Speaker A
Stay in the system, you get promoted, then you get put into upper management, and then you retire. From the soul's perspective, that's absolute failure.
Brian Stafford discusses levels of consciousness, ego dissolution, and ecological disconnection in psychiatry and personal transformation.
Key Takeaways
- True human development requires moving beyond ego-centric paradigms to deeper soul and ecological awareness.
- Ecological disconnection may be the fundamental disorder psychiatry overlooks.
- Rites of passage and nature-based experiences are essential for psychosocial and spiritual growth.
- Ego dissolution is a profound and irreversible process that can lead to new consciousness levels.
- Authentic transformation cannot be achieved solely through intellectual means like podcasts but requires direct experience.
What the video covers
- Brian Stafford, a psychiatrist, left academia to pursue a path as a wilderness guide focused on eco awakening and soul connection.
- Western society suppresses human development by promoting ego-centric success, which from a soul perspective is failure.
- Stafford describes three worlds of consciousness: ego consciousness, upper world (Eastern traditions), and underworld consciousness (shamanic and Jungian insights).
- He experienced a profound call to leave his medical career after receiving an endowed professorship, guided by a noetic voice.
- His journey included participation in men's rites of passage and discovering Bill Plotkin's work on soulcraft and nature psyche.
- The ego is dissolving irreversibly, a process deeper than psychedelic experiences, leading to new paradigms in psychiatry.
- Ecological disconnection is proposed as the root disorder underlying many psychological issues.
- The work emphasizes the importance of rites of passage, connection to nature, and psychosocial and psychosiritual transformation.
- Stafford highlights the need for authentic experiences beyond intellectual engagement, such as ceremonies and nature immersion.
- The conversation touches on cultural loss of soul connection and the potential for humanity to awaken through eco-spiritual practices.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and critique of Western success model
- 05:45Personal transformation and spiritual calling
- 11:03Men's rites of passage and discovery of Soulcraft
- 17:03Three worlds of consciousness explained
- 23:58Ego dissolution and new paradigms in psychiatry
- 29:18Importance of nature, ceremony, and soul connection
- 34:30Ecological disconnection as root disorder
- 39:38Future implications and humanity's potential awakening
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
Westernized society actively suppresses human development. I met psychiatrist Brian Stafford, whose work focuses on moving from an ego to an egocentric paradigm in psychiatry.
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What if the disorder of disorders was ecological disconnection? I took my CV, like 34 pages, and I burned it in the fire.
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About to become a professor, Stafford left academia to become a nature guide, leading people to what he calls an eco awakening. The ego is dissolving even more than in a psychedelic state. It will not come back to its former form.
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It's done. It's done. We live in three worlds of consciousness: consciousness of ego. Then there's upper world consciousness, which is primarily what Eastern traditions are helpful at accessing. Then what the shamans know and what Jung knew and what we're re-imagining is underworld consciousness, which was called hell by Christians because they didn't want you to go there.
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Your puzzle piece to the fabric of the massive puzzle of the world. And if you discover and live that the rest of your life, you fulfilled your destiny from the soul's perspective. And if you don't, you're living an ego fate.
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Are we all called to have this experience? Can anyone have an ego awakening, you think?
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Yeah, but it can't come from listening to lots of podcasts.
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Warm welcome at the Asencia Foundation's YouTube channel. We are in Harlem, the Netherlands, at the Interdisciplinary Conference on Psychedelic Research, and at my table I have Brian Stafford.
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It's a pleasure to meet you, Brian.
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Pleasure to be with you. Thanks for asking.
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Yeah, I visited your talk and was touched by the work you do, which I will introduce to our audience. So great to be able to sit down with you in person.
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Yeah, great. And you are a psychiatrist by training, and at the top of your career you had just received an endowment and an endowed professorship, and you had it all sort of, so to speak, going well.
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You felt a calling to leave it all and to pursue a quite different path, and you became a wilderness guide. Now you work at the Animas Valley Institute, founded by Bill Plotkin, and he's the author of Soul Craft.
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In that book, Plotkin argues that our culture lacks the deep connection with soul; we sort of lost that connection, and we lack certain rites of passage from adolescence into adulthood, the dark night of the soul. Your work is very much about that.
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And I just said that you made that huge transformation in your life. I was just, as an opening question, what was it in Bill Plotkin's work that fascinated or resonated so deeply with you?
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Yeah, it's a great question. I think a couple of things. One is I was at a place in my life where I had already achieved what I wanted to achieve.
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Something that felt authentic. Being a psychiatrist, especially supporting poor families in their parenting, that's the main thing I focused on, and training pediatricians and child psychiatrists how to identify and work with those things. It felt really authentic,
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and it's something I pursued from the time I was like 25 when I entered medical school. I just knew that's what I wanted to do, and I was good at it.
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Yeah. And so part of it was I was living an authentic life, on fire for what I did. I loved training psych students and trainees and serving families and building systems and doing research and fundraising. I just loved it.
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And I thought I would probably do that the rest of my life.
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Yeah. It's like, oh, I'm back in Denver where I grew up, close to the mountains. I get to go skiing. I'm close to my parents.
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Got a family. Stable family, kids. Perfect. Like the postcard of the American dream.
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Yeah. And then this endowed chair came to me, and a couple nights later after they had the induction ceremony, a voice said to me, "You're done." Like one of those noetic voices, kind of a voice of God mystery. I'd never had a voice like that before.
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And there was a part of me that felt terrified because I had a mortgage and children to support, you know, 14 more years before they even go to college. But there was also an excitement there. It was like right here: both excitement and fear of what this might mean.
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Was it a dream or a vision?
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No, it's just a voice that came probably like hypnagogic, hypnopompic, when you're falling asleep or waking up. You're done.
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But it was so powerful. I knew I had to listen. If I didn't listen, it would kind of be like—I don't know if you know the story of Jonah in the Old Testament.
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Oh, yes, I do.
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Yeah. Right. So, Jonah gets invited by God to go to Nineveh, commanded. Jonah goes the other way.
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Well, we know what happens. He falls over the boat and gets swallowed by a whale, and he incubates in the whale until he agrees to do the will of God, his own God, the God image, whatever voice it is.
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So it was that kind of voice, and I was raised Christian, so I knew these stories, and I was like, "Oh, this is one of those things."
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And so I talked to my wife, I talked to my department chair, and said, "I think I'm done with medicine."
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And they're like, "What are you talking about?"
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Like, it's a voice. I'm like, "Well, I think I have to go on a journey in a certain way. Call to adventure, you know, others have called it that."
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And so I took a sabbatical during that time. My department chair says, "You're great. We want you to be chair, maybe dean someday. Everybody loves you. You're doing all the things you're supposed to do."
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And a lot of things I was doing well in work. My marriage was not so great at the time because I was so busy focusing on work and not on marriage and projecting things on my wife and all those kinds of things that couples do.
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And one thing that I felt like I needed was to be around more men. So, as a perinatal psychiatrist in a pediatric clinic, we were mostly working with moms and female therapists and female clinicians. So, I felt like I needed a little bit of masculine.
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So, I went on a men's retreat. A guy named Father Richard Rohr. I'm not sure if you've heard of him. He's a big person in the United States, kind of a leader who's not been kicked out by the church for doing incarnational mysticism, as he would call it, the Center for Action and Contemplation.
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And I did a men's rite of passage with them, which is like four days in Texas of all places, which is, as a Coloradoan, not where you'd want to go do things in nature, but it was powerful.
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And at the end of those four days, there was a piece of paper on how to go further on the masculine spiritual journey. There was this book Soulcraft listed. I was like, "Oh, I've always wondered if there's a soul."
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You know, I'd already left Christianity by this time, practicing Buddhism, integral Buddhism, hanging out with Ken Wilber and all these other people.
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But I thought, "Soul, what is soul? What is that really?"
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And then I started. I downloaded the book in an airport on my way back home. By page 10, Bill's words really resonated. I was like, "Wow, if that's the way the world is, that's the world I want to live in."
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And I wondered if it was almost synchronous that I heard this voice and then this word Soulcraft came into my life.
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And in that book, Bill talks about what happens when you cross into the mysteries of nature psyche in a ceremonial space, longing to kind of leave your identity and wonder what your deeper identity is.
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And that's one way to call soul: a deeper identity. And Bill talks in there about these synchronous and mystical encounters that happen in nature when on some of these programs, including like a version of a vision fast.
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And I was just like, whoa, I didn't know those experiences could happen in a lifetime. I didn't know nature spoke. I
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I wasn't just good. I was great. But I was also really good. Like I never wanted to get in trouble, which meant I was often conforming to whatever authorities want, I would do it because it was just easier. I learned
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that early, right? And so when I got out there, I was kind of surprised. I look and there was this giant juniper tree. I don't know how many hundred years old. Ancient.
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And I realized he was like the grandma the grandfather of the canyon. I was like, "Oh, I never had a grandfather who just treasured me." Yeah. I never had that. My on my mother's side, they had 15 children. So,
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you were just a number as a grandchild. On my dad's side, my grandmother had died, and my grandfather was not really into kids or relationships. So, I felt like I had missed out on something of just someone to love me for who I was. rather than
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how I had to show up in the world. So I asked him if I could climb up in his lap.
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So I climbed up about six feet. That's was his lap. I just said, "I want you to love me for who I am. I've never had anyone do that." That's what happened.
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So he held me. I felt comforted. I felt nurtured. I felt seen. I felt like everything about me was just fine. Even the stuff I hated about myself, it's like, "Yeah, those are there, but it's okay. You're great.
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Don't worry about it. And then after that it got dark. This is May. So the sun set sits a little earlier than it does in summer.
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And so I slept at the base of the grandfather tree there. Just no tarp, just had a tarp, sleeping bag, nothing else, water. And then I woke up in the middle of the night and I could look at
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the stars and I could see like the half moon coming across the sky. And then I kind of cleared my eyes and right in front of me, maybe about 2 meters from me, there was an indigenous woman. H.
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And I wondered what was really going on because they inhabited this place, but they hadn't lived there for like 800 years.
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Yeah. So this was a vision. Yeah. And so I didn't know that. Right. I'm in it. I'm altered.
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It's like that like real. She was real. Yeah. She was sitting there right in front of me and I looked at her kind of looked around and wondered what was going on because I'd never really had this kind
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of visionary experience in nature. And then she looked at me with these really soft grandmother tender eyes and she said, "Brian, welcome home." And I broke into tears.
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Broke into tears. Like it was overwhelming um to be welcome home by this grandmother.
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Later I realized it was like grandmother earth welcoming me home. I didn't know that at the time. It was just a powerful numinous kind of archetypal experience.
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And um I went back to sleep. The next morning I wrote about what happened. And I could just feel in my heart joy, grief, grief for the planet like I'd never felt before because I know these things in my
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head of what's happening atmospherically waters habitat species, climate, all these things. But there was something else that had kind of opened up into me that this was happening to where I belong in a particular place. This this is happening
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to my kin. All of this is happening. So it wasn't head knowledge. It was heart m it was psychosspiritual sematic emotional.
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Um but I also felt never at home, never at home before like I felt in that moment like oh I'm home on this planet.
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This is my one and only home. And I was a kid who spent a lot of time in nature skiing and hiking and backpacking and mountain biking, but I'd never had a mystical experience in nature.
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That's interesting, right? You say that we do some people do spend time in nature and you do not have these experiences and they sound too many people I think listening some people might have had these experiences. I haven't. They s sound so
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far off. Right. Yeah. Uh but that is perhaps because we do not connect with nature in ways that you did during that that program and you said during your um uh presentation here I think you said that we do have that connection with
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nature at very early age when children have that connection but you said like 95% of us lose it when we're six by by the age of six we've lost it.
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Yeah. So we're born in what we call egocentric consciousness. Egoentric consciousness, which means that the center of our lives is all of life, not just the human and not just myself. And when we're raised in particular ways because
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of our society, our parenting, our educational system, our religious system, our technological system, we begin to lose that. in my estimation is probably 95% lose it by the time they're six. And now they're living primarily from what we might call
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egocentric self and primarily anthropocentric. What's most important is human and nature is just a backdrop rather than where we belong and our home for ourselves and all the other species. And that's a pathological turn for the human.
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It's a pathological turn for the human. I call it now the disorder of disorders kind of underlying everything else that's happening right now underlying even our psychiatric and psychological disorders.
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Um our separation from nature is like a pathology of pathologies. Yeah. And we don't know about it because for hundreds of years probably longer most of our ancestors were also in that kind of consciousness. And wherever our ancestors went and found people in
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ecoentric consciousness, they subjugated them. And part of empire. Yeah. Yeah. Would you say that to to sort of um alter our ways and to to um I mean it can be a rational process in a sense. We know that we're sort of
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depleting and exploiting nature and we all know of that. And then there's of course this deep emotional feeling of being one with it which you and uh Bill Platkin it's it's called eco awakening right could could you unpack that sort
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of exactly what it is because it does seem like an esoteric thing what what is it? Yeah, it's for me it's the most important awakening that needs to happen in the human conscious right now. M and um it happens primarily for those
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who are raised in egocentric and anthropocentric western kind of dominator cultures which is most of the western world Europe American we've imported it elsewhere [sighs] and in this experience a mystical experience where one realizes that their primary place of belonging is the earth
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community not the social community like we spend so much of our lives thinking we primarily belong to social communities because we do but it's not the whole show.
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We belong to the earth community actually all beings. So when we reenter so it desenters the human a little bit and it reenters all life including every species plant mountain river dragonfly salmon etc. those that becomes our greatest concern
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is the greater ecology in our local area but also on Gaia in a certain way. And I'd never heard of these terms before. I don't even think Bill had used these terms at the time I had this experience.
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Um but it was profound and it's an artifact of being raised in this westernized culture which is tragic but it's also one of the greatest experiences one can have in a lifetime.
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Like it changed my life. Another way I call it is ecological metaninoia. Like that term they use for spirituality or a rebirth.
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A rebirth. It's like, oh, I was reborn into the earth. I've been so stuck in society and my political beliefs and my religious beliefs and my other practices and family and sports teams and all the things that we affiliate with.
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Yeah. And I recreate recreate in nature, but I didn't really know how to fully belong.
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And this started that trajectory. So, it's a state of consciousness that happens in many different pathways.
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And that's actually a book I'm working on and hope to finish in the next couple months.
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And um so it really propelled me deeply into my body, into my imagination, into my senses, and I could feel this belonging to Earth. And I wanted to act primarily on her behalf and all of life rather than just on the human, which is
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what I do as a psychiatrist. It's all about the human. And would you say that one that we are all sort of uh this is to be experienced for anyone who goes with this intent into nature and maybe
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has sort of like a period of fasting but that and then that anyone can experience this what you call eco awakening and secondly how would it compare to uh what many people and have experienced themselves and and what this conference
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is also very much about um on psychedelic substances of course because I know from first person experience that on psychedelics I have had this not in this way not a vision so strongly as you describe it but a deep oneness with nature but that was
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on psychedelics right yeah it was wonderful it was wonderful but I'm just um curious because this seems so um yeah is are we all called to have this experience can anyone have an equal awakening you think yeah yeah I think if you've lo there are
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some people who never lost their ecological egocentric consciousness. Jung was one of them. If I read his, you know, his biography, memories, dreams and reflections, he never lost it. which is why he went so much deeper than Freud, why he went into
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the mysteries, why he went into the collective unconsciousness because to be ecosentrically informed means you can move to the next stage of development which we find that very interesting how you make that to Jung because I'm absolutely a novice
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when it comes to Jung but I never sort of saw the link between nature and Jung if you could unpack that a bit sort of when you say that he he remained sort of ecoentric. Yeah, it's really interesting
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if you read him closely and there's also a book about Jungan nature by Meredith Sabadini Sabatini who goes deeply into some of his writings about it but in his kind of biography which was written by Neil Joffrey in his interview
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her interviews with him uh it's pretty clear that uh he rejected conformity to the church right his father was a minister his grandfather was a minister struggle with faith. Yeah.
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And whenever there was a choice between like God and what we might call the creation, he chose the creation always. And he studied biology first, not religion, which is interesting. And obviously he spent a lot of time in nature as a kid. Most
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children did back then. All of us spent more time. We weren't in the house so much. We weren't on planes, trains, and automobiles and screens, right? And where did he choose a lot of his life? On a lake.
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All right. And um so if you read really closely, it's pretty clear that he always has this affinity that he's acting on behalf of self and earth and human all at the same time. So nothing is really excluded in him, but he's
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egocentric. Interesting. Which allowed him to get to this place of being authentic when he severed from Freud. M and when that happened, that's when what we would call his own journey of soul initiation began or the descent to the
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soul or the um kind of the confrontation with the unconscious which he called it.
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I actually had a wonderful um conversation with Clea McKenna, the daughter of Terrence McKenna, and she told about her youth in which psychedelics were of course all around her and but but also just in the philosophy of Terrence McKenna
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who's also I'd say very much ecoentric and all all about nature. Totally. uh that she could already on an early age sort of like just experience sort of the the buzz of life but also the will of life like it's an interplay
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dance and it's not not all just nice and romantic it can also be confronting sure and which made me think of of of of shopen hour and the will like and we our channel is very much about philosophy
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and metaphysics and I'm I'm curious what what your thoughts are on a metaphysics when you had that vision there are many ways to interpret this and Jung is very complex on that like what is the status is that real is just me talking to
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myself what were your thoughts there and and and also in the work you do do you keep it just open-minded or you think nature literally speaks to us yeah and images speak to us Images are coming from our own unconscious and the
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depth of the collective unconsciousness and you know the way Jung worked with most of his dreams which is how he found he you know he went on this journey without a guide.
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Yeah. External guide but he had internal guides and Bill writes about in his latest book journey of soul initiation.
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He had his internal guides and he worked with the active imagination which is to treat every entity in the dream world and in the world as its own autonomous person and to interact with them. And so part of it is like being in conversation with
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the land. That's a different mode from most westerners. Listening and speaking as if it's sentient, has its own life.
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Same thing with dream characters. We do soul centric dream work at the Animus Valley Institute and also with visionary states, which is like being in close to them, being close to them and seeing if there's communication that wants to
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happen. kind of like in some psychedelic states. Yeah. When beings are speaking to you, whether it's Iawaska or the mushroom or some other part of your psyche or the world's psyche that just wants to have a conversation with you how to live
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differently, point out some things that you don't really see in your shadow, things like that.
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Um, and then there's sometimes there's aspects of oursel that show up as guides that can open us up into what we call the windows of knowing. openness and Jung would call these you know the different kinds of functions of the
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psyche sensing imagination thinking feeling those kinds of things that there's characters within us that help round out our personality we might say because most of us raised in western society are encouraged and celebrated for thinking and most of us are very suppressed in
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being emotionally intelligent especially as young boys like don't cry be a Yeah, that's true. Yeah.
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And we've lost a lot of our senses. Not just our gut sense, our interosception to know what the vibe of the moment is, but also the sense of smell and long distances and hearing, right? Because every we're so much
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inside and on our screens and with earplugs in and stuff, we've lost a lot of our senses.
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And so like in psychedelic states, a lot of these things come back. That's why it's so powerful. Images, emotions, embodiment, senses. You're like, woo, this is the way the world could be, right?
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And so this is part of what our guides help round out our personality or the language he uses, cultivate our wholeness. Cultivate our wholeness and to help us kind of live from a place of wholeness, which is not too often found in western
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psychology, not at all in psychiatry. Right? Psychiatry is about symptoms, disorders treatment. I wish your background. So this was like also on that level like I was challenging everything I understood.
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Yeah. Like a fundamental paradigm shift. But it sounds as if you could sort of like surrender to that uh new reality you had experienced like easily or did it sort of go with struggles mental like am I am I getting
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crazier? No, because it felt like most psychedelic states feel real more real than real.
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That was it. And have you also had like a lot of psychedelic experiences, Brian.
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Yeah. And it's is it sort of the same experience? Very much so. I'd say nature and psyche and visionary states, they happen anywhere.
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And there's many pathways to kind of eco awakening and like the you know the French I think it was French anthropologist Marcia Eliad like 60 years ago described the techniques of ecstasy that shamans use.
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So all of these techniques are in the world to help us shift consciousness to connect with ourselves to each other to nature and to mystery.
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Yeah. And the ones he identified, you know, coming out of Africa were like rhythm and dance. Those are the fundamental ways that we shifted consciousness. Then there was music, singing, chanting, fasting, all these things.
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So it's it's very rich if you think about it. what we have uh the techniques the toolkit we have and I just only to use that toolkit but um at a conference like this is very much sort of um also
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now bringing in western science to study these and I and sometimes that's a good thing and sometimes it can also be sort of like sure hindering but I'm I'm curious from like your p um um your your background
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how um I mean in psychedelics we know that these substances uh will sort of tune down the default mode network which is sort of like about the story of self and then these things happens what happens during these nature
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quests I can imagine it's something of that kind I think it's very similar you stop eating so that does something if you fast yeah so let me describe the way that we guide a ceremonial wilderness fast would be helpful because this is the next
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program I did with animus on my journey um and so part of what's important about why I experienced this mystical experience it It's held in a ceremonial container.
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When I go on a mountain bike ride, it's not a ceremonial container, right? I pack my bag, I get ready, I'm making sure I have my first aid kit and I'm in shape.
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Yeah. Letting know people when I'll be back, etc. Protein bar. Yeah. But it's not ceremonial.
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No. And it's mostly physical. It makes me feel good. I love being in nature rather than around a drum or something like that.
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Yeah. But it's very different than a ceremonial thing which already shifts your consciousness. To be in a ceremony moves you into the possibility of mystery coming to you.
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Ceremony is the language of mystery. Okay. Yeah. And on the first program we also had soul poetry offered which shifts your consciousness. We sat around a fire and spoke deeply from our heart which shifts your consciousness. And listening to
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others without thinking about what you want to say shifts your consciousness. Dreaming shifts your consciousness.
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Talking to canyons and lizards and crows when it's not normative for you, that shifts your consciousness. So you get really altered 3 days in and beyond. So the techniques of ecstasy that we use, we call them soulcraft practices that
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Bill and the other guides have kind of crafted by looking at the deeper structure of how to shift consciousness.
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How do we do this for people raised in westernized societies? So to go back to fasting, so the vision fast, the amlichea fasting is a pancultural practice to shift consciousness. So it was often done for adolescent boys who needed to discover who they were and
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come back to the village with the gift that the village needed. So that's one way to understand that. But walkabouts were like that in Australia for the Aboriginal peoples. All these different cultures had ceremonial passages for women but mostly for men because the
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adolescent masculine is a very dangerous force to let go into the world. We'll come back to that too. Okay.
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Interesting. Yeah. So on a vision fast um the moment you sign up is when it begins like four months ahead of time for me it's like when you know it's time to walk away from who you've been. So
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the ceremonial wilderness fast is really a death practice. It's a ceremony of death. It's a celebration of who you've been and telling mystery I'm willing to sacrifice everything I've been to discover what's coming next for me. And the way that we
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offer it it's not just a right of passage. It's in a particular stage of development in order to have what we call a soul encounter which means the ego is dissolving even more than in a psychedelic state. It will not come back
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to its former form. It's done. It's done. When you're back the ego you were you're like literally transformed.
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Yeah. Let me go a little bit further. So we're doing practices of severance. Honoring who we've been honoring my career. I took one of the things we do is a particular ceremony called the fire ceremony which is a ceremony of offering
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something that you'd like to hold on to but you know if you hold on to it might hinder the depth of your vision fast.
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So I took my CV like 34 pages and I turned it into a chair like my endowed chair. On the seat of the chair, I put a heart that I made out of construction paper with glitter because I wanted to find my heart too in
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a [clears throat] certain way. And when it came my turn to offer something into the fire, I offered gratitude for my life as a psychiatrist and a pediatrician and an educator and a clinician and a researcher.
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And I said, "Mr., if you want it, it's yours." And I burned it in the fire.
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It was an act of um surrender, trust, knowing I may not get this back and maybe taken from me. Maybe mystery doesn't want me in academics. There was a part of my ego that says I can do both
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of these things. Yeah, I can be an endowed chair and a wilderness guide and know who I am.
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So, anyhow, I offered that. And so it's really about how to become a hollow bone by giving up on your fact that you know what you're here to do.
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You are in the first half of life, but you have to wander into these mysteries and to offer that you can't figure it out. It can't come from the head.
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It can't come from listening to lots of podcasts either. I just have to name that it comes from the experiential and ceremonial act of offering yourself as food to mystery.
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The Asencia Foundation exists to share with the world that consciousness is fundamental in our universe. It's our essence, our essencia. This worldview is known as non-jewism or idealism. And not only is it more compatible with modern science, it also gives deep meaning to
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our lives. [music] Once you decide that you're going to find out, the world will present you the next step to do. We are a nonprofit that relies on donations [music] and your membership would really help us to continue and grow this
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or not, I really want to thank you for watching our videos and for all the love that we've been receiving for the last couple of years. Thank you so much. What fascinates me in in all of this and and
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and is the notion of of soul and that you apparently have an inner guide as you say.
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Yeah. Um, and how this compares in in getting back indeed to to Jung who sort of like gave it back to us where I think in Western think we were losing that sort of that notion of anime or
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animas uh which is very much the name of of your your uh institute and compared to uh eastern traditions that also will tell us to deattach but they sure I'm just curious how that relates because they do not have in in what I've
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read such a strong notion of soul. Yeah, they don't. That's true. So, what's the difference there? And yeah, and it goes maybe back to maybe a um shamanistic understanding of the world, which is, you know, out of Africa and
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out of, you know, certainly North Americans, Southern America, is that we live in three worlds of consciousness. Obviously, there's many more, but three primary worlds of consciousness. We live in the consciousness of ego which is our everyday ego that you know Freud and we're both
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writing about and you and I are talking from y in a particular way which helps us function in what we would call middle world consciousness where we love and work and get wounded and help others etc. Yeah, that's middle world consciousness. Then
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there's upper world consciousness which is primarily what eastern traditions are helpful at us accessing suchness, emptiness or even in Christianity divine love.
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Yeah. Oneness with everything. That kind of unitive upper world consciousness that I and one I am one with everything. Yeah.
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Or like Christ said, I and the father are one. These are all experiences of upper world unit consciousness that everyone has access to and that they all feel very similarly.
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Then what the shamans know and what Jung knew and what we're reimagining is underworld consciousness which was called hell by Christians because they didn't want you to go there because you might throw overthrow the patriarchal priests.
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Okay, this is interesting stuff. Okay. Yeah. So the underworld consciousness is the realm of the dead, the ancestors and soul.
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And um you have to go on a descent to soul rather than ascent to spirit.
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So there's a particular you can always ascend to spirit once you're an adolescent continue to meditate and psychedelics might connect you to that but there's a particular developmental stage where you're actually ready for the descent to soul and that's what we specialize at animus
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and the way we do it is similar except we're not heading toward the light we're heading toward the dark we're not heading towards spirit we're heading towards soul and the way I would define soul is something like it's
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what's absolutely unique only about you. So if you're one with everything, there's also something really unique with that about you that's different than your persona, your ego persona in the world.
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And one way to name soul, Bill would call it your ecological niche. Uses a biological term, which means you're in this is how you're best in relationship with everything.
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Yeah. You're in unique position ecology of Yeah. your puzzle piece to the fabric of the massive puzzle of the world or your unique part of the cosmos that no one else can do and it's just yours to do.
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And if you discover and live that the rest of your life, you've will fulfilled your destiny from the soul's perspective.
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And if you don't, you're living an ego fate. And I I'd say sort of the the I find all of this beautiful.
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Yeah. also buzzling from like the perspective of like bringing in sort of like what we know from neuroscience or psychology that when you have these uh transcendent experiences whether on psychedelics or in nature quests um they stay with you but also that ego
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reboots. Sure. And yeah, as you just said, it's bringing stuff into the fire and it dies. To what degree is it still in you and will it still?
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It always comes back. It always comes back. Well, let me let's go back to the ego a little bit.
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Um, the ego is not really the problem. An immature ego is a problem. And what I mean by immature ego is something that's really wounded.
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And so that's a lot of people in Western culture. And what I mean by wounded, it has inner critics that run the show all the time. Has parts of yourself that get wounded and get pricricked all the time.
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Yeah. Or it has habits of addiction or escapism. or it has so much of yourself you've repressed in your shadow that you don't really know who you are.
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So a lot of people come from that kind of place when they reach 18 or 21.
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They're primarily in what we would call the protectors. So this is part of our work too. We call it wild mind work. And it's kind of like people know internal family systems from Dick Schwarz. This is like a nature-based transpersonal
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internal family system of archetypes, windows of knowing, qualities of love that are assigned to each of the directions based on what we've witnessed.
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So, a lot of the work that we do is help mature the ego. And part of it is to get to a place where it becomes the ecological ego.
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That's the egocentric part. And the ego knows how to do things in the world.
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It's really good at doing things in the world. You're doing this because you were a journalist and a great interviewer and a nice guy and very curious. That's part of your ego and my persona. I play it.
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And your persona playing it. Yeah. And also probably not unrelated for what you'll be called to do in your soul work if you keep going.
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I hope so. And uh but the soul knows what's worth absolutely doing in this lifetime.
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But it doesn't know how to manifest anything. That's that's what the ego is for.
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Yeah. This is the marriage of the soul and the ego. So at the moment of soul encounter, the ego running the show is kind of over. Now the best thing is for it to become an agent for soul.
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Yeah. It's like a good advice over the lousy king. Very similar. Yeah. And so it's kind of like the master and the emissary a little bit.
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That's the one you're in. Exactly. And I like Yeah. I find this beautiful and it it it's sort of this ying and uh perspective on how we uh on the journey in life, what we are called to. And you have um what I
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found interesting um it also relates to this uh notion of the thespian right in Bill Plotkin has his eight stages yeah eight stage we don't have to go through all of them but I what what I found interesting is that most of us if I'm
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not mistaken remain stuck in what we just discussed this persona my role especially when we're very good at it because then the world just keeps confirming us just keep on playing you're doing great you know and and then
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there's this voice you had I sometimes sense that voice as well, but then you're scared, you know, because what's what's out there? And I'm I'm curious that transition. So that's you guys call it the thespian, the actor, the persona,
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the role player. Yeah. And it's not there's nothing wrong with it like our stages of development we have to go through. You can't skip stages.
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So right in psychosocial theories of development, your childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and elderhood. Yeah. Right. And we're taking a little different take on that.
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In our model, there's two adolescence, two phases of adolescence. One is your first stage of adolescence, which we call the thesbian at the oasis. And what is important there is that you live authentically in the world.
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Yeah. You choose a profession, relationships, way you show up in the world that's authentic to you and also serves the world.
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So, you can't really be a dictator and be a good one, right? or a drug dealer or something like that. Maybe psychedelics is a different thing. Not really a drug dealer, but uh authentic and serve the world. That's what I was
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talking about. When I loved being a psychiatrist and then when this moment came where I was authentic enough, I moved to the next stage of development which isn't biological.
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Adolescence is biological. We go through puberty. Yeah. The next stage is a psychosspiritual shift of development that's not on Eric Ericson's map of human development. Okay. And we call this passage confirmation that you've done enough from the ego's perspective
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and being authentic enough that it's time for you to go into the mysteries of nature and psyche. And what's best in a healthy culture, there'd be elders and initiates initiators looking looking for signs of you kind of the fire for your
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life burning out, you being ready. They say they're they're watching you. Yeah. and they'd say it's time to come into the mystery school or go into the right of passage or something. We don't have that.
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Yeah. Unfortunately, what we have are a lot of psychiatrists who medicate. And and the fun thing, Brian, I'd say we go to cinema to see these stories because we we we we immersed we love it when we see it on screen and we eat our
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popcorn and Exactly. That's what it's sort of like. We do. That's the hero's journey in a certain [clears throat] way. And in some ways, it's similar, but it's also really different.
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Okay. Yeah. because uh you may not come back celebrated by your people as a hero.
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Yeah. But you know what you're here to do now. So let me go a little further here. So uh the thesbian at the oasis which is really about being authentic in the world. That's and it's also about sex
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and safety and security. That's also part of it and a place of belonging. But then the fire burns out for that stage of life. And then you hear the voice that you're done or your life collapses or I I have to be honest with
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you like 20 people came up to me after my talk and says I thought I'd be doing this the rest of my life but what you said really resonated with me. I feel like there's something else being asked of me.
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And I'm like oh yeah could be you're ready to cross into the mysteries of nature and psyche.
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Yeah. And so in a ceremonial healthy nature-based culture, they'd be taking you out into the social the psychosspiritual practices of that community and helping you dissolve who you've been.
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Yeah. Learn how to resource yourself in the wild because it's a lot about solitude in a conversation with mystery and nature.
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Yeah. And then they're hoping and praying that you will have a mystical encounter with your deepest identity.
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That's what we call soul encounter. Yeah. And that's not a guarantee. So the elderly would be praying for you hoping that to happen. It's not a sort of it's of course nothing nothing you can force.
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You can't force. The best way is to be vulnerable and filled with longing and grief that you don't know how to serve the village anymore.
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That there's a unique gift that you were born for that you have to be mature enough to go discover by leaving your attachment to who you've been. That's why it's so tricky because in our culture we're trying to hold on to
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everything. Like we get insurance for everything. Yeah. Right. Would you say that that in our culture there are quite some people at this stage in development so they're authentically serving the world around them and they feel the calling but then
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there's just not a culture to embed that and lots of them and then you of course get if you stay you hear the calling you do you keep going on then you get depressed right I guess you can sort of like
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yeah or people do all kinds of things they leave their partners thinking that's the issue oh yeah let's start another another persona let's different job, right?
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I also think that's why many people are going to psychedelics is because there's a longing. They know it's sacred. They know it requires a shift of consciousness.
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It's not necessarily about healing for some, but they don't have the teiology of soul for people to understand.
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Yeah. Just kind of like, well, what is a life for? Is it all about healing? Right. And sometimes the western psychedelic community gets stuck in healing. that it's all about healing all your wounds.
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Well, I have a thousand wounds. They're not that interesting to heal. It's more important for me to heal the ones that needed healing that keep getting tricked into. But it's more important for me to live for my wholeness and from my deeper niche
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and to love the world and to offer myself with a kind of a delivery system of that serves me bringing my gifts to the world. And so that's what happens after soul encounter. It's this experience of your deepest identity. It's a metaphor
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too. So I'll share Bill's here because he writes about it in Soulcraft and all his other books except for Wild Mind.
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So Bill is similar to me in the sense except he got there earlier. He was like 30 and he was on a a mountain peak. I think he was in winter in western Massachusetts and he just knew he was
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done being a psychologist studying an honorary states of consciousness. So he moved west, retrained as a psychotherapist, and then he heard about a vision fast thing and talked to a couple of people who were doing that.
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And then he found himself on a mountain in Colorado enacting his own ceremonial wilderness fast by himself, no guides.
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And I think the story is in about day three, he was sitting by a lake and there was a tree, green pine tree, bent over that looked like a Zen monk. He was hanging out with that one. And then all
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of a sudden he noticed coming across a field there was like a butterfly moving as butterflies do and then it brushed his cheek and right as it brushed his cheek he heard the words cocoon weaver.
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Then he wrote that down in his journal and then a couple minutes later it like hit him. Oh maybe that's what I've been waiting for. Cocoon weaver.
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What's a cocoon weaver? Right. Yeah. Over time, researching butterflies caterpillars Bill eventually realized that maybe his deepest identity in his niche niche was to weave cocoons of transformation for his people. That's what he's been doing for 50 years now.
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He weaves cocoons of transformation for his people through these ceremonial practices, through these programs, these wilderness fasts, and also his books. So when you read the book, you're kind of getting woven up in a cocoon where you eventually might dissolve because our
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lives are not to be meant as a caterpillar. So here's another metaphor. Caterpillars go through molings like three to five molings where they shed their skin because they've eaten too much, right? They're consumers. Yeah. As we are.
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Then it comes a phase. It feels like it's weaving a or a it's molting, but it's not.
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It's transforming. It's weaving a chrysalis or a cocoon, which is actually where the caterpillar goes to die.
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As soon as it's done weaving the cocoon, these catalytic enzymes begin chopping up begin chopping up this one, this caterpillar, until it becomes its elemental form. And then there's these things which biologists wisely call the imaginal cells. I kid you not, the
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imaginal cells which begin putting the caterpillar into a new form which is the true adult form because caterpillar is not supposed to be a caterpillar its whole life. It's supposed to be a butterfly or a moth and the moth is the imago. That's the
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word for the adult form of the butterfly. So it's a very similar thing for us is that we go through different molings in our adolescence and early adulthood of okay I was a Christian now I'm a Buddhist I was a virgin now I'm
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not now I'm employed now I live in this country these are all big psychosocial shifts that feel more authentic but then it comes time for a psychosspiritual shift where we have to die to who we've been and then eventually
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when we're ready we open our wings and we become a pollinator of culture, not a consumer of goods.
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Yeah. Beautiful. Yeah. It's beautiful. Also, as a good metaphor. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. And then you earlier said the danger especially with young men remaining in adolescence, caterpillars that just keep on eating.
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Yeah. That's then of course the image, right, in our culture. Um wounded caterpillars that keep on eating.
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Yeah. Wounded also. Yeah. That Yeah, exactly. But um what fascinates me is to what degree we also mentioned Jonah which to me is also like personally I love that story in the Bible also because it ends so somewhat open-ended
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in the end he does listen to God but he still is somehow it's a fascinating story but Jonah doesn't listen and he ends up in the belly of the wheel. So eventually the calling if you don't listen it will sort
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of like make you listen in a sense you could argue and I'm curious how that sits with your work to what degree can we just this whisper this calling can we just ignore it and will it come shouting
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and just take us a great question what we're trying to do at the Animus Valley Institute is to guide um people who are prepared so we help people prepare for this journey some people just drop into this stage of
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consciousness and it's terrifying. They're not resourced. They're wounded. They don't know what's happening. Like Jung, Jung wasn't that wounded, but he didn't know what was happening him. He was flooded with all these images, right? He was overwhelmed.
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He thought he was going psychotic actually. And he might have been in today, he might have been medicated by someone who said, "Oh, you're psychotic or you're manic or something like that." When in fact, he's just in a different
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stage of development. And so the question becomes um if we hear the call what happens if we don't respond.
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Yeah. Partly most of us don't know what the call means right because we don't know that this is part of the journey of a life is to live a full spectrum life which means uh a healthy ego connection to spirit and
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also have gone on this descent and journey of soul initiation here and uh so uh it may not ever come back so may not ever come back and many people let's just say I don't know if too many people hear it my guess is
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Maybe 5% or 10% of people might hear this call over their entire life. Yeah.
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Most people live in this egocentric adolescence the whole life which just goes in other phases.
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Yeah. Actually, so it's kind of like um in Bill he shows a different model in his book nature and the human soul. The egocentric eventually like you capitulate to your dreams and your longings and you just stay in the
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system. You get promoted, then you get put into upper management, and then you retire.
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From the soul's perspective, that's absolute failure. Which is why so many people when they retire get depressed because they're not living an eco soulcentric life. They're living an ego anthropocentric life. And would you say uh Brian that in in u in the west now in
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search of meaning the meaning crisis we experience also young people experiencing that turning east meditation mindfulness psychedelics that's all what you talk about that's that vertical dimension upwards to towards spirit psychedelics can do both.
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Ah yeah for sure they're also a soul craft practice if done in a ceremonial container with a particular intent.
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Yeah. Is there a hierarchy of what needs to be done first? like do we need to first go to the soul before we can go to the spirit? Uh how's that?
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We're not thinking about now now we're speaking of it thinking about Christianity. Christ when he dies he goes to hell you know.
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Yeah that's soul stuff. Um yeah one way to name it which Bill and I'm kind of along for the ride with him is looking like how do we really shift culture? What's the thing we focus on here?
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And one of the things that we've come up with is that um westernized society actively suppresses human development.
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So I mentioned that a little earlier in our conversation here and it partly becomes that we don't know there's nature-based tasks of human development and we live in a sick society. So here's what I mean by that sick society.
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There are not true elders in the world. very few in books book and Bill's book nature and the human soul he interviews Thomas Barry I don't know if you're familiar with him who is a geologian or earth elder
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brilliant man who knew lots of other spiritual traditions and really realized that what primarily needs to happen is a deeper connection to the earth the dream of the earth some of his books etc he also interviewed Joanna Macy who
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you might have heard of this kind of ecosystems Buddhist who was a brilliant woman who lived her whole life in service to stopping nuclear weapons and to connecting to earth. She started the work that reconnects.
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Um these are true elders and because they primarily their primary place of belonging was earth but they also went on this journey also without guides. So you don't have to have guides at the Animus Valley or other guides. You can
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find your way in. Um, we also don't have very many authentic adults, which is a different definition, which we might get to. And we have a lot of unhealthy adolescence. And probably where it really begins is in childhood.
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We fail to support the nature-based task of development in childhood. And what I mean by that is that children in nature-based cultures and healthy westernized cultures are encouraged to explore wild nature often on their own.
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You know, 5-year-olds, you know, when I grew up, I was in the ditch behind the house for hours, exploring the snakes and the croads and the cattails and, you know, splashing water on people and all this kind of
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stuff. and we had a cabin in the mountains and I'd go out for the whole day and then come back at dinner. Um, and we have helicopter parenting. We have fears of what might happen and we have a lot of recreation trying to get
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kids into sports so they can get a good academic or a sports scholarship to college etc.
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Yeah. Yeah. But we've really forgotten that what's really important for children is access to wild nature and their own exploration of it by themselves or with each other just to discover the wonder of it all.
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Yeah. That's one of their gifts. The second thing that we suppress is um children's understanding of emotions. They're wild emotions. We often talk them out of their emotions rather than talk them in and mirror and label help them
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understand why they feel these emotions and what it tells them about what they're feeling. We're not really good at that. We're really emotionally illiterate and also experientially like we don't know where emotions live in our body.
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Often when men I'm guiding I'm like, "Well, what do you feel?" They're like, "I think I feel." I'm like, "No, what do you feel and where do you feel? It's a really different thing." So, we mostly live in our heads. Okay.
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Yeah. The other thing that we suppress is our imagination, our spontaneous musings and wonderings and all those kind of things that, you know, my kids when they were four, they're like asking me 10,000 questions a week. What is the moon? What
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does a bumblebee do? You know, and kind of just imagining of who I might be when I grow up. And when I was growing up, I heard after a while, oh, it's just your imagination. So, I shut it down,
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thinking, oh, it's like fantasy. And in fact, imagination is probably one of the most important aspects of our psyche um individually, but also collectively on how we might get through what's coming, this crisis of meaning, this crisis ecologically, this societal
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collapse. We're going to need access to all of our faculties, but especially our emotions, our uh bodies, which was the fourth one I didn't mention. We don't know how our bodies work or how we feel about them, right? Where it's like, yeah, it's just
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for running and things like that, but we don't explore them much. So that wisdom of imagination, body, and emotion and connection to wild nature is really suppressed by our educational and our parenting practices. That's a lot of what we do on some of our foundational
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programs is connecting people to these windows of knowing we call them. So we're talking about um why the way the world is now with suppressed human development, patholescence is one of the terms we use, egocentric, anthropocentric. A lot
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of it has to do with what's happened to parenting and what's happened to children that they get suppressed early and they lose this egocentric consciousness and they lose their faculties and they become primarily people that think and watch rather than
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using all their senses, all their bodies, all their emotions, all their imagination. So some of the things we're doing at the Animus Valley is like remedial work from childhood to cultivate these archetypes, these windows of knowing, our senses, our
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body, our imagination, our emotions. And there's a lot that we've suppressed. And so like on psychedelics where a lot of these things come out like you're surprised at the sematic states or the sensations or the emotions or the
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images, that's what happens on in nature too. people might discover great grief or great joy or aeros all these different kind of things happening here.
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And you mentioned how um it sort of the calling to to to to wander and to go on this soul quest um requires sort of like have sort of in a sense stable people who are already living authentic life.
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Yeah. reflecting on that critically when I uh come across sometimes just whether it's on LinkedIn or people promoting I can often see sort of this wilderness quest of of men doing it and I there's also this image of just like it's a
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privileged thing to do for like business leaders or let's go on a soul quest and it often costs thousands of dollars and has a sort of like you know it's um and people critique it and I can sense that
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critique as sort of a privileged thing to do um how can this also benefit benefit people who don't have the money, who are wounded in a city, don't who don't have access to nature.
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Yeah, it's heartbreaking. Yeah, heartbreaking the lack of access to nature. And so there's a couple of answers here is um the one way I would think about um the privilege part because I'm privileged too. I grew up in an upper
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middle class white family in America, physician, white male. It's a lot of privilege, right? Yeah.
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And to whom much is given, much is required. To whom much is given, much is required.
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And so there's something here. It might even be hopefully self-regulatory that to whom much is given, those who go on the vision fast, if they're guided compassionately and fiercely enough, they'll realize that their life is not their own. Mhm.
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Their life has been given to them by the earth and mystery and it's meant to be of wild service to the more than human world and the human world. That's what this journey is really about is discovering unique way of loving the
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world, giving your gifts which help transform the culture. So it helps transform the culture from kind of this technoindustrial dominator culture to a lifegiving ecoentric soulcentric kind of culture.
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Um, so I don't know what other people are doing on vision fast or if it's more like drinking beer out there in the wild [snorts] or I assume they're doing good things primarily healing father wounds, military wounds, all these kinds of
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things. I don't really know but I know what we do and it's to discover how to be of ultimate service to the world.
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Yeah, something like that. So the other part is like the great disparity in opportunity is one way to name it of nature and also spiritual exploration right it's a huge issue which is one of the reasons I got interested in
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psychedelics because psychedelics can quickly bring you into these altered states of consciousness like yeah how many people can take eight days off of 11 days off from work buy camping gear fly across the country buy food get a rental car come out to one of our
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programs. Not many. Yeah. You're honest about that. Oh, absolutely. And it's heartbreaking to me.
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Yeah. And so I got interested into psychedelics. How can psychedelics also help eco awakening?
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How can they help cultivating wholeness? Yeah. How can they prepare people for the descent to soul? How can they help people have a soul encounter? Um and we also know that like I'll just name this on a side like Manver Vir Singh is here
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the anthropologist from UC Davis right he talked about actually not all nature-based cultures had these psychedelic medicines had these sacred medicines maybe 6% did the rest had all these other techniques of ecstasy which mostly western cultures and Christianity and other things have
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destroyed um and we're in dire straits so let's just name that so psychedelics offer a they democratize sort of this experience in a sense because as you say that is in in of course is prohibited in many countries but I mean the
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mushrooms just plants it's that's not cannot be like an expensive thing and just you need like any piece of nature and then you can have the experience I find that beautiful and hopeful but of course you need to sort of guide that and then we
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get back to sort of that a culture that doesn't have Yeah, perhaps enough elderly people, elders like wisdom, wisdom can keep and hold that space. So that and I think that it is interesting and and hopeful that there's now in the research community in
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psychedelic research sort of so much focus on therapists like educating good therapists, right? But so what are your thoughts there on on how to train more people to guide other people? Yeah, it's an really important question because we don't really have a
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lineage too much of guiding people into the mysteries, right? There were mystery schools obviously in Greece.
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You know, there's probably lots of hidden mystery schools around Western cultures, mostly run by women.
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Um, psychedelic and otherwise that don't advertise, so to speak. Um, part of the answer is uh twofold, maybe three-fold. We'll see how many we end up with here.
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Um, I'm trying to bring some of our maps and models of this journey of soul initiation and these three worlds into the psychedelic world so that they can be formed that life is not just about healing. that there is
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this possibility of connection to spirit which many people on psychedelics experience but there's also this possibility of going on the journey of soul initiation all the way through to become a true adult and to offer your gifts to the world through a delivery
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system whatever that might be and that might be sorry to interrupt you but just because you sat it's not all about healing relating it back to Jung that maybe we're at our most value to the world around us if we are a wounded
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healer right that in a we're all wounded healers. Yeah. So, but that that entails that we to a certain degree keep our wounds like we we go away.
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Yeah. And well, we can go there in a little bit here. Like um a wound's not a mistake.
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Sacred wound is not a mistake [clears throat] actually. It might be related to your core vulnerability and also your core powers.
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And that's what shamanic dismemberment is partly about. And it's also what he superheroes are about. Right? If you know superheroes, they often have a deep wound in childhood which allows them to find their superpowers.
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So these are archetypal things here we're talking about of the human. Um and so part of it is kind of how do we show up in the world? Partly I'm here to kind of be a secret agent for soul.
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Yeah, I kind of look like a psychiatrist and a little bit of a wilderness guy, but it's like I really want us to understand what's really possible in a full human life. It's not just healing.
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It's not just feeling one with everything. It's about finding our unique way to love self, other humans, and the more than human world is an act of service in the unique way that we can.
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And for me, just me personally, a lot of that has to do with guiding these wilderness programs. It's what I'm here to do. When I'm out there, I'm fully alive. I feel full alive. I know I'm serving people. I feel powerful and
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humble and grateful. People feel altered. I just like this is my niche is that's part of it.
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Yeah. And I knew that from the moment I read Soulcraft. I like I think that's what I was trying to do instead of go to medical school and psychiatric training.
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The second thing that I discovered later in the journey was like, "Oh, these sacred medicines, this is also part of what I'm here to do, which was a big surprise to me because I was terrified of them." Being raised a good Christian,
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a good physician, not wanting to break the law, not wanting to lose my medical license, all these kind of things.
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And then after I began hearing stories and then exploring them, eventually some of them said, "This is the medicine.
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Guide me." And I was like, "Oh, that's interesting." But I'm mostly here, I think, to marry the two worlds of the soul craft practices and current psychedelic community to put psyche back into psychiatry.
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Something like that. That we've lost. Psychiatry is mostly about suppressing the ego's wounds. Something like that. That's what it's evolved into. And now there's an opportunity with nature and psychedelics to really shift the conversation from wounds and symptoms and disorders to cultivating
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wholeness to live in ceremony with each other and the world in nature. Yeah. And to discover a unique purpose. That's more like what a shaman does.
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And I'm not a shaman by any means. I'm in a different lineage. Um but it's a very different way to think about it. What we're doing at Animus [clears throat] is helping people find their magnificent ways to love the
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world. That's partly what the soul is. It's not this other thing of looking for problems everywhere and having 3,000 different diagnoses with different codes. That's not what the world is should be.
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Um, yeah. I'm curious about so far with talking about like young man like historically in these communities that would would sort of make this retulthood.
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Um me myself I'm I'm fascinated beyond gender and the archetypes of the the male and the female and also when we relate it to sort of the the the spirit and the soul I'd say the the spiritual upward um is
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more the realm of the mill I mean in eastern thinking Shiva would be like it's the all the whole everything but it needs form it needs sort of bi to to to bring about existence and and getting back
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into the soul to me resonates also as um the feminine. It's the the womb of you you mentioned yeah the womb of Gaia.
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Could you sort of elaborate a bit on that male female on this archetypal level?
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That's a great question. Uh I'm not an expert in this by any means. Let me just say that just curious what your experiences are.
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I mean also working with male I I suppose primarily men who go on these quests but yeah um yeah part of it is part of because of the culture we live in and patriarchy but also the fact that we suppress a lot
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of our emotions and I mentioned and our bodies and our imagination. So these are Jung would call them inferior functions in modern man men mostly in their heads and then they have explosions of emotions.
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Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. Rather than knowing, oh, I having emotion. Let me just sit with that for a second and where does that live in my body?
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Oh, what does that tell me about what's just happened here? Do I want to choose to act on what I'm feeling right now or was it just me?
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Yeah, something like that. So that's kind of maturing. Bill calls it emotional metabolism. And uh I'm getting better at emotional metabolism. It's like wondering, oh, I'm having an emotion. That's interesting.
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Where is that? Why did that come on now? So it's really slowing down and being more proactive and metabolizing experiences. And that's what emotions for. They tell us about what we value in a certain way. Um, and the other part of the masculine, we
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all need to cultivate wholeness, male, female, and those that are in between or both, something like that. We need to cultivate our wholeness. And we often like see emotion and embodied or imaginal is the feminine.
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And there's a couple reasons for that. One is it's less suppressed in women than in men. But also the inner part of a man is what might you be called his dark muse beloved anima. These are archetypal names for aspects of the self
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that hold some of these qualities actually. And so we might see it in others. We might see it in women and fall in love with them quickly because they have aspects of the self we've yet to develop. But they're actually a
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projection by which we have to realize, oh, that's within me as well. So that's part of the work of growing up is stop projecting the goddess onto women. Treat every woman as a goddess. Treat every man as a god humbly. But also to
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discover the inner ones of yourself that have aspects of yourself that you've suppressed and are part of becoming fully human. So that's one way to think about that in the same way. And the same thing this is what Jung called the anima and the ana
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anamoose. Anamoose for a woman who's primarily feminine. she needs to cultivate her relationship with her animus which might be more generative in the world something like that because women were not you know they were encouraged to be nurturing but not really
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generative. So all of it's really mixed up in our kind of postmodern culture right now where you know identities shift all the time and names shift all the time and the most important thing is to like um on
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this journey to discover these archetypes which often show up in dreams. Y Jung all of Jung's guides came on dream states and many of my guides came from me projecting it on others and then realizing it and then seeing it in a
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dream. It's like oh this thing that I saw was in that woman is actually in a dream and now it's within me.
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I have to develop a relationship again through active imagination and other practices of being in touch with my feminine.
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And you can maybe feel it right now. I'm a little softer because I can feel her within me right now. She's right there and she just loves that I'm here with you.
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Loves that I'm talking about the feminine as the guide for men. Yeah. Beautiful. Yeah. I can sense that, Brian. And that's sort of I already sense it when you were presenting a softness that felt grounded and whole because I also see a wilderness guide
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that will probably know what to do when when there's action to be taken. the things we associate with like masculinity and that's of course just something we pro project also into masculinity but I can sense that wholeness that softness
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and I I I love that and personally in rounding our conversation we started with the the the the marriage of the opposites right and again to sort of the the the animus anima is it yeah and also like the spirit the wholeness the
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oneness, the unity of it all, what sort of the the eastern traditions sort of have like gazillion of practices to get us there and then this more union quest.
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I'm just so curious where they where they can meet in our lives and is that for you a going going between those two or both at the same time like being grounded here the soul work and like I'm
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one I'm at all. Sure. Um, yeah, that's one of the potentials of a human lifetime, right? Is to have a mature initiated ego by the soul and to live from soul, but also know I'm one with everything. That would be a
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great place to be and to go on the full journey of a lifetime. I don't know if I'll make it all the way around this wheel to true eldershood.
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I'm getting closer. Um, but you never know, right? Um, and it might be also something I learned here. here. I learned quite a bit at this conference and it's where I would learn most is from the women and the
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indigenous and the people of darker skin because they've not had a place at the table in many cultures and many conversations in the west and here they're put foremost in there and they have a lot of wisdom that I don't know
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and I'm learning and I really appreciate that and one of the indigenous uh teachers who's who's both a um medical or a healer in her tradition but also a medical doctor was talking about a confluence and I just love that like where rivers meet
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but they don't blend. They just go side by side. M she was using this image from rivers where she's from and it feels like there's a confluence of lineages and traditions that together if we look closely we might realize how they are
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unique different but together they might make a whole and there might be things that our tradition is missing because of just our own conversation and what's happened and but we're in an evolution now where everything is coming together
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and with epistemic humility, we can say, "Well, this is my lineage and what's in your lineage that I can learn from and that we can do this together." And I think that's what we need to do, right? And I think
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part of the conversation for me is uh the indigenous are way the hell away uh ahead of us. They're far ahead of us in terms of their understanding of culture and of rights of passage and practices and community.
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We need to learn from them and we also have to respect them. We also don't need to take their medicines without asking permission and asking how should we use them and they also want to learn from us. So what do we know about biomedical
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science that could be useful to them? But there's also things I'd love to learn from other eastern traditions as well that I'm unaware of. And I'd love to share some of our things with eastern traditions that may not have exactly the
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same language, but maybe they're doing something like soul work, descent to soul, maybe not. So there's this possibility of the blending of all these traditions and worldviews and spiritual practices that we might be evolving possibilities of becoming full human in
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all the worlds, so to speak. And that's excites me. It's also terrifying where we are in the world right now. But I feel like it's possible if we bring all the wisdoms from all the different lands and all the different elders and the
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initiators and the scientists etc. we might find our way through what's coming. That's my hope.
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Yeah, that's nice that you bring it up. I wanted to ask you if you were hopeful and if that confluence that stream if those streams can more of them can get together then I sincerely hope that we we are on time to sort of be ready for
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what's coming. Um I I had just one more question one final question. So far it's been uh I know this must have been like a difficult route for you as well but I'm just curious where sort of uh but me personally on this journey I
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very often sense sort of the fear of the fire. You mentioned that offering that to the fire that we are attracted to it to the soul but we know something needs to to die and I don't want to be
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dramatic but where has the journey been like like like super fearful for you like the dark the dark night of the soul? Yeah, I'd say when it was time to leave academics.
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Yeah. Because I'm like, wow, it's time to leave. And then I realiz I g I'll just share a little bit more personally here. So after my vision fast, um I thought, well, what am I partly what is this one of me here to
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do? And part of it was putting psyche back into psychiatry. So my department chair, the one I had mentioned earlier, said, oh, we'd love to give you have you give a talk called grand rounds.
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You're very funny. You're usually very scientific. would you give one? I'm like, yeah, this one's going to be different. And what felt most authentically for in that moment was to give a talk called Putting Psyche Back into Psychiatry,
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which was very edgy and maybe a little dumb um but probably the most authentic thing I could do. So, I gave this talk um I never felt more alive than giving that talk. M I was pretty critical of psychiatry
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which led to some other things but I was also like fully alive and talking about myth and poetry and nature and what's really possible in human life and maybe we're not doing service. Maybe our worldview's a bit too small. Um and
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most of my colleagues thought I was losing my mind a little bit to be honest with you. Like what happened to Brian?
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What's this vision fast done to him? And all the arts and music therapists thought it was the best thing they ever heard in the department. Like, oh, he's one of us, right? And then after that, there was a bit of fallout, like, why
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are you so critical of what you're what we're doing here? So, I just realized that it was like uh what do they call it in divorce? Um, irreconcilable worldview differences. M I realized that I'd matured and gone beyond the western psychiatric
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worldview and I could no longer participate in that way of living in the world and that I had to find a deeper more authentic way of living in the world. It wasn't about helping people fit into a sick society but find their unique gifts
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to transform society to a earth-based culture. M so then I walked away and they were actually happy to see me go because they thought I was losing my mind.
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You know it's funny you mentioned I I I spoke to John John Perfect. He was also presenting at this conference and he he says it beautifully went that disillusionment like being disillusioned about an old worldview an old me
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uh and truly realizing that is a one-way ticket. There's no way back. Yeah. Yeah.
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And I guess that goes for your work and on these quests and on psychedelics or in meditative meditative states of unity. Once you've experienced that, there's no way back, right?
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There isn't. Yeah. You know, and I still think psychiatry does some good things for people who are really severely impaired.
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But the worldview itself probably inhibits human development. It inhibits human development. And that's one of the things that psychiatrists and researchers are learning that these disorders we've called like it's hard to find validity for them. And what many of the former
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directors of NIMH are saying is like well it's what what if it's really the default mode network that's overactive and that we call these things disorder but what happens is that we develop these strategies in childhood that get
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ingrained over and over and over again and that we can't break out of them even though we are supposed to be maturing and they need a shift of consciousness and what we need to do is to scramble the default mode network vision fast
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does that. Psychedelics do that. 24-hour solo fast does that enough so that deeper aspects of the self can come into consciousness and help us become more whole, connected to self, earth, other humans and the world as it is. So I
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think that's what psychedelics can really do for psychiatry. There's certainly some reason for psychoarm and some of these other bio and technological interventions but most people need support maturing actually and that model is just not in the psychiatric nomenclature or in the
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worldview or in the practice right now. Thank you so much for sharing this this wisdom and your views and how to integrate the opposites.
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Yeah, thank you for asking me. I really appreciate your curiosity and just your heart and your Yeah, thanks.
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Thanks for the invitation. Yeah, thank you. And u for you watching, we will share links down below in description to Animas work Brian is doing and also perhaps some other links you can provide us with the work of Bill
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Platkin. Yeah. And uh happy to read your comments and Brian, thanks so much. [music] Yeah, welcome. Yeah, thank you.
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It's good to see so many people here. I'll call you human nature earthlings, not just psychonauts, but good to see you here. Um, yeah, I'm a psychiatrist who went a bit wild actually at midlife. And uh, so I'm
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going to talk about something related to nature relatedness, but ecological awakening. It's a an experience a psychosspiritual experience that I experienced in the wild and also guide in the wild and also guide with psychedelics and uh it's I think it's a
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really important thing. So thanks for letting an American come to Europe. Okay. I don't have many um funders right now but I'm very grateful to this one as we all are. so dependent, so giving, so forgiving, so abundant, so imaginative,
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all these creatures. So my goal is to take a slightly different thing and talk about the collective problem is our primary disconnection from the earth.
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Disconnection from the earth. And then we'll go through a little bit of um the fact that it lives kind of in our shadow. We don't think about it. We don't think about it in the opening presentation which was wonderful. The
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climate crisis, the biological crisis was not named. The war against the earth is happening all the time and we have to put it out of our minds to actually survive sometimes. Okay, I'm going to give you two stories of eco awakening,
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not research stories. Hopefully, you'll be interesting and you'll get a sense of what I'm talking about. And then I'm going to be talking about what I call egocentric consciousness is what we're born into and we can only lose and sadly
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in my research probably 95% of children lose it by the time they're six. But there's a possibility of awakening to egocentric consciousness. Talk a little bit about other perspectives on this as well as the pathways there and another way to think about psychedelic
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healing. All right. What if the disorder of disorders was ecological disconnection? Like underlying almost all of it, underlying all of it. Just think of that kind of worldview shift. What if it's the disorder of disorders? What if it's
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the pathology of pathologies is what we live in now, this egocentric and anthropocentric consciousness that we don't know that we're as wild as every other thing on the planet. that everything is kin, that everything has consciousness, sensience is available
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for communion. Here's my hypothesis is that the majority of our collective problems as a culture or a society is because we're disconnected from ecoentric consciousness. It's suppressed. We've lost it. It's a slumber. We're like in an ecological slumber in a particular
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way. And this is our greatest wound. when in fact when we reexperience this it's an incredibly psychosspiritual mystical experience of our deepest place of belonging.
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Okay. So for some stories. So about 13 years ago and one month almost to the day um I had uh gotten a gift that I didn't really deserve. I had an endowed chair at like 42 which is like a big deal. And
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uh couple nights later, a voice said, "You're done." This one of those noetic voices, the voice of God, something like that. Maybe some of you will have that tonight. Um we can hope.
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[snorts] And I knew it meant that I'd probably have to leave academia and psych psychiatry and probably America.
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And there was right here in my heart like excitement and terror at the same time.
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And fortunately, I came across a book um shortly thereafter called SoulCraft by Bill Platkin. And then I did a program with them and I found myself in the southeastern Utah desert canyons here on a program called Soulcraft Journey where
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it starts out on the top of a canyon and we're sharing in a council and then we go into the canyon like we're going into the psyche and we're learning to listen different to perceive differently to open our senses our
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bodies our imaginations to let the dreams work us to talk across the species boundaries by being more than 3 days in. We were seven days in. And by day three, things began to shift. On day five, we had the opportunity to do a
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24-hour solo fast. And I found my way down the canyon. There was a ka nearby, which is a sacred place for the indigenous people who hadn't lived there for a long time. And one of the wounds I was trying to heal was how I always had
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to be good for my parents, for my teachers, for the Sunday school teachers. I had to be the good and the best. And I never had a person who just treasured me for who I was. Anybody resonate with that? Maybe some of you
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had grandparents. I didn't have any grandparents like that. So I saw this large juniper tree. He was a grandfather. He was a grandfather. I asked him, "Can I climb in your lap? Can you hold me while I weep?"
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He said, "Yes." He held me, made me feel love just for my integrity of who I am.
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That night I slept at the base of the gr of the grandfather tree and I woke up and beneath the moon, kind of a half moon and the night filled with stars, some owls hooting, right in front of me,
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about as far as you were, there was a woman, an indigenous woman. I was a bit confused because I knew they lived there for centuries, but they hadn't lived there for 800 years. And I just kind of stared at her. I didn't
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know what to do. And then she looked at me and with such soft eyes and a soft voice, she said, "Welcome home.
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I burst into tears. I'm one who spends a ton of time in nature. I was a skier, mountain biker, camper, fisherman, all those kind of things. I'd never had an experience like that. something about the set and setting and the work that we've been
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doing over there. I was a little worried about sharing this experience with my psychiatric colleagues like they might diagnose me with some sort of canyon psychosis. Lock me up, put me away.
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[snorts] But I knew it had changed everything that I could no longer go back to just thinking about myself, my family, my career, my politics.
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something had been wildly decentered and it was the human. What became the center of my consciousness with the earth and all her beings, local ecosystems, but also planetary.
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So that's one story. There she is. Here's a slightly different story. This is from a man I mentored who's a physician now a ketamine psych or ketamine ER physician. And this came from my mentoring for a couple years.
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And then one day I asked, "Have you ever had psychedelic experience?" He goes, "Yeah, I had a really weird one. You want to hear it?" And I'm like, "Yeah." And uh so he tells this story when he was 21. He and a bunch of friends drove
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from New York down to Virginia or West Virginia and they were at a Grateful Dead or a Grateful Dead cover band. And of course they brought LSD and he took a large dose and he was having a good time
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dancing and then he felt like something in nature was calling him to go out and above the stage. So he went above and behind the stage near where the trees were and he was just kind of taking in
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the music, the dancing, the trees, the cosmos and then something kind of coalesed and right in front of him there was a being.
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He didn't really know what it was, but it began chastising him. He didn't really know what to make of it, but he said he felt like it was a mother. Then he realized it was Mother Earth, actually. And she chastised him
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for not paying attention to Earth. And it was really interesting because when he was a young boy, his own mother often would chastise him about rules that he didn't know anything about. He felt horrible and ashamed because he didn't
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know what the program was. It was very similar to that. And right at that moment um something began miraculous began to happen. He began to feel the pangs of childbirth.
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He was pregnant and he was birthing something and he could feel his uterus kind of contracting and he could oh just feel the horror of this. And at the same time, he could feel himself in the dark of the uterus. And he could feel the
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contractions and the darkness as he went out down through the vaginal canal until he entered and he had rebirthed himself.
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And he said, "I rebirthed my ecological self." And now I pay attention to Earth because that's what's required of me.
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Totally changed his life. So this is what I'm talking about. This is an example of ecological awakening and I'm hoping all of you want to experience this if you haven't. Okay, ecological awakening. Here's a definition from my mentor and Bill
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Platkin, the v founder of the Animus Valley Institute. Uh ecological awakening is one of the first experiences and it's a mystical experience where someone raised in a westernized culture has their first mystical experience of belonging to the earth community
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that's undeniable like the two stories that I shared. It's just undeniable and after that what really becomes important is the vitality of the earth community.
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all life not just career not retirement fund not favorite football club it's earth and all her species okay so eco awakening it's different than knowing about gaia can we put it that way like all of us probably know about
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gaia but it's it's very different it's very somatic as you heard in that last story about be it's also very emotional overwhelming emotional in times like mine It's spiritual. It's like, "Oh, I never knew this was the way the world was. I
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never knew she was alive. I didn't know I belonged." It's very mystical and it's very imaginal. And the combination of this kind of um mystical experience changes people in a way that we haven't captured yet in the psychedelic or in other research. This
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experience is known well in like eco philosophy and deep ecology and wilderness guiding but it hasn't really hit so much the psychedelic space and that's why I'm here.
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Okay. It's not cognitive although it changes your cognitions changes your conscious conscience. Okay. So here's a definition here. Um, like Sam was talking about, sometimes if we have an experience like that and we're supported and we can go deeper, we
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move from a state of consciousness, an ecowakening state to a egocentric consciousness, which is again a return to our original consciousness.
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Every baby is born in eosentric consciousness. Healthy indigenous cultures never lose it. We often grow or we forget it here.
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Okay, here's some other perspectives on this experience. This comes slide comes from Paul Marshall and his great book on nature mysticism as I did a close reading and kind of came up with some other definitions. These are the kind of
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things that happen in an ecom mystical experience here. You feel like you're part of the unbroken whole of the earth contained and held. You are the world, right? Connected to everything and participating in the life of the source.
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It's an incredible experience. And that's part of what Sam was talking about is what we're one of the disorders we're living in is this disconnection disorder. Right? In the UK, they have a minister of loneliness.
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Minister of loneliness. But what if you knew you were connected to other humans, to yourself, to the earth, to the cosmos, to all the other species? Then wounds don't really matter so much. and social doesn't matter so much because
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you're connected to something so much more vast than you are. Okay, here's some other important things. Um, one of my understandings is that Western society is probably the most pathological society that's ever existed on the planet. This techno-industrial
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dominator culture mostly run by white men patriarchal um capitalistic likes to suppress the feminine, likes to subjugate the dark, likes to see the earth as a primary resource for what we want to do. That's called a path patholescent human being and a path
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patholescent culture. And that's what we're living in right now. patholescence here, right? And as I mentioned before, it's an artifact of being raised in western society. Indigenous people from intact cultures never lose this consciousness.
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They never lose it because the way they parent and the way that they live supports what we would call nature-based human development. Our models of human development are mostly psychosocial.
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Following up on Eric Ericson, didn't really know that there were nature-based models of human development that Bill Platkin and others in our organization have developed.
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Okay, here's a brief take again on anthropocentric consciousness. The human being is the most significant entity in the universe.
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It's pretty big universe to be saying that. Okay, we might need to humble ourselves, which reminds me of hum, which is part of earth and dirt.
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Okay. So, this is what's everywhere in our world. It's even in the psychedelic spaces, right? It's about human healing, not about human relationships with the wild. It's about human healing, healing our wounds. Sure, those are those are important things to do, but there's more
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than just healing yourself. There's deeper connection. And there's even more beyond ecological awakening. There's something called the journey of soul initiation, which maybe I'll talk about in two years.
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Okay. egocentric. Well, we know about this. This is my president right here. Like everything's about me, right?
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Everything's about me, right? And there's so many people in the world that that's still the case, right? This is what's everywhere as well, right? This capitalistic multinational corporations that are basically own everything, destroy everything, are hard to stop, rig the
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politics. This is what we're faced. So, this is a research conference and I'm hoping that there'll be a leap of consciousness here. A leap of consciousness as this one goes up the ladder back to its home waters. A leap
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of consciousness that maybe we should think a little bit different about who we are and how we're embedded into this earth.
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The absence of eco is everywhere as we've heard. Here's a psychiatry unit. There's a psycho uh psychedelic assisted therapy uh entryway, a church. We've gotten domesticated over our evolution.
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Let's remember a long time ago we climbed out of trees, then we began walking, then we began to specialize.
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And the more that we moved away from huntergather consciousness and into buildings and safety, we called it progress. But it was also more and more disconnect from the earth. So, it's kind of like if you had a compass and it was
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0.1 degrees off and you walked for 40,000 years. Think about how lost you'd be. That's kind of where we are.
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Okay. So, I've been researching this in some ways for consciously for 12 years. And as the psilocybin told me, you've been researching this your whole life.
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That's what you're here to do. Um, psychiatry psychology theology it's not in their models. The earth is not in its model at all. And in fact, that's just such a huge oversight and a fact of shadow that who we really are is
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that we're primarily embedded in this ecology here. And here's Albert Hoffman talking about kind of one of his ecommystical experiences when he was a child. Okay, they're common actually and we can facilitate more of them. Let's see here. Okay, this is where I go on my
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rant about Western society, but I think I've already done that. Okay, here's another thing. I mentioned this briefly at the beginning. Carl Young mentions, and this is more related to sometimes we think the problem's within the individual, but it's in the
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collective, but we can't see it because we were inculturated within the collective. It's a blind spot. It's in our shadow. And what we really have to do is take our psychotherapies and expand them as well. Like the previous
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speaker on psychotherapy was talking about, we have to expand our models. And we have to understand that most human problems are probably related to disconnect from ecoentric consciousness.
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Okay. Yeah, I'll wrap it up. Uh mystical experiences. There's many pathways to mystical experiences which you can see here. I've heard stories from people with all the medicines including ketamine who had eco awakening experience. I was really surprised. She
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had a ketamine assisted therapy session, was driving uh close to um Table Mountain in Cape Town and boom, it happened. Okay, so there's a lot of different experiences that can lead to that. These are some of the things that
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I do on my programs. We access nature, presence, emotion, the imagination. We emphasize what's happening on the climate and the world, the liinal time.
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It's in a ceremonial container. So, we really shift the set and setting. Okay, I'm just going to say imagine if we did something else. What if we didn't put all of this at the center? Like, yeah, those things are there, but what
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if we didn't put it in the center and we began to kind of move some of these things out and to begin to kind of evolve some of our disciplines because a discipline is not worth having if it doesn't include the earth. It's
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missing something important. Okay, here's where we are. It's a beautiful world. Most people don't get to experience that way. Yeah. Pay attention in a unique way of consciousness. Tell about it. Thanks.
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We get chairs now. You pull chairs up. [applause] Oop. Sorry, I went a little long.
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Nice. Are they Can we disconnect them? Oh, this couple of them are probably save time and stand. I'm just going to stand.
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Thanks for stopping me. I was really in the flow. Sorry, dude. [clears throat] Well, thank you so much everyone for such wonderful talks and such an important topic. I'm really really glad that ICPR are making time for this
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because it's incredibly important and it's criminal that none of you are getting paid which is is wild because it's super important. Okay, so a few questions for you based on that. So the first one is how can people meaningfully
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connect with nature when access to natural environments varies so widely? So for those who don't have easy access to forests, mountains or wilderness areas, what forms what forms and can a genuine connection with nature take? Uh we'll start off with uh Sam. [laughter]
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Um yeah, no, that's um I don't know if I'm coming through. That's a good and important question. Like firstly as you've sort of alluded to in the question it's important to like point out there is huge disparity in access to
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green space and uh natural environments unfortunately depressing depressingly and lower income groups tend to have less access to to quality nature on their doorstep in urban environments. uh and it's up to us as a you know as a
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society to um address that and in some quarters there are sort of steps being made. Um but yeah that inequality needs needs addressing and sometimes it's easy to think that cities are where there isn't much nature and the countryside is
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where there's more nature. depressingly again in somewhere like the UK that we're so nature depleted even in the countryside that sometimes the cities particularly the the parks can be actually surprisingly rich with nature and that's one of the nice things about
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London and some of the big cities is they do have parks that you are able to access nature and some of the nature connectedness research that's been done actually has focused on urban environments and there is nature to be
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found there and increasingly so like life is adapting to um our urban uh scapes and and environments. So um even in um bustling human centers, there is other non-human life to tune into and be be aware of. So I think we can be nature
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connected wherever we are in the world. And just riffing off that, so we're talking a lot about clinical trials, how to get nature into clinical trials. How would you ideally run clinical trials?
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So bearing in mind we can't just be in nature. So it's a randomized control trial. So we have to you know have everything to get it you know through the FDA or whatever it's going to be.
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How would you see clinical trials working in your ideal world in terms of nature connectedness?
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Um yeah that's I mean this is slightly outside of my wheelhouse. Can I maybe pass it over to you Brian?
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UCLA is doing this on a rooftop garden. So they have the ecological medicine initiative and to my senses that's what they're going to do. I've invited them to a botanical garden where I do a lot of my nature programs. But it's kind of
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a controlled environment but again it's the same question here. I think the thing is let's get these through first then let's expand where we practice like it's hard to get paid even as an ecootherapist or doing therapy outside
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of the office. So there's a very much a discrimination of these other kind of things. So I think we just keep pushing or we just do it underground.
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Okay. [laughter] I mean and another option is potentially where possible bringing bringing nature into the clinical space. I mean in at for instance at Imperial that was not feasible where they're administering the psilocybin because it was a it was a
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working hospital uh designed for immuno compromised patients the particular room. So you couldn't bring any plants or anything like that in. God know like maybe some photography and art uh of nature but I feel like there is a lot
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more we could be doing with biohilic design and sort of incorporating more non-human life into clinical spaces if we can't take people outside of clinical spaces.
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Awesome. Thanks. Can I just comment on that because I attended a workshop yesterday on grief and palative care and Human Press the Canadian doctor was there uh and they are now designing nature into their hospital settings making it more
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accessible. So for those of you who design hospitals, think along those lines, you know, think ahead and and plan for that, incorporate it to a greater extent.
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Beautiful. That's amazing. Actually, look more into that. All right. And now one for you, Brian, as well. So from the stories that you were telling us, it sounds like I don't want to make any assumptions, but it sounds like your
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perception of mother nature is is alive almost kind of like an animist perception. I'm not sure. Now, how much does it matter what your perception of nature is? So for many indigenous groups like the Shapiro that I work with, they
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have a largely animist perception of nature changes the way they interact with it. If you perceive nature just to be biological, does that is that less of a nature connection? Do you need to have that belief system? What what do you
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think of that? Yeah, it's a great question. Part of the challenge is like when we're in nature, we've lost so much like our senses are dialed down.
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And so one thing you can do actually in like parks is to help people get closer, slow down, [snorts] smell, touch, ask permission, act as if it is sentient and and kind of enter in that way. And with regard to the other question, it's
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like I would say eco awakening is part of it. It just goes eco deepening over time. It gets deeper and deeper and deeper in your connection to earth and her life systems and her the waters, the clouds, all these things do become
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animated because you're in a different state in the stage of consciousness. Um and also just to name that uh animists teach their children to be animus.
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So it's also a cultural phenomenon of helping them participate more fully in it. So when we can do it sometimes we teach people why don't you pretend as if it is this way and through pretending then it happens.
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Do you think it's the normative consciousness that we're born with? Eocentric. Yeah. Yeah. Uh animism. Yeah. Probably. I think animism is probably something that evolves uniquely in place um in peoples that have nature-based tasks of development complete and evolved
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cultures over centuries or longer. Uh animism just becomes the primary mode and it was not recognized obviously by missionaries or anthropologists or militaries when they entered these places because we're so disconnected from it. But I think that's where we can
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head back to and it's a great place to be. Beautiful. Thank you. Okay, now our final question before we hand over to the audience. I think we'll have enough for maybe one question. What are the potential consequences for humanity if
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we fail to recognize ourselves as part of nature rather than separate from it? How might this affect our psychological well-being, our social systems, and our relationship with the natural world?
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Let's start off with Cecilia, please. Yeah, thank [clears throat] you. So that's a really important question and and in I think we're in big trouble if we don't change how we see ourselves in the relationship to to our surrounding and
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and look at how we are in the world. We see, you know, loneliness epidemic, the minister of loneliness in the UK, we see that, you know, in large parts of the world, that disconnection. Uh, I know a lot of us have an addiction to this.
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This is not real, by the way. Right. Um, so I think there's a there's great work to be done here. I'm hopeful that we can change it. I'm I absolutely am, but I am really concerned if we don't. And that's
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again back sort of to your comment that you know happy that ICPR is putting this on the program. We need to have this as a sort of integral part of all the conversations that we have. Um yeah just
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off top of my mind. Yeah. I mean yeah just to kind of just yeah build on that I think we're already seeing that those side effects manifest.
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um you know like despite our amazing material technological progress and the the capabilities that we have now and it's not slowing down it's just going up but like despite those metrics of success and material sort of development like we're we're in a poly a global poly
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crisis so interacting converging different crises you know we're we're in a a global mental health crisis you know apparently over a billion humans have now been diagnosed with an anxiety or depression disorder. And we've got multiple environmental crises, you know,
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like we've got climate change and biodiversity loss. And I feel like those are all expressions of this this disconnect. Um and I feel that unless we can sort of and unless we can address that at its root and sort of shift our
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societal western societal value system no like small feat granted but unless we can do that and recalibrate our societal values um it's only going to get worse.
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So yeah, so our kind of salvation really I think um rests on sort of on that connection and facilitating it.
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Thank you. I couldn't agree more. Do we have time for a question from the audience?
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Nobody's saying no. Okay. Yeah, we'll uh go with you please. Yeah. So much for bringing this up.
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Um so many questions but But we we spoke briefly about the lack of nature availability for more and more people and it's only getting at the same [clears throat] time some of you brought up the connection to somatics and I'm
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wondering if that's something one part of nature is always available to us and that's our body right um so even in a clinical setting I wonder how if if a connection is being made between nature connectedness and somatic
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awareness or how you conceptualize Yeah. No. So interesting. I'll just I have to mention my friend uh Dr.
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Lindseay Brham. She has a paper explicitly looking um at this at the role of interceptive bodily awareness and and it's linked to emotions and and one's connection to nature. Um, so yeah, I think that's a really interesting kind
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of um, uh, line of inquiry, sort of the physicality of our bodies being a nature connecting thing. But I would highly recommend, yeah, checking out her work.
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We can speak afterwards. I can link you to that. Yeah. Also related to that, there's a part of our body uh, a part of our self that their primary window of knowing is through embodied emotion. Not just emotion, but embodied emotion and
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knowing where that is. is and if it just becomes I think I have this emotion rather than being into it and breathing in it allow you to move through it you're going to get stuck. So they're inter intricately which is why I think
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we're seeing so much ecological anxiety because people cannot be present to what's happened can't be in their senses can't slow down can't actually allow the waves of grief that might be coming to do their medicine.
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Yeah. Beautiful. Well, thank you everyone. I'm afraid that's all we have time for, but do come and our panelists. I'm sure they won't mind.
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Stay here. Yeah. [applause]
Topics:Brian Staffordlevels of consciousnesspsychiatryego dissolutionecological disconnectioneco awakeningBill Plotkinsoulcraftpsychedelic researchnature guide
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