and is going to be a lot of things. And I can root myself in a deeper truth of who I am. And that also means, right? That also means that in this life, I am a white man and that I need to navigate this world in a way that is responsible to understanding what that means. Both of those things are true. But the thing that that shifted for me was it taught me how to trust, well, first to locate my inner wisdom and my intuition and then to trust it. The left taught me to not trust my inner

The left taught me that as a white man, I should fundamentally distrust myself because it taught me that I was socialized to be a monster and that I always had to be second-guessing myself, hyper-vigilant about how I would cause harm, always deferring to others. And specifically, what that amounted to was the cult-like behavior on the cultural left where we defer the judgment and opinions of others and call that accountability, right? You know, we call that being accountable when really what it means is just performing to the social standards of what is invoes, for the analysis at the time. It taught me to shed all of that. And when I did, I became a much better comrade, a much better organizer, a much better movement builder, a much better partner, a much better lover, a much better human, a much better son, because I knew myself.

And I could show up to the table in struggle with my comrades, especially across difference, especially engaging working class struggle that is multiracial, especially being a white man who's in leadership of multibracial social movements where there aren't very many white men in leadership, it showed me how to do that in a fundamentally different way, where I wasn't in this weird culture of deference because I knew who I was. And so I'm grateful for that, you know. And it taught me, which I still struggle with discipline, you know, but it helped build within me a lot more discipline. It taught me how to respect and take care of my body a lot more, which again is a

lifelong, you know, I'm still trying. I fall off the path all the time, but it taught me that when I don't take care of my body, that's when life becomes overwhelming mentally. And, you know, it unlocked my singing voice. You know, I'm pretty tone deaf. But song is one way that medicine moves through, whether you're in ceremony or whether you're, you know, singing in a workshop, you know, building an organization or whether you're chanting in the streets and it helped me unlock my singing voice and to not care that I'm so to be able to sing well enough that despite the fact that I'm tone deaf that the spirit can still come through. It's teaching me still how to get out of my head. You know, I feel like that's going to take me my whole life because I've spent

so long being so cerebral and, you know, trying to come back into the body is one of my main goals with this practice. And so, you know, I'm still working on that. And, um, but it also politically taught me about reciprocity, energetically and spiritually, which, which we'll talk more about when we get to the part when we talk about cultural appropriation. Um, it also taught me how liberating, um, forgiveness is. Um, you know, often in ceremony, I'm just forgiving everyone who hurt me. You know, I'm releasing any old negative feelings that I was holding on to that were poisoning me. You know, I'm forgiving myself. Um, you know, I'm forgiving myself. My teacher, you know, Ricardo teaches that there's no faster path to healing than forgiveness.

And that's, that's been true in my experience, you know, I've really, and that was something that, again, as an activist, I was pretty skeptical of, because I had only, you know, heard about forgiveness in this sort of Christian paradigm that I thought was used to justify people's oppression. But sincere forgiveness is about taking your power back, you know, it liberates us, it's not about the other person, it liberates you from holding on to pain. opens up a way for compassion. It holds potential to, you know, shift the perspective and story that you have about your experience. And that's the key to agency, you know. And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, my,

my over cerebral brain wanted to believe that understanding a thing is the same thing as doing a thing. And that's that's another thing that I love about learning from Shepibo culture is that it's so like, you know, like there's just not a lot of patience for theory. You know, like calling something theory is an insult. It's all practice. And I do, I do appreciate theory. I think study is important. It's one of the reasons why I love listening to this podcast. but the emphasis on doing, I think, is an important part of this medicine.

And, you know, another thing I'll say, though, because I know I'm saying lots of fanciful things, but I don't want to over-romanticize the path. It's hard, you know, and it can make things pain. It can make things harder at first, not even at first. You know, it's, if you have an experience where you come to know who you are, it can be way more painful to then not live your life in accordance with that. And there was a long time where I came to a deeper truth that I was scared to live out loud because it was not socially acceptable, especially within my community of activists.

You know, in particular, being a white man working with medicine, I was scared of, talking on this podcast about it, you know, that this is part of like a truth for me to be able to share with you right now. And it took me a long time because I was scared of getting criticized for it. it, you know? And, and so the, there's actually, there's a great Ursula Kela Gwynn quotes. She writes, as a person's real power and knowledge grows and their knowledge widens, ever the way they can follow grows narrower, until at last they choose nothing, but do only and wholly what they must do, right? So, so the wider the breadth of your wisdom, the narrower the path that you can walk and the more painful it is if you're not walking that path right and so in that way it's it's

there have been long periods where i've i've i've been a lot less happy because i wasn't living in a way that was consistent with what my heart knew i needed to live and so it's that's also why a lot with this medicine like you got to be called to it you know you you got to you got to come correct like it demands like integrity and um and if you you you you you know you Yeah. And there's things that, you know, I still struggle. It helped me clean marijuana out of my life and all of the fatigue and anxiety and self-judgment and distractions and heaviness and malaise and laziness and binge eating that came with it for me. And I know that that's a medicine for other people, but for me, it did those things. And, you know, this practice helped me clean that out of my life. It also helped me learn how to build integrity of the heart, you know, which is what I mean by that is like, Before I was on this path, I had all of these intentions, you know, like I wanted to be able to, I wanted to have a morning routine where I'd wake up early and do pushups and do blah, blah, blah. And those intentions weren't clear goals. And I wouldn't follow through on them. And so I was constantly living an experience where I was proving to myself that I couldn't follow through on taking care of myself. I was proving to myself that I didn't love myself enough to do the things I knew I needed to do in order to feel better. And it taught me to instead, you know, make a process. to myself every night before bed about what I would do the next day to take care of myself

or to love myself. You know, maybe it's something simple. Maybe it's like, you know, you know, sitting in a five-minute meditation. Maybe it's, you know, something, you know, a way that I was going to eat or not eat the next day, maybe, you know, whatever it is. And then follow through on it, no matter what it is. And each time I follow through on it, I have a practice, a lived experience of proving to myself that I can be counted on to myself, you know. And I guess the last thing I'll say that, and this goes back to a little bit of what we said in the first podcast, which is like it helped me learn how to surrender. You know, activists confuse surrender with submission and that those are not the same thing.

And finding your place in the larger cycles that are beyond that, which we can control and surrendering to them, helps you find your agency within it, which is where you can find. your ability to act. And that's how I reconciled climate change. I was in tremendous despair about climate change until I came on this path. You know, it strikes me to share one other thing, which is that I want to be careful to not paint too rosy of a picture of the medicine. I used to believe that ayahuasca always brought the people who drink it into their highest

selves, that it just, by definition, made us better. And it's pretty common for newcomers to think that this medicine is all light and to hear things like, you know, if only everyone could drink ayahuasca, it would save the world. And I quickly learned how silly and reductive that perspective is. The medicine has a duality. What matters is how you apply it, how you work with it. It can not only be very difficult, but I've also learned from people, people that even the way, concept of spirituality as something distinct from our material existence is a division that just isn't, it's not how they see the world, it's all integrated in and all the good and bad

of it. And, you know, in many cultures that work with this medicine, for years, these techniques were also used for warfare. They were used to cause harm. And there's plenty of ayahuas Wasquettos who give in to jealousy and greed and use the medicine to harm people. They use the term, it gets translated into the term black magic, which, you know, it's kind of a weird translation, but, you know, it's basically about giving into the negative elements of it. So I also want to be clear that this, like anything else, is a set of tools, it's a set of guides, and it matters what you do with it. And if you integrate it in a way that moves with integrity, you can stay in the light and not

in the you know the shatana of it yeah no i think that is beautiful and i think it's so incredibly relatable and not even to just people who have walked your particular path but to people in general the struggles that you're mentioning um you know just the the lack of discipline the the idea of the integrity of the heart um and not being able to live up to that the truth that pain and suffering and setbacks are part of any path of advancement, sort of counterintuitively. And for me, you know, through meditation with the aid, as I've talked about before in this series

and elsewhere on the show of psychedelics, has also come with a bunch of having to face things that I otherwise would have tried to wiggle away from and repress or escape. And that is not always a path of lollipops and rainbows. It's hard. But of course, has to be because if you're going to to advance in the ways that we're speaking about you have to

become to an honest deep truth with those dark parts of yourself and that is going to be a painful process by definition and so not expecting these paths to be ones that are purely just me getting happier and happier and happier but ones that are sort of like two steps forward three steps back, you know, five steps forward, two steps back. And those steps back are particularly painful in light of the steps that you just took forward. And it can be, it's a very protracted process. You mentioned, for example, your struggles around masculinity. I think that's something that a lot of us struggle with is certainly something I've struggled with. Growing up in this culture as a cis man, for me, you know, I was taught or I absorbed the lessons that masculinity

meant being able to knock somebody's teeth out, being able to have reckless sex with as many partners as you could possibly have, you know, having an attitude where, you know, it's like, fuck the world, I'm in this by myself, don't talk shit to me, sort of mentality. And that is absolutely corrosive. I spent my late teens in my early 20s to some extent, locked into that notion of masculinity. And it was only through some of these spiritual practices that I could see the laughable limitations of that conception of masculinity and how actually that entire framework of masculinity was rooted in a profound insecurity. It was this hyper overcompensation for the fact that deep down was a trembling little boy that, you know, that wanted to claim

masculinity but didn't know how. And, you know, obviously that's deeply wrapped up with cultural conditioning, but also the ego and these spiritual practices, whether psychedelics, meditation, other spiritual paths are, you know, revealing the ego to yourself, like showing you how this thing operates and how it limits you and how it gets you trapped in these really unhelpful patterns. And so, yeah, just beautiful all around. I want to take this conversation in many different directions. I'm very interested, for example, in your discussion of marijuana. And, and, you know, my struggles with it, I feel like there is still a profound place for it in my life that is fundamentally healing. But the compulsive use of it is terrible in all the ways you

mentioned, this binge eating. So, you know, my anxiety would be perhaps peaked through smoking, weed and then I would go and eat those feelings instead of dealing with them and the sort of sloppiness of your overall life that can ensue not always but can with the compulsive use of marijuana is clearly a problem but for me the struggle has always been there are these clear benefits I get from it and it's like how can I balance those benefits and and try to take away the negative aspects like the binge eating like the paranoia like the fact that you know compulsive daily marijuana use for me at least instead of healing my anxiety caused a lot more of it um and and that was a a really brutal cycle a spiral if you will that i would get into so maybe before

i ask you the next question i'll just linger there for a moment can you talk like a little bit about that like have you had a complete break from it and do you in retrospect see anything positive that marijuana offered you that you sometimes feel like you know maybe you could get get it from that again or maybe you can find other more healthy avenues through which to gain those things. I'm just curious of your thoughts on that and your experience. Yeah, this is a deep convert. This is a deep thing for me because, you know, when I was bedridden, marijuana really eased so much of my pain and I'm so grateful to it for that. And and then very quickly it started holding me back. And I'm at a point in my life where just like how I said,

said when I don't take care of my body, life becomes unmanageable mentally. When I'm, when, when marijuana is in my life, life is a lot more difficult to manage for me on the whole. And I'll stick with. So when it comes to ayahuasca, you know, I started off this conversation by saying there's a lot of traditions that have a lot of different conflicting rules and approaches and they all make sense within their own context. And there are some ayahuasca traditions like I'm pretty sure in at least maybe offshoots of the Santo Dime

tradition which is a completely which is totally different than the Shepibo tradition they I've known people who actually smoke marijuana as a part of an ayahuasca ceremony which I once went to a ceremony where that happened and I was horrified because the

tradition that I come out of those spirits do not mix at all they don't get along at all and in the tradition that I come out of part of the paradigm is, you know, everything has a duality, everything has the light and dark, and that different spirits have different proportions of those. And the simple way of talking about the, like, quote unquote, you know, dark side of a particular energy is the word shatana. And so marijuana has a lot of shatana.

It also has medicine in it. And for different people with different constitutions, some people can, I think, work with marijuana in a way where they stay in the medicine part of it. But I can't. And for me, the Shatana is too strong. And so, you know, I've had a while where, you know, I'd go fast for a month in the jungle. And a big part of that was clearing out the marijuana from my body. And so I would get sung to every night with Ikaro's that were, you know, one of the ways that the Ikaro works is it's like a scalpel cutting stuff away.

and they would sing to clear the marijuana. They talk about it in in people culture, or at least Ricardo talks about it as like a sticky spirit, right? It's like an energy that sticks inside you. It gums you all up and it makes you heavy and it sticks you to the couch. And it like, you know, it's, and it's physically sticky too. And it, and so it's hard to clean. It's like, and it's so even if you're not smoking it anymore,

like the residue of it is still kind of. lingers is sort of how they talk about it. And so I'll go through all of this work fasting and clearing it and then I'll feel so much better and the anxiety will be gone. And, you know, I'll come back and, you know, I'll have, you know, six months or eight months of not smoking it. And then start to get the idea in my head of like, well, maybe I can approach this in a more balanced way now. Maybe. And then I'll do, you know, I'll open the door to it. And at first I'll have, you know, very like, you know, I'll maybe have a gummy that's mostly, you know, CBD, but a tiny bit of THC and be doing that for a couple weeks and it'll actually maybe be good for me. And if I could,

if I could stick to that, that would be right for me. But opening the door to it, I just inevitably I'll have days where like my anxiety just gets too strong and I'll just lean into it as a coping mechanism and then it's back. And so I've learned that I, I don't think I can ever have it in my life again. And it's a, it's, which I had to mourn. You know, I've, I've had many ceremonies of like literally breaking off the relationship like I would with a partner. And, um, and last, and I did that a year and a half ago. And I was, I was clear of it in my life until Michael Brooks died. And after, um, who's, you know, a good friend of mine who's actually introduced, uh, well, he didn't literally introduce Brett and I, but it was from me going on Michael's podcast on Michael Brooks show and the majority

report that I even got into this podcasting world and that's how I learned about Rev left and that's, so that's why I mentioned, mentioned his name. But after he died, I, you know, fell back into it. And it was on this last time that I went there that I had to then reclaim it all out again. And so, you know, I'm in that way, I'm still caught in an addiction cycle with it. And so I'm trying to be done with it forever. I think I am now. But if I fall back in again, I'm going to have to approach another strategy. But that's just for me. And that's also, but, and certainly in the lineage that I sit in, my teacher is like, you can never have marijuana again if you want to be on this path. You know, you, it will all, and so on the, on, on, in this lineage, a lot of things

will block your experience in ceremony. And gosh, there's so much more to talk about specifically with ayahuasca. And I do want to talk about the cultural appropriation. stuff soon too but the um there there are certain things you know it's also common to have ceremonies where nothing happens uh and they call that being blocked and there's um different different things that can block you some of his energetic or emotional or it could be a thing you ate that you weren't supposed to eat um but the energy of marijuana blocks you and so i've had experiences where i've i've had like you know weeks of ceremonies where i was totally blocked and then i finally cleared out energetically the marijuana and then it opened up again and I didn't really believe

you know I heard that that was a thing and I didn't really believe it until I just that's my experience is that that's true that's how it works and and yet like I said there's other traditions where people literally smoke ganja during ceremony so it clearly doesn't block them and so that's that's what I mean with the complexity of the medicine and how context specific it is yeah it's a it's a very complicated relationship it's not as simple as as most people make it sound, whether on the pro-marijuana or the anti-marijuana side of this particular debate. But we are getting sort of stuck, if you will, in that conversation. So let's advance the ball a little bit.

And the main thrust of that whole thing before we got into the marijuana detour was simply to ask you, because I've, so much of what you say resonates with my experience in meditation and other psychedelics, I've not done ayahuasca, you know, what makes ayahuasca different? Is it just different for some people, like, you know, you particularly find ayahuasca to be helpful in a way that these other psychedelics are not? Or do you think that somebody could have a sort of ceremonial, spiritual relationship to something like psilocybin and get very much the same benefits out of that as you would out of ayahuasca? Where do you come down on that debate? Is there something truly objectively unique here? Or is it like there's a different sort of, you know, thing for every person?

Yeah, it's an interesting question because there's contradictions in my answer. You know, like on one hand, all of it, whether it's working with plant medicines or doing breathwork or particular meditation practice, all of it is a path to oneness, right? And so most introspective, somatically oriented spiritual traditions, whether they make use of plant medicines or not, are trying to get to. a similar place and the experience of getting and and and so um in that sense it's just about what works for you you know about what resonates for you but that doesn't mean that they're all the same um either and psilocybin for example with with your specific question is not the same as DMT um i also work with mushrooms um it DMT is to me um it's or well i shouldn't i'll say ayahuasca in particular, it's an older spirit.

You know, so the way that different traditions refer to, they refer to different plant medicines and in familial terms. So ayahuasca's grandma, you know, and the tobacco, which we haven't talked about, which is not a psychedelic, but is worked with in a way that is probably outside of the frame of reference for many listeners in terms of their understanding of tobacco. But tobacco's grandfather. And there is Wachuma, you know, San Pedro cactus is called the Young Prince and the mushrooms are called the Holy Children, you know, and they each carry the energies that are, that get associated, you know, like grandfather is also, you know, the Iboga from Africa is also, you know, talked about as grandfather. And they, they have different energies that are more masculine or more feminine.

They have different, they work differently physiologically on the brain so that they, they structurally do different things. They open up different aspects for insight. They certainly all can connect you to self, but also the way that you work with them is really different from each other. You know, like there are certain medicines that I, that is, you know, it's like I have a lot of friends who sit in, you know, Native American church and work with peyote. I'm just so amazed at the level of rigor that that, that medicine demands, you know, the level of protocol, that that sort of ceremony demands, you know? And whereas, like, mushrooms are much more, you know, they're like, come play, you know, like there's a lot.

They're like, you know, however you want to do it, do it, you know. And so different medicines, I think, require different levels of discipline. They need to be held with different levels of care. and there's a reason why and you know there's cultures all over the world including ancestors that everyone listening has that have worked with different medicines and they work with them differently for those reasons you know I don't have much experience with the synthetic stuff and I do have you know my my so my opinion on things like LSD is more informed by what friends have shared and from my reading of the literature and my understanding of

things like LSD is that they're, they're really different, they're really not similar to plant medicines because you don't have a plant spirit guide with you. And, you know, LSD doesn't induce true hallucinations where, you know, like instead it can, you know, people might see visions that they, that they experience as reality, but mostly it just distort, you know, creates visual distortions and exaggerates the sensory experience, which can be, you know, beautiful. But that, that's, that's a little bit different than, um, being able to have your, field of vision lifted to be in dialogue with another conscious entity, not that people don't have those experiences on LSD as well, but, you know, there's, it's a synthesized molecule that was

created in the 20th century in a laboratory, rather than something that has been stewarded for, you know, 5,000 years. And so, so again, there's, I think you approach the medicines in different kinds of ways and you find the medicine. And I, and I, and I, and I, and I, and I, I know people who different medicines work for them differently. And some of that is cultural. Some of that is physiological. Some of that is the work that they're meant to do. But, you know, to me, so much of it is about context.

It's about how you hold ceremony. It's about how you are in reciprocity with the medicine. How are you in relationship to where the medicine comes from? And that determines it for me. Yeah. That's really helpful and it actually helps me make a lot of sense of some of the differences that I personally experienced, particularly the two heaviest psychedelics I have experience with is LSD and psilocybin. And I would always, when people ask me, you know, what's the difference? If you just took them once, you know, and especially if you were in a thrill-seeking younger mindset, you can more or less say, well, they're kind of the same. But really, if you have repeated experiences with them, you do see this divergence happen in these differences. And they're subtle. at first, but they become very obvious over time. And for me, with psilocybin mushrooms, that always had this organic feel to it, a feminine feel, the visions that one would have that I would have on these were always nature-oriented.

And with LSD, it always felt, and I would always describe it, even before we've had this conversation, to other people, as in contrast to psilocybin, as metallic and cold. And not cold and like, it's a terrible trip. it's often beautiful and insightful and revelatory but cold in that and maybe what i'm getting at is like that that lack of as you put it um the plant spirit is like there's like an absence there that is present with a psilocybin but i've never had a framework through which to understand that and my i default to you know materialism or you know i'm just trying to explain metaphorically my subjective experiences but that to me the way you frame it and and and and and

And that whole way of understanding and conceptualizing it makes a lot of sense. And I think that does explain at least it helps me understand the difference and experience I had between something like psilocybin and LSD. And I find that fascinating. Well, let's go ahead and move the conversation forward in the direction of something that you've touched on a few times, which is cultural appropriation. You and I have talked about this topic before we recorded and are very much on the same page. And I think you articulate it very, very well.

So yeah, what is your basic orientation to this, you know, concept or accusation of cultural appropriation, which you have seen flourish on the left quite a bit in the last few years, though perhaps recently it's slightly tended to drip off a little bit. There was a really intense sort of accusatory moment of cultural appropriation a few years ago, but particularly when we get in discussions like this, or even when somebody would say, like, I'm really, into Buddhism, for example, but I'm an American. This comes up. And I think it's worth visiting. It's not something you can just dismiss, but I do think the extremes on both sides of this argument sort of lose the plot a little bit, but I'm just wondering what your opinion is on the idea that, you know, some of this stuff could be culturally appropriative

and where you sort of draw the line between legitimate acts of cultural appropriation and a healthy, respectful engagement with a culture that's not necessarily the one you were born into. Yeah, it's, it's so useful to have a precision of analysis here, especially when we're talking, because in this conversation, we're talking about spirituality, which is so much closer to the hearts of people than, say, like, you know, a fashion choice or something like that. So, and I've, I've gone through, you know, over the last 20 years, I've encountered a lot of different frameworks that define cultural appropriation in a lot of different kinds of ways and really come to my sense of how I navigate the world as, as a white person who learns

from indigenous cultures. I guess I'll start by saying that if you have an analysis of capital, it makes understanding the stuff a lot easier. Because you need to be able to think of it structurally. So to me, cultural appropriation is capital's exploitation of the sacred, specifically practices that cultures have been stewards of without reciprocity. So when it comes to the medicine work, it's useful to know that almost, I think it's 74% of modern medicine's plant-based remedies were first discovered by indigenous societies, right?

And at every step along the whole chain of production of these, everyone is making tons and tons of money except for the people and cultures that actually discovered them, right? And so that's extraction, right? And to this day, less than 2% of all plant species have been fully tested in laboratories, right? And the majority of the remaining plants are in tropical rainforests. And so the pharmaceutical industry is heavily reliant on indigenous wisdoms for discoveries that, for which they are not remunerated.

And in addition to that, right, once you, once you relegate something to the chain of the market in that way, right, there's things like, you know, Vandana Shiva's work on biopiracy with the patenting of genes, right? the you know there's there's a way that the commercialization of certain things creates such a market that thing that certain plants become over harvested and depleted right and so you know or you know in a cultural sense the mass based commercialization of certain cultural forms for the sake of profit that exploits certain knowledge or or patterns and removes it from context right and so for example right now there are pharmaceutical companies trying to patent DMT right and so that that kind of behavior that that happens structurally and is enacted not by individuals but by corporations and has has really real world material consequences for people that are that are dramatic and exploitative when when we think about medicine work in particular understanding that the context of of colonization in different places helps one understand different people's relationships to their medicines and whether they want their medicines shared or not. Like I have a lot of native friends from North America, Turtle Island, whose basic perspective on a lot of their plant medicines is that, you know, these medicines were demonized, they were made illegal, they were tempted to be exterminated, and now they're in vogue from, you know, a generation of white people who feel, who feel spiritual.

racially deprived and now they're being over harvested to be sold at urban outfitters. And so their perspective is we need to defend this from you. You know, our medicines are not for everyone. And I think that perspective is totally reasonable, of course. It totally makes sense

in that context. And for those medicines, and so I'm speaking about things like peyote and teepee ceremony. I'm speaking about, you know, even the conversation around White Sage, which is complicated. those kinds of medicines, I absolutely, you know, defer to the cultural stewards of those of those

medicines. It totally makes sense. And we can still recognize that also comes from trauma, you know, and that perspective. And that's not the perspective, however, of the Shepibos that I sit with, or at many of the people that I've met and learned from who work with plant medicines from the Amazon, who have a different relationship to colonization, which isn't to say that colonization was like prettier or nicer. It's just that the way, the forced Christianization happened, left a lot of those medicine practices intact in a different kind of way. The perspective of the Shepibo people that I sit with is almost the exact opposite. Their perspective is, you know, we've been stewards of this medicine for time of

memorial. And right now, this medicine wants to spread. And we are following, we are accountable to spirit. And spirit wants to spread right now. And the people who need this medicine the most people of all races are the people who come from the culture that has brought the planet to the brink of collapse and so and it's lots of different lineages to people lineages and others who are specifically like the people you know we we want white people to drink this medicine you know if you talk to politicized people you know the ones that I talk to tell me you know that it's your culture that has been so disconnect from the land and disconnected from each other that you need this medicine right now to come back

into yourselves, right? Don't take my word for it. I actually have, you know, I mentioned before Ricardo, there's this book of transcripted conversations. And so I just want to read two quotes that I think can frame ayahuasca specifically and kind of what I've learned from it, which is one quote is, he says, I think ayahuasca is for all people. but not all the people will want to drink it. So it's not just for any person. The ayahuasca was put on this earth to help us all, but not all want to be helped.

So that was one thing. And then another quote is, and this was in response to a question about basically the globalization of ayahuasca, right? Because part of the complexity of it is like there is a tourist industry around it now. There is a lot. And I'll share more of my personal opinions on all that. and how it's spreading. And, you know, we live in a system defined by global capital.

So a lot of this is being mediated by, you know, capital market relations, too. And so the question that was posed to Ricardo is like, doesn't that compromise the medicine? And then specifically he was asked about cultural appropriation. And he said, quote, I'm not worried about us losing our traditions in the least, not in the least. Instead, I'm very happy. I'm happy that the people from America and the other countries are coming here to take ayahuasca. I don't have those ideas about, quote, contamination of Shepibo culture, or, quote, in the future, everything will be lost because our traditions will be gone or diluted. The gringoes have these ideas and fears.

Not us. No, that's not the right way to think. Our old way of life is already gone. The gringoes took it from us a long time ago. But our culture is still strong. sharing it with the world makes it stronger. What the people who worry about these kinds of things don't realize is that the ayahuasca will never be lost. It will never be erased. And this is our true culture, the culture of the medicine, to be able to see in the spiritual world. And even if people

contaminate the ayahuasca with their greed or bad energies from all the different cultures of the world, they're only contaminating themselves. They can never hurt the spirit of ayahuasca, end quote. So that is my teacher and who I learn from. And part of what really shifted my thinking on cultural appropriation in general was mostly spending a lot of time with people from the global south who think the discourse on cultural appropriation that comes out of the U.S. and Europe is ridiculous. And, you know, it's, as you mentioned, it's in vogue right now for the left to talk about cultural appropriation in really reductive and individualized ways that are frankly, to me neoliberal academic ways of thinking where it shrinks the discourse of politics down to the level of the individual where basically people use the trope of cultural appropriation to police each other's personal spiritual practices or fashion choices and I used to be in that I used to be that way because that was the

culture that I was swimming in right and I was really challenged by this by native peoples in the south You know, they're like, that's a Western concept based on a puritanical notion of like basically intellectual property rights, ironically. The idea that like that a group of people can own a plant or own or the idea that like culture isn't constantly shifting and the idea that like culture can't be shared simply because we live in a society that's structured by white supremacy and capitalism and patriarchy and that therefore by definition. sharing cross lines of power is is extractive and and and and that it can't be shared like that that academicization of things that that puts the focus on the individual um I think gets away from like at the end of the day when you're doing medicine work it's like you're accountable to spirit and you're either doing it with integrity and people can feel it energetically because you're doing it for the sake of genuine healing or or you're not and you know i i do think you know on the

flip side as as ayahuasca spreads of course i hear a lot of you know dumb white people online talking about it and i cringe you know and uh and there's dangers right there's like with the globalization of iwaska on all sides where there's there's bad and so now now i want to get It's a little bit of like the warnings because I know that I've been talking about how great this medicine is, but it's, it's, there's really, it can be dangerous, not because the medicine's dangerous, but because either, you know, like, I've seen plenty of times where there's like some white hippies who think that they're qualified to serve medicine because they can like play a guitar and they like charge a bunch of money for people to come sit in a circle and they'll serve medicine and play guitar and they are not qualified to handle it if someone has their trauma. come up and has a really difficult experience that's that those are the kind of moments where like when people talk about a bad trip i think i've said this to you on a previous podcast like in my experience all a bad trip is is when you're confronted with your inner material and you don't have a container with which to deal with it in a good way so it becomes nightmarish but if if you

have a guide and and a space to navigate it then when difficult material comes up it is for the sake of your healing. And so if you are sitting with an experienced practitioner, even if it's difficult and even if the next day you're like, that was, I hated that, it's still in service of your healing. But if you're with some, you know, like someone who's not experienced, it can be dangerous to your mental health, you know, and on the flip side, because there's a tourist industry built around it in places like Akitos, there's tons of, you know, and again, my experience is in Peru, There are tons of Peruvians who are not actual shamans who pose as shamans because they see they can make a lot of money by taking advantage of tourists. And things like there's actually like, you know, a pandemic of sexual assault that happens.

That when, because when you drink ayahuasca, you're in a very vulnerable state. And there are people who will take advantage of that. All of that stuff is consequences of this spreading. And so like Ricardo said, like when it spreads, that doesn't mean it's. It's not going to be messy and full of contradictions and problems. That doesn't mean that the world doesn't need this medicine right now. It does mean that if you're going to come to this medicine, to come to it with reverence, to come to it with accountability to spirit and a reciprocity to want to give back,

which is why, you know, I really want to, like when I'm down at the center that I go to, I'm also organizing. I'm like talking to people who are having their lives changed by this medicine and saying, hey, like, why don't you support organizations that are defending the rainforests and that are defending the rainforests not by some paternalistic, you know, corporate protection scheme, but by giving direct resources to frontline indigenous communities that are that are defending their territories and asserting their sovereignty because the best way to support intact rainforests is through indigenous sovereignty. And so I do think it's important that as this medicine spreads, that, that, that, that, especially because, you know, in many ways, this medicine more than other psychedelics, at least in the Shepibo tradition, it is a very individualized path, but the integration of the healing has to happen collectively. It has to happen in community. The application of it has to happen in community.

And a lot of that is about, well, what are the relationships with communities like, you know, for people who come to this for the sake of healing? And, you know, the entering of money into the equation also makes it complicated where, like, I've talked to lots of people, people who are like, yeah, like, we were in a position where young people were not interested in maintaining our traditions and going into the cities. And we, like, a lot of this was being lost until Westerners started getting interested in it. And then you could make money doing it. And now there's a lot of people, a lot of our youth are apprenticing in it because you can actually sustain yourself doing it. And it's provided economic development for our communities. And that's a really good thing.

And at the same time, there's like lots of, you know, non-indigenous-owned healing centers in the Amazon now that don't pay their Iowa scatos very well and, you know, reproduce neo-colonial like market relations. And that happens too. And, you know, in some in some aspects of plant medicine, there's there's all kinds of opinions on money, right? A lot of people think money is a desecration of the sacred and that there's, you know, people shouldn't pay. to go to ceremony and it depends on the tradition that you're in about which perspectives are dominant. But in the Shepivo tradition that I sit in, they're like, yeah, we're doctors. Of course you're going to pay us. You know, like, you're going to pay 75 bucks to 150 bucks a session to go to therapy and you won't, you won't pay like your doctor who's like fundamentally

transforming your life, you know, get the fuck out of here. Whether the ayahuasgado is native or not native. And so when I first came into this work, again, because I came out of the left and I was rigid and puritanical, I thought it was totally illegitimate to practice this medicine if you weren't native and from a family line that worked with it. And I would see like white practitioners and think that that was cultural appropriation. And I no longer think that at all. I know a lot of, I know white people who practice this medicine with so much integrity and the amount of healing they bring the world. There is no political analysis that can tell me that that's not a fundamentally good thing for the world, especially in the way that they walk with it.

And then for me personally, like, I'd be dead if it wasn't this medicine. I do think there's a lot of nuance to it, of course. And even the idea of culture spreading, like I was recently supporting a group that is connected to Alaska Native tribes who are building language nests because colonization has robbed them of their languages. and there's very few speakers left of their languages. And, of course, indigenous languages holds entire paradigms of seeing the world. That when those languages are, the reason that colonization tries to stamp out languages

is that it stamps out entire life ways, ways of being, and ways of knowing. And that the loss of languages is a fundamental, you know, it's a crime against humanity. It's genocide, yeah. Yes, yes. And, you know, Shepibos, who weren't, you know, they, there's still lots of, you know, people speak Shepibo as their first language. But Shepibos are teaching their language to people. I mean, I've been learning Shepibo for years, right? They're teaching their language to people from all over the world now.

And it's, and for me, learning Shepibo has shifted my way of understanding the world. And it shifted the thoughtful, it shifted the way that I think, the way that I make meaning of the world. And so to to imagine that that, you know, the laziness to me of an analysis of cultural appropriation that that sort of would disparage that, I think is, um, is, is, is actually offensive to me. And so, um, so yeah, I, I, I think it's complicated and, you know, it's not without, the spreading of it is not without problems. And I have a lot of sympathy, like a lot of, I can, It really resonates with me when people see, you know, like I, like, I've seen TED talks of people who go to the jungle, white people who then, like, have an experience and then act like they're the experts. And there's so many books written about ayahuasca from people who put themselves in expert roles. And of course, that is obnoxious behavior. But there's a balance with it. Yeah.

I think that's incredibly nuanced. I think that's handled with the, with the detail and the insight that is required for such a complicated topic. I think that the people that really go after it with this stuff and take it to way too far end up sort of circling back around to what I believe to be a more or less white supremacist idea of which is like we should live in these silos. Whatever culture you're born into is the culture you stay within and any attempt to intermingle even in the most respectful ways with other cultures is automatically sort of abhorrent, immoral, etc. I think that is obviously taking this stuff way too far and erasing all nuance out of it. But on the other hand, you're right. It's not a binary. It's not like sharing culture good, sharing culture bad.

It's a spectrum. It's messy. There are clearly cultural appropriative moves and there's structural co-option and there's commodification. And there's also human beings who genuinely benefit from engaging respectfully and meaningfully with other cultures. And that should be something that we applaud and that we love. And there's a parallel in the mindfulness world, right? Like with meditation, obviously, like these practices originate in Asia, you know, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc.

They come from that part of the world. And then they come over here largely in the 60s with a handful of practitioners who, you know, reach the limitations of psychedelics, want to go over to Asia and practice these things, and then bring them back to the United States. Well, that's a messy problem. process. And the result of it is everything from Americans who would otherwise never be introduced to

these things, reaching enlightenment, becoming genuinely compassionate, active beings in their community and making everybody around them, you know, better for it. And that's a beautiful thing. That should not be discouraged. But on the other end of that, there's also Amazon mindfulness booths, you know, and everything in between. And so I think this subject in particular needs to be handled with the amount of nuance and detail-oriented analysis and structural analysis that you're presenting here. And I think it's a really important contribution to this discussion. This is a discussion that can so quickly become incredibly lazy and nobody is made better for it. So I appreciate and agree and align with your analysis here for sure. I think the reason why I'm going into this

point so much is it's not actually, to me, we happen to be talking about cultural appropriation, But we're actually talking about a dynamic within the left in general, which is that the left for the last, you know, 30 years has retreated away from a real conversation about power into a conversation about interpersonally policing each other and through a certain moralistic lens. And this is just an example of that. You know, there's there's a thousand other examples of that. And so to me, the issue isn't even about about, this is just one manifest. of, and that's, you know, last time we talked about the wildfire project and how we support organizations helping keep their eyes on the prize. And a lot of that is about having a structural analysis and getting away from gatekeeping and policing each other and building, building

these purity politics of, you know, that to me are antithetical to the insights that the medicine offers, because what the medicine offers is not just compassion, but it's embracing your fullness and all your contradictions and shadows. And it's the thing that has poked the most holes in the sort of shininess of the left analysis that I was given. And yeah, yeah. 100%. I could not agree more.

Many people who have limited experience with these substances will hear us talk about hallucinating or having visions and probably have a rather underdeveloped or even a radically distorted understanding of what exactly we're talking about. I know when I would talk to somebody like my mom who has had none of these experiences, the very idea of like you hallucinate. Like that doesn't seem pleasurable or something that you should aim for. It seems rather scary. It's like almost like it's synonymous with having a mental illness or something. It's scary rather than something that could ever be conceptualized as reifying or revelatory. So just with that in mind, like especially for those people who have never had any experience with this stuff, what exactly

do we mean when we use these words and how should they sort of be understood? Yeah, I think to start, it's important to have a little bit of scientific understanding of how the waking minds typically perceives reality, which is to say that we are hallucinating the reality that we perceive right now. I think a lot of us tends to assume that our eyes are somehow like windows and we're looking out of them, seeing the world in front of us. And that's not at all how the brain works. There are light particles that hit our eyes. We have receptors in them. And then our eyes translates those light particles into our brain. And our brain creates a visual map inside itself about what our brain thinks

is going on outside, right? So what that means is that we have these receptors that are taking in some information, a limited amount of information, right, where we only perceive a tiny fraction of what's going on around us, right? We don't perceive infrared rays or magnetic, you know, waves or, you know, we can't see things like CO2, you can't see Wi-Fi, right? There's a limited bandwidth of what these receptors are even designed to be able to receive. And then we create, we create an image in our brains.

And so that's, that's our daily reality. So you're hallucinating everything around you. Your brain's creating a map of it. And so true hallucinations are about your, your brain receiving more data, more information than you usually receive, and then creating a picture based on that data, right? which is why, you know, when people work with DMT, they'll have, you know, they can describe it's visions or hallucinations and will be very clear that what they're seeing is an aspect of reality that they can't normally see, right? And it's, because I used to really believe, you know, before I had any experience with any of these substances, I assumed that like you're taking a drug that just like is just like scrambling what you can see. just either exaggerating your sensory experience or that, you know, you're seeing just kind of you're discharging images and memories that have been stored in your brain and, you know,

you're watching it like a TV or something like that. And that's how I perceived dreams to be, right? That you're just seeing stuff that have been stored in your brain. And certainly that can happen on some of these substances, especially the synthetic versions, which is why I mentioned earlier that like, you know, know, things like LSD aren't really considered true hallucinations because they, they are just, you know, potentially exaggerating your sense of perception. So that can happen, but also what can happen from my, I'm speaking from my experience, is, you can see more of reality, right? And

the human brain is limited, right? We may not be able to make full meaning of what we're able to see and that, you know, it's very common with, you know, everything and not just even from substances, people who do holotropic breathwork, for example, where you're not taking in any substances from the outside, that people see patterns and images they've just never seen before in their, in their lives, sacred geometry, or, you know, the world of the consciousness of the plants, or, you know, it's very common for people to report all over the world really similar kinds of visions, you know, it's very common, for example, with ayahuasca for the spirit of ayahuasca to come to you in the form of a snake. You know, those kinds of things wouldn't

happen so consistently across people and across cultures if it was an entirely subjective experience. However, the meaning that you make of it in your mind is, of course, subjective, right? So when I told the story earlier of how I, in a vision, saw my body. birth trauma and saw my infant self in the incubator, well, I have a subjective choice about how to make meaning of that, right? There's some people who might experience that and the meaning they make of it is I traveled into, you know, an actual like memory in my brain. And I, and I was re-experiencing a memory that I, that I had, you know, deep inside. There's people who might experience that and say, you're literally time traveling, your consciousness.

This is literally going back in time to your infant self. There's people who might say that that's just a projection of, you know, I'm inventing that, that like I must have heard and, you know, at some point like, oh, you should be aware of your birth trauma. And then I was just sort of projecting that and inventing it. And, you know, it's up to you the kind of meeting you want to make of your visions, right? And I don't think there's any, you know, no one has a monopoly on what is, quote, unquote, objectively really happening. The point of it for me is that, you know, using that, that example that I gave earlier,

it did heal me. It, you know, the, like, it's like how I think about, you know, there's that phrase on the left, direct action gets the goods, you know, like, it works. And so there are scientific ways to try to begin to understand the sort of chemical mechanics of what's going on. And I think those are limited. There are spiritual ways to understand what's going. going on, and those are culturally contextual and are also limited.

And so at the end of the day, I think, where we're all grasping to make meaning of experiences that are at the edge of what our brains evolved to be able to process, and however you choose to make meaning of it, if it's in service of your healing, that's great, you know? And so I have my ways of making meaning of what I see when I have visions. And I also want to be clear that you don't have visions every time you drink ayahuasca. And especially after you get some more experience with it, I actually very rarely have visions. So when I do, it's, you know, it can be a special and distinct experience. But that wasn't the case when I first started.

When I first started, I was having, you know, visions every night and would see just impossible geometries. you know, things that like were just inconceivable otherwise. And what it instilled in me was a level of wonder and reverence and, and depth of understanding of the multi-dimensional reality that, that we are a part of and how, you know, we were able to perceive just such a tiny, tiny, tiny slice of it. And it's humbling. Yeah. Yeah, I really find this whole avenue of discussion incredibly fascinating when I was

in college studying philosophy. I focused on philosophy of mind. I worked in a neuroscience lab. I've always been very, very interested in this. And there is this sort of folk idea that the brain, you know, through the, through the eyes, just experiences the world as it is. And that it's not really a constructive process going on all the time, but it clearly is. And there's a couple ways you can navigate into this and make sense of it. One is, I think you were getting at it a little bit, but we're limited inherently by our sensory organs. You know, if you have five senses, you experience the world through them, but there's no reason why, let's just, you know, use the example of alien life in a different

evolutionary context, couldn't have six, seven, eight, nine sensory organs, and what would that mean for their subjective experience of how they view the so-called objective world? It's interesting. The philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote a famous paper in philosophy of mind called what it's like to be a bat in which he argues that sapiens given our brain how it's constructed and our sensory organs literally cannot possibly imagine or comprehend the subjective experience of a different animal in this case a bat because how does a bat create a map of their

world where humans use their visual cortex and their eyes primarily bats use echolocation So they literally do high-pitched sounds well beyond the auditory ability for humans to even hear and by bouncing sound off of their environment they can create a map of the world around them with such nuance that they can We've all seen bats fly between trees They literally hunt mosquitoes and moths

And through their echolocation They can determine whether the moth they're pursuing is a poisonous one and they should abandon the pursuit or one that they can they can healthily eat. And in fact, it's put selective pressure on the moths to try to create through their body structure, echolocation that is more resembling of the toxic sort of moths so that, you know, bats sort of get confused and maybe leave them alone and a few more of them, you know, reproduce and pass on their genes, et cetera. But, you know, we can talk about echolocation. We can kind of conceptualize it, but we can never, ever, ever, possibly, no matter how much we scientifically

understand the brains of bats, subjectively understand the experience of what it's like to be a bat. And I think that is another way of getting at this idea that the brain, the nervous system, constructs reality more than it objectively, simply takes it in. And, you know, it's not even hallucinatory substances, but as you mentioned, Joshua, with a breath can cause, you know, these disruptions in our sensory experiences, high fevers, sensory deprivation tanks, intense grief. And even I have an alcoholic very close to me in my family and he recently went into a hospital and had to detox just by definition because he had to go

to the hospital for some other health issues. And he goes through delirion tremens when he goes through alcohol withdrawal and he literally he tells me afterwards like I see people in the corner of my room full figures and this is this is actually him being not on any substance him withdrawing from alcohol use produces these these things so the brain is really a complex constructive organ it is not a passive organ that merely receives objective reality as it is and if you're really interested in more of this I would recommend the book hallucinations by the neurologist Oliver sacks. It's profoundly interesting and he works with patients who for a variety of reasons have sensory distortions, full-on hallucinations, et cetera. And he talks about how the brain produces it,

et cetera. So yeah, I just thought those, it's a very interesting line of inquiry and definitely worth pursuing. Absolutely. And once, you know, once you abandon the arrogant assumption that the default neurotypical mode of processing the world is somehow objectively true, you begin to have a reverence for other beings and an ability to begin to learn from them. And I've certainly, through this practice, replaced that with a different cosmology, a different set of assumptions, which, of course, you know, I've learned from Shepibo people, which is that, you know, everything is conscious and that we can barely begin to understand, and the consciousnesses of other beings.

And, but the beauty of, of these practices is that you can begin to come into dialogue with them. And, um, that's not something that is, uh, you know,

provable with the tools of science yet. Uh, but is certainly, um, it's my truth, absolutely. Like I, I do,

I do have the opportunity to communicate with other intelligences. And, you know, there's many ways in which, now modern science is beginning to start to catch up with the wisdom and insights that indigenous cosmologies have had for time immemorial. I think that's happening in multiple fields including quantum physics, you know, where even as limited as, you know, like string theory, it is, you know, it's really shifted. It's the fundamental assumptions of science, you know,

of moving from the idea that matter is the fundamental building block of reality to understand that energy is and that energy vibrates matter into being and that there's, you know, something like depending on, you know, which model of string theory that you lean into, there's something like 11 or 13 different dimensions of reality and we are only perceiving three of them, four of them, if you include time. And that when you begin to lean into the wonder of that, it becomes almost self-evident that, of course, there are other consciousnesses that are inhabiting and operating these different dimensions and aspects of reality. And of course, life is propelled by evolution and that consciousness evolves. And of course, humans are not the pinnacle of that. And that there must be all kinds of consciousnesses that that we do not understand. stands that are more evolved than we are. And there's plenty of spiritual practices, including this one that help us connect and learn from them.

And in particular, you know, the tradition that I sit in sees plant spirits as much more evolved than animal spirits. They've been on the planet for longer. Of course, they're more evolved. They've had a lot more time to evolve. That's why they're so advanced. And, you know, and I think various human cultures have different words of connecting with different consciousnesses, you know, some people call them aliens, some people call them angels,

some people call them ghosts, some people call them gods, some people call them spirits, you know, and I don't claim to have like a, you know, a system of knowing that, like, fits it all together. I have more of a general reverence and awe and also a respect for, you know, different, different cultural practices that may use different words to talk about different consciousnesses that each belie some kind of insight, you know. It may not be, you know, the whole objective truth and whatever, but they all have something useful to teach. And that's one of the ways that's changed kind of my way of viewing myself in the world. Yeah, that leads really well into this next question, which I do want to get into, but just generally responding to what you

just said there. For me, I have this epistemic humility that's really crafted in the face of, as I've said earlier, you know, the list of things I don't know being infinitely longer than the list of things I do. And that for me instills in me just an open-minded agnosticism on questions like this. And that's just me personally. I, you know, I'm not one to say that this is 100% true or this is exactly how things are, but I just know that we know so little about the nature of reality. And what we do find out about the nature of reality is so bewildering and weird and strange, you know, talking about quantum mechanics and the mini-worlds theory, et cetera, that you would have to be incredibly arrogant to assume that whatever

the, you know, the norms and accepted beliefs of our current epoch, which is always developing, always evolving, we always look back on what we thought we knew before and say, actually, we didn't really fully understand this thing. We have a better understanding now that radically transforms that. We're still in that process. So at any point along that process to say, okay, stop right here, we understand things. It is an inherently absurd and highly arrogant position to take. But talking about cosmology, worldviews, it's a tricky game here because it's a tricky game to play when one has these intense subjective experiences, you know, through medicines like ayahuasca or psilocybin, and then try to make sense.

of them and apply those subjective experiences to the objective world. Many people come out of psychedelic or even just spiritual or mystical experiences more broadly and they really want to make scientific or metaphysical claims about the nature of reality. I know throughout this conversation we've touched on some of this stuff, but maybe there's some aspects we haven't addressed or maybe we can drill down a little deeper. So what are your thoughts on this general jump that some people try to make from subjective experience to objective truth and you know maybe you could talk a little bit more about how your experiences have fundamentally changed your worldview and cosmology over time yeah in the practice

that I sit in you know your subjective truth is is your truth and what matters is how you apply that and so I'm not really in the I'm not that interested in in trying to make claims that are true for other people you know I'm I'm interested in learning how to navigate my world in as integrous a way as possible, and I'm interested in sharing what I've learned in the event that it's useful for other people. And so in that way, it's like, you know, again, to like bring it back to, you know, a left audience, theory is only as good as it can be put into practice, right? Like, it's, you, you may, you may have a body of theory that is, is, you know, correct or incorrect or correct in some circumstances and not in others. But what matters is like, is it useful?

And so that's how I approach this practice is, you know, when I, when, when I make meaning of what, you know, even the metaphysical stuff we were just talking about, it certainly changed the things that I believe. And what matters to me is like, does, does acting on those beliefs make me a better person that can I be a better, you know, ancestor? Will I make the planet a better place for future generations? Will I be able to navigate this historical moment in which I can help take care of the people around me and myself in a better way? And that's, that's my compass. And I think one of the differences between, you know, some of these insights and the hegemonic religions is that the hegemonic religions, you know, claim to be an authority on what is and then build all these boundaries around it and then

assert those beliefs that other people need to believe them. And I'm just so disinterested in that. And, you know, if you go down to sit in the lineage that I sit in, um, on one hand, you know, someone like Ricardo will, will definitely assert like this is the way it is, you know, but in the same breath, we'll say, like, that's the information that he received from these plants, like, he doesn't care if you believe it, you know? And in that way, it's, you know, I do like the way that, you know, people like Neil deGrasse Tyson and stuff who talk about science education say, you know, science doesn't care if you believe in it or not. I think there's, there's an aspect, well, I guess this is, I haven't thought,

fully worked out this idea, but there's a contradiction to that where it's like, I think we're touching on things outside of ourselves that like it's, they're true regardless of whether you engage them. And on the other hand, how you engage it, how you believe it, what you do with it is is what makes it meaningful. Absolutely. And there is this element of the subjective versus the objective. There's this element of needing to have that third person perspective for the scientific endeavor. So when you're going out and you're trying to study plate tectonics or the movement of the stars, you take on this dispassionate third person perspective, and that's the scientific posture. But the stuff we're talking about here is the subjective experiences of

being a human being, the introspective revelations that one has with the aid often of either spiritual practice or a plant-based medicine. And so we're just talking about two different realms of knowledge. And I think that's also important to sort of keep in mind as we go through discussions like this is you don't need to collapse the realm of life that science just almost by definition can't say much about and try to fit it into the box of objective third person science because you're making a category error and being very clear about not making those category errors and understanding what realm of reality you're dealing with and what set of tools

is most efficacious for that realm, I think is important. And there is this scientific materialist, scientism effort to try to collapse all this subjective internal stuff into the realm of science and then, you know, just almost immediately dismiss it because they're making a category error mistake. The tools of science are not necessarily meant or at least are not sophisticated at this point in time to be able to make those investigations. and so I just I always like to tell people to keep the tools for the job that those tools are made for and not to mix them with other with other toolboxes if you will but let's go ahead and move on and talking more about the psychedelic experience a key component of it is our ability or our attempt to integrate its lessons into our daily lives we talked earlier about my experiencing my experience is just smoking DMT and it was very fleeting

such that there was nothing really for me to integrate. Now, if I have an eight-hour acid trip or, you know, a six-hour mushroom trip, there are, you know, huge things that come and go and that, you know, in the light of sobriety, I can begin to try to detangle and really try to integrate the lessons into my life. And it's a task all its own, really. So can you talk about about that a little bit and sort of how you've integrated your experiences into your daily life and how that process really happens? Yeah, absolutely.

And there's a few different angles on this that are worth getting into. To start, I'll just share. There's kind of a cliche in, you know, psychedelic discourse that's actually really useful, which is to understand that, you know, again, when we talked about this earlier, is that the vast majority of our beliefs, attitudes, and actions arise from the subconscious. We're not choosing them. And the way that we navigate the world, there are, over time, your brain builds synaptic pathways and certain thought forms begin to sort of move along the same path over and over again in the same kind of grooves, so to speak. And so you ruminate on the same kind of things.

You start to behave in patterned ways. And those grooves deepen and deepen over time, which is one of the reasons why change is so difficult for human beings. it's why building a new habit is it takes is very challenging changing all kinds of behaviors like you know how you eat versus how you you know talk or think about yourself all of that stuff is very challenging for for physiological reasons because of how the brain develops and so you know the metaphor that's often used is the idea of like there's you know if you think of there's new snowfall and the grooves that build are like there's a track of a sled going down a hill and the more that it goes down that same track if you if you go down the hill

it'll tend to just follow the same path over and over and over again and and so the metaphor that's used is that psychedelics in general but especially DMT but also things like psilocybin they they you know shake the snow globe and sort of reset the etcha sketch so that um you have the opportunity to have your thought forms um move move in different patterns and especially for some you know a practice like ayahuasca a lot of what you do in ceremony is you are you are retraining you're shifting the the ways that your subconscious operates and then gives rise to your your waking choices and so that's why when you you know in ceremony if you do things like you know forgive someone who hurt you in a deep complete way and and really pray on

then you can actually free yourself of the emotions that then get attached to, you know, when you think of that person and the harm is gone because you're actually working on a deeper level than your conscious waking mind. And so that's the opportunity that comes. But then the integration is once you've shaken up the snow globe, you have to build new grooves or else you fall back into your old habits. You know, another way of putting it is it's like a game. of Tetris where, you know, there's blocks that make a certain pattern and they, you know,

it's throwing up in the air and after you have ceremony, they're slowly falling back into place. And then you have an opportunity to make changes in your life where it's much easier to build new habits. But you have to do it. You have to do the work. And if you build the new habits and do your kind of 90 days of repetition, then the blocks fall into place differently. But if you don't, they'll fall right back into place where they were. And it's very common for people to go down to the Amazon, for example, and have major shifts in their lives. And in that environment where you've kind of retrained your nervous system and you don't have any of the external stressors that are in your day-to-day life and you don't have any of the pressures that you have in your

day-to-day life, that people often are like, I'm changed forever. Like, it's, it's, it's, it's, For many people, they have the experience of just, you know, it's hard to ever imagine going back to the way you were. But of course, you do go back to the way you were unless you immediately sort of start setting intentions and actually doing the work of changing your life. And there's an aspect of that that's individual, but there's a more important aspect of that that has to be done in community and has to be collective, which is, you know, there's different traditions of working with ayahuasca. some of them are, you know, on the community and group level. The Shepibo tradition that I sit in is that it actually is very individualized, but making meaning of it with a group of people or at least a therapist and having, having, you know, someone who you can talk through the integration with is really important.

And it's, and so addictions are a good example of, you know, working with ayahuasca, very good to heal and transform addictions. And it will shake up those neural pathways. And I know many people who have been addicted to all kinds of things who come down to the jungle. And while they're down there, they're like, I can't even imagine ever wanting to touch that substance again. And I know a lot of them who never do because they get home and immediately start building new habits that include, how am I going to navigate stressors when they come? So I don't lean back on the old coping mechanisms and they build the muscle memory of doing other things instead like breathwork or meditation, you know, for example. They build a set of tools and resources that actually are

the new grooves for them of how they're going to navigate life. I've also known people who, you know, they've been alcoholics for 30 or 40 years. They think they'll never drink again and they go back without a plant. And of course, they relapse, of course, you know. And it's the same with anything. So when I, when I come back from fasting in the jungle, I usually come back with a list of like 10 major life changes that I want to make. It can be changes of how I treat my body or my sleep schedule or my breathing or my morning routine or how I talk about myself to myself or stretching my body or my relationship to screens and social media or, you know, how I prioritize my relationships or even how I'm going to navigate politically the you know the movements

that I'm a part of or you know changes to my diet whatever it is all that kind of stuff um I usually have about 10 things that I want to change and I prioritize them because you know that's a lot of things and usually I'll come back and feel so fresh and alive and engaged and I'll start implementing them And after a couple weeks, a few of them fall by the wayside, and I've become clear, like, I'm not ready to integrate those things yet. So I let those go. And then, you know, a couple months later, more of them have fallen by the wayside. And then six months later, I'm pretty much just doing the main things that I've prioritized. And a year later, about three or four out of those ten things stick.

and so every year that I go down to the jungle I come back and you know I mean sometimes it's less than that sometimes it's like two but but but I usually have two to four major things that I'm able to change about my life after I do a dieta and that's just my personal integration process you know for some people they just might pick the two to four and just work those the reason why I pick 10 is that often when I'm when I'm you know isolated alone in the jungle. I just have so many. I'm just bursting with things I want to do when I get back. And so I make the list and I'm excited about it. But I also take for granted that like on one hand, I need to make a commitment what I was talking about earlier with the integrity of the heart of like there's a couple

things I need to commit to and follow through on in order to prove to myself that I'm going to follow through. And those are the top couple things on the list. And then everything else, I'm like, I'm going to try to do this and I'm going to see what I'm ready for based on where I'm at and my path and and what's going on in my life right there's you know you come back and you're smack in the face with the real world and you your job is beating you down and you're you're working to survive and you're struggling in this and that way or some life tragedy happens and those are the kinds of moments when that really sort of test your practices and the longer that you are able to integrate a thing the more the muscle memory of those behaviors shows up when you really need it the more that

you know, when when my friend dies and I'm in tremendous grief, those are the moments of truth, so to speak, where do I fall back on the practices that I have integrated or do I fall back on self-soothing comfort coping mechanisms? And, you know, for me, sometimes it's one, sometimes it's the other, you know, it depends what's going on. And so that's why it's also not a linear process at all. like I there's stuff that I think I've mastered in myself and then life happens and I'm back at square one all over again and that's how it goes you know it's it's totally not a linear process you think you've arrived somewhere and then you're like fuck I'm like a child and you know and that's the opportunity to keep keep working at it and to you know and working this practice for me gives me the humility to not get too discouraged when that happens and realize that's part of the process and realize I'm only human and have the tools to then forgive myself to and and then have the tools to dig myself out of the self-doubt that comes with messing up, you know.

And so, so that's all one aspect of integration. There's another aspect of integration that's more political in the sense that, you know, and this goes to some of the appropriation stuff we're talking about, which is that, you know, there's a lot of, especially, you know, white people or people from the U.S. in particular who approach these medicines from an individualized perspective of personal healing and growth. And without really doing the political work to think about what we're talking about earlier, which is that if you're going to, if you're going to benefit from these medicines, you need to be in solidarity with the communities that are both

stewarding them and still undergoing colonization and aspects of genocide to this day and also be engaging with an environmental awareness of what's happening to the rainforest and incredibly biodiverse ecosystems from which these plants come and be accountable to those plant communities as well. And so integration, I think, and this is not how it's usually talked about in ayahuasca circles, is also about how am I going to live in reciprocity with that aspect of it. And some of it, you know, and it depends on your social location. I'm not saying that everyone needs to become an activist or that, you know, that's accessible for everybody. But there are organizations and groups that you can support

in the U.S., both groups like Amazon frontlines and Amazon watch that support frontline communities in different parts of the Amazon that sort of act as a bridge, you know, and even just donating to those groups is a good thing to do. But also there's an aspect of integration that's about learning about and connecting with indigenous sovereignty struggles where you live that are local. You know, and here on Turtle Island in North America, you can also connect with groups like native movements, which is rooted up in Alaska or north of the border groups like indigenous climate action, groups like indigenous environmental network or NDN collective. There's a lot

of different ways that you can support movements for indigenous sovereignty. And then in the process, you know, also learn how to walk in a different way. And I think that's also an aspect of integrating the lessons of these medicines. And then the third thing that I'll, third kind of dimension of it that I'll say is like there's also the piece of just not doing it by yourself, which is, you know, finding a community of people that are also on this kind of path that can support you, that you can support. And, you know, it's, it's, that's, that's, that's been just as important for me to, to, to build relationships with other people who are on a medicine path.

And I learn about myself by supporting other people. That, that's one way that, that, that, that you give, you know, and I've integrated that into my group facilitation in, in different kinds of ways. And it's also a way to, you know, be held accountable, which is, you know, the buzzword on the left that means a lot of different kinds of things to different people. But, you know, ultimately, your primary accountability is to, to this medicine and to spirit. And, you know, how to move in integrity is hard to figure out sometimes. And so all of those things, I think, are an aspect of integrating the experience that you have,

you know. And there's other things that, like, you know, when I'm not. I'm down in the Amazon and new people come to the center that I go to, there's tons of things that I'll support people with of just say, you know, like bring a journal, like journal every night. You know, one way that people integrate these lessons is through their dreams. Like if you're down there especially, but if you're working with these medicines, you'll notice that the subconscious processing that happens in your dreams has information for you.

And so, you know, build a practice where you have a journal next to your bed and, you know, do some dream journaling right when you wake up every morning, right? What happened? Just try to find patterns. Try to make meaning of it. The lessons from these things are often not cerebral. They're not rational. They're often symbolic and metaphorical. And be a student of those things. Be a student of the patterns that emerge in not just your waking life, but the signs that come to you in your dreams. That's one of the ways that you can continue to tune to listen to some of these these spirits and some of these messages um and and it's you know that's a practice too like like having a dream journal is like one of the 10 things i put on my list this last time i came

back from the jungle and um uh you know and and but also a journal that i write in you know when i'm down and and i i have a practice now of every month or so i'll go back and read a journey, you know, every time I go, I fill up basically a whole book, like a whole journal, like every, that, that is based on the dieta that I'm doing, based on the plant that I'm becoming a student of. And I'll go reread it, you know, and tons of stuff I forget. There's tons of insights that I have that I forget or that I don't integrate and re-realizing them is, is really important. The other piece is that, like, if you're building a practice with this medicine, eventually you learn to use it. Eventually, you're not just like laying in ceremony and

letting it happen to you and having the iOS get a work on you, but you're learning to work on yourself. You're doing energy work on yourself. You learn, you learn to sing the songs. You learn to people. You sing to yourself to center yourself. And, you know, I sang to center myself before we got on this podcast today. And the more that you do that, the more it strengthens your medicine. A fifth aspect of integration that's really important for people to know about that, you know, the details of which you'll learn more about if you decide to go on this path, but in order to keep your medicine strong, there's things you can't do anymore. So, for example, like in a Shepievo practice, you can ever eat pork again for different

reasons. And, you know, there's reasons that there's good reasons that spiritual communities all around the world don't eat pork. And I don't think when you get in the specifics of that, but in the tradition that I sit in, if you do that, it'll block your access to the medicine. You'll feel off and, you know, there's, I could put, you know, I could give an intellectual analysis about why, but at the end of the day, it's, that's just been experientially true for me that if, you know, if I don't observe the guidelines of what to put in my body or not put in my body after, after I do a long, a long diet, it affects me. It totally throws off my mood. And so I've learned to follow the rigor of that protocol of, you know, and when I slip off the path, it affects me. And so that's an aspect of this work, too, that's a little bit, you know, more than we should go into in this session.

But that's an aspect of integration, too, is respecting the experience that you've had enough to take care of it and follow the guidelines and follow the protocols and take them seriously. And if, you know, if you're in a tradition that says, you know, don't eat onions and garlic or sugar or certain kinds of fats or oils or salts, you know, in the lead up or after to follow it, you know, there's there's, I've seen, you know, and again, that's the difference of like I see on Reddit and stuff, people who approach this medicine out of context and they're just like, oh, all of that's just cultural superstition and this is how this medicine physiologically works. And the arrogance of that is just, it's like, Why would you dismiss a 5,000-year-old tradition of people who specifically their worldview is based on the practice of what works or doesn't work? And just because you may not understand why it works or doesn't work, I don't understand why most of this stuff works or doesn't work. But I notice how it happens and I see how it heals or doesn't heal, and I follow, you know. Yeah, I think that's incredibly important and interesting. and a lot of what you said is definitely important. The thing you said about dreams,

they can teach you a lot about yourself and becoming more conscious and engaging with your dreams can be very, very helpful. Particularly, I find some of my fears and stuff that are not always conscious in my day-to-day waking life manifest themselves in interesting ways in my dreams, and I can sort of come out of that and wrestle with that more consciously going forward.

The non-linear aspect of any of these patterns, is also crucial to understand. Meditation for me has really taught me that lesson. Things that I thought that I conquered for good, you know, they do have a way of coming back and reasserting themselves in really surprising ways and to not get discouraged by that non-linearity and to know that it's more complex

than just a linear move towards being happier and better. I think it can prevent a lot of disappointment along the path. One little quick example from my life of integration with this stuff came with a dose I did last year, psilocybin mushrooms. And it was my entire trip was very oriented around compassion, seeing the limitations of my egos, deeply, deeply caring about other human beings, especially and including complete and total strangers. and you know at one point in that trip I'm by myself and I'm weeping literally like on the ground weeping into my hands for the suffering of the world for you know people I don't know and can't

even ever know genuinely caring about them and wanting that they're suffering to end and a voice broke in during that during my you know sort of breakdown my weeping of compassion for other beings and the voice just said do more and it wasn't a it wasn't a brow beating voice it wasn't my own thoughts it was it was very clear to me in that moment and even in retrospect with sobriety that it was not like you know you can just talk to yourself in your head and like that's my normal voice that's what i do all day in my head all days talk to myself it was very different than that it wasn't angry it wasn't accusatory it was firm but it felt soft and it felt loving and it felt like it came directly from my heart, and that voice has never left me. There will be times when I

am just driving about, you know, driving the car, just going about my day, and that voice is just a gentle reminder. It just intrudes into my inner incessant dialogue, and it just reminds me to do more. So, okay, you have this voice, you have this experience of selfless compassion. It's incredibly powerful. How do you integrate it? Well, one of the ways I try to integrate this particular lesson was realizing what I can and can't do. I cannot save the entire world. I cannot, I can still connect with the suffering of beings all the way across the planet, but I can't necessarily stop their suffering. And that can be very frustrating for somebody that has a deep, sincere care about other beings. You want to save the world. You want to stop the suffering of all

beings, but you know that you're limited. And so, you know, how can I reasonably integrate this? by do more it set up in me a commitment to whenever I am asked to help somebody or whenever I see clearly that somebody needs help and I can meaningfully intervene I will do that it won't even be a debate it's not like well I technically am free that day but god I would really love to go fishing instead or you know just like immediately yes I will do that and I've been able to maintain that ever since that trip and um and it's really changed it's it's benefited my life in the people around me and i could always do more and i'm always trying to challenge myself about how i can do more realizing that you know there's like there's never really enough like you can always there's suffering

all over the world you can do more um but at least in that way i could integrate it in a way that was reasonable like okay i can't save the world but any time in my life that somebody needs help and i can meaningfully help i will do that without a second thought and just making that automatic through practicing it. It's really been a huge benefit to me. And so that's just one little tiny example of taking a lesson in this experience and then integrating it into your life. And the fact that this voice has never left to me is an interesting thing I wrestle with. I don't really know how to make sense of it. It very much felt like it was an intervention by some other entity. And it's changed me. But yeah, to try to make it

full logically make sense is an impossible task and so i don't even try that's that's so beautiful to to hear i just really want to appreciate that and and and the aspect of just like obeying the directive that you're getting there's there's i i just think that's there's there's real beauty and actual liberation to that where um being of service comes from a deeper place then you know there's especially on the left so there's there's there's a lot of desire to be of service that that comes from the ego it comes from guilt or shame or saviorism or you know people trying to like work something out in themselves by acting in the world rather than coming from a grounded place of being like being of being of service is is part of

of why we're here. You know, to me, I think, you know, one of the fundamental organizing principles of the way life works is evolution and that part of our purpose here is to learn how to take care of each other and that that requires us to learn how to take care of ourselves and the guidance that we get from whether that, you know, regardless of whatever story you want to put on where that voice comes from, following that intuition, that following the heart in that way. It also changes how you show up in places, you know. And when I, when I was younger, I totally had some of that, like, you know, anxiety driven, wanting to be, like, doing, doing work because I wanted to be a good person, you know, is what I shared a little bit about earlier. And that,

that came from, you know, that that was about me. That wasn't about other people. And when you're able to be centered in yourself enough, that, that, you know, doing more comes from a genuine and sincere care for the sake of others, that is just so healing and so real. And that's, that's one thing that I hope with, you know, as, as ayahuasca gets more globalized and as more people feel the call to be of service, that's, that's where the social movement aspect comes in is like, well, well, then what's, what's the political analysis they have with which to make meaning of that directive to do more? And that's why I want to make more accessible people who work with this medicine, being able to find in right relationship based on who they are

and what they can offer a way to relate to collective change and struggle as well as their interpersonal behaviors and their personal lives and without prescribing what's the right way to contribute for any particular person. But that's beautiful. I'm really glad you shared that. Yeah. And to your point really quickly, the self-list component of it was front and center the entire time. Inside the experience, when the voice first came, I was having a moment that, you know, in my Buddhist framework, I frame it as a selfless compassion. There was not me crying for other people. It was just a pouring out of love and compassion. I was not there. And in every instantiation where I tried to integrate that lesson and actually hold myself

to that standard, the selfless component is there, which is, this has nothing to do with you. You helping this person, it is not to get a pat on the back. It is not to make you feel like you're a better person. It is certainly not to get any sort of reciprocal down the line feedback from them or you don't need a thank you. You don't need anything in return. You don't even need to think about it after the fact.

Like you do something good and then you're driving away, patting yourself on the back. Like, damn, you know, I really did that. I am a good, you know. Like even that is completely just stopped. Like just go about your day. What's next? so I got to go pick up my kids from school, whatever, and just forget that you even did the thing

because it is not about bolstering your ego. It's not a project about you becoming a better person or what you can check off your personal list of I did this so I can feel a little bit better about myself tonight has nothing to do with you. And that component of it remains and has always been the main primary center of gravity around which this other stuff happens.

And I think that is what makes it feel so different. And that is a higher standard than what you're saying, helping other people as fundamentally a way of you building up your own ego or, you know, creating a self that you can be proud of or whatever. That selfless component, I think, is essential. That reminds me of, there's a Jewish teaching that always stuck with me. I remember being in, like, middle school and going to synagogue and going to Sunday school and being told. that, so there's a concept of a mitzvah, which is, you know, a good work, you know, an active service is a mitzvah. And I remember learning that, I don't know if it was communicated in the form of like a parable, but like, you know, someone who, I don't remember the details, but basically someone who goes and helps someone does, and, you know, does an active service and that's a mitzvah. But the same person can do the same thing and honestly have the same material outcome for the person that they're helping.

but they also call in a bunch of TV cameras to film them doing it so they can get credit for it. And then it's no longer a mitzvah. It's no longer sacred. Absolutely. And that always stuck with me. And I remember wrestling with that as a younger activist because I'm like, yeah, but depending on the thing, if you call the TV cameras, that amplifies the work and does the work, you know, blah, blah, blah. So there's like I got stuck in the kind of details of it. But part of that is also, you know, the other.

other side of this is to also not demonize your ego so much that you think that like you have to be a saint or whatever in order to be good but like to but it's rather instead to understand that you have an ego it it does motivate you to do certain things it is also possible to not act from your ego um and and sometimes you do act from your ego and to become aware of it and understand when is your ego in the driver's seat when are you letting you your kind of larger self, your higher self, your deeper awareness, be in the driver's seat, negotiate the relationship between those aspects of yourself, forgive yourself, you know, for being human, because being human means that you do act out of self-interest and that that's okay, too. And the question is, are you bringing intention to that? And are you more than just that? and I think there's space for all of it. Yeah. Yeah.

And lots of times the self-flagellation and the hyper concern with, you know, destroying your ego or killing your ego, that sort of over the top is actually kind of a way that the ego sneaks in the back door and like beats itself with a stick as like another ego project. So it's just, it's just very, very interesting how that manifests. And yeah, I don't know. It's just a funny thought. You know, I know we got to move on, but just a,

quick thing about that that is like, you know, I've met many people who work with ayahuasca or who have smoked DMT who've had, you know, an experience they describe of dissolving their ego and or like annihilating their ego where they just have no sense of their individual self and they're, you know, completely integrated with the oneness of everything. I've never experienced that. So that's, I just want to mention that just to say that that's not like an inherent part of like it happens to everyone who drinks ayahuasca, that's not the case. And I remember when I was younger in my practice, I really wanted that. I really, and so I would often go for these really large

doses of the medicine for the sake of trying to dissolve my ego. And it took me a while to realize, like, that was my ego. Like, that was actually thrill-seeking behavior. And the fact that I had been motivated by a kind of thrill-seeking behavior was undermining the integrity of my medicine. It was undermining the clarity of my experience because I was actually acting from that other place. And it was also based in me not having made peace with my ego enough to be comfortable with, number one, being able to surrender enough that the ego can be present, but that's not what I'm sitting in in ceremony. I'm sitting in something else. but I don't need to, like, destroy it in order to feel connected to the oneness of everything.

I can feel that and still have a sense of self at the same time. And that that's actually much more useful, you know, like there's, that's much more. And in a lot of ways, it is like the difference we were talking about before of, like, smoking DMT being so much overwhelm of information. You can't integrate it. A lot of times the most, you know, they'll talk about finding your dose of ayahuasca, your working dose, which is usually not the like blow the doors off your perception of reality kind of dose. It's that the more useful doses are, tends to be more mellow where you can actually engage with the medicine in an intentional way and do do your inner work rather than just be so overwhelmed by sensation that, I mean, sometimes that's good. I do

enjoy being forced to surrender in that kind of way. I think that is part of the work that's useful and I still go for very large doses many of the times. But it's a, being able to like kind of learn how to master your own reactions to the overall and sensation is is a useful part of the practice but but bigger is not better necessarily and um learning to make friends with your ego and not demonize it is the same work as doing that with all of your shadows and all of the things you disavow about yourself the things you don't like about yourself that you repress and police and self-flageulate and and that's the thing that leftists are particularly good at is like building our own cops in our heads that are just

you know enforcing the laws of the left and um this is a way of being just more forgiving and human of your own complexity and inner contradictions yeah absolutely well said that's something i've i've had to learn on my path as well as like it's not that the ego is killed or slaughtered it's like your orientation to the ego is transformed and it no longer is necessarily in the driver's seat but it's still there. It's still present. And you can treat it like a little brother or a friend, somebody that you're amused by and you watch it come and go, but you're not swept up by it. And you're not out there trying to slit its throat either. So, yeah, very important lessons for sure. All right, let's go ahead and move forward. And I don't want to spend too much time on this point

because I think we've covered it probably throughout our conversations and also more broadly on other episodes we've done. But we are living in a sort of, quote, unquote, psychedelic Renaissance here in the United States, major universities and institutions are opening up investigation into a wide range of psychedelics for their impact on things like depression, end of life anxiety, PTSD, and more. So just, I mean, we don't have to go too deep in this direction, but I just kind of am curious of your thoughts on this psychedelic renaissance more broadly. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely overdue, right? And it's a beautiful thing that there is more legitimization and curiosity about working with these medicines. It comes with all the contradictions

we were talking about earlier in the appropriation conversation, which is that as these medicines become more accessible, they move through the existing institutions of society, which all are flawed. It's a nice way of putting it. And so it comes with its contradictions, of course. I think there are, for example, you know, that the movements to decriminalize are interesting to me as an activist because they don't, they're not really of the left. And so I've worked a little bit with, you know, decrim kind of efforts. And it's just, it's just such a totally different milieu than left-wing movements are. but I learn a lot from that for that reason and you know there's where I live in Oakland it's many many psychedelic plant medicines have been decriminalized there's places in the Pacific Northwest I don't really know the full map of it and certainly

you know one of the main ways that that it's becoming more accessible is through therapeutic use and there's you know a long process that's happening that is you know right now it's not a psychedelic but like Ket Ket is is is is is legal for doctors to work with and therapists to work with in certain kinds of contexts um the organization maps uh seems to believe that mdMA is is is soon going to be on that list um and you know i think that the the mistake that was made in the 60s uh with the last time that psychedelics sort of entered the popular culture and then became such a threat to nixon and um the ruling congemony that they clamped down so so hard on it that they ended all research on it and

It sort of entered a period of being in the shadows for a long time that we're only now coming out of. You know, in the 60s, a lot of people were using psychedelics without any of the context that we're talking about, without a ceremonial container, without a guide, without an elder, without working, you know, in any of the traditions that have learned to hold these medicines. And so it was really messy and chaotic. And it's great that I think in this stage, there's been some learning from that experience of how to work. with them in more intentional ways. And I also want to just clarify, I don't think that the only legitimate use of these medicines is to do it in some particular kind of traditional ceremony. I don't, you know, essentialize or exoticize certain ways of working with them. I think that these medicines are adapting to different kinds of contexts. And it is beautiful that people are learning

to work with different kinds of medicines in entirely new kinds of ways and building entirely different kinds of protocol around it, and that's certainly happening in, you know, psychedelic assisted therapy, for example. But just to say another thing about the decriminalization thing, with those movements, you know, a lot of those movements I've found, because they're not necessarily of the left, they don't have similar values of, you know, respecting frontline leadership, for example. And so, you know, there's conflicts within them where here in California, there are tribes that work with peyote, for example, who don't, who do not want it decriminalized. They're like, this medicine was stolen from us and demonized, and we had to fight for decades

and decades to get a religious exemption to work with it. And now we can work with it. And if it becomes decriminalized and everyone starts using it willy-nilly, not only are we worried about it being abused and misused, but we're worried about it being over-harvested. And so that goes to what, you know, what we were talking about earlier. And so there's been a conflict where there's been movements here in California to decriminalize all psychedelic plant medicines and then push back from certain tribes saying, yeah, that's all great for all the others, but keep peyote off the list. And, you know, I'm not, it's a complex, nuanced debate that I don't know the details of. So I'm not, I may not even be framing it correctly.

But I just give that as an example of, you know, there's a lot of care that needs to happen with it. Um, another thing is, is, and I mentioned this earlier with, with ayahuasca and how sexual assault can happen because people are, you know, if you drink ayahuasca, you're in a vulnerable position. And if you're not with a trustworthy person holding the space, um, you can be open to, you know, abuse. Um, there's, there's a conversation happening right now by some friends, um, who have an organization called chakruna of a lot of women who are coming out with stories of their sexual assaults that they experience at the hands of therapists. Because, um, Back when these medicines were more underground, people had a higher level of discernment of who they would sit with. But once they become above ground and you work with a doctor who has the credibility and legitimacy of saying I'm a therapist, it often gives people a sense of trust that the culture has not necessarily caught up with in terms of the ethics and rigor of protocol of how it's held. and so there are there are real dangers with it as well and you know I think there's certain things and I wanted to just find an opportunity to mention also because I since I mentioned the since the dangers with ayahuasca that you know there's different different medicines that have different contraindications and with ayahuasca in particular it shouldn't be taken by people

with certain kinds of medical conditions and if you are thinking about taking it you should talk to your practitioner and be you know disclose what's going on with you health-wise it's especially true for people who have bipolar it can induce manic uh episodes um it shouldn't be taken by people who are on SSRI antidepressants um but i do think on the whole uh there the the the legitimization of working with psychedelics has brought a lot more care to it uh and more rigor um but how it moves and how capital is going to engage it or, you know, is, you know, where they look at this stuff and you see it as a gold mine, it's full of contradictions, you know, but, but on the whole, I think it's something that the planet needs on, and the culture

needs right now. So it's, it's a real lesson. Yeah. I definitely agree with, with all of that. And, you know, just if people are interested in that first entrance of psychedelics into mainstream culture. One of the best books I've read on that entire era was Being Ram Dass, the autobiography of Ram Dass, who started off as a Harvard psychology professor. And he was friends with Albert Hoffman who synthesized LSD for the first time. And as that was created, him and a colleague of his within Harvard,

I think it was Timothy Leary, started running experiments with these psychedelics in their psychology department, and part of the backlash in the crackdown was aimed at Ram Dass and Tim Leary, and they were, you know, expelled from Harvard, kicked out of their job positions, and that whole history is funneled through Ram Dass's autobiography being Ram Dass, and if you, instead of wanting to read it, if you listen to it on Audible, it's done by one of his friends and has done really, really well. it just covers that entire period and it also touches on

on a bunch of spirituality and a lot of the issues that we're talking about because Ram Dass was somebody who did LSD and psilocybin mushrooms in heroic doses thousands and thousands of times and eventually came to the conclusion at least his conclusion and obviously this is not

ayahuasca this is specifically psilocybin and mostly LSD that those substances in particular in and of themselves could not take him where he wanted ultimately to go, and that sent him to India on a path of, you know, sort of Hindu mysticism and trying to, you know, he found a teacher, spent many years under this teacher, Maharashi, and it's just a fascinating story, but so much of the entrance of psychedelics

into the popular mainstream culture plus the backlash, and then the inevitable down the line bringing in of Eastern philosophy into the West and making it more mainstream, that book is really, really good lens through which to understand that history. So I highly, highly recommend it. I'm going to shift gears here pretty intensely. And I'm just really curious. I'm somebody who I enjoy camping. I enjoy hiking. I've camped by myself many times in the woods in the middle of winter, for example, and it's an intense experience, but this idea of going down to the Amazon in the jungle in a different country, and then having these intense experiences on top of that, it's unsettling. It kind of like, I'm like, wow, I admire those who can do it.

It seems like it would be scary, you know? So just with that in mind, like, what is the actual experience of going to the Amazon like? How are your days structured? How do you live? And what impact does being in the jungle have on your experience as a whole? Yeah, there's, hmm, where to start. Well, I guess I'll just start with where I've started, which is that, you know, I didn't go down point blank out of, you know, like I was, I was in Peru facilitating workshops for Peruvian climate justice activists. And then I got invited. And so I had a, a, a, way in you know and i i don't think i would have ever tried the medicine had i not had an invitation especially because the way my politics were shaped at the time i was just like you know i needed an

invitation and um and when i ended up at the at the center that that that i go to the community that i sit with now um you know that the amazon itself is is their most remarkable place on earth to me. Uh, everything, everything is alive. Everything is awake. You're, you're in raw creation. Um, and it's, it's, it's, it's, it's just so much happening. There's, uh, there's, uh, and, and the discomforts of it are part of the medicine of it. So like, yeah, you're covered in, you know, you get lots of bug bites and it's, it's hot and sweaty and you're, you know, you, it's easy to get dirty. There's there's an aspect of like, um, just sort of being in the jungle that is like you're kind of coming back to your humanity in that way. And it's just not the case, you know,

I know there's a lot of like ayahuasca centers now that are a little bit more fancy. Um, and try to kind of recreate sort of a more comfortable experience for people from Europe and the U.S. Um, and that's, that's not, that's not the place I go to. I kind of think that the, the messiness and discomfort of it is part of the medicine. I think in general with ayahuasca, like the fact that you're in the nausea, you're like puking your guts out that is as part of how the thing heals. And I think that's true for my experience in the Amazon as well. And so when I'm down there, you know, I spend as much time like hiking and walking around as I can.

There's, I spend a lot of time tuning into all kinds of the different animals around me. I have a connection with frogs, and the frogs always come to me, and they sing, and it's, it's remarkable. Depending on the sea, you know, there's a wet season and a dry season, and I go at different times of the year, and I love the rainy season, but I mean, it rains a lot in the dry season, certainly compared to drought rid in California where I live. And so, you know, it tends to rain most days for like an hour, like really heavy rain. and that is wonderful like getting to sit out in the warm rain is it just cleans it just cleans you and you know there's there's almost no greater joy in my life than when I'm in the middle of ceremony and I leave the Maloka which is the name of sort of the spiritual building that you know it's like the temple basically and I go outside and it's and it's raining out and I just

sit and let the raindrops just kiss my cheeks and bless me up. And, you know, it's, and there's no, there's nothing more beautiful than the night sky in the jungle above, above the Maloka that, then looking up at it while you're under the effect of ayahuasca is just incredible. And getting to see all the stars in the sky is, you know, and just being reminded that that's what the sky looks like everywhere. If we didn't, you know, if I didn't live in a city with light pollution. is is you know helps me kind of bring that back home and um in terms of the day to day you know

the the place that I go to and I'll share more in detail about about the community that I sit with but you know you're you're in ceremony four nights a week so so you sit on you know you do ceremony Monday night and Tuesday night and then you have a break on Wednesday night and then you do it Thursday night and then a break over the weekend And when you're not in ceremony, you're just integrating. I mean, there's so much, you're resting, you're laying around. Like a lot of it is just sort of like cellularly. You're just integrating and laying there.

It's exhausting the work that you do in ceremony. When I do have energy, I'm journaling or there's a Moloka that's in the center that I go to that has like canvases and paints and pens and colored pencils into a little. allow you to process your experience through artwork, which is really a wonderful gift that they have that there. So I'll be doing art. I'll also be hanging out with the larger community around it that is around the center. The center itself is a village and they have soccer games every day and like a soccer team that competes with other soccer teams in the region. And there's lots that you know i'm playing with kids uh i'm going to swim in the river um and um yeah there's but but i'm also work in my practices when i'm down there you know like every all of my like

i want to try to integrate a morning routine when i get home i try to do that morning routine when i'm down there i want to do like you know and it's hard when you're when you're doing when you're fasting down there and emptying yourself out you you you have no energy physically most of the time so when i you know the kinds of things that I want to integrate. Like, I want to do a certain amount of push-ups every morning. Like, that's, that's a little harder to do. But I try to, you know, and I try to do

my, you know, stretching in yoga and stuff and sometimes I'm too, too exhausted to do it. You know, and if you're on diet, if you're fasting, it's, the traditional way to do it is that you're totally isolated.

So that you're, you're just like shedding all of this external stimulus and shedding all of your self-identified with your, and you're not performing for other people in any kind of way, and you're just there with yourself. I've never done a complete isolation diet, but I try to keep to myself most of the time. But it also depends on the, on the kind of fast I'm doing. On this last time I was down there, I was I was dieting a plant that it's really just about like shoring up self-love and self-confidence and connection. And so I was actually really social during that time. And there's a lot of

other people who are at the center, both the Shepibo folks who live there and work there as well as the international guests. I guess I'll kind of translate their transition to sharing more directly about the center since I'm already talking about it, which is that. So the place that I go to is called Miwe Rao. It's one of the only indigenous owned centers in the region because lots of Native people don't have the kind of capital to start up a center that serves international, you know, patience. The people who come, they don't call us patients. They call us passajeros, you know, passengers on the journey. But this is one of the only indigenous-owned places in the region. And it is a village. It's a, you know, the folks who

live there actually come from a place called Pukalpa. And, but they came to build the center outside of a, outside of Akitos. So, you know, when you get there, you, The city of Akitos is the largest city in the world that you cannot access by road because it's in the middle of the jungle. So you can only get there by boat or plane. And so it's a city in the Amazon. And so you fly into Akitos and then you get on a motorbike or like a tukuk and drive for hours down a mud path into the jungle away from the city and come to a clearing. And then you're at this village that this community came from Pakalpa to. because that's the place where, you know, the, it's easier to access for the Pasejitos.

And so they built out basically a village around it. And so Ricardo, my teacher, who is the master Ayahuasato there, he employs about 75 people and their families live there. And it surrounds this, you know, this healing center. It's adjacent to a community called Yamchama. And it also employs people from. that community too. And I'll also share how Niue Rao was created because it's an interesting model. It was co-founded between Ricardo and then also a Colombian American doctor, medical doctor named Joe Tafour and a Canadian artist Svita Mamik. And their collaboration across

cultures is deeply inspirational to me of making the medicine accessible in a way that is both attuned to the needs of internationals, but also integrous to its traditions at the same time. And financially, Joan Svita helped with the initial finances and set up a system where Ricardo could buy them out as it grew, so that now he's the sole owner. And in many ways, the center is itself an economic development project for his community. They also form New Way route specifically to make it a place that would be safe for women in the wake of a number of centers in the region having had sexual assault happen, safety for women was a cornerstone of the desire to create Newey Rao.

And, you know, I've given warnings throughout this podcast that there's lots of places that are not trustworthy. And Neway Rao absolutely is trustworthy. And it's deep, deep healing work. You'll get there and have a consultation with Ricardo, and he'll basically give you a diagnosis after you tell him what you're there to work on and what you're there to heal and what your intentions are for being. being there. And then he'll prescribe to you a teacher plant, a master plant that you'll do your dieta with. And then you, you know, you're in ceremony and then you're, you're processing it.

And so, you know, and for a lot of people who are new there, they, the community that you build with the other people who are also passajeros, who come from all over the world. There's, it is disproportionately from Europe and North America, but there are, you know, it's pretty multiracial, it's pretty, you know, in terms of the composition of people who come. Um, it's also a thing, you know, like, I would encourage people to not have assumptions either. Like, when I first came, I thought it would be mostly like, you know, middle class people or, or wealthier people who would have the capital to do something, like go on a, you know, a healing journey to the Amazon. And, and that's not actually my experience at all. It's mostly working class people. I was wondering about that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Sorry, because I was wondering about the accessibility. Because to me, you know, just hearing that, I'd be like, I have to fly to a different country and I have to, you know, boats and planes and transportation. And then the cost. Yeah. And then the cost. at the center itself. So I'm just curious, you say that there's like a representation of just regular working people. What's the accessibility and what's the financial realities of trying to do something like this? Well, like anything that costs money and time, it's certainly not

accessible to people who need it most. In general, this is a problem with what we were talking about earlier with the so-called psychedelic renaissance is the ratio of people who are like tech executives trying these medicines versus people emerging from prison using it as a trauma therapy, for example. And that's why medicine workers who are trying to find a way to serve people who are caught under the boot of colonialism, imperialism, our immigration system, poverty in general, are doing such important work. And certainly going from the U.S. all the way down to the Amazon is not an available option for lots of people. That said, I think it's a lot more accessible than many people might realize. Most of the people I meet who are Pasaheados at

Niue Rao are working class people who have come to this medicine out of necessity. And certainly, compared to the health care costs in the United States, it's quite inexpensive. I went broke trying to heal my Lyme disease with Western medicine that didn't change anything for me. And at first, the idea of taking even two weeks away and making this trip seemed like a huge undertaking. And then after I went there, I thought about how many years being stuck in bed, out on disability, EDD, you know, as well as how much money would have been saved had I got over the psychological block I'd had earlier and treated it not as some kind of like exceptional indulgence but as a pivotal life experience. I now organize my life in such a way that

prioritizes and centralizes this medicine in it. And so, you know, it really does depend what you compare it to. How much money do you spend over the course of a year on therapy weekly to manage your anxiety or depression? And, you know, for that matter, how much money do you spend on alcohol or marijuana or other ways you self-medicate in order to feel somewhat okay in a collapsing world. Compared to that stuff for many people, it is doable. If you understand this as an alternative to all that, it's actually much cheaper than what many people in our society spends in terms of service to their health. If you can manage to take a little bit of time away from work. So, you know, going to Neway Rao costs about $1,200 a week, which includes

room and bored and food and medicine and ceremony and getting doctored, all of it. And it gets cheaper weekly the longer you stay. And while, you know, that's, that is beyond the means for many people, you also don't need to be, you know, comfortable in the professional managerial class in order to make it happen. And it's, it's certainly not the case that the other people I meet down there are just, you know, rich kids on some self-indulgent joyride. You know, you're going to a hospital for the soul. And most people I know are, are grateful for it for the rest of their lives. So, you know, it's a lot, we need to change a lot in terms of accessibility, but it still might be more accessible than, than one realizes. It's also the best gift you could ever give to

yourself, you know, if you feel the call, if you feel the call. That's the other thing is like, for a lot of these medicines and ayahuasca in particular, you've got to want it. You got to want your healing it's not the kind of thing that you can like push someone into um and like there you it's a very consent oriented thing because it teaches you to fight for yourself and it's difficult it's it's it's really difficult and um but so rewarding you know and um and being down there in in particular like there's you know that this center so nui rao um it is people word that that is for specific sacred tree. And I guess I'll just say the website if people are interested, which is, so it's spelled

N-I-H-U-E-R-A-O. And so if you go to neway-R-A-R-A-O, they built, they recently built a website that is kind of amazing looking to me because they, of course, they're making it to advertise to a Western audience. So it looks kind of way more fancy than it's ever felt to me. When I look at their website, I'm like, wow. But you get a sense of the range of, you know, the kind of medicines they offer. And it's, I really do encourage people to go down there and I encourage people to support native-owned businesses.

And I guess this is also a moment where I should mention that, you know, I am starting to bring groups down there. So if, number one, if you're curious about going, let me know. I mean, this is, this is my spiritual home. I'm really open to, like, if anyone listens to the podcast and is actually considering going, I'll totally talk to you about it. And you should message me on Instagram is probably the best way to do that. And my Instagram is just at Joshua Con Russell. And let me know if you're going.

And I would love to, you know, support you in that. And, but also, I'm going to be beginning to bring groups down. So if you want to have a group experience where we, where some of that group integration that I was talking about can happen. It is much better than going and being there alone. And not that you can't have a great experience on your own, but there's another piece about that center is like the way that it functions is that there's, you know, all the people who actually run the actual center are all

Chepibos, but the main people who as a Pasajero that you interact with are kind of the Western volunteers who are there to kind of interface with you. and honestly like because they're volunteers sometimes you'll go down and there'll be people who are like trained therapists who are who are just or who have a lot of experience with the medicine and really help you on your path and sometimes there's people there who are brand new to it and they are mostly just like helping you know translate for Ricardo and and the difference in the experience that you might have is is vast if you're there alone and so if you want to come with a group where we're going to do things like, you know, have, um, you know, extra integration sessions, which, you know, as it is the way that it functions is that, so you have ceremony at night and the next morning, you come and you have an integration session with Ricardo, usually, um, or one of the other chavans who work there. And there's, there's usually, I can describe ceremony a little bit, but there's, you know, there's multiple ayahuas catoes who are singing

during the night. It's not just this one person. Um, but, um, you know, we'll, we'll do extra integration. Ideally, you know, if I want to bring, start to bring groups down that come from social movements. So where it's a little more politicized in the sense that, you know, learning about the history of resistance to colonization in the region, Shepibo history, that kind of higher context way of experiencing the medicine, understanding your role within it, etc. And, you know, finding ways to to help people integrate when they're back home. So if you're interested in that, You can also reach out. I'm not sure when I'm going to be doing the next group,

but that is one way of accessing the medicine. And then, you know, it's also worth mentioning that people do drink ayahuasca in the United States. And it's a totally different experience. It's one that is worth doing if you have access to a space that you trust with people that you trust. I find that a lot of the ayahuasca circles in the United States are, are problematic in the way that we talked about, you know, and are held by people who are not really qualified to hold them. And, but that said, there's also lots of circles that are great. And, you know, but I will say it's a completely different experience, at least in my experience,

drinking it at source in the jungle with practitioners who come from a lineage who work with it. It's night and day. I experienced it almost as a totally different medicine when I drink in the US. And I do, I mean, I drink, I assist in ceremonies in the US. And I kind of think of it as like maintenance. And so like I go to the jungle to do my deeper, you know, deeper work. And then, then I kind of maintain my practice here. And so it's, it's, it's, so if that's more accessible to you to, to, to try it out here, but the difference also, I mean, one of the thousands of differences between doing it in, in the Amazon versus here is also, um, typically, Typically, when it's taken in the U.S., it's like over a weekend.

So you'll drink on a Friday night and then a Saturday night, and you do kind of two ceremonies is pretty typical. And that's fine. That's useful. That's still good to do. But being able to go with a real treatment and a real diagnosis and to go for at least eight sessions is fundamentally different. And it's just a much bigger experience.

experience. Because also the other thing that's happening to you while you're in the jungle is you're detoxing. Physiologically you're detoxing, but mentally and emotionally you're detoxing. And that opens you up to a much deeper experience with the medicine than if you were, you know, working all day on a Friday. And then you, especially if, I mean, there's people who drink ayahuasca, like in the city in an apartment.

And that is so different. And you're, you know, it's, it, you're less open to, to the medicine because you're so full of, you know, it's like when you go camping. And it takes you a few days to just arrive. You know, it takes you a few days to, like, get the social media out of your brain and and all that kind of stuff. It's like that, you know. Yeah.

Yeah. It's incredibly interesting. And, you know, for people, it's not for everybody, I'm sure. Like, there are people out there that's like, this is just not my path or I'm not particularly interested in that. That's fine. But where there's a will, there's a way. If you really, really want to have these experiences and this is waking up something inside of you that is very interested in this. I think a lot of people could find a way. Of course,

there are family obligations. There's monetary restrictions. But especially if you're somebody that, you know, maybe has the ability to not go to work or doesn't have kids or has a nice little tax return, you could possibly make it happen. But in any case, reaching out to Joshua is a great place to start if you're particularly interested. And on Rev. Left, we are really interest in the stuff and we try to provide or at least point toward multiple different paths, right? We've had on a Sufi to talk about Sufism and Islamic mysticism. We've talked about Buddhism and meditation. We've talked about different forms of psychedelics. And this is another one of those paths that are available for people. And I find it absolutely fascinating. And,

you know, I'm not even sure if it's for me, but there's a part of me that is certainly intrigued. and a part of me that's frightened by the possibility of going into the jungle in a different country and experimenting with this stuff. So I'm sure a lot of people have different feelings for it. But yeah, reaching out to Josh is great. And I'll link to everything that you just mentioned right there in the show notes for people to get to easier. One thing I do want to do before we wrap this up and try to bring it home and hopefully put like an interesting little exclamation point on this conversation is like,

a story or two like you know something that has happened to you why you've been down there that is interesting or unexpected or surprising or whatever it may be if you have any interesting stories that you could just kind of toss out there before we wrap this up i think it would be an interesting way to to bring it back down to earth and to to concretize it a bit for and one other thing i want to say just about the last bit of conversation we had sure is that um you know and and I began by saying I'm not here to proselytize. I'm certainly not trying to sell this. And if, you know, it's definitely not for everyone.

But the reason why after 10 years I'm comfortable not just talking about this publicly, but actually encouraging listeners who I don't know to check it out is that the level of healing that I've seen, if you feel the call and it resonates with you, I do. want to support people doing it in a good way, doing it in a way that is, that is, you know, good for them and good for, for, for reciprocity with this medicine, especially because, like we said, there's so many people who get, you know, see it on Reddit or hear it on the Joe Rogan podcast and, and have bad experiences. So my interest in, and an enthusiasm in terms of sharing this as an option is about, is about offering a safe, integrous way of, of engagement. engaging a medicine that is within a tradition that I sit in that, that wants to, wants to be offered. And so I just wanted to really emphasize that because, you know, there's, there's, you'll see things of people basically like trying to sell this experience to people. And I, I really like, if, if you're not called to it, you know, from the heart, it's probably not for you,

at least not right now. And so it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, if, if it's for you, you, you know. Um, and yeah, there, you know, there's, gosh, there's so many stories that and, and there's, there is a way that people telling stories of their journey can, can, can sort of come off as sort of like, you know, uh, you know, I don't know, macho or as, I don't know, something, but, uh, I, I guess there's just a couple, a couple things I'll share just to give a sense of, the range of, you know, as I said, every ceremony is different and medicine is very complex and it works so differently for different people and different bodies and different moments

in time. And I will say that like, it's important to arrive without expectations because whatever happens, it's not going to be how you expect. And for a lot of people, it takes a while to even have an effect. There's a lot of people who drink ayahuasca for the first time and nothing really happens for them, even sitting for a week and not a lot happens for them. And of course, that's the lesson, right? And so it's always true that whatever emerges for you is your lesson for that moment and that you need to find the lesson. And for me, my first time drinking, I also didn't experience much of an effect. What happened for me was I drank and I was, of course, all very nervous and, you know, had,

was trying to not have expectations, but of course, did. And I was just analyzing everything. Like my brain was spinning. I was like, did, you know, is it working? Is it not working? Should I do? Am I breathing too much? Am I doing this right?

Am I said, like just going, going, going going, going? And, you know, like, like, is it kicking in? Should I drink a second dose? Is that too much? Is that greedy? Am I just be patient? Am I not patient enough? Is it?

It's not really working, is it? You know, just being like that. Yeah. And I was like that. that in that sort of rapid fire hyper-analytical place for like five hours and it was no fun at all um and i really like it was so fatiguing it was so exhausting and i was i was like disappointed i didn't quite understand what was happening uh around me and and i and i was just depleted and that's all that happens for the first night for me and my second night

finally so what happened was that on my first night my ego was in the driver's seat analyzing and I it was so tired that part of my brain was so tired that by my second night it just had it just there's nothing it could do other than surrender and then the medicine opened up for me and I experienced myself independent of my ego and in in I would experience what I would describe as blitz for the first time ever. I touched, you know, a sense of, you know, what you could call, you know, God or the sacred or the universe, you know, for the first time. And I immediately understood that the first night was necessary for me to experience the second night. The first night, what the medicine did for me, the medicine was like, all right, dude, like you are so locked in your analytical brain that all we're going to do is, like, hypercharge that.

And just let it run out of gas because you don't know how to surrender. You don't know how to release. You don't know how to let go. And so I'm going to help you do that by running you out of gas. And if I didn't have that experience the first night, I couldn't have had the experience the second night. And then through that in my second night, I got to begin to meet my ego for the first time and get to know it for the first time. because I wasn't so identified with it that I can step outside it just a little bit. And that is then what, you know, my first sort of two weeks down there was largely about that

and getting to know these other parts of myself. And so, you know, you always get what you need, but it's rarely what you expect. And sometimes it's not even an effect at all is what the medicine is. And I know people who, they would be blocked for weeks, you know. and just be in, you know, roiling in discomfort for most of the ceremony. And then it wouldn't be for months later that it would click what the lesson was. And they'd be so grateful for it. And so it sometimes, you know, it doesn't all happen at once.

And I'm still learning lessons from ceremonies from eight years ago now. And there's an aspect, you know, one of my teachers, Svita, you know, she describes it as spiraling in spiraling. out. There's an aspect of being in a journey where it's all about the surrender and just following spirit. And then there's another aspect where you're actually learning to direct the medicine and bring it in service of your intention. And there's a balance of both and knowing when to, you know, when to lean in and when to step back. And, you know, there's, so there's times when like all, you know, a lot of times in ceremonies I'll do, you know, I usually begin

ceremony with a with well certainly with a prayer and with gratitude and then after that with like a body scan and like bringing just exquisite attention to the tips of my toes and and and to my my toenails and really feel what it feels like to fully somatically inhabit them and and and then like radiate light from them and then slowly move up my whole body and in doing so then I diagnose like well what's actually going on okay there's like a pain in my left hip in a in a place place that I didn't notice. Okay, let's go in there. Let's get curious about that. And then the more that I feel it, then the emotions begin to surface that are stored in there. And then I might have some insights mentally about what was going on emotionally. And then, you know, I'll, I'll move back into my body. And so it's, you know, it's a practice that I've learned that is, you know, sometimes you go in the, through the mind, sometimes you go in through the body, but they're, you know, they're all connected and using your body to diagnose what's going on and then then clear it out

is is part of the work and you know I've also had plenty of times where you know in my adult life I don't have many or I didn't have many childhood memories at all you know younger than 10 years old I just didn't remember much of my life and that always kind of freaked me out a little bit where I was like do I have like some crazy repressed traumas or you know what is it and part of it is that because I had Lyme disease, you know, Lyme disease just really eroded my memory synapses. I just, in general, after Lyme disease, both my long-term memory and my short-term memory were shot, and I still really deeply, deeply struggle with it. And there's, I've had to build daily practices around the fact that, like, I don't remember

conversations I had that morning. And so this is an aspect of that. And, you know, so one of the ways in, you know, in ceremony in this tradition that you work is one of the tools you work with is the tobacco. It's a kind of tobacco called mopacho. And the, I was working with the tobacco in ceremony in basically praying to it and asking for its help uncovering my memories. And through work in ceremony and through using a bunch of the techniques that I had been learning over the years, I was able to go back and, you know, this is like what we're talking about with the, with the visions piece, not only recover a number of different memories, but go back and sort of re-relive them in a sense. Like, it's hard to describe, not relive them like, you know, like there's an aspect of it that was like watching a memory.

There was an aspect of it that was like watching TV. Like, I was still in the room. But in doing so, I could also feel the feelings. that I felt at the time, and sort of experienced life as I experienced it at that time, rather than just experiencing it in retrospect, you know, as the person I am now. And the memories just came after like some deep, deep, deep, deep prayer, deep rigorous work, deep energetic work, the memories began to come flooding back. And I just, like, up from like, you know, three years old to seven years old,

I was given the gift of getting my childhood back and it was I just couldn't stop crying with joy and not because all the memories were good but they were all just so clear and it really like unlocked the you know for whatever reason whether it was Lyme disease or something else like I just lost access to them and it sort of repaired the pathway that that had given me access to them.

And it was just such a beautiful gift that I give, you know, that I'm grateful for every every day now. And so those are a couple things. I mean, I have plenty of other stories that I can share that are a little more rough and tumble. Like, you know, and not just for myself. There's an aspect of it that, you know, you are in a room full of people working. through their trauma. And part of the work is learning to energetically protect yourself to not be impacted by it, you know, because also one thing that Ayahuasca does is it really enhances your

hearing and your smell and your sight, which is why you do it in, you know, at least in this tradition, in pitch black. And when other people are going through their stuff, it can impact you. And learning how to build boundaries so that you don't take in someone else's process is an aspect of the work that serves me every day so that I don't take on other people's shit, you know? And but in the process, like, especially when you're sitting with people from all over the world and you get to see the patterning of different traumas, of different countries and cultures. I mean, like, and, you know, I don't want to stereotype here, but, like, seeing the way that Russians work through their purpose. process and how sort of like rigid and intense it's hard to not draw the conclusions of the collective trauma that you know like like understanding some aspect of the collective trauma that people who grew up in that society go through and the the intensity of of the anger that I've

seen and you know someone punching a shaman face you know like while they're working through their stuff like serious you know stuff happens and um all that can be part of the process as well And there's moments when you, you know, you tune into what's going on around you, and that's where the medicine is and being part of the group. And there's moments when building your boundaries to not let it in as part of the medicine. And, you know, and then part of my experiences have also been working with other Amazonian plant medicines, too. And including ones that are, you know, also purgatives that are, you know, deep. A lot of Amazonian plant medicines, the difference between a poison and a medicine is just dosage. And especially for the purgatives, stuff that like if you don't vomit it up, it can really hurt you.

But if you leave it in your stomach for a certain amount of time and then vomit it up, it'll pull out a bunch of stuff with you. I've had heavy metal toxicity that actually I got from being, you know, I've had this whole history of civil disobedience. I've been in jail a lot. And I got nickel and other heavy metal poisonings from some experiences that I had back in 2002 or 2004, I don't know, know, it's all blurb a little bit, but the, um, and, uh, and I, I was able to, you know, pull out this heavy metal toxicity, like out of my bone marrow with, with some of these, these, uh, plant medicines. Um, but I, to do it, I was puking blood for seven hours. To be clear, it wasn't not, it was not ayahuasca. Um, and, um, so there's, there's definitely a route

of intensity. You can go with some of them. And I found deep reward from that. Um, But I also don't want to over, you know, over-emphasize that aspect because there's also deeply gentle medicines. And if you go to the center, if you go to any way, Rao, you know, twice a week they offer flower baths where it's like basically a bucket with these flower essences that you take a bucket and sort of dump it on yourself. And the gentleness of the, you know, energy of that medicine is, is just, it's just exquisite. And so it's not always so intense. I think sometimes I can over-emphasize the intensity as a way of just making sure that if people want to work with some of these medicines, that they're like really ready for it. But I also don't want to, again, like, seem macho about it or like it always has to be that way. There's definitely a very gentle way of working with a number of these medicines that are associated with these plant traditions.

And, you know, there's also more gentle ways of working with ayahuasca and drinking very small doses. Or, you know, you can go to the center and you don't even need to. drink the medicine in order to participate in ceremony and you can go sit in ceremony and get worked on and go and sit in front of the ayahuasgero and receive an ikoro and you know receive deep healing from it without ever you know taking a psychoactive substance and so it's all it's all there but um yeah so those are some things that come to mind yeah beautiful fascinating and profound. Very, very interesting stuff.

And I thank you so much, Joshua, for coming on this episode, being so open, so vulnerable. I know this is something you take very seriously and question whether or not you should be doing it. And it was at the urging of your teacher that you decided to do this. And I'm just very grateful that you chose Rev Left

as the platform through which to express this stuff. And yeah, very, very amazing stuff. And I would love listeners that are interested in. this, that feel that calling, that have been perked up by this conversation and genuinely become interested to, at the very least, reach out to Joshua on Instagram. I'll link to it in the show notes and take it from there. And I encourage that for sure. But before we let you

go, though, can you let listeners know where, again, they can find you in your work online, anything else you want to plug, any last words, anything like that at all. Yeah, well, thanks again for, you know, it feels in some ways like the mini-series we've been doing has been building up to this for me. So thank you again for offering your platform in this way and, you know, how much, how much I just respect this, the discourse that happens on this podcast and the nuance and complexity with which you navigate, both politics and spirituality. So thank you for that. And yeah, a couple things I'll just reemphasize, you know, first is that if any of this, you know, pique your interest, supporting groups that support indigenous sovereignty,

is, you know, the fundamental. And so I'll just rename some of the ones that I named earlier. One is called, so the first two that I'll name are they're kind of like bridge organizations. One is called Amazon Frontlines. The other is Amazon Watch. And both of them are ways that, you know, you can, if you want to donate to them or even just follow them on social media, get connected to different frontline struggles in different parts of the Amazon.

on, they're both like NGOs, you know, they're, it's not direct, they're not frontline organizations themselves, they're the bridges to them, but they're the most accessible ones that I can, you know, name right now. And then here, here in, you know, on Turtle Island, there's, um, you know, there's some groups that we, the Wildfire Project work with, like native movements and indigenous climate action, um, uh, NDN collective. And then, of course, groups like indigenous environmental network. And, You know, I mentioned them not because any of them are connected to medicine work as organizations and certainly not necessarily to this conversation of ayahuasca, but just because it, you know, in terms of being in right relationship with indigenous sovereignty and stewards of, you know,

certain lifeways, I think supporting those movements is really important. If you want to check out my organization, the Wildfire Project, our website is wildfireproject.org. And I know we didn't talk about as much on this episode, but I know we have, you know, before. And one thing I didn't mention on previous episodes, because I'm just bad at, you know, pitching is that, like, it would be great if you wanted to support the Wildfire Project financially. And you can go to wildfireproject.org slash donate, you know, the bulk of our support is, you know, we try to not be dependent on grants and some of the challenges of the nonprofit industrial complex. And so in order to do that, it's movement people that support us and support our work. And so, you know, we'd be very grateful if you wanted to become a sustainer. You can also get on our newsletter on our website.

And our newsletter, we only send out like three, maybe four a year. And they're mostly just updates of the good work of a lot of grassroots frontline social movements. And then, yeah, I guess the last thing, just about my own work, as I mentioned, you know, Instagram is the way to get in touch with me that I'm comfortable sharing right now. But I'm also, you know, my background is facilitating group processes, mostly lately with wildfire. But I've been more and more moving on a path of beginning a personal practice of doing individual coaching for, you know, movement leaders, for people who are experiencing ecological despair, our anxiety about the state of the world. And then as I mentioned also, these kind of group processes. So that part's new for me.

Working with a private practice with clients is also new for me and I'm taking it slowly. But if you're interested in that, I'll be having some openings pretty soon as well. And yeah, thanks so much for letting me share those different options for plugging in. Absolutely. And this is the third installment of a subseries, but you and I both plan on doing more episodes. I'm not exactly sure what the next episode will be in this series. but this is not the end. So definitely if you like this so far,

be on the lookout for our other explorations together. Thank you again, Joshua. It's been absolutely amazing, and I look forward to talking with you soon. Likewise, thanks so much, Brett.