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.
Transcript
Cory Firth: Around the age of 10, I started to experience depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation. I basically took my complex trauma of, proving myself as an athlete when I was a kid and put it into my work and turned my whole agency, I called it Proof of Performance. I was proving myself all day long, and I realized through that ayahuasca experience that all I’m doing is proving myself all day long to my clients.
I used to have a three-hour morning routine before I had a kid, and I would do this, and then I would do that, and I would do this, and if I didn’t do it, then my whole day would be a mess, and I would… If I missed one or two of those things, I would walk around with this little tinge of fear and anxiety ’cause it was like, “What’s gonna happen?”
This guy was talking about his ayahuasca experience, and all he did was talk about throwing up and shitting himself all night. And I thought to myself, “Wow, this sounds like something I need.” The way that I would describe it is the way Timothy Leary describes the shaking of the snow globe.
Definitely shook things up for me in terms of my identity, my work, my meaning, purpose, vision for my life, my health all kinds of different things. From what I love studying the most is flow states, which is in a very simple word or simple summary, is effortless action. So when you’re in a state of flow, you’re not thinking about being in flow.
You’re not thinking about doing anything. You’re absent of time. You’re absent of self-consciousness, and you’re immersed in the present moment experience. You’re listening to ayahuasca podcast.com
Hi, guys, and welcome to Ayahuasca Podcast. As always, with you, the host, Sam Belinf. Today, I’m having a conversation with Corey Firth. He’s a coach and a consultant in the psychedelic space. He is the former executive director of the Psychedelic Association of Canada. Corey is a leading voice in mental health policy reform and a flow state neuroscience coach.
After overcoming 20-year battle with depression, he now dedicates his work to sovereign evolution, helping others bridge the gap between ancient wisdom and more science to unlock their full human potential. This episode is sponsored by LaWayra Ayahuasca Retreat. At LaWayra, we combine affordability, accessibility, and authenticity.
LaWayra, connect, heal, grow. Guys, I’m looking forward to hosting you. Corey, welcome to the show. Thanks, Sam. It’s good to be here with you, man. Corey tell us about your story. How… y- about your depression, how you overcame it, what role psychedelics played in it, and why did you step into this line of work?
Yeah, sure. I’ll try to keep it short. I could probably go on this whole time, but yeah. So my, my story goes back, I guess a lot of people’s to their childhood. I had a wonderful childhood, wonderful upbringing, great parents, great family life, great community. Played a lot of competitive sports, so that kind of layered in a, a bit of a complex around performance and proving yourself and all of that kind of stuff.
But around the age of 10, I started to experience depression anxiety, and suicidal ideation. And, that was a challenging experience for me growing up in the late ’80s, early ’90s when just even things like depression weren’t really well known or discussed or really open. Even like seeing a psychotherapist in the ’90s, wasn’t super mainstream.
It was something that a lot of people didn’t really talk about. So the options available to me when I was a child outside of, like I said, my loving, nurturing family, there wasn’t a lot. And so I didn’t really even speak it out loud to a lot of people. I just quietly struggled with it in the background.
And then as I grew, it continued to get more and more challenging for myself. And then when I got into, to working later on in life in my early 20s it started to mount even more, and the suicidal ideation specifically started to grow there. And then I got into starting my own business and growing an agency that right off the bat was really successful from a money perspective basically.
But everything else about the business was killing me slowly alongside these, these challenges that I was experiencing. And then also around that same time in sort of my mid-20s, I had developed a tumor in my throat the size of a baseball, and it took about 12 to 18 months to really understand if it was benign or not, which it was luckily, and I had it removed.
But I also developed Hashimoto’s disorder. It’s a, a thyroid disorder. And yeah, I was just treating myself really poorly. I had really bad health habits. Was drinking a lot, smoking cigarettes other drugs and things like that and was just really yeah, I was just really challenging myself in terms of if I should stay or if I should go kind of thing, and was really contemplating things.
And then right around the time that my agency was at its peak, my my younger brother had a daughter And I was peak stress, peak, unhealthy at that time. But when I saw her and I held her for the first time, I kinda saw like a vision of my future, that I had to stay and I had to see her grow.
And that kinda shifted things a little bit. I still chall- was challenged by a lot, but I felt motivated now to kinda do something different. The doctors that I was seeing for my thyroid condition were just basically saying “Here’s medication. You’re gonna have to stay on this the rest of your life.”
I have ended up– Actually, I’m- I’ve overcome that. I don’t have that disorder any, any longer. Healthy thyroid healthy, generally. I I tr- I tried at one point through before I found psychedelics and ayahuasca specifically I tried, like everything under the sun.
I- I say that I tried like everything that ends in therapy. Any therapy you could think of. Electroshock therapy. I did horse therapy all kinds of different things. And some of them worked to a certain extent, but then a friend of mine sent me a podcast. This was in 2015 or ’16, I think. And this guy was talking about his ayahuasca experience, and all he did was talk about throwing up and shitting himself all night.
And I thought to myself, “Wow, this sounds like something I need.” Which at the time, or maybe six months or a year before that, I would’ve been like, “This is crazy. I’m absolutely not doing this.” But I needed that like gut punch. I needed that like, whatever that was that I was hearing, I– it felt like it was calling me.
And yeah, my friend and I ended up where we were planning to go down to Costa Rica to do a retreat down there, and I backed out after planning it all with him. He ended up going down. I was too scared to go when I, when we were re- ready to pull the trigger, and he went down, kinda told me all about it.
He had this massive breakthrough, and within two weeks I had booked. And, his validation was enough for me to, to kinda book it and go. And then I went down there had an incredible experience. I would say it, the way that I would describe it is the way Timothy Leary describes the shaking of the snow globe.
Definitely shook things up for me in terms of my identity, my work, my meaning, purpose, vision for my life, my health all kinds of different things. And then ended up coming back and I would say as like Corey 2.0 after that. And made a lot of different changes from 2017 to now that have completely transformed my life in many ways that we could talk about.
But that’s the background to getting me to ayahuasca and to that period of time, yeah. Tell us more about that, that first Ayahuasca experience, like the shaking of the snow globe. ‘Cause obviously it’s, it changed your life a lot. I believe, Yeah. Tell us about the experience, and also then what happened afterwards.
‘Cause I think you, you sold your company, right? And you just completely went to this you dedicated yourself to this psychedelic space, right? Which kinda happened to a lot of us, like myself included. Yeah. I’m always curious about those stories. Yeah. I think, yeah, I just, like coming away from it, it’s how do, how, you- we have this like delusional optimism when you come back and you’re like, “Everyone needs to try this.
Mom, you gotta go down.” Da, whatever da. You, it’s like everyone can be fixed by this, right? And and very quickly within a conversation or two, I realized, oh, I can’t be doing this. And it took me longer to integrate. But back then there, there wasn’t what, the infrastructure now in terms of community and integration and even content like this type of stuff or news articles that are coming out and talking about people’s stories.
So I didn’t really have much to ground myself back into things. And I’m lucky I would say, ’cause some people go this is not the best way to describe it, but maybe like off the deep end in terms of like completely alienating themselves from their community and their family and their past life now that they’ve had these experiences.
I’m luckily I didn’t do that. And I did find some good community and then realized that there was more of that needed. And I think in a lot of ways too as these things happen, there’s a letting go of what’s supposed to happen that occurs that allows what’s actually supposed to happen occur.
And I, what I mean by that is it was very obvious somewhat quickly that I, the work that I was doing in my agency, so my agency was a proof of performance marketing agency that comes back to the intro of the the background in childhood in profe- in, in competitive sports. I basically took my, a, a complex trauma of, proving myself as an athlete when I was a kid and put it into my work and turned my whole agency, I called it proof of performance.
I was proving myself all day long, and I realized through that Ayahuasca experience that all I’m doing is proving myself all day long to my clients. I’m not actually delivering value. The skills that I have are valuable, but I’m putting them into things that are really perpetuating capitalism and materialism in a way that doesn’t feel right to me, it didn’t feel right to me.
And that was that unlock of what I felt was making me sick. I was try- constantly proving myself and working, in places and with companies that weren’t really aligned with m- my maybe skills, highest good truest self. And it took time to, to realize that. But luckily I was able to transfer out of my, the company that I had, excuse me- And and get into this work where it was a little more at the beginning, more kind of philanthropic and charitable where I worked with a foundation to help build an Ayahuasca and psilocybin retreat center down in Costa Rica.
And then the pandemic hit not long after we kinda launched that, and tourism slowed down, everything slowed down obviously at that time. And then there was a group out in British Columbia here in Canada that had just started to form what was at the time called the Canadian Psychedelic Association.
It has since rebranded to the Psychedelic Association of Canada. But they had raised I think like 25 grand, 30 grand to get started. They had formed their nonprofit corporation and had done a few little things. And then they hired me as the founding executive director. So I helped to build the infrastructure of that organization, which then spawned another organization.
The Psychedelic Association itself was really about advancing access to individuals. So they were lobbying the government they were building community, they were hosting educational events. And then Psychedelics Canada, which was birthed out of the Psychedelic Association, became more of that professional trade association, which was trying to build the infrastructure for the professional deliverable side of what’s happening, so therapists, clinics, drug development companies, and things like that.
And through those leading I ended up founding that organization, the second one and was the founding executive director there and founder of that to begin with. We started the board, and then we raised some money there. And between those two organizations, I I also led a team that, Myself and others co-authored what’s called here a mem- memorandum of regulatory approval that you submit to our government and our health association called Health Canada to get them to add MDMA and psilocybin to what’s called the Special Access Program here in Canada, which is a, a program that allows medical professionals to access scheduled substances for specific use cases.
So in this instance, we were proposing them adding severe depression, end of life anxiety to that list, and then adding MDMA and psilocybin as as options. Because what happened here was our Health Canada system went through an approval proce- process on their medical assistance and dying program, and they actually added depression to it.
Severe depression, sorry, I should say. And so we thought, right to die, right to try kind of concept, which has been shared across the world in other various ways with psychedelics. But we really leaned into that. We submitted the memorandum of regulatory approval. We worked with Health Canada in a lot of ways, which was re- really awesome.
And they ended up in January 2021, I believe, ended up changing the Special Access Program and adding psilocybin and MDMA to it. So now access has grown and increased there. But I’ll take a breath. I’ll just say at the end, what I realized through that process and working with government and government relations specialists and politics and all that kind of stuff, I just felt every day that I was being hugged and stabbed in the back at the same time because there’s this manipulation inside of making changes at a policy level that are really ugly and I would say inhumane in some ways.
And it’s very challenging to make that work in a way that feels like in alignment with my integrity. So I quickly after the, the changes were made I left that and started a community center here where I live, and then started to getting into the coaching and consulting, working with other companies in the space that are, were a little bit more aligned to my work, my skills and my vision for what I believe I can do inside of helping others receive more access to these types of important medic- medicines and tools.
Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. And something you said about like the zealous phase where you kinda destroy relationships just because you’re pushing people to heal exactly how you healed and you want them to be there right now. It’s kinda we talk to people a lot about that too, to not do it because it’s it’s a trap that we all fall into. And kinda like accepting that different people have different healing schedules. They need to come there on their own terms, and all we can do is plant the seeds. And something that you… As, as you described your process and then you kinda went from one very intense lifestyle to another still very intense lifestyle in this space.
There’s definitely this there’s definitely power in using trauma as a performance tool. So I don’t know if you wanna talk about this. What have you learned and understood about this where something in you that, that pain in you is driving you to, to perform and how to overcome that?
Yeah. Growing up here in Canada hockey is obviously a big part of a lot of, kid’s childhood. It was a big part of mine. And I was pretty good. I was not a bad little hockey player, especially when I was really young. I stood out, amongst the crowd. And my dad saw that and did a really great job of steering me towards improving and growing.
But the challenge was when it became competitive in, in, in areas I had coaches and things like that, that were really playing a bit of a political game. And we’re, like, kids, right? We’re like six, seven, eight, nine, 10 years old, kids playing what is for us just a game. And so when I was a kid, I would st- I would spend all day outside playing, just playing and playing, and that’s how I actually, I think, got good at it.
It wasn’t necessarily needing a lot of coaching, but then, I had certain coaches that just were playing this political game, and it just didn’t… It wasn’t fun anymore because I was now forced to, rather than just play the game that I loved and was relatively good at I had this pressure behind it that was, if I don’t do this, I won’t make the team, and if I don’t make the team, then I won’t be with my friends.
If I don’t, I’m not with my friends, then what am I gonna do, and yada, yada. So luckily I, I moved through that and, made these teams and, kept going. But as I kept going through that and I got older and was playing in different leagues and things like that it just became more just, it just, it completely drained the fun out of what was the game for me.
But that didn’t go away. That, that kind of imprinted in me, I would say this desire to perform and grow and achieve have a goal and set it and, yada yada, and be the best and all of this kind of stuff. And that didn’t really go away and it followed me. I went through a period, I would say in high school and a little bit after where I rebelled.
I just, I just disconnected from everything and really didn’t want to do any of that. And then when I got into getting a career or moving through, my career, it came back hard. And it was like, I wanna be the best, I wanna be, I wanna have the big- biggest, best clients, and I wanna have the best business and I wanna be successful.
And, it was like the keeping up with the Joneses analogy where on the outside, I might be building this white picket fence and this nice house and whatever, this relationship and this business that I actually was working with the biggest brands in the world, like Amazon and Universal Studios and all of that, but I was dying inside.
And I didn’t really know why ’cause I, I was just like trained or conditioned to like grow and improve yourself and be successful and, have this thing and it drove me, in a good way, maybe just like economically for a little bit, but it also just ate me up inside.
And then when I had these sort of breakthroughs with psychedelics and a few other therapies and trainings and things that I had done, and some really great teachers, I started to realize that that energy can be channeled in a different way if it comes from a place of clarity and calm not from pressure and force.
More from what I love studying the most is flow states, which is in a very simple word or simple summary, is effortless action. So when you’re in a state of flow, you’re not thinking about being in flow. You’re not thinking about doing anything. You’re absent of time, you’re absent of self-consciousness, and you’re immersed in the present moment experience.
And so I Yeah, once I shifted that, it was like I can still use the energy of creating something or trying to build something that is of value and helpful for others, but not from a place of having to perform for it or to prove to anyone that it’s successful or prove to anyone that it’s valuable.
Just to create for the sake of creating and stay in the flow as long as possible through that in order to allow the truest form of what it’s supposed to be, rather than it be from my self-conscious ego maybe, or my my idea of what it’s supposed to be, rather than just allow it to create and build and go slow with it.
I’m not sure if that answered the question, but that’s what came from me. No, I think it did. I kinda recently I myself am realizing a lot of that. I have a lot of very similar patterns in, in the way I live life, and it’s kinda like connecting to it but from the point of view of self-love where not really forcing things that much.
And when you talk about flow, I don’t really think about it too much. But it’s if you can have a water flowing and it’s like a laminar flow where it just flows effortlessly and it still flows, right? Or you can have a turbulent flow. And the… Your desire to control the outcomes exactly and specifically, and the w- the way I’m understanding is sometimes I’m kinda burning myself as fuel for a certain outcome.
So I, I’d like to… Some people expect, because I’ve, I run this Ayahuasca retreat now. I’ve been in this space for five years. Some people expect me to have figured it all out. I’m not there yet. But I one of my recent realizations they’re in this space of that if you kinda, if you don’t need a certain outcome To people for, in order for people to love yourself. And if you kinda love yourself, then you can still do things, but even with less effort somehow come up with even better results. So it’s a- … that’s kinda what I’m integrating right now. So I don’t know if any more comments for you, Cameron.
And just- Oh, yeah. Totally … go with us deeper on the topic of flow, and also like what- Yeah … what’s the role psychedelics play in it? Yeah. I totally relate to that. And I think, the, the thing that was showing up for me when you were speaking was this- This idea of like s-storytelling.
We’re storytelling beings, right? We’re meaning-making beings, and our brains have evolved to make meaning and create story out of survival. And that’s a very useful, that’s a very useful thing for survival. But the way we live today is not as, as we did back thousands of years ago, where we’re hunter-gatherers and there was a potential bear outside of our cave that we had to be mindful of that, that could potentially hurt us.
But that storytelling architecture in the mind is still there, and what I’ve found very useful for myself and this started, at the beginning of this sort of transformation for me, but has really cemented on more, more recently, is getting out of the way and really not listening to the story in my mind, good or bad.
Because in a lot of ways and at least from my own personal experimentation, the story’s never true. It’s there to provide meaning, and we like having meaning ’cause it helps us and it kinda dr- guides us in a way. But it’s not really true. And so having some, some ability to figure out what is true is is a useful skill.
And I think that i- a lot of ways it comes back down to awareness. You were hinting at it a little bit, I would say, around like loving yourself. For me it’s like awareness of what is true. I just had an experience recently where I moved houses and the impetus for moving was my shower was leaking.
Leaking so bad into the room below it kinda thing, so there was a lot of inf- infrastructure damage happening. Just the house was falling apart. And, I could’ve been in my head, and maybe a couple years ago I would’ve been in my head going like, “This is the end of the world for me. This is like, where am I gonna live?
Da, da. My family,” all this kinda stuff. Relatively quickly, through a bit of just awareness of what the brain was doing, was like, this is just information. Something is happening in my reality, and I have a choice here to choose to take a step towards whatever is happening and make a change in that way, or I can sit and suffer inside of the story my mind is creating around this experience rather than just playing with the raw materials of what’s really happening.
So I find that’s really useful, and that’s like a… I guess that would be more of a play with consciousness relative in, in comparison to, to flow. But where flow comes into it for me is, Actually, I’ll pause there ’cause I, I know we were kinda touching on a few things there. Was there anything else that, that you wanted to chat about related to- No, it’s good.
Let’s- … what you were sharing? No, continue. This episode is sponsored by LaWayra Ayahuasca Retreat. Most of LaWayra if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while. Some of you might have already been to LaWayra before. For those who don’t know us yet, we started LaWayra four years ago. At LaWayra, we combine authenticity, accessibility, and affordability.
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L-A-W-A-Y-R-A.com. Okay. So where flow comes into it for me was when a few years ago I did some training with an amazing guy named Steven Kotler and his organization called The Flow Research Collective. He’s probably like the modern day, most researched individual or his group has researched the state of flow more than anyone else.
He’s written a bunch of really great books on it, and he has some, he has a training. He doesn’t have it anymore. But he had this really great training that brought all the top neuroscientists from all the biggest institutions across the world together to distill down the foundations of flow state neuroscience, and then help you develop a program for yourself whether it’s coaching, consulting or in whatever sort of capacity you’re building in.
Develop your own program that takes the philosophy and science of flow and embed it into whatever you’re doing. And when I understood a lot more about the flow state, I s- I saw a lot of parallels with psychedelics because in the state of flow, you’re, like I was saying before, you’re immersed in the present moment.
You’re not thinking about the that, there, then of the past or the what, where, when of the future. You’re right here and now in the present moment. And that’s all there is. You probably hear that a lot. There’s a lot of people probably talking about that. But the, the state of flow goes through a predictable cycle that has been studied and researched extensively now that mostly looks at like Navy SEALs, athletes, and creatives.
But to me, this, the state of flow, if everyone can access it every day, it’s, I think it’s the most optimal state of being. Because what happens is there’s four, four phases to the what’s called the flow cycle, which is what gets you into flow So you have in the first phase, you have what is termed as like the struggle phase.
You’ve probably seen this before if you’re like sitting down to do a business plan or write a book or whatever it is. You’re in that, you’re in that state of like the, the to-do list you had set before. Maybe you had an argument with your partner, or maybe you’re thinking about a meeting you have coming up in the afternoon.
But you’re like really trying to focus your attention on the thing that you’re doing. Let’s call it writing a book just for the sake of a simple example. Your brain is going through a neurochemical and a frequency change as you’re going through this cycle. And so what’s happening is stress builds in the struggle phase.
So norepinephrine is building cortisol is building, and your your mind and your body are trying to calm down and to focus. And when you move through the struggle and you stay with it enough and you keep moving, you’ll enter into the release phase of the cycle. And in that phase is where things like nitric oxide come on and you release out of the struggle phase.
And the to-do list and the argument and the future things you’re doing, they start to fall away. And then that thing that you’re presenting yourself with and the attention that you’re trying to get starts to come online, and then you enter the flow state. And that’s a beautiful mix between like sort of a gamma, theta brainwave state, and that’s where like dopamine and endorphins come online and your focus comes in naturally and you, your self-consciousness down regulates and your sense of time disappears, and you’re just focused and in the moment.
And that to me is available to everybody because we all do stuff. We all channel our attention and our focus throughout the day. But a lot of people don’t actively try to be a conduit to that. They’re more controlled by their environment and the things that they’re doing, rather than being the one that’s driving their ability to get into flow And so my, my thought here is if you can have someone access a deep level of flow and psychedelics offer that in many ways, especially I would say 5-MeO-DMT, what it seems like anyway then they can see what’s possible in that state.
And then ideally that they with certain habits and practices, which is some of the stuff I coach up in my coaching and consulting, is a daily practice of flow where they’re getting into flow. Sometimes it might be like a meditation style practice, or it might be a work-based practice, it might be a connection-based family practice.
But it’s trying to live a bit of a more flow-based lifestyle, and there’s different really cool practices and tools that I think support psychedelics really well, especially in terms of integration, where people can find that present moment, find that, that focus on something that’s very important to them, that even for just a small moment in the day can stack and build and grow and become something that I think is very important.
Not just from a mindset perspective or from let’s say, an output perspective, but I think from a nervous system perspective. Because the other really interesting thing about the state of flow is it’s the really integrated balance between the parasympathetic nervous system and the sympathetic nervous system, where you’re in this heightened state of, you might call it anxiety if you were in the wrong situation, but you’re in this ex- heightened state of excitement where you’re trying to focus on something that’s valuable and important to you.
But you’re also really if done right and, coached through or even just found right in the practice, you’re also balancing that heightened nervous system state with the really calm parasympathetic nervous system state. So for me, that is the ultimate optimal state of being for anyone when it comes to health, because if you’re too much in the, the sympathetic nervous system state, obviously you’re wildly stressed out, anxious, fearful.
And then if you’re too much in the parasympathetic state, you’re just like puddle, not doing anything. So this balance here for me is like a really unique state of wellbeing that I think is achievable for a lot of people. But right now, a lot of the, the science on flow is geared towards performance-based things.
So I’m really fascinated in terms of how it can be used for what I’ll just call like optimal state of being which can be applied to, I think, everybody. But more so when we’re talking about psychedelics, those people that are, I think, maybe sick of the mainstream and more interested in like alternative ways of living and being that are a little bit more in, in alignment with them as their true state of being, rather than, let’s say, what what the culture has decided is like the optimal way of being.
Yeah, definitely we’re… very few of us are optimal these days. There is a lot of chaos. So one, one other topic that you like to talk about is psychedelics and fatherhood, right? And personally I struggle a lot with being in the flow in the moment when you’re, like, surrounded by kids and they’re…
I have three kids. They’re all very small. And or I’ll describe you a situation. I wake up in the morning and I come out of my room and they jump me and they all want love simultaneously, and they’re… So one might be crying and the other might be telling me something, and it’s like first thing in the morning, that’s pretty stressful.
So how do you how would, how does one find flow in that moment? Without go- making this a coaching session, I’ll just share from my experience. I have a four-and-a-half-year-old. So I don’t know if that’s close to the ages of your kids. But I just have the one. And I get the same thing.
Get up in the morning and I come out and it’s like, “Yeah, Daddy play me with me,” da, blah, blah, blah. Which I love and that’s great. And so what I try to do is anticipate that so I’m not coming right out and getting into my morning routine and isolating myself. I’m… That’s part of my routine, is to accept that love, that playfulness, that wrestling that giddy energy that she has in the morning.
I’m anticipating that and I’m planning for that. And I’m not scheduling it or, it’s not like a productivity point for me. It’s really just trying to organize it so I have… if the ideal state I come out and there’s love and there’s good and she’s cool with me separating and going and doing my own routine, then I can get a longer, sacred ritual in before I start my day.
But if she needs more of my attention, then I have a minimum viable routine that I can drop into that’s five to 10 minutes, so that if I don’t get everything that I’d like to get in, I get the time, I give the time that she needs, but then I also give myself some time. So I’m never ignoring what I need, but I’m also still accounting for her needs and making sure I’m part of that.
That’s how I think about it. It’s never perfect, and I think that’s the idea is to separate myself from perfection, is to get away from the idea that every day is going to be ruled by this routine. A lot of people have these habits and routines and morning routines that are hours and hours long, and myself included.
I used to have a three-hour morning routine before I had a kid, and I would do this and then I would do that and I would do this. And if I didn’t do it, then my whole day would be a mess. And I would… If I missed one or two of those things, I would walk around with this like little tinge of like fear and anxiety ’cause it was like, “What’s gonna happen?”
‘Cause I didn’t get my cold plunge in or whatever the hell it was. And now it’s like, it’s just… that’s not optimal. It’s not optimal for even someone who doesn’t have kids. But someone who does have kids we have to make sure that we’re doing that idea where, you’re on a plane and they say, “Take care of yourself first with the mask, oxygen mask.
If things go down, then take care of your people next to you.” And so it’s like that. It’s like I’ve always gotta make sure I’m taking care of myself because if I’m not good for myself, I can’t be good for others that, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I think not to take, not to say that you have it easy, but one sounds very easy.
Yes. My kids are one and a half, three and a half and five, and it’s like they simultaneously want attention right now. I can’t be like, “Oh, I’m gonna love you and I’m gonna love you.” No, it’s like they all want it to them right now. So it is the for few minutes, then they calm down and I’m like, I’m able.
And I do get my morning meditation before I even step out of my room because I know that if I, if they even see me, and even then they’re already knocking on my door. Yeah. So- Yeah … it’s challenging, but it’s still beautiful. I’m not complaining. I just try to turn it all into play.
Yeah. I just try to think of everything as play. Everything as play. Even, we’ve got a wood fireplace at home. I’m playing with her building the fire. I’m playing with her in getting the fire. The firewood, for example. And so I’m always thinking about every interaction, like, where can I make it playful?
And that seems to ease any of the tensions that I’m feeling around, oh, I didn’t get this in, or I didn’t do that, or I’m trying to move from this to that and you’re interrupting me in some way. But it’s not easy as much as you think it is. I’m with you on that. Definitely one is easier than three, of course.
But I feel you in the in, in like what might be, tension or friction sometimes. I guess it’s like a process of letting go. This morning I woke up and I bought them this puzzle, and we I wanted to do this puzzle together with them. We set up a table and everything, and then the youngest one started, like, destroying it.
At first I was like, I started to get angry. Like, why? Like, all this process that we’ve, all the progress that we made. And then I just accepted. I just accepted that you cannot make a 150 piece puzzle with three kids under five years old, ’cause my oldest he’s gonna turn five this, this month.
So I just accepted it, but not oh I, I got angry or anything. I just let go, which is a progress for me, to be honest. So yeah. But you wanted to talk about psychedelic f- fatherhood. So what from which point of view, like psychedelics helping you be a better father or maybe overcoming postpartum depression?
‘Cause it both affects the man and the woman or maybe- … yeah. T- talk to us about that. Yeah. I’d say a little bit of all of that really. But I think it, at the beginning, the anchor for me on it is psychedelics helped me become a father. I’d always wanted to be a father. I had a great father, a great grandfather, great men in my life that represented fatherhood, and I always wanted to, I always wanted to be a dad.
It felt, it feels like for me being a father, and this is no judgment to anyone that doesn’t have kids, but- Be- being a father is like a rite of passage as a man in this world, as a human, and I really wanted that experience. And for a long time, not the right person or not the right time or situation or whatever, it didn’t really present itself.
And then as I was going through, like I shared in my story at the beginning, some of my struggles and the agency and, everything where I was at, I just, that all came to a head. It was like I- it’s kinda like now or never. If I don’t find the right person and make it happen, it’s not gonna happen.
And Ayahuasca showed me, in a lot of ways… I try to be careful the way I describe this because, you can get an insight on these experiences, but then it’s like, how do you make that ordinary? Because on the experience with Ayahuasca, I was with a woman that I’d been with for a long time and it showed me that I needed to, or I interpreted the insight that I gathered around doubling down and trying to make that relationship work.
But then when I came back and started integrating, I realized that the insights that I was actually given was I needed to let that go in order for a new relationship to emerge. And then from that experience, a a baby will emerge out of that And I actually saw that in my ayahuasca journey, but I, you, it’s like we talk about puzzles.
Like I, I always describe ayahuasca as like showing up to the ceremony with four different boxes of four different puzzles and piling all the puzzles down on the floor and trying to figure out where all these puzzle pieces go. So I had a puzzle piece here and a puzzle piece here, and I was trying to fit them together when I really needed to do what your one-year-old was doing and just throw that puzzle away and just play with this puzzle piece.
And so it took me a little bit to figure that out, but once I did, all… I kept getting these experiences coming back to me where I was where I actually met my partner through the ayahuasca experience and then coming back and meditating. I was seeing her in some visuals and had an experience of actually meeting her in real life, and then we got together and we’ve been together for almost six years now, and we have a four-year-old.
And it all happened really fast because like you said, I let go. I didn’t try to force it. I let go of the relationship once it was clear that needed to be let go of. And I would say love emerged out of that and a daughter emerged out of that, which is amazing. And so that was supportive of me getting to a place where I knew that I wanted to be a father and I found the right person that I was able to have, have a child with.
But then it became, am I ready to be a father? Am I… Do I have it all together? Do I, do I have the right skills to bring a, a child into the world? Am I set up, structurally, financially, s- m- mentally, spiritually? And so that took a little bit too. And then tools like psilocybin and MDMA helped me with my relationship with what I’ll say just manhood and my relationship to what it means to be a father.
And I’ve had– I actually have a, a really profound, had a really profound experience with psilocybin where my partner now, who at that time we hadn’t had a child yet, sat for me and walked me through a bunch of e- really emotional release around being a father. And then a week later she got pregnant.
It was a very beautiful experience. So helping me Ayahuasca showed me that, it’s there, it’s possible. I had to do the work to make it happen, and I had to listen and let go and trust. And then again, the same thing of the emotional side of it. I had to let go of that and trust and receive and really believe in myself and take the actions towards that.
And, I did that. And then, yeah, and then once we had our daughter yeah, you brought up postpartum. My partner, she had a really challenging postpartum experience. I would say the nine-month gestation period was beautiful. She super calm. Even our birth was really fast and natural and amazing and quick and from my perspective, not painful.
Not too stressful. She would have a different story on that. But yeah, it was a beautiful experience. And then three days after, My partner was brought to the hospital. We actually almost lost her. She had postpartum preeclampsia, and her heart rate was just out of control. And we didn’t really know what to expect.
We had such an easy sort of transition and everything, so we didn’t really know what was happening. I thought she was just tired from giving birth. But yeah, she was in the hospital for a day and we thought, we might have lose her, might have lost her. And so in that experience, right off the bat, I’m three days old.
My daughter’s three days old. I’m sitting in the car ’cause it was COVID time. I couldn’t even be in the hospital. I didn’t know what was happening up there. I was just getting news from nurses about what was going on. And I’m holding my daughter in my lap in the car and just “What am I gonna do?”
Like how can I do this by myself? Yeah. And luckily everything worked out, but it was a pretty traumatic experience for both of us, and we’ve both worked through that in our own ways. And one of the ways that I’ve worked through it is partly psychedelics, and it’s helped me release some of that stuff, but also trusting in myself to be able to hold it down no matter what happens.
And it’s helped me in a lot of ways with my mental health through that postpartum depression period that she had really deeply after that hospital experience and for myself as well, watching her go through that, trying to hold it down and keep a stable household while I was also building this nonprofit and some of this business stuff too.
Coming back to baseline and finding a balance with some microdosing and some various things is really helpful for me. Yeah. Those are all very, very useful tools. And I sometimes ask myself, like, when I’m going through very difficult times and then I go, I drink Ayahuasca or work with other plant medicines, and it just helps you so much, and you process and you understand so quickly.
I’m just wondering how the hell did our parents do their life? And it kinda explains why, in my case, like- My dad and he, like my mom, they definitely made lots of mistakes, but my, my dad didn’t have ayahuasca, right? He was going through a rough time, so he ended up becoming an alcoholic.
But I don’t even judge him that much because it’s sometimes the pain is too much and that’s what people end up doing. So we’re living in a really cool time where all of these things are available. Yeah, I think so too. And I wish for more fathers to be able to have these types of experiences.
That’s why it’s such a fascinating and a, a fun topic for me, because exactly what you said, like that era of our fathers turning to substances that created more sadness and more depression and more angst and didn’t help at all. In fact, probably made things worse. Ideally, with everything going on lately with the psychedelic movement and over the last 10 years, ideally that can switch, right?
And I, there’s obviously a big movement now going like sober, alcohol-free, that kind of stuff, and a lot more people exploring these things. And I just think if a lot more households were connected to the spirit of plant medicine, not necessarily having to explore it, but the spirit of what it provides, then I think we’re gonna be creating households and futures for our kids that I think will create a, an even more beautiful future for the world.
And I really think that’s a possibility and it’s happening right now, which is very exciting. Yeah. And obviously for this to happen, like psychedelics need to become more legal and more available. I think that’s something you’re very passionate about to get more people to have access to that.
So obviously I don’t know how much you know about me, but I run LaWayra, which is an Ayahuasca retreat here in Colombia, and basically that’s what we’re trying to do, like lower the barrier of entry for people to be able to easily access those medicines, but in a, let’s say an affordable way, but also not needing to go like deep into the jungle.
Like k- combining the accessibility and the authenticity of this space. So what have you thought about in this, like what would be the best outcome of your work from the point of view of like people getting better access to those medicines? Yeah. I think, there’s different parts of the world that have lesser boundaries around these types of things.
Where I come from in Canada- Yes … very strict, I would say, other than what I shared with you in the beginning of what, was able to change. But in a lot of ways, I’ll just speak from like the Canadian perspective. What happens here is like when public opinion changes, policy changes, but that takes a long time.
And so public opinion has already changed. I think the, there’s some recent surveys that have gone out around psilocybin in terms of like approvals and people that are in favor of having psilocybin as a medicine for people struggling with various mental health disorders. Public opinion’s already there, and the majority of people, I would say probably somewhere close to 99% of people, if not more than that are experiencing these these medicines and tools outside of the current medical system.
So the medical system is just archaic and just super slow to evolve and change. So what we need to have happen is what’s continuing to happen now, where communities are getting together and forming their own structures in a lot of ways. That part is messy too, and there’s a whole bunch of problems with that, but we have to go through that period, I believe, of kind of breaking things down in order to rebuild something new.
That is a lot harder inside of the current medical system and current government system. But I really believe that things are changing and I’m hearing more and more of politicians exploring these things. And I had some experiences myself with my, in my advocacy days of, speaking with government relations officials and things like that, and them being interested in this from a personal perspective.
So I think I think it’s just time. I think time is more, more the issue here than anything else because I think things have shifted and we’re at the beginning of that, and it’s just gonna take some time. And it might take some more breaking down, which might cause chaos and problems, but I- I’m just a d- a delusional optimist and believe that’s a good thing.
Yeah, I’m also personally very optimistic about the space. It kinda goes in waves, but I think that from an Ayahuasca point of view, I think that within the next 10, 10 to 20 years we’ll go from people conversation changing from “What the hell is Ayahuasca?” To, “When’s the last time you did Ayahuasca?”
Kinda like what happened with yoga. I’m envisioning people coming out to do it like once a year on the regular basis to, to kinda keep them more sane- saner living. And then including other tools like microdosing in between, or it’d be a mushroom ceremony here or there, or meditation, yoga. Ob- obviously not seeing psychedelics or Ayahuasca as like the end all be all, but also u- h- using it as a tool to cultivate a healthier- ways of living.
So more as a tool to understand and grow from there, and not just as a pill you take to take away the problem or mask it. Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s a big part of what I was saying before around fatherhood and the family system, is the philosophy of what comes out of a, a medicine experience also needs to be embedded into the culture more, too.
Where the idea of integrated living is a concept that I really love to write about, and explore, and play with, where everything you think about or everything you do in your day is related to your health and wellbeing, from your work, the way you manage your time, the way you organize your life. But those aren’t things that we think about.
We think about… When we think about health here in the mainstream culture in North America it’s like what do you put in your body, and then how do you work it out? But how you schedule your time, how you think about organizing your life, how you show up for your work, and what work you do, and who you work with, those all directly impact your stress levels, your nervous system, your health.
And so I think the more that not just, access to medicine and policies change, but also a cultural shift in the philosophy of a way of being, where these linear goals, they’re just not working. I’m gonna do this, and then this, and then I’m gonna succeed.
I’m gonna be this thing. Rather than it be about this identity thing, more being about this integrative way of living, I think is another element that, that needs to shift alongside this stuff because, And I think that’s maybe partly why we’re not necessarily ready for it as a society, because there’s a whole philosophy and way of being that comes with these types of things, and I think the more that gets spread, the more I think the access will be there, and then the less people will need the medicine at all.
Ideally, you just don’t need any of it. And that’s not good for someone like you that has a retreat center, but, like you said it’s not a pharma thing, right? It’s not take this pill and this’ll be better, and take it consistently forever and it’ll be better. But then when you are experiencing the medicine or you want to go further and you need it from a certain life transition or season of time, it’s there for you, and you can come down to a place like where you are and experience that and have that ex- have that journey and recalibrate and re-sync to the philosophies or ways of being that you, you want to live you want to live into.
Yeah. I disagree with you, though, on people needing the medicine or not. So my… Our, our motto actually is connect, heal, grow. So when people are done with connecting and healing, then there is this growth part. So in that case, people coming and drinking with the medicine to deepen their spiritual practice or even learn more about the way things work in the universe.
I think that healing is definitely- one focus, but it’s because of the situation which we’re in as a society. But I’m envisioning, let’s say 20 scientists coming here to my retreat, like 20 physicists, and just drinking ayahuasca and sitting in circle and just, like, brainstorming some big problem about something quantum physics related.
I think that once we start seeing medicine as a tool for exploration in in also scientific sense, I think that’s where we can become a next level society. But yeah, I’ve definitely got- I, I actually totally agree with that. I actually totally agree with that. What I was… The nuance in what I was saying was, like, need it.
Yeah. I don’t think it’s needed necessarily. It’s like you said, a tool for growth. And that can happen outside of it, and then you pop in when there’s those opportunities to grow in some way. Yeah. And I think that’s a beautiful vision that you have around having those people down. I’ve had similar ones, and I’ve had a couple of really cool leadership experiences with some founders and some teams that have gone through some, some s- some low-dose stuff.
And it is- … really powerful when that group mind comes together around a problem and- … and to see how the medicine supports it and guides it and is an ally in how it evolves from a place of truth, right? ‘Cause then you’re removing the ego from it- … in a lot of ways, which is what gets us in trouble, and people trying to be right all the time instead of trying to solve a problem.
I think your vision’s very beautiful. Yeah. So we’ll be curious to get, Get that like a scientific study. Bring… let’s say there’s a math problem that nobody- … can solve. Yeah. Bring in 20 mathematicians, give them a lot of ayahuasca, and just like they create this hive mind and they try to solve it.
That would be really cool. So- That would be fun … let’s manifest it. So on that positive note Corey, thank you so much for this episode and sharing your knowledge. Tell, tell the listeners where they can find more about you and about your work or, and any last last comments or wishes for the audience.
Yeah. Appreciate it, Sam. Yeah, you can find me mostly on my website, coreyfrith.com. This is where you can access me. I’m always available for a chat around this stuff. My… Where I kinda share most is on LinkedIn. I have a, a banned TED Talk that I share my story on, so you can check that out on YouTube.
It was banned from TED, TEDX, so it didn’t get approved, but I got the access to it and I published it, so that’s up on YouTube. And then yeah, my, my website’s like the most accessible point for people. There’s a little newsletter there that people can sign up for, a little community group if people are interested.
And in general, I just trust that people are gonna find me when they need it. Sounds good. Thank you for sharing. Guys, thank you once again. You’re listening to Ayahuasca Podcast. As always, with you, the host, Sam Believ, 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 wherever it is you’re listening.
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LaWayra, connect, heal, grow. Guys, I’m looking forward to hosting you.