TrueLife - Rose Moulin-Franco - Conscious Awakening; The Cure for Human Suffering

Episode Date: May 20, 2023

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/https://www.casedavis.com/https://www.mokshajourneys.com/A former outpatient trauma and addiction treatment center owner, Rose has found the path of conscious awakening to be the only enduring cure for human suffering. She is a Certified Integral Consciousness Master Coach and experienced plant medicine facilitator. Over the past 28 years, she has been immersed in the creation of holistic strategies for recovery and developed protocols that helped hundreds of her clients break free from the past and thrive.Rose is a Subject Matter Expert in traumatic stress, addiction, esoteric psychology, integral consciousness, plant medicine preparation, facilitation and integration protocols, entheogenic ceremony, western mystical practices and schools, and a range of yogic traditions, philosophies and techniques. One on One Video call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USCheck out our YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. Fearist through ruins maze lights my war cry born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Serafini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life podcast. It's Friday. Aloha Friday, everybody. I hope everyone is in the presence, or at least got to wake up in the presence of someone they love, got to take a moment to remember someone they love.

And I hope the birds are singing the sun is shining and that the people understand that even if times are tough, it's just a task and you're going to get through it. I wanted to share an incredible guest we have today. Rose Moulon Franco, some know her as GOT. We're going to get into what all of this means. We're going to get into this idea of the circle. She's the founder and senior guide at Moksha Journeys. And I love the tagline of Awakens.

potentials for personal and planetary transformation. You may know her from Case Davis, a full service, vertically integrated neuro-wellness service company offering offering neural wellness technologies, clinicians, cautious, wellness professionals, expert facilitators. But most people in this space know you for potentially the lineage that you hold, for all the people that you've helped, and the fact that you have been in this space for so long,

helping so many people. You have an incredibly unique understanding of where we've been and where we're going. And I'm hopeful that you'll be so kind as to share some of your insights today. GOT, how are you today? I'm great. That's great to be here with you, George. The pleasure is all mine. I spoke with our mutual friend, Prema, and it was just amazing to get to speak to someone who is not only knowledgeable, but very passionate and caring about what he's doing. And when I spoke to him, I saw his face flush when he brought up your name. And so I was like, okay, if this gentleman has so much passion, I have to speak with the person with whom he has so much passion for. So I thought that maybe a good place to begin would be at the beginning.

Maybe you could maybe fill people in about who you are and a bit of an origin story. Sure. Well, you know, like a lot of people, I was born in a different state of awareness. and I was the only one in my family with that experience. And so, you know, as a child, you don't know that other people don't know the things that you see and that you think are normal. So it took time to make that realization and to learn to, you know, don't scare people and don't try to tell them, you know, that there's invisible beings around us all the time and they're friendly or they're distress. or, you know, whatever my experience was. But I was born quite clairvoyant and clairaudient,

so I could see and hear things of the spirit level in the physical world. You know, people think, oh, we're here in the body and the physical, and then the spiritual's up here somewhere, and we're going to get from here to there. But it's actually all together in one space. So awakening to that consciousness is really a physical change that happens. And, you know, that's a lot what the neuroscience of consciousness shows, too, is that your brain actually changes when you have certain levels of realization. And certainly in the psychedelic realm, that's true, too.

So by the time I was 13, I was experiencing Kundalini awakening and ecstatic states. And my mother very wisely, although as a 13-year-old, I didn't think it was so great. She put me in a boarding school with Franciscan monks. and because they're the mystics and my parents were raised Catholic and the Catholics had a great history of killing people with spiritual gifts and so are marginalizing them

I think she had had an aunt who also had mystical abilities and was put in an asylum and so she was she didn't really understand what was happening with me but she understood that I needed a safe place And so it wasn't until many years later that I appreciated very much what she did at that time.

And they were quite liberal, and it was the late 60s, and they were all, the monks were long hair and beards. That's their tradition. And then they wore sandals and robes with ropes, ties. But they were into mysticism heavily. And that's cool, though it had a high academic standard. it also had a serious commitment to help young people awaken to the mystical side of life into spiritual experience. And so it was in that setting that I experienced my first psychedelic experience with, I believe it must have been San Pedro, in the extracted masculine form.

And, you know, it could have been a bad, setting, right? Except that they were so loving and they were so compassionate and so open-minded and encouraged us so much to explore mysticism and spiritual reality. And they were really quite appropriate and they didn't interfere with our explorations and they didn't, you know, push us when we were under the influence. They certainly could tell, you know, that our peoples were dilated and things like and it wasn't like everybody was doing it.

And it wasn't like we were doing it all the time, but it was in the culture in which we were growing up and we were becoming young adults. And we were in a school of mysticism, you know, kind of the Catholic version of Hogwarts, I guess. And, you know, we were, they would have literally weeks, a week of every semester, no classes, you would just have different experiential offerings. like they would have workshops on what is an aura and how to meditate. And we would listen to lectures of Alan Watts and, you know, some of the other great conscious raising people out there. We would have, they would take us to the park on the weekends for anti-Vietnam War protests. And then there was a small group of nuns there as well.

And they were the feminist movement was what they were. were all about. They wore, you know, short skirts and short bales and showed their hair. And they had, we had sisterhood week for women's rights and we got involved in civil rights. And, you know, they really had this philosophy that if we change our consciousness, it should show up in how the world is, you know, like, we're not raising consciousness in isolation. We're not entering higher consciousness just for ourselves. If we're going to be more consciousness, and how is that going to show up in our society and in our culture? And, you know, that time led to so many amazing changes in our world.

Organic farming, organic food, you know, all of the great early food co-ops that offered organic products and vegetarianism and veganism and healing with herbs and natural methods. the idea of returning to the land, living in community, creating collectives. You could tell that the higher consciousness experiences that people were having at that time were real, and they had reached a threshold among a significant portion of the population that led to these kinds of changes in our culture. And because, you know, war was wrong and corrupt and immoral, and the guys and women that were serving were being hurt,

and the people they were fighting against were being hurt, and women weren't getting rights, and people of color weren't getting rights, and gay people weren't getting rights, and all of that began changing because consciousness began changing in a significant threshold number of the population. And so that was always inherently tied,

in my core being, to why we changed, change our consciousness, why we try to reach the transcendental self. It isn't to go up on a mountain and be in meditation the rest of your life and good luck humanity. It's, you know, to live the enlightened life. And so many years later, my temple was formed in 1997 and I called it Enlightened Life temple. It's a temple of consciousness, not a religion. It's sort of an anti-religion, anti-gourouroo, self-awakening.

Transcendental empowerment, you know, it acts as a collective of independent people who have realized the self or want to realize the true self. So after leaving there, you know, because of the education was so good in the boarding school, I wanted to go to college. And my family was sort of, you know, middle class. And there wasn't so many opportunities for college at that time. And so the war in Vietnam was winding down and they were putting women in the military in equal capacity. They were getting rid of the women's separate Army Corps and all of that. And so we were supposedly going to have equal rights. And most importantly, though the war was ending, I mean, I think after I enlisted, it was about five months later, Saigon fell.

But at the same time, this major war was ending. they were integrating women equally into the ranks with men. So it was a volatile time for a very young woman to enter military service. But I did it with the idea that I will get college benefits. I'll be able to go to school because I want to be a therapist. And I wanted to use psychedelics with people that I worked with because I was very interested in the work of, you know, Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary and all of the great psychological research that was going on with the using psychedelics to help people therapeutically.

And so, of course, by the time I graduated, it was illegal. They had made it illegal because, let's face it, the status quo that runs the government, the dualistic illusion, doesn't want people to reach higher consciousness. They'll be defeated if we all realize our unity. They're far better served if we're all against each other. And so I really saw that in life living, you know, and lived experience that that was the reason that it was put on Schedule 1.

Nixon hated the hippies. He didn't like black people. He didn't like, you know, all these people agitating saying, hey, we're not doing things right. We need to be better than this. We need to go beyond duality and separation. And that's the death of the political system, right? So I saw it very connected to that,

that this is why it was made illegal. It wasn't, you know, that people were jumping out of buildings and running down the street naked. I mean, there were some pretty dramatic incidence of things like that. But that was typically people who would take multiple drugs together or extremely high doses. It wasn't the common experience. Mostly we were just lounging in the park and loving nature and experiencing unity.

And that's a bigger threat than people jumping out of windows to the system anyway. So I joined the military and right away I realized, you know, this was a very bad mistake. Like most people who joined the military, you know, you think, oh, I'm going to get some benefits. and I'll, you know, I'll do some little job here. But, you know, we were guinea pigs, the women that were in that first bunch of women to be integrated with the men. And it was a horrible, horrible experience. And every day was virtually life-threatening.

So military trauma, when people hear old military trauma, they think about war and combat trauma and, you know, nurses and medical people with mass surgeries and trium. and extreme wounds. And certainly that does cause very severe trauma. But just being in the military is traumatic because the first thing you're subject to is brainwashing by violence. And they call that training.

But really, it's just brainwashing you. And yeah, so the man that I served with, a lot of them had just come back from Vietnam. A lot of the leadership had been in Vietnam multiple times and they were suffering, you know, severe, traumatic stress, but they were in the system. And so the way they controlled it was just drink a lot and, you know, be, continue to express your, your macho nature.

And a lot of that went against the women. They weren't, they didn't want us to be there. They felt, you know, I mean, they were in a bad position for the male psyche as well. They had just lost a war the first time they had ever, you know, America had ever lost a war, although that war was a losing war from the beginning. But they were carrying the weight of that. They were carrying the weight of the hatred of, you know, a lot of anti-war protesters took it out on the veterans at that time.

And so the only way you can survive in the closed system with that level of psychological wounding is to, you know, take it out in ways that the system approves of. So there began to be very high rates of rape against the women in the military. Now, that hasn't changed. It still runs about, I think women have about an 89% chance of being raped, and the majority of those are gang rapes.

And the military culture really has just gotten worse over the years. But I did have some moments of light. You know, always in the darkness, there's that something there that reminds you, you know. It is a temporary thing. It's not the whole of existence here. It's a little photograph of where you're at right now. And I met a man who was a career military and former infantry and three-time combat veteran Vietnam, multiple decorations for heroic actions and young, you know,

but he had seen a lot in his short life so far. He's sort of like the soul of an 80-year-old in the soul of an 80-year-old in the body of a 35-year-old. And so we got together, and I decided to get out of the military. And he had his last tour of duty in Hawaii, and I went with him, and we got married there, and I had my first child in Hawaii.

And then he retired, and we moved back to the mainland. And he began to show symptoms of severe PTSD. right, you know, within that first year back. And he handled it the way military people handle it. You drink a lot of alcohol and you, you know, party and you try to not think about it. But his symptoms were really severe. And he was multilingual because the military had trained him in numerous languages. But he would be screaming in Vietnamese in these flashbacks.

and really harming himself in so many ways. And I was in school by then. I had got my G.I. Bill. I was going to get my degree and be a therapist. And they taught me nothing about what could be happening with him. You know, back then, this was in the early 80s, they had very little knowledge. You know, they called it post-Vietnam syndrome.

but there was no effective understanding that could lead to effective treatment. So he passed away at the age of 43 and he had lesions on his heart from saturation with Agent Orange. And Dow Chemical gave me $3,000 for my trouble of losing my husband with two small children. And the military gave me nothing even though he had shrapnel that was in his, body that would still come out from time to time. They said when the VA reviewed his records to see if there was compensation for that, they said, well, he could have had that shrapnel in his body before he ever went to Vietnam, right? For sure, that happens all the time, right? So the system that entices you into the military and brainwashes you and the military abandons you as soon as

you get out. The Veterans Administration is a lost cause. It's considered among experts to be the most corrupt bureaucracy in the whole of the government. I found out more about that because after he passed, I wanted to work with veterans. I wanted to stop whatever had killed him. I wanted to know more about it, and I wanted to do something to prevent it and prevent other families from suffering

like we had suffered the loss of our loved one. And so I took a job at a little tiny office in a not great part of town that had a grant to help Vietnam Vets. And I was still kind of finishing my college at that time. And that was really like being in a war zone of its own kind. It was really intense. But I persevered. And then soon the VA opened the Vet Center,

program, which was supposed to be very unique and separate from the VA and independent and these little centers that would be located and they would just help veterans with with war-related trauma. And of course, they're not independent anymore. They're completely absorbed into the VA and they're not anything like what we had in the beginning. But that was the most incredible experience in my life, the years that I worked in the vet center. There were hostage situations. There were suicide attempts. Right in front of me. There were guys who had attempted suicide by shooting themselves in the head

only to have it ricochet around and not kill them with shattered skulls. And they'd come in, you know, straight out of the hospital, the police would bring them to us. And there were, you know, a million stories of a million different kinds of extreme traumatic incidents. And I began to get very, very deep into the world of treating traumatic stress at that time. I was a founding member of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, and I was a founding board member for the International Society of Trauma Specialists, which at that time was trauma counselors, establishing criteria, learning from all the great experts of the day.

and then becoming, I became ultimately an expert myself. I left the VA and opened my own center when I got my license. So I ran the traumatic stress recovery center in Austin, Texas for 15 years and had a full staff of therapists. And we treated every kind of trauma. And we also, I ran a critical incident response team that would show up within 24 hours of any critical incident like mass shootings, earthquakes, disasters, anything. If it was traumatic, we would be there. And I got a lot of recognition and trained a lot of people and really feel like I was blessed, you know, to contribute to the understanding of post trauma and appropriate ways to treat it.

In my practice, with my clients, I would see them, you know, go. I realized really early on, like, whatever I learned in school at that time wasn't really going to help them. And I remembered back to my time in the mystical immersion in the school. And it came to me one day that what I need to do here is surrender. And, you know, because that's what the great saints would do, right? The surrender and trust the divine and see what happens. And I did. And it made a huge difference in the experience of the person I was working with.

And so when I had my own censure, I went even further into those kinds of explorations. And I specialized in non-ordinary states of awareness. I never forgot my own experiences with plant medicines and psychedelics. And though we couldn't really incorporate that, there are many ways and methods to induce non-ordinary. states and I became really expert in trance work and hypnosis and depth the dream analysis and hypnotic methods to get to that deep state and I worked with so many different types of traumatic stress dissociative disorders and any any kind of trauma is what we specialized in so I did that for a long time and then one day because I was seeing, you know, into the deeper and deeper levels of,

you know, that yes, this person had this horrible experience, but it was, it was always human inflicted. You know, sure, there were the people with trauma from earthquakes and floods and tornadoes and things like that, but they were not impacted in a lifelong way like childhood abuse survivors, victims of crime, victims of mass shootings that survived or combat veterans, or, you know, these are, this is human inflicted suffering that we're looking at. And I started to struggle with that, you know, on the spiritual level. And I met a woman who was teaching and holding meditation groups on the path of consciousness. And some of the sort of, sort of, systems of esoteric psychology that are out there that are available and I got involved with her.

And this gave me a different lens on, you know, that manifestation of evil that we see when there's human inflicted suffering that's deliberate, that's conscious, that's at a governmental level or a cultural level or a world global level. And so I really went deep after that. And I got involved in a program through Amnesty International where they were training people to go into prisons where they were holding political prisoners or other prisoners, but prisons in other countries where they torture people. And they couldn't get them out. You know, they would love to get them out, but they couldn't get them out. So they were focused on teaching them how to dissociate during the torture so that they could survive better. And so I went to. I went to. I went

really, really into the worst of the worst. And then one day I just reached a threshold, you know, going to my consciousness studies and my meditation groups and then being in my office and watching this, you know, some of my clients, I'd been seeing them eight years, 11 years. Yeah, they're better. I mean, they're coping. They have better understanding, but they're not healed. You know, they're not healed.

And so I felt like this other. path of consciousness seemed to offer options that the field of psychology didn't offer. And so I closed my clinic and got immersed in the path of consciousness to see if it was true that if you find your real self, if you find the transcendental self, then everything falls into place. Nothing that's happened to you is who you are. Nothing you struggle with is who you are. There is a self beyond all of that that is eternal, that is eternally not affected by anything.

And if you find that self and become one with that self, everything else falls away. This is the teaching. And I had to prove it to myself, is it true? You know, and by that time I was really coming to terms with my own post-trauma from my military experiences. and I pursued it. I spent five years in isolated practice pursuing those practices and pursuing those studies. And within six months, I had the realization of the South. And I entered a state of bliss and I never looked back.

There's so much that I could start to talk about. But something that's just, as I'm listening to the conversation, that just hit me in this last part is what does it take to go from the understanding that there is something greater to pursuing wholeheartedly that thing that is something great like that seems like a giant step

like yeah okay I know there's something there but there's a to take this step and start to pursue it with your whole heart is a is monumentous to me and I'm wondering if you could talk about what that what that how you found the courage to do it what it looked like, some thoughts that were going on, and was there something that was driving you to that?

Absolutely. You know, like I said, my own post-traumatic stress symptoms were coming up. I was deep in political things at that time, trying to effect change for veterans, for how they get treated. How are they treated? I was advocating for women veterans, you know, because of my own experience,

and a lot of other women veterans were speaking out at that time, and they were holding hearings in the Senate, and I went and testified. And even though you have awakenings over and over through this life about, you know, what the political system really is, there's still this hope that we cling to, you know, that they're going to do something that is going to help or stop it or do something. So we all testified and it made no difference. In addition, because of my background, my expertise, I began writing white papers for the Senate on, you know,

how should the VA treat women veterans? And my answer was they shouldn't because they're no different than the military. It's a, you know, I had suffered sexual harassment while I worked for them. And, you know, it's dangerous for, in many VA hospitals, it's dangerous even for the men to be there. It's not quality care. It's not helping. It's not the highest standard.

And it's like being back in the military. You all have the same background. You're all in the same behavioral patterns. And it just, I did, you know, go there for counseling because it was available. But I never felt safe. and it's hard to heal from trauma from a male-dominated culture. You know, and then when I would go in, they would say, oh, we don't give, the veteran has to come in himself.

You know, they would even recognize that a woman could be a veteran. So I was, I had gone up to the top of the chain of command, right? Like, oh, we're going to change things. We're going to make things different. And the, the reality was, you know, you're not going to ever change it. You're not going to ever make it different. And I mean, maybe you will someday, but you have to think very carefully what that might take.

And so anyway, they were going to dedicate a statue to the women who had served in Vietnam. And it was going to be the first statue ever of women, soldiers, the way they really are, right? They're not always wearing their dress uniform with a skirt and all of that. They rarely ever wear that. They're all wearing fatigues and combat boots just like the men. And they were going to be that, and they were going to be, you know, representing the women that served in Vietnam. So I went.

And because I was with a national women veterans advocacy organization at that time, I was their national director of education. We were invited to a special reception with the secretary. of the VA and so we went. But it turned out it was not a special reception for the women or in relation to the statue at all. It was a Marine Corps birthday party at a VFW. And the secretary of the VA got intoxicated and he assaulted three women, including myself.

And there I am trying to deal with my post-military trauma. And now I'm being sexually assaulted by a cabinet. member. And, you know, it was an eye, it was like, that was like my awakening right then. It was like the final door slamming in my face in that world of belief, you know, that I can change the dualistic world. Because the world of duality exists for a reason. Like I didn't realize that at that time. I thought it's something we can actually work with. So I decide I'm not going to going to, you know, I'm not going to just do this again. Go walk away and be told it's not a crime. There's nothing you can do. So I engaged a lawyer and got together with the other women.

But it made it very difficult because it was causing a lot of triggers to my military experience. I was having flashbacks and my symptoms got way worse. And I was going to a VA. for my psychologist was there. I had been seeing him eight years. My psychiatrist was there. He was shocked. He was like, oh, your symptoms are so much worse now. And it was all very documented, the whole thing and how it had happened.

And then within a few weeks and needing care more than ever, I was stunned one day to go to my appointment with my psychologist and to have him say, you don't have an appointment with me. You have to get out of here right now. I got to go. And he literally got up and grabbed his briefcase and was running down the hall

and I was running after him. I was saying, I do have an appointment with you. Where are you going? And then he got in the elevator and the doors closed. And I'm like, what happened? And then I tried to find my psychiatrist. And when I got to the clinic there, they said he resigned. Well, then I found out that

the secretary of the VA who was behind all of this. He had gone in there and threatened my psychologist, which is how the VA runs. Again, it's the most corrupt bureaucracy on the planet. And he said, you know, I found out that he had told him he was, the psychologist was very close to his retirement in the VA system. Right. He was a black man, and he had fought hard to get to that point.

And he told him, you stop seeing her or, you're fired. You lose your retirement and everything. And then they tried to tell the psychiatrist the same thing. Stop seeing her. I don't want to hear about it. I want any documentation about this. And the psychiatrist said,

this is completely unethical. I quit. Good. And then he ended up giving me a letter, you know, for my case. So, maybe I was to say it was not possible for me to to continue my practice.

my therapy practice and neither did i want to because i felt like this isn't helping this isn't helping anyone you know it maybe is helping them week to week but it isn't changing their lives and besides i had gone so far down this path of study of who we who we are in this quest for the transcendent south that i said that's it all these other doors are closed literally the elevator door closed in my face all the doors of the outer world were closed There's nowhere else for me to go but inside and to try these principles and try these practices and prove whether they're true or not. It's the only thing left for me. And I closed down everything and I went home and I set up an altar in my bedroom and I began to practice.

And I said, I don't care how long it takes. The key to everything is surrender. I don't know what I'm doing. My life is a mess. My emotions are a mess. I lost all help that I ever had. And there's only one help and it's inside of me somewhere and I have to sit here until I get it. So that was my motivation to devote myself like that, which most people, I don't know, they're, they're, they're, it's not easy, you know, like I didn't, I still had, I was a single mom because I was a widow and my children were in high school.

and I still had responsibilities to them. But this path says, if you are in dead earnest, if you are willing to give up everything in order to attain this one thing that could be the solution to all of that, then you will find it. And there's just very, it's very hard for people to do that.

It wasn't hard for me because, honestly, I'd had enough. There was nothing else. I felt there was nothing else for me. And I think the fact that I had that strong, mystical current running in my being this whole entire time and all the spiritual things I had witnessed in my clinic all those years, that I had a faith that somehow something would keep me going and that we would be okay. And that I didn't have to figure it out and I didn't have to have all the answers.

And I just reached a place of total surrender. And that's what really allowed me to do it. That and the reality that there's nothing else. So that sitting every day, seven or eight hours a day, meditation, practices, I grew my own food. I rode my horses. I stayed in nature. I took suicide and mushrooms from time to time.

and I began to have powerful spiritual experiences. And this is before all the neuroscience came out about how these practices change your brain and change your neurochemistry. And that first realization that I had made a huge difference. But up to that point, of course, it wasn't easy. You know, I still struggled. I still had anxiety.

I still had depression and nightmares. but yet I didn't want to take any medication. I lost all my treatment providers. I would know where I would just trust, trust it. And I would sit there and just cry out to this higher self. And literally I concentrate on calling out to that self so hard that I would sweat and I would cry. And yet I would persist because I had nowhere else to go. I literally felt this is it.

this is my only path forward and it happened and that's not to say that you know this is something that could happen for everyone but what we know now about the power of meditation and spiritual practice and dedication devotion and the quest for the self and what that does to your your biochemistry and your neurotransmitter system and your brain and your no pathways these are non-ordinary states that I'm entering into. And it was, from that point, from the time of that realization, I then met a very advanced yogi from India who initiated me into his lineages. And then I, we started the temple together and just started offering practices and ceremonies for people. And that temple is just a few months away from our 30th year.

And we created a whole school of study and school of practices. And it's a healing tradition. And we offered all kinds of healing practices. And then after some time, I went to India because of those, you know, getting in touch with those lineages through him. And I end up staying in India for the better part of 17 years off and on. And that was the big transformation. You know, that was like, this is an enduring state.

This is who I am. This is not everything that happened to me. This is about being free in the moment. And they hear now, right now, every day all the time. And that's how I began to live. When I came back, that's when all the neuroscience was coming. out like you know like oh well this is why you know like I changed my brain I changed my brain and I changed I changed my neural pathways and I changed my neurochemistry and I wanted to share that

I wanted to you know that full circle like oh all these people have trauma and addiction and and I had it too yeah I didn't have the addiction but I had the PTSD in some ways probably like you know, the addiction to going back and trying to make it better, like believing. That's almost an addiction, believing that it's something you're doing wrong, like, believing, like, okay, I'm not trying hard enough. It's my, if I just got to the right person, if I just could get this person to think this thing, then they would see it. Like, it's sad and beautiful at the same time.

Like, it makes me want to cry, you know, but it's. Yeah, but, you know, it's really, really hard. It is. To throw off that conditioning to, to that, you know, that somebody's going to help me. You know, that that's from the, we're like born with that. If somebody doesn't help us, we're going, we're not going to survive, you know. And that goes to the root of a lot of our, our habits and patterns and programs, you know, we're always hoping. and we're always believing

and I reached a state where I went beyond belief I lived from values, not beliefs. Wow, that's such a powerful statement. It makes me fascinated in so much, thank you for sharing the truth and what you went through and the ideas that there's something wrong with me and all the struggle and it,

in some way, it allows you to see all these people that are hurting and you see how close they are. The people that are like, at the worst conditions are the people that are probably closest to breaking through to the idea of living from values. And if you could just like, and I think that's why someone don't want to help.

I'm like, people that have gone through trauma are like, look, you're almost there. You're almost there. You're fighting with everything you've got. You've got to call that higher self into existence. It makes me happy and proud. I'm so thankful for that. I do you see looking back on on some of the things that have happened to you, especially where you are now, congratulations on the 30 year anniversary coming up and helping so many people.

As you look back on some of the traumatic events that happened in your life, do you see those as necessary events? Were those tests in your life? Were those doors being slammed on purpose to show you something? I don't think that there's tests. I think this whole existence is a test. if that's the case, you know. And I think that they're gateways. You know, I see trauma as a path of initiation.

You know, the whole mythos of the initiatory tradition that I got so deeply immersed in is, you know, you're wandering in the darkness of the material world and you're seeking something and you don't know what you're seeking. And you attribute what you're seeking to all these things outside of you. But what you're really seeking is a hidden light that's inside of your own self.

And that's the initiatory path. So if you face the trials and tribulations and continue to seek that light, then the time will come for your initiation. And initiation is really a change in brain chemistry and a change in your neural pathways. and something that changes your inner being. This tradition that I hold also say that enlightenment is physiological. There has to be a change in your blood chemistry in order for there to be a change in your brain. And then I'm studying this all these years, and then I come back from India and there's the neuroscience. Oh, look, all these people that meditate a long time that follow a path of consciousness,

their brains are different than other people's brains. And I was like, that's what happened to me. My brain is, I changed my brain. But it changes your reality. And they documented that too. The amygdala in longtime meditators and spiritual practitioners is much smaller, whereas people with trauma and people who haven't, don't do those practices, the amygdala is larger.

Amygdala is the fear and survival center of the brain. And when you shrink it, or it shrinks because of what you're doing. This is literally spirit over matter. We've heard about that in metaphysical circles, right? But we are literally changing the gray matter of the brain. So it's spirit over matter by discipline, by practice, by focusing on higher consciousness and calling it in. You're changing your physicality.

You're changing matter in your brain. And the image gets quite small and it's no longer reactive. And so you see reality differently. You have a different perception. You're not saying, oh, I better watch out. I could get hurt or this could be bad. You're saying instead, everything is great. I'm here in the moment.

There is no past. There is no future. There's just this moment where every potential and possibility is alive. And I feel blissful and I feel joy. And, you know, that's what happens when you change your brain. And it works both ways. If you change the brain, consciousness can change. If you change your consciousness, your brain will change.

And so when I saw all these studies and proofs of what had actually happened, I wanted to get back in the game. I wanted to start helping people with trauma and addiction and negative loops and cycles and disrupted neural pathways and teach them the yogic path. And of course, you know, while I was on the, immersed in all of that, the yogis gave me psychoactive plants. They use it as an integral part of that path because it's an accelerator.

And you can study and practice and study and practice and you get little glimmers. But when you start to get those little glimmers, if you take the medicine at that time, you can really accelerate those realizations. And then, you know, the practice continues, and that's called integration. And that's important, you know, and how am I going to change now? How will I change myself in light of what I've realized?

And what do I need to let go of? Enlightenment isn't about what do we get. It's about what do we get rid of? It's so beautifully put. Yeah. So I wanted to, so I created a program in integral consciousness, and I became a professional coach, and I began to share that system with people. and it really is based on a lot of the practices that I did during my many years of Saadana.

And I have seen amazing results in every person that I've worked with who's worked the system and gone through the process of getting rid of what isn't you in order to reveal who you really are and what you really are. And I had the opportunity in 2018 to run that program in an opioid. addiction treatment center. And it was phenomenal the results that those people got compared to the people in the program who weren't in my group. And then I ran case studies on them. And part of that training is about plant medicine and how plant medicines help us accelerate

that communion with our true self. and one of the participants, you know, obviously I'm teaching this in a clinic and I can't like, you know, say, hey, come on over and we'll give you some. I didn't give them anything, but the program itself has that education built into it. And so one of the participants decided he was going to try it and he took a full experience. But let me tell you, he had been addictive from the age of the age of. 12 when he suffered a serious car accident that almost killed him. He went through multiple surgeries the rest of his life until his 20s. And he was constantly having extreme pain and they put him on opioid medications.

And here he was in his early 30s and he had been trying for at least six years to get off of opioids. And he would go to these treatment programs and they would give him Suboxone, which is an opioid, but at a lower level, just off the craving, but you're still addicted. And then when he would try to get off the suboxin, he couldn't do it. It would end up in excruciating pain and suffering,

because you get like this rebound pain that it's suppressing all the time, and he wasn't able to do it. And he had been in treatment 14 times. And so some of the people in the program microdosed, and some of them, he was the only one, I think, that took a full journey.

And he happened to be one of my case study clients. So it was really cool that I could go deeper and find out what happened. And he, after that experience, he got much more involved in the program and much more interested in doing the practices and doing the homework and actually working in the program. And he made realizations that were really important to him.

But he was still on the Suboxone. So at the end of the program, 36 weeks, mind you, years of his life he's been trying to get free. 36 weeks at the end of the program in his exit interview for his case study, he said, I did a second journey. And I got off the Suboxin. Wow. So when, and I followed up with him, you know, and this is now, we're coming up on almost five years.

Okay. and he's never used drugs again. And he's a totally different person. He's living his best life. So that in the context of the integral consciousness training is very powerful. So when they started decriminalizing psilocybin, I thought, I want to add this to what I offer. And so I also had dabbled in at that time. time when I got back into that treatment arena, trying to come at it from a better place with

better options. I end up working as a national clinical director for a company that would screen and offer memberships to elite treatment providers, meaning they're doing something different, right? It's not just your standard revolving door. Come and get treatment a year later, coming to treatment again, a year later, coming to treatment again. The treatment doesn't work because nobody's getting to the core problem, which is the brain malfunction. And you've got to reset, you have to repair that. And then there's a few strategies that are holistic,

that are non-psychedelic, that can contribute to that healing. And they would do it here and there. Some of these centers would do it here and there. Nobody was doing everything. And so I conceived of a consciousness center that I would create. age that would do everything and that would change the brain in addition to the counseling, the coaching, the wellness. There are infusions, natural substance IV treatments, amino acid IV treatments, NAD,

IV treatments. There is meditation, chanting, drumming, the path of consciousness, flotation tanks. There's all these therapies that heal the neurology of the brain. that because they're using not, they get you in a non-ordinary state. And they change your biochemistry. And that's the same as the path of practice that I had undertaken all those years, changing your biochemistry by your own energy, by your own focus. You're moving energy internally.

You're concentrating on something to the extent that it starts to change your actual biochemistry. So the consciousness center would be great. but when you could add psilocybin, it would be the best. Yeah. And so when Oregon had an initiative to legalize it, I said that's even better than decrim. So I came to Oregon and got involved in creating the legal system here. And that's kind of where we're at now, although we're doing retreats in Colorado already.

We're able to offer retreats there under the community model. for people and we're seeing people come to us, you know, for, and once again, I built a team and I have psychotherapists and coaches and we have our own in-house trading program that's state approved for licensure as a psilocybin facilitator. And then, and then I partnered with Premah, who, you know, brings the whole urbanism, natural supplement side of things that prevent or alleviate traumatic. psychedelic experiences. Because we, you know, we can do things, I think, so much better, even though the field's just getting started.

The excitement is there. People don't know how to really conceptualize those reports, people who are not having great experiences with it. But when we can understand the biochemistry and the function of the brain and the history and the history of the person and how long it's been there. And, you know, we can create programs and methods that allow them to have a safe and effective journey without having it be a traumatic experience. And because traumatic psychedelic experience is like not just a challenging experience, right?

People can get PTSD from it. Sure. They can suffer long-term psychological harm. And I think we can alleviate it. And that's one thing that we do that's a little bit different. We focus really intensely on holistic methods to prevent it or to disrupt it if it starts to happen. And so far we've been very successful. And not everybody needs that, of course.

But I feel like, you know, there's the full circle again, you know. But can we now take it? from the realm of we're going to heal your trauma into when you become a transcendental self and you're in a collective of other transcendental selves, how are we going to change the challenges we're facing on this planet and in this culture? I don't think that part's up to us. I think that we just have to surrender to that, right? Like we have to do, like people like you and me and Prima and our neighbors

and our loved ones and our family members, we have to have faith that we can become the best version of ourselves. And there's people that are doing it, like the centers that you guys have created. And we must continue to push the envelope and try to help people overcome that which they are fearful of. But once you begin doing that, I think the wheels have been set in motion.

But you have the experience. Let me throw the question back to you. Like you have seen the first, here's a question that I post to people sometimes. Is it a tsunami? that's happening or is it high tide? You know, like we have seen, like some, high tide denotes a cyclical motion of it.

And you have, we've spoken about a circle. You were there in the, in the, in the first wave of psychedelics. You saw the government come and push people away, the authority, the fear covered people back over. Is that something that can happen again? I think it's already happening just by the way that is being framed. Oh, yeah. Heal your trauma, become your best.

But don't try to change your culture. Don't try to make things more equitable, more fair. Don't try to clean up the earth and preserve the planet we all live on. Don't try to change the political drama that's going on, which is really not going to lead to a good place. We need disruption as a species. We need disruptors. And disruptors are people who have gone beyond the kids. conditioning. So yes, you get rid of your trauma, but that's step one. You become your best self,

but is your best self a person who just doesn't care what happens to all the other people? Because the best self is a self of oneness and the self that is all. And that's all of it. And so do you want to, are we going to change the social fabric like we did before in the first wave? Or are we going to fall into this new conditioning? It's a healing for trauma. It's a healing for depression. That's it. Don't think beyond that.

Don't lose your conditioning. I see. They're trying to, they're trying a containment strategy with patents and, and kind of selfishness is a way to, and it's a way to keep people out. Sorry.

Before all this happened, I had the realization in my own practice of psychotherapy that this is a dead end. This is a limiting idea. You know, the way they're setting up psychedelic treatment is you're going to take it, you're going to be with a therapist, and after you take it, you're going to be with a therapist, and you're still going to have to

be with the therapist. And that is a, this is a model, okay? This is a, an imprint. If we, and if you think about set and setting, we're talking about set being mindset. What is your mindset? Are you going to, are you going to think, oh, this, I'm going to be in a spiritual place, and I'm going to be following my spiritual leader, and I'm, we're, we're, we're, we're, going to be having statues of different deities in the setting, and I'm going to be focused on that. That's your set. But what is a set if it's your psychotherapy?

I'm wounded. I'm sick. I need help. I got hurt. I'm suffering and trauma. I'm dysfunctional. I need a therapist. I need a psychiatrist.

All of that, neither the scenario, neither the spiritual scenario nor the psychological scenario are who you really are. And that's what we offer. people as your focus and your imprint. Find out who you really are. Find your transcendental self. And the psychedelics can help us do that. Yeah. When we talk about fear and boundaries and psychedelics, it seems to me that plant medicines and whether it's the, it's the fundamental changing of the brain or consciousness and one does to the other, as we were talking about earlier, doesn't that process the people that truly make that transformation where they use where it changes their brain it changes their consciousness aren't those people going to become natural disruptors and try and break down the boundaries and spread this message of look this is the wrong way dang it we're not doing it anymore we're doing it this way and i'm not afraid of you doesn't it kind of doesn't it take away the fear and isn't that what's beginning to happen like do you do you see that happening to the people that

graduate and you saw it in yourself. And wouldn't that denote that we become the disruptors? Absolutely. You know, fear is power. Yes. Fear is power that we haven't yet mastered. When we feel fear, power is present. This is part of the teachings of my entrepreneurial consciousness training that I share with people.

And it comes from Essential 4. It's called the 12 essentials. And essential four is explore and restore your power. And it's all about fear. When we have fear, power is present. And if you cannot get to the point, if you can get to the point where you can say, I feel fear, therefore power is present, and I choose to respond to it as power, then you will become fearless.

How do you respond? Like, if we just back it up one step and you feel fear as present so you understand there's power there? Fear, when I feel fear, power is present. When I feel fear, power is present. How do you react? In that point, how do you react to the power? Well, in the first, in the beginning, you can't really react any differently because fear is an emotion and you're just trying to give yourself new conditioning about it.

Right. So what I learned on the yogic path is, you know, ultimately the teacher will point out, you know, this is your programming speaking. This is your conditioning speaking. And you'll have that realization, yeah, this is my conditioning. And then the teacher will start teaching you an alternative philosophy, alternative perspectives and concepts. And then at the end of that, this one teacher used to always say,

you know, the person would be getting the realization, and you'd see them, their mind would be melting. And, you know, they're undergoing the transformation right as they're hearing it. And then the teacher would say, this is new conditioning. I love it. So all that that I learned is woven into this program. So when we say, I feel fear, that means power is present. We're setting ourselves up with new conditioning.

And at first, you may not react any differently. You might still react from the fear. But you're going to continue to persist with that reminder. Every time you feel fear, you'll say to yourself, I feel fear that means power is present. And ultimately, when you get that down really well, so that every time you feel fear, you think power is present. Okay, once that's in there and that conditioning is taken,

the next step is to say, I choose to take the power. I choose to be in the power. I choose to respond as power. And from that point, you become virulous. There's never any reason for fear. If you're willing to master the power. And there's all different kinds of power expressions that trigger fear. And everybody's a little bit different in what that might be.

But we're really meant to be fearless. That's our transcendental nature. What do we have to fear if we're an eternal self? That's really, really well said. I think that, well, obviously, I can't speak for anybody else, but I can speak for me, and I have found myself in some, especially in the last few years, in some very fearful situations. Not that I'm afraid for my life, but speaking truth to power. You know, there's that term speaking truth to power. And I think a lot of people, I'm hopeful that a lot of people will get this understanding that when you are fearful, and when you're fearful and you realize there's,

power in some ways that's you being aware of yourself that you're powerful. And, you know, when you think about it from that angle, all of a sudden, at least for me, like it helped me understand a lot more. And I'm still trying to contemplate all that. But thank you for breaking that down. And I, it's a beautiful way to look at the way in which your life is governed. And it's a beautiful way to understand that you need not be fearful because what does it do for If you're honest with yourself, fear is the thing that has gotten you in trouble.

Fear is the thing that pushes away the people that love you. Fear is this. And it's something that's pushed on all of us, right? Like you said from the very beginning, whether it's the military, it's fear of loss or maybe you lost a loved one. Like this idea of our relationship with fear is something that we're never taught in school. You don't hear kids going to school and learning about how to deal with fear. The school is run with fear. Yes, yes. Conditioning, right?

Conditioning. The conditioning starts from a very young age. You know, you better listen to that adult because you're small and they're big. And you can't wear what you want because you're not in control of your own will. And then, you know, and some of this is obviously helpful, right? We don't want children to just be unprotected. But for parents to use their power wisely with children requires them to be fearless, themselves and they're not. They have their own fears. And then that becomes part of the conditioning. And then the child goes to school and now you will sit down and you will do this or I'll send

you somewhere where you're going to get in trouble or you're going to get punished, right? There's bigger adults than me that are going to terrorize you. Okay. So now you become fearful every time power is present. Power comes to mean an authority figure or a consequence or whatever it is. It's not the healthiest way to cultivate, you know, confident, empowered human beings, but it is our system. And after school, then what? You go to college, same thing. You get some power, but you don't know what to do with it, and you still have fear.

What if I don't graduate? I won't be successful. How will I pay my loan? You know, money causes a lot of fear. Money is a big power. Yeah. And it has to do with value. What is your value if you're always afraid and you don't have power?

You don't, you know, it's all interconnected. And then you get a job. And now you've got to feed yourself and pay your rent and your boss holds the power over that. And, you know, what if something happens or you try to start your own company and you're afraid to, you know, like there's so many fears that can happen in the process of creating your own business. But are you, you know, it just affects us. And it affects even our relationship with the psychedelics. I have so many clients that come for the plant therapy. They have tremendous fear about losing control.

Well, the reality is we're not in control anyway, you know? We're never in control. Anything could happen any minute. Everything is possible in this dynamic flow of consciousness we're living in. And so to think that we have control is illusion. But that is another conditioning and that has to do with how We cope with fear. We cope with fear by being in control and making sure we don't get in a fearful situation.

And then the plant medicine comes along and says, hey, I'm going to hijack your brain. Why do you feel about that? I love it. So, you know, you need to understand this is a power. The plant has a power. It's a power you haven't yet mastered. But if you relax and surrender and trust the journey and trust yourself, your real self, not your conditioned self,

then you'll discover that you can master that power and you can gain a lot of benefit from it and then you'll be fearless, at least in regard to that. It's so well put. I heard a story a while back. I was listening to this interview between Terrence McKenna and Ram Dass. And I want to share it with you. You probably already know it,

but they were talking about the wave of psychedelic transformation that happened. And I'll premise it with that. I'll tell you the story and then I'll get your reaction to it. So the story was something along the lines of. It's a fictional story about a warlord general in Southeast Asia. And he's just sweeping through the countryside. And he is just murderous. And the only real rebellion that has the courage to stand up to him is this idea of faith in some of the Buddhist monks in the ashram.

And so he has made it crystal clear that he is going to send a message. And he brutally just hangs them. And it's just brutally ruins them. the people can see this is the wrong thing. And as his story is growing bigger and bigger and he's making his way to the countryside, he comes into this town where he's met by the leaders and they say, oh, great warlord,

every monk has fled to the hills except one. And he is, the general is furious. He's like, there's one, where is this man that dare stands to me? And he, oh, he's in the ashram. So he finds his way to the temple and he both slams open the doors and spits coming out and he sees the monk standing there.

he walks up to him and he looks at him and he gets his finger out and he's like don't you know who i am i could have my sword and i could run it through your belly without blinking an eye and the monk just stands to him and he says and don't you know who i am i could have your sword run through my belly without blinking an eye and in that conversation there was like this pause between them and and as ramdos is telling terence mackenna terence mackenna says well that seems a lot like what happened to us. When the man with the gun came, we ran for the hills. So I guess my question to you is, do you see that that is a little bit of what happened? The authority came on that last wave. You know, what do you think about that exchange in that story?

You know, it goes to the root fear of every human, every sentient human, which is the fear of death. And, you know, the path of consciousness is the path of realizing all illusions. And death isn't just the biggest illusion, I guess. It's the way we could put it. If you identify as the body and not the embodiment, then, you know, you're naturally going to feel like I'm losing everything I have. but if you know that you're in eternal consciousness and consciousness never ends

and you can reembody if you want or you can be free from all this drama then there's nothing to fear you have the power and that's what that monk is expressing you have the power and this is the thing that those in power in government fear

is that we will become fearless and empower and realize there's no reason for us to fear anything, and especially each other. Right. Like right now, the political machines have really worked hard to get to this threshold in our society where people literally hate each other and fear each other.

And this is, you know, we know where this leads historically. This is going to lead to the complete destruction. of the constitutional country that was created, you know, as a vision of something greater, something better, and end in the reestablishment of tyranny, which seems to be the cycle of human history. But those in power in those levels do work very hard to keep people in the fear conditioning and keep people under the threat of death and sickness and differences and loss and, you know, all the bad things that are going to happen if you don't, you know, join one cult or the other. It's called grainwashing or psychological operations if you understand the real background of it. And it's a deliberate conscious act.

and, you know, that's the nature of what we're faced with. And because this country was set up to be run by the people, and the people are now completely at war with each other. And so the politicians and those with the financial means are the ones that are just orchestrating everything. So the psychedelic Renaissance comes into this context. It comes in this context. And at a time when the earth is going to be suffering some pretty great changes itself that are going to affect human life, maybe even get rid of the human species altogether.

And we don't have power. We have fear. So, yes, it's okay to take psychedelics to help get rid of your trauma and help you move beyond the pain or the suffering that you're in. And if that's it, then you're still in the machine. Because liberation is way beyond that. And for us to reach a collective threshold of conscious liberation is really what it's going to take. And I think we start with where we're at. And we work with what's in front of us.

But I do think that we need to begin to introduce bigger concept. into this picture, which is what we're doing through Moksha journeys. And we called it Moksha journeys because we're after actual real liberation and liberation from your conditioned stage, liberation into the oneness and the reality, the true reality and not the illusion. So I don't see it as something that, you know, we're going to just sort of snap our fingers and now we're all there, you know. But we have to be willing to look objective. at every context in which the psychedelic experiences presented.

Is it going to be limited to my vacation retreat that I'm going to go have, that I'm going to get this experience and now go back to my worldly way of not living sustainably, not caring about the earth, not caring about my neighbors because they belong to the other political party. Or am I going to go to psychotherapy and do it to try? try to heal myself and still be struggling self, be the struggling self on the other side? Or is anyone going to open the door to say, look, you can be liberated way beyond that. And that's what Moksha journeys is here to do. I love that.

You know, when we talk about Mokshah journeys or Mokshah medicine or we talk about cycles, I'm often reminded, I love the name of your company. And I'm often reminded of the world. in which Alda's Huxley has painted for us. And if you look at his work as a cycle, you go from the perennial philosophy to the doors of reception, to Brave New World, to the island.

And in some ways, he's painted a cycle for us of what things can be. Like, let's look at disassociatives in the world of Brave New World. Here's this disassociative that allows you to get up and go do these silly things or continue to live this horrible life you hate.

As long as you take this medicine, you feel better for a little bit, and you can go back and repeat this same, pattern of living a life. It's not even worth living at times because it's not your authentic self. And then later in his life, he comes to this realization like, what about the island? What about this world in which there's rites of passages that young kids climb this mountain and sit with their mentors and sit in this church and understand this magical mystery in the

gifts they have where they're given the time to contemplate how beautiful they are and how they can change the world. And I think that, you know, that's the Moxhaa medicine. And I, I believe wholeheartedly that we can create that system. In fact, we must create that system because the alternative to that system is something I'm fighting against every day of my life. I dislike the way in which my mom, my sister, my brothers, my son, my wife, I despise it. I despise the fact that there's this system of fear put in place to push people down. It makes me really upset. I'm sorry I'm fending right here, but it makes me mad.

And I'm not going to take it. I fight all the time. And I hope that on some level, people are inspired by that because everyone can be better. Everyone has something to teach someone. And everyone is looking for someone to believe in. Just be that person. Be the leader. and you will inspire the thing that you want to create.

And I love it. I'm so stoked to talk to you. I was really looking forward to this. And I love that what you're talking about. Are you okay on time? Can I keep talking to you? I'm okay on time. And I just want to say that, you know,

that yearning that you have, just expressed, that passion and that, that willful, powerful energy that you have, that you want to break through, that to that field of consciousness, that is your transcendental self. And to be a transcendental self in the world of limited selves

is to experience that. And I expressed to, I went to this Advaita, ad vaita means non-duality, and I went to this sot song with this very famous Advaita sage in Mumbai, India. And I was pretty much in this

you know, had transferred my identity a lot at that point. And a friend asked me to go with her. And so I listened to him talk and they said, if you're new, you sit in the front. And so if you've never been here, so I was in the front. And they said he always talks to the people in front first, the new people.

And so his standard question that he asked everybody, he asked me, he said, what are you seeking? And I said, I'm seeking nothing. my friend invited me and I came. And he asked another couple of questions and then he realized, oh, you've already attained a certain level, you know, of awareness and comfort in that awareness.

And so he said, is there anything you'd like to ask me or anything you'd like to talk about? And I said, you know, the one thing that I have is that I get frustrated by being in this place and wanting to share that with others and wanting to see them also experience that place.

And I see that that is hard because, you know, it's a process and I didn't just get there overnight and they're not going to just get there overnight. And maybe, you know, but I feel frustrated by that, by, you know, wanting to share it, like what you're expressing with your family. And he said, come with me. And he left the room and I followed him

and he took me in a separate room. And he leaned close to me and he said, the sage doesn't get involved with anything. And he said, frustration arises and it passes. And the sage doesn't get involved. And the sage doesn't get involved with anger. The anger arises and it's there and then it's gone. And the sage just doesn't get involved.

And something in not just what he was saying, but the transmission that he was giving me with it, it just melted that last attachment inside of myself to where I realized, okay, we're in a human embodiment and emotional energy is part of that. And we have the power to witness. and not get involved. Thank you. It's fascinating. It's fascinating to think about.

It's beautiful to think about at the same time. Let me think for a second here. It's a lot. It's so simple, it's so simple, but it's so profoundly life-changing some of these understandings. How do you feel about people seeing you in a different way now that you have changed your reality.

I'm sure that's just, maybe this happened. Maybe this happened quite some time ago. But it sounds to me in your story, you began seeing yourself differently. Not only that, but you began seeing your reality change and you began seeing people see you different. How do you, how do you sit with that? You know, I think that each individual, is a mystery unto themselves.

I think that we're all in this separate embodiments. And to some extent, whatever we really are fully experiencing inside of ourselves, no other embodiment outside of us can never really fully understand that. And so to that extent, we can't expect understanding. And I came to the first,

the realization that, you know, at this point, my purpose is to understand, not to be understood. And it doesn't matter, you know, it doesn't matter. That, you know, to bring understanding to others and to be able to embrace them for who they are. That's really what it's about in the long run. And another thing that I learned from my ad biota teacher, when you think about others, there are no others. There are no others. There's one living consciousness.

And we can't even say we are all that because there's no we. We can just say that is all there is. It's so soothing to think about that. It does take away the anger. How can you be mad? Like how could you, maybe it doesn't take it away, but it helps you sit with it. It helps you. It arises.

There's no doubt. It arises. And because we're emotional beings, you know, just because you reach a, the, because you shift your identity to the transcendental identity, you don't stop being human. This is a human capability. And if we don't fully embrace our human selves, we're, we're missing the. point. And so we are emotional in nature. And there's a reason for that. If we didn't have feelings and sensitivity, we wouldn't be able to place ourselves in that wholeness in a helpful manner or in a way that allows us empathy. And empathy is the beginning of that feeling of

oneness. Because why, it's not sympathy, which is separation. It's empathy. I feel what you feel. And of course, so we have to feel. It's in the feeling that we realize our one is. It's not an intellectual idea. So feeling will arise. Emotions will arise.

Consciously, we don't have to get involved. And it's our involvement with it that flames the fire and keeps it going, right? It's like that monk you were describing with, you know, I'll calmly stand here and have the power, you know? Yeah. And it's the same with our emotional nature. You know, I'm willing for those emotions to be there. Of course, they should be there.

That's natural. And at the same time, they'll pass. You know that. Have you ever been angry? Yes. Are you angry still from that? No. Okay.

So it comes and goes. And don't get involved with that, which has ever changed. Remain fixed on that which is eternal and enduring. You know, some people, myself included, when they talk about their journeys with plant medicines, one of the common themes that I hear brought up is this idea about getting rid of the other in the self. And it's almost like you have this view from the mountaintop where you can see yourself in an objective point of view. And I'm curious if that is something that not only happens that you try to, is that also something you think can begin to happen naturally without the plant medicines after you've gone to that experiment multiple times?

Yes, I experienced that without the medicines. The plant medicines are like any other technique, right? If I chant mantra, a chanting mantra for a certain period of time, I'm going to induce a non-ordinary state in my brain. If I practice pranion breathing exercises at a certain point, I'm going to enter a non-ordinary state of awareness. It's in those non-ordinary states of awareness that realizations happen. And the realization that, hey, I could let go of something.

or, hey, I am not that. Or, you know, there's all different levels. And the plant medicine experience can certainly be one of those states of non-ordinary consciousness. Although the plant medicines, in my view as a spiritual practitioner, are living beings of consciousness. And they are teachers. They embody a consciousness that has the power to teach us, and to teach us some things in a very rapid way and to show us things in a very rapid way.

So we say, okay, that suicide and journey could be six or seven hours, but it's like 20 years of therapy in one day. And those realizations are all important. The realization of, well, yeah, that happened, but now I can see a different point of view on it. Or, yes, I behave this way, but I can now see that that's not really, who I am and that that's just a pattern or a conditioning.

So the first step in the process is realizing who you are not. And that allows you to discover who you are. Because we are always that self. You're already the transcendental self. And we have moments of knowing that. And capability, even in the face of trauma, we have capability to realize this is not the ultimate. destiny of my life. And that's what keeps us going. The transcendental self is that impulse

that drives us forward no matter how bad things are. That makes us seek the help, seek something different, seek the next thing, that's seeking, pushing, pushing. And we think that we're the ones that seeking the self when the whole time the self is baiting us to get to be caught on its hook. Yeah. Because it owns, it's the owner of this life. That's the owner of this body and this mind and this psychology,

these conditioning. That's the owner. And so really stepping into the self is just taking ownership of yourself in your life. And I do think psychedelics help. What we see and what I see in working with people is they come to it for some kind of healing or because they know they're not where they want to be. And they may not even know what they really want. But to know what you don't want is the beginning of finding out what you do want.

So to take the medicine, it illuminates all of that. And that's step one, the illumination, the realization, the higher perspective, that, oh, yeah, I don't have that. I don't have to have that. I don't need to do this. Those are the layers, you know? And partly, I believe, that's one of the effects of the reconnecting of the neural pathways that have been disrupted by trauma and entrenched cycles and addiction and things like that.

And then the second journey, which is how we do, we do our retreats very strategically. Or the first journey, you're going to go through these layers. And the second journey, you have the bigger chance of a mythical experience because those layers is all that's preventing you from that ultimate realization. So the second experience is the most likely time that you're going to have the mystical experience. So we kind of geared everything toward that. Give yourself time to find out who you're not. Give yourself time to let go of what you need to let go.

Be love yourself right where you are, exactly how you're. you are. Don't feel like I have to attain this other self because the self I am is not good enough. The stuff you're seeking is the self that made that happen, right? So don't argue with the author of your life. And don't argue with your life that was written. You know, just acceptance, just a state of self-acceptance and self-love. And then you can go through the layers and let go and realize and get a different perspective and understand. that you couldn't get in any other way. And then the next time, you can make this step.

Take the big step and have the mystical realization. I am not that. I am this. And I love that when we see people at the end of their second experience and they come out saying, I know who I am. I am the higher self. Or recently a client came out of their journey And with the declaration, this present moment is all there is.

It's beautiful. And then we want them to hang on to that and nurture that. And that means follow up and integration and practices and working the path of consciousness and working those 12 essentials and then maybe another journey at some point. You know, there's, it feels like an endless evolution. We can say, I'm an eternal self. That's great. But that just means that you're in a process of eternal evolution.

So greater change in transformation is always possible. There's no pinnacle. There's no, I'm it now, you know. And then the end result is there is no person. So there's nobody to claim the credit or, you know, get the status. So maybe we can talk. We talked a little bit about so you come in for a, Maybe you could just start by telling us, what does it look like for someone that hears this or someone that has maybe heard a calling and then they find what you guys are doing?

What does it look like for someone who stumbles upon mocha retreats or they come into contact with you or Prima and they're curious about what you guys do? Can you walk us through the process of what it's like for someone to begin working with you guys and then through the graduation process? Sure. The first thing is that we want to talk to you. We want to talk to everyone. So we have a way on our website that you can set up a free call with a guide. And we want you to understand our process. But we also want to find out what do you need? What do you want? What is your interest? How can we serve you as a unique individual? Because we're not here to put an imprint on someone. or a structure or a process. We're here to, we customize everything we do to the individual, to what they need, what they want. And we work with couples and small groups and things like that. So the person goes through the process of the call,

and we talk about what you want, and we talk about, you know, how that could happen. And we tell you what our process is, which is the first step is that you will have an intake and screening, and we'll find out more about you in the intake and we'll start to look into what are your goals and intentions for the experience. And then the screening will highlight areas

that could be contraindicated, if any, you know, are pharmaceuticals that you might be taking. Other supplements that you might be taking could be contraindicated as well. There's quite a few natural herbs that are contraindicated. with psilocybin. And then do you have medical conditions?

Do you have cardiac issues? Do you have high blood pressure? Sometimes in those cases, we'll refer you to, you know, see our medical doctor or see a neural wellness person on our team to see if we can help you, you know, if you want that. If you don't want that, that's okay. We just want you to know, you know, that screening is really for the benefit of the client to say, okay, these could be risk factors and I have the option to follow up and get

further evaluation. But we operate under state law in Oregon and Colorado, which is adult supported use. So we're not making diagnoses. We're not treating any conditions. We're supporting people to explore this for their own purposes. And if they choose to have those evaluations, that's fine. Now, in Oregon, there are some conditions in the screening that. that we're not allowed to give you services if you have certain conditions.

And we're pretty mindful about those kinds of things anyway. We want everybody to have a safe, effective, and meaningful experience that profoundly changes you in the way you desire. So after you pass the screening, then you have a preparation session. You get assigned guides. We do not have one guide per person. We have two guides for each person. This is a very intense process.

The retreat is a very intense process. You're going to be in that journey all day. We don't want just one guide there, and then you don't have anybody else. The guides can relieve each other. And it's helpful to have co-facilitators for this level of experience. And so we offer all of our guides are different.

You can choose who you want your guides to be, or we might recommend, you know, given what you're going for, what you want. this might be the guide for you. And then we partner them up. So both guides will take you through preparation. So you get to know them. They get to know you.

Our preparation process is quite in depth. We have a very long questionnaire, which is not medical or psychological. It's all about you, who you are, what you want, what is your vision, what do you like, what do you love, what do you fear? what is reassuring for you? What is, you know, we want to know as much as we can about that person so that we can really guide that person for who they are. And then we help them to think about creating a sacred space for themselves and what that would look like.

How could that sacred space reflect your intentions? And all of our guides are trained not only in professional psilocybin facilitation, but they're also trained in consciousness coaching. So they can bring a lot of skills to help people go deeper and really get to the root intention and not just land on a superficial intention. And then, you know, you don't really get as much as you can get from the journey. So everything's designed to help them go deeper.

Then we send them that form. And we say, take a week and keep working on this. Start keeping a journal right now. We give a full preparation checklist. How are you going to prepare? for your journey. What should you eat? What should you avoid? What should you do? What should you bring? We give them a whole checklist to follow. And then the second session is an education session where we teach them what will happen during the experience because not knowing what's

going to happen and then having a psychedelic experience can cause trauma. And so if you know what's going to happen you're being a much better position. We don't just go through the whole process what each stage of the journey looks like, but we teach them navigation skills for each possible event. So that's a very thorough and in-depth. And then there's a long list of all many different kinds of things that you could experience. And then we talk with them. The guys will, you know, have a conversation and how do you feel about that or did anything scare you or, you know, what concerns do you have? And to make sure that we didn't just give you all this information.

Now you've got to go home and think, you know, am I going to survive it? So we want people to be as prepared as possible. And then the next step is arrival at the retreat. And the first day you come, you check in, you have dinner. And then in the evening we have an opening circle. and that's facilitated by our ceremonial medicine woman. And that is followed immediately by a sound session that is amazing, that is a non-ordinary state in itself,

just to help you relax and settle in. And during the circle, we have a ceremony where the client gets to express their intentions and the guides get to express their support. And at the retreat, you won't just have your two guides. We always have a backup guide. If you have had some flags for neuro-wellness support, a neuro-wellness team member will be there as well

in the event that you could use some support at some point for that. And then we also have the ceremonial medicine woman who comes for the ceremony, the welcome ceremony, the opening circle, and comes to serve the medicine each time you have a journey, and she'll also do a closing circle. And then the sound therapist will be there for the opening night for this amazing Kotomo session that she does.

And you just drift into this amazing sleep. And the next morning you're going to get up and have a light breakfast. We're going to spend a couple of hours organizing your space, reviewing your plan, and then the ceremonial medicine woman will come and serve a traditional drink with the psilocybin. The guides will leave the room. Our guides do not handle, share, distribute, or get involved with the transfer of medicine in any way. The guides are there for supportive services during the experience.

They're not there to be involved in that. So we have a beautiful ceremonialist who's very experienced and part of a sacred community. and she does a ceremony with them, and then she leaves and the guides come in. And then you have your journey all day, and at the end of the day, you come into Plateau. We usually have locations that feature nature and hot tubs, so you can really relax and just kind of drift into the evening.

People are usually very tired. psilocybin has a powerful effect on the brain. Your brain has been through a lot. And just like a baby is going to sleep a lot because their brain is making so many neural pathways, you're going to want to sleep that night. Sometimes people are agitated and we can make them an herbal tea that will soothe the central nervous system and kind of help them relax. And then the next day, sleep in a little bit.

And then you're going to get up and have breakfast. and then in a little while, the sound therapist will come. We believe in the power of sound, the neuroscience of sound and music, and the importance of integration of the experience into the body before we try to talk about it. So it's a cellular process, and that session lasts quite a while, and people drift into, you know, I mean, you're going to be in an altered state the next day as well. And then you'll have a session with your guides that day to just talk about your experience.

Just start to put words with it, which is the first step in integration. And then they'll lead you through some other questions so we can, you know, make a plan for your next journey. And then the next day, you'll have your second journey. And then the next day, you'll have a second day of integration therapy. And then that evening, you'll have your closing circle. This is a six-day, a two-jury, six-day retreat. We also do eight-day three journeys retreats as well. And then the next day you check out.

And then we have follow-up sessions on Zoom, where we have depth integration. And oftentimes, you know, those will be however many we think you should have, but the minimum would be two. And we also offer the opportunity to explore deeper with, the whole suite of coaching tools from the Interferral Consciousness Program, and we offer people the option to continue that path of conscious awakening, conscious exploration. If they want to work with our psychedelic psychotherapist afterwards, they can do that. And oftentimes when about I'd say four to five weeks after the journey, some people who've had these like lifelong entrenched

patterns, they start to see a little bit of that coming back. And we suggest get on a microdose protocol and get into our microdose coaching program. And that will help you tremendously to complete the process and really end up where you want to be. So those coaching programs and the microdose protocols can range anywhere from 8 to 20 weeks. Depends on what the person needs. And some people, of course, want to go deeper and want to, you know, be, I think in some cases that the journeys make it apparent that I need to spend time like this with myself more often. And so they can come back and have a second retreat at any point when they want to.

And then we do small groups. And that's basically the motto for everything. but it's very customized at the same time. Yeah, it is really well thought out. I'm so glad to hear the way in which you have people come in and you get to know them. It sounds like there's almost like a personality assessment on some level, you know, where you're really getting to, okay, is this person empathic? You know, it's really well done.

I really am thankful to hear all that. And it must be really rewarding to get to see different kinds of people come in there and get to see them heal on some level. Is it, do you, have you found that there is a, because the therapy can be so wide ranging. It can really help people change the way they see the world. It seems to me that a lot of people with ailments across the board can come there. Have you said, is there like a pattern of people coming there? or we tend to get people who have neurological issues or brain uh brain related well i think more like tBI and um we had a client with the early onset dementia we've had a

client with some uh Lyme disease related brain complications that was their doctor sent them to try it Many people have, you know, trauma that they haven't been able to resolve. And the people with trauma often say, you know, I've been in therapy 20 years. I've been in therapy eight years or, you know, and it's not making progress. I'm not getting free. They want to get free. That's why they come to Moshe. That's liberation.

Yeah. That's just total freedom. So we try to help them get where they want to be. And then people with, you know, addiction, past addiction issues, substance abuse disorders, they often are not actively using, but they still have cycles that are going on. They don't, you know, the treatment for addiction is a whole other thing we can talk about for hours. But it's basically, it has relied on getting the person to identify themselves as an alcoholic or an addict, which is, terrible conditioning and has not proven to be successful. You know, if you have to say repeatedly over and over,

I'm an addict, I'm an addict, what does an addict do? An addict uses drugs. So if you affirm that conditioning over and over and over, you're ultimately going to use drugs because that's who you are. And that is a fatal error, one of many in that treatment arena. So we're, because every person that we work with, we offer them the philosophy of the transcendent self, the authentic self, and how that can be the solution to everything, rather than having them come in and say, I want to work on this

particular trauma, I want to work on this particular trigger or reactivity that they have. Okay, you can do that, but is that the best use of the time that you're going to give to this and the money that you're going to spend on it? Or you could, you have the option to be free from it. you know and we tried we we do offer that to them you know you can just become you could go on a quest you know yeah and you could could you have that option the medicine will open whatever door you ask it to open that's very unique in that way and we don't want to limit that so oftentimes people are so grateful to hear that like they've never heard that and they never knew that that was

an option, you know, because they're in that psychology, psychotherapy mindset. And we want to help them understand you can have whatever mindset you want for this experience. It doesn't have to have any preexisting programming or conditioning. You can make it whatever you want it to be. And the medicine will attune with what your intentions are. So people really love that. And they're like, yeah, that's what I want.

I want to get my, I want to find my higher self. I want to find my authentic self. I want to be transcendent, you know. And these are new ideas. The ideas themselves are liberating. And you see just by learning that in the process of interacting with us and learning these things, people already starting to get liberated. So by the time they get to the retreat, they're ready for that. And that's often is what happens.

You know, first they call this up, oh, I want to get rid of this trauma. I want to get rid of this thing. or I want to show up differently in different ways, okay, you can do that, or you can just become the real self and then never think about all that ever again. So they're happy to hear about that. And it is amazing to watch the transformations happen

and to see people. And we want to manage expectations too. We don't want people coming here thinking, I'm going to do this one retreat and take two journeys and then that's it. I'm good to go for the rest of my life. The path of consciousness is a path, right? It's not a destination. And the journey never ends.

The journey just takes different twists and turns. And there's lots of other things to learn. And we offer all of that through Nexus Center for Consciousness, which works hand-in-hand with Moksha journey. So, yeah, it's a pretty amazing thing to get to witness, especially after, you know, having been there in the beginning when this was possible. And to see that now it's possible again. Well, I can't imagine going through the transformation that your life took you on. Like your life at one level was on this path that you were probably, how am I going to do this?

And now here you are with a giant flash, like, hey, everybody, the path is right open. over here. Let me show you. Like, it's so beautiful to me. I mean this in the best way. I'm so proud to know, to get to talk to you. Like, I can't imagine how proud you are to see cool people that you're helping. Like, it's really, really inspiring. And I think that that level of inspiration can only come from somebody who has lived experience. And one of the reasons it's so beautiful is because you're giving the gift to other people that they can then inspire other people. And it's just, man, it makes me want to cry. I love it. Thank you for that. So beautiful. I want to say, I want to give credit to my team. I have an amazing team of guides and facilitators.

Who are they? Let's talk about them. Well, Sienna Taranova is our lead facilitator for Moxha Journeys, and she's the lead instructor in our Bodie Academy, which is our training course for our employees. And she's phenomenal. She's like totally the blend of, of spiritual that you want to have, spiritual, practical, entheogenic experience. She's been an advocate and underground facilitator, minister. And she's just a beautiful person. Clients love working with her. And she supervises, you know, all of our apprentice guides and practicum students.

And she's really phenomenal. And then I want to mention Drew Snyder, who's a psychedelic assistant. psychotherapist, but he's our Buddha. He just brings this presence, you know, of the potentials, you know, the true potentials. He's, he operates in the realm of psychotherapy, but he's not attached to those concepts. He's, he's very client-centered. All of us are very client-centered. And it's just really nice for the, for people with trauma or depression, to know that, hey, your guide in his other job is a therapist. So he's not acting as a therapist.

He's acting as your guide. But it's just often reassuring. And then Premah, of course, who you've talked to, head of our neuro-witness department, he brings the magic to the experience. You know, like the guides work so hard in those journeys. And people go through so many different kinds of experiences. And when you were in a session and the client is saying,

I'm in a dark place, I can't find my way out. I can't see my higher self. Everything's dark. It's so bad. And then you can call on Premah and he'll come and give them a natural herb or supplement. Mind you, we can only do this in Colorado. It's not allowed in Oregon to give people anything. And although they could take whatever they want them.

but they're not encouraged to do that. But in Colorado, we can bring the whole tradition, which is from our lineage. And they take that, and within like 30, 45 minutes, they're like, oh, I understand all that darkness. This is all, you know, like, and then, oh, I'm free, I'm free, you know, and then coming out saying, I am the real self, you know.

And it's not that we're taking away, anything that they need because those those there's a difference between a challenging experience and a traumatic experience and a traumatic experience is being stuck in terror and that causes psychological harm so we we are trying to offer people the option to change their biochemistry change the chemical and these are traditional plants that are used with with psilocybin and psychedelics in other cultures and traditional lineages. And so yeah, that's beautiful to see that when that needs to happen, that it can happen. And then I want to mention Rachel Foxfeather, who is our phenomenal sound therapist. She's an expert in the neuroscience of sound. She's highly

trained. She teaches the neuroscience of sound and music in our Bodie Academy training program for our facilitators. And she brings that magic gift of transformation to people in so many ways. And then Ava Linnae is our ceremonial medicine woman in Colorado. And she is a phenomenal, beautiful ritualist and ceremonial, just a beautiful presence. She's the perfect person that you want to receive that cup from when you're uncertain or you're anxious or it's your first time or you're scared.

You just know that, you know, this woman would never give me anything that would be not what I want, you know. And she encourages you to remember that. You know, you chose this. This is your journey. This is your choice. Very empowering. And I also want to mention Tova Dujak, who is our clinical supervisor, but she's just,

she's a Jewish ecstatic practitioner as well, a student of Jewish ecstatic traditions. And she's really good at blending the ceremony and the focus and the presence with people. And we also have our administrative team, which is Blossom. She's our chief controller. And she doesn't just control the finance, but she controls all the systems. Like, say, the guides are at a retreat and something happens and we need something delivered. She's on it. She takes care of it.

She's not there at the retreat, but she is. And then we have Liz, who is our chief compliance officer, who is always helping us, you know, around all the intricacies of the rules and regulations in Oregon. But she's also a musician and also a phenomenal presence for people. And then we have Anthony Smith, who's a Ph.D. Biochemist. But he's also a facilitator, and he's a really good facilitator. And our team is growing all the time. We have more people now that are in our second cohort. And we're currently looking for more team members.

So if anyone out there is interested in, you know, entering an innovative way to support people in psychedelic use to truly expand consciousness and truly make those big, you know, get the bigger understandings. We'd be very excited to talk to anyone about that. You know, that brings me to the idea of the academy. Like I think is that something that other people can join that aren't affiliated with you? Is this something they can be certified in?

Or how does that work? Not yet. The program right now allows us to hire and train people in our methods and our approach and our philosophies, all of our coaching methods and all of our tools that we use in that process. And so it's in-house right now as we're building our team. We want to have services in every legal state. And as you know, other states are coming on board soon and we want to be ready for that. We're getting going in Colorado with retreats.

We're working to get the funding to open a center in Oregon. And yeah, we're positioned for that kind of growth. So right now it's helping us get the capacity of guides that we need to. increase the size of the groups that we can offer. But we do have plans for that training to be public in the future. And so I would encourage people to follow Moksha journeys on LinkedIn or sign up for our email on the website because besides Bodie Academy, which is a very in-depth comprehensive training program with a 150-hour practicum at the end, that's worth working live with

psilocybin facilitation. We also are getting ready to offer training for psychotherapists who want to know more about the options and philosophies that can be incorporated as well as the skills that can be incorporated into psychedelic services. And we're going to offer programs for people to learn our coaching methods and our coaching skills and the path of integral consciousness and how to incorporate that into what you do. So we will have trainings coming up. The next big thing we have coming up is a women's microdose coaching group that Sienna and I are the primary guides for. And Rachel and Ava

will be participating as well. And that's an eight-week program and it's going to be incredible. And at the end of that program, we're offering all the women in the group the option to come to Colorado for a live retreat together at the finish. So that and other, specialties. One thing that I have been working with a lot in the past couple of years is medical doctors and emergency room physicians. It's something that I have special interest in and expertise in because of my background in working with trauma and critical incidents. And so I want to, I'm organizing in my, in the background, an offering for medical doctors to, have the psilocybin experience and, you know, find that place of liberation within the

highly demanding and specialized work that they do. That is so beautiful and awesome. What a way to bring, in some ways I'm so enamored to see the reintroduction of spirituality into medicine. Like, it seems like for so long they were being torn apart. But now it's like you're reintroducing. it and as you see it, such a holistic approach to the soul that seems to soothe the pain or the demons that reside within us.

Yeah. It's not, it's not, you know, we're not, with psychedelics, we're not medicating symptoms. Right. You know, we're healing the root and transforming the identity. And that's where I think psychology can really benefit from interacting with the consciousness path and the people that are experienced in that, to understand that power of identity, which is not something that's been fully explored in those arenas. A very interesting

analysis was done by the Beckley Foundation on a clinical trial, I think, that was with Imperial College in which they discovered that people who had a stronger mystical experience were the ones who got the lasting resolution to the problem, and the people who had a lesser mystical experience were the ones who continued to have some level of symptoms. And they recommended out of that analysis that spiritual frameworks be brought into psychological settings, but I would say, let's go past that, let's go beyond that,

let's establish the set and setting for mystical settings. experience to happen. And let's introduce education to the clients that give them the inspiration to understand that I'm not this limited self. I'm not what happened to me. I'm not the patterns. I'm not the symptoms. I'm not the struggles. I'm not the triggers. I am a whole self that is completely empowered and fearless and eternal and never affected by anything. And if I I could step into that, everything else would be gone. And I wouldn't say that if I hadn't experienced it myself. And it was just a promise that I had read about when I was studying the path and not fully diving into it. But it was a promise that became the only thing that I felt

was left for me to try. And I tried it and it actually happened. And I've now seen it happen for many other people, so I know it can happen. So I think it's important that we all respect each other's offerings, right? It's not just what we're offering. There's many people offering medicine now. And that is so important because we need to open every door for people to access the sacred plants and do it in a safe way with appropriate guidance. There's a new study that just came out a few weeks ago about people who do it on their own

and they get mild to moderate benefit and it may not last. And if people have the structure of preparation and education and guides and therapies for integration and integration support, their changes can be really big and really dramatic. And we take that into account as well as reducing. producing potential negative effects. I think that's really critical. There are so many people that are struggling from having had a traumatic psychedelic experience

and they feel completely discounted by the chorus of advocates who are saying, it's good for you to suffer and it's part of the mystical experience. And, you know, this is conditioning of a new kind, but it's old, you know,

goes back to that previous religious conditioning in a way. And I think the more we understand about the neurology of the experience, the effects on the brain, the biochemical aspect, the more we'll be able to prevent that. Because, you know, it's like depression is just your brain is disrupted. Your neurochemistry is disrupted. And PTSD can be the same way. The addiction can be the same way. Your brain is stuck in a cycle because the neural pathways are disruptive.

And your neurochemistry is all thrown off. there's many effective natural and functional medicine methods that we can use to bring you to a better state. And then when you take a psychedelic, you're reducing the chance of a psychedelic-induced trauma or lasting psychological harm. It's something we need to be really talking about and making ways to reduce or stop it. instead of, you know, just telling those people that are struggling, you know, there's a reason you had that experience. And they're just, you know, it doesn't help when you're suffering to be told that. Yeah, I think there's something to be said about the ceremony, the rites of passage,

and the rails that were put on. And that gets back to lineages. That gets back to people studying the traditional ways of serving medicine and understanding The forms that are built around it have a purpose. You know, it's not just this a la carte sort of thing. While for some people, it may be, especially someone that's going to try something new for the first time that has already experienced a trauma in their life. It's they already feel alone enough, you know, and then trying to sit with this powerful, life-changing ambiance and like, wow, it's too much. You need, if you find yourself in a position where you're, you're a little nervous and scared, then regardless of what it is, you probably talk to somebody, you know, and like, hopefully somebody you could trust.

I think that that goes a long way. Another, as you were talking to, I, and we started talking about patterns and the way trauma happens. It's so interesting to me to see the way that people's thoughts manifest in the world. Like, when I think about addiction, and I've had tons of my family. family that have dealt with addiction. I've dealt with addiction. And isn't it interesting that business models have tried to take the world of addiction and monetize it.

If you look at like Hewlett-Packard or like a copy machine, maybe not Hewlett-Packard, but like a copy machine, they'll sell you the machine. Then they want you to buy the ink. It's like a drug dealer. You know what I mean? Like, oh, you've got to have this certain kind of ink over here. This is $1,000. It's the same premise of addiction.

They're going to sell you something and then sell you the supply for it. They've monetized it. And when you, like, that's just one pattern. But when people begin to pan back and you can see the model of addiction that's been introduced to us through the business model, then you can really begin to see how sick our society is. Like, it's everywhere. It's everywhere. And people are capitalizing on it.

Like, we need this. It's so crazy to me. I know. You're getting on my bandwagon now. I'm happy to be there. Let's talk about the concept of relapse. Relapse is part of the disease. it's normal, it's going to happen.

No, relapse is a symptom that the treatment didn't work. That's what it is. It's so funny. It's not funny, but like, you know, I mean, think about that person who's struggled and goes to treatment multiple times, only to be told, well, you relapse, just go back to treatment. It's like everything is on that person, but did you fix their brain? Because you've known now for many years what the science shows, that's, that, the brain is impaired. The neural pathways are disrupted. Neurochemistry is off. We know that

psilocybin reconnects it. We know that psilocybin is non-addictive. It's not harmful. And if it's done with the proper sentence setting and guide and preparation and integration, it's beneficial. I mean, my client, that one little case study, sure, it's only one little case study, but this is something that's being studied now. Can psilocybin disrupt the cycle? It's a cycle. It's a cycle. Okay. So why didn't you treat the cycle? Why does the person now be told you're going to, oh, you relapse? Well, that's, that happens. You know, that's part of your disease. It's like this is going to become your identity. You're an addict or you're an alcoholic. You're subject to relapse. You have to go to meetings and declare a false limited identity that's harmful to do to yourself to declare that over and over. Granted, that's the only thing that they had for decades, right? And, But if we look at the statistics, the failure rate of those kinds of programs is really high. In other words, the success rate runs about 5 to 10%. That's a 90 to 95% failure rate.

And the statistics show people who go to inpatient treatment, one year later, 85% to 90% of them are right back where they started. So you didn't treat anything, but you got paid a lot of money for it. And now they're going to be told, oh, well, you might relapse. Just come back to treatment again. I've envisioned a day when we can launch a 28-day recovery retreat where people can be in nature, build a community, not have a bunch of clinical brainwashing, not have a bunch of conditioning about you having a disease

and blah, blah, and all this relapse and everything else. But experience a liberating power of psilocybin, and reconnect their brain internally, establish a connection with their real true self, establish a connection with others, which is a big part of what keeps people in those cycles, too, is just disconnection from other people and community, and have all the benefits of all the alternative holistic therapies that we offer, and then leave the retreat, and, yes, come and have community gatherings and stay in touch, but don't come back for treatment anymore.

That's my hope that we can get to that point. And I would love for us to be able to have that program available to people. It's a whole different world. It's not, we don't need all the, you know, granted detox can be very dangerous. So detox is a medical, critical situation. And it has to be done appropriately in a safe way. So that's important. But once you've detoxed, the next step is you have to fix your brain.

Your brain has been impaired by the addiction and by the medical, whatever it is you've been addicted to. Those substances are harmful. They're causing damage to your entire body, including your brain. It's not just a moral situation. It's not just an emotional, psychological situation. We have to fix the whole person. And we have to help the whole person.

So that's our long-term goal, a 28-day recovery retreat, not rehab, it's not treatment. You don't need that. You just need to find yourself, restore your brain processes, make a bond with a community, and find out who you really are. Yeah, you know, and we're right back to the story of the monks and don't you know who I am. you know, after you read a lot about the medical industry, it's really difficult to, so for me, I've come, and I could be wrong, but it, it seems to me, it's not a bug, it's a feature. You know, there's no money in a cure. There's money in a patch. And like, it makes me, like that now I got to, now I got to listen to your rules and let's sit with my anger for a minute, let it pass, you know, but it's, I found that it's very, there's a very, there's a very, good argument for that. And I know, I know there's lots of good people in the world of medicine. And I know people have a lot of love and they try. But if you take an objective look at the

system of addiction, it seems to be a business model. And it's, it's very disturbing. And it, it crushes families. It crushes children. It crushes marriages. It crushes relationships. Yeah. And it's a feature. It's not a bug. It's, it's get on the treadmill. I, I agree with you. And, um, I also know that many people in the treatment arena are suffering from conditioning as well, like the counselors, the peer support people, the social workers, the psychologists. It's not, it's all they have, and they're so programmed that this is it and this is the only way. And they're threatened by hearing about psychedelics.

has an option because they've been told that those psychedelics are just another drug. And if you're if you have addiction or substance use issues, you can't use any drugs. Um, you can't take pain medicine after surgery. You can't take psychedelics for your, for your, uh, situation. I think it's going to take, you know, that collective shift of consciousness that we were talking about. Right. Within that community.

And so another retreat that I'm planning to offer along with training is training for people working in the addiction field to come and stay in a retreat setting and learn and to experience a medicine yourself and see the difference. I think that it's going to be very important that we reach out to professionals working in that industry to show them this is not relapse. This is the end of relapse. Yes, I love that. It is the end of relapse. It's all in the language, too. If you listen to the language people they're using, like, you guys serve medicine. The people that serve medicine at Mokshah medicines have had the experience that they hope to give to other people.

A pharmaceutical company makes a drug after bribing a cent. Okay, maybe they don't bribe a cent. They make a drug and they give it to people, and they have no idea what that drugs. The guy that gives somebody subox, they never takes the box. And they don't understand what it does. And it doesn't make them a bad person. person, but I'm saying wouldn't you rather have someone with lived experience helping you through your traumatic experience rather than someone that doesn't understand the experience

that read a book from somebody, right? Of course. I agree 100%. And I don't believe in treating addiction with addiction. Yeah, that doesn't make any sense. It makes zero sense. I've never agreed with that. It's sort of like, okay, you keep on relapsing, so just get on this and you want to

won't crave and you won't relapse. And, you know, maybe it's, I believe in it as harm reduction. I believe in it as something that we can do right now that reduces the potential that somebody is going to overdose or die. And I don't want to take it away because that it does do that. We know that. But I don't think it's a long-term solution. They want to be telling people with addiction disorders now that it's like diabetes and

you have to take this medicine. to your life just like you have to take insulin. But it's not the same. You're basically saying you have to keep your brain hijacked to a low level of addiction in order to not have the bigger problem. But I will say it's encouraging. The research that's happening in this arena is very encouraging. I know there was a study being undertaken.

I think it was University of Wisconsin. I don't know where they got to with it, but they were wanting to look at using psilocybin to get people off of Suboxone. And I'm very interested to see where they get to with that research. But in the lived experience of my clients, that is a fact. They can get off of the medication. That's their experience. That's their story, right?

Their testimony. And I know that's not enough to change anything. And then the profit, we're all driven by profits in this world in the system that we work in. But if I'm just having a person come to one long retreat and it costs about the same, but you don't have to repeat it, then it's much more valuable. Back to values. Yeah. So it's an important arena to that.

We need to persist in trying to present alternatives to the conditioning. And, you know, when people are deeply conditioned and you introduce, something that doesn't fit with their conditioning, they react with what's called cognitive dissonance, and that they can't fathom it, and they're usually very defensive. But if you persist and you introduce a little bit at a time, you can ultimately get there. But I feel like we're just like just barely getting started here, and the legal states are leading the way. I'm a big believer in natural plant medicine.

Like, yes, you can make psilocybin molecule out of chemicals in the lab, and then you can make it a patent and a pharmaceutical, and then insurance will pay for it, and doctors will make a lot of money and, you know, all of this. And pharmaceutical companies will make a lot of money. But that's not what the medicine was put on the earth for.

That's not why these plants are on. These plants are on the planet for us to get free, for us to become liberated, for us to get in touch with higher consciousness to realize our potential. And they're not going to make us get there, but they're going to show us, they're going to be like opening that gateway and showing us, this is what you can do. This is how you can be. And I think that that's a whole different thing. I also know that biochemically, there's a lot of different things in that.

mushroom. It's not just psilocybin. There's other things that are in there. And they're starting to study those components now when they're finding some of them are related to a greater mystical experience. And they all have different purposes. So if we can begin to work with that as a science, the science of the natural plants, we can one day have a mushroom that we know is going to give you that mystical experience that we know is going to be the solution. And that's a great benefit. And, you know, now you still have to integrate that into your life, right? Now you have to be like you and I were saying, you know,

how are you going to be in the world now that you're in this? Right. You know, how are you going to show up? And what else could you learn or practice that would really help you sustain that and be on a path of mastery at that point? Yeah. It's a vision of a future that, you know, we're just building the foundation for right now.

Yeah, you know, in a vision I have and a practice that I do, and this may be good homework for the women's retreat or this may be good homework for anybody that goes to a retreat. I would love, and the reason I tell you is I would secretly want you guys to do this. So I'm going to put that out there. Isn't it, wouldn't it be, I have found that when I try to cultivate mushrooms, that I've learned they're easily contaminated. I've learned that there's a process that happens in order for you to get from spore to fruit. And I have learned that that process correlates to my life because the same way the mushroom can be contaminated, so can I. By different people being in my life are contaminants, but different rooms in my life, different containers. And I think that there's something magical that happens when you as an individual grow your own medicine from spore to fruit.

And you realize the contamination. And you can sit with that and be like, I wonder why this is contaminated. And then this thought pops in your head. I wonder why I'm having tough time in my life. Well, it's so strange that all this is popping up on the soil here. Hey, maybe my environment is polluted. And I think there's something to be said about self-actualization

that comes from growing your own medicine like that. And so I'm using that as a Trojan horse for you guys. That is the kind of very similar to the original philosophy of alchemy that you master yourself by mastering plant medicines in the lab and that it is that kind of symbiotic relationship that you form with the plant. Now, when it comes to the mushroom, the mushroom is very watery, and it's a plant of Soma, which is in the Vedic tradition, it's watery. And so it absorbs everything.

And then spiritually, it absorbs vibration. So one thing that we're very conscious of, and, you know, Case Davis is a company that has interest in every aspect of this arena of neural wellness. And so we have a company that is a product company that will at some point come online as well. And our products will not be grown in plastic because testing shows mushrooms grown in plastic it contained plastic, and that's a part of what's harming this world. So we're looking at wild cultivation,

biodynamic regenerative environments for our mushrooms and our food at our retreats, right? We want the healthiest, purest. And we don't want to harm the earth or create any additional toxicity in that process. So, yeah, we have that in mind all the time as well. And the environment, conscious environment is important too. In my traditions, there are ways you can attune the mushroom to various states and levels of consciousness. And we have a blueprint for that.

And we are going to train our growers the chance and the mantras and the symbols that relate to each of those states. and will have growing areas where this mushrooms will be attuned to this level and this state and these kinds of things by symbols and by song and chant and music while they're growing so that they'll embody that because they're so absorbing of everything. And so then our product line will include 10 different Soma formulations at the end that we can choose, the client can say, you know, I need more passion or I'm feeling not enough life force or my intellect is out of whack or my body needs help or I want the union, you know, I want the full cosmic consciousness. And we can say, oh, a guy, you want someone number four,

you want someone number nine. Yeah. So you're on, you're exactly right about that. And these are living creatures of consciousness. They're living beings of consciousness. And you know how they say, oh, when you first take the mushroom, you get that time where you see different geometric forms.

And little wheels spinning around in different colors and all of that. From the very first experience I ever had with those mushrooms, I identified those in my consciousness as the conscious

beings of the mushroom that there they are. They're showing up. And then everything happens from there. But I really, we have tremendous respect for the sacred nature of that living being. Mushrooms in fungi in general are phenomenal. Their mycelium literally is the interconnectedness of everything. It's holding together massive forests. It's holding together every place on the earth where they grow. They are the masters of connection and communication. When you think about the mycelium connecting, I think about the neural pathways in the brain.

And so from the beginning of time, humans have turned to nature to find those things in nature that replicator represents symbolically what their healing powers are. and where that matches our internal systems. We're not, you know, it's not just we're one with other humans. We're one with this earth.

Yes. The earth is the place where our oneness exists. Yeah. Every living thing rests on the earth, stands on the earth, walks on the earth, or rests on the earth if it flies, it lands on the earth. So that is the place where we are one, all underneath our feet. And that is where the mycelium is, and that is where the mushroom grows in the dark forest. And I believe we have to enter the dark forest in order to find the treasure that we're seeking.

And that treasure is often the mushroom itself. So it's very important. The growing side of it is extremely important. And there's so much potential to be explored there, you know, from where can we, we go with what we know about their nature and their consciousness. There was a fascinating study done on

mushrooms in the UK that identified language that they use different frequencies of sound amongst themselves and they literally adapt based on what they're learning from each other and they're self-motivated.

They have a sentience that plants don't have. And so they place them somewhere between a plant and an animal. So they are a very special life form on this planet. And we have to respect that, which is why we have a ceremonial medicine woman who has had a long relationship with the earth and with nature and with the mushrooms. And yeah, the growing is so important. And sure, if you grow your own, you can, you're going to get much. more from them because you're going to be able to tell them, I'm going to you for this reason.

This is what I need. This is what I want. This is who I am. And they will attune to you and they will pick up on your vibration and they will serve you in a very unique and powerful way when you eat them. Yeah. And, you know, it gets back to this idea of relationship. And like you're cultivating a relationship with another organism. You know, and you begin to see these patterns and this relationship growth.

And it does, isn't it interesting that you and I are having this conversation. It's almost like our relationship on somehow was formed through the mushroom. Like we're growing together the same way the mycelium grows together. And the people in our lives have been brought to us. You know, we've grown together in a sort of way. And that's what healing does. You're growing together in a certain way. I was digging in my backyard the other day.

And I was digging down, digging down. And I got to like the root, part of the root of this tree was exposed. and I looked at it. And then you could see, like, the mycelium in the root structure. And I was just sitting there thinking, like, wow, that mycelium helps bring nutrients to that root ball. And then I started thinking, you know what? That looks a lot like the brain imaging, like neural pathways. And like, you know, I just, I must just sat there for 30 minutes to my daughter came out.

I was like, Dad, who are you talking to? I'm like, what? She's like, we're just sitting here talking. And I'm like, oh, no, I was just explaining to myself, like, what's going on with this root structure? She's like, let me see, you know, but it was just, it's this moment that you have where you just get these insights. That's kind of on a tangent there, but it's beautiful. And I think you can learn so much in the relationship, and there's still so much to learn. When I see some of those 3D images, I do think about language.

When I see this abstract geometrical images, I begin thinking about relationships. And it made, for a long time, I've been thinking about this way in which we communicate and how words fail. And everybody has that experience at some point in time, in a heightened state of awareness. You're given this, you revealed this understanding that words fail. And I think that sometimes looking at those abstract geometrical images, it allows you to understand relationships, different angles to things that you would never think about from a linear point of view. There's so much in there. It's so beautiful. It's so pleasant and beautiful to talk to you and have this conversation.

And I, you know, we're coming up almost on three hours, Rose. It just goes by like that, you know. Well, as I told, as I once told my mother when I was 16 and I had taken LSD and I came home late, and she said, do you know what time it is? And I said, mom, time is an illusion. So, you know. That is, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So what's a good way to summarize where we're at here at this point? Well, I think the best way to summarize this is that you are an beautiful person and you're surrounded yourself with a beautiful team of people, some of whom I've spoken to. And I think that a good barometer of a person is the people that are drawn to them. And it sounds to me that a lot of people are drawn to them. I am thankful, but maybe the best way we can sum it up, or I can summarize it to you. was where can people find?

You know what? Actually, there was a quote that I wrote down somewhere right here. And it was to establish a legacy to the path that has proven time and again to be the only reality, the essential oneness that is all there is. I think you embody that in a way that is so beautiful. And I'm thankful for it. And I would just like to give it back to you. And if there's anything that you want to summarize or say,

But after you do that, please tell people where they can find you in what you got coming up. Well, the most important thing, I think, for everyone to know is that you are a treasure and your life matters and where you're at in your life matters. And that there are people here who respect you and appreciate you. And no one can be you. we're all in different embodiments for one consciousness but we're all in different embodiments for a reason and you have a purpose

and you have a self that has created that and it is worth everything in your life to discover that and I believe that is the reason we are here to discover that self that created your individual embodiment because it has

a meaning that is important to the whole of the oneness. So please value yourself and love yourself and take time for yourself and explore yourself and find yourself and then live as yourself, your real self.

You can contact us at moxhajourneys.com M-O-K-S-H-A-Journeys.com and I would be happy to have a call. You can get a free call with me. You can get a free call with Sienna or Prima or other team members. So please do get in touch. You can also on our website, sign up for our newsletter where we announced programs coming online. We share information and articles that are inspiring. We share, you know, the points of view of different team members. And don't forget the

women's microdosing program. I think helping women in this world is very important. You know, we endure a lot as in our incarnation. And we have a unique nature and that nature often gets lost or distorted or confused. And women have special needs in recovery because of, you know, living in a world of where they don't have equal rights. And that makes a difference. So, yeah, I'd love to connect with each and every person and see where your journey can take you and how we can help you take that journey. So well said, ladies and gentlemen, I hope that everybody enjoyed this conversation as much as we did and as much as I did. I really enjoyed it. I'm really thankful.

And I'm sure we'll be hearing more from the team over at Moksham Edison on this podcast for sure. go to the show notes and if you're at all curious, do yourself a huge favor and check out the free information they have available for you over there. So that's all we got for today. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much, Rose. Hang on one second. I'm going to close with the audience, but I wanted to talk to you again real shortly after this. Thanks, moham. Of course.