Heroic Interview: One Spirit Medicine with Alberto Villoldo

You're listening to One Spirit Medicine, an optimal living interview with Alberto Villoldo, Ph.D. and Brian Johnson.

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living Interview series. Today I'm really excited to be chatting with Alberto Violdo, PhD, who is extraordinary. He's written One Spirit Medicine along with a number of other books. I'm a big fan. We've featured his courageous dreaming and power up your brain as well. I'm going to tell you a little bit more about Alberto from his bio and then we will jump in. So Alberto is a psychologist and medical anthropologist who studied the healing practices of the Amazon and Inca shamans for more than 25 years. While at San Francisco State University, he founded the Biological Self Regulation Laboratory to study how the mind creates psychosomatic health and disease. Dr. Violdo directs the Four Winds Society where he trains individuals in the US and Europe in the practice of energy medicine and soul retrieval. I find your background as an integration of a PhD medical anthropologist and a practicing shaman incredibly inspiring and empowering. So thank you for being here, Alberto, and I'm really excited to chat.

Thank you, Brian. Thank you so much.

Well, One Spirit Medicine. And of course, we could also talk about courageous dreaming and power up your brain, but I'm excited to chat about One Spirit medicine today. The subtitle is Ancient ways to ultimate wellness. And you really integrate the ancient shamanistic wisdom with modern science. And can you just start by describing for us what is One Spirit medicine?

Well, when you look at the Western science and how many different ways there are being sick in the west, we have 14,000 different diagnosable illnesses. And I remember my time in the Amazon with the shamans, and I asked them, well, how many different diseases do you have? And they said, one. There's only one disease and there's only one cure. So, yes, from a perspective of simplicity is incredibly elegant. And the cure is one spirit. The illness is the disconnection that we have from ourselves, from nature, from our ancestors, and from our own bodies. And one spirit refers to the state of communion that allows for healing to happen.

That's amazing. I love that. 14,000 diseases. That's crazy.

Yeah, that's in the Western. That's.

That's really funny. 14,000.

Yeah. It's extraordinary how many ways we have of being sick. And if you think about it, there's only really one or two ways of being well, and nobody really knows what they are.

I love it. Just the simplification. And I love how you integrate again, the ancient wisdom with the modern science. And particularly with the nutrition. So I know you've worked extensively with Mark Hyman and David Perlmutter, and I'd like to explore some of those ideas, which I think is a really unique and important integration of. Of starting with. Tell us about the gut brain, our second brain, and why it's so important that we pay attention to that.

Absolutely, absolutely. You know, Brian, to begin with, we're dealing with situations today that shamans never had to deal with in the past. You know, we have over 70,000 toxic chemicals that we've produced. We have been exposed to antibiotics, to pesticides. We come from a generation. Do you remember playing with mercury when the thermometer broke, putting it in your hand and seeing how it wig. And so we've been exposed to toxins that indigenous people never had to deal with before. And so today, the first thing that we need to do is to begin to detoxify. And the primary way that we detoxify first is by keeping pathogens out, which is what the gut does. And if you have a balanced gut flora microflora, you're basically going to have. You're 90% of the way. There's. So this is our gut brain. It's the second brain that we have over 100 million neurons that are in the gut that regulate the entire process of taking the outside world and making it you. Because when you eat a piece of broccoli, you've got to turn that piece of broccoli into you. This is what the flora does. So we, in effect, are a colony organism. And humans have about 25,000 genes. But a grain of rice has over 80,000 genes. A flatworm has 75,000 genes. So nature experimented with humans by making us a colony organism. We've hijacked the genetic machinery of over 600 species of bacteria that live within us and that are 90% of who we are. And they turned the outside world into us. And they are the ones that, you know, 85% of our immune system is in the gut. And today our gut is so out of balance because of our diet primarily, and because we haven't been exposed to. We used to have something called the backyard, where you put everything in your mouth when you were a kid. And now when one of the kids comes in with. With dirt in their mouth, we rinse it out with a mouthwash, which is the worst thing we could do because we're destroying the flora in the mouth and in the gut.

Yeah, that's amazing. Just to highlight the point, you just made something like 10 to 1 is the relationship between kind of what we consider us versus foreign substances. Is that right?

Well, their DNA outnumbers our DNA 10 to 1. Wow.

It's hard to believe. And the whole hundred million neurons. That is amazing. And the hundred million neurons in our gut, literally every time I read that, I just am blown away by it. And can you tell us about serotonin and how more of that is produced in our gut than in our brain and how that affects the kind of spirit molecule? You walk us through that in the book in a beautiful way.

Well, this is really important because in order to create psychosomatic health, you need to be producing the spirit molecules, which are molecules that are very psychoactive, actually. But we produce them in minute doses, primarily when we sleep or when we meditate or when we have an ecstatic experience. So you need to be able to access these ecstatic states to create psychosomatic health. Otherwise, if you're producing only the stress molecules, which are cortisol and adrenaline, you're only going to be producing psychosomatic disease.

And the gut, in fact, produces something upwards of 95%. Is that right? Of the serotonin in our bodies.

Of the serotonin in our body. And what the pineal gland does, which is incredible, we have this pineal gland in the center of our brain, is that when it's time to go to sleep, it takes serotonin and tweaks it a little bit and turns it into melatonin. And if you tweak.

Sorry, go ahead.

Well, if you tweak that melatonin a little bit more, you end up with ayahuasca or psilocybin, with the tryptamines, because serotonin is a tryptamine. It just takes a little bit of tweaking of methylation, and you end up with a very powerful psychedelic drug, which is what the brain needs in order to go into these deep meditative states where you can begin to epigenetically modify the expression of the genes that create health or the genes that create disease.

It's so good. And again, it just makes my head kind of spin to imagine that if I want to be a good meditator, I got to eat well, right?

Absolutely. You absolutely do.

That's so good. Yeah.

See, the thing is that nature selected our species for longevity, not the individual, the species. So the way that you guarantee the longevity of the species is by getting the individual to reproduce. So this is kind of the operating system we're all born with, but we're personally, at this point, very interested in our longevity, each one of us, and living long and healthy lives. But what nature does in the operating system that we were born with is that at about the age of 40, when you pass your reproductive years, it begins to shut down the repair systems in the body and our hormone levels begin to get quirky and shut down the growth hormone stops. You don't produce anymore the natural antioxidants that are produced inside the cell. That system shuts down. And what the shamans of old discovered was how to turn on these systems again, how to switch them on so that you could get your health span to equal your lifespan.

Amazing. And then what you talked to us about too, is how to not switch them off by some of the most toxic behaviors we have, which I want to talk about in a moment, the specific nutritional things. But before we jump there, as we kind of went from our gut brain up to our brain with the pineal gland and all that good stuff, can you tell us about the limbic brain, mammalian brain, and how it's kind of an inner tyrant vis a vis the neocortex?

Well, you know, we have four different brains inside our heads and they evolved at four different times during the evolution of life on the planet. So we have a reptilian brain that we share with the lizards and the snakes and the reptiles. We have a mammalian brain that we share with all the mammals in the planet. And this brain is encased in the neocortex. It's a brand new brain that's become operational in humans and whales and dolphins. And then we have the prefrontal lobes of the brain that some neuroscientists are calling the God brain, because it's that part of the brain in the frontal cortex that allows you to have these experiences of one spirit communion with all life. And the problem with the mammalian brain is that it was really practical when we were living as Neanderthals or with the Neanderthals, because it has four subroutines, four operating programs which are fear feeding or scarcity, fighting violence and predatory sexuality. Now, most of the planet is still working on this brain. And what you have is a planet that's living in scarcity, that's living with low self esteem, and that is living in violence. So this is the brain that's in the driver's seat and it becomes a tyrant. It's a tyrant king. The kings of old told you you've got to go fight a war and you've got to go kill, you've got to go die. And that's what you did. And today many of us are waking up and saying, hey, wait a minute, who's the enemy here?

Yep, yep. And a big part of the book, of course, is to help us properly relate to that part of our brain and to more consistently live from that higher place.

Well, see, the brain, this brain encodes its programming and the emotions. And what I'd like to suggest is that we cannot ever really heal our emotions, but we can do away with our emotions. We can get rid of our emotions and instead we can have feelings, because feelings are authentic. Emotions are this residual ancient programming of the limbic brain. And feelings pass through you. If you've ever wanted to kill someone, and most of us have, if you know, if you've been married or if you have children, you've wanted to kill at one point or another, and then a few moments later you go, how could I have felt like this towards this person that I love the most? It passes, but emotions linger. You know, we've all been angry for 20 minutes and remember that the nervous system resets itself every 20 minutes. So if it lingers for more than 20 minutes, it's not an authentic feeling, it's an emotion. If you've been angry for 20 days or 20 years, that's a toxic emotion. And we have to eliminate them. And we do that by upgrading the quality of the brain.

Well, let's talk about how we do that. So what are some ways we go about upgrading the quality of our brains?

Well, there are a number of different things. One is the don't watch any war movies. Don't feed that brain to violence that it, that it thrives on. Don't read the news, shut down your television, cancel your newspaper subscription. But on a more practical level, what we have to do is to feed the brain the superfoods that it needs to repair itself and to upgrade its quality. And first and foremost among these is the omega 3s. And the omega 3 fatty acids are essential fatty acids because we don't produce them in the body. And we used to get them from eating fish, from eating a piece of salmon. But today all of our fish is farm raised so that we're not getting any dha. They're farm raised and they're fed corn. And you cannot produce DHA or Omega 3s from corn. We end up with brains that have begun to shrivel, particularly the region in the brain responsible for new learning, for having a new experience, which is called the hippocampus. The hippocampus will actually contract and shrivel in Size so that you're not able to have a new experience. You keep repeating the same old mistakes over and over again.

Amazing. So much there.

You know, I've got a friend of mine that invited me to his wedding recently, and it was his fifth wedding. Wait a minute, what's wrong with this? And he said, no, Alberto, you've got to meet her, she's different. And I met her perfectly lovely woman, a brunette version of the last one. And I said to him, look, you have to stop looking for the right partner and work on becoming the right partner. And then he uninvited me to his wedding. But this is what happens when the hippocampus is damaged. We keep repeating the same behavior over and over and expecting a different result.

If I remember the story correctly that you shared in the book. Anyway, six months later, he also ended that wedding.

Didn't you remember he ended that one? He called me up and he said, why did you let me do it? So we got to repair the hippocampus. DHA Omega 3s are absolutely brilliant for that.

That's amazing.

But then we also have to detoxify the brain. Remember that toxins are stored in the long lived molecules in the body and the longest lived molecules in the body are fat. And 70% of our brain is fat. So we, and we are all the children and grandchildren of parents who used to, who had lead plumbing, who cooked with aluminum pots, who, you know, pesticides were a big thing 30 years ago before we had health food stores. So we've been exposed to toxins that are stored in the brain that we need to Detoxify. So step two, after you take the Omega 3s is to begin to detoxify the brain. And a brilliant supplement to do that is alpha lipoic acid ala because it crosses the blood brain barrier and it's water soluble and fat soluble. So it'll begin to detoxify the brain. And then after you do six weeks of the Omega 3s and Alpha Lipoic acid, the brain fog goes away and you realize that you've been living in a bog for decades and you just came out of it that day.

I love it. And then continuing on the superfood side of things, you also talk a lot about cruciferous veggies, right?

Absolutely.

Can you tell us about that and why they're so powerful?

Well, you know, Brian, we co evolved with the plants and not with the animals. The animals would run away, but the plants would stay put. And as we adapted to the plants, the plants don't have a Fight or flight. They have chemical protections. So as we adapted to them, we adapted to their chemical protections. So lettuce, for example, iceberg lettuce, we've adapted to completely. But arugula is delicious. It's got that little bite to it. It's because we've not fully adapted to it. And it's the same with all of our spices. Our spices are spicy because we have not fully adapted to their chemical defenses. But there's some foods that are harmless, but when the body eats them, it registers them as toxins and it mounts a huge antioxidant defense against them. It switches on the free radical scavenging systems inside the cell. And this is what the cruciferous vegetables do. And if you take the, for example, if you take the broccoli and broccoli flower extract, which is called sulforaphane, it's extraordinary in turning on these ancient systems that are in the body, but that nature shuts down after about the age of switches them on again. So you could be 60 years old and supplementing with sulforaphane or eating your cruciferous vegetables, and you have the antioxidant systems of a 20 year old.

Wow. I'll take it.

And you know, all the antioxidants that we take orally, they don't work because they're destroyed in the gut. And that's not where you want them anyway. You want them inside the cell to clean up the mitochondria.

So the idea is the best source of that is going to be the cruciferous veggies, the broccolis, the cauliflowers, the bok choys and brussels sprouts and all that good stuff.

Absolutely.

My favorite veggies.

Yeah.

Good. So those are kind of healthy, toxic foods, right, that we've adapted to, that actually helps us cultivate an optimal microbiome and overall cellular health, et cetera. You mentioned two primary toxins, sugar and grain. And you describe sugar as literally the most toxic substance in most Americans kitchens. Can you tell us why sugar is so toxic?

Well, sugar, if when you look at it from the perspective of biology and of nature, nature came up with insulin and what insulin does. Today, we believe that insulin helps to bring sugar into the cell. But from the perspective of biology, what insulin does is to take sugars and turn them into fat so that we would gorge on the sugars, on the ripe fruit. At the end of summer, we would absolutely gorge on the berries and on the peaches and the apricots for six weeks until, in order to build up the body, store the body fat to take us through the long winter. But today, the long winter never comes, so we keep putting on fat, and we have an obesity epidemic that's primarily caused by grains, not so much by the fruit. But this is the way nature programmed us, is to eat the sweets for six weeks of the year, and that's it. Today, we eat close to 200 pounds of sugar per person in America annually. And 150 years ago, it was 5 pounds. So it's extraordinary. And sugar is deadly. It's because what sugar does is that it keeps the insulin system switched on, and it doesn't allow the recycling or the detoxification systems in the body to kick in. Because remember that we used to feast and fast. So we would feast when we caught. When we found some road kill or found an avocado tree, we would feast and then we would fast for three or four days until we found the next gazelle that had been mauled by a lion. And in that fasting period, the body was able to detoxify. And today we've been eating three meals a day since we were born. So it's very difficult for the body to even go into detox mode.

You talk about the importance of fasting and having kind of that intermittent daily fast, right, where we give ourselves the break in consuming that sugar from early evening through to midday the next day. Can you talk to us a little bit about shifting from burning sugar to fat?

Well, the burning sugar is a building mode. So you're building muscle, you're making proteins. But we need the detoxification mode, which we talked about just briefly a few moments ago. But in terms of awakening the higher brain, the higher brain does not feed on sugars. The higher brain, the neocortex, feeds on fats. It loves the fats. And the fats are 20 times as powerful as the sugars as a fuel. It's a super fuel for the brain. So we cannot access these states of one spirit and of communion while eating sugar. So sugars will feed the Neanderthal limbic brain and keep us living in aggression and in scarcity and in fear. So it's only when we're able to switch on to the ketones, which are the really healthy fats, that we're able to access higher brain function. Hmm.

So it's. So when I talked to Dr. Perlmutter, I said counterintuitive, and he corrected me and said, it's not intuition that's being countered, it's conditioning. So counter. It's so Counter conditioning for me still to realize that the sugars are what's making us fat and that consuming fat doesn't make us fat. In fact, it's the primary preferred fuel for our brains. And I love the way both of you articulate that. And there's so much more we can talk about there. I'm going to leave it there for now and tell us about.

But it's not only the sugars. Remember that, it's the carbs.

I was just going to go there. Yeah, the grains. Tell us about the grains.

Absolutely. You know, there was a huge shift that happened in the history of humanity around 6,7000 years ago with the discovery of agriculture. With the coming of agriculture, you have our diet changing from primarily fats and proteins and our diet changes to one that's based on grains. And at the same time that you have the discovery of grain, you have the discovery of religion and the discovery of warfare, and they all go hand in hand. In fact, even the grains are really the basis of all of the religions of the world. You find that they're embedded even in the Lord's Prayer where you pray and give us this day our daily bread. You know, the prayers should say, give us this day our daily fats and proteins. But what happens is that with the rise of agriculture, our diet shifts dramatically. And the carbs, the grains, tend to feed this old brain, the mammalian brain that we talked about it being very predatory, living in scarcity, and you have suddenly, you have an inability to reach the higher states of consciousness that you read about in all of the sacred literature. These individuals who were able to speak with God, who felt communion with all life, who were in ecstatic states of samadhi, or cosmic union. It's become the stuff of literature and folklore, and it's because of our diet.

Again, fascinating to see that interconnectedness there. Well, fantastic. We just did some great stuff on that part of the book. And your wisdom, and of course, so much of it is based in the mythology and creating new mythology around the medicine wheel. I want to touch on a few of the things you talk about in that regard. First, you mentioned briefly how we need to quit feeding the mammalian brain by literally stop watching the war movies, quit consuming so much news. And you shared a stat that just blew me away. Something along the lines of the fact that in one week, via TV and Internet alone, we are more stimulated in that week than our Paleolithic ancestors were in their entire lifetime. Is that an accurate accounting of that?

Well, you know, we don't have any way of measuring the bandwidth of our Paleolithic ancestors, but it's a pretty good guess. And also, Brian, remember that this primitive brain we're talking about, the mammalian brain, it cannot tell time or distance, so it cannot tell the difference between something that happened to us when we were four and something that's happening now. And it can also not tell the difference between something that's happening in Iraq or Syria. And, you know, this brain believes that the barbarians are at the village gate and they're about to overrun us, so that it keeps us living in fear. So we have to be careful what we feed, what we feed our brains. And the. It's because whatever you put in, it's what's going to be inside your head. But, you know, the one area that we haven't talked about is the energy field and the importance of the information field that exists and that informs and creates the body. So I don't know if you want to go there.

Yes, I would love for you to. Please do.

Because, yeah, we've been. We're so focused in our Western mind on the literal and the physical. And so they were still kind of working with Newtonian mechanics. And we forget that there's quantum mechanics and that because we're still obsessed with matter and with form. And there was a big debate that happened just about 100 years ago when they were trying to determine whether the electron was a particle or a wave, and physicists finally determined that it was both. It was both a particle and a wave. And we have both a particle and a wave state. Our particle state is our body. Our wave state is when we are without a body, but they both coexist. When you are in your particle state, you still have this information field that surrounds your body that actually extends to infinity, but that is most dense around your physical body, which is the information field of who you are, of the genetic predispositions you have of the cancers that run in your family or the heart disease. What the shamans discovered how to do was how to upgrade the quality of the information in the field so that you didn't have to live out what they call the genetic curses, the illnesses that run in your family so you could epigenetically modify the state of your health by tweaking on the genes that create health and switching off, silencing the genes that create disease. And this is where the greatest contribution of the shamans lie.

Amazing. And this is also kind of the second part of the book, you'd say, right, precisely. With the mythology and walking us through the medicine wheel, of starting in that south and the west and the north and the east, each of those journeys and mythological truths that we experience and integrate in that process. Right? Yeah.

Because if we're only focusing on the physical, we're forgetting the whole entire dimension of the sacred. And the sacred is absolutely essential. Without a sense of the sacred, our journey through this life is pretty meaningless. It's a matter of accumulating and having the best time we can. But the. But our relationship to the sacred and our sacred nature is at the core of what my book, One Spirit Medicine, is about. So after you do the detox, after you upgrade the brain, then you're really ready to start having the real fun, which is experimenting what we can create, how we can dream the world into being.

That's amazing. Can you give us a quick tour? I realize, you know, this is so much of the book, but a quick tour of that. Of that. Each of our directional points.

Well, in the. In the ancient lore, in every culture, you find that there is a medicine wheel, which are the four cardinal points. But for the shamans in particular, they represent four steps to power and to wisdom. And the first step, which is identify with the serpent, has to do with healing, with healing yourself, with shedding the past, the way the serpent sheds her skin. And after you do that, you go to the west, which is represented by the jaguar. And there you have to shed your genetic legacy and your stories that come with your family of origin so you don't keep repeating them. And the jaguar is the figure that takes you mythically, symbolically, beyond death, and you actually, literally experience that journey beyond death. The shamans say that the object of all of the wisdom teachings is to learn how to get out of this life alive. And so in this direction with the jaguar, that's where you learn. You step beyond death and therefore lose your fear of death, and you can live life fearlessly. At that point, the next step is in the north, which is the hummingbird, represented by the hummingbird. And the hummingbird is the one who embarks on the epic journey because they migrate from Canada to Brazil every year, and they don't go, well, you know, we don't have enough wings. We don't have enough money. There's no flowers to suck on until we get to Cuba. They go, and this is the responding to your calling. What is your calling? And one spirit medicine is founded on the notion that your healing will happen once you discover and respond to your life calling, and that that's an absolutely essential part of Your healing. The diet is not enough, the meditation is not enough. What did you come here to do in this, in this life? And this is the hummingbird learning the ways of stillness and flight, learning how to drink only from the nectar of life. The trouble is we spent so many years making our way to the shit pile that suddenly we see the flowers and we have to break the habit when the nectar is offered to us. And finally the east is the represented by the ego. And that represents the awakening of your vision so that you can see the totality of things and not just the fragments. And then you can begin to co create, to dream a healthier, more healed, more beautiful world into being.

Amazing. And Alberto walks through each of those aspects of the medicine wheel in beautiful stories around the mythology around them and helping us kind of unpack and go into depth. So I highly recommend checking that out. And then of course that leads to a vision quest, right?

That leads to the vision quest. Ultimately it's in all traditional societies you end up in nature. It's you and spirit where you, you summon all of the demons from your past and you face them and you have solved yourself with them. And then you have this encounter with this invisible world which is the true reality. You know, Carl Jung used to say that neurosis is because people are out of touch with reality. But what he meant by reality was not the everyday going to work reality, but the spiritual reality. And it's when we come face to face with it in nature, not sitting in our living rooms, but surrounded by thunder, by lightning, by wind, by sunsets and sunrises, then we understand our place in creation.

Beautiful. And again, you have a guide and some wonderful examples about how your different clients did that in different contexts and responsibilities and just really inspiring. Well, again, there's so much more we can talk about. I appreciate this quick look at a number of different ideas and I like to wrap up these chats by asking two questions. One, a big part of my work and the work I do with our community is to help people integrate their fundamentals, the practices that keep them connected to that higher self and the one spirit. And again, as you said that the only disease is disconnection from that.

That's right.

And we talked about a lot of your practices, but I love to learn about what you do on a consistent basis that helps you stay plugged in beyond what we talked about so far. Can you share some of the pract that you have?

Well, I have two practices, Brian. The first one is the practice of impermanence, of recognizing that everything is simple, that we are just simply passing through this world and so is everything else. And knowing that nothing is permanent and being thrilled by the beauty of the fact that a flower will bloom only for one day. So that practice of impermanence brings a deep appreciation for the moment. And it has to be impermanence. You cannot practice being present in the moment because impermanence means that you face the reality of death and of life. So it's a very deep and challenging practice. And the other one is a practice that I do with the breath where I go. Every time I take a breath and I remember to do it, which is maybe half a dozen times a day, I say to myself, all that I have is my breath. All that I have is my breath. And those are my two practices.

Amazing impermanence in that breath, which in itself is the most wonderful demonstration of that impermanence and its presence currently. Right?

Absolutely amazing.

Well, the final question I'd like to ask is if you could only share one piece of wisdom with individuals passionate about optimizing their lives and connecting and expressing themselves, what would that one piece of wisdom be?

I think that the it's not that I'm trying to select from many as that I have none that really pops up right now, but I would encourage our listeners to next time that you're watching a beautiful sunset or there's a rainstorm outside or the thunders clapping, take your clothing off and go get in the rain. Go do something that is totally outside of your ordinary realm with nature. Go be barren in the elements. Because this is so essential for us to return to nature. And you know, we were born naked and we're going to go in the same way. So take a chance to go back to nature in the suit that you were born in.

Fantastic. Alberto, thank you so much.

Thank you, Brian. You have a very good day.

You too.

We hope you enjoyed this optimal living interview. Please visit BrianJohnson me for more. Sam.