3 Key Points:

Practice And All Is Coming: Abuse, Cult Dynamics, And Healing In Yoga And Beyond

Show Notes

About Matthew

Yoga was a safe space of retreat and recuperation after being in cults
He was in a cult for 3 years led by Michael Roach at the Asian Classics Institute
He was in Endeavor Academy for 6 years in Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin
These experiences gave him group dynamic perspective
Yoga gave him somatic autonomy, and allowed him to feel himself again after the cultic nature of the groups
He spent age 22-29 in these groups where we would have built some sort of career, and he didn't
He became a yoga teacher and opened his own yoga studio as a part of his healing

Cults

People end up doing harm to themselves, or do things that they didn't sign up for
- An organization misrepresents itself, and presents itself as a safe haven for people who may be vulnerable for any reason
High Demand Organization, along with other synonyms, are other words for ‘cult’
‘Self Sealed’ implies that everything that happens within the group is to have the individual think it's for the ‘good’, a ‘bounded choice’ environment (saying that sexual advances or torture are a part of the development toward enlightenment, for example)
The high demand group rewires a person's attachment patterns to make them ‘unattached’
Steve Hassan’s BITE model
- Behavior Control
- Information Control
- Thought Control
- Emotional Control
The content of the cult doesn't matter (religious, psychedelic, political, etc), it's the element of control that is the same amongst true cults
- There can be political groups that aren't cults, but the element of control is what defines it as a cult
Octavio Rettig and Gerry Sandoval
- They are perhaps responsible for multiple deaths (maybe not directly but through negligence)
- They use 5-MEO-DMT with abuse and malpractice

Cult Impact

The impact from a cult can be cognitive, labor related, relationship/family oriented, etc.
- Matthew says the estrangement from his family has taken over a decade to repair
- The relationships he had prior, has been unable to restored
His identity was changed for him through social coercion
“The cult takes its best possible part of you for its own agenda” - Matthew
The after effects from high demand group life can be extreme, they can have PTSD, they may not be able to form romantic bonds, they may become estranged from their family, etc.
Recent estimates in the US alone say that there are 8,000 high demand groups
- These dynamics can be found in many organizations
Wild Wild Country - When a controversial cult leader builds a Utopian city in the Oregon desert, conflict with the locals escalates into a national scandal

Psychotherapy Cult

Psychotherapy cults look like a Buddhist or yoga cult but with different group practice techniques
- They will depend upon group psychotherapy that break down and humiliate members and create fear that looks like love and acceptance
- It includes members revealing intense secrets so they become vulnerable

Practice And All Is Coming: Abuse, Cult Dynamics, And Healing In Yoga And Beyond

Matthew’s book is applicable in many different community constellations
- His intention is to help foster critical thinking and community health
Joe says that anyone in a group dynamic or especially those leading groups (such as an ayahuasca circle) need to read this book

Links

Dr. Andrew Gallimore - Accessing High-dimensional Intelligence through DMT 0

About Matthew

Matthew has been practicing meditation and yoga since 1996, sitting and moving with teachers from the Tibetan Buddhist, Kripalu, Ashtanga, and Iyengar streams. Along the way he has trained as a yoga therapist and an Ayurvedic consultant, and maintained a private practice in Toronto from 2007 to 2015. From 2008 through 2012, he co-directed Yoga Festival Toronto and Yoga Community Toronto, non-profit activist organizations dedicated to promoting open dialogue and accessibility. During that same period, he studied jyotiśhāstra in a small oral-culture setting at the Vidya Institute in Toronto. Matthew currently facilitates programming for yoga trainings internationally, focusing on yoga philosophy, meditation, Ayurveda, and the social psychology of practice. In all subject areas, he encourages students to explore how yoga practice can resist the psychic and material dominance of neoliberalism, and the quickening pace of environmental destruction.

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Apr 23, 2019

In this episode, Joe interviews Computational Neuro-Biologist, Dr. Andrew Gallimore, one of the world’s knowledgeable researchers on DMT. In the show they discuss DMT and the possibilities of being in an extended state of DMT, such as accessing higher dimensions and communicating with intelligent entities.

3 Key Points:

This reality that we are in is a lower dimensional slice of a higher dimensional structure. DMT is a technology or tool that allows us access to reach out to these higher dimensions.
Andrew has developed and written about the Intravenous Infusion Model, which allows a timed and steady release of DMT to induce an extended state DMT experience.
Extended state DMT hypothesizes that with enough time spent in the DMT space, the ‘map’ of the space would begin stabilize over time and you could develop a ‘life’ in the DMT space like we do in our waking life.

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Book
Alien Information Theory: Psychedelic Drug Technologies and the Cosmic Game

Show Notes

About Andrew

Since age 15, he was into psychedelic drugs and altered states of consciousness
- He was at a friends house and was looking at a book called Alternative London and it had writings on different psychedelics but only a very short segment on DMT
- His fascination grew from his yearning to learn more about DMT
His interest turned into academic work, learning chemistry and pharmacology and he is now into learning more about the brain itself
He is currently a Computational Neuro-Biologist

DMT

DMT is a compound found almost everywhere in nature, highly illegal, yet highly interesting
- Interaction with entities are common
- All frames of reference are gone
Andrew says that the first few times were very intense and he would come back with no way to comprehend or describe it
- Then after a few more times he started to see the entities and have a more stable experience with more intent
Andrew describes a very vivid experience of a man in a dark robe where he asked him “show me what you've got” and he opened his mouth and Andrew woke up a if he had seen God himself. He describes it as a shattering experience
- These beings in the DMT experience, aren't just pointless beings in a dream, they are powerful and extremely intelligent
- We don't have any way to comprehend the levels of intelligence in this dimensional space, we only are ever able to experience intelligence with our human capacity for what intelligence is
- There is a sense that these beings are intelligent because they have been around for billions and billions of years or potentially infinitely

Communicating with Intelligent Entities

He calls his book the ‘textbook of the future’
“We are imprisoned in some kind of work of art” - Terence McKenna
This reality is a construct or artifact of the alien intelligence or the ‘other’
“This reality that we are in is a lower dimensional slice of a higher dimensional structure. DMT is a technology or tool that allows us access to reach out to these higher dimensions” - Andrew
DMT is everywhere
- “Nature is drenched in DMT, but it takes a high level of sophisticated intelligence to identify it, isolate it, and discover a means of using it as a tool” - Dennis McKenna
- “In order to communicate with these beings, we need to bring the right tools to the table” - Andrew
Target Controlled Intravenous Infusion Model - using the same model for DMT as the anesthesia model
- It uses administration of a short acting drug using a mathematical model to control the release
- “We are not just passive receivers of information but we are actively constructing our world from moment to moment.” - Andrew
Continuity Hypothesis of Dreaming - it says that dreaming is continuous with our waking life, the brain constructs the world when you're asleep in the same way that it does when you're awake

Extended State DMT (DMTx)

Our brains are constantly updating its model of reality, so if you put someone through the DMT space for months at a time, that person’s model of reality would completely shift
- This idea has been completely unexplored
- The hypothesis is that an extended time in the DMT space would begin to make that space more stable over time, the goal being to live in the DMT space as you would in this reality of waking life
The measurement of DMT in the blood with Ayahuasca is 1/5th the level of DMT in the blood as a breakthrough DMT experience
Andrew hasn't heard of anyone trying the Intravenous Infusion Model yet
There is this space that exists one quantum away, and it is accessible by everyone (technologically, not necessarily legally)
- Inter-dimensional citizenship is close at hand

Links

East Forest - Creating Ritual for Journeywork through Sound 0

Instagram

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About Dr. Andrew Gallimore

Dr. Andrew Gallimore is a computational neurobiologist, pharmacologist, chemist, and writer who has been interested in the neural basis of psychedelic drug action for many years and is the author of a number of articles and research papers on the powerful psychedelic drug, N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT), as well as the book Alien Information Theory: Psychedelic Drug Technologies and the Cosmic Game (April 2019). He recently collaborated with DMT pioneer Dr. Rick Strassman, author of DMT: The Spirit Molecule, to develop a pharmacokinetic model of DMT as the basis of a target-controlled intravenous infusion protocol for extended journeys in DMT space. His current interests focus on DMT as a tool for gating access to extradimensional realities and how this can be understood in terms of the neuroscience of information. He currently lives and works in Japan.

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Apr 16, 2019

In this episode, hosts Joe and Kyle interview music artist, East Forest. Influenced by psychedelic Psilocybin sessions, Trevor Oswalt, the mind behind the project, produces soundtracks for psychedelic journeywork sessions.

3 Key Points:

East Forest is a music artist and producer with a mission to create a playground of doors for listeners to open and to explore their inner space.
His recent project, ‘Ram Dass’, captures the words of wisdom of Ram Dass and pairs it with sound, a project with four chapters that will release throughout 2019.
Ayahuasca is connected to the Icaros, but psilocybin doesn't have a music ritual. His goal with his project, Music for Mushrooms: A soundtrack for the psychedelic practitioner, is to bring ritual to psilocybin journeywork.

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Show Notes

About (Trevor Oswalt) East Forest

East Forest is a 10 years and running music project that unfolded exploring into sharing and medicine circles and developed into a public interface
Its based around introspection and tools for people to use
Between retreats, podcasts and live performance, Trevor is inviting people in to assist with their journeys

Ram Dass

Trevor is working on a 4 part record project with Ram Dass
- He had the idea to do a record with spiritual teachers
Ram Dass had a stroke 20 years ago, and he got Aphasia from it
- It would take him 15-30 minutes to answer a question, so Trevor would put it to the music and put Ram's words on the pauses in the music
- His wisdom and story would come alive in the songs
The first time Ram Dass did psilocybin was with Timothy Leary and he said it changed his life
Ram Dass talks about the ‘witness consciousness’ a viewpoint of things from the soul
- It is a place where you can love everyone and tell your truth and accept your dark thoughts
- You can't get rid of your dark thoughts, but you can learn to live with them

Journeywork Soundtrack

Music for Mushrooms: A soundtrack for the psychedelic practitioner
- Its a 5 hour playlist for journeywork that guides you and helps you do the work
- He made it live during his own journeywork session over a weekend the previous summer
- He says he is influenced by Keith Jarrett, who does long form pianist pieces
Joe says trance in music is under explored
Trevor describes a trip that he had where he took mushrooms and listened to his own (first) album that he made
- “It was as if I created this album without knowing what I was creating. My soul had tricked my ego into doing it so I could use it as a tool in that moment to transform into something new.” - Trevor
- There is a lot of music, science, and arts that are inspired by psychedelics
- He describes its a symbiotic relationship between psychedelics and music
- That's the thing about art, you put it out there and everyone puts their own meaning to it
His first experience with psychedelics was in college with mushrooms
- He was outside at a festival and it was a very transcendent, blissful experience

Retreats

He attends retreats where there is either yoga, wilderness hikes or mainly revolved around music
- He does a retreat using music at Esalen with his partner, Marisa Radha Weppner
- They are doing another retreat in June at Esalen during the summer solstice and he will also be releasing the third chapter of the Ram Dass Record
- Next Esalen Retreat

Sound

He went to Vassar college in New York and there were pianos all over the school, he learned how to play simple songs and was shocked of how great it sounded coming to life and that fed on itself and he was hooked
- His first album was made in iMac with pro tools and his skills developed from there
Sound quality is critical in journeywork
Joe’s friend has mentioned that it's hard to make a living as a music creator, she goes by Living Light
Joe also mentions a festival he attended listening to Reed Mathis and the Electric Beethoven
- They went on a 20-30 minute talk about how the music is a ritual
Kyle used to lead some hikes, once was with Trevor Hall and it has gotten more common to collaborate these experiences with music

Live Music

During Ayahuasca, the shamans sing the Icaros, and the song is a part of the ritual
- No one uses Ayahuasca recreationally, the ceremony has never been detached from the drug
- With psilocybin, in the western culture, it's almost always only been used recreationally
- His goal was to create a new musical tradition that would speak to our western years and make sense to us without taking from another religion and putting it to our ritual

Links

The Teafaerie - Psychedelic Emergenc(y), Shamanism, 5-MeO-DMT and more! 0

About East Forest

East Forest is an American Ambient/Electronic/Contemporary Classical/Indie Pop artist from Portland, Oregon, United States. The project was created by Trevor Oswalt who derived "East Forest" from the German translation of his last name. To date he has released eight full-length albums and six EPs. East Forest’s newest release, “RAM DASS” is a full length album releasing in collaboration with the acclaimed spiritual teacher. Covering topics such as dark thoughts, nature, the soul and so much more, these songs are full of inspiration. The album will release in four “chapters” throughout 2019, culminating in a full length release on August 9, 2019.

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Apr 11, 2019

Event in Ran Rafael, CA w Tam Integration

In this Bonus episode The Teafaerie and Joe Moore get into lots of great topics. Enjoy! !

The Teafaerie micro-bio(me)

The Teafaerie is a writer, flow arts teacher, ruespieler, toy inventor, app designer, street performer, party promoter, and superhero.
erowid.org/columns/teafaerie

Some links

Tickets

Mapping the Source on Erowid
Carrying the Light - Audio

Telepathetic - https://www.erowid.org/columns/teafaerie/2013/02/21/telepathetic/

The Teafaerie on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/flowfaerie/

Twitter - https://twitter.com/ruespieler

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Jesse Gould - Healing PTSD Veterans through Ayahuasca Retreat Opportunities 0

Apr 9, 2019

In this episode, Joe interviews Jesse Gould, founder of Heroic Hearts Project, a non-profit doing psychedelic work with veterans. They discuss the difficulties veterans face finding healing from their PTSD in the current landscape.

3 Key Points:

Heroic Hearts is a project geared toward raising funds and providing resources for veterans to receive healing through Ayahuasca and other psychedelics.
Our current landscape of social media and government make it extremely difficult to receive donations and get veterans the help that they need. Heroic Hearts is trying to bridge the gap between PTSD and access to healing.
Veterans tend to feel alone in their symptoms from their experiences, so creating community and an integration plan are both really important in the healing process.

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Show Notes

About Jessie

Founder of Heroic Hearts Project
- He found the healing potential of Ayahuasca after a week long retreat after struggling with severe anxiety after combat deployments with the army
He was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico and grew up in Florida
Jesse graduated with an Economics Degree from Cornell

Heroic Hearts

Heroic Hearts is trying to be the voice of veterans in the psychedelic community
- There are very few options through the department of veteran affairs
- The organization helps raise money to provide opportunity for veterans to access treatment such as Ayahuasca retreats
PTSD and Addiction affect the veteran community more than the general public
Aligning the veteran voice with the psychedelic cause is a powerful force for change
Integration is so important, both to understand what you're trying to achieve (beforehand) and stay on that path (afterward)
Jessie says they work very hard to make sure vets are having true healing through their Ayahuasca experiences

PTSD

People have a common misconception around PTSD that there are these constant traumatic outbreaks, and although that can happen, there are so many people living their day to day lives and you'd never know they have PTSD but they still suffer from it
- PTSD doesn't always come from severely traumatic events like war, it can come from other things like childhood abuse or sexual assault
SSRIs numb the pain but don't help with any actual healing

Donations

It's really hard to get donations
Heroic Hearts provided financial scholarships so far to about 15 people
- They are doing a retreat in May for another 7 veterans
The received a grant from Ubiome to study the effects of Ayahuasca on the gut microbiome
- There is a strong link between the stomach biome and mood
They are coming up with do it yourself marketing campaigns to help individuals raise their own money, setting people up for success
In a place where it's easier to get money, it's also harder to get money because so many people are creating personal fundraisers for their dog, etc.
There are more and more large organizations helping smaller companies like Heroic Hearts with research

Community

Breathwork can be used as a helpful bridge between patients and their PTSD
Veterans tend to trust veterans more
- They tend to feel alone so creating community among vets is really important
- Psychedelics and ceremony really help vets transition out of feeling alone
Jesse says he plans on creating local meetups and groups for vets
He tends to send vets on retreats with friends or other vets from the same community so when they return from their retreat they have a built-in community to come back to

Heroic Hearts Project

There is an application for vets
There are many options to donate, all funds raised go right to the vets
“Why is there no government funding going to the biggest breakthrough in PTSD research through the MAPS MDMA therapy? Not one cent of government money has gone to that.” - Jesse
“Why are we having to send veterans to other countries to get the mental health that they deserve?” - Jesse

Links

Lucas Jackson - Breathwork, Ayahuasca, NDEs: Integrating Exceptional Experiences 0

About Jesse Gould

Jesse founded Heroic Hearts Project after attending an Ayahuasca retreat in Iquitos, Peru on February 2017. During the week long retreat he instantly saw the healing potential of the drink and knew that it could be a powerful tool in healing the mental struggles of his fellow veterans. Jesse was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico and grew up in New Smyrna Beach, FL. In 2009 he graduated from Cornell University with a degree in Economics. After working in investment banking for a short time he enlisted in the Army and became an Airborne Ranger for four years and three combat deployments. Most recently, he worked in finance in Tampa, FL After struggling with severe anxiety for many years, he finally decided to go to an ayahuasca retreat which has had a profoundly positive effect on his anxiety and daily life.'I know what it is like to be at the mercy of uncontrollable elements in your own head. I also know the extreme relief of finally having these elements under control. Ayahuasca provided this. We have the ability to help thousands who are suffering but we let politics and ignorance get in the way. This is unacceptable. I started this foundation because the therapy works, I will risk what I have to ensure my fellow veterans get the treatment they deserve and a new chance at life.'

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Apr 2, 2019

In this episode Kyle sits down with a close friend in the psychedelic space, Lucas Jackson. They have shared many experiences such as Near Death Experiences, leading breathwork workshops, and other similarities. They cover topics such as the Near Death Experience, Ayahuasca experience, Breathwork tools, and accepting death, finding meaning and integrating these exceptional experiences.

3 Key Points:

Exceptional experiences are not always euphoric and light, they can also be dark and cathartic and make it difficult to transition back into ‘real life’.
Lucas explains his Ayahuasca experience as his darkest and hardest. He felt alone with no help, no one to talk to to help understand it, he felt as if he actually died. But this gave him a realization and acceptance of death.
The key to making it through and putting understanding to the dark experiences is having the right tools, such as a community of understanding people, practices such as breathwork, yoga, meditation and just simply coming back to the breath.

Support the show

Patreon
Leave us a review on iTunes
Share us with your friends – favorite podcast, etc
Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community.

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