Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Ayahuasca and Shamanic Exploration w/ Matthew Pallamary - Connecting Minds Podcast Ep13
125 Plays4 years ago
Episode shownotes: https://christianyordanov.com/13-matthew-pallamary
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/JECvEsw5hqw
Matt Pallamary (Mateo) is an award winning writer, musician, and sound healer who has been studying shamanism all of his life and incorporates shamanic practices into his daily life as well as into his writing and teaching.
In this episode we talk about Mateo’s exploration of shamanic cultures and their medicines, including Ayahuasca. We also talk about other cool stuff, so tune in as there are many gems of wisdom from Mateo’s decades-long study of shamanism, sound healing, and plant medicines!
Links to Mateo’s books, website, and social media:
Website: http://mattpallamary.com
Books: http://mattpallamary.com/writings/
Mystic Ink Publishing: https://mysticinkpublishing.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattpallamary
Amazon author page: http://t.co/wo9nR2vYsf?amp=1
Topics discussed on this episode:
- Mateo’s background and his explorations with psychoactive and consciousness-expanding substances.
- His experience with Ayahuasca ceremonies and shamanism in Peru. The Dieta and other plants he’s worked with.
- The time between psychedelic experiences is where the real work gets done.
- How working with the medicine (Ayahuasca) can help you get past the mind/head/ego and become more heart-centered. Becoming essence-centered allows you to see you are the creator of you own ego, which is a set of coping strategies designed to help your survive in the world.
- Our primary wound is abandonment.
- Stanislav Grof’s perinatal matrices.
- The two basic fears we have - entrapment and abandonment.
- The difference between LSD and Ayahuasca.
- Why it’s so important to do Ayahuasca with an experienced shaman/facilitator in a ceremony.
- Mateo’s experience with Huachuma (San Pedro) and Peyote.
- How sound can be used for healing. Mateo talks about his work with sound healing as a musician. The importance of energy and intention.
- The plant Dieta and becoming one with the jungle.
- The importance of integrity for facilitators.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Connecting Minds 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. Here is your host, Christian Yordanov.
Welcome to Episode 13 with Mateo
00:00:41
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Connecting Minds podcast, episode 13. Thank you so much for joining me today. I'm Christian Jourdanoff, your host. And on this episode, I have a very special conversation between myself and Matthew J. Palamari.
00:00:56
Speaker
also known as Mateo, to his friends. And I feel blessed to now consider him a friend. He's just such a warm, inviting guy. From the first time I emailed him, it's just been a blessing to connect with this
Mateo's Journey in Writing and Shamanism
00:01:09
Speaker
man. He's got a lot of experience with ayahuasca. He studied shamanism for decades. So it was really nice to kind of pick his brain about his experiences with the psychedelic medicine ayahuasca.
00:01:24
Speaker
as well as his other adventures with the Shamans around in South America, in North America, as well as we talk about a lot of other cool stuff like sound healing, the diet that one undertakes before doing the ayahuasca journey, and just a ton of other, there's a ton of gems in this conversation, I won't really spoil any of them.
00:01:51
Speaker
A little bit of background about Mattel, he is an award-winning writer, musician, and sound healer who has been studying shamanism all of his life and incorporates shamanic practices into his daily life as well as into his writing and teaching.
From Tough Beginnings to Spiritual Exploration
00:02:06
Speaker
I have a few of his books. He's written a ton of books. I think it's 15.
00:02:09
Speaker
at this point, and one of his latest books is his own memoir, Spirit Matters, which I would highly recommend that you either read or get the audiobook of it. It's only like four bucks on Audible, or you can get it for free if you join Audible, if you've not joined yet.
00:02:31
Speaker
it is such an interesting basically account of his life. He's had a pretty tough childhood, pretty rough in Boston and how that basically turned into his exploration into psychoactive substances and then ayahuasca and seeking out these medicines and learning from the shamans from the traditional healers which
00:02:58
Speaker
I have a great interest and it's truly fascinating stuff. What these indigenous culture, the knowledge and the healing potential of their medicines have. So his book, his memoir is kind of an account of how he got started with that.
00:03:14
Speaker
And we are eagerly expecting the follow up to that sequel, where I'm sure there'll be a lot more riveting adventures. I've actually listened to his audiobook memoir, Spirit Matters, I think at this point, something like three and a half times. So it's that cool.
00:03:34
Speaker
And you have a couple more of his books. He got nonfiction books as well as fiction books. So whatever tickles your fancy, he will cater too. But we will have links to all of that in the episode show notes and on the website. So you can, if the conversation peaks your interest, there will be links for you to check out.
Mateo's Psychedelic and Shamanic Path
00:03:53
Speaker
So without further ado, I present to you Matthew J. Palamari. All right, Mateo, thank you so much for spending the time with us today.
00:04:03
Speaker
Thank you for having me.
00:04:06
Speaker
So this last week after we spoke, I got your book, your memoir, Spirit Matters, and I got it on audiobook, which is great because you read it, right? And I just have one question before we start. It wasn't very clear after listening to the book once and then the second part another kind of time. Have you ever in your life tried any mind altering substances? That wasn't very clear.
00:04:37
Speaker
Every one I can get my hands on. I mean, I'm sure I missed a few now in this day and age, but I mean, I was really on a mission to try everything possible. I've never tried crack. I don't want to do that because I see what that does, but I've done enough other stuff all around it to have a sense of what it is. And I know myself better to be tempted.
00:05:04
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. What struck me from your book is that maybe you can actually get into a little bit of your history. Take your time, of course, give the listeners a bit of your background. But what struck me is that you've been through a lot of pain, a lot of kind of tough stuff. So maybe give us some background on your life and how you got to where you are today.
00:05:32
Speaker
Sure. So I grew up in Boston in a neighborhood called Dorchester, or as we say Dorchester. Dorchester. And there's the famous actor, Mark Wahlberg. We call him Machi Mach. I grew up within a couple of blocks of where he grew up, just to give you a sense of where I come from. He's a lot younger than me, so I was there before he was. But the same neighborhood is the point.
00:06:01
Speaker
And I grew up with a lot of violence. My father went to prison when I was four or five, and I grew up on the streets, street fighter, all that stuff that goes with it, and a lot of violence in my family. But I constantly sought after All Third States. I started when I was really young, hyperventilating.
00:06:27
Speaker
And then I was sniffing glue, and then I was drinking, and then I found a pot. But interestingly enough, out of all the things that I tried, the psychedelics really talked to me. And my first acid trip was 1972. And I've done, I don't know, I'm sure there's somebody out there who's done more acid than me, but I don't know who they are at this point.
00:06:55
Speaker
Same with mushrooms and other stuff. And then as I got further into it, as I got more access, I got to experience more and more things. If anybody's familiar with Sasha Shillgan, who's considered, for lack of better words, the grandfather of designer drugs, I was good friends with Sasha and his wife, Anne, who actually inspired me in a big part in writing my memoir.
00:07:22
Speaker
So, I went through, let's see, 1996, I went to my first entheobotany seminar. And then I went to one in Uxmal and three in Palenque Chiapas in like 99, 2000, 2001, 2002, where I got to know Terrence McKenna really good and Paul Stamets and all of those people.
00:07:49
Speaker
And that's where I got exposed to all the research chemicals. A lot of them at the time were still legal. At that point, 5MeO was legal. We used to get it from China. So one of my missions in life is to try everything at least once. Some things I won't, you know. Things get too far weird out there. I'm not interested.
00:08:14
Speaker
And now at this point in my path with all the time I spent in the jungle and all that, there are particular substances and energies that I'm drawn to, that I feel are consciousness expanding. And other ones I don't want to have anything to do with, particularly alcohol. And, you know, crack and heroin, the ones that are very damaging that I don't feel are really consciousness expanding at all. I'm all about consciousness expanding.
00:08:41
Speaker
Yeah, I can really tell that from your books and the stuff you talk on other podcasts, which kind of brings me to the, I suppose, the bulk of our conversation is what I'm really interested in is kind of getting your insights and experiences with the ayahuasca and the shamanism stuff. So can you tell us how did you first start going down to Peru and what were your experiences with ayahuasca then?
00:09:11
Speaker
Okay. You know, that's like a volume of encyclopedias, but I'll get with you as straight as I can. I first, I was researching, so I wrote a historical novel called Land Without Evil, which was published in 1999. And I did two and a half years of research at the UCSD University of California in San Diego, the library there. They have a massive medical library.
00:09:38
Speaker
And I started reading about plants. It was actually, even now I'm thinking back, I was working on a book even before Lamb Without Evil, where I discovered those plants. At that point, I actually took 13 years off from doing any mind altering substances. In fact, I wouldn't even have coffee. I wouldn't even take Aspen if I had a headache. I was a vegetarian. After doing lots of things, I thought I should go baseline. I tell people all the time that if you're getting altered all the time,
00:10:08
Speaker
And then you go baseline, baseline actually becomes another altered state of consciousness. And, you know, you need to explore all of them. So I would go there. This was pre-internet and I would download, I would log on with the telephone, bulletin board modem, and I would download pages of research. And then I would go to the library and I would spend like $30 for a copy card and get all these books.
00:10:38
Speaker
And I would get a mile and copy all the relevant stuff. And when I first read about ayahuasca, and I read it was called the vine of the soul and the vine of death. All of a sudden I was driven. I got experienced that. And I researched it for 10 years before I found it. So we're talking, you know, we're talking 19, maybe 1990 ish.
00:11:03
Speaker
And I studied it for about 10 years. And then when I went to the entheobotany seminars, I ran into somebody who was working with it, who had a lot of experience with it, who had been going into the jungle. And there were actually shamans coming up here to the United States, obviously undercover. And the guy who was running things that kept trying to get in and he kept blowing me off, probably because I can be a little edgy sometimes, finally let me in.
00:11:32
Speaker
And I went to one ceremony and I was just blown away, like, okay, this is for me. So I convinced them into letting me go to the jungle. So I was working with it up here a bit. And then I started going into the jungle and I've been going into the jungle now for 20 years. It's been a few years lately because of life and all that. But I did, I've done a dozen extended ayahuasca dietas.
00:11:59
Speaker
uh, 10 days each over the years. I also work with the Shepebo Indians quite a bit. And I worked up here, um, with the two or three, I've studied in about maybe three or four different traditions. And I was thinking back and at the peak of it, I was actually doing about 30 ceremonies a year, um, for a couple of years. And I've also learned about all the other plans, San Pedro, Wachuma,
00:12:25
Speaker
Syrian roux, and also all the other substances that I could get my hands on. I did a lot with mushrooms and all that. So I've been very intensely involved with ayahuasca. I've read tons of stuff on it. I researched on it. And of course, one of the key elements of shamanism is learning by experiential knowledge as opposed to book learning. So I wanted to experience things directly.
00:12:52
Speaker
which I have many times over now. And then I got to the point, now I like to say I'm permanently altered or I'm in a state of integration 24-7. And if I never touch another substance ever again, I'm fine. Because I have that perspective now that I like to think of it as being like broken loose. I'm flexible. One of the big things of the center of the universe, shorthand for the book with the long title there,
00:13:23
Speaker
is that reality happens outside of us. I can't control the fires and the hurricanes, but I can control my reaction and how I put it together in my mind and what kind of a reality do I want to create with the raw materials that are put toward me externally. So I'm to the point where if I never did anything ever again, I'm fine. But all of my mentors are aging or passing.
00:13:49
Speaker
I spent all these years studying and I feel now a strong duty and obligation to carry the torch. So I've been leading ceremonies now for about 14 years.
Insights on Shamanism and Personal Growth
00:14:01
Speaker
Sometimes being the leader, sometimes co-leading, because all of this knowledge and experience that I have, and I feel very, it's important for me and I'm really glad, like I really appreciate the work you're doing, aside from this stuff, your regular work, you know, what you do.
00:14:18
Speaker
for the world and for people and your healing. I got a lot of respect for that. So one of my missions in life is to inform people, especially younger people. And one of the reasons I wrote my memoir is, hey, I went down this dark alley and I got mugged over there. So I already did that for you. So you don't have to do that. You can read about me doing it and maybe you won't have to go there. Go the other side, go the other road.
00:14:46
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I already looked down there. You don't need to go there. I went there for you. But this stuff is powerful medicine. And it's not something to be taken lightly. And so I want people to go in with their eyes wide open. I want people to be informed. And that's like kind of my mission these days is to inform people so that their eyes were wide open. So nobody's going in blindly and thinking, oh, you know,
00:15:13
Speaker
I'm going to have a wonderful time. No, this is not easy work. Yeah, exactly. This is why I wanted to kind of bring you on because you have all this experiential knowledge. And I think people really, we would really appreciate, could you, because you've led ceremonies and you've co-led ceremonies now for so long,
00:15:33
Speaker
Could you actually paint because and you're you're able to paint a really good picture like I was listening to kind of chapter 30 30 to 40 of your book today, you know, and you have a real good way of painting how you were going through the jungle and you know these spiders and I was just thinking we were camping at the start of the month, you know, and just dealing with the mosquitoes.
00:15:56
Speaker
and the flies was an ordeal, right? And you're there in the jungle, so can you paint a picture of us? What's it like going down to the jungle? And then what is it like actually participating in the ceremony? What do you do? What does the shaman do? What's kind of the whole process? Okay, I'll try to keep this within 18 weeks in my explanation. And cut me up once you hit my on button. Cut me up whenever you feel like you want to.
00:16:26
Speaker
But as you know, because you've been reading my stuff, I refer to myself as a perspiring writer. I've been writing for well over 30 years, maybe 36 now. I've been teaching for over 30 at major writers' conferences. And one of my goals in life is to be able to take something like a visionary experience, which by its very nature is non-rational, and to try to put it into words to convey to people
00:16:55
Speaker
that experience so they can live vicariously through me and get a sense of it through the words. And I'm getting better and better at it. I would hope after all these years. And the key that I've discovered is metaphor. And metaphor is one thing that tells you about something else. So you could say, simple one, sharp as a knife. Well, everybody knows
00:17:21
Speaker
by putting their finger how sharp a knife is. So if I were to say sharp as a knife, they can get a sense of what I'm trying to relate to. So one of the things about shamanism is that shamanism is really all about energy. And in a shamanic world view, absolutely everything is energy. So the shamanic path, so to speak, is called the power path.
00:17:48
Speaker
And the power path is learning about energy. And I'm talking about energy on all aspects. The toughest energy to master is emotional energy. It's mercurial. It can mug you. And then there's the mind, and then there's the heart. And the heart is actually superior to the mind. But we're mind-oriented.
00:18:13
Speaker
When I first went down into the jungle the first time I got to go and I realized that the whole experience, the diet is about purification. And in the jungle in Peru, they call ayahuasca la perga, which is the purge. And it clears you out physiologically, spiritually, emotionally, mentally. I mean, it really goes in there and it stirs up
00:18:41
Speaker
all your subconscious material, much of it which is hidden, shadow work. It's all buried in there. So my first time I went to the jungle, which is the ending of Spirit Matters, my memoir, I had the most profound spiritual experience of my life. And I won't spoil it, but it tied in with my mother and her sense of spirituality and the profound experience I had that literally changed my life and convinced me
00:19:12
Speaker
of the true nature of reality. So my driving force in my life now, I like to say, is my search for truth and to try to channel truth as much as I can. So when you go down there, first off, the diet is very strict. It's either oatmeal, rice, or quinoa, which is a grain, boiled. A baked or boiled platano, which is a banana, not ripe,
00:19:42
Speaker
and maybe chicken or fish. That's it for 10 days. No salt, no scents, no soaps, no shampoos, no toothpaste, nothing of any kind. And then you get fed twice a day. You generally have a ayahuasca ceremony generally every other night. Or if you're hardcore like me, now I'll do the every other night five and then I'll give me two of them by myself during the day.
00:20:13
Speaker
isolated in my tombos. The tombos are hot. And then every day, you get a picture of a plant or plants. So now they give me a cocktail of all these plants. I've worked with most of their plants now, and it's not easy. In fact, the last time I was down there, I said to the shaman, you know, I've been doing all these reactors, and they're really hard. And I was thinking on maybe doing Bolbin Sana, which is the first plant I worked with. It made it a little easier, you know? These have been tough. And he looks at me, looks me right in the eye, and he says to me,
00:20:43
Speaker
Yeah, you can do bobby and sauna, but we're going to hit you hard. I'm like, oh my God. And they did. They gave me this combination of six plants and it was one of the toughest things. They're all tough, but the benefits are amazing. So you go through this 10 day experience and during the course of that 10 day experience, the boundaries between your conscious and your subconscious become blurred. Your whole schedule is off. You're up most of the night doing ceremony.
00:21:13
Speaker
your dreaming gets really vivid, and your dreams and your visions overlap and mix, because it's all subconscious material. So as you become increasingly aware, physically you become more tired, more wore out, weaker, but that whole boundary becomes blurred, and you start having wild experiences. Clear audience, you know, I'm gonna walk up in the middle of the night from my voice yelling at me,
00:21:45
Speaker
And then the dreams and the visions work together because it's all subconscious material that's coming up. Now, if you are what I consider to be intellectually centered, which most of us are, and you try to deal with it all at once when it's coming, it's coming too fast. It's non-rational experience. You can't. The people I've seen who have had the hardest problems are like high-level PhDs. I had a renowned PhD in my lab.
00:22:14
Speaker
for three ceremonies in the fetal position because he couldn't handle it. Because he's used to controlling his reality with his mind. And suddenly you're put into a situation where that doesn't work anymore. And if you've been in your whole life controlling your reality with your mind, which most of us do, suddenly you're in a place where it doesn't work. And then you're terrified. And of course, the more you struggle with it, the worse it goes. So you have to learn to dance with it. You have to accept what's unfolding.
00:22:45
Speaker
You can think about it while it's happening a little bit, haha, but you can deal with it. But it's really the integration that's important. And what I tell people all the time is that in many respects, psychedelic experiences are wonderful. But in many respects, it's the time between those experiences that is really where the work is done. So I can't tell you how many people I have seen who have had an ayahuasca experience
00:23:12
Speaker
found some insight about themselves like, Oh, Hey, I'm greedy or Hey, I'm really a jerk about this or whatever. And they go, Oh, I've seen it. Now I'm cured. No, you've only been shown it. It's so deeply ingrained that it's going to keep coming back. So if you don't take what you learn in those visionary states and apply them to your regular day to day life where everything really happens, then you're just wasting your time. You're not, you, you've only been shown it.
00:23:39
Speaker
And it's a persistent thing that comes back. And I can get into the nitty gritty of those details of your life. But if you don't deal with it in your everyday life when it arises, then you're not doing the work. You're a fake. So I've seen people who have, oh, I've seen it. Now I've seen the light. Now I'm enlightened. No way. It never ends. And there's a beauty to that. It's infinite. I don't consider myself to be enlightened. I consider myself to be more aware than I was 10 years ago.
00:24:09
Speaker
But you never arrive. In the same token, people have called me a shaman. I hate that. I don't like to call myself a shaman. I don't like to be referred to it. I don't. I don't. And then I started making too much of a stink about it. And then I was drawing too much attention to it. So then I did a podcast and I was going on, kind of like I am now.
Gurdjieff's Teachings and Shadow Integration
00:24:27
Speaker
I said, everybody's a shaman, only most of us don't know it. And that's a good resolution. Because that whole pop culture thing, you know, no, no.
00:24:36
Speaker
Let me go off on a little thing and then you can jump back in and whack me in the head and wake me up here. But I don't know if you ever heard of, or anybody has ever heard of Gurjif. Gurjif was a renowned Russian mystic. He was actually Turkish and Armenian, but he was Russian and he worked, he was famous with his work with, so there was Gurjif Uspensky, Uspensky was a Russian philosopher. And then Carl Jung,
00:25:01
Speaker
was actually kind of a student of Gurdjieff in his later years, like during World War II. Gurdjieff was born in something like 1895, and he was a secret of truth. Went all over the world, very powerful man, and most of what he learned ties directly into shamanism. So according to Gurdjieff,
00:25:22
Speaker
And I believe this, and when I did an in-depth two-year shamanic study course, and when we were well into it, I said, this is Gurjeep, isn't it? And the teacher smiled at me. He goes, exactly. So Gurjeep says that we come into the world as essence, essence, spirit. The first thing we do is we emulate the behavior of everybody around us, whether it's our parents or our kid next door, our brothers and sisters. How else do we learn except by copying?
00:25:52
Speaker
And we're copying strategies to cope with the world that we have, but that doesn't make them right. That's how we're learning. But in doing that, in doing that, reflecting and emulating and copying, we're creating, we create a personality. We create a personality because we need a personality to function within the world. And when I say personality, I mean ego, or I like to say egos, and I like to tell everybody all the time, I'm a cast of thousands, right?
00:26:22
Speaker
I mean, we all are. I admit it. I face it. I deal with it. I learn from it. So we create the ego slash we create the personality and we do such a good job with our creation that we inhabit our creation and we become our creation. And then we think that we are our creation, but we're not our ego.
00:26:44
Speaker
We created it, but we're so identified with it, we've done such a good job, and it kind of gets on autopilot and remote control, and then we identify with it, and we think that's what we are, and we lose track. That is personality slash ego. That's the head. So when you work with this medicine, and by the way, medicine's not the only way. I know ways of doing this without medicine. Everybody's different. Me, I'm a hard head. I need to be hit upside the head hard to wake up, and even then, I don't always make it, right?
00:27:13
Speaker
But when you do this medicine, you get past the mind, the ego, you deal with it, and you get into your heart and you begin to listen to your heart, as the Bible used to say, or still says, the still small voice within. And if you continue to do this work and you face all the terror and the stuff and the barriers and this, that, and the other thing, then you start listening more to your heart than your head.
00:27:43
Speaker
And then you become heart centered. And then when you become, the more you become heart centered, you're shifting back from being head centered, from personality centered, being essence centered. So you can do it. You can do one ayahuasca session and suddenly become heart centered. It's a process of decoupling from the head, the ego. Yeah.
00:28:09
Speaker
Yes, you are correct. And by the way, it's been scientifically proven that there's a greater density of synapses in the heart than there is in the head for what that's worth. Because a lot of what I'm saying, I've read the science behind it. There's science behind it. These shamans knew science before science knew what science was. The things they do, there are elements of the dialect to talk about in a little bit. But point is, when you become essence centered, and you realize that the ego is actually your creation,
00:28:39
Speaker
So, you know, who's so in the zoo? Who's running the show? When you realize that you've been identifying with your own creation, you can begin to realize that you are actually the one who created it, which makes you your own God or goddess. Because now you're shifting back to what is normal. And as my mom used to say, then things aren't fast upwards, right? You're shifting your orientation and you become more heart centered. And when you become more heart centered,
00:29:08
Speaker
And you realize that all the ego things you created as strategies to cope with the world. So you go into this, getting opened up like that. Now, everything I'm talking about, all these sub-personalities, many of them are deeply connected to traumas that go all the way back to birth. So when you identify on that deep of a level, you're on auto
00:29:34
Speaker
And all the things and the bad habits that you have and the bad things that you do with your ego are your creations that you made to cope with the situation. And when you did that, you were unprecedented. You didn't know how to act. You get traumatized in some way and you look around or your mind makes up some way, you've been blacking out and forgetting it. And those become buried traumas. Those become buried energies. So when a shaman does what they call soul retrieval, they're going back to those particular traumas, which are stored energies.
00:30:05
Speaker
Now, when you do this medicine and in other ways, you go back and rediscover those traumas, and you're rediscovering them with what I like to call, and I'm sure anything I say, I don't know what's original, I'm a writer, I steal everything. But you go back with what I call witness consciousness. Or I like to say mommy's home or daddy's home. So now you can relive the experience, but you have that objective part of yourself that wasn't there the first time, and you can live through it and re-experience it.
00:30:34
Speaker
So you may go through intense grief, pain, anger. The things I've seen happen to people in ayahuasca sessions totally even have had to be physically restrained, right? You go back and you re-experience, but you re-experience it with this witness consciousness and in the re-experiencing of it, you get to see it with this objectivity and you get, you can let it go and you release it.
00:30:58
Speaker
And the interesting thing that happens is you release it and you become free of it and you're no longer holding that energy that you've been holding quite conceivably for a lifetime. And you get rid of what my old shamanic teacher would call energy leaks. So suddenly you're in another situation where normally it would drive you crazy. You get angry or want to be violent or something with somebody and somebody does, it drives you crazy. And you suddenly that situation comes up again and there's no emotional charge to it.
00:31:28
Speaker
And you realize you're free of it. And when you see that behavior and you realize, God, that's just how I was, then you have compassion. It's one of the reasons why shamans are called the wounded healer, because they have to resolve the wounds within themselves. And once they do, and they really understand the depth of it, they gain compassion. And when they have the compassion, there's a loss of judgment. And with that compassion and loss of judgment, they're able to heal others because they've been there.
00:31:58
Speaker
They've had the experience. So there's a whole thing of unraveling. And as you do this work, and you continue to do this, and these different diverse aspects all come home to your one eye, your one awareness. By the way, Jung called this individuation. You become more complete. You become more whole. And you start to integrate the shadow aspects of yourself. You integrate the darkness. You integrate the shadow. And you own it. Yeah, I created it.
00:32:28
Speaker
Because all of these elements, these personalities that you have created, you've created them and then you've abandoned them. You've ignored them and they're trying to help you. So the more you ignore them and the more arguments that you get into when you're an alcoholic or even people, you know, I like cannabis, I'll admit it, but people get lost in cannabis, sex, drugs, all those diversions are all there, particularly alcohol, to deaden your awareness and take you away from the truth that you're trying to escape from.
00:32:58
Speaker
The irony is the truth that you're trying to escape from is something that you created yourself and you have to face, you got to face the darkness, you got to face the terror. And those aspects are so dedicated to trying to help you that in some extreme aspects, they could even cause you to take your life because they don't want to be found out. Because in their own misguided way to protecting you, because you created them, you set them in motion, and then you abandon them. And abandonment wound is the biggest wound that we have.
00:33:26
Speaker
So when you start to face it and you face the darkness, then you start work on becoming whole. You said the abandonment wound is the biggest wound, is it? Yes. So we all, our primary wound we have is an abandonment wound. Now, I don't know if anyone is familiar with the work of Stanislaus Graf.
00:33:51
Speaker
But he started, I think, he started working with LSD in like 1947 as a psychologist before it became illegal. If I remember, he's Czechoslovakian. So he came up with the perinatal matrices. So he worked with LSD and then when it became illegal, he continued his research and he came up with what's now called holotropic breath work, which allows you to access it. So we have four primary elements of the perinatal matrix.
00:34:20
Speaker
One is you are in the womb, at bliss, oneness, amniotic bliss and oneness with mom. All your needs are met. You're surrounded by love. Everything's wonderful, expansive, all you need to take care of. That's the first one. The second one, all of a sudden one day, your pristine, wonderful environment becomes polluted. There's a flood of hormones and suddenly it contracts.
00:34:47
Speaker
So you go from expansive and loving and all your needs met to a sudden contraction and a pollution of your environment. That's the second perinatal matrix. The third perinatal matrix is when you get jammed into the birth passage. It's even worse. You're gonna totally in the opposite direction from expansive to contraction, right? And that gets unbearable and then suddenly, bang, you're coughed up into the world. Number four, you're abandoned from mom
00:35:14
Speaker
And what's the first thing that typically happens? You get smacked in the ass by the doctor, right? Welcome to the world. Here's all this blind, whatever you can see, there's all this light and you get smacked in the ass, right? Here you go. Come on down, right? It's stressful. Those are the first four. Those are the primary four. Now, everything that happens after that builds on those four emotional things. And when you break it all down to the basics, we have two basic fears.
00:35:42
Speaker
And I had a lady friend point this out to me when I was pontificating about this at one point. We either have a fear of abandonment or a fear of entrapment. Generally speaking, women have a fear of abandonment and men have a fear of entrapment. And what is entrapment? Being stuck, being caught in the third perinatal matrix. So generally, even going back to the mammal kingdom,
00:36:11
Speaker
Men are hunters. They go out. They want to be out hunting the mastodon or whatever. They're hunting. They like to be quiet and focused and on the hunt, and they like their time. You know, the whole cliche we have now, I want my man cave. They like to be, that's what they do. They like to stay focused. That's a function of survival. If you look at women, and no, I got to do it with a woman one time because she took me all wrong. But women, okay, they give birth. The fact that they give birth,
00:36:41
Speaker
automatically makes them vulnerable. The fact that they give birth and have to take care of the young makes them the ones responsible for the nest. They have to be in the nest to take care of the offspring. It's a biological imperative. So the guy goes out and hunts and brings back the food and, you know, as they say, brings home the bacon and the women have to keep the nest. They have to nurture.
00:37:07
Speaker
And them, and of course, even as humans, for our first few years of life, we're tremendously vulnerable. We don't just pop out in the world and function. We're mostly formed, and then as we grow in our earlier years, we're starting to put together greater cognition and all the other aspects of being alive. But we're vulnerable, and women are vulnerable. So when women, using any kind of tribal situation, I'm just using American Indians for an example,
00:37:36
Speaker
Women have to keep the nest and it behooves them to stay in touch with all the women surrounding them. It's why women are gossipy and guys are often quiet. Gossip is part of survival. Hey, there's wolves at the edge of the village, until everybody know, right? And so they have to yak among each other. It's part of biological survival, leaving back beyond human to the mammalian animal kingdom.
00:38:02
Speaker
They have to be gossipy. They have to keep in touch. They have to keep the nest. And they are dependent on the men to bring home the bacon. So there's that whole thing that goes on. If you want to break it down to the barebone basics, beer is contraction and love is expansion. It's like a universal secret. When you expand with love, you have to accept vulnerability.
00:38:31
Speaker
which is a part of it. And that's been one of my biggest struggles because I grew up violent. I grew up protecting people. I used to have to protect my mother and my sisters from violence growing up as a kid. I was the guy who jumped in and helped people and stood up and beat up bullies when bullies got out of hand. All that stuff I went through, right? But it comes down to those
Psychedelics in Self-Discovery
00:38:49
Speaker
basic things. Fear is contraction, love is expansion. Now we all have our subconscious shadow. And for the most part, most of us are denying it.
00:38:59
Speaker
And then you get the people who say, oh, you know, I just want to be a light worker and I just want to love, and I just want to embrace the light, and I just want to be light. Well, that's a load of crap. You have to embrace the light and the darkness in order to see the big picture. If you want to find the center, you have to embrace both. You have to honor both. And so the big thing of ayahuasca and other substances when you go in is when you take something into your body, you're actually asking a question.
00:39:30
Speaker
Oh, I'm going to take, I'm going to take these nine grams of mushrooms. What's going to happen? Right? Boom. Oh my God. Right. And of course, once you take it and you're on the way, particularly with 10 days of an ayahuasca, there ain't no turning back. So then you have to deal with all this stuff that comes up that's been hidden and much of it is terrifying. But in the darkness and in the fear lies the key to the secret of
00:39:59
Speaker
who we really are. And it's actually the path back to the heart. Now, the heart is tied in with the feminine. And the heart is tied into the right brain, which is tied into the heart, which is tied into intuition. And intuition is superior to logic. When I'm communicating, you and I are communicating right now and in our audience, whoever they are, bless you all, when you
00:40:29
Speaker
When I'm communicating now, I'm taking the thoughts that are in my mind. I'm putting them into a word at a time. I'm ordering my spoken thoughts in a particular way. You guys are all receiving them and putting them back in an order to make sense out of it. That's called serial data, one thing at a time. Boom, boom, boom, boom. That is the process of logic. That is the process of how things work. Intuition can take like a bunch of different things.
00:40:58
Speaker
and put them all together and suddenly get an epiphany or an insider. That's what that is. All those 27 different things that I was thinking about, they all this same thing, right? And boom, and that's a lot of what happens in ayahuasca. And it blows your mind away.
00:41:16
Speaker
Can I just briefly ask, because you mentioned the work of Stan Groff. So how, in terms of, you know, uprooting, uncovering these deep seated traumas, how is ayahuasca different from LSD when one starts uncovering all these, you know, birth traumas and other kind of aspects of the shadow? Yeah. Great, great question.
00:41:45
Speaker
In my humble opinion, and what I've learned and thought, LSD is more of an amplifier. So if I'm paranoid, LSD can make me more paranoid. A lot of the tragedies happened in the beginning where people who already had psychological issues, and then they gave them LSD when they were already not right. And of course, they were giving it to them without them knowing it. And you had some suicides and things like that because you just made things worse.
00:42:16
Speaker
Now, in my humble opinion, in my experience, ayahuasca has an innate intelligence. In the jungle, they call it the mother of all the plants. To me, it's the voice of Mother Earth. And it speaks in a different language that takes a while to interpret and figure out. So when I've done, so I was working with a personal coach for many years.
00:42:44
Speaker
And anybody else she was working with, if they were working with ayahuasca, she'd tell them, stop and quit doing it. But she told me to keep doing it. And it took me four, five, six years working with her and ayahuasca to figure out how to make them come together. And I finally got it. And I realized there are two different approaches to the same process. So she was very good and she could narrow in. She loved it. I'd call her a surgeon. She'd go right into a particular trauma and discover it or help you discover it.
00:43:12
Speaker
And then here you go, this is what it is, here's how you need to work with it. Iowaska just stirs everything up. It's like having a clear lake and a muddy bottom and going down and stirring and all that stuff underneath comes up and there's not necessarily a rhyme or a reason to it. So you have all this deep seated subconscious material and you have to deal with it, which is why I say that integration is so critical and so important. It comes up and it comes up in a funny form. How do you deal with it? How do you resolve it?
00:43:42
Speaker
find peace with it. How do you bring that denied aspect of yourself back and bring it home after it's been abandoned? And it's pissed off that it's been abandoned. So how do you bring it home and how do you integrate it? And then I'm talking subpersonalities, but they also work together so they can gang up and start making sense. One of my mentors has a wonderful book called Transforming Your Dragons.
00:44:12
Speaker
Tuning Your Fear Patterns into Power. It's by Jose Stevens. And it actually lays out in a different way the teachings of Gurdjieff. And it helps you to put, for lack of better words, a name and a face to identify the sub-personalities that we have and how to work with them. And without going too much off on a tangent, Gurdjieff said that we all have a primary, what he called a chief feature.
00:44:42
Speaker
And it's one of the things that we all choose individually as a challenge to ourselves to learn a particular lesson. And all this extensive work that I did, I found out that my chief feature is greed. But not greed like I want to own all the gold in the world and blah, blah, blah, but greed, the definition of greed being a fear of not having enough. And when I realized how deep-seated that was within me,
00:45:10
Speaker
started to see all the situations where, because I grew up poor. I was hoarding things. I was, if I saw something, I liked that by three of them and I'd stash them all in a drawer. I wouldn't even take them out of the packages. And I would eat horribly. I would eat because of, oh, I've got to have two burritos in dessert because I don't know what I'm going to eat again. Things like that. So there are a number of personality types and chief features, and then they, they go back and forth. In my case, I was told through a series of examinations and things,
00:45:41
Speaker
My role is I'm a sage with a warrior casting, which makes sense. So I never remember them all. Let's see if I can remember them. But there's a sage, a warrior, priest, king, server, artisan, and scholar. In this system, those are the primary personality types. And you can be more like I'm more of a sage.
00:46:08
Speaker
But I'm a sage with a warrior casting. So it's not hard and fast. We all have all of them in us, but we have ones that are predominant. So when you start to learn that, and you start to put a face on those particular sub-personalities, or even like, you know, he called them dragons, sometimes I'll call them demons. They're not, demon isn't always necessarily a bad thing. But they're the ignored and denied aspects, you know, of who we are.
00:46:36
Speaker
So when you accept who you are and what you are, and you've started to integrate that and you pass through the darkness, you get rewarded. So it's why I'm always saying that the jungle diets, the jungle dietas, they're not fun. They're ordeals. They're all ordeals. They're hard. But in the lore of the jungle, what they say is that the discomfort that you have to go through physically, physiologically, psychologically, spiritually,
00:47:03
Speaker
All that discomfort that you go through is the price you have to pay to prove that you're worthy of the gifts of the knowledge that the plants have to give you. So the more I've been on this path, the more I've been more and more inclined toward the plants and less and less toward anything. I did a lot of work with other things too. I did years of 5MEO, all this toad stuff that's now a big deal. I did that 20 years ago. I was done with it 10 years ago. I did last year, I was offered some
00:47:34
Speaker
Toad, I smoked some Toad, first time in a few years. It was great, it was going back home. But there is an expression among older psychonauts. And in essence, what it says is, you've gotten the message, you can hang up the phone now. Because you get to a point, I kind of mentioned it myself, you get to a point where I don't, if I don't ever do anything ever again, it doesn't matter at this point, because I'm like in a constant state of
00:48:04
Speaker
integration. Now I do it, if I do it, people ask me, like I had somebody ask me, I went out a couple months, I went out two or three times now, a couple months ago, I went out to the desert. I did a big dose of mushrooms with them. Because they want to be there. And I was facilitating it while doing it. And being a guy. But I wanted to be in the space with it too. All those years, I've taken hundreds and hundreds of people on their first LSD trips.
00:48:34
Speaker
And every time I did, I always took twice as much as they did. And then if they'd start to freak out and I'd be going, Hey, look, look at me. I took twice as much as you. I'm okay. Right. And they go, Oh yeah, okay. You know, it would really be a stabilizing thing. Cause I'm a hard head. You know, um, I really, I like to say, I like, like to leave no turn on stone or, or, you know, no, no brain cell, uh, on, on experimented with.
Shamanic Ceremony Dynamics
00:49:03
Speaker
And it's been a real, that curiosity has really driven me. Yeah, you sound like just the book, the center of the universe, it sounds like you've done a lot of research over the years. You're not just taking substances, you are a scholar of these medicines, you know, which, you know, this is partly why I was so drawn to when I listened to you on podcasts.
00:49:33
Speaker
just a knowledge seeping oozing out of every word you say every sentence is really you can see it's dripping with with experience and knowledge so that's that's really awesome but let me ask you this Mattel what what's the difference let's say I order some you know ayahuasca cook it on my pot here and drink it
00:49:59
Speaker
other than, you know, the diarrhea I'm probably going to get, how would that be different than doing it with like an experienced facilitator shaman, you know, that sings the Icarus and all that stuff? What, what, what, what, what really will be the difference there? That's a great question. You get an A for the question for starters. A plus. So in my humble opinion, except in rare instances, I think it should always be done in a ceremony.
00:50:30
Speaker
Now, when I'm in the jungle doing the dietas and I'm doing five ceremonies with the shaman, then they'll have me do two by myself. That's because of now all the experience I have and they're dealing with all the experience that I have. So I'm okay. But it's all about energy. So aside from the fact that you can take the word spirit and you can take the word energy and they're the same thing. So when they'll say the spirit of the plants,
00:51:00
Speaker
in the jungle, they're talking about the energies of the plants. Just like you have a particular personality, and I have a particular personality, and we're all unique in manifesting our personalities, so we're putting out particular kinds of energies. You and I, among other people, you and I have clearly, we're kindred spirits.
00:51:23
Speaker
We're reflecting particular energies within each other. We're drawn to each other in that way because we're manifesting ultimately in that aspect the same energies. So when you are, I'm getting off track a little bit. So sometimes my brain gets ahead of my mouth. Of course, sometimes my mouth gets ahead of my brain. That's a whole other story. But when you are working with all of these energies, then when a shaman or someone is leading a ceremony,
00:51:53
Speaker
They're orchestrating the energies. So when I'm leading a ceremony, for all those, all those years when I'm working, when I'm in the ceremony, but not leading, I take a full dose, sometimes more, and blast away, fine to the cosmos. But when I'm leading ceremonies, I usually take about a quarter or a third of a dose. So I'm in the zone, but I'm aware because when I'm leading a ceremony, I am responsible for absolutely everybody in that room.
00:52:23
Speaker
And I take that seriously. So when you are doing that, and you're leading the ceremony, and you're like an orchestra conductor, and you're controlling the energy. Years ago, one of my mentors taught me that ayahuasca is the river, and the icharos are the boats that carry you on the river.
00:52:46
Speaker
So when I'm singing Ikaros, I'm also a percussionist and I play handpan and I'm a vocalist and all that. So when I'm in a ceremony and I'm leading, I can sense the dynamics of the group. And after starting to go kind of too far down, I'll pick up the energy with what I sing and what I do. And then if it starts getting out of like the wild west, too much out of control, I'll do something else to bring the energy down.
00:53:14
Speaker
But I think of it as leading an expedition into the jungle with a bunch of people who don't know the jungle like I do. And it's my job to take them down that path into the places they need to go and allow them to do that and do those explorations and be vulnerable, yet safe. So, you know, every once in a while somebody is too much out of control and it's too much for them. We have to take them out of the group because they're disruptive.
00:53:40
Speaker
And we take him to another room and then have a sitter sit with them and walk through. You know, one time I had a guy, we figured out he was stuck in the birth passage. We actually birthed him, you know, but he was like screaming and clawing. And, you know, I spent a couple hours screaming in my face. Um, you don't know what's going to come up, but you need to facilitate it. So to have somebody who knows the territory and when a ceremony's done properly, you know, you open with a prayer and you create a protective container around everybody.
00:54:09
Speaker
And then you lead them into that place. And when, when then they all go off, you're, you're overseeing them. You're watching out for the wellbeing. You're allowing them to be vulnerable and safe. So that's why, uh, I always like to say, don't try this at home. You know, uh, now, you know, for me with, with 20 years of direct experience and 30 years of researching it, and I do everything I've done, either I read about it extensively before or after. So I get kind of both kinds of knowledge, right?
00:54:38
Speaker
But to have all that and understand what's going to happen and to see somebody go through a trauma. And I can say to myself, oh yeah, I remember when I went through that. I know what they're going through. And to be able to be there as a support. And I say this all the time, I will go anywhere in the dark with anybody. Because I've been there. And I know the territory. And if somebody's going to go into the dark,
00:55:05
Speaker
It's good to have somebody to support them and be there for them and allow them to go through whatever process they need to go through in order to heal the trauma that they do. So there are a lot of unexpected things that can happen. And one of the things I love about ayahuasca is that it's unpredictable. So if you're by yourself and suddenly something comes up that you had no idea was going to come up, which happens, and you don't have anybody to watch over you, you could really damage yourself.
00:55:34
Speaker
You can also damage yourself if you're doing anything having to do with MAO inhibitors or antidepressants, or if you're taking different substances, like even MDMA, and you take them close to doing ayahuasca, you can hurt yourself. You can go into convulsions. You can have serotonin overload. You can die. So the other thing I realized is when I was first reading about ayahuasca, there was a guy by the name of Richard Spruce. Don't quote me on the dig. It was something like 1865 when he first discovered
00:56:04
Speaker
ayahuasca in the Amazon, or, you know, saw the use of it. And he called his active component, telepathy. And as soon as I heard that, that was another thing, oh, vine of death, telepathy, and I got to try that. I want that. Right. And, um, he, he noticed that there were telepathic experiences. So I've had a lot of telepathic experiences around ayahuasca and since I've done it.
00:56:33
Speaker
I can never make it happen. I can never predict it happening. I can't say, oh, I'm reading your mind right now. It happens when it happens. There's no rhyme or reason to it. And it often ties in with synchronicities. So I had those experiences. When I've been in the jungle, I've gotten so highly aware that I'd be there lying in the dark. It'd be daytime, but I'd be lying in the dark when my eyes closed. And then I would think of somebody.
00:57:03
Speaker
And I would sit up and like 30 seconds later, they would come over the hill, you know, or I would have my vision figured out and we were integrating after a ceremony and suddenly somebody across the room would start speaking about the vision that I had, things like that. So then I did some research and found out that there's a belief, they would say, why didn't the ancient ancient Egyptians have a better written communication of language? And, um, the,
00:57:33
Speaker
theory or what I believe to be true is that they were heart centered. So if they were all heart centered and they were communicating really through their hearts instead of their minds, they didn't need to speak because they knew what the other person was doing. And I think in my experience, that being heart centered is what increases telepathy and intuition. They're related, they're connected. So I don't think anybody should do this stuff by themselves.
00:58:01
Speaker
I was on a radio show a couple of years ago and the guys, the host says, yeah, my wife and I, we got some ayahuasca and we took it and we went out in the middle of the lake and we had a really bad experience. And I went off on him. I felt kind of bad afterwards. I went overboard a little bit too much, you know? And I was like, you shouldn't be doing that. You really need to be doing somebody, you know? And I also believe that the ayahuasca chooses you. Just like, for lack of better words, spirit animals choose you.
00:58:31
Speaker
My big thing is hummingbirds. Hummingbirds, picoflora, they chose me. Any type of animal communication type thing really has to be on their terms. They pick you. I like to joke around that I'm a mama's boy. I mean, I'm a mama's boy because I'm beholden to ayahuasca. And whatever she says, I follow and she's been leading me and guiding me. And interestingly enough, in shamanism, ayahuasca is considered the dark feminine.
00:59:01
Speaker
So there's the light feminine, the dark feminine, the light masculine, and the dark masculine. So the light feminine is like snow white, right? Snow white's the light feminine, the wicked witch is the dark feminine. They're both elements of the feminine and masculine, and you need to consider them both. You can't ignore one without the other because you can't have light without darkness. The darker it is, the greater the light is, and vice versa. They're complementary. They're two aspects of the whole. They're the essence of what energy is. Energy is about polarities.
00:59:30
Speaker
the greater the polarity of the energies, the greater the energy itself is there. So when you start to learn about that and you start to learn about the energies that we're made up of, then we start to acknowledge them. I mean, when you think about it, how many things do our bodies do? We breathe, our heart beats, our blood pressure is regulated, right? If we get hot, we perspire.
00:59:57
Speaker
the blood chemistry, the neurological chemistry, all of that. The body takes care of all of that. You don't have to think about it. You don't have to think about breathing. It happens. You don't have to think about your heart beating, all those things, right? So there's a complete wisdom of the body that most people don't acknowledge that's there, keeping things going. So there's the body and the mind and the heart. And there's in the Inca,
01:00:24
Speaker
In pre-Inka traditions, there are three worlds, the upper world, the middle world, and the lower world. The upper world is represented by the color rose, which is represented by the condor, which is love. Middle world is like an electric blue, it's the puma or the jaguar, which is power. And the lower world is represented by gold, which is the serpent, which is wisdom. So there's love, power, and wisdom, truth, love, and energy. Emotional body, intellectual body,
01:00:53
Speaker
physical body. Those are our three primary energetic bodies. And when you do this work, you start to learn more about the ones that we mostly take for granted or ignore or don't even know they're really there because we're not paying attention. So when you get them all working together and you get this electric ultraviolet color, and I could say something, you might respond with your intellect. You might respond emotionally. You might respond physically. I could say something to offend you.
01:01:23
Speaker
Not meaning to, but I can offend you. You could get emotionally upset. You could punch me in the head, and then you can think about it later and feel bad about it. Or you might think about it first, then get emotional, then punch me in the head. Or you might punch me in the head and get emotional. I mean, we all respond in different ways, and typically, depending on our makeup, they're not in sync. So when you really work on this stuff and work toward becoming more whole and more unified and more complete, more individuated, as Jung said,
01:01:52
Speaker
Then you have things that come at you. And when you respond with all three, then you're responding more fully aware because at the end of the day, it's all about awareness. A whole path of a spiraling expansion of consciousness is about increasing awareness. And the more aware you become, the more you function in all these different energetic areas. And the more you influence people around you, it's really important.
01:02:21
Speaker
So, you know, kind of going back just a second, if you think that everything is energy and you take Ayahuasca in a ceremony with other plants and the shaman is directing the energy and he's guiding the journey, even though Ayahuasca is a group experience, let me back up on that. It's an individual experience in a group setting. So tied in with the telepathy and that stuff when you are in a group
01:02:51
Speaker
and you're on your journey, you also have the energy of the whole group to back you and support you. It's a really fascinating thing like that. Now you can go and do like, I think mushrooms are more inclined toward an individual journey, although if you're not experienced, somebody should watch over you then too. I've done everything wrong and I've been lucky to survive so far and I've learned a lot from it.
Spiritual Transformation and Sound Healing
01:03:16
Speaker
So some of the things I've done, I wouldn't necessarily recommend.
01:03:21
Speaker
When you get into the different plants in different energies, I've also done a lot with San Pedro watch whom I trained tell me a bit about that Because we're going to do it. Yeah, we're going to do a what Chuma Ceremony two weeks from now here up here Yeah, yeah, so interestingly enough watch almost considered a daytime medicine and the times that I've done it I've done it We did walkabouts
01:03:50
Speaker
And the last few years when I was doing it, we actually, we mixed in a little bit of mushroom with it, which was really nice, a little bit of psilocybin. But Wachuma, San Pedro, Trichoceras papanoi, contains mescaline. That's the psychoactive component. Peyote contains mescaline. But peyote is considered a nighttime medicine. Wachuma in the end is considered a daytime medicine.
01:04:19
Speaker
Now, mescaline is a phenethylamine. So there's tryptamines, which are visionary, like DMT and that. And then there's phenethylamines, which are the cactus. And MDMA, ecstasy, is a phenethylamine. So it's related to the cactus. So in a way, the Ytum is a little bit more, for lack of better words, empathic. And when I first started training with it, I had already done tons of ayahuasca.
01:04:49
Speaker
and other things. So when I first had my Wachuma experience, I was like, what? So what? Well, a big deal. And it took me a while to get into the subtleties of it. But I learned here, I went through a lot of experiences here, and then I worked with a Wachuma shaman in the Andes for some time. Had some wonderful experiences. At one point, we were way up there in these hot mineral springs, and they had us floating with water wings on us, floating in this hot mineral water.
01:05:19
Speaker
on Wachuma and the shaman was doing body work and it was releasing stuff. You know, I actually had a purge and got rid of some stuff, right? So, it's more like that. In some respects, it's gentle. It's also very alkaloid, alkaline. So your gastrointestinal, it's very bitter. So your gastrointestinal distress can be more
01:05:47
Speaker
And the key to that is to getting like citric acid, like oranges or lime or something, or lemons, and taking that enough to balance out your stomach. I, um, watched him a second. I was also blessed to be able to go into the Mexican desert and do the whole, we troll a peyote ritual overnight pilgrimage ceremony. Where you go and you do the peyote hunt and you find it and you do an online ceremony. That was amazing.
01:06:13
Speaker
And then they gave us oranges and I had to eat a fair amount of those to balance out. Because if you have something, you have alkaline and acid, those are the two extremes. And if you go too much in either one direction, it upsets your chemistry. So the idea, when you combine alkaline and acid, you end up with a base. I think it basically turns it into a salt, which is a base. It's a neutral thing, but it's a combination of the two working with each other.
01:06:43
Speaker
So you want to be aware of what's going on in your stomach, and if you're feeling distressed gastrointestinal-y, then more of the citric acid, like orange or whatever, should be taken to help balance that out. Another thing I learned, if you know this or not, when we were out doing walkabouts, we were doing walkabouts up here in the Northwest,
01:07:10
Speaker
at a place here in the United States called the Four Corners Monument Valley, where we did walkabouts and things like that. And when you're doing that and you're into it for a while and you start to feel the energy drop, if you take a spoonful of honey, it'll send you right back up again. That's a little old Indian trick number 27, secret. Practice. So it's more, generally speaking, there are hallucinogens.
01:07:40
Speaker
And there are empathogens. Lewis and the gens tend to lean more toward the visionary. The empathogens tend to lead more toward the emotion. So they're opening. You know, one of my favorite things I used to do back years back is, um, so there's, there's what's called a candy flip, which is LSD and MDMA, which for me I thought was a bit much. It was like.
01:08:09
Speaker
To me, it was overkill. I was just like driving 120 miles an hour all the time. I just didn't really care. I could handle it. I didn't care for it. But my favorite was what's called a hippy flip. Or I used to say a flippy hip or a trippy hip, right? And mushrooms and MDMA and a good dose.
01:08:31
Speaker
you can get the subconscious sometimes dark material that comes out and then the MDMA is opening you emotionally and it can be very therapeutic and dealing with it and it can be a very joyful experience. So there are some combinations that are good, some that aren't so good and of course ultimately it's all subjective to the individual in their experience. Do you know I actually saw I think
01:08:54
Speaker
There's a study, I'm not sure it's been approved yet, but they're thinking of doing a study with combining LSD and MDMA. I think it's going through the approval process at the moment. So that's kind of, it's going to be interesting what that comes out of that. Yeah. My good friend, Charlie Grove, Dr. Charles Grove did the very first federally approved study using psilocybin for
01:09:22
Speaker
death anxiety in terminally ill cancer patients. He did, I was like 25 people. I indirectly helped with that. And one of my best friends was the primary neurosonic. And then this is something in your field you'll appreciate. The last I heard he was going to get funded for a study using MDMA for helping socialization in autistic kids.
01:09:51
Speaker
Interesting. Which in kids. To me, it's like, wow, what a concept, right? I think that shows a lot of promise. Yeah. Well, you know what? If they're already giving, you know, kids with ADD, Ritalin, it's not a massive step. You know, MDMA is probably better physiologically than Ritalin, than methamphetamine, isn't it? I would agree. Yeah, absolutely.
01:10:22
Speaker
Very interesting. So, you know, it's nice to see these things gaining legitimacy now. Yeah. I was underground my whole life. And in the beginning, I was just, well, I'm going to take this. Let's see how messed up I can get. And that's all I really cared about is what's this experience going to bring me? And then after 13 years of not doing anything at all, and then being exposed to the works of Terrence McKenna,
01:10:53
Speaker
It changed my whole perspective like, wow, there could be spirituality in this stuff. Are you kidding me? And then I went back taking things with the spiritual intention and everything changed then. So I had no idea. You know, when I first read, you know, I've written a bit of horror and I was researching the, the werewolf mythology, which is called lycanthropy. And that research led me into shape-shifting.
01:11:23
Speaker
And then I realized that shape-shifting mythologies were deeply seated in the Amazon, which had the greatest concentration, generally speaking, of visionary plants. And that really got my attention and drew me in. And that's what was a big factor in leading me down the path toward working with and experimenting and researching these stuff. A little funny side story. When I first decided to go into the jungle, I told my mom,
01:11:52
Speaker
And she was like, Oh my God, let me get this straight. You mean to tell me you got to go into the middle of the Amazon jungle and hallucinate. And I'm like, yeah. She's like, Oh my God. Then I was on a radio show and the guy who was interviewing me knew me really well. And he started hitting me on the shamanism and the visionary plants. And I got a tape of the show and I sent it to my mom. And once she heard that and realized that I had done the research, I knew what I was talking about. She felt better.
01:12:24
Speaker
So it ties in with what you said and I appreciate you saying that. I've done the research back and forth. Either I do it, I usually read about it first, then I do it. But even after I do it and I think, okay, I know that, so to speak, I'll still go and read about it because I want to be prepared and I want to know inside out and backwards. And somebody else can have insights I could may have not have missed or helped me to be aware of the ones that are important. It's critical. I mean, knowledge is power.
01:12:50
Speaker
Yeah. And then it helps you better integrate the journey. Yeah. Especially if it's something that's been written by somebody who's been down that path. Like when I wrote the center of the universe, the center of the universe is right between your eyes, but home is with the heart. It's one of the longest titles of a book ever. But when I wrote that, I took all my experience and put it in a way that people who are either embracing visionary experiences or not, you get a sense of that perspective.
01:13:19
Speaker
that subjective perspective because ultimately, it's all subjective. Actually, there's something from that book. I was just perusing it while I was before our chat together, but I want to ask one question before we get into that topic. Have you ever done anything with Ebola? No, I almost got a chance a couple of times. It was on my list.
01:13:47
Speaker
And so I live in San Diego, which is on the border of Mexico, Tijuana. And I got a tour of an Ebola clinic down there, which is used for curing addiction. And you probably already know this, but Ebola fits the same receptors as opioids do, the opium receptors. So when you take Ebola, those receptors are filled, and physiologically speaking, you're instantly cured of addiction.
01:14:16
Speaker
But if you don't follow through with counseling and therapy and this and that and follow up integrating that, then it won't last. You can relapse if you stick with it. But years ago, when I was at the entheal body seminars in Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico, we're talking right around 2000, I got to hang out and meet and get to know a gentleman, Giorgio Cemarini. He's Italian. And he had done some of the first, quote unquote, Western research.
01:14:46
Speaker
Um, on Ebola and they spent time with the Bawidi in Africa. So I learned a lot about it then. And it's been something that's on my list and something I want to do. And I know a lot about it, but I have not gotten to experience it yet because it's also something you really don't want to mess with. You can, people die. You can die. You got to really have. Somebody you had to have, you know, a physician or a nurse in attendance to make sure you get dose router. You can just slip off, you know, comma and check out. So, um, I'd want somebody very, very qualified, but I'm not a versus doing it.
01:15:20
Speaker
I'm actually interviewing someone on Tuesday in a couple of days. So it'd be interesting to get into the nitty gritty of that. I'd actually love to try that myself as well. But like you said, you don't want to mess with it, especially now you want to check your heart, do an EKG, make sure there's no vulnerability.
01:15:42
Speaker
Now, what I wanted to ask you, Matteo, is talk to me a little bit about how sound is used by shamans and how sound can be used for healing. After, you know, reading your stuff, listening to you, I actually, yesterday, I ordered that the jury do. And a few other little bits... Oh, right on. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It should be here by next Friday, so I'm super stoked. I told my girlfriend, baby, I'm going to sound here. She's like, oh, Jesus.
01:16:11
Speaker
What are you into now? Tell us, how does sound heal? How can that be used to heal? Yeah, sure. So I've done a lot of sound healing. I've actually done sound healing tours with my other musician partner who's an amazing Didge player. One of the things I love about the Didge is that it's very primal. It really gets down. We do ceremonies together and
01:16:39
Speaker
You know, I'd be freaking out somewhere in the cosmos flying. And you would come over and play the Dijs like into my heart, and vibrate my whole body. Now, if you realize that everything is energy, and from a shamanic perspective, everything is energy, and let's say Mike, just using me for an example, if I'm leading a ceremony, and I'm playing music, and I'm singing, and my partner there is also, he's doing his musical part, and we're guiding the energies of the ceremonies.
01:17:09
Speaker
I've been in the darkest depths of hell, an ayahuasca experience, and then a musician would start to play like a flute. And suddenly my visions would shift and I'd be with like beautiful colors and butterflies and high frequency colors. There's a renowned Peruvian musician, if you ever heard of it, Tito La Rosa. He specializes in pre-Columbian instruments,
01:17:35
Speaker
His most famous, he got an Emmy for an album he did with Native American Mary Youngblood called The Prophecy of the Eagle in the Condor. And I've worked a lot. I've actually performed with Tito now. We're good buddies. We go back some years to the jungle and all that.
01:17:52
Speaker
And that music can really lift you. So if you think about, you can even go back to think about film and cinema, right? And you're watching a movie, right? And the sky walks in the door and you hear the music, right? You go, oh, this must be the bad guy. That's really low music. It's basic. It's making me uneasy. Or the most famous one from the movie Cycle, right? I mean, how powerful is that?
01:18:22
Speaker
Right? So in shamanic ceremony, and even with psychedelics, generally speaking overall, the nature and the vibratory nature of the music and the frequency of it affect you physiologically. So you can guide somebody on a journey. It's like I was telling you earlier, if I'm in a Malina session and people are really going too much into the dark, how
01:18:48
Speaker
I'll sing or play something light or soft and bring them up out of the darkness and bring the energy up so it doesn't go too far down. So, and again, getting back to what I said earlier that I learned from one of my mentors, ayahuasca is the river and the ikaros, the music are the boats that carry you along the river. So we are truly energetic beings. And if you think of, I learned this years and years ago, human beings, hue is light.
01:19:17
Speaker
So human is light man, light man being. So regardless of what you think, and if anybody thinks, well, this is hardcore, three-dimensional, physical reality, right? Guess what? Talk to me after you die. What has it done? Right? I have a quote. I'm right now, I'm about 160 pages into the sequel to Spirit Mount as my memoir. And on one thing I say, there's the old nursery rhyme.
01:19:46
Speaker
Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream. So in indigenous cultures, waking, dreaming, visions, for them, there's no separation. They're all the same. It's a continuum of consciousness. And when you learn to navigate certain things,
01:20:10
Speaker
You learn to navigate that state of consciousness and it helps you. Even going through a physical life, you have to navigate. You have to look both ways before you get hit by a car when you cross the street. It's navigation. So I've been through a number of dark experiences in ayahuasca. Almost like a preview, prophetic, there's another word I'm looking for in economy in a minute, but almost like a preview of what's coming.
01:20:38
Speaker
And then I've gone through hard life situations where things happen and I catch myself and go, wait a minute, you've been through worse with this than I was. You've already been through this dress rehearsal for this thing. You can navigate it and bang, I can go through it. What they would do is a little bit of history, anthropological history, if you will. Traditionally, back to prehistoric times in the jungle, if they were going to hunt an animal,
01:21:06
Speaker
And I'm going to use a jaguar for an example, because it's one of my favorites. They would go and take ayahuasca, and they would embrace the jaguar, the spirit of the jaguar, and the spirit of the plants. And they would, in essence, do an agreed upon hunt of the jaguar in their visions. Then when they come out of it and they go to hunt the jaguar, in many respects, they've already done the hunt. Now they're just following through. Now an interesting thing happens.
01:21:34
Speaker
When you do this diet and you're reading this very bland diet without all the added stuff, and you're just ingesting mostly plants, after a while you begin to smell like the jungle. You're sweating, everything that comes out of you smells like the jungle. In fact, I came back one time and my girlfriend was like, you smell like the jungle. And I said, I am the jungle. She's like, oh, I like that, right? But here's the thing.
01:22:02
Speaker
And using a jaguar for the best example, jaguars have a highly refined sense of smell. It's something like 500 times or more of what humans have. They can smell you five miles away. It's one of the reasons, among others, that you shouldn't have sex and things as part of the preparation for ayahuasca dieta, because those smells, those pheromones that we may not notice, they'll notice all those things.
01:22:28
Speaker
So if you hunt the jaguar in your visions first, and you're doing an ayahuasca diet, and you're purifying yourself, and you're smelling like the jungle, and then you go out to hunt the jaguar, and if their primary sense of perception, their eyes are good too, they're nocturnal, but you know, if the smell scent is a big thing, and you smell like the jungle, then in many respects you become invisible to that jaguar.
01:22:52
Speaker
So there's that whole thing of going through that and becoming one with the jungle. And I like to think that when you do an ayahuasca to a large extent, that you become the jungle and the jungle becomes you.
Nature's Interconnectedness and Technology
01:23:06
Speaker
And you fully embrace the fact that everything is connected. All life is connected. Every little thing in the jungle, you know, the bug eats you, the lizard eats the bug, the bigger animal eats that bug, right? It's that lizard, right? Goes all the way up and then the jaguar eats that.
01:23:23
Speaker
And then, you know, the jaguar takes a crap. And then what happens? The plants feed on that, right? It's all connected. And that's one of the reasons why the world is so whacked out right now, because people have lost... It's a society and a humanity. We've so lost touch with the natural world, except those of us who are going back to the roots of it and exploring it.
01:23:43
Speaker
But this whole thing about everybody looking at their cell phones and these young kids with video games and everybody's glued to their phones. I mean, you know, you see the videos and people walking in front of cars and walking in the fountains because they're on their cell phones. They're completely out of touch with nature. And we're deeply connected to it. And it's why the world is such a disaster right now, ecologically and otherwise, even humanity and all this, you know, the rioting and the discontent and this and that. It's because we've lost touch with the place that we're deeply integrated with. We've lost it.
01:24:13
Speaker
So one of the things I love about the jungle, when you go there and you become one with the jungle, like I say, from the inside out and they call Ayahuasca the mother of the plants. And when you become fully integrated with that and you become one with the jungle and you have the telepathic experiences and you're deeply connected with every little thing. There's no radio waves and there's no 4G or 5G or there's no transmitters. There's no crap. It's you and the natural world.
01:24:42
Speaker
and the plants and the animals and the thing. My place in the jungle, my combo where it is, and people can look on my website to see it. It's not a little promontory overlooking the river and there's rapids there. So 24-7 when I'm there, I hear the rush of that white noise.
Sound Healing and Facilitator Role
01:25:00
Speaker
And it's wonderful, it's clearing, it's clarifying, it's purifying, and it's an elemental spirit of water. And what is it that's getting me clear and making me feel good? The sound.
01:25:12
Speaker
So what's the energy? When you manipulate sound, you manipulate energy. And when you manipulate energy, you can guide people, being the boatman, guiding the boat on the river. And I say ayahuasca is the river because that's what I was taught. But in any other experience, you can really guide people with what they're hearing. Because certain things, even popular songs, right?
01:25:38
Speaker
You hear the love song and you get that uplifting feeling in your heart. And this is my favorite song. And I feel good when I, when I hear this song. So you think of music and you think of creating music or being a channel for music. What you're doing is you're manipulating energy. And when you do it with a healing intention, like you're going to be doing, when you get your didge and you're going to make your lady all happy, right? You're going to be guiding her on a sound journey. You're going to be hiring, guiding her on an energetic journey.
01:26:07
Speaker
And you're going to be touching into energies that she has. And if you're doing it properly with the right intention, you're going to be tapping into particular traumas that will get loose. I've had people, I've done sound hints with people and have them completely break down emotionally and get released. And then they're thanking me profusely, not guide. No, I haven't, I worked last year. I worked with a Vietnam veteran who had PTSD.
01:26:38
Speaker
And he couldn't sleep and he was upset, this and that. And he finally came and I did a ceremony with him. And I got the most beautiful letter from him thanking me. He slept for the first time peacefully in like 30 years. He no longer had those issues. And caught how gratifying that was. Now there's a fine line there because, okay, I facilitated that. I did the healing. I played the music. I gave out the brew. I worked closely with him.
01:27:08
Speaker
But the reality is I didn't heal him at all. I guided him to heal himself, but he did the work. And so in that respect, and this is where people get really lost. I'm not a guru. I'm not really a healer. I guide people to heal themselves. And I'm not, people will do that.
01:27:28
Speaker
And then they're getting profusely thanked. And then, of course, the ego gets all blown up. Yes. I am the healing shaman. I heal people, and I am a lightworker, and I'm divinely inspired, right? And that just makes me nuts. I call that guralitis. You know, I was years ago, 20 years ago, I was in the jungle with a woman. We did five ceremonies. She only did three. Couldn't take any more. Then she wrote a book about ayahuasca, and everybody was praising her for all this expert, right? And I was just like, you know?
01:27:57
Speaker
It just makes me insane, which is another reason why I'm so outspoken. If I do anything, let me put it another way. I'm not calling myself a genius or anything like that. But they did it some years back. They did a survey of all the known geniuses in the world. And every one of them to the person said, it ain't me. It's not me. And when I've done my best healing in my ikaros or whatever I do, whether I'm drumming or playing or playing hand pan,
01:28:27
Speaker
I opened myself up and I let it go and I get out of the way. There was a Native American shaman called Fool's Crow. And he said, I am a hollow bone. And I opened myself up and I let the energies go through me. And when that's done properly, and it's not an ego thing, you're really setting yourself aside. And when I've been the most inspired and done some of the most powerful healing, I just surrender myself and say, Hey, here I am, man, take me, make me do what you want me to do. And I get out of the way.
01:28:57
Speaker
And I get the most profound results in that way because I'm not, you know, you got to have a healthy ego, especially being a writer. I'm aware of my ego and I have to be confident in what I'm doing, but I'm not being run by my ego. I'm getting out of the way and letting that inspiration come through. Interestingly enough, I'll stop here and let you talk for a minute, but the word inspiration comes from inspire.
01:29:23
Speaker
And inspire comes from spiral. And spiral is the Fibonacci spiral, which is based on the golden mean, which is the basis of all creation when you look into the geometry of it. So being inspired to me is being divinely connected to source and manifesting source through your heart. When I'm playing and I'm inspired like that, I'm coming from a heart. And my ego doesn't get in there unless I want to make a bad joke in the middle or something like that. I mean, I'm very aware of the dynamics of it.
01:29:52
Speaker
I'm acknowledging it all, but not taking credit. You know what I mean? That's very healthy. I like that because you can take substances and have visionary states, amazing states, and suddenly it's very easy to slip in the wrong direction and think now you're like Jesus or like Buddha or like whatever. Exactly.
01:30:23
Speaker
Especially with five MEO. Yeah. Is it? Well, there are some people out there practicing now that make me insane because they're, they're set up as these big gurus and people are like just about bound down and worshiping him because it's such a profound experience. And when people come out of it and they look at that person, Oh, there's my savior, right? Oh, you are divinely blessed because you've given me this wonderful experience. Well, not really.
01:30:50
Speaker
I mean, facilitated it, yes, but they were taking credit for what the medicine did when the real truth lies in getting out of the way and letting it come through. On that same note, one of the things I learned in my shamanism studies being the power path.
Integrity in Spiritual Practices
01:31:07
Speaker
Power in and of itself is neutral. It's the intention behind it.
01:31:15
Speaker
It's why a lot of quote unquote shamans or spiritual healers get caught because people are adoring them. And then they've got a freaking harem of a dozen women, right? You know, some of these, some of these, you know, spiritual, you know, historically quote unquote spiritual teachers and leaders, oh yeah, you know, I've got 24 women. Um, they all adore and worship me, or there have been shamans in the jungle who will say, you know, there's a beautiful babe there, right? Well, love.
01:31:42
Speaker
come down to the water's edge with me at midnight, and that will give you a special initiation, right? I mean, those temptations are very strong. And it's a big, big sin, for lack of better words, because when somebody comes to you to be healed, they're being vulnerable with you, and you're responsible for that. And the temptation to take advantage of that vulnerability can be very, very strong. You know, it's a beautiful woman, right? So, you know, you have to really pay attention, you have to realize that people
01:32:10
Speaker
coming to you to be healed are being vulnerable and you need to really respect that because they're basically putting their whole life, their spirit in your hands. You know, they're coming to you to be vulnerable and interesting because the more you follow this path and the more you become, for lack of better words, a man or a woman of power or a man or woman of knowledge, the greater responsibility comes the more further along you go and the more and more
01:32:40
Speaker
Integrity becomes critical. Integrity is everything. And so the higher up you go, the more critical integrity becomes. And which that also means if you go really further up the path, so to speak, and then you break that integrity, the price of pay is even more extreme. So the higher you go up in the spiral, for lack of better words, the spiral of ascension, the greater responsibility you have, especially to those who are further down on the path.
01:33:09
Speaker
I like what you said, you know, the intention and now the integrity. Now these are incredibly important. And I think as human beings.
01:33:19
Speaker
These are not just if you want to be a healer or shaman. Furthermore, the way you say it, you don't do the healing. The person does the healing. It takes some impediment, some blockage, or help them see, be like a mirror, help them see something. They do the healing. The body does the healing. It's like he does the healing.
01:33:42
Speaker
But I think as humans, if we can embody, you know, good intention and integrity more, we will all have a better world, you know? So really like that. You're really kind of aware of these important things. Mateo, I want to be respectful of
Future Works and COVID-19 Impact
01:33:57
Speaker
your time. So just in wrapping up, can you tell us, so you said you're about 160 pages with the sequel of your memoir. Can you tell us when is that going to be available?
01:34:08
Speaker
And even more important, when is the audio book going to be available? Because I definitely want to listen to that. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. It's probably going to be a couple of years. Um, I'm working hard on it, but one of the things I've done is when I go into the jungle, I'm a writer. I don't want to write when I'm in the jungle. So for years from the very beginning, and, um, I would go in with a cassette recorder and I would just record all my experiences.
01:34:37
Speaker
And then right, so I would do an ayahuasca ceremony and then I would come out of it. It'd be like four o'clock in the morning and I would take my plant bath and I'd sit there in my birthday suit and just start babbling into the recorder. Well, this happened and this happened and the condor came to me and you know, I was rapping with this demon, you know, and he showed me these colors and whatever. I just, I blabbed it all. So now the very ending of Spirit Matters,
01:35:06
Speaker
Which I'm so glad I recorded because it was the most profound experience spiritual experience of my life I just transcribed the recorders what I recorded raw and then I edit it and I tweak it so I've done a dozen extended dieters in the jungle and I've got like in the beginning I had like a dozen tapes and
01:35:30
Speaker
Oh, oh, I farted, I farted, you know, and then I stopped. Oh, oh, you know, I saw a bird or a leaf moving. I mean, all this really, I burped, you know, like that, right? So then, you know, the first year, maybe there were a dozen tapes, maybe the next year there were eight, maybe the next year there were six. And then I got down to like a couple because it's like, okay, I've already been through all that, you know, nothing, nothing worth writing home about. So I'm in the process of transcribing those and then editing those. And, um,
01:35:59
Speaker
I'm seeing now because the point I'm at right now is from 20 years ago. So now I'm looking at it with 20 years of experience behind me. I'm like, oh wow, look, this is what my dreams are trying to tell me. I totally missed it then, right? Like that. So I'm working hard to get it out when I have other obligations and other writing things. I also teach writing and I lecture and all that stuff. So I'm trying to, but it's moving ahead at a really good pace. So I'll be sure to let everybody know
01:36:30
Speaker
when it's ready to go. And then I'll look into doing the audio book. And are you planning to do some trips to the jungle this year? First chance I get this whole COVID thing is nuts. I was actually scheduled to go to Australia next month and do a lot of work. I had a whole tour set up, both sound healing and ceremonies. And of course we had to cancel that. Then I've done ceremonies up this way and we canceled last
01:36:59
Speaker
April, and we canceled next month. And I don't know about the next month because of the COVID thing. So I haven't done group ceremonies here for about a year now. And we normally were going every year to the jungle. And of course, that's all on hold. So first chance, again, I can't wait to go back. I miss it. The last time I went was actually 2015. I've been leading ceremonies since then up this way.
01:37:29
Speaker
until all that stuff gets shaken out, I won't be going. And when I go, I'm leading and guiding. I started all those years ago singing with the shamans, and then they started to coach me, and then they actually start teaching me songs. And so I became a big part of that. And then my main mentor, he's like 86 now, and his heart's weak, he can't do it anymore. So he passed it off to us, and we're now running the show. And it's like I said earlier, I'm obligated to carry the torch.
01:37:59
Speaker
So, there's no escape. How old are you now? I'll be 65. In November, I'll be 65. Awesome, man. I like to say I'm in the old age of youth and in the youth of old age. I was saying for years that I'm a dirty old man in training, but I think I'm out of training now. You have that pep and spark in your voice, you know, that's unmistakable. So,
01:38:28
Speaker
Um, what final question, uh, where can folks, uh, where can folks find you, your work, your books, your writings?
Where to Find Mateo's Work Online
01:38:37
Speaker
Yeah. Thank you. Uh, and bless you for having me on and honoring me and for your, you'd really show me a lot of respect and I, you know, bless you, my son. Thank you. Appreciate that. Um, so my webpage is mattpalamary.com. M-A-T-T P is in Paul. A-L-L-A. M is in Mary. A-R-O-I.com.
01:38:57
Speaker
I've got bunches of podcasts, videos, video lectures, TV shows, radio shows, tons of photos, stuff from the jungle, lectures on shamanism. You can find all my books through there. And then my publishing is Mystic Ink Publishing, M-Y-S-T-I-C-I-N-K, B-U-B-L-I-S-H-I-N-G.com. And you can find all my books through there. Plus they're all on Amazon.
01:39:27
Speaker
I have a few translations, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian. That hasn't worked out as good as I would like. I think there's even one in German. But they're all on Amazon. They're all through Mystic Inc. My webpage has a contact form. So somebody says, hey, I saw you on there. You know, here it hits me. And this is my email. It will automatically email me.
01:39:52
Speaker
And I can get back. And then I'm on social media. I'm on Flakebook. I call it Flakebook. I have a love-hate relationship with it. But in terms of the tribe and the community and the writing, people are connected through there. And it's a big part of even the writers' conferences. So for me, it's a necessary evil. And then, you know, I'm on all that other stuff, the Twitter and Pinterest and Instagram, all those. I have a presence there.
01:40:22
Speaker
But my website's kind of the motherlord, and that's tied into the Mystic Inc. website where the books are. And again, they're all on Amazon. They're all e-books. They're all three books. And maybe seven or eight of them are audio books. And thank you for what you said about me being narrating my audio book. I thought, I need to do that. That's me. That's my voice. I need to do that. It's your story. And I do plan on... Yeah. Oh, bless you. Bless you. Yeah. And I plan on doing that with the sequel when that comes around when it's ready to do.
01:40:52
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So listen, Mattel, thank you so much for honoring me coming on the show, spending, you know, almost two hours with us. It was really, really interesting. Obviously, we can talk probably for weeks and months.
01:41:10
Speaker
But yeah, thank you. Exactly. Yeah, you're a fountain of knowledge. Thank you so much once again. And all the best with, you know, with finishing the the sequel to the memoir and we'll be in touch for sure. All right. You know how to find me, brother. Yeah. And thank you again. Maybe we'll get FaceTime in the reel in the flesh at some point. Who knows? Hopefully, hopefully. All right. Thank you so much, brother. All right.
01:41:50
Speaker
for listening to Connecting Minds. 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.