Episode 5 – Hey! You got your plant medicine in my talk therapy! Ft. Dr. David Zwoboda

This guy was able to completely give up drinking, get off of all of his SSRIs, handle all of these anger issues. But there was still this thing inside of him, this rage that just bubbled up out of nowhere. And that was the final frontier that he had to cross. And he feels like he left that all behind in the jungle.

Welcome to Therapy Is My Therapy, a podcast where licensed counselor Olivia and unlicensed client Tanya delve deep into real and raw all conversations in order to demystify what really happens in that 50 minutes hour heads up. This podcast contains strong language and sensitive topics related to mental health.

Hey, everyone. This is Tanya, and today's conversation is with our first guest ever on the podcast, dr. David Swaboda. David is a doctor of physical therapy, a fellow jiu jitsu nerd, and now he's embarking on a journey to heal souls as a plant medicine facilitator down in Peru. Our conversation explore topics such as how plant medicine played a role in his own mental health journey and how talk therapy and plant medicine can work both separately and together in order to create lasting change. This conversation with David was so illuminating, and it was a blast to be able to listen to two experts talk shop on the subject of psyches. Enjoy the episode?

Yeah.

Olivia, you want to start this off as my brain hurts?

Yeah, sure.

So I think we figured we'd just start off by having you give us a little bit of an elevator speech. So just a short overview of who you are, what you do, all that kind of good stuff.

Sure. So, I'm David Zugoboda. I'm technically a doctor of physical therapy by training, worked in a clinic, started my own business doing PT for Grapplers, but still found that I wasn't quite helping people to the fullest extent that I was capable of. Along the way, I started working with plant medicines more and more, and I decided to double down on that, pretty much give up working in the physical realm, and get into teaching people how to work with plant medicine. So that has looked like microdosing programs to teach veterans and civilians how to work with microdosing psilocybin. It looks like organizing ayahuasca retreats in Peru, and now it looks like Jujitsu retreats that are blending holistic wellness, mindfulness spirituality with training jiu jitsu, both for civilians and in October, we actually have one that's just for veterans and first responders. So a kind of emphasis on handling things like PTSD, traumatic brain injury, anxiety, depression, through plant medicine, through holistic wellness, and, of course, through Jujitsu.

It seems like a lot of that transformation from traditional healing job to what you're doing now was largely informed by your own personal journey. So if you just want to talk a little bit about how that happened for you and how you've seen it work in your own life that led you to the point of wanting to help others with it.

I became a physical therapist because I wanted to help people, right? I wanted to help people heal. And then as I went down my own path, and you're completely correct, this evolution was really driven by my own evolution, my own path. With plant medicine. It kind of became apparent that plant medicines hold the key to healing a lot of shit that is broken in our modern society. They hold the key to helping people unlock this healing potential that a lot of modalities fall short of. Increasingly it just became apparent that I was the guy who stood at a crossroads to be able to connect people with this stuff. I have no intention of being like a shaman or something or like some white dude serving people ayahuasca I just see my role as someone who's uniquely suited to connect people to this stuff, and I've sort of embraced that. I have an ability to communicate about these things and introduce people to these things in a constructive way. Honestly. We sort of stumbled into doing much of what we do now. The jujitsu retreat that we put together, long story short, we had put down a non refundable deposit on this retreat center to do something completely different, and they all bailed out. So we were like, how can we pivot and do something else? I had always thought I would do jujitsu camps ten years down the line in the future, like when I'm a black belt. And my wife was like, maybe we should just do that now. And I was like, okay, same with the microdosing program. People were asking us for advice, and it quickly became apparent that it just wasn't serving people well enough. And so it evolved into this entire fleshed out three month structure that we put people through. So, yeah, all of this stuff was really just kind of a natural evolution. Things that I kind of, like I said, stumbled into that. I didn't quite set out to be this medicine man type of person, but the role that I see myself playing is like someone who connects people to these medicines and trying to do that, of course, with integrity, with respect for the medicine, with respect for the indigenous culture that it comes from, that's something that we take very seriously.

I think what you're talking about is really common for people in any kind of healing role, is that you usually don't set out to do anything other than heal yourself. And then you end up realizing, oh, there's all these people that want help and that could benefit from this, and then you kind of just fall into that role. And so I think that makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, I definitely agree with that. Any sort of coach or healer or mentor or whatever, the people that you work with are ultimately who you were before you figured it out for yourself. I've always been the kind of person, like, my motto is, like, if I've ever climbed two rungs higher than someone on a ladder, my first instinct is to turn around and pull you up with me. So you don't have to be at the end of your journey to be able to share things with other people. I think you do have to be living in integrity and actually putting the things you say into practice or else you're a fucking fraud. And especially the spiritual and plant medicine community is rife with that. Particularly.

Yeah. And obviously there's differences between talk therapy and plant medicine, but I think a lot of the similarity is that there's so much impostor syndrome. If I'm not this far along or if I haven't been doing it for this long, I can't do a good job. But I think a lot of at least what we learn is that you are the gift and you are what you're able to offer your clients or the people that you're working with. And so even how you said, oh, I didn't think I would do a jiu jitsu retreat until I had my black belt, and then through it just happening naturally, you were able to realize that you already had what you needed to offer.

Yeah, absolutely. That applies to everyone. That imposter syndrome, that feeling like, I can't do this until X thing occurs, I feel like that right there is what keeps so many people stuck in a very unhappy kind of way of living. It's almost making a contract with yourself to be unhappy or unsatisfied until some future thing happens that's outside of your control.

This is to the previous point, but I found that passage about the impostor syndrome to resonate with me because there are times where I feel very uncomfortable when people ask me for help or when they reach out to me and ask for guidance on things. And I struggled with that for a long time, but I realized that I came from it more as a training teammate or someone else who's in the trenches with you. They may be in a different spot than me, but like you said, I want to reach out and help them. And I find that social media and I guess the world today, there's a lot of emphasis on being an expert, but I feel there's also a great deal of importance with someone who is also going through something similar or has gone through. And so that is just my point in how, like you said, these self imposed limits can be very, very paralyzing, but it's about finding a way of doing it that feels authentic to who you are and where you are.

Yeah, and I think that the whole concept of, like you said, oh, it seems like an obvious thing, but I didn't realize it until I was using plant medicine of this idea that we are putting the limits on ourself. And I think that parallels a lot of what we see in therapy where when we're talking about things, it's not clicking in your body. And so there's a lot of therapeutic modalities like EMDR and brain spotting and where we're really starting to look into actually get your nervous system and your brain to believe these things.

I'm glad that you brought that up because this is exactly what I wanted to talk to you about, if I could steer the conversation towards anything. First of all, you're like the 11th person in the last week to mention EMDR to me. So clearly I need to figure out some more stuff about this from people I've talked to. It sounds like the only thing that's actually made a difference in how they feel. But what I wanted to bring up, what you just said of it's easy to hold these ideas, these sort of abstract ideas in our mind, but just like you said, these things don't necessarily click in our body where you can understand that a limit is self imposed. But then you're left with the question of how do I move past it? In my work now with this micro dosing program, especially among veterans, everyone that I work with has been through some form of talk therapy in the past and has more or less failed, for lack of a better term, to make substantial changes. And again, the EMDR is the one thing that people mention as making a difference. But in my experience so far, it's almost like therapy has I don't want to say it's made people worse, but what it's done, I think it can have a negative effect. For this reason, people become so self aware of the issues that they have, so self aware of why they are the way that they are, right? Like, they can trace it back to whatever thing in their childhood, whatever traumatic thing happened, but then they're still left with this question of what do I do about it? And now they're in this double jeopardy of understanding why they're fucked up but not being able to fix it. And then it makes them feel worse because they know why and they can't do anything about it. So they're almost victimizing themselves because of this awareness of it. And I see you nodding, so I'm glad that I'm not, like, offending you as a therapist by bringing this up. But just in my experience, it's been like a major shortcoming, at least among the biased sample of people that I interact with who are people who other stuff has failed for and so they're seeking my help.

Right? It's such a complicated topic. And you're right that that happens for a lot of people where talk therapy just makes you more aware of what has happened. And then you're like, now I just know that I have all of these fucked up things in my life and that's not making me not do them. It's just making me have more shame or more self hatred and things like that. So that definitely comes up. And I think a lot of recently, at least from what I've seen the last several years, talk therapy has been incorporating more and more mind body connection to help address that issue and really recognize, like I was saying, okay, how can we get your nervous system regulated so that these issues don't pop up the same way? I think a lot of it too is finding a collaborative approach, right? Because just talk therapy is often not going to be all that it takes for someone who has really complex trauma or who has had a lot of difficult experiences over their lifespan. I think it can be really effective for a lot of issues. But there's also people who come in with just so many different things that have experienced for so much of their life that they don't know what it feels like to be mentally healthy. I think a lot of it is like a relay race where you can collaborate with multiple providers of different modalities and it's just like, okay, you're passing the baton of I've had clients who started with talk therapy and then also while doing that, started using plant medicine and then had a similar experience of, okay, well, I've had this huge revelation. And it makes sense to me now, but I don't know how to integrate it properly in my life. And so then going from there to using talk therapy to work through how to integrate that process in a very structured way, everything can be combined of using EMDR and talk therapy or mindfulness or plant medicine and making the process interdisciplinary. What I see a lot is this competitive mindset of no, this is the only way to do it, or this is the right way, and if you do it this way, it's not going to last, and makes it often worse for the clients. And so I think the collaborative approach is something that I've seen a lot more recently that is making me feel way better about it. One approach just doesn't fit for everyone, especially when there's so many different issues that at least I see come up with clients.

Well, I definitely agree with you that any one thing is never going to be the answer to really anything, even with Ayahuasca as well. So the people who serve the medicine, they call themselves maestros in the lineage that I work with. This one guy was basically lamenting. The fact that so many Americans come to see him and sit in the jungle and then go right back to America, and he feels like they're actually wasting their time for the most part because they're going right back into their old lives, right back into the old patterns of behavior that made them sick in the first place. And so you bring up the integration piece, which is in plant medicine stuff. I kind of think of it in three phases preparation, the experience itself, and integration. And integration is really what makes changes in your life. The experience itself means nothing if you don't go and do anything differently. I would agree that talk therapy can be a great thing for that to unravel what the fuck you just experienced and figure out how to put those lessons into practice. I think without that, it can lead people down a destabilizing kind of path if you aren't able to make sense of that experience at all in your clinical practice. If you have experience with patients who have done their own plant medicine stuff, what that's been like for you to help them figure out that process?

Yeah, I've had a couple who have it's been a really interesting experience because a lot of times the concepts that they experienced during that are things that we had discussed prior in our sessions that they had a very hard time integrating. And I talk all the time in session with my clients about if you just work on this during the one time a week we meet, nothing is going to sustainably change. It needs to, like you talked about, be integrated into your life throughout the week. My role is to help make it easier for you to integrate those things, but I can't make sure that you're doing the other things throughout the week. And so that was a really interesting concept to notice. That something that we had talked about, that they had a really hard time actually applying in their life when they were able to use plant medicine. It jumpstarted that even though it was the same things we had talked about, they were more able to feel it in their body of how it was affecting change. And so, at least from the small caseload of experiences I've had with it, it's been really positive.

Tanya, I'm going to say one more thing and then I'll let you talk because I see you squirming with the silence over there. But Olivia, in my mind, I talked about the preparation, experience, integration. That's sort of the best way that I see the talk therapy to integrate with the plant medicine stuff is in that preparation phase, getting clarity on what issues you have, basically. And as I'm going down to Peru to do Ayahuasca, we talk about intentions and intention setting, I think it's particularly important with Ayahuasca, but it plays a role in any psychedelic experience and you need to get clarity basically on what issues you have so that you know what to ask for help with. And we see that with a lot of the people that we work with where we can make a lot of progress just with the therapeutic stuff that we do with the micro dosing leading up to it. But then they're still left with these things that they know what's wrong, but they haven't been able to actually implement a change in their life. And it's like, this is the one final thing that I'm going to really ask Mother Ayahuasca for help with and then be able to come home and ideally put that into practice. And I went down a few months ago with a couple of Canadian veterans, and that was one of the most profound shifts I've experienced, is this guy was able to completely give up drinking, get off of all of his SSRIs, handle all of these anger issues. But there was still this thing inside of him, this rage that just bubbled up out of nowhere. That was the final frontier that he had to cross. And he feels like he left that all behind in the jungle. So I definitely think that kind of merging of these things, the talk therapy to get clarity on it, and then the plant medicine to instill it into your body, and then the talk therapy to solidify those changes, I think that's like the best way possible to integrate those two. And I will stop rambling and let Tanya ramble.

Now, you know me. I love a good rambling. When I listened to you discuss the shortcomings and the benefits of each modality and how they could really integrate with one another, while the science is very out on it, dry needling for myself has been a very effective modality in dealing with muscle tension. And I was listening to an episode of a podcast called Bendy Bodies, and they said that dry needling is like control alt delete for your muscle. It's a very hard reset. However, it is not effective long term unless you are able to address the underlying issues. And I feel that plant medicine, there are some parallels within that because I'm not as well versed on the science. So I imagine there are things like neurogenesis and lasting effects when it comes to psilocybin and other psychedelic therapies. But this hard reset, I feel it can really only truly be effective with long term maintenance of long term action and self reflection. That's my initial take on it.

So the control alt delete analogy, as a physical therapist, I actually think that's a good one for the dry needling. And I would agree to an extent that that sort of hard reset is what's occurring definitely with a breakthrough psilocybin experience to a degree. An MDMA experience in like, a ceremonial setting, ayahuasca has a little bit of a unique flavor because this is going to sound crazy to hard science people, but it's an intelligent entity with which you communicate, and there's like a two way communication there. I know that sounds weird, but it's been my experience. So kind of on like the neuroscience side, what a large dose of any psychedelic is doing. There's a circuit in your brain called the default mode network that's sort of the background operating system of your brain telling you who you are, your relationship to the rest of the universe. Telling that story that's going on at all times about who you are and how the world works simplifying things here. But when we're on psychedelics, that network is down regulated substantially and it allows processing to occur in your brain that normally would only flow through this one network. All this processing gets routed through various other pathways in your brain. And that's part of the reason why certain people can experience synesthesia on hallucinogenics where you would smell a color or something like that, because these pathways are normally not working together, but now they are. And so that experience that downregulation of the default mode network, it can shut down whatever fixed story you've been telling yourself. And I feel like anxiety and depression are kind of on this end of the spectrum that's related to too fixed of a worldview and too fixed of a story about yourself. So by down regulating the default mode network, we create an opportunity to experience some new story. Some story where your past is actually okay, or where those traumatic things that happened to you are not paired with fear in the present or where we're not fearful and anxious about outcomes of things in the future. So Tanya yes, I like that control alt delete analogy and I think there is a backing neuroscientifically for how psychedelics affect that.

It's really interesting the way that that process works, because we have something similar in talk therapy that is called narrative therapy, and the idea is the same, but it's more on a cognitive level than necessarily, like, deeply embedded in you of how often we get stuck in these narratives about our life that people are bad. I'm always going to get hurt. The trauma that I've experienced is going to happen again and again. And so the process of that theory is working to rewrite your story so that the things that have happened to you are not holding the same level of power and are not informing the way that you approach your current life. And so I think that's something that has worked really well when you also combine it with some of the more bodily modalities like EMDR and things like that. So I imagine that's a process that would be a really good fit for what you're talking about, of hard reset and adding in how you can rewrite your story to be more functional.

Yeah. So that process of rewriting the story of who you are, to me, that's what all of healing has been about for any issue that I've encountered with any person. It all comes down to the story that we tell ourselves about the way things are or about the way that we are. And I feel like all of these things are really just attempts to rewrite that story in your mind, but then perhaps even more importantly, get that story, that new story, to feel true within your body so one of the things in our micro Dosing program that we work with is affirmations. And I feel like affirmations are something that's easy to roll your eyes at because it's like, I affirm that I will be a millionaire. Where most people go wrong is they choose an affirmation that doesn't feel true. So if I'm trying to tell myself every day, like, I am someone who's worthy of being loved, but then that voice in my head is like, no you're not. You're a fucking worthless piece of shit. What are you talking about? That's not going to work because it's not crossing that gap of feeling true. So I tell people to sort of lower the bar with their affirmations and say, every day I am learning to love myself a little bit more, or Every day I become more worthy of love, or Every day I feel more worthy. So the voice in your head can't say no to that because you're like, well, I am trying to today. So it's like almost too much of a gap to bridge. It doesn't work. And maybe that's where just the talk therapy alone falls short, where it doesn't instill that feeling into people. I am curious to hear more about how you do bridge that gap. You don't have to get into all the clinical stuff of EMDR, but if you could give a rundown of what that looks like or any other sort of like embodiment practice that you do.

I'm curious a lot of what you're talking about with the affirmations and that the very critical voice that you hear in your head that makes it hard for those to feel true is something called internal family systems. So it's basically inner child work, but to the extent of the theory believes that we have these parts of ourselves that present as different voices in our head. A lot of times issues come up when our adult self blends with those younger voices. I do that a lot with clients of working through, okay, when you're hearing this critical voice, when you try to say, I want to love myself, or I do love myself, and you hear a voice that's saying, no, you're not worthy, you're never going to be worthy, people aren't going to want you, things like that. It's figuring out where that voice comes from and recognizing that it's usually a younger part of yourself that was exiled or that was put into a role that it shouldn't have been in. And so that's something that I find really helpful, especially with clients who had childhood trauma or things like that. And that is something that I found to be really effective with clients of recognizing that that's not necessarily your voice that you're hearing. Obviously it's not the same as what you're talking about of really integrating it more bodily. But it's something that I've seen a lot more effectiveness with than some traditional ways of doing affirmations. It sounds kind of similar of the process of starting smaller with not necessarily being like, okay, I love myself, everything's fine now.

Is that similar to like parts work?

Yeah.

So that's the overarching theory of parts work.

Part of this program is also a series of journaling prompts to get insight into where that stuff is coming from. And the prompts look different for different people. But we've definitely found the process of journaling is paramount to making changes with the microdosing. I almost feel like we're uncovering similar kind of stuff, maybe with different language, but where is that voice coming from? Where does that belief come from? Why is that voice there? How can we overcome that voice and sort of win it around to see our point of view that I am a person worthy of love? So I feel like there's a lot of similarities.

I'm going to pipe up because while I may not be an expert in either plant medicine or therapy, I am in the unique position of being a longtime client of modalities such as Ifs and doing psychedelics. Not well, as David has noticed to his consternation. We'll talk on that more. But I have found actually, I just made the link when you were discussing parts work and using plant medicine, because I have had instances where I've taken psilocybin or edibles and have had that default mode network turned off. And I feel not entirely like I'm someone else, but I'm experiencing memories, but really disconnected in the sense of I'm not being emotionally overwhelmed by said experience. I am watching a child self go through this experience and in therapy that is actually what we have done. I've really found success with how my therapist Catherine has started using Ifs with me and regarding these emotions or these voices or behaviors as parts within me. When I disconnect from me and I see a child having a hard time with something, it is so much easier for me to extend that level of compassion and patience with her than I would with myself.

It's so cool to see the underlying similarities of two different ways of doing things. And I think that's a big key to creating more healing for people is recognizing, like we talked about earlier, that it doesn't need to be one or another. It can be both, it can be at least educating yourself on what both look like. And that's part of why we're doing this is really making people see deeper into what the process is rather than just viewing the misconceptions. And I think a lot of times these things get weaponized of if someone has any issue, people will yell at them, well you need therapy. Or if someone says that they're struggling with trauma or something, there will be people who say, well, you just need to do psychedelics. And it's like it's talked about in this very casual way. And so being able to actually talk about. What it looks like is important, I think.

Not just that they can complement each other at the same time, but also recognize that the path that a human being is on spans a very long time, right? Like 80 years or so, give or take. And so we've turned away a good number of people who want to come do ayahuasca with us or wanted to do like a mushroom ceremony with us because we have a pretty rigorous intake and kind of safety assessment and it's not the right thing for a lot of people a lot of the time. Doesn't mean it always will be the wrong thing. But we had one woman who wanted to come do ayahuasca with us and we just determined she was not in a good place mentally. I wasn't confident that she wouldn't have a mental breakdown and not be able to put herself back together. So the answer to her was no. And usually those kind of people, they tend to not take that answer very well because they're eagerly seeking something and it's like that's the exact reason this isn't for you right now. And we referred her to a therapist in her area in Florida and she worked in therapy for about a year and then came back, was grateful that we said no to her, underwent some microdosing kind of on her own and maybe she'll come back and do ayahuasca with us in the future. But I think it's important to recognize that psychedelics might be the answer for you, but the time might not be right now. If you already have a tenuous grasp on reality, you shouldn't dive off the deep end of that. I think talk therapy can also just help with that preparation piece of untangling, this web of trauma that you have and getting some clarity on where the actual work lies. And Tanya, it sounds like that was kind of your experience where the talk therapy, the parts work, it helped you to get clarity on what part of you needed this help and where these issues were arising from and then psychedelics were able to help you really put that into practice. I don't know if I'm off base.

With that, but no, you're quite correct. And as someone who has done psychedelics when my grasp on reality was tenuous at best, I did them recreationally and that didn't end well. And I stayed away from them for a long time and I'm glad I did because they weren't for me and they would not have been right for me until I was able to go to therapy and build a good foundation as to what the issues were. And for me, I found that was really beneficial to me in regards to talk therapy is for me, Catherine was great in normalizing, just normalizing, a lot of things, not downplaying it because I'd have suicidal ideation or I would have episodes that I suppose are bordering on psychosis or severe dissociation or PTSD flashbacks. And oftentimes my response and my conditioned response to those episodes or those occurrences exacerbated what was actually happening. So, say, with a suicidal ideation, I went, oh my gosh, I'm having this thought in my head, time to freak the fuck out. I have to fix this, I have to fix this, there's something wrong with me. Whereas over time, she had taught me, in my case, there are people who are genuine risk to themselves and need to be cared for accordingly. But in my case, she started nudging me towards the notion that perhaps this is a symptom or this is a warning sign of something else. It's not simply that you wish to end your life, is that something is really hurting you and it's okay right now to feel this way. Obviously we want you to stay safe, but where you are is okay. And with all that work, then I was able to not freak out when I did start experimenting with psychedelics. Because if I still had that very charged, very trigger happy attitude towards any emotions that I thought were problematic, it would have been a terrible, terrible time for me.

Yeah, I mean, that's a perfect example of effectively preparing for a psychedelic experience. And then I said, prepare, experience, integrate. Right? So the experience part also entails having the tools to be able to navigate that space safely and you're never going to really have control over what's happening. That's kind of the whole point of psychedelics, is that you're surrendering that control, ideally, but the one thing you always do have control over is how you react to things and at the very least, just your breathing pattern. So having some experience in meditation or in breath work or in just not freaking out when things get uncomfortable, aka jujitsu. I think that that goes a long way in helping somebody navigate a very challenging psychedelic experience. Because it's easy, right, when everything's sunshine and rainbows, but then when you're seeing demons that are telling you to kill yourself and you're tripping, what do you do then? So that's why having some tools is very important.

And if I may segue, this is a question for both of you, because I would love to see the similarities and divergences of what happens when someone is having a terrible, terrible time. I've had full blown PTSD flashbacks or trauma responses in the office, and in one episode I discussed what my therapist did and how she got me back into my body. And David, I would love to hear what the maestros have, what lessons and what methods they've distilled over millennia, honestly. And where that converges and where that diverges with Western talk therapy.

The answer from the lens of the maestros will be a little bit different because we're entering a question of the cosmology and worldview of the shapebo indigenous people in Peru. And on a practical answer to that question, how do they handle those kinds of things as they occur? The entire idea, especially of an Ayahuasca ceremony is that we have gone to this other place, gone to another country. We're in the jungle. We're in the ceremonial building called a maloka. We are setting this time aside for a ceremony. Whatever comes up during the ceremony, it's supposed to come up. It's supposed to happen and pass through you, and you're supposed to just let the experience occur, trusting that you will be safe on the other side of it. That's the entire role of the maloka, this ceremonial space, it's a safe setting. That's the entire role of the Maestros. And everything that we're doing down there is creating this space for whatever to occur, to occur, and to sort of trust that we're going to land back safely. My decision making tree is pretty simple of is their life in danger? If the answer is no, I don't really have to do anything. The most I'll do is just sit next to them and breathe calmly and maybe they can sync their breathing up to mine. So that's kind of my role and a sort of practical answer. And then on the spiritual or cosmological side of things, the shapebo Maestros, so they sing these songs called ikoros, which is their way of communicating with the medicine. So when you drink the Ayahuasca, the medicine is inside of you, and they sing these ikaros to you to activate the medicine and to work with it, to do basically whatever it needs to do. So that's one thing that they're doing. They're also smoking tobacco and using this stuff called Agua de Florida. Basically, the idea is to banish all the negative energies and dispel evil forces that are around you. So that's all a little bit more on, like the spiritual, out there end of the spectrum, which we can definitely get more into, I don't know the flavor of this podcast. How out there you guys try to get?

Let's get weird. We can get weird. But first, Olivia, before we get weird.

Yeah. And once again, it's interesting because the role you talk about playing when someone is having that experience is very similar to the role that I would be playing if a client is presenting with suicidal ideation in session. And of reaching that kind of crisis point is that I'm assessing if they are physically at risk of harming themselves or someone else. If they are not saying that they have a plan to act on it immediately and that they don't feel safe. I'm not allowed to call the hospital or send them out to crisis. So my role, unless that is the case, is to do exactly what you were saying and sit with them and co regulate and keep myself calm and keep my breathing regulated so that they're able to come back to that state and making it so that they recognize that the feeling that they're experiencing is going to pass. Even though it feels like it's unbearable and that it's going to last forever, it isn't. And that I can sit with them and hold space for that big terrifying thing that they're experiencing. And it's really cool that it's very similar. But that's been my experience of clients who have been in those crisis states, is that it feels never ending. And I'm able to just sit with them until it passes and use that as a learning experience of if this happens again in the future, you have proof that it will fade.

Yeah, definitely. Some similarities in terms of feeling like it will never end, but then ultimately it passes.

Okay, you have permission to get weird now.

Well, where would you like to start?

I would love to hear you get into the more spiritual aspects because although many may think that therapy is very, very strict and it comes to hard science, I mean, Jung would have something to say about that.

I guess we can start talking about Ayahuasca and then bring some of that back to the conversation at large. But I feel like Ayahuasca is such a different thing. It really highlights these aspects. So in the Amazon rainforest, it's the most biodiverse place on the planet. There's tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of different species of plants. There are precisely two plants that when put together, creates a psychedelic effect. Either of those plants in isolation does nothing. So the Ayahuasca vine actually contains an Mao inhibitor and the chakruna leaf contains DMT. So we have to smoke DMT. That's why you hear Joe Rogan smoking DMT, because if you just eat the DMT, your stomach breaks it down immediately because of this thing called monoamine oxidase. The Ayahuasca vine has a monoamine oxidase inhibitor which allows the DMT to be orally activated. 5000 years ago in the jungle, they didn't know anything about neurochemistry and things like that. So how the fuck did they figure out that these two plants, you put them together and it allows you to trip like that? It's a mystery currently unsolved by modern science. If you ask them, they would shrug and give you a very simple answer of oh yeah, the plants taught us. So to them, plants have a spirit, plants have an intelligence, specifically master plants are a subset of plants who kind of have the strongest spirit or the most to teach us. But so, just from the origin story alone of Ayahuasca, we're met with this spiritual world that we don't have access to in our normal everyday life or our average everyday awareness. And that's where Ayahuasca comes from, is being taught by the plants how it even came to be the maestros. They would tell you that a Western doctor has a scalpel and a stethoscope and that's how they heal people. Those are their tools. And an Ayahuasca shaman has their tobacco pipe and they have agua de Florida, which is this extract that's made of different plants. So it's just this alcohol extract. And to them, the tobacco smoke is what clears away any sort of negative force or any negative energy or entity that's been attached to you. When you're in a ceremony, they're blowing tobacco smoke on you. They're smoking this tobacco pipe and blowing the smoke on your head, blowing it all over your body. To them, the tobacco smoke removes those negative spirits. And in terms of what I've been learning and taking back from these people, I smoke a lot of tobacco now. And we just did these jujitsu retreats where one of the things that we did was a holotropic breath work session. And during that ceremony, I was smoking my tobacco pipe. Anytime that somebody seemed like they had some really big emotions coming up, whether it seemed like they were right on the verge of actually breaking through and experienced something or they were in the middle of an experience and it seemed really challenging. Just like my Maestros do. I would sit right at the crown of their head and smoke the tobacco and blow it over their body. And I swear to God, it elicits something in people. It elicits a breakthrough in people who are on the verge of it. It elicits a release of people who are really struggling, and you can tell that they're not quite letting go of everything. Do I have empirical evidence of that? No. Do I have my experience of being in a room full of twelve jujitsu guys sobbing and crying and screaming and me knowing that lowing tobacco smoke on them was actually aiding that process and allowing them to have a more healing experience? I definitely think so. So that's been one of the biggest things for me that I've taken from that, is working with the tobacco and the spirit of the tobacco plant.

I love hearing about these stories. And I have been starting to form this nascent theory where Western society is exceptionally removed from ritual. That is obvious, but especially with the substances alcohol, tobacco. We say these things are bad for us and obviously there are adverse health effects. But I feel that the sacred nature of them and the ritual and the context of what they are, what they do, what they are meant to do has been lost for us north Americans. And when you describe this tobacco facilitating a person's experience, there is a context to the tobacco, there is an intent that we've applied or that we have learned, and when you have that, then it is easier for that person to reach that breakthrough. That's all I wanted to say. Olivia, if you have anything you want.

To say when you were talking about not really having hard evidence for the impact of the tobacco smoke, I think in psychology we know our senses can activate visceral memories and deeply impactful moments and smells, tastes, all of that makes total sense. So regardless of being able to figure out the exact specific reason for it, it seems obvious that that would create an impact based on the long history of what they seem to have experience within it.

And honestly, sometimes unweaving the rainbow is not you lose something out of it. When you have distilled it and make nicotine, then it doesn't serve what it originally has for, again, millennia. So. Yeah, go ahead, David.

Absolutely. Even the species of tobacco that we use, it's called Nicotine rustica. It's almost like how bananas have been genetically modified over time for commercial purposes. The tobacco that's in a cigarette is barely even the same plant as this type of tobacco. And, Olivia, you mentioned the power of smell, and one of the other elements that we worked with at this jujitsu retreat was a tamaskal. So it's an indigenous Mexican practice of this sweat lodge ceremony. And the idea is that there's four different rounds. Each one is dedicated to one of the cardinal directions, and each one of those cardinal directions is associated with a different deity, which is associated with a different sort of energy of the human spirit. Just the smell elicits part of the emotional reaction and the spiritual encounter that you're having in the tamiskal, something that.

I hear people talk about a lot with spirituality of I can't prove it, so I don't know. And I think exactly what you're talking about, even if there's no way to prove it, it was an experience that felt real to you and that impacted you deeply. And so I feel like that's all that needs to exist for it to.

Be proof, and it's also what you do with it. Olivia, if you have any questions.

The only question I had is you talk a lot about the way that you do it and how connected it is to the roots of where it came from, the cultures that really found this stuff, and talking about the intake process that you do and how you make sure that it is ethical. I guess just any thoughts you have on what that process is for you or figuring out how to make it ethical and also communicate and be in tune with the cultures that created it and not just turning it into a western thing.

I'm glad you bring that up, because it is a huge problem in the landscape of these things now, especially because there's so much money to be made now that things are becoming legalized. It's kind of two questions of the safety aspect and then the honoring indigenous practices. The safety stuff for me was always at the forefront because of my background as a physical therapist. So there's always the informed consent process. There's always that decision making process of inherent risks in any modality that you're choosing, and considering contraindications to things, contraindications to prescribing medications, or understanding how things can interplay with each other and there is a very real risk of things like Serotonin syndrome occurring if someone's on SSRIs and they go and do Ayahuasca. So certain things like that, just from a health and safety perspective, have to be taken into account. And then the other aspect, kind of the honoring or respecting indigenous cultures historically, especially in the Amazon, like, if you look at what has happened to the Amazon rainforest, we have raped the rainforest for its resources, and we have massacred its people to plant freaking banana trees. So it is important to me that we don't continue that process. So the people that run this retreat center, they own the land where their family has lived there for generations. They are cultivating the medicine right there. Not just that, but they're replanting entire fields that had been cleared right on the edge of the rainforest. The one guy, Maestro Noe, he has a soft spot for orphan children, and he has this whole vision of planting this entire grove of medicinal plants and then starting an orphanage to teach children how to cultivate those plants and use them medicinally because they have a natural remedy for everything. No matter what's wrong, they know how to fix it. But they're even losing that knowledge, that cultural history, because it's really untenable for most people in these communities to make a living the way that their ancestors did. They've found a way through serving Ayahuasca, to support their family, to keep their cultural traditions alive. One last thing. It's important not to have the hubris and ego to think, oh, I've done it a few times, so now I'm qualified to serve it. That would be like if I watched an open heart surgery once, and I was like, yeah, I can do that. I recognize how small my role is of connecting people to this and facilitating the ceremonies and translating for the maestros, because they only speak Shapeibo and Spanish. So, yeah, honoring that culture is everything.

I am seeing a lot of shamans, quote unquote, in New York lofts doing all sorts of ceremonies, and I feel it's important for listeners to understand what to look out for. So one of my questions was, so there's this novella that I read called Six of the Dusk, and the protagonist, he has this feather that was a symbol of his first rookie mistake that almost cost him his life. And I was wondering, what was your feather? And it could be for Olivia, too.

Yeah, olivia, feel free to go first. I need to ponder that for a second. That's a good question, Tanya.

I don't ask easy questions.

For me, it was something that I knew logically but wasn't practicing. It was a very incongruent part of my life that I don't think it clicked for me until during my grad program, I went to india for two weeks as part of a transformational trip to see how immersing yourself in another culture would impact your journey. As a counselor. And something that I had known before but wasn't practicing, is that you can't do anything for anyone else, and you have to meet people where they're at. Sometimes that means you are going to go it alone and it means that you cannot take control of anyone else's journey and even in your own way, you can't really control a lot of your own journey. Exactly what you were talking about earlier. Of the only thing you can control is how you react to things and how you show up when people and situations are what they are. And so I think that is something that was a big moment that if I hadn't had that, I don't know how effective I would be as a therapist.

Kind of on a similar vein, the way that I see our role is being a mirror for people to shine a light on things that are out of alignment for them. And that means that things must be in alignment for you. As you get better at that, it's just a process of polishing that mirror more and more. And going back to my first clinic job actually as a physical therapist, there was a woman who was coming in to get treated and I wasn't even her primary PT, but we became friends. And then when I left and went out and did my own thing, she became one of my first clients for sort of personal training. And she was part of my whole evolution of going from just prescribing exercises to teaching her mindfulness and affirmations and trying to work on her anxiety and depression and body image issues and stuff like that. I sort of started us off on the wrong foot because I was not a perfectly polished mirror back then. And one of the reasons I went to do Ayahuasca was to change my behavior and romantic relationships. And so this was a person, like I said, not my patient, but I was definitely hitting on her when she was in our clinic and that opened the door to some very unprofessional sorts of behaviors and encounters with her and her saying some things to me that crossed boundaries. And it's this really muddied relationship where I was figuring out how to even do this kind of work for the first time in terms of supporting her. And lines just got way too blurred between the personal friendship, professional relationship and what became her romantic interest in me, which I probably opened the door for from the very beginning. It's not something that's an issue anymore. I of course don't engage in that kind of shit now and I figured out how to do this a lot better. But that was definitely one of those lessons for me that if you are going to be doing this kind of work, not that you have to be perfect, but you have to be in perfect integrity and in perfect alignment with what you know to be right. And any sort of slipping from that is just opening the door to negative encounters happening.

Damn, that was amazing from both of you. That's very cool. My final thoughts on this would be it's been just utterly fascinating listening to where plant medicine once again converges and diverges. And the common theme is brains are complicated, bodies are complicated, souls infinitely more complicated. And for people to think that there's going to be a weekend seminar or a silver bullet, that's not going to be the case. So I would love to hear your.

Guys'Closing remarks again, it was so enlightening to really learn more about where it all originates culturally and just in general, how the process actually looks. So if there are any resources that you would guide people to, sure, I'll.

Give the self serving answer first. I have a podcast called The Way Broadly, where I do actually have a lot of episodes detailing this stuff. So there is a ton of background info on Ayahuasca and microdosing there. Our website, Becomingome.com has a ton of info. And then the other resource I always point people to, for veterans specifically is the Heroic Hearts Project. Their entire mission is to sponsor veterans to go and do Ayahuasca, and they also put an emphasis on the preparation and integration process. They have integration coaches that you can work with, and they're doing spectacular work in this stuff. So if that veteran tag applies to you, that's definitely a place to check out. And then yeah, Tanya, I think that you wrapped up everything pretty well there. I appreciate getting to talk with you, Olivia, and hearing your perspectives. It honestly was a little bit encouraging to me actually hearing from you, because I think I've had a pretty negative view of most talk therapy modalities. But yeah, I think the moral of the story here is that healing occurs by changing the beliefs that you hold about yourself even further than that, finding a way to instill that as a feeling in your body instead of an idea in your head, and that talk therapy can be one modality to get us there. Plant medicine can be a modality, especially to hit that angle of putting it into your body as a feeling. But then again, the talk therapy helping to prepare and integrate after that experience, I think can work together nicely. So who knows, maybe we can work together a little bit more in the future.

Yay. I like that we got at least one person to soften their stance on talk therapy because that means we're doing our job well.

Cool. Thanks for letting me talk about this stuff, guys. I appreciate it.

And that concludes this episode of therapy is my therapy. If you enjoyed today's episode, please consider subscribing so you never miss an update. Once again, thanks for tuning in. The content discussed on this podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only and does not act as a replacement for therapy. Although we may share tools that have worked for us and talk about symptoms that we've experienced, it is not meant to be used for diagnostic purposes and does not constitute medical advice.