Dr. Rosalind Watts | You Are Not Broken, You Are Becoming

Welcome to the Radical responsibility podcast. I'm Dr. Fleet Mahl and I'm excited to guide you on a journey of authentic transformation. In each episode, I'll bring you insights from leading experts to explore trauma recovery, mindfulness practices, positive psychology, and innovative breakthroughs in health, wellness and life optimization. This is a space for real conversations that inspire meaningful change, helping you find alignment with the person you were always meant to be. Let's get started.

Foreign.

What if transformation isn't just about thinking.

Differently, but feeling differently?

Science shows us that true change happens when we align not just our minds, but also the neural networks in our hearts and guts. This Heart Mind connection is the key to deeper healing, resilience and expanded awareness. That's why I created the Heart Mind All Access, Membership and Community, a space designed to help you rewire your nervous system, cultivate heart intelligence, and live with greater clarity and purpose. With over 1000 hours of transformational teachings specifically curated to meet your needs, you'll learn from world renowned meditation teachers, neuroscientists and experts in neuroplasticity, all sharing powerful tools to help you shift your mindset to and heart set, regulate your emotions and unlock your full potential. You'll also gain unlimited access to every summit and course we've ever produced, a treasure trove of Wisdom worth over $10,000 and growing, plus live gatherings and an inspiring global community to support your journey. If you're ready to step into a more heart centered, connected and conscious life, I invite you to join us. Click the link to learn more and and start your journey today.

What if healing wasn't just about a single breakthrough moment, but about the slow.

Steady weaving of your life back into wholeness?

In today's episode, we're diving deep into the acer model with Dr. Rosalind Watts.

Accept, Connect, Embody, Restore. A powerful year long framework for integrating.

Lessons of psychiatric assisted therapy into everyday life. This isn't a quick fix or a magic pill. It's a path inspired by the Celtic Tree Calendar, rooted in nature's wisdom and designed to help us space our shadows, deepen our connections, inhabit our bodies more fully and restore our relationship with the rhythms of the earth. Whether you're on a healing journey yourself, supporting others in theirs, or simply curious about how deep transformation happens, this episode will offer a grounded and heart centered.

Map for lasting change. Let's get started. My name is Fleet Maul, your co host for this session and I'm really happy to be here today with Dr. Rosalyn Watts. Welcome.

Thank you Fleet. Lovely to be here.

Really looking forward to talking with you about your work on integration, which is so important and sometimes a bit neglected and I think a really important thing for us to focus on. And let's talk about your Acer model, which I know is very much central to your work. So how does maybe just talk about how it works, who finds you, how you enroll them, what the process looks like, what some of the prerequisites are, what the benefits are and so forth.

Thank you. So people find us usually from our website, which is Acer integration, or also from when I've been doing talks and things like this, people sometimes Google us and find us. We don't have any formal referral pathways. So people come from all sorts of different places and it's open to anyone, anyone that's exploring their consciousness. Most of our participants are using psychedelics or have used psychedelics for personal growth and therapeutic work. And people can apply. We have two intakes per year, a summer intake and a winter intake. Each year people can apply and if they're successful, we accept them into this year long process, which is the basic structure of it is a global online community. But within this format we follow a 12 month framework. A 12 month process which is based around it was inspired by the Celtic tree calendar because I wanted to engage with, well, my own roots, because I have a Welsh lineage, but also because I was so aware that so many of us in the west and in Europe are getting on planes and going to the Amazon and searching for indigenous medicine using culture. And that it felt to me like it was important for certainly in Europe to discover our own plant medicine using lineage and Celtic culture and Celtic ideas and Celtic stories felt really, really powerful and important. So the community follows this structure of 12 trees. Every tree is a teacher and we learn about a different aspect of connectedness through the tree. We follow this structure and we have things like breath work and sharing circles and guided imagery, meditations. And some people come to the live workshops a lot. Some people just like following it on the platform. They do the kind of recorded material. So it's very flexible. But essentially, when people have been through the 12 months, the 12 trees, we feel that people well, that what A C, E and R stand for is accept, connect, embody, restore. And we feel that people well, and we hear from people repeatedly that they're more able to accept their emotions, to sit with them, sit with them long enough to learn from them, to connect to the meaning in our emotions. When we have painful feelings, psychedelics teach us so well, when we really engage with those feelings, we can learn so much incredibly important insights when we give space to those feelings. And then it allows us to really embody those lessons in a very visceral way. We work a lot with embodiment practices. And then the R, which is restore is really about restoring ourselves to the rhythms and patterns of nature, which is about being slow, cyclical, interconnected and in balance. So that's the broad, that's the kind of focus of the community. And we've discovered that a lot of people, it surprised us in staying on for a second year. So we thought people would just stay for the 12 month process and then go back to their lives. But actually people are staying on for a second year. So we've been developing a whole new structure around what people can do in the second year, which is about sharing the practices and the tools with people in their local communities.

I hadn't really thought about it, but your HR model is very similar to the way we talk about our work here at Heart Mind and Heart Mind Institute. We talk about. It's about helping people become more deeply embodied, more heart centered, more resilient, more earth connected. And that restore sounds like, you know, slowing down, you know, being within the cycles. That's about getting earth connected and one way to look at it anyway. So yeah, it sounds really wonderful. So when people join this year long program, is there like something every week? Are there daily activities? How often are the workshops? What does it look like for people to participate?

Well, it's completely flexible. So if you wanted to engage in everything, you could pretty much do something almost every day. I mean, there's workshops, live workshops every week at the very least. But there's such a range of different things. We have everything from dances, where we have a playlist for every tree. Every tree theme has its own playlist and we get together and dance as one way of working with the theme of that tree. But we also have Q&As where we have guests that come and talk about that theme and talk about psychedelic integration and breath work sessions. And there's a range, but some people are really, really active and they're on the forum and engaging with each other and doing sharing circles with each other pretty much every day. And other people who have, you know, they don't have the time will find a way to fit it into their working schedule, their life schedule, in a more flexible way that it's whatever works for people.

So I would imagine that, you know, when people join your program, they come with who they are. Right? And they're coming with everything that's going on for them and everything that's going on in our world today. And, you know, we are experiencing kind of an endemic of people being exposed to a lot of stress and trauma, a lot of resulting anxiety, depression, sadly higher suicidality numbers, especially among the youth, but among the elderly, among clinicians, all kinds of groups, you know, and some people use this term, the poly crisis that we're facing, this complex entanglement of many crises today. And so the challenges we all face can be quite immense, depending on how we relate with it and how tuned in we are or not, how empathic we are or not. And we may be able to compartmentalize and ignore a lot of it, but a lot of people are not so good at compartmentalizing, and they're very affected by all this. And in some ways, we all want to be open to it, but, you know, can we be open to it without being overwhelmed by it? And part of that anxiety has to do with also the existential threat were facing from climate change, which, if you really start reading about and thinking about it, can be very overwhelming, very disconcerting. So I'm wondering about how that's coming up and how your model is helping people deal with what's sometimes called echo anxiety, as well as this anxiety around those holly crisis and things like that.

Thank you for that question. It's such an important one. The Acer model, the way we work with it, or just the way we. We embody it, is that each one of those four elements is like a part of a tree. And if I try and explain this, it will kind of. It will make sense as why I'm saying this in response to that question. So we think about the acceptance going into our emotions as like the roots of a tree going down into the earth. The hidden parts of ourselves, the dark half, the challenging half, the shadow, the things that we don't usually look at, don't want to see, all the rocks that our roots have had to grow around and all the challenges, the scary stuff, and then the branches of the tree. So that's the acceptance. The A of aces, the roots, the sea of Acer is connection. And that's the. The branches of the tree. And we really believe that our branches, our sense of meaning and purpose, what we stand for, what we grow towards, is a mirror image of our roots. So every centimetre of suffering and challenge, when we're supported in a community process where we really help to alchemize that suffering into growth, it gives us a sense of Purpose, why we're here, what we're doing. And it galvanizes us to become activists in some way, whether it's in the outer world or activists in our own. And then the trunk of the tree is the E, that's the embodiment. And that's kind of the place where the transformation happens. And the r, the restoring to the rhythms and patterns of nature is about coming back to our interconnectedness. And where that is in the tree is the mycelial connection underneath the tree that connects one tree with all the other trees in the forest. That is what I feel our community brings people in these times. It's the mycelial network of other people that we're together and the support that we can feel when we find the other people. If you look at the kind of mycelium underneath the forest floor, it's almost like lots of kind of hands together. You can see this kind of blanket of like hand, like connections kind of holding each other. So I think it's so important in these times because we live in a very individualized, disconnected culture to feel alone with these problems and these existential crises, as you say. And we're all living in these separate boxes. We've had decades of neoliberalism on top of centuries of capitalism and even longer colonialism. And in a way, it's like the soil has become depleted. We're living in very depleted, dry, degraded soil. But trees regenerate the soil in which they stand, and they also provide structure to eroded soil that has lost its dense quality. So in a way, by joining up with other people in this way and really having these conversations with each other. And also a lot of people that are taking psychedelics for therapeutic purposes are. They're exploring these big questions in their journeys. So when we come together with other people and talk about this stuff, but feel the support of each other, I think it helps us explore those questions in a, in a way that doesn't feel completely incapacitating. Instead, we feel that sense of camaraderie and togetherness and we come up with ideas. We witness every day in asa little changes in our own lives, in the lives of other people in the community. And I think we, by witnessing that change, we realize that transformation is possible, it's happening, and that we can often feel that we're solely responsible for somehow. Like, how do we change the world? How do we get out of this mess? How do we change the narrative, change the paradigm? But I think when you're with like minded people, you realize that things are changing on their own. And that in a way for us to just stay in our center and keep trusting and keep doing what we can in our individual lives, but also in our communities, then it's kind of trusting the process, trusting the unfolding and it can be very hopeful. So I think we really recognize and feel ourselves the frankly the terror of the time sometimes, but it's incredibly nourishing. And I'm sure you feel this in your community to be able to be open and real with each other and to show each other our tears and our concerns and to have that witness and to know that from that pain, you know, the mirror image of that pain is our values is what we care about. And it helps us stand up and make those changes that we really need to make.

Well, I love the metaphor of the scope of means of the trees. And I wasn't familiar with that 12 tree tradition from the Celtic traditions. Ethnically a lot of my background is Scotch and Irish. So I connect all to explore some of that but somewhat came up for me. You know, there was a very wonderful and popular book recently, the Life of Trees, I think it was called, and I've had conversations with Paul Stamets about how, you know, fungi and mushrooms have co evolved with us and the whole relationship of the mycelium to our lives and to the planet, the ecosystem that we all participate in. And there's a lot of direct real connectedness as well as a kind of metaphorical beauty around all that. That's absolutely wonderful. So it sounds like your community would be absolutely wonderful regardless of psychedelics. This would just be a wonderful spiritual, personal evolution kind of community for people. But bringing, you know, the fact that it is focused on people who are having psychedelic journeys or been involved in psychedelic assisted therapy. I'm wondering how much of the bandwidth of the community is taken up with working with or talking about those experiences and integrating those experiences. And I'm particularly interested in, you know, we're hearing about many wonderful results and life changing results. But we also know that psychic experiences are very intense and can be at least temporarily destabilizing in many cases. You know, we all develop within our personality and sub personalities kind of management structures that kind of keep everything together underlying that there may be traumatic experiences and things that we're keeping contained and suppressed. And a psychedelic experience would kind of reopen that landscape a bit and maybe even destabilize some of our management structures such as suddenly we're dealing, you know, with something. And I'm curious how much of that comes up, how much of that is surfaced in the community and how you work with that, how the community collectively supports each other in possibly working through some of the things that come up are revealed through the psychiatric journeys.

Yeah, also lovely question. Yeah. As you say, the whole process could be engaged with by people that haven't taken psychedelics before. But because our community is made up of people who. We've realized that the kind of. If you think of a Venn diagram of where like psychedelics and interest in nature and also some interest in being of support to other people. Because being in a community like ours, there's lots of sharing circles. You don't have to hold space for others, but that's really at the heart of it. There is that sense of, you know, you're not just receiving support, but you're also giving support in that reciprocal kind of mycelium network metaphor. So those three things together, the kind of psychedelic exploration with nature interest, with this interest in being holding space for other people, we just get the most wonderful people that come. The community is incredibly grounded and it's really robust and resilient. So, absolutely, people have. In their small groups. So we put people into small groups. They're called orchards, and that's a group of about 10 people. And they go through the whole process together. We do it by geographical locations. You know, many of them meet each other in real life as well. And when that happens, I think people do really hold space for each other through their process of psychedelic journeys. Because many people will be engaging in psychedelic therapy through the course of the 12 months. It's not just afterwards. It's also at the same time as. And so, yeah, people really share about their experiences. And there's a lot of time and presence for unpacking and unfolding those insights that come. And in terms of the. When people are discombobulated or where people do feel like, yeah, the experiences can be extremely stressful. I think the grounding in nature is incredibly helpful in those circumstances. So we make friends with these 12 trees. And not everybody will have all the 12 trees in their locale, but we really change our relationship with nature and with trees. And so we spend a lot of time integrating outside in the real world, sitting with our back against the tree, breathing with the tree, realizing that the tree's in breath, is our out breath, and really building that connection. And I think that kind of meditative, grounded approach. And also realizing that when we have this cyclical approach, we realize that things aren't great all the time. There are cycles of regeneration and decay and regeneration and decay within nature and within us. So when someone is going through a time of feeling like things are falling apart, which can happen after a psychedelic experience or just when life throws somebody a curveball, there is that real deep trust in our community of, okay, this is the nighttime, this is the winter time. The dawn will come, spring will come. And it's about holding space for each other as we go through that. Rather than panicking that there's something wrong because things are feeling disintegrated, it's allowing that process and trusting that when the tree loses all of its leaves in November and those dead leaves make a rich compost for the seed that will come next. So it's really trusting that when you go through periods of loss and confusion, that if we can stay with it, then that can be the beginning of our next chapter. So far, we found that it's that the nature connection and the community connection provides a lot of safety for people going through these. Yeah. Really quite courageous and sometimes intense experiences.

Wow.

Amazing. So part of this model is connection and connectedness. And you've developed a scale around that, the Watts Connectedness Scale. And I'm wondering if you could talk about how you developed that and the significance scale for its use in measuring outcomes in psychedelic assisted psychotherapy and how it's been used in clinical trials and so forth.

Yes. So when I was working at Imperial College, the first trial I worked on as a. I was a guide for people with depression having psychedelic experiences, which was wonderful. And I did some qualitative research when that first trial had finished. And I interviewed everybody in the trial and I asked them, you know, this psilocybin experience you've had, how has it affected you? How has it changed you, if at all? And the interviews that I then transcribed and did a thematic analysis on, the strongest theme that came back was that people had felt disconnected from themselves and other people and the world around them. Before, when they had been depressed, they'd been kind of living in the prison of their minds and disconnected from their bodies, disconnected from other people. And that when they had the psilocybin experience, it helped them connect to that. It helped their life kind of get bigger and develop a more. I suppose I started thinking of it as an ecological self rather than a kind of mind self. It's this self that is in interaction and relationship with this whole web of life. And that expansion doesn't always happen, but we saw it happen quite a lot in the trial. And of course, if you don't have further integration work. That expansion can then contract again after a few months. But it just seemed like this sense of connectedness that was developing was really important. And there was no measure, There was no tool for measuring the tripartite structure of connectedness. So there was a measure for social connectedness, There was a measure for nature connectedness. But I was seeing these three things. Connection to self, connection to others, which is the social connection, and connection to world, which includes nature connection, but also includes connection to spirituality. Connection to a sense of being interconnected with everything, Connected to purpose, that kind of thing. I saw it all as the same process. So from. Based on the qualitative research that I did, some of us from Imperial kind of selected 19 items that really cover the three subscales, self, others, world. And then it was validated. There was a validation study which was looking at large samples of people who had been on psychedelic retreats and filled in the form online to look at their connectedness scales before and after. And we also included it in the second psilocybin study at Imperial, which was a randomized control trial. Yeah, essentially we found that the validation study showed that these three subscales are related. So we had evidence for this idea that connectedness to self and others and world is part of the same underlying construct. It's kind of opening up, and it does look like it's a really important mechanism in psychedelic therapy, but also so important for the times that we're in, because you mentioned the polycrisis and this connection to self, which includes connection to emotion and connection to the body, kind of coming out of the numbing that we have been, I suppose, so conditioned to in our culture and so. And connection to nature, obviously, is such an important thing for us now and connection to community. So I think, I hope that this measure will be. Well, it's being used by people all over the world. And yeah, I really, really hope that the results from psychedelic therapy will show a really robust and significant increase in connectedness. And that will lead us to think about how we can think of psychedelic therapy not just as a medical intervention for people suffering from depression or addictions or ptsd, but but also to think about this communal project that we have, this collective project of our time of reconnecting to the living web around us. How can we find our place in the ecosystem and stand up to protect it? I'm really hoping that we will start to develop interventions that really help psychedelics be opening towards that kind of work, as well as being useful as a medical treatment.

And how many items did you say were in the scale?

There were 19 items in the validated measure. But actually there are two items that we've added on and that's because. So the 19 items relate to connection to self, others and world. And I was contacted when the measure had been published by a group of psychologists and researchers from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. They were Maori psychologists and they wanted to use the connectedness tool in, in a psychedelic study looking at people with cancer and microdosing. And the reason they wanted to use the study is because they said that the connectedness model closely resembled the Maori construct of health, which is all about connectedness to community and to land. So this was a good outcome measure, but they said, you've missed out two of the most important things. And the two items that they suggested we included and we did, were I feel connected to my ancestors and I feel connected to my land. But the Maori word for land was fenua, which means placenta. So it's connection to the land as placenta, as connection to our mother that sustains us. I thought that was an amazing addition. So, yeah, there's a 19 item validated official version and then there's a 21 item version which I prefer with those two items added.

And you've established not only validity for the scale altogether, but interscale or intra scale validity as well. It's amazing. I'm curious. Well, you know, eventually work I've been doing in end of life care and many other fields for a long time in the literature, the idea of spiritual well being, spiritual health versus spiritual distress is really around exactly those three scales. It's connectedness with self, intrapersonally, connectedness with others, interpersonally and then some kind of transpersonal connectedness. So that's quite beautiful. Is it in the public domain?

It's absolutely free to use. There's a paper and there's an article in the journal Psychopharmacology which has, which describes it all. And people can also get it from my website, which has a manual as well with scoring and where we're starting to kind of collate the information of different teams that are using the measure. But we just. Yeah, we are under resourced right now, so it's taking us a while.

Well, I'm quite interested in using it with some programs we're doing. I'm wondering how if you've compared it with a scale instrument that's often used around psychedelic research. I remember the exact name, I'm sure you're familiar. It has to do with Mystical experiences?

Yes. The Mystical Experience Questionnaire? Yes.

Oh, that is, yeah. And that probably focuses more on the third of your three scales. But I wonder if there's been any studies that show any cross validation between those two.

I would imagine that there was certainly a relationship between the two of them. I think that the Mystical Experience Questionnaire is going to be will show up more people will get higher scores on it when they're having strong high dose experiences and they're breaking through to those transcendental states. There's lots of items about unity and awe. But I think that the connectedness tool will show some kind of change when people are even microdosing. I think we can open up a little bit to connectedness through breath work, microdosing, all sorts of other experiences, whereas the Mystical Experience Questionnaire is more for use with those big experiences.

So actually you brought up microdosing a couple times. That study in New Zealand had to do with microdosing. So I was curious, I was gonna ask you a question about that. Whether within your Acer community, whether that includes people both who've had stronger psychedelic experiences, journeys on their own, or plant medicine, or they're doing psycho assisted therapy, but is there also an ongoing microdosing going on and is that part of what people are sharing and working with?

Absolutely, yes. I think we've been talking about it more and more in the community and we have guest speakers every month. And we had the man that started the Microdosing Institute in the Netherlands last month and yes, Hein Pieneka, he's a wonderful man. And it's been really interesting hearing people's stories about microdosing and also the combination of nature connection, especially spending time with trees and microdosing, it seems to be a very good combination. So yeah, there's a lot of microdosing and also people using microdosing to integrate their larger dose psychedelic experiences too.

So I'd like to keep focusing a bit on this connectedness aspect of your work in terms of the Acer community and path. Now you already described this somewhat, but I'm wondering if focusing specifically on connectedness, how involvement in this year long program can help people deepen their connectedness with self, their connectedness with primary relationships, but also a sense of community and then getting that sense of connectedness with nature which you've already talked about a bit with the trees and so forth. But I wonder if you could go a little further with all that.

Yes. So of the cycle that we have, these 12 trees, they all have a different lesson, but they all teach some part of connecting us to self, others or world. So, for example, we have the rowan tree. The rowan tree is the tree for February. And this is a tree all about connecting to our grief and what our grief teaches us about what we love. So I won't go into more detail, though. I could talk for many hours about just the rowan tree, but the rowan tree is about really going down to the deepest, darkest parts of ourselves and learning from those places what lights the candle in the darkness for us. So that's the rowan tree. So that's just one example. That's connection to self and deep emotion. And then the Douglas fir tree, which is our tree for May, is about connecting to local communities so the people that actually are around us. Then the metaphor there is the Douglas Fir forest. I don't know if you've read Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard, but it's a wonderful book. It's about how Douglas fir forests operate with the law of cooperation rather than competition. They used to kind of herbicide all the other trees apart from the Douglas firs, because they thought that the Douglas firs were the cash crop and so they would get rid of all the competition. But what they found is that when they did spray all the other trees and bushes away when they killed them, that the Douglas fir trees themselves perished and did not thrive because of the mycelial connections underground. They were working as a reciprocal village. And so it was like all for one and one for all that. You know, the thriving of one is the thriving of all, the suffering of one is the suffering of all. And so we really use that metaphor to really think about reciprocity and cooperation and getting to know the people that live around us. And also coming out of the mentality that so many of us have been really trained in about competing, there's only enough for some of us, scarcity, domination, being better than. And so, yeah, that's just an example of two trees, but one is connection to self, the other is connection to community. And the connection to nature is just kind of all the way through it. So every month we're working with a different element of connectedness. But we meet the trees in these guided imagery journeys, which are these half an hour long form journeys with music, bespoke music set to them. The way we work with them is we can do this together in workshops or sometimes people just do it in their own time. They listen to the recording, but that we in all of the journeys, and we have 12 of them, one for every tree. The music Starts, we close our eyes, and we imagine the tree. We walk up to it, and we imagine sitting down with our back against it, and we feel our torso merge with the trunk of the tree, and we become the tree. And through this embodiment where we're breathing as the tree, we're imagining the roots going down. And we do this particular breathwork technique where we're breathing up from the earth, up through our bodies, up to the crown of the human, crown of the tree, feeling the sun on the crown, and then the breath goes back down again, and we're really starting to embody this feeling of becoming more tree. So the way we work with these themes, it's not just in a cognitive way of thinking about, you know, what I was saying about the rowan tree or the Douglas fir tree. It's not just thinking about the ideas. We actually go into a subtly altered state and let the wisdom of that lesson grow through us. And so the insights people have feel that they're very embodied and they're very visceral, and they stay with us longer than if we were just reading about it in a book. So we're letting connectedness kind of grow up through our bodies.

I'm curious if a maple tree is one of your 12.

Well, the most important of all of them, although I suppose we can't say that because it's. Yeah, each part is equally important. But the maple tree is what really led to the whole development of Acer. Because I had an experience with a maple tree where I, for the first time in my life as a materialist scientist, clinical psychologist, trained in cognitive behavioral therapy, had an experience in a very painful moment of my life where I'd kind of floods of tears in the rain, in the dark, leaning on this tree, which was a field maple, and having this incredibly profound experience of feeling the support of this tree and feeling this wisdom of this being and this animism and this feeling of being held. And so that was where the whole thing came from. From that the whole model became, you know, was born.

Oh, wonderful. I asked that because my wife and I, Sophie, we live in. I feel very fortunate. We live in a small New England town, a very kind of bucolic street, especially within, you know, three or 400 yards either way of our house. These beautiful old maple trees lining the street. 200 to 300 years old. Big, large old maple tees. And we just love walking along them. We often stop and connect with them and spend time with.

Yeah, yes, they're queens, the maples. And also, of course, the maple syrup is. Maple syrup is one of our metaphors because we talk about how through the process of alchemical processing, we can turn the mud at our roots into maple syrup, like trees do. Trees. Maple trees take in the mud that they stand on and they bring it up through their bodies, and they turn the mud into maple syrup. And I think that's an amazing analogy for turning our suffering to growth, as psychedelics are so good at helping us do.

That's a wonderful metaphor. Somewhat like the idea of the lotus which, you know, blooms in the mud and so forth. Yeah, beautiful. I'd like to explore a little bit more of the other aspects of your ACER model, ACE in particular. So acceptance, embody and restore. So accept has a lot to do with accepting ourselves, but in many dimensions, probably accepting one's past, what's one been through, traumatic experiences, one's present circumstances, like grounding the way forward, the journey forward, and some ground of acceptance. And I'm wondering how you develop that in your community and through this model.

So in our tree metaphor, the. The acceptance is. This is our roots. And I think there's something very profound that happens when we de Shame having a dark half, that a tree is a mirror image. Its roots and branches are a mirror image of each other. And that every centimeter of growth at the branches is mirrored by growth down in the dark half. And life is polarity. We have shadow cells, we have pain, we have things. We have traumatic experiences like big rocks that our roots have had to grow around. And I think in life, we so often try and pretend we don't have any of that, because roots are by their very nature, very tangled and messy and muddy and hard. And we all stand like. When you look at other people, I kind of almost see people as trees now. And I imagine that, you know, the side of you see that the trunk and the branches, but you don't see the roots. But we all are standing on very complicated roots, and we have no idea what other people have been through, but we don't really show it to each other. So I think there's something about the sharing circles that we have in asa. We have them after tree journeys. We have them all sorts of different sharing circles. And we're really normalizing practice of witnessing each other's tangled, messy, complex roots. And so in our sharing circles, we don't give any advice. We don't even give feedback. We just take it in turns to share, and we share about how things really are. We don't put on a brave face or Pretend things are fine. People cry, people express frustration. People share about things that they've done that they feel guilty about. They share about an argument they just had where they said something terrible. They share about an experience they've had where they've really confronted a monstrous part of themselves or their shadow. We really normalize that sense of, you know, we all have this. We all have this tangle that we grow from. And so I think by hearing each other talk about it, it really helps us feel more courageous to share about our own and to realize that is like the lotus and the month of the maple syrup. That is where the change really comes from. So we work with it in breath, work in sharing circles in the tree journeys. But I'd say more than all of that is this general approach in the community of we can be our real, authentic selves and we don't put on any. Put on any act or we don't feel we need to pretend. And I think what's helpful about that is, you know, in our places of work or in our families, like, we have certain roles and there's certain expectations in a community of people that are all coming together because we're exploring psychedelics and we have a kind of commitment to really learning as much as we can. It's somehow easier to just really be there as a. Just completely true and completely without pretense. And it's also easier online. I was unsure at first whether an online community would really work. I thought maybe, you know, it would be better in person, but I really wanted it to be global and available to everyone. But it's interesting that zoom sharing circles, I found them really, because we're all in our own home environment, so we have our home comforts. We have a certain amount of kind of safety, and we see all these faces on the screen and you can really see each other's compassion and care, and you can feel safe in that way. You feel held by this screen full of people. But it's not too overwhelming. And people know that at any point they can, you know, they could turn their camera off or leave. So I would. I think that the depth of the sharing was quite profound and really helps with this. Yeah, the A. The acceptance of emotion and acceptance in each other's emotion as well.

Yeah. To your last point there about accepting each other, I'm wondering, you know, that acceptance kind of goes from the individual into the collective because, you know, we all have our individual history with traumatic experiences and the entanglements of the shadow. But, you know, part of it is Our family lineage that gets passed on to us in many ways. Direct contact, epigenetically. And then we all share in our ethnic heritage, our nation's heritage, and then the human. I mean, we're all sitting on this mycelium of human suffering and human trauma that's very interconnected and complex and entangled and so forth. So I'm wondering if there's some quality of, you know, I mean, in some ways we would almost maybe individualistic instinct. I wish I could be apart from that, not deal with all that and have a more. I had a positive birth, and I'm not exposed to all that. You know, I feel compassion for all those other suffering beings. But there could be a shift. Of course I'm part of all that. Of course I'm exposed to all that. Why would I want to be separate? That is my community. It includes suffering. But, you know, in some ways, the acceptance of suffering is the entryway into a broader community. So I'm curious about the individual and collective aspects of it.

Interesting. Yeah. I mean, I think that we certainly have had people in the community that have, I'd say, felt like we have lots of therapists in the community. Lots and lots of therapists. Space holders. And I would say that we have had some people who, at the beginning of the journey, have kind of. Yeah, like, maybe there's been a bit of a distance of, well, I'm okay. You know, I don't. My patients, my clients have a lot of trauma, but I've had a sheltered life and I'm okay. And of course, that may be true. But when we look at the times that we're in and when we look at the predicament of humanity, when we look at the predicament of the living web and our biodiversity in our ecosystems, and we look at the injustices in our globe and the situations faced by so many people, we can no longer take that position of saying, like, oh, I'm okay, thanks. It's like, okay, yeah, we are needing change, all of us together. And so I think when that shift happens and people start to really. And I think psychedelics can open people up to the suffering of the world as well, really feeling the pain of others. And when that happens, then I think at first it can feel a bit overwhelming, like it's too much of a task. But then when we realized that being alive at this time is, I think, in a way, a privilege, because there is such work to do and there is such change happening that, you know, that whole question of, like, what's My value? What's my purpose? That existential question that people can have. I feel that now it's like, well, we all pull together and we do whatever we can do as part of this project of, you know, connectedness, like, opening up connectedness again for. In small and large ways. So I think that people. There is really a sense of, like, the project of the time, and that everybody wants to be involved in that in some small or big way. And that gives people a lot of sense of meaning and purpose, and that in many ways, that can be so much more fulfilling than ease and comfort. And we've had many decades of kind of numbing and ease and watching TV and, you know, all of the things our culture gives us to keep us kind of distracted. And I don't think we've been that happy with that. I think there's a general sense of kind of. There's an emptiness, there's a yearning for something. There's a longing for something. And that the times we're in now where we connect to the collective and the pain in the collective, we might have less comfort, we might have more anxiety and more fear about the future, but we also have more of a sense of, I get it now. That's part of me that felt like I was maybe missing something. I know what that is now. And I think, yeah, it can be beautiful as well as scary to connect to the collective.

I'd like to explore just a little bit more the embodiment aspect of your model. So you mentioned sort of literally physically connecting with trees and visualizing or connecting the trees and sort of becoming the tree? And you also mentioned the breath work that you do. Are there other types of embodiment practices that you do in the community to help people become more embodied, more connected to their body? And does that involve, you know, the conventional ways we connect with body, but also the more the landscape of interoceptive awareness, like the really deep, energetic, sensate experience of the body.

Yes, yes. So we have a couple of different. So we have one exercise called the Pearl Dive, which is very much about interoceptive awareness and diving into the deepest layers of the body and really getting a sense of the parts of the body that feel tense and tight and leaning into those places, opening up to those places and learning from them. So that's something we do as a whole community every few months. That is a standalone visualization that people can access from my website for free and they can use it with clients as well. It's called the Pearl Protocol. It's on my Dr. Rosalind watts.com website. And that gives people a chance to kind of test out these visualizations before they join Acer as well, to see if they kind of like the way they work. So that's one thing we do. We do dancing, as I mentioned before, we have these monthly dances as a different kind of embodiment. But we also. I'd say that the main thing is music meditation. Music is such a wonderful way to bypass mental control and go deep, deep into our visceral, embodied awareness. And so we have John Hopkins, who's a musician, an artist who's created lots of amazing psychedelic albums, incredible talent. He gave us, donated lots of his music for us to turn into music meditations. And we also have another musician who's created all these bespoke playlists. So we have lots of music meditations that aren't linked to trees. And some are short, some are long, but we get lots of feedback that they really help people cry. You know, sometimes we are carrying so much around with us and there's something like crying. It's this, like, physical release of tension and stress and that it can be such a beautiful, relieving experience to just sob and let all those layers of just unwind.

I'm curious if you employ any Celtic music in your.

It's so interesting. So Finn the musician has just started now weaving in a little bit more. But it's interesting because thinking about kind of the spiritual chapters, in the 60s, there was this move to the east, to India, and lots of Indian music. And then in the times that we're in now, the spiritual gaze has gone towards the Amazon. And so we have lots of amazing Icarus and ceremony songs from Brazil or from Peru. And so for me, the music from India and the music from Peru, that music for me feels really evocative because I have a muscle memory of this music being aligned with spiritual ideas. But when I listen to Celtic music, because we have not yet turned our gaze to Britain or to the Celtic lands, I hear that music and it makes me think of other things. So I think that there will be ways of weaving in some instruments and with some Celtic refrains and rhythms, But I think it's going to take some refining. When I made a Spotify playlist of Celtic music, it just. It took me out of my kind of meditative medicine headspace and put me into wanting to do like, a ceilidh dance or go and kind of Guinness in the local park.

You're right. No, it's very much part of your culture. So I could see how it would do that. It would be like, you know, other forms of popular music in North America, the West, for us. But actually I love Celtic music and when I listen to it, because I didn't grow up in a Celtic culture, even though I have that ethnic background, I find a very embodied kind of music, especially when it involves drumming.

Drumming is incredibly. I would love to include. We've just started including wood whittling in our community where we, in fact, after this I have wood whittling where we take sticks from all the different trees and we engrave them into kind of almost like tarot cards. So we make a set of 12, but we use like runes so we sticks like that. Each one has a different meaning. So we've started wood whittling. But I would love to include drumming at some point too. And I just don't know how we do drumming online. We're going to test out wood whittling online and see how that works. But drumming online, I don't think. I think you need to be in person, but that one could be difficult.

Yeah. So what's your research in psilocybin? When you were involved with clinical trials and so far I know there's been very, you know, positive results, although the sustainability of the results sometimes can be in question. Like, you know, maybe someone goes through psychedelic assisted therapy with psilocybin and maybe is depression free for six months or longer, but then it arises again. So I'm curious about the long term effects of psilocybin therapy, positive and negative, and also the sustainability of the benefits and then how to, how to sustain the benefits long term.

Yes. I think one of the things I realized from working with people long term, so some of the participants in the first and second Imperial trials we're talking about like eight years ago, nine years ago, now are now they've been through the process of Acer and they're now facilitators within Acer. So there are some people I've worked with for eight years and have seen their journey, but lots of other people I've stayed in contact with that I was a guide for in the studies as well. And so I've really seen the long term journey unfolding. We don't have data for it because the studies only record data up until like six months at the very latest. So this is all kind of informal, this is kind of case study based rather than something that's been written up in academic journals. But I think what I've realized is that psychedelic therapy doesn't really take away pain. It doesn't take away difficult experiences. It doesn't take away. It's not going to stop you from going through really difficult times in your life. Think about that seasonal analogy as well, of the darkness and the light and the winters and springs. It's not going to stop you having winters. So often people with depression, they would have a psychedelic experience and they would feel like they kind of go into spring and summer for a while, and then it would fade into autumn and winter and then. And sometimes people would stay in winter and the depression would come back. If there's no way that they can keep working in this way, but if they can access either breath work or an integration community or further sessions, then I think it's possible to come into a rhythm when they are. They're also having springs and summers as well as winters. So to come into something that is more in the flow of nature rather than being like, stuck in a winter that never ends. But I think this idea that a psychedelic experience would take us to constant summer, which is the idea that some, you know, our culture is quite in love with the idea of, like, constant summer and feeling happy all the time. And it certainly doesn't do that. It doesn't take away suffering, doesn't take away pain. I think what it can do is equip people with the tools to face their pain and to be with it and to learn from it. And it can help us be more open, more able to connect, more able to connect with other people. And I think it's often those openings and those connections that it can bring. That's what really helps us stay. Stay well through all the seasons. Because we have more of a sense of being in a network of other people that we can share with. And I think the other thing that really helps, the thing that I really think is the real medicine. You know, people talk about the kind of the plant medicines and yeah, I'm hugely grateful to the mushrooms and to all of the teachers, but. And the trees. But I think one of the strongest medicines anyway is being able to give back. So when we are receiving lots of support, receiving care, it's wonderful. But the real joy comes when we are able to support somebody else. I think it's why AA is so effective, because, you know, you go through your 12 steps and then you become somebody else's. I can't remember the word for it. Sponsor.

Sponsor. Yeah.

Someone comes to you and you're saying. And you're in that position of like, I know something here. And I can help you and it makes me feel good to help you. So the model of Acer is kind of based on the same thing. You go through the 12Es initially for yourself, although you're working with community connection and nature connection as well as self connection. But then in our second year, you can either become a facilitator for asa, you can apply at least to become a facilitator in our program. So you hold the sharing circles for new people coming in. But we also have these two in person community levels where people can be out greaters. So we talk about integration, which is where you're bringing all the gifts in and you're bringing all the learning into yourself and then out of gration, where you share those gifts with other people in your local community. So we give people four of the tree journeys and some of the other resources and they set up groups in their local community. Not of people that are necessarily taking psychedelics, although they can be. But it's often just people that live in the village or people that they're friends with and they go around to their house or the like village hall or you know, some kind of center. It's all for free. We give the resources for free and people don't pay to do it. And they share these tree journey workshops with their local community. So that's one way. And the other way is we're starting to license the whole all of the 12 tree materials to therapists that want to start their own in person local Acer group. So by spreading the model that way people get the chance to have received it, received the wisdom from the trees and the gifts, and then it's offering it to other people that really is the beauty for many people. It's the most beautiful part.

Absolutely. And I've always felt for a long, long time that some kind of service, and I love the term out of gration, that that the service aspect is so important to any kind of transformational healing journey and spiritual journey. And it seems like to be a natural culmination of those journeys. And I also love what you said. It seems like your view of this kind of recognizing the emotional seasonality of our lives is a much more realistic view of mental health and what you described of being stuck in an endless winter. That is the way people experience depression. I think people would often describe it in that way. And of course we don't want to be stuck there. But the idea of imagining that we can be in an endless summer I don't think is particularly realistic or so healthy either. This has been really an illuminating conversation and so helpful. Ross, I think maybe just a final question, if you have any final reflection just on the connection between mental health and nature or human thriving in nature altogether.

So I've written about this with my colleague Sam Gandhi. We've written papers on the kind of the synergy between psychedelics, nature connectedness and mental health, mental well being. I mean, we know that there is lots of research showing that nature connectedness is really good for mental health. But I think what many people don't realize is that nature is an incredible therapist. So I was talking to a colleague of mine, Adrian Harris, who's an eco therapist, and he telling me that when he goes out into nature with his individual clients, he says, you know, you do realize, don't you, that you're working with the best therapist in the world. And that therapist is nature. For me, it's nature. And when we go out into nature with our eyes open and an open heart and really ask questions, we can find so much wisdom reflected back there. It's. It's hard to really describe what I mean by it unless people have had a taste of it. But it feels like there is a reciprocal relationship and that nature is not just inanimate. Nature is not just a picture or a backdrop. Nature is a being holding us and interacting with us. And so I hope that there will be a real resurgence in nature based therapy, not just psychedelic integration or psychedelic therapy, but also just really understanding the deeply healing, therapeutic quality of nature and how nature can not just help us heal. And you know, walking on the earth, our bare feet on the earth is so good for regulating our nervous systems, but also just learning about ourselves as well. And I think the trees are amazing friends. When you connect with trees like you've connected with your maples, everywhere you go in the world, there's friends there. And hugging a tree is such a cliche, especially for the 60s psychedelic times. But hugging a tree, feeling heart to heart, you know, the center of the tree is called the heartwood and you put your heart on the heartwood and really breathe with that tree, feeling the reciprocal connection that the tree's out breath is your in breath and the tree's in breath is your out breath. The way the oxygen and carbon dioxide work reciprocally, and just feeling that support, it can be, yeah, really life saving. And yeah, I hope that maybe people listening this will maybe go and hug a tree today if they don't feel too embarrassed doing it.

Absolutely, I think so. I don't think I ever made fun of tree huggers, but I certainly thought knew of that expression as being a little bit not quite derisive but a little bit making fun of. But I have become a tree hunger. I'm a dedicated tree hugger today, so. And I'm inspired to go out and hug my maples when we get done with this. So thank you very much. This has really been joyful and illuminating and thank you so much for the amazing work that you're doing. Dr. Rosalind Watts, thank you so much.

Thank you Fleet. Thank you everyone for listening.

And where do people find out more about your work online?

The website is Acer integration, so that's a C E r integration, all1word.com and we have a wait list that people can join and they can get lots of information about when we're next taking people in from that wait list. And there's also an info pack that people can request. So it's definitely worth signing up to the mailing list, the wait list because you get loads of good free stuff.

And you also have your own website, don't you?

Yes, that's drrosalynwatts.com all one word. And that's where people can find the Pearl Dive Audio journeys and all sorts of other good stuff.

Okay, wonderful, wonderful. Well, thank you again so much. Please be well and keep going with your work.

Thank you. You too.

Thank you.

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