TrueLife - Shannon Duncan - Coming Full Circle

Episode Date: June 15, 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/http://shannonduncan.com/Shannon Duncan is an entrepreneur and author of the landmark book, Present Moment Awareness. In his newest book, Coming Full Circle, Duncan shares what he learned during his own intensive multi-year process of healing trauma with the help of psychedelics.An advocate for those seeking to heal from trauma, it is his sincere wish that sharing what he learned through his experiences will be of service to those who are in need.Shannon lives in California, enjoys spending time with his family, engaging with friends, learning and playing music, artistic expression, cooking, playing with his dogs and riding fast motorcycles. 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. Hears 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. I hope everybody's having a beautiful day. I hope that a little miracle is about to happen in your life. I once heard a quote that said, the miracle happens right before you're about to give up. I love that little quote there.

It kind of brings me a little bit of joy when times are tough. I have an incredible interview for you today, an incredible conversation with an incredible guest who's written a book that looks something like this right here. Actually, it looks exactly like this right here. The one and only Shannon Duncan, he's an artist, an author, an entrepreneur. You may be familiar with his landmark book, present moment awareness, or perhaps you're listening to, or watching this particular conversation because of his newest book coming full circle, healing trauma using psychedelics. Some people are referring to him as the Jack Kerouac of our time. He is the Michael Pollan of the Generation X. Shannon Duncan, I'm so excited you here today.

How are you feeling today, my friend? I'm good. I'm good. It's a great day and I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to talk to you. So, yeah. Yeah, me too. It's, you know, There's a question that's burning in everybody's mind. And after reading your book, you know, the covers, the inside, I think everybody wants to know, what do you consider to be a fast motorcycle? That's a great question. You know, man, I have this Italian sport bike. It's an Apprilla Tuono.

And that is probably 50% more power than I should ever have any business riding on. And it's, I consider that to be a fast motor. cycle. I think it just, it's got this big V4 engine in it. So it's got this Italian sport bike rumble. And it's just this visceral, amazing experience to ride it. And I scare the crap out of myself on that thing pretty regular. So it's fun. That's classic. My nephew is named after Valentino, the famous motorcycle rider who's just getting all guts and stuff like that. So my dad used to race professional flat track. You know, so we got the big steel boot. coming along getting all nuts like that. Yeah. Yeah.

When I read that about, I'm like, oh, this guy just gets it, man. It's pretty cool. Yeah. I want to start off with this quote and just I just want to, I want to read this quote to you and then kind of get your feedback to what you think about. It's one of my favorite philosophers, Alfred North Whitehead. And the quote is, mysticism leads us to try to create out of the mystical experience, something that will save it or at least save the memory of it.

mysticism, clarification, action. What do you think about that? Processing that for a second. I've never heard that quote before. That's a cool quote. So out of mystic experiences, we try to create understanding and have a memory of it.

Boy, that's kind of 5MEODMT in a nutshell. Right? I have had profound moments of very enlightened states, It's not pure enlightenment, but just seeing things with such incredible clarity and the heartbreak of knowing it's not coming back with me. But then there's this deep relaxation of knowing that it's there. You know, my experiences on 5MEODMT have been spiritual and mystical, but they've also been deeply healing and opening.

And it works on all those levels, right? And it's, there's a great deal of surrender and knowing that, okay, my ego is not going to let me bring this back with me, but I've been here. I've touched that goal and it's, it's changed me profoundly. Yeah, the heartbreak of knowing it's not coming back with you. That's such a beautiful way to put it because in the moment, it's so clear and it's, it's tangible, you can see it, you can live it, you can be it. Yeah. But then it just, just kind of feel the layers coming back in and blind you from it, right? But it's, you come back, change just the same because you know it's there and you can feel

for and even if your mind won't let you specifically, you know, sit here and live. You're not going to, we don't get to be Buddhas from doing five M-M-E-O-D-M-T. At least I'm not yet. If I do, my books, I'll be way more expensive, right? But you get to touch the divine ever so briefly, and it's soft. For me, it softens me. And it gives me more trust in life and less fear of life, less fear of death. just but it's it's really open to me to just trust in the flow

touching those divine moments so yeah great quote i like that yeah yeah sometimes you know now that you say it like that i wonder if it's not so much about us bringing something back as it is us leaving something there is that is that possible yeah i've never looked at it that way but there's definitely uh my moments of intense spiritual culture in psychedelics have always allowed an unwinding and a relaxing to happen. And sometimes you read tension after getting back into everyday life a little bit. There's always that expansion and contraction that happens. But I feel profoundly changed by every one of those kind of experiences.

They're beautiful. Yeah. It's fascinating to me to get to be, you know, take a trip to the mountaintop, as you say, and just have a few moments of clarity. And, you know, and when I think about moments of clarity, or a trip to the mountain top or a mystical experience or a psychedelic experience, you know, it ties into language and these ideas of language in the way we express things.

In your book, you talk and give praise to your writing coach, Nancy Marriott. And I hope I pronounced her name accurately right there. And in doing so, in writing the books that you've written, and in conjunction with the psychedelic experience, how do you think that language shapes your relationship with the mystical experience? Well, you know, as we all know, putting a mystical experience into words reduces it, right?

It's that whole finger pointing at the moon thing. Yeah. You know, you don't want to confuse the finger for the moon that is pointing at, but it's, you know, you do your best to put into, words so you can share for somebody else and maybe that'll inspire them to go see for themselves. Yeah. Yeah, Nancy was a great writing coach.

You know, more than anything, she helped me to see that I can write for myself. I contacted her for coming full circle because I knew I could write the technical stuff. I've done a lot of that kind of writing, but it was the personal narrative. I was concerned, gosh, I don't know how to do that. But honestly, most of the time, she was just saying, yeah, you're doing great. keep going and that's the cheerleading I needed to have faith in myself. You know, she had some great pointers. Anybody that's, you know, wanting to write and needing a little help, I highly recommend

her. But, yeah, it was a beautiful experience, a trying experience, a challenging experience writing that book, but a beautiful experience just the same. Yeah, kind of psychedelic in its own nature, trying to put your life in your idea and the thesis into words is sort of having to have that experience too, because you kind of got to sit outside yourself for a little bit and, you know, it's almost like something writes through you at times. It's exactly like something right through you. It's, you know, I've gotten a lot of approval for having written the book in the way that it came out. And honestly, it's,

it's always appreciated, but it's just like, man, that's just something that came through me. Yeah. If I tried to sit down and do that again on purpose, for me, for approval, I couldn't do it. It just, it was me getting out of my own way. And there was a favorite coffee shop here near where I live. And I did a lot of the writing there. And there were days I just like started having tears coming down. Like, shit, I got to go. And I knew that I was like talking to myself as I was writing because I would look and people would be watching me.

And my. That weirdo. Yeah, exactly. I wanted to let him in here. Right. Moving their kids away. Honey, come over here, please. Yeah, it was a powerful process, but it was something that it actually came up in a medicine work journey and a deep psychedelic journey.

I'm like, I need to write this. And then several months later, I was working with a different guide, my latest guide, Katie. And I just said, yeah, it's time for me to start writing this book. And all of a sudden I was just doing it. I was putting in 10, 20, 30 hours a week, just sitting down and writing and writing. and it took a little over a year to put it together before going to real editing, but it just came right through. It's crazy in the psychedelic work how meaning and purpose can come up.

And if you surrender into that, it opens you in just these incredible ways. You know, the writing of the book was a big one for me. Playing music was a big, that was something I never thought I could do before. And I practice hours a day now, and I just love it. It's just this beautiful expression of my, my authentic. Atlantic light shining through. And I just, I would wish that for anyone. It's just such an incredible experience.

Yeah, that's really well said. We've got a couple of people in the chat here. Kyle, Jake, thanks for hanging out. And they're obviously tuning in to hear some of the things you're talking about the book and the inspiration. And, you know, when we talk about the something working through you, whether it's writing a book, do you think that that feeling or that process of something writing through you, is similar to the things you see in a mystical experience. And by that, I mean, like, sometimes when you're on a medicinal journey,

and even after you've done the work, like, you begin seeing signs in nature that point you in the right direction. And those things seem similar to me as the same force that writes through you. Is it, do you think it's, first off, do you think that's true? And the second is, is that part of the integration of beginning to see the world in a more holistic point of view. Like you can harness this power that writes through you. You can see the signs in the tree talking to you to,

hey, it's probably a bad idea. Or does that kind of make sense? It does, actually. And I talk in the book quite a bit about setting intentions going into a psychedelic journey and that it's the deeper wisdom within that sets real intentions. You know, intentions coming from the head. They're rationalized. Their belief systems.

They're prayers from some religion or something. Those don't tend to let you go deep, but it's allowing that deeper wisdom to speak through. And a part of becoming more authentic and more whole is living with more and more the expression of that wisdom coming through and animating your life, animating you in your life, right? So for me, the insights that come through in psychedelic journey, the book writing, that's all, that's all me, but a much deeper part of me that is the light that is, an individual, the expression of the universe or God or whatever it is you're thinking of that animates each of us. It's shining through the lens of whatever it is that makes us us. And the more you do the work of untangling the ego, untangling the false selves, the more that natural light can shine through. That's the beauty of this work.

And why I put so much effort into writing about becoming whole and authentic and looking at shadows and discussing in the book is because all that does is clear the lens. It clears the lens without light to shine through and the expression that is you to come through. And it's it's such a beautiful thing to find that authentic expression. And I'm still finding it. I'm still there's more that wants to come through me. There's there's something in the realm of visual artistic expression.

And I've been playing around with some painting and, you know, doing a little drawing. and I'm not quite finding it yet, but there's something that wants to come through, and very powerfully so. And so I'm looking forward to learning what that is. And so it's just, it's such a beautiful part of the work of healing is becoming more and more authentic.

And that's, that's probably one of the greatest benefits I've gotten from it. This is, you know, unburdening myself from carrying around these negative self-perceptions based on past traumas and whatever. And, but then that,

authenticity that gets to shine through. That's the part that makes everyday life way more magical. I'm just curious to see what happens next. It's just cool. Yeah, that sounds beautiful to me. And it makes me think of if I try to translate some of the lessons I've learned from your book into a painting or a picture, I would say something like the trauma we go through becomes the cocoon of which

the authentic self breaks through. You know what I mean? You have all these things that harden you. You have this incredible trauma shell, I guess. And then when you explain the light, like I can almost see the cracks in the chrysalis and the authentic self beginning to show through. It's beautiful the way in which we try to synthesize pictures and paintings

and a different sort of story emerges from the two-dimensional story, which I see a pattern here. Not only in your book, but I'm beginning to see patterns in other books. And it's breaking away from the idea of the dialectic of modernity. And for those that may not know, the dialectic is thesis, antithesis, synthesis. And like, that seems to be the narrative that modernity has gone through since,

you know, I don't know, the last 200 years. Like we have told stories in this form. It's thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. But what I see in your book is not only, thesis and antithesis. I'm seeing this new third wheel, there's new third stone emerge, and that's lived experience.

So you have an antithesis. You have a thesis, antithesis, but then you mix in this lived experience and then comes the synthesis. And I think that there's, it gives me goosebumps because I think that that's similar to like a mystical trip

where you have your story, then you have this different thing, you have this antithesis, but in a mystical experience, you're able to get, like this glimpse from the mountain top. Like you have a third perspective, a lived experience. Is that something that you were conscious of when you were writing it?

Were you trying to create another part of a story when you wrote this book? Was I trying to create another part of a story? When I wrote the book, I was trying to describe what it was like to rewrite the story. Okay, break that down for me. I got to understand that. Yeah, sure. So, you know, I had lived with a narrative both conscious and unconscious of who I am and what I'm capable of. And, you know, I knew I was a smart guy, you know, lots of smart people in the world.

And I knew I had some potential, but a lot of it was really hindered by deep insecurity, deep stories about myself. I mean, at the core of me, you know, stories about my safety in the world, my ability to, be open and available to other people, you know, just all these stories that really limited who I was. And going through the, going through the psychedelic healing experience. And, you know, in the book, I talk about how there's three basic uses of psychedelics that I've identified. There's probably way more. And I'm excited to learn what they are. And I'm excited to meet people who've had different experiences. But there's recreational, which we've all enjoyed. festivals or whatever. And lots of times people get powerful insights in those that really help reshape

their life or set them on a new course. And then there's expansive, which is the mystical kind of experiences where you're opening into something far larger than yourself. You're seeing things from this higher perspective. You get those powerful life-changing insights. You can have emotional releases. That's the spiritual retreats. That's a lot of psychedelic therapy. They harness the power of this expanded state of consciousness to really re-look at how your life is wired together, how your self-perceptions are wired together. And then in the book, I go into medicine work. And medicine work is on a whole other level, not better than the other experiences,

but just different. And that's where you take that expanded consciousness, this powerhouse of your own conscious awareness, and you take it deep into your own shadows. And that's where you confront the terrifying stuff, the stuff that you're usually psychologically hardwired to stay out of. And traumas live near the top of that list. You know, when you experience true traumas, the emotions that came with it were so powerful that your body, your psyche, determine them to be a threat.

And so they're locked away and all these defenses are built around them. And that's those defenses that cause so much trouble in our lives, right? it walls us off from other people. It makes us reactive and easily triggered. It's whatever it is, the ways that we really diminish ourselves in our lives. And so medicine work is about going there directly against our own psychology's hardwiring to stay out. And, you know, sometimes in psychedelic experiences, people have what they call bad trips. But really, my experience has been bad trips are when this deep emotional material starts

to move, the body panics, you go into paranoia, you go into imagining scenarios, anything to keep you away from the actual thing being triggered. But in medicine work, that's the pay dirt we're looking for. That's your gateway to go in. And when you've got a qualified good guide with you and you've got the right mindset going into it, you just breathe through those intense feelings coming up and you allow things to unwind and for true healing to happen. And that's the real magic of healing trauma with psychedelics is moving out of just the expansive approach and going deep into the medicine work approach. And that's why I took so much time to really try to be clear about it in the book. Because even many of the so-called psychedelic guides that I've met have had no idea you can go deeper.

They've never done it themselves. I don't know what it is. They feel like they're offering to people that they're kidding for, which is why I complain about them quite a bit in the book, too. I want anybody who's interested in pursuing this kind of healing to understand what they're looking for when they're looking for support and what to watch out for with big giant egos and thin-skinned snowflakes being top of the list. You get these people that are just deeply insecure, but they get a real sense of being powerful and in control when they're acting as a psychedelic guide. and that specific personality type is intensely drawn to being a psychedelic guide. And they're dangerous, especially when they're telling people they can help with PTSD or they can help with trauma. They can help with sexual abuse.

They can help with rape. And they have no capacity to hold that space. And that's a big part of my role in the psychedelic scene. It's really my only role is helping people understand that real help is available and You just need to know how to look forward and what to watch out for. Yeah, those are great points. And in some ways, I think to myself, like nature is such a great teacher. And if we just take time to look at other aspects of the world we live in,

then we can use those as like comparative ideas to other things. And I'll give you an example. If you and I were going to go to Yosemite and want to look at wildlife and we wanted a really good guy, We would find someone who probably live there who probably knows all about animals who may have, you know, not only read books, but thoroughly understands what happens when you come into an encounter with a bear or, hey, where's the best place to find fish? Or where's the best place to go? What time should we go? And like, you look for a guide that knows the environment, who's been there. He probably has some really good stories and been scared the bejesus out of them or had some really crazy.

Like, that's the guide you want. You don't want a guy who just shows up the same day you do. And it's like, okay, so I read this in a book one time. And we're going to go check this thing out. Exactly. Yeah, you want someone who's deeply educated. You know, you probably don't want a mountain guide that, you know, learned what they did from books and they managed to survive for 10 years doing it themselves.

But, you know, you want somebody that's educated. You want somebody that's deeply experienced. You want somebody that's gone through some challenges because then they know how to hold that space for you. And far too often, that's not what's showing up. And it's, it's a, it's a really important. It's, it's challenging for people because you meet people that offer psychedelic guide services and they have a great deal of confidence. They've got this spiritual air. They've got the whole guru stick kind of going on usually.

And a great deal of self-importance because they found their purpose in life in offering these services. but in the book I talk about the Dunning Kruger effect. Are you familiar with that? Smart people or people that aren't that smart think that are really smart? Well, what it really is is somebody with a minimal level of skill at something, assuming that they are highly skilled, even masterful, because they don't understand how much there is to know about it. And so a lot of the homemade guides, they really put a lot of effort into playing therapist.

And, you know, playing therapist means being a therapist like, you see in TV shows in a movie because they do things that real therapists don't do. For example, all the talking. I've worked with guys that needed to tell me what my experience was. They needed to break it down and psychoanalyze it. But the only ones that do that are the ones with no actual psychotherapy training because somebody with actual psychotherapy training, they know to shut the hell up and listen and help you to dig out your own answers, right? It's only the people that don't know any better that do that, they get a sense of importance and power and telling you what your experience was. And it's, I don't know, it's a mess. And it really breaks my heart because

people are working up the courage to give this kind of healing a try. And a lot of the time, they do it once and never come back. They either didn't get what they wanted from it and they didn't see the point or they were traumatized by it. They had an intense experience and it wasn't held well. and all of that comes down to how it was supported. They weren't properly prepared for the experience. The experience wasn't properly held. They didn't have good integration afterwards. And I talk about this a lot in the book.

Just because I want people to understand what that looks like so that when they do go out and look for support, they know what they're getting. And it's just as true in the legal clinical trials with psychotherapists, you know, licensed psychotherapists as it is in the underground world where most of this is available is there's people that have either done it or they haven't, they either have that deep experience of themselves or they don't. And if they don't, they just can't hold a real space for it. Yeah. This is a, you know, one thing I really have

noticed lately about psychedelics, and it kind of gets back to my previous example is that it shows you, like you can see the example in psychedelics. It's happening throughout the world. If we take, if we go back to the example of guides in integration, you know, we also see, that like isn't the same problem we have with guides who are inexperienced pretending to be really good guides isn't that the same problem we have with education like we have teachers that have never have the lived experience but yet they stand in front of a classroom and give people their understanding of what it is to do this thing and then as soon as that class graduates some of them just stay there and some of them move on but they're never really getting the lived experience that would

thoroughly allow them to understand the craft that they want to be doing. And it seems that we have we have gone from, you know, having into into the illusion of having. You know what I mean by that? Like we do, but now we just have the illusion of doing. And you get further and further away from the truth when you do that, right? It's true. It's a lot of what you see out there in the spirituality circles and not all, not all. But in spirituality circles, in self-help circles, in psychedelic healing circles, especially,

is you get this regurgitation of stuff that sounded good when they heard it. And it's just, it's just, you know, people hear these things and it somehow resonates with them. And so they take it on as true and they start repeating it as being truth. And they start, you know, using that in their therapy sessions with other people. but they've never actually had a direct experience of it. And so, you know, they've never actually healed in that way. They've never actually, it just, it sounded good. And a lot of times people are more interested in talking about these things

and having community around these things than actually believing they can do something real with it. And it's the difference between speaking from what sounds good, what sounds right, what other people have said, and speaking from direct experience. And that direct experience is something that I worked really, really hard to convey in coming full circle is there's nothing in there that I just regurgitated because it sounded good. It was all hard-won direct experience. And a lot of it is stuff that I learned, you know, decades ago reading, oh gosh, Pema Chaudrin when things fall apart. The Developing Mind by Daniel Siegel. Oh, my God, that's an incredible book.

Bowen family theory systems. And, you know, it's stuff that was just decades ago, but it really, there was lots that I learned and read that also shook out and didn't resonate with me. But it's, it's what I directly applied in this process of healing with psychedelics that I turned around and conveyed in the book. And I'm, I'm hoping that it's deeply helpful in that way, because so much of what is out there is just repeating what they've heard and it's not really hopeful. It just all that does is give you a place to hide.

It's a mental construct, a concept of a belief system. And so you grab onto that and you ignore the truth of what's really happening in your body. And that's where the wounding stays. That's where the wounding lives. And that's where the healing happens. Yeah. It's beautiful. In some ways, like I think that your book, it reminds me of mythology in some ways.

And what I mean by that is when I read mythology, I see a set of tools that's available to everybody. You can read mythology and you can take the lessons in there and use them as tools and then experiment with those tools in your own life. Like there's the idea of King Arthur who at one point in time he's sitting around the round table with all the nights and all of a sudden, boom, this image of the Holy Grail appears on the table. And they're like all like all the knights are there. And they're like, whoa, look at this beautiful Holy Grail. This is a sign. None of us can eat. We must go on a quest.

So King Arthur and Sir Lancelot stand up and they're like, this is a sign that we must find the Holy Grail. And this is the way we're going to do it is each one of us will go into the darkest part of the forest. The one is the most scariest to us. And we will all find our own entrance into that forest. None of us will go with each other, but we will all find our own way. And when you start reading the mythology like that, you go, look, only I, I can blaze. There's plenty of trails cut, but I must cut my own trail. And when you talk about what you have done about reading those books, it's like you have found the tools. And now you have

written a story about how you found the tools and you applied them in your life. And in some ways, it's that beautiful rotation of mythology that you're giving back to other people. Because I think that there are lessons in your book that people can take and use as tools too. But that only comes from doing that work. That comes from finding the tool, figuring out, hey, this fits over here. Ah, damn it, that doesn't fit. If it's over here, you know, like, one of the funniest,

like, your book is chock full of humor too because it's so vulnerable. And like, I remember you, in one of the stories you tell about you and a young lady and you're, you are the guide in this one. And you're like, listen, I'm going to show you this experience. It's going to be beautiful. And then you go in to tell how that whole thing falls apart, man. Like, that's so funny to me. Thank you for doing it.

You know, I don't want to, I don't want to ruin the book for anybody. No, they wouldn't run the book. Yeah. You didn't share a little bit of that story then. Yeah. In that section, I was talking about once you start using psychedelics for deep healing and you're giving permission for old pains to surface that trying to use them recreationally can be problematic.

And I was seeing this woman briefly because of this scenario. And she wanted to know what it was like. And so we did some MDMA together. And that was a beautiful day. That's a really safe one. And then the next time she visited, she wanted to try mushrooms and we did it. And her initial fear, you know, because when somebody's new to mushrooms, you can have some fear as it's coming up. And her initial fear just triggered something deep in me.

And I spent the rest of the trip just holding on by my fingernail. She heard me purging. She saw me laying there with my legs kicking. And in the book, I used the turn. she got to see how the sausage gets made with, with medicine work, right? You know, stuff that's just normal in a medicine work session would be really troubling to somebody,

their first trip on mushrooms, to see somebody else going through. And it just, oh, it was so humbling, and I'm still really embarrassed by the whole thing. She and I have laughed about it since then. It's so honest, though. It was just this. I just wanted people to understand

that once you invite in deep healing with psychedelics, they're going to use that opportunity. So if you're doing this deep cathartic work and then you try to take some mushrooms and go to a concert, you might be in for an interesting experience. And you just need to be aware that deep stuff can move even outside of the guided stuff once you invite it, once you start allowing it out. And that was kind of the lesson of that chapter was be mindful. It's so meta. Like when I think about that story and integration, like it's interiors.

Like it's integration on so many levels because you have to integrate like what's happening to me there. Then you have to integrate the fact that you did it in some in front of somebody. And then you have to integrate the fact of like, okay, I did it in front of this person that I kind of like to probably think I'm crazy. And I gave it to them. Like they're just so it's so meta. It's just layers and layers, right? Yeah, there was a lot to process with that. But mostly I learned, all right, until I get past the intense, fearful stuff that's coming up in my psychedelic healing sessions, I should.

probably not do psychedelics recreationally. And so I took quite a bit of time off until I felt much more comfortable that there weren't more surprises waiting to come out. And, you know, once I got kind of to the core of things, and it's all housekeeping and healing and maintenance, now I can do, I can do recreational experiences, but I'm very selective in doing so. Yeah. You know, in some ways, it almost seems like when we, if you read like books by the Cosmic Serpent by Jeremy Narby or you read some of the two volumes set by Dr. Jessica Rochester, you begin to learn about rights of passage, apprenticeship, you know, the proper way to learn about using different plant medicines.

And they talk about apprenticeship as a huge part of it. But it seems to me on some level, and perhaps. it's always been this way, but the world has a way of apprenticing you. And I'm not saying it's the right way, but I think that there is an apprenticeship, the world, it's almost like a, it's almost like it's, it's handing scholarships out to some people. And okay, you start off recreational. Like so many people started off recreational, you know, and in, it's a great way to start. Yeah, like, hey, I'm going to, I'm going to go see, I'm going to go to Balboa Park and check out the Laser Floyd show. You know what I mean?

Or, you know, and, and all of a sudden, you have a friend. something happens. Maybe the thing that happens is afterwards you guys are finishing off your eighth together and you're smoking some weed and you're just all of a sudden things start making sense, you know, and you're like, wow, that was interesting. But it just seem in some way like there is this natural apprenticeship that happens and you get more and more challenges. You get more and more trauma coming up.

And if you graduate through it all, the next thing you know, you're writing a book that's a bestseller. You know what I mean? Like it's interesting how the world works in concert with you if you're willing to take the hits. Is that too deep? Is it too much to think that the world can work like that? It's, well, there's a lot to that. Yeah. So in getting the most from psychedelics for yourself, which is how I started.

It sounds like how you started, you know, those challenging experiences, those deep experiences, sitting with friends when they're going through challenging experiences. Those are a type of apprenticeship. You're learning, you're going deeper, you're learning, you're learning a sense of confidence in how to navigate that space. And those early experiences have helped me out in amazing ways going into the deeper medicine work. You also talk about apprenticeship, and that's one of the things that I really,

what's the word I'm looking for? I really advocate for is that anyone, anyone who's going to be even a trip sitter, but any level of a support during a psychedelic experience that they have intensive internships under somebody that's been there and done that. And it's just an important part of the process. And it's, it's not one of those things that you can fake it until you make it. And although there's a lot of people trying. And so apprenticeship in that way is really powerful, but also, apprenticeship in medicine work session. So the guides I've worked with have gone before me into the kinds of spaces that I'm going through. And they're how they hold the space, the confidence that

they have to reassure me that I'm going to be fine, even though it feels like I'm going to die. Like I need to get up and run out of the room and run down the road screaming. When they reassure me that it's okay that they've been there, that I'm going to be fine, that I just need to relax and breathe and allow and surrender, that. that, you know, that kind of apprenticeship, working with my own guides, has taught me so much. And that's, you know, that is an important part of what a guide does is they, they apprentice the person going through the process of healing because they themselves have done it. Yeah.

When I think about this, this idea of group work or a retreat work or doing things together, you know, I'm often reminded of this term integration. It's just, it's such a massive word. And I've talked with a few people that have, that do integration work. And one of my questions is, you know, don't we need to be really careful that priming is not a part of integration? Because integration can be you just reprogramming someone. And I'm not sure that that is the right thing to do. Because anybody who has gone to school to learn and really taken.

time to understand the way in which the brain works can understand how to reconnect certain ideas to certain feelings. And you can do that without psychedelics. You could do that through talk therapy. But it seems to me that... Symatic therapies, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Like, how much of that is responsible to do? I don't know the answer to that. Like, if you can't... I'm not sure I'm tracking your question. I'm not sure I'm tracking your question. And I think we may use the term integration differently. Okay. And so when I say integration, when I talk about it, that's the period after a big psychedelic

experience. Okay. And that's when the things that were moved, the lessons that were learned, the changes that are trying to happen, that's when you really have a specific intention to keep allowing the energy of the emotion that's trying to release to move, to stay mindful of, okay, I can see my old habits trying to creep back in, but I can see this new opening that I really wanted. And so I want to stay mindful to that and really lean into this new opening. And integration support. I'm actually on a thing with Christopher Brown tomorrow talking to therapists about

about, you know, my perspective on what good integration is. But integrated support is, is support to help you stay open and keep what started moving in the psychedelic session to keep moving so you can maximize the benefit from the changes trying to happen because you can have these big psychedelic experiences and you just go right back to your normal life and your normal habits and you'll have some expansion and contraction and some benefit that comes from it but it really gets minimized because you just you kind of settle back into the way you were before really quick so this integration period for a few weeks or even a few months afterwards you've got this support and this intention that you want to allow yourself to keep blossoming you want to allow even if things become

fearful, you can breathe through it and you don't have to close off again or you close off and then you reopen again. That's really what integration is, is you're integrating the changes that came about. You know, if you've got somebody giving integration support that's telling you how you should feel or what things mean or trying to give you their answers, well, you're working with somebody playing at being a therapist and not a real therapist. And that's a good sign that you need to find different help. So I don't know how that is in alignment with what you were thinking of as integration. For me, for me, psychedelic experiences, you have support before that's preparatory.

So you're helping get really clear on your intentions. If you haven't done any kind of somatic body experiencing work, they would help you get in touch with what your emotions feel like in your body and how to navigate down through the layers. And so for some people, that'll be a month. for some people, that'll be six months or a year, but then you're the best setup you can be to get the most out of the psychedelic experience. In Canada, I was just exchanging information with somebody where they're doing low-dose ketamine in traditional psychotherapy, and that would be a beautiful way to start prepping for a bigger

psychedelic experience because you get used to what it's like to have your body open for you, to have these emotional spaces open and having more access than you know. do and you can use that. I love that as an idea for preparing for a bigger psychedelic experience, whereas other uses for ketamine like take-home ketamine and psychedelic telehealth, I think that that's just criminal. It's so negligent. Ketamine clinics with the IV drips, there's people getting benefit from it, but mostly what I see is a symptom management, not healing. But this use of low-dose ketamine, I use big-dose ketamine in my psychics. journeys all the time, but they're guided and there's somebody there and I'll do 250 milligrams

insufflated and most people that would put them through the wall. They would just wake up in the next week and I'm conversational. I'll take that and then I'll do mushrooms on top of it or 3MC or MDMA and it's incredible day. It's an incredible tool, but it has to be used properly. It has to be used with the right intent. It's interesting the way you explain some of the ketamine work as symptom management. In some ways, it seems eerily similar to the way we use SSRIs today. Do you think that that could be similar if it continues to go around or is it being pushed in that way there?

That, you know, there's always a chance that there's something about this that I don't know. I can say that about anything I talk about. But my experience has been, you know, microdosing mushrooms, low dose, ketamine. It's symptom management. And it might be that that's all somebody is ready for. And if that's the case, then I would personally lean towards microdosing mushrooms instead or LSD just because ketamine becomes, can become psychologically addictive.

And it will start calling your name in really sneaky ways. I mean, I use it once a monthish. And even just with that, I'll have an evening where I may be a little bored or I'm a little anxious and I'll feel like practicing Kiana. anymore in my brain will we could do some ketamine maybe watch a movie it is sneaking how it sneaks up on you and i've really deeply worried for the people that are being given take home ketamine just for that very reason you know they're being there it's already being shown that people are using larger and larger doses so they're running out before their next prescription refill and i have to

wonder how accurate the reports of how much it helps with depression are and how much of it is people just wanting to keep that prescription coming. I've personally known people that have had real problems with ketamine, and it's just so reckless and irresponsible to send that home with people to use every day. It's just such a bad idea. And there's better ways to heal. There's better ways to manage. And I would say if ketamine is helpful for you in relieving the symptoms of depression,

maybe give microdosing a try. not ready to go in and directly confront the causes for why you're shutting down in this depressive way. And that could be something you do until you do work up the nerve and the resolve to face what needs to be faced to do real healing. Yeah. I find myself always, like, turning to Aldous Huxley, you know, like his, I probably do, I'm sorry for the listeners.

I always do this. But like, it seems to me, like, if you look at his collection of books, you know, he's not, he from like the perennial philosophy to the doors of perception to brave new world to the island like you see this flow of his thinking in a ways and sometimes i feel like we're on the we're we're in between or we're coming up on brave new world but we could transition to the island and what i mean by that is in the brave new world they talk about soma which is explained as a disassociative which is the same way ketamine is explained yeah and when the way i hear you explain it like symptom management, you know, and then I, you know, I talk to some people who are, are thinking, you know,

if you read between the lines, you can see multinational corporations toying with the idea that a disassociative can make people more productive, you know, and it, it just seems like yoga on the slave ship to me. You know what I mean by that? Like, hey, here we go over here. Do you think there's a potential problem for that? I think that there's a potential problem with a great deal of what's happening in the psychedelic renaissance. because it's also a psychedelic gold rush. And, you know, things like 5MEODMT,

they're coming up with patents for versions of 5MEODMT when a massively, unbelievably powerful version exists for free. We already know that recipe. We already know how to make synthetic 5MEODMT and properly administered. There's nothing more powerful that I know of on earth for opening a person's psychology and letting it be expressed and examined and healed. The psychedelic gold rush is also pushing these take-home ketamine clinics

that are, you know, claiming to heal people. And, but it's, you know, it's just the same model as SSRIs, right? It's, you give somebody something that's not really going to heal them, but they need to come in back for it. And when you add in a, whether they're consciously allowing themselves to be aware of it or not, these companies are also addicting people. And I really believe there's going to come a day when they are viewed very similar to the pill doctors that were handing out opioids like candy. It's going to create a whole new wave of people with some serious problems, especially when the government comes in and says, yeah, this was a bad idea.

You can't do that anymore. Now all of a sudden they're, you know, trying to score ketamine off the street instead. It's just going to be, it's a problem and there's better ways to go about things. there's more responsible ways to go about things. Yeah, it's interesting. I was talking with a young lady yesterday, Lubo, who's a big fan of yours, by the way. She's like, you're talking to Shannon tomorrow.

So shout out to her. And she had mentioned something that I thought was interesting. She had said some, she had mentioned a lot of things I thought was in her. She's a very interesting person. However, one part of the conversation that we had was about the psychedelic business ventures that are happening and how a lot of them seem to be failing. And she had mentioned like, hmm, maybe that's a sign that the world we're moving into is going to either destroy the industry or it's changing the industry. Or maybe it's a sign that these particular medicines can't be commercialized in that way.

And the example I gave back to it was if we take cannabis, for example, like it was it was fast track and there was all these things that happened. But if you look at the price of cannabis now, it's just rock bottom. And maybe that's what's happening. Maybe it's like these particular medicines are finding a way to show us. You can't use medicine in these models that we have. Does that kind of make sense? Like you're seeing the models fail, kind of. It's something that I complain about pretty regularly on LinkedIn.

I talk about people who are unqualified and holding these bases, for one, because there's a rush for people. you know, there was a time when, you know, people were super fired up about CrossFit. You know, they went to a CrossFit gym and all of a sudden they had deltoids and muscles they never had in their whole life. So they mortgaged their home and they opened their own CrossFit gym, but they had no background in exercise physiology. They had no understanding. And here their work out of the days were ripping people's shoulders out of their sockets and snapping spines. And, you know, it's just, it's, it's kind of that thing happening.

But there's also this, this rush to capitalize on like a. that is radically diminishing the efficacy of them. A lot of what's showing up in clinical trials, these therapists are either so unaware of how psychedelic healing actually works because they've never actually done it. Maybe they dropped acid in college and they think that's what it is and that's not what it is. They think that big insights are what does the healing and that's not what does the healing.

Or they're either unqualified. or their hands are so tied that they can't be effective in the clinical trial models. I mean, a lot of times you're like in a zero gravity chair or a recliner or you're laying on a sofa and you got on ice shades, you got on headphones, but you're in a professional office so you can't scream or yell or cry really loud. You know what I mean? You can't give expression to the emotional release that needs to be because a lot of times it's in movement. So you can't be on a sofa, you need to be on a floor. And music is really helpful for shaping experiences, but if you're wearing headphones, one, they're distracting.

And two, if you start moving around, you knock them loose. You need to be in a place where you can play the music pretty loud if it needs to be loud, but that you're not going to disturb neighbors. But you also need a place where you can have permission to be loud yourself. I mean, I've been screaming, I yell, whatever wants to come through, profanities, whatever. And if I were in a therapist office knowing that other people are on the other sides of the walls, internally, I would hold that in because it wouldn't feel safe to me. You have to be in a place where you can allow the expression to be whatever it needs to be.

And most of the legally sanctioned clinical trial facilities don't have that. That's why I think that the real people are getting benefit from the clinical trials. And I don't want to take anything away from that. It's got to start somewhere, right? Yeah. But I think most of the real deep healing, the kind of healing that I've gone through, the kind of support that I've had is going to remain underground because it can't be handcuffed by red tape written by people that have no idea what they're talking about that have never done

psychedelic healing work have never held space for somebody doing psychedelic healing work and it's um it's that's i really believe that the the important work is going to continue in the underground for some time to come i mean there there are there are universities that are opening psychedelic departments and that's great but i've spoken to people in those departments and they're like yeah mostly These people have no idea what any of this is. They're looking to separate the trippy part of psychedelics from the magic part of psychedelics. And it's like, well, that's, that's ridiculous. Yeah.

Ridiculous. I almost said what the famous line from Tropic Thunder. And I realize that that's politically incorrect. But it's your experience of yourself. It's the different corrective experience you have in psychedelics. That is what does the healing. It's not some flip a switch with a with a with a with a molecule in your brain and all of a sudden things are better. That's that's symptom management.

That wears off. But it's your corrective experiences directly confronting yourself. You're you're allowing emotions to express that felt to your body too big to be endured, too big to survive. But now you're in this safe place where you can let them out and you survive them. So now you have a new experience of them and your psychology around it changes. That's where you're the. fences you've always had to keep you out of there become less and less necessary and they started just evaporating over time all by themselves. That's that's the magic of working in this way. And that

seems to be lost in a lot of what's happening in the psychedelic gold rush. Yeah, that's really well said. There was a recent paper that came out of Helsinki, I think it was in nature. And they talked about the activation of not the 5H2A receptor, but the like the TRKB receptor. And they went into this long, you know, it was very fascinating article, very fascinating paper and props to the people that have published it. But they,

it went on to talk about the potential to just stimulate this particular receptor and have the, you know, dendritic spines grow and all this growth and stuff like that. But the problem I see with that research and the other research where they're trying to take the magic out of the medicine is that they're, it's all theoretical. Like it looks good on paper, but they don't have any person that's been like, yeah, I've done this and I've done that and they're the same. And I don't, I think that that is like, I don't think they'll ever find that because anybody that's had that terror before the sacred realizes that that that terror before the sacred was this part that can never be duplicated.

In fact, you can't have the same trip twice, but you can have this story that stays with you forever. And if you're, you know, anesthetized and someone shoots you up with this mega dose of a semi, you know, semi sort of psychedelic that doesn't have anything in it. What are you going to remember? Like, what are you going to bring home with you? Like there's nothing. There's no marker there. You know, as, you know, biological robots of a sort, you know, our programming comes through experience. Yes.

And trying to short cut the experience and make, you know, our experiences, shape how the neural networks in our body work, how the, how the, how our body utilizes neurotransmitters. We phase in and out of these different levels of states of mind. So, you know, I'm in a very calm, open, warm state of mind right now. And if somebody came charging through my front door with a shotgun, I would move into a very different state of mind. And, you know, when trauma gets triggered, we can move into a trauma-based state of mind. And it's our experiences that shaped those states of mind, but it's also our experience.

experiences that change them. We reprogram through corrective experiences, different experiences, having an experience that shows us that life is different than how this programming told us it was. And that's the magic of healing with what you can do it in therapy. People do it all the time in therapy, especially with like somatic body experiencing, EMDR, Haikumi, these direct experiential, experiential tying your mind and body together kind of therapies can help. invoke that, but then sometimes you're so heavily defended, you can't get in there. And that's

where psychedelics really shine. Properly held, when you're properly supported, when you're properly prepared and supported also in integration after, you can make miraculous changes to your own networking, to your own programming. And that's the beauty of it. And that's what I really tried to share in coming full circle, is just showing my process of how this evolution changes and still continues. It's really incredible. One of the things I share, in the book is at one point I just, you know, I wanted musical expression, but I had this desire to sing that just kept coming up in sessions again and again. And so I went and I had an experience with a singing coach of him showing me, yeah, you've got a great ear, you can match pitch just fine,

we just need to teach you how to and strengthen these muscles and how to use them so you can get consistent airflow and stay in resonance, right? And so my ability to sing, while I'm not going to be on American Idol anytime soon. I'm not going to win any awards. My grandson likes it just fine. We're singing cantos songs together all the time. You know, I've had moments of where I'm open to this idea that, hey, I can sing. And when I show up in my singing lessons, my voice is open, uncomfortable, things are getting better. And then I have moments where the old side of mine comes in. It's like, God, I can't sing. And then it's choked off. And my jaw is super tight. And it doesn't allow it to happen same person same biology just different states of mind and it's it's that's that's the beauty of

that's the beauty of this kind of work as you can reprogram those states of mind and i just don't think it can be shortcutted i don't think somebody could you know hit my brain with magnetic frequencies and make me comfortable singing you know what i mean it was the experience of it it was the experience of allowing myself the possibility through psychedelic work and then the corrective experiences of going and doing it and seeing myself improving over time. That's that's the beauty. That's how we get reprogramed. Yeah. I don't know. There's some pretty powerful magnets out there. I haven't read all the research. And from what I read, some of the ideas with magnetic therapy seem to be kind of out there. And I've spoken to some people who have bought all the equipment and are super disappointed with like all the

the magnetic resonancing, you know, and then other people that I've spoken to are like, this is this. But it's interesting to think about the different states of mind. And I guess if I shift gears for a moment here, it seems that in the world of psychedelics that there's a lot of talk about fragility and there's a lot of talk about wounds and trauma. Do you ever think we run the risk of like fetishizing fragility or weaponizing trauma? Yes, and I see it happening in the world to a degree. It's one of the things that allows, in my experience, I always speak like I'm an expert, but I'm always just speaking from experience, right?

And so I could have an experience tomorrow that changes my mind completely, and I'm open to that. But my experience is there's a lot of people heavily identified with the idea of being traumatized. it's a part of their identity. Yeah. And when something is a part of your identity, in much the same way that, you know, we can have defense mechanisms.

Like I had a big thing with anger for a lot of my life. And I was very identified with being an angry person. And that made me a real turd. And I just, you know, I had all these stories about it. And I was very identified with it. And once I could see and realize that, oh, this is a defense mechanism in me.

It comes up to create space around me when I'm feeling overwhelmed. And the dangerous feelings start getting triggered, right? And so it is, and once I saw that that's not me, but something my body is doing in a misguided way to try to keep me safe, then it was something that could heal. And so a problem with trauma identity is that then that's you that has to change and all sorts of survival mechanisms come into play. And things just can't move or heal when you're identified with them. It's the same way, but it's the same. It's with spirituality. It's the same with notions of enlightenment.

Once your ego identified with these things, nothing real can happen anymore. It just becomes another facade to have to upkeep. And it's, you know, one of the most powerful things you can do when you're ready to start healing is start looking at the ways that you're identified with your depression, how that's a part of who you are and not just something that's happening in your body. Look at the ways you're identified with your trauma. I also think that trauma is, it's not for me to say who has trauma and who doesn't. But my experience in watching the outside world and meeting a lot of people is sometimes painful situations are being called trauma when they're painful situations. And that doesn't detract from their importance and their need for healing. But it kind of makes it something to hold on to and again, identify with instead of, you know, like PTSD for real PTSD.

that that's usually got some level of existential terror of death involved. It's got some, it's an existential crisis too powerful to be endured. And so the body locks that shit down, right? It's locked down and put away. And that's why it's so hard to treat and why psychedelics like MDMA are so powerful in helping to treat it and it gives access. But, you know, lots of things are being identified as PTSD that probably aren't, but there's still emotional wounds that need help healing and that doesn't detract from them.

But it's just, I think it's important to start backing up from needing to identify and needing to label and just looking at ourselves as these organic, flowing, energetic mechanisms, and where is that energy stuck? Where is that energy not allowed to flow? Where is that energy defended so that these automated defenses cause so many problems in our lives? And that's where healing can really happen in my mind. Yeah. Yeah, it's, I love the idea of really taking a good look at defense mechanisms like anger and then realize, like it's a beautiful way to put like, then I realize it's something that came up that created a space around me. Like that, you've done some deep thinking to figure that out. You know what I mean? Like that's not a easy to figure out. That's, that's just the direct experience of going back inside myself again and again with the heartfelt. intention of healing without knowing, without putting any labels or markers on what healing should

look like. I'm just trying to blossom into an authentic expression of me. And so there's no identification with any aspect of what's in there. And there's no thought that I'm getting rid of bad things and adding in good things. I'm healing. Where there are defenses, there's a wound. is, you know, there's nothing to be defended, whether that's an insecurity or an emotional wound or deep trauma wounds, whatever that is, where when you have triggers, when you can be triggered, and when life triggers you, it's because you have a trigger,

and you only have triggers if there's something to be defended. And that's the learning, right? You go in again and again, and you just, with a very open mind, you look for what's true. What's true here? And it just allows this, that deeper wisdom within, just allows the blossoming to happen. I don't know.

Did I leave the track of what we were talking about? No, no. There's a great quote that reminds me of. It says, and the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. Yeah. Like, you know, when I think about that.

Yeah, that's beautiful, actually. Isn't it? It's a nice nin. Anias Nin, I think, is that quote. But it's so true. But when I think about what you said, that quote in blossoming and, and the manifestation of anger as a bubble around you.

It seems to me at that point, I could get stuck or I could see other people getting stuck recognizing, hey, this is a thing around me, but look what it's done to all these other people. Then I'm in my mind automatically goes into, wow, I've heard that person, that person, that person, that person, that person, that person, that person, that person. And how do you get unstuck from that?

You know, it's easy to start being critical of the self, being judgmental of the self, feeling shame for the self. Yes. In my own life, I've just owned it. I've just owned, hey, you know what, I can see that I was a real knucklehead there and I did not treat you well and this just came from my own pain and I'm so sorry. And that lets it go. That is I just, I own it.

I own it within myself. You know, I've had defense mechanisms bring out behaviors in me that have, that have been hurtful for other people a lot. And there were people who had similar things that raised me and their hurtful behaviors hurt me a lot. And I can have empathy for them because I can see how it works in me. God, there was something else I wanted to say and I lost it. I'm sorry. Oh, we were talking about the bud and two people to stay in.

And I've used the analogy of when I started medicine work, I remember those just heartbreaking images of people on 9-11 when they had the choice to stay inside and burn alive or have a few more seconds of life and jump when there's really little or no hope. It was terrifying, but that was kind of the options. And when I moved into doing deep psychedelic work, that was where I was. I was in a lot of suicidal despair, a lot of suicide ideation. I had had an attempt not that long before. And it was just luck. It was just grace that, you know, all those pills I took on half a bottle a whiskey didn't kill me, but instead I woke up and something in me decided to live. And it wasn't too long after that that I was introduced to my first guided psychedelic session with 5MODMT, which I talk about

in the book. And it gave me hope. It was, that was me jumping out of that window. And it's like, I don't know if this is going to help, but it's, I can't stay where I am anymore. And so I made that leap and I made that choice, I set the intention that heal or bust, right? And it was, it was again, Grace, that I was matched with a guide, well, not perfect and certainly not entirely qualified to hold a space for trauma. I didn't understand when I started with him the depth of the trauma that I had. In fact, when he talked about trauma, I'm like, you think I have trauma? I just didn't know. I know I'm screwed up, but, uh,

you know, I'm trying. He's like, yeah. Um, but it, you know, it was when I started that process and it was a painful process to move

into, but nothing compared to the process of staying in the bud that I was in, of, you know, deep self-doubt, deep pain, deep isolation. Um,

yeah, that was just such a beautiful quote. I'm surprised I've never heard it before. Yeah, it's, it's, I think it resonates with so many people because I think we're all in that butt

and there does come a time when the pain is okay you got to change. Yeah. And it's so bittersweet too because all you need and it's sort of the dark humor of psychedelics when I think about it like this. Like all you need is just that beginning

because once you start, can't go back. You know what I mean? It's like once you start moving forward like, okay, I don't do this anymore. And like psychedelics, like too late. You are just starting to follow this thing through. You're going to have to write it out, brother. That's one of the problems I'm seeing with the psychedelic gold rush

and all these people rushing out to being guides is there are a lot of people that are having one experience and not going back. And that's either because they didn't get what they needed out of it and they didn't understand it or they were terrified by it. And all of that comes back to how it was held, how they were prepared beforehand, the support they got after, the support they had during. And another problem with the psychedelic gold rush is it's pushing this narrative. It's one of those things that sounds great. And so it's just kind of through the telephone game evolved over time

that psychedelics are a magic bullet. You can go do this and you're going to be fixed. And, you know, people do get big releases or big shifts in perspective on a single dose of psychedelics. But for healing trauma, I have never one time met anybody that's done it in the magic bullet fashion. And that really sets people up for failure. And then it was, it was that messaging going around that really pushed me to start working on coming full circles because I wanted people to have a realistic idea, at least for me, what this really took, what this really looked like. Because if I had, if I had gone to a psychedelic experience in the despair that I was in, thinking that it was going to be a magic bullet and it was going to fix me, I would have been deeply disappointed. And I would have, I don't know.

know that I would have continued and I would have. Yeah, it's just, yeah, there's just, there's, there's so much, there's, there's just too many people setting themselves up as experts that have no idea what they're talking about. They're just, they're just rehashing the same old, the same old propaganda that everybody in the psychedelic scene wants to put out there as these can heal you. It's going to, and it's evolved into, it's magical, it's peaceful, it's beautiful. Here, come do this, do mushrooms in a yurt in Ecuador and you're going to feel all better. And it's just not how it works.

You can have powerful experiences in groups, but if you're genuinely working with treatment-resistant trauma, you need one-on-one help. And you need it to be safely supported in a proper environment. Yeah, it makes me think of Dennis Walker, the micropreneur, who's been putting out some fantastic videos like just talking. He's so funny. Shout out to Dennis, man.

We love you. You know, what do you think about when I think about the psychedelic gold rush, I have some reservations about people getting diplomas from certain schools. It's like on one level, I look at it and I'm like, well, at least they're trying to train people. But then when I see people graduating with a diploma and then they go to a retreat and the retreat is like the McDonald's of transformation, you know what I mean by that? You come down. You can get the number one package, the number two package. On the way out, you get an integration and a large Dr. Pepper.

and it's four days or five days or six days. You know, is that like the beginning of an industry standard? Is that the gold rush? Or what do you think about that whole system? You know, my hope for my own voice at the table and other people that understand this to the level that I do will outshine that. But it is that kind of thinking that makes me think that their real help is going to remain underground for a very long. time. There are people that have never done this. They're just seizing on an opportunity or, you know, they've had some big expansive experiences of Burning Man or whatever. And so they think

they know what's going on. It happens all the time. You know, people go and have, they'll go to Burning Man and have a big experience on 5MU DMT because there are camps that offer those. I'm not sure that I agree with that. But there are camps that offer those. And they're like, oh, my God, I need to share this with the world. And part of sharing that with the world is them offering the service. And it's, they don't have the depth of experience. They don't have the depth of experience working with trauma.

They don't have the depth of experience understanding psychological principles. But somehow they're qualified to go and offer this because they, they lump it under spirituality. They're lumping under shamanism. The people labeling the help of shaman. Yeah. Oh, dear God. Save us from them, right?

It's just so ridiculous. You're not a shamanism. shaman. Shaman come from long lineages and decades of imprimidship and deep understanding of their own psychology and how energy moves in the universe and in the human animal. And they don't have any of that. They just, they want to grow their hair out and have a beard and call themselves shaman. It's just ridiculous. It's so funny. It would be funny if people weren't genuinely getting hurt, either getting hurt from his health experiences or from missing their opportunity to heal. that's that's that's that's what kills me but these there are schools lining up to certify people to be psychedelic guides that do not require them to have any experience in psychedelics themselves there's a one up in Canada that does that and it's oh my god it just hurts my brain so much because nobody on that on that board of directors it's it's all it's you know if you don't require them to have psychedelic experience then you are pool of people who can come

you for you their diploma or their certificate gets much bigger. Yeah. But you're putting people out in the world that are radically misinformed on how this works. And they're just, I've met some. And, you know, God bless them. Their intentions are good. Their intentions are really sound. But it really, they've got this ironclad Dunning Kruger in place.

They think with a certificate that they know something and they don't know anything. They don't know anything because traditional psychotherapy. doesn't play in a medicine work session. It's not a conversation. It's holding energy. And if that person starts expressing something from a level that's deeper than they themselves have gone within themselves, they're going to be triggered on some level. And that person going through the journey is going to feel it.

Even if they stay calm, they keep the peaceful facade going, you feel it. And it profoundly shapes the course of the journey. And that's why only people that have. have done deep work within themselves should ever sit for somebody working with trauma. I mean, because once you get outside of the waters of where you've gone yourself, you're just pretending. Yeah. And you can't pretend.

There's no room for pretending in there. It's too, it's the difference between being a general practitioner doctor, you know, maybe that's a trip sitter and a neurosurgeon. Right. And the tiniest mistakes can have the mass of as consequences, right? And massive forward, the most massive consequences. consequences. And people just don't realize that. They just want to feel special and important. And they want a new way to garner more clients. And so they jump on this bandwagon. And it's, then it's truly dangerous. And people are missing their opportunity to heal. Yeah. All lifeguards should know how to swim. You know what I mean? Like, you should be trained in that. If you're going to help that person. Yeah, trained in that and CPR. All of them, right?

Like, you've got to know that stuff. And it's interesting, too, because I think the... Oops. I think a lot of the... There is another problem, too, because... I lost you for a second. Oh, how about now? Maybe I lost my headphones there.

Back now? Yeah, you're back now. Okay, okay. You know, it seems that a lot of people who go to get help, they want to see that certificate. They're like, hey, you're going to serve me medicine. Where did you... And rightfully so, they have questions about... about it, but where were you trained at? Where is your certificate? You know, and if you don't have a

certificate, but you have traveled the world providing medicine for people, you can look like someone, at least to the in an untrained eye of like, what do you mean you don't have a certificate? You didn't go to that school? You know, so I think of kind of on both sides a little bit, right? Well, you know, it's why in coming full circle, I spoke at length about what qualified support should look like how to identify unqualified support, whether they have a certificate or they're a licensed therapist or they're a PhD or not. And I even give a list of questions to ask just so you can start getting a sense of where this person's really coming from and how much they actually understand. Because the certificates, I mean, a certificate program could be a good place to

start and then move into your own deep work and then move into an apprenticeship under a mentor, that could be a path forward. You know, and the certificate gives you the very base minimum understanding to start building on from there. But without having done your own deep work, you're just an imposter. You're just playing at something that you do not have to actually give. And there is a very real chance you're going to hurt somebody. there's a very real chance.

I mean, I had worked with a guide who I still respect and love. But when we started coming around some of the more intense traumas that I had gone through that I didn't even know I had gone through, we started recognizing pretty quick that we were out of his depth because he would become triggered at times. He would close off. He would, you know, it wasn't big triggers, super subtle trigger, micro triggers. But when you're on psychedelics, you feel it. It's like the temperature and the room changes. You feel it.

And we were just out of depth of what he could hold a space for. And, you know, somebody that's never done any of this work, the whole experience is going to be like that. And if the person doing the journey has never had any other experience, they're going to just think this is what it is. And, you know, okay, this isn't going to work for me. It's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's,

in guided psychedelic work, when you're working with an authentic person who's done deep work that's qualified to do it, that can hold an open space, is there's a trust. And it's not a psychological, mental trust. It's a deep trust that they're going to hold this space, and you're going to be safe to let these very sensitive things out,

these very dangerous feeling things out. You're going to feel safe with them. And it's not always obvious when you don't feel safe. I mean, if you obviously don't, don't feel safe, that's a big sign to get the hell out of there, right? But there are lots of little micro signs of not feeling safe that just cause a closing off, a lack of accessibility. You just don't get as deep a work as you could have. And that's where the real losses happen with unqualified help, what people with paper certificates, but no experience, no real understanding of how this works.

They hold the space and the person has what feels like a big psychedelic experience, of course, because it's psychedelics, right? You know, take a fistful of mushrooms, something's going to happen. You're in need. Every time. You've never done MDMA before. It's going to be a big, profound day for you. And good stuff is going to happen. But what they don't realize is how much more could have happened if these invisible barriers hadn't been in the room because this person couldn't hold space for them.

And that's where the real damage starts happening is you never get to see what's really possible. You lose your opportunity to heal. because there's no space in the room for you to truly let this stuff out, to truly cathart. And it's a big part of it. And it's the part that the people that have no idea how this works have no idea is there. Do you think that that is one of the biggest differences between someone going it alone and group work is that you can really go deeper with group work? Or was that accurate? You know, people have profound experiences in groups.

I don't want to take anything away from that. And they are brilliant for big, expansive experiences, right? Because, you know, somebody next to you is having a really hard time. You can have deep empathy for them and that can resonate things in you and maybe you release things too. Somebody's having a blissful, you know, orgasmic, spiritual experience over here. And you can see you into that and you can open yourself even more. So group experiences are beautiful, but not for healing trauma. know. Again, it comes down to that sense of safety, that sense of trust that what's trying to come

out is going to be safely held and not further damaged, that its reasons for staying in there aren't going to be relived. You know, one of my big things was I was afraid for these authentic parts to come out because it might trigger somebody around me to do something inappropriate or, you know, they're going to lash out in anger or they're going to want to punish me or they're going to want to touch me or, you know, whatever it is. Totally. It's very real. And it's not even on a conscious level, but once I got deeper and deeper into the

work, I could feel those concerns at play. And so who you're around, if you're around a roomful of people going through a variety of different emotional experiences, the likelihood that you're going to feel safe enough to let that out is pretty small. And it's the same with unqualified guys. The likelihood you're going to feel safe enough to let that out is pretty low. You might go into a bad trip experience and have something terrifying come out and hopefully you've got good support to let it out. But to let it out in a systematic, safe, and even comfortable way with a guide, it's, that's where it really becomes beautiful.

It's where it becomes really powerful. I, you know, regularly in my psychedelic healing work, I would have big fear come up. And my guide would work the vagal nerves on the side of my neck and remind me to breathe and it would just become energy flowing. It was no longer this thing where I felt like I was going to be killed, but it was just this release of energy. And then we would get to the stuff underneath. And it's just, it's such a beautiful, incredible experience when properly held. And that's what I wish for anybody that's seeking this kind of help. That's, if I have any mission in regards to psychedelics in this way, it would be that.

It's just helping people understand what real help looks like. and that pretty much everybody that offers this thinks that they're offering real help. I mean, there are a few predators out there that sexually abused people in these situations. That happens. But mostly it's well-intended people that just don't understand how much they don't know

or they don't want to look at it. They don't want to think about it because this gives them such a powerful sense of approval and importance. And they're getting their sense of self from it. they're identifying with it. And it's, it makes it harder. It makes it harder for them to see and it makes it harder to let them see. I've had, I've had conversations with multiple guides, actually several guides about stopping

when I just start walking them through. Well, this is what you really need to know. And, you know, I know you, I know somebody who struggles with depression, struggled regularly with depression. And he was reached out to me one time and said, hey, yeah, I've got a friend coming over. We're going to give him some mushrooms because he's got depression and I want to help him with that. You know, it's one of those propaganda things. You take mushrooms.

It helps depression. No. I mean, you can have some relief. But I said, hey, you know, I appreciate that you want to offer this to your friend, but you yourself have not healed your depression from mushrooms. So what is it exactly that you're offering? Right. What is it that you're offering to this person other than just this idea that it's supposed to work this way?

you know, how much help are they really going to get? And so I was able to talk him down and helping help his friend to find real help. Yeah. But that kind of well-intentioned help is, is out there a lot. And it's, it's a problem. Yeah, it's interesting to think about, you know, how people that take the medicine sometimes confuse themselves as the medicine. In fact, that's something people should, that should be part of the course. You're going to go into school or you're going to learn or if you have a mentor, like that's a real. symptom of the of the medicine is like hey sometimes this thing makes you think that you're the medicine like you should be careful with that relationship right there right happens a lot and then the ego

the on the unqualified guides very often tend to feed on the approval you know because anybody that's gone through a guided session one of the first things you say is oh my god that's amazing look at your guide you say thank you I still say it to this day but I'm very very aware of the difference between them and the medicine but a lot of time a person going through it, attributes what they went through in part to the guide and the unqualified ones feed off of that. And so it becomes very important for them to get that approval. And so if things go well, it's about them. But if things don't go well, then they do the whole guru stick of, oh, you did it wrong. You didn't come in with clear enough intentions or you let fear master you or you should be a vegan.

You should be voting Democrat or whatever it is. They always push these weird agendas. And they make it about the other person instead of realizing that this person just wasn't properly supported. Have you ever gone through a guide that took the medicine with you and that didn't take the medicine with you? Or what do you think about those two particular scenarios? I have never done true guided work with somebody who is also on the medicine. Sometimes they'll have a very tiny, tiny sampling, like perceptual sampling, so they're kind of been the same groove as me. But normally they're sober and it's important that they're sober.

There is huge value in what I call co-journing. And I on occasion will co-journing with somebody when I feel like we have something to offer each other and we can safely hold space for each other in that space. But, you know, what can come up when you're approaching trauma is just too big for somebody to not be sober and understand what's going on? you know for so for for for treatment resistant trauma work for healing emotional warnings it's it's it's it's pretty essential that they are clear and they always understand because otherwise their own fear can get activated they're their own wounding can get activated and

that would just be oh god that would be a shit show for sure it would be terrible that would not be good for anybody um you know but i do co-journey and it's it's a profound experience. And I trip sit now and again. That I feel very qualified to do trip sitting. And so I trip sit for people on occasion and I co-jurney with people that I know very well on occasion. And that's always a really powerful exploration. But getting into deep medicine work, that's on a whole other level. Yeah. It's interesting to be at this time we're at now and see the things that are happening. And sometimes you catch glimpses of patterns. And some of the patterns, I feel I've begun to notice are this move on some level from healing to optimization.

You know, and it seems that at some point in time, you begin to see that some of the medicines can not only heal you, but they can help optimize you. And sometimes those words are almost interchangeable in a way. I know that healing has its own connotation and optimization has its own connotation. But what do you think about the future of psychedelics and optimization? You know, I always kind of cringe when new buzzwords are brought into something that's already existing. And there's a lot of layers to that. So not everybody has deep treatment-resistant trauma that they need to go slunking down into their inner world to earth. Right.

But for me, an optimized human being is somebody who is shining with their own authentic light. Right. And it's the doubt and what Carl Young would have called the shadows that prevent us from, you know, it's all the things that get layered on our lens that prevent us from shining that light in an authentic way. And that kind of house cleaning is essential. When people reach for, you know, spiritual expansiveness or optimization without cleaning house first, whatever that means for them, they're creating a bypass. They're bypassing the reality within themselves of the mechanations that cause them to be and exist in the world as they do, to show up in the world as they do. They're bypassing that. They're avoiding looking at the difficult stuff, which is, you know, the ego's prime directive, really, in order to grasp on to ideas of being elevated, of being optimized.

Can psychedelics help you to live more optimally? more, yeah, that's, you know, that's my experience with this just passion for learning and playing music that's happened for me. I feel like I am living a more optimized life because of that, but that's just something that authentically came out. I never could have predicted that. My capacity for learning has really expanded. And, you know, I've had interesting conversations about the neuroplasticity that's supposed to come from drug use. I don't, or psychedelic use. I don't know the truth of that, but I can hold so much more information for learning now than I ever could. I mean, I weekly take an hour of classical piano, an hour of jazz improvisational piano.

That's a lot of theory and technique, an hour of classical guitar and singing on top of running my business and doing my day job and doing my own work. and I just hold so much more information with a great deal of confidence than I ever could before. I feel more optimized in that way. And I've actually thought about trying to stretch it and just see how far I can take that. And so those kinds of things I attribute to having done all of this psychedelic work and having, you know, taken the internally imposed limitations based on insecurities or what was modeled for me or what other people demonstrated as possible and kind of learning to release. those and set those aside and just open into something else. And I'm very curious what else I can be,

what else I can do, what the even deeper authentic expression of me might be. And I don't know. I'm curious. You know, stay tuned. We'll find out together. It's cool. But it's just, I think optimization gets used as a buzzword to sell microdosing. And, you know, microdosing can be interesting. I've definitely had days where I got it right. I don't do it a lot, but I've had days where I got it right and I felt a definite mood lift, a definite energy lift, a definite creativity lift. But it wears off. Yeah. And, you know, but I've also had a very authentic mood lift and creativity lift and energy lift from having done a lot of the house cleaning in myself. And so these things that were sucking so much of my life energy aren't there like they were before.

And that's, that's, that's where, you know, you can, you can do it for real or you can play at it. And it just depends on what you're ready for, kind of where you're ready if that, if that butt is painful enough that you're willing to do the hard work to evolve into something more or not. And not everybody's there or maybe even ever will be. But for those that are, there's some really interesting options. Yeah. I love the way in which when I read your book, it reads as a relationship with psychedelics.

And it seems like that to me. The longer you have the relationship, it's like a marriage in a way, you know, where you sometimes you fight with it, you know, sometimes you love it. Sometimes you make love to it.

Sometimes it just gives you this inside of like, this nagging feeling of like, you're doing it wrong, you're doing it, you know, and like you have to fix it. And I love that idea of like, it grows with you or if you look at the Carlos Castaneda idea of an ally.

You know, it's sort of that same relationship there, but it's much more of a relationship than it is a one-time thing. And I hope people get that. Well, it's, you know, we were talking about my Italian sport motorcycle before. And, you know, my ability to ride it fast and well and accurately and, you know, and to really appreciate all the technical aspects of riding, you know, probably faster than I should, has improved greatly because I've had a lot of experience over the years.

I went and got some training. I did some track bike schools. And so, you know, my experience when I first started writing is very, very different from what I can get out of it now because I've developed a relationship with what it is to be on a motorcycle. And don't put weight into the handlebars. And it's all very technical and very subtle. And it's just this beautiful thing.

You're constantly breathing and relaxing and allowing and working with it. And psychedelics are exactly the same way. What you get out of your first experience or your first 20 experiences is not what you're going to get out of your 100th experience. And what you get out of an experience at a Grateful Dead, well, probably not Grateful Dead concert. You get the idea what you get out of the experience at a music festival is very different. night and day completely different than having it professionally guided and held when you're properly prepared before and you're properly supported after. It's a completely different thing. It's switching from riding a moped to, you know, riding a huge race bike. It's just a different

thing and the opportunities and the potential for growth get radically different. You know, when I read the book coming full circle and I listen to, you know, some of the stories we've been talking about today. What is the relationship? Let me go back for a minute. In reading some of the stories in the book and listening to some of our conversation today, it seems to me that you have found a way

to incorporate the stories that have happened to you, the stories that you've read, and find lessons in them. So that being said, is it, how much of that comes with age? Like, do you think, like, you know, if we tie that, there's just something to be said for being almost 50 and looking back on those stories and being able to pull the wisdom out of it. And maybe psychedelics help us do that. But those two things go together. How do you think that psychedelics and age kind of wind around each other or relate to one another? You know, I've thought about that actually quite a bit. I've wondered if I could take coming full circle and give it to my 25-year-old self.

how much of it how much of what I consider wisdom that I put into that would I have been able to absorb you know because you give a hundred people that same book to read they all come out of it with with very different things you know even even what's reflected back to me from people who've read coming full circle it it's all indicative of kind of where they're at in their own journey yes um you know and certainly somebody could read coming full circle and it's like well this is kindergarten stuff you know maybe they're just way past anything I've done so far and that's great I'd love to have that conversation with them but it's just it's just you know everybody meets it with where they are so if i could take the experiences i've yeah i don't know i i mean i would have loved to have started this earlier in my life

you know if i could have started this earlier and had this massive release i would have had decades more life not encumbered by a terror of living not a not just you know so afraid of imminent threat that i'm afraid to connect with other people. You know, I've spent most of my life in that shell. And, you know, but I'm 52 now, and I'm going to rock and roll as best I can with the time I have left as, you know, hopefully still got some, some miles on the vehicle. Age does play into it. Age does play into it.

And a, having lived with the struggle long enough, it's like, screw it, I'm going to jump. I'm going to jump and I'm going to go for it. Because, you know, this building is on fire and it is not going to sustain life for very much longer. I keep circling the drain on this and it's just, at this point, I've got nothing to lose. I'm going to try. And that's what made it work for me. Had I done it 10 years earlier when I was still super identified with being a depressed person and super identified with being an angry person and really, very hard on myself, I don't know.

Maybe I would have had a flash of insight that helped me open and, start moving. It's like it's just for me it worked when it worked. It just all came together. What is that old saying that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. It's like I feel like that's how it worked for me. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. I don't think I think about that idea of I wish I could have done these things 10 years ago, but you can't. You couldn't have done them because you weren't ready to do them. And the challenge wasn't great enough. You didn't have the courage. You needed all those things. Like you needed that pain. You needed that tragedy. You needed that those harsh words. You

needed that angry person to threaten. Like you needed that. And that's weird. In some ways, it's powerful to look back and be like, oh, that was a pretty big gift, really. You know what I mean? It's crazy to think about that, right? Yeah. It is crazy to think about that. I mean, you know, I've gone through some challenging experiences, especially early in life. And I I suffered greatly from it for a very, very long time. But looking back, I wouldn't go back and change anything. I mean, I wouldn't have my same daughter and grandchild if any one thing was different. And I adore them in ways that I didn't know it was possible to adore.

And I just, I just, I love being a part of that family. and I wouldn't have that exact thing, if anything. So it's all a gift. And if I had lived a middle of the road life with good enough parents and nothing that would cause me to be challenged, I don't think that I would have the depth that I do today. I don't think I would have the depth of understanding that I do today because I never would have needed to go deep.

There would have been no cause. So it's all a gift when you get on the other side of it. it's all a gift I almost cried when I might have shed a tear Shannon when I read the story about the ice cream cone and your mom man

how is that a gift well you know in the in the book I tell the story of I was probably in fifth grade maybe fourth grade I think it was fifth though and my mom brought home this big ice cream Sunday and I was sitting there and really enjoying it and really enjoying the crunch of the nuts and the whipped cream.

And I always love those little candy cherries on the top. And I was just enjoying it. And she waited until I was like into it. And she's like, hey, what happened to that money in my bathroom? And, you know, she worked side jobs and she had been squirling away money because she got paid in cash. And I'd been sneaking a few bucks to go get, you know, candy and whatever with my friends from the convenience store. And what made it so painful was. that she wanted me to feel really good before she confronted me with this so I could feel as badly about it as was possible. And it was just a massive betrayal. And, you know, clearly she had a right to talk with me about, hey, you know, this, I work hard for this and you're not entitled to

just help yourself. And, you know, that would be a normal healthy parent conversation with somebody around, with a child around this. But she really wanted me to feel good so that the blade could sink in as deep as possible when I was confronted and ultimately for this. And, you know, it's just, it was just one of many experiences that added to this profound sense that there's something about me that really triggers people. There's something about me that is not safe out in the world. And, you know, at the time, it wasn't a gift. And because of the accumulation of those things, I, like I said, I suffered greatly. But without it, I wouldn't have had the depth of work that I've been able to go through

and I wouldn't have the depth as a human being that I do. It allowed me going in and helping those parts to heal is what allowed me to find this authentic expression of me. And if I hadn't gone in and done the digging, if there hadn't been a reason to go dig, if my life had been just kind a bland and unremarkable. And for good or ill, I probably never would have had any motivation to change. I wouldn't have had any motivation to grow. I wouldn't have had any motivation to go deep. But I did. And for that, I'm grateful. I'm grateful that I could go in and really start finding me. And me finding me is given the people I've come in contact with permission for them to go find them. And that is a gift. It's beautiful. I,

after I took some time to think about it one of the things that I thought about was like what an incredible tool to give to a child like you're just giving a child like the sharpest blade or a knife and like how can someone and maybe this speaks to generational trauma

but she provided you with one of the most hardcore psychological techniques that people in positions of authority used to this day. You know what I mean? Like that is an incredible weapon. And for you to be able to wield it on some level,

or just be handed to it, you know? Like, that's a gift in a way. Because not that you need to, I bet you there's times in your life where you used it that way. But was there ever times in your life where you used that tool that way? I shouldn't say that I bet that.

I lost it a little bit. Tell me what you mean by tool. Okay. So she showed you, hey, I'm going to make you feel really good just so I can hurt you. Somewhere along the lines. No, I never, I was more of a blunt tool. Okay. My anger would come out and I'm just like, okay.

Smash. And then, you know, leave me alone. And so subtle psychological manipulation like that is a little bit beyond me. It's not really something. And intentionally hurting people was never something that was really in my toolkit, like being hurtful in order to win or to make a point. I mean, I'm sure I said it said inappropriate things in an argument or whatever that was meant to be hurtful. But, you know, everybody does that.

I beat myself up for that. I've owned it. But, you know, being my grandmother was, I'm pretty sure she was a sociopath. I mean, she was so deeply. psychologically manipulative of her children, which is in part what, you know, just put them into the places where they were that they behaved in the way they did. And something happened in her life to make her that way. You know, you can follow it back. And it's, it's easy to hate. It's much harder to find compassion. But as I find compassion for these people, I give myself more

compassion too. So it's a gift. But yeah, I never, it was never, I never psychologically torqued people like that. That was never anything I was driven to do or want to do. Again, my hurt would get triggered and I would use, you know, passive aggressive humor or anger would come out. Yeah, you know, like that. Yeah, yeah. That was more my schick, but what's really interesting is there's nothing I have to fight with anymore.

It's nothing that I wrestle with or I stop myself from doing. It's just it's not there like it was in me before. you know if i if i feel myself getting a little triggered or a little fearful or a little overwhelmed i've got many other tools and i'm not wrestling with those old coping mechanisms they're just they're five percent of what they were before they're in there i don't know that they ever fully go away but um maybe they do i'm guessing five percent and so it's it's just it's just it's just you can deeply heal and evolve for real not like you know typical self-helf help frenzy where everybody's excited and wanted to talk about it, but nobody actually changes.

Everybody wants to talk about it, but nobody actually wants to do it. And with this, it's the change is real. The healing is real. The personal evolution, the optimization is real. You just have to be willing to face yourself to get it. Yeah, I like what you brought up about, like the frenzy of people wanting to change, but not really doing the hard things to change. And when I think about that, I'm reminded of like the science we do today.

And let me give you an example of the science we do today that leads to medical procedures that attempt to help us. There's a lot of experiments that are done. I was talking to this young woman yesterday. And she said she worked in a laboratory. And they were trying to establish ways to help people with PTSD through modern science and pharmacology, I believe. and the way they began the project is they would breed mice and the mice had to be in a certain range

a certain way, certain age. And they would, the ones that weren't in that range, just kill them. And then the ones that were in that range, then you're going to electrocute them and play a tone, sort of Pavlovian in a way, right? Where you're conditioning them.

So you electrocute them play the tone. Electrocut them play the tone. Electrocut them play the tone until they get to a point where you just play the tone and they cringe up in the electric shock phase. Yeah, they give them this thing. And so, and then from there, they try to take away the reaction to that tone. They simulate trying to take away the PTSD through different methods.

But can we ever really solve the problem by creating the problem? You know what I mean? Like, it just seems odd to me. They're like, okay, let's kill all these mice that don't fit. and then let's electrocute them. Like, isn't the very premise of that just perpetuating the problem? You're not going to come to a real, the person that's doing the example is getting PTSD. You know what I mean? You know, it's the whole thing of believing that we can put a chemical in the body and it's going to change the brain in a way that changes our experience of life.

Or we can shoot magnetic waves through the brain or otherwise encourage changes in the brain that are going to result in a better experience of life, a less stressful, less challenging experience of life. It's a cart before the horse thing, right? It's just like, you know, the beauty of working with psychedelics in this way or any therapeutic process that's effective for you is that you have experiences that change your brain naturally. You change the way the neural connections are made

and the kinds of emotions that are triggered and the kind of state of mind and the perspective you have. Basically, you change your context. You change the felt context that you live in. So it changes how you feel and respond to it. I don't know. I have a friend who's an oral surgeon, and I was telling him about the psychedelic thing,

and he was trying to figure out the action on the brain of the psychedelic that causes these improvements. And I'm like, yeah, man, you've got it all backwards. You're going in and you're having an experience. You know, it's corrective experience therapy. There's a better exposure therapy, I think is what they call it, is it's been around a long time. You know, somebody that's afraid of dogs, you start off looking at pictures of dogs, and then you sit in the same room with a friendly dog, and then maybe you get to pet one and over time,

you change how your body responds to dogs in a profound way so that you don't have the same triggering that you did. And, you know, that's really similar to what you do in deep psychedelic work, as you're going in and having new experiences of yourself, corrective experiences of yourself, that change how your body and mind respond to ideas of yourself and your place in the world and how safe you are and any of that. That's really the work that's being done are just corrective experiences on these really deep levels.

Yeah, it's interesting. I think for me, my relationship with psychedelics as of late me has really taught me to see the fractal nature of the world we live in and I start to see it everywhere and when I think about depression or anxiety I'm reminded of the breakout room

I just do with my daughter have you seen these breakout rooms where like you go in there and have to solve all these problems and then you can make it out I've heard of them I've never done one sounds like fun they're really really fun

if you have anybody listening like you should find a good one and go do it they have different themes and my daughter and I have been doing a bunch of them And like when I'm in there, like I just started laughing the other day. I'm like, dude, this is just like being trapped in the past or trapped in the future.

You know, it's like, this is a physical manifestation, the psychological problem. Right. You're trying to break out of there. And I'm like, you know, my daughter knows me. It's so good. She's like, dad, to stop. Stop it. Because I just started laughing maniacically.

She's like, I don't want to know, dad. But, you know, it's so funny to think about how once you begin noticing. the problems you have internally, how you can see them outside. And then you can find that solution outside sometimes. And then you can go back in and fix it inside. And that's what I think of when you talk to your friend about when he's like, I wonder what mechanism that is. Like, oh, you got it backwards.

You know, it's interesting to for the way in which people around us can reflect solutions to our problem by seeing it in a total different way. You know, it's so weird to think about it from that angle. I love it, man. Well, that's the, you know, it's the whole thing with the insights that come up on psychedelics. Insights are a beautiful part. They're not, they're not the whole healing part. Right. They are a beautiful, really amazing gift that comes out of using psychedelics. You get these moments where you just get a shift in perspective and you see things from just a really different angle.

And sometimes that is the corrective experience. Sometimes just seeing it allows something to just like, oh. And sometimes it just gives you insight. that you can work on in therapy outside of the psychedelics. It's just that's the, that's the beautiful thing with getting a different perspective that you allow in. You know, when you're on psychedelics and you get this other perspective,

you're allowing it in. Whereas if somebody explains it to you, if somebody's playing therapist and maybe they got it 100% right, but they're telling it to you, then that's got to come in and go past your defenses and not really likely to land, right? But when you have a direct experience of that shift in perspective in psychedelics, it's really powerful.

It was crazy. One of the examples I used in the book was I was walking through the neighborhoods with a friend on MDMA, on ecstasy. And all of the sudden, I was probably in my early 30s, I think. And all of the sudden I had the first experience I have any memory of, of having love and approval for myself. I had never, you know, I'd been on ecstasy a number of times and I had felt love and empathy for friends that I was, with and whatever, but all of a sudden that was pointed back at me. And I'm like, oh, my God, people can feel like this. I had no idea. You know, that's, that's a beautiful kind of thing that can come out of using psychedelics. And, you know, there was a lot of work that had to come

after that to really make that my daily experience of life. But that is much more my daily experience of life now than it's ever been before. Yeah. Yeah, it's weird how, you know, I think it's, I think it's called the reticular activating system. Like when you, if you get like a motorcycle and then all of a sudden you see that motorcycle everywhere or you get a new shirt and all of a sudden you see that new shirt everywhere or you know you begin to notice things once it happens and that same thing happens and it is sometimes that little shift in a psychedelic experience like all of a sudden you begin noticing it everywhere and then it's like oh then you can incorporate it into your into your mojo you incorporate into your life or see it and other people sometimes in

some way yeah it's yeah once you see that difference i don't know how many people have that experience of being that disconnected from themselves hopefully not many Probably a lot. But, you know, once I recognized it in myself, I could start recognizing it in others as well and start seeing when people were really walled off from themselves or versus people who are open and, you know, free to be more authentic. And it's just, it's really interesting. It's interesting how it works. And now we're right back to an experienced guide, someone that can notice something in their journey gives them the ability to notice things in other people's journeys. You know, I often share the experience when growing up, that was molested as a.

kid. And in some ways you think like, oh, this trauma. But when you get older, you learn that all those internal things that you thought about, the night you laid awake, the why me, all these things that happened to you. And it could be any traumatic experience. But you begin to learn that all those things you stayed up late or worried or cried or traumatized about, they begin to coalesce into a point of focus that can be recognized in someone else. And that becomes. the gift. Like, oh, I see, oh my gosh, I know what happened to this person. Or maybe somebody close to you dies. And then all of a sudden, you recognize that pain in someone else. And you can become a catalyst for their healing. Like, you can become the person that just a pat on

the shoulder like, I know how it feels, man. You know, sometimes that's enough. But that person can really feel it. And then they start asking you, you do know how it feels. You know what I mean? Like there's a weird thing that happens there. Yeah. It says powerful, powerful. authentic empathy that opens, the more you can be honest with yourself about how you show up in the world and the things that have held you back. And, you know, like I'll see on social media, even on LinkedIn, I try not to be on there very much. But, you know, people talk about, yeah, I put out an opinion and all these haters came back to me. And I'm like, well, I don't see haters. I see somebody that's maybe overly identified with their point of view and, you know,

being identified with it. When somebody questions it, then they feel like they are being questioned. And so there's just a lot more compassion that can be held rather than, rather than, you know, reinforcing this self and other illusion that causes so many problems. Yeah. How about all these people? Look at all these people that are drawn to you. Are they haters? Are they drawn to you for something? That's a better way to look at it.

Like, these people want to talk to you. I haven't occurred. I haven't encountered anyone with strong opinions counter to what I'm talking about, to my talking point. I could. And if somebody comes at me like that, I'll, you know, I'll actually be very interested in their point of view because maybe there's something I haven't seen yet. And I certainly understand being triggered and being angry and being overlay identified with points of view. And so I can have compassion for somebody that comes in from that perspective. So I've learned that people who do a lot of writing are usually their toughest critics. When you look back at what you wrote,

Are there some parts that you will criticize yourself about? No. No. That book, if it had come out of my head, if I was like manufacturing information and trying to prop it up for approval, you know, if this book were a work of me trying to put myself out there so people could praise it and thus me, it would be very different. And I'd probably find lots to be critical about. But again, this just flowed through me. and I honestly don't have that much sense of ownership with it. I just, you know, this is this is something I'm putting out into the world.

It doesn't really have anything to do with me. You know, it's like somebody that paints a painting and they can be all arrogant about it. But, you know, if it's real art, it flowed through them and they should just have gratitude that they had that opportunity. I have gratitude that I had the opportunity to write this book. The process of writing was very healing for me, like that ice cream story. That was something that was still flashing in my mind over time. And once I wrote it out, it's pretty much stopped.

I mean, all of those things, it was kind of a releasing just saying, yes, this happened. This is something that happened. And it shaped the struggles that I had. But here, look, I also found a way to use it to become a source of strength, a source of depth, a source of wisdom that I wouldn't have had if I'd never plumbed those depths. How much of the success of this book was laid on the foundation of the previous book, in your opinion? Well, you don't know. If I were talking about the success of the book, I'd use air quotes. I'll say it.

I think it's incredibly successful. I think it's been put out to so many people. The people that have reviewed it have been unbelievable. The way in which you've gone about getting it out there and stuff. And the stories in it and the way it's totally successful. But that being said. You know, for how people reflect back to me, how it affected them and what they got from it, for that it feels very successful.

you know book sales numbers you know it's slow getting started but being a pretty much no name author with nonfiction that's to be expected and it's building over time and that's fine it'd be nice to recoup what i've invested in all of this but i as time goes by my hopes dwindling on that part but that's fine because i'm happy to have put this out in the world i've honestly i think i've probably given away as many or more books as i've sold and that's fine too it's just i i want it in the hands there's an organization that does work with veterans and I sent them a bunch of both books, you know, because one's very good for just garnering self-awareness. Present Moment Awareness was just like the beginner's guide to being more self-aware at once, right?

And then coming full circles, when you're seriously thinking about getting into doing some psychedelic work, it's there to help you have a realistic understanding to move into that as empowered as you can be to get the most from it. and you know if it does that for some people then definitely i consider it a success yeah i would in those in that when i think a success i would put you among one of the most successful authors someone who goes out of their way to create change in the lives of people who need it most like that to me is an author that's beautiful like that is i think that is how people should look at it Like if we look at things strictly from a monetary point of view, it's an empty container. You know, I mean, it's a, it's, it's coming from the wrong spot, in my opinion.

And the real, like, I have tons of Terrence McKenna books, but I don't think any of them were ever bestsellers. You know what I mean? Like I, so many of the people I love, maybe didn't even become as famous as they are, or maybe they're not even mainstream names. But like I just, I'm looking at Marshall McLuhan in my, in my library right here. and just, you know, so many incredible people that, Merci Eliyad and just all these people that have changed my life because of the books they wrote. And they never did it in order to make money. They did it to change perception.

They did it because it flowed through them. They did it because they wanted to help. And that's a way better definition of success, man. So I'm thankful for it. I think it is successful. I just learned something interesting yesterday. Somebody who has my book in their hand. And I'm really looking forward to hear.

they have to say about it. It's Deepak Chopra. Yeah. DeFon Choper has my book in his hand right now. A good friend of mine gave it to him. He works with Deepak on his retreats and he's going through it now. I don't know if I'll get a written something or another. I hope so. That'd be so cool. But I would just love to know how it lands with him and what he thinks. And it'd be an interesting guy to get his perspective on this work because he's been moving more and more into the psychedelic space and supporting the psychedelic space. I would, yeah, my friend there, I, I, forget where they are. It's not here, but he said, yeah, Gipak was asking if you were here and if you wanted to have dinner. And I'm like, no. I don't live too far from his, his North County,

San Diego place here in Salana Beach. So maybe, maybe that invitation will come back when he's back down this way. Look, that's the definition of it. You know, I mean, if that's not success, I don't know what is, getting to sit down and break bread with people with whom you admire. And, Hey, this book was important. That's phenomenal to me. I really admire it. Shannon, this conversation is blowing my mind, man. I'm really, really thankful that I got to spend some time with you today.

Likewise. I've enjoyed this. Yeah, it was really fun. And I love the book. I think people should go out. The links will be in the show notes. But here's what it looks like for people that maybe that, I don't know, people can see that here. Coming full circle.

It's a tremendous story. And like I said in the beginning of the show, I think it breaks from the dialectic we're so, the dialectic of modernity of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. I think it's this new beginning of a new sort of breakthrough where you're having lived experiences intertwined with thesis and antithesis and bringing forth a full circle of synthesis. But where can people find you and what do you got coming up, Shannon? You know, I'm taking it kind of easy and slow. I'm doing cool podcasts like this.

I'm giving a talk tomorrow to a group of therapists that are interested in being integration therapist, so, you know, doing the preparation and integration after. And so I'm going to just, you know, have a conversation like this with them and what I think is essential for that role. Hopefully that's helpful. I've had a lot of people asking me if I was going to the Maps thing in Denver, and that's not really my scene. I'm not big on big crowds. Though if I were Rick invited to speak to something like that, I certainly would. That I would enjoy. I've given presentations on other topics to very

large crowds and I enjoy that process. So it would be fun to teach in that way and to share in that way. I'm very open to doing workshops and seminars and things like that, being of service where I can with just the same kind of conversation. I'm being pulled to do some more writing, although I'm so exhausted from this one. I just want a little bit of time. Hopefully it'll whatever that energy is that's wanting to be written will give me at least a few months before I've got to start all that up again.

But yeah, I don't know. I'm taking it a day at a time. Do you ever feel that maybe sometimes psychedelics or the writing process, it leaves you alienated? I've never felt that way. I've felt both in the sharing in the book. I think because the book just came from such an authentic place. I mean, I really let myself get out of the way.

I don't know if you noticed chapter 42 in the book or not. Did you see that part? I couldn't tell you what it is. It's like right at the very end. The book goes chapter 18 and then chapter 42. Surrender and allow. surrender and a lot. You know, the book is laced with

pop culture references of stuff I love as a kid, Star Trek and Star Wars, and there's some Monty Python in the Holy Grail. And in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, you know, they've built this giant supercomputer and they said, what is the answer to everything? And millions of years later came back to him, 42.

And I was getting a massage, actually a ketamine massage, and I just had this idea for chapter 42. So what is that, what the answer to everything in regards to using psychedelics to heal is to surrender and allow. So I just, I just had a lot of fun kind of putting my sense of humor and my love of pop culture references in there. That's good. I love your quote from Abraham Lincoln about the internet. Yeah, it was important because, you know, people take insights so seriously. And it's like, look, it's just another piece of information and you don't know what's influenced it. So, you know,

I didn't invent that quote. It's been around for a while, but Abraham Lincoln's saying, never believe quotes you see on the internet. You know, don't believe everything your insights tell you, but, you know, just stay open to the wisdom and see what you can learn.

And that's, that was what that was for. Yeah, I love the way you lace the humor through there. And I think that's a big part of psychedelics. It teaches us to laugh at ourselves. It teaches us sometimes in a dark way of like, okay,

you know, to laugh about that. Yeah, yeah, yes. Just deep humility. Yeah. It's so freeing to learn humility, to not learn it because that sounds cognitive. It's to allow humility to not need to be so rigidly structured and rigidly perceived.

And just it's just humility comes with authenticity, I think. There's no need to prop up anything or to be perceived in a certain way. It's just allowing and then trusting that those that like what it is you're emanating are going to be the people that come. into your circle. And that's how you get real family. Yeah. You know, I heard this quote on a lot of times in this space, you'll hear the term ego death thrown around in certain ways. You know, and sometimes I think maybe a better description is like ego integration, right? Like what does your take on this whole ego death or is there ego integration or, or what do you think about that guy's stuff? All right. So ego death is

when you're normal, you know, because your ego is just the story that's written into your physiology of who you are and how life is and how things feel to you and what they mean. It's all layers and layers of meaning. And that meaning isn't necessarily true. You know, like the example with somebody who's fearful of dogs, they have a meaning in them that dogs are dangerous. And so this creates an emotional response of fear and panic when they see a dog. But that meaning can be changed through corrective experiences in psychedelics and out. So ego death in a psychedelic experience is when all of that story temporarily gets suspended. All of that story temporarily gets shut off and you see things with this incredible clarity.

That's when I was talking earlier about 5MEO DMT and I would see things go clearly, but I would know I can't bring it back because I'm know my ego is going to come back together and blind me from that truth. But usually the ego doesn't come back together quite as complete as it was going in. And, you know, that's the whole, I don't know if it's a real thing or not, but the whole myth of enlightenment is a person who operates from a position of seeing that clarity all the time with none of these blinders in the way. You know, maybe a human being can get to that. I don't know.

It's a nice story anyway. It's something to shoot for. I mean, if you're always shooting to see things more clearly and more authentically, how is that not good? So, yeah, so ego death experiences in psychedelics can be really powerful. I've had massive releases happen and massive shifts happen after ego death experiences. But I find that those are the experiences that tend to kind of fade. They show me that it's something as possible.

You know, I gave a story in the book about fear of needles. And after a big ego death experience, I went and got a root. now done and I didn't have that fear of needles, but then it came back a few weeks later. But over time, it showed me that this body can operate without a fear of needles. It's totally possible. I've seen it happen. And so it gave me something to work towards. And it's just, it's all in how you look at it.

You know, another thing that was really unique to your book, and I think your experience, is the depth of different psychedelics that you have, have a relationship with. Like you have a relationship with a lot of different kinds. Like how did that come about? Was that like just searching and looking for things? Or how did that come about? You know, that really started with my first guide, you know, because we started with 5MODMT.

That was the experience that let me see that true healing can happen, that I could really reach into these deep places and something real could happen. And then we worked with MDMA. And then we worked with MDMA with some. 5MEODMT on the come down, which is very much since then, every journey I work with 5MEODMT on the way down. I see. It's just like I spend the whole time catharting and opening and then I'll just feel something

living and alive and with pressure to it that's wanting to release. And I'll use the 5 and I'll almost always get it. And so we also started layering in some ketamine. We would do ketamine before we started working with the other. medicines, whether it was MDMA or he also introduced me to 3MC, which is very similar to MDMA, but it's way more clear. You stay way more clear during the experience. And the ketamine is really, really good with that because it's super speedy, so the ketamine

helps kind of calm the down. And also doing it ketamine with mushrooms. And then just in the last several months, I've started working with GHB. and GHB is a for me accessing sadness has been something that's just been almost impossible my whole life for me to cry is rare I mean in the bulk of my life for me to have like a real cathartic cry you can probably count on your fingers outside of medicine work in GHB I just wanted to experiment with it and see what it had to offer and so I would I would do some and then I would queue up some sad movies like one was a falter in our stars And I cried like a friggin' baby. I mean, just giant tears coming down. Just, it was great. It felt amazing.

It's like, why can't I do this all the time? But it showed me that it gives me access to that like nothing else does. And so I've been doing GHB as the base instead of ketamine and then layering on mushrooms or layering on MDMA or 3MMC and using that to help. So the different medicines, they're different shape keys. They open different doors. So you can come at these places from different. trajectories. You can come at them from a different place. And so if one thing doesn't give you access, or maybe it moves you closer, but you want to try something different, you know, MDMA one time,

mushrooms, the next, add in some five-m-o-D-M-D-MT, you're just, you're finding the doors, you're finding the keys to fit the locks. And I've got, I developed a really powerful, intuitive sense of it. And my current guide just lets me choose what medicines and what doses is I'm doing every time we work together. Now she's really developed a trust in me to know what I need. And sometimes she'll show up because we do the work here. I've got a room that's purpose built just for doing psychedelic work. That's so awesome. Yeah, right?

It's pretty cool. My friend's called the launch pad. Yeah. But it's just purpose built for it. And so she'll show up. And every once in a while I'll be undecided. So I'll have both sat out. And we'll just talk about it and we'll come down to the one that feels best.

And that's what we'll work with that day. And it's never not been a big, powerful experience in that way. That's fascinating. I got, you know, on, you do hear about this term layering from time to time. And, you know, it's, it does seem, it seems like you have a lot of experience with that. Do you, and you say it's a different trajectory, you can access different things. But in your opinion, do you think that certain molecules may fit certain sorts of, um, uh, issues better than other ones or, you know, my,

Might there be a protocol for certain types of therapy with certain signs of molecules or is it just independent per person? You know what? I don't know because I only have my own experience in approaching this way. For somebody who is kind of wired together like I am and they process things like I do and there's somebody that, you know, dissociates and gets up in their head all the time. And, you know, if they approach life like I do, then they could probably use the medicine protocols. that I use to get access. Like this gives better access to sadness. This helps me navigate terror better or fear better.

You know, the last session, it was really good, but it felt like it really wanted to go deeper. So this time I'm going to switch to mushrooms, which those little dudes, they get in there. Keep your hands and feet inside the car at all time. So right, stop because it's going to be an adventure, especially if you do with ketamine, because it just opens you so much more deeply.

Holy crap, does it open you more deeply? I've been surprised at what came rushing out of the gates. But it's good because you've got a good guide and they see what's happening. You know, she'll come over and start working, massaging the vagal nerves on my neck before I even realize that she'll see me starting to tense before I even realize that I am. And she's just honest. She's just in tune with me and knows what to do. And it's such a beautiful relationship.

That's why I'm such a big advocate for properly qualified. as I've gone on ad nauseum for probably qualified guides. Yeah, you know, like one of my favorite books on psychedelics is Rick Strassman's DMT and a spirit molecule. I love all the lead up to it. But when he starts giving the case studies of what people went through, like it's mind-blowing because it just exceeds the imagination, you know, and it's a glimpse into the mind of the other that is still tied to us in some level.

And it sounds to me some of the experiences you're having, like that, would make for an incredible book, I would love to read some of the experience, the relationship with terror tied to mushrooms and ketamine, you know, like, I think that they're, have ever thought about, like, just releasing some of the actual trip reports or, you know, writing stories based on that? I haven't. You know, it's trying to describe a psychedelic experience to somebody who hasn't had one. And, you know, like I said in the book, and I don't know where this quote is from, but it's like trying to describe the color blue to somebody that's been blind since birth. Right. I mean, it's just not something they can relate to.

And I tried my best to convey in coming full circle what it's like to do this with medicine work. Because in medicine work, the trippy aspect becomes far, far removed secondary. It's just, it's, I mean, I did eight grams of mushrooms. And that was a big day. Oh, my God. That was a challenging day. But I never noticed any visuals the whole time. I never noticed any visuals the whole time.

It was when we were done and we're walking out. And I've got this big picture window where you can see hills off in the distance. And they look like a swirling Monet that I realized that I was still affected by mushroom. But when you're in medicine work, it's all about emotional expression. It's just the felt sense in your body of what's moving and what's expressing and what's coming out. And once that does, what comes next. next. That's why it's so fundamentally different than an expanse of a recreational experience of psychedelics where the trippiness is the point. It's just, it's really, it's just about doors

start opening. When your, when your intention is to heal and allow yourself to experience whatever you need to to get that healing, it's just layers and layers of doors opening. It's, it's opportunities to release. Yeah. You know, when I, when I, sometimes when I, I've had, I've had, I've had, a tremendous amount of experience in, for me, like when I do, when I do a large dose of mushrooms, it'll be me alone in laying on the bed and just darkness, you know, and just thinking. Yeah. And like, you get this crazy time dilation. And then you find yourself at a place of surrender where you finally can try on ideas or

you can be honest with yourself. And, but there have been times where maybe not in that state. where I found myself in front of profound geometric images. You know, sometimes they're moving. Sometimes they're not. And I've been thinking about those times a little bit. And sometimes I wonder, are these geometrical images a form of language? You know, when I think of symbols and imagery and language,

and you start thinking about, wow, it's so connected over there. And then it gives you this insight of, I wonder if that time when I was seven, when my mom told me this thing is how I should be. thinking about this relationship. You know, like it just gives you this weird insight to different connection. Have you what is your take on on psychedelics and symbology and relationship? That's an interesting question. I don't know what all shapes the things we see.

Right, right. You know, it's, um, sometimes it definitely feel, I'll say this. I think it's all relevant. Sure. It's all relevant. It's all, it's all an expression on the theater. You know, your mind. theater screen, right?

It's an expression of... It says, you know, you got the movie screen up here. Yeah, totally. And it's an expression there. And I don't know if it's just the experience of seeing it. Or if it's just that energy moving and expressing in that way. Or if it's just entertaining. I think my experience has always been that the symbology is all relevant to what

ever is moving in me at that time. And it could be a clue into where I... I could open more, what I can express more. You know, I've had imagery turn like dark red when fear was starting to become a real issue, but then when that releases and things become calm, it becomes like a neon light blue. You know, it's just, it's just, I don't know. I'm endlessly fascinated by the psychedelic experience. And I'm very curious what else I can learn from it.

What else, how can I take this deeper? Where can I take this further? You know, maybe that'll be the next book when I figure out how to have force powers or telekinesis or something. Yeah. Who knows? I don't know where it goes. I'm curious.

Nobody else is talking about it. There's a lot of postulating, a lot of, you know, a lot of supposition on where it all goes. But I'd kind of like to go see for myself. I think there's some truth to being able to. And this is a poor example of explaining it, but you can read people's minds. Not that you can look through them and see exactly what they're thinking. But you can empathize with people enough to understand some of the experience they're going through. And if you can really be in touch with someone else, you have a really good chance of speaking their language, so to speak.

So there's not much as reading their mind is speaking their language and speaking to them and identifying with them. I think that that's almost like a superpower in a way. You know, as I've become less defended, I've been able to be more open and empathetic with other human beings. And so that that's been a big bonus, a big, a big, a big, a big, part of the evolution that I've gone through. Although in years past, I've had a couple of experiences with a buddy where we were doing, I think they're called Hippie Flips now where you mix mushrooms and MDMA. And we were walking and talking and he thought something and I responded to it out loud.

And I was looking at him because his mouth wasn't moving. And I mean, granted, we were we were winging pretty good. So it could have all been a mental creation, but we both had the same experience. He's like, I didn't say that out loud. And I'm like, whoa, and it's happened more than once, and I can't explain it. And again, it could have just been we were tripping balls and that's just how it's seen. It's hard to say, but it was a pretty, it was a pretty profound experience. And I've spoken to other people who've had similar things happen where there's this communication, but not verbal.

And it's, I don't know. I just find it all so interesting. It's really opened my mind to there's likely a lot more going on than I know about. so I need to work really hard to not think I've got this all figured out. Yeah, maybe it's a glimpse into the future of communication. You know, I mean, I think it was philo-Judeus who said that the next form of the logos will be beheld instead of, you know, it'll be a language that's beheld. And like, it would get away from a lot of miscommunication if we could communicate that way. Oh, man.

I don't know. We need some new discipline or it'd be like that movie with Ricky Jervais where nobody can lie. Whatever you're thinking is out there. It's probably a better world. There probably be a lot of fights until we got used to it. Yeah, maybe that's why we're not ready for that. We went through the roof for a couple of years, but then it got better. I don't know.

You know, on the periphery, I hear, I think, I think his name's Andrew Gilmore. I think he's written a book that's beginning to talk about mapping the landscape of the psychedelic environment. Have you heard anything about this? I heard Joe Rogan talking about people that are trying to map the landscape of the NNDMT environment. Okay, okay. And that's something I actually really, really want to experience. I'm holding out a secret hope that I'll get on Joe Rogan to talk about this stuff. Yeah.

And maybe he'll invite me to go do some NNDMT because he's really big on it. But, you know, that's just one of those fantasies. We'll see if it actually happens. I'll just put back to the universe. Yeah. Joe's great a tremendous guest right here. I think you learn more from him than as much as anybody you've ever spoken to. It's interesting.

And they want to do D&T with him. Yeah, absolutely. That'd be pretty cool, actually. Anyway, I heard him talking about some people that are trying to map the NNDNT world. And that's super interesting. I don't know. Mapping the actual psychedelic space. I think it's a co-creation with the medicine of you and where you're at at the

time and what's trying to move. It's always different. I mean, no two journeys for me have ever been the same, especially in medicine work. It's always different. It's always, you know, there's always trepidation before and wondering if I really want to do this, you know, but that's how I know that my intentions are really trying to move me towards something real. I mean, it's gotten easier over time at first.

It was really hard. I had serious conversations with myself about just not showing up. Yeah. But I'm glad I always did because it was always. worth it. But the, yeah, the inner landscape is just always different. It's always evolving and changing. So it's, I don't know about mapping it.

Yeah. It's weird to think of that idea of mapping it. You know, first off, a great quote, I think it was McKenna's quote that said, when it comes to doing work with mushrooms and on the topic of taking mushrooms, he said that if you take an amount and then you don't. say, holy shit, I took too much, then you haven't taken enough. You know, it's fascinating. The edge of your challenge is there's value to that as long as you're not traumatizing

yourself, as long as you've got the internal resources to hold space for whatever wants to come up and you've got some support, maybe a sitter to help hold for whatever wants to come up. Because, I mean, as somebody who's gone through levels of terror that I didn't know it was possible for a human to feel. on psychedelics as a part of the healing process, it's not something you want to be unprepared for. And so, but yeah, I'm all for pushing the edge and pushing the challenge and seeing what else a person can learn about themselves in a safe and supported way. Yeah, it's, it's interesting.

Like, there's been times where like large doses, like, sometimes I'm afraid to do it in a group because like for me, it's not uncommon for me to be on the floor rolling around making noises completely naked. like, ah, you know, breathing out crazy. And I'm like, probably shouldn't, it's not enough

when my wife was like, George, never mind. You know. I don't want to know. You know, you're right? Yeah,

okay. Yeah, groups, groups are groups, man, and again, I don't want to bash groups, but just my own experiences have been,

you know, profound, expansive things can happen there. But if you're moving deep, traumatic material, it could, it could just be a force multiplier for the,

the difficulty too, you know, because everybody feels what you're so sensitive and everybody feels what everybody else is feeling and it could, if it's not held well and they can't hold a good space for everybody there, you could, you can have some people in some real trouble. So it's, yeah, I'm, I would like to have some, I would like to go back and explore ayahuasca some more. And that's always in a group. And I'm looking for an authentic facilitator that's got long time in an internship under an authentic, you know, somebody who really does, because there's just so many knuckleheads that go and they have a few of these experiences and they just start offering them as a guide. And it's all the same problems I've

gone on and on and on again today. But now you're in a group and now you're trying to hold a group of people together and keep them from going into a bad trip. And it's just, it needs to be held well. And the one time I did it, it was powerful. And I learned a lot and a lot started moving, but it was, it was difficult. It was, it was difficult. I was just not recommended for, you know, trauma processing usually. But I do want to go back and explore with how medicine has to offer in a group. Yeah, I've been speaking with, I think I have her book earlier too, Dr. Jessica Rochester. She's the Mahadrina of the Santo Dime Church in Canada. Like, man, And you'll know this, but sometimes you get in the presence of someone where you're like,

I'm just going to learn. I'm just going to try to ask the right question. I'm trying to be super respectful. And I'm going to try to, you know, and it's, she has a presence about her that is that only comes from having a relationship to something sacred. And like I could say that without any, any questions or whatever. It's just like, wow, they get it. Yeah, she actually sent me PDFs of her book. We traded books.

Oh, yeah. And I've been wanting to get into them. I started the first one and I'm like, ooh, I need to clear the decks if I'm going to take therapy. Totally. Totally. This is some real talk and it's getting into collective unconscious. It's getting into, you know, stuff that 10 years ago I would have pooed on in a heartbeat,

but I got a very different perspective on it now. And I genuinely want to go through her books. I just, I need to be in a place where I can really devote some mental capacity to it because I don't want to treat it lightly. Yeah. Yeah. She's an interesting human. I agree.

It's so fascinating to see the people in this space. I've ever gotten to a spot in a psychedelic state where you try on ideas that scare you? Yeah. Yeah. I have. You know, it's not uncommon for men who are sexually abused by other men to have deep concerns. about their own sexuality, to have fears about the fears about what it means. And, you know, I had direct confrontations with a lot of that in, in psychedelic work.

And I found my fear of the answer so potent that I couldn't even get the full question out. Wow. Am I, am I a gay man? Oh, my God, am I? And it wasn't until I was willing to let the answer be whatever it was that I was able to fully ask. the question and no, there's nothing wrong with somebody being gay. It's just not how I happen to be wired. But it was incredible, the intensity of the fear of knowing the answer to that question that I had in me and I had no idea. Things like that. I've had really uncomfortable direct confrontations with itself. It's like, oh yeah, you know, you're being a little bit of a know-it-all and you're a little inflexible when you're thinking. And even around stuff,

around this book, I've had sessions where I've gotten really intense clarity and super uncomfortable had to work through some shame around it. I'm like, you know what, man, you're you're stating things as absolute fact when there's lots you could still learn. You need to let in your touch a little bit. And, you know, it's just, that's just part of it, right? You face the uncomfortable parts and you learn and you grow and you let go. You surrender and allow you evolve into something greater. Yeah. I think sometimes surrender gets a bad rap in the West. And I know at least for me, the way in which I've interpreted until even recently is like a weakness. You know, when I think a surrender, I think of troops running away or not fighting or not having the courage.

But it can be, and that can be one definition. But I think that there's a better definition for it that allows you to grow. Maybe that definition is something along the lines of being able to, yeah. What do you think about that? Yeah. Surrender is fundamental in growth, whether you're doing psychedelics or not. but it's especially. That's why, you know, my chapter 42 is surrender and allow. And the words are really interchangeable. They're just two ways of kind of saying the same thing. But you, you know,

it's so easy to hear a resistance to feeling. It's a resistance to knowing, a resistance. And you breathe and you allow and you get the energy to just start flowing. And all of a sudden, it just comes through. Just, you know, like the questions around sexuality, I couldn't ask myself the question. I couldn't allow myself to answer the question because I was so terrified. of what the answer was. And that only comes from, you know, having grown up in rural Oklahoma in the 70s and how gays were referred to back then.

And, you know, and based on what had happened to me, there were fears about it. And I didn't even know they existed. I didn't even know that the abuse had happened until deep into psychedelic work. And so it was when I was able to surrender and just say, what's true about this? It's like an honest evaluation,

an honest asking of the question. I even, even in between sessions, I even went and just looked at some gay porn. I'm just like, all right, honestly, does this do anything for me? I'm like, no, no, this isn't doing anything for me. And so once I could surrender to allowing the question to fully be asked, all the tension around this release, all the fear around this release, and it was a big unburdening for me.

And I don't know. Maybe I meet the right guy sometime, and I question all of this, but it's not something I'm drawn towards. I'm authentically not drawn towards it. I like the female form. It's kind of what works for me. And I'm very accepting of whatever works for somebody is what's right. So it's, I don't know.

You were asking about confronting things and not being able to ask honest questions or allowing them. And that's really what surrender is, is surrendering is allowing of the difficult things, the things would get the physical distance. and you resist the fear because it's bringing up terror and it's triggering the lizard brain, but when you can breathe and surrender and allow it to just flow, then you get to find out what you are fearful of.

And that's where the healing can happen. Yeah. And I think it speaks volumes about imprinting or society. There's that old joke that there's these two fish, these two young fish, and they're swimming through the stream and this other fish, comes by. He's like, how's the water, boys? And those two fish look at them and like, what's water?

You know, we don't understand, like, whether it's rural Oklahoma, whether it's Hawaii, whether it's San Diego, California, Southern California, you know, or wherever it is, sometimes we don't realize how much society has just laid on us, man. Like, how much of the conditioning. Yeah, man, you don't realize that until you surrender and you float to the top and you're like, am I this? What is that? Who is this? You know? And like that kind of, that's a newer realization that I got to. Like, hey, surrender is just realizing that you've been conditioned, man. Like, that's, that's a, that gives me goosebumps to think about. Like, that's a beautiful type of it. Yeah, it's letting, it's releasing the things you're identified with. So if you look at them and question them, right? Yes, that's a beautiful definition. Thank you. Well, becoming more and more authentic and whole is the practice of letting go of these identities.

It's seeing them, seeing them for what they are and being willing to not be that. I mean, I used to have pretty strong political affiliation, not strong, but I've, you know, I've definitely had a team. And I don't, I don't feel that at all anymore. I don't feel any alignment with any political ideologies at all. I just, you know, there's pieces over here and pieces over there and pieces I think that are being missed completely. And I just, there's, there's no team aspect of it for me.

And it's, it's the same with almost everything anymore. I don't other than team, you know, get safe, effective psychedelic resources for people that are trying to heal. There's nothing I'm super fired up about. And I just, you know, it's just more about flow. It's just flow through your life rather than having these strongly identified things that need to be supported and propped up and defend it against. And it's just so much work. It's exhausting. Way better.

Way better on the other side of that, letting that go. Yeah. Yeah. It is. Life feels better. Life feels better when you're not on teams. Yeah. Yeah, it's true.

And sometimes I feel like maybe everybody comes to psychedelics for a different reason, or maybe it's something similar, or maybe psychedelics find us. But it does seem that it really helps to transition for someone who is seeking their authentic self. And when we think about conditioning, you know, my story, one of my stories is that, you know, I was a UPS driver for 26 years. And I didn't realize how much my identity was mingled with that and intertwined with who I am. And I think that happens to a lot of people. We identify with what we do.

And when we stop doing that thing, we lose part of our identity. And that can be really harmful. It can ruin relationships. It can send us into depression. It can send us into anxiety. And then the medicine comes in. And you start becoming and having these realizations like, I am not. what I do, you know, or you start thinking of, I am George's anger, I am George's anxiety,

you know, but like, it's interesting how we, we identify with the patterns of what we do, right? Yeah, it's in my first book, present moment awareness, I talk about false selves. And I actually go down a long checklist asking somebody, are you, are you what you do for a living? Are you the worst thing you've ever done? Are you the best thing you've ever done? Well, you know, what is it that you're identifying with and realize that none of those are actually you? And then in coming full circle, I take it to a much deeper level talking about Jungian shadow work. Shadows and masks and the way aspects of the self get locked away, often outside of even conscious awareness of them and how powerful it is and what a powerful move towards authenticity it is

to learn how to recognize those and how psychedelics are a really potent way to do shadow work. Yeah, that's one of the next books that's really calling to me is specifically talking about doing shadow work. And I was thinking of maybe trying to align myself with maybe a therapist that is well regarded, like Jordan Peterson, perhaps, of working with shadows, but tying that into my own shadow work and then sharing my experience of what that's like to go with that and with professional shadow work support and doing deep medicine work around shadows and masks. You know, shadows are the things that are hidden from us, about us. A lot of times, somebody who's shamed around their sexuality, that can get partially or fully shadowed.

But then we also wear masks. And masks are the socially acceptable face we wear around others to fit in with our tribe because we're hardwired to live in our tribe, right? And we don't want anything that gets shunned. And so social conditioning is a big part of what makes shadows and masks and familial conditioning, specific idiosyncrasies of your parents or your caregivers. sets up shadows and masks. And all of it,

the more of that you have, the less authentic you feel, the more hollow you feel. And the more you can go in and really own that and grow and integrate the shadows of mass back into the whole of you, the more authentic and whole you get to be.

That's really well said. I think of Carl Jung's Red Book, you know, where, you know, where, and then he speaks about talking, or I've heard it put in a way, well, I'm kind of paraphrasing, but it's something along the lines, of making the unconscious conscious decouples you from the idea of fate.

You know, and it's, it's a pretty massive thing to think about, right? And it's kind of scary to bring it up. I actually use that quote in the book, that which we do not bring to conscious awareness lives in our lives in our lives as fate. Maybe you can break that down for people a little bit. Yeah, sure. So the things that get locked outside of conscious awareness and what Carl Jung called a shadow, So it's because it was in some way deemed by your psyche to be a threat to you.

It was deemed by your psyche. This is going to cause you your place in your social network. And we're hardwired to stay in our tribe no matter what. And it's a lot of the deep psychological distress people are feeling today is because of a loss of that sense of being in a networked in a tribe, by the way, I think. There I go speaking as an expert again. but that's my point out two on it. And I think social media has been one of the greatest perpetrators of that severing. But I'll save that soapbox for the next podcast.

But, you know, like for me, anger was a shadow. And, you know, I was aware of having anger issues, but I was unaware of having healthy anger, you know. And so being somebody who was targeted by unhealthy anger as a child, I didn't want that in me. I hated to look on their face when they were raging and just how they looked and I just didn't want that. And so a big part of my own anger was shadowed. It was shut down out of my conscious awareness.

And so I only knew anger is something that would explode out of me when it built up too much pressure or something that would come out passive aggressively. And there was no access to healthy anger. And once I recognized that and I went in and I found my anger and I started incorporating it back into the whole of me, unbuckling any sense of shame or wrongness around it, it became the guard of my sense of my own personal boundaries. But any notion of it using it in a punishing way pretty much evaporated. And it's just, you know, sometimes a gritty, you know, somebody tries to mug you,

you need aggressive anger to protect yourself. But, you know, grabbing a baseball bat and beating a person to a pulp after they're already, you know, to punish them is that's unhealthy anger. And it's so the more you pull these things out of the shadows, the more you become integrated and whole. And that's when life starts feeling truly purposeful. When life starts feeling, you start feeling your trajectory, even if you don't know where it's going.

Like I am definitely on a trajectory of sharing these kinds of experiences, of sharing growth. That feels authentic and whole and real to me. Same with playing music. That's just something I rarely play for anyone, but I love listening to myself play. whether, you know, whether I'm learning or not. And it's just, it's, you find these authentic things that you like to do

and you stop seeking out ways to fill the gaps with external stuff. And it's, I don't know, I'm a fan, but you can't tell. Yeah, no. Yeah, I, you know, I think some of the criticisms, I think Jordan Peterson, when he talks sometimes about young in the shadows, he talks about how dangerous it can be because, you know, doesn't that give life to things like Alistair Crowley's do what, thou will and if there's no real negative things you just do whatever you want as long as

no that's kind of that's kind of the mentality that keeps it walked away okay and certainly you have to proceed with caution you know you can you can start you can start uncorking your anger if anger is a shadow for you and you can explode in unhelpful rages you can but you know I was very mindful in the process I was very mindful of looking at it in the psychedelic space but then also being very mindful of it and just over time, you know, because things like anger are natural. It's a natural part of being a human animal. It's a, it's a natural part of, you know, our emotions are just the things that move the physical being through our environment to help us stay alive. It pulls it towards the things that are positive, moves us away from things that feel negative. Anger is something that

we used in defense of the physical self and in defense of the emotional self. And that could be as just as, you know, hey, I don't want to talk about that. You know, and if somebody keeps persisting, maybe it's a little more for him. I'm not going to talk about it. You know what? That's anger. That's anger coming to your defense. And that's a healthy use for anger. And I know I had fears that, oh, God, if I let my anger out, I'm just going to be this screaming maniac all the time. But it was only the case when I didn't have it coupled with my own deep wisdom, my own compassion, my own empathy for other people. When it had to build up and pressure until it exploded out, well, then there was no guidance for it at all. But when it's integrated in whole, there is guidance. You know, some people, it's a natural human thing to feel greedy. That's never really been a thing for me, but some people feel it very strongly. And when it's shadowed,

it comes out in very unhealthy ways. But when you own it, you can say, oh, man, yeah, I would like more of that. What can I do to earn that? You know, and it's just, it's just, these things stop being negative when they're embodied and when they're a part of the whole of you

rather than being fragmented off and vilified. Yeah. It's a great, and it's almost back to integration again, More like you begin to understand the helpful desires to, you know, bring forth your emotions and that they shouldn't be things you fear. There should be things that you embrace and use in a way that enhances the human experience instead of causes pain for it. And, you know, it's saying it in the way we're talking about it, it can seem overwhelming

to the uninitionated. Just know that, especially with psychedelic work, I've never been given more than I can handle. my own personal deep wisdom, my guides wisdom, my intentions for myself. I've had very intense experiences, but it's never been harmful to me. It's never been re-traumatizing to me when the experiences were held well. And I've only had one guided session where my guide was, it was my original guide where he was just, he was having his own problems and he was getting ready to leave for a few months

to go sort him out. And he just wasn't there for me. and it spiraled down into a level of terror that was a thousand times anything I've ever known before. And it was just, it was brutal. But normally in psychedelics, and especially in working with shadow work, these things just come out a layer at a time. It's just a layer and it accramates, acclimates, and then another layer and then some more layers. And you just work with it.

You worry it's a part of growth. Growth is uncomfortable. Growth is challenging. And it's part of what makes it so rewarding. Yeah. Would you consider that to be spiritual in nature? And what do you, how do you, or do you see that experience is spiritual in nature? And do you see a new sort of spiritual nature emerging in congruence with this psychedelic movement? From my perspective, it's evolved that it's all spiritual.

All of this, how the, you know, I keep using this lot, this, this analysis. of a light shining from me or a light shining from a person. And to me, that is the spiritual expression of me. That is, that is the expression of me that is connected to all that is. And the only things that feel separate or other than that are these ideas that I have about myself that make up the ego, you know, these concretized identifications with notions of the self. That is the ego, right?

And so for me, all movement back towards the wholeness of being back towards authenticity. is a deeply healing process, but also a spiritual process. It's a part of being whole is, you know, and I don't have firm ideas about afterlife or any of that. I don't know. I can say that I live in the mystery of it, but truth does exist. There is a truth to it and whatever that is.

And I'm fine to stay tuned in and just see what that is in my own time, right? And so I don't really, I don't, I don't separate. separate spiritual development from personal development. It's all one thing. I'm all one thing. And even that's an illusion ultimately because, you know, I'm all one thing that's everything. And I just feel that. It's not a concept. It's what I live with. But it's sometimes the stretch for spiritual development, again, like we talked about, creates a bypass. And you end up not doing the house cleaning work, the healing work, the self-awareness work, the shadow work that allows you to truly be spiritual, to allow you, that allows you to authentically express your spiritual nature

and, you know, clamping onto notions of enlightenment or how, how aware you are, what practices you do, anything you identify with is moving in the opposite direction. That's just, that's a pretty inflexible law of how things work. You're identifying with it, it's not real. I don't know, again, my point O2. Yeah. I think the, you know, the term I am is usually a warning sign, right? Like, I am. Whatever are we going to say is like, okay, if you say I am, you should just pause for a minute.

You're like, wait a minute. Yeah. I don't really ever unshackle all of that, but definitely thinning the weeds brings a profound level of relief in that person's experience of life. just trying to identify with less. And then you can't just say you're identifying with less because that becomes a bypass. It's going in and really going through the mechanisms that are doing the identification. You bring them out into the light of your conscious awareness. And if they're a lie, if they're an untruth, they start dissolving all in their own.

And that's how that entangling happens. It's the willingness, the surrender to seeing your own mechanations in a very truthful and honest way. Yeah. Have you noticed in your journey that your relationship with silence has changed? It seems to me when I look at the world and I look at my life, and especially since becoming into relationship with psychedelics, like this idea of silence has changed for me. And I've begun to notice how uncomfortable silence can be for a lot of people.

And if you're in a conversation with someone and you just stop for a minute, like in your daily life, if you're talking to a coworker or a family member or just, casual conversation. If you stop to pause, people automatically think there's something wrong and they want to fill that gap with some words. Have you noticed your relationship with silence kind of changing as you've grown older or used psychedelics? Well, I actually like long pauses in conversation. I can't really do it in an interview. Right. Yeah. But very often in conversation, somebody will say something and I just take a minute and see how that feels in my body or a second or two. I just, I try to allow not a knee-jerk response, but an authentic expression to come.

I like my solitude. I like, I like silence. I appreciate just being able to get quiet. And if I don't give myself that enough, I start building chaos. And then I got to go, you know, I think some daily mental hygiene of quiet time is good for anyone. And it's very, it's, it's illuminating. for yourself just to see how anxiety might creep in for you when you try to be quiet. It's a great way to learn.

It's a great way to start strengthening that muscle. Yeah. Yeah, it is very difficult for a lot of people to have. And I've been there. I've been there myself. Yeah. I've been there myself. There's no judgment.

It's just it's a sign that your inner world has a great deal of stress. There's tectonic plates with a lot of pressure building. And, you know, you can go in and learn to work with that and learn to heal it and open the space. and naturally relax from within or you just wait until it explodes and you do whatever it is you do when those things explode. It's all opportunity, right? Yeah.

In the book Coming Full Circle, you talk, you use a lot of knowledge and you talk about Maslow and Young. Are there some, it seems to me that those are people that you look up to and you've learned from. Are there some other, like, books or people that you would like to give to the audience that they may want to research to help them with their journeys?

Well, I want to be very upfront, though. Like in the last 15 or more years, I've read one book on self-help. And that was Andrew Colts, The Body Keeps the Score. That is a powerful book. If you're wanting to learn about how trauma lives in the body, that guy nailed it. I mean, he truly nailed it. And the audiobook is really good. It's there were, you know, in psychedelic therapy sessions, it's not uncommon to have movement, right?

arms moving your legs moving. I was doing these long drives to go visit my daughter, and I was listening to the body keeps the score, and I started having those releases while I was driving. I could stop it if I needed to, but I just relaxed and my arms just releasing and releasing. I'm like, holy crap, man, he is really pushing some buttons here, and so I would just breathe and allow.

And it's just a deep and powerful book from before that. Books that really informed my first book, present moment awareness, Pema Chodran's going to pieces without falling apart. Alice Miller's drama The Gifted Child, drama of the gifted child, if you're wanting to understand how trauma

lives in the body and manifests. It's a little dated, I think if she were able to re-release it today, she would update it a little bit, but it's a really powerful book. Daniel Siegel's the developing mind. That's like a textbook, but it's talks about the neurobiology of how the brain gets wired together through experience. And that was a really potent eye-opening book for me back in the day.

I'm trying to think of what else was really, the power of now was a big one, although I'm such a pragmatic soul. I found myself really wanting concrete examples in everyday life, and that's really where my book came from. It was kind of my answer to the power of now. and it's not anywhere near on the level of that book. I don't speak from the place that Eckert totally speaks from. It was just at the time it's the knowledge I had

and it's what I felt I wanted to express. Oh, healing the shame that binds you. I think it's Tara something. That was a really good one. That's what I have off the top of my head. Those are awesome. I'm writing them down so that I can learn from all myself. Yeah, there were more.

I'm just not... Yeah, it's hard on the spot to think of all the different kinds like that. Yeah, it was actually a book I read and talk about spiritual bypasses. I've watched a lot of them. But there was this book called Spiritual Enlightenment, The Damnedest Thing, by Judd McKenna. And that, it's a fictionalized story, but what it points to resonate so powerfully is true. it really rocked my world. That was after I read his,

well, he had several books on the side. But after I read that book, the need to read other self-help personal development books really just evaporated. It just pointed to something that moved me so powerfully that it just, I knew that bringing in more concepts wasn't going to be the answer.

And, yeah. So Jed, if you're listening, I'd like to have a conversation. He's like, the author is actually completely anonymous. Nobody knows who he is. Lots of speculation on the internet. Lots of conspiracy theories. But nobody knows who this guy is,

but I'd love to have a conversation with him. Anyway. Yeah, it's fascinating. Shannon, I can't believe we, it's like three hours coming on, man. I feel like we've just been shooting the breeze, man. Yeah, this is very, you made it. You made it very easy, and I appreciate that. You ask really great questions, and you just seem genuinely engaged,

and it just makes it a pleasure to do an interview like this. The pleasure is all mine, because I feel like the book has been incredibly helpful, and it's fun. I've really been looking forward to it, and I really admire the authentic experience. I admire the definition of success that I hope continues to permeate the book and your life and the next book, and it's really fun, and I'm really excited about it. the world we're living in and the things that are happening. And, you know, the book resonated with me.

And I'm really stoked that I have a signed copy of it, man. So thank you for that. My pleasure. It's my pleasure. Yeah. And hopefully in the future, I got a feeling we'll be talking more often. And I'm really thankful to get to see the things you're doing and see the imprint that you're making.

And I hope that you're as stoked about life as I am for you, man. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I am stoked about it. life. I'm very curious to see what happens next. Because I have no idea. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the, that's the beautiful mystery that we all get to participate in. And I'm going to hang up with the people, but I want to talk to you briefly afterwards for a minute. So anything else you want to tell people before we go? I feel like we covered it all.

We went deep. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm so thankful for everybody. And I'm glad that we got to answer the question. What is a fast motorcycle to Shannon Duncan? And thank you to everybody. I hope we have a beautiful day. That's all we got. A little bit.