In this episode of Ayahuasca Podcast, host Sam Believ (founder of http://www.lawayra.com) has a conversation with Micah Stover, a certified psychedelic somatic therapist, educator, and author of Healing Psychedelics. Based in Mexico, Micah specializes in trauma healing through plant medicine, blending clinical models with indigenous traditions. Her work is rooted in personal experience with complex trauma, motherhood, and cross-cultural wisdom.

We touch upon topics of:

  • Micah’s traumatic birth story and healing journey (01:28)
  • Birth and motherhood as psychedelic experiences (04:31)
  • Postpartum depression and ancestral trauma (06:11)
  • The role of MDMA and psilocybin in healing (12:39)
  • Nature as a co-facilitator in integration (16:28)
  • Cultural insights from Mexican and Latino worldviews (20:28)
  • The power of playfulness and reverence for children (25:50)
  • Travel and relocation as healing catalysts (28:06)
  • The importance of community and “finding the village” (29:22)
  • Group vs. one-on-one healing work (32:55)
  • Lessons from curanderas and traditional medicine perspectives (36:08)
  • Science vs. spirit in psychedelic healing (40:14)
  • Understanding and healing complex trauma (42:56)
  • Accessing preverbal trauma through somatic memory (46:05)
  • A profound healing story involving mobility restoration (48:35)
  • Who Micah’s book is for and why she wrote it (50:48)

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

Find more about Micah Stover at http://www.micahstover.com and on Instagram @micahsugarfoot.

Transcript

Sam Believ: You’re listening to ayahuasca podcast.com.

Micah Stover: I think a birth as a psychedelic experience. The medicine is the spirit coming through your body.

Sam Believ: Dying is a psychedelic process. Being born is a psychedelic process. Giving birth as a psychedelic process and so much more in between.

Micah Stover: Like the mentors, the elders, the guides, the facilitators who impacted me and held space for me were just as important as the medicines.

We’re humans are the only animals that don’t understand, or we’ve forgotten how relational we are. Think about how many animals travel in packs. When did we stop doing that and why We should really reconsider we’re better together. These medicines go into the brain and they create. Neurogenetic activity, and that is amazing because from a certain age we automatically decrease our neurogenetic activity.

That’s what happens as we age. So when we introduce these medicines, we have an increase of plasticity, elasticity in our mind, and that enables us. To have like new perspective on old things, and so the medicines can enter in and create an openness, a receptivity to what I would refer to as corrective experiences when an honorary sort of like archetypal mother, father figure.

Can offer an update or an upgrade to the information stored in the nervous system.

Sam Believ: Hi guys, and welcome to Ayahuasca podcast. As always, really the host, Sam believe. Today I’m having an interview with Micah Stover. Micah is a certified psychedelic somatic therapist, educator and author specializing in trauma healing through psychedelic assisted therapy. After a traumatic pregnancy experience, she pursued training in internal family systems and psychedelic somatic therapy.

Based in Mexico, she hosts healing retreats and trains practitioners. Micah advocates for safe accessible psychedelic therapy, blending clinical knowledge with indigenous practices, and she’s also the author of the book, healing Psychedelics. We talk about intergenerational healing and ancestral trauma, psychedelic nature of giving birth healing, postpartum depression with psychedelics, the role of nature and community in healing nature deficit disorder.

Healing complex PTSD per verbal trauma using travel as healing modality commodification of psychedelics in the west, how psychedelic healing actually works, and so much more. Enjoyed this episode. This episode is sponsored by Lara Ayahuasca Retreat. At Laira, we can combine affordability, accessibility, and authenticity.

Laira connect. Heal, grow guys, I’m looking forward to hosting you. Micah, welcome to the show.

Micah Stover: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

Sam Believ: Micah, tell us about your story and how did you get into this line of work with mental health and with psychedelics?

Micah Stover: Yeah, as you alluded in my introduction, a lot of what brought me to this particular chapter of my healing journey was a wildly traumatic pregnancy.

And what that pregnancy, I think unearthed for me was a whole lot of unprocessed, intergenerational trauma. It’s really kind of poignant and poetic the way things look when you look from the back, from hindsight. I’m a descendant of a lineage of midwives. So it feels somehow appropriate that this, like cracking open that I experienced happened in the labor and delivery room and space.

My son and I were lucky enough to make it out. We were okay. I lost one baby in that experience, a twin. And when they sent us home the message was you guys made it like you’re survivors, you’re awesome. But from a mental health standpoint, I was broken the culmination of 10 weeks in a hospital, the sort of brushed over loss of a of vanishing twin and the fragility of a tiny preemie plus.

Like a resurgent of what I have come to understand as ancestral ghosts screaming for help was a lot, and I had some psychedelic experiences in the past and I don’t know if that was enough that it left like a footnote in my psyche, but I just felt a very clear. Call, that’s the way to heal enough to be a good mom was gonna require some pretty powerful tools.

Sam Believ: I feel you. Sorry to hear that and sorry to hear about losing one of the twins I married as well. We have three kids and I’ve had the, from the. Husband’s perspective. Plenty of postpartum depression and we had a miscarriage. Our first kid, we lost our first kid but we do have three healthy kids now.

Why do you think that happens? Like in your journey of understanding it, why do you think birthing and new child triggers that healing? Process. Do you have any thoughts about it? ’cause I think about it and I just don’t understand why in such a vulnerable moment, and how do we take this chaos and this difficult moment as opportunity for healing?

Just talk to us about that.

Micah Stover: God, I could talk to you about this. I’ll say where to begin. I think of birth as a psychedelic experience. If we define psychedelic experiences, our sense of I, our sense of self, our ego dis dissolving. Our whole sense of time and space and where we fit in, it being redefined as a woman giving birth.

You’re there and that’s the ceremony. The medicine is the spirit coming through your body. It is like a oneness with divinity. For a certain period of time. If you think about any ceremony, like it’s like labor contraction, expansion, pain purge, and then something on the other side, and what, what felt to me like awoken out of that unexpected way for the birth to go.

Was a, I don’t know, just a great call to understand epigenetically. How do these intergenerational trauma threads like weave through time and space, like what about we get better, but we’re not better? One of the things my father often told me growing up is, you have it so much better than I did.

Which was not a lie. Totally. I had it way better, but also I was wildly abused. So the relativity of better and what that means for me, when I held my premium, my hands, I just thought, oh my God, I’m not fully embodied. How am I gonna mother him like this? I have to be. Alive, like in my body, not just in my brain, which I’d gotten so comfortable just living in my brain.

For me, my oldest now is nine and a half, and it has, he, all of my children are my best teachers, and each of their birth stories have been like invitations for me to just. Come so much closer, just any sort of cosmological design, understanding that there, there is, I don’t know if it’s my lineage or what, but I felt a strong connection to all of my babies that I, they’re not babies anymore, but I met them before they came to me, as spirits in dreams, in ceremonies, and so my relationship with them.

Began before they had a physical form. And I think a lot that’s what conscious parenting is like. It begins before they’re born, but so many of us don’t even know that we can have these kinds of inner dimensional dialogues.

Sam Believ: Yeah, I think I, I felt it before when I. Connected to my children before they were born.

It is interesting that you say about, birthing process being psychedelic because we just had a daughter eight months ago and I was there with my wife in the birthing room for the first time, even though it’s our third kid, but it’s the first kid, after this whole COVID madness.

So they should have let me in. And I was there with her and she was crying and she was processing so much stuff and she, obviously we run an ayahuasca retreat together, so she knows how it feels and she’s I’m full tripping. I’m having a full ayahuasca experience. It’s like very DMT and not just that, but it was a very productive experience where she was grieving some things and processing.

And what I’m realizing more and more also through this podcast as I interview people, dying is a psychedelic process. Being born is a psychedelic process. Giving birth as a psychedelic process and so much more in between. Eventually it’s what is not psychedelic or like what is more normal, the psychedelic states or common states.

Micah Stover: I think that’s such a good thing. Like I always tell people like, I think the. One of the things I’ve come to understand is that we’ve got to shift away from this living for a ceremony and understanding that life is the ceremony. So like you’re saying, like it’s a cadence, it’s a frequency, it’s a vibration, and how do we bring that to everything?

I think our kids are really good. Teachers for that because they’re so purely still connected to the source.

Sam Believ: How long did your postpartum depression last? Or if you can maybe give it time because I know it can be difficult to scope.

Micah Stover: I would say for the first like solid year of my oldest life, I was like.

Teetering on a fine line between sanity breakdown, breakthrough, on that tightrope in between, where some days I felt like I don’t know if I can be this epigenetic guard. I don’t know how to quell the ancestor cries. And also I feel like this is my assignment and it was madness in there. But also like with a sense of purpose and love that I’d never felt to drive me, like the love you have for your child.

I started my psychedelic personal healing journey pretty shortly into that postpartum period, which parts of me thought were crazy ’cause I grew up evangelical. So you know, I was breaking a lot of rules, but I just felt called to that. And it was through that, those experiences that I feel like, I was told do not have any more children.

You had the most traumatic, dangerous pregnancy and birth ever. Don’t do that again, please, for all of our sakes. I got pregnant again. I was diagnosed of as being, having fertility issues. I got pregnant again without really trying. If I was trying, it was on the first sort of, okay, maybe we’ll try and I had zero complications.

My second son was born totally natural in a birth center with no medical interventions required. To me what that says. Is that thank you science for how you saved my life the first time around. And also, you don’t know this whole mystery that’s happening here, which is the woman’s body, which is birth, which is like how spirits come through.

Sam Believ: So can you talk to us a little bit about this process of you going through your postpartum depression, getting out of it, learning maybe, you know what? Psychedelics did you use, if you wanna mention that, or any modalities? Specifically what helped you the most?

Micah Stover: What helped me the most? All of it intentionality, having the right support.

I could not have done this alone. Like the mentors, the elders, the guides, the facilitators who impacted me and held space for me were just as important as the medicines. Because I believe through my own experience, like the wound was relational, I had to heal in a relational space. Medicine didn’t cure me, but it helped to facilitate a relational repair that I didn’t even know was possible.

My first medicine to work with was MDMA, which was profoundly helpful because I was, I did not love myself. And MDMA is very good at helping us to love and forgive ourselves. I would say it’s one of its superpowers. It’s like its capacity to open our channel for empathy. And my whole life from the evangelical backdrop, the message was that everything bad that had happened was ultimately my fault.

And dare I say woman’s fault, dare I say Eve’s fault for being curious in the garden. So it shut down my curiosity, it shut down my body. It shut down any possibility for pleasure or play. Indie A helped me to find those little kid parks that were so stunted in there, feeling already like at age five, dirty, ashamed, responsible, and I spent, a fair amount of time just working with that medicine.

Because I needed some serious like deposits in the self-love department, and then I had a very strong feeling at some point, probably about a year in that, the spirit of the mushroom was like calling me like, okay, you’ve learned a lot about what’s under the hood of yourself. Good girl, good job.

But now what happens if you talk to a spirit that’s not just your own? I really believe psilocybin is a spirit. It’s a relationship. So I began a relational journey with the spirit that is psilocybin. And to me, that spirit showed up as earth mother, as Pachamama, and that repair job was so deep and profound, like I don’t think I’d ever been mothered like that before.

It feels like being mothered by the earth, like her helping me see what I didn’t have. Feel what secure attachment is. See through myriad examples like kaleidoscope of pictures and nature of how animals are as mothers. Be it the otter, be it the lion, like there are pictures, the motherhood everywhere we look in the natural world.

So I think a lot of it was seeing all that helped me come out of the lack of my family system didn’t teach me this, so how am I gonna ever do it? Meanwhile, nature has abundant examples for me to draw from, learn from.

Sam Believ: So you learn a lot from nature. You say a phrase that I really like, which is Nature deficit disorder.

Can you talk to us about that? Why do we have it?

Micah Stover: God bless. I appreciate technology here. We are having this bubbly conversation thanks to that, but also how much time do we spend now on these machines versus in the natural world? You know what I mean? And I just think that maybe it was all the time I spent in Mexico.

Maybe it was the Eros who I had the opportunity to be. Taught and stewarded by there. There was a very strong message that there are like these three pillars to being solid. One of them is your connection to the earth as mother. The second is your connection to your village. We don’t do this alone.

And the third is your understanding of like right relationship and reciprocity. We are not here to take, we are here to give and receive, and out of that alignment, it can’t work. So nature was a big part of it. Like my integration happened in nature through nature, and I see that so much with people. I work like now.

The ones who really not only get better, feel better, but stay better. Cultivate this relationship with the earth. I think that’s where the kind of like whole eco psychology comes into play. Like we exist on this planet. There’s a relationship there we have to tend to in repair.

Sam Believ: It’s beautiful what you’re describing because it, it kinda have to, I just get this understanding that we can get, let’s say the relationship with your mother.

Hasn’t been perfect because her relationship with her mother hasn’t been perfect, and there was maybe a line there somewhere, something was broken. But at the end of the day, we can always restart it again by forming a relationship with the Earth, which is. The mother or you know the God, which is the father or whatever you, whichever cosmology you believe in.

But it’s kinda like in the end we can always reconnect. It’s kinda like when you talk to shamans and you ask them, I wanna learn more about ayahuasca. They just say nobody can teach you. Ayahuasca can teach You just drink it and it will show you. So in the way we can always, we have this ability to reset just by going back to the.

To those flat medicines. And it is interesting that you also mention, your parents always think that you had it better. ’cause I have the same thing with my dad. He’s oh, you had it so much better. And his life, his childhood was. Tremendously traumatic. Like he could easily be a serial killer.

You could say with this childhood, I understand and I forgive you, but he’s somewhat abusive, but he is. He is all right. And I’m so much better now with my kids. It’s like it is getting better. And I think in the end of the day, all parents are always doing their best. So you live in Mexico, right?

And you talk about. Learning a lot from the Latino culture. I’m coming to you here from Colombia and my wife is Colombian. So it is triggering sometimes, when they’re one hour late. There’s a lot of like issues with the way we see the world differently, but there’s also lots of lessons and how to differently treat life.

Can you talk to us about that and what you learned from. From the Mexicans. And from the Latinos.

Micah Stover: Yeah. God also could talk all day about this, but I just remember when we first moved there, and this thing that you’re describing where time isn’t fixed, but it’s fluid. W when is the party gonna start? It’s like a range.

Could be six. Six could mean seven, but it’s not a problem because people just show up when they show up and there’s a flow. There’s a non urgency, and for me, in the beginning when I moved there, I almost felt like I had to detox from the American way of everything being so fixed and immediate, like so much immediacy.

It’s strange to be as a shared earlier I’m here in the States actually right now. I’ve been here for a little bit and it’s so strange to be back here after having been there for six and a half years because I’m like, oh, this is familiar to me because, I grew up in the States, but also the cadence, the rhythm of how things flow here don’t feel quite right to my nervous system anymore.

Like I really so appreciate. The slow, non-urgent pace of life, which as you mentioned, can sometimes be frustrating ’cause you’re like, okay people, but this, there’s three hours passed when we said we were gonna do something, but really, who cares? And most of the time if people are late, it’s because they got really engaged in something that was really important, like a conversation that could change a life.

One of the things I most appreciate about Mexican culture is. Not only their fluidity about life and time, but also their like playfulness of spirit. And I feel like one of the ways that I have seen that most beautifully expressed is through how childhood is revered as sacred. When there’s a, an expression amongst people in Mexico that kids are king.

Kids rule this country. And if you look around and you see the number of pinatas and celebrations for children, it’s true. And I just think that is so beautiful. What if all of us around the world revered childhood like that? Not only was that beautiful to witness for my kids, but healing for the inner child in me that wasn’t allowed to play.

That didn’t know that was safe.

Sam Believ: Definitely the importance of playfulness or lack there of we’re just too serious all the time and it’s hard to enjoy life this way, as I like to say. I don’t know much about Mexico, but I been there a couple times and the culture seems to be very similar to and here at la so we have two teams.

We have a ceremony team and like business team that’s largely foreigners. And we have the com, the hospitality team, which is largely Colombians and I like to say everything that’s with this foreign team is gonna be on time and everything that’s. With the Columbia team, there’s, plus, minus 30 minutes.

Please don’t get offended because I say that their approach to time is also psychedelic and there’s not much you can do about it. We’re more on time recently, but still there’s, an occasional disruption in time space continuum, and it just happens. But talking about culture, so you, you described as moving to Mexico was.

Was a like a new beginning for you and your healing journey been job started by it. How do you, would you recommend people to travel, to reset their normal and how. No. Talk to us about that moving and healing.

Micah Stover: Yeah, I feel like travel is another one we could put on the, put in the, under the umbrella of psychedelic experience, right?

Because again, our concept of self, our relationship to language, time, space, food, everything that makes us have a sense of I is shifted when we travel. I think that is so valuable. It’s humanizing, it’s instructive, to have the opportunity. I spent six years in Mexico. I will continue to spend time there now.

I spent five years in Asia. Like these experiences define my life. I always recommend people travel. As a mechanism for healing themselves and understanding humanity better.

Sam Believ: And as you traveled, you describe of finding your village. Talk to us about that. What does it mean and why should everyone has a village, have a village?

Micah Stover: There’s a book, I talk about this book a lot ’cause it’s one of the like top, top five for me of life changing called the Wild Edge of Sorrow. And one of the quotes in that book says. It is our greatest grief that the village did not appear. Not only were we longing for a mother and a father, but really two people never would’ve been enough.

’cause what we wanted was the whole village to hold our hands. So it is our greatest grief that the village did not appear. Never before have I read. That resonates with such depth in my soul. We need the village. We’re humans are the only animals that don’t understand, or we’ve forgotten how relational we are.

Think about how many animals travel in packs. When did we stop doing that and why we should really reconsider. We’re better together. The village is essential. I always tell people if they contact me and they wanna work with me as a guide, as a supporter, I, we can’t do it until we make the village. And I’m not big enough to be your village.

I’ll be one in the village, but who else? And then when people are like, I don’t know, there is no village. Like in America, for example, I’m like the earth is Mother is a great place to start.

Sam Believ: Yeah, we’re. We have more people than ever now in the earth, but we’re lonelier than we ever been. And I’ve just booked, I just bought the book on Audible.

I’m gonna check it out. I’m al I’m always impressed with people that quote stuff from the books. It’s I recently interviewed Gal Burma and he just starts, to quote the books. I’m so impressed. I need to learn some passages myself ’cause I feel not knowing stuff deep enough. Yeah, I totally agree with you regarding the importance of the community and that we’re tribal animals that for some reason forgot that we were tribal and now, there’s nothing natural about a couple having to deal with.

Three kids, for example, without any support because it’s just too much for, it’s lovely to spend three hours a day with a kid because it’s invigorating, it’s beautiful. But if you have to do 24 hours, then you get burned out because kids, they just. Operate on the different revolutions.

They go fast and they, they’re a lot. But I think the community is even more important with work with plant medicines or psychedelics. Like for example, here at LoRa, we notice. Like big part of the healing comes from the community. When you take people together and you burn, you make a fire in the middle and you give them psychedelics, all of a sudden they revert to this natural mode of being and they start supporting each other and it’s just so healing.

So can you talk to us about that? What have you noticed in your own work regarding like one-on-one work or group work and importance of the community?

Micah Stover: Yeah. I have a lot of thoughts on this too. So I think there is a necessity to evolve to inner our healing to being in a relational space with a group, because I do ultimately think one of the measures of healing is can we be in a village relational context?

Again, all this hyper individuation is a trauma response. So now that being said, I work with a lot of people who have very complex PTSD, meaning that. Their PTSD didn’t just happen after one recent event. They don’t even have a memory in their psyche in this lifetime, in this body where they felt safe in relationship, where they knew secure attachment.

So when people come to me in that space, I don’t necessarily recommend that they go do group work first. Why? Not because it’s not good, but because I want them to have an opportunity to process what’s going on within their sovereign self before they go into a group. Because if you put a lot of people into a space together who have complex trauma that’s not been processed, you’re gonna get a lot of what I would call transferential projections, meaning the wounds of the past, projected on the onto the canvas of another.

And that’s beautiful in. Ultimately, because then we can potentially repair. But if people haven’t processed their trauma or been held at all in one safe space with secure attachment, they might not, they might get overwhelmed in a group. So I think of it as like a graduation. We start here, we find the sovereign inside ourselves.

We come to understand our shadows, our lights, how we project out. On to others. And then with that awareness, we go with great discernment into group. Not throwing it everywhere, but like recognizing and being able to talk with like intention and consciousness. Oh, when you said that, that triggered the thing in me and I wonder if we could explore it together.

It takes a lot of preliminary work, I think, for people to be able and ready to do that in a group context. Safely Transformatively,

Sam Believ: I know that you work with ES like back to the topic of the tribe a little bit. I guess every tribe used to have Es. So what have you learned from there about, how to work with plant medicines properly?

Traditionally? What are the main sort of lessons and differences, for example, from the Western approach to psychedelics?

Micah Stover: In some ways, almost every way, Lila, let me give you an example. I remember one of the first RAs I met when I moved to Mexico, and I was telling her, because I had studied the maps model for working with MDMA.

And I was telling her how, I do this and then I wait six weeks and then I have another session, and then I wait six more weeks and then I do another one. And I’m integrating in between. And she thought it was hysterical. And I was like, W why are you laughing? And she was like I just don’t understand how anyone would ever think that you wouldn’t forget everything that you learned in that six weeks because it, from a more indigenous model, you’re gonna submerge yourself, like you’re gonna go deep into the ceremony and probably at minimum have three pretty close together before you come back out because we’re trying to like.

Almost fertilize your system with the remembrance of nature, the nature that is inside us, that is the same as the nature that we live with. This was wildly different than like following a protocol, doing all these things in a systematic way. Like once again, it’s the same vein as what we were talking about before, like things flow as opposed to like one of the things that worries me most about the clinical.

Movement of psychedelics now is like the commodification of something sacred, the izing of something sacred. There’s a big difference between a protocol and a ritual, but I don’t know if in a Western context people really get this sense. Okay, if you burn Palo Santo you’re not in like the set or setting that’s indigenous to that.

Is it have the same ritualistic impact? I don’t know. Maybe it can. For me it was I needed to be there. I needed to feel the whole thing and just be pummeled by it in the best way possible.

Sam Believ: Yeah. For some reason, we always try to reinvent the bicycle. It’s yeah, psychedelics have been done for thousands of years.

There are existing traditions. Let’s just learn from them. No, but we know better. Let’s give you a mask and put you on the couch and put you in the room and with the two therapists or whatever, and just charge you a. Downloads of money because it’s fancy. Yeah. There’s definitely value in in that model, but I just hope that eventually they, people that work with plant medicines, they will just try and bridge and find a perfect combination of Western and Eastern combine plant medicines and traditional indigenous setting, but then add some talk therapy or integration, which is like a beautiful combination.

It works really well. I asked that question. All the people that wrote books about psychedelics, because obviously you analyze the topic really well. And your book specifically healing psychedelics, is about how to heal with psychedelics. So my question is, how do you describe psychedelics? How do they work?

What is the mechanism in your opinion?

Micah Stover: Scientifically speaking, and I wanna be clear then I’m not bashing. Clinical protocols in science because I also love that stuff too. I really resonated with what you said about, I like think of that in my own sort of self-identity as someone in this body of work.

Like how can I be a steward who is a hybrid? Meaning, I’m walking with the learnings of both of those. The science. The more indigenous spirit of the work. But to get to your question about how it works, scientifically I can explain it in terms of these medicines go into the brain and they create.

Neurogenetic activity. And that is amazing because from a certain age, we automatically decrease our neurogenetic activity. That’s what happens as we age. So when we introduce these medicines, we have an increase of plasticity, elasticity in our mind, and that enables us to have like new perspective on old things.

Sam Believ: And from the point of view of ez. How would you explain it?

Micah Stover: That you’re remembering you are a primal creature. You are an animal and a body, and that you belong to yourself and the earth. And if you can return to the wisdom of the wild, everything will be fine. Your answers aren’t up here. They’re in here, they’re in the earth.

And I think both the beauty of that is that both of those things are true. Science and the spirit.

Sam Believ: Yeah, because we have a physical body and we have our emotional body and we have our soul. And those are just describing like different layers, different depth. Let’s talk a little bit about trauma. You mentioned complex PTSD, you yourself have this religious trauma with evangelical background.

What is trauma? How does one. Identify trauma and how does one heal trauma with help of plant medicines or psychedelics?

Micah Stover: Complex trauma in particular, as I was saying before, is when. People like don’t, there was never any safety and there was never like a oh this golden period where everything was safe and then it fell apart.

Complex trauma is usually marked or distinguished by, there was an absence of safety and secure attachment from the very beginning where PTSD might be more like an isolated event that happened. Then that creates trauma. So I think I work mostly with complex PTSD survivors. That means that, we are going back often to the very beginning.

Sometimes it can be to pre-verbal and utero trauma. Sometimes it can be early childhood adolescence. And really, often I think of my work when I’m working, I’m drawing from the same well as when I am mother to my children because. Survivors of complex trauma have living inside them like a complex world of little kid parts that were stunted in their development because they did not get the maternal paternal reflection needed to.

Develop, and so the medicines can enter in and create an openness, a receptivity to what I would refer to as corrective experiences when an honorary sort of like archetypal mother, father figure. Can offer an update or an upgrade to the information stored in the nervous system, like for example, to make it concrete.

That can be as simple as saying to someone who’s felt responsible their whole life like me for everything that happened. This was not your fault, none of it was your fault. And then asking them, what do you feel in your body when I say that? And really inviting them to have this opportunity to explore how much their body organically, naturally responds to that right information.

We want to heal, we just need the support and the safety for it to happen.

Sam Believ: So you mentioned pre-verbal. Trauma, how does one access those states and how can one heal something so early, so deep? So let’s say animalistic brain, so to speak.

Micah Stover: I’ll use myself as an example to make something that would otherwise be very esoteric, a little bit more concrete, hopefully.

But I actually think as I’m sure you’re familiar with Bessel Vander Cock the Body. Keeps the score. I actually believe that the body remembers everything that the mind sometimes works to forget. So for example, a very impactful healing sessions that I had, I relived the experience of being born, like being pulled out with forceps, being pulled out of this dark space that felt safe and encapsulated.

Into chaos and then handed to not my mother, but my father, and I felt in my body. He doesn’t want me. I don’t remember any of that cognitively, but because I think that neurogenetic activity makes us be able to access stuff that our cognitive linguistic narrative brain can’t recall, doesn’t mean it’s not there.

That shit was real. I felt it in my body. My body trembled and shook to show me how real it was. And I think the potency of people being able to recall things like that is the pathway to wholeness.

Sam Believ: Yeah, that sounds very. Very scary. I never went that far in, into the past. A lot of work that happens with Ayahuasca, for example, naturally there’s a lot of purging through body, a lot of shaking, a lot of movement, and sweating and purging, and it feels your body gets lighter in, in your practice.

Like what is, what are some of the most impressive transformation stories with people healing with the help of plant medicines?

Micah Stover: There have been so many amazing things that I have witnessed that I. Still, I’m just what? That’s possible. Let me just little dole out a few. There’s a couple chapters devoted to these stories in my book, but one of the human beings who his journey and healing and gets getting to be part of that has impacted me the most.

The first time I met him, he was not able to physically walk and so in a wheelchair. This was even before medicine. He said to me something like, it occurred to me as I was doing my preparation work that maybe this quote unquote disability is a way for me to hide from life because I’m scared, because I’m wounded.

And I was like that feels like there’s something to it. I didn’t know if he was gonna walk again, but he did. He does. Oh my God. And sometimes he still has setbacks and needs to sit and needs to use the cane, but it’s not like his healing is any less profound. He has a wildly different life now than when I met him.

He like didn’t leave the house. He was scared of everything and now he has a life. That’s amazing.

Sam Believ: That’s very impressive indeed. You know some of the transformations. That can happen, and the speed of them sometimes as well is very impressive. Like the lifetimes of pain just going away very quickly.

Let’s spend LA last minutes talking about your book. Who is your book for and why should people read it?

Micah Stover: Yeah, thanks for this question. So the book is really written for a couple of main, I would say. Participants, readers first and foremost, as I’ve watched this whole like field explode over the last.

Five to 10 years and all the stuff we were mentioning before about the prices, and it’s just really clear to me that some of the people who need this work the most are not gonna be able to access it because it’s not available financially. So I wanna be explicit in saying that I don’t think a book can ever replace a skilled facilitator in total.

I know because I lost someone in my life who tried to go this road alone and she’s no longer with us. And when she passed I was like I’m writing the book. And then if people who wanna go this journey and they don’t wanna go it alone, they can find like a companion guide through the book.

The book walks them through the whole arc of the psychedelic journey from preparation. To medicine work, to integration, and very intentionally, the book is a combination of like science, why is this working, how is this working? And also narrative, like real life stories of how. This looked, this wound looked under the metaphysical surgery, if you will, as well as exercises that people can do to support their own integration.

I think the other people who have shared with me that the book’s been really meaningful for them are people thinking about and wanting to explore. Being a facilitator and wanting to know, how do I go about things like conscious touch, safe touch. How do I not make this worse? How do I help, in an integral way?

So that the book is also for those folks as well.

Sam Believ: Thank you for sharing. Thank you for writing the book. Thank you for doing the work. It’s it’s very valuable these days and I totally agree with you with the topics of affordability, accessibility. That’s what I focus on a lot as well. Mike. It was, pleasure to have a conversation with you

Micah Stover: and you as well. Thank you so much for having me.

Sam Believ: Where can people find more about you?

Micah Stover: Yeah, people can find me on my website@micahstover.com. You can find my book there. I have a newsletter that people can sign up for where I share about podcasts like this or classes I’m teaching on Instagram.

People can find me at Micah Sugarfoot. Those are probably some of the best places.

Sam Believ: Thank you, Mike. Thank you for this conversation. Guys, you’ve been listening to our podcast. As always, we do the host and believe, and I’ll see you in the next episode. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you’d like to support us and psychedelic renaissance at large, please follow us and leave us a like wherever it is you’re listening.

Share this episode with someone who will benefit from this information. Nothing in this podcast is intended as medical advice, and it is for educational and entertainment purposes only. This episode is sponsored by Laira Ayahuasca Retreat. At Laira, we combine affordability, accessibility, and authenticity.

Connect, heal, grow guys. I’m looking forward to hosting you.