In this episode of Ayahuasca Podcast, host Sam Believ (founder of http://www.lawayra.com) has a conversation with Daniel Shankin, a mindfulness coach and psychedelic integration specialist. Daniel is the founder of TAM Integration, which provides support, education, and integration circles for those working with psychedelics. He also leads the Mountain TAM Psychedelic Integration Coaching Program, training emerging facilitators in integration practices.

Topics Covered:

  • (00:34 – 02:21) Daniel’s early psychedelic experiences and how they shaped his path
  • (02:23 – 03:49) The evolution of integration and its growing importance in psychedelic use
  • (04:11 – 07:39) What psychedelic integration actually means and how it works in practice
  • (08:28 – 10:52) Defining enlightenment: is it real, and what does it look like?
  • (12:20 – 17:43) Relationships, marriage, and how psychedelics impact personal growth
  • (18:24 – 19:55) Couples using psychedelics together—how should they integrate their experiences?
  • (20:52 – 26:44) Working with difficult psychedelic experiences—when to seek clinical support
  • (27:10 – 29:08) PTSD, CPTSD, and the potential of psychedelics in healing trauma
  • (30:19 – 34:29) The importance of a supportive environment post-ceremony
  • (35:09 – 38:54) The thin line between spiritual experiences and psychological projections
  • (41:15 – 43:07) Shadow work—what it truly means and how to approach it
  • (43:12 – 46:48) Mindfulness and integration: how self-awareness helps psychedelic experiences land
  • (47:00 – 50:32) The ego and the default mode network—understanding the role of self-identity in psychedelic work
  • (52:19 – 55:32) The Mountain TAM Psychedelic Integration Coaching Program and how it trains integration coaches

If you would like to attend one of our Ayahuasca retreats, go to http://www.lawayra.com.

Find out more about Daniel Shankin and his work at http://www.tamintegration.com or follow him on Instagram at @tamintegration.

Transcript 

Daniel Shankin: You’re listening to ayahuasca podcast.com. There’s a lot of stuff inside of us that we can’t own, and when it pops up, we think it’s something else. A lot of folks are in agreement that like, they call it the sh, the shadow or what have you, right? So we’ve got stuff inside of us. We’ve got hate and rage and guilt and shame and yada yada man’s in humanity to man.

And then, we have a vision of it. The subconscious is Hey, we wanna deal with this. Look at this, right? Can we deal with this? Please? It communicates it the best way. It knows how, because it doesn’t necessarily speak English. It speaks in this five dimensional vision. People have a tendency to go into fight or flight around it, right?

They push it away. They don’t wanna believe it. They other it, they think it’s something else. They wanna fight against it, all this kind of stuff. They think it’s other. And that’s tricky because then we go into fight or flight. If it’s us, the wise thing to do would be to try to create an, open a dialogue with it and see what kinda love it wanted.

Does it need love? Does it need support? What do we do? How can I help? As Ramdas would say.

Sam Believ: Hi guys, and welcome to Ayahuasca podcast. As always, we do the whole Sam. Today I’m having a conversation with Danielle Shakin. Danielle is a mindfulness coach and psychedelic integration specialist, founder of TAM Integration, which offers support, education and integration circles. For those working with psychedelics, he also leads the Mountain Tam Psychedelic Integration Coaching Program Training Emerging facilitators.

In this episode, we talk about psychedelics and counterculture, the importance of processing psychedelic experiences, complexity of making real life changes, enlightenment, psychedelics, and relationships, handling difficult psychedelic experiences, share the work. Ego and default network and more. Enjoy this episode.

This episode is sponsored by Laira Ayahuasca Retreat. At Laira, we combine affordability, accessibility, and authenticity. Laira, connect, heal, grow. Guys, I’m looking forward to hosting you. Daniel, welcome to the show.

Daniel Shankin: Thank you so much for having me, Sam. It’s great to be here.

Sam Believ: Dale, tell us a little bit about yourself and what brought you to work with psychedelics and psychedelic integration.

Daniel Shankin: I’ve started doing psychedelics at a young age. I was in high school early high school when I first started doing psychedelics. And and at the same time I was also interested in meditation, things of that nature. I was, I had my parents’ record collection and I know that like the Beatles.

Hung out in India and did LSD and they made awesome music. And that seemed like a good combination. And so these things have always been interesting to me and I’ve been following that path in a variety of ways for, years and years now. And this is where it’s led me, this is where it’s led me today.

So you mentioned

Sam Believ: like early high school. What kind of psychedelics are we talking about and what year I would it be?

Daniel Shankin: I was at, I, yeah, I was probably 13. Seems young now, but it seemed, started smoking pot, when I was 13 and I think I ended up at a party the end of my freshman year.

And there was some, with the big kids and, there was some guy who was even older than the seniors, I think. And he had some l and I ended up on, on some L and it was a, a wild curious evening. And so that’s like about where that started. And, it’s, this was the usual things that were available to kids in those days.

Cannabis and LSD and mushrooms. And it was basically the what was on the menu.

Sam Believ: Which which of these experiences made you realize about the importance of the integration? Maybe was it a personal experience where you realized that

Daniel Shankin: It’s necessary? Integration wasn’t even a word until much later.

Nobody spoke about it. This was the nineties, there wasn’t the internet, like awi, I, we didn’t know about any of the book, any of the books in the library weren’t gonna give you straight information. You had to learn through, books on counterculture.

Is what I found. If you were interested, you had to read about the hippies and you had to read about the meditators and things like that. You had, hopefully you could find some MDOs or something and he would talk about it. But integration yeah I didn’t hear about until much later that, people were doing Integra.

There was like maybe two groups doing integration circles, right? Erie was throwing an integration circle and Cherie down in LA was doing an integration circle, and they just seemed great. That seemed like a really good thing to be doing. And yeah, I felt like I needed it, and so I needed it, so I started doing them so that I could, have a circle to be with people.

And that’s how it started. That’s, yeah, that’s how it kinda started for me.

Sam Believ: So how does one go about that and learn integration? What would you say this, say somebody who’s listening has never heard that word before and, but they had psychedelic experiences and now they want to integrate what they do.

Daniel Shankin: So you had an experience, right? Good job. You had an experience and you survived. I’m talking to somebody new. You had an experience and you’re okay. But you might have had experiences of. Visioned for yourself, right? You you might’ve, there was probably some good stuff that happened and there was probably some intense stuff.

Maybe it was bad, it was confusing. And so there’s a mix of these things where maybe you saw the face of God, right? And he reached down, touched your heart, and it exploded into rainbow love. And you’re like, Hey, I want my life to be like that always. And then also you might have seen terrifying visions of hell or had excruciating memories of times past, or you might have been confronted with your lower nature and realize that you haven’t been being the best version of yourself possible and you’re struggling with that, right?

So experiences can be mixed. That’s okay. And so with that in mind, you have two choices. You can just stuff it all away and be like, that was weird. And forget it was happening and go back to your normal life. Or you can say to yourself, Hey, I wanna take some of that. So I want to learn from this and I want to grow from this.

And maybe I do want my heart to be more filled with rainbows on a regular basis. And maybe I do wanna be a better version of myself and maybe I wanna learn to forgive and I want myself and others, and maybe I want to clean up my act in certain ways. And so integration is a process that is basically the process of making that happen.

And so it’s highly individualized, right? Generally people do a lot of the same stuff. They, they’ll journal or they’ll create personal ritual or they’ll make commitments to themselves to live a different way. They’ll probably wanna do some meditation and some yoga. A lot of people wanna clean up their diet and that’s how it goes, right?

And, but. What your curriculum and your lessons are highly individual, right? It might, for it, for some people it might be quitting their job. For some people it might mean getting a better, a different job that’s more in line with your values. It might mean going to church, it might mean leaving the church.

It might mean doing yoga. It might mean cleaning up your credit, right? And paying back the people that you owe. But you know what it is. It’s just you gotta take responsibility to actually do it. And it’s helpful to recognize that it’s a moment to moment practice. Sometimes people think oh, I should already be enlightened.

And there’s people out there who will pretend to be enlightened. They’re like, oh, I got enlightened. And then they just act as if they’re enlightened all of a sudden. And they’re obviously not for everybody around them can tell that they’re not. And, so you don’t focus on like the goal or necessarily like some sort of lofty goal.

You think about how am I going to be more kind and honest every time a challenging moment arises, right? And oh, maybe I did it good, maybe I did it not so good, and take responsibility for it without criticizing yourself too harshly and then just getting up and trying again. How’s that? Does that work seem like a good starting point?

Sam Believ: Yeah, it’s the integration is one of those topics that many people say, but not many understand that it’s can be explained in so many different ways. Yeah, I don’t think there is a right or wrong, but it’s a good, it’s a good start. And I definitely struggle with explaining it to people that come to our retreat.

I do my best. I, we even do a workshop on the topic. But knowing my own experience with medicine specifically, I work mostly with ayahuasca. I just understand how hard it actually is to do. So it’s one of those things that are easier said than done. But you mentioned enlightenment.

So quick question for you. Have you met anyone who is actually enlightened?

Daniel Shankin: I’ve met people who are close. Depending on our definition. What’s our definition of enlightenment?

Okay. You want me to answer? The, from a Buddhist perspective I think that it refers to somebody who is free from ignorance and addiction and craving and hatred, right? So it’s somebody who is just clear in their seeing. Because a lot of the times our clear, our seeing and our understanding gets clouded by what I want, what I need to have, how am I make sure I have the stuff I need?

And then it’s also clouded by, I hate that. I don’t like that. That feels threatening to me. And then of course, there’s just confusion about the nature of the world and the self in general. So in yoga, they talk about, enlightenment is knowledge of the true self, right? So when we stop mistaking what’s false for what’s true what’s permanent from what’s temporary, what’s real from illusory, then we’re getting close and to and a lot of that is in reference to what we think we are and who we think we are because we have a lot of.

Erroneous ideas about who and what we are, I think, and that we’re very attached to being perceived a certain way by ourself and others we’re very attached to not being seen in other ways. And it’s a it creates a lot of chaos for ourselves and the people that we love. I think the state of enlightenment is really simple and natural.

I think sometimes those of us who have got glimpses of visionary states full of magic and wonder and subtlety and other dimensions and stuff, think that enlightenment is like a magic state of some kind. And I think that it’s just a real simple, peaceful mind full of understanding and they’re having a lack of confusion.

Sam Believ: Sounds beautiful. Sounds like something I would want to experience sometime in my life. You never claimed you’re enlightened, but you definitely look and talk the part to me. Yeah, I remember when I was when I was preparing for this podcast, I listened to some episode with you and definitely your voice is very soothing.

So I, I have to thank you for this because I had a very stressful day to coming up through this and like lots of stuff moving and I can feel myself almost relaxing and integrating. So I’m sure the listeners will. Yeah. Thank you for that. But back on the topic of integration,

Daniel Shankin: that’s just, man, I gotta tell you, that’s just teaching yoga for 15 years.

That’s just, you just learn to talk in a way that relaxes people. It doesn’t, you can still be a crazy schmuck and be able to like, speak in a relaxing voice, but thank you. I’m glad it’s helping.

Sam Believ: Yeah, you definitely talk the talk, so that’s for sure.

Daniel Shankin: And you can ask my wife if she thinks I walk the walk.

Sam Believ: Yeah. Wifes they will always know it. It’s a, it’s interesting. I wanna talk to you about that afterwards, about wives and relationships. What are you married? Yeah, I’m married and I have three kids. They’re all very young, so at the same time as having three kids and building this ayahuasca retreat that’s very busy.

It’s pretty difficult. And I think that, I’m not a Buddhist, I’m not like the most spiritual person you’ve ever met, but I definitely have my, egoistic attachments to certain kind of outcomes. So I definitely would like to come to the point where I’m more peaceful or maybe perceive the world in a different way.

And I definitely progress a lot in my own emotional. Healing journey. But I’ve I think that women are placed in this planet to no matter how good, like my wife is an amazing woman, she’s a great wife, but I think they’re this like permanent destabilizer that so here’s my theory. I think that life is a game for the souls play because they wanna learn something.

But the premise of the game or the background setting is you can never win because when you win in the game, you switch off the computer. So you don’t, you no longer wanna play. And the way it’s kept from ever winning is by having always some kind of complexities. And I think women is one of those that will never, ever go always as, of course you can become a monk and never deal with women again.

But I think that. That’s also very unpleasant. So what do you think about that? Have you noticed that, men and women were from different planets, and how does that intertwine with your with your own like growth journey?

Daniel Shankin: I’m pretty sure that if I live with anybody and was like up in their business all the time and had my finances tied together with them and had my fates tied up with them, that there would be challenges.

Regardless of regardless of gender or anything like that. I know that my wife and I do challenge each other. We, we, I’m lucky she lives by spiritual principles as well we have. Kind of guidelines for who, how we wanna be and how we wanna live.

And those are fairly closely aligned, and that’s really great. Yeah we’re not monks, right? We’re householders, we’re allowed to be in the world. We’re allowed to want stuff, we’re allowed to, like cool clothes and tasty food and sex and all those kinds of things. And, we’re allowed to wanna, provide good lives for our children.

I think that’s dharmic that’s a good thing to, to do and to participate in society and support monastics. We donated, Tam donated a little bit of money to a monastery in Nepal this week. That feels good. It’s that’s part of the householder gig is to support charitable projects.

I think to have reciprocity as well is a big thing in our. Community these days. We practice sacred reciprocity with a variety of organizations. And one of the things that, that does, and working with people in general, right? We working with, wife and children, hopefully inspires us to have a generous heart, right?

We’re talking about, it’s like we want to, it’s like a relationship I think works when everybody is they’re enjoying what they’re getting, but they’re also enjoying what they’re giving, right? Working to, support the people in our care, in our, ever widening, it’s like we’re universal, psychedelic.

People can think really big. We can get really universal into one world family, the whole cosmic crew and all that kind of stuff. The interdimensional family. But then, the, there are also intimate, more intimate circles of care, right? And it that is hopefully what I am inspired to do by my wife, and that includes being generous of spirit with the things that might irritate me because I know that she’s generous of spirit with the things that I do that irritate her.

And one of the things that I like about psychedelics is that it seems to open those channels of love and generosity that, is people are like, oh, what’s your intention for this psychedelic journey? It’s it’s to open the channels of light so that the love of the Lord can shine through me and spill out onto the, of all the people I care about.

It’s what do you wanna do? I just wanna like channel, I just wanna channel the love through. And I think that a family is a really good way to, to make that real, to really bring that to the forefront.

Sam Believ: You mentioned psychedelics and sort of couple couples format, so that’s something that’s not commonly talked about, but what do you think should be the integration process maybe for a couple that did psychedelics together or maybe talk about some of your personal experiences?

Daniel Shankin: I am not going to talk about personal experiences that involve other people. But I think in general what’s, but generally speaking, in vaguely speaking, it’s really nice again to have a shared language. When you have a shared experience you sometimes have a shared language and you can decide, what are the shared values and perhaps that even means you have an accountability buddy, right?

So it’s great to have an accountability buddy and to be like, these are the things that I wanna live up to and I’m willing to have you hold me to that. What are we doing? What tinctures you got? Oh, okay. This is a synergy by fruiting bodies. They’re also outta Massachusetts and it’s just multi mushroom blend is like reishi and eps.

Sam Believ: I was interviewing the guy and he mentioned how great the CBD is. So I bought some. Good, I’m glad we’re doing it. Cheer.

Daniel Shankin: Cheers a little. Your action. Have

Sam Believ: cheers.

Daniel Shankin: Cheers.

Sam Believ: You mentioned that you and your wife or your wife lives by spiritual principles. Can you talk to us? What is this and how does it look like?

Daniel Shankin: Oh, I don’t know. I don’t want to get too in the weeds with that, but it’s just the things that I’ve been talking about already. It’s like we want to be good, wholesome people, right? We wanna be honest and generous and patient, and, kind. We wanna raise our children with good VA moral values and stuff like that.

Sam Believ: Cool. That sounds good. I guess I live by them as well. I didn’t know, I didn’t know the, how to call it. Okay. Let’s go back to the topic of integration. That’s that’s your expertise, I believe. And what would you how would you approach someone who had a psychedelic experience and they had a difficult one, like a very deep one, slightly destabilizing one.

How would you work with a person like this?

Daniel Shankin: That’s really big. Have you had one? Do you wanna talk about one?

Sam Believ: We had we had a few, we had one actually recently, and I think we did a great job. He was I’ll try to describe it without scaring people that are listening, but it was a lifelong repression of a traumatic memory.

And when it started to come up, the person seized and tried to like, prevent it from happening and got kind a little stuck. That’s how it felt, like a little stuck in that state of like very body centered, like fear, emotions, stuff like that. So we had the, we still have a pretty great team, so we did, our approach was.

A lot of support, a lot talking and just calming and very like grounding presence. And then we did some somatic experiencing style exercises to release those things. And then I also have two integration coaches with whom I work remotely. Both of them did some work as well of which I’m not sure exactly what they did, but yeah this person is back now.

They actually came to, to visit and he’s doing great. So that, that definitely worked. But once again I’m not an integration coach, so like that for me, it’s the reason I’m asking is because I’m still learning and what is the proper is there like a proper sequence,

Daniel Shankin: people are different.

I can’t coach they, they actually call this coaching the ghost. There’s a concept in coaching called coaching the ghosts. When people show up and they’re like, my partner did this and they want me to fix the per them, they want me, they’re like, my partner did this.

What do we do about them? And they want me to fix the person who’s not there. And I can’t really do that. I am always curious, to, to what extent the repressed memory is actually a memory, if this makes sense. Because sometimes the subconscious communicates in symbols and visions that aren’t exactly what happened, right?

So I’m pretty convinced, like my dad never chased me through the streets with a knife. I swear in a Bible that my dad like never chased me down the streets with a knife. So much so that if I had a vision in, on psychedelics that my dad was chasing me down the streets with a knife, I would probably wanna ask myself, what does that represent?

It’s like, why am I being shown this? And so I always think that’s curious. Sometimes people are like, yeah, this definitely happened and, that wants to be supported and cared for, but also, why now? Like, why, yes, you had an experience, but like why is this coming up?

What do you want to do with it? What does this mean? And these kinds of things. So I’m a real, I’m really into inquiry and fact finding. It’s what do you do? You just what do you do? It’s like you just give the person, and this goes for anything. This goes for good experiences, bad experiences.

The experiences are strange and giving people a safe place and like an open forum to discuss what happened and asking them questions that they know the answer to, but they know the answer to like liminally, right? They gotta look for it. Like the answer isn’t a place where they don’t ordinarily look. So can you ask folks a question that will get them to think more creatively about themselves in their lives is basically the approach I take with all that kinda stuff.

And then of course, if somebody is like, if it starts to become clear that somebody is suffering from like C-P-T-S-D or like something. That needs clinical care. I generally refer people, I’ll still work, I’ll still meet with folks, but they should also be seeing a clinician who is trained in C-P-T-S-D, sexual assault trauma, things like that.

I’m an integration coach, I’m a coach. As Bob Jesse and the John Hopkins team says, there’s a population of people called healthy normals. And there’s practices, there’s, ways to do psychedelics and what they call the betterment of well, people. And so that’s my population, I work with healthy normals who are looking for the betterment of well people as opposed to people who need clinical care. And therapeutic intervention, if that makes sense. So if somebody has an experience where that becomes clear that they need that, I want them to go and get it. And I won’t abandon them.

They can still, we can still have some talks if it’s useful to them, but they should get the clinical care that they need. That’s the ethical thing to do, in my opinion. That’s a lot. I threw a lot at you there.

Sam Believ: No, but that’s that’s all good stuff. Clinical care is definitely important.

Very valuable. I think both of the integration coaches that I mentioned, one is counselor and the other one is a therapist. So they know those things as well. But you mentioned C PS PTSD which is a complex PTSD. And what’s the difference?

Ptsd, TSD and C-P-T-S-D?

Daniel Shankin: You, again, you’d probably be better at suited to ask a clinician, right? These definitions, complex what as PTSD is post-traumatic stress disorder, right? So we all have stress, we all undergo stress as you were telling me you had a stressful day to day.

Did that stress are you processing that stress in a way that is, is that stress manageable to your system, that you can process it and digest it and deal with it and, maybe you need a beer at the end of the day and get some extra sleep or something, right? And cool, I dealt with my stress.

You meditate, right? You deal with your stress. But then sometimes, like this system can’t process it because what do they say? It’s either it’s too much, too fast for your particular system or it’s too little for too long, right? So like the cases of neglect with children, right? Too much, too fast or too little for too long.

That kind of breaks down the system a little bit. And then we call it trauma, right? So this is traumatic stress that is disordered, right? So it’s like my system becomes disordered. I can’t manage my thoughts, right? The thoughts of the stress and the trauma is like intrusive. I can’t make decisions, right?

I react in ways that are embarrassing because, in ways that are not appropriate because of the kind of, what the stress has done to my nervous system and my mind. And then we have a stress disorder right post because it’s in the pick. Has it happened before? I guess so. It happened before, right?

And then what changes that into a complex post-traumatic stress disorder? I’m fuzzy on those lines. We should get you a trauma therapist in here to talk about that. It’s the edge of my knowledge, I think on those definitions.

Sam Believ: Maybe you can recommend me someone to interview. But let’s assume because it’s complex, it’s a little more complex than just normal PTSD.

Daniel Shankin: So I have a g coaching training program, psychedelic integration coaching training program. And we work with a therapist at a Sacramento named Robin Kand. And she actually talks about, she teaches our students about how to deal with repressed memories and remembering abuse and things like that.

She’s brilliant and she works with trauma and she’s rad.

Sam Believ: Does she like to go on podcast?

Daniel Shankin: I she’ll probably she could probably fit it in. Has she tried ayahuasca? Probably.

Sam Believ: Okay.

Daniel Shankin: I don’t know. This might come as a shock. I don’t always, I don’t give everybody, a checklist since I’m not like an ayahuasca, like I’m not really like an ayahuasca guy.

I don’t necessarily talk about I’m not bringing up, Hey, I was in Peru when this happened, kinda thing.

Sam Believ: Yeah, no, and n neither that you have to, it’s it’s just something that is always a bonus. ’cause this is in, in, in the end of the day and I ask a podcast, so we try to somehow tie things back to ayahuasca.

So let’s do it right now. So what do you think about PTSD and the potential of psychedelics to to work with PTSD, anxiety and depression? Would it help obviously not a medical advice, just your educated guess.

Daniel Shankin: Anecdotally it seems to, in a lot of cases, doesn’t it? We’ve there’s news art, there’s articles out there, there’s research papers that would suggest that it does, right?

Yeah.

Sam Believ: So

Daniel Shankin: that’s

Sam Believ: cool. Yeah. No, I believe in it. I don’t need convincing. I just want your opinion and then maybe I. What to do, ’cause somebody comes to, let’s say an vascular treat with PTSD and they have a difficult but great experience. They come back. PTSD is somewhat better. And I’ve had many stories like this.

How do they integrate or what should they do? What would you recommend or how to do it properly, maybe even before they come, what should they?

Daniel Shankin: I would recommend, so assuming this person has C-P-T-S-D, we’re going to assume that they have a great therapist, right? So they’ve got therapeutic support.

Hopefully they also have a community of care, right? That they are not going to come back to the same like an unhealthy environment that’s not safe for them. Because that could be even more destabilizing because sometimes people are raw and vulnerable. Do you know like time, space, community, right?

Do they have time to integrate? Are they coming right back to an 80 hour work week? Because it’s probably not gonna land well, right? Are they coming back to like hostile family who are mad that they left for a week? That’s not gonna be good to come back to, are they gonna have the space they need to take care of themselves, work the work, work out what they need to work out?

You wanna think of the matrix of their experience, right? That, to make sure that it is supportive, right? And I think that is clutch along with hopefully again, a competent therapist, perhaps a community group, maybe a men’s group, a woman’s group, depending, yeah. Maybe I hope maybe they have a spiritual community they could start to tap into. So these sorts of supports I think are huge. And then there’s plenty of integration circles and, there’s plenty of literature about integration. People can pick again, the projects that one does to support their integration is going to vary by person to person.

I knew somebody who had a bunch of journeys and they were like, I need to cook for people. They started having dinners at their home and they had a friend who played such and such a music and they started, built a community around food. ‘Cause that’s what came up for them. And, people, recommit themselves to the arts.

All kinds of stuff could happen, but again these people were resourced enough to be able to make that happen. And, you don’t necessarily want your experience to just you want it to fall on like fertile ground, right? Where it can take root and blossom. You don’t want it to just fall on rock.

You don’t want it to, you don’t want the seeds of your experience to fall in the desert. And so setting up an environment where you can flourish is big.

Sam Believ: Yeah. It’s very inform important because you can’t really heal the trauma while it’s being formed, and normally that’s why they call it post traumatic stress disorder.

It needs to be over because if ayahuasca does or psychedelic do, open you up and then you come back and it gets even worse. And you mentioned that sort a hostile family. Maybe somebody, some people need to give themselves permission to never come back if it’s really that bad, but not. Not an advice.

Once again, it’s more always more complex than that. But something you mentioned about the hypothetical vision of your dad chasing you with a knife on the street, which is the, subconscious representation of something. What do you believe sometimes people’s subconscious representation makes them feel that they’re possessed or there’s some demonic thing or something dark but it’s just their subconscious, masking negative occurrences that way.

What do you think about that? And also like where you stand on spiritual side of things. Like when is it like real demon or what is, when, is it just your crazy thought?

Daniel Shankin: That’s the question of the ages. I have people that I check in with about that. Know I don’t have that site.

There are people who are gifted with that site, but it’s my sense that there’s a lot of stuff inside of us that we can’t own. And when it pops up, we think it’s something else, right? So that’s a lot of folks, a lot of folks who are in agreement that they call it the shadow or what have you, right?

So we’ve got stuff inside of us. We’ve got like hate and rage and guilt and shame and yada yada man’s in humanity to man. And then, we have a vision of it. The subconscious is Hey, we wanna deal with this. Look at this, right? Can we deal with this, please? And it communicates it the best way.

It knows how, because it doesn’t necessarily speak English. It speaks in this, five dimensional vision. And then we have a tendency to, this is actually a lot of the work that I do in preparation with people. People have a tendency to go into fight or flight around it, right? They push it away.

They don’t wanna believe it. They other it, they think it’s something else. They wanna fight against it, all this kind of stuff. They think it’s other, and that’s tricky because then we go into fight or flight. If it’s us, the wise thing to do would be to try to create an, open a dialogue with it and see what kinda love it wanted, does it need love?

Does it need support? What do we do? How can I help? As Ramdas would say. So that’s a good place to start. But there’s other stuff out there, man. We know there’s other stuff out there too. And, but it’s not, I in my sense, in, in my worldview, you don’t treat them that much different. It is hard, it’s that’s one of the reasons that we wanna build up the light body as it were.

We wanna, I was talking about opening those channels, so channel the light through from the divine, right? It’s like pour, pour the light of the goddess into my system so it can flow through is so that like dark entities don’t stick, or that we have the wherewithal that if they show up we can give them love, we can bless them, right?

And we can perhaps help them on our, on their way instead of being some sort of like victim or a meal, right? I don’t have any interest in being like a meal of dark forces. And to be honest, I don’t think I’m much of a meal. If you really want the light and the love, which everybody wants.

You’re probably better off going to the source. So I don’t really know, again, there’s people who are better at this, better at talking about this than me, but I think there’s a lot out there under you in God’s creation. There’s a lot of different things and a lot of it’s us but a lot of it isn’t.

What are you gonna do? It’s do your best. Be honest. My, my dad once told me you can’t cheat an honest man. It’s if if the devil wants to make a deal, but you don’t you can’t you’re not tempted then, okay. It’s our own, I think moral and spiritual weaknesses that let the dark forces in and the more that we can ask for help from.

Right places and, be positive and, build our energy system the safer we are. But yeah, either way, whatever it is that shows up, be kind and try to help. It’s my theory on stuff. And also, which is not to say sometimes you don’t need to burn sage and ring a bell to clear the energies, like sometimes you gotta do that too.

But the other stuff I think is primary,

Sam Believ: the line between actual negative spirits and negative emotions coming up is very thin. It reminds me of this other line, which is between when the person is spiritually gifted or just crazy is also very, it’s very difficult sometimes to. To tell the difference, but we work with the shaman, so we have a shaman.

He is an indigenous shaman from Lineage. They know their stuff, so I can always consult ’em and be like this person, do they actually have something or is it something in them? And then he is they had a little bit of that, but we cleared it out. So now it’s just whatever that’s in their head, so it’s then I can suggest them to the therapist.

So it’s it’s good to have both worlds working in tandem. You mentioned shadow. Is this something you like to talk about or not really?

Daniel Shankin: Yeah. That’s, people love, it’s like world of shadow. Crazy. People love doing the shadow work, don’t they?

There was a great definition, I forget where I heard it. The definition of shadow are the parts of us that are still waiting to be loved, which I think is very sweet because a lot of times we wanna demonize the shadow, right? It’s bad, it can’t be trusted, it’s whatever. And it needs, it deserves to be pushed down and cast out, right?

Cast out of our hearts. Instead of recognizing that it’s our job to love all parts of ourselves, right? And that it’s, yeah, of course it’s cranky, right? It’s been cut off. It’s been cut off from the light. And that’s on us, right? It’s not, can’t blame. Yeah. How old are your kids?

Four, two

Sam Believ: and a half and six months.

Daniel Shankin: Yeah. You’re gonna, you can’t blame a 2-year-old for being a 2-year-old. Why are you doing 2-year-old stuff? It’s like it’s my job to love them anyway. But we do that to ourselves all the time, right? We kick and, numerous amounts of the, like our inner children, we kick them out of our hearts because they acted the way they’re supposed to act.

Right? And then wonder why our work, our life isn’t working out.

Sam Believ: You talk a lot about mindfulness as well, mindfulness and integration. What’s what is the role of mindfulness and integration?

Daniel Shankin: You ever read the four agreements? No, not yet. Should. It’s great. And the cool thing about the Four Agreements is you don’t really even have to read the whole book.

You can just read the four agreements and then, contemplate them. You’re, you’re a smart, spiritual man. And that’s one of the cool things about these things is that, the first of the four agreements is be impeccable with your Word. And he talks about how like we are creating our reality with our words and our thoughts, and that this is a divinely gifted spiritual power is how we use our words.

Are we blessing each other? Yeah. Great. There you go. Yeah are we blessing each other or are we cursing each other with our words? And then are we blessing ourselves or cursing ourselves with our words? So a lot of folks are constantly just shredding themselves. So they, somebody told them something about themselves, or something happened, and then they decided something bad.

They internalized the story. And so we have all of this mental chatter inside of ourselves that is just like, you’re not good enough. You’re unlovable. You always mess things up. You’re terrible. All this kind of stuff. It’s just rattling around in there. And so mindfulness practice is, there’s literal practice called mindfulness of the mind, mindfulness of the thoughts.

And so we start to see those thoughts and then we can interrupt. We just, oh, I’m not gonna do that anymore. Stop. And you can investigate it. You go to therapy and stuff and talk about, oh, why do I think that I’m bad? Oh, because this happened, but that, and a dollar will get you on the bus.

It’s I need my, your mind is happening. This is what people distance themselves from your mind is happening in real time and you’re able to interact with it in every moment. That’s what I’m talking about. Like integration happens in every moment. So if I can sit down, I’m like, I’m gonna sit with my mind and my mind’s you can’t do that.

You’re not good enough for that. You’re not meant to do that. You’re this and you’re that and the other thing. And I could be like, oh, actually no. We’re not doing that thought. Like we know why we do it, but we’re still knowing why doesn’t stop it, right? And so a mindfulness practice where I’m sitting there and I’m catching the criticism and I’m being like, we’re not doing that.

And then maybe even with your intention and your prayer, you put more positive words into your mind until that’s the habit. Mindfulness is like a practice that helps you install better mental habits, better self-talk habits, right? It’s like people want to kill the ego, which first of all, you can’t, right?

It’s like you’re not gonna kill the ego with six ayahuasca sessions. Probably not even with 600. It doesn’t work that way. The ego comes back. Why not just program the ego to love, humility, and gratitude, right? Mindfulness practice, program, the default mode network to like peace. That’s why I think mindfulness is good, ’cause it can help you do that.

Sam Believ: It’s interesting that you put in the same sentence, default mode, network and ego. I think about it this way, what is the difference or is it the same thing? What do you think?

Daniel Shankin: The default mode network you should talk to. Like I. Manesh, GIRN or something like that.

One of these neuroscientists who really know what it means, I have a video of it somewhere in my archives of this conversation, but, it’s the way that it’s a neurological functioning of some kind, right? The ego, I like, like a ramen and maharshi style definition, which is outta water. Outta water the false sense of being a separate, long lasting entity, right? So a false sense. So it’s erroneous, it’s not correct, but it’s a false sense that there is this entity that is persistent. And long lasting and separate from the totality of reality. So that’s the ego.

So you think you’re, you think you’re you think you’re special. I think I’m special. You think you’re Sam? I think I’m Dan. And and on one level that’s true, but there’s a lot of other stuff going on beyond just, and then I seem to be the same thing day by day, even though I’m consistently changing, right?

And so that’s the ego. And people show up to me all the time. I’m sure they come to you too, and they’re like, all right, I gotta kill this ego. Gotta kill it. It’s like nuts. ‘Cause only the ego would want to kill the ego, right? Pure undifferentiated consciousness is blissful and is no desire for death of any kind.

Doesn’t care. It’s not suffering. Pure undifferentiated consciousness is not suffering. The ego is suffering because it’s self-centered and it’s not getting what it wants. And it won’t let go of all the stuff that it wants. You know what we, suicide, ego trying to kill itself.

Yeah. Yeah. It’s trying to kill herself because it and it thinks what it’s saying is basic, there, there’s a sense that people have a sense that they’re making themselves miserable. And they want it to end in some ways. And that’s cool. But it’s not feasible. It doesn’t seem to be feasible.

At best people have a, that to get some relief, right? It’s like we just wanna not take it so seriously. It’s yeah, I want some water right now, and the body is unhappy, but I’m not the body, right? It doesn’t, I’m not gonna suffer that much. Maybe I’ll even shoot a text down.

Can you send kid up with, can you send the kid up with some water? We’ll send it in. If it happens, it’s great. If it doesn’t happen, that’s great. We all have preferences, especially householders, right? I want this, I don’t want that, I want this, I don’t want that. To what degree are we gonna suffer if we don’t get it?

And to what degree are we willing to sacrifice our wellbeing and the wellbeing of others in order to get it? Or how willing are we to compromise our values to get the stuff we want? It’s that’s where the rubber meets the road. That’s where the suffering begins, because since we’re not so separate, we cause suffering to others.

We get it. I we’re, it’s all connected.

Sam Believ: That’s very deep way of seeing thirst, but yeah. I’m sure you’re you’re getting thirsty and I don’t wanna cause any more suffering. So let’s,

Daniel Shankin: It’s just an example. It’s just a handy example.

Sam Believ: Yeah. We can start wrapping it up. Yeah. Once again, to avoid the suffering. So my back hurts a little bit oh

Daniel Shankin: man.

So sorry. Do we have it rough or what? Yeah. What you say? Do we have it rough or what? I’m not sure what that means. When you have it rough, right? That’s just like a us saying we’ve got it bad. Like we’re really in bad shape. The two of us we’re two peas in a pod, a hurt back and a thirsty mouth.

Sam Believ: Fathership does that to you. Householding, as you say. Householders. Before we wrap up, can you talk to us about the Mount Dam Psychedelic Training Coaching Center? Psychedelic Integration Coaching center?

Daniel Shankin: Oh yeah. So we have a year long program. We train people to be coaches and it is highly practical.

I like to think, this is one of the things that sets us apart from some of the other programs that are all great as well. But, I have this yoga teacher background and I used to teach yoga teacher trainings and philosophy is nice and everything, but we really want to, oh, hold on real quick.

We got a visitor. Hello? Yeah. Bring you in. There’s another dad here.

Can you bring me a little water?

Water? Yeah. There’s no water, babe. So we, so it’s a pr so we want to teach people to really, like, how do you work with people? What is it like to be in the trenches? ’cause it’s like it doesn’t help my students really if I say, Hey, write a paper on whether or not psilocybin is good for major depressive disorder.

It’s what we know that it usually is. I want to help folks ask good questions and to have the tools and the skills to design good field work. It’s a, it’s about 200 hours the program we meet a couple of times a year. Thank you and I appreciate it. And.

You gonna drink the whole thing now? You good? Yeah. Can I have some? Yeah. Okay. Thank you.

How old is he? How old are you? Two. He’s two. You two, right? Can you do this?

Hello? Hello. Hello. And so that’s the program. I’m doing a great job of selling it, I’m sure. But, we really, we, I look at it almost like a yoga teacher training in a lot of ways. Or a a technical college, right? If you’re gonna train somebody to, fix your plumbing, you wanna know that they can fix your plumbing, they don’t, you don’t care about philosophy of plumbing, right? That’s of this,

Sam Believ: if they know Bruno’s principle flow, laminar flow, et cetera.

Daniel Shankin: So you need to know the ones that actually allow you to do this, the work that you’re gonna do. And so that’s what we’re focusing on. We’re focused on like skill building in a lot of ways and we’re coming up on our fourth cohort in the fall and, it’s shaping up is probably gonna be pretty great.

And that’s what we do.

Sam Believ: That’s really great. And I hope some of the listeners will will be interested. Yeah I approve of your practical approach. We do something very similar. Ayahuasca is very diverse and there’s so many things you can do with it. So we just focus on healing.

Just do this one thing, do it well, and then you can do other things later. So where can people find more about you and more about your coaching program?

Daniel Shankin: Tam integration.com. Like we, we come up the Instagram, you found me on Instagram. I think, that we’ve got a pretty decent following there.

And we have all the social properties. I’m sure you’ll put the notes, oh, there it goes. It’s off

Sam Believ: Instagram at TAM integration.

Daniel Shankin: Yeah, there’s a website too. TAM integration. And we do have ioss on staff. My assistant, has been assisting in ceremonies for decades, 30 years or so.

Down in the jungle and things like that. So we’re tuned in to, even though, I’ve only had minimal AYA experience, we’ve got some. Some good big initiates there in the program. Supporting folks who that’s their medicine. And of course, one of the things we like to say one, one thing ’cause sometimes people are like, oh, what do you do?

Like, how do you integrate this? Versus how do you integrate that? It’s we’re you integrate people, right? It’s not necessarily about a molecule, you just support the person where they’re at. So there you go. Thank you. Thanks for your patience.

Sam Believ: There are a lot of similarities, but yeah, integration.

People need psychedelic people so that they have something to integrate and psychedelic people need integration people so that we can get support and we both need to learn from each other so that we can, make make it work, make people better, and feel better and be happier. So Daniel, thank you so much.

It was a really interesting episode. It was a little different than others. We did we did our. Think your thing and all and stuff like that. So I enjoyed it and I definitely am no longer stressed. So yeah, it’s psychotherapy. Good. Go take a nap with

Daniel Shankin: your baby or something.

Sam Believ: No.

Right now a group of 26 people is gonna arrive and I have to sit in front of them and talk for a few hours. So it’s good for me not to be stressed. Awesome. Tell him I said hi. Yeah. Okay.

Daniel Shankin: Thank you so much. It was really fun to talk to you.

Sam Believ: Thank you, Danielle,

Daniel Shankin: or be well

Sam Believ: guys, you were listening to our podcast.

As always. We do the host and believe, and I’ll see you in the next episode. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you’d like to support us and psychedelic renaissance at large, please follow us and leave us a like wherever it is you’re listening. Share this episode with someone who will benefit from this information.

Nothing in this podcast is intended as medical advice, and it is for educational and entertainment purposes only. This episode is sponsored by Lara Ayahuasca Retreat. At Lara, we combine affordability, accessibility, and authenticity. Lara Connect, heal, grow. Guys, I’m looking forward to hosting you.