EP 212: Cassandra Vieten | The Healing Power of Mindful Psychedelic Experiences

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Welcome to the Radical Responsibility Podcast. This is your host, Dr. Fleet Mohl. And in this episode, I'm joined by Dr. Cassandra Vitin, a clinical professor and director of the center for Mindfulness at UC San Diego, to explore the transformative power of psychedelic assisted therapies and mindfulness practices. We dive into the fascinating intersection of indigenous, Eastern and Western approaches to healing and discuss how these practices can reshape our neurology and unravel trauma. Dr. Eaton also covers the ethics and future of psychedelic therapies and how personal healing can inspire broader societal changes. So tune in and explore how mindful psychedelic experiences can spark profound healing from within. And by the way, if you'd like to take advantage of a current offer on Radical Responsibility.

You can go to our website, radicalresponsibilitybook.com and order the book online. Put in your order number and you'll receive over $1,000 in free free bonuses. So take advantage of that offer. Currently@radicalresponsibilitybook.com okay, and now our episode with Dr. Cassandra Vitin.

And I'm really happy to be here today with Dr. Cassandra Vitin. Welcome.

Great to be here. Thank you, Fleet.

Well, we're really excited to have you be part of our summit this year, and I'm going to share a bit of your background with our audience so they're familiar with who you are and your work, and then we'll jump right into the conversation. Sound good?

Great.

Okay, so Cassandra Vitin, PhD, is a clinical professor and director of the center for Mindfulness at the Centers for Integrative Health in the Department of Family Medicine at UC San Diego. She's also Director of Research at the Arthur C. Clark center for Human Imagination and Clinical Psychology, Director at the Psychedelics and Health Research Initiative at ucsd. She is a Senior Advisor of the John W. Brick Mental Health foundation, where she served as executive director from 2019 to 2023, just recently, and as a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, where she served as president from 2013 to 2019. Her research has focused on spirituality and health, transformative experiences and practices, the development of mindfulness based interventions for emotional well being, and the development of media technologies to inspire law. She received her PhD in clinical psychology at the California Institute of Animal Studies and completed her research training in behavioral genetics at UC San Francisco. She has authored three books, published numerous articles in scientific journals, and is an internationally recognized keynote speaker and workshop leader. So again, welcome Dr. Vitin.

Thank you.

So much.

Your work has focused, at least in part on understanding, on our growing understanding of psychedelic medicines and plant medicines and how they intersect with spirituality and health. So I wonder if you could talk to us about that intersection and from a research perspective, what is the connection between our physical, mental, emotional, spiritual health and well being and plant medicines and psychedelic medicines?

Yeah. Well, first of all, it's just an honor to be here, Fleet, and I'm so happy you guys are doing this summit. And it's just a wonderful opportunity for so many people out there to learn about psychedelics and psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, which is of course in the midst of a gigantic renaissance.

So, you know, people started to. Well, people have used psychedelics and entheogens and plant medicines for millennia, since the beginning of recorded history for multiple purposes. And of course, we don't know necessarily what was happening in the early, early days before written language, but we can tell through some artifacts and, you know, cave paintings and things like that that people were using it either for, you know, achieving altered states of consciousness for probably some kinds of healing purposes, for spiritual, shamanic kinds of purposes, such as a shaman in the tribe maybe taking a psychedelic and trying to see on the other side of the mountain whether the it was a good day for a hunt, seeing if they could expand their psychic abilities or clairvoyant abilities. This is things that we at least think they might have been doing and that have been passed down over the generations in oral tradition. And then when we started writing down history, there have been many, many accounts of psychedelics and plant medicines being responsible in part for aspects of the world's major religions. You know, little known fact that LSD had a little bit to do with the insights that came to Bill Wilson about starting 12 step programs and, you know, have spawned all kinds of different insights around psychology. And when I got into this field, it was because I was studying along with Marilyn Schlitz and Tina Amarok at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, how people transform their lives in positive ways towards greater health and balance and meaning and joy and purpose. So we call this, you know, positive transformation. And so many of the people who were interviewed or surveyed for those studies of people who had had these profound shifts in their lives towards greater health and well being had experienced plant medicine at one point or another, often as the opening, initial glimpse into a new way of viewing the world or themselves. So even if you talk to someone who had never used it since then, they'd say, you know, When I was 17, I took LSD and I had a glimpse of a whole different way of looking at reality and at myself. And that set me on my journey to becoming a doctor, becoming a healer, becoming a psychotherapist.

So that's how I initially encountered it. And then, since then, have studied more in depth how using plant medicines have changed people's lives based on their own reports. And of course, we're all very thrilled now that we can legally study psychedelics in clinical and research settings to see, not just retrospectively, but prospectively as people are going through it, how it's changing their lives.

So it seems like, you know, modern psychology here in the west really shifted in the 60s. And I mean, there were roots certainly in Jungian psychology, but much of the psychology of the 19th and 20th century was focused on pathology and very behaviorist in orientation and somewhat diagnostic and reductionistic. And then we had the humanistic psychology and transpersonal psychology movements that began to surface in the 60s and 70s with figures like Abraham Maslow and Stan Grof. And it would seem like psychedelics and plant medicine played a role in this shift in our, our approach to psychology and then psychotherapy.

I would think so. And I think they probably even had a role before that, because as you know, the so called grandfather of the entire field of psychology, William James, was very much interested in peak experiences and the varieties of religious experience and talked about psychedelics and altered states of consciousness being incredibly important to understand human psychology. Then there was even Freud and Jung and some of those initial analytic figures. They may not have talked as much about altered states of consciousness through plant medicines, but what they did talk about was the crucial importance of making things that were not conscious conscious, especially Jung, but also very much Freud. That the entire psychological endeavor at that point was how can we help people become aware of complexes and behaviors and conflicts that are deep inside of them that they don't know about that are driving their behavior? And of course, anecdotally this is what a lot of people share, that psychedelics and entheogens and now things like ketamine do for people is they sort of deactivate the inhibitory ego or, you know, the inner editor or, you know, they disrupt your narrative of who you think you are and how you think reality works. And they provide this moment where other material that was not conscious comes into consciousness. So I think it's very much in alignment with that. And then of course as you were saying, in the 60s and 70s, we had the transpersonal movements and people like Stan Grof very vocally talking about LSD being a key tool to use in helping people access aspects of their psyche that they might not be able to access in any other way. What's really interesting now though is that that reductionistic, mechanistic side of things that scientism that psychology really got is, has become more dominated by is coming full circle now because these are in fact brain agents. And so as we look at psychedelics in modern research times, we're at them both as.

You know, compounds that. Chemical compounds that are addressing specific brain targets, which is very much in alignment with the scientific worldview of modern psychology. But we're also looking at these deeper shifts in people's understandings of themselves and their worlds.

So it would seem like, as you were describing, the general arc of the development, maybe, maybe the whole motivation behind psychology and therapy is, is bringing into awareness that which we're not aware of, which is really driving our behaviors and outcomes in life. And then some process of integrating that, some process of integrating that in ways that has an overall impact of healing and transformation. And then, you know, that probably goes back into the roots of shamanism and even dream work and.

Greco Roman era and so forth. So seems like human beings have always longed to understand why am I behaving the way I'm behaving, what's underlying all that and then how do I integrate and heal that?

Yeah, and I think really important to say here that it's not just the negative things that we're unconscious of, it's also the potentials and possibilities that we are not conscious of. So, you know, as we move through modern society and, you know, coming up as a. In the later half of the 20, 20th century or the beginning of the 21st century, there have been a lot of dampening, I guess, of what people think is possible, what. What they think is possible in terms of solving the world's problems, what they think is possible in their own psyche. And so those positive possibilities and potentials are also part of what gets revealed. Like maybe it is possible that we could someday achieve a way of people being at peace with one another, that those kinds of aha moments come up in plant medicine journeys in addition to, oh my gosh, look at how I've been acting and how I don't want to act anymore. So.

Well, I'm really glad you brought that forward because we do seem to be an age in kind of an overall zeitgeist of deconstructionism and kind of the whole evolution of postmodernity, which has its purpose and it evolved naturally, but nonetheless it's bent on deconstructing things almost solely for the purpose of deconstructing things, which just takes into a kind of nihilistic materialism and a cynicism about life. And that's no place to live our lives from or to try to co create the future we want to create together. So I'm really grateful, glad that you brought forward a way, a touch into that, those positive possibilities through this work. So you referenced William J. As the grandfather of modern psychology. And I don't think he used the term mindfulness per se, but he's often quoted. There's a short quote that pretty much describes the process of mindfulness. Continue returning your attention to some object of attention. And so your work has focused a lot at UC San Diego on, on mindfulness and integrated mindfulness and spirituality and so forth. And so I'm wondering about the intersection in your work between mindfulness and awareness practices, mind training altogether, and then psychedelic experiences and psychedelic assisted psychotherapy.

Yeah, very. It's. It's become a topic of really strong interest for me and several others. And you know, it's interesting because the mindfulness, the. The aspect of mindfulness that's derived from, let's say, Eastern philosophy or Buddhism or other kinds of, you know, martial arts or Hinduism and things like that, that kind of contemplative Eastern practice often is altered states of consciousness would be antithetical to some of those. The bases of mindfulness, some of the traditions that we don't use, things that intoxicate us, that we don'. Do. We don't pay attention to distracting altered states of consciousness, whether they're coming up through things that we encounter in the world or whether they're coming up through our own misunderstandings that we really try to stay away from Maya or the illusory world. And so I think initially the kind of collision of psychedelics and mindfulness might have been a bit uncomfortable for some people because they like, you know, hey, those big visions are kind of exactly what we're trying to stay away from in let's say in Zen, for example, where we're really trying to quiet down, not pay a lot of attention to the fireworks and just stay simple and very, very realistic, let's say, very authentic, very genuine. Whereas some people might see these psychedelic experiences, as I say, like is completely antithetical to that breaking the rules of non intoxicants and Creating these fireworks in people's minds that are exactly what we want to stay away from. On the other hand, what I will say is that there are, I think, a lot of anecdotal stories about psychedelics and entheogens and people's experiences in them that are the very first time they ever truly understood what these traditions were pointing to in terms of, let's say, non dual awareness or extensive unlimited compassion, unlimited love. True Metta. And so I do believe that there is an overlap in the moderate, intentional, deliberate use of psychedelics and entheogens and other forms of agents that help us reach altered states of consciousness to provide a glimpse into, of course, what Aldous Huxley famously talked about as the, you know, the, the doors of perception, you know, the, the windows being kind of unveiled for a little bit so you can see clearly for just a little while. Then you can come back and get back into your mindfulness practice having had an embodied experience of what the mindfulness practice is pointing to. And I kind of believe that in my own practice and my own interest, research wise. And so I think it's important to look at that. The other intersection that I think is really important is that now that there is this big psychedelic renaissance, a lot of people are accessing psychedelic experiences and journeys without a lot of preparation and without a lot of integration. And so I believe there might be a role for mindfulness practices in preparing for psychedelic experiences and in integrating psychedelic experiences so that we can really boost the effectiveness and even the safety of psychedelic use.

Yeah, and I'd like to circle back to that kind of distinction you were making earlier about the mindfulness movements and you know, kind of foundational meditation practice. Certainly values are kind of sobriety and, and really, you know, reality focus and so forth.

But just your point on, on preparation and integration for psychedelic sessions. Meditation mindfulness mind training is fundamentally about developing a relationship with our own mind and a familiarity with various mind states and the ability, the greater ability to navigate that territory. So that seems incredibly useful preparation for psychedelic sessions to have more confidence that one can navigate what may arise and then as well, the process of integration. I mean, basically the fruits. I wonder if you would agree that some of the fruits of a consistent, fairly long term mindfulness practice.

Is having a more integrated brain. Really in neurobiological terms, we have a brain that's more differentiated to solve complex problems, but it's also more integrated and those accesses flow more easily. And so we're more likely, having done that work, we're more likely to be able to integrate experiences from psychedelic sessions than if we haven't done that kind of work and we're still dealing with, you know, a lot of lack of integration in our self structure or dysregulation where, you know, we're kind of in dysregulated states a lot. It's going to be a lot more difficult.

I would think so. And I'm looking forward to hopefully doing some research in this domain because I don't think there is any research yet on, let's say, the difference in effects between someone who has a mindfulness preparation and someone who doesn't have that preparation. That'll be a great study to do, but I think theoretically it should really help.

Yes. And I think, you know, back in the 60s and 70s, I was very well, well aware of this because I was very involved in the whole psychedelic movement back then starting in about 1966, and also got involved in meditation at the same time. And a lot of the meditation teachers and some very prominent teachers back in the day were counseling against involvement with psychedelics and so forth. I always felt there was a connection, although I was willing to hold that in question, you know, and, and pay attention to, to wise elders. But.

You know, certainly basic training in mindfulness, it's kind of foundational training in various forms of Buddhism, whether it's Zen or Theravada or even basic training in Tibetan Buddhism, as well as probably basic yogic training and other Vedic traditions, does value sobriety and real and being very connected with reality. And you know, part of the problem, you know, our neurosis is very tied into our constant externalization and kind of fascination with the relative Maya. Right. The relative illusion of relative reality. So it seems like by coming back in and developing a kind of sober, clear view of things as they are and an ability to drop into a deeper, a kind of depth of our being beneath all the noise can be just that place of being in a very sober, reality tested state. But then it also seems in many traditions, certainly in the inner yogic traditions of Tibetan Buddhism and various Vedic traditions, it also then becomes the doorway into those realms that people experience.

Through psychedelics. And certainly Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzer's book, the psychedelic experiences, drawing the parallels between their LSD experiences and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, for example. So it seemed that the contemplative spiritual traditions, maybe there's a kind of very sober pacifying part of the contemplative tradition which seems to be very necessary to kind of get unhooked from our Fascination with relative of illusion. But then there's a whole realm of depth which seems to parallel the psychedelic experience.

Yeah, and of course many, many traditions, spiritual traditions around the planet.

Value tremendously states of ecstasy and bliss and altered states of consciousness. Drumming the whirling dervishes of the Sufi tradition. I mean there are tons and tons of even something as what we would think of as conservative as the Catholic Church. Part of the reason why they burned frankincense and myrrh in the, in the cathedral is to have a slight altered state of consciousness through this aroma. And, and even the way cathedrals are built are supposed to bring you into a sense of awe and wonder and giganticness. And so, you know, I think all spiritual traditions understand to some extent the importance of these ecstatic or mind opening states of consciousness, whether or not they literally used entheogens or psychedelics or not. When we have looked at the ways that thousands of people have engaged in positive transformation in their life, what we see is a dialectic between.

Long term periods of practice, which is kind of like learning how to play the piano, practicing day after day after day, watching the breath, watching the body sensations every day, choosing to be in integrity or to live with meaning or to practice compassion. And then these periods of great insight or aha moments or big leaps. So there's sort of like this leap, plateau, leap, plateau, leap, plateau way that transformation in people's lives work and those leaps or those aha moments, those moments of clarity I think are as important as the long term bottom up practice and they can really work together in a powerful way.

That seems to be one of the big questions.

The sustainability of these big leaps that are brought about by psychedelic experiences. And so the question is, could even, you know, can just one psychedelic experience really bring about transformation in people's lives? It certainly seems to be. So in the short term people, you know, the, the countless collected qualitative data, people's descriptions of their experiences and, and the shift that it occurred in their worldview, their belief systems.

But whether that sticks and whether it shows up in how, how we lead our lives, you know, we can even have in the meditation, I think most long term meditators are familiar with through retreat practice or even deep daily practice, you know, I haven't gotten at times of places where they felt, you know, very sane and especially coming out of retreat and then with a few days feel like they're back in a swamp of, of neurosis. So I wonder about, you know, the sustainability of these big leaps that are brought about in some ways chemically or at least maybe what to put it in terms of plant medicine, a little organically, through our relationship.

With these really in some ways sacred plants that Mother Earth has provided for us.

Yeah, I do believe, and some evidence supports the idea that a single psychedelic experience can have long term effects. And it's kind of like sometimes I think of it as PTSD in reverse, that we know that a single traumatic experience can have long term effects on someone's way of thinking, feeling and being and even brain chemistry and structure. In the same way, I believe a powerful psychedelic experience and other positive experiences without psychedelics can have long term effects. One of the things that's unique about let's say psilocybin is it does look like physiologically there is an increased plasticity during the psychedelic experience. So, you know, there's almost a.

Somebody mentioned to me that almost like a silly Putty, you know, like it makes your brain very malleable for a short period of time. And then you may have restructuring or experiences or lessons that you learn during that time. And when it reconsolidates, it consolidates with those new experiences. Kind of hard coded in. Now some of this is theory, right? But the neuroplasticity that happens during the session is not theory. That's clear. And so it may be that that is part of how it works. We have one of the founders of the center for Psychedelic Research at UC San Diego was named Albert Lynn and is named Albert Lynn and he is a National Geographic explorer. He's on TV on the nat geostations and has been all over the world. But he had a car accident where he had one of his legs amputated and he was having excruciating phantom limb pain, meaning that where the limb was amputated he was still experiencing pain even though it wasn't there. This is a commonly observed phenomenon in people with amputations. So he tried a lot of different things, pain relievers and different kinds of processes. And he then started using something called the mirror box, which is where you hold a mirror up against your existing leg. And it kind of tricks the brain into looking down and seeing the mirror image of the existing leg, looking like it's the leg that's missing and it stops hurting because your brain says, okay, that's what's supposed to be there. That's what I'm supposed to be seeing. It only helps temporarily though. And so what Albert did was he decided to do his own psilocybin administration while using the mirror box off and on and since the time of that session, he hasn't had the phantom limb pain. And so it seems like somehow, and the way he says it is I changed my story about the pain.

So it could be that something physiological happened in his brain that reset the imagery. And it also could be that it was really psychological, that he did change his story about the pain and that's what allows him to not feel it as excruciating anymore. But that was really the inspiration for a current study we're doing on phantom limb pain where we're recruiting participants who have an amputation who experience phantom limb pain doing a psilocybin session or doing a placebo session. And then we're looking to see if the people who receive the psilocybin have improvements in their phantom limb pain. So that's an example of how one experience can have lasting effects in really profound.

Quality of life relevant ways.

Well, that's a fascinating line of research and seems like a very fertile avenue of research. And there are so many. I mean, it seems like we're at a time when there you could just go off in a million directions with some really fascinating research to better understand this. And you know, we understand more about the brain and you know, our whole, whole nervous system. Sometimes we talk about three brains, the skull encapsulated brain, the neural networks in the heart and the gut and so forth. But, you know, we understand more than we ever have. And yet it's still a great mystery because it's really the most complex system in the known universe. So it's a fascinating time to be alive in the cross section between neuroscientific research and psychedelics and contemplative spirituality. It just seems so such fertile ground for research. I know that, you know, in my own experience, my early psychiatric experiences in the 60s and 70s certainly radically changed my worldview, radically changed my relationship to the natural world. You know, I, I no longer made the, the casual distinction between the animate and the inanimate world. I mean, I really had the experience of being an energetic being living within an energetic matrix of life and connect with the natural world.

Very experiential. And it definitely changed my belief systems, my worldview. But then living from that, I mean, it still seems like in my own experience one and I think you hear about this in anecdotal reports from many people, both with peak, any kind of peak experiences that you still have to do the work. There's still the long, long work of, of, you know, appealing and, you know, developing your character and Becoming gentler and more compassionate and less egocentric and so forth. One of, one of the parallels between the contemplative traditions in their various forms and these psychedelic experiences is either sudden or gradual experiences of what people call ego dissolution, a loosening of the, of the limited self structure so that we can experience a more expanded state of self or in some cases what people may think of as no self or some kind of complete non dual. So I wonder about that intersection between those two.

Yeah, well, there have been now studies and advancing theories about one of the primary mechanisms of the effectiveness of mindfulness and other forms of meditation is something like loosening of ego or having experiences of ego dissolution or reperceiving, you know, having a different perspective on the solidity of the ego. And you know, a lot of people will sort of misunderstand Buddhist philosophy and say there's no self. And it really is more like there's no solid self. And it's more accurate to say the philosophy would say it's a flowing, it's a constant dynamic, changing flow of energy and information that we tend to crystallize into. This is me and this is what me means, and these are my jobs and my stories. And, and so just like meditation can gradually break that down and say, you know, hey, it's really more accurate that you are ever changing context dependent being that is not just a single being but is part of a larger whole. And that we are all working together to be kind to each other, to reduce suffering, to have a healthier planet, to have healthier children, to do better in the ways that we function. And once you've had that experience at a deep experiential level, it's hard to feel isolated and lonely again after that. That, you know, there's something that gets, there's something that you see that you can't unsee. Now does that mean that you never get depressed or anxious again, or never eat non organic beef again or. No, that's where you have to practice. That's where you're like every day how do I engage in some kind of daily mind body practice that allows me to orient myself around my true values as opposed to being captured by the sort of weapons of mass distraction in society or the programming or all of that stuff. And we're always going to want to move back to homeostasis or move back to the status quo. And so that's what these practices kind of keep us over and over reminding ourselves of who we wanted to be. And I think these big psychedelic journeys or entheogenic experiences and are just big reminders. They're big reminders of a different view of reality.

I wonder if we could explore a little bit the intersection of.

Indigenous, perhaps Eastern contemplative and more Western ways of knowing, frames of reference, worldviews and so forth. I know in your work with John Brick foundation you were doing cross cultural studies, different perspectives on.

Mental health issues across indigenous cultures and other cultures. And so it seems like psychedelics could be a. It is a fertile meeting ground right now. And, you know, there's risks in terms of, you know, as this psychedelic renaissance and the emergence psychedelic assisted therapy field are.

Largely Western phenomenas. And there's a danger that they will discount or ignore the.

Indigenous peoples and elders who've been stewarding these plant medicines for millennia.

Or get caught up in the kind of reductionistic scientism as we necessarily medicalize this in order to roll it out as therapy. But it also seems because of the experiential nature of psychedelics, there is tremendous promise in not letting that happen and in actually discovering some intersection of wisdom amongst these different worldviews. I love. I've interviewed an Indigenous elder from Nova Scotia, Micmac Elder Albert Marshall, who talks about two eyed seeing. He feels there's tremendous promise for humanity in bringing together both the Indigenous and the Western ways of knowing and that our future problems lies in not one or the other, but really integrating them. And I suppose if you brought in the more contemplative Eastern yogic view, you could talk about three eyed seeing and then we'd have to acknowledge the third eye or something. And I'm wondering if you could talk about that kind of intersection from your research experience, your work, the John Brick foundation and other forms of your work.

Yeah, well, just to clarify, that work was not at the John W. Brick Mental Health foundation, that was at the Institute of Noetic Sciences where we really looked cross, culturally cross traditionally at various aspects of transformation and practices and how they fit together. And it's a, it's a tricky topic. The second part of what you brought up. So the current view on the current, as I say, psychedelic renaissance that everybody's saying right now, there is a grassroots movement and there is a sort of public health perspective and.

Gosh, what would I say? Kind of more along the lines of how mindfulness has been brought into society, that it came in, you know, rekindled its importance in the medical domain through the, you know, initial work of Jon Kabat Zinn and Richie Davidson and several other people who said, hey, let's try this as a medical intervention, and let's secularize it and make sure that it's a applicable to everyone and doesn't bring in any specific religious belief system. And it really worked because of that, because of secularizing it, because of making it non religious, non spiritual. It was able to be brought into the medical system and now is in every major medical center, every university. I mean, it's. It's amazing what's happened with mindfulness and the amount of healing it's been able to have because of that. Now some things were left out that other researchers are starting to really unpack, like what about energy? What about consciousness, experiences people have? What about what is the role of the. Some of the more esoteric aspects of mindfulness and meditation? And is there sort of a.

Are we sort of diffusing any part of it by leaving that out? What I would say is that when I teach secularized mindfulness, people tend to have those experiences on their own anyway. And so it's not like you have to tell them. They come back and say, oh, gosh, I really feel like my whole self dissolved. Am I doing this right? You know, and you're like, yeah, yeah, it sounds like you're doing it right. You know, anyway, so when you move it into psychedelics and entheogens, unfortunately, in my view, unfortunately, there are tons of drug companies and startups who are seeing this as a gold rush and who are looking to patent compounds, to patent processes, to extract processes that have been happening for millennia, whether it's a therapeutic delivery system or a certain mix of compounds.

And make a profit from it. And when I hear things like, isn't it great that a drug company has.

I guess I heard the other day that, you know, it was. There was a legalization of using this for PTSD in Australia. I'm not sure I have this whole story correct, but it was something like $8,000 a session. And I thought, you know, this is exactly where we're going to make the same mistakes we've made before of drug companies profiting off of healing compounds and making it inaccessible to most people and really blown out in terms of what insurance covers. There is a role for this in obviously in establishing efficacy and using the drug development model to make sure that we have safety and effectiveness trials that. And stay away from.

Kind of unindicated uses and are, you know, looking at adverse events and side effects and all that stuff, which is useful. But I would tend to move more toward having that approach available for people in a medical setting, if that's what they want, but also having the equivalent of midwives or doulas or hospice workers who are working in the community that are certified to take people through trainings, that we don't make it illegal for people to do things that make it only so that only drug companies that profit can do it and not other people. And so I do think there should be a grassroots movement of community medicine that allows people to work as similar to a midwife, a doula, or for that matter a mindfulness teacher who gets certified to teach it and can do it out in the community and has to meet certain standards. And of course there are rules, but it's not limited to profit seeking drug companies.

Yeah, well that seems like it'll be in where we've evolved to societally. That seems like it's going to be inevitable. If, if the medical system doesn't figure out how to roll out psychedelic assisted psychotherapy that's delivered by licensed clinicians in a way that's economically feasible for people and affordable for people, then a grassroots movement, whether, whether legalized or not or semi underground or it's just going to be, I mean it's already there, that's happening. And you know, and similarly we've seen, you know, I remember one point, I think the FDA was actually sending armed agents into some natural health food stores around the, around various supplements. And, and at one point I remember reading many years ago, but somebody did a research and found that, that American citizens were spending more money on alternative medicine than on conventional medicine. I'm sure that was a huge wake up call to the conventional medicine world. But also what we saw in the development of the legalization of cannabis marijuana in many states, kind of what led the way was medical marijuana and the fact that many people who were suffering from all kinds of illnesses and chronic pains and stuff just kind of started using it and demanded we're going to use this legal or not legal. My family's going to find a way to get it. And I think it was that drove a lot of the movement towards legalization of ordinary people. Not, not, not pot smoking hippies from my era, but ordinary people saying no, this is medicine and we need this and we want this. And so I, I think the same will happen with psychedelics if, if the, you know, the medical world doesn't figure out a way to make it affordable and accessible.

Yeah, yeah.

And maybe ideally there should be both. But, but hopefully the medical version of it, the licensed psychotherapeutic version of it won't be something is only available to people with tremendous means.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and you know, today if you want to learn about meditation, you can choose to learn about meditation in a medical context. You can learn to learn about meditation, choose to learn about meditation in a secularized non medical context. You can choose to learn about it in a religious or spiritual context. And I'd love to see that happen for psychedelics as well with some oversight. You know, there have been also of course, stories of psychedelic, for lack of a better word, cults, where people are being taken advantage of by community leaders and you know, falling into that old human mentality, you know, that we. Anything that can be used for good can also be used for something negative and can be exploited. And so I don't think it should just be a complete free for all. I think it would be great if there were some.

Various levels of certification and oversight and sort of really honoring these medicines and respecting them as powerful forces.

Yeah, I think that's going to be because I know in the clinical trials and a lot of people are thinking about how this can be brought to scale, made more accessible to people and they're has been the use, the mixed use of licensed clinicians with unlicensed sitters or trained guides. And I think that's going to certainly going to have to be part of the landscape. And there's actually a lot of people already out there doing it who could get certified and legalized, especially as some of these plant medicines are rescheduled.

And then in some states where it's actually being decriminalized. So that's really fascinating what's happening in Oregon and Colorado and other places and how that's going to evolve.

So.

You also have done research in behavioral genetics and, and I'm wondering about your experience from that research. You talked about, you know, the realm of neuroplasticity a bit before and this idea of reverse ptsd. I like that, that idea. And I wonder if you could say any more about that line of research of yours and what frame of reference that's given you to try to understand what we're experiencing with psychedelic medicines and where that's going.

Sure, I mean that was quite a while ago for me and it was mostly in the area of addictions, which was interesting because even back then when I was in my postdoc and pre doc, when I would go to meetings on alcoholism or addiction, there would always be the odd scientific poster here or there on ketamine or LSD or psilocybin or you know, iboga, having some really anecdotal or you know, a case study level, more of a case study level of incredible effects on ending addiction. These, some people would have almost a complete relief of their craving, whether it was alcohol addiction or heroin addiction or something like that. So I think that's still an open field for exploration. And in fact, the first NIH grant in modern times for psychedelic research has just gone to Johns Hopkins for studying smoking cessation. And so that really tells you like that's a field of research that actually has continued over time even through the sort of desert period where nobody was really doing a lot of psychedelic research. There were a few people doing it it and allowed to do it. One was in the field of addictions and sometimes it was done in other countries so that it would be legal. Another was in the field of end of life where people like Charlie Grob at UCLA have been doing continuous research on human studies on using psychedelics. Because, you know, having someone at the very, very end of their life, you know, I think the people who are holding sort of the safety and or moral kind of values around it said, well, you know, they're at the end of their life, do whatever you want with them, right? Go ahead, try psychedelics with them. And he still was having great results of being able to ameliorate end of life anxiety and end of life despair with people. So from that behavioral genetics perspective, I think the only thing I could say is it's very likely that the medicines don't work the same way on every person, that we all come in with a genetic makeup. And, and I myself have had experiences experimenting with different forms of agents and saying, boy, this one really, really worked for me and this one did not at all. And I think other people are going to have that experience too. So I would caution researchers and say, you know, this is probably not going to be a cookie cutter approach. The same way that antidepressants haven't been and the same way any other agent or even psychotherapeutic techniques. For example, people do come in with their own genetic makeup and that will be, that'll have an effect on how they are impacted by various agents. So the same way there is in medicine, there might even be a way for personalized medicine to be using people's genome to find out what are the best compounds for them to use.

So Matthew Johnson is part of our summit. We did discuss of it that his, his work on smoking cessation in the upcoming further study with the grant more in depth study. I have a good friend who was an addictions counselor for many years up here in the US and retired to Mexico and is now living in kind of south central Mexico and working in an ibogaine clinic. And he talks about, at least in his experience, people having tremendous results coming in with alcohol addiction and a lot of heroin addiction and at least getting a window of possibility for change because they are free of the craving, at least temporarily.

Pretty amazing thinking back to what you know, when you talked about that idea of reverse ptsd. So.

On the one hand, I like the way Stephen Porges sometimes describes the impact of trauma, is that our nervous system gets locked on to these fight or flight, you know, kind of responses. And that doesn't mean we're in that all the time, but they could be memory specific or state specific or anything could remind us. And then, you know, our nervous system. So you can think of our nervous system kind of has these state specific kind of knots and tangles and kinks and so forth. And it does seem that that deep contemplative experiences of flow can allow that to untangle and heal, that that psychedelic experiences of induced neuroplasticity seem to allow that to happen. And then we also. There's been a lot of, I don't know how much solid research, but there's been a lot of discussion about how intergenerational trauma may be passed out not just through the actual interchange between parents and children, but epigenetically. And we now know that genes are not as determinant as we once thought, but there's epigenetic factors that cause genes to express one way or another. It's almost like a dimmer switch on a light. And we tend to immediately want to think of, oh, there must be this little gene and there's this little dimmer switch. They're kind of mechanical. But my understanding, at least my very limited understanding about the epigenetic environment is it's more of an energy environment at the cellular level within every cell that impacts the expression of genes. And so I'm wondering if in terms of what you, you know, in terms of what your epigenetic factors, whether neuroplasticity impacts that as well. In other words, because you evidently, it's hard to think of how kind of an energetic environment could then be sort of passed on, a propensity for genes to express in a similar way. And I don't know genetic biology anywhere near enough to even conceptualize that, but evidently it can be. But then some phenomena of neuroplasticity induced through contemplative practices or in this case, psychedelic medicine, maybe that can shift that landscape of the epigenetics that impact gene expression, especially when there's some kind of trauma embedded there.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I have to admit, I'm not an expert in epigenetics either. But what I can say in relationship to what you were saying, number one, when I say PTSD in reverse, I do mean it a little bit the way that, that you were mentioning, which is the unwinding of old traumas. But what I really mean by it is having experiences of awe and wonder and beauty and ecstasy and bliss that also imprint. And that then as you're walking through your days, not only do you have cues for old traumas, but you have cues for beauty, awe, and wonderful. And so you may be walking through the parking lot of a mall, you know, on your way with your normal stressors, and you see a little dandelion poking out through the asphalt, and all of a sudden, bam. You're like, there is beauty everywhere. There's beauty everywhere. And it's something you realized in a psychedelic journey. These kinds of. It's almost like the opposite of PTSD that, you know, we'll have to come up with a good name for it. But, you know, it's post insight, being able to reconnect with very positive new story. I call it the new story. You know, you can come out with a new story. And yes, that new story is a seed. And it can only take root with appropriate nutrients in the soil and water and sunshine and stakes in the ground, which are all of our practices to make that seed grow into our lives. But you do come out of a journey with a seed or many that have been planted that are possible for you to grow, a way of looking at yourself in the world. That's completely different. Other common seeds that grow are. There is no other. There is no other. There is no different kind of person from me. The people who are of different races or from different countries or different political parties or different ages. Before my journey, I thought, those are different people from me. After my journey, I have seen these are. We are all the same kind of people. That is profound. That changes everything. It means that you can no longer engage in behaviors which harm others, even if they're halfway around the world, but benefit yourself. It becomes very hard to go buy sweatshop made items because you know, that $5 camp chair that you bought at Walmart was. There's no way that's a $5 camp chair. Somebody suffered to do that. So you start shopping locally. You Start understanding that I can't really eat animal meat maybe at all, but certainly not from tortured animals. So you start only being able to purchase free range or grass fed or you know, humanely treated pasture raised kinds of things or you know, reduce meat altogether in your life. Those are just a few examples of the kinds of changes that can come out of one gigantic shift in your awareness. They, they're not magic like you said earlier. They do take practice, they do take reminders, they do take meditating every day or engaging in practices or you know, all of the soil nutrients, all of the water, all of the sunshine, all the stakes in the ground that it takes to truly grow that seed. But you have this huge head start sometimes from the journey because you've seen something that you can't unsee. And so in addition to changing gene expression or changing the brain like Albert Lynn said, and I do believe he believes that his brain was changed and gene expression was probably changed, but he also understands that his story changed. And when your story changes, there are a whole lot of behaviors and ways of being that ripple out from that story changing.

So I, from what I, from what you're saying, it sounds like there could be an actual neurobiological healing or untangling in some places, in some cases of trauma. But there's also the problem of counterbalancing it with these positive experiences that balance out often, you know, with the negativity bias and so forth. The way our brain works are our long term memory and thus our implicit memory just full of panic and fight and danger and negative experiences. So if we can counterbalance those kind of things with positive experiences. And then you brought forward the importance of narrative which seems so important. And I've been struck by, in watching many of the films from the clinical trials of psychedelic sessions that, that afterwards, you know, where the, the client is being filmed and they're talking about in some cases a pretty rough experiences because you know, the people in these studies are often suffering from severe depression, anxiety disorders and so forth. So in many cases, in some cases they have blissful experiences, but many are having really difficult journeys. But yet afterwards they are able to talk about it in a very different way. They seem to have been able to witness it from a different, different part of their brain, their self structure which so wasn't getting caught or re traumatized and, and they're, they have a new narrative that's more courageous and accepting and braver and, and so forth. And, and we all know the power of narrative and our, I mean if you could think of what one single factor that seems to drive how we show up in life and how we feel about life and how we interpret life is the narrative we're walking around with in our head.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, one of my most profound psychedelic experiences myself was having a journey. This is many years ago, where I recognized in the journey how fearful and exactly what you're saying, the negativity bias, you know, that the world is such a difficult place, there's so many challenges, it's so hard sometimes. And this is all true, right? It's true. But I noticed inside myself there was kind of a big no to life. That's the best way I could describe it. You know, in the journey it was like, I don't like it, I don't want it. It's not fair, it's terrible. You know, it's. It's such a struggle. And something shifted through an experience in the journey that was a completely embodied experience, all encompassing, completely full of authority and certainty that came from a figure in the vision that was representing something like God or the Creator. It happened to be an old woman. But, you know, it was like this world is the most absolutely beautiful, radiant, diverse, incredible. I mean, giraffes and whales and oceans and forests and, you know, it was on and on and on, right? The incredible proliferation of stunning beauty in the world. And I have never seen the world again from a no perspective. That's 25 years ago.

Amazing, beautiful.

You know, so probably something changed in my brain, probably something changed in my, maybe in my gene expression, but it certainly changed in the way I see things. And that has definitely changed everything. Another thing I'd like to say about that gene expression is there are also, you know, dormant genes basically that are latent potentials that are in our bodies. And we know this from animal research that, you know, if you put fruit flies, for example, Drosophila, into a very, very cold environment, only after a few generations they will start to sprout hair and ways to deal with the cold. And we know that that's not natural selection. That's that there was a hair growing possibility in them that got turned on when they got exposed to this. So one wild theory I have about psychedelics is that you can be exposed to impossible experiences in psychedelics. You know, you can fly, you can be in the center of the earth, you can be a dragon, you can be. You know, all of these things can happen in a very realistic way. And maybe when we get exposed to some of those things, it signals the body to, you know, turn on some gene that was waiting for that exposure. So that is definitely a theory and not proven. But I certainly think many people's stories will reveal something like that, at least psychologically, that they had a potential within them that got turned on, you know, hearkening back to Timothy Leary while they experienced this. And no, you don't need to necessarily drop out. But, you know, now we know that. But it can really change everything. So I'm really excited about the field of psychedelic research. I hope that we proceed with caution in some of the things that we've talked about, that we do.

Have strong integration and preparation practices, that we don't use exploitive methods to focus only on profit, that there are things that we need to look out for that we don't become so enamored of the effects that we ignore the adverse experiences. And there are adverse experiences that people have that people are so excited about psychedelics right now that we tend to. We want it to be perfect, and it's not perfect. I was at a conference recently with a woman whose son used psychedelics, and.

He got an insight during the journey that he needed more protein in his body. So he went to the kitchen and opened up what he thought was a protein shake, and it was protein powder, and asphyxiated by pouring it into his mouth. And, you know, this is not reefer madness, right? I'm not trying to make it be like there's, you know, this is terrible. But we also do a disservice if we as medical professionals and psychiatric and psychological professionals don't say there are potential risks. And some people also have had bad trips that have.

Affected them negatively, that have made their depression worse, made their anxiety worse. Some people have felt like psychosis was stimulated by a psychedelic experience. So just because we're all very excited about it doesn't mean that we should deny those experiences. We have to find out more about what happened and how to prevent it or avoid it. But in general, I'm very excited, and I think there's a whole new world ahead of us. Us.

Well, thank you for bringing that forward as well, because these are very powerful medicines, and I think we need to bring as much humility and respect to the. To the engagement as we possibly can. And it really requires a lot of individual psycho education to really understand what we're. What we're dealing with, everyone involved, whether the clients and the practitioners and. But thank you so much for everything you've shared today. The conversation is reflective of what a kind of fascinating and Psychic exciting time it is to be alive in the world of understanding the human mind and consciousness and development from integrative and holistic perspective. And you're right at the forefront of that. So where can people find out more about your work at UCSD and other places where you're working?

Yeah, at UCSD you can find our work at the Arthur C. Clark center for Human Imagination, which is imagination. Ucsd.edu. there's also the center for Psychedelic Research, which is at psychedelics. Ucsd.edu and then the center for Mindfulness. And you can find that at UCSD by searching. I'm not sure if it's mindfulness, but mindfulness, ucsd.edu or you'll find it there. Yeah. So definitely look us up. There's lots of great work happening at all those places. And yeah, thanks Fleet, for doing this again. It's really been a pleasure to be with you equally.

So really, really wonderful. Thank you so much, Dr. Vitamin.

Take care.

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