In this episode of Ayahuasca Podcast, host Sam Believ (founder of http://www.lawayra.com) has a conversation with Austin West.
Austin West is a certified psychedelic medicine practitioner, microdosing philosopher, and founder of Entheo Holistics. He specializes in helping men forge a life of purpose, power, and authenticity through psychedelic healing and intentional microdosing.
We touch upon topics such as:
- Austin’s story of addiction and transformation (01:06 – 05:48)
- The impact of microdosing on his healing journey (04:55 – 05:48)
- How trauma, especially father wounds, can lead to addiction (10:18 – 13:41)
- Porn addiction, erectile dysfunction, and healing from it (14:47 – 22:42)
- Synchronicities and the ‘creator mindset’ (26:07 – 31:57)
- Ayahuasca revealing his suppressed grief and a life-changing message (36:56 – 42:38)
- The fear of change and trusting the medicine process (42:38 – 47:22)
- His microdosing company and its impact on mental health (47:32 – 52:22)
If you would like to attend one of our Ayahuasca retreats, go to http://www.lawayra.com.
Find more about Austin West and his work at IamAustinWest.com.
Transcript
Sam Believ: You’re listening to ayahuasca podcast.com.
Austin West: The difficulty I experienced in all of my ayahuasca ceremonies are the very reason I can trust and surrender the way I do now. They are the reasons I have the re a relationship with God I’ve never had before. They are the reasons I’ve been able to heal things that I struggled with and suffered from for nearly my entire life.
Know. Earlier when I was talking about, I believe that each of these medicines have their own consciousness to ’em and directive. Essentially. It’s I believe mushrooms are the ultimate connector. MD MA is the ultimate feeler. LSD is the ultimate seer. I believe Ayahuasca is the ultimate healer. There has been no medicine that has brought me the level of healing and trust and perspective and embodiment that Ayahuasca has brought me.
And so these fears we have the fear of what if it’s going to blank? That fear is the thing that’s keeping you trapped in your own suffering of your own making. And so when we choose to lean into the fear, that’s when we finally become free.
Sam Believ: Hi guys, and welcome to Ayahuasca podcast. As always, we do the whole Sam belief. Today I’m having a conversation with Austin West. Austin is a certified psychedelic medicine practitioner, coach and entrepreneur who teaches the framework. Men need to forge a life of purpose, power and authenticity. Austin is a certified psychedelic medicine practitioner, microdosing philosopher, and founder of Athea Holistics.
In this episode, we talk about overcoming steroids, drug and porn addiction, with help of psychedelics, workaholism, synchronicities, and the law of attunement, creator versus victim mentality. Microdosing and more enjoyed 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 Austin. Welcome to the show. Good to
Austin West: be here, man.
Sam Believ: So I’ve interviewed Austin’s girlfriend a few months ago, and she was the one who recommended you to me. She’s, obviously your relationship is great ’cause you guys support each other and promote each other.
This is this is really nice to see. So yeah, Julian, if you’re listening, thank you for the heads up. Austin, tell us a little bit about a little bit about yourself, your story and what brought you into this different way of living your life.
Austin West: Yeah, I guess the easiest place to start would be the Cataly event, and when I was 14 my dad walked out.
It was a shock to us all. It really disrupted all the semblances and stories I had of safety and family dynamics and love and everything that naturally comes with the divorce. Within six months of him walking out, I began drinking. By 15 I started smoking weed. By 16 I was snorting coke.
By 17, I was injecting and taking oral versions of steroids. By the end of high school, I had started taking Xanax, painkillers, Valium and couple different pharmaceuticals. I started messing with pretty much anything. Get my hands on during those years. Engaging in a lot of meaningless sex. By the time I was 20, my hormones were so fucked up from the steroids that I developed erectile dysfunction, and I got addicted Cialis and Viagra.
By 22, I got hooked on Adderall from my, what I now look at as my drug dealer. But my doctor prescribed me Adderall instead of looking at any of the symptomology that I was experiencing. All of these addictions and abuses lasted anywhere from 14 to 32 years old. So they dominated pretty much my entire life and no one really knew I was the life of the party.
Everyone’s best friend, high school football captain, track star, successful business person. And it wasn’t until I found the medicine path that it was really able to open my eyes to. What I was suffering in, what I was suffering from the addictions and abuses that were really taking control and taking over my life, but I was so ignorant to how bad these were.
I was living in that paradigm. I think a lot of people do were just because I would stop on weekends. I had convinced myself that. I wasn’t an addict, I wasn’t in abusive behaviors or tendencies. Yeah, essentially later in, into my late twenties I always like to say the medicine path finds you, but psilocybin was introduced into my life.
My first time ever microdosing. I was at the beach with my friends and the world changed for me. All of a sudden my mind quieted. I was able to feel, again, feel connected to myself, my friends. The environment around me I felt present. My mental rumination had disappeared. And in that altered state, in that brief escape from the hell, frankly I was living in, I was able to see my life, really what it was which was suffering which was a lot of pain, which was a lot of distraction, which was a lot of numbness.
And that began my now six year long journey with the medicine path.
Sam Believ: Thank you for sharing that, and thank you for the vulnerability. So for people who are listening, they might assume that you had terrible and unpro unproductive life, but there’s another side to it, right? While you were in that sort of addictive state, you also I believe were addicted to, to work.
So tell us a little bit about what you achieved while you were in that state.
Austin West: Yeah, that’s the surprising factor is no one on the outside would’ve ever guessed that I was suffering, that I wasn’t happy that I was living in my own personal hell that I had different addictions or abusive tendencies.
Because on the outside, like I mentioned, I was high school football captain, track star. At 22, I opened my first multimillion dollar business by. 24. I was the youngest senior manager in all of JP Morgan Chase across the country. They’re a Fortune 10 company. By 28, I was part of a team of seven that built a hundred million dollar company in three years.
I made the money, I had the fancy cars, I had the beach house or the condo by the beach rather. And so outward facing, nobody knew that I was suffering from all of these things. I kept it very internalized. I was battling a lot of anxiety, a lot of depression. I had this, the only way I can really describe it is this this panic every night before I went to bed and every morning that I woke up, it wasn’t really anxiety, like it was a literal panic.
My heart would start racing and I always felt like something bad was about to happen to me. I lived in this for probably a decade of my life and. I think that the workaholism really came in that when I stopped partying on weekends, it’s like I, I convinced myself I wasn’t an addict because I would leave a lot of my behaviors in that Friday to Sunday window, but Monday would roll around and I would be taking Adderall, which is just another drug that we have masked as a medicine, and I would work 16 to 18 hour days, and I got addicted to the money chase as well. I thought that the lifestyle wasn’t the reason I’m not happy, it’s that I’m not making enough money. It’s that I don’t have enough toys. It’s that I don’t have the right clothes or the next expensive bag, or the expensive vacation, whatever it might be.
And so the workaholism really tormented me for many years because the more unhappy I got, I just thought it meant I wasn’t being productive enough. And so it up my hours from 10 a day to 12 a day, to 14 a day. To essentially getting to a portion of my life, or Monday through Friday, I was up at 6:00 AM working from seven and not home till 10:00 PM at night because I was dumping all of my energy into work because it was the easiest way to distract myself by convincing myself I was actually benefiting my life in some.
Sam Believ: Yeah, workaholism is just another, addiction is just the one that society does not criticize, but nevertheless, it’s still an escape from pain. And it’s interesting that, your story of being a dream, having this dream life on a societal standard, but then being a mess inside and suffering, I think.
It’s very common now, especially because we all live this Instagram life where you have this one version that’s presented outside and another version that’s inside. And we’re all thinking that everyone is doing great. We’re the only ones that are not doing great. We notice here, for example, at Laira, people come over and they start sharing and then they realize oh my God, everyone is suffering.
Equally, and as through that vulnerability, they can start, actually sharing openly and connect and start to help each other. Obviously you had many addictive behaviors. I love how you say that your number one drug dealer was your doctor. We had people tell stories that like, they come to the doctor, it’s I have a headache.
Here’s an antidepressants I have, I. You name it, anything is antidepressant is just in case, so what, obviously your father leaving maybe something else, were you able through your medicine path to find the root cause of of all the addiction that pain that, that is driving you, was driving you to substances and behaviors?
Austin West: It was absolutely my father walking out. I think that was the pivotal moment in seeking a lot of these distracting and numbing behaviors, which that’s my definition of addiction. I think even people today, society today has a the wrong view of what addiction is. Addiction has nothing to do with the substance.
So we have convinced ourselves that as long as I’m not shooting up meth every single day, I’m not an addict. An addiction is just a reoccurring abuse or behavior that is leading to numbness or distraction. And so I am convinced that 90% of us are addicted. Whether that’s social media, the work, AOL or tv or fighting in a relationship, whatever it is.
So a side note, but my addictions all stemmed from that because I was trying to numb and distract myself from the pain of my father leaving because he was my best friend. I went to work every weekend with him from the time I was probably four years old, up until he left. He was self-employed, and so every weekend we spent together on nights we’d be playing basketball or other games in the street.
We played chess together all the time. There’s just so much. Of my life leading up to that point that was involved in, he came to all my sporting events and my games and then all of a sudden he was gone. And it, because it was such a surprise, I think the way it is handled, the society really determines the outcomes of kids.
Are you treating your kids like adults? Are you having a conversation like, Hey, we’re not happy, we’re going to counseling. This is what’s coming up for us, or are you ignoring everything? All of the symptomology of that tormenting relationship, are you attempting to hide that from the kids? But our nervous systems are picking up on it anyway, so we can tell something is going on, but if our parents are front facing that it’s okay.
And then one day randomly, your dad walks out. He called my mom on her lunch break and told her so she wasn’t even aware that it was happening that day. So that level of trauma from that event, the shock of the event. Is what spun me in all those behaviors. From there, I think it just piles on top of each other, right?
I think the alcohol started, but then the group I got ingrained with because of the alcohol, introduced a new behavior and a new behavior. And a new behavior, and it just started rolling. And so I think that traumas can compound over a lifetime. I think getting to the root cause is important, but then you needing to understand that there might be branches off of that original root trauma that have been created.
That is what the medicine path has been really unhelped or helping me unravel. And then even the understanding of like even take the divorce out of it, the dynamics of that I had with my parents are reflected in my relationship. So the relationship I had with my mom growing up has reflected as certain big T little t traumas on say the relationship I with Jillian, like not feeling the level of nurturing and presence I needed from the feminine growing up.
I then project those wounds onto Jillian. So the father is I think, the big catalyst that led me to a lot of these abuses and behaviors. But understanding it, it stems from a much earlier age. I think that most of our patterning and programming really starts in that first seven years. What Bruce Lipton calls the.
You’re in a developmental stage where you’re in hypnosis for seven years. You’re just picking up on everything around you. And yes, the father wound was big and I learned what love was. In the first seven years. I learned what the feminine dynamic was, what the masculine dynamic was, how to hold space, how to express, how to be intimate.
All of those were learned in the se first seven years, which I’ve spent quite a bit of time with my medicine work unraveling that as well.
Sam Believ: Yeah, it’s we all have some kind of trauma and I have a similar trauma, of abandonment and betrayal, so to speak, and also a bit of a mother one. It’s I identified when I was getting ready for this podcast, I identified a lot with with your story.
So it’s really interesting how we can find people that mirror, mirror ourselves. You also. Talk about, erectile dysfunction and porn addiction. That’s not a topic we talk about a lot on this podcast. I don’t think I’ve ever said word porn before, maybe. I don’t know. But it’s something that I that I wanna talk about that that definitely I have been addicted to porn.
I didn’t think I was addicted to porn until I tried quitting porn. First time, maybe about 10 years ago. I just got lucky. I found some weird forum on internet and they’re just like if you’re not addicted, then try it. I was like, oh my God, I’m addicted. The reality is like these days, especially with males, like 99.9% are addicted to porn.
Unless you’re, I don’t know, unless you don’t have internet or you’re blind or something like that, you are addicted to porn and, quitting important for me was this big catalyst for basically all the other good things that happened in my life afterwards. But yeah. Talk to us about this. What, how did you find out you were addicted?
How did you quit? What did you learn there and have you ever had any plat medicine encounters on the topic?
Austin West: Yeah, I think it’d start back with the steroids caused. Because the hormones were so over the place and I ended up getting Ed at such a young age, I had such a fear of intimacy with women because I wasn’t sure what would happen.
I had, I think my first time I had issues with performance. I think I was 18, maybe I was 19 at that time. It was towards the end of high school. And so that just instilled in me a story that I was gonna be broken forever and that fear of intimacy, that fear of dating. And here I was also like a party animal.
So I’m going out every weekend, and when you’re young, the entire point of going out is to meet women, right? And really getting involved in the hookup culture. But I was terrified of that at the same time. So porn was somewhere I turned to find that eroticism and that pleasure and that charge. But what fueled it was that I was so afraid to go interact with women and get that in any other aspect or regard.
I didn’t start watching porn then it, it started when I was 12 years old. I remember, I think I was in seventh grade the first time I watched and I. The difficulty with it is it builds in these natural ways of seeing the world in intimacy, in sex that I think are radically damaging to the male psyche.
With the objectification of women, with the unrealistic expectations of what intimacy are, what sex is, what the physical, what the. Physical form of a woman is. And so not only did I suffer from the addiction of porn and what that does to your dopamine and your distractions, and it’s like running in the background and thinking about it all day, but it affected how I looked at women as well.
It affected how I showed up in relationships, what my expectations were sex were, how quick I was to want to jump to sex. Not really building that relationship with my partner prior to engaging in that, right? Even before foreplay, it’s like really getting present. So poor disrupted many aspects and areas of my life.
It never came up specifically in a medicine ceremony. Not the topic of it or the energy of it, but I had to work with through so many of my intimacy and sex wounds. From what it caused. That in a way it did. It made me look at the aspects of myself that were so afraid of being vulnerable and open-hearted in an intimate container because I convinced myself that the way pornography was my desire.
It was ultimately what I wanted to fulfill, but I was really outsourcing my desire to something that I had been training myself was correct and proper. Because that’s all I was filling my head with, and so I not never got to actually be in my body like, oh how does this feel? If I eliminate this energy for my life, how can I view my partners more beautiful, more embodied, more attractive, be turned on by her more?
By eliminating these alternate in a lot of times, fake perspectives and views of what women are in my life. It was a long journey. The ed addiction was a really big part of that too. Because I wouldn’t have sex unless I took one of these pills. And I remember right towards the end of ending that addiction and realizing pornography was such a big deal is I had a woman that was gonna come over one night and I remembered, I sat on my bed and opened up my nightstand and I took out my bottle of, I think I had Cialis at that time.
I went to take a pill and I just burst out and started crying because I had felt so captured. Here I was at 30 years old, 30 or 31, being a complete slave to something outside of myself with no relationship to what intimacy and sex really is and how divine it really is and the depth of pleasure can really bring us.
I just started weeping and I went to the toilet. I dumped all the pills down the toilet. I texted that girl and asked her not to come over anymore, and then I started a two year stint of abstinence in that abstinence without the pills, without the other women to distract myself with. That’s when the pornography addiction really arose because like you said it’s when there’s less distractions, even when you try to quit, you start to realize how loud the energy of that.
That abuse is in my life. And so over that two year stint of abstinence is when I really had to come to terms with a lot of different things. The attempt to eliminate porn for my life showed me how shameful I felt about my sexual desires and eroticism my own sexual energy. I felt guilty about.
My relationship with those. So the avenue of trying to eliminate porn for my life, which the medicine showed me, these pills were making me slave and the intimacy and sex issues, it really helped me uncover a lot of that deep shame and guilt and trauma had around my own sexuality. And then, yeah, man, my, my quitting journey probably took me a year and a half.
It was a lot of ups and downs. It was a lot of, I would have a two week streak and then I’d be two weeks back on. It was a lot of beating myself and punishment, which doesn’t help the, trying to eliminate that addiction in any way. And it was difficult and the rewards I’ve been able to get by eliminating that addiction from my life have been pretty profound.
And it sounds like you’ve experienced the same things. My, my energy, the way I see my woman in relationship, the way I interact with sex, the slowness, I’m able to enter in any sort of. Erotic space is so much more fulfilling. I’m so much more connected to God in these spaces now. Performance anxiety and performance issues left as soon as the porn was exited for my life.
The objectification of women, emerge just when I would watch a lot of porn. I’d be at the gym just looking at women and objectifying them, and it felt gross. It didn’t feel embodied, it didn’t feel like I was. In my divine masculine, to use the term people understand, but standing postured in am I making women feel safe or am I making them feel objectified?
And so being able to eliminate so much of that from my life by eliminating porn, I mean it was radically life altering.
Sam Believ: Yeah. Thank you for sharing this. I think porn is absolutely a disease. One of the many diseases we unfortunately have as a society. It’s something that has been normalized and you’re like, I remember even when I was younger, I was like, I was suspicious about this whole porn thing, but everyone would say yeah, like you have to have an orgasm at least such and such amount of times, or you get prostate.
So it’s kinda almost like a healthy necessary thing. But yeah. So tell us about then, in this sort of dark night of a soul, you somehow stumbled upon mushrooms and your initial resistance to working with psychedelics.
Austin West: Yeah. The microdose I took at the beach from my friends was my first introduction.
Obviously, that is the very entry level to what this path can bring. Within three months of that first. Mushroom chocolate. I took, I was able to quit Adderall, quit my Xanax, stopped taking all my anxiety medication. So a, an intentional microdosing practice helped me get off many of my pharmaceuticals.
But it was a year from that date before I ever did my first guided journey. I ended up finding I was talking to a buddy at a Christmas party and was just expressing to him that, yeah, this microdosing has changed my life in so many ways, but I’m still depressed. I still hold a lot of anxiety.
I still don’t feel fulfilled or like I have purpose in life. I’m still chasing money. I’m still chasing women. There’s so many things it was mixed up in, and this friend I had been to Australia with this kid. I’ve traveled the world with him and which is why I was comfortable opening up and he casually mentions, Hey, you should start working with my dad.
He’s an underground psychedelic therapist. And I was like, what? It was a shock to hear this friend of all people, his dad was a. Psychedelic therapist. Within two months of that date, I had my first guided psychedelic therapy session. I was actually with MDMA. One thing that he had told me is before I was able to progress into mushrooms, that I had to remember what it was like to feel again, especially as a man in our society and culture, we have been robbed of what it means to really feel ourselves, to feel others, to hold empathy.
To be in tune and attuned to our emotional state, to be able to harness the wisdom and the teachings that come from that. We’ve been disconnected from it. And for good reason, because a man in his power is the man that is in touch with his emotions. So after the MDMA session really reconnected me with my emotions, I remember crying for the first time in years, like a visceral, deep grief stricken cry.
I was able to release a lot. And then every three to four months, for the next three years I worked with that teacher with Bufo, with psilocybin ketamine and many other medicines. I believe each medicine has a different consciousness to it. They have, they’re different teachers to us in a different way, and they’re here to help us uncover parts of ourselves in different ways.
And so by having that safe container with one teacher and one guide. To experience a lot of these medicines in the entry level way. It opened up a lot for me.
Sam Believ: Yeah. The way you’re describing with your friend’s father being exactly what you’re looking for is this very typical example of a synchronicity.
So once you start working with psychedelics, I think they, they become more and more common. And regarding like feeling again my, in my first dance ceremonies with Ayahuasca, my intention was. Then half of them was like connecting to my emotions and before ever working with Ayahuasca, maybe cried one time in 10 years superficially.
And after starting to work with Ayahuasca I’ve unlocked my ability to cry. Not on demand and not not too much still, but when I need it, it comes up and I can embrace it, so it’s really nice. So talk to us about those two things, the synchronicities and ability to feel again, how this journey was.
So whichever one appeals to you more.
Austin West: Yeah. I love the concept of synchronicity. Especially from the Carl Young lens, right? Like synchronicity is your soul telling you’re on the right path. It is a way of discovering that you’re in alignment. It is a way of your subconscious, your psyche, your soul, what the Greeks called your Damon, right?
The Greeks believe that all of us are born with this sort of guardian spirit that loves us more than anything in this life, and its entire purpose is to guide us towards our truth. And our dharma, and often I think we’re using a lot of different words for the same things. All of those are different aspects of linking to synchronicity, right?
There’s something within us that triggers this bridging of the unconscious and the conscious mind that feels like deja vu. That feels like coincidence. That feels like an accident, but none of those things actually exist. Synchronicity is what I use to make sure and tune into the alignment I have in life.
Like speaking that I want something for, from the universe or for the universe. Then all of a sudden I have a person fall into my life that aligns with that vision I’m trying to create. That’s not an accident because I spoke it and I teach this framework in my work called The Law of Attunement, and it’s essentially it’s a.
A framework of understanding the pec nature of reality and consciousness and how it relates to our truth, our desire, our life experiences and ultimately our personal evolution. And once you understand this framework, it unlocks what I call the creator archetype. And so from the sea of the creator archetype, you can build the life you want.
Whatever you want, I believe you can have it. Synchronicity is at the root of all of this, what synchronicity is and where it falls in my. Into my practice is I have these four pillars of the law of attunement. It’s truth, desire, catalyst, and wisdom, and catalyst is every single event that happens in your life, every moment, every experience, every conversation, every leaf that falls off that tree outdoors is happening with such a profound level of purpose to it.
All of it meant towards driving you to your evolution. In the quickest and most rapid way it can. That is how the universe conspires for us. If we’re, if we allow ourselves to attune our consciousness, to accept the perfection of the universe, and that all of these things are happening in a profound way, then we start to look at every single moment as something we can learn from.
’cause if we’re learning, we’re evolving. Synchronicity slide in right there. In my work I tell people, synchronicities is one of the first things I want to start. Attune your reality and awareness to stop using the language. Wow, that’s crazy, or I can’t believe that happened because you’re starting to reject the signs of the divine.
Clearly, and obviously presenting themselves as in your line, telling you to keep going that direction. That’s how I incorporate my work with synchronicity. That’s how I relate to synchronicity. That’s my belief in synchronicity is one of the, it is one of the most catalytic, powerful aspects of reality that we can tune into to let us know that we’re getting that much closer to our dharma and our purpose.
Sam Believ: Yeah, it’s, it’s a great explanation. If we, if you talk about creator mindset or creator mentality and then as opposed to victim mentality. I think most of us, most of the people live in a victim mentality, and I, I would like to believe I’m no longer there, but still it comes up.
It’s always kinda oh, you did this to me, thus is your fault and I’m the victim. It’s really hard to reprogram yourself you can and it’s possible, but definitely takes time. I’m more commonly now when something happens, I’m like where is the lesson there? But it’s definitely took a while to, to make this program work.
So this view of creator mentality and also you mentioned the word soul and the fact that, everything there is, there’s some reason behind this existence and maybe. Some kinda learning and the reason you went through the suffering when you were younger, you had to learn something to basically become stronger so you can now have this information and pass it on.
What do you think about that? And yeah, tell us about this.
Austin West: Yeah, I like to look at this from the concept. There’s a really powerful spiritual teaching that. Actually I consider this spiritual teaching. It’s a channeled text to be one of my ayahuasca integrations. That’s how powerful this text was for me.
And it’s called the Law of One. And the law of one believes that in, in our souls come here with a specific set of karma in circumstances that we’re here to learn. And through learning, that is the only way to evolve. And it looks at karma. In a similar way to Buddhas Buddhist Karma what the Buddha was actually saying.
And I think a lot of people misinterpret Buddha’s teachings of karma. Buddha doesn’t believe that souls are infinite in the sense of I am rebirthing my own soul. So I am actually, my soul is the one carrying the karma for our souls are born into a karma that we are living out. So there’s this separation of the past life aspect, which I think is really fascinating when you dive into it.
But the law of one is a little bit different. It’s assuming that the energy of karma is the soul in a way. And so when I was born into this existence, I chose my parents because they were going to deliver me the exact lessons I needed to learn from my evolution. And the entire purpose in the law of one is graduating or evolving through these densities.
It believes that there’s seven densities. That build essentially all of consciousness and all of reality throughout the entire universe. And we as human beings are in the third density. And our job is to learn the lessons required to evolve into the fourth density, which aligns with the heart chakra. So it’s embodying wisdom, it’s embodying love, and living holy and solely from that place.
So when I think of the soul. I connect to my soul and I work on listening to my soul. And even when I pair things like the Greek mythology, the Damon, I use that a lot in my work as well. I believe my soul already knows exactly who it is, what it’s here to do, what its purpose is to fulfill and has the teachings incarnated with ready to be learned.
My job is to get out of its way. And I think this is where the ego comes in and creates this separatist mentality that we are not actually a fractal piece of the same divinity that created all of this. If I allow myself to live in that experience, that I am a fractal of the infinite intelligence, the one infinite creator, right?
It’s bigger than what I think any, not any religion. I think Taoism explains it perfectly. It’s the everything. It’s the unknowable. That is the only way it can be that powerful is if it’s actually unknowable. If I trust that I am part of that unknowable, then my soul came here with a specific mission to fulfill, to get closer to me, knowing as close as I possibly can to what that unknowable everything, the Unknowable Infinite is.
So my relationship with the soul is trying to get out of its way. And this is what I do with my medicine work. It’s why I have a meditative practice. It’s why I have a breath practice. It’s why I spend an hour in devotion every single morning. It’s why I journal. ’cause it’s the best way that we can converse with God, which is our ourself, which is that soul.
And so I think religion has corrupted the meaning of soul in a lot of ways. It’s this, it’s good or bad, you’re gonna heaven or hell. They’ve taken a lot of the. Power away from the benefit of relating to your soul in a way as you’re guiding light, not just something that’s going to go to heaven or hell.
I grew up Christian, so that’s just my framework and how I’m explaining this. But the soul is something to be listened to. It already knows it, it has its mission, it has its direction. And if we actually bring in synchronicity to the conversation of soul. If I, my belief is the soul already knows exactly what I’m here to do.
Synchronicity is the way of my energetic being, and maybe even my ego coming in a deeper alignment with what that soul’s mission is. And so if we pair the idea of synchronicity with the understanding that our soul is bringing us to the. The most abundant, fulfilling, joyful, pleasurable, erotic, ecstatic, open experience of life that’s possible for us.
And it’s about developing these techniques with the meditation, the breath work, synchronicity to just find a way of listening to it as best we can.
Sam Believ: And you mentioned as you’re reading this text, you were integrating your Ayahuasca experience. Talk to us about your Ayahuasca experience and, how was it different from your mushroom experience?
Austin West: Yeah, ayahuasca. My first one was two years ago, April so almost three years ago. It’ll be three years. This April actually, I’m sorry, yeah, 2022. So March of 2022. I wanted my first Ayahuasca retreat in Peru, sacred Valley. It was four different journeys that retreat.
So we sat with the medicine four nights of Tibo the Tibo lineage, and the first night I took Ayahuasca. The first night I drank within two hours of ceremony starting Ayahuasca told me I had cancer and it. Happened in the way of those old Begay commercials. I don’t if you remember ’em, this is probably from like the nineties, and they’d put this like outline of a human on the screen and then they just have this like blinking red thing to, to represent where the person was having pain and rub the begey on here and your pain will go away.
A really simplistic thing, but it like, IO showed me my body and it showed me right on my right lung slash liver and it was just blinking red. Through the energetics of the interaction with ayahuasca was telling me I have cancer. Or if I don’t take care of the grief and the anger and the rage I’m holding onto this will metastasize and become cancer.
I’m a big believer in Gabor mate’s work and even Zach Bush’s work, where to put their extensive theories, very simplistically that. All disease and cancer are manifestations, energetic manifestations in the physical form of some sort of deep root, deep rooted trauma. I believe that emotions are the aspects of the energetic body that are physically manifest into cancer.
And so it’s not an accident that, especially when you look at things like Chinese medicine, that we hold energies in certain aspects of our body. So for a lot of people that have a lot of grief that they haven’t processed, they get lung cancer, right? So this grief is held in the lungs. Different aspects like that.
We can go throughout the entire body. Fear is held in the kidneys and different aspects of what’s held. So I had so much grief from my father walking out that was on process. Of course, I’m experiencing all of this pain and the suffering in Ayahuasca telling me that this will convert into cancer if I don’t take care of this.
And I believed it. It felt like one of the most true things I’d ever experienced on any medicine in any event in my entire life up until that point. After it told me that, after grandmother told me that I was transported back into the memory of the day, my father left, I was reliving the event to such a level of vivid specificity that it reminded me of the grief.
That I was stricken with that day, that I had not been processing, that all of those addictions and be abuses were numbing me from, I remember being transported back to my body, looking at my dad when he told me. I saw myself walk down the hall. I saw myself get into my bed laying the fetal position on my right side and cried until my mom got home.
And it, of course it was masculine, so it’s on the right side of my body. It’s anger and grief. So it’s, of course it’s on where the liver and the lungs are and it became an undeniable yeah the other three ceremonies were really powerful. The rest of that retreat and. Ayahuasca is really when I began tearing my life down four months after I got home from that retreat this is a couple years into my medicine work, I logged into my email one day.
I had a full blown panic attack ’cause I knew I was unhappy. I hated my job. I hated the life I was living. I hated the money chase and. Ayahuasca since I got home from that retreat was dripping on me. You need to leave. You need to leave. You need to leave. And I just wasn’t listening until one day I had that panic attack, fell to the floor, and then I got up, quit my job in the spot, and I sold my house six weeks later to walk away from everything I had built.
Half a million dollar job, my team, my million dollar beach house condo. I walked away from all of it because Ayahuasca was clearly telling me, this is what’s gonna kill me. This is part of the distraction. This is part of the numbness. If you don’t walk away and give this up, everything I showed you will manifest as truth.
That was my first sit and then I sat again last April in Costa Rica this time with Shabo, and yeah, had probably the most difficult medicine experience I’d ever had in my life.
Sam Believ: That sounds very painful and very traumatic. I think a lot of people that are listening is I’m not sure if I’m not sure about this ayahuasca thing, if it’s gonna make me quit my job or quit my relationship or discover some trauma and stuff like that. I wanna talk a little bit about that because I think we’re all very afraid of changing our life and afraid of big change.
But I think that. In your case, and I do believe that what you’re saying is correct because out of like thousands of people we hosted, so far, only one person ever said ayahuasca told me I have cancer. So it’s not like a really common thing to happen. And yeah, it told you like, yeah, if you.
Don’t improve your act, there, there will be a problem. So it’s very valuable. You could probably test it by not changing anything, but w would you take the risk? There’s nothing wrong with finding an issue or quitting a job or quitting a relationship. If it meant to happen, it will happen.
And on the opposite as well, sometimes the medicine will show you what to do. Maybe a relationship you should have or a job you should have. So how has your life been since making those drastic changes? Are you content with the result? Do you ever regret it?
Austin West: No. It was the best decision I ever made, even in the unknowing what I was going to do next.
I just trusted, and that’s one of the most powerful benefits I’ve had from my medicine work is just the. Level in which I allow myself to surrender to what life is bringing me, and I trust the hell out of the divine. I trust that no matter what, I’m gonna be taken care of no matter what. I’m gonna be safe.
And walking through life with that level of trust has opened up everything I hoped it would, and Ayahuasca was absolutely impactful in allowing me to live in that level of trust and surrender. And it’s not easy. And I used to be really timid on how I told these stories ’cause I’m like, I wanna bring more people to the path.
But if I tell the story in the way that it actually happened, it might scare people from the path. And it’s then it’s not for you. If you know that you are not happy living the life you are, if you are not in the relationship you desire, if you’re not having the sex you desire, if you’re not making the money you desire, if you know you’re numbing and addicting yourself and distracting yourself from getting to the root of why you’re feeling the way you are.
If you’re suffering from anxiety or depression, if you have disease where cancer, if any of these things are happening in your life, ayahuasca can only bring you closer to wholeness. It may be difficult and that is exactly what you need. The difficulty I experienced in all of my ayahuasca ceremonies are the very reason I can trust and surrender the way I do now.
They are the reasons I have the a relationship with God I’ve never had before. They are the reasons I’ve been able to heal things that I struggled with and suffered from for nearly my entire life. Earlier when I was talking about. I believe that each of these medicines have their own consciousness to ’em and directive.
Essentially, it’s I believe mushrooms are the ultimate connector. MD MA is the ultimate feeler. LSD is the ultimate seer. I believe Ayahuasca is the ultimate healer that there has been no medicine that has brought me the level of healing and trust and perspective and embodiment that Ayahuasca has brought me.
These fears we have the fear of what if it’s going to blank. That fear is the thing that’s keeping you trapped in your own suffering of your own making. And so when we choose to lean into the fear, that’s when we finally become free. So when I walked away that day, I didn’t know what I was gonna do, but I knew I was free from everything that I had been self imposing that was keeping me stuck and restricted in a life that I no longer wanted to live.
Once I was able to walk away, I energetically opened up space for something new to come in. And as we evolve our ourselves and our state of consciousness, we’re now, Tesla talked about this, like when you start to understand the universes energy, frequency and vibration, everything will change as we evolve our state of consciousness, which is what psychedelics are doing.
We’re evolving our state of energy, vibration, and frequency. And so when we call in a new desire for ourselves, I no longer desire to work a purposeless job. I have to leave that old job for the universe to bring me the energy that aligns with where I’m vibrating now. But when we evolve and we keep ourselves in our old patterns, behaviors, thoughts, addictions, frequencies, friends, jobs, relationships, this is where discomfort comes in.
I want to be here. I want more for myself, but I’m actually staying here because I’m not releasing myself from any of these thoughts, behaviors, actions, addictions, friends, relationships, and in that gap of what I want and where I am are the manifestations of cancer, disease, anxiety, depression. PTSD. PTSD is a little different, but it’s still a manifestation of a symptom, right?
That jump I took was the realization that there is so much in my life that is not no longer aligned with who I believe myself to truly be that I have to be willing to let it go or I’m never gonna have the life I want.
Sam Believ: So speaking of the life you want, I know you have a project microdosing company. Tell us about that.
Austin West: Yeah. Microdosing changed my life and. I have made it my mission to use that practice to help change other people’s lives too. And so I’ve been called to work with the medicine. So I started a company called Antheil six. We have, right now we have six formulas out. We have nine total that have been developed.
We have built formulas that integrate Chinese and Ayurvedic medicinal knowledge. So the herb and plant knowledge from those two medicine lines that can trace back thousands of years. We blend those with the psilocybin to create these synergistic blends that target very specific lifestyle applications, use cases or therapeutic applications.
And so for an example, we have one called Mood in Mind. It’s an Adderall replacement, right? So all of the herbs and ingredients in there help our cognitive function. They open up creativity, they open up a sense of presence, they open up memory focus. Which are essentially what we’re told Adderall gives us, but it gives us one of those things and all these side effects too.
And so using the natural medicine of the earth that we know for a fact produces the same. Benefits, integrating that with the synergistic effects of psilocybin. And now we’ve created an Adderall replacement for people or a blend that’s great for artists that are wanting to be more creative or present in their work or more attuned.
And so we have a whole line. We have one for anxiety. We have one for depression, we have one for intimacy. We have one for energy and performance, so people that really, that have obesity, that are really struggling to be motivated. You don’t need a statin, you don’t need an obesity drug, you need a lifestyle intervention.
You need behavioral change. And so developing these blends that really target behavior change through neuroplasticity, neurogenesis, glu, and gaba, quieting of the default mode network, all of these things that science is now showing psilocybin does in the brain. I think that’s one aspect of it though. I think what microdosing is also doing is it’s working on the.
Mind, body, and the soul. Our current paradigm of medicine is broken because it’s only operating on the body. It is detracted from the aspects of reality in nature that there is a soul or a spirit, and there is a mind, right? Everything is mind manifest. So belief systems, thought forms, and so Microdosing also operates on those by bringing you a sense of presence, which I believe is spirit.
All we have is the now. It’s the only thing that exists. By bringing us into the present moment, we can look at our life from a different lens and different perspective. And then in the mind these things directly target the ruminating mind that keeps us in the past, that projects us into the future that creates these stories and belief systems that are so radically untrue.
But those are what anchor us in place and prevent us from evolving. So I believe that micro doses are the future of mental health. I believe that they are absolutely replacements for pharmaceutical drugs, and that’s why we’ve built the blends the way we have. And I believe it’s a way of helping us develop our truth.
Psychedelics in general, whether that’s a microdose or microdose, are agents of change, and it’s the greatest tool we have for developing and enhancing awareness. If I’m stuck in life, if I don’t know why I feel the way I do, when I microdose in that presence, in the quieting of the rumination, in the mental benefits that it’s giving me, I can view my life from a frame of truth because I have awareness with everything else coming offline, I can now be aware like, oh, I’m so anxious because I go to a job I hate every day.
I’m anxious because I’m in a relationship where I don’t think I can freely express my truth and my desire, so I don’t feel seen. And so every time I speak and I don’t feel seen, I’m projecting that on a relationship which pre projects as anxiety ’cause I feel trapped, right? All, all of the symptomology we suffer from.
There’s a, there’s an underlining truth that we need to come to terms with before we can adequately move forward with building a relationship with that aspect of our suffering. When we intentionally microdose, it’s also a catalyst of us helping recognize our truth. So I’ve been called to, to serve this medicine as my mission because it’s the thing that changed my life more than everything.
I don’t believe ayahuasca is for everybody. I don’t believe taking five gram hero dose of mushrooms for everybody. I do not believe buffo is for everybody. I do believe microdosing when used intentionally in community with guidance. Can be revolutionary for everyone, and that’s one of the biggest differences in how we use these medicines.
Sam Believ: I feel you microdosing changed your life. So you started a microdosing company? Ayahuasca changed my life. I started an Ayahuasca retreat and an Ayahuasca podcast, and I’m also on a mission. I do disagree though. I think Ayahuasca is not for everyone, but I think ayahuasca is almost for everyone. If you do it right, everyone can find the time.
But I think there, there is a match made in heaven for something like one ayahuasca retreat a year and then some microdosing in between and some therapy and some yoga and meditation. There is this perfect modality that everyone has to discover for themselves, and I’m a big fan of microdosing, but I also am a big fan of ayahuasca, where can people find more about your microdosing company and also about your yourself and how it can get, how can the people get in touch with you?
Austin West: Yeah, through my main website, you can branch to my men’s retreats, my microdose company. It’s I am austin west.com. And you’ll have links to everything.
So more information about my teachings, my work, my offerings, my microdose company and anything else they’d have questions on.
Sam Believ: Perfect. Thank you, Austin. Thank you for this episode. I think it was really insightful and people will enjoy it.
Austin West: Yeah, appreciate you having me on, brother.
Sam Believ: Guys, you’re listening to Ayahuasca podcast.
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Nothing in this podcast is intended as medical advice, and it is for educational and entertainment purposes only. This episode is sponsored by LoRa Ayahuasca Retreat. At Laira, we combine affordability, accessibility, and authenticity. Laira, connect, heal, grow. Guys, I’m looking forward to hosting you.