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Decoded | Unlock The Secrets of Human Behavior, Emotion and Motivation
The Dark Side of Psychedelic Therapy
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As a society, we owe it to ourselves to educate people about the risks and not only pitch it as this amazing euphoric experience that is going to change your life, because just as easily it could change your life in a negative way for the rest of your life. Your brain is wired for deception. But here's the truth. Patterns can be broken. The code can be rewritten. Once you hear the truth, you can't go back. So the only question is, are you ready to listen? Welcome, everybody, to another episode of Decoded. Today we are talking about Medicine Journeys. I realize this episode is probably going to be fairly divisive. We all know that I'm not afraid of doing that here. But so I want to set some ground rules for what my intention is going into this. And maybe a good point of reference. I did a podcast on one called the psychedelic report with Dr. Dave Rabin, who I very much admire, and we have a really great conversation about psychedelics on that one, where I go a lot more into the childhood origins that to me predispose somebody to not be a candidate for psychedelics. So if you want to go a little bit deeper into the brain pattern elements of who it could be for and who it's not for, we dive very deeply into that. So the podcast itself is called the psychedelic report with Dr. Dave Rabin. Today's episode. My goal is to help us establish when there may be a more sinister narrative behind pushing or putting something up on a pedestal. If we look back at the early 2000s, it's probably the first time that I started fairly loudly sounding the alarm about this because I was seeing the trend and the uptick in people engaging in psychedelics that, in my opinion, are not good candidates for psychedelics. So I want to make sure that we're clear. This episode is about highlighting the concern, understanding where there may be a more sinister underbelly of psychedelics, and not to say that they're inherently bad. I think there's a time and a place for quite a few things. But I've noticed a trend that I think puts many people in a very dangerous psychological position that they had no business being in. And our society normalizing things like Medicine Journeys is partly responsible for why this has happened. I think it's important for us to connect this uptick in psychedelics to a normalization of weed culture, because I don't think you can separate the two of them. The normalization of weed culture very much made the way for psychedelics to kind of come alongside that, not to mention, and certainly not Picking on him. I. I really love Joe Rogan's show and I think he's done a lot of great work. There are a lot of people that love talking about psychedelics and psychedelic research, but as you know, brain pattern typing helps us decide who is a good candidate for something and who's not a good candidate for something. And I'm here to tell you, not everybody is a good candidate for psychedelics. In fact, most people are not a good candidate for psychedelics. I've spent a lot of many, many years of my work, almost in every season of my work, dealing with clients who I'm trying to help them clean up a psychotic break that came from engaging in psychedelics or overusing weed. When we see something start to be normalized, like weed culture, I think we should all ask questions. Why would we go from something being a no to then all of a sudden it being everywhere? Typically there's someone or some group that has either a financial incentive tied to it or something even worse, like some sort of psychological incentive. I know if you followed my podcast since the beginning, I've talked about how a mentally unstable, confused society is easier to control. Well, when you are in the weed culture, whether you like it or not, you are operating in some times and spaces outside of objective reality. That's part of the reason I think people like smoking weed. And most likely by the time this episode comes out, we will have already launched my episode on why smoking weed is making your anxiety worse. So hopefully the timing of this will work out quite well. And if, if not, it's coming, if it's already happened, go back and watch it. It's important when we smoke weed, and by we, I mean you, because I don't smoke weed. I actually smoked weed a little bit when I was early in my teen years, and I experience heightened interoception, which is when you are more acutely aware than perhaps the average person of what's physically changing inside of your body. And I found out the hard way that as a teenage, I would become fixated on my heart rate. And when you become fixated on your heart rate, your heart rate tends to go up. And then it's pretty easy to slip off the edge and convince yourself that you're having a heart attack, which of course I was not. But weed became the catalyst for me to have my anxiety augment rather than decrease. So if I've already done that episode, go back and watch it. I won't go too much more into it right now. One of the key features, though, is when you smoke weed, you lose touch with how we experience time unfold chronologically. And again, that's part of the reason I think people like it. You'll hear people say things like, well, it's just so much easier to do my chores around the house if I'm high. Why? Because arguably you're one of two things can happen. You're either pinpoint focused and fixated in a way that makes time, the passage of time, feels maybe not like it does typically, or maybe you're not stressed out about what you're having to do and you can kind of lose track of time. This is why I think people, when they're high, a task that may take them 20 minutes sober takes them three hours high, but they just enjoy doing it more. It's certainly not making you more efficient. It's just making the passage of time maybe feel less stressful. Because are you, arguably, you're operating somewhat outside of the construct of time. I know I talked about this in my episode on Shadow Work. Parts work and ifs a little bit, but I'll. I'll take a second to lay a little bit of foundation here. We live in the third dimension, right? There's physical objects. My microphone is physical. We live in a physically dense reality. Time is the fourth dimension. And in a lot of my work I've tried to help people conceptualize what happens between the fourth and the fifth dimension. And I often will refer to it as a sticky web. If the fourth dimension is our chronological time, and then if you do any digging into string theory or other things that talk about dimensions, there are, there are other possibilities that exist in the fifth dimension. I'm not necessarily going to go deep in describing those right now, but most of what people who are spiritually seeking or trying to find God, God, et cetera, what they're trying to find is actually fifth dimension and beyond where people unfortunately go when engaging in psychedelics, weed, medicine, ceremonies. And if you're listening to this, I'm giving air quotes, you often are getting stuck into the liminal space between the fourth and the fifth dimension. Some may call this the astral realm, some may call this the spirit realm. It is a place where time distorts. Time exists, but it distorts. Think about somebody smoking dmt and which, by the way, I have not done. But a very common way to describe it is that you feel like you were gone for a really long time, but it's about 20 minutes. How is that possible? It's because you are moving out of our chronological time. But you're also still somewhat aware of the passage of time. So when you come back, it still feels like it was a very long time. So there's still a concept of the passage of time. It's just not the same as what we experience in our everyday, sober lives. That is why I call it the sticky web. When people talk about astral projection, remote viewing, dream spaces, etc. Or even from a Christian perspective, kind of battling in the spirit, oftentimes what we are talking about is that space in between. And one of my biggest frustrations from a spiritual perspective about medicine journeys is that you're not actually going high enough to be communing with actual God. And I believe the parts of the spirit realm that you want to be interacting with, you're actually subjecting yourself to quite a dark, confusing place. And for what it's worth, I actually believe that is part of the reason that it has been put up on a pedestal and been made more normalized. Because ultimately, I'm a firm believer that the powers that be that run the world that we live in today, and I will let you decide what that they group is, want us confused and distracted and disoriented and thinking that we're trying to chase God or meet God while we're actually being trapped into a web of deception and communicating with perhaps entities and spirits that are not inherently good. I remember early on in my career, somebody was like, who are your spirit guides? Don't you know your spirit guides? And I'm sure I probably came off like an a hole at the time and, like, perhaps I still do, and that's okay. But I remember being like, I don't have spirit guides. And they're like, busy. Everybody has spirit guides. And I'm like, well, I don't have spirit guides. I only walk with God, Jesus, Holy Spirit. Like, there's. I don't have spirit guides. And people would be like, oh, well, you must have them. You're just like, choosing not to. Anyways, from where I sit right now, I realize a lot of my spiritual walk, I was very much covered and protected. And I think to other people, it may have came across as though I was being maybe judgmental or stubborn. But I realize now in hindsight, I was honestly very covered. I never came into agreement with any energies or entities or things that ultimately don't belong in my life. And I think for that reason, it actually, it helped me a lot because I think a lot of people end up coming into agreement with things that don't have their best Interests at heart. They are a distraction, they're counterfeit. They're meant to make you think that they're something they're not, right? They can be tricksters, etc. And when we're talking about things like medicine ceremonies, this conversation becomes even more important because often people are, they're entering into these ceremonies because they're trying to connect with some sort of higher power, right? They're trying to learn a lesson. They, they are trying to transcend some sort of human pain or stuckness. Another way to say that is they're showing up very vulnerable. And when you're showing up very vulnerable to something like a medicine ceremony, you better believe it's very easy to get deceived and tricked into coming into agreement with something that actually seeks to destroy your life. I'm not saying that I think all psychedelics and all medicine ceremonies are functioning this way, but honestly, most, most are. And if I hadn't have spent the last years helping people clean up for, from some of these psychotic breaks resulting from psychedelics, maybe I wouldn't feel this way quite as much as I do. But because I have been on the front lines helping people clean this up, I just feel more compelled to stand in the truth on this one. You have to be really careful what you're opening yourself up to because the average person is even opening up to these things by way of emotional dysregulation, like in the three dimensional space when you're sober. So think about if you're sober and you still potentially are accessible to these things, what happens when you take some sort of substance and now you lose your agency and actually who you are, your spirit, your soul, whatever language you want to give that actually now gets pushed into the back seat right now you're almost like along for the ride rather than driving. You literally get thrust back in the passenger seat. Passenger sheet, passenger seat. What then if it was already going to be challenging for you to not come into agreement and make these connections that ultimately make your life worse? What happens when you willingly place yourself in the passenger seat of your own car? Psychotic breaks, intrusive thoughts, hyper fixation on spirituality, things over assigning spiritual meaning to things. The danger here is imminent. And as a society, we keep talking about these things in a way that makes them very enticing. And people are highly susceptible to peer pressure. So I just think there's so many people who should be doing a better job at being honest about these things. And instead we just kind of go with where society is going and we're like, oh yeah, sure. Psychedelics? Oh yeah, sure. Weed? Yeah. How about ketamine? We'll just ship it to your house. Now you've heard me talk on the show about how I used to be a raver. It's a big raver. Thankfully for me, I was a mostly sober raver. But I remember in high school there were plenty of people in my friend group that loved to snort ketamine and go into a K hole. So imagine my surprise when after years of being a raver and watching people go into a K hole, where you literally think they're dead temporarily. Then they come back, reanimate, and then they're like, can I do another key? Imagine my surprise when all of a sudden in the mental health space, people are asking me to take ketamine therapy seriously. I'm sorry, excuse me, what did you just say to me?
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Let me ask you a question. Have you ever noticed how you can know something is unhealthy and still do it anyways? You know you shouldn't react that way in an argument.
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You know that habit isn't good for you.
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You know that that thought pattern is irrational. And yet somehow your brain runs the same loop again. This is where a lot of personal development goes wrong. Awareness alone doesn't change the brain. Repeated behavioral input does. Your brain changes through neuroplasticity, through the pathways you strengthen with action, not just awareness. And that is exactly why I created Renew youw Mind. This program sits at the intersection of neuroscience, behavioral rewiring and biblical teaching around the command to re your mind. Inside this program, I walk through what's
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actually happening in the brain when patterns
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form, why your prefrontal cortex shuts down under emotional pressure and how specific behaviors activate areas like the anterior mid singulate cortex, which is responsible for resilience, discipline, and the ability to push through discomfort. But the most important thing we talk about is pattern opposition. Because if you want a new life, you can't keep feeding the same neural pathways that created the old one. Scripture says, be transformed by the renewing of your mind. But most people were never taught how to actually do that. Renew your mind gives you the framework to begin interrupting destructive patterns. Strengthen your ability to regulate emotion and build the emotional resilience that is required to become a new creation. If you've ever felt like your reactions, habits or emotional patterns are running your life instead of the other way around,
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this program was built for you.
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Renew youw Mind can be accessed at Stan Store busygold.
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Now I do admit that there is a body of Research that has been emerging that shows that there is some sort of efficacy with ketamine usage. I'm not. It's not my job to, you know, tell you that there isn't or try to refute that. I think as it pertains to studies, I think studies can be manipulated in a variety of ways. I think there are a lot of things that are likely true that you can't properly recreate in a clinical study. And then I think there are some things that you can make seem like they're true through manipulating the data in a clinical study. So I don't personally put a whole lot of stock in clinical studies for that reason. It's not to say that they're all wrong, but I can assure you they're not all right either. And there were quite a few people who, especially during COVID went out of their way to actually research and prove that a lot of what's published is actually false. They. I think I'm trying to remember exactly the details. I'm somewhat paraphrasing here, but I encourage you to look into this. I think there were some people that, in an effort to reveal or expose that a lot of these studies were false, they actually put forth a lot of false studies, but just buttoned them up in the way that they were supposed to to see if they could get published. And they got a bunch of nonsense published, really, just to show if you follow the right steps, you can even publish nonsense. And this is certainly not a podcast that's intended to just exclusively criticize clinical studies, because, of course, I understand the time and place for them, but for me, the. The pushing of the narrative of, like, this is automatically good because of XYZ studies. I. I think most likely if you talk to the clients themselves en masse who are engaging in ketamine therapy, you're going. It doesn't take you long to start to find the people who are actually getting thrust into crisis via ketamine therapy. And I will share. I've had this happen with quite a few clients, one in particular, where I was actually making a lot of progress with this client. They're doing great. They were taking a lot of ownership and personal responsibility. Their relationship was changing. I had both she and her husband. Everyone was doing great until she started doing ketamine therapy. And all of a sudden, then the husband would be like, every time she's coming back from ketamine therapy, she's cycling on all of these things that she's remembering. You already know where I'm gonna go with this. And she's blaming me for this and she's blaming me for that and, and busy, I don't know to tell you but like, I think she's, I don't think these things actually happened. I don't either. Many people that go into ketamine therapy and they are unfortunately. And I, I realize a lot of this has to do with the practitioner and perhaps she had a bad practitioner. It is dangerous to assume that anything that's coming forward when you are in a drug induced state is automatically truth. And I know we talked about this in the episode about shadow work and parts work. It is a slippery slope to automatically try to integrate something that you air quotes remember and fit it into your identity. And now even wor go like berate your husband about something that you air quotes remembered during ketamine therapy. I think a clinician or a practitioner should have likely given them a disclaimer like, hey, just because things are coming up in ketamine therapy doesn't mean that they're objectively true. Why don't we take note of these things, go back to them, see what ends up fitting, what holds, et cetera. But to have a client immediately leave a, you know, ketamine drip session and buy into every single thing that she saw, that is dangerous. And it's also clinically wrong. Like I don't understand how any clinician wouldn't have prevented that before it even happened. And this goes to once you start to normalize and push something now, I mean, thankfully I haven't actually seen it as much on Facebook feed lately, but there was a couple year period there roughly like 2022 to 2024 where ketamine therapy was all over Facebook. I really hope that they actually buckle down and are limiting the ads that can run for Academy therapy. And that's why I don't see it anymore. I don't know, somebody report back. But the idea that you can quite literally advertise for a drug induced experience like that means that naturally other clinical environments are going to be like, oh, this is a great money making pathway. Then you have all these people like opening up ketamine therapy clinics because they want to make money. And now you can advertise it and people want it because it's like, oh cool, maybe this. Then they're leading with curiosity, oh, maybe this thing. And then you have a bunch of practitioners that are administering it that maybe have no business administering in the first place. You see where this is snowballing. So perhaps this was a clinician error But I think the issue is much bigger than that because I've had many other clients also do ketamine therapy. The one experience of ketamine that to me actually made sense and still this is not something that makes sense to be repeated. Would have been one client that I had where they were just in such a perpetual state of hyper vigilance all the time, like insomnia, couldn't sleep, they just, their body was revved so high all the time. When they did their first round of ketamine therapy, they felt relaxed for the first time in many years. Arguably because in the ketamine session they couldn't be in that state of hypervigilance. So it might have actually felt like the equivalent of the first time they got a good night's sleep. Okay, cool. I get that. Is that treating a root cause? Absolutely not. Is ketamine in that way curing anything? Is it treating anything? No, it's a distraction technique. And I think all the more dangerous a place where you are putting yourself into a drug induced state and somebody is more susceptible to delusion, outside influence, false memories presenting as real. And it's already hard for people to parse through accurately their own historical narrative. Then if you add drugs on top of it, you go from, you know, black and white to the grayest thing you've ever experienced in your whole life. So to me, this idea that we, this idea that we are going to now normalize weed, normalize ketamine, push psychedelic research and you start to normalize psychedelics, we have to wonder what the true origin of that is and ask ourselves some really honest questions about does introducing those things generally help us or harm us? I think that there are specific use cases where people have benefit. Here's an example. When it comes to things like mushrooms, if somebody is a rigid control freak and they want to control every single step, they can't get out of their own way. They are extremely rigid and fearful. Could doing psilocybin mushrooms give them some sort of a life altering temporary experience where they cannot be in control? And maybe they have make contact with something that feels beyond their physical reality that makes them feel a sense of purpose? Of course that's true. Of course that can happen. But it's also equally as true that somebody who already naturally skews toward psychological mechanisms like projection, deflection, blame shifting, splitting and or some sort of other delusional behavior is actually more drawn toward doing a medicine ceremony. And should that person do psilocybin mushrooms? Absolutely not under any circumstances. So my biggest concern is that if you make it broadly accessible and you start talking about it like it's generally great for everybody, it's life transformative, it'll change your life, you're potentially putting people in harm's way because you've just talked about the generalities of it rather than saying these people are not a good fit for this thing. And by the way, I feel the same thing about vaccines, right? I, I've never vaccinated any of my four kids. I've known way too much about this for a really long time in my adult life and myself had vaccine injury. So I've never been the type of person that says, like vaccines were, were maliciously intended from the outset. But I do think we have a lot of evidence at this point that there are certain people who are predisposed genetically to have negative reactions to vaccines. And we just pretend like this is not a thing. So we don't learn how to screen for those people to be like, you're a candidate, you're not. Instead we just literally like do this and hope everybody just starts saying, you know, splitting you into two, you're either a vaxxer or an anti vaxxer. There are a lot of people in the middle that actually have wanted to do more research on what makes somebody have such a bad adverse reaction and can we protect the population from that? The same structure, I think should be applied here. There are people that should never touch psychedelics with a one foot pole, not even a ten foot pole, A one foot pole. You should stay absolutely away from them. Additionally, there are people who seek out these things for curiosity and maybe they've convinced themselves it's healing, et cetera, but if they're honest with themselves, if you're going to do ayahuasca, for example, and you do ayahuasca and do it again and again and again. Is that medicine at that point? I don't think so. And if we're talking about a person who again, is hypervigilant and doesn't take any risk, we're probably not talking about that person repeatedly going to take ayahuasca, when in my opinion, they're actually the one type of person who ayahuasca or some other psychedelic experience is actually well suited for, because that is pattern opposition, right? That is medicine because it's opposite. And unfortunately, the people that tend to want to do these things and do them repeatedly are the worst candidates to do these things. Now what I also want to go back to, because we were talking about this whole fourth Dimensional sticky web situation. Some people end up going into some sort of medicine journey and they quite literally come back in a full blown psychosis. I've seen people come back with multiple personality disorder. I've seen people come back and suddenly present has did. I've seen people come back and suddenly even though they were married for 20 years and have kids, all of a sudden there's some spirit or voice in their head telling them that they're gay. Lives can get ruined very quickly by having a person lose their tether to objective reality. And I think here's where I want to take it. My concern is that most people, and I think I, I realized this at a fairly early age and this goes back to the epiphany that I had watching Fight Club when I was 13. Most people haven't really sat with and considered how easy it is to slip off the edge into insanity. I know I have. Like I've thought about that question way too much in my life and I've been aware of that edge many times where it's like there might even be certain questions that you've asked yourself where there's an awareness like I shouldn't go down this line of questions too much because I'm going to slip off the edge. The line between sanity and insanity is razor thin, if at all. And unfortunately, most of the people that have slipped off that edge by way of self deception don't realize they've slipped off the edge. This is why I've talked in other of my break method lectures about this analogy. And really it's posed as a question what separates the best psychic in the world from somebody with schizophrenia? Possibly just a communication filter. Honestly, especially if you look at indigenous cultures and who they make to be their shamans and medicine people, one could argue that they are intentionally seeking out people who we might call schizophrenic. But because it's being trained and cultivated and nurtured, they are building a communication filter so they know, they know what to communicate to you about and what to keep to themselves. When, if you've ever met a medicine person or a shaman or a psychic, etc. Even in the Christian space, somebody who operates in the prophetic, what makes that person not seem insane is their ability to delineate what you can handle versus what you can't handle. There are conversations that I can have with a handful of people that there's no way I could have those conversations with the everyday person because their brain would literally melt. Understanding who can handle what and understanding what the average person can perceive objectively versus what you're perceiving is incredibly important. And unfortunately, many people with diagnosed schizophrenia, they can't find that delineation anymore. That delineation also often goes away when we're talking about psychedelics, which is why I think so many people end up being irrevocably harmed by psychedelics because nobody was pre screening for who was not a good fit for this. And I do want to very much thank Dr. Dave Rabino for the work that he does because I believe he's really at the forefront of trying to create a very clear protocol and screening process so that the people I'm talking about are never subjected to psychedelic therapy in the first place. So Dr. Dave Rabin, he's the best, big fan I know. He has a book coming out soon and he's going to join us, I think, in September. So maybe we can bring up this conversation topic again. But one of the things we talked about on his show was how important it is for people with personality disorders to not engage in this work. This work is not for you if it's already challenging to align your awareness or your perception with the objective record. Psychedelics are a terrible fit for you. And if you are seeking truth, right? If you're somebody who has a. It's the best way to say this. I have. This is the best way to say this. I have a saying that I use all the time in my Somatic Movement practitioner certification and in break method. And it is that you can seek truth or you can seek healing, but you can't seek both at the same time. And there's a very specific reason for this. When you are seeking healing, actual healing and integration, you have to be okay with operating in the gray and knowing that you may never know when somebody is seeking truth. Think about it this way. They're almost showing up to their personal history like a detective, like, was I sexually abused? Who did this? I have to know. Naturally, you're putting yourself into more of a hypervigilant state. And that suspicion predisposes you toward confirmation bias. And you're highly likely to make assumptions or connections that might not be objectively true. And because we can't hit the God replay button, we cannot go backwards. You are setting yourself up to potentially start to loop on suspicion and add pieces into your personal narrative that are actually not objective truth. And in that way, they're not benefiting you. They run the risk of actually making your healing process delayed or stop entirely. What I have found to be true Is that the more you seek to understand yourself and what made you who you are, eventually you get to a place where you realize concretely you know nothing. And there's some sort of freedom in that. Which is why I call it the paradox of self understanding. As you're pursuing understanding yourself, you start to realize like none of it matters. Actually, as I get here, like the most evolved state is like, oh, actually I'm never gonna know. So letting go of the need to know is actually one of the most freeing experiences I've had. Some very bizarre things happen to me in my childhood and there are so many people that when I talk to you about some of these things, they're like, well, don't you want to know the truth? Don't you want to know the answers to X, Y and Z? And my answer to that is usually if God wants me to know those things, they will happen. But I do not need to go seeking those things. I do not feel broken and separated within myself by not knowing the truth. I know who I am. I know who those things potentially made me to be. I know where I have work to do. But there's no part of me that feels like I can't move on in my journey unless I know how to put those pieces in. Because I know it's a farce. I cannot go back and guarantee the validity of those pieces. So isn't it kind of a waste of time with the same idea? You can't objectively know the things to be true that you find in a hallucination experience. And far too many people over assign meaning and actually latch onto stories and air quotes, memories in those spaces that may be objectively untrue and actually harmful to your healing by trying to fit them in. Your brain isn't broken, it's running. An old code break method is a system that maps your neurological patterns, decodes your emotional distortions and rewires your behavior fast. No talk therapy, spiral, no getting stuck in your feelings, Just logic based rewiring. In 20 weeks or less, head to BreakMethod.com and see what your brain is really up to. Now. What I will say is I actually have done a lot of mushrooms in my life. Okay, let's. Let's flip the tables, right? I'm kind of sounding the alarm on the things that I think are dangerous. But I also need to be honest with you. I did a lot of mushrooms in the early part of my adulthood and I was much more that hyper vigilant. Not wanting to kind of, I would not I wouldn't let myself not be sober. All of the raves that I went to, I was the designated driver. All the raves that I went to, I was the designated driver because I wanted to take care of myself and others and know my surroundings. Situational awareness was a big deal to me. So when I finally went to boarding school and I was away from my childhood environment and some of the hyper vigilance that really only made sense around my parents, and now I was in a struggle school environment where the rules were kind of the rules, they weren't a personal attack. I kind of could learn what my day to day was going to look like. When I got offered to do mushrooms for the first time, I was like, I can't believe I'm gonna say this, but yeah, let's do it. But going back to this, I actually, in my opinion, was the prime candidate for this because I was very afraid to let go, right? So in this way, I was forced to let go. And when I came out of it, yes, the coming out of it phase was really disorienting and actually gave me a lot of anxiety because most people don't tell you that you're in this almost dreamlike, confusing state afterwards where you know you're not tripping, but reality doesn't seem the way that it did before either. And there's a part of you that's like, oh my God, is it gonna be like this forever? And I remember every day kind of panicking about that a little bit. And then one day I just forgot and I was like, oh, I'm back to normal, thank God. But you kind of, if you've never had it before, again, going back to, I naturally have heightened interoception. I was kind of like waiting for the other shoe to drop. Like, am I going to be changed forever? Is this never going to go away? But ultimately what I was left with from that experience was that I actually, I can let go and I can have fun and I don't have to be in control. And I honestly, I think I may have laughed harder during that trip than I have ever before in my whole life. And I chose to do it at boarding school, which probably was a bad decision because at some point in the night my dorm parent thought that I was acting weird and came to my room and shined a flashlight in my eyes and was like, are you tripping? And if you know me, you know that I'm stubborn and I. My consciousness is very strong. So in that moment, I somehow overrode the tripping and was like, excuse me, I have a fever, and I would really like it if you would leave my room. I, like, immediately. I just, like, flipped the tables on them and, like, power played them. They're like, sorry, sorry, sorry. And then I went back tripping, and I was like, whew, that was scary. So I was able to override just enough to scare the person into not getting me in trouble. I was 13, you guys. It was a wild life. But going back to this, it planted enough of a seed in me that there was something about me that changed, I think, permanently from this place. And I did it quite a few more times throughout kind of like my 20s. I think I've probably done mushrooms maybe five times. Actually, once, ironically. This is a hilarious story. I was a speaker at Biohackers World Conference, I think, in, like, 2024, maybe. No, it was in 2025, but in, like, March of 2025, so, you know, a little bit more than a year ago. And they gave us these amazing VIP goodie bags. And usually I kind of throw out a bunch of the stuff, but for whatever reason, this whole goodie bag came back with me. And weeks later, I was prepping to go to another biohacking event where I was speaking for Dave Asprey. And in the night, as I'm organizing my bag, I'm like, oh, yeah, like, this stuff from my VIP goodie bag. And there was this chocolate. And in my mind, I'm like, there's no way they're going to give us actual mushroom chocolates. I was wrong. They were actual mushroom chocolates. In my mind, I thought it was Reishi Cordyceps. So I eat this chocolate, I'm cleaning my closet, organizing my bag, and I lay down in bed to watch a movie with my husband. And all of a sudden, I'm like, this movie is giving me a lot of anxiety. He was like, do you want me to turn it off? And I was like, yeah, kind of. I just like. I just really feel really anxious. Then he's like, well, that's not like you at all. And I'm like, yeah, let's just do something else. Then all of a sudden, I'm like. I kind of feel like I'm melting into the comforter. And he's like, babe, you're scaring me. And at this point, I couldn't figure out what was happening. But eventually, when I put it all together and I realized I had accidentally dosed myself, then I couldn't stop laughing. So then I'm like, manically laughing, trying to tell my husband. But I have like tears streaming down my face because I just think it's the funniest thing ever that I accidentally dosed myself. So finally I. I spit it out. I'm like, I. I accidentally took mushrooms. I'm tripping. He was like, what, are you kidding me right now? And I was getting on a plane in a few hours to go to Austin. So it actually in that state because again, I tend to be like, go, go, go. My days are so structured. I have so much going on that it ended up actually forcing me into a momentary relaxed state that perhaps I wouldn't have taken for myself. So once I realized what I'd done, I kind of just submitted and went with it. And it was fine. Up until that point when I didn't know what was happening. It was very scary because I know myself really well and I knew something wasn't right. I didn't know what that was because I didn't realize that I had dosed myself. But once I figured it out, I was able to submit and it was, it was fine. All this to say two things are true. There can be a time and a place where somebody can benefit from something like this. And there can be a time and a place where this can change somebody's life irrevocably forever. And far too often the latter is true. I think we need to be very conscientious of how we have let certain, you know, air quote spiritual practices kind of seep into the mental health space. And with that in mind, I do think that at the same time we have kind of a gaping God chasm in mental health. So I'm certainly not saying there is no place for spirituality and mental health, because I think think there is. I think there's actually a lot of that missing. But often what ends up getting put on a pedestal are things like medicine journey and hallucinogens. And I think we're going to see this pushed much more. Even things like, I know that now RFK Jr. Is starting to kind of expedite psychedelic research and access to psychedelics. I mean, I've done Molly as well. I'm a pretty happy person. I do not really get like moody and down in the dumps and depressed. I have never felt worse in my whole life than after I did Molly the next day. I was like, oh, this is what it feels like to be in full blown depression and suicidal ideation. This is terrible. Hated every second of it. Would never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever do it again. So, example, I can't be the only one that has that experience. And believe me, because I was a raver for a long time, I've seen other people go through that. I was such a control freak back then that I never even tried. I was like a full blown adult when I tried. These things can be really dangerous. And as we are seeing access be given more and more, I am doing this episode to encourage you to hit the pause button and to think more clearly about whether you are a candidate or whether you actually are somebody whose life could be permanently damaged by engaging in things like this. In brain pattern mapping, we track very specific markers for thought processes, chronological behaviors, for biochemical reactions, and similarly to how we can see who's predisposed for ptsd, we can see who is a candidate for psychedelics and who is not. So I would highly encourage you if it's something that you are considering, absolutely. Take the 20 minutes to do Predictive Mind and find out if you actually are or are not a candidate for psychedelics, because it could be what makes or breaks the rest of your life. I've had clients that have quite literally been descended into a 10 year on the verge of psychotic episode ever since they started dabbling in this stuff. And we need to be really careful because when it's presented as something that, that's spiritual and enlightening, it makes people immediately want to do it without taking the steps to make sure it really is for you and to ask some of those deeper questions. The other thing that is really important to note is that anytime we're doing something where we're pushing ourselves, like I said, into the passenger seat rather than the driver's seat, what can happen in that space between the fourth and fifth dimension is we can give access to, to however you want to say it, spirits, entities, energies, things that do not belong in your body. And you can't accurately push them away because you've actively given them the space to come in. From a biblical perspective, this is why if you were to cast out a demon in the way of deliverance, and that person is not ready to have an infilling of the Holy Spirit, the Bible says that the seven spirits come back in its place. So is that actually something worth doing or are you potentially putting them more at risk? Biblically speaking, you're putting them more at risk if that person is not able to sustain the work that you just did because you're kicking them out only to have them come back with friends. Using this same sort of structure when we are putting Ourselves in a space where we've kind of put ourselves willingly in the passenger seat, we've created all this opening and now even worse, now we're putting ourselves in a physical space with a bunch of other people who are in that open space. Because often in medicine ceremonies, you're surrounded by a bunch of other people. So now going with this idea that we each have a biofield that is emitted relatively 3ft in every direction around us, and inside of that we have plasma and there's all different types of conductivity. There's a measurable megahertz frequency that we emit. When our biofields are now next to other people's biofields, now we're susceptible to whatever they're letting in because all of our biofields are now slammed up on top of each other. The same is true, frankly, for a lot of holotropic breath work. When I see a lot of those classes happening, every part of me that understands somatic experiencing and somatic therapy wants to run in there and rescue every single person. When you're putting yourself into a state of nervous system dysregulation through hyperventilation, many people are experiencing trauma. And then the teacher is like, oh, this is a release. When anyone who's trained is actually looking. And you're like, actually, no, this is a nervous system dysregulation. And you're actually. They are in a trauma state and you're just calling the shaking or release. That is not actually accurate in most of these cases. And now because you're doing this around other people, all of their trauma and all of whatever they're carrying in the spirit is now potentially bleeding onto you. So you're potentially leaving with entanglements from a variety of people around you. And you deserve to know that that's what could happen. And are people advertising that? No, they're like, come to my holotropic breathwork class. You know, come with anxiety, leave with 10 demons. Is that how they're advertising it? Probably not. And ultimately the same is true for medicine journeys. You have to tread with caution here because they're not going to be upfront about the risk that you're taking. So I encourage you if it's something that you're truly considering. I will be honest with you. Do go to predictivemind IO and we will let you know if you have the markers that predispose you for a dangerous opening experience with psychedelics. As we close this episode, I really want you to be considering how much of going toward kind of the medicine hallucinogens comes from a place of curiosity. Because if you're looking at something and you're like, oh, that's so cool. That looks so awesome. Like, I want to be a part of that group. And your curiosity and your desire to be a part of the group is what's leading you to want to travel to Peru. I want to do ayahuasca. I want to do peyote. That part of you that wants to be included in the group and be part of something that's so cool. That part of you right there, in my opinion, is actually indicative of the brain pattern type that makes it so that you are not a good candidate. So you have to be even more careful. I actually don't have a brain pattern type that wants to fit in. I'm much more hyper independent when I look at stuff like that. I'm like, absolutely. No, thank you. That sounds awful. And ultimately, medicinally, that's probably why I benefited from it selectively. So it's important that you're hearing what I'm saying and you are being honest with yourself about what is leading to the intrigue in the space of medicine journeys. Because what you may think of as medicine may actually be far more harmful and exposing over the long run than you're even considering. And I. I hope that I'm getting that point through to you right now. Before we close, I want to share one other little story because this is interesting too. So when I was in my early 20s, I did a peyote ceremony. And I was laughing about this with my friend the other day, because, again, I had no. All. All these things were so opposite of what I ever would have done. The idea that as a person who's naturally very claustrophobic the day prior, because it was all part of the same thing. The day prior, I did a sweat lodge ceremony. Even though I was so claustrophobic, it was actually a very pivotal moment for myself because again, I'm opposing patterns, right? So day one, sweat lodge, nailed that. Learned a bunch of things about myself that ultimately very much helped me when I created Break years later. And then the next day is the peyote thing. When I go to do the peyote thing, they force you to be in a circle. And then there's this, like, spontaneous chanting thing. So everyone's going around spontaneous chanting. And you guys, when I say that I hate the idea of like, like group sharing and chanting and all this stuff, I was like, oh, my God, what have I. What have I done? What am I doing? And it gets around to me and I don't have anything to spontaneously chant because I'm like, what am I even doing? And they were like, we have to say something like, go, go, go. And I. So I start singing the ABCs and eventually I was like, I am, I'm not a candidate for this. I can't do this. But what's really interesting is so at this point I've already drank, right? You're like drinking on multiple rounds. So I'm already on peyote at this point. But now when I have found myself singing the AC, ACBS, the ABCs in this circle, I'm like, I need a timeout. I can't do this. I can't be around these people because I, I didn't want to laugh at them. I knew that they were having some profound experience and I just kind of was up observing and just, I didn't want to be disrespectful and laugh at them. And I knew that I was right on the edge where I was like, I, I can't chant in a group circle right now. So I actually removed myself from the group and I went. This was on a property where I lived. So I went to my house and at the time, my Sarai's dad, he was an incredible artist and he had painted this huge Ganesh Tonka. So I was actually sitting in front of this Ganesh Tonka, obviously, like tripping hard on peyote. But at this point I just wanted to be away from people. And I actually had an incredibly profound experience that I don't have any regrets over. It was great. So I want to leave you with. I am certainly not ever going to say that there is absolutely nothing to gain from a psychedelic experience. Because I personally, I would be fraudulent, I would be lying to deny that I myself have had personally transformative experiences with hallucinogens. Because that is absolutely unequivocally true from where I sit now as a 41 year old woman with four kids. I think as a society we owe it to ourselves to educate people better about the risks and not only pitch it as this amazing euphoric experience that is going to change your life, because just as easily it could change your life in a negative way for the rest of your life. So my intention with this episode is to help you understand what you're potentially opening yourself up to, especially when we're talking about from a spiritual perspective. Because many people think that they're meeting God and you are literally in the wrong dimension. And for that reason, I've seen a lot of people, maybe even Joe Rogan included, who are chasing all these psychedelic experiences, thinking that they're trying to find God and maybe have met God, when really they're actually meeting deceiving spirits. And they're actually blocked in their spiritual evolution because they're not even going to the right dimension. And with that, there are so many ways to access that part of yourself without taking drugs. I'm able to access many parts of myself that have those connectivities without doing drugs. I can remain sober of mind and quite literally expand my consciousness to be able to operate in those higher dimensions without sounding like a crazy person, looking like a crazy person, or having to do drugs. And far too often I see people in my life who are very able to operate in the higher dimensions, who do have access to information that is beyond our time and space, that use drugs as a crutch. And in many cases, I've looked them right in the eyes with, with a holy fire and said, you know, you don't need this. This is a crutch. You've convinced yourself that I can't access these things without this drug. But that is not true. So for those of you who want to be able to access those higher levels, my best advice to you is heal your nervous system first. Learn how to regulate yourself emotionally first. Understand who you are and where your patterns get the best of you. Because when you've done that, that when you go have some sort of psychedelic experience, arguably it would be profound. You maybe would learn a lot of things, and if nothing else, it's like learning skills in a video game. And when you come out, you're like, woo, that was crazy. But most people go seeking those things to help themselves heal emotionally, and that is not what those spaces are there for. If you don't learn how to heal yourself emotionally and behaviorally before you go open those doors, the chances that you will become worse, not better, are extremely high. I'm excited to open up this conversation again when Dr. David Rabin or Dr. Dave Rabin comes back in the fall, because I think there's more here and it is a nuanced conversation. And I hope that you hear me when I say I'm certainly not just trying to be anti. I am much more trying to help you prevent harm by being honest. And for those of you that are interested, we can certainly take this conversation way more spiritual. I know we try to keep it pretty scientific practical on this podcast, but if we want to do a part two on what's really happening in the spirit realm. We can totally do that as a webinar. So thank you for tuning into this episode. Please share it with somebody who may put psychedelics and medicine on a pedestal and not take the time to think more clearly about what they're exposing themselves to without understanding if their brain is suited to for this type of medicine. And if you want to know, you're going to go to predictivemind IO I will see you next week.