5 Step Method To ACHIEVE PEAK Psychical & Mental Performance And Healing | Jamie Wheal

You don't have to become an athlete, you don't have to become a yogi. It's just learning how to adjust the knobs and levers of our bodies and brains for greater health, greater resilience, and overall higher well-being.

You talk about five drivers that can really help us to actually reconnect with things that matter, that are based on ancient traditions and ancient wisdoms and technologies that we've sort of discarded, whether it's breath or being in our bodies in different ways, sexuality, the use of various kinds of substances and plants and music and dance. How do we start to think about these things? Can you talk about how you came up with these concepts, why they're important, how people can access them? And then we want to get into some of the research you've done to show how this actually can be played out, because it's very interesting what you found.

It occurred to me doing a free diving workshop with Kirk Krack, who's one of the sort of champion coaches for world champions and record holders. Free diving is when you go dive.

Deep underwater and hold your breath for long periods of time.

Without scuba tanks, so you're all self-contained, right? So it's just you holding your breath and going as deep as you can go. And as he was describing, he's like, oh, you know, when most people have this urge to breathe, you would think you're out of oxygen, but you're actually not. you actually just have a buildup of CO2, you probably have 40 to 60% of your usable air, your usable oxygen still in your body. It's just your early warning system. And I thought, well, that's really interesting that we have such a huge built-in buffer, right? Which is basically saying, hey, human, diving for oysters or shellfish or lobsters back in the day, don't cut it too close, because if you cut it too close, you die. And it just felt like it was like, wow, that's a brilliant, very strong, biologically encoded driver. If we don't breathe, we die.

Basically, four minutes.

And at the same time, right? At the same time, if you modulate your breathing in a host of different ways, either by hyperventilating and breathing deeply and quickly or breathing extremely slowly to calm yourself down, you can upregulate yourself, you can create yourself an energized focus state, you can downregulate yourself, you can become more calm, less stressed. And if you do varying more complicated practices, you can even straight up shift your state. So almost kind of gas pedal breaks. And I was like, oh, that's really interesting. And Mother Nature encoded it. So if we can find ways to tweak it or change it, that's a very strong intervention.

And it's free.

And it's free, right? Zero tech. And the same with sexuality, which has all sorts of taboos and sort of strongly held feelings around it. But if you just look again from the evolutionary imperative, if we don't find a way to procreate, none of us would be here. And for the overwhelming majority of human experience, there weren't instruction manuals.

No.

And they're certainly not for anyone, any primate cousins or anywhere else in the animal kingdom. So you're like, okay, so that is purely hormones and incentive structures baked into our mammalian bodies to encourage that behavior. Well, not surprisingly, evolution through the kitchen sink at pair bonding to ensure that we did it. it runs and governs most of our lives on autopilot, often to negative effect, lots of trauma, lots of grief, lots of unhappiness. But if you can untie the puppet strings of evolutionary imprinting, what can you do with all of the sexual nervous system? And John Lilly, the famous renegade University of Pennsylvania neuroscientist back in the day, mapped in the early 50s that the entire basically pleasure centers and network of our human nervous system map one-to-one with the sexual arousal system. Not because there's anything kind of sordid or salacious about it, it's just that was Mother Nature's job one. And then all of our other pleasure encoding and sensation seeking is mapped onto that pre-existing circuitry. So that's another one. And then you get into the body.

And sexuality is to speak to that. It is something we really haven't seen as a vehicle for awakening and for connection other than sort of the obvious ways. But this is something that has been in ancient traditions, whether it is the Kama Sutra from India with this Tibetan, you know... -The Vajrayana. -The Vajrayana practices of tantric yoga. I remember being in a Tibetan monastery up in Northern India with the abbot of the Bön tradition, which was the pre-Buddhist, indigenous shamanic tradition of Tibet. and he was very cute. He was probably in his mid 80s and he's a monk, right? And I'm hanging out with him and we're having lunch and he's so excited to show me this book that he has. And this guy's sort of sensibly an enlightened master. He was a Dali Lama's meditation teacher. He brought over the Himalayas, the texts of the Bön tradition and single-handedly rebuilt the whole religion. And he had this book that he wanted to show me, which was of the Dali Lama's secret temple. And behind the Potala Palace in Lhasa, in Tibet.

Yes, yes, yes.

Sitting in the island, in the lake? Yes, there's a lake, and then there's this island, and only the Dalai Lama could go there. And essentially it was this tantric sexual sort of kind of murals, sort of explaining how to wake up through sexuality, which I thought was kind of funny to be in a Buddhist monastery, but they're all into that.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. The seventh Dalai Lama was actually like the Lord Byron of the Himalayas. He was a total dissolute, stillettan and just spent all of his time on that little island.

Yeah, incredible. So that's sort of a different framework than most of us think about with sexuality. And I want to sort of talk about how do we start to activate that? Because most of us haven't even really touched the surface of our body's capacity to feel, to sense, to experience what we can through sexuality. So I want to come back to that. But going back to the next one, which is embodiment.

Yeah, so I mean, there's all sorts of, I mean, obviously the more integrated and aligned and we are in our physical bodies, the healthier and happier we tend to be. There's a whole field of embodied cognition kind of supporting that how our bodies and brains are affects our hearts and minds. And that's fairly straightforward, sort of established science at this point. There are several in particular that sort of have, you know, most folks don't know about them and they have a really helpful balancing effect to our whole system.

Yeah.

And, you know, One is our fascia, the sliding surfaces of our body that is arguably an interconnected organ, toes to the tops of our scalp. And if anybody's ever seen chicken or you've ever had meat from the butcher and you kind of see that white almost filmy layer, right, that's the fascia. And typically for most of us, when we get wounded or injured, it freezes and bonds to prevent injury, but then when the injury is healed, it kind of stays fused.

Right.

And keeping those sliding surfaces supple and fluid is really, really helpful for all sorts of health. For yoga.

Yeah. Massage. Yeah.

I mean, even the big trend these days in theraguns and percussive massage and ways to kind of break up those tissues. So, that's a beautiful way to take metaphors like I'm centered or I'm balanced or I'm flexible in my life or in my relationships and actually just make it palpable and physical.

Yeah. And then, I mean, it's so interesting, Jamie, because I, i just, as a doctor, I see so many people disembodied, not living in their body. We, we are so gifted with this extraordinary organism to feel, to sense, to do, to move, to play, to experience. And so many people are so disconnected. And I, and it makes sense, given our trauma culture. I mean, one in four people are sexually abused, and then there's all the other kinds of trauma we experience as children. And so in order to survive, we, we disconnect from our bodies. this is why, you know, somehow someone can get from like a normal weight as a kid to 600 pounds. It doesn't happen overnight, right? And how does that happen? It's because we're so disconnected. And I think these practices, again, are accessible. We don't learn them. We're not taught them. They're not part of our culture, but they are part of other cultures, whether it's Tai Chi or Chi Gong or yoga or those kinds of martial arts or dance or movement. that have always been in human culture, but we sort of, you know, we go to clubs and party, but that's about it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then even a couple of sort of big metronomes to our entire sort of physiological systems, as you well know, are the endocannabinoid system, which most folks aren't even aware of. In fact, I think there was a study maybe about 10 years ago that said that 90% of US physicians weren't even kind of conversant in it as a system or its impact. But I mean, there's been phenomenal studies in Israel on that since the 1960s. Raphael Mechoulam is the pioneering physician. He actually did it with NIH grants from the US for that whole time. And it's the system into which cannabis interacts, but it's not because of cannabis.

That's not the body already had that going for it.

Yeah, right, right. The body, I mean, sea sponges from 500 million years ago have an endocannabinoid system. So the fact is that it governs everything from bone growth to stem cells to brain health. Israeli military studied it for TBIs, right, for traumatic brain injuries and being able to flood the body in all of those things. There's studies at Cornell Medical Center on the impact on mood and fundamentally anandamide is what they call the bliss molecule, which is endogenous to human brains. And that is what the endocannabinoid system produces.

Yeah, we call it endocannabinoid receptors, opioid receptors. There are actually metabolizing and interacting with molecules that our body already has.

Absolutely. And in fact, there's an interesting genetic variant where Nigerians have an unusually higher amount of anandamide. Oh. And there's a couple of other cultures around the world that do, and typically it reflects in less anxiety, greater fear extinction from adverse events, and overall a generally higher set point. So that's amazing and has all these profound impacts that virtually none of us are aware of, but it governs huge swaths of our physiology and resilience. And then the vagus nerve, which is becoming increasingly more known through Stephen Porges' work and Bessel van der Kolk and others, but it's largely unknown. And it goes from our brain stem all the way down to our root. And again, is this huge metronome governing all kinds of internal regulation. And you can improve it by gargling, by singing, by humming, by massaging your throat. pacemaker interventions, there's more kind of high-tech pharmacological stuff, but like just those alone, just fascia, endocannabinoid system, and vagal nerve tone, you don't have to become an athlete, you don't have to become a yogi, there's nothing extreme about it. It's just learning how to adjust the knobs and levers of our bodies and brains for greater health, greater resilience, and overall higher well-being.

And the practices that help you do these things are in the book. Right.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and particularly easy ones like respiration. Here's just ways to become more in charge of your respiratory awareness. And I'm sure that many of your listeners are probably familiar with Breathwork. They might have heard of folks like.

Wim Hof or other- We've had a.

Number of those folks on the podcast. Progressing the conversation, James Nestor wrote that great book, Breath. But I think people often these days still fixate on A specific version of breathing, often a hyperventilatory state shifting one, assume that's what breathwork kind of is versus, hey, the goal is to be conversant across the entire range of rate, rhythm, and depth for desired outcome, and then we can kind of just be.

In our own skins. And then breathwork, you know, I was a yoga teacher before as a doctor, they called Pranayama, which is all these.

Different techniques for modulating your breath and changing your biology through breathing. Yeah, I mean, Aleister Crowley, the sort of infamous Western sex magician who wrote dozens of books and never said anything straight. It was always hidden in riddles and verses and all this kind of stuff. The one thing he says out loud on the page is Pranayama, Pranayama, Pranayama, Pranayama, Pranayama alone is everything.

Yeah, it's so powerful. So you have breathing, you have being in your body, you have sexuality, and then you have substances in music.

Yeah, so you can kind of consider those depending on how you want to make the argument. Ron Siegel at UCLA has talked about the urge for animals to seek non-ordinary states or intoxication is not only older, not only ubiquitous across human cultures, it's not only ubiquitous across primates or even mammals, it even goes to birds. Really?

Who seek non-ordinary states of consciousness? What do you mean, there's tripping parakeets?

Yes, yes, absolutely. And fundamentally, he was saying that but other than air, food, and sex, you can make a case it's our fourth biological drive. So you can either see it as an amplifier. Oliver Sacks, the famous neuroscientist, said, say what you will about drugs, but they offer transcendence on demand. They actually work in a predictable way, which is part of the reason why the psychedelic renaissance is generating so many radical insights into theories of mind and consciousness is because you can predictably give somebody a molecule a compound, park them in an fMRI machine or whatever other measurement you're going to be doing, and you will get a repeatable result versus getting a Tibetan lama to be chanting or meditating or something harder to pin down or more esoteric. So substances and specifically state shifting, and my inquiry in the book tended to focus on those compounds which were both available and accessible. They weren't either strictly controlled or wildly esoteric. So they were available over the counter, off the shelf by prescription, schedule 3-4 compounds, those kind of things. But also from functional, what do they do? Compounds that typically, some of the most interesting compounds to provide that kind of peak state experience, that kind of death rebirth experience, are those that drop your neural EEG down into delta wave states. Yeah.

Which is what you get from meditation.

Or... Well, very esoteric meditation. I mean, into the Vajrayana traditions, a lot of meditations are sort of alpha to theta. I mean, A, there's no singular meditation. They're all very different, produce different things, as you well know. And their neuroelectric signatures vary comparably. So deep delta, waking, like delta sleep, delta is typically only accessible to most of us in deep and dreamless sleep. Waking Delta is a very rare, pretty esoteric state because it's down to damn near brain dead, so four hertz and less. And that has super intriguing correlates with near-death experiences. So Carl Djerassi at Stanford has done all that work on optogenetics and the ability to source different states via tweaking things, obviously, in mice and that kind of stuff. But in human patients, they had epileptic patients and they gave them the compound ketamine, which is a dissociative anesthetic, which induces delta wave states, found, and then correlated that with a sense of egolessness or ego death and correlated that with antidepressive effects. And so what they realized is that they isolated the region of the brain that was coming in at right around 3 hertz was the sort of signature that they were picking up when patients were under the influence of ketamine and reporting a sort of selflessness or an out-of-body experience. Then what was really interesting is that they then went back in and electrically stimulated that same 3 hertz signal in that same region without the drug without ketamine, and patients were still reported the same out-of-body experience. And then as a result of that work, another group started researching nitrous oxide for its potential- Laughing gas. Yes, exactly what folks use at dentists, what doulas and midwives use to ease childbirth, that compound. Because they were like, oh, maybe there is an analog for nitrous oxide as an antidepressive also, and it is actually proven out as well. And then the anesthesiology team at MIT did research on nitrous oxide and were shocked to find that it actually doesn't, not only does it induce delta wave sleep or state for three to 12 minutes after a 50-50 oxygen-nitrous oxide gas blend infusion, so wearing a mask and breathing it, but for three to 12 minutes you get double the amplitude delta wave oscillations in the brain before the brain then normalizes out. So you get all of these experiences and you realize, oh, delta wave activity is arguably the signature of a sort of quote-unquote near-death experience, AKA what has been, as you were saying in the wisdom traditions, a death rebirth initiation protocol. So you're like, okay, so those are potentially super interesting because always, it's not just that, this is like that old movie Flatliners, with all the med students go into the basement and take turns paddling each other and see, and there's always the cautionary tale of don't play God, right? But we are close to getting to do that in more controlled and more responsible ways now. And the interior content of those experiences are often quite profound and provide as much access to the healing, to the anti-depressive, anti-anxiety effects as the physiological experience itself.

And they can help heal traumas?

Well, I mean, the There's strong evidence to suggest that, and I just don't think we are anywhere near teasing this apart. And you and I talked about this a bunch of isolating factors. What of even more broadly, all of the research into the psychedelic renaissance, whether it's ayahuasca, MDMA, ibogaine, psilocybin, the compounds that are under a fairly intensive comprehensive study, it's hard at this stage to really separate out what is pure neurochemistry, resulting in decrease in depressive symptoms, anxiety, et cetera, whatever they're studying, versus what is the interior content, the ineffability, the mysterious nature, the profundity, whatever it is.

Once you see God, how can you turn back and not see it? Yeah.

And I don't know if we'll ever truly unravel which tail is wagging which dog. on that. Yeah.

So, you know, in the service of this sort of conversation, there are some substances you talked about that are accessible and legal, whether it's ketamine or nitrous oxide, in many states cannabis, as sort of doorways to help us access these altered states, which you say are non-ordinary states of consciousness that humans and primates and other animals seek, which is interesting to me. And I think we're all looking for that, whether it's we pray or whether we dance or whether we listen to music or whether we We know we take substances or addictions, they're all attempts to change our state, right? Because it's somehow disconnected from something that makes us feel whole and complete. But these are sort of, in a way, more adaptive and more therapeutic strategies than often we've used. And you've sort of codified them in a way that is very interesting. And you actually created a research project to look at these things in a more objective way. And I'd love for you to talk about this research project because essentially you took people and put them through a three-month program and measured objective scientific metrics to look at the changes in their state and the change in their biology and the change in their psychology. And you discovered some pretty interesting things. So I'd love you to sort of share about this concept of hedonic engineering, which is sort of what the larger frame of this conversation. It's not about hedonism, it's about how do you activate these altered states which help us then be more connected to ourselves, be more connected to our partners, be more connected to the social fabric in which we live. And how did you sort of create these experiences for people? What were the elements of them and what were the findings of this study?

Yeah, I mean, it was really interesting because as I was doing this research, I basically just started just keeping my eyes and ears open for any published research that was indicating any interaction with the body and the brain at the air and, you know, in the realms of neuroanatomy, neuroelectricity, neurochemistry. So what was going on and where was it going on? What parts of the brain was it being informed by? Cardiac state or coherence or condition, endocrine system, any sort of just how, you know, does any intervention positively inform or help boost the the metrics of well-being and all the way into non-ordinary states. And if you sort of play that fill in the blank bingo, you end up in kind of this unavoidable place of sort of sexy biohacking. Because most biohacking is about what pills to take, what headset to wear, it's very kind of geeky, very technological, and often consumer driven. People advancing the biohacking movement tend to want to sell you the thing that they tell you. solves all the bits. So basically we wanted to see if, as we were putting together this chart or matrix of all the different ways to affect the elements of our body and brain to create healthy outcomes, we sort of ended up in this strange or curious spot, which was sort of sexy biohacking. You're like, well, it seems like if you're really looking to intervene in our bodily systems, the sexual arousal pleasure centers are a sort of helpful to non-negotiable part of it, which puts this into the realm of consensual couples practices. So it's not that that was in any way unique or specific. It was just evolution through the kitchen sink at pair bonding. And back to John Lilly's original insight, our sexual arousal networks map one-to-one with our pleasure centers. So it's just seemed the easiest and simplest way was to have pre-existing couples come in being willing to practice some version of a kind of a sexual fitness protocol. And we were drawing quite heavily on Kinsey Research Institute fellows, Dr. Helen Fisher and Dr. Nicole Prause's work because both of them have gone deeply into the neuroscience and psychology of arousal and then even physical and psychological healing. This is Prause's work especially via orgasm and via sexual arousal. She's actually doing work on women's orgasm as prescription pharmaceutical effectively, right, to alleviate pain, anxiety, insomnia, inflammation, all sorts of things. So you realize, wow, how interesting, and again, cheap and accessible to everybody. So that's kind of where we were starting. And we also wanted to track not just subjective reports, did I like this? Did it feel am I happier or sadder? But actually try and create, use metrics that are available for the entire academic research community, including citizen science. And so we took a couple of metrics that are sort of gold standards in the fields, for peak states. If you were conducting a sort of a sexual yoga practice, are you accessing non-dual, non-ordinary, transcendent states? If so, how often, how deeply? As well as day-to-day kind of flow states and how much is it shifting your ease and focus and concentration in daily life? And then also on the trauma, on the healing, a self-assessed trauma score. So how much deep how many long-term adverse life events have I had? How deeply do they impact my day-to-day, my emotional resilience, those kinds of things, as well as biometric, because sometimes we're not great self-reporters, especially of traumatic events. So how do we deal with that micro-PTSD we were talking about earlier? Just my nervous system is fragged and fibrillating. So we just used biometric devices. We're both wearing an Oura ring. Oura ring. They put a hardware variability.

Right.

And measuring overnight, heart rate variability is a sign of how well balanced is my nervous system. And then also connection, because again, back to evolution, throwing the kitchen sink at pair bonding, it's like that's the one relationship in our lives that and the children that result that evolution has strongly, strongly, strongly encoded us to do well. And so if we can't figure it out at that level, it probably just gets harder and weaker downstream, right, with strangers, with anybody else.

I was sort of thinking about this, talking to friend of mine about who's an example of a healthy relationship these days. It's hard to find. Yeah.

And it's kind of a raw deal that many couples get into, which is, and this is back to Helen Fisher's work, all the original hormonal imperative to mate, the testosterone and the estrogen, and then all of the bells and whistles, the fireworks of early attraction, the dopamine and the norepinephrine and the drop in serotonin, all those things kind of fizzle over time as you then have a child, you then get into the grind, sleep interruptions, the hassle of domestic life. So the question there is, if you engage in a deliberate sexual fitness protocol, not something esoteric, not even something romantic, just saying, hey, this is an essential part of our nervous systems and physiology. When we cycle it, we are healthier, and we're also signaling to our body, I'm still alive, I still matter, don't start phasing me out yet. Does it improve connectivity? does it improve intimacy with a partner? And does it improve your overall, you know, affect or positivity on life? So you do all those things. And again, you know, now we're wading into, you know, delicate Waters. There's probably not a more intimate and strongly held sense of, like, life than my sexuality. How good I am at it or not at it. How do I, you know, and what do we do behind closed doors? So we weren't going to be overly prescriptive. So we just said, here are some basic protocols to do on a daily basis, a weekly basis, a monthly basis. Here's the thing that we want, baselines that we just want everybody to engage in how they see fit. And then kind of gave everybody your Lego set. Gave everybody a menu and said, here's how you increase nitric oxide, here's how you boost vagal nerve tone, here's how you engage your endocannabinoid system, here's how you do all the things that we've been discussing. And there's kind of mild, medium and spicy. You choose. and under the advisement of a functional medicine doctor, you guys can engage any of those combinations as you see fit and just report back on that in your subjective logs. So over 12 weeks then, the results were, I mean, fundamentally, an increase in connection, a decrease in heart rate variability, meaning a decrease in stress, and a boost in mystical states, and particularly for women. So women had higher self-reported trauma at the beginning, but they also had the largest delta or positive improvement over time. And then, and a majority of subjects reported that during that practice with their partner, they experienced the highest mystical state or non, you know, state of sacred state of the sublime that they'd experienced in their lives.

Wow.

And then the end results outperformed talk therapy and even sort of isolated psychedelic therapy as well. And it would make sense.

It's a big change.

It's a huge change since that's the kind of lead candidate right now for addressing our social ills. And the beauty of it is that it does it at the level of pair-bonded family unit. So any benefits that an individual experience, goes into their partner, goes into their children if they have them, family unit, and it can hopefully radiate out from there. So it's very much a kind of the most grassroots way of DIY healing and integration that I've seen. Because, you know, Rick Doblin, the founder of MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, I'm sure, again, many of your audience are familiar. Rick and I were at an event on a panel and then we were talking in between breaks and I just wanted to kind of catch up. I was like, what's happening with the phase three trials? What's the latest and greatest and what's happening on the neuroscience? And he said, yeah, basically what we have found in our studies is that the benefits, I mean a couple of interesting things. One was is that moderate dose MDMA, 85 milligrams versus like 150, was actually better for the psychotherapeutic. So it was actually more helpful not to simply just get love bombed and just kind of be in a puddle of goo, just fired up and stoked on the world, but actually kind of a threshold level that allowed people to access traumatic memories, process them with a therapist, rework the memories, and then kind of put them back on the shelves of their mind. And then he said, yeah, that the high prolactin oxytocin vasopressin signature that we're seeing in those patients where they're having such positive results, the closest analog we can see is the post-orgasmic state. And that's what led me to Nicole Prause's work, where she was doing the orgasm is prescription. You're like, okay, why on earth isn't everybody across cultures around the world, why don't we all have some sexual fitness practice?

Yeah.

Right.

It doesn't. I've ever heard that term sexual fitness. It's a very new idea. Yeah. And what you're doing is you're sort of stacking a lot of things from a lot of different areas of exploration and human therapy and consciousness and neuroscience and sort of putting them all together in a cocktail, which has never really been done before in an intentional way. I think people have probably played with it on the margins, but, yeah, and, and, you know, what you've discovered was something quite profound. And I, I think, you know, you're, you're, you're using the doorways that the human body already has for activating these States, whether nitric oxide pathways or whether it's vagal nerve, which is your relaxation system, or your endorphins and dopamine system, which are your pleasure molecules, or oxytocin, which is the molecule that gets released when a woman is breastfeeding or when you're making love or testosterone and adding in all these plant-based or other psychoactive compounds that whether it's cannabis or ketamine or or GHB or 2CB or MDMA or things that are actually kind of emerging as they're not necessarily natural molecules. They're kind of man-made molecules, but they can activate some of these states and pathways and various kinds of other psychological therapies. And I'm putting them all together in a set of simple practices that are safe, accessible, scalable for the most part. Not some of these compounds are hard to get, but that help people change the way they think, they feel, they see themselves, they see their place in the world and kind of create meaning in a way where there was a lack of meaning. We're in a crisis of meaning. And that that's really what recapture the rapture, I think, is about, is about how do we recapture meaning and how do we capture connection? How do we capture intimacy with ourselves and each other and our world? So I think it's kind of brilliant. And I'd love you to sort of talk about what you actually had these couples do, because it's kind of, you know, it's kind sounds to most people, I think, a little odd and strange and weird, but actually it's actually pretty interesting. And some of these practices are ancient practices too. So can you talk about what the instructions were exactly and what these couples actually did?

Sure. And obviously for anybody who is a student of Neo Tantra or from originating in Eastern traditions or Western sex magical schools, this will seem remarkably tame and sort of beginner level, but the intention was to make it accessible to folks. And so we borrowed from Nicole Prause's work, where she had been studying subjects doing 15 minutes of clitoral stimulation of the female-identified patient or practitioner.

That's kind of ohming, what's been called ohming.

It has been. I mean, that's how it was branded and then very problematically kind of captured in that space. But yes, fundamentally the idea of just simple, no frills, not as foreplay, just as kind of almost a, you know, almost think of it as sort of tactile medication, you know, just stimulation of the high nerve endings and concentrations in a woman's clitoris and just using that to create the neurochemical cascade on a recurring basis, on a daily basis, and just having that as a baseline practice. and then engaging in, as we discussed, all the bodily elements. So Thai massage, which is a very beautiful practice with two partners where you can kind of, you basically yod on each other's limbs. So you're kind of, you know, you're pulling and provided, pulling traction and doing all these things to kind of open and expand the joint capsules, lengthen ligaments and tendons and musculature. It's a very nice kind of grooming practice. Like partner stretching. Yeah, good old bonobos, you know, like grooming each other. We've stopped doing that.

Right.

And yet it's essential. So that using foam rollers, roll out tools, Theragun, percussion, massage, those kinds of things on a daily basis. And then two 60-minute sessions a week, typically Tuesdays, Thursdays, where you would engage in all of that and then leading into 30 to 45 minutes of basically partner erotic play into potentially sexual intercourse. But just doing it, if folks are familiar with the coital alignment technique, which is a very specific adaptation of the missionary position where the male will be on top and can sort of push forward. So it's pubic bone on pubic bone and you just have that experience, but then engaging in focused movement and breath practice. So it's not kind of like wild mayhem. It's just, can we create this bodily hookup? Can we stimulate our nervous systems in these ways and can we breathe in ways that are focused and intentional and then see what results? So not like romantic.

It's not like the end game of just having an orgasm.

It's actually- no, it was just truly that sexual fitness practice. And then once a week, ideally a sort of self-identified Sabbath-like experience, just some half a day where you kind of turn off the phones and close the doors and dedicate to reconnecting and potentially.

Including.

Hyperventilatory breath work.

So- To include breath work as part of this too.

Yeah, because that goes back to the respiration embodiment, sexuality, substances, music, right? So the whole suite of interventions and then potentially once a month to once, depending where people's tolerance for intensity and able to stably hold it, you could introduce cannabinoids, so edible cannabis and/or smokable cannabis if that was congruent and/or available legally in your area, and then potentially breath work with, and this was functional meddoc, overseen, which would have been oxygen and/or carbon and/or nitrous oxide. So you could begin breathwork practices with, instead of just breathing the available air, actually specifically choosing to supersaturate your lungs with different gas blends. A little bit how scuba divers will blend different gas blends. And then they were open to choosing that up to and including oxytocin, ketamine, nasal spray, which would be a sort of a primer to put you in a sort of, ironically at low doses like that, a sort of embody, disembodied state. So it almost serves as a disinhibitor and kind of a sensorium, as well as the oxytocin potentially increasing feelings of connectivity. There's some question of blood-brain barrier crossing and absorption and bioavailability of that, but that's still to be determined. And then everybody just kind of kept journals over the 12 weeks. and reported, I mean a number of people reported, not surprisingly, if you're doing this with a practice partner and you're intensifying the frequency and the consistency and even the intensity of your sexual fitness practice together, good things and bad things are going to come up. You know, you're both going to have higher highs, like, oh my gosh, we've reclaimed our love and passion, we feel like teenagers again, you know, like you've reanimated the polarity. of the early lust and attraction phases, even in a longer term relationship, but then also running into the rocks of a little bit like the MAPS research with trauma sufferers, right? That idea of like, oh, I'm now in that safe and secure connected state. So some part of my system is saying, okay, now is a time that it's okay to bring up a deep thing. And it could be relational issues, past things, it could even be predate the relationship. It could be adolescent traumas, early adult traumas, often sexually, relationally coded. And it can even include sort of access to almost transpersonal senses, all women everywhere or all men. And you can start and people start interacting with that. And similar to the MAPS, PTSD studies, as partners took those memories off the shelf, as it were, and explored them, discussed them in the state of safety, connection, belonging, right? The vasopressin oxytocin, you know, some of those kind of those states, they were able to rework them and release them. Now, there were a couple of couples that actually ejected out of the study.

Because?

Well, we started with 12 couples. We ended with 10 because they came up against anything from, you know, just life compatibility and fit. They simply weren't able to stick with the program to another couple that it just, It uncorked harder stuff than they were able to deal with themselves. Yeah. And so that's also really important to know that it's not simply a Willy Wonka ticket to the chocolate factory. It is a very intense, I kind of think of it as sort of NC-17, fifth-class rock climbing. You know, it's not for kids and the falls can kill you.

Right?

But it doesn't mean that we blame it on the mountain if somebody goes up there unprepared and falls off. You teach it, you train it, you have systems and safety and backup and a traveling partner. And if you do that, then you can stand on the top of a beautiful, beautiful peak at sunrise.

Yeah, that's amazing. So basically, sort of unveiled a way for us to access healing states through sexuality that incorporate multiple modalities from body work to breath work to substances to our own sexual energies actually help us release things that keep us from ourselves and from each other in a way that heals trauma and has the potential to create a greater healing within the culture, it sounds like. Yeah.

And I mean, and if you stay with that practice, it sort of spins up like electromagnets, you know, basically where the, you know, the the rotation of the copper wire on the metal poles creates magnetism. So you can literally learn to make love. You can engage the protocols that create the neurochemical signatures and profiles of everything from lust to attraction to long-term love. And it's literally practice-based. When you stop the practices, it powers down and the polarity dissolves.

Well, it's like fitness, right? It's like exercising and you get unfit.

100%. And that's really one of the biggest unlocks a lot of the subjects noted in their journals, which was, oh my gosh, like committing to sexual fitness as ironclad practice. I don't wait till my teeth are shining and I'm smiling to floss my teeth. I floss every day because I know I don't wait till I feel like a million bucks and I can bench press a car to go to the gym. These are long-term incremental practices. And that was one of the biggest insights, I think, that a lot of the subjects had was like, oh my.

Gosh, this is game changing to commit.

To this practice whether we want to or not. and then the question is, is now my cup overflows.

Yeah, sometimes you don't feel like going to the gym, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But to have at your nexus a thriving, stable, love-filled relationship where my nervous system is defragged, where I'm integrated, where I'm connected to my closest quote unquote stakeholders is a great place to start from. And then the question is, can we take the dyads or the pairs and turn those into dozens, a group of people that are close and connected. And can those dozens connect with dozens of dozens? And can we actually just one pod at a time expand that kind of care and connection and commitment to each other more broadly through the culture?

Yeah, wouldn't that be interesting? And that would, I think, help us, like you said, rethink God, sex, and death in a world that's lost its mind. Jamie, this is quite amazing. And I think for those interested in the details of the study and what they did and how they did it. The book is a great explanation of those, which is available everywhere. You can get your books or you can go to recapturetherapture.com youm know, we were chatting a little bit earlier over lunch about your post Burning Man experience with your wife and discovering a doorway to states of being and feeling and meaning that you previously had not accessed in the same way. And it led to work that you've been doing over the last 10 years that finally led to this book and to talking about some of the existential challenges and crises we're facing globally now, economic, political, social, environmental, climate. I mean, the list goes on health. And it can be a very disillusioning time. When the headlines and news are all pretty depressing, whether it's the war in Ukraine, whether it's climate change, whether it's increasing the degradation of our health, the polarization of society, this disconnection from each other. So, you know, we've kind of have a world where it's hard to make sense of what's happening. It's hard to make sense of where we're going and what we're doing. And it leads to what I think you referred to in your talk that you just gave at Harvest Festival. We are in Bodrum in Turkey. Leads to something called micro-PSD, which is PTSD, micro-PTSD, which I think is a very interesting term, talking about the sort of little traumas that we all face that sort of degrade our sense of well-being and happiness and health. So how did you sort of come to this concept of Recapture the Rapture and how do we start to sort of make sense of the world and how we lost our way?

Yeah, I mean, funnily enough, I think it was probably, I mean, it was ages ago, it was probably 2015. And I just remember seeing a news clip of some American politician, House of Representatives kind of fellow, maybe from Iowa, it might have been that Steve King fellow or something, stridently holding forth in front of a microphone about Women's reproductive rights, which has obviously come back to the fore lately.

For against them.

No, massively against. And I was like, well, what on earth does this old white dude, you know, and I think there's some crazy statistic that members of Congress, only 30% have passports.

Wow.

And you're like, what? Yeah, so here is this, you know, old white guy, evangelical, alt-right, great leanings, holding forth stridently about women's reproductive rights around, about which he knows next to nothing and yet has this strongly, strongly held convicted opinion that is actually going to be shaping legislature, politics and the actual on the ground realities for, you know, half of the world, all the women. And I thought, my God, what a crazy situation we're in where the, you know, this goes back to William Butler Yeats's poem, the Second Coming, you know, that the one about slouching towards Bethlehem, you know, that kind of thing. But he has that great line. where he says, the best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with a passionate intensity. And in that moment, that kind of- Wow. Right, there's just that sense of like-.

The best lack all conviction and the.

Worst are filled with a passionate intensity.

Passionate intensity. Yeah.

And that to me was the seed of writing this book, which was, oh my gosh, the crazies have hijacked the mic of our collective conversation, you know, on both sides of the political spectrum and the moderate middle. Right? That the best of us, the rest of us, need to find a way back to shaping the narrative of where has we come from, what's going on, and what do we do now? And that was really it. It was the idea that at a high level, you know, rapture ideologies, the idea that there is, you know, the world as we know it is doomed. It could be, you know, spiritual, religious, ethical interpretation because of, you know, moral degradation where sinners and, you know, and, and, to pay. Or it could be a techno-utopian rapture, right? It's systemic overconsumption, collapse, population, whatever it would be. So we need to build, you know, underground bunkers or colonies, space colonies, right? Either way, we are being increasingly in the grips of these rapture ideologies, and all of them share the same trait, which is their one percenter solutions. Now, how you slice and dice who gets to be in the one percent, it could be the religiously observant or pious. It could be the technological, best and brightest. It could be meritocratic like that, or it could be simple socioeconomics who has the money and the cash to build a ranch in New Zealand. They're all 1% solutions for our collective challenge. And that leaves 99% of us high and dry. So how do we reclaim the story and the narrative? around our collective future, and then also kind of a double meaning of the word rapture. So not just a sort of biblical end times or techno-utopian Kurzweil singularity, but also our lowercase rapture. The idea of our bliss, our healing, our inspiration, our connection, our agency. How do we reclaim that? Because if we can't reclaim that, then we sure as hell can't engage the capital R rapture conversation. So it's a sort of a dual interpretation of the word. How do we reclaim our inner passion, courage, and conviction so that we can have the bigger conversation about what do we all do now?

So in a way, healing of the world starts with us.

Yes, and that's a slippery slope for folks that are socialized and conditioned to believe in the kind of personal growth slash new age spiritual bypass, right? Because often when people of privilege and access to personal development and growth, biohacking, optimization, spiritual seeking, hear that, they get agitated about the state of the world. And then there's that quick, quick, quick movement into a spiritual bypass of, oh, change comes from within. We can't heal the world until we heal ourselves. and that becomes a convenient excuse to go back to my weekend workshop, to seek stillness on my meditation cushion, to do my yoga practices or my psychedelic therapies, my medicine journeys, whatever it might be. And we've effectively bypassed our social responsibility to people who don't have access to those opportunities, people where we absolutely need to be acting on collective behalf of social justice inclusion for the bottom four billion people. So there's a lot of, you know, well-established critiques on kind 1950s to now mix spirituality.

You sort of break it down in ways that make sense to me, which is kind of cultivating our own ability to connect to source or truth or meaning or you call it rapture. But that has to happen within the context of you call it ecstasis or ecstasy states, right? That has to be connected to community and that has to be connected to the context in which we live and also the healing, the general healing of our larger toxic culture.

Absolutely. And then there's also that, I think, a potentially helpful guideline, which is sort of 80-20 woke to broke.

Tell me what you mean by that.

Well, the idea that, again, in the kind of commodified personal growth space, there can be an almost preoccupation with the perfectability of ourselves. And I might have access to- the navel gazing, basically. The navel gazing. the Gnosticism, the spiritual materialism of like, I am going to keep seeking peak states and keep seeking them until at some magical future, I am free from all of my worldly constraints and suffering and problems versus hey, because there is that kind of parado principle in effect, right? The first 20% of our access to peak states, whether that's meditation, bodywork, group therapy, psychedelic experiences, music, whatever it might be, the first 20% typically gives us 80% of our hits, of our growth, of our insight. And then the Pareto ratio shifts, and then the following, and if I didn't know that the 80-20 split was in effect, I might go, oh my gosh, I've just spent 20% of my time. I've had 80% insights. I'm going to keep going. This is the most amazing thing ever, not realizing there's a diminishing returns on those things. So then I become quite self-indulged and I spend all my time, all my money, you know, traveling, jumping, seeking, seeking, seeking versus, hey, get, you know, take your proverbial red pill. Realize you were maybe into a socially conditioned world environment, series of choices, life. And then remember what you forgot. Remember what's yours to do. mend where you are debilitatingly broken. But after that, get back up. And then report back to the front lines because we're needed. We're all needed. And I thought, I mean, one of my dear friends is a SEAL Team Six commander. And we got to experience some of their base in Norfolk, what they called their mind gym, which was where they did all of their body brain training for operators coming off deployment.

Mm-.

And I was just thinking of them one day and I was like, oh my gosh, they come to this amazing place with all the biofeedback, the float tanks, all, you know, the body work, all this stuff. But they don't spend the rest of their lives there. They don't decide they're gonna quit the teams and go and get their yoga certification or massage therapist, you know, accreditation. They're like, put, you know, patch me up, put me in, coach. I have a mission that is greater than myself. I have a commitment to my brothers. and I want to get back to the front lines as soon as possible to serve a greater good. And that feels good for all of us.

Yeah, it's interesting that you bring that up. I had a friend who was a Navy SEAL and he was deployed in, I think, Iraq. One day someone put on the steps of his trailer How to Change youe Mind by Michael Pollan and he read the book and he came back and explored the psychedelic space and ended up realizing that he, even though he thought he was in an elevated state, he was really kind of a robot in a robotic state. And that changed everything he thought about what he'd done and what he wanted to do and actually ended up ending his career as a Navy SEAL as a result of that journey. So it's interesting. And the other thing you sort of speak about just reminded me that this is not a new conversation that we're having. I studied Buddhism in college and there was this sort of framework of Buddhism that was the sort of original Buddhism, which was what we call Theravada Buddhism, also known as Hinayana Buddhism, which means lesser vehicle, because it was not named by them as lesser vehicle. It was basically about self-realization, that the highest good was to become awake yourself. But as it evolved, you know, the same problem occurred, which was not just about enlightenment for yourself and salvation for yourself, but about how do we heal our greater society and culture. And that is where the model of Mahayana Buddhism, also known as the Greater Vehicle, came into play, and the concept of the Bodhisattva who reaches the gates of enlightenment, but then turns back to help relieve the suffering of all sentient beings. And so essentially it is what you are talking about.

It is like, okay, you can get yourself straight, but you have to come back in the game. Yeah, I mean, even Japanese Zen has another very similar story of the Zen ox-herding, parable, right? There's 10 sort of 10 panels of art and it starts out with, you know, the individual seeking enlightenment that in this story is represented as the ox, right? And they first he chases the ox, you know, first he sees it, then he chases it, then he follows it into the forest, then he mounts it and becomes one with it. And, you know, I read that in college and I was like, oh, wow, everything I thought was the pinnacle of human consciousness or seeking is like panel number four out of ten. And then there's all these esoteric distinctions of like ox forgotten and self alone, and there's just a mountain, there's no ox, there's no dude, there's no nothing. But the final one is, it's beautiful because it says, His doors and windows are locked. Even the wisest scholars cannot find him. He is down in the marketplace among the people with helping hands. And that notion of, you know, Hero's Journey 101, like you start out at home, you go away on your adventure, you return home. and the idea of going to sort of ordinary enlightenment and the fact that all the bells and whistles and all the fancy state seeking and all the pretty lights ultimately should dissolve into complete human ordinariness. You know, in the wisdom traditions, that's often sort of known as the twice-born human, right? Someone, because When we are all firstborn, we all get born into this life, into this world.

-Born again.

-Well, yeah, that one has got more problematic connotations. But they are speaking to something really true and beautiful, which is none of us, unless you have some faith, some preconceived conception of it, none of us chose being born the first time. Our parents got together happily or accidentally, we were conceived, and we were in this womb-like amazing state, and then we were birthed into a world cold, scary, loud, kicking and screaming. And there was that instant fall from grace. Some of us, if we were fortunate, had families of origin that kind of kept that womb-like container. Many of us didn't. We get booted out early, but all of us at some point are kicked into a cold, hard, unforgiving world that doesn't really behave as we imagined it should have or might have. It's not safe, it's not fair, right? It's not always kind, it's not always predictable. And so, many people want to get out of this world. We seek some form of escape. We seek states. We get snookered into addictions. It could be, you know, surfing the web, it could be pornography, it could be gambling, it could be substances, it could be food, addictions.

They're all attempts to get to the.

Right place, but they're all maladaptive. Yes, and they're all attempts to kind of get out of this raw deal of life. And so, it feels like it's not until we have the chance to experience some form of a death practice. And they're ubiquitous across the traditions, but also around the world, of things that either literally or figuratively give us a chance to have that choice, to come back to this mortal experience with gratitude and without apology or reservation. And you see it in Jimmy Stewart in A Wonderful Life, right? That's a classic. Ebenezer Scrooge is another. Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, all that idea of of I went away, I risked it all, only to come back to a profound appreciation that there's no place like home. That is arguably the substructure of almost every esoteric initiatory tradition around the world for thousands of years. And once we come back, then we say, oh my gosh, it's not the amazing transformational states. It's not the esoteric experiences. It's not all of that endless seeking to get out of this that's the incredible thing. It's this here and now, it's this eight or nine decades, we're blessed to have opposable thumbs and prefrontal cortexes, you know, and we're the existential mayflies of the universe. It's the brevity and the mortality. Right?

Yeah, I guess we are mayflies in the context of human evolution. I mean, I heard you say, like, we look at human evolution, we're like 0.4 seconds before midnight or something in terms of our current state.

And you think of all the stories, right? The Greek gods on Olympus, right? Are always somehow kind of jealous of humans and the angels were and even vampires in like the sexy vampire stories, right? They're always like, what's up with you guys? You guys seem to care so much more than we're able to. Like the immortals just have ennui. They're just like, yeah, it just all comes and goes. Nothing matters. How do you guys care so goddamn much? And it's because of our mortality.

So, it's just kind of Shakespeare, it's the Greek tragedy. Well, it's interesting because as I'm working on my new book about longevity, there's the scientists talking about longevity escape velocity, which essentially means we never die. If the science advances far and fast enough, we can outpace death. And I don't know about that concept. I don't know if it's possible.

I don't know if I like it, but it changes our humanity in a very material way. Fundamentally, I think I'm with Elon on this one of just like, you know, that dying is actually an essential part of human progress. And I think, it wasn't Feynman, it was... Max Planck. Yeah, that physics advances one funeral at a time.

Exactly. He said, we don't advance science by convincing our opponents and helping them see the light, but because they eventually die and a new generation grows up that's familiar with it.

Exactly. So I feel like live fast, live well, and then clear the lane, you know?

Yeah. So, so one of the things that I found very helpful in your book, and I think it's sort of the deconstruction of the sort of stage we're in, in the evolution of humanity. You know, we went from a stage of very organized beliefs, organized religion, shamanic traditions, things that really were very well-constructed worldviews, whether they were right or wrong, whether they were doing good or bad, they were, they sort of infrastructures that we all lived within as guideposts to meaning and purpose and why we're here and what we're supposed to do. Those have kind of crumbled in many ways, and though there's still sort of the rise of fundamentalism and Islamic traditions, Christian traditions, and Judaic traditions, but we've now kind of let go of a lot of that in our Western culture, separation of church and state. America's a great example of that. which is kind of ironic because a lot of our state is controlled by the church in America and the fundamentalist church which drives the election process. And it's right now we're facing the challenges to Roe v. Wade in the Supreme Court because we're in this polarized society often because of this fundamentalist abuse. But for most of us, we've sort of gone away from that. I'm Jewish and most of my friends who are Jewish have become more secular Jews and didn't relate to that. that old sort of stodgy, stifling traditions. And then we sort of adopted a new view, which you call meaning 2.0. That was meaning 1.0, and now we're moving into meaning 3.0. So, can you kind of unpack that a little bit for us? And then I want to get into how we kind of recreate meaning in a new way and how the title of the book and the Rapture conversation is really about recapturing something that can be very positively viewed and not stifling or constrictive like these old ways, but actually liberating.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's, you know, meaning 1.0, if we just say kind of any faith-based tribal set of beliefs, usually mediated by a sort of shamanic or priest class, you know, somebody with anointed or appointed authority to interpret divine dictates. that's honestly, that's how we've been for pretty much 100,000 years. I mean, now there's even studies on Neanderthals, like, that even predates Homo sapiens, some form of ritual and belief and organization. And then, you fast forward to 10,000 years ago, to 5,000 years ago, the rise of what we now know as the kind of the Axial Age and religions, right? And all humans everywhere forever were part of kin, clan, tribe, and faith. And that told you who you were, what your role was, how you ought to live. So, let's just say 100,000 years up to roughly 1990s. That's how we made sense of the world. And so, when we read things like the Pew Research Foundation studies on the rise of the nones or the sort of I don't identify as religious, but I might identify as spiritual, agnostic, atheistic.

They call it SB&R, right? Spiritual but not religious.

Yeah, exactly.

Did you come up with that term?

Did I?

Yeah.

No.

I was like, wow, where did that come from? I heard people talking about it. And somebody identified that group of people now as like 30 or 40% of the world's population.

Yeah, it's at least in the US and I think Western Europe also, it's the fastest growing and largest group for the first time in human history. So that's radical. And for most folks, whether it's the Christopher Hitchens or the Sam Harris of the world, the kind of new atheists, there was the cheering of that. There was saying, yay, down with superstition, religion is the opiate of the masses, that kind of thing. and we're all going to move into evidence-based, atheistic, kind of modernity, the real world, science, progress, all these kind of things. And for a while, that seemed to be holding true. But in the last, take your pick on where you start seeing the wheels come off this, but 2008 is an example for sure, COVID and the recent kind of fracturing of collective meaning. Those were serious hits to what we would call meaning 2.0, which was sort of modern liberalism. The ideas that came out of the European Enlightenment, civil rights, democracy, free markets, science, empiricism, all of these kind of things. We sort of took that as sacrosanct.

Which seemed to be the highest goals of humanity, but maybe they're not.

Well, it was supposed to be clear, impartial, based in reality, eternal truths, those kind of things. And of course now, the foundations of that have been collapsing and crumbling. And so even international organizations like the WHO, the CDC, the UN, things that used to be, with all their faults, used to still be seen as some form of unbiased truth, even BBC News, or major American networks, all of that has been critiqued in question. And so now we're in, and religion 1.0, or meaning 1.0, offered salvation at the cost of inclusion. So if you believed in our tribe or our people, you were saved. If you didn't, you were a heretic, you were a pagan, you were something even denied human rights.

Yeah, or burned at the stake.

So offered something awesome, salvation, but at the expense of inclusion. Meaning 2.0, aka our modern liberal world, offered inclusion at this expense of salvation, separation of church and state, God is dead, no one will tell you what to believe. And so the question is now, in this vacuum, as those two pillars have collapsed, we haven't just had everybody waking up, coming to their senses. In that vacuum, we've had a pull to the extremes of fundamentalism, people doubling down on convicted beliefs. And this isn't just religious, right? You've got cryptocurrency fundamentalists. You've got all sorts of fundamentalist thinking. You've got QAnon as fundamentalist thinking. There is an overarching, hermetically sealed, unassailable view of the world that is always and exclusively true. Fundamentalism. but you also have nihilism. You have people saying, There's no meaning, there's no point. I give up. And that's where we see the rise in the spike in diseases of despair. You have addiction, depression, suicides, those kinds of things. So that's where we are. And the question is, is how do we put the roof back on and create a shelter under something new and different that can balance inclusive salvation, meaning for everyone.

And so that meaning 3.0 is that framework. Yeah. And how do you describe that to people? How do you conceive of it? What is meaning 3.0? Well, I mean, it's not religious, but it's spiritual.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's fundamentally, and the some colleagues of ours at Harvard Sacred Design Lab, who have been studying this at Harvard Divinity School, basically came to their sort of research of what makes what makes religious communities healthy, happy, useful, and sustaining. And it was basically healing inspiration and connection. That those were the sort of nutrients that regardless of your particular deities or origin stories or moral codes, those three things help people become well-adjusted, integrated, connected. Vivek Murphy, the US Surgeon General, has written on that and written his book together. those ideas that our alienation, isolation, lack of connection to profound sources are all eroding us. So meaning 3.0 is how can we provide access to healing, inspiration and connection, the core elements that traditional religions used to offer us, and at the same time do something on the inclusion piece, right? How do we make sure that everyone everywhere has access to that? and so the goals there would be like, okay, how do we make it open source so that this isn't hidden, this isn't in the tabernacle, right? This is accessible and available to everybody. Scalable, which means it needs to be pretty much cheap or free to meet the bottom four billion of the world who have limited resources. And potentially antifragile, meaning that it can actually survive contact with hard realities. and still persist. And if we can do that in a way, my hope with this book was to say, here's the sort of the neuroscience, here's the anthropology, here's the psychological building blocks. What does the blockchain or WordPress of culture architecture, how do we build healthy institutions, how do we build healthy rituals and habits and customs, not tops down like they were done in the past, but bottoms up. so that everyone in the world, their own communities, their own cultures, their own preferences can build with these tools, skin it how they would like it, and then create communities of practice that serve them.

Yeah, that's a beautiful vision and I think it speaks to our need for meaning and purpose and connection and things that I think are the basic fundamental ingredients for health and well-being and I think they're not often seen as that. I, and I think the data is really striking on this, that the, if you're part of a community, if you're part of a tribe, you're part of a bowling or, or knitting Circle, that you're healthier and you live longer, independent of what you're doing with your lifestyle, that if you're socially isolated, disconnected, you live shorter to independent of your lifestyle or smoking, and that there is a, there is a sort of deep need for all of us to have meaning and purpose, and then without that, that our lives sort of become frayed. And then we see these crises of mental illness and depression and anxiety and trauma. And one of the things you do talk about is this concept of micro-trauma, but also the bigger traumas that we all suffer from and how part of our cultural framework has been always putting this back on the individual instead of on society. and I think when you look at the context of trauma and suffering, if we don't deal with it in our collective toxic culture, it's very hard for us to deal with it as individuals. So in a sense, we need to reimagine how to live as individuals, in community, in society, and we don't really have a good roadmap for that because all the guideposts and benchmarks have been taken away from us. And like you said earlier, if you were born into a tribe or culture, you had all your rituals and all your ceremonies and all your rites of passage and the context in which you healed. And I had Wade Davis on the podcast and he was talking about how in Lakota traditions, when someone was sick, it was an invitation for the community to heal and for them to do it in community. And I remember being in Nepal, when I was a medical student up in the mountains and, you know, someone was sick and the shaman didn't just take them into their little clinic office and do a little ritual. It was the whole community was there. They were all witness and they were all part of the ceremony. It was striking that we don't do that anymore. We were in this sort of sterile isolation rooms in medical care, which take us out of the community. And I've actually found that the biggest lever for healing is actually bringing community into medical practice, which I've done through faith-based wellness programs, which we've done in Cleveland Clinic through to shared medical appointments and bringing people into connection creates far more effectiveness. We've published data on this, far more effectiveness in creating healthier outcomes than one-on-one business with the doctor.

And what are the faith-based wellness programs look like?

So, I did a program called the Daniel Plan. Are you interested in me? I like this. Okay, I'll answer the question. It's called the Daniel Plan. I created it with Rick Warren. We've talked about on the podcast before, but essentially it was born out of this idea that the disease is a social problem, not an individual problem. And that whether it's spiritual disease, mental disease, physical disease, these are things that arise in the context of the world in which we live. And so we can't heal without community. And basically I worked with Rick Warren and his big mega church in Southern California to create a faith-based wellness program where people healed in community. And they had a curriculum they followed there was no healthcare providers, just me and a few others that would create some basic lifestyle curriculum. It was based on functional medicine with the intel inside of how to create health. But they did it together in their small groups, which were already built to help each other live better spiritual lives. But they now could live better physiological lives as well. And the results were astounding. I mean, we had 15,000 people sign up. They lost a quarter of a million pounds in the first year. and they reversed all sorts of chronic illnesses. And I remember this one woman come up to me after the six week, we had a six week kind of recap of our first rally and we had brought people back after they'd been on it for six weeks. And this woman came up to me, she says, I don't understand, Dr. Hyman. I've been depressed my whole life. I've been out of mental hospitals. I've been on every drug you can imagine. My marriage is falling apart. I can't function and work anymore. I, you know, I just was ready to commit suicide. And in three days of doing this, I totally changed everything and I feel completely different in my depression went away. Is that possible? I'm like, well, yeah, it's possible because it happened to you and it's because of what you were eating and the things you were doing to your own body. Three days. Three days, yeah. I'm just changing her diet. And I see this all the time. I mean, I just did a workshop here in BodhGyam and Kapil and Kai Six Senses on basically how to resurrect your health in a very short time by just taking out the insults and putting in the right inputs. The body has a capacity very quickly to regenerate and heal. and activate old healing systems in the body. And I think that's what your work really does. And I'd love to talk about something you wrote about in the book called the Ethical Guidelines that can help us for our own personal explorations. And there's a whole bunch of them. Do the obvious, don't do stupid shit, let the mystery stay the mystery.

Can you kind of unpack those for us? Yeah, well that was actually a subset when we were talking about Meaning 3.0, right? And how do we make that available to everybody around the world, but they can build their own? in the same way that like the Harvard Sacred Design Lab was like, Hey, healing inspiration and connection, make sure you don't miss those. There's also the sense of, well, what.

Were the core elements? What's the toolbox?

It allows us to get the healing inspiration and connection. Yeah, for Building Meaning 3.0 and it sort of felt like you need a metaphysics. You need some way to pass the numinous or the sacred and not get unstuck in woolly or magical thinking. And as we can see these days with everybody from anti-vax conspiracies to QAnon conspiracies to lizard people and various various things. We're not very good at unpacking non-ordinary states these days. So having a clear and concise metaphysics is essential. But then we also need an ethics, right? We need a way of governing what ought I do. And up till now, organized religion, at least in the Western world, was, you know, Abrahamic. The Ten Commandments. Ten Commandments. Thou shalt and thou shalt not. And those were binary and they were moral and they were absolutist. And there was a reason for that, which is if you left it up to the judgment or discernment of the everyman, the everyman was going to bugger it up nearly every time. So they were very, very strict and they coded for the lowest common denominator. But an arguable distinction between morality and ethics is morality is absolutist and ethics is, it depends. It's situational. It's not the act, it's your relationship to the act that determines its rightness or wrongness. That's right. instead of the Ten Commandments, we just kind of playfully said, well, how about the Ten Suggestions? Can we have a list of a checklist that's not absolute? Ten suggestions?

How many tablets is that?

But can we play with this in just sort of here are known issues. Here is kind of collective wisdom on going down this path where you're not shunning ecstatic states, you're not outsourcing healing, but you're going to take these under your own advisement and what are some good ways to proceed? So having a set of ethics feels really important. And then the last two were scriptures. What are the stories that inspire us and provide us how we ought to live? And then ultimately deities as well, which is like how do we invoke some living relationship to the deities? And you spoke of the Tibetan traditions, right? They have cultivating wrathful and benevolent deities, right? They have that sense of I'm going, you know, Marshall McLuhan's, you become what you behold. So that idea of meditating on an articulation of the divine, the Catholic tradition has veneration of the saints. There's lots of instances where we, and these days it's the Kardashians and TikTok influences, right? We have them on our walls or on our screens. The idea is can we actually create healthy relationships to all five of those things? And the 10 suggestions was just kind of the guidelines to try and help people not put it in the ditches for you.

What are they?

Gosh, well, I mean, you've got- Do.

The obvious, I'll cue you.

Do the obvious is basically, you know, sleep well, move often, get outside, eat real foods, mostly plants, not too much, you know, Michael Pollan 101, right? Make love, be grateful. The entire self-optimization movement is arguably tripping over itself to spend so much time and so many dollars over investing in the perfectability and the fine grain this and that, and the next diet, the paleo, then it's vegan, then it's something, something. Just do the obvious, the things that have always worked for humans, and then you'll be alive and vital and healthy, and every culture has had this stuff. So let's not overthink that, and let's get it online and then go back to being helpful. And the next one's do stupid shit. Don't do stupid shit. Don't do stupid shit.

Right?

Because, you know, no matter what, if we're saying we're not under the shackles of traditional meaning 1.0, we're under our own recognisance to play with all of these techniques, which up until now have been highly esoteric, tightly controlled. So if we're open sourcing all this stuff, that comes with the caveat of don't do stupid shit. So don't end up in a body bag, a cult, a mental institution, divorce court, caused by any of those things. Right?

I did the ladder a bunch of times.

Well, yeah, but I mean, obviously these things happen as life events. but don't do it in your pursuit of putting all this stuff together. And the Let the Mystery Stay the Mystery is just very much, at least in the transformational scene these days, there's an awful lot of kind of carpetbaggers of catharsis where everybody is telling you their journey. Everybody is reciting in excruciating detail all of their breakthroughs, their last profound teary session, all what it all means, what their star tribe is saying, whatever, whatever. And it's kind of like, look, you know, the numinous or the non-dual is infinite in all directions and whatever we're just bungee jumping into at this state is just one pinpoint bound by the prison house of language, selfhood, identity. You're too wrapped up in your own story and nonsense. So let the burning bush burn. Yeah.

And then let's get back to awe and humility and wonder.

And what's 8020 woken to broken? Well, that's the one we were speaking of earlier, which is just that idea of just just remember, have this peak state to remember what you've forgotten, because that's a fairly common subjective experience. And typically, it gives you a punch list of the places you're still broken. Go mend yourself to the point where you're functional and helpful. And then instead of devoting all your excess time and money to chasing the imagined long tail of your perfectability and getting your head above the clouds, turn around. and help someone who's just struggling at their head above the water. Yeah. And be helpful because arguably, like even if you're selfish, right? Helper's high is still one of the best ways to provide life satisfaction.

So if you're missing that final bit.

I mean, altruism hits the same receptors as cocaine or heroin. Absolutely. And there's so many of our brothers and sisters that need help.

So if you're able-bodied, like show up joyfully.

What's the one about F your Journey? Oh, yeah. I got dragged to a hot yoga.

Class in Austin and there was this what's wrong with hot yoga?

I love hot yoga. No, it's fine. It's fine. I don't. I. I would rather. I'm a cold weather athlete, so I prefer to be someplace either in the water or in the mountains. But anyway, I was in it and I was feeling a little salty because I was dragged there. And. And. And the teacher was like, well, when my journey began three years ago, and I just.

This.

This neon sign just popped in my head of, like, your journey. Right. Because. Because, hey, I. I was a captive in a hot yoga class, but I was also just thinking how much time we spend belaboring the stages and steps of our own process. And if we are fortunate enough to find ourselves in a flow state, in the deep now, in a place of grace, and what the Greeks would have called Kairos, that sort of sacred time, then everything that got us there is redeemed in the unfolding. you look back to divorced parents or abusive dad or whatever, you look back to the bullies in grade school, you're like, oh my gosh, they were all part of my road to get to this ineffable moment, which is dropping me to my knees in gratitude. Therefore, Saint Paul said, he said, Love keeps no record of wrong. So if we get to that place, then it all comes out in the wash. So shut the f up about it.

Yeah, it is actually much of the Buddhist parable of Crossing the river to get to the other shore of enlightenment. And when you cross the river with a boat, you don't carry the boat on your back for the rest of your journey. So, yeah, very similar. And the other one is do the hard thing.

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of times when people get initial access to peak states, and that could be something as simple as a performance state like flow states, playing basketball or music or whatever it might be, or more profound breakthrough states, there is a sense of ease, there is a sense of effortlessness, there is a sense that everything is unfolding without anybody at the wheel or according to plan. And so people can kind of get hooked on, oh, if I'm not feeling it, if it's not easy and effortless, then I'm not going to do it. And I think actually what you really want is some version of a sort of stoic Taoism. which is the Taoist part is kind of go with the flow. So wherever you can, don't fight the forces of nature, life, reality. But on the other hand, there are times where you got to dig like a son of a bitch, right, to get through that close out set of waves. And there's a time for active, aggressive striving in the face of adversity. And the ironic thing, I mean, the Mark Twain things, if you've got to eat two frogs in a day, eat your ugliest one first, right? So there's that sense of, yeah, I think Stoic Daoism really kind of embodies, I guess, where I've come down, which is, you know, go with the river of life wherever you can and dig like a sun when you have to.

The next of the ethical guidelines that you talk about is never lose the one.

Yeah, well, I mean, I think a lot of people are losing the plot, right? So they have non-dual experiences or peak state experiences, and they will they effectively just go off the reservation. They sort of lose contact with last known point of shared reality and consensus opinion or reality, right? So they start espousing all kinds of wack, to put it technically, right? So what I was thinking about is both music and action sports where a musician, right, you've got the beat, you've got the chorus, you've got the drummer and the bass player, and then a break comes and either the guitarist or the percussionist or somebody goes off on a solo. And the more they tease it, the more they lose the one to go off on their riff but then come back and nail the one, the more satisfying the solo is. But if they've then just lost it and they don't come back, the whole thing collapses. And the same in action sports, in martial arts, it's your hara or dantien, it's the center, sort of two fingers down and two fingers in from your belly button. If you think about Surfers, snowboarders, half pipe skiers, everything we saw in the Winter Olympics and, you know, most Red Bull films. It's athletes deliberately flipping, spinning, twisting around their Center, around the one or the pulse in this case, in a bodily sense. And then they Stomp the Landing. Of course, if you lose the one upside down in space, whatever it is, you eat and it's not nearly as fun. So we all want to tweak what is the beat. what is the pulse? And the more we tweak it, the further afield we can go and land it, the more joyful and delightful it is. And the same can be said of our metaphysical explorations. So for me, not now to kind of stack a metaphysically.

Tie that back to never lose the one metaphysically.

Yeah, well, for me, it's a little bit like now I think of mountain guiding using a compass in a whiteout, right? Like you can go anywhere you want beyond the backcountry access gates at your ski area. you know, into the backcountry, provided you can navigate back to that gate. If you just go out there and you just start wandering like, woohoo, we're doing it just like in the movies, then you're lost and you're a casualty, right? But if you can say, we're going out into dangerous terrain, we're going out into uncertain spaces, but I know how to reverse my tracks and get back to the gate and back to civilization and back to safety and consensus reality, then I have permission to wander further afield and potentially even to help or guide others. and so that to me is the idea of just, you know, you can go anywhere you want and you can think anything you can think of, provided you never lose the one.

Right. And the next ethical guideline is it's not that either or either. Yeah.

Well, I mean, look, one of the classic terms and we're seeing piles of it these days is apophenia, right? Where people get an excess amount of dopamine in their systems and that could be their own chemical balances or imbalances. It could be a state experience, it could be whatever is going on, and then start seeing patterns everywhere and they engage in a sort of false certainty and it shows up in schizophrenics and it also shows up in conspiracy theorists in particular. So when people have outside of wisdom traditions, without a wise teacher smacking them down and saying, Ah, it's not that. Go and chop some more wood. Do your thing.

It's not that either, right?

Right. The idea that people often fixate on the glimpse they have seen and they experience apophenia. They get that false certainty that they have seen the light, the truth, the way. And just to remember that it's not that either.

Right?

That might anytime you mistake a lowercase truth for a capital T truth, you screwed the pooch.

Yeah.

Right? So just that idea of take your insights for what they are, honor them, cherish them, but keep going and hold on.

Yeah, that sort of reminds me of the Buddhist parable. Again, another this stuff is not new. Don't mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself. So we have a lot of ways to get there, but we often kind of get fixed on the technique or the vehicle or whatever instead of actually the thing itself. Practice resurrection?

Yeah, well that one... That sounds exciting. Well again, that's Wendell Berry's phrase from that same poem we were talking about earlier. So that's how it ends. And to me, it was such an evocative phrase because again, I mean, we're here we are, it just seems like we're just giving lots of love to the Tibetans today. But that whole notion of they spend three, four, five, seven decades just trying to prepare for a conscious death. And if at that moment of dying, they can stay awake to it, not get suckered into the bardo's, then they can step off the wheel of incarnation and you're like, okay, that is a shit pile of effort for one at bat. And if you slip on a banana peel, get hit by the proverbial bus, you might have blown it. So I think Wendell Berry's injunction to practice resurrection, what does it mean to die to my preferences, to die to my stories, to die to my pleasure, die to my pain, die to my history, die to my rightness, die to any of it in any given moment? can I then go from marching along in this chronological life of ours, seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, can I yield to annihilation in that moment? And that whole, all those practices that we were talking about, those death rebirth practices, are not just metaphorical, they're literal. Back to that delta wave EEG, almost brain death. If I can experience any of those moments of dying, I have a chance in that spaciousness to choose a different pathway and or to potentially bear witness to or, yeah, I would say bear witness to a different, deeper and richer way of being in the world. But it's hard and the trick with dying, even if it has been simulated in stages, you have it a few times, you're like, oh, I got the hang of this. And my experience at least is it's it is incredibly hard and it happens out of your white knuckled hands every single time. And if it didn't, it wouldn't actually be dying. So we have to practice it.

Yeah, I think again, Tibetan have a model for this called dream yoga, which is lucid dreaming. And it's a different state of consciousness where you're awake in your dream and you're able to direct your dream and access states of knowledge and experience and consciousness. You can. is their practice for dying, essentially. And the last is, above all, be kind, which seems obvious, but unpack that.

Well, I mean, that was Aldous Huxley's, among his dying words on his deathbed, with his wife Laura. And in all of the neuroscience and the fancy waistcoats and all of the fascinating cultural anthropology and the studies of this and all of the excitement and possibilities that we each might experience as we kind of go down these roads of discovery. I think it's just kind of easy to forget that essential, you know, that the Hopi grandmothers had a phrase for when the men were kind of getting too big for their britches and talking too much around the fire, which would be, Yes, but does it grow corn?

Does it grow corn?

Right? Is this helpful? Does this help our people? Is this life affirming? Is it life sustaining? And the being kind part is, again, in a world that feels increasingly unkind, and there's so much lack of care and concern to remember that, you know, and again, this is that Houston Smith, the famous comparative religious scholar, he said, May your passing illuminations become abiding light. And that just feels like a really good kind of way between Huxley and and Smith there. Those are some elders of our time. And just to be more loving and more compassionate and potentially more courageous, not just for ourselves, but on behalf of the least of our brothers and sisters in a world that really needs it. It feels like a good place to...

It reminds me of that book, Everything I Learned in Kindergarten or something about basic rules for being human.

Playground rules.

Share, be kind, be nice.

Yeah, put things back where you found them. Leave it better than you found it. Women and children first, which can sound chauvinistic until you realize it's actually caregivers and their dependents first. If you're a freewheeling, healthy, able-bodied person, these rules work for standing in line at the fire department during a fire evacuation or a drought or an interruption in service. This works in aid camps and refugee camps. These are hardcore instilled cross-cultural sets of values and fairness and reciprocity of how we do this thing. We know how to do it. It's just getting back to the basics.

Wow, Jamie, thank you for an incredible conversation, unpacking the ways in which we've lost meaning, how to get back to meaning, how to recapture the rapture through both tools that are easily accessible to all of us and by simple principles for living that I think can take us back to a better world, which we desperately need right now because it's very sort of unsettling to be at the end of the fire hose of of the crises that are our global environment right now. And, this is sort of a breath of hope and fresh air and possibility. And, I invite everybody to take a look. You can go get books wherever you get your books. Recapture the Rapture, Rethinking God, Sex and Death in a World That's Lost Its Mind. And, it could be recapturing your mind. So, Jamie, thank you for the work you do.

I can't wait to see what's next.

And, it's been great having you on the podcast. Yeah, man. Awesome to chat. And, for those of you listening, if you love this conversation and you know people who are struggling with finding meaning and how to recapture that and recapture their connection to what matters. Share this with them. I bet they'd love to hear it. Leave a comment how you've found your way in this crazy world we love to hear and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and we'll see you next week on the Doctors Pharmacy. If you love that last video, you're gonna love the next one. Check it out here. We cannot separate the biology from the psychology or the spirituality anymore. These sacred plants come from a very feminine shamanic tradition, and we're trying to use them in a very masculine patriarchal.