See You On The Other Side
Meet Leah and Christine. Busy moms and entrepreneurs just trying to balance this crazy thing called life. But we don't do surface, and we're definitely not your typical momtrepreneurs...so let's go a little deeper. Empaths, traumatic childhoods, generational trauma, people pleasers, toxic relationship patterns, anxiety, depression, feeling stuck and desperately seeking peace and happiness. And then we fell into the world of magic mushrooms and psychedelics. The catalyst that helped us break out of our comfort zones and took us DEEP into our personal healing journeys. We'll take you behind the scenes as we learn more about the holistic side of healing and all the amazing people we plan on meeting along the way. Join us as we share the good, the bad, and the ugly side of healing. With and without psychedelics. We hope to see you on the other side! Note: We are not professionals and we do not advise the use of illegal substances. For more about psychedelic support or clinical trials in your area, visit https://psychedelic.support/
See You On The Other Side
95 | Transformative Therapy and Psychedelics with Dr. Shealy
Our favorite clinical psychologist, Dr. John Shealy, takes us on an extraordinary journey of personal and professional transformation, revealing how a sabbatical in the Peace Corps and profound ayahuasca experiences in Peru reshaped his therapeutic approach. With over 35 years of expertise, Dr. Shealy shares compelling insights into the integration of mindfulness and psychedelics in therapy, highlighting how these elements foster profound personal growth and healing. He offers a unique perspective on the evolving landscape of consciousness and the role of modern media in shaping our reality and self-perception.
Our conversation digs into the challenges of authentic self-discovery in a media-saturated world. We explore how societal pressures influence personal and cultural identities, with a special focus on relationships and the significance of breaking free from conditioned beliefs. Dr. Shealy passionately discusses the power of embracing discomfort as a catalyst for growth, the healing potential of psychedelics like psilocybin and ayahuasca, and the importance of integrating these transformative experiences into daily life.
Listeners will be intrigued by Dr. Shealy's reflections on cultural shifts in parenting, masculinity, and youth development, alongside the healing power of meditation and nature. We engage in a thoughtful dialogue on the importance of setting boundaries and prioritizing joy and authenticity in our lives. Through personal stories and introspection, this episode invites you to explore the profound impact of mindfulness, community, and self-awareness, encouraging a more meaningful and connected existence.
Connect with Dr. Shealy here: https://https://www.bemindful.org/.johnshealyphd.com/
1:1 Discovery Calls
Are psychedelics right for you on your healing journey? Book a discovery call to ask us anything.
Colors
Use code OTHERSIDE15 for 15% off
Microdosify
Use code SYOTOS for 10% off
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1982724/support
Our Website:
https://linktr.ee/seeyouontheothersidepodcast
All right, you're in the hot seat. I know this is new. Am I supposed to talk?
Speaker 2:too. Oh boy, I don't know, I'm pretty nervous.
Speaker 1:It's like my favorite thing is when you're talking.
Speaker 2:Oh, you like that. I just read it.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's very soothing you could do like meditation.
Speaker 2:Oh, I could really yeah just tune into the body and just let the. That really is an important part of what we're talking about being able to connect with the body. Yeah, yeah, we'll talk about that We'll get there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, dr Sheely, everybody.
Speaker 4:Dr Sheely, the man, the myth, the legend. We have talked about you a lot on our podcast, just kind of name-dropping you because I've seen you individually. Tony and I have come and have seen you together, and same thing with Leah you saved my marriage.
Speaker 1:I mean you were part of it.
Speaker 4:I mean, you both kind of saved your own marriage. Oh, thank you.
Speaker 1:But you were a tool.
Speaker 3:Yes, One of the one of the one of the best.
Speaker 1:That's it.
Speaker 2:He was a modality yeah, that's the best way to think of me okay and that's true for whether we're talking about psychedelics or preparation integration whatever yeah, it's a tool I love that, so.
Speaker 4:So how would you introduce yourself?
Speaker 2:well, um, I guess I would, you know, just start with the credential part.
Speaker 3:like everybody generally does, I have a PhD in clinical psychology, and I got that at the University of South.
Speaker 2:Florida, in Tampa, I've been doing therapy of different varieties over these. I don't know 35 years or something like that. I don't know 35 years or something like that. And what I find is that, because we're talking about this sort of clinical or professional development in some ways that's how I see relationships that it starts out one place, and so here I am in graduate school, scared to death of everything trying to be able to do some decent cognitive, behavioral whatever and then that just gets kind of old and dry.
Speaker 2:So then I move on to something else. And then I discover, like mindfulness, and that's why my website be mindfulorg how'd you get that? So what? I got it back in the stone age, but that was enlivening for me. That's another piece about relationships, because we can start out one place and we're all excited about this, that or the other thing, and then, heaven forbid, we have our 2.3 kids and now need to get excited about something else. And so when they went from, uh, from that came up. You know, my wife and I went away out of the country for four years, did peace corps in southern africa about two and a half years, that type of thing yeah.
Speaker 2:That's important too.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:To be able to that transition, after having about 23 years in Tampa and developing a growing practice, and I did the work I needed to do so I could train other therapists and continue my education programs and all that sort of stuff. So it would be like a nightmare for a financial manager person to say so. Here you are now and I was expanding and doing these workshops, blah, blah, blah, and explain to me what you're doing now. Well, we're getting rid of everything that won't fit in a friend's closet and we're going away. Do you know where you're going? Well, we're going to start in Peru for a while, but that was, and the fact that my wife Jordan and I worked so together, 24-7, basically living out of a suitcase for four years, and then Peace Corps was another thing. So all these opportunities to grow, but that's very different.
Speaker 3:You see than we had back in Tampa.
Speaker 2:And so then we come, we, you know, finish that up, come back to Louisville, and then I do some more mindfulness stuff, and then, for whatever reason, psychedelics come in about eight years ago or so that's an interesting path too, I guess you could say, because 16 years ago when we first left the country for that four-year sabbatical we talk about it, as I had some very powerful ayahuasca experiences.
Speaker 2:We actually lived with what I would consider a very well-qualified shaman, alonzo del Rio, and we lived with him for a couple months, and this ties into another piece I'd like to spend a little time with. What was it that motivated me to work on, trying to figure out is there a way of helping, myself included? How do I integrate these experiences? What do I do with these experiences? Because those experiences and particularly there very powerful, you know, just a very clear, dying experience, lying in the floor there and that feel the, the coldness coming up my hands and feet and say well, you're dying.
Speaker 2:Now here's another piece. Why were those experiences important? Because I hear, and that's sort of like am I watching it happen, there's nothing I can do about it? And then I hear a voice, or what I think of as the higher voice, and it says well, john, you can ask for help. And I say hell, no, I don't ask for help. And it's like, well, maybe. And so then I open up and then, very clearly, it's like here are these figures standing around me and it's not a clear face or clear faces, but it was very clear.
Speaker 2:The ancestors have come and so that would be very consistent with ayahuasca experiences and nature, mysticism and all that. The spirits are still here, they're still with us, which I still work with all the time, and as I work with it more, it just seems more and more real. The spirits are here. Where else would they go, and are they limited to this thing or that thing? Where are they and can we tap into them more? But that was very, very light word. It was just extremely transformative in some ways in the sense of saying not only the purging, which is unbelievable, just you know all sorts of purging, all sorts of things coming out. The shaman there would say when he first saw me, he said you know, you have a lot of other people's stuff on you. Don't know how I got that, you know doing 25 years of therapy.
Speaker 2:Don't know where that stuff came from.
Speaker 3:Apologies, Maybe I stepped on. You Don't know how I got that, you know doing 25 years of therapy.
Speaker 2:Don't know where that stuff came from. Apologies, maybe I stepped on something, but that the purging of that ayahuasca very, very powerful, but I didn't know what to do with it, I didn't have. I just like it's almost like having a experience of a psychedelic experience. That's about taking a break, doing a gram or two of mushrooms and going to a concert. There's nothing wrong with that, it's just that the intention is not to go into as dark a place as we can go into, and so the ayahuasca experience is a half a dozen or so I had during that period. It was definitely going into Ayahuasca is not really a particularly pleasant experience. But then come out and now how do I think? Do I think of myself differently Now? Do I think of myself differently?
Speaker 2:I've seen aspects of myself and relative to relationships, particularly too, I saw an element of my adaptive strategies Growing up in my family. It was sort of like I have three brothers, four years between us, all each of us. But the message there, and the message my father sent too, pretty much was you know, you don't ask for help much.
Speaker 2:That's not a part of the masculine identity or what it means to be a man back in the 50s and 60s so that was important, but it didn't register as important at the time. That didn't really that didn't start coming together until I was doing um, some of my personal favorite really is, uh, psilocybin, which is just a they all psilocybin mushrooms are not the same, but you know a good mushroom is is uh can be very gentle, it can be very uh, it can be very opening.
Speaker 2:It can be all sorts of whatever it needs to be Not always gentle, but it's going to certainly be, in my experience, going to be an easier ride than a good dose of ayahuasca.
Speaker 1:I think we would agree with that. Yeah, a little bit easier, yeah.
Speaker 2:So you've had experiences, do you talk?
Speaker 1:about those we do talk about them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay, folks know so, you've had experiences. Do you talk about those? We do talk about them. Yeah, okay, folks know that you've had experience.
Speaker 4:No, yeah totally we are um really open books. Yeah, that's great we usually.
Speaker 1:Uh, so they, they also know. Like ayahuasca for us we talked about, that experience was like much harder, like that's not something we would go and do a little bit of for fun right, that's like a deeper right.
Speaker 4:Purging my guts out right yeah, yeah yeah, um.
Speaker 1:So how do you come back to the real world?
Speaker 2:oh, boy, thank you so much for that one, because see the real world one argument is when we're psychedelics one piece of it and this is getting into the model why it's important to have a model or something, not that it's the model or how it works, but the model I work with often is my conditioning, is not my true self, yeah, and so if I'm living all my life and my thoughts and my direction and pretty, much everything is coming through the distorting filter of my conditioning.
Speaker 2:I'm not in the real world and so with you know, you know ayahuasca, psilocybin particularly, and bufo holy be Jesus, bufo is another. We can talk about that in a little bit, but it's another thing. I think of it as sort of a graduation ceremony After you've had some of these experiences and you know what to look for and you can relax with letting go of completely of any kite string or anything tying you back to what you were talking about consensual reality.
Speaker 3:Nobody's there.
Speaker 2:And it's like well. I don't know what that is, but what I do with it. I say this must be what it's like to die. There's just no body there's no conditioning, there's no responsibility.
Speaker 3:There's no nothing.
Speaker 1:It's just no body, there's no conditioning, there's no responsibility, there's no nothing, it's just except it's everything. Oh, wow.
Speaker 2:No, nothing, except it's everything. Go back to this thing. True reality To me. Well, I mean, where were we before? Yeah, like these easy questions. How old are you? Well, I don't know. And I said let's just go back to the Big Bang. That's fine. There's nothing here that wasn't there before. Reality you're talking about. All of this is evolving over thousands and thousands and thousands. I have opposing thumbs. My father, grandfather, didn't come up with opposing thumbs. My favorite place is to go back to when the first reptile started to fly.
Speaker 3:Let's just start there.
Speaker 2:That's how old I am. We go back to this silly place and say you know, it's actually whenever I came out into the world.
Speaker 3:The real world, okay, real world, that's correct, except you know, you go back and you look at this egg and sperm thing and the capacity for this little tiny to construct this and the brain, and you know, new body every seven years, the unbelievable miracle, it's like.
Speaker 2:So was this just a blank slate? It knew nothing at all.
Speaker 2:I mean, I wouldn't, have my thumbnail sticking out my nose. It doesn't make any sense. So you start to look at the true reality of it and some of these psychedelic experiences in my mind, in my experiences. It will give you some glimpses. Yeah, now, what do you do with those? Right, how is? In my experiences it will give you some glimpses. Now, what do you do with those? How is that helpful? A big part of it and again back to the model and how psychedelics can be helpful is now there's a whole different perspective. Who am I? And you say, well, huh.
Speaker 2:And then like is there an? Ending to it and if we look for these experiences particularly if we kind of cue it into them. Then it's like in the model that I work with, a lot is consciousness, awareness and object. So they're always happening, awareness and object. So I can see the glass. I don't think I am the glass, think that's when I'm gonna have a little problem, but when I can see who I have been conditioned to believe myself to be.
Speaker 2:I can see that what I thought was I, me or mine, as a collection of it's and objects, holy smoly man. And it's like whoa, who am I really? And then it starts settling in. Well, I'm that which is watching the show Awareness, and then you get with some of these folks and this is some years ago. I forget the guy's name. They have a little journal about it.
Speaker 3:Concerning the evolution of consciousness.
Speaker 2:So not only are we developing over time, posing thumbs, all sorts of stuff, but our consciousness, our capacity is growing and evolving, yeah. And of course, we have tools that can facilitate that now that we didn't have even a handful of decades ago. I mean, there's all sorts of power that we can look at with computers and all sorts of different things. Of course those can take us again. Let's go do two grams of mushrooms. Let's go to the concert.
Speaker 2:That's fine, there's nothing wrong with that, just realize you're not going deep into the darkness and the confusion and the distortion of your conditioning is that necessary?
Speaker 2:nothing's necessary and I tell people. They say my man have you done powder cocaine? I've done powder cocaine about 12 times in my life and that was close to 50 years ago and when I was coming out and I was saying how much I can't send my motorcycle let's say, get rid of my truck because I'm just converting that into powder. There's something that went off that said this stuff will take your soul, baby, and I'm saying okay.
Speaker 1:Never mind Never mind.
Speaker 2:I had a lighter experience of that in the past few years, when I was smoking some cannabis flower every day for two years and I realized this is harming my marriage, that this is harming my capacity to function in what you're referring to as the real world all sorts of ways and see, this is not what I was smoking 50 years ago.
Speaker 3:It's not the same.
Speaker 2:It's nowhere in the ballpark. So I mean I'd go to my little shop and I'd have a toke, and then it's sort of like, oh, let's see there was a house here somewhere, there was a house here somewhere, and see, that's not what we used to smoke back then. It really looked more like hay, really Seeds all in it.
Speaker 3:It was awful.
Speaker 2:So what we have now is so powerful like that, and I work with folks, and this is a whole other.
Speaker 3:I just keep throwing all these little sidebars as we get to them.
Speaker 2:I work with folks that have a smoke amount for them and their makeup and their attitude toward turning toward the discomfort versus turning away from it, and what seems to me is that their function to think is distorted now.
Speaker 3:So I'm not talking.
Speaker 2:I might be talking. This person might be 35 or 40. I'm not talking to someone who has a rational brain. The brain it's like something's off here because they, they, they're not seeing the consequences of what's happening.
Speaker 3:Lost their job. They're now basically live out in that shop.
Speaker 2:They play video games all day and they have two kids and a wife. What about that?
Speaker 3:Can't get away from it.
Speaker 2:So you know I have some concern about that. Of course, the level of intensity of whatever folks are taking in is getting greater and greater, and so this is my back to how would I describe myself? One of my favorite hobbies is being like an amateur anthropologist, because I look at this stuff. I mean I might have no training in it, but I look at this, look over what's happening over all these decades that I've been alive and what's happening now is rather extreme.
Speaker 2:You know, my father saw the battery-powered radio come in the house. I saw the black-and-white television come in the house. There was so much control around what could be shown magazine-wise otherwise. Then my first little computer you know that had the big floppy disk you load up virtually useless, but compared to now Right.
Speaker 2:But the access, the average movie. Now, if I just plug into something, the level of violence is unbelievable, absolutely unbelievable. And people are so casual they just kill people and it's like bow, bow, bow, bow, bow, bow, and so that. And then, of course, there's the representation of women and sexuality and the distortion of that and what seems to me to be the loss of the sense of sacredness. And back to couples again.
Speaker 2:We've lost the sacredness and there's been, particularly with adolescents, at this point that they're, I mean, I, I remember, honestly, I must have been 14 years old and we had, like, I found like a playboy somewhere and I could actually see the pubic hair looking sideways on this woman and I'm thinking, holy smokes, they're just showing anything now. So that's where it was, that's where it was. And then Hustler comes in and Hustler brings more open, all this stuff. But compare it to now with the average 8-year-old can access for free, dial it up, man, what do you want to see? And then women being abused and loving and all this sort of stuff. So see, it's not unknown that there's power in the media.
Speaker 2:I mean, why are we spending $1,000 million, at least in a presidential election?
Speaker 3:It's not about educating people it doesn't seem to be.
Speaker 2:It seems to be more like the porn, like the violence. Get it up so that the dopamine rush is noticeable. So if we take the dopamine rush and we're resting state about right here somewhere, then you've got to give it a pretty big shot here, or I'm not going to notice it. Yeah, and if you dull me down, like what about reading a book? Reading a book I've heard that term before. I don't know what that's about, but of course it, reading a book, impacts the brain in a very different way. You read, you read a few words, the brain, the brain takes the words, it creates an image and it also it has to follow. It's creating the storyline or it's following the storyline that's not happening. Bam, kabam, kabam, kabam, kabam, kabam, uh-uh, go back, it's got to be 50 years Close to it.
Speaker 2:Gerrymander four arguments for the elimination of television. What does television do? You couldn't show a married couple in bed together. We're not talking about the content, just the bam, bam bam. It's totally unnatural. We can lose our capacity for critical thought. Now you just put that on the wall somewhere, lose capacity for critical thought, and then you kind of like say, well man, so people can be shaped into doing all sorts of weird stuff.
Speaker 2:Huh, Beyond the just, we're going to sell this beer or this, whatever, and make you feel inadequate. You can buy this thing or that thing millions and millions of dollars in a Super Bowl game. I mean the art that goes into these advertisements.
Speaker 3:See, they're not about saying you're perfectly fine and complete as you are.
Speaker 1:Nobody's going to say that.
Speaker 2:Nobody's going to say that. I'll say that.
Speaker 1:You'll say that I sure will. We'll say that. You'll say that I sure will.
Speaker 3:We'll say it right here, we'll say it right yeah.
Speaker 4:Even my stepdaughters. They've been talking to me about their 19 and 22 dating and how hard it is to date. Because they feel like, and it's it's probably you know both men and women, but a lot of the like and it's it's probably you know both men and women, but a lot of the the men that they talk to it's like all right, you got one thing wrong with you or one thing I don't like. I'm not going to address it onto the next, onto the next, onto the next. And so they find it very right here. Yeah, they find it very hard to like, be in a relationship, to like and connect with somebody, because it's like you know, one thing goes wrong.
Speaker 2:You're out, new, new girls in and and yeah, I I feel for for this generation that's a beautiful opening, you see, because now you're seeing an adult woman yeah uh and and basically, uh, what she, what I would say she's talking about or they're talking about is they're talking about the current conditioning of the culture that is saying you should look this way, and so they're not there. Even as an adult woman, they're not being motivated to discover their authentic, true self. They're motivated to to make up, color it up, heal it up, do whatever you got to do because that man over there is geared up to look for a certain thing. Of course, the man over there, he didn't know who he is either. Yeah, so what? One thing we're talking about is what?
Speaker 2:What I do a lot of work with, and that would be the midlife opportunity. A lot of my folks come in, they're 45, 50 years old and they say I don't know who I am. I said, said bingo, that's wonderful. And so see if they go into the wrong place, like to their primary caregiver, for example, and they say I'm depressed, I'm anxious. They say, oh, we can fix that baby. And here's some benzos. Holy moly, you really don't want to do benzos. It's just so horribly difficult. Some folks get off those things. But antidepressants too, because, see, the person comes in and they're confused in some way and they're sad in some way. And what I say is and I steal this from David Snarch I guess he died a few years ago but he would work with couples and they'd come in like having intense. He'd probably not work for four or five days, just intense stuff. And his point was nothing is broken here.
Speaker 3:You folks are waking up.
Speaker 2:Nothing is broken because you're anxious and depressed. You have moved through decades of your life and now, like you're 20, 22 years old and you're about to define, particularly if you go after the 2.3 kids pretty early, which you need to do if you're a woman for sure, then you're on a path now and you don't know who you are. And the culture is again getting more and more extreme, more and more resistant, less and less interested in actual, authentic reality. Who am I really? And then they wait until they're 45 or whatever. Oh, we're divorcing, well, whatever. And people say, oh God, what went wrong? And I'm saying, well, what went wrong happened when they were 19, 20, 25, 26, because there hasn't been a sufficient awakening, somebody hadn't shaken them up, somebody hadn't given them a good five grams of psilocybin with a good preparation, good integration, and saying wow, I feel different, you are different, I'm seeing the world from a different perspective. Well, bingo, that's right. Your perspective before came out of your family of origin which said I don't know where you're going to go. Find a family that's not going to say this is okay, this isn't. This is okay, this isn't. We don't do music here, we don't tell jokes here, you can't say this, you can't do this, you can't blah, blah, blah, blah. So we're restricted, of course, back to the couples again.
Speaker 2:Oftentimes, since we are restricted in our sense of safety, sense of attunement, sense of being treated special, sense of being able to work with our emotions, somebody has their back. We find a complement to that. We find what we don't have this person appears to have and what they don't have you appear to have. So now we've got one and one equals one quarter. So we come together and that's okay if you understand what you're doing Right now. It's like going to the concert. Let's take two grams of mushrooms, go to the concert, that's fine. But understand what you're doing now. You're kind of answering needs that really fit into a developmental model. They're not something you're going to go fix right away, and heaven forbid that other person can't fix them for you. Back to relationships again. So am I saying that it would be great to be in a relationship where there's a lot of growth and a lot of quote-unquote conflict? Absolutely, because otherwise we're not going to be growing into our true, actual self, you're not challenged.
Speaker 2:That's right, you're not challenged. And now see it's so difficult to get two people in the same page to understand things like, like and they'll say things like um, so I'm just telling you, let's go to your model.
Speaker 2:you talk a lot about being triggered and she did this and I went off and I was eight, actually like an eight-year-old, and blah, blah, blah and all that. I don't like that you're trying to say is this supposed to be good for me, or something I'm gonna say well, yes, it is, it's not only good for me, or something I'm going to say, well, yes, it is, it's not only good for you. I don't know what else is going to work. And if you have a relationship, committed relationship, and you trust each other over time, you know, go, do whatever experiences you need in order to test each other out, if you have those things and if you have a language around it you can say wow, I set my glass down hard or something, or I do whatever I do and see, instead of me rolling back into my eight-year-old self, which is often what happens, because that's the adaptive strategies kicking up, and I yell and whatever.
Speaker 2:I kind of just like wow. And she's like, oh, okay. And she says what's up honey?
Speaker 3:Nothing honey, it's just of course you do it enough.
Speaker 2:She just say, well, he's off zoning out. Again I said, well, but actually it's not zoning out, it's zoning in, zoning in to see, because the body's reaction to that trigger is really what the panic is about.
Speaker 2:An eight-year-old says we've got to fix this, Don't need to fix that. That's where being able to scan the body, let that ripple go, come back and say, wow, I wonder why that was so hard. Then, of course, they've opened up a whole channel of investigation, curiosity, whatever. And it might come to you in your dreams journaling. It might come to you as you dreams journaling may come to you right down the road. You say, wow, that's what my violent drunk dad used to do.
Speaker 3:He would come in, he'd slam whatever and something about the day, that night or whatever, when my loving husband did that. I wanted to kill somebody and it's like, but I could feel it, I could see there's something that's not real, that's not relevant, that is hijacking me.
Speaker 2:And then it's like okay. I don't want to be hijacked.
Speaker 3:And you say well, honey, thanks for slamming the cup down and he says what are you? Talking about.
Speaker 2:I said well, just clearing things out, and you do that for each other. See, it opens up. It opens up amazing. I just don't know of any other. I mean psychotherapy, blah blah, all this stuff. But man, if you want a situation for uh healing these types of traumas, you know, developmental traumas, where we've grown up with these traumas and we've had more and more repeated experiences of feeling worthless and inadequate and whatever else we are.
Speaker 3:Man, that committed relationship is the place.
Speaker 1:I want to take it back to these like triggers.
Speaker 3:Okay, I mean we don't have to live there for a little bit. Oh, I love it.
Speaker 2:Let's live there. We don't have to live there for a little bit. Oh, I love it, let's live there.
Speaker 1:This is interesting because I remember it starts with awareness right, and I think when my husband and I first started seeing you, it was wild because he was also newly sober. Our relationship was so much harder when we started to become aware. For the first half of it we were just kind of coasting, but both of us unhappy, but we didn't fight that much. And then, like once we brought this awareness up and we were both seeing things, like it was almost, I mean, I had to lock him down. I mean he wanted to walk away because he was like I've never fought this much with you and I'm like but we're working through things Like they're not happening again and again and again and again. It's like one big fight and then a resolution happens and then a repair happens, and then that is a lesson that we have learned, that we never learned before.
Speaker 2:And you likely trust each other in a different way than you did before.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Because you've gone through this and so that gets easier every time that's right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's like the duration of whatever these blowups would be used to be like. We would be in this for weeks and then it'd be like one week and then it'd be like a few days and then now it's like, oh, we're, we're repairing in an hour. What, what you're gonna apologize to me within 30 minutes that's wild but, I also remember like trying to I wouldn't say teach him, but but like I would, I would point things out Like that's triggering, because this, this, this Sure, it used to bother him Like you're pointing out all these things I'm doing wrong.
Speaker 1:So you're activating one of his triggers yes, okay, that that, yes, he hated it. Sure, how would you feel if I pointed out everything you did wrong and I'm like well, if I'm hurting you, I'd want you to tell me so I can be aware of it and not do it like try to make a conscious effort not to do it. And so he did this one time, like it. You know, we're taught, we're arguing, and then later he comes back and he's like I don't like that because that's what my mom used to do to me.
Speaker 2:That's it, and I'm like there, it is there it is that's right.
Speaker 1:You've never said that to me before.
Speaker 2:And now.
Speaker 1:I'm aware of it.
Speaker 2:Right and see that can shape us into not doing Right or it can shape us into saying wow. So basically what was triggered was my eight-year-old little boy, and oftentimes we can say I'm an eight-year-old little girl, right. And we're squabbling.
Speaker 1:Right, because I didn't know that I was doing anything either.
Speaker 2:That's right, yes, but see that, to me, is a sign of a healthy relationship. But see that to me is a sign of a healthy relationship is that we move into this place away from this sort of what they used to say about traditional psychotherapy is about helping people be less miserable in their miserable life. Instead, that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about moving through the discomfort in order to be truly who we are and to be truly happy, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Happy, feel with joy Be able to drink water when your throat clogs up.
Speaker 4:At peace Now. All of that sounds very familiar.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 4:Just everything Leah's talking about, because it is when Tony and I first started dating. I went from being a 20-some year old with no kids to then what I felt like was locked down with two teenage stepdaughters and you know not great co-parenting situation. And then I was in it and I felt honestly, kind of stuck and I'm like what the heck? You know what am I doing? And it got.
Speaker 4:It was to a point where if we weren't fighting, it felt weird because we like there was just so much happening. But it's almost like the more we just continue to work through it and working with you and and actually just like talking things through, because I was somebody who I would get incredibly triggered. And once I got triggered, that was like the eight-year-old little girl who's like you can't trust anybody. You had an absent father and an emotionally neglectful mother, so like it's you, you don't have anyone. Or now it's like we've really done the work where I feel safe with him. So even if I am triggered, I can now say like okay, and we can talk through it. But it took a long time, oh yeah, and it's still a lot of work. Oh, sure it is, yeah.
Speaker 2:But what you said there about I feel safe. Now see one of those five elements of attachment safety, I think safety sort of comes back to all of them. Yeah, but once you felt safe, then the little girl feels safe, and I think of that, as you know reparenting, yeah, and.
Speaker 2:And so they're the mother in you. Addressing your inner child, you might say well, it's able to say notice what's going on, he's not hitting, he's not throwing things, he's not threatening you, but and you're scared, it's okay to be scared. And so here's where the model, a model where we can understand and say what's happening, my little girl is feeling threatened. And so the answer to that, fundamentally, down the road somewhere, is it's not him A little sidebar about psychedelics it's not him, it's the experience of being cared for since before the beginning of time. We don't have to go back that far, but we go back and realize again, if you look at it, ayahuasca, experience, a good five grams of psilocybin experience. If we look at it and say, do I feel is there, and that this is, uh, this notion from the idea of a mystical experience, and so there, there's no fear here, there's no urgency, here, there's really no hope, nothing needs to change. And so if you really settle into it and you say, wow, this is, this is interesting, and see what, I would say is now
Speaker 2:this is real. This is real, undisturbed by all of this conditioning. And so if we, that's like sort of the goal of integration. A goal of integration is that the norm that used to be going through the eight-year-old it has to go through. There's nothing broken that it goes through that. We learn that in order to survive. We learn that in order to not be abandoned because we're abandoned as little people, we're going to die. We're very, very fragile species here. So we've got to get it out of our head that something's broken. It's not, we're just using a tool that we don't need anymore. And so we step out of that. And again it becomes where's my higher self, where's my higher parenting? Where's my mother, my father? That's all right here, but it's tied to again. A mystical experience I find when this falls away and my eyes are clear and I can see. I can see there's nothing wrong here.
Speaker 3:I don't need to defend anything.
Speaker 2:It's all wonderful and again that see. I don't want to send the message that you do the psilocybin experience or ayahuasca experience? I mean MDMA is another experience which has a lot of application but MDMA, it's just you know I don't talk about it because I don't know about it.
Speaker 4:It's a different and I've had experiences with it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think it can be helpful in opening couples up if they use it appropriately and to make sure they test it before they take it, because some people are dying because it's got fentanyl in it. Now there are stories of that actually happening, with flour too.
Speaker 3:Some things are coming back.
Speaker 2:The person got in their trunk, they got whatever and they got fentanyl too. Some things are coming back. The person got in their trunk, they got whatever and they got fentanyl too, and fentanyl. So you really need to know where you're getting your stuff. But anyway, to come to this place where the comfort with discomfort and that learning that See. I think that there's all sorts of examples of that.
Speaker 4:If we do yoga, if we go to school, if we get married, there are all sorts of moving into discomforts oh yeah, with me, because I felt like I was the one who was always instigating the fights, because there were things that were like okay, you're driving me insane.
Speaker 4:But, I don't feel that way anymore, because we've really accomplished a lot by learning how to fight with each other, learning how to communicate with each other and learning that a lot of the things that we're fighting about now it's stems way, way, way deeper, and learning those things about each other have been very enlightening.
Speaker 1:I think a lot of people think the goal in a relationship is to find someone you don't fight with. I was going to say that and I think that's so. I don't even know what to. That's basic.
Speaker 4:That's so. I don't even know what to that's basic. Well and I know, I know, I know a teenager who her parents got divorced and she would be like you guys, didn't ever fight and she was correct. But that was kind of.
Speaker 1:If we're not fighting the problem, you should be worried. Yeah, because I reached a point in our relationship where I stopped fighting because I was like he's not hearing me, I'm done, I'm checked out. I reached this very apathetic state and he thought things were great.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Isn't that?
Speaker 3:great. But what we see when you?
Speaker 2:say he it's another thing I work with like this little piece of neurolinguistic programming. When you say he, what you're really describing there is his conditioning yeah, that's not him. Back to what's real again. So basically, his little boy is being activated and he's responding from the little boy.
Speaker 3:That's all.
Speaker 2:And then he moves through into an authentic experience and he does that like what I'll do piece at a time.
Speaker 3:He has a realization.
Speaker 2:He says wow, I just realized.
Speaker 3:I had an insight. I didn't sit down and rationally, you know, four plus four is eight.
Speaker 2:It was an insight that said that's what my mother used to do, and one of the terms that I use so much about that is don't take it personally, because it's not. Yeah, and then so you're saying like you might see a six or eight-year-old little boy and he's having a fit you can go in, you can approach him like he's an adult and say but we usually don't.
Speaker 3:We usually say, so he's activated in some way. Let me see if I can help him feel safe.
Speaker 2:Help him know somebody's treating him as a special person.
Speaker 3:All these same attachment issues it's there.
Speaker 2:But those experiences, see of sort of reparenting each other.
Speaker 3:It's sort of what we do.
Speaker 2:And see, I'm not talking about enabling, I'm not talking about what's that other term, Whatever it is codependent I'm talking about we both understand, we have a model of what's going on and we should be able to. It's sort of a heroic challenge in some ways to be able to say things like how old do you feel now?
Speaker 1:That's what we say a lot.
Speaker 2:And the partner.
Speaker 4:Who did we learn that from things?
Speaker 2:like how old are you feeling now? That's what we say a lot, and the partner who did we learn that from? We don't know, but you come back and see it requires that you're both able to pause for a minute and say, oh, about eight years old. Okay, fine, say anything you want. Say anything you want, do anything you want. I'm here for you, baby.
Speaker 1:Can I give an example of this? Absolutely Because this was a concept that took Jason a very long time to get.
Speaker 2:It took Jason's adaptive strategy.
Speaker 1:There, you go His conditioning.
Speaker 2:And see that could be very helpful. I appreciate that there's some notion of understanding masculine egos. What I would encourage you to do is understand that's not the whole picture.
Speaker 1:I like that. I also feel like I'm throwing him under the bus a lot.
Speaker 3:But I want you to know like.
Speaker 1:I had to learn all this too, and coming to see you one time.
Speaker 2:You know you asked me how does that make you?
Speaker 1:feel and I'm like, I don't know, maybe like six, six years old, and our daughter was about five at the time and and you asked him how he deals with her when she does the same thing, and he's like well, that's different and you're like, but it's not. So I remember, like on the way home, I'm like, you got to treat me like I'm five and he's like, but you're not. And I'm like, in that moment I am, and what I need from you is what you give to our daughter.
Speaker 2:Yes, that's right.
Speaker 1:And now it's crazy to think of. I don't have to like spell it out like that anymore, because I do feel we do that for each other, like if he's activated. I I've said this to you before Like I sometimes feel, like I'm like, oh my God, I feel like I'm yelling at a child. That's right, I don't like that. Well, I got to step back a minute. He's got to feel safe and that's what's happening.
Speaker 2:I'm yelling at a child, yeah, and the child has been beaten or conditioned in one way or the other that he says I've got to stand up for myself. Yeah, you can't tell me I'm worthless. You can't tell me I can't do this, whatever. So you got the eight-year-old saying, yeah, why don't you make me do that, baby? Come on, let's see you do that one. All right, and you don't make me. That's not it, but but see it's I think it's really important to understand.
Speaker 2:We're talking about a process, so we're not talking about settling to it. Now I've got two eight-year-olds living in a house. That's not it, but it's just what you're describing and it's going to be difficult in the beginning. I don't have I don't know what to do with it, it's just got to be difficult it's, it's a it's a long process yeah I. I don't know if it'll ever end I don't know if it ever ends.
Speaker 3:I mean, I'd like to say well where are you now?
Speaker 2:oh, I fixed all that. I've never. My wife is totally incapable of triggering me let's get her on here. Let's get her here exactly right, it says when's the last time you were triggered. Oh, let's see what time is it this morning, this one, what? It? It like you're saying about, or said a minute ago about, these are two weeks, is it? One week is one day and now it's just watch it like whoa.
Speaker 3:Okay, write that down, whoa I like that, yeah, but I mean, that's like you know, a good, solid 20 years of pretty dedicated meditation practice.
Speaker 2:When you know 10 day, 20 day, 30 day meditation practice. You, you know 10-day, 20-day, 30-day meditation practice, you know into the place of saying notice what's going on no conversation, no eye contact.
Speaker 3:Get up at 4.30, blah, blah, blah. Now what's happening? What's happening, what's happening.
Speaker 2:And you sit there and you're just all this stuff comes.
Speaker 1:You say, well, there's this sort of this is in me somewhere it's got to be in you, it's always in you.
Speaker 2:Oh, thank you.
Speaker 3:It heals, though, see.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then we learn about ourselves, we learn about our conditioning, and we can understand things, my conditioning, when I look at it now, which I don't know when but it's fairly recent that this came on certainly in the past 10 years and I think I would say it was facilitated by some serious psychedelic experiences.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but see I mentioned earlier, I'm the youngest of four boys, so by the time I'm six years old, somebody everybody went to Clemson University down the road where we lived. And so by the time I'm six years old, somebody is in college, so they're having conversations, and then he leaves the next person's in college and the next person's in college. So I am fundamentally the stupidest person at the table who cannot interact at that level at all. So the conditioning around that was really I honestly could not imagine myself ever owning a home or ever going to college. And then I went down. I was involved with a union there.
Speaker 2:I worked at a telephone company for 12 years before I was a cable repairman outside climbing telephone poles, all that good stuff, Because some of that matched with my father. He was an outside person. He didn't do that telephone climbing pole stuff. And I'm in a training and Rudy Craig is up there and he says, okay, just take out a piece of paper, no one will see. But you Write on there where you want to be in 10 years and I'm saying, no, it's your job. And I'm thinking I could not write that down in a piece of paper.
Speaker 3:And so that came up and I said I'm not quite right about this.
Speaker 2:So after that week of training there, whatever I said, well, I'll go to school part-time and get my undergrad degree in about eight years, as it turned out, in 10 years. I colleges. And see, some of that was a realization of saying, wait a minute, and as soon as I went into the little junior college to take my remedial math class, I could start taking real classes. See, it was like a whole world opened up. And then I'm an older student.
Speaker 2:I'm 30 at the time, and so the teachers, professors probably teachers at that place responded very well, and so there's the sense of safety, the sense of attunement, the sense of being treated special. All these things were right there. And so then the school. Just, I remember there's a library probably about as big as this room at that little college place. And I walked in there and I said holy smokes man, and I grew up around books all the time.
Speaker 3:But there was something about that experience. See, it's interesting to me to go back and say what changed there?
Speaker 2:And I said this whole section is about whatever it's about. And of course at a real university you wouldn't say this whole floor is about this. And then undergrad was there, essentially finished two years, three years into 24 credits a semester.
Speaker 3:All this sort of stuff.
Speaker 2:Because I could and because I was motivated and because I was brought alive in that transition. So if we're not brought alive in these transitions there's, I don't know how much time we're going to spend there, because that was a pretty hard road. Then I showed up in graduate school and looked around the table with the 12 of us there, I think and I realized I am not the brightest bulb on the tree, but it's like whoa, this is gonna be something else.
Speaker 2:so there's pretty focus in there and you know whatever it was but then come out of that the four years in the work for my major professor in. Hmo sweatshop, All of those things I've seen. But those experiences of finding what brings us alive is so important. A lot of people find that with their children, they really can. It's such a miracle to have a child. It really is, but then of course I mean being a man, my wife at the time she said that was a pretty difficult time.
Speaker 3:I was kind of sitting out there, you know trying to go find a place to smoke a cigarette, which I did for about two years, you know.
Speaker 2:But she's in there having birth and all this kind of stuff, but it's a miracle and the birth of my daughter when I was almost 19 saved my life. I have no doubt about that. Aw, I was almost 19. Saved my life, I have no doubt about that Aw. I was doing some horrible things. It was crazy.
Speaker 3:It was crazy, it was you know going to Atlanta buying a pound of trash weed for about $100. Crazy stuff.
Speaker 1:That good weed.
Speaker 3:That good weed. That was good weed back then right, but it's that seed.
Speaker 2:When I look back at that, I'm saying I'm trying to find a place, I'm trying to find an identity that I didn't have in my family All the spaces are taken up, so I'm going to be the rebel. I think I did a pretty good B job of being a rebel. See, it wasn't about me at all.
Speaker 3:And then I look back, like even today right over here, I thought about Mr Prather.
Speaker 2:Mr Prather was someone who lived next to where.
Speaker 3:I believe were my grandparents.
Speaker 2:at the time I was probably five or six years old and he would take us some of us with him. He went around into what we would call back then, the African-American or black neighborhoods. And I remember asking him what do they like to be called?
Speaker 3:And he said they don't like to be called anything. And say I feel that right now.
Speaker 2:I was a five-year-old little boy, and so we can go back and revisit some of these powerful moments that we've had in our life. I think the advantage of that is that we're sort of strengthening our identity who am I and how did I get to be here?
Speaker 3:And some of these conditionings are really negative and harmful. And some of them are very positive and helpful. And how did that?
Speaker 2:shape me Attitude toward race, going to Peace Corps and going and being the only white people in the neighborhood and on the bus.
Speaker 3:Was that it Did, mr Prather plant a seed Was there a seed planted when I was 18 and did.
Speaker 2:LSD. Where are the seeds? Where are the helpful seeds? Because I don. I don't want to encourage and support the unhealthy, but there's a lot of positive stuff back there. Drink water on that one, huh.
Speaker 1:Raise a glass to that.
Speaker 4:Yeah, no, my stepdaughter has recently moved in with us and over like the last four or five weeks, we've been having just a lot of conversations about um repressed memories that she has had, and these conversations have been incredibly hard, but I see them as a really good thing because there has been an increasing level of awareness and so there are things that she'll say and she'll be like oh, you know, that happened and um, oh gosh, I realized I do that too and I don't really like that about myself. And oh, you know, the reason why I do this and this and this is because I got pressured to do this, this and this, but it's not really. It's not really me.
Speaker 4:And and but I'm I love it because I never had I never had that, those conversations with anyone at that age. So I do think it's a good thing, cause I'm like that's awesome, like I was having those conversations at 30, right.
Speaker 2:You know, and I was doing.
Speaker 4:I was like, oh my gosh, I feel like I'm losing it and I'm, you know, don't know what to do. Mushrooms definitely saved my life, but like she, I feel like she's, in ways she's getting a head start.
Speaker 2:Oh, absolutely.
Speaker 4:Because she has that.
Speaker 2:No doubt. See. That's it Back to my amateur anthropology person. See, like I mean my father grew up in a multi-generational household and see what happens there.
Speaker 2:it's like what we see in Swaziland when we're in Peace Corps it's like, oh, look, look at that child with the mother and you say, well, why would you think that's her mother? Well, she's nursing Not necessarily her mother. That could be her sister or aunt, a visitor from across the street, but that baby is not going to be a toddler, it's not going to be far away from somebody that's going to pick him or her up and hug her, nourish her and support her.
Speaker 3:It's all about that.
Speaker 2:And now you see again a handful of decades, we moved to a place where the normal for Americans at least the norm is to live in bubbles. So I don't have like I had. I don't have a Mr Prather next door, I don't have my Dande, who is my Dande, and Bomba that's official names for my grandparents that I grew up with. I don't have that, see, and so I, you know, grew up like a lot of people do. My parents are burning out, frustrated, raising teenagers, all this sort of stuff, so they don't have opportunity for that, and I didn't have a constant grandparent figure. But in the quote-unquote old days and this is true even now in some cultures.
Speaker 2:I noticed some of the folks from from southeast asia come and, and it's norm, the month the grandparents will be living in the house they are taking care of the child, because somebody says these people are having a baby.
Speaker 2:As they ain't really kind of tuned in to be able to raise babies so much, so we'll help them with that. Yeah, now it's like a miracle that happens. Yeah, in some places of course've got other cultures that has a lot of focus on the children and just to talk about the shift in cultures, I was in Atlanta Airport actually Monday and Atlanta is a home of a different culture and so in the airport I wish it's Melonic. I'm trying to get the right word. There's a better word than black or melanin melanin melanin.
Speaker 2:I think that's it. They're there, but we're there they have like a. This, honestly, is the best meal I've ever had in a restaurant. It's a kebab.
Speaker 3:Anyway, it's a nice place.
Speaker 2:And so I'm watching these folks interact and they're joking all the time and they're kind of egging each other on all the time and they are so present with each other. They're present when they come up. They come up and they're connected and she says, hey, baby, what do you need Something? Like she said, and there's just a sense of warmth there and a sense of community in that restaurant and in the airport period.
Speaker 3:Because if you're there, you're going to be interacting with this is who you're going to be interacting with.
Speaker 2:This is the culture you're in, and it was just a joy to be interacting with. This is the culture you're in now and it was just a joy to watch all that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, because some of what I see in America particularly lately is folks are young people, particularly young people being 18, 20, whatever they are they're like zombies. They really are like zombies, and I try to interact with them and they're kind of like yeah okay, well, it's like man you need to sober up man.
Speaker 2:But they're not Right, because they haven't learned somehow. What I would assume is they haven't experienced the reward of being their genuine, true, concerned self and exchanging that connection with someone else. And then I think about talking about relationships. Where are they going to go?
Speaker 4:That's what I worry about, and you were talking about the Peace Corps. My mom was in the Peace Corps as well. That's how I came into this world. Oh, that's great. But I got separated from my Marshallese side of the family and it was the. Grandma lives with you, grandpa lives with you, cousins aunts uncles.
Speaker 1:The village. You have a village.
Speaker 3:You have a village.
Speaker 4:Now it's gotten more Americanized and so they've strayed away from their own culture. But in a lot of my psilocybin journeys, those ancestors show up and tell me to not do the things that I'm I'm doing and to work on being more, and all that. But what I was going to say, what I was going to say, is it's really hard now having kids because I don't, I don't have any help. It's you know, and so part of of it was hard to work, because I'm like how are you supposed to work 40 hours a week and own a business and then also show up for, you know, you have three kids, I have three kids. Like it's impossible, and so we both have made the decision to step away so then we can be present with our families and be for our kids what we never got to have.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. That's beautiful, but see that norm in America changed. See, when I grew up, my norm was, honestly, I don't know what I was. I must have been in my 30s before I ever came home. I've had a key to a house. We don't lock the house and so and so, man, my mother is always there. She's always there. And then I go riding off my bicycle, on my bicycle ride down the little roads out here. If I fall off and hurt myself, I'm going to just walk to the door that's there somewhere and the woman's going to say do whatever she needs to do to get me help.
Speaker 2:You know if I need help, whatever.
Speaker 3:So and my mother knows that.
Speaker 2:See we've been conditioned so much. Now, one thing about COVID for us was a surprise. We have kids living in our neighborhood we'd never seen before.
Speaker 3:Oh my gosh, and it's like holy smokes man.
Speaker 2:They're out riding bicycles. Honey, do you know where these kids are? Well, I think that's like a third house up. Why I said honey, do you know where these kids are? Well, I think that's like a third house up. Why don't we see them? They don't play. Why aren't they playing? They're not playing now. They're not playing now. And it's like how do you learn? And now we're back to nature. Mysticism like ayahuasca is grounded in. How can we be so separated from nature and expect that?
Speaker 3:to not have some harm to us. It's amazing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what you said about the piece of you got the message of what you need to do is change, so I'm down. This is my two-year experience.
Speaker 2:What I'll say was it was very helpful for about six months and then I had about 18 months that I was addicted to cannabis flower. So I'm down doing an ayahuasca experience and just plain as day, man, and that language of ayahuasca, mother ayahuasca, what I would say, is my new mother. My mother says John, you got to stop smoking dope. And I said that's what we used to call it back in the 60s.
Speaker 3:And it wasn't like.
Speaker 2:I'm saying, oh, you do it. It's like that's right. And so I came home and I had a collection like people have wine collections and I take out my collection of flour and my pipes and all the other stuff and I take it over and give it away. It's like I'm not going to throw it away. I think it has potential, too, of being a sacred healing medicine. It's just, you've got to be careful with it, is all I'd say about it. I don't think you're going to have to worry about that with ayahuasca and I don't think you're going to get to where you got to. Microdosing is wonderful Microdosing. Let's talk about this little sidebar here, microdosing for me, I've just had some folks that have been on antidepressants since God was a small girl and they start microdosing and the antidepressants, the pharmaceuticals, fall away and they don't need to come back. And I'm saying somebody needs to know this. You need to know you can do like 0.1, 0.2 grams three or four days a week and holy smokes man.
Speaker 1:They talk about a good thing to do. We have a lot of people who are like I've been on antidepressants for 20 years and I'm scared to come off and lots of. I mean lots of people are like they don't realize they're addicted, but they're definitely like dependent on it.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:And they realize that they're like oh, I don't, I could.
Speaker 4:I could live life without it well, and here's what's crazy is, so many people are dependent on it, like that's just our norm is to like pharmaceuticals to take a take a pill for something and I'm like, I feel like we're more depressed, more disconnected than ever before.
Speaker 2:So if they're so great, like why are we so?
Speaker 4:miserable just as a society. You.
Speaker 1:You were talking earlier about all the stuff on TV. I was reading this article a few days ago that was talking about how women now will watch these serial killer shows to calm down and to fall asleep and it's like I can't anymore.
Speaker 1:And I used to be that. I used to listen, that, I used to like listen to like the murder podcast and like now I realize like my tolerance for that, my capacity to like sit with that is so much smaller, because now I'm like that gives me the ick that like that's something I used to listen to to calm down. That's backwards calm down.
Speaker 2:That's backwards.
Speaker 1:But we're so disconnected from what feels good and moving towards things that feel good and moving towards things that feel like chaos and dark and scary, and that shouldn't be normal, but it seems like it's getting more and more normal.
Speaker 3:Where somebody right now does that. It's like you know so you're watching stuff that's feeding your fears. Yeah, and it's all right there, and it's not like you're reading a story or whatever You're seeing, images and the brain takes those images and it's very difficult for the brain to say is this real or not?
Speaker 2:especially with the big screen and the high definition.
Speaker 1:And you wonder why you're anxious all the time.
Speaker 2:That's right, exactly.
Speaker 4:So this is a random side note. There is one time where Tony and I we were watching Stranger Things, okay, and have you seen that? Yeah, okay, I think her name is Max. Yeah, she has a really abusive brother, and it was so like I don't do scary movies, I hate scary movies, but I didn't, wasn't expecting it, but watching that I got very triggered because I had an older sibling who was abusive to me.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 4:And I started crying. Yeah, tony's like, like, laughed at me. He's like. You know, why are you? Why are you crying Like it's?
Speaker 1:just a show.
Speaker 4:It's just a show. It's just a show. Well, we got into like a pretty big fight about it, but the good thing about having that conversation was he realized like why I was crying and why it was so triggering and why it was very hard for me to watch. But yeah, no, you're right, I'm very sensitive to things. Now I will watch Game of Thrones, though.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 4:Everybody gets their head chopped off at Game of Thrones, everybody gets their head chopped off.
Speaker 1:Medieval times.
Speaker 4:I don't know why that's the only exception of mine, but it is yeah.
Speaker 2:But I want to go back to what what you're saying about your, your, your learning that the things that used to calm you down or excite you or whatever. Those things are changing now and that that's.
Speaker 3:That's a very big piece too.
Speaker 2:That can be difficult for folks who are in a whatever the norm that they established in their relationship in the past 5, 15, 25 years, whatever yeah, they come up and say that's, it's not doing it for me now and see then the partner says, we've done this for blah blah, blah, blah blah and say well, I don't care if we've done it since before I was born. I'm just telling you now that my sensitivity is different.
Speaker 3:I think some of that is we're seeing the real world differently. Yeah, and what's really?
Speaker 2:one of the things that's really important there is we're learning what nurtures us and what kicks us in the job or some more sensitive areas.
Speaker 3:It's like why would I do?
Speaker 2:that, and then you start to notice because awareness is continuing to grow. And, like you, go out and take a walk, like you know, at the area you're just talking about right at your.
Speaker 3:You live in it pretty much.
Speaker 2:Go there and spend a couple hours and not only the research suggests that your immune function goes up for maybe two or three days, just from that.
Speaker 3:But that in your mind, the mind, mind.
Speaker 2:the rabbit's got to run some and now the calm is starting to come back.
Speaker 3:Yoga, meditation, all sorts of different things Moving into silence different types of music, all sorts of stuff, but it's like we've shifted away.
Speaker 2:There's been a shifting away from avoidance into moving into and releasing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, numbing and avoiding and running.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so what are your favorite tools? Are your favorite tools? Because I can honestly say that awareness for me didn't happen overnight or naturally. I think the first time I did mushrooms kind of opened up this level of awareness that I'd never had before, and it's just grown from that first experience several years ago. Yeah, how can people get there without psilocybin? Or do you feel like, what do you think is the best tool?
Speaker 3:well, see, I, I would, I would take your question as uh, what is a? What is a um?
Speaker 2:a reliable. What would be my suggestion for preparation?
Speaker 3:yeah, and the preparation would be for turning toward discomfort.
Speaker 2:Uh preparation like you say I want, I want awareness to grow, I want to be more aware of, I want to be able to step back and watch the show that my conditioning is playing out here.
Speaker 3:I think one of the things that's important?
Speaker 2:is it's important? That folks find something that resonates with them, and of course I mean I think there are other examples- I guess, but the two go-tos that come to me is Hatha yoga and some of the other eight limbs of yoga that might be helpful, and then meditation, the thing about meditation, particularly when you get past the weekend experiences and five-day experiences and you go into, like Esen, Goenka, Vipassana experiences the container there is exceptional you know, just let the dogma kind of float through you.
Speaker 2:You know don't agree with some of that the rules and whatever else. But to be in a place where your only responsibility basically else but to be in a place where there's, your only responsibility basically is to not interfere with people and to um, to settle into the stillness, and you do that. I don't know six, seven hours a day, and it's not, it's not difficult.
Speaker 2:See to see here's the discomfort rising and see there's nothing to be uncomfortable about no responsibility, a quiet place, a quiet place, generally good food, the two meals a day you have, and there's such a wonderful opportunity to practice feeling uncomfortable, tied in a knot, and it's kind of like, oh okay, let me see what I did. The high end of that experience for me was after we left Peace Corps. That would be after what would it be three or four years after Ayahuasca experience? I'm not sure how that feeds into it, but I suspect it might. I'm doing a 20-day retreat Thailand and there's a time there.
Speaker 3:I can't relax or focus because those are four years in.
Speaker 2:Peace Corps, there's a lot of meditation going on, I mean Peace.
Speaker 3:Corps. You don't have to do much.
Speaker 2:I mean we got involved in different bringing money in sewing machines, all kinds of stuff, but then to be and I had a very difficult- time for the first seven days, and that's just to concentrate on the breath right here. Seven days, come back, come back, come back, come back, come back, come back.
Speaker 2:Get your mind somewhat settled and then you shift into a body scan that's what uh, I think that's what um mbsr is based around body scan, move up your body, down your body. As soon as we shifted into that, then there was just a profound stillness that came in.
Speaker 2:So after a few days of that then there was just a time when what they would describe as just the individual energy, the kalapas vibrating in the body and so that came on, and I'm just sitting there thinking wow, so there's no pain here, there's just vibrating energy and of course, the idea is that that's essentially true. The vibrating energy like, I mean the vibrating energy all around us, and if we can that's like a to me it's like a high end experience of looking beyond the conditioning, even beyond the conditioning of the body to move away from things that are uncomfortable, relax into them and to a degree, this is how mindfulness-based stress reduction programs John Kevitt's Zen stuff would work with someone in chronic pain.
Speaker 2:What do you do? Look at it and folks say I don't think.
Speaker 3:I understood you. Look at it, notice what it is.
Speaker 2:Notice your resistance to it.
Speaker 3:Notice your labeling to it.
Speaker 2:Notice your body tightening, and so I sat there for at least four hours.
Speaker 3:Folks would get up. Sit for an hour, get up they walk around for 15 minutes.
Speaker 2:Come back again.
Speaker 3:And I have a column of probably 15 or so monks.
Speaker 2:You know they're in their orange, they're over here and when you get to these higher level meditation experiences, the room will be full of people, they're not moving. It's just it could be in that situation there'd be probably 100 people there.
Speaker 3:And it's just dead still.
Speaker 2:And so you sit with that dead still and you move into that dead still and you move, you move into that and then you just experience. Then the mind says well do you need to get up? I don't think so. And then there's another hour and you think you'd get up not really. And then, of course, then they strike a little thing for our snack, and a snack in thailand it's like holy smokes man. So I said I gotta get up with this one.
Speaker 3:So up we go, and then for a couple days there's still that that experience sword block in some ways similar to a, you know a psychedelic experience, but it's seeing very differently and it's also it's like a training course in objectifying experiences in the body watching the working of the mind and come back to awareness, non-reactive awareness.
Speaker 2:So I mean I don't know how serious someone would need to get with that, but I think any amount that you do and I don't know why.
Speaker 3:I was drawn into that, so that it made sense to me, right, uh, but we need to find something to make sense, to us, that is about being quiet and being in the body, and yoga hatha yoga.
Speaker 2:Hatha piece of yoga is very helpful in the sense that you know you start moving and you say, well, I can't move past this, and you just relax into the discomfort, be loving and compassionate and gentle and you notice you've got all kinds of movement you didn't have before Similar to this, and you learn to not be so reactive to the first sign of discomfort that arises.
Speaker 1:That's probably the way more.
Speaker 2:You want to know about that.
Speaker 1:I'm interested. Jason's much better at meditating than I am. Sometimes I'm like you're a little too calm yeah so see okay, so you're.
Speaker 2:Uh, what's that teak?
Speaker 1:not hon, I think, said that we in the west have very limited capacity for peace oh, and I think a lot of people, when we talk about about meditation, they're like I can't do it, I can't quiet my mind. That was me, but it's like the practice of it. Of course you can.
Speaker 4:Right, I thought I had to be perfect and I'm like oh, I have ADHD mind, so it's like squirrel flower outside you know and see if we work with that what you said before.
Speaker 2:see who you truly are is not striving toward perfection. One of your strong condition pieces is you've got to be perfect. And see when you talk about the 22 and 21-year-old women here you've got to be, perfect, but the culture is going to bring that on too. Somehow we've got to break that bubble. But the question is how do you know? You can't meditate, the culture is going to bring that on too.
Speaker 3:Somehow we've got to break that bubble.
Speaker 4:But the question is how do you know you can't meditate?
Speaker 2:How do you know you?
Speaker 4:aren't meditating. I was meditating. I think it's a practice that's right, you were meditating.
Speaker 2:That's right. Yeah, it was like you said, you couldn't meditate.
Speaker 4:Well, I used to think that. You used to think that, yeah, so I used to be like I can't do that, I can't focus for more. You know, focus on or not, just my mind be blank and I'm like, well, that's kind of. The point is just practice. Notice your thoughts. And notice them and be like oh hey, okay, you did notice that squirrel and that flower, Okay, that's great.
Speaker 4:What advice would you give to like okay, so let's say, my stepdaughters, who are in this world where social media and movies and there's just so much busyness and it's really hard to date and it's really hard to kind of really find out who you are? Um, there are so many young adults that are really, really struggling right now. I've really noticed so, like a lot of their friends. They're medicated, um, they have depression, they're bipolar, they're anxious, um, they struggle with their sexuality, like it's. I feel like it's more prevalent now than when we were younger. I didn't even know what anxiety was. I was anxious, but I was very. We just didn't even have those conversations. We didn't have the language for it either.
Speaker 1:We didn't have the language, but either.
Speaker 4:We didn't have the link, but it's almost like they have too much language without the tools, if that makes sense. So, like a lot of them they identify with, like well, I'm depressed and I'm anxious and I'm this and non-binary and you know all of the things, but there's, they're all struggling, All of them. What advice would you give to the younger generation, who they are trying to find themselves and they are trying to figure it out?
Speaker 2:Yeah, there are a lot of major points in what you just said, and one of them was they're trying to find an identity.
Speaker 4:Yes.
Speaker 2:And folks like. Ken Wilber when he talks about the development level of the culture. I think at this point he would say we're like. What he would say is like green, we're past rational now we're into sort of anti-hierarchy even if the hierarchy has some purpose. Like you know, this is a molecule and this is a cell and all this stuff.
Speaker 2:And when you go back to what's a healthy upbringing, wealthy upbringing. A lot of that has to do with a sense of belonging, a sense of being valued, a sense of purpose, and I use the story most often. I think of my father being probably six, maybe eight, but he would carve a slingshot for himself and he would bring a rabbit into the house and they'd cook the rabbit and his mother would say we need to thank Edwin for this.
Speaker 2:He killed the rabbit. So he's a little boy there, see, and then he might go hunting with his father with a bow, or arrow or maybe a shotgun and we're going to try to kill this deer and being still and silent.
Speaker 3:We're not talking about this is what you have to do, and if you're able to do that, then we're going to have I don't know 50, 60 pounds of good meat to eat this winter. If you don't, then father here is going to be very clear with you.
Speaker 2:This is not what you can do. Not because you're insulting me, not because I want you to be a different way, because you're threatening the health and survival of our pack our plan here.
Speaker 3:And so, even as a small child, we see it in Swaziland. You see little?
Speaker 2:children carrying maybe a gallon of water and they're walking up from the creek and and they see, that was something that mattered see they had a role they had a purpose and so what's happened here? Again back to the amateur anthropology piece is um and this is stealing from uh back in 80s, mid-80s or so there was a strong men's movement. It was called Robert Bly, sam Keen.
Speaker 3:these folks- and what Robert?
Speaker 2:Bly would say is there was a collapse with the Industrial Revolution, and what he would say is that the fathers are no longer feeding their sons and what he would say is that the fathers are no longer feeding their sons, that there's a feeding. That happens in that experience of saying, what are we doing now? We're being absolutely still and quiet because, you know, the deer has to come within 50 feet of us and we're planting the corn this deep.
Speaker 3:Not this deep because the crows will get it or it'll rot.
Speaker 2:This is not a game we're playing, and it changed.
Speaker 3:It became and the father.
Speaker 2:You see, he's doing things too, that makes sense find some more milk cows 10 acres of tomatoes.
Speaker 3:Whatever it is, see, it's all right in nature working, functioning, and he's on his own a lot like farmers often were back then.
Speaker 2:And so now the male figure which in my rearing.
Speaker 3:That would be my father, but of course he didn't go into a factory, he was like a self-taught not self-taught. So much but unlicensed civil engineer which you could do a lot with in those early days. And his last, probably 20 years of his job, he'd have a shotgun in his car.
Speaker 3:And if he came up on a cubby or quail he'd get out and hunt for a while and I got some beautiful stories from people that worked with him just how wonderful he was He'd say, you know? We've got to go get somewhere in some kind of urgency.
Speaker 2:Well, there's a dozen quail, just jumped up and came over man, let's go do this, and he would tell me. He told me as a young man, I don't even know what job I was working I might have been. I was still working construction job. He said you really don't do anything you don't like to do. He said three sons and I quit a job with no idea of where I was going to get another one. It didn't matter.
Speaker 2:I know I was going to get something and you always will you get along with people you don't mind work. Don't worry about it, don't stay in some place like that.
Speaker 3:I remember that I was a teenager at the time.
Speaker 2:I still remember that's a beautiful lesson.
Speaker 3:I don't know what the substitutes are for that. See my father's there.
Speaker 2:He sends him to the table every day. I know him. My mother's not getting on too well. He enjoys having affairs every now and then. It was a delight watching him be late 70s and taking him to get some kind of procedure or test and watch him interact with the nurses.
Speaker 3:They like him and he liked them.
Speaker 2:They light up, so they just have a beautiful time, but Mama didn't like that much. No, yeah.
Speaker 4:I would assume not.
Speaker 2:But it's that there's also there were clear messages.
Speaker 3:What does it?
Speaker 2:mean to be a man here, and so not that it's a definition of what a man means.
Speaker 3:I'm saying within the culture, what does it mean to be a? Man and I say so John, what are you up to? Well, I work for a telephone company.
Speaker 2:What does that mean? Well, I type telephone polls and blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 3:Kind of a top craft job unionized and a lot of sort of the good and bad of masculinity is represented there. But not like now, which I'm a psychologist, most psychologists psychotherapists in particular, are going to be female Of course I learned that, having little of my father's inclination look around and say, man, if I'm taking a psychology class.
Speaker 2:there are some beautiful women in these classes. There are not so many guys, you know, say well, that sounds well, I can tolerate this.
Speaker 3:So all of that.
Speaker 2:And then having the validation that this is an okay path. It's okay to walk away from a 20-year psychotherapy practice and go off in the world for a while.
Speaker 3:It doesn't make any difference.
Speaker 2:You come back and do something else.
Speaker 3:Don't be afraid of that.
Speaker 2:And there are folks like back to the men's movement and developmental psychology is not, I haven't had much of that, but you look and say what does this uh six-year-old need the? Six-year-old comes in and he asks them the would you stay with the? Father because that that's a.
Speaker 3:What we're doing is trying to where's the example of a healthy male, energy? And a six-year-old comes in and says Daddy, is there a God? And six years old? You turn to him and say absolutely son, absolutely don't ever doubt it never doubt it.
Speaker 2:He comes back when he's 12, and he says Dad, is there a God? And you say oh, whoa, whoa son, no, that is not a question you ask anybody outside of you. That's a question you ask inside of you Because you don't believe anything. Anybody tells you about that.
Speaker 3:But your questioning is very important. See that six is not appropriate it's not appropriate to tell a six-year-old what's? A gender. What's a male, what's a female? I don't know.
Speaker 2:Fine Are you kind of curious? Do you know what's happened? They're not. They're saying now I don't know, it's mid to late 20s, before our brain is fully developed. So we're talking about a little infant here, basically in a little bit bigger body, and whether they're 8 or 12, and they're confused, why would? They be confused. Look at the culture, look at the images, look at the presentations, the conditioning presentations that you're seeing in the media and the movies and the rest, it's all over the place.
Speaker 2:So the lack of stability I'm not saying that all the stability is good and helpful. I'm just talking about from the child's perspective, if you know what to do, like again hunting. You're not going to sing and hum out here, son, we're waiting on the deer. The deer can hear you scratch your face. You know you can't do that, and so moving into that maturity eight-year-old, mature enough to shoot a deer.
Speaker 2:I'm not a big shooter person, but that's a back in the old days that was. That was an important thing to do. So these days, see, I don't know what to say other than notice what is going on. Yeah, step back and notice what is going on.
Speaker 3:And because we just flew, up from atlanta yesterday or monday, whenever it was and, and there's a a man here, this is a man. He's not 16, he's 30 something and and a little hour, 10 minute flight he, he never takes his mind, his, his eyes off that phone.
Speaker 2:He is there lost another. That's when I see a lot of the culture, I guess, of people who have sufficient resource to fly in a plane period, and I think they have some type of basic education and we're coming back from British Columbia, I think, and there's a woman here and she has a small child.
Speaker 3:The child couldn't be over four. And so she's on her phone and he goes, mommy, mommy what.
Speaker 2:What do you want to watch? He says I don't want to watch anything. Well that's what we have to do here. That's all we have here is the movie. What do you want to watch here? Pick it out, go back in and I'm thinking, see if she had mother ayahuasca or somebody to say you need to pay attention to what you're doing. You've got a three-year-old boy that says mommy, mommy, are you there for me? And you say no.
Speaker 2:I'm not son, I've got some stuff to keep up with here on my social media page, because social media again, man, we talk about something geared up for the bam bam bam Wow, bam bam wow. 14 seconds, 15 seconds, 50s, unbelievable.
Speaker 3:You see, again, it's getting higher and higher it goes from the three networks black and white, no married couple in the bed together.
Speaker 2:Now it is extreme, and so it would be like again. I'd say folks say something about they've never enjoyed a drug. I see ever done powder cocaine, because I mean people that don't like that. There's something wrong with them. But you need to appreciate that will take your soul. I think you're safer with powder cocaine than you are in letting your letting yourself be conditioned, without any interference on your higher self part.
Speaker 2:Allow yourself to be drifted away by this and allow our culture to shape you into the horror of the reality of it is you can believe what they say to you is actually an authentic reflection of who you actually are.
Speaker 2:Talk about something that's upside down, and so folks that have had less and less of that can come in and they can kind of see some of that, because I can say, can you remember you remember what it's like to get your first bicycle? And say, can you remember you remember what it's like to get your first bicycle? I mean, I had that when I was what was it 35, I think when I got my first off-road bicycle and I was on that thing and I said, man, I feel like I'm 12 years old, I junk up over curbs, get the ditches. I just love that. But there it was.
Speaker 3:I was 12 years old on my bicycle, and nowadays there can be young men, for example, 25 years old.
Speaker 2:They're not interested in getting a driver's license. I'm saying I mean I would sell my mother's soul when I was. I started driving when I was 14.
Speaker 3:Got a license at 15. But at 13, you say what do you think about?
Speaker 2:selling your mother's soul, unless you drive alone. Oh yes, I don't think she needs her soul really. I got to tell you about freedom. Oh my goodness gracious.
Speaker 4:Well, so to add to that, that's what's really interesting is because in Iowa we could drive at 14 if we lived in the country.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 4:I was all about that.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 4:And I wanted to drive. I wanted to leave the home. I wanted to drive. I wanted to leave the home. I wanted freedom, I wanted independence. These kids are built different in that way where they're not wanting to go to work, and I was so excited to get a job make my own money get out, right, that's right. A lot of these kids aren't like that. It's really hard for them to get a job.
Speaker 2:You got to like oh, you got to yeah. Sh Shut them out the doors.
Speaker 4:Get them to go hang out with their friends yeah. Get them to go outside yeah. Get off their phone. Stop watching TV. Yeah, they don't know a world without social media and the internet. Right, even yeah going and getting a license. Yeah, like there are so many kids who just don't drive. And I'm like what the.
Speaker 1:My 16-year-old. I'm like I want you to go to a party. They don't do that anymore. They don't do that anymore. They don't do that anymore. He has no desire to go hang out with his friends because he just can. He.
Speaker 2:FaceTimes them, he texts them.
Speaker 2:Well, back again, I mean what we have is something to make powder cocaine look like it's not addictive at all, yeah, and see the increasing intensity and the dopamine rushes, and the rest, some of the folks that wire people up and see what's happening in the brain. You can just sit your phone on the table in a restaurant, whatever, and you get a shot from that. So we're addicting our children to shots of dopamine and we're elevating those higher and higher all the time and so we say, well, it's because, see, they don't have the things, they don't go. When I was, what was I?
Speaker 3:I must've been 12, maybe 13.
Speaker 2:My first real job with the Osteens at the drive-in movie place I elevated myself from taking tickets. Now I'm actually popping popcorn on a popcorn machine and then I elevate to the top of the line, which now I'm serving people food at the cafeteria the whatever concession stand.
Speaker 2:I guess it was. But see, those things meant something to me, as corny as they are. It's like can I do this? I mean I'm like 12. Now of course, I lie about my age and get a job at the grocery store, and now I'm stocking shelves and all, and that gets elevated too. And so if I work hard, and.
Speaker 2:I'm quasi-honest and don't steal too much, then I can see. And then I have the gift. Mr Collins, who was my last boss man there, he was a good man. The man before that not so much A boss man there, he was a good man. The man before that, not so much the man before that said you have to go to school tomorrow, and I'm thinking tomorrow's.
Speaker 2:Wednesday he knows, he's got to go to school. He's trying to get me to cut classes. Come in here and do this. I'm not going to do that. I'm just not going to do that. And then Mr Collins would never ask that he sees what I see in him is he appreciates that I'm on the road to somewhere?
Speaker 2:I'm not going to be a bag boy the rest of my life. The man before that doesn't care. See, I see that happening. Those things are important. I still remember them. I mean that's not yesterday that that happened. Whether I'm getting a first construction job, carrying buckets of concrete, all these kinds of stuff, it doesn't make any difference.
Speaker 3:It doesn't make any difference.
Speaker 2:Are you being seen for who you are? Are you being challenged to get a little deeper into your true self? Are you allowing some of your talents and gifts and whatever else? Are they coming out and somebody saying damn, you're good at that. Thank you, appreciate that, because that wasn't what was there growing up and now, of course. So you're thinking about this odd, strange thing of staying home as a mother and maybe do some interactions with children, whether they're 21 or two.
Speaker 2:It's like, well, that was the norm and now it's not the norm so we moved to the place like I see when in my, I guess it'd be my niece my wife's niece, it's like the new norm is and her husband is a perfectly competent person, college educated, working for a plumbing company. He could have his own business just with nothing Her mind 40 hours a week two children.
Speaker 3:Who's going to take care of the?
Speaker 2:kids Daycare would be good.
Speaker 3:See daycare is a new invention.
Speaker 2:Daycare is a new invention.
Speaker 3:So when you ask about what's happening with our children our children are not having the challenges.
Speaker 2:I should change that. Our children are not having the deeply validating and rewarding challenges that used to be available to us. Going to a party, all sorts of I mean hormones kick in. That's happening a little early now too. It's not unusual for a young girl I use that word intentionally. She's not a woman, she's a girl. And now she's starting, she's having menstrual periods now and she might be nine years old. Yeah, nine years old, and I think the norm used to be like 14.
Speaker 3:Yeah, Some are in there, yeah.
Speaker 2:Because you look at her and say yeah, she's 14. And she's kind of easing into that young woman phase Now they're nine or 10. By the time they're 12,. You might see some of those at the movie and they look like they're hookers and you say so, honey why do you do? This and you say why do I do this man? I walk in the room. Everybody, every man at least. I don't care if he's eight or 80, they're going to look at me and say, holy shit, talk about a beautiful woman.
Speaker 3:She has no clue about who she is.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And so you've got all these things happening. So again, anthropology here's the conditioning.
Speaker 2:My wife and I spent some time in british columbia.
Speaker 3:Part of that and most of that has been in small towns north north part of the island in vancouver, I know, for example, come into small and we remark about things.
Speaker 2:We have a conversation with a young person. They have actually look at you in the eye and listen to what you're saying and actually have a reasonable response back to what you're saying, and it's like, wow, honey, there's something different here and so I don't know what's happening there, but somehow another, as soon as we can get a corrective experience. What's a corrective experience? It may be some type of back in the old days again it might be a wilderness experience.
Speaker 2:It might be learning to climb, rock climbing, it may be something see, that's going to give. And I think that whether you're riding a motorcycle or you're doing high-risk behaviors, there's some charge to that. In a lot of ways, there's a charge that say I you know that the sign said 30, I was doing 60. I'm thinking, ah, that's fine, and I'd actually be able to lay it down enough where I'm not propelled off the side of the mountain. Learn to ski, learn to do something, learn to do something.
Speaker 3:There's some challenging somehow don't get that.
Speaker 2:It's like where does the self-confidence come from? Yeah, and then of course you go into the school system and the school system's overwhelmed because the children, they're just kind of wired up and they're looking for something. They're not going to get what I got like in ninth grade. I guess when.
Speaker 3:Ms Hahn.
Speaker 2:See, these are Cs. I go back to my Cs. Where's the Cs? Where's the positive Cs she gives?
Speaker 3:me back my paper and she says you know, you're a good writer, really.
Speaker 2:Wow. There's this woman and she sees me and she says I'm a good writer. Wow, what do you have about that? Never got that at home. And then I had I guess it would be a college-level algebra class which I had F, f, f, f, f, f, F, d, and she said there's no reason for you to not graduate and see she saw me too, but I mean you know, if you smoked up and drank a lot of alcohol college-level math does not calculate well in the brain. So those little gifts, I don't know.
Speaker 2:I don't know, I don't know what to say other than notice what you're doing Detox yourself. Nature seems like such a a reasonable, easy access, if you do it go out in the field someplace for a couple of hours or in the woods in a couple of hours without your phone. I think your phone is a dangerous machine, so you're sitting there without your phone and just look at just sit down and notice the life around you, and that's one thing about, like the rainforest out west. You just sit there and it's like holy smokes.
Speaker 3:And Jordan and I, we've discovered the slugs that are out there. They're slugs and they're different colors, and so we'd stop and sit, and one time I think we were at least there 20, 25 hours and then you start seeing this guy.
Speaker 2:He's about this big, then he's this big and at some point he lifts up and you see, there's a face under there. There's just a face under there. It's like a little person looking at. See. I've never gotten that close to snails before we actually believe it or not.
Speaker 3:I hate to confess this we had poison for snails in our garden. We don't do that anymore.
Speaker 2:we just go out and talk to them and say, hey, you know, you just don, just don't eat everything, it doesn't matter if you eat anything.
Speaker 3:We're not going to kill these guys. They have little faces.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't know how you do that. I don't know how somebody goes out and stays in the woods for three or four days, one of my personal rehab experiences back when I was still working in Tampa at least once a year, maybe twice.
Speaker 3:I'd go up by myself four or five days in the woods up in. Shining Rock.
Speaker 2:Wilderness around Asheville, and it'd be what am I doing?
Speaker 3:I said what are you doing up there?
Speaker 2:Well, I started out talking to trees, and that's fine talking to trees, but man after two or three days.
Speaker 3:the trees start talking back, and that is important it really is. I went there and did about three grams of mushrooms and it's like holy smoly Now.
Speaker 2:this is a nice place to do three grams of mushrooms.
Speaker 4:I did five grams outside and. Tony came out and I said you know, I need you to leave me alone because I'm talking to the trees right now. And I was talking to them and they were talking to me back yeah, yeah, yeah but, back to the, the parenting thing.
Speaker 4:You know, having a five-year-old and also not having so much on my plate has been really wonderful because I am able to watch him do things with so much wonder. Things for him, like if we're outside and we're at the park things are slower, like our walks are slower, getting things done is slower, but I'm I'm learning to appreciate that because he wants to stop and he wants to like play with the grasshopper and look at the lady bug and look at the flower and talk about the butterfly. And I'm trying to, like he is so authentically himself, and learn from him and how he sees the world. And I think a lot of times we are, we stray away from that because of our parenting and conditioning and all that.
Speaker 2:But we're also, as adults, we're also, you know, we have a dopamine addiction.
Speaker 4:Yeah, oh, I have to. I've had to set limits on my phone. So you know, at nine o'clock at night I can't be on social media. From 10 to two I can't be on social media because it is so easy to just pick it up get it boom, boom boom okay, there's, three hours goes by, yeah and it's like what was I even doing? Jason?
Speaker 1:wants to get a dumb phone. Oh good, I've thought about that too. A phone that calls like and I'm like we're calling it a dumb phone, like. Remember when they first had them and we were like this is awesome that's a smartphone yeah, it's pretty smart, yeah, but I also agree, like I think a lot of what's happening is like the problem isn't with the kids necessarily, it's with the parents and we have to heal in order to give them a space to heal in, in order to see them. I don't know.
Speaker 4:Well, and how can we teach them to be connected to ourselves when we're disconnected? We're disconnected to them. We're connected to things like our phone.
Speaker 1:I also think this is so wild because I've never been a stay-at-home mom. Past 18 months has been my thing. And what does Elle's Christmas list upstairs say?
Speaker 4:Homeschool she list upstairs, say homeschool.
Speaker 1:She wants to be homeschooled. So bad, and I've thought about it. I've thought about it and I don't even know how to go about it, I have two and I. I don't even know where to start, but it's crossed my mind because it what you're saying, with the schools and everything like it's. It's all like I want to.
Speaker 1:I want to be home, but I also like I want to have a commune and I want you to be there and Dr Sheila, you can come visit like who's going to garden and we have a community kitchen, so like that village is something that, like our grandparents had, that we thought was crazy and now I want it back.
Speaker 4:Leah and I are in the process of making our own bread, oh great.
Speaker 1:Oh, I've made the bread. I haven't made sourdough bread, but I've made honey wheat bread and it's delicious. That's great, but my kids are like do you have any more of that bread?
Speaker 3:Yeah, but what you're saying is back again advice.
Speaker 2:I think you're spot on when you say what we're working with really are parents yeah. And so it's not like parents just got pulled into the addictive whatever's there. I mean, I saw that when I was. I don't forget what I was looking at. Somebody said you've got to put yourself on the social media or whatever. And I was there for like 90 minutes.
Speaker 3:Easy, I was sitting in the backyard and I'm saying, damn, for like 90 minutes Easy, and I'd sit in the backyard and I'd say, damn, it's 3.30.
Speaker 2:How did I get to be 3.30?
Speaker 3:So I'd say just don't do it. Just you know same thing about.
Speaker 2:I don't have any powder cocaine. I don't have any flour cannabis flour in my house. Yeah, Don't have sugar in my house.
Speaker 3:back, there in the corner that's a little treat, but the thing of being able to realize that if I'm awake, then my child can have a model of being awake. And I can also be awake and curious. So when? They stop it's sort of like walking the person that really is tuning in with their dog.
Speaker 2:The dog says who's going for the walk? My dog's going for the walk. And so here we go and they stop, and they've got to smell something or whatever to come back and they blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's not the only way to treat a dog, but it's just kind of what we did.
Speaker 2:But you get to that place where there's an appreciation for that, when they stop and you see the child, the five-year-old, the six-year-old, that you see, the whatever and see it's sort of like in back to the relationships, like like we're shaping ourselves up to to treat our partner. I want to notice the things that are are helpful to our marriage which is um. I guess it was uh jose was.
Speaker 3:Joseph Campbell. That said in a marriage there's not, there are individuals anymore.
Speaker 2:It's not me and you, it's simply the marriage.
Speaker 2:So what helps the marriage are these experiences and these supports and so whenever the partner does something that other partner recognizes it says, wow, I need to support that, and it could be all sorts of little things. You could be over there. One partner's lost in whatever they're lost into. And the other partner says I think I'm going to go for a walk. Okay, you want to go with me? Instead of saying go for a walk, let's do it, or whatever else it is, I'm going to go meditate and go do some yoga. Let's do partner's yoga. That's a beautiful thing.
Speaker 3:It really is, because it's all sorts of you know a good teacher and guide.
Speaker 2:You can do all kinds of things that are trusting and build confidence.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I've always wanted to try that. I didn't think I was flexible enough.
Speaker 1:It's a practice.
Speaker 2:That's why you do yoga exactly. I wish there was more I wish.
Speaker 3:I had an understanding of how people can deal with the culture and the.
Speaker 1:Thing you can't save the world.
Speaker 2:Well, I can, I've done that already that, I say, is my Jesus complex and that's what got us into peace corps my wife said something like I've always wanted to go to the peace corps, so I was actually in brazil. I'm filling out the application. I'm down there with john of god. He's got some bad reputation here lately, but uh and and so I sent her a text.
Speaker 2:I said honey, you're filling out your application and she says well not yet I not yet I said we've got to apply to Peace Corps, and so we applied to Peace. Corps and off we go.
Speaker 3:Then we traveled After we left the country we were never going to get for our four-year sabbatical. We didn't know if we were going to get in or not. We get phone calls sitting in Peru. Our cell phones are still working. Ring, ring, hello. We still want to go, absolutely want to go. Would you go to sub-Saharan Africa?
Speaker 2:Absolutely Off we go. So it's just, you just never know. It's sort of like being able to recognize the opportunities, yeah, and some of the opportunities are not going to be supported by the real reality in our culture. They're going to say that's ridiculous. You know, don't?
Speaker 3:do that when I was 56.
Speaker 2:Wait, wait, 20 years or do peace corps when you're 12 or you know. I guess that most people there are just out of college but somehow or another they're planning that, that interest in that drive to have an actual embodied experience of some variety.
Speaker 4:Yeah, we have um with the podcast. We have both struggled with, uh, cause it's almost like if you have a podcast, if you have a business now you have to be on social media. And so both of I have both of us have struggled with social media and feeling the pressure to show up in a consistent way, and we recently have showed up way, way, way less, like non-existent, like non-existent um. And what's interesting about that is, I think, that people often think, like if you don't show up online, that there's something wrong oh yeah, and you're not good, I've wondered that.
Speaker 1:I'm like I wonder what our listeners are thinking, Cause we don't post anymore. We haven't said anything. We've just kind of taken a step back and kind of focused more on our worlds, our inner worlds. Yes, without telling them, we're doing it.
Speaker 4:Yeah, but but yeah, we're we. Yes, without telling them we're doing it. Yeah, but yeah. We live in a world where, if you don't show up on social media, something's wrong and it's like no, something is right because I'm not on social media.
Speaker 3:That's right and that's something you might consider. What the impact?
Speaker 2:might be, but that might be. Here's what we're doing.
Speaker 4:Yeah, here's what we're doing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you know here's what we're doing, yeah, and you know here's what we're doing. We're pulling away from this, yeah, and we're we're plugging in every now and then and we say you know, we have a handful of podcasts that we will.
Speaker 3:We follow because we do but there I'm trying to think of uh it it.
Speaker 2:I don't know if it's anybody as folks out there doing interviews and they say someone asked him about. What do you do about all those comments? He said I never look, yeah, Never look, Joe Rogan.
Speaker 3:I think I mean somebody's a big time person as far as podcasts go Right.
Speaker 1:I think it may have been him. He said I don't look at that yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Because you could go down. I mean, we've been guilty of it where we've, you know especially Like responding and getting worked up Well, and two women, two moms.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Who talk openly about our psychedelic use, and there's, you know, people in this space who they're like. You don't look the part. You don't look the way you're supposed to look, or you know, and in the moment it felt like, look the way you're supposed to look. Or you know, and in the moment it felt like I'm not bothered by this. So I'm going to tell you what I really think.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 4:Now, looking back, it's like you weren't even worth our energy.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 4:Because you don't know me.
Speaker 2:So that to me is so important is to figure out what is worth our energy, yeah and realize that there's so many demands out there that if we, if we don't, if we don't do some of that, then we're going to get burned out right, because it's sort of like and what I say about, about myself is I. I was an activist and I started like earth save in tampa and we did john robin's here and all sorts of stuff, and then active in meditation community and all sorts of stuff.
Speaker 2:and active in meditation community and all sorts of stuff, bring teachers in from all over. Blah, blah, blah blah. I retired from that and now there's a deeper level than retirement. I'm in a place where I really have to block my engagement with so much stuff because it's just not my job. Because it's just not my job and the overstimulation of the stuff, climate change politics.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, questions you ask about what should we do with our children, blah, blah, blah. I say well, sorry, and then other things that I need in order to stay adequately balanced.
Speaker 3:Need to go in the woods, need to go take trips, need to do different things. Why are you doing it?
Speaker 2:Because I'm needed, and there are more important things to do around here. No, not for me and folks say, well, you know you should contribute. Why don't you go to southern Africa for two and a half years and go with a Peace Corps and tell me that I need to go work in the ditch for a while? What are you doing? So I think I'd already done that. I'm going to check that box and that was my Jesus complex. I'm going to go save the world. Found out, got this piece about there.
Speaker 2:And you say well, I don't think so. John, this is pretty big. Going to help that person, to help that child? Nope, nope. How about that one? Yeah, let's focus on that one. Too big can't do it all. Three eyes, yeah, and it's sort of three eyes in our life now.
Speaker 4:So it's always that way. Yeah, well, it's like. It's like you speak about something. It's like well, why don't you speak about this? Why don't you?
Speaker 1:talk about this.
Speaker 4:Why don't you care about these people?
Speaker 4:and it's like it's not enough it well it can never, it never ends. And then, if you know, if you have a little bit of a platform, it's it's you. Enough, it will. It can never, it never ends. And then, if you know, if you have a little bit of a platform, it's it's you. I feel like you can get held to a really high standard and have a microscope on you of well, you said this about this, why don't you talk about this? And it's just. I want to be home with my family right now.
Speaker 1:I just want to be home.
Speaker 4:I just want to be home and I want to make my bread and I want to go for a hike. That's what's really important to me right now.
Speaker 1:And that, to me, is saving the world. It is Absolutely that is doing that?
Speaker 2:Where is that it's saying? There somewhere.
Speaker 4:Mother.
Speaker 2:Teresa, the notion is that we really save the world by saving ourselves.
Speaker 4:Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:And we can't get caught.
Speaker 3:It's another one of those attachment issues the cultivated adaptive strategies, whatever.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, I'm Mother Teresa or I'm Jesus or I'm somebody. Well, who are you really? You're trying to act a role and you know maybe it's a better role than being. You know something else, but it's still a role and we can't be who we are if we can't take these insights, like you're having, and say it's time for this to fall away. And that's why I don't want to get lost with this one, but I've been working for a while now on the notion of dying well living in a way that dying makes sense, and one of the biggest pieces there is what we're talking about now, and
Speaker 2:that's sort of like here's the role I'm playing, here's what's taking my energy.
Speaker 3:Here's what I'm invested in and now that's gone.
Speaker 2:Let's just let that go now, and then we have some type of period where we can have an open to a transformation, insights, whatever it is, and now okay, here comes a rebirth.
Speaker 3:We're not talking about.
Speaker 2:In some way it can be a spiritual rebirth too, but I'm just talking about what are we filling our time with?
Speaker 3:Because if we don't do that, then we're going to get burned out.
Speaker 2:It's not going to be bringing us alive anymore, and if we're not, brought alive my simple philosophy is it's not what we need to be doing.
Speaker 3:If it ain't fun, don't do it.
Speaker 2:I mean it's yeah, yeah, time to have more water.
Speaker 4:yeah, yeah, I brought up mother Teresa because she I think it was her that said the quote like the best thing oh gosh, I'm gonna butcher this like the best thing you can do to like heal the world is to go home and like love your family, or something like that yeah, okay, yeah, and I think we did an episode on this last year where it was like I'm doing my part by working on me.
Speaker 1:I don't need to be an activist, I don't need to put out there whose side I'm on, because I'm focused on myself.
Speaker 3:Call it selfish, but it's the best thing I can do for my family.
Speaker 2:I don't see that as selfish. I'll roll back. I don't know why this image is coming up. See that as selfish. Again, I'll roll back. I don't know why this image is coming up. We were bounced around from those storm things and we're bounced around airports. They sent us out to Minneapolis somewhere. We're trying to get to New York and you can see in my view, you can see some of the worst of.
Speaker 3:America in those situations, because people are yelling at the people and all this stuff.
Speaker 2:And so I'm coming up to this poor young woman who's been yelled at. I'm just standing there, and so she's doing what she does and she sort of starts like okay, yeah, I'm just seeing if we can get a flight out to. What can we do here?
Speaker 3:And she's sort of like she has to readjust herself because she has to. It's like working with police officers they have to put their armor on because, of what they're dealing with. They're not safe and she's not safe.
Speaker 2:She can't be herself.
Speaker 3:And there are a lot of situations like that I find is that they're like in that experience in the restaurant and airport.
Speaker 2:I connected with a woman that served us.
Speaker 3:I don't know what she was 45 or something, but she was there.
Speaker 2:And then the people who were cooking. I looked back there and said I really love watching you guys cook and that's not a huge big thing, but it's at least something that brings some sense of I appreciate your sacrifice so I can have a decent meal whatever it is, but if we free ourselves up, of the things that we're thinking speaking and doing that are draining our energy. I think that's what naturally comes out.
Speaker 3:I really believe this notion that people are really genuinely loving.
Speaker 2:This is a loving species and somehow we're forgetting how to do that and that's just spooky to me and I see it deteriorating rapidly. We've been back in the country now about 11 years and I see it. It's different. People aren't as warm as they used to be. If I'm passing somebody in the Kroger I would say, excuse me. Most people these days have no response to that.
Speaker 3:And see if we go back to attachment issues, which you learned something about with relationships particularly. I want to mention her name would be Sue. Johnson.
Speaker 2:And there's anything. I've talked about here. I'm going to have some kind of reference on my website about it, but she shows a little video of a small child and the mother and the mother just goes stone-faced and the baby goes berserk.
Speaker 3:Can't stand it. And then you see a couple kind of acting out the same way. We've forgotten how to be open and we've forgotten how important it is to have an engaged face to say how are you doing and connect and say you know, welcome to our store.
Speaker 2:I had that at Costco, right where there is around here, and it's like the young woman and I said can I put this card on my phone? And she said need an app. I said I need an app, costco app. I said okay.
Speaker 3:But see, she's a zombie.
Speaker 2:She's not saying saw it in the hospital the other day doing some basic checkup stuff.
Speaker 3:That nurse did not take care of that man Lefty 83 years old.
Speaker 2:He's sort of walking around. She's walking away from him. You need to put him where he needs to be you need to pay attention to what you're doing and so because she's off, wherever she is, she's off wherever she's not used to focusing anymore yeah and being able to a lot of that little sidebar is about noticing the rewards where they exist. They are rich, wonderful rewards in being present and being open and allowing just the natural sense of concern and compassion to just. It's not. That's not work. That is not work.
Speaker 3:The work is getting the noise out of the way, so the true loving signal can come out.
Speaker 4:I love that you said that Tony and I we went on a date on Friday and it's been forever since we had gone on a date and we had a wonderful conversation with just the waiter and it ended up just very organic Me and this guy exchanged not weird, sounds weird.
Speaker 1:No, I get it, don't worry about it.
Speaker 4:Yeah, we exchanged information because I just started bringing up psychedelics and you know whatever, and we had just this beautiful conversation and a lot of the pressure I have felt has been to like show up in a certain way, be seen, be heard, because often growing up, I didn't feel seen or heard, and so Tony was watching this interaction and, like he was, like I just love watching you be yourself. And when you be yourself and just be you even if it's at a restaurant or wherever, like people love you. The right people love you.
Speaker 2:Wow, that's beautiful.
Speaker 4:And I was like, yeah, yeah, you're right. I always felt like I had to show up in a certain way on social media or whatever and get that attention. Where I'm now I'm, I'm having a better time integrating my last psilocybin journey, because I'm like, oh, so that's what you mean about just being?
Speaker 2:Being yeah, that's great. Stop trying to be. Yeah, that's what you mean.
Speaker 4:Ancestor, about just being. You don't have to try. You just be you and just you'll make the connections that way and you don't have to try so hard to be liked and be seen.
Speaker 2:And that's such a beautiful example, you see, of the wonder of a couple. Yeah, see, he didn't say I don't really like to sit here in a restaurant. I want you watch this guy try to pick you up.
Speaker 4:It wasn't that I swear. I know I swear. He was like he could be my grandpa.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm just saying've got this energy, but he's looking at you and he is seeing you.
Speaker 3:He is recognizing your authentic self and he tells you that yeah.
Speaker 2:So that's that support that I was talking about.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You're not nine years old or eight years old, and he's not either. Right Two functioning adults saying this is the woman I love, I care about, she's the heart of my life. And here's an opportunity to say wow, I just want you to know yeah, so wonderful to see you.
Speaker 4:Yeah, he always jokes that even though I didn't have a dad, I have a daddy now. So there you go Exactly.
Speaker 1:Who sees you?
Speaker 4:for who you are Exactly, yeah who sees you for who you are exactly yeah, so it's you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, that's some of the stuff we're talking about. Really, it's got like reparenting.
Speaker 4:Yes, it really is, yes and that's what we have conversations about. That and that is his joke. He's like listen, you didn't have a dad. You got a daddy.
Speaker 1:Now you're good and we have dr shaley and we have dr shaley he's.
Speaker 2:He comes in rambles about stuff all the time I love your rambles.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I appreciate it.
Speaker 1:I love my rambles too, so it's a little bit different when you're not like digging in on me I know yeah it doesn't feel as intimidating. I'm not crying it's not a therapy session.
Speaker 4:I'm like my mom and my dad did this.
Speaker 2:I'm feeling like a failure sitting here today, no tears happening.
Speaker 1:No tears happening. You didn't get to it. No, you got to it really well, just in a different way. We appreciate everything that you do. We send a lot of people your way. I don't know how many of them are brave enough to come, but anytime somebody reaches out to us about a journey or anything that they've had trouble integrating or setting an intention, we send them your way. We're like. You don't have to break up with your therapist, Just go see Dr Sheely.
Speaker 2:I appreciate that.
Speaker 1:He'll help you get on the right track. You helped us in so many ways helped our relationships and you're helping so many people Well. I appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Well, it's all a part of my own growth and my own healing to be able to do that. If I couldn't do that, then what would I be doing?
Speaker 1:What would you be doing?
Speaker 3:That's like maybe in the transition phase, yeah, find something that brings you alive because there's, there's there's more growing and more healing.
Speaker 2:I don't know if it ever stops. So till you die I don't even know about that part. I mean this there's some real interesting stuff out there about, or in here too, about opening up to spirit, and what is that. But I mean I don't, I don't mind, I just don't know what it is, but there seems to be some, some presence that, if we have experiences like we have with uh you know, sufficient dose of of different medicines, then it's like we, it's like it tunes in our, our ear, like someone who knows music and they'll say his guitar string's too loose or whatever and I'll sing.
Speaker 2:Then I thought that was a violin, so it's like. But people that know, know, and so if we know and start looking for that, oh, there's the spirit, there's the spirit of my authentic partner, there's the spirit of that five-year-old, there's the spirit of that 12-year-old. Because see, that's what's not being supported and fed Back to the question what's the advice?
Speaker 1:Find somebody that recognizes you, does that person have to also recognize themselves or be able to recognize themselves?
Speaker 2:Pretty difficult task, isn't it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it is.
Speaker 2:And they also have to be tuned in to what's important, but not about the distraction I mean it just makes me a little bit batty to see a young couple, young couple and and they're at the table and it's like you see them. I'm saying you people should be what you know you're missing. You're just missing such a wonderful time in your life Hormones going crazy being recognized, physical touch, sexual intimacy All this stuff is right there opening up and you're saying did you see this one? Take your phone and smash it with a hammer.
Speaker 1:Throw it away.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I'm about ready too.
Speaker 1:I think it would be really good to just go on like a phone break through the holidays the holidays really get to us, especially us and we're going into an election right now yeah, and it's you know, if you vote this way, right, try not to. So yeah, I say turn them off.
Speaker 2:That's a great idea.
Speaker 1:Put them away as much as you can. I know that I have. You know I've got schools calling me right now. So that type of stuff like I can't completely get rid of it, but just try to turn off a little bit more and be intentional about it. Intention to me is like huge.
Speaker 4:With everything. With everything with everything, psychedelics or not like.
Speaker 1:Listen, I know a soda is not good for me, but like I'm gonna have this soda and I'm gonna enjoy it on the weekend because I like the way it tastes. I know it's not good for me, but I'm gonna be intentional with it. Yeah, I like that. How can um'll put your? Is it okay to put your website? I love like the resources that you have like three or four books. Yeah, You've got, it's a. It's a full of resources.
Speaker 2:It's been there for a long time.
Speaker 1:So you always add to it oh yeah, okay, sure.
Speaker 2:Especially yeah, different things and this.
Speaker 3:Yeah, different things and just the form it takes too Like my website up until before psychedelics was all about mindfulness.
Speaker 2:Now it really looks like it's a vibe generator somewhere. And then also the resources are there too different.
Speaker 3:As.
Speaker 2:I present different things like attachment theory, somatic experiencing there's little sections of that in different ways.
Speaker 1:So even if people aren't lucky enough to get to meet you in person, you have so many resources.
Speaker 2:And then I'm still uh, offer like a 20 minute conversation to somebody if they want to, if we connect and we have a phone call or whatever.
Speaker 1:So I've sent so many people his way From high school who did like a call with you from like London, kentucky, all right, and I thought that was like so cool, because she was like it's okay that I can't do in person yeah, so obviously not dropping names but I was just like, oh my gosh, that's so cool. I went to high school with this person.
Speaker 2:That's great, and I do a lot of Zoom calls with people, yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh, you do, that's what she was doing.
Speaker 4:She was seeing him through Zoom. Okay, good to know. Yeah, good to know for our non-local listeners.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, yeah, Not all over the place.
Speaker 1:So here you guys go, the man, the myth, the legend.
Speaker 2:Da-da-da.
Speaker 1:One of our favorite people, Da-da-da yeah.
Speaker 2:And sort of an ongoing joke with my wife is I. And it's sort of an ongoing joke with my wife is I say, honey, the only thing wrong with me is my humility.
Speaker 1:I'm just too humble. Anything, any last statements you want to leave our listeners with, or us with, or anything I don't know.
Speaker 2:I think we covered a lot of stuff.
Speaker 1:We did, we did.
Speaker 2:That piece about finding practices that resonate with you that are moving you toward greater stillness wholeness and a deeper sense of your authentic being. There are all sorts of stuff out there that can be such a powerful thing to just recognize what is a distraction and what is an enriching, embodied experience of who you truly are. Figure that out, man, because if you don't, if we don't do that, we're lost really.
Speaker 1:And we're all just walking each other home.
Speaker 2:I love that.
Speaker 1:I love that. I love that Some Ram Dass, but I think it's like when someone figures it out you know, listen to them I think a lot of times we don't listen to other people. We think we got it all figured out. We don't ask for help.
Speaker 2:Well, you guys see Whether I watch. Go to. Yeah, she'll there, you go Whether.
Speaker 1:I watch. Go to that. Yeah, she'll help you out. All right To all our listeners. Thank you for listening. If you don't hear from me and Christine, or see us, we'll explain later. Well, but we have been taking a break and I'm sure you've noticed. But we're still here and we're good. We're good, we're just taking care of ourselves and our families and stay open, be curious and we'll see you on the other side, all right.
