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Marcina Hale and Steve Apkon
145 Plays1 year ago
Today on Move The Needle, Rob speaks with Steven Apkon and Marcina Hale. They are the founders of Reconsider, and on they're on the cutting edge of transforming how we think about mental health in America.
Stephen Apkon is an award-winning filmmaker, and social entrepreneur. He is the Founder and former Executive Director of the Jacob Burns Film Center, a non-profit film and education center located in Pleasantville, NY. Stephen is the Director and Producer of Disturbing the Peace. He is also an Executive Producer of Fantastic Fungi, Planetary, Backyard Wilderness and a Producer of I’m Carolyn Parker, Enlistment Days, and Presenting Princess Shaw. He has also directed Stories of Transformation, which is a series of short films documenting the healing potential of psychedelic medicines.
He is the author of The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux – foreword by Martin Scorsese.
Stephen lives in the Hudson Valley with his partner Marcina, their dog Osa, and the flora, fauna and fungi they share this corner of the planet with.
Marcina Hale LMFT grew up in Ashtabula Ohio, an adventurous tomboy who loved to climb trees, bike, swim, play sports and ponder life. She studied psychology at Ohio University, Media at Long Island University and Systems Therapy (Marriage and Family) at Fairfield University. She is enamored with the mystery of life and loves to play with what is possible.
Marcina Hale LMFT is a therapist and filmmaker who is trained in many modalities from different traditions and appreciates the collective wisdom of cultures. She is a License Marriage and Family therapist certified by CIIS, in Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies & Research and MAPS in Facilitation and Education. She is a facilitator of workshops internationally and across the US and has had the honor of co-creating with many amazing people especially the team at Reconsider.
She is an Executive Producer of Fantastic Fungi, Producer of Disturbing the Peace and is a facilitator for Reconsider workshop experiences, which have been given in the U.S. and internationally. Marcina spoke at TEDxKC Women about how to change the world in which we are living. “Who wants out?"
Marcina’s vision is to catalyze the creation of experiences that evoke thought and conversations that both challenge and inspire new ways of relating to ourselves and to life itself.
#movetheneedlewithrobkaplan #movetheneedle #marcinahale #steveapkon #mentalhealth #reconsidermentalhealth #entrepreneurs #founders #filmmaker #therapy #mentalhealtheducation #author #psychedelic #socialentrepreneur
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Move the Needle' Podcast
00:00:06
Speaker
This is Move the Needle with Rob Kaplan, where we talk to people who lead, innovate, and inspire. I got pulled over for speeding. We all know what it feels like to have the sirens going behind you and the anxiety that it provokes, but for some reason, there was no anxiety that
Meet the Founders of Reconsider
00:00:23
Speaker
morning. Today on Move the Needle, Rob talks to Steven Abcon and Marcina Hale. They're the founders of Reconsider, and they're on the cutting edge of transforming how we think about and treat mental health in America.
00:00:36
Speaker
I first met Steve Apkon in the early 80s. We were both associates at Goldman Sachs. Steve was a brilliant banker, brilliant colleague and had an excellent investment banking career ahead of him. He ultimately left the firm to pursue other
Professional Ties and Conscious Evolution
00:00:55
Speaker
endeavors. I stayed at the firm and I did not reconnect with him again.
00:01:00
Speaker
until probably a year and a half, two years ago, when I learned about his nonprofit, Reconsider. And through Steve, I met Marcina. Steve and Marcina, I know you met around 2012. Talk a little bit about how you met each other and what you each were doing at the time you first met.
00:01:26
Speaker
I was involved with doing programming around the conscious evolution and basically it's the same thing that we're still working on.
Middle Eastern Peace and Transformational Medicine
00:01:39
Speaker
It's the idea of how do we find people who know that there's a different way
00:01:45
Speaker
of creating on this planet and that we're recognizing that the trajectory that we're heading in was not one that was going to be able to sustain life on this planet for humans and for many other species. And so it was almost like an opportunity to just kind of look and find
00:02:07
Speaker
other people who were either having these conversations or that were interested in furthering the exploration of what's going on and what's possible. What was interesting at that time actually was that Marcina was teaching workshops around consciousness and around transformation. I had just begun working on a film in the Middle East about a group of Palestinian fighters
00:02:35
Speaker
who had spent years, some decades in prison and Israeli soldiers who laid down their weapons to work through nonviolence. And what we were finding with each of the participants was that they had gone through a very similar process to the transformational process that Marcina had outlined in the workshops that she was doing. And there was really such a strong alignment between both of those things.
Holistic Practices vs. Traditional Psychiatry
00:03:01
Speaker
We're in an elevator and you have a chance literally to do the elevator pitch and I say to you, what is transformational medicine? I would say that transformational medicine is an experience or a medicine or substance that transforms the way that you think about your life and shifts consciousness in a way in which
00:03:22
Speaker
It's easy to juxtapose it with, let's say, traditional psychiatric medicines, which today are mostly there to provide relief or to deal with symptoms. So transformational medicine as opposed to symptom relief is getting to the underlying issues and transforming the way that we experience ourselves and the way that we experience life. We talk about them as medicines even though we're not talking solely about substances.
00:03:51
Speaker
So that breath, like using breathwork and different ways of oxygenating your brain can be medicine, music, nature, conversation, community. But it also refers to medicines like psychedelic medicines and plant medicines that again are more operating at the level of the underlying issues and the consciousness that's creating the suffering within an individual or a community as opposed to just treating symptoms.
00:04:19
Speaker
So many of us had mental health challenges and we've used traditional medicine or Western medicine, maybe seen a psychiatrist, maybe taking medication, maybe seen a psychologist. What's the biggest thing that's lacking?
00:04:38
Speaker
in these traditional approaches or Western medicine approaches to mental health. Life itself is an experience and many experiences in life can bring you challenges and the challenges are going to bring you through situations that can bring in all kinds of different emotions including fear and anxiety and so forth and
00:05:00
Speaker
If we start to bring in natural things that you're going to experience in life and call them mental health issues, then there's almost the diagnosing of life itself. And that's a part of what we're actually seeing is that there's a place where the resiliency or the understanding that people have around their experience of life or how to live it then is
00:05:29
Speaker
being co-hopped into being called a mental health issues. And then the solution is based on medicines and changing of the biology rather than the use and the understanding of greater tools and ways of navigating life.
Systemic Issues in Mental Health
00:05:43
Speaker
even the advent of SSRIs like Prozac and Zoloft and Wellbutrin and things like that. And they were originally introduced as short-term symptom relief to be able to deal with underlying issues. What's happened is they've become annuities. A couple of things have happened. One is we're giving them to people at younger and younger ages.
00:06:06
Speaker
So we're now introducing antidepressants to young kids, 8, 9, 10 years old. The other thing that's happened is that people are being put on them, not just for the short term, but they are on them essentially for life. And what they're finding is that it's very difficult to get off of them for many people and that they can cause longer term issues.
00:06:31
Speaker
Well, I think the other one is what we always talk about is how many times are you going to diagnose a fish swimming in toxic water? One of the issues that we're dealing with in the mental health field is that we are not looking at the systems or the life circumstances that we've created as humanity that many people are dealing with.
00:06:50
Speaker
And so the idea of anxiety, depression, stress can be appropriate responses for the world that we've currently created. And the need to look at the systems that people are working in or within and actually work together to actually create changes.
00:07:20
Speaker
I used to teach leadership for 10 years at Harvard Business School and I made it a point to tell my classes that I saw a psychiatrist, that it was okay to see a psychiatrist. I had times in my life where I had anxiety and I didn't know how to deal with it and I needed help.
Psychedelics in Personal Healing
00:07:42
Speaker
And the reason I wanted to do this podcast with Steven Marcina, I think there's a lot of people out there suffering silently
00:07:54
Speaker
What is it in your own life story and experience that led you to this work? For me, it goes back about 14 years ago and I was dealing with some traumatic loss in my family and grief and depression that followed.
00:08:15
Speaker
And I had no background in psychedelics. It wasn't anything I had done recreationally. It wasn't anything I imagined would be in my life. And I dealt with that grief and depression in the only ways I knew how, which first were to just suck it up.
00:08:30
Speaker
And then I eventually went to speak with somebody, with a therapist, and I agreed to take medication because I didn't know what else to do. And all along, you know, in starting the medication protocol, it really wasn't speaking to me and I felt like there had to be something else. And I had a friend who knew I was hurting and invited me to a ceremony.
00:09:01
Speaker
And I knew nothing about what that meant, but again, I was hurting and I trusted them and I went. And I had an experience that night with psychedelics where rather than having me cope with that depression or to numb those emotions, it actually did the opposite. It opened up a space for me to feel that grief and to go into it.
00:09:29
Speaker
and to grieve like I had never grieved before. And through that experience, it took me into a sense not only of the grief of that loss, but a collective grief, grief over our planet, grief of the choices that we were making. And then it took me through to this place of connection and love.
00:09:51
Speaker
And that's where that healing was. I'd say it was a life-saving, life-changing kind of experience. And I remember two things happened the morning after. The first was that I called the therapist and I explained to her what I had done. I didn't have any other context, so I was just honest with her. And I said to her, I said, you know, for me, I didn't need to be taking medication anymore.
00:10:19
Speaker
and I didn't need to see her. And that's not to say that that's a panacea and all of that. But she heard it in my voice and she said, I hear you. She said, but could you come in one more time and talk to me because I have so many people who are hurting and we don't have the answers. And I want to give that some context also. It's not that the sadness goes away and that you're just happy. I mean, that sense of loss is always there.
00:10:47
Speaker
but you're in relationship to it in a very different way. The second thing that happened was I got pulled over for speeding.
00:10:54
Speaker
And we all know what it feels like to have the sirens going behind you and the anxiety that it provokes. But for some reason, there was no anxiety that morning. And I handed the policeman my license and my registration. I said, good morning. He went back to his car and he took the obligatory 10 minutes of waiting to write the ticket. And he came back to the window and he looked at me and he said, I have no idea why I'm doing this because this is not what I do, but have a good day.
00:11:25
Speaker
And he had to meet my license and registration and that felt affirming that there had been something positive that had come out of the experience. But that was my first experience with psychedelics and a deep understanding of the difference in what it offered as opposed to traditional medicines and approach. And just since that time,
00:11:48
Speaker
Have you used psychedelics frequently or is it episodically or once in a while to help facilitate your self exploration therapy? You know, I do have a relationship with these medicines where I will use them periodically, but it's not something that I do regularly. It's, you know, something that I'll do as I'm called to it. And that has been a very helpful and important and meaningful part of my life.
Motivations for Exploring Psychedelics
00:12:18
Speaker
Can I ask one other thing so I don't forget to ask when, if someone were to use one of these medicines, would you advise you should never do it alone or is it okay to be alone?
00:12:32
Speaker
It's a great question. I think that for people who are new to psychedelics and transformational medicine, it's both important to be safe and to have somebody around and also to recognize that the part of the experience and part of the healing come from that sense of connection and community. Marcina, let's talk about how you came to this work. You know, for me, my experience and my relationship with life is you cannot not be spiritual.
00:13:02
Speaker
And for me, when I was introduced to the work of psychedelics, I actually was willing to enter into understanding it because I read an article in National Geographic around the use of it for depression. And because my father struggled so much with depression and my brother, I felt like I needed to find something that would be able to reach.
00:13:28
Speaker
not just them, but many other people that I saw heading in that direction and many of them that were going the way of medicines prescribed to them that were not helping them. And so for me, what I dedicated my life to was not just the use of psychedelics, but that transformational stage that it was helping to show us and to be able to usher in almost like a midwife
00:13:56
Speaker
people out of that stuck very dense energy and into the possibilities that we can live into, both as individuals but as humanity. At Reconsider, we are bridging the medical and the mystical, the sacred and the scientific. This place has become a sanctuary and this is just the beginning. I will never be the same because of what actually has transpired here.
00:14:27
Speaker
So even your terminology is somewhat different than traditional medicine. You don't call somebody a patient, you call them a participant. There is a medicalized version in which people are patients and they go to a clinical setting and that's the research that's being done at Johns Hopkins and Yale and NYU and many other places. In other settings, they may be participants, they may be clients, but it's interesting, there are other communities, for instance,
00:14:56
Speaker
that think of the people who are actually doing the medicine as the guides themselves because what they're actually doing is accessing their inner healer. You see, the difference with psychedelics from traditional therapy is that it's this knowledge that the insights, the wisdom, the guidance, the healing is within the person themselves.
Empowerment through Transformational Medicine
00:15:18
Speaker
And what they're doing is they're actually allowing you to access that higher knowing, that intuitive self.
00:15:25
Speaker
So there's so much we take for granted in traditional medicine in that even the term patient suggests something is being done to you. You are passive. There's a doctor who's doing something and there's a patient and you're receiving something. And it sounds like even your terminology is creating more ownership and changing that mindset.
00:15:54
Speaker
I think that's a really important point. In our Western mentality, we think about having a medicine to be able to cure us. And when you're looking at psychedelics, psychedelics create a window of opportunity for us to see things or perceive things in a new way. And then from there, the work begins. So it isn't about giving any medicine to cure you. It is about an opportunity and a process.
00:16:22
Speaker
And I'm not a linguist, but it does strike me that the term patient or patience is more passive. And it's not putting the responsibility, the ability, the ability to respond, the responsibility on the person who is actually dealing with the issues.
00:16:41
Speaker
You know, one of the things I'd like to say about that is when we talk about transformation, it's moving out of one state of thinking and into another state of thinking, but it's also in a new state of feeling or perceiving. And so when you allow for opportunities to perceive and feel and see things in a new way, that's that idea of transformation. And it can be something as simple as curiosity.
00:17:09
Speaker
In fact, curiosity works similar to psychedelics in that it shuts down the prefrontal cortex and amygdala and allows for new synapses to come in. But it's also moments of pause, where we stop the current narratives or what's going on. And again, psychedelics help us do that in that. But it can come through both states of using sound or breath work. But it also can come through authentic conversations, connections.
00:17:40
Speaker
And in that, it allows there to be a different way to be able to perceive life, our own lives and the lives of others. One of the things that we feel like is a really important part of it. It's not just transformation within ourselves, but between us and then into our greater relationship to life on this planet and what we are doing with this period of time.
00:18:04
Speaker
What would you say is the biggest misconception about transformational medicine and transformational approaches? I would say, Marcia, you might have your own thoughts about it. I would say that people want to see these approaches as a quick fix, as a magic bullet that will take care of whatever the underlying issues are.
00:18:30
Speaker
And the reality is that what they do is they create a window of opportunity for you to do your own work. What gets in the way sometimes of people even looking at transformational medicine is this idea of it being woo woo out of the box.
Facing Fear and Embracing Change
00:18:46
Speaker
There's, there's that, that fear, um, you know, and one of the things that we talk about is that many of us live in a state that's petrified. And so the idea of transformation can feel scary.
00:19:00
Speaker
And really what is not understood is that in the transformation is the freedom. It's actually harder to stay in a petrified state, but they don't know that that's actually how it is. So what they do is they're more afraid and they stay in a state that's very limiting because they fear the freedom, but they don't know it's the freedom. Does that make sense? Makes a lot of sense. And that's probably true in a lot of parts of our life. Our approach to work, our approach to everything we do, we're,
00:19:29
Speaker
you know, getting a comfortable pattern and there's security in that comfortable pattern, even though it may not be good for us. Exactly. If you had to assess how effective traditional mental health medicine is today in dealing with depression, suicide, a lot of the challenges of life we're seeing, social media, I know plays a role in this. Give us a grade and explain the grade if you would.
00:19:59
Speaker
I mean, it's clearly an F. One of the groups that we are pulling together to come together are parents that have lost kids to substance use. We have to remember that substance use is not a moral issue. This is the attempt to deal with our lives. There's many factors that we are not putting into our mental health, which again is the environments that we are creating.
00:20:27
Speaker
for our young people, for each other, for humanity, and the incredible amount of stress that most people are living in, economically, you name it. So we're not dealing with the issues that have created the mental health issues, but it's become a part of our medical system that less and less time is available for personal one-on-one, no matter what field it's in.
00:20:55
Speaker
And so just the amount of time that's needed to be able to teach skills and create new opportunities for our ability to have and build community and create connections has been lost in the culture that we've created. 50 years ago, were we more integrated? Was there less anxiety or were these problems just, they were there, we just didn't acknowledge them as much?
00:21:20
Speaker
There's been incredible changes in our culture in the last 50 years. One of the number one is social media or media in general. There has been a place where both parenting and mental health, it's difficult to keep up with the kinds of changes that have happened in our societies. Our mental health dollars continue to skyrocket the amount of money we're spending on mental health.
00:21:49
Speaker
yet the statistics of depression, anxiety, addiction, suicide across socioeconomic categories and everything else are continuing to increase. The levels of prescriptions of people on prescribed medicines has continued to increase over these decades while those statistics of health have continued to dissipate.
00:22:14
Speaker
So something is wrong here. The other thing is we know that this is not what's happening in every culture and in every country.
Barriers and Challenges in Transformational Medicine
00:22:22
Speaker
So explain cultures that are handling this better. I'll give you an example of a country that actually was handling it better until media came in and that was
00:22:31
Speaker
If you looked in Hong Kong, for instance, you didn't have the level of eating disorders until they started to consume our media, including our songs and everything else, and all of a sudden it became an epidemic. We're infecting cultures around the world with some of those things, which can lead to depression and anxiety and some of these other challenges.
00:22:56
Speaker
So the big question I had after talking to Steve and Marcina, why aren't these techniques and alternatives be more, why aren't they more widely promoted and discussed? And I think what I learned from Steve and independently at the moment, these things do not generate a lot of revenue. Is traditional medicine threatened?
00:23:21
Speaker
by transformational techniques, and is there a business threat to the pharmaceutical industry and others by transformational medicine? I think it's a great question, Rob, and there's a bunch of different factors in it. Both MDMA and psilocybin have received breakthrough status by the FDA.
00:23:45
Speaker
And these are psychedelics or other drugs? MDMA is, you would know it as ecstasy or molly on the street, but it turns out that if used in a facilitated way, in a therapeutic way, it can have tremendous benefits in terms of working around trauma and other issues.
00:24:05
Speaker
psilocybin, which you would know as magic mushrooms, has also received breakthrough status. MDMA around trauma and psilocybin around depression, although they're being researched for lots of other indications as well. What's interesting, and there's a lot of industry and a lot of money moving into this field,
00:24:25
Speaker
What's interesting as it relates to the big pharma industry as it exists right now is that these medicines are medicines that you would access one, two, three, four times or periodically. They're not annuities. They're not the kind of thing that you take every day for the rest of your life. We know that they are, for a large part, non-addictive and also non-toxic, but you're also not taking them very often.
00:24:53
Speaker
And that's one way in which there's competing interest. The second is that you might see your psychiatrist for a 10 minute or 15 minute appointment just to do a psychopharmacology check. These medicines require you to sit with somebody for six to eight plus hours.
00:25:09
Speaker
And our therapists aren't trained to work with these medicines necessarily. It's really important to know that these are not only coming through the FDA, but there are states that are either decriminalizing or legalizing some of these substances, both Colorado and Oregon are two examples that have legalized psilocybin for therapeutic use. And there's also emerging interest
00:25:36
Speaker
in the sacramental use of these medicines under the religious freedom restoration? I would say that yes, it has to be a concern for some of the institutions that these medicines are going to be used because many of them are being used in communities and many of them people are using these medicines to help get off of the medicines that people have been on. You both have explained to me something that I hadn't thought a lot about
00:26:05
Speaker
but the light went on once you explained it, which is traditional medicine, it very much is based on, I see a psychiatrist or psychologist every week. For short periods though, I take a medicine, maybe antidepressant, and I take it daily, maybe for years, and it creates an annuity stream for those drugs.
00:26:32
Speaker
You might, I'd like you to comment on that and explain the threat that could create to traditional medicines. Well, I would say in general, the threat is that it is a paradigm shift. And so that the, the continuation of medicines at a, at a cost would shift. I also want to be cautious in, in stating that these are not magic bullets. So it's not like a one and done as they say, kind of.
00:26:59
Speaker
Way of looking at it but it's not done as often as as the medications and it does require there'd be the personal work on it and is it may not be the revenue model and as a patient it's probably dramatically less expensive than traditional methods i gather.
00:27:20
Speaker
So that's really interesting. It depends on which way they're being accessed. So in the medicalized model, what's coming through the FDA, you're going to look at treatments of 20 plus thousand dollars for a medication that either you could grow for a couple bucks or find on the street for a similar amount. So in that model, the economics have not yet been fully determined.
00:27:48
Speaker
But in other models, whether it's through decriminalization or a spiritual context, the economics are quite different for sure.
Community and Context in Healing
00:27:57
Speaker
I know for many of your participants, they've been through their first responder. They went through 9-11 or they've been in a war.
00:28:06
Speaker
And so it brings these two ahead. What's the process likely to be if I say, okay, I raised my hand. I want to try something transformational as an alternative because traditional medicines aren't working. What do I do? And what's the process likely to be? Unfortunately, right now, the field of psychedelics, we are still in the midst of being able to bring out the psychedelics in a way that's accessible to a lot of people at this point.
00:28:37
Speaker
You're right, the veterans have been one of the first communities that have been working on accessing this. And if you can imagine, the veterans that came to the Fotner Wars and were there to protect us, currently many of them leave the country and go to Jamaica or Mexico to find help. Who do I go to to start?
00:29:02
Speaker
That would be a trusted advisor because I'm scared without the advice. I'm a little scared. I don't want to try one drug or another.
00:29:12
Speaker
These medicines are much more in the zeitgeist today and much more talked about in our culture. So five years ago, it would have been much tougher to find out where to go. Today, you can actually talk to your doctor, you can talk to your therapist, you can talk to your psychiatrist, and many of them are more knowledgeable about psychedelics and transformational medicines than they were. That doesn't mean that everybody will be, but more are. If I want to try a psychedelic like psilocybin,
00:29:41
Speaker
Is there a medical professional that needs to dispense it or who would I go to to even access that?
00:29:49
Speaker
It really depends on which track is coming out. Under the FDA, if once MDMA and psilocybin are legalized, you will go to a prescribing psychiatrist and they will both prescribe the medicine for you, but they also will get you trained facilitators. What's interesting about what does that mean? There's a lot of unlearning that has to happen because it's a very, very different approach.
00:30:14
Speaker
Are there cautions you would give to people listening to this who say, boy, I'm really struggling. I want to try something new, but I'm a little scared. What are the do's and don'ts of what they ought to do next? And what are the downsides and what are the things they ought to do to take the next step? I mean, I think, you know, it's interesting because even in this conversation, you can feel the complexities under which we're dealing. Okay. And I think that we have to acknowledge that.
00:30:44
Speaker
That's been a huge problem in being able to get the help to the people that need it. I can see why. I want to acknowledge that there are communities and spiritual communities that have existed for well over 50 years that have been holding this work in a very sacred and important way. You know how a lot of the vets find out about this work? Tell me. It's through their buddies.
00:31:10
Speaker
They are out there and after they go through experiences, they hold a place and they actually are in contact with other veterans. And when they are struggling and so forth, they are willing to step up and talk to them and send them to the places where they can get help. Let's pretend I'm a veteran and I buy everything you're saying and I go to another veteran. What's the best advice veterans have got given?
00:31:37
Speaker
to other veterans on how to access these transformational approaches. What's the best advice that a veteran could give another veteran?
00:31:48
Speaker
Many of them are connected to groups that are working right now, like Heroic Hearts and Mission Within, and other groups that are doing the work to be able to bring veterans into programs. So maybe a good advice from a veteran will be to direct you first to an organization that you could approach. Yes, where you can learn more about it, get your questions answered, and feel comfortable. And they do not have the capacity
00:32:16
Speaker
to handle the amount of people that they're already receiving, which is also a problem. I think it's also really important to get one point across here, which is that when we talk about transformational medicines in psychedelics, we have to recognize it is not just the medicine.
00:32:31
Speaker
This is really critical. We know that there are huge amounts of not just young people, but young people for sure using MDMA or ecstasy or molly at raves every weekend.
00:32:47
Speaker
So this medicine is out there and it's not necessarily leading to enlightenment or mental health. What we know from that is that it's not just a medicine, but it's the medicine. As they'll talk about in clinical terms, the set and the setting, the mindset and the intention with which you bring to it. So are you using them for healing or are you using them for recreation? Are you using them for insight and introspection? And then what's the context or the container in which you're using them? So the facilitation
00:33:16
Speaker
and the way that they're held is extremely important to the experience and to the therapeutic benefit. What we came together and realized was that the challenges that humanity is facing today, whether they're ecological or political conflict, economics, race, any of those issues, we tend to treat them like they're the disease. And we throw time and money and resources at them.
00:33:43
Speaker
And what we've come to understand is that there are less the disease than there are the symptoms of the disease. And what's underlying all of them and connecting all of them is really a crisis of consciousness. It's really a spiritual crisis, a crisis of meaning in which we're disconnected from ourselves, from each other, from the natural world, and ultimately from life itself.
Consciousness Crisis and Growth Opportunities
00:34:17
Speaker
Many of us, and I guess I'll include myself, have used work, money, binge watching television, other tasks to crowd out feelings so I didn't have to deal with this. I gather in learning from the two of you what these transformational approaches are doing
00:34:40
Speaker
is carving out the space to have to deal with this in a way that many of us have gone to great lengths to prevent from happening. You know, I wouldn't say just even deal with thrive. We look at trauma as the problem. Trauma is not the problem.
00:35:01
Speaker
When if you are born, you are going to go through betrayal, loss, suffering. That is a non-negotiable. The question isn't, are we going to have trauma? The question is, what are we going to do with the experiences that traumatize us? And trauma in many ways is what helps elevate us both on an individual and a collective level. If we meet it,
00:35:26
Speaker
in a way that will help us learn how to be better humans, how to be more compassionate, more forgiving, and or it can create more victimhood and more I need to be taken care of. And if we go in that direction, which is the direction that is kind of where we have headed for a long time, then we lose the opportunity to grow
00:35:54
Speaker
in a spiritual way. So many of your participants have gone through wars, traumatic events for some people out there listening to this retirement, basic things are creating to varying degrees, trauma in a different way that they're struggling to deal with. What advice would you give to people who are feeling that way?
00:36:21
Speaker
This is where I think the whole paradigm and how we're looking at life is important to change. Community is very important. In fact, one of the studies that they have done has said that people that thrive the most are not the ones with the higher IQ or any of the things that we think, but the ones that have more what they call grit or ability to move through situations.
00:36:49
Speaker
it is important to find people not that agree with your stuckness, but that actually help you move through it. And I think that's the other problem that can come up in the medical model or the way that some psychiatrists or mental health people are viewing it is that we can become more stuck in our diagnosis rather than moving through the difficulty.
00:37:13
Speaker
Well, I was just thinking, as Marcina was talking, that there's a richness to life that very few people get to truly experience.
Community Engagement and Conclusion
00:37:23
Speaker
We have become much less connected. We've become more material. We've become more concerned. Our lives have become more constrained, more limited, more crowded. And the anxiety and the disconnection and the depression, it can come in. And frankly, even the addiction.
00:37:43
Speaker
Right. And then we're not just talking about addiction to substances. You mentioned it, Rob, to work, to TV, to social media, to whatever it might be. Yet we know that there's a sense of awe and wonder that can be experienced. Let's talk about very practical things. You turn off social media, turn off the daily news that is bombarding you with negative images and thoughts.
00:38:09
Speaker
you increase your amount of time that you spend with people from different areas of your life. And you create opportunities for new ideas to enter in. You have 24 hours in a day, everybody gets the same amount of time. The question is, what are you doing with that time? And so the more that you spend that time in areas that are productive, that are giving to others in yourself, that are nurturing,
00:38:37
Speaker
is time that will shift how you experience life. So in our closing moments, people on this podcast have heard about reconsider, about transformational medicine, Western medicine. How should they go about connecting with you? And how could they go about helping you if they're listening to this and they want to help you?
00:39:01
Speaker
Our big focus right now at Reconsider is in building community and building a community of people that can hold this vision and support each other and the emergence of these medicines together. We're building communities in the veteran space, the first responders space, the healthcare space, addiction and recovery. You can come to our website to learn more and also to meet
00:39:24
Speaker
many of the people who are integrally involved in these communities that we consider to meet veterans and first responders and others who have benefited from these medicines and can talk firsthand about their experiences.
00:39:46
Speaker
Today on Move the Needle, Rob talked to Steve Apkon and Marcina Hale, the founders of Reconsider. If your loved one needs help or you'd like to learn more about Steve and Marcina's work, please do visit reconsider.org.
00:40:09
Speaker
Move the Needle with Rob Kaplan is produced and edited by Sam Zaff and Scott Richardson and I'm executive producer Renele Golden. We want to thank Michelle Brown and Zarek's team from Hello Studios for help with production and logistics. Do not forget to subscribe to Move the Needle wherever you get your podcasts and to Rob's YouTube channel. Until next time, this was Move the Needle with Rob Kaplan.