Adam Andros Aronovich - Meaning-Making, Psychedelics, and Masculinity

Foreign.

Welcome to the Man Talk Show. I'm Connor Beaton and joining me today is Adam Andros Aronovitch. This was such a great podcast. I just want to say, before I even tell you about who Adam is, I just want to say that this was one of my favorite interviews of the year. Certainly we covered a good breadth of topics from why psychedelics, things like ayahuasca and psilocybin are making such a huge cultural push right now. Why now we talk about and sort of reflect on the effects and impacts of ayahuasca on men and masculinity and why so many men are being drawn towards things like ayahuasca and psilocybin. And we sort of talk about the cultural need for different or sort of alternative psychological therapeutic modalities. And so we sort of look a little bit at the current mental health system. We talk a little bit about where psychology and therapy has taken us culturally, and then why there's sort of this resurgence of alchemy, shamanism, and some of these alternative healing modalities. So let me tell you a little bit about Adam. So born in the urban jungles of Mexico City, raised mostly in Israel, and having lived in seven different countries, he is very much about interculturalism. He's a psychologist, cognitive scientist, and medical anthropologist, which we talk about. I get him to define that. He has also studied traditional systems of medicine in Mexico, India and Peru, adopting a dialectical approach that integrates and unites evidence based science and traditional worldviews. He has worked extensively in Western psychiatric institutions and has spent time learning from a variety of indigenous and traditional healers around the world, trying to understand the diverse manifestations, conceptualizations, and approaches to mental illness and mental health. So balancing between research and practice. He is an active member of the Medical Anthropology Research center, which I didn't know was a thing, the Interdisciplinary Psychedelic Studies Group, both in Catalonia, while sharing his extensive experience facilitating transformational processes in a variety of psychedelic support and harm reduction projects around the world, such as the Cosmicare Project in Portugal and the Zendo Project in the United States. So, I mean, there's many different pathways that we could have gone down in this interview and I will certainly have Adam back on, but otherwise enjoy what I felt was a really meaningful conversation about the lack of meaning in our world today. And we talk a little bit about.

The relationship between this medicine and the ever present need within our culture for more meaning. In a time where our meaning making mechanisms are breaking down, our sense making mechanisms are breaking down culturally, relationally and Individually. Okay. And now for a quick housekeeping note. Something exciting to announce you have asked and I have built. Over the last few months, you may have seen many of the posts on Instagram. Some of the content here been directed towards your questions around shadow work. How to do it, what is the shadow, why it's important, and how we can start to face it, move through it and integrate it. So exciting. The exciting news is that in the new year, I will be releasing a course all about shadow work. It'll be a program designed to help help you discover and uncover your own shadow, walk you through a specific process of being able to unearth it and face it, to be able to meet the inner critic, to be able to understand why and how you sabotage and how to end that self sabotage, and then to walk you through a process at the end to integrate the shadow. So the shadow is the part of us that can get in the way in many ways to sabotaging us in love and intimacy, in our finances, in our mental health and well being, in our fitness. And so being able to face this part of ourselves and being able to understand it is an incredibly important aspect to our own growth and development. So be on the lookout for the shadow work program coming at you in 2021. So without any further delay, please welcome Adam Aronovitch.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah, absolutely. This is a topic, a subject that a lot of my listeners have been asking for more of, something that I've been diving into as well over the last however many years. And so I'm excited to talk about this. We recently just had one of the researchers from Johns Hopkins on about the impacts of psilocybin on depression. And so this is going to be a little bit more, a little bit of a different angle, which I think is great. But why don't we start off with the question which I ask all my guests, which is tell me a story about a defining moment in your life.

A few years ago I was an undergrad student. I grew up in Israel, by the way, so I'm Israeli and Mexican, but I grew up most of my formative years in Israel, and I went to university there. I did my undergrad in psychology and the community sciences. And part of my school, as part of my school kind of scholarship, it was kind of a social scholarship that I got to go to school. And part of social scholarship entailed that I was to be in a mentorship relationship with a child from an unprivileged background in the city where I was living at the time. And when I. When I went to meet the woman who was in charge of matching up the students with children, she took me to the side and she said, adam, I have a very special person for you. Would you be up for the challenge? And I said, well, sure. What's the challenge? What's so special about this person? And she said, well, this kid. This kid, basically, he's a schizophrenic. And up until that moment, I have already been working with people that were diagnosed with schizophrenia, but mostly people that were way older people that were already maybe decades in and out of psychiatric institutions, heavily medicated. And I was very curious to see what schizophrenia was like in a very young person who hadn't been through a whole ordeal of psychiatric care. And it took me a long time, well, not a long time, but quite a while to actually realize the damage that that person had done to my relationship with this by first and foremost presenting him as a schizophrenic child. Because from that moment on, I kind of internalized that label and I absorbed that diagnosis like something that is essential to that being. And it took me a while to be able to relate to them beyond that label, right? And eventually, I did manage to see through that label. And who I met was actually this beautiful human being who was, you know, extremely intelligent, fiercely, like, smart, very affectionate. Like, he had, like, this amazing capacity for empathy with very little boundaries otherwise, right? But, you know, like, I managed to see through that label and meet this person in front of me. But through, like, the whole first few months of our connection, like, everything that I was really interested in was invalidating everything that I was learning in school, right? So everything that I was observing in this person, like, all this behaviors and the way that he spoke, everything was just like, checking boxes for me with everything that I was learning about what schizophrenia was like or what madness was like, right? So it was like this checkbox, disorganized speech, disorganized thought, delusions, hallucinations, and so on and so forth. And I wasn't really, like, seeing, like, the person in front of me and actually, like, his favorite subject to discuss with me or, like, his favorite subject to discuss with anybody was time travel. So he would come to our sessions with this incredibly beautiful, dense narratives of everything that he was doing, hopping across space, time, and all the historical figures that he was meeting in the past and all the amazing discoveries that he was making in the future. And again, as he was saying all of these things, I was hearing it. But what I was Actually doing was just like, checking these boxes, right? Like, I wasn't really listening to the story and I was kind of trying to poke holes into his story, right? I was like, well, if you're really a time traveler, where's your machine, right? Or if you're really a time traveler, like, show me the math that makes time travel possible. Where are the equations that make time travel possible? And he would just stare at me with this look that I couldn't really recognize at the moment, but in retrospect, I recognized very easily. So he had this look in his eyes that was just pity. He was like, poor guy. Like, you just don't get it. Like, you don't need a time machine. You don't need math. You just close your eyes and you go wherever you want to go. Like, you meet all these people, you do whatever you want to do. Like, what is this silly question even mean, right? Obviously, I understood what it was really telling me in the subtext, like, between the lines. What he was saying is like, hey, like, don't judge my experience. Like, don't try to pathologize me or to make me abnormal or pathological, like every other adult that I ever met in my life. Just listen to my story and take it as face value. Just be my friend. Like, a whole space for whatever I bring to a conversation without really trying to box me in some sort of mental pathology. And after I kind of did the switch and I was able to hold space for him and, like, really connect with him in a way that I wasn't trying to constantly, like, box him in within a certain label. That's when our relationship really started to pick up. And I was able to relate to him in a very horizontal way as equals, right? Like, without, like, kind of giving away from that dynamic of expert patients, so on and so forth. And that, for me was defining because in that moment where I really, really understood what that kid needed for me, I basically understood what every other mental patient that I ever had in my life actually needed from me, which was exactly just like that warm human connection, like, the empathy, the understanding that, like, hey, like, nobody has a fucking flying fuck of a clue of what's going on in this life. So your guess is just as valid as mine. So I'm not going to judge you or invalidate your experience. I'm just going to listen to what it is your experience, like, and just, you know, we can connect from that level of horizontality. So I left everything that I was doing. Like, I left my work, I left my Job. I was working in a psychiatric hospital at the time. I was working inpatient ward in a psychiatric hospital, which is pretty horrible. I don't know if many of your listeners have had that experience, but, like, working in psychiatric hospital, at least that was the case 15 years ago. That was a pretty traumatic experience. It's just like you see in the movies, right? Like, very violent. And I mean, I knew that I wanted to help people, and I knew that I wanted to be at the service of healing. I knew that I wanted to be at the service of alleviating human suffering in any way that I could. I just couldn't participate in the structural violence that is implicit in kind of mainstream psychiatric services. So I went out into the world and I traveled the world for four years, pretty much trying to find, like, kernels of wisdom in all sorts of different cultures and societies about how they understand and treat and diagnose mental health, which oftentimes I found is intertwined with spirituality and other ways of understanding the psyche. Right. Except in the west, we have, like, a very reductive understanding what the mind is that is not shared by everybody else. Like, other cultures are much wider and actually much more solid understanding of the holistic human psyche in that sense. So for four years, I pretty much traveled, went back to school, I went back to mental health. But this time I didn't want to go back to, like, a clinical, psychological, or psychiatric perspective, but rather to understand really what are the social, cultural, and environmental aspects that have an impact in our mental experiences? How is human suffering correlated to social illnesses or cultural maladies or environmental devastation? Like all of these other layers that are not necessarily related to just our individual neurochemistry or broken brains, but actually are always in relation with other layers of the human experience. And that's what I've been doing ever since. That was what led me to the place where I'm working right now, which is an ayahuasca retreat center in the Peruvian rainforest. And the reason I went there to begin with is because I saw that place as a possible.

Positive example of what a next paradigm mental health care place could look like. Like a place that is really at the service of individuals and is really at the service of communities and not necessarily at the service of pharmaceutical interests or Big Pharma or social control in a very general sense. So I have been there for four and a half years, pretty much exploring, I mean, this is my own research pretty much exploring how can we really address human suffering and particularly mental health from a much broader and much More holistic perspective than just a very reductive, brain based, neurochemistry based perspective that Western medicine offers. I think that story.

Well, well said, well said. I mean, your story is very, I think it's very representative of what a lot of people in Western society are feeling, right? This very sort of reductive, pulling the person down into its, you know, that. Pulling the identity down into its separate parts. It's almost like we have spent the last century, you know, kind of from Freud on moving more and more into being ego obsessed, you know, becoming sort of just like very, very sort of obsessed around this, this ego identity. Yeah, but I think what I love about what you're saying is that we often interact with people who are different, right? This story about you and the child. We, we often interact with people who are different and you know, we, we put on this framework of listening to what they're saying versus listening to why they might be saying it's. And really hearing the nuance in what they're saying. Right. Because what I heard in that jaw story is like not only incredible imagination, but also a sort of nuanced kind of wisdom. Right? And there's, and this is sort of what we lost, I believe, in Western culture is we've lost the true roots of education, right? The original word etymology of education was Latin. It was educare. And it meant to draw out, right, to draw out. But what we do in our modern education system is just fill in, right? We indoctrinate people and we try and, you know, insert as much information as possible. And it really, you know, it propagates this ideology that our rational mind is somehow this omnipotent being. And we, and we lose connection to, you know, intuitive intelligence. We lose connection to, you know, a form of, as, as Carl Jung would have talked about, the collective unconscious to so, to sort of like tap into this collective consciousness that we, that we are a part of. So, I mean, there's many different aspects of your story that I feel like we could have jumped off into and, and, and done a deep dive into. But we're gonna, we're gonna sort of carry on here because I do want to talk about, you know, this broadening expanse into.

Older forms of medicine in a, in a modern time of mental chaos, you know, and we find ourselves in a complete sort of breakdown of the psyche in some ways for a multitude, a multitude of reasons. But I did want to ask you because I think this is, this was interesting because this is, you know, you're a psychologist, a cognitive Scientist, but also a medical anthropologist. And I was wondering if you can just give a little bit of context and flavor, maybe a bit of a definition for the listeners of what a medical anthropologist is, what they do. Because I think it's not very often that we sort of bump into medical anthropologists on the street.

Yeah, absolutely, yeah. Medical anthropology is kind of like a rising field within the humanities. And basically it's a gaze that looks at medical cultures. So it can be like classic social or cultural anthropology, right? Which is like what most people understand as anthropology, like this white bearded person with a funny hat, like going to an indigenous culture and figuring out how these people live and so on. Except in modernity, we also have learned there is a lot of value in applying the methodologies of classic anthropology or ethnography to also analyze Western culture in our own institutions as if they were kind of these foreign, alien, exotic cultures. So basically, anthropologists look at medical cultures. The discipline that I come from, which is critical, Medical anthropology takes a critical look at Western institutions that deal with medicine. Right. So looking at, for example, my field is more in mental health. So I take a critical look at the way that we address mental health within the constructs of Western psychiatry, Western psychology, the diagnostic constructs and system that we use. And from them we are able to kind of deconstruct to some extent our own assumptions or the nature of the mind, the nature of the psyche, our, you know, like the assumptions about the nature of mental pathologies and what are even mental pathologies, if they're even a thing or just refined social construct that is useful for other things. So, yeah, medical anthropology basically looks at the culture that arises around medical practices.

Very cool. Love that. I appreciate the definition. And, you know, I think it's one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on the show is to just broaden the scope because I think, you know, oftentimes, especially in Western society, we love data, we love things that are linear. And when we start to talk about things that are more conceptual in nature, maybe more intuitive in nature, or using, you know, plant based medicine like ayahuasca or psilocybin, oftentimes especially within the context of healing or relationships or masculinity, as we're going to talk about today, it can be very challenging because people are so programmed and so sort of, sort of indoctrinated in this ideology that we need to have linear sort of breaking down of how these processes work. And so one of the things that I, that I appreciate about the work that you're Doing is that it sort of moves outside of those boundaries. So let's just shift gears a little bit here because you do a good amount of work around psychedelics. And I'm curious if you can just maybe give a little bit of context into, you know, after having done all this work within psychology as a cognitive scientist, why move towards psychedelics? Why move towards things like ayahuasca and psilocybin as a therapeutic modality?

Yeah, and that's a great question. There's, there's a quote which has become kind of a cliche within psychedelic circles, which is a quote by Stanislavrov, who is the father of transpersonal psychology and a very well known figure within the psychedelic movement. And he said basically many years ago that psychedelics were for the psyche potentially what the telescope was for astronomy. Right. Like psychedelics could be for psychology or psychiatry or all the brain based, mental based sciences. What the telescope was for astronomy, meaning that it's the most powerful tool that we have found so far to really have a deep, thorough look at the inner workings of our own psyche. And this has been my experience as well. I mean, I have dabbled in all sorts of different mystical technologies or spiritual systems to really be able to gain access to parts of my psyche that remain locked under normal daily consciousness. And I haven't so far found anything more powerful than psychoactive substances. And you know, like, psychedelics is a massive topic. I mean, this is a topic that is very broad and we can talk about it for a long time. But in the last few years, in the last decade, more or less, there has been also like a massive movement within academia and within the established medical institutions to bring psychedelics back from their exile. They were sent to by pretty much government agencies for reasons other than their actual medical potential.

And religions, I would say, I think, I think religions also had something to do with that, sort of.

Absolutely. I mean, who, which religion would like individuals to have a direct connection with the mystical without media being mediated by an appointed priest? I mean, obviously that's a massive risk to institutionalized religions. What is the same for medical establishments? You know, like, we don't, we don't want to turn all of the psychologists and psychiatrists obsolete. If a person can work out on his own like all of these different layers of trauma and so on, which, I mean, that's not really what is going on, but that's the fear, right? I guess we have like a tool that is too powerful. So. Yeah. So my interest in psychedelics comes mostly from my own experience. Like I'VE always been very open about my own users and my own experiences because they have been a massively positive influence in my life in all aspects. So it is something that I've always wanted to share with other people. And in order to be able to do so legally and without as many risks, then that also entails, you know, like a path of working through the academic establishment and the legal establishments and so on and so forth. So the research that I do is minded in part towards accumulating more data and validating the things that we already know and translating them into a language that can be absorbed by the academic and legal epistemologies or ways of understanding things so they can translate into better, basically, rules, decriminalizing and legalizing practices that are actually, you know, like very powerful and very useful for people. Ayahuasca is a brew that is made from two different plants that has been used in the Amazon rainforest for at least hundreds of years, probably thousands of years. We don't really have any solid archaeological evidence for it, but we can assume safely that it has. It's a millenarian technology. And I call this kind of psycho spiritual technologies. I prefer that term to most of the other terms that are floating around. So psychospiritual technologies.

So why is that? Just out of curiosity, why do you prefer that terminology? Just because I think you're so rooted in this practice. I'm curious to get your perspective on why that resonates with you.

I mean, I like psychedelic too. I just feel that psychedelic carries certain connotations that people associate with a certain stream of counterculture that was more prominent in the 60s or 70s. Another word that people like, entheogen, which is kind of a God revealing substance or something, which I don't find very appealing for myself. I mean. I mean, I do have like a spiritual side, but I'm definitely not a theist. So in theogen or anything that has to do with God doesn't really resonate very much with me. So, yeah, I mean, I like to turn, I like to think, I guess, more in utilitarian terms and technological terms. So psycho spiritual technologies is a good term for me. I don't know. That makes sense.

Yeah, yeah, it makes. It makes total sense. I mean, it's interesting. I want to sort of shift gears here and start to talk about the effects of ayahuasca on men and masculinity specifically. But I do want to just pause and ask one question, which is that we, you know, we seem to be in this very chaotic time where the sort of social fabrics and agreements that we've had for a long time are starting to unravel. We're seeing more of the. I think they're called s. Snrs or sbrs. Like spiritual but not religious is on the. Is. Is just skyrocketing. Right. I think. I think in America alone, It's been like, yeah, 27% of people identify as spiritual but not religious. So people that are sort of moving away from the sort of traditionalized religions and. And a lot of those people are accessing deeper forms of consciousness or healing or spiritual experiences through things like psychedelics. And there seems to be resurgence of the shamanic practices, you know, like these shamanic traditions that have been around for a very long time. So, interestingly enough, I think psychology sort of has started to fall back on itself, right? Like, we've kind of reached this place where we've gone so deep into the minutia and the details of the. Of the ego and the personality and the psyche that it's now sort of returning back to its origins in some way. Because, you know, Jung believed. And I think a lot of depth psychology looks at the unconscious mind as sort of functioning in terms of mythology and symbolism and archetypes. And, you know, for many people that have psychedelic experiences or psycho spiritual experiences, what. What they describe are often things that are very symbolic in nature, very mythological in nature. And so I'm curious to just get your perspective briefly. Although this could again be its own topic on why now? Like, why are we entering into this sphere now where people are more open, more receptive, craving even this return to a more.

Again, I can't seem to find, like, alchemical and shamanic version of healing.

Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, that can go in many different directions, I think. Like, I mean, if you ask the average Ayahuasca person, they probably go into, like, a certain New Age mythology about ascending to a new vibration and so on and so forth. There's also a myth going around in the Ayahuasca community about benevolent Amazonian shamans kind of like deciding that it was time to share this beautiful medicine with their white brothers and sisters because it was time for us to. Whatever. I think in a very pragmatic, real sense, what I feel is that one of the most important crises of the modern era is a meaning crisis. And as you mentioned earlier, I think all of these different metanarratives or stories that have given meaning to people's lives throughout the last centuries, religion, for one, is just not relevant anymore. A lot of people don't find that relevant anymore. The other narratives that took the place of religion in the modern era, which were like, you know, capitalism and individualism, that kind of gave people another meaning. Well, maybe religion doesn't make much sense anymore, but at least we can make a bunch of money and like win at capitalism and that can guide our steps. But again, like, a lot of the younger generations don't see that anymore as the ultimate goal. Like, that's another metanarrative that is becoming quickly obsolete. And I think what's happening is that as these meta narratives become obsolete, the crisis of meaning deepens because we are left with this existential vacuum where nothing makes sense and we don't really have like, anything to give coherence to our lives. So I think a lot of people are going back into the roots of. Terence McKenna is one of the greatest psychedelic thinkers. Like, he called this the archaic revival, which is this draw of.

Can you say again? The.

Archaic revival? Yeah, like this draw that modern people have now to the ancient, like the ancestral wisdom, you know, like people who still remember what it is like to live in harmony with each other and in harmony with the breathing, sentient, intentional earth. So I think a lot of people are kind of like flocking back to shamanism and archaic wisdom and ancestral ways of knowing and the psychospiritual technologies and medicines that indigenous people offer, because it provides with another story. And it's not a story of human supremacy or individualism or existential whatever, but it's a story of like, hey, like, we're just like one tiny aspect of a much broader interconnected system of sentience and life in this planet. And we need to find our way back into harmony and balance with all of the rest of our fellow people, human and non human people. So I think this draw towards shamanism, ayahuasca, mushroom, psychedelics, ancestral wisdom, whatever, is kind of like a natural way of people to try and regain a sense of meaning in a meaningless void that Western culture has become, while at the same time something that actually holds some promise as we face a multiplicity of existential risks. You know, like, it would be silly to deny Western culture has driven this world to the edge of the precipice in relation to multiple existential risks, whether it's climate change or whatever. So I think like a lot of young, the younger generations know that and they're like, well, like all these other metanarratives, all these other ways of being had levels here, they don't really will, you know, it is unlikely that we will provide the answers of how actually can we reverse, you know, those trends? So maybe there's other people with other ways of being in the world and other technologies and other ways of understanding our place in the universe that actually have better answers. And I think shamanism can provide. I mean, shamanism I use as a very inadequate term. It doesn't really mean anything, but shamanism as, you know, a standing word for just like this beautiful variety and complexity of different social roles that these people play, which are simultaneously psychologists, magician, like Jungian, archetypal interpretators of whatever, you know, that are kind of like in charge of providing that mythological framework for cultures.

Yeah, well, well said. Well said. I feel like that's, you know, maybe a topic that we can go into next time in depth and spend an hour on that. Because I think in many ways what I've been seeing is that, you know, in the last however many years as sense making our sort of cultural ability to make sense of life and the world and for us to make sense of what's even true in an individual and collective space, as those things collapse, it also seems to sort of be riding in on the coattails of the collapse of our cultural mythologies, you know, and these sort of narratives and larger cultural stories that have really held together the individual and the collective psyche in some ways. But again, that's. I don't want to derail us because I think that's a. That's a topic for. For. For next time. But I am curious, you know, because I. One of the reasons why I wanted to have you on the show is that I've. I've seen just a tremendous amount of interest in the men that I work with in doing ayahuasca, having, you know, psychedelic LED experiences. And so this psycho spiritual technology that you're speaking of is very much being sought after by men. And I have my own insight or inclination as to why that might be, but I won't put that forward. I would love to hear, you know, for you. Why do you feel like so many men, especially Western men, are sort of coming into this desire for exploring these psycho spiritual technologies like ayahuasca and psilocybin? And then secondarily, let's talk about what are some of the effects on these men and maybe on masculinity in general? So I'll pass the torch over to you.

Yeah, beautiful. I mean, that's a great question. Yeah. So I mean, as we were discussing before, like, we live in a time where every human experience is pretty Much reduced in a very reductive way to like a certain aspect of our brains, right? So if people are feeling depressed, then there's this antidepressant that they can take. If people are feeling anxious, there's this like anxiolytics people can take. You know, the truth is that we're living through a historical time when anxiety and depression have become a pandemic. I mean, they're the real, they're the real pandemic of our times. Like the amount of people, men in particular, who are afflicted by crippling anxiety is immense. And a lot of that actually doesn't have to do with brain chemistry. A lot of that has to do with, with layers of society and with layers of culture and with layers of how we are socialized to behave and think and the expectations that are placed on us. And I think for men, anxiety in particular is a massive thing. And this is something that I talk about both from first person experience, like my own experience, but also from like my observations about all of the people that I work with. You know, so we kind of like are social. I mean, many in particular, I think we have been socialized for many generations in very particular ways that excel or promote certain aspects of what does it mean to be a man? Or like some idea of masculinity that is still very rooted in this very kind of chauvinistic, the main, the man as a provider, the man as a solid rock who doesn't really experience emotions. You know, like very rational, logic minded person who kind of comes up with solutions to problems but doesn't get immersed into things that are considered to be less pragmatic. So just feeling things like feeling is almost a hindrance to like real strong masculinity. I mean, this is kind of a cliche, but you know, how many boys have been told like, oh, boys don't cry, right? But actually boys do cry. And it is very important for boys to cry because then they can become healthy, adaptive males who can process sadness and grief, which are inevitable parts of the human experience. So a grown up man who hasn't learned how to properly express sadness, grief, shame, guilt, because they're not aligned with what he was taught, that being a man is, is going to be a very fragmented and very incomplete person. It's going to be a person who doesn't understand how to deal with a very important aspect of being human, which is emotions like our ability to feel, sense, experience in that way. And again, I mean, we come back to epistemics, right? Like it's since Enlightenment, we have been like. Like Western culture has been very rationally minded. Like everything has to do with our mind, like how we think. Like, the cognitive processes and emotions have been understood oftentimes as being like this thing that just gets in the way of rational decision making or rational thought. But again, that's just a peculiarity of Western culture. Many other cultures, many other people in this earth, actually value emotions as a proper mechanism through which we receive information about the world around us. Emotions can inform how we respond to different situations in a way that is not irrational per se, but actually it's informed by a different set of knowledge that is not less important. So I feel as I work with men in Ayahuasca, I come across a lot of men who are emotionally illiterate, men who never learned how to properly express, feel, and deal with strong, uncomfortable emotions. I mean, some of them, yes, like anger, for example, anger is acceptable. Like, men are taught that anger is fine. Like, you can be angry, you can express your anger outwards. That kind of makes you a real man. Yeah, the listeners can see this because it's on the audio, what I'm doing kind of like this with my fingers.

Air quotes.

Exactly. So anger, it is okay to express anger, but not so much to express other things, right? Like sadness, shame, grief, guilt, and so on and so forth. So I think, like, we're just dealing with, like, a generation, like, generations of men who, again, like, are just emotionally illiterate. And that's creating a massive amount of problem because, well, also in a relational frame, right? Like, obviously when we enter relationships, then inherently we're going to have to deal with very strong emotions, many of them uncomfortable. And when we're not prepared to know how to actually process and handle strong, uncomfortable emotions, then that creates a massive amount of problems for everybody. One of the main things that ayahuasca does is something that I have seen abundantly throughout my research and my experience facilitating workshops and particularly for men, is that oftentimes it will bring men to very strong, powerful emotional experiences. Things that have been repressed for decades are going to flourish and come up to the surface. So, you know, like a very strong, resilient man who always thought about himself as being the solid rock of logic rationale, who doesn't get moved or shaken by any, you know, emotional nonsense, suddenly is going to have, like, a massive breakdown and just spend the whole night weeping and crying and having, like, this beautiful, amazing, amazing experience. And the next morning you'll be like, hey, like, I didn't even know that I had the capacity to cry, you know, like, I mean, how many men haven't cried in years? And I'm one of them, by the way. Like, I'm talking about my own experience. Like, up until very recently, it was very, very rare for me to cry. Crying is amazing. I mean, it's an incredible thing, you know, Like, I can't even believe the amount of relief and nurturing and emotional, like, resilience that I get after a good cry nowadays. And for decades I wasn't able to do that, you know. So for a person who hasn't cried in decades, I mean, just imagine what kind of experience it is to just have like a full night of deep infant, like, sobbing and crying, ugly crying, you know, as they say, you know, and processing that and like understanding, like, hey, like, it is okay actually to feel emotions. You know, it is okay to cry, it is okay to be sad. It is okay to express your grief. It doesn't make you less, it actually makes you more. You know, as you connect with your own emotions and as you connect with your own capacity to feel and experience the human experience in its totality, then obviously that, you know, like, brings the fragmented self back into some sort of wholeness. And this is something that I've experienced abundantly with everybody, but particularly with men, particularly with men who for whatever reason that has to do with their own socialization and their own upbringing were taught that it wasn't okay for them to experience the whole human experience, which includes sadness and grief and so on and so forth.

Yeah, yeah, nice. Well said, well said. I think, you know, for some men, I, like you said, emotionally literate. And I think for, in my experience, for some men, I usually say that there's a lot of guys that are just emotionally constipated. You know, there's a job, right? It's like they know it's there, they've been experiencing it, but they haven't let themselves move that out of their psycho emotional body. And that over time, that kind of fullness, just like a physical fullness, if we, you know, this is really unsexy, but if we haven't taken a shit for a few days, that's going to have adverse consequences and effects on our ability to be in the world, right? To be in relationship with other people, to be in relationship with our purpose, to be in relationship with creating meaning, all these different aspects. And so if we've been repressing over and over and over again just a tremendous amount of emotions or we haven't been taught how to actually be with them or feel them or process them, then in many ways we're going to have that. That fullness. I think the other thing that. Just so I can add, because I want to get your perspective on this, I think the other thing that brings men into it, from what I've seen, is that we in Western culture are really lacking in masculine initiation. And so a lot of men are. I mean, they're. They're. They're just like, literally dying for some form of initiatory process. And some. Some men, I know for myself, I searched for initiation in really unhealthy ways, right? Drugs, alcohol, women, you know, extreme racing. And it was all sort of these forms of me trying to conjure up some sort of initiation into some resemblance of manhood, because I didn't know what other. What other pathway there was. And I feel as though in some ways, Ayahuasca, psilocybin, they. They are in many ways an initiation, some form of initiation that a man has been looking for, because it sort of takes them through this very confronting experience and expanding experience of their. Of their consciousness or their emotional body or spiritual body or whatever the case may be. And that confrontation for many, they'll, you know, maybe confront death in there along the way, which can be fun. That confrontation sort of provides them with some sort of, like, initiatory endeavor. And so I'm curious to get your thoughts on that. Like, do you see men sort of coming out of these experiences, maybe not using the words of initiation, but. But talking about these experiences as if they have gone through one?

Yes, absolutely. I mean, I love that. I love that you brought that up. And that's something that I definitely relate to also as a man. I mean, I. I did have, like, my little funny initiation when I was 13. I come from a Jewish family, so I have my bar mitzvah, which, again, like, I mean, it's not. It wasn't horrible, but it just wasn't meaningful. And I think, like, this is. This is the same thing for most people, right? Like, all of these kind of initiations and like, rites of passage, if they exist, which they don't usually exist. But even if they do exist, they kind of just become like these empty shells of social pretense. They're just there for showing, you know, like, others kind of just like virtue signaling as a. Or like wealth signaling as opposed to, like, actually being meaningful for most people. I mean, that was the case for me, for sure. And I did find exactly that which you mentioned, which is my Actual initiation into men who are the adulthood through psychedelics, you know, and the inevitable confrontation with our psyche that follows and like the inevitable commitment that a person needs to make at some point in their life, you know, to act with integrity and be wholehearted and. Yeah, I mean, psychedelics can definitely be that rite of passage. And I mean, it is not unlikely that throughout history and across cultures, psychedelics did take a path in most initiation rites and rites of passage. And I think there's solid historiological and archaeological evidence to suggest that most rites of passage, both for men and women did includes some sort of psychedelic component which would confront the participant not only with the social expectations, but also with their own, like, inner world, for sure. And kind of the mythopoetic aspect of it. Yeah, definitely.

Very cool. And what would you say, what would you say are some of the impacts or effects that you see things like ayahuasca or Salah Sabin having on masculinity? Like, what's the transformation or transition there, if any at all? Like, do you, do you see any difference or does it just give men a different awareness or vantage point into their consciousness? Like, what's some of the impacts?

Yeah, I mean, I think like our own notions of masculinity are also very entrenched with like, the political and ideological corpus that kind of like guides our own indoctrination. So as you mentioned in the beginning of this talk, by the way, which is, I mean, we don't have education systems anymore, we have indoctrination systems. And the purpose of most of our indoctrination systems obviously is not to create free thinking, whole adult individuals, but actually to create, you know, generations of obedient consumers and conformist workers that will serve the dominant ideologies of our culture, such as consumerism, capitalism, so on and so forth. And oftentimes a lot of people or some people have analyzed those ideologies that kind of form the ideological corpus of Western science as being also traits of toxic masculinity. Right. So if we think about like Western corporate culture, for example, which is extremely authoritarian, extremely extractive, extremely opportunistic, predatory, so on and so forth, that structural way of being oftentimes is always in relationship with individual ways of being. So we tend to both be influenced, but also reproduce the patterns that we see playing out in society and culture. This is why my work, my main interest in my main work is always to bring light into the relationship between individual well being and individual health and structural well being and structural health. Right. I mean, if you Think, for example, about society is very easy. An individual cannot be fully healthy and fully happy if the community that he lives in is also healthy and happy. Because the individual is an abstraction. There's no such thing as an individual. That's just an ideological construction. We are social animals and we're always in relationship with other people. It's inevitable. We can't be happy and healthy unless our group is always happy and healthy. In terms of one layer after that, like culture, if the culture that we immersed in is not healthy, it is very difficult for individuals to be healthy. Because, you know, we just like. For example, if you think about, like, consumerism and how consumerism works, right? In order for our culture to sell us, like a constant stream of shit that nobody needs or wants, they first need to create that artificial need, right? And the way that to do that is to create an artificial vacuum in people. So then they can fill that with advertisements, you know, say, like, hey, like, you're not good enough, you're not adequate enough, you're not successful enough, you're not beautiful enough, so on and so forth. So if our culture is not conducive to us actually feeling, hey, like, actually we are good enough and we don't need to, you know, then it becomes very difficult to be healthy and happy. Because we're constantly being sent that message that we're not one layer after that. I mean, environment is kind of the easiest one, right? Like, if the rivers that we're drinking from are polluted or the food that we're eating is contaminated, doesn't have any nutrition, obviously that's going to affect our health, right? But oftentimes these layers get obfuscated by an excessive focus on the self and more so on the individual brain. So I think as men go through these initiations and they figure out, like, their own psyche and their own motives and their own indoctrination, and they managed to see the programming that they have received for what it is, then we can also have choice and say, like, oh, okay, so this is how I was programmed to act and behave in certain ways that are conducive to maintaining structural violence, right? As manifest through these ideologies of consumerism and patriarchy and whatever is that I do. But I don't really have to follow that because now I have free will to actually reprogram myself in a way that is conducive to actually being better. Relationship is all other layers of existence in relationship. That's fairly evident, right? Because a lot of times we tend to reproduce in Our personal relationships, the same cultural and ideological patterns that we have been indoctrinated into. So, you know, it's something that probably many women will be better placed than I am to talk about. But if you really want to transcend, like, that culture of, like, patriarchal violence, and that can happen in some places in our societies, then one necessary step towards, like, actual healing gender relationships is for men to actually be able to do the deep work that it takes to be able to deprogram ourselves and decolonize our minds from these bad ideas that we have been indoctrinated into through these many, many, many years of cultural and social indoctrination.

Yeah, again, well said. Really well said. And I think a lot of that very much, deeply resonates. You know, I think in many ways I'm always an advocate for putting forward the message to men that there's almost always some form of a war for their masculinity and their masculine consciousness, because men and masculinity traditionally and historically have been the gatekeepers of power. And so if people can. Can sort of accumulate your masculine consciousness, then they can reinforce. Reinforce their power structures, and we really maintain them. And so, you know, I do think that in some ways, things like ayahuasca and psilocybin and, you know, some of these other psychospiritual technologies. I like that word. I have to keep using it really help to liberate men from the rigid indoctrination that we are rigorously put through throughout our upbringing, whether we, you know, grew up in a sort of staunch Catholic, religious, you know, environment that told you you need to act a certain way because of this, and, you know, or whatever our conditioning has been, maybe we've had many layers of that. It sort of helps us to sort of step back consciously and observe those structures and then to. To. To engage with choosing whether or not those structures are actually serving us, serving our. Our daily meaning making, serving our sense making, serving our communities, and then the stratospheres above that. So I really enjoy what you're saying. I wish we had another sort of hour to go into these conversations, because it's really quite good. But we're going to have to wrap it up. So I'm going to have you back on the show in the new year to dive into this topic a little bit more. But where can people, if they want to learn more about you and the work that you're doing in the Temple of the Way of Light, where can they find you?

Yeah, I mean, I have a few different articles and resources out there. I think I don't really have yet link tree or a webpage. I'm working on it like this very moment. So I think the best, the best way would be just to google my name and then you get like a bunch of different results both from videos from conferences where I have spoken, articles that I have written or other podcasts where I've spoken about different topics.

Yeah, beautiful.

On my social media.

Yeah, we'll have links to that in the show notes so people can find you. So. All right everyone that's out there listening to this wonderful conversation. If you enjoyed this, please man it forward, share it with at least one person that you know would enjoy it. And don't forget to hit the subscribe button. Leave us a rating and review goes a long way. And until next week, this is Conor Beaton signing off. Join me next week for another inspiring conversation with another inspiring individual.

Sam.