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#26: From Crisis to Meaning with Shinzen Young
Welcome to our season one finale! On this episode, we talk to Shinzen Young about mindfulness within the context of the modern meaning crisis. Shinzen is a renowned meditation teacher and neuroscience research consultant. We met with him in Toronto after he had just finished leading a meditation retreat. Shinzen first became fascinated with Asian culture as a Jewish teenager growing up in Los Angeles in the 1950s. As he likes to describe himself:
“I’m a Jewish-American Buddhist teacher who got turned on to comparative mysticism by an Irish-Catholic priest and who has developed a Burmese-Japanese fusion practice inspired by the spirit of quantified science.”
We discuss happiness, enlightenment and his current new project which involves using brain stimulating technology that may dramatically accelerate meditation gains. He is the author of The Science of Enlightenment: How Meditation Works.
Highlights:
- Why is Mindfulness everywhere?
- Meditation to Optimize Happiness
- Co-evolution of Science and Mindfulness
Resources:
- The Science of Enlightenment by Shinzen Young
- Shinzen’s Periodic Table of Happiness Elements
- Julianna Raye
- Unified Mindfulness
- SEMA Lab
- Jay Sanguinetti
Listen:
Poem Inspired by This Episode
Full Transcript
Thal:
Welcome Shinzen to the show.
Shinzen Young:
Thank you.
Thal:
Thank you for agreeing to come on. Thank you.
Adrian:
I think a neat place to begin this conversation is to ask how you see your role as a meditation teacher within, what we’re calling the meaning crisis, within the context of the modern meaning crisis. How do you see your role and how that relates to the bigger scale problem that we are, you know, sort of experiencing as a collective.
Shinzen Young:
So I like to answer questions by first asking a bunch of questions and I appear on, you know, a number of podcasts and usually they have a direction or an interest. And so by finding out how the person that’s interviewing me sees the theme, the broad theme of the podcast, I apply my dimensional analytic skills to getting an idea of what they’re talking about and then I can relate it to my areas. So I’ll begin by asking you folks a question. There’s three words: modern, was it meaning?
Thal:
Meaning
Shinzen Young:
And crisis. I’m interested in how you think of what those words mean. Um, when does modern start? What is a crisis in meaning? Uh, so I’ll let you folks talk first.
Thal:
Wow.
Adrian:
Yeah, no, that’s… Yeah, I love it.
Thal:
Yeah, sure. I’m, the way I see it is, um, sort of maybe the breakdown of the old way of seeing things, thinking about the world. Old paradigms. Um, it’s very hard. It’s not that black and white, it’s not really breaking down, but there’s this energetic shift that’s happening where just the old way of doing things is no longer working. And so we’re seeing that institutions, religion, politics, it’s just no longer working, the old way of doing things. And so then all these questions are coming up and they’re, um, along with those questions, there’s this anxiety around what’s going to happen and um, and sort of being lost in a way and grasping for meaning and a worldview.
Shinzen Young:
And would this be among the younger people? A certain generation? Do you have an age demographic that tends to listen to your podcast? And be in the meaning crisis?
Adrian:
I would say yeah, to a degree. It’s relating to a generation that we belong to. Sort of that millennial generation that I would consider myself part of.
Shinzen Young:
That would be called millennials part of, yeah. How old do you have to be? What’s the range of millennials?
Adrian:
I don’t know what the hard cutoff is. I mean, I was born in the mid eighties.
Thal:
I was born in ’82. I think. I think I’m like the older side of the spectrum.
Shinzen Young:
Well, I was born a long time before that. So, I actually belong to, um, some would say Boomer, but I’m at the very earliest part of the boomer. Boomer was supposed, I believe is taken to be post World War Two when the Vets came back. But I was born while my father was off fighting the Japanese in the Pacific. I was born during World War II. Um, as I, you know, that’s, that’s a long time before Boomer. Uh, okay..
Adrian:
For me, the meaning crisis at an individual, personal level was when I, towards the mid twenties was when I started really recognizing just a lack of fulfillment in my life. You know, having success from a career perspective, but just not feeling like this is what I’m supposed to be doing. I’m not fulfilled. I don’t feel, I don’t feel happy. I, you know, and the chasing doesn’t seem to be filling that, that experience that I was expecting…
Shinzen Young:
So that’s fulfillment.
Adrian:
To me it is, yeah.
Shinzen Young:
So what I’ve got so far is old things, the old ways of working. Um, and there’s rapid change. And there’s fear and a sense of unfulfillment. So yes. And maybe particularly for the millennial type, but of course it’s a Zeitgeist or spirit of the time kind of thing that would apply to any age demographic. Yeah. Well there’s a lot of relevance. Um, so you described me as a mindfulness teacher, which is an accurate description. Although the fuller description I would say is that I am a teacher of, but also a researcher in the field of what I would call Modern Mindfulness. So I’m all about dimensional analysis and careful use of words. Um, I think you guys speak Chinese, right?
Adrian:
Cantonese.
Shinzen Young:
Not so good.. [chuckle] in Cantonese. But Confucius said this idea of “Cheng-ming”, which is translated rectified names, I’m sure it’ll be pretty similar in Cantonese. So that was an early influence. It’s like, “oh yeah, it’s important to be careful about how we say things”. So I’m all about careful definitions and axial, you know, dimensional analysis of phenomena. So for me, Modern Mindfulness is a set term. I define it in a certain way. Obviously other people may use “mindfulness” or other related words in different ways. But for me, Modern Mindfulness is what some people call “secular mindfulness” or some people call “mainstream mindfulness”. But I don’t like either of those words for various reasons, but we need a name for it. And what the “it” is, is a contemplative practice co-evolving with science. So the reason that mindfulness is found all over the world now within the therapy setting, within the corporate setting, within the medical setting, even within the military. The US trains mindfulness. When Jon Kabat-Zinn and Saki Santorelli, who are sort of the heads of the MBSR approach, when they went to Beijing, there were members of the PLA, the Chinese national army there. And Saki told me that he thought the reason that they were there taking the seminar on MBSR was that they knew that the US military was using it. And I don’t know if that’s really true or not, but I think if you pardon my French, is pretty fucking amazing right?
Adrian:
Competitive advantage.
Shinzen Young:
I mean, are we gonna have um… Yeah, I don’t mind a Mindfulness Arms Race! Okay. That’s like a cold, that’s a Cold Peace as opposed to a Hot War. [Chuckling] Uh, but anyway, why is this everywhere? Okay. How did this happen? Well, Jon was able, Jon Kabat Zinn, spelled J-O-N, was able to put this South-east Asian Buddhist practice within the framework of clinical science. And okay. You know, you have pain, we give you these techniques. It may not make the pain go away, but youy perceived suffering goes way down. And we can use different psychometrics to make that a credible claim. So modern he linked it with science. Jon was originally a molecular biologist, which is pretty hard-nose quantitative science, but he was also a long time practitioner. So doctors started to send chronic pain patients to him because that’s a huge problem in clinical medicine. It’s an intractable problem, really. I mean everyone talks about this opioid epidemic or whatever, but I mean it has various causes, but one of them is, you know, these painkillers have these bad effects. So in any event, he got results and then it took off. So if we generalize what… MBSR stands for mindfulness based stress reduction. So if we sort of generalize what he did, um, which would have come online just about the time you folks were getting born. I would say he did two things. He abstracted the attentional skill training from the cultural doctrinal, religious, philosophical matrix of Asia. So that you didn’t have to believe in reincarnation or whatever, uh, you know, in order to do these practices. And then what he also did is he validated it by the standard cannons that are used in medicine. And it worked. It performed. It outperformed. So to me, what that represents is taking the spirit of science and modifying, in this case an essentially South-east Asian contemplative practice, um, making something that’s culturally universal and logic and evidence-based. But we can generalize that further because South-east Asian Buddhist practice is a proper subset of World Buddhist practice, but World Buddhist practice, in other words, quote “Buddhist Meditation” is a proper subset of world contemplative practice. As you folks know. There’s Christian, you have a Sufi path you have a Muslim name. So I’m guessing Muslim. Yeah, there’s contemplative tradition in Islam and Judaism, Christianity. So I’d like to take an even larger view. I talk of contemplative practice worldwide. So if we take contemplative practice, we can improve it by bringing in the spirit of science. But it works the other way. The science is… yes, it’s a cultural meme, but it’s also a human experience. It’s the experience of doing science. Whether it’s high school science or whether it’s professional level you’re shooting for a Nobel prize science. There is the doing of science, which is a human experience and experience of thought and emotion. And if the scientists take on a contemplative practice, they will be much happier human beings and therefore much more effective scientists. Um, so we can imagine a positive feedback loop moving forward in time.
All we need to do is somehow get past the next century or so, I would say without a catastrophic collapse of civilization, if we could somehow squeak through. I would expect that as contemplative practice becomes improved through interaction with science and as the scientists become improved through taking on contemplative practice, which then allows them to do better science, et Cetera, that a positive feedback loop could develop where they co-evolve. It’s a notion of course, from evolutionary biology. Sometimes species co-evolve. Sometimes they co-evolve to fight each other, but sometimes they co-evolve to cooperate with each other. And I see that as a viable possibility. Now, the reason that Buddhism sort of plays a big role is that of all the contemplative traditions of the world, or of all of the religions of the world, contemplative practice is most central in Buddhism. It’s what it’s all about really. Secondly, in the Buddhist tradition, there’s been very systematic and comprehensive analysis of what meditation practice is. It’s already proto-scientific in the way that it has been described historically. So there is a reason why Buddhism is central to this, but I see it as really a broader thing. But if we think of Buddhism or meditation practice as done in Asia, to me that represents the pinnacle of Asian civilization. It’s what Asia did better than anyone. And therefore the whole world should pay attention to that in a little bit of a special way because they did it right. They did it proto-scientifically, actually. Um, so if we wanted to somehow say, well, modern science is sort of a European thing. I mean, before the renaissance, other parts of the world, including the Islamic world actually was the center of science, but in the modern period, it’s been the west that took off. So my thing was, well, what might happen if the best of the East and the best of the West cross-fertilized? There would be some hybrid vitality. Some “wunderkind”, some wonder child perhaps born from that. So to get back to how I think about myself, so I’m essentially a researcher in Modern Mindfulness. So you need to know about two things. Since it’s these two worlds. You have to have an experiential background in contemplative practice. And you have to have scientific chops. You have to be good at math and a bunch of other things that make you a good scientist. So I decided to devote my life to developing those two directions within one person so that I could be in an ideal position to help the modern mindfulness movement. So I would say that’s how I think about myself.
So you’re asking a teacher and a researcher of Modern Mindfulness what about this rapid cultural change? What about the fear of the future? What about the sense that the old things aren’t working? Uh, what about this pervasive unfulfillment? And yeah. Hell yeah!
Thal:
[Laughing]
Shinzen Young:
A modern mindfulness researcher would have a lot to say about that. Actually it’s pretty much just a couple of things that cover all of the above actually. Um, if I had to pick, of the different things, if I had to pick the first dimension that I would respond to in terms of how you define the modern existential crisis, I would say unfulfillment or not broadly, deeply and intensely happy. A lack of being broadly, deeply and intensely happy might sum it all up. In the sense that fear is a form of being unhappy. It’s an uncomfortable inner state. So it’s a form of suffering. And certainly part of happiness is reducing suffering. The sense of the difficulty managing change and particularly unpredictable change. Um, well that’s actually a form of suffering also. Um, so really that managing change is part of being happy. So I still put it under the rubric of Happy. It’s interesting when you said the first thing that Thal said was the old ways aren’t working anymore. So, you know, the first thing that came to my mind is “the old ways never worked”. That was the first sentence that came up in talk space. The old ways never worked. Ever, actually. East, west, ancient, modern, they sort of worked. And sort of worked is okay, but I think we can do a lot better in the modern era, the information era. I don’t want to say things that might offend people, but I seem to end up doing it anyway.
Adrian:
Do it anyway.
Thal:
Please, go ahead.
Shinzen Young:
A lot of the old ways, not all, but at least the old ways in terms of post Neolithic humans, maybe Paleolithic or whatever proceeded that. That may be a different conversation, but, and this isn’t all of the old ways, but a lot of the old ways were ways of being happy. So they sort of worked. I mean they sort of make you happy. Um, you’ll notice I mentioned three dimensions of happiness, for an individual. How broadly happy they are, how deeply happy they are and how intensely happy they are. There could be a fourth dimension, which is the scope of happiness. How many individuals are to what degree broad, deep and intensely happy? And that would be of course a universal metric for happiness on this planet. Without loss of generality. Well, actually maybe with some loss of generality. So we’re going to just limit the conversation to human happiness. Happiness of nonhuman species is important, but that’s complicated to say nothing of speculations about other types of sentient beings in the Verse, the multiverse, whatever, however big this thing really is, which is I’m guessing probably much bigger than we can currently imagine. But in any event that’s speculative. So just limiting to humans on this planet. Basically we’ve got four dimensions to happiness. And so I warned you I have this dimensional way of thinking about things. By the way, that’s an example of what happens when you’re thinking process is profoundly informed by the spirit of science. That’s one of the skills you learn as a scientist is how to look at a complex phenomenon. And diagonalime the Matrix, find the eigenvalues, find the basic atoms, components, primes, canonical dimensions, whatever you want. These all mean the same thing essentially in science. Well prime is in number theory, but it’s analogous. So in any event, the goal is to optimize happiness. And I would claim that Modern Mindfulness as I describe it, is key to optimizing happiness. So that means the greatest number of people with the greatest intensity, breadth and depth of happiness, that’s what we want. So I mentioned that “Cheng-ming”, I try to be very precise about names. So I have a Periodic Table of Happiness Elements. You can find it on the Internet, although I revise it from time to time. It’s not as big as a periodic table of chemical elements, but it is actually amazingly similar in some ways. So one dimension I call how broad your happiness is. And there’s five sort of basic columns and then there’s four rows and they measure what I call depth of happiness. But as with any technical term, you shouldn’t associate breadth, depth, intensity with what they may mean elsewhere. They have to be defined, you know, within the particular scientific theory.
Adrian:
Contextual.
Shinzen Young:
So easiest to understand how broad your happiness is by specific example. So my sort of five pillars of heaven are “relief from suffering”, “increase in fulfillment”, um “understanding yourself at all levels” and we’ll get into the levels in a minute. “Mastering behavior, mastering actions” that could be sort of performance skills. But in the Buddhist tradition, they have an interesting thing. They use the word “skill” to refer to a one’s character. You have skillful character skills, or you have a skillful character, unskillful character. It’s what other traditions would call good and bad. A good actions, bad actions. But another way to think of it is skillful unskillful. It’s ort of the same thing. So I riff on the Buddhist ambiguity of skill to include both things like academic skills, performance skills, artistic skills. Um, those are forms of mastery of action. And there are how you, there’s how you carry yourself in the world. What kind of person you are in your interpersonal interactions. Were you an admirable person by your own cannons or the canons of the culture that you identify with. So all of those are mastery of object of actions. You’ll notice that the first three pillars sort of represent experience, right? Uh, experiencing physical, mental, emotional pain with less suffering. Experiencing physical, mental, emotional pleasure with more fulfillment. Um, understanding yourself at all levels from the biographical to the transpersonal. These are all sort of might be described as on the sensory side of experience. But I believe that how we act in the world is also a valid dimension of happiness. I have a lot of backup on that starting with Aristotle and actually most of the religions of the world. So acting skillfully or mastery of action, that’s dimension number or that’s column number four. Column number five is “service”. Maybe not everyone thinks of that first. Uh, you know, if you’re in chronic pain, all you think about is the first aspect of happiness. It’s all you care about. That’s why people get, have problems with drugs. Problems with drugs are action in the world. Now that’s mastery of behavior. So in any event, um, service, if you’re in chronic pain, being of service to others may not be the first thing that jumps up unless you’re really an extraordinary person. And every once in a while you get that. Someone that you know, that’s how they cope with it. But as people mature, they will come to see that it’s quite natural for a human being to derive immense happiness from serving others, in various ways. I would want for myself and for anyone else that we can check off all those columns that we couldn’t give them a way of reducing suffering, elevating fulfillment, understanding themselves at all levels, and making positive behavior changes. And ultimately a happiness based on a larger identity that one serves. So that’s the dimension of how broad, it’s a kind of qualitative dimension in a sense. Um, and I believe a complete positive psychology needs to take into account all those aspects. What I call level is not what you might think. It’s not how strong. It is how obvious a certain form of happiness is. The most obvious form of relief from suffering it is get rid of the condition that’s causing the suffering. But what if you can’t do that? Well, maybe I can cover over the symptoms somehow. So without loss of generality, uh, if I have pain, it’s caused by a disease, well, cure my disease. Good. We’ve taken care of the situation. Oh, you can’t cure my disease. Okay, well then give me palliative care that covers it over. Good. Now, no problem. Still still have the object of condition, but my perception of uncomfortable body-mind experience has been removed. Oh, the drugs cause addiction and eventually don’t work. Doc, what can you do for me? I’m afraid what they’re going to say is learn to live with it. Which may not be a very satisfying answer. Try not to get addicted and learn to live with it. Um, there are deeper levels of relief that are not obvious to people and entail mindful awareness skills. You have to have mindful awareness skills to get those less obvious forms of relief.
Analogously, there are less obvious forms of fulfillment, less obvious forms of self knowledge, uh, less obvious forms of service, et cetera, et cetera. So the deepest part of my grid is the least obvious. Those also happen to be the ones for which mindfulness skills are critical. Can’t get them without mindfulness skills. And they also are the ones that work when nothing else works. It’s the heavy guns. So how intense a person’s happiness is, well if you imagine this sort of two dimensional grid, then each box, you know, as a certain height, creating a three dimension, uh, sort of a two dimensional, um, profile. Right? How happy am I? How intense is my happiness? Oh, I should back up just to make it tangible with what I mean. The deepest level of relief is the ability to escape into the pain, be it physical, emotional, mental, or all three at once. The ability to escape into it is the ability to experience it with perfect concentration, clarity, and equanimity. And we can train you to that ability. By you, I mean anyone who’s willing to put in the time and energy. We can train you to a level where, even if the discomfort is very intense, the suffering is manageable. So it’s not obvious to the general public that that’s a viable option. But Modern Mindfulness says absolutely. And it’s just a click away. Well, maybe I’m not in pain, but I’m not deeply fulfilled. Well, the obvious, uh, if I want more fulfillment, what’s the obvious? Well, more wealth, more power, reputation, sexual prowess, just you name it. Something in the object of world, um, status, the mate and rate. Now that’s a legitimate dimension of happiness. There’s nothing in my value system that says it’s wrong to passionately pursue success in the world. So these are obvious. Of course what happens? I see this all the time because being in the science field, we interact with wealthy people of the Silicon Valley ilk. And the reason they’re interested in people like me is they’re millionaires, sometimes billionaires, and it really didn’t make them that much happier. And it’s like what’s next? So there’s a next! But it’s not obvious. And mindfulness skills to it, concentration, clarity, equanimity, trainable attentional skills, turn out to be key to that deeper aspect of fulfillment. So the normal paradigm is, what I want is intensity, variety, and duration of pleasure that’s going to fulfill me. So actually that’s not entirely incorrect. It’s just not complete. What you really want is to have complete experience of pleasure. Um, I’m going to define complete experience of pleasure to be completely analogous to complete experience of pain. Just a different category of sensory phenomenology. So when you escape into the pleasure, um, you bring so much concentration, clarity and equanimity to it that it provides you with the maximum perception of fulfillment. So I sometimes talk about the Imelda Marcos phenomenon. So she was, uh do you know?
Adrian:
No.
Shinzen Young:
So interesting generation thing. She was the wife of the president of the Philippines who was a dictator that was president for a long time. Marcos. I guess set up after World War 2 by the U S. Anyway, his wife was named Imelda and she became an object of ridicule. It’s really sad, um, because it’s not just her, it’s, it’s everyone. She just was extreme and it got out and, um, therefore it became sort of a thing. But, but she had thousands of pairs of shoes. All of them of the, you know, most expensive worldwide, you know, kind of thing. Um, so if I have some nice thing, uh, maybe I’m a guy, so it’s not going to be the shoes probably, but something I really liked, uh, well let’s just say, an expensive meal. So the tastes are, the actual sensory event is putatively worth a lot of money. How much fulfillment I derive from that intensity, duration and variety of pleasure that is this banquet. How much fulfillment I derive is not just a function of the sensory experience, it’s a function of how completely present I am to that sensory experience. Well, for that you need concentration, clarity, equanimity skills. You have to distinguish things. You have to stay, keep your attention on the tastes and whatever. And you have to not grasp on moment by moment to the pleasure. Because if you grasp on microscopically, you won’t be fully present for the next moment and the next moment and the next moment. So the key to fulfillment, yes, in part it relates to circumstances. Yes, in part it relates to intensity, variety and duration of pleasure. But let’s say that you have very mild pleasures. Um, good news. With mindfulness skills, you can derive enormous fulfillment from that. Bad news, if you conspicuously lacked those skills. If one pair of expensive shoes doesn’t fulfill you. So pleasure times mindfulness. If the mindfulness is zero, fulfillment equals pleasure times mindfulness to a linear approximation. It’s a much more complicated function. No doubt. I don’t want to sound mathematically illiterate. That’s my ego, my pride. To a linear approximation. We could say that fulfillment equals pleasure times mindfulness. Unfortunately, if mindfulness is at zero, that means one pair of expensive shoes gives you zero fulfillment. 10 times zero is still zero. 2,000 times zero is still zero. So there’s a bad news thing and that’s the Imelda Marcos phenomenon, which is no one taught her how to be fulfilled systematically. So for the deeper version of fulfillment, um, mindfulness skills are critical, then there’s understanding yourself. Well what’s the self? There’s the biographical self, there’s the archetypal self. You mentioned some influence of depth psychology? Would that be Freudian and Jungian idea of depth psychology?
Thal:
Mostly Jungian.
Shinzen Young:
Jungian Depth Psychology. Yeah. Okay. So that deals with what I would call the archetypal self.
Thal:
Yes.
Shinzen Young:
Or the collective unconscious. What have you. That’s a deeper level of self than the surface biography self. But I would distinguish two more levels of self understanding that are not obvious, that critically involve mindfulness skills. One is to understand yourself as a sensory system. That’s the path to enlightenment done in Theravada practice, south-east Asian practice Then there’s understanding yourself as a kind of primordial perfection. That would be your “Soulspace” to riff on the name of the podcast. So that would be the deepest level. Now that’s the paradigm for enlightenment that you get in Chan or at least some forms of Chan. Aka Zen, Tzun, Tien, different names in East Asia. Tien is the Vietnamese pronunciation. A lot of that deals with what they call the “huo-xing”, the Buddha-nature, uh, “Gou zi yuo huo xing”. You know, “gou zi” is a dog. “Yuo”, have. “huo xing”, the Buddha nature. “Yo”, or. “Wu”, not have. Would be pretty similar in Cantonese, I’m thinking. That was a famous Koan or a Zen question. Yes or no, dog have Buddha nature? So what did the Buddha nature is the Mahayana formulation for a kind of primordial perfection that is literally our soulspace. That is the deepest and broadest sense of self. So in the Mahayana and extending from that Vajrayana like Tibet, the “mi jiong”, you know, the Esoteric Tantric Buddhism, in those traditions, enlightenment, not always, but often is formulated, not in the sense of something you achieve, but something you notice. That that nature was always there. So that’s your deepest level of understanding. So we, if you untangle yourself as a sensory experience, that leads to a liberated experience of the space of self. It becomes a place to live, not a place where you are imprisoned. So that’s a South-east Asian paradigm. And we could take a Trans-himalayan slash East-Asian paradigm of well. But below that, all along there was never any need to train, um, because of the nature, the deepest sense of self. But the problem is, although there’s no need to train, there’s still a need to train because it’s just an idea until you notice it. The “it” meaning this primordial perfection. So in any event, to summarize, if we think of Modern Mindfulness, so you asked me and I’m a Modern Mindfulness researcher slash teacher. So I guess you call it faculty. I’m part of the Modern Mindfulness faculty. I teach and I do research the research. Yeah. So in any event, um, you, you asked me as a Modern Mindfulness teacher, researcher how would I respond to the crisis of meaning, etc. And then you gave me the meaning of the crisis of meaning for you. So I would summarize it by saying, um, that the old ways sort of work and we don’t even have to get rid of the old ways, but there’s a larger way that either replaces the old ways or is in some sort of detente with the old ways or maybe even a complementarity, depending. So the new way… Well we’ll contrast with the old way. The old way is, here’s a list of beliefs. Here is a list of social customs. Here’s a list and in some cases and amazingly elaborate list of what’s right and wrong. Now keep your nose clean. Follow this list. And depending on the tradition, it will be general guidelines or it could control literally every moment of your life. My background is Jewish.
Thal:
Same.
Shinzen Young:
You’re Islamic, you know.
Thal:
Yeah.
Shinzen Young:
You know what that is. So here’s the rules, here’s the customs, here’s the beliefs, join up and you’ll be happy. And it actually sort of works. Some people are freaked out by fundamentalist religion. I’m not freaked out by it. I think I understand it. To be honest, I may not like it, but I do think I understand it. Um, it sort of works. And it probably works better than the angst of the modern crisis in meaning. Okay. Relative to that, those people are happy, but it’s happiness at a price to be honest. Um, first of all, they’re not as happy as they could be. Secondly, the way they found to be happy in some cases precludes them being happier in a broader way. In some cases, not always, but the worst is, the list of rules don’t agree. The list of customers don’t agree. The list of beliefs don’t agree. So I trot out my Tanakh, the Old Testament, you trot out your Quran. The Mormons trot out the book of Mormon, which is later than both and in their claim. Therefore, the final revelation. [Chuckle] On the other hand Nichiren Shōshū will trot out the Lotus Sutra. And Pure Land Buddhism will translate and we’ll trot out the Maha-Saccaka. What is it called? Maha-Saccaka sutra anyway. It’s not just the Abrahamic religions that have scripturally based fundamentalism. You can find it in certain forms of Buddhism and it pervades Hinduism. Um, anyway, be that as it may, that sort of works. But the biggest problem is, besides the problems I mentioned, is it sometimes doesn’t agree with science and it caught, it causes an us versus them mentality. Um, that then leads to say, jihads what have you. And a lot of other problems. So it’s sorta worked and we have to respect it for working in the way that it works. But to be honest, I see a broader paradigm of happiness that number one, works better, and number two, does not necessarily preclude the old ways. Uh, I have born again, Christians. I certainly have a lot of Catholics. I have practicing Orthodox Jews that come to my retreats. I do retreats in Israel. And we have a lot of orthodox Jews that come. And no one has any problem with anything. Because it’s Modern Mindfulness, it’s not “Stealth Buddhism”. Um, so in any event, if you want to follow the old way’s fine, but if they really don’t work for you, well we’ve got a larger broader paradigm.
So the new paradigm or perhaps the extended paradigm, if we want to include the old ways, uh, it’s so cool because if the old ways really don’t work for you, then okay, well there’s another dimension and it’s consonant with science. In fact, it can coevolve with science. Um, but it doesn’t involve these lists of norms. It has some conceptual baggage, but minimum. The minimum conceptual baggag is there’s an attentional skill, or you could call it a “mind power” if you want. But that’s mind is a very ambiguous word. When I present this stuff in Chinese though, one of the…I see you have my book, the Science of Enlightenment. So we’re translating it into Chinese now. By we, I mean me and a couple people born in China. So it’s a very interesting conversation because how do you say mindfulness in Chinese? Okay. Um, for modern China, right? Uh, anyway, one of the words, we were thinking, one of the terms that we were thinking of using his “Shin Li”, which is like “Shin”, “Sum” luck? I’m guessing Cantonese here, something like that, right?
Adrian:
Yeah.
Shinzen Young:
Like consciousness strength, right? You could think of it that way, but we call them attentional skills. So there are these attentional skills and they are cultivatable. We do ask you to believe that, but that’s not a big stretch because just try and you’ll see you get better and better. And it’s just like any other strength. You do exercise, your muscles get big. You concentrate and your concentration power elevates. So there are these attentional skills: concentration, sensory clarity, equanimity. The’re cultivatable and in fact, eminently cultivatable you can, you can only get maybe twice as strong, I don’t know. But you can get 10 times as mindful. So there are these cultivatable skills and they are relevant to all types and depths of happiness. Everything on my happiness grid is impacted positively. In other words, happiness is optimized at all levels, not just the deepest level, but the mindfulness skills are related to the surface level of happiness. Also because if being a success in the world in some way is on your happiness checklist, we can show you how systematically cultivating and applying mindfulness skills will make it probable that you will be successful. So the main message here is, in a sense what might be called a bigger way to be happy or if the old ways really don’t work for you, then you would think of it as an alternative way to be happy. And what we ask is that you allocate a certain amount of time and energy to developing these attentional skills and that you also apply those skills in daily life to achieving your happiness goals. If a person does that, we can’t guarantee, but we could be like a doctor. We can say, if you establish the structure of practice, retreat, practice life, practice, you get support, you give support those are sort of my four pillars of practice. If you establish that structure in your life, it’s like a health, it’s like a fitness regimen except it’s a psycho-spiritual fitness regimen. But it’s no more demanding than a fitness regimen. That’s why you can be hopeful because there was a time when no one worked out. No one jogged. I remember the transition. I can remember buying my first pair of running shoes because as people say, everyone’s jogging now, what the hell is jogging? Well, you just run. Well, what’s the point? And then well, turns out there’s a big point to it. And no one was doing it, but then people were talking about it and so it’s like, oh, okay. I got some running shoes and I can remember running around the block and getting winded instantly. It’s like, this sucks. I don’t want to do that. But then no, you just keep doing it. You get better at it. And sure enough, in a month I was running a couple miles. Now I was in my twenties. And you can do the math on that one when that would have been, um, so there was a time when no one had systematic fitness training. Now a lot of people do. Um, it’s not unreasonable to think that there’ll be a time in the future when a lot of people have systematic mind strength training or a “mindfulness training”. Uh, so, um, the hopeful news is that if you’re willing to establish a sort of psycho spiritual fitness regimen and I would say that the single most important factor for that is to have a competent personal mindfulness coach.
Um, if you want one, just go to unifiedmindfulness.com. Go to support. Send an email to my main trainer, Julianna Raye, and she’ll get you set up. Um, now of course, that’s not the only game in town. There’s many, many, many mindfulness programs. But as I say, I, one of my great sources of joy is that I can say, if you want to have a personal mindfulness coach, now you may have to pay for that. You pay for a therapist, you pay for a competent workout coach. Now her people do a lot of pro bono work because this isn’t a for-profit industry, but the most important pillar is a competent personal coach. You give them your happiness list. Here’s my checklist. Here’s my sources of suffering. Here’s where I want to be more fulfilled. Do I want to understand myself psychologically? Okay, do I want to go a little, a little deeper? Okay. Um, here are the behavior changes I want, et cetera. You give them your laundry list for happiness. And then they guide you in the process of achieving that goal. Now, just as a personal health regimen, you have to keep it up your whole life. I just came from the gym. I’m 75 years old. I mean my body is very deteriorating, you know, relative to when I was 25 years old. But you keep it up for your whole life as, as best as you can. Now, the thing about physical health though is it deteriorates with time. It’s an up an uphill battle, right? That eventually you lose. You get injured, you get sick, you die. But the psycho spiritual dimension of growth works exactly the opposite. The older you get, and the more feeble your mind and body become, the more powerful your underlying spiritual vitality. Thank God because if it didn’t work that way, I’d be up Shit Creek without a paddle. So the good news is that if you’re willing to do that, and as I mentioned, you know, if I had to say one thing is get a coach because the coach knows the model, knows the turf and if they’ve been, at least, if they’ve been certified by my organization, they’re certified to a certain level. And if they can handle the levels of happiness you want, then they refer you to a coach that can. Let’s say you want classical enlightenment as per the path of purification described in Sri Lanka in the sixth century. It’s like, that’s my happiness. I want stream entry. Well, I’m not saying every, every unified mindfulness coach has the confidence to lead you there, but plenty of them do.
But that’s probably not on your happiness list. It’s probably “I just want to have less mental turmoil and less emotional distress” or “I want to do better in school” or “improve my tennis game”. So that’s where we start. We start there. But the paradigm, the perspective that we give you and the attentional skills that we impart and the focusing strategies that you can apply as you go about daily life. All of that is the same essentially, regardless of what your goals are. So you can, the incredible thing about modern mindfulness is it is a upaya for the modern age. Upaya is a Buddhist concept. How do you reach people? Most people don’t care about enlightenment. Actually, a lot of people may not even care about being a good person.
Thal:
That’s true.
Shinzen Young:
I’ve actually had students that were criminals. Professional criminals. Now I can’t, um, you know, I couldn’t affirm their lifestyle, but I taught them. I will teach them and because I’m setting the stage for possible lifestyle changes, I’m, I’m, I’m fine with that. Um, not everyone even wants to be a good person, but everyone has something they want. And whatever it is, a competent mindfulness coach… we can’t guarantee that they’ll deliver it. But we can say with time, if you keep up the regimen for the duration, it’s likely at some point in your life, likely that in fact, yeah, you’ll sort of get that. But as if that weren’t powerful enough, the same attentional skills and the same focus strategies that you would use to deconstruct your back pain, you can also use that to deconstruct your anxiety or your confusion. And so a Modern Mindfulness teacher is a kind of a device that transforms the world’s small concept of happiness as a goal to this huge concept of happiness. But the same skills and techniques are applied for all types and levels of happiness. So by the aesthetic canons of science, it is an extremely powerful and elegant system.
Adrian:
Shinzen, we’d love to hear some of the latest research that you’re involved in. You mentioned the research side. So how that blends into your current work and also just, I mean it’s the name of your book, the Science of Enlightenment. We want to hear about the path of Enlightenment. Is it for everybody? And how is that connected to the work that you’re currently doing?
Shinzen Young:
Well, enlightenment means different things to different people. I mean, if you just go to Wikipedia disambiguation page, you’ll see how many things have been called enlightenment. I mean, there’s a period in European history that’s called the enlightenment. But this is a different meaning. Um, so if we take enlightenment to mean understanding yourself at the deepest level, then I’m going to say that it’s probably relevant for most people. In the sense that if understanding yourself at all is relevant than understanding yourself at the deepest level would be relevant, I would think as a natural consequence. Because most people want to understand themselves, at least at some level, I’m just extrapolating from that. Then if we take enlightenment to simply mean the deepest level, then that’s relevant to most people because that’s just the next step after the next step of understanding yourself. It’s also relevant because sooner or later everyone dies. And you might die quickly. Like, you know, just die in bed or you know, something, an accident just takes you out. But a lot of people aren’t going to die quickly. They’re gonna go through a dying process and all the structures that they use to cope will eventually be broken down and stripped away by that dying process or at least a lot of them. In other words, a lot of the surface stuff that constitutes our identity, the surface self that’s getting ripped away in the dying process, I mean like hour by hour, day by day, minute by minute. So a lot of people are going to go through that and there’s a natural.. In all the humans that don’t die quickly really quickly. Anyone that dies consciously is going to have to go through all of the surface levels of self being majorly fucked up and stripped away. So if you have some sense of the part of you that is so deep that it is immune to that. If you have some sense of that before the dying process, then your mortality, the mortality of everyone you care about has a different context. Furthermore, of course, once you understand yourself at that level, you’re able to fully participate in life for the first time as nothing blocking. The doingness of the personality, the somethingness of the self is gone. But the underlying doingness, the verb, the dynamics space, that is the soul that is deeper than an individual’s life and death. So if you are able to have that way before you physically die, well, that’s really the deepest and most central dimension of human happiness. So I would say, yeah, it’s relevant and it’s feasible. So it’s important to realize, I repeat, enlightenment is used in different ways by different people. So here what I’m talking about is what in the Southeast Asian tradition is called stream entry. And what in East Asia is called seeing your nature “jian shin”. Could the average householder, average might not be the word, but, uh, generally a householder, someone that has family that had that has a career, job, is it feasible that in their lifetime, that level of enlightenment, uh, could be achieved? Yeah, it’s feasible. But you have to establish and maintain the psycho-spiritual health regimen that I mentioned. See as I mentioned, for physical health. It’s a losing battle. But for psycho spiritual health that older you get that the more experience you have, the closer you get to this liberation. And you can call it liberation or enlightenment. They call it enlightenment because there’s a kind of intuitive understanding that arises. But you can call it liberation because there’s a freedom from the limited identity. So first levels of liberation enlightenment are feasible and relevant for most people, I would say. Now, full enlightenment, full liberation, that’s actually a very different critter. So I expect that a significant proportion of people that participate in my version of this training and keep it up for their whole life will get at least that initial level, but maybe not quickly and maybe not suddenly, but with time, gradually it’s probable. So that gives you a little bit of a reality check. Now, there’s full liberation. That means the full braking of the identity with the mind body process. That is a different critter. So stream entry, it’s all over the place. Uh, you’ve met, all of you have met or interacted with people, whether you knew it or not, that were stream enterers by my criteria in any way. The problem is different teachers have different criteria, right. Arhat, I mean, I spent my life in this field and I lived where it came from. Asia. Yeah. I met a few Asian masters that I think we’re in that ballpark. But that’s in 50 years and it was just a few. If you’re interested, I can give you the names, you can look up. Look them up and so forth. But complete liberation, that’s a whole other thing. But an initial taste that satisfies you for the duration, that’s feasible. Problem is, uh, you remember, I only said it’s probable and I said it might take quite a while. Um, so most people’s experience, initial experience of meditating is “I can’t do this, my mind wanders, I can’t concentrate”. Um, and very quickly they just give it up because there’s not a quick reward, in many cases. So it takes a lot of maturity to stay with it until it all starts to make sense. And you start to get some tangible… I mean, people obviously get some benefits or no one would stay with it. So we were talking about like the opioid epidemic. It’s on my mind because some of our research is probably going to be directed towards that clinical population. We’re at the University of Arizona. But we’re partnering with the major addiction recovery center in the state of Arizona. So it’s on my mind. So, heroin, man, I mean, try it two times…you know, two, three times, I guess you’re hooked, right? That’s instantly addictive. And it changes your whole life for the truly horrible in a truly horrible way. So the idea would be, well, what’s the diametric opposite of that? Something that very quickly gives you fulfillment, independent of conditions. And now, oh, I want more of that, but this isn’t an addiction. This is actually a freedom from addiction. It’s equanimity. It’s a non-grasping around pleasure. So the idea is that if we could enhance the training protocol that currently exists, which is, as I mentioned, retreat practice, life practice, get support, give support. If people want details on that, they can go to my web resources. What I mean by those things.
But if in addition to those components, people often when we start to talk about technology enhanced, whatever, they think, “oh you guys think that you can just zap people into enlightenment?” No… Not exactly. Um, but what we think is it may be possible with technology to enhance the training so that people start to get more dramatic results quicker. A lot quicker so that anyone that has an interest in this tries it a few times and it actually works. It works the way. Maybe not the way it works after 50 years. Because I’ve got 50 years. That’s, that’s a bittersweet experience. The sweet part is this shit works and yeah, everything they said would happen happened. The bitter part is you look out at the world and how many people put in 50 years of that kind of training. So if in five months, five weeks, people could get a taste of what this can really deliver, that would change the course of history precipitously for the better everywhere. Particularly if what I’m describing is folded into standard medicine. So my plot, so to speak, what is a good plot. Okay. in other words is my strategy is, uh, to um, use neuromodulation technology to not zap people into mindfulness but to induce a state of neuroplasticity where in the mindfulness training becomes more efficient and therefore the rewards are more immediate. And then it’s a global viral meme and you get it just because you visited a doctor at a hospital stay. Or you got addicted to opiates and now you’re in a recovery program. But the recovery program after we’ve detoxed you, provides you with a techno boosted mindfulness training regimen and then you maintain that to maintain sobriety. That would be one example. So what we want to do is take all of the, any major area of clinical medicine, create a techno boosted training program. Not, not some zap that we claim is going to take you into some state, but something that creates an environment wherein you can train more effectively. Um, and you get that by contact with medicine. In other words, science. Wherever you are in the world. And since medicine is medicine everywhere, it doesn’t matter whether it’s in the People’s Republic of China or under the Ayatollahs in Tehran, medicine is still medicine. And since these interventions don’t have any religious component to them, there shouldn’t be any pushback. So the idea would be to weave…to sort of enlarge what medicine does from relieving suffering by curing diseases or relieve suffering by palliating symptoms. That’s what medicine now does. So a larger view of medicine is medicine cures suffering. Or medicine allows you to be happy at the deepest and broadest formulation. Uh, and that’s what medicine delivers. So this would then make optimal happiness part of all human cultures. So that’s the dream. That’s the holy grail. Now, the trick is, are there neuromodulations that can do this? A lot of people claim that they have that. To which I say bullshit. And here’s why. If we really had that or if we have had that for a while, see, one of the things about sciences is that causes have consequences. So the kind of technology of enlightenment that I’m envisaging would dramatically change the world for the better. Look around at everything that people are offering that says, hey, this is it. I’m going to microdose you with the psilocybin. But we’re gonna do this new expensive neurofeedback. We’re going to blah, blah, blah. Okay, fine. Is it a reasonable hypothesis that knowledge of this intervention will in the next century, fundamentally change the name of the game on this planet from competition for limited resources to… Well, yeah, there’s that, but there’s also how much fulfillment you get from what you got and turns out that’s even more important. Will these technologies end war, more or less. Will they end social injustice, more or less? Will they end violence? Well I said wars, crime. Okay. Is that, it’s this super neurofeedback or this microdosing of psilocybin. Is this all we need? This plus a hundred years essentially this planet is now Heavan on earth? Extrapolate. I don’t think so! Not even remotely. I don’t know. But maybe, that plus mindfulness plus a hundred years, but maybe we don’t have a hundred years. Um, so I’m asking for something more dramatic. A lot more dramatic. We don’t know if it exists, but it’s certainly worth looking for. And if you were to ask me to make my best candidate and best candidate doesn’t mean I think this is gonna work. It’s just the best out of everything I’ve seen so far. But I’m not claiming it will work. And I’m also not claiming it’s safe, by the way. So very careful about claims because people make claims. Irresponsible claims. It really frosts my buns. But my best guess for where to start is ultrasonic neuromodulation. Low intensity focused ultrasound directed to ego hubs, grasping hubs that could perhaps relax that a little bit and create the situation where people can get dramatic results fairly quickly. That would be my best candidate. But that’s not saying Shinzen Young thinks it’s a good candidate. It’s just the most promising I’ve seen so far. We have a lab called SEMA lab at the University of Arizona that stands for Sonication Enhanced Mindful Awareness training lab. Um, and that’s what we’re looking into at this time.
Adrian:
Thank you for sharing that.
Thal:
Wow.
Shinzen Young:
Uh, you guys should have Jay on too. He’s my PI. He’s the director of the lab. I’m in charge of a protocol development.
Adrian:
It feels tangible too because you’ve also identified a timeframe, right? Like the goal of within the next century, you know, would be ideal. Um, and then also the imminent like needing to accelerate this too. There’s a sense of urgency of finding that technology to speed up what has a proven track record, the methodologies and, but then to augment it with the modern…[chuckling] We started this conversation with what modern means. But it sounds like it’s, you know, yet to be discovered. So there’s an excitement to this type of work.
Shinzen Young:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, if people are interested, they can go to youtube and find Jay Sanguinetti. And he talks about the, what the work that we’re doing.
Thal:
Um, I’m still thinking about the word enlightenment. An, is it for everyone? And is it a goal that we should all aspire to? Um, I think it’s just, I don’t have a specific question around enlightenment, but maybe how is it relevant for our generation? Uh, I really don’t have a specific question. What I’m thinking about is thinking about some friends who would listen to the word enlightened and be like, “pfff” like really? I mean, do I have to sit… Yeah.
Shinzen Young:
Hence, you don’t have to call it enlightenment and maybe we shouldn’t call it enlightenment. I called it enlightenment because that’s just what I called it. Right. But, um, when I go to the People’s Republic of China, probably this year, I’m going to just call it understanding yourself at the deepest level.
Thal:
Yes. I think that answers my question. Yeah. Understanding ourselves is part of the meaning crisis really.
Shinzen Young:
Sure.
Thal:
Absolutely. Yeah.
Shinzen Young:
So there’s your answer, right. And this word is used to translate certain Asian terms, but we can get you there without calling it enlightenment.
Thal:
Right.
Shinzen Young:
Um, I would just call it understanding yourself at the deepest level and that makes, that makes it normal. That normalizes it. So you’re right. Uh, enlightenment, even though it’s on my book is actually not a good word moving forward.
Thal:
Anything else you want to ask?
Shinzen Young:
Well you got a lot more than 70 minutes. But use it as you wish, you know, chop it up. Parcel it out.
Thal:
Yeah. The way I see it. This is an opportunity. So anything you say is our gems really. So thank you. Thank you.
Adrian:
Are there, are there any teachers like currently that you have a relationship with? Dead or alive? I was actually curious because, you know, I see you…
Shinzen Young:
Do you mean that they function as a teacher.
Adrian:
Yeah, you’re a student to them. Yeah having that relation.
Shinzen Young:
Not at this time, no. But we’re sort of co-teacher’s to each other. So in that sense, I would think the dialoguing that I do with other teachers, we’re all sort of teaching each other at this point. Um, but I don’t have a formal relationship with anyone. Neither do I think of the people that utilize my programs as being my disciples or, I mean we call them students, but, um, it’s really more of a, yeah. I don’t, I don’t have that, uh, Asian lineage thing. That is very important for cultural reasons in that part of the world. But you know, I’m not going to have successors and I encourage people to just utilize any resources that are available that are competent in this area. So I guess because I don’t look upon myself as a teacher in the sense of, you know, um, do what I say because you know, you have to sorta in some way surrender to me as your teacher. I don’t think of my students in that relationship. So I guess I don’t think I need that relationship with someone else at this point.
Thal:
Actually I have, The Science of Enlightenment in an audio book and I’ve like been listening to it on and off. And there was a story that you mentioned speaking again of, and I love the word enlightenment. You, uh, one of your teachers, you asked him to, um, I hope I’m getting this right. You asked him to teach you an advanced form of meditation. I really loved that story and maybe you can share that and, um, like the experience of like enlightenment moment.
Shinzen Young:
Um, can you, uh, refresh me on the details of the story?
Thal:
I think you were in, I don’t know, I think you were probably in Japan, I’m not sure. And and it was a zen teacher and you ask them to give you an advanced…
Shinzen Young:
Is this like I was doing breath than I wanted…
Thal:
Yes! And you wanted something more advanced and he’s like, really? There are people who have done breath for years.
Shinzen Young:
Well, there’s several parts to that story, but yeah, I was doing the breath and I was going to be leaving Japan. So oh wait, no, I’m conflating the past. Hold it just second. That’s what happens. Um, okay. No, it was not when I was about to leave. I’ve been… Yes. I’d been practicing for several months. Uh, the standard Chan breath counting. And then yeah, I went to him and I asked for a more advanced practice and because he was in, you know, there’s sort of, some of the Zen masters are ferocious. It sounds, uh, sort of, I don’t know, um, romantic or somehow interesting culturally that there would be masters who are ferocious, but I can tell you it gets old really quick, right. Really quick. But that’s a whole other thing. So anyway, yeah, he was like “there have been people who have done 40 years of zen practice…” Yes. In Japanese so it’s even more macho.
Thal:
[laughing]
Shinzen Young:
Yeah. Try to remember the original Japanese. But anyway, it was like, “who do you think you are kid? You just begun to begun to begun”. And it’s true. Now I’ve met people that spent 40 years at the tip of their nose and it worked that, that, that, you know, that did it. Um, but did you want me to say what would the more advanced practice was?
Thal:
Yes.
Shinzen Young:
Well, it wasn’t really a more advanced practice. That’s sort of the whole point. It was a different practice.
Thal:
Yes.
Shinzen Young:
It was self inquiry in the Buddhist form. Answer this question: who are you? Which is of courses, you’re being asked to understand yourself at the deepest level. So it all comes full circle, right?
Thal:
Absolutely. Yeah. It’s, um, it’s interesting because when you said it, there’s this romantic idea and it gets old really fast. I just went to a 10-day Vipassana and going through the practice everyday, they today is not romantic at all. It’s painful. So I admire your dedication and those years that you spent, I mean…
Shinzen Young:
Yeah, but I hope that you continue with formal practice or with systematic practice. You may or may not want to work in that tradition.
Thal:
Right.
Shinzen Young:
I actually lived at Mr. Goenka’s Center in India and it’s a wonderful, powerful way of working.
Thal:
Yeah.
Shinzen Young:
Okay.
Adrian:
It’s a real pleasure.
Shinzen Young:
It’s a wrap.
Thal:
Thank you.
Adrian:
Thank you.
#25: Raising Consciousness Through Sound with Alexandre Tannous
So many elements of our human experience affect our consciousness, including sound. Classical music, indigenous forms of drumming, African desert blues, or the mere sound of silence produce different feelings and thoughts. It can shape our inner life in significant ways — in fact, awareness around how we consume sound shapes the way we create meaning and how we live our life.
Alexandre Tannous has been active as a musician, educator, composer, and an ethnomusicologist. For the past 13 years he has been researching the therapeutic and esoteric properties of sound. He has developed a protocol he calls “Sound Meditation” which uses specific sounds to help people tap into the self-healing capacities that we all possess. We discuss Gnosticism, the physics of sound, and how music is weaponized and used to hijack consciousness for religious and capitalistic agendas. Alexandre holds a Bachelor of Music in Theory and Composition, a Master of Arts degree in Music Education as well as a Master of Arts and a Master of Philosophy degrees in Ethnomusicology from Columbia University. His works are frequently performed in the United States, Europe, and in Asia. He currently works as a sound therapist, researcher and educator.
Highlights:
- How Sound Hijacks Consciousness
- Therapeutic Properties of Sound
- How to Incorporate Sound into Your Spiritual Practice
Resources:
- Sound Meditation
- Sample Recordings of Alexandre’s Work
- Biocentrism by Robert Lanza
Listen:
Poem Inspired by This Episode
Full Transcript
Adrian:
Welcome to the show.
Alexandre :
Thank you. Very good to be here.
Adrian:
Yeah, maybe a good place to start… just give us a bit of a background of how you first fell in love with all these subjects that you’re so passionate about. Sound and consciousness. And all the things that you’re involved in.
Alexandre:
Yeah. Well, ever since I was a teenager I was attracted to esoteric knowledge, occult knowledge. And I have to define occult here because most people think automatically of evil and dark staff. No, not necessarily. Occult is simply the hidden that which is around but hidden in a way because people don’t have the right tools to perceive and understand it. And interested in meditation and eastern philosophies and the psyche and why the human experience is going on and so on and so forth. And one thing will always lead to another. And, but the most important element here is curiosity. I’ve always had the curiosity to know things. I didn’t know that they’re there to be known. Uh, of course it’s a long and tricky journey, treacherous sometimes. It’s part of the learning process. Uh, making mistakes is important that these mistakes should be perceived as a stepping stone toward betterment and deeper understanding, realizations and, seeking the truth. Yeah. And this grew over the years and still growing. I’m still a student of variety of different things that most people don’t give attention to. The things that informed me a lot and have been really fascinating for me are certain fields such as hermeticism, the knowledge of Hermes Trismegistus. Gnosticism, the body of knowledge that the Gnostics, those who sought Gnosis experiential knowledge. Nonintellectual knowledge. Embodied knowledge. Knowledge that come out of experience. That’s really important because, um, it also appears in other cultures, ancient cultures and systems. The Gnostics were the people who lived around the time of Christ, um, and sought knowledge. The prototype Gnostics were the scenes. But it’s also something talked about in Kabbalah, Da’ath, is intuitive knowledge as opposed to Yeda, learned intellectual knowledge. And Jnana in Hinduism and Rigpa in Tibetan Buddhism and so on. Other subjects I was interested in and still interested, theosophy the school of Madame Blavatsky. Anthroposophy, the school of Rudolph Steiner, even though he started as an Anthroposophist. Eastern philosophies as well especially specific schools, for example, the Vedanta schools in Hinduism and Dzogchen in Tibetan Buddhism and other esoteric and called philosophies and practices. And Rosicrucianism as well and certain secret societies. Although these have been, or it seems for the most part that they’d been hijacked by other entities and derailed because the fight at the end is about knowledge. Knowledge is the ultimate power. And then absence of knowledge is the absence of power. And as humans wake up, they realize the level of deception and trickery and corruption that’s going on on all levels, especially political and religious, just the usual hypocrisy that’s part of the human condition. And they’re waking up because they’re gaining this knowledge and this knowledge belongs to people and the knowledge went underground, it was preserved in a lot of these fields that I mentioned, but it was preserved up into a point where consciousness is ready to handle this knowledge and people are aware. And I think this is the time where this knowledge is coming back little by little but you need people to be less distracted and to pay attention to it instead of pop culture and stupid media that’s trying to frighten people and to create the inner instability because the manipulation is through entrainment. We can talk about entrainment later on. Yeah. So the search is still going. I love what I explore and it’s now became part of my life’s work. Um, I quit the things I used to do. I’m trained in music. Four degrees over 12 years. I wore different hats when it came to music. Making I studied composition and conducting performance music, education, ethnomusicology. But now I focus all my efforts to do sound research and scientific studies and fieldwork. And I work as a sound therapist, bringing this knowledge to people where one is being awakened from within. One experiences different non ordinary states of consciousness to understand the self. And meditation, contemplation, mindfulness also go hand and hand with working with sound. Yeah.
Thal:
You know, of course, it’s amazing. Your interests are so varied. But kind of two questions come to mind as you were talking. First, you know, when you’re talking about the esoteric knowledge, sort of the experiential knowledge, it’s like hidden in plain sight and as you said, there are a lot of distractions, I guess. I don’t know if we can answer it or I’m just thinking about like what holds us back? Sort of peeling away the layers of the veil. What is it essentially that’s holding back people, you know? Like I know I’m thinking about fear, but I would like to hear your thoughts around that. That’s one question. And the other one is, um, you know, the fact that you are so multifaceted and interested in all these different types of knowledge. What early experiences in your life, was there a certain moment or like an insight that came to you at a young age or an experience that you’d like to share that sort of initiated you in a way?
Alexandre :
Yeah. Um, so yes, fear is the number one element that holds people back. Um, but also fear manifests in various ways. There’s some reticence and some holding back in us realizing who we are ever since the quote unquote fall out of Eden, whatever that story is really about. Where humanity, the human being lost the God, the connection to God, God within, not God outside. I completely disagree with the Abrahamic understanding of the divine. There is no divine outside. It’s a trick. So there’s something within us that does not want us to realize who we are. There is a fear. There is hesitation, but there’s also attachment to the material world. Um, in Hinduism and Buddhism, they talk about Maya, which is the state of infatuation with the material world, with the changing world. And um, we lost who we are in the dream. It’s very important to start to create an analogy here. A dream is like this reality when we fall asleep, for the first few moments we are aware that we are falling asleep and we starting to dream. And some people can control that by doing lucid dreaming on demand. It happens to every person let’s say the person wakes up in the middle of the night, then they go to the bathroom and if they stay latched on that dream, they can hop back on it and continue it. But in the first few moments, few seconds or a minute or two, they’re aware that they’re dreaming. But then as they go on, they lose the self in the dream. They lose who’s having the dream. They lose the fact that this is a dream and it’s not consensual reality and they’re not aware of to what extent and how this dream replaces completely consensual reality up until they wake up again. Whether to go to the bathroom again or to wake up in the morning. And then they realize, oh, that was a dream. This is consensual reality. This reality seems to be working in a similar way where, um, we don’t really understand what reality is. We don’t understand how the psyche, the mind, can create reality, that is, uh, similar to the stream and sometimes could be even more powerful than the dream itself. And, um, when people do Shamanic experiences and take psychedelics, exactly the same process happens, is that they live through a dream, the visionary state that is, that can have an aspect that makes it seem more real than reality itself. So this requires some attention. How can this happen? What is reality? So we become deeply engaged in the dream and invested in, especially when we take our emotions, feelings, and thoughts seriously. And this is where the suffering comes from, is that we’re taking things too seriously. People who are experiencing depression or severe anxiety or PTSD, there’s a different flow of chemicals that happen in their body and that becomes the new trip. And there will be great attachment to the new trip, if we can call it, which is, well I should preface here that feelings, emotions and thoughts and sensations all are induced by chemicals and endogenous chemicals that are secreted in the body. And we run on chemicals. It’s really the human experiences is a human trip and all we do is change it. So we can become addicted to certain things. And that’s why you find a lot of people who are angry all the time. They don’t enjoy being in group and they’re attached to being angry or being sad or feeling self-loathing and so on because of the attachment to the chemicals that their bodies secreted. So the chemicals in the way we invest our energy and we pursue them, that ends up by creating form of reality. And uh, we become attached to that. And that’s the only thing we know and we tend to shy away from that which we don’t know. So if you consider all of these things, then uh, you realize to what extent it’s easy to perpetuate this sense of loss of the connection to the divine that’s within and carry on with life as it’s being fabricated through form of entrainment. Entrainment is when we’re playing music and music starts to affect us and we start to move and sync with it even when we’re not dancing. Entrainment is when people watch a film. And the music in the film is affecting people’s reception to the visuals and the dialogue. It’s very, very important. I wrote for film music and I know how important that is. And also in commercials. Why? Because it changes the inner processes, the brainwave cycles, the heart rate variability, the subtle energy and every aspect of being. Sound, music is immensely powerful when it comes to entrainment because you’re dealing with physics. And the universe is ruled by the laws of physics. We don’t give so much attention to the extent in which consciousness is ruled by the laws of acoustics, a specific branch in physics that deals with the study of sound and vibration. And that’s why within sound and music and all sorts of ceremonies, whether they’re religious, Shamanic, traditional, spiritual, mystical fields and so on and so forth. So we can be kept in this dimension and not have to follow to what we came here to do, which is to unravel the nature of being and to understand who we are. That’s something that people used to do in matriarchy. Um, and they understood this complexity that’s within nature. And there was no science back then. There was natural philosophy. Schools of natural philosophy, which science came out from that. Science suffered a huge setback, became reductionist, materialistic. And then we lost this connection to understanding the value of the mathematical systems that we use to understand the nature of being Fibonacci Series, fractal geometry, the relevance and the importance of Phi. And the most important one is the harmonic overtones series that has always been associated with the creation of the universe. With the tool which gets you to find what God is and where God is. We can talk about this later. So when you consider all of these things, then we can on a deeper level why we’re so attached to being in this dimension to being in this reality. And especially that’s being perpetuated. There is media and everyone’s trying to sell us something and trying to get us to buy things that we don’t need. Consumerism is big and you know, it’s easy to become addicted to these things. Why? Because of the literal dopamine reward when people buy something and you know. Shopaholics do exists and there’s a reason why they exist. Um, mostly because of altering this human experience. Our actions, feelings and thoughts alter the way the body runs on chemicals and that’s what constitutes reality. So, um, we are afraid of realizing the self. There is a sense of fear, hesitation, but also there’s a sense of manipulation and loss and that’s contributing to this. Now what’s changing in people is that they’re getting more and more clues and there’s something growing within us that is creating this more serious than ever a paradigm shift, I believe. And it’s, uh, coinciding with things falling apart on political level, religious level. People are losing faith in book religions. People are resorting to archaic revival, you know, Shamanism and traditions and uh, eastern philosophies, meditation, Yoga or working with sound, taking psychedelics and so on and so forth. Uh, I have to say that not all the time is being used in an efficient, thorough and sensible way, but that’s the human condition. You know, it’s not always optimal and, and uh, we can still be manipulated even though we have serious endeavor to achieve these things. Nonetheless, consciousness has the power to circumvent all of that and still gain a higher and higher ground. But one needs thorough attention to the energy that’s being used to the attention to will awareness to curiosity. The totality of the mindset, what we bring to every experience and to pay attention to the phenomenological aspect of the experience.
Because that is at the end what is needed. The individual’s faculty, resources being invested in something that’s going to make a difference. There is cognitive dissonance though that can hold the person back. And for the people listening, if they don’t know what cognitive dissonance they should look at it, which is basically, if someone tells me something that’s so far outside of what I believe in, what I’ve known, uh, even though that’s a more accurate truth or an upgraded version of the truth, I may reject it because it makes me few so threatened. So that’s serious. And these techniques that are used in a weaponized psychology, weaponize anthropology, weaponized sociology, weaponized music, weaponize faith, and all these things that people tend to become interested in are being used against them because of cognitive dissonance and other faculties that are based on ignorance. And what is the ultimate point here? Well, we’ve derailed because we started prioritizing profit over consciousness and that caused us to become attached to money. Money is a symbol of power, a symbol of survival and safety. And when you have cultures that are promoting reptilian brain interaction, that is, they do that because that makes money. And keeping the, keeping people on the couch, watching the news and the reptilian brain, which is the inner most part of the brain that’s responsible for fight or flight and running the body as a machine without the person having to have the awareness to do that. Then the body becomes a slave to the reptilian brain that wants to protect the person and they become addicted to news because they think that the more they watch, the more they’re being informed in keeping themselves safe and money sings well to that. So at the end we ended up by having completely different relationship with the hardware in the body, pardon me for using these terms, but I do that on purpose. So the computer is now not using the entire parts, but focused on specific parts were mostly left hemisphere these days. We rely so much on education and intelligence and less so the imagination, which is what the right hemisphere deal with, um, imagination and inspiration, the feminine side of the brain versus the left brain being the masculine. So we’re mostly running on left brain with a lot of reptilian brain action. And that creates different reality. And this is what’s causing the big fork on the road now where humanity is starting to become split in two halves. And it will become more and more so. In one part, humanity is waking up and resorting to things that really reveal the true nature of the self, of reality, of the divine within. The archaic methods to seek holistic experience, integral discovery, um, and um, you know, pro-organic farming, permaculture and no GMOs and all of the stuff. And then the other part, the other part of the fork in the road is people are going on with the status quo and think that, oh, things are improving because now we have technology and AI is gonna make things much easier and cheaper. And not thinking of the consequences of how much the dehumanization is going to happen in the Trans-humanistic agenda behind all of that. And, um, the, the danger of having AI that you cannot control and it’s going to upgrade itself and design itself. So it’s a very, very, uh, critical time in humanity. Um, and we can go deeper into this if you want at a later point.
The second question, what made me become interested in all of this? Well I grew up in war in Beirut and parents who immigrated to the states. So I lived through a lot of violence and terror and that made me ask questions that you know, a young person would not usually ask from an early age. And to demystify and the nature of suffering and the madness that can, um, affect people and people start to kill each other over either who’s God is more merciful or which way is best to worship that same God. That’s basically why book religions and the denominations and sect within them, whether Protestant and Catholic, Sunni and Shiites and so on and so forth, kill each other. Basically they’re killing each other over who has the better method to worship Jehovah. And the level of fingers go so far that they think that Christians or Muslims like, oh, these Muslims, I mean Christians or Jews think that, uh, let’s say, Allah, the name of God in Islam is a different God. No, it’s not a different God. It’s the same Jehovah God. So there’s a very deep level of ignorance. Basically what’s what I see happening here is that the same old methods is being used but on steroids and rocket boosters because finding God, understanding what God is, where God is is something that we are encoded. Then we need to find that. We came here to understand that. Well that is being used against people and their emotions are involved. And of course then if we have a person who is ignorant enough and passionate enough, of course this person is capable of killing him or herself, uh, blowing up themselves to kill a few people, few innocent people, uh, they come from a good place, but it’s causing terror. So who’s at fault? It’s not the person’s ignorance. I mean ignorance is ignorance. Uh, it’s those who are manipulating these people and fuelling divide because that’s how you bring humanity to it’s knees. Divide and conquer.
Thal:
Yes.
Alexandre:
In any method, whether religious, socio-cultural racial, and sports teams and you know, people kill each other over at the end of certain football games in England for example. Right? Being trampled and hitting and beating each other. So, obsession!
Thal:
It’s such a, like as you’re talking, I’m just, the word paradox keeps coming up. It’s such a paradox. Our human condition. Um, and just, you know, speaking about like your background and I’m just thinking about the Quran. Like there is a verse in the Quran that talks about “Al-‘Ilm Al-Ladunni” which is the experiential knowledge and that that knowledge you can, it’s something that you just is that is just placed in the heart. It’s not an intellectual, quantitative thing. And it’s funny because that same book is used for other interpretations and the more dogmatic like fear based interpretations or whatever. Um, I’m also thinking about like music and sound and the therapeutic aspects of sound, which is, you know, the main part of your work. And similarly, you know, it’s, you know, I’m just going to share this like a lot of the dogmatic interpretations of Islam, some of them have actually said that music is just not allowed at all. Like just avoid music completely, which is insane considering even historically within the Islamic culture, um, you know, there’s someone like Al-Farabi. And there’s the hospitals in Andalusia where the mental health institutions where they were playing music as a, as a form of therapy. So yes, please dig in, go deeper, whatever you’re saying, I’m enjoying it.
Adrian:
And maybe at the same time, if you can share with listeners how, how is sound therapeutic? Like how if someone’s just hearing this for the first time, can you share what’s happening to consciousness and what is sound? Are we talking about instruments and singing? Like there’s, I’m sure there’s a lot of difference in between, you know, within that category.
Alexandre :
Yes. Yeah. Well, this is all stuff I can talk about for the next 10 hours.
Adrian:
Amazing.
Alexandre:
So I’m going to make it succinct and but yet packed with info. So yeah Islam uses music, but it does not call it music. That’s the curious part. And Adhan, the call to prayer, is not considered to be music. Um, and um, well what’s music again? So, um, I can’t tell you why it’s not called music, why it’s considered to be blasphemous to call it music. But, book religions did use music tremendously. And if I may say, this may sound blasphemous to a lot of people, especially religious ones. I don’t mean any offense to anyone. I respect people’s faith but I also know that in this faith they’re being tricked to believe that they’re on the right track where actually not completely so. Well Abrahamic religions Judaism, Christianity and Islam and all the denominations, they do offer wonderful teaching and things that can help humanity. But at the same time, at the end, it’s about hijacking consciousness and misleading people. Whether this came to be out of ignorance, out of deliberate action or both combined, I can’t tell you. There’s evidence of all the above. So music is used to unravel consciousness when you go inside any church, especially Greek Orthodox Church because in Christians, the Greek Orthodox Church use music the best. Why? Byzantine chants that are used in Greek Orthodox church are a mixture of classical Arabic and classical Turkish music. It’s when Constantine invaded Istanbul and became Costantinople book, um, he used the music that was going on around which was Arabic and Turkish and they’re both very similar on the classical level at least. And used as part of the church. When you listen to this music in a secular environment, it gives you an altered state. Why? Because… This is a lot better. I’m going to say it shortly… Because the notes that are being used in the modes, modes are like scales, succession of different notes, have different mathematical ratios between them. They have different frequencies and these frequencies are closer to the tuning of the notes in the harmonic series. We’ll talk about that later. Harmonic series is the blueprint for sound production. Um, and it’s responsible for the tone color or timbre. All harmonic systems come from the harmonic series, the place from where the concept of harmony came up from, which is mathematics at the end. Tt’s considered to be the most sophisticated of all of these intelligences, uh, that, that we measure using mathematics. Pythagoreans told us that it’s not mathematics that created the universe, mathematics is what we use to measure that intelligence. What’s there is fields and phenomena systems and patterns. So talking about Pythagorean knowledge here, the knowledge that Pythagoras brought to Europe and Plato and Aristotle and Socrates were his followers, a little over a hundred years later. In Byzantine chants, and the notes that I use. And similarly also in Quranic chants, adhan, call for prayer, you’re using frequencies that are closer to the tuning of the harmonic series notes, which is the place where harmony came from. And harmony is a concept that exists in mathematics at the end when we listen to music or the harmonic series, when you listen to a gong being played or singing bowls, you’re listening to the audible side of mathematical ratios. The mathematical ratio lays between two notes in the musical interval. If you take C and G, for example, that’s an interval of a fifth because it’s C, D, E, F, G, one, two, three, four, five. It’s a three to two ratio. C to D is a nine to eight ratio and so on, so forth. So harmony is audible mathematics, audible mathematical ratios to be precise. When you create a musical system or a chant that is based on these pure tones, uh, it’s going to alter consciousness, just like a normal sound bath or a sound healing… two terms, I avoid using because they’re gimmicky and they don’t give justice to what is being done here. I like to call it Sound Meditation or some therapy sound journey, whatever it is. Something that would indicate that the individual is doing something. Healing is not happening just like that. So, um, they create transcendental, introspective, euphoric state psychedelic states sometimes. So they alter consciousness. These are the same notes that are being used in church, in Judaism, in Cathedral, in mosques. And if you take this out of context, you have a very powerful use of music that is being used in a specific place along with incense and church bell, which has all overtones and golden mean, golden ratio in iconography, in fractal geometry in the ceiling in the mosque and all of these things that lure people deeper into the faith thinking that God is here. Well these are things that humans looked for and understood in matriarchal period. Matriarchy to me, is not that women were more dominant than men. That’s a caricaturesque understanding of it. It’s basically where people, men and women lived in harmony, in equilibrium with nature, with all living things and they understood the power that nature has to ultimately understand who they are to nature, what is nature to humans and where God is and what God is. This was appropriated by Patriarchy and by book religions. And they were expropriated. We know that the early Christians, which is the Roman Empire really continuing to exist under the guise of Christianity. Again, no blasphemy here to the good believers but this is what it is. Seems like it’s a business that hijacks consciousness by using very powerful tools to lure people into deeper faith thinking that God is here. It’s just the labeling that’s wrong. When you expose someone to these things in a church or any other Holy House on these big book religions, you’re going to get the same thing that you do as if you’re doing it in the cave or out in nature or in any other context because everyone does this except here it’s being done in a specific set and setting and the label is different. So people leave the church, the cathedral, the mosque, the temple, feeling elated. The problem is that someone put it as “this is God here. God is here. Come back again.” You get a repeat customer because we’re programmed to understand who we are through music and unravel the nature of being because of what sound, harmony and music does to every aspect of being. It alters your consciousness. It puts you in elated states through entrainment basically. So there is a trickery here. Is that something that happened through ignorance or deliberate action or both? Again, there’s clear evidence to me that all the above are true and it’s not just ignorance. Um, so, um, so sound is often used in a very particular way to get a specific result. That’s what you do when you create music for commercials or when you go inside a store and you hear a specific music that put this type of the prototype clientele to spend money to be in a good mood, to spend money. If you go to teenage clothing store, you’re going to hear different music, then you go to Jewellery store or so on. That’s functional music. It’s used all the time in commercials, to put people at ease through what? Through form of entrainment so that there can be more in the mood to spend money and to spend more time to feel in the mood, uh, as opposed to when you leave. They leave the store and there’s the hubbub of the city and the noise. And so there’s a level of deception here that’s being used without people knowing that you can go very, very far with this because that’s what a Shamanic experience is about. To give you an example, if you do an experience with a Shaman in any tradition, they’ll give you a plant, usually psychedelic that knocks you off of baseline reality. And with you surrendering, allowing, trusting, accepting, you believe that this Shaman who is a professional who’s job is to hear you using plants, spirit, quote unquote. And using their ancestors and they’re guiding spirits and the power animals. This is all stuff that we in the west talk about and we call the subconscious mind, the collective unconscious, the psyche, you know, and the unconscious, the conscious, all of these things. In the East, they call the Shiva, the Shakti, the Atman, the Brahman. It’s the same thing. So you see how ignorance manifests to a level where it creates different reality to the individual without the person knowing that. Now as the person is going through the Shamanic experience, experiencing that sacrament, whether it’s Ayahuasca or San Pedro or you know, Iboga or mushrooms or Peyote and so on, whatever grows around in the region, um, they receive visions and sound is being played to guide them in the process and the olfactory stimuli is used. Um, so could be Palo Santo or sage or kopa and other, you know, olfactory agents to help the person surrender and let go so that they, they allow the work to happen. But what it is causing here is an unfolding of the nature of consciousness in the visionary state. So a similar version of that happens in church when the priest gives you a wafer or sacrament, it’s like handing you the Ayahuasca cup, the Shaman, and sound is played in a church to put you in the mood, the congregation, electromagnetics between people. The music played in a perfectly acoustical space because there’s connection between the architecture of the space and sound. Because sound reverberates on walls and ceilings, and so the space has to be, has to be optimal for the acoustics to be great. That’s a known thing in concert halls and so on. So and there is a iconography. There’s dazzling visuals that communicate the mathematics of uh, of God. If I can see the math of God is divine mathematics that we’re attracted to. We’re interested in. It communicates something defined, something sacred because of where it takes us. To me, that’s where sacred is. It’s not the sacred outside of us. It’s what that sacred thing, whether it’s a mushroom or sound, where it takes us, that’s really what’s sacred. And now people are being so flippant with saying sacred, this sacred that, and then the next thing, they lose the true definition of what sacred is. At the end, everything is sacred. But when people are distracted, they’re lacking the knowledge, then they’re not going to have the deep understanding what is really, truly sacred? Why is it sacred? What’s in it that is sacred? So people don’t have the time, the energy or the skill to really investigate these things by being scrutinizing and being persnickety about the meaning of a word. The power of word, which is sound. Again, language creates reality. So I hope I covered your questions Thal did I? And Adrian.
Adrian:
I just wanted to mention just speaking of acoustics, so there’s a little bit of, um, I don’t know if there’s another mic that’s rubbing on a shirt. It, we’re just getting a lot of, um, friction as you’re speaking.
Alexandre:
Oh really?
Adrian:
Yeah. Yeah. So I don’t know where it’s coming from.
Alexandre:
The mic is not touching anything. Maybe the cord? Is this, maybe it’s the cord perhaps?
Adrian:
Yeah, maybe the cord is also picking up. Is there a mic in the cord as well or?
Alexandre :
No.
Adrian:
Oh, okay. Okay. It sounds better right now. Yeah, it was just while you were speaking.
Alexandre:
I’ll be immobile then.
Thal:
[Laughing] No. Because you are so, um, uh, connected with what you were saying and I think your hands was moving and the cord was moving into the microphone is very strong and it was picking up. Yeah. But um, yeah, we’re enjoying the depth of the conversation. I mean, um, what an honor. Like I, yeah, I I want to know more like about the Fibonacci, about the like all of it, really.
Alexandre :
Yes. It’s very important and that’s, this is something that’s surfacing more and more again, this interest in sacred geometry. Um, uh, the way intelligence manifests in mathematics. We measure intelligence by measuring the value of this mathematical systems. Phi or the golden mean or the golden ratio, Fibonacci series or numbers, fractal geometry. The harmonic overtones is the one that has been considered to be the most important and often associated with creation with God. Now you asked another question, Adrian, it was about sound what is sound?
Adrian:
I was just also curious the difference between like instruments that produce those harmonic overtones versus singing. If someone’s chanting, I imagine there’s another way of producing the sound through vocal cords. Is there a difference on consciousness when it’s listening through the instrument or, or is produced through yeah. Through, through singing or chanting or mantras or…
Alexandre:
Yes, certainly. So I’m going to move around to get some instruments to demonstrate a concept. But, uh, so the overtone system is one that is so important, as I said earlier, because that’s the system that gives us, um, the tone color or a timbre, which is the difference between our voices. Um, the difference between various notes also is caused by various notes played on different instruments caused by overtones. So when you listen to a note, that note is not just one thing, it’s predominantly one thing, one note, one frequency. We call that the fundamental tone or fundamental frequency. In it, there are tiny auditory pixels that they’re not always audible, but their job is to color the tone. If the three of us sing one note the same note “ahhhh” and it’s going to sound different because every person has different overtones. So the overtone series, harmonic series is one that goes on to infinity and has specific intervals and it builds on the fundamental frequency. So “ahhh” is a fundamental tone. If you were to use specific software to analyze the spectrum of my voice, you will find various horizontal lines. Um, the lowest one, the fundamental tone would be the thickest most pronounced that within it there’s the overtones they’re so faint that they may seem to be completely inexistent, but they actually are there except the fundamental tone is greater and it overshadows these overtones. And, um, the value here is that when we use instruments such as gong, singing bowls, discs, bells, overtone singing, I’ll demonstrate in a bit to bring out this overtones to level where they’re clearly audible. And that changes everything. Why? Because the individual now is hearing this magic that’s in sound, although they’re listening to notes, but they’re being exposed to pure mathematical ratios. What binds the notes and the harmonic series together is an infinite series of harmonic, mathematical ratios. So, uh, to bring out the overtones in my voice from this note “ahhh”, I would have to sing it out, but creating a different conditions of physics inside the buccal cavity. The buccal cavity is the area that starts right above the vocal cords up into my lips. And this is a specific size and we have different tone colors because we all have different variables. Let’s say Thal your vocal cords are smaller than mine and Adrian and for sure they will be smaller. This is why women have higher pitched voice. You know, women can sing in soprano, mezzo soprano, alto and men have tenor, baritone and base, sometimes counter tenor, which is made out to song in falsetto, because the vocal cords are thicker or thinner, bigger or smaller. But the throat might be wider, um, the uvular is more protruded than usual. The soft palate is bigger than usual than someone else. If the tongue is bigger and the teeth, all of these create different conditions that eventually give the individual his or her specific tone color.
Right? And um, now I’m going to sing that same note, but I’m going to move my tongue inside the buccal cavity to open and close this space so that I can naturally amplify the overtones that are in my voice. By doing that, I’m creating different conditions of physics called Helmholtz resonance and then I can amplify naturally these overtones that are in my voice but one cannot hear them because the fundamental tone is so loud, it overshadows them. And when I do that, you will hear the fundamental tone, which tend to be most pronounced and upper notes that would be changing one at a time based on what I do with my tongue to open or close it more. And that’s what people do when they play Didgeridoo. They play brass instruments, trombones, trumpets, flugelhorns, and tubas and French horns and also wind instruments. It’s the movement of the tongue also embouchure which is the totality of that. How wide or small the opening of the lips are, the velocity of the air and the position of the tongue inside the mouth. That’s very important for music playing. And people use that as well when they’re doing any form of overtone singing, throat singing. It’s done in a variety of different ways. The Tibetan Buddhist monks do it in a more guttural way. Tuvans do it different ways and Mongolians and so on and so forth. So it sound like this: “hmmmmmm”.
Adrian:
Wow.
Alexandre:
This is what I believe the primordial Om or Aum is trying to communicate. Om is not “om” even though it’s often chanted and written like that, it’s “aum”. But it’s not aum either. It’s what “aum” is referring to. “Aum” is referring to the opening and closing of the buccal cavity. “Aaauum”. You start with open and you close the mouth. By doing that you’re going through all the vowels. And the shades between them and these change the formants, that’s concept in physics. People can look it up. It’s too long to explicate here. Basically when we speak, we speak in vowels and then consonants come and add another layer, another action to the vowel. An example of that is Eee. E. And if you say “D” Dee. There’s the tongue is being involved now touching the back of the upper teeth. And the little bit the gum. And “T” tee would be slightly different interaction. Pee, now “P” is involving involving lips. So all of these are variations with slight addition to what “E” is. So what you’re doing here, you’re creating various packages of overtones, very specific dimension of the package of the overtones that’s coming out. The vocal cords are buzzing and the buzzing is being amplified in the buccal cavity and it’s coming out as language, but it’s at the end overtones. So “Aum” is pointing the finger, “Aum” the primordial “Aum” that created the universe is pointing the finger toward sound once again. But that’s not anything new. We’ve heard that from a variety of different places. You know, aborigines in Australia tell you that the universe was created with two songs. And Ancient Egypt will tell you the universe was sung into being. The word that created, you know, in the first sentence of Gospel of John and the word was God.
The word here is a mistranslation of the concept of Logos. Logos is what the word was when the Bible was brought to Ancient Greece. Logos is a ratio, is reason. So Genesis is not telling you how God created everything a day at a time and rested on the Shabbat, the seventh day. On the first day, God said, let there be light and there was light. What I interpret this now is that you become God when you learn how to create with your words. That’s really what the message is. So this comes from variety of different angles. Sound creates reality. Sound is the creator of the universe. Sound therefore is God. Or you can use sound to understand where the God is within. And that’s why music is used in all Shamanic traditions and all mystical sects, in eastern philosophies and religions book religion, ceremonies. Why? I’m going to demonstrate the concept here. So I’m going to play chimes, two different times with different tuning. These are called Koshi wind chimes, which is fire, but the notes and the harmonies involved have nothing to do with these elements that are just arbitrarily named like that. So when I play the chimes, you’re going to hear different notes. The chime itself is the logos. The logos is the unknowable. The logos is um, the metadata that language expresses. The logos is the feelings, emotions and thoughts that are within us that are in sensations and visuals. Whatever we communicate via language. First it’s in an abstract form. And then when you speak about it using words, in this case, when I played the chimes, you’re going to hear notes. The notes become… and that is the harmony in the logos become the ethos. Ethos is the distinguishing quality, the personality, the character, the beingness, the allure, all of these things of an instrument or person of the company or whatever entity we’re talking about. When we listen to the ethos of this chime or any speech, it creates reality within us. And that is Pathos. Now keep in mind that this is not how these words are defined in, you know, various traditions. I’m defining them with a twist here based on my own research and own understanding, because you can read the whole, the entire book about ethos and logos and still not know what ethos and logos are about. We’re talking about big words that are part of the fundamental structure of reality along with pathos, I mean along with mythos. But we’re not going to address mythos now. We’re just going to concentrate on logos, ethos and pathos. So words creates reality in the ears of the listener. It creates reality inside of you. Just like now I’m talking about things, and the listeners are fathoming internalizing, visualizing, but they’re communicating information. It’s a form of reality. So I’m going to play this logos and ethos coming out of the logo is going to create specific sounds. And then we’re going to talk about this later. And these sounds that people feel inside of them best is to listen to it with eyes closed to focus on the auditory aspect. That would be the pathos.
[Koshi Wind Chimes] So many people describe the sound as being lighthearted. There’s a sense of awe, curiosity, happy, um, whimsical, looking outward, it’s joyful and so on and so forth. So that’s, that’s the pathos that was created in people. It’s pretty universal. People, various traditions, people with musical experience or not all tend to use these words. Compare it to the second chimes, which is a different logos. And when it speaks, it has a different ethos. And when people listen to it, it creates a different reality. A different pathos.
[Second Koshi Wind Chime] So this has more of pensiveness, of introspection, the sense of yearning and nostalgia. Um, gentle but healing, sadness.
Adrian:
Mystery for me.
Alexandre:
Mystery, contemplative, and we can add more and more words or visuals and sensations. It doesn’t have to be just words, but you see what creates reality. You see how sound can create reality. If the person is very attentive and getting their mind out of the way and not quickly labeling things. But wait, wait, wait, feel it, feel it. And then choose carefully the words. And this is where miscommunication happens. That people are not always careful with how they speak to really bring their ethos out. And, and we’re becoming more and more sloppy now with words. And there’s a lot of speech disfluency um, and inaccurate words. And even people using the wrong inflections, we sing the words differently now. A lot of redundancy, repetition or even, um, talking in an ascending tone, like that and repeating it over and over. And you know, this is so common these days. It’s not really singing the words correctly. We don’t just speak words, we sing words all the time and this is the most important part. And that is something we’re losing because of the high reliance on texting and emailing. So you see how technology, when it’s mishandled. I’m not against technology. I’m against technology being used in a way that can jeopardize the existence of a human being and modify humanity and take away the humane elements that are within us. We sing language, the inflections, the changes in the tempo, the articulation, the emphasis on words, syllables, the changes of the tempo of the speech, the dynamics, how loud or soft, the silence between the words, how gestures and grimaces and body language in general aligns with this. All of this is adding to the context and emojis are not going to replace that at all, at all. We’re losing a very important part of speech that creates reality. And the speech disfluencies especially “like”, and of course when I mentioned these things, I have no judgment to people who use it, but it’s indicating a lack of self awareness. There’s really no need for 10 or 20 “likes” a minute. We’re making great effort in doing something, saying something that has absolutely no value. On the contrary, it’s causing the person listening to sift out all the likes that are not needed for meaning to come to place. So we should take this stuff very seriously because that can change the human being. This is trans-humanism, which has a very old agenda is didn’t just start now. There’s clear evidence that it started in the forties. So, um, so sound is very, very important and what human beings are resorting to is sound as we know, you know, sound therapy or sound gong bath and sound healings, vibrational healing, whatever people choose terms.
I highly encourage people not to use any gimmicky terms, but use something that indicates that the individual is doing something. That’s why I use Sound Meditation, which is not term that I coined. Yes my website is soundmeditation.com. That was gifted to me because I had soundmeditation.us and anyway, uh, but I’m not promoting it. No, because it’s indicating that, well, if we don’t talk about anything, uh, you know that you’re doing something if you come to Sound Meditation. And, but we should say some things, we should give people the tools and create a protocol so that people are tapping into the self healing capacity within us. It’s about that. It’s about using sound and other stimuli to create the conditions for healing to happen. That’s also entrainment. Except here we’re doing it in a positive way.
Thal:
Yeah. Um, you know, as you’re talking, I’m thinking about a few things. Um, so I’m thinking about noise pollution.
Alexandre:
Oh yeah.
Thal:
And I’m thinking about the distraction of… In fact, we have so many sounds right now, like you said, and um, you know, like pop music, you know, and I’m trying hard, like this is not to be judgemental. I’m just really, um, trying to, um, uh, connect to what you’re saying. Like I’ve, I went to a 10 day silent meditation, the one time I went in my life and it was so amazing to be able to sort of, um, go on a fasting from the noise pollution.
Alexandre:
Yes.
Thal:
And I remember when they would, they would beat the Gong for lunch time, the sound of that Gong was everything. It was, um, sorry, something happened to Skype. Okay. Yeah. The sound of the Gong was so delicious and it was so like, it was, it tasted like honey and
Alexandre:
[Chuckle]
Thal:
Yes. And then at that point I was like, wow. Like we do need discernment when we’re choosing who even to listen to.
Alexandre :
Yes,
Thal:
And the artists that we’re connecting with, like the music that we’re listening to. The state and the condition of the artists that singing will transfer through what they’re producing. I mean, what, what are your thoughts around that?
Alexandre :
Yeah, that’s very important. So this is called synesthesia. When you hear something and another sense becomes involved in what you’re listening to. The senses are bleeding into each other. Some people are natural synesthete. They see hues and colors when they listen to pieces in particular keys. D minor versus g major and B flat minor and so on. Some people see shapes when they hear numbers. Um, some people smell things when they hear specific words or see colors and so on and so forth. And when people take psychedelics, uh, this happens where the psychedelic that they’re taking causes them to see visuals in their mind’s eye with eyes closed, uh, upon hearing specific sounds. And that’s what triggers the visionary state. Why? Because the brain that does a variety of different things involved in reality. The brain is a transducer of consciousness. It receives consciousnesses. Transduction is when you change the state of something. For example, when you turn on a radio and you hear music, clearly the musicians, I’m not in the radio. The radio, the transceiver is transforming a transducing frequency to audio. A TV set gives you audio and video. So the brain transducers consciousness consciousness is not all made in the brain. It’s non-local. That is from locality, Bell’s nonlocality. Um, and uh, the brain also filters reality because there’s so much information out there. It needs to be confined to specific things so it filters a lot of things out. And also indoctrination and conditioning has a lot to do with what is being filtered out. And this is how a lot of nascent capacity within us becomes dormant or inexistent. Uh, the brain also, um, uh, tweaks reality, judges it. So sound affects the brain, the entire body that is involved in the creation of reality. That’s what really is at the end. That’s what music does to us. And that’s how entrainment can be effective. Human being is not a completely autonomous person. It’s always imbued by external sources. So that’s why people must always pay attention to their diet. The diet to me is not what people eat, it’s what they listen to. Music or speech or news is what the films that they watch, documentaries, they watched the commercials they watch or they become exposed to even just, um, commercials in the street, the noise pollution, all of that becomes part of who we are. And it wreaks havoc on our awareness and especially when you deal with noise pollution. It’s so detrimental. Noise ,sound is also used in military application. We’re not going to cover that because it’s a whole thing by itself. So, um, people think that they’re sovereign, that they can decide. No. It’s always, we are product of who’s around us, friends, acquaintances, colleagues. Other people’s electromagnetics. Um,EMF’s and all of this stuff becomes part of the human consciousness because of how it secretly, inconspicuously impacts the individual. And we are being changed by these things more and more. So we’re losing sovereignty. We’re losing, uh, so many things because of entrainment. So we need to be extremely careful. Inform ourselves of these things and not to dismiss them as woo woo and conspiracy stuff. No, no, no. There’s a lot of stuff that’s really valid and impactful.
Adrian:
Yeah. There’s so much I want to ask, but I’m also realizing that we don’t have all the time in the world. So, um, at this point though, I’m considering just for people who want to start intentionally incorporating sound into their practice, if they’re regular meditators or they have other forms of spiritual practice, where do they begin? If sound is a new element to their practice, where would you direct them?
Alexandre :
Yeah, various things. First, the voice. Just toning with lips closed to experience the vibration. And when we, when we speak or tone, we experience a lot of our voice through bone and tissue conduction and not only the auditory part. An example of that is when people close their ears and they speak, that is bone and tissue conduction. Uh, so experience sound in two different ways. So toning vocalization is very powerful because gets the body to vibrate. Um, if they want to go deeper into it, they can learn overtone singing. Uh, there are many youtube videos now that can teach people can take lessons with some of these experts on youtube. Um, and to sing. Singing is for everyone, not only singers, but if they don’t want to deal with the voice, then… Well even if they want to deal with it, I highly encourage them to get some instruments that would be great. Singing bowl or two. Small handheld gong, tuning forks, any of these instruments. And I have a list of them on my website soundmeditation.com they can get a few things and these are very easy to play instruments. They don’t need to practice for years. Like people practice, you know, playing guitar or a piano. No, it’s, it’s easy to handle them and to make them part of their practice or listening to recordings of singing bowls, gongs or the above. I’ve made six albums. Uh, some tracks are available on my soundcloud that if you are interested, they can contact me to purchase them directly from me, um, at some point soon and they’re going to be released along with eight other albums that I recorded recently, uh, sounds for meditation. They’re very, very effective. They’re not the same as listening to these instruments in person and acoustically, but they’re very powerful. Why? Because acoustically you feeling sound, you’re not just listening to it. There’s a lot of information that cannot be captured using microphones. So to receive more of the sound therapy sessions that are happening more and more and realize that there’s certain knowledge required to how to still the mind. I always talk for at least half an hour before I facilitate the sound meditation to give people the tools of understanding why these instruments are powerful, how to listen in a very particular way, judicious, attentional, intentional. Um, and how to get the mind out of the way. How to use a contemplate of state versus a mindful state versus a meditative state. How to work with discursive thinking and how to disengage from that instead of trying to fight it. But to involve sound in their life. And also to keep ear plugs on them when they’re walking in the streets and there’s noise pollution or uh, in subway stations or whatever to really at least block their ears. Because the ringing in the ear and people losing hearing. Just very, very delicate. We have 20,000 Cilia hearing cells in each ear that they start dying, the day we’re born. They die more when people are exposed to loud sound and they don’t grow back. This is a really tiny number compared to the over 120 millions photoreceptors we have in each eye. So hearing is so important on a variety of different levels. So it’s very important to protect the hearing. And also when people are listening to music, using headphones or airpods to not blast the volume loud to heighten the mood to get the body to secrete more of you know, chemicals, endogenous chemicals that can heighten the mood or to raise the volume so loud to drown out the external noise pollution. In this case it’s not the noise pollution that’s causing the hearing loss. It’s the music that they’re listening to and they love. So there’s a great level of unawareness. So protecting the hearing and using sound in a correct way to affect the vagus nerve, the autonomic nervous system to switch from sympathetic to parasympathetic. The parasympathetic state is not state that we often go to, which is when the body is not doing anything based on the fact that there’s nothing happening outside of us around us to do something. Sympathetic is when we are concentrating, we’re doing something and that can cause fatigue. And these days that’s also becoming epidemic. People work for many hours and they go home and they need to do more things, answer emails or do domestic work, cook or watch TV. There’s not enough of a state of relaxation to get the body to be in a parasympathetic state. And that’s why people start to have problems sleeping or taking pills to sleep or having to smoke weed or having to take alcohol to fall asleep. That’s forcing the body to shut down. So the people need to learn about the sympathetic state in the parasympathetic state and how the autonomic nervous system runs the body as a machine. And deeper research that’s coming out now on the vagus nerve, the central nerve that runs the body house, slow, deep breathing exercises, toning, vocalization, working with sound are great ways to massage and tone down the vagus nerve. Vagus, spelled V-A-G-U-S which in Latin means vagrant meandering. So the, the body is full of various elements. These are the hardware. And if we start to misuse the hardware, then there’s a different operating system that’s gonna be happening. And different software and reality becomes different. And that’s what we’re going through right now. The reality that we going through, this awkward point in the history of humanity is the result of what’s going on in people’s hearts. It’s a consciousness crisis. It’s all projected out. So to change that, we need to go inward and change the way we’re feeling because the inner world is the same as the outer world. That’s what the hermetic principle is really about. As above, so below. As within, so without. It’s the biocentric nature of reality that we’re now starting to hear about from coming from science. That consciousness is not a product of the universe. The universe is a product of our consciousness. Great book to read about this is called Biocentrism by Robert Lanza.
Thal:
Amazing.
Adrian:
Alexandre, I know you’ve gotta go in like one minute, so yeah, I just want to thank you for that really rich conversation. Um, maybe we’ll do a part two. And that was really beautiful. We covered a lot of ground.
Thal:
Yeah. I feel that this is an introduction. Definitely would love to have you back. Thank you so much for sharing all that knowledge. Thank you.
Alexandre :
Great pleasure. Happy to be here. Thank you.
#24: Psychedelic Integration with Susan Scharf and Rebecca Hendrix
Psychedelic experiences can be quite powerful and life-changing, but there are also other forms of consciousness-expanding experiences that may challenge one’s old paradigm. Sometimes even taking a big leap with a significant life-decision can challenge one’s psyche.
So what is integration? It may well be the act of weaving together new levels of understanding that arise with new experiences into our evolving life stories. It is to provide the framework for ourselves so that we may benefit from new insights, something like a psychedelic experience can be a fleeting moment or a new milestone. Without integration, our psyche may be susceptible to so many things, be it splitting from one’s reality or ego inflation. The path of consciousness expansion beckons us to harness wisdom and discernment.
On this episode, we explore psychedelic harm reduction, preparation, and integration with Dr. Susan Scharf and Rebecca Hendrix. Dr. Scharf and Rebecca founded One Integration to raise awareness around the mindful and safe use of psychedelics for the purposes of personal growth and healing. They offer individual as well as group integration for in NYC.
Dr. Scharf is a Board Certified Internal Medicine Physician and has also received advanced trained in Functional Medicine and Mind-Body Medicine. She has completed the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) therapist training and is the study physician for the phase 3 clinical trials for MDMA therapy for PTSD in New York. She has also trained with the Psychedelic Education and Continuing Care Program and the Integrative Harm Reduction Psychotherapy Program from the Center for Optimal Living.
Rebecca is a licensed marriage and family therapist. She completed her Master of Spiritual Psychology and her Master of Counseling Psychology from the University of Santa Monica She has a coaching degree from The Coaches Training Institute (CTI). She is a certified Imago Therapist and has advanced training in Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT). She is trained in Energy Psychology by Henry Grayson. She has completed the Center for Optimal Living’s Psychedelic Education Program’s 101/102 workshops and is in a clinician group for harm reduction and psychedelic integration.
Highlights:
- Psychedelic Harm Reduction and Preparation
- Role of Community Integration
- Ketamine Therapy, MDMA-Assisted Couples Therapy
Resources:
- One Integration
- Dr. Gabor Maté
- How To Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan
- Erowid
- https://chacruna.net/
- Psychedelics Today
- https://www.psychedelicprogram.com/
- Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies
- Heffter Research Institute
- Beckley Foundation
Listen:
Poem Inspired by This Episode
Full Transcript
Thal:
Welcome Susan and Rebecca to Soulspace Podcast.
Susan Scharf:
Thank you. We are happy to be here!
Rebecca Hendrix:
Yeah. Thank you for having us. We’re so excited.
Thal:
Thank you for coming on. I guess a place where we want to start from is what got you interested in psychedelic psychotherapy and why?
Susan Scharf:
Oh, should I start?
Rebecca Hendrix:
Well, do you want me to start?
Susan Scharf:
Go ahead.
Rebecca Hendrix:
Okay. Um, I’m a traditionally trained psychotherapist, but within that I also have a specialization in spiritual psychology, which is helping people to look at their unfilled issues as a means of growing spiritually. And in doing that, um, I’ve noticed over the past few years, especially with my clients that are on medication and taking the traditional medications, they don’t always work for everybody. For the people that they work with they are a godsend. But for the people that, um, don’t find success, it’s really, really hard. And some people that are going on them have a lot of side effects even in increased thoughts of suicide going on them and coming off of them can be a lot harder than expected for some people. And I guess it was (?) years ago or so, um, I’ve been a fan of Gabor Maté for a long time with the work that he’s done with addiction and looking at all addiction as rooted in trauma. And in following him and going to some of his talks, he talks about, uh, sometimes doing Ayahuasca and leading some Ayahuasca trips. And so, um, an opportunity came up in New York where I work to do a training for clinicians called Psychedelics101 and 102 with the Center for Optimal Living. And so I did that last year and was just fascinated by all the information that they provided about how these medicines can be used and are being used in clinical trials to help people heal from things like OCD and depression and PTSD in ways that the psychopharmacological industry just aren’t. Often by using them once or twice or three times. So, um, that’s how I became interested just by kind of seeing what’s going on in my practice. Having some personal experience. One of my best friends committed suicide a number a number of years ago right when she was coming off some psychiatric medications. Um, so I’ve always just been kind of had a feeling inside that we just don’t have enough to offer and that our mental health system is a bit broke. We need mass mental health and we need more options for people that are in pain. And so that’s kind of what got me interested.
Adrian:
And just for listeners, I wanted to point out that that was Rebecca because we haven’t done a four way conversation. So people are only hearing your voices. I want it to match the voice with a name. So that was Rebecca and thank you.
Rebecca Hendrix:
Thank you. I’m Rebecca and I’m a holistic psychotherapist.
Susan Scharf:
And you guys can hear okay. Yes. Okay, good. So I’m Susan and how I got interested… I really just the process of my… it’s a longer process because I trained in internal medicine and really somehow had an awareness of other ways that we can heal, which is not really being offered to us in our traditional training, whether that’s psychological training, um, psychiatric training, medical training. And I just started exploring these other ways of approaching things and I learned about functional medicine and I was like, oh, great. Okay. That feels right. Let me go to that as fast as I can and see what that offers me, in terms of helping people. And it really opened my eyes to other ways of healing and thinking about our body, our system, and the connectedness of all of our parts and systems and how they affect each other. So I’ve kind of been approaching ever since I started medical school, just approaching everything from that. It’s all connected. So, uh, so I do practice holistic medicine as well and it’s really the mind, body, spirit, soul. It is all connected and it might sound a bit cheesy, but all these parts affect each other and things that we go through and just thinking that, um, especially the things like stress and anxiety and trauma and, um, these are not just things you take a pill for and expect it to fix a problem that has affected your life in all these areas. And although, you know, natural and holistic medicine might be geared toward non-medicine type things, a lot of these substances medicines we talk about are plants. And even then there’s, it’s just, um, it really touches upon all the aspects of a whole person to me. And that allows that person true healing, deep, healing, connected healing, and support. And when you see people getting better, you can be with people getting better from these modalities, it’s just undeniable, the help that it offers.
Thal:
Absolutely. I mean, it’s like you have this amazing role, um, of like bridging between sort of western medicine and holistic medicine. And in many ways too Rebecca, you shared like, you know, as a spiritual psychotherapist, mainstream psychotherapy tends to maybe not look at the spiritual aspects of things, but, you know, it’s like there has to be more bridging more conversation between different parts of sort of medicine, psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy and holistic approaches to things. So, you know, that’s, um, an interesting space that you both occupy.
Rebecca Hendrix:
Thank you.
Susan Scharf:
Yeah. Thank you.
Adrian:
Can you guys share with us the, maybe the origin story for One Integration, that you guys both founded this company and it seems like you’re now offering services that are within the psychedelic integration space. Can you talk about what inspired that and tell us a little bit about One Integration?
Rebecca Hendrix:
Sure. Actually, we met in a clinician’s group, a clinicians consultation group for other therapists that have had some advanced training in working with patients who are interested in psychedelic healing through the use of psychedelics, um, through that Center for Optimal Living training. And so when we met we started chatting and we realize that, well, a lot of what we do in our clinician group is talk about integrating these experiences and different clinicians will bring forward case studies about, um, patients that are having challenges in integrating. And we will all brainstorm about the best way to help that patient to maybe integrate the experience into their life. And so we realized that, um, that there’s a real need to have a service available for people to integrate. There’s a lot of integration, well, within specialized communities. There’s some integration circles.
Susan Scharf:
There are some.
Rebecca Hendrix:
There are some that exist, but we didn’t, um, we didn’t know of another group per se that is formulated by a psychotherapist and a doctor that, because there’s a little bit of like a middle ground, the integration circles, um, the ones that I’ve been to anyway tend to have a lot of people that are quite experienced in psychedelics. Um, and that have used a good many of them. And, um, it didn’t seem like there’s a lot available for people that were curious or who might have had a recent experience in Costa Rica or someplace, people that were experimenting on their own. I started to see in my practice, um, people that are flying to different countries to use Ayahuasca or things like that, um, but weren’t necessarily integrating when they came back. And so jointly we just decided it would be a great add on to our existing businesses to make something like that available. And so we just, it was, it’s also fun and exciting because we both have a passion for this work. And so we wanted to figure out a way that we could work together and also help people.
Susan Scharf:
Yes. That was Rebecca. And this is Susan, just to keep with that. Um, I also want to add to that because that’s exactly right, that, um, two things we both I think really want to provide this, uh, service to people as a real safe place to really, uh, expand upon either these experiences or, we also talk about peak experiences. It doesn’t have to be with a specific substance, but a peak experience and really bring whatever shows up to the light and learn from it and grow from it. Um, but also, uh, as in many communities, there’s not always therapeutically, and I’m not saying there’s only one way and I’m not saying, um, I’ll finish my sentence and I’m not, there’s not always therapeutically trained people there available to support people through difficult times. And not that you have to have a certain type of training or that you need to, you know, have a psychoanalysis background, but some people that are going through these underground communities may need a lot more support than that community can provide. And, and, and we do have the training to provide that kind of support.
Rebecca Hendrix:
And I think we also feel like, you know, fingers crossed, this is the future. This, this could happen, you know, in the next five years.
Susan Scharf:
This is happening!
Rebecca Hendrix:
This is happening! And so we want to be prepared and there’s still so much stigma attached to, um, the use of psychedelics for healing. Um, even with ketamine, which is perfectly legal, there’s stigma attached. And so we wanted to, you know, kind of even proactively start to educate people or talk about it in a normal way so that people will start to see this as a possibility to help their loved ones or just to suggest to a loved one that really needs help and is struggling.
Thal:
Hmm. I mean clearly we are talking about very powerful substances and people might go through, you know, powerful experiences. And so what does integration mean? How can we integrate? Like if someone goes through something that’s so, um, either traumatic or you know, something from the past, how does integration look like?
Rebecca Hendrix:
Integration. I mean, basically what it is, is using the information you’ve learned and consciously incorporating it into your life to make changes to help you create your best life. Um, but integration in general is being really mindful of your use of it and then inquiry afterwards and doing anything that you can do to make your life better because of it. Um, you know, for people that just use these medicines recreationally, they may laugh about the fact that, you know, they saw a dinosaur, you know, in one night when they were out partying. Um, but if you’re trying to integrate an experience, you’re more being curious about that dinosaur or what that dinosaur means to you or you know, how that dinosaur, what it represents, you know, may help to heal something that is keeping you stuck in a place in your life. So it’s, it’s using, um, the experience and any information you got to be really curious and ask yourself questions and give yourself time and space and patience in order for any answers or help to come through you and to use certain tools that may assist you to do that.
Susan Scharf:
And again, I think it’s bringing mindfulness, mindful awareness to the process. Consciousness to more consciousness. Giving more space for consciousness, more consciousness to happen. Um, and of course that’s going to be still defined by the person going through it. So, uh, for example, if someone has, I mean, I’m just going to use Ayahuasca for an example because it’s one of the most powerful, um, mind expanders or consciousness expanders out there, um, in on our planet as a natural product. Um, but there are people that, um, have ceremonies with Ayahuasca that are legal when they go abroad, um, in certain areas. But some people, it could be months before they’re even able to begin the processing and maybe even a year or longer before there’s even some awareness of some of the subtleties from the experience. So every, every person’s experience is different with these medicines. And the processing of that experience can be very different as well. So it’s very much guided by the person going through the experience. And um, and like Rebecca was saying, taking the time, even finding the ability to, to allow for time and processing and openness to the process.
Rebecca Hendrix:
Yeah. It’s really just giving, you’re giving yourself the gift of time, um, and intention to get as much out of this type of experience that you, that you can and that doing the actual experience is just the beginning of it.
Susan Scharf:
Yes!
Rebecca Hendrix:
It’s the journey that you take afterwards. Um, and how you can make your life better, to be a better person, to be more loving, to heal whatever it is that you know, may be keeping you stuck.
Adrian:
Yeah. I wanted to ask, uh, perhaps what does dis-integration look like in your experience working with people? What might be some signs that, oh, someone might not be integrating? Well, what would that look like? Um, in a real case scenario,
Rebecca Hendrix:
A sign that somebody may not be integrating well, um, maybe not being able to function in their daily life. I’m finding it really hard to, you know, go back into their job, go back into their life, go back into their relationships, um, showing some signs of depression or increased anxiety..
Susan Scharf:
Isolation.
Rebecca Hendrix:
…isolation, you know, but to the extent that it really interferes with their peace and serenity. Um, and then going back to maybe old coping mechanisms, you know, which could be self medicating in one form or another. Um, isolating, shutting down, um, or throwing themselves into work or exercise or just something where they’re just, you know, instead of being with what might need to come up or getting support, they just kind of go into…
Susan Scharf:
Filling the time.
Rebecca Hendrix:
Autopilot to fill in the time, or become affected in such a way that a really can’t go about their day to day. Does that make sense?
Thal:
Yes. Yeah. It’s an interesting way to think about integration to think about dis-integration because also, um, we do have discussions around integration ourselves as psychotherapy students also interested in the work of psychedelics. And just, you know, I’m thinking about ego inflation or ego deflation. That can happen too with, um, with psychedelics and within the psychedelic community as well.
Susan Scharf:
Yeah, that’s a good point.
Adrian:
What’s coming to my mind is just that there’s such a huge potential for people to experience spiritual emergence right? Or you can even call a spiritual emergency depending on how rapid the changes are happening and that, that coincides with this potential for inflation possibly for somebody to come out of a peak experience thinking they’ve had more insight than they really had or more more healing than, than what actually happened. And so I think at one point you mentioned, you know, it could take a long time, it could be months perhaps for some folks after peak experience to begin to notice even that things are starting to shift. And, you know, um, I wanted to ask you about the role of practice, you know, because the thing, you know, most people when they seek these experiences are not doing it every day. And so they’re filling most of their life with just the regular, mundane activities. So what’s the role of having daily practices perhaps to come back to?
Susan Scharf:
Yeah, that’s good. Because that’s what we would talk about anyway. So that’s excellent way to segway into that. Um, yeah, I think even just when we talk about creating space and time and space in your life, it’s that, that’s the way to do that is to have that daily time for time with yourself, time for processing, whether that’s sitting and not actually processing, but just being quiet or time for meditation, um, or being out in nature. Um, that beingness with what is, is actually some of the ripest time for processing to happen on its own without efforting even. Um, that is the best time. Um, and we even have, we even created a little list here, we have our little notes in front of us of some of the things that people could do.
Rebecca Hendrix:
So we have a long list of integration tools that we find that we’ve compiled just from talking to a lot of people that have integrated successfully. Um, but things on it are things like working with the psychedelic friendly therapists and in terms of what you’re talking about a minute ago it, it’s really important I think to work with somebody before you go and then after you go, because before you go you can talk about what you want to get out of the experience? Why you’re thinking about doing it now? You know, for example, if you are somebody that’s working on um, a core issue of not feeling good enough and then you set that as your attention when you go into your experience and you come out of it thinking like, “wow, I’m done with that. I’m totally done with that. I know it now! I feel it in every cell of my body”. But maybe the therapist that’s working with you could help point out that. Like I know that got a lot of information on that in your experience, but maybe you still are struggling with it a little bit because you just told me about how you acted or felt when you didn’t get the promotion that you wanted. So, you know, having that continuation with somebody that knows you before and after, um, could be really supportive in terms of maybe helping to manage expectations or even point out possible realities about what has actually occurred versus what their real world experience is. Um, but we have found and encourage everybody to find the right modality that works for them to intentionally carve out time and space so that anything that can come up, you know, has a space to do so. You know, as Susan was saying earlier, doing a plant medicine or a psychedelic is not at all the only means to grow spiritually or to get information that can help you move along a path. It tends to be something that makes some of these things happen a good bit quicker, um, for some people. Um, but slowing down your life in general. For most people, especially people that we know, living in New York City is a really good idea because it is often when we’re running or when we’re meditating or when we’re communing with nature that we do get insights or information or downloads, so to speak, the same type of information that people report getting when having these experiences. So if you can have a spiritual practice that you’re practicing, preferably before you go, um, meditation, or breath work, um, journaling, um, you know, any of those, chi gong. Um, just being in nature, chanting any of those types of things, just yoga would be good because then you have that to get back to. Um, it’s almost like you’ve started it and then it’s like, ah, yes, those are my things that helped me to expand my mind. Or you know, when I do those things I tend to get information. So doing those things after a ceremony might also be that way that your, you know, inner counselor, your inner self can make a connection with you to give you that information that’s somehow been stored back away as you come back online to real life.
Susan Scharf:
And on that, just on that same note, even though we’re not, it’s not really what you brought up. You know, there’s the talk about, um, is it the medicine? Is it you? And I know we both feel quite strongly that all that information is in there. And in fact, some say these medicines help you remember yourself, get back in touch with yourself and, um, we do feel that it’s, it’s all you and it’s enhancing you. It’s helping you find those parts of yourself or remember those parts of yourself or reconnect to those parts of yourself.
Thal:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That is important to mention because, you know, um, you know, some people might hear this, especially people who haven’t tried psychedelics and like, “Oh, really? Like, really psychedelics is going to solve everything?” But just knowing that it’s just a tool or an amplifier of your own consciousness is an important reminder. Yeah.
Rebecca Hendrix:
Yeah. I mean, they tend to be, you know, I was listening to somebody talk the other day and they were saying, they interviewed somebody, I think it was Michael Pollan said that he interviewed somebody that had been in the smoking cessation trial using psilocybin. And the woman said that she got this very kind of banal, you know, information, which is like, “wow, I should really stop smoking. It’s not good for you and I shouldn’t kill myself that way. And there’s a lot of other things to see in the world”. And it’s, those are the types of information that you get and you know, this kind of going into it, but coming out of an experience, you know, it in a really authoritative type of way. And so then it’s, you know, okay, now that I know this, not just thought it, I like have, feel it almost in a lot of the cells in my body. What tools would support me to anchor it in and live from that place.
Thal:
Yeah, yeah.
Adrian:
Yeah. What I also notice is that there’s a real hunger for community, you know, for people who have come out of these experiences and not knowing where to turn to because perhaps their friend group isn’t friendly, you know, to talk about this stuff or their family, um, can you maybe touch on that because I see that’s one of the goals you have for One Integration is to build community and to do sort of group processing.
Rebecca Hendrix:
Yeah. Yeah.
Susan Scharf:
She’s a good talker. She should talk [laughing].
Rebecca Hendrix:
That’s a great point because that is one of the reasons why we got together to do this because especially living in a city like New York, community is just becoming more and more important with everything that’s going on in the world. Um, with everything that’s going on politically, like people need a place to call home. The biggest gift you can ever give anybody is the gift of attention. Yeah. So being able to, um, provide a space for people to talk about these experiences, um, to feel safe. Um, to know that that’s something that they can get back to. I mean, if you just take psychotherapy alone, a lot of the reasons why it works is because somebody has a safe space, um, to be listened to. And most of the time people in life, when we’re speaking, we’re thinking about the next thing we’re going to say when the other person stops. And so, in so doing, we’re not necessarily listening and being there for somebody else, giving them that gift of attention and to do it in community, um, in a group is just, it just makes it for the people that are open and benefit from that just makes it so much more supportive and can help their process, exponentially.
Susan Scharf:
Yes, completely agree. And um, I think also one of those important aspects of integration and integration in groups is being able to hear other people that may be going through similar but different things. Or hearing someone express something about themselves that really resonates with you and you feel a kinship there or that you’re all souls searching for things and, and creating, I will say it, a loving and safe place and we, I think we really all do want that and need that in our society has not been constructed around those values. So we do need to find a way to create them for ourselves. And I think, again, safe is key. You know, you can still have a community of people like in these underground settings that are trying to do that and they’re not always creating the safest place either. So it’s again, being mindful of safety and um, yeah, having that community is key because to try to do this on one zone, um, that’s just, it’s really difficult.
Thal:
Yeah. Um, I mean, speaking of safety, um, another thing that we’d like to know about, and I, I don’t know if you guys do work around that, is the harm reduction model.
Susan Scharf:
Yeah.
Rebecca Hendrix:
Could you speak to that, please?
Rebecca Hendrix:
Yeah. Yeah. Love to speak to that. Other than integration, that’s one of the things that we love to talk about, that we think everybody could benefit by knowing about.
Susan Scharf:
I actually think that the, um, there, I mean, there’s a harm reduction model. Well, the Center for Optimal Living is one of the places near us that takes this approach, um, for the integrative harm reduction psychotherapy. And I think that can really be applied to everything in every aspect of your life. It’s not just putting things in boxes, it’s considering the whole picture. Um, so I mean, we’re calling it Mindful Engagement, as an easier way to kind of make it make sense when we’re talking about it because not everybody wants to hear about integrative harm reduction as a term, but you know, it’s starting, uh, I hope this makes sense. But, you know, when we start to talk with people about, um, you know, even why, if they’ve never had a psychedelic experience or a peak experience, you know, start from the beginning. What are your motivations? We have actually a whole process that we’ve thought about through, of understanding one thing is, um, understanding your motivation, um, choosing a facilitator, a guide, thinking about the environment you’re going to be in, the people that you’re going to be around you. Um, your own… You guys paused, you’re still good… Your own physical and mental health. Um, it’s thinking way in advance of, well, first of all, what do I, what do I want to get out of this? If I do get out of this, what I want to get out of this, what is that going to mean for my life? How will that feel? And if I don’t, what will that mean? Or how will that feel? Um, and that’s just even the beginning. Rebecca, do you want to continue? Yeah.
Rebecca Hendrix:
Um, so I think one thing that we like to tell people is that there’s a, there’s a lot of positive talk that is going on around using these substances. Um, and it can get, it can get really easy to just get wrapped up on that and say, oh, I want to do it too.
Thal:
Absolutely.
Rebecca Hendrix:
But one of our main messages is like, stop and pause and think and focus and ask yourself why it’s not. It’s not for everybody any more than going on psychiatric medication is for everybody. Um, but you know, you have to know yourself well enough to know that you’re doing it for the right reasons and to know and to do your homework. And in terms of, you know, what could happen, considering your set and your setting, your mindset is so important. What you’re feeling as you’re going into an experience and knowing, um, you know, for example, if you’ve recently gone through a longterm relationship breakup and you’re at that stage in the very beginning where you’re just flooded with emotions and you’re crying and you’re even having trouble, like knowing which emotions you’re feeling, it may not be the best time to do one of these experiences. If you’re somebody that had been grieving your relationship for quite a while. And, you know, were not being flooded with emotions and it actually could be a good time to get some information that would help you heal. And and move forward. But it’s the process of just slowing down, doing research. There’s a lot of amazing resources online. We have a great comprehensive list on our website at www.one-integration.com, to be able to just look at all the different scenarios, look at, you know, things to consider about medication interactions, which Dr. Scharf can speak to a little bit, but there’s just a lot to consider. And harm reduction is about just that, like it considering all these possible things to reduce harm as much as possible.
Thal:
Hmm. Um, speaking of medications, like if someone is on anxiety medication or you know, depression medication and they really want to try psychedelics, what kind of advice would you give them, Susan?
Susan Scharf:
Well, of course it depends on the um, medicine that they’re using in the medicine that they want to take. Um, many of the psychedelics are not compatible with antidepressants and can be quite dangerous if combined with, uh, with antidepressants. Ketamine can be combined with antidepressants. And although I mean, Ketamine is a different, it’s very different from Ayahuasca or MDMA. Um, it is something that is legal and it’s able to be monitored. You’re able to be safely monitored by a doctor. Um, and it does provide support and relief for many people for depression. And it’s being used for some other things. It’s been studied the most in depression, but, so that is a possibility. Um, but in terms of advice, uh, we always say, you know, find a psychedelic literate practitioner who can really help you tease through the details before you go off and consider something. Because of course it is not without risk to use any of these substances or medicines that they, although they’re, they are heavy, beautiful place for healing. For many people, they, they have risks and things can happen and have happened and for various different reasons. And, um, and those, all those aspects need to, I mean, you have to consider for as a person yourself, all the aspects of what you need to know know know. You have to have the knowledge and be very judicious and aware before you participate in anything like this.
Rebecca Hendrix:
And because ketamine is already legal, it’s prescribed by a doctor. And so you could potentially even meet with a doctor that prescribes ketamine in order to talk about how you may be effected if Ketamine’s for you or they could even be knowledgeable about the other medicines perhaps. Perhaps. I mean, it’s no guarantee, but you know, yeah.
Adrian:
Because you brought up ketamine, I wanted to ask because, so it’s legal and supervised under medical context. I noticed you guys offer integration for Ketamine therapy. So there’s a group coming up on your website. Can you talk about what that would look like, the structure of it, I’m just curious, you know, to get a glimpse of, um, other forms of integration groups that might be drug-specific or experience-specific.
Susan Scharf:
Yeah, we really wanted to make this kind of, uh, modeled after a group therapy experience. We want it to be a closed group that everyone has. Uh, we’ve spoken with each person individually, um, before they enter this group. And it’s not just for people that are already involved with ketamine therapy, but even people who are interested in want to learn more. And, um, as you say, psychedelic curious. Um, so that by having this closed group of people that are committed to a certain period of time and a certain number of sessions that in fact that has its own container and safety to it so that everybody there we know is committed and, um, as much as possible. Right, to be present and hold space for each other.
Rebecca Hendrix:
And, uh, in terms of structure, what we plan to do is to have like each session somebody, will be part of the time focused on them and so they can share what they want to about their experience. And again, everybody that experiences ketamine just like the other medications may have a different experience. Some people don’t really remember much of their experience at all. Some people, you know, have a lot of of memory. So, and a lot of people that are going to see psychiatrist or the anaesthesiologist or the ER doctors that have set up ketamine clinics might not also have a psychotherapist or you know, they may just have a psychiatrist. And so it’s a space for them to add that piece of it in as well. And so as for structure, it’ll, you know, it would be everybody sharing a little bit, but each time there’s one person in particular that we can go deeper with during the eight week process and then that person also can get input from the group. Um, reflective listening, um, you know, that kind of thing.
Susan Scharf:
Yeah. About what Rebecca is saying. We’ve, we’ve found that ketamine is definitely, it’s happening in a lot of places now and it’s being, it’s very helpful for a lot of people, but it’s not generally provided, uh, from those practitioners who provide ketamine with any or very little space for any kind of integration. Although that might be with someone’s private psychotherapist, uh, we’re not finding that’s being combined often, if at all with the ketamine therapy.
Rebecca Hendrix:
Yeah, we’ve even spoke to a doctor recently who said that he feels that a lot of people are looking at it as just another drug. You know, you go into the office, you said you get your IV, the doctor could leave the room often no music, no blind fold, I mean no mask. And so that can, you know, that can affect somebody’s experience.
Susan Scharf:
Even the depth of their experience. Yeah.
Rebecca Hendrix:
Yeah. So, so making sure that, you know, providing a space that if somebody is considering using this, that they have as much information as possible on how to make that experience a good one for them. And if they have had one but they’re not quite sure how else they could be anchoring it in or even what happened to them, providing space for them to do that.
Susan Scharf:
And giving more space for transformation to occur.
Thal:
Yes.
Susan Scharf:
Transformation rather than just a receptor drug phenomenon.
Thal:
Hmm. I mean just you mentioning that I would think like what a waste to go and take, you know, and sit in a place and go through the experience and not be able to, um, go deep. It would be a shame. So yeah. Thank you for raising awareness.
Rebecca Hendrix:
Exactly. Yeah. And especially like, cause I know you guys are in the field and studying to do more of this, but, um, maybe a lot and I think a lot of the people that, I don’t know, some people anyway that are going to do ketamine may never even had a therapy experience. So, and I don’t know, Dr. Scharf or Susan, tell me what you think, but I think of the psychedelics, it might be one that, um, some people could have more of a dissociative reaction to then a, um, maybe classic psychedelic experience. And so for, for, for those people that could be even more challenging, but even maybe even more necessary, I don’t know about more necessary, but definitely, um, a tool that they could use to try to, you know, just how does it feel to have taken it? What was that like for you? What does, what does it like if it isn’t, or what if it, like what is it like if it is working, right. Um, just to have a place to talk about the experience. Just as if somebody were taking, uh, getting a prescription for Zoloft. You unpack that with your therapist, you know, what are the side effects and how are you feeling and what are you do?
Susan Scharf:
You know, honestly, we know that that doesn’t happen a lot either. We want it to, but yeah.
Thal:
Ideally.
Susan Scharf:
Yeah. Right. And setting expectations and moving through those and being with them. Yeah. Being with those feelings. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that ideally with, even as Rebecca was saying, um, an SSRI, you might start a Zoloft medication and ideally you would process how you’re doing on that medication with your therapist or maybe even your psychiatrist, and how you’re feeling and what that’s like as much as we’d like to think that’s happening and would like that to be happening. That’s not necessarily happening everywhere either.
Thal:
I think I, yes, I think, um, I’ll see you guys brought up an important point that not a lot of people that experienced psychedelics have had a therapy session or don’t know how a therapy session looks like. And that’s important because sometimes that whole psychedelic experiences literally like five hours of therapy, it has that potential. So yeah.
Rebecca Hendrix:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean the more that we are doing talks just to try to, you know, kind of psychedelic literacy talks just to help people to understand what these medications are. Yes. Um, the more that we’re realizing that a lot of people don’t really know much about them at all, a lot of times we have to even say what a shaman is or what a shaman does or you know, why, who would be a candidate for this type of medication and why would they ever do it and how to explain that it’s not, they’re not addictive medications. I mean, anything could be addictive, but they’re not normally after you have one of these experiences, you don’t wake up saying, where can I get more? I want to do it again because it’s just such a powerful experience that that doesn’t happen. But a lot of it, a lot of just some real, you know, amazingly smart, well educated, successful people just, it’s nothing is in their awareness about it.
Susan Scharf:
And also this, I don’t know how this will land, so you’re welcome to um, cut this out. But I was just thinking how, you know, integration, just like therapy, you know, therapy is practicing practicing how you think about things and practice and practice and integration also provides some of that practice and it’s a practice to, it’s a, it’s a practice to find ourselves again after whatever this growing up in our society or going through trauma or whatnot. But it’s a practice just as mindfulness is, it’s all kind of one in the same as is giving yourself time and space, giving yourself time to be with things, looking, being a, hopefully a nonjudgmental observer of your experience and being with that. And it’s all a place for practice.
Thal:
Yeah. I can see where the name One Integration comes from. Love it. Also another thing that I’m curious about is the relational aspect of psychedelics to like, even during the experience of Psychedelic, like, um, Rebecca, I think you’re an Imago, certified therapist and um, I’ve heard about couples therapy and ketamine. Like can you talk about that? Like what’s the potential?
Adrian:
And I just want to throw in there also, um, cause I know Susan you are, you’re involved with the MDMA trials, phase three, and some of those studies were conducted with couples. Yeah. I mean, so by design they had couples go through experiences. And this is something I actually last night I was, I was thinking about is, is realizing how potentially how useful that can be for integration that your partner, your perhaps your spouse, your life partner actually goes and does it with you. Yeah. So you don’t have to go home and actually feel…
Susan Scharf:
Explain it to them.
Adrian:
Be disconnected. Yeah.
Rebecca Hendrix:
Explain as if you could.
Thal:
Yes. Hello, stranger! [laughing]
Rebecca Hendrix:
Um, I mean, I would love, I mean, I can’t wait to get to the point where, um, we can do MDMA assisted psychotherapy for couples because so, oh, many of the couples that I work with, you know, either, you know, mostly one is more of a pursuer and very open with their feelings and wanting to talk and poke at the other person, they’re much more shut down and withdraws, you know, when there’s an argument. And so to have, um, a psychedelic assisted psychotherapy session, you know, and the more trauma a couple has either one or both of them, everything gets exponentially harder to the thousandth degree because they’re also feeling issues around emotional safety that often it has nothing to do with their partner, but it’s very hard for them to block and to not act out on, in ways that make them feel very disconnected to their partner. So, you know, having a situation where MDMA could be used to basically get everybody in their loving essence, which is my main goal anyway, but when I’m working with individuals or with couples is to get them into their heart-centered self and then to speak to your partner from that place and feeling the emotions from that place versus the hard side of, you know, most of the time people might be speaking in the more defensive hard side of a feeling like anger, but underneath that there’s hurt and to get them to speak from that place. Okay. It’s in that place, that a corrective emotional experience could happen that they then could start to do at home. And that’s where healing occurs when people are relating from that space versus just the surface. I’m so upset because you’re five minutes late to our movie and you don’t care about my time and all of that. So I would love that. I’m not familiar with the ketamine assisted couple’s therapy. Um, I’ve been more familiar in and or imagining what it would look like with the MDMA. Do you know anything? Have you heard anything about..
Susan Scharf:
I know of people that have tried things, but I actually haven’t heard much on that. I would love to hear about it. Um, yeah. What’s happening with that? I know about the couple’s study I think isn’t Anne [Wagner] even part of that? Um, yeah. Or was part of that, but I don’t know the actual findings, although, um
Thal:
I guess my question was more like, it’s not about the actual medicine, but the potential of psychedelics and..
Susan Scharf:
Oh, my intuition and yeah. I mean I have a dream of also providing this to perhaps adult families, um, for, you know, for healing, all of those things that happen. Oh, such a place for, I mean, just, just even with the PTSD study. I think what it allows that, that layer to be peeled off of having to react of the, of such, the, what comes up with all the, the PTSD symptoms and experiences and flashbacks and the gamut of things. It allows the system to almost like take that layer off off and not have to be constantly reacting and protecting so that the inner, the feelings, the knowledge, the other things are gone. Just like Rebecca is talking about instead of being that defensive mode, um, from the feeling hurt by being defensive and see me and you’re just being able to be in that place, feeling those, those hurt feelings or, I mean, there’s so many different things that can happen in those instances, but, um, I think of course the study in order to move things forward in our society had to be focused on a thing. So PTSD was chosen and I think it’s a very good choice, but the implications of MDMA use for so many things are very obvious to the both of us. Yeah. It sounds like to you guys as well, and we feel that it can be beneficial in so many different areas for healing. No doubt. Absolutely. With, with the couples, with families, with, um, yeah, so many places.
Rebecca Hendrix:
Mother, daughter…
Thal:
Yeah. I was just thinking mother, daughter, father son. Siblings, right. Yeah. There’ll be no wars in the world!
Rebecca Hendrix:
Can you imagine?
Adrian:
It’s amazing, reimagine “family trips” and take it to a whole other definition.
Susan Scharf:
Like a new Disney. Yeah. Okay. I didn’t mean to make it into.. it’s not a toy! But yeah, that’s kind of something in my heart that I think about is being able to do these for sure. Relational connective experiences.
Thal:
Yeah. Sort of coming from that heart space versus Ego space.
Adrian:
Just as we, as we bring things to a close, could you guys share resources that might be helpful for people who are listening? Either they are curious. Uh, pre-experience, we mentioned maybe peri-experience, they’re really close to doing something or, post, they’re still integrating. Any helpful resources you can point to?
Rebecca Hendrix:
Gosh, um..
Susan Scharf:
Well you think, well of course Michael Pollan’s book is very helpful. Um, he’s, he’s so good at what he does and so we definitely, that is a, a place for resources. Um, we refer to that a lot. Rebecca mentioned our website for resources. I mean there are, um…
Rebecca Hendrix:
There’s one called Erowid.
Susan Scharf:
I was going to say, Erowid.
Rebecca Hendrix:
Another amazing one, just chockfull of information.
Susan Scharf:
The one thing about Erowid is that you know, you, it’s a, it’s, it’s anything, right? So you have to know that you’re coming to it. Um, that one person’s experience again may not be yours and that this is information gathered from a number of people and is not, it can’t be taken one piece at a time. It’s kind of looking at the whole so you’re not getting… I guess they kind of do have a a lot of good resources in there, but it’s not been combined into one little nugget that you can just bite. It’s a larger if that makes sense.
Rebecca Hendrix:
Yeah Chacruna.net is an amazing one and started by Bia Labate. Psychedelics Today. Um, all the Center for Optimal Living. They have a psychedelicprogram.com. MAPS.org which is one of the nonprofits that is doing a lot of the MDMA research, you know, these nonprofits are the ones that are moving these drugs forward into getting them license because they’re not being funded by the FDA or you know, a lot of bigger companies aren’t necessarily interested in getting involved in something that you’re going to take once or twice or three times. Traditionally the bigger companies are invested in something you’re going to take every day for the rest of your life. So all of the reasons why these are moving forward is because of, um, private donations and then the, um, trials that are being done by MAPS by the Hefner Haffner Institute by um, or, um, yeah.
Adrian:
Awesome. Amazing. Thank you so much for your time ladies. That was a lot of fun.
Thal:
Thank you.
Susan Scharf:
Thank you so much. Such a pleasure.
Rebecca Hendrix:
Thank you for having us. It was great to meet both of you and we will look forward to continuing to follow you as well and see where you go on this journey as you become professionals in the industry.
Thal:
Awesome.
Susan Scharf:
We broadened our community.
Thal:
Ah, yeah.
Adrian:
Definitely.