Austin Mao: Ineffable

Hey, humans. How's it going? Susan Ruth here. Thanks for listening to another episode of Hey, Human podcast. This is episode 444, and my guest is Austin Mao. Austin is the cofounder of Ceremonia, a nonprofit antheogenic church in Colorado. I had to say that slowly so I

got it right. As a leader in legal and safe psilocybin mushroom and ayahuasca retreats, Ceremonia uses a synthesis of science and shamanism in partnership with plant medicine to guide people in spiritual, mental, and physical well-being. We had a great conversation. Austin's super fascinating, and I'm excited for you to hear this one. Check out Hey Human Podcast for links and to learn more about my guests in the show. Hey Human Podcast is on YouTube

under official Susan Ruth. I'm on Patreon at susan ruthism. My TikTok and Instagram is susan ruthism. Check out susan ruth dot com to learn more about me and my other artistic endeavors, and find my albums on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, wherever you get your music. Rate, review, and subscribe to Hey Human podcast on Apple, iHeart, and Spotify podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening. Be well. Be kind. Be love. Here we go. Austin Mao, welcome to Hey Human.

Hey, Susan. Thank you. I'm gonna start asking where you're from originally and how growing up shaped you into the path that you're on now. So I'm originally from Los Angeles or a suburb from LA. My parents divorced when I was less than one years old, and I grew up primarily with my mom. You know? So I I run retreats, and I'm sure we're gonna go in go into

that. We run psychedelic retreats. One of the questions that we often post people on the first night, just as a means of introduction is, like, what is the early childhood memory that most defines who you are today, or maybe most impacted who you are today? For me, there's a memory of when I was around eight years old, and my mom was broken down on the floor sobbing. And at that age, I had no idea why she was crying, only that she was in pain, and it was my responsibility

to save her from that pain. And so I sang to her as a kid, trying to console her. And I think in that moment, there was this savior complex that was born in me, you know, particularly directed towards the feminine, like wanting to help people, in my life. But that was very much in the shadow for so much of my life. And where I, you know, where I gave that energy was from a place of altruism, you know, from self sacrifice, sacrificing my energy. Martyrdom type? Maybe you could, you could say a

little bit of that. But ultimately, you know, there's this, this term in psychology called parentification. And it's this idea of, of that the child now has to take care of the parents. And, and that's really how I grew up. My father didn't have a high school education. He was like a poker dealer in a casino in Los Angeles, you know? And I used to think that he loved money more than me. And in fact, the way that he would express his love to me is by giving me money as a kid.

I grew up with this need to, like, earn my father's love, while my mom raised me, giving me so much blessings and love, and I could do no wrong, and it was just complete positive reinforcement. So fast forward to my adult life, became a multi time entrepreneur, really became good at, not working, which meant that I was making, you know, a high 6 figure income working four hours a week from anywhere in the world, culminating in having the largest

Airbnb company in Las Vegas. We're hosting 2,000 guests a month There were portfolio of houses that I owned. And then I found plant medicine. Recently, I was in a speaker training because I'd give a TED talk, and we were asked to tell stories of who we were before, who we are now,

etcetera. What I learned there is that I couldn't really even use the stories from before I tried medicine in a ceremonial context, psychedelics and ceremonial context, because I had changed so fundamentally that that it wasn't like I was writing a new chapter of my life. It was a it was like a complete sequel to who I was. Your question is, you know, how did my

formative years make me who I am? It all kind of got wrapped up in what I do now, which is to say that I, you know, now I am also devoting my life to helping people, but from a place of, I think, greater mindfulness and skillfulness than I used to, you know, from a place of self sacrifice and burning out now and doing it in a more, I think, considerate and and tactful way. When you were doing the Airbnbs and had that empire, which you still may have that empire, but back then, were you happy?

Or were you feeling like there was something missing? You know, it's funny. There's a spiritual teacher that you may know of, Ram Dass. Right? Love me, sir Ram Dass. Love you, sir Ram Dass. Exactly. And he has this line that says, you know, who are you in the privacy of your own heart? And someone else that kinda came up with him, Joseph Goldstein, gives the line, who are you when you're sitting on your toilet? Right? Like, what are

your most private thoughts during that time? So from the outside looking in, I was living a Instagram life. I was humble bragging on Facebook and Instagram, the photos of cars and houses and travel and blah blah blah. But on the inside, I was rudderless. I did not have direction in my life. There's this book that we have people read when they come through Ceremonia, called The Second Mountain, and the author David Brooks distinguishes between happiness and

joy. Happiness is this fleeting, like, pop a bottle of champagne, win you an award, do something good. Great. You're happy for a moment, but joy is something deep and pervasive. Right? It's something that lasts, much longer than the moment. And so I would say that I had many moments of happiness. And in fact, what I was doing was chasing happiness by going to exotic destinations and whatnot. But I didn't have joy in my life. I didn't have purpose.

I didn't have values systems, and I didn't have relationships that nourished me. I often think of plant medicine as bringing us back to a place of remembering. I myself have not done Ayahuasca. I've done mushrooms maybe two or three times. It worked once. The other two times, everything just got real sparkly. But I haven't done it in the sort of context of purpose other than finding a moment of joy.

But I do believe that plant medicine, considering the source of it, it's facilitating a way back to the truth of who we are instead of the idea of who we are. Yeah. Totally. I, you know, I liken it to the feeling that that maybe anyone has felt here, of feeling the most alive you've ever felt. So think like falling in love for the first time, or skiing down a mountain, or solving that problem that's been or getting the

big paycheck or something like that. The most alive you've ever felt, combined with the feeling of being home. Coming home with your dog wagging its tail after a long trip, and that feeling of, like, ah, here I am. And that's such a they're, like, polarized. Right? Like, one is has this extraordinarily exuberant energy and another has this very relaxed energy. But imagine both of those combined. That's the feeling that people often feel or describe feeling when they come through this experience.

And it goes to show you, it provides what we call, again in psychology, an index experience. It's like, Oh, now I know what that feels like. Like, I know that's possible. Then you can start aiming your life like a compass towards that. Did you experience plant medicine first and have it give you an epiphany and then move into these spaces? Or did you think, oh, this is an interesting thing to do, this sort of ceremonial type scenario? And then how did those two things

meet? In order did you have to go through your own healing first or were you healing along the way? I guess is more specific? My consciousness journey, if I were to pinpoint when it began, it was about eight years ago when I heard that my father was diagnosed with cancer. Mhmm. And I spent the last his last six months of his life bedside with him. In that time, you know, I had been estranged from him.

I would see him maybe once a year, and we whenever we would talk, maybe once every month or two months over Skype or over FaceTime, it'd be a quick, hello, how are you doing, what'd you eat for dinner, how's life, okay, great. You know, a super short call. And I imagine that many of your listeners may have relationships with their parents that can be similar, you know. That experience taught me something because he learned what is truly valuable in life, that it's not the money that he hoarded.

It's not the the property. It's the it's the love, the connection, the experiences that we have in life. So after he passed, you know, I went through a deep grieving process, and it wasn't until four years after that that I had my first ceremony experience. In that case, it was with Ayahuasca.

Now, when I sat with Ayahuasca, I had already had over a hundred psychedelic experiences, many years of Burning Man, festivals, camping trips, etc. I went in with a chip on my shoulder thinking, what could this possibly teach me that I haven't already seen? And I'll share with you because I I just heard you say that you you had some experiences, and one worked, one didn't. Something like twelve percent of America uses psychedelics a year. A lot of people don't realize that.

It's it's a very staggering number. And for those that have used a psychedelic, whether that be in college or whether that be therapeutically, whatever it is, the gap between normal waking consciousness and what you experience in a psychedelic is so big that it's already called ineffable, which means I literally couldn't explain to you in words in a way that you could understand it. Right?

The gap between recreational or solo use of psychedelics and a guided or therapeutic or ceremonial container is equally as big, and I had no idea about that. And so my first ayahuasca experience, you know, in the first ceremony out of three, I felt embraced by my mother and felt the warmth of her love to a capacity that I had never remembered feeling before. And it felt like divine. Then I had a vision of introducing my then wife to my father who had passed years prior.

And I didn't even know I was missing that in my life. Because, wow, you know, like, in the grieving process, of course it grieved the memories that we had, I didn't know to grieve the unopened possibilities of the future. Right? So I came out of that ceremony and I was like, hallelujah, I am healed, I'm ready to go home, where's my Uber? But there were still two more ceremonies.

The next morning, we did a workshop, and we were asked to recount an early childhood memory, very much like you just asked me. And I could barely pick out anything. It was a complete haze. So I went into that ceremony with the intention of investigating my memories, and I took a very large dose, in this case, and I started reliving my memories in vivid detail going back and back in time. I mean, I could remember turning my locker combination in high school, like flipping pages in the

book and reading passages. Like, you hear about photographic memory or you see movies of, a beautiful mind or something like that. Right? Like, that was me living that experience. And I went back and back and back in time until I was a child under sheets, and then I felt horny. I popped up on my yoga mat in the middle of the jungle. There's 49 other, you know, entrepreneurs and founders next to me. And I'm like, what the heck could this

be? And when I went back in, I realized that I was sexually touched by my mother's boyfriend when I was four years old. And I had no idea. My mind had completely repressed it. And my mind threw the baby out with the bathwater because it repressed all memory. So then I started going forward in time in this vision with the new knowledge of not only the sexual trauma, but also the knowledge that my mind would repress long term memory,

and everything started making sense. Like I had sexual confusion as a kid, a bully as a kid, you know, as a teenager. Just my relationship with the feminine and and and sexuality was was so marred, so so complex. And I couldn't hold on to relationships because or even hobbies because I I just would simply forget the beautiful memories that I would create within them.

All the way to the present moment where I'm lying on this mat in the middle of the jungle, and I woke out of it with tears in my eyes, and I told the facilitator about this, and she says, Oh my God, I'm so sorry. And I said, No, no, no, you don't understand. I feel like I was cured of Alzheimer's. So that ceremony heralded the beginning of the rest of my life, what I call the renaissance of my life. That was about four and a half years ago.

And since that time, I've been on an accelerated and extraordinary healing path. Going deeper and deeper into myself. And then being in service, you know? If you look at every major spiritual tradition, they agree on certain things, whether it's Buddhism or Christianity or Hinduism or Islam, one of the things they agree on is that service is a path to a spiritual experience, the experience

of self, of God. And where my healing path has taken me is to be deeply in service to the same path of healing that I took to find myself. And so my story that I'm sharing with you now, you know, I've shared on stage, to thousands of people, I've shared on the TED stage, but it's not unique. Because now I facilitated more than 500 individuals, and I can tell you, like, we have a ninety six percent rate of people saying it's the most life changing experience of their of their life.

And what I've been witness to and what I've what I've had the blessing of of being able to hold people through is their version of this too. Yeah. So my healing journey started back then. It continues now, and it also cascades into the healing that I get to be in support of for so many people. Is your mom still with us? Mhmm. Yeah. She actually came to retreat last year, and through psilocybin, she was able to kick twenty five years

of depression. She was on antidepressants for twenty five years, and and no longer takes them. When you come to a realization like the one you had from four years old, did you feel like you needed to talk to your mom about it at all? Or was it, were you able to process it in, out, and through without going back to that? First, I'll share my my what happened for me, and then I'll share what what often happens for people. You know?

For me, I told my mom, she initially met it with criticism, and some anger, which I don't fault her for because underneath that anger was a lot of guilt. I'm sure she blamed herself for that, even though that's not at all her fault. And I think that also triggered something in her, because my belief is that this runs through our family. It's ancestral, as is often the case with any kind of trauma people have.

I went through a process of integrating this, but where it began, which was really interesting, a lot of people think like, Oh, you come to a realization like this, this has got to mess you up all sorts of ways. Or man, how come you're not so pissed off at that guy? Who is still alive. It's because as soon as I realized it, I experienced an extraordinary amount of gravity. And I was so grateful because the mere knowledge of it filled in the gaps of who I am. The understanding of who I am.

And so we like to say, all love begins with self love. And it's really easy to go to healers, and they're just like, just love yourself, bro. And you're like, but how? And really, where love begins, and again this is something else that many spiritual traditions agree with, is where love begins is through the experience of the present moment. Of being here what Ram Dass calls being here now. And experiencing this now in all of its infinite depth and glory.

And because I was experiencing that moment now in the jungle, and experiencing myself in such capacity and so much more understanding, I was filled with gratitude at everything that ever happened in my life to lead me to that moment of revelation. Including all the stumbles, including all the falls, including all the betrayals, including all the hurt. Like, all of it led me to who I was at that moment. And all of it led me to who I am right in this moment talking to you now.

What happens for a lot of people is they go through a process of integration. Integration, we say, is like the most important part of this work because you can have this extraordinary helicopter ride to the mountaintop of consciousness, but if you come back to life and you're still an asshole, what's it all for? Right? And so where integration happens is

that's where the rubber meets the road. Like, how do we bring this insight, the the felt sense of, what some many people describe as enlightenment or deep amounts of peace and love and harmony? How do we bring that back to life where we're, you know, on Zoom calls or working on a cubicle or, you know, having deadlines and whatnot, or sitting in traffic. Like, how do we embody that? And that's a process.

And that's why there's such an extraordinary difference between doing psychedelic work or doing transformational work, it doesn't have to be with psychedelics, attempting to do that by oneself versus having some level of guidance through the process, and curriculum and structure. Because this stuff is hard, you know? We're not just rewiring our own neural pathways, we're remapping generations of patterning that we've gotten from our parents and their

parents and their parents' parents, you know? And I think ceremony is integral to that because it puts the sacredness around it. It gives it a gravitas. I did a cacao ceremony a few months back, and it came up at the beginning of the ceremony that it was gonna be about mother wound. And I too believe that ancestral trauma, especially through the lineage of the mother, is very much a thing. And it was an incredible experience. It all day long. I didn't know how long

it was gonna take. I went in with zero expectation. Got there about 03:00, ended up leaving around midnight. It was just me and the facilitator. And it was so powerful, and I felt so released from a lot of I I came to some realizations. I felt very released. And weirdly, the next day, my mom called. She and I have historically, you know, a tenuous relationship and such. But she called me the next day, and it was like she was a totally different person with me.

And I thought, is it because I'm different? Or did that work Mhmm. Travel through this? See, this gives me shivers to travel. And I know it sounds woo woo and all of that, but that it traveled through my DNA. And because I'm of her and she's of her mother and all that, did it go on through the whole lineage, which I love to think it did. So powerful. Yeah. You know, this we're still trying to understand

what's happening here. I was just on, Richard Branson's island for his first Psychedelic Summit, and it was gathered scientists, advocates, funders, and then ceremonial. We're now one of the leading institutions in The US. We represented facilitators. And so lots of presentations on the science, the neuroreceptors that are hit, critical periods of learning, you know, how it works with addiction, so on and so forth. And then the advocates talking about getting access to veterans and whatnot.

But what is often missed in the conversation, with the very left brain approach, is this mystical spiritual domain that we have no idea what's actually happening. And part of the reason why it's missed is because often when you engage in that kind of conversation, you start the void starts getting filled with a bunch

of dogma and beliefs. And ultimately, like what we're, you know, trying to do here at Ceremonia is provide you the framework so that you can discover your own belief, your own truth, what feels right for you. So as an example, you know, one of the aims that we have to to get people to feel is the feeling of self empowerment. We always tell people before ceremony, you know, you can ask us questions, you can you can try to talk to us, but by and large, our answer is

going to be only you know. So one time I went to the bathroom, you know, in our in our retreat center, you have to go up some stairs to the bathroom. When I when I open the door and come out of it, right in front of me is, is one of the participants, his name is Eric. And Eric looks at me, he's like, Austin, should I go to the bathroom? Now this guy, you know, got up off his mat, walked a distance, which probably felt like an eternity to him, climbed a little stairs, and is standing in

front of the restroom door. Right? And so every part of me wanted to say, well, of course, you made this whole trip all the way here. Obviously you came here to use the bathroom. But instead, I said to him, Eric, only you know. And he looked at me, and he's like, yeah. You're right. I do know. Now the next day during our integration circle, which is a circle where we share our experience, he would then share that that was the most important experience of his life.

Because all his life, people have been telling him what to do, and he would listen to it. But in that moment, what really hit him is that he has the inner gnosis to intuit where he's going and what he wants to be in his life at any given moment. And there's a saying that I love, sometimes my intuition leads me wrong, but it's the only thing that's ever led me right. You ask the question like, what is, you know, what

is this really happening? Is, you know, I'd like to think that my family member has had some ancestral message that has come through. Who knows? But only you know. Well, and I love the idea that it matters and it doesn't matter. That's very Ram Dass. It's that this is the thing that's so frustrating about religion to me is that whatever is good for a particular person, that's great. If that's working for you, that's wonderful. That doesn't mean it has to work for

me. And and we do walk a path that is so connected and yet so individualized. It can be confusing, obviously. That's why I chuckled so hard when you said, what the heck's going on? Nobody knows. And there's a beauty in that in that unknowing. I'm I'm all also often, I'm curious your thoughts on this, perplexed by those who are as afraid of their own joy as they are of their anger. What's that saying? It's like the devil that you know is often easier than the Yeah.

What is it? It's, the devil you know is is better than the one you don't. In other words, if you're you live in such comfort of the knowing even if it's terrible for you. Exactly. Exactly. So one of the first things that we ask when when people come into our coaching container is, are you ready to approach this with a thick with a change mindset or a fixed mindset? Because if you're here to make a change in your life, that means that you have to be ready to question

the things that you've your patterns. Right? Your default that you've done. And we liken it to scientists often use this metaphor that you're skiing down a hill and you keep skiing down the same tracks. It makes it pretty difficult to like veer off that track. But imagine fresh powder for those skiers out there. It's beautiful because you can carve new tracks. What happens within the psychedelic experience is that the mind opens up its pathways that you can carve new neural pathways.

So that if your brain would go from point A to point B to point C to point D, now maybe you can go from point A to point D, or D to G, or G to Z, you know? And so you can retrain and rewire your brain literally to remap how you would experience joy or anger. We had another participant, Christina, who came. And in the ceremony, in the first ceremony, she was walking to the bathroom and I was following her and then she collapsed and I caught her.

And her whole body was limped kind of like Gumby, but she was still very cute and sweet and said, Oh, I'm totally fine, I'm fine. She was obviously not pretty much dead weight as I propped her up. Second ceremony, something very similar, also collapsed. Now, Christina originally came because she had been in and out of the hospital for digestive issues. There was this big curiosity of, like, what's going on here?

Then we did a workshop where and not to not to give it all give it away to all your listeners, but we did a workshop called reparenting, where the workshop is two people holding each other to gentle music for fifteen minutes, role playing being the divine parent and the divine child. In other words, what would it be like if you just allowed yourself to be held by your parents? It often produces a lot

of tears. Like, we're talking about this cognitively, but in the moment, it's an incredible experience because how often have we allowed ourselves to just be held for fifteen minutes straight? Try this at home with your partner, by the way. It's an amazing experience. After that, she realized you know, I asked the question, like, when do you feel the most safe as a kid? And she realized that when she felt the

most safe was when she was sick. Because at that moment, that's when her mom would take care of her. And so her body learned to it clicked for her. Her body learned to get sick in order to feel love and safety. So when she would feel unsafe, immediately, let's get sick. Third ceremony, she was vibrant, dancing, singing, and ever since,

those physical elements have largely gone away. To your point, many people can have a discomfort with certain feelings of joy or peace or love because they're like, what is this feeling? What's even deeper than that is our body keeps the score, our body stores the experience of what's familiar to us. And it can store decades of stress. It could store generations of pain, trauma, of blame,

of shame, you know? Psychedelics doesn't have to be the answer, but but you know, in my opinion, it is the best answer that we have right now for an accelerated path of healing. When you work in these spaces and hold that kind of energy, how do you decompress from it? How do you cleanse yourself from it? And also, you mentioned the savior complex. How do you keep in a detached way, especially when such huge things are happening all around you? How do you keep your ego from going, yeah, I

did that. You know? I was with Richard Branson. I'm cool. How do you detach from that space? Well, first I'll say I'm still learning on both those subject matters, detaching and also the ego. I'll be the first to admit that pride has been my biggest shadow. Coincidentally, it's a little bit of a tangent. Pride exists to hide shame. AKA shame being the parts of us that carry the burdens of I'm not enough or I'm not good enough. Right? And so I'll inflate my chest and be like, no, I'm

actually amazing. That's just an aside. I like being nerdy about psychology. No, that's a very good point, I think, to make. I'll target the first, the first part of your question, like, how do I decompress and how do I re articulate it? How do I make sure I'm not taking on too much? And I learned something from Doctor. Thupten Jinpa, who's the translator to the Dalai Lama and a prominent Buddhist monk himself. And he has something in San Francisco called

the Compassion Institute. Through a combination of speaking with him and speaking with Doctor. Richard Schwartz, who created Internal Family Systems, the fastest growing psychotherapeutic framework now, and the one most often paired in psychedelic assisted therapy, this idea of compassion versus empathy. Empathy is, if you're crying, Susan, I am crying with you. I'm feeling your feelings as you, with you, and I'm in it with you. I used to lead every interaction that way.

And I was good at it, you know? I was good at feeling other people's feelings. And I would then pat myself on the back and be like, damn, I did a good job by really feeling your feelings. But then I would get so drained that I would barely be able to walk after a retreat. Like, I was exhausted. And then I learned from Doctor. Jinpa and from Doctor. Schwartz

that empathy is a protective part. It's actually a part that tries to protect me from feeling myself, which is very interesting because the more that I feel you, the less I'm able to feel myself, which which is the impact that you're having on me. And whereas empathy is a protective part that is energy depleted, energy subtractive, compassion is an aspect of self with a capital s. This is under the IFS model, which is infinitely available. And so you would look at, you know,

there's a story of the Dalai Lama. He was at a conference, he was at this hotel over the course of three days, right? And he was the featured speaker. Thousands of people attend, and they listen to the Dalai Lama speak. And afterwards, the Dalai Lama goes to his assistant and says, please gather all the staff at the hotel. So 150 staff line up in front of him. And one by one, he greets every person and asks how their day is, you know, and expresses gratitude to them. This takes hours.

And every single person had his complete and full attention. As if at that moment, they were the most that person was the most important person in the world to him. Then he gets on a plane and he goes to the next talk. And so you might ask yourself, like, how is it possible that someone of that age has that much energy? And it's because the amount of compassion that he has, the amount of compassion that doctor Schwartz has is so available. It's so expansive

that it's actually energy additive. They can have less sleep and have more energy than most people. I use that as inspiration to discover that well of compassion inside of me. And now the way that I hold the container is if you are deeply crying, I'm not crying with you. I am being very present with you, I'm breathing with you, and I am pouring my compassion into your experience. Thich Nhat Hanh, who's a prominent Buddhist monk I was just gonna say this sounds very

Thich Nhat Hanh. Yeah. He wrote about 118 books, passed away something like two years ago, and I love his definition of compassion. He says it's the want for someone else not to suffer. You know, I've been in spaces where I've seen the deepest amount of pain, like humanly imaginable, you know, combat veterans or people that have suffered tremendous abuses, and they're reliving it in front of me, you know, just like I relived my experience.

And to be and I'm able now finally, like, it took me a long time to develop this skill and I'm still learning this. But to be able to sit there and just give them my presence and my compassion without, you know, being in it with them. Does that make sense? It does. It feels like the difference between going into someone's space and holding space for them. Yeah. Yeah. You know, a lot of times, like, if you see your friend crying, what's the typical thing that most people do?

They're like, Oh, put a hand on your shoulder, and, Oh, it's okay. Don't cry. It's gonna be okay. You know, as facilitators, part of our training is to ask, why am I doing that? Why am I putting my hand on someone's shoulder? And the real answer 99 times out of 100 is, it's not for them, it's for me. Or my ego tries to convince me that it's for them. Because in that moment, there's some part of me that is uncomfortable with them crying that doesn't want them to cry.

But have you ever had a really good sob after that really good sob? How do you feel? Awesome. Awesome. Exactly. The reason why you feel that way is because that sob has been locked up inside of you for God knows how long. And now it's finally allowed to release. And so if I put a hand on your shoulder as you're crying and say, oh, you don't need to cry. It's gonna be okay. And then you stop

crying. I may have just robbed you of that experience of being able to release something that's been trapped for a very long period of time. And I did that not for you. I did it for me. This is why it's such a problem that boys are told they're not supposed to cry. Oh, totally. Yeah. Yeah. I love crying. I'm a good crier, but I used to suck at it before because I was a man.

Yes. Right. I've been to various energy working scenarios where the facilitator step back as I I would call it a primal cry, you know? And, boy, it feels like hundreds of pounds are lifted and hundreds of years are lifted when you come out of something like that. It's such a release. Totally.

Yeah. But, I mean, this is my argument for saying this is why we go to the movies or read a book or listen to music because sometimes we don't know how to get to those spaces, and they are our conduit into that release. And in our brain, we're like, oh, no. No. I'm just crying about the movie. But what you what you're actually doing is you're mirroring, you're feeling that mirrored experience, and it allows you to make that release. I'm a huge believer in being emotional

in those spaces. Because I I think it does. It does the work. Yes. Yes. And I also have opinions in that sometimes we go and seek it out. And we seek it out out out of a a form of masochism. Like, we wanna feel the pain. Absolutely. I mean, there's a lot of confusion as, love and and fear slash hate, how those two things,

what they feel like. And and especially with parent parent wounds, when you grow up thinking, when those two things get so convoluted as to the meaning of them and then you seek them out in other relationships and all hell breaks loose. That's certainly not an uncommon thing. Mhmm. Yeah. Tell me about Yeah. What steps led to creating the facility.

And I think a lot of people would be like, well, why aren't you supposed to go off and be in a jungle to do this versus going to Colorado, which by the way is a beautiful state. Yeah. Prior to founding Ceremonia in 2022, I was the director of one of the most well known Ayahuasca retreats in the world based in Costa Rica called One Heart. Through One Heart, you know, I was part of around 300, individuals' journeys, mostly founders and entrepreneurs.

What I observed in that experience, like, they produced an extraordinarily beautiful experience, and I will forever be grateful to them. Extraordinarily curated, well intentioned, really best in its class at what it does. And it was missing something tremendous.

And the way that I discovered that it was missing is because despite doing ayahuasca dozens of times myself, despite being deeply in service, despite devoting a lot of energy of my own to that path, I was suffering in ways that I did not understand how to get out of. And I did not have I didn't even know what to look for in terms of support. And how to get out of it myself. And I'm a pretty smart dude.

So, you know, for me to have spent that much time and energy in a container that professes to provide deep and long term healing, that I was still clueless as to what to do to get out of these very painful things that were happening in my life, well, I went on the path of self discovery. And what I figured out was that we don't have to reinvent the wheel. There are previous maps to this, and they come from mindfulness and

psychology. I have a podcast, it's called Modern Enlightenment, and we have the luminaries from the psychedelic and spiritual space coming onto our podcast. And before the podcast, I explain to them what this podcast is about. And I say to them, a hundred years ago, if you wanted to pursue the path of spiritual enlightenment, you'd have to become a horny monk on a mountain. But now we have all these different tools.

We've got breath work, we've got neuroscience, we've got psychedelics, we've got so on and so forth. Retreats. Blah blah blah blah. Right? So how do we get to enlightenment? Right? What's the optimal pathway there? The because what ends up happening is is psychedelics is is just an accelerant. It's a catalyst. When Maharaji, which is Ramdas's teacher or Ramdas's guru, when Ramdas gave him five hits of acid of LSD, Maharaj is like, that's interesting, give me five more. So now,

you know, Doctor. Richard Alpert, AKA Ram Dass, gives him another five. Maharaj is now in ten doses of LSD, which is exponential. And then he says, this is a plaything. In other words, what Maharaj's waking life what he was experiencing in his waking life was more than ten tabs of LSD. And really, in fact, probably more than LSD could possibly even get person two. In other words, the path of meditation and mindfulness already has a map for where we're trying to get to

within the psychedelic space. That's data point number one. Data point number two is psychotherapy. Psychotherapy, we're now in the third stage of psychology. First stage was Pavlov, ring a bell, dog salivates, human must be the same way. Second was cognitive behavioral therapy, which is CBT, which is I'm gonna say affirmations and I'm gonna be able to change my mood, largely disproven. And now the third wave is a more integrated

model. It began with a form of therapy called acceptance and commitment therapy, which was a which was, a psychotherapeutic or clinical model of mindfulness. And so now we have gestalt, IFS, EMDR, like lots of different forms of therapy in this third wave that are effectively saying the way to healing is the experience of the present moment. We all have trauma with a lowercase t or a capital t. We all have stuff in

the past. We all have anxiety or fears of the future, but what really matters is how do you experience it now? Because now is the only time it exists. You feel anxious about, you know, what you're gonna do in your retirement or your wedding next week? Well, you're actually experiencing that anxiety right now in this moment. How can you be with that experience The greater mindfulness and skillfulness. So I started to learn these tools.

And the way that I learned it would be I would meet somebody with an embodiment of something that I would want. It's like, wow. You are so much more peaceful. You're so much more present, compassionate, sensual, tantric, whatever it was. I was like, how did you get that way? And they said, well, go and try this thing. And so at that time, my partner and I would go to a training or retreat almost once a month, all over the world.

Right. We had the freedom and and both the time and money to be able to do that. And it very rapidly, like, learned a huge toolset of not just theoretical ideas, but really embodied sense of, like, how to work with these things. And we took the best of I took the best of the best of these workshops from various different programs, stitched it together, iterated on it, and now that's what Ceremonia

is. We've run now like 36 retreats in two years, a little over two years, which is an incredible amount of retreats. And every single one is different from the last because we still keep iterating, improving on this model. And the model is effectively the same path I took, just more compressed. The idea is you come here to learn skills.

The skills of being with your own experience of self and then the present moment, AKA self empowerment, and being with the other, like in a community, AKA connection. You practice these skills in workshops, and you grow your capacity to to meet your experience.

So that when you go into the psychedelic, something that would normally trigger you, let's say a trauma with a capital T comes up, let's say you're a combat veteran and you're reliving an experience of your friend dying in front of you, which we've had, instead of fight flight or freezing in that moment, you now have the skills and the capacity to

meet it with greater fullness. And then boom, what that does is instead of what would normally become a bad trip, now has the opportunity to become fuel for your transformation, for your deeper understanding of yourself. But here's the kicker. Here's the best part. While that experience is valuable, the most valuable thing is that you did it and that you know how to do it because you're gonna go home to life and life is going to continue to life.

You know, Buddhism says, everything that you love, you will lose. We will lose our parents. We will lose our loved ones. We will lose our pets. We'll lose our jobs. We will lose it all to time. And so how do we prepare ourselves for the continuation of life and its inevitable loss? The way that we do that is through the same mechanism, through skills and capacity, through mindfulness and skillfulness.

And so by practicing this on ourselves in a psychedelic, we're able to then translate that into the three d world and integrate that into our life. I mean, I spent a lot of high school on LSD, but, it obliterates the the guards at the gate, which is also helpful when you're trying to get into those spaces. How do you know when people come to you which pathway is the pathway? Whether it's psilocybin or ayahuasca? Because those are two totally different beings.

Totally. Well, I'm gonna first answer more generally and then, and then that specific question. How do we know what pathway is the right pathway? What I've discovered is no matter if you're a starving artist or you are a billionaire, and we've had those two kinds of people in the very same circle, everything funnels to the same place, which is this question, do you love yourself? Can you be with what is?

Be with this experience now. Now as to the question of psilocybin versus ayahuasca, we get asked this a lot. We have different levels in ceremonial. Our level one is with psilocybin, our level two is with ayahuasca. And the reason why that's the case is because ayahuasca is typically held in a

very shamanic container. So for you to become an ayahuasquero, at least one that I might recommend to somebody, would require you to go train in the jungle drinking ayahuasca a few times a week for years, and then apprentice for years in ceremonies, and then finally you conserve medicine. So to become Ayahuascaro is a lot more than getting a PhD

in any subject matter. The benefit of that is that you're getting, when you sit with Ayahuasca, assuming the shaman or the facilitator is a good one, and by the way, I know hundreds of facilitators, I only trust six of them, and and the ones that serve medicine here. But when you're sitting with someone, you're getting their lineage, the oral traditions and their training that's been passed on through thousands of years. There's a lot of beauty in that, but

there's also baggage in that. Because it includes dogma, it includes their beliefs. So I often say to people, one way to discern whether a facilitator is spiritually safe for you is to challenge their beliefs. They say, you ask them, what do you believe in? And then the follow-up question is, how do you know that to be true? And if they get triggered, please run away because it's very likely that they're not gonna create the room for you

to discover your own beliefs. So when you're in a container where the facilitator is carrying their own baggage and serving you medicine, it's really important that you as a participant have enough skillfulness and mindfulness, right? AKA the training that we provide off the medicine, for you to be able to discern what is true for you. In other words, if you have an experience, the mind attempts to make meaning out of that experience.

Attempts to put form into that meaning. So one of our alumni is the president of Unity Church, a mega church in The U. S. Mega Christian church. Right? So he has an experience, and he experiences Christ consciousness. We had someone else who's Muslim. He has an experience, and he experienced Allah. We have someone who's atheist that comes in. He has an experience, and he has something that he can only call spiritual

spirituality. My point is, it's with Ayahuasca, it's more challenging for you to discern what is yours because of the impression from the outside, from the shamanic history and container. With psilocybin, the kind of training well, you know, we're one of a few licensed center a few centers in Colorado be approved to train and license facilitators here under Colorado state law. And so, our training program is nine months long, and then you can serve medicine.

In a perfect world, I would make that much longer, but of course accessibility and so on and so forth. The point is, people can have the level of training from the get go to be able to make room for everyone else's beliefs more easily with psilocybin. Psilocybin versus Ayahuasca, I would say I advocate for doing psilocybin first with training so that you can have the tools to support you, and then Ayahuasca after that because it's an absolutely beautiful medicine that

is my teacher. I just would caution people to do Ayahuasca right off the bat because it's so easy for the mind to assign the healing agent to something outside of themselves. Oh, it's the shaman healing me, it's the music healing me, it's the medicine or the plant spirit healing me. The danger of that is when you go home, that same process can be ingrained, and so now suddenly when you have when life continues to life, you're like, damn, where's my shaman? Or I need to drink Ayahuasca.

Or the flip side of the coin is victimhood. Oh, it's something outside of me that's causing me to feel this way. Mercury's in retrograde, therefore that's why I'm an asshole. Right. You know? Yeah. So everything that we're doing is aimed towards people feeling their own heart. How does Austin, the man, live a life outside of Austin, the facilitator and the person who is present and

in it, not of it. They how did you have an ability to detach even from the detachment to just, you know, chill out, eat popcorn, and watch a movie in your own life? Not literally, but metaphorically speaking? Yeah. Totally. You know, I don't preach from a pulpit. I I'm human, and I do human things. Yesterday, I was at a party at my friend's bar, and, you know, and I go to Burning Man, and, you know, I date, and I I'm of course a man.

And I'm still on my path too. You know, a really big part of this work, in my opinion, is to bring the fullness of our own being, even as facilitators, into the container. So that we can model vulnerability and authenticity. As long as like, you know that we got you, AKA like we got our shit together enough that we got you. I think that's that's as long as there's that, then, I advocate for all of our facilitators to bring

everything. And just as we would expect or advocate for the participants to do themselves. May I ask your dad's name? I like to say the names of the people who have passed so that they have their immortality intact. Yeah. His name is Jeff. Jeff. Hi, Jeff. What do you see moving forward for your work? Will it is there room for expansion in this kind of work when you know that these tools at your disposal are so powerful.

I mean, I think working with veterans and people with PTSD and and survivors, how do you grow without growing too big? How does it not become, a caricature of itself? You know what I mean? We're an extraordinarily unique organization. Most places, if you were to go, let's say, ceremony, you come in, you shake hands, a group of people, two hours later, you're tripping together. The upside is, that can be pretty inexpensive. Like in Denver, you can find a ceremony for $250 a night.

And then you go home at that night, or you sleep on your mat that night. The downside is that you're effectively doing spiritual and psychological surgery on yourself. And what is so important in that case is how safe do you feel? There's a sharp limit to how safe you can possibly feel doing things with strangers that you haven't

met or talked to. And so, you know, what we do here is, in addition to the mindfulness and skillfulness, the training that I shared with you, is we build connection and we build community. We gather every Sunday in perpetuity as a community, all our alumni, and we get anywhere between ten and fifty people at a time to come and we practice our tools. We practice being in community and relationship with

each other. What's really important to me, my goal, is that this model that we've created to provide some level of training and then provide community for people that are undergoing this transformational process, this model doesn't stay unique to us. That it is widely available and is the standard for the field at large. And so, you know, I'm part of the legislative process in Colorado, or one of the few centers that will license people.

And, you know, my goal is to teach people this model, and eventually open source this model, so that facilitators of the future can know that there is something, like, available that provides deep and durable healing beyond what we as facilitators can provide one on one. And that's through tools, that's through peer support, that's through community. There's a limit to how much I can help people. I still get messages from people like telling me their challenges and and whatnot.

And I can't save everybody anymore. You know, that's what I try to do with my mom and the woman in my life. And so, you know, my goal here now is is to spread this model. Do you have scholarship for people that can't afford maybe to to attend? Absolutely. And and what I would say is, you know, go on our website, ceremoniacircle.org, sign up for a breakthrough call. We might move to webinar format soon,

and have the conversation. And we do what we can to support you through a combination of scholarship and payment plans. We also have, we're also about to release a microdistant course called Awaken at Home, where it's a more elongated program. Right? A three month program where you're learning the tools and you're micro microdosing and going through a coaching container. There's lots of options that we're gonna make available.

I'm assuming those things are done on Zoom or some sort of a video conferencing, as well as the check-in you were talking about of community? Yep. Yeah. Absolutely. God bless Zoom. It's made the world smaller. Austin, I really appreciate your time. This all is is fascinating and something that I personally am incredibly interested in. My hope, regardless of how people find their way to themselves, that this will be a continual process for humanity. We desperately need

it. And I know it's scary, but it's my hope. Thank you so much, Susan. This is this is beautiful. Thank you for sharing your gifts to the world. Would love to have you in one of our retreats. Let's set that up. Oh, absolutely. I'm I'm ex I've already before I even when I got your information, and I said, absolutely. I would love to talk to Austin. And then I started looking at the website, and I've been sending it out to people like crazy. I wish I could I wish my parents

would do something like this. But, again, I know that these are the types of things that it will do no good unless you're ready. And you never know you never know what might happen, for sure. I mean, that's the beauty of life. But I never thought I would do a cacao ceremony. I thought, Wait, I drink hot chocolate? What do you mean? You know? And it was so powerful. But I might not have been in a place where I could have accepted that kind of medicine if I had done it any other time.

You just never know when those doors open, and then the walking through it is a whole other process. Totally. Yeah. Totally. Thank you for listening, everybody. Thanks, Austin. Thank you, Susan. Great. Review and subscribe to Hey Human Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks. Bye.