EP 157 WTH?!?: Integrating Psychedelics for Transformation with Tah and Kole Whitty

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Welcome back, everybody. I'm Dr. Greg Echo, and this is what the health. Our topic today is health optimization through psychedelics and plant medicine with my special guests, Ta and Cole. Witty. And they have the Condor approach. Ta has 25 years of clinical nursing in the emergency room, in particular in one of the biggest cities on the planet, New York City. I'm sure he has seen a lot. And his life partner and business partner, Cole, she's got years in substance abuse education, combining together their 20 years in fitness, 25 years in plant medicine, and psychedelics to help people prepare, navigate, and integrate their psychedelic experiences to optimize health and stay safe, connected and fulfilled. Welcome aboard, you two.

Thank you.

Thank you so much here for our favorite conversation.

It is.

I love it because, you know, as we were just mentioning, it is like the wild west out there. Plant medicines and psychedelics in particular. You know, the burgeoning. I'm kind of a, you know, I grew up in the 70s, and I always looked back to the 60s of like, oh, I missed the decade. And now I just feel like, wow, we've actually, we came for this, like, we're primed for this new burgeoning and blossoming of very strong and amazing medicines when done properly. And I love that you two really have been out there on the forefront and actually have a whole teaching and methodology for helping facilitators create safe spaces and. And do this properly with full integration and perhaps even less emphasis on the medicines themselves. And so I'm wondering maybe if you two. I'm just going to lob that over to you on how you would like to field, at least just what resonates with you. There's. And what percolates.

Well, I'll kick it off. So, you know, we initially started that our focus was on facilitators. And what we found is with so many people becoming what's classified as an overnight shaman or becoming facilitators in very short period of time, we, yes, we offer a year training certification program for practitioners. You know, they could be ketamine clinicians, underground facilitators. You know, it's none of our business. We just know they want to understand what it really is to integrate neurologically, physiologically, spiritually. And so what we also found, though, is a large audience of people who wanted to learn for themselves. Maybe they're going to Peru, maybe they're going for ketamine sessions, and they want to understand more how to prepare, navigate through challenging situations or challenging experiences, what many would classify as a bad trip or afterwards what do they do? Right. And so for us, so much of our commitment now is as much in the public facing so they can find safe spaces for themselves. Because what we can't do is police everything that's happening in the underground. And clinically, we're seeing as much harm from ketamine sessions where there wasn't the care and the intentionality, you know, in that really clear setting. And, you know, just as with anything, there's some people getting into it for the opportunity financially and not for the heart. Focused, we'll say, of intention. And so we've really come to understand that because of Ta's years as a nurse, the way that he tracked all of our clients, we were full time facilitators. We've led trips to Peru. We have elders from the jungles. But, you know, all of our teachers really have been evolutionaries. And really that is what integration is, is where is this bridge of Western medicine? And we'll say more ancient methodologies or medicines like ayahuasca, like psilocybin, mushrooms and things like that. And so for us at this point, the focus is education and helping people find safe spaces for themselves and then for some people to go into the program. But, you know, for us to train someone, we want people walking the walk. We're not interested in handing another certification or training to sit on the wall or in a folder. So we tell people, come to an event, experience it for yourself. Then we'll talk about if the program is something, a path that you want to step on. Because we're not interested in people that are looking to just, you know, get a book education. This is an embodiment practice, understanding emotions, body mapping, how the past influences our health. We want to take an integrated approach, which means we want to look at the whole big picture and teach a practitioner, but foremost people, how to coach themselves. Because if you can at least learn the difference between instinct and intuition, that can be life changing in who you choose or what path you choose to walk.

You know, in the United States of America, we have about 330 million people and the last time I checked in, active therapists, okay, doing talk therapy and the like. We have about 200,000, maybe 250,000 on the high end of practitioners that are active in the United States of America. Now, when we consider 330 million people contrasted to 200,000 active practitioners, we are in a CPR type of situation when it comes to mental wellness and emotional wellness. Now, psychedelics are moving into a position to support people in ways that no Other medicines, no other modalities have been able to. Not even close, not even remotely close. And so people are turning to psychedelics in mass right now because they're like, well, my cousin got out of depression, my cousin, my friend over here got out of PTSD and I saw this documentary. And so people are leaning into doing psychedelics and they don't have any idea of what they're doing, they're just going to do it. Now I'm not saying that people are going to have a rough way to go. There are people that are going to have rough ways to go because they don't have an on ramp. And so, and they don't have an on ramp, then they don't have anything to be on the plateau and then they don't have an off ramp, you know, and so they don't have a therapist available. And so what we're in encouraging people to do is learn how to coach themselves, to learn how to have a methodology to lean into things to where you don't have to go to a practitioner if you're going to do it anyway, because people are going to do it anyway. And so if people are informed and educated, think they'll have more of a chance of having the most amazing harm free. And we're not looking, we're not talking about harm reduction, we're talking about no harm, okay? The way we work, no harm. We don't want harm to come to anyone. Harm reduction is nice, but that means there are people still being harmed.

It's still a settling. We're like, no, we're going to keep going towards no harm.

And for us to be able to train people in this space and to train coaches, it doesn't. Training coaches takes a fraction of the time it takes to train a therapist. And so when you have coaches that are a world that is armed with coaches. I worked as a nurse for 25 years in the clinical setting and I wish when we were sending people home we had a coach. Hey, listen, this is your, this is your discharge coach. They're going to coach you, they're going to talk to you about your medications, they're going to talk to you about follow up and they're going to follow up with you to make sure you're held accountable to going to your, to your situation. I wish we had coaches to send people to. And so now with, with, with this advent of psychedelics, we have this wonderful opportunity to introduce the idea of integration not only into psychedelics, but into wellness, Just world. Oh, sorry. Worldwide. As I Beat my wife up here. So excited.

I was waiting for it because her arms were getting bigger.

I was waiting for it. I'm excited right now. So, yeah. So I love talking about this stuff and it's my passion, it's my heart, it's my soul. And as a nurse, as an ER nurse from New York City, I have never seen anything as transformational psychedelics for myself and for the people that we've worked with.

I love that. So it definitely comes through with you too. I'm wondering. So just for the, the general, because you guys can go super deep on a lot of those different facets there if we just kind of go out to that meta level on maybe why. Why do you think this resurgence of plant medicine and psychedelics? Because. And there's different levels of legality. Like you had ment coal with, you know, underground and you know, clinicians and going to South America and you know, just for the general lay public that maybe had heard of it or, you know, heard watch the Netflix documentary, you know, heard their Uncle Joe did this. You know, he got out of depression. Why? How do you think this is now? How is this coming together now?

You know, we could speculate on all sorts of anything from Christian doctrine to shamanic practices. What I can say is that for me and many of the people that have taken our training or been drawn to it or people we sat for is for many they became desperate because western medicine wasn't working. And so for me, being raised in Utah, being raised in the LDS faith, there was a lot of anti substance for lots of different reasons. Plus I was raised in the 80s, Dare was very big in school. And so I think that now people are reaching a desperation point with health when it doesn't make sense anymore that, you know, we're getting these diagnosis. For me personally, I had so many medical diagnosis by 26 and it came to a moment where I sat down at Disneyland and I cried. I couldn't take another step. My knees were so swollen. Fibromyalgia, endometriosis. I'd had three traumatic brain injuries, I'd been in a coma. I had a lot of unresolved dis ease in my body that they were just putting more medications on, but they were guessing because we don't know what's causing the fibromyalgia. And then I can't sleep. So then I'm taking, you know, things to go to sleep and things to wake up. My physical body reached a point that it would not let me take another step and it was in that moment where whether we call it prayer, intention, desperation, I said, I'm willing to do anything, but I know I can't live like this. And then it was that time that a friend introduced psychedelics as a possibility for me. Now, previously I was given a day of recognition by the state of Utah for educating youth on the dangers of club drugs. So when I tell you I've seen both sides of this spectrum, I have seen it unlike most have. I've been on national talk shows about it. I was in a coma at 17 from an overdose in Salt Lake City. Technically contamination, but regardless. So I've been the addict, I've been the traumatized teen, I've been the educator. And now I'm on this side of it. And what I saw is we have a trauma problem, not an addiction problem. I was getting 200 plus emails a day, parents about their kids, kids about their parents. And what I saw was not that addiction was a disease, that there was so much unease from trauma that people couldn't find answers. So when we see someone outside of us having these results and we're desperate, I just think that more people are being open about it. And now with all the documentaries, the research, the government's funding a lot of research with soldiers. So that's kind of been the safe entry point into the conversation. And from a shamanic perspective, from an energetic, it is a changing of times. That's why what we do is called the condor approach. Condors are vultures. They fly the highest of birds in the world. So it's this high level perspective where we can see the past and where we've come. But we are a part of humanity's cleanup. These evolution of dead and dying systems that must evolve for us to carry on. Our physical nervous systems haven't changed in thousands of years much, but our brains and technology have. So for me it's this, we are kind of at this cusp with technology and biology that we have to find a new way. Because the organic matter for us through psychedelics, when you can speak to your gut, biome, when you can speak to your heart. When we had people who had been struggling with long Covid respiratory issues, we would put that around a heart energy space. When we did work around grief or sadness or loss, then we would watch their symptoms that had been there for months finally resolve. So we could make up lots of stories or we could say a lot of people saw similar results from similar approaches. Just like science does. We saw trends, we saw patterns, we had data. Here we are.

I Love it.

So. So.

Yeah, what do you got?

So. So you want me to get meta, right? He said you wanted some meta, so I'm going to give you a quick meta. Our technology, like Cole was saying, the human organism has been gradually evolving over thousands and thousands of years. Our technology over the past 200 years has shifted. An upgrade like that, okay? And so the vibrational tone of our technology, of our technological mecca, right, of the things that we use, the vibrational frequency is completely different than the frequency of our bodies. And so the. When we go into psychedelic spaces, the vibrational tone of our bodies shift and change to, to accommodate for a rapid change, okay? And so there are rapid shifts that are happening in people's psyches, rapid shifts that are happening in people's, happening in people's physiologies that we can't explain. These changes these people are having, these things happen in psychedelics. So there's a rapid change that happens when we go into psychedelics. And so the plants know, the mushrooms know, right? They know. They're not trying to rationalize. They know the changes that are going on. And so there's this been this influx of the technologies of these ancient wisdoms that are coming online to support humanity in getting the physical organisms to accommodate to that shift in technology. And so if we're going to get meta, then let's get meta. Let's talk about vibrational tone, let's talk about vibrational frequency, let's talk about energetics, let's talk about sound wave progressions. All of these things have to do with the opening of our bodies into a different space, a space that we have not known as human beings yet. And so we haven't known this technology until the last 200, 250 years. We've started to really get technological in the last 100 years alone. It's been ridiculous the last 50 years, 20 years, and now we have AI and all of this stuff. The vibrational tone is changing rapidly. Our access to information is changing rapidly. And so for these bodies to accommodate, there has to be an opening for us to mutate and change with the technology, or the technology is going to move without us. So that's the meta that I'm seeing. That's all the studying that I've been doing around the work that we've been doing with people is the CONDOR approach is an operating system for human beings to install, and then they can put their own software in to ride along the wave with technology. So we don't get overridd and buy technology. We grow with it. Meta.

I love it. Thank you. So beautifully put. You know, that, that I was in an AI training recently and in there it was a three day training and there was a kind of a collective malaise that came over everyone of, wow, this is different. And a thought that arose was it's, it's almost as if these medicines have come on board to help with the transition of the old system going not quietly into that dark night and the new system, new Earth, arising out of, really out of the heart space of humanity and, you know, for us to fully access our full creative potential and power, which we haven't really been taught. So, you know, I, I see a lot of the, the plant medicines, which is a humongous topic, but if we just keep it at like a psychedelic discussion as a way to help humanity return to its greatness in the heart portal, you know, and allowing us like. I wanted to talk about like how you guys frame the integration and creating safety around these processes because it is very potent medicine and should, I think should be used that way. And that, that's coming from a Deadhead. So I used to travel around watching the Grateful Dead taking psychedelics as a youngster. So I'll be, you know, very vulnerable and open about it. But I think what that has done is it's really positioned me in a point where then I became, you know, a co director of, you know, kind of the Saturday night guy on the Harmony event medicine, where we'd go to festivals and people taking all kinds of substances in the wilds of Oregon. And we were overseeing them with care and you know, we had a whole trip sitting crew and we did it with, you know, it was a harm reduction component. And now to be able to legally prescribe these substances in a therapeutic setting both in Utah and Oregon, it's really come full circle for me of looking at, okay, well, how, you know, how is it? Because I'm not, you know, I'm just one, one person out here with a big heart. But, you know, in, in shaping the conversation and you know, really overseeing a lot of transformation. I couch it in transformation components. So I like you have this body mapping component and the secret language of your body and you know, you're, you're enveloping and creating a container for people. So I just want to kind of open up that opportunity to share that with folks.

Sure. You wanna.

Yeah. You know, for us, even when it comes to plant medicine, psychedelics, not all. Well, for one, mushrooms are not plants. So that gets confusing for people because they're fungi, but they get classified into plant medicine. But truthfully, when you look at the context, plant medicine really comes medicina from a lot of people studying with Spanish or in South American, excuse me, cultures, where it's la medicina, but that is every plant in the jungle is medicina, not just one. Right. And so that translation into English doesn't translate the same with the context of our American medicine, actually. And so down in Peru, especially with some, one of our mentors, in particular one of our teachers, he says they're not only used for medicine, medicines for sick people. The, the priests and the visionaries down in Machu Picchu, for example, would work with them as master teachers to illuminate, not to fix. There was nothing. They weren't sick. They were looking for broader perspective outside of their current lens. And there is a healing aspect that happens that once we get to a certain point, we trust healing is happening. It's not something we do or don't do. It's actually always happening. And once we bring intention to it, we can start to see outside of our lived experience. First, we, we do need to do some internal work on ourselves, get ourself healthy. Just like if I hurt my arm, I want to take care of my arm without necessarily ignoring the rest of the body. But prioritize, after we go through that, how do we determine for each individual person what is working for them, what isn't? Some people want a clinical setting with a ketamine clinician. Others want to be in the woods with mushrooms they foraged out there. We're not going to find one unified answer for everyone. So for us, the key is translating the body. Because otherwise you're still relying on the external perspectives or someone outside of the self to say this is the right way, this is the regulated way. It needs to be this dosage with this body weight. And we have historically found that not to be the case case with mushrooms or ayahuasca. It's not based on weight. There's other factors. Even if you remove the shamanic perspective, a bigger person doesn't equal more. I've had someone that's 4 foot 11 take as much to take out a elephant and it not do anything to them. And so, you know, then it. When we're looking at how do we then delineate what's correct for each person. For us, it's body mapping. What is the body trying to tell you? And if I was going to do a, you know, I obviously couldn't break it all down right now. But if I was going to simplify it. What is the literal function of the body part that's being impacted in any moment? What does that body part do? And then if you're into chakras, what is the associated chakra to that center? So when I mentioned earlier, around the heart, and if someone's feeling a loss of connection or sadness or grief, the body can manifest conditions within that area of the body. So around the heart, just think connection. Or if I'm having migraines, am I overthinking? Am I. Do I have so much going on I'm overthinking? Stomach issues? Am I having a hard time digesting something? Or am I over digesting something? Or constipation, not letting shit go? Right. Like, what is. What is the literal.

Literal, Right.

And then some of the childhood development, which is what we teach in a lot more detail that we found. For example, people with autoimmune conditions often had a father. These are our clients. I can't say universally. Often people that had adrenal fatigue, autoimmune issues. Eight out of 10 had a father that gave significance and love for high achievement. So they were high performers, high accolades, get good grades. And if the father, and so it was either father gave significance and love for high achievement or was emotionally absent, that could be physically too, but emotionally not there. Maybe also an alcoholic, maybe something else. But truthfully, it didn't even matter if a parent was an alcoholic if the child still knew they were loved. We saw harder or more autoimmune issues when someone their physical body, if love and significance was taken away. There was no proof of healing where a child who was beaten, they saw bones heal over time. A child who was emotionally withdrawn from had no evidence or no proof of the love. And so they walk on eggshells of high performance for significance. And that was just off our, you know, we work with a lot of biohackers, medical professionals, nurses, therapists. And so it was as we started to track childhood experiences that also what we found, determined what substance might be more supportive of their body. Someone very tired and depleted. Ayahuasca may not be the first choice because it can be physically taxing. And we have to work on mending the relationship with the body. And if we go into an experience forcing the body to drink, forcing the body to do more, we can be doing the same problem we're doing in the walking world, which is forcing our body to carry on when it doesn't want to. And we've had people go to the jungle for Too long, go too hard and come back with all these allergies to things they didn't have before they went. And for us, it's because the body is literally telling you, I won't do this anymore. And so for us, the key is when you start to translate the language of the body, you'll know if this is the correct or supportive teacher for you, both in who sits for you and the substance itself. Because if you've been attached to success comes from hard and suffer and struggle, you will probably be most drawn to medicines that are hard and struggle. But then you're actually feeding the same kind of dysfunction when what might benefit you the most is some grace and some ease. And not so harder, faster, more now.

And so to add on to that, the way we see things, the way we move through things. At the condor approaches, we have something called the hierarchy of esteem. And human beings tend to put themselves in esteem, right? How we value ourselves. And we put that esteem in a hierarchy. And at the top of that hierarchy, we tend to put spirituality in mind and mental processes in your heart. Then your constructs, right? The things you ascribe to your belief structures, race, religion, gender, ethnicity, nationality and so on. Underneath that, we put our heart, intuition and emotion space. Below that, we put the body. Below that, we put the microbiome. So the body is really low on that totem pole. And this is why body mapping is so important. So what we do with that hierarchy is we take that and we turn it sideways. So every aspect of the self is held in high esteem. And then we bring those all together so that they work together, right? The body and the mind, the spirit, the heart, the constructs, they all work together. And nothing is at a higher echelon than anything else. So that once we have all of those things in the same esteem, nothing falls off track. We love and nurture every part of the self. That is integration. That's when we become whole, we are integrated, and so we work from that space. You want to say something?

I was going to say the. With what he's saying, with this hierarchy of esteem, when we turn it sideways, it becomes what we call the health continuum. So you're going on that now. You've got all of these different parts, and if you look at each of those parts and your health was on a continuum from ease to dis ease. Each one of those is moving towards ease or moving you towards dis ease. That's your health. Health's not an arrival point, it's on this continuum. So if every Drop in the bucket was towards stress. If your body was stressed, if your biome was stressed, if your job was stressful, all of those are sliding you on this continuum towards disease. And for us, optimal healing happens in ease, not rest. Anyone can rest, but have you ever been in bed all night and you slept according to your watch, but it was restless, it was, you know, not. It wasn't relaxing. And so when you can take all these components of what Todd just described and then look on this health continuum, the condor, we developed metrics or ways to count that so you know what direction you're moving towards and what things are putting another tick on the dial towards disease and what things are bringing you more towards ease so that you can make radical decisions with your life. For us, it's not about having some optimal choices in your life of health. It's, are you being radically honest with your choices? Can you accept the choices that you're making? That's it, it's your life. But if you're going to complain, then maybe track for a little while. Because we've had just as many people that were gluten free and eating all the right things, whose health was crashing because they were so hard on themselves that it had nothing to do with diet. It was how they were driving themselves from traumas of the past. And it was like they were trying to outrun the past still.

So that body.

Yeah, it's almost like. Yeah, perfect.

Perfect, yeah. So that body mapping along with emotional navigation is tremendously important in what we do at the CONDOR approach. And like Cole was talking about, you have the disease side and you have the E side and the navigation space in between those is your emotional complex. So all of your, what people call positive emotions are telling you that you're in the E space. All of your negative or uncomfortable emotions, unpleasant emotions, are telling you that you're in disease or moving towards disease. And so we ride along those complexes, listening to the emotions, and we navigate it with three points. And that would be safety, connection, and fulfillment. And all of our human experiences can be found in those three spaces. The safety space, the connection space, and the fulfillment space. Safety is the poverty line. When you fall below the poverty line, that's where there's a threat space, a threat of hurt, harm, loss, deficit injury, death or pain. Okay, that's all below the poverty line. When you get above the poverty line, that's when you start to move into spaces of connectivity, of joy, of passion, of all of these things. And you start to move up to the luxury which is fulfillment. It is a privileged space to be fulfilled in our world. Right. It's a privilege. And so this is where our emo. So when you turn that sideways and you ride along the health continuum, as you move towards ease, that's where it was disease. As you move towards. As you move towards ease on this side, you're getting into your fulfillment space. As you move away from it, you're getting towards the safety space. And that's where you find all of those things I was talking about. And most people, and you asked. You had spoke about safety earlier, and I just wanted to bring this up before I turn it back over to you. Most people in psychedelics and anything else in this world have no idea what safety is for them. So we came up with what we call the seven attributes of violence, which will tell a person if they're safe or not. Am I free from hurt, harm, loss, deficit, injury, death, or pain? All of those things will signify if I'm safe or not. And when I'm free from those things, I'm generally safe. And when we've taught this at the CONDOR approach, this is where people have had. We've had to stop the whole curriculum because people didn't realize that they were not safe in so many different aspects. In their money, in their constructs, in their spirituality, in their belief structures, in their family situations and so on, and. And their physical bodies. And so once you can get yourself into a space where you feel safe, where you know you're safe, you can slide along that continuum towards the E space.

And each one of those concepts pretty much have their own day. Because, I mean, I'm sure. Well, we could probably all take a breath because it's actually a lot. You know, the body's not that simple.

Yeah, it is not that simple, but I love that. What in particular? The free from deficit. What was that one?

Yeah. Deficit is when you don't have enough, Right? When I don't have enough, I'm in a deficit space. And so if I don't have enough food, if I don't have enough water, if I don't have enough love, I'm not safe. Okay. There's a safety space that comes with that. Most of the people that come to work with us are in a space where they're running, trying to get pay their rent or get their kids through school or something like that, or they want to be more so that they'll be loved by other people because they've been taught that they have to. They have to earn love. So they're not enough. So that is a deficit space. And when people are in a deficit, they. They are not safe. Their wholeness is disrupted. If I need to attain something in order to get love, if I need to attain something in order to get food, I'm not. I'm not entirely safe, or if I.

Don'T, I'm going to run out, right?

And I. And I won't be safe. And so this is. This is something that flies under the radar of safety with people, the deficit space. And so we've expanded it from just being hurt and harmed by things. You know, the loss in the deficit space are the two places that people bypass a lot of. And when you lose something, if you lose a loved one, if somebody passes away or if somebody leaves you, you become fragmented, Your. Your identities become fragmented.

And it's a disintegration.

It's a disintegration. And this is something that we talk about at the CONDOR approach that I don't see anybody in modern psychology talking about. And that's construct trauma. If my identity is threatened, it becomes traumatized, and it has no way to protect itself other than through my physical body. And so it enacts the trauma seque for the entire physical organism. And so if we are bypassing and not looking at people's relationships being threatened, people's jobs, people's identities, even if it's like, all right, my identity as a father is great, but my identity as a husband is disrupted, that's a different aspect of me that's being threatened. And then I don't know why I don't feel safe all the time. There's an aspect that's not being looked.

At or, say, with a new mother, you know, when we see a lot like postpartum depression, quite often when we're working with someone, it's her actually mourning her past self, the version of her that is no longer existing. But we don't have a context of integrating who someone was with who they're becoming. So there's this lost. Because depression, right, is really a loss of connection. And if they have now lost connection to who they were, the activities they had, what they were doing before, even if it's not their first child, if there's a big enough change, they can't work anymore. Then there is these parts of the self that are mourning where if we, through integration, can speak to the different parts of the self that are feeling, like, disintegrated to help them find connection. And through that connection, through that safety, they can get back to connection and fulfillment in the new life. But often we just go, well, we don't know why, it's a hormonal thing and throw medications at it. It versus when we've slowed down to look at the different constructs, the different identities of a person. The woman that's now the stay at home mom, that, that's what she chose. But her past selves were driven by significance and achievement and those selves don't exist here. And so, so much of what an individual could have built themselves on is gone. And so for us, when, when you can look at the different aspects of identity and how it shows up in your health, your body will speak to before you're even aware of the thing. And that's why it's like your body has all these, I see almost like a map where you've got all those symbols on the side that are like, this means a gas station, this means a rest stop. Right? Your body has a key that only you can fill out. What is lower back pain? Why on some days does an old illness flare up for us? There's a message there. It's not happenstance, it's consequence con. Sequence in sequence. So we want to look at the sequences to see what, what it might be trying to say, I love it.

And, and that component of, you know, all of the symptoms, that's the way that I talk about it with the body as well, is like, these are symptoms, this is your body. We need to listen. Like I'm training clinicians here on deep presence and listening because the person, the individual in front of us will tell us exactly what the map is. And by you all reflecting back to them of like, no, that, that's the path, that's your curriculum, that's, that's your body, innate intelligence speaking to you. And we've been taught to ignore it or suppress it or take this drug or that or like run from it. So that, that piece of disintegration and then integration, there's a lot of talk, or maybe there's not a lot of talk. I, I would say like the VA doing ketamine research for healing ptsd, they're basically just doing two ketamine sessions a week for three weeks and it's still working. But if we could actually provide integration, you know, one of the pieces that I really like to propagate is it's not so much the substance. Yes, they're great teachers, but ultimately it's your learning and it's your curriculum and understanding and listening and your intuition and trust. Of yourself. It's almost like a returning home to you is the way that I talk about these things. So I'm curious on the integration approach for you. Like, how important is that?

It's foundational.

Yeah. And the thing is, integration is always happening when we bring intentionality to it is the difference. Just like if, if my arm was to be broken, which it has been before, delete, delete, delete, delete, my arm is going to heal no matter what. So if someone goes into a psychedelic experience, they're going to heal no matter what, but how are they going to heal? Right. So it's the difference of when we're being intentional about it. If there is a disintegration, and I have a coach or someone that is a. I can look to, to help me assess the disintegration and say, hey, we need to do some alignment on the bone and then cast it so it can heal optimally so that it's in the right position for what you want, which is a functional arm. So with psychedelics, it's similar to your point. When we have a plan where someone has a big realization and we understand what support structures would they need to either make the breakthrough last or support a breakdown. So it doesn't last longer than it needs to. Because I've watched in particular with ketamine, where people go have a very challenging experience and they didn't, they weren't really informed ahead of time of the potential of that disintegration. So now they're scared and they don't want to go back because of that fear. Where a supported casted environment means we let people know what is their support system afterwards, what, in what sessions, or what coach or family. But we want to have a structure to support it without creating a codependency because a cast has to come off or else it degrades or the muscles will atrophy. And so what happens is people can become codependent on the substance to get them back into their heart, but they're not developing the muscles to maintain it. So we're. We're creating a different type of codependency. Not in a chemical sense necessarily, especially with psilocybin, some other things, but in a significance connection and not having the tough conversations in their life they need to have. They go back to an MDMA session where they feel great for four hours and go back to an environment and don't have the tough conversation. And so the difference in integration is financially, it can cost more for the integration, but these are investments into the tools that are going to change your life forever. How to be with emotions, not run from them. Elevate your communication skills. And so intentional integration is. It's all the difference. Otherwise people will have to come back for a booster for, you know, whatever, for a lifetime. And then we're. We're still. Which I'm. I have no problem with. Everyone has the right to choose, but for me, I wanted for myself that sovereignty, to know how to support myself and how to get people to get my back versus a codependency.

You know, integrate healing from our lens. Healing is not a good or a bad thing. It's becoming whole. Okay? And so if I have something, if I have an idea space and I disintegrate that space and I get something different, I can change it. And then I'll reintegrate and I'll bring it. I'll bring it back together in a different way. And so I have healed. And so we, we can heal. Like Cole was saying, I can. I can have a broken bone and it never gets, you know, we can set it back the way, you know, so that it heals wonderfully in, in. In a functional space, or it can heal like this and then the leg can be shortened, right? And we can have a dysfunctional space. It's still healing. And so healing has got this, this wrap of being a good thing or a bad thing, right? I mean, well, a good thing or I need healing, need to be healed. But we're not looking at how we are healing. We're not setting up the environment. And so a huge part of what we teach is the first front end work is more important than the psychedelic experience, period. If you're not doing work on the front end to actually kind of stir the pot and see what's going on with you, then all of the work in the psychedelic experience is like jack in a box or it's playing lottery. It's like, okay, what comes up, what may come up when we get the information stirred up and we talk about it beforehand. And we know what. Cole and I have never had a surprise at any kind of experience that we've done with people. Because our intake form for our clients, when we were doing experiences, if you were to print it out, it's 46 pages long. 46. And so we're going through your health history. We're asking about your family situations, cultural, cultural stuff, how you feel about the recent politics, how you feel about your parents.

Are you first generation in this country?

Do you have tattoos on your body? Were you Exposed to crop dusting, did you eat lead paint? All of these things we ask because these are old traumatic circumstances that may come up during the experience that your body and your psyche are looking to release. And once they're there, you, you, you move them out of the way. You have space for newness. And so you go back home and the people that you live with are seeing a person that they've never seen.

Before, which can be scary for them.

Scary. So you haven't set up with them, you haven't spoken to them about it, you haven't set your environment up, you haven't made an intention of what you want to do, you haven't made plans and contingencies and it becomes a challenging situation. So the front end work is the most for us in psychedelics. The front end work before your psychedelic experience is more important than anything.

We can tell just by someone's knowing, just by knowing how someone was raised. We are binary. Trained humans are up, down, you know, right, left. We're binary. So if we know someone had a background, whatever it was, we know that there's only going to be one of two things that happens in the ceremony. If they're a high performance, controlling person, they're either going to say, see or feel nothing, or they're going to get blasted open and feel a lot, which might be positive for them, might not be positive for them, but we can handle that. But by knowing their past, we can help inform them of the potentials, not what to expect, what to anticipate. So I'm sure you work with this at the clinic. We're always mitigating expectation. That's really the truth of it. And no matter how many times someone says, I don't have any expectations, they always do. And instead of, yeah, instead of pretending, we'll say, okay, so what would it, what would happen if nothing did happen in your first ceremony? And really just talking through the potentials so that we can face it more head on. Or what if something big did come through? Who would we want to inform in your life? How can we get that support? Someone might not have a family that supports them and if they don't, they need somewhere, some sense of community or else now they're an island in change, which can be further traumatizing. If they say they just came home from a ketamine session, they're in an environment that's not safe for them, it can deepen the roots of trauma in that heightened state. Right, Their cement is wet, you take them home to their family and it's like they've got a duck flipping through their cement, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

You know that. Well, one, one component. I did consciously call these centers for a reason. And it goes back to the component with your mentor in Peru saying, you know, these are. They're not medicines to necessarily heal a broken thing. These are inspirational, maybe co collaborators. So I like that languaging and in particulars on how we view the environment, because I think there can be this tendency of maybe that Protestant work ethic or like how you had mentioned of the, you know, if you've just done tough things that you're going to then choose a tough experience and then it's propagating kind of the dysfunction and the imbalance of. For yourself. So it is that awareness and consciousness and intentionality around creating that container for yourself. Right. Or you're a clinician or facilitator listening to the show. Like having that intentionality for, you know, what you're doing together, or having that safe space established with. If somebody's sitting with you or facilitating or if you're just in your own journey in the woods or whatever you're doing there. I think that my focus has always been around transformation. I know everybody can have different components and I, I'm fine putting that out there. And I don't have a judgment onto how utilize their, their curriculum on the planet either. Just as a center and licensed professional, I. There's some components that I'm gonna bring forth and what I think people get attracted into in working with us, so. Or trusting us as their guide, etc. So that component, you know, I know you guys have been, you're like really out there with a lot of different folks without, you know, there's not a, you know, you don't have a desired component, I think, other than the transformation of people or in that learning. But maybe you want to speak into that. And then we'll kind of wrap up today. I mean, we could talk for hours here. I'm so enjoying this. Yeah, thank you.

Go for it.

You know, at the end of the day, our hope is that people, at least if they understand what drives them and they can see where they are, it's like GPS in the car. If you want to get somewhere and you don't know where you are, the potential of getting there when you want to is very low, if ever. But when you have clarity in where you are and where you want to go, and then you've got technology or support or coaches or doctors or whoever, you can get there in fractions. Of the time. Our desire is people don't suffer the way that we did. You know, I spent nine years going from doctor to doctor to clinic to time to jobs that I couldn't stand at because you know, the. When I looked at the emotional turmoil and I didn't want to live anymore at 26, you know, and so to be 40 now, it's more that what took me 13 years to learn without support. We're basically saying this is everything. If I could have handed this to my past self, I could have done it in two years because I was willing. But I understand my path. For us to create these things, we had to walk it. But it's that this is the power every person has. And to be to go into any clinic or any coach armed with knowing yourself, it's the greatest gift. I had to learn my body. I had to learn so that when I tried a medication, what were the symptoms that I could even delineate or distinguish. And so at the end of the day, it's that by having a clear path forward for people to know what to track or at least some, you know, we're giving some bumpers to the bowling alley of what to track so you're within a smaller range, you can get back to doing what you really want to do. All I wanted back then was for my pain to suck less. I wasn't looking for nirvana. I wasn't looking for, you know, this like pain free life. I didn't think that was possible. So to be where I am now and for anyone listening that might be on the suck less path. I was like, if I could just, if it could just only suck at a 6 instead of an 8, I can enjoy my family. So for me, it's giving people the ability to reclaim their life, to connect. There's no block to purpose like pain. So recognizing when you start to learn that that pain is a language too. My fibromyalgia was all the emotions I refused to feel. And it was just my body contracted so much because I didn't want to feel it all because it hurt too much. And so then it literally hurt. But that is because I had a bigger mission and purpose that I wasn't acknowledging. And so this opportunity for anyone that's been looking for that breadcrumb, that's been looking for that sign, know that I've been off all medication since 2009. I haven't had a diagnosis or even needed to go get anything checked since 2011. And so it's to say that there's no greater path to step on than the one of really understanding that your body isn't against you, that you don't have bad knees or a bad back. It's that you've been bad to your knees and you've been bad to your back. And so it's reacting as something that's not loved. And that was a. That was a tough path, but that was the most fruitful one I've had.

Sounds like she wrapped it up really well. Listen, we love people, okay? And I, as a nurse in ERS, I've been a nurse for 31 years and being in the ER all over New York, all over New York City, I worked in 12 different hospitals because I was interested in the different socioeconomic conditions and how people's health was affected by where they were from, how much money they made, what race or religion they lived in. And I saw that there was one commonality in all human beings that drove a lot of disease. And that commonality was loneliness. People were alone in their suffering, people were alone in their bodies, people were alone in their love. People are alone in their emotions. They didn't have connection and integration with other human beings to that depth of level where they were heard and seen the most. One of the most profound thing in my career was I got so close with my patients that there were plenty of times where people would say, hey, can you come in here and close the curtain? And they would tell me their deepest secrets that they never got to tell anybody. The people they were in love with, that they never got to be with, how they got abandoned, the things they wish they could have done, the things that they did do. And those people would say the things that they had to say, and then they would die right in front of me. And this is what I saw. The commonality was in our deepest hope, in the advent of psychedelics, is that we change into a world where we can leave loneliness behind and we can be open and vulnerable and honest with one another to a point where we accept, acknowledge, and love one another on that deep of a level.

Foreign.

Thank you, beautiful beings, so much for messages of hope. And that, that is truly beautiful. I think that really will bring us to an end here, folks. If you got something out of this show today, please go out there and give us a five star review and tell people what you learned, because this is how we get the word out. This isn't coming from mainstream media. It's the whole premise of what the health and the healing begins here. Thank you all for tuning in. We wouldn't be doing it without you. Thank you. The condor approach. Todd, Cole. And we're going to put all of your contact information in the show notes. And I look forward to another really juicy conversation. Thank you both.

Thank you.