Welcome to Destiny. Now here's your host, Cliff Dunning.
Mm hmmm.
I always a quate sitar music to drugs, and in this context it's plant medicines, hallucinogens, psychedelic And it's really the format and the prelude to our program today, which is a different kind of application of psychedelics. We've had people like Graham Hancock and Bob Straussmann talking about DMT. We've talked about ayahuasca. Oh my god, how many people have we had on about ayahuasca. And I have to admit I have not used the drug, haven't tried it.
I'm still in preparatory state. It may not be in this lifetime I try it. But these psychedelics are important for a number of reasons. They open up pockets in our brain for creativity, for healing, for vision quests, for spiritual growth. I mean, the list goes on and on and on. We've had people on the program presenting a variety of uses of psychedelic and if you've been listening for the last few years, you know how we can apply psychedelics to our daily life. Here in northern California,
we're close to the Silicon Valley. There are engineers that are microdosing DMT, that are microdosing would you believe LSD and making fantastic claims about powerful creative energy visioning and using it to really further their careers. We come full circle today with psychedelics and sexuality, which is a really interesting topic, but not just pleasure sexuality, but healing trauma, healing trauma from abuse, sexual abuse, and perhaps relationship abuse.
It can be a variety of things, and this is the topic today. Hey, this is Cliff, your host of Destiny and my guest today has been using psychedelics in a very very positive therapeutic manner and finding very very profound healing effects and also openings. When I say openings people who are blocked who have issues with creativity, because when you're sexual, you're expressing, you're expressing a form of
creativity as well. And I've always said, and of course I wrote a book called Cannabis and Sexual Ecstasy for Men, when you have an orgasm, that is the epitome of creativity. And that's why there's a lot of people that say we have to have an orgasm like once a day, which is I think pretty tough if your working soul like me, because you know, you come home, you don't want to even think about and form of coupling or sexuality. You want to just decompress. So but you know, we
want to consider these plant medicines. And we know that the indigenous people, the natives of various parts of the world, use plant medicines for uh spiritual awakening, for community with the higher levels of spirits we've heard, We've had people like Graham Hancock talking about connecting with various animal kingdoms while they're on ayahuasca, and so it makes sense that
we would have a program on psychedelics and sexuality. So today's program is Embrace Pleasure, How psychedelics can heal our sexuality. And my guest is d. D. Goldpaw as the year he comes doing in a lot of us are thinking about twenty twenty six, what that year is going to be like. I would like to invite you to a special tour that we're doing. It's our seventh annual Grand Egyptian Tour April twenty eighth through May tenth. This is not to be mince. We only hold and take about
twenty five people at the very max. We want to put everybody in the bus. But what makes this tour simply amazing. It's really a great time to be in Egypt. Number one, we are going to visit the brand new Grand Egyptian Museum in downtown Cairo. This museum holds almost a million artifacts, many many have never been seen before. There's a lot of anomalous stone cuts, there's a lot
of statuary. I have been wanting to go, I haven't had a chance to go, and I've been going to Egypt now for seven years straight, almost eight haven't seen this museum. But this tour allows us to see the museum. But what makes it special is that is a focus on megalithic stoneware. This is megalithic sculpture. This is the Pyramids, amazing temples that are perhaps prediluvian in many ways because
they were discovered by the Pharaohs and then repurposed. For all the details on this tour, and to get half off, go to Earthancients dot com forward slash Tours now Remember Earth Ancients is half the typical price of these twelve to thirteen day tours and includes a tour of the Nile River on a five star cruise boat and has all your accommodations all your in country flights. Most of these tours are between ten and twelve thousand dollars ours
is less than half that much. Again for all the details, go to Earthancients dot com Forward slash Tours. Make it your Christmas present, you and your friend, you and your partner, or just you come out and join us Earthancients dot com Forward slash Tours. I often talk about my deep depression when my grandfather died. It was a devastating event in my life and I didn't know where to turn. I was just depressed. I was unhappy, I wasn't doing well at my work. If it wasn't for a therapist,
I don't know what I would have done. I went for at least I think it was over a year and a half almost two years, and it really helped me. It really cleared the air, helped me understand my process of depression. And although I was sad that my grandfather left, you know, I was happy to get the guidance, the therapy so that I could continue on and get back to feeling like myself again. There's a new program out there.
It's called Rula, and they do things differently. They have partnered with over one hundred insurance plans that make the average copages about fifteen bucks per session. It's not just affordable, the experience is tailored just for you. Other online therapy platforms might match you with the first available provider, which might fit or might not fit. Rula considers your goals, your preferences, and the background that you have and curates a list of therapists in an in network system that's
ideal for you. Rula supports every aspect of your mental health journey, from therapy to medication management. With its diverse network of licensed, experienced therapists, Rula makes it easy for you to get the care that you need. Thousands of people are already using Rula to get affordable, high quality therapy that's actually covered by insurance. Visit Rula dot com Forward slash Earth Ancients to get started. After you sign up, you'll be asked how you heard about them. Please support
our show and let them know we sent you. That's r u la dot com Slash Earth Ancients to join the program again Rula dot com Forward slash Earth Ancients. You deserve the mental health that works with you, not against your budget. We've had a number of different authors over the past few years talking about psychedelics, and we're talking journeying with ayahuasca. We have had people talk about DMT. In fact, that's been in the news lately with a number of people who are working with DMT and finding
various entities and other types of phenomenon. Today we're talking about psychedelics and sexuality. We're introducing a new book called Embrace Pleasure, How Psychedelics Can Heal Our Sexuality in. My guest today is d d Goldpa, and let me tell you a little bit about DDI. She is a psychotherapist, an educator, a leading voice in the development of psychedelics or I should say psychedelic integration psychotherapy. We'll talk a
little bit about that. And I had a chance to look at this book, and I have to tell you it's very well written, not only because this is something that I have not heard about psychedelics in sexual healing, but also just for its general information and overview. So DEDI, welcome to Destiny. Great to have you on the program.
Thank you so much for having me. Cliff, I'm thrilled to be.
Here talk about psychedelics and sexual therapy, or I should say in therapy as a whole. I have understood that you can use psychedelics in microdosing, you know, so you're not too out of balance, But how do you integrate those two?
Sure, well, I think I'll go back to sort of how you introduce this interview the topic of psychedelics, sexuality, and pleasure. Despite the fact that psychedelics have sort of emerged into the mainstream as something that's getting folded into acceptable medical treatment, is certainly part of our mainstream culture
more than it ever has been. These are particularly taboo top and to my knowledge, my book is the first by a major publisher that addresses these issues right, how psychedelic impact, how psychedelics impact our sexuality, and how we heal through pleasure. So you started to talk about microdosing and perhaps other ways of taking psychedelics. So just to define this for our listeners, microdosing is not actually a
new phenomenon at all. There's some evidence that this existed in indigenous cultures traditionally and was primarily used to heighten the senses for hunting. And there was a wave of interest in microdosing, I don't know, fifteen years ago, primarily coming on a Silicon Valley for exactly the opposite reason,
which was to optimize performance in creativity. So it's a really interesting place to start the interview because whereas I cover microdosing in the book as a phenomenon, my approach to psychedelic healing is actually quite the opposite, and it's founded on this idea that the psychedelic experience has value in and of itself, that the ways we are impacted spiritually, emotionally, and physically by psychedelic experiences has the potential to profoundly
change our relationship to our personhood and to our sexuality. And the experience of taking psychedelics itself is an erotic experience because it is somatic. It puts us in touch with the divine, and those are deeply spiritual erotic experiences,
and the pleasure of the experience itself is healing. Microdosing on the other hand, not to put it down in any way, because people mental health is impacted in really positive ways by my redosing, but it's looking at these medicines as something that could be integrated into our life for the purpose of mental health versus how will we changed on a large scale through the experience of pleasure, embodiment and connection with spirituality.
M amazing. I should have mentioned before we started that I wrote a book a few years ago called Cannabis and Sexual Healing for Men, And.
I've heard of that book.
I Oh really, I think it's the same publisher you're with, Inner Traditions, right, yeah, oh yeah, it was Barren Company, which is one of their companies. But one of the things that I discovered is that cannabis heightens sexual pleasure, and I had never thought about And you list the various types of psychedelics kennamine as well as masculine piote
d mt LSD as a form of sexual enhancement. I mean, because they're so powerful, how do you work with them in a way that allows for enough expressions so that you to get sexual pleasure.
Yeah. It's a really interesting question because my work really focuses on the post acute effects of psychedelics. So there's different ways to think about psychedelics and sexuality, And one is sex on psychedelics. So what is the experience of adding a psychedelic to a sexual experience? And I do write about that in the book, But the area of interest that is much deeper for me is how are we changed as sexual people because of our psychedelic experiences.
How does it make us more connected to our partners, more embodied, more present in our sexual experiences. So, you know, I do write that there are some medicines that people have seemed to experience as libido enhancing or sexuality enhancing LSD being one of them. And again as a therapist for example, to give you the opposite side of this. You know, I work clinically in my psychotherapy practice with ketamine, but I'm certainly not working with people who are having
sex on ketamine. But what they may be doing in my office in a you know, controlled clinical context, is addressing issues about their sexuality, particularly sexual trauma, that help them to feel as though they are more healed sexual people in the world. And so many medicines can be profoundly helpful with that.
Yeah, And I gotta say, for those of you listening, Dedi's book is outstanding in its coverage of these different psychedelics. But also, and we'll talk about this in a minute, she has great case studies which we'll bring up a little bit later. Talking a little bit about your personal journey as a I guess you could call it a sexual trauma victim. Was this part of your work, or is this a foundation for your work and to go to school become a psychotherapy and to focus on sexual trauma.
Well, like many therapists, I have a deeply personal investment in the work that I do. So yes, I am a survivor of sexual violence. That's something that I've really empowered myself to talk about publicly, and I do so because I want if there's any message that I have for people, it's to see that healing is possible and to stand in the world as an example that terrible things might have happened in your life and there is the possibility of healing that is always accessible to us.
So it felt very important to me to sort of own that publicly, that this is part of my history. So I had treatment resistant PTSD for quite a long time, and I tried many different approaches to healings, certainly traditional talk psychotherapy. I got very deeply involved in Eastern spiritual practices,
which were very helpful to me. I was a very diligent meditator, as I remained to this day, and there was a certain point in my healing trajectory where I was introduced to ceremonial psychedelic medicines, And when I say ceremonial, we often think of the healing of trauma as occurring only in clinical contexts with psychedelics, because many people are sort of familiar with psychedelics as a recreational tool or psychedelics as a clinical tool. And for me, the experience
was quite different. I was very lucky to be able to go to Peru and experience plant medicines in a ceremonial context. Fantastic and there many times I've been to Peru now, and this offered a legal, safe way to experience medicines that had been held ancestrally for generations, and those experiences there at the beginning of that journey, there was a lot of hard work that I had to do about confronting the traumas that I have experienced, and
those were really hard experiences. It took a lot of work in integration and took a lot of persistence to actually work through all of that trauma. But really the foundation of the book takes off from the perspective that in the West were often told that healing happens through hard work, that we might encounter psychedelics in a clinical context or otherwise, and it's about confronting terrible things that
have happened to you. But in my healing journey, there was a particular healing point where I had done all of that hard work and I had a ceremony in Peru with San Pedro medicine, which which is also known as what Chuma medicine, and the active component of that is mescaline, and that's really been the medicine that's been
the most heart healing for me. And I remember this day of being on this mountaintop and for the first time feeling so alive in my body, so connected to the earth, connected to the other people I was with,
without any thought of trauma at all. And that is the moment that I realized that that was actually the healing, that the hard work that I had done in those previous ceremonies led me to this point where the real healing was about being connected to myself, the earth, and to the divine again in this way that was so deeply pleasurable. So when I undertook the process of writing this book, that was really the message that I wanted to convey, is that there's something beyond the hard work.
There's a reason to keep going and that reason is the reconnection of pleasure in your life.
Wow, sexual pleasure is a huge deal for the body. It's released as hormones. We know a lot about it, but there's a lot we don't know. Would you say that these psychedelics, these plant medicines provide a shortcut for healing, another way to access the body, the mind, the spirit and integrate them in a way that brings you to the problem quicker and resolves it, perhaps well not necessarily resolves it, but helps you understand it, which I think is where the healing is. Yeah.
Yeah, So I'm holding onto your question, and I preemptively want for our listeners to go back and just define how I talk about pleasure in the book. So, the concept of pleasure in general, I think is one that's really misunderstood because it's a word we use colloquially all the time, and it can mean when we talk about something that's pleasurable, it could mean eating a food you like, It could mean kind of disappearing into your phone and
scrolling on it. Now, I am not trying to make the argument that those types of activities which I put under the umbrella of leisure are going to necessarily be healing. They have their utility right, because sometimes it can actually be very relaxing or helpful to us in some way
to disengage from life. So I'm not anti leisure. But the pleasure that I'm talking about that I think can lead to the healing that will address in your question is actually when we have the experience of being awake, mindfully tuned to the present moment, with an experience of
savoring the sensual. So it has to be something that is embodied, alive and wakes us up to how good it feels to be in our human experience, which is something when people experience trauma or really anything just being a person in this world, we can become very disconnected
from the pleasure of our own humanity. So when we take this a step further to address your question directly about sexual pleasure, erotic pleasure or sexual pleasure, I think is probably one of the most profound and heightened forms of pleasure we have, and paradoxically, it's also the form
of pleasure around which we feel the most shame. So one of the reasons I focused on sexual pleasure in the book is because I think almost all of us walk in the world with something within us that needs a little healing around our capacity to own our right to sexual pleasure. So I think when we endeavor to heal that we can actually access really deep parts of ourselves that we can become cut off from psychedelic medicines.
I think research does tell us that they have multiple different quality that are shown time and again in different research studies to support connecting to this type of pleasure that can be relationship enhancing, that can heal our relationship to our bodies, that can make us more attuned to sexual pleasure in sexual experiences, and those categories are that psychedelics induce the equality of openness, meaning we have more
capacity for fantasy, we have more cognitive flexibility. Psychedelics are also empathy enhancing, so we have greater capacity to be in our relationships and feel empathy for ourselves and other people, which makes us more connected. Psychedelics also are mindfulness enhancing.
So what's really interesting. There's a sex researcher I really respect named Lori Brato, and she wrote a book about sexuality and mindfulness, and what she found is that people we're not experiencing as much pleasure as possible because we are so habituated to multitasking, we actually are unable to focus on the sensations and queues that can turn us on, that can make us feel alive and awake in a
sexual experience. So psychedelics are tools in deepening all of these categories which can lead to sexual keeling and enhancement of pleasure.
We're going to take a short commercial break to allow our sponsors to identify themselves and will return shortly with my guest today, d D Goldpa discussing her new book, Embrace Pleasure, will be right back. You know, it used to be that you take a photograph and you frame it and you put it up on your wall, on your desk, or on a table to have a memory, have a thought, have a feeling about a past event.
That's all changed now it's all digital and there's a company out there called Aura Frames that can actually digitize hundreds of photographs and videos and have it on one framed presentation. What if you could give a gift that brings your favorite holidays, tradition and memories to life every day. With Aura Frames, you can what's your favorite holiday tradition? Who started it? How long has it been going? Do you have photos of it. The earlier you order, the
more time you have to curate your gift. Which photos are you adding? For a limited time, visit Aura Frames dot com and get forty five dollars off Aura Frames best selling Carver Matt Frames named number one by Woodcutter. By using the promo code Earth Ancients at checkout. That's au Raframes dot Com promo code Earth Ancients. This exclusive Black Friday Cyber Monday deal is the best of the year, so order now before it ends. Support the show by
mentioning us at checkout. My guest today is d D Goldpas. She is a psychotherapist who uses psychedelics in her therapy sessions to release sexual trauma. I kept hearing in my head orgasm orgasm. Is do these psychedelics induce orgasm easier or is it just part of the process that you're going to have an orgasm on a regular basis. That's a big deal.
Yeah, yeah, And it's a really interesting question because some of the people that I interviewed for the section of the book that are personal accounts from some of the authors of those personal accounts that I interviewed or named, and some chose to go by pseudonyms, but some people do talk about the experience of orgasm during psychedelic experiences
as being deeper, spiritual, completely transcendent for them. And as a sex therapist, when I'm working with clients, I often find that getting people to focus more on the experience itself, on the attunement to sensation in their body is helpful for them over single mindedly focusing on orgasm. So most people who are having sexual experiences want to have orgasms, but in fact, more satisfying sexual experiences can happen when we're savoring the entire experience instead of just this one
part of it. So broadening people's sexual scripts, helping them to be more present and attuned in sexual experiences is one of the strategies that I use as a sex therapist.
Fantastic, All right, So I come to dit, I come to your office, and I come with my partner and we're having issues and we sit with you and so forth and so on. When do you begin to integrate the plant medicine? How does that work?
Well, that's also a really interesting question because right now in most places in the United States, psychedelics, most of them continue to be illegal.
Exactly that was my next question.
They are federally illegal, right, so we have certain decriminalized places within the United States where there's more flexibility. I do not live in a decriminalized state. I practice in New York State. I live in Woodstock, New York, perhaps the most psychedelic small town in all of America, and yet these medicines remain illegal. So what I can work with as a tool is ketamine assistant therapy. That is a legal, medically supervised intervention that I work with under
medical guidance with a physician. On the other hand, many clients come to my office. I would say the majority of people that are coming for any kind of therapy that addresses psychedelics are not doing the psychedelics with me. They are coming for psychedelic integration therapy, which means that they are using these medicines on their own and they
are coming for therapeutic support. They're either using them independently, they are experiencing them with guides or sitters, or they are going to retreats or ceremonial contexts outside of the country.
Okay, so let me understand it. So you're you're there to as a therapist to find the trauma or the disease in the relationship and working to ease that. And then you're saying, are you saying I suggest that you use this retreat e ketamine retreat or are you I mean? I don't want to get into the I do want to get into the legal legalization we can. Yeah, when do you bring in the suggestion of using the plant medicine?
Legally, I can tell a client you are an exibing symptoms for which I think a medical evaluation for ketamine would be appropriate, right, because that is legal. Now if they say I want to do ayahuasca, this becomes a predicament, right, because I can't guarantee safety in an unregulated context. So the ethical boundary that I've set as a therapist is I don't recommend or refer clients to practitioners or contexts
that are currently illegal. And this is why creating legal pathways to these medicines is so important, because it is not stopping anyone from doing them, it's only making it more dangerous. Oh interesting, So to protect my license, right, I don't tell a client you should go out and get this substance that is illegal and do it. If a client says, hey, I just had a huge bushroom trip, and I need to make sense of that with a
knowledgeable therapist. I'm your person, right that is a place where you can come to my office and I can help you make sense of an experience you have had.
Oh, very good. So you're actually helping them define the experience that they're having on a plant medicine. Yes, with their partner or individually.
With their partner or individually, Yeah.
Okay, fantastic, that is fantastic. I have to say this that I haven't tried ayahuasca. I'm on the fence about it right now, but it is so powerful and it's so transformational that it's almost like you're not supposed to be in control. And so do you suggest that people use an intention that's kind of a software application to the hardware, hardware being the app the drug itself, and say, you know, my intention is to do this and have this experience for a healing or what.
With ayahuasca, particularly when I write about ayahuasca in the book, it is an extremely powerful medicine. And the first thing I would say is that people should have a lot of discernment about whom they sit in a nyahuasca circle with, because an ayahuasca circle that is held by someone who is a lineage holder with the rights and responsibilities to hold space for that particular medicine. It requires a tremendous amount of training, spiritual and training related to safely holding
the space. And the truth is ayahuasca has proliferated around the globe in so many ways that there are many people that are undertrained, and it can be a particularly dangerous medicine when it is not held well. With ayahuasca, I think what you're really pointing at is that there are some medicine experiences that can be overwhelming, profound, beautiful, even terrifying at times, and there's something about them that requires us to surrender. So how do we get ready
to surrender? And I would say the first step to rendering in a way that's therapeutically useful to us is that we know we are safe to do so, which is why it's so important to find a safe context. Intention is the other piece that you asked about. In the psychedelic assistant therapy world, people love to talk about intentions and to me, intention and it's like saying, I need this medicine to give me this, I want to feel less depressed. I want to feel healed in this
particular way. That's not a bad thing. I mean, it is completely understandable to me why somebody going through all of the of the trials of finding these contexts and undergoing these ceremonies would want something specific for themselves. But I exercise a lot of caution around intention, and I encourage my clients to define intentions broadly about what they
would like to invite in in the experience. So instead of saying I don't want to feel this way anymore, would invite a question that has to do with being curious about yourself, I would invite an intention that might say I'd like to be more open to intimacy, or I'd like to understand more about my blocks around my sexuality or something like that. So you know, I personally feel like and the way I write about it in the book is like our intention is like our north star.
So if we start to feel lost in an overwhelming experience, we can come back to this star and think about where we want it to head in all of this. But it isn't it shouldn't be what defines the experience itself. Like that psychedelics can be surprising.
It's funny you mentioned intentions where someone will actually form a question or an intention that is kind of like almost negative. I don't want to have this experience anymore. I don't want to feel bad about myself anymore. I don't want to, you know, be depressed all the time. That's like that I was. I was never think my idea of an intention is a very positive forward as I keep using the term software because it's you're using this tool to ask the plant medicine to work with you.
It's kind of like a heads up ahead of time. So in your practice, and I'm curious, would you say that your clients are a mix of people that have sexual dysfunction, sexual trauma, or they just want to have more connectivity with the relationship.
Mm, well, I'm not an interesting career phase right now.
I mean, I have many years of experience as a psychotherapism going into my eighteenth year of practice, so I've probably I mean, I really couldn't say the number, but it's got to be over somewhere in the five hundred to one thousand range, right of individual people who I have seen over time, right for at least some kind of therapy to context, and they have been vast people with sexual dysfunction issues, people with relationship issues, people with trauma.
But as I moved through my career sort of where I am right now. I'm at a place where I have a number of long term clients that I've been working with for a while. I do a lot of supervision and consultation, and of course writing and teaching are big parts of my career now. But when clients come to my practice some of the more common issues that
I feel that I really specialize in. I do see people for sexual dysfunction issues, but I think looking at our relationship to sexuality, into our relationships in general through a spiritual existential lens, and healing trauma through a spiritual existential lens is really sort of where I shine as a therapist. There are a lot of really well resourced therapists that do sex therapy for issues of sexual dysfunction.
But I feel like where I've gone in my career and where I feel the most connected to my work is when people are really asking themselves, who do I want to be in this relationship or what do I want my relationship to my sexuality to be? And that might be about disrupting harmful narratives that we internalize about ourselves, to really looking at blocks to intimacy and learning how to open our hearts and connect more deeply to love.
Because to me, at the end of the day, is as cheesy as it might sound, love really is the most important thing. And if I can help my clients to feel more love in their life, that is a job well done.
But you got to admit that having good sex is huge, you know, Yes, of course, good sex is huge. I want to address something that you have in the book, which is how do psychedelics address something like ed or frigidity in a woman, unresponsive sexual sexuality, things like that. I mean, I can't. It's really something that when you're lost in the plant medicine, it's like what do I
grasp on to? You know, in my mind, I have this feeling that you're in the room with the couple or with the individual and kind of guiding them along. But maybe that's too much to think about. I'm just curious about how that works.
Yeah, I mean the practice of sex therapy and even psychedelic therapies don't necessarily include any kind of I do give people somatic exercises, but it's exercises they're doing in the privacy of their own homes and then we're talking about it, right, So I'm not actually present for that part. Although there's disciplines such a sexological body work where people do work much more hands on with people, that is just not part of the discipline of psychotherapy. So you
mentioned ED. That is a really interesting one because the majority of men who experience rectile issues is it has a psychological ideology. So that means that it is not coming from any kind of physical dysfunction, which could commonly be, for example, circulatory or cardiac problems. That is, if you have ED and it does have a physical ideology, it's a big indicator you might have something going on with your heart, for example. Most men who experience it, it
has a psychological basis. So there's almost no research about this in psychedelic science, but we're starting to explore this and point in that direction. But what we do know is that psychedelics can radically shift how people feel about themselves as sexual beings are open to new ways of being sexual, and they can be very anxiety reducing. So a lot of men with a reptile issues really, what it's coming down to is ruminations. Right, they are in
their head and not their body. There is relationship dissatisfaction, or they're not asking for what they want, right, There could be It varies based on the individual. So it's an interesting way to look at it because we really don't have research that says particular sexual dysfunctions respond to psychedelic treatments, which we may in time, but what we do know is that the underlying psychological reasons people experience
sexual dysfunction can be improved greatly by using psychedelics. Now, you mentioned the word frigidity, and I think that is actually an interesting one to look at because one of the things that I do write about in the book is a case example of the treatment historically of frigidity
in women with LSD. Now that term in sex therapy has evolved to a term called hyposexual arousal desire disorder, so the term evolved clinically, but the idea, right that we do have some really interesting case examples, and there's one that is quasi famous. That was a woman who presented with a problem with frigidity who was treated psychiatrically with LSD, and she wrote a memoir of her experience with being treated with LSD, and I have to tell
you it is a very very interesting read. And this comes out of the early psychedelic experiments of the fifties, before these were scheduled substances, before we had the Controlled Substances Act. Now, when you look into it a little bit more deeply, what's really interesting is kind of a time piece that pathologizes female sexuality and really points to that there is a right way for women to be sexual.
And thankfully, I think we've evolved a lot beyond that, because if you look at these old documents from the fifties, they very much point to if a woman is not satisfying her husband in a certain way, she is suffering from a problem. Doesn't look like any of the social these social circumstances that might suggest why a woman in the nineteen fifties or even women today might not be so incredibly jazzed about their sexual lives with husbands when it's all vectored towards their pleasure.
Right.
So again, I think, like, what the interesting evolution in the field is, you know, the way psychedelics can help us to actually discover our own relationship to our sexuality and ways to be more generous and connected in our partnerships.
We're going to take a short commercial break to allow our sponsors to identify themselves and will return shortly with my guest today, Did Gopa and her new book Embrace Pleasure, How Psychedelics can Heal our Sexuality. Will be right back. Did Gopa is my guest today. Her new book Embraced Pleasure highlights psychedelics plant medicines as a form of therapy, and she uses kennamine in her own practice. This is another form of therapy and it is proving to be
very effective with a number of clients. Fascinating. Have you studied the work of Rick Strassman and his DMT studies on He doesn't get into sexuality at all, And this is my next I'm forming my next question, which is why hasn't more studied been attempted by these clinics on plant medicines and pleasure.
Well, I think that that goes back to one of the very first things that I've mentioned is that it is still an incredibly taboo topic. There are a couple of research studies out that are really extraordinary in the field, and two that I want to point to is the work of Tamaso Barbara at Imperial College, which was a really beautiful comprehensive study on psychedelics and sexual satisfaction, and another by Daniel Krueger that was really looking at psychedelics
impact on people's sexual self perception. The reason that this is not studied is because, first of all, it is incredibly hard and incredibly expensive to run psychedelic clinical trials because in general they are not being funded by the government. They are being funded either by for profit pharmaceutical companies or academic institutions. And the highest level of priority is
not sexuality and pleasure. It is finding specific molecules that can treat specific mental health disorders so they are patentable, can be marketed. And I don't mean to sound cynical, but I mean that is the truth of the clinical research world. So this really interesting research that you see emerging around sexuality, and I think there's going to be a lot more of it coming out, are really being done by researchers who are in academic contexts, who are
interested in exploring these questions. And honestly, these these preliminary kind of groundbreaking research studies I think are paving the way. There are smaller ones that are people are doing more qualitative or observational studies, and all of that will start to multiply over time.
Wow, uh, I don't trust big pharma when it comes to psychedelics. I don't trust uh. You know they're going to synthesize ayahuasca one day and it's going to be a mess. I just it's not going to be something you want to use at all. Talk about kennamine in your personal journey. You you're a practitioner who uses it in your own healing. What's the high, what's the feeling? And how do you address you? I don't want to say your well, I will say your sexuality or your issue using ketamine.
Well. I am a ketemine assisted psychotherapist and straight up ketamine has not been part of my personal healing journey. I have experienced ketamine treatment in my training as a kedemine therapist. So thankfully you know their opportunities as a practitioner to receive treatment, so we know how to adequately
hold space. Yeah, right, as you should. And I know that this is a debate in the field, but I will come down very very clearly on the side of people who operate as psychedelic assisted therapists should have experience with psychedelics themselves, and I strongly hold that opinion. So ketamine is a surprising one. And I began to use it at my practice because that was what was legally accessible to me. And I'll be honest with you, I
didn't feel any kind of heart connection to it. It's not a medicine that I felt offered me profound healing. But I thought people really are benefiting from it, and the research is there to support this, so why wouldn't
I offer it? And much to my surprise, I've learned that there are ways that you can create a container around ketamine within the context of clinical practice and guidelines that can be very sacred for people, that can help people to achieve expanded states of consciousness that could help them deeply connect to themselves. So the experience of ketamine ketamine, I should say for our listeners first, is it's a little bit like the Pluto of psychedelics, right, It's kind
of like outside of the psychedelic solar system. It's there, but it's not really one of one of the classic psychedelics or one of the ones that we kind of keep in our pantheon of medicines. It's a dissociative that is used as an anesthetic, And what was discovered is that in a certain dosing range, there's like a mid range where ketamine induces an altered state of consciousness that unique from other psychedelic experiences. Can almost be dream like.
It can induce visions, it can induce a sense of connection with the divine in some cases a sense of disconnection from the body, which is unique. And it can also have different effects at different dosing levels. So a full psychedelic dose of ketamine might put someone into a dissociated state where they feel connected to the universe, and a very low dose of ketamine might mean that someone in my office can sit and talk and have a psychotherapy session, but do so with many of their defenses
being lowered. And specifically, the way I think that this is very helpful around sexual healing and sexual trauma healing is that I have found optimally dosed ketamine can relax the physical body to an extent that topics or memories that are normally extremely activating for someone, they are not feeling it in their body in the same way their body isn't starting to tense, their heart isn't starting to race.
So what I find with my trauma clients is that they're able to have a psychedelic journey, the experience of which is helpful for them and the content of it. But as they're coming out of the ketamine medicine, we've got this therapeutically optimal time to talk where they are extremely expanded and relaxed, but they're still lucid and able to communicate in therapy. So they're very interesting.
Yeah, so it kind of sets the body from the mind, separates them and a person can actually function and actually respond in a very clear status.
Sounds like there's also some colleagues of mine who I respect deeply who are really innovating in the area of ketemine assisted couples therapy, and I've also facilitated ketemine assisted
couple's therapy retreats. And one would think, like that doesn't feel like an obvious fit, but I was very surprised to see that ketamine can really disarm people so that they have their experience of journeying together and then they're able to connect as a couple in ways that they normally could not so, I will say I do think certain psychedelic medicines are a better fit for certain people
or certain problems. And we certainly don't have the clinical evidence to suggest any psychedelic could be healing for any problem. But I do suspect that people who have psychedelic experiences together, that go through a journey experience and then share that with each other, that that is an essentially heart connecting experience.
H amazing. Talk a little bit about sexual trauma, Define it, but also what are the levels of sexual trauma? Because it doesn't necessarily have to be physical. Someone could be as a child, influenced by a parent, a guardian, or somebody who's who's doing inappropriate things that trigger this trauma. So give us the definition.
Yeah, Well, in the book, I use what's a relatively controversial definition because we have to first start with the idea that we have a clinical definition of trauma that for someone to meet the diagnosis of PTSD, there are certain clinical symptoms that they have to experience over a period of time. I understand why we need diagnostic criteria and why that is important, but it is not the framework that I rely on most heavily in my practice.
Of working with human beings. The way I think about sexual trauma is any experience that we have in our lives that prevents us from being able to access pleasure that impacts our sexuality or that impacts our sexual self perception. And the most important part of this is in an enduring way. We have negative experiences all the time. We might have experiences with a partner that don't feel good to us at all, but our nervous system is capable
of actually metabolizing a lot. Right. We can have something that's not a great experience and we get over it, we move on with our lives, and it might not be thought of as something we want to have happened again. But it's not necessarily a trauma. So what makes something traumatic is that it stays with us and it begins to define how we see other experiences and the levels
of trauma that you mentioned. It's really easy to identify the traumas that we might think of as the quote unquote big ta ones, and that might mean sexual assault, being sexually abused as a child, But we are also on the other end of that spectrum, steeped in a sex negative culture that's giving us constant messages about the right way to be sexual, about who we're supposed to
be as sexual people. We might be shamed for certain expressions of sexuality and those can actually create really enduring harm, and I consider them sexual trauma or slash sexual violence as well.
How do we know when we've been traumatized? In other words, if you are traumatized as a young person and you've forgotten, what are the signs?
That is a really complex question, because one of my areas of clinical focus is psychedelic induced recovered memories of sexual abuse is a huge issue. It is a very complicated one and it is one that can it requires a lot of delicacy to talk about it ethically.
So are you saying that psychedelics can actually extract the source of the trauma.
Well, there is currently some very interesting research being done in this on the scientific side of things, So I think one thing, this is an incredibly in depth topic, So I'm going to attempt to talk about it in
very simple ways. We can, as children experience inappropriate sexual events and at the time not experience them as terrifying and in fact not even know that they're sexual, and so those memories can be stored away we are not walking around feeling like we're traumatized until later, as adults, we remember the experience, and when it's recontextualized as inappropriate, it can become traumatic. So that is an experience where a person essentially doesn't repress, but forgets an experience and
then later is reminded of it. The interesting piece of this is that in laboratory studies, we have no evidence for repressed memories, meaning that a person could have a horribly traumatic thing happened to them and then repress it entirely. The clinicians in the field report continually that they experience this as true incredible in their clients, that people can indeed have experiences that are deeply traumatic, and then those
experiences are later unearthed, either through psychotherapy or in psychedelic experiences. Now, what gets really complicated is that we have this legacy in the nineteen nineties of this phenomenon where therapists were suggesting to clients it sounds to me like you were sexually abused, rather than the clients coming forward with that information. This created a frenzy of false accusations. It harmed a
lot of people. So this sort of the memory wars of the nineteen nineties are very much in our cultural consciousness around this issue. So what we see in psychedelics is that there is a couple of different things on
both sides of the coin. I have worked with many survivors who have had experiences, usually in more intense psychedelic states, where they recover a memory of being sexually abused, and that memory comes through either somatically, meaning they have a sense of knowing in their body, or they experience a
narrative that they see depicted visually. For some of those people, they come to realize that that was indeed a memory that did indeed happen to them, And some of my clients conclude that it was not something that actually happened in the way they saw or experienced it, but it represents feelings that were part of their childhood. Some clients even come to believe that that has to do with
an ancestral memory. I mean, this is getting into the more of the shamanic, right, So some clients that I've worked with believe that they were having a real memory that is not their memory. So it really creates this situation for clinicians who are really undertrained in this area and want very desperately to either endorse or deny that these memories are real or not, and therapists can't do that.
All we can do is sit with our clients and try to support them ethically and help them to understand and to decide for themselves what it is, and then how do we go about healing from that, because the experience of having this recovered memory be quite traumatic in and of itself. And the last piece that I feel is really important for listeners to hear is that psychedelics can induce suggestibility, which means that we're in a psychedelic state,
we are more suggestible to outside information. So if somebody were to suggest or there was something in the environment that led us to be predisposed to have a recovered memory, it's conceivable that that could happen, which is why ethical space holding in diligent psychotherapy is really of the utmost importance, because our minds are more flexible and suggestible in this state.
We want to take a short commercial break to allow our sponsors to identify themselves, and we'll return shortly with my guest today, did Gopa presenting her newest book, Embrace Pleasure. Will be right back Didi Goldpa is my guest today. Her new book, Embraced Pleasure, highlights microducing of various psychedelics otherwise known as plant medicines, and follows the indigenous tradition
of working with healing and therapeutic effects. I'm so glad you brought up ancestral healing because this is a very big theme right now in your practice. Do you see this bleed through of unknown traumas or fears or psychological states that are not present that could have been generational handed down from the parents, from the grandparents and so forth.
My personal opinion is absolutely. I think the epigenetic research that's emerging right now that we actually can genetically carry trauma from previous generations is starting to substantiate the idea that this is scientifically credible. And what feels important to me as a therapist is I'm not interpreting that for a client. I don't say to my clients I'm wondering
if this could be ancestral trauma. Well, people start to wonder that when peg start to be curious about it for themselves, I am absolutely there to deepen that inquiry
with them. Another piece that I've been exploring that I just think is a really uplifting opposites to the idea of ancestral trauma, is how we may be epigenetically encoded to ancestral ways of knowing, because I feel like we're in a moment on planet Earth right when we're facing some really dire political circumstances, and at the same time people are becoming so interested in consciousness movements and learning indigenous technologies and trying to learn more about their own ancestry.
I mean, I feel like that is incredibly present with us in our culture, and for so many of us, our Earth based ancestral traditions are lost. So if we can carry ancestral trauma, we can also carry ancestral knowing, which means inside of you are into suative ways of knowing, how to connect with the earth, how to work with plants, how to create ritual that our ancestors knew you have it as well. So because if you can carry the bad,
you can also carry the good. And I am particularly interested with learning how to turn that on in people and help them to connect into these ancestral ways of knowing, which is also part of your birthright.
That was my next question is as a therapist, How do you provide tools for someone who's dealing with an ancestral trauma. I mean, I, off the top of my head, as a lifelong meditator, help them understand the importance of meditation. But that could be minor if it's a really big issue.
Yeah, well, I can say that internal family systems therapy has some really elegant tools for dealing with legacy burdens, meaning things that we carry that are part of our ancestry. So there are some therapeutic modalities that acknowledge and have tools within them for addressing ancestral traumas. For me, I feel like when a client is receptive to it, developing ritual practice can be one of the most profound ways
that people can can address ancestral trauma. And so what that can look like is it doesn't have to be a ritual that has any particular religious form, It doesn't need to look like it's ceremonial per se. But ritual can be symbolic practices that help us to either deal with that burden that we're carrying in some way. It can be visualization, It can be writing a letter and burning it. It can be creating an altar in the
woods that honors the experience of that ancestor. But something that we do to mark in some way that we are releasing an energy that we have been carrying. It has a profound psychological effect, and my personal opinion is that it also has a profound spiritual effect.
Yeah, that was my next question. It sounds like you do understand the components of spirituality and you are are you integrating that into the practice that you have.
Well, I approach spirituality in a very pragmatic way, So when I am working with a new client, I am listening very carefully for how they talk about spirituality. So if someone is using the language of God, that's the language I'm using. If somebody is talking about ancestors or certain kinds of trans personal practices, that's what I'm mirroring back to them. And if somebody says I'm not a spiritual person at all, I say, okay. But the way I'm thinking about the spiritual domain in our work is
fundamentally around the question how connected are you? How connected are you to the earth? How connected are you to experiences of the ecstatic experiences of the divine? So honestly, nobody people who come in and say I am not a spiritual person at all. I believe all people are
spiritual people. I think that I respect that in people because most of the people that tell me that, when I get them to know them well enough, the core of it is that they have been traumatized by organized religion in some way.
Yep.
So I am not going to be the person that forces that on them again. But helping someone to connect to their spiritual self is really addressing that question of connection.
To me. Yeah, the books called Embrace Pleasure, How Psychedelgics can Heal Our Spirituality? And my guess today has been d D GOPA. As we conclude, d D, can you give us a couple of case studies, obviously without naming names of people who've come in and worked with you, and your suggestions on the plant medicines.
Sure, I will take some of these. I do in the book talk about clients, but they aren't real clients. They're all composites. It felt very important to me too, and I say that in the forward of the book that the case studies that are in the book are composites, because I feel like what happens in the in the privacy of psychotherapy is really sacred. So the stories are stories that are the stories of many clients that are sort of composites under a fictional facade, if you will.
Interesting you did that, yeah, yeah, because I was going to pick out a couple of people in here.
I thought, well, I mean, you can certainly ask about it. But the stories in the book that are actual people is a chapter later in the book that our first hand accounts of people I interviewed, and those people are not my clients. But there are some particularly beautiful, beautiful stories, one of a woman calling back her child self and healing from sexual abuse she experienced as a child with ayahuasca.
There is also a range of ages. I interviewed Charlie and Shelley Shelley Winninger, who are a very prominent couple in the psychedelic community here in New York City, and they're in their seventies, and they talk very much about how psychedelics have shaped their sex life and their experience
of love and their relationship together. I interview somebody who's actually quite a good friend of mine, who is a Rabbi who's a transper, and talks about their experience of gender unfolding through their psychedelic experiences, so I really just have That was some of the most beautiful part of writing the book was hearing people's personal stories that they were willing to share with me. But you can absolutely ask me about any of the case studies you'd like.
I didn't want to do that because the book. You know, you have a lot of work in this book, and I didn't want to go with page twenty two. You know, that would be just a little too much. You mentioned the trans community, and I'm here in San Francisco. It's very big. I don't I don't follow it. I mean, I have a couple of friends that are trans, but that's a really challenging position to be in society. And I can imagine. Do you have clients that are dealing in that situation?
Yeah, I mean I specialize in working with the LGBT community. So the interesting thing about transness is I think the hardest thing about being trans is living in a country that is persecuting trans people.
Now right, now, Yeah, you're right, yeah, And that talk about trauma. You can't go out and be yourself. I guess, you know it's crazy, you know.
I tend to think about all queer identities as having a really divine aspect to them, because queerness in any way is some expanded state of personhood, right, and being queer trans it's really about celebrating parts of yourself the society normally thinks of as different, aberrant, unnatural, and standing in your power and saying, not only is this who I am, but this is one of the best parts of who I am. That's what really a queer affirming
or trans affirming perspective is. So yeah, I mean, I think there has been a lot that's probably beyond the scope of what we could say on this podcast about the intersections of LGBT identities and psychedelics. And one piece that I can touch on briefly, which I do touch on in the book, unfortunately, is that there has been a legacy of psychedelics being used for conversion therapy.
And yeah, so say conversion therapy. It's like someone's homosexual and the physician wants to make them heterosexual, giant what are they called that? Conversion therapy?
Correct Social conversion therapy is a really tricky topic because many people have the perception that it's an involuntary treatment inflicted upon queer minners by clergy, and that is one way that conversion therapy happens. But many of the case studies we have in the psychedelic litter point to voluntary treatments that LGBT individuals voluntarily undertook in order to change
their sexual identity. So any treatment that a person provides that is aimed at changing the sexuality or gender identity of another person, whether it's voluntary or involuntary, is conversion therapy. And we have so many mountains of clinical evidence to tell us that conversion therapy, whether voluntary or coerced, is harmful.
The percentage I don't have the statistic right on the top of my head, but a large percentage of people who have experienced these treatments become more depressed, more anxious,
more suicidal afterwards. So to me, part of the reason that it's important to shine light on this and psychedelics is so that in this moment we can create consensus as psychedelic therapy is gaining traction that these treatments were harmful, that they are harmful, and that the psychedelic community needs to have consensus that psychedelics will not be used in this way.
Again, Wow, yeah, that's heavy. If someone's feeling less than that the community, that the society they live in is not happy about their sexual identity, and they start taking psychedelics thinking that that's going to be the solution. That's terrible.
And you're right.
The church and medicine, Oh boy, I can't imagine. That must be tough. DDI. It's been a real pleasure having you on the program. How can people learn more about you? You have a website? Give us your website.
I do. Indeed, the book has a website, and if you would like to read it, and I hope that you will, you can go to Embrace Pleasure dot com. There's many different buying options. You can read more about myself and my work. I also have a personal website, which is ddegoldpod dot com, and you can connect me with me in that way.
Did you must have a YouTube channel with videos? Come on, now, what's going on?
I don't I'm really just getting on this.
So I've spoken you need to have a video page, girl, Come on, No, but I've.
Been sitting in my house writing this book through a long time.
No, it's uh, you're a natural, and get a camera in your face and uh, let's see some video because that's another way of I mean, I'm learning the hard way too. There's a whole generation that won't listen to a podcast and list it's on YouTube, so you got to consider that.
Well, if this airs tomorrow, I will say, if you happen to be in the New York City area on Saturday, I'm doing an event with my colleague Mitzi Bautista at the Brooklyn Psychedelic Society and it's going to be a really interesting offering and it's going to be a dialogue that takes in the perspective of Western psychedelic traditions and indigenous traditions to try to talk about right relationship to these medicines. And it's going to have audience engagement, music,
somatic practices. So if people happen to hear this podcast and they happen to be in the area, we would love to have you.
Well, podcasts will be out shortly twenty four hours. Are you promoting that and just locally or are you promoting it will be like aired or streamed in some way.
No, it's going to be a closed event that will be in person only, because we hope it'll be an intimate experience with the people who attend, But if you happen to be in New York City, you can check out the Brooklyn Psychedelic Society website and learn more about the event.
Psychedelic Society. I like that. It sounds very cool. Ddy much success on this new book. I love the cover, I love the material, and I think you got something going on. In fact, I have a prediction. I think there's one or two more books that are coming forth very soon.
Am I right, I've got some I've got some things cooking. I'll say that.
Fantastic. Hey, real pleasure having you on the program.
Thank you, Cliff. Take care.
You have to read this book, Embrace Pleasure, because she gets into great detail about using psychedelics, and I mean, I've always heard about using them for microdose sessions for creativity and for working with mood alterations and things like that. But dd is working in a special environment and she's very very talented and very on board on what to use. And I'm not a real expert on canemine, and I'm wondering just how that affects you because it's it's a anesthetic.
It's a general anesthetic that they use in surgery. So what's the dosage and what's the application? And can you take too much? Can you take too little? How do you gauge you? Those are all things we could have talked about. But you need to read the book. It just came out. You can get it on Amazon and all the details are on Amazon. Also check out her website. Her website has a lot of information and she's great. I thought she was very very well informed and presented
a really strong case for working with trauma. So there you go. Hey, if you're enjoying Earth Ancient's Destiny and Earth Ancient Special Edition, please consider becoming a subscriber. For as little as five dollars a month, you can support their work. We do here on these podcasts and we have bills. We've got to pay our bills, and you can really help. To become a subscriber, go to patreon dot com, forward slash Earth Ancients and subscribe. You take it out of your ATM or your credit card. You
don't have to even think about it. And we have a whole bunch of thank yous. We have a library of digital books. I think we're about fifty plus right now, and if you want to download a book that you see, you might find a Graham Hancock. You might find a book from a presenter that you liked, a guest or an author. There you go, it's there for you to download for free. It's converted to a PDF and you have it on your desktop. So to become a subscriber,
go to Patreon dot com Forward slash Earth Ancients. Okay, that's it for this show. I want to thank my guest today, Dd Goldpa, coming to us from New York. As always, the team of Gel Tour, Mark Foster and Feya Pavar. You guys rock all right, take care of you well and we will talk to you next time. And I