Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
#35 Tah Whitty | Psychedelics, Physical Trauma & Sexual Healing
7 Plays2 years ago
We go into psychedelic leader, coach and rapper Tah Whitty's story, trauma, life changing events, emotions, his relationship with his brother, father and past romantic relationships, and how psychedelics changed his life.
He grew up in tough Brooklyn, where he at an early life started hiding and developing masks to keep himself safe. Sex became his outlet and addiction. Insomnia became a biproduct. As a registered nurse he found his calling: helping people to heal. Eventually, he saw the money the took precedence over people’s health, and transitioned to become a personal trainer for high end clientele. In the mean time he was always pursing his love for rap. One day he met Kole, his now wife, who introduced him to psychedelics which opened up his heart and gave him the courage to look at his past and no longer hide. Many years later, he has done the work, and transcended to a place where Tah and his wife Kole teach facilitators and practitioners in the psychedelic space to become leaders to pass on what informed, wise, structured and guided use of psychedelic looks like.
____________________
TAH WHITTY:
⚡️ Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-psychedelic-coach-podcast/id1481060523
⚡️ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tahkole/?hl=en
⚡️ Website: https://sociatap.com/tah/
______________________
SEBASTIAN ENGSTROM
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Ta Witte's Transformative Journey
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to the Safina Podcast. I am your host, Sebastian Engstrom. And today, Ta Witte joins me. He is a psychedelic professional, a leader in the space. And you'll soon understand why. He has truly put in the work. And he is probably just like you, just like me. Once lost, now found.
00:00:30
Speaker
Everything from abuse, nuances of sexual abuse, growing up in a rough, tough neighborhood of Brooklyn. And everything that went into it, defining his passion for helping people. This has now transformed him into the healer, the amazing human being that he is today. He is no longer suffering from insomnia.
00:00:55
Speaker
He's no longer hiding. He now lives life with an open heart. And we're going to exactly how that happened. Thank you for tuning in. Okay, so it's amazing to have you on. Just I want to say a deep gratitude. Just thank you for being here.
00:01:24
Speaker
Thank you for having me. I'm grateful to be here. I'm grateful for the work that you're doing and I'm grateful to be part of the voice to your audience. Thank you.
The Impact of Childhood and Personal Growth
00:01:36
Speaker
One thing, what it says behind you is integration.
00:01:41
Speaker
When we saw you for the first time and called a paleo effects. My wife and I had just done a MDMA ceremony. And it was the first one that I've done. I've been on.
00:01:57
Speaker
I've been in the, the game of psychedelics or it's been surrounding me for quite some time but I've been resistant saying okay, that is your path. I'm more of the, you can say the superior mindset of a spiritual person like oh I'm going to do the hard way, I'm going to do the
00:02:16
Speaker
the meditation. I'm going to do the birth work. Oh, you don't need psychedelics. But eventually I saw the profound work and the healing that it's done. And my wife connected with this woman in Santa Cruz, just beautiful facilitation that was done. And we went there to access
00:02:38
Speaker
something deep within us to connect as a couple. And we hope for it to be a beautiful session, just the two of us, because especially having children, the dynamic changed. And we just wanted to get closer and find that deep love instead of finding the flaws within one another. We did want that was the initial part. But the big part is some significant trauma from Sofia's childhood that came up. But in that,
00:03:09
Speaker
The flip side of that was that I found myself being able to really hold space. And I've been so caught up in myself, one can almost say as the ungrounded, unhealthy masculine, that I now found myself as the rooted, grounded mountain of a man that I can be. And that shifted me.
00:03:34
Speaker
on a very subtle level that I didn't realize at first. But all of this, why I'm telling you this story is when we were very shaken up, it was just a few days after, we almost canceled the trip to Austin and then we came and when I saw the topic that was at UN and CO were hosting on, I'm like, ah, old things came up, should we really go into this?
00:04:03
Speaker
and eventually we did and moved me deeply. I was in tears several times and especially by your story and ever since then we've been so grateful that there are professionals and deeply
00:04:24
Speaker
You can say brave people like yourself were taking this to another level of being serious about how this should be done, it can be done, and how to help people. Is there anything that comes up for you when I tell you about that?
Professional Life and Self-Expansion Teachings
00:04:39
Speaker
Yeah, a tremendous amount of gratitude, you know, I've been, I've been a nurse for 29 years, and I worked in ERS all over New York City for 25 of those 29 years. And, you know, to, to be recognized in a space where all the culmination, the
00:04:58
Speaker
all of these experiences have come together to get me into a position where I could actually teach people how to expand themselves differently than the traditional healthcare model. And for someone to have to come to a talk that I'm doing at a conference and have a profound experience and there were several people in that room that came to me and said they had profound experiences just by hearing me speak about psychedelics and the potential of it and how to integrate this into body and that there are people who
00:05:25
Speaker
are crafting something for people to have a long-term experience that they are sovereign in creating. It's not like the doctor told me this or the doctor's fixing me and healing me or the shaman told me this and the shaman is doing this. The reflection that you're offering to me right now is warming my soul because the reflection that you're rendering me is
00:05:53
Speaker
I couldn't see where I was going for all these years. I was like, what is all that? What am I doing here? What am I doing with my music and traveling? What am I doing with nursing? What am I doing with personal training? Why am I learning all of this stuff? And now I see. And when a person such as yourself that I have a tremendous amount of reverence for comes to me and shares with me what you shared with me then and sharing what you share with me right now,
00:06:18
Speaker
it validates me. And I had a huge, there was a lot of trauma in my life and drama in my life around me not feeling valuable. And that's been a lot of my work. And so when I have a reflection like this, it's that this is currency for me. This is the most valuable thing in my life is to be recognized for what I am as a human being that's contributing to the life of another person who's contributing to the lives of many.
00:06:44
Speaker
So that for me reinforces the foundation of what I am and I am of source, I am of God or universe, whatever you want to call it. I am of all of this and I am a huge part of it. And so I'm creating from this space of limitlessness. And so to see another aspect of myself celebrate me puts me in a position or it inspires me to be in a position of celebration of myself.
00:07:11
Speaker
So your story is just amazing. And you're, you're touching upon a few things. How did it all start? Let's just go into it. Cause that's what really moved me so deeply in how you change direction multiple times in it. And even as you got the call, you refuse to call. Yeah. So please, how did it all start? What are the calls? Call to work and take a belly. Yeah. Let's, let's, let's see to even start. Like what was it like growing up?
00:07:40
Speaker
Well, growing up was an interesting space. I'm the middle of three kids. My mother and my father were 13 years, I think, 11 or 13 years apart in age. I can't recall right now. But they had three kids. They had my brother. And I was born 23 months after my brother and my sister three years after me.
00:08:03
Speaker
And so I'm the middle child. And when I was around six or seven, I asked my mother, how come sometimes, you know, because between December 16th and January 2nd, my brother is, there's an age difference of one year, and then there's an age difference of two years after January 2nd.
00:08:21
Speaker
And so I would ask, I asked my mother one day, how come sometimes I'm one year younger than my brother and how come sometimes I'm two years younger? And she said, well, you're the surprise baby. We didn't plan for you. So you came really close together. And so I took that, that.
00:08:37
Speaker
idea that she rendered to me and I turned it into they didn't mean they didn't want me. I was a mistake. And so I had this this undercurrent of shame that I created from this statement that my mother gave me. And then I use that as a lens to look at how I was treated.
00:08:54
Speaker
And, you know, there was a lot of, you know, and I've done some work with myself and my mother around this, this very particular space of me being treated differently than my brother and my sister. I was always, I always felt like I was the problem. I always, you know, everything was inconvenient with me. And this was this, and I got confirmation about this from the horse's mouth, you know. And so I had this, this reinforced the idea that I had very limited value and that I was a problem and that something was wrong with me and that
00:09:22
Speaker
you know, they could do without me. And so there was a lot of I'm running away from home, you know, ideas, a lot of maybe not being here anymore ideas as a child growing up. And my brother, you know, I had a very tumultuous relationship with my brother.
00:09:38
Speaker
There was a lot of physical abuse, a lot of beating up, a lot of hating, a lot of, I'm gonna kill you when mommy leaves. I spent a tremendous amount of time in fear in my life. And so I had issues sleeping. When I was a kid, I would pass out and you couldn't wake me up. And so I wet the bed until I was 14.
00:10:04
Speaker
And so I had a lot around that. My brother would tell people in the neighborhood and tell people at school. And I had all of the shame around wetting the bed. And my father would take my mattress and put it up against the wall and say he was airing it out. It was disgusting. And there was so much stuff that happened to me as a child that just happened to me that was happening around me. And I was a participant in.
00:10:28
Speaker
um you know they they thought something was wrong with me so they took me to the doctor they took me and they ran all these tests on me they put tubes in my bladder to see what was wrong with my bladder why i couldn't stop being in the bed and it had nothing to do with the physicality of my my body it had to do with
00:10:45
Speaker
my psyche and what was going on and how scared I was and I didn't know this and so when I when I reached um you know there was there was a host of other things that happened in my childhood you know sexual explorations with cousins with male cousins and all of these different things that happened because um I questioned my sexuality as a child because my brother would always call me a faggot you faggot right and so I I
00:11:10
Speaker
took my brother's word for it. Maybe he knew something I didn't know. And I explored in spaces that were really, really wonky for me. And so I had a lot of shame around my sexuality, had a lot of shame around a lot of stuff as a child. And so when I got to high school, I ended up going to the same high school as my brother. That's one of the only high schools that I got into. And he was so angry that I was going to the same school as him.
00:11:33
Speaker
so angry. And so I made sure that that my brother couldn't tell anybody that I was waiting in bed. So I just stopped going to sleep. And so I had insomnia from the time I was 14 to the time I was 44 was 44.
00:11:53
Speaker
Yeah, I think it was around 44, 43, 44. No, it was before that. I was from 59 or so. My insomnia went away in 2013, I believe it was, 2013 to 2014. So, yeah.
00:12:10
Speaker
around 43, 44, something like that. 44, maybe 40. I don't know. It doesn't make a difference. So I grew up in a shitstorm of self-doubt and self-loathing, and I got into really, really toxic situations and circumstances.
00:12:30
Speaker
I started to explore sex when I was around 14 with females. And by the time I was 16, it was just nonstop sex all the time. Everything was sex, sex, sex, sex, sex. I couldn't think of anything else. And I got involved with a girl who told me that she was one age and she was another age. She was younger than she said she was.
00:12:56
Speaker
And we would have sex all the time, like our mother would go to work and we would just have sex every day, like all day. And it was the most profound sexual experiences. It was fantastic. And I had this self-saboteur inside of me that would not allow myself to be loved because
00:13:17
Speaker
somebody would take it away because love was always taken away at home. And I was afraid of the love that this girl rendered to me. And so I sabotaged the relationship and I started seeing somebody that really just did not give me
00:13:33
Speaker
any kind of significant full love situation. Everything was conditional. It was perfect. It was a perfect demonstration of low self-esteem. And so the girl that I had that relationship with, she called me one day, the initial relationship, she called me one day and she said, I need to talk to you. So I went over there and I spoke to her. I used to skateboard, I used to compete.
00:14:00
Speaker
And I skated over to her house and she said, listen, I had sex with your brother. And I was like, OK.
00:14:14
Speaker
And I was like, she was like, I was really mad at you for even walking away from me. And I couldn't get the closest I could get to any, to you was your brother. And she's like, are you mad? I was like, I can't be mad. I mean, look at the way I left the situation.
00:14:31
Speaker
and you know oral sex is my thing like i love oral sex a big deal for me and i learned my oral sex pleasure from this girl and she was amazing phenomenal she today to this day she is still the barometer for my sex life like
Navigating Adolescence and Identity Challenges
00:14:47
Speaker
if if i'm gonna be like this sex is awesome it's compared to this girl right and so she asked me she's like
00:14:56
Speaker
Do you love me? And I said, I do. And she said, do you love the sex that we have? And I said, I do. And like, I do. And she was like, do you love the way I go down on you? And I was like, yeah, I do. I love it. And she said, did you ever wonder why a girl my age could do that to you the way I do?
00:15:15
Speaker
And I said, oh, I never thought about it. And she said, do you want to know? I said, tell me. And so this girl's mother was this beautiful dark-skinned woman. It's very sad. And her father was this really, really tall, angry, pale white guy.
00:15:37
Speaker
her father hated her mother for having a black baby for her and so he would invite his friends over on the weekend and he would have them have sex with her and he would make her go down on them and that's how she learned
00:15:52
Speaker
That's how she learned to have the sex that we had. And so this put me into a spiral of guilt and shame for desiring to feel the way I felt with this girl based on...
00:16:09
Speaker
Where she got the skills for this from and so I had a hard time being in any relationship with anybody and asking them for sexual gratification or to participate in that stuff because of the shame that I felt the guilt that I felt around that situation that this is where my greatest pleasure came from such a heinous situation.
00:16:29
Speaker
And so this affected my sex life. And so a lot of the sex that I had moving forward was in the shadows. I used to pay for sex. I used to drive around in my car and do all this crazy stuff. And I didn't know why I was doing it, but I was looking for the connection that I had with her.
00:16:49
Speaker
And I was looking for it through these activities and never found that connection that I had with her. And so this put me into some really awkward spaces. School was crazy, writing music was bananas, like it was such a dark time in my life.
00:17:08
Speaker
And I ended up staying with the girl that I left her for, and she was physically abusive to me. She would burn me with things, like all of these really, really crazy situations and circumstances around women. And my father had always taught me to never hit women, never hurt women, only walk away, let them do whatever they do. And so I was physically abused.
00:17:30
Speaker
And this was a thing for me to be abused verbally, physically, mentally by other people and allow it and just had this resilience from being beat up by my brother all the time. And so this was a thing for me. And so this was a pattern that was built into my nervous system. I would attract people into these spaces and then I would go into the shadow and look to connect and have sex. And so this was a mess, a mishmash of all kinds of crazy stuff.
00:17:57
Speaker
And so I didn't get the attention from my parents that I really wanted. So I made sure I messed my grades up in high school and they still didn't pay any attention to me. They paid a lot of attention to my brother and my younger sister. And so I ended up with really terrible grades. And so I couldn't get into any solid accredited colleges. And so I went to a community college in Brooklyn called Kingsborough Community College.
00:18:24
Speaker
They had the one of the best passing rates for nursing in the country for the for the boards. And so I took nursing, right, I took nursing, and I excelled I went through the whole thing with flying colors. I mean, I believe myself to be a very intelligent person.
00:18:44
Speaker
Accademia has nothing to do with my intelligence and so when I went and I took all of the proficiency exams I excelled and I did all this stuff and he put me in these honors classes when I was in.
00:18:55
Speaker
in the community college. And so I got my nursing degree and I graduated when I was 20 years old. I got my nursing degree. I got my license. I started working as a nurse and I was still doing my sexual stuff from the sidelines. And so I was doing all this really grimy stuff and I was helping people with their lives at the same time. And so I was watching the contract. Excuse me. Why nursing?
00:19:16
Speaker
Well, I had a lot of my friends told me that I was able to help them navigate psychological situations and all of these things. They would come to me with issues. I would help them navigate it and they would be like, where did you learn this stuff? I'm like, I don't know. I learned it from my experiences. And so.
00:19:31
Speaker
I had this idea of becoming a psychiatrist because I wanted to help people with mental things and emotional things. Then I said, listen, my grades are terrible. There's no way I'm getting into medical school with these grades. Let me go become a nurse and I'll do this. I paid for school on my own.
00:19:52
Speaker
I had no student loan debt when I got out of college. And so I was like, I can use nursing to pay for medical school. And then when I got through with nursing, I was like, I don't want to do medicine. When I started working with doctors and I saw what they were going through, I was like, I don't want to do this.
00:20:09
Speaker
And I really love caring for people. And so that's how I got into nursing. And I really loved nursing. And it was awesome to be a nurse. The system, though, was really, really dysfunctional. And so I would go and I would work and help people and do all these things. And I would just watch the system. And so when I graduated from nursing school, it was in 1992. And that was at the early part of HIV.
00:20:36
Speaker
And so HIV rocked New York City. I mean, it was a nightmare. And so this is where a lot of really a lot of questions came into mind with me is because there was HIV everywhere and I was having sex with all these different people. Right. And so there was more guilt and shame. I mean, there was there was protection for the most part, but there were times where there wasn't.
00:20:58
Speaker
Right. And so I was there were times I'm being honest. There were times I was not using condoms. Right. And so there was all of this like I was so wound up inside. I wasn't sleeping. Right. I wasn't sleeping because I was afraid I was going to wet the bed because I had not dealt with that.
00:21:14
Speaker
And here I am an adult, right? I'm having sex with all these people. There's HIV rampant everywhere. I'm helping people, saving their lives. I still have my dynamics with my mother, right? My mother's a physician. My father's an x-ray technician. My father had retired. All of these things are going on. I still have this relationship with my brother. I was estranged from my brother for five years.
00:21:34
Speaker
My younger sister went off to study medicine.
Brooklyn's Influence and Societal Struggles
00:21:37
Speaker
All of these different dynamics were going on and I was juggling all this stuff. Meanwhile, I'm not sleeping. I'm having sex with all these people and HIV is rampant in New York. And so I'm in this perpetual state of fight or flight all the time. And so I don't know how I was navigating all this stuff.
00:21:55
Speaker
And still in that, I was able to assist people in navigating their spaces and to hold space for people and to be friend and to be brother and to be all of these things to all of these different people. And I learned to navigate all this. And so I started writing music in 19
00:22:15
Speaker
1991, I started to write music because hip hop was a big deal and I really didn't like what was coming on the radio now. I was like, I want to write my own music. I got to ask, who did you like back then?
00:22:28
Speaker
Oh my gosh. My favorite MC's, Rakim, Kool G Rap, Tribe Called Quest, Grand Puba, and Brand Nubians. Man, there's so many people. There was a guy named Sui that was on the underground that I just loved.
00:22:51
Speaker
KMD, third base, oh man, there's so many, Slick Rick, are you kidding Slick Rick? Just one of my top five MCs of all times. And that was my start space, was UTFO,
00:23:11
Speaker
you know, Roxanne Roxanne was one of the greatest songs that I remember hearing that song for the first time in my grandmother's basement and I was blown away, you know, just blown away at the lyrical play. And so I loved words. And so this is one of the things with me with English, I love wordplay and linguistics. And so I would orchestrate my lyrics into these really awesome
00:23:33
Speaker
complex spaces. At first, I would follow the battle rap stuff and insulting people and doing all of these things. Just the same cliche trash that I had been exposed to. And not that it was like all battle stuff is trash, but there was a lot of garbage that I was exposed to.
00:23:51
Speaker
And I was following what was on the mainstream radio to make my records. And so I moved. So bringing in another nuance to that. Could you mention, so Brooklyn Community College, do you mind sharing more about what is it really like growing up in Brooklyn at that time for people who don't know? Because that brings a flavor to this that some may not know.
00:24:17
Speaker
Yeah, listen, so Brooklyn was a very interesting place. And so in the neighborhood that I grew up in, it's the most culturally diverse place in the world. Over 60 languages are spoken in that neighborhood. It's called Flatbush. And I went by, I still do, go by Ta from the Bush, right? I'm from Flatbush, right? And so Ta from the Bush was my, that was my name. And you can ask people in New York about it, Ta from the Bush. And growing up as a kid,
00:24:47
Speaker
watching the gangs. So we moved in the 70s. I was born in 71. We moved through some tremendous gang phases in New York City. And Transformers came out and there was this gang called the Decepticons. And the Decepticons would destroy everything. And they would go out in these, they would call them posse, right? And they would go out in these rampages and they would just wile. We called it wiling.
00:25:13
Speaker
right? You're wilding out, right? And they would go and destroy everything and hurt people and all of this stuff. And so these were the things that were going on. We had HIV, we had gangs, we had gangs, we had HIV, we had crack, right? And crack was just in the 80s was bananas. And crackheads would come and break into your car, break into your house, steal your stuff, you know, your
00:25:38
Speaker
friend's daughter or son was a crackhead and they would come over and you wouldn't know that they were crackhead and your stuff would be missing like this was Brooklyn like and it was it was pretty crazy for a long time and you know the the cops were all all white people.
00:25:53
Speaker
and they would beat up on black people and Latinos relentlessly. The stuff that you see on the news now, it's a lot more subdued than it was in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. People are sensationalizing it because it's put on the news. You can't get away from it because everybody has a camera now. But this stuff has been going on for a long time in New York.
00:26:19
Speaker
And so my mother was definitely afraid of me being out when the lights, when the street lights would come on at night, you had to be home.
00:26:27
Speaker
When it got dark in the street lights, we had to be home. Otherwise, my mother was absolutely terrified that we were going to get killed by cops or other people. And so Brooklyn was pretty crazy as a kid, as a teen. And in the late 80s, beepers came out and drug dealers had beepers.
00:26:52
Speaker
It was a really, really easy way for people to get in contact with one another. You could beat me or my beeper and I'd go to the payphone and call you and then we'd meet up somewhere. If you were seen with a beeper, the cops would assume you're selling drugs or your parents would assume you're selling drugs. It was this whole deal. People were hurting each other like crazy. Brooklyn was just one huge ghetto.
00:27:20
Speaker
And there was the neighborhoods where white folks lived. And it was like, that's the white people's neighborhood. And so there was all this segregation. And so there was, you know, and if you got caught in the neighborhood where there were houses, right, if you live in the buildings and you got caught in the neighborhood where there were houses, the cops would come and come and mess with you.
00:27:36
Speaker
And so there was a lot of dynamics. There's so many dynamics. I mean, it would take me all day to discuss the dynamics of growing up in Brooklyn. But people would, there was a lot of gangs, there was a lot of times, and my mother put me and my brother and my sister into Catholic school. And so we would wear uniforms.
00:27:53
Speaker
And so we were targets for the other kids, the kids that went to public school because, oh, your mom got money and they put you in this school. So those rob you. And so people would dig through our pockets and, you know, take our stuff. And it was it was crazy. And so, you know, I spent so there was fear all over me all the time. I was scared of crack. I was scared of crackheads. I was scared of HIV. I was scared of my brother. I was scared of my mom. I was scared of
00:28:18
Speaker
of everything. I was scared of my family being hurt and I was doing all in all of this I was doing my best to protect my little sister from my brother and from getting hurt from anything outside. So the dynamics for me I thought this was normal.
00:28:31
Speaker
And a lot of my other friends had similar dynamics, but this is not normal. Well, I guess it was normalized. It's not natural to live this way. I thought everybody lived this way. And so, you know, as things started to get more subdued, moving through the 80s and the 90s and
00:28:51
Speaker
HIV started to scale back. They came out with a drug called AZT, which helped the symptoms and the syndromes around HIV and AIDS to slow down, which got us as a race of people to isolate HIV into a space.
00:29:12
Speaker
things started to even out and crack started to even out. All of these things started to even out at the same time. And then we started to have financial crashes and all of these weird things were happening in Brooklyn and people started to move into the white people started to move out of Brooklyn.
00:29:31
Speaker
And so the housing market shifted. And so people started to other people, blacks, Latinos, Asian folks started to buy up the houses and everything started to mix even more, which started to even things out. And so things started to get safer. Things started to change. People started to care more. Black and Latino folks started to get into the government and things started to change. And so things so there was this evolution in Brooklyn and that's and that's what it was like coming up in Brooklyn. And I mean,
00:29:58
Speaker
We could have a whole week's long worth of podcasts for me telling you stories and stuff around that. But that's a synopsis of what it was like growing up. Being in the hip hop situation was awesome for me. I felt powerful and I felt connected when I was on stage. I'm this scared dude by myself and all this stuff. I got on stage and I felt when people were listening to me,
00:30:24
Speaker
And when somebody would come up to me after and be like, man, that that that hit home that was just so here that got me into a space to start to open up and open up my vulnerability and start to start to be different. Hip hop initially was it was a thing where if you copied somebody's style, you were biting. And that was the biggest crime in the world to bite somebody's style.
00:30:44
Speaker
And I found that I was doing that. I was like, I don't want to bite. That's the most heinous hip-hop crime you could do is copy somebody else's style and try to claim it as your own. And so I started to do a lot of avant-garde stuff and just do really weird things in my stage show. They used to call me the Gallagher of hip-hop because I would go to my shows with this big tub full of props and I would set up the whole stage.
00:31:05
Speaker
And where other MCs or rappers would get on stage and just wrap in the mic and get off the stage, I would have this elaborate stage show with these different hats and outfits and wigs and all these different things that I would put on in different parts of the show. And I would throw toilet paper. I had this one song called Toilet Paper. And it was, here's some toilet paper. Wipe your lip. MCs don't come equipped. You're just talking shit, right? And I would throw toilet paper out to the crowd. And everybody in the crowd is waving toilet paper. I had a song called Middle Finger. And what I did was,
00:31:33
Speaker
I had my money was so jacked up I would go to the post office and get the overnight not the overnight I would get the express mail and the priority post things and I would cut them and I would put them through my printer and I would print this big middle finger and I would put it on sticks I would go to uh to there was a store what is this store called Pergament and they would have the stirrers for the paint
00:31:57
Speaker
and I would get a bunch of stirrers and I would glue them to the middle finger. And everybody in the crowd would have these middle fingers. Put up your middle finger, wave it around. And I would do all these absurd things. And I would do these shows where I would have like a s'mores. I would have graham crackers and chocolate and marshmallows. And I would be like, come to my show and make s'mores and sit on the floor in these pillows, right? And it was just the weirdest stuff to do for a person who was on some hip hop shit.
00:32:27
Speaker
And so then there were other shows where I would have like peanut butter and jelly and you can come make your own sandwich and all of this stuff. And people loved it. And it was different than the other stuff. And so the fans that I had back then, I still have now. I have a solid thousand fans that love everything that I do musically. And they're like, oh, you haven't done music in a while. I'm like, something's coming. So yeah. So that's part of my upbringing in New York is
00:32:53
Speaker
all of the influence that I've had around hip-hop.
Father's Influence and Personal Reflections
00:32:57
Speaker
I wrote an album. The last album that I released was in 2010, the last full-length album that I've released. I've done single since then. But it was 2010. It was a book, a full book, and an album called Luminous Dark Allies, The Insomniac Works. And it was a title where the insomniac me, I work, and it's the works of the insomniac, right?
00:33:21
Speaker
It's all about my experiences with insomnia. And it was an introspective dive into myself because I was tired of not sleeping. And I knew as I know, as a health care professional, as a nurse, that if I continue this way, it's going to affect my heart. And I was not interested in dying. My father in 2000, my father, my mother had asked my father for a divorce at one point right before their 25th anniversary.
00:33:51
Speaker
And my father slowly, just after that, his health just tanked and he ended up in the hospital with something called amyloidosis. And amyloidosis is one of the most rare diseases. I've only seen it in two people in my career as a nurse and my father was one of them.
00:34:06
Speaker
And it attacks the heart muscle and it's a genetic, there's a genetic something that comes online and it completely destroys the heart and you have to get a transplant. And I watched my father, my father had severe claustrophobia and I watched my father die in a hospital bed attached to a heart bypass machine that he was on for almost nine months. And it was terrible, it was terrifying for me. And so, you know,
00:34:36
Speaker
That space, being in that space was really hard for me. Yeah.
00:34:49
Speaker
I love my dad. And he was the one person that would hold space for me regardless of anything. And he supported me in my music. He supported me and always said he believed in me. And he was a tremendously lonely person. And to watch him in that space and watch his heart break, literally break when my mother separated from him was frightening for me. And so I saw
00:35:17
Speaker
my heart in my insomnia. And I was like, I'm not going down that route, man. And so I was like, I got to figure out how to get to sleep. And I didn't put two and two together that the bedwetting thing had put me into that space. And I got so lost in everything that I was doing. I forgot that I decided to stop going to sleep. Let me ask you one thing about your father. What came up for you right there? I miss him.
00:35:48
Speaker
He is, he was funny and wonderful and loving and like just the way he loved women was inspirational. Like I can feel it in my body. Like I cry at least once a week, like I'm crying right now when I speak about my father or anything. And the stuff that I know,
00:36:16
Speaker
and how I know how to navigate the human psyche and the human experience. I know that if I had that, if I had these tools the way I have them now, I might have been able to support my father in being in a different space. And it kind of fucks with me.
00:36:40
Speaker
You know, it's a really heavy space. And my father is probably my biggest motivation for the work that I do right now. And watching this man in his angst, in his suffering, in his loneliness, in his love for my mother and my sister and his mother, I saw my father cry twice.
00:37:10
Speaker
My father cried when his mother died. I think it was in 1976. He came home and he cried into a towel. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. And then when my mother graduated from medical school,
00:37:24
Speaker
my father ran out into the aisle and they called her name. He's like, that's my baby. That's my baby. Here's to streaming down his face. And the moments that he had, that joy, that
00:37:43
Speaker
And that is what I was in search for in my life was to have that joy. And so I got into this space where I started outsourcing my joy to the women in my life and looking for them to be the catalyst for my joy instead of finding it inside of myself. And that's what I saw in my father is that he was outsourcing his joy to the women in his life. And so this is part of my learning experience and diving in with all of these things.
00:38:12
Speaker
So that's what comes up. So if he was here right now Just right here with you. What do you think he would tell you? Great job, man. Keep it up. I always knew it
00:38:30
Speaker
And he would say things like that to me, you know, and just really, really subtle. You got this. You'll figure it out. You always do. You always will. And he would just say that to me. You'll always figure it out, Tom. You will always figure it out. And you got this. He never, he is the one person that never had a doubt in me, not a shred of doubt. And, um,
00:38:56
Speaker
And it's something that I never gave myself the opportunity to sit and nurture with him was that confidence that he had in me because he didn't have it in himself. He had it in me.
00:39:12
Speaker
Do you feel like you have that for yourself now? Do you still feel like you're doing it for your dad? Yeah, I do. So confidence, the way I see confidence, confidence runs along a continuum. We never lack confidence. We have confidence that we can will and do, or can't will and don't.
00:39:32
Speaker
And so there's a confidence, there's a continuum between those two, can will, do, can't, won't, don't. And so I am confident that I can, will, and do anything that I choose. And when I find myself getting into this space that I can't do something, I won't do something.
00:39:47
Speaker
Right? And then don't do something, but how am I going to get to the other side? That's how I tweak my confidence spaces. And so I do draw from my father when I'm in the space of saying that I can't do
00:40:03
Speaker
that. Um, let me do that. Nope. I'll bring my father online. He says, you'll figure it out. And so a huge part of the work that I do with people is, is creating strategies. We, something Cole and I call us of running an SOS and as part of our integration protocol with, with psychedelics and all these other things.
00:40:19
Speaker
And this is what I'm telling you, man, I draw a lot from my dad. And he's very, very limited words, but the feeling and the intention behind his words were powerful. And so we created this thing we call an SOS. And it's running an SOS. Are you checking your state or your strategy? There are no limited human beings. There are only limited states of being and limited strategies to get into those states.
00:40:44
Speaker
And so the strategies provide you the confidence. Where are you in the confidence that you can will and do can't won't and don't. And so if your strategy is limited, it might be more on the can't won't don't side. If your strategy is unbridled, it's on the can will and do. And how do I figure out how to be able to do what it is that I want to do.
00:41:03
Speaker
And so this is all the work that I do. And if anyone ever comes to me to have a conversation or talk about my work, my father is deeply infused in all of it. Very, very few words. And I can feel his love all the time. I can feel it in my body. I'm a product of this man. And so I can feel it in every atom of my being.
00:41:30
Speaker
when I'm in a space of confidence that I can do and will. So when we go back to the story of how you saw your father pass away and the fear that came up with your heart, what happened then?
00:41:49
Speaker
Yeah, so I wrote the book, and in writing the book, one of the things that I learned to do in my explorations with myself is to write things out, let it rest, and then come back to it later. And the stuff that I write reveals something to me that I didn't see before.
00:42:11
Speaker
usually because when I'm writing, I'm in a sympathetic nervous system state of doing. And when I come back to read it later, I'm in a parasympathetic space and my mind is able to expand into a different realm of processing. And so I was able to look into these things and see the holes in what I'd been doing and how I did self-loathing and the habits around it. And so the self-talk that I had
00:42:37
Speaker
All of the negatives, negatives, negatives, negatives, negatives. I can't do this. I won't do this. This is messed up. I am dysfunctional. And saying things like, I'll never do that. This is how I am. This is how I am. Very, very permanent speech. And so I found that in my writing. And so in that writing, I started to translate that into my music.
00:42:56
Speaker
And so I started to translate the music and the writing into how I speak on a day to day basis. And so I started to see how my linguistics in how I spoke to other people inspired them to reflect the language back to me, which actually created a habit in my physical body to keep perpetuating the language that felt awesome. And so when I put the language out,
00:43:21
Speaker
And the language is reflected. My body actually generates hormones that feel awesome, like serotonin and dopamine and oxytocin. And these things make me feel connected. And my body started to realign itself around that type of situation. So I was getting all these rewards for being in these spaces of connectivity. And so I started to move into a space where I saw how linguistics affected everything that I do. I am the word. And so when I look at the word that I am,
00:43:50
Speaker
I am creating this through how I express and how I elicit a reflection from other human beings. And when I elicit a reflection from other human beings, it influences my organism to generate the hormones that vibrate at a particular frequency. And the frequency that they're vibrating at is a frequency of ease, a frequency of flow, and a frequency of fulfillment.
00:44:15
Speaker
So that's how it's, that's what I'll share with that becomes up for me. There are a few things that I've been holding back on the confidence is one thing I'll touch upon first rap and hip hop growing up in Sweden. I was never exposed to it. My minor like pop, hip hop things, but then I found DMX.
00:44:41
Speaker
Oh man, I love DMX. And the first album I ever bought at 11, 12 years old was It's Hot. It's Dark and Hell is Hot. And for anyone who knows this album, it's hardcore.
00:44:58
Speaker
uh for for 11 12 year old swedish boy who barely well decently speaks english um and opened up a whole new world and uh new york rap is very close to my heart uh everything from talib kali most stuff jada kiss kormega naz some of the list goes on you mentioned several of them tribe call quest i mean there's so many and um so what you're speaking of i'm like
00:45:26
Speaker
Like I told you, I don't do much research intentionally and I'm holding myself back not to listen to you. Where are your tracks? I'm going to listen to them right after this. The word, what you're speaking of, the vibration of the word,
00:45:42
Speaker
So deep and so meaningful like that was my therapy like growing up Those were my best friends were the rappers because I couldn't relate to the people around me like that's why I drew connection Inspiration love but also meaning from like I had my first like real speeches in class Were about one was some I'd started getting the southern rap after that was one was in college about chameleon and one of his songs and
00:46:10
Speaker
And another one, talking about biting, one of my English papers that I wrote in high school, I copied one of Slick Rick's songs, added a few things, and the teacher's like, this is amazing. Have you really written this? I'm like, yeah, yeah, I have.
00:46:31
Speaker
And we would get into arguments because she'd say, oh, you shouldn't be like rap and hip-hop is so like there's profanity and so on. Well, you just gave me the best A grade on my essay that was a copy of Slick Strix. Freaking, I don't have a song. So yeah. Awesome.
00:46:54
Speaker
with with your connection to words, and how you speak. I mean, what you were you speaking to me right now? It's just it's mesmerizing. It's mesmerizing. It's captivating. Like how? Where did things start shifting in your life? Like you start saying that you wrote this book, that you haven't touched upon the personal training thing, we went into the sex thing, like how did, where did the changes, like when you start diving deeper in yourself and start realizing, okay, well,
00:47:24
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great question. That's a great question. And I've always been a deep person. My mother used to say to my mother, you know, it's really basic. She's like, no, you're not a basic person. You are not basic by any stretch of the imagination. I had no idea what she was talking about. I had assumed
00:47:41
Speaker
And I don't do very many assumptions anymore in my life. I had assumed that everybody thought the way I do. And so this is one of the reasons I felt very lonely is because when I would speak, people would be like, what are you talking about? Because they didn't get it. And so I had to actually dial into my language and see how my language was affecting other people. And so in that exploration, in that
00:48:03
Speaker
that book and that album, Women in Starks of the Allies, there's a chapter in there called, there's a song called Horror Calamity, and I was in a triangle with two women that I was tremendously in love with, and I was lying.
00:48:22
Speaker
to both of them just lying because I wanted I didn't want to hurt them but I wanted to be with them and I wanted to do this like it was just so crazy and I had wanted to kill myself because I wanted to get out of it that was the only way I could see myself getting out of it I couldn't see myself just saying bye I wanted to kill myself and so this is where this I and I net that's a place that I
00:48:45
Speaker
It's a space. If you've never experienced it, it's not a space I would recommend diving into. Suicide is a frightening, frightening space. And it's a very heightened situation where I went from this place of not wanting to die
00:49:05
Speaker
watching my father die, too, wanting to die, and actively making plans to kill myself. And it was bananas. And because I loved these women so much, again, my father's influence was loving on women. I loved these women. And I couldn't see my way out, and it's because my strategy was limited.
00:49:28
Speaker
And so I started looking to figure out how, what I needed to
Transition to Psychedelics and Personal Training
00:49:32
Speaker
do. And so I got started to amass all of these songs and all these unwritten things that I had in boxes and I would lay them out and I would just read. And so I started to see that all of these things that I had written out over my life were actually messages to myself for that moment. And so all of this stuff started to come together.
00:49:51
Speaker
And I started to see the congruence of all of these things. And so Luminous Dark Alley's The Insomniac Works was a huge part of me starting to open myself up into considering things differently than I had been considering things. And then I started to see things happen in the healthcare industry. There was a huge push for the flu shot.
00:50:14
Speaker
And I was like, why are they pushing the flu shots so hard? We've had the flu on our planet for a long time, but they're really pushing the flu shot. So there were two things that really struck my attention, the flu shot and how hard they were pushing it, how there was a rollout to give flu shots away to everybody for free and to put it everywhere and to make sure that kids were getting it in old people. And it just kind of struck me in a weird space. And there's a medication called Lipitor.
00:50:43
Speaker
Lipitor is a medication that's given for cholesterol to bring people's cholesterol down. And so they started to put these protocols in place if somebody came in with chest pain to give what we call stat lipitor. And stat means right now. And lipitor takes weeks to start working.
00:51:03
Speaker
It's not something that's going to be working right now. And so why am I giving stat, why is this in our protocols to give to people who are in chest pain? You start them on Lipitor right now. Why is this so important? You give them Aspirin and Lipitor. Why are we doing this? And so I just started to investigate.
00:51:24
Speaker
those two drugs and some other stuff that was going on in a hospital situation, the vaccine and certain other things. And so I started to see the fishiness that was going on. And I started to see the surveys and stuff that they were doing to get people to become repeat customers. And it just started to really, really freak me out. And I was like, I don't like this. And I took an oath as a nurse to do no harm, right? That's part of the Hippocratic oath is I promise to do no harm.
00:51:53
Speaker
And I started to go to work every day. And the one place I felt like I could be authentic and just do the thing and help people, I felt like I was doing harm. So here comes my shame complex online again.
00:52:06
Speaker
It's just like the shame complex of having sex with these people in the dark. Now I'm going to work and I'm giving people medications that I don't believe that they should have. And I don't like to use the word should, but I didn't believe that these people should have these medications. Something is in place that is not in flow. And so at one point I stopped taking, they put H1N1.
00:52:34
Speaker
the swine flu, they started putting that into the flu shot. And first they announced that the swine flu is starting to get rampant, and then like six, maybe nine months later, they had it in the vaccine. And I was like, that's real quick for them to develop a vaccine and just put it in the flu shot. And I was like, I'm not taking the flu shot anymore. And so I stopped taking another flu shot.
00:52:57
Speaker
The administrators, the hospital started to get really upset and they were like, well, you have to wear a mask. I was like, okay. So I was wearing a mask for 12 hours, right? Every two hours I would change my mask, right? I was wearing a mask. I would put smiley faces on my mask. I wasn't taking a flu shot. And, you know, I got threatened to be fired and all this. I was like, then fire me. And so I started looking for an out.
00:53:17
Speaker
And so I had been training people with fitness for a long time because I was kind of making a transition, right? I was doing my music. I was doing a nursing thing and I was coaching people in fitness. And so I had started to make this transition away. And I developed this thing called Underground Celebrity Fit Club. And I was training all the underground artists and MCs and singers in New York and all these things. We had boot camps and that's how I met Cole.
00:53:44
Speaker
And I met Cole in my music. I met her in Las Vegas. We did a show together at a conference called Music Strategies. And we had been loosely associated. And Cole called me up one day in 2012. She called me up. She had moved back to New York because she's from Utah. And she said, hey, I'm having a Cinco de Mayo party. Can you come by? And I was like, OK.
00:54:11
Speaker
And so I went to her house and the girl I was dating, our relationship, eight year dating situation, I was coming to a crash. I went and I saw Cole and I was like, man, she looks so amazing. It's so great to see her again. And as that relationship started to crash, I mean, Cole started to create fitness programs for people to lose weight. And we had hundreds of people online losing body fat.
00:54:39
Speaker
And so I was like, yeah, maybe I need to really lean into my personal training shit. And so I started leaning into that and making a transition away from nursing because I felt like I had more influence in that space to actually help people stay out of the hospital. And that was my thing. I want people to stay out of the hospital.
00:54:56
Speaker
And so I started doing that and I got into the space where I just kept saying, I gotta get out of here, I gotta get out of here, I gotta get out of here, I gotta get out of this hospital. And I ended up fracturing a vertebra in my spine, lifting a patient and her needing disc in my back. My L5S1 had squashed a disc and I couldn't walk for three months. So while my clients were gone, I couldn't tour with my music, I couldn't do nursing, I couldn't do anything. And so I had to sit
00:55:24
Speaker
for three months on this couch in this one really crazy slouch position so that I wouldn't be in pain.
First Psychedelic Experience and Self-Discovery
00:55:31
Speaker
And Cole had asked me, she was like, hey, you know, she was like, I'm going to this ceremony. I think you should come. And I was like, well, what's that? And she was like, well, you know, you take these, you go into this place and you sit in a circle with all these people and you take these plants and you go off into a psychedelic realm and you kind of find yourself. And I was like, oh, you want me to do some drugs with some hippie white people? I'm not doing that shit.
00:55:53
Speaker
And she was like, right. And because I was indoctrinated, man, in the health care industry, any kind of substances that alter you.
00:56:02
Speaker
Other than what big farmers prescribing? No, absolutely not. I'm not doing that shit. I'm not going to be a junkie. I'm not doing that. And so the thing that was crazy for me is I didn't have any judgment for anybody that did any substances. I had a really close friend that was a functional alcoholic and used cocaine to actually to journey. That's his medicine. And he would go off into these places. And he knew exactly what he was doing, how to dose himself. And it was every Thursday. He would go into the space.
00:56:32
Speaker
And so I knew how to navigate that. And so I was like, I don't judge her for doing this. I have plenty of friends that smoke weed. I'm in hip hop, right? I'm not judging you. I'm just not doing that shit. And so it got to a point where she was going again and she was like, look, I see where you are. And I think that you would be a tremendous asset to the community of people that are doing psychedelics because of the way you think and the way you're able to navigate spaces and linguistics and all this stuff. I had no idea what she was talking about.
00:57:02
Speaker
And so I was like, I'll go because I trust you. And I went and I had a really, really small dose of something called MDA or sassafrost, right? And it put me in, it's what's considered a heart opener, like MDMA, right? It's actually what MDMA metabolizes into MDA.
00:57:19
Speaker
And I had this, it was the most grimy experience. I felt terrible and I was scared. I was frightened because I had never really been altered before. Like the first time I tried marijuana I was 36.
00:57:36
Speaker
And I had never really been altered outside of alcohol in that. And so I spent like three hours just holding coal. I was petrified. And she said, top, why don't you just can you just let go? And as I let go, the whole experience changed. And I figured out in that moment, in that moment that I was a control freak.
00:57:58
Speaker
And that I was looking to control everything at the same time. The way people saw me, the way people saw other people, the way people interacted with it. And so I was doing this through how I spoke to people. And so my linguistics and how I was really great with words, I was able to kind of influence people into spaces based on how I was speaking. And so no matter what, my primary motivator, right?
00:58:25
Speaker
in my life and this is one of the things that I found out in this experience. This first experience was that my primary motivator was to make sure that all the lies that I had been telling and all the hiding that I had been doing in my life to make sure that it never got back to my mother so she would not approve of me.
00:58:45
Speaker
And so circling back to the very first part of this story when I was telling you this very first part of this interview, when I was telling you about my situation with my mom and how I felt undervalued, I did everything to prove to my mother that I was valuable and worthy of her love.
00:59:03
Speaker
And so if she found out about anything that I was doing, I made sure that nobody, there was no paper trail. So all of the grime, all of the things that I'm doing, all the stuff that I'm talking about on this podcast, my mother's just learning about because I had hidden it so well from my entire family.
00:59:20
Speaker
My entire family, nobody knew what was going on with me. I used to sneak out of my house in the middle of the night in the 80s, and I would go and hang out with crackheads. I would just watch them do crack. I would watch them, and I would watch their faces twist up, and that's one of the reasons why I never wanted to do substances, because I would go and talk to them. But the despair that they were in, and all of the stories that they were in, and the vulnerability, I saw the humanity in these people.
00:59:46
Speaker
Anyways, so, you know, in that psychedelic experience I had this huge opening around the control that I had been looking to have over my environment and that control is an illusion.
01:00:00
Speaker
I can influence things can't control things. And so the amount of energy that my brain was putting into controlling the environment is part of what was still keeping me awake. Right. And so this started to open me up into considering other things. And so
01:00:18
Speaker
in psychedelics you do disable what's called the default mode network which is how your brain is wired to see to see things in a particular way your habit forms and so this got disabled and so now was able to see things differently.
01:00:32
Speaker
in a more expansive way than I had before. I was like, how, what is, how have I not seen this before? How have I not seen this? And so I started to explore and I started to explore my linguistics in a different way where I was eliciting situations from other people and having them reinforce things in me by just asking things like, one of the most profound things in that journey, that very first experience that I had was Cole said to me,
01:00:58
Speaker
How you doing?" I was like, I'm good. She's like, you always say that. That's such a canned response. Why can't you be awesome? You're awesome to me. I mean, why can't you be amazing? You're amazing to me. She said amazing. And I said, yeah, I am amazing. And I was like, oh, I like the way that feels. And so what I started to do was I started to ask people, how are you?
01:01:17
Speaker
Right. How are you? And they would say, I'm good. I'm okay. How are you? I'm like, I'm amazing. And I would feel the amazing feeling that I had in my body. And I was like, is it that simple to elicit this from myself? And so it's still part of my day to day experience. When somebody, I asked people, how are you? So they could say something and whatever they say, they ask me, how are you? I'm like, man, I'm fucking awesome. Right. And so it draws this into my body and it gets my body to
01:01:45
Speaker
reset itself into a different space and so I started to see how linguistics influenced everything around me and how I started pulling back from looking to control things and I got more courageous in the space of
01:01:58
Speaker
vulnerability and letting people see me. And my nervous system started to calm down. And one day Cole came by my house and this is when we were dating. She came by with Henry, my little dog, right? Before he was my dog, he was just Cole's dog. And they spent the night and we were talking and I just went to sleep and I slept for six hours. And that was the most I had slept in.
01:02:23
Speaker
yawns. And I blamed it on Cole. I was like, man, it's Cole. Cole stayed over and I went to sleep and it's all Cole. And so down the road, I started to evaluate. I started to backtrack what happened. And I said, what happened that night? And so I started thinking about it. Cole and I sat there and we talked to each other and I had told Cole things that I had never told any other human being.
01:02:49
Speaker
shame things, sex things, money things, stealing things, all of this stuff that I had done. And after that got out of my body, my body wasn't controlling the story anymore. And somebody actually accepted me for who I was in the raw.
01:03:08
Speaker
That was the safest I had ever felt in my life. And in that safety, my body allowed me to actually go to sleep because I wasn't hypervigilant. I wasn't worried that this would get back to my mom. I wasn't worried about any of this stuff anymore. And so I started to play with honesty. I started to trickle it out to my friends. Hey, listen, I never told you this. Now I have a, I have, my daughter is 32 years old, right? Or she'll be 32 this year. And, um,
01:03:36
Speaker
I have two grandkids, right? And the oldest one is 13, the youngest one is seven. And when my youngest grandson was born, I put pictures of my grandson on Facebook. And I was like, oh, it's my grandson. And I started to get phone calls from people, from really close friends. And they were like, yo, how do you have a grandson? I didn't even know you had a kid.
01:04:07
Speaker
And I had been so ashamed of being a father at 18. And I was a father at 18. I didn't even bring this into the story when I was talking about it earlier. And I didn't mention my daughter to anybody because I was so ashamed to be a father and my mother's huge disapproval upon me being a parent at that age. So I kept it to myself.
01:04:32
Speaker
I didn't not tell anybody. I mean, I didn't hide it. I just didn't tell anybody, you know what I mean? I just didn't mention it. If somebody was like, oh, you have a kid, I'd be like, yeah, but nobody asked me. So I never said anything. And so I had this huge, this huge situation and circumstance around having this kid and not being honest. And I started being honest about it. And people started to confront me and I just started to be honest about it. And I started to go to sleep more and more and more.
01:05:00
Speaker
And I saw that control in my brain and how complex it was, the complex weave of storytelling I had been doing my entire life. And as I started letting go of those constructs, each story is a construct, as I started letting go. Because if I were to tell you,
01:05:21
Speaker
and I was to tell your wife and tell your daughter, I would have three different renditions of the same story to make sure that it never got back to you in any particular way other than I wanted you to perceive it. And so this was on autopilot for everybody that I knew. And so this is one of the, I believe, this is one of the influences on why I couldn't go to sleep is because I had programmed myself into this type of behavior
01:05:47
Speaker
And my nervous system was always on alert. It was just always on like, I got to make sure nobody finds out. And so it was always working. So yeah, that's how I got into this work.
Psychedelic Integration and Collaborative Work
01:05:58
Speaker
And so working in psychedelics, people started to ask Cole and I to go to journeys because of how we would sit with people and we would have conversations and they would have these huge breakthroughs based on the questions we would ask them. And it was how we asked the questions and how I knew how and Cole knew how
01:06:16
Speaker
to ride a person's nervous system. And that's what we call it, riding a nervous system. Based on how a person's breathing, what their skin tone is like, what their body temperature is like, what the cadence of their speech and the tone of their voices, we could actually know how and when to ask a question to elicit something from them so that they could actually see themselves in totality in the hiding that they've been doing. And the asset that I have is that I lied so much about so many things, I can see through a lie like that.
01:06:44
Speaker
Like in a second, I can I can see through a lie. And I don't judge the lie, right? Because I was the liar. I was the liar. I used to lie about everything. So I don't judge it. I know what lies are for lies are there to protect. They have one purpose and one purpose only. And that's to protect to protect information, right? Why? What would happen if this information got out?
01:07:04
Speaker
There's something that someone's protecting. And so when you get a person to be in a safe space where they're fully accepted and you are honoring their truth and stuff, you're not going to go blab it to everybody else. You honor it and you welcome it. Their lie is now a welcome thing and they can start to see the information as information.
01:07:22
Speaker
And so we started to sit with people in psychedelic spaces and they would have these huge revelations and these huge openings and would change their relationship, their businesses, their job situations, their relationships with food, their relationship with exercise. All of these things started shifting. And so people started having me and Cole come to these journeys. And Cole is a very, very, very masculine. When she gets into her, she's a female in a female body and she can be very masculine.
01:07:47
Speaker
I'm in a male body I can be very chaotic and feminine, right. And so, we have this way of navigating spaces that is unlike anything that we've seen. And so, so we started to do, people started to ask us to do our own events and we're like we're not facilitators we, we're just you know we're just participants.
01:08:04
Speaker
And so it got to a point where we started to explore having our own events and facilitating psychedelic environments, and people would have these tremendous, long-standing situations. And a lot of it had to do with how we do an inventory on people, how we do an intake on people, and how we move that into a space of making sure that the intention of me as a facilitator
01:08:30
Speaker
is interwoven and integrated with the intention of you as a person or a participant. Then how your body, not just your body and your mind, not just the place that you're in, but also the set of your constructs, your identity, your race, religion, gender, ethnicity, nationality, your family structures, how all of that coincides with you as an individual.
01:08:55
Speaker
your social set and your emotional body, how all of this stuff works as an individual. And then after that, integrating the experience into your day-to-day life, what's the plan? You've got this new information, you're this new person, what are you going to do with this? I had an opportunity when I first started my psychedelic experiences to work with some
01:09:15
Speaker
A list, A list facilitators who when stuff came up for me, Cole called them and we went and sat down with them and they helped me to map out how I'm going to integrate this information and bring it into my life.
01:09:31
Speaker
And so I took that and I was like, oh, I see. And so I started to integrate my own stuff and I started to help people integrate in the experience, right? And we start integrating inside the experience and then outside of the experience. And so this is how we develop this stuff. And so after a period of time,
01:09:49
Speaker
We see the revolution that's been going on in psychedelics. We see the psychedelics are hitting the stock market, big farms got its hands in it. Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies is doing trials. Johns Hopkins is doing all of this work. Columbia, all of these people are doing these studies and psychedelics are on the rise and so there aren't
01:10:12
Speaker
the amount of psychedelic psychotherapists that are potential in this country in the United States or in the world at large is very limited. And so the more people we see as having the ability to support people in integrating their experiences is going to make a possibility for a huge shift on this planet. And so that's how I got into what I do.
01:10:38
Speaker
And now how does this, like, how can people interact with the work that you do today? You and Cole.
01:10:47
Speaker
Oh, man. Well, we have what we call a psychedelic-informed practitioner training. It's called the Condor Approach. And we do a five-day intensive where we teach people how to navigate these spaces, to navigate the integration space through linguistics, understanding certain archetypes, and running SOS, like I said before, assessing a state and strategy and all of these things.
01:11:15
Speaker
We also teach our practitioners how to actually create a business structure that will support them doing what they're doing through whatever is going on. It doesn't matter if there's a recession or inflation or depression. This can work beyond that because we teach a format that is one practitioner to many people in the service space. We teach people how to not be dependent on any kind of
01:11:43
Speaker
health insurance or anything like that, this is a format where this is accessible to people at large. And so that's what we're teaching. We have a five day component. We do it three times a year as a five day in person or online component. And then there's a 12 week situation where you actually go through the integration process. Right. And so we teach you the process and then you go through it so that the five day is actually the transformational experience.
01:12:11
Speaker
We have four intake intention setting in the space and in integration. And the five day is actually the in-space component. And then we integrate over a 12-week period. And it's wonderful, man. I mean, we do it February, June, and September. And it's wonderful. We have a movement we call integration is not optional because we are always integrating things that we experience
01:12:39
Speaker
Are we aware of and are we in the person who is the chief influencer upon our integration of our transformational experiences? Transformational experiences in the lens that we're working right now is psychedelics, but this can be applied to anything. We have people applying this to life coaching. We have people applying this to their patients that come through hospital situations because that's a transformational experience. When you're ill or you're sick or something happens to you, it's a transformational experience.
01:13:07
Speaker
And so we are working with people in this space because you don't need to be a physician to cook somebody through their own stuff. You don't need to prescribe medication. You don't need to even give anybody psychedelics to support them.
01:13:24
Speaker
creation of what they have experienced. And this is why we're training people because this is something that everybody can get in on. And these are skills that we're teaching our practitioners to teach their clients so that they're empowered. And so it's not, I don't, I don't have to depend upon my coach. My coach teaches me this and I'm able to coach myself. And so we're looking to get people to integrate their experiences. And so that's what we offer.
01:13:49
Speaker
So you touched upon it with the dynamic that you and Cole have, and that's exactly what Sophia and I experienced, my wife and I, when we met you, is that you embodied a very soft, you call it also chaotic part energy, and one can associate that with the feminine, and Cole was very much of a dynamic, powerful force, and sometimes one can
01:14:14
Speaker
Yeah, associate that with the masculine. And I think that's such a beautiful representation of what's happening and is there's I don't want to say a need, but there is a it would benefit the collective so much. And I think so many people are looking for it.
01:14:31
Speaker
For example, in a masculine, there's so many who are so uptight like myself, like there's this stereotypical, you don't express your emotions, you go about your life in a very structured, disciplined way, you provide, you earn the money, climb the ladder, and you do very certain things.
01:14:48
Speaker
Well, I'm a feminine. It's it's almost been repressed and it's almost be in the shadow. Don't speak up Don't do as you're told and be this pretty girl and and you're both twisting that completely and it's so freakin refreshing and I I know that's why I so much deeply related to you and why I was just in in tears and
01:15:10
Speaker
when I saw you speak because you said something along the lines like I don't give a fuck what any of you think of me because I've been through this I led through this and if I can help any single person in this room that is what I do it for and people were just crying left and right like men women and just you could feel it deep in your soul deep in your heart like this is the man who's putting everything on the line it doesn't
01:15:36
Speaker
doesn't care like this healing is more worth than anything like yourself than anyone else around you. So thank you. Thank you,
Balancing Masculine and Feminine Dynamics
01:15:46
Speaker
man. I appreciate that reflection. And I do care. I just don't give a fuck. I care a great deal. I don't give a fuck. And now is not the time, family, for us to tiptoe around the love that we have for one another.
01:16:05
Speaker
I'm not going to paint a pretty picture. My love is all over the place. And when I speak about chaotic, my love is everywhere. It can't be harnessed. And for me, that's feminine, right? The feminine energy is all over the place, and masculine energy kind of nudges it into some kind of order. But if you have masculine energy that's holding and preventing the feminine energy from expanding,
01:16:29
Speaker
you have hypermasculinity and this is what people would consider toxic masculinity. I don't see it as toxic, I see it as hyper. We have overgrown the masculine components that keep us into these spaces where we're rigid, where we're stoic, where we can't move. The feminine energies was bubbling up inside. To be able to have the feminine energy bubble and then to nudge it into spaces that it functions for both, that's tantra. You have the ebb and you have the flow,
01:16:57
Speaker
You have the yin and you have the yang. You have all of these things. And this is where we are in flux. And so this is one of the things that I work with, with my clients and my coaches, is to make sure that you are mindful of being very, very rigid because we need to flux. I flux with you, man. I flux with you. And so to be able to be in flux is tremendously important. And I think that the container that Cole and I provide is really interesting because we flux in and out of these two spaces.
01:17:27
Speaker
And so Cole is very much a woman and she's got a lot of feminine stuff going on. Her masculine game is crazy. I watch her and I learn from her in that space. And she looks at me and she learns about femininity and soft and being able to be fallen into. And so that's an important space for us to toggle. And so thank you for that reflection. I appreciate that.
01:17:52
Speaker
Yeah, and on the flip side, like he said, what we call like, there's instantaneous respect, like, you know, she she had one of our lines, like, I don't surrender, like, I don't surrender to God, I don't surrender to anyone. But I can, I don't know the exact words that she used, but I can allow something to happen. I can allow myself to be part of an experience.
01:18:12
Speaker
And it was so empowering. I feel like that's so, even as a man, I learned what you were saying there too about masculinity and about getting empowered. And I feel especially for women, like she's really owning her worth and who she is and what she's doing in this world. And she will not take any shit from anyone. And I think that's so freaking beautiful and amazing that she's doing that.
01:18:36
Speaker
and how the two of you mesh and ebb and flow. There's a reason you were up on stage at one point or later. You were called up on stage. You weren't part of the actual talk, but there's a panel discussion and all these
01:18:55
Speaker
influencers in self-development just called you up on stage and all of a sudden it was the Ta and Cole show and I mean that in a way like you the work that you guys are doing and how you're doing it like you're moving mountains you're creating waves and yeah let us all be part of that ocean and that beautiful world so thank you
01:19:18
Speaker
Thank you, man. I appreciate that so much. I think it's tremendously important to provide a format and a voice for people who feel like they don't have one. I know I was one of those people. Beautiful. It's been a sincere pleasure. Thank you for everything that you do.
01:19:39
Speaker
Thank you so much. And yeah, anybody who's interested in diving in and leaning in, you know, jump on our website, talkhole.com, T-A-H-K-O-L-E, and we have an amazing integration manual that is free. It's talkhole.com backslash free, F-R-E-E. We are doing a full version of this, and we have already translated it into Portuguese, Spanish, and German.
01:20:05
Speaker
the French edition has come in and we want to get it into as many languages as possible to serve as many people and we're just giving away. Nice. I will link everything in the show notes. Yeah, check it out. I highly recommend it. The whole Condor message that they have, read about it. It's fascinating if you're into mythology and symbols. Again, thank you Tal for jumping on. Thank you, family. Peace. Peace.
01:20:34
Speaker
Tom Whitty truly moved me in this episode as sexual abuse is part of my past and people around me I truly appreciate his courage to share what he shared and if you feel like this might hit home for you
01:21:04
Speaker
Then I kindly ask you to give some feedback. Leave a review. Maybe hit five stars or a like. Because this helps now other people see this podcast, find this podcast. So thank you for sharing and giving their love back. I truly appreciate it. Much love.