In this episode of Ayahuasca Podcast, host Sam Believ (founder of http://www.lawayra.com) has a conversation with Lauren Taus, a licensed clinical therapist specializing in addiction and trauma treatment. Lauren is licensed in both New York and California and integrates alternative treatment modalities such as trauma-sensitive yoga and psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy into her practice. She is the founder of Embodied Life, a platform offering psychotherapy, psychedelic training, and retreats aimed at supporting personal transformation.
We touch upon topics such as:
- Lauren’s journey into psychedelics and healing (00:40 – 03:40)
- The importance of knowing the source of Ayahuasca (05:43 – 07:10)
- Healing eating disorders with Ayahuasca (08:06 – 09:29)
- The role of integration in psychedelic work (12:12 – 13:37)
- Morning routines and their impact on mental health (15:07 – 16:39)
- Ayahuasca and grief processing (16:52 – 19:45)
- Navigating intergenerational trauma with Ayahuasca (28:20 – 29:47)
- The balance between Western medicine and plant medicine (39:02 – 42:51)
- Facilitator responsibilities and Ayahuasca retreat safety (30:22 – 34:43)
- The importance of community in healing (50:41 – 53:57)
- Internal Family Systems therapy and psychedelics (54:22 – 57:29)
If you would like to attend one of our Ayahuasca retreats, go to http://www.lawayra.com.
Find more about Lauren Taus at http://www.embodiedlife.com, on Instagram at @lauren.taus or @embodiedlifetherapy.
Transcript
Sam Believ: You’re listening to ayahuasca podcast.com.
Lauren Taus: My experience with this medicine is that there’s a lot of intergenerational content that can be pre presented and that there’s a lot of guidance that can be presented. Now, of course, I’m speaking about my own personal experience. There are many folks who don’t have as much vision as I have, and that doesn’t mean that ayahuasca is like better or worse for anyone, right?
Like certain people have much more somatic experiences. I can get very visual and get very clear directions. And for me, it’s very much a conversation and it’s a deep relationship for me. It’s absolutely the case that folks can get lots of counsel and content around what has been generational patterns and what their role can be to both honor and sever what is no longer functioning, and also to kinda continue in the ways of the good.
But the vine knows everything. The leaving the vine, they know, like she knows whatever you wanna call. I don’t even. There’s so much that’s beyond language in this conversation.
Sam Believ: Hi guys, and welcome to Ayahuasca podcast. As always, we did the whole samie. Today I’m joined by Lauren Taos. Lauren is a licensed clinical therapist specializing in addiction and trauma treatment with licenses in both New York and California. In her practice, Lauren integrates alternative treatment modalities, including trauma sensitive yoga and psychedelic assisted psychotherapy.
Lauren is the founder of Embodied Life, a platform offering psychotherapy, psychedelic training, and retreats aimed at supporting personal transformation. I talked to Lauren about the topics of overcoming anorexia, sustainability of ayahuasca integration and daily rituals, her processing loss of her mother.
Death as a teacher, embracing emotions, shared group healing, internal family systems, and much more. Enjoy this episode. This episode is sponsored by Lara Ayahuasca, retreat. At Lara, we combine affordability, accessibility, and authenticity. Lara Connect, heal, grow. Guys, I’m looking forward to hosting you.
Lauren, welcome to the show.
Lauren Taus: Thank you so much, Sam. Happy to be here.
Sam Believ: Lauren, before we begin, tell us a little bit about your story and specifically how did you end up working with AB medicines?
Lauren Taus: Huh the, I like most stories, mine, mine is started with my own suffering. I was not a happy kid.
I was painfully good. I was really very much committed to being perfect and. Perfection is pretty strangulating and straight jacketing. And that, if any child is as good as I was, I would be very concerned. The children should be testing boundaries and exploring and not so concerned with achievement and excellence.
And of course that was a mask for trying to feel okay. My parents, bless them, beautiful beings, beautiful souls loved me very much. And they also had their own human challenges, which of course impacted me very deeply. And formed my primary architecture, which I needed to reorganize, do some interior design and building kind of redevelopment.
I was I consider myself the unlikely drug girl. I was not engaging in any sort of psychoactive explorations in high school or college. I was far too busy being skinny and good, getting straight a’s doing what I thought I was supposed to do. And drugs were nowhere near that list. I was also, as part of my perfectionism, an almost successful anorexic.
And I say that because I think the the mission of anorexia is suicide in a very slow way. And I can remember thinking to myself, bones would be too big. I would be too much space to take up. So I I was doing everything I learned about around taking care of myself and coming back to life.
I was the walking dead for much of my existence. And therapy helped a lot. Yoga helped a lot. And much later in my life, I was admitted to a journey. And I was with my brother and it was very powerful. And I had been very resistant. My brother had invited me many times to go and have an experience with him, and I was scared of that.
This would affect my diet and my boot, my body. I was like, nah, I’m not gonna do that. But eventually I said yes. And, I went flying through the doors, I knew that this would be part of my life. I started in a place and with medicines that I no longer sit with I, I’ve started naive like everybody else and have learned a lot along the way.
I have blown the wings of many things. Many times they have shown me and grown me. And I have a really beautiful relationship, psychoactive plants and compounds. Of course it’s been my most favorite. Bless the vine of the healing vine. I’m very passionate about ayahuasca. I feel it’s a privilege of a lifetime to, to drink this medicine and to commune with this medicine.
And more and more I’m learning about how to give back to it because it’s one thing to, to be served and to have your life supported by this very powerful life force. And at the same time the medicine wants our care and partnership needs it actually. Yeah I have received unfathomable levels of healing from this medicine that like, bring me to my knees and tears and of thanks. And yeah there’s a lot to say, but I think I’ll leave it at that.
Sam Believ: Thank you Lauren. Thank you for sharing your story. Whatever you did, and I believe you showed the viewers, your, the ayahuasca vine that you’re having, and for those of you who will see the video version of it yeah, you look pretty good, given given your story and the eating disorders it worked for you.
So congratulations. And I’m always happy to see somebody’s life change, not just by ayahuasca, obviously you did a lot of work. I can imagine. But facilitated by ayahuasca, it’s interesting that you mentioned being an unli, unlikely drug addict or unlikely drug person.
That’s how I define myself for sure. ’cause I always thought, before, long ago when I thought Ayahuasca was a drug, I was like you do drugs and you end up under the bridge and your life was over for me. Ayahuasca was a first ever psychedelic experience and first ever back before I thought it was a drug first ever drug experience, so to speak.
I don’t believe that anymore. So obviously you mentioned that you worked with Ayahuasca, you’re a big fan. Talk to us about that. Was that ceremony with your brother, was it with ayahuasca? Or how did you start knew, you said that you did things wrongly and you wouldn’t do it again.
Maybe you can give some words of warning for the beginners in this space.
Lauren Taus: Yeah. The, I, one of the things I’ve really learned along this path is that it’s very important to know where your medicine is coming from. And, to create one liter of the tea of the ayahuasca tea that we drink in ceremony, it takes like hundreds of pounds of biomass, of plant matter.
And it takes this beautiful vine five to seven years to mature. So your facilitator should be part of regeneration projects for them to be serving responsibly. Like it’s really important for people to know where their medicine is coming from. The providence is incredibly important. And I think that I didn’t, I had of course had no idea to even speak about that when I started and I started in a circle that was not ayahuasca.
He was often folks ask me where do you need to have other experiences first before you drink ayahuasca? No, not necessarily. I don’t think that’s required. I do think that a certain amount of inner resourcing is required. I think that the circle really needs to be incredibly well held.
I have seen and heard many bad and nightmarish stories around people drinking medicine and not being cared for and the medicine not being cared for. Those are happening concurrently. If the if the medicine isn’t cared for, then the space isn’t gonna be cared for, then people are cared for.
And as I mentioned, I work with ketamine, I’m trained with MDMA and other tools. I think all of the medicines have their own space in place. But for me I am my, my teacher is Ayahuasca and I have a teacher who knows this path. It is very connected to her teachers and the son.
And I, I think that, I came later to Ayahuasca after having worked with other medicines, and I was very scared of Ayahuasca. And I think that people should be scared of ayahuasca. It’s scary. It’s a lot. It’s like big leagues for sure. And I like that. If you change the letters around just a little bit, the words scared is the same as sacred.
Whenever I’m stepping into a moloca or an air temple for a ceremony, I’m reverent I, and in that comes a wholly dread, there’s a certain amount of trepidation that is appropriate, right? And then I wish that I walked the world that way. ’cause we’re in this mystical garden of all times.
Of course, when you drink medicine, like you’re opening up to deeper levels of existence and capacity building content. But, I was in quite a lot of pain when I said yes to the, for the first time to ayahuasca. I was really grappling with my weight. I’ve always been thin, but, I would marry too much of my worth to the number that I read on a scale.
And, the fluctuations were overwhelming to me. Mind you, they were maybe a pound and a half. But I was like tortured by this. And a very close friend of mine who sat in other medicine circles with me and who doesn’t particularly love Aya. But heard me and said, listen, like this might be your time to go.
And so I said yes. And my first experience was very powerful and profound. And it really helped me to get off the scale and to stop weighing myself. I got the memo, it’s time to retire your extra small life. To be so concerned about half a pound is insane. And to put so much of my life force and energy in something so small, and Ayahuasca gave me a whole download, a whole curriculum around the importance and also the sovereignty of choice, which, medicine was like you don’t have to, but if you don’t like, your life will remain small.
And my life did get really big when I followed direction.
Sam Believ: Yeah. IAS is really good for anorexia or at least the very few examples that I personally have. ’cause we had the girl, she came to our retreat. Six months or so ago. And she since then gained a lot of weight. She’s actually back now. She wants to gain even more weight than she even actually wants to volunteer.
But I told her I told her she needs to gain five kilos to be able to volunteer and she already overpassed that number. And it’s important that you talk about the sustainability of ayahuasca as well. In our case, like my shaman and his family, they have 50 hectares of land and they grow their own ayahuasca.
So it’s not poached. But the interesting thing I think a lot of people don’t know about is for ayahuasca to grow, it needs a tree. So if you have a farmland and you wanna grow ayahuasca, you actually, you’re forced to grow a, somewhat of a jungle first, and then the vines grow around it.
But yeah, in some places they still poach it and it is found in the wild. So it is important to know where it’s coming from. But even more important, core, the people that plant it and what are the intentions and do they follow the rituals and when harvesting it and cooking it, and basically every step is important.
So yeah, this is where I think I, I find myself like really finding a lot of comfort in having this indigenous tradition to rely upon. And this is very genius that you said about sacred and scared. I’m definitely gonna be using it. I never heard this before, but Totally true. No matter how many times you drink ayahuasca, when you’re about to drink it again, you’re like, ’cause you never know what’s gonna happen.
Lauren Taus: We’re building our capacity. It’s, this is, it’s a, it is a physical, emotional experience. It’s not, your mind is off, right? There’s I love when I reach a place where there’s no thinking. I am just a vessel to receive the divine and in a curriculum that is specific to my soul and has only given me like tremendous amount of fortitude and care.
This medicine is only benevolent, and I have had very hard experiences very terrifying experiences very painful experiences, and they’ve all been benevolent. They’ve all been like for me, and have softened me and widened my city for really what matters.
Sam Believ: The painful experiences and the difficult ones are sometimes where most of the work is done.
People are afraid of them. But if you don’t re resist them, and if you go through them, you come out a little better each time. Obviously Ayahuasca helped you, but I know you say that you cannot just ayahuasca your problems away. So what is that mysterious work that people need to do after the ayahuasca?
Can’t talk about that.
Lauren Taus: And I don’t drink ayahuasca every day. For me, it’s a special occasion. And I do get very specific guidance from the medicine. And then it’s very important for me to deepen my listening and aligning with the information that I receive, right? So they, integration is the name of the game, right?
Integration, what does that even mean? It shares the same etymology as the word integrity. It’s about our wholeness. And so how do we on a daily level practice that, like practice the council, the good council that these sacred plants give us For me that, that’s looks like many different things.
I, myself, I’m in practice of my offerings. I’m a therapist. I go to therapy, right? I work with internal family systems, which dovetails really beautifully with psychedelic work and certainly with the work of ayahuasca. I also, I pray and meditate every day. I sing, ayahuasca very early on.
Wanted me to sing. And one of the greatest gifts, and there have been countless, but one of the greatest ones that I received from my time in ceremony is the gift of song and making my life sing. So I sing every day, and for me, song is prayer. It’s a way, a deep way of praying. It’s not a performance, right?
I think that song and dance have become so bastardized in our culture that they don’t look good or sound good. We think they’re not good, which is absolutely not true. It’s an offering and we all get to do that. And so I sit and I pray and meditate and read poetry and sing songs and read, for my sitter, I’m Jewish and I sit in a specific tradition that is very amenable to your own tradition.
What is your tradition? What do you practice, what do you believe? What were your ancestors’ practices? And do you wanna continue along with them? Play the guitar, like these different things. And then of course, if you get counsel, like you need to do something, you wanna sit with that before you go immediately do it.
But if it’s aligned and right, go do it. Do the holy homework. It’s not, I’m gonna do it for you. Alka is not going to do it for you. You still have to like, okay, got the memo. Now I need to, at the, for me, for example, when I started, like I had to eat more, I had to get rid of my scale.
I had to make changes in my life that were hard, but I was, resourced and supported by the root and the vine.
Sam Believ: So you said you mentioned that your morning routine is yoga, meditation reading poetry and things like this. Why do you say that your morning routine is essential?
I’ve heard you saying that
Lauren Taus: having a morning practice for me gives me a scaffolding to support the navigation of my life. Why life is wild. Life is unpredictable. Life is excruciating and exquisite. It’s brutal and beautiful. It’s like everything I love life. I’m like madly in love with it.
And you get thrown curve balls. The, there’s pain. There’s there’s sickness, there’s death. There’s stuff that shows up. And if I don’t have a scaffolding that can hold me in any weather including sunshine, right? Like how do I stay present to the sun on my skin, right when the kiss of the breeze?
Like how do I enjoy that? For me the scaffolding allows more presence and invites that it gives me like a home inside of my body and my spirit. And otherwise, I, we disintegrate our culture is very sick. I like to say, I’m tired of diagnosing fish and toxic waters.
Fish are fine. Like we are big water problem. For me how to, part of how I counteract the sickness of culture is by sitting and being well. So if, I’m not, if I’m not sitting.
Sam Believ: So you mentioned bad things and death amongst them, the but I know you also talk about death being a teacher.
Lauren Taus: Absolutely.
Sam Believ: Can you talk to us about that?
Lauren Taus: Yeah, absolutely. This is called the vine of the dead ayahuasca, and I’m much less interested in death than in, I’m much more interested in life but leading cause of death is life. We’re all gonna do that. And I think that the more we appreciate our finitude, the more invited we are to this game of life, to the majesty of our own existence and of existence itself.
I myself have been on the roller coaster the death rodeo. Couple times. My sister died of cystic fibrosis when I was 20. My mom died of pancreatic cancer when I was, I think I was maybe 34. And so being really close to people I love dying. I very hard, I actually, in a recent ayahuasca experience, I relived my mother’s dying process.
And there’s so much that I, and we as humans in, in the acuity don’t have the spaciousness or capacity to fully feel. And that then gets suppressed and repressed within us. It was it was a big lot of grief, and I think that grief can be orgasmic. I think it’s very fertile.
It’s rich and of course grief is also married, married in a good marriage to joy. But revisiting my mother’s death and dying was very healing for me. And of course, I was like weeping my face off. I thinks like signature Lauren Toes in Ayahuasca is like big grief and lots of laughter. Big grief and lots of, I’m always leader of the Giggle gang.
Like I like just giggling with myself. It’s so fun. But we live in a culture that wants to, or I do in the United States that really doesn’t do well with death. We don’t like to look at it or think about it. And when people die, we want it to be like tucked away and done. My mom’s experience is that people wanted her to be done with my sister’s death pretty quickly and didn’t really hold the space for the continuation of the relationship the continuation of the grief or primary loss.
And we have a lot of work to do around how we honor the dead and honor the process of death and dying and the elders. And I believe that this work of sitting with Ayahuasca is very helpful with that. And also in, in the maintenance of the relations that are no longer here in forum. I’ve had so many beautiful connections with my mother in, in ceremony and my relationship has deepened with her and has healed with her.
And it’s death is really an illusion in many ways, but it’s it’s a, it’s an illusion we really need to grapple with more directly.
Sam Believ: So you’re basically saying that your choice is to feel all the emotions. The good one, the bad ones don’t repress them. I definitely find that would work with ayahuasca.
Lauren Taus: Not the feelings are bad. Like we are, we’re conditioned and trained to think that certain emotions are bad, right? I think that anger, for example we have an anaphylactic allergy towards, so it gets super weird. It gets really weird, if we can, and if we can manage conflict better, which of course includes anger, boundary violations.
Then we have the opportunity for peace. Peace requires mastery, conflict. It’s not bad. Like we’re ecosystems. Each one of us and complicated ones at that we have our own conflict inside. And how we then bring ourselves to one another and to the earth itself, right? We should be grieving grief practices are essential.
I love grief and yeah I want everyone to really open more fully to their emotional lives. Like we’re emotional beings. This is a feeling universe. We get stuck upstairs and thank God for our cognitive capacities, but we need to marry our minds to our hearts and our bodies and live in a more integrated way.
Sam Believ: The stuck upstairs is, thinking too much. The opposite would be feeling more. How does one do it, let’s say. I ask or not any advice? How does one get unstuck?
Lauren Taus: Quite literally move. I think movement is really essential. When I started my work as a psychotherapist I had very little skill because of course I was just beginning and at the time I was also teaching yoga. And yoga was in a really important and continues to be a very helpful tool for me to get into my body, to unlock whatever it is that I’m experiencing that might wanna be tucked away based on whatever pain I’m trying to get away from.
But moving our bodies consciously, dance, yoga, running, this is all very helpful. I think dance is really a good medicine. And listening to evocative music I find that can be very helpful as well. Time and nature. A lot of people live in concrete jungles with soundtracks of honking horns instead of crickets like you’ve got going on back there in Columbia.
And just putting our nervous systems into places that have a different kind of clamor than urban environments, I think can invite us into deeper levels of listening, which is generally an emotional process. And and it’s also not a one size fits all protocol or process.
Many of us are like deeply armored against our emotions for good reason. And I think it’s important to be respectful of the defense and to work with kindness care and respect towards defense versus just trying to bulldoze internally. Like how do we befriend our challenges and the parts that may want us to not feel so much.
Sam Believ: You mentioned losing your mother and then processing that loss in the ceremony as well. Have you ever been able I’ve heard stories, many stories of people being able to get in touch with the lost ones, say the lost parting words or receive a message. Have you ever had these kinds of experiences?
Lauren Taus: Not like that. I feel like the way of my mother’s death was very complete for me. I have deepened my relationship with her. I have, I was very angry at my mom and she, she had a very traumatic existence. She maintained a beautiful spirituality. A lot of resilience and simultaneously she was very traumatized and her trauma led her into an addiction.
I don’t like that word. But she was medicating to, to get away from her pain. She didn’t have anything else that worked better than that. And so for anybody who is in that kind of relationship with any sort of substance or behavior, we need to, get much more compassionate and curious.
So I’ve been able to replace my anger with compassion and curiosity and, my mother’s trauma was largely sexual. And so I’m, I became aware of the way in which I was just another person that took her dignity in my rage. And I can simultaneously honor my own anger towards her and restore the dignity and apologize.
And I’ve been able to, as her seedling, right? Like I, my mother lives in me, grieve what I feel she wasn’t able to grieve. Let more of that go through my body and feel her dancing and alive and pure within my system. And what a gift. What a gift. And my mother and I had ups and downs in our relationship.
I, I wanted more for her. I, and I was upset that that wasn’t happening. And I have been able to see her with all that she merited in this lifetime through ceremony. And and that, that’s been very corrective for my experience as a woman and also for my experience around relationship with the world and with other people
Sam Believ: by wanting more for her.
You mean you wanted her to maybe use some of the things you’ve learned yourself to improve the quality of her life or something else?
Lauren Taus: Yeah, for sure. I believe that. I don’t believe, I know that my mother would’ve lived longer with access to this kind of work. And I know that’s true for many people.
We are fools to think that our experiences don’t impact our bodies, right? Like my mom had pancreatic cancer. She was living with chronic stress. I thought, Bob, that’s not disconnected. I struggled with my mother’s lack of self-esteem and self-worth. Which was taken from her, it was taken from her and she had a hard time reclaiming it, right?
She had a lot of expensive therapy and treatment that made things worse. And I’ve seen that happen time and time again in my clinical practice. A lot of like treatment facilities and a lot of therapeutic interventions are shaming and blaming and do not help people reconstitute themselves at the site of injury.
Believe that psychedelic medicines can do that. And I wouldn’t necessarily have suggested ayahuasca for my mother, like she would’ve needed something like MDMA or something gentle, heart-centered, body-based ayahuasca is not,
Always gentle. She certainly can be gentle, but she’s not always gentle.
And I think that for folks who are interested in this it’s absolutely something you self-select into. But it’s this isn’t big work. This is this is big work. And I believe people need to like, have some kind of constitution for it. I wanted my mom to have more, more self-respect.
I wanted my mom to have more of a voice. I wanted her to stand up for herself. I wanted my mom to treat her body with more kindness. When we’re traumatized the body becomes a scary place to be. And my mom did not feel safe in her vessel. And I have so much compassion for that now, my God, and everything that she did to her body, in her body.
I get it and I have compassion for the younger me that was angry about that. And I can bring the consciousness of both of our higher selves together now and we’re just in a beautiful relationship when she’s with me. But I feel, again, as her seedling, like I’m standing up and speaking on her behalf.
And I’m healing like for us and for all the generations of women behind me that maybe didn’t have as much of a voice. Or as much sovereignty agency as I now have
Sam Believ: talking about the generations and intergenerational trauma. How can I asca be helpful there? Is it, has it been a thing, obviously you seem to know about that.
Lauren Taus: This medicine ab knows absolutely everything about everyone and their respective histories. It’s outrageous. And one of the things that I know is that I don’t know anything, right? You say you drink medicine, you know nothing. You think oh, this is my dose. No, you don’t know your dose.
You could have like a tiny biting tea, like out the races, soup cops pretty present, it’s like she’s doing, I’m gonna do what she’s gonna do. But my experience with this medicine is that there’s a lot of intergenerational content that can be presented and that there’s a lot of guidance that could be presented.
Now, of course. I’m speaking about my own personal experience. There are many folks who don’t have as much vision as I have, and that doesn’t mean that ayahuasca is like better or worse for anyone, right? Like certain people have much more somatic experiences. I can get very visual and get very clear directions.
And for me it’s very much a conversation and it’s a deep relationship for me. But it’s absolutely the case that folks can get lots of counsel and content around what has been generational patterns and what their role can be to both honor and sever what is no longer functioning.
And also to kinda continue in the ways of the good. But the vine knows everything. They’re leaving the vine. They know, like she knows whatever you wanna call. I don’t even, there’s so much that’s beyond language in this conversation.
Sam Believ: Yeah. And the other of the day, the ayahuasca will provide the necessary information.
It’s like I. Doesn’t need much of the inter intermediation except for somebody holding a safe space and
Lauren Taus: which Sam is a big deal and not one that is obvious. The amount of stories I’ve heard of people not being well cared for or supported in ceremony is incredible. It’s a huge thing to serve this medicine and to serve it well.
Sam Believ: Yeah. It happened to me personally. I’ve been I’ve been drinking medicine in the jungle and I was I went to purge in the bathroom and I closed the door and I went to do the bathroom realm. I don’t know if you’re familiar,
Lauren Taus: know the bathroom realm
Sam Believ: and I was stuck there and I, because it was a brick building where the metal door and I shut the door closed and I went very deep.
I, couldn’t do anything, couldn’t open the door. I was flailing around. I was hitting walls with my hands and I was trying to hitting my back on the bathroom. It was the only thing that I could control. ’cause this like down of the bathroom, like connected me to this realm dimension.
Yeah. I was stuck in some kind of mental loop where I could not regain my consciousness. It was a very unpleasant experience. And when I came out of it, another thing I was trying to do was, for some reason I really wanted to touch my brain. So I was like scratching my mouth and stuff like that. I I don’t wanna scare people away ’cause it only happened to be once, but it was a terrifying experience.
And when I came out of it, I found myself alone in the jungle in this bathroom. There was nobody in this house, there was nobody in Moloca. They’re just like, whatever. He is gonna do his thing. And I got PTSD after that for quite a bit. And it happened like few ceremonies after. One of my biggest, most beautiful ceremony ever.
The one that. Caused me to start LoRa, the was retreat that I run. So it was really shocking. It shows you there’s two world. So when I went ahead and started my retreat, we did everything the opposite way. For example we, in our bathrooms, we have a little space on the bottom that we can see and we can also open your door from outside if we need to, and things like that.
So basically doing the opposite. But yeah, there are places that don’t care about you or there are places that open openly wanna hurt you.
Lauren Taus: And I think there’s like a lot of people who are serving that just don’t know what to do just yet. It’s like you really need a tremendous amount of experience to serve in a good way, like a lot of experience.
And you, yourself, as a facilitator, need to really be a clean vessel and have, like that’s a big, it’s a big task. May maybe the biggest. Because what might present for folks is outrageous. Like it’s un, it’s unimaginable and it’s imaginable because it’s happening.
I have a lot of concern around that this issue and making sure that people are safe and cared for. Bathrooms of course should not be locked. Angels should be monitoring where everybody is. Nobody should be left alone after ceremony if they’re still in process, the, these kinds of things.
Like they should, nobody should be leaving the space very far. I think nobody should leave the location. I also think for folks who are new to drinking ayahuasca it, it can be really helpful to start with a North American facilitator because if you go straight to the Amazon, like they’re not gonna give you any information around like flight school or landing gear or how to integrate or think about what’s happening.
And, it’s such an. Outrageous shift to of consciousness. And I think people need a lot of handholding and education around how to make use of the, their time in the space and how to apply it in the aftermath. I think that people going to the Amazon and working tribes like they should do that, right?
Ayahuasca goes on global tours all the time, but she likes it when you go visit her at home. And you should do that when you’ve got some air miles. I think like when you really know what to do and you don’t need so much coaching or handholding. I think that people who are, sitting within their own tribal traditions, like it’s not their job to educate a North American person.
It’s not like it’s a they that, that so much of that kind of navigation information should already be present with the person, I believe.
Sam Believ: Yeah, it’s it’s interesting because I think there is a perfect balance where you take the where you combine the indigenous knowledge and western approach.
And I obviously tooting my own horn. I believe that’s the balance. We strive here for having an indigenous shaman lineage, but then at the same time, having integration and having support and like English speaking team members, they can make you feel comfortable. And also like we’re in Andes, for foreigners when they come here, they think they’re in jungle because it’s green and there’s palm trees but like not real jungle, with things that can kill you, like snakes and stuff like that.
So I think having that, I think there’s like levels. You come to a place like low wire first, let’s say You not because we only good for fir first timers, but because we prepare you for what’s to come. And then when you’re ready. Maybe like when you already step on a path like shamanistic path and you really want to go meet medicine where it comes from.
Because like I I’ve been to jungle and it’s a little, it’s already overwhelming. The medicine experience itself, it’s already scary enough, but then you get scared of snakes and spiders and malaria, et cetera. So like every mosquito you get freaked out of. So it’s it’s definitely not for everyone, but interestingly enough, it will call you.
I remember having this, I had no idea why, but I had this irresistible call to go to Jungle, and then Synchronistically person comes and says, I’m going to jungle. I’m like I’m gonna go with you. Synchronicities will happen if you need to. So I’m not saying like there’s one correct way to do it, but regarding safety, yeah, there is.
There’s physical safety. Somebody just making sure you don’t hurt yourself or jump over height. What. Knives away and all that jazz. Yeah. Like a basic stuff. Like in Ma Loko, we don’t have sharp corners. Everything is somewhat rounded. And then there’s spiritual safety, which is the space that shaman protects from all the other things that are invisible to us.
Emotional safety. So there’s like layers and layers. It’s a complex work. I know you also organize retreats, so I I can imagine you, you know a lot about it.
Lauren Taus: And I wanna say too, that I think what you’re describing is perfect and beautiful, right? I want for people to have an authentic experience and to be connected to a lineage, right?
Not, and I feel that’s very essential. And part of what allows for a person to really be held. And like you said you’ve got your shaman and then you have folks who are around the space who speak English, who know the culture. It’s that’s what I’m talking about. It’s not that you can’t go to the Amazon, but the context needs to also be for someone who’s brand new.
I think unless they’ve really got a sturdy constitution, maybe they’ve got a lot of medicine experience under their belts. They need, people need education and information around like how to navigate the these mystical spaces.
Sam Believ: Yeah, a bit of mediation between the Amazonian culture and our understanding because they don’t, they see things very different.
They don’t feel the necessity or desire to sell your, their tradition to you. They just want you to follow it if you wanna be a part of it. So we need to mediate and it’s there’s many sensitive topics that, that are difficult, but it’s manageable when you like, pay attention to, so there’s a lot of like very minute.
Micro adjustments that you need to make, but it works and I think it, it can be done and should be done. Let’s switch a topic a little bit and talk about medicine from the point of view of medicine. I know you have lots of doctors in your family and you, you don’t hate the allopathic medicine model.
What is that, where do you see this beautiful marriage, hopefully eventually of those two worlds?
Lauren Taus: Yeah. I’ve I’m the daughter, granddaughter, and niece of medical doctors. I am the daughter of a nurse. My mom was a nurse. I, myself, I’m a clinician in a Western trained orientation.
I think, western medicine, like all good things meets partnership. I think that the way that the system is operating is as deeply abusive to medical doctors right now. Simultaneously I bow my head to western medicine thank you so much. There are so many outrageous miracles that Western medicine has accomplished.
No I think I made a video on Instagram about it. Just getting them blood test. This is a tiny little vein, can extract infinite data from your vein and help us understand like where our bodies are in imbalance and how we can create more balances. It’s absolutely phenomenal. And it’s, is it perfect?
No, it’s not. It needs marriage. Like the PE people know, I think about Bob Marley and Steve Jobs who totally rejected Western medicine and likely would’ve lived longer had they opened themselves to these things. Now it’s their choice to die, right? It’s their choice, but. I wanna live as long as I can in, in, in as healthy way as possible.
Now, there’s no question in my mind that even the atmosphere that I live in Topanga, California, where I look outside and see the natural world, where I wake up to birds, bird songs, and not taxi cap signs where I, fall asleep to the sounds of crickets, that this is medicine, and there’s more and more research indicating the real health benefits of time in a more natural environment.
Korea has medicalized forest bathing, and there’s forests that are medicine, like there’s science medicine, no, ayahuasca is my medicine. The way that has supported my nervous system and has given me counsel around how to live well and how to also be in, in higher levels of service and connection, right?
We suffer from disconnection, separation, et cetera, and that creates disease in our bodies. We need to learn about relationship. I believe IAS is all about relationship and how do we have right relationship within medical context as well. I find a lot of respect for the different verticals of medicine.
One of the things that I’m thinking about a lot is medicine is so hyper-focused in, in ways that are problematic, right? Like there there’s a doctor that’s focused on, respiratory or focused on like heart issues and maybe overlooking the larger system. But like, how then did the specialists and experts weave their wisdom in conversation?
Connection? I believe in the worlds of wisdom traditions, like medicine is, western medicine is not, is one of them. I think that it’s a grave mistake to, to rule one out. Any one of them, right? Thank you for Ayurveda thank you to acupuncture, thank you to ayahuasca. Thank you to all the plant medicines.
Thank you to, to all of the doctors, right? There’s the plant doctors and there’s the medical doctors and respect what? Follow respect. And we don’t live in that reality right now. Again as a person who comes from all of these physicians and who’s also been blessed and privileged to be a teacher to different doctors and to be their students in return, I’m aware of how much burden they carry and how little support they get in the business of saving lives that they have devoted themselves to.
It’s a whole language that these guys have. And I love when I find doctors, and I’ve got many of them that sit in circles. I put together with medicine and helping them, right? Like they, they’re devoting their lives to, to the health of the human form. And they’re learning, right? Let’s keep learning together and respect one another.
I don’t know if any of that made any bit of sense. I feel like it was a bit rambly but there’s just no part of me can discard the wisdom of Western medicine.
Sam Believ: Yeah. And I’ll give you an interesting example. Our shaman actually this week we have a retreat and we have four ceremonies in one week.
And he gave the first ceremonies enduring a lot of pain. He was really feeling unwell. Then he went to the hospital, then he had the pen appendectomy. They cut his appendicitis out. And he’s in the hospital now, so he’s, his dad is coming to replace him. So it’s and so he’s being helped by the allopathic medicine and it’s, has its use, it’s all perfect.
But we also have a lot of doctors that come to low wire and they’re depressed and suicidal and not only they can’t really find help in the, in their own system, but they’re not even allowed to talk about it a lot of times. Like they, they cannot. They cannot openly say that maybe they’re depressed or suicidal because they’ll lose their job, and that feels very unfair.
I don’t know if you have any opinion on that.
Lauren Taus: The statistics demonstrate that people in the medical profession have much higher rates of suicide, depression, and addiction. I’ve seen this time and time again, and as you mentioned, for many of them, it is unsafe for them to report the need for help because it makes them seem unfit to do the job.
Now, of course, they’re struggling like to sit and swim in, in the content of sickness and death all day to like triage, specifically emergency room doctors, a very hard time. And there, there’s certain verticals within the larger medical profession that have more difficulty than others, right?
Like someone in plastic surgery who’s just doing like cosmetic work is not as likely to have as much difficulty as somebody who’s dealing with pediatric cancer, for example. But the physicians need care and it’s an area that I have so a lot of passion for and have some desire to even research, although I haven’t refined the question just yet.
But physicians are largely unintended to, I think their personality profiles are such that they’re, they have certain complexes and they wanna help everybody and then, and they usually don’t get the help that they themselves need. I’ve seen this over and over again, whether that be in my father or close friends or students who are medical doctors, but to the, for the devotion that these humans have poured into service I wanna serve them and I wanna make sure that they’re doing well.
And as I mentioned, they’re not statistically doing well.
Sam Believ: Yeah, same thing with the police people and Fire p firemen and many others that like,
Lauren Taus: who are attending. I wanna tend to those who are attending. I wanna put. Circles together that are just medical providers.
Sam Believ: Yeah.
Lauren Taus: And there’s each need to follow our respective passion and life force.
Like I have a lot of passion for this area and there are close friends of mine who are doing work with veterans and close friends of mine who are doing work with first responders and things like this. And wherever our life force takes us, like we should go and go.
Sam Believ: Yeah. So service people, but also I wanna talk about service from a more medicinal, more medicine sort of point of view.
I’ve recently, so obviously running a retreat and helping a lot of people overcome their mental health issues is a service as well. But I’ve recently connected with this, I don’t know if it was in the medicine or right after the ceremony, but this like act of serving as in you can’t really find words about it, but.
Feeling like a joy of serving that does not revolve around receiving anything in return. I don’t know if you can, if more about it or have more experience about it. I don’t know if you can talk about that
Lauren Taus: giving just for the sake of giving. Yeah, just giving is fuel, right?
I like to say that people should only give from their saucer, right? I find that a lot of folks are empty and serving and serving from a place of not full. And so I find, back to my daily practice, like my practice fills me up and, for me, God fills me up. I don’t care what spirit, universe, whatever, like I’m filled up by, by spirit.
And from that place, I feel more comfortable serving. And I do think like it’s important to manage like the in ins and outs and ensure that you’re not like in deficit. A lot of people who like to give or are in service positions are giving to their detriment. And that’s becomes a problem.
But of course we should give to give one of my mom’s dying bits of advice to me was to give as much as I can and give anonymously. Like just give ’cause it’s the right thing to do. ’cause it feels good to give without wanting thanks or credit or whatever. Just do it. ’cause you should.
But again if it’s all one to ensure that, that you’re, you’ve got to give that, you’ve gotta give.
Sam Believ: How about giving but not receiving gratitude in return? Like having a very difficult what?
Lauren Taus: That that’s exactly right. It’s my mom said just to do it.
’cause it’s right to do not for the thank you, not for the attention or the validation or any of that, but to ensure that like you have. You have enough inside of yourself that giving doesn’t deplete you. Like giving doesn’t create resentment within you. Giving is like authentic to you, right?
That’s the space for which to give. And as I mentioned for me, like I fill my tank, I fill my tank, like I’m not getting filled up. Yeah, of course we need relationship and connection and we’re all infinitely, intimately, forever and ever connected. Like I’m I get filled up by my trees, I get filled up by the birds, I get filled up by my prayers.
I get filled up by my songs, by playing my guitar, and then it’s from that place that I can give and just give because I want to, and I don’t need anyone to know.
Sam Believ: Yeah. It can be difficult when you’re trying to help someone, but not only they don’t like it, but they can also hurt you in return.
Yeah. You have to be like. Kind of Jesus consciousness where you can literally be slapped. Like it happened to me in a ceremony where I was slapped in the face for wanting to help. But that’s that’s okay. Karmically you’re getting some points. Few more topics.
We have 10 more minutes left, but I have a few more topics we can talk about. I’m just gonna give you a list and you can tell me which is the most exciting for you. Childhood wounding somatic approaches individual healing versus group healing. Doctors offering ketamine without trying to do cells first in internal family systems.
Which ones of these would you like to talk about?
Lauren Taus: No, you got a lot going on there. Hold I think that for nobody should be giving any psychoactive medicine without having a lot of their own personal experience. So to the doctors who are delivering ketamine because they can medically, legally stop, right?
And if you’re not like a seasoned traveler yourself, like this is not diabetes medicine. Stop, there’s so much harm that happens in spaces where people do not know what they’re doing. And the harms are coming from very naive and innocent places. So like compassion, but there’s a big lot of mess that needs to be then cleaned up.
And again, it’s about understanding the potency of the medicines that we serve and that we work with and that we recommend. And especially if they’re designed to be something other than anesthetics, right? Like ketamine is anesthetic. So if you’re using this for mental health treatment, please understand what you’re doing as it relates to individual versus group.
I have a lot of thoughts about this. We all need individual attention. We all need individual attention. And I love giving people individual attention. I love being like intimate and front row of their like breakthroughs and their breakdowns and celebrating with them and grieving with them, and like holding their hands through their lives, et cetera.
And we are largely starved of community in, in North American culture. And we are living very masked lives and very separated lives and very, like Instagram highlight reel lives. And when we sit together in community and ceremony, we are also healed by the healing of others that we get to bear witness to.
We are healed by watching and opening our hearts to, to the great heartbreak of what lives inside of our neighbors and our friends and our family members. Just to bear witness is a medicine that to bear witness is the whole of my profession. I don’t need help or heal anyone.
They help and heal themselves. And I hold their hands and I give them all kinds of skills. And yes, internal family systems is one of my favorites. And as I mentioned, it dovetails really nicely with psychedelic work and certainly to work ayahuasca. But I can’t plug enough the potency and power and the healing that happens when we sit together.
And of course when we’re sitting together with ayahuasca their candle goes off, everyone’s got their medicine inside of them. Medicine is drinking up each of the individuals. And we’re going on a solo journey. Like we’re going on a solo journey
Sam Believ: together,
Lauren Taus: right? It’s like I feel like I zip up my spaceship and I’ll see when the candle comes on again, right?
But I’m also like aware that I’m sitting in a space where someone’s grieving, someone’s barfing, someone’s laughing, someone’s dancing, someone’s crying like this all happening at the same time. And it’s like right here, right now in our lives, nevermind medicine. So I think that when we really feel in the moment this truth we feel more connected.
And that is one of the biggest medicines of all. So I’m a huge advocate of sitting together. I feel very blessed to run retreats with medicine myself whether they be trainings that I do with ketamine or retreats with plant medicines. And when we come together, big things happen. And I think sometimes those big things need support individually and often.
And whether that’s in the privacy of your own home or in, in the, under the care and support of someone with a title of therapist or something like this. But I can’t advocate enough for group experience.
Sam Believ: And you mentioned Internal Family systems several times. Can you tell our audience maybe if they’ve never heard about it before, what is it?
Lauren Taus: Sure. So Internal Family Systems is a, an orientation that really dovetails nicely with psychedelic work. It was and set forth by men named Dick Schwartz. Basically the concept is that we all have self energy, which you could also consider like your soul. It’s like the sun. It’s always shining.
Your true self is entirely undamaged and unnamable, like nothing can touch it. Nothing. Not war, not raved, not molestation, not incest, not nothing. We also have many parts inside of us, and this isn’t a function of mental illness. Like we all have many parts inside.
And it’s best to look at these parts as like ontological realities as like entities and like all beings, they can change. They aren’t one thing. It’s not like you have a part that’s always angry, but you might have a part that’s carrying a lot of anger, or you might have a part that’s carrying a lot of criticism or a part that’s carrying a lot of depression or grief, sadness.
The parts are generally in contact with each other or the outside world. The work of Internal family Systems is to bring the parts into relationship itself. And these parts are often managing or protecting exile parts. So very wounded, often younger parts of us that have been neatly tucked away, locked away and pushed to the side so much so that often we don’t even remember them, we don’t even think about them.
But maybe this kind of work can resurface them. Like the managers and protectors go to sleep. And exiles can be more, more present with medicine work. But all of the parts are good. Dick Schwartz wrote a book called No Bad Parts. I had a, an anorexic part like that was like, that’s job was like, I’m going to start off.
And that was very effective. I was like 50 pounds less than I am now. I’m a very petite little person, right? It’s insane that I did that, but like that part was trying to protect me from the pain of my existence. So thank you. Like whenever I’m working with anybody who’s got any sort of quote unquote addictive process, it’s like we have to start by saying thank you to that, but it’s really working from a lens that’s non pathologizing, that’s understanding that even a suicidal or a homicidal part is there, protect you.
It’s got a good intention and we don’t want it to act out, right? Like we don’t want that. But how do we build a relationship with this part such that it can put down some of its behaviors and change its role and allow us to access more of our wounded exiled parts that really need our consistent cure and attention but have been pushed out in order for us to survive.
So it’s really about building relationships with these parts and understanding that like our souls, our infinite souls themselves are like just not bothered. They’re like capable of doing anything. They can die and it’s okay. Like it’s like it’s okay. There’s something that will witness like the whole process and still be there when it’s.
Sam Believ: Yeah, that’s a great that’s a great way to see things. Lauren, thank you so much for this episode. I think it was packed with gold nuggets. I’m sure people will enjoy it. Where can people find more about you and your work?
Lauren Taus: We’ve got my website, embodied life.com. It’s spelled with an IN ’cause I want you to go into your body and live in embodied life.com.
Also on Instagram at Lauren dot Taos, or at Embodied Life Therapy.
Sam Believ: Thank you Lauren.
Lauren Taus: Thank you, Sam. Super fun
Sam Believ: guys, you’ve been listening to I Ask Podcast as always with you, the whole assembly of, and I will see you in the next episode. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you’d like to support us and psychedelic renaissance at large, please follow us and leave us a like wherever it is you’re listening.
Share this episode with someone who will benefit from this information. Nothing in this podcast is intended as medical advice, and it is for educational and entertainment purposes only. This episode is sponsored by Lara Ayahuasca Retreat. At Lara, we combine affordability, accessibility, and authenticity.
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