Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Zoe Helene
http://www.zoehelene.com/http://Zoe Helene
Date this lecture was recorded: August 20, 2018
Today’s podcast features a conversation between Zoe Helene and Lorenzo. After successful careers in the arts as well as in the corporate world, Zoe has transitioned herself into an advocate for the use of psychedelics, ayahuasca in particular, to help us all accept women as equals in our currently male-dominated societies.
Zoe Helene’s Website
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Psychedelic Feminism
Download a free copy of Lorenzo’s latest book
The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic
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salon.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And a big thanks to Hans L. for making a direct donation to the salon to help offset some of the expenses involved with these podcasts.
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And additional support for the podcast also comes from Rock Z and Benjamin L., both of whom recently became my newest supporters on Patreon.
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Also, I’d like to give a shout out to some good souls who won’t actually hear it for several weeks.
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First, they have to recover from this year’s Burning Man Festival.
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And, of course, they are the wonderful people who have built Camp Soft Landing
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and who have organized and are running this year’s Palenque Norte lectures.
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If all goes well, we’re going to be able to hear some recordings
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of the
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more than two dozen talks that they’ve scheduled for this year. In fact, according to the lecture
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schedule for this year, Ashley Booth and Erica Siegel are delivering their talk right now.
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It’s titled, How to Be a Psychedelic Ambassador. And I’m looking forward to listening to that
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along with you here in the salon a little later this year.
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So now I’m going to play a recording for you of a recent conversation that I had with Zoe Helena,
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who already had a very interesting life before psychedelics came along for her.
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Now, when she was 10 years old, her parents moved to New Zealand, where Zoe grew up.
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ten years old, her parents moved to New Zealand, where Zoe grew up. She eventually returned to the United States, where she received a master’s degree in fine arts, and she then not only worked in the
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arts, but also in the corporate world of Fortune 500 companies as well. But it was in Peru in 2008
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that Zoe had her first ayahuasca experience, and like many of us, it was life-changing.
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Since then, Zoe has founded and participated in the growth of several organizations that
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seek to reach a better balance for life on this planet, mainly through the advocacy of
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psychedelic plants, among other things. Her newest platform, which she calls Psychedelic Feminism,
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intrigued me no end. So I decided to begin our conversation by asking,
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what exactly does she mean by psychedelic feminism?
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I think the first thing I would say is that what has really started to be what people think of
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when they think of me is psychedelic feminism, which is something that I came up with not that long ago of my, you know, inside.
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I didn’t share it with the world, but I remember thinking,
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what in the world is it that I’m doing?
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I know I’m an environmentalist.
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I know I’m a feminist.
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I know I’m working with psychedelic sacred plants.
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What, where are the connections?
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And it just hit me, you know, psychedelic feminism., where are the connections?
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And it just hit me, psychedelic feminism.
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Of course it is.
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I’ve been a feminist all my life because I’m a female and I have some self-esteem.
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And I went through life in a way that I wanted to do things.
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I was really switched on as a young kid.
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I was born in 64.
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So I remember the 60s and the early 70s as a child, but I was a child in a very artistic, creative environment. The sciences were there too. So I was lucky to be
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encouraged to be creative. And I was treated as a real person as opposed to children are to be
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seen and not heard. So I would say that I was a feminist, you know, a real outspoken feminist
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really early. So there’s that. I also started working really young. So I immediately started
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to notice how people would treat me differently for no other reason than that I was female. And
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that wasn’t always a bad thing, but it was a curious thing. And sometimes as I got older, especially, I started to notice that there were some doors and windows that were
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just simply shut for no other reason that I was born female. And it had nothing to do with my
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abilities or my interests or any of that. So that began very, very early. Well, when you’re a female
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in a male dominated culture, which we have and have had for thousands of years, not just here in the United States, but most countries.
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I mean, you’d be hard-pressed to find any culture that’s truly matriarchal or even 50-50.
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So when you’re born a female in a male-dominated culture, you begin to be treated differently in ways that begin to really hold you back and can also hurt
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and they’re insidious and they are omnipresent and they’re quite varied also so then you also
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learn that one of the things you get is you get silenced and when you get silenced you begin to
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internalize and put it way inside you so all all of this is just feminism. None of this is psychedelic feminism. The difference being, one of the things that
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happens with psychedelics that so many people are talking about now, and it’s, I think, part of the
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psychedelic renaissance, is this intentional journeying with psychedelics. I’m interested
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in the sacred plants. I’m really interested in the ones from nature. I’m married to an ethnobotanist, so that’s how I found psychedelics. But what’s intriguing to me
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is this intentional journey where you look inside yourself and you really say, what are those things
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inside me that specifically are there because of being born and raised female in a male-dominated
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culture? What are those pieces inside me that are conditioning
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that doesn’t help me, doesn’t serve me in any way, maybe even really holds me back? Or wounds
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from the patriarchy that are, you know, can be quite terrible and traumatic or can be more subtle,
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such as, you know, silencing or such as just sexual harassment that kept you back
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or having to compromise to get anywhere in the world.
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Those kinds of things are the things we’re looking at with psychedelics.
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And it’s been fascinating.
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Well, you know, as you were talking just now, Zoe,
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I got to thinking that what you’re saying also extends to other people who are kept out,
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like young people whose opinions aren’t listened to, people of color who are excluded as well,
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and even poor white kids sometimes get excluded from things.
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So what you’re saying has a lot more of a general appeal, I think,
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you’re saying has a lot more of a general appeal, I think, in that we can all relate to being excluded because of something that we had nothing to do with. Yes, and the interesting thing is I
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focused on this in part because I just was going with the flow of my own healing, primarily with
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ayahuasca and cannabis, I would say. So, and also, this is my expertise. This is what I’ve had as an experience myself. I’ve also had many very close women friends who have had many, many conversations way before any psychedelics. So I know the problem.
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would work for anyone. In fact, you could take different oppressed groups, like you said,
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or people who are feeling like they have no voice or they don’t have a strong enough voice. You can also take different types of subgroups, such as people with PTSD or people who are
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suffering from depression or alcoholics, or even going even more specific, you could take a group
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of children with alcoholic parents. You can take different groups and really work in the sort of preparation stage,
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the deep immersion stage, and the integration stage afterwards.
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All of these different stages really focusing on those things.
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And, wow, they bring up a lot.
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You know, another thing that interests me about your work, Zoe,
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is that people that are listening to this are, Zoe, is that, you know, people
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that are listening to this are going to say, well, you know, she’s a medicine woman, goes
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to Peru and all.
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But in reading your bio, you were on the corporate fast track.
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It brought back a lot of memories, bad ones, a lot of them too.
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But, you know, I think maybe you should backtrack a little bit.
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And how did, you know, before psychedelics, you were on a whole different track than you’re on now.
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And you must have been searching all this time.
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But how did you go from the corporate world to where you are now in the world of psychedelic medicine?
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Oh, I’m smiling because it is an interesting track like yours has been.
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You know, corporate America came later for me.
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I had already had several successful careers, but I don’t know where to start.
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I think the start is I was born in 64, which is the piece about being born in the 60s,
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but not really remembering it in the same way that older baby boomers would remember.
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I was born the last year of the baby boomers.
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So I am a boomer.
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I’m just a baby boomer,
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a baby, baby boomer, I guess. So yeah, I have hilarious conversations with the older boomers about that because half the time they look at me and go, no way. And I absolutely relate to being
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a boomer. So the 60s was fabulous for me. Everything was there. I was a very psychedelic
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kid. I just didn’t actually have to take any because hey kids are psychedelic kids are not especially kids who are you know encouraged to be creative
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so I I didn’t need any psychedelics and but all of my dad’s students were these gifted performing
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artists and they were amazing and they were older and they were all doing everything you know
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including there were times on campus where they were all doing everything, you know, including there were
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times on campus where they were all nude, you know, that happened. But with the whole sex,
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drugs and rock and roll of the 60s and early 70s, I was a kid. So, you know, yeah, I heard the rock
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and roll. But when the sex and the drugs part came around, it was time for me to kind of, you know,
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go to bed. I was too young to enjoy that piece of the 60s and the 70s,
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but I do definitely remember it.
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And what I remember most is this idea,
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which was definitely a childlike ideal view,
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was that, oh, wow, the adults have figured it out
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and it’s all going to be great from here.
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You know?
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Yeah.
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So that’s what I think about.
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I relate to being a boomer because i too got really disappointed
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with the 80s well weren’t we all you know and you know it’s a kind of a hot buzzword that
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that you use of course is feminism and yes i i graduated from college the year you were born
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64 and the year before that my girlfriend who went to Michigan State
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got me to read The Feminine Mystique. And to be honest with you, here I was, you know,
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a young college student, and I was shocked, just shocked at how poorly women had been treated,
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because my dad was really, you know, he took care of his mother and his sister and my mother and her sister
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and you know I was just taught to really respect women and and I it never occurred to me that they
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were being prejudiced against you know just was a shock to me when I read I think that book probably
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shocked a lot of people so I’m I’m one of these old guys that’s been kind of familiar with feminism
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but it’s gone through so many transitions that old people like
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me, especially sometimes I hear the word feminism and they just run away. And then when you say
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psychedelic feminism, I have this picture of people with wild eyes burning their bras or something.
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First of all, the burning of the bra thing was like the 70s and it had to be and it was of its
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time and we don’t do that anymore.
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I know.
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You know, I am kind of familiar with where things are now.
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Yes.
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But, you know, what you’re saying in a lot of ways, there are a couple of different things.
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There was a lot in there.
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One is I’m not a man hater and never have been.
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Love men.
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I should say I love males.
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I love little boys are wonderful.
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So I’m not a man hater.
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I don’t think that’s healthy.
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I think this is about balance, and it’s about where we are today
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in this ongoing feminist battle that is not done yet.
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In fact, I’m 54, just turned 54,
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so I’ve seen just over half a century of very, very, very slow progress.
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I’d really like to see that speed up. And I
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believe that psychedelics can potentially help us do that. And I hope I’m hoping they will. And
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that’s the core nature behind psychedelic feminism. And like you said, that can be for anybody. But
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just to say, just to make this clear, anybody can be a feminist, you don’t have to be female to be a feminist a feminist is someone who believes that women are equal basically to to men and that’s a very
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simple thing and it also is about balance being more healthy right you know it’s healthy for
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everybody for the earth also i mean the facts of the matter is and people don’t like to hear this
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but and again i’m not blaming you personally i’m not
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blaming men personally this is a long history that brought us to here and some of it’s a bit random
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but we’re destroying our own planets and it’s getting pretty desperate and right now we still
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have a very strong patriarchy around the world to various cultures have a little better treatment
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here and there but it’s still very much male dominated.
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So that’s gotta be an indication of an imbalance problem ultimately in our
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species. And if we don’t get hold of that and do something about it,
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then we don’t have a species and we take everything else with us when we go.
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And for me, I love humans.
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So I’d like to see us evolve and do
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better. And I know I’m not alone on this podcast. I’m sure there are a lot of people who’ve come to
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that same conclusion, because I’ve never seen anything like psychedelics for moving the
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conversation forward. And, you know, obviously, I totally agree. You know, I have five grandchildren
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and four of them are women. And, you know, I have a
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big stake in this myself. And what you’re saying about the environment, I think is it’s even much
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more serious than those of us who’ve been paying attention have been thinking because with the
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oceans warming and the Arctic warming, we’re in some really, I didn’t think what’s happening today
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was going to happen until long after I died, but I’m still going to be alive to help my grandkids
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cope with some of this because things are changing rapidly. And I have come to the conclusion,
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as you have, I think that while not even a large percentage of humans need to participate in
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psychedelics, but we all need to come around to the kind of thinking that comes out of psychedelics.
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psychedelics, but we all need to come around to the kind of thinking that comes out of psychedelics.
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And everybody I’ve ever met that has used psychedelics comes out much greener and much more aware of nature and life. So I think they are critical to human survival on this planet.
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I hate to be so melodramatic about it, but I guess we’re both preaching to the choir here.
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We are totally in sync. And I often will tell people when they’re asking me about
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psychedelic feminism and cosmic sister especially cosmic sister is really where ecofeminism and
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psychedelic feminism meet because i don’t think it i think it would be very very difficult in fact
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i can’t even really imagine it to be a psychedelic feminist and not be an ecofeminist because you
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really just need you know you’re so in touch with nature. You’re so reconnected with nature because we are of nature, no matter how much we
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try to pretend we’re not. We still are. We have these bodies we live in and they’re a natural
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thing. They’re from nature. So if we’re, you know, with psychedelics reconnecting, then
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we’re going to realize what’s going on. And we’re also, it’s the funny
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thing. Another thing about psychedelics, I think can really help us jog through irrational thinking
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within ourselves. So people are able to deny things like climate change or deny very significant
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problems that we’re all facing as a species. And psychedelics can really help bust through that and say, oh, OK, I see it now.
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Yeah, you know, you know, as you were saying that, I was thinking, yeah, that, you know, of course, you know, we’re part of nature.
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With the exception of that, we have opposable thumbs and we’ve managed to use the technology of language.
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And then I got thinking, yeah, I guess actually we’re just the freaks of nature.
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Everything else is in balance. And we have to get our human species back in balance, which I believe it was at one time.
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You do. You think so?
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Way long time ago, before America was great again.
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Oh, I’m talking pre-agriculture tribal days, you know, when, you know, it wasn’t as comfortable. And I still have to believe that
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people fell in love and loved their kids, you know, and had some fun times. I don’t think that
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we were just purely animals as we were developing agriculture. I think that a lot had been taking
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place there. And I think there was a lot of balance. But of course, there weren’t a lot of
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humans either. Well, I think that the truth is is depending on how far you really want to go back I mean I
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you know so far as we know we’re all from Africa so let’s say we go back um 10,000 years you know
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there’s still lots of different cultures and the cultures are each going to have their strengths
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and weaknesses I was talking with my husband about this too, because of course he had to go through this whole psychedelic feminism thing with me,
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which is a hoot. He’s 66. So, you know, he’s, he’s survived the seventies as well.
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But, you know, he’s great. And we talk about it and he says, you know, we basically to cut to the
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chase agreed that the truth is some way back in the day,
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at least in certain regional areas where people had, let’s face it, inbred for a long time in tribes,
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they were of different types of shapes and sizes.
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So in that balance, it seems that typically the male is larger than the female in a human tribe.
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is larger than the female in a human tribe. Just as if you have a wolf tribe or a lion pride,
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the males are quite a bit larger than the females usually. So there’s this physical,
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you know, dominance that in the early days probably did come into play. Now, you look at today, it shouldn’t be the case. Although in some cases it would be, but I was, you know, debating with him that doesn’t really exist anymore because now we have guns, for example.
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who tend to be a smaller size and another group of people who tend to be larger. So you could get one really large, you know, incredibly strong woman and a little teeny guy from another culture who’s tall in his culture and you put them together.
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And that doesn’t even exist anymore. So it’s of the past is the point.
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It’s of the past, but it may very well have been the reason that we got on this track in the first place where we were so imbalanced. And yes, we are a bit of freaks, I think,
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in a lot of ways. And we may be an invasive species at the moment. We are. So the question
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is, can we get beyond that? And will psychedelics help? And it seems like you and I are on the same
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page there, which I’m not surprised. And the thing I like about the phrase
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psychedelic feminism is,
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as I understand feminism, it’s not like trying to start a matriarchy and just replace the patriarchy.
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It’s to balance things out, like you were just saying. I’m so glad you brought the thing up
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about the matriarchy, because often people will assume that I believe that we would be better off
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with a matriarchy. And the thing is, that wouldn’t have been balanced either. Even if that had come into play thousands of years ago,
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the truth is, it would have, the women or the females
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would have probably developed some pretty perverse,
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weird power things over the males.
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And it would have been an alternate universe
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that you could write movies about or novels about.
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But it hasn’t happened. and this is what has happened
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and this is where we are today the war thing is interesting because when you have an imbalance
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this long like this is very long term imbalance of gender okay even language and culture is so embedded in these ideas of defining which gender is what.
00:20:28 ►
So I even question ideas like a man’s feminine side.
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I suspect that the male has a beautiful, sensitive, receptive side when they’re born.
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Little boys are very sensitive. So when you start to categorize what is feminine and
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what is masculine over and above our sort of physical characteristics, which can also get
00:20:50 ►
you into trouble, you run into trouble pretty fast. You start to really break that down. What
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is masculine? What is feminine? Naturally. And I really don’t think we can know is the truth.
00:21:05 ►
I think we’ve been that conditioned.
00:21:07 ►
You know, that’s a really good point.
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And especially like with little boys, instead of saying they’re being feminized,
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they say, well, you know, he’s honoring his gentle part of his nature there.
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And the words are important, as you say.
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I think honoring is a really beautiful word.
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Honoring, celebrating, expanding, experiencing, all of these wonderful, positive words to really support these characteristics that are often suppressed in males.
00:21:38 ►
And that gets back to psychedelic feminism, because for me, where I’ve come with with it I’ve gotten more and more to understand
00:21:45 ►
and a very deep level for myself how men have also been or males have also been victimized and
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wounded by the patriarchy it’s not good for males either and you know I mean there was something you
00:21:59 ►
were talking about with trying to understand feminism as well and other, when you first came across it, I wanted
00:22:06 ►
to bring up the movie The Black Klansman, which is out right now and is just an absolute must-see
00:22:12 ►
work of art, in my opinion. I think that with each generation, we need to bring these things out
00:22:17 ►
again. I remember those times in the United States. We moved to New Zealand when I was
00:22:23 ►
just about to turn 10. It was 1974. I remember
00:22:26 ►
the period that the Black Klansman is about. And it was a great period of time, even though there
00:22:32 ►
was so much upheaval. And it was kind of like an ayahuasca ceremony in that we were all kind of
00:22:37 ►
saying, hey, we need to look at our cultural problems and do something about them. We’re
00:22:41 ►
going to get them all out. We’re going to purge them and recreate. And then there was backlash. So here we are again. And thank you, Spike Lee, for that movie,
00:22:54 ►
because he’s educated an entire new group of people in the United States and abroad. And it’s
00:22:59 ►
very, very important work. When you look at racism, sometimes it’s easier to understand sexism
00:23:06 ►
and vice versa. Because ultimately what it’s about is this group of people are treated differently
00:23:12 ►
and they carry wounds because of it. And they know these wounds. They experience these wounds
00:23:18 ►
every single day. Sometimes I switch it around and talk about that and also sometimes it’s the same with classism
00:23:26 ►
especially places like england you have really significant classes in there you have it here
00:23:31 ►
too in the united states but it’s a little different here because we believe in the you
00:23:34 ►
know making money and becoming like you know you’re always still nouveau riche whatever that
00:23:39 ►
is but all of these kinds of isms ageismism, big one, these are not good.
00:23:47 ►
And, you know, a lot of this comes from the language we pick up as young, very young children.
00:23:52 ►
I, you know, I just edited an Aldous Huxley talk in which he kept talking about mankind instead of humankind.
00:23:59 ►
And, you know, we’re raised that way.
00:24:02 ►
And I think especially, you know, I used to practice law in Houston, lived in the Deep South a lot and saw the way these kids are raised about race.
00:24:10 ►
And, you know, it’s just sort of a second nature that they hear this thing, these things from their parents.
00:24:16 ►
And, you know, I was lucky because my mother was the bookkeeper for the garbage company in our town and it was all black people so every
00:24:25 ►
Friday we’d have like 20 garbage trucks around our house on the corner and they would take me
00:24:31 ►
for rides in the truck you know they’d come pick up their paychecks and so I got to toot their
00:24:35 ►
horns and ride in their trucks and these guys I grew up with these guys as my friends and so
00:24:39 ►
I was shocked when I moved south and saw young kids who are already, you know, essentially racist.
00:24:46 ►
You know, there’s these things again, we’re talking about this basically movie set in the 70s.
00:24:54 ►
Well, even back with something like South Pacific, the musical, there’s a song called You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught.
00:25:01 ►
There may be a different name for it. I don’t remember the actual title of it.
00:25:04 ►
But if you read the lyrics, they’re really quite profound. And it’s basically
00:25:09 ►
about, you know, a child doesn’t, is not born racist. It’s what you’re saying. You have to
00:25:14 ►
be carefully taught to hate and fear. I can’t remember all the lyrics, but if you were looking,
00:25:19 ►
you know, Google them, they would probably be very relevant. So again, each generation needs to carry this forward.
00:25:25 ►
We have to keep up the fight.
00:25:27 ►
We really have to keep it up.
00:25:29 ►
And when we look at who’s, you know, our current president,
00:25:33 ►
it’s pretty frightening how fast this switched around again.
00:25:40 ►
You know, since you brought him up, I’m going to switch back to my safe place.
00:25:44 ►
You know, since you brought him up, I’m going to switch back to my safe place.
00:25:55 ►
And I will go out and Google the South Pacific song because you triggered a really cool memory I hadn’t had in years.
00:26:01 ►
My dad and mom drove in to Chicago to see Mary Martin perform in the South Pacific.
00:26:07 ►
When they got back, they woke my brother and I up like at one in the morning to tell us all about it. So I, I, I love that play. I’ll go out and check that song now.
00:26:12 ►
When you listen to that song, it’s not the greatest melody.
00:26:15 ►
When you listen to it, it makes me cry.
00:26:17 ►
And a lot of it makes me cry because of how slow progress has been.
00:26:23 ►
There is no question, depending on where you measure it from, about how slow
00:26:29 ►
progress is.
00:26:30 ►
But just 14 years ago, when I started the Psychedelic Salon, I almost didn’t use the
00:26:36 ►
word psychedelic because it was so toxic at the time.
00:26:39 ►
Ah, yes.
00:26:40 ►
And, you know, when I moved to California, I came from where I was having to drive down to the dark side of Tampa and buy dope on the street from people.
00:26:49 ►
And now I go to a website and put in my credit card and it’s delivered the next morning.
00:26:53 ►
So there has been some progress, you know.
00:26:57 ►
We’re in Massachusetts. It’s wonderful.
00:27:00 ►
Right. And, you know, my youngest son was just here and he’s concerned about the gay rights are slipping back, too.
00:27:06 ►
And, you know, he’s married.
00:27:08 ►
He and his husband live in Phoenix.
00:27:09 ►
And their next-door neighbor is this woman running for Senate and probably is going to win.
00:27:14 ►
So he’s seeing a lot of the work that they have worked for all these years is starting to slip a bit.
00:27:21 ►
But on the other hand, from where I’m starting from, a lot of progress
00:27:25 ►
has been made on gay rights, women’s rights, black rights. But we haven’t, you know, we’ve only made
00:27:30 ►
the first step in each of those things on a very long journey. But at least I think that we’re
00:27:35 ►
still inching forward and not going back too much. We’re just slowing the progress a little bit. But
00:27:40 ►
I’m still a hopeless optimist about things are going to, you know, I like this concept of the parallel universe that they talk about.
00:27:50 ►
And I look at these parallel universes as a bunch of like flat plates that are all stacked up against each other.
00:27:56 ►
And one of them is a happy ending universe.
00:27:59 ►
And so I’m navigating through all these plates.
00:28:01 ►
When I find the happy ending universe, that’s where I’m staying.
00:28:04 ►
Oh, happy ending. I love it. Well, well you know I am an optimist too I’m ultimately hopeful I’m also a
00:28:11 ►
realist I look at what’s in front of me and I think that yes we’re moving forward very we are
00:28:17 ►
progressing it’s true however we can see by this person that won’t be mentioned again, so you don’t have to go to your safe place.
00:28:27 ►
We’re witnessing how fast it can backlash.
00:28:30 ►
Right.
00:28:31 ►
So it’s not enough to inch forward this slowly.
00:28:34 ►
We’re not going to make it if we don’t evolve faster.
00:28:38 ►
It’s just the truth.
00:28:40 ►
I know I’m not alone in thinking this because it’s zeitgeist.
00:28:43 ►
This is what’s going on right now in the world.
00:28:45 ►
There are other people like me coming to the same conclusion.
00:28:47 ►
I’m sure there are many.
00:28:49 ►
It’s out there to look at it.
00:28:51 ►
So the optimist in me has found psychedelics.
00:28:57 ►
And I’ve been exploring mostly with women in this particular thing just to see how it goes and it’s been quite fascinating to
00:29:06 ►
watch women especially go down to the amazon and work on these specific issues and and witness them
00:29:12 ►
before during after it’s not a magic pill obviously or magic potion i should say it doesn’t cure all
00:29:19 ►
but the progress is fascinating and their experiences and their, their stories of healing and their visionary experiences and how those then
00:29:27 ►
factor into their lives at home and how then often they want to come back and
00:29:32 ►
bring someone else.
00:29:33 ►
And just watching that evolution from a more individual basis and then watch
00:29:39 ►
them go out in the world and spread it around and pay it forward has just
00:29:44 ►
made,
00:29:44 ►
it feels wonderful because I I felt like
00:29:48 ►
you know I I couldn’t do a huge amount of good I didn’t have that kind of resources so at a certain
00:29:55 ►
point I was feeling pretty desperate despair despairing is the word I felt very despairing
00:30:01 ►
mostly from my wildlife work which again goes back to humans, because
00:30:06 ►
we’re the problem. Wildlife would be fine if we weren’t here. My wildlife work had put me into
00:30:13 ►
such a funk, you know, because we’re losing the battle, that I asked the ayahuasca, you know,
00:30:21 ►
what to do next, and I got a very simple message. Do what you can.
00:30:26 ►
Start small.
00:30:27 ►
Start with the individuals and treat them like they matter because they do,
00:30:32 ►
because it all is about each individual.
00:30:34 ►
So I started with one woman who did something I thought was really brave and
00:30:39 ►
wonderful for her family, for a family member, probably saved her life.
00:30:43 ►
And I knew that she needed she was traumatized
00:30:47 ►
by the experience too and I asked her if she wanted to come down and said I’d pay for it
00:30:53 ►
and that was the beginning of the plant spirit grant which is the the deep immersion grant in
00:30:58 ►
the Amazon and it’s probably the most charismatic of the three grants, but the other two grants are, I think, equally important and quite different.
00:31:07 ►
I’d like to share that with the audience, too,
00:31:10 ►
because that’s really what Cosmo Sister is most known for is these grants.
00:31:14 ►
And they did come out of that experience.
00:31:16 ►
That was the answer I got from the ayahuasca.
00:31:18 ►
They’ve grown substantially.
00:31:20 ►
And through the process, of course, I, too, drink.
00:31:23 ►
So I, too, learn. and through the process of course I too drink so I too learn and the bonds that we have
00:31:27 ►
in ceremony and just are extraordinary my husband also comes and I want to kind of clarify that too
00:31:34 ►
people tend to think it’s all women circles and a few articles have sort of insinuated that they’re
00:31:39 ►
not all women’s circles they’re often primarily women but I’ve been feeling like I want a little
00:31:45 ►
bit more balance there too. This is a tricky subject because many of the women have expressed
00:31:50 ►
that they like that there are mostly women and they feel more comfortable going into this territory.
00:31:56 ►
But I also have witnessed that if men are working on similar types of things, that too can be very
00:32:02 ►
revealing to a group. The group dynamic is wonderful and very important, I think,
00:32:08 ►
at least in the ceremonies that I participate in.
00:32:12 ►
And I also want to just, while we’re on it, I’d like to clear something up too.
00:32:16 ►
I am not a shaman or a healer in the sense of leading ceremonies.
00:32:20 ►
I’ve been asked to train by some pretty amazing maestros,
00:32:23 ►
which is a great compliment,
00:32:25 ►
but it’s not my path. I really respect their calling and their work and their expertise.
00:32:33 ►
And I like to bring people to them and then do what I do to maybe help them understand what
00:32:40 ►
they’re going to do and how best to work with the medicine. Again, in those three specific phases,
00:32:45 ►
that’s where I feel like I can offer the most good.
00:32:50 ►
So I don’t know if that helps at all.
00:32:53 ►
Well, you know, actually, Zoe,
00:32:54 ►
that’s a perfect segue into a question I have for you.
00:32:59 ►
Because, you know, I am going to your website.
00:33:02 ►
There’s all these different tracks,
00:33:04 ►
and I spend a lot of time going down different tracks.
00:33:06 ►
And I was trying to relate.
00:33:09 ►
I’ve had three long-term, you know, 10- to 20-year relationships with three different women in my life.
00:33:16 ►
And all three of them, before I met them, were single mothers.
00:33:20 ►
And their lives were, oh, just hectic.
00:33:23 ►
I mean, it was really – I can’t express how how much i feel for
00:33:28 ►
single mothers it’s just an awesome job they have so i’m thinking and and also you know i i know
00:33:35 ►
it’s hard to feel sorry for them but soccer moms are equal they a lot of them are carrying down a
00:33:41 ►
job and trying to pick up their kids at daycare and all this stuff. And women who are raising kids, whether they’re a soccer mom or a single mom,
00:33:50 ►
and they can’t all go to the jungle, but how can they get some assistance
00:33:56 ►
or some support through your groups?
00:34:02 ►
What would they do when they go to a website?
00:34:04 ►
That specific group? Well, each woman is really seen as an individual. You don’t have to be a
00:34:10 ►
mother. You don’t have to be even old enough to have married and had kids or anything like it.
00:34:16 ►
Not that you have to get married anymore, but you don’t have to be that. It doesn’t have to
00:34:20 ►
be that specific, but we have had single moms come and they’ve had some really great work.
00:34:24 ►
We’ve also had a volleyball mom come.
00:34:25 ►
She’s also my editor and she’s wonderful.
00:34:27 ►
Her name’s Robin.
00:34:28 ►
So we’ve had different women who would fall into that category.
00:34:31 ►
But if there was somebody specifically that,
00:34:34 ►
that somebody that’s a group that you care about,
00:34:36 ►
that you’ve personally witnessed the,
00:34:39 ►
the hardships there,
00:34:40 ►
right?
00:34:41 ►
There are many groups like that within the,
00:34:43 ►
the larger group female. i like to try to
00:34:47 ►
keep it diverse because i only have so many resources this thing could grow just to be clear
00:34:51 ►
the only thing holding it back at this point is funding i get so many people applying for these
00:34:56 ►
grants and i have to tell you it’s all over the world and they’re quite remarkable women quite
00:35:01 ►
varied all different ages from younger than I’d like to bring to
00:35:06 ►
older than I think could handle it. What if somebody’s listening that might be able to
00:35:14 ►
provide some funding? How would they get a hold of you? Oh, well, there are, this is where it gets a
00:35:19 ►
bit tricky, but the easiest thing to do is just to email me. You can go through the contact form on the site,
00:35:26 ►
or if they’re really interested in providing that kind of funding,
00:35:30 ►
I don’t want to give my email out on.
00:35:32 ►
No, don’t do that.
00:35:34 ►
The contact form does reach me,
00:35:35 ►
but if you want to just go to CosmicSister.com support,
00:35:39 ►
you can donate through MAPS, which is my fiscal sponsor.
00:35:45 ►
And so your donation would be tax deductible.
00:35:47 ►
And that will go specifically to Cosmic Sisters Psychedelic Feminism grants.
00:35:52 ►
It does not go to the Deep Immersion Ayahuasca grant.
00:35:56 ►
That was where they do the line with Uncle Sam.
00:35:57 ►
They didn’t think Uncle Sam would be cool with, you know, and I quote,
00:36:01 ►
sending women down to the Amazon to trip.
00:36:04 ►
It’s hilarious. It’s hilarious.
00:36:06 ►
So what we do is instead we provide a different type of grant on the side.
00:36:11 ►
That’s more of a creative grant,
00:36:13 ►
an educational grant where these women can begin to express what,
00:36:17 ►
how it was for them.
00:36:18 ►
They helped to educate the public on their experience,
00:36:21 ►
their healing experience and self-liberation.
00:36:23 ►
I like to say, experience
00:36:25 ►
with ayahuasca. So that’s how we get around that. And those grants, there are two grants,
00:36:32 ►
they’re identical. They just have two different names. One is Women of the Psychedelic Renaissance
00:36:37 ►
and the other is Cosmic Sisters of Cannabis. I only separated them out because cannabis is so
00:36:43 ►
huge as a category. It’s an ambassador plant, a sacred plant, and a psychedelic.
00:36:48 ►
And it is really doing a number on our culture.
00:36:52 ►
And I do everything I can to support the cultural movement of cannabis liberation.
00:36:58 ►
So I separate them out only because of that.
00:37:01 ►
But they’re basically educational grants for women.
00:37:04 ►
Everything from helping speakers more
00:37:06 ►
women speakers speak at psychedelic conferences or cannabis conferences helping women to get
00:37:12 ►
place articles and write articles journalistic articles of more personal articles things like
00:37:18 ►
that photojournalism anything that can move the conversation forward from the female voice perspective.
00:37:25 ►
I’m doing something that might really be interested to your younger millennial listeners,
00:37:31 ►
female millennial listeners.
00:37:33 ►
If you’re hearing this, please apply for a Women of a Psychedelic Renaissance grant
00:37:38 ►
and or a Cosmic Sisters of Cannabis grant,
00:37:41 ►
because I am right now putting together a project for millennial women because I feel that the millennial women in the psychedelic and cannabis
00:37:50 ►
community are not being heard enough and they deserve to be. They’re getting older and they’re
00:37:57 ►
quite remarkable and I think they get a really bad rep in the media in general. So I’m doing
00:38:03 ►
something that’s focused on them right now.
00:38:06 ►
And I’m really excited about it.
00:38:08 ►
Very, very excited about the finalists
00:38:10 ►
I have right now in hand.
00:38:12 ►
They’re quite remarkable, very different.
00:38:15 ►
And I’m looking for a few more.
00:38:18 ►
You know, something you just now said too,
00:38:20 ►
that I think could be a benefit to a lot of people
00:38:24 ►
that are sitting there saying
00:38:25 ►
well you know I don’t have any money to donate I can’t go to Peru what can I do but you you you
00:38:29 ►
used a phrase that’s so important it’s what you’re doing is moving the conversation along
00:38:35 ►
and yes everybody can do that whether it’s at your your you know at lunch at the lunch table
00:38:42 ►
at work or or even in your church group if you haven’t go to church
00:38:46 ►
you can always move the conversation along and myron stoler off you know he lived into his 90s
00:38:51 ►
but he was so good uh he every time he got on a shuttle to an airport he picked up a conversation
00:38:57 ►
about psychedelics with people and that was back in the 70s and 80s but nowadays it’s so much easier
00:39:02 ►
to do and i think both cannabis and ayahuasca,
00:39:05 ►
which are the two main substances I’m interested in and have definitely changed my life, both of
00:39:11 ►
them. Yeah, and the two of them are the most important things in my life, and you can talk
00:39:16 ►
about them now because ayahuasca is all over the news, and of course cannabis is as well, so
00:39:21 ►
we can all move the conversation along every day. Well, this is exactly it. And I’m
00:39:27 ►
really excited about how that’s going. And I’m very interested that you chose the two plants that
00:39:32 ►
I work with as well. Those are my two plants. I love mushrooms, but I haven’t done a lot.
00:39:39 ►
Well, you know, my guess is those two plants chose us.
00:39:43 ►
You know, my guess is those two plants chose us.
00:39:46 ►
That’s very, very possible.
00:39:51 ►
Dennis McKenna told me once, he said to me, you owe it to yourself to explore mushrooms.
00:39:53 ►
So I will do that.
00:39:55 ►
Something you might want to do.
00:39:57 ►
I was going to say something you might want to do with mushrooms.
00:40:00 ►
I’ve done quite a bit of mushroom exploration.
00:40:02 ►
And I took a tape recorder.
00:40:04 ►
Now it would be a digital recorder.
00:40:06 ►
And I’ve got maybe 20 hours of what I call my mushroom tapes that they wouldn’t make any sense to anybody else
00:40:12 ►
but I can actually recall the colors and visuals I had with some of them so uh be sure to document
00:40:18 ►
it if you do it wonderful what a great idea so you literally were were journaling and while you were tripping
00:40:27 ►
i was kind of anal back in those days
00:40:30 ►
but i’m glad i did it now you know it’s fun to talk to someone who understands taping
00:40:37 ►
who even uses that analog term i know oh it’s it’s a funny thing to my grandson is into analog vinyl. And I asked him,
00:40:49 ►
he was into 45 RPMs. And he didn’t know what a 45 was. So boy, yeah, the vinyl thing is awesome.
00:40:57 ►
What a trip, you know, the whole thing is so interesting to watch. And I do want to say
00:41:02 ►
something about that, since we’re on this subject. And again, you know, this can be all humans or you could focus in on the group that I’m focusing on,
00:41:11 ►
which is females. And we’re about 50% of the population around the world. So it’s a large
00:41:17 ►
group, right? But within that group, you can always create subgroups, okay, so one of the things we deal with, this is
00:41:25 ►
a classic patriarchal divide and conquer tactic, it’s also colonialist, but colonialists were not
00:41:33 ►
the only dominators, there were others in different times, in different places, so I don’t like to use
00:41:38 ►
colonialism so much as, you know, dominators, okay, so the dominators were, they knew that one of the best ways to
00:41:45 ►
keep a population down and take them over and, you know, be able to somehow get them to do what
00:41:50 ►
they wanted to do, be subservient in some way was to divide and conquer within that group,
00:41:56 ►
whatever group they were conquering. So they’ve done a really good number on women. And we have
00:42:01 ►
this thing where we are brought up to not trust other females of different generations
00:42:07 ►
or or other females we compete we you know we’re taught to tear each other apart the thing with
00:42:16 ►
mean girls that’s a very real thing i have a currently have a troll out there and it’s very
00:42:22 ►
very unfortunate to see a um a woman being like that about another woman,
00:42:28 ►
because that’s, that’s a patriarchal wound, in my opinion. Yeah, you know, it’s, it’s interesting,
00:42:33 ►
and it definitely is. And, and that’s probably more difficult for women in, among other women,
00:42:41 ►
because men, men don’t really do that quite so much i don’t think
00:42:45 ►
to each other you know we we beat each other in sports or just ignore one another or something
00:42:50 ►
like that but uh you know getting getting really kind of uh stalking and getting mean to others uh
00:42:56 ►
uh we seem to move on or at least the men i know i guess well it may be the men you know because i
00:43:02 ►
think the predominant probably gender in trolling would be male, actually. But back to the divide and conquer thing is very real. So with Cosmic Sister, I do everything I can to include in the diversity dimension. You know, when I’m looking, I really try for diversity. I want more and more.
00:43:26 ►
I want more and more. But part of that diversity dimension is time of life.
00:43:34 ►
And I do prefer that to age because really what we’re getting down to is the time of life. Right.
00:43:40 ►
The life experience and what you’ve learned in your time of life. Some people haven’t learned very much.
00:44:05 ►
Well, there is that. confident and cocky and starting businesses and doing all this stuff and traveling around.
00:44:10 ►
I wasn’t real obnoxious, I don’t think, to people, but I was pretty full of myself.
00:44:15 ►
And then after I turned 70 and I started reflecting and looking back a little bit,
00:44:23 ►
I guess wisdom comes from knowing how naive you were about the world. And I really had a lot of false assumptions about things I realized. And I’ve
00:44:26 ►
lived a nice life. I haven’t been mean to people and I try not to burn my bridges. But on the other
00:44:32 ►
hand, I think that as you get older, where I turned a corner was when I realized that whatever
00:44:39 ►
I’m going to be in this world, I am. There’s no more companies I’m starting. I’m not going to get rich
00:44:45 ►
again. I’m not going to just, you know, I am what I am, like Popeye said. And once you realize that,
00:44:51 ►
you kind of relax and you don’t try to show off and be something that you want people to think
00:44:55 ►
you are. And all you really want is recognition and others to care. That’s the bottom line.
00:45:00 ►
Your cultural references are a hoot. Papa, I love it. Okay. I’m teasing you because I’m 54,
00:45:09 ►
you see. So it’s all relative is the thing. And that’s, I’ll tell you, I love being in the Maloca
00:45:15 ►
with a group of people who are very different ages. Fantastic. And you know that the ayahuasca
00:45:22 ►
circle I participated in for quite a few years was, years was about 75% men, 25% women.
00:45:29 ►
And of the men, half of them were gay.
00:45:32 ►
And it was really an interesting group, especially the next morning after, you uh, every time we had a circle where no women showed up,
00:45:46 ►
they were really not as pleasant as they were when we had some kind of a
00:45:51 ►
softening influence. And we talked about that a lot, but, and,
00:45:54 ►
and nothing really changed. The stories were the same and all,
00:45:57 ►
but there was some sort of a vibration that just kind of made the, the,
00:46:01 ►
the evening go much better.
00:46:03 ►
So any man is lucky enough to go to the
00:46:06 ►
jungle with one of your groups will find that he’s in heaven i am really looking carefully this year
00:46:13 ►
i mean it’s tough because i don’t go that often and i really like i said i could go down much more
00:46:18 ►
often if if that was possible and if it was something I wanted to do. So, you know, space is limited is what I’m trying to say,
00:46:25 ►
but I do really enjoy having more men in the Moloka too.
00:46:29 ►
And I think they are going to be really special spots for whoever manages to
00:46:34 ►
snag them first. And that’s the hard part is already there’s so many,
00:46:38 ►
I don’t know how to do, how to even look through that selection process.
00:46:43 ►
How do you choose?
00:46:44 ►
And I do look at it from a diversity perspective as well.
00:46:47 ►
And I go with my gut a lot, you know,
00:46:50 ►
because there’s other diversity dimensions.
00:46:52 ►
For instance, someone who’s a hyper intellect
00:46:55 ►
with a ridiculous CV and somebody else who,
00:46:58 ►
you know, maybe is a single mom
00:47:01 ►
and didn’t get to go to college
00:47:02 ►
or is taking care of her mother or whatever it is that they just didn’t go
00:47:07 ►
that route, but they’re wonderful in their own ways and very intelligent.
00:47:10 ►
You know, that that’s a diversity dimension for sure.
00:47:13 ►
You put them in the Maloka together. It’s very interesting.
00:47:16 ►
They can be really healing.
00:47:18 ►
If you could see me right now,
00:47:20 ►
you would see a big smile on my face about you dealing with a problem.
00:47:25 ►
How do I choose among all these people? Whereas a few years ago it was,
00:47:29 ►
I wonder if anybody’s going to apply.
00:47:32 ►
Well, isn’t that a wonderful problem to have though?
00:47:34 ►
It is. It is.
00:47:36 ►
Fundance challenge. Now I want to just run. There are a couple of notes I’ve taken.
00:47:39 ►
I don’t want to miss these. One is I want to mention mentoring,
00:47:42 ►
because when we were talking about the different ages and the wisdom that you do earn over time, you know, getting older, for me, it’s
00:47:49 ►
been such a strange experience, because now the younger ones come to me, and they’re looking at
00:47:54 ►
me for wisdom. That was a very weird transition. It sure is. For a few years, I just would like
00:48:01 ►
literally tear up, because all I could think were the mistakes I’d made in
00:48:07 ►
life it was extremely humbling I know you know what you’re saying yes okay then I realized I need to
00:48:17 ►
um step up to this I need to I it was hard to put into words. I need to own this in a way,
00:48:27 ►
at least in their eyes, because in their eyes, they’re seeing me as wiser and older. And the
00:48:34 ►
truth of the matter is, in some respects, I am. So what I need to do is just simply say, look,
00:48:41 ►
I’ve learned a few things along the way, and I’m seeing something for you. I’d love to share with you. Have you been reading my notes? I say very similar things. That’s good,
00:48:54 ►
because that means, I always say to myself, when you end up talking with others in this scene,
00:48:59 ►
and you’re coming to similar conclusions, that to me, it seems like we’re on the right track. And
00:49:04 ►
that feels really good to me. But yeah mentoring very important and everybody can mentor i tell
00:49:09 ►
younger people who will come with us you know there was a 21 year old last time and i said you
00:49:14 ►
know you can mentor someone who’s 10 you know and really change their life change their life
00:49:21 ►
you know by saying something just even the smallest thing like, wow, you’re really good at art.
00:49:29 ►
Exactly. You know, my 13-year-old granddaughter is a mentor in her junior or her middle school.
00:49:39 ►
And the eighth graders get to mentor the new kids.
00:49:42 ►
And she was one of them selected to do it.
00:49:44 ►
And she’s got two or three kids that she’ll be mentoring.
00:49:47 ►
And it’s very excited about it.
00:49:48 ►
And they’ve had classes about it and stuff.
00:49:50 ►
So it’s really important.
00:49:53 ►
And the earlier someone starts, I think, the better.
00:49:55 ►
And then they’re in the habit of picking up and helping people.
00:49:59 ►
I think in the other direction, it also helps people be better students to their mentors.
00:50:04 ►
I still have
00:50:05 ►
mentors and sometimes you know in different fields I would consider someone a mentor in a different
00:50:10 ►
way if they had an expertise I didn’t have but were younger that’s all but it’s a little different
00:50:15 ►
when we’re looking at time of life you know there are some women who were highly influential on my
00:50:21 ►
life and some of them I’ve never met but I still consider mentors like a
00:50:25 ►
Gloria Steinem I’ve never met her she’s been extremely influential to me you know Christine
00:50:30 ►
Downing I’ve never met well I have met her in person but it’s a long time ago but her best
00:50:34 ►
friend who was in archetypal psychology comparative mythology it’s a field that I’ve I really love and
00:50:41 ►
could have it could have been another track of my life if I had a clone.
00:50:51 ►
She’s definitely been a mentor to me and Jean Shinoda Boland, same thing. Have I been mentored in person? Not so much, but their words and the things that they’re sharing with me have
00:50:56 ►
helped me to have a really fabulous life, actually. Well, I am largely who I am today because of my mentor
00:51:07 ►
that I had for many years in my early or throughout my 20s and early 30s. There you go. And I have to
00:51:14 ►
say, you know, paying homage to my mentors that were actually in my life that I, you know, went
00:51:19 ►
to school with or learned with, I wouldn’t be able to list them all. They’ve been so, there’ve been so many,
00:51:25 ►
and there’ve been so many wonderful ones, but I,
00:51:27 ►
I’d say off the top of my head,
00:51:29 ►
I turned down a Yale scholarship to grad school and just out of undergrad to
00:51:37 ►
work with Patricia Zipporat, who you would never heard of.
00:51:41 ►
I can tell from your paws and most of the listeners would never have heard of
00:51:44 ►
either. Look her up she’s one of the most influential theatricals of the past century
00:51:49 ►
and or just period she was a costume designer but she was also a self-confessed director junkie so
00:51:56 ►
she worked with some of the finest of all directors she was considered like what they would call it
00:52:01 ►
would be a director’s designer okay so the director’s like working with her because she understood humans so well.
00:52:08 ►
She didn’t talk about costumes.
00:52:09 ►
She talked about clothes and character and story.
00:52:13 ►
So she was an extraordinary mentor.
00:52:15 ►
And when you asked me about my career path, you know, for me,
00:52:19 ►
when I think about what I chose in the arts,
00:52:21 ►
I could have chosen anything in the arts.
00:52:23 ►
I ended up working in the theater because it was the most collaboratively of the arts and
00:52:28 ►
it was the most the one where you could be a multidisciplinary artist and it was
00:52:32 ►
it was a strength you know so there are many different arts that come into play
00:52:36 ►
but it’s also about human condition it’s about character what is character you
00:52:42 ►
know in method acting especially character is action it’s very
00:52:47 ►
simple it’s not words it’s action now if the words are are in fact an action like let’s say a troll
00:52:53 ►
I’m being trolled right now so in that case those words are actions or putting it up on social media
00:53:00 ►
deciding to publish these remarks, that is an action.
00:53:06 ►
And it shows character.
00:53:07 ►
It does.
00:53:12 ►
I think that all of these things in my past led me to where I am today.
00:53:15 ►
It may be a little difficult for somebody else to understand,
00:53:18 ►
but especially for the young people listening,
00:53:24 ►
I believe that the most important thing is to follow your true path as best you can.
00:53:25 ►
Follow your heart.
00:53:27 ►
Do what you love the most.
00:53:29 ►
Hopefully you also have a talent in it.
00:53:33 ►
You should listen to people when they, you know, sometimes, well, that’s complicated.
00:53:36 ►
Sometimes people can judge you incorrectly.
00:53:37 ►
So follow your heart.
00:53:40 ►
Do your very, very best at what you choose to study. But don’t feel like you’re going to have to do that for the rest of your life, because it’s
00:53:45 ►
rarely the way things work, and I know I’m speaking to the converted with you, Lorenzo, because you
00:53:50 ►
have had a very varied career path like I have, but a lot of young people don’t realize they could
00:53:56 ►
go that direction. They get really worried about what are they going to study in college, you know,
00:54:01 ►
what am I going to declare as a major? I was not that kid. I knew
00:54:05 ►
what I wanted really early on. I was hyper aware of it. And I went after the mentors I wanted to
00:54:11 ►
work with. But I know there are a lot of people who don’t know what they want. They haven’t found
00:54:15 ►
it yet. They’re exploring. And I think that the best thing to do is just do what you love the
00:54:20 ►
most and do it really, really well. And that then will lead you in the direction of where you’ll
00:54:25 ►
you wherever it is, you’re going to end up right now in my life. It’s psychedelic feminism, who knew?
00:54:32 ►
And, and, you know, that is perfect advice. And obviously, I’ve followed it myself. The thing
00:54:37 ►
also that you said was so important is that, you know, it may not be the thing that you want to do
00:54:43 ►
forever that you you could be following your bliss today,
00:54:46 ►
and six years from now you say,
00:54:48 ►
you know, I’ve explored that cave as far as I’m going to go.
00:54:52 ►
I’m going to go out and find another one.
00:54:54 ►
And you have to be willing to let go.
00:54:57 ►
And here’s where that is difficult because you’re going to disappoint people.
00:55:01 ►
But everybody’s seen these surveys now they’ve done in hospice
00:55:05 ►
care where 90% of the people who are dying say their biggest regret is they always try to do
00:55:12 ►
what others wanted them to do or expected them to do and they didn’t follow their own dreams. So
00:55:16 ►
your advice is right on. And I think that I hope that everybody hearing it will bite the bullet
00:55:22 ►
and do that. Well, this again goes down to programming and psychedelics,
00:55:27 ►
because I think a lot of these ideas are put into our heads by other people,
00:55:33 ►
maybe in our family.
00:55:34 ►
My family wasn’t like that, but a lot of people’s family are.
00:55:37 ►
But somewhere in their head saying, oh, you need to be a, you know,
00:55:41 ►
I hate to say lawyer because I know you went into law.
00:55:43 ►
Law is great, by the way, if that’s your calling. Law is awesome. Law, you know, you need to be lawyer because I know you went into law. Law is great, by the way, if that’s your calling.
00:55:45 ►
Law is awesome.
00:55:46 ►
Law, you know, you need to be a doctor.
00:55:48 ►
You need to be a lawyer.
00:55:49 ►
You need to be a fill in the bank.
00:55:50 ►
You need to take over the country’s store or the restaurant or whatever.
00:55:54 ►
No, you don’t.
00:55:55 ►
You need to do what you love.
00:55:56 ►
And you have one.
00:55:58 ►
But do it the best you can because then it will be useful when you reach that phase you were talking about.
00:56:05 ►
Like I like that idea.
00:56:06 ►
I’ve explored this cave as much as I can or whatever.
00:56:08 ►
I felt the same way, and my husband is the same.
00:56:11 ►
He’s had some very interesting career changes over the year,
00:56:15 ►
but each one led to another.
00:56:17 ►
Started in yoga.
00:56:18 ►
He ended up in natural products, was very influential in that,
00:56:23 ►
ended up a medicine hunter slash ethnobotanist
00:56:26 ►
it’s it’s uh he’s like me that way you know I’ve run into first of all started in performing arts
00:56:33 ►
and again I was already a multidisciplinary artist and I was gifted and I was very disciplined also
00:56:38 ►
so I was good at it young and I could never choose one over the other because I got so much out of each
00:56:48 ►
and I was good at each so I went into the theater because that’s where I could continue to explore
00:56:54 ►
and express each of these things that I was good at and that I loved and work with others who were
00:56:59 ►
the same as I was and the collaboration was wonderful There’s nothing like it when it comes together,
00:57:05 ►
when you’re working with others like yourself who are really dedicated to the craft and are in the
00:57:11 ►
flow and all of that. And, you know, back then, you know, you’re talking, you asked about my
00:57:16 ►
career path and where psychedelics fit in. There were no psychedelics in my life other than my
00:57:22 ►
own, you know, altered states that i could get into with art
00:57:25 ►
or with dance which is an art i didn’t meditate in that sense back then but i definitely my art
00:57:32 ►
was meditative because when you’re in the flow you are in an altered state of a type so i did
00:57:37 ►
explore altered states of consciousness but not with a quote unquote substance in my body.
00:57:47 ►
I didn’t try anything.
00:57:56 ►
I had all of the propaganda from the backlash era that sort of was in college in the just say no,
00:57:59 ►
this is your brain on drugs era for real.
00:58:02 ►
And I bought the propaganda of cannabis.
00:58:08 ►
When I had an experience with cannabis, it was after I was living with my sweetheart at the time,
00:58:12 ►
who was a, it’s fair to say, very, very sweet Wacom baker.
00:58:17 ►
A real full-on pothead, okay?
00:58:20 ►
And I never touched the stuff, although we were living together.
00:58:21 ►
I was afraid.
00:58:23 ►
I had all the ideas.
00:58:29 ►
I can’t, well, first of all, it was illegal, and I was was on scholarship I was terrified I would lose my scholarship which I might have so there was that but there was also this fear around you know
00:58:33 ►
letting go or becoming addicted or you know losing your mind and never coming
00:58:38 ►
back all these ridiculous ideas from the 60s and I I was watching our neighbors we were living in one of those houses
00:58:47 ►
where there were four different apartments and I was watching a party downstairs with my neighbors
00:58:52 ►
who I liked who were not in school I was in school he wasn’t he’d already graduated they were older
00:58:57 ►
professionals but they were still young and they were having a great time and there were no drinks
00:59:03 ►
they weren’t drinking and everybody else at my college were drinking.
00:59:07 ►
It was drinking culture, which is terrible.
00:59:11 ►
They were already alcoholics at like 18, 19, 20.
00:59:15 ►
And I was here, it was 2021, something like that.
00:59:18 ►
And finally, I said, I would like to try some of that.
00:59:21 ►
So he whipped me up a very strong bong bong hit and i took a hit and i had the full-on
00:59:28 ►
psychedelic experience without question you know i’m i’m doing the math i’m doing the math here
00:59:34 ►
zoe and i’m figuring that was around 1984 yes you’re very right and 1984 for the, up through the first half of 1984, I was a Vietnam veteran, 42 years old,
00:59:49 ►
and had never smoked pot or done anything like that.
00:59:53 ►
And so you and I started at the same time.
00:59:56 ►
Well, how about that? That’s interesting.
01:00:00 ►
Well, here’s the thing. It took me a long time speaking with media.
01:00:04 ►
I would tell this story. They would ask me, when was your first psychedelic experience? And I would always tell them about my first ayahuasca experience. And then finally, I realized, but, well, actually, and then I realized, no, I had a full on visionary life changing experience in Charlotte, North Carolina, with my then boyfriend, sweetheart, Kevin’s bong head.
01:00:29 ►
I, it was, it was really remarkable. And it was what I needed at the time as a whatever I was
01:00:35 ►
21 year old woman exploring my sexuality for the first time, really exploring. So I, it was a,
01:00:43 ►
it was a self liberliberating experience changed everything
01:00:45 ►
and then I again through the media I realized that my story I hadn’t really understood what I was
01:00:52 ►
doing from that moment on I would secretly with Kevin and others who were in our cannabis community
01:00:59 ►
but secret from my school I would explore cannabis as a way to get to the next level
01:01:06 ►
artistically because I was very good for my age and I needed some way to push it forward.
01:01:13 ►
And I found that if I worked with cannabis the right way, I was a lightweight and I still am,
01:01:20 ►
so I didn’t need very much, but just a little bit and something would shift in the way I could do
01:01:25 ►
my assignment I could get it to the next level and learn something myself teach myself something
01:01:32 ►
and so I was not going back from that no one was going to take it away from me because what I
01:01:36 ►
wanted more more than anything in the world was to be the best I could be in that subject
01:01:41 ►
and that continued on through grad school so i was definitely working with
01:01:46 ►
cannabis i was never a stoner like try to you know hide from my pain and things like that that’s not
01:01:52 ►
my nature but i was absolutely exploring it in the same way i explore ayahuasca it’s just a different
01:01:58 ►
well it’s a very different situation with you know those those are are two important words to use with with cannabis or any medicine is working with and exploring you know both of those words
01:02:11 ►
imply that that it’s not just going to be a fun trip while it will be pleasurable
01:02:16 ►
but it’s really pleasurable to get some kind of a creative insight as well and that’s when you’re
01:02:22 ►
working with it you know i’m so, this is why we like each other.
01:02:27 ►
I hope we like each other. I like you a lot. We are really in sync.
01:02:31 ►
I use those words really carefully. And part of my, you know,
01:02:34 ►
work as an educator in this and moving the conversation forward culturally,
01:02:39 ►
I understand culture. So I’m, I like to think of it as a cultural activism.
01:02:44 ►
I try to talk about it as cultural activism.
01:02:51 ►
I try to talk about these kinds of words, like the words that you use, that you choose to use in whatever you’re doing. And you’re speaking to media or your speeches or your journalism if you’re a writer.
01:02:57 ►
These things matter.
01:02:58 ►
I don’t like the word use when associated with sacred plants.
01:03:01 ►
It’s not very respectful.
01:03:03 ►
And it’s not at all how I see it or experience it.
01:03:06 ►
I don’t feel like I’m using anything I’m working with.
01:03:11 ►
And the exploration is the same thing as,
01:03:14 ►
I like the word trip because I remember the 60s and it’s a great word.
01:03:18 ►
And you are tripping, it’s the truth.
01:03:20 ►
But I also like visionary experience or altered state
01:03:23 ►
because they really say the same kind of thing.
01:03:26 ►
But there’s an intention in it that’s maybe a little bit different. Right.
01:03:30 ►
Exactly. Exactly.
01:03:31 ►
I think that really matters. And when you’re talking about it to people of varying degrees of, you know, their their journey with psychedelic, I think those are really important distinctions.
01:03:41 ►
And those are the kinds of things I do when I work with people and bring them down to the amazon for the first time unless they’re psychedelic um explorers in
01:03:51 ►
their own sense and many are in fact some of the people who come with me are psychonauts way beyond
01:03:56 ►
me so there are like i said there’s a there’s a big variety. People coming to the Amazon with me who have never taken a psychedelic in their life.
01:04:06 ►
I had a wonderful woman, 67 years old.
01:04:10 ►
And the way she put it, which I thought was hilarious, was always the trip sitter and never the tripper.
01:04:17 ►
She just turned 70.
01:04:18 ►
She wants to go back down.
01:04:20 ►
She had a wonderful experience.
01:04:22 ►
And she’d never done anything all through the 60s, nothing.
01:04:26 ►
You know, Zoe, what you just said, for our first conversation, we are seemingly getting along
01:04:31 ►
pretty well. And we’ve gone on a little bit longer than I was usually going on, but we’re
01:04:36 ►
going to have to do this again. We’re going to have to continue this conversation. I think that
01:04:40 ►
we can have a lot of fun doing it. So maybe I’ll get this out in a week from tomorrow.
01:04:47 ►
And then in a month or so, as you get some more,
01:04:51 ►
you know, move along,
01:04:52 ►
you’ve selected your grant recipients and stuff like that.
01:04:56 ►
Maybe we can do this again
01:04:57 ►
because I still have a bunch of questions I want to ask you.
01:04:59 ►
Oh, aren’t you wonderful?
01:05:01 ►
Absolutely.
01:05:02 ►
Thank you.
01:05:02 ►
Thank you.
01:05:03 ►
And I hope we meet someday in person.
01:05:05 ►
I’ll be at Spirit Plant Medicine in Vancouver this year.
01:05:08 ►
It’s going to be a happening.
01:05:09 ►
It’s quite a group.
01:05:11 ►
When is that taking place?
01:05:13 ►
It’s the first weekend of November.
01:05:15 ►
I’m not speaking.
01:05:16 ►
I haven’t gotten to that point where I can get up there yet.
01:05:18 ►
I’m working on that in the medicine space.
01:05:21 ►
But I will be there.
01:05:22 ►
And there are quite a few grant recipients who will be there as well speakers five of them and some others who are on educational grants to be present and be
01:05:30 ►
able to learn from these amazing people uh there are a lot of i have to say this because i have
01:05:35 ►
you you you’re a big poobah male okay i laugh about this term because big poobah male is like the big chief you know yeah yeah there are
01:05:46 ►
check out the lineup of big poobah males at this particular conference
01:05:51 ►
it’ll be a blast it’s gonna be i think it’s gonna be a happening you know for the the last uh four
01:05:59 ►
and a half years i i quit accepting any invites to speak because I just got sick and tired of seeing
01:06:05 ►
these old white men up on the stage, you know?
01:06:07 ►
Oh, yes.
01:06:08 ►
Well, that is a dimension I would love to speak with you about maybe on the next, in
01:06:13 ►
our next conversation, because we didn’t talk about that too much.
01:06:17 ►
That’s a big part of what Cosmic Sister is about, is trying to help, you know, with that
01:06:23 ►
problem, because that’s an easy problem to solve.
01:06:26 ►
Well, I’m going to add to the problem by next month.
01:06:29 ►
I’m going to go up and speak at the Imagine Festival
01:06:31 ►
up in Orcas Island.
01:06:32 ►
So I’ll be close to Vancouver,
01:06:34 ►
but not quite there when you’re there.
01:06:36 ►
Well, I’m sure you’ll be brilliant
01:06:37 ►
and I’m sure you have loads of things to share
01:06:40 ►
and I wish I could be there.
01:06:41 ►
So it’s not all about kicking out the white males,
01:06:44 ►
the older white males, the older
01:06:45 ►
white males. It’s really about balance and making room. So if that means you have to have longer
01:06:51 ►
conferences because you don’t want to lose these wonderful guys, then hey, that’s what you got to
01:06:55 ►
do. Well, there’s going to be a conference on Orcus again in March that I’m going to. And right
01:07:00 ►
now it’s at least 50-50 men and women. So, uh, and it’s not, yeah, it’s not going to be exclusively psychedelics either. So, uh, that,
01:07:08 ►
that should be a lot of fun, but, uh, we’ll talk about that more.
01:07:10 ►
And you and I’ll probably talk at least once before then, because, uh,
01:07:14 ►
as I said, Zoe, I still have a bunch of questions and, uh,
01:07:16 ►
I want to get into more, uh, discussion about ayahuasca work and, uh,
01:07:20 ►
we’ll just, uh, we’ll.
01:07:22 ►
I would love that. And just remember, you have four granddaughters.
01:07:25 ►
They’re already going through this, not the psychedelic part, but the being female in a male dominated culture.
01:07:31 ►
There is no way I can forget my four granddaughters.
01:07:36 ►
Just know that they’re already having this experience in the world.
01:07:39 ►
Oh, I know.
01:07:40 ►
I know.
01:07:41 ►
And hopefully that they will find somebody like you to help mentor them.
01:07:44 ►
And I’m sure there are a lot of great people out there.
01:07:48 ►
There are.
01:07:48 ►
Thank you so much.
01:07:50 ►
Well, thanks for being here. And I look forward to our next time, Zoe.
01:07:53 ►
I do too.
01:07:54 ►
Okay. Bye bye.
01:07:56 ►
Bye.
01:07:59 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:08:06 ►
As you can tell, Zoe and I hit it off quite well, and I look forward to speaking with her again
01:08:12 ►
in the not-too-distant future, I hope. Normally, I really don’t like conducting interviews myself
01:08:18 ►
because, well, I’m always afraid that I won’t think of enough interesting questions to ask.
01:08:24 ►
So, before we
01:08:25 ►
talked, I asked Zoe to send me a list of questions that she would like to speak to. But, well,
01:08:31 ►
Zoe is so easy to visit with that I never even got around to asking any of the dozen
01:08:36 ►
or so questions that she sent to me. In fact, I didn’t even get to ask all of the questions
01:08:41 ►
that I came up with myself. As you will see, if you visit some
01:08:46 ►
of the links to Zoe’s work that I’ve added to the program notes for this podcast, well, you still
01:08:51 ►
have a lot of surfing to do before you get close to seeing the full picture of Zoe’s work. These
01:08:57 ►
are really beautiful sites. They’re full of photos and stories that I’m sure will catch your interest.
01:09:02 ►
And I’ve linked to them in the program notes, as I said,
01:09:05 ►
which you’ll find at psychedelicsalon.com.
01:09:09 ►
Well, I think that you’ve already heard enough from me for today.
01:09:13 ►
And, well, besides, I’ve got to put the finishing touches on the talk
01:09:17 ►
that I’ll be giving at the upcoming Imagine Orcas Island Music and Arts Festival
01:09:21 ►
that begins on the 6th of September.
01:09:24 ►
And I’ll be talking about the
01:09:26 ►
role that psychedelics have to play in this new age of artificial intelligence. Maybe I’ll see
01:09:32 ►
you there. Outside of that hour that I’m committed to make my presentation, the rest of my time there
01:09:38 ►
will be spent walking around and visiting with fellow salonners who I expect will also be added
01:09:43 ►
to my list of new best friends,
01:09:45 ►
and hopefully you’re going to be one of them too.
01:09:48 ►
So for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:09:52 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you.