Suggestibility and Ayahuasca: Managing Influence | Jerónimo Mazarrasa ~ ATTMind 195

You know, I looked into it and this is, I think the fifth, the fifth time you've been on the show, like twice with a dedicated interview and two, maybe three times on a, on a psychedelic cafe. Which is great. You're the most repeated guest on Adventures of the Mind. Wonderful. Well, I'm honored. I guess with that, we'll jump right in if you're ready. Are you ready?

Yes, one second I'm ready Hello everyone and welcome back to Adventures Through the Mind, a podcast that explores topics relevant and related to psychedelic culture, medicine, and research. and always guided by the underlying question of how we can work with and through our psychedelic experiences to become better people, not just for ourselves, but for all those with whom we are nested in relationship, presently and across time, human and non-human.

alike. I'm your host, as always, James W. Gesso. Today's guest is Geronimo Masarraza, someone who's been on the show a handful of times previously. He is a program director at the International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research and Service, which is also called ICERS. ICIRS is a non-profit organization that is, quote, dedicated to transforming society's relationship with traditional indigenous medicines, end quote.

Geronimo is also founder of iSears Academy and creator of Aya Safety, an online course that seeks to help people increase the safety of their ayahuasca facilitation, in particular to... nontraditional contexts What non-traditional context means is going to be clear in the interview as we're going to be talking about IS safety. We're going to talk about the course generally a little bit, but specifically we're going to be talking about a vignette from the IS safety course.

which has to do with influence and suggestibility. It has to do with how a facilitator can accidentally harm their participants by unskillfully navigating the increased suggestibility that that participant will have as a consequence of ayahuasca and other psychedelics.

Throughout the course of the interview, we're going to talk about a couple of specific ways, sort of specific scenarios where the increased suggestibility and influence potential between facilitator and client can accidentally harm client or participant by using examples of where those scenarios were handled well and where they were handled not so well.

We also talk about the relationship between openness and vulnerability around how caring and a lack of care can exist simultaneously, how isolation and the clan dynasty. clandestine nature of underground psychedelic facilitation can block cultural learning. How a facilitator can learn. what is harmful to their clients with respect to suggestibility, but also how participants can protect themselves from the harm of a facilitator's lack of care.

list maybe of the things, the topics we're going to discuss today on the show between Geronimo and myself. And as always, there are going to be chapters available if you want to just jump ahead to a specific section. be they timestamps in the description or embedded directly in the file if you're listening to this on like Overcast or something or watching it on YouTube. So if there's a specific...

part of this you want to jump to, it's all going to be listed there. So feel free to jump ahead. Although, you know, I think, I think listing the whole interview is worthwhile. I really do genuinely believe Hironoma has a lot of great things to offer in this episode and generally.

Now, before we get into the interview, which we're going to do very shortly, there are two things I want to say about the IS safety course. The first thing is that it starts on May 9th. Registration closes May 5th. If you use the promo code. Aya TTM, so that's Ayahuasca Adventures Through the Mind, Aya TTM, you can get 15% off the price of the course.

If you use that promo code before March 23rd, it gets added on top of the early bird price for 25% off the price of the course, which I think is great. So again. iattm to get at least 15% off the price of the course, if not 25% if you do so relatively soon. Links to check out the course and assess it for yourself will be in the description to this episode. The second thing I want to say about the course is that

I took it back in 2023, not as a facilitator because I don't, but as somebody who does do some integration coaching and also tries to... I try to position myself in such a way in this sort of cultural movements and learnings around psychedelics that I can

I guess, share that learning through the avenue of the podcast and through integration coaching so that I can have a positive effect on this kind of movement that we're all a part of. Simply by listening right now, you are a part of this. And so I took the course and... I mean, to the best of my authority to say so, I think objectively, it's a very good course. But personally, I found it incredibly, incredibly valuable and incredibly insightful.

That's the second thing I want to say is that I genuinely believe this is a course that if you are a facilitator, are becoming a facilitator, or want to become a facilitator of ayahuasca or any other psychedelic, this course will be invaluable to you and to your clients. And so I highly encourage you to at least head over to the link, take a look and assess whether or not it's right for you.

because I do genuinely believe that Hieronym on the iSears team have put together something really, really beneficial here with this course. And that's all for the intro. A very long intro today. Thank you for bearing with me. And without any further ado, here is my interview with Geronimo Mazaraza on episode 195 of Adventures Through the Mind. Enjoy. Geronimo.

Mazaraza, welcome to Adventures Through the Mind again for your fifth, maybe sixth time. Thank you, James. It's a pleasure to be here again. So the last time you were on the show, it was pertaining to... what you're doing, like a course that you run with ICERS, which is the AIA safety course. It's a longer title, which I'll get you to say in a moment. And you had approached me saying like, hey, can we do an interview and like talk about some of the content?

of this uh of this course and knowing you trusting your work and trusting eye sears i was like sure let's do it even though i had really no in-depth understanding of what the course was about And I thought it was a great interview. We specifically explored what in the course you talk about as the six pitfalls for ayahuasca facilitators, sex, money, power, legal issues.

intercultural relationships and, oh, what's the sixth one? It's isolation. Isolation, of course. And well, since then, I've actually taken the course. And so... Where before I just sort of like trusted in UNI's years. Now I can confidently say like, yes, this is a hell of a good course. And it's nice to have you back on the show to talk about it. This interview, we're going to go.

specifically into one area of the course, which has to do with suggestibility and influence and how that relates to vulnerabilities and potential harms that can come from this in the mix with ayahuasca. But before we get there, why don't you just give us a quick kind of like the elevator pitch of what this course is, who it's for and when it starts. Thank you. This course basically comes out of...

I've been drinking ayahuasca for 20 years. I've worked in a number of documentaries. Then I've been working with ice years for more than 10. And in this process, I've spent a lot of time with... dozens, more like hundreds of facilitators, people working with plants. In different types of relationships, at first I was making films about some of them, then I was working directly with them.

through my work with ICERS. But one thing that I noticed was that basically and this has to do with the trap of isolation because very often because of the nature of the work of ayahuasca and also because very often people working with plants are working in some sort of clandestinity or semi-clandestinity.

There is a process that happens naturally with just about everything in our society when you throw something new at our societies is that, you know, there is a few years where, you know, a lot of mistakes get made. And then people very quickly begin to figure out how this works and then it evolves very quickly. So, you know, I always use examples like if you look at, you know, surfers 60 years ago and what they're doing now, or you look at, you know.

latte art and the drawings that people make in Capuchinni. Generally speaking, our societies receive new things and there's a period where it's most dangerous. You can also see it with x-rays, for example. When x-rays were first invented, everybody was really excited that you could look inside of people. And then they were running x-rays all the time on pregnant women. They would put people in x-rays for hours just to see how digestion worked, etc.

etc and it took some time to realize that x-rays are indeed a wonderful tool but they have some dangers and some risks and that they have to manage with certain safety and this process happens sort of naturally and organically But it hasn't happened with psychedelics. If you look at the way we use LSD now, you cannot say that it's significantly better than the way it was used in the 1960s. And when you say that, you mean it hasn't happened with psychedelics in sort of the modern Western?

global north world exactly exactly because indeed when you look at traditional use of psychedelics you see the opposite you see indeed very very evolved sophisticated systems where very much you know the benefits are maximized and the harms are minimized So the reason I think why it hasn't happened is because when things are in clandestinity, when things are even sometimes outright illegal, then it's very difficult for this very natural flow of information to sort of circulate.

And then people tend to sort of encapsulate themselves in these sort of like bubbles where, you know, certain groups develop certain techniques and other groups develop other techniques, but they're not really talking to each other. And so the level of it doesn't raise, but sort of stays kind of... stagnant in a way. So the sort of motivation behind the course, not just the course, but a lot of the work that I do in ICERS has to do with sort of pollinating.

gathering all of this sort of practical empirical knowledge that has been developed both by indigenous and traditional cultures and by westernized uses of the psychedelics. putting it all together in one place, one resource, one course, where we can address one very particular topic that is not very often.

addressed directly, which is just safety. So the course is called IASafety because it's only about safety, it's about increasing the safety of ceremonial plant work in what we call non-native contexts. Non-native context means when you take So if an indigenous shaman is doing an ayahuasca ceremony in their community, that's a native context.

When that same shaman is working outside of the community in an urban environment in that country and in other countries, then it's no longer a native context, even if the entire ritual itself is still fully traditional. And then so in non-native contexts, they bring a whole set of new needs and new situations that are not necessarily present in native contexts. Most often native contexts are community contexts.

And that means that what we call screening and what we would call integration happens sort of implicitly. In the native context. yes people know each other so you don't need to have a previous interview to screen whatever and if someone after drinking ayahuasca is not doing well people are going to know you don't need to do a protocol follow-up because this just comes through the grapevine so

In this course, it's a course aimed for people who are interested in increasing the safety of ceremonies. This includes everybody from, you know, assistants, participants, organizers. Sometimes we get people who are simply interested, they're just participants. And we focus only on safety issues, so physical safety, psychological safety, and legal safety. The parts that we don't touch are the parts that are usually most important and most relevant in facilitators' work.

such as ritual, energetic, spiritual aspects of the work. We don't enter at all on this. This is not a course to learn how to run ceremonies. This is a course for people that are already involved in running ceremonies. who want to improve the level of safety of the work that they offer. It's very, very different from what's out there and what is usually associated. Normally people who are learning some sort of facilitating or psychedelic assisted therapy, safety is a small part of a much bigger.

thing that has to do with how the ceremonies are run or the sessions, etc. This is only about the safety. And to clarify, I think... listeners would be able to infer it, but I didn't hear you say it specifically. You talked about native facilitators or shamans in their native context. When they leave that context, it's non-native. You didn't speak to people who are not.

Native people, right? Like anyone who gets the, you know, starts practicing the facilitation of ayahuasca who isn't someone who... was born into and raised within a native context of ayahuasca use, such as in the indigenous communities that have used it for at least hundreds, if not thousands of years. Is that severe? yeah exactly yeah that you know that that we we don't have this is this is not course aimed or directed at indigenous people

They know well enough how to manage the work that they do. But people who have learned from indigenous people. might be interested and might learn some interesting things in this course, some valuable things for them, and all the way to people who are working with plant medicines who don't have an indigenous or traditional training but have developed other ways.

they will also find some value in this. We also have people that are, for example, people who organize tours of people who work with plants. also sometimes join the course. They don't directly work with the plants, but they are in the organization of these ceremonies and then they will also benefit from this. from this knowledge and we also have you know psychologists participate you know all sorts of people interested in the topic i mean myself as well like

Primarily, my role is journalistic and on a research level. But to the degree of my direct involvement is usually with people supporting them in their integration and so forth. And even for myself, I've... found like I just I got a lot like a lot out of the course um when does this iteration it runs it runs every year but when does this iteration of the course start and give me like a basic

layout like how often for how long and then we'll sort of like cap that off and then we'll go specifically into suggestibility which i'll have a question or prompt there yeah um the course happens every year It's a little bit shorter than five months. So the course starts in May and it runs all the way to October, November. And there's about one hour of videos a week.

And then every two weeks there's a live meeting where people can ask questions and we can have debates and there's guest opponents, etc. from the different teachers and people who teach in the course. and then registration application for the course is open already and it will run until the end of April. Awesome.

I'll make sure links to all of that are in the show notes of this episode or on wherever people are checking it out. And I'll ask you again for those details at the end. So let's get specifically into what I want to explore here with you today. which has to do with um which is from pardon me module five

which I believe was called psychology for non-psychologists. One of the cool things about the course is that you have this way of skillfully using repetition to help sort of ingrain things in sort of different contexts. of discussion as well as at different depths perhaps. So it's mentioned previously throughout the course, but I believe it's in psychology for non-psychologists that you go a little bit deeper. Let's start off by hearing

you know, what is suggestibility or influence? And what is it about ayahuasca that makes this something worthy of considering as a potential concern? Yeah, I would start by saying that psychedelics, not just ayahuasca, tend to open people up and they tend to make them more suggestible. This is not a bug, this is a feature.

This is part of the reason why people take psychedelics. So this is the first thing to understand. It's not wrong in and of itself. It's the very source of the power of these substances.

you know what makes cars useful is that they can go very fast this also makes them somewhat unsafe we could make safer cars that only run 40 kilometers an hour But most people wouldn't be interested because you know they want cars to be able to go a little bit faster from one place to the other and they're willing to assume the risk that comes with the fact that if you're going at 100 kilometers an hour there is more harm that might come to you than if you were running at 40.

First, I want to establish this. If the level of suggestibility in psychedelics were lower, it would also lower their power. and their capacity to help. So that's first of all, suggestibility is not in and of itself or openness that comes from psychedelics is not in and of itself a negative trait. Usually it's quite the opposite.

However, it comes with a certain, much like speeding cars, it comes with certain added dangers precisely because there's more openness and suggestibility. You know, when people take psychedelics, they are... um they are um they might have some of the most you know powerful profound experiences of their lives um when that happens the person is you know shocked in awe is very grateful is very moved and is deeply shaken and this is and this is not

this does this applies not just to the to the duration of the effects of the psychedelic but there's a quite a sort of tail or after growth this you could say that it lasts i would say even a few weeks where the person can be still deeply sort of affected by what happened. Again, this is not a bug. This is a feature. This is precisely the point. This is why it's looking for this experience that people approach psychedelics very often and is the root of their therapeutic value.

Because the persons, the people have become so open and so suggestible, and because this period of sort of suggestibility is larger than just the effects, just the duration of the fact, a whole new set of sort of... safety features come, which is, I think here, you know, perhaps the metaphor is not so much safety as it could be hygiene.

hygiene might be a better way to think about it when you are about to undergo surgery you're going to be your body is going to be open up you know Things will be taken in and out of your body and, you know, a part of yourself that is normally not exposed to the elements is going to be exposed to the elements. In these conditions, hygiene is extremely important. The tools, the operation, the surgery room, the hands of everybody have to be extremely sanitized. Hygiene is called asepsis.

You want to make sure that when you close the person back up, nothing from the outside got in that could be harmful. Now, it's a useful metaphor to think about. what happens to people in psychedelics, except it's not their internal physical bodies, but it's their psyche, it's their internal sort of world and our psyche and our psychology, which actually gets exposed.

to levels that normally are not exposed to the outside world, even to ourselves. And in here, the asepsis, the hygiene, doesn't have to do with how physically clean... of germs the environment is, but with the work, the attitudes and the position of the facilitator, which is the person, because it's the closest person, which is... who can be most likely to sort of

introduce willingly or unwillingly, you know, with the best intentions or with ignorance or directly with bad intentions can, you know, really affect the person. in a in a period where they're very open and so this the aspect of the core i've got a list of ways in which facilitators can you know accidentally harm their clients um with specific respect to um suggestibility it's a longer list in the course but this is the ones that are most directly about suggestibility and part of

the sort of setup for the list is to discuss like vulnerabilities. Is this... Vulnerabilities is this openness that you're talking about when we are open, like our, you know, our open, our surgery or whatever, we are very, we're quite vulnerable. in that space and the surgeons the hospital staff all the rest that hygiene part of that hygiene is them caring for our vulnerabilities such that you know we as we open ourselves up to be vulnerable

What is offered to us is something that can help us be healthier afterwards or fix the problem that the surgery was about or whatever it might be, rather than introducing these other things in this state of vulnerability. Is that about right? I would say, yeah, I mean, vulnerability would be like the negative reading of openness, right? Again, they're the same phenomenon. And you can see this in other, you know...

sort of life processes that touch people very deep for example falling in love. Falling in people who are in love are also very open. And this brings with it a wonderful flow of emotions and feelings and things. But they're also extremely vulnerable so that, you know, the person that is the object of their love, they can do a tiny thing, you know, and really send them reeling.

So in the case of the work with psychedelics, what happens is, first of all, again, this is not a bug, but a feature, all of us have a certain worldview. You know, a way that we interpret things, an ideology. You can call it an ideology about politics, an ideology about relationships, an ideology about sexuality, an ideology about, you know, all of us have this. This is unavoidable. You don't have.

person that is neutral right this is inevitable but in the case of psychedelic work if the facilitator is not able to sort of keep this inner ideology, which is also the compass of the facilitator, is what the facilitator uses to decide what to do, what not to do. I mean, this is not an attack.

on ideology, although there are certain toxic ideologies, but it's not ideology itself that is the problem. The problem is that when facilitators don't keep learn how to keep this to themselves and make very clear boundaries of where their interpretations begin and the experience of the boundary between their interpretation and the experience of the facilitator.

The problem sometimes becomes when facilitators, most often with the best intentions in the world, begin to give this ideology back to the participant, begin to give certain interpretations back to the participant and begin to guide. the participants understanding of what of what's happened or not i mean i will give i will give a very sort of clear example because i think it's easy well let's take a pause let's take a pause there i want this clear example but i also want to ask you

a little bit i want to go through this this list of ways that that this could happen i'm going to give the short answer all right i will give the short answer and then and then and then we can go to the list of ways um so the the To make it very short or very succinct, the most important... thing that a guide can know about one of the participants experience is not what it actually means or what is the right answer or the right thing to tell this person about what they lived.

because this is very hard to do in many cases and psychedelic experiences are not always clear in their meaning or in their interpretation. What's very, very important, we cannot expect guides to know what the right answer is in every step, but guides should definitely know which ones are the problematic interpretations that can harm the person and avoid these. That's the asepsis. That's the hygiene. The hygiene is not to bring certain things, knowing which things and also...

not just interpretations in themselves, but interpretations in the participants. So for example, the participant will decide to make a drastic life change, and the facilitator will openly or less openly encourage this. Instead of telling the participant, look, you should be careful. You had a very strong experience. This happens all the time. We have seen this going very wrong. Sometimes this has gone very right. Our advice would be that, you know, you take it easy and we go slowly.

don't worry you don't need to make this big change so this is this is an this is an example this would be an example of that so i want to go more deeply into the the complexities i think i like the way you characterize that there it's not so much knowing what the right thing to offer is it's being aware of what the you know quote unquote wrong things to offer or or allow um are

I want to go into that a little bit more in a bit. First, I want to go through this list. So this list of ways in which the facilitator can accidentally... you know harm their clients through suggestibility i'll list each one some of which i think is going to come with a bit of repetition but i think that will be helpful in integrating the understanding so the first one i have is imposing their own beliefs onto a vulnerable individual, for example, homosexuality.

Yeah, I mean, I have a true story about that, you know, that I heard from a facilitator. He said, you know, once this woman came to drink ayahuasca with me and she cried all night. And then in the next morning she told me that she was crying all night because Ayahuasca told her that she was a lesbian. And she was not a lesbian. Is she? She asked the facilitator.

And the facilitator told her, look, you're not a lesbian, you're just afraid of being a lesbian. That is like, you know, a terrible psychological note. to put somebody into. Because if they do have, like, you know, homosexual, then this will make them believe that actually it's fear, but not their actual drugs. And if they don't have it, they will believe that, you know, it's an answer that is wrong no matter how you look.

at it you know the the the the right answer for this would be like something like well this process about identity and sexuality are very delicate These things happen sometimes in the ayahuasca. And I know a person that you could talk to that can help guide you better through this turmoil or through this.

you know this is this is you know when it comes to people's identities you know even even your best you know intuition can actually throw things off balance and when you say I know someone who can help you through this you're talking about someone that a facilitator ideally would have and they're sort of like either direct or sort of

you know, satellite team that might be a therapist or someone specifically who deals with gender identity or sexual identity, someone who's that is their skill set. And so it's like you refer out to people who it is their skill set. That's what we recommend in the course. We recommend that facilitators are very aware of the limits of their knowledge, which is very wide, but is very focused on usually what happens during the session.

and that they don't overstep the boundaries of their own knowledge. I will give you a counter example, which is, I think, a good example. This was from another facilitator. They got hired to do one-to-one sessions with this woman, and she was a very...

wife of a very well-to-do man and they will begin to do this and through the sessions the women begin to open up and begin to touch certain aspects of their of her life and her past and their current circumstances as this often often happened and she began to share them with the facilitator. And then she began to ask him for advice on a number of important life decisions that she had to make. And that's when he said, look.

This is the limit of what I can do. You know, I can share the ayahuasca with you and I can take care of you during the ceremony, you know, and I can talk to you afterwards. But in terms of this, you know. you know very difficult sort of decisions and things that you have to look into this is outside of my you know of my knowledge and you should actually talk to a therapist someone who's like you know skilled in guiding people through things like this i'm not the person

to help you make these decisions. So, I mean, knowing your limitations infers being able to know yourself, which I understand to be a part of the... course uh that you go into but well maybe that'll come up again maybe maybe not but let's move on to the the next question or the next list of the next point Inappropriate introduction to religious or spiritual beliefs while under the influence or shortly afterwards. Yeah, I mean, this is again, these things.

I cannot stress enough how important, and without picking for many people working with plants, this sort of like a spiritual sort of basis is. They couldn't do the work they do without this. And it absolutely shapes and informs how they work. The question is, does there participants? need to receive this or this is just for you. I will give you what I think is a very good example. It actually comes from an indigenous Colombian, Taita.

And he told me the following, as you know, for people in the indigenous world, the spiritual realm is very much real. It's not a psychological issue. It's actually very much sort of a real... So he says, you know, often I get Western people that come to me and they carry with them this sort of, you know, you can call them dark energies, dark spiritual entities, parasitic. It takes many names, but they come with this.

You know, when they come to me with this, I just clean them off it. But I don't tell them anything. Because I have noticed that when you tell white people these things, white people, they don't understand this world. And it only scares them. And it drives them into this sort of paranoia, like suddenly they have encountered. So you see there is a way for facilitators to keep very much in line with their worldview and do their work based on their worldview.

and still not impose on the others a worldview that it can be deeply foreign to them and can cause all sorts of sort of like ontological shock, which is something that also happens. sometimes around ayahuasca and other psychedelics that people go very quickly from a sort of materialistic world to a much more spiritual world of which they understand very little or nothing at all.

And then, well, it's like being, you know, it's like suddenly being dropped in the middle of the jungle. You're just in a completely foreign environment and you don't know what's good, what's bad, what can be had, what cannot be had, what water can be drunk and not drunk. What is the danger?

you know and you just become you know deeply vulnerable and scared again this is something that's going to come up a little bit more later because this kind of like you know the vulnerability the disorientation sort of like calls in a question especially when it pertains to sort of understanding the

the ontology, the sort of spiritual awakening can come through ayahuasca and the role the facilitator does or doesn't have in supporting that part of it, which is directly a part in some ways of the work. But we're going to talk about that in a second. The next thing I have on the list here is sharing with the client or participant that you had some kind of vision or telepathic understanding.

of something about their experience, their history, their lineage, etc. common to the, to, you know, I would say to ayahuasca, but in general to any sort of, you know, once I went, you know, I myself have a sort of... ambivalent relationship to things like tarot readings, the horoscope, etc. But I'm still a consumer of these things. I find it useful.

even though I'm not sure if I fully believe it. But I'm still a consumer. So, you know, one time I went and I had my astral chart and I got a card reading. I was in a difficult moment of my life and I figured any...

might be interesting enough. And this was a very special, it was a woman, it was a very special character. It has absolutely nothing to do with psychedelics. But what I understood... in the conversation that I had with this person is that the skill set that she possessed, what she had learned all of these years, was not how to interpret what the cards said.

or what the horoscope said. But how to take that interpretation and turn it into a message that was helpful to the person that was going to receive it. And there's a huge difference between these two things. And I can give you examples of the opposite. I can give you examples of people I know who went to a tarot reader and the tarot reader told them that her husband was cheating on them with the women in a foreign country, blah, blah, blah. And this was not true.

It was not true. And that really caused humongous harm to this person and this person's marriage. And, you know, go figure what she saw in the cards. But for sure, the delivery of that information was incorrect. and was harmful so there is a skill set that has to do with how you deliver certain intuitions readings call it what you will It doesn't have to be spiritual to work anyway. We all the time have certain notions or ideas, but how those get turned into a message that will help.

people are supposed to harm them. This is the actual skill that takes years to learn. Not the skill of having the intuitions or reading the cards or knowing what the symbology means.

And this applies for, you know, even if, yeah, during an ayahuasca ceremony as a facilitator, you have some sort of insight about somebody's, they're... what must have happened to their great, great grandmother or something about their paternal line or a past life or something that it can, it can pose harm to the individual, the participant, the client as a facilitator to share that with them as though.

it was like it ultimately to share to share it with them in a way that could constrain their understanding of themselves and their experience i mean the the thing is again you know and i go back to the story of the titan As a facilitator, how much do you need to tell the person in order for your work to be successful? I think the example of the Titus is a brilliant example of ethical work.

He definitely saw things in the people that came to him, and he was definitely acting upon these things. But to which degree was it necessary? that he shared this information with the participants and how sure was he that this information was going to be helpful instead of harmful. And this is no longer a question of whether it's true. And this is again, what I get is like this sort of skill set has to do with a very fine understanding.

of these things and this doesn't have to do with the you know it's it's it's a very fine understanding of where these things can become harmful other times these things are indeed very helpful Right. So, you know, we will see again and again. And, you know, I think you will remember from a course that, you know, we get asked lots of questions and very often the answer is it depends. There is no, you know, one size fits all.

you know, cookie cutter, perfect solution for everything. No, the same thing can be helpful or harmful depending on the circumstances. And one cannot make these sort of clear cuts. And the ability to discern this. is indeed the art of the work of what facilitators learn. It's not how to measure the dose and distribute this and sing some songs, which also is part of the work.

but it's this it's this thing you know it's again there's one part that is technical like i saw with the card reader about laying the cards and knowing what each card means and there's one part that is sort of like experiential and that is learned and is that now how does this information that you receive be put to best use to help the person instead of to harm them so the next list i've got uh you know three perhaps four of this list before

i i get into the sort of like coming back into what you're talking about here in the balance between like this sort of like experiential skill set claiming that perception or suggestions come from an external source for example god or the plant and not from the guide themselves and again sometimes right again this is not this is not i would i would you know there is there's been all sorts of

you know, examples of perceptions and suggestions that seem to come from external sources and that have had, you know, very sort of valuable impact on people's lives and beneficial effect. But also external. The problem comes when you basically relinquish the responsibility. So you drink ayahuasca and ayahuasca tells you to divorce your wife.

When should you divorce your wife? Well, I think, you know, just as a sort of advice, you should divorce your wife when you can tell your wife, look, I thought about it and I realized that I want a divorce. So when you can take ayahuasca out of the picture, the worst thing you can do is go to your wife and say, ayahuasca told me I should get divorced, so I'm going to get divorced. That is... you know claiming a perception and putting on an outside source

You know, I'm putting all the responsibility on the outside source. And then you keep your sort of innocence because you're not responsible. It's just something that Ayahuasca told me, which is a superior force. And no. No, this doesn't work like this. This is still a decision that you're making that is affecting your wife, your children, you know, all sorts of your lifestyle. And you should take this decision personally as a personal responsibility, not as a command from an outside force.

Not because, again, ayahuasca doesn't tell you or these things cannot be true or that you shouldn't divorce your wife. Sometimes you should. But whether you should or not, it should be 100% your agency, you know.

and your responsibility in making this decision. And you take the things that come from ayahuasca, from the external source, whatever it is, as a sort of... lamp to help you shed light on some parts that are not visible to you, or that are, you know, it becomes one more perspective that helps you enrich your perspectives and make an informed decision as an autonomous, sovereign individual, which is something that you should never lose. This also comes from the traditions.

You know, heard from indigenous shamans, this sort of concept that you cannot let yourself be, you know, that you always have to remain in sort of in mastery, in ownership.

of your thought and of your being. I got this advice a number of times when I was undergoing this sort of shape-shifting and transformation into different animals, which was very... intoxicating experience for me you know and the advice that i got is like that's great that you got to feel you know the power of this creature but you should always remember that you're a human being and you're not this animal

And that you should always remain, you know, ownership of this and then write this experience like this. And it goes back to a similar. sort of, you know, ayahuasca and other psychedelics is going to expose you all sorts of things that are inside of you and outside of you. You know, and some of them are absolutely fantastic and life changing and they will enrich your life. And some of them are sort of.

debris and hubris of your own that also get amplified, you know, your sadness, your jealousy can sometimes get, you know, very much amplified with ayahuasca, your paranoia. that is sort of like in the background can get very much amplified with ayahuasca. And this is a way of understanding that this is part of you. But if you let yourself be carried away by it, I'm convinced that this is...

Sort of a deeper truth than the deepest truth is that you remain a sovereign individual, you know, and that you remain responsible for the choices that you make. That's when things go off the rails. And I mean, you spoke specifically to sort of a participant having an experience. We talked about this in our last interview. Ayahuasca told me that.

the description or the phrase that you used to describe this kind of phenomenon. And you're talking specifically to someone who gets an experience of ayahuasca telling them something, and then about maintaining this agency. and the sort of potential harms of letting that external source sort of dictate or to act from the sort of perceived dictation from external source. You also kind of like referenced a moment where know a facilitator for you sort of did the sort of the helpful thing

which is to sort of encourage you back towards your center rather than affirming like, yes, that's because you are the jaguar or you are the anaconda. So one of the potential harms under the suggestibility here would be for a facilitator to affirm. to their participant yes in fact ayahuasca did tell you that and to either explicitly or implicitly infer that that has a kind of authority that needs to be trusted followed acted upon etc um is there any like

please feel free to expand or correct that. And then maybe if there's anything else with respect to this external source as it pertains to the facilitator that you'd like to speak on. Yeah, I mean, and again, it all depends. you know some people have these encounters with that with these animals with the jaguars and the narcotic on this and they're deeply meaningful and life-changing and they inform big big changes you know they're they're a big part for example of shamanic awakenings you know

But in my case, I don't facilitate. I'm not a facilitator. I had a fantastic possibility to tap into something. But that was it, you know, so the experience is not exclusive. Having this experience doesn't mean that. Because, you know, becoming a facilitator is a certain calling, is a certain, also a skill set.

You know, I sometimes, you know, use the example of, you know, it's like it's the difference between going to art school and being an artist. Everybody understands that artists are people that have a certain talent and they seem to be born with this. It's a certain facility, a certain affinity to make music, to draw, to whatever. And you can see it very early on. Now, having this affinity is not the same thing as being an accomplished artist.

That takes years of work and honing this ability. And many, many years of work and practice is what takes you to be a great artist. You need the talent and you need the work. And then, you can... School, you can go to school and you can go to school even if you don't have this talent and you will still learn some things and that will not make you. So all of these things are what combines in these things, you know, so very often people have.

you know the experience of you know of healing in themselves of healing in others you know and and this is the talent that is you know democratically widespread like the talent of making music or the talent of you know But having a talent and even getting a taste of this thing is not at all the same thing as doing all the work to become a skilled professional. And this is where many people can get the Jawas and the Anacondas and only very few of them will become accomplished.

walkers on this path I'm wondering if there's still a piece there around how the how a facilitator then speaks to their client with respect to these experiences when they arise but i i think the that is well inferred i think so so far with the way that uh go ahead I think always with just basically explaining these realities, well, this is a very long path. Sometimes it means something, sometimes it doesn't, you know.

not everybody gets this experience but then again it's not unique to have this experience you know and it's something that will get you know again i i think Part of the wonder of engaging, at least for me, with ayahuasca has been the sort of...

The very slow process I've been drinking now 20 years in which things are, you know, revealed, they're revealed fairly quickly and they're only understood much, much later. And the process by which you... I am still elaborating, you know, and understanding things that happened to me seven years ago, eight years ago, you know, 10 years ago.

And still now only beginning to sort of capture, you know, and I was lucky enough to be with, you know, facilitators who basically just sort of told me things like, well, you know. The content that emerges in ayahuasca ceremonies doesn't come with a timestamp. So it's never possible to know whether you're getting a vision about your present. about your future, about yourself, or about the world at large, or all of the above. All of these only get settled with time.

Only time will let you understand, you know, what was the meaning of what you lived. This is the sort of... I think better practice around these things. Okay, let's take a little break from the interview here as I'd like to thank my patrons on Patreon. This podcast and... it sort of place in my, in my sort of work, my larger work in the world, it feels like at least as a, as a writer and a researcher, it's deeply meaningful to me. It's also my job. It's my full-time job.

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and i suppose like i'll read it the way it's written down but i imagine it's something that you could hear from both the client and the guide's perspective like as if it was being said to the guide or to the client so the point is this ignoring how a guide's perspective beliefs and language influences the client's experience for example ufos young as in carl young death etc yeah i mean this is you know this this this for example you know we we are now in a process in which certain

ideology or you can call it psychological theories around trauma are very very widespread and this theory and I'm making a very sort of short A summary event says something like, you know, something bad happened to you when you were a kid. You don't remember this bad thing. You know, but this bad thing is still conditioning everything that happens in your life.

And until you get to this thing and you uncover this trauma, this traumatic event, you're not going to be able to go forward no matter what you do because this thing is there getting in the way. This is, of course, based on sort of true observation. of a number of cases where people undergone very, very bad things and they went into some sort of dissociative state and then they didn't remember for a long time what happened. And then later on this was...

This was revealed. The problem is when you work this theory backwards and you say, because this thing happened to these people, we must all carry this and everybody has to go look for this thing that they forgot in their past. And then you begin looking for something, right? Then you are in a way sort of creating a situation that, you know, once you begin to look for something, then of course you're going to find something. And sometimes you're going to find something.

That is true. And sometimes you're not going to, you're just going to get a reflection of your belief, you know, which is also something that ayahuasca does. It puts your beliefs in front of you, but it doesn't tell you this is your belief. It just shows you an image, right? So another place where these things get, you know, so I've seen, you know, certain, you know, less skilled facilitators who were more obsessed with trauma.

thing basically in a way condition people so ask them questions you know like what is the most traumatic thing that happened to you what is the worst thing that happened to you talk to me about and begin to sort of bring up a number of questions that already create an environment create an idea

create a sort of predisposition, you know, what in trials, you know, the lawyers will call leading questions. This is a leading question, right? How fast were you going when you slammed into the other car? Well, maybe they didn't slam, maybe they just bump, right? In that sentence, you're already putting, you're living in, right? So that's an example, you know, of something that...

that has to be managed. It's one thing for people to remember something, you know, and it's another thing for you to tell them that they have to remember something or there's probably something that they have to remember. And so this can be. So what you're saying is like, there's the level in which it's kind of imposed directly, say with these leading questions. But if I'm interpreting this right or correctly, there's also just, if I'm a facilitator.

How I talk about the experience, how I talk about, say, the mushroom experience or ayahuasca, how I refer to ayahuasca, what it does for me, if I start talking a lot about it helps to heal trauma, and I start sort of having a... perspective on what ayahuasca does and what it does to you know what configuration or organization of the human

psyche and my frame of this ontology and these beliefs and use the language that sort of captures that. I'm kind of imposing, or at least I could be, I'm at least offering, but I might be imposing a priming. onto a client's experience that would alter their experience or maybe either support them, like you said, it depends, or harm them. Is that kind of what you're speaking to? That's the thing. There's an aspect to this same phenomenon that is invaluable.

Right. And I'm thinking of, you know, some of the most beautiful songs that I've heard in ayahuasca ceremonies that, you know, that spoke about the most lofty feelings and the opening of the heart and the connection and mother nature. And I mean, I'm sure you've been there. You want to cry so beautifully, so inspiring, and it takes you to such places, right? And this is also influence, right?

And this is also suggestibility and this is also vulnerability, but it's used in a very particular direction, right? It is used to sort of evoke and bring out of people the best things in them, you know. So, I mean, I've had songs. you know certain certain icarus that i've heard you know absolutely blow my mind with the words that were being used but these were you know extremely carefully chosen words you know about forgiveness about

That's what I mean, that this is not a bug, it's a feature, right? And a big part of the work of the... Certainly traditional healers of curanderos is precisely to blur the boundaries between your experience and their work. You know, the question is the hygiene.

Yes, when you are going to do surgery, you're going to cut people open. People are going to be exposed. Yes, you need to. So I'm not trying to... you know say this is something bad that should be taken away because now this is the very core of the work and what i'm saying is that this level of work requires a level of hygiene and of care that is sometimes not present

And that most of this, you know, revolves around the type of self-knowledge that the facilitator has. It's like until you know very well who you are. What are your drives? What are your desires? What are your fears? What are your sort of driving instincts? It's very, very difficult to be able to discern and to separate what comes from you.

what comes from the other person and what comes from the experience. This is the reason, I believe, why traditionally training for people who work with psychedelics is very, very long. And it's very, very long and is supervised by someone for many, many years. It's a self-apprenticeship because it requires that the person undergoes a personal process of self-inquiry. And this process has to be supervised closely by somebody else because we by ourselves cannot see our blind spots.

And this, this speaks to, you know, the, the, the pitfall, the beginning of the interview, we talked about the six pitfalls from the previous interview, also part of the course. And the one that I forgot, which is interesting, I'm going to put a level of extra interpretation. The one that I forgot was. isolation. But thankfully, I didn't forget it in isolation. You were there to reflect it back to me, to help me remember, to see what I could not see in myself. And so what I'm hearing is that...

Yeah, again, isolation can be something kind of like funnels facilitators into not being able to see themselves, to know themselves in order to not. harm their clients with the lack of self-knowledge that leads them to perhaps perpetuating unhygienic engagement with food during and after ceremonies. Yeah. Yeah. proper discernment. So this is again something that is much more rare in traditional communities because people are not isolated in the same way.

around, for example, plant medicine circles, is that you end up having this structure that is a pyramid. There's a person on top that is the most knowledgeable. There's a group of people that work with this person. And then there's a group of people who drink with this person. So the person who is on top, the very knowledgeable person, is not alone at all. They're constantly surrounded by people. In the place where they're alone is they're alone in peers.

They have nobody who is at their level who can call them on their... This doesn't happen in indigenous communities. In indigenous communities, whether it's your wife, your father, your brother, your sister, your father, somebody is going to call you. up on on this right if you begin to get you know somebody who's known you all their life and say look i know you since you were a kid and you know you're going off the rails

This is much harder in this sort of, you know, isolated, atomized sort of bubble situation that tends to happen around sort of clandestine, you know, plant medicine and psychedelic practices. And this is the last danger. for facilitators because it's the danger that comes the latest. It usually comes late in the life of facilitators. When all the other things have been sorted, the person has a...

you know, a solid sort of team and operation has been running for years. They're very experienced. They're confident in themselves. They're confident in their work, you know, and it seems that everything is running. They've already done their apprenticeship. And it seems that everything is running smoothly. They're getting late in life. And this is when this new danger appears. And is that who is now going to call you on your blind spots? And that's where...

the other pitfalls get even more, say larger, more likely for a facilitator fall into it, sex, money, power, et cetera, because these are the time. Go ahead. Yeah, and you cannot discern anymore. So what happens then is that basically your shadow that you cannot see begins to manifest itself as intuition.

And you begin to feel that you have now this very fine sort of intuitive power, you know, this ability very quickly to sort of see and decide and make decisions and make calls because you're very experienced, you're very confident and you're now moving without. But whatever aspect of yourself it is that is still unworked will manifest itself as part of this.

I think if people want to hear more about these pitfalls in this particular issue, I would, of course, refer them over to the course. If they're still not certain about the course, we do have our most previous episode where we went to...

more deeply into that. So I'm going to leave it there for people to explore either our previous interview or the course if they want to hear more on that. I want to finish up with suggestibility before I go into a particular phrasing and how it kind of relates to this.

it depends hygiene balance and thing that you're talking about although the the last point i think is is pretty clear it's like maybe the most sort of fundamental um and you may want to go into it more you may not but it's ultimately quote, and speaking from the perspective of a facilitator, if we ignore suggestibility in how we conduct ourselves with our clients as a, that is.

a potential way in which we can harm our clients if we just simply ignore it is and we could leave it there if you want to comment on it you can though i would just say that all of all of all of this happens because facilitators and participants are not meeting in what you call, you know, an equality of conditions. They're not equals.

I mean, again, these things, the giving advice, the telling people, you know, this happens among friends, it happens among family members, you know, it happens, you know, at work, it happens, it's part of life. But the circumstances are different there in the sense that, you know, well, you know, your neighbor told you that they think that you are such and such way.

or that such and such thing happens to you and because you're in a certain you know equilibrium of conditions you can dismiss what this person says or not or you can think about it or you can you know and that's again this is life and this is fine. But what happens is that when a person is administering psychedelics to somebody else,

There is an inequality of power. There is an inequality of conditions. And you have now a person who is very open, who has become basically a patient, who is going to go into transference with the guide. the words and the actions of the guide will have much, much larger impact than a normal person in similar circumstances in any other context. And this is the part that is sort of...

you know, key to understand. Because again, you know, this is all of this is the business of everyday life. You know, people having problems, people trying to make decisions, people asking for advice, people consulting others.

You know, you giving opinions, you giving, like, you know, and there are certain things about people that are very easy to see. You know, you can look at a total stranger and very quickly, you know, see, like, this person is blah, blah, blah, and they should probably do this. Right. But when this relationship is an equal, then one has to be more careful.

So again, I think what I'm about to ask is going to sort of like bring it a bit of repetition to what you've been speaking to throughout the course of the interview here. But it also has to do with a phrasing. So the list of points that I just brought from the course, in the course, they're presented as we as in guides, quote, the ways in which we might accidentally harm our clients through a lack of care.

I want to ask you what that means, especially when it comes to lack of care. I mean, harm is clear. We just discussed that so far. But what do you mean by lack of care? Because I assume... most of the things that you've listed here outside of it being particularly, you know, egregious, perhaps, although the people offering it, there was a might have been quite a lot of care there, I could have been deeply caring.

for a person if i'm the facilitator i'm caring for their experience i'm caring for their confusion there's a lot of care there in me offering my perspective my advice my interpretation. So how is it that these things can amount to a lack of care if the subjective experience of the facilitator is that of caring for? or having the best intentions to care for their client or participant.

Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. And it goes back to the thing. It's a lack of care because the guide's job is not to know the correct perspective or interpretation, but the guide must know. which ones are problematic interpretations. And that's when it becomes a lack of care, when they don't know which interpretations might be problematic. And this includes everything from taking drastic life changes on the heat of the moment.

to you know people who receive orders of missions or tasks and they go ahead and sort of like to you know reaching conclusions about one's identity sexual identity personal identity psychological identity during certain money, you know, going to places that are full of guilt or paranoia or jealousy, you know, predictions of the future. You know, these are just sort of a list of things that can be problematic.

and that interpretation is key. So the guy doesn't need to know which is the right interpretation, but they should know which ones are problematic. Because people don't have problems when they have a vision and say, well, I'm not sure if I had this vision, it means this or that. Problems come when people are convinced of something I have told them. from divorcing, to changing jobs, to whatever. We had a recent case in the...

We had a recent case where a person drank ayahuasca and ayahuasca told this person, this other person is going to die. And then this person died. So then the person who drank ayahuasca became, you know, very sort of... certain of ayahuasca's authority you know and then they drunk ayahuasca again and ayahuasca

told them during this certain time that they should undergo this surgical procedure, that the person had been wondering whether to undergo or not a certain surgical procedure. They drank ayahuasca and ayahuasca said yes. Go through the surgery. Don't worry about anything. It's going to be absolutely fine. Then the person underwent the procedure and the procedure had all of these complications. And the person had sort of complications stretching.

for months, even years. And then the person fell into this total sort of disarray and confusion about whether they could trust ayahuasca or not, and they made the right decision or not. This is sort of like an example we thought. you know the facilitator is not part of this but what would have been the role of the facilitator on this

You know, I say, well, you know, first of all, to tell the person that, again, that surgery is a strong decision. That is great that they got this message from Ayahuasca, but that they should be sure. about it, because sometimes, not just sometimes, but sometimes very often, Ayahuasca says one thing or one thing appears during the ceremony, you know, and then it turns out to go in a very different direction. You know, I can give you...

countless examples of these. But I will just give perhaps one tip that will be useful for everybody. Then this is an example that came from a very experienced facilitator. who I know who's also a psychoanalyst. I have been a meditator. This person has done all the personal work imaginable plus with plants. And they were going to sort of a personally complex.

a situation having to do with, you know, a lawsuit and lawyers and, you know, an inheritance and, you know, a number of things that were being set up and she had set up this sort of... you know solution to it and then she drank ayahuasca and ayahuasca told her this solution that you picked this is never going to work and it's going to be a disaster and you're going to lose all your money

And she's like, what are you talking about? I thought about this so well. You know, we look at this thing. We look at this thing. We really talked with different lawyers. We're pretty sure we're doing their unusual. I'm telling you.

It's never going to work. You're going to lose all your money. And then she was like, are you sure? I'm telling you, this is ayahuasca. This is going to be, and this went on all night. She went in a terrible struggle because this was a huge decision with like very, very big implications. And she was about to do a Sayawasca Todor because it was coming so strong that night. This message was coming so strong. And then she was wise enough to ask the right question.

Which was, whose voice is this speaking right now? Whose voice is it that is speaking right now? And then she realized it was the voice of her mother, who had always been critical, always telling her. This is always. And then she went and she did the opposite of what Ayahuasca told her. And it worked. And indeed, it went as she has planned.

Again, the ability, and this would be part of the job of a skill facilitator, the ability to help people see, either direct them to somebody else or help them see whose voice is this. Are you sure? I mean, are you going to, you've really thought about this, you looked at it very well, you know, and now you're going to change the mind on the flip second because of something that happened during an ayahuasca ceremony. There's other ways to check, but...

You know, to go back to, and we spoke about it in the previous interview of how you can confirm, you know, what are ways to confirm what ayahuasca tells you and discern. But, you know, I think this is where the lack of care. comes, the lack of care comes in misunderstanding, you know, what the sort of the duty of the facilitator is.

You know, theoretically, the lack of care isn't that the facilitator isn't caring on a subjective personal felt perspective. It's that, you know, if we go back to your, you know, surgery. metaphor as a surgeon i could deeply care for my you know patient on the table but i'm still showing a lack of care if i don't wash my hands exactly it's lots of caring

and lack of care. And these two things can happen at the same time. Unfortunately, they happen often at the same time. And a big part of that, I assume, is a lack of sort of I mean, support, education, skillfulness, awareness, et cetera, but is this sort of discernment.

I want to ask you again, this is probably something that you're going to, it's going to be a bit repetitive, but it's these two questions are direct. One will be about as a facilitator and one will be about as a participant. And the first one is. you know as a facilitator as a guide how do we tell the difference between helpful and harmful interpretations or perspectives how do we learn about ourselves and about you know what is you know these

You said that you don't need to know the positive ones. You just need to avoid the negative ones. How do we come to learn that? How does a facilitator come to learn that in their practice and how it might play out in the way they conduct themselves? as facilitators i mean i i i think this is this is

very new for us. I go back to the x-rays examples and we're a little bit at that stage, sort of a cultural stage, I think with psychedelics where we're just putting the x-rays on everything and all the time and we're only going to... with time develop much safer practices around this. But this issue that I'm talking about is sort of like...

neutral to psychology. People who study psychotherapy, psychology, psychoanalysis are deeply aware of this. They are the first sort of people in our culture that run head on. into this topic, which is how often when you try to help people, especially by talking to them.

you know about their problems and stuff you end up doing more harm than good and this is this is the reason if you haven't done the proper training and the proper work if you don't understand active listening if you don't understand projection if you don't understand transference and counter transference if you're not even and and by understanding i don't mean knowing

what they are in theory, but having undergone the personal process where you're able to identify these things in yourself, where somebody asks you enough questions that you yourself suddenly catch yourself. in what you're doing. This is more or less, very roughly speaking, the idea of these processes. It's not that somebody else is going to tell you, I noticed this and this and this and this about you.

But it's somebody helping you notice this in yourself by asking you enough questions the right way until this thing comes to you, right? Until this sort of insight comes. I think guides should be very, very honest about what they don't know. You know, this is the most, and it's hard to know what you don't know because you don't know that you don't know it.

But they should be very honest about this to themselves and to the participants. And there is a way to accompany people without directing them. There is a way to help people be autonomous and adult. And it's difficult to do it when people tend to put you in the opposite position. People want you to be a guide. People want you to be a father figure. People want you to be all-knowing. People want you to be, you know, revested of spiritual authority.

to you they're going to do this to the plants you know this is also the other half of this equation right people will fall into this and i myself are falling into this you know all of us and it's part of there is no other way to learn except to sort of go through this you know i i don't think you know i think i think you know i i'm

I'm hoping the really big mistakes can be avoided. But I think the medium to small mistakes are unavoidable. And this is how we learn. So this is not about creating a perfect... sort of situation where no one ever is wrong and because there's also no growth and no learning there but there is like you know the bigger more dangerous interpretations the biggest mistakes can be sort of avoided with the level of and then

There is a sort of, you know, I work with David, he also teaches in the course, he's a psychologist. He has one of his teachers, I can't remember the name, he's an Italian psychologist. but he said something that I found really interesting and he said basically he said two things one was that any sort of tool that you give people and that have not done the personal work will immediately get turned into a weapon of the ego so you know everything is and it also happens with the spiritual truths

You know, the world is perfect like it is. This is a spiritual truth to be rich after meditating for 40 years. You know, if you haven't done this spiritual work, the world is perfect as it is. We'll get used to justify abuses, you know. misbehavior, everything. So this is an example. One is how tools, you know, insights without the work become weapons.

It reminds me of the phrase, the right thing said at the wrong time is the wrong thing said. And then the other thing that he said is that the minute... The minute one stops becoming, one stops being a student and one stops being a patient, that's when the danger begins. So the other recommendation, I think, for guides is that... The minute, you know, one should always have a doctor and a therapist, you know, a supervisor. And there should always be somebody else that you go to for this.

Because when you become alone and you don't have this, then the danger begins. Okay, hold on. short moment of orientation i began thinking about something totally different just like came in hit me with like a freight train totally knocked me off the track let me see if i get back on here uh so I know for a fact there are some people who listen to my show who are facilitators, and I can imagine there are many, many more.

than I know. And even many more than that who want to be facilitators are training to be facilitators in traditional, you know, or learning through traditional contexts or going the path of psychotherapy. schooling here in the Western world, psychedelic psychotherapy. But I assume quite a small portion of my listeners relative to the people who are participants.

They're the people who are putting themselves, like subjecting themselves to that disbalance of power in the hope and in the trust that their facilitator will have good hygiene and an abundance of care for their experiences. My personal experience is that the majority of the facilitators that I have sort of interacted with at least early on did not have a lot of this knowledge.

And I can look back and some of my most troubling experiences, especially having taken the IS safety course and seeing how the things that you're talking about, these sort of significant things that we can avoid. you know, happening if we have the right amount of like education about them, strategizing plans and, you know, in advance, so on and so forth. Like they happened because those things were lacking because the facilitators were falling into.

you know, all of these different places that could have absolutely been avoided. My assumption, even as somebody, you know, who helps people like they contact me, I had this experience and need some help integrating it. The stories I hear. of the kind of facilitation that is underway around me sometimes is very jarring and depressing even at times, if not at the least concerning.

I imagine yourself, you know, working at ICers, you know, this to also be the case. If this wasn't the case, there would be absolutely no reason for an eye safety course to exist. Right. So all that being said. The people who are listening who are not facilitators, but will be looking to be facilitated. Is there any...

Can you offer some advice? It depends. But specifically, is there any way in which we as participants can kind of like... navigate the potential things that might come up such that we can you know still leave the optimized space of openness you know that allows for positive things to come while mitigating and being careful with what might end up being a lack of care from our facilitators with respect to suggestibility.

perspectives, etc. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, there's, there's, there's, there's a lot of work trying to sort of create you know better better training for facilitators and eventually sort of you know our hope and our vision in ICRS is that eventually this will be a respected profession.

like any others, and it will be part of our society for those people who are interested in participating in these things. We're not there yet. And instead, what we have is a sort of Wild West where everything sort of coexists. absolutely brilliant people you know committed care full of care and and and knowledge and some not so well prepared people i always remember you know i have a friend whose mother was a nurse and she worked in the emergency room

And because she worked in the emergency room, she saw all the car accidents that teenagers got into in Spanish motorbikes, teenagers have motorbikes. She saw every weekend all the motorbike accidents. So she was terrified of... you know, her daughter having ever touching a motorbike. In a way, she had a point. In another way, her vision was distorted because she worked in the emergency room. She saw all the accidents. This was all the accidents in the area, right?

I felt lucky that my mother didn't work in the emergency room. She let me have a motorbike and I didn't get in an accident. So I keep this in mind because like you, I receive a lot of the, you know, and in ICS we receive a lot of the accidents. you know so we get to see this and this this can also in a way sort of you know bias your perspective of what's happening you know and i try to keep this also to keep my optimism

Sure. I don't get a lot of messages from people saying like, hey, everything went extremely well and I got all the support I needed and so I'm messaging you for extra. That's sometimes, but for the most part, that's not why people are reaching out. Yeah, I mean, the Chinese say, you know, everybody hears the tree that falls in the forest and nobody hears the other 10,000 trees that continue to grow quietly, right? This is sort of, yes, you know, this is like this.

The other thing is that also a huge part of this will go away if participants were more knowledgeable and better educated, if there was more education in the demand side. instead of on the offer side of psychedelics. I think a lot of these issues could be... avoid it if people had better tools. But this is again very new and nobody knows what a good facilitator should look like or how you tell. You have some ways to tell if you like your plumber, your electrician, your dentist.

But really, when it comes to, you know, facilitating psychedelics, are they supposed to look weird? Do they have piercings? No, are they supposed to, you know, sort of anything goes. It's the Wild West. But there's some... basic tips that people can always and should always keep in mind. First of all, one of them has to do about having some distrust around what looks like very rigid contexts.

If the context seems very rigid to you, if the person that you're dealing with seems very rigid to me, this doesn't have to be a problem. But it's definitely something to keep in mind. It's something to observe. You should never drink with people that you don't trust. Because if things get difficult, then you're really going to need to trust the person who's going to take care of you.

So if you meet a facilitator and there is something that just doesn't feel right, don't do it. Keep looking. It's okay. You don't want to find yourself in a situation. where you're completely open, fully vulnerable, and you don't trust the person who's supposed to take care of you. A big part of this process working also has to do with the participant trust in the facilitator. So if the trust is not there, that's it.

That's a no, no. You shouldn't trust people who don't seem to care for you very much. So people, they care about your money or about your sign up or about, you know, if the person doesn't seem to. You know, that's also something to take into consideration because this is the person who's supposed to take care of you. And you should know that this is going to increase your suggestibility.

You should know that if you keep drinking with this person at some point or another, you're going to find this person either attractive or supernaturally wise or just, you know, all around incredible, you know, and you should know that this is coming.

So that when it comes, you recognize it for what it is. You should know that you should try to not take life... changing decisions on a rush it's okay you can you know if it's important it will be important today and one month from now if it's important it really deserves that you give it all your time and all your thought about how you're going to

Do all of these moving pieces if you're going to make a big life change. Take your time. And always think about whether this process is developing your personal autonomy and your critical discernment. Or it's quite the opposite. You find yourself becoming more and more dependent on this person. And again, part of the therapeutic alliance is that you will become dependent on someone.

And it's not the dependency and the fact that you have doubts and you like to ask this question that is the problem. It's the shape that it takes of how long, whether you feel that you are being brought in or you're sort of... push back into yourself. All of these things will give you sort of clues that can help you begin to discern. I think, you know, I haven't... I've been drinking ayahuasca 20 years. I've basically...

drunk roughly with the same group of people. Some changes, but they're within the same sort of satellites of the same group of people for the majority of these years. And I think that's part of the reason why I still have faith in the power of these plants and I haven't become jaded. or about the potential, there is something very beautiful and special and powerful that can happen once the right match happens. between you and the person who will take care of you in this state.

Like all other important matches and relationships in life, like romantic engagements, like friendships, like many other things, it might take a few trials. You might be disappointed with a few people. you know and then you might eventually come to the place where you as a sort of mature adult know what's good for you and who's the company that you want to keep

I would say something to close with is something that a friend said to me in my birthday, and he was quoting somebody else. He said, it's not the company that you keep, but the company that keeps you. Your comment there about, you know, going back to the very beginning of like, we here in the sort of Western world, global North, the institutionalization of psychedelics.

from a facilitation standpoint is very new and on the facilitation end and on the participant end like you said wild wild west we don't really know what's best yet or how to assess that what's best or what's worse i mean what's worse is getting more and more clear what's best is still sort of emerging thankfully um i i i like to hope that i'd like to intend at least that

the conversations I feature here on the show help sort of elevate people's understandings of what's possible with their own experience, but also what is reasonable for them to expect from their facilitators. both in the sense of like, I expect this should be offered and I expect that this should not be offered. And I deeply appreciate, Geronimo, your work and you helping to elevate that as well.

giving your time onto us today to help with that elevation outwards into the our sort of budding psychedelic world here in the west slash global north and you know, on the facilitator side of things for courses like ISsafe. And so in closing, can you give us another quick sort of info packet about the ISsafe course?

and when it starts and how people can get more information. Yeah, I mean, if you found this conversation interesting, or very interesting well you know we have a full course full of much more than this but it's these topics and much much more you know we also touch things like medical interactions and, you know, the legal issues, you know, dangers for participants, dangers for guides, psychology for non-psychologists, as you said, and there's also a module for Marc Cashelard.

about everything that we learned running an emergency room for 10 years, which is the ICR Support Center, and what we see. So it's a six-month course. we we are an ngo we're not a business we're a non-profit so we try to keep it very accessible it's not expensive at all for the number of hours that it has It's both in English and Spanish. There's two versions of it. There's different price options depending on your country and residence because we want to keep prices fair.

the possibility of scholarships. So, you know, we really try to make it so that money is not a barrier in accessing this information. this information that I shared that is not mine. I don't know if you noticed, but in case people didn't, all I've done is repeat things that other people had told me.

and that I found useful, wise, important, relevant. First of all, to my own experience, because I also went through all of these things. I've gone through all of these things myself. All of these we have poured into this course. that we feel offer something that you cannot find in other courses. It's not enough in itself to prepare anybody to facilitate, but it is a great complement for people who are facilitating.

that's how the course or they're around sort of organizing you know one of the most sort of um things that we have heard in terms of reviews that made me feel the best was you know i had a number of knowledgeable and very knowledgeable facilitators who participated. And when it was done, they told me, look, you know, when I saw this, I thought, I don't, you know, I'm beyond this. You know, I'm not going to learn anything new.

or anything interesting and they were surprised to see how much how many new things they learned and then the other thing that for me was really Yeah, that was sort of like, then we've had also a small number of people participating in the course who have told us, you know, after taking the course, I realized that this is not for me and I'm going to stop facilitating. I think that's a sort of...

That to me shows that people understand something that I think is deeply important here. And it's just how delicate this is. to which degree it can really influence people for better and for worse, how high the demands are associated with this profession is not at all, you know. Yeah, it's not at all fancy. It's very, very difficult work that goes on for very long, that sometimes is full of appreciation and sometimes is full of strife. But many of the biggest harms can be avoided.

simply with awareness and education. The course runs every year. It runs for six months. It starts in May and applications are now open and they will be open until the end of April. And to go there, you just go to the website is iasafety.school. type that into your browser and you will get there and we will also have some links for you also i want to thank you very much james for having us you know you know it's without spaces like these

Part of the problem with this work is precisely the fact that it's atomized and it's small and it's not pollinated and it's not evenly distributed. So the work of podcasters and other people... It's also very, very important to spread these ideas and to collectively create a cushion of common sense. around a set of experiences that are not always so driven by this. Well, thank you for saying so, Ronomo.

i appreciate i appreciate that um and i also appreciate again your time here today uh for the listeners i'll be sure that there's a link to uh you said aya safety aya safety dot school That's it. That's all you have to type. And I look forward to talking again maybe one day if we get you on for another podcast in the future. But we'll call this one a close. Thanks again, Geronimo. Really appreciate it.

That'd be great. Thank you so much, James. And cut. Okay, that was episode 195 of Adventures Through the Mind with Geronimo Mazaraza. Definitely go take a look at the course. IS safety is just... Personally, like I said in the intro and throughout the course in the interview, I really genuinely believe it's an incredibly valuable course. So links to check it out are in the description to this episode.

And as we mentioned in the intro, if you use the promo code AYATTM, Ayahuasca Adventures Through the Mind, you'll get 15% off the price of the course and... That'll be added on top of the 10% early bird discount if you sign up before March 23rd. So that's 25% off before March 23rd and 15% off afterwards if you use the promo code AYATTM.

Links to the course will be in the description to this episode, and it starts May 9th. Registration closes a few days before that, so make sure you head over there and at least take a look before you lose the opportunity to be a part of the 2025 cohort. If you're enjoying the show generally... and you'd like to stay up to date and sort of like...

on board with new content that I am producing, podcasts and otherwise. Of course, you can subscribe to this show, be it on your favorite podcast app or on YouTube where I release these interviews and videos. You can also follow me on social media. I'm on Instagram. at A-T-T-M-I-N-D adventures to the mind at mind podcast. So A-T-T-M-I-N-D podcast on Instagram. I'm also on blue sky, jameswjesso.bsky.social. And I'm on other. platforms too, but I just...

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Consider me there. And there's also a Telegram group. So a lot of options for you. Instagram, Blue Sky, Substack, email, Telegram. Links to all of that are in the description to this episode. And, you know, pick your fancy. And here we are. We're at the end of the episode, episode 195. And I thank you for your time and attention and for sticking around all the way to the end. I have been your host, James W. Gesso. And until the next episode, take care and stay curious.