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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
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And I’ll bet that you probably thought I forgot about you.
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Well, I’ve been busy.
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But here are some fellow salonners who weren’t too busy to make a donation to help offset some of the expenses here in the salon over the past few weeks.
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And these generous souls are…
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And these generous souls are Cohen H., Brian B., Josh F., Stretch Films, Sassadar M., and longtime salonner Marjean M., who I should add that over the years, Marjean has become our largest single donor here in the salon.
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And I would like to add one more thing that Marjean has done for me.
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She’s helped me relax a bit.
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You see, like most of our donors, I’ve never met Marjean.
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And yet when her letter arrived with a check in it, my first thought was,
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oh my gosh, I haven’t done a podcast in over a week and there are all these donors that I want to thank.
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I can’t believe I’ve been so lazy getting a new program out.
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these donors that I want to thank. I can’t believe I’ve been so lazy getting a new program out.
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You see, I’m working on two new books right now that I plan on publishing later this year.
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One of them is what I’m thinking of as a post-modern kind of autobiography, and the other is a collection of some of the short stories and essays that I’ve written over the years but
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have never published. And for what it’s worth, my plan is to release both of
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those books in the public domain with only an attribution required. And while they will be
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available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle formats, well, I’m also going to post PDF copies
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that you can download and print for yourself or give copies away to friends if you want.
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Anyway, as I was working on my book of short stories,
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well, I came up with a really great way to tell a story
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that’s kind of been lurking in the back of my mind for a long time now.
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I’ve just never gotten around to writing it.
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However, now that all of the main characters in this story are long departed,
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I shouldn’t laugh at that, I guess,
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but since I really came up with a funny way of telling this story also, I’m sorry. And I thought, wow, if Marjean is okay with me just goofing off, well, then she certainly wouldn’t care if I took another few days off to get my new story into some kind of a comfortable place to leave it for a bit.
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So thanks, Marjean, both for your very generous donations over the years, and also for understanding that us ex-Catholics sometimes need to be reminded that, well, it’s okay to follow our bliss every once in a while.
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And, of course, my sincere thanks also go out to Cohn, Brian, Josh, Stretch Films, and Satishar
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for their recent donations as well.
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Well, now that I’ve got that off my chest, let’s get on with the show.
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Well, now that I’ve got that off my chest, let’s get on with the show.
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We’ve got a really interesting program today as our regular contributor, Shauna Holm, sent me a recording of a conversation that she recently had with Catherine Coder, who has written a much-needed book for our community. one of the recent psychedelic stories at the Symposia Team podcast in our Salon 2 series,
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they pointed out the importance of integrating our medicine, our psychedelic medicine, in
00:03:51 ►
ways that can make some important impact on our lives.
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But rather than have me tell you about Catherine, let me pass the mic on to Shauna right now
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and she can tell us a little bit more about Catherine’s work.
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Hey everybody, this is Shauna right now and she can tell us a little bit more about Catherine’s work. Hey everybody, this is Shauna Holm and I have not been on the salon for a while now, several
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months busy with my own projects, but I am so happy today because I have a really amazing woman for you. Her name is Catherine Coder, PhD, and I happen
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to know her personally. And she has a book out that we’re going to discuss. And she is quite
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the medicine woman. Let me just read her bio for you here. Dr. Catherine Coder is a transpersonal
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psychologist working
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through elemental medicine, one-on-one meetings, and group trainings. She invites people to realize
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and express their full humanness to themselves in relationship and in community. Dr. Kat’s
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specialties include trauma resolution, healing shame, relationship healing, cultivating the deep feminine, ceremony, and
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one-on-one client work for those looking for a deeper connection to themselves and their
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world.
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Her transformative work connects body, mind, and spirit to allow people to integrate at
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a profound level and live from their true essence.
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So she has a new book titled After the Ceremony Ends, a companion guide to help you integrate visionary plant medicine experiences.
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And I read this book. It is very relevant, very essential.
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And so, Catherine, welcome.
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Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
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Oh, yeah.
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I’m so excited.
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Yeah, yeah, me too. I can’t, I’m really looking forward to hearing you discuss.
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I have got a lot of notes here and questions.
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So, and this is all about integrating the visionary experience.
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And so let’s start with that.
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What is visionary medicine integration to you?
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Well, this is a huge topic of consideration for me personally
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after going through so much of my training in transpersonal psychology
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and working with clients in a more, let’s say,
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traditional format and the therapeutic context, and then diving into my own plant work for years,
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and then actually leading plant medicine ceremonies for about a year, and then working
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with clients all across the spectrum, those going into plant work, those coming out of plant work, helping people inside ceremony, outside ceremony.
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And, of course, then all of my own personal work with Visionary Plant Medicine.
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And so integration was an idea that I came into literally because I was stuck.
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And I felt that I had hit a wall with my visionary plant medicine personal work.
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And I was trying to figure out how to get myself unstuck.
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to get myself unstuck. And in that process, I realized, you know,
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as many people as had told me or had implied to me shamans and otherwise, you know, medicine people and otherwise, that the visionary plants will just do the healing work for you. You just show up.
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I don’t mean to dismiss or discount people’s level of earnestness and devotion to this ceremonial container and process because I had that myself.
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but the idea was that if I just showed up in ceremony and sat there and participated fully in this process as much as I could then the plants would basically do the work of my healing
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I had to engage but really the heavy lifting would be up to them. And what I found after years of that kind of practice was
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that that just wasn’t really true. So there was an entire process of what I call integration of,
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of me actually taking the initiative and working with material that was coming up in ceremonial contexts and afterwards,
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and working with different healers, working with myself, working with my spiritual practices,
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working with the elements to help move that material that was coming up in ceremony.
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So ceremony didn’t just heal everything by itself.
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I had to participate after ceremony to help shift certain patterns and structures and my personality.
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and that was and has been, because I’ve now been in a very strong integration container for about two years,
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that’s been a lengthy process, and I feel like it is a lifelong process to take the insights, the revelations, the understandings from ceremony, and actually live them in my daily life,
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walking essentially, walking the path, but walking the teachings, if that makes sense.
00:09:59 ►
Yes.
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The plants offered me the teachings, and they offered me revelations, but it was my job to walk those
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into my, in my daily life, minute by minute, hour by hour, you know, I, you know, for the rest of
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my life. And I had to show up and have had to show up very powerfully to do that. And so this process for me is all integration.
00:10:29 ►
So literally, in short, taking the teachings and revelations
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and understandings from the visionary plant medicine work
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and living into them on a day-to-day basis is what I would call integration.
00:10:47 ►
Okay, great. That’s a great answer.
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And you have really more than covered this process in your book,
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and so we’re going to delve into some of that today.
00:10:56 ►
In your book, you state that you are biased against the individual use of visionary substances,
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and so I would like you to expand on
00:11:07 ►
that. I’d love to say more about that. Yeah. Sure. Because that that certainly would be a
00:11:14 ►
controversial thing to say. That’s why I asked it. Right. Juicy. So in my experience, and there is, you know, in my book, I do talk about there being a caveat. So I’ll just name the caveat. I know that there are practitioners of visionary plant medicine out there that have trained and studied for years with master teachers and had, you know, sometimes decades of guidance working with plants.
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And I could imagine that those types of practitioners could initiate solo journeys
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and have the level of containment and protection that’s required for this work be present.
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I think that is a skill that some very long-term gifted practitioners can develop.
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Now, then there are other people who have not had that kind of training or that longevity of training, let’s say, with adequate teachers, etc.
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And what I find is that these visionary plant medicine experiences are so powerful.
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I mean, they are literally mind-blowing. And I find that most people do not have the
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level of skill to be able to contain themselves as they are becoming completely uncontained.
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So give an example of that, for example.
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For example, well, I will tell you I have a number of people reaching out to me who
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have initiated a solo visionary plant and experience for themselves without any
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kind of facilitator present who can adequately handle what might be arising in those minutes
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and hours that transpire.
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And they get lost somewhere in the experience and
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they don’t know how to get back they and often when they’ve reached out to me they’re not back
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they’re some of them you know part of them is back in terms of their personhood and their ego,
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but part of them has been split off into another realm and is traumatized.
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We would call that, this would be a process of soul retrieval probably to get that piece back.
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and they are living in this very uncomfortable liminal space between feeling whole and not feeling whole.
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And it can completely upset one’s world.
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You can become completely dysfunctional.
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You cannot be able to work.
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You cannot feel like you can relate to other people.
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You can feel like you don’t know yourself anymore.
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The self stops being able to recognize the self.
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And I’ve had this experience, and it is very unpleasant.
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It’s very disorienting.
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And from that place, thoughts of suicidality can start to
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occur. And so there is, in my mind, a very real danger to initiating these extremely powerful experiences by oneself without a person there that is holding the container,
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that’s holding the space, that’s making sure that you’re not doing anything that would put your life
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in danger, for instance, while you’re extremely altered, or that if you need assistance or help,
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or you find yourself in a place of extreme terror,
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that there’s not someone there to put their hand on your shoulder and say,
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it’s okay, I’m with you.
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So that’s very basic.
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And then, of course, you know, Shana, we could get into all of the, let’s say, etheric energies that become present in the visionary plant
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medicine experience and what gets opened and what sort of etheric energies can then enter
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this type of sacred space that may or may not be welcome.
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enter this type of sacred space that may or may not be welcome.
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And so if a person is very altered and they’re by themselves, they may not necessarily
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have the ability to protect their
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container so that these energies or entities don’t attach
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to them and invade their space.
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So, I could say more.
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Well, I mean, this is interesting because, you know, I note that we have no touchstone
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in this modern culture for this kind of work, right? So those guidelines are not sort of common knowledge, right?
00:17:10 ►
Of, well, yes, of course, you know,
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it would be most helpful to work with someone, whatnot.
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We just simply don’t have that.
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And so we have a lot of, you know,
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people just engaging this on their own,
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and it can absolutely blow your mind
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and can be very frightening or challenging
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or absolutely wonderful
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or people come out of it thinking they’re Jesus.
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And so, and you know,
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I got to lead into the next question here
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because which is about this. Okay, well, what I want to talk into the next question here, because which is about this.
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Okay, well, this, this, what I want to talk to you now about is how you observe a very,
00:17:50 ►
after that a very minimal integration and folks who are exploring psychoactives and,
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and, and noting that their answer seems to always be more ceremony.
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Oh, just do another one and another one.
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And, and so yeah,
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I’d love for you to speak to that. Because it’s something that I have noted in, you know, certain
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people as well with concern. Sure. Yeah. I mean, I, I wrote about that in my book,
00:18:20 ►
because that was my experience. I mean, I worked with a medicine person consistently
00:18:28 ►
for about four years and there was never a conversation. I mean, we had a very quote
00:18:35 ►
unquote close relationship. I was a very close student to him. We spoke on the phone regularly,
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student to him. We spoke on the phone regularly, et cetera. And the answer was always, well,
00:18:53 ►
we have another ceremony coming up, or we have a ceremony that’s going to be happening and whatever. And, oh, we have an intensive retreat that’s going to be happening. You
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should come to that. And innocently, I thought, oh, well, yeah, sure. And I want to be a part of community.
00:19:06 ►
And, you know, I love being a part of these spiritual communities
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where people are working on themselves and exploring deeply.
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I mean, this is what I love.
00:19:15 ►
So I, you know, of course I wanted to say yes, yes, yes, yes.
00:19:19 ►
I want to go to everything.
00:19:21 ►
And, I mean, let me tell you, if I think about how much money I spent
00:19:23 ►
traveling the
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world, doing all these things quite a lot. But nowhere. And, and, and so that was, you know,
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one teacher that I worked with. And then I worked with several other medicine people in various
00:19:39 ►
medicines and, and, and still nowhere in any of those ceremonies either was there a conversation of, you know, you’ve done a lot of ceremonies the last six months.
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Maybe you need to sit the next six months out and just work on this trauma that’s coming up around not feeling seen from a young age.
00:20:05 ►
I mean, there was never a conversation.
00:20:07 ►
Never, never, never did anyone say,
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don’t go to the ceremony.
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It was always, come to the ceremony!
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And somehow the ceremony will figure it out for you
00:20:16 ►
and everything will be fine.
00:20:19 ►
So there just seems to be almost no conversation around integration in the ceremonial context.
00:20:30 ►
And I don’t know exactly how to reconcile myself with that.
00:20:36 ►
I think sometimes it feels like there’s a bit of a nefarious energy there, or maybe it’s just ignorance a lot of ignorance i mean perhaps in you know more
00:20:49 ►
traditional indigenous context if you were to be living in a village and working with these
00:20:54 ►
medicines consistently then the integration might just be happening all of the time in your village life. I’m not really sure.
00:21:05 ►
Also, there is a difference in the way these indigenous cultures use those medicines
00:21:13 ►
because, you know, Westerners are endeavoring to heal a lot of inner trauma and whatnot.
00:21:23 ►
And so it’s a different approach than has been.
00:21:26 ►
Absolutely. And I think that’s also part of the challenge. And thank you for bringing
00:21:32 ►
that up. There are many beautiful anthropologists that have been studying these Amazonian shamanistic
00:21:38 ►
cultures and noting the differences between how more traditional Amazonian societies are working, for instance, with ayahuasca and other types of medicines,
00:21:48 ►
and how Westerners are working with it.
00:21:50 ►
They are different, very different context and a completely different culture?
00:22:11 ►
And how does a medicine person from perhaps an Amazonian culture, for instance, work then with a Westerner who has very different objectives from how they’ve been taught to work with medicine traditionally.
00:22:26 ►
So, you know, there is potentially a huge disconnect there that does happen.
00:22:33 ►
And a traditional medicine person’s ability to work with what a Westerner is actually attempting to work with.
00:22:44 ►
what a Westerner is actually attempting to work with.
00:22:50 ►
This is why I think it’s so important to have people like yourself,
00:22:55 ►
people like myself, and others who make themselves available to assist people to integrate so that they have someone to turn to
00:22:59 ►
because, of course, I’ve spoken to people, as I know you have,
00:23:03 ►
that can’t exactly pick up the phone and call the shaman in Peru and, you know, run, run this stuff
00:23:11 ►
by him or her. So, so this role of, of assisting people to integrate is really important. And
00:23:18 ►
I had someone who I worked with, who told me that they had worked with the mushrooms as a teenager.
00:23:27 ►
They tried the mushroom and they had a very profound experience, but then came out of that experience and looked around at life as it is and just said, this sucks.
00:23:39 ►
This sucks.
00:23:41 ►
And there was no one for this person to discuss their experience, because they were also
00:23:46 ►
in a very religious environment. And they turned to alcohol and for a number of years, just drank.
00:23:56 ►
And so, wow, yeah, so so you know, the role of practitioner to assist in the integration process, I think, has never been more important.
00:24:11 ►
And this leads me to my next question here.
00:24:15 ►
You talk in your book about the essential need to change interiorly.
00:24:21 ►
And you say that unless one is dedicated to changing, those old habits will
00:24:28 ►
return. And so that these substances, they’ll illuminate those areas, often in your journey,
00:24:36 ►
they’ll bring this to your attention. But, you know, you are you say in the book that unless
00:24:41 ►
you’re diligent beyond that in your self-work, those old habits will return.
00:24:47 ►
And so I would love to hear you elaborate on that.
00:24:51 ►
Oh, absolutely.
00:24:52 ►
And I mean, that comment that I’m making in my book is nothing new. Spiritual practices, intensive contemplative practices of all kinds and all traditions have been bringing up our deepest wounding since we’ve been practicing them.
00:25:14 ►
And whereas in any of these wisdom traditions, including working with visionary plants, you can have a transcendent experience or an illuminating experience.
00:25:26 ►
That is not where this ends.
00:25:30 ►
Nothing has then been, something has been revealed and something has been seen through
00:25:36 ►
and something has been opened, but it’s not done.
00:25:42 ►
And so I’m very grateful to the field of transpersonal psychology,
00:25:46 ►
which I was fortunate enough to be able to study,
00:25:49 ►
for incredible modeling and wisdom around the topic that you’re bringing up.
00:25:57 ►
And so often I find that the plants, the visionary plants,
00:26:04 ►
serve as incredible teachers.
00:26:07 ►
And they will illuminate a pattern in our personality structure.
00:26:15 ►
It’s almost like a constellation.
00:26:17 ►
It will light up and you’ll see, oh, that’s related to that.
00:26:21 ►
And that’s, oh, that’s coming from there.
00:26:22 ►
And then it just kind of lights up like a whole matrix,
00:26:26 ►
which, of course, psychologists have been writing about complexes
00:26:30 ►
and these matrices for a while.
00:26:34 ►
Nothing new there either.
00:26:36 ►
And yet, okay, so we’ve seen the pattern,
00:26:41 ►
but just because we’ve seen the pattern doesn’t mean the pattern has changed.
00:26:46 ►
But it means that we have awareness around the pattern, that the pattern is there. And of course,
00:26:53 ►
awareness is absolutely essential in order to be able to make the change or make the changes that
00:26:58 ►
we might want to make to live in a more full and whole and integrated way.
00:27:13 ►
So I love, I was able to study with a beautiful Native American teacher for a little while.
00:27:15 ►
Her name is Mona Palaka, and she talks about her spiritual practices,
00:27:23 ►
and she talks about the idea of this sort of
00:27:26 ►
the half moon versus the full moon.
00:27:30 ►
And so there’s, in a way, this half moon is
00:27:32 ►
we’re coming to awareness of what the pattern is,
00:27:36 ►
and the full moon is we’re taking steps,
00:27:39 ►
we’re taking action in order to make those changes.
00:27:43 ►
And to live in the fullness, we have to have both.
00:27:48 ►
And I think what’s really, really challenging for people in visionary plant medicine work,
00:27:55 ►
because they’ve sort of been sold this promise that the plants will do the work for them,
00:28:01 ►
is that they’re not really expecting that they’re going to have to be doing a lot of this work
00:28:08 ►
and making a lot of these changes and going perhaps to therapy or going and working with a somatic practitioner
00:28:16 ►
that can help them release body-based trauma or changing their diet or changing their life, changing their lifestyle,
00:28:32 ►
They’re changing their life, changing their lifestyle, making huge corrections that spirit or in their own higher self, in essence, are asking them to make.
00:28:39 ►
So the work is, there’s no shortcut, Shauna, right?
00:28:40 ►
That’s right. That’s right. That is the disillusionment, I think, around the plant work.
00:28:49 ►
Well, and I think it’s an essential grow up opportunity for people because we’ve been infantilized in this culture now.
00:28:59 ►
You know, everyone’s pointing their finger at the government saying, well, do this for me and fix that and do that.
00:29:04 ►
And then they go to a doctor and, well, give me the pill. Where’s the pill? Make it go away.
00:29:10 ►
And quick fix. Exactly. And so the medicine, I think, in its ancient wisdom is saying,
00:29:18 ►
oh, I will illuminate this for you more than happy to do so and even offer some wisdom. But of course, you know, you’re either
00:29:26 ►
going to take it and work with it, or, or just or not, or not. And so let’s talk about ego death.
00:29:38 ►
And because you know, you and I are on the same page here in that you specifically say that this is not about
00:29:46 ►
destroying the ego entirely as as i quite agree like we need our ego if you destroy your ego
00:29:53 ►
you’re dead but i mean you go into a psychiatric ward right right right but of course at you know aspects of the ego that we’ve of our self that we’ve outgrown
00:30:06 ►
need to
00:30:08 ►
need the heave ho
00:30:10 ►
so I would like you to
00:30:12 ►
expand on that
00:30:13 ►
well I thank you
00:30:16 ►
I like to differentiate between
00:30:18 ►
the traumatized ego
00:30:20 ►
and the ego
00:30:21 ►
now of course they’re a part of the ego
00:30:24 ►
but I think if we make that differentiation,
00:30:29 ►
we can see that there, and people who are really deep in the healing path know this, they know this
00:30:38 ►
kind of inside and out. They know that their ego developed almost like a tree, right, that’s growing.
00:30:50 ►
And say that there was this huge impediment around the tree.
00:30:55 ►
You know, it’s got to grow up, it’s got to root, and then it’s got to come through the
00:30:58 ►
earth, and there’s this gigantic rock.
00:31:01 ►
You know, so the tree will grow around the rock in order to find life. And when we’ve
00:31:10 ►
experienced, as many people have, early childhood wounding, pre-verbal trauma, just a very deep
00:31:18 ►
sense of not being met, not being seen. No one was consistently present from a young age, that then forces
00:31:31 ►
the ego to develop in a certain way that is then an adjustment.
00:31:37 ►
It’s not exactly how the ego would naturally like to grow, but it will do a workaround
00:31:43 ►
for survival because we have a very strong
00:31:47 ►
mandate to survive.
00:31:49 ►
And we’ll do whatever it takes to do that, no matter how dysfunctional or self-destructive
00:31:55 ►
that ends up being.
00:31:57 ►
And so what we find, I think, often in work, is that these very profound adjustments that our egos have had
00:32:08 ►
to make in order to get us to where we are today become seen. They’re seen at a much more profound
00:32:18 ►
level. And, you know, I would call parts of those adjustments the sort of the traumatized ego.
00:32:28 ►
And, you know, there are so many beautiful therapeutic modalities.
00:32:36 ►
And I think all of them would point to the need to have as much as we can,
00:32:43 ►
to have as much as we can,
00:32:49 ►
a huge capacity to have compassion for how our ego has had to twist and turn
00:33:00 ►
in order to allow us to be here and to see those adjustments for what they are
00:33:11 ►
as what was necessary to survive.
00:33:16 ►
Now, what was necessary to survive, as you know, is not often what is necessary to thrive.
00:33:23 ►
not often what is necessary to thrive.
00:33:28 ►
And so there’s this delicate dance that then begins to help our kind of our larger ego
00:33:34 ►
to be able to see these aspects of the traumatized ego
00:33:40 ►
and allow those sorts of parts to be seen through, felt through, acknowledged, witnessed,
00:33:54 ►
held, and loved even.
00:34:00 ►
And this is not for the faint of heart. I talk about it all theoretically.
00:34:06 ►
But, I mean, we can sometimes hate these parts of ourselves.
00:34:12 ►
We have hidden these parts of ourselves off in a deep, dark drawer or cave that we never, ever want to see again.
00:34:21 ►
And we run from them.
00:34:23 ►
We will do anything to feel them or be with them
00:34:26 ►
um this is this is work is not for the faint of heart absolutely no and so yeah you’re going into
00:34:35 ►
shadow here deep shadow and uh you know my late teacher brew joy who was just a just masterful teacher and quite the student of Jung.
00:34:48 ►
And Bru talked about us delving into our shadow piece and saying, first of all, that, you know,
00:34:56 ►
the ego itself can’t handle that because it’s identified with a certain identity.
00:35:01 ►
It’s like, no, that’s not me. And he said, it’s important to remember that these aspects are but a clump of trees in the forest of being. So it doesn’t define you. And then he also said the way into this work is through the heart center in that the heart center can hold
00:35:25 ►
the whole show,
00:35:27 ►
the whole show.
00:35:29 ►
and so I never forgot that.
00:35:33 ►
And all right,
00:35:35 ►
you,
00:35:35 ►
you talk about spiritual bypassing.
00:35:40 ►
I quite,
00:35:41 ►
I found this really interesting rather than looking deeply at those disowned parts,
00:35:49 ►
there are people focusing on transcending all of it.
00:35:54 ►
They’re just going to transcend the ego, transcend that, you know,
00:35:57 ►
and thereby avoiding this very necessary work of shadow.
00:36:04 ►
Sure.
00:36:05 ►
I mean, it sounds great, doesn’t it?
00:36:08 ►
Sure.
00:36:09 ►
Just transcend, transcend.
00:36:12 ►
We’ll elevate our consciousness.
00:36:14 ►
We will…
00:36:15 ►
Or we’ll ascend.
00:36:17 ►
We’re ascending.
00:36:17 ►
There’s another one.
00:36:19 ►
Ascending, yeah.
00:36:20 ►
We’ll, you know, the mountaintop
00:36:22 ►
and just dismiss everything else
00:36:25 ►
that doesn’t seem to fall in line with that and that’s not really real.
00:36:29 ►
And a lot of this focus on, I mean, Wellwood, John Wellwood,
00:36:33 ►
Wellwood and also Robert Augustus Masters are just really brilliant
00:36:37 ►
when they’re talking about spiritual bypassing.
00:36:40 ►
And I would refer them widely to anyone who wants to learn about that more.
00:36:45 ►
and I would refer them widely to anyone who wants to learn about that more.
00:36:49 ►
But even this focus on positive thinking.
00:36:54 ►
Oh, don’t even let that thought come into your mind.
00:36:57 ►
Just focus on the positive.
00:37:02 ►
And there’s a lot of shaming around that in our kind of modern,
00:37:06 ►
new-agey spiritual culture and you know this conversation around oh well you you manifested this horrific tragedy in your life you know
00:37:12 ►
obviously you’re just not doing enough affirmations or I mean it’s it’s gotten very twisted um and and not helpful. So I was fortunate to be a student of Ken Wilber
00:37:31 ►
when I was in graduate school.
00:37:32 ►
I found myself very interested in his work.
00:37:35 ►
And from their perspective, the idea is always transcend and include.
00:37:42 ►
Transcend and include.
00:37:44 ►
It’s never transcend and include transcend and include it’s never transcend and transcend transcend and include
00:37:50 ►
and so then i was very fortunate to be a student in the waking down to mutuality tradition which
00:37:57 ►
is actually a corrective spiritual tradition towards some of these more kind of tend to be like masculine dominant
00:38:05 ►
yogic traditions that are all about just transcendence um that don’t don’t uh have a
00:38:12 ►
huge amount of uh that’s the right word i don’t want to say respect but uh inclusiveness towards the body. I mean… Thank you. The body, the earth, the feminine.
00:38:28 ►
Matter.
00:38:30 ►
Matter. Yes, mother.
00:38:32 ►
I mean, it’s just, you know,
00:38:33 ►
so of course, you know, we’ve been in 5,000 years
00:38:36 ►
in the patriarchal, and so it’s no
00:38:37 ►
surprise, right, that
00:38:39 ►
there’s this focus on
00:38:42 ►
transcendence.
00:38:45 ►
And for anyone who’s really sincerely on the spiritual path in the modern world,
00:38:54 ►
to forget the body, to forget the earth,
00:38:59 ►
to forget our basic humanness and the process of spiritual maturation
00:39:04 ►
just seems kind of bizarre.
00:39:07 ►
It’s like, of course we would need to include that.
00:39:10 ►
But that gets messy, right?
00:39:12 ►
So it’s like, oh, that’s really messy.
00:39:14 ►
My body’s messy.
00:39:17 ►
And I don’t know if I want to have all these feelings.
00:39:19 ►
And I don’t want to go to therapy.
00:39:23 ►
I don’t want to deal with my. I don’t want to deal with my psychology.
00:39:25 ►
I just want to transcend.
00:39:27 ►
So, I mean, I understand.
00:39:31 ►
I mean, we just have such a strong desire to avoid pain,
00:39:34 ►
and we just really do, and it’s embedded in us.
00:39:37 ►
Well, there’s a lot of suffering in the current culture
00:39:40 ►
because people have lost touch with their ancestral cultural roots. I mean,
00:39:46 ►
we’re in this melting pot, but it’s really just, I see it as a corporate sameness,
00:39:52 ►
just a corporate sameness. And I don’t care what ethnicity you are, we’re losing touch with,
00:40:00 ►
you know, with our roots. And yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think there’s think there’s some kind of little trickery,
00:40:10 ►
maybe not little trickery, going on, big trickery,
00:40:13 ►
where there’s the idea that if you could just be Jedi enough,
00:40:18 ►
you could somehow remain and pursue your essential soul nature
00:40:24 ►
while putting on the suit and tie and
00:40:27 ►
pretending to be in the matrix. And I mean, that’s something that I think is actually very
00:40:34 ►
challenging to do, to not lose yourself in the machine of social conditioning. It’s just,
00:40:44 ►
it’s very challenging.
00:40:46 ►
And being a corporate wage slave.
00:40:49 ►
How do you,
00:40:50 ►
how do you do that?
00:40:51 ►
And the other,
00:40:51 ►
I mean,
00:40:52 ►
that,
00:40:52 ►
that takes like an incredible,
00:40:54 ►
incredible amount of skill.
00:40:56 ►
Um,
00:40:56 ►
and most people are just trying to figure out how to survive.
00:40:59 ►
They’re trying to figure out how to pay their bills.
00:41:00 ►
They’re trying to figure out how to bring children into the world in a way
00:41:04 ►
that seems somewhat healthier. People are overwhelmed. So yes, if there’s a spiritual teaching that says,
00:41:13 ►
you know what, you don’t have to deal with that pain anymore. Well, that’s very appealing. I mean,
00:41:21 ►
it’s very, very appealing. And I certainly was on that path. I was in a deep path of spiritual bypass for years without even realizing it, thinking that I was this earnest to be able to be whole unless I addressed my trauma,
00:41:47 ►
unless I went into my pain, unless I went into my shadow.
00:41:51 ►
That just wasn’t going to happen.
00:41:55 ►
And I wasn’t going to be able to be of service to anyone, including myself,
00:42:00 ►
unless I did that work.
00:42:02 ►
And I’m sure you have your own story around that, Shauna.
00:42:07 ►
Oh, yes.
00:42:07 ►
It’s really be of service.
00:42:09 ►
Well, yeah, yeah.
00:42:11 ►
I mean, you know, I call this the work of know thyself.
00:42:16 ►
And that was inscribed over the threshold of the Temple of Delphi.
00:42:20 ►
And essentially saying, before you step over this threshold, my friend, you know,
00:42:27 ►
you have some work to do before you really enter into the mysteries and some deep, deep work. And
00:42:35 ►
so, and then I just think of it, even the analogy of just, you know, a good corporate CEO, a good
00:42:41 ►
one knows both their strengths and their weaknesses. Otherwise,
00:42:47 ►
those become your Achilles heel and your company fails. So yeah, very important. And so speaking
00:42:55 ►
of that, you also delve into the seduction of the visionary worlds and so there’s that desire to just sort of bypass
00:43:07 ►
everything transcend and then just stay in those visionary worlds they’re very seductive oh my gosh
00:43:14 ►
maybe maybe not for everyone right but maybe people like you and me. I just, and in my integration process the last couple of years,
00:43:27 ►
I have just, you know, I feel into that edge, that seduction.
00:43:32 ►
You know, every once in a while I’ll just wake up in the morning
00:43:35 ►
and I’ll just, I’ll be like, oh, yeah, that.
00:43:38 ►
Like, oh, that was so good, you know.
00:43:40 ►
And part of, like, what was so seductive to me was I felt like I was living through this mythological version of my soul or myself.
00:43:52 ►
And it was really awesome and pleasurable.
00:43:56 ►
I loved feeling this depth.
00:43:59 ►
I mean, I’m a Scorpio.
00:44:00 ►
That’s my calling or whatever.
00:44:03 ►
Deep, deep, deep.
00:44:06 ►
you know that’s you know it’s my calling or whatever deep deep deep but it’s feeling this like incredible depth and then you know seeing all the synchronicities and you know feeling like this
00:44:14 ►
this sort of like the the veils very thin the the degree of kind of this almost like this magical
00:44:21 ►
realism that would present itself and you know i have to say, for me, it was wonderful.
00:44:29 ►
I really enjoyed it.
00:44:31 ►
It felt very profound.
00:44:33 ►
Everything felt very profound.
00:44:36 ►
It was very pleasurable for me.
00:44:44 ►
I don’t know how else.
00:44:46 ►
Well, okay, so, okay, here’s what I’m thinking with this.
00:44:52 ►
First of all, I think it is very profound.
00:44:54 ►
It takes us into deeply profound places.
00:44:58 ►
It can bring us into connection with really exquisite, wise intelligences. And, and, and, you know,
00:45:08 ►
that for me has really shaped and changed my life in really beautiful ways. And there is the
00:45:17 ►
seduction, I think you were speaking to, and I’ve noticed as well as people can get
00:45:23 ►
totally caught up with
00:45:25 ►
that, you know, like my feeling, in other words, is all right, I live in a body as we’re talking
00:45:30 ►
about before. And I live in this 3d world. And I see it more of as a gift that I’ve even found my
00:45:38 ►
way to these, you know, to the mushroom in my case. And so that is i dip in there and i i gain i get gifts from
00:45:48 ►
that and then i come back here you have to integrate it and and share that and uh but
00:45:55 ►
remember my place in other words you know that my place i live here in this 3d world
00:46:01 ►
right now and i think that seduction as they’re people
00:46:05 ►
just can get very lost in the other.
00:46:08 ►
The other world, yes.
00:46:11 ►
You know, one of the…
00:46:15 ►
It’s funny.
00:46:16 ►
It reminds me of these ideas of disorientation and reorientation.
00:46:22 ►
And when I was really deep into the vegetal plant consciousness
00:46:29 ►
and that world, that became my world.
00:46:37 ►
And it wasn’t as if I was going to the bar and drinking every night
00:46:44 ►
and passing out on the floor.
00:46:46 ►
And, you know, it didn’t appear to be profoundly unhealthy is what I’m trying to say.
00:46:53 ►
But what happened is that that visionary world started to feel like that was the real world.
00:47:02 ►
And this other world that I was living in was less real.
00:47:10 ►
And it was, the visionary world felt like perceptually felt bigger. It felt like, oh,
00:47:17 ►
no, this is where, this is where the action is, you know, this is where it’s all happening.
00:47:26 ►
you know this is where it’s all happening and and so you know it kind of facilitated this kind of continued pursuing like a of that kind of world and then as I came out of it
00:47:37 ►
it’s almost like coming out of water I realized wow actually that world is really small in a way.
00:47:48 ►
I had thought it was really big.
00:47:51 ►
And then what kind of came to me afterwards was,
00:47:54 ►
oh, no, no, no, it’s small in a certain sense
00:47:57 ►
because there’s a lot of worlds.
00:48:01 ►
And there’s this world that my body is in that I’m living in
00:48:05 ►
and other worlds that if I had the time and patience and interest
00:48:09 ►
I could probably go into and then there’s the visionary world, the plant world
00:48:13 ►
but there are many worlds and I had been
00:48:17 ►
it was almost like Alice
00:48:20 ►
in Wonderland thinking things were very big and very small, and kind of like losing sense of relativity in some way,
00:48:30 ►
like how big things actually are and how small things actually are.
00:48:34 ►
And so I came on, and I just had to almost reorient my whole understanding
00:48:41 ►
based on moving away from that immersion experience that I had been in for a
00:48:48 ►
while. So I’m sure other people have different experiences around that, but several people,
00:48:59 ►
wise people, pointed it out to me that I was getting seduced by the vegetal world.
00:49:08 ►
And I didn’t want to believe it at first.
00:49:14 ►
I was sort of like, oh, whatever.
00:49:16 ►
You know, they don’t really understand.
00:49:19 ►
At first it was like they don’t really understand.
00:49:22 ►
They don’t really get it.
00:49:24 ►
But I received the information. It went into
00:49:26 ►
my brain. I put it in a file. And then I heard it again in a different format. And then I heard it
00:49:33 ►
again in a different format. And it was almost like a waking up process. Like I started waking up to hmm, what if that’s right?
00:49:48 ►
What if I have been seduced? What if I’ve
00:49:52 ►
oriented my entire life in a direction that isn’t
00:49:56 ►
as complete as my soul would really prefer?
00:50:01 ►
Hmm. And I just kind of
00:50:04 ►
slowly backed out of the vegetal consciousness. But let me tell you,
00:50:15 ►
I mean, I would love to ask you the questions. How, you know, how do you hold going so powerfully
00:50:22 ►
into the vegetal consciousness, and then coming out so powerfully and being here in our, you know, sort of consensual reality world?
00:50:33 ►
I mean, that takes an incredible amount of skill to be able to go in and out.
00:50:37 ►
Yeah, well, that’s why I think the preparation is so important.
00:50:48 ►
the preparation is so important. And I’m talking about years of, or a certain amount of time of deep psycho spiritual study. And so, I mean, you know, I did not, I didn’t do anything. I don’t
00:50:57 ►
drink, I don’t smoke cannabis, I you know, so when I came to the mushroom, I was 48 years old. And I, prior to that, had a solid eight years of really deep exploration.
00:51:10 ►
And, you know, a teacher like Brew, who was, I’m so grateful I found him.
00:51:16 ►
Because he was the one who, you know, introduced me to Carl Jung.
00:51:22 ►
And he was a master of shadow and dreams and he held us
00:51:27 ►
accountable there. And he would use what we call the black needle every so often, you know,
00:51:34 ►
and he would just burst your ego. Not not cruelly. No. But in other words, he wasn’t pandering to overly sensitive.
00:51:48 ►
No, no.
00:51:49 ►
If you were working with Brew, you were engaging with a teacher who was going to engage you, all of you.
00:52:00 ►
And my God, he was good at that.
00:52:02 ►
And I learned so much.
00:52:27 ►
And my God, he was good at that. And I learned so much. It was very mature teaching. And so much of it was new to me when I first came to it. And I realized, my God, I’m so grateful I had that before the mushroom because, you know, it can take you into directions that are not so healthy if you’re, you know, if you really don’t know anything else. And so that leads me into my next question, which you talk about beautifully,
00:52:34 ►
what are the signs that you’re overdoing this stuff? How do you know if you’re overdoing this?
00:52:42 ►
How do you know if you’re overdoing this?
00:52:44 ►
Mm-hmm.
00:52:45 ►
Yeah.
00:52:51 ►
And that, you know, this gets to be a controversial conversation.
00:52:52 ►
Yes, it does.
00:52:54 ►
Very quickly, too.
00:53:03 ►
And I really, you know, when I was feeling into it, I sat with that idea.
00:53:12 ►
And just reflecting on my own experience and what I’ve seen in clients and what I’ve seen just peripherally,
00:53:16 ►
I have been embedded in this work a lot in South Florida,
00:53:22 ►
and there’s very strong practice communities for visionary
00:53:25 ►
plant medicine in South Florida. So it’s in the field, I’ve been around it.
00:53:30 ►
I, you know, and I have to own this. This is my opinion. I mean, it’s, I would call a professional
00:53:37 ►
opinion, but it is my opinion. I think questions that you have to ask yourself when you’re considering, am I overdoing it?
00:53:52 ►
I mean, hopefully, that’s even a question in your mind.
00:53:55 ►
Because I have definitely seen that even asking that question isn’t even, I mean, that is a good question to start with, right?
00:54:03 ►
Am I overdoing it? Because
00:54:05 ►
sometimes that question is not even asked. Now, starting there, I feel like, you know,
00:54:13 ►
based on my understanding and the work that I’ve done and other scholars that I’ve read and,
00:54:19 ►
you know, if you’re sitting in ceremony more than once a month, or even more than once every few months, I would wonder about that.
00:54:36 ►
I would wonder, did you really integrate that first ceremony?
00:54:44 ►
A ceremony can take a year to integrate.
00:54:47 ►
It could take five years to integrate.
00:54:49 ►
One ceremony.
00:54:50 ►
It could take a lifetime.
00:54:52 ►
I definitely have ceremonies that I’m still integrating,
00:54:54 ►
and I will integrate for the rest of my life.
00:54:56 ►
So, I mean, the question is, you know, am I overdoing it?
00:55:02 ►
Have I integrated?
00:55:05 ►
If the plants gave me a teaching or showed me something,
00:55:09 ►
did I go work with that teaching or revelation
00:55:13 ►
before I went back to ceremony?
00:55:17 ►
That would be a question I would ask myself.
00:55:22 ►
I would wonder, I would have to wonder, I would want to check myself around, am I being seduced?
00:55:36 ►
Why do I want to go back to the ceremony?
00:55:39 ►
Did I like the people there?
00:55:42 ►
Did I like the energy?
00:55:44 ►
Did I like being people there? Did I like the energy? Did I like being around the fire?
00:55:46 ►
Did I like the feeling of love and belonging that happened there
00:55:50 ►
that for whatever reason I don’t feel in my day-to-day life?
00:55:54 ►
Am I going back?
00:55:56 ►
What am I going back for?
00:55:58 ►
Right?
00:55:59 ►
What is the ceremony going to give me, really?
00:56:06 ►
These are hard-hitting questions that I would suggest ask themselves
00:56:13 ►
before going back.
00:56:15 ►
And it takes a fair amount of willpower to ask oneself that question,
00:56:22 ►
number one, or discipline and discernment.
00:56:28 ►
So I would also say, you know, if something came up very powerfully in the ceremony that
00:56:35 ►
felt like, wow, this is a part of myself I really need to attend to that I didn’t even
00:56:39 ►
realize was there, have I gone outside of the ceremonial context and tried to find a healer or a psychotherapist
00:56:50 ►
or a body worker or an acupuncturist or some kind of professional who can then help me
00:56:58 ►
with that that came up?
00:57:01 ►
Have I done that?
00:57:03 ►
Right?
00:57:09 ►
up? Have I done that? Right? So, you know, do I, how am I engaging with the material that came up in the ceremony in my day-to-day life? You know, am I journaling about it? Am I meditating on it?
00:57:16 ►
Am I praying about it? What am I doing day-to-day to help myself with what has arisen in the ceremony? I think, you know, those are
00:57:30 ►
questions that I would ask, or I would want to ask, or I’d be curious about. I would suggest
00:57:37 ►
people ask themselves. Yeah, and maybe, are you spending money that you don’t have,
00:57:42 ►
because you have to go again and again?
00:57:47 ►
That’s not on my list, but that’s a great one.
00:57:51 ►
And that’s the seduction, right?
00:57:53 ►
That’s part of the seduction, I think, that happens there.
00:57:57 ►
It becomes so important.
00:58:01 ►
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:58:09 ►
yeah yeah yeah you uh you write in one of your chapters in relation to trauma work that quote we are the ones we are waiting for and you speak to the personal responsibility around that and i
00:58:17 ►
would love for you to speak more on that oh sure well i think it goes back to what you were saying earlier, moving from this more
00:58:27 ►
infantile orientation in our lives to actually becoming mature. Now, I have always felt,
00:58:40 ►
and I’m not sure how you feel, Shanaana that the plants were always telling me that personal
00:58:47 ►
maturity and maturation and responsibility taking was of paramount importance it was like if
00:58:54 ►
perhaps the most important it wasn’t about the visions or the this or the that but it was about
00:59:02 ►
how can we get you to take more responsibility for yourself
00:59:07 ►
in your life? That, I mean, I got that teaching repeatedly. So in a sense, what I’m writing about
00:59:15 ►
in the work around trauma and healing more widely is part of what I’ve seen in just my psychological practice and what I’ve learned is that a deep
00:59:27 ►
part of our healing is becoming personally mature. And that means taking responsibility
00:59:35 ►
for ourselves. And when we take responsibility for ourselves, we’re not relying or expecting or we don’t feel entitled to someone taking care of us or doing our work for us, plants or otherwise.
00:59:56 ►
We take action to help ourselves. And when you see people taking action to take care of themselves in their lives,
01:00:12 ►
you know that they are well positioned on their healing path
01:00:18 ►
because they are doing what is required in order to become whole.
01:00:24 ►
And they have made themselves available
01:00:27 ►
for that. They have, in psychology we talk about marshalling of will, the willpower.
01:00:34 ►
They have, they’re channeling their energy into that kind of action. And they’ve in a sense surrendered they’ve surrendered to okay yes i have work to do
01:00:48 ►
and they’re and and just as a you know beautiful 50 year long meditation practitioner goes and
01:00:57 ►
sits on the cushion in the morning the person wakes up in the morning and they
01:01:00 ►
move forward responsibly towards their healing and And I think there’s a deep humility
01:01:09 ►
in that that emerges as well. And so all of these things combine, you know, a sense of
01:01:17 ►
marshalling one’s willpower, waking up to the need for personal responsibility on your healing path.
01:01:23 ►
up to the need for personal responsibility on your healing path.
01:01:26 ►
No, a healer doesn’t heal you.
01:01:27 ►
That’s right.
01:01:29 ►
You heal yourself.
01:01:33 ►
But you get support from healers, right? I say a healer is someone who is healing themselves.
01:01:38 ►
I mean, I don’t heal people.
01:01:41 ►
You don’t heal people.
01:01:42 ►
People heal themselves.
01:01:44 ►
They may need some stabilization
01:01:46 ►
or some support around that. But inherently, in our own being, we are choosing to heal.
01:01:53 ►
Yes. One of my teachers said it this way. He would say, look, I am just the pizza delivery guy.
01:02:00 ►
I’m bringing you the pizza. And then it’s up to you. Take it from there. Yeah, but I’ll bring
01:02:10 ►
you I’ll bring a pizza. I’ll bring it or I think of it as the gatekeeper. You know, I’ll open the
01:02:15 ►
gate here, step through this is what I can offer. But you know, you have to take those steps. So, so yeah, now also, you talk about the importance of, of having a contemplative
01:02:28 ►
practice of some nature. And so what what might that be? And what are the benefits of that?
01:02:38 ►
Sure, I, I think we’re really lucky and fortunate in some regards to have access to so many different options for contemplative practice in our modern world.
01:02:53 ►
I mean, we’re at the buffet of spirit, unlike even probably 100 years ago, very limited offerings at the table.
01:03:14 ►
And so I encourage people to choose what feels right to them.
01:03:20 ►
What feels right to them might be something very, very traditional,
01:03:23 ►
waking up in the morning and offering the earth water and greeting the sun and saying prayers.
01:03:26 ►
It could be sitting on a cushion and having that sacred time.
01:03:34 ►
It could be some sort of a beautiful movement practice, a tai chi, a qigong,
01:03:43 ►
a martial art of some kind, or dance.
01:03:47 ►
There are so many different contemplative practices available.
01:03:54 ►
And what the beauty of a consistent contemplative practice offers,
01:04:04 ►
meditation, prayer, movement, more earth-based spirituality,
01:04:08 ►
is a form of grounding and continuity.
01:04:18 ►
So, of course, there can be insights received through contemplative practice and a sense of connection often or
01:04:28 ►
disconnection sometimes.
01:04:32 ►
And a personal evolution to one’s relationship to their contemplative practice.
01:04:37 ►
Those are all very interesting things.
01:04:39 ►
Yeah.
01:04:40 ►
But what I point to for especially for visionary
01:04:45 ►
plant medicine work is
01:04:46 ►
a grounding
01:04:48 ►
and
01:04:50 ►
because visionary plant work is
01:04:52 ►
sometimes inherently ungrounding
01:04:55 ►
and so
01:04:56 ►
what goes up must come down
01:04:58 ►
and if there is a consistent
01:05:01 ►
contemplative practice of some kind
01:05:03 ►
then that can anchor the work
01:05:06 ►
and it can anchor the body and it can anchor one’s sense of self in the 3D reality, which
01:05:19 ►
is the one that we live in. So that’s important. And can provide this lifeline, I mean, a lifeline.
01:05:29 ►
Now, I also find that a consistent contemplative practice can also provide an incredible amount
01:05:37 ►
of stabilization inside the visionary plan as an experience.
01:05:42 ►
And I don’t know if I wrote about this in the book, honestly.
01:05:45 ►
I don’t, I’m not sure that you did either. I don’t remember writing about this. I think it’s
01:05:50 ►
just coming through right now. But, you know, in the destabilization that can happen with the
01:05:58 ►
visionary plan, it’s kind of things are getting unbound to be able to have a practice of breathing, for instance,
01:06:07 ►
to be able to have a practice of being with the earth, connecting to the earth energy,
01:06:14 ►
a meditative posture where you can be able to watch your thoughts go by,
01:06:20 ►
and to return back to the present moment consistently. Now, if you have a consistent spiritual practice,
01:06:27 ►
you have that, you’ve developed that strength.
01:06:31 ►
You’ve developed that tool.
01:06:33 ►
And that can be extremely helpful.
01:06:36 ►
Also in integration, since we’re talking a lot about integration today,
01:06:41 ►
in order to be able to go into the shadow material
01:06:44 ►
that inherently is part of the healing process, having a consistent spiritual contemplative practice of some kind can enable one to be able to withstand the challenge to the ego, to be able to go into the shadow more effectively and not just want to run and hide
01:07:07 ►
all the time. So for me, the consistent contemplative practice is very strengthening,
01:07:15 ►
very grounding, fortifying at this kind of like body meets spirit level.
01:07:23 ►
like body meets spirit level.
01:07:26 ►
Yeah, nice, nice.
01:07:29 ►
I really appreciated that you discussed in the book the importance of working with nature
01:07:31 ►
and incorporating ritual practices
01:07:35 ►
to invoke assistance from the elements.
01:07:40 ►
And so I’d love to hear you elaborate on that.
01:07:44 ►
Sure.
01:08:00 ►
You know, I guess I personally have the benefit of going through a multi-year training process with an African, a West African teacher named Maladoma Somme. and his work, his ritual work, his elemental work that we studied and practiced
01:08:08 ►
was something that I was able to take into my visionary plant medicine work.
01:08:14 ►
And I had found it enormously helpful in terms of feeling that I could step into the ceremonial space,
01:08:26 ►
I could step into the ritual space and become unbound
01:08:31 ►
and then come back together again.
01:08:35 ►
For me, the visionary plant world is all about the elements.
01:08:43 ►
I mean, it’s so, it is the elements. I mean, and our bodies
01:08:47 ►
are the elements and we are the elements and we’re living in the elements and, and, and
01:08:51 ►
the visionary plan, this sort of breaks you into that elemental world, sometimes just
01:08:56 ►
like much more profoundly than you’ve ever experienced it before. But, you know, to be able to receive the teachings from the fire, to be able to sink into the earth energy, the Pachamama, the mother nature energy, to be able to receive the teachings from the elements in that regard, to receive the stabilization of the earth, to be able to work with the alchemy of the fire as part of the visionary
01:09:25 ►
planet experience especially if you’re in a place of really releasing you know there’s a lot that
01:09:30 ►
wants to be released and being able to have that relationship with fire that enables that
01:09:35 ►
alchemical transformation to happen perhaps more quickly to be able to receive your own breath, to receive air, to breathe into these spaces in the body that
01:09:49 ►
are really trying to shift or move something.
01:09:52 ►
Water, I mean, goodness, water, I mean, so much to be said about water, but being able
01:09:58 ►
to work with that in the space and to invoke the healing, the deep healing that water offers.
01:10:08 ►
Water always finds a way.
01:10:10 ►
Water always finds a way through, you know, to be able to receive that as part of the
01:10:19 ►
work, whether in ceremony or outside of ceremony.
01:10:22 ►
And for me, working with the elements was a really beautiful
01:10:26 ►
way to ground some of the more visionary states and to be able to help my body to make the
01:10:37 ►
transitions that it wanted to make, to release what it wanted to release. And there were ceremonies where I really feel that, you know,
01:10:45 ►
Pachamama saved me.
01:10:47 ►
It was no small endeavor either.
01:10:53 ►
And that was, you know, sometimes the only thing that I could hold on to
01:10:58 ►
and pray to and to receive from.
01:11:12 ►
I find myself just at a loss for words, honestly, that you bring this up because it’s so powerful and it’s so important.
01:11:16 ►
It is.
01:11:16 ►
I think it’s the whole idea of ritual goes way back in time,
01:11:24 ►
and it’s in all of us. It doesn’t matter what race.
01:11:29 ►
It’s in all of us as human beings
01:11:31 ►
and to bring it into this kind of
01:11:36 ►
deep experience, I think
01:11:39 ►
it helps exponentially.
01:11:44 ►
We just have a little bit of time left.
01:11:46 ►
A couple more things, but you spoke of something that is near and dear to my heart.
01:11:51 ►
You spoke also about the importance of diet and exercise and rest,
01:11:57 ►
pointing out that these medicines can be very depleting to the body.
01:12:03 ►
And so talk about that.
01:12:06 ►
Yes.
01:12:06 ►
You know, I think that is also what you’re pointing to
01:12:10 ►
as another huge misconception around the visionary plant medicine work.
01:12:14 ►
It’s the idea that, well, it’s a plant, so it’s good for me.
01:12:19 ►
And it’s not going to deplete me.
01:12:20 ►
It’s going to enliven me, and it’s going to help my body.
01:12:26 ►
going to deplete me it’s going to enliven me and it’s going to help my body and um you know that that is something that i think probably not everyone has that misconception but it is a
01:12:32 ►
misconception that i ran into and especially with intensive use of the visionary plant medicines it’s it is can be incredibly energetically draining and the physical
01:12:49 ►
body can really suffer and so you know it’s it’s just this is just probably a piece of like
01:12:58 ►
grandmotherly wisdom that always gets passed down i mean if one is going through an incredibly transformative experience and a lot
01:13:07 ►
of shifts are taking place to to resource the body becomes just common sense so you know water
01:13:17 ►
food movement rest these are just just basic physical practices that one would want to engage in if they were to want to be healthy at all.
01:13:33 ►
And of course they align with the plant work.
01:13:36 ►
Now I think people don’t realize how much rest they might need.
01:13:49 ►
they might need. You know, in the visionary plant worker, you know, one’s energy body changes quite dramatically. And a lot of things are happening on the physical level as well. And,
01:13:55 ►
and to allow proper time for all of the pieces and parts to come back.
01:14:02 ►
all of the pieces and parts to come back.
01:14:09 ►
And I think this goes back to this more feminine understanding of really honoring the body, honoring matter,
01:14:14 ►
and treating the body as a temple.
01:14:19 ►
So there’s a love and a care that, for me, Ayahuasca said to me, she said, I mean, one ceremony where I think that I was being hosted and I ended up purging for the entire group for about 10 hours, which wasn’t very pleasant.
01:14:36 ►
But at the end of the ceremony, Ayahuasca said to me, nothing, nothing.
01:14:44 ►
And she was very specific.
01:14:45 ►
Nothing is more important than your physical health.
01:14:48 ►
Nothing.
01:14:50 ►
She said, do whatever it takes to maintain your physical health.
01:14:57 ►
Amen.
01:14:58 ►
Whatever it takes.
01:15:01 ►
So I know you’re very deep into that work, Shauna.
01:15:04 ►
Yeah.
01:15:06 ►
Mm-hmm. so I know you’re very deep into that work Shauna and we will receive
01:15:11 ►
we will not be able to read
01:15:14 ►
our environment properly
01:15:16 ►
we will not be able to read other people properly
01:15:19 ►
we will not be able to read ourselves properly
01:15:22 ►
if our bodies are not healthy
01:15:24 ►
we will receive a distorted view
01:15:29 ►
of what’s happening inside of us and outside of us and so the healthier we are the more we take
01:15:35 ►
care of ourselves the clearer we are our body supports that our body wants to support us
01:15:42 ►
to be clear but we have to give our body what it needs.
01:15:47 ►
Yeah. So, you know, it becomes like a great, a great ally to us. And it’s amazing.
01:15:59 ►
Our bodies are, you know, our greatest teachers in some way, you know. So, you know, talking about exercise and rest and movement and water,
01:16:08 ►
it’s really just, it’s a lot of body care.
01:16:12 ►
And treating the body as a temple,
01:16:14 ►
treating the body as the master teacher that it is.
01:16:19 ►
Yeah, yeah, beautiful, beautiful.
01:16:22 ►
All right, well, you finish this excellent book,
01:16:25 ►
quite rightly, I think,
01:16:26 ►
with a chapter titled Returning to the World.
01:16:29 ►
And you include a quote there by Woods
01:16:33 ►
that I would just like to read.
01:16:36 ►
And so it goes, it says,
01:16:38 ►
What stimulates the mystic’s return to society
01:16:41 ►
is not love alone.
01:16:43 ►
Rather, the mystic is drawn to the world from which she had
01:16:47 ►
withdrawn in order to carry back the answers to the questions, her society’s questions, which she
01:16:54 ►
had borne within her into her solitude and which were raised to consciousness in the process of
01:16:59 ►
reflection, assessment, and reintegration. Having recovered the integral vision of the society which produced her,
01:17:07 ►
the mystic must communicate that vision in word and deed.
01:17:12 ►
And then you write, quote,
01:17:14 ►
the crux of visionary plant medicine is how we move into the world and participate, end quote.
01:17:23 ►
Just beautiful, beautiful.
01:17:26 ►
I’ll just speak a little bit about that,
01:17:28 ►
and that’s a good place to conclude.
01:17:30 ►
Sure. Yeah, thank you.
01:17:32 ►
Thank you.
01:17:34 ►
I wasn’t quite sure how the last chapter
01:17:37 ►
would be received by people who read it.
01:17:42 ►
I just, I feel so deeply that those of us who have been blessed to have endeavored a mystic’s path,
01:17:57 ►
who have had the privilege to be able to withdraw from society,
01:18:03 ►
to be able to withdraw from society,
01:18:12 ►
to gestate on some of the largest questions facing us and our humanity,
01:18:34 ►
and have had the privilege to be able to come back into the world from this place of profound wholeness and offer so much and it doesn’t have to look like millions of followers or anything like that.
01:18:47 ►
It just could look like being present in a way and responding to what actually is, what’s the right word, healing.
01:19:11 ►
I mean, for lack of a better word, that’s opening, that helps other people access the
01:19:20 ►
deeper parts of themselves, their own essential natures, their own soul natures,
01:19:26 ►
their own higher selves, in a way that can perhaps encourage others to know that they’re not alone,
01:19:36 ►
to know that the questions that they have and their deeper longings are important
01:19:43 ►
and essential for all of us in humanity and so i think to return
01:19:49 ►
to to to have been able to receive um from the plants to be have to have been taught to have
01:19:59 ►
practiced the teachings to have learned something and to be able to bring that, what I might call wisdom,
01:20:07 ►
lived wisdom, back into the world is just,
01:20:11 ►
I mean, for me, that is so hopeful.
01:20:14 ►
You know, it’s such an opportunity, it’s such a gift,
01:20:16 ►
and I would really encourage people to keep going on their paths,
01:20:24 ►
to keep following this thread all the way through,
01:20:29 ►
you know, through their own healing work
01:20:31 ►
and back into society,
01:20:35 ►
back into their families,
01:20:37 ►
back into their relationships,
01:20:38 ►
back into their workplaces, you know,
01:20:40 ►
so that we start living the reality that we aspire to.
01:20:49 ►
Beautiful. Well, thank you so much.
01:20:52 ►
Thank you so much.
01:20:54 ►
Thank you.
01:20:54 ►
So much wisdom there, my friend.
01:20:58 ►
How can people reach you?
01:21:01 ►
Sure, Thanks. Um, I’m, I have a website, uh, which is katherinecoder.com. I’m sure you’re
01:21:11 ►
going to be posting something online. Yes. Catherine with a K. Catherine with a K,
01:21:16 ►
Catherine the long way. Um, you know, through email, I’m also on Facebook. And would you
01:21:26 ►
mind if I just said one
01:21:28 ►
small thing about the elemental
01:21:30 ►
school? Oh, of course.
01:21:32 ►
Please, please. Sure.
01:21:34 ►
So, one of
01:21:36 ►
the
01:21:36 ►
things that Spirit
01:21:39 ►
said to me as I left
01:21:41 ►
facilitating
01:21:43 ►
plant work, I said, what now? And spirit said,
01:21:49 ►
elemental work. So I started a couple of years ago offering seminars in elemental medicine,
01:21:57 ►
and I have been able to join with a beautiful soul sister. His name is Liv Wheeler.
01:22:09 ►
She’s a cantomblé diviner and a ceremonialist as well. And we have started a Sacred Elemental Wisdom School and Institute,
01:22:16 ►
and we have a year-long certification program that we are starting in July.
01:22:22 ►
It’s only for women at present,
01:22:25 ►
and we’re going to be taking 14 women into that program.
01:22:30 ►
And we have a website, which is sacredelementalwisdom.org,
01:22:34 ►
and we’re on Facebook under Sacred Elemental Wisdom.
01:22:38 ►
And I offer that out as a point of connection for folks who,
01:22:46 ►
for women especially,
01:22:49 ►
who want to go deeper into the work of ritual,
01:22:50 ►
into the work of elemental medicine, who want to have that kind of grounding and orientation.
01:22:55 ►
Maybe they’ve been in the visionary plant world
01:22:57 ►
and want to go deeper in the elemental direction
01:23:00 ►
or want to have that as part of their practice, even still working with visionary
01:23:08 ►
plans.
01:23:09 ►
So I’m just going to throw that out there as something that could potentially be very
01:23:14 ►
much in alignment with someone who wants to integrate deeply and have a lot of support
01:23:19 ►
around that.
01:23:20 ►
Excellent.
01:23:21 ►
And a community.
01:23:22 ►
And a community.
01:23:22 ►
Yeah.
01:23:23 ►
Yeah, great.
01:23:24 ►
All right.
01:23:24 ►
And then to access the book
01:23:25 ►
this is an ebook form yes it’s ebook form and it will be released i have a page on facebook
01:23:35 ►
called visionary plant medicine integration and i will be releasing uh the book as soon as it is finished completely. It’s going through just the last
01:23:48 ►
stages of production now. So I will be releasing information about that on my Facebook page,
01:23:58 ►
Visionary Plant Medicine Integration. Also through my professional page, Dr. Catherine Coder on Facebook, also on my website.
01:24:06 ►
So I’ll be releasing that widely on different forms of social media and websites.
01:24:14 ►
And I will say that I will be offering it for free initially
01:24:18 ►
because I want as many people who want the information to be able to access it.
01:24:24 ►
So if you’re someone who’s listening and this is something you’re interested in,
01:24:30 ►
please plug in to my social media pages,
01:24:33 ►
and you’ll be one of the first people to know when it’s released,
01:24:38 ►
and you’ll be able to get it for free.
01:24:42 ►
Excellent. Excellent.
01:24:44 ►
All right, well, Catherine, thank you so much. Thank you. Oh right. Well, Catherine, thank you.
01:24:45 ►
Thank you so much.
01:24:47 ►
Thank you.
01:24:48 ►
Yeah, this was just great conversation as usual.
01:24:52 ►
I mean, we have such a great connection anyway.
01:24:54 ►
Yes.
01:24:54 ►
I’m so thrilled with the work you are doing.
01:24:57 ►
And so, yeah, so have a great day and we will talk soon.
01:25:01 ►
Thank you.
01:25:02 ►
And thank you so much for your support.
01:25:04 ►
Absolutely.
01:25:04 ►
It means the world. All right. Take care. Bye. You you. And thank you so much for your support. It really means the world.
01:25:05 ►
All right. Take care. Bye.
01:25:11 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a
01:25:16 ►
time. Well, now there’s another book that I need to add to my shelf of current reading,
01:25:23 ►
which is already kind of overflowing,
01:25:26 ►
I should add. I just finished reading Matt Palomary’s new novel, No Thing, and I’m almost
01:25:32 ►
finished with Listening to Ayahuasca, a new book by Dr. Rachel Harris, both of which I’ll be talking
01:25:38 ►
about in future podcasts. Also, I know that I’ve promised to read a new book about cannabis that was written by one of our fellow salonners, but I’m sorry to say my email correspondence with him took place just before my old computer died, and I haven’t been able to find that message.
01:26:06 ►
send me another reminder. Sorry about that, but sometimes us formerly super organized people,
01:26:12 ►
when we retire, well, we seem to become the opposite of organized. Of course, it could also be due to the exceptionally high quality of the legal cannabis that seems to be making its way
01:26:18 ►
to me from time to time. And now that I think about it, that definitely could also be part of
01:26:23 ►
the problem.
01:26:29 ►
Anyway, this has been kind of a long podcast, so I’m going to cut it off for now.
01:26:39 ►
But I don’t want you to forget that the MAPS Psychedelic Science 2017 conference is going to begin later this week and take place over the coming weekend.
01:26:45 ►
And if you live in the Oakland, California area, even if you can’t afford a ticket to the full conference,
01:26:50 ►
well, there’s still going to be a lot of talks that are going to be available on the Symposia stage,
01:26:56 ►
which is going to be located in the marketplace in the West Hall of the Oakland Convention Center.
01:27:01 ►
And that’s immediately adjacent to the Marriott where the main conference is going to be held.
01:27:05 ►
And what a lineup these guys have.
01:27:10 ►
Just take a look at their schedule, and you can find that online at, and this is all lowercase,
01:27:22 ►
no uppercase letters here, www.symposia.com, slash, all one word, lowercase, psychedelic science.
01:27:23 ►
And I have to admit how impressed I was when I first looked over their schedule.
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They have a full day’s schedule on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday,
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and it includes talks by Android Jones, Michael Devine, Mariana Denkova,
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Ido Hargison, and Jim Fadiman, most of whom you already know from here in the salon.
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Also, Android Jones and Bruce Dahmer are going to help Duncan Trussell do a live podcast there.
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And there are more than a dozen other presenters who are going to be appearing on the symposia stage,
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as well as the ongoing recording of anyone who wants to stop by and record one of their own psychedelic stories,
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which may eventually be played here in the salon one day.
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All in all, I think the Symposia stage would be a great place to hang out and meet some of the others.
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And if you’re in the San Diego area on the 27th of this month,
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well, then it would be great to see you at the Symposia event that night in San Diego.
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Both Matt Palomari and I are going to be there telling some of our favorite stories, and we hope to see you at the symposium event that night in San Diego. Both Matt Palomary and I are going to be
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there telling some of our favorite stories, and we hope to see you there. But for now,
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this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends. Thank you.