Trust & Forgive: Turning Trauma Into a Doorway for Healing w/ Dr. Richard Grossman | EP 438

You know you need something, you're just not sure what. You've been listening, you're doing the work, but there's still this feeling that you're circling the same place, like you're waiting for the thing that finally moves you. Now maybe you've thought about working with me one-on-one. Maybe something's held you back, the timing, the money, or you're just not sure you're ready yet. I get that. And I want you to know there's still a place for you. I built a resource for exactly this moment, guided meditations for when the waves hit and you just need to breathe. Workbooks to help you get out of your head and onto the page, ebooks on what near-death experiences tell us about the people we've lost, and whether they're really gone, a full course for widows and widowers who are ready to find their way back to living, and a full course for the evidence of the afterlife. And all of it is available for pay what you want. Nobody gets turned away because of money. I think these resources are valuable, but I don't want to hold them back because you don't have the money to pay for them. You don't have to wait until you're ready for coaching. The next step might be a lot smaller than you think. To find out, go to grief2growth.com/store. That's grief, the numeral 2, growth.com/store. And check out the resources I've made for you. Close your eyes and imagine. What are the things in life that cause us the greatest pain? The things that bring us grief are challenges, challenges designed to help us grow, to ultimately become what we were always meant to be. We feel like we've been buried. But what if, like a seed, we've been planted? And having been planted, we grow to become a mighty tree. Now, open your eyes. Open your eyes to this way of viewing life. Come with me as we explore your true, infinite, eternal nature. This is Grief to Growth. And I am your host, Brian D Smith. Hey there, welcome to Grief to Growth. I'm your host, Brian D Smith. And whether it's your first time joining us, or you're a longtime listener, I'm truly grateful that you're here. This podcast exists to help you navigate the toughest parts of life, to face grief, trauma, and uncertainty head on while exploring the bigger questions about our existence. Who are we? Why are we here? Where are we going? Where do we go when we leave this world? And how can we make them make the most of the time we have while we're here? Today, I'm honored to be joined by Dr. Richard Grossman. He's a truly integrative healer whose life work bridges ancient traditions and modern sensibilities. With over 40 years of experience as a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine, and a deep journey into the wisdom of Amazonian plant medicines, Dr. Grossman is known for his ability to guide people through deep healing processes that go far beyond symptom management. We'll be exploring what it really means to view trauma not just as a wound, but as a doorway, something Dr. Grossman has seen transform lives when people are willing to slow down and be present with their pain. He'll share insights from his new book, The Book of Not Knowing Yet, and invite us into a space where healing comes not from answers, but from surrendering to the mystery. We'll talk about integration, what happens after those big aha moments, and why so many people still feel stuck even after therapy or medication. Dr. Grossman also explains why he doesn't see himself as an instructor, but rather as a fellow traveler offering what's helped him along the way. So if you've ever wondered what true healing looks like, or you're curious about the intersection of ancient, modern, and ancient medicine, modern trauma recovery, this conversation is for you. And as always, I invite you to continue the conversation over at grieftogrowth.com/community, where you can connect with me and other listeners directly, and let's walk this path together. So with that, I want to welcome Dr. Richard Grossman.

Thank you. The book title is actually Trust and Forgive: The Medicine of Your Life.

Oh, I'm sorry about that. Wow.

That's okay, it's not your fault. It's a great, it's a great title. I wish I thought of that title.

Yeah, really. Well, um, what I want to do is just have a conversation with you, and you know, one of the things, as I was telling you before we got started, you know, a lot of people that are listening to this podcast have suffered some sort of trauma that's led to their grief. And you describe trauma as a doorway rather than just a wound. So what do you mean by that?

Well, you know, there's a beautiful old story of Buddha. And the story goes, a woman came to Buddha holding her dead child and crying and weeping and screaming and Buddha, please bring my child back to life. Please restore the life of my child. And Buddha was like, "I can't do that. There's nobody who can do that." And she was like, "I know you're Buddha. You're the enlightened one. You're the awakened one. You're the master of this age. Please, please, please." And they just went on back and forth. And finally Buddha told her, gave her an empty bowl and said, "Well, here's a bowl for you. I would like you to find, get me a bowl of rice." from a house where there's been no death. And she said, no problem, I'll be back in a few hours. And so she takes— I don't know if she took her dead baby or left the dead baby there, I don't know what that part of the story is, but she goes out with this empty bowl of rice and a few days later comes back and bows down to Buddha and said, please may I be your student. And she discovered that there was no place where there was not death. There's nobody who's not traumatized. There's nobody who is not suffering from grief in one form or another. And for her, it was the doorway into acceptance of the fact that her baby was dead. It was the doorway into recognizing the beauty of being with a true teacher, a true awakened one. And it was— she became a nun and then studied with Buddha for the rest of her life. Sadly, I don't know her name, but that's the only story— that's the story I know. And I think for every person, you know, to recognize grief is normal, you know, trauma is part of life. I've been working with people for 45 years, 43 years, and I have yet to meet anybody who wasn't wounded, who wasn't, you know, having their soul, their heart at one point torn out of them and trampled in one way or another. So why is that a doorway is just a beautiful question. That I'm not sure there's an answer for, at least an answer in words for. But, you know, the old cliché of your heart doesn't break, it breaks open. And so perhaps trauma is— I'm not going to say trauma is a gift because trauma sucks. I mean, it's horrible. But the recovery from trauma is a gift because it allows a person to explore parts of themselves that they never had a chance to explore before, that were hidden, that were covered up by the shells of life, by the things of life that are our ideas, are our concepts, are our ways of perceiving reality that are based on our culture, based on our religions, based on our upbringing, based on our friends, based on our schools, based on our food, based on do we meditate or don't we meditate, based on any one of 10,000 different things that become the personality, that become me, who I think, I think I am. I think I am. And so, you know, something happens in life and who you think you are is at least temporarily shattered, you know. There's enough examples of it happening in this moment today that I don't have to go into them. Mm-hmm. People being shattered. So how does recovery from that happen is, you know, probably the topic of this discussion here.

Yeah, yeah. So I'm curious, I mean, your background is so varied with Eastern medicine and also South American plant medicine. How did you discover each or both of those things?

Number one, I'm insanely curious about life. I, I find the process of being alive and living and learning fascinating. And second, more importantly, is I got into all these things because I was on my own journey of recovery from trauma, recovery from deep, deep grief that was due to a childhood in— injury that, you know, kind of haunted me through the majority of my early years, teens, 20s, 30s, um, until I started really discovering real ways to begin the process of healing it. And I say to begin the process of healing it consciously because I think healing is a lifelong, maybe a multi-lifelong process that doesn't get finished. I can, you know, have a wound on my arm. I can cut myself or hit my finger with a hammer when I'm putting some nails in and not being conscious. Those kinds of things tend to heal, although they do leave some scar tissue. But the emotional wounds that we deal with may not ever heal. They may continue to exist as a shade covering our experience of our ability to perceive reality as reality is. So initially, my healing journey was through yoga, and martial arts and a little bit of plant medicines. Then I went into— I wanted to learn acupuncture, and I felt like, you know, the healing of trauma at that time in Western medicine, and even now, was not so very good. There wasn't a lot of information about it. In fact, PTSD as a diagnosis is relatively new. Post-traumatic stress disorder is relatively new. So then, then one day I was, um, I had been working with a friend of mine who I call in my book El Viejo, the old man, and he called me up and said, I have some ayahuasca from Peru, you should do this, this will be where your healing occurs. ." And I never heard of it. This was like way before you could read in the Wall Street Journal today about an article about ayahuasca integration in Silicon Valley. This was a long time ago where nobody had ever heard of it. And I certainly hadn't. So I said, "Sure, of course." I trusted him. And next thing I knew, I found myself on a mattress, on a pad in the middle of a living room. Drinking this weird-tasting, kind of awful-tasting medicine from Peru. And the beautiful colors that ayahuasca is famous for in the beginning stages were happening, and patterns and geometric designs and DNA and, you know, animals, and so beautiful. And then like, almost like that, it shifted into the most horrific thing I'd ever experienced, which was being in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. And being herded towards the gas chambers. So this was big, you know, for me. I, I can say I don't know if I've had any relatives that were there in that. Most of my relatives from Eastern Europe came over to the States back at the turn of the last century, so I don't think I had any immediate family connections there, but it was so real. And I was stuck there. I couldn't get out. I was like, listen to the music more. Nope. You're not getting away that easily. So ultimately, I kind of put out a prayer slash request slash plea to the universe, to God, to whatever, to whoever might be listening. I was like, what do I do to get out of this? Because the line's getting closer to the gas chamber. I didn't want to experience that. And a voice came like deep inside of me, outside of me, I don't know where. It just said, trust and forgive. Trust and forgive. Of course, it was the wrong thing to say. To me. I felt it was wrong because I wanted out. I didn't want to forgive this. I didn't want to trust this experience. But as I continued, I started getting in dialogue with this, like, what is trust? What is forgive? Mm-hmm. And ultimately it was trust is releasing all connection to anything that is in the past that's causing pain. And ultimately, releasing my connection to that experience I was having allowed it to dissolve into something else. It wasn't the end of the journey by any means. I went back and back and back and back through time, going through these various horrific situations. And, uh, it was incredible. It was beautiful. It was powerful. But the idea of trust and forgive as a medicine, perhaps as the medicine for healing, became very strong for me. Kind of started consuming me, as, you know, not in a bad way, but it's eating me, you know, but in a good way, in a way that made me think a lot about it. And part of my journey was into South Asian philosophy where they have the idea of maya, The Illusion. And you know, you could look at it in a couple different ways. And the more common way, which I think is not so accurate, is that everything we see is an illusion. But I think the illusion occurs in how I perceive, how I interpret— or let me put it this way, if I interpret what I'm experiencing. So the interpretation of what I'm experiencing comes from the experiences of my past. Hmm. You know, somebody who fell off of a ladder when they were a kid might be forever afraid of ladders, or they might become a skydiver. Yeah. You know, for compensation, or a mountain climber to compensate for that fear. So This idea of letting go of everything, which we can't do all the time, obviously, but if I'm having a resurfacing of a traumatic memory, I can engage with it with judgment, with analysis, with worry, with wondering if it's ever going to get better, with wondering what's wrong with me. With wondering, "Why me?" You know, all these things that we wonder in response to pain. Or what I started to discover, especially with the use of plant medicines, which I don't think people necessarily need plant medicines to discover for themselves, is if I can just sit with what I'm feeling non-judgmentally, non-analytically. I don't need to understand my trauma. I need to trust and forgive and release it. And so if I can be with it for some time, almost like the— we could, you know, we can get scientific and call it the default mode network in the brain, but something in the brain opens up, and that particular aspect of that particular trauma that I was experiencing at that time can be melted into nothing, the nothingness that it really is. Because all trauma exists as memory. It's the only place, you know, unless, unless, you know, unless you're in the immediate process of being wounded, The trauma exists as a memory. And granted, it locks in the body, it locks in the musculature, it locks in the emotions, it locks in the gut, it locks in the brain, but it's still something that happened. Ed.

Yeah.

It's not happening. The memory happens in the present, but the memory, because it's of the past, And this is a hard one to get for many people, but because the memory is in the past, that trauma no longer exists. It's all memory. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't process out grief. I'm not saying that at all.

Mm-hmm.

Because that's such an important part of this whole thing. But I'm saying to recognize that what is bothering me, what is haunting me, let's say, because it is the ghosts of the past that are doing the haunting, doesn't really exist. This is maya.

Yeah. So that was your first ayahuasca trip. And were subsequent trips similar, or did you learn different lessons from those?

—so many different lessons and nothing like that ever repeated. Well, something like that repeated once. I'll do that because this was also a very important learning experience that shows that trauma is generational. And I was doing a private ceremony with a friend of mine. And this is back in my early days of leading ceremonies. And I thought I was pretty hot stuff, you know. But I knew it all, of course. So, you know, we were going to do a ceremony together and see how we work together, maybe merge our communities. And it didn't work out that way, but that was okay because this was the experience I was supposed to have. So she gave me her medicine and it was really, really, really strong. So strong that about 20 minutes into it, and it had other plants in it that I normally wouldn't use. About 20 minutes into it, or half an hour into it, I feel like I am physically going to die. I knew I was physically going to die. This was it. I took too much. This was bad. I'm not going to make it. And, uh, which wasn't real, but it sure felt real at the time. And she, she, you know, she sat me down because I was getting up and walking outside and coming back inside and, you know, punching myself and doing everything I could to stay grounded in this reality. So she took me back inside and said, tell me about your ancestors. And again, like instantly, I was my grandmother hiding in terror under the bed in her home in Eastern Europe when there was a attack by the Cossacks against the village, and they were killing everybody there. And it was so strong. It was such a strong experience. But I utilized the trust and forgive process in there of, you know, speaking with my grandmother as a child, with my connection to my grandmother as a child within me, because that's where it was happening. To the family karma, to the generational karma, to everything, and finally was able to process through that to where it no longer existed inside of me. What I felt at that moment was extraordinary because I felt like not only did I heal myself, but I healed my grandparents, my grandmother. That that was something— I found out that that was actually an experience she had, you know, that she carried the fear of that with her until she died. Hmm. And this happened after she died, but I felt like in my processing through it, I had released a generational trauma that helped her heal and helped whoever comes afterwards heal. As well. You know, and these are things everybody's carrying. I mean, you know, whose ancestors have not had some kind of trauma? Yeah. Yeah. And it doesn't mean we have to go through and pick apart each one. I'm not saying it's a past life experience. I'm not saying it's anything other than an impression that was held within me. That was my connection to my grandmother on that level. So that was another incredibly, incredibly powerful experience I had. And, um, I've had— I've been working with this medicine for over 20 years, so there's been a lot of experiences, and it's hard for me to— yeah, pick out which ones are the important ones because they're all important. But, uh, I think my favorite ones though are the ones where there's joy.

Yeah, it's interesting because, um, with the plant medicines, from what I hear, you can have, you know, joyous trips where you see bright colors and lights and fun things, and you can have trips that would be, I would say, maybe scary or, you know, somewhat traumatic, but there's a lesson in it.

Yeah.

Stay with us, we'll be right back. You know, one of the hardest things about grief? Most of the people in your life just don't get it. They want you to be further along than you are. They get uncomfortable when you bring it up, so you stop bringing it up. And that's why I started writing. My Substack is where I go deeper. Thoughts I don't always get to on the podcast. Essays on consciousness, on continuing bonds, on what it actually means to carry loss and still build a life. The stuff that used to keep me up at night, written out in a way that I hope meets you in the morning. But here's what I didn't expect when I started it: the community that showed up. People who are doing exactly what you're doing— listening, learning, trying to find their footing. Readers who comment, who share their own stories, who remind each other that none of us are as alone in this as we feel. And that's what the Substack has become— a place to go deeper with me and to find your people. It's free to subscribe. Find me at grief2growth.com/substack. That's grief, the numeral 2, growth.com/substack. Or just go to Substack and search for Grief to Growth. I hope to see you there.

Yeah, there's a lesson in joy too, because I think it's the Dene who have a saying or have an instruction that healing, to be true healing, must be beautiful. And so their ancestral healing is done through songs, through singing people back into harmony, singing people back into the tribe, really. And if I'm getting that wrong, and if any Dine people are here, I'm sorry, this is what I was told. I try to do the best I can with what I have. But that beauty is in and of itself healing. So quite often, these, what we would call, or what I call traumatic experiences or painful ceremonies, are immediately followed by incredible joy. Because, you know, part of the process of ayahuasca is purging out what's inside of you, getting rid of the pain inside of you, letting the medicine get rid of the pain inside of you, because by ourselves it's really hard to do. But when the medicine comes in and says, here, you are going to throw up that trauma, and then that trauma is going to be in the bucket next to you, and it's no longer going to be in you, there can be like such such a— oh wow, life really is beautiful. Life has the potential to be beautiful. And, uh, you know, once the— in whatever manner or way possible, once what's inside of you, metaphorically even, ends up in the bucket. Yeah, yeah.

As you were saying, I was just thinking that there's that— the trauma or the pain, the grief that we're carrying, a lot of times we want to turn away from that. But it has to be processed. It has to be felt.

Yeah, I call, I call that the, uh, I don't know if people are still doing this, but I used to call it the Barney syndrome, you know, where you get a wound, a cut, let's say, and you put a nice cute Barney Band-Aid on it. You know, Barney's the dinosaur. Some people use flowers. You put a nice Band-Aid on it. And then leave it there. You look at it, it's pretty. You know, you look at it, it's nice. You look at it, everything is okay, it's good. But underneath that, there's an infection brewing. Still looks pretty. Yeah. Still looks nice, but there's an infection brewing under it. And, you know, as, as, uh, I think it was Hafez said, you know, dance when you've torn the bandages off. You know, and we have to tear those bandages off, or at least maybe soak them off and peel them off gently. It doesn't have to be torn off dramatically to see what the infection underneath is. And so turning away is putting on the Band-Aid. Yeah, I will compart— I will compartmentalize my trauma in a place where I never have to look at it. Another story in my book, this one was a funny story. So I was— I rented a house from a friend in Hawaii for a week once when I really needed to get away. And it was beautiful. Her house was beautiful, you know, kind of traditional small cabin close to the ocean. Everything was perfectly arranged. Like, the forks were stacked one on top of each other. The pots were arranged according to size, and the lids were according to size. And every little, um, tchotchke, every little Hawaiian cute thing that she had for decoration was almost arranged like it was a Fibonacci cycle or something, or a perfect golden mean triangle, golden mean, right on the table. It's perfect. So my Last day there, I'm walking along the beach and I'm sad because I'm going to be going back to Los Angeles and I was really having a great time there. And I kicked a piece of coral really hard accidentally and tore open the tip of my toe. It hurt. So I limped back, you know, dragging blood behind me and, you know, kind of like, oh, what a way to end a vacation, you know. And got back to the house and she had arrived. And I said, "Do you have any Band-Aids?" And she said, "Sure." She takes me into her hallway where there was a locked door I never saw, locked cabinet door, opens up the lock and opens up the doors, and inside is utter pandemonium. Hmm. I half expected, you know, everything to come falling out. Hmm. But as neat as the rest of her house was, that was how not neat this cabinet was. And so I was like, hmm, this is the human condition, you know. We all try to keep our houses neat, usually everything in the right spot, everything according to size, whatever it is. And then, you know, there's this place inside of us that's that cabinet. Inside of that cabinet, there's a safe. Inside of that safe, there's a box that shall not ever be opened. The worst of the worst, the place where demons lie, the place where, you know, the worst part of ourselves that we could never admit to anybody else, maybe after, maybe after 20 years of therapy or psychoanalysis, but it's there in each person in some way or another. So when you open that box up in medicine work, or in therapy. Mm-hmm. You open that box up and what's inside of it is both at once the worst thing ever and it's also a nothing. But it's been there being a nothing underneath that beautiful Band-Aid festering for most of a person's life. So that's why not to turn away is so important. Yeah. You can't— there's, there is no away where things can be thrown. You know, we throw stuff away, right? Put it in the trash can, somebody comes and picks it up. But there's— in our bodies, there's no away. Yeah, there's no place in us where somebody's going to come and carry the garbage out for us. We have to do it ourselves with the help of maybe plant medicines or therapists or somatic experiencing or whatever. Yeah, that makes sense.

So I— you mentioned earlier you're, you're a curious person, you, you explore lots of different things. And I, I think it's fascinating that there's so much wisdom, so much ancient wisdom in so many different cultures. What are surprise— what are some surprising ways that you've integrated Eastern traditions with, with plant medicine from, you know, from this hemisphere?

Surprising. I would say more natural than surprising. Um, I was joking with somebody the other day, is like, you can judge a person by how many tools they have in their toolbox. And, you know, with the corollary, you give a man a hammer, all he sees are nails. And so, you know, take that far, you know, take that far. So when I first started working with ayahuasca in the jungle, I already had spent time in India, you know, on the banks of the Ganges meditating, trying to be a good sadhu. I'd already been to China and studied acupuncture there. And I had, you know, a great deal of respect for martial arts, for Taoism, for tai chi especially. And so all of these things, when I'm in the jungle drinking medicine, I had this realization like, this is the yoga of the jungle. This is a very high level of yoga that's being practiced there under the idealist, most ideal situations. Of course, there's a lot of negative stuff going on there too. It's like any place else. But starting to combine you know, breath work of yoga with ayahuasca ceremonies, you know, helping people like really focus in on the breath, which— because the breath is the closest thing to the now that we have inside of us, you know, working, working with that, working with maybe movements under other medicines like tai chi, teaching people tai chi or qigong. I think that the beauty of this time, and I'm going to go out on a limb here, a lot of people say that with ayahuasca, when I was in China, there was the argument of like, can we use Western technology when we practice Chinese medicine? In the Amazon, it's, you know, we can't mix this with anything else. And my feeling is that this is a time where the universe is curious about these, you know, out-of-control monkeys on planet Earth that we've all become. You know, so what is it? What does it mean that a medicine of the jungle wants to come out of the jungle and be in the rest of the world. Mm-hmm. Or even the rest of South America because it's a jungle medicine. So this is perhaps a time of everything being integrated into something that's new that has never existed before. Interesting. Because we need a level of healing on this planet that's never existed before. Because what we're going through has never existed before as far as we know. I'm talking to you real time on a screen in my house, right? I mean, that is— 20 years ago, that would have been just something that you might think, see on a science fiction movie. Exactly. Yeah. You know, and so much that's happening now where we're in communication. Somebody sneezes in Australia, you can say bless you in real time. Yeah, you know. Yeah, absolutely. It's a fascinating time. And, um, so I think that is something that to me is highly significant right now. We don't know where we're going. I have no idea what the future is going to bring. I have, you know, at one point I was curious about people who said they could foresee the future, and I have yet to find anybody who could foresee the future accurately. And, um, we don't know what's going to happen in 30 seconds. Yeah, I have a good idea, good idea, you know, we'll still be talking.

Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure.

We don't know. So we're heading into a future that is changing so rapidly Somebody— I saw a picture of a bird that ChatGPT drew a year ago or 6 months ago, and it was this little stick figure of a bird that looked like, you know, something a 6-year-old could draw compared today, which is a bird you could look at and you wouldn't even know it wasn't a real bird. Yes, yes. And like, you know, this, you know, not even a wink of the eye of time. We've gone so far in that way. And I'm especially curious about what the future is going to bring. Hopefully we'll all survive, and hopefully that out of the ferment that's happening right now, the turmoil and trauma that's happening right now, a real healing could occur, not just on an individual basis But the 1 1 1 1 1 1 becomes something that's much more than 5 or 4. Yeah, let's count it. But you know, it's the idea of synergy, the idea of each person in my mind that goes through a true healing experience— have a little thing flying around here— um, each, each person that goes through a true healing experience is in some way, no matter how subtly, opening up a door for others to have that same healing experience. You know, in the Native— some of the Native American traditions, when they're about to do a healing ceremony, they'll say something to the effect of, we heal not just for ourselves but for all the children, which is all of creation. Interesting. And so, you know, my healing, your healing it may be more important than we not understand, that we can process or believe. And the healing of every person who might be watching this could be far more important and far more beautiful than anything that we can conceive of. Because at some point, I believe— I believe, I don't know, I believe, I hope that there'll be a worldwide— people wake up one morning and go, what are we doing here anyway? What is this about? Yeah. And the answer will come. We're here to love. We're here to celebrate. We're here to sing with each other, to make magic with each other, to, you know, discover what it is to no longer be carrying the traumas of the past, but to be walking into the future. And that's a very high level of healing that we don't have to wait for either, right? First part of healing, healing the past. Second part of healing, healing your present. Third part of healing, healing what's to come. You know, and interestingly, healing the past is healing the subconscious and unconscious mind, cleaning it out. Healing the present is healing this world. Everything matters here, you know. How I wake up in the morning matters. Do I turn on my phone and forget about the fact that I am committed to taking a hike every morning? Or do I take my hike? That choice matters. And each one of the choices a person makes has ramifications into the future. And then healing the future is overcoming, in a way, it's overcoming the fear of the past and learning to be in the present. Because if I'm in the present, I can see the opportunities that are present around me. You know, am I taking the opportunity to communicate with an open heart? That heals the future. Am I taking the opportunity to sit and connect to that deepest possible experience of love and joy that exists in my heart every moment of my life? Or am I going to cover that up with something else? So in, in, in Andean medicine, there's the idea of the three worlds. There's the underworld, the lower world, Uchupacha it's called. And that's the place where demons dwell. The ghosts live there. Monsters live there. To me, when I first heard this, it's like the unconscious mind.. It's not a place necessarily, although they will believe that it's a place and there's places you can enter it. And maybe that's true as well. Mm-hmm. Like, you know, one does not negate the other. But to me it's like, whoa, this is the unconscious mind. This world, Kaypacha, is the world of the jaguar where, you know, the jaguar when it moves, moves with great deliberation. Any cat can, you know, walk across the top of a fence. I couldn't do that, you know, no way. But you watch them and they're so deliberate in how they place their feet. So deliberate. So the jaguar is the medicine of this world, the medicine of deliberation, of being deliberate. And then Hanakpacha, heaven, the higher realm, the celestial realms, is the realm of the condor. Where we get to fly with the goddesses and gods and the angels, and it's so beautiful there, and there's light and music and everything is amazing. The upper level related to the superconscious, to the place we go to in meditation, or can go to in meditation, ideally go to in meditation, or plant medicines as well. So the thing, the thing about this is, is that you can't bypass these levels. And people try so hard to bypass the levels. Everybody wants to be in, in Hanakpacha, you know, in heaven, right? We try so hard, like, forget about, you know, I'm not going to clean my floor. I'm not going to go into the basement and clean out the stuff that's down there, you know, because I don't want to deal with it. I don't want to deal with the unconscious mind stuff. But for mastery, a person has to be able to deal with that. Yeah. Similarly, you know, I'll just, you know, get a soapbox on a corner and, you know, a little hat, and I won't have to worry about this world, and I'll just collect, you know, alms from people who want to support me in my slovenliness. You know, it doesn't really work that way. Hmm. And, or I'll take all the drugs I can to get into heaven all the time I can. Doesn't work. When they're in balance, then a person can, as they need to, be a master of any one of those three levels, or of all three of those levels. I can sit and I can go into a state of exalted consciousness. Hopefully, you know, it's not that easy, but I can. I can, I can, you know, sit at my desk writing a book the next book or treating patients or having a conversation with somebody in this world. And when the stuff bubbles up from the unconscious mind, I can trust and forgive it into nonexistence again and again and again and again. You know, I can love it into nonexistence in a way, because love is giving attention. To that which needs attention. One aspect of love.

Yeah. So you, you mentioned working with your patients, uh, just a bit ago. What, what types of things do people come to you with to, to integrate or to heal?

Interestingly, as I've, as I've been, you know, walking my own path more and more, the— in my early days, it was backs and necks and shoulders and knees and you know, stuff like that because I'm an acupuncturist and I learned a lot about that kind of stuff. Then as I started working with plant medicine, it got more and more subtle, you know, more and more of working with people who had tried— sometimes they would say everything to heal their past, to heal their traumas, and were unable to and didn't have the— I would say that the, the ability to have those breakthrough experiences where the real issue was brought into light, you know, that box I was talking about, the safe in the closet, right, where that was opened up. Right now I work with people who are both going through recovering or healing from past traumas, healing from past griefs, healing from, you know, past upsets, and want to bring their life into the present so that they can recreate their future, create their future. And, um, I get a lot of people, you know, some of the people I work with are at their end point. They're really like, can't live with this anymore. So much pain. And then I'll usually work with some kind of medicine with them or meditation or teach them some movements or all of the above. And I get to watch people's life transform very rapidly. Once they're no longer afraid to go into that closet. Things don't have to be dramatic. You know, it doesn't, doesn't really take screaming and yelling and hitting pillows and all that kind of 1970s and '80s stuff to heal. Healing does— dramatic healing does not have to be dramatic. It can be a breath. It can be like something inside lights up and there's a realization that you don't have to carry it with you anymore. The idea of, you know, the backpack, right? Mhm. We have a backpack that we've been collecting stuff and putting it in there whole lives. Yeah, nice brick, you know. Yeah, nice rock, nice bottle of dirty water, you know. I'm gonna just— I want to keep all of these things. And, and so we collect these things, and, and the magic of it is— and you may have done this, you know, because you wear glasses too— have you ever forgotten you're wearing your glasses and started looking for them? Yes. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So we forget we have this backpack on. Mm-hmm. It becomes the who we are so that the, you know, the going through the process of taking things out, technically, I don't think you even have to look at them, just throw them away. But most people want to look at them a little bit and then say, ugh, I don't want that anymore. I don't need that anymore. I don't need that anymore. And so finally it's like, I don't need the backpack anymore. You know, that's a beautiful place to get to that not everybody is going to get to. And, you know, I would say that that's the few and far between, to get to no longer having a backpack with anything in it at all, right? But even taking out one brick is such a relief.

Yeah, now you, you mentioned that you, um, you don't see yourself so much as an instructor as someone who shares what you've gone through. What's, what's the difference there?

That's a good question. Um, I do might see myself as being a teacher, mainly because other people see me as being a teacher. Um, I don't want to exalt myself as a teacher. Like, I don't like when people call me, you know, teacher, people call me anything other than Richard, you know. I don't like being called a shaman. I don't, I don't, I don't like titles. I just like being me. So I think it's more of not sitting in front of the classroom and telling people what to do and what to believe, but helping people discover that with inside of themselves, I think, is a There's a big difference. I have a squirrel out there eating something. Yeah. It's a big difference, you know, because if I'm helping people to find their own experience, their own wisdom, their own knowledge, I think it's more guiding than it is teaching. Mm-hmm. It was really hard for me to write a book because I didn't want what I do to be crystallized, you know. Now it is. It's okay. Works. People like it. People, people send me nice letters about how great the book is for them and what they've learned.

Well, speaking of the book, let's talk more about that. So tell me about the book. What will, what will people find in it?

Um, you can find it in two places. One is Amazon. Uh, .com. Of course, it's called Trust and Forgive: The Medicine of Your Life, Richard Grossman. And it's also available— a link to that is available at my personal website, which is heartfeather.com. And it's an interesting book. It's a different book. Um, it's kind of a gen— uh, genre buster. I didn't really write it You're supposed to write a book for a certain audience. I didn't really do that. I just wanted to get out what was inside of me that I wanted to share with people. So it's part biographical, part autobiographical, part philosophical, part about medicine, part about ayahuasca. There's a few short stories in there that I put in because they just seemed appropriate at the moment. You know, sweet little short stories that are teaching parables.. And, um, that's what it is. I mean, I have, I've seen people that are like carrying it around with them like a Bible now and, you know, taking notes and their books are almost falling apart. They've read them so many times. Other, for other people, it was just like a nice experience to read it. Mm-hmm. But it's a very, very strong book about how to trust and forgive and have your life transformed.

Yeah, you've mentioned trust and forgive a few times, and those words can be tricky for people. What is— what does that phrase mean to you?

Yeah, that's a really good question. Let's start off with the harder one, which is forgive. And forgive has absolutely nothing to do with saying to another person or to yourself or anything else, "I forgive you." That's not what it's about. That may be an important step, but that's not what it's about. It has also, you know, nothing to do with me looking inside of myself and finding a place where I might have wounded somebody or hurt somebody. And saying, oh, Richard, I forgive you, let me give you a hug. You know, because that just goes on and on and on. That repeats over and over and over again because the closet door is not opened up. So the forgiveness involves— I'm gonna back off a little bit, back up a little bit there. So something happens to me 30 years ago, something bad, let's say traumatic. Shortly after it happened, probably very, very shortly, I remember it hits my mind. Shortly after that, I remember it again. And again and again and again and again and again and again. So I'm not remembering the experience, I'm remembering my memories of the experience. I'm remembering what's here, you know, maybe in the body too, but mostly it's the memories come from the brain. So I have not found it successful to go back to the original experience and try to forgive that. It's too big sometimes. But I can forgive the memories of the memories of the memories by allowing them to melt away, by allowing them to no longer I call it, you know, enter the unreality there where they already exist, you know, or, you know, return to the unreality where they've always been. Because again, those thoughts are not real in the same way that your microphone is real. Yeah, your glasses are real. They're not real, you know, they're just thoughts. So letting things go into the stream of time letting time wash it away and not recalling it into the present over and over and over again. And admittedly, the more severe the trauma, the more recent in time the trauma, the more difficult that's going to be. Right. You know, because it has weight, has a lot of weight. Um, but with plant medicines especially— excuse me— with plant medicines especially, It is possible to release a whole timeline in a matter of moments, you know, by fully and totally trusting, which is accepting, which is not resisting, which is no longer fighting, which is allowing what's there to be there. Yeah. Without analysis, without judgment, without needing to work on it. How do you work on something that doesn't exist anymore? Hmm, a really interesting question, you know. How do you work on something that no longer exists? But I can, I would say, give it my attention. I would say give it my patience, my heart, my love. My awareness, my consciousness. And consciousness by itself is healing. You turn on the light in a dark room, you know, you don't have to fight the dark out of the room. Hmm. You have to turn on the light. Yeah. And much of what has been, you know, the history of psychotherapy has been fighting the darkness out of the room or trying to fight the darkness out of the room. What if I could go into the palace of my mind, into the magnificence of a human being's mind and memory, and shine light into that place that needs healing, to the point where the darkness of its— no, of its unreal existence no longer exists? The darkness of its unreal existence no longer exists. I like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I like that too. Thank you. So yeah, and you know, I'm not saying in any way, shape, or form that it'll be an easy path to do this. It's not like, oh yeah, all done, I'm done. You know, it can take some persistence, some work, some trust, some guidance. Yeah, but it is possible. I mean, healing is possible. That, that has to be something that I think everybody needs to own. Eventually, time itself will wash away everything. You know, all the memories will no longer exist. Everything that we were no longer will exist. That's inevitable. So why not allow that level of trust and forgiveness and healing to happen now? To happen in the present moment? Because it ain't no fun carrying around a backpack full of bricks. Yeah. Nothing about that is fun. Yeah. You can put it down. Nothing about that allows a human being to be what they are, and nothing about that. Because some of those bricks in there are like, I hate that person, you know, they're an evil culture, they're not as good as me. Some of those bricks are in there like that. And, you know, welcome to 21st, the last, the first quarter of the 21st century.

Right, right.

You know, what if I didn't have those things in me and I could just see— in Taoism they say, see the tree as a tree. You know, what does that mean? It's like, if I look at a tree, I can get very spiritual and say, oh yes, this is the Druids and this and that, and it's the tree spirit and this and that,— and in doing that, or I could look at it and say, "Oh, that's $10,000 worth of lumber right there," or "That's in the way of my view of the ocean out my window. I'm going to cut it down." Or, you know, so many different ways of experiencing a tree and analyzing it and judging it and putting up the filters in front of myself so that I no longer am seeing the tree as a tree. Yeah, you know, and when I see the tree as a tree, I'm seeing something that's magical because the existence of any given tree on the entire planet is absolute magic. The existence of any person, every given person on the entire planet, is absolute magic. You know, we talk about what's the purpose of life, and you know, what is life? Where are we? What are we doing here anyway? What is this all about? And in my life, I can only find that the purpose of life is to discover joy, is to discover what would be called in South Asian philosophy, sat-chit-ananda, truth, consciousness, and bliss, the nature of reality beyond the veil of the illusions that our minds have created. Is something far greater than the average person ever gets to touch upon. And then the tree becomes just the tree, and I can see it in all its beauty and glory and magic. And I'm pretty good at this because I live underneath trees and friends, you know. Yeah. Um, so that's, that's, that's the magic of that. I forgot what the question was, um, but it doesn't matter, I guess.

Yeah, I, I think you, you answered it very well. So, um, as we're coming to the end of our time, is there anything that you would like for people that I haven't asked you yet that you might want to, to get across as a message to the people that are listening today?

If you're hopeless, there's hope. You know, I think that's so many people that I meet are losing hope. And if you think I'm not talking to you, I'm talking to you. You know, there's something very beautiful and special in who you are and unique. There'll never be another— talking to everybody here. You know, there'll never be another you. And the you that you are is magical, has incredible potential. And, you know, healing is part of learning that potential. Learning how to heal is part of learning the potential of who you are. And so life will be difficult, life will be challenging, life will be intense, life will have traumas, life will have pain, life will have pleasure, Life will have good meals and bad meals and beautiful sunsets and foggy sunsets. And, you know, there's no guarantees about anything. But what's inside of the heart, what can be unveiled and revealed inside of the heart, can be a source of beauty and joy that is there Until when? Until never. Yeah, excuse me.

Well, I think that's a great message.

That's the part, that's the part of us that doesn't get washed away by time. Yeah, yeah.

I think that's a, that's a great message to end with. So, um, I want to thank you for being here today. Thank you for sharing your, your, your wisdom, but covered from so many different, uh, sources. And, uh, people can go out and check you out on your website and your book if they want to know more about you. So Thanks a lot and have a great rest of your afternoon.

Thank you, Brian. This was really delightful.

Yeah, it was great to meet you.

Thank you. Likewise.

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