(00:02) we have been duped by feminism sexual Liberation and anti-depressants we have been told that we are powerful and free now as women but we feel tired wired and bitter we’re mostly eating right exercising and meditating wrangling to-do lists and arranging playdates and yet there’s a haunting holess beneath the huge complaint what if I told you that there is a huge Storehouse a reservoir of energy inside of you that has not been tapped that you could feel light and pulsing excited and alive in ways that a wellness lifestyle
(00:49) cannot deliver that you could trust yourself that the world could feel safe and that unexpected and expected Delights could start to illuminate your path no coach therapist doctor or Guru required just you learning to get real present and attentive with you I feel like I’m here to matchmake your inner parts for the greatest love affair ever written I want to help you learn first where you’re buying eggs from the hardware store which is the source of all pain I want to help you master entering through the upset which is the
(01:27) only spiritual practice You’ll Ever Need and to get real comfortable putting on your villain Crown which is in my opinion the key to True power and then you’ll attune to your inner yes so you can live the life defined by the specific pleasure of who you are I am so excited to announce my latest book called The reclaimed woman which is available for pre-order now so if you head to the link in show notes you can learn more about bonuses events and companion offerings and I cannot wait to see your gorgeous face on the
(02:07) [Music] path I’m Dr Kelly Brogan you may know me as a New York Times bestselling author of a book with an exploding pill on the cover Renegade psychiatrist P dancer or honorary member of the disinformation doesn’t what can I say I’m a born provocator I’ve spent most of my recent life exposing deceptions connecting dots and discovering the secret places my inner victim is still waiting to be liberated and now I feel called to help you reclaim all of your parts your health your sexuality your power and your expression so that you can finally
(02:46) truly own yourself I want to ignite in you that inner knowing and the pulsing Vitality that lives beneath your disempowerment disconnection and resentment so that you can audaciously courageously and playfully alchemize your struggle into the specific pleasure of who you are this is Reclamation radio a soulfire production hi and welcome to Reclamation radio I am Dr Kelly Brogan and I’m here with my girlfriend and colleague Dr Maya shreat and if you don’t know her from her previous work the dirt cure then you
(03:28) may know her as an herbalist or as I will say an enlightened neurologist and I know her in almost none of those capacities and really has somebody that I have connected to on a soul level and met in like the darkest spaces of my life and found her hand there you know that the way that we intertwine as women in our spirals is so fascinating to me and that’s really when we came together right was like in the chnal ground of both of our lives back up in New York so I am super super excited to be in combo with you there’s so many things that we
(04:11) could talk about but what I really want to focus on today is your new masterpiece entitled The Master Plan experience that I had the pleasure of finishing recently and I want to unpack why it is you know that you are focused on on really speaking your truth about what is now so in the Zeitgeist and I want to talk about this that there are parts of me that are are a bit suspicious you know about what might be going on that everybody’s talking about PL medicine all of a sudden so I welcome you here woman and I’m excited to to
(04:49) chat about this well I’m as always so happy to be here in a conversation with you awesome so I want to start out by reading a quote I’m a quote kind of gal okay so this is a quote from page 128 and you write we remain in an ongoing sacred exchange with plants through the entire cycle of life and death they feed us with their bodies when we take their lives and when we die we in turn feed them with our bodies which eventually become part of the soil that nourishes them we’ve evolved together with plants we are
(05:27) kin and this is just is so beautifully written this and I know you as a farmer right as a gardener Master Gardener and I know that when we were just even speaking before I started recording about like the plants in your home that require your care and attention on a very intense level like if you’re going to travel or something as much as your animals and I know that when we’re talking about plants we could just focus on you know so-called entheogens or psychedelic ceremonial plants I know this story of your relationship to
(06:01) plants begins well before your intimacy with these more Fantastical varials so I’d love to just sort of get your Reflections on looking over your life like has it been the case that you have always had this relationship intact I know for so many of us it’s not the case you know like the most intimate we’ll get with a plant is like eating a salad right and I know that there’s so much more intimacy available conscious intentionality and relational exploration that’s available so I want to hear a bit about your journey when it
(06:37) comes to plants in general well I will actually start by answering part of your question about people’s Intimacy in general with plants because you know one of the so to Define Master plants right because I called my book The Master plant experience and people assume that means psychedelic Master plant but in fact Master plant are an indigenous term for flora fauna fungi that alter our Consciousness and human behavior right so we assume that means psychedelics but in fact it is not only psychedelics it can be coffee the coffee plant it could
(07:14) be the cacao plant you know or any number of like potent tea right things that are very much part of people’s daily rituals and what most of us would go quite a bit out of our way right to get our daily coffee or our chocolate or whatever it is so while all psychedelics are considered Masters many other kinds of plants that are potent are under that same umbrella of Master plants and I say this because we’re incredibly intimate we’re already very much in relationship every single one of us with these Master
(07:49) Teachers right they’re called Master plants because they are considered to be transmitters of ancient wisdom that helped guide us in how to be human and navigate this you know crazy place we call Earth School but my own story I think you know I grew up a little only child in the 1970s and so I had no cell phone my parents were a little you know I won’t say checked out but it was basically the opposite of Boomer parents and the opposite of millennial parents because nobody knew where we were we all just did our own thing and you know like
(08:23) we were supposed to get home when the street lights came on it’s 10 p.m. Do You Know Where Your Children Are right and that was a real thing thing in the 1970s it was not actually that strange to hear that commercial so I think I used to go I was an only child and so I had to keep myself busy one of the ways I did that was reading tons and tons of books although I now realized that was probably also a way I like checked out of my life as much as I could so you know maybe my drug of choice in a way um and obviously I had friends but like
(08:52) friends had family time that you know and they had siblings to play with and things like that which I did not so another thing I did was I would hang out by this Creek in my neighborhood which I now realized was really like probably just runoff you know definitely had like little gasoline you know kind of rainbows in it and things but I used to just sit and be with like the nature there I would play in the water I would make little altars although I wouldn’t have called that you know an altar at that time but I would
(09:23) just take bits of Earth I’d be with the plants and that was really one of my happy places you know that I would just go on my bike and be there for hours and hours and also I just remember right growing up in my Suburban neighborhood outside of Washington DC seeing lots that were clearcut for houses and feeling the grief of the trees missing their kin in those lots and I would cry sometimes and my mother would ask me why I was crying and I would have to make up stories because I had no way to explain to her what I was feeling or perhaps I
(09:56) didn’t feel safe explaining it to her so I would say things like you know had a parakeet I’m like I was like I’m afraid there’ll be a fire and my bird will die in the fire right like that was not what I was like tearing up and crying about it was hearing these trees so I think there were a lot of ways you know that I became intimate with plants and I’m really not I wouldn’t even say I’m a Master Gardener I just it’s just my way of being with plants my plants die sometimes you know I mean I am not I am not like the Maestro of plants but I’m
(10:27) always trying part of why I grow plants is to tend them and be in service to them in order to learn from them first of all I’ve seen your garden and I will assign the master label to you that [ __ ] is impressive and it’s all relative right like in my my little gardening stint I remember like the fennel bulb that grew after like six months I felt like I should frame it so you’re talking about the like objectification and commodification of the natural world and this very appropriate grief you know that you felt even as a little a little
(11:03) nugget and I know that you’ve written you know how you observe this phenomenon this relational phenomenon leads to a fear of our own inner wildness and I’d love for you to speak to like what you’ve observed in your embodiment journey and your journey as a woman and how it is that you see the relationship between you know the clear cutting of that lot or so many ways that we relate to the environment as an an object well I think it all begins really with programming and that starts at a very young age you know maybe many
(11:44) listeners know that between the ages of zero and seven we get a huge amount of our programming it begins very very early with our families because we have to learn what the rules of our family are and how to be in our family how to be in our community how to be in our society and a lot of that just becomes really unconscious and we operate from it mostly you know more than we operate from our conscious mind we’re operating from that programming and the programming continues in education and that education programming is all about
(12:18) obedience it’s really primarily about obedience and I always kind of Point people to this quote by John D Rockefeller who we could really go on a tangent about but you know he was in a sense the father of public education in the sense that he was the funer of public education the beginning of public education and he basically said I want a nation of workers not thinkers and I think that’s just beautifully encapsulates The Obedience narrative that we’re fed and all of this is very important because most of us are very
(12:52) educated right certainly through high school if not College if not grad school or med school or some on and there are all these accolades that we can earn by doing that but there is like a straight jacket that we are then in this programming and this obedience that we have to uphold so obedience is the opposite in a sense of wildness in opposite of finding your own agency and your own intuition and your own inner wisdom and your own meaning making and when we value obedience over all of those other things in order to kind of
(13:32) hold on to those accolades in order to experience acceptance and to be seen as you know all of the achievements that we have worked hard for actually and have earned it suppresses these other parts of ourselves this wildness so in order to reclaim all of these or claim sometimes for the very first time all of these jewels that are within us that really are everything that can lead to new ways of being and authentic ways of being we have to be willing to become disobedient and wild and I think it’s reflected in a
(14:17) sense in how we treat the natural world which is we want everything to be manicured we want everything to be controlled I live in a neighborhood where I don’t rake my leaves in the fall I’m sure there are many people here who have neighbors they hate who don’t rake their leaves I also leave a part of my lawn very wild and lots of like kind of vines and bushes and things where animals live and you know my neighbors have completely they have no leaves they have totally manicured Lawns that’s sort of this for me it’s a sign of the
(14:53) honoring of the wildness of Nature and where that can take us both within ourselves and around ourselves the assertion that you make in the book also is that we have passed present and future selves right we talked about this programming I think you and I would agree that part of the embodiment and Awakening process is the integration of all of these right so it’s not like forsaking one for for the next and it’s not being preoccupied with you know what’s ahead or what’s behind or really potentially even valuing the present
(15:30) more than the holistic tapestry of who it is that we are and our story so if one of the things that Master Plan experiences can confer is a sense of like belonging and understanding that we have a role in this greater tapestry that involves these dimensions of ourselves that involves our Dynamic relationship with the natural world then there is an opportunity to like come into aliveness and and I loved I think that’s vivification experience like that is what we’re here for right that Reclamation of our Heros our vital force
(16:09) our Shakti whatever you want to call it reconnection opening the channel so I’d love for you to speak a bit about how it is that you see the interaction with an engagement we’ll talk about ceremony and ritual but just how it is that you see these plants to have been delivered to us for this Express purpose of like self-actualization do you think that’s like actually what the nature of the relationship is and do you think it’s always been that way or it’s like particularly now in this zis that this relationship is so
(16:48) needed well so I think that the plants have not been delivered to us but the plants have come to us themselves to offer themselves in this moment in time and I do think very much actually that we’re all really one thing we’re all one being and that we’re each utterly unique expressions of that one being and our job our biggest job is to fully Express that uniqueness which means you know not fitting into any kind of cookie cutter sort of programming what’s interesting about self-actualization is and in the book I explore this so I
(17:32) talk a little bit about you know the very well-known masslo hierarchy of needs and mlo who you know sort of has been having a moment for some time now it turns out really studied with the Blackfoot Nation for a summer and that really changed his ideas about self-actualization which he kind of put at the top of the pyramid this hierarchy which is funny because that’s such a kind of different way of thinking than most indigenous people would necessarily have said and in his idea about self-actualization you must be
(18:09) disobedient you must be disobedient not like just for the sake of Disobedience but in order to be self-actualized you have to break certain rules in alignment with how you can be most authentically present now on the other side the blackoot people would say we’re born self-active Ed and everything we’re doing is just practice in self-actualization so all of this to say why do I think that Master plants are emerging into the Zeitgeist at this time and in this way I think there’s more than one thing going on but one of the
(18:48) reasons is for us to recognize right we’re so polarized right now we’re really as a society I mean not maybe not me not you maybe not of the listeners but many people are so quick to go to that US versus them mentality even the people who think they are the most you know into non-duality and non-binary and non it’s like the more it almost seems like the more you say that the more polarized you can be right so all of this to say I think these plants are there to help us move from US versus them to me and we because of the the
(19:29) fact that we are all connected we are all one being we are surrounded by beings and not things and we are surrounded by Family by our own family in every living and what we would call non-living being around us so you know I think it’s interesting that in this moment very recently the Surgeon General of the United States declared an epidemic of loneliness and we can talk about how you know Master plants and psychedelics can play a role there but this epidemic of loneliness is very much because of this Us Versus Them way of living that
(20:09) we’ve been more and more and more leaning into I mean for decades and decades I love that at one point you talk about how you know obviously this Oneness this non-duality this concept of like merger with the Divine in the unified field has gotten some traction in the new age but you talk about how one of the potential points of expansion conferred by these experiences with these plants is to hold Paradox right and you sort of touched on that and what it is to actually find the aliveness that lives in the space of that tension
(20:49) you know to find the complimentarity between the seeming irreconcilable dimensions and to find wholeness through that right like yinyang rather than through just like the monochrome and I wonder if maybe this is a good time to sort of back up and just name so that people can Orient around what the hell we’re going to be talking about for the rest of the discussion name like what you consider to be the master plants like I don’t know if that’s something that’s like up to debate or like description and I’m sure there’s you
(21:21) know all sorts of discussions happening and whether there are certain plants or Brews if will that you think have like a special role in you know what’s happening collectively now or like would serve a certain kind of person and not this is obviously not prescriptive but like I’m interested in the fabric you know that we’re we’re seeing having been woven and that you know there’s a particular role let’s say that iasa is playing for the collective or San Pedro is playing for the collective and in anchoring these energies you know which
(22:00) you talk about as being and I want to get more into this like far more than just the chemical distillations and reductions that a lot of the research would have you imagine the research and even just sort of the again commodification of these plants like you know even in the micro doing world right like there’s just this idea of like the grams and the the chemical and whatever so what are you talking about when it comes to master plants and maybe if you could just share like a bit about each one and the role that you see the
(22:33) ritualistic and ceremonial engagement of these plants like playing for us right now well I can talk a little bit about some of them and I do you know have a a long chapter in the book where I go through a good number and it would definitely not be comprehensive but some of the biggest players and I definitely don’t think I am well I don’t think anyone can say what each one is best for in the sense that these are incredibly mystical powerful beings and they are so outside of anything I found the more I know about them the more I would not try
(23:14) to Peg them or say a specific goal however with that said so that people know who we’re talking about here I’ll give some examples of the most I think popular and maybe quote unquote excess ible at the moment the ones that are more in the Zeitgeist in this moment and there are many more and there are some that are more poisonous right like not something to just like you know do in your backyard kind of thing like whereas some are far less risky but the most I think popular right now so always you know magic mushrooms right the sasabe
(23:54) mushrooms I think everybody knows about those the iasa Vine slash brew and we can get into the difference if you want San Pedro cactus coyote iboga rmania detour tobacco is actually considered to be probably the most powerful of the master plants people are always very shocked when I bring up tobacco if they’re not in the world of Master plants tobacco is probably considered worldwide and I certainly do not speak for indigenous people in any way indigenous people are an incredibly diverse group with incredibly diverse
(24:35) opinions so when I share any indigenous wisdom that I’ve learned it’s from my teachers who are also a diverse group of people and also commonalities but around the world tobacco is considered universally the most sacred plant above and beyond all these other plants so um those are some examples but there are many many more you know the Amanita mushroom Salvia on and on but this is probably a good number and some are you know considered much more playful much more gentle some are considered much stronger rmania for example is like you
(25:14) know something that could put someone in a coma for two weeks like somebody will have like a horrible accident you know in a community there where they’ll be put into a coma literally for a long time and have visions of going to like conventional as we would call it medical institutions having doctors and nurses doing surgery on them so on and so forth and actually come out being healed right like there are incredible stories of this but nobody would recommend touching that plant without being incredibly trained and you know even the most
(25:51) trained people are very careful and have people watching over them when they drink that so you know these are are some of the many Master plants that are psychedelic meaning that they they give us visions and we can talk about what Visions may be what they may mean but they offer us Visions whereas some of the others like the cocoa plant the Opium poppy right coffee cacao and many others they alter us but differently right not typically with visions so youall know that I am super Discerning when it comes to what I share
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(27:24) com and use the code Kelly 15 for 15% off the link is in the show notes so a lot of what you foreground the like nearly encyclopedic exploration of so many aspects of these plants that you just referenced in the book is first of all this idea that these plants are regarded as you know what some of us in the secular world would describe as like an anthropomorphized you know sort of they have like these personas almost but you know in more native environments that they are are spirits themselves and they have these spiritual signatures right so
(28:04) whether it’s you know the you know grandmother grandfather the kids you know whatever it is the ninos and that is part of how they originated was that these Spirits spoke to shamans and of course you you touch on something that you know is near and dear to my heart which is how the recognition of you know shamanic gifts and Powers by the West Wern Cult of Psychiatry is you know part of this Grand inversion right that these are like primitive maybe even crazy people and meanwhile they are connected to and channeling this Source
(28:42) information that could never have quot quote scientifically been arrived at you know so like you think about the combination of you know Vine and plant in an iasa Brew of the oh I don’t know hundreds of thousands of plant options you know what was it trial and error you know itself is evidence of the communication that happens between the plant world and you know the human psyche and so I wonder if you could speak a little bit about this concept of plant spirits and shamans who are you know ordained around those
(29:19) Communications and how it could possibly be that these plants were identified as having these very particular properties right right was it just sort of like somebody rolled up a tobacco leaf one day or did they get a vision in a dream or was it some kind of lore that was handed down from who knows when and where and really to defy the reductionistic probabilistic materialistic concept that these are chemicals that you expose yourself to that we’ve learned about because people who are around those chemicals have some
(29:53) experience with them that’s just like one narrative that is almost like it’s are just ridiculous right so we we’re almost forced to in our Western psychology encounter that which is beyond the framework that we are habituated to well so much to unpack there the first thing I’d say is you know I always take issue a little bit at this point with the concept of anthropomorphizing because right that goes back to everything is alive everything is a being everything has a voice everything has wisdom so to me plants are beings I am a being there’s
(30:33) not really right anthropomorphizing and you know I’m not getting on you about it but I’m kind of inditing our societal way of putting humans at the top of some pyramid and kind of comparing everything else to personhood when we’re all persons everything’s people and right so you know even when people talk about like getting information or you know tools from the inputs from the environment around us to me it’s we’re in conversation with beings we’re in conversation with beings all the time so that sort of will take me into how we
(31:11) think about these Master plants who in fact right I mean just to back up I think most people may not realize that 70 to 80% of pharmaceuticals that we regularly use in Western medicine right now including in surgeries and anesthesia and so on were derived by bio Prospectors and anthropologists who were visiting and kind of inserting themselves and insinuating themselves into indigenous communities to learn of the hundreds of thousands of plants that by the way you know and this is for anyone who has not been to the Amazon or been to the Jungle
(31:52) nobody looks that impressive in the midst of hundreds of thousands of different varieties of plants like the iasco vine is really impressive if you would see the iasco vine an Old iasa Vine all by herself but you will not necessarily recognize that vine as being so very different from other big green bushy Vines right and so that’s number one right is almost all Pharmaceuticals that we have are synthesized you know and replicated and so on from indigenous knowledge of plants that those bioprospector would still be trying to figure out a plant
(32:32) and what it did you know to this day like we would not have a pharmaceutical system as we do so then we up to have to ask ourselves well how do they know right how do they know because for example as you say the iasa vine is not alone this psychedelic it’s not like someone just like popped it into their mouth and said hey wow like I’m seeing all these Visions the iasa vine and it is by the way the vine herself not the leaves or any other part but in fact and this Vine actually does well being cut back a little bit you know so that
(33:08) actually has to be brewed for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours until it is like a paste and then even alone by itself would not be psychedelic would not offer Visions but in fact has to be then mixed with a plant that contains DMT and the plant that contains DMT so many plants we ourselves make DMT you know which is a psychedelic molecule that’s a whole interesting conversation that we we make it animals make it in our nervous systems and in fact many plants right so nature is a wash in DMT but not every
(33:43) single plant so there are certain plants and in South America it’s often the chacruna plant mixed then with this brew and cooked then longer for this to be a psychedelic brew that we call iasa and and you know DMT is very quickly broken down in our body in our digestive tract without by enzymes that we have so what iasa does is actually blocks a certain enzyme but let us remember you know there were no pcrs there were no extracting materials in the jungle when indigenous people were learning about it so of course there is a question right
(34:18) and there are many examples not just the iasa brew and I give other examples in my book but you know how would they know how would they know without knowing the molecules and the enzymes and what blocks what and how long to prepare it and all these things certainly not trial and error right and but when we would ask you know anyone asks how do you know they say the plants told us now the bio Prospectors the anthropologists obviously you know all of these people would automatically say that’s crazy that’s a lie these people don’t know
(34:50) anything they’re primitive Etc you know this is just some kind of crazy idea they were obviously very happy to take the colge back though and utilize that and integrate that and commoditize that but you know it’s clear that there were Transmissions happening right everything else was true but we didn’t like that little part where they said we learn from the plants now to get to your point and I don’t want to go on for too long about this but I think this is very relevant actually to you and your professional background and something
(35:22) that you’re very passionate about and written about is this idea too that people who have you know we call mental illness or neurode Divergence and obviously I’m also very passionate about this as a neurologist and especially because I worked for a very long time as a pediatric neurologist I ended up becoming a protector of neurod Divergence and we could even take apart the whole idea of neurod Divergence but people with bipolar disorder people with schizophrenia people with sensory integration disorder autism ADHD and on
(35:52) and on we could go on but particularly people with psychosis in other societies and in many indigenous societies the first what we would call psychotic break was considered to be an initiation an initiation initiation an invitation right and they would enter into training and we can talk also about you know what psychedelics do and why they open our gates of perception our sensory gating which we can measure in neurological you know clinical ways but why having open sensory gating is very important and psychedelics can offer that gift people
(36:28) by the way also have very wide sensory gating or can you know and part of our obedience training is to Tamp down on those windows of perception and you know so we pathologize everything that doesn’t kind of fall into this very narrow way of seeing the world and experiencing the world but these people who had neurode Divergence or you know psychiatric Divergence let’s say mental Divergence were considered gifted now it did not mean they were going to have easy lives it did not people weren’t like able to you know they couldn’t say
(37:01) oh I want the psychotic break right I mean it was a hard life it is a hard life or it can be but imagine what would happen if we looked at people who had these neurod divergent or mentally Divergent ways of being and we said oh you are ready for your training now and offered them the opportunity to then become these people who were able to bridge worlds like right we call shamans which is actually you know not a probably a great word because it is actually a very colonized anthropological word but at the same
(37:37) time it’s a word we kind of all have a common understanding of so I would say you know thinking about these people who have that capacity to see more than what most people have the capacity or the training to be able to access those are the people who are the most called often times to receive the wisdom of these plants couldn’t agree more and I think these reframes are part of the Reclamation right because the inversion is often the exact antithetical understanding of the truth I mean it’s not like a little off it’s like the
(38:17) actual opposite you know I think of that Krishna mury quote like it’s no sign of Health to be well adapted to a profoundly sick society and then we call the people sick who are not adapted you know to what’s misaligned you talk about the Visionary plants and I’m curious about what you think because you alluded to this earlier like Visions actually are right because we can get into and there’s so much you know John’s Hopkins research about this now that when we get into the chemically reductionistic realm we can theoretically attempt to explain
(38:52) some of the phenomena that accompany but even that you know these days with my hardcore you know like circle of Skeptics like I believe pretty much like nothing about what we are learning when it comes to biology or have learned and so much of it is assumptions and so much of it is hand waving but let’s say you know we could explain you know what a vision is you know from another perspective is it the spirit of the plant speaking showing demonstrating revealing is it like your own higher self your own psyche that is chaperoned
(39:27) you know in way like by the spirit of the plant to show you what it is that you need to see is it just like coming from the ethers that now you get to tap into because of that sensory gating phenomenon like what have you come to really understand these these Visions when it comes to these more psychedelic plants to represent well so I think we can start with the idea that and this was an interesting experience for me as a medically trained person that we don’t really totally understand Vision in medicine in science
(40:02) you know we’re taught a whole sequence of events and rods and cones and light and retina and all these different things you know but in fact when I started researching Visions I fell into a rabbit hole on Vision period and so we don’t understand why we see really this amalgam of light as an image right like we’re not you know we think oh yes there’s an apple right here and we see an apple it is not that way at all so you know I’ll let people dive into that if they want to a little more in my book but in fact we don’t really understand
(40:39) Vision so of course when there is not something kind of physically agreed upon in front of us like how could we possibly have very reasonable understanding of something not physically in front of us you know so Visions are a an interesting concept we don’t understand very much about Visions at all on the one hand and one of the things that I explore as well as all of the great scientists who have received their biggest life’s work through Visions psychedelic or otherwise from the periodic table to knowing how
(41:21) to create PCR all came through Visions right and I mean even kind of these in itions these hits like Einstein and his theory of relativity now right or wrong as any of these may be you know they certainly influence Society in a massive massive way so okay so then the idea sort of comes about visions and understanding too the context of you know I consider indigenous science to be a valid concept a thing and advanced and you know even though it’s not in western words and technicalities and so on but to understand how much of our entire
(42:02) Society is based on indigenous science that was received through visions that gave me a real interest in understanding how to understand Visions differently because for us Visions we’re called hallucinations really right I mean we call what happens during a psychedelic Journey you know in the Western World we call them hallucinations and and hallucinations are psychosis or they’re wrong or they’re delusions or they’re not real right I mean they are the opposite of anything we should be paying attention to their pathology whereas on
(42:32) the other side you know in a more indigenous environment it would be considered deeper truth you get a vision right that’s like a visitation that’s an understanding of something more truthful than the rest of us can see so I just want to kind of you know to your point of flipping things on their head which is one of my favorite things to do but you know and then this will take me I think to what we were just talking about in terms of sensory gating right and all of the different groups who are actually in certain societies considered to be
(43:00) more gifted so sensory gating is really just our Windows of perception that we all have in our you know on a cellular level let’s say and maybe in a more esoteric way as well of how well we see reality and we talked about that obedience training that really tamps down our sensory gating because you know children babies infants have wide open sensory gating but the more you’re educated the more you’re getting that programming that we talked about right from 0 to seven and Beyond the more you Tamp down further and further and
(43:31) further our sensory gating and those are really our literal Gates of perception like I can send someone for evoked potentials you know in a hospital setting and learn about their sensory gating if they have MS or if they have schizophrenia or they have other things we use this actually to contribute to a diagnosis let’s say in mainstream medicine now if somebody has more wide openen sensory gating right just because you’re tuning down the volume doesn’t actually mean that there’s not like this gorgeous music playing right like it
(44:01) just means you’re not hearing it as well as other people or you’re hearing it much more quietly so that is I think one of the key points around sensory gating and I think you know if we think about let’s say a musician right like you know I is let’s say someone who sang Opera will be much more attuned to Flat notes and sharp notes as compared to someone who may not have ever sung and just likes listening to music and someone who has Perfect Pitch which I do not might even more have right ATT tuned sensory gating auditory sensory gating or think
(44:31) about how we can modulate it like if you hear your voice in a crowd you hear your sorry your name in a crowded room right suddenly you’re going to open your sensory gating right your auditory sensory gating be like o what is that person saying about me right so just so people have an idea of what sensory gating is and what it looks like the more we open that sensory gating the more we perceive not of a world that’s not true but probably probably a world that’s more true right and so this is not to me our higher self you because
(45:03) think about this we’re all one being we’re all expressions of one being so really it’s tapping into that knowing and certainly yes what we uniquely must know in order to fully creatively Express the uniqueness of who we are as a being as an expression of the one being that is what I think these Visions confer that’s beautiful and I know that in the context of these reframes there’s another one that I found super helpful to explore in your writing and through your writing which is the role of myth you know socioculturally and this idea that a
(45:49) myth is just a false story like it’s a it’s fake news and how the role of myth and often Associated ceremony and settings for the relaying and retelling and upholding enlivening of myth is really to understand how truth is handed down right and it’s not obviously in Rockefeller history books so is it possible Right like that when we forsake myth and when we describe it as this like toss off archaic like primitive thing we are falling asleep you know at the wheel of our own chain of custody right like holding that truth
(46:32) from generation to generation so I love for you to share a little bit about like how it is that you see myth as related to the reconceptualization of plants as beings and the reconceptualization of the potential relationship you know integrating and healing relationship between plants and specifically Master plants and humans and how does that relate to myth for you like why why even talk about that in this conversation well I think we can begin with the idea that myths old wives tales you know are all kind of classified as
(47:16) untrue right again so we’re getting now even deeper into this idea of how if you want people to be disconnected from who they really are and the fullest Untamed purposefully disobedient expression of their unique selves as part of the one being you tell them that all the things that are truth are false okay so you know just to bear that in mind right myth right like we’ll say well that’s just a myth right or that’s just an urban legend or that’s just an old wives tale old wives tales I’m going to start with that are actually you know so I
(47:53) talk a lot about extr literate ways of transmitting knowledge and I could talk about that for an entire podcast because there’s so much to unpack there but many cultures believe that oral tradition is much more important than written tradition actually and it doesn’t make them more primitive it makes them focus and prioritize different things and they make a great case to be honest for using tic memory and other things in order to you know encode it in like amulets and other things where they can know entire
(48:28) maps of massive geographical areas by just looking at a sacred object and they don’t even need the actual sacred object after a while they can just see the sacred object and unpack the map like Aboriginal people that is part of how they know their song lines and can go through you know massive distances and know exactly where the right caves are and the places they can hunt and so on and so forth all encoded through oral tradition so that’s just to begin now oftentimes what we think of as old wives or as myth are actually they seem like
(49:08) stories but what they are is actually the children’s level version of very complex knowledge right it’s the story to begin the initiation to then if you are initiated get to learn deeper deeper deeper deeper deeper and actually know an entire volume or volumes of information around ethics and geography and hunting and ritual and so on all encoded into what we would call a myth so myths are really volumes and volumes of transmitted information passed down generations to Generations plants and animals and land and spirit and
(49:55) ancestors to humans and what we tend to know of the myth of let’s say another culture is really just scratching the surface of the actual knowledge that’s being transmitted it’s such an essential point of reclamation because otherwise we’re like starting from scratch all the time and arguably we’re already so disconnected from so many myths that would otherwise have been living in our shared history that we are starting from scratch right like we are waking up from the you know narcotic Amnesia so I love that I love that and actually makes me
(50:33) aware of even just the role of like tradition and ritual and family and when you don’t Embrace that and I know so much of your lived life experience is predicated on you know the power of ceremony like you personally when we don’t Embrace that there is like a a fraying of the fabric right like there’s a missing link and it’s not going to suffice to just like hand people you know photo books and you know novels and autobiographies or whatever that there is something in the relational experience invocation of the
(51:06) imagination and story you know in that really enlivened way that is so powerful transmission like you said I love that I want to I mean there’s just like a million directions that we could go with this conversation and that’s where you know there’s just such a careful consideration of so many aspects Dimensions from the scientific I feel like putting that in quotes I don’t know why from the scientific to you know the experiential in your book and I know what a passion project this has been for you but I want to talk about what I
(51:39) think is such a unique contribution that you’re making to this space which is this conversation about dosing and how it is that we are in our ever expanding understanding of the role of water in human biology and you know of course this isn’t new because this is the basis of Homeopathy and you know so many other you know older approaches and methodologies but how it is that you’ve invoked the principles of energetic dosing and are now actually making that available like that we can you know purchase and experience these plants through you
(52:22) without actually sitting in ceremony and everything well sitting in group grp ceremony let’s say and formally ingesting them at doses that would be considered quote unquote therapeutic so I want to talk about your Quantum drops and I want you to tell the story that you told me in that voice note yesterday because it’s just too good okay so I’m trying to think of of where to begin in this story but I think what I’ll start by saying is you know so I I was doing micro doing coaching with people and I noticed that that people would reach out
(52:59) to ask questions about micro doing with let’s say Mushrooms or something like that for any number of reasons and before they would even ever ingest or maybe they would never ingest their lives started to change dramatically as if they had already ingested and I saw this again and again and again and again and what I started to recognize is oh the relationship has already begun when the master plant and the person or the being right feel each other right when they feel invited into each other the relationship already Begins the medicine
(53:34) quote unquote already begins to unfold now for myself you know I have in some instances ingested larger Doses and I have also experienced micro doing but one of the big ways that I interact at this point in my life with Master plants is by growing them so you know I grow iasa Vine and this is legal you know I don’t ingest my plants I grow an iasa Vine a 10-year-old Vine I grow s many San Pedro Cati I grow gmany I grow tobacco and on and on and in my tending they are you know they kick my ass I mean I get Transmissions from them all
(54:13) the time and they’re hard on me you know they have expectations and you know and for me also I’ll say you know 10 years ago about I had an experience with San Pedro cactus which was actually not what most people would consider a big dose because in Ecuador it was actually their tradition is a much smaller dosing than like a lot of other cultures and that experience I’m still unpacking this many years later so to me going back to a Master teacher who’s given me a gift and asking for more and more gifts without
(54:46) really fully thanking them and offering reciprocity right like how am I showing up in the world with their gift you know how am I unpacking it in the world and sharing it with the world that is part of also what guided me but as I’m tending these plants I got this very strong message and this was many years ago which was why do people think they need to ingest Us in order to experience our medicine show them another way and I was like you know what like I mean I’m a neurologist I mean I have prescribed Homeopathy Flower Essences I’m all about
(55:24) you know all those vibrational medicines but but I was not necessarily looking to create something like that but I was charged with this and I started to think about it I knew it wasn’t really Homeopathy because I knew it would not use even a tiny amount of the plant matter right and I knew it was not exactly a flower essence traditional flower essence and what you know over time in partnership with my plants I began to understand it was really about creating ceremony together so with medicine songs I was given in the
(55:59) presence of the plant with music of the plants that measures the oscillations of the plants and translates them into music at certain times of year at certain times of month or certain times of the plant letting me know you know rmania bursting into Blossom you know filled with Gorgeous yellow flowers I know she’s interested right in having that kind of interaction I began to do ceremony and what we call you know Quantum dosing these Quantum drops is ceremony in a bottle and the reason for that is it’s more than just compounds
(56:35) it’s not compounds but in fact it’s the entire ceremonial capturing of the relationship that then cultivates intimacy and depth and a relationship between a person and the plant and that person may be sober and not want to engage with a large dose or even a micro do of a master plant they may be medically fragile or Beyond medication or they may be just sensitive or they may be a child right or they may be pregnant or whatever the reasons may be but they still feel that call right or perhaps you know as they’re preparing or
(57:07) integrating right if we want to understand because what is the hardest thing about anything sacred we experience it’s having to go back into ordinary reality and understand how do we integrate this extraordinary experience into the ordinary and so this is really what quantum dosing is about Quantum dosing can also be other things Quantum dosing can be you know the cover of my book has a beautiful slice of the iasa vine and that is a Quantum dose of iasa when you look at that right it will change you just simply by looking I
(57:42) Quantum dose through growing Master plants I am changed every single day by that experience so all of that to say it’s a you know it’s a way of understanding the plants that actually we in this world of compounds and receptors and neurotransmitters it’s very foreign but to indigenous people you know in an iasa ceremony there are these songs that are sung by the IAS skto called iOS and eatos are considered to be vibrational Transmissions from the plant that deliver the wisdom of the plant and they are considered equal in potency by many
(58:19) Iowas skos to ingesting I’ve been in ceremony where actually Nobody Drinks The iasa Brew except perhaps the IAS skto but they are singing the EOS and people will be purging people will be crying people will be having these experiences that are very moving and very big just in the presence of these eaos because you know it’s really in that Paradigm right and maybe it is a more true Paradigm because these are the people who have been custodians and allies with these powerful Masters and students of them you know for Millennia
(58:55) you know they’re like what are compounds what are psychedelics what are you talking about that’s not a thing you know this is about the spirit and this is about the master and this is about the transmission so understanding that we can be in relationship with that vibration and with that being and that can create this extraordinary experience in everyday life that’s you know what I started to play with and we’ve had some really amazing now feedback on Quantum jobs from hundreds and hundreds of people including you know doctors and
(59:28) therapists and it’s really exciting to see so many people interested and curious and willing to be playful with this way of experiencing potent medicine and transmissions and so you know you wanted me to tell the story this just happened a few days ago I was at a conference and someone you know had Quantum drops and they they said you know we talked about it for like an hour how they work etc etc and he said well I don’t really know how they work actually but I just like you and I trust you so I’m going to try them and I was like
(1:00:02) okay like you know so he he took them and he the next day I saw him and he said oh you know I took the quantum drops last night and this morning he’s like I don’t know if anything really happen but you know I feel good I feel really calm and I feel connected and I’m connecting with lots of people so that’s good and I’m like great and he’s like and you know this morning I took out a picture of my father who passed away many years ago and I I made an altar and I bowed and I prayed to him and I was like oh do you do that all the time is
(1:00:30) that common he said no I never do that and he said but that’s my culture I’m Chinese and you know we build altars you know and we honor our ancestors and I said yeah absolutely I said you know I build altars all the time I was like do you have altars in your house do you have an altar in your home and he said no he said you know my home has nothing like that at all and I said oh so so this is unusual for you then and he said yeah but I I had the grandfather which is the name of you know one of the drops and I and I just I had taken the
(1:01:03) grandfather and I just wanted to make an altar with my father there and bow down and pray to him and I just felt really connected to my lineage and that’s one of the things we’ve seen again and again and again is this connecting to lineage connecting to ancestry father wound mother wound you know inner child right that like all these way days that we’re deprogramming right like releasing that programming so we can be more fully in our self-expression I’ll tell you one other very quick story which is a doctor
(1:01:36) who was interviewing me had been taking the children but I didn’t know and we got on an interview he said Maya before we start I just have to tell you you know I’ve been dancing every morning and I said oh that’s really cool and he said no you don’t understand like I get up and I turn on music and I don’t drink coffee I don’t shower I don’t I don’t do anything I just I just start dancing and I was like wow he said and I I couldn’t figure out what was going on and then I realized it started as soon as I started
(1:02:05) taking the children so he was taking the children every day and he just started dancing so just like really beautiful stories I love I just love this I feel such Delight about all of the medicine that is available right to receive in all of these different ways if we can just expand our conceptualization about what receiving consists of and that it doesn’t have to be this you know sort of Sledgehammer Cosmic 2×4 approach like this it’s very feminine to my mind delivery of such potency and I am for one super excited to figure out which I
(1:02:48) will choose to experiment with and yeah and to report back and I just so honor the way way that you have created I mean I feel like this work is is itself an altar right it’s it itself an altar that you’ve created to the Plant World and you’ve invited us you know you’ve invited us to come sit at it and I’m really grateful to you and inspired by you and I know that this is exactly you know what so many people need and in a way that I just don’t see anybody else holding it so thank you woman and the links will be in the show notes to your
(1:03:25) book and the quantum drops and yeah I am so excited that I have a front row seat to what it is that you’re sharing with the world thank you thank you and thank you for everything that you’re doing to hold space for all this reclamation
