How MDMA Is Transforming Mental Health - Dr Dan Engle | Modern Wisdom Podcast 367

Dr. Dan Engle is an MD, the Founder and Medical Director of Kuya Institute for Transformational Medicine and an author. For the last 50 years, MDMA has been illegal whilst psychological trauma and depression has mostly been treated by trying to negate their symptoms through medication. After decades of research and lobbying, we are finally on the verge of being able to treat the root causes of psychological pain, by using the very same drug which has been around since 1912. Expect to learn what an MDMA-assisted psychotherapy session is actually like, what makes MDMA such a useful therapeutic tool, the difference in effectiveness between MDMA and current psyche-meds, what the future of its availability looks like and much more... Sponsors: Get 20% discount on the highest quality CBD Products from Pure Sport at https://puresportcbd.com/modernwisdom (use code: MW20) Get perfect teeth 70% cheaper than other invisible aligners from DW Aligners at http://dwaligners.co.uk/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Buy A Dose Of Hope - https://amzn.to/3jBj8Vf Check out Dan's new Wellness Centre - https://www.kuya.life/ Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #mdmatherapy #depression #plantmedicine - 00:00 Intro 00:27 Dr Engle’s Work 06:46 Outlining MDMA 24:26 How MDMA Can Help Trauma 28:32 MDMA’s Creation 37:58 Different MDMA Levels 53:09 MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy 1:05:59 Aftermath of MDMA Use 1:22:09 When MDMA Might Fail 1:26:30 What’s Next for MDMA? 1:29:19 Where to Find Dr Dan Engle - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The most exciting thing in mental health care right now is psychedelic therapies. Because for once, we have really strategic, pretty consistently successful therapeutics that get down to root cause issues versus treating the symptoms.

• 0:18Chris Williamson?

  Dr. Dan Engle, welcome to the show.

• 0:21Speaker 00

  It's good to be with you, Chris. Thanks for having me on, man.

• 0:23Chris Williamson?

  I am very, very happy to have you here. How do you describe what you do for work?

• 0:28Speaker 00

  Uh, these days, the conceptual frame of that is transformational medicine, which incorporates a lot of different things and we could dissect that out. But I'd say that's the gist of it.

• 0:39Chris Williamson?

  All right. How many MDMA assisted psychotherapy sessions have you done? Like that you've sat with or facilitated?

• 0:47Speaker 00

  Oh, on or off the record?

• 0:50Chris Williamson?

  Well, we're definitely on the record now, but you can include whatever you want.

• 0:56Speaker 00

  Yeah. Um, I have facilitated, I don't know now, uh, several hundred different medicine sessions. And I don't know if I've even kept a track of which ones are which different medicines. Historically, I've facilitated with quite a few different medicines for people in different contexts. Sometimes individual, sometimes group.

• 1:21Speaker 00

  Sometimes in the States, sometimes out of the States. There's a variety of different contexts where we can do that legally, whether it's in a religious context or if it's in a retreat context in places where medicines are legal and used. I lived down in South America, outside of Iquitos, Peru, for about a year, studying with ayahuasca in an apprenticeship. And that was 15 years ago, when there wasn't much really known or understood or appreciated about ayahuasca. And at that time, I really started to get into the the curiosity and the fascination with how you have different levels of people who can be supportive to another going through a process.

• 2:05Speaker 00

  You have sitters, you have therapists, i.e. facilitators. Facilitators in more of a kind of a Western psychological framework. And then you have trackers, you know, trackers that really can pick up the subtle nuances of the landscape and help people rescue those lost parts of themselves.

• 2:24Chris Williamson?

  What are your credentials?

• 2:27Speaker 00

  A medical doctor. Yeah, I've gone through medical school here in the States. So that was in San Antonio where I grew up. I did my psychiatry residency in Denver. That was three years. Then I did two psych fellowships, one in forensic psych and one in child psych and finished that up in Portland. And I've been the medical director for, let's see, eight different centers up to now and to the eve of what we were just talking about, launching Couia in about two weeks.

• 3:03Chris Williamson?

  Is it rare for somebody in the plant medicine world to have this degree of Western clinical credentials as well?

• 3:15Speaker 00

  Historically, it's been very rare. Thankfully, it's growing because, in my experience, and when you go through medical school and residency, you end up studying all the variety of fields and then you specialize. And in the different specialty fields, as I was vetting what I wanted to get into, in my experience, two of the most pessimistic fields are neurology and psychiatry. And those are the two fields that I ended up studying in because everything was fascinating. And they have really revolutionized since my medical training 20 years ago. And the most exciting thing in mental health care right now is psychedelic therapies.

• 3:58Speaker 00

  Because for once, we have really strategic, pretty consistently successful therapeutics that get down to root cause issues versus treating the symptoms, which has its place too, for sure. It's good to be able to support people easing their suffering. We also want to be able to use the therapeutic tools that really get down to the causative root factors.

• 4:23Chris Williamson?

  The symptoms would be your Paxils, your Zolofts, your SSRIs.

• 4:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And with the medical model that we have, psychiatry, you know, psyche means soul. It translates to that terminology historically. It means mind too. And there are various aspects of the mind, one of which is this connection with soul. And you know, a soul is to spirit is a drop is to the ocean. You know, we all have this underlying experience of what animates our being.

• 4:54Speaker 00

  And we, as a field of psychiatry and psychiatrists, have largely sold out to our role as a spokesperson and a physician for the soul to the pharmaceutical industry. And it's not to make that wrong, it's just to say that that's a particular orientation. We've kind of maxed out the benefit, at least when you look at the numbers and the data. And if somebody's standing on the ledge and all they have is antidepressants and antipsychotics and neuropsychopharmaceuticals available to them, I say, well, use the medicines. Those are medicines. Every medicine has its place. Pharmaceuticals have their place, just

• 5:34Speaker 00

  like going to the ER has its place and going into the OR if you need to get under the knife or in that kind of Western triage care, like, let's put you back together. We're really good at that. That's what we do really well. In Western medicine, however, we're really shitty at preventative care and chronic care management. And so we're seeing this whole reclamation of psychiatry as this deeper aspect of getting to know the root cause issues and having tools that can get into the nitty gritty, ideally being facilitated with people who are good, trained, experienced facilitators and to let the medicine work

• 6:15Speaker 00

  its magic. Because oftentimes, as facilitators, if we create the safe environment, the safe set and setting, and people can really relax into it, trust it, surrender into it, then we offer the medicine and the medicine does its magic. And then it's as much of the facilitator's role to not get in the way, to not try and mess with it, or think that they need to do something, because the medicine's pretty phenomenal at being able to help people get in touch with the deepest aspects of their being.

• 6:46Chris Williamson?

  The medicine that we're going to be talking about today mostly is MDMA. What's the story of that? How did it come about?

• 6:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's fascinating when MDMA has followed the trajectory of many different medicines. You know, this whole field of psychedelic therapy is now gaining more and more traction. And we could talk about the different pantheon of medicines. You have level one medicines, level two medicines, level three medicines. And just like you wouldn't go into the gym and put 300 on the squat rack unless you had worked up to that. It's also advisable to not start at a level three medicine.

• 7:20Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so what's a one, two, and a three? What would be some examples of what sits in those brackets?

• 7:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, so before even that, it's good to set the foundation, right? Get your stance correct, really understand your posture, alignment. And that would look like meditation. And that would look like self-regulation.

• 7:40Chris Williamson?

  Level zero.

• 7:42Speaker 00

  That's ground zero. That's the solid foundation. And that might look like going into a float tank and seeing if you can hold your stuff together in a float tank. Because if you can't hold it together in a float tank, it might be pretty hard to hold it together in a ceremony. And so what does it look like when we find our conscious ability to chase our growth edge and lean into our fear and get intimate with that fear? And breathe through that and learn self-regulation in the midst of fear? And in the midst of our core wounding? It's hard for us to do our tracking on our own. Like, we don't self-observe super well as a species. We're good at, well, relatively depending on training and kind of our gestalt

• 8:25Speaker 00

  or our constitution, ability to be able to do that for others. But traditionally, it's, we don't do that super well for ourselves. And part of that's because we have these awesome ego defenses that keep our wounds kind of at bay. And when we start to learn that the things, the core wounds and the things that we've really walled ourselves off from, they're actually...

• 8:49Speaker 00

  Available to become our teachers. They're they're assets to us as our as our weaknesses become our best strengths, et cetera. And so this foundational experience, setting the the firm ground matrix, so to speak, so that the new growth can happen, is oftentimes through these neuro-regulation, self-regulation practices. Meditation is just one example of that. And so, once we start to be able to self-regulate, then we can opt into having more altered state experiences and still be able to find our center. Or maintain a state of available curiosity

• 9:31Speaker 00

  in the midst of the the ego's reflexive position to move away from that which it fears. What would be an example of some of that? Trauma, right? So eventually, this is part of the preparation. So MDMA, to answer your question, would be a level-one medicine. Okay. I can share a little bit about some of the others. And in that preparation process, we can onboard the person going through that to understand that trauma can be a gateway to transformation. Like Barbara Marcus Hubbard says, "Crisis precedes transformation every time." And when we go through this experience of being reclaimed into wholeness,

• 10:14Speaker 00

  which means bringing all of these separate parts home, like the traumatized parts of ourself that might have been locked away after trauma. And trauma doesn't have to mean like being in in war and on the battlefield, or having a near-death experience in a head-on collision, or a variety of other light, very obvious, life-threatening experiences. That's classic PTSD.

• 10:40Speaker 00

  But there's also this growing awareness now, over the last couple of decades, of what we would call complex PTSD, which is more of the accumulation of adverse childhood experiences from very young, oftentimes which are before memory. So we didn't really consolidate language with memory centers until we're like four, five, six years old. So so much that happens before that, which we're still configuring our identity and persona and view of ourself in the world happens in these early formative years, and we might not have access to it.

• 11:16Chris Williamson?

  So you're saying that we can have something prior to our ability to recall it

• 11:22Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 11:22Chris Williamson?

  as a child, which has impacted us in terms of our trauma

• 11:26Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 11:27Chris Williamson?

  throughout the rest of our lives?

• 11:28Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 11:31Chris Williamson?

  How much of the trauma that you see with the people that you work with comes from that pre-memory phase versus the post-memory phase?

• 11:42Speaker 00

  Seventy, well, part of it's a selection bias because I don't only work with veterans. But if I was to take a random sampling of the population, I'd say it's about sixty to seventy percent complex PTSD versus classic PTSD.

• 11:58Chris Williamson?

  Presumably, the complex PTSD is not just the pre-memory phase, though, that there will be the small eroding and chipping away over time that contributes to that, too.

• 12:11Speaker 00

  Right. And that small chipping away oftentimes is the that's a good term, the erosion of a sense of safety and security in the world, a sense of being able to trust our caregivers, whoever that was, if that was our parents or our grandparents, or however we were raised. Can we trust the bigger people? When we're a little person, the bigger people just seem like gods. Can we trust those gods? Can we trust a god? What's our relationship with God? What's our relationship with life? What's the relationship with the planet? These are the factors that go into establishing a sense of safety and security.

• 12:55Speaker 00

  And that can get eroded through these.

• 13:00Speaker 00

  Experience and so it doesn't all have to be like in the first four, four or five formative years, it can be later too. Like for example, say I'm in elementary school and I have a pretty safe, secure sense of my family and my attachment style and I haven't been exposed to a whole lot of trauma, I've been loved a lot. Say my family moves to a totally different culture, totally different community and, and maybe I'm on the smaller side and now I just start getting pummeled by the, the guys at school. That's gonna leave a mark, right? So, but maybe it wasn't like I got so thrashed that I almost died and there was obvious trauma. Maybe it was just bullying.

• 13:44Speaker 00

  And, and, and not to say just bullying, not to mean that bullying is just this, oh, piddly thing that doesn't have consequences. That can be significantly detrimental to a growing person's sense of themself in the world and how they trust themself and, and maybe if, if that gets utilized as a platform, like maybe I come home, I tell that to my parents and my parents are like, okay, yeah, I could see that that sucks, you know, tell us about it, how does that feel? Let's get you into self-defense classes, let's get you into martial arts, let's get you, maybe it's, it's another initiation, right? Crisis proceeds transformation every time.

• 14:25Speaker 00

  So maybe it was able to get worked through and dealt with then, but maybe it didn't. Maybe I didn't feel like I could tell anybody or my parents were thrashed themselves because they moved and then we lost all our money or they were having trauma too. And so we can just see all the different radically complex and beautifully intricate scenarios and characteristics of life that would help us evolve into a particular experience of ourself. So that's level one. So MDMA would be a level one medicine.

• 14:59Speaker 00

  And this is not an exhaustive list. But if we think about level one medicines versus level two versus level three, basically, the differential would be, in part, level one medicines are typically easier to navigate and with a higher likelihood of having a positive experience if you only had a sitter supporting you. In a safe environment, maybe you had facilitation or maybe your sitter knew how to support it more than just helping you stay safe, which is the minimum viable product, so to speak, to entering the space is make sure that you have safety. Make sure that you know, and by, you know, I should probably also preface like, not everybody's ready to have a medicine experience.

• 15:42Speaker 00

  Not everybody's ready to have a psychedelic process occur. And that might be for a variety of reasons, too, that we could speak about, like what are the contraindications? So ease of entry into the space, ease of experience of the space, high likelihood of a positive outcome, relatively short process, I'll speak about that a little bit further, and relatively low need for potential intervention by those that are helping to hold the container. So level one medicines, MDMA, ketamine, psilocybin.

• 16:22Chris Williamson?

  Psilocybin would be in that list.

• 16:25Speaker 00

  Dose-dependent.

• 16:27Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 16:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, dose-dependent LSD.

• 16:31Chris Williamson?

  That would be on the longer side, I'm gonna guess. We're talking sort of upwards of maybe 10 hours there.

• 16:36Speaker 00

  Right. So low-dose LSD, you start to have what's called a psycholytic experience. So kind of like ketamine in that you start to open up what Aldous Huxley would describe as the doors of perception. You start opening up the gateways. And low dose LSD, 100 micrograms, 150 micrograms. Depending, that's also dependent on a bit weight distribution, a bit person's experience in altered states, a bit their kind of metabolic profile, a bit their psychological armoring. Because you can shut down experiences too, if you just will them away, so to speak. Unless you jump up to like 500 to 600 micrograms of LSD.

• 17:20Chris Williamson?

  That's just along for the ride, yeah.

• 17:22Speaker 00

  Right, and that's a level three process.

• 17:24Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 17:25Speaker 00

  You know, the differential with psilocybin, you have a one, two gram experience, that's a level one, typically for most people. You have a three to four gram experience, that's a level two for most people. You have a five gram and above experience, now you're getting into level three. So some of that's dose dependent. And then the fifth medicine is cannabis. Cannabis is an amazing medicine. We tend to not use it much as a medicine these days, because it's now going so widely recreational. It, it, very, there are very many people who are still using it as a medicine. And so many more and more people are using it as a recreational tool. And I'm not here to say that that's wrong or bad, I'm just talking about the differential between a recreational

• 18:09Speaker 00

  engagement with a medicine versus a therapeutic engagement. And in my experience, no other medicine highlights the differential there, more so than MDMA. Because you can take MDMA and go to a rave and hang out with your friends, and it can just be so fun. Ecstatic states, really high. And oh, by the way, it's still illegal, so you have to know legalities, and maybe you're not even ready, because it can be a, a bit much. Depending on, again, dose. And also purity, because people getting stuff off the street that's called ecstasy, that's not MDMA. It's oftentimes cut with a lot of stuff. And if you're working with pure molecule, then it can, yes, it engenders that joyful process.

• 18:55Speaker 00

  That's a, that's an ecstatic state, which we are driven for extasis, we're driven for transcendence. And that's a very different set and setting and intention going in versus a therapeutic setting using the same molecule. But I've had so many people tell me that the experience between a recreational process and a therapeutic process felt to them like it was a totally different molecule that they're working with, totally different experience, totally different outcome.

• 19:24Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. I'm someone that's partaken in many of those substances, but most of them during a party setting. So MDMA, especially throughout my twenties, a lot of that. I don't think I've ever taken MDMA and not had it with alcohol, ever. I would be surprised, and I'd be talking like 30 times, 50 times. You could, you could, I wouldn't be surprised if it happened to be 100 and I've just forgotten another 50.

• 19:54Chris Williamson?

  But it's never been, it's never been with that in mind. Okay, so that's what sort of the dose-dependent stages would be. Are there any compounds that aren't in, that aren't in level one, but are in level two and three? I know that some of them, we can have same compounds, different doses. But are there other compounds? Yep.

• 20:12Speaker 00

  And I want to highlight something you just said because it's a fascinating experience that happens for most of us. The two biggest things that we don't teach our youth, sex and drugs. And the two biggest things that they're going to explore on their own, because we're driven for creativity, procreation, exploration.

• 20:29Chris Williamson?

  Rebellion.

• 20:29Speaker 00

  And, and hormones are coming online and we're meant to be rebels at that age. And if we don't express our healthy rebellion at the teenage level, it comes out later in adulthood and it looks really fucking messy. Right? So unfortunately, we don't onboard our youth with an understanding of how to appreciate and use these medicines and these altered states of consciousness and that exploration in a healthy, good way. And, and so that it doesn't come out in a distorted or destructive way. Same thing with sex and having a conscious, engaged educational platform around healthy sex. And, you know, I suppose we could use a bit of a term that's been used more and more lately, like a sex positive culture, sex positive educational platform.

• 21:15Speaker 00

  And so you're highlighting something really important is like, we're going to explore altered states. 90% of high school adults.

• 21:28Speaker 00

  In the US, 90% of high school seniors say that they have experienced alter states of consciousness with some degree of significance, more than once, and with something that was not legal. Because in high school, you're not even supposed to drink alcohol, at least in the States. So it could be cannabis, could be alcohol, could be MDMA, could be LSD, it could be a whole sort of thing. So that's a fairly significant number, right? And that's in a setting where you're telling people not to, most of the time. Like, "Don't do that Friday commercial." I don't know if you remember the "This is your brain on drugs" Friday commercial.

• 22:11Speaker 00

  I grew up in that era, and it worked. But it was okay for at least us in our culture to drink alcohol. We just couldn't smoke dope, because you're gonna end up in a stupid puddle for the rest of your life, if you did. And so, when we have the opportunity to change the narrative, and actually have an adult conversation with our youth in a transparent way that lets them ask questions and get curious about it, so that they have ownership of the process, and it doesn't have to happen in the shadows, so to speak. Then, now we're gonna start to have a new orientation to consciousness. And that's part of the reason that the War on Drugs was so popular in the 70s.

• 22:55Speaker 00

  It took everything and put it into Schedule I, including MDMA.

• 23:00Speaker 00

  That happened a little bit later, but like LSD, psilocybin. Like Nixon administration, the public enemy number one was the drugs, and so War on Drugs happened. So to then peel it back to what you were talking about in regards to the recognition, you've worked with this tool in a different setting, with other tools on board. Alcohol can be an amazing tool too, but in our culture, we typically use it extraordinarily poor, poorly, mindlessly. And it creates an opportunity for people to continue to numb out to their pain, because we don't have yet a medical system that starts to get to the root cause of the trauma.

• 23:43Speaker 00

  I get curious for you, in that kind of recognition, like this is a medicine you've known pretty regularly throughout your twenties, but in a very different cocktail of experience and state-dependent intention. So then to work with it as a therapeutic tool, you might quite likely have a very different experience. And MDMA is a phenomenal medicine in how it engenders a therapeutic process. Because if you were to construct a neurochemical profile for a particular agent that's so good consistently at helping to work with trauma, you'd be hard-pressed to find one better than MDMA. Why?

• 24:27Speaker 00

  Because it's so phenomenal. So the way it works in neurochemically, neuroanatomically, psychophysiologically, it stimulates certain areas of the brain, as well as creating this awesome opening process through the neuroendocrine cascade, so the neurohormonal cascade. It releases and floods the system with something called oxytocin. Oxytocin is our bonding hormone. It's the hormone that mothers secrete in breastmilk when they're lactating and breastfeeding their children, and they're in this unification experience, this union experience.

• 25:10Speaker 00

  So oxytocin is very much a hormone of union. Union with ourselves, union with the divine, union with others. And it also creates this neurochemical cascade through primarily serotonin and norepinephrine that allows the fear center to relax. That's also part of the oxytocin effect, because when you're flooded with union, fear typically is relaxed and vice versa. It's hard to be flooded with union when your fear is really heightened. And so the amygdala starts to relax, the ego defenses start to relax, so our fear

• 25:52Speaker 00

  centers start to relax, in the middle of creating this really hyper-alert state. So the neuro- The norepinephrine neuroendocrine experience of the prefrontal cortex allows us like supreme witness to come on board and you can track really well. I mean, you've experienced like it's a very energizing medicine. So it brings energy into this. It's also an amphetamine derivative. So it it tends to kick up the the energetic profile. It feels like you've had a couple of shots of coffee. And it also helps to impregnate a greater connection neuro anatomically that that behaviorally expresses itself as improved memory because you get a really heightened

• 26:36Speaker 00

  connection between the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus where we hold our memories.

• 26:40Chris Williamson?

  So what the

• 26:40Speaker 00

  So three things just happened. I've I've relaxed my fear center. The amygdala is downregulated. I have a better witness because the prefrontal cortex is online and I have a better memory because the hippocampus is more online. So in the midst of all of that with with my ego defenses now relaxed and my unification, that bonding hormone alive. Now you've created this amazing neurochemical soup that allows the curiosity and the investigation of the things that we've held back that we were scared from, maybe that we didn't even know was there. The trauma starts to naturally bubble to the surface. And those things that I wouldn't have

• 27:22Speaker 00

  let myself acknowledge or become intimate with before are now coming up and we can work with it.

• 27:30Chris Williamson?

  It creates a very appropriate environment for a therapist to work in.

• 27:34Speaker 00

  Bingo. Especially for trauma. I mean, pretty much for anything because MDMA is an amazing medicine for communication. It was in the early 80s used for couples therapy predominantly because it's just so good at helping us drop our bullshit meter and get real, but also speak from a place of truth without so much defensiveness or animosity or the subtle communication factors that maybe that's passive aggressive, maybe they're barbs, maybe there's subtle sabotage, maybe it's like all of that starts to now also relax. All of

• 28:15Speaker 00

  those historical ways that maybe we were sideways or distorted in our communication. Now we have the opportunity to speak with more truth, clarity and love. And so it's a great couples therapy agent.

• 28:27Chris Williamson?

  What about the story of MDMA? How did it get created?

• 28:34Speaker 00

  And then we'll come back and I'll say more about level two, level three, et cetera. So I think it was 1912, methylene dioxymethamphetamine. So that's what MDMA stands for. And it wasn't used for 50 or so years until 50, 60s, it started becoming more widely used and appreciated. And it became a strong psychotherapeutic tool in the 70s and in the 80s.

• 29:00Chris Williamson?

  Why was it created in the first place?

• 29:02Speaker 00

  Um, it was created, yeah, I don't know what initially the impulse was that we're going to create this particular molecule. And it wasn't for a psychotherapeutic aim back then in the early 1900s. We weren't really looking at psychopharmacology at that time as a tool into like doorways of the mind, so to speak. And then it got resurrected. And that has its own kind of colorful story that I'm probably not the best to describe because there's a lot of circumstance

• 29:43Speaker 00

  and a lot of iterations to that story of like how it just magically kind of came back onto the scene. And as I understand, once it became more widely used and appreciated psychotherapeutically, that was also in parallel, late 50s into the 60s, coming into our curiosity in the psychedelic revolution that was happening at that time, psychedelics in general. And it, it didn't get as much appreciation as things like, you know, LSD was the frontrunner of the counterculture movement in the late 60s.

• 30:23Speaker 00

  And then kind of backdrafting all of LSD's entry into the space was MDMA as not so much a psychoactive psychedelic experience. Like LSD is a classic psychedelic, psilocybin is a classic psychedelic, DMT based medicines, ayahuasca is a classic psychedelic. MDMA is not. MDMA is described as an empathogen or intactogen, which means it engenders empathy.

• 30:52Speaker 00

  And it has all of those neurological and neurochemical aspects and kind of attributes that I mentioned. And because it's so fascinatingly powerful in its ability to help people speak their truth from a place of being unguarded and essentially more open and available to contact that truth and then communicate it, it's an amazing psychotherapeutic tool. So it was being used more and more by the psychotherapeutic community in the seventies and into the early eighties. And never should have been in schedule one. Schedule one means that's our, in the United States, classification of medicines that have no known benefit and they're highly addictive.

• 31:37Speaker 00

  And those would be also, we could call, street drugs like heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine. But now we're talking about only a few iterations off of the classic meth or crystal meth, which just wrecks a lot of people's lives. You have, not so far away from that, something like MDMA, which is saving a lot of people's lives. So medicines oftentimes have not only their sacred place at the table, like all medicines, once we get to understand what it's for, then we can understand how to use it in a good way. And we can also start to not just bastardize something like heroin, which is very similar

• 32:21Speaker 00

  to morphine, which is very good for helping many people with intractable pain syndrome. Like, part of my background's in neurology. And I've had a host of concussions and I've helped people with traumatic brain injuries and some of the centers I've run in the past, that's been our focus. And neuropathic pain sucks. Having a chronic nerve injury, like a structural nerve firing, that is like an itch that you can't ever scratch, it's this constant pain. Like sciatica is a common experience of neuropathic pain and most people have sciatica, right? Yeah, that really sucks. Well, if you have that ongoing all the time, it's a really rough day.

• 33:03Speaker 00

  And so that can be another aspect in a potential trajectory for transformational experience and being able to work with your mind. And it's also helpful to do that with an opioid pharmaceutical like morphine. Morphine was the first one on a battlefield medicine was very good. But then you have something like heroin that's just a little bit different. Right? And now we have the differential between a medicine and a drug. Or if you look like something like cocaine. Ritalin is pharmacologically very much like cocaine. Right? And we give that almost like M and M's to youth to help them sit still. Little Johnny in the back who's just got a lot of mental energy, maybe a lot of physical

• 33:45Speaker 00

  energy, and he learns by moving his body in space. Everybody learns a little bit different. There's like at least seven different primary learning styles. So when we have a one size fits all educational model and we make kids the problem because they're not just going to sit there like little minions and stamp widgets for an hour at a time because that's not how they're geared, then we start to drug them with things that aren't that pharmacologically different than the things that we're bastardizing and putting people in way in a privatized prison system for long periods of time. So that we just start to see how all of this is going through this massive transformation. It's not just the medical industry through psychedelics. It's also the privatized prison system and going through a just social justice reform.

• 34:30Speaker 00

  It's also the political system. It's also who's right? So there's a law, a large downstream effect. When we have something like the reclamation of truth telling in what the war on drugs was actually about, then it calls us into action to make sure that we're doing our due diligence to make sure that that doesn't happen again to the best of our ability. Because it's very clear that the Nixon administration, public enemy number one was the was drugs. But that was still smoke and mirrors and kind of like the front story for the fact that they.

• 35:09Speaker 00

  Wanted a control mechanism for the minorities. And they knew that if they could connect the black community with heroin, and they could connect the hippies with cannabis, and make both of those illegal, then they can marginalize both of those communities and continue to control like status quo. And so this whole war on drugs was not based in data and science. It was based on political motivations. And we're seeing something similar in the current global crisis with COVID. Or with the last political election. It's hard to know which data to trust, on which side of the pole.

• 35:54Speaker 00

  Because you can have really good data that sounds like legitimate truth. And you can have, on one side, you can have really good data that sounds like legitimate truth on the other side. And so this is where so much confusion and a sense of paralysis can happen. It's like, fuck, I don't know now who to trust and where to go. And like, what are your, people like yourself, doing podcasts and like giving information to the masses. This is where it's a grassroots movement to start en masse demanding more truth telling. And then finding those, if we can't trust the political leaders and those that quote unquote above us are in charge, then we'll go to one another. And so MDMA, just like most of the psychedelics,

• 36:38Speaker 00

  is coming online right now. As one of my teachers would describe them as claregins. So MDMA now is going through this legal. How would I describe this? Its own transformation. Illegal renaissance.

• 37:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, we could call it a renaissance. Yeah, psychedelic therapy in general is going through a renaissance for sure. MDMA is even going through something interesting because it is such a north star wayshower of what's possible.

• 37:17Chris Williamson?

  Because it's so effective, it's very safe.

• 37:19Speaker 00

  Right, right. You just hit it on the head. Those are the two prime factors. It's so effective, so people hear the stories of transformation. It's so safe, so it's so clear that MDMA doesn't belong in schedule one. It's saving people's lives. It's helping people reclaim their trauma so as to be able to grow from it and through it and with it to become more whole humans. That's exactly what the field of psychiatry is meant to do. So it is this wayshower of what our potential is in this renaissance. So I think that's a great word to use.

• 37:58Chris Williamson?

  Let's get back to level, let's get back to level two and three. I want to, I want to find out what's in that.

• 38:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, where we're going to go is legalization with MDMA. It's scheduled to become legal in the next 18 to 24 months largely.

• 38:11Chris Williamson?

  Legal for clinical use. Yep.

• 38:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you just excited a lot of people there thinking that it was going to be sold at the corner shop.

• 38:21Speaker 00

  Right. And that's a totally different orientation, right? Because usually drugs, they go to legal therapeutic use and then potentially legal recreational use. Cannabis did that, right? No one can use it. And now you can use it if you have a diagnosis, chronic pain syndrome, ah, and now a lot of people are using it recreationally because there's a lot of money in it.

• 38:42Chris Williamson?

  Does this mean that there's going to be loads of dodgy street vendors on Venice Beach flogging MDMA cards? Like, oh, come and get you.

• 38:50Speaker 00

  I certainly hope not.

• 38:52Chris Williamson?

  Come and get your MDMA therapy card here.

• 38:55Speaker 00

  I certainly hope not.

• 38:58Speaker 00

  I think there's going to be a much more concerted rollout with MAPS and MAPS's relationship with the feds. And that you can, because people won't have like, in order to.

• 39:11Speaker 00

  Sell it on the streets, you'd have to have it, but nobody's gonna be able to have it outside of a licensed facility. So it's gonna be under high regulation. Yeah. And to an extent, we want that, because we don't want to give any ammunition to the feds to prove their doubt that we're not ready for this, at least as a therapeutic tool. And then we can solidify that safety and then talk about recreational further down the road. So, that's where we're headed. We mentioned level one. Level two, typically a bit more variables to take into consideration, a bit more of an intense process with even

• 39:52Speaker 00

  an entry level experience, can bring up more shadow work to be able to do internally. What does that mean? Uh. Shadow work? So, like if your, if your trauma started coming into the space, and part of this is because how the medicines are facilitated, the three level two medicines, ayahuasca, peyote, San Pedro, they're not typically done individually. They're usually done in groups. Like peyote's in a group setting, ayahuasca, San Pedro. It's not typically oriented for a person in the same kind of MDMA framework or therapeutic setting to do

• 40:33Speaker 00

  one on work with, with those tools. You can, but historically, that's not its cultural context. And that's not the religious context that the UDV and Santo Daime and the Peyote Way Church, they don't hold it in the same kind of context. And you don't necessarily have to hold it that way in order for it to be a legal sanctioned church congregational ceremony, so to speak. But recognizing the lineage that these medicines come from are, are procured and offered through

• 41:11Speaker 00

  A tapestry and a technology of consistent facilitation. So there's a reason why those medicines are facilitated that way and have been done that way for hundreds and hundreds of years. So, something like ayahuasca, because it translates into the vine of the soul, or the vine of death. And that's more of an ego death, not a physical death, so people typically going through an ayahuasca experience won't die.

• 41:38Speaker 00

  But, that's another indication too, that we have to be even more clear in our contraindications. Because level two experiences can bring up a lot of intense stuff. And if a person hasn't done a level one process, or if they haven't kind of gotten their solidification of being able to regulate their own nervous systems and they just pop into an ayah ceremony, a lot of people have bad trips. It really depends on the setting, the facilitation, how much they're given, all of that.

• 42:07Speaker 00

  And, same thing with peyote and San Pedro, because they're so strong and they last so long, it can be an uncomfortable experience if people are having a rough time and you just have to sweat it out for a good eight to 10 hours, because you might not have a facilitator immediately right there that you can just pull on, like is usually how MDMA has worked. Usually it's in a group setting, so if you're having a hard time, you're typically gonna have to just sit with it and be with it.

• 42:35Speaker 00

  And, that's part of the benefit, because it's like resistance training. Over time, we get better and better at being able to sit with our discomfort. And ayahuasca is my primary, I would call her as my primary teacher, the medicine that's had the strongest influence on my life. And, when I came out of my psychiatry fellowship, had a clinic, was open for a couple of years, we're doing integrative psychiatry, helping people come off of psychiatric medications, so we're doing good work, but there was still a little bit of, like, the depth of it, missing. And I was introduced to ayahuasca Circle Underground about 15 years ago, and I learned more about myself in one weekend with ayahuasca than I had in one decade of psychotherapy.

• 43:18Speaker 00

  I was like, "Holy shit, where the fuck has this been? And why haven't I heard about it?" I was both fascinated and pissed. Because I had spent close to 20 years studying the mind and never come across this. And so I closed up my clinic and moved down to the jungle just because I was fascinated.

• 43:36Chris Williamson?

  As you do.

• 43:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. So that I level two, to the extent that if you're a facilitator, entry level, if you're a sitter or an entry level facilitator, you can support people through a level one process pretty routinely, pretty successfully. But to facilitate ayahuasca, peyote, or San Pedro, usually my teachers would go through a decade of training before they ever worked on behalf of another. Just consistently apprenticing, consistently learning, understanding the medicine, understanding the astraplane, understanding the energetic profile, understanding how to go into a person's field to be able to track what they're not able to see on their own,

• 44:20Speaker 00

  come back, present that, help them integrate it, and then dust off, clean off, so that we're not taking on their residue or the same. I'm not influencing their experience with my own impact. So there are so many different nuances of this kind of work. And doing that level of curandisimo or vegetalismo or, you know, my teachers wouldn't even describe themselves as shamans because it's a term from a different culture. But the healers of that traditional path are those that know how to make a right relationship with the medicines and the herbs, the plants, and be able to work side by side, hand in hand, with that technology on behalf of a client or a group of people.

• 45:03Speaker 00

  That is next level mastery. So that's why I put that in those in schedule or a level two. So then we have level three. DMT and Iboga. DMT because nothing will invite your ego to die quite like DMT will, especially if it's in a smoked version of either an N DMT, Fabio DMT, whether it's synthetic or organic, like from the Snorin Desert Toad.

• 45:30Speaker 00

  It's so fast, it's so strong, it just catapults your ego straight out of your body and it can happen so fast that it feels really freaky. And I've worked with clients who had their first psychedelic state with a 5MEO experience and were shattered for months afterwards. What does that mean shattered? It just blew their doors open. I guess we use that same kind of like gates of perception, doors of perception. Well, you can unlock the door, or you can dynamite the door. Blast them off the hinges. Yeah, exactly. Right. And so that has a particular psychological, psychic and energetic impact.

• 46:11Speaker 00

  It really frees the energy body, and this gets more into like Ayurveda, if you're talking about the Naadies or like the energetic body, or like astral tear in the field, so to speak. Like it requires surgical intervention of a particular, like now we're being interventionists to the mind and to that degree of trauma. But it's not just psychological. There's a neurological, there's an energetic experience too. So we, in the worst case scenario, somebody gets their doors blasted open and they can get psychotic, or have intractable insomnia. Intractable insomnia will lead to psychosis eventually. And so we might need to use a psychopharmaceutical,

• 46:53Speaker 00

  like an antipsychotic, like Xiprex, Seriquil, and the list is long, but just as examples. And that's where, that's a good example of if we need to shut down the symptoms that we can, and so we have tools for that kind of intervention. Ideally, if we come back to the rubric, you don't start at level three. If I walked into a, I can't squat 300 pounds, I used to be able to, but I'm just not in, I'm not doing those kinds of exercises like I did before. I can perform in ways now that I didn't do before, but you have to understand where you're at and you have to work up to that level. So DMT, because it's so strong, and it has that impact for creating trauma, and the last thing we want to do is that, we're actually wanting to heal trauma.

• 47:37Speaker 00

  And Iboga, because it lasts so long, and it's so arduous. How long is Iboga? What's an Iboga trip like? It's about 18 to 36 hours. 36 hours, Jesus fuck.

• 47:51Speaker 00

  Mine, both of mine were 40. And

• 47:56Speaker 00

  It's fascinating because it, there's so much to do in that time. There's lifetimes of work to do in that time. But it also is a really intense process. And the reason I said, both of mine were 40, I did it, I was at a, one center. So the reason I got into this work more kind of front and center, and it's in the front part of the dose of hope, is because my sister committed suicide. And that was from a long, longstanding battle with depression and alcohol, all stemming from PTSD, that really wasn't acknowledged, and we didn't know much about it then, and that was also about 10 years ago.

• 48:40Speaker 00

  We didn't know, I didn't know, I don't think we knew as a culture, as much about complex PTSD, and MDMA wasn't as available then, and I was a Puritan and an ayahuasca path, so I didn't even know about MDMA, I didn't even know about iboga. I was just doing my ayahuasca.

• 48:57Speaker 00

  Like, the, I was still in school, and I was just pure on that path. And then she left, and I was like, fuck, man. I know there's more medicines available. I wish I would have known more about all of the variety of medicines to be able to support her.

• 49:20Speaker 00

  And so, that's when I journeyed into iboga. Because iboga is the best medicine for addiction recovery on the planet, period. The best single agent.

• 49:32Speaker 00

  And it's because of how it works pharmacologically, also energetically, psychically, in the astral planes and beyond, for sure. But predominantly, how it works neurochemically. It works on 50 plus different receptor profiles. It goes in there like a Brillo pad and scrubs the opioid receptors clean. So if somebody goes through an iboga experience or an ibogaine experience...

• 49:58Speaker 00

  They don't have withdrawals and they don't have cravings. It's crazy. There's nothing else like that on the planet. When I say they, it's not 100%, it's usually about 75, 80% of people don't have cravings and don't have withdrawals. And I ran, I was the medical director of an ibogine center in Mexico for a year and it was just phenomenal to see people that had been daily users of heroin or pain meds they couldn't get off of and just so scared to stop because the withdrawals are so strong. Or they tried so many times and failed and now where there are people that have been daily users for 10 plus years go through one experience, done.

• 50:42Speaker 00

  It just blew my mind about what's possible. And so I wanted to understand it first formally. That was, I didn't get into medically directing that center until I had my own experience because I wanted to have my own experience first. I knew I wouldn't be able to support people going through a process if I hadn't had that experience. So I had an ibogine experience down in Costa Rica. It was 40 hours. I was like, wow, that was just a fucking marathon. And then I had the, I had the thought like, wow, it can't be that way the next time. So I did it a few days later and it was still 40 hours. So not everybody's 40 hours, but man, it's, it's strong, long, beautiful. Aubrey describes it. We were talking about a mutual friend of ours. He, like if you're

• 51:25Speaker 00

  an ant on God's tuning fork and he just goes pow and you're just vibrating uncontrollably at that cellular level, psychic level, somatic level for 18 plus hours. So it's a long ride. But it's fascinating too, because it's, it's called what, it's what's called an onirogen. So it's a dream medicine. It takes us into this dream time. So we have consistently this review of our principal life experiences and the medicine will convey this communication with the deepest aspects of our own being, i.e. our soul, about what's in alignment

• 52:07Speaker 00

  in our life and what's out of alignment. And so it's very clear at the end of that what our marching orders are, what our homework is. And again,

• 52:17Speaker 00

  Down at Crossroads, we would see a lot of people that never had a psychedelic experience. So they're coming straight into a level three, but they're doing that in a very controlled environment. And because there's massive risk if they don't do that treatment.

• 52:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 52:35Speaker 00

  Because daily opioid use has a massive risk.

• 52:38Chris Williamson?

  Compared with a bad trip, continuing to use heroin every day seems like a

• 52:42Speaker 00

  Right.

• 52:43Chris Williamson?

  A walk in the park. Yeah.

• 52:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. So now you get a sense of, and that's, by the way, that's nobody else's system or rubric. That's just mine and other people might have differing opinions. And, but this is where I get excited about having open label, kind of open source conversations, because we're creating the new system of transformational medicine. And that includes the understanding and the ability to be able to assess which medicine to use for which person at which time.

• 53:09Chris Williamson?

  Talk me through what an MDMA assisted psychotherapy session feels like. From someone arriving at the place to getting in the chair, to taking the drug, how's it administered? What happens? What are the sort of conversations? Take me through that.

• 53:24Speaker 00

  Totally. Well, that's why I wrote the book, because there's a lot of information in there. But the Cliff Notes version is, so the way that MAPS has done it, and I think they've done a good job. They've essentially set the, the process platform for MDMA is going to get rolled out. And, and the success rate's phenomenal. If you look at phase one trials, 80, 83% success rate. Cure for chronic severe PTSD. Nothing like that on the planet. You look at phase two trials and it's like 60, 65% cure rate. Still pretty good, a little bit lower.

• 54:05Speaker 00

  And then you're looking at phase three trials and it's about in the middle, 75 plus percent. So we were looking at like two thirds, three fourths of all people with chronic severe PTSD.

• 54:18Speaker 00

  Go through two to three sessions and they're done.

• 54:21Chris Williamson?

  This is compared with a thirty four percent improvement rate, which is the other alternative.

• 54:29Speaker 00

  That's the standard of care. Standard of care is psychopharmaceuticals, talk therapy. And that has a thirty five, forty percent improvement rate. So we're not, we're talking about a differential in cure rate versus improvement. So the numbers are even differential, but the exponentially different because we're talking about improvement versus cure. So the reason I say all of that is the prelude to your conversation, your question is because the, the data and those numbers are largely not just because of MDMA, because MDMA is so amazing. It's how it's offered and what's happening around the sessions too, because it's not just the sessions. You have twelve psychotherapy sessions

• 55:14Speaker 00

  interwoven with three medicine sessions, right? So you have three medicine sessions, you have three therapy, three therapy, three therapy, three therapy before interspersed and then after the last one. So you have twelve psychotherapy sessions around three medicine sessions. So you have fifteen sessions and those medicine sessions are with both of your therapists because it's a dyad, man and woman ideally. And the therapy sessions are oftentimes with dyads too. So, but not, it doesn't have to be. Uh, it's either your primary therapist or the dyad therapist. So now you've got so much investment and involvement and people like really in your business, but also helping you get clear on

• 56:00Speaker 00

  self-regulation, expectation, setting the stage, understanding what the process is going to be like. That's why I'm going to answer your question, but I want to just set the stage too. Like it's important for us to realize that when this medicine goes legal, it's going to be mandated to have that degree of psychotherapeutic engagement before, during and after. And unfortunately, because insurance companies are not reimbursing for this right now, it's going to be like ten to twelve thousand dollars out of pocket. And now all of a sudden, you've just now made this a very rare medicine that chosen few are going to be able to pay for. So we're in the midst of rehabilitating the entire medical reimbursement system to be able to support those that need it the most to be able to have access. That's going to roll out over time, but there's a concerted effort

• 56:45Speaker 00

  to doing that right now.

• 56:46Chris Williamson?

  I'm going to guess that that cost can't change a massive amount because you require two people who are very experienced for a significant amount of time, over 12 sessions, plus presumably background checks, testing, checking in with the client, so on and so forth. So the only way really that that cost can be brought down significantly is with adding more trainers in or more facilitators and more therapists into the system so that you can actually have a little bit more employment competition, or it being just an assistance by insurance companies.

• 57:19Speaker 00

  I think both are going to happen.

• 57:21Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 57:22Speaker 00

  And I think, I think also the cost is going to come down because some of that cost includes payment for research and

• 57:31Chris Williamson?

  Also, there's contribution to research from everybody's session.

• 57:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:36Chris Williamson?

  That's kind of cool. That's kind of like a, by, by taking on the therapy yourself, you contribute to the benefit of other people getting it in future. That's quite altruistic and cool.

• 57:45Speaker 00

  Right. It's kind of like phase one, two, and three studies have had that same kind of ethos. And that's what we do for, for the benefit of medical knowledge and research. So that's the framework. What does it look like, feel like? So when you go through an MDMA session, it feels like, you know, you have the felt experience of remembering what MDMA is like. It really feels like a few Red Bulls or a lot of coffee, like your system's amped. Your heart rate and blood pressure knock up about 20 points each. So one of the contraindications is heart disease. Another contraindication would be intractable

• 58:23Speaker 00

  epilepsy. People on psychopharmaceuticals are ready, so you can't be on psychiatric medications when going through MDMA. It's a clear contraindication. People with a history of psychosis or mania, not a good idea to open up the doors of perception even further. So there are a few cardinal contraindications. So the felt experience, it comes on, you get really aware, and you start to feel

• 58:53Speaker 00

  What we could essentially describe as love. Ease, comfort, safety, bonding, curiosity, openness. Maybe a more neutral word would be open versus love. I think they're very synonymous. Um, so that opening feeling with the alertness and the curiosity with the facilitator who knows at least some of your background and trauma narrative.

• 59:19Chris Williamson?

  Well, at least three sessions, right? Before the first time that you do it.

• 59:23Speaker 00

  At least three sessions. Ideally, longer, ideally more. Ideally, people have a therapist or a coach, mentor, guide, some kind of elder or somebody that they're able to talk with that knows them, that's here for them, that consistently offers that safety and security in a connective, supportive, positive relationship to be able to be the person to help them land the plane, so to speak, after all this. So when that's all in place, then you have the ability to go even further and deeper and wider and know that you're going to be held on the other side. So you can get really open and you can get really radically vulnerable with whatever's

• 1:00:08Speaker 00

  just right underneath the surface. So we don't really have to go as facilitators fishing for what we think is the deeper material. Like, let's trust the process. It's kind of like peeling back the curtain and seeing what's right there.

• 1:00:24Chris Williamson?

  Do you find a lot of the time that your patients are bringing up the most pertinent, most important stuff on their own?

• 1:00:34Speaker 00

  It may be, it may be the core wound is right under the surface. It may be that the core wound is expressing itself through something more recent. Or maybe even something a little less intense. Like, let's just test the waters and make sure that this is safe to get through. Like, can you hold me through this? If you can't hold me through this, I'm not ready, you're not ready, we're not ready to get into the trenches and really dredge the riverbanks.

• 1:01:09Speaker 00

  And in my experience, once we've done the preparation work, it's usually pretty close.

• 1:01:13Chris Williamson?

  Right there.

• 1:01:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Okay. So somebody's lying there. You have this dyad, this dialogos that's going on, which is typically masculine and feminine to reflect masculine and feminine energy. Is the person lying eyes closed with a towel on? Are you allowing them to intersperse talking with you with music? What what's happening there?

• 1:01:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Great question. So because the medicine has a little bit of an arc to come on, comes on over the course of about an hour, depending a little bit on the dose.

• 1:01:45Chris Williamson?

  Depends if you get shitty drugs from a guy in an Ibiza nightclub. Sometimes it doesn't come on all night.

• 1:01:52Speaker 00

  Good point. So so let's assume that you're getting good molecule.

• 1:01:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:57Speaker 00

  Uh, it it comes on and you get to cruise altitude at around the hour mark. So that can be nice to have a person with a blindfold, with a playlist, with a curated playlist, no vocals, no words, especially in their native language, something that's really soothing and just generally opening and gradually opening for that hour. And then invite them to come out of the the at least the music, oftentimes keep the blindfold on and start checking in. How's it going? How are you feeling? Are you noticing anything? And and ask it, ask open ended questions and let them just start.

• 1:02:41Speaker 00

  Some people will still be pretty silent. And some people will be just jabber boxes. And and and if somebody's just like, you know, going for it, like the the verbal psychic hose is open in the on position, great, then let's just harvest and let's like, what's that like? What's that like? Tell me more like, okay, great. Is there anything deeper? Is there anything under that?

• 1:03:05Speaker 00

  And then when we start getting in, you can start telling, you can just read the the trauma narrative, the trauma languaging, the somatic experience, if we're at the core issue, and if we're there, then we'll explore that. And if there, if we get the sense that there's something deeper, great, is there anything below that? Is there anything behind that? Or if it's about a particular cardinal person in their lives, can we understand what that relationship was like for you, what the experience was like for you? And then eventually, it oftentimes gets to this, gets to this place like, okay, can we understand the experience from their position? So not to only go through the healing of it, but actually also to be able to have a compassionate view and a greater understanding as to how they were involved in that too.

• 1:03:50Speaker 00

  Like, oh, my dad, yeah, he was a dick. You know, he did X, Y, and Z, or he didn't love me in the way that I wanted him to, or like, all these things. And then, let me just be clear, that was my experience in a healing process with my dad. I had this vision, like, my dad needed to love me a particular way, or, my dad was largely, um, like, the, a combination of the Marlboro man and a CIA agent. And I was always trying to, as a little dude, and I didn't grow up with my mom and dad, I just visited him occasionally, like, every weekend, constantly trying to do enough to just get his kudos. And, and that's largely what generated so much performance.

• 1:04:33Speaker 00

  And, but there was also this resentment, like, wow, I, it's like I always had to work for it. And then in one of my ceremonies, this is actually when I was doing my apprenticeship, this is with ayahuasca, but this is the same kind of trauma recovery that happens with the Indian A2. I saw him as a child, and the fact that he didn't, he wasn't raised by either, either of his parents. He was raised by his grandmother. She was amazing, but neither of his parents were really ready to be parents. And, and I think there was an experience of rejection, and it was just like a hard road for him early on, so he was largely self-made. And just kind of grinned and knuckled down, like, a lot of our parents and grandparents did, just...

• 1:05:15Speaker 00

  Pushed on, head down, push on, move through. And thankfully, this is why I described this process as the privilege to heal. We have this growing privilege to heal. We have these tools that many of our ancestors didn't have. And so we're carrying a lot of their burdens and traumas. So when we can get to a place, particularly with our parents, and be like, okay, what's behind that? What's behind it from their side? What was their experience like? Where did that come from? Because oftentimes, transgenerational trauma happens in a way that feels like ours. But when you get under the hood, we realize it didn't start with us. It's still ours to heal. And it's a part of the privilege to heal it, because now we can heal something our ancestors have been carrying, that they just weren't able to access the tools for.

• 1:05:58Chris Williamson?

  It's a little bit like being a bookstop. You know, you have Corey, mutual friend of ours, he talks about when someone gets angry at him, and he often thinks of it like a virus. So he thinks, I wonder who gave you that anger? And I wonder who gave them that anger? And I wonder who gave them that anger? And it gets passed down and passed down and passed down. And he talks about it in a mindfulness setting, and he says, the mindfulness gap, the beauty of being able to have a beat, pause between stimulus and response, to choose whether or not you want to take that anger and then pass it down to the next person that you see that day that cuts you up in traffic or serves you the wrong drink in Starbucks. That's your choice. And you are right, there is a degree of privilege there, that you think, right, there's this

• 1:06:42Chris Williamson?

  virus, this whatever, this transgenerational trauma which has been passed down. My mother's mother and her mother and the mother before have all been like this. But I'm not going to be like that. And I have the opportunity to take the beat, to use this mindfulness gap, or to use some psychotherapy assisted by a medicine to get to stop that. Yeah, it's a beautiful opportunity to have that. This may be my party background talking, but my recall from times on MDMA has been sketchy, to say the least. Is there a difficulty with integrating the lessons that people learn whilst they're on MDMA?

• 1:07:26Chris Williamson?

  Because of the fact that, well, I mean, how much of that's because the fact I was drunk? And is there a difficulty with recall?

• 1:07:34Speaker 00

  For sure. It's a great question.

• 1:07:39Speaker 00

  And you're highlighting one of the beauties and the challenges with this kind of work. Because it engenders an altered state. So by definition, we're not in our usual kind of frame of mind. And so all of the experience is catalogued through a different veil and energetic of consciousness, so to speak. So we have to pierce that veil and be able to access those files. It's kind of like that experience is held on an external hard drive. And we have it on the hard drive, we just have to know how to wormhole back to it.

• 1:08:16Speaker 00

  And so I think a few things are relevant to your question and your experience. Alcohol has a huge impact on memory, we know that. And I imagine there wasn't just like a swig here and there, there was probably a healthy...

• 1:08:31Chris Williamson?

  I was sending it, I was fully sending it, yeah.

• 1:08:34Speaker 00

  Right. So that's going to have an effect, the setting's going to have an effect. Particularly in a party setting, there's so much energy and attention outward. And the feedback experience is very much in the middle world, in the outer world. Right? And in a therapeutic setting, it's very much in the internal world. In the curious landscape, where you're actually having the input that's coming towards you is one of facilitating awareness. Versus in a party scene, oftentimes the input that's coming in isn't facilitating inner awareness, it's facilitating...

• 1:09:18Chris Williamson?

  What people are looking for when they take MDMA at a party is to enhance that collective effervescence. Right? That's exactly, they're looking to, you hear people use the terminology, "I lost myself in the music."

• 1:09:29Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:09:30Chris Williamson?

  As opposed to finding yourself in you, which is what you guys are trying to do. So that, the framing, the setting, focusing the attention inwardly or outwardly, that's an interesting insight.

• 1:09:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. Because it's a medicine of opening, right? So you're going to open to something that's happening externally, the collective, the music, the vibe, that energetic. Or are we going to open to what's internal? And when you have a facilitator that's constantly referencing you to the internal, it's really helpful. And oftentimes, helping you get back on the track. Because it's like you can be open and get down a wormhole of your mind that's not super helpful. Or it's not like getting to the root cause of the issue that you've come in for. So the therapist and guide can oftentimes like bring it back to that common thread.

• 1:10:28Speaker 00

  And so, the experience with MDMA is usually around four to six hours. If you level up again, the entry dose is usually around 120 milligrams. The level up after two hours is about half of that dose. And then it turns into a six to eight hour experience. So it depends on the time signature and how much there is to go through. Most people will re-up. Particularly, a lot of important work is getting done. Like, I've done all this prep work to get to here, so I'm going to get as much out of it as I can. And oftentimes, it can feel really pleasant. Especially if somebody's been really walled off and guarded and the psychic armor's been heavy.

• 1:11:10Speaker 00

  Not to say that trauma work is pleasant, but there's an experience that can feel affirming and strengthening.

• 1:11:24Chris Williamson?

  Liberating as well, I imagine, yeah.

• 1:11:25Speaker 00

  And liberating, yeah, like wow. And oftentimes, it doesn't feel liberating in the moment. Well, cancer clearly, it very much can. Especially if you're consciously engaging the process of recognizing the lightness that comes from shedding the old story and being able to see it in the new light. So that can feel both not only strengthening, but very much liberating.

• 1:11:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, totally. Talk to me about reintegration and the end of it, because I've had some fucking brutal come downs in my time. And I, I don't want to be, I don't want to be ordering a Domino's to the MDMA centre and asking them to turn off the lights and, and send me like a packet of Coca-Cola in or something.

• 1:12:12Speaker 00

  Right, totally. And so by the come down in the integration, you mean like how you felt afterwards?

• 1:12:18Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 1:12:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so when we talk about integration, if you're in a recreational setting, integration is primarily around how you feel, right? Versus if you're in a therapeutic setting, integration is very much about what you learned. Right? So the integration is kind of like, let's harvest. We can oftentimes benefit the integration by taping, recording the session, and then going back through the notes. Because now you have it all, your hard drives right there and alive, and you can just like, plug in your thumb drive. Versus it being stuck in a particular file that you have to actively investigate, potentially even with the help of a facilitator or a member. Because that facilitator is going to queue you, because

• 1:13:03Speaker 00

  they're tracking your process. They're going to be like, oh, so tell me more about how that, how going through that experience was.

• 1:13:10Chris Williamson?

  So they can drill down when you're in a slightly different conscious state. Yeah, because I suppose having the facilitators there, what one of the worst things about recreationally taking any of these sort of compounds, especially let's say psilocybin, which I, I think people are starting to take mushrooms just on their own. Someone's interested their own consciousness, this is why I've taken it before, but I haven't taken it in a fully qualified therapeutic setting. And one of the brutal things about that is that as you're having the experience, and some interesting insights come to you, the onus is on you to be able to recall them once you're out of it. And there's a certain degree of pressure that sits below the surface, where you, you see something, or you realize something, or you notice something, and you go, right, that's, that's fucking awesome.

• 1:13:52Chris Williamson?

  And you try and get the pad and pen out before your mind falls away from it. And I remember... Particularly trying to write, trying to write something down. And as I was writing it on my, my pad and paper, I looked at my arm and the colors of my arm looked like tiger's arms. And I went back to look at what I wrote down and it wasn't the thing that I put before. I just wrote my arms, my arms look like tiger's arms. I'm like, no, that wasn't the one that I meant. I meant the fucking interesting insight about my soul, not the fact that I have arms that look like tiger's arms.

• 1:14:23Speaker 00

  Totally. I just solved the riddle of the universe.

• 1:14:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly. Fucking tiger arms.

• 1:14:27Speaker 00

  And I forgot it.

• 1:14:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, fall flat on my face.

• 1:14:30Speaker 00

  Right. So it can be helpful to record, to audio record that versus trying to transcribe so much because that, that motor system might be a bit offline. And when we have a facilitator that's able to help us track it, or the audio recording that's able to help us track, then we can stay more actively in the process. And we're not trying to have a part of our brain that's tracking it and a part of our brain that's

• 1:14:58Chris Williamson?

  Medicogness gets let, let rid of. Yep.

• 1:15:01Speaker 00

  Exactly. Yeah. And so the integration sessions are really about harvesting and, and going through that and looking at the, the principal themes, looking at the areas that perhaps we were really able to get in pretty easily, or those things that we really wanted to stay away from, but then gradually opened up. What was the pacing of it? What was the energetic tone of it? How am I feeling coming out of it? So that's another thing that we'll get to. And all of that starts to turn into the new story.

• 1:15:41Speaker 00

  Because ultimately, at the end of the day, with these as claritians, seeing the deeper aspect of our being, reclaiming these parts of ourself that our ego's been so focused on, consciously or not, suppressed or repressed. Now we're liberated from that and even more empowered to write the new story, to create the new self-image, to create the new relationship with life, relationship with our partners.

• 1:16:08Chris Williamson?

  All that. This is something that interests me. So I can fully appreciate why the use of MDMA creates an environment in which someone can feel comfortable enough to talk about their traumas. You have the facilitators there who are able to draw out of them in a professional setting and kind of guide them to the answers and the questions that they need to be asking themselves. But how does this contribute to lasting lifestyle change long term, once you're out of this session?

• 1:16:38Speaker 00

  You're now hitting it on the head. This is where the rubber meets the road.

• 1:16:45Speaker 00

  If we were to talk about in a pie-shaped distribution of like the energetic.

• 1:16:51Chris Williamson?

  Priority?

• 1:16:52Speaker 00

  Hours. Uh, like, like if you had so many marbles in a jar, like how much, how many of those marbles are going to preparation, experience and integration? It's about a five to 10% preparation,

• 1:17:07Speaker 00

  30 to 40% experience, 50 to 60% integration. The majority of the work happens in the integration because that's where we make lasting change. And this is where it's vital to have some kind of truth-telling process. Because if you go through experience and you, and you learn the riddle of the universe and you forget it, that's a big fucking bummer. And so you want to have some kind of truth-telling recording device or process, and you want to have an accountability structure. So now how am I going to hold myself accountable? How's my therapist going to hold me accountable? How's my coach, my guide, going to hold me accountable for acting on that truth?

• 1:17:51Speaker 00

  Because we can't unlearn what we just learned. You won't unsee what you just saw. Now it's open, the genie's out of the bottle. Like now, and usually what that means is now taking more ownership and responsibility. And that has its opportunity, massive payoff for benefit. But it also has some detriment. Because if we start taking massive responsibility for our life, that means we can't blame anybody else for our experiences. And so there's, there can be a lot of processing the grief in order to get mature. And now, like what, what life was lost? Because I was maybe, you know, orienting towards all of these things that I now realize

• 1:18:34Speaker 00

  were, were not the, the greater, deeper, more integrated aspects of myself. But maybe all that was exactly what needed to happen for me to get here. Right? So there's so much reconfiguration now that happens in the worldview, self-view, life view. Having an accountability structure to be able to act on that truth, act on those new choices is vital. And then the third thing is having a positive community. A community around, not necessarily this kind of work, it could be.

• 1:19:07Chris Williamson?

  I was gonna say, do you ever, do you ever try to provide that for people?

• 1:19:10Speaker 00

  For sure. Yeah, I, so over the last three years, I created a platform called Full Spectrum Medicine. And every week we would do integration calls. Cause I, cause it was clear that so many people were going through experiences and getting just way out there and maybe big things happening, but didn't have any integration support. And so it's like foundering around. So I, it was free. I'm not doing it right now because I'm launching Kuya, so I put that on pause. But we catalogued 18 months of our video recordings, all on integration support for free, just to have a safe place for people to come experience. A, a community of transformation, growing and evolving together and supporting each other. We'd have anywhere from, it was relatively small.

• 1:19:56Speaker 00

  At any one time, there was probably between 20 and 80 participants on a Zoom call platform. And we'd have people cycle in and out and we'd record all of the, I would share topics of integration. Like tools, strategies, techniques, things to do, things to not do as well. And then we would do question and answer at the end and we have somebody in the power seat that might be going through a really challenging process with their integration. And I would support them, coaching them through it while the rest of the group was kind of looking in as sacred witnesses, so to speak. And I've trained a bunch of facilitation guides to do this kind of work. So I, so a lot of that community was a variety of people.

• 1:20:41Speaker 00

  Some people just kind of casually exploring, some people guiding, facilitating others. So it was a really rich conversation. And the community piece is vital. Because for me, I know when I started waking up, so to speak, with ayahuasca, I realized, man, I love a lot of my friends and a lot of them are not on the same trajectory anymore. And it wasn't a make wrong. It wasn't like I was better and they were worse. It was just like, I'm going down this path and this path is really vital. And that included like saying no to a daily cannabis habit that I had had for five years. And my, my riding buddies and my climbing buddies and my, my party buddies, you know, we, I had so much fun with those guys.

• 1:21:24Speaker 00

  But it was clear that I was going, and I also moved out of the country and down to the jungle and everybody thought I was just off my freaking rocker. So it was clear that it was easy for me to plug into a different community. But the reason I'm just bringing that up is oftentimes it's really freaking hard for people. When they start going through a process of waking up and reclaiming ownership, power, responsibility, and you look around, you're like, okay, is, are those the kind of values and virtues that, that my current tribe is vibing at? Are they supporting the growth that I'm going through? Am I feeling like they're like wind at my back or they kind of like lead weights? And it can be, it can be a hard road if it feels like the community is not supporting the trajectory that you want to take.

• 1:22:09Chris Williamson?

  What would be some of the characteristics of the type of person who wouldn't succeed at MDMA assisted psychotherapy? What would be the sort of things that they would do afterward? How would they integrate suboptimally? How would they enter the session suboptimally? What would be some of those things?

• 1:22:31Speaker 00

  That's a phenomenal question. If I was to recognize, if I was, if I was to translate your question into a way that I can make more context and answer more clearly, I would say like, what might be the factors that would set up a less than optimal MDMA experience to happen and then to get integrated? And I would say, okay, the facilitation is lousy. Right? So they're not going to be able to hold a strong accountability structure. Like if I go into the gym and I know I'm working on performance measures, I want a coach that's going to hold me accountable, that's going to help me see like where I was and where I'm getting to.

• 1:23:12Speaker 00

  And but most facilitation with MDMA, because of the legal structure, they have to be good. Yep. In the States, all of it right now is happening with clinical trials. But there are a lot of underground facilitators who aren't that good. Maybe they're good sitters, but they might not be, not be very good facilitators. So if, if deep trauma comes into the space and the, and the container can't hold it, and the facilitation can't hold it, then it can get messy. And now you've got all this trauma re-wounding in the space, impregnating the field, but it's not getting worked through. So it's like, well, that's great. Now I'm just left with all this mess and I like, who's going to help me clean it up? So that can be a factor.

• 1:23:55Speaker 00

  Another factor can be the expectation that the medicine is going to fix something. Cause the medicines are not here to fix anything. They're here to show us truth. And they're here to help support us do our work in order to become more whole humans. And if a person thinks that they're going to go through a process and they're just going to magically pop out the other side, awesome, and life's awesome, and they're not willing to put in the work, then that expectation can be a handicap. And that expectation can also potentially look like they think the work is going to be easy. Sometimes the work's not freaking easy. What started me on the ayahuasca path was

• 1:24:38Speaker 00

  a prayer to help me open up my heart. I was going through a separation and divorce and I couldn't feel it. And I didn't want to live that way. So I didn't realize the answer to that prayer was going to be eight years of going through all the trauma that had shut off my heart in the first place. So there were times in the integration where I thought like, this isn't supposed to be happening. This wasn't in the fine print. Fuck. You know, I blew a fuse, something's off, we're, you know, in a nosedive. And that was just an expectation of what I thought was going to happen, didn't happen. It happened in a different way. It happened in a better way. It happened in a way that I wouldn't have chosen, but was orchestrated for my best outcome. And it's helpful to have a

• 1:25:22Speaker 00

  validation team and community to lift each other up, to reference the growth that we're doing together, to be able to cheerlead each other on, because this isn't easy work. There is a massive amount of global calamity and crisis and pain happening. That's not just current. That's mountains of unhealed residue from past traumas, from past cultural traumas, global traumas. A ton of trauma is getting brought current right now. So by no means is this easy work. And we need to be in communities where we're lifting

• 1:26:06Speaker 00

  each other up in order to do the good work, so that we can unburden our children and the coming generations from having to carry our shit, because they're going to have a lot on their hands without carrying our stuff too, to deal with.

• 1:26:21Chris Williamson?

  You're gonna have your work cut out over the next few years then?

• 1:26:24Speaker 00

  I think probably so.

• 1:26:26Chris Williamson?

  What is the roadmap for the next, I think it seems like the next 18 months or so are going to be pretty exciting. What's the roadmap that you see from here on out for MDMA-assisted psychotherapy?

• 1:26:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think your point's a good one. We've got a lot of good work, and ideally fun ahead too. I do have a very clear sense that if this isn't fun, then we're missing some of it. Because being in a body.

• 1:26:52Chris Williamson?

  If you can't make MDMA fun, give up.

• 1:26:55Speaker 00

  Right. I mean, it's a pretty forgiving medicine. It has a phenomenal success rate. It's amazing to see people go from being really walled off and hurt and in the somatic experience of trauma to being really free and really released and really available to work through that trauma. Not to say again that it's fixed and done, but it's it's pretty magical to help people go through these kind of processes. So I think we're going to train. I am not, I'm a spokesperson and educator and advocate for this work. I'm not formally affiliated with the MAPS organization that's that's involved in doing the majority of the training.

• 1:27:38Speaker 00

  I support their organization for sure. And without them, we wouldn't be having this conversation. So they're in charge of training as many facilitators as possible. And we're going to need somewhere on the order of

• 1:27:55Speaker 00

  fifty plus thousand facilitators over the next five to 10 years. And we're going to have five to six thousand centers doing this kind of work over the next five to 10 years. We're going to gradually roll out this medicine and this next wave of the psychedelic and psychiatric Renaissance with medicine work, we're going to continue to rule that out as the new growing standard of care. I see allopathic Western medicine has turned largely into functional medicine when it's done well, but it's still relatively reductionistic. And now functional medicine is turning into transformational medicine,

• 1:28:36Speaker 00

  which is now we're going to have the data to show. We already have the data. And when we start bringing the software sciences, mind and soul, with the hardware sciences, body and brain. Right? You got psychology and neurology. You bring those next level medicine practices. So regenerative medicine with the psychedelic therapies. When you bring those together, now you've just created a whole new medical framework that actually gets to the root cause issues and starts to help us transform better than we ever thought imagined.

• 1:29:10Chris Williamson?

  Sick, absolutely sick. Dr. Dan Engle, ladies and gentlemen. A Dose of Hope, the story of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy will be linked in the show notes below on Amazon. And if people want to keep up to date with whatever else you're doing, where should they go?

• 1:29:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, you can go to my website. That's one, drdanengel.com. Full Spectrum Medicine I mentioned. Again, it's a free platform. I just want to give people information on this kind of work. And then Kuya, our center that opens in two weeks is kuya.life.

• 1:29:39Chris Williamson?

  How do you spell that?

• 1:29:41Speaker 00

  K U Y A dot life, L I F E. Kuya means love in Quechua. And so we want to continue to give just mad respect to the origins of a lot of these medicines and the communities where they've come from and have a good reciprocal relationship to be able to give back to the communities where a lot of these medicines have come from and make sure that we're working with these medicines in sustainable ways. MDMA because it's a synthetic. We can make that in a lab and scale that en masse. But many of the other medicines, peyote, ayahuasca, San Pedro, 5-MEO DMT from the Sonoran Desert toes, iboga, these are all natural medicines that take a long time to grow and we're harvesting at accelerated rates that are stripping out our supply.

• 1:30:25Chris Williamson?

  I had Hamilton Morris on about six months ago, just after, as his Vice series, his most recent one, sorry, his Hamilton's Pharmacopeia, I don't know if it's still done by Vice, as that was on and obviously he was very, very forward about trying to save the Bufo alvarius, about proposing that people use a synthetic version of 5-MEO instead of an organic version. So it's beautiful when you see everything, multiple people within similar industries or analogous industries coalescing around similar talking points, talking about sustainability within the plant medicine world. It definitely seems like that's going to be a huge push over the next few years.

• 1:31:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, it has to be.

• 1:31:10Speaker 00

  Because if not, then we're going to lose a lot of the traditions that have been in place for hundreds and thousands of years. And it's irresponsible to the coming generations. We have the opportunity to work with these really powerful, very beautiful and sacred technologies. And how do we live sustainably? I mean, you know, it's the same relationship with our fossil fuels, with the ocean acidification, with like blah, blah, blah, we can fill in the gap. Like, how do we continue to live in right relation with the medicine kingdom, with the traditional cultures and communities with all people? And also be mindful of our impact for the generations to come.

• 1:31:54Speaker 00

  So I'm so glad, I didn't see that from Hamilton, but he's always got a good story to tell. And I appreciate his story around sustainability.

• 1:32:04Chris Williamson?

  Dan, thanks so much for having me.

• 1:32:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely, Chris. Thanks for having me on, man.