In this episode host Sam Believ interviews Kani on topic of Eastern spirituality V.S. Ayahuasca
There are more similarities that you can imagine explore them in this awesome episode full of fascinating questions.
LaWayra Ayahuasca retreat
Transcript
Sam Believ: You’re listening to aya podcast.com.
Hello Connie. Welcome to Ayahuasca in Columbia podcast. No, actually that’s not our name. Ayahuasca podcast.
Kani: Lara Podcast.
Sam Believ: No, it’s actually Ayahuasca podcast. I have originally got the main Ayahuasca podcast. You
registered it. Amazing.
Sam Believ: Yeah, and we will be, you give us time v Ayahuasca podcast that everyone will go to, but as of now, we are at our humble beginnings, just having faith and growing and expanding.
So KA is coming live to us from India.
Which part?
Kani: I am in a place called Lana, which is towards the north of India. So close to Delhi. It’s a capital city. Very city like, nothing like where you are.
Sam Believ: Why does it look like I’m in India and you’re in Columbia because I have a man this big mandola from India behind me
Kani: from Yeah, we should definitely.
So kind
Sam Believ: of, you, you came to our retreat in September, right? And we had some very fun conversations regarding the parallels that both you and me were noticing in the eastern tradition, eastern spirituality tradition and the Amazonian plant medicine tradition. And so that’s what this episode will be about.
We’ll talk about, from the perspective of Ka about what she knows about Eastern spirituality. And she knows a lot. She’s very smart. And I’ll talk about the very limited amount of information I have on Amazonian tradition and we see how it goes.
Kani: Okay, let’s do it. Right off the bat, I’m no expert.
Okay. So I’m rediscovering my own roots and my spirituality myself. I’ve lived in the UK for the best part of my life. We weren’t particularly religious or spiritual growing up, so this is just me reading and rediscovering stuff. And so if I’m wrong, please feel free to correct me.
Very happy for that, for any of your audience members. But yeah, I’ll try and see what we’ve got.
Sam Believ: Yeah, that’s a good idea. Connie, thanks for being humble. We should be humble and if, yeah, if anything’s guys, you can comment on the live stream and, we will we’ll reply. So are you watching
Kani: the live stream?
So you’ll tell us,
Sam Believ: Yeah, I will, I need to figure out how to do it because when I open it, it starts to starts to make a lot of noise. Yeah I figured it out so kindly. You you’re in India. I’m here in, in South America. It’s perfect for us to you can feel that energy there and I can feel that energy here.
First question will be, it seems that like those two cultures, they seem to go both hand in hand. One seemed to compliment the other and and reinforce each other. For example at our retreats we really like to start with a bit of meditation before the ceremony so people can get connected and it really helps with their plant medicine experience.
And then we like to do yoga because it also helps, like why do you think they’re so complimentary.
Kani: I think they’re trying to work on the same system, right? The human body, the human spirit and mind. So absolutely one tradition evolved to use plant medicines to work on these systems and another has developed other strategies.
And so there’s, all the parallels of working with these systems. And I think from what I. Experienced at the retreat. A lot of what you guys or of the experience felt very similar to what we call tantra. So tantra has been like the term has been bastardized, I think in the west or associated with sexuality and whatever.
That’s not what DRA is. Tantra is basically using energy for spiritual growth. And I felt that’s what we were doing with the plant. So Sotha works a lot with energy, as you will tell us a bit more about hopefully. But that’s what we felt that healing was happening at that energy body level.
And there’s of course a lot of like physical purging that happens as well. And I, there’s a lot of Indian tradition. There’s a pope system of how. To heal with purging. There’s a whole ceremony called Kar as part of Ayurveda, which is like the Indian medicine system. And that involves taking Purgatives and releasing.
And they often say that a lot of emotion will be released during this time. And so these systems seem to have a lot of parallels in that way. Yeah, a
Sam Believ: hundred percent. Because if you go to the jungle and you say, I have this disease, I have that disease. The prescription is almost always gonna include some kind of purge.
And and some of them are very tough hours of vomiting and it feels like what’s the connection, right? But if you do it strangely enough it helps. And then I. A lot of purging. And the way Tita explains it for those who don’t know, T is a, is a Colombian name for shaman in, in their language, he explains that.
Yeah. The energies leave you with, together with the vomit. And sometimes during the ceremony, for example, drinking ayahuasca, ’cause it also has a part to it. You start feeling an emotion or a memory comes up and it sorta of sws around, rolls around you Yeah. And kinda and makes you nauseous and then comes out together with the purge.
And it’s like how do you explain that?
Kani: Absolutely. So there are other parallels in Ayurveda, in our systems as well, which make use of the purging. And I think that’s quite a key component to both, like ayahuasca, I think the purge it’s called Laga, right? I think that’s a huge part of it and still have to figure out.
What that is and why, but it seems to be a key component of all of it.
Sam Believ: Were psychedelics ever used in Eastern spirituality? Have you read anything about it yourself? I.
Kani: So my understanding was very limited until we had that conversation. So for me, I know that substances are used. Shiva is one of the three entities that we worship.
The key ones is like the known as the Destroyer, and he has a lot of like stories. He’s supposed to be constantly intoxicated and that’s the state he is in at all times. There’s a whole tradition of using, I don’t know if you know the Dura. They’re the fruit and the flour.
That’s supposed to be supposed to have hallucinogenic properties. And that’s often given to him as a presentation to ask for his blessings, that sort of thing. So that’s still used by certain aesthetic like sadhus and stuff in India and stuff like that to bring about states and spiritual awakening.
So that’s actually part of, so I knew about that. And marijuana is used quite a bit actually as well. And in, in sort of relation to Shiva, the festivals that are associated with him Norma people just get high on, on what we call hung, which is like the milk concoction of marijuana. But I didn’t know, and until you mentioned the Soma story.
So I looked it up actually, and it’s super interesting. They it’s for me, Soma was always like either the moon god, or it’s supposed to be like something that washes over you, like a plasma, like a brain fluid, plasma sort of thing. But when you look into it, there’s a whole chapter in the Rigveda, which is like 1500 bc that talks about methods of thinning, the veils between the waking state of consciousness and pre deeper transcendent layers and the ways to do that.
And mantras are one of, one of them and tappas, which is the meditation, the arduous yoga and all of that to get into that state is another. But they also mention something called, which are, is supposed to be herbs. And light filled herbs and herbs that like bring light. And so the, there’s a whole like, chapter the ninth ela, which describes like the preparation of it and what it like what sort of thing.
It’s and it seems like it’s, it was suggested either it’s a psychedelic mushroom or it’s something very similar to a brew to ayahuasca. So like you use the stock of this plant, whatever this plant is, and no one’s actually managed to recognize what the plant is yet. Maybe it’s lost, maybe because the sort of methods existed further up in the Himalaya is supposed to be a mountainous plant.
And to use the stop, which is, I think ayahuasca used the vine, right? And then it’s, it described as a climbing plant which I think is similar too. And then you crush that, and it’s bitter and fermented and it filters through you. So it’s sounds like I asked it.
You
Sam Believ: know, I have a, I’m not a sch, I’m not a scholar. I don’t know much about it, but from what you said I have a theory, right? Yeah. There is A-M-A-O-I that can, MAI inhibitors that are contained in the vine itself. They, a, they activate, they allow you to make DMT orally active, but they also make oth other psychedelics like mushrooms be more powerful.
So for example, there’s this concept of silca, like psilocybin ayahuasca basically, and mixing those two. So what if it was, what if it was something like that, like MMAI from that vine? And it occurs in nature in other plants. There’s, I know there’s an acacia that’s a DMT. There’s many plants that have those compounds.
It’s, and they grow in different parts of the world. Maybe there was or still is a plant like that, and somebody just figured it out and they were doing something very similar. So yeah. That’s another parallel, right? The psychedelic. Absolutely. Because I, I think that eastern tradition now is largely associated with with meditation and like self-work.
Just stuff coming from your own body. But I think that people who wrote all this literature and who became that enlightened, definitely had the help from some kind of psychedelic because the difference in, for example tradition here in, in the Amazon in South America, is that they seem to have they don’t seem to have that many scriptures surviving.
I’m sure they had it because to have that amount of knowledge and not have it, you see those ancient temples that are very similar. Mega, like talking about parallels, right? One of them would be psychedelics. Another one of them, as we spoke purges. Another one would be megalithic structures.
You have a lot of them in India as well. They have a lot of them here. So these cultures, they seem to have coexisted and they seem to have such a level of advancement that I will be really surprised if they did not communicate to one another, but that’s completely different concept, totally different across
Kani: the world.
Sam Believ: It’s a totally different topic huge in itself. But yeah. Really? I think
Kani: So cultures that are born out of the land, right? Like your relationship with the land and your relationship with your natural environment. They’re all, I feel like they’re all gonna evolve in generally the same direction.
I. So even if it is across the globe, like there’s gonna be some what we call morphic resonance, right across the globe of like creatures of the same type, evolving at the same ’cause The consciousness is evolving at the same kind of level. And so you will see parallels across there’s a lot of data around Morphic resonance as well, which is super interesting.
But
Sam Believ: When you drink ayahuasca or even other psychedelics, you, one of the first revelations, or as we call them universal truths, is that we are all connected. And ly and you do feel other people, not only people other, life forms, but I’m sure that, in that collective unconscious somewhere there they were, even if they were not physically connected, taking boats or something like that, they were definitely connected in some other ways because the amount of similarities is just, there’s too many, and we’re just touching on it. Let’s talk about the other one, right? What is the significance of serpent in the Eastern tradition? ‘Cause when you drink Ayahuasca it’s largely known as a, there is a serpent energy to it. Sometimes you even your body moves like a serpent.
And they say because it’s a vine, vine is a serpent in a way. And but what about Eastern traditional? Honestly, I know nothing about it.
Kani: So for some reason the serpent is connected to spirituality ’cause it’s everywhere. So in our symbology, in our like myths, there’s always stories around like snakes being present either as a kind of vehicle for the God or for example, Shiva wears a snake around his neck as a very common symbol.
And I think it’s a lot to do with we can come to it, but Kundalini energy is considered a serpent energy that sits at the base of your spine. And it’s a dormant energy that doesn’t do anything unless you try and activate it and try and clear the channels of energy that like ascend to through all your seven chakras up to the top of your head.
It’s it’s got that kind of. Quality to, and there’s two channels that are present that like twirl around each other called the eita and pala. Those are the two like sun and moon channels that exist. And like when they cross, that’s where each other, the chakras are. And so that’s the kind of symbology that exists.
And the vine thing is the fact that ayahuasca looks like intertwining serpents. Super interesting. ’cause there’s there’s like a myth. We call it a myth or you can call it like whatever. But that the thing so herbs herbologists say this, that the thing that’s supposed to affect that particular organ looks a lot like that organ.
So for example, walnuts, look a lot like the brain. It’s super helpful for like brain development. There’s not getting like ginger apparently looks a lot like a stomach or like a. Your intestines or whatever. Avocados are really good for women’s health and it looks like the womb, with the little the seat at the middle.
So the fact that Ayahuasca Vine looks so much that channel system, I feel like it has some sort of energy effect. I don’t know what that is. I’m still trying to figure it out, but like something on that channel. So I, that’s the parallel that I saw quite like immediately. And the other one obviously is that why is it making an appearance in all the visions and stuff?
And I think there is something there,
Sam Believ: Interesting. When when you drink Ayahuasca, there’s this moment at least it’s a bit of a kinda realm place, but where you go and it seems to be filled by bodies of snakes. With patterns on them, yes. Yeah. Have you been there? What is
Kani: that?
Sam Believ: Yeah. And it seems like they’re like grinding against each other and you’re in the middle of it with a buzzing sounds. Yes. And it seems to be like a, like an ego grinder you go through and then when you come on the other side. When you start recollecting your ego you create a better version and then you feel really good.
But it’s a painful experience. It’s really like you feel being ground up and
oh my
Sam Believ: God. Another thing you mentioned, thank you. This
is what I experienced. I could not describe it for the life of me. Yeah,
Sam Believ: that’s it. Yeah. It connected. Yes. Sometimes in the, in, in our word circles, I hear somebody describe something and I’m like yeah, I’ve been there.
And a lot of things are recurring and you feel
Kani: like you’re trapped in it. So I felt really immobile. Like I could not move when I’m in that sort of state. And I felt like the whole thing is just around me. Does that make sense? Like you’re being squashed by the snake, but not really.
Sam Believ: Yeah. Absolutely. Being ground up. And you mentioned chakras, right? And I remember that was what sparked our conversation at the retreat. I noticed I noticed when Ty goes and does the cleaning, he goes and uses the floral water to make crosses on where your chakras supposed to be.
And I was like, and I know he, he does not. Not that he’s illiterate or doesn’t know much, but I know for sure he’s not reading books on Eastern traditions or reads anything at all. He just lives in the jungle and cooks the medicine. He’s just really connected to that. But somehow he consciously or unconsciously knows where the chakras are because he goes and puts, crosses from that plant, on all the chakras, obviously without touching, inappropriate parts. But it’s he can see,
Kani: he can see the energy, right? That’s my, that’s what I think is happening. They can visually how people can read auras or whatever I feel like you can probably see people’s, like there is a particular spiritual guru that I follow, and he’s done a whole thing where he’s sat with somebody felt things and then he just draws oh, this is.
This is, this particular chakra is a bit strong for you. This one isn’t so strong and like he just notes all these things. I’m po I’m guessing it’s possible to read and sense these things and we just don’t have the perception for it. But he obviously does, having worked with plants for a long time and being like in this tradition for his entire, like seven generations.
Sam Believ: Yeah, I’m sure he does not know what even the word chakra means. No, probably. But I think he knows what it really means more than any of us any, it’s pretty Absolutely. It’s pretty crazy. Are there any medicine systems, like spiritual methods in Eastern spirituality similar to indigenous medicine and shamanism here in, in Amazon?
Kani: So I think shamanism has existed everywhere. So Taoists and the Zen Chinese traditions or shamans or shaman. There’s like shamanistic branches to all traditions, I feel. And those are like the ones that are super close to nature. I think any, and like we were saying before, like any kind of culture system that’s evolved from living with and in tandem with nature understanding, it’s like subtle, being sensitive to it and everything.
I think they develop these systems. And I think the way I was talking about Ayurveda, I think Ayurveda has a big sort of it’s all of our traditions were oral traditions, right? For the longest time. And then we managed to write them down. And I think that’s the difference that you were saying that we, indigenous sculptures, we haven’t quite scribed them down or I think knowledge is passed down, but by oral traditions.
So whether it’s like, depending on how the tribe is doing, the, the lineages, whether it’s lost or it’s retained, whereas we’ve managed to put a lot down on paper it seems. So I think Ayurveda has a lot of a again, obviously it’s all about local herbs and local plants and what exists here may not exist over there.
And but the bunch Garma procedure is like a 21 day ceremony where you first drink lots of oils to try and so we have this cow based oil called Key. I don’t know if you’ve come across KE before, but it’s the, yeah,
Sam Believ: It’s cla, it’s clarified butter.
Kani: Exactly, but purified in like the essence of what the milk product is and you just like drink lots of it and it seems really unhealthy, but the idea is it like captures a lot of the toxins in the body and transfers them to the gut. And then the idea is to purge those things. So it’s then you take purgatives to try and vomit those things out.
Very and vomit are the two techniques and I’m actually studying a little bit of that as well. So it’s super interesting. But you let them try and purge it all out and it’s two, three hours of purging if you like. You’re like literally taken your interests out similar to I aspects to be honest.
And then that’s posted.
Sam Believ: How did you say this Procedures called
Kani: Kar mean Five. So five
Sam Believ: procedures. It’s funny because a couple days ago we were at the retreat and s is my wife’s mom. She had some gut issues, so she went to ti to complain and guess what, she guess what he gave her. He gave her half a glass of olive oil and the per and the purgative.
Oh, wow. There you go. So yeah,
Sam Believ: They definitely seem to be reading same books, in some library somewhere.
Kani: And then the other thing so I think Ayahuasca would, again, did for me and for. Everyone, pretty much the, I met at the retreat, it was a lot of emotional release, right? And trying to release a lot of body-based tensions that exist in different parts.
And I think, we track a lot of our emotions in our bodies and these methods are ways to release all of that energy. And so there’s another one called ana, which is a meditation technique where the idea is to get closer develop it’s like a 10 day thing. The first retreat’s a 10 day silent retreat, but you hone in on your skills or really experiencing your sensations in your body.
And so as you do that kind of body scan you realize where those blocks are and slowly as you see them for what they are. So just. Face the pain as it is in Ayahuasca. It all releases. There’s a lot of like emotional release in these retreats as well. I’ve been to one lot of wailing, crying, et cetera, and all of that comes out.
And so I think very similarly, this is another thing that I’ve come across, which is very similar. And obviously like the practice of tantra is done in different ways in all of our traditions. And there’s a lot of priests and medicine men. It’s obviously, it’s really difficult in India to find like true ones ’cause there’s so many fake ones.
I’m guessing it’s very similar there. It’s also
Sam Believ: difficult. It’s also difficult here because for every real real title you have 20 fake ones, which is, oh my god.
Kani: But they have very similar, so the experience of me sitting over there and what was doing with La Wire, the leaves and the kind of spraying our Oscar and all of that it felt very similar to what we call like charred folk and like these, like there we go.
One of those. Absolutely. Yeah. So we use like peacock feathers, a lot of sort of priests who do this stuff and like you call them in the house when there’s like bad energies and they’re supposed to whack those bad energies out of you. Al
Sam Believ: Titus do the same thing. If she had Zel come over, he brought the wire and the tobacco and special sprays and just walked around and, using the smoke.
And it’s, it has seem, it seems to have something to do with. Plants or feathers as well. In Northern North American tradition, they also use feathers to basically kinda move something around. Softening it up before ex exposing it.
Yeah. Exp Yeah, that’s a word. We’ll go with it.
Kani: Yeah, so there’s that.
So the it felt so similar. It felt like I was in like an Indian like ceremony, which I’ve never been to, but I was just seen, even here. But the process just felt so, so similar and like smoke is used and I know in your ceremonies you have somebody walking around with those like things, I don’t know what you burn is a tobacco,
Sam Believ: it’s called copal.
It is called copal. It’s a tree resin dried and finely ground put on the coals. And it creates this intense smokers. It smells pretty pleasantly. It’s we, it’s not, I think this conversation is, shouldn’t be about even finding parallels. I think it will be harder for us to find things that are not parallel like this, be everything.
Is done in that tradition in, in, in India seems to be mirrored here. And this really makes you ask a lot of questions. Right?
Pretty amazing.
Sam Believ: Let’s talk about another one. I know for example, in preparation for Ihu ask, the diet is very important and you need to eat in a special way or not eat in a special way.
Are there any parallels like that in the Eastern spirituality?
Kani: Yeah, so diet has a super important role. We are what we eat. So that’s, that one’s pretty obvious, but we often say that diet is supposed to be appropriate for the kind of work that you’re doing. Say you were a king or whatever, and you have to do grand, big things.
You should eat a rich, high caloric kind of diet. And it’s named the Raik diet, right? It’s got a lot of. Key oils, rich foods and it’s, it gives you a certain energy to do that kind of work, right? The warrior, for example, should eat accordingly, and all of that’s written down. But spiritual work they say, needs to be a SIC diet, which is food that’s largely plant-based, vegetarian, super easy to digest such that it goes through your system and you don’t even feel the effects or the big strain of digestion so that you can put your energies into the spiritual work.
So the idea of yoga and all this diet stuff is like your body should not even be contributing. So say. So again with ayahuasca, like you really all that stuff, right? Like the idea is to release all of it such that you don’t even experience the body and then you quieten the mind and then you open yourself up to what the universe is for real, for the whatever the universal truth is.
So exactly. So there’s that, and obviously each of the foods are attributed qualities and what they do to the system. So there’s like foods with which are called high chronic foods, meaning they help the prana. So the prana is like the life force energy. So these are like foods that are positively chronic.
And these are like the negative and these are the neutral. And so if you eat accordingly, you’ll find that you need less. To, ’cause you’re gaining energy just by say, working on your Kundalini, and that’s energy, right? So you don’t require as much food when you’re working on this stuff. And also whatever food you do eat for substance is positive helping the product.
So that’s what the, yeah,
Sam Believ: I work with with spirituality, but I still prefer to eat my warrior’s diet. So
You’re creating a business. So I think in no
Sam Believ: way, yeah. I’m still finding a lot of small wars to just make it all happen. But I’m sure, yeah, T doesn’t seem to eat much at all.
Like he, he is very flexible with his diets, but he doesn’t eat much at all. And when you ask them about, for example, vegetarianism or just about what foods are they allowed to eat or not allowed to eat. They do eat meat in their tradition, but it has to be a very specific type of meat.
Like they, they really highlight the importance that the, before you eat the animal, you need to, the animal has to live its full lifecycle. It has to be pro, obviously you would call it organic happy chicken. And then it has to have had, kids. And that’s interesting. I don’t know if there is any parallels in, in, in eastern tradition to that sort of notion for
Kani: meats.
Yeah. I’m sure there, so meats are not forbidden. I’m like, I’ve been vegetarian since I was like born, so I have like very little understanding of the other stuff. But yeah, any indigenous tradition will say that the, you need to be part of the ecosystem and part of the natural life cycle of the food, right?
And so it needs to have finished its life in order for you to then consume it. But yeah, I haven’t like really delved into the meat consumption part. But certainly meats aren’t and certain Ayurvedic doctors recommend meat for certain things. So I imagine they have certain properties that will help cure ailments or like otherwise to yeah.
Sam Believ: Let’s talk about another parallel, which is the use of music in the ceremony, in the healing. And to me, two things seem somewhat similar, which is ikaros like chance and the mantras. Do you have any opinion on that? Have you noticed that one?
Kani: Yes. So when I was there the recovery thing, there’s the iro, the medicine music part, which was beautiful, by the way.
Thank you so much. And then of course, what sort of the, that the sounds that th makes when he’s doing the healing work, right? And they don’t have, they’re not words per se, I don’t think they are. Anyway. You can enlighten me if they are, but like they sound, but if they were put into words, they would sound like little chants.
That so I think with music and sound, it’s very much not the words, but the energy that the sound is carrying. And so yeah like just to, to me it sounded super similar. But yeah, mantras like they’re supposed to encapsulate the energies of the primordial sound of the universe kind of thing.
So they’re supposed to capture in certain ways and each mantra is supposed to invoke a certain energy within you and you find resonance with that particular sound. So I remember I think day one, I think you must have asked Cesar to play a particular mantra. And because I knew it and I resonated with it, it blew up my kind of visual.
So experience. And so I think we’re all instruments, right? Being tuned by music and sound. And I think that’s a huge part of both our kind of traditions. Like chanting, we’ll tune our instrument in a certain way, in the same way across or the other music and sound will tune our, so I found that with having taken ica, the certain, whenever music started playing, it would cause a physiological change in the body.
Like you would feel sick afterwards or like it would do something. It would cause a shift as soon as the music started. It wasn’t always consistent. I like was, yeah, I don’t I don’t know what experience like you’ve had with several people noting this, but like it’s very. Pronounce what music does in those ceremonies.
Sam Believ: A absolutely. We know that. And the even in, when I’m instructing, for example, Caesar, what to play, I always Caesar, he’s a little bit he’s a little bit difficult. I always tell him when people are very quiet and they’re not purging, you need to increase the intensity and play songs that are like really powerful.
And they, they will create the, this ca this chaos and then the purge. And then when people are
Yeah swirling starts with it, exactly. It stimulates it. And that’s really interesting. And
Sam Believ: when you, and when you, whenever one is like super quiet and like falling asleep as well, you need stronger.
But then when it’s a chaos and everyone is like releasing and there’s a lot of noise, then you quiet down and you quiet people down with the music. Like for example, me, when I play in the ceremony, it’s also not just the music itself. It’s kinda like an intention.
I sorta. I envisioned myself singing, and I I mostly sing with my eyes closed for some reason. Not only medicine, music, it’s just, it’s a thing. And then I envisioned putting like a warm blanket around everyone, sending, good vibes. And people seem to feel it, like they feel the difference and they notice it.
And if you ask t like, what is the musical all about? What is why harmonica? Why this? He will yes. I’m very
Kani: curious about that.
Sam Believ: Yeah. Tits normally say that they use sounds to harmonize the space. So let’s say there’s somebody goes through a difficult process and there’s a little bit of chaos if you allow it to be, and Tita doesn’t come and help.
Then you see there’s another person with chaos and another person with chaos. And then it, so then Tita comes out and starts, with harmonica and with ra he starts to and then or sometimes just with chance, it’s hey. Yeah. Hey. And then people start to calm down.
And it’s it’s there’s a little fire and he like extinguishes it and otherwise it spreads and it chaos, right? So they use music to harmonize and yeah it’s very interesting. Music is, it’s another universal language that I’m sure if you take an Indian shaman that works in some specific tradition and then put him in the ayahuasca ceremony and let him do his chance right at home, he’ll connect, it will connect with everyone and vice versa, right?
It’s too bad you lost your soma. ’cause otherwise I’ll be doing so.
Kani: Yeah, no. We can go on to the Himalayas and try and find it again. It’s supposed to be in that region, so from Afghanistan to like the Himalayas, that’s supposed to be where like, it’s roughly located. And obviously that’s like beyond India now. So ones
Sam Believ: really well. As soon as we’re done, as soon as we’re done with this live, I’m sure you’re gonna come out and start looking for it, right?
Kani: And start hunting for Soma.
It’s okay. I’ll just come back to you.
Kani: Cool.
It’s the same thing. Remember? It’s the same thing.
Sam Believ: Yeah. I wanted to talk to you about something personal, right? You’re a doctor and you came to our retreat. You work as a doctor in London, right? And there, there’s this thing about doctors and policemen.
And this time we had a fire. Fire chief from London as well. And they all seem to be very worried about sharing about their IAS experience on like social media and it’s there seems to be this taboo for people of those professions to have, have emotions and have emotional issues.
Do you have any opinion on that?
Kani: It’s not that we’re not allowed to have them, we’re just not allowed to express them. So first of all, the uk and I’m sure Americans similar, but it’s not quite, the UK is well known for a stiff upper lip. You just take it and that’s it. And like you just have to deal with it yourself.
You’re never gonna share it with anybody else. It’s like a very British thing to do. But yes, people in these professions see a lot. They experience a lot of trauma. We see people dying in front of us. We need to be able to cope with that. Yet we are given hardly any tools to do that. So you know, whether it’s you’ve tried to save somebody and you haven’t been able to, you might be a little debrief session with your seniors as to what went wrong with very technical.
It won’t really be about your emotions and what you took in, and it’s like a human life that you’ve just dealt with. And I’m guessing it’s very similar with firefighters, policemen, et cetera. We hold a lot of traumas but we’re for some reason not given the tools and we don’t have the tools.
Does anyone really in the west have tools to try and figure out how to express and release trauma? It’s. Yeah. Yeah. So we just numb it. We just, we decide to just become functional again with these antidepressants. So if we’re feeling low, great. Let’s just take antidepressants, just take uppers.
If we’re feeling like a bit manic, let’s just take some benzos and get to sleep at night. These aren’t permanent solutions. They might help they might put like a little plaster over your problem for a short period of time, but they wouldn’t really get to the root cause of why you are this way.
And obviously people who go into, yeah, absolutely. And like people who go into these professions clearly. Have some sort of, thing to work out, right? We need to figure out why we want to help people. We wanna figure out like, why are you drawn to like these particular professions? What is it about them?
Is it about proving it to somebody that you can do it? Is it about you saw so much chaos in your life before that you can deal with chaos and you’ve got a skill now because of what you’ve gone through, but like it still hasn’t released out of you. So it’s those questions that I think we all need to ask and I don’t think we often do, but,
Sam Believ: yeah. Do you mind talking on the subject of you being a doctor? Do you mind if I share the story about Titan and tobacco and what he saw? Yeah,
Kani: that’s fine.
Sam Believ: Yeah. I think it’s very fascinating. So about a month ago you messaged me and said you felt felt strange and a little bit energetically blocked and yes, if I can ask t for any advice.
So I spoke to t and Titan normally says, okay, if you want me to look into some person I need a photo and I need their full name. So he looks, he sits down lights at the tobacco. He looks at your photo and your full name. I don’t know how he does. It’s kinda a version of spiritual Googling.
And then he smokes the tobacco and he looks at the way the tobacco burns and starts to get some kind of hints and information from it. And what really surprised me, he asked me like, oh, is she a healer? And I thought oh, I’m gonna, I’m gonna ask you if you do some kind of healing work.
And then it struck me that you’re a doctor, which is a healer, right? And and then yeah, he, when I said, you’re a doctor, he smiled. And because obviously he was correct somehow through that tobacco, he was able to see that. And then he said that when you do your healing work as a doctor, in that sort of physical realm, you also do part of it spiritually.
And you keep some of the things people are some of their energies and people are. It stays in you. And that’s what causes that this balance. So I don’t know how cool is that? Very,
Kani: very cool. And it just validates what I’ve always known about myself, which is really interesting.
So I, I do that, with my work, of course, but even with just normal life and people and relationships and friends and whatever, it’s like I am the one that’s sit, sitting there holding people’s pain, like trying to like, trying to see if I can find a solution for them. Heal. Healing is, have no formal training and healing.
I do doctor work, like it’s very western medicine, but yeah, so I know that I take on people’s energies. This is something I know about myself. And so like it was interesting that he corroborated that. And very interestingly, after it, was it after, or before you told me this, I actually watched a Gabor Mate interview with Tim Ferriss.
He’s promoting his new book at the moment, and like he speaks about how he himself was, so he does integration work, I think with like his own retreats and stuff. So he went to a retreat and took a bunch of physicians, actually took a bunch of doctors with him and they were all doing their healing work.
After the first night he was chucked out of his own tree. The shamans came up to him and were like, you’re messing up people’s energies what’s going on with you? And he’s oh, what is it? And they basically highlighted two things. One was you basically have done so much healing work on other people, but you don’t know how to discharge it.
And so you’re holding a bunch of that within you and years of it. And so that’s not helping. And the other thing was you’re still holding onto some sort of like childhood trauma that happened to you at very early in life where you were abandoned or something of that kind. And he always has a story about that, that you can go and look up and stuff.
But he, yeah, being a Holocaust survivor and like his mom had to abandon him for a period of time and things like that. And so that is, and they just saw that. And so I think we have that problem. I think doctors, healers the shamans know how to discharge their, like emotions. And we probably don’t have the tools to that.
And this is where like the eastern stuff, like yoga and somatically with body work, discharge it every day. Like with meditation, try and work and like discharge that. Like you need to be fine tuned to what you hold and how are you holding it. And I think that’s the tricky part for us.
But yeah, it’s super interesting way
Sam Believ: of discharging it. And then maybe help the other people in your types of profession to, to learn how to do it. Speaking about some sorry,
Kani: I said that’s the work that’s the challenge. Yeah.
Sam Believ: That’s the plan, right? Speaking about other things that would be considered unexplainable and a little bit woo.
I remember we talked about reiki, right? And and the yes and the healing. So me, myself for people who don’t know I did tell the story in. A couple times is that my whole journey about starting the vascular retreat started with the medicine experience in the Amazon jungle where medicine gave me the gift of healing with my hands, which is not easy for me to talk about because it’s totally outside of my worldview.
And I’m still now stuck in between those two worldviews of and I’m trying to find my piece, trying to find my piece and create my own worldview, which sorta includes both physical And Because you were
Kani: like you were an engineer, right? Or are, or Yeah, I was. So that’s, I was a marine mechanical engineer, like material worldview, everything is matter. You have to construct it in certain
Sam Believ: everything. Very much so about physical and like lava used to be part of Soviet Union and religion was prohibited. So we grew up with zero religion zero spiritual, everything was. Just about this world, and and obviously now I understand this is not a healthy way of being, but so for me the whole journey of starting a retreat began with that experience of of of given being, given this information about healing with my hands, which I’m still learning and occasionally get like a learning sessions from Ayahuasca about how to do it.
But there, when I was describing this to one of the visitors here, happened to me, and this is what I’ve been shown, and it’s largely about moving energies. So it’s either taking something from a person and removing it. Or taking something from outside of the person and putting it in specific parts of the body.
And when I was describing exactly how it happens, he’s yeah, that’s reiki, that’s he’s a reiki practitioner. It’s that’s what they teach us at the Reiki course. And I was like, that’s pretty cool. ’cause I dunno what even reiki is. And then I remember talking about that to you and you say that you know something about it.
And is reiki an eastern tradition?
Kani: I think so. Again, I don’t quite know where the roots are, but it is energy work. It is basically working with energy, same as what tantra is in the sense that you work with your hands and you’re able to, I think it’s a lot to do with where you’re directing your attention.
So wherever your like attention is, that’s where the energy flows. So that’s why you have say the bus now where you’re like scanning your body and you’re like. Focusing your energy in those specific your attention in those specific spots and working out the energy kinks in those areas.
And very similarly, you’re supposed to direct like your whole body’s energy or your heart energy. For example, you can imagine that your heart is sitting in your arm, in your hands, the palm of your hands. And if you wanna do some kind of loving kindness, healing for somebody, that’s what you wanna do.
And you wanna work with your chakras and their chakras and interact with them. Apparently chakra don’t just sit stable in those like places you can actually move certain, some of them around, like where direct them as to where your attention is. So I think I don’t know much about it. But like this is there’s a lot of like self-proclaimed reiki masters around here.
One of my uncles is supposed to be one. So that’s the sort of thing he describes and like you can actually feel so energy. So Tai Chi, for example, is energy ma manipulation as well, right? And you’re supposed to be able to feel like this ball of energy in your hands in between them. And actually, if you really hone down, you can feel the heat and the energy in between your hands.
It’s really quite, I don’t know if you’ve had that experience, like if you’re dealing with somebody’s pain, for example, on your like focus, your energy there, they stop feeling a little bit of heat or something in that space. Something’s happening. Medicine, science,
I dunno, I don’t know if they can explain it.
Sam Believ: I mostly focus on the flow of the energy. That’s what I feel. It’s kinda you become a pump, right? That’s how it feels.
Kani: Where is it coming from? Is there a source that you’re like channeling it from into, or I.
Sam Believ: For example one of the examples when I had to do healing work, because I’m, I, it’s not that I’m that I decide oh, I’m gonna go help this person if I drink during the ceremony.
Sometimes the medicine tells me, oh, you, you need to go help that person and that’s what you need to do. And in that case she had certain disease which I saw as a lack of the life energy. And so I was listening and focusing on the nature outside of the retreat and sound of the river flowing and the trees and the plants.
And I was pulling that life energy from the nature. And I was putting that in like a specific part of the body till I could see that that the, that organ. I could see that you went from being like a sort of waste, like a desert sort of empty space to starting to fill up with green and then I could see a flower sort of blooming.
And then that to me was an, a realization that the work has been done. So I was like, happy and that’s good. And I dunno,
you saw that like visually you saw that?
Sam Believ: Yeah. With your eyes open or like with your eyes shut? No, with my eyes shut and obviously when drinking with I. Yeah. And and I don’t know.
I, I talked to her a couple months after that. I actually need to check up on her as well if she feeling better. But she was very skinny and she sat after the retreat. She gained like three kilos in three months. So I guess that’s a sign.
Kani: Do the same for me. What is this? You should come and help me.
Sam Believ: Honestly, at the moment I’m still learning and I don’t, I. I don’t say I’m a heal or anything, I’m just basically a low level student and I only do things when medicine tells me it’s, and it’s very, the instructions are very clear. If you’re at the retreat and I’m like, oh, I need to go do something, then I will.
But it’s a really rare thing. It’s, it happens to me once every six months.
Kani: Yeah.
Sam Believ: And last time I did it, it was basically me putting a hand on the part that hurts and then focusing on it and it’s a lot to do with like colors and shapes the way I see the pain and then I need to remove it and then in place of pain, put in once again, the energy of some kind of life, one of, one of the four elements it seems to be, but, and it also has to, a lot to do with chakras and kinda, yeah.
It’s as if I’m trying to like when you use the defibrillators to start somebody’s heart. It’s kinda similar, but I’m trying to like,
instead of electricity, it’s like energy,
Sam Believ: just like a rank, rank up their energy. Yeah. It’s but it doesn’t come from me. None of it comes from me.
Basically what you’re like
a channel, right? As a channel?
Sam Believ: Yeah, as a pump. I just get instructions and I say, pump this from here to there. And it’s very so you’re told
like specifically oh, for this element is needed, like fire or water or whatever,
Sam Believ: Yeah.
And if you ask Ty, he will say the same thing. He’s, he will always say, I’m do, I’m doing none of it. It’s basically I’m just conveying something. And I think that’s a very healthy way of seeing it because there’s a lot of people that have a lot of huge spiritual ego and then, they want you to kiss their feet or something like that, but which is.
Yeah, I know much about it, but
Kani: you can’t be a.
Yeah, no, the elements thing is super interesting because obviously with ailments, like with Ayurveda, what I’m studying as well is o often a lack of a certain combination of elements. So like each food is considered to have either fire and water, like it’s composed of I mean it’s five elements or whatever.
It might be different for you, but like they’re supposed to, each food item is supposed to be composed of different combinations of these five, and then your body is supposed to be composed of different combinations of these five, and each process is slightly different in what it uses. For example, digestion is a digestive fire, right?
And yeah, like the fact that you’re saying there certain elements were missing in somebody and you’ve tried to pull that energy and put it in them. That’s super interesting too, because that’s what we try and do with food and herb treatments in our rhythm, so that’s cool.
Sam Believ: Yeah, and it’s very clear, right?
Let’s say I’m doing that I have like hand, one hand on the part that hurts, and the other hand like collecting energies, like with my fingers spread and like antennas, right? And then if I go oh I go oh, I need something from the ground. And I go my hand. And then I was like, oh, I need something from up.
Oh it’s really strange because I don’t know anything about it. One, once again, I don’t know about, see,
this is what’s fascinating about us.
Sam Believ: So it’s not pa it’s another, a parallel in, I guess in methods of.
Kani: The pile between you and I is the fact that like we come from such mechanistic ways of looking at the world and then for some reason all of this we’re not saying we, we know anything about it, but it’s super interesting and it’s challenging our worldview that we filed for the longest time, right?
I came in a skeptic.
I don’t,
Kani: i’d heard about Ayahuasca, but I hadn’t like really, it’s a different thing experiencing it for sure. Like you, you go back a believer
Sam Believ: I’m still a skeptic though, right? And that’s the weirdest part. I’m like I a healing. You have healing.
I do a healing on someone and it works. And I still like, no, you’re full of shit. Like, how,
Kani: but how? But like why? Why is it working? You’re full of shit.
Sam Believ: This is garbage. You’re just crazy. And then I’m like, but then when I’m in that state, I believe it a hundred percent. And for me, like it’s a big conflict right now.
I need to find where I sit because I still. Let’s be honest there in the world of spirituality and this healing, 99% of things is bullshit. There’s so many people trying to claim something and make something mind me out of something. Yeah. And that’s why it’s so watered down then, and that’s why it’s so hard to believe, because it’s really hard to find something that really works.
But if you look at titles work and all this unexplainable things, you really re you really realize like when somebody’s real, it is real. I’ll give you an example. Like literal, the retreat that just ended two days ago. The guy was like he was at his darkest throughout the all retreat and he was just basically under the blanket going through the hardest trip ever.
And he says. Exactly at that moment, Ty just runs up to him, takes the blanket off him and starts, he starts helping him. And he is like, how the hell did he know that I was in that space? And it happens. Every retreat, there’s one person that’s like exactly where when I needed him, he came because otherwise he doesn’t bother you.
You, you’re, you’ll rarely see him. He’ll be there in the kiosk meditating and seeing things. So it’s, it is real, but it’s still really hard for me to accept.
So hard to accept. It’s really difficult. Yeah, no, absolutely. It’s been drum
Sam Believ: drummed into us, like for our entire life, lifetime.
Kani: Like you go into that space, whatever, that world, and it’s very real when it happens. Like it’s very, like you feel a presence of somebody else. There with you in your mind, and that’s and you can, there’s ways of looking at host decisions and like psychedelics and what they do to you, right?
We were talking about the default mode network and the mechanism of that and so that’s like the egotist mind chatter that you have about yourself. So what psychedelics supposed to do is like quiet that part of your brain, so you become an antenna for the rest of the universe. And so like you start like becoming more receptive to what else is going on.
That’s supposedly how it works. But that’s so mechanistic, like that feels very simplistic and reductionist. Whereas with Ayahuasca, there’s a presence that’s doing that to you and with you and taking you like, on this journey. And everyone’s having the same kind of experience, so they can’t all be lying and making shit off, right?
There is something here that’s like slightly different. There is a spirit of a plan of some sort. Now what does that mean? To put it into the wider world context. Oh, plants have spirits. Oh, okay. They’re not inert. Things that like, you’re supposed to ravage and, they have intelligence.
They have wisdom in the same way that we do. We just are not tuned to it. So clearly we need to readjust the way we’re functioning in this world to like, recalibrate a bit and open our minds to other possibilities.
Sam Believ: Yeah. Find a worldview that includes all of those things and there is no conflict.
It’s kinda like a conflict between Newtonian physics and quantum physics. It’s like they’re both real, but they don’t and I think they’re
Kani: conflicting. Yeah. There’s no, no theory that matches between, there is this
Sam Believ: world, there is a spiritual reality and there is probably something in between.
And yeah. But for me personally, it really messes with our mind, place, messes with my mind. And as, as all of you who are watching this probably can see, we have a lot of questions, very few answers, but it’s important to ask those questions, to start thinking those thoughts. And, we should do another episode 10 years from now.
And maybe we’ll have you see
where we’re at, if we gained any more understanding of
Sam Believ: this. We figured it out. And may maybe by then we’ll be doing lives in total spiritual world without any Oh yeah. Oh, that would be
good.
Sam Believ: Just oh, tune in on such time, make telepathic
channel three, three work.
Telepath.
Sam Believ: Which is another bizarre thing because Titus do communicate remotely with each other.
What?
Sam Believ: Yep. Yep. And once again, using a tobacco, they can. So many questions, so little answers. But I think on that note we’ll wrap up and yeah, I just yeah. Another thing, when you do come to the retreat, please don’t come seeking me out and asking to heal you for something because I don’t know how to do it.
Oops. Unless the medicine specifically tells me to do it. Yeah. Give me another maybe 40 years when I’m tight this age and I can control it and do it on demand. But as of now yeah. With just just learning and it’s fascinating this whole world that no matter how bizarre this world of spirituality is, but it makes me feel very much liberated because there’s so much more to explore and so much more to learn because it feels like I remember growing up I really liked that venture books, and I would read books and I would be, I read the entire, in the library that we had in, in the.
In our neighborhood. I read all adventure books and I was like, and I just realized that there’s nothing left to explore. You can, you can’t just go jump on the, you wouldn’t have done it all. Find the new continents, somebody have done it all. And I was like, what am I gonna do? What am I gonna explore?
This is so boring. This is X. And then now discovering this psychedelic, I realize that this world you go to and this worlds and paradigms and, parallel universes you go to on psychedelics is, might be much bigger than this reality, which for me personally, is really exciting because there’s so much more to explore and understand.
There’s nothing we understand about it. So yeah, I’m really excited.
Kani: It’s a journey, not a destination. You have to keep exploring.
Sam Believ: Connie, thank you for coming and thank you for teaching us a little bit about Eastern tradition and I really hope you. Find a way, to help all those doctors to heal themselves and clean themselves.
I really, I really think you have a passion for that. And maybe next time you’re on it, you’ll be you’re on our PO podcast, maybe you’ll be, you’ll write a book or something, it’s time to act,
Kani: it’s time to act. I’m trying to find my path. Let’s see where it leads me.
But yeah, book, books, book might be in the works. Let’s see.
Sam Believ: Yeah, book book a course, something that people can find and learn. Meanwhile you said you do have a blog, right? Would you wanna say, oh my God, yeah.
Kani: Yeah, sure. I’ll put it you can put it in the description later.
Sam Believ: I will do that.
And yeah. Thank you. Thank you for coming. And it’s
Kani: oh. Thank you for
Sam Believ: having me. It’s a fascinating subject.
Kani: It was a fun discussion. Thank you so much. Yeah.
Sam Believ: Thank you Ka and I’ll see you in 10 years in another one,
not before then. What? No,
Sam Believ: no. I’ll see you at the retreat hopefully sometime next year, but 10 years from now we’ll do another episode.
We’ll provide the answers for all the questions that we asked this one.
Kani: Absolutely.
Sam Believ: Bye bye everyone.