The Tim Ferriss Show - #298: Dr. Gabor Mate - New Paradigms, Ayahuasca, and Redefining Addiction

Episode Date: February 20, 2018

Dr. Gabor Maté (@DrGaborMate) is a physician who specializes in neurology, psychiatry, and psychology. He's well known for studying and treating addiction.Dr. Maté has written several books, including the award-winning In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. His work has been published internationally in 20 languages, and he's received the Hubert Evans Prize for Literary Non-Fiction; an Honorary Degree (Law) from the University of Northern British Columbia; an Outstanding Alumnus Award from Simon Fraser University; and the 2012 Martin Luther King Humanitarian Award from Mothers Against Teen Violence. He is an adjunct professor in the Faculty of Criminology, Simon Fraser University.I've wanted to invite Dr. Maté to this podcast for a while because he is not only an expert in the pathologies of addiction, but he's experimented with -- and used successfully -- tools that are perhaps outside the realm of traditional psychiatry. He is also a co-founder, along with Vicky Dulai, of Compassion for Addiction, a group that advocates for a new way to understand and treat addiction.Enjoy!This podcast is brought to you by Ascent Protein, the only US-based company that offers native proteins — both whey and micellar casein — directly to the consumer for improved muscle health and performance. Because the product is sourced from Ascent’s parent company, Leprino Foods — the largest producer of mozzarella cheese in the world — it’s entirely free of artificial ingredients and completely bypasses the bleaching process common to most other whey products on the market.If you want cleaner, more pure, less processed protein — which I certainly do — go to ascentprotein.com/tim for 20 percent off your entire order! I’m a big fan of all of their flavors — the chocolate, vanilla, and even their newest option, cappuccino. Enjoy!This podcast is also brought to you by 99Designs, the world’s largest marketplace of graphic designers. I have used them for years to create some amazing designs. When your business needs a logo, website design, business card, or anything you can imagine, check out 99Designs.I used them to rapid prototype the cover for The Tao of Seneca, and I’ve also had them help with display advertising and illustrations. If you want a more personalized approach, I recommend their 1-on-1 service. You get original designs from designers around the world. The best part? You provide your feedback, and then you end up with a product that you’re happy with or your money back. Click this link and get a free $99 upgrade. Give it a test run…***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Please fill out the form at tim.blog/sponsor.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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limited, I share it first with Five Bullet Friday subscribers. So check it out, tim.blog forward slash Friday. If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely that you'd dig it a lot. And you can, of course, easily subscribe any time. So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss. and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job each and every episode to interview world-class performers, world-class experts from any range of disciplines to tease out the habits, routines, lessons, approaches, etc, that you can use. This episode features Dr. Gabor Mate. You

can find him at drgabormate, G-A-B-O-R-M-A-T-E.com, also on Facebook, forward slash Dr. Gabor Mate. Gabor is a physician who specializes in neurology, psychiatry, and psychology. He is well known for his study in treatment of addiction. Dr. Mate has written several best-selling books, including the award-winning In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, subtitle Close Encounters with Addiction. His works have been published internationally in 20 languages. Dr. Mate has received the Hubert Evans Nonfiction Prize, an honorary degree from the University of Northern British Columbia, and the 2012 Martin Luther King Humanitarian Award for Mothers Against Teen Violence. He's an adjunct professor in the Faculty of Criminology at Simon Fraser University. And I've wanted to have him on the podcast for some time now because he is not only an

expert in the so-called pathologies of addiction, but looks at it very, very differently and also has experimented and used successfully tools that are perhaps outside the realm of traditional psychiatry, including, for instance, the psychedelic brew known as ayahuasca. He is also a co-founder, along with Vicky Dulai, of Compassion for Addiction, which is an organization that advocates for a new way to understand and treat addiction. Their mission is to raise awareness and become a resource for organizations, people, and treatment modalities that are working to increase compassion and reduce the stigma around addiction. We get into that in our conversation. We also talk about how even though you might not consider yourself an addict, if we look at compulsive behaviors, thought patterns, and so on, there are, of course,

many shared similarities and shared treatments. Compassion for Addiction, and you can learn more about that at compassion4addiction.org, will provide education and training to those working on the front lines of treating people suffering with addiction. This population includes counselors, social workers, nurses, psychologists, and doctors. Check that out. Compassion for the number four addiction.org. I really enjoyed this conversation. It took place in Austin, Texas at the LZR facility, which was and is perhaps also known as the La Zona Rosa. And it was courtesy of the help

of John Price. So John, thank you very much for letting us use your beautiful facility. And you guys can learn more about that facility. Check it out at LZRATX.com. That's LZRATX.com. They have an incredible space for venues related to music, for events. They have any number of different rooms and locations where you can shoot film and perform music, interviews, etc. So take a look, check them out, and hope that helps you out, John. LZRATX.com. Without further ado, let us get to Dr. Gabor Mate. Gabor, welcome to the show. Tim, it's a great pleasure to be here. Thank you. I have been looking forward to this conversation for a really long time, and I wanted to make an attempt at least to do it right.

So I wanted to have the video and the audio and everything else, because I think the work you're doing is very important. And we're going to cover a lot of ground, which I'm very excited number two, in Tribe of Mentors, the last book that I wrote, or that my guests wrote, you were featured. And I thought that many of the books you mentioned paint a picture of your life experience and also your life's work in many ways. And we can go in any particular order, but I thought maybe it would make sense to start with the scourge of the swastika. And that was one that you mentioned had an impact on you or that perhaps you recommended on occasion. Why is that? Well, so this has to do with my family's history. I was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1944 in January, two months before the Germans occupied the country. And Hungary at that time was the only country in Eastern Europe

where the Jewish population had not been annihilated. And now it was our turn. So I was two months of age. The day after the German army marched into Budapest, my mother phoned the pediatrician to say, would you please come and see Gabor? Of course, he's crying all the time. And the pediatrician said, of course I will come,

but I should tell you, all my Jewish babies were crying. And of course, that's the infants picking up on their mother's terror and stress. And that's how I spent the first year of my life, which has had a huge impact on my development and my lifelong struggles with depression, ADHD, self-shame, and other issues. Jumping ahead now, I knew very little about that history. My parents didn't say much about it as I was growing up.

I knew my grandparents had been killed in Auschwitz. I knew my father had been in forced labor, and I never saw him for a year and a half. But beyond that, I knew not much about the details until I was about nine or 10, maybe 11 years old, and there was a book on my parents' shelf in Budapest with the title The Scourge of the Swastika, which was written by a British civil servant and a member of the House of Lords. This man had served with the British Army, and it was the first book published in the 50s that detailed the Nazi crimes.

And I climbed up on a chair, took down the book when I was, I think, 10 or 11, began to read it, saw photographs of the horrors of the concentration camps and the extermination details in Eastern Europe. And all of a sudden I swooned because I got what happened to my family. And that question of how can people do such things to other human beings would strike me every day. And almost every day this thought occurred to me for years and years and years. And almost every day I almost got dizzy with the question. So why people suffer and why people make other people suffer

and what is the origin of all that has been a motivating question in my life. So that's why that book was so important to me. Thank you. And I have to say that, you know, my life's work has been motivated by that question. As a medical doctor, Thank you. Why do we become perpetrators? What drives us? What kind of insanity covers our basic human nature, which I believe to be good and positive? And what happens to us?

We're going to spend a lot of time in that territory for sure. Okay. So you mentioned sanity or insanity. I'm not sure if that's a good segue to Don Quixote, but I'll let you choose the next one. So there are a few that came up and you described them in brief in the pages of the book. But for instance, the background that you just gave me was much more in depth. So we have a few, and these are going to strike folks as eclectic. Winnie the Pooh, the Dhammapada, the drama of the gifted child, and Don Quixote. Which one of those would you like to explain next?

Let's go with Winnie the Pooh. Let's go with Winnie the Pooh. Yeah. So that was one of the seminal books of my childhood, and my parents would have read it to me long before I even knew how to read. The Hungarian title is Mitzi Motsko. Mitzi Motsko. Mitzi Motsko.

Mitzi the Bear. And the translator is a great Hungarian humorist. So if anything, the Hungarian book is even funnier than the original English, which is not something one usually says about translations. But what struck me about Poole, of course, was number one, that there was this bear of little brains who was somehow so much wiser than everybody else.

So fundamentally, he found a peace inside, despite the fact that his intellect is just under functioning. Number one. Number two, there was this relationship with the little boy, Christopher Robin. And there's a passage towards the end of the book where Christopher Robin, I don't know if you know the real story. In fact, there's a movie about it right now. But Christopher Robin's father, A.A. Milne, was a writer. And he bought these toys for his son to make stories about them.

And Christopher Robin actually suffered because he was secondary to his father's career. They did not have a good relationship. So these characters that the father made up kind of dominated and squeezed out Christopher Robin's own life. And he himself became a bookseller later on in his life and he wrote about his autobiography. So there's something about the dysfunctionality in father-son relationship. But in the book, Christopher is playing with his toys and then he starts to grow up and he has to go to school

and he won't be able to play with his toys anymore. And at the very end of the book, there's a passage where the book ends with, but wherever they go in the enchanted forest, a little boy and his bear will always be playing together. And that would just bring tears to my eyes for decades upon decades upon decades. Until recently, I had an experience, actually a psychedelic experience, when I realized that there's nothing to mourn because I'm both the bear and the little boy. And I always will be playing, that nothing is lost. But when I read that book, there was a sense of loss. When I read that passage,

something's being lost. Childhood innocence is being lost. Playfulness is being lost, which resonated with my own childhood because I did lose innocence and playfulness very early in life. So both for the fun and the humor. Then, of course, there's Eeyore, for whom everything always goes badly. And there's a part of me that's totally Eeyore, always expecting the worst and nothing will ever work out for me. And never mind, leave me alone. I'm OK with my own suffering.

That sort of determined victim attitude, that was also very much germane to my own suffering. You know, that sort of determined victim attitude. That was also very much germane to my inner experience. So that book just spoke to me and made me laugh. And it still does. It's one of the funniest books ever written. And one of the wisest as well. I need to, I've only, I'm ashamed to say this, but I've only seen the cartoon. I know, I know. Well, listen,

listen, one of the sins that Walt Disney is going to be burning in hell for the rest of existence is what he did with those stories. Cause he Disney-fied them. Disney-fied them. You, you, you got to read the original and you, you, you would laugh your head off. All right. I'm in, I'm in. I wish I spoke Hungarian so I could read the translation. Which of these would you like to, and we can certainly touch on other books, but so we have three remaining on my list. Dhammapada, The Drama of the Gifted is by a Swiss, German-Jewish-Swiss psychotherapist named Alice Miller, who was for three decades a psychoanalyst. But she realized that the Freudian psychoanalytic method wasn't helping anybody get better because it ignored trauma. so the drama of the gifted child the german title of which was prisoners of childhood was really all about the fact that stuff happens to us as children negative things happen then we adapt to those things by taking on certain defensive ways of being and then we leave the rest of our lives from those defensive modes so we're not actually experiencing the present we're constantly reliving the past from a perspective that we acquired when we were helpless and vulnerable children.

And when she says the gifted child, she means the sensitive child. So the more sensitive the child is, the more he or she feels the pain and stress of the environment, and the more affected they are, and the more that shapes their lives. And that book came along for me when I was in my 40s, and I was a successful doctor, and I was a father, but I was depressed, I was anxious, I was a driven workaholic. You wouldn't have known that when you saw me on the job. But inside me, I was discouraged. I had difficulties in my marriage with my children.

I felt they were afraid of me, and they were because of my rages. And that book helped me understand. It was the first book to help me understand where all that came from. So that was, for me, as for many other people, a seminal read. And really, my whole work since then has been to help liberate people from that prison that childhood often imposes on so many of us. This book has come up repeatedly in my life as a recommendation, as a recommended book from friends who benefited from it. They are very, certainly from any outward perspective, highly functioning. In some cases, world-class performers in their fields.

And I'm, in retrospect, sad that I ignored those recommendations, but it was in part because I didn't like the pairing of gifted child. I didn't want to label myself gifted child. We could certainly psychoanalyze that, but I was like, if this is a book written for people who are in say gifted and talented programs or have some God given talent for whatever reason, I had a resistance to that. So I didn't read it, but the prisoners of childhood makes a lot more sense to me anyway. I think it's a more accurate title, but there's two things I would say in response. First of all, why do you resist your own giftedness?

You're clearly gifted. So why would you not want to find out about that? Don't know. Yeah, so that's something you might want to consider. Sure. Number one. Number two, really what she means is the sensitive child. Yeah, so sensitive, that would draw me in because I've had, we don't have to necessarily go down this rabbit hole right now,

but I've had a number of my friends recently ask me, when did you know you were so sensitive? And not sensitive in a hyper-reactive way, not in a negative way, just in a perceptive way. And I'd never thought of myself, it would never have occurred to me to label myself sensitive. And just in the last year, I've been thinking about that. So the sensitive child would make more sense or be have occurred to me to label myself sensitive. And just in the last year, I've been thinking about that. So the sensitive child would make more sense or be more appealing to me. You have to think of sensitive in terms of its word origin. Now the word sensitive came from the Latin word sincere to feel. So the sensitive person feels more. Yeah. So the example I often give is, and that can lead to both very positive and very difficult consequences. For example, if I tapped you on the shoulder right now, you wouldn't feel any pain at all.

But if you were not wearing your shirt and your skin was exposed, furthermore, if you had a burn on your shoulder, so your nerve endings were close to the surface, if I tapped you with the same force, you'd feel extreme excruciating pain, even though the external event was no different. Right. So sensitivity magnifies the pain that we have. Sensitivity also leads to more creativity. So very often the most creative people also have the most pain, which is why so many creative people escape from their pain through all kinds of dysfunctions like addictions and so on.

So there's a real link between creativity and sensitivity and creativity and and sensitivity and suffering at the same time that's the first point i would make now the other thing goes back to what you said about these people that you know who are high performers look at that word performers what does it mean to perform one meaning of it is to put on a show sure that's one meaning and i would have been one of these people who was a high performer uh in other words look at that from the outside a successful family doctor director of a palliative care unit at a major hospital national columnist for canadian newspaper writing medical columns, performing at a high level. And inside, again, anxious, frustrated, depressed, discouraged.

And in my personal life, a lot of suffering. So a lot of people who perform well are actually deeply troubled inside. And of course, there's many famous examples of that. Some of the greatest performers like presley or melon no and any number of people like the name that's what they were they were performers and even from themselves they hid their own suffering well we are sitting in a venue right now recording this that is is now known as lzr and there is a mural of Prince outside because he performed one of his as I understand it last performances in this venue really before he passed away before he overdosed

before he overdosed yeah exactly and we can certainly come back to this but part of the reason I wanted to big piece of the reason I wanted to have you on this show was that I spent, I'm in a much better place now for many reasons that may be outside of this interview, but, uh, feeling the exact same way you just described. Yeah. Outwardly successful, inwardly tortured. Yeah. How do you answer the question if someone meets you and you just have a short interaction what do you do what do I do if someone asks you what do you do

I may be self serving but somebody once called me a people whisperer people whisperer I do have a gift for seeing inside because I've studied I'm also sensitive in some ways and I've also studied myself very deeply I've had to because my life just wasn't working and as a medical doctor I worked

with all manner of conditions terminal diseases newborns families physical illnesses mental dysfunctions I spent 12 years working with addictions. I spent time exploring my own and other people's ADHD. And so I work with people to bring out the truth of their experience so that they're no longer prisoners of their childhood, but that they can make a conscious choice about how to live in the present moment, not based on how they were programmed in childhood. But for that, you have to do it in a way that the dog whisperer do, in a very compassionate way. Otherwise, people just shut down, and they shrivel up, and they protect themselves.

So that's what I do. And I know, I also write, and I speak publicly, and so on. But the intent is always to bring insight and liberation to people. So I'm going to come back to the medicine because I'd love to know when your journey into medicine began. But first, since I know my listeners will say, but you forgot the other two books. What about the other two books? The Dhammapada, Don Quixote, in any order you like. Well, let's go in the order that I discovered them, which is Don Quixote, which again, I read that as a child and then reread many times as an adult.

And he's my favorite character. So Quixote is this deluded Spanish small nobleman who wants to revive the age of chivalry and chivalric knighthood. So he gets this broken-down horse called Rosinante, and his lance and his sword, and he gets this squire called Sancho Panza on his donkey, and off they go to these adventures. And he does not see reality.

He thinks windmills are giants, and he attacks them, and of course he gets hurt. And he keeps getting hurt, because he doesn't see reality. He thinks windmills are giants and he attacks them and of course he gets hurt and he keeps getting hurt because he doesn't see reality. But his heart is purely committed to liberating people, to truth, to justice, to fighting oppressors, to liberating the oppressed. So here's this guy who really wants to do good in the world and he's just deluded in his vision, but he's far truer and deeper and more human than all the people that scoff at him and laugh at him. So what a great character.

And the book is both poignant and very funny. And he's one of the great creations of world literature. And of course, again, that yearning for justice has always burned in my heart, owing to what happened to me and what I witnessed. And the Dhammapada? The Dhammapada is the Buddha's collection of sayings, and it begins with basically the idea that we create the world with our minds. He says everything is thought in the lead. So how we see the world determines the world that we live

in. So if I see the world as a horrible place, quoting the current president of the United States, then I will be defensive and aggrandizing and selfish because I want to take before they take from me. I want to attack before I get attacked. I'll always be looking out for myself because the world is not to be trusted. So if that's the world you live in, that's the world you're going to create.

And the Buddha was a great psychologist in which he recognized that our perception shaped the world that we live in. Now, what he didn't say, and that's where modern psychology comes in, is that before with our mind we create the world, the world creates our minds. So that the kind of world that we live in is very much shaped by early experiences. Buddha didn't say that. But interestingly enough, when you think about his search for truth,

what happened to him, if you read his biography, his mother died before he was a week old. So he's lost his most important relationship. So his life began with suffering. And then he spent all his life trying to find the nature of suffering and how to transcend suffering and how to get beyond it. And this is how he ended up with this particular method of meditation and contemplation and truth-seeking. So that book was written 2,500 years ago, and psychologically, we're still trying to catch up to the wisdom in it. So let's talk about wisdom or perhaps science first. Yeah.

And maybe they're related in some fashion, although I know we'll dig into certainly some things that might be missing. When did medicine enter your life or an interest in medicine, interest in being a doctor, either of those things? Well, I've speculated on that and there's a number of sources.

Strangely enough, or not so strangely enough, my grandfather, who was killed in Auschwitz in his 50s, happened to be a writer and a doctor. Grandson ends up as a writer and a doctor. So I think part of it was me trying to fill a hole in my mother's life. That was a devastating blow to her. This is not conscious, but i'm speculating looking back it's not that she ever said you have to become a doctor it's not that she ever said you have

to follow in your grandfather's footsteps but i think i consciously i stepped into that role number one number two um another reason is that as a jew in eastern europe you had every reason to feel insecure and my mother never failed to tell me that as a doctor, you carry your profession in your hands. So you don't have to have a business. You don't have to have riches. You just have to have the knowledge. And then you can go anywhere in the world and you'll be okay. Beyond that, healing and making this world a better place and help people lead healthy lives was just an ideal of mine.

Then there was egotistical reasons. Let's face it, doctors get respect. They have a role. They have a good income. People look up to them. And they have a sense of authority that I think I lacked in my own life. So it was a combination of unconscious reasons and idealistic reasons and egotistical reasons. But all I know is that all my life I had wanted to be nothing else but a doctor. I always grew up knowing I'll be a physician.

And when you were studying medicine, what did you think your specialty or specialties might be? Well, first of all, I should say I didn't end up following the dream because in my late teens, I just couldn't concentrate and study hard enough to get through the sciences. I could get through them, but I couldn't get the high marks needed to get to medical school. So I actually taught high school for three years. I taught English and history for three years. And then I would wake up and there was this voice in me, you've got to be a doctor, you've got to be a doctor.

And so then I went back to medical school and did a lot of hard work. Having been an older student in medical school and being interested in history and literature and the larger picture, I always wanted to put medicine in the context of history, in the context of society, in the context of human experience, not just as an isolated science, but as part of the broader human experience. And I was interested right away in the beginning between, in the connections between emotions and illness, between social factors and health and so on. So I was always a larger picture person. And so that was with me already in medical school.

So the integration of mind and body as opposed to the sort of Cartesian duality and separation of mind and body. Exactly. Not that anything in medical school prepared me for that. I mean, in medical school, you just don't get that information at all. But that was always my interest. And then when I started practicing, if your eyes are at all open, you just can't help but to see it. That who gets sick and who doesn't isn't accidental. And who gets cancer and who doesn't isn't accidental. And who gets addicted and who doesn't isn't accidental.

In other words, there's reasons. And those reasons go beyond the individual and it has to do with their emotional lives and their relationships and the society and the culture that they live in so more and more over the decades my own personal struggles and my medical experience showed me that these connections are important how did you end up in palliative care? And I suppose for those people listening who don't know what palliative care is, perhaps you could give just a brief explanation of what that is. Some people might think of it as hospice care, which I don't think are necessarily identical. But how did you end up? What was the road to palliative care?

And what is palliative care? So I was a family physician, and a very driven one, and also I have ADD, which means that you want to move around and have different experiences, you know, because you get tired of the same thing. And really, in retrospect, I might say that there's some guidance in all this, but how it occurred was a series of accidents. So I happened to be walking down the hall of Vancouver's major hospital when the current director of palliative care said, I'm quitting, how would you like to come and work in palliative care?

And I said, sure. It took me not a moment to think about it. He was just looking for someone to grab. Palliative care, sure, thank you you what is that and uh deeply meaningful work uh because when people are facing death they also come up against the truth of their lives and and and uh if you can face death you can face life in palliative care meaning you're helping people to transition with terminal illness these are people with terminal for whom nothing curative or healing is going to happen in the sense of physical healing so they need to be helped with their symptoms whether pain or debility or weakness or nausea but also you have to help them go through the psychological process of adjusting to a very short future.

And the people that get drawn to palliative care work, the nurses and the doctors, tend to be a special breed. It's not because many doctors are not comfortable with death. They're not comfortable with not being able to do something to save somebody. So you have to develop a lot of patience and a lot of acceptance. You have to let go of your power to change things. So it's deeply meaningful and deeply transformative work. And you also have to work with a lot of people with multiple different attitudes towards life and death, religious, non-religious, spiritual, non-spiritual, in denial, in acceptance, and all the stages in between.

So it was beautiful, beautiful work. And one of the highlights of my medical career, all the same time, I was still doing my family practice. And when did a focus on addiction or an acute interest in addiction start to steer your medical practice? So as a family physician, I've always had substance addicts in my practice. Just a few. And again, it was an accident. I got fired from a palliative care job. And my argument is that I was fired for gross competence. I was just too damn good at it. But also for gross arrogance. In other words, with my spontaneous and insightful and rather radical, non-traditional style, I could have great results and often did in palliative care. If I may interrupt for one second, what would be or might be an example of your approach

that others thought was radical or something you would say or something you would do with a patient that got great results but that would seem very radical to others? Well, I would engage them in deep conversations. Stuff would come up that would be painful but would be transformative. Physically, I would just use methods that had not been proven but occurred right to me and they seemed to be helpful in helping people out of pain or deal with issues and so on. I was very open in multiple approaches. I wasn't just following things by the book.

So that was my competence. The arrogance was that I had a very busy life. I was still delivering babies, running my family practice. So I would get into palliative care. And then the nurses said working with me was like working in the eye of a tornado. And other physicians who didn't have my attitude or my particular mindset would legitimately question what I was doing but I would regard all such questioning as an attack rather than as an inquiry and I would react like a bulldog who's being threatened and that's the arrogance and that's what ended up leading me to be fired and and it was a great firing because as always I learned a lot about myself.

It took me a while. And then three weeks after I was fired, I got this phone call from a clinic in Vancouver's downtown east side. Now, the downtown east side of Vancouver is North America's most concentrated area of drug use. We have more injection users in a few square block radius than anywhere in North America. So I get this call saying, how would you like to come and work down here? And this is three weeks after I was fired from palliative care. Had I not been fired, I couldn't have taken that other job, which then led me to the high point for my career, which is working 12 years with addicted population and eventually leaving family practice

and doing that full time. So who orchestrated all this? I have no idea, but it was a beautiful progression. Something that's come up quite a bit in interviews on this podcast is some variation of sometimes you need life to save you from what you want to give you what you need. Exactly. And I think about that a lot. At the very least, it's a pain relieving lens through which to view events that unfold. How do you define addiction? Or maybe a better question is, what is addiction? And along with that, if you want to tackle it, what are poor definitions of addiction or misconceptions. Fair enough. So an addiction is a complex psychological physiological process, but which manifests in any behavior that a person enjoys, finds relief in, and therefore craves in the short term, but suffers negative consequences

in the long term and doesn't give up despite the negative consequences. So craving pleasure, relief in the short term, negative consequences in the long term, inability to give it up. Now, notice I have said nothing about substances. I said any behavior. So it could be related to cocaine, crystal meth, heroin, fentanyl, marijuana, nicotine, alcohol, whatever. It could also be sex, gambling, internet, relationships, shopping, eating, work,

extreme sports, working out, pornography, any number of human activities. So I said any behavior. Now, the official definition of addiction, according to the American Society for Addiction Medicine, it's a primary brain disorder. It arises in the brain largely due to genetic reasons. This is how they see it. And I say that's just not true. The other popular idea about addiction is that it's a choice that somebody makes,

that people choose to be addicted, which is what the legal system is based on. Because if people are not choosing, what are we punishing them for? Although I think the medical definition is closer to the truth, I don't see it as just genetic disorder and I don't see it as a primary brain disorder.

So let me perhaps show you why, if that's okay. So I give you this definition of addiction. Again, craving relief, pleasure short-term, negative consequences long-term, inability to give up. Would you be willing to tell me if you've ever had an addiction in your life i don't care what to what i'm not asking what oh yeah oh i i can i can say yes and i can tell you exactly what it was okay so i in high school uh so i suffered for from what i suppose most people would consider depressive periods beginning at latest age 10.

Right. And never found relief from that until I was competing in wrestling very seriously in high school, all throughout high school. And an older teammate introduced me to ephedrine. So ephedrine hydrochloride, which for those people who are curious, is, well, at least at one point, ephedrine was found, or at the very least, pseudophedrine in something called primatine mist used for asthma. And I think they also mixed it with guaifenicin. Nonetheless, the reason you cannot buy in many places, large amounts of primatine mist is because people free based it into methamphetamine. That's right. So you have ephedrine, which is a very strong stimulant

combined with caffeine and aspirin. And when you combine those three, it's not an incremental increase in effect. It's, I mean, it's probably logarithmic. It's a very synergistic effect. Exponentially. Exactly. And he was recommending it for increased endurance. And, uh, there, there is some effect, although it's also very highly thermogenic, which wasn't good for me. So it made me really hot, which was already a weakness of mine, but it ended up providing me with relief. It was a very strong stimulant and I began to not only use it for sports, but self-medicate using it. Okay. So great. So let me quickly ask you, what did it do for you? Relief from what? it's, it made me, or at least contributed to, uh,

euphoria, uh, optimism, uh, energy. So I didn't, I didn't, I didn't feel the symptoms of what I,

in retrospect, I would call it depression, the lethargy, uh, the pessimistic lens through which I viewed things. Fair enough. It seemed to magically just erase all of that in about 30 minutes. So euphoria literally means a good feeling.

Right. It gave you energy. It made you feel good. It made you optimistic. Also improved sports performance, right? I'm sure it did. Are those good things or bad things? To feel optimistic.

Those are all good things. Okay. In other words, the addiction wasn't your primary problem. Your primary problem was that you were depressed, that you lacked a sense of well-being, that you lacked energy. Right. So in other words, the addiction is not the primary problem.

It's an attempt to solve a problem. Right. And then the real question is, how did the problem arise? Right. In other words, this is where my theory is that it's always rooted in childhood trauma and that the addiction is an attempt to deal with the effects of childhood trauma, which it does temporarily while it creates even more problems in the long term. Right.

I would have one more side question for you, given that estimate was your drug of choice. This may not be true for you, but do you think retrospect you might have had adhd as a kid quite possibly because typically people with adhd self-medicate with stimulants yeah because hardly treat adhd now we give people stimulants yeah ritalin methylphenol so so a lot of people that choose uh stimulants of self-medication like nicotine and caffeine and crystal meth and ephedrine are actually self-medicating idiocy. It's very likely. Yeah. And I was punished by teachers for, I wouldn't say not paying attention, but being interested in other things in class. So I remember very distinctly my kindergarten teacher, I'll name her by name because it's shameful. Mrs. Ms. Bevan or Mrs. Bevan.

I refused to learn the alphabet because she wouldn't give me a good reason why I needed to learn the alphabet. It was just, you need to learn the alphabet. So she made me eat soap in front of the class and put me at the bad table. She got me at the bad table. But I was always interested in doing many, many, many things. And in fact, the reason, one of the reasons that I started wrestling was because I was very hyperactive and as I believe the story goes other mothers recommended to my mom that she put me into something called kiddie wrestling to drain my batteries before I got home so that makes perfect sense I've never been drawn to depressants never been drawn to

opiates in fact after surgeries I get very sick if I'm given Vicodin or anything like that. So I've opted out, uh, have never personally had any issues with alcohol, although a lot of people do. It's always been a draw to stimulants. And once the, we don't have to go down this, this, this path, cause I want to, I want you to be able to focus on, on these, these definitions. But, uh, where I got myself into trouble was having never been physically addicted to any substance before. I started using the ECA stack once a day. My friend was using it twice a day. I started using it twice a day. And then I started using it three times a day and you develop a tolerance very quickly. Right. So you have to

take more and more. And if you stop the withdrawal symptoms are awful. So I had never experienced that. So I continued after sports to use this. And certainly in the long term, there are some very nasty side effects. Of course. But I didn't stop. I mean, for many, many years. Well, so there's a great link between ADD and addictions. And not just because they both begin with the same three letters.

And I can tell you about my own ADHD. And this is where we go back to childhood again. So that tuning out, that absent-mindedness, that desire to scatter your attention all over the place, that's not a disease. They say it's an inherent disease. The hell it is. That tuning out, that divided attention

is actually... But let me give you a personal question again. If I were to become abusive towards you right now, verbally or otherwise, what would be your options right now? I could ignore. Well, but that's not what you would do first, is it? Not likely.

I mean, I would, right now, I would probably just listen and pause. I shut down often if I get attacked verbally because I don't want to respond with rage, which has historically been my response. I hear you, but let's get a bit more basic about it. The rational response, if I were to become abusive, would be for you to just assert yourself saying, don't talk to me that way. Right. Or it would be to leave, saying, this interview is over. And if for some reason you had not the strength to do either of those, there's other people in the room here with us, you could ask for help.

Right. But what if you couldn't escape, fight back, or seek help? Then you would shut down or tune out. Right. In other words, the tuning out is simply a defensive response on the part of the brain. Now put me back into my infancy, where my mother is so grief-stricken that I'm crying because she's in pain. And I'll read you a quote here, if I may.

Yes, please. And this has to do with the sensitive child. The child is very open and can feel the pain and suffering going on in its immediate environment. The child is aware of its own body and can also feel the tension, rigidity and pain in the body of the mother or anyone else he's with. If the mother is suffering, the baby suffers too.

The pain never gets discharged. The organism does not develop the confidence that it can regulate itself, that things will happen the way they should, hence lack of optimism. Okay, now, Mama didn't abuse me. She did her best to look after me, but she was stressed, depressed, terrorized, grief-stricken. I'm picking that up as a sensitive infant. Can I fight back, change the situation, or escape?

None of those. What can I do? Nothing I can do. My brain will tune out as a way of dealing with the stress. So I'm not talking about abuse here. I'm just talking about stress mothering or parenting. The child's brain then will tune out. When is the child's brain tuning out?

When the brain is developing. So the tuning out then becomes programmed and then there's the default setting. And that's why ADD. So it's not an inherited disease. It's not a disease at all. It begins as a coping mechanism, which then gets programmed into the brain.

And as a lot of these early coping mechanisms function, they help you in the short term create problems in the long term. And that's ADD is one of these examples. And of course, it also makes you more prone to be addicted, because now when you tune out, life becomes less interesting. You shut down emotionally, you protect yourself. Now you feel depressed. What does depression actually mean?

You said you were depressed. What does depression mean? To depress something is to push it down. What do people push down in depression? They push down their emotions. Why would they? Because the emotions are too painful. So even depression becomes a coping mechanism.

You push it down so you don't feel the pain. But then later on, that interferes with your life functioning. So it all begins as a coping mechanism, and later on becomes a source of dysfunction. And all this is happening when the brain is actually developing, which we can talk about later. So these are the links I began to make, including after I was diagnosed with it.

And then despite the fact that a couple of my kids were diagnosed, I knew that this wasn't a genetic disease, that what it is actually is a coping mechanism which got programmed into the brain. And then when I read the literature on brain development, wow, it turns out that the human brain is shaped by the environment and particularly by the adult-child relationships. And so it all began to

make perfect sense to me. There are a few things I'd love to underscore or reiterate because I think they're very astute and very helpful. And certainly if I had had some of these reframes, I think that I would have been able to be proactive with working on a lot of my own issues much, much earlier. Uh, me too, by the way. Yeah. Uh, for instance, uh, we can come back to this. I'm actually just going to mention two things and then we can, we can go where that takes us. But the first is rather than asking why the addiction, asking why the pain, instead of looking at the, the consequences, looking at the causes and not confusing the, the symptoms with the causes. Uh, so instead of asking why the addiction, asking why the pain and the, the other, this, this might take a moment for me to

read, but I think it's worth reading. And I should say that Compassion for Addiction, this is an organization co-founded by you yourself and Vicki, I'm going to make a guess. I've never actually said her last name, but do lie or do lie. Vicki, just for, for context, for folks who are wondering, I was actually the very first person about five years ago to recommend that we meet. And I took a note of it in a notebook I still have. And that's part of the reason that I reached out for the book. And just because we may revisit this, I met Vicki at a gathering at the home of someone named George Sarlo, right. Who has a lot in, who, who, who shares a lot of common background, uh, with you and certainly common interests, but we'll come back to that. The part that I wanted to read is, is the following and I'm going to make my, make an

attempt here. All right. So the mainstream view of addiction, you mentioned this compared to the clinical perspectives that addiction is a matter of individual choice, moral failure, or weakness, which is why so many approaches are based on deterrence and punishment. Which includes self-help approaches, for that matter, that I've attempted myself. The clinical view is that addiction is a disease of the brain with disordered brain circuits and behaviors. An accurate yet narrow perspective. So I think that's a really important line. An accurate yet narrow perspective. So I think that's a really important line, an accurate yet narrow perspective. So perhaps accurate but incomplete, right?

It is accurate that in the addicted brain, that the addicted brain is demonstrably a physiologically dysfunctional brain, but narrow because it seeks to explain the dysfunction in strictly physiological and biochemical terms without recognizing the emotional and social component of how the brain works. And this was really driven home for me recently. In the last several years, I've gotten to know Tony Robbins. And I attended an event not too

long ago with several of my very close friends called Date with Destiny. And at this event, he asked the audience of a 5,000 people, how many people here know someone who takes antidepressants? Pretty much every hand goes up. How many people here know someone who takes antidepressants yet is still depressed. And it was probably 80% of the people who raised their hands the first time. And I personally know quite a few people who take antidepressants, which seem to help on some level. Although the tolerance for some of these pharmaceuticals can also be developed very quickly. And yet if, if my experience is anything like the experience of, or I should say, if the experiences of other people is anything like my personal experience with friends, let's say who have depression, you witness these thought

patterns and verbal patterns that can take them from the highest high or just a, a baseline of optimism and drive them back into depression. And so they're just, it seems to be just from an empirical or observational standpoint, more to the story, right? So I, I, I really appreciate you putting into words what I've grasped to try to understand and also convey. Uh, so with this definition of addiction, how do you work with patients? Well, let's go back to what you quoted me saying, not why the addiction, but why the pain. So if we understand that addiction in every case

is rooted in some painful internal experience, and that when you ask people, what does the addiction do for you, they'll say, it numbs me, it soothes the pain, it makes me feel connected with other people, it gives me a sense of control, it gives me inner peace. Well, the lack of inner peace, the lack of control, the lack of connection, they're all forms of emotional pain. If I ask the question, not why the the addiction but why the pain then that leads to an examination of that person's life rather than looking just at the brain chemistry so I'm quoted from an article

that appeared in the journal pediatrics which is the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics it's about as prestigious as you can get. 2012. The article comes from the Harvard Center on the Developing Child, again a prestigious child development research institution at Harvard University. This article did not present new information so much as it elegantly summarized decades of research. And notice what they say. They say,

Growing scientific evidence demonstrates that social and physical environments that threaten human development because of scarcity, stress, or instability can lead to short-term physiologic and psychological adjustments that are necessary for immediate survival and adaptation, but which may come at a significant cost to long-term outcomes in learning, behavior, health, and longevity.

That's what I was saying before, that those early adaptations, like pushing down your feelings, when the feelings are too painful, will help you as an infant, as a young child, but then they cause problems later on. The tuning out that you do to protect you from the stress in your environment, if you're very sensitive, it doesn't take a lot of stress, helps you endure, but in the long term becomes a problem. That's exactly what they're saying. Now, I'll jump a few pages ahead to what they say about brain development.

And this is so crucial, and it's so crucial because they still don't teach this in medical schools, even though scientifically it's not even vaguely controversial. The human brain develops an interaction with the environment. It's not genetically programmed purely. Here's what they say. The architecture of the brain is constructed to an ongoing process that begins before birth, continues into adulthood, and establishes either a sturdy or a fragile foundation

for all the health learning and behavior that follow. Not some of the health learning, all the health learning. Now notice what they say. First of all, the architecture of the brain is constructed through an ongoing process that begins before birth, which already means what happens in the womb already has an impact on you.

So if your mother is stressed and she's got high levels of stress hormone, that's already affecting your brain development. And when you think of all the stressed pregnant women out there, no wonder we're seeing so many kids in trouble. And we know from American studies, international studies, that when mothers are stressed, their placenta will naturally have more cortisol and adrenaline,

the stress hormone. Those kids will be more likely to have stress issues later on, abnormal stress hormone levels even at one year of age, behavior problems, learning problems, and so on, which tells us a lot as to why adopted kids have so many more problems. That's another issue. But the next paragraph is key. The interactions of genes and experiences literally shapes the circuitry of the developing brain and is critically influenced by, in other words, the circuitry, the chemistry of the brain, and which centers and which circuits and which systems develop

and which neurochemicals will be present in what quantities depends on the early environment and is critically influenced by the mutual responsiveness of adult-child relationships, particularly in the early childhood years. In other words, the most important influence shaping the physiological development of the brain is the quality of parent-child relationships. Now, when parents are stressed or distracted or workaholics, like I was a young parent,

if there's instability, economic troubles, relationship troubles, unresolved trauma on the part of the parent, loving parents who are just stressed, that'll interfere with the child's brain development. That's why we're seeing so much more ADHD now, so much more autism and so much more other problems because of stress in society that affects the parenting environment. In other words, yes, there's physiological problems with the brain, but it's not a genetic issue. It's related to early experience. So when you look at brain scans of adults that are troubled brain scans, as you do in addicts, you're not just looking at the impact of addiction, you're also looking at the impact of childhood trauma and childhood stress.

And this has been shown over and over and over and over again. So there's no separation between the physiology and the psychology. So if you come to me as an addict and you say, I got such and such, and I ask you, what does it do for you? And you say it numbs the pain, then my question is, where did you develop the pain? What happened? And then we have an inquiry. And now it no longer becomes a shameful thing that you chose this.

Nor does it mean that you're stuck with it because you've got this genetic problem. We get it as an adaptive response to something that happened and we can heal that. The reason why addiction treatment is failing is because physicians don't understand this. They keep dealing with the effects, which is the addiction, and the behaviors, which are the effects of the addiction, but not the cause, which is the childhood distress. And the impact of childhood distress that carry into adulthood, in other words, how we stay prisoners of childhood. And so present methods of treatment in psychiatry, in addiction medicine,

in childhood psychiatry deal with effects rather than causes. And this is why we're so ineffective at it. I have many questions. Yeah. So the first is just to underscore something, which is our software, the genetics play a role. They do. But it's not a comprehensive explanation for what we're discussing genes

can predispose but they don't predetermine right exactly no there are very few genetic diseases there's one runs in my family muscular dystrophy if you got the gene you'll have the disease my my mother had it right so that would be predetermined that's just predetermined very rare those diseases let me tell you an interesting study from either Australia or New Zealand. They looked at a group of people for aggression. They found that the most aggressive people had a certain gene variant. Do you think they found the gene for aggression? No, they didn't.

Because the least aggressive people in the group had the same gene. So the most aggressive and the least aggressive shared the same gene as compared to the average. The gene could not have been for aggression. Now, if you actually looked at the life histories of those people, the most aggressive people had been brought up in troubled, sometimes abusive, but always very stressed homes. The least aggressive were brought up in very nurturing homes. What was the gene for? Sensitivity.

The more sensitive you are, the more you're going to be affected. When you're brought up in a peaceful home, you're going to be that much more peaceful. When you're brought up in a stormy home, you're going to be that much more aggressive. So there are these predispositions, but they're not for specific illnesses. They are for temperament, which means that you're going to be more or less affected by the environment. And so, yeah, there are some predisposing genes, but we know both from animal studies and monkey studies and human studies that even you find a gene that for similar reasons predisposes somebody to addiction. if that animal or if that human being is brought up in good nurturing circumstances,

their risk of addiction is no greater than creatures without that gene. Right. So it's just not a genetic disease. And the fact that it runs in families doesn't prove anything. Because, you know, as I always point out, I'm a medical doctor, and if two of my kids become medical doctors, which is no danger whatsoever, but if they did, that wouldn't prove that the practice of medicine is a genetic disease. Right, right. It's not a catch-all explanation. Also, you have, I mean, because of a few of the books I've written, I hear a lot of stories, both successful and unsuccessful about people attempting to lose

weight. And they'll often say, well, it runs in my family. Like my parents are fat. My grandparents are fat. And I'll say, do you have pets? And they'll say, yes. I'll say, are your pets overweight? And they're like, yeah, my pets are fat. Okay. Well, that's clearly, clearly not just a genetic issue. Well, may I say something on that? Yeah. Have you heard about the Adverse Childhood Experiences Studies? The ACE studies. The Average Child? Adverse Childhood Experiences Studies. You know, I haven't, but I feel like there's a questionnaire or a...

There is. There's a test that you can take. Yeah, there is. So the Adverse Childhood Experiences Studies were done in California with, I think, 17, 14 or 17,000 adults, mostly Caucasians, half of them university educated, and they looked at the relationship between childhood adversity and adult outcomes. And an adverse childhood experience was defined as physical or sexual or emotional abuse, a divorce, a parent being jailed, violence in the family, a parent being addicted, a parent being mentally ill, a parent dying.

These were the main ones. And for each of these adverse childhood experiences, the risk of addiction goes up exponentially, the risk of autoimmune disease goes up, the risk of depression goes up, the risk of ADHD goes up, the risk of relationship problems, STDs, everything goes up. Now, you know how these studies started? These studies started at an obesity clinic. Dr. Vincent Felitti, who's a San Diego internist, wonderful guy, deep thinker and researcher, they noticed that at this clinic, with rigorous dietary control and exercise, they could help people lose weight. But what do you think they couldn't do?

They couldn't ensure they continue those behaviors when they leave. Exactly. They couldn't help them keep it off. And then Felitti did something that's, I have to say, is unusual for a medical doctor. He listened to his patients. And they said, don't you get it? We're stuffing down our pain. This is all based on childhood trauma. And so obesity itself is a response to childhood trauma. It's just another addiction. I could talk about it in many ways.

And the adverse childhood experience studies have been repeated numerous times now in other countries, always with the same results. And so that the obesity epidemic right now is not just an epidemic of junk foods and sedentary lifestyles. That is true. Yeah. Those are contributing factors, but... But the underlying basis is people self-soothing their stresses in their lives. And so it's really an epidemic of stress so let me return to another point uh or one thing you said in in passing which i'd love to dig into a little bit and that was how at the time say the example i think we were discussing well

actually before that let me mention one thing so So I've had my entire, my full genome sequence, a predisposition to alcoholism is very prevalent in my family from a genetic standpoint, just from a software basis. However, I mentioned earlier, I never had issues with alcohol as with stimulants. So, uh, just, just as, just as a footnote, but what I was going to, what I'd love to ask you, and then I'd really love to hear what you do with patients once you start looking at their pain and the tools you use or the approaches you use. But one of the epiphanies for me in the last very recent, uh, year or two has been looking at my coping mechanisms very differently. And what I mean by that is for a very long time, I had certain behaviors, certain defaults that, uh, I hated, which of course means I'm hating a part of myself. And that included anger, rage responses, use of stimulants, you name it. Uh, a close friend of mine who is a therapist,

but I've never, I've never engaged him as a therapist. And, uh, there are certainly plenty of bad therapists out there, which I think is a separate topic. Nonetheless, he was helping, and I'm sure we'll get back to this, but in preparation for a very controlled, supervised psychedelic experience, he was helping another friend of ours prepare. Is this with MDMA? This is with ayahuasca. With ayahuasca, okay. And this person had a number of addictions. And she hated these addictions.

And she said, I hate these. I realize they're terrible. They've, they've ruined my life. They're ruining my life. And it was all a negative relationship to these behaviors. And he said, did these ever serve you? Did these ever help? What did these do for you? And she, and she described how they helped her cope with very difficult circumstances early on. And he said, perhaps what you should do as an exercise and what we can do is for you to effectively thank those behavior for the role they played and for the necessity they filled. And to then recognize, thank them for their duty effectively, but to let them go because they're no longer needed. And that was a huge eye opener for me. And I began to, this is coinciding with a number of things and I don't want to take us off the

rails, but began to use something called loving kindness meditation or metta, metta, M-E-T-T-A meditation, which I was introduced to by a gentleman from Google actually, or formerly Google, Chade Meng Tan, and then also Jack Kornfield, who really reiterated it for me. But I never applied it to myself. I always applied this loving kindness meditation to other people. And what was recommended is that I apply that loving kindness to these, to the younger Tim, to the other versions of Tim who had these behaviors that I had grown to hate and resent and to actually thank them for the role they played. For instance, that rage, that anger was the fuel that got me out of Long Island. And where I grew up, there are a lot of serious drug issues, particularly with opiates. My best friend died of fentanyl.

Many of my friends are addicted to opiates who I grew up with. Many have died. And I got out because I was angry. In part, I think that was the fuel, but that fuel ended up over the long term being very corrosive. But to, in a way, to reconcile myself with that,

I had to stop resenting it. Uh, and I suppose that's maybe more of a confession than a question, but your, your comment, uh, brought it to mind and maybe as a, as a segue, I just love to hear, and we can take it anywhere we want, of course, but once you have shifted the focus from why the addiction to why the pain and you start to work with someone, what approaches have you found to help? What tools? Well, so I very much salute your friend's approach. It's exactly what the approach I would take myself. And I call it compassionate inquiry.

So inquire in a compassionate way. Not, why did I do this? But, hmm, why did I do this? Right. The first one is not a question. It's a statement. It's a self-condemnation. The second one is a question.

Hmm, wonder why I did this. Ah, it soothed my pain. And so, what your friend said, that it served you. So, thank it. Love it. But let go of it, is absolutely right. I call it the stupid friend. The stupid friend is the one who helped you in a particular way at a certain time, but it can't learn that that way doesn't function anymore.

That instead of helping, now it's hurting. So it's a friend because it's really trying to help, but it's stupid because it's not learning that you're no longer that 3-year-old or that 5-year-old or that 15-year-old. So this leads to the question of trauma because it's one thing to recognize that all this originates in childhood pain. It's quite another to transform that pain. And for that, we have to understand what trauma is. So people often think that trauma is what happens to you. So trauma is a divorce when you were small and your parents fighting. Trauma is your mother's depression.

Trauma is your father's alcoholism. Trauma is your parents' argumentation. Trauma is physical or sexual abuse or some loss. Those aren't the traumas. Those are traumatic. But the trauma is not what happens to you. The trauma is what happens inside you. And as a result of these traumatic events,

what happens inside you is you get disconnected from your emotions and you're disconnected from your body and you have difficulty being in the present moment, and you develop a negative view of your world, and a negative view of yourself, and a defensive view of other people. And these perspectives keep showing up in your life in the present, because they're the stupid friends.

And so the issue is not just to recognize what happened 10, 15, 30, however many years ago, but to actually recognize the manifestations in the present moment and to transcend them. And how do you do that? By reconnecting with yourself, by restoring the connection with your body primarily and with your emotions that you lost. And once you do, when you found these things again, then you have what we call recovery. Because what does it mean to recover something?

It means to find it again. So what is it that people find when they recover? They find themselves. And the loss of self is the essence of trauma. So the real purpose of addiction treatment, mental health treatment, any kind of healing is reconnection. For people who are listening and want to reconnect with themselves, with their bodies, for instance,

what recommendations might you have, whether that's things they can do or resources they can look to, or both, or something else? What recommendations? Because I'm sure, actually, can look to, uh, or both or something else. What, what recommendations? Cause I'm sure I could actually, I am a hundred percent sure because I've had people come on and for the very first time on this podcast, talk about sexual abuse that they endured as children and what they did to help recover from that. Uh, many people listening, I am sure,

have addictions, both traumatic past experiences and trauma. What recommendations could you make for them? Sure. So I want to say first of all that for trauma you don't need terribly traumatic events.

So there's two ways to look at trauma. One is that bad things happen that shouldn't have. We've talked about those. But the other way to get traumatized is when good things happen that should have happened. So if good things didn't happen, that should have happened. Sorry.

So when you look at that... The trauma of omission. The trauma of omission. But the parents, not that they didn't love you, not that they didn't do their best, but they were too stressed, traumatized, distracted themselves. Then you didn't get the kind of attention and the kind of acceptance

and the kind of attuned being with that you needed. That itself can make you disconnect from yourself. The child needs that acceptance, that connection, that attunement. Our brain development requires it. Our emotional development demands it. And when we don't get it, not because the parents don't love us, but simply because of their own issues, we can also suffer that disconnection. So that's what I call developmental trauma.

And now how do we connect? Well, there are many, many forms of therapy. It's very difficult for anybody to do this on their own. Some people do it. I certainly couldn't do it on my own. I've needed a lot of help in terms of therapy that helps me understand what happened to me. And so that there's a reason for it. So that not if there's a reason for it, then it's no longer me.

I'm not somebody to be ashamed of. I'm just somebody who developed along certain lines for some very good reasons but it's not in my deepest character and it's not who I am and I don't have to be that way that's a relief to know it's also not that I'm genetically programmed so I'm doomed to stay that way

you know number one number two you have to reconnect with the body there are various body therapies my friend Peter Levine and his somatic experiencing. Walking Tiger? Is that one of his books? Waking the Tiger. Waking the Tiger. Waking the Tiger was his first book and he's written many wonderful books since then.

So that's the somatic. Somatic experiencing, his method is called, which he developed. It's brilliant. There is EMDR, eye movement desensitization reprogramming, which is a way of bypassing the conscious mind and getting to the emotional brain quicker than talk therapy by itself can do. So it's combined with talk therapy, but it takes you past just a conscious, defensive, egoic mind. There is emotional freedom tapping that people do.

There's various variations on that. There is motor sensory integration techniques. Then there is the traditional therapies like yoga. Now yoga was not simply a physical modality when it first developed. Yoga actually means unity. So the very essence of yoga is to regain that unity, not just with ourselves, but also with the larger creation. And so yoga, when it's practiced in its intended way, not just the hot yoga where you get a good workout, That's great. I'm not against it.

But I'm talking about intentional yoga with a meditative aspect to it, which is taught by a number of disciplines. Body work of all kinds. I'm just going to hit pause for one second. Do you practice yoga? And if so, what type do you practice? So I have always said that with my ADHD, I'm not a yoga person. I can't do it. Until a year and a half ago, I met actually a yogi.

His name is Sadhguru. And he's an Indian yogi with a big following. I was very skeptical. But I met the guy. I now have a 50-minute daily yoga practice, which I did this morning before coming to the interview. And this made an enormous difference in my life. With my ADHD mind, I really have trouble just sitting there. When I sit on the meditation cushion, my mind is like all over the place. But with the yoga,

which is more body based, I can stay much more present. There is a meditational component to it. And so the answer is yes. If you had asked me 18 months ago, I would have said no, I support it, but I don't do it. But now I'm actually a very committed practitioner. And it really has made a difference. Is there a particular type of yoga that people could Google or learn more about? Well, so I'm not a yoga expert. And there's many forms of yoga that other people more knowledgeable than I am could recommend. But the one I learned is called Inner Engineering, and it's taught by either Sadhguru or his

followers, and you can look up Inner Engineering online. Inner Engineering. When I recommended it to friends and others, everybody has been only being grateful, so I can highly recommend it. Typically, there is to me what seems to be a cult around the guy, which I don't take too particularly, but he's the genuine article in terms of having a deep experience and being able to try and transmit that experience to others and creating

a practical system around it. So it's worked for me. I'm not here to recruit anybody else, but since you're asking. No, no, it's just my fans appreciate. Well, you know, I'm not going to blame it on my fans. I like specifics. So Inner Engineering, you can look up online.

And it's taught here in the States and in Canada internationally, actually. But I did interrupt you. You were about to mention, I think, another technique or modality that can help. We talked about, for instance, the somatic experience, EMDR, emotional freedom tapping, motor sensory integration technique or techniques, yoga, and then there's something coming up after that. Well, about 10 years ago, I began to work with psychedelics. Now, if you're 15 years ago, you were to ask me, will I ever be working with psychedelics as a healing modality? I would have said, you're out of your mind. But then through a series of events, I became aware of the potential role of psychedelics in healing. And I've been doing work with them now for 10 years.

And they're another potent method. They're not for everybody. And I have to emphasize that whatever modality you choose of a psychedelic nature, you have to do it with adept practitioners with deep integrity and deep knowledge and experience. But in such hands and in such a context, it can be like a superhighway to self-awareness. Not in isolation, but it opens doors that otherwise might take years.

And so it's not unusual for me to conduct a psychedelic session with somebody or a series of sessions either in a group or individual setting and have them say, that was like 10 years of psychotherapy in one day. And I've had the same experience myself. So again, it's not to be isolated from other kinds of work, and it has to be integrated, but it's not a potent way of working. And of course, as I know you're personally aware, there's an increasing movement amongst psychologists, therapists, psychiatrists, medical doctors, other healers to find ways of incorporating psychedelic healing in the larger therapeutic scheme. So Gabor, you mentioned a series of events leading you to psychedelics or to consider psychedelics potentially as a healing or medical modality.

If you're able to, could you describe any of those events? Sure. So in 2008, my book on addiction in the realm of hunger ghosts, Close Encounters with Addiction, was published in Canada and very quickly became a number one national bestseller, subsequently published in the States as well. And I was on a book tour and people kept asking me, what do you know about addictions and ayahuasca as a treatment? Ayahuasca being a Peruvian or Amazonian vine that's made into a brew that has psychedelic properties. I knew nothing. The next speech or the next event, somebody else would ask, what do you know about ayahuasca and the treatment of addiction?

I finally started getting annoyed with it. Like, leave me alone. I've just written a book. I've spent years researching it. My life experience and all kinds of scientific exploration went into it. Ask me about something I know about. And then I realized that maybe the universe was knocking on my door. And somebody said, did you know you could experience it here in Vancouver?

There was a Peruvian shaman leading some ceremonies up in Vancouver. So who am I to say no? And I jumped right in, and I sat in this tent with 50 other people. 50? Yeah, that's how they set it up. It's not what I recommend, but that's how they set it up. They played beautiful music, and there was a little baby in the room. Mother and dad were there for the experience.

The baby was in the room and the baby was cooing away. And tears started flowing down my face. And these were not tears of sorrow, they were tears of joy. And I got in touch with such profound love that I had never consciously experienced before. And there were tears of love. And it wasn't love for anybody in particular. It was just love. And then I saw in all the ways that I had closed my heart against love in my life, and

how I had betrayed love in my personal relationship with my spouse and my children and in other ways. So I just got this experience of love as something profound and universal and life-defining, but something from which I've been cut off in so many ways. And I got it because I closed my heart against love precisely because when I was vulnerable and small I'd been so hurt

owing to my mother's states of mind she couldn't respond to me the way I needed to be responded to not her fault but she couldn't and then when I was a year old she gave me to a stranger to save my life and I didn't see her for a month, which is a huge... Can you explain that for a second?

So again, it's Budapest, Hungary, Second World War, January. The Russians have circled Budapest and are fighting the Germans. The government in power is a right-wing fascist, anti-Semitic military force. and even though the deportations of jews had stopped the germans had annihilated half a million hungarian jews in three or four months but now the hungarian fascists were killing jews in budapest and including in the house where my mother and i were living so my mother gave me to a stranger in the street a christian woman because she didn't know she'd be dead or alive next day. Wow. Or that I would be.

And I was quite sick. So I didn't see her for a month, which I experienced as a deep abandonment. How else could I experience it? So my heart closes against love. And I got all this. And so I got that if this plant, this plant that, as you say, manifests the mind, can show me both the ways in which I've closed off from myself and that I don't need to because the love is still there, what healing potential it has.

Now, I wish I could say that after that experience, I became a loving husband and a loving human being. I didn't. It's not that simple, as my wife could tell you. Nevertheless, it opened the door for me and I got right away. Now, however, the thought that I had was that I had no induction. I had no introduction. I had no processing afterwards. Ayahuasca is a medicinal plant that has been used in the Amazon basin for hundreds of years, maybe longer, in a cultural context. In a tribe, in a village where people know each other, where they know the shaman, where they share the same assumptions and the same history.

That's not the same as a bunch of Westerners, strangers to each other, coming together for one night, drinking the stuff, and then going their separate ways. Agreed. So, immediately the question that came up for me was how can we create a setting that at least resembles as best we can fashion the original setting.

So, we came up with the idea of a retreat where a small number of people get together with properly trained shamans who have integrity and experience, deep experience, and with me facilitating people's preparation and their post-ceremony integration. And so I've been doing that now for 10 years.

And a lot of learning involved we made mistakes but it evolved and the essence of it is that people don't come into it cold they come into it with preparation in a safe setting where pretty soon a group becomes a family to each other

which means that not only do they love each other and support each other but they also trigger each other. I mean, basically, I tell people, guess what, you're back and you found your virgin. And everything you've hated but you found virgin is going to show up here. But in the context where it's safe for that to happen. And so I've seen a lot of great healing.

I've had people with multiple suicide attempts heal from depression. I've seen people get much better with their autoimmune diseases. I've seen people deal with all kinds of addictions and life issues, relationship problems, come out of it much more themselves, much more able to deal with these issues, so long as the proper integration is done afterwards. So that was my personal experience. Now, that then introduced me to the whole world of psychedelics. And I realized that there's a lot of research being done these days.

There's this organization, MAPS, Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, which is a group of psychologists, psychiatrists, medical doctors, therapists, counselors, interested people to study scientifically the role of psychedelics in healing. And as you're probably aware, interesting studies have been done around psilocybin, mushrooms, and end-of-life anxiety. Studies have been done which are revolutionary in using MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, MDMA being the medical name for the technical name for ecstasy. Again, in the right setting with the right leadership, these have proven to be very powerful modalities of healing. And so there's a whole new resurgence of psychedelic research in a number of different areas,

some of them man-made, some of them plant-based. But there's a whole world that i was introduced to and i've learned a lot in the last 10 years and again i both practice it in my own healing work and i'm interested in it also as a participant i'd love to add a few things to your second comment and then ask a bunch of questions about the first. Yeah. So for, for people who are,

and I'll maybe direct this to camera cause I don't usually have cameras. So I'll just do this for people who are actually, no, that's too weird. All right. For people who are, I don't know where to look. Definitely keep that in,

uh, for people who are interested in learning more about the current scientific studies and mechanisms of action related to some of these compounds and what is being done. There are a number of very interesting and, uh, very competent organizations as far as I can tell maps is one that you mentioned, and I'll actually be seeing the founder, Rick Doblin, in just a few days' time. There is the Hefter Institute,

which I've worked with, primarily run by MDs and PhDs, or at least the board and so on, is comprised of scientists and medical doctors. It was through the Hefter Foundation and also directly with Johns Hopkins. So I've had some involvement with- The SILA-7. With SILA-7 studies.

And actually, thank you to many of you. Sorry about smacking the mic. To many of you in my audience who helped through a crowdfunding campaign to raise funds for a study at Johns Hopkins related to treatment-resistant depression and SILA-7. So Hefter Institute, excellent organization to look into. And then USONA also, uh, which I believe is primarily focused on psilocybin, whereas MAPS at this point has done great work on many levels, including, uh, helping to facilitate MDMA being designated a breakthrough

therapy and effectively getting fast-tracked into phase three trials. By the FDA. That's right. Yeah. And these are all organizations that I would encourage people to look into. And it's really an exciting time and also a fragile time as it relates to these compounds, which have certainly demonstrated historically, accepting MDMA. Let's just look at the studies, many of which were done starting in, say, 50s and 60s, looking at the clinical efficacy of using these compounds for everything ranging from alcoholism to nicotine addiction to many of the things that you mentioned. Well, you know, what is little known, but that Bill Wilson, Dr. Bill, who founded, one of the funders of AA,

actually had some powerful LSD experiences, which helped him in his spiritual growth. Within AA, they don't talk about that very much, but it's a fact. If I may parenthetically say, as much as I support the 12 steps, what AA also doesn't tend to talk about is the trauma that first causes the addiction. And Bill Wilson himself was a traumatized child. He was abandoned by his parents when he was very young. And so it's interesting that AA, for all the good work that it does do, which I support, I don't support people being forced into any particular form of treatment, but as a self-chosen form of treatment,

it can be very helpful to many people. But they don't talk about two very interesting things, which is one is the psychedelic part and the other is the trauma part. Yeah. It's, for me, just looking at my own childhood experiences and exploring recovery, defined as you defined it, in the last several years, especially in the last six months, it's been fascinating and frustrating to discover and try to piece together these various elements. What is the frustrating part that there is, uh, well,

there may, it may exist, but I couldn't find one stop shopping that checked all the boxes, right? So, so it's, it's been a exercise in collecting various tools and piecing them together. Like you said, AA does incredible work. What they have done in terms of a distributed free service with social accountability and support is incredible. Absolutely. The psychedelic component, which Bill actually wanted to, as I understand it, make one of the steps in AA. Needless to say, it was hard to get widespread leadership support for that. And then you have the trauma piece.

So these are all tools in the toolkit that people can use for their own sort of bespoke approach in some respects. Coming back to the ayahuasca specifically, and I should just as a caveat point out, because I do think that these tools, I know these tools are very powerful. I have firsthand familiarity from past experiences and have been very engaged with this scientific community for some time now. They can be misused. There are many charlatans. And unfortunately, it's more than that. There's some very powerful healers, shamans, who unfortunately exploit people sexually and financially.

Very common. And this is, of course, not just restricted to the ayahuasca world. It also happens in the spiritual world. How many spiritual leaders with tremendous power, tremendous healing influence, have at the same time exploited men and women and created all kinds of further trauma so unfortunately when you have that much power and you haven't totally done your integration work you can start misusing that power and that happens in all the healing modalities as we know but it certainly happens in the psychedelic world as well yeah it's very it's uh i wish i

could say it's rare it's not uh but it's something to safeguard against especially when you're in that vulnerable state so i would actually recommend that people see a documentary called kumare which is very much worth watching and the brief overview is it's an Indian filmmaker who begins studying various gurus and healers in the U.S. in hopes of, I believe the original impetus was to simply do a documentary on charlatans. And then he went to India and he said, they're just as bad here. And he said, 99% are just as bad or worse. And he decides to make himself a guru as an experiment. And it's a very thought-provoking documentary that I think will...

It becomes a kind of fake guru, right? That's right. Yeah, I remember it. Then he unveils it. I don't want to give too much away, but it's very well done, very worth watching because it helps to prepare you i think psychologically to uh not lose yourself in a dangerous way and here's the problem you see what i said about the essence of trauma is that you use you lose connection to yourself and that means you lose connection to your gut feelings right yes as long as your gut

feelings are with you and you honor them they'll protect you but the very essence of trauma is the loss of that which means that when you lose connection to your gut feelings then you're very vulnerable to being exploited and when you talk to people who were exploited in any context psychedelic or not if you ask them do you have any kind of vague sense that this is not quite right they'll say yeah, yeah, but I didn't listen to it. And the fact that they didn't listen to it is already a marker of trauma. So since it's traumatized people, which is most of us, who seek healing, it's also vulnerable people who seek healing. And this is what some of these people can exploit. So the very portal into healing, which is opening up the vulnerability

that we've shut down against, is also the portal for potential loss. So people have to do their due diligence. And I'm not trying to create paranoia here, but people just should be careful. You just mentioned something that I'd really love to just pause and emphasize. You mentioned a few things. So number one is that your, your gut feeling

slash psychological intuition can help you. And that's something that for many reasons, I completely muted or ignored for a very long time. So it's been a process of getting reacquainted with that. And I would say two things that I found helpful. And if you have any comments on the second in particular, I'd love to hear. One was dramatically decreasing my caffeine intake, which I found was almost like turning up the volume on static. It made it very difficult for me to read or feel other things. I was using it, uh, maybe for many reasons, but it had the side effect at least of muting. Maybe that was why I did it subconsciously. Many of these feelings. Uh, the second was, um, in fact, a video that was

recommended to me, but it, it corresponds to a book called the gift of fear by gavin de becker and who actually owns a company that does protective services and executive security so you have to keep in mind maybe you don't always want to ask a barber if you need a haircut. So keeping that in mind, uh, it, it also in brief points to the benefits of some of these reactions or emotional states that we are prone to labeling negative. Yeah. Uh, and, uh, the, as you said, not to make anyone paranoid, but rather to inform them, these and put into the same schedule in the United States as heroin and cocaine to have them rescheduled so that they are prescribable. If then that happens, the ability to certify therapists, to regulate and to maintain a broad type of quality control goes up. So that's also one of the hopes is that that will decrease the likelihood of bad actors

and allow appropriate punishment for bad actors. Mind you, as we know, even in legalized legitimate professions... It still happens. This stuff happens. So ultimately, gut feelings are still the best response. And let me address first why we shut down our gut feelings, if I may. Please. So a human being has two fundamental needs, apart from the physical needs in infancy, in childhood.

One is for attachment. Now, attachment is the closeness and proximity with another human being for the sake of being looked after, or for the sake of looking after the other. Now, human beings, as mammals and even birds, are creatures of attachment. We have to connect and attach because otherwise we don't survive. If there's nobody that's motivated to take care of us, to attach to us that way, and if not motivated to attach to others, we just can't survive. One of the interesting things is that the endorphins, which are the body's internal opiate chemicals, which heroin and all the other opiates resemble, they have to facilitate

attachment. So if you take infant mice and you knock out their endorphin receptors so they don't have endorphin, opiate activity in their brain, they won't cry for help and separate from their mothers, which would mean that they would die in the wild. And which goes back to what happens in early in childhood when there's stress and trauma, these endorphin systems don't develop. And then when people do heroin,

it feels like a warm, soft hug to them. They feel love and connection for the first time. That's why it's so powerful. So we have this need for attachment, which obviously the human infant, who is the most helpless, the most dependent, the least mature of any creature in the universe at birth, cannot survive without the attachment. And that attachment relationship, given that we have the longest period of development

of any creature, well into adolescence and beyond, attachment is not a negotiable need. But we have another need, which is authenticity. Now, authenticity, out of the self, means being connected to ourselves, just knowing what we feel and being able to act on it. So that means our gut feelings. So let's look at how human beings evolved. For hundreds of thousands of years,

and for 100, thousand years or so, this species existing on Earth, how did we live? We didn't live in cities and houses and so on. We lived out there in the wild until very recently in human existence. Now, just how long do you survive in the wild if you're not connected to your gut feelings? Not very long.

Not very long. If you start using your intellect instead of your gut feelings, you just don't survive. So that's a powerful survival need as well. So attachment is a survival need. Authenticity is a survival need. But what happens if your authenticity threatens your attachment relationships? For example, as a two-year-old, you get angry because you didn't get that cookie before dinner. But your parents can't handle anger because they grew up in homes

when there was rageaholism, and they're terrified at the very expression of anger, so they give you the message that good little kids don't get angry. The message you receive is not that good little kids don't get angry, but that angry little kids don't get loved. Because your parents are now sullen, they won't look at you, they talk to you in a harsh way, you're not getting loved. Not experiencing love at that moment. No. But you've got to stay attached. Guess what you're going to suppress? The authenticity every time. And this is how we lose connection to ourselves and to our gut feelings. So that, strangely enough, that very dynamic which is essential for human survival

in a natural setting, not becomes a threat to our survival in this more modern setting, where to stay authentic is to threaten attachment. And so we give up our authenticity, and then we wonder who the hell we are, and whose life is this,

and who's experiencing all this, and this life doesn't, you know, and who am I really? And so that's where the reconnection has to happen. That's where the healing happens is with that reconnection. But it's because of that conflict, that tragic conflict in childhood between authenticity and attachment that most of us face, that we lose ourselves and lose connection to our gut feelings. There's so many directions we can go with this uh and i'm really glad you shared that because i had an enormous that observation has had an enormous impact on some

of my close friends and something i was only exposed to really today because our mutual friend vicky recommended that i ask you to expand on it. What I'd love to return to if we can. Can I say something? Of course. Sorry. In this building, there's a picture of Elvis Presley. Yes.

So there's a song of his that I play at my retreats and my events all the time. It's called Any Way You Love Me. Remember how it goes? I don't. I could actually play it for you, but it goes, Any way you love me, that's the way I'll be. In your hands, my heart is clay. I'll be strong as a mountain or weak as a willow tree.

I'll be powerful. I'll be like a little baby. Any way you want me, that's how I will be. Now, that's considered a love song. It isn't. It's a lack of love song. It's a song that says, just attach to me. I'll give up anything about myself. Just accept me the way you want me to be. It's a sadder song. And when you hear him sing it, there's deep sadness in it. And some of the power of Presley actually came from his own suffering. He wasn't just singing a song. He was actually infusing it with all the emotions of loss.

So even though it's presented like a love song, it's actually a song about the loss of love. And that's the situation of the infant who says, just love me. I'll be anything you want me to be. And that's the tragic conflict with an attachment and authenticity so this ties into exactly where i was going yeah uh which is related to your pre and post work with psychedelics yeah and for people who are watching this or listening to it

i'm returning to this not because I want to hammer home psychedelics. They're not for everyone. And in my experience, the vast majority, or I should say, in my observation, the vast majority of psychedelic use is very irresponsible. And I would not recommend because you, it can, it can certainly cause a good amount of harm if not done in a supervised, safe fashion. But the pre- and post-work could apply to many modalities. I mean, it does in this case, this example that we're about to talk about, apply to psychedelics. But it could, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like it could very easily apply to going into any intense or unusual modality. Oh, like Vipassana medication.

Like Vipassana, like this date with Destiny, Tony Robbins, I mentioned, which is certainly intense and very, very different, very powerful. That's why I'm coming back to this. But we can discuss it as it applies specifically to psychedelics and even specifically to ayahuasca if that is the primary uh that's the primary compound we're talking about uh which is really just for people who are wondering it's uh one of the reasons ayahuasca is really tricky is that it is unlike, say, I'm going to get off topic for a second, but it's still on topic. It's not quite like, uh, mushrooms and what people consider the

primary psychoactive molecule of psilocybin. It's a bit different. It's more of an old fashioned, like if you go to a bar and you order vodka and soda, pretty much everywhere you go, vodka and soda. Yeah. Very similar. Assuming the pour is the same. Yeah. Ayahuasca is more like an old fashioned. There are a few ingredients that are almost always there. So if you go to, let's say, I want to say Pucallpa or other parts of Peru, it's going to be mostly the ayahuasca vine plus a plant called chacruna or psychotrioviridis, which is a DMT. I suppose it must be NNDMT-containing plant, which is made orally active through the MAO inhibitors, monominoxidase inhibitors, in the vine. How they figured that out is a whole separate story, which is kind of wild. The plants told them is the short version.

I know, although I have a scientific friend who gave me a startlingly simple explanation, which makes more sense to the Western mind. When I was in Peru, they also told me the plants told us, which on some level I accept. But I just want to say something here, because we're talking in an extended way about the psychedelics. I don't want to create the impression that this is most of my life or work. It isn't. I do this stuff one or two or three weeks a year. So it's not like the major part of what I do.

But it is a very interesting part because it illuminates everything else that I do in the sense that it goes very deep. Now, this scientific friend of mine, this science friend of mine says, actually, they were, let's say, using the ayahuasca and boiling it up. Because ayahuasca itself, the vine, has some psychedelic properties on its own without the chacruna. Yeah. Very strong auditory in particular. Yeah. So then what happens is some leaves of chacruna fall into it. Inevitably, over hundreds of years, that's going to happen.

Now they say, oh, well, this combination is even more powerful. So it need not be as esoteric. It could have been a rather simple discovery. So who knows what the real story is? But in any case, the preparation and the processing. And I was just going to add one thing to that, which is that is one combination you then also have in certain regions of, and it's found in other places outside of Peru, most certainly in the largest ayahuasca as sacrament based churches are actually out of brazil yeah um but the it can also be ayahuasca vine plus yage which is a different plant also dmt containing but a a uh for some people a substantially different experience and then the only reason i'm mentioning this is so that people are aware of why i am particularly concerned when people are cavalier about,

Hey, my friend's ordering some ayahuasca from Hawaii and we're going to put it in a slow cooker and have it at his house this weekend. I'm like, bad, bad idea. Many, many centers, even a well-intentioned centers in, in Peru will also put other things in the brew because they think that foreigners want more of X. So they'll put coca leaves, they'll put, so think cocaine, coca leaves, they'll put toe, which is even, datura, which is even scarier in some respects.

Coca, not that scary. So just be aware that when you say ayahuasca, not you, but when people think ayahuasca, it is not a standardized dose that you're getting. And recently I was at a retreat in Costa Rica where really four different night state ceremonies and each time with a different concoction. Oh, God. So one night with the Peruvian Shipibo tradition preparation, one night with the Yahé from Colombia.

And, you know, it's who prepares it, how much they boil it for, what combination, what intention, and so on. So that's by and large true. And really, the people I've worked with, not that it's always the same drink every night, but it's pretty much the same preparation. Same preparation. Yeah. And so I took us down a little rabbit hole, but the question I have is with all of your clinical experience, you know, recognizing that this is a therapy, but it's an adjunct therapy. It's not used in isolation.

Yeah. come to a place now where you have maybe certain best practices or approaches to the pre pre and post work. Could you tell us about either or both of those? Uh, and you know, ideally maybe exercises or questions people could think about, uh, on their own. I know not, it's, it's hard to recommend that in isolation perhaps, but I'd love to hear any details that you're willing to share about the pre and post because it's so, so important. It's hard to, for me at least, in my limited experience even, to overemphasize.

Well, with ayahuasca specifically, which is not the only modality I work with, but with that specifically, there's a physical preparation. For example, no caffeine for a period of time, no red meat, cutting down on salt, excluding dairy products. So there's a physical preparation just to cleanse the body and to make it more receptive to the ayahuasca. From the emotional and psychological point of view, you want somebody to really formulate an intention. What do I actually want out of this experience? Because intention is everything.

So it's not like I'm going to take this stuff and let's see what happens. Why am I here for it? Why am I coming? What is my intention in going there? What do I want to find out? What issues am I working with? So intention setting and really considering what is my purpose in undertaking this experience?

When people arrive, we don't just plunge into ceremony. In my IWASCO retreats, we have a day and a half of group preparation. So everybody articulates their intention, why they're there, and we deeply explore how that intention arose and what in their lives brought them to this point and what issues they need to deal with. And my way of working is to get people very deeply to their core issues, which they may not be even aware of, but again through this process I call compassionate inquiry.

And this is true whether I'm working with plants or not. They get to see what it is that they're really seeking. And what are they seeking? They're seeking themselves. They're seeking reconnection, ultimately. But there's steps that you go through. And then we help them set a specific intention for that first ceremony. And the specific intention is, what do I want to learn tonight?

Not just what I want to learn in general, but what I want to learn tonight. Some people want to learn about, tell me about my fear. Teach me about my fear. Teach me about my pain. Show me what love is. Show me what courage is. Show me what my strength is. See, it's not that the ayahuasca comes with an agenda. It works through you

and it manifests what's in you so that your intention, the more specific it is to where you are in life at that moment, the more effective it's going to be. And then the shamans work with you during the ceremony and they chant to you based on what they're picking up from you at that moment. They work with you energetically. Sometimes they work hands-on as well. And you both have your own experience and you share the group energy. And then people go

to sleep and the next day and then the following day we then process what happened to you, what visions came to you. Now some people will will have visions some people with more prosaic minds like me will already ever get visions i i did originally get visions but it's been years since i've seen anything uh some people will have bodily experiences some people have go through in intense emotional states uh which in my view are always memories of maybe forgotten memories but indwelling memories of very early experiences, intense. Some people will have beautiful entities coming and teaching them, you know, jaguars and anacondas or various angelic entities. I've never been blessed with that.

I used to get frustrated, but actually, whatever experience you have, that's the experience you need to have. And for me, it's not about the visions or anything. It's about what is the teaching. And the teaching is always there. And the purpose of the processing is to help you find the teaching that was imparted to you

by whatever experience you had, not about comparing your experience to the night before or two nights before or to the experience of other people. It's your specific experience. What does it mean in your life? So this is, and now post-retreat, then again, whether you do a program like Vipassana

or whether you do the Landmark Forum or whether you do a program like Vipassana, whether you do the Landmark Forum, or whether you do a Hoffman process, or whether you do any kind of transformational work or a meditation retreat, if you don't integrate what you've learned into your life and you build up some practice around it, it's going to become a memory, a nice memory. At best, right?

Yeah. I mean, if you go straight back into making hypercritical decisions impulsively 12 hours later also could be very destructive. Absolutely. So the more integration we can, and in general in psychedelic work, this question of integration is becoming more and more recognized and more and more practiced. So integration means keeping in touch with people that can help you stay on track, keeping in touch with the group that you shared the experience with, putting some practice into your life,

such as journaling, meditation, yoga. Perhaps you're going to return and do some more plant work, or perhaps you won't. That's entirely up to you. There's no prescription to be made there. But the point is to go from experience that is discrete and time limited to some kind of integration that happens over time. How do you format that integration? Are you interacting with the people on your retreat once a week for four weeks or you have

two sessions in the following week what does the actual format look like well that's evolving and that's different for different people but in general i would say that if you can talk to somebody regularly over time and if you can maintain your contact with the group so they're like a facebook group facebook group where people share experiences if you take on certain practices and you do them together or at least you do them simultaneously and then you talk share about the practices these are all forms of integration which and we've mentioned this a few times applies to more than just the modality of using plant medicine absolutely so after this not to sound like broken record, but this is very recent after going to

this 20 Robbins event with a number of people, including, uh, we have a photo online. So I think he's fine with me saying it. Joe Gebbia, co-founder of Airbnb, uh, Mark Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce was sitting right behind me. He wasn't part of the group, but he's a friend, at least an acquaintance getting to know each other. In any case, uh, we kept a group text, uh, going afterwards to hold each other accountable and also to set followup group calls and so on. Uh, a number of things I'd really like to underscore because, uh, you mentioned them and, and I'd like to reiterate their importance, uh, and also how they transcend the plant medicine work, the psychedelics. Uh, the first is, um, you mentioned intentions and, uh, I'll just, I'll just share my experience and also

a number of recommendations that helped me tremendously yeah with plant medicine work but then life in general which is you set a clear intention but the clear intention is not the same as an expectation that's right and if you go in to and you have an expectation you can't let go of that's right you end up many people end up trying to white knock all the experience and that's true in general in life and it's very true for plant experiences yeah so if you get there that this is going to happen that's good this should happen and some people sit there the whole night resisting their experience because it doesn't meet their expectations right so there's there's a

there's a card it's a little card that i was given as a gift uh which i didn't come to appreciate fully until maybe a year or two ago i've been carrying it a long time and it's, it was given to me by an ex-girlfriend and it says, the task which hinders your task is your task. And so you mentioned a few things and you said, well, that is the work for that night. And I've come to know a few people I respect as, I hesitate to use the word, but they're,

because they're really only two or three people I've personally met, I would feel comfortable calling a shaman. And they all have minimum 10, 15 years experience in a traditional apprenticeship setting. And by the way, that means deep personal work. Very deep. That means sitting in a jungle by yourself,

being beaten by mosquitoes. That means drinking in a jungle by yourself, being beaten by mosquitoes. And doing, yeah. That means drinking various plants, tobacco and other plants, beyond ayahuasca, and really preparing. I know somebody on that path right now, let me tell you. Very deep. It's deep, committed work. It's not for the faint hearted. Very, very intense.

I would never do it. Yeah, it's very intense. Yeah. Very, very intense. And, I mean, there are people who do 15 months of isolation, dieting, various plants, no sex, no salt, no pork, no red meat. And you know, you know, we won't get into it right now. And, uh, what, what they've, they've shared a few examples with me of say, I, I've never, well, that's not true, but I, I've always in the past shied away from large groups. That's why I was taken aback with mentioning 50 people. It seems very common in any group, especially larger groups,

and this is true in psychedelics or at Vipassana retreats. The nickname for it that was given at the 10-day silent retreat I did at Spirit Rock was the Vipassana Vendetta, where you decide that someone who's sitting close to you is coughing too loudly or clears their throat too often or whatever. And it starts to, you start to perseverate and think about it incessantly and maybe get angry about it. And instead of watching your own reactions, instead of watching your reaction. And you know, there, the example that was given to me by this this this particular uh i'm just going to say ayahuasquero to simplify things ayahuasquero someone who works with ayahuasca

was uh he told me about this this this westerner came down i guess i guess they're kind of westerners too they're just south of the. So Northern American who came down and was furious that someone in the group wouldn't shut up with their screaming. He was just furious about this. And there are a number of ways an organizer can handle that. But he, he took the guy outside and he said, that person is your work tonight. Absolutely. And if you think about that reframe and how to view something that perhaps historically you would respond to as a problem or an annoyance or offensive to view that. And there are certain times when you have to fight and stand up for yourself. I'm not saying you shouldn't, but I think that in my case and in the cases of many folks, we fight too often. We wear ourselves

out. We get upset too often. How can you view that as a gift? How can you view that as your work? Well, can I again give you a quote? Yes, please. Which I love. It's from one of my favorite teachers. And his name is A.H. Almas.

And he says, Your conflicts, all the difficult things, the problematic situations in your life are not chance or haphazard. They're actually yours. They're specifically yours, designed specifically for you by a part of you that loves you more than anything else. The part of you that loves you more than anything else has created roadblocks to lead you to yourself. You're not going to go in the right direction unless there's something pricking you on the side saying, telling you, look here, this way. That part of you loves you so much that it doesn't want you to lose the chance. It will go to extreme measures to wake you up.

It will make you suffer greatly if you don't listen. What else can it do? That's its purpose. And I found this to be true of physical illness and mental problems and everything. You've got to see what is the teaching here. So we can look at all these things as problems to get rid of, which is what the personality wants to do, or we can look at them as learning opportunities,

which is what your true self wants to do. Now, two things. One is you talked about intention in life. So my wife and I had a holiday recently in Costa Rica. Partly it was a working holiday, but partly it was just a holiday. Traditionally, we've had terrible times during holidays, partly because of my workaholism. And once I go into a holiday, I just collapse. And now my wife is dragging a corpse around, you know, because, because I'm a workaholic, you know, and I hadn't clear space. So this time, we actually went into the holiday with intention.

This is nothing to do with psychedelics. It's just to do with that we set an intention. What is our intention? And if we have an intention, I've learned from a couple of very wise teachers, what structures do we want to set up to support our intention? And how are we going to handle when there's kind of disagreement or conflict? We had a beautiful holiday because it was the first in touch in our holiday that we've had so that intention in life in general is absolutely essential like every morning what is my actual

intention so the the problems the upset so want to do a bit of an exercise sure okay and then you know if you don't like it, just tell me. When was the last... This is something I do in my groups or when I speak or in the song when I teach. So I ask people to tell me

some recent episode when they're upset with somebody with their lives and something that they're open to sharing. So it doesn't have to be anything sordid or something, but just something, you know, whether it's your spouse, partner, the bus driver.

I don't care who. Sure. A friend. Okay. So are you willing to go there? Anything. Okay. I can share anything?

Just where you're upset with somebody. Okay. Yes. Okay. So what happened? Describe it. What happened? Yeah.

All right. There were a number of issues in my home, broken aspects of the home, things that were falling apart or needed to be fixed. Physically? Physically. Yeah. Right. And I had hired someone to do these things while I was gone. Okay. And I came back and none of them were fixed. Okay. And your emotional reaction was? Anger. Rage. Anger. Okay. Anything else besides anger i think they're close cousins frustration frustration is frustration is anger yeah yeah i was disappointed disappointed is sadness yeah it's a different feeling so it's disappointed myself also because i started to look at how maybe... Well, disappointed is not so much an emotion as a state of mind. I'm asking what the emotions were. What's inside disappointment? Something didn't happen. I want it to happen. How do I feel? Isn't there sadness there?

Sure. Yeah, there's sadness. I'm not talking into it. I'm just asking. Well, I suppose I might be confusing states of mind and emotions. Yeah. I'm not sure how to do it. Yeah, so I'm looking at the raw emotion. Yeah, sadness. So there's anger and sadness. Those are the emotions.

Let's go with that. Okay. So I'm going to ask you a silly question. What were you sad and angry about? Well, I suppose the answer, which is not the right answer I'm expecting, was I was angry that someone had made commitments to me and not fulfilled those commitments. Okay, well, that's what happened. They had made the commitment on the phone, but that doesn't tell me what you were sad or angry about. What does that mean that they didn't fulfill their commitments?

Meant that they didn't care about me. They didn't have that. They didn't respect me. So they didn't care about you and didn't respect you. What kind of person doesn't get cared or respected? I might need a lifeline here. I don't know. Someone who doesn't deserve to be cared for or respected. Exactly.

Don't be unworthy, right? Sure. Of respect and care. Okay. Now, if there are other people here, which there usually are when I do this exercise, I would ask them, okay, we just listened to Tim tell us about this experience.

Are there other reasons why this other person might not have done the work that has nothing to do with him or her not caring about Tim or not respecting him? So what other reasons might there be? A million and one. A million and one. Yeah. He could be in the hospital. He could be in the hospital. He could be in the hospital.

What else? His partner carried one. Could have been in a car accident. Exactly. He had a flight delay and got caught on Puerto Rico during a hurricane. Yeah. He's got ADHD. Yeah.

And he can't follow through. He's under stress and he couldn't. Right. Okay. The email that I was supposed to send a sitting in drafts and I thought I had sent it, but in fact he never received it. I mean,

okay. And any number of possibilities. Yeah. No. Of all the possibilities that you've just outlined, including that they don't care about you or respect you, which is the worst one? The one I immediately defaulted to.

Right. Well, I mean the worst, the guy i immediately defaulted to right well i mean the worst if the guy's dead then it's bad but no no but internally yeah internally the worst assumption is the one that i immediately made exactly so let's notice something a you i should say we because we're all like this we don't respond to what happens we respond to our perception of what happens right okay that's what the buddha said it's with our minds you create the world don't respond to what happens. We respond to our perception of what happens. Right. Okay? That's what the Buddha said. It's with our minds we create the world. So that if you'd found out he had ADHD or he was stressed,

you might have been sad for him, but you would not have been angry and you would not have been sad. Okay? So, first of all, we don't respond to what happens. We respond to our perception of what happens, to our interpretation of what happens. Number one.

Number two. Of all the possible interpretations, we choose the worst one. Yeah. Number two. Thirdly, what I just said isn't true. We didn't choose it. It's not like you went through all these possibilities and you said, It wasn't multiple choice.

I chose option D. Oh, no. He doesn't care about me. He doesn't you didn't do that your brain jumped there automatically right my question is why yeah now here's the learning first time in your life that you felt hurt and angry that you when you perceive somebody didn't care about you or didn't respect you or has it happened before this is is where the exercise might go sideways. I'm going to hit pause on that. I think that's probably for more of a conversation over wine.

But you'd probably agree it's not the first time. It's not the first time. Very good. And most people I talk to, it goes back way back. Yeah, this goes way back. Into childhood. Okay? And that's what trauma is.

We don't respond to the present moment. We respond to the past. Now, but along the lines of our discussion, it's a beautiful learning opportunity. Now you get to know. Now what if you assumed for a moment that you're the most lovable, most worthy of care,

most worthy of respect person in the history of the universe. And this guy doesn't do your home. What's your response? Any number of the other options, which does not trigger an intense negative emotional state. None of those other options would trigger that. So something in you, I would argue, still believes that you're not worthy of care and respect. And that's what gets triggered. So who's the one that doesn't care about you?

And who's the one that doesn't think you're worthy of respect? No, it would be me. It would be you. So that's a learning. And this is exactly what you're talking about. You're saying how these difficult things, how these problems are always teaching opportunities. And that's the beauty of healing.

Is that when you reframe things and you actually see the source within ourselves, all of a sudden, that's liberating. Because guess what? If you're feeling that way because this guy did this or didn't do that, that makes you a victim. Yeah. But if you see that you're the source that makes you a victim yeah but if you see that you're the source now you're powerful yeah you're empowered you're empowered exactly this is something that a friend of mine here in austin uh robert origas recently said to me in a very similar way i mean it was a completely different context he was actually telling a story about

someone else who was constantly blaming people for everything in the film world. And he said, if you are the victim and you're, and it's everyone else's fault, you're powerless. And he said, but keep in mind, every time you're pointing a finger at someone, and I'd never heard this. I know it now after the fact that, that there are other people who have said this, but he said, every time you're pointing a finger at someone, keep in mind that there are three fingers pointing back at you. Exactly. And I thought about that. I was like, was like wow yeah that's just a good that's great sentence to keep in mind no this is a recording studio sometime was it this yeah they do recordings did they record in the past or just i just did johnny cash ever record here by any chance you know i don't know if johnny cash is ever here

it's i would say it's possible because it's been around for a long time the reason i ask is because Did Johnny Cash ever record here by any chance? You know, I don't know if Johnny Cash was ever here. I would say it's possible because he's been around for a long time. The reason I ask is because he's got a song that I play at all my events. In Your Mind, it's called. It says, it all goes down in your mind. It's from the soundtrack of Dead Man Walking. And I think he wrote it himself. It all goes down in your mind. And it goes one foot in the fire, one foot on Jacob's ladder, another in the fire. It all goes down in your mind. And it goes one foot in the fire, one foot on Jacob's ladder, another in the fire.

It all goes down in your mind. So whether you're going to hell or you're on the way to heaven, it all happens up here. Which is such a powerful teaching. Because this is what we can work on. You know, if we're victims of the world, Ramana Maharshi, who's a great Indian guru, he said something like, if your foot hurts when you walk outside, you can do two things. One is to wrap the whole world in burlap,

or you can get a pair of shoes. So in other words, you can see yourself as the victim of the world and trying to change the world so that they won't hurt you anymore, or you can actually empower yourself. And that's what the healing is all about. Well, I will say the reason I wanted to have you on now

is because I've been so focused on trying to navigate these things myself over the last several years, but most intensely over the last several months. And I wanted to be ready to have this conversation with you. And how are you doing so far? I'm great. I'm great. I'm great. I'm doing very well. I think I'm the sanest and arguably in the best place I've been maybe ever. So I feel very good. That's very good.

Which means that healing is just available. It's just possible. Yeah. You know, I got an email a few months ago from a woman called Bettina Goering. Now, Hermann Goering was the chief of the Luftwaffe under Hitler. Oh, my God, that's right. I was wondering where I knew that name. Yeah, and he was the head of the Gestapo.

Just an opiate addict, by the way. And a very clever, very ruthless man. His great niece sent me an email a few months ago to thank me for my work. And she's been through her own process. Imagine the karma she was carrying and all the healing she has had to do. So there was her great uncle trying to kill me and my people. And there's the Great Knees making contact with me. And to me, just in your example, in my example, in the example of so many people I know,

it's not like I'm a big piece of cake. It's going to continue as long as I live. But I experience internally the goodness and the healing that's available to us. And I didn't used to. And I used to think I could help heal everybody, but that I was beyond healing myself. That was my core belief.

Well, that's been my core belief for the last 10 years. Okay. It just ain't true. Yeah. And anybody listening, I just want to know, it doesn't matter what state of mind you're in, it doesn't matter what you're experiencing. It's human, it is transmutable, it is transformable,

because that true self that you got disconnected from is still available to you. So it's not a question of just talking about what happened in the past, it's a question of how do we reconnect to ourselves. And what you're describing about your own state, if I can put it in one sentence, you'd probably agree with me that you're probably much more connected to yourself than you used to be. A hundred percent. Yeah. A hundred percent. And that's the prerequisite. I mean, that's why I feel the way I described. Exactly. Gabor, I really want to encourage people to learn more about you and your work.

And there are certainly a number of places they could start. Where would you suggest people dig more deeply? Is there a particular book of your books you would suggest they start with? Is there a particular social media handle where they can pay attention and learn various announcements and see what you share of your work and others? Well, thanks for asking. The simplest thing is my website, www.drgabormatte.com, d-r-g-a-b-o-r-m-a-t-e.com, where my speaking events and I travel. I'll be in North America and five countries abroad this year. My speaking events are listed. Chapters of my books are available.

Writers about my books. Articles I've written. I've multiple talks on YouTube that people have filmed and posted, seen by hundreds of thousands of people. I have a Facebook video that somebody did about my work that's been seen 12 million times now. So there's all kinds of ways to discover me on Facebook, on YouTube, at my website. And I would also really hope that people check out my books, of which I've written four.

The first one, the American title is Scattered, and it's about ADHD. And I wrote it after my own diagnosis. And pretty much what I've said earlier that I don't see it as an inherited disease I do see it as a response to family multi-generational and social stress in sensitive children people say you're blaming the parents I'm not blaming the parents I don't blame myself but I know how stressed my family was when I was a workaholic doctor. And so that's my first book. And when you say, well, why are we looking at the percentage of kids with ADHD going up so fast?

It's not because of any genetic problem. Genes don't change in a population over five or ten years. It's a social problem. There's much more stress in the culture now. There's much less connection in the culture now. There's much less connection in the culture now. The less connected people are and the more stressed there is, the more pressure there is on sensitive kids. So that's scattered. Another parenting book of mine is the work of a brilliant psychologist, a friend of mine, Gordon Neufeld, Dr. Neufeld, who is the world's leading developmental psychologist as far as I'm personally concerned.

And I say that advisedly. And the book is called Hold On To Your Kids, Why Parents Need To Matter More Than Peers. That's been published in over 20 languages now. And it's about the fact that since kids need attachment, the attachment need is the primary drive that we have. And we've talked about that. It's like a duckling. When the duckling hatches from the egg, the duckling would prefer to attach an imprint on the mother duck.

But what will he do if the mother duck is not around? He'll imprint on a toy or a dog or a horse. Our kids, because the parents are too distracted and stressed in our society and aren't so much anymore physically as during human evolution, now find themselves in the company of other kids guess what they imprint on their peer group and now you have immature creatures influencing each

other immoderately and this happens through the social media it happens in personal contact and as that happens the parents get pushed into the background they get more and more frustrated now they get more authoritarian or they just give up. And kids, therefore, don't grow up. They don't mature and they develop all kinds of problems. Not because the parents don't love them, but simply because in this culture, the connection between the kids and parents have been really disturbed. And how to restore that connection is the subject of Hold On To Your Kids. So three of my books that I wrote on my own, this one I wrote with Gordon. My next book, which is on the mind-body unity in health and illness,

and that's a conversation I could have another time, but again where I show that cancer, autoimmune disease, ALS, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's, colitis, Crohn's disease, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia are not accidental and separate physical events. They have to do with the scientifically proven fact that mind and body can't be separated. And when things happen emotionally, they will also happen physiologically. In fact, it can't be any other way. And that the emotional system in our brains, in our bodies,

and part and parcel of the same system that also governs immunity, neurological response, and hormonal response. And therefore, when our lifelink patterns of emotional repression, when people have to suppress themselves in order to maintain their attachments, that will have a negative impact on their immune system, on their hormonal apparatus, and their nervous systems as well. And that book is called When the Body Says No, Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection.

And that's been published in over 20 countries internationally as well, including in the U.S. My final and, to my mind, my favorite book is the most recent, In the Realm of hungry ghosts close encounters with addiction which explores addiction not from the point of view of a disease model or a choice model but how it is a response to childhood loss stress and trauma and how to address that and also how to deal with like if you look at the united states right now you know what the facts are the most common cause of death under the age of 50 is now overdose. And in the U.S., every three weeks, you have the equivalent of a

9-11. Every three weeks, a 9-11, in terms of the number of people dying. But where's the public outcry? Where's the resources? Where's the political will? Where's the mobilization of the media and all the public health energies compared to what happened after 9-11? And we're having this every three weeks. And why? Because the treatment profession, the medical profession, and politicians, and the legal profession does not understand trauma and its relationship to addiction. The average medical student doesn't even hear the word trauma in four years of education. Doesn't even hear the word, let alone get a lecture on it. Let alone get a course about it.

The stuff I told you about brain development is still not taught in most medical schools. So we have this response to addiction which is just dealing with the effects, the behaviors, controlling the manifestations and not dealing with the causative factors. That's why people don't get better. And if you look at why right now,

it's because social stress has increased, economic insecurity has increased. You don't look at where do the overdose happens more, it's where areas where there's despondency and despair. And so that's the book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. Other than that, lots of my talks are on YouTube, but I think the best hub to check all this stuff out is my website. And I hope to generate a podcast, a regular podcast fairly soon if the people around me can twist my arm strong enough and organize me well enough to do it. There'll be a podcast and I hope that'll be up soon. But knowing myself, I don't want to make any promises, but that'll

certainly be listed at my website if it happens soon. And could you give your website URL one more time? Okay. Dr. Gabor Mate. And drgabormate.com. And to everybody listening and watching, there's the camera. I will also put that in the show notes. So for everyone, everything we've discussed, the books, the resources, organizations, everything, including

your website, which will be at the very top will be listed in the show notes, which you can find at Tim.blog forward slash podcast. And, um, it'll be right at the top. So all of that will be very easy to find, uh, just in closing. And, uh, we may very well end up doing around two at some point. It wouldn't surprise me. Even if it's off camera, certainly. We'd love to spend more time together. Do you have any final closing words or a request or suggestion to the audience? Anything for people listening

that you would like them to consider after they finish this interview? Yeah. Okay. I hope people will listen to this interview in a very personal sense, not just as an interesting experience, but as possibly pertaining to themselves. And that the discussion with you will help people look at themselves in maybe a new way with what I call compassionate inquiry. So rather than self-judgment about stuff that went wrong

or they did to themselves or others, they get curious, what made me do that? They get curious compassionately because we were all born innocent and we were all born just wanting to be loving and loved. And then something happens. And then it's a hard road back. But I hope that this conversation helps people reconnect with that path or encourage them

to continue on it. And then secondly, not to see it as an individual issue. It's a social issue. We live in a society that really does disconnect people. And so it's not just an individual problem or an individual family problem. It's multi-generational. We never even talked about the multi-generational nature of trauma, but it is. We pass this on from one generation to the next, not because we intend to, but because we can't help it.

So it needs to be looked at in deep over the generations and broadly as the function of a whole society. Now, let me give you one quick example, if I may. Sure. A study last year showed that American black women, the more experience of racism they have, the greater the risk of asthma. And what does that tell us? What do we give people to control their asthma? We give them inhalers that contain a copy of adrenaline and a copy of cortisol. That's stress hormones.

In other words, asthma has everything to do with stress. I'm not going into the scientific details now. I could, but I won't. But it shows this question. Is the asthma of an American black woman an individual disease, or is it the dysfunction of entire society? And obviously it's the latter. So that the Buddha said that without the many, there cannot be the one.

Without the one, there cannot be the many. And he talked about the interconnected core arising of phenomena. So we are social creatures. Our brains are wired together. Dr. Dan Siegel talks about interpersonal neurobiology. We we are social creatures, our brains are wired together. Dr. Dan Siegel talks about interpersonal neurobiology. We're not isolated creatures. So what are you dealing with? You have to look at not just the individual internal environment, but also the broader social and cultural environment of which you're one particular manifestation.

And as our mutual friend, Drew Polish Polish so fervently wants, we need to change the conversation around these issues, particularly, for example, around addiction, from a blaming and shaming and ostracizing and just medical model perspective to one that takes into account trauma and social issues and which brings compassion into it, and that must be the same for all mental health issues as well.

And whatever we look at we have to look at both the individual and the broader context thank you for that and you mentioned how we all begin loving and wanting to be loved or needing love and then something happens and it's a hard road back and what i'd like to add to that is it's a hard road back, but it's a worthwhile road back. And it is possible to find your way back. If you had told me that a year ago, I would have completely dismissed it, but I'm in a different place now. And I would just like to thank you for helping people to navigate that. And it's very meaningful work that you do. Thank you. Thank you for taking the time today as well. Oh, it's a great pleasure to speak with you. Thank you. And to everybody listening and watching, as I mentioned before, definitely also visit the show notes, revisit

this. This is not a one and done something you listen to. And then you go on as if you never heard it. Please look at the show show notes look at gabor's work and you can find all that at tim.blog forward slash podcast and to everybody listening i would just say as always thank you so much for joining in hey guys this is tim again just a few more things before you take off number one one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend?

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