PODCAST EPISODES

In this episode of Ayahuasca Podcast, host Sam Believ (founder of http://www.lawayra.com) has a conversation with Bia Labate, a Brazilian anthropologist, activist, and one of the most influential voices in the global psychedelic movement. She is the executive director of the Chacruna Institute, editor of 28 books, and a champion of Indigenous rights, equity, and cultural integrity in plant medicine spaces.

We touch upon topics of:

• Bia’s early psychedelic explorations and road trip across the Americas (01:02)
• Her first Ayahuasca experiences and academic journey (02:41)
• Pre-Google era of plant medicine research and early stigma in Brazil (03:23)
• Ayahuasca’s paradoxical rise in the digital age (07:54)
• Loneliness, vulnerable connection, and the appeal of Ayahuasca (09:51)
• The evolution of Ayahuasca use in Brazil and globally (11:42)
• Comparing Ayahuasca traditions: Santo Daime, UDV, Shipibo, Huni Kuin (16:32)
• The limitations of comparing traditions and the food-culture metaphor (19:28)
• Why Bia has published 28 books and her methodology (21:49)
• Creating legitimacy for Ayahuasca as a field of study (24:38)
• The tension between spiritual practice and entrepreneurship (30:51)
• Ethical complexities of running an Ayahuasca retreat (32:16)
• Integration circles and her mixed feelings toward them (35:39)
• The founding, mission, and programs of Chacruna Institute (42:16)
• Indigenous Reciprocity and Psychedelic Justice initiatives (44:37)
• Chacruna’s conferences, education, and publications (47:01)
• Women and psychedelics, invisible labor, and cultural dynamics (50:58)
• Menstruation taboos in ceremony and cultural relativism (55:44)
• Ayahuasca’s origins and Colombia’s historical role (59:21)
• Ayahuasca’s global spread to places like Hawaii and Australia (01:03:08)
• The cultural mission of Chacruna and decolonizing psychedelic narratives (01:09:02)

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

Find more about Bia Labate at http://www.bialabate.net or on Instagram @labatebia. Learn more about her organization at http://www.chacruna.net.

Transcript

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

Bia Labate: I had a, an important role in creating this field work framework of discussions for the universe of ayahuasca, helping to legitimize ayahuasca as a field of studies because we’re also stigmatized within academia and even in anthropology, that is a science, not soft, so to speak, science that is not considered so serious by, biomedical researchers.

But even within anthropology, that there is a whole openness towards the otherness. Other cultures, religion, tradition, indigenous anthropology study, this kind of thing, exotic things that are not very common. But even within anthropology, in the early years, we were quite ridiculed for our studies. For example, you go to your defense of your master thesis and the professor ask, are you gonna be serving that little tf.

Afterwards, which is infantalizing and ridiculing your serious academic work. So our work, our consistency, our faith was part of a movement to legitimize ayahuasca as a field of work, of research.

Sam Believ: Hi guys, and welcome to Ayahuasca podcast. As always, we do the whole assembly. Today I’m having an interview with Bia LaBatte. BIA is a Brazilian anthropologist and leading voice in psychedelic culture. She’s the executive director of the Chacruna Institute, where she champions indigenous rights, equity, and cultural integrity in psychedelic spaces.

With over two decades of experience in ayahuasca and psychoactive research, she authored 28 books and is a key figure in global convert conversations on plant medicines and decolonization. This episode is sponsored by Awa Ayahuasca Retreat. At Laira, we combine affordability, accessibility, and authenticity, Laira connect, heal, grow.

Guys, I’m looking forward to hosting you. Be welcome to the show.

Bia Labate: Hi, thank you. Thank you for having me and for the kind words.

Sam Believ: Bia, let’s let’s start with your story. What what brought you to work with with Plat medicines and ’cause I believe in one of the interviews you said it was, it felt like you were dragged into the vortex.

Bia Labate: I don’t know what interview is that? It’s a vortex. I’m not sure it’s a word that I use a lot, but yeah, basically, like so many other people in this space, what drove me to plant medicines was a personal inter curiosity, a kind of spiritual inquiry and a taste for adventure and for. Finding new things and traveling and learning about other cultures.

And so I had the chance to try mushrooms and peyote when I was backpacking in my 1920s in Mexico. I did a big road trip across the Americas, traveled for one and a half year and was very open. And, in that kind of pure early years that you’re very wanting to change the world and full of love and hope and have more freedom and more time and more naivete, still like young heart. And it was very influential and really changed my perspective on life and on being human, and on being here in the planet. And took a huge turn since then and later on went to the Amazon and tried ayahuasca. And had different experiences both in the San and UDV context and with proven Vemo or Misti Smo and then Tibo and others, and have since then, devoted my whole life to studying and researching, publishing, advocating, sharing, bridging, all of that.

Sam Believ: You said you were very excited and you wanted to change the world. I believe you, you are changing the world through your work because I think you, your work reaches a lot of people. So it’s not too far from what came to be. And for me, it also started from a road trip through Americas.

That’s how I ended up in Colombia. And then later on found Ayahuasca or Jahi, how it’s called here. You started working with Ayahuasca 30 years ago. It was back before it was a saying. I think Google did not exist. Can you tell us about. Back then, like how did you find your first ceremony? How was it?

Bia Labate: It’s funny that you mentioned the topic of Google because I remember I was on this just returning from Alpa, like right now, last month and I had been, the last time I had been in Alpa was 25 years ago in the year 2000 doing field work for my PhD. And I remember going to a little internet cafe and asking a local like, what is Google?

It’s just going in the middle of this little town in the Amazon. And he is let’s boy, fus, let’s move. It’s very easy. And showing me how to put a word in Google and it, appearing the options on screen. So it was curious for me to have that experience in the middle of a small cafe in a jungle town.

Yeah, and I guess, I’m 54. It’s not like when I think I first had contact with the internet when I was 26. We had, I had a blog at an early age as well. I started a blog in 2004. But for us experiencing the worlds like that was not exotic. It was just the world the way it is. I feel the constant overwhelm, also learning about AI and Bitcoin and NFTs and everything.

It’s very hard to catch up. There’s a lot going on all the time. In a way, it was different to travel because you couldn’t like research online and you couldn’t be in communication with your family. This big road trip, I disappeared for three months. My, my parents resent me for that until today.

I did write a few letters that got lost in the mail which was unfortunate, but I didn’t call, you had, it was hard to call as well. But it was good. It was it was what can I tell you? It was some good in years. I felt a lot of love and a lot of it was a great privilege to, to have these experiences, to go and to find out, be curious, and just go by learning and asking questions.

The key is trying to learn the language, talking to people, just asking question, putting yourself in the position of a student and, not the center of the action, but you’re there to listen. To learn.

Sam Believ: Yeah. I think, there’s a, the internet is blessing and a curse because now we can research everything about the place we go to and to such an extent that we don’t have this surprise or this awe and amazement of coming there because we’ve seen like some videos, they, because they’re edited, they even look nicer than the real life.

And same with io, like people that shop at my retreat for example they’re full of information and a lot of it is not a good information as well. And then you have to not just teach them, but you have to reprogram their beliefs and understanding of it. And I it’s funny ’cause I can imagine, you googling your first word and it would be interesting if it was your first word you Google was ayahuasca, but I’m sure it wasn’t.

Bia Labate: I mean there wasn’t a lot of things about ayahuasca like it is now as well. I saw witness in my own life about all of this explosion. I’m not the first generation that. Watch this explosion. There are, researchers, anthropologists that went to the Amazon on the sixties. I’m not talking about early explorers as well, or Richard Spruce who found the brew, or I’m talking about more contemporary generation of researchers.

I have a professor, Jean Langdon. She went to the Amazon, I think 1971 when I was, born others, Michael Harner and the folks that wrote the Yaha letters, Ginsburg. And but it was it was not as I say, there wasn’t all these offerings and there wasn’t all these sites and you couldn’t really shop online like you can.

And I agree with you. It’s a paradoxical time actually. You today, you have to pay. And good money to be offline. Like you have to go to a special retreat where you cut yourself. It’s those paradoxes. We have never had so many means of communication on so many fronts. Every single person has a lot of different methods of communication, and yet we have this kind of epidemic of loneliness and this connection.

So it’s impossible to think whether there’s a a connection between those two things. And this anxiety for new technology is completely like not replacing the lack of need for slowing down and nature, which is also a big issue for people, especially from cities. And I think that’s also a lot of the appeal of the ayahuasca experience for a lot of people is this sense of remembering something, of connecting to.

Generic feeling of being a human and belonging to a planet and having a purpose and a meaning and feeling connected to the stars, to the universe, to the moon, to the invisible world, to the world between, beyond us, to this living web of connections, this breathing, planet earth full of this beings that we are in relationship with and our other fellow humans are kinship.

And I think that’s also why ayahuasca is such a boom and so desired, which doesn’t mean that it can’t be object of the same, to the same colonizing processes that we’re talking about here, to which is frankly related to the advent of big cities. And, we’re not drinking water from rivers and.

I’m sorry, I’m a little bit going all over the place here. I’ll go back to your questions. You have what?

Sam Believ: It’s okay. There’s no fixed rules on what you can talk about, what you cannot talk about. We like to let it flow, but what you talk about loneliness is a big thing. It’s like we have hung some friends on Facebook and we have all those people around us, but we are lonely and lonelier than we ever were before.

And we have a lot of people coming here. And they, there’s a group of people that they’ve never met before and through Ayahuasca and also through vulnerable sharing, they end up really connecting to such an extent that we have groups that people met each other for the first time and now they travel together.

They do things together. There’s something missing in our society. Which makes this vulnerable connection possible. And I believe part of it, part of the issue is the internet because everyone is so perfect on Instagram. So everyone thinks, oh my God, everyone is perfect except for me. So when people come and they share vulnerably and they actually talk about the problems, then they can, through that imperfections, they stick to each other.

And yeah, there’s definitely an epidemic of loneliness. But one question I wanted to ask you is you come from Brazil and Brazilian? I, based in statistics, Brazil has highest percentage of people that worked with ayahuasca. It’s an astonishing like 0.8% or something like that, which is still very small amount, but it’s more than any other countries.

So like growing up in Brazil, were you. Were you hearing about Ayahuasca? What was the perception like? Or is it just same as everywhere else?

Bia Labate: No, it’s not it’s not something that, everybody goes to school and have conversations about ayahuasca in high school to now, yes, more.

But when I grew up it was a bit demonized, frankly. It was a bit persecuted and pathologized When I was in high school, we heard a lot about a cult in the Amazon that, gave people, brainwashed people. And there were a few scandals that happened or in the early days as well with people that left their families and moved to the Amazon and cut ties or, accidents or things.

And then there were some celebrities that. Came out and talked about it, but they were also a bit stigmatized. There’s a lot of media sensationalism. So it was more, it was not entirely normalized. It’s not something that you would talk, in your family meetings. This is for me, the eighties, the nineties I think it, it expanded from beyond the Amazon in the like eighties to cities like Sao Paulo and Hu hug Janero.

And then in the nineties it became more and more popular. I think early two thousands you could say that there was this explosion. When I did my master thesis, you had only, mainly like in the big cities and the indigenous folks that lived in villages they used the ayahuasca among themselves, but they were not traveling.

To the big cities. There were a few events like the Eco 92 summit in huge janero. There was like some movement, but in general, the traveling groups of indigenous visitors to the city started in like 2003, four, 2005. Now 2025, it’s 15 years later. You have an explosion of everything on all different modalities.

But this is all to say that you could follow this process. In my lifetime, I was witness of all of these changes. For me, when I wanted to do my master thesis, it was called the reinvention of the use of ayahuasca and urban centers. I had to take a subway and talk to somebody that would agree to tell me, as long as I kept him anonymous, meet in this neutral spot somewhere that gave me a telephone, that led me to somebody that would be willing to talk to me.

Because I wanted to try to research what was happening in the margins besides and UDV, which were considered like the main official churches and the, so to speak allowed or permitted by law. There’s some gray areas, but they were holding this place of tradition in the imaginary, in the larger social imaginary cultural references.

And so anything beyond that was really edgy. That’s like 1998, to 2000. I launched my book in 2002. It was still pretty not. There were like five people you could be counting on that. And today there’s like dozens and hundreds of ceremonies each weekend. Same in the us I have witnessed similar expansion in places like New York or Los Angeles, here in San Francisco, in the Bay Area Hawaii.

There’s some spots that are, more concentrated, but I’m sure there’s also just a lot that we don’t know out there.

Sam Believ: So Co Columbia is actually the second country in that list of percentage of ayahuasca use after Brazil. Which is not surprising because there’s also every weekend in every big cities, there’s couple different shamans coming and serving medicine and they have their own circles.

I’ve only been exposed to Colombian version of Ayahuasca and Colombian tradition, so I’ve never I don’t know much about Santa Diamond in UDV. And I’m sure my listeners also it would be interesting if you could tell us, ’cause you worked with different shamans, different traditions in different countries.

What differences you notice between, let’s say Peruvian tradition Shabo tradition, or I forgot the other tribe that you work with? Ka

Bia Labate: KU is, they, the name they gave themselves and they the self denomination and the nickname by the Portuguese. The one, the way they were renamed is Ka Kaa.

But yeah, that’s a very like big. Question for a lifetime. The AMI traditions and the UDV, they’re similar in, they hold a lot of similarities. In a kind of more structural generic sense, you could say. They come from a sort of similar metrics, which is a combination of aminian shamanism and Christian influences popular Catholicism and also some Afro religion elements.

From ble. There are some elements of European is artism and so you could say that they drink on the same source, but the rituals themselves are very different. For example, Santa Dmi has a ritual that is dancing that can take many hours on this kind of standard dance to, to, to the side, to that side, similar and.

Similar. It’s repetitive and with the lights on and there’s another ritual that you sit and you close your eyes and it’s more like a meditation. And the UDV has individuals a chance, not like Dime has collective chorus. The UDV has just one person singing, you could say, reminds you more of IDOs from like Peruvian traditions.

My experience in with TS and in Columbia, I have I’ve been three times, but I’ve also sat in ceremonies abroad outside of Columbia. I guess I, I don’t mention that in my bio because I forget, I have done so many things I forgot. Yeah, I think it’s more festive in a way that, it has can have the harmonica and it’s more like it expansive in a way, should people is normally.

At night and those are at night too, but like with the very dark and very introspective and silent and really pointing towards that inner healing. And I feel that other indigenous traditions also when you queen, are more like, I don’t know how to say it, like festive or celebratory, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not healing.

So anyway, this kind of question is the kind of question that I don’t love. Just like people can go, they can have their, experiences. It’s not my job to translate all of these things, into words. There’s lots of books. It’s a lifetime. It’s you’re saying what’s the difference of the food in one country to another?

It’s it’s a whole other tradition and it’s. It is good to think about these things as like food, nutrition. It’s just this innumerous ways of cooking, innumerous, ingredients, innumerous. Each cook is gonna have one tip, is gonna have one angle. It’s like the, this pot of culture, knowledge, generations, insights, layers, traditions, people, voices, sentiments, ethos.

It’s a lot of things. It’s, it’s a whole universe. And once the more you get involved, the more you think you don’t know anything. And actually the last, you feel comfortable in talking about it. Because it’s also like something you can really express in words. And it’s just a very magical and powerful and enchanted understanding.

It’s a whole paradigm to see the world if you go deeper in this path. It’s also not our job to tell everybody to do it, and it’s not for everybody. Anyway, I hope that answered a bit.

Sam Believ: Yeah. The yeah, it’s the, there’s definitely this I think it’s called Danning Kruger Effect, where you, the more you know, the less you realize, till you actually know more.

You, this like this graph and people that have one ceremony, they’re like, oh my God, I’m a shaman now. And the people who’ve had hundreds of ceremonies and they’re really work and that, they’re like, oh my God, I know nothing. ’cause it’s so complex. And I think the reason you get asked those questions is because there’s not that many people that have had your experience and exposure to so many different traditions.

And also there’s not that many people that wrote so many books as you did. You wrote 28 books about, close to this topic. So why so many? What, what has driven that level of contribution?

Bia Labate: I didn’t write 28 books. I published 28 books. So I wrote, I co-wrote, I co-edited, I edited, there’s like different modalities of book production.

And I think it’s been a passion, what can I say? It’s, one thing led to the other, my, my recipe for my, for being so prolific. And the reason why I have done so much is because I have really a method of learning by doing. So if I’m interested in a topic, I’m just gonna create a book around it and try to learn by creating it.

A way to think a book is like you think what has been done, and so you map. What, where is the discussion at? And even if you write a book proposal for publishers, you have normally to do some kind of session called competing books. And that session, if you look at it in a loving way, and not in a negative way, is like a chance for you to examine the literature, what exists, what is out there.

And so then you can say, I’m giving you an example. I don’t know there’s a bunch of book in the seventies. There’s a bunch of book books by people that died. There’s a bunch of book in Spanish. There’s a bunch of, things on pharmacology on this specific aspect, but there is not this and that.

So that’s a gap. Then how do you fill that gap? And then you map everybody that’s working on that gap on their different contributions and you compare what are, the pros and cons of it. And then maybe you have five people that are very doing similar work on this one trend, but then this one is more, generic and speaks better to a wide range.

So by learning what everything exists. For example, our peyote book that we did when I was living in Mexico, I spent about six months mapping all the things that had ever been published about peyote on all fields, history, pharmacology indigenous uses, legal matters. And then we create a book collection that is a, representative of this whole, for example, now I’ve been really wanting to do a book about, the new indigenous Urbans uses of Ayahuasca in Brazil because my master was about the expansion of Central Diamond UDV to the big cities. That first wave that I mentioned before. Now there’s a new wave since mid two thousands of an explosion of a new phenomenon. So there’s a lot of different thesis out there.

If you create a collection and you get the best of what is out there, you really help launch the fields, you create the framework for the conversation. So I’m not the only one, and it’s not just me. There’s a other people doing this, but I had a an important role in creating this. Field work framework of discussions for the universe of ayahuasca.

Legitimate helping to legitimize ayahuasca as a field of studies because we’re also stigmatized within academia and even in anthropology, that is a science, not soft, so to speak, science that is not considered so serious by, biomedical researchers. But even within anthropology that there is a hole.

Openness towards the otherness. Other cultures, religion, tradition, indigenous, anthropologists study, this kind of thing. Exotic things that are not very common. But even within anthropology, in the early years we were quite ridiculed for our studies. For example, you go to your defense of your master thesis and the professor ask, are you gonna be serving that little T afterwards?

Which is infantalizing and ridiculing your serious academic work. So our work, our consistency, our faith was part of a movement to legitimize. I was ’cause of field of work, of research, and I have co-hosted in the Brazilian Anthropological Association in know working groups on religious and traditional and sacred plant uses combined with other social phenomena that.

Is also stigmatized and marginalized. And we have had these working groups for many years. So it’s three, three days of conversation. And each day is a different topic and you have seven papers each day, and you have people coming from all over the country. And when we first launched this, there was, hardly any persons.

And now we always have to reject a bunch of thesis. I have a publication that I did, I think 2008 or something that was the reference. It was a balance of the field of references, academic references that were ever published about ayahuasca. And we tracked down over 500.

This is it would be very hard to do such work this day. I have done a lot of work of keeping up with the bibliography and it exploded as well. Realities after. The literature is after reality. So the reality goes faster and then the researchers go trying to catch up. And so there was a time that we could map rituals, churches phenomena, and the literature.

And then there is an explosion of all of that. I got overwhelmed, I also had a kind of burnout of trying to keep up. And it’s been like, like drinking ayahuasca itself, there’s been different waves. There’s moments of deep enthusiasm, deep love for the studies, and there’s moments that it feels a little stuck and uninteresting.

And then, I’m just coming back from a diet with ayahuasca and it was very interesting because the maestro told us, don’t read, try to silence your mind. But, if you read something, it’s going to, you should read something spiritual. And then there’s this library full of books of ayahuasca and I’m thinking, I’m not gonna read a book a, a book about ayahuasca because that’s academic for me.

I’m gonna start to have thinking about like references and why was this coded? Anyway, after a few days, my friend got the book and bought it and gave it to me a book, and I decided to read. And then I started to read the book in my diet and I started to think it was so extremely interesting and I started to laugh a lot and myself, because basically I was thinking, wow, so interesting to read about.

I was like, like I came to day one all over again. I was completely fascinated with the study of ayahuasca and thinking about the diet I was doing and reading the book. And then I had a book, a big book diet. I was thinking a lot about all the books that I published and how I want to publish other books and how other.

Teammates in Karina should be, have a chance to publish their books and came back with a bunch of ideas of new books and extending, that book, vision to colleagues. Inna and seeing the need to digitalize materials. Anyway, this is really nerdy. I don’t know why you got me talking about all of this random, very obscure academic interest in Ayahuasca books.

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Grow L-A-W-A-Y-R a.com. No, but that’s that’s what you enjoy talking about. And that’s the whole idea. I don’t want it to be boring for you. You mentioned that you’re on the right now, so can you maybe talk to us about, so I, you learn by doing and you learn by doing. If you wanna learn something, you write a book about it.

I learn by doing, but when I’m fascinated with the topic, I start a business about it. So I started an now retreat, which is very successful and very beautiful. But I struggle a lot with the balance between my own spiritual journey and the business and entrepreneurship, which is a very different energy, almost opposing.

How do you balance your academic pursuits with your own spiritual work? Writing all those books. Do you ever find yourself in a ceremony where you’re like deep with the medicine and having your own experience and there’s like a narrator voice what am I gonna write? How am I gonna describe this in the book?

Or something like that.

Bia Labate: That’s a really good question and it’s a really dense question for me because it’s a question that goes back, 30 years of my life. And it’s the essence of everything for me, how to combine all these other aspects. I do wanna cheat a bit by your question and just say that wanna encourage a reflection about Ayahuasca businesses.

What you said about yourself is interesting and there’s a chapter in a book of ours that’s called Global Ayahuasca Entrepreneurship or something, and it’s talking exactly about how the business of ayahuasca is different than other businesses. Because in a lot of industries you have all these investors or people coming in and trying to create.

Profit, a lot of the ayahuasca center centers and related economies, let’s say the paraphernalia, the textiles and paintings and CDs and all, tobacco or things that go together with it. A lot of it is started by people like yourself that fell in love with ayahuasca and then created a ayahuasca business and ayahuasca retreat.

And then there’s this paradox that, a lot of people feel like I wanna drop out and I’m tired of capitalism, individualism, consumerism, shallow, western society, and I’m gonna go to the Amazon, drink ayahuasca and help others do the same. But by doing that, they’re also bringing this economy.

To the world of Ayahuasca. And then there’s also these paradoxes that are associated to this growth, which has not always been positive for local people, and sometimes have even increased the difference between foreigners and locals. And also, frequently locals are in a position of less power and are not like the leaders of the retreat or end up working as, chauffeur or maids or, cleaners or the generic shaman, but not a real active agent.

So that’s an interesting discussion about the economy of ayahuasca. I don’t know anything about you or your center, and I’m not trying to get into any merits here. I’m just saying that’s a good discussion. And I think that a paradox for founders of centers, it’s also they are I’m an advisor to a few centers.

I have helped Misti Vegeta for over 10 years as assisting him with issues and. More recently had other experiences, helping in the foundation of a retreat and consult with retreats. And it’s a big challenge for retreats as well to find this balance. Like you want to announce you want to market because you need clients, but you can’t say this is going to work and, pay and your success is guaranteed.

And there’s a lot of issues around marketing and whether it’s like ethical to try to push on people to drink ayahuasca because it’s not for everybody. And there can be like situations where it’s not helpful and there can be problems like just with putting it in social media and making claims.

So I have, helped people try to navigate where to find a balance of. Echo Ayahuasca businesses. That is not like making it a panacea, is not trying to fish for new beginners all the time to just, and yet have to keep it rolling. To pay the staff to pay the people that are involved. And I think all of this balances between, I can make a joke, I was like 20 years fanatical for Ayahuasca and nine years fanatical for Una.

The joke is Una is the nonprofit, but it’s named after Ayahuasca. So in a way I never got out of it. But yeah, I’m just gonna say I had different phases. I had phases where I was completely in love and enamored and thought that was the ultimate thing of humanity. I had phases where I was very disillusioned, especially with the patriarchy, the politics, macho leaders and lack of transparency and problematic leaders, I think the main challenge is like charismatic leaders that, people tend to project on them like all the, benefits from the experience, lack of, clarity on, on, on a lot of in integrity issues and not to talk about sexual abuse, which is happens.

And then I have phases of being re enchanted. And, as I said, I’m just coming out of this experience, which was so incredible. I had moments of deep happiness, of deep contemplation and deep gratitude. I had a journey through my life that is just unique that it’s hard to get. I don’t know how, you know how to get something like that.

It is really my path. And I feel, I feel really blessed. I feel really lucky. And one thing that I have struggled with is this integration circles because from where I come from my early ages, my early years in Ayahuasca, there was never integration. And we learned not to talk a lot about it.

It’s personal and intimate. So it would be some kind of like spiritual voyeurism, to spiritual nudism, to look at it and try to see what everybody else is doing. And just feeling a lot like people like. Competing with each other who had the best experience. And looking at the other one and saying, oh, he had that, he saw that, I didn’t saw, see that?

And like seeing that create, expectations on people because they would hear other people sharing and then they wanna feel that, and then they’re treating ayahuasca like it was some kind of jukebox that he put a coin and a, a music spits out and sometimes it doesn’t work and it’s not like that.

So I’ve struggled with integration. I’ve also struggled with learning, understanding what people say in English, like the next day of a ceremony, feeling like tired, didn’t sleep well, and have to sit in this circle for hours to listen what people have to say. But I also try to keep a open mind, and I know a lot of people like that and need that and feel for them.

It’s so incredibly like wild and novel and a lot of people also just like a lot of awareness around like therapeutic basic processes to see, oh, I’m feeling this, and then interrogate inquiry. Oh, why am I feeling that? What does this come from? And just be so immediately touched by your own feeling that you don’t, realize that this comes from other things.

Like just seeing people discover basic things about therapy and self-knowledge through their ayahuasca experiences or thinking about eating, what are they putting in the bodies? So I think a lot of these retreats have a lot of are important for people and I can understand the value.

And so I think by this answer I’m saying like, different people need different things. And for me, some of the integration stuff has raised my more critical intellectual mind and I don’t like it very much. So you ask me how do I feel, integrating different aspects. What I’m looking when I go to an ayahuasca retreat is not like talking about ayahuasca and integration and this self-reflection.

I’m looking for a silence in my mind, not talking about it. It’s true that I read a book, so it’s complicated. There’s a lot of angles, I can always tell you that particularly this thing of I have felt anxiety when I was forced to integrate and talk. Because then I start to be in the experience thinking about what I wanna say the next day.

Oh, this is a good thing I could quote. Tomorrow and then create this weird eco inside your head when I like more, to pay attention to the music. Anyway, was that very confusing?

Sam Believ: No, it was a great answer. You definitely want to lower the place, touch lots of topics that I myself would wanna talk about.

Like definitely the business of Ayahuasca is is is a friend of mine who, he’s a marketing expert and he works in lots of businesses. He said this is the most difficult business model out there. It’s just too complex. I think people do it, they definitely do it coming from the place of a bit of zealously, this is amazing, and they can save the world and they get very motivated and that’s kinda what happened to myself.

The word circles. Yeah. We do word circles, but we kinda limit the time to three minutes per person, so it doesn’t get too, there’s not too much of this spiritual exhibitionism as you talk about look at me. But it does tend to create connection between people and helps them memorize the experience they went through by talking about it.

It goes from short term memory to long-term memory, and then builds the connection between the group and the people that having a similar experience. They start supporting each other. So there’s but I can also see, I’ve definitely, I even noticed myself sometimes in the ceremony like, wow, this is great.

I’m going to share about this tomorrow. So it’s inevitable. I think for, even without word circles, people tend to think this way because they, they do wanna talk about, and yeah, the danger of charismatic leaders as well. I’ve had facilitators that. Did that, they tried to get all the attention that they tried to be the person, or, some shamans are like this as well.

So that, that’s something I’m acutely conscious of, and I try to actively avoid that. It’s not about one any given person. It’s just about you and the medicine. Even myself as a founder I’m not that involved. So people can’t, some people do still like, think oh my God you’re so great.

You did this for me. But I try to avoid this because I think for me personally, it’s actually not comfortable to be like somebody, grabs you by the hands and they thank you. For me it’s difficult for me. It’s easier to receive criticism. But let’s talk about Jauna.

You mentioned Jauna it’s your organization. I’ve heard lots of great things about it. Tell people, what is it about, how was it born and. How can they, why and how can they support you as well? Maybe some people that are listening would like to do that.

Bia Labate: Yeah. Thank you. Una is a 5 0 1 C3 nonprofit organization based in Northern California with strong ties to Mexico and Brazil.

So we have a very diverse team. A lot of Mexicans, Brazilians, and Young Gen Z Americans, some new team members in Europe as well. We produce like mainly public education and we have different programs. One we called the Indigenous Response Initiative of the Americas, that we give small grants like s Money to 12 different organizations throughout the Americas.

The criteria to join that is that it’s like indigenous led and has like a track record of. Know actions and it’s collective led, and it’s also grassroots and not already, like on the circuit of big philanthropic dollars. And that is a really cool project. We’re trying to keep our donations completely unconditional of them, sending us decks or marketing materials and keep the bureaucracy very low.

So trying to do what we call decolonizing philanthropy, supporting soverty self-determination, the projects and the leaders on their own terms. And then we have two, the program, psychedelic Justice, which we, it’s mainly empowering voices of people of color. So indigenous, black L-G-B-T-Q, queer immigrants, women.

And so platforming giving visibility, in conferences, in publications. So that’s like our stars in our conferences. And we have produced different materials as well. We have our book Psychedelic Justice. We have women in psychedelics, we have queering psychedelics. We did a big work on the intersection of the queer movement with the psychedelic movement.

Were very influential in like bringing this together and created the two conferences called Queer and Psychedelics, and then a big publication around it. And also a lot of materials around racial justice, trying to teach like white people to self-reflect about whiteness and how to be a better ally And social justice questions.

And the other program we call Protection of Sacred Plants and Cultural Traditions, and we’re trying to create critical conversations and awareness around the globalization of. Things like ayahuasca, peyote, mushrooms and the expansion. Teach people about their religious rights. We have a important resource called the Guidelines for Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and Best Practices.

We also have a few workshops and courses for psychedelic churches trying to help people self-organize and have accountability and peer-to-peer dialogues and awareness around topics like conservation and reciprocity extraction, cultural appropriation. So creating a lot of critical conversations and what we call legal harm reduction.

So we have, it’s a lot of years and many different fronts. We have a lot of volunteers. We have a program of interns. We have a membership program. We have a fiscal sponsorship program. We have. Original books and publications from peer review to like online articles that are shorter and for a wider audience.

RIN is a big network. We have Op Operated started organically as a blog to publish articles from academics in more accessible formats, and it grew into different programs. So had a lot of influence of social justice movement in the US California particularly. And yeah, we’re very enthusiastic.

We have an annual conference called Psychedelic Culture. I would like to invite everybody to come. We’re gonna do it for the first time during bicycle day in the Bay Area next year. And we have a certificate on ethics, reciprocity, and ceremony. Or the name is Ceremony, ethics and Reciprocity. We’re working on.

A training for religious professionals. Right now for clergy, like a psychedelics 1 0 1, we’re creating a new book on psychedelic humanities, and we have also a new book on indigenous voices. I can go on forever. We have a lot of different programs. It’s a big school, it’s an incubator of ideas, people, new generations, leaders, thought leaders.

It’s a community based, it’s a mix between community, media and university. In between. It’s not as hermetic and hard to get as universities, but not as like loose. And with lack of expertise as just like any other community member self invented organization. We have a lot of people, experts and.

People with a strong history in the field. We have four different websites. We have a branch, Toch, Latin America, that will publish articles in Portuguese and Spanish. So we try to give back and, be connected to our roots. As a Brazilian who lived and worked many years in Mexico, I have both ties, strong ties to both countries, and we have the psychedelic justice, the psychedelic culture website, the Chana website, and the indigenous reciprocity website.

We also have different Instagrams for all of those. And just keeping afloat is a a huge task keeping existing on all of these different fronts. We have a network of about 80 people but employees. Employees, very little. It’s a lot of volunteer work.

Sam Believ: I can imagine how difficult it is. And it’s very important the work you’re doing.

So thank you so much for it. It’s someone has to have those conversations because normally we just try to avoid them. And like I know what bicycle day is, and I think most people do. But what is the date, specific date for bicycle day?

Bia Labate: I think the conference is gonna be 17 to 19, and I believe that bicycle day is on the 19th, the day that Albert Hoffman experienced LSD on a bike ride.

Charan is more related to plant medicines, sacred plants, or there’s different ways to call it. Not all of us don’t love the word psychedelics necessarily, but we are part of this larger spectrum of the psychedelic ecosystem. We are the ones advocating for indigenous voices, voices from the global south for anthropology and social sciences for more holistic ways of learning and knowing.

And that’s at the core of what we do.

Sam Believ: So April 17th to April 19th, just to clarify one of the topics you work on explore is women and psychedelics and there is this like how do you balance women’s rights and making women feel comfortable in a ceremony and sort of the indigenous tradition approach, especially around the time where women have their period.

’cause it’s seems pretty universally very difficult to navigate. Like we have our ways we do it and it’s works and we’re very democratic when it comes to that. But I don’t know if much about it or something you can share. ’cause sh you should probably know more than anyone ’cause you wrote a book about it.

So yeah, let’s talk about this topic. If you can.

Bia Labate: The book woman in psychedelics is recognizing different indigenous indigenous, non-indigenous researchers are not researchers like women as leaders. And we’re trying to give visibility. If you think historically and this is an example I draw from my dear friend and colleague who’s also co-editor of this book, Erica Duke, Dr.

Erica Duke. Historically, women would participate in think about the early research in the fifties, sixties, seventies, on the psychedelic research that women would sit. Together with their husbands. And they would help the husband create a protocol. They would help cleaning, they would help setting up the space.

They would help comforting and talking to the people. They would help the husband who’s afraid to participate. They would help the folks follow up, integrating the experience of everybody, the manuscript, manuscript writing, like they had all this presence, but their name was not on the paper. So there’s all these figures or we talk about Albert Hoffman, but we don’t talk about his assistant that also was the first woman to try LSD.

So it’s trying to give voice to this invisible. Leaders and a lot of men that go on heroic journeys had women sitting for them, taking care of them. Like this people of color, the brown people, women, people that are taking care are in the vaccines that are invisible. It’s like the big heroic guy that climbs the Himalayas, but the locals that carry his bags, they are not, figured in National Geographic as the leaders who conquered, but they’re going up and down every day, and so it’s a bit that spirit. There’s all this people behind the great deeds that we don’t we don’t see. And we, Chana, I have a wife, I’m queer woman. We are led by women and we like to pay attention to women’s leadership. And we did this book first in Spanish and it was even harder to try this.

Find his voices in Latin American places like Peru, Columbia. Brazil, what are the women leaders, both in plant medicine and psychedelics. But this is not to say there aren’t women doing important work on all areas from and it’s not just women related areas like giving birth or helping to die or helping to take care, but other kinds of leadership and why don’t we know them?

They exist. So this book is trying to elevate that and I don’t see any I don’t see much of a contradiction or tension with the topic of women not being able to sit in ceremonies when they are having their period. I think I see it as an anthropologist that’s part of cultural traditions and have cultural like reasonings.

I don’t think it’s I personally don’t see as just like an oppressive. Branch of patriarchy, and I think there’s a lot of reductionism in just projecting our values to other cultures. If you understand the logic behind those prohibitions, it’s part of a larger whole that has you know, a lot of aspects like this economy between men and spirits with this, all these exchanges and shamanism being this source of mediation between realms.

So there’s a lot of taboo, so to speak, related to hunting or ways to debone the game and what species are you allowed to hunt and what is how many, different animals. Are you allowed to take? And what are the correct ways to taking them down? And the logic of this economy of exchange between us animals, the ancestors, the invisible world.

And one of the things that are said is that like spirits don’t, like maybe this the smell of dead blood. They like perfumes and there’s a way to seduce them to talk to them. There’s all these other explanations, these logics of exchange, of donation, of reciprocity with this set of web web of life that are like the native explanations for this prohibitions that have to do with the same idea of the diets of creating this dialogues, this with the, world of the.

Species, the plant species, learning how to incorporate that knowledge, that sentiment being that plant that has an agency, that has intentionality, that is alive, that is a being that is ultimately like a human, like you, that has a culture, that has, a personality, has an understanding, losing your humanity and being in dialogue with this plants and letting them sit on you and teach you and following the tests, the prescriptions, the different periods and trying to be more open and sensitive to things like dreaming and, just deeper forms of knowledge, embodied forms of knowledge that this traditions take that I don’t think is just.

Saying men want to oppress women, and yet, yes, perhaps there are some social complications. And there are, there has been also processes of women from different indigenous communities that were not allowed to take diets and that have fought their rights. And they are leaders of diets right now.

And our big leaderships, men wanted to be protective of women and were con, worried about women being able to take care of children and didn’t want to force them to go through this difficult experiences. But women have also advocated for their rights and have changed traditions. So there’s a lot of ways to look into it.

And it’s a big complicated topic. I think the best way to go about it is if you’re going to a certain tradition, try to get informed and try to talk and ask the rationale. And listen and pay attention and not just bring your own ideas, to the mix.

Sam Believ: Yeah. Thank you for this explanation. I agree with this as well.

We, we have to like, find the balance, but we can’t just come to a tradition and only take the things we like and reject the things we don’t like. And it comes in a package. And then from the, in the spirit of you saying, there’s women behind all the men doing cool things. Yeah, my wife is a co-founder of the of the Wire and she, we have crickets together and we started from the beginning, it was just me, her, and the shaman.

That’s it. And we did everything from cooking, cleaning, to washing buckets and, definitely would not be possible without her. But she’s definitely not in hiding every group that comes, they meet her and she’s still in charge of everything, all the hospitality related stuff of the running, the retreat.

So she’s not listening to this podcast because she doesn’t really speak English, but I keep telling her to listen because I mention her a lot. So if you’re listening, I love you. One last question, which is really interesting for me because in one of the interviews that I’ve heard of you in preparation for this podcast, you said that there’s some reason to believe that Ayahuasca originally comes from Columbia and Amazon.

Like where can I find more about it? Like, where did you find about it and, where, like how did they manage to figure that out?

Bia Labate: There’s a large discussion about this. It’s not something set in stone and it’s also a little bit controversial. I think maybe you could try to have some indigenous speaker come to your podcast.

And it’s been more and more those of us that are studying this topics are learning that indigenous people want to have they don’t need the voice of anthropologists. And we’re happy to continue to be allies and support our indigenous partners and friends. But I think it would be good to get also, like indigenous speakers on your podcast.

So I’m just gonna suggest that you find an indigenous scholar and speaker and invite with the same questions. There’s different theories and it’s a kind of controversial topic and I’m perhaps, I’m just gonna leave it like that. Okay.

Sam Believ: Anyone specifically you wanna recommend that interview on the topic?

Somebody indigenous.

Bia Labate: We can talk more offline, but we have a bunch of resources in Chaa too, recommending different people of color. We have a page, people of color. We have another one psychedelic indigenous voices in the psychedelic Renaissance. I think that’s, I would even ask you why you’re interviewing your own local healers.

Sam Believ: We have I have a podcast with my shaman. I think it’s about 10 episodes ago. But I don’t think he knows those things. I asked him like, he knows the story of creation of ayahuasca. Like they all have their own story. But that, that’s from, that’s, I would like to hear that answer from the anthropologist, but

Bia Labate: But that’s the exactly the problem.

Like what is the timeline? Are we talking about stories of creation? Are we talking about like you found a ceramic pot in the Amazon with which date? What is the science that we’re listening to? That’s the challenge because the immemorial narratives, they don’t match necessarily what’s, are we gonna consider like Richard Spruce who named Ayahuasca or, you know what I’m saying?

There’s different stories. And this question became political of different epistemologist, different timelines.

Sam Believ: Let’s assume we don’t really know, but yeah. It comes from Amazon. That’s let’s settle at that. But yeah, I’ve heard you

Bia Labate: the UDV says that it was from King Solomon.

So they have their own original myth, which they don’t think is a myth. They think it’s a historical timeline.

Sam Believ: King Coleman, like from Israel as in maybe using their own plants like mimosa and something like that.

Where do they get the V from if it doesn’t grow there?

Bia Labate: That’s you go into the story of them, they have their own narrative. But yes, I agree with you. It comes from the Amazon and it’s also spread, all over, you have plantations now in, in places like Puerto Rico or. Maybe a bit of Florida, Hawaii, have different people studying the DNA, trying to figure out how it migrated one place to another.

Sam Believ: It’s really cool. The Hawaiian Aya Astoria, I interviewed Dennis McKenna maybe a month ago, a bit less. And it’s, it is basically was I believe it was his brother that brought the ayahuasca from Peru to Hawaii and now it’s spread all over. It’s it’s crazy how one person’s actions today can change the world 20 years from now.

Bia Labate: It’s a variation of what I was saying. We’re all witnesses of this expansion. When I was telling you my timeline, what I did in my masters, what I did, my PhD, this work in Una, it’s all different phases of the Ayahuasca movement. I’m friends with Kat Harrison. She went to the Amazon in 1976.

She is ex-wife of, terence McKenna, who’s passed, she was there in 1976. That was on Google. I was five years old. And yes, Terence and Dennis brought Ayahuasca back and they planted. And Ayahuasca is a plague, if you will, in a more like strictly ecological terms in the island because it’s a species from the outside and it grows very fast and it’s taken over.

It’s very interesting because, it grows very fast. It’s a kind of really vitamin land that it has a lot of properties and it grows fast and it takes over. And also a lot of people have land and they can grow their own ayahuasca. In their backyards. So it’s a very interesting scenario where you have a lot of different people growing ayahuasca everywhere, and you have a whole economy of ayahuasca being brewed in Hawaii and shipped internally to the US because it doesn’t pass immigration.

So there’s less risks of it being caught. And so there’s this whole economy of people creating planting, ayahuasca, harvesting and cooking and spreading it and going to other islands. Also, Australia has a lot of ayahuasca plantations. It’s a global phenomenon at this point.

Sam Believ: It’s a plague, but it’s a beautiful plague.

And yeah, because in Amazon, the soil is very infertile. It’s very hard. So it’s a plant that’s used to less nutrients. And then you. Spring it somewhere where there’s lots of nutrients and hot weather and it probably grows very quickly. But yeah, when I heard you mention in Columbia that Ayahuasca might come from Columbia and Amazon, I just felt really good because I’m on the, a bit of a mission where when I first learned about Iowasca, I thought it’s something you do in Peru.

And then I was already living in Columbia back then or being here for a long time and it was completely unknown. So I’m trying to sorta spread the word and educate people that Ayahuasca is from Columbia and it’s actually very traditional and it’s absolutely much more traditional than Costa Rica, which doesn’t really have anything to do with Ayahuasca traditionally.

And that Richard Ulti came here to to do his research and, dennis Dennis and Terrance, they came here looking for this other plat medicine as well. And then Narcos happened and it dero it and arose that part of the history. So when you said that I got excited and I Googled it and apparently there is definitely a discourse about that.

I am a little bit emotionally invested because I just hope to prove that Ayahuasca is in Columbia as well. And our website is still active.

Bia Labate: But it is in Columbia, you don’t have to prove that it, so you have, have different indigenous rights that are considered part of cultural patrimony in Colombia.

It’s also the constitution in Colombia has, is really one of the most advanced in the matter of indigenous voices and recognizing a bit some. Rights to nature and, autonomy of indigenous people, you’ll have different recognitions of ayahuasca in the health system. It is deeply IBI in the culture of Columbia.

It’s very strongly documented. And I have a colleague I just talking to her, she’s working the, like national history and anthropology or archeology patrimony department in Columbia. And we were just talking, there’s a whole reality that I don’t know who you’re hanging out with, but in my book, nobody’s questioning that Ayahuasca is deeply, part of Colombian life.

And I think maybe you’re just like influenced by, English speaking guests that don’t have knowledge. Because in, in the world that I hang on anthropologists and lovers of this kinds of things, we all know about this. It’s. I think we lack, we lack pride, frankly. And that’s a common Latin countries.

It’s still stigmatized. That’s the thing. It’s still seen as a, not a part of culture, but it’s on foundation. And think about like Mexico. It’s built, it’s an civilization builds with sacred plants, different psychedelics, if you will. Foundational, tobacco is across all the Americas.

It is part of our culture in deep sense. All of this plants about, and the stories, the myths of origin that tell how the van came to be are frequently inter winged with the story of creations of these plants and these immemorial times where, you know. Maybe there wasn’t this distinction that exists between an animals and men, or, things like rivers and mountains.

And so there’s another way to tell the story, the stories that we tell ourselves. Chana is trying to give visibility to this narratives and to the storytelling and retell the stories that we tell about ourselves, about the psychedelic movement or the psychedelic space, or what is psychedelic healing.

Putting these voices in the forefront, putting this time of this type of knowledge in the forefront. And it’s a rich universe. As rich as the experiences itself, the culture, the traditional knowledge associated to it.

Sam Believ: That’s important work to be done. And what you mentioned about Colombian indigenous people, I, yesterday I had a meeting with the mayor of a nearby town, and then we visited an indigenous community called AMI. They traditionally used to work with mushrooms, not with ayahuasca. The tradition got lost.

Now they’re re rediscovering it, and they, there was the government just bought a big piece of land in that sio where they’re gonna do another, has gudo indigenous reserve for some displaced families. So it’s definitely very active and very real here. Which is really cool and I would love for you to connect me with with that Colombian person that does that.

So it’s really exciting for me. Bea Bea, we’ve been going for a bit more than an hour, which is not what I promised you. Let’s start wrapping up. Anything else you wanna talk about or maybe mention where people can find more about you, your favorite book you publish, they should read, or anything like that?

Bia Labate: You can follow me in lab at Instagram. I’m also on LinkedIn and have our sites and psychedelic culture, indigenous reciprocity, charan, Latin America, encourage people to become a monthly member. We have lots of perks and we’re really nice community. We also have our internship program.

We have a few positions open. We’re always looking for donations to make our work sustainable. And we also ask for donations for our indigenous response to program. I invite everybody to come to our conference. We launch like a really nice newsletter that comes on and off, and I have my own website.net and it’s a real pleasure to be here.

Thank you everybody for listening, and thank you for inviting me and yeah, sending much love. Pick hug from San Francisco.

Sam Believ: Thank you bm. Guys, you were listening to our podcast. As always, we did the host, Sam, 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 buy affordability, accessibility, and authenticity. The Yra Connect, heal, grow.

Guys, I’m looking forward to hosting you

the.

In this episode of Ayahuasca Podcast, host Sam Believ (founder of http://www.lawayra.com) has a conversation with Marc Aixalà, a Barcelona-based psychologist, psychotherapist, and former engineer who has become a leading figure in psychedelic integration. Marc is trained in integrative and strategic therapy, is a certified holotropic breathwork facilitator, has worked on MDMA and psilocybin clinical trials, collaborates with ICEERS, and authored Psychedelic Integration (Synergetic Press).

We touch upon topics of:

• Marc’s path from engineer to psychologist (01:01–02:57)
• How he defines integration & why definitions fall short (03:25–05:40)
• Marc’s metaphors for integration (puzzle pieces, astronaut, developing photos) (05:40–08:40)
• Sam’s grocery-shopping metaphor & Marc’s response (08:45–10:49)
• Two types of integration: crisis vs. growth (10:49–13:55)
• Seven categories of difficult experiences (13:55–17:10)
• Preventing harm through preparation & facilitation quality (17:10–18:46)
• Dose management and psycholytic vs. high-dose models (21:26–26:23)
• Self-inflicted overdosing & patient expectations (26:23–27:51)
• Positive/growth integration & the importance of immediate rest (27:51–30:33)
• Long-term integration: outer behavior vs. inner insight (30:33–32:13)
• Seven dimensions of integration (spiritual, cognitive, emotional, physical, behavioral, social, time) (32:13–35:33)
• Avoiding extremes: materialism vs. magical thinking (35:33–36:52)
• Why people resist integration & who should be concerned (36:52–39:53)
• Overuse of psychedelics and the risks of “more is better” (45:01–48:33)
• Spiritual bypassing & misunderstanding ‘light only’ approaches (48:33–52:10)
• Indigenous approaches vs. Western integration culture (53:08–56:25)

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

Find more about Marc Aixalà at:
Instagram: @marcaixala
ICEERS Training & Integration Programs: https://www.iceers.org
Book: Psychedelic Integration (Synergetic Press)

Transcript

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

Marc Aixalà: Yeah. Spiritual bypassing is usually understood as using spiritual content or spiritual experiences to divert our attention from painful more ordinary aspects. Yeah. So somebody that has, I know a lot of issues with social or interpersonal relationships.

But somehow marriage is to avoid the pain of these because they’re having spiritual experiences. Yeah. So that the light of these spiritual experiences somehow makes it easier to forget the suffering that we have, as if we could only, or we should heal or we should improve by focusing only in the light and not focusing on the pain that our ordinary lives bring.

Which is sometimes a line that certain schools have approached certain, even Buddhist meditation schools, they say no keep meditating. This is part of the veil. You need to transcend that you’re suffering is do not get attached to your suffering. Your joy do get not attached to the church.

Just keep pushing through the oneness. Yeah. Through this. That most of the times, for most of us life is not that easy to take. Only in that dimension. We have families, we have jobs, we have parents, we have friends. We need to also live in this, in dual reality. Yeah. Then when we are trying to use.

Psychedelic experiences to avoid those conflicts, to avoid those feelings, to avoid those difficulties. I think that’s when we are doing a harmful spiritual bypass, because in the end, we’re not having a real spiritual experience because we are just putting something aside. We’re not having a. Whole experience.

We’re choosing just to focus on one side of the spectrum, but why should be sadness less spiritual than ecstasy? There’s a whole universe that I can think of how spiritual can be to contact with your own sadness and to see the reality of sadness in your life and doing something about it.

Sam Believ: Hi guys, and welcome to Ayahuasca podcast, as always with you, the host, Samie. Today I’m having a conversation with Mark Alala. Mark is a Barcelona based psychologist and psychotherapist with a background in telecommunication engineering who has become a leading figure in the field of psychedelic integration and non-ordinary states of consciousness.

He holds advanced training and integrative and strategic therapy and is a certified facilitator of. Teleo Tropic breath work. He has worked with clinical trials using MDMA for PTSD and psilocybin for treatment resistant depression. He collaborates with the International Center for Athena Botanical Education Research and Service.

I seers his book, psychedelic Integration Psychotherapy for Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness, consolidates his years of experience helping people integrate expanded states of awareness. 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. Mark, welcome to the show.

Marc Aixalà: Thank you, Sam. A pleasure to be here.

Sam Believ: As I was telling you earlier, I learned about your work because one of our volunteers was reading your book and it was, it’s a big book, on topic of integration.

Interest me a lot. And then I’ve heard about the courses that you provide in. I ended up talking with one of your team members as well here in the podcast. Mark, let’s start by talking about your past and like how your life brought you to this line of work. ’cause I used to be an engineer as well.

I was a marine mechanical engineer and now around this ayahuasca healing center. So how was that story for you?

Marc Aixalà: So I guess that, not that different from yours, but yeah, I was an engineer. I studied engineering at university and I have to say that even during those years of study at the university, I had some experiences with states, expanded states, northern United States.

And that showed me a world that I had not known before and that became some sort of an interest slash obsession. So even as I was becoming an engineer something entitled me. I knew that was not really my path. And eventually, after a couple of years of working as an engineer, I clearly saw that I would never be a very good engineer and that my heart and my passion was elsewhere.

And that brought me to go back to university study psychology, become a certified tropic brother practitioner, and start trying to find a career around non the United States of consciousness supporting people during, before and after experiences in expanded states. Yeah, that was a long journey from an engineer to psychologist.

It took whole transformation about, I don’t know, probably six years or so. So it was a slow process, but it ended up being a really powerful one, and that’s why we’re talking today.

Sam Believ: Yeah. I think engineering is a good foundation for many things because healing is body is an body is like a mechanism as well.

So if you’re, if you kinda understand those concepts, you can be very step by step. And I think it’s it might be a good influence on, as opposed to just psychology by itself. So I’m happy that I have this engineering mindset and it’s useful even in this line of work. You you obviously are an expert in in integration and you you dedicated lots of time to it.

So integration is one of those topics that’s kinda has many different definitions. So I’d like to hear yours. What is integration for you?

Marc Aixalà: Yeah. So the way that I usually approach that question is by not answering this question. I think that defining integration can run into some reductionist bias, and as we give one, just one definition, we are skipping, we’re keeping some things out of the picture, which could be important as well.

I think that maybe the only thing that we can agree on about integration is that integration is what we do after the experience. Yeah. Or integration starts. As the experience finishes, then the practices that are involved in integration can vary from practitioner to practitioner, person to person, or experience to experience.

So the way that I’ve tried to define and explain integration is through a way that could be somehow expanding and providing different angles of what integration entails. That’s why most of the times I start defining integration through different metaphors. And a big chunk of my, my book in which I summarized my understanding on integration is talking about different metaphors like growing trees, developing a picture seeing things from different angles, planting seeds, so integration cannot be captured by a single definition. Different experiences will be integrated in different ways. For some experiences, we will need a conscious effort. Sometimes even with support from somebody else, sometimes integration can happen in a very natural, spontaneous, and effortless way.

I think it’s more helpful to understand how broad can be integration in order to facilitate integration. If we get stuck with very rich definitions of what it should be. I think that we’re missing the point that we’re not doing a favor to those in need of integration.

Sam Believ: So you mentioned that you have 11 metaphors for describing integration.

I’m not sure if you know all of them by roads, but maybe you can tell us the ones or your favorite ones.

Marc Aixalà: Yeah, I think that this has changed since I published the book. I have added some more, and depending on the class or lecture or talk that I’m giving, I focus more on some or others.

But definitely there’s some classic metaphors that are like highlights. One would be the pieces of the puzzle, how, psychedelic experiences. Experiences in non United States can be like new pieces of the puzzle. They provide new information and then integration could be like trying to put that piece into the existing framework and try to see where this piece fits.

Sometimes it’ll fit right away. Sometimes we’ll spend a lot of time trying to make it fit. Sometimes we need to work with the piece. We need to, I don’t know, turn it around, look at it, maybe polish it or whatever. In order for it to fit into existing framework. And sometimes we will need to work with a framework what is already been assembled.

We need to maybe readjust that so new pieces will fit. Yeah, so that would be a classic metaphor for integration. Another one that I use very often and that captures a different aspect of integration would be an astronaut coming back from these space travels back into the mothership. I’m sure that you’ve seen these movies that they go with all these space suits and then they go back to the ship.

They close the doors and it becomes pressurized again, like all the air coming in and the sounds coming in again, and the effort of taking the suit and all that, like this transitioning space from expanded realities into ordinary reality. That time, that space can also be considered a space of integration.

And that’s extremely important to make a safe and good landing. Yeah. So that could be another metaphor and then one that I’m playing a lot with lately is developing pictures like old school analog photography in which you went holidays with only a 24 picture role. And you would take some pictures and then the process of developing those pictures were was when the pictures actually came alive.

And there’s a lot of art in the developing. Process. One had to do it in specific conditions with red light, with specific chemicals. You have to choose the frame that you want to develop, how much you zoom into this. So there was an art team choosing what I’m going to be developing from that negative, from that picture that I took.

Yeah. So this could be three metaphors, then planting seeds, growing trees, for example, or organizing information in a coherent way, ordering the information. Usually I like to talk about it more visually. So when I teach about these in my trainings, I present images because I think that they capture much more of the power of these metaphors and just talking about the metaphors.

That’s the beauty about metaphors, that one doesn’t have to speak much about them, for people to really see the depths of them.

Sam Believ: Thank you for sharing those. I’m I’m a man of metaphors and analogies myself. I would like to share with you the ones that, that I came up with. One is.

What for integration specifically is when you go to have a psychedelic experience, let’s say you go to an Ayahuasca retreat, you have one week retreat and you it’s like going grocery shopping. It’s like you, you bring all of this information out, it’s on your countertop of your kitchen, all the vegetables and meat and dairy products.

Everything is it’s right there. So integration is taking it and putting it in the fridge or cooking some and processing it and putting it where it belongs. And the way I like to describe is if you don’t do anything, you basically, it will just get wasted and then rott.

But in reality it’s just just gonna disappear. So that, that fresh information and all this knowledge it’s right there, right now and it can be worked with and can be processed into something beautiful. But if you don’t do anything, it just. Fades away. That’s an analogy. What do you think about that one?

Marc Aixalà: Yeah, I think it’s a really a point that many times we don’t do anything with all the information that we’ve been given, all the experiences we have been given, they have a natural tendency to fade away. That’s part of the psychedelic experience. That’s just the way it is, so it’s not just by having had the experience that we embody those learnings Many times we need to act on that.

We need to do something, we need to pay attention to these afterwards moments. Sometimes it could be a matter of days, sometimes we’ll be weeks, months, sometimes years. Yeah. But I think that the more we concentrate and we focus on providing that time and space for integration, the more fruitful our experiences can become.

Yeah. Like food. If you don’t store it then you waste the food and all the fantastic recipes that could come up with those grocery shopping that you did, it’ll never exist,

Sam Believ: very wasteful. That’s just how it feels sometimes. But when I, as I was getting ready for this interview I’ll, I thought about the concept of, obviously integrating difficult experiences and I know you focus a lot on that and also integrating beautiful and light and easy experiences.

And it’s I almost think that we should come up with two different names because it’s a two different, two very different processes. I don’t know, may, maybe there already is a, is some kind of distinction and are different names. So before I continue can you, is there any abbreviations or anything that, that distinguishes the two?

Marc Aixalà: I dunno if there’s any specific names, but that’s definitely something that I have been noticing for a long time as well. And when I started doing integration work, it became very clear that these. Two very distinct aspects of integration working for maximizing the benefits as I call this, or dealing with adverse reactions or dealing with challenging experiences.

I think that these are two different courses of integration. Many times the interventions, the things that we can do in one scenario will not work for the other scenario. Yeah. When we have had a beautiful, easy experience, it’s usually easier to integrate with our own tools like journaling, painting, whatever.

Yeah. So this natural and classic integration tools that we use, these are something that will be useful and we will help us to integrate experience. But when we have had a difficult experience and we’re struggling with symptoms, ruminations strong emotions or whatever, those things might do something, but they will not solve the situation.

So for me, these are two different integrations. We could still put them under the same label of integration. But I think that even the professional or the person that can do or can support that process many times are different professionals. Yeah. Because when we’re dealing with difficult reactions, many times we need interventions that are more similar to therapy or therapeutic interventions.

And I don’t think that you need to be a therapist to facilitate integration when things have gone in a positive direction, so I do make that distinction as well. And that’s I would say like the second de second definition of integration. No, we have the metaphor, but then we have these scenarios and needs.

What are we working for to maximize some positive experiences or to deal with some difficult reactions that people have experienced.

Sam Believ: Yeah. Like one is like crisis integration and the other one is like growth integration and, with the kitchen analogies. Like one is you coming back to a kitchen full of groceries and the other, you’re coming back and your kitchen is on fire and you need to do something urgently.

But I always feel like there should be a different word, but I’m not nothing’s coming up for me right now, but let’s talk about those difficult integrations You have you have seven, seven different types of difficult experiences. Can you talk to us about that?

Marc Aixalà: Yeah. This is some attempt that I did back in the day to understand what people were needing.

So the place which this came from was not just my intellectual sort of thinking about integration. It came through observing the cases that I was working with in the ICR integration and support service. This is a free service that we’ve been providing for. 12 years or so, or 13 in which people could contact us and we would do integration support for those in need.

Usually when somebody contacts you to do integration work, it’s ’cause they perceive that there is a problem that they’re dealing with. Usually people don’t contact you so much to say how beautiful their ask experiences were. They contact you when things have gone wrong. Yeah. So after some years of working with people, I started trying to document to get some sort of data to understand what kind of requests people had, what sort of problems they were experiencing more often.

And that is how I came to this classification of the different problematic in integration. This is not meant to be a diagnosis criteria, but it’s meant to help integration practitioners understand what can have been the cause or the problem that has originated the challenges in integration.

Also how it manifests, and then how to support these different nuanced situations. So they go from. More general situation of lack of preparation when somebody has gone into the experience with not enough preparation and then things go south, not because there was anything problematic, but because the person was not ready enough in whatever sense to deal with what could come up.

Then we have experiences, what I call unresolved experiences. When something opens up in your experience in your journey and you’re not able to process that due to lack of trust due to the intensity of experience. And that is like a door that remains open reminding you of the content of experience in your daily life.

Yeah. Then we have interactions with shaman or facilitators or therapists and harm can come also from that interaction or when people have memories that emerge, that they seem to be traumatic memories, that they had repressed what to do with that. That they real, are they not real? Yeah. That are very common sort of problems.

Integration as well, or. When we have people that overdo, so to speak, the healing practices. They drink medicine too often or they do too many techniques, too many experiences, and then they up end up more yeah, they lose ground. Yeah. They end up in more theory sort of spaces and their life is not improving rather the opposite.

Yeah. So they seem to be less and less in touch with their daily reality. So these are some of the more common integration scenarios that I was observing as I was supporting people. So I tried to somehow formalize and summarize them so we could talk about that in more depth and with more detail and hopefully find ways to support these particular needs.

Sam Believ: Yeah, I’m familiar with many of these cases and a lot of them, as you described them, they almost feel more than half of them can be, almost completely. Removed by just good organization of the retreat or good facilitation. It’s like when I tell people when I first want to drink ayahuasca, like right now, people that come to our retreat, they go through a three hour course, and then they, they fill out the questionnaires and it’s a process.

But and then there’s still workshops when they arrive. When I first went to drink ayahuasca here in Columbia, it’s like you just, you come in and here’s your cup and good luck. It’s if you don’t know anything or if you’re taking any medicines or nobody knows, nobody cares. It’s just so a lot can be avoided.

And I think that there’s there’s some difficult experiences that you described there. I think you could separate them into. Forms, which is like productive ones and unproductive ones for example, an unresolved difficult experience. Or they can be terrifying, like a very common one.

People remembering that they’ve been sexually abused. I still think is much better to find it than to just let it be there and poison your life. So I, I don’t know if you wanna talk about this which if, some difficult experiences can be necessary w whilst others are, basically a side effect.

Marc Aixalà: Yeah, that’s a good point. And in, in my way of working, I have not taken these stance that much in the sense of consider what would be useful or good or not. I’ve been more pragmatic in the sense like, somebody’s coming. With a problem after use of bio, ask for psychedelics and they need some sort of relief.

They need to feel that they can go back to where they were before, so to speak. Like something bad has happened to me, helped me be as I was before this experience. But I do agree with you that there are experiences that, although challenging, they come with potential growth. Yeah. So as you were saying, an unresolved, difficult experience, something that has opened up and I have not been able to deal with probably if I am able to deal with, I’m not only as I was before this, but I am stronger or I am more complete or I am closer to my truth after having been able to confront that, to go into that experience and go through that experience.

And some experiences, as you say, this could be like a side effect or traumatic event that has happened that could have been prevented. I dunno, an abuse that had hap happened in a therapeutic setting or an abuse by a child or facilitator or a therapist. Even if you can grow and end up somehow stronger, I will never say no that this was for the good.

Yeah. So these things should be avoided. They should not happen. And same thing as when people have really intense experiences, what I call in my definition of these profiles, the very traumatic experience with dissociation with can look like a psychotic break. I think that many times, although this can be not permanently harmful, I don’t think that a lot of good comes from this.

No. So people can recover, people can go back to who they were before and yeah, have suffered no consequences from them. But most of the time I wouldn’t say that there’s been a learning or a growth or something of value after having overcome this experience. So definitely when we. Open ourselves to work in United of Consciousness.

We need to know that things can be hard, that we can be confronted with difficulties with hard experiences, and that is part of the process, that a normal part of the process. But as you say, there’s many of these difficulties that can be prevented because they are not because of our own inner psychic journals.

They are related to facilitation or the context or safety or interactions. And these things should be minimized and optimized. Yeah.

Sam Believ: Yeah. First of all, thank you for doing the work you’re doing because I’m sure people I’m happy that you exist. When they go through those difficult experiences and they’re left confused, they really need integration.

Like in our case we work with integration coaches and one of our coaches, Simon, who also interviewed a few episodes ago. He takes those difficult cases, when someone specifically sexual abuse it’s unfortunately more common than we would like to believe and helps people integrate those experiences.

But what I notice in reality, and I’m, you’re on the receiving end of all of the difficult situations on all the retreats or traditional ceremonies all over the place. Anyone who can find you, they end up going to you. But I’ve, what I find from from the other side where we work with people in the medicine, as long as you do it in a very gradual and very reasonable way, and especially managing the dose of the medicine specifically, I ask it’s not really that common that people get so destabilized.

But and I would like your opinion on, on, on the dosage because I think what, from my point of view, what I observe is a lot of places is where people come and all they have is one ayahuasca ceremony. And ayahuasca does tend to, for you to break through and go to this productive part of the experience where the information starts coming up in a conscious way.

It takes few ceremonies to build up. And you have a group, for example, let’s say we, we have a group of 25 people. If we were to give exactly same amount to everyone so that everyone in the group would have this profound experience on the first ceremony, I believe, then we’d have to take three or four of them to a psychiatric hospital next day.

And like the way we work with our shaman is we start slow and we find who needs more and who needs less. And we take people to that level where. They are having productive process, but they’re not overwhelmed. I don’t know. And it’s like integration is one thing where it’s like you’re dealing with the consequences.

How much can be done on the level of people that it serve the medicine to even prevent people from going to this difficult place.

Marc Aixalà: I think that’s the key question. And that’s where we should be putting all the attention, or maybe not all the attention, but a lot of the attention integration should not have to be focused on dealing with difficult directions.

We should focus more on preventing those difficult reactions from happening. And as you say, I think that a lot can be done in order to bring. Experiences to people that they can somehow manage. And what you were saying sounds very similar to what the European current of psychedelic therapy back in the fifties and the sixties were doing, which it was called the psychic therapy.

They were using incremental amounts of psychedelics starting low, not just to stay low, but to find an experience in which happens exact exactly what you’re saying, that you’re immersed in the experience, that you’re navigating the experience, but you’re not overwhelmed by the experience. Yeah. Which that goes in sharp contrast with the psychedelic approach which they did mostly in the United State, which is one high dose, 500 micrograms of LSD trying to reach Eagle D solution and in one session do all the work.

Yeah, that can turn out very well, but it has lots of risks as well. These more incremental approach. I think it makes much more sense for the times that we’re living in now in which we see that the importance is not so much in the experience itself, but in the process in which the experience is immersed.

So using incremental dosages in which there is internal agency to navigate the experience. So it’s me surfing the psychedelic waves rather than me being drowned by the psychedelic waves. I think that’s what we should aim for. Like people have this kind of experience that it’s an intense enough experience to be in experience, but that is not too intense, so you cannot relate to the experience.

That’s when we start losing track of what’s going on, that’s when we forget what’s going on. That’s when we can go into more psychotic like manifestations, and the Psycholytic authors, they said it back then. Han Handcar lawyer said that the key element in achieving this is the dose.

So one should be really careful in finding the proper dose for each person, so they will be inexperience, but by not, but not overwhelmed by the experience.

Sam Believ: This episode is sponsored by Lara Ioas Retreat. Most of Lara, if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, some of you might have already been to Lara before.

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There are no hidden fees. Visit lara.com to book your retreat or learn more. Lara Connect, heal Grow. L-A-W-A-Y-R a.com. Yes. So a lot of those negative experiences, they can basically. The unproductive ones, they can basically be described as an overdose. Basically. You’ve been overdosed on psychedelics.

And but the problem there is that it’s a lot of times it’s self inflicted. Like no matter how mu how careful we are, no matter how gradual we are people because of the videos they watched and people they spoke to. People want to have, they self-inflict this. They’re like, give me more or give me more.

And it’s so hard for us to be like, just trust the process. You will get there. It’s like a little bit more and a little bit more, not not to overwhelm them, but unfortunately a lot of times it’s this difficult situation where as someone who facilitates ceremony, we won’t everyone to have the experience.

We want them to have a productive outcome, but they want everything and all at once. Give me like five cup, let me just because ’cause people have this mindset and it’s it’s challenging, but like to put things back to positive perspective, like we, we hosted more than 2000 people here at LA Wire and those cases were in somebody’s this completely disbalanced after the retreat and needs completely needs integrations.

I can think of maybe three cases. And even then when they do the integration and the process, the experience, they come out better on the other side. But like 99% of cases is very manageable and just rainbows and butterflies and good things. So let’s let’s talk about this positive side, which is this other kind of integration like growth integration, the integration of a beautiful experience.

You’ve already gotten so much, how can we get more out of it?

Marc Aixalà: Yeah. So I think that there’s not a lot of sophisticated stuff that needs to go into this sort of integration. One thing that I really believe to be really important is to distinguish between what I call immediate integration.

Which is integration the following hours or days after the experience, and then long term integration. Yeah. There’s certain things that I believe need to happen in this short or this immediate integration that have to do mostly with rest, recovery, nutrition, hydration, like a soft and proper landing.

Yeah. So taking care of the body, having time to having time. Yeah. Just to be with yourself, be with experience. I’ve worked with people that have had problems in the integration phase, not because the experience itself, but because few hours after the ayahuasca retreat ended, they had to take an airplane to go back to Europe, for example.

And all of a sudden this shift of dimension even, like you’re in this very cared environment and all of a sudden you’re thrown into an airport and people go crazy. Taking care of this immediate phase of the integration as usually happens in good retreats, that they allow some time for integration that is essential in order to be able to then continue working in a soft, in a relaxed way.

Usually most of the practices that are done in retreats I dunno, journaling, Mandela drawing, group sharing interviews walks in nature, meditation, all these sort of activities, they can continue being useful after we go home, and also understanding that integration. Is itself a process, it is not a, a task or a deadline to be done.

No. I need to integrate my experience in the next three days and then I’m done and I can go and do something else. Integration is again, this metaphor of planting seeds. We’re planting a seed and the results will come with time. Yeah and time needs to go by as well. We cannot rush integration many times for an experience to be fully embodied.

We need to go through other life experiences as well. We need to reflect on things, we need to experience things, we need to act on things. And only then our psychedelic experiences will really find its way into being embodied and being fully integrated. Yeah. So I think that patience and working in this soft and trusting way that the process will unfold at little on pace.

It is also essential, but that’s not to say that we should not devote certain amount of time to think about experience, to listen music that connects us with experience, to journal, to write the trip reports, to continue painting, reading, inspiring books, being in touch with the peers that we had experience, so all this will be very important.

And there needs to be a a coherence between the steps that we are taking in our inner process and the steps that we are taking in our life. So we learn things. We open up, we discover things, but then that maybe needs to be reflected on our behavior, in our relationships, in the way that we do our job, or what job do we do.

So all these things that need also to change as a result of this inner change. And if we’re not doing the outer change, that is a sign that the inner change is not that complete. That’s when I talk about the different dimensions of integration from spirituality to the behavior cognition, emotions, physical body, social component of integration, and the time dimension of integration.

Integration needs to happen as a whole, not just as a cognitive exercise.

Sam Believ: Can you tell us a little bit more about the dimensions of integration that, that you just mentioned?

Marc Aixalà: Yeah, that’s another attempt to keep expanding the definition of what is integration. Yeah. So we have the metaphors, we have the different scenarios, difficult experiences versus positive experiences.

And I talk about these different dimensions, the spiritual dimension, cognitive dimension, emotional dimension, physical dimension and behavior. And then the social dimension of integration and time. Yeah. So these are the seven dimensions of integration and certain tools, certain interventions will focus more in one domain than another.

Yeah. So for example, when we are journaling or we are writing, or when we are sharing our experience and putting words into experience, maybe we’re working more on the cognitive domain of the experience. And for a lot of westerners, that’s a very important domain and I need to understand what this means.

Yeah. Other situations might involve lingering strong emotions and we need to deal with this emotional domain as well. And attending to the emotions, even if they don’t have any cognitive or any thoughts attached to them. It’s very important. Same thing with the body. The body is both a tool and that we use to go into the experiences, but also it’s a place where we get a lot of information about what’s happening in our inner process.

So we might be focused very much on doing some cognitive work with our experience, but actually what we’re getting most of the information is through the body. So paying attention to what’s happens in our body sensations, in our body processes, that can be an extremely important intervention or approach.

Same thing with social interactions. In order to fully be able to sustain work in the United States of consciousness, I believe that it’s much easier to do it if you have. A circle around you that can hold those experiences as well. If you are isolated, having psychedelic journeys that you cannot share with anybody, that you cannot find people that you relate to and understand you on that level, that’s gonna be very difficult to sustain a journey in this non-ordinary realities.

So taking this as a whole, I think that it helps us see where we could focus more in our integration process. Am I being too cognitive in my approach to integration? Am I basing integration just in, I don’t know, certain practices, or I’m being too spiritual or I am not being spiritual at all in my approach to integration?

That was a bias that we find in the Western Scientific approach to psychedelics that they try to, not to speak so much about spirituality or spiritual experiences because it sounds not serious, not scientific, but in other contexts we have an over-emphasis on spirituality and all integration seems to be spiritual.

All experiences are because of. Spirit or because of the higher dimensions or whatever, and they are missing, for example, that there’s difficulties in relationship with your family or your friends, or that you have some behaviors that really need to be addressed and modified. So like expanding our understanding and focusing on the things that we might not be focusing before.

I think that can help to have a more complete integration process.

Sam Believ: Yeah. It’s important to not go from one extreme where, you, you just fully material to another extreme where it’s like everything is magical thinking. We, you know what as we speak about integration, I feel really good about what we do here at Lure as we do everything from giving people journals, and even with Mandela, they can call and the integration circles.

And we even, we also do conversations with the title with the Shama, where people can sit down and talk to ’em and a lot of times they come and they say oh my God. Like I, this bad energy, whatever. And because our title, his wife is a psychologist, he’s no. It’s you’re just depressed.

Something like that. Grounding them. But regarding all the topic of integration what we find is that a lot of times people they come and they wanna do the ayahuasca experience, right? Because it’s it’s this big flashy, interesting experience and it has a lot of hype around it, but they don’t really want to do the integration part.

It’s it’s that kind of boring, a little lame, it’s oh, what do you mean? I just need to like, sit down and journal and of course like when you get people that are in a bad situation, people that have, their kitchen is on fire, they will look for help. But what about those people that like, have countertop full of good groceries, but they just don’t really want to process it?

Of course if they’re busy and they just don’t have time and life happens it’s understandable. What if they do have time, but they just choose for some reason culturally or something’s missing? How can we motivate more people to do integration? And specifically why do people that needed the most wanted the least?

Marc Aixalà: Yeah, that’s good point. And as a therapist that I’ve worked with people that came with some sort of problem or request, I have not encountered this situation that often in the sense that when somebody comes to a therapist asking for help, it’s because they do perceive that they need help and they are even willing to pay for the services.

No. So there’s clearly a need, an interest in doing that. If somebody comes to your retreat and they don’t want to do any integration work, I can think of different scenarios that would lead to different interventions and who is this person? It’s just somebody that came, wanted to experience this and goes away and they have no intention of doing anything within.

Okay. So in that case, I would say, I don’t know if that’s, you’re an adult, you are adult enough to decide to do ayahuasca, to do psychedelics, and you’re adult enough to decide what you want to do with that. If you want to waste your time, I don’t have to push you to do anything. I, as a practitioner, would definitely provide.

As you are saying that you do the context in my retreats in which that can happen. If you don’t want to use it, you know I can do my best. I can try to create the best environment for you to really see the point in that. Spending some time doing integration can be actually really beneficial for you.

But if you don’t want to, I will not force you. It would be different if this is somebody, for example, that wants to become a practitioner, let’s say. Yeah. Or somebody that wants to become a psychiatric therapist and they’re doing psychedelic experiences, but they’re not doing any work afterwards. So then that would be a concern because this person wants to eventually lead other people in these experiences.

No, if you are a shaman apprentice and you’re not doing what you’re supposed to be doing outside the ceremonies, that would be a concern for the teacher. So I think that depending on who is doing that, we would have a different approaches. But if somebody decides just to take psychedelics or ayahuasca for the sake of doing that and having a blast and taking a picture and then sharing that on social media and telling their friends how crazy was their time in Columbia or Peru?

I dunno if it’s my role to, to judge that, but if you want to come and learn, then there is a path.

Sam Believ: Yeah once maybe every six months, we do integration retreats, which is after we’ve done three, we do three retreats a month. And after the those three retreats, we have sometimes four or five days integration retreat, which like, there’s no medicine, it’s just yoga, meditation, lots of workshops.

And we’re actually doing one right now. And this month we had maybe 70 people attending different all the three retreats and only two people stayed for the integration retreat. So that’s the ratio because it’s even though people, we’ve done it before, once we had, I think eight people or 10, and they had an amazing result, they were so happy they stayed.

But it’s just so hard to explain the value because it’s not, it doesn’t have this. This sexy, explosive side that Ayahuasca does have. And it does feel like work, even though it can be fun. Let’s let’s change topics a little bit ’cause I think we, we’ve gotten good understanding of integration.

Let’s talk about yourself, your own your own experiences with plant medicines or psychedelics. ’cause obviously if you’re in this space, you might, you must be pa passionate about those things. Can you talk to us about your own journey and maybe your own integration as well and challenges in it?

Marc Aixalà: Yeah I’m not a person that likes to share a lot my personal journeys. I think that psychedelic experiences are part of the intimate world of each of us. And I don’t know if my journeys are relevant at all really or that spectacular or that memorable that I could not, probably not write a book about the amazing experiences that I’ve had.

My, my experience with non of consciousness has been more of a process. So I could highlight some experiences, like my first experience with having, for example, my first experience with MDMA, but or with ayahuasca. So there’s been some moments that they have had definitely an importance, but the.

The value of it has been more of an ongoing journey, and that has also been very much the case with holotropic breathwork. That’s been a technique, maybe the technique that I’ve used the most holotropic breathwork is a non-pharmacological tool that induces an non set of consciousness that can be similar to the what we achieved with psychedelics, but also different.

Yeah. And breathwork is interesting because experiences are not, I would say they are not spectacular compared to psychedelics. At least in my case. I don’t get these fancy visions. I don’t go so much into these archetypal experiences. I don’t go to transpersonal experiences that would be really impressive.

So a lot of my breath work experiences have been more. I don’t know, ordinary dealing with anger, dealing with fear, with sense of loneliness, like difficult emotions that I guess that we all carry inside. Definitely. I carry inside and somehow relating to those emotions and those contents in a different way.

As a teacher of mine would say I could not say that my breathwork experiences were really impressive, but what I saw is that following this path, my life was becoming better. I was becoming a better person. I was becoming a person that was more confident, more calm. I found more purpose in life.

I found a path for me, I, I am maybe the example of somebody that is not a very fast changer that I had one experience and then the day after was a different person. My story is more a story of a continuous. Evolution, so to speak, or a transformation that has happened sometimes in a non perceptible way.

But then you look back and it’s yeah, I have transformed this is because of the path and these experiences that I’ve had, but I could not really pinpoint one specific moment. Yeah. Dunno if that makes sense at all. But that’s a little bit how my journey has been so far regarding experiences in the United States of consciousness.

Sam Believ: Yeah. No, I can identify with that. My mind has also been slow slow and gradual and, but yeah, you can see the change after years and there are some experiences that are more profound than others, but it is a process. I think more people understand that it’s in case of ayahuasca or breath work, it’s like a, you’re creating a lifelong relationship with with this modality and once again, you get some groceries, you cook them, you eat them. Then you go and get some, again, you don’t want to like, overwhelm your system. Let’s talk about that. What do you see with people that are overdoing it? They’re like doing a different retreat every, I’m doing three retreats every month and not integrating what is the what is the risk there?

Marc Aixalà: I think that there’s definitely several risks. One is wasting time and money to begin with. As you said, you buy too many groceries and you cannot process them, so you have to end up throwing them because they rot or whatever. No, they expire. So there is no need to do that much all the time.

But I think that there’s also and this is we humans, we all carry a longing inside that sometimes becomes even a craving for wholeness, for connection. And that makes us go looking for more intensity, for more quantity. So that’s definitely there, and that will not be solved by going into having more and more.

That’s actually the symptom, not the solution. But I also think that there’s a part of this that has to do with the ecosystem that we’re living in with is team. The market economy, so there’s been this hype in, in retreat and psychedelics, and there’s a lot of people offering a lot of things.

And many times to differentiate yourself from the other people competing doing retreats, one needs to offer something more, or at least I’ve seen this happening in Spain for example, now has maybe quiet and down, but for some years you had this crazy retreat in which in four days they would take AO three times.

They would have all experience with, they would take rap, they would take changa, and then we, they would have, I don’t know what else, five, six experiences in four days without proper screening, without really measuring doses. Like providing a really intense experience as if more would be better.

Yeah. And of course that’s, that has certain appeal. No, I’m gonna go for this transformative weekend and next week I’m gonna be a different person. I’m gonna heal my traumas, I’m gonna heal my depression. And because it’s so intense, it’s gonna be a reset. That narrative makes a lot of sense, but usually it’s not true.

That is not how change happens, or if it happens, it’ll probably be somehow stormy. Yeah. Because there’s this saying a rabbi that said that the problem is that people want to change overnight and they want to sleep well that night. And still things have not happened on the same time.

Yeah. I don’t think that going for more and more is the answer. Actually, that’s one of the profiles that I describe in my book of people running into the difficulties know that you end up so much into the collective, into the trans person, that you start losing yourself. That you start losing who you really are as a unique individual, and then you somehow lose track of your own work and you’re just that mercy of the energies, the experience, the forces, the archetypes, and then it’s not your journey through life anymore.

It’s you just drifting through those psychic waters. Yeah.

Sam Believ: Yeah. It’s all about balance, I think. Any extreme is bad. Having someone that’s completely doesn’t believe in anything and just thinks, you were meat bags that are just here to live, work and then die is not good.

And then having someone that just spiritually bypass is everything. That’s also not good. Can you talk a little more about the concept of spiritual bypassing? Do you have any topics on that?

Marc Aixalà: Yeah. Spiritual bypassing is usually understood as using spiritual content or spiritual experiences to divert our attention from painful more ordinary aspects.

Yeah. So somebody that has, I don’t know a lot of issues with social or interpersonal relationships, but somehow manages to avoid the pain of these because they’re having spiritual experiences. Yeah. So that the, of these spiritual experiences somehow makes it easier to forget the suffering that we have, as if.

We could only, or we should heal or we should improve by focusing only in the light and not focusing on the pain that our ordinary lives bring, which is sometimes aligned that certain schools have approached certain, even Buddhist meditation schools. They say no keep meditating. Everything is Maya.

Yeah. That’s all. This is part of the veil. You need to transcend that. Your suffering is do not get attached to your suffering, your joy to get not attached to a joy. Just keep pushing through the wellness. Yeah. But through this, that most of the times, for most of us life is not that easy to take only in that dimension.

We have families, we have jobs, we have parents, we have friends. We need to also live in this dual reality. Yeah. Then when we are trying to use psychedelic experiences to avoid. Those conflicts to avoid those feelings. To avoid those difficulties. I think that’s when we’re doing a harmful spiritual bypass.

Because in the end, we’re not having a real spiritual experience because we’re just putting something aside. We’re not having a whole experience. We’re choosing just to focus on one side of the spectrum. But why should be sadness less spiritual than ecstasy? This a whole universe that I can think of how spiritual can be to contact with your own sadness and to see the reality of sadness in your life and doing something about it, but again we live in the, in this western world in which usually these techniques are marketed or sold as you are gonna be having positive results only I had a friend long time ago that she told me when I started this spiritual path or this healing path with breath work with psychedelics, I thought that I would, that my life would be focused only on the positive emotions that I would start experiencing only positive emotions.

But what I realized is that it actually was like my field of experience was broadening. I was able to experience more in depth, joy and happiness, but I was also opening myself to sadness and grief and the challenges that life brings, so I think that’s much more spiritual than only being happy.

Imagine a friend that it’s always happy, somehow it’s a little bit shallow. No, there’s certain shallowness in only being happy or only being in the positive.

Sam Believ: Yeah. It’s like you can only. Let’s, this song you only miss the you only miss the sun when it starts to snow. And, it’s kinda like you to understand, to feel happiness.

You can only feel it from the difference between how sad you were and how happy you are. It’s this emotional range. And if you just feel happy all the time, you, I guess you, I guess it’s not possible because you just can’t if it was possible. My, my approach to this sort of spiritual bypassing, kinda seeing, focusing on just one thing.

It’s if God made us this way and put us on this world with this experiences, then it’s for a reason. It’s kinda if somebody says no to be, to serve God, I need to be celibate, for example. Then why did God made us with sexual desires? It’s I would say I see more sense in living full life and then trying to get wisdom through it and not just be like, oh, of course it’s easy to be enlightened if you’re in a cave and don’t have three kids running around, like in my case, which is very challenging.

But I guess that’s what makes you really stronger. You talk about the topic of that indigenous people don’t really have concept of integration. Why so and in general, like what is that dialogue between Western approach and the Amazonian approach?

Marc Aixalà: I think that indigenous traditions, they do have integration practices, but they don’t frame them as integration.

Yeah. Again, we westerners, I believe that when we talk about integration, first thing that comes to mind is the cognitive aspect of it. I need to understand my experience. I need to interpret, to analyze, to reach. Rational coherence about experience integration in Amazonian traditions. I think it’s different.

You go to diet with the s and what they will tell you to do after the diet are some behavioral prescriptions. You cannot eat this, and that for certain amount of days. You cannot have sexual relationships. You should not drink cold or drinks or whatever, so they tell you, do this after the experience, because that’s the way in which your data is gonna be really embodied.

You need to do that for the data to really work. That in a way is an integration practice, but they don’t frame it in the same way that we frame it. It’s part of the process. And somehow we understand that this is the way that it is. You have your experience with the plant and then you need to do something else and you do that.

Yeah. And the thing is that, that is already integrated in their worldview. That’s why they don’t have to integrate anything, because everybody knows that after a data, that’s the way that you do it. They even know it in the restaurants, in the cities around, for example, in Alpa or in SCO or in ketos, you can go to restaurants and in the menu there’s Ayahuasca diet, which is food that you can eat after ayahuasca, and they sell it on the restaurant.

It eats integrated in the society already. It’s part of what, what happens. It is not so much integrated in our society now. It’s starting to be maybe a little bit more in this last 10 day 10 years. Things have probably improved a little bit, but we haven’t had a social container in which we can bring these experiences and somehow process these experiences.

We have to do it in a very individual way, at your own pace, in your own home in solitude, so we, that’s why we have to integrate because these experiences are something that feels alien. To us, it’s almost like it’s something external and needs to be integrated in our lives. For many indigenous traditions that these experiences are not alien.

There’s no need to integrate because it’s already integrated. It’s part of what we do. It’s not that we need to do something different to bring this here because it’s part of our reality. That’s why I say that indigenous ations do not talk about integration in the same way that we do.

Sam Believ: Thank you, mark. We’re gonna start wrapping up.

Tell the guests more about you, where they can find you, social media about your book, your courses and things like that.

Marc Aixalà: Yeah. Thank you. If people are interested in knowing more about this integration approach and going more in depth about these different metaphors and approaches to working integration, I’ve put a lot of information in my book, psychedelic Integration, which is published in Synergetic Press, and I offer a training at IC.

In which we go more in depth on how to apply the contents that you read in the book and somehow practice them to make them real. That’s a course that is mostly designed for therapists or for people that work with people. But also we have a few openings for lay people that are just interested in the field.

So this is gonna be starting in January 26th and we’re gonna be opening registrations soon. That’s the work that I do regarding integration. Then I offer workshops of phototropic breathwork trainings in holotropic, breathwork in Europe. Yeah, and usually I publish this information in my social media, which is a mixture of my personal life and my kids and my adventures in the psychedelic field.

So feel free to meet me there and communicate there. There are smart, so pretty straightforward to find me. And I think that’s that’s it. Yeah.

Sam Believ: Thank you, mark. Thank you for your time and thank you for your work you’re doing. I think it’s very important in this space.

Marc Aixalà: Thank you, Sam, for the invitation and for sharing also the way that you work at your retreat center.

It’s good to see that you bring so much heart and attention to working in a way that is compassionate and professional and useful for people. So yeah, thank you for the invitation.

Sam Believ: Thank you, mark. Guys, you’ll be listening to our podcast as always with you, 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. Laira connect, heal, grow. Guys, I’m looking forward to hosting you.

In this episode of Ayahuasca Podcast, host Sam Believ (founder of http://www.lawayra.com) has a conversation with , a Colombian-American family physician, curandero, and author who bridges Western medicine with Amazonian spiritual healing. Trained at UCLA and UCSD, Joe spent six years in the Peruvian Amazon studying Shipibo curanderismo and is the author of .

We touch upon topics of:

• Joe’s journey as a doctor and curandero (01:16–02:22)
• Why he wrote Medicine Song and what it adds beyond his first book (03:39–05:14)
• Mystical experiences as a core part of healing (05:14–06:40)
• The Eagle and the Condor prophecy: science and spirit uniting (06:40–08:32)
• Measuring spiritual wellbeing and connectedness in research (09:03–11:42)
• Nature connection as a foundation for healing (13:54–17:56)
• The state of the psychedelic renaissance today (21:14–25:31)
• Traditional plant medicine and modern clinical therapies learning from each other (26:27–30:35)
• The limits of scaling retreats and ethical growth (31:20–44:25)
• Building a spiritual community and legal recognition in the U.S. (45:08–51:49)

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

Find more about Joe Tafur at http://www.drjoetafur.com and his work at http://www.modernspirit.org.

Transcript

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

Dr. Joe Tafur: The idea that this psychedelic medicine and psychedelic therapy is rooted in these ancestral traditions with the plant medicines and mushrooms, et cetera, is opening the door to allowing mystical experiences. Into the healthcare system, and ultimately it’s showing this relevance of the spiritual healing to modern health and wellbeing.

So the book is about weaving those things together, showing that, hey, we’re in this timeframe when some ancestral people prophesize that we need to address the mind and the heart, the science and the spirit would need to come together. They would need to bridge, they would need to soar together for us to move forward.

That if they don’t, we’re gonna have more problems than we already have. And so that’s one movement. And then the psychedelic research world has been, for the last 30 years, creating stronger and stronger arguments of how spiritual wellbeing, how relevant it is to people’s healthcare, their mental health, and even to their physical health.

So the book is about ex exploring that, but it’s through stories. Through stories from my own life and journeys, and trying to draw upon ancestral wisdom from indigenous traditions, and also weave that into science and bridge it, and then tell the story of somebody who’s just following their spiritual path, and trying to understand the kind of.

Multidimensional Mystery of life.

Sam Believ: Hi guys, and welcome to Ayahuasca podcast. As always, we do the whole assembly of. Today I’m having a conversation with Joe Ur. Dr. Joe Ur is a Colombian American family physician, ero and author who bridges western medicine with Amazonian plans, spirit healing after training in family medicine at UCLA and doing MINDBODY research at UCSD.

He spent six years in the Peruvian Amazon at Rao Cent Spiritu studying bu. He is the author of Fellowship of the River and his new book, medicine Song, spiritual Healing and Psychedelic Renaissance, where he explores how spiritual healing psychedelics and modern science can come back into harmony.

This episode is sponsored by Lara Ayahuasca Retreat. At Lara, we combine affordability, accessibility, and authenticity. Laira connect. Heal, grow guys, I’m looking forward to hosting you. Joe, welcome back to the show.

Dr. Joe Tafur: Thank you, Sam. Nice to be back. Nice to be back on the show. Thanks for having me.

Sam Believ: So yeah, that’s that second time I’m having Joe on the last time.

It was about two years ago. It’s he can watch it in episode number 34. So back then he was still writing the book about which we’re gonna talk today. Joe, welcome back, back on and tell us how what’s changed since the last time we spoke in your life.

Dr. Joe Tafur: Yeah, I think the main thing that’s changed is, probably little things have changed, but is the book, yeah, I released the book.

That’s what I was focused on, was releasing medicine song. And so it came out this year in July. So now I’m in the process of slowly promoting the book and. And meanwhile the otherwise, just digging in on my projects here in, in Phoenix, Arizona, and also there are other projects still going to Columbia a little bit.

It’s assignment and some trips to Peru. So all that’s the same, but now bringing this book and that kind of message out. And then slowly making my way here in Arizona towards more probably more integrative medicine doctor work as well and some psychedelic work with ketamine.

Sam Believ: Yeah. That’s actually was something I wanted to ask you. Given your history and everything you’ve done, do you see yourself more as a doctor or more as a ero or if you were to assign percentages, where would you put that?

Dr. Joe Tafur: I don’t know. I don’t know. I think that here in the, like in the states, and I would say it’s a, it’s.

I don’t know, maybe like half and half,

Sam Believ: 50 50.

Dr. Joe Tafur: Yeah. But I don’t know if that’s that accurate with the time, but in my heart, I would say something like that. Yeah.

Sam Believ: That’s that’s very good to hear. You’re a busy man. You have projects all over the place in different parts. So I’ve interestingly enough, when I was interviewing you last time, I didn’t read your book yet, but after that I’ve read the book, the Fellowship of the River, and it’s it’s a really great book.

So I highly recommend listeners to check it out, that it’s like relatable has some stories and you question many things. And I really enjoyed listening. I’m an audio book kind of person and I believe it. It’s you reading it as well, right?

Dr. Joe Tafur: Yeah, no, I read it. And then we have the new audio book of medicine song, and I read it as well.

Sam Believ: Yeah. So I’m looking forward to check out your new book. So I will basically be the, that’s the questions I’m gonna ask, so tell us about your new book. What is yeah, why did you need to write it? What, what was missing in the first book and why should people check it out?

Dr. Joe Tafur: The new book is about so the old book was about my journey as a doctor getting involved with plant medicine and making the case. I think trying to connect the dots medically to, to what I was observing there as a doctor in Peru and seeing the plant medicine work, how it was helping people and coming up with some theories, trying to relate spiritual healing to, to healing that could affect mental health or physical health.

And so that was the focus. And then this book is about tracking three decades in a way. Like it’s stories. This book is mostly about stories. So people, they want stories, they like stories. And so trying to catch, get people’s attention through stories, but also to teach something. And and so then I picked stories that are covering from my own personal life.

The first book, a lot of people were, sorry, I’m gonna clear my throat. The first book was a lot of people wanted to hear more stories, more, more the mystical side of things. And so then I wanted to do something that was addressing that and speaking more about the kind of, the relevance of the mystical side of healing work.

And so I track over these 30 years of stories in my own life. When mystical things or mystical experiences happen to me, not necessarily because of planned medicine or psychedelics, but just from life. And then also some experiences that happened in ceremony or even in psychedelic therapy. So tracking those stories and how it shaped the course of my journey all the way to, the church of the Eagle in the condor and our work here in Arizona and the legal battle and all that kind of a journey, but also tracking this prophecy of the eagle in the condor and aversion from Peru that said that this last 30 years would be this big kind of change period, the nineties into the 2000 twenties.

And that’s a very interesting timeframe when a lot, so much has changed and the internet came, and the cell phone came, and so many other advances in science and technology and quantum physics and artificial intelligence. It’s very interesting shifting period that was in a way anticipated by indigenous astrology, at least in Peru and by other groups suggesting this would be this big time and it would be a very trying time and a difficult time where there would be so much disequilibrium and the ecosystem in the world, but also in the mental health of the human society.

And that it would be some time when this eagle in the condor and in this version, there are many other versions in this version. The eagle is in a way, you could say like the path of the mind and the other one, the condor, and this version is path of the heart that they would have to come together.

And so it’s about science and spirit coming together. So during this same 30 years of the psychedelic renaissance is this overlaps, maps in the research? You were just at the maps conference. So in the 1990s, the first psychedelic research started. 2010 started publishing 2010 to 2020 to now the psychedelic twenties, that they announced at maps.

And within medicine, the idea that this psychedelic medicine and psychedelic therapies rooted in these ancestral traditions with plant medicines and mushrooms, et cetera, is opening the door to allowing mystical experiences into the healthcare system. And ultimately it’s showing this relevance of the spiritual healing to modern health and wellbeing.

So the book is about weaving those things together, showing that, hey, we’re in this timeframe when some ancestral people prophesize that we need to address the mind and the heart, the science and the spirit would need to come together. They would need to bridge, they would need to soar together for us to move forward.

That if they don’t, we’re gonna have more problems than we already have. And so that’s one movement. And then the psychedelic research world has been for the last 30 years, creating stronger and stronger arguments of how spiritual wellbeing, how relevant it is to people’s healthcare, their mental health, and even to their physical health.

So the book is about ex exploring that, but it’s through stories from my own life and journeys, and trying to draw upon ancestral wisdom from indigenous traditions and also weave that into science and bridge it and then tell the story of somebody who’s just following their spiritual path, and trying to understand the kind of multidimensional mystery of life.

Sam Believ: So you mentioned the spiritual wellbeing, with in the scientific world, you’d need to. You need to have numbers. So how does one measure someone’s spiritual wellbeing or how does one

Dr. Joe Tafur: Yeah.

Sam Believ: So the spiritual

Dr. Joe Tafur: yeah it’s been, there are a number of measures that psych, so psychological questionnaires that have been validated.

And so they’ve been building their way up in medicine and medical research and psychological research to become established measures of spiritual wellbeing that have been some cases been correlated clinically to, to the way your body works. So they’re starting to bridge that, you have gratitude and psychological gratitude measures that have been correlated to inflammation in the blood.

So you have spiritual wellbeing measures of different kinds. There’s like a big questionnaire where they try to see. People’s kind of shift and their sense of meaning and purpose in their life and their, and then there’s a further one that I think is a little broader. It’s called the connectedness scale that’s come out of psychedelic research.

And the connectedness scale is assessment of through questions and questionnaire, but it’s been linked to healthcare outcomes. So it’s not just an idea, it’s not like somebody’s dogma. It’s actually stuff that’s tied to, to a reality, to a measurable reality. So maybe it’s not so perfect, but it does trend in that way.

So people’s idea of their sense of connectedness with themselves, with their bodies, with their emotions, with their loved ones, with their community, with their society, with their ecosystem, and with the universe is, is a measurable number that it’s a scale, the connectedness scale that’s been validated and published and, shown that if you can shift connectedness in individuals, so let’s say an ayahuasca ceremony or an ayahuasca retreat or in some kind of intervention that it’s a good prognosticator, that it would probably, you can probably show that may lead to long-term benefit.

And so they follow those people out to say, is that in fact true? So that’s using the research machine to assess this. So then all of a sudden it’s connected in scale. Maybe it’s abstract, maybe it’s just a psychological measure, but it does have some value, some measurable value that’s related to healthcare outcomes.

So that’s an example of what has come out of the psychedelic research world that has been trying to understand what is it that these people are getting out of these experiences. That is leading to this big change for them. So some of the research is showing you could probably say something more simple that they’re shifting their emotional processing.

They’re able to process emotional experiences from their past in a different kind of way. That it’s a, and that has a connection to their biology, to the physical function of their body and also to their psychology and how they’re triggered or they’re not triggered. And so what is it that’s driving that?

And what role does a bigger spiritual context, or at least a mystical context or a transcendent context play in facilitating that kind of shift in somebody’s being and. So that’s, again, that’s looks like the shifts in spiritual wellbeing from other studies. Again, there’s a separate questionnaire. I could pull out the name.

It’s a complicated acronym, but it’s a form of questionnaire that again, it’s like, it’s just mounting evidence. Say, okay, this is the one we’re using. This is, and that’s, as the research is published, you show everybody, this is the questionnaire, here’s the questions, here’s the scale, here’s the history of the publication of this particular scale, and how, what the evidence has been accumulating around this scale.

So that’s how you assess it. Yeah. But it’s more rooted in, like I said, a sense of connectedness, a sense of feeling, like I said, meaning and purpose. So how do we, what are the more universal concepts around spirituality? So it’s not about it’s a very, it’s very much about the personal relationship, with the universe, with the transcendent, the mystical side of life.

Sam Believ: Yeah. Speaking of connection, one of the things you can talk about is the importance of connection to nature to in the process of healing. I dunno if you wanna talk about this a little bit.

Dr. Joe Tafur: Yeah. I think that nature, so nature, nature connectedness is one of the connectedness scales.

That was before there was the more broad connectedness scale, or maybe at the same time, but parallel. Some people had just focused on nature connectedness. So in the psychedelic therapy world, if you could, they, there was some research that had demonstrated that if you could promote more nature connectedness in the individual, that they would be more likely to heal.

And so there’s something there about this connection to nature. And so then there’s a step further. There’s different perspective. You could just be psychological measure, oh, I feel more connected to nature. But we would go a step further and say that connectedness to nature, that’s, it’s a resource, that there’s a resource, that there’s a metaphysical resource, that there’s a spiritual relationship with the earth and with nature that provides guidance, that provides information, that provides peace.

That is an example of how harmony could exist, within the ecosystem. How there could be a stable, sustainable equilibrium formed here on this earth. So nature is our example to understand that, the people that think that the world is an empty chaos, that nothing matters.

Everything’s meaningless. There’s no point to anything. And it’s the forest, is somehow functioning on its own in some kind of rhythm and consciousness that many people across the world would, they acknowledge the, in some cultures, the divinity of that. That is, there is a sacredness to the existence of that.

And so then that becomes, the nature becomes an example of what a loving community looks like in the sense that it can support, without judgment. So I think that the nature and our connectedness to nature. It is something that most of the ancestral cultures around the world acknowledge that’s very important, our spiritual relationship with nature.

That all the, I would say, I would argue that all the sustainable cultures that we were aware of, so the meaning that they were able to coexist with intact ecosystems for maybe thousands of years. The only examples that we have of cultures that have done that are ones that somehow acknowledge their spiritual relationship with nature.

That’s integral. So a lot of ancestral culture in Columbia, for example, are very focused on that, that they don’t believe that you can achieve sustainability, that you will not come to a place where you clean, where the rivers are clean, where you live, until you acknowledge that you actually, there is an a mystical side of life.

There is a transcendent aspect to our existence, that the quantum physics and all the other physics and just being alive and being honest, that there is a mystery that exists. So then addressing this and trying to find some kind of right relationship, how they call it, some kind of way to come into peace and, there’s a lot of room for skepticism and questioning, but still moving in that direction that, that’s important.

That, that’s a value of yours that’s, that’s necessary for the long-term health and outcome. Here I am in United States, like the amount we’re really dealing with some heavy duty stuff here of the disrespect. They just have something that’s been going on for a long time.

They just published something last week that, colorectal cancer, like high rates in young people, 30 year olds, from, they said they’ve been feeding around the bush so long. What is it? Why? What could it be? And it’s the ultra processed foods, and the lack of the, poisoning the environment constantly.

And then the damage that it’s causing, here on the development of the youth, there’s, it’s a big issue here that’s a big mystery, like what’s going on with, whether it’s autism or these other things like so much environmental contamination and kind of disrespect over what it means to, to be in relationship with where you live.

And there’s immense suffering that is like bubbling up right now. It’s very intense, that the healthcare system, it’s like we probably cannot just deal with it, it’s gonna overwhelm the system and we’re just seeing it coming up now. So the concern is this, is this ignorance of these things?

Is it sustainable? And as far as we know, no, there’s no reason to think that it would be. Like, we have no argument that it would be. So then we’re on the edge of that cliff, and here in this culture, I think we’re really overlooking over the edge and seeing the way that’s bleeding over into other parts of the world.

And so it’s just okay, how do we relate to nature here in North America? The tribes, the indigenous tribes had a much different attitude towards. Like we say, the creation, within the, let’s say the monotheistic religions, the Judaism, Christianity, for example, that the creation would be considered sacred.

That it’s not a piece of garbage for you to use up and throw away, and that is, it’s impractical, but there’s some kind of deeper metaphysical consideration as well, in the mix there.

Sam Believ: Yeah, U US is a very unhealthy place. The world is getting unhealthy, but US is extra unhealthy.

When I went to maps and I’ve been there for a week, I felt terrible. Like just the food and something there, I physically, I felt were very ill. So you talk about, last 30 years from nineties the psychedelic renaissance. How far along are we? Like how’s that urinalysis, how is that looking?

How much is left for us still, hopefully better times are coming or maybe people embrace psychedelics more and other spiritual practices.

Dr. Joe Tafur: Yeah, it’s further than ever number one like that we know of. And in America, there was the, you were at the MAPS conference and the MDMA research that got, in America that got denied.

Like you said, this what you know, for your, as a tourist is this felt like a very unhealthy culture. That you comment and this culture that’s dominated the, the industry is dominating the government. And so there’s big questions around why was MDMA assisted therapy denied here when Australia said yes and Canada said yes.

So they’re moving forward. So thanks to the MAPS research conducted largely in the United States, Canada’s moving forward with MDMA, Canada’s also moving forward with some degree of psilocybin therapy. Australia’s moving forward with MDMA with some degree of psilocybin therapy as well within the United States.

There’s this MDMA research and the battle with the FDA continues. To try to find approval of these treatments. Psilocybin has breakthrough therapy status is in clinical research trials that are supposed to culminate in, I don’t know, a couple years. And while they do that, it’s been sup lending support to a lot of decriminalization movements that have allowed for mushrooms and other plant medicines to become decriminalized in a number of states with even tracks towards therapeutic use within Colorado, in New Mexico, in Washington, in Oregon, for example.

So that’s growing. It’s not going backwards even with the, the changing politics, it’s not going backwards as far as we can tell. They just secured $50 million for ibogaine research in in Texas, very conservative part of the country. At least here in the United States, we’re seeing that because of this unhealthiness that you observe.

That the suffering in the disease is so intense that they have to look for these kind of options. So I believe that it’s, we just keep moving forward towards making more psychedelic therapies and trauma-informed care available, including, more legal support for the Sacred Plant medicines.

Since we brought our case across last year there’s been two other, after 15 years of no legal kind of permission for communities working with Ayahuasca now since we got past, there’s two more, and then there’s a few more that are coming. And so there’s a lot more open-mindedness that’s happening towards these things.

And so I’m not sure how far we are. I guess I just see it keep growing and growing in the United States. Psychedelic research is happening at all the top universities. I don’t know of one that’s like against doing this research. I’m not aware, and so it just, how could it not grow? There’s a resistance to it, but the growth continues, so it seems to continue growing.

I don’t know, ketamine is legal. And so trying to find the ketamine assisted therapy and create good examples within that practice and to also confront the, the abuses that happen in that world. So that’s happening. And so then meanwhile I was in Brazil and they have the cannabis medical conference and then there they went psychedelic research and plant medicine support at that conference.

And that was there, that was this year in Columbia. I don’t know. There’s movements that are trying to encourage more psychedelic therapies. In Mexico, there’s, there’s iboga treatments, facilities where people are going. People go to Jamaica to do mushroom ceremonies. It’s just, they’re just more and more opportunities and more and more open-mindedness, I think again and again.

I think it’s going as fast as it can go.

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Yeah, that’s very promising. To see. And you mentioned MDMA and ketamine and new kind of psychedelics. I know you’re grounded in the world of ayahuascan old, traditional psychedelics. So how do you see those both worlds coexisting? And what can both of those modalities learn from each other?

Dr. Joe Tafur: Yeah I think first of all, not everyone is gonna to drink ayahuasca, nor should they, so it’s like, how many people do you see at your center? I guess you see a lot of people, but turns out there’s way more people on the planet Earth. And as far as meeting the demand of the amount of suffering that exists is, it’s really formidable.

And so you’re gonna have to have multiple strategies. That’s just a reality. And so within the United States, as I said, while, there’s a few, sacred plant medicine, spiritual communities, including communities that work with ayahuasca. A few, there’s underground use, and there’s all this other stuff going on.

But the MDMA psychotherapy is illegal. Psilocybin clinical work is very limited. Psilocybin, spiritual ceremonial work is very limited. So ketamine, is the legal option that can grow freely to address the problem here, as an example within the healthcare system, even potentially be paid for by the healthcare system one day.

Who’s gonna pay for all this? So it’s so important to me that the options that are actually available to the society are there because if the society doesn’t change at a larger scale. The problem is devastating. So that’s the first thing. As far as what they can learn from each other, I think they can learn a lot from each other.

And I think they are learning a lot from each other. And so I am really interested in, I and I am involved in teaching and bringing people to Columbia, to Peru to take psychedelic therapists who want to learn about ceremony in the spiritual context. Those people who are guiding people in clinical settings, even with ketamine or with psilocybin or with MDMA, like many times they encounter like spiritual phenomenon that happen, when you open up those portals and those spaces and they’re not getting a lot of guidance around how to address, this other mystical side of what we’ve been talking about.

So you have the ancestral traditions that have a lot of experience to draw from. And so we are trying to connect those two. Areas so they can learn from that and learn from the guidance and draw upon that. And eventually we see people here with Ketamine, for example, including myself okay, bringing live ceremonial singing to those settings that there are people who train and have experience and gifts in those areas.

And like why won’t it eventually turn into that the way it is traditionally, not just recorded music, but also, shamanic or energetically conscious exchange. So that’s beginning. It’s very, it’s in its early stages, but we’re involved in that and in trying to connect those two kind of ways.

And then on the other side, from the science side there’s so much to be gained, that some of the ancestral traditions and the beauty and the magic of focusing maybe on the energetic side of things so much. But there’s a lot of psychological knowledge to draw from, that’s beneficial to the tribal people as well and the kind of healing work they’re working on with their own families.

And so just drawing upon the experience of Western psychotherapy and western science and that there’s just so much to learn about, how these things are interacting with the brain and the mind, and the body. And it’s useful, to, to recognize also people that might be more at risk that, hey, this is something that’s maybe not so safe to do.

This isn’t, maybe we should be more careful, like the medical screening side of people going to an ayahuasca, a retreat or a retreat center that works with ayahuasca, for example, like the Western Diagnostics is huge in helping avoid problems in those settings. So there’s a lot of knowledge to draw from.

Sam Believ: Yeah, it’s really cool to see that. Synergy, so to speak in collaboration if it happens this way and the both sides take the best from each other while growing simultaneously. But yeah what you’re saying is correct. I’ve calculated that in order to give 8 billion people Ayahuasca, you’d need to give 1 million people.

You’d need to have a 1 million people ceremony every day for 30 years, which is obviously not possible and would not be enough at all, because as people would need to do it over and over again. So it is, I think it forever is gonna stay limited in let’s say it’s for the very special people or very interested people in it because there’s just.

It’s just hard. And you yourself working at Nivera and seeing that format of of retreat, you probably know how difficult it is also to, to organize and to make it happen and how non-scalable it is. From a strictly business point of view, you can’t really scale that. Let’s say we have a retreat Lara and we host, we do three retreats a month and we host anywhere from 60 to 90 people every month, which is a lot.

But yeah, if I wanted to, I’m completely burned myself down to the ground. I could maybe start one, one or two more retreats. So that’s a couple hundred people a month, but still, it’s not enough to make a dent. However, another thing you touched on, I think that’s where the, my personal hopes are from the point of view of spreading the medicine is training the facilitators because, you said you wanna bring people that serve the medicine, you wanna train them in the more shamanic traditional approaches. And that’s separately from that conversation, I came to the same conclusion that it’s necessary. Because even if you’re a psychiatrist, it doesn’t mean that you know what to do in the ceremony from a spiritual point of view.

And, in the clinical setting, they don’t really use all the tools that are used in traditional ceremony. And also there’s a space because all, most of the facilitation training programs in us they lack practical experience. It’s it’s all very technical. So I don’t know how far along did you get in there, but if you ever want to collaborate I would more more than be more than happy to do something together because we do have a lot of people and there’s a lot of opportunities to to practice.

But actually this December we start with doing a first, have a retreat where people that, doctors and therapists that are coming, they can they can participate in the retreat. They pay a little extra but there’s a training program on top of that. I’m collaborating with the few people.

Some of them I’m at maps and we, and they will be able to do the retreat, learn and also take that expense out of their taxes and learn continuous learning credits. So that’s my first attempt in, in that direction because if we were able to get a lot of people like that they wanna serve the medicine.

N not ayahuasca, but they wanna work with ketamine or MDMA or whatever else gets legalized, and then we can train them on how to do the shamanic part. And the ation part, because let’s be honest, practicing on ayahuasca is the best way because of how hard it is. And, sitting in a Cain clinic is much more difficult experience than being in an ayahuasca ceremony.

It’s just more intense. Yeah. Do you have any thoughts about that? Any ideas?

Dr. Joe Tafur: Yeah, everybody’s trying to do different things and so I don’t know what’s harder or not harder, that’s very, that’s an opinion, that people might have different opinions about that kind of thing.

But I think it’s important to create those opportunities for those people that are getting into psychedelic therapy and so yeah I’m doing that myself and. And like with these other, they didn’t got enough on my plate right now, I don’t know about new projects or new collaborations.

They’re just trying to keep the ones we’re going, we’re doing, trying to get those established and functioning. And, but I think it’s really important to do it, but I don’t think that it’s like these are cultural shifts and so the focus and the business model and scale up and all that is, supposedly because they’re trying to address the big problem, that’s not why people really scale up.

They’re trying to make more money. That’s why they scale up. And and so I think that new pro, all these programs, like you said, trying to come up with ways to do it where it’s sustainable, where it’s takes care of the workforce and not gonna burn everybody out and create examples.

So that’s gonna take multiple people. So the idea is you create more example, look, this is what we’re doing and this is how we’re helping, and hey, you, maybe you guys can do it too, and then you’ll also help, but the idea that somebody needs to monopolize the whole thing, in order to get rich, would be the main reason.

It just not, doesn’t work out very well, as you mentioned, because it takes such more care, to do what we’re trying to do. So it’s oh, this is not a completely capitalist model. And so that’s part of the issue of the change. It’s okay, are there small businesses and things that are sustainable, that do well enough that can keep something going that they really feel good about and that they believe in?

That it’s not just about the venture capital, it has already come and gone through psychedelics. They’re the fantasy and the thrill of thinking, oh wow, this is such an exciting treatment. This is such a big treatment. We could get rich. Alls we have to do is what we already got rich from cannabis, or we already got rich from crypto.

So they think, oh, alls we do is just put our money into here because, they’re so smart because they made so much money so young that they must be so intelligent, but then as it turns out, when you get into the work that you’re doing you realize that it’s yeah, it’s very difficult.

It’s tough, it’s not fun all the time. It’s not just a thrill. It’s not just a cheap vacation or whatever, or a luxury vacation. It’s serious. It’s heavy, and the profit margins aren’t what you thought it was gonna be. And so once that kind of reveals itself, they go away. They were in it for the profit margin.

There was a thrill around, oh my God, I, oh my God, I got so high. Oh wow. I saw so much. But really what was boring was, oh, we’re not making as much money as I thought we were gonna make. So then they leave. And that’s what we’ve seen a lot of. And so the idea that there would be investment in capital to scale up, there’s few examples.

There are examples of people that are pulling that off. It’s, again it’s so hard, it’s so hard to maintain the integrity, around this kind of work to keep it on track. And so I think that it’s so important that there are good examples. And so the good examples means that before they think about scaling up, before they think about growing, that they get what they’re doing stable, and otherwise there’s really nothing to grow.

And so that’s what we’re trying to get to. And I think it’s a patient process.

Sam Believ: Yeah. It’s, it is an interesting topic for me personally. The, and forever topic, this balance between spirituality and helping people and then the business, because unfortunately no matter how amazing we are and wanting to help people, we are still existing within this capitalist society.

So it’s kinda like you have to defeat it with its own tools. ’cause if you can’t. At least for now, I’ve not figure out how to do something without making money. And then, like from a strictly business point of view, it’s the people that solve the biggest problems are the people that make the most money.

Like in, in a sort of, is that true? Is that completely true? ID idealizing it, but at least that’s what a, that’s what a capitalist would say.

Dr. Joe Tafur: Yeah.

Sam Believ: Yeah. But with the retreat model, you can run a retreat, but it takes, as you say, so much love and care that the moment you try to spread your effort, it all falls apart.

That’s what it seems to me. But but at the same time I remember it was up to the ceremony that I sat down. I was like I feel so great. How can I get everyone else to feel the same way? And I made this calculation. I’m like, oh, this is. Very difficult. So I hope somebody figures it out eventually.

Not to make a lot of money, but to, yeah. To help a lot of people and hopefully make some money still, because of course. No, I

Dr. Joe Tafur: think it has to be, it has to be, like I say, you gotta be profitable to be charitable. Paul Staman always says that, and I think it’s true. So you want it to be, profitable and you, and people deserve to make a living, doing what they’re doing, especially trying to help.

And so I’m all for that, and I think that’s really important. And it won’t sustain without that, it’ll fade away out competed by everything else that’s out there. So I think it’s really important, but I think it’s the growth model, that people want to grow before they’re ready because of ambition.

And that’s the part that keeps falling apart. And we’ve seen it fall apart in the psychedelic world of. Multiple organizations that grew. I don’t know. There’s this field trip with a group that, I don’t know, I’m not trying to trash field trip. I’m just saying they were planning to do ketamine retreats and all this stuff, and they tried to grow very fast and it, and they overextended and they fell out.

It didn’t work. And that’s happened a few times now. There are a few retreat centers within Ayahuasca world that do expand and are able to create, more environments. And so it does go on in those worlds. It’s just, yeah, it’s tricky, it’s not so easy to do. So people are trying to do that.

And I think it’s just, everything’s changing. Everything’s changing all the time. And so it’s unstable. So then you’re trying to find something that you enjoy, that you’re able to sustain. That you feel good about. And then if you can make it, if you can grow it in an effort to help more people and also to be more successful, great.

But I think the reality is just that’s not a, it’s not a slam dunk, it’s not just ’cause Oh, this was so big for me and for the people that I work with that, oh my, this is gonna be huge and, we’re gonna run it so big. And I say for example, in America, the rehabs, there’s no the rehab business is it’s so personal, so it’s so deeply personal, the work that they do with people.

And you really don’t see like a brand name growing in some big way across the country to be able to handle that. It’s just, it’s not common in mental health care. To see a large scale business behind it, it’s something that’s been difficult to maintain. And so maybe part of the nature of that. So then you have other formats, the people that really want to help.

For example, you have people like Santo Dime, the Brazilian, where it’s a church and they have a way of approaching the medicine and the community that’s is not a capitalist model, and they’ve probably grown more than any other ayahuasca utilizing community, then the old fashioned was not a capitalist model either.

The tradition, they’re just doing it as part of their spirituality and yeah, spread across the whole Amazon. In that case, even that wasn’t enough to fix everything, in those areas. So I think there’ll be some element of it that will be, that’ll grow beyond, the capitalist model.

But a retreat center is a retreat center. You offer a special service. People are coming, they’re staying, you’re feeding them, you’re taking care of them. You’re translating for them. They can take a shower in the jungle, all these things. So it’s a special service that, that you’re offering people an immersion experience that I think warrants, yeah.

Its own business, but there will be to, for the change to grow into the world, it’ll have to extend beyond the business model.

Sam Believ: Yeah. I agree. There’s some, something else needs to be figured out, and I don’t think it’s been figured out before. That’s that’s something I think about a lot.

But the church model is very interesting. And you mentioned Santo and not a business model. We’re talking about a model of how to spread healing Yeah. To, to far and wide. And obviously you’re a part of a church as well, right? The, yeah. Eagle and Conor. Yes. Te tell us more about that.

Like, how does it look like I’ve interviewed a few people that run psychedelic churches and obviously, tell us about that. How does it look like? I only know this world, the retreat former indigenous youth and also Yeah. For us tell us, I think our community,

Dr. Joe Tafur: they don’t like being put into this psychedelic church category because we feel like it’s, yeah.

It’s a sacred plant medicine tradition. So we’re like carrying on the tradition that we learned in, in, in Peru. And we continue in our connections to ancestral traditions in Columbia and also our connections to ancestral traditions here in the United States with the Native Americans that are part of our community and drawing upon those deeper traditions.

And so then it’s just a small scale. We’re a small scale, community that just went through the big process to try to be legal. And we just are, we’re starting from very little, so we don’t have a lot of investment or anything. And so we’re still securing a location and we’ve been just doing it in people’s homes and just very small scale kind of operation that’s just very grassroots and focused on our community.

So we’re like we just wanna build out our community. We wanna make sure that the people that we’re offering the ceremony to are part of our community, and that we are gonna be able to follow up with them and be aware of what’s happening with them. And they don’t just come and go, but that it’s actually investing into, the future of the community and seeing, okay, what’s the real, what, what really happens when you offer this to people within the same place?

And over time, are they making progress or not? And so we’re focused on that. And so we are also. Dedicated to honoring the ancestral traditions, the indigenous traditions across cultures in the world. So not just obviously here in Americas with the indigenous traditions, but encouraging our, members to learn more about their own ancestral culture and to honor ancestral culture.

That it was more connected to nature, that was more connected to spirituality and bringing these things back online. And also encouraging the connection to health and wellbeing that we feel like, okay, this spiritual practice is has, there, there’s potential therapeutic benefit of spiritual practice.

And so we’re saying that if it is like genuine spiritual practice, that it should be the therapeutic. That it should help your health and wellbeing. How we started the discussion today, that it’s like if what we’re doing is helping you, that it should be helping you at some level, like mentally or emotionally or spiritually or maybe even physically and that’s, or in your relationships, with each other, with your family, et cetera.

That’s what we’re trying to help improve. So we’re just trying to be an example, like I said, of we’re not saying we have all the answers. We’re not saying we figured it out. We haven’t figured out the financial side of it. We haven’t figured it out, but we think that we’re trying to approach it with integrity and doing our best to address the issues and the concerns and the problems that come up.

And like I said, share the example with the larger so that other people will pick up and do something. The people are playing soccer all over the world, not just because obviously there’s a huge business around soccer, but they just do it. People are playing music all over the world, there’s big business around music, but that’s not the only thing that’s going on with music.

So just letting these things grow from the ground up.

Sam Believ: How was your, were you able to get the exemption with the da?

Dr. Joe Tafur: Yeah, we did. One was, we got the, we got it last year. Yeah, I think or I dunno if it was last year or the year before. I think it was last year. I believe we got the exemption.

Yeah.

Sam Believ: Congratulations. That’s very exciting. Yeah. Thank you.

Dr. Joe Tafur: Yeah, we got it. Yeah, we sued the government and they settled with us, out of court. And settled. The court was aware of the settlement and so they settled. And part of the settlement was that we got our DA license.

And so we’ve been renewed a couple times now ’cause there was a couple different processes. So now we’ve imported Ayahuasca, brought Ayahuasca from Peru to the United States a few times and we’re legal. So that was what our fight was. Yeah, we fought to do that. And also again, like we’re not responsible for everybody else and they want to do it.

It’s okay, start your church, start your community, put your, if you want to do it this way, if you want to bring it legally through South America, here’s the path. And so two other churches have gotten it right after us, so we broke the ice and there’s more and behind them. And so we wanted to break the ice.

And our argument was this is a legitimate spiritual tradition. It should be treated like, for under religious freedom. And the concern was that, oh, the Santa a die in the United States is considered legal. And same with the UDV, the Brazilian churches that are syncretic with the Christianity.

And we’re not against that, but we just, they felt like the indigenous traditions or the traditions that were learned drawing upon the more ancestral tradition were not given the same respect. They were not given the same dignity. And we felt that was important to address. So we fought for that and we got it.

So that’s a sign of a big change. And here. In the us I don’t know. In my experience personally, for example, with the DEA, they’ve been very supportive, with the process. So it’s a bureaucracy that maybe it’s not the greatest to have to deal with, but it’s not that bad and we’re moving forward.

Yeah. So it’s a big success for us. And it’s the Church of the Eagle and the condor in celebration of the prophecy.

Sam Believ: Congratulations. It sounds like something very difficult to pull off suing the government. It’s, it sounds complex. So I’m happy you did it because last time I’ve, I was aware you were still in it and so yeah, it’s it’s very helpful for the other people and churches and legalization or just change in the way people in US look at it at large as well through, through this process.

Yeah, we’re almost wrapping up, but few more things I’d wanna talk about is you mentioned mystical experiences. If you wanna talk about this what, what happens when you work with Yeah.

Dr. Joe Tafur: I think that it’s just that the idea of a mystical experience or some kind of experience that’s I might shut this there’s different, obviously when you’re working at a retreat center works with ayahuasca plant medicine and the idea that okay, people, some mystical experiences are very relevant to, to what happens to them there.

I think that’s maybe not every time, but it’s common that would be play a role. And there was a publication here in the United States a couple years ago that also was presented at the previous maps. Certain experiences from Emory University saying spiritual, existential, religious or theological experiences.

Trying to give a broad, so that might feel spiritual to the person or might be existential challenging the meaning of the universe for them or something of their life and death, their existence or religious or theological, like their kind of understanding of the, these things.

And so that these kind of experiences, they said, at least within the psychedelic therapy world, they said it’s very common. When they observe and study everyone, they realize, I’m gonna shut this just real quickly. Just be a second.

They realize that is this very common, if you were to ask people at your center, after a retreat. Did you have a, non-ordinary experience? I think it would be pretty high percentage, of people. So then they say in the same paper they publish, they said, yeah. And then these cert experiences, beyond, like there was previously in the academic world a mystical experience with the questionnaire and a scale that was there.

But they said with the cert experiences that they’re very, they said these were really important in the person’s outcome. When they clinically relevant. So the person if in their wellness journey, did they get better? Did they find therapy? Did they have spiritual healing from their process?

It turns out that if they had this certain experience that a lot of times that was very relevant to their process. So it’s the idea of a transcendent experience. If you look at the mystical questionnaire, you’re talking about people having experiences. Where maybe they, they feel like they transcend, time and space, or they feel their ego dissolve or they feel themselves come into a union with the cosmos, with infinity.

That they begin to feel this kind of gnosis of this and knowing, and a connection to some kind of inner healing intelligence or maybe a connection to the intelligence of nature. What people call non-ordinary experiences, but that those could also take on, deeper kind of questions and understanding about what they find meaningful in their life, what they think is really significant in their life, what they would consider like sacred in their priorities.

If I were to die without addressing this, that’s a big deal. What am I doing here in this life? So addressing those kind of things is really important in general, actually. But then with the sacred plant medicines and some of the psychedelic therapies that some of these things are brought into the forefront.

That maybe the society, the culture is bearing these things, over material concerns, et cetera, that are real. But sometimes they might get carried away and they get, overly prioritized. And so then the person goes through their life and maybe they were really successful and they’re, great capitalist and they got so rich and they have all the money and they have everything they wanted, but then they’re not happy and they don’t understand and maybe they even get, become very unhappy, maybe they become so depressed and lost that they wanna kill themselves despite achieving everything that they were guided to achieve.

So it’s okay, what is that other element? What is that X factor that would’ve made them happier? How can they come to understand what that is? And is that happiness and that connection to some kind of deeper kind of metaphysical understanding of the course of their life, does that actually improve their health?

Not only would they feel better, but do they have less medical problems, less mental health problems? Do they bring more, joy into the world? Do they bring more goodness into the thing? Do they take better care of the nature and the world? So there’s something there that, the mystical side that there, if we’re trying to understand the nature of existence and, our life on this planet, et cetera, that there’s some, like I said, there’s some mystical side of that.

And so all the cultures all over the world have been, have all developed a lot of spiritual practices that are designed around helping people get in touch with that. And then if you’re in a culture, in a society where you’ve just been really closing the door to that, then sometimes plant medicine or psychedelic therapies can really help reopen you to something that you’ve been very disconnected from.

That may actually just be part of the nature of reality.

Sam Believ: Okay. Thank you, Joe. Thank you for for another episode. I think it was really great. Lastly, just tell the audience where to find you, your books where you want to send them.

Dr. Joe Tafur: Yeah, so then the new book, the old book, and the new book is available on amazon.com and through Audible, you can get it.

They also have it on ebook there. And then we have our activities, our retreats for the healthcare providers on modern spirit.org. And then I also have my own website, dr joe defer.com, so that’s where you can learn more about our work.

Sam Believ: Thank you, Joe. I guess I’ll see you again when you write another book.

Dr. Joe Tafur: Thank you, Sam. Good luck with what you’re doing.

Sam Believ: Guys, you are listening to Ayahuasca podcast. As always, we do the host and live, 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. Laira connect, heal, grow. Guys, I’m looking forward to hosting you.

In this episode of Ayahuasca Podcast, host Sam Believ (founder of http://www.lawayra.com) has a conversation with , the creator of the Adeptus Psychonautica YouTube channel. Rob is known for his grounded, humorous, and skeptical approach to altered states, sharing honest self-experiments, retreat reviews, and long-form reflections as “an ordinary person having extraordinary experiences.”

We touch upon topics of:

• How an Aya retreat led Rob to start his YouTube channel (02:55–04:45)
• Good retreats vs badly run retreats and red flags to watch for (05:10–11:40)
• Spiritual ego, cult dynamics, and predatory facilitators (08:40–12:30)
• Separating the medicine experience from the retreat organization (10:00–11:50)
• Exploring different Aya traditions beyond Peru (13:10–15:20)
• What it means to be a psychonaut and inner exploration (16:00–19:40)
• Creativity, storytelling, and integration after difficult life periods (21:00–23:30)
• Healing family relationships through shared ceremonies (23:30–25:30)
• Consciousness exploration and daily practice vs ceremony work (26:00–29:20)

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

Find more about Rob and his work on YouTube at Adeptus Psychonautica.

Transcript

Rob: You’re listening to ayahuasca podcast.com. Once you experience truly psychedelic experience or truly spiritual experience, I would compare it to like when you have your first orgasm as like a teenager, suddenly the world just opens up you thinking, wow, there is something else here. It’s just a whole new world, and I just find that fascinating and particularly that.

Dive into the same experience and have just such a radically different experience each time. Your worldview can be changed, each time. You can discover new stuff about yourself each time. For me, I’ve always liked that experience of just being like amazed by whatever’s going on in that experience. And I tend to think of as an inward experience that what I’m experiencing is me, my subconscious.

I don’t really subscribe to ideas of this is aliens being beaming ideas into my head. I flip flop a little bit on some of these worldviews. But even if we’re just take at that, that this is an inward experience and the depth and richness of that experience is just so vast, then it is, how could you not be fascinated and want to explore more of it?

So that’s why I’m a psych arts. I think we live in a golden age. For someone like me from the north, north of Manchester, to be able to get a metal tube fly across the world, sit with these ancient traditions, be welcomed into these kind of ceremonies, have these mind blowing. Soul expanding experiences.

It is a privilege beyond all privileges. I’m just so grateful. Yeah. I live in this time where I can even know these things exist. If you rewind the clock 50, 60 years, we’ve lived at the perfect age of like information, travel capability, just to be able to do this. I feel such gratitude that these tradition.

You know these tribes share these things with us ’cause it’s amazing.

Sam Believ: Hi guys and welcome to Ayahuasca podcast. As always, we you the host, Sam. Today I’m having an interview with Rob. Rob is the creator of Adapta Psycho Nortica YouTube channel, one of the most trusted channels exploring plant medicine and altered states known for his humor, skepticism, and raw honesty. He breaks down intense inner experiences in a way that’s relatable and ground that.

His channel mixes a long form, self experiments, retreat, reviews, and deep dives into the psychology of intelligence. Rob is also one of the few creators openly discussing the risks from predatory facilitators to spiritual bypassing to traps of chasing cheek experiences. He calls himself, an ordinary person having an extra ordinary experiences.

This episode is sponsored by Lara Ayahuasca Retreat. At Laira, we combine affordability, accessibility, and authenticity. Laira, connect, heal, grow. Guys, I’m looking forward to hosting you, Rob. Welcome to the show. Cheers. I’m pleasure for you, mate. As having you on before we start and tell a story about how you got here, tell us how did you get into this?

To starting a YouTube channel about psychedelics. How did this came into your life?

Rob: Yeah, it actually, it came in from being on an Ayahuasca retreat. And one of the, the downloads I got during that particular retreat was I had a lot of bad habits, a lot of mindless habits, just like extended playing video games, just doom, all the usual kind of, modern stuff.

And I wanted to change that. And it’s kinda logically, if you’re gonna offload some bad habits, the best way to, to get that to stick is to fill the gap with good habits. So what is the good habit and the encouragement was to do something creative. I used to do film studies at college when I was younger.

And while I’ve been on these retreats, I’d just been doing what everyone does, taking lots of pictures, taking lots of little videos, not quite knowing what to do with it, and then it just kinda came through. Okay, why don’t you. Edit all this stuff together as some sort of travel blog was on, was my first idea or just a kind of blog of my experiences.

And so I did that. I then got the idea to review some of the retreats that I’d been on because by that time I’d been on some really great retreats. I’d bit of some absolutely horrific retreats. And so I thought I wanted to amplify the good ones and call out the bad ones. Yeah I made a few of these retreat review videos also along with a couple of just.

My personal experiences with medicine and yeah, I was kinda surprised it, it took off, it started to get a bit of a following and and people seem to like and resonate with the fact that I wasn’t coming at this from this angle of trying to be a guru or a shaman or just, I’m just like, setting the intro.

I’m just an ordinary person having these extraordinary experiences and people seem to click with that. So it just took off and I started doing more and more content and that’s where it got to.

Sam Believ: Cool story. I think good hap good things. That’s how they happen. They just yeah, all over the place.

Kinda like me getting into this line of work. But what is and I like that reasonability. That’s, I would like to believe I have a similar. Similar way of seeing those things. And then kinda working in this space you talked about great retreats, war, bad retreats. Te tell me your worst ever retreat experience.

Rob: Yeah, no worries. And it’s, it is easy ’cause it was my very first one, so it’s surprising that I came back to to do another one. But yeah, my first retreat experience was in Switzerland. ‘Cause yeah, I wanted to try I live in Switzerland. I wanted to try and do this as. Simply as possible.

So yeah, went with a, an organization called Inner Mastery who is quite big around Europe. They put on a lot of retreats and it was, they’re just complete cowboys. It was the higher space they would pack in as many people as possible. You would be served by, I don’t wanna be too derogatory, but basically like kids who.

With good intentions who wanted to serve the medicine, but they’d paid this organization to be like, become facilitators. And it’s not cheap. The amount I did a video breaking down, like the kind of, it was almost like a Scientology kind of structure of how much you pay them. But yeah, I went to this retreat with it was my wife at the time.

They packed like 50 of us into a room. It was literally shoulder to shoulder. We were like that. They. They didn’t give buckets to vomit. They just gave you like plastic bags to throw up into. And as soon as they were talking, it was because I, I’ve been into psychics like 35 years now, and they were just, it was just full of woo, full of bullshit.

It was just run horribly. It was just one of the most uncomfortable experiences ever. But there was something there where I got a little the medicine was I’ve said not great. But there was something there. I thought, okay, this I’ll explore a little bit more here. So the next retreat I found was a a more local group, like a group of friends.

Basically, we just put it a bit like you described when you first started doing it. And again, I didn’t super connect with the medicine, but I, again, I could see there was something there. So I thought, okay, that I was like four ceremonies in. At that point I thought, okay, I’m gonna give this one last try.

Then I’ll know whether this Aya ask Think is bullshit or not. I thought if I’m gonna do that, let’s go to the source. Went to South America, into the Amazon, and did it there. And that was my lights of, okay, wow, this and that was actually a really great retreat. So that was what I came back and from that like a believer.

And that was about, yeah, roughly about 10 years ago now.

Sam Believ: First of all, congrats on persisting. Yeah. Because, I was getting do so many great things for you, but you could have been like, oh, this is just what it is and I’m gonna bounce. There is definitely in this space, there’s there’s a little too much woo and a lot of people that don’t really know what they’re doing, they kinda use Woo to justify Yeah.

Bad behaviors. I dunno if you wanna talk about that sort, the fluffy, like lots of words and little meaning have you noticed that in those kinds of places?

Rob: Yeah. And al also just the, the, there’s certainly that, there’s certainly places where I been where they’re very much just trying to you’ve basically gotta be a believer.

You’ve gotta believe whatever the, there’s so many different traditions and there’s so many different. Versions. Some are very new agey, some are very culty, some are just very traditional talking around lets hot the plants and mother ayahuasca and I’m fine with all of that.

It’s just on. If I have to join the cult to, to then I’m that point, I’m I’m not issues. I just wanna be there to have my experience. I’m there to certainly experience the tradition, but I don’t wanna feel like I’m being like a, a gun against the head to do it. And then you then you get these things, if you have an experience where you don’t connect with the medicine, oh, it’s ’cause you didn’t believe in mother io.

Ask me enough. It’s because ’cause you’d have faith in the great leader enough. And that kind of stuff. I’d, I just find it really putrid. So the retreats where I’ve had the most benefit is the ones where you really, you’re guided through the experience, but you’re not, like I say, required to fall on, jump into the cult kind of thing.

Sam Believ: Yeah. I totally agree with that with that vision. And what I like to say is a good retreat is where the information comes from. The ayahuasca itself. Yeah. And what the retreat does is they just basically. Help you go through that process, but you obviously had the bad experience, but something that stick to stick into you.

So would you say better Ayahuasca is still better than no Ayahuasca experience or you’d say like better in no ayahuasca

Rob: or just the excellent one? The thing I like to do, particularly with what I’m talking about, retreat centers, you’ve got to, and I think this is difficult for a lot of people, but you’ve gotta pass out the experience with the medicine.

From the actual experience of the center and the people, because you can, you could be at the best, most luxurious center in the world and have a nightmarish experience with the medicine, or you could be in a shack in the woods, one-on-one with some village shaman and have the most transcendent experience ever.

And I think people struggle with that. So say for the horrific retreats I just described earlier, there were people that are having very preferred experiences with the medicine. And when I came back and said this was cowboy-ish, this was run awfully, this was not a good experience.

I got a lot of, criticism for that. Oh no. The come, the medicine’s wonderful. I’m not talking excited about the medicine, the medi medicine experiences over here that doesn’t justify sticking this number of people in room with three facilitators for 50 people. It was, so I try and pull those two things apart.

I do think, yeah, I think even at that shittier sort of retreat center, there was something there in the metastatic. I thought, okay, there’s something here worth exploring, just not with these guys. Yeah, and I would, and I’d encourage anybody to do that. Just it’s, yeah. Don’t I, what I see a lot of is.

Because people are having such a profound experience in medicine, they start to deify a little bit, like particularly with shamans and stuff like that. So in South America, you have this profound medical medicine experience and then it’s like the shaman gave me this. They’re to sort of power, powerful.

You get, shamans put on pedestals and the centers I’ve liked the most is where the shamans are just the most. Going to earth guys they will sit back and say, Hey, what I’m doing is orchestrating the space. Yeah. I am not giving you this experience. Of course I’m serving the medicine, I’m holding the space, I’m making it safe container, but I’m just a dude.

I’m a dude and this is my calling. And I really appreciate that compared to the guys who just wanna be worshiped, which is, again, it, that just goes in all sorts of weird directions. And you start to see yeah, very inappropriate sexual behavior and stuff like that. It’s, yeah it could be a bit messy.

Sam Believ: The ego, spiritual ego. That’s the most important factor. Like when you ask me about our team, that’s what I told you. That’s what I’m most afraid of. And that’s why we filter. Because those people, they also tend to be, they’re very impressive in the way they present themselves. But it’s like once you learn to see them, you’re like no, we don’t want any of that.

Yeah. Tell us about how you got here.

Rob: To hear in particular it’s funny ’cause I’d had a bit of a kind of blind spot to. Yeah, doing ayahuasca in Columbia. I’d say really doing it anywhere outside of Peru. I think that’s where I, that’s where I had my first major experience. I love the Amazon jungle.

I think even if you go to the Amazon and take Ayahuasca out to the equation, it’s just paradise. It’s just such a beautiful location. So there’s definitely a place in my heart for that. But I think, and although I’d, I did experience various different centers around around Peru. In, yeah, in the Sacred Valley, in the jungle still.

I, I was very focused on p Peru and I think a lot of it’s ’cause I really enjoyed the shabo tradition of ceremonies. It’s very different to what happens here, but I just that’s what works me. Stick with that. And so yeah, I never really considered Columbia for for Ayahuasca until you reached out to me.

And is you invited me here to, to the center. And now that I’m here, I see it. I’m just kinda yeah I’m almost cringing a little bit at just, God, why did, I don’t want to, explore more and so to experience a different tradition, which is so different to what I’m used to, but so beautiful when it’s all right.

And I think that’s something I’m gonna have to really make an effort to get across to my audience because I think there is a lot of value in experiencing these different traditions and I think it’s just like with anything you can very easily get into a sort of a comfort zone of what you know.

And because this is great, it must be the best and there’s nothing else right there with experiencing. And I like to think of myself as a bit of a. A bit adventurous in this regard, like trying different traditions. So I’m super grateful that I’ve Yeah, got the opportunity to come here to lair and ex experience this England tradition.

And yeah, it’s beautiful. It’s and now I’m a bit conflicted ’cause there’s a part of me that will want to come back here, but then there’s a part of me that wanna carry on that journey experience both. So it’s interesting. You should do both.

Sam Believ: I try to, but yeah, I like to say, I like to see this analogy.

It’s if IAS is like flour. Then you can do, but you can do so many things with flour. Like you can make dumplings or you can make pizza, or you can make pasta, or you can make bread or pie. Yeah, those are like different traditions. They kinda use it properly and you’ll still fill your belly up, but it’s like in so many different ways and it’s beauty of it that like this entire world and it is just ayahuasca alone, but there’s also other medicines and different traditions and so many of them were lost.

But, so we kinda. We’re lucky that this one did survive. And it’s a, I can’t help but be grateful that this exists because it’s kinda it’s what’s missing in our, lives now in sort of western world, this sort unknown, ’cause we think oh, everything has been discovered. You’re a au you’re like if I would think au I would imagine a person like you, like experimenting and a au like, is like astronaut, right? It’s like someone who explores Yeah. Explore the inner world rather than, so talk to us about that. What is what is it being a psycho note, why did you become one and why should more people, do it as well?

Rob: Yeah the last one’s a tricky I’m I do think it’s not something necessarily for everyone, and I don’t mean that in a gatekeeper kinda way. But it is, you are I think by being a psycho you’re throwing yourself into the precipice in a lot of ways.

But for me, what I just, yeah. I’m from the north of England in Manchester. There was, when I was growing up. LSD mdm a, these were just very common. And so I got into these things at a very young age and purely from a recreational basis, but there was something there particularly that LLSD that just absolutely fascinating with this, just this the sense of peace and connectness.

I just, at least, I love taking like LSD, going to the park and just lying there and just watching the sky move overhead, just feeling the grass. So even without fully having the kind of spiritual vocabulary, I felt like there was something there, even though I wouldn’t have recognized the spiritual aspects of time.

I was very like militantly, atheist, yeah, very, secure the knowledge. Oh yeah, this is, these substances. It’s just a good time. It makes you think, but never really recognizing the deep element to it until quite a few years later where I started having experiences, which I, in hindsight, I came to recognize as like spiritual experiences.

And then I had to think how do I reconcile this with my sort of diehard atheist worldview? And it was that, that took a while for me to be able to put those two words, toge, two worlds together. But for me, I just, that. Once you experience a say a truly psychedelic experience or truly spiritual experience, I would compare it to like, when you have your first orgasm as like a teenager, suddenly the world just opens up you thinking, wow, what is, there is something else here that I’ve it’s just a whole new world, and I just find that fascinating and it’s particularly that you could dive into the same experience and have just such a.

Radically different world, experience each time your world, you can be changed each time. You can discover new stuff about yourself each time. And for me, I’ve always liked that experience of just yeah just being like amazed by. Whatever’s going on in that experience. And I tend to think of it as an inward experience that what I’m experiencing is me, my subconscious.

I don’t really subscribe to ideas of this is aliens be beaming ideas into my head. I flip flop a little bit on some of these worldviews, but even if you’re just taking it that, that this is an inward experience and the depth and richness of that experience is just so vast then is how could you not be fascinated and want to explore more of it?

That’s why I’m a psych ops. And I just feel, yeah, very, just to come back to your point earlier of where we’re talking about the traditions that for, I think we live in a golden age for someone like me from the north, north of Manchester, to be able to get in a metal tube, fly across the world.

Sit with these ancient traditions, be welcomed into these kind of ceremonies, have these mind blowing, soul expanded experiences. It is a privilege. It is a privilege beyond all privileges. I’m just so grateful that, yeah, living this time where I can even know these things exist. If you re rewind the clock 50, 60 years, I would’ve never.

No. So we’ve lived in the perfect age of like information, travel capability just to be able to do this and it’s. Yeah, like I said it is, I feel such gratitude that these tradition, these tribes share these things with us. ’cause it’s amazing.

Sam Believ: Yeah. We also have unique issues as society right now, so I think that it’s all coming at the same time to kind of balance, balance things out.

You obviously came here and I reached out to you. It was pretty synchronistic. I saw your video and you said you’re about to start looking for retreat for, because you’re going through some personal stuff and, yeah. You’re in a pretty low place. That’s why you wanted it. So how do you feel now? Do you feel do you feel better or how do you feel with your

Rob: wellbeing?

Yeah, I feel absolutely, I feel great and I’m, which is not uncommon after retreat, ’cause you are, you certainly get this kind of honeymoon period afterwards. But with what’s happened in the ceremonies this week, I do feel like I’ve bookended a look at a lot of those. It’s been a rough couple of years, I’ll put it that way, without getting too much into the details and it just stripped out a lot of one, one thing I always prided myself on, particularly with the YouTube, but just I always saw myself as a very creative person, a lot of imagination.

I think this look comes across through a lot of my videos and my trip reports. I just really go out there, try to visualize and story tell these experiences. And then to go through what I’ve been through the last two years that just bottomed out to me. And all I was focusing on was legal shit and just problems going on to life.

And this week I’ve, first day I felt like I’d managed to package a lot of that stuff up, put it in the rear view mirror, but also I just felt that creative spark and just kicking it again. And for me that was, it was a major component. ’cause I was. I just love create, I love storytelling so much that I just didn’t feel like myself for the last couple of years, and that’s why I, my channel’s been on hiatus while all this legal stuff’s been going on, and that’s one of the reasons was because I just had to keep my head down while I had some, like this legal case.

But the other thing was, yeah, I just energetically just didn’t have it though. I want, my imagination just wasn’t firing and I’m sat there in ceremonies. I’m just. The storytelling is just kicking off in my brain. I’m like, and and that storytelling, it’s, we’ve talked a lot about integration in this retreat.

That’s how I integrate stuff. It’s, I think that’s how humans integrate stuff. We are telling ourselves a story, a about what, what’s happening, about how our lives fit together. I think when you can’t make that story make sense, that’s where you’re not integrated, but. For me, just be able to sit on these things and work through.

That’s why one of the reasons I talk to a camera, I’m talking to myself, I am I’ve turned the camera on and I start talking to it, and that’s me. Making sense in real time of what’s going on with me. So yeah, this retreat’s been absolutely awesome. I also got to share it with my brother my older brother.

And that’s, again, it’s just been a privilege to, to spend that amount of time. I’ve not spent this much time with my brother for 30 odd years, and now we’re sharing things in spectacular, intimate ways as two adult, men, I’m in the late forties, eighties, early fifties. Now we’re sharing stuff about our childhood, about our lives just about our feelings, and it’s been beautiful.

Sam Believ: Yeah. It was lovely to see you and your brother and you were you definitely, maybe because you were together and you kinda went into a bit of a child mode. I think it is. It’s very beautiful and profound. And we had daughter with her mother here, and sometimes we have the entire family’s house.

I think that’s. It’s absolutely amazing thing to do with your family members or loved ones and friends, and

Rob: it’s amazing. But it’s also I must admit there was an element of trepidation around it because I think it could, obviously the ideal is that it goes in, into the kind of thing like I’m just had with my brother, but it can also, go into a very uncomfortable space.

I’ve had that when I was I’ve done retreats before with my ex-wife and we just didn’t. Click at all. In fact, we just end up in very different places. One person has an amazing ceremony, the other person’s had a shitty ceremony. Yeah, it can flip around. So the energies can be very weird though.

Sam Believ: I’m glad your creativity is back and hopefully you’re gonna make a nice video about your experience. I look, I’m definitely looking forward seeing it and but what were you talking about? Going through rough times? I am myself also going through rough times similar to yours and there’s two big problems I’m dealing with at the same time. And I think I would’ve been like completely debilitated, if not for Ayahuasca. Yeah. It’s like I just, whenever I’m like, I can’t take it anymore, I’m, it’s life is too much. I’m overworked and overstressed. I just go back, sit with it and it lifts me up and says do this, do that.

And I of course it’s a luxury and not everyone can live it now as retreat and like I was doing the one ceremony a month, but. Like one, one good retreat a year, I think in. Make most people a bit more saner. I’m surprised. So we got a bit delayed with our interview and now the bus is about to come.

I’m surprised not here yet. So I wanna talk a little bit about more psychotic things. Like I, I looked through your YouTube channel, you did interesting experiments like taking DMT for every day, entire month. Yeah. Let’s talk a little bit about DMT. Obviously it’s an active com, one of the active com compounds in the Ayahuasca, but people take it separately.

What did you learn from that? How do you compare doing DMT in a sort of more modern wake as opposed to doing an ayahuasca ceremony? Let’s talk about

Rob: that. Yeah, so the way I would differentiate between the two things, and I’ll just say, first off, I would not. Really advocate for taking ayahuasca at home on my own and that sort of cycle.

I, I don’t do that. I only really only ever do that on retreat. ’cause I think it’s just the community aspect the guided ceremony aspect is important and experience. But for me, DMT on its own is, I think that is almost like one of the most perfect psych art experiences because it’s got a quite short duration.

It’s very potent and it’s just I see DMT as pure consciousness exploration. It’s just consciousness explodes outwards and you just have this experience that’s just beyond imagination. And I think there’s that in itself. It’s awe inspiring. It just reminds you of the wonder and awe of the world.

And I think like you said, when you’re having. Personal problems and stuff going on, just be reminded of how amazing life could be. It’s great for the 30 days thing, one of the one of the questions I was kinda asking myself was, is the value in having that kind of experience, like on set of a daily basis, so let’s say is there value in sitting and meditating every day for 15 minutes?

I would say, yeah. What if during that meditation. What if during that meditation, what if during that meditation you could teleport to the International Space Station and look down on Earth for five minutes a day and just see the totality of civilization of the world, and just have that experience of looking down on all of everything, just for five minutes a day.

Or tell Port to the top of Mo Everest or just look out and just feel that complete or wonder is the value in that. I think there is, I think there’s something there where, just to be able to remind yourself on that daily basis, which I think is, it’s one of the goals of meditation to sit there and just feel completely within yourself on a daily basis.

So that’s what I saw, set it to do. And that was the sort of what I got from it. Just it wasn’t really, I didn’t see it so much as kinda something particularly hardcore, like really pushing the frontier, like blowing my mind in like sometimes I only do quite small doses. Some days I was doing larger doses.

It was a mix. But that experience of just being humble before the universe every day as, as part of a daily practice I found it incredibly beneficial. Yeah, so we could talk a lot, but the bus is here, so what we should do some is when I’m back. Let’s set up let’s do a video thing.

Let’s one we can go deeper into all the psych

Sam Believ: stuff. Sounds good. So Rob, thank you for coming. Thank you for pleasure your psychedelically Virgin brother to us. I’m glad he had a great experience as well. And I hope that’s not the last time I see you. It will be right. Definitely. Guys, you are listening to our podcast.

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

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

In this episode of Ayahuasca Podcast, host Sam Believ (founder of http://www.lawayra.com) has a conversation with , a clinical psychologist, licensed alcohol and drug counselor, and co-founder of the Psychedelic Society of Vermont. With decades of experience in addiction, anxiety, and depression treatment, Rick bridges traditional recovery models with modern psychedelic-assisted therapy, drawing from both personal recovery and clinical practice.

We touch upon topics of:

• Rick’s early addiction and path into recovery (00:50–05:30)
• Addiction, youth, and the challenge of getting sober early (03:50–06:00)
• Replacing addiction with meaning, purpose, and spirituality (07:48–11:00)
• Psychedelics, sobriety, and common fears around relapse (12:14–16:05)
• Therapy vs retreat models and why multiple paths can work (17:02–19:30)
• Integration, spiritual bypassing, and real long-term change (21:08–26:00)
• AA, community, and where recovery models succeed or fail (33:05–36:40)
• How psychedelics disrupt addictive patterns and cravings (37:46–40:37)

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

Find more about Rick Barnett at vermontpsychedelic.org, on LinkedIn and Instagram at @DrRickBarnett, and through the Solquinox conference in Vermont.

Transcript

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

Rick Barnett: What do psychedelics do? We know that they are interrupters, they’re disruptors of patterns that are habitual patterns. Our ego, our personality, our behaviors, our beliefs, our very entrenched, and when we take a psychedelic, whether. Ayahuasca or even nons, psychedelic psychedelics like Ketamine, MDMA, basically they’re all disruptors.

They disrupt habits, patterns, beliefs, all that stuff. And I think the mechanism there for depression, for anxiety, for trauma, for OCD, for alcohol or other drug addictions, gambling like psychedelics, disrupt, and get in there and fundamentally. Tweak something deep inside of us. Like you said earlier, you’ve had people come down for your Ayahuasca retreat and, or maybe they had an alcohol problem before and they, you get a call from them a week or two later and they’re like, yeah, I just stopped drinking.

It’s just not appealing to me anymore. We can’t really account for why that is, but obviously something changed deep inside them. This is once a very compelling. Force this craving, this need insatiable desire to fill the void by using a substance or engaging in a, an addictive behavior. And that somehow that mysteriously dissipates it, it goes away.

It’s like something gets in there and says, actually. You don’t need that anymore. You’re okay. You are enough. You know we are the medicine and you have a community of people and you have this new outlook on life that really helps you see that. Now, do some people relapse afterwards? Yes. It’s not cure all.

Sam Believ: Hi guys, and welcome to Ayahuasca podcast. As always, we do the whole assembly of today. I’m interviewing Dr. Rick Barnett a clinical psychologist and licensed alcohol and drug counselor with decades of experience helping people achieve and maintain freedom from addiction, anxiety, and depression. Dr.

Burnett is a leading voice at intersection of psychology and substance use. Disorder treatment, and he specializes in psychedelic assisted therapy, having completed extensive training and modalities involving in MDMA, psilocybin and Ketamine. As the co-founder of Psychedelic Society of Vermont, he advocates for balanced, innovative approach to recovery that blends harm reduction with traditional abstinence-based methods.

This episode is sponsored by Laira Ayahuasca Retreat. At Laira, we combine affordability, accessibility, and authenticity. Ra, connect, heal, grow. Guys, I’m looking forward to hosting you. Rick, welcome to the show. Thank you, Sam. Happy to be here. Rick I really your story is very unique. You you yourself dealt with addiction and you yourself you started very early, like you were already an addict when you were at 10, which is impressive in itself.

So not only. Having this, but then recovering and now helping other people walk us through that journey.

Rick Barnett: Yeah, I wouldn’t say I was fully addicted when I was 10 years old, but I believe that at the age of 10 when I first used tobacco and that really was a foundational event in my life.

I, I’ve heard of people using other drugs as young as, 8, 9, 10, 11 years old. Due to various circumstances, but in my case, yeah I started using tobacco when I was 10 years old. And then alcohol by the age of 11, cannabis age 12. By the time I was 13, I was getting arrested for underage drinking at high school parties.

By the time I was 15 I’d used cocaine, M-D-M-A-L-S-D mushrooms, and for the preceding five years until the age I was 20. All of that just accelerated, intensified in terms of amounts and frequency and got me into a lot of trouble. And I think psychedelics as being a part of that, journey both opened my mind to another view of reality, but also was involved in, unhealthy experiences really dangerous experiences. So it’s a paradoxical situation in my case to to be, thrust into using a lot of alcohol and drugs at a young age. And then to come out the other side relatively early as well.

The age of 20. Really, I’m sorry about the background here. The the age of 20 really starting to get to the other side of that and enter into recovery. But I really do credit my use of LSD at the age of 15 with having given me the. Open-mindedness and perspective that enabled me to be receptive to the message of recovery when I was 20 years old.

I think without that I might have just rejected treatment and recovery pathways altogether. So it’s a ironic situation there.

Sam Believ: In a way, psychedelics are being lumped in together with all the other drugs in this drug category, but it can be a blessing in the case. In your case, it was a blessing because.

You just took this other drug, but it turned out to be a medicine for you in this occasion. Because of your youth with this process what do you think is different in recovery for someone studying that early? Obviously your brain is still very young and malleable.

Do you reckon it it’s, it makes it easier to recover or on, on the contrary.

Rick Barnett: That’s a great question. I found that when I was 20 years old and looking at the the life I had lived up to that point, and looking at the pathway in front of me, I felt it was extremely difficult at the age of 20 to extract myself from a lifestyle, a social situation, an age.

An age group where, partying, college that whole culture was just rampant. And I think it. It is very difficult, I think for people who are young and who get, into these experiences, addiction type experiences really early on, it’s very difficult to pull yourself out of that and find a something that’s appealing about being sober.

It can be very difficult at that age ’cause everybody, your in your age group is partying and having a good time, and all of a sudden I was like, okay, I can’t do that anymore. So what do I do with myself that’s different than somebody maybe in their forties or fifties who you look around and there’s a lot of people in their forties and fifties who actually aren’t drinking or using drugs as much as they did when they were younger.

So I wouldn’t say that it’s any easier because in that case you’ve got even more decades of. Unhealthy use of alcohol or substances. So trying, in later years trying to get into a path of recovery can be very difficult as well. So it’s hard to say. I know for me it was very challenging.

There’s a lot of other young people who were trying to get sober at the same time. I was getting sober and they didn’t make it. Several people have died and it’s it’s very difficult at that age to pull yourself out of that culture,

Sam Believ: yeah. Thank you for sharing, Rick. I actually I’m gonna share a story that I never shared before when I was about 17 years old and I was in, in my first year of it’s basically college, but it’s a college.

You start early. It’s like profession college. I was starting to become marine mechanical engineer. So I was I was kinda, it was kinda last years of school, but combined with already some college curriculum and, I always liked computer games, but I was I always had a good relationship with them and I could still study, but then World of Warcraft came out.

I don’t know if you ever heard about this. Yeah. But it was this online game that was extremely addictive. And in just one month, all of my grade, I went from being the best student in class. All my grades fell. I was almost expelled. Like I, I just completely stopped going to school. I got so addicted to it, so I don’t know where, but I got this.

Strength and energy to quit. And it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. Because as you described, not only you’re removing the object of your addiction, but you’re also losing all of your friends because that’s always spoke about that. Like I was, there wasn’t much drinking. Some people played and drank at the same time, but there wasn’t much drinking.

I, I was always cautious with drinking ’cause my dad’s an alcoholic. But this one slipped through and for a few weeks. I was just burn, burn, like, how do you call it? White knuckling it. I was going to say bare knuckling it. So yeah, I was white knuckling it and I just I managed to pull out of it, and then I tried to pull some of my friends out of it and they didn’t.

And as you describe, it didn’t kill them, but some of them spent. Eight to 10 years playing. And they basically lost their youth. Yeah. They didn’t have a girlfriend. Their studies were ruined, their careers were ruined. But as I was trying to help them, they actually hated me. So I was early on that path of annoying people by giving them advice.

But, so that’s an imp an important part of addiction. Not just removing that. Substance or behavior you’re addicted to, but also you gotta put something in its place. Is there something you can talk about in that direction?

Rick Barnett: I think that’s in part why my use of psychedelics helped me so much in those early years early days and weeks and months of finding this new path of sobriety or recovery is that, I was intrigued by the spiritual side of things.

I was intrigued by. Things that are less materialistic and more, spiritual in nature, not religious. And there’s a whole movement, the spiritual not religious movement. And that gets into sort of new age stuff. And I’m not necessarily talking about that, but my own experience with LSD and then what was the meaning and purpose of my life at that point?

Transitioning from this lifestyle of, hedonistic illegal, all kinds of craziness into a new. A new realm of being spiritual concepts, psychological concepts, health promoting concepts. All that stuff was really appealing to me, and that’s what I think.

Took the place of finding the meaning and purpose in partying, which was really enjoyable for me. I loved the life that I lived, I loved the craziness of it all. I loved the social life, the everything and I knew that it was killing me. So I knew, early on that was not a path I could.

Continue to travel if I wanted to live a longer life. Basically it’s like the 180 degrees opposite of, instead of, pursuing partying and that whole lifestyle, I had to pursue something as meaningful if not more meaningful to counterbalance that, that destructive side. I was fortunate to be, to have had the, to have the personality or mindset or experiences that enabled me to find literature. Finding the program of and the material and the Alcoholics Anonymous, the spiritual side of things. Very interesting. Not from a godlike perspective, but just psychologically speaking and other books like.

The power of the subconscious mind, the road less traveled. Things like the power of positive thinking, all these classic self-help books back in the day that basically paved the way for me to become a psychologist. As I continued in my recovery and pursued my, my academic my academic pursuits.

Yeah, that’s pretty much what replaced it. It’s hard to say at first. It’s easy to say I’m a thrill seeker. I like, sensation seeking, I like the adrenaline junkie kind of stuff. You think you could just replace it with high risk activities that aren’t alcohol and drug use, but that’s a little bit of a too simplistic, it had to go deeper than that for me.

So that’s pretty much the path that I chose and that sort of was able to stick for me that, that worked for me. I don’t know if it works for everybody that worked for me.

Sam Believ: So you psychedelics helped you and you were able to replace drugs with psychedelics and find that more spiritual side of things and what not quite.

Rick Barnett: What about Not immediately, Sam, just to be clear, I didn’t go from getting sober at 20 years old to using psychedelics for spiritual development at that age. I didn’t come back to psychedelics until, six or seven years ago. Pretty much.

Sam Believ: Okay. Okay. So yeah, it was a process. But let’s say obviously I see it a lot in, in, in our work.

People come, let’s say they’re addicted to alcohol or drugs. They work with ayahuasca. Something shifts in them, and the addiction almost magically goes away. It’s very interesting because some people come for other reasons. And they go back home and they report to us later that they just stopped drinking because they just don’t want to anymore.

So obviously I come from the perspective knowing that traditional use of psychedelic or therapeutic use of psychedelics can be very helpful in addiction. But what about those people that are addicted to alcohol? So they quit it and they white knuckle it, and now they avoid anything that can be seen as quote unquote drug.

What would you tell those people that prevent this potentially very healing modality because they’re afraid that they’re gonna get addicted. Like people ask me like, oh, aren’t you gonna get addicted to ayahuasca? Or some, something like that. Like what? Any comments on that?

Rick Barnett: Yeah, that’s a very common, that’s a common concern amongst people who, I would even say myself, like I couldn’t imagine.

In those early years of my sobriety and my recovery, if someone had said, here, try some ayahuasca. This will help you on your spiritual path. I would’ve been like. Oh no. I’ve been there, done that. Used all the LSD, used all the mushrooms, used all the M-D-M-A-I could think of that I thought was helping me on the spiritual path, but it was doing nothing but destroying my life.

So I would’ve been that kind of person who said no, I can’t. I can’t alter my consciousness in any way. But now, many years into recovery and I am somebody who believes regardless of your. The stage that somebody’s at, let’s say someone’s in active addiction, they’re in early recovery, an abstinence-based recovery.

They’re in, maybe they’ve got a year or five years without using any alcohol or drugs, or maybe they’ve been sober with any al without any mind altering substances for 20 years. I would say to them now, I would say, don’t dis disregard this. Pathway altogether. Just hold on a second.

Where we are now as as the research has been coming out over the last 10 plus years, even though ayahuasca and psilocybin and peyote has been around for centuries, millennia it’s more recently where at least in Western society, we’re developing a model where this isn’t just haphazard. Recreational, crazy use of Iowa, let’s go use ayahuasca and see what it does.

Or let’s go take some LSD and go to a concert or eat some mushrooms and, hang out by a campfire and shoot the shit. It’s really it’s really a situation I’m sure. What you have in your retreat the retreats that I’ve been part of legally and in settings where these.

Substances, molecules, sacraments, whatever you wanna call them, compounds. Drugs are being taken. And in such a way that there’s a lot of thoughtfulness that goes into it. So if you’re in any phase of recovery, if you’re, if someone’s curious about ayahuasca, five M-E-O-D-M-T, psilocybin, MDMA, ketamine, any of these substances, as long as you’re being thoughtful about it, you’re doing your research, you have trusted people who you’re listening to who may be preparing you for an experience that are creating a safe environment for you to have the experience.

That are providing follow-up care for you after the experience. That’s very different than oh, you’re gonna get addicted to ayahuasca, or now you’re gonna ruin your sobriety because you’ve now used the mind altering substances and you know you have to start from scratch. It’s a very different paradigm that doesn’t get talked about enough.

And I think it’s really a shame when there’s people out there who are saying, oh no, you can’t use psychedelics. You’re sober and that’s gonna destroy your life, that’s gonna destroy your sobriety. That it’s not true as long as someone is. Very thoughtful. If they’re considering having a psychedelic experience as part of their addiction recovery process, as part of their sobriety journey it’s not only possible.

It’s, and I think for a lot of people it can be extremely beneficial.

Sam Believ: Yeah. Yeah. Definitely don’t mean for people that have been sober for 10 years to go and, buy some street drugs, potentially laced with like street psychedelics, potentially laced with something and then get addicted. Again, I’m talking about like people who are still struggling and yes, engaging with either a therapeutic approach or a traditional approach in a very intentional container.

What is the role of therapy in this in the work with psychedelics? Obviously psychedelic therapy. How the two compliment each other

Rick Barnett: it’s a very important question and it’s very much debated in the field right now as I’m participating in all kinds of different discussions with different people and different, with different backgrounds.

And, given that I’m a psychologist, I’ve been trained in the Western medical model, clearly I have an appreciation for therapy for a medical. System that provides the kind of supports and safeguards and ethics and standards that are important for safety and, to help people with whatever they’re dealing with.

However, it’s not the only way to do it. So therapy, psychedelic assisted therapy is one model. What we think of when we hear psychedelic assisted therapy. We’re thinking of like a licensed therapist or licensed healthcare provider who would be providing preparation, dosing administration and integration services in the context of a clinic, an office, a research setting, a hospital, whatever that is, and that’s only one.

Model, and you know this well because you run a retreat and that’s, a retreat is not psychedelic assisted psychotherapy. And the retreat model is a very good model for some people. The psychotherapy assisted, psychedelic experiences is a good model for some people. An experience.

With trusted friends who have ex, who have extensive experience with a certain compound who can provide a safe environment that isn’t a retreat center, but isn’t also a therapy office. That can be a model as well. There’s multiple models, all have their strengths and potential weaknesses. Psych, psychedelic assisted therapy has its downsides as well.

Retreat centers can have their downsides as well, and doing it with friends in a, in a. Somewhat thoughtful or recreational way can be positive, but also can be negative. So there isn’t a one size fits all approach. I just want to be clear. When I’m talking to you or other people, I’m not advocating exclusively for one model.

In fact I’m quite, I critical of the medical model. Even though I’m a, classically trained, psychologist and work within the Western medical system, I can be very critical of it. I believe that there’s. There’s lots of ways to do it safely, ethically, effectively, and it’s not once one approach isn’t for everybody.

Sam Believ: Yeah. Maybe there is still more models to be discovered that, that are maybe combining the benefits of both. We in the retreat model, we basically in a clinic. Model you, you ground yourself in, in, in psychological knowledge and in the retreat model you ground yourself in indigenous knowledge and just tradition And bo both get legitimacy from the, from those two different sources.

But we do try to meddle a bit with a more modern things like for example. We work with brain mapping and brain training with QUG brain maps. We try to provide group therapy style integration, word circles, and also provide people with an integration course and then also when they go back home for those who choose to we pair them up with the integration coaches slash therapists.

Unfortunately, not as many people want it as, as it would, as it should be. So it’s like there’s this interesting thing where people don’t seem to like integration that much because it’s not as sexy as a psychedelic experience. So let’s talk about integration. I know it’s a topic you like to talk about a lot.

Rick Barnett: Yeah, mark Al’s book, I don’t know if you know that book that came out a couple years ago called the Psychedelic Integration Spanish guy.

Sam Believ: Yeah. I’ve interviewed Mark a few episodes ago. It didn’t come out yet, but he is, he knows a lot about integration.

Rick Barnett: Yeah. Yeah. I would definitely defer to him.

That book is fantastic. Psychedelic integration, big shout out to to Mark. I’ve never met him before. Thought about inviting him to Vermont for our conference, but, it’s such a big topic for me. I know it’s not as sexy as the psychedelic experience itself. Everybody puts so much hype and expectation into the psychedelic experience itself, and certainly that can be a catalyst for change, right?

That’s that’s what it’s all about. So there’s no getting around that piece of it. However. People’s egos come back online and they’re, they go back to their lifestyle and change doesn’t always happen automatically and sometimes we need to do things. To nurture, to nourish, to cultivate, to practice whatever downloads or experiences we had as part of the psychedelic journey itself, or the preparing for it, what are we doing on a daily basis that could be nudging ourselves towards.

The kind of changes we wanna see in our life. And that’s just life, that’s just life. We wanna live our lives in such a way that we’re trying to practice new daily disciplines or reengage with previous disciplines that may have gotten. Stale over time or stagnant like a meditation practice or a yoga practice or certain readings or writings that we’ve done.

We can go back to these practices with a new, with new eyes and new. New perspectives, or we can start these activities with new eyes and new perspectives to see if they can help produce the changes long term that we want to see. And I think that’s what integration is all about for me.

It’s like trying to continue to live into some of the, the deeper experiences that are, that get generated from these, from the psychedelic the acute psychedelic experience itself. And it’s not always easy. And it doesn’t mean that, there’s a phrase, and I know you know it, it’s called once you get the message, hang up the phone.

I don’t know who’s attributed to that who we attributed to that quote, but once you get the message, hang up the phone, which is like. Once you’ve had a psychedelic experience that’s profound. You don’t need to have any more psychedelic experiences. You need to go out and do the work. But that’s not always true.

People can have a powerful psychedelic experience and learn something from it and make some changes, and maybe they want to go back and they want have another psychedelic experience, maybe with a different molecule, a different compound. And that’s okay as long as it doesn’t, transition into something that’s just, this kind of addictive craving seeking, spiritual bypassing or like this yeah. This compulsive use. But I think there’s integration itself has a way of helping us pace our our progress in the changes that we wanna make. And so it’s a complicated and very broad topic, but I do think it’s extremely important if.

All phases of psychedelic experiences are important. I think the preparation phase is super important. Even the pre-preparation phase. You know what, I don’t know what your experience was, but the first time you ever heard about ayahuasca or got a glimpse of what that might be like, there’s something in your soul, in your spirit that got activated and curious.

That’s not even preparation, that’s just some pre-preparation intuition thing that comes to you. That’s just as important as the preparation, which is just as important as the psychedelic experience, which is just as important as integration. So it’s a whole circle that we just continue to roll through and, and learn along the way until we die.

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LA Wire Connect. Heal. Grow L-A-W-A-Y-R a.com. Yeah, it’s the process of seeds germinating, the seed was planted and then for me it took about three or four years. I had a good question for you, but for some reason it’s gimme a second.

Yeah, no I wanted to share this. It is it’s interesting with ayahuasca that. If some people abuse psychedelics, why they do it too often with that ask. You can’t really do it because if it gives you a clear homework and then you don’t do it and you come back eventually it’ll be like, okay, what’s going on here?

It didn’t do homework, and it’ll give you a bad trip. So it’s like a strict grandmother spirit. So it’s an interesting part of it. How is integration different for people that are dealing with addiction specifically?

Rick Barnett: I think when it comes to addiction and somebody who’s on a path towards living a healthy lifestyle, going from active addiction to transitioning into something that is more like a sober lifestyle.

And what I mean by sober is not necessarily a total abstinence, but just sober as in something like taking life seriously. Levelheadedness clarity of thought. The gravity of our lives and the purpose and meaning of our lives. Being sober minded doesn’t necessarily mean abstinence based, and in that context, I think that when it comes to psychedelic integration or integration from psychedelic experiences, we want to be developing and integrating our own understanding of what.

A healthy lifestyle would look like. Psychedelics can provide these profound experiences and then they’re done. And yet we still have the intention or desire to change or be healthy or live a healthy lifestyle. So trying to develop our own understanding for ourselves of what a healthy recovery or sobriety.

Lifestyle would look like involves, ongoing, connection to community members, ongoing internal work, whether it’s with a therapist or meditation or journaling. Harnessing within us the desire for freedom. One of the things that I like to talk about. Is that the opposite of addiction is not only connection, but really the opposite of addiction is connection to health and healthy people and healthy behaviors as well as freedom.

The addiction itself is slavery. Addiction itself is being addicted to something is meaning. You’re being dictated to by this behavior, by this substance. And the opposite of that is really freedom. And we achieve freedom, I think by. Really connecting with ourselves, with spirit, with other people who are traveling the same path.

So integration really involves those three, three elements, connecting to others, connecting to spirit, and connecting to ourselves in new ways that that develop our sense of freedom in inside ourselves and in the world.

Sam Believ: Why? Why do people. Why do some people get addicted to things and others don’t?

What is that addictive personality? What are the underlying psychological patterns that cause them to in people?

Rick Barnett: It’s co it’s a complicated question and there’s no real answer to that. Addiction is very diverse. You have people who are extroverts and introverts who develop addiction.

You have people who are shy, depressed, quiet who develop addiction. You have people who have a lot of anxiety or OCD. That develop addiction. You have people who have trauma and trauma’s, a big buzzword and a lot of attention towards trauma these days. But not everybody who’s had traumatic experiences in their life go on to develop addiction.

So we can’t just say all addiction comes from trauma has been popularized. Recently, so it’s such a diverse subject. They’ve researchers and clinicians have tried to identify like an addictive personality disorder for years, and because there’s so many different variables that play into why somebody goes on to develop a real addiction, that it’s just impossible just to just define a, an addictive personality disorder. There are certainly personality traits or tendencies or biological dispositions that might be risk factors for developing addiction. If you have a father and a grandfather who has alcoholism, you’re that much more likely to develop alcoholism.

If you grew up in an environment where there’s addiction around you, you’re that much more likely to develop an addiction, but it isn’t a guarantee. So it’s really. It’s really hard to say. It’s just different for everybody. I know my story’s different than a lot of people’s stories because I didn’t have any major traumas when I was a kid, and yet here I was going on to develop an addiction very early in life and, for all by all accounts, my childhood was.

Pretty privileged. So that’s a strange thing when you think of people who develop addiction as oh, people who are, impoverished or homeless or have, been physically or sexually abused. And certainly that is true, but that’s just, it doesn’t explain at all. So it’s a very, it’s very complicated question and it’s very difficult to say who goes on to develop an addiction, and then also how can we predict if someone will be able to achieve.

Recovery, long-term recovery, that’s also very difficult to to predict.

Sam Believ: So if someone’s listening to this episode and they are addicted to, let’s say, alcohol, that’s the most common one. Somebody’s listening and they’re addicted. What should they do? What is the good path?

Rick Barnett: First of all, ask for help.

That’s the hardest, that’s the hardest thing for people to do, to ask for help and reach out. And it, asking for help is a form of surrender. Not surrender. Surrender, like you’re just giving up everything and just being, taken over by some agency or organization or group of people and they’re just gonna brainwash you to, to do whatever.

But really just deciding internally, I need help. I can’t do this alone to ask for help. Please. I think everybody who’s listening, if you feel like you have a problem with alcohol or you know you’re an alcoholic ask for help. Help is available. And there’s a lot of pathways that you’ll be, suggested to follow and.

You have to determine with loved ones, with your support system even if you don’t have loved ones or a support system, trying to lean into your intuition and see which path might be right for you. That might be a psychedelic experience if you have access to it in a healthy and, safe and effective way.

It may be going to a treatment center, it may be seeing a therapist. It may be, going off to a desert island and, detoxing on your own or from alcohol. I wouldn’t recommend that because it’s dangerous if you stop cold Turkey and you’re drinking a lot. But there’s a lot of different pathways and I do believe that psychedelics provide a new pathway for some people who may not have considered it.

Sam Believ: One of the pathways obviously is aa. I like to say there’s a missing a, there’s one more a they need, which is ayahuasca, but obviously I’m very biased. What do you think about aa good aspects of it and maybe some drawbacks.

Rick Barnett: Yeah, I’m partial to aa.

It’s how I got sober. And so I have a lot strong affinity and affection for the that program, but I know it’s also not for everybody. And I think the strengths of the AA model as it exists, like in vivo, in natural settings, not through necessarily court mandated AA or. Legally mandated AA or aa that’s shoved down your throat at a treatment center.

But as it exists in communities, AA is free. It’s widely accessible. A lot of people in there have been through it. They can relate, they’re supportive. So you have this sort of instant built-in community if you’re willing to be open to, sitting in a room with strangers, which is very difficult for people, and listening to the message there.

A lot of people find it quite uplifting and is it inspirational and motivating and supportive to find the kind of change that they want. And like I said, it’s free, it’s widely available, it’s all over the world, and it contains a lot of psychological and spiritual principles, which I think are essential as components of a healthy recovery process.

The drawbacks, unfortunately, is that. AA itself gets mixed up with, like I said before, court mandated treatment, which makes people resent AA meetings. People are exposed to AA through certain organizations that. Are a bit dogmatic and hardcore when it comes to taking some of the principles in AA to extremes, which is was never meant to be done.

So people can get, rightfully I guess pretty caught up on concepts of turning your will and life over to the care of a higher power and the word God. And this idea of hitting bottom and total surrender and, we Americans in particular, we are this sort of fiercely independent people with, have this strong philosophy around self will and independence and we can do things on our own.

And there’s something about AA for some of those people that really just turns them off, which is, I think, unfortunate, but understandable. So there are drawbacks for some people, whether it’s the way in which they find AA or some of the people they encounter in AA that are very dogmatic. Some people in AA would just flat out say, if you use.

A psychedelic drug, you’re no longer sober. You have to start over and count days all over again. And I think that’s just really unfortunate. That’s just misinformed in today’s day and age. But but I’m a, in general, I’m a big fan of that model. The model is like a community-based model.

If you think about the psychedelic world, think about the retreat that you run, all the people that you’ve met through your experience with. Second, there’s a community out there that is there are safe and effective and ethical. People in the psychedelic community that are really supportive and can help us.

We help each other on this path. Same thing in aa, but there’s also bad actors, right? There’s bad actors in the psychedelic space. Just like there’s dogmatic and, old school people in aa. But the community piece of it is really important.

Sam Believ: Yeah, no community is extremely important.

It’s a big part of the healing that people achieve. Even here with Ayahuasca, like I would say it’s, it almost feels sometimes equally as powerful as Ayahuasca itself. And with ai, it’s interesting that the dogma is interesting because the, one of the founders, or I believe the original founder, bill Wilson he got very curious about LSD and he was actually seeing a lot of potential in it.

It’s just that, that happens sometimes dogma. I guess there’s positive things about dogma as well but yeah. For those who do choose to work with psychedelics in their recovery what do you think is the mechanism, like how do psychedelics make it easier or maybe better or faster?

Like what is the benefits of that path specifically and. What’s the mechanism in your opinion?

Rick Barnett: Again, I think it goes back to any stage of active addiction or early, mid, or late stage recovery process. What do psychedelics do? We know that they are interrupters, they’re disruptors of patterns, right?

That are our habitual patterns, our ego, our personality, our behaviors, our beliefs. Are very entrenched and when we take a psychedelic, whether it’s ayahuasca or even nons, psychedelic psychedelics like Ketamine, MDMA, basically they’re all disruptors. They disrupt habits, patterns, beliefs, all that stuff and I think the mechanism there for.

Depression for anxiety, for trauma, for OCD, for alcohol or other drug addictions. Gambling like psychedelics, disrupt and get in there and fundamentally tweak something deep inside of us. Like you said earlier, you’ve had people come down for your Ayahuasca retreat and. Maybe they had an alcohol problem before and they, you get a call from them a week or two later and they’re like, yeah, I just stopped drinking.

It’s just not appealing to me anymore. We can’t really account for why that is, but obviously something changed deep inside them. This is once a very compelling force, this craving, this need to this. Insatiable desire to, to fill the void by using a substance or engaging in a, an addictive behavior, and that somehow that mysteriously dissipates it, it goes away.

It’s like something gets in there and says, actually, you don’t need that anymore. You’re okay. You are enough. We are the medicine and you have a community of people and you have this new outlook on life that really. Helps you see that? Now, do some people relapse afterwards? Yes.

It’s not a cure all. I had a person I know went down to Mexico had just gotten off methadone and was still struggling with their addiction, but they went to do Ibogaine in Mexico. And about a month after they got back from that experience, they overdosed and died. So it’s not a cure all.

It’s not. And I don’t know why that is. This person had a good community, good supports but it was very sad and tragic. And that is just, again, it’s not, it’s meant as a tool. It is a disruptor. It’s a massive interrupter, whether it’s depression, addiction, anxiety, that’s the mechanism that, that, that is at play, but how that actually unfolds after the psychedelic experience, there’s.

There’s got to be other things in place to help, maintain that, that change.

Sam Believ: Yeah. No, no matter how much we’d like it to be, but there are no magic pills. It’s it’s, there’s always gonna be a lot of work. Some things definitely help but you still need to do the work. Like I’m personally right now going through a lot of things like both in my relationship and in work, and I’m.

Really struggling. And I come to Ayahuasca and it lifts me up. And then it says okay, now do this and you have to do the work. I have to actually sit with my staff. It doesn’t just fix everything immediately, even though it’s priceless. When you’re in a really low place to have this, push and to feel better even for get your, get yourself some breathing space. And regarding addiction and specifically alcohol. I, it, I have a episode number nine with a guy named Damon, which describes his experience coming here and then coming here with his wife, just out of curiosity and then coming back and a few months later realizing he stopped drinking and he just doesn’t want to.

So for those who are interested, you can check it out. It’s episode number nine. So you said that you’re intrigued also by spiritual side of things. I’ve had an episode a few episodes ago. I had a conversation with Simon ruffle from Aya Sciences and he’s, he works with VO shamans and he was describing to them the clinical model of use of psychedelics.

And the shaman was saying like who’s there? And in the, in a clinical setting, who is, who’s the shaman, who is like doing the spiritual side of work? And when he explained that there, there is no person like this, there the shaman was like, oh, like this is reckless. What do you think about, should therapists that work with psychedelics be trained a little bit in shamanism or what do you, what are your opinion about the spiritual side of psychedelic.

Rick Barnett: Work? I think it works both ways. I do believe that the better therapists in the psychedelic space are those therapists who have had some kinds of spiritual experiences, maybe non-denominational ideas about spirituality, that they’ve looked into it, they’ve studied it, they’ve practiced different things, whether it’s mindfulness or yoga or chakras or, other Sufism, Taoism, those kinds of things. And I think that’s really Im important. So that would be the, I wouldn’t say Shamonic, but that would be the ideal therapist situation that would allow for the spiritual. Side of psychedelic therapy to be, made more front and center.

There’s a researcher formerly out of Johns Hopkins, I think you might know him, Matthew Johnson. And Matthew Johnson has written extensively, done a lot of research, written a lot of articles on psychedelic, compounds and different conditions. And he pointed out one time is that, the opposite is also true.

Psychedelics are highly suggestible, putting somebody in a vulnerable state and they’re under the influence of a substance that makes them very suggestible to meaning and beliefs. And there’s this idea that he presented do you want to be, do you want to be somehow your, you, let’s say you have a Buddha statue in your ceremony space or whatever I icon, religious iconography you have or you’re feeding people about spirituality before their psychedelic experience.

That can be. Co seen as coercive, or you’re suggesting something that you’re trying to guide people into something that they may or may not naturally discover on their own. So I think it can work both ways that you have to be mindful of the suggestibility and the vulnerability of the patient.

And if you’re prompting them and preparing them for all kinds of religious or spiritual, ideas or whatever. That could be harmful. What if they don’t have any real, do they feel like they failed if they didn’t have any, big spiritual moment or whatever. And so I think it works both ways.

I think it’s really important to have a well-rounded sense of what spirituality is, to have had some experiences with it as a therapist so that you can help people with different. Models or frameworks that they can help them understand their experience, that’s really vital. But also not to be too suggestive or to be promoting one, one spiritual path over another, that can be really dangerous.

Sam Believ: Yeah. My philosophy is that the spiritual knowledge should be coming from the plant or substance itself not from whatever people say. Like for example, here at LoRa, we. We guide people on like psychedelic navigation, like how to go through the experience, but we don’t tell them specifically what to believe in.

And even the shamanic tradition itself, like it’s not really a religion, it’s more of a, it’s just how they do things. What I’m implying is spiritual protection as in is there someone that can feel and maybe protect or hold the space, but not in not like in an empty way of saying it, but like what Shaman does, as in.

Protecting the person from the bad energies, I guess coming in, I, I don’t know if there’s any notion of it in in the clinical model or I mean at least smudge the space or something like that. Is anything being done or is just completely like. Cut and dry and like white walls and,

Rick Barnett: yeah, I, I think even the way I was trained as a psychologist, I was trained in a sort of classic psychoanalytic sense where I was advised by and trained that if I was to set up my office, it would only be two chairs. Really be really thoughtful about what you put on the walls.

Any personal pictures that you might have up, even if you put your diploma up on the wall, what are you conveying to the patient who’s coming into your office if you have too much stuff going on. And, the flip side of that is that, someone comes into a very sterile. White walls, empty space that can be intimidating in and of itself.

There’s just nothing familiar to, for them to relate to or whatever. There’s gotta be a balance. I love what you said about just allowing the medicine, the plant, to generate its own. Spiritual framework for somebody based on their own internal experience their intergenerational lineage that might come up during a psychedelic experience or their early childhood or, some part of their life.

Something crystallizes for them that has a spiritual quality to it. And that’s, helped along by the psychedelic experience itself. That’s great, but that doesn’t, you don’t need to. You don’t need to have Buddhist statues and Palo Santo and chanting going on in order to help somebody do that.

But sometimes having that stuff is really nice. Some people find that very comforting or helpful to, to create the kind of safe environment. Some people might find it foreign and unsettling to have smoke blown in your face or be smudged or whatever. They don’t like certain scents or certain chants or sounds.

It might bring up something that’s very. Upsetting to them. So I think there’s a way to, get to know people, understand what might work best for them without being too prescriptive, but also not being too bland, too too sterile.

Sam Believ: Maybe as the field progresses, there will be medical devices that form as the same function.

They’d be like in meeting a certain frequency. That scares the bad spirits away, whatever. I’m still very new to my own shaman journey, so I don’t really understand it too well. So it’s more of a hypothetical question and yeah. Tell us about the stories, the success stories you’ve seen with people.

With addiction working with psychedelic assisted psychotherapy?

Rick Barnett: Yeah, not unlike your experience there, there seems to be a pattern in my work and not for everybody, but there are plenty of examples where one or multiple psychedelic experiences seem to shift something inside someone that makes their.

Addictive behavior or substance of choice, less appealing. The craving almost disappears suddenly. I’ve seen that with ketamine. I’ve seen it with psilocybin. I’ve definitely seen it with five M-E-O-D-M-T or also known as bufo. That something enables that, that shift so that the addictive behavior either completely gets eradicated, eliminated, or.

Or really the intensity and the frequency of use or engaging in the unhealthy behavior goes way down. So I’ve seen it with alcohol. I’ve seen it with other drug use. I’ve seen it with food addiction. There’s a lot of. There’s a lot of examples of that, and the research also bears that out.

The more and more research is coming out on psychedelics for addictive behaviors, and I really do think they’re a promising new tool. And I wish they would get approved and integrated into practice more quickly. The, the model that we have for approving new drugs is bogged down in bureaucracy and red tape, and you have to prove all kinds of stuff.

Plus psychedelics have still have so much stigma associated with them, and people still have so many outdated ideas about what they are and how they can, how they affect people. And that’s a real, it’s a real hurdle. We need to have more conversations like this so that people understand that this isn’t just.

This, this party recreational, like spiritual bypassing, new age bullshit. It’s actually, millennia old. History and technology that if done in, in the, in a healthy way is very transformative. It’s been that way for so long and there’s no reason why modern society can’t get their act together to to create the models that, you know can really help people.

I wish it would happen a little bit quicker, but.

Sam Believ: Beautifully said, Rick. I totally agree with you. Let’s hope this future is coming. Thank you for this episode. Thank you for all the knowledge. Tell us more about you, where people can find your work or maybe somebody wants to. Work with you or go to your conference?

Tell us more.

Rick Barnett: Yeah, I’m definitely searchable on the internet, so if you look up Rick Barnett, Dr. Rick Barnett on the internet, you’ll see some resources to find me. I’m very active on LinkedIn and at Dr. Rick Barnett and also on Instagram and Twitter X at Dr. Rick Barnett, all one word. D-R-R-I-C-K-B-A-R-N-E-T-T.

You can always, those are all open. You can direct message me on there. And every year we put on a conference here in Vermont, we get some really great people to come to Vermont. A very small conference, not the big Colorado Maps conference, but a very small. Group of like 150 people come to Vermont every year either on the solstice, summer solstice, or the fall equinox.

It’s called Sequinox. So you can Google, S-O-U-L-Q-U-I-N-O-X. Sequinox is a conference that we put on every year. We got Rachel Yehuda coming this year in June, so people can find out information on that by going I, so I co-founded the Psychedelic Society of Vermont, and so there is a. A website called Vermont psychedelic.org where people can find information on that.

So yeah, I’m definitely reachable. And I’m always happy to try to educate people and to try to be helpful where I can. And I really appreciate coming on your podcast.

Sam Believ: Thank you, Rick. It was a pleasure. Guys, you’ve been listening to Ayahuasca podcast. As always, we the host, Sam, 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. Laira connect, heal, grow. Guys, I’m looking forward to hosting you.

In this episode of Ayahuasca Podcast, host Sam Believ (founder of http://www.lawayra.com) has a conversation with , also known as Mycopreneur. Dennis is the creator of Mycopreneur, often called the “Onion of the psychedelic space,” a leading media platform exploring the business, culture, and future of mushrooms through sharp satire, journalism, and long-form interviews with founders, scientists, and visionaries.

We touch upon topics of:

• Dennis’ early fascination with mushrooms and altered states (01:30–04:30)
• Humor and satire as tools for integration and cultural critique (05:00–10:00)
• Trustafarians, influencer culture, and spiritual ego (07:20–12:00)
• Ethical concerns, wild-west dynamics, and retreat culture (12:20–16:30)
• Visionary exploration vs healing journeys over time (16:30–20:30)
• The role of the jester archetype in psychedelic culture (22:00–24:30)
• Meme culture, media, and modern communication (51:00–55:30)

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

Find more about Dennis Walker at mycopreneur.com, on Instagram @mycopreneur, and through the Mycopreneur newsletter and podcast.

Transcript

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

Dennis: You ate a mushroom and it made you hear colors. What does that even mean? You could see music. So I started going down these rabbit holes. I started seeking out literature, going to the library and checking out books like Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice. That was about someone, mark Plotkin, who apprenticed with some indigenous tribes in the Amazon.

And then eventually I discovered Terrence McKenna. And it was something that put everything in perspective for me at the time as someone who was very interested in these compounds. Didn’t really a COA, they fit into my life. So fast forward to 17, 18. I decided to try them, and I did my homework, my due diligence.

I didn’t just jump into it blindly, and I had a really comforting, grounding, inspiring, beautiful experience. Like so many people will tell you about their experiences with mushrooms. This one was the first one, and it blew the roof off my imagination. I wanted to learn more. I wanted to know why I never heard about these things, or the things I did here were very negative.

Of course, it did not reflect my experience at all. I had a very, I would call it uplifting, beautiful, eye-opening sort of experience. So I feel very fortunate. I was in a good frame of mind. I was in a good place in my life, and that really just set me off on this path of inquiry, trying to learn more about these substances, about the cultures that have traditionally used them, about why they’re so threatening and so restricted from.

Our modern Western culture, and ultimately at that point there was no quote space, right? It was like a very niche underground psycho not bubble of people who were interested in drugs and altered states, and that grew over decades at this point, 20 plus years into now there’s a formal ish psychedelic space and emerging industry research clinics working with them, et cetera.

So I think it was really just a lifelong curiosity that turned into almost a calling to use sort of a humorous word about it. But yeah, that’s essentially how I ended up here is it’s been me pulling on a thread for many years and then ultimately arriving at satire and humor as being my contribution and my way of giving back.

I’m not a clinician, I’m not a guide or a therapist or anything like that, but. I do have a lot of experience and I found a way to integrate that experience into my life over many years, which we can talk about, and I find humor to be a really beautiful way to make sense of this often tumultuous and chaotic world we live in.

Sam Believ: Hi guys, and welcome to Ayahuasca podcast. As always, we are the host, Sam, today having a conversation with Dennis Walker, also known as Micropreneur. So Dennis is a creator of Micropreneur, known as onion of the Psychedelic Space. It’s a leading platform, exploring the business culture and future of mushrooms known for his sharp mix of insight and satire.

He interviews founder scientists and visionaries shaping the global micro industry. Dennis brings humor, clarity, and depth to conversations about functional fungi policy and the modern psychedelic landscape. If you’re hearing it on audio you’ll probably, it’ll be harder for you to recognize, but if you’ve, if you’d see it on a video, you’d immediately recognize his face.

He is a very well known face in this psychedelic space because he makes fun of people like me, and it’s very funny to watch. This episode is sponsored by Laira Ayahuasca Retreat at Laira, we combine affordability, accessibility, and authenticity. Ra, connect, heal, grow. Guys, I’m looking forward to hosting you,

Dennis: Dennis.

Welcome to the show. Thanks very much for the invitation, Sam and I also make fun of people like me, so it’s a pleasure to be here. Hello, everybody.

Sam Believ: I think humor is is a lovely space. Te tell us about let’s start with your story. What, how did you go from, how did you go from No.

How did you get into psychedelic space and making fun of the space and into the mushrooms and all of that. What was your, what’s your journey?

Dennis: Ever since I was 16, 17-year-old, I became fascinated with plant medicines. The idea of altered states. It’s so alien to someone coming from California growing up in the suburbs and public schools to all of a sudden start hearing stories and reading on the internet about taking a plant or a mushroom and having these incredible visionary experiences, these spiritual experiences.

So I never heard anything about this growing up. I was in a very sheltered middle class suburban bubble. And then in that same bubble and high school, you start hearing stories about cannabis. You have some anti-drug education classes, essentially dare things like that about. Psychedelic mushrooms. And then when I started hearing stories from people in my extended network, my peers, my friend’s cousin it can’t help but get you interested.

You ate a mushroom and it made you hear colors. What does that even mean? You could see music. So I started going down these arrowwood rabbit holes. I started seeking out literature, going to the library and checking out books like Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice. That was about someone, mark Plotkin, who apprenticed with some indigenous tribes in the Amazon.

And then eventually I discovered Terrance McKenna. And it was something that put everything in perspective for me at the time. As someone who was very interested in these compounds, didn’t really a COA, they fit into my life. So fast forward to 17, 18. I decided to try them and I did my homework, my due diligence.

I didn’t just jump into it blindly, and I had a really comforting, grounding, inspiring, beautiful experience. Like so many people will tell you about their experiences with mushrooms. This one was the first one, and it blew the roof off my imagination. I wanted to learn more. I wanted to know why I never heard about these things, or the things I did hear were very negative.

Of course, it did not reflect my experience at all. I had a very. I would call it uplifting, beautiful eye-opening sort of experience. So I feel very fortunate. I was in a good frame of mind. I was in a good place in my life, and that really just set me off on this path of inquiry, trying to learn more about these substances, about the cultures that have traditionally used them, about why they’re so threatening and so restricted.

Restricted from our modern Western culture. And ultimately at that point, there was no quote space, right? It was like a very niche underground psycho not bubble of people who were interested in drugs and altered states. And that grew over decades at this point, 20 plus years into now there’s a formal ish psychedelic space and emerging industry research clinics working with them, et cetera.

So I think it was really just a lifelong curiosity that turned into. Almost a calling to use sort of a humorous word about it. But yeah, that’s essentially how I ended up here is it’s been me pulling on a thread for many years and then ultimately arriving at satire and humor as being my contribution and my way of giving back.

I’m not a clinician, I’m not a guide or a therapist or anything like that, but I do have a lot of experience and I found a way to integrate that experience into my life over many years, which we can talk about, and I find humor to be a really beautiful way to make sense of this often tumultuous and chaotic world we live in.

Sam Believ: Thank you for sharing your story. I think that’s we all get to this line of work in so many different ways. So there’s two sides of you, right? There’s this serious side of you. That interviews people about mushrooms and their very various uses, not just psychedelic.

And then there’s this funny side of you, the comedic side, the side that I guess most people know. Yeah talk to us about that. How is that balancing act and like what, which which version of you. Are we talking to today?

Dennis: Great question. It’s something that I wrestle with a little bit.

It’s having the inspiration whenever it strikes and being able to pursue something. If I want to do a really serious subject or a really serious story, like for example, I’m interested in these ethnographic types of experiences. As I mentioned, I’m in Tunisia right now in the capital of Tuni and before this I was in Uganda and I met some Bota Pygmy a community there, which is an indigenous community in Uganda and they use cannabis.

And so I really wanted to explore that when I learned that this was part of their cultural fabric. Because there’s not a lot of documentation or research or anything like that into cannabis use in Sub-Saharan Africa, specifically among the pygmies. And I just stumbled into it because I was at a mushroom festival.

You meet a person, they tell you about a place. Next thing you know. The Pygmies are offering me cannabis, and there’s very little outside sort of exposure to this that I’m aware of, and I was doing my proper due diligence. Didn’t find a lot about it. So that’s a story that would be tough to tell through satire, or the same thing with the Uganda Mushroom Festival.

That’s a story where I don’t know that it really speaks to satire, where you have Sub-Saharan communities that are abjectly impoverished, who are really facing critical urgencies in terms of their limitations. No access to clean water food. Energy issues, things like that. Where, how do you satirize something like that.

How do you tell that story through satire? It’s very easy to tell the story of middle class and upper middle class and rich white people who drink ayahuasca one time and they discover that they too are a shaman. And this is like a very easy low hanging fruit trust. Yeah. The trust afar.

Anyone who spent time in Tulum or Ibiza and I really think it’s an important thing to recognize and to look at because. People tend to romanticize their suffering and their healing. And it’s the, to me, very humorous to be like, you can endlessly fetishize and romanticize this process of healing.

Anything can be heavy and dark and traumatic. But there’s something about being able to reframe some of those experiences and look at ’em with a little bit of skepticism, humor lightheartedness. That to me, in my experience, actually gives you agency over a lot of these experiences and qualities because if you keep trying to heal over and over, you can do hundreds of ceremonies and some people do, maybe that’s their path.

And I think that, I have more stories of how I arrived at these insights and why I’ve arrived at them, but as far as balancing, seriousness and lightheartedness, I think it’s nice when they can dance in between each other. And I think really good satire and humor for me has a really dark, heavy element to it.

It’s almost like you can’t talk about these things. Really effectively and communicate them without being able to put a sense of humor on them. And I tested that theory extensively when I first really started pushing how far I could go with Micropreneur. And I started examining things like geopolitics, like I was making satire on the Israeli Palestine border and going into refugee camps.

Talking about things that are hard to saturate and speak to the, these kinds of experiences I found at the time you could. Examine them through satire, but other times it’s today that would be very hard to do that same kind of satire. This was like four years ago. So I think that it really just depends on the subject matter.

The story and the last bit I’ll say here is satire, usually to me involves punching up. You don’t want to satirize like a vulnerable single mother in a refugee camp. That’s not really satirical material. But satirical material might be the white Arian with the dreadlocks who’s gonna go save the world by starting an ayahuasca center and the Amazon, and it turns into a pyramid scheme and they create a influencer culture around it.

That’s to me, what you would satirize, and it’s being able to judge or distinguish which one deserves which treatment.

Sam Believ: Yeah, and I watched a few of your videos. There is always a part there where they build an Amazon warehouse next to the retreat for some reason. It is. It is funny. So I totally agree with you and I agree with the importance of humor in space, and especially in such serious matters as healing and as psychedelics.

And I think you I’d like to invite you to my retreat. I think you’d appreciate the amount of humor. We have those jokes that we recycle over and over again because there’s this there’s a lot of under the belt humor that comes with ayahuasca because of the purging and things like this.

So there’s this couple jokes that I would love to, to share with you. So yeah you are officially invited, but you, the things you do is basically psychedelic infotainment, right? You, if you were just a person that would hate on all of those, all the psychedelic space, I probably wouldn’t be interviewing you.

So I kinda understand that it’s. It’s like a wrapping. The humor is a wrapping, but deep inside you don’t understand the importance and the use of this space. So it’s like Trojan Horse, right? You lure people in with with funny criticism and then you kinda keep them you educate ’em through a podcast.

Is that a fair assessment of your, of your idea?

Dennis: I think so. I think it’s all about continuing to learn and being open-minded, and that’s what led me to the humor in the first place. I used to be the first one to defend the seriousness of psychedelics. I mentioned I’m a psycho knot. Some people maybe if they’re new to the work I’m putting out, they haven’t been following.

Sometimes it can come off as a little bit like this person’s making fun of healing culture. But I think that is something I arrived at after years of taking it very seriously and also. There are potential pitfalls or challenges and these get recognized sometimes about people who maybe are not in a good position to be serving ayahuasca or serving mushrooms, and they are, because a lot of people don’t know where to get this stuff.

And I’ve seen that play out. I can share some of the stories about going down to Peru. I went down in 2010, 11 and 12 on retreats to ayahuasca centers. And to me it was very new. It didn’t seem to be as culturally in vogue as it is now. I was among the first people in my peer circle, certainly that I knew in my entire community who went and had a ayahuasca retreat in the Amazon.

And I both got wonderful insights and experiences and I also saw. A lot of really unhinged sort of behavior, this idea of you don’t really know who’s serving it. They didn’t necessarily have a lot of safeguards, things like that. So it, it always has been, in my eyes, a wild west frontier for better or worse.

And it’s still like that I don’t think that the answer necessarily is to strictly regulate it and that there’s pushes to do that. But then when you have that wild west frontier, it means that you’re also gonna potentially have some chaos that happens and chaos magic. So yeah, I think being able to.

Have these experiences and then use humor as a form of integration has been a great tool for me and it’s something that I want to teach that to people too. And just one brief story I love to share. I was at Maria Sabina’s house, right? She’s like the patron saint of mushrooms from the mtech culture.

And I’ve been to her family homestead twice. And the second time was a few years ago. It was 2022. And I took a big dose of mushrooms. I was there by myself with her family. They did a vlada, which is the ritual with the copal and incense and prayers and all that. And then they left me there and I was thinking I was gonna have this breakthrough dose experience because the first time I was there in 2010, I had a breakthrough dose and a completely visionary.

Cosmic level experience? This time very little was happening. Like I felt clearly I had the mushrooms in my body, but I really wasn’t breaking through to where I wanted to go. And I felt entitled at a point where I was like, I came all the way down here to Waka and I did the whole ceremony and I ate a double dose of mushrooms and nothing’s happening.

And then I started maybe three hours in just thinking of plot lines for skits, just thinking of, I was just bored. I started thinking of plot lines and then that’s when the mushrooms really kicked in and it felt like there was a sort of collaboration there. And at that point I realized I’d been doing it for a while, that maybe mushrooms also have a sense of humor if we’re willing to assign agency and intelligence to these substances and say that they are, they do have a spirit and they do have an intelligence.

I think they also have a wonderful sense of humor, and why not explore that avenue? In my experience, they’re, they’ve been kicking me plot line saying, Ooh, here’s a good idea. And then all of a sudden it becomes like you’re a you’re, you have a co-pilot instead of just you trying to figure it out.

And then by turn, that becomes very therapeutic as well.

Sam Believ: Yeah. Ayahuasca also has a very keen sense of humor and a lot of people report to it. It can tease you, it can make fun of you. It can also be strict. It’s interesting with those plant or fungal medicines that sort of have that very pronounced spirit, they do seem to also have a personality.

So you mentioned the, in the end, like the therapeutic effects of it. So let’s talk about your own healing journey. A lot of the there, there’s this cultural notion that a lot of the comedians become funny because it’s the way to navigate the world and run away from some pains and process things. I’m assuming what brought you to psychedelics at the first place was healing. And I don’t believe you share about it much. Can you share to us your own healing journey?

Dennis: Yeah, thanks for asking. So truthfully, when I first came into psychedelics, and I mentioned I had a mushroom experience when I was 17, and then that opened the door to higher doses and further exploration open the door to whatever was available within the next few years.

It was DMT salvia, different molecules, right? And truthfully, it wasn’t about healing when I started. It was about visionary purposes. I was so infatuated with this idea that you could close your eyes and see other worlds. And again, that’s the writing of Terence McKenna. It’s the writing of Mark Plotkin, it’s the Arrowwood trip reports, and in particular, as fascinated.

With the writing of McKenna because he is a brilliant writer. I don’t necessarily agree with all of his ideas. I think he had a very humorous element. People take, this is a great example. I think people take Terrence McKenna as like gospel, what he said. But if you read a lot of McKenna, he says don’t believe me.

Have your own experiences, right? I think. I in, in my eyes, like if he were to see how he gets deified and put up on this huge pedestal, he would probably find that very ironic and perhaps distasteful in some ways. I think that it’s all about you have your own experiences and you make up your own mind, but it was in particular how adept he was at being able to describe these experiences.

And it was at a point in my life where I knew there was something there. I had low dose experiences, but I had never heard anybody talk about them in such a eloquent way. So that opened my eyes to, there’s something really here. This person in my eyes as a brilliant writer, he’s really making a lot of sense to me, at least at this point in my life.

I’m gonna explore this further, and it was a high dose visionary experience. When I was 18 years old, I did a seven gram solo. In the dark experience that really delivered on the money, talking about these close eyed visuals, open-eyed visuals, very complex landscapes and insights, and a feeling of this connectedness with something broader.

Very difficult to find the words for it still for a lot of people, much more so when you’re 18 living in the suburbs and there’s not really that level of culture or familiarity in your immediate community. I remember having that really high dose experience and not being able to really talk to anyone about it.

It wasn’t like today, and even now I, I am thinking like, oh, seven grams, there’s so many different variations of potency and different mushrooms and things like that. Not then, not in my community. You pretty much had access to golden teachers. Sometimes they had penis envy, but that was about it.

It wasn’t at all like today where there’s psychedelic cups and people have 150 mushrooms in their culture bank. So yeah, I feel like. It’s been a rollercoaster of a ride still, and I think it’s really important to put time around these experiences too. I feel like a lot of people, myself included, you start to get this sort of honeymoon phase with psychedelics.

You romanticize them, you become an evangelist for them, or everybody needs to do them, everyone needs to try them. But the older I get, the more I put distance between that version of myself. And today I’ve been married for eight, nine years. I have a 1-year-old son, or he is turning one next month.

I’ve been really committed to my work projects. Like it’s different than, 15 years ago where I thought that we needed to get rid of money and, form this new, I still have that level of utopian thinking sometimes, but I just feel like. What I see in psychedelics now is people being very infatuated with them and leaning into them all the time.

And I also strongly believe in cognitive liberty. So I think people should decide what’s right for them. You’re not hurting anyone. You wanna, macro dose for days on end, that’s your decision. But in my own life, I’ve found a lot of value and being a little bit more intentional and then also maybe putting a little bit more space between some of the trips.

Sam Believ: Yeah, definitely. The integration is important. So that’s not the topic I was planning to discuss with you ’cause it’s not the funniest one. It’s actually one of the, one of the boring topics. But I don’t know, maybe you have some wisdom you wanna share.

Dennis: Let’s get into the funny stuff. So how I got into the satire is I was interviewing mushroom entrepreneurs, and that’s what I still do.

Every Friday I put out a new podcast, and that’s actually become quite lucrative because over five years of this 240 something episodes lots of other short interviews, I’ve just built this really cool network of people all over the world who leverage the potential of mushrooms. It’s not just psychedelics, right?

There’s people making materials, there’s people building houses outta mushrooms. Someone just built a surfboard that is commercially available in France. They’ve got a skateboard. So like I’m doing all these interviews and after about a year, especially the psychedelic ones, I was just like. Just everyone’s treating this just like a business, like they’re shipping units of apple juice, right?

This is mushrooms. This is like one of the weirdest, strangest, furthest out thing. And we’ve got all these like CEOs now who are trying to turn it into this commercial interest where they’re treating it like it belongs on the NASDAQ Stock Exchange. So it just created this really wonderful set and setting for humor.

And I in particular found a lot of humor around these kind of, like I mentioned I’m white, obviously I’ve encountered this a lot where god bless the confidence of a white man. A white man goes in, has a psychedelic experience, and then the next thing you know, like they wanna launch a company, they want to, be on featured on Forbes and Rolling Stone and stuff like that.

As a thought leader, and to me there’s just something really beautiful about trying to take the ego down a little bit. That’s what psychedelics for a lot of people are intended to do, or what, it often gets promoted. Like they, you have ego death. But I would challenge that. I think a lot of people, it shows maybe it’s the opposite.

You have ego amplification. There’s a sense of I am great, I am the best. I am gonna dominate. And to me satire is a great way of taking people down a pig in a beneficial way. And then I started to learn that this is something historically that various cultures have seen the value in. So like with the archetypal role of the jester, right?

And the actual renaissance, not the psychedelic renaissance, but like Renaissance Europe, there was usually a jester in the king’s court. And the express role of the jester is to bring the king down a notch a little bit. It’s to make fun of him. It’s because nobody else could do it. If some, if one of the peasants makes fun of the king, they would get their head chopped off.

But it was the Jester’s job to make the king laugh and to lampoon the king. And again, this kind of archetypal figure has shown up in different cultures. And the idea, as far as I understand it, is that they don’t want the king to get too full of himself. There has to be some element of humanness.

And part of humanness is having a sense of humility and having, being able to. Look at yourself and being like, you know what? I am being a little bit of a jerk right now. I don’t know if it always works, but that’s my understanding of the gesture’s role is that there’s like a, an archetypal role, just the way that like there’s different figures and a culture.

Like you have your king and you have your soldier, and you have your damsel in distress. You also have the gesture in that this is a super important role. Yeah, I have fun with it. And the litmus test I use for if something’s worth doing is if it is funny for me. I think, humor is very authentic.

It’s very complicated. What is humor? Where does it come from? What makes something funny? There’s so many different cultural tropes that are tied to that about, if I tell you a joke. And it gets translated from Latin Ian to English. It might not be funny, right? I used to host exchange students sometimes, like the Russians would tell me a joke.

It’s not funny but it’s hilarious and Russian. ’cause you have to be able to understand the culture and the context and why it’s funny and that’s a lot of humor. So to me, what makes it really cool to do psychedelic humor and mushroom humor is it means that the culture has evolved to a point where people have these shared ideas about why something is funny.

If you were to tell mushroom jokes or DMT jokes a few years ago, they’d have to be pretty surface level. But now you could talk about DMT entities and the joke and people know what you’re talking about. Or you could talk about like ego death with the mushrooms. People know what you’re talking about.

This just means that the culture has grown. So we have a shared language. So I think that’s another interesting point with the satire. I,

Sam Believ: yeah, it’s interesting you mentioned language because, with knowledge of language, when you get real proficiency in the language is when you can start making jokes in the language.

And also humor does tend to be a sign of a high intelligence as well. There, there’s definitely something there. But I had the good, I had the good follow up for that and I’m blanking on it right now. Gimme one second.

I also, I’ll just switch the topic.

Dennis: Yeah, sure. I’m happy to, yeah,

Sam Believ: no, carry on. You wanna say something?

Dennis: I wanna point out the difference between humor or, it’s like comedy and satire. I think that’s important and I think satire has a moral component to it too. It’s like a sort of a morality tale or like a moral compass for a culture and for me.

Standup comedy and humor. You could tell poop jokes and they could be funny, and I’ve laughed at them like Eddie Murphy, great comedian, standup comedian. Also great satirist, but mainly known as a comedian. He talks about when he first started standup, like he could just tell poop jokes and part jokes ’cause he was 16 and that’s all he knew how to tell jokes about.

And I think you, you could do that with satire, but satire usually has an element where there maybe is a teachable moment. And it’s this idea of like in a culture, when you want to embed certain social norms or like a way of thinking about something, you can do it satirically and there’s a moral component to it.

So I think that’s important. And and also I just wanna mention, yeah, doing like. Dark stuff. Like even right now I’m working on a bit, which I’ll probably drop today, that’s a collab post for one of the sponsors that I work with. And it has to do with like proprietary mushroom blends because there’s all these themes and elements and it’s very niche and nuance right now, but essentially, most people listen to this are probably familiar with this, but there’s a lot of these quote mushroom chocolates or mushroom gummies that are for sale online.

Like TikTok has a trending product right now. I don’t even want to use their name, but it’s you have people who are unfamiliar with psychedelics. They’re not going down or drinking ayahuasca or doing integration. It’s the sort of consumer culture, right? Where it’s like on TikTok shop and it gets marketed as wink, nudge, nudge.

They don’t use the real words, but like magic mushrooms essentially. But they’re research chemicals, right? They’re manufactured in the lab. It’s not magic mushrooms, it’s a lab drive chemical. There’s a lot of nuances and debate about how this gets in, but the point is that it’s marketed as being this like psychedelic mushroom, and it’s not.

So I’m like creating a meme right now that leans into these tropes about who uses these products, who sells them? And sometimes you look at ’em, you’re like. Oh, this is like potentially very offensive to some people and I think that’s important too. I think it’s okay, like to, you don’t wanna walk on eggshells.

Like we went through a period culturally where like comedians were afraid to say things. It’s even happened recently, right? Where it’s like people could get in big trouble if they make the wrong joke. And I think that’s a sign of a weak dying culture, like comedy satire. This should be the most protected form of speech and it has historically.

And once you start telling people like you need to be really careful who you make fun of and how you make fun of them, then I think everybody loses. And South Park’s been a great example of that. South Park has said if you can make fun of one group or one type of person. You have to make fun of every type of person, and I think there’s a lot of value in that sort of ideology right now.

Sam Believ: This episode is sponsored by Lara ias retreat. Most of Lara, if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, some of you might have already been. To Lare before, for those who don’t know us yet, we started Lara four years ago at Lara. We combined authenticity, accessibility, and affordability.

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All of that is included in price as well as pick up from Metagene Accommodation in Ayahuasca. Visit la wire.com to book your retreat or learn more. La Wire Connect. Heal. Grow L-A-W-A-Y-R a.com. No, definitely. I think taking things too seriously is not always good. So let’s talk about the value of humor in this psychedelic wave specifically.

So we’re, I think they call it third wave Renaissance. I believe the previous one was with the hippies, and I think part of the reason it, it fell apart was the seriousness. Like they, everyone wanted to change the world. And as you say, utopian thinking, I think humor can help there. What are your thoughts on that?

Dennis: Oh man, I would love to go back to 1969 to the sit-in the loving and just put whoopy cushions under the hippies, have fun with it. Yeah. There’s a real potential right now for humor to really bring healing that people are looking for, that maybe they are not getting, like ironically, psychedelics, mushrooms, ayahuasca, probably a lot of people can attest to if they’re not respected, if they’re not shown a certain level of respect and integrity like.

They can just as easily cause harm for people. Th this is like a blind spot a lot of people don’t always wanna talk about, but if you abuse something, it can definitely hit you right back. If you think about things being like a amplifier of internal states, right?

So humor I think can get to the bottom of a lot of that very quickly. And I heard it framed in a way I liked where someone I respect a lot I got to connect with in Austin at South by Southwest. And they mentioned like, when, you’re purging with ayahuasca, you think about throwing up right as a purge for a lot of people.

Like humor. If you get a belly laugh, you’re like, you’re moving the energy down in your belly and it’s like a breath that comes out. You think about breath work of people like breathing deeply, getting to the root of their trauma. If you really hit the bullseye and you have a deep laugh, you’re releasing something very deep, it’s in your gut, it’s coming out in a very kind of like breath work.

It’s going way beyond your normal breathing patterns and thinking, and it’s touching something very deep. It’s touching a nerve. I deal with a lot too as many of us do. I just mentioned just having my son and. The birth process is pretty challenging. It was pretty traumatic.

We’re so blessed and so grateful. But as any new parent will attest to you, like it’s tough when you get your sleep interrupted, your schedule’s topsy-turvy you still have work to do. You have commitments, you have family, but it’s like you’re taking on so much new energy. I can’t like just focus on work like I used to, right?

It’s if I take my eyes off this kid, he might fall down and hurt himself or, put his fingers in the plug or whatever. Point being that I’m now finding like I have to deal with a lot of stuff too. And so when I have a chance to find humor in something or make something humorous, it’s really beautiful.

And I also see this when I travel. I mentioned I’ve been very fortunate to travel a lot, host exchange students, and I found people in very challenging situations who have wonderful senses of humor. It’s if you can find humor and laughter and joy and these challenging circumstances. What’s really gonna get to you after that?

Like you say, oh yeah, that already happened. I was a soldier. I’ve been involved in lots of things and I choose to find joy. You can let. Your circumstances define you, and it’s really easy to tell yourself the story that you’re the victim. This thing happened to you, that thing happened to you, this person did something wrong.

It’s just as easy, or at least if you think about it this way, to make yourself have a different story, like change your story, find a sense of humor. And just briefly I’ll share, that was one of my early exposures to kind of plant medicine healing was with cannabis. It was before I’d taken mushrooms and I had a close eyed visual experience where someone who was tormenting me a lot at that point in my life, I was having, troubles at school and I didn’t know how to feel about this person.

And I saw them just like dancing like a clown. Like while, they were like, it completely reframed my perspective of them and I was laughing at them. I remember so that after that, when I’d see this person, I’d just be like, I’ve seen you just acting like a total fool, and you’re no longer threatening or scary to me.

I’ve heard ERO tell me that, but in the Amazon with Ayahuasca telling me that if you know these something’s very dark and heavy and they, it’s trying to scare you in your vision, just laughing. Its face, just, I’m not scared of you. Like you look ridiculous right now.

You’re stuck in this five D matrix and I get to go drink my mint tea and drink beer tomorrow if I want. And you’re stuck here by reframing things. It gives you a lot of power over the situation.

Sam Believ: Yeah. Humor is very important. It’s it’s a very powerful tool and especially if you have kids and you have business and it’s busy.

I I attest to that. I have three kids myself, and I dunno if you can see my under eye bags, but I was woken up by one of them today at 2:00 AM because he. His diaper leaked and he pe he peed himself. And then I had to go take him to my bed. And so it is challenging. Yes. Stressful humor helps.

That’s why we would definitely joke a lot. Like I, I joke a lot. I call myself a sit down comedian because we sit in the word circles and we share, there’s a presentation and I and I make a lot of dad jokes, and some people find them funny, some don’t. But humor really helps sometimes.

For me, the problem is not to make a joke, in a serious situation. Somebody sharing something and I find something funny and I’m like I can’t really make fun there. And I’ve a couple times I’ve made an appropriate joke. So that’s another that’s another level there.

So are you ever worried about offending people or, getting an enemy or something like that through your humor?

Dennis: There was a point where I was, but at this point, I’m truly worried about not offending enough people. There’s I don’t go outta my way to do it, maybe I should, but something that happened with Micropreneur and is in the process, is like, when I first started I’ve always been an outsider, right?

Like I’ve always I discovered mushrooms and my own way and was doing doses, and then I was never really connected to a strong sense of psychedelic community or things like that. And I always felt before that, even before psychedelics, just like on the edge of the cool group, like I wasn’t, I was part of the cool group, but I was on the edge and humor was a way for me to fit in, right?

So I was class clown in high school. And just like you say, like I have problems not making jokes. Like I wanna make a joke at a funeral, and I want people to make a joke at my funeral and tell jokes and things like that. And. Like when my entrepreneur became popular, I think it was because it, I was like really pushing the boundaries as far as I could.

Like I mentioned, I went over to Baghdad, Iraq. I was at like Saddam Hussein’s, abandoned palace above Babylon and then Babylon just wanting to be as weird as I could. It was this sense like psychedelics just were really starting to become an industry. There were these conferences happening. I got looped into through the podcast some of these circles where it’s all of a sudden it’s like professional and we’re trying to be serious and.

There’s a part there, there’s definitely room for that, but not at the expense of the weirdness. So I just said, I’m just gonna be as weird as I can be and make a lot of jokes that are over the top. And I pushed it and then I ended up, this was 2022 doing satire about Davos. They did the psychedelic industry meetup in Jabos who was getting mainstream coverage and like The Guardian and BBC.

And it was all these stakeholders from like ketamine companies and MDMA aspiring companies and things like that, who met at the World Economic Forum. And while this was happening, I was in Palestine, I was in Jerusalem, and I went to Hebron and learning about that whole story, which of course now is much harder to talk publicly about than it was then.

It was still very culturally sensitive, but not nearly the same as it has been in the last, like two years. So I was like making these absurd videos. But also educating people about the situation, like showing them on the ground how things were in places like Baghdad and Palestine. I was in Israel and then in Egypt, so like this part of the world.

A lot of people have only read about. And I found that satire became this wonderful vehicle for educating as I was learning. But it started to get popular and I think it’s because people saw, like I was being earnest. I wasn’t trying to tell a biased narrative. I was trying to like, make sense of what I was seeing and also have a sense of humor about it.

And then, that earned me more invitations. All of a sudden I was starting to publish with different platforms and I got, let’s say, taken seriously. So why I mention all this is because at that point when I was creating a lot of this type of content, the point was to see how far I could push it, right?

Fast forward two years, it wasn’t that long after I started, all of a sudden I started getting like all of these opportunities, right? I got invited out to Miami to mc, a big conference with Paul Stams and Rick Doblin. They gave me the influencer of the year award. I started getting paid, I got invited out to England to give a keynote at breaking convention, which is a huge academic psychedelic, like biggest European psychedelic conference.

Next thing you know is like India first mushroom conference, and then I was in Geneva a month ago, but it was it’s been like that for the last three years. When you start getting like these bigger opportunities and you start getting money, sponsorships and things like that, it changed the game a little bit.

Like when I was just having fun and seeing how far I could push it, I really didn’t have anything to lose. And then you get to a point where it’s like all of a sudden a lot more people were paying attention and I would actually hear about it if somebody didn’t like something I said, or they didn’t like a video, I get a text, and it felt like people were watching me from all over and all this. And I didn’t have any issues with this. And at this point, frankly, I could care less most of the time. But like I started having to think oh, if I offend the wrong person, whatever, I could get a sponsorship pulled.

And then you have to make that choice. You’re like, do I want to be making money and getting stage time and, getting published and getting quoted and yada. Or do I wanna push it a little bit. And that was the cultural moment at the time too. Like I mentioned, there have been comedians who get their gigs canceled or they say the wrong thing and they get a sponsorship pulled.

So yeah. But I come out the other side of that and realize if that’s the way you wanna approach things, then you you might as well just coast into the sunset because your work has lost its punch. If you’re letting other people dictate what you’re saying and how you’re saying it.

I don’t think that’s what good comedy or good satire is. I think you could be tasteful. So yeah, at this point I’m gonna see if I can get back to offending people. I think that’s the right move.

Sam Believ: Yeah. Sounds good. I remember first one of my we call people that come to my retreat patients and one, one of them, Martin, he’s also a Latin guy.

He sent me a video and I was a little bit offended. I remember. I was like, so it can definitely, he can definitely. Trigger sometimes. But my question to you is, obviously you make fun of white retreat owners and I’m just having to be a white retreat owners, white retreat owner.

So there’s definitely a lot of funniness and I’ve met a lot of crazy people. I would love to believe that I’m different, right? I’m still probably funny because LA guy in, in the Colombian jungle working with the medicine it is a funny concept, but have you met retreat owners that you’re like, yeah, they’re legit, they’re doing good work, they’re working with tradition, they’re helping people, they’re not overcharging or is it always or is it always bad?

Dennis: I think people are not easily camped into like good or bad. And I think that’s something we tend to do a lot is like there’s this sort of ideological purity people have when they look at another person about like how they should act. I think there’s certain things that really shouldn’t be tolerated and I ran into that unknowingly when I first went out to these Amazonian retreats I mentioned like that was really a wild West situation and there were really quite a few accusations after the fact.

None that I was aware of at the time, but they started coming out later of things like sexual assault or like this retreat owner pulling a gun and like one of my. People that I knew who was part of the retreat down there, told me later that this retreat owner pulled a gun on him and fired bullets at his feet because he offended him and then told him he had to leave.

And if he ever saw him again, he was gonna kill him. That’s pretty extreme. And I think especially before today’s culture, like back then, I didn’t know this was a thing, but apparently you could, they could just pay, ’cause I heard this from a lawyer who was working directly with this person. They could pay to get bad reviews removed from sites or suppressed, so they have now Treat Guru, and I don’t think that was around back then.

I was unaware if it was, but for things like TripAdvisor or whatever, where there were reviews of these centers, they could actually pay to have a bad review removed. Or they could threaten with litigation, things like that so that if somebody leaves that review or says on a forum like this. Retreat owner has done this and X, Y, and Z, they could just get that removed so that when you do the Googling, and again, this was like 2010, 11 or back then all is great reviews and it’s oh, so they’ve had 200 reviews and they’re all five stars or four stars or whatever.

So you know that, but at the same time, I know that a lot of people are conflicted about that kind of stuff. ’cause they say I had a great experience. I don’t think we should be okay at all with having someone like that allowed or able to do things. But again, just trying to paint things into either this is good or this is bad.

Most people fall into both camps, so I would like to think that there are ethical operators. I haven’t really been to too many retreats since then. I will say the handful of retreats I’ve been on, I went to one in 2021. I think that was a mushroom retreat somewhere by invitation. And I also had a really weird experience there and I’m not.

In the business right now of trying to like name names and shame people and those people are no longer operating that retreat. But there, there’s just been like, in my experience, a lot of strangeness, a lot of cult dynamics. I would love to go maybe experience a retreat today. ’cause I do think the culture has learned a lot.

I think more people who have been called to, to serve, let’s say more or less selflessly or like really called to help people, hopefully they’re in those positions, but also. Like I spent a lot of time in Mexico and it is a way to turn a quick buck for a lot of people because there’s almost no regulation, right?

If I wanted to set up a Iboga retreat in Mexico, it would not be very hard. Like you have to have a few connections. And I’ve been born on the border, I’ve been going to Mexico since 1990 and have lived there on and off for over a decade, right? Or for many years at this point. Point being that I’ve never opted to do that, but I’ve seen like backpackers or people come in.

And they set up overnight shops where they wanna run retreats and things like that. And I’ve never really been motivated to participate in those. And there have been quite a few stories of how those kinds of things can go awry, where, people aren’t doing intake, they’re not interviewing, they just like whoever can pay you arrive and then, it can just come off the street basically.

Some areas they’ll have like signs on the street being like, Bufo ceremony tonight you can just go smoke five M-E-O-D-M-T with no prior relationship or knowledge. So I do think it’s an interesting dynamic to think about, like gatekeeping verse access and I vacillate or go back and forth about it’s, is it one or the other?

Or it’s somewhere in the middle. Because I do think that there’s a lot of potential for not. Ideal experiences and maybe even flat out harmful experiences, like I’ve heard about and heard direct stories from people of but at the same time, does that mean you wanna make it like super restrictive and like very hard and you have to get this level of license and this level of clinical training so I think the community quote unquote at large is navigating those boundaries.

And that’s truly a lot of that stuff is what drove me back to mushrooms because I saw, wait a minute, do I personally need to go fly down to the Amazon or fly to Gabon? I’ve been invited to West Africa to do iboga or could I have a breakthrough healing therapeutic plant medicine or fungi medicine experience was something that’s grown in my neighborhood.

And mushrooms spoke to me in that way. Wait, I and I do think one other hot take I have is there’s a lot of comparing and subjectivity right now of like people saying iboga is the strongest plant medicine. There’s nothing even close. But then the five M-E-O-D-M-T facilitators will say five MEO is by far the strongest, weirdest, psychedelic.

And then people are being like have you ever hit a K hole? Have you ever done like a big ketamine dose? And I personally think these are all different ways to access these altered states. And have you ever done a ultra macro dose of mushrooms? Because I don’t hear many people talking about that.

But if you do. What, whatever the psilocin equivalent would be of like a 20 gram dose, a huge heroic dose. There’s absolutely states that you can access that have a lot of overlap. So that’s my take on it, is like they’re different tools for different people and I think if someone’s called to go work with something, they should probably do that.

They should be aware of what they’re getting into. And but one other thing I’ll mention is there’s this trend. Now maybe you’ve seen it, I don’t know, but I’ve heard about these centers that will serve like IBOGA and five M-E-O-D-M-T, and peyote and they’ll be giving people like multiple things. Again, I think if that’s what somebody wants to do, they should have the right to do that.

But you really need to know that maybe that’s not a great idea. Like it could just as easily destabilize you if not done intelligently. And some people don’t care at all. And if that’s you, just be careful and don’t hurt anyone else and hopefully don’t serve it to anyone else.

Sam Believ: I have an idea.

So I’m so convinced that what I’ve created here is the most reasonable way to run a retreat. I really want you to come over and if you find something that’s bad or humorous, make a video about it. I give you an open invitation to criticize me. And also I think there’s a, there is an opportunity for some good fun content playing on Columbia’s history, cocaine.

And I get, there’s a lot of humorous content and comments I get on my post. It’s oh, you’re just a glorified drug dealer. We could make a sketch about that. I think it would be really funny that of some tourists that went to Columbia to to do some cocaine and somehow ended up at the Naas retreat.

I think that could be a good piece of content. And because I understand what you say, it’s I see I feel the same criticism, the fakeness, the. The white shamans that drank ayahuasca a couple times and now they’re shaman or mixing different medicines and combo one day fu the other day, or just weirdness and the fakeness.

’cause I kinda I avoided, I also don’t understand the fact that you need to like, look a certain way or have dreads or copper cups or crystals and, there’s definitely spiritual layers to it that I’m only still accessing, but there’s a lot of fakeness in this space, so I try to avoid this.

So yeah I really hope you take this invitation and, we can make something funny. Even if you make fun of us, like I’m open. Oh,

Dennis: I would love to. And I’m not above being made fun of I would hope that people could make fun of me and do it well. And I think to really make fun of someone in a way that’s funny requires you to know that person, or at least to have respect for them.

I think. When I, so go back to South Park, which has been a shining light for a lot of people in their satirical lives, or just in far in terms of pop culture, a lot of the celebrities that South Park really destroys. It’s a badge of honor. They’ll say I made it, like they, they fun of me.

But like I, it’s an honor in that way. And again, I think when you show that you’re not bothered by it, it shows that you are. Confident and secure in yourself. There’s something about satire and it happens with all of us. We’re like, if I get criticized sometimes I take it really personally, right?

That happens and then you say, wait a minute. Why did I take that personally? Like why did that hurt? And then I think there’s something there and then think, focus on that and be like, if somebody criticizes you for something that you are stronger than you, it doesn’t bother you.

But if there’s some, for some reason it bothers you, I think that’s more a comment on yourself. So yeah, I’m interested definitely. And I’ve been to Columbia several times. Love it there. And hope to come back. So I think we can stay in touch after this and as schedules allow, it would be really interesting to, to explore this.

Sam Believ: Yeah. What you just touched on, I think is very deep because it’s basically shadow. If something’s making fun, if someone’s making fun of you and you get offended, it’s because your shadow gets triggered. It’s the same way. The easiest way to discover your shadow is when you look at someone and they really annoy you and you don’t know why.

It means you see something in them you don’t like in yourself. It’s your shadow and you have to do, you have to do the shadow work. So that’s another good reason for humor to exist. In, in, in our modern day, the attention spans are very low. People are distracted. It’s so hard to educate people.

So I think what you’re doing with grabbing their attention with humor and then educating them is actually very smart and very useful. What is your opinion in general and on the way communication is done these days? Social media and like meme culture anything you wanna share in that direction?

Dennis: I think it’s so important look at the fact that, like the president, I think both presidents in the US in the last two administrations have leaned into meme culture and like it’s, Elon Musk and these, very internationally. Prestigious influential people leaning into meme culture, and I think that kind of shows how powerful it can be.

I’ve also become interested in meme advertising. Like I, I mentioned, I like to do all the funny, silly stuff and I also wanna not worry about money, but for all of us. You kinda have to figure out how to put two and two together. You got kids, you got bills, stuff like that. Like it’s turned out that meme advertising can be really great.

Like it’s fun, it’s engaging. Spirit Airlines. No Ryan Air does it really well. They make fun of themselves. It’s a cheap airline. They lean into that. They lead into the shadow instead of being like, don’t make fun of us for being cheap. That’s their whole advertising strategy. It’s yeah, we’re cheap, but you’re gonna fly with us because we’re cheap, so we can make fun of it.

And we’ll make fun of you too. So I think as far as communicating the idea of a meme, as far as I understand it, is, it’s something that’s a replicable unit of culture and that’s what makes things go viral, is like you create an idea, a piece of culture and then it resonates with people and they wanna share it.

So that’s also what let me know. I was onto something with the satire because it was organic. I didn’t convince anyone to share this. People saw it and they’re like, so many times people have said. I swear you made this about me, or I swear you made this video about my friend and I think, no, I didn’t actually.

But you saw that because it’s again, this archetype, it’s this person that exists of it could be the white shaman. That’s a easy one. And then as far as like how things get communicated and social media, that’s what my background is like. I have a degree in media studies from University of San Francisco, and it was on the first wave of social media.

So I arrived at university, a psycho knot already, and like full blown, high dose, fascinated wild eyes. And this was 2007. So like Facebook, I think launched in 2007 or oh six. Twitter launched in 2006. YouTube had just launched. So I really got to ride this first wave of social media and. See where it’s gone from there.

So I’ve been tracking, studying, building, trying different things. I also feel a sense of pride in that. It’s taken a long time to have some success in this space, right? Like back in film school, back when I was an undergrad, I didn’t get the breakthroughs I was hoping for, and a lot of people don’t, it doesn’t happen overnight.

But then the fact that I got to continue working towards something, chipping away, working on different projects, playing in bands, teaching multimedia, working on independent films, things like that. And then eventually it’s satire and humor that broke through. And I never planned to do humor or satire, just.

Was a sort of hidden talent, let’s say. Like I knew I could be funny, but I never thought about putting out explicitly satirical skits and content. So it’s the virality the meme culture that paved the way for all of that. And I started seeing oh, if I make this certain type of content that I think is funny and people think it’s funny, then it actually affords me more opportunities to do cool things.

And so really the last few years it’s been about like finding ways to leverage that. To ironically grow the business. It’s but it started out me just like criticizing, rallying against this psychedelic industrial complex. And then I’ve been co-opted to a degree where now, people hit me up to Hey, I’ve got this brand of this, that, or the other, this conscious brand.

I want you to promote us great $2,000. And it’s wonderful because if people don’t like it, I’m like, I’m having fun. I think the most important thing for a lot of people is avoid burnout. And it’s tough to do that. And the way you avoid burnout is by having fun and enjoying things and means satire, humor.

Leans really well into that. And then the other side of that is we talk about like the kind of fake plastic shamans, which I think definitely exist, but there’s a lot of this like social media glorification of psychedelics, right? Like the psychedelic influencer as such rich subject matter to me.

Live streaming a mushroom ceremony. I think that’s like a wonderful topic for satire, live streaming, an ayahuasca ceremony, this idea of something very sacred and beautiful, but like I did a skit that I thought was funny about get ready with me for an ayahuasca ceremony.

People do on TikTok get ready with me for a night out. So just talking about what I’m gonna wear to the ceremony because they think there’s an element of that where like you, you get these people who do a ceremony and then almost immediately after they’re updating their Twitter about what they learned in the ceremony.

Or they’re like taking a picture with them. And I just think there’s a lot of room for satire and comedy there. ’cause can you imagine like the traditional lineages, which obviously we’ve evolved from that to a degree, but once upon a time, as far as I understood it, like if you wanna learn about some of these plants or these entheogen.

You go in solitude, you diet, you’re very intentional about it. And now we’ve created this fast food culture around it where like you fly in, you do the ceremony, you take selfies, you update it, and then you’re back in the office on Monday and you make a LinkedIn post about what the spirit’s taught you about ROI and Q4 and how you really need to finish strong in Q4.

This is what my vision was. And I’m not saying it’s my place to judge or say like a person’s right or wrong, but I do say it’s my person, it’s my place to make fun of that. It’s my place to be like, I think this is silly and I think we can make fun of it. If your whole thing you got out of your ayahuasca trip was how you’re gonna be like a slightly better employee that’s you.

But I think that is, is a silly way to approach it personally. I think these experiences. Probably take longer to figure out what happened than to like force this night. Sometimes people have the narrative written before they finish the experience. There’s a, I’m gonna go down and I’m gonna figure this out.

And then they already have it written their idea. So when they finish with everything, it’s like they already, they told the ayahuasca what they wanted, they didn’t open themselves up to see, they told ’em, oh, I want this and this is what I’m gonna manifest. So I digress. But I think, yeah, there’s a lot of room for skepticism, humor and the, this idea of the fast food, ayahuasca ification or fast food psychedelic experience.

Sam Believ: No, I as you talk about it, I understand there’s just so many things that are finding in this space and I appreciate the work you do. I think the gesture is necessary and I definitely. Had a lot of fun watching your video thank you so much for coming on and talking.

This is a very unique topic in this space, so I was glad to have you and yeah, just tell people that haven’t seen you, which they must be living under the rock because I think everyone have seen you. But tell them where to find you and any asks from the audience.

Dennis: Awesome. Thanks Sam for having me on.

I really appreciate it, and I do hope to go to Latvia one of these days. I’ve always wanted to go to Riga. I mentioned I work with a chocolate maker there of all things. So yeah, micropreneur is the name of the platform. I’m very active online. I try to have at least one post per day, a satirical reel lately with traveling.

I was in Uganda, as I mentioned, for Mushroom Festival last couple weeks. I’ve fallen behind a bit, but I do a lot of online content on my Instagram and on LinkedIn. TikTok, I got kicked off a Twitter. That’s an amazing story, but I’ll save it for another time. So I’ve been de platformed from a few, because I talk about psychedelics a lot.

Anybody who’s in this space knows that’s a potential thing. I do the newsletter, which covers. The mushroom innovation space globally, that comes out every Thursday in the morning, and then on Thursday afternoons I host an incubator. So if anyone’s interested in connecting with other mushroom entrepreneurs, and a lot of mushroom entrepreneurs also have a lot of skin in the game, or connections with other things like.

Ayahuasca, tryptamine, so on and so forth. Come join us at the incubator. It’s free. The invite goes out Thursday morning in the newsletter, and we have really solid presentations. Like we just had one from a group in Colorado that breed exotic psilocybin mushrooms and olis mushrooms. So like things way beyond Ensis Zappo decorum and T-T-B-V-I, which is the strongest psilocybin containing mushroom in the world, or at least that’s been tested.

And they did a whole presentation about the future of psilocybin mushrooms and beyond Cuban. We do this every week. So this week it’s gonna be someone from Silo Safe is the organization, which is a third party labeling system, which makes sure that products on the underground market have inside of the product what the labels say, and they match up.

And it’s a great way to get your finger on the pulse of what’s happening, to meet people who are deeply invested in the space and established already especially in the mushroom innovation space. So that’s every Thursday. The podcast still comes out once a week. We always have interesting guests.

Primarily focused on mushroom innovation across the board. We get into a lot of subjects like we did here. I do a lot of public appearances at these different conferences, festivals. Essentially what I tell people is it’s a media platform. And wherever you find media, that’s where the platform is.

So between the podcast, the newsletter, the online skits, the serious journalism stories, sometimes I’m writing stories for High Times or doubleblind, different magazines, things like that. I would love for all of you to connect with me, whoever feels called to. And I just wanna thank you again for the platform and the time.

And let’s keep in touch about my next visit to Columbia. I’ve been two or three times, I’m sure I’ll be back.

Sam Believ: Thank you, Dennis. Guys, definitely check out the videos. They’re very funny. So guys, you’ve been listening to Ayahuasca podcast. As always, we do the whole assembly and I’ll see you in the next episode.

I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you’d like to support us and psychedelic renaissance at large. Please follow us and leave us a like wherever it is you’re listening. Share this episode with someone who will benefit from this information. Nothing in this podcast is intended as medical advice, and it is for educational and entertainment purposes only.

This episode is sponsored by Lara Ayahuasca, retreat. At Lara, we combine affordability, accessibility, and authenticity, laira connect, heal, grow. Guys, I’m looking forward to hosting you.

In this episode of Ayahuasca Podcast, host Sam Believ (founder of http://www.lawayra.com) has a conversation with , founder of . Based in Colombia, Danielle has spent over a decade working closely with Indigenous communities to produce ethically sourced, high-quality ceremonial cacao. Her work bridges traditional knowledge, sustainability, and modern processing while supporting local farmers and regenerative practices.

We touch upon topics of:

• Danielle’s first Aya experiences and how they led her to cacao (02:00–05:30)
• Building Origin Cacao with Indigenous communities in Colombia (06:00–11:00)
• Cacao as a daily connection practice vs ceremonial use (13:00–20:30)
• Cacao as an integration tool after Aya ceremonies (21:00–26:30)
• Ethics, sourcing, and avoiding exploitative cacao industries (29:00–32:30)
• Fermentation, roasting, and why “raw cacao” is a myth (55:00–58:30)
• Replacing coca crops with cacao and Colombia’s agricultural future (38:30–44:30)

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

Find more about Danielle de Kisere and her work at origencacao.com and on Instagram @origencacao.

Transcript

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

Danielle de Kisere: There are so many ways that cacao can be beneficial, whether it’s spiritual or emotional or just physical with the properties, all the vitamins and nutrients, antioxidants, there are so many ways that people can choose to drink cacao. You don’t have to be on a spiritual mission every day.

Sam Believ: So I just realized I’ve been lying to people because I thought that the difference between the ceremonial cacao and the store-bought cacao is the type of the bean.

Danielle de Kisere: If you have something that tastes anything like chocolate, it’s not raw and there’s no possible way for it to be raw. There’s a lot of people that tell you that, ah, no.

The ceremonial caca should be harsh as you straw, but if you don’t like to drink it, then you’re not gonna drink it.

Sam Believ: You talk about Columbia government replacing Coke. Cow plantations with cacao plantations.

Danielle de Kisere: God forbid you buy cacao from Africa, where still 80% of the labor that works in the cacao fields in Africa is slave labor and child labor.

Sam Believ: Hi guys, and welcome to Ayahuasca podcast, as always with the host. And today I’m having a conversation with Dan. Dick is here. Yeah, Danielle is the founder of Origin Cacao. We’re right here at her farm. Some of you the come to Lare, you’ve been participating cacao ceremonies last six months or so, and it’s been done with cacao from Danielle’s Farm.

So I’m here at the Source and we are gonna talk about cacao today. This episode is sponsored by Lara Ayahuasca Retreat. At Laira, we combine affordability, accessibility, and authenticity. Laira, connect, heal, grow. Guys, I’m looking forward to hosting you. Dan, welcome to the show.

Danielle de Kisere: Thank you so much.

Sam Believ: Dan, tell us Kate is your sort of final stop when you participated in other medicine traditions before.

Tell us your story of where were you before and then how did you find the medicines and how did you end up working with your Cal?

Danielle de Kisere: I came to Columbia in 2014. I didn’t know anything about the medicine or any medicines or anything like that. I had, was in a transitional point of my life and I had just come here for a short vacation.

But then I decided to stay, I ended up going to an Ayahuasca ceremony. Just by pure accident I met some woman on the plane who said that I needed to go to INE because it was the most beautiful city in Columbia. I was staying in Santa Marta. And and so I just Google search what to do in Met Jean.

And a little article came up about an ayahuasca ceremony and huh, that sounds interesting. Maybe it might help me. And I went and it was absolutely terrible. It was the most ridiculous thing. I couldn’t believe that I paid Lenny to go. It was, I think it was only like 20 bucks.

Yeah. But it was up in, in the mountains and it was so cold and, I didn’t really speak much Spanish at the time. And when I arrived the Titan gave me a tobacco purge. So he just put this like golf ball, size of tobacco in my mouth with his dirty fingers. And I just really sick from that.

And I didn’t really feel the medicine and it was freezing cold. And I’m like why? I can’t believe I paid money to do this? Like, why do people do this? It’s ridiculous. And so I went back to Santa Mar to do my thing and one of the girls that I had met at ceremony, she was also from the us she came to visit me out there.

She’s oh no, but it’s really great. You need to try again. I’m like, I don’t think so. She’s no, you just try again. So I went back and I went to go find the organizer and I told him that I wanted to thank the lady who was singing at the last ceremony. That it was the really the only beautiful thing that I experienced the whole time.

There was some love and singing and it was really super beautiful. He is like. What are you talking about there? We don’t have a female singer. There was nobody singing that night. So I had I had spent the whole night thinking that absolutely no effects from the medicine and nothing happened to me.

And and turns out something did happen. And then that night turned out to be really beautiful. So I kept going back and then I stayed in Columbia and been working with medicine ever since. As far as cacao, when I had decided to stay in Columbia I figured I needed something to do besides drink medicine, that if I was gonna stay here and live here I should do something.

And my mother had asked me at one point to send her back some chocolate. She had heard that Columbia made great chocolates and I couldn’t find any. It turns out nobody in Columbia was actually making good. Chocolate bean to bar chocolate, ceremonial cacao, nothing. There was nothing nothing happening here in, in that sense.

And so I started to learn how to make chocolate and and

Sam Believ: it’s okay. It is a dog saying it is funny.

Danielle de Kisere: So I started learning about chocolate and started, kept working with the medicine and learning about, the plant medicines and that. And had one of my ceremonies I met as Dils who is from the ar waku tribe.

And we started talking a lot. And turns out he had a cacao farm in the Sierra Nevada on the ar waku reservation. And so he sent me some cacao. To see how it turned into chocolate. That’s violet. And so he sent me 50 kilos of cacao and it was absolutely terrible. Absolutely terrible.

They, at that point nobody in the Sierra Nevada really knew how to ferment cacao properly or what to do with the cacao. They just dried it and sent it off and and so I showed him what went wrong and so he went back and tried again and learned some more, and we tried again and it was still terrible.

And anyways, I think that went on for about a year of, every couple months he would try a different technique and, eventually we started getting some good cacao from them, and his wife was here with their kids, and she started coming over to our little tiny factory learning how to make, how to process the cacao.

And and so once we finally had a really beautifully tasting cacao that was coming from their farm, I, I thought, what better to do with it than to share it for ceremonial cacao? Because at that time, this was like 10 years ago, there still wasn’t a lot of ceremonial cacao in the world.

It was a new thing. There wasn’t really that many options in the world. And, to have beautiful, organic cacao grown in a spiritual way I really wanted to share that. So I started trying to put that out there and nobody really knew what it was. And the beginning, I just had to keep giving it away and giving it to people that I thought might know what to do with it.

And we started. Just kept growing from there and I eventually started finding ways to sell it in the world. And and yeah. And now we export about, I dunno, a thousand pounds a month. A thousand pounds. Yeah. And

Sam Believ: I think at least 20 of those go to lower Earth.

Danielle de Kisere: Yeah. It goes all over the world.

We export to the us, Australia, England, the Europe. So we’ve really developed quite a beautiful community of people that love our cacao a lot. And we now started working with a few other regions. We have cacao from Put Mayo, which is grown by the India community there really beautiful project they have.

And of course. We have our own cacao here at our new farm, which I’ve been really trying to spend about two years. We’ve been working on really developing the cacao we have here, and I’ve just started offering that. Yeah it’s really a beautiful project and it’s been really interesting to see and learn just how much our cacao really touches people in the world.

Whether it’s for ceremonies or ceremonies that people organize or just people that use it on a daily basis as a way to connect every day. So it’s really a project that I’m quite proud of in that sense. And the work that we have done with the indigenous has been really great.

The this back and forth, this year long learning process with, as he has. 17 brothers and sisters. And his wife has 14 brothers and sisters. And so the knowledge that they learned, they shared with their family, which then gets shared with their greater community. And now we’re really getting a lot of really good cacao coming out of the Sierra Nevada.

And of course, I’m not the only one to give credit to that. There’s been a few people that have really worked hard sharing the Sierra Nevada cacao with the world, and they have won a lot of awards. But it’s this sharing of knowledge that really is what changes the world. When somebody learns something and this improves their lives, now they can, now they’re making about twice as much perb of kilo that they used to make when they didn’t know how to ferment it. That’s what we’re to. Trying to do a little bit in Tamayo. They’re still new to Cacao and Tamayo and we’re still in a little bit of a learning curve, but it’s a beautiful project to really help the people on the Inga reservation there with their empowering them to, to have a a way of of improving their lives through through bigger earnings. So

Sam Believ: Okay. Thank you for sharing your story. So I see a lot of patterns, like synchronicity. You weren’t really looking for it then I was cofound you and then it’s kinda like my story and many people that I interview, it’s just, it just happens to you Yeah. For various reasons.

And yeah, the Colombian style ceremony is. Can be very shocking for new people. It’s you come and here’s your cup and sometimes it’s uncomfortable and you don’t really have the medicine. So that’s what we’re trying to combat at LA Wire and make it comfortable, especially for the first time or so when drink the medicine.

Don’t get this care experience. But I’m glad you persisted and you had a beautiful experience eventually. And the story about not feeling connection and then figuring out that there was connection all along, that’s very common because we have it all the time. People drink to medicine and they say yeah, nothing really happened.

And then they go ahead and describe a perfect, hadn’t described a perfect DI experience. I felt this and I felt this, and I cried and I purged. But it’s I did not connect because it’s just not what they expected. So let’s talk about caca, right? Because that’s your specialty. You said that, people reach out to you and they tell you how cacaos change their lives either in the working with it individually or in a group setting. So tell us about this, what is cacaos effect on people’s healing and growth journey? What is the role of this medicine in this lab?

Danielle de Kisere: Cacao is really a very, it’s certainly a more subtle medicine as compared to ayahuasca. It doesn’t really quite, do that, but I think it’s a really beautiful medicine that can be many things to many people. It can you know what it’s really known for, because it has theo bro wine and the polyphenols and all these things that help elevate your mood.

It also works with your cardiovascular system. And, so these two in combination can be a really powerful way to open up your heart space, open up your emotional space, help get the blood flowing in all of your body to, to really help move some energies around. If you wanna have it in a ceremonial or in a spiritual way, this can be a really beautiful way to open up all of those possibilities.

So if you have a cacao ceremony and you share music and song, and then you know, also open up and share thoughts and feelings, this can be really a way to help people that might not. Be able to do that on a regular basis for themselves. For me I like to drink the cacao and just as a way to connect every day.

I don’t drink. A lot of people ask me if I drink cacao every day and I don’t. We have tons of cacao. We have 5,000 cacao trees here. Every day I get up in my office and I look at the cacao trees, which are right behind us. And I feel like my whole life is cacao and that energy.

But if I do drink it, it’s, I find it’s a really great way to just ground in and connect. And I think that’s something that most folks are missing in life. Hello Norman.

Sam Believ: He is quite loud is all,

Danielle de Kisere: but those are not

Sam Believ: watching the video. It’s his big dog,

Danielle de Kisere: big ginormous white dog named Norman.

Cacao can really help keep us connected. And I think that’s the thing that most people are really missing in life is connection. Whether it’s to nature, whether that’s to one another, whether or not that’s to God the universe, source, whatever you wanna call it. I feel that this connection is what really has most of the world feeling lost.

So whether you can find that connection every day in your yoga practice or in your meditation practice, or in your medicine work, working with ayahuasca or mushrooms or in a daily practice of cacao. Sorry, I’m so worried that they’re gonna knock over your little stand. No,

Sam Believ: it’s okay.

Danielle de Kisere: It’s, it is that time of day that they get frisky.

Sam Believ: Yeah they see that you’re here and you’re watching, so they’re. They want that attention, I think we can go, the microphone will still pick up. So guys, if you’re hearing some other sounds, it’s the two dogs, they have their daily ritual of blood and slash fighting.

So

Danielle de Kisere: yeah, it’s carry on. There’s no editing I guess, of this, huh?

Sam Believ: Yeah, I can’t remove that, the background noise.

Danielle de Kisere: I really feel that if people were able to find this connection on a daily basis, that the world would be in such a more beautiful place and we as individuals wouldn’t feel so, so depressed, so lonely, so lost because that is, I think the, one of the biggest problems that most people face.

All the anger in the world, all the frustration, all the, the, all these things all stem from the same thing as well. And I don’t think we really need to, put it on anyone? What what form that they find this connection in. A lot of people find that with their yoga practice, a lot of people find this with their meditation practice.

A lot of people use both of these things. And

sorry.

Sam Believ: Some find it through playing play in front. Yeah.

Danielle de Kisere: And they always wanna do this at my feet. I’m trying to think of where I think it’s an

Sam Believ: actually do it for you as much as they do it for themselves.

Danielle de Kisere: If we can, if we could all find a way to connect and connecting with nature is one of the most beautiful ways to do that.

But the majority of the world lives in cities. They don’t have the opportunity to go and connect with nature. Know, cacao could be a really beautiful practice as a way to stay connected. Instead of, getting up in the morning and feeling sh feeling sad about your day and oh, I gotta get up and I gotta go to work.

I don’t wanna do what I have to do, I let me drink some coffee ’cause I’m tired and I’m just gonna knock it out. I’m gonna wake up. Instead of doing that, when you consciously decide to drink cacao as your morning beverage, then that’s making a conscious decision that I am gonna take a few moments to really focus on what I want to achieve today.

What are my intentions for today? And I think cacao can really help that, the Arcos believe that all of the thoughts and knowledge of that there that has been passed down from their ancestors also can be passed on to people through their cacao or through their crops, whether that’s cacao or coffee, or coca leaves or sugarcane.

They take care of their crops in the ancestral tradition, and they’re constantly in this form of meditation and awareness of their connection with the earth. And they believe that by sharing the cacao with you, that you can also tap into that as well. There, there are so many ways that ca cacao can be beneficial, whether it’s spiritual or emotional or just physical, with the properties, all the vitamins and nutrients and antioxidants and oh my God, all the things that are in there.

Maybe this. So there, there are so many ways that people can choose to drink a cow. You don’t have to be, on a spiritual mission every day. I have people that bite just because they want all the vitamins and nutrients and the polyphenols and the antioxidants as a, the over wine. And this is part of their wellness body activating routines.

So many beautiful ways to use cacao.

Sam Believ: So I know you’re yourself is also are very, you’re very into the ayahuasca world and you organized ceremonies and you. I drink and still drink a lot Ayahuasca. I want your take on this. What, when we offer caca to the people at La Wire it’s after this ayahuasca ceremonies are over.

It’s the morning right before they leave. And we try to use it as a tool for integrations. The importance of integration post ceremony and specifically as a catalyst, because sometimes people go back home and they they just forget life starts happening. But if they have this daily ritual where they can sit down and drink a cow, and then maybe together with it they can meditate or journal or set intentions for the day, as you say, and add other layers.

This kind of stack it, but that sort of pleasant moment of drinking that cacao because it is very tasty. And I congratulate you on figuring out how to make it tasty after all those tasks because I drink it regularly. And it’s also very addictive in a good way. Yes. So it’s using our desire and our addiction to something tasty and healthy and then building other habits around it and create this like morning ritual where for half an hour you drink your cacao and you just hold something warm and you connect, as you say.

So what do you think about cacao as a potential tool for integration? What do you think about integration in general?

Danielle de Kisere: I think it’s a beautiful tool and I’m, and I really like that idea. I might have to steal it. We have at times offered cacao as a way to open up the group when they first arrive.

And I do know lots of people that ha, that offer cacao in their integration circles as well. As. As a powerful heart opener this is also a great way in your integration sessions to allow people to open up a little bit more to really feel that. But the idea of carrying forth your experiences in the tools that, that you learn in your ceremonies and your retreats to stay connected afterwards, whether that’s, cacao, whether that’s the music that you hear in ceremony, whether that’s the fluids that you get from the plant fluids that are often available in ceremonies.

These are all great tools to be able to reconnect because I think one of the biggest problems is people come to ceremony and they have this beautiful experience and they learn so much and then they go back into their real lives and then. It’s oh. And little by little you start losing that connection that, that beautiful feeling, it’s oh, somebody cut you off on the road and oh, your boss is mean.

And oh, the lady at, Walmart was rude and like all these things like, oh, I have to go stand in line in the bank for an hour. And hey, this, and I gotta do, like little by little it starts taking away the, that beautiful connection that you achieved in ceremony. And and so whatever tools that we have to stay connected to that’ll bring us back to that moment is really great.

So by closing your ceremonies with cacao, I think that’s a beautiful idea because then also it gives the opportunity to the people like, oh, wait a minute. I remember how great I felt that morning. And then I’m going to try to recreate that every day and then I’m gonna focus on that every day and I’m gonna remember what I learned and what I was trying to achieve in my ceremonies.

And I think that’s a beautiful way, integration. Integration is actually a new thing that people have really been talking about the last couple years. When I first started drinking medicine here in Columbia, it was just like here’s your cup. Whatever happens to you.

Yeah. And so there was no, there’s no talk about any, anything having to do with the history of the medicine or the elders in Columbia really believe that the medicine will show you what you need to know. And that’s great if you have the opportunity to really work with the elders and drink a lot of medicine.

And that’s great ’cause the medicine will teach you all these things, but the Western mind wants to know, why does this happen this way? How does this happen? What does this mean? And I really believe that the western mind works a little bit differently. And so this is where it’s really important to.

Find a way to bridge what you learn from the elders, what you learn from the medicine and somehow connect that into your experience and then carry that forth into your life. The last couple years there’s been a lot of lot of integration talk. A lot of people have been offering classes facilitator programs a lot of psychologists, a lot of therapists have really been adding this up to their practices.

And it’s just all of a way, because oftentimes you can go to ceremony and just get blown wide open and have this beautiful out of body experience outta world experience. All these things that happen to you and then you’re just. Dump back into life and like, how do you integrate the two realities?

And if you don’t find a way to, to combine the two somehow then it gets lost. So I think the integration thing is a really great thing. It’s not something that I’m super great at. But we have a lot of people as a busy

Sam Believ: business owner. I understand. Yes. Myself too.

I’m not, and it’s so funny ‘

Danielle de Kisere: cause, I don’t really like to talk about the medicine. I don’t really like to talk about my work with the medicine. I, the majority of people that meet me in the world would never even know that this is what I do if they didn’t meet me at ceremony. My experiences with medicine are my experiences and I don’t really think that it needs to be shared and talked about too much. ’cause I think it takes away a little bit. And I, and it’s not up to me to convince everyone else that it’s, that they should have the medicine. If somebody comes to me and wants to, thinks that they might be ready and they wanna know how to do that, then great.

I’ll help you find the right place for that. But it’s not my job to tell you. It’s your time. And it’s not my job to tell you what the universe was trying to tell you in your ceremony. And I think that’s something that a lot of people need to be really careful when they choose their integration therapist or that, so that because I’m always super conscious of not interpreting other people’s experiences.

I just don’t think it’s my place in the world. Yeah. And

Sam Believ: I think only the person themselves can know the meaning because your subconscious talks to you in the language. Only you can understand. But let’s go back to the ka. So what is what is ceremonial cacao and how is it different from, let’s say, just the cacao you buy in the store?

Danielle de Kisere: There really isn’t any difference. Cacao is cacao, right? In the sense, our cacao is, it’s really the difference between ceremonial cacao and regular cacao lies in how it was prepared and how it is treated before it gets to you. If your goal is to use cacao as a tool in your life for your wellbeing, for your mental, physical, emotional wellbeing.

That you really wanna choose cacao that has the right base. If you are buying cacao, that was factory farmed per se, like in Peru, they’re just cutting down so much native forest to set up these huge industrial plantations of cacao. And the deforestation that happens and then you have massive corporations that, that own these farms and workers that are not getting paid.

God forbid you’ve bought a cacao from Africa, where, you know, still 80% of the labor that works in the cacao fields in Africa is slave labor and child labor. Ha those energies. Go into your cacao. And it’s the same with your food as well, and your medicine as well, and everything in life.

But if you choose cacao, that has been grown in harmony with what’s around it that hasn’t been, that the forest hasn’t been cut down for your cacao, that it hasn’t been sprayed with chemicals, that the people that grow it are growing it with the right intentions to that it’s not just this huge commercial project.

All of those things will energetically infuse itself in your cacao, and that’s what you really want for ceremonial cacao. But if you were to look at, my cacao trees versus this cacao tree, the cacao bean is insane bean. But energetically. It’s really important to think about where your cacao comes from and who is processing it as well.

So you have to look at how it’s grown, and the deforestation and the chemicals and the, what goes into this? Who’s processing it, who’s touching it? But also when it gets to the factory that processes, what are their intentions, is it just mass produced and somebody’s buying it to call it ceremony or Pi house so they can make a lot of money?

Are they are they really putting the intentions in there to create a beautiful product? A whole product, in the sense that, we know where it comes from. These people are making more than they’re asking for on this. We, we have this, like our relationship with the indigenous here, we have, a beautiful relationship with them.

That they get paid more than they asked for. That. That we, we help them with other projects, that there’s inter exchange of knowledge. So this is really important for me. But then when the cacao is here at our farm, it’s we treat it with the care that, we don’t just oh my God, we have to go up every day.

We have to make a cow and nobody wants to be here. This sucks. No. The people that are making ca cow really wanna be there and make beautiful cacao for you. Because this is what’s important and I package it. We use 100% completely compostable packaging. It doesn’t go in plastic. It’s not, there’s so many different layers of this, just my packaging, is it made in China and shipped here?

And, are we creating more pollution in the world with this? For me, all of these things are really important so that when you get your cacao that I produced, that I know it’s gonna, that I know the people that grew it we’re happy. I know that the people that made it we’re happy and you are happy to get it.

And we’ve done as little, much, a little bit of damage to the world as possible in the process of getting it to you.

Sam Believ: This episode is sponsored by Lara Ioas Retreat. Most of Lara, if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, some of you might have already been to Lara before.

For those who don’t know us yet, we started Lara four years ago. At Lara, we combine authenticity, accessibility, and affordability is currently highest rated Iowas retreat in South America with more than 705 star reviews and an average rating of five stars. If you come to lare, you’ll experience powerful, authentic ceremonies led by our indigenous shaman.

Fernando, in a. Very beautiful venue. Just one hour south of Meine Columbia. We’re surrounded by nature and have comforts like hot water wifi at La Wire. Our team has guided more than 2,500 people through this life-changing transformation of Ayahuasca experience. At the same time, we keep it very affordable.

So whether you’re coming for healing, clarity, or a deeper connection to yourself, LA Wire is the best choice. If it is your first time drinking Ayahuasca, you will love our three and a half hour preparation course and integration support. All of that is included in price as well as pick up from Metagene accommodation and ayahuasca.

Visit la wire.com to book your retreat or learn more. Laira Connect. Heal Grow L-A-W-A-Y-R a.com. So I just realized I’ve been lying to people because I thought that the difference between the ceremonial cacao and the store-bought cacao is the type of the bean.

Because they told me that’s Creo, Jovie.

It has more Theo Brome.

Danielle de Kisere: You’re partially correct. It depends. There is a lot, especially here in Columbia, there is a lot of Creo cacao, a lot of the table chocolate that you might buy at the stores here. And table chocolate is really only a Colombian thing. Your listeners in the US we don’t have that there.

There’s and there’s baking chocolate, which is yeah. Really low grade, 100% pure chocolate. But you don’t wanna make a ceremony out of that.

Sam Believ: Yeah, it’s, that doesn’t taste the same way.

Danielle de Kisere: No most of the cacao in Columbia is fine flavored cacao. I think it’s 95% of the cacao in Columbia is fine flavored cacao.

So we have creole trees, which are the original trees, or as closer to the original as possible. And you’ll find a lot of that in in the Sierra Nevada because. They have their old trees, and what they do is they just use the seeds from the same trees and make new trees because they don’t have the money to buy fancy trees.

They don’t have the money to buy chemical fertilizers. They don’t have the money to buy chemical insecticides. If it grows. There’s really not that many diseases that Ca cow are susceptible to. There is a mold that grows on it, and if that, the best thing to do is just cut it off and get rid of that, and eventually you can control that without any chemicals, but they don’t have the money for that.

Most of the growers in the Sierra Nevada, they have very small amounts of trees. They grow a little bit working with his dral and he works a lot with the community there and the associations. And they’ve started to form small associations where they bring in their harvest to a central fermentation plant.

So that it gets properly fermented and then from there it ends up here. So it’s still community run. But this in ensures that a more even taste because I really think the taste is important. There’s a lot of people that tell you that, ah, no ceremonial couch should be harsh. It should be straw.

And, but if you don’t like to drink it, then you’re not gonna drink it. Then you won’t ever get the benefits. I started off learning how to make chocolate, bean to bar chocolate for chocolate bars. So I took that same knowledge as to how to find the right beans and how to, toast it correctly and how to process it correctly so that your ceremonial cacao tastes like fine chocolate.

Because I think that’s really important. So you will find a lot of cho trees here in Columbia. We have a lot here of the trees that came with the farm. Some of them are hybrid trees, and the new ones that I’ve planted are hybrid trees. The problem with the Creole trees, they’re the originals.

They don’t have the disease resistance and they don’t produce a whole lot. So you won’t find a whole lot of them planted as much anymore. But when people talk about hybrid trees you often get a lot of people worry that it’s genetically modified and that’s not the case. It’s not genetically modified.

There are amazing university programs here. There’s such great studies on cacao here in Columbia. It’s really beautiful. But what they’re doing is they’re taking the original trees and they graft on, branches of other cacaos that may produce more to create a hybrid tree. And so this is really beautiful because it can double the production of a farmer.

And by eradicating some of the diseases that are common and also increasing production, but you’re still getting really fine flavored cacao. So all of the cacao we get from pta, mayo most of that will be Trin cacao, which is the hybrid cacao. It’s the cross between Creo and for aero edit.

It creates a beautiful tasting cacao but it’s a little bit easier for the farmers to manage in bout Mayo, specifically the, over the last 10 years or so, the government has been working with a lot of NGOs, a lot of charities to help the people. Plant cacao in place of other crops that may not be as legal like coca.

Yeah. And so it started out as a project to really replace Coca which is a whole different story. But I think the people are starting to really notice that hey, cacao, is a really valuable crop. And it’s really great for the environment and it’s really great for a lot of things.

You can grow it in conjunction with a lot of other things. So a lot of people are really now starting to really catch on and plant a lot of cacao. But what we’re now getting out of, there was originally programs to help empower the people. And so there was a lot of cocoa eradication programs and a lot of programs to help the indigenous that live on the reservations with new crops.

And so they were given trees. Which are hybrid trees. And our most popular chocolate bar comes from 50 minus is some of the best chocolate I’ve ever had you do. So it’s not saying that it doesn’t have value, so you are partially correct. Here in Columbia, like I said, 95% of the cacao here in Columbia is fine flavor cacao.

If you go to Africa, it’s pretty much all forest cacao which is which was developed from the original cacao trees. But it produces just massive amounts of cacao that just really tastes horrible. Yeah. And you’ll find that a lot in Africa and you’ll find that a lot in Peru. It’s a mix.

It’s actually interesting. Cacao was a cacao originated in the Amazon basin. You could probably go to Ecuador or to Brazil and they’ll tell you that no, no CACA originated here in our country. But it came from the Amazon, which at that point, there was no Columbia, there was no Brazil, there was no Ecuador, there was no Peru.

It was all just the Amazon basin. And it was actually a very short bush. It wasn’t actually a tree. And, it was the indigenous at the time, were so industrious and they were so observant of all the things that were in the forest. So they were constantly walking around and seeing what could be of use in their natural environment.

And they discovered that the birds would go and pack at the. The cacao pods, the little ones that were growing on, these little bushes. And the birds would then start to fly like they were drunk. And they discovered that the, once the cacao juice started fermenting that it became alcohol. And so its first original purpose was as an alcoholic beverage.

But the indigenous, they were, they had, this huge network where they were constantly traveling by BGE and visiting other tribes and visiting. And eventually they took the cacao out to the ocean. And at that time there was all these slave trip ships and spice traders moving around the planet on their sailing vessels.

And they went there and started trading it with people. And it became super popular for that. And and people started cultivating the cacao and it started changing from being a bush into a tree. Still not a very big tree, really. Most of ’em are only about, five, six feet tall. And then it started spreading around the world.

So this original one, you won’t see it too much anymore. But it went to Mexico and it went to Africa and it went to all the islands and it started changing depending on where it went. So we ended up with creole trees. We ended up with the forest arrow trees that developed in Africa and the Trin trees, which were a combination of the two in the island of Trinidad.

They planted both because there was a lot of ship traffic there. They had planted both and were really developing a lot of cacao there. And then a hurricane came and wiped out the entire island. And so they were so busy focusing on rebuilding their cities. They didn’t really pay that much attention to the old, the old farms and stuff and new trees started popping up that were a combination of the Creole and the forest stereo, and the people found out that.

Had the beautiful taste of the Creole beans, but it was stronger and produced more. And so that’s pretty much what you see when people talk about fine flavored cacao. Most of it’s t trita. And you can find that all over the world now.

Sam Believ: So it’s interesting that you talk about Colombian government replacing coca plantations with with cacao plantations, because one of the, one of the sort of unofficial missions that I’m on is rebranding Columbia from bad drugs to good drugs or from from cocaine to ayahuasca, or in this case to cacao as well.

So I’m glad that people are doing it already. It’s a great idea.

Danielle de Kisere: The theme of Coca it’s such a delicate thing to talk about because, if you are not in Columbia, you think of, the drug wars and you think of Pablo Escobar and you think of all these things.

And so the theme of coca is really complicated because. There are people there, there are there, there are a lot of people growing coca still to this day. And even you can even find it nearby here in Antioch. But mostly it’s in, in different parts because it’s easier to control over there.

But there are people that are forced into growing it that really don’t have any choice. They’re just told, like the coons are told, you’re gonna grow coca for us now and you can’t say no, but they get paid for it. It’s a complicated thing ’cause Coca is one of the original sacred medicines as well.

I don’t know if you’re your Titus or your elders or anyone here on the podcast is really ever talked about the law of the origin. It’s quite interesting because the indigenous speak about how every plant medicine has an owner and this owner is the spiritual owner that knows all of the knowledge of the plant.

And how to utilize it to help the people and how to properly take care of the medicine. So we have tobacco, which the indigenous talk about as being the first gift to humans from God and all the beautiful things that tobacco can do. And it was gifted to the people. And according to the legends the indigenous people of the Amazon, the re and the Witoto are the owners of tobacco.

And they’re the ones that carry all of the spiritual knowledge of tobacco. Of course, it’s used everywhere, you have ra which is the powdered tobacco you have and then you have coca. And supposedly the owners of Coca are the tribes of the Sierra Nevada region, and you have ayahuasca and the supposed owners of that are the.

Cohan and the Inga and the Si people of the Lower put Mayo region there. And you have cacao, which also has a spiritual owner, and this is a funny one, but the spiritual owner of Cacao is technically the ancient Mayans and the Aztecs because it was the, even though it originated here, it was the ancient mines and Aztecs that really started to understand the spiritual properties of cacao and how to utilize it.

So they’re the spiritual owners of that. So every plant medicine has a spiritual owner. They say marijuana is, its spiritual owner is in India, the natives of the actual country, India. And so

Sam Believ: my people are the spiritual owners of the vodka.

Danielle de Kisere: Alright, just kidding. That’s a good one. You can have that.

So when these medicines are used in accordance to the rules that have been set forth, then these are beautiful things. For a person. Coca is one of the most nutrient dense leaves, plants that is found on the planet. It has so many beautiful nutrients and properties and that’s why it’s been used for so long.

Because it can, it’s an, it’s a food for your body. It’s also a f it’s also a sacred medicine to stay connected to God. It can help with all kinds of ailments. The same with tobacco. Tobacco can, keep you connected to God. It can also, cure all your physical ailments, cure your depressions, all of these things.

But the problem is if you’re not using these things in accordance to the rules, that’s when. They no longer serve the people. So you have coca, which is this beautiful thing, but somebody comes along Hey, this kind of feels good and we can make a lot of money if we do this. So they take the coca and they treat it with chemicals, and then it becomes this product and people are getting rich and it’s created all these wars and all this death.

But the original plant is a beautiful thing. So to only talk about, eradicating coca, and the same with ayahuasca, you have the beautiful, pure way to do it, or you can, extract the chemicals and, get really high. But you’re not really connecting with it. Cacao is a beautiful medicine, but you overprocess it, you add a lot of chocolate, then it makes you fat.

It’s

Sam Believ: add milk and sugar and you

Danielle de Kisere: Yeah. So then it takes away from the beautiful properties that it has. So every plant has this spiritual owner. And so in the context of Coca, coca has been used by the people you know, of this country for millennia.

It is a powerful medicine. You’ll see the tribes of the Sierra Nevada always walk around with their bag, and they’re always chewing on their leaves. The tribes of the Amazon will turn it into Mabe and share this in their community meetings as a way to connect as community.

So when we talk about eradicating it, you’re not really talking about the real reasons behind this. One problem is you have massive amounts of poverty, and especially here in the rural parts of Columbia where there is no access. You’re here at my farm, it was a whole journey to get here.

Imagine the people that live here that don’t have any access to anything. And here’s a way to quickly make some money. And, there’s no schools, there’s no social services, there’s no nothing, and people need to eat. So you have that. So you can’t just say, we need to eradicate Coca because it has a beautiful purpose.

And there, there is a great need for the people that are growing it. They just really need to feed themselves. They need to send their kids to school. So unless we address the issues that are causing this but that’s, like I said, a whole nother story. Yeah.

Sam Believ: I personally really like Mamba, for example, and it’s a beautiful medicine and.

And tobacco and cacao and I explore a bit of all of them, and they all have their use. It’s just it’s less about the plants themselves and more about the intention with which you use them. Yeah. Should everyone stop drinking coffee and start drinking cacao every morning? Ah,

Danielle de Kisere: I don’t know. It depends on your relationship with coffee.

I’ve never had a cup of coffee in my life. And that is purely because as I was growing up, my mother, who still to this day, cannot function. To do anything without her coffee. Every morning she has to have a cup or two of coffee. So I remember being a kid, we couldn’t go ever do anything. I remember waking up on Christmas morning and there’d be a tree full of presents, and we couldn’t open the presents until my mother had her coffee.

So I decided I was never gonna have coffee. So I don’t drink coffee. But if you have a healthy relationship with coffee, I don’t see any reason why you can’t continue to have that relationship. But if you are only drinking coffee as a way to get yourself motivated every day if you’re, if your coffee has switched from being something pleasurable and something beneficial to your life to being something needed, then that’s when you might need a shift.

I think connecting to cacao is a much better way to start your day because of the properties that cacao has. I think it’s so much more beneficial for you. But people love their coffee and the coffee growers. Grow coffee for a reason and they still need support as well.

Sam Believ: I personally think within the next 50 years, more and more people will start drinking cacao instead of coffee because it’s just, it’s less, less strong, less jittery, more has more property.

So maybe doing both at the same time. But I’m a believer in the future of cacao. So on the topic of cacao you mentioned, cacao culture in colo, they, people, it’s available here, people drink it. What else have you noticed? And do you know why is it, what’s the history of it?

Why is it why is it available here, but not us?

Danielle de Kisere: Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know why the US doesn’t have such a. Cacao culture in the morning. The US is, we have hot chocolate, which is mostly milk, powder and sugar, and a little bit of cocoa. It’s powder. And that’s what I drank growing up as a kid.

I think here in, in Columbia, because there is so much cacao grown here, families all over the place, they’d have, their few cacao trees, they’d roast a little bit on the stove, they’d mash it up and they drink, hot cacao drinks. And this became part of the culture here.

And when you go to a restaurant and for breakfast, you’re given a choice. Do you want cacao or do you want coffee? And you’ll never see that outside of Columbia, I don’t think. But it’s also like the worst possible quality cacao that you will ever encounter. Most of the time it’s absolutely disgusting and I have to cover it up with lots of sugar or cinnamon or.

In some cases cheese. I don’t even know what the cheese or the cacao thing is. But it’s, I like it. I like, our neighbors and friends are really happy when I get a batch of cacao and it doesn’t meet our standards and I give it away so they, they’re not used to super high quality stuff, but that also applies to coffee, because traditionally coffee, all the good coffee was exported and they didn’t know until just recently what good coffee was.

Sam Believ: Yeah. So you mentioned that local people, they just dry it, grind it up, and then make a cow. So that’s a kind of process, but how is that process different? Where you have I’ve seen your little factory there. What’s what’s the process of making good cacao?

Danielle de Kisere: The, one of the.

One of the most important things is that you start off with good quality cacao, and it has to be well fermented, and it has to be well dried. If it, if you don’t have that base, you’re never gonna get anything good out of it. But if we start off with good cacao, then the next really important step is if the roasting it has to be roasted.

I know there’s a huge movement in people that talk about rock cacao, and I can tell you that there is no such thing as rock cacao. For a couple reasons. One is in the fermentation process of fermenting the cac, in fermenting the cacao, it naturally gets up to about 140 degrees which is well above what the raw foodies say is the maximum temperature that qualifies for raw food.

I think it’s what, 110 degrees. And so this naturally occurs if the heat, if it doesn’t naturally generate that heat in the fermentation process, it won’t change the flavor. So if you were to go out in the cacao fields right now and pick a cacao pod first you’d suck off the juice, which you had some cacao juice earlier you’d suck that off.

And then you end up with the bean. And the bean, you can eat it just like that raw but it just tastes like a knot. It doesn’t taste anything like chocolate.

Sam Believ: Same with coffee, right?

Danielle de Kisere: Yeah. So the first part of starting to get the chocolate flavor that everybody is looking for starts in the fermentation.

And if you don’t get it up over that temperature, it’s not going to ferment right. And you’re not gonna get the chocolatey flavor. And the second part of really developing the chocolatey flavor is in the roasting. So if you don’t roast it I do know there’s a company that sells on a roasted cacao. It’s absolutely disgusting.

It doesn’t taste like anything and it certainly doesn’t taste like chocolate. So if you don’t roast it, you’re not gonna get that flavor. And we, we try our best to roast it at a lower temperature for shorter amount of times. That’s one of the big tricks of what if you end up with cacao that doesn’t taste good, is they over roast it for long periods of time to try and kill all those off flavors.

So as long as we start off with a good bean, we just lightly roast it to pull out a little bit more of the cacao flavor. From there we take off the shells. We don’t waste any part of the cacao. I sell the cacao shells as cacao hus tea, which is super, super popular because it’s very light.

It has a nice chocolate flavor. It’s full of the line, full of magnesium, full of all of that stuff. But it has zero calories and zero caffeine. But yeah. Our cacao has tea has gotten so popular that half the time I’m out of it because I can’t produce as much tea as people want. So we separate out the tea and then it goes into the stone grinders.

So they grind for a few days, so they’re perfectly smooth. It’s also in this grinding process that it helps expel all of the acidic and bitter flavors that live in the cacao bean. And it’s very important. I know there are some companies out there that claim to have raw cacao, but there really is no such thing.

If you have something that tastes anything like chocolate, it’s not raw and there is no possible way for it to be raw. There’s, it’s physically, chemically, scientifically impossible.

Sam Believ: Yeah. Last question. Let’s say somebody just did a retreat at Lair and they bought a pack of the cow. They’re back home.

What’s the best way to prepare their morning or afternoon ceremonial cup of cacao?

Danielle de Kisere: I usually use about a half an ounce or in grams it’s 15 grams of cacao per cup. I have to have sugar mine that I use pinella, which is raw. The can literally cane

Sam Believ: juice, sugar, cane

Danielle de Kisere: juice, sugar.

I put a little of that in there. I put it in water. I heat it up and then I have a cacao drink. I don’t usually put milk in mine or any alternative milks. I know lots of people like it that way. I don’t think it needs it. A lot of people like to put cayenne. A lot of people like to put other spices in there.

Cinnamon, I like my pure a little bit sweet. Sometimes it’s just a little touch of salt. Pulls out the chocolate flavor. I don’t like it super strong and super thick. That’s why I use about 15 grams. If I’m preparing it for a ceremony, I might make it thicker to give people a little,

Sam Believ: what is the ceremonial dose that you would give to per person?

Danielle de Kisere: A ceremonial dose should really be between like three quarters and one full ounce. So that’s 20 to 28 grams. But that’ll end up with a really thick cup of cacao which can be difficult. So it also goes back to, it needs to be prepared in a way, but people are gonna enjoy it.

’cause if they don’t enjoy it, they’re not gonna appreciate it. They’re not gonna connect to it, they’re not gonna keep doing it. But on a daily basis, 15, 15 grams of cacao, 20 grams of cacao is more than enough to really feel, and I can feel it even as much cacao as I drink and as much how energy I have around here all the time.

One cup of cacao. And I definitely feel it in the energetic push in my body the movement of energetic flow. It’s really beautiful.

Sam Believ: Very nice. It’s getting dark here, so we’re gonna start to wrap up. Daniel tell the listeners where they can find more about you and where can they get your cacao?

Danielle de Kisere: We are origin cacao.com, which is origin with an E-O-I-O-R-I-G-E-N which is the Spanish spelling origin cacao.com. You can find us on our own website. You can also find us on Amazon in the us, Amazon in the uk, and Amazon in Australia. We have distributors all over the world, so you can find us as Poland, Iceland, the Netherlands.

I sometimes even here, you can find us in ballet at times.

Sam Believ: And you can even find some at Lara store.

Danielle de Kisere: Yes. You do end up selling quite a lot of cacao every month. I’m, yeah. I’m very happy about that. So

Sam Believ: thank you Danielle. Thank you for educating us on topic of cacao. Yeah. Sorry,

Danielle de Kisere: I can nerd out a little bit and,

Sam Believ: I’m sure some people appreciated that.

And I definitely like to learn. Guys you’re listening to Cacao podcast. Just kidding. I ask a podcast as always with you, the host and belief, 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. Laira connect, heal, grow. Guys, I’m looking forward to hosting you.

In this episode of Ayahuasca Podcast, host Sam Believ (founder of http://www.lawayra.com) has a conversation with Metta Beshay, a filmmaker, musician, and creator known for his citizen-scientist approach to ethnobotany and plant traditions. Metta explores misunderstood substances, Indigenous cultures, and the realities behind modern plant-medicine tourism with humor, skepticism, and deep curiosity.

We touch upon topics of:

• Metta’s path from viral videos to ethnobotany storytelling (03:30–05:00)

• The realities of the Amazon jungle vs romanticized ideas (34:00–36:30)

• Indigenous cultures, tribal politics, and modern monetization (07:30–09:30)

• Comparing Aya experiences with other altered states (26:00–28:00)

• Music, icaros, and sound as a healing tool (19:00–24:00)

• Spirituality vs skepticism and cultural context (38:00–41:30)

• Ethics of retreat culture and shaman training (43:30–45:30)

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

Find more about Metta Beshay on YouTube and Instagram at @MettaBeshay

In this episode of Ayahuasca Podcast, host Sam Believ (founder of http://www.lawayra.com) has a conversation with , an Australian multi-instrumentalist, ceremonialist, and trauma-informed facilitator best known for his work in Spiritus Breathwork, somatic healing, and sound-based transformation. With over a decade of experience, Tim blends breath, movement, energy work, and music to guide deep healing and integration.

We touch upon topics of:

• Tim’s journey from elite Muay Thai fighter to healer after a life-altering injury (00:41–02:16)
• First Aya experiences, shamanic awakening, and long-term integration (02:16–03:46)
• Apprenticeship in the jungle and the origins of Spiritus Breathwork (04:16–06:41)
• Breathwork vs Aya: similarities, differences, and altered states (11:56–17:59)
• Trauma, nervous system regulation, and somatic healing (16:32–29:56)
• Dangers of spiritual bypassing and over-doing the work (30:05–34:01)
• Breathwork inside ceremony: grounding vs amplifying (34:15–38:47)
• Sound, music, and vibration as healing technologies (58:19–62:33)

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

Find more about Tim Morrison on Instagram at @timmorrison__ or contact him at info@tim-morrison.com.

In this episode of Ayahuasca Podcast host Sam Believ (founder of http://www.lawayra.com) has a conversation with Wade Davis. Wade is a world-renowned ethnobotanist, anthropologist, and explorer; former National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence; and author of One River, The Serpent and the Rainbow, The Wayfinders, and Magdalena. Together, they explore Wade’s early journey into Colombia, Richard Evans Schultes, the roots of Yahé/ayahuasca knowledge, ayahuasca tourism, and Wade’s mission to liberate coca from the shadow of cocaine.

We touch upon topics of

• 00:01–00:52 Wade Davis intro and why this conversation matters

• 00:55–09:38 Wade’s first arrival in Colombia, “destiny,” and meeting Schultes (plus Schultes’ advice to try ayahuasca)

• 09:38–22:55 Did Schultes go deep with entheogens? Set & setting, pioneers, and the psychedelic era context

• 22:55–25:28 Yahé vs ayahuasca in Colombia: pharmacology, MAOIs, admixture plants, and early research

• 25:28–36:02 Why Peru became the ayahuasca “center” and how access shaped tourism (and why Colombia being overlooked helped)

• 36:02–41:10 Colombia, violence, and the “peace dividend” of a more intact Amazon

• 41:10–01:01:38 Coca: benefits, racism behind demonization, nutrition, WHO/UN policies, and why it matters for Colombia

• 01:01:38–01:14:23 Wade’s travels, National Geographic mission, and the McKenna brothers story (Dennis vs Terence)

• 01:14:23–01:27:16 Ayahuasca vs other entheogens: frequency, respect, terrifying vs ecstatic experiences, San Pedro comparisons

• 01:27:16–01:33:04 Sam’s “third S” (skill): preparation, dosage, integration, and how modern retreats can work well

• 01:33:04–01:36:31 Wade’s closing lesson: “Take your side and get on with it”

• 01:36:31–01:37:59 Where to start with Wade’s books + invitation to visit LaWayra

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

Find more about Wade Davis at http://www.daviswade.com

In this episode of Ayahuasca Podcast host Sam Believ (founder of http://www.lawayra.com) has a conversation with Paul F. Austin. Paul is a leading pioneer in the modern psychedelic movement, founder of Third Wave, author of Mastering Microdosing, host of The Psychedelic Podcast, and head of the Psychedelic Coaching Institute. He focuses on psychedelic education, microdosing protocols, and training practitioners to help scale the responsible use of these medicines in the modern world.

We touch upon topics of

• 00:01–00:44 Introduction to Paul F. Austin and his work

• 00:44–03:14 Paul’s early LSD experiences and conservative upbringing

• 03:14–04:17 First microdosing protocol and founding Third Wave

• 04:18–07:08 Convincing his parents and guiding his dad through a mushroom journey

• 07:09–10:01 Parent–child healing and psychedelic experiences together

• 10:02–13:29 The “third wave” of psychedelics explained (indigenous → LSD era → today)

• 13:30–15:45 Microdosing as the safest path to legalization and cultural acceptance

• 15:46–17:29 Stepwise dosing and retreat philosophies

• 17:30–20:16 Why different psychedelics require different approaches

• 20:17–22:09 Psilocybin tolerance and retreat spacing strategies

• 22:10–27:29 Microdosing LSD vs psilocybin vs wachuma

• 27:30–30:48 Vine-only microdosing and adaptogenic effects

• 30:49–35:34 Psychedelics vs SSRIs and the “crutch” metaphor

• 35:35–41:39 Importance of psychedelic education and practitioner training

• 41:40–45:38 Addiction, cannabis dependence, and integration

• 45:39–49:15 “CEO medicine” and psychedelics for conscious leadership

• 49:16–52:27 What Paul is excited about in 2026 and the future of psychedelics

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

Find more about Paul F. Austin at thethirdwave.co and follow him on social media at @PaulAustin3W

In this episode of Ayahuasca Podcast, host Sam Believ (founder of http://www.lawayra.com) sits down with Adam Butler — psychedelic philosopher, researcher, and author of Butler’s DMT Field Guide. Adam shares his transformation from addiction, depression, and a suicidal breaking point into a life built around self-knowledge, meditation, and consciousness exploration. We cover the differences between ayahuasca and smoked DMT, safety/containment, “midlife crisis” vs depression, entity/spiritual protection, and how to integrate extreme experiences into real-world change — plus a lighter look at creativity, leadership, and relationships.

Timestamps / Topics

• 00:01 – 00:50 Intro: Adam Butler, Butler’s DMT Field Guide, “DMT-saturated perspective”

• 00:55 – 03:27 Adam’s background: alcohol removal, depression, suicidal ideation, life “on paper” vs inner collapse; mushrooms as the start

• 03:28 – 06:12 The DMT “last resort” moment and first breakthrough: perspective shift, present-moment relief, not a magic pill but a turning point

• 06:12 – 07:55 Oliver update (LaWayra GM story) + Sam’s question: am I in a midlife crisis?

• 08:06 – 12:34 Midlife crisis vs depression: “indicator lights,” pressure buildup, avoiding explosion, alignment vs masking with work/alcohol/pills

• 12:34 – 17:11 What heals? neuroplasticity vs spiritual process, “instruction manual” feelings, vibration/hum, expanded senses, getting out of your own way

• 17:11 – 24:00 Smoked DMT vs ayahuasca: duration (~7–8 minutes), intensity, “no hangover,” multiple sessions in one sitting, pros/cons of each modality

• 24:00 – 30:41 Safety + spiritual protection: why containers matter, sitter/space-holding, intention/reverence, entity risks, disclaimers around solo use

• 30:41 – 36:48 Sam’s position: no gatekeeping, but sequence matters; risks of DIY ayahuasca; responsibility to prevent backlash in the “renaissance”

• 36:48 – 40:44 Adam agrees: cautious approach, book as conversation starter, recent entity-heavy session = why first-timers shouldn’t go alone

• 40:44 – 46:33 Fun/esoteric side: “recognition” of DMT, jester/entities, body “diagnostic,” future-self feeling, being “moved” to another space

• 46:33 – 52:08 Integration: inner compass + accountability, practices that sustain alignment, psychedelics not for everyone, nature retreats as medicine too

• 52:08 – 55:00 Beyond therapy: creativity, science, politics/leadership, relationships + intimacy (with care), enjoying being human

• 55:00 – 56:36 Where to find Adam: socials + free PDF offer; closing

   

  If you got value from this conversation with Adam Butler, please share it with one person who needs to hear it. And if you haven’t already, subscribe / follow the show so you don’t miss the next episode.

  Where to find the guest (Adam Butler)

  • Instagram / social handle: @booksbyadambutler (this is his main handle across most platforms)

  • Email (for a free PDF copy of his book): booksbyadambutler@gmail.com

  • Book: Butler’s DMT Field Guide (Adam also shares access directly via email)

In this episode of Ayahuasca Podcast host Sam Believ has a conversation with Cory Firth. Cory is a psychedelic coach and consultant, former Executive Director of the Psychedelic Association of Canada, and a leading voice in mental health policy reform and flow state neuroscience. After overcoming a 20-year battle with depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation, Cory now helps others bridge ancient wisdom and modern science to unlock human potential and live more integrated, purpose-driven lives.

We touch upon topics of

00:00–02:30 Cory’s childhood, early depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation

02:30–07:00 Entrepreneurship, burnout, health struggles, and searching for healing

07:00–11:30 Discovering ayahuasca and the first life-changing ceremony

11:30–15:30 Integration challenges and leaving his marketing agency

15:30–20:00 Founding work in the Psychedelic Association of Canada and policy reform

20:00–24:30 Psychedelic advocacy, MDMA and psilocybin access in Canada

24:30–31:00 Trauma-driven performance and learning to channel ambition differently

31:00–36:30 Flow states, effortless action, and the neuroscience of optimal performance

36:30–43:00 The relationship between psychedelics and accessing flow

43:00–48:30 Parenting, morning routines, and finding balance with young children

48:30–54:00 Psychedelics and fatherhood, relationships, and emotional growth

54:00–58:00 Postpartum challenges, resilience, and healing through psychedelics

58:00–01:03:00 The future of psychedelic access, culture, and policy change

01:03:00–01:06:00 Integrating psychedelic philosophy into everyday life and society

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

Find more about Cory Firth at coryf.com and follow his writing and updates on LinkedIn. You can also watch his banned TED-style talk on YouTube where he shares more of his personal story.

In this episode of Ayahuasca Podcast host Sam Believ (founder of http://www.lawayra.com) has a conversation with Alexander Beiner. Alexander is an author, cultural commentator, co-founder of Rebel Wisdom, Executive Director of Breaking Convention, and author of The Bigger Picture. His work explores psychedelics, sensemaking, culture, and how transformative experiences and cognitive science can help us navigate the social and political challenges of the modern world.

We touch upon topics of

00:00–02:42 Alexander’s early psychedelic experiences, Psychonautica, and the online psychonaut forums before the current renaissance

02:42–07:10 The current psychedelic renaissance vs the previous one, psychedelic capitalism, and the risk of psychedelics being captured by late-stage capitalism

07:10–12:07 Can psychedelics still transform society if they go mainstream? The “psychedelic Walmart” question and the importance of containers

12:07–17:20 The argument from The Bigger Picture: psychedelics teach us a way of being, not just new ideas

17:20–19:23 Pain, truth, and the transformative power of going directly into what hurts

19:23–23:02 Culture as “people like us do things like this” and why changing systems is harder than changing individuals

23:02–24:17 Why society feels sick, and whether psychedelics can help us change fast enough

24:17–28:04 AI, abundance, Star Trek, space exploration, and why exploration may be humanity’s next frontier

28:04–33:45 The Imperial College DMT study, intravenous DMT, hyperspace, entity encounters, and the sense of entering a real ecosystem

33:45–36:17 Are DMT entities “real”? Consciousness, idealism, and synchronicities

36:17–39:26 Synchronicity, writing, manifestation, and how inner state affects what shows up in life

39:26–42:45 Responsibility, control, grief, and balancing personal agency with surrender to larger systems

42:45–46:07 Consciousness, truth, and how psychedelics shift Alexander’s worldview

46:07–49:32 Healing vs purpose, what we are healing for, and how to avoid spiritual bypassing

49:32–50:26 Where to find Alexander, his book, and his current work through Kainos

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

Find more about Alexander Beiner through his book The Bigger Picture, his platform Kainos on Substack, and on Instagram under Alexander Beiner.

In this episode of Ayahuasca Podcast host Sam Believ (founder of http://www.lawayra.com) has a conversation with Ronan Levy. Ronan is a pioneering entrepreneur, co-founder and former Executive Chairman of Field Trip Health, author of The Ketamine Breakthrough, and host of the Ronan Levy Podcast. A former lawyer turned innovator in cannabis, biotech, and psychedelics, Ronan focuses on scaling mental health solutions and exploring how altered states can reshape human wellbeing and consciousness.

We touch upon topics of

00:00–01:35 Ronan’s background, cannabis, ketamine, and entering the psychedelic space

01:35–05:11 From lawyer to entrepreneur, cannabis clinics, and discovering plant medicine as real medicine

05:11–09:19 The psychedelic zeitgeist, investment boom, and why the hype cycle has cooled

09:19–12:53 Psychedelics becoming normalized vs pharmaceutical models and the future of adoption

12:53–16:15 Alcohol, cannabis, psychedelics, and personal freedom vs societal responsibility

16:15–19:09 Capitalism, conscious capitalism, and market dynamics in cannabis and psychedelics

19:09–22:13 Running a spiritual business, money, ethics, and balancing purpose with profitability

22:13–24:13 Entrepreneurship as a spiritual path, stress, and personal growth through business

24:13–29:17 Wealth, success, and why money doesn’t solve deeper emotional or spiritual problems

29:17–33:52 Life as a game, meaning, productivity, and embracing both struggle and fulfillment

33:52–35:47 Relationships, self-awareness, and recurring life lessons

35:47–38:22 Cannabis vs psychedelics, product vs service, and different use contexts

38:22–41:22 Responsible use, set and setting, and personal vs ceremonial psychedelic use

41:22–43:01 Longevity, mental health, and what actually creates a long and fulfilling life

43:01–45:24 Psychedelics, neuroplasticity, and unlocking creativity and new perspectives

45:24–47:25 The future of psychedelics, community-driven models, and resistance to corporate commodification

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

Find more about Ronan Levy at ronanlevy.com, on Instagram @ronandlevy, LinkedIn, and through his new project Fun Loving Company (@wearefunloving on Instagram).

In this episode of Ayahuasca Podcast, host Sam Believ (founder of http://www.lawayra.com) has a conversation with Dr. Richard Soutar. Dr. Soutar is a neuroscience pioneer and the Chief Scientist at New Mind Technologies. With over 30 years of experience, he is a world-renowned expert in QEEG brain mapping and neurofeedback, dedicated to bridging the gap between modern technology and ancient spiritual practices. He has mentored groundbreaking research into the neurological effects of Ayahuasca and Wachuma, helping practitioners use neurofeedback to integrate and sustain profound shamanic shifts.

We touch upon topics of:

• 03:45 – Dr. Soutar’s early spiritual awakening and experiments with altered states in high school.

• 07:20 – The realization that psychedelic experiences mirror high-level meditation with added “sensory noise.”

• 10:15 – Discovering neurofeedback as “electronic yoga” for inducing deep meditative states.

• 14:30 – How neurofeedback serves as a “crash course in reality” following psychedelic breakthroughs.

• 17:10 – The role of the default mode network as a portal between dimensions.

• 21:05 – Defining neurofeedback: Selective feedback loops and operant conditioning for brain exercise.

• 24:50 – Using topographic QEEG brain maps to identify areas of low or high electrical activity.

• 27:30 – Scientific findings: How Ayahuasca pushes the brain toward optimal statistical norms.

• 30:15 – The “drift” factor: Why psychedelic improvements often dissipate after three months without integration.

• 33:40 – The paradox of Ayahuasca: Upregulating or downregulating the same brain areas based on individual needs.

• 37:20 – Accessing “liminal states” between waking and sleep for trauma resolution.

• 41:10 – How psychedelics and meditation can alter DNA and RNA to heal transgenerational trauma.

• 45:00 – Shaking up the system: Using neurofeedback to sustain the neuroplasticity triggered by medicine.

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

Find more about Dr. Richard Soutar at http://www.newmindtechnologies.com

In this episode of Ayahuasca Podcast, host Sam Believ (founder of http://www.lawayra.com) has a conversation with Steve DeAngelo. Steve DeAngelo is a world-renowned activist, author, and entrepreneur often recognized as the “Father of the Legal Cannabis Industry.” He co-founded Harborside Health Center and the Last Prisoner Project, a non-profit dedicated to freeing those incarcerated for cannabis. With over four decades of activism, Steve has been a central figure in transforming cannabis from a prohibited substance into a respected plant medicine and a global industry.

We touch upon topics of:

• 04:10 – Steve’s first spiritual experience with cannabis at age 13 in a neighborhood park.

• 06:30 – The racist origins of cannabis criminalization and its use as a tool of oppression.

• 09:15 – The devastating toll of the “War on Drugs” and mass incarceration on families.

• 11:50 – How targeting cannabis ships in the 1980s inadvertently sparked the cocaine surge.

• 16:40 – The counterproductive nature of drug prohibition and the rise of fentanyl.

• 20:25 – The mission of the Last Prisoner Project: Seeking justice for those still serving time.

• 24:10 – Cannabis as Mother Nature’s “kindest and most gentle plant teacher.”

• 26:50 – Archeological evidence of shamanic cannabis use dating back 12,500 years.

• 29:30 – The historical spread of cannabis from Central Asia through India, Africa, and Europe.

• 32:15 – Cannabis in ancient religion: Its presence in Egyptian mythology and the holy anointing oil of Jesus.

• 36:45 – The industrial versatility of hemp: From Levi’s jeans to construction materials like “Hempcrete.”

• 41:20 – The “Decriminalize Nature” movement and the rise of mushroom churches in Oakland.

• 45:00 – Resisting corporate colonization: The importance of community-centric psychedelic access.

• 48:30 – The fusion of traditions: Rastafari communities integrating Ayahuasca and Iboga into their practice.

• 52:15 – Exploring the feminine spirit of cannabis and its role in a world needing more cooperation.

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

Find more about Steve DeAngelo at http://www.stevedeangelo.com and http://www.lastprisonerproject.org

In this episode of the Ayahuasca Podcast, host Sam Believ talks with Denny Goler, an entrepreneur and researcher who has gained viral attention as the “DMT Laser Guy.” Denny is the founder of Code of Reality, an organization that investigates simulation theory and the computational substrate of existence through experimental methods. By projecting a diffracted laser while in a DMT-induced state, Denny claims that anyone can observe what appears to be a “self-executing code”—a highly specific, non-random linguistic structure that suggests our physical world is a computationally rendered simulation.

Key Discussion Points

• 04:15 – Denny’s early start with psychedelics (age 11) and how mushrooms eventually cured his debilitating OCD.

• 08:30 – The “Frog Dude” encounter: The hyper-realistic experience that convinced Denny the DMT realm wasn’t just “in his head.”

• 12:10 – The First Principles of the Laser Experiment: Why light and geometry are the keys to testing the reality of the space.

• 15:45 – Describing the “Self-Executing Code”: Why it feels like looking through a microscope at an operating system rather than a typical “trip.”

• 18:20 – Replicating the results: Shamanic experiments with Ayahuasca and the “8K resolution” version seen on 5-MeO-DMT.

• 21:30 – The DIY setup: How to safely use a 5-milliwatt diffracted laser to see the underlying substrate of reality.

• 25:00 – Challenging the Null Hypothesis: Why Denny assumes the phenomenon is real and invites science to prove him wrong.

• 29:15 – The Specificity of the Code: Why the characters resemble Asian languages (Chinese/Japanese) more than random brain-generated patterns.

• 33:40 – Perturbing the Observation: Code of Reality’s mission to use magnets and high-res video to find a scientific “handle” on the code.

• 38:10 – Defining Simulation Theory: The world as a computationally rendered space that doesn’t negate spirituality or God.

• 42:45 – The “Nested Dolls” of Reality: Communication with higher-dimensional species tending to different layers of our “game.”

The DMT Laser Experiment: A Summary

The core of Denny’s work involves the use of diffraction, which splits a single laser beam into a complex “speckle pattern.” In ordinary consciousness, this looks like static. Under the influence of DMT (or other tryptamines like Ayahuasca), the brain appears to use this pattern as a scaffolding to perceive a stable, moving, and intricate “code.”

Understanding the Computational Substrate

Denny argues that behind the laws of physics lies computation. If reality is a simulation, the “physical” world is simply the output of an underlying operating system. This perspective aligns with the “multiverse” theory, suggesting we are one sliver of a larger computational space.

Learn more about Denny Goler and his research:

• Website: codeofreality.com

• Instagram: @code_of_reality

Ready for your own exploration? Visit lawayra.com to learn about our Ayahuasca retreats in Colombia.

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