How Do Psychedelics Treat PTSD? - Dr Martin Polanco & Michael Higgs

Martin Polanco is Founder of The Mission Within and a Veteran Mental Health Advocate and Michael Higgs was Command Master Chief of a Navy SEAL team and is Director of Operations at The Mission Within. For a very long time, once soldiers have finished in war, their battles have often continued back home. Both active and retired veterans suffer with childhood traumas, life traumas, divorces, opioid addiction, family issues, Traumatic Brain Injuries, deaths of team members, chronic pain injuries and long term inflammation. Martin and Michael believe that psychedelics are an important potential solution to give suffering veterans another shot at a functional life. Expect to learn how iboga rewires the brain in 12 hours, why Michael held a gun to his head after being out of the seals for two years, the insane pressure placed on Special Forces operators by themselves, what happened when Michael ate 20g of mushrooms on a Native Indian reservation, how to sign up to Martin's current studies which he needs volunteers for and much more... #ptsd #psychedelics #specialforces - 00:00 Intro 04:05 Dealing with Trauma in the Armed Forces 11:18 Martin’s Journey with Psychedelics 18:00 Commonalities of Veterans with PTSD 24:57 Taking Psychedelics for the First Time 33:42 How the Brain Restructures PTSD 43:55 Current Accessibility of Psychedelics 48:30 Side Effects of Psychedelics 52:33 Advice to Suffering Veterans 57:20 Where to Find Michael & Dr Polanco - Join the Modern Wisdom Community on Locals - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - 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

  Yeah, it was terrifying. Yeah, you got a bunch of frogmen going down, Navy SEALs, getting in a van to go do drugs they've never even heard of before. We're all terrified. I was never terrified overseas, right? I was never terrified ever in my life. But what we were terrified was ourselves. The medicine's gonna show us.

• 0:17Chris Williamson?

  Give me the story of how you guys first met.

• 0:21Speaker 02

  So we met in context of treatment with psychedelics. So I was running a program for special operations guys called The Mission Within. And we had been working with veterans since 2015. And I had treated some of Michael's or Punky's friends. So he was trying to refer another buddy. And I don't want to get too much into the details because they're concerns, just medical information. But I'll let Punky really dive into how far and how deep he wants to go.

• 0:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, pretty much what Martin said. It was two years ago. I had four years out of my retirement. And I was in school. And it was, the train of life finally caught up with me. And I had reached out to Martin to help another friend of mine to get into a program that I had heard about from a bunch of other friends, but didn't really know too much about. And it was a psychedelic program. And it came around at just the right time for me, and it was just the right time for my friends as well. Then I've been involved with Martin ever since.

• 1:26Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean when you say that the train of life had come around?

• 1:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, for me, you know, it's the 30 years in the SEAL teams, you know, and the normal, I say the normal life traumas that we all have that we kind of run away from. Like, we're always moving target until life catches up with us. So, you know, childhood traumas as a kid, and then life traumas as a young adult, two divorces, had a spouse addicted to opioids, living in that kind of tumultuous world. And a daughter addicted to opioids as well at the time during the big opioid epidemic. At the same time, the war kicked off. So I was like fighting, I was kind of fighting on two different fronts at the same time. Then a bunch of losses overseas of friends. And then a bunch of moral injury, then a bunch of blast injuries to my noggin.

• 2:18Speaker 00

  And then masking all that with pain pills and psychotropics and everything else, just trying to keep the wheels turning and keep myself moving forward and eventually just kind of all caught up with it.

• 2:30Chris Williamson?

  Were you trying to medicate while you were still in the teams to keep you moving forward while you were working?

• 2:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, a lot of it was pain management, then a lot of it was just my cognitive ability was just severely declining over time. I was a breacher in the SEALs teams and sniper, then just a bunch of blast injuries from training after combat. I was starting to suffer memory loss, you know, massive migraines, and then just the frustrations that come with that, you know, trying to mask, getting covered up and kind of move through life. And then on top of all the other daily things that I was struggling with on the home front and then show up to work with a smile on my face, going, hey, I'm ready to go, right? Like we all do. And, um, yeah, then I'd gotten out and retired at the end of, uh, 2016.

• 3:19Speaker 00

  Uh, went off to grad school, was going to school up at USC, then I had four more of my friends passed away, uh, in the teams. And then I had another close, two close friends got blown up in Syria. And at that time when that happened, that was just my catalyst for just meltdown.

• 3:36Chris Williamson?

  I agree. I do think that most people that have got problems, whatever that's going on at home or personally or medically, have to put a smile on and go to work. But the risks of most people's jobs are not quite as dramatic as somebody that's doing Overwatch as a sniper or breaching the door so that everybody else goes in. So there is a, a, a total extra level of, of pressure, I suppose, to do that. How would you categorize the atmosphere generally in the armed forces around difficulties with injuries from the past, with emotional traumas from the past at the moment?

• 4:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, as far as the injuries go, it's interesting, at least in our community. And I remember when I was going to like the naval, the naval hospital and it was full of people trying to get out of work, so they're all hanging around the hospital, right? And then in the spec ops community, you don't go to the doctor because you don't want to lose time at work, you want to work and because if you're absent from work, you may lose that spot, right? It's the same as playing on the sports team, alright? So, everyone was always masking pain, masking injuries as long as they could. So that just kind of got looked at. Now, if they needed help, they always got it. And then, as far as the mental health aspect of it, there was just always this kind of

• 5:05Speaker 00

  a fine line, but you know, we were always told, hey, you know, the medical professionals are here to help you, but there was always just this fear, like, hey, how much do I share before I get grounded or taken offline? So, you know, you answer the questions and the questions are always yes until a point and then it's no, no, no, no, no, and can I get back in the game, right? So, the help was always available to us. Hardly anyone really fully took advantage of it, just I think it had a fear of just getting sidelined.

• 5:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so you have some slightly contradictory incentives here. The guys don't want to have themselves taken out of action because it's their job, it's their duty, they feel competent at it, for a lot of people, it's probably their sense of meaning in life as well. And you've got, I guess, this tension between the two. You've got, on one hand, I need to look after my health, I need to make sure that I'm not so far gone that I basically can't do my job anymore. But you're talking about a group of people that have been trained to be able to put up with severe levels of discomfort for extended periods of time. I mean, you've selected for a group of people, I imagine, that are going to be able to tamp down their emotions and swallow that discomfort, whether it be physical or emotional, for a pretty good period.

• 6:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was super interesting too, you know, because, you know, I always laugh, you know, everyone's like, all the SEAL teams, you know, Spec Ops, like, you guys are always so close. We don't know shit about each other. Because everyone keeps at the veil, even as close as you are, there's still a degree of separation between the true you and, you know, and what you're, the face that you're putting out to your friends. So maybe people know kind of maybe what's going on in your, you know, your marital life, your dating life and stuff like that. But as far as the really deep stuff, no one's going to share the underbelly, right? They're just not going to expose that.

• 6:58Chris Williamson?

  Do you think it's possible for somebody in the SEALs to develop that kind of a relationship? Or do you think that that would be so antagonistic to the sort of way that they need to show up, to the atmosphere within the team itself? Is it possible to be able to be that open and still be effective as a member of the team that's maybe seeing death and destruction every day?

• 7:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, maybe, but I think it would have to be really brought on so early in the pipeline, right? So that's ingrained, it's institutionalized to where that trust factor is really there.

• 7:37Speaker 00

  You know, no one wants to feel that they're holding anybody back. I think that's the big thing. And then, you know, no one wants to be looked upon as weak for not being able to handle things. You know, if you can't handle your life at home, can you handle life overseas, right? And all that kind of goes together. So, yeah, that's a really good question. I'm not really sure what the answer to that is yet.

• 7:59Chris Williamson?

  I've spoken to a guy called BT Urala, who is a buddy of mine for three and a bit years. He started the Veteran's Sports League and he was injured, tried to save one of his legs during an IED attack, and for a very long time was battling backward and forward with that couple of suicide attempts. And his, the savior that he had out the other side of that was the fact that he actually went for amputation. Now, I didn't realize that if you go for elective amputation, they make you wait, I want to say, six months, maybe, or a year, because they want to ensure that this is, I mean, you can't, there's no command and Z on this. You can't undo this particular surgery. So they need to

• 8:41Chris Williamson?

  make sure that you're well done in that way. But even with him, who wasn't in a, he wasn't a SEAL, he was just an infantryman.

• 8:49Chris Williamson?

  Even he was talking about this strange balance between what you need to show, forward facing, the expectation around you. I think the conversation certainly over the last 15 to 20 years seems to have developed a lot more than, you know, go back 100 years, calling it shell shock, go back to Vietnam and people coming home and having very, very low levels of support. The really sort of interesting pervasive thing here is that it's not about the facilities not being there. It's not even so much anymore about the cultural norms not being there. It's to do with something that's quite internal to the individuals themselves and the sense of expectation and the desire to show up and perform for the team.

• 9:31Chris Williamson?

  I guess one of the problems there is that's even more scalable, right? That's even more deeply seated, you know? How are you going to, how are you going to pull that out of somebody? You can offer all of the treatments and support and courses that you want, but how do you actually begin to get somebody to, to make that decision to reach out for help? So, I mean, when it comes to you, what, there had to be a day upon which you woke up and realized, right, I have to make a change here, that I cannot continue to go like this. What, what was that point?

• 10:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, for me, it was, it was after, it was actually after I retired because I remember probably the last maybe four or five years of my active duty service, I was struggling.

• 10:18Speaker 00

  And I was command master chief of a SEAL team too, you know, in a, in a pretty high level, you know, listed leader, running programs and pretty well respected, like, all right, how do I maintain this reputation? Because your reputation in such a small unit is so critical, right? That's how you get promoted, that's how you get selected, all the other things that kind of go on with that. So, there's a lot of pride in it and we all know that pride's a double edged sword, right?

• 10:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, but it wasn't until after, and it was really when my friend really started having his breakdown and started bringing up a lot of stuff with me, that my emotions and memories and everything just kind of caught up with me, that it was past the point of, of my handling it myself. It's like, hey, I need some help now. I mean, I was suicidal at the time when I called my team. And I had been there once before too. So, I was like, all right, this, I know, I know where this is going to lead very quickly. But it took me a very long time to get there.

• 11:18Chris Williamson?

  Martin, what's the beginning of your story of how you start to get yourself involved in this world?

• 11:26Speaker 02

  So that was back 1999. I was trying to help a family member. I was in medical school at the time and she was dealing with a cocaine addiction. And we had tried all the western approaches, you know, what's usually recommended, which is the 12 steps rehab, you know, threats, kicking her out of the house, but nothing seems to stick with her, like nothing was working. So I had always had an interest in psychedelics, you know, starting as a teenager. And so I knew that there was something that could potentially help her. And I was aware of Ibogaine. Because I had watched a documentary. So I looked it up online and I took her to see a provider. And Ibogaine is still pretty obscure, but back then it was even more obscure. There was

• 12:08Speaker 02

  not a lot of data. There was some research going on at the island of Cenkitz. And there was one provider that I found that would, you know, help her. So I took her and it was really remarkable to see the pre and the post. So she was in denial that cocaine was a problem. Because she had actually started with an eating disorder and the cocaine, you know, took away the hunger. So it was a solution. And oftentimes when people fall into addiction, they're self-medicating either depression or anxiety. So the drug serves a purpose. And I think that's often missed when people look at addiction. They just view it as a moral failing or, you know, a certain weakness, but there's always something underneath it, which is generally trauma.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  So having, you know, that experience of me witnessing her going through this process and the very next day having this deep understanding of her addiction and the need to move away from it was striking because there's nothing in western medicine that with one single treatment can take you and give you that perspective. So I, you know, stuck in my mind, started my training in eye surgery. I was going to become an ophthalmologist. But I, I could never get that out of my head that there was a treatment that could help addiction. So I took a year off and started an Ibogaine clinic back in 2000 in Mexico City. Ran that program for a number of years until 2015.

• 13:31Speaker 02

  When I met some veterans that were using heroin and then they reported their PTSD was gone. So I was again intrigued because there's nothing that we have in our arsenal that actually cures PTSD. We have treatments to mitigate it, to numb symptoms. But to address it at a core level where the person no longer meets the diagnostic criteria with a single treatment is pretty unheard of. So I, you know, started seeing more veterans and it just took off after I treated a few SEALs. They're a very tight knit community, so they started referring their friends and that just started growing. 2020, 2021 was super busy years and obviously COVID had something to do with it

• 14:15Speaker 02

  because people are struggling. And yeah, that takes us to now, which is a program that has just kept growing over the years.

• 14:25Chris Williamson?

  You saw an increase in the number of veterans suffering with PTSD during COVID?

• 14:32Speaker 02

  I think it was twofold. I think it was the fact that gyms closed. So they didn't have that outlet of the physical exercise. The social isolation, being stuck at home, you know, with family is very challenging sometimes. Along with greater awareness that psychedelics are a good option for addressing what I consider the core injury instead of special operations community, which is mild traumatic brain injury. So it's not even the PTSD. I would say every single operator that has gone through their training has been exposed to multiple blast injuries. And it doesn't mean an IED. It could be shooting a mortar, being close to rockets, opening doors with explosives, even repetitive gunfire will cause a certain

• 15:17Speaker 02

  overpressure wave that can rattle the brain in a way where it's not designed to be, you know, shaken. And this can cause inflammation. This can cause hormone dysregulation and

• 15:29Speaker 02

  Over time, sometimes years, this manifests with anger, insomnia, depression, anxiety. So we look at it as a biological injury, not so much merely stress or depression or anxiety. There's something going on physically in the brain of these guys.

• 15:46Chris Williamson?

  Does that predispose people to whatever's classified as PTSD now? Is that laying some sort of biological foundation that a psychological construction can be built on top of?

• 15:58Speaker 02

  Definitely. And then there's also the childhood stuff. So a lot of the guys that come through, they come from troubled backgrounds or broken homes. And it's pretty common, I think, that people gravitate towards the military because they want more structure. They want that kind of external source of discipline. So there is the complex PTSD, which is childhood trauma and post-traumatic stress. And then obviously, the brain injury is laying kind of this fertile field for people to then get further traumatized and display even more symptoms. And then the ways of coping with it are also problematic because oftentimes they resort to alcohol. And alcohol is inflammatory, so it makes the brain injury worse.

• 16:42Speaker 02

  So it's this kind of cycle of kind of repeated insults to the brain, which can lead to, you know, pretty bad outcomes.

• 16:52Speaker 02

  A lot of the guys that we're treating are suicidal when they come in.

• 16:58Chris Williamson?

  I suppose one of the particularly brutal things as well about being an ex-special forces operative, that suicidal is you're intimately familiar with lethal violence too. And it's not good to be able to be great at killing when the person that you're looking at potentially harming is yourself. And I remember hearing a while ago, I think this is true, that women commit suicide more than men. But women actually try to take their life more than men. It's just that men are better with lethal force. So they're more successful at taking their own life.

• 17:37Speaker 02

  More successful.

• 17:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, which is, I mean, that statistic is, it kind of changed a lot of what I thought about how we should be dealing with and treating suicide. I don't really know what that means. It means that more women are getting themselves to the stage where they consider killing themselves.

• 17:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, very, very, that's just such an interesting stat. So if we were to, if we were to try and create an avatar of a very, a very common sort of ex-special forces soldier, patient that comes through the doors of your clinic, what would that person look like? What would their age be? What would they present as? What would the sort of state texture of their mind be like? What would that, what would that avatar be?

• 18:26Speaker 02

  So from a demographics standpoint, we're looking at 30 to 40 year olds. The majority of the guys we're treating are post 9/11 veterans. So they've served in Iraq and Afghanistan. I think the SEAL community has, I don't know if it's self-selected, but it's mostly white men. They're generally type A, like very, like they're overachievers, they're elite performers. In terms of the issues that they're dealing with, there's this thing called operator syndrome that was characterized by a researcher named Chris Brew. And he, he looked at this complex symptomatology and presentation that they have.

• 19:07Speaker 02

  And it includes hormone dysregulation, you know, family issues, insomnia, anger, sleep issues. We see a lot of sleep apnea as well. Obviously depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress, traumatic brain injury, chronic pain. And all these things are interrelated. So when somebody has chronic pain, it wakes them up at night. And then if you're not sleeping, then the not sleeping by itself is a type of brain injury. So getting the sleep under control is one of the most important things. Then obviously, like the diet that we have in the West is not helpful. And a lot of the psychopharmaceuticals that they get prescribed actually make things worse. I mean, I've treated guys that were on 13 different medications. So first we have to get them off of the medications.

• 19:50Speaker 02

  And that, that by itself is a process because anytime you're tapering off a medication, you're going to get the opposite effect. So if you've been on Xanax for a number of years, when you get off it, you'll have even worse anxiety. So it's, um, it's, it's definitely a process. And I'm sure Punky can add to more of the psychographic of the patients.

• 20:10Speaker 00

  Yes, it's been interesting. So when I went through, I was fifty, how old am I? I was fifty-two. Those are a lot of my peers. I mean, when I walked in the room, uh, you know, we treat six clients a week and I walk in the room and I know four of them, right, that are my peers, right? And they're like, oh, you too? I go, yeah, man, me too. Um, but yeah, the demographic is just pretty much everybody in there. And just like Martine said, we know we're all high performers. It's a high-performance environment. Um, I was on twelve different medications when I came down, you know, psychotropics, pain meds, antidepressants, anti-anxiety pills, uh, just all sorts of this concoctions, like to

• 20:52Speaker 00

  deal with whatever the hell I had going on. And interestingly enough, I'm off every single one of those except for my blood pressure meds. Um, to include my sleep meds, I go to bed at nine o'clock, I wake up at six in the morning, I sleep, and I've got sleep apnea. And I, what, years and years with zero sleep. Um, but yeah, the demographic gets, it's thirty to fifty and typically because it's the guys, you know, we typically they're post-service veterans that are coming in, so they've already either retired or they separated early. So, you know, you're looking at, you know, probably sixty percent of guys that are twenty to thirty-year veterans and then the rest, uh, that separated early. It's a big swath.

• 21:33Chris Williamson?

  Can you explain the experience of going through the doors of that treatment center for the first time, Punki?

• 21:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was terrifying. Um, it's funny, I laugh, yeah, you got a bunch of frogmen going down, Navy SEALs, you know, getting in a van to go do drugs they've never even heard of before. We're all terrified. We're like, I was never terrified overseas, right? I was never terrified ever in my life. Uh, but what we were terrified was ourselves, right, with the medicines going to show us. So, uh, no, I, I had reached out to Martine for a friend of mine and got in touch with him. And then he hooked me up, uh, for a medical screening, so got screened medically. Um, then I got, uh, lined with a coach for my preparation training, which is key to all of this.

• 22:16Chris Williamson?

  What does that, what does that look like?

• 22:18Speaker 00

  I have zero psychedelic experience.

• 22:19Chris Williamson?

  What's the, uh, preparation training look like?

• 22:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I had zero experience with any, you know, recreational pharmacology or psychedelics at all, you know, high school and college. So with the coach really walked me through my Cosentia, it was just like, hey, here's the point, here's what the medicines can do. Here's what they can't unlock. Here's how you navigate the space when you're in it.

• 22:45Speaker 00

  Here's how to build your, frame your intentions, spice your expectations, so you don't set yourself up for failure going into medicine. And here's how you navigate the medicine when you're in it. And then, hey, here's what's gonna come up afterwards, or here's what can come up afterwards, and here's how we've worked through this. That was key.

• 23:04Speaker 00

  And then I got screened medically, went down, I got my, my heart checked out, did some labs and stuff, make sure I was, and then I had to taper off all those crazy meds that I was already on. And then went down. We had, the way we run the retreat, and the same, same as what I went through, we have six clients per weekend. So went down, met up with our therapist and our coach, there's a therapist down there, trauma therapist. There's veteran coaches that are down there, typically from the Spec Ops community, so they're peers, you know, helping the guys through. Then there's a cook down there that's also working in the space forever. Then there's the organic medical staff for the clinic. So, so we got down to the house, we did a bunch of preparation work when we got there.

• 23:49Speaker 00

  Again, kind of everyone sharing their story, hey, who's who in the zoo here, how'd we get here? And it was interesting, because we're going around the circle of telling stories, and here's, here's guys that I know and that knew me, and this is the first of any of us have ever heard the other guy's story. Like, oh, wow, I didn't know that about you. I'm like, I'm sorry, I didn't know that about you. Um, yeah, then later that night, we got, uh, EKGs done and some more lab work done. And then we did a little fire ceremony, kind of walked through our intentions. We burned, and we wrote down our intentions for us to receive from the medicine, and then what we wanted to get out of our lives, which for me was, I thought the story's almost a shame, right? Shame, anger, guilt, pain, anguish, all that stuff, hate.

• 24:36Speaker 00

  And then we burned that in a small fire ceremony and then we took the medicine. Uh, the medicine we took is Avagane from the above root. Uh, in this case, it's in pill form. It's an isolate. Uh, so we took that and then went upstairs and laid there. It seemed like for two days because it was only like an hour. Waiting for the medicine to kick in and uh,

• 24:56Chris Williamson?

  Talk to me about, so you're someone that hasn't played around with psychedelics beforehand. You are at a particular point in your life where things have got pretty intense. You've needed to reach out for help. You've had this built up. Now, obviously the preparation and the counseling will have tried to calm you down, but you're not going to be able to get away from the fact that I've just taken something. It's inside of me. There's no going back. What's that one hour before everything kicks in? What does that feel like?

• 25:30Speaker 00

  I think the hour was shorter than the fact of the time that I had the pill in my hand staring at it. Right, like, am I gonna take this one? Is this a red pill or the blue pill, right? And I was just like, fuck it. What have I got to lose? You know, three, two weeks ago, I had a gun to my head, so screw this. So took the pill and then just lay there waiting. And obviously the anticipation and they, even the weeks going into it. You know, stuff starts to come up. The medicine works before you're ever even in the medicine and just starts unearthing things. So it was really kind of beautiful.

• 26:05Speaker 00

  My medicine journey played out very interestingly for me. So in the SEAL teams, I did a lot of targeting, um, and just hunting people down. We used a program in the, in the SEAL teams called Palantir. It's a link diagram program. It's all like cause and effect and stuff. So to get to X, I need to go here, but I need to find this person first and this person, this person. And I actually did that with me all the way through my life. So it would bring up people and flash them in front of my face. It was like, oh, that's my mother. That's my father. That's this person. But it would, it would keep going until I recognized them at a certain age. And then it took me back into their life and it played out their life. And then it brought it back to our intersect.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  And then played that forward. So I got to see, you know, kind of where my abuses happened as a kid, but also how I played that for my parents and other stuff. And then other people that came into my lives. Same thing for overseas. I had a bunch of situations that happened. It just kind of kept playing it for me. It's like plays for you a million different ways. It's all going to turn out the same. So by the end of that journey, I kind of came out. I was just like, which is complete understanding and reconciliation. So I got to basically relive my entire life over again without the emotion attached to it.

• 27:20Speaker 00

  And it was powerful. I remember I just woke up and I cried. I was like, I had a million people to apologize to and a million people to forgive. And the fact that I wanted to forgive people was huge because that was a huge anchor, right?

• 27:36Speaker 00

  And then, you know, I came out of medicine fairly early in the morning. Other guys came out a little bit later in the day.

• 27:43Chris Williamson?

  How long is the duration of the trip?

• 27:46Speaker 00

  It's a good, yeah, about 10 to 12 hours.

• 27:52Speaker 00

  And then you're out typically by roughly noon the next day. So there's a really peak, there's a peak period of time where you're really deep in the medicine that slowly starts to wane off. It is a stimulant. So you're not really sleeping because your brain is just remapping itself and it's working all night. And when I came out too, like my, I felt like someone put a vacuum cleaner in my brain, like it was still, it was finally quiet. And I've always had monkey mind and chatter, you know, that noise that's always in there. And it was just completely quiet, which was very eerie and scary at the, at the same time. And peaceful at the same time. It was nice to have.

• 28:34Speaker 00

  And then the other guys kind of came out a little bit later in the day. Some people have rough, ugly journeys. Mine was rough, but it wasn't painful for me to see. It was just very teaching. Some people had very joyous journeys. Some people had very lost in space journeys. So everyone's journey is extremely different. It's interesting too. Same medicines, you know, and actually some of the same traumas going into it, but the journeys play out entirely differently for everybody.

• 29:07Speaker 00

  That night, we did some more integration work. Pretty smoked that day, Abogaine's really taxing on the body. It's extremely draining.

• 29:18Speaker 00

  And then we did prep work for Sunday, for Sunday morning, we did five MEOTMT, which is from the Storm Desert. Some people call it the God molecule, the spirit molecule. Super powerful medicine, I always laugh, like, who figured these things out? Right? Bunch of kids go in the desert, they found a toad, they cooked it over fire, and they talked to God.

• 29:40Speaker 00

  I mean, how does this thing play out? But it's a beautiful, beautiful medicine. And if you look back into history, too, the toad and the mushrooms, like, and all these artifacts all over the world.

• 29:53Speaker 00

  So that medicine, the way I like to explain it is, you know, where the Abogaine really dove into a lot of cerebral memory and just unearthed stuff. The five is a very powerful emotional medicine. And it goes in and just unearths all these, I like to just say, suppressed emotions. And you're talking a lifetime of suppressed emotions.

• 30:15Speaker 00

  Happiness, pain, sadness, guilt, anger, shame, all that stuff has a voice to it. And it causes damage.

• 30:23Speaker 00

  And if you let it, then it'll get there, and it comes out. And

• 30:28Speaker 00

  to someone outside the room, it could sound like this helter-skelter going in there, murder, death, kill, or Chuck E. Cheese's birthday party, or complete joy, or the Super Bowl, depending upon what's going on.

• 30:40Speaker 00

  To the guy or girl that's there, we're just laying there, just expelling all this energy and this emotion that needs to come out. And on the other side of that is ego dissolution, just complete connectivity, right back to yourself again.

• 30:54Speaker 00

  I fought my medicine, it was too much love for me. Like, I just received this flood dose of love, and I didn't want it, I couldn't handle it, I fought it.

• 31:03Speaker 00

  And then I tried to get back into it, I couldn't get back in. And then I thought I failed, because I couldn't do it. And, uh, so I remember I was talking to my coach, Cynthia, at the time, and she's like, "No, you felt it, you saw it." "Yeah, I did." She's like, "Well, you can get there again." So after I left after that weekend, for me, it's like, alright, I know what's on the other side of this curtain. Um, and I'm just gonna continue to do my work and get there. So it's about three, four months later that I finally broke all the way through with a, with a different medicine, um, with the intent of just allowing myself to surrender. Give in, but I'd already, the heavy lifting I had already done, the big boulder had already

• 31:44Speaker 00

  been moved, right from, out of, out of the way when I was down in Mexico. Um, other guys and girl, the other guys with me had just these beautiful spiritual journeys. Um, and then some, again, were dark, you know, everyone's journey is just completely unique. Some people have beautiful avigay journeys and, and horrible five M E O journeys and sometimes it's flipped over, you know, the other way around. But eventually in the weeks after, it just kind of all starts to play out. You start to get these downloads and everything just kind of falls right back in line. So it all doesn't happen right into medicine. That's what happens after that. Um, and if I had not had my coach Cynthia, you know, work with me at the time, I could have easily just kind of gone into self-destructive mode of like, hey, I fucked this up.

• 32:28Speaker 00

  I failed this. I didn't do it right. I wasted these people's time and all that, and it wasn't the case at all. Uh, so that was a huge win for me. Yeah, just a beautiful, a beautiful medicine pairing and just the container, the, the mission within it set down, it was just so powerful, like, yeah, got a bunch of guys that are coming in, a bunch of alpha males, but we're entirely just extremely scared at the time. Um, but they set the right container, just, it was, it just helped us navigate through that space.

• 33:01Chris Williamson?

  What was the medication that you used the, uh, after four months? What was the different thing that you used that time?

• 33:10Speaker 00

  After that, I, uh, ended up going out to a reservation out here in San Diego. And I'd done a, uh, very heavy psilocybin dose with the Indians out here. A heavy psilocybin dose.

• 33:23Chris Williamson?

  Do you know how much, do you know how much it was?

• 33:24Speaker 00

  And got, and gotten through there. Uh, 20 grams.

• 33:29Chris Williamson?

  Sorry?

• 33:32Speaker 00

  20, 28 grams.

• 33:40Chris Williamson?

  Okay. What, Martin, can you try and explain what's going on in the brain that's causing this particular restructuring? Why that combination of iboga and five MEO? And how is it that this, there's obviously something functional that happens or something physical that happens, but then there's also something psychological, something emotional, maybe even something spiritual. How does all of this work together?

• 34:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, you hit it right on the nail on the head, which is that there's a physiological changes. There is psychological changes and there's also a spiritual effect of these compounds. From a physiological standpoint, Idegen is not considered a clean drug in that it doesn't affect one single receptor. So Idegen affects about 50 different neuroreceptors. So it's working on many levels, on, you know, the dopaminergic system, on serotonin, on the opioid receptors. It's increasing communication between both hemispheres. It's helping stimulate neurogenesis. So it elevates levels of BDNF and GDNF, which is brain-derived neurotropic factor and glioderive

• 34:55Speaker 02

  neurotropic factor. So there's new brain cells being grown. And then from a psychological standpoint, the Idegen is a shadow work. So it allows a person to deal with unprocessed trauma, like unfinished business, things that they've been avoiding, childhood stuff that they might have repressed. A lot of the trauma that we have is pre-verbal, so it happens before the age of five. And because the language centers in the brain are not developed, it doesn't get encoded in language. So there's no way to access it just through psychotherapy because you're trying to use a semantic framing to access things that are like visionary, almost like they're just energetic patterns are encoded.

• 35:36Speaker 02

  So with the Idegen journey, because you're gaining this perspective and seeing yourself as a child and you're floating in the room, something like this observer standpoint from Buddhism where you're just objectively observing without the emotional pain of the memory. So you don't get re-traumatized, but you're now an adult, so you're seeing it through the eyes of an adult. And you're able to then recontextualize what happened to that child and understand it better from a different perspective. Many times, you know, we blame our parents. Or things they did or they didn't do, but we don't realize like what they were dealing with at the time or the trauma that they had. So being able to see it in that kind of broader swath of like their history as well leads to a lot of forgiveness and understanding.

• 36:19Speaker 02

  But it's not easy because you're confronted with opportunities you've missed, people you've hurt. And just, you know, ways that we've shown up in relationship with other people that were not kind of in our in alignment with our highest self. Sometimes you're even shown how you were perceived by that person through their own eyes. It's almost like you're in the back of their head seeing yourself, like how you how you reacted to things they did. So a lot of people, you know, they want to go home and fix relationships right away, but we tell them to like just take some time. Because the person might not be able to, the person you hurt might not be able to receive that information.

• 36:57Speaker 02

  So a lot of shadow work with the I D again, and then the five M E O is very different because it's more of the mystical experience. So it's that sense of oneness, of unity, of connection. People report being in the presence of God, feeling that they've gone to heaven almost and recognizing themselves as divine beings. So going from, you know, the shadow work and kind of these difficult experiences to then the five M E O is a very healing process. Because some of the stuff that the I D again shows you, it's just hard to integrate. Because it might not even be your stuff. It could be just the pain of the planet, you know, factory farms or war or things that are happening

• 37:38Speaker 02

  that are, that we might not be aware of, but it shows you that. And then the five M E O just blows it all away. It shows you that everything is as it should be and, you know, that everything is perfect and in your control. From a physiological standpoint, the five M E O reduces inflammation. And when you have a brain injury that is related through blast exposure, when you have a mild traumatic brain injury. And you are able to reduce inflammation, the brain can heal itself. So the neurogenesis from the I B gain and the reduced inflammation from the five M E O go perfectly hand in hand. So there's a synergistic effect. They're also working on different neurotransmitter systems.

• 38:18Speaker 02

  And like Punki was saying, the the experience itself might be thirty percent of the healing, but the integration of the experience is seventy percent. It's what you do with it. It's the meditation, the yoga, the ice baths, you know, regular coaching sessions, you know, relying on on your therapist and and really taking advantage of the resources that that are available. And this is a lifelong process. It's not, you know, one month, three months. It's it's for the rest of your life, you really have to work on yourself to maintain these benefits. If you don't, then the experience can fade after two or three months.

• 38:54Chris Williamson?

  Punki, did you do your I B gain, your five M E O, and then your psilocybin? And was that pharmacologically, was that the lion's share of the work that needed to be done?

• 39:08Speaker 00

  No, you know, I like to say it's peeling the onion, right? I didn't get here in one day, and I'm not going to get out of this in one day either.

• 39:17Speaker 00

  But what I got from that one weekend in Mexico was enough to really move the needle in a significant way. I got the, it allowed me to get to the X, which therapy was never getting me to.

• 39:31Speaker 00

  But even though I got the X, there's still more stuff that kept coming up. I was like, whoa, there's more, there's more, there's more. So, you know, subsequent medicine journeys for me have been able to help me deal, work through that.

• 39:44Speaker 00

  So typically, I do all my work, and if I get to a sticking point that I can't get any further with all the right things that I'm doing and with my coach and with my therapist. And sometimes I lean into medicine. Sometimes it shows me more, you know, I get more more downloads or I get more insight. Sometimes there's nothing to see. Sometimes I just need to offload some some energy or just some built up, you know, stuff that just needs to go away. But I don't I don't do much medicine. I haven't touched psychedelics since all this been a year now.

• 40:14Speaker 00

  So that first year was pretty heavy for me and just kind of peeling back that onion as fast as I could. And then two, They all, they kind of kept falling in front of me like right at the right time. Like I would just bump into someone that knew somebody and I would go uh experience another uh another modality uh because all these medicines have just such a different energy to them. Uh but it was the right medicine for me at the right time. And uh yeah, they're just entirely different. Um.

• 40:47Speaker 00

  I, I think I had zero practice going in when I, when I, when I met Martine. I couldn't meditate. I had zero mindfulness practice. I had, I had no any good practice whatsoever other than throwing weights around. That was it. So uh my self-care, my self-understanding was to a point of almost zero. Um it's entirely different now, you know, just the way that I move through life.

• 41:11Chris Williamson?

  What is the reason for working with, uh Martine, do you work with anything else other than Ibogaine and 5-MEO or is that, are those the two that you work with mostly?

• 41:23Speaker 02

  So uh we've been working mostly with Ibogaine and 5-MEO and we've done a few retreats with psilocybin, so with mushrooms. Um and these have mainly been for the spouses of veterans uh that have also experienced trauma just by, you know, being in that community and also living, living with, with them and going through the, the process of grieving and loss because they've had so much death. Um so yeah, we, we have retreats for psilocybin and for Ibogaine.

• 41:51Chris Williamson?

  What's the reason for not using uh peyote or for not using uh non-5-MEO?

• 42:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the, there's uh obviously benefits to say a peyote journey or an ayahuasca journey. I think with, with ayahuasca, uh you, you, you have to be trained in that lineage and I don't feel qualified to administer that. We are partnered with a nonprofit called Heroic Arts Project that runs ayahuasca retreats, so we generally just refer people to them if they want to do work with. With ayahuasca, the peyote is a little bit challenging because of sustainability issues, so it's hard to promote a compound which is sacred to Native Americans and which is running out because it takes so many years to mature. So mostly when people want to try mescaline, I would direct them to San Pedro, which has very similar effects in this, which a lot more common.

• 42:45Chris Williamson?

  What about ketamine? What about MDMA? I've seen a lot of talk about that as treatment for PTSD as well.

• 42:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, ketamine is wonderful as a kind of a short-term, staunch-to-bleeding type of intervention when somebody's suicidal. We can refer them to a ketamine provider in the US because it's the one psychedelic that's already legal. So you can find it everywhere in the US. For MDMA, it's a bit problematic because it's not legal in Mexico. So ibogine and 5-MEO are legal. They were never scheduled, so they're basically not recognized by Mexican law as being compounds of abuse. With psilocybin, it falls into more of a gray area where it can be used ceremoniously if used by indigenous people in indigenous contexts. Other countries like Jamaica, they're very open about psilocybin.

• 43:36Speaker 02

  So we are setting up a retreat center there, which is going to be mainly for military families, so spouses and adult children, but also for female veterans that are dealing with sexual trauma, which we have to separate the men from the women because oftentimes the perpetrators were other people in the military.

• 43:54Chris Williamson?

  What is the current legality around this in America at the moment? If you're somebody that's been in the US Special Forces, you simply can't get this legally in America, I'm guessing?

• 44:10Speaker 02

  Only ketamine can be done legally. What Punky was referring to of Native American reservations, there is a dispensation there that is that there's tribal sovereignty. So there's a Native American church, there's also some ayahuasca churches that have exemptions. But mostly the work has to happen under kind of FDA-approved.

• 44:35Speaker 02

  Trials and there are a few, there's something called expanded access where they're already, they've proven to the FDA that these compounds are effective, specifically MDMA and psilocybin. So now that there's a possibility to start offering it more widely, but it's still very limited and small. Most sites only get five slots. So it's difficult. So most people are traveling, they're going to different locales overseas where these things are legal.

• 45:07Chris Williamson?

  What is the potential usefulness of this for people who don't have super strong PTSD? It sounds like a lot of people may have had trauma that has been ingrained before they can even remember it, certainly before they can semantically put it into words. So is there a case to be made that far more people than just veterans perhaps might need this?

• 45:34Speaker 02

  I would say they don't need it, but they would definitely, most people have trauma that they haven't processed. There's just things that they might not be aware of. There is some evidence that microdosing can help with creativity and just be a better option for people than Adderall. So it does have some elements of increasing human performance and making people more empathetic, more connected to themselves, more aware, better in relationships, just nicer humans.

• 46:10Chris Williamson?

  It makes me think, how many people at the moment, we've got a pandemic of anxiety, of people being very, very concerned about their mental health at the moment. And you can lay this at the feet of social media if you want, but there's a lot of other things I think that are contributing to this, increases in single parent households, higher levels of uncertainty about life paths for the future, lack of connection to religion, lack of connection to your local community, you know, the list is pretty endless of the grand narratives that have collapsed so that people now feel a little bit atomized. I'm just wondering how much of that, you know, how much a therapeutic session of something like Ibogaine could perhaps help them?

• 46:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, probably, I mean, I would recommend, like, if somebody's gonna try psychedelics, I would actually start with breathwork or with flotation therapy and then move on to psychedelics. And then of the psychedelics, Ibergaine is, you know, like, the big gun, is the Mount Everest of experiences. So there's some psychological challenges that it can bring up, but also there's some physical risks. It can, it can affect your heart rate, it can cause arrhythmias in combination with other drugs, so it's definitely delicate. Um, ayahuasca and five amino can be hard to integrate, so when people ask me, like, where they should start once they wanna do a psychedelic journey, ketamine is probably the easiest entry point, uh, because it's short, uh, you know, it can be manageable,

• 47:38Speaker 02

  you can titrate the dose really carefully, uh, and then mushrooms would be the next one. So I do think that for the wider population that is dealing with this, kind of this sense of disconnection and, and, and there's a lot of, you know, causes to it, I think we're, we're disconnected from each other, we're disconnected from nature, very few people find meaning in their jobs. Uh, so having community, uh, especially if it's, like, guided through a trained facilitator and there is a psychedelic type practice could be transformative for us as a society.

• 48:11Chris Williamson?

  Well, in an ideal world, we would be able to fix the cause of the problem rather than finding a solution to it on the other side, right? At the moment, we are retrospectively going back and then trying to, okay, something went wrong, let's, let's go and fix it. It would be much better for nothing to have gone wrong in the first place. You mentioned there about the fact that, uh, Ibergaine particularly can be quite challenging. Are there any, um, issues of dissociation, of psychosis, of people having onsets of schizophrenia, or any issues like that that come about due to people taking the medicine?

• 48:50Speaker 02

  We haven't run into that, but we screen people carefully. There's definitely people that shouldn't take psychedelics. So when somebody is manic, it can make them more manic. So that's one contraindication. If people are not in touch with reality, if they're schizophrenic, if they're hearing voices, it's also not a good time to be taking psychedelics, as well as some drugs that are contraindicated. So we haven't had issues with IVIGENE. I've seen some people that have trouble integrating 5-MEO when used on its own. And that's why it's so important to have a coach or a therapist that is well versed in the medicine, that is checking in with you afterwards. Because sometimes it's as simple as getting grounded, like eating food, taking a warm shower, getting a massage.

• 49:34Speaker 02

  But when you're not aware of this and you're having these like reactivations, these flashbacks of a 5-MEO journey, people like they don't sleep, they don't eat, and then that by itself makes them spin out. So it's definitely something that's happening in the community. I've also seen it with ayahuasca, where people come back and they're just not the same for months afterwards.

• 49:57Chris Williamson?

  What's next for you then, Punki, in terms of your personal journey of recovery, of moving forward? I mean, how, just how much have you managed to undo with the therapeutic and medicinal solutions that you've looked at?

• 50:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a good question. You know, so it probably took a year of really just diving in. I just kept moving the needle, right? And, um, you know, I finally, I remember I hit one medicine journey where there was no more trauma. It was just done. It was just me finally meeting my young self and I got to walk my young self back through, you know, the happy stages of my life vice the dark stages. And that was an interesting journey and I would just woke up, I was like, okay, we're done, we're moving forward now. Uh, but it's really, it's like, it's controlling the things that you can control, right? And focusing on all those things that you can control. So can I control my sleep? Yeah. Can I control my thought patterns? Yes.

• 50:59Speaker 00

  Can I control what goes into my mind and what goes into my ears and what goes into my, uh, my mouth? Yeah, I can. So I'm focused on that and just being very mindful. Um, stuff comes up still, but now I'm ahead of it, like I recognize it and... I'm able to sit with it now vice reacting to it.

• 51:22Speaker 00

  And then I can just really kind of dive into it. So it's been an interesting journey on this side of the equation vice where I was before. Um, and now I have this huge community of, of guys and girls who are on this side, I like to say on this side of medicine. Uh, that I can talk to, you know, that are my peers, you know, my wife, my friends, you know, my coach, I'm a coach now as well. Um, and it's just been, my relationships are entirely different. Uh, they're very more, much more intimate, more open and authentic with all my friends. So there's no more veil, like this is what you get. This is me. There's no, there's no hiding anything. Uh, so I don't have, I'm not, I'm, I don't feel I'm ever at risk to ever go down that path again.

• 52:07Speaker 00

  Um, will I, you know, dive into the medicines more? If something comes up, I feel I need to, or I'm curious about it. Yeah. But I don't lean on it. They're not a question for me. It's not something I chase. I'm not a, I'm not a psycho. Um, for me it was, it was healing. It wasn't about expanding consciousness. Um, so I got that part out of the way and I'm just trying to live my best life right now while I can and just get back to others.

• 52:32Chris Williamson?

  What is, oh, if there's some people that are in the special forces or perhaps are looking to come out pretty soon and are thinking that sounds an awful lot like the situation that I am in, the situation that you were in is now what they're feeling. What would you want to say to them?

• 52:54Speaker 00

  Reach out. Yeah, that's the funny thing. Um. Every client we have down there, myself included, were never self-referred. Someone else brought them, referred them, right? So someone else threw a life ring out for that person. So we're not self-arresting. No, we're not asking for help. Uh, and that's out of pride. It's out of fear. It's out of shame. It's out of, out of all sorts of things. So really it's just knowing that you have a community of brothers and sisters that will help you if you reach out. Uh, it's the same in any aspect of life. If you ask for help, somebody will help you. Uh, you just have to ask.

• 53:34Speaker 00

  And we've got a beautiful community that's been in this space for a long time. You know, it was underground for a long time. Everyone's slowly coming to the surface now. Because we're not helping anybody by staying underground. We're just not doing it. And the momentum's already moving forward. So I think the narrative's changing, so it's safe to be in the space now, you know, and maybe in some work environments it may not be. But it's getting more and more accepted.

• 54:04Speaker 00

  And it's safer than what we've been doing, which is taking this, these pharmacology. You know, this, these medicines that we're taking, they're actually compounding the issues that we already had.

• 54:19Speaker 00

  But the big ones just ask for help, reach out.

• 54:23Speaker 00

  Come to us, come to someone. We're not ever telling anybody to come to us. We're not the only retreat out there. We're one of the few that specializes in treating veterans, and we're run by veterans. But just, yeah, ask for help.

• 54:37Chris Williamson?

  What was your process of starting to become a facilitator or an assistant with the organization?

• 54:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, Martina reached out and goes, hey, we've got a big group coming down here. You want to help out? You want to, I go, yeah, I'll drive the truck, you know, I'll wash the dishes, I'll clean the towels and walk guys to the bathroom. And it started just like that, just holding space for guys. And then I think when you and I started this conversation, I said, yeah, I walked in the room and there's six guys, I know four of them. It was just more and more and more of that. I was like, damn, I know all these guys. And so that really kind of shifted, you know, my mission to like, hey, these are my people. And wanting to go down. Initially, I, I think I probably jumped in too soon trying to help. I hadn't done a lot of my own work and

• 55:29Speaker 00

  you know, you go from a non-feeling, non-caring guy to being completely busted wide open and being an empath and taking on everything. It's like, oh, I need to back out of the space for a bit. And, uh, but no, it was really healing because then I got to really learn. You know what, I think we kind of go through life thinking our trauma is so unique to us that no one's going to understand it. And then you hear all these guys and girls' story and if there's two of them that are exactly the same, if not three, and trauma is trauma, right? No matter when it happens or how it happens, it's still trauma. It's something that got you in, allowed you to get in your own way and it stopped you from moving, you know, to your full potential.

• 56:11Speaker 00

  So I got into that and then got serious about it, so I took a psychedelic integration coaching course. Really dove into that, started coaching after the sessions and now I go down, I'm a facilitator, I'm a coach. I manage the operations down there. And I just love the work.

• 56:31Chris Williamson?

  Where can people go if they want to find out more about what it is that you guys do and the process of everything?

• 56:38Speaker 00

  So our website is missionwithin.org. And then we're also funded by nonprofits, so the SEAL Future Fund or sealfuturefoundation.org, heroicheartsproject.org, and the hopeproject.org. They fund, we're probably sixty, I think sixty if not seventy percent donor funded for the clients that come down and then the rest are self-paid.

• 57:05Chris Williamson?

  Is this available for anybody worldwide or are you only taking people from the US?

• 57:12Speaker 00

  No, we take everybody. We're very, pretty heavy on veterans, but nationality doesn't really matter.

• 57:21Chris Williamson?

  Martin, anything to add before we finish up for the day?

• 57:26Speaker 02

  We're recruiting for a study that we have going on, so this is a Gold Star study. This is women that lost men in combat or to mental health issues. So information is on the website and they would be coming to UT at Austin, getting their brain scanned and then going to retreat, coming back for the US, getting another brain scanned. So we want to see what the effects of psilocybin are on prolonged grief as well as spivimio. And these would be separate groups. So yeah, I just want to get the word out on that study because I think it's important to also help the widows of men who have served.

• 58:03Chris Williamson?

  What's the website again for that?

• 58:05Speaker 02

  Missionwithin.org.

• 58:08Chris Williamson?

  Gentlemen, I very much appreciate the stuff that you're doing. I think that it's long overdue to try and give people that have served their country and put their bodies and their minds on the line to keep everybody else safe and free. The fact that you go through all of the sacrifices and then potentially come home to suffer more feels particularly unfair. So I really, really applaud the work that you're doing. It's incredibly inspiring and long may it continue. Mr. President, my company foreme of the explosion on our rig.

• 58:41Speaker 03

  On October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami.

• 58:45Chris Williamson?

  They all heap the blame on me.

• 58:47Speaker 03

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 58:54Speaker 02

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stop, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 58:59Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 59:02Speaker 02

  I'm not the first then.

• 59:03Speaker 03

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a minute without parent.