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Why We Get Addicted and How to Get Out of It w/ Anders Beatty - Connecting Minds Podcast Ep16
212 Plays4 years ago
Shownotes: http://christianyordanov.com/16-anders-beatty
Watch this interview on YouTube: https://youtu.be/W7aglaLTvKA
On this episode of Connecting Minds I had the pleasure of chatting with Anders Beatty.
Anders works with the leading ibogaine and plant medicine providers around the world to help their clients prepare for and get the best out of their journeys. He shared a ton of great insights into addiction, trauma, plant medicine, and the journey to recovery.
This is another important episode if you are a parent!
Anders is a psychotherapist and works with a number of ibogaine and plant medicine clinics worldwide specialising in pre treatment "set" and integration for people undergoing a rite of passage for addiction, PTSD, trauma and 'burn out'.
Anders runs ibogaine counselling services and was once in "addiction" himself.
Links to Anders’ resources:
Ibogaine Counselling: https://www.ibogaine-counselling.com/
Psychedelic treatment for addiction: https://www.psychedelicsforaddiction.com
Topics discussed on this episode:
We covered a lot of ground in this interview, some of the most salient points include:
- Anders’ background, his experience with ibogaine and other plant medicines, and his work with the leading ibogaine and plant medicine providers around the world.
- The importance of “putting intentionality, integrity, respect and reverence into the process,” as Anders puts it.
- How various childhood traumas, big or small, can lead us to addictions.
- “Addiction is about self-medicating from being inauthentic.”
- What the lead-up for the client to the plant medicine journey looks like in terms of preparation.
- “Addiction is about being in control.”
- The magic is not in the plant medicine, it is in the work that the client does themselves.
- The “metaphorical cooking pot” or cauldron where each person put their own “ingredients” used to facilitate their own personal transformation.
- Guilt and shame are completely unproductive when it comes to addressing one’s addictions.
- The importance of therapists and counsellors having worked with the the medicines.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:10
Speaker
Connecting Minds is a space dedicated to honoring the amazing authors, researchers, clinicians, artists, and entrepreneurs who are contributing to our collective evolution or simply making the world a better place. These thought-provoking conversations are intended to expand our horizons, so come with an open mind and let us grow together.
Overview of Episode 16: Ibogaine and Addiction
00:00:30
Speaker
Here is your host, Christian Yordanov.
00:00:41
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Connected Minds podcast. My name is Christian Jardinoff. Thank you so much for joining me today. This is episode 16. We have Anders Beattie on the podcast and we talk all things ibogaine, plant medicines, addiction, getting out of addiction, the roots of addiction, such as trauma and a feeling of inauthenticity.
Meet Anders Beattie: Integrative Psychotherapy
00:01:06
Speaker
Anders was introduced to me by a previous guest, Jeremy Wheat, with whom we had an awesome conversation about Ibogaine. And I feel like this episode really complements that one well. Anders is... This episode really blew my mind. I just really listened to it to write up a few show notes. Anders has been through addiction himself. He's an integrative psychotherapist. He works with a number of
00:01:36
Speaker
the leading ibogaine and plant medicine clinics worldwide.
Roots of Addiction: Trauma and Inauthenticity
00:01:40
Speaker
He specializes in pretreatment, set and integration for people undergoing a rite of passage for addiction, PTSD, trauma, and burnout. They, of course, also work for those that want to pursue psycho-spiritual development.
00:01:56
Speaker
He's been through addiction. He has been trained as a psychotherapist. He's had experience with the medicines, which makes for a trifecta of a really authentic, genuine person who knows what it's like to be addicted. It's the pain of being addiction and the process of
00:02:18
Speaker
of getting out and staying out and I also think this episode is extremely important for parents especially those with young children because Anders touches on how small or big traumas as we grow
Beginning of Conversation with Anders
00:02:35
Speaker
up
00:02:35
Speaker
can lead to this feeling of inauthenticity, as he puts it, that can then make us reach for substances, behaviors, relationships, or any other way an addiction can manifest in order to blunt or numb that pain. So extremely interesting episode. I will certainly be re-listening to this one a few more times in the near future.
00:03:03
Speaker
And I am sure you will enjoy it just as much as I did. So without further ado, here's our conversation with Anders Beatty.
Preparing for Ibogaine: Intentionality and Respect
00:03:12
Speaker
Today on the Connecting Minds podcast, we have Anders Beatty. Anders, thank you so much for joining us today. My pleasure. I'm very, very, very happy to be here and thank you very much for the invite.
00:03:24
Speaker
Yeah, it's truly a privilege to have you on. I listened to you on a couple of other podcasts and I'm really excited to have you share your insights with our listeners. I think they'll get a lot of value from your wisdom. To start off with, can you get everybody up to speed? What's your story? What do you do? And yeah, all that good stuff.
00:03:49
Speaker
What I do is I work with plant medicine and Ibogaine providers globally.
Challenges in Addiction Treatment
00:03:55
Speaker
They come to me and normally they give me their clients and they've got clients who might be going in for an Ibogaine experience for alcoholism or addiction or burnout. And they come to me to prep them, to get them
00:04:13
Speaker
ready to get them into the right headspace. I mean, we're talking really sort of set and setting here. I'm part of that process. I call it putting intentionality, integrity, respect and reverence into the process of taking perhaps, for example, the world's most profound and powerful entheology and IB game. I think it's incredibly disrespectful not only
00:04:41
Speaker
to the medicine, but to the client to allow a client to go and take these medicines without actually having put some work in beforehand. To be able to sit on the end of a bed to have this experience and feel that in some way, you have contributed to the process of connecting to the medicine. More often than not, what we see is people, especially in addiction, they fly over to Mexico or Portugal or wherever they're going,
Ibogaine's Role in Addiction Recovery
00:05:10
Speaker
They fly over on a Saturday. They come into the Ibogaine provider on a Monday morning. And Monday evening, they're being given the world's most profound entheogen known to man. It's hardly a great setup. It's hardly a great way to go about taking this medicine. So for me, the work is to help the clients understand that
00:05:41
Speaker
Um, you know, they, they're going to take, take a medicine, which is not a magic bullet. Very, very, very important. You know, you're not going to wake up as George Clooney after you've taken Ibogaine or magic mushrooms. You're going to wake up as yourself and you're going to wake up with the same problems as you had before. More often than not, when we talk problems, I'm talking emotional or financial or whatever.
00:06:05
Speaker
Fortunately, with Ibogaine, that does take you out of addiction. It does help you become withdrawal free. But being withdrawal free is hardly enough to ensure that you can start living the rest of your life without falling into the old habits again.
Anders' Personal Journey with Addiction
00:06:22
Speaker
And this is where I come from. I have three qualifications, I suppose.
00:06:32
Speaker
My first qualification is that I am a trained integrative psychotherapist and to be honest, there's not much of a qualification. My second qualification is that I was an addiction. I was an addiction for many, many, many years and I was in an extraordinarily painful place and I felt very, very inauthentic and I felt very lost and I looked everywhere to make myself feel better, including drugs.
00:07:03
Speaker
And I tried every modality of recovery you could imagine, from new girlfriends, to new homes, to new countries, to new continents, to detoxes, to rehabs, to ashrams, you name it. I tried it. So that's my second qualification. And I think my major qualification is that the very thing that gave me my life back and gave me an authentic voice and made me feel whole again.
00:07:34
Speaker
That journey to becoming whole again was facilitated by Ibogaine and plant medicine work. These are truly spectacular and amazing compounds that help us break down, I suppose, the cultural, societal, familial, religious narratives that have been fostered upon us in childhood
00:08:00
Speaker
that's denied ourselves an authentic way of moving forward to become who we should be, we become what we feel we should be as demanded by family or society.
Childhood Trauma and Addiction
00:08:14
Speaker
And for me, that's what addiction is all about. If we want to take it from the addiction point of view, I don't know if you want to do that, Christian, but people are in addiction because they're self-medicating against feeling inauthentic. The question is, why are they feeling inauthentic?
00:08:30
Speaker
And that is where the pretreatment comes in. So when they get to go and do the client medicine themselves, they've been cracked open a little bit. The medicine knows where to go, knows what to do. The client themselves has put a little bit of work into it. So they feel good about themselves. They've respected themselves. They've put some intentionality and integrity into it. And that's very, very important. I think
00:08:59
Speaker
you know within the plant medicine scene and how it's sold and how it's marketed we're doing a terrible terrible terrible disservice to an awful lot of people because it's got to this stage now that people are looking at ayahuasca or ibogaine or magic mushrooms like any other commodity it's it's a it's a bottle of hair conditioner if we could pretend that i'm going to use it and
00:09:28
Speaker
Why are they better? You know, we can't just go in and buy ourselves a magic bullet. We have to go in there and we really do have to put the work into it. We have to really look at wanting to change ourselves. And to change yourself, you can't look externally. You can't look at something to fix you, like a new girlfriend or a new job or a new car or
00:09:58
Speaker
a rehab. Really, at the end of the day, the real works come as having a relationship with yourself. This is a little bit of a point of contention at times with my partner. We are
00:10:14
Speaker
Sometimes she's like, well, these plant medicines are people just replacing one addiction, let's say of stimulants or alcohol with a plant medicine now. And I guess my point of view would be more, some can and probably do, but that's not the intention of the plant medicine. So with that in mind, can you
00:10:43
Speaker
Can you tell us, Anders, I know you already mentioned you're led to addiction because of feeling of inauthenticity.
Societal Normalization of Trauma
00:10:50
Speaker
Could you unpack that a little bit? Why do we get addicted? What in our childhood causes this? And then maybe you can talk about what the right way the plant medicine process should be before, during, and after to help us get out of this. I know it's a big one, but... I'll try my best.
00:11:13
Speaker
I think Gabor Maté gets it right. All addiction stems from sort of childhood trauma in one form or another. Now, what we've got to be careful with is the word trauma because I don't think most people really, really understand it. They think trauma has to be something really, really horrific.
00:11:35
Speaker
and really full on to be trauma, to constitute trauma. And so many of my clients, when I talked to them for the first time and I asked them what their childhood was like, tough, difficult childhoods with little or no love, with lots of demands placed on that child to be something that they're not, has been completely normalized within our cultural narrative.
00:12:07
Speaker
You know, we live in a world at the moment where, you know, and I can say this quite clearly with my own daughter, she's five years old, she's started school and already we're getting the teachers calling us in at the end of the day saying, you know, look, your daughter doesn't want to do her sums and she doesn't want to do her spelling. All she wants to do is play. Of course she wants to play. She's five years old.
00:12:34
Speaker
But already the expectations of culture, the expectations of education are setting an example for her that she's not good enough and she needs to catch up and she needs to do better. And so, you know, I found it quite depressing at times when she'd come back and said, well, you know, I'm naughty because I'm not doing well at school. I'm like, that's not the case.
00:13:01
Speaker
There's one particular phrase which perhaps we can contextualise this whole idea of maybe cultural trauma, which is very insipid. It comes into every area. But I'm sure, Christian, when you were younger, you had this expression, Christian, I think that you should
00:13:24
Speaker
put your socks up. I think that you should try harder. I think that you should cut your hair. I think that you should essentially, if that is a commentary, which has bombarded you from a very, very, very young age, I think that you should begins to be heard by the child as, I don't like you the way you are. I want you to be something else. And
00:13:53
Speaker
As we grow up, when we have these influences
Unmet Childhood Needs and Inauthenticity
00:13:56
Speaker
coming in from the outside and demanding to us to be this person or that person, what we tend to do is we tend to become actors. We could look at it in a slightly different way, but if a child's parents are divorcing and mum and dad are arguing the whole time, the child's not being seen, it's not being heard, it's not being respected,
00:14:22
Speaker
That child, maybe age nine or 10, says, well, I feel that I'm not being seen, I'm not being respected, and I'm not being heard, and I'm not being loved. I better start behaving in a way that gets me the attention I feel that I need. I better become an actor. So we start pretending to be something that we're not in order to fit into the environment that we are in. And if we do that, we do that at the expense of our authentic self.
00:14:51
Speaker
We lose the ability to play. We lose the ability to be joyful. We suddenly feel that to fit in, we have to be something different to what we are. And I think that's where addiction really starts. It's this idea that somehow to fit in with the environment you're in, you have to reject a little bit of your authentic self and to become an actor.
00:15:24
Speaker
Young Pueblo puts it this way. He says, I don't believe anybody is addicted to coke, crack or heroin. What people are addicted to is filling the void they have in their chest with anything other than self-love. Now, if you've rejected a part of yourself and you don't know who you are and you're pretending to be something else, there's definitely going to be a hole in the chest because you're feeling inauthentic.
00:15:48
Speaker
Um, so that's really sort of where I believe kind of the trauma comes from. And, and, and, you know, it can be trauma with a capital T, you know, something really awful. It could be trauma with, you know, maybe parents divorcing or father's not there. It could be sexual abuse, but also by the same token, it can be something as simple as not being heard, not being seen and not being respected on quite a minor scale. Um,
00:16:19
Speaker
I've had a client who said to me, I think it's quite interesting. He said to me, look, I've got absolutely no problems in my childhood. Everything's perfect. There's nothing wrong. Mum and Dad were great. They never divorced. I did okay at school. I went to university. I don't understand why I found myself in this position. Sure enough, as we're talking, he tells me a story about himself.
00:16:44
Speaker
aged eight or nine where he used to be the king of the playground with his two friends and they were climbing on the big climbing frame in the middle of the playground every day and they're playing cowboys and Indians or whatever they were doing. And he said I was fantastic and I used to love coming down to the playground in the break and I'd get in the middle and we'd have this fantastic fun. And he said, but then one day one of the boys started picking on me.
00:17:11
Speaker
And a couple of the boys started picking on me. And he said, I went from being the king of the playground to a week later standing on the edges looking in. And he said, you know what? I remain there for the rest of my life.
Integrating Therapy and Plant Medicine
00:17:24
Speaker
I became fearful that I would be rejected for the rest of my life. Now, to me, that's trauma. A lot of people won't say it is. We can have debate about semantics or whatever.
00:17:35
Speaker
But this is something that has changed the way that he has reacted. And he denied a part of himself by staying on the outside and looking in the whole time. And that's where that emptiness is from.
00:17:56
Speaker
I think that's a little bit about the trauma side. So I think, you know, the job is of ibogaine or ayahuasca or whatever. It doesn't, it doesn't take that trauma away. It doesn't, but what it does do is perhaps help you understand it and come to terms with it and understand why you feel lost and you feel empty. And if we can do that in the pre-treatment scenario, um,
00:18:24
Speaker
Well, then people are going to be open to the medicine in a more profound way. I believe that really just work that we do with the plant medicines is what some people would call shadow work. I mean, if you want to go down the union point of view, the shadow work is not
00:18:43
Speaker
And this is really important to understand. It's not about working with the dark or nasty or bad or evil or dysfunctional areas of your psyche or who you are. It's about working with the rejected parts of you. If you can work with the rejected parts of you, the rejected child within you, then you're going to be bringing up a whole
00:19:10
Speaker
reservoir of intelligence and knowledge and wisdom and joy that you've denied to yourself because you've pushed that bit away from yourself to be able to fit into the environment you're in. So if my clients can start to have a relationship with their lost traumatized child, start to understand that lost traumatized child,
00:19:34
Speaker
I start to understand why it's so angry and upset because it's not been seen or heard or respected for many years. If they can start to have that relationship, all of those things that have been missing, all of the things that has caused that hole in your chest, where you start to put them back up in there again, and then you start to feel authentic. And if you feel authentic, you don't need to self-medicate.
00:20:04
Speaker
You know, addiction is about self-medicating from being inauthentic. If we get to know who we are and we get to know why we were in pain and we get to know what happened to us as children for us to feel that we had to pretend to be something else, then you can start mending.
00:20:24
Speaker
But if you think you can get it out of a bottle or you can get it out of a rehab or you can get it out of a detox or you can get it out of a new relationship or a new car or a new watch
Setting Intentions for Psychedelic Experiences
00:20:35
Speaker
or new shoes, well, you're looking externally. You're looking externally to mend yourself. The real job is about having a relationship with yourself.
00:20:47
Speaker
And in your opinion, if one was to try to do the talk therapy side of things without using the plant medicines, how do their chances stack up to actually being successful in reading the results of the addiction? I think as a protocol, it works well. And I do occasionally get a client who gets to the stage and says, well, you know, I don't feel that I need to do Ibogaine now. You know, I feel okay.
00:21:17
Speaker
I mean, obviously that won't be a client who's got an opiate addiction, because first and foremost, what Ibogaine does, for example, is take away opiate withdrawal. But I have had clients who've got to that stage, and the decision has always been made to further go down the road with the plant medicine. The fact is, is that the very tiny little bit of work I do beforehand with the clients is nothing in comparison
00:21:46
Speaker
to the capabilities and the intelligence and the wisdom of the plant medicines themselves. I think what the plant medicines do really, really well is clear away the debris of conditioning, clear away the debris of defense mechanisms within somebody so they can start looking at themselves with new eyes without
00:22:10
Speaker
without the conditioned voices which have been fostered upon them by their parents or by their school, that they're useless or whatever, kind of mushrooms and ibogaine and ayahuasca sort of move that all away. So you can have, and I know it's a corny thing to say, but you can have years and years and years of therapy with one really, really good,
00:22:36
Speaker
psychedelic or entheogenic experience. It gives you the platform to move forward in a very, very, very rapid and very wonderful way.
Client Preparation for Ibogaine Treatment
00:22:48
Speaker
And that is why we have to put intentionality, integrity and respect and reverence into these plants. These plants are majestic and wonderful. They're not to be used willy-nilly. They're not to be disrespected because they can be life changing.
00:23:08
Speaker
And, you know, if you do disrespect them, you know, they can give you a kicking and the kicking is probably the lesson not to disrespect them to get on and do the work. Yeah. Okay. So maybe can you, can you talk us through what, what does the process look like? So at the point where you, uh, meet with the client, what, what, what are the topics of discussion, uh, do you
00:23:36
Speaker
I normally do six sessions and that will be a six week lead up to working with the clients. Three to six weeks seems to be the sweet spot. When I meet the clients, I suppose my first question is why I began? What are you hoping to expect from that? More often than my clients, to get off drugs completely.
00:24:00
Speaker
we kind of discuss that actually the drug addiction as a symptomology or something else going on underneath and you know when I talk to my clients you know one of the first questions I asked them is you know what did that drugs give you age 20 you know when you first started using coke what did it give you and
00:24:19
Speaker
near enough, a hundred percent of them said, you know, gave me confidence. I felt great. I felt like I could talk to the girls or the boys at the bar. I could hold my own with my friends. Life felt good. Life felt great. I felt part of a tribe. You know, I enjoyed my dancing, whatever.
Addiction as Control in Chaos
00:24:39
Speaker
Well, you know, that kind of tells me that life must have been pretty shit beforehand.
00:24:47
Speaker
You know, they must have been pretty lost beforehand if they're self-medicating on a drug to feel so much better about themselves. More often than not, I've found with my clients, you know, I say to them, what happens if you haven't found coke age 20 or something? And a lot of them say, well, you know, I hated myself so much and I felt so lost. I dread to think, what would have happened if I didn't have to coke at that time?
00:25:16
Speaker
So for me, to pick up drugs at an age can be a perfectly intelligent and acceptable adaptive response to the pain that you're in. And the pain that you're in is caused by the conditioning of your childhood, that you cannot be yourself. It's this idea that you're lost from yourself. Drugs like coke or crack or heroin, what they do is kind of open the door to a better place temporarily.
00:25:46
Speaker
You know, so you're feeling down, you're feeling depressed. Okay, I want to pack myself up. I want to feel better. I want to feel secure. I want to feel loved. I want to feel held. So I'm going to take some heroin and it opens the door and it does the job. It does what it's supposed to do. It makes you feel better. The problem is, is if you abuse that too much, that door becomes a revolving door. And instead of you using the drugs to feel better, the drugs start using you.
00:26:16
Speaker
And then that's the difficult stage. That's when you enter proper sort of addiction. And then you're compelled to use almost on a daily basis until it gets really, really unmanageable. I would like to look at this idea that if we further expand on this idea, if you think about addiction,
00:26:41
Speaker
Or you think about using drugs, becoming a user. It's very much about people talk about addicts and they say, oh, they're so out of control. It's all out of control, blah, blah, blah. It's quite the opposite. Addiction is about being in control.
00:27:00
Speaker
So when your life is falling apart, everything's difficult and everybody's going, having a go at you and you can't get a job or your job's going wrong or a whole host of other things or that you're just living in fear most of the time. There's a ritual that you can turn to to make you feel safe, irrespective of what the outcome is of using coke or crack or heroin. However chaotic life might be after,
00:27:30
Speaker
in that moment when you are using, you are turning to a ritual to comfort you. And I think this is something that a lot of people don't actually see or understand about people in addiction.
Readiness for Ibogaine: Behavior Indicators
00:27:44
Speaker
It's used to begin with, to just make you feel better, to make you feel safer.
00:27:53
Speaker
So I know you talk about the power of ritual and how we can actually begin to integrate rituals that are more about self-love. Can you can you talk us through how you get someone onto that? I think by just turning up to sessions,
00:28:18
Speaker
tells me whether a client really wants to do Ibogaine or not, or whether they just expect it to be something that's given to them. So, you know, when clients turn up to sessions and when they look at the videos you've sent, et cetera, et cetera, it shows there's a modicum of humility in their approach to taking the Ibogaine or the Ayahuasca.
00:28:39
Speaker
My problem is, and the problem about all Ibogaine and plant medicine providers have, are with the clients who feel that they are entitled to take the medicine. Give me the medicine and cure me. We've got to get them changing that mind. It's about you working with the medicine to cure yourself, okay? It's not a magic bullet.
00:29:03
Speaker
It's a misnomer. And you know, I see this the whole time. I see a lot of either game providers promising the world. They're liars and they're cheap and they'll take your money. So we've got to be careful. You want to be going to, to the kind of providers and say, look, we will help you on your journey. We will take you out of withdrawal. We, we will hold you to a certain extent, but the real work has to be done by yourself. So when the clients start turning up the session,
00:29:34
Speaker
and they make it on time or if they have to delay and they're sending me a message beforehand. Well, these are behaviours which are contrary to what it is to be normally an addiction. They're going out of their way to help themselves. And so if the client is jumping through a certain amount of hoops to ensure that they get their treatment, that they're willing to look at
00:30:03
Speaker
the inner child and their conditioning, et cetera, et cetera, when they are setting themselves up for that plant and medicine experience, they're moving forward in a way which shows self-compassion, shows intentionality, shows integrity, shows respect and reverence for the medicine and not only the medicine, but for themselves as well. And this is the big thing because most addicts have no self-compassion. Yeah?
00:30:32
Speaker
So in many ways, we're helping them find that to a certain extent. Also, the other thing is that I feel that I have a duty to protect providers from people who are just not ready to take these powerful plant medicines. And there are a few of them. There are a few people who are just not willing to do the work themselves, they're just
00:31:01
Speaker
are so entitled, they feel that they should be given it, and you know that their Ibogaine treatment is probably not going to go too well, and you know that they are going to look to blame somebody else that
Guided by Plant Medicine: Respecting Narratives
00:31:14
Speaker
it didn't work. They will not take responsibility for it themselves. So part of my job is to warn the providers of this type of client if they're coming into Vision.
00:31:28
Speaker
So what circumstances would make one take preference, let's say for ayahuasca over ibogaine or psilocybin or LSD? How do you, is there specific conditions or types of addictions that one works better? Mainly I work with ibogaine and I work with ibogaine because it's really, really, really effective of addictions and especially opioid addiction.
00:31:56
Speaker
But let's say if somebody was coming to me for a psycho-spiritual burnout, something along those lines, depression or whatever, I'm a great believer in whatever calls out to you, you know, whatever medicine calls out to you. Some people really want to do ayahuasca, some people really want to do mushrooms, some people really want to do peyote.
00:32:20
Speaker
The important thing is that if they've got a calling to do a certain medicine, it is my job to help them facilitate that because this is their narrative. It's so important that the clients find their narrative of recovery, but it doesn't belong to somebody else. If I turn around to you and you're really wanting to do psilocybin, I turn around to you and say, no, you need to do San Pedro.
00:32:49
Speaker
Well, what I'm doing is forcing my belief systems on you. I'm conditioning you to be something that maybe you are not, maybe that you don't have a calling to do. So I'm doing you a disservice. Yeah? I mean, I think, you know, this is a major part about conditioning. You know, conditioning is this idea that
00:33:15
Speaker
we get conditions so much by society and culture, and we're told so much how to think and to behave and what we do, that we lose connection to ourselves. And that goes back to being an authentic. So when I work with the clients, the protocol that we use is what we call a metaphorical cooking pot or the cauldron. So
Building Personal Narratives and Authenticity
00:33:40
Speaker
What we encourage the client to do is, well, I suppose we take them shopping and we introduce them to Alan Watts and we introduce them to Eckhart Tolle and to Karl Rogers and J.K. Rowling and Jonathan Boldy and this person and that person who has an understanding of addiction and dualism and whatever.
00:34:03
Speaker
When the client finds something, you know, maybe something Alan was saying, you go, oh man, that's my story. Well, you know, for example, let's say Eckhart Tolle talking about the pain body. This idea that if you don't have somewhere to safely talk about the pain you're in, what you do is swallow it and swallow it and swallow it until it becomes sort of this negative dark energy that rises up in you in a semi-autonomous
00:34:34
Speaker
way and starts berating you from inside. Now, if you say to a client, well, you know, Eckhart Tolle has this view on that negative voice in your head and they go, yeah, do you know what? I've never thought about it that way. That works for me. I'm going to put that ingredient into my cauldron. And you know what? That idea that turning to drugs age 20 was actually an intelligent and sensible
00:35:03
Speaker
adaptation to the pain I'm in, nobody's never put it that way. And that feels right to me. So they dump another ingredient into the cauldron. My job is to take them shopping so they can find ingredients. And the more ingredients they dump into their cauldron, the more they start to make a recipe or a brew. And that's an understanding of who they are on their terms. Most of my clients are fucked up.
00:35:32
Speaker
because they've got a great big dirty spoon in their hands, and they're still eating out of their mother's recipe, and their father's recipe, and their headmaster's recipe, and their friend's recipes, and they have never found their own recipe for living life. And that is what we do in the pre-trained stage. We start that process of furnishing, and I like to call it cauldron, I used to call it a metaphorical cooking pot,
00:35:59
Speaker
But I think it's a cauldron. I think it's magical. Your people are putting in ingredients to create their own magic about themselves. My job is to help facilitate that. I don't tell them what ingredients to put in, but I take them shopping and offer them an awful lot of ingredients. And when they find something that works for them, put it in. That ensures that the client is beginning to have their own narrative of life, their own understanding of who they are.
00:36:28
Speaker
their own understanding of their trauma, their own understanding of epigenetic ancestral trauma. Because sure as hell, you know, if your father's a bit of an asshole to you, I can almost guarantee that his father was a bit of an asshole to him. And there's reasons why your family behaves the way they do. It's not because they are bad people more often than not. They're not.
00:36:56
Speaker
It's because they don't have the tools to relate to children in a way which is sympathetic, empathetic and full of unconditional love. They've been conditioned to treat their family members in a different way. Am I making sense to you here?
00:37:13
Speaker
Oh, so much, man. I love that analogy with the cauldron or the metaphorical cooking pot because I feel like this is what I've been doing in the last... I mean, I've been doing it probably since about the age of 19. That's when I first read Eckhart Tolle's book, The Power of Now. But the last couple of years, even more so, and that's what I'm doing. I'm reading Stan Gruff's work that goes into my cauldron. I'm reading
00:37:39
Speaker
or listening to Gabor Matei's books and, you know, just kind of adding stuff in there. That's it. And, you know, the more you put into the part, the more authentic you feel, the more that you know yourself. So, you know, what you're doing is, what is it? Socrates says, you know, what is the most important thing a man can do is to know thyself, to know yourself. Well, if you're spending your life
00:38:07
Speaker
considering and contemplating and adding ingredients to your metaphorical cauldron and when an ingredient may be not work for you, taking it out. Well, then you're living life with intentionality, integrity, respect and reverence. Then you're living a good life. Then you're doing what you're supposed to be doing.
Societal Pressures and Addiction
00:38:27
Speaker
Then you're owning your own narrative as to who you are. Now, I want to bring this in. Why doesn't NA or AA work?
00:38:37
Speaker
Well, it does for a few people, so I'm not going to knock it completely. But for an awful lot of people, it doesn't. It didn't work for me. I was there for 15 years. And the reason it didn't work for me is by the time I left NA, this is what I heard. You're an addict and you're going to have to be an addict for the rest of your life. You are diseased. You are a burden on your friends, family and society. And because of that, you are not to be trusted.
00:39:05
Speaker
You're not to be trusted to such an extent that we're going to give you a sponsor. And this sponsor is going to help you think correctly. Your thinking will be based on our new gospels. And these gospels have 12 steps and 12 traditions that you must adhere to. And you must turn up to meetings for the rest of your life. Because if you don't, you'll end up in prison, jail or an institution. And by the way, you better be grateful for what we're giving you.
00:39:34
Speaker
Well, isn't that the same type of conditioning that brought us into addiction in the first place? It's an inauthentic way of being. That is not your narrative. If you don't have ownership of your journey, how do you get better? You'll always be doing the journey for somebody else or under somebody else's terms.
00:40:01
Speaker
So I suppose also this is the great thing about psychedelics and entheogens that you become more expansive, it's much easier to see these narratives of subjugation, these narratives of control. I'm not saying that we should
00:40:21
Speaker
all become rebels and just do life our own way. No, we have to fit in the society, we have to fit in the culture and we have to be productive members of it. But we don't have to judge ourselves the whole time through those values. And, you know, is it insidious? Because
00:40:45
Speaker
Every night you watch television you have adverts bombarded at you saying you're no good if you don't have this car. You're no good if you don't have these shoes. Look at your teeth, they need to be whiter. Look at your stomach, they need to be flatter. Why don't you have biceps? It bombarded at you the whole time but in some way you are imperfect unless you buy this product or unless you behave this way or unless you have this much money in your bank.
00:41:15
Speaker
Me, I think the most important part of this journey is to recognize that the perfect human being is imperfect. They're crazy, chaotic. They have foibles. They make mistakes. And that's how we should be. We're humans. We're not robots. The imperfect human being is the one who chases perfection. Our whole culture and society
00:41:42
Speaker
is about us trying to jump through hoops to become perfect. No wonder so many of us feel disconnected. No wonder so many of us are turning to drugs. No wonder so many of us don't have relationships with our family and our friends.
Addiction, Isolation, and Connection
00:42:00
Speaker
We live in a world now that, you know, 50 years ago, if you went to a typical English village in the countryside,
00:42:12
Speaker
There would be a couple of pubs and there'd be a corner shop and there would be a policeman who knew everybody's first name. There would be a midwife. There would be a priest. There would be a cricket club and a tennis club and a bowling club. And there would be a sense of community and people would have a sense of belonging. And now we go home and we drive our cars. There's no pubs.
00:42:38
Speaker
There's no shops, there's no cricket clubs, bowling clubs, tennis clubs, there's no community policemen, there's no midwife, there's no priest anymore. And we all live in our little closed areas with our roofs coming down on us and the walls coming in and we switch on the TV and we put some shit in the microwave and then we get on our phones all night long.
00:43:04
Speaker
And when we're on the phones, we're told we're not good enough because we don't have Alexis. Man, you know, we need to start getting back to being authentic. We need to start to connect to people. Addiction itself is defined by the fact that you're in isolation, you're isolated, yeah? And the opposite of isolation is connection. And again, I think, you know, the psychedelics
00:43:34
Speaker
certainly give you this fantastic sense of connection, this fantastic sense of expansiveness, this fantastic idea that you are not separate from Mother Earth, you are not separate from the universe, but you are part of it. Our conditioning tells us something else. Our conditioning tells us that you are an individual and you have to strive for perfection. It doesn't allow you to just be.
00:44:05
Speaker
Yeah, that's some powerful stuff right there. So this concept of guilt and shame, is this another thing that maybe is a shortcoming of NA and AA that is completely unproductive when it comes to one addressing their own addictions? Well, how can it help you?
00:44:29
Speaker
How can how can it help you? Because actually, I think one of the most important things about. Getting better and getting connected is to understand that you are fragile and you do make mistakes and it's OK to make. Well, we live in a society where it's not OK to make mistakes. It's it's it's OK to deny your mistakes. It's OK to obfuscate. It's OK to believe it's OK to
00:44:59
Speaker
You know, I'll put it this way. You know what? I am a bad-tempered, irritable, arrogant asshole at the best of times. And for years and years and years, that used to really, really, really upset me. The fact is, is I realize that my irritability and my anger and my arrogance are actually my fear and my defense mechanisms. And once I started to accept them and to see myself as a fragile human being, that is when I started healing.
00:45:29
Speaker
But if you can't accept those things about yourself, then life is going to be really, really, really difficult. So for me, the acceptance of the fact that I'm not perfect means that I don't have to live in a shame narrative the whole time.
Critique of Traditional Recovery Programs
00:45:47
Speaker
But when I make a mistake, I make a mistake and I've got every right to just dust myself up and get off.
00:45:52
Speaker
Within ANA, I have seen people who've had five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 years of clean time, and then they've had a slit, and they've had to go and collect a new white key ring. And it's an awful thing to see somebody go through that sense of shame, when actually all they've done is been human and made a little mistake. Now, if we lived in a place where we weren't so judgmental, and we weren't so controlling,
00:46:22
Speaker
And we could turn around and go, hey, man, I hear you had a mistake last night. That's OK. Can I help you? What can we do? What did you learn from that? How did you set yourself up for this? What was happening? People don't just end up taking drugs again or relapsing because more often than not, it's because they're not looking after themselves in some way.
00:46:50
Speaker
more often than not, it's because some ritual has fallen down, which keeps in place. They're not doing anymore. I find that, you know, a lot of the addiction recovery, the standard traditional addiction recovery is really dehumanizing, is really subjugating, and it doesn't give people room to grow unless they grow within the parameters.
00:47:16
Speaker
I want to add a caveat to this because I do feel like I've slated NAA off really, really big time. On the other hand, I feel also it is the most fantastic thing. There is community, there are friends to be made there, there are cups of tea, there are coffee, there is a safe environment to turn to. A lot of the steps are fantastic, if not all of the steps as a spiritual program are fantastic.
00:47:47
Speaker
But NA and AA must be used as a tool to your recovery.
Supporting Loved Ones with Addiction
00:47:54
Speaker
They must be used as an ingredient that you put into your cauldron. They are not the cauldron. They are not the only way. Do not allow anything to become a religion for you.
00:48:09
Speaker
use them as a talk. What advice would you give to folks whose partner friend or close loved one is struggling with addiction and they want to help them without shaming them, without imposing their narrative on them? What advice would you give to someone who has a loved one with an addiction? That's a great question. I think the most important thing to understand is that
00:48:37
Speaker
your loved one or your friend or your brother, your sister, they are in the problems they are in, not because of some moral failing. They are doing it because they are in pain. And I think if people could approach people from the point of view that I understand you are in pain, is there anything we can do to help?
00:48:58
Speaker
Is there any way we can make you move forward? Would you like some help in some way? Can we support you in some way rather? And I think that you should go to rehab. I think you should go do Ibogaine. That's probably not the right way to go. You can't say to the client, you know, I've read this thing, this amazing thing about Ibogaine. There's this and there's that. Look, if that's something that you feel might work for you,
00:49:29
Speaker
hey, I'll support you in that journey. It's not about imposing your will. And if you can sow the seed, and then that brother or sister turns around to you and says, hey, Christian, you know what, you know, you sent me, you know, I am in a bit of trouble. That Ibogaine is calling to me. Well, guess what? Then it's their narrative.
00:49:54
Speaker
We've already started the process of them owning it and feeling authentic about it. Had you said to your brother or your sister, hey, you need to go and do Ibogaine? Well, whose narrative is it? See, good recovery is about finding out who you are on your terms and having ownership of your journey. If you do it for somebody else, you're not doing it for yourself.
00:50:25
Speaker
really that simple. Makes sense. Now at the start you said that I think you said something along the lines of your training as an integrative psychotherapist is not much of a qualification to do this type of work. What
00:50:43
Speaker
What does a young or any psychiatrist or psychologist or counselor therapist that wants to work either with addiction or psychedelics or both, what do they need to do to learn the ropes other than, I suppose, experiencing the psychedelics themselves? I think that's the most important thing is that I have been to rehabs where I have had
00:51:10
Speaker
24-year-old psychologists and psychotherapists telling me about addiction. They can fuck off because they've not done it themselves. They've not been an addiction. They don't understand. So if you feel that you can really understand and add it through studying it at university, well, that's just arrogance, okay?
Therapists' Experience with Psychedelics
00:51:35
Speaker
I think if you're a psychotherapist, it feels that you can hold the psychedelic experience or the Ibogaine experience without having done it yourself. Well, that's ego and arrogance again. I think the major, you know, I was talking to somebody about this the other day, and actually I was talking to, you know, I shan't mention his name, but he's one of the big academics around addiction. And we were talking about how
00:52:06
Speaker
You're getting the medical world trying to take over psychedelics now. It's becoming all the fashion, et cetera, et cetera. We were talking about this idea as exactly what you're saying, but psychotherapists who haven't had the psychedelic experience themselves, should they be involved in this work?
00:52:34
Speaker
I clearly think no, a lot of psychotherapists who think they should be. I put it down to this. I know for a fact that I would rather have a gnarly old timer who's used a lot of psychedelics and has put a lot of people through journeys with no education, I'd rather have him
00:53:01
Speaker
than a trained psychotherapist or a trained psychologist or doctor who've never talked about it. There's no two ways about it. If I happen to have a doctor or a psychologist or a psychotherapist who also happens to be a gnarly old psychedelic timer, fantastic. You know, bring that in.
00:53:27
Speaker
For me, I do feel the most important criteria to be doing this work is to have been at the cold face, to have done it yourself, to have taken that journey. You know, this is stuff that we can't just garner out of a book in some way. You have to
Challenges of Clinical and Spiritual Integration
00:53:48
Speaker
have done it. It's a little bit like, I don't know, it's a little bit like a
00:53:56
Speaker
Sorry, my battery is about to run out, but it's a little bit like... I will keep going to the address. Somebody being... Okay. It's a little bit like somebody being trained to go to war by a sergeant who hasn't been gone to war. You know, you're going to be far more confident if your sergeant has seen some action. It's a little bit like being trained how to...
00:54:23
Speaker
fly an aeroplane by somebody who's actually been in an aeroplane rather than a sympathetic. Yeah, of course. You know, somebody turned around to me the other day and said, well, you know, how can you say that? Because most people who deliver babies are men. I said, well, I can say that quite easily because I think that most people who should be delivering babies should be women.
00:54:51
Speaker
I don't think, you know, we're so skewed in our thinking of what is acceptable and what is normal and who's in power and who's right. You know, we're looking at a world now where the very, very people who've caused most people to be in addiction are doctors. Yeah, they're the biggest dealers in the world. They're the ones who have been giving out
00:55:21
Speaker
pills and potions for symptoms rather, you know, for the problem rather than looking at the symptoms. Rather than looking at the childhood trauma, let's give you some pros out. Rather than looking at the childhood trauma, well, let's get you off heroin and put you on methadone. And now these are the very same people who have let
00:55:46
Speaker
millions of people down in many ways. These are the very, very people who now wanted to take control of the psychedelic scene. I think there's a place for them. I think actually in many ways they are the very people who are going to drive this forward and they are essential. But we have to be really, really, really careful around what parameters they put down and how we go forward in the psychedelic world we're entering at the moment.
00:56:14
Speaker
I myself certainly wouldn't want to be doing mushrooms or ketamine or Ibogaine in an extraordinarily clinical setting. Sure, I'd want my EKG done, I'd want my bloodworks run, I'd want to find out where are my viable candidates. I want to know if any of my pre-existing medicines might be contraindicative.
00:56:40
Speaker
Fantastic. Really, really, really important. But I don't necessarily want to be doing it in a sterile room at a bottom of a corridor and some dodgy neighbourhood in London and some Victorian hospital. With fluorescent lights blasting, yeah. Yeah, lights blasting and the smell of chlorine or whatever it is.
00:57:03
Speaker
I don't know how that counts to something that is essentially at the end of the day, it's an extraordinary spiritual experience.
Pre-treatment for Effective Integration
00:57:15
Speaker
This is about spirituality. This is about you connecting to yourself so then you can connect to nature.
00:57:24
Speaker
We just had a little outage there. So I believe my last question to you was, are you involved in the client's journey after the week or two of the retreat? Yeah, I think it's important. I mean, what we tend to do, we live in a
00:57:45
Speaker
Within the industry, everybody talks about integration and integration is very, very, very important. I want to make the distinction between doing the pretreatment protocol and just purely integration. If we look at the sort of standard plant medicine protocol these days, when people turn up to an Ibogaine clinic or an ayahuasca or whatever, they literally just get off the airplane or the bus.
00:58:11
Speaker
And they go there and they have their experiences and then they're supposed to integrate those experiences after. And what I say about the pretreatment protocol is that actually
00:58:24
Speaker
what you're doing is giving them the tools before they have the plant medicine experience to be able to integrate the experience after. They're not just reacting to life immediately. In many ways, we talked about
00:58:42
Speaker
you know, their childhood trauma and the things that trigger them. So, you know, post Ivy game, they might have an argument with their girlfriend or whatever, and they can feel their inner child beginning to rise and they can feel that there's some old default thinking is coming back in. But because we've talked about it beforehand and because they're aware of it, because I always get my clients to name their inner child, whether it be Bob or Peter or whatever.
00:59:13
Speaker
They can start to be mindful and they can start to observe they're in a child rather than be there in a child. Does that make sense to you? A lot of the integration that is needed should be really done in the pretreatment scenario.
00:59:35
Speaker
After people do, I begin, yes, I do like them to connect with me and I do suggest that we do a further few sessions to help them come back into society and into their environment and to be able to face the problems and to be encouraged to face them and to let them believe that they have the power to do so.
01:00:00
Speaker
And to just be aware of those old default thinkings coming up and those old behaviors coming up, this whole idea of that metaphorical cooking pot or cauldron is so that you start to know yourself. So if you know yourself a little bit before you go in and do a plant medicine experience, it's going to make the integration a lot easier.
Continued Plant Medicine Work
01:00:23
Speaker
I'm a great believer that
01:00:27
Speaker
Yeah, my clients connect after and if they have problems, we can talk through it and we can see it into relation to their pain body or their inner child or their bad wolf or whatever you want to call it. And then my other recommendation is that they continue to do some more plant work, plant medicine work.
01:00:52
Speaker
you know, two or three more experiences of some type or another post IB game going into the future over maybe a year. And what you'll find is that the clients, they say, well, you know, I've had my IB game three months ago. Now I want to do some San Pedro and they put that intentionality, integrity, respect and reverence into that process.
01:01:14
Speaker
And then three months later, they go and do some cambo or some psilocybin or whatever, and they put that respect, reverence, intentionality and integrity into that process.
01:01:26
Speaker
And then, you know, a year after they've got out of addiction and they've had four or five experiences, they kind of look back at that process and they see that they've been caring for themselves and they've been looking after themselves. They've been putting intentionality, integrity into that journey for an extended period. And they think, oh, wow, guess what? I've been looking after myself for a year.
01:01:54
Speaker
25 years before I did Ibogaine, I didn't do that at all. All I did was poison myself and self medicate myself and deny myself and isolate myself. This last year has been about me growing and expanding and putting ritual into my life and caring for myself and loving for myself. And because I'm doing that, I'm attracting different people and different energy into my life. Isn't it fantastic?
01:02:25
Speaker
For me, I think the big thing about doing these plant medicines experiences is that it sets you up for being you.
Creating a Supportive Recovery Community
01:02:35
Speaker
It sets you up for living your life in a really new and meaningful way to look at the important adjectives, which, you know,
01:02:48
Speaker
When we're connected to addiction, the important act is joy and happiness and to eat and whatever. They're really pithy and not important. The big adjectives in life is about enrichment, it's about reward, it's about education. If somebody can start living their lives where
01:03:15
Speaker
they're wanting to expand and they're wanting to improve and they're wanting to be kinder to themselves and they're wanting to try things, then they're living a good life. And that's the end game is for the clients to attach to what they consider to be a good life for them, for them to condition themselves rather than to be conditioned. Yeah.
01:03:44
Speaker
So yeah, I suppose to a certain extent, I do want my clients to come back and talk to me for a while, but I'm also the kind of guy that
01:03:58
Speaker
You know, when when they're ready to to move forward on their own, they've got to do that. You've got you've got to cut the April sprints. And invariably, what happens of most of my clients is they become my friends. And, you know, six months later or a year later, we're calling each other up and in your fantastic expression before we started this podcast is shoot the breeze.
01:04:28
Speaker
And I think this is the really great thing about the plant medicine scene is that you meet so many fantastic people in it and so many decent people in it that you start to populate your world with a new village and a new lot of people who understand the journey you've been through, understand who you are, understand the trials and tribulations of your life and they can be there to encourage you
01:04:53
Speaker
and they can be there to validate the changes that they see in you. That's some major thing and we all become each other's village. We had this conversation before about this idea of the English village not having the cricket team and not having the pub.
01:05:14
Speaker
and not having the kindly neighbors talking to each other over the fence. Well, maybe if we do this job well and we open our arms up to people who have taken this journey, we can actually perhaps replicate that village and replicate that connection for our clients so they feel that they're seen and that they're heard and that they're respected.
Warning Against Spiritual Bypassing
01:05:40
Speaker
That's awesome. I love it. But actually, here's a question that came to me that I was wondering. I feel like there's a lot of folks out there that are on their plant medicine journey that are not necessarily addicted to something or they may have overcome that addiction. And now they're at a stage where they're doing it more for self-development, psycho-spiritual growth. Do you work with folks like that? What's your kind of modus operandi with folks like that?
01:06:10
Speaker
I don't see any difference between the psycho-spiritual client and the addict. Addiction is a psycho-spiritual malaise. It's about not knowing who you are. It's about feeling inauthentic. It's exactly the same narratives at the end of the day. People who are depressed or feel anxious, it's because in some way they feel inauthentic. The difference is, maybe a lot of people are
01:06:40
Speaker
you know, if they're depressed, they might be kind of almost addicted to the depression, almost addicted to being a victim. They're almost, you know, or they are addicted to their Prozac or they are addicted to, you know, many, many things. You know, some people might be, you know, Gabo Matei talks about actually the biggest addiction in the Western world going on at the moment, the addiction to money and power.
01:07:09
Speaker
You know, I don't see the difference between a business executive who feels that to provide for his family, it's okay to go and work 70 hours a week and never be available to his wife and his children and expect his children to grow up and be centered and grounded.
01:07:31
Speaker
when they've got no father there. But that's an addiction in our society that has become so acceptable. Oh, he's such a good father. He works all of these hours to provide for his family. He's not providing for his family. He's not providing the essentials, which is love and compassion and consistency.
01:07:54
Speaker
You know, children need four things at the end of the day. They need a roof over their head. They need nourishment. Most of us get that. Then they need unconditional love. Most of us don't get that. And then fourthly and most importantly, they need consistency. They need ritual. And many of us don't get that either. So for me, I can't see much of a difference between someone who's
01:08:24
Speaker
smoking a whole load of crack than somebody who whole reason for living is to get an extra zero on their monthly paycheck. You know, they're disconnected from themselves. They're inauthentic. They're chasing the wrong narratives. They're not getting to know themselves in any way. So, yeah.
01:08:52
Speaker
What about folks that have done some inner work and are at a stage where let's say they've realized these things, they're making more time for the family. What if they're, I think David Nichols was saying it, what if they're well people that just want to, how do you work with folks like that? Or is it just a continuation of the same finding your own narrative? What we have to be really careful of is what I would call spiritual bypassing.
01:09:20
Speaker
And I think this is a really important thing to talk about. And we often get this when people come out of the Ibogaine and they feel fantastic and they feel connected and they feel, oh, what I need to do, I need to go down and an hour of holotropic grieving every morning, followed by cold baths, Wim Hof, followed by meditation, followed by gym, followed by smudging and saging my house. Aren't I spiritual? No, you're fucking not.
01:09:50
Speaker
You're an actor. You're pretending to be something. You're not engaging in life. You're doing the same things as you did before, but you're... Don't get me wrong. I think there's place for all of these. And I think it's important practice. But a lot of people decide that once they've done, I began, they have to show the world and they have to be validated by the world that they recovered and that they're perfect.
01:10:19
Speaker
And as we spoke about before, the perfect human being is imperfect. They're crazy and chaotic. For me, the most spiritual living you can do is actually just to connect to life. If you've been given the opportunity to come down to Earth School for 60 or 70 or 80 years, where you've come here to educate yourself through your experience, it's not about
01:10:45
Speaker
how much you learn or how much you become spiritual. I think the spiritual process is about how much you are willing to connect to your life in a meaningful and important way.
Embracing the Human Experience
01:11:04
Speaker
I love that Earth is cool. That is really awesome. You know, I get Ibogaine clinics to phone me up and say, hey, Anders, we've got this amazing aftercare protocol. You know, we check in in the morning, we check in feelings, and then we have breakfast, and then we have a group session, and we follow that up by some holotropic breathing, and then we go and have a vegan lunch, and then after vegan lunch,
01:11:32
Speaker
individual therapy followed by, I don't know, meditation and yoga and then we have dinner in the evening and then we have a circle and we talk about our feelings and then we have an hour of free time. Isn't it fantastic? And I'm kind of like, no, fuck off. Where's the Frisbee?
01:11:53
Speaker
Where's the table? Where's the badminton? You've got to remember that most of the people who are there are there because they've had their childhoods robbed from them in some way. That somewhere aged eight or nine, they've had to become an adult and they've had to pretend not to be a child anymore.
01:12:12
Speaker
So for me, this idea of connecting to nature and connecting to play is the most spiritual thing you can do. It is the kindest thing you can do to your inner child. It's the kindest thing you can do to yourself to have that deep and profound connection with what you can see around you, what is there in front of you. Why try to transcend the human experience
01:12:40
Speaker
So there's a tight rope to be played. I do think, personally, I find that for me, the greatest work I can do with psychedelics now are the lower dose stuff, where take a gram and go out into the countryside and connect to the trees and see them dance again and see them breathe again.
01:13:05
Speaker
and to be able to hear the wind and feel the birds and to feel part of the universe as opposed to disconnected from it. And that for me is a far more natural form of spirituality than trying to be too
01:13:25
Speaker
kind of spiritual, you know, I see it a lot, especially with the young guys in their 20s, they do a bit of ayahuasca and they do some magic mushrooms and all of a sudden, you know, they're trying to sit on float on top of a mountain and they're trying to, who were they trying to impress? Who were they doing it for? Is it really about growth? Or is it really about this idea about look at me?
01:13:55
Speaker
Look at how well I am. Look at how perfect I am. And it still comes back to this idea. You're right, this is such an important thing because with the spiritual bypassing we can go straight through the mystical experiences, you know, understanding the mind of the universe, God.
01:14:18
Speaker
and forget about our traumas. And I think it's so many folks, young folks, especially on the journey need a wake up call. And it's like, yeah, like for me right now, the biggest joy, as soon as we finish this call, I'm going to take my dog to the beach. We go through a little wooded area, then we're going to go to the beach. And I'll just look at her running around with inexplicable joy. And I can't think of a
01:14:45
Speaker
A nicer thing to do today. I will certainly won't be sitting meditating for two hours. I'm sorry, but yeah, I mean I'll finish on this is that you know, I did some five me I'm not long ago and Oddly enough Jeremy wheat who you interviewed the other day he had he has a powerful role in something he said in that and
01:15:09
Speaker
around that, but I was with my business partner, Ben Talb, and we'd been to Portugal, and we'd done five MEO, and I had this incredible experience where I sort of fell and enveloped into the universe and became a vibration, and I was in this fantastic space of incredible love, and I felt all of my pain purge out of me, and it was
01:15:34
Speaker
absolutely probably the most beautiful experience I ever had of my life. I turned around to Ben and I said, wow, that was something really deep and that was something really special. Really weird thing is there's a part of me that doesn't want to do that again. And after what I've gone through, I can't understand why I don't want to do it again. And so Ben turned around to me and said, well, you know,
01:16:02
Speaker
You're kind of returning to the source. You're kind of returning to what you really are when you do the five MEO experience. And suddenly you find yourself on Earth and you're having a human experience. Why the fuck would you want to transcend the human experience if that's the gift you've been given? And I thought, wow, that is amazing. And this ties into something that Jeremy said to me once,
01:16:33
Speaker
He was just talking about things going on, et cetera, et cetera. And I asked him why he was facing something very, very, very tough at that time. He said, well, if I don't do it now, what's the point of being at school?
01:16:50
Speaker
And that blew me away, this idea that we'll come down here. The gift we've been given for the 50, 60, 70 years is to go to Earth school and become enriched and rewarded about our experience on Earth.
01:17:05
Speaker
And for me, I'm gonna go a bit woo-woo here, a bit kind of hippie, but for one of the things that really sort of centers me is this idea that maybe 50, 51 years ago, when I'm back in the matrix, when I'm back in the full consciousness, somebody said, hey, and it's your turn to go down to earth again. It's your turn to go back to school. What curriculum do you wanna do this time?
01:17:33
Speaker
And I probably turned around and said, you know what, I think I could learn an awful lot from abandonment and addiction. Send me down to do that. And that's how I've seen this kind of journey out of addiction. My addiction has been the vehicle that has brought me to a place where I feel like I'm actually living life fully and authentically.
01:18:00
Speaker
And most of the people around me who were chasing the big jobs and they're chasing the cars and they're chasing the second homes and they're chasing the private education and they're chasing, chasing, chasing, chasing. They're chasing and missing the opportunity to live life. So in many ways, you know, maybe addicts
01:18:25
Speaker
And the addicts who get out of addiction and the people who have struggled, I'm not just talking addicts, but the people who have really, really, really struggled with themselves and felt inauthentic and then found a way out of that. These are the people who are really, really living life properly. And actually their addiction or their problems or their mourning or whatever's happened to them has been the gift that brought them to a place where they can start living.
Role of Plant Medicine in Recovery Journeys
01:18:54
Speaker
that spirituality for me is appreciating your freedom when you're released from prison.
01:19:05
Speaker
Well, that's some really profound stuff to end on. I really love it. I also am of the conviction that our soul chooses based on some limited information, not the whole of the life to be lived, but we choose the experiences we are to have. And then when we die, we go back, we do like a
01:19:27
Speaker
post-mortem like a review with our whatever spirit elders guides and it may be an infinite process to maybe there's like some type of end to it but we may never know at least in our human form but um
01:19:44
Speaker
Yeah, really. Thank you so much Anders for all your insights. That was a great note to end on. But just before we end the conversation, can you tell folks where they can find you on the internet? Yeah, sure.
01:20:04
Speaker
my and my team and we do psycho-spiritual and we do addiction work and we, you know, I work with sort of six or seven of the top global Ibogaine providers. I also work with other plantless and practitioners. We have two websites. We have www.ibogaine-counselling.com and we also have www.psychadelicsforaddiction.com
01:20:33
Speaker
Um, and basically within those two, there's a team of about three or four of us. Um, I'm not the only one who, who sets people up for treatments. You know, we've got spare, um, you know, we, we've got to be really, really careful that
01:20:56
Speaker
You know, if we're dealing with a girl who's gone through sexual trauma, etc, etc, that, you know, maybe a female therapist or a female guide is going to be best placed to move her forward rather than me or Ben or something like that. We have Ben Taub, who's an anthropologist by training at Sverre as an etho psychiatrist. We have another couple of people coming onto the team as well.
01:21:25
Speaker
And yeah, you know, we're also sort of moving into other areas now where we're doing sort of eco psychology, nature walks on low dose mushrooms and things like that, which is kind of pretty groundbreaking work. I mean, you know, people can really start to connect to themselves and start to
01:21:49
Speaker
see what's wrong in their lives on these fantastic walks in nature. And certainly I'm not the therapist there, it's definitely the mushrooms, definitely nature which do the work. I think the other thing to really understand is, and I just know the last thing I want to say before I go, is
01:22:10
Speaker
The way we look at it is that nobody knows the client better than the client themselves. We are not going to tell the client who they should be or what they should be. Nobody knows a client better than themselves. Our job is to perhaps facilitate that belief in the client that they are the ones who can take ownership of their lives. They're the ones who can make it move forward.
01:22:35
Speaker
and they're the ones who can be empowered by that process. Don't hand over your recovery to an outside agency. That's the really important thing. Don't do it for your mother. Don't do it for your father. Don't do it because NA or AA tell you to do it. You do it for yourself and you do it on your own terms. And our job is to help facilitate that.
01:23:05
Speaker
It's amazing. I love the work you're doing and of course I wish you many successes and to continue to expand your team and touch the lives of more people that need some help along their journey. Love it. I look forward to coming out to Portugal and perhaps going for a walk with you.
01:23:25
Speaker
Absolutely. I was just going to say when you were talking about doing these nature walks, we should see if we can organize a little maybe three, four long weekend type of retreat, see if we can get folks that are up for it.
Future of Plant Medicine Work
01:23:40
Speaker
I know some folks that we can organize it with. I've been working with some
01:23:50
Speaker
reporters basically from, I can't say the news agency, but one of the major news agencies, and these reporters are foreign correspondents, war correspondents. Essentially, they've been trained to walk into war like soldiers. They've been trained to walk into war. A lot of them have got pretty profound, complex post-traumatic stress disorder.
01:24:16
Speaker
And this idea of doing these nature walks is almost sort of like training them to walk out of war. And with the use of the connection to nature is to find themselves, to find some sort of homeostatus again, to kind of walk away from the trauma.
01:24:39
Speaker
They've been trained to walk into trauma. Somebody needs to train them to walk out of trauma. That's the work we're doing at the moment. So that's been really, really exciting because, you know,
01:24:56
Speaker
there's been some really sort of profound epiphanies for these people really sort of the move forward and they found themselves again, they found joy, they found happiness. They realize that they don't have to live in fear anymore. So I think this whole sort of psychedelic renaissance is really, really, really interesting at the moment. There's going to be a lot of people getting healed by it.
01:25:28
Speaker
Oh yeah, I think so. I think so. I love the work you're doing. You're definitely at the forefront of this movement. You're on the front lines. Again, Anders, thank you so much for gracing us with your presence, your insights, your wisdom.
01:25:46
Speaker
And I'm looking forward to your own podcast that you're saying. Thank you for listening to Connecting Minds.
01:26:10
Speaker
We hope you enjoyed this conversation and found it interesting, illuminating, or inspiring. For episode show notes, links, and further information on our guests, please visit christianjordanov.com. If you found this episode valuable, please share it with someone who might also enjoy it. Thank you for being here.