#298: Dr. Gabor Mate - New Paradigms, Ayahuasca, and Redefining Addiction

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Again, that's Athletic Greens.com slash TFS as in Tim Ferris show. Athletic Greens.com slash TFS. The WorkLab Podcast from Microsoft answers the questions that keep business leaders up at night. Like, how can I reinvent processes for the AI era from customer service to sales to HR? How can I prepare for AI to fundamentally transform jobs, companies, industries, and the whole economy? Don't panic, tune in.

Each episode of WorkLab brings you the top experts, hard data, and actionable insights to help you future-proof your organization. Check out WorkLab. That's W-O-R-K-L-A-B, no spaces on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferris, and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris show where it is my job, each and every episode to interview world class performers, world class experts.

From any range of disciplines to tease out the habits, routines, lessons, approaches, et cetera, that you can use. This episode features Dr. Gabor Mate. You can find him at Dr. Gabor Mate, GA-B-O-R-M-A-T-E.com, also on Facebook, forward slash Dr. Gabor Mate.

Gabor is a physician who specializes in neurology, psychiatry, and psychology. He is well known for his study and treatment of addiction. Dr. Mate has written several bestselling books, including The Award Winning, In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts, subtitle, Close Encounters with Addiction. His works have been published internationally in 20 languages.

Dr. Mate has received the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize and Honorary Degree from the University of Northern British Columbia, and the 2012 Martin Luther King Humanitarian Award for Mothers Against Teen Violence. He's an adjunct professor in the Faculty of Criminology at Simon Fraser University.

I've wanted to have him on the podcast for some time now because he is not only an expert in the so-called Pathologies of Addiction, but looks at it very, very differently, and also has experimented and used successfully tools that are perhaps outside the realm of traditional psychiatry, including, for instance, the psychedelic brew known as Ayahuasca.

The idea is also a co-founder, along with Vicki Duly, of Compassion for Addiction, which is an organization that advocates for a new way to understand and treat addiction. Their mission is to raise awareness and become a resource for organizations, people, and treatment modalities that are working to increase compassion and reduce the stigma around addiction.

We also talk about how, even though you might not consider yourself an addict, if we look at compulsive behaviors, thought patterns, and so on, there are, of course, many shared similarities and shared treatments. Compassion for Addiction, and you can learn more about that at Compassion4, the number four, Addiction.org.

We'll provide education and training to those working on the front lines of treating people suffering with addiction. This population includes counselors, social workers, nurses, psychologists, and doctors. Check that out, Compassion4, the number four, Addiction.org. I really enjoyed this conversation. It took place in Austin, Texas, at the LZR facility, which was, and is perhaps also known as the La Zona Rosa. It was courtesy of the help of John Price.

So, John, thank you very much for letting us use your beautiful facility, and you guys can learn more about that facility. Check it out at lzraetx.com. That's lzraetx.com. They have an incredible space for venues related to music, for events. They have any number of different rooms and locations where you can shoot film and perform music. So, take a look, check them out, and hope that helps you out, John. Lzraetx.com, without further ado, let us get to Dr. Gabor Mate. Gabor, welcome to the show.

Thank you, it's a great pleasure to be here. Thank you. I have been looking forward to this conversation for a really long time, and I wanted to make an attempt at least to do it right. So, I wanted to have the video and the audio and everything else, because I think the work you're doing is very important, and we're going to cover a lot of ground, which I'm very excited to cover, because I think it's a real contribution, and you have tools and frameworks can really help people.

I thought we might start with books, and the reason I thought that could be a fun place to start. My audience loves books, number one, but number two, in Tribal Mentors, the last book that I wrote, or that my guest wrote. You were featured, and I thought that many of the books you mentioned paint a picture of your life experience, and also your life's work in many ways.

And we can go in any particular order, but I thought maybe it would make sense to start with the scourge of the swastika, and that was one that you mentioned had an impact on you, or that perhaps you recommended on occasion. Why is that? Well, so this has to do with my family's history. I grew up, was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1944, in January, two months before the Germans occupied the country.

And Hungary at that time was the only country in Eastern Europe where the Jewish population had not been annihilated. And now it was our turn. So that was two months of age. The day after the German Army marched into Budapest, my mother formed a pediatrician to say, would you please come and see God bore a course he's crying all the time. And the pediatrician said, of course I will come, but I should tell you, all my Jewish base were crying.

And of course, that's the infant speaking up on their mother's terror and stress. And that's how I spent the first year of my life, which is at a huge impact on my development and my lifelong struggles with depression, ADHD, self-same, and other issues.

Jumping ahead now, I knew very little about that history. My parents didn't say much about it as I was growing up. And you, my grandparents, had been killed in Auschwitz. I knew my father had been in forced labor and I never saw him for a year and a half. But beyond that, I knew not much about the details. Until I was about nine or ten, maybe eleven years old, and there was a book on my parents' shelf in Budapest with the title, The Scourge of the Svastika,

which was by a British civil servant and a member of the House of Lords. This man had served at the British Army and he was the first book published in the 50s that detailed the Nazi crimes. And I climbed up on a chair, took down the book. When I was, I think, 10 or 11, began to read it, saw photographs of the horrors of the concentration camps and the extermination details in Eastern Europe.

And I was suddenly, I salooned, because I got what happened to my family. And that question of how can people do such things to other human beings, which strike me every day, and an almost every day, this thought occurred to me for years and years and years and almost every day, I almost got dizzy with the question.

So why people suffer and why people make other people suffer, and what is the origin of all that, has been a motivating question in my life. So that's why that book was so important to me. Thank you. And I have to say that, you know, my life's work has been motivated by that question. As a medical doctor, I'm always looking at, well, what is it that makes people be the way they are?

Why do we come cruel? Why do we become victims? Why do we become perpetrators? What drives us? What kind of insanity covers our basic human nature, which I believe to be good and positive? And what happens to us?

We're going to spend a lot of time in that territory for sure. Okay. See, I mentioned sanity or insanity. I'm not sure if that's a good segue to Don Quixote, but I'll let you choose the next one. So there are a few that came up and you describe them brief in the pages of the book. But for instance, the back on you just gave me was much more in depth.

So we have a few and these are going to strike folks as a clectic. We need the poo, the Dhamma Pada, the drama of the gifted child and Don Quixote, which one of those would you like to explain next? Let's go with the poo. Let's go with one of the poo. Yeah. So that was one of the seminal books of my childhood and my parents would have read to me long before I even knew how to read.

The Hungarian title is Mitsimotsko and it was Translates. Mitsimotsko. Mitsimotsko. Mitsidabair. And the translators are great Hungarian humorists. So if anything, the Hungarian book is even funnier than the original English, which is not something when usually says about translations.

But what struck me about poo, of course, was number one that there was this bear of little brains who was somewhat so much wiser than everybody else. So fundamentally, he found a piece inside, despite the fact that his intellect is just under functioning. Number one, number two, there was this relationship with the little boy Christopher Robin.

And there's a passage towards the end of the book where Christopher Robin, I don't know if you know the real story. In fact, there's a movie about it right now. But Christopher Robin's father, A.A.M.L. was a writer. And he bought these toys for his son to make stories about them. And Christopher Robin actually suffered because he was secondary to his father's career. They did not have a good relationship.

So these characters that the father made up kind of dominated and squeezed out Christopher Robin's own life. And he himself became a book seller later on his life and he wrote about his autobiography. So there's something about the dysfunctionality and father's son relationship. But in the book, Christopher is playing with his toys and then he starts to grow up and he has to go to school.

And he won't be able to play with his toys anymore. And at the very end of the book, there's a passage where the book ends with, but wherever they go in the intended forest, a little boy and his bear will always be playing together. And that would just bring tears to my eyes for decades upon decades, until recently I had an experience, actually a psychedelic experience.

When I realized that there's nothing to mourn because I'm both the bear and the little boy. And I was, will be playing, that nothing is lost. But when I read that book, there was a sense of loss. When I read that passage, there was something's being lost. Childhood innocence is being lost. Playfulness is being lost.

We resonated with my own childhood because I did lose innocence and then playfulness very early in life. So both for the fun and the humor, then of course there's EOR for when everything always goes badly. And it's a part of me that's totally EOR. I was expecting the worst and nothing will ever work out for me and nevermind, leave me alone. I'm okay with my own suffering, you know, that sort of determined victim attitude.

That was also very much germane to my inner experience. So that book just spoke to me and made me laugh. And it still does. It's one of the funniest books that I've written and one of the wisest as well. I need to, I've only, I'm ashamed to say this, but I've only seen the cartoon. So I know, I know. Well listen, listen, one of the sins that Walt Disney is going to be burning in hell for the rest of existence is what he did with those stories. Because he disnified them.

You got to read the original. And you would laugh your head off. I wish I spoke Hungarian so I could read the translation. Which of these would you like to? And we can certainly touch on other books. But so we have three remaining on my list. Dama Patta, the drama of the gifted child in Don Quixote. Well, let's go to the drama of the gifted child. So the drama of the gifted child is by a Swiss German Jewish Swiss psychotherapist named Alice Miller, who was for three decades of psychoanalyst.

But she realized that the Freudian psychotic psychotic method wasn't helping anybody get better because it ignored trauma. So the drama of the gifted child, the German title of which was Prisoners of Childhood, was really all about the fact that stuff happens to us as children. Negative things happen. Then we adapted those things by taking on certain defensive ways of being. And then we leave the rest of our lives for those defensive modes.

So we're not actually experiencing the present, but constantly reliving the past from a perspective that we acquired when we were helpless and vulnerable children. And when she says the gifted child, she means the sensitive child. So the more sensitive the child is, the more he or she feels, the pain and stress of the environment, and the more affected they are, and the more that shapes their lives.

And that book came along for me when I was in my 40s, and I was a successful doctor, and I was a father, but I was depressed. I was anxious. I was a driven workaholic. You wouldn't have known that when you saw me on a job. But inside me, I was discouraged. I had difficulties in my marriage with my children. I felt they were afraid of me, and they were because of my rages. And that book helped me understand. It was the first book to help me understand where all that came from.

So that was for me, as for many other people, a seminal read. And really, my whole work since then has been to help liberate people from that prison that childhood often imposes on so many of us. This book has come up repeatedly in my life as a recommendation, as a recommended book from friends who benefited from it. Very certainly from any outward perspective, highly functioning, in some cases world class performers in their fields.

And I, in retrospect, sad that I ignored those recommendations, but it was in part because I didn't like the pairing of gifted child. I wanted to label myself, gifted child. We could certainly psychoanalyze that. But I was like, mm-hmm. If this is a book written for people who are in, say, gifted and talented programs or have some God-given talent, for whatever reason, I had a resistance to that. So I didn't read it, but the prisoners of childhood makes a lot more sense to me anyway.

Well, I think it's a more accurate title, but there's two things I would say in response. First of all, why do you resist your own giftedness? You clearly gifted. So why would you not want to find that about that? Don't know. Yeah, so that's something you might want to consider. Number one, number two, really what you mean is the sensitive child.

So sensitive, I, that would draw me in because I've had, we don't have to necessarily go down and grab it whole right now, but I've had a number of my friends recently asked me, when did you know you were so sensitive? And not sensitive in a, in a hyper reactive way, not in a negative way, just in a perceptive way. And I never thought of myself, it would never have occurred to me to label myself sensitive.

And just in the last year, I've been thinking about that. So the sensitive child would make more sensitive, be more appealing to me. You have to think of sensitive in terms of its word origin, the word sensitive came from Latin word, sincere to feel. So the sensitive person feels more. Yeah. So the example I often give is, and that can lead to both very positive and very difficult consequences.

For example, if I tapped you on the shoulder right now, you wouldn't feel any pain at all. But if you were not throwing your shirt and your skin was exposed, furthermore if you had a burn on your shoulders, so your nerve endings were close to the surface, if I tapped you with the same force, you'd feel extreme excruciating pain. Even though the external event was no different. Right.

So sensitivity magnifies the pain that we have. Sensitivity also leads to more creativity. So very often, the most creative people also have the most pain, which is my so many creative people escape from their pain through all kinds of dysfunctions like addictions and so on. So there's a real link between creativity and sensitivity and sensitivity and suffering at the same time.

That's the first point that would make. Now the other thing goes back to what you said about these people that you know who are high performers, look at that word performers. What does it mean to perform? One meaning of it is to put on a show. Sure. That's one meaning. And I would have been one of these people who was a high performer.

In other words, look at that from the outside. Successful for my doctor, director of a palliative care unit that a major hospital, national columnist for Canadian newspaper, writing medical columns, performing at a high level and inside, again, anxious, frustrated, depressed, discouraged. And in my personal life, a lot of suffering. So a lot of people who perform well are actually deeply troubled inside. And of course, there's many famous examples of that.

Some of the greatest performers, like Presley or Mel M. Nrow and any number of people like the name, that's what they were, they were performers. And even from themselves, they hid their own suffering. Well, we are sitting in a venue right now recording this that is now known as LCR. And there is a mural of Prince outside because he performed one of his, as I understand it, last performances in this venue. Really, before he passed away. Before he overdosed. Before he overdosed. Yeah, exactly.

And we can certainly come back to this. But part of the reason I wanted to, big piece of the reason I wanted to have you on this show was that I spent, I'm in a much better place now, for many reasons, that may be outside of this interview, but, feeling the exact same way you just described. Yeah. Outwardly successful, inwardly tortured. Yeah. How do you answer the question if someone meets you and you just have a short interaction? What do you do? What do I do?

If someone asks you, yeah, what do you do? I may be self-serving, but somebody once called me a people whisperer. People whisperer. I do have a gift for seeing inside. Because I've studied, I'm also sensitive in some ways, and I've also studied myself very deeply I've had to, because my life just wasn't working. And as a medical doctor, I worked with all manner of conditions, terminal diseases, newborns, families, physical illnesses, mental dysfunctions.

I spent two or five years working with addictions. I spent time exploring my own and other people's ADHD. And so, I work with people to bring out the truth of their experience, so that they're no longer prisoners of their childhood, but that they can make a conscious choice about how to live in the present moment, not based on how they were programmed and childhood. And, but for that, you have to do it in a way that the dog whisperer do in a very compassionate way.

Otherwise, people just shut down and they shrivel up and they protect themselves. So, that's what I do. And I know, I also write and I speak publicly and so on, but the intent is always to bring insight and liberation to people. So, I'm going to come back to the medicine, because I'd love to know when your journey into medicine began, but first, since I know my listeners will say, but you forgot the other two books. What about the other two books?

The Dhamma Pada Dhan Ki Hote, in any order you like. Well, let's go in the order that I discovered them, which is Dham Ki Hote, which again I read that as a child and then re-read many times as an adult. And he's my favorite character. So, Ki Hote is this diluted, Spanish, small noble man who wants to revive the age of shivalry and shivalry at nighthood.

So, he gets this broken down horse called Rosinante and he lands and is soared and he gets this squire called San Chupanza on his donkey and after he goes to these adventures. And he does not see reality. He thinks windmills are giants and he attacks them and of course he gets hurt. And he keeps getting hurt because he doesn't see reality. But his heart is purely committed to liberating people, to truth, to justice, to fighting oppressors, to liberating the oppressed.

So, here's this guy who really wants to do good in the world and he's just diluted in his vision, but he's far tourer and deeper and more human than all the people that scoff at him and laugh at him. So, what a great character and the book is both poignant and very funny and he's one of the great creations of world literature. And of course, again, you know, that yearning for justice has always burned in my heart, owing to what happened to me and what I witnessed. In the Dhamma part?

The Dhamma part is the Buddha's collection of sayings and it begins with basically the idea that we create the world with our minds. He says everything is thought and the lead. So, how we see the world is, it determines the world that we live in. So, if I see the world as a horrible place, according the current president of the United States, then I will be defensive and grandizing and selfish because I want to take before they take from me. I want to attack before I get attacked.

I'll also be the look in her for myself because the world is not to be trusted. So, if that's the world you live in, that's the world you're going to create. And the Buddha was great psychologist and we should recognize that our perception shaped the world that we live in. Now, what he didn't say and that's where modern psychology comes in, is that before with our mind we create the world, the world creates our minds.

So, the kind of world that we live in is very much shaped by early experiences. Buddha didn't say that, but interestingly enough, when you think about his search for truth, what happened to him, if you read his biography, his mother died before he was a week old. So, his last is the most important relationship. So, his life began with suffering and then he spent all his life trying to find the nature of suffering and how to transcend suffering and how to get beyond it.

And this is how he ended up with this particular method of meditation and contemplation and truth seeking. So, that book was written 25 and a hundred years ago and psychologically we're still trying to catch up to the wisdom in it. So, let's talk about wisdom or perhaps science first. Yeah, and maybe they're related in some fashion, although I know we'll dig into certainly some things that might be missing. When did medicine enter your life for an interest in medicine?

Interested in being a doctor, either of those things? Well, I've speculated on that and there's a number of sources. Strangely enough, or Nussos Lenzhinov, my grandfather who was killed in Auschwitz in his 50s happened to be a writer and a doctor. Granson ends up as a writer and a doctor. So, I think part of it was me trying to fill a hole in my mother's life. That was a devastating blow to her. This is not conscious, but I'm speculating looking back.

It's not that she ever said you have to become a doctor, it's not that she ever said you have to follow on your grandfather's footsteps, but I think unconsciously I stepped into that role. Number one. Number two, another reason is that as a Jew and Eastern Europe, yet every reason to feel insecure. And my mother never failed to tell me that as a doctor you carry your profession in your hands.

So you don't have to have a business, you don't have to have riches, you just have to have the knowledge, and then you can go anywhere in the world and you'll be okay. Beyond that, healing and making this whole better place and helping people lead healthy lives was just an ideal of mine. Then there was the agotistical reasons.

Let's face it, doctors get respect, they have a role, they have a good income, people look up to them, and they have a sense of authority that I think I lacked in my own life. So it was a combination of unconscious reasons and idealistic reasons and agotistical reasons. But all I know is that all my life I had wanted to be nothing else but a doctor. I always grew up knowing I'll be a physician. And when you were studying medicine, what did you think your specialty or specialties might be?

Well, first of all, I should say I didn't end up following the dream because in my late teens I just couldn't concentrate and study hard enough to get through the sciences. I could get through them, but I couldn't get the high marks needed to get to medical school. So I actually taught high school for three years. I taught English and history for three years. And then I would wake up and this voice in me, you gotta be a doctor, you gotta be a doctor.

I went back to medical school and with a lot of hard work. Having been an older student in medical school and being interested in history and literature and a larger picture, I always wanted to put medicine in a context of history and a context of society in a context of human experience, not just as an isolated science, but as a part of the broader human experience.

And I was interested right away in the beginning, in the connections between emotions and illness, between social factors and health and so on. So I was always a larger picture person. And so that was with me already in medical school. So the integration of mind and body as opposed to the sort of cartesian duality and separation of mind and body? Exactly. Not at anything in medical school prepared me for that. I mean, in medical school, you just don't get that information at all.

But that was always my interest. And then when I started practicing, if your eyes are at all open, you can't help but to see it. Who gets sick and who doesn't, isn't accidental. And who gets cancer, who gets doesn't, isn't accidental. And who gets addicted and who doesn't, isn't accidental. And there is this reasons. And those reasons go beyond the individual. And it has to do with their emotional lives and their relationships and the society and the culture that they live in.

So more and more over the decades, my own personal struggles and my medical experience showed me that these connections are important. How did you end up in palliative care? And it's supposed for those people listening, you don't know what palliative care is. Perhaps you could give just a brief explanation of what that is.

Some people might think of it as hospice care, which I'm not. I don't think you're necessarily identical. But how did you end up? What was the road to palliative care? And what is palliative care? So I was a family physician and a very driven one and also a VDD, which means that you want to move around and have this experiences, you know, because you get tired of the same thing.

And really, in retrospect, I might say that there's some guidance in all this, but how it occurred was a series of accidents. So I happen to be walking down the hall of Vancouver's major hospital when the current director of palliative care said, I'm quitting. How would you like to come and work in palliative care? And I said, sure. You know, I didn't think it took me a minute, not a moment to think about it. He was just looking for someone to grab.

Yeah, palliative care. Sure. Thank you. What is that? And deeply meaning for work, because when people are facing death, they also come up against the truth of their lives. And if you can face death, you can face life. Imp palliative care, meaning you're helping people with the transition with terminal illness.

These are people with terminal illness for whom nothing curative or healing is going to happen in the sense of physical healing. So they need to be helped with their symptoms, whether pain or ability or weakness or nausea. But also you have to help them go through the psychological process of adjusting to a very short future. And the people who get done to palliative care work, the nurses and the doctors tend to be a special breed.

Because many doctors are not comfortable with death. They're not comfortable with not being able to do something to save somebody. So you have to develop a lot of patience and a lot of acceptance. You have to let go of your power to change things.

So it's deeply meaningful and deeply transformative work. And you also have to work with a lot of people with multiple different attitudes of life and death, religious, non-religious, spiritual, non-spiritual, indenial, in acceptance and all the stages in between. So it was beautiful, beautiful work and highlights of my medical career. All the same time I was still doing my family practice. And when did a focus on addiction or an acute interest in addiction start to steer your medical practice?

So as a family physician I've always had substance addicts in my practice. It's just a few. And again it was an accident. I got fired from a palliative care job. And my argument is that I was fired for gross competence. I was just too damn good at it. But also for gross arrogance. In other words, with my spontaneous and insightful and rather radical, non-traditional style, I could have great results and often did in palliative care.

If I might interrupt for one second, what would be or might be an example of your approach that others thought was radical or something you would say or something you would do with a patient that got great results but that would seem very radical to others? Well, I would engage them in deep conversations. Stuff would come up that would be painful but it would be transformative.

Physically I would just use methods that had not been proven but occurred right to me and they seemed to be helpful in helping people out of pain or deal with issues and so on. I was very open and multiple approaches. I wasn't just following things by the book.

So that was my competence. The arrogance was that I had a very busy life. I was still delivering babies running my family practice so I would get into palliative care and then the nurses said working with me was like working in the eye of a tornado.

Another physician who didn't have my attitude or my particular mindset would legitimately question what I was doing but I would regard all such questioning as an attack rather than as an inquiry and I would react like a bulldog who was being threatened and that's the arrogance.

And that's what ended up leading me fired and it was a great firing because as always I learned a lot about myself took me a while but it took and then three weeks after I was fired I got this phone call from from a clinic in Vancouver's down town east side. Now the down town east side of Vancouver is North America's most concentrated area of drug use. We have more injection users in this few square block radius than anywhere in North America.

And I was like this call saying how would you like to come and work down here. And this is three weeks after I fired from part of care had I not been fired I couldn't have taken that other job which then led me to the high point for my career which is working 12 years with addicted population and eventually leaving family practice and doing that full time. So who orchestrated all this I have no idea but it was a beautiful progression.

So it's something that's come up quite a bit in interviews on this podcast is some variation of sometimes you need life to save you from what you want to give you what you need. Exactly. And I think about that a lot at the very least it's a pain relieving lens through which to view events that unfold how do you define addiction or maybe a better question is what is addiction. And along with that if you want to tackle it you water. Poor definitions of addiction or misconceptions fair enough.

So an addiction is a complex psychological physiological process but which manifests in any behavior that a person enjoys finds relief in and therefore craves in a short term but suffers negative consequences in a long term and doesn't give up despite the negative consequences. So craving pleasure relief in a short term negative consequences in the long term inability to give it up.

Now notice I had said nothing about substances I said any behavior so it could be related to cocaine crystal math heroin fentanyl marijuana nicotine alcohol whatever could also be sex gambling internet relationships shopping work eating work extreme sports working out. Fornography any number of human activities so I said any behavior now the official definition of addiction according to American society for addiction medicine it's a primary brain disorder it arises in the brain.

Roll largely due to genetic reasons this is how they see it and I say that's just not true. The other popular idea of addiction is that it's a choice that somebody makes that people choose to be addicted which is what the legal system is based on because if people are not choosing what are we punishing them for although I think the medical definition is closer to the truth.

I don't see it as just genetic disorder and I don't see it as a primary brain disorder so let me perhaps show you why if that's okay. So I give you this definition of addiction again craving relief pleasure short term negative consequences long term inability to give it up would you be willing to tell me if you've ever had an addiction in your life I don't care what to what I'm not asking what oh yeah I can I can say yes and I can tell you exactly what it was.

Now I in high school so I suffered from what I suppose most people would consider depressive periods beginning at latest age 10 right and never found relief from that until I was competing in wrestling very seriously in high school all throughout high school and an older teammate

introduced me to a fedron so a fedron estimate a fedron hydrochloride which for those people who are curious is well at least at one point a fedron was found at were the very least pseudo-fredron and something called primateen mist used for asthma and I think they also mixed it with guia fenisin nonetheless the reason you cannot buy in many places

large amounts of primateen mist is because people free-based it into methamphetamine so you have a fedron which is a very strong stimulant combined with caffeine and aspirin and we combine those three it's not an incremental increase in effect it's I mean it's probably log arithmetic it's a very synergistic effect

exponentially exactly and he was recommending it for increased endurance and there there is some effect although it's also very highly thermogenic which wasn't good for me so it made me really hot which was already a weakness of mine but it ended up providing me with relief it was a very strong stimulant and I began to not only use it for sports but self-medicate using it

okay so great so let me quickly ask you what did it do for you relief from what it's it's it's made me or at least contributed to euphoria optimism energy so I didn't I didn't I didn't feel the symptoms of what I in retrospect I would call depression the letter G the pessimistic lens through which I viewed things fair enough it seemed to magically just erase all that in about 30 minutes so you for your literally means good feeling right

you gave the energy it gave you made you feel good it made you optimistic also improved sports performance right I'm sure it did yeah those good things are bad things to feel optimistic those are all good things okay in other words the addiction wasn't your primary problem your primary problems that you depressed right that you lacked a sense of well being that you lack

energy right so in other words the addiction is not the primary problem it's an attempt to solve a problem right and then the real question is how did the problem arise right in other words this is where my theory is that it's always rooted in childhood trauma and that the addiction is an attempt to deal with the effects of childhood trauma which it does temporarily while it creates even more problems in the long term right I would have one more side question for you given

that estimate was your dog or choice this may not be true for you but do you think that respect you might have ADHD is a kid quite possibly because typically people with ADHD self-medicate with stimulants yeah because obviously three day days you know we give people

stimulants yeah riddle in that the family really a method so so a lot of people that choose stimulants of self-medication like nicotine and caffeine and crystal math and effedment are actually self-medicating ideas so it's very likely yeah and I was punished by teachers for I wouldn't say not paying attention but being interested in other things in class so I remember very distinctly my kindergarten teacher I'll name her by name because it's shameful

Mrs. Miss Bevan her Mrs. Bevan I refused to learn the alphabet because she wouldn't give me a good reason why I needed to learn the alphabet it was just you need to learn the alphabet so she made me it's open for the class and put me at the bad table she got

was that to but I was always interested in doing many many many things and in fact the reason one of the reasons that I started wrestling is because I was very hyperactive and as I believe the story goes other mothers recommended to my mom that she put me into something called kiddie wrestling to drain my batteries before I got home so that makes perfect sense I've never been drawn to depressants never been drawn to opiates in fact after surgeries I get very

sick if I'm given vikin or anything like that so I've opted out I have never personally had any issues with alcohol though a lot of people do it's always been a draw to stimulants and once the we don't have to go down this this this path because I want to I want you to be

able to focus on on these these definitions but where I got myself into trouble was having never been physically addicted to any substance before I started using the ECS attack once a day my friend was using twice a day I started using it twice a day and then I started using three times a day

and you develop a tolerance very quickly right and to take more and more and if you stopped with draw symptoms or I never experienced that so I continued after sports to use this and certainly in the long term there's some some very nasty side effects of course

but I didn't stop me for many many years well so there's a great link between 80 DNA addictions and not just because they both became with the same three letters and I can tell you what my own ADHD and this is where we go back to sheltered again so that tuning out that absent

mind and this that desire to scatter your attention all over the place that's not a disease they say it's a inherited disease the hell it is that tuning out that divided attention is actually but let me give you a personal question again if I were to become abusive towards you right now verbally or otherwise what would be your options right now I could ignore you well but that's not what you would do first is it

not likely I mean I would right now I would probably just listen and pause I shut down often if I get attacked verbally because I don't want to respond with rage which has historically been my response I hear you but but let's get a bit more basic about it the rational response if I were to become abusive would be for you to just assert yourself saying don't talk to me that way right or you'll be to leave saying this into years over and if for some reason you had not a strength to do the

other those there's other people in the room here because you could ask for help right but what if you couldn't escape fight back or seek help then you would shut down or tune out right now there's the tuning out is simply a defensive response in the part of the brain now put me back into my infancy where my mother is so greased again that I'm crying because she's in pain and I'll read your quote here if I may yes please and this has to do with the sensitive

child the child is very open and can feel the pain and suffering and going on its immediate environment the child is aware of his own body and can also feel the tension rigidity and pain in the body of the mother of anyone else he's with if the mother suffering the baby

suffers to the pain never gets discharged the organism does not develop the confidence that it can regulate itself that things will happen the way they should hence lack of optimism okay now my mother didn't abuse me she did her best to look after me but she was stressed depressed terrorized

grief stricken I'm picking that up as a sensitive infant can I fight back change the situation or escape no none of those what can I do nothing I can do my brain will tune out as a way of dealing with the stress so I'm not talking about abuse here I'm just telling was stress

murdering or parenting the child's brain then will tune out when is the child's braining it to knowing out when the brain is developing so the tuning out that becomes program and is the default setting and that's why ADD so it's not an inherited disease it's not a disease at all it begins as a coping mechanism which then gets programmed to the brain and is a lot of these early coping mechanisms function they help you in the short term create problems in the

long term and that's ADD is one of these examples and of course it also makes you more prone to be addicted because now when you tune out life becomes less interesting you shut down emotionally protect yourself now you feel depressed what is depression actually means you said you were depressed what is depression mean to depress something is to push it down what do people push down in depression

the push down their emotions yeah why would they because the emotions are too painful so even depression becomes as a coping mechanism you push it down so you don't feel the pain but then later on that interferes with your life functioning so it all begins as a coping mechanism and later on becomes a

source of dysfunction and all this is happening when the brain is actually developing which we can talk about later so these are the links I began to make including after I was diagnosed with it so I and then despite the fact that a couple of my kids were diagnosed I knew that this wasn't a genetic disease that what it is is actually is a coping mechanism which got programmed to the brain and then when I read the literature on brain development wow turns out the human brain is

shaped by the environment and particularly by the adult child relationships and so it all began to make perfect sense to me there are a few things I'd love to underscore or reiterate because I think they're very student very helpful and certainly if I had had some of these reframes I think that I would have been able to be proactive with working on a lot of my own

issues much much earlier me too by the way yeah for instance we can come back to this I'm actually just going to mention two things and then we can we can go where that takes us but the first is rather than asking why the addiction asking why the pain is actually instead of looking at the consequences looking at the causes and not

the the symptoms with the causes instead of asking why the addiction asking why the pain and the other this this might take a moment for me to read but I think it's worth reading and I should say that a compassion for addiction this is an organization co-founded by you yourself and Vicki I'm going to make a guess I've never actually said her last name but do lie or do lie Vicki just for for context for folks who

were wondering was actually the very first person about five years ago to recommend that we meet and I took a note of it in a notebook I still have and that's part of the reason that I reached out for the book and just because we may revisit this I met Vicki at a gathering at the home of someone

named George Sarlow right who has a lot who who who shares a lot of common background with you and certainly common interests but we'll come back to that the part that I wanted to read is is the following and I'm going to make my making attempt here

here all right so the mainstream view of addiction you mentioned this compared to the clinical perspectives that addiction is a matter of individual choice moral failure weakness which is why so many approaches are based on deterrence and punishment which includes self help approaches for that matter that I've attempted myself the clinical

view is that addiction is a disease of the brain with disorder brain circuits and behaviors and accurate yet narrow perspective so I think that's that's a really important line and accurate yet narrow perspective so perhaps accurate but incomplete right it is accurate that in the addicted brain that the

addicted brain is demonstrably physiologically dysfunctional brain but narrow because it seeks to explain the dysfunction strictly physiological and biochemical terms without recognizing emotional and social component how the brain works and this was really driven home for me recently in the last several years I've gotten to know Tony Robbins yes and I attended an event not too long ago several of my very close friends called date with destiny and at this event

he asked the audience of a 5,000 people how many people here know someone who takes antidepressants pretty much every hand goes up how many people here know someone who takes antidepressants yet is still depressed and is probably 80% of the people who raised their hands the first time

and I personally know quite a few people who take antidepressants which seem to help on some level although the tolerance for some of these pharmaceuticals can also be developed very quickly and yet if my experiences anything like the experience of or I should say if the experiences of other people is anything like my personal experience with friends let's say who have depression you witness these thought patterns

and verbal patterns that can take them from the highest high or just a baseline of optimism and drive them back into depression and so it seems to be just from an empirical or observational standpoint more to the story so I really appreciate you putting into words what I've grasped to try to understand and also convey so with this definition of addiction how do you work with patients?

Well let's go back to what I said what you quoted me saying not why the addiction but why the pain so if we understand that addiction in every case is rooted in some painful internal experience and that when you ask people what does the addiction do for you they'll say it numbs me it's the pain it makes me feel connected with other people it gives me a sense of control it gives me inner peace well the lack of inner peace the lack of control the lack of connection they all forms of emotional pain

if I ask the question not why the addiction but why the pain then that leads to an examination of that person's life so I'm quoted from an article that appeared in the journal of pediatrics which is the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics

it's about as prestigious as you can get 2012 the article comes from the Harvard Center on the developing child again at prestigious child development research institution at Harvard University this article did not present new information so much as it elegantly summarized decades of research

and notice what they say they say growing scientific evidence demonstrates that social and physical environments that threaten human development because of scarcity, stress or instability can lead to short term physiologic and psychological adjustments

that are necessary for immediate survival and adaptation which may come with a significant cost to learn to outcomes in learning behavior, health and longevity that's what I was saying before that was really adaptations like pushing down your feelings when the feelings are too painful

will help you as an infant, young child but then they cause problems later on the tuning out that you do to protect you from the stress in your environment if you're sensitive it doesn't take a lot of stress helps you and you are but in the long term it becomes a problem

that's exactly what they're saying now I'll jump a few pages ahead to what they say about brain development and this is so crucial and it's so crucial because they still don't teach this to medical schools even though scientifically it's not even vaguely controversial the human brain develops an interaction with the environment it's not genetically programmed purely they say the architecture of the brain is constructed to an ongoing process that begins before birth, continues into adulthood

and establishes either a sturdy or fragile foundation for all the health learning and behavior that follow not some of the health learning, all the health learning no notice what they say first of all the architecture of the brain is constructed to an ongoing process that begins before birth

which already means what happens in the womb already has an impact on you so if your mother is stressed and she's got high levels of stress hormone that's already affecting your brain development I mean you think of all the stress spreading the women out there?

no wonder we're just seeing so many kids in trouble and we know from American studies and international studies that my mothers are stressed their placenta will naturally have more cortisol in the adrenaline, the stress hormone those kids will be more likely to have stress issues later on

abnormal stress hormone levels even at one year of age behavior problems, learning problems and so on which tells us a lot as to why adopted kids have so many more problems that's another issue but the next paragraph is key the interactions of genes and experiences literally shapes the circuitry of the developing brain and is critically influenced by in other words the circuitry, the chemistry of the brain and which centers and which circuits and which systems develop

and which neurochemicals will be present in what quantities depends on the early environment and is critically influenced by the mutual responsiveness of adult child relationships particularly in the early childhood years in other words the most important influence shaping the physiological development of the brain is the quality of parent-child relationships now when parents are stressed or distracted or workaholics like I was a young parent

if there is instability, economic troubles, relationship troubles, unresolved trauma in the part of the parent loving parents who are just stressed, that will interfere with the child's brain development that's why we see so much weighty HD now, so much more autism and so much other problems

because of stress in society that affects the parenting environment in other words yes there is physiological problems with the brain but it's not a genetic issue it's really a thoroughly experienced so when you look at brain scans of adults that are troubled brain scans as you do in addicts

you're not just looking at the impact of addiction you're also looking at the impact of childhood trauma and childhood stress and this has been shown over and over and over and over again so there's no separation between the physiology and the psychology so if you come to me as an addict and you say like a such and such and I ask you what does it do for you and you say it numbs the pain then my question is where did you develop the pain? What happened?

and then we have an inquiry and not no longer becomes a shameful thing that you chose this no it doesn't mean that you stuck with it because you got this genetic problem we get it as an adaptive response to something that happened and we can heal that the reason why addiction treatment is failing

is because physicians don't understand this, they're keeping with the effects which is the addiction and the behaviors which are the effects of the addiction but not the cause which is the childhood distress and the impact of childhood distress that carry into adulthood

in other words how to stay prisoners of childhood and so present methods of treatment in psychiatry, in addiction medicine, in childhood psychiatry deal with effects rather than causes and this is why we're so ineffective at it I have many questions

so the first is just to underscore something which is you know the our software, the genetics play a role but it's not a comprehensive explanation for what we're discussing genes can be disposed but they don't pre-determine no there are very few genetic diseases

there's one one's in my family, muscular dystrophy if you've got the gene you'll have the disease, my mother had it so that would be pre-determined pre-determined, very rare those diseases let me tell you an interesting study from either Australia and New Zealand they looked at a group of people for aggression they found that the most aggressive people had a certain gene variant do you think they found the gene for aggression?

no they didn't because the least aggressive people in the group had the same gene so the most aggressive and the least aggressive shared the same gene is compared to the average the gene could not have been for aggression now if you actually looked at the life history of those people the most aggressive people had been brought up in troubled sometimes abusive but always very stressed homes the least aggressive were brought up in very nurturing homes what was the gene for?

sensitivity the more sensitive you are the more you're going to be affected when you're brought up in a peaceful home you're going to be that much more peaceful when you're brought up in a stormy home you're going to be that much more aggressive so there are these pre-determined positions but they're not for specific illnesses they are for temperament which means that you're going to be more or less affected by the environment and so yeah there are some pre-determined genes

but we know both from animal studies, in monkey studies and human studies that even you find a gene that for similar reasons predisposes somebody to addiction if that animal or if that human being is brought up in good nurturing circumstances

their risk of addiction is no greater than creatures without that gene so it's just not a genetic disease and the fact that it runs in families doesn't prove anything because as I was pointed out I'm a medical doctor and if two of my kids become medical doctors or which is no danger whatsoever

but if they did that wouldn't prove that the practice of medicine is just a genetic disease right right it's not a catch all explanation also you have I mean because of a few of the books I've written I hear a lot of stories both successful and unsuccessful about people attempting to lose weight and they'll often say well it runs in my family like my parents are fat my grandparents are fat and I'll say D.F. pets and I'll say yes I'll say are your pets overweight?

no yeah my pets are fat okay well it's clearly not just a genetic issue well let me have a say something on that have you heard about the adverse childhood experiences studies the ACE studies the average child adverse childhood experiences studies you know I haven't but I feel like there's a questionnaire or a test you can take yeah there is so the adverse childhood experiences studies were done in California with I think 17 14 or 17,000 adults mostly Caucasians half of the university educated

and they looked at the relationship between childhood adversity and adult outcomes and an adverse childhood experience was defined as physical or sexual or emotional abuse a divorce a print being jailed violence in the family a print being addicted a printing mentally ill a parent dying

these were the main ones and for each of these adverse childhood experiences the risk of addiction goes up exponentially the risk of autoimmune disease go up the risk of depression goes up the risk of ADHD goes up the risk of relationship problems STDs everything goes up now you know how these studies started?

these studies started in obesity clinic Dr Vincent Feliti who's a San Diego internist wonderful guy deep thinker and researcher they noticed that at this clinic with rigorous dietary control and exercise they could help people lose weight but what do you think they couldn't do?

they couldn't ensure they continue those behaviors when they live exactly they couldn't help and keep it off and then Feliti did something that's I have to say is unusual for medical doctor he listened to his patients and they said don't you get it?

we're stuffing down our pain this is all based on childhood trauma and so obesity itself is a response to childhood trauma it's just another addiction I could talk about it in many ways but and the other shots of the experience just studies have been repeated numerous times

nine other countries always with the same results and so that the obesity epidemic right now is not just an epidemic of junk foods and sedentary lifestyles that is true contributing factors but the underlying basis is people soothing their stresses in their lives so it's really an epidemic of stress

let me return to another point or one thing you said in passing which I'd love to dig into a little bit and that was how at the time say the example I think we were discussing well actually before that let me mention one thing so I've had my entire my full genome sequence

a predisposition to alcoholism is very prevalent in my family from a genetic standpoint just from a software base however I mentioned earlier I never had issues with alcohols with stimulants so just as just as a footnote but what I was going to

what I'd love to ask you and then I'd really love to hear what you do with patients you start looking at their pain and the tools you use or the approaches you use but one of the epiphanies for me in the last very recent year or two has been looking at my coping mechanisms very differently

and what I mean by that is for a very long time I had certain behaviors, certain defaults I hated which of course means I'm hating a part of myself and that included anger, rage responses use of stimulants, you name it a close friend of mine who is a therapist but I've never engaged him as a therapist and there are certainly plenty of bad therapists out there which I think is a separate topic nonetheless he was helping and I'm sure we'll get back to this but in preparation for a very controlled

supervised psychedelic experience he was helping another friend of ours prepare this is with IOSCA with IOSCA and this person had a number of addictions and she hated these addictions and as she said I hate these, I realized they're terrible they've ruined my life, they're ruining my life

and it was all a negative relationship to these behaviors and he said did these ever serve you did these ever help, what did these do for you and she described how they helped her cope with very difficult circumstances early on and he said perhaps what you should do

as an exercise and what we can do is for you to effectively thank those behavior for the role they played and for the necessity they filled and to then recognize thank them for their duty effectively but to let them go because they're no longer needed and that was a huge eye opener for me

and I began to, this is coinciding with a number of things and I don't want to take us off the rails to use something called loving kindness meditation or meta-meda-METTTA meditation which was introduced to by a gentleman from Google actually, a formerly Google

Chade Mank-10 and then also Jack Cornfield to really reiterate it for me but I never applied it to myself, I always applied this loving kindness meditation to other people and what was recommended is that I apply that loving kindness to the younger Tim to the other versions of Tim

who had these behaviors that I had grown to hate and resent and to actually thank them for the role they played for instance that rage that anger was the fuel that got me out of Long Island and where I grew up there are a lot of serious drug issues

particularly with opiates, my best-fred diet of fentanyl many of my friends were addicted to opiates who I grew up with, many have died and I got out because I was angry in part I think that was the fuel but that fuel ended up over the long term being very corrosive but to in a way to reconcile

myself with that I had to stop presenting it and I suppose it's maybe more of a confession than a question but your comment brought it to mind and maybe as a segue I just love to hear and we can take it anywhere we want of course but once you have shifted the focus from why the addiction to why the addiction to why the pain and you start to work with someone what approaches have you found to help? what tools?

well so I very much salute your friend's approach it's exactly what the approach I would take myself and I call it compassionate inquiry so inquiry in a compassionate way not why did I do this but hmm why did I do this right the first one is not a question it's a statement it's a self-condemnation

the second one is a question hmm wonder why I did this aha it's with my pain and so what your friend said that it served you so thank it love it but let go of it it's absolutely right I call it the stupid friend the stupid friend is the one who helped you in a particular way at a certain time

but it can't learn that that way doesn't function anymore that instead of helping now it's hurting so it's a friend because it's really trying to help but it's stupid because it's not learning that you know along with that three-year-old that's five-year-old that's 15-year-old

so this leads to the question of trauma because it's one thing to recognize that all this originates in childhood pain it's quite another to transform that pain and for that we have to understand what trauma is so people often think that trauma is what happens to you it's a divorce

when you were small and your parents fighting trauma is your mother's depression trauma is your father's alcoholism trauma is your parents argumentation trauma is physical or sexual abuse or some loss those aren't the traumas those are traumatic but the trauma is not what happens to you

the trauma is what happens inside you and as a result of these traumatic events what happens inside you you get disconnected from your emotions and you disconnect it from your body and you have difficulty being in the present moment and you develop a negative view of your world

and a negative view of yourself and a defensive view of other people and these perspectives keep showing up in your life in the present because they are the stupid friends and so the issue is not just to recognize what happened 10, 15, 30, however many years ago

but to actually recognize the manifestations in the present moment and to transcend them and how do you do that by reconnecting with yourself by restoring the connection with your body primarily and with your emotions that you lost and once you do when you found these things again

then you have what we call recovery because what does it mean to recover something it means to find it again so what does it mean to find it again so what does it mean to find when they recover to find themselves and the loss of self is the essence of trauma so the real purpose of addiction

treatment, mental health treatment any kind of healing is reconnection for people who are listening and want to reconnect with themselves with their bodies for instance what recommendations might you have whether that's things they can do or resources they can look to or both or something else

what recommendations because I'm sure I could actually I am 100% sure because I've had people come on and for the very first time on this podcast talk about sexual abuse of the Enders as children and what they did to help recover from that many people listening I am sure have addictions both traumatic past experiences and trauma what recommendations could you make for them?

Sure so I want to say first of all that if you're trauma you don't need terribly traumatic events so there's two ways to look at trauma one is that bad things happen that shouldn't have we've talked about those but the other way to get traumatized is when good things happen that should have happened

so when you look at the trauma of omission trauma of omission with the parents not that they didn't love you not that they didn't do their best but they were too stressed traumatized, distracted themselves then you didn't get the kind of attention and the kind of acceptance

and the kind of attuned being with that you needed that itself can make you disconnect from yourself the child needs that acceptance that connection, that attunement our brain development requires it and when we don't get it not because the parents don't love us but because of their own issues we can also suffer that disconnection so that's what I call developmental trauma and now how do we connect?

well there are many many forms of therapy it's very difficult for anybody to do this on their own some people do it, I certainly couldn't do it on my own I've needed a lot of help in terms of therapy that helps you understand what happened to me and so that is a reason for it

so that if there's a reason for it then it's no longer me I'm not somebody to be ashamed of I'm just somebody who developed along certain lines for some very good reasons but it's not in my deepest character and it's not who I am and I don't have to be that way that's a relief to know

it's also not that I'm generically programmed so I'm doomed to stay that way you know, number one, number two you have to reconnect with the body there are various body therapies my friend Peter Levine and he has somatic experiencing walking tiger?

waking the tiger waking the tiger was his first book and he's written many wonderful books since then somatic experiencing his method is called which he developed is brilliant there is EMDR I movement desensitization reprogramming which is a way of bypassing the conscious mind

and getting to the emotional brain and quicker than talk therapy by itself can do so it's combined with talk therapy but it takes you past just the conscious defensive egoic mind there is emotional freedom tapping that people do there's various variations on that there is there is

motor sensory integration techniques there is then there is the traditional therapies like yoga now yoga was not simply a physical modality when it first developed yoga actually means unity so the very essence of yoga is to regain that unity not just with ourselves but also with the larger creation

and so yoga when it's practiced in its intended way not just the hot yoga where you get a good workout that's great I'm not against it but I'm talking about intentional yoga with a meditative aspect to it which is taught by a number of disciplines body work of all kinds

it's going to hit pause for one second do you practice yoga and if so what type do you practice so I have always said with my ADHD I'm not a yoga person I can't do it until you're not half a go I met actually a yogi his name is Satguru and he's an Indian yogi with a big following

I was very skeptical but I met the guy I now have a 50 minute daily yoga practice which I did this morning before coming to the end of you and this made an enormous difference in my life with my ADHD mind I really have trouble just sitting there when I sit on the meditation question

my mind is like all over the place but with the yoga which is more body based I can stay much more present there is a meditational component to it and so the answer is yes if you asked me 18 months ago I would have said no I supported but I don't do it but now I'm actually a very committed practitioner and it really has made a difference is there a particular is it a particular type of yoga that people could Google or learn more about?

well so I'm not a yoga expert and there's many forms of yoga that other people more knowledgeable than I am I really recommend but the one I learned is called inter-engineering and it's taught by either a satguru or a follower and you can look up inter-engineering online

when I recommend to friends and others everybody has been only being grateful so I can highly recommend it typically there is to me what seems to be a cult around the guy which I don't take too particularly but he's the genuine article in terms of having a deep experience

and being able to transmit that experience to others and creating a practical system around it so it's worked for me I'm not here to recruit anybody else but since you're asking no no it's just my fans appreciate well you know I'm not going to blame it on my fans I like specifics my fans

so it's inter-engineering you can look up online and it's taught here in the states and in Canada, internationally actually but I did interrupt you you're about to mention I think another technique or modality about for instance the somatic experience EMD or emotional freedom tapping

motor-centric integration, technique or techniques yoga and then there's something coming up after that well about 10 years ago I began to work with psychedelics now if you're 15 years ago you were to ask me will I ever be working with psychedelics as a healing modality I would have said

you are out of your mind but then to a series of events I became aware of the potential role of psychedelics in healing and I've been doing work with them now for 10 years and there are another potent method they're not for everybody and I have to emphasize that whatever modality you choose

of a psychedelic nature you have to do it with adapt practitioner is with deep integrity and deep knowledge and experience but in such hands and in such a context it can be like a super high-weight to self-awareness not in isolation but it opens doors that otherwise might take years

and so it's not unusual for me to conduct the psychedelic session with somebody or a series of sessions either in a group or individual setting and have them say that was like 10 years of psychotherapy in one day and I've had the same experience myself so again it's not to be isolated

and it has to be integrated but it's another potent way of working and of course as I know you're personally aware there's an increasing movement amongst psychologists therapists, psychiatrists medical doctors other healers to find ways of incorporating psychedelic healing

in the larger therapeutic scheme so Godmore you mentioned a series of events leading you to psychedelics or to consider psychedelics potentially is a healing or medical modality if you're able to could you describe any of those events?

Sure, so in 2008 my book on addiction in the realm of Hungry Ghosts close and connoisseur with addiction was published in Canada and very quickly became a number one national bestseller subsequently published in the states as well and I was in a book tour and people could ask me

what do you know about addiction and I wasca as a treatment I wasca being a proven or Amazonian vine that's made into a brew that has psychedelic properties and you're nothing the next speech or the next event somebody else would ask what do you know about I wasca in the two-in-a-delicion

I finally started getting annoyed with it like leave me alone I've used it in the book I've spent years researching it exploration went into it asked me what something I know about and then I realized that maybe the universe was knocking on my door and somebody said did you know you could experience it here in Vancouver? there was a Peruvian shaman leading some ceremonies up in Vancouver so who might have said no when I jumped right in and I sat in this tent with 50 other people 50?

yeah that's how they set it up I don't know what I recommend but that's how they set it up they played beautiful music and there was a little baby in the room mother and dad were therefore the experience the baby was in the room and the baby was cooling away and tears started flowing down my face

and these were not tears of sorrow they were tears of joy and I got in touch with such profound love that I had never and there were tears of love and it wasn't love for anybody in particular it was just love and then I saw in all the ways that I had closed my heart against love in my life

and how I'd be trade love in my personal relationship with my spouse and my children and in other ways so I just got this experience of love and I just something profound and universal and and life defining but something from I was being cut off in so many ways and I got it because

I closed my heart against love precisely because when I was vulnerable and small I'd been so hurt going to my mother's state's mind and she didn't know she wanted to be responded not her fault but she couldn't and then when I was a year old she gave me to a stranger to save my life

and I didn't see her for a month which is a huge explain that for a second so again this Budapest Hungary second World War January the Russians are circled Budapest and are fighting the Germans And even though the deportations of Jews had stopped, the Germans had annihilated half a million Hungarian Jews in three or four months, but now the Hungarian fascists were killing Jews in Budapest, including in the house where my mother and mother were living.

So my mother gave me to a stranger in the street a Christian woman, because she didn't know she'd be there to her life next day. Well, or that I would be, and I was quite sick. So I didn't see her for a month, which I experienced as a deep abandonment. How else could I experience it? So my heart closed us against love. And I got all this.

And so I got that if this plant, this plant that, as you say, manifests the mind, can show me both the ways in which I've closed the earth from myself, and that I don't need to, because the love is still there. What healing potential it has. Now, I wish I could say that after that experience, I became a loving husband and a loving human being. I didn't. It's not that simple, you know, as my wife could tell you. Nevertheless, it opened the door for me. And I got right away.

Now, however the thought that I had was that I had no induction, I had no introduction, I had no processing afterwards. Ayahuasca is a medicinal plant that has been used in the Amazon basin for hundreds of years, maybe longer, in its cultural context. In a tribe, in a village where people know each other, where they know the shaman, where they share the same assumptions and the same history.

That's not the same as a bunch of Westerners, strangers to each other, come together for one night, drinking the stuff, and then go in their separate ways. So I agreed. So immediately the question that came up for me was, how can we create a setting that at least resembles as best we can fashion the original setting?

So we came up with the idea of a retreat where a small number of people get together with properly trained shaman, who have integrity and deep experience, and with me facilitating people's preparation and their post ceremony integration. And so I've been doing that now for 10 years.

And a lot of learning involved, we made mistakes, but it evolved, and the essence of it is that people don't come to it cold, they come into the preparation in a safe setting where pretty soon a group becomes a family to each other, which means that not only do they love each other and support each other, but they also trigger each other. I mean, basically I tell people, guess what, you're back in your family or virgin.

And everything you've heard about your family virgin is going to show up here. But in the context where it's safe for that to happen. And so I've seen a lot of great healing. I've had people with multiple suicide attempts, heal from depression. I've seen people get much better with the autoimmune diseases.

I've seen people deal with all kinds of addictions and life issues, relationship problems come out of it much more themselves, much more able to deal with these issues so long as the proper integration is done afterwards. So that was my personal experience. Now, that then introduced me to the whole world of psychedelics.

And I realized that there's a lot of research being done these days, that this organization maps multidisciplinary association for psychedelic studies, which is a group of psychologists, psychiatrists, medical doctors, therapists, counselors, interested people to study scientifically the role of psychedelics in healing. And as you're probably aware, interesting studies have been done around silestive and mushrooms and endolife anxiety.

Studies have been done, which are revolutionary in using MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, MDMA being the technical name for ecstasy. Again, in the right setting with the right leadership, these have proven to be very powerful modalities of healing. And so there's a whole new research, and there's a whole new research in a number of different areas, some of the man-made, some of them plant-based. But there's a whole world that I was introduced to. And I've learned a lot in the last 10 years.

And again, I both practiced it in my own healing work. And I'm interested in it also as a participant. I'd love to add a few things to your second comment and ask a bunch of questions about the first. So for people who are, and I'll maybe direct this to camera, because I don't usually have camera solstice, for people who are actually not as too weird, for people who are, I don't know where to look, I should definitely keep that in.

For people who are interested in learning more about the current scientific studies and mechanisms of action related to some of these compounds and what is being done, there are a number of very interesting and very competent organizations as far as I can tell. Maps is one that you mentioned, and I'll actually be seeing the founder, Rick Doblin, in just a few days' time.

There is the Hefter Institute, which I've worked with primarily run by MDs and PhDs, or at least the board, and so on, is comprised of scientists and medical doctors. It was through the Hefter Foundation and also directly with Johns Hopkins, so I've had some involvement with... With Solstice? With Solstice studies.

And actually, thank you to many of you, sort of smack in the mic, to many of you in my audience who helped through a crowd running funding campaign to raise funds for a study at Johns Hopkins related to treatment-resistant depression in Solstice. So Hefter Institute, excellent organization to look into, and then Usona also, which I believe is primarily focused on Solstice.

And whereas Maps at this point has done great work on many levels, including helping to facilitate MDMA being designated a breakthrough therapy and effectively getting fast-tracked into Phase 3 trials. By the FDA. That's right. And these are all organizations that I would encourage people to look into. And it's really an exciting time and also a fragile time as it relates to these compounds, which have certainly demonstrated historically accepting MDMA.

Let's just look at the studies many of which were done starting in, say, 50s and 60s, looking at the clinical efficacy of using these compounds for everything ranging from alcoholism to nicotine addiction to many of the things that you mentioned. Well, what is little known, but Bill Wilson, Dr. Bill, who founded one of the funders of AA, actually had some powerful LSD experiences, which helped him as in his spiritual growth. He wasn't AA, they don't talk about that very much, but it's a fact.

If I may parenthetically say, as much as I support the 12 steps, what AA also doesn't tend to talk about is the trauma that first causes the addiction. And Bill Wilson himself was a traumatized child. He was abandoned by his parents, and he was very young. And so it's interesting that AA, for all the good work that it does do, which I support, I don't support people being forced into any particular from a treatment, but as a self-chosen form of treatment, it can be very helpful to many people.

But they don't talk about two very interesting things, which is one is the psychedelic part, and the other is the trauma part. Yeah, no, it's, for me, just looking at my own childhood experiences and exploring recovery, defined as you defined it. Yeah. In the last several years, especially in the last six months, it's been fascinating and frustrating to discover and try to piece together these various elements. But the, what is the first training part?

That there is, well, it may exist, but I couldn't find one stop shopping that checked all the boxes, right? They ain't any. Right, so it's been an exercise in collecting various tools and piecing them together. Like you said, you have the AA does incredible work. And what they have done in terms of a distributed free service with social accountability and support is incredible.

Absolutely. The psychedelic component, which Bill actually wanted to, as I understand it, make one of the steps in AA, needless to say, it was hard to get widespread leadership support for that, and then you have the trauma piece. So these are all tools in the toolkit that people can use for their own sort of bespoke approach in some respects.

Coming back to the ayahuasca specifically, and I should just as a caveat point out, because I do think that these tools, I know these tools are very powerful. I have firsthand familiarity from past experiences and have been very engaged with this scientific community for some time now. They can be misused. There are many charlatans. Unfortunately, there's more than that. There's some very powerful healer, shamans, who unfortunately exploit people sexually and financially. Very common.

This is of course not just restricted to the ayahuasca world. It also happens in a spiritual world. How many spiritual leaders with tremendous power, tremendous healing influence have at the same time exploited men and women and created all kinds of further trauma. So unfortunately, when you have that much power and you haven't totally done your integration work, you can start misusing that power. And that happens in all of the healing modalities, as we know.

But it certainly happens in a psychedelic world as well. Yeah, it's very... I wish I could say it's rare, it's not. But it's something to safeguard against, especially when you're in that vulnerable state. So I would actually recommend that people see a documentary called Kumare, which is very much worth watching. And the brief overview is it's an Indian filmmaker. Who begins studying various gurus and healers in the US.

In hopes of, I believe the original impetus was to simply do a documentary on charlatans. And then he went to India and he said, they're just as bad here. And he said 99% are just as bad or worse. And he decides to make himself a guru as an experiment. And it's a very thought-provoking documentary that I think will... It should become a kind of fake guru, right? That's right. I can remember it. And then he unveils it. Yeah, I don't want to give too much away, but it's very well done.

We're watching because it helps to prepare you, I think, psychologically, to not lose yourself in a dangerous way. And here's the problem, you see. What I said about the essence of trauma is that you lose connection to yourself. And that means you lose connection to your gut feelings. Right. Yes. No, as long as your gut feelings are with you and you are with them, they'll protect you.

But the essence of trauma is the loss of that, which means that when you lose connection to your gut feelings, then you're very vulnerable to being exploited. And when you talk to people who were exploited in any context, psychedelic or not, if you ask them, do you have any kind of vague sense that this is not quite right, they'll say, yeah, but I didn't listen to it. Yep. And the fact that they didn't listen to it is already a marker of trauma.

So since it's traumatized people, which is most of us, who seek healing, it's also vulnerable people who seek healing. And this is what some of these people can exploit. So the very portal into healing, which is opening up the vulnerability that we've shut down against, is also the portal for potential loss. People have to do that, do diligence. Yep. And I'm not trying to create paranoia here, but people just should be careful.

You just mentioned something that I'd really love to just pause and emphasize. You mentioned a few things. So number one is that your gut feeling slash, sex physiological intuition can help you. And that's something that, for many reasons, I completely muted or ignored for a very long time. So it's been a process of getting reacquainted with that. And I would say two things that I found helpful, and if you have any comments on the second in particular, I'd love to hear.

One was dramatically decreasing my caffeine intake, which I found was almost like turning up the volume on static. It made it very difficult for me to read or feel other things. That's right. I was using it maybe for many reasons, but it had the side effect, at least, of muting. Maybe that was why I did it subconsciously. Many of these feelings.

The second was, in fact, a video that was recommended to me, but it corresponds to a book called The Gift of Fear by Gavin DeBecker, and who actually owns a company that does protective services and executive security. So you have to keep in mind. Maybe you don't always want to ask a barber if you need a haircut. So keeping that in mind, it also, in brief, points to the benefits of some of these reactions or emotional states that we are prone to labeling negative.

As you said, not to make anyone paranoid, but rather to inform them, these are currently existent risks. And one of the hopes, certainly, with, say, ultimately better researching these compounds after they've been really unfairly, but for understandable reasons, politicized and put into the same schedule in the United States as heroin and cocaine to have them rescheduled so that they are prescribable.

And if then that happens, the ability to certify therapists, to regulate, and to maintain a broad type of quality control goes up. So that's also one of the hopes is that that will decrease the likelihood of bad actors and allow appropriate punishment for bad actors. Mind you, as we know, even in legalized legitimate professions, this stuff happens. This stuff happens, you know, so ultimately, you know, God feelings are still the best response.

And let me address first why we shot Dunner God feelings, if I may, please. So a human being has two fundamental needs, apart from the physical needs in infancy, in childhood. One is for attachment. Now attachment is the closeness and proximity with another human being for the sake of being looked after, or for the sake of looking after the other. Now human beings as mammals and even birds are creatures of attachment. We have to connect and attach because otherwise we don't survive.

If there's nobody that's motivated to take care of us, to attach to us that way, and if not motivated to attach to others, we just can't survive. One of the distinct things is that the endorphins, which are the body's internal opiate chemicals, which heroin and all the other opiates resemble, they have to facilitate attachment.

So if you take infant mice and you knock out their endorphin receptor, so they don't have endorphin, opiate activity in their brain, they won't cry for help and separate from their mothers, which would mean that they would die in the wild. And which goes back to what happens in early in childhood when their stress and trauma, these endorphins systems don't develop. And then when people do heroin, it feels like a war and soft hug to them.

If you love and connection for the first time, that's why it's so powerful. But so we have this need for attachment, which obviously the human infant, who is the most hopeless, the most dependent, the least mature of any creature in the universe, that birth cannot survive without the attachment. And that attachment relationship, given that we have the longest period of development of any creature, well into adolescence and beyond, attachment is not a negotiable need.

But we have another need, which is authenticity. Authenticity, auto, the self, means being connected to ourselves, just knowing what we feel and being able to act on it. So that means our God feelings. So let's look at our human beings evolved. For hundreds of thousands of years, and for 100,000 years or so, this species existing on Earth, how did we live? We didn't live in cities and houses, and so on. We lived there out there in the wild until very recently in human existence.

Now just how long do you survive in the wild if you're not connected to your God feelings? Not very long. Not very long. If you start using your intellect instead of your God feelings, you just don't survive. So that's a powerful survival need as well. So attachment is a survival need, authenticity is a survival need. But what happens if your authenticity threatens your attachment relationships? For example, as a two-year-old you get angry because you can get that cookie before dinner.

But your parents can't handle anger because they grew up in homes when there was rage at the house, and they're terrified that they're very expression of anger. So they give you the message that good little kids don't get angry. The message you receive is not that good little kids don't get angry, but that angry little kids don't get loved. Because your parents are not alone, they won't look at you, they talk to you in a harsh way, you're not getting loved. Not experiencing love at that moment.

No. But you've got to stay attached. Guess what you're going to suppress? The authenticity every time. And this is how we lose connection to ourselves and to our God feelings. So that, strangely enough, that very dynamic, which is essential for human survival in a natural setting, not becomes a threat to our survival in this more modern setting, where to stay authentic is to threaten attachment.

And so we give up our authenticity and then we wonder who the hell we are and whose life is this, and who's experiencing all this. And this life doesn't, you know, and who am I really? And so that's where the reconnection has to happen. That's what the healing happens is with that reconnection. But it's because of that conflict, that tragic conflict, the childhood between authenticity and attachment, that most of us face, that we lose ourselves and lose connection to our God feelings.

There's so many directions we can go with this. And I'm really glad you shared that because that had an enormous, that observation has had an enormous impact on some of my close friends and something I was only exposed to really today, because our mutual friend, Vicki, recommended that I ask you to expand on it. What I'd love to return to if we can. Can I say something? Of course. Sorry. In this building there's a picture where I was personally.

Yes. So there's a song of his that I play at my retreats and my events all the time. It's called, Anywhere You Love Me. Remember how it goes? I don't. I could actually play it for you, but it goes, Anywhere You Love Me, that's the way I'll be. Any of your hands, my heart is clay. I'll be strong as a mountain or weak as a... I'll be a little bit more powerful, I'll be like a little baby. Anywhere You Want Me, that's where I will be. Now that's considered a love song.

It isn't. It's a lack of love song. It's a song that says, Just Attach to Me. I'll give up anything about myself, just accept Me, the way You want Me to be. It's a sad song. And when you hear him sing it, there's deep sadness in it. And some of the power of Presley actually came from his own suffering. He wasn't just singing a song, he was actually infusing it, but all the emotions of loss. So even though it's presented like a love song, it's actually a song about the loss of love.

And that's the situation of the infant who says, Just Love Me. I'll be anything you want Me to be. And that's the tragic conflict with an attachment and authenticity. So this ties into exactly where I was going, which is related to your pre and post work with psychedelics. And for people who are watching this or listening to it, I'm returning to this not because I want to hammer home psychedelics. They're not for everyone.

And in my experience, the vast majority, or I should say, in my observation, the vast majority of psychedelics is very irresponsible. And I would not recommend because it can certainly cause a good amount of harm if not done in a supervised, safe fashion. But the pre and post work could apply to many modalities.

I mean, it does in this case, this example, they were about to talk about apply to psychedelics, but it could incorrect me if I'm wrong, but it seems like it could very easily apply to going into any intense or unusual modality. Oh, like the past and I like the past and I like the past. Like the date with Destiny Tony Robbins, I mentioned, which is certainly intense and very, very different, very powerful. That's why I'm coming back to this.

But we can discuss it as it applies specifically to psychedelics and even specifically to Iowaska, that is the primary compound we're talking about. Which is really just for people who are wondering, one of the reasons Iowaska is really tricky is that it is unlike, say, I'm going to get off the topic for a second, but it's still on topic. It's not quite like mushrooms and what people consider the primary psychoactive molecule of psilocybin. It's a bit different. It's more of an old fashioned.

Like if you go to a bar in your order, vodka and soda, pretty much everywhere you go, vodka and soda, very similar. Assuming the poor is the same.

Iowaska is more like an old fashioned. There are a few ingredients that are almost always there. So if you go to, let's say, I want to say, Pucalpa or other parts of Peru, it's going to be mostly the Iowaska Vine plus a plant called Chacruna, where a psychotriavidides, which is a DMT, I think I suppose it must be NNDMT containing plant, which is made orally active through the MAO inhibitors.

Bano-mean oxidase inhibitors in the vine. How they figured that out is a whole separate story, which is kind of wild. The plants told them is the short version. I know, although I have a scientific friend who gave me a starting, the simple explanation, which makes more sense to the Western mind. When I was in Peru, they also told me the plants told us, which on some level, I accept.

But I just want to say something here, because we're talking in an extended way about the psychedelics. I don't want to create the impression that this is most of my life or work. It isn't. I do this stuff one or two or three weeks a year. So it's not like the major part of what I do. But it is a very interesting part, because it illuminates everything else that I do, in a sense that it goes very deep.

This scientific friend, the science friend, who says, actually, let's say using the Iowa Scorn boiling it up, because the Iowa Scorn itself, the vine has some psychedelic properties on its own without the Chakruna. Very strong auditory particular. So then what happens is some leaves of Chakruna fall into it. It never will be over hundreds of years that's going to happen. So this combination is even more powerful. So it need not be as esoteric as the plants told us.

It could have been that rather simple discovery for sure. Who knows what the real story is. But in any case, the preparation and the processing. So I was just going to add one thing to that, which is that is one combination. You then also have in certain regions of, and it's found in other places outside of Peru, most certainly in the largest, Iowa Scorn as sacrament-based churches are actually out of Brazil.

But the, it can also be, Iowa Scavine plus Yahe, which is a different plant, also DMT containing, but a, for some people, substantially different experience. And then the only reason I'm mentioning this is so that people are aware of why I am particularly concerned when people are cavalier about, hey, my friends ordering some Iowa Scorfrom Hawaii, and we're going to put in a slow cooker and have it at this house this weekend.

I'm like, bad, bad idea. Many, many centers, even well intentioned centers in Peru will also put other things in the brew because they think that foreigners want more of X. So the coca leaves, they'll put, so I think cocaine, coca leaves, they'll put toé, which is even datura, which is even scarier in some respects. Coca not that scary. So just be aware that when you say, Iowa Scorn, not you, but when people think Iowa Scorn is not a standardized dose that you're getting.

And recently I was at a retreat in Costa Rica where really four different night states ceremonies and each time with a different concoction. Oh God. So one night with the Peruvian, Shippeebo tradition, preparation one night with the Yahe from Colombia. And you know, it's who prepares it, how much they bullet for what combination, what intention and so on.

So that's by on large true that that and really the people I worked with, you know, it's always not that it's always the same drink every night, but it's pretty much the same preparation. Same preparation. And so I took us down a little rabbit hole, but the question I have is with all of your clinical experience, you know, recognizing that this is a therapy, but it's an adjunct therapy. It's not used in isolation.

Yeah. And you've through trial and error and design come to a place now where you have maybe certain best practices or approaches to the pre- and post work. Could you tell us about either or both of those? Sure. And you know, ideally maybe exercises or questions people could think about on their own. I know not it's hard to recommend that in isolation, perhaps, but I'd love to hear any details that you're willing to share about the pre and post. Sure. Because it's so, so important.

I just, it's hard to, for me, at least in my limited experience even to overemphasize. But with, with Ayahuasca specifically, which is not the only modelality I work with, but that specifically, there's a physical preparation. For example, no caffeine for a period of time, no red meat cutting down on salt, excluding dairy products. So there's a physical preparation just to cleanse the body and to make it more receptive to the Ayahuasca.

From the emotional and psychological point of view, you want somebody to really formulate an intention. What I actually want out of this experience, because intention is everything. So it's not like, I'm going to take this stuff and let's see what happens. Why am I here for? Why am I coming? What is my intention in growing there? What do I want to find out? What issues am I working with? So intention setting and really considering what is my purpose in undertaking this experience.

When people arrive, we don't just plunge into ceremony. In Ayahuasca retreats, we have a day and a half of group preparation. So everybody articulates their intention, why they're there. And we deeply explore how that intention arrives, a role, sorry. And what in their lives brought them to this point. And what issues they need to deal with.

And my way of working is to get people very deeply to their core issues, which they may not be even aware of, but again through this process I call compassionate inquiry. And this is true whether I'm working with plants or not. They get to see what it is that they're really seeking. And what are they seeking? They're seeking themselves. They're seeking reconnection, ultimately. But there's steps that you go through. And then we help them set a specific intention for that first ceremony.

And the specific intention is what do I want to learn tonight? Not just what I want to learn in general, but what I want to learn tonight. Some people want to learn about, tell me about my fear. Teach me about my pain. Show me what love is. Show me what courage is. Show me what my strength is. See, it's not that the IOS comes to an agenda. It works through you, and it manifests what's in you.

So that your intention, the more specific it is to where you are in life at that moment, the more effective it's going to be. And then the shamans work with you doing the ceremony, and they chant to you based on what they're picking up from you at that moment. They work with you energetically. Sometimes they work hands-on as well. And you both have your own experience, and you share the group energy. And then people go to sleep.

And then the next day, and then the following day, we then process what happened to you. What visions came to you. Now some people will have visions. Some people with more prosaic lives like me will all the energet visions. I did originally get visions, but it's been years since I've seen anything. Some people will have bodily experiences.

Some people will go to intense emotional states, and there were always memories of maybe forgotten memories, but in dwelling memories of very early experiences, intense. Some people will have beautiful entities coming and teaching them. Jaguars and Anakondas, or various angelic entities. I've never been blessed with that. I used to get frustrated, but actually whatever experience you have, that's the experience you need to have. And for me, it's not about the visions or anything.

It's about what is the teaching. And the teaching is always there. And the purpose of the processing is to help you find the teaching that was imparted to you by whatever experience you had, not about comparing your experience to the night before, or two nights before, or to the experience of other people. It's your specific experience. What does it mean in your life? So this is an outpost retreat.

Then again, whether you do a program like the Pasinar, whether you do the Landmark Forum, or whether you do a Hoffman process, or whether you do any kind of transformational work, or a meditation retreat, if you don't integrate what you've learned into your life, and you build up some practice around it, it's going to become a nice memory. A lot of best. Straight back into making hypercritical decisions, impulsively, 12 hours later also. Absolutely. It could be very destructive. Absolutely.

So the more integration we can, and in the journal in Psychedelic Work, this question of integration is becoming more and more recognized, and more and more practiced. So integration means keeping in touch with people that can help you stay and track, keeping in touch with the group that you shared the experience with, putting some practice into your life, such as journaling, meditation, yoga, perhaps you're going to return, and do some more plant work, or perhaps you won't.

That's entirely up to you. There's no prescription to be made there. But the point is to go from experience, that is discrete and timely-limited, to some kind of integration that happens over time. How do you format that integration? Are you interacting with the people on your retreat once a week or four weeks, or you have two sessions in the following week? What is the actual format, look like? Well, that's evolving, and that's different for different people.

But in general, I would say that if you can talk to somebody regularly over time, and if you can maintain your contact with the group, so they're like a Facebook group, a Facebook group where people share experiences, if you take on certain practices, and you do them together, or at least you do them simultaneously, and then you talk, share about the practices. These are all forms of integration.

Which, and we've mentioned this a few times, applies to more than just the modality of using plant medicine. Absolutely. So after this, not sound like Birken record, but this is very recent, after going to this 20 Robbins event with a number of people, including we have photo online, so I think he's fine with me saying it. Joe Gebbia, co-founder of Airbnb, Mark Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, was sitting right behind me. He wasn't part of the group, but he's a friend.

At least not quite, getting to know each other. In any case, we kept a group text going afterwards to hold each other accountable and also to set follow-up group calls. Right. And so on. A number of things I'd really like to underscore because you mentioned them, and I'd like to reiterate their importance. And also how they transcend the plant medicine work, the psychedelics. The first is, you mentioned intentions.

And I'll just share my experience and also a number of recommendations that helped me tremendously with plant medicine work, but then life in general, which is you set a clear intention, but the clear intention is not the same as an expectation. That's right. And if you go in to, and you have an expectation you can't let go of, you end up, many people, end up trying to whitenuck all the experience. And that's true in general life, and it's very true for plant experiences.

So if you get there, this is going to happen. This should happen. And some people sit there the whole night resisting their experience, because it doesn't meet their expectations. Right. So there's a card, it's a little card that I was given as a gift, which I didn't come to appreciate fully until maybe a year or two. I've been carrying it a long time. And it was given to me by an ex girlfriend. And it says, the task which hinders your task is your task.

And so you mentioned a few things and you said, well, that is the work for that night. And I've come to know a few people, I respect, as, I hesitate to use the word, but there are really only two or three people I personally met. I would feel comfortable calling a shaman. And they all have minimum 10, 15 years experience in a traditional apprenticeship setting. And by the way, that means deep personal work. Very deep. That means sitting in a jungle by yourself, beating by mosquitoes. Doing.

That means drinking various plants, tobacco, and other plants, beyond Iowa's ground, and really preparing. I know somebody on that path right now, let me tell you. It's deep committed work. It's not for your fate, Harry. Very, very, very, I would never do it. Yes, very intense. Very, very intense. And I mean, there are people who do 15 months of isolation, dieting various plants, no sex, no salt, no pork, no red meat. Absolutely. And you know the drill, we won't get into it right now.

And what, they've shared a few examples with me of say, I've never, well, that's not true. But I have always, in the past, I've never, ever, ever shed away from large groups. That's why I was taken back with mentioning 50 people. It seems very common in any group, especially larger groups. And this is true in psychedelics or at the Vipassana retreats.

They actually, the nickname for it that was given at the the 10 day silent retreat I did at Spirit Rock was the Vipassana Vendetta, where you decide that someone who's sitting close to you is coughing too loudly, or clears their throat too often or whatever, is to, you start to perseverate and think about it incessantly and maybe get angry about it. Instead of watching your reaction. Instead of watching your reaction.

And the example that was given to me by this particular, I'm just going to say Iowascato to simplify things. Iowascato, someone who works with Iowascato, told me about this, this Westerner came down. I guess they're kind of Westerners too. They're just south of the border. So, Northern American who came down and was furious that someone in the group wouldn't shut up with their screaming. He was just furious about this. And there are a number of ways an organizer can handle that.

But he took the guy outside and he said, that person is your work tonight. Absolutely. And if you think about that reframe. And how to view something that perhaps historically you would respond to as a problem or an annoyance or offensive to view that. And there are certain times when you have to fight and stand up for yourself. I'm not saying you should. But I think that in my case and in the cases of many folks, we fight too often. We wear ourselves out. We get upset too often.

How can you view that as a gift? How can you view that as your work? Well, can I again give you a quote? Yes, please. Which I love. It's one of my favorite teachers. And his name is AH Almas. And he says, your conflicts, all the difficult things, the problematic situations in your life are not chance or have hazard. They're actually yours. They're specifically yours. Designed specifically for you by a part of you that loves you more than anything else.

The part of you that loves you more than anything else has created roadblocks to lead you to yourself. You're not going to go in the right direction unless there's something prick you in the side, saying telling you, look here this way. That part of you loves you so much that it doesn't want you to lose the chance. It will go to extreme measures to wake you up. It will make you suffer greatly if you don't listen. What else can it do? That's its purpose.

And I found this to be true of physical illness and mental problems and everything. You've got to see what is the teaching here. So we can look at all these things as problems to get rid of, which is what the personality wants to do. Or we can look at them as learning opportunities, which is what your two self wants to do. Now, two things. One is you talk about intention in life. So my wife and I had a holiday recently in Costa Rica.

Partly it was a working holiday, but partly it was just a holiday. Traditionally we've had terrible times during holidays. Partly because my workaholism and once I go into a holiday I just collapse and now my wife is dragging a corksour on it. You know, because I'm a workaholic, you know, and I head into a space. So this time we actually wanted to do a holiday with intention. This is nothing but it's like deluxe. Just to do it that we said an intention. What is an intention?

And if we have an intention, I've learned from a couple of very wise teachers, who are structures that we want to set up to support our intention. And how are we going to handle when there's kind of disagreement or conflict? We had a beautiful holiday because it was the first intentional holiday that we've had. So that intention in life in general is absolutely essential. Like every morning, what is my actual intention? So the problem is the upset. So, want to do a bit of an exercise?

Sure. Okay, you know, if you don't like it, just tell me. When was the last... This is something I do in my groups or when I speak or in the song. When I teach. So I asked people to tell me some recent episode when they were upset with somebody with their lives. And something that they open to sharing. So it doesn't have to be anything stored either or something. But just something out whether it's your spouse, partner, the bus driver. I don't care. Sure. A friend.

Okay. So, are you willing to go there? Anything. Okay. I can share anything. Just where you upset with somebody. Okay. Yes. Okay, so what happened? Describe it. What happened? Yeah. All right. There were a number of issues in my home. Broken aspects of the home. Things that were falling apart or needed to be fixed. Physically. Physically. Yeah. Right. And I had hired someone to do these things while I was gone. Okay. And I came back and none of them were fixed.

Okay. And your emotional reaction was? Anger. Rage. Anger. Okay. Anything else besides anger? Hmm. I think they're close cousins. Frustration. Frustration is... Frustration is anger, yeah. Yeah. I was... Disappointed. Disappointed is sadness. Yeah. It's a different feeling. So it's disappointed. Myself also, because I started to look at how maybe... Well, this is not so much an emotion. There's a state of mind. I'm asking what the emotions were. I'm like, what's inside disappointment?

Something didn't happen. I wanted to happen. How do I feel? Isn't there sadness there? Sure. Yeah, there's sadness. I'm not talking into it. I'm just asking. Well, I suppose I might be confusing state of mind and states of mind and emotions. Yeah. I'm not sure how to do it. Yeah, so I'm looking at the raw emotion. Yeah, sadness. So there's anger and sadness. Those are the emotions. Let's go with that. Okay. So I'm going to ask you a silly question. What were you said in anger about?

Well, I suppose the answer, which is not the right answer, I'm expecting was I was angry that someone had made commitments to me and not fulfilled those commitments. That's what happened. They had made the commitment in the phone, but that doesn't tell me what you were saying or angry about. What does that mean that they didn't fulfill their commitments? It meant that they didn't care about me. They didn't care about that they didn't respect me. They didn't care about you didn't respect you.

What kind of person doesn't get carried away respected? I might need a lifeline here. I don't know. Someone who doesn't deserve to be cared for or respected. Exactly. So be unworthy, right? Sure. Well, respect and care. Okay. Now, if there are other people here, which there usually are when I do this exercise, I would ask them, okay, we just listened to him tell us about this experience.

Are there other reasons why this other person might not have done the work that has nothing to do with him or her not caring about him or not respecting him? So what other reasons might there be? A million and one. A million. Yeah. He could be in the hospital. He could be in hospital. What else? He could have been in a car accident. Exactly. He had a flight delaying at Codan, Puerto Rico during a hurricane. Yeah, he's got ADHD. Yeah. And he can't follow through.

He's under stress and he couldn't do that. Right. Okay. Okay. The email that I was supposed to send to sitting in drafts and I thought I had sent it, but in fact, he never received it. Okay. And any number of possibilities? Yeah. No. Of all the possibilities that you've just outlined, including that they don't care about your respect, which is the worst one. The one I immediately defaulted to. Right. Well, I mean, the worst. Well, the guy's dead. No, no, no, no. It's bad, but.

No, no, no, no, no, no. But internally. Yeah, internally the worst assumption is the one that I immediately made. Exactly. So let's notice something. Hey, you, I should say we, because we're all like this, we don't respond to what happens. We respond to a perception of what happens. Right. Okay. That's what the Buddha said. It's with our minds you create the world.

So that if you'd fund a DHD or he was stressed or, you know, you might have been sad for him, but we're not of an angry and you will not have been sad. Okay. You might have, you know, so first of all, we don't respond to what happens. We respond to our perception of what happens to our interpretation of what happens. Number one, number two. Of all the possible interpretations, we choose the worst one. Yeah. Number two. Thirdly, what I just said isn't true, but it didn't choose it.

It's not like you went through all these possibilities. And you said, what's the multiple choice that you have? No, he doesn't care about me. He doesn't respect me. You didn't do that. You brain jumped there automatically, right? My question is why? Yeah. Now here's the learning. First time in your life that you felt heard and angry that you, when you perceived somebody didn't care about you, I didn't respect you. What has it happened before? This is where the exercise might go sideways.

I'm going to hit pause on that. I think that's probably for more of a conversation over one. But you probably agreed it's not the first time. It's not the first time. Very good. And most people I talk to, it goes back way back. Yeah, this goes back. Into childhood. Okay. And that's what trauma is. We don't respond to the present moment. We respond to the past. Now, but along the lines of our discussion, it's a beautiful learning opportunity.

Now you get to know, now what if you assumed for a moment that you're the most lovable, most worthy of care, most worthy of respect person in the history of the universe? And this guy doesn't do your home. What's your response? Any number of the other options, which does not trigger an intense negative emotional state? None of those other options would trigger that. So something in you, I would argue, still believes that you're not worthy of care and respect. And that's what gets triggered.

So who's the one that doesn't care about you and who's the one that doesn't think you're worthy of respect? No, it'll be me. It'll be you. Yeah. Now that's a learning. No it is. And this is exactly what you're talking about. You're talking about how these difficult things, how these problems are always teaching opportunities. And that's the beauty of healing. When you reframe things and you actually see the source within ourselves, oh, a sudden, that's liberating. Because guess what?

If you're feeling that way because this guy did this or didn't do that, that makes you a victim. But if you see that you're the source, you're powerful. Yeah, you're empowered. Exactly. This is something that a friend of mine here in Austin, Robert Origa, has recently said to me in a very similar way. I mean, it was a completely different context. He was actually telling a story about someone else who was constantly blaming people for everything in the film world.

And he said, if you are the victim and it's everyone else's fault, you're powerless. And he said, but keep in mind, every time you're pointing a finger at someone, and I'd never heard this, I know it. Now, after the fact that there are other people who have said this, but he said, every time you're pointing a finger at someone, keep in mind that there are three fingers pointing back at you. Exactly. And I thought about that. I was like, wow. That's just a good sentence to keep in mind.

No. This is a recording studio sometime? Was it? Yeah, they do recordings. They record in the past. I just... The Johnny Cash I've ever recorded here by your chest? You know, I don't know if Johnny Cash was over here. I would say it's possible because it's been a spitter out for a long time. The reason I ask is because he's got a song that I play at all my events. It's going to... In your mind, it's called. This is... All goes done in your mind. It's on the soundtrack of Dead Man Walking.

And I think here we're doing this self. It all goes done in your mind. And it goes one foot in the fire. One foot on Jacob's ladder, another in the fire. It all goes done in your mind. So whether you're going to hell or you're on a way to heaven, it all happens up here. Which is such a powerful teaching because this is what we can work on.

If we're victims of the world, Ramana Maharshi, who's a great Indian guru, he said something like, if your foot hurts when you walk outside, you can do two things. One is the rap, the whole world in burlap, or you can get a pair of shoes. So in other words, you can see yourself as the victim of the world and trying to change the world so that they won't hurt you anymore. Or you can actually empower yourself. And that's what the healing is all about.

Well, I'll say the reason I wanted to have you on now is because I've been so focused on trying to navigate these things myself over the last several years, but most intensely over the last several months. And I wanted to be ready to have this conversation with you. And how are you doing so far? I'm great. I'm great. I'm doing very well. I think I'm the sanest and arguably in the best place I've been, maybe ever. So I feel very good. Which means that the healing is just available.

It's just possible. I got an email a few months ago for one one called Bet in a Göring. My Herman Göring was the chief of the Luftwaffe under Hitler. Oh, God, that's right. I was wondering where I could do that name. Yeah. And he was the head of the Gestapo, just an opiate addict, by the way. And a very clever, very ruthless man. His great niece sent me an email a few months ago to thank me for my work. And she's been through her own process.

Imagine the karma she was carrying and all the healing she has had to do. So there was her great uncle trying to kill me and my people. And there's the great niece making contact with me. And to me, just in your example, in my example, in the example of so many people, I know it's not like I'm a big piece of cake. You know, it's going to continue as long as I live. But I experienced internally the goodness and the healing that's available to us. And I didn't use to it.

And I used to think I could help heal everybody, but that I was beyond healing myself. That was my core belief. Well, it's been my core belief for the last ten years. Okay. It's just ain't true. Yeah. And anybody listening, I just want to know, does it matter what state of mind you are in, does it matter what you're experiencing? It's human. It is transmutable. It is transformable because that true self that you got disconnected from is still available to you.

So it's not a question of just talking about what happened in the past. It's a question of how do we reconnect ourselves. And what you're describing about your own state, if I can put it in one sentence, you'd probably agree with me, that you'd probably have much more connected to your self than used to be. 100%. Yeah. 100%. And that's the prerequisite. I mean, that's why I feel the way I describe it. Exactly. God, I really want to encourage people to learn more about you and your work.

And there's certainly a number of places they could start. Where would you suggest people dig more deeply? Is there a particular book of your books you would suggest they start with? Is there a particular social media handle where they can pay attention and learn various announcements and see what you share of your work and others? Well, thanks for asking.

The simplest thing is my website, www.gabormathe.com, drgaboormathe.com, where I'm speaking events and I travel, I'll be in North America in five countries abroad this year. My speaking events are listed chapters of my books are available, right across about my books, articles I've written. I've multiple talks on YouTube that people have filmed and posted, seen by hundreds of thousands of people. I have a Facebook video that somebody did about my work that's been seen 12 million times now.

So there's all kinds of ways to discover me on Facebook, on YouTube, at my website. And I would also really hope that people check out my books, of which I've written four. The first one, the American title is scattered and it's about ADHD. And I wrote it after my own diagnosis. And pretty much what I've said earlier that I don't see it as an inherited disease. I do see it as a response to family, multi-generational and social stress in sensitive children.

People say you're blaming the parents, I'm not blaming the parents. I don't blame myself, but I know how stressed my family was when I was a workaholic doctor. And so that's my first book. And when you say, well, why are we looking at the percentage of kids with ADHD going up so fast? It's not because of any genetic problem, genes don't change in a population over five or ten years. It's a social problem. There's much more stress in the culture now.

There's much less connection in the culture now. And less connected people are, and the more stressed there is, the more pressure there is on sensitive kids. So that's scattered. Another parenting book of mine is the work of a brilliant psychologist, friend of mine, Gordon Newfeld, Dr. Newfeld, who is the world's leading developmental psychologist, as far as I'm personally concerned. And I say that's advisedly. And the book is called, hold on to your kids.

Why parents need to matter more than peers? That's being published in over 20 languages now. And it's about the fact that since kids need attachment, the attachment need is the primary drive that we have. And we've talked about that. It's like a duckling when the duckling hatches from the egg. The duckling would prefer to attach an imprint on the mother duck. But what will you do if the mother duck is not around? He'll imprint on a toy or a dog or a horse.

Our kids, because the parents are too distracted and stressed in our society, and are not aren't so much anymore physically as during human evolution. Now, find themselves in the company of other kids. Guess what they imprint on? They're a peer group. And now you have immature creatures influencing each other immoderately. And this happens through the social media. It happens in personal contact. And as that happens, the parents get pushed into the background. They get more frustrated.

Not they get more authoritarian. Or they just give up. And kids, therefore, don't grow up. They don't mature. And they develop all kinds of problems. Not because the parents don't love them. But because, simply because in this culture, the connection with the kids and the parents have been really disturbed. And how do we store that connection? Is the subject of hold on to your kids? So, three of my books that are one of my own. This one I wrote with Gordon.

My next book, which is on the Mind Body Unity in health and illness. And that's a conversation I could have another time. But again, where I show that cancer, autoimmune disease, ALS, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's, colitis, Crohn's disease, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia are not accidental and separate physical events. They have to do it the scientifically proven fact that mind and body can't be separated. And when things happen emotionally, they will also happen physiologically.

In fact, it can't be any other way. And that the emotional system in our brains and our bodies, and part and parcel of the same system, that also governs the immunity, neurological response, and hormonal response. And therefore, when our lifeline patterns of emotional repression, when people have to suppress themselves in order to maintain their attachments, that will have a negative impact on their immune system and their hormonal apparatus and nervous systems as well.

And that book is called, when the body says no, exploring the stress disease connection. And that's been published by over in over 20 countries internationally as well, including in the US.

My final and to my mind, my favorite book is, the most recent, In the realm of hungry ghosts, close encounters with addiction, which explores addiction not from the point of view of a disease model or a choice model, but how it is a response to childhood loss, stress, and trauma, and how to address that, and also how to deal with, like if you look at the United States right now, you know what the facts are? The most common cause of death under the age of 50 is now overdose.

And in the US, every three weeks you have the equivalent of a 9-11, in turn every three weeks the 9-11, in terms of the number of people dying. Now where's the public outcry? Where's the resources? Where's the political will? Where's the mobilization of the media and all the public health energies, compared to what happened after 9-11? And we're having this every three weeks.

And why? Because the treatment profession, the medical profession, and partitions, and the legal profession does not understand trauma and its relationship to addiction, the average medical student doesn't even hear the word trauma in four years of education. Doesn't even hear the word, let alone get a lecture or not, let alone get a course about it.

The stuff I told you about brain development is still not taught in most medical schools, so we have this response to addiction, which is just dealing with the effects, the behaviors, controlling the manifestations, and not dealing with the causative factors. That's why people don't get better. And if you look at why right now, it's because social stresses increased, economic insecurity is increased. You don't look at where do the overdose happens?

More, it's where areas where there's dissonance and despair. Totally. And so that's the book in the realm of hungry ghosts. About not lots of my talks around YouTube, but I think the best hub to check out the stuff out is my website. And I hope to generate a podcast, regular podcast fairly soon, if the people around me can twist my arm strongly and organize me well enough to do it.

They'll be a podcast, and I hope that'll be up soon, but knowing myself, I don't want to make any promises, but that'll certainly be listed at my website if it happens soon. And could you give your website URL more time? Okay, Dr. Gabur Matte. And Dr. Gabur Matte.com, and to everybody listening and watching, there's the camera.

I will also put that in the show notes, so for everyone, everything we've discussed, the books, resources, organizations, everything, including your website, which will be at the very top, will be listed in the show notes, which you can find a Timed-Uplog forward slash podcast. And it'll be right at the top, so all of that will be very easy to find. Just in closing, and we may very well end up doing around two at some point, it wouldn't surprise me.

Even if it's off camera, certainly, we'd love to spend more time together. Do you have any final closing words or a request or suggestion to the audience? Anything for people listening that you would like them to consider after they finish this interview? Yeah. Okay. I hope people will listen to this interview in a very personal sense. Not just as an interesting experience, but as possibly pertaining to themselves.

And that discussion with you will help people look at themselves in maybe a new way, with what I call compassion and inquiry. So rather than self-judgment about stuff that went wrong or they did to themselves or others, they get curious. What made me do that? They get curious compassionately because we were all born in a cent, and we were all born. Just wanted to be loving and loved, and then something happens. And then it's a hard road back.

But I hope that this conversation helps people reconnect with that path or encourage them to continue on it. And then secondly, not to see this an individual issue. It's a social issue. We live in a society that really does disconnect people. And so it's not just an individual problem or an individual family problem. It's multi-generational. We never even talked about the multi-generational nature of trauma, what it is.

We passed this on for one generation to the next, not because we intend to, but because we can't help it. So it needs to be looked at in deep over the generations and broadly as the function of a whole society. Now let me give you one quick example if I may. A study last year showed that American black women, the more experience of races and they have, the greater the risk of asthma. What does that tell us? What would be give people to control their asthma?

We give them inhalers that contain a copy of a dvenolin and a copy of cortisol. The stress hormones. In other words, asthma is everything to do with stress. I'm not going to the scientific details now I could, but I won't. But it shows this question. Is the asthma of an American black woman an individual disease? What is it the dysfunction of entire society? And obviously it's the latter.

So that the Buddha said that without the many, they cannot be the one without the one that cannot be the many. And he talked about the interconnected core rising of phenomena. So we are social creatures. Our brains are wired together. Dr. Dan Siegel talks about inter-personal neurobiology. We're not isolated creatures. So what are you dealing with?

You have to look at not just the individual internal environment, but also the broader social and cultural environment, of which you want, particularly manifestation. And as our mutual friend, Dr. Apollesh, so firmly wants, we need to change the conversation around these issues, particularly, for example, on addiction, from a blaming and shaming and ostracizing and just medical model perspective, to one that takes into account trauma and social issues, and which brings compassion into it.

And that must be the same for our mental health issues as well. And whatever we look at, we have to look at both the individual and the broader context. Thank you for that. And you mentioned, and we all begin loving and wanting to be loved, or needing love. And then something happens, and it's a hard road back. And what I'd like to add to that is it's a hard road back, but it's a worthwhile road back. And it is possible to find your way back.

If you had told me that a year ago, I would have completely dismissed it, but I'm in a different place now. And I would just like to thank you for helping people to navigate that. And it's very meaningful work that you do. Thank you. So thank you for taking the time today as well. Oh, it's a great pleasure to speak with you. Thank you. And to everybody listening and watching, as I mentioned before, definitely also visit the show notes. Revisit this.

This is not a one and done something you listen to. And then you go on as if you never heard it. Please look at the show notes, look at GodBor's work. And you can find all of that at Tim.LogFordsLash podcast. And to everybody listening, I would just say as always, thank you so much for joining in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Fibolet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me?

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