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Processing Past Trauma and Integrating Peak Experiences w/ Peter Conley - Connecting Minds Podcast Ep05
106 Plays5 years ago
We all have trauma and pain that is buried deep inside us. It’s not a matter of IF we do, but of what it is.
On this episode of Connecting Minds, I talk with Peter Conley of Integration Station about healing past wounds by accessing and releasing stored traumas using various modalities. We also discuss the all-important topic of integrating peak experiences so we may truly benefit from them.
Peter Conley is the Founder of Integration Station, a resource for Psychedelic Integration. Integration Station provides protocols, tools, and awareness of modalities to improve your mental health and performance. He is a certified yoga instructor, completed a 10-day silent Vipassana meditation retreat, and advocates for the responsible use of altered states of consciousness as therapeutic modalities.
Episode show notes here: https://christianyordanov.com/05-peter-conley/
Links to Peter’s website and social media:
Integration Station website: https://integration-station.com/
Peter’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/PeterDConley
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast and Guests
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.
00:00:41
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to the Connecting Minds podcast. I'm your host, Christian Jardinov.
Peter Conley's Focus on Psychedelic Integration for Mental Health
00:00:45
Speaker
And today on episode five, we have Peter Conley. Peter is the founder of Integration Station, a resource for psychedelic integration. Integration Station provides protocols, tools, and awareness of modalities to improve your mental health and performance.
00:01:03
Speaker
He is a certified yoga instructor, completed a 10-day silent vipassana meditation retreat, and advocates for the responsible use of altered states of consciousness as therapeutic modalities.
Exploring Trauma and Mental Health Journeys
00:01:16
Speaker
So on today's podcast with Peter we'll discuss various things including dealing with our past trauma and our wounds,
00:01:24
Speaker
various non-ordinary states of consciousness and how we can use them to access and release these kind of pent up stored up traumas. We discuss Peter's journey into improving his mental health and his own struggles and I think this is really valuable for other folks to hear because
00:01:47
Speaker
We all have our own traumas and our own wounds that many of us have repressed and simply don't want to deal with, but they're at the same time diminishing our quality of life mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually. So it's really refreshing to see someone who can be so open and vulnerable with us so that we may benefit from his struggle, his journey, and his work now.
00:02:17
Speaker
So i really appreciate and i'm very thankful that peter got on and open up to us especially for guys i think this is valuable because so many of us. Are so close of closed up and we simply don't want to think or or discuss or deal with these issues that we have that are just.
00:02:38
Speaker
They're just causing blockages in our psyche that over time can develop into more serious things. So the first step as always is to kind of become aware of our own traumas and then begin to process and integrate them.
Resources for Integrating Psychedelic Experiences
00:02:57
Speaker
And for that, if you were on this kind of journey or beginning to or thinking about embarking on such a journey,
00:03:05
Speaker
I would highly recommend Peter's resource, his website, Integration Station. There, he covers a ton of the modalities that are available or at our disposal for this type of work. We'll be discussing some of these on today's episode, things like Tony Robbins seminars, breath work, meditation, silent meditation retreats, psychedelics, of course.
00:03:31
Speaker
His website covers a whole lot more. So I found quite a few that I will be doing further research into. He also, if you do go to his website, I highly recommend that you get his integration station protocol. I think it's like 16 or 20 pages of basically it's a PDF you can get that just really helps you to plan for and integrate some type of
00:04:01
Speaker
Pick experience let's say you're going to a four day silent retreat or you want to do psychedelic therapy or any other therapy really counseling and justice is a great tool that he has available for free for folks that can.
00:04:16
Speaker
use it to go deeper into yourself and really prepare and get the most out of these peak experiences because as he talks about a lot, you might have an amazing experience, but unless you actually integrate that into your daily life, you've just had an amazing experience.
00:04:37
Speaker
it's really important work he's doing and once again I'm really thankful and appreciative that he came and opened up so that basically he's setting a good example for more of us folks that are walking around holding our traumas and pain and not doing anything about it because we know that doing something about it is infinitely better than not doing something about it. It might be a painful
Accessing Additional Content and Peter's Background
00:05:01
Speaker
and uncomfortable process for a while
00:05:04
Speaker
But in the end, you're much better off. So yeah, great conversation. As always, show notes on the website. Links to Peter's Integration Station website resource and social media will be included there. And then the show notes on
00:05:24
Speaker
in your podcast player. Also, there's a video interview available on YouTube in case you want to watch that instead of listening. Some folks prefer that. And I think that's about it. Once again, thank you for joining me on Connecting Minds. I really appreciate you spending an hour of your time with me. I know it's valuable and I hope that you get as much out of this conversation as I did. Thanks again. And without further ado, here is Peter Conley.
00:05:52
Speaker
Okay, today on the Connecting Minds podcast, we have Peter Conley. Peter, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you, Christian. Now, of course, I'll read your bio with the introduction, but do you want to give folks a little bit of your story, your background, what you're up to these days?
00:06:10
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. My name is Peter Collie, born and raised in Buffalo, New York. I went to a small state college in rural New York called Geneseo, lived on the West Coast in Portland, Oregon, specifically for about five years, and then recently moved back to Buffalo in 2019. And I guess my story or how it pertains to this podcast and this space in general is
Peter's Personal Mental Health Tools
00:06:34
Speaker
Over the past five years, I've been on this journey and this path of improving my own mental health and using tool after tool. And some of those tools have included
00:06:48
Speaker
In the six Tony Robbins seminars, I've had a meditation practice, specifically Vipassana, a consistent one for about two years. And I did my first and only 10-day silent retreat of Vipassana back in 2015.
00:07:04
Speaker
own Alaska Washington. It's included talk therapy, it's included EMDR, Transcendental Meditation, and several other tools, which we'll discuss and get into. But it's really just been like, what can help me tone down or rid my depression and anxiety that I've dealt with for years, if not a decade and a half.
00:07:27
Speaker
That's kind of what I like to share my story and just bring awareness to specific tools that people might not be aware of yet and kind of share my story.
00:07:41
Speaker
Yeah, so you said you were grappling with depression and anxiety for what could even be said as a decade and a half. Could you maybe elaborate? You can tell us whatever you want to share. You don't have to share everything. Obviously, there's always personal elements to every story. But whatever you can share with the listeners,
00:08:08
Speaker
Can you tell us kind of how that started, how it progressed, what were in your view the catalysts for that and how did you begin to unravel this stuff over the last several years? Yes. So how did it start? What did it look like essentially? So I think the first time
00:08:29
Speaker
I went into counseling was teenage years, 14, 15, 16, and it didn't really stick. I didn't see the importance of it, but I was there because I had
00:08:40
Speaker
I guess what would you label as mild depression? Right around that time. So I'm 30 years old now. So to give the listeners context, that was around 2004, 2005, 2006. My family was going through a fairly hard time. My father was struggling with a lung disease called pulmonary fibrosis and he was on an oxygen tank from 2002 until 2009.
00:09:05
Speaker
He got a lung transplant which extended his life, gratefully, for about three years.
Family Challenges and Mental Health Impact
00:09:10
Speaker
But that whole period of me from age 12 to 19, it was just highs and lows, peaks and valleys, rollercoaster. For a period of three years, we spent every major holiday inside of a hospital room just because he got this lung transplant and he was great. And then five weeks later, he was on life support. Then he got home and he was recovering. And then there was just kind of complication
00:09:33
Speaker
after complication until his body and his lungs started rejecting the transplant. So that whole process was grueling and sad and tough and
00:09:47
Speaker
at the time, I didn't really understand the effects it had on me and my mind and my body. So that was probably the largest issue that led into the depression anxiety further on that surfaced as a young adult. So there's that piece. And then throughout this, my mom was like just a makeshift nurse. She was just like a hero in that regard, attending to my dad's needs, doing research.
00:10:15
Speaker
And i think in that process she lost herself a little bit she i don't think it was she was officially diagnosed by think you you could fairly say she had clinical depression or some form of hardship just from giving her soul and to keep my dad alive and then
00:10:32
Speaker
On top of that, my own sibling had a severe drinking issue. Luckily, they've been sober now for over 14 years, but their substance abuse got fairly reckless where they had to get sober by age 18 or they would have killed themselves. And then
00:10:53
Speaker
And onto that, which I found through therapy is I had a fairly severe case of bullying around age 12, right when my dad got on an auction tank.
00:11:05
Speaker
Kids around the neighborhood who happened to be my closest friends at the time just kind of shifted radically on me within a week or two. I think it was just young boys jockeying for status and they chose me to level themselves up by bringing me down. But it was pretty severe at a time where they were threatening to kill me and my family and physically trapping me at the back of the bus. So all those four major points just in a very formative year in my life, formative years in my life,
00:11:35
Speaker
kind of set in a sense of unease to my nervous system, physical trauma, and
00:11:45
Speaker
At the time, I didn't have coping mechanisms or adults in my life to hold emotional space. So all that kind of set in and affected me around ages 12 to 19. And so I went to therapy, talk therapy, I think around ages 14, 15, 60, briefly. Was that your choice or your parents, your mom? I think it was my choice, their influence. Um,
00:12:14
Speaker
And they recognized the sadness, but what was my
Ayahuasca Experience and Bipolar Diagnosis
00:12:18
Speaker
saving grace was that in high school, I had an amazing group of friends, just unbuilt, just caring, ambitious, loving, good, clean, fun as a teenager. We obviously had some beers, but it was never the focus of socializing with that group of friends. Call it like 15 of us. A lot of us lived around the neighborhood.
00:12:42
Speaker
that was an amazing source of stability through all that chaos. And honestly, if I didn't have that, I don't know how far I would have fallen, that support group and just that great social circle. So yeah, the therapy was influenced by my parents, I believe, but I did it a little bit. But because I had that source of stability, I didn't see in the short term to use any other tools because that was kind of my rock.
00:13:13
Speaker
And so that kind of sets the table for issues that would fester for years. And those traumas and the lack of grieving properly for my dad and all of that started to rear its head, as a young adult, call it 22, 23.
00:13:38
Speaker
At age 23, I had my first and only manic episode. I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. What that looked like was I was working for AmeriCorps, which is like the Peace Corps, but a domestic program in the United States.
00:13:58
Speaker
Um, it was in the thick of a 10 month program about five months in, I had this like overwhelming sense of euphoria that I wanted to be a writer that came out of nowhere. And I told all my coworkers, I was going to be a writer and I'm going to do this. And it led me to just leave. Like I exited the program with no plan. Um, throw up a blog only wrote like two blog posts. And, um, I left and joined some friends that were doing a backpack trip in Peru. Um,
00:14:25
Speaker
And in the back of my mind, I remember hearing about ayahuasca, the substance down in South America that people use to spiritual awakenings for healing depression and things like that. And so I signed up for a retreat of ayahuasca. I believe it was three sessions in six days. You know, you do a session, take it off, do a session, et cetera.
00:14:52
Speaker
And that was in July of 2013. And mind you, silly enough, I didn't. I had no meditation practice at the point. I didn't understand the altered stage of consciousness. I didn't do anything beyond talk therapy. And I was basically learning how to swim in the open ocean.
00:15:13
Speaker
so to speak. So you can see, you can see it kind of laying the foundation for a bad experience. So I went to two sessions after the second one, I was not willing to do the emotional work and was just very discomforted by the actual experience of ayahuasca. And then things started to unravel from there.
00:15:34
Speaker
Did you do the diet? I'm sorry? Did you do the diet prior to the ayahuasca? Correct. I did the diet. The diet was part of the program.
00:15:51
Speaker
And things started to unravel down there. I lost my short-term memory for about a day or two. I was incredibly confused. My depression just got like 10x worse. The metaphor I can give it, it's like I went down there to get open heart surgery to clear out my mental health.
00:16:11
Speaker
you know, the ayahuasca or the surgeons caught my chest open, started working on me and I'm like, nope, nope, I'm good. No more, I don't want this. And I ran out the surgery room with my heart still open. That's, I think that's the best equation where the obviously the best decisions would have been to see it through, walk the route or just never sign up for the surgery in the first place.
00:16:34
Speaker
I, um, luckily talked to my brother over Skype when I was unraveling and he's just like, as calmly and as concisely
Recovery and Coping Mechanisms
00:16:44
Speaker
as he's just like, Peter, get on a plane. I'd love to see you come back to Buffalo. It sounds like you're having enough time. Just get on. And I think if my mom were to have that conversation with me, it would have pushed me back to much or someone else, but my brother, just the way he said it was just like it got me on a bus from the Sacred Valley to PZAC.
00:17:10
Speaker
I spent the next six months just in a deep, dark depression, could barely get out of bed, and tried very mild and other tools starting there. So that looked like, at the time, it looked like talk therapy, it looked like medication, did acupuncture on a regular basis, and started to dabble with meditation.
00:17:34
Speaker
So it really was six months of just grinding to get to be basic level functional. And then I got stable on that point. Moved out to Portland, Oregon in 2014. And had a pretty good life. Worked for an additional marketing agency. Spent a lot of time outdoors. Had a good time with friends.
00:18:02
Speaker
And around 25, 26, the anxiety started to really surface. Um, I was, I was functional at that point. I was employed, but it, my ADD was so severe. I was like borderline unemployable. I was rarely present in conversations. I would just always escape to my head and my mind and my daydreams. Um, could barely sit still. I am my digital marketing agency in Portland. Um,
00:18:29
Speaker
I would leave my desk maybe 20, 25 times a day, just doing walks around the office, go to the bathroom 12 times a day, just like could not sit still literally. And so in Portland, I just started kind of continuing that journey of trying different tools, where I did in Buffalo, you know, with the acupuncture with medication, and those tools got a little bit more definitely wider. I signed up for my first Tony Robbins seminar back in March of 2016, and did
00:19:01
Speaker
three more. Well, I did six total, but I did three more. I did four of his behavior change seminars. He has a couple of like business and things of that nature, but learned a lot. And that was incredibly valuable. And right around that time, signed up for my first 10 day of Vipassana meditation, which was an amazing, amazing tool of Vipassana.
00:19:22
Speaker
And then got back into talk therapy. And it's probably half a dozen other tools, man, like EMDR. If there's any science literature, if there was any person I followed, whether it be an author or an entrepreneur that said this tool helps and it was within my comfort zone, I would just do it. I mean, my anxiety was so severe. I was
00:19:44
Speaker
not really putting money into retirement. I would say no to vacations just to pour the money into some modality to help move the needle for me and my anxiety. Yeah. Well, that's, I think that is such a great thing you did for yourself because that, you know, why invest in the future if you're suffering in the present moment, right? Quite literally. Yeah. Like I could have, my dad could have left me 10 million and I,
00:20:11
Speaker
It could've left me 100 million and the quality of life wouldn't have been worth the just general day-to-day what that felt like in my body. So of these tools, when you started using them, what do you think moved the needle for you in terms of starting to feel better? Yeah, great question.
00:20:41
Speaker
I had a couple epiphanies. The first one was probably in the first Tony Robbins seminar I ever did and in those he uses a lot of different tools. He uses static dance, he uses incantation, he uses questions to reframe your thought patterns.
00:21:00
Speaker
And I think in there was the first time I realized I could radically shift my emotional state just from dancing. As silly as it was, it gave me a sense of power over myself and helped remove the victim mentality from my mind. For the longest time, it was just like, what was me? My dad suffered, like I suffered because this wasn't fair, and that script was running in my head for the first 26 years.
00:21:30
Speaker
And in that seminar, through experience of just like going from like walking in day one, being fairly depressed and anxious to three hours later, dancing to pop music, just being like a static and I didn't have to put a drug in me, I didn't have to put a medication like, oh, like I can shift things, like this powers within me. So that light bulb went on. Then
00:21:55
Speaker
Second would probably be Vipassana meditation, getting distance from my thoughts, and truly understanding and experiencing that I am not my thoughts, at that the issue isn't me, it's these patterns of software that run on a loop, saying, you know,
00:22:11
Speaker
Why are you so lazy? You can't be present in a conversation. It's like those are just thoughts. Those aren't me. Those were two of the biggest aha moments, I think. And then the third would be in talk therapy, just. So talk therapy paired with reading other people's stories about talk therapy got me to get a map of my mind.
00:22:38
Speaker
And my history understanding that, yeah, Peter, like your father going through that sickness and your mom struggling with her own and your siblings struggling, that can lead to
00:22:51
Speaker
severe ADD that can lead to just feeling so uncomfortable in your skin. Like that makes sense. And for the longest time, I told myself this narrative just like, you know, you grew up upper male class, you've never been marginalized for your skin color, you've never been marginalized for who you love.
00:23:10
Speaker
you didn't experience real pain. There was sadness, but there's no way your history could lead to the anxiety and what you're suffering with. But talk therapy and reading other people's stories, specifically Tucker Max, the author, him sharing his history and how that led to his issues of attention seeking and such clicked. It's like, oh, here, my past did matter. Here's how it's showing up. Here's how it's affecting me. And your pain was real.
00:23:40
Speaker
It gave me permission to understand it, and then it gave me kind of a map to be like, oh, this is how you can solve it. These are the territories you need to walk.
00:23:49
Speaker
I'm glad you kind of brought that up because that is so important. Not to take anything away from people who are marginalized for what gender they identify with or for who they're attracted to or their skin color and so on. Of course, what they're going through is obviously horrible, horrible marginalization.
00:24:15
Speaker
but at the same time pain is pain, psychological pain is pain and we can have trauma where something is inflicted upon us but we can also, some people have trauma where something is missing through their childhood, let's say.
00:24:32
Speaker
And that can lead to us getting into depressed states and anxious states and seeking substances or experiences to avoid or make up for that pain or that hole in us. This is such an important thing to give yourself permission to
00:24:56
Speaker
the way you said it is, how did you say it? To give yourself permission to feel the pain, is it? It's okay to- Yeah, to one, recognize the pain is showing up in your behavior, your coping mechanisms, perhaps habits you can't stop on willpower alone, and then feel the pain. Yeah. So have you been able to process some of that trauma since
00:25:26
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So that's a great segue. And I think that's a good segue into talking about my project integration station. So how we connected was over Twitter, and I was just talking about trauma and talking about different tools I've been using. And through that, I'm building a project called integration station.
Integrating Insights from Altered States
00:25:45
Speaker
And integration is a term of the process of taking an insight, a realization, a download from an altered state of conscious modality and then bringing it into becoming a habit, bringing it into taking action, bringing it into catharsis or emotional release.
00:26:05
Speaker
And what an altered state of consciousness is, there's many, many tools to get there. I mentioned a few already, like meditation. There's several forms of breath work, like holotropic breath work is probably best understood, neurodynamic breath work, soma breath work. And then in the, I think what's hot right now or getting the most attention is psychedelics and specific compounds or entheogens being used as medicines.
00:26:33
Speaker
um, the enthalogen that I mentioned in the beginning was ayahuasca. Um, and there's several that are being, um, and have been under, um, clinical trials over the past, I want to say 15 years ago, uh, the nonprofit maps started doing work with MDMA or the active ingredient ecstasy for specific trauma.
00:26:58
Speaker
to heal trauma in believe the population they target was veterans or veterans. And so, with integration station, my purpose is to kind of bring awareness to all these different tools and modalities, and then make sure you're actually integrating those experiences, whether it's you just walked out of a 10-day Vipassana retreat and you had the realization like, oh, my job isn't right for me.
00:27:29
Speaker
this career in law, me being a lawyer, I know my heart isn't right, but I've been ignoring those thoughts for years. Let's take action on it." Or it could be, in my case, doing MDMA therapy and I had repressed memories of
00:27:46
Speaker
severe bullying. Like I knew bullying was there but I didn't realize they were threatening my lives. I didn't realize they were threatening to kill my family and my dogs and having that come up and then working on that, like having that realization and then getting into a type of therapy like internal family systems. So that is kind of how we connected and where I'm going is using all these different tools and responsibilities as possible.
00:28:16
Speaker
to help unpack my trauma and heal the things that are harder and deeper to get into. So could you maybe give us a little bit of an overview? What is it like to do MDMA therapy? And what is it like to do, let's say, ecstatic dance and EMDR?
00:28:42
Speaker
Just to give the listeners a bit of a brief introduction maybe to each of these kind of most common holotropic breath work. Obviously, we know with meditation, it's thought surface up, but what about some of these less commonly known modalities? Yeah, that's a great place to go. Holotropic breath work, and I'm not, I might,
00:29:11
Speaker
not articulate the best, but it is a, you can call it like active way of manipulating your breath, like over-auctionating it to induce a shift in consciousness, a shift in mental state. And then within that state, you'll get visualizations, you'll get emotional releases, could be anger, could be sadness, could be laughter.
00:29:37
Speaker
It's effectively playing with your physiology to get out of your normal waking state consciousness.
00:29:44
Speaker
the, you know, the, the heavy monkey mind where you just have that crazy person talking over and over on loops and narratives. And a tool like breath work specifically halotropic can change the TV channel in your mind so that you're tuning into something else. You're not tuning into that narrative or those patterns of thoughts and emotion that have been there over and over. I think
00:30:13
Speaker
It's impossible to fully describe in words what an altered state of consciousness is until you actually experience it, but I'll try with the language I have. It is shifting your experience of reality and shifting the patterns of thought you have, shifting the somatic experience in your body with a certain tool and holotropic breath work.
00:30:42
Speaker
Um, it's been a, it's been a really good one for me. And, and so to, to, to, you know, the purpose, sorry, Peter, can I just, um, go ahead, squeeze this in. So you talk about, um, you tweet about how the trauma is stored in the body. Maybe you can kind of weave that into as you continue. Yep. Yep. So based on my learning.
00:31:11
Speaker
through people like Dr. Peter Levine, who wrote, my book is right here. The book title is In An Unspoken Voice and Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, who wrote The Body Keeps a Score, awesome book. Their theory or their research has led them to understand that
00:31:34
Speaker
stress and actual emotions literally get trapped in your body when you suppress them, anger, sadness, grief, etc. And you need or in order to relieve them, you need a modality that actually tackles it and releases it. A lot of, from my understanding, a lot of psychedelic compounds do that.
00:32:01
Speaker
MDMA therapy did that for me. I actually had like, during those sessions, I had like, it looks like seizures, but I'll call them like Jimmy legs. Like my body involuntarily was vibrating back and forth to like physically release the stress that was trapped in my nervous system. I've also done a type of massage called Lomi Lomi. I believe it comes from Hawaii or Southeast Asia. My practitioners from Hawaii, awesome guy.
00:32:30
Speaker
And he is – he will hone in on like parts of my muscles and bones and be like – he said, like, oh, Peter, I think you have some anger from when you were seven trapped in your shoulder. I'm like, no. You like crazy – what are you talking about? And like, lo and behold, he'll start digging into the tissue and I'll have a memory of being angry at my dad pop into my mind and I'll just start roaring uncontrollably.
00:32:57
Speaker
So it's just, what is going on here? It seems so surreal and it doesn't seem real. But from using the school of thought of trauma from doctors like Dr. Bessel van der Kolk and Dr. Peter Levine, their theory is that the
00:33:17
Speaker
emotional suppressions you have, the high stress impacts, the actual traumas get physically stored in your body, stored in your nervous system and you need tools to actually go in and release them. And from my understanding, the tools are plentiful. It could be trauma release exercises like TRE. YouTube has a bunch where they're just kind of like look like yoga poses, but they induce the same somatic releases that I talked about.
00:33:41
Speaker
It could be lomi-lomi massage and it could be some psychedelic compounds that help actually tackle and release those stored in the body. So there's only so much we can do with dog therapy, it seems, right?
Therapeutic Approaches and Their Efficacy
00:33:55
Speaker
Correct, yeah, from my understanding. And I forgot, someone had a really good quote, would have been Tim Ferriss, said that you cannot talk your way out of what you talked yourself into.
00:34:09
Speaker
So if you had an issue like pre-language when you were a one-year-old where you felt terror because your parents were screaming at each other, you can't talk therapy, you can't get to it because it was developed before your language was fully online. Yeah, and I'm not disparaging talk therapy. It's been an awesome tool for me. Specifically, I know it's helped millions and millions of people.
00:34:35
Speaker
part of my project is to bring to awareness that it's one piece, it's not the whole puzzle. And that from my understanding now, you need a modality that actually works on the body to release those emotions and those traumas trapped in the body.
00:34:55
Speaker
Um, there's a couple more. I'm actually, I have quite an interest in, um, I know a little bit about EMDR. I have a couple of books that I've yet to read. Could you tell us what your experience with EMDR and what it is and what your experience has been? And then we can maybe this internal family systems. I'm not quite sure what that is. That would be great to know a little bit more about.
00:35:16
Speaker
Yep, so EMDR is, I'm gonna get the acronyms wrong, eye movement, de-sensitization. Desensitization. Okay, yeah, it got better than me. And it is the movement of your eyes back and forth while, and in my EMDR I use tappers that look like video game joysticks that release vibrations.
00:35:46
Speaker
So it's influencing your eye movement while having those vibrations in your hands. And I believe, I'm not terribly well versed in the actual science behind it, but I believe it's trying to get past the guard of your conscious mind or bring down those defenses to get into your unconscious, to help give insights, to help unpack emotions, to help get understandings into what's beyond the conscious mind.
00:36:18
Speaker
I've done it with a therapist, a trained practitioner. I've done it twice. I did it with my therapist, my general talk therapist in Portland a couple of years ago, and then I've done one. Did it again in Buffalo.
00:36:31
Speaker
That's one modality for whatever reason. It didn't move the needle too much for me. I've heard plenty of people where it's been great. I don't know if my defenses are too strong or what's going on, but I think it's worth checking out for sure if people are interested. There's plenty of practitioners in most major cities that do it and most of the time it's covered by insurance.
00:36:55
Speaker
It's low invasive. You're not flying down to Peru to go talk to the Jaguars. It's very accessible. By the way, sorry, can I just go back to that ayahuasca stuff? I really feel like doing three ayahuasca sessions in a week, that's just way too overwhelming for people, isn't it? Don't you agree with that?
00:37:22
Speaker
It was obviously overwhelming for me. It's probably overwhelming for a good chunk of people. I'm sure it, it has, it has, there's some reasoning and logic behind it. I don't know if not Bayahuasca or the tradition of the indigenous cultures so I can't
00:37:43
Speaker
I get what you're saying. I'll agree with you. It was too much for me. Perhaps it's too much for a good chunk of people. Who knows if that's 5%, 10%, 20%? Yeah. I guess people, they don't have the luxury to fly over one weekend every month to do it once, so they have to squeeze them in to a retreat type.
00:38:05
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And I don't know if the theory behind it is like the first two sessions are to lower your defenses and then you actually dive deep on the third. I don't know if that's the reason behind it. But I do know, I believe, Sultara, which is a ayahuasca center in Costa Rica that a lot of the
00:38:22
Speaker
larger well-known names like Kyle Kingsbury from Onnit talk about and talk about with great respect. And I believe they have a similar structure. I believe it's two to three within a week or whatever it is. So there might be a there there. I have no idea. It clearly was too much for me. And I'm under the camp that it'll be too much for you if you've never dabbled with any form of altered states of consciousness like meditation, like breath work.
00:38:54
Speaker
Even though there are plenty of people who have been okay with it, I am in the conservative camp of just before trying any entheogen, any psychedelic, just meditate please. Understand and experience what that is to get space from your thoughts. And then try something deeper like breath work. I think I've seen and I'm worried people are diving a little bit too deep with these hyper potent tools.
00:39:22
Speaker
And I'm, I'm literally a case of that. Like I was a knucklehead 23 year olds who signed up for literally the most, the strongest mind transforming compound on the planet. You got balls at least. You got balls. Balls are stupid. I guess maybe they go hand in hand, but I, yeah, it's definitely not for everyone. Do not learn how to swim in the open ocean. You can get wrecked and drowned. Um,
00:39:51
Speaker
But yeah, yeah, for sure. The three times in a week was too much for me, for everyone, probably not. It might actually be the exact protocol they need to go deeper, but my experience was like way too much. But I like what you said, you know, do stuff and there's so much free stuff you can do before you go deeper with medicines. Like you said, meditation, journaling, you know, there's
00:40:20
Speaker
things like, I don't know, tai chi, chi gong, yoga, of course. I think journaling, writing your thoughts, I don't personally do it anymore, but that can really help people kind of process a lot of stuff before you get into the nitty gritty of it, so yeah. Yeah, journaling has been a really good tool for me. Yeah. Talk to me about internal family sisters, Peter. That was something very interesting that I know a little about.
00:40:49
Speaker
Yeah it's another one I'm not terribly well versed at so apologies if I get some details wrong but it is
00:40:56
Speaker
reviewing your history and identifying parts of you or ages where there was some sort of trauma or issues that need healing and that could be the three-year-old that saw their parents get divorced, could be the 12-year-old that got severely bullied, it could be the six-year-old that got sexually molested and understanding when that part of you surfaces and that could look like
00:41:27
Speaker
fear of attachment in a romantic relationship. Let's say you're 30 years old and you're in your career and things are going well, but you're afraid to fully commit. And perhaps that's because your seven-year-old that saw your mom afraid to fully commit and got a divorce, that seven-year-old is coming up in you and being triggered. So it's identifying and working with those points in your history and those parts of you that rear their head.
00:41:57
Speaker
And also giving context of those heightened emotional experiences and how they can shape you. How witnessing one fight from your parents at a very young age can have its effects and impacts today. So you've read a little bit into how trauma can affect addiction. Would you maybe discuss that point a little bit?
00:42:26
Speaker
Yep. Yeah. So my reading and understanding of how trauma can affect addiction, the majority of it stems from Dr. Gabor Monte's work, who's an amazing man. I recommend anyone who is learning about or wants to understand the trauma model of addiction opposed to the disease model to just Google Dr. Gabor. And he's been on the podcast circuit like he talked to. He has a great one with Tim Ferriss. I think it's two and a half hours long.
00:42:56
Speaker
Really wise man like grew up I believe during the Holocaust in Eastern Europe fled became a doctor Amazing story and he's just so like calm and soothing and double-headed. He's like the elder you want So so my understanding comes from his work
00:43:13
Speaker
Um, and his, I'm going to paraphrase his school of thought is he believes that the majority, if not all of addictions stem from trauma or emotional wounds and most likely childhood wounds. So that, you know, that, um, opiate addict on the streets of Vancouver, Canada, um, the reason why they're escaping their pain with opiates perhaps is because of childhood sexual abuse.
00:43:42
Speaker
or, and it doesn't even have to be substances. He's under the realm like people, even in our public, like public figures or business leaders are actually addicted to power and money.
00:43:55
Speaker
They literally could not stop running a hedge fund if they tried. And that's because they didn't get some need met or they had some emotional wound as a kid. And they're trying to stuff down that unconscious pain with a behavior that numbs it in the short term. And that behavior could be attention seeking, that behavior could be gambling, that behavior could be porn, like me. It took me a while to actually
00:44:23
Speaker
kind of grips with it, but I was addicted to porn. Call it from age 18 to 30. And with the MDMA work I've done, that addiction's melted away. Don't even, not even literally tempted to do it. And I haven't watched it in October, over five months after my last MDMA assisted psychotherapy session.
00:44:49
Speaker
Which is just mind boggling, right? I feel like the most common school thought is the disease model of addiction, where it's like once you go past a tipping point, the chemical hooks get locked in, and all you can do is mitigate the addiction. I'm probably not articulating that perfectly, but it's the general, my understanding. But after my work with all these modalities and my last MDMA session, literally not even thinking about porn,
00:45:18
Speaker
for the past five months, when I did for the past 12 years, it's just mind-boggling. And I believe what's happening to me is I was using porn to quell the anxiety that was constantly going in my body.
Overcoming Addiction with Alternative Therapies
00:45:33
Speaker
And once I released that through the MDMA therapy, like that general feeling of electricity running through me, that general feeling of unease toned down a lot. So I didn't need a soothing mechanism.
00:45:47
Speaker
And how many sessions of MDMA therapy did you do in total? Yeah, I've done it outside and I've done more than the maps protocol. So I don't want to get into how many because I want the focus to be on the nonprofit that's doing all the research and doing the protocols, but I've done more than the protocol. I'll leave it at that. Okay. That's cool.
00:46:15
Speaker
Yeah, so this is what I like about all these modalities, right?
00:46:30
Speaker
Unlock traumas. So a lot of us think our personality is the way it is because of how our brains are wired, right? But the research into things like neuroplasticity, how the brain changes itself depending on the environment and what we put into our body, and neurogenesis, the ability to literally grow new brain cells,
00:46:58
Speaker
It's not like we are wired one way. We're constantly rewiring ourselves based on everything we do in our environment. Many of us are unaware of traumas that are stored literally in our body somewhere, in our psyche somewhere.
00:47:15
Speaker
And what these practice is not necessarily just psychedelics, although they are probably the most powerful, weakest way to start unearthing these traumas. What they allow us to do is to unearth and process, and this is what I think Stangrove talks about, it's all about
00:47:35
Speaker
allowing the full spectrum of the emotion, the wave to complete itself so that it can be integrated, so something you can fill that space. And I think that why this is so important to talk about, and this is why I wanted you to get on the podcast and talk about this stuff, and I highly appreciate you being so vulnerable and sharing so much of your story with us, Peter, is if we don't deal with this shit now,
00:48:02
Speaker
We're literally going to be passing it on to our kids. Literally. We're perpetuating our own traumas. They're literally inheriting our traumas and it's like what you have on your Twitter account, kind of your little statement where the bio thing is.
00:48:24
Speaker
Hurt people hurt people. I love that. And heal people heal people, you know. And in order for us to collectively heal ourselves and each other, we need to start processing that kind of the gunk, the garbage blocking us up.
00:48:42
Speaker
agreed. Yeah, the breaking the pain of breaking the chain of the pain, breaking the trauma starts with us. And through my specifically talk therapy work, I've noticed the patterns my mom's had specifically anxiety and extreme daydreaming and checking out like I absorbed one to one that I modeled her how to deal with pain and like,
00:49:08
Speaker
And I know for sure if I didn't do this work, I would have passed on to my kids. Um, so yeah, it, uh, it definitely can be passed down. And I love that quote, hurt people, hurt people. I don't know who, who said it first, but it's so simply, it's so powerful. Like it's so true.
00:49:30
Speaker
So what's your plan for integration station to develop it and grow it in the future? Yeah, great. Thank you. Awesome question. I'm building it and I'm seeing where it goes, but as of right now in October 2020, it is to one, bring awareness to all these other modalities that can really help.
00:49:53
Speaker
And to the people that are already using these altered states of consciousness modalities, whether that be holotropic rhetoric, whether that you're going down to Saltarons, use ayahuasca, it's to create resources and more structure and to the actual integration process itself.
Importance of Integration Work
00:50:10
Speaker
And if you ask me, and you'll probably hear this all around, like integration is the actual work.
00:50:15
Speaker
So I'll give you an example. Integration would be like if someone did ayahuasca and then they had a repressed memory that comes up of sexual abuse, right? It was locked in their mind. They didn't realize they had it and they felt those emotions and that experience.
00:50:34
Speaker
Integration would be going, you know, once you get back home from South America, be like, okay, I'm getting myself into a support group. I'm going to try internal family systems. I'm going to talk to my mom about it who didn't abuse me but wasn't aware and we're going to cry together. It'll be journaling about it. It'll be integrating it into your understanding of who you are and how it's shaped your behavior.
00:50:57
Speaker
So that's my main focus with integration station is one, awareness to these other tools, please use them wisely, please use them legally if possible. And then two, try these journaling exercises after your holotropic breath work. Hire an integration coach if you've done MDMA therapy, like do the actual work.
00:51:16
Speaker
post-peak experience to get the most out of it. I'm playing with this analogy and it feels like doing a peak experience whether that's ayahuasca or whether that's four hours of holotropic breath work and then no integration feels like signing up for a tough mutter or a marathon once in your life and then never working out again and
00:51:40
Speaker
You'll gain some muscle and you'll probably lose some fat, but the whole point is the consistent practice to have those habits solidify and just build on top. Yeah, or you could injure yourself and have a bad experience. Yeah, or you can injure like I did. I was the full 23-year-old fool flying down to Peru to jump into the deep waters.
00:52:03
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I think what you were seeking is healing. And this is, I think this is why kids and not kids, but even folks our age, you know, 30, 35, even older, they're seeking out, they can see that the system. The systems we have in place are inadequate in helping us deal with all this stuff. So they're seeking out left field solutions.
00:52:31
Speaker
So, are you going to have a directory of integration coaches at some point? Is that part of your plan? Yep, I will. I have one on there right now, Cindy, who's awesome. I used her for my last MDMA session. She really helped me. And then once I kind of tweak what that system is with my website, I'll add on more. I know Maps, the nonprofit has a really exhaustive list.
00:52:56
Speaker
Yeah, once the website gets rolling and enough people ask, I'll definitely build out that coaching list. And actually, what is it like? Okay, give you an example, right? Let's say...
00:53:10
Speaker
There's no coaches here, right? Let's say I'm going to take whatever, psilocybin, and I want to be responsible about it, and I want to work with a coach, but I can't go into a therapist, you know, like some sanctioned therapist because of whatever reasons. It might not be legal, I might not have access, etc.
00:53:29
Speaker
So I want to work with an online coach. What is the process with working a coach like that in terms of the preparation you need to do? How many sessions would you do optimally before, after this kind of stuff? What's that like? So I'll make a distinction. There's a facilitator who actually is sitting there while you're doing the plant medicine work or empathogen work or entheogen work. Um,
00:53:55
Speaker
Who's the actual therapist holding space while you're undergoing that trip? And then there's a coach who's the afterwards. So the facilitator is like the surgeon, the coach is like the physical therapist helping you mend afterwards.
00:54:10
Speaker
I don't deal with facilitators. I'm not building a directory of them. You kind of have to find them on your own. And if you're waiting into the waters of plant medicines or things like outside of
00:54:26
Speaker
legal realms, you got to be very, very cautious. It's like literally giving your brain to a brain surgeon you met off Craigslist, like there are good ones. But just like, use your discretion, not everyone's well trained. And I don't even when people ask me and I don't point them in there. I just I don't feel
00:54:50
Speaker
Well, educated enough, I don't. It's finding a facilitator for these modalities outside of the MAPS trial or going to Ayahuasca clinic is a tricky thing. Okay. So there's that. But then in terms of coaches, let's say you've gone down to Saltara or you did Psilocybin in Myco Meditations, which is in Jamaica and it's legalized. The coach is for the afterwards.
00:55:19
Speaker
And what the coaching looks like is a lot of back and forth conversation. It's kind of like, it feels a little bit like therapy plus specific journaling exercises plus understanding of the mind. And I'm sure coaching looks very differently, but effectively what a coach does is helps reinforce the epiphanies you had during those sessions, whether it be holotropic breath work, whether it be,
00:55:46
Speaker
ayahuasca down in peru and then holding you accountable to you know get into those support systems if you did indeed experience sexual abuse you know you let's say you you surfaced it from your mind you're back home in detroit and you're like oh it's awful
00:56:03
Speaker
And then three weeks go by and you're not in support group. That coaches be like, you know, this is the work, like, please get in there. This is how you heal. So it's, it's that piece. It's the social accountability plus deepening your understanding and the insights you already brought up during those peak experiences. So these coaches would they then be have to be well versed in whatever modality you're, you're experiencing?
00:56:28
Speaker
Correct. Yeah. I find it very hard if they haven't done it themselves to be a very good coach. And that could be from ayahuasca to halitropic breath work. Definitely find yourself a coach who has personally gone through that modality and understands the ins and outs of it.
00:56:48
Speaker
Would you care to share now? I know you've tried a lot of different stuff and a lot of it sounds really awesome. And I'm actually signed up for a breath work workshop in a few weeks time and you know, I love trying stuff. I'm doing more meditation lately. But can you tell us of all the stuff you've tried, you know, what, what are your favorites and what are like your, your kind of your staples now that you do, let's say on a daily, weekly, monthly basis, this kind of stuff. If you, if you would care to share. Yeah, no, of course the,
00:57:19
Speaker
The three by far most impactful have been Vipassana meditation, which is a staple of mine. I do it 10 more, 10 minutes every morning. I'm sorry? What's the difference between, let's say, Vipassana meditation and just whatever meditation?
00:57:34
Speaker
Yeah, so Vipassana has two parts. It's Anapana and the Vipassana. The organization or nonprofit was started by a man named S.N. Gawenka. I think he's from Southeast Asia. He has since passed away. He's built hundreds of free nonprofit centers to learn Vipassana across the world. The Anapana section of it is literally just awareness of your breath underneath your nostrils. And then the Vipassana part is body scans.
00:58:03
Speaker
of just being mindful of up and down between the top of your head to the front of your forehead, to your jaw. And supposedly, I believe this is the exact same technique the Buddha used as to how verifiable that is, I don't know. But Asangawenka built this institution and this understanding of this practice. And it's been awesome for me. It's
00:58:29
Speaker
You can do a 10D Vipassana. It's purely donation-based. If you only have 10 bucks to give after the 10 days, you give 10 bucks.
00:58:36
Speaker
I'm gonna drop 10 grand because you're so thankful you can do that. So I do Vipassana every morning for at least 10 minutes. I actually do it in work now. My day job is sales, software sales, and my boss is cool with it. I'll literally go into a conference room, sit there for three minutes, reach in my mind, and then get back on the phone to sell, and it's awesome. It's free. It's so gentle. Anyone can do it. Awesome tool.
Impact of Tony Robbins Seminars
00:59:02
Speaker
The second would be the Tony Robbins seminars. I've gotten so much out of them, just from understanding of psychology, from understanding, like, just getting rid of my victim mentality, which was just such an anchor. And if you have that, it's really hard to heal. It's really hard to improve in life. Like, as much as it sucks, taking full responsibility of your life really is, like, a prerequisite.
00:59:29
Speaker
And then MDMA therapy has been profound for me. It's been an amazing tool and I'm incredibly excited to see it available to the public very, very shortly. MAPS, the nonprofit, is doing amazing work. Rick Doblin, the founder, has been in the trenches getting that whole protocol legalized and getting the public knowledge for like three decades now or something crazy. The guy's just been an awesome champion for healing. Yeah.
00:59:59
Speaker
And what's amazing is that they won't stop. As soon as MDMA is legalized, they're going to be, you know, Psilocybin or Ayahuasca or God knows what else, maybe BOGA or Ibogaine, which is amazing that it's really going to revolutionize mental health care, I think. I agree. Yeah. Okay, Peter, can you tell folks where they can find your work and you on social media, please?
01:00:30
Speaker
Yep. The only place really I'm active on social media is Twitter. And my handle is Peter D. Conley. That's P-E-T-E-R-D-C-O-N-L-E-Y. That's how we connected. I love Twitter, by the way. It's an awesome space for this. And then my project integration station can be found at the URL integration-station.com.
01:00:54
Speaker
Also, I will have the links in the show notes and on the website so folks can go learn more. I'm looking forward to producing this episode because I have to rewatch it and
01:01:12
Speaker
put the links in there, and I'll link to some of the stuff you linked to. Obviously, I'll link to integration station, but I'm just really looking forward to exploring more. There's this Vipassana meditation with the body scans I've been reading about. I forgot the type of meditation where you basically, it's like a body scan, but you're feeling the energy go up your back, kind of upwards. I forgot the Roy,
01:01:38
Speaker
Masters or something meditation and there's people saying just these body scan type Meditations are really really beneficial. I think in the military they teach Soldiers to do a certain type of body scan that helps them fall asleep in like two minutes or something like that, you know
01:01:55
Speaker
There's a lot of really powerful tools out there. And yeah, look, I want to thank you once again for sharing your story, being vulnerable
Encouraging Openness and Sharing in Mental Health
01:02:04
Speaker
with us. I think especially for guys nowadays, it's hard enough to talk about this stuff with a therapist or with your friends or someone close to your partner, never mind to share it with a wider audience. So I want to really thank you for that shows a lot of
01:02:24
Speaker
maturity and you know a lot of I don't know a lot of kind of it feels like you really want to help people because sharing like that it actually is helpful for people because it will allow others to open up more I believe so thank you so much for your work thank you so much for sharing your story and thank you for your time today on the Connected Minds podcast Peter
01:02:50
Speaker
Thank you, Christian. And special thanks to guys like Tucker Maxx and Tim Ferriss. I wouldn't be here without their guidance and them sharing their stories, so I feel like I'm just paying it forward, passing down the baton to people who I can.
01:03:04
Speaker
Yeah, it's like standing on the shoulders of giants. All the folks that are on this podcast, everything I know and I talk about, I've learned from them and others. So it's all about sharing the knowledge, sharing our experiences together and growing together and healing together so we can pass it on to others.
01:03:29
Speaker
Yield people, heal people. Heal people, heal people, exactly. We'll definitely be staying in touch, Peter. Thank you again. Thank you, Christian. This was awesome. Thank you for listening to Connecting Minds.
01:03:53
Speaker
We hope you enjoyed this conversation and found it interesting, illuminating or inspiring. For episode show notes, links and further information on our guests, please visit christianjordanov.com. If you found this episode valuable, please share it with someone who might also enjoy it. Thank you for being here.