(00:00) recording and here we go i wonder oh yeah jeff asked me to sometimes clap at the beginning of these because he can sync the video to the audio later but i don’t think it’ll actually work we’re not doing videos today though yeah well we we are like our reactions can be used and then we just put a picture of dr dan whenever like that’s how i’m doing narcissist survivor i’m just putting okay well let me get my light okay greetings boys and babes it’s the magic hour a place where we navigate through

(00:42) life’s peaks and valleys with all the vulnerability and shamelessness we can muster with the help of world-class guests from all walks of life we uncover new truths and valuable tools for manifesting our highest potential i’m your host mercedes terrell along with my partner in shine jade rice hey you guys today’s guest is doing some groundbreaking work to help integrate alternative practices into clinical settings he’s a really fascinating guy he lived in the jungle for a whole year studying and drinking plant medicine six

(01:13) days a week and has worked with ayahuasca over the past eight years he said there’s life before plant medicine and life after plant medicine and you guys know i couldn’t agree more he wrote the concussion repair manual as well as this book as well he wrote the concussion repair manual as well and this book is a must read not only for people with brain injuries but for anyone wishing to enhance their cognitive abilities conquer emotions and get the most out of life i am so excited to have him on today yes i am too so without further ado let

(01:51) me introduce a man who is one of the leading pioneers in plant medicine and transformational healing with a background in integrative psychiatry neurocognitive restoration peak performance medicine and psychedelic research he helps individuals shift from illness and trauma to health and happiness his transdisciplinary approach focuses on healing the body and brain the heart and mind and finally integrates the spirit to help individuals optimize all aspects of health for sustained fulfillment he lectures and consults globally and is

(02:27) the medical director of revive treatment centers of america as well as medical advisor to onnit labs the true rest float centers and several international treatment centers using indigenous plant medicines for healing and recovery additionally he has programs to help people get free from meds and practices full spectrum medicine utilizing the most effective tools available today to improve mental health care and help and heal chronic suffering his multidisciplinary approach focuses on helping people become whole happy and

(03:02) free he is truly a student of life and his newfound growth is experienced each and every time you hear him speak he has said that coming to truth is not a comfortable path but we’re so thankful he chose it because the world is truly benefiting from his work as an ever unfolding human please welcome dr dan angle to the magic hour let’s do that again yeah that was pretty bad you know what sucks laura mccowan the one that canceled that saturday she was in austin when you were in austin but i didn’t know she had a

(03:44) signing of book people gosh i know we should by the way when are we going to set up the ones that we’ve already my neighbor went to it um wrote for i’ll work on that today it’s laura gloom even the thing that sucks is they’re all on the east coast yeah but if you’re able to do it at 10 a.

(04:06) m my time i could get it in while the kids are in school but their new school is only 9 to 12 tuesdays thursdays okay let’s talk about after because i’m recording still okay greetings boys and babes it’s the magic hour a place where we navigate through life’s peaks and valleys with all the vulnerability and shamelessness we can muster with the help of world-class guests from all walks of life we uncover new truths and valuable tools for manifesting our highest potential i’m your host mercedes tarot along with my

(04:38) partner in shine jade bryce hey you guys today’s guest is doing some groundbreaking work to help integrate alternative practices into clinical settings he’s a really fascinating guy he lived in the jungle for a whole year studying and drinking plant medicine six days a week and has worked with ayahuasca over the past eight years he said there’s life before plant medicine and life after plant medicine and you guys know i couldn’t agree more he wrote the concussion repair manual as well and this book is a must read not

(05:08) only for people with brain injuries but for anyone wishing to enhance their cognitive abilities conquer emotions and get the most out of life i’m so excited to have them on today yes me too so without further ado let me introduce a man who is one of the leading pioneers in plant medicine and transformational healing with a background in integrative psychiatry neurocognitive restoration peak performance medicine and psychedelic research he helps individuals shift from illness and trauma to health and happiness his

(05:41) transdisciplinary approach focuses on healing the body and brain the heart and mind and finally integrates the spirit to help individuals optimize all aspects of health for sustained fulfillment he lectures and consults globally and is the medical director of the revive treatment centers of america as well as medical advisor to aunt labs the true rest float centers and several international treatment is using indigenous plant medicines for healing and recovery additionally he has programs to help people get free from meds and practices

(06:13) full spectrum medicine utilizing the most effective tools available today to improve mental health care and heal chronic suffering his multidisciplinary approach focuses on helping people become whole happy and free he is truly a student of life and his newfound growth is experienced each and every time you hear him speak he has said that coming to truth is not a comfortable path but we’re so thankful he chose it because the world is truly benefiting from his work as an ever unfolding human please help me welcome

(06:47) dr dan engel to the magic hour cool hi let’s see hello hi hi guys hi how are you i’m great um so okay if this is not video yep we’re aware yeah if um yeah because it’ll drop you off you said right yeah we’ve been having a hard time with uh our uh wi-fi here lately i’m not sure if it’s the local 5g server or what’s been going on but our video has always been intermittent uh well not always but uh in the last month three out of the last four video podcasts have all been almost unusable wow intermittent click outs oh

(07:36) my goodness okay um yeah okay so we’ll just use um like stock footage or an image of you when we make our little promos okay cool that’s good for you guys that’s great for me yeah yeah wait go ahead i was gonna say i don’t know if you can see us on your side but we like to record ours at least so that we have it for the promo as well yeah you guys look awesome on my side oh you see us okay um we have so much that we want to cover with you so um so we’ll just squeeze as much in as possible and um

(08:10) uh yeah i talk fast and i like this stuff i noticed yeah quite a bit of stuff yeah it’s perfect okay um do you want to read his bio or just start it with the questions um i think we should let’s well you know so much we we usually dr dan we usually read like a very extensive bio for our uh guests and we put a lot of work into those but because we want to get to so many questions with you and you probably know all this about yourself already i’m going to skip that and let’s just get into questioning so that we don’t so

(08:44) we have enough time to do that with you because i know we have yeah and you guys uh feel free to record the intro or anything you want yeah yeah we did yeah yeah okay awesome all right mercedes you got first question alrighty so dr dan first of all thank you so much for being here we’re so excited to talk to you yeah absolutely it’s great to be with you both and um we like we mentioned we have a ton to cover with you but before we get into all that you have a really fascinating story so maybe you can just pull some of the

(09:14) highs and lows that brought you to who you are today and give that to us and our listeners hmm well that’s a great question uh so let me pick uh three of the most uh notable i broke my neck two weeks before medical school and that got me into psychiatry and neurology because i was going to do surgery or er medicine i was really um just focused on those uh more interventional therapeutic domains and after i broke my neck i realized wow i don’t know anything about neurology it’s a it’s the first time i’ve slowed down

(09:52) and i realized i’ve just been standing on the gas pedal and really cruising through life and not really enjoying it very much so i slowed down became much more humanistic and just curious too about our minds and what make our minds so unique and start to work as this navigation system for life and that got me into both of those arenas i did my full training in psychiatry with residencies and fellowships and then opened up an integrative site clinic we were doing pretty good work um getting kids and adults off medications

(10:24) but it still wasn’t the soul of it and the second chapter in this uh short little autobiography was me being introduced to ayahuasca in an underground circle about 14 years ago and i learned more about myself in one weekend with ayahuasca than i had in one decade of psychotherapy so i closed my clinic moved down to the jungle well i lived in ashram for two years before moving down to the jungle and i lived in the jungle for a year uh deep in the woods no running water no no electricity no other green goes just

(10:58) me the plants uh studying with a couple of teachers and that was transformative a hundred percent really amazing and it also when i came back and moved back to the states initially initiated me into my dark night of the soul and uh was in a year of a suicidal depression lived in a tent on the backside of a friend’s property um because i didn’t really appreciate how much integration is necessary for medicine and i had been living at the pace of nature and at the speed of birds and crickets for a year so to come

(11:32) back into the fast-paced society the way that we live was just so grating on my nervous system eventually came back out and um started to run a few other clinics um but it was kind of part-time was still studying with ayahuasca studied with aya for about eight years and was pretty cruisy until third chapter uh my sister committed suicide and that was a real powerful experience for me and my and our whole family and it brought me on to the stage so to speak i knew at that point i wasn’t gonna be doing my dharma if i was uh not speaking

(12:11) on this work and the importance of the right use of these psychedelic medicine technologies in the contemporary and modern day medical landscape and what does it look like as a field of psychiatry starts to reclaim its essence as a soul-centered medicine and use these transformative tools for consciousness that are really powerful for a lot of the epidemics that we have right now so that that’s probably the short and skinny auto bio uh in three chapters right there yeah thank you for that wow um i i know that a lot of your background um

(12:51) two comes from like you said you broke your neck and um and you wrote your book um about you know overcoming traumatic brain injury and both mercedes and i come from an mma background it’s how we know each other so we have a heavy heavy mma following um which you know concussions are a very common thing in the cage um absolutely can you tell us about traumatic brain injury and how many how like so many people are unknowingly suffering from this without even knowing about it yeah it’s true most people who have post

(13:23) and custom syndrome don’t know it and most times people have concussions they do spontaneously heal because our brains and our bodies are built as surviving adaptable self-healing machines when it doesn’t heal there’s usually some other confounding variable like gut inflammation hormonal dysregulation uh immune system dysfunction if any one or all three of those are off the nervous system is going to have a real hard time healing on its own and with combat athletes it’s super helpful to have baseline

(14:01) diagnostics to just know how your brain is already functioning because in combat sports it’s not a matter of if you’re going to get hit but when you’re going to get hit how hard you’re going to get hit maybe even how many times you’re going to get hit and if you’re going to recover fully so if you have baseline diagnostics and that could be doing a quantified eeg or qeeg brain map you can get those through some neurofeedback technicians and technologists you can do more sophisticated tests like balance

(14:40) and postureography video nystagmography these are just different ways to test the the health of the nervous system or even baseline cognitive function how fast do you read do you recall do you shift sets from one task to another how quick can you um uh put short-term memory into long-term memory how’s your focus in concentration if you know those baseline cognitive measures and there are a variety of different practitioners locals that can do these kind of tests this would be kind of described as neuropsychiatric testing or

(15:14) neuropsychological testing um as well as cognitive performance testing if you have baseline now we have data to compare it to so when you get hit if you don’t heal and i can look at your baseline diagnostics and i can look at your brain real time or your nervous systems function real time now now i have a better idea where the primary deficit is if i know where the primary deficit is now i have a better idea of how to treat it so that’s just a general approach to doing this kind of work now as far as people with post and

(15:49) custom syndrome or after you get smashed it’s really important to take your own um first person perspective responsibility choice to not get hit again too soon you can’t you can’t wait for your trainer to to tell you to stay out or your coach to tell you to stay out because they don’t know what you’re feeling right and it really sucks when your brain’s off and you can’t think straight and you wake up with chronic headaches and you you have because i’ve had six pretty bad concussions and that’s why i

(16:25) wrote the book because there was no treatment manual out there and my posts and because of syndrome look like mood death mood dysregulation hyper salmonella and sexually developed narcolepsy uh chronic myerian headaches um had worse any time this was my medical training too i had worsening time putting short-term memory into long-term memory so everything i was learning in didactics in the clinic i couldn’t retain and it was just super frustrating and so it’s important to give yourself the time and space to heal

(17:02) be out of combat for another four to six weeks minimum while you’re healing and what things help healing well first of all do the obvious don’t get another head injury from the first one um start taking cbd and fish oil start a low sugar diet stop alcohol start cleaning up anything that would be causing inflammation be mindful of how you share your energy and if you have light noise sensitivity which i had uh you may not want to be on screens for longer than 30 to 45 minutes at a time or definitely not after the sun goes

(17:41) down yeah all of these things help to ensure that sleep regulation is going to be ideal that you are decreasing the the brain’s inflammatory load and that you’re not stressing your system too much like retraining even if you’re retraining hard and you’re not getting hit but if your brain hasn’t healed then you’re essentially taking energy away from the healing mechanisms and you’re diverting that energy for healing into further training and that’s when people can push themselves over what’s called their

(18:16) metabolic threshold and have a re-experiencing of their symptoms even if they didn’t get hit what about um like the dangers of micro-concussions on roller coasters and things like that do those are those caused for concern those have a stackable effect for sure uh they’re really small and typically spontaneously heal and it’s it’s if you have an occupational hazard because not not many people are going to be riding roller coasters repeatedly like you know for days at a time or months at a time but occupational injuries

(18:52) are repeated exposures to micro traumas and that could be somebody who’s firing uh an automatic weapon or a rifle on a regular basis that’s a concuss that’s a concussive blow directly to the side of the head that’s why there’s a limit to the number of recommended rounds fired per a given caliber and there’s oh sorry go ahead yeah and and that’s just a one example of a bunch of different occupational hazards so if somebody is in repeated exposure even if it feels like not much is happening

(19:31) it’s important to at least be protective and take as many neuro protectants as possible they may not necessarily need neural reparatives if they don’t have a full-blown head injury or concussion but neuroprotectants are really helpful and that would be things like cbd fish oil antioxidants like selenium coq10 alpha lipoic acid there’s a bunch of different supplements to be able to take to essentially protect the neurons and and their ability to buffer external intense uh environmental loads is that something

(20:10) everyone should be taking just as a preventative measure to keep their brain healthy i think it’s uh well we can answer that in a couple of different directions if you want to take a minimalist approach then uh use it if there’s a high suspicion or if there’s a high likelihood for susceptibility so for example three out of four my grandparents died with neurodegenerative conditions both my mom’s parents died with alzheimer’s my dad’s dad died with parkinson’s and those are just horrific ways to exit

(20:46) one monkey suit and after seeing them go through neurodegenerative conditions and stacking my head injuries on top which predispose you for neurodegeneration i hedged all my bats and and i take pretty consistently both neuro neuro protectants and neuro imperatives because i’m still snowboarding i’m still doing stuff that you know my partner or my mom or people that are close to me would say maybe you shouldn’t be doing that there’s a lot on the line and yeah well we’re still um i’m not gonna

(21:21) uh not live your life exactly i’m not gonna prevent myself from doing the things i really love so if there’s a high likelihood if there’s a past experience of trauma and a high likelihood for more trauma or potential for neurodegeneration then i say for sure because everybody does pretty well with fish oil and there’s a good there’s a good case to be made that uh eating um seafood is what helped us develop into the magnificent brains that we have today that and maybe microdosing psilocybin yeah yeah and you also talk a

(21:54) lot about stress and how that affects the brain is this um is that as awful on the brain as concussions uh yes but in a different way stress is one of those ubiquitous experiences in our current human condition everybody lives to a degree of stress in our given society whether it’s external stress because we’re trying to keep up with the pace of our technology while our nervous systems have really evolved at the pace of nature it’s only in the last hundred years that we’ve tried to keep up with the speed of our

(22:29) technology that’s a stress for schumer externally internally there’s the constant stress that tells that our mother culture tells us that we’re not good enough do we need to buy the next widget fancy this fancy that to be cool to be successful our whole capitalistic orientation is built on find people’s primary pain point push it and then sell them the remedy and and it starts early you know when when we were oftentimes raised by parents who were only just trying to do the best that they know how to do

(23:04) and oftentimes got satisfaction or value of their own parenthood at the success of their children so kids are start kids early on are rewarded for how well they do not just for who they are yeah so that’s already an externally based level of self-validation so there’s all these stressors and stress is the number one cause of chronic disease we know that and the number one cause of stress is time urgency and that’s yeah worse i feel like i get stuck in that like um the other day i got pulled over for

(23:35) speeding and the cop asked why are you in such a hurry and i i literally was like i don’t know i’m i’m early because i’ve been i’ve been in a hurry all day so i’m actually early to where i’m going i have no idea why i’m in this constant sense of having this constant sense of urgency um that’s something i’m definitely working yeah it just gets normalized right right yeah and if you see the rest of the lemmings running off the cliff and you stop then they’re gonna be like what are you

(24:03) doing what are you stopping for let’s go it’s you know the the the goal is this way stop being against the herd is an active process and it can feel strange because you’re not doing what everybody else is doing yeah but the definition of normal and the definition of health today are not the same what’s normalized now is not healthy absolutely but because of the way we all live and so it’s really helpful that’s why meditation is an active process it takes a lot of discipline to just sit down and slow things down it

(24:38) really is it’s some i mean it seems like such a popular thing now but even so you know the majority of my friend group that i grew up with are still having issues around sitting down and being silent and i have issues myself of getting myself to do that on a regular basis because i get all caught up in the glorification of busy but that does lead me to my next question which is what are the methods of healing the human that you special specialize in specifically healing the human like the whole human experience yeah yeah

(25:14) uh awesome question i don’t know if ever been asked that question that directly brilliant uh when i think of being human and this human experience i think of it as a multi-leveled process right we are physical we have a body a mind a heart a soul and a spirit or at least a spiritual connection so i think of it on all five levels and what we are reclaiming through the field of psychiatry in this new modern era on this eve of transformational medicine is a soul-centered approach like at the core of our being we all

(25:48) have a soul but most people don’t even know what that means or it’s a little nebulous and a little effuse it’s important to be connected to a soulful experience of living which means that we we do appreciate the beauty and the privilege that it is to be human that we do appreciate everybody else’s beauty and intelligence and genius and importance all life is sacred all people are as important there’s no more important person and there’s never been another you and there will never be another you

(26:21) and so what is it that you’re here to do the song that you’re here to sing the genius that you’re here to launch and we can also start to come into more experience of reverence and and deep connection if we appreciate that every body is living the same kind of human experience just in a different way we’re all leaves falling from the same tree so at the core of our being i think it’s helpful and important to be able to start to orient a conversation around the connection with soul and also a connection with the stories

(26:58) that we choose to tell ourselves about life what stories have we told ourselves up to this point about different aspects of our life about our relationships about where we live where we came from who we are what we’re here to do do we feel good enough about who we are do we feel like we need to keep proving ourselves or that if we’re not just perfect in the way that we project ourselves then we’re not going to get the love that we want and everybody deserves so we can start to consciously create the narrative for which we choose to

(27:30) live and the majority of the people and the stories that are most compelling are those that go on the heroes in the heroine’s journey and they get called to action and they go through a trial of challenges and into the dark knight and they pop out the other side oftentimes scuffed up and bruised up but but wiser for it stronger for it more resilient for it and here to give their service back to the collective so as we start to bring in these core components of what it is to be human then we notice too that the other things

(28:07) in our lives start to fall into place our body starts to spontaneously heal from chronic disease once we find meaning purpose and value in our lives in our expression and to come back to a heart-centered experience of community and our relationships and knowing that we’re born to bond and that’s one of our primary drives and if we’re not expressing our primary drives and it’s going to come out as some distortion or a blockage and so when we know that these drives include freedom of expression freedom of

(28:40) love being able to serve feeling safe and secure in our relationships and the drive to transcend and have transcendent experiences ecstatic states all of these include the the different facets of what it is to be in this tapestry of a human experience and all of them are important and sometimes we express some of them but most of us don’t express most of them and when we do that more effectively i’ve seen consistently that all of the things that we want to track in the biohacking arena start to get better hormones start to improve some of

(29:24) this is like flow data and flow states and cutler and wheels um conversation in the rise of superman and um stealing fire and that flow states is just one perspective of that it’s also about how we serve community how we find meaning and value in our contribution and and giving back in a way that leaves the world better than when we found it yes absolutely uh that you know to me is just speaks to the same recycled um ideas that each religion even seems to have used and it’s and i don’t know if this is gonna well you’re so

(30:14) articulate dr dan it’s hard to even add anything to what you have to say here and i’m not really trying to add but i’m just trying to note i guess that we as a species and a culture especially seem to be um having an issue with getting in touch with our soul and we have a lot of pushback you know and i have experienced that in my own life i have done that in my own life um i still find myself doing that and so when i get to hear someone like you speak on that so articulate it cuts straight to my core it’s kind of hard to

(30:53) uh it’s kind of hard to continue to live in that lie you know yeah and it sounds so simple when you say it too [Laughter] so thank you for doing the work that it took to get you to the place you are now and able to speak on it the way you do um so for you is there specific uh maybe uh modalities that you could offer to us and our listeners that would be great ways um we’ll get into plant medicine of course during this talk but maybe things that are not using psychedelics that people could use to get there to

(31:31) access you know their soul and their truth like float tanks i know you speak a lot about yeah um happy to get into that maybe we can describe those as technologies and experiences uh because kind of like stan groff said once a while back who’s like a heavy in the whole field of plant medicine research and psychedelic therapy um what we’re lacking in our uh current cultural landscape is an experiential spirituality an experience of spirit and mercedes you were describing this like recycled more modern language around similar

(32:15) themes that most spiritual traditions speak about and you’re right there’s a really good book called oneness by a funny enough a guy by the last name of moses and he just did a discourse in looking at the world’s primary spiritual traditions and quote-unquote religions and how all of them speak about pretty much the same things and so this is what it is to be human this is at the core of our being and it is fairly simple it’s not easy because in our culture we just live such fast-paced lives and so externally

(32:49) oriented and we’re not taught these kind of things as children frequently you know our parents were um doing the best they knew how to do our grandparents came out of the second world war uh you know it’s only pretty recent that we’ve had so much modern luxury on a global scale and the shadow side of that is now we have these diseases of affluence where it’s easy to just sit around being a couch potato all day and hit one button purchases on amazon and numb out to the fear-based media so there is an active process

(33:25) of deprogramming and re-centering that’s necessary and jade you mentioned flotation tanks and probably that that’s probably my most favorite current technology yeah outside of plant medicines because everybody can float it doesn’t matter how old you are young you are on medications not on medications healthy not healthy everybody can float the only time people have said i can’t float is when they have claustrophobia and don’t like being in close spaces and i said that’s an even better timetable

(33:58) yeah i know some people don’t like it because when they get in there they feel like they see a bunch of dark images um coming at them so it’s yeah another reason to really want to need to do it yeah that can be another fear-based experience um that’s really a doorway into self-discovery like what are all of those images that are just percolating in the background that are only now on the screen of my awareness because i’ve slowed down and i’ve disconnected from the environment enough to allow that

(34:34) to come forth right well let me allow that to come forth because i don’t want to just walk around numb to that or right not there because it’s going to shape how i experience life and i wonder if sometimes because it’s it’s the closest it can be to being in our mother’s womb if um you know i know we feel emotions in our mother’s womb like maybe it somehow takes us back there if we didn’t have a positive experience i’m curious i think you’re right on with that and a lot of uh float researchers would even

(35:07) say the same thing it is the first time since we were born that we’re without sensory experience we had even more sensory experience when we were in the womb because in the womb we could feel proprioception and mom moving around hear noises yeah we had auditory input and so but it’s the same kind of experience we’re in a dark held protected womb space that we’re buoyant in and we start to because the water temperature is the same temperature as your skin we start to lose even the familiarity with where we stop and

(35:49) the rest of the world begins and and it’s easy to now have a greater connection to perhaps this place that we all come from before we’re in a body and where we’re going to go to once we exit a body yeah i think that the fear though too comes from that same idea of not knowing where you are yeah no boundaries of um where you end and the rest of the world begins in a sense it’s almost triggers you to feel like that that ego story of do i exist do i exist you know always needing to be validated and reaffirmed in that

(36:27) knowing and then for me when my very first float tank the most frightening thing for me was being in such darkness um and stillness and i’ve had this reoccurring dream i’ve talked about on the show before but where i’m standing there and you know like an on an old uh property used to live in with my grandparents as a farm so it was very dark at night didn’t have any other external lights really going on but there was this one bug zapper light that’s shown on the group of our family um me and some you know people that were

(37:01) really close to me and every time i would blink one would disappear into the darkness and each so obviously i was there eventually left alone and i had to choose to to walk into the darkness or not and i i chose to but um that for me the float tank was very triggering in that same sense of that fear that comes with the darkness because that’s the chaos that we haven’t confronted yet in ourselves i for some reason thought i was going to die the first time i did it like when i was in there i thought i could possibly die in here like i

(37:33) don’t know why this fear of death came over me um but what has been your number one benefit they’re both really powerful each of those experiences is about being okay in the unknown okay with the the experience of disconnection and darkness and then to find our ability to self-regulate in that yeah come back to our breath to slow things down to find an experience of connection that we hold in our own mind’s eye that that is the thread of our own human experience it’s it’s this sleeping dream time that

(38:19) you’re that that’s easy to morph in and out of and if i can state one or two of the primary benefits to your question jay is the ability to support people in the growing experience of being okay in the unknown and becoming more comfortable in the discomfort because it starts to build resilience in the mind and then we start to look less outward for our own ability to resource resource our worth resource our love resource our own personal meaning and and it grows this ability to connect within and and to be honest with you too these are

(39:08) a lot of you know fancy words that i’ve noodled on this for a long time so that’s why i can speak on it you know fairly off the cuff um but that’s also to say a lot happens in the tank that we don’t even know what’s happening just like in the medicine experience there’s a reason that medicine experiences are called ineffable which means hard to put into words and what we do know is that the more people float it tends to create greater and greater relaxation now that that’s physical

(39:40) physiologically because we can see yes stress hormones get normalized blood pressure normalizes forces you to unplug forces you unplug for sure which is like meditation on steroids yeah and so it has this stacking benefit and what’s happening psychologically and and soulfully i think we’re we’re still starting to uncover and put understanding towards yeah yeah there’s a i love that that’s uh you know the magic trick you’re leaving with our listeners maybe too because it’s such a simple thing to just walk into a float

(40:17) um tank facility and and spend 90 minutes doing that and see how how it goes for you your first time if you haven’t already yeah mercedes i love your backdrop too buddy yeah you also speak on something called the sen satori method could you explain that for us a bit yes uh satori is a zen buddhist term for sudden awakening and there are practices that we can engage that will give us a sudden awakening experience and sometimes that happens spontaneously and and if it does happen spontaneously and there’s no

(41:03) reference for it it can feel really destabilizing sounds like a kundalini awakening exactly another great example and one of my primary teachers ran something called the kundalini crisis clinic which was a clinic for people going through spontaneously kundalini uh opening experiences that they they couldn’t manage and they thought they were going crazy yeah wow and and it’s unfortunate that we don’t have a better understanding for that because i’ve had many clients that were unfortunately stuck in psychiatric

(41:37) institutions and put on medications because they had an expression of a kundalini opening and awakening that they didn’t know what it was sometimes their body moves in certain positions we would call those mudras or they may hear something that other people don’t hear or have visual experiences that other people don’t and and those are by the way all the classic symptoms of schizophrenia according to modern psychiatry so it’s helpful to have a framework to engage people in the preparation process

(42:08) so if we’re going to engage satori methods it’s really important to be able to onboard people with the understanding of what could happen and then to help them integrate it on the other side so it’s a three-phase approach preparation experience and integration now classically and historically support experiences were accessed through a variety of different wisdom teachings and traditions like the practices of certain yogic postures breath work practices and meditation styles that’s one lineage in one particular

(42:45) orientation other experiences of awakening could be in isolation and nature and that would be described by certain traditions as a vision quest or in the lakota language uh hambuche those are experiences of typically inward focus or outward communion with something outside of the usual ego right so i’m either going deep into myself below the ego subconscious or i’m going outward and to commune with something outside of my little me mine and i and to remember where i come from and to commune with the divine

(43:30) outward super conscious so we have these two different directions we can go subconscious and get in the material we can go super conscious and give them material and a satori experience tends to be similar to that process of metamorphosis when the caterpillar turns into a butterfly and the caterpillar doesn’t have any idea what’s going to be but to be a butterfly so if it spontaneously happens it might freak out like whoa where’d the wings come from who am i and all my caterpillar friends now are going to look at me like what

(44:05) just happened to you right and so we have this tendency to project our experience onto others and make them right or wrong based in our own idea of what’s normal and if we can introduce these kinds of practices and we just mentioned a couple there’s also holotropic breath work or a style of pranayama where you can get into elevated states just through breath there’s also fasting and going without food particularly toxic food in order to clean up the internal system and draw energy up through the crown

(44:42) to open into the mind and um blindfolded trans dance is another historical method it doesn’t have to be blindfolded but when you do blindfold then you go even deeper in and when you start to dance or move at a high bpm or beats per minute above 140 or 160 you start to get into elevated states so these are just a few practices of what can stimulate something called a satori experience and then the the magic happens really on the other side of that which is how do we integrate that peak experience and make that

(45:23) usable for our daily walk and bring that treasure so to speak back to the collective like the hero and the heroine do on the other side of their journey right yeah where’s a good place to find out more about that method um i’ve given a bit of its description and some of the preliminary um like the nomenclature or the language around it as well as a schematic for it on full spectrum medicine okay uh that’s our education advocacy platform for these kinds of awakening experiences and it’s also part of the curriculum that

(46:01) we’re designing for the center that we’re opening in austin this summer called cuyah oh wow that’s where i live so that’s exciting excellent yeah you’re in austin local yeah i actually almost ate thanksgiving dinner with you at the kingsbury’s but i ended up leaving town that would have been fun that would have been ultimately me yeah oh great well then you’re gonna firsthand what we’re up to yeah i can’t wait um i’d like to also discuss the loneliness epidemic with you that the majority of people are

(46:31) experiencing well i love how informed y’all’s questions are good job on the homework um yeah it’s phenomenal when we look at the five primary and this is not an exhaustive list by the way but the five primary obvious psychiatric epidemics of our time right now depression anxiety ptsd addiction and pain and both chronic physical pain and emotional psychic soul level pain all of these particularly the obvious ptsd depression anxiety addiction all of those are going through epidemic proportions even with the fancy advent

(47:08) of all of our psychopharmacology all of our pharmaceuticals and it may very well be that at the core or at least a common thread between all of those is loneliness and an experience of disconnection because we know that we’re born to bond that’s a part of being human we are social creatures we do better in secure safe expressed joyful relationships than in isolation as a whole yes there are some rishis and sages and um and and enlightened beings so to speak that do their work in isolation meditating on peace on welfare on love

(47:58) and essentially anchor a pillar for that frequency into the collective consciousness so that there’s somebody in isolation doing that because it the hardest work is to do like your enlightening work in the day-to-day like in in downtown urban jungles it’s a bit easier to stay in the zone so to speak tucked away in a cave kind of like it was for me tucked away in a hut when i was living in the jungle the work is really to do it yeah in the day-to-day and so when we do connect with one another and we lift

(48:36) each other up in conscious community and we share the experiences of being human and we start to re-inhabit the village so to speak which is a term that i enjoy um i forget the name of uh the woman that wrote that she wrote a really good book on re-inhabiting the village and it’s all these different experiences of being a human in village life and what does it mean to have like a modern village it means that you’re around people that you can count on and most intact cultures have a community-based experience of living we

(49:10) in our modern society tend to be pretty isolated with this frontier mentality that we have to do with all of our on our all on our own and we have to own everything so as to be independent as possible and and we don’t know most of our neighbors because it’s easy to just hit the garage door button open drive in and close and like oh yeah i saw my neighbor today driving by into the garage um we just don’t tend to have as much social connection and communion as our ancestors where we come from and as a part of our

(49:47) like human blueprint had and expressed so all of that is just to say that when we get connected to people that we have like-minded like-hearted like-spirited experiences of living with we tend to live more joyful better lives and the longest study that we’ve ever done which is a 80-year harvard study showed that the best measure for longevity wasn’t genetics wasn’t exercise wasn’t diet wasn’t how much you sleep wasn’t like all these bio hacking metrics that we can track it was the quality of a person’s

(50:23) relationship yeah do you think that um the amount of screen time that kids are now having that that’s just kind of making this even a more downward spiral in our future of of those five conditions that you spoke on 100 yeah and it is true that we can connect more virtually than we’ve ever been to able to do um but i think that’s been at the detriment of our physical connection and our soulful connection if i have 5 000 superficial friends on facebook instagram and twitter but i don’t really have you know half a

(51:00) dozen really good friends that’s the opposite of the way it used to be what it used to be is like yo yeah there were five six so like really tight people those are my homies those are people i could count on and maybe i had a whole bunch of other acquaintances so we’ve kind of flipped the number and and and their virtual touch will never substitute human touch and physical touch yeah it just can’t i noticed too in my own life it’s a matter of or the way i would describe it is i am seeking sometimes validation over

(51:40) connection so you can get validation from you know the screen time um you can get validation from you know your gaming buddies on your headset or through social media likes and such but it’s not true connection it’s at the back of our mind we know that that little endorphin hit we’re getting isn’t sustainable and isn’t real and it isn’t the thing that we want most which is you know that real person-to-person connection soul connection yeah yeah i haven’t ever heard anybody describe it that way but i really like

(52:14) that summary statement yeah i do believe most of us are using our electronic technological social media based platforms as a means of validation and not it is the style of connection but the end point is validation and when we’re usually together with people that we really jam with and really connected with that’s communion yeah right we’re deeply connect connecting in community to an experience of union deep presence with one another yeah union is really the right word because after all like even in order to

(52:52) procreate we need to create those type of connections that type of unity that type of union so that we can move this species forward hopefully onward and upward and um kim john payne from simplicity parenting he talks about how the average amount of screen time kids are having right now that by the age of 18 it would equal up to 60 000 hours and he’s like the saddest part of that is that that’s 60 000 hours that they may have spent connecting to their siblings or to their parents or to playing outside on a tree you know and

(53:24) um how how that sixty thousand hours of just staring into a screen and instead of a lot of time yeah it’s it you don’t think about it you know day to day or week to week and then when you yeah think about the it’s that’s a massive span of it yeah and and i mean jeez it’s got to be hard to be a kid uh you know kids don’t necessarily know that it’s hard to yeah because they’re just doing what they do yeah um but i i’m not a parent and and i feel for parents having to navigate the the balance between what’s the right

(54:01) amount of screen time and but you don’t want to grow up completely technologically ignorant either i just get fascinated about where we’re heading as a species too it’s sometimes it feels inevitable that we’re just you know going to become these robots we’re going to become the thing we stare into all day long there’s people having these conversations is what gives me hope because then it means there will be the awakening as well yeah and this is a good example part of the light side of our technology is the

(54:36) ability to share this much information yeah right that we’ve never been able to share something like a maasai warrior in sub-saharan africa has as much information in the palm of his hand as the president did 15 years ago that’s amazing that’s a fairly short period of time and so it’s enabled people to become more independent to actually bring also information from the shadows into the light like the whole me too movement yeah built on that and the fact that we we are requiring more and more transparency from our elected leaders

(55:10) and and ideally more and more transparency and freedom in the information that we receive so that there’s not somebody managing our google media searches and telling us what outlets we can or can’t watch yeah it’s it’s such a interesting time is all i guess i can say about it because there’s so much and that’s what we talk about on the show is that everything in our lives in our minds comes through contrast and it’s a matter of figuring out how to how to float somewhere in the middle

(55:43) there and continue to have balance so what does it mean to have physical and psychic integrity in our modern world dr dan well another awesome question good we may have to extend our or have a part two to all of this i know it so let me take those separately and then we’ll weave those together so physical integrity these are based on the building blocks of what it means to be human and to feed this monkey suit to the best of our ability with the greatest chance for success and longevity and like you said procreation

(56:24) right so that’s that’s ensuring the continuation of our species integrity in our daily practices of what are the building blocks of life this means movement breath nutrition light electromagnetics all life is built on the same building blocks when we know how to access those fundamentals and we do that on a regular basis into the sweet spot then we start to up level our physiology and what i mean by a sweet spot is everything has all medicine has its sweet spot if you don’t use enough there’s no effect if

(57:03) you use too much it’s poison sunlight’s like that right uh if i go lay on the sun and and i’m not used to that and i just go out and get an eight-hour sun bath i’m probably gonna get fried or waters like that if i drink a gallon of water at one sitting in like five to ten minutes i’m going to get hype any treatment i can have a seizure and die it’s actually one of the quickest ways um that you could just do something natural that would be toxic um same thing with food if we eat too much which many people in our culture do

(57:34) it’s detrimental same in the opposite direction so all of these basic fundamentals build the integrity structure and movement breaks down into a variety of different things too coordination balance speed flexibility strength i.e power they’re not totally synonymous but for our purposes we use this um and breath work is the same we talked about that in relationship to meditation it can go in either direction breath is the cons breath is the only conscious physiologic practice that we have that that thankfully is also subconscious like we

(58:11) don’t have to think to breathe otherwise we’d have to think about all of our animals and exhales and that would last very long and we can toggle our nervous system into either direction sympathetic awake ready ready for action so to speak or parasympathetic rest digest assimilate and breath will put us in either of those directions most people are stressed so we can use our breath to relax and that’s one of the best easiest quickest practices there’s a practice i call four minutes to freedom where

(58:45) if you do an inhale to four count and then exhale to eight count exhale while you’re humming then it’s about a six or so breath cadence per minute and if you do that over four minutes that’s 24 slow breaths so inhale and then exhale with a hum to eight count [Music] [Laughter] [Music] that’s actually one of the most effective practices for people with post concussive syndrome to start re-regulating their nervous system and have a decrease in inflammation and stress i could see anxiety too a bit yeah and

(59:27) it’s good for so many anxieties calm me down just listening to it try it just give yourself a week do it for four minutes a day commit to it and see how it affects your day i’ve noticed that if i’m already in a really kind of mellow state and i do that then i’m even more mellow and i might not be like ready to have a podcast because it has a physiologic effect um so all of those i see is physical integrity practices and the integrate and if if we just look at the term integrity and integrity means to me integration

(1:00:02) integration of all different aspects of ourself or all practices that are engaging health and optimization in a particular area of ourselves so body psychic psychic integration i think of integrating all different parts of our psyche and all different aspects of what we would describe as ourself and some of that includes the things that we’re really proud of and we want to put on social media and instagram and facebook profiles and selfie sticks but also our shadow material the things that we have shame or guilt

(1:00:40) and around and don’t want to show people they’re not our most um joyful expressions or the things that we wanted to keep in the closet even our traumas what what’s a part of us that maybe has been locked away as a result of a traumatic experience that we’re not connected to and how is that disconnection limiting us from being our our full spectrum human our most whole awake in-service human and so if we have practices where we can regain and reclaim these disconnected parts of ourself establish more psychic integrity

(1:01:18) in my experience we do become a more full experience of what our potential is and i’ll just leave with this one quote in a book i read recently christ is the name of the single unified being who is expressed as the totality of human consciousness wow that’s a that’s a name that i’ve never heard and jesus was a christ of being he was an enlightened being and there are other enlightened people as well and what does it mean to be the fullest expression of the totality of human consciousness which means a whole human

(1:01:58) right with psychic integrity and it’s a remembering isn’t it it’s all a remembering 100 yeah if we use jesus as another analogy he said all these things i do you can do and more which means we’re all remembering our divinity we’re all remembering our glory our amazingness like this body is a freaking amazing super machine right mind and brain is an amazing super computer it’s a it’s incredible to be a human in a human body just of all the factors that go into creating life and sustaining life is

(1:02:36) magnificent beyond awareness yeah and when we can come into those experiences of remembering and if we bring it back to satori so much of what i think is satori experience is is our actual remembering of our divinity and our grace yeah i love that dr dan so we have a couple more questions and we also have a bunch of questions from the magic mob would you rather me schedule a part two um with your assistant so that we can get those done or would you rather us try to ask a few real quick um i suspect that we’ve got enough

(1:03:17) uh juice here for a part two yeah we do we definitely just just a hunch yeah so if we have enough uh for a part two then uh we’ll leave this as the intro and we’ll pick up with part two and i want to make sure that i can serve you guys uh to the best of my ability and answer all your questions and and um yeah being some of the the more personal questions um just a little bit of air time sometimes leaves them a bit short and not not really yeah answered yeah we had like six come through from our listeners so there’s that’s

(1:03:50) that’s probably um in itself yeah um and then we really wanted to talk psychedelics with you as well and that was our last question so um so this is right at an hour so this would be a good part one um and then i could get with your assistant and figure out a time for a part two that sounds great yeah okay thank you so much and maybe next time we’ll be able to have video time too yeah yeah what city are you in dr dan i’m in boulder oh you’re awesome my best friend tom lives in boulder uh majority of the time he teaches at um

(1:04:24) the boulder college there yeah it’s uh it’s an amazing place if you guys haven’t visited i highly recommend it yeah i well we’ll be in telluride for mountain film festival um in may wow telluride’s an amazing place yeah we i try to go every year it’s um a film festival of just documentaries and this year it’s um the topic is young visionaries last year was equity oh wow yeah news that’s when is that uh it’s memorial day weekend if you’d like to go um let me know and um we can

(1:04:56) most likely get you a pass cool yeah send me a link send a link and the information to marla okay and then schedule part two and i’ll check it out and see if it works for her calendar i love telly ride that area yeah my dad lives in durango so i guess oh that’s that’s where we fly into it’s just both of those are really cool areas is so cool the film festival itself is is pretty incredible yeah you’re in the middle of a postcard with people who care about issues like right equity and speaking about young visionaries

(1:05:31) i’m a yes totally yeah awesome okay i’ll send all that to marla thank you so much for your time yeah thank you dr dan and like i said you are your work is so well thought out and i don’t know you know if it’s the plant medicine or the nothing you’ve done or all the things combined but you are being such a light to our lives and our listeners lives so thank you for taking the time with us yeah thank you both for the invitation it’s been a pleasure to be with you guys thank you i look forward to you again

(1:05:59) yeah bye awesome bye let’s see um okay yeah because i he’s so um