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- [00:01]
Pierce Salguero
Close your eyes.
- [00:02]
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- [00:28]
Nick Canby
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- [00:30]
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- [01:00]
Pierce Salguero
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- [01:13]
Nick Canby
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- [01:20]
Pierce Salguero
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- [01:29]
Pierce Salguero
See mint mobile.com welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:36]
Lan Le
This is Black Barrel producer lan Le, here to let you know that not all BPP episodes are syndicated on the new Books Network feed. To catch all of our episodes, you can subscribe directly wherever you get your podcasts. That's Black the color B E R Y L. Now onto the show.
- [01:56]
Nick Canby
Foreign.
- [02:05]
Pierce Salguero
Welcome to the Black Barrel, a podcast with intelligent conversations about Buddhism, Asian medicine and embodied spirituality. I'm your host, Dr. Pierce Salguero, a professor of Asian history and health humanities at Penn State's Abington College outside of Philadelphia. Today I sit down with Nick Canby, visiting assistant professor at Brown University and a clinical psychologist specializing in meditation and psychedelics. Together we dive into Nick's research on the self, what it is, and what it's like to lose it. We also talk about his work at Cheetah House helping meditators in distress. Along the way, we mention some of the downsides of experiencing oneness, the the complications of defining a mental health disorder, and whether non self is a dangerous teaching for college students. If you want to hear scholars and practitioners engaging in deep conversations about the dark side of Asian religions and medicines, then subscribe to Black Barrel wherever you get your podcasts. Also, check out our members only benefits on substack.com to see what our guests have shared with you. Enjoy the show. Why don't you start us off with just your name, your position, academic credentials, situation, affiliation, et cetera, Whatever you want to say.
- [03:31]
Nick Canby
Yeah, so my name is Nicholas or Nick Candy. I have a PhD in clinical psychology from Clark University and I worked for many years in the lab of Dr. Willoughby Britton and Dr. Jared Lindahl doing work related to mechanisms of meditation based interventions, mindfulness based interventions, and over the past few years much more focused on meditation related adverse effects. I'm now transitioning a bit more to psychedelic related adverse effects. My dissertation kind of looked both at meditation and psychedelics and there's been sort of a increase in research in the psychedelic area, so recently transitioned a bit more in that direction. Currently I am a visiting assistant professor at Brown University. I worked part time teaching a class on senses of self this semester and also a class on psychedelics in the spring. I am also a clinical psychologist. I see clients. Apart from my academic work, I also work for Cheetah House with meditators in distress in a clinical capacity. And I'm also on a couple of grants as a research consultant. So I kind of wear a number.
- [04:40]
Pierce Salguero
Of different hats so listeners might remember. And if you don't, go back and listen to the episode that I did a few months ago with Willoughby Brittain and Jared Lindahl from the Brown Lab. We got an overview of the research that's come out of the lab as well as Cheetah House and what the purpose is and what sort of the experience has been working with people who have experienced or in the middle of experiencing meditation related crisis. So I don't think we need to sort of retread that ground here with you. I think we can build on what we already talked to Willoughby and Jared about. Get into your own area of expertise. I'm really interested in talking with you about senses of self and the kinds of modifications to that, both, let's say positively and negatively valenced changes in sense of self as a result of meditation and other kinds of spiritual practices. So where should we start? What do you think is the best kind of entree into the kinds of stuff that you've been interested in and looking at.
- [05:42]
Nick Canby
So my dissertation project was about senses of self, Specifically experiences involving either a loss of senses of self or a change in the boundaries of the self, broadly defined. And the reason for kind of defining that fairly loosely actually was because there's a number of different definitions of these types of experiences. And I was trying to gather a lot of information about a variety of experiences involving changes in sense of self in order to develop a more kind of precise and specific way of understanding what's actually happening for these people and also how they affect people's mental health afterwards. So happy to talk about that more.
- [06:24]
Pierce Salguero
I know you just said it's a. It's nebulous, but why don't we start off with just a basic kind of understanding of. When you say sense of self or senses of self, what all are we talking about? Are we talking about a sense of physical boundedness? Are we talking about a sense of identity, A sense of kind of personal history? What is the range of phenomena that you're including within that. Within that sense of self label?
- [06:46]
Nick Canby
Yeah, I think that's a really good question. And I think that's really where a lot of the lack of clarity lies, actually, that people use the term self to refer to such a really wide range of phenomena ranging from people's likes and preferences and demographic information or where you're from. Or usually if someone asks you who you are, you say your name and what you do for work. And that can range all the way to more of a sense of, like, being a subjectivity existing in a body. And like, having a sense of I'm the one who's moving my body. Or these are the boundaries between my body and the external world. So that often is kind of a range of psychological self or narrative self all the way to body ownership or agency or, like, sense of having a perspective at all. Having, like, a sense of being a subject.
- [07:37]
Pierce Salguero
Yeah. And then there's also sort of like a perceptual centrality. Right. Regardless of how I might conceive of myself as an entity or non, the visual field is arranged in such a way that my nose is in the center of it. Objects sound like they're behind me or in front of me or to the left or right of me. So there's a perceptual center to that experience as well, that I think maybe is another sort of form of self. Right?
- [08:01]
Nick Canby
Yeah. And I think that sometimes it's referred to as like spatial self location. So that sense of like feeling, like your sense of self is located in a particular area of space. Some people experience it like behind their eyes or in a certain part of their body. It's interesting to point out some of these ways of identifying ourselves that we don't maybe typically think of why am I behind my eyes as opposed to why am I not at the soles of my feet or something. But also a lot of these experiences can be altered through meditative practices, sometimes mental illness as well. Psychedelics, various religious or spiritual practices. Trauma can alter a lot of these senses of self. It's quite a wide range of ways that they can be altered also.
- [08:40]
Pierce Salguero
Let's kind of lay a little bit of that out. I think probably a lot of our listeners, they're probably familiar with the notion that the sense of being a self is itself a construct or kind of a high level, kind of meta level summary of all of these various processes that we were just talking about, taken all together. So, you know, from a Buddhist perspective, this is like Buddhism 101, right? That there is no, no Atman or an entity at the center of the being that. But the me is rather produced by all of these kinds of processes running at a subconscious level. And so part of the idea there is to use meditation to get down into what's happening there and discover how that sense of self is being produced, to discover that it is this product of process and not a. Not an entity being there. So lots of other kinds of practices, whether it's Advaita style kind of self inquiry or various other types of religious or spiritual practice, or like you're saying, psychedelics and mental illness and all sorts of other things, injury to the brain, et cetera, can alter this sense of self. So maybe it's a good place to distinguish between positively valence and negatively valence changes in the self. Because it strikes me that somebody who's very familiar with that Buddhist context that's maybe sitting in meditation precisely for the purpose of doing this kind of investigation, might have one kind of experience. Whereas somebody who's sitting there in a mindfulness course because they want to be more productive or less, less stressed at work or something like that, and went through the same changes would have a radically different experience. Never mind somebody who is a sense of self suddenly started dissolving because of trauma or mental illness or something like that. It seems to me that would be radically different firsthand experiences, like maybe a specific example might be the sense of a boundary between me and other Things, you know, that's one of the senses of self you were just talking about. And so there are meditations that are specifically designed to permeate that boundary. Right. So then a person who's experiencing the sudden loss of this boundary between self and other things might describe that as, oh, I lost the self. They might describe that as, oh, I'm now one with everything. They might describe that as a terrifying experience of can't find. I can't find myself anymore. They might describe that as, I'm enlightened because this is what my tradition tells me should be experienced. So, yeah, the same phenomenology with different kinds of interpretation that create different sorts of, like, thoughts and ideas about. And feelings about what's going on. Do you feel like that those would be actually phenomenologically distinct or what? Yeah. Where do you stand on that question?
- [11:16]
Nick Canby
Yeah, I really like the way you phrase that. I think that there's a wide range of different types of phenomenological experiences involving a change or loss of sense of self. And also there are different appraisals and feelings that can be associated with the same one. So if you're referring to a sense of a loss of boundaries, some of what, like my dissertation research found is that there's actually a number of distinct types of changes in sense of boundaries of the self. So, like, some people describe the sense of boundaries as like, kind of an expansion of their sense of self into everything. Other people described it more as a loss of a boundary. There also were people who described it more as, like, that they had this kind of insight into that they'd always been experiencing an illusion of a boundaried self. And their experience didn't actually change, but that illusion was no longer there. And then there were some people who described more of an interpersonal boundary that was changed. Like, it wasn't a boundary to everything. It was more like a boundary with other people was altered. And then lastly, there were some people who described it more as like a boundary between physical objects. Like, more of a sense of their body dissolving into other things. And it's possible to have different reactions and different kinds of ways of interpreting or feeling about each one of those possible experiences.
- [12:36]
Pierce Salguero
Great. Yeah. So your dissertation is a little bit of, like, a taxonomy of these different kinds of phenomenological experiences and how people react to them and so on and so forth.
- [12:45]
Nick Canby
Yeah, that was the attempt. And it's definitely not meant to be the final say in that. I think that there's a lot additional work that needs to be done. But it was a first stab at that.
- [12:54]
Pierce Salguero
So what are the take home points then from this kind of taxonomizing of all these different ways that one can lose the self and react to that experience? What should we take away from your dissertation in terms of the contribution that that's making to our understanding?
- [13:09]
Nick Canby
One takeaway is that there are quite a wide range of slightly different experiences that can be categorized under the broad umbrella of like, changes to sense of self or boundaries of sense of self. And when we use these kind of more vague or broad terms that sometimes we're not really sure of which of those other ones we're really capturing. There was a distinction in terms of phenomenology between experiences involving more of a loss of a boundary or an expansion of a sense of self versus other experiences that involve more of a increase of a boundary accompanied by a loss of sense of self. So some people felt like they lost their sense of self and they were more alienated and alone and at a distance from everything. And that tended to align a little bit more with what is often considered dissociation. That was an experience a bit more associated with trauma, with mental illness, and more negative effects on mental health. Whereas the experience of like expanding and having reduced boundaries was a bit more associated with improved mental health and more intentional experiences from contemplative practice or religious or spiritual practice or psychedelics. Now that's sort of a broad stroke distinction because I think that both positive or negative experiences are likely to be possible from either of those. But that was just like a, at least in terms of phenomenology, that was kind of one of the main sort of differentiations.
- [14:39]
Pierce Salguero
Yeah, let me ask you about that a little bit more. But first, before, before I do that, could you say a little bit, just about sort of what's the basis for these observations that you're making right now? You presumably interviewed many, many people and about their experiences and what all. What was the sort of the source of the data?
- [14:54]
Nick Canby
So the source of this data actually was an online questionnaire that was meant to be collecting data about people who have had an experience of either losing their sense of self or expansion or loss of the boundary between themselves and others or the world. And it was intentionally meant to collect a broad range of experiences. And then it was both a quantitative and qualitative analysis. We asked them a number of kind of more precise and specific questions about what types of phenomenology their experience involved and also had some places for them to write paragraphs describing what they experienced. And then also asked them about many other characteristics of their emotions during that experience, the result it had on their mental health and sort of other aspects of their life afterwards. And whether they felt that they had insight from that experience or not, whether they felt they were able to voluntarily surrender to the experience or not. And so kind of included a number of different questions to try to get at different hypothesized aspects of the experience that could be important. And then one of the main techniques that we used was called factor analysis. So trying to figure out, figure out grouping the types of quantitative responses that they gave into kind of discrete categories of what went with what, what was the.
- [16:14]
Pierce Salguero
Give us a like a snapshot of the participant pool. How many did you have? And what were their kind of cultural backgrounds? What's the range of people that participated?
- [16:23]
Nick Canby
Sure, yeah. So. So there were 386 participants in this study and the average age was about 35 years old, a little bit on the younger side. I will say that the study was really biased by like mostly recruiting online about people who want to talk about their experiences, which is a particular subset of people. And it's a bit unavoidable. Especially if people have had either very positive experiences or very negative experiences, they might be more excited to report about them. So that is something that we found where the types of experience impacts tended to be either very positive or in a very negative way, which could be partly just about the sample collection. It was somewhat balanced between male and female. It tended to be fairly biased towards white North Americans, English speaking. And there were quite a range of religions worldviews represented. But I think 18% identified as Buddhist, which was the largest religion. But it was not only meditation. So this was meditation, psychedelics, trauma, mental illness, or any cause. And the reason for designing it in that way is really to try to better understand this type of experience across causal contexts rather than focusing on the N1.
- [17:44]
Pierce Salguero
So a minute ago we were talking about the potential for interpreting positively or negatively these experiences. And you were talking about how some kinds of loss of self lend themselves towards more positive interpretations. Well, as other kinds of, in the aggregate, let's say, generally tend to lead towards more negative interpretations. And I'm wondering if you found any correlation between what kinds of practice people are doing or what the cause of that shift is and what kind of shift they have. You know, if you're doing meditation or if it's psychedelics or if it's trauma, can you reliably predict what kind of loss of self people are going to experience? Or could it be that absolutely any of these different forms of laws of self could spontaneously happen in any of those settings?
- [18:32]
Nick Canby
There were, I believe, seven types of changes in sense of self that were identified through this study, and then another seven other experience characteristics, like things like changes in positive emotion or negative emotion, or whether people surrendered or experienced insight. And so that was like 14 types of experience overall. And so we looked at how those 14 types of experience ranged across all the different contexts that people described. So context referring to, was it meditation, was it psychedelics, was it trauma, was it mental illness? And one of the things that is actually really interesting about that is that first of all, the changes in sense of self themselves did not vary that much. So the way that changes in sense of self were altered was fairly similar across all of these different contexts, whether it was in meditation, whether it was trauma. Similar to what I was mentioning before, I think the main way that it did differ a bit was whether it was more of reduction in a boundary or an increase in a boundary. So the increase in a boundary was a little bit more associated with trauma and mental illness. The reduction in a boundary was a little bit more associated with meditation and psychedelics. But some of the changes that were more associated with a loss of sense of self were actually the same across all of those. They did not seem to differ. The things that did differ the most though, were the appraisal or kind of emotion characteristics. Essentially the more positive or more voluntary kind of contexts, like meditation and psychedelics, where people might be purposely trying to adduce an experience like this, were associated with more positive emotion, more voluntary surrender, more appraisals of spiritual insight. Whereas the context that seemed likely to be more involuntary, like mental illness or trauma, or experiencing this out of the blue, was one of the contexts as well. Those were associated more with a sense of struggling with the experience and a sense of not necessarily seeing it as a source of insight and not feeling positive about it. Deck your home with blinds.com. Diy or let us install. Free design consultation, free.
- [21:01]
Pierce Salguero
Plus free samples and free shipping. Head to blinds.com now for up to 45% off with minimum purchase plus a free professional measure. Rules and restrictions may apply. I don't want to be too heavy handed with what I conclude from that, but to me it seems to be arguing quite clearly the importance of having a support system, having a practice system, having a philosophy, having a worldview. You could say that sort of is supportive and very enthusiastic about this kind of shift that can make all the difference when somebody's Going through this shift in terms of reframing it or framing it in the first place as a positive, desirable outcome as opposed to not having all of those supports in place. And then you're at sea. You know, there's. There's meditation, then there's meditation. Right. There are people who are engaging in meditation with all of those supports in place, you know, as part of a Buddhist philosophical structure and community and so on and so forth. And they know that this is what they're aiming for. They know this is what the techniques are about. And then contrast that with I'm participating in a mindfulness session focused on my productivity at work, or stress reduction or something like that. Same with psychedelics. You can be taking psychedelics because you're doing a psychedelic journey and you're assisted by some kind of, of guide who's really focused on a particular kind of experience. Or he can just be taking psychedelics like at a rave, you know, like a party drug. Yeah. I'm wondering how much you were able to parse out the role of worldview or philosophy or epistemology or whatever you want to call it in people's experience.
- [22:30]
Nick Canby
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's totally how I have viewed this data as well. A lot of those topics came up on this paper that my team recently published with Dr. Britten and Dr. Lindahl on the effect of meditation teachers, the impact of meditation teachers as either a support or sort of a lack of support for people with meditation related challenges. And I think that a lot of it there is quite nuanced as well, because sometimes having a teacher who had a. Offered a framework that normalized or provided a structure to understand an experience was really helpful. And sometimes of the real life support for people and at times also normalizing an experience that was actually felt as really pathological and not necessarily part of the path sometimes was also harmful. So there were people who like had a psychotic break and then were told like, just stay with it, this is part of the path. And they tried to stay with it and be part of the path. And that actually just made it worse. And then eventually they had to go to the hospital and get into psychotics, for example. You know, I think that a lot of the time there's just having sort of a supportive, normalizing presence can be really helpful. But if it's something where like you need someone to be like, no, this is, you've got to get help immediately. This is not part of the path, then that also is sometimes needed.
- [23:51]
Pierce Salguero
So I talked in the interview with Willoughby and Jared, about the, the person centered approach that they take in their clinical work. Understanding and working with that individual person's own life context and worldviews and emotional well being and so forth. So you're pointing again to the same advice to one person can be helpful or harmful. It really depends on the full picture of what's going on with them and how their, their whole sort of person is responding to this event.
- [24:19]
Nick Canby
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that overall that's kind of why it's quite difficult to research this topic because so much of it is very context based. And so drawing really general kind of conclusions can be. In a way, I really like the sort of level of nuance and complexity. But also it's challenging to say anything definitively because there's always sort of a caveat in the other direction.
- [24:41]
Pierce Salguero
The sensibility that I get behind the work that all of you are doing, both through Willoughby's lab and also your own work, the sensibility I get is one of really striving for nuance and really striving to move away from kind of reductionist interpretations that lead to an easy sort of flowchart if this, then that sort of approach to understanding these issues and helping people through them. It seems like you guys are a lot more interested in unpacking the subtleties and really exploring the individual factors and the very complex configurations of different factors that lead people to experience these things positively or negatively. You know, you talked about this taxonomy of seven different kinds of changes in self with seven other kind of ancillary or secondary effects. And I'm curious about how you see or if this was something that you found or looked into at all, how you see those changes in self temporally progressing across time. So those changes, do some changes happen earlier and some later? Are there connections between them causally and. Or also are you interested in the difference between somebody having an experience for 30 minutes in a meditation session versus that sense of self being lost in some more permanent way or long term way where just that part of the self, that process of selfing drops away and doesn't resume after that meditation session. Just a general question about how do we understand the temporal dimension of these phenomena that you're describing?
- [26:17]
Nick Canby
Yeah, really good question. I think the experience duration matters a lot. And in this particular study it ranged from seconds to over a year and the Median Duration was 1 to 12 hours. Duration was not associated with like mental health impacts, which I don't really have a good way of defining why that is, but I think there'd have to Be like a follow up study more designed to answer that question, to really to know what that's trying to say. So shorter experiences were a little bit more of the norm. But some people do have experiences of losing certain aspects of self for a very long time. I think that it's a really important point because there are some experiences that might be felt as like very positive and insightful if they happen for a short amount of time and then someone goes back to their normal functioning and then could be actually very distressing or impairing if you can't go back to your normal functioning. And just an example of that is if you feel like all of your boundaries are lost and you are one with everything, that might feel really good. But then if you're maybe driving a car later on and need to figure out how to stop at the red light or make sure you're pressing the gas at the right time or the brakes at the right time, that might be very difficult to live in a modern city or go to the grocery store if you can't turn off the sense of experiencing everything as one. And also that that might depend on exactly like what you mean by that. Because there, there might be a distinction of experiencing everything as one is like you're fully able to differentiate things on like a relative level but you have this kind of background understanding versus you actually feel like you can't differentiate your body from the floor. And those might be very different experiences.
- [28:04]
Pierce Salguero
Yeah, I mean one thing that comes to mind is this kind of process of what's normally called integration or embodiment which is after having experienced this kind of dramatic loss of self sort of experience, even if the effects linger for a very long time, there's still can be this process of acclimation back into kind of ordinary activities like driving. But doing that from this new kind of state or new kind of, in this case from this loss of self kind of perspective so that you don't need to reconstruct the self in order to figure out how to drive and you can figure out over the long term how a non self might drive. Right. You know, so, so there's some kind of, there's some kind of acclimation process to this new normal that the phenomenology can persist and it doesn't necessarily impede functioning in any way. I don't know if that was something that you asked about or people talked about at all.
- [28:58]
Nick Canby
That totally makes sense. And that would be a really interesting kind of follow up. I think this particular study wasn't really able to kind of answer that in the way it was designed. But I think that would be really interesting to further explore that kind of reintegration or acclimation just to also, I think that it would depend a lot on the type of experience that we're describing.
- [29:17]
Pierce Salguero
Yeah, I get the feeling that's the case. Yeah, for sure. And your relationship to the experience. Right. If you're constantly bringing to mind anxiety and stress and dislike of this new situation, that's presumably less likely to integrate than if you're curious. And if the experience is pleasant and you have curiosity about it, integration may happen more easily.
- [29:36]
Nick Canby
That. That makes sense. Yeah. And also, like one of the things that can cause dissociation to become chronic is, is when people are preoccupied with noticing that they are still dissociated and feeling upset about how it's never going away and they might be stuck like this forever. Those types of kind of mental observations of this is distressing to be in this state actually cause a feedback loop that kind of keeps you stuck in it.
- [30:04]
Pierce Salguero
And that might affect integration too. I mean, in terms of being in the depths of one of these non self states, if you're really just running on autopilot, you hop in the car and drive home, it might be perfectly fine. But if you're sitting in the car like, oh my God, I can't find my boundary between myself and the car and so on, and you get, get in your head about it, then you're going to crash. But if you just sort of like let your, let your autopilot take over and you just drive home without thinking about it, you may, may find yourself to be completely functional and not have any problem at all driving.
- [30:34]
Nick Canby
Absolutely. And there's always like some nuances, some people who maybe can't really do that, and there's other people who maybe that's like actually really helpful to.
- [30:42]
Pierce Salguero
Yeah, yeah. Do you have an interest in, you know, neurological correlates underlying some of these processes? Loss of cell, et cetera? Obviously it's beyond your scope as a specialist, but I'm just curious where you see your work fitting into some of the neuroscience on this.
- [30:57]
Nick Canby
So neuroscience is definitely something I interface with through my work, but I'm not really a neuroscientist myself. I think that in certain ways there are certain questions that it can be very helpful for. But also on a more clinical or contextual level, I feel like sometimes the neuroscience doesn't necessarily tell us that much that it's necessarily new because you can look for what is a neural correlate of this type of experience or that type of experience. But I think that sometimes neuroscience is given a bit more weight than it necessarily needs to have in our society, especially around contemplative practice. Because contemplative practice is something that previously was more dismissed, I think, in mainstream Western society. And so there's an emphasis of like, you can find that it's in the brain, so therefore it must be real or unusual experiences. If you can find that they have a neural correlate, you can claim that it's real in more of a scientific sense. And honestly, I think that beyond that sense of legitimizing the discipline, I don't know if it adds that much else. Maybe that's a controversial statement, but I feel a little bit like some of it is giving a lot of technical detail that doesn't necessarily have a lot of practical utility.
- [32:04]
Pierce Salguero
I think it might help us eventually to understand more about the perceptual system or about how human experience is created in the brain and so forth. But yeah, when you're a practicing clinician working with patients, what does knowing about the neural correlates actually get you on the ground working with patients? It sounds like not too much.
- [32:21]
Nick Canby
I think one of the things that I find really fascinating though is also related to worldviews of kind of the scientific approach and how that differs from much more traditional approaches or religious approaches. Some of the implications of assuming are these states just related to neural correlates. And what do you do with that? There's now work on inducing changes in the brain through different kind of neuromodulation techniques. And is that really the same thing as like, as Buddhist practice? If you can kind of like lead the brain to get to the same state through some kind of machine or some kind of neuromodulation? I don't really know, but I, you know, I think it's an interesting thing to consider and might be quite different than the goals of like, more traditional meditative systems.
- [33:03]
Pierce Salguero
We'll have a guest on soon who is an inventor and an engineer in this area and has developed an enlightenment helmet, let's say, where you can stimulate the brain in certain ways in order to produce all kinds of different effects. Also, the same question about psychedelics. To what extent, if you are able to very quickly flip a switch in the brain and enter into certain kinds of states, how does that differ from developing over the long term through sustained practice, developing the skill to do that sort of on your own? And what, what are the long term implications for how you're changing your brain in the meantime, one versus the other of those.
- [33:39]
Nick Canby
My impression is that many traditional systems that have used contemplative practice and also psychedelics as well have really not emphasized experience as much. Looking at like more traditional Native American or shamanic uses of psychedelics actually typically don't emphasize the experience. They emphasize more of a long term practice and kind of way of being similar to have meditative traditions emphasize the same thing. Of course there's a wide variety and maybe some traditions are more about having a particular type of experience, whereas others are less about that. But kind of experience seeking seems to be a very kind of modern Western thing.
- [34:16]
Pierce Salguero
I've definitely found equivocation in the Buddhist texts that I've studied in the Chinese tradition between a lot of texts that are talking about particular kinds of experiences as desirable. You do this and then you'll have visions of the Buddhas or in, in very positive terms talking about these as being stages of the awakening process and so on and so forth. But then on the other hand you also have other texts that are saying, yeah, don't pay attention to any of that. Whatever happens in meditation, that's not the point. The point is insight or the movement of the baseline over the long term. So I think, yeah, within the traditions themselves, there's mixed message on that.
- [34:51]
Nick Canby
Sometimes I think that sometimes also these traditions might do a little bit of tempting people in one direction and then once you get there they're like, no, it's actually not about that, it's about something else.
- [34:59]
Pierce Salguero
Exactly. And actually, interestingly enough, one of the main themes coming out of the project that I've just completed, which is a edited volume with 25 of my colleagues, translation of different texts from around the Asian Buddhist world on meditation related adverse effects, which I'm using the Chinese term meditation sickness to talk about that. And it's historical, contemporary, like a snapshot from all across the Buddhist world. One of the main causes of these meditation difficulties again and again is being said, is taking too seriously the phenomena that occur in your meditation. You know you had visions of demons and so therefore you think you're haunted by demons, or you had visions of Buddhas, and therefore you think you're enlightened. Both ends of the spectrum, whether the phenomena are positive or negative. These texts are saying, don't put too much credence into any of that. It's just passing phenomena that doesn't really warrant getting excited about.
- [35:53]
Nick Canby
Within psychology discipline, there's now a lot of attention being put on mystical experiences and whether they like lead to positive sort of psychological outcomes. And I can say some of this too is like my clinical experience outside of that particular study. But I think that one of the dangers is if you have a really blissful, really positive experience that you start to crave that or search for that again and try to like, replicate it. And that sort of blissful, positive experience can be a bit addictive or also like a way of avoiding things that maybe you don't want to experience. I've heard this about people who learn how to enter into jhana states or like, certain aspects of like, sort of states of mind where they're maybe in a kind of a pure consciousness experience or they separate from other aspects of reality. And. And sometimes that can actually become of an avoidance mechanism. Like, as soon as something gets stressful, they retreat to that state of mind. And there's this complex question of, like, when is it more of a kind of a meditative experience that's transient, that's not related to a disorder, and when is it? When are we dealing more with a mental health disorder? Kind of a more clinical question. And it's really complicated and also has to do with, like, how we define both of those things. And like, what is even is a mental health disorder. But sometimes like really expansive experiences where you feel like you're one with everything. That also can happen, especially in mania. On the other end of that spectrum is dissociation. So people who have a more kind of contractive sense of like, feeling distanced from themselves, feeling more emotionally numb, like their surroundings are unreal, that is classic depersonalization. And that can also sometimes become chronic. So a lot of the people I see at Cheetah House sometimes might also be considered to have depersonalization, derealization disorder or mania or psychosis. On the other end of the spectrum.
- [37:49]
Pierce Salguero
Yeah. So we just recently had on the podcast a scholar named Richard Saville Smith. So he's coming from a Mad studies perspective, which is the way he says that he's interested in breaking down the boundaries between humanities, social science type research in psychiatry. Coming from the perspective that the sharp line or distinction between religious experiences and madness is actually an artifice of an artificial kind of boundary that is being drawn by both scholars in psychiatry and also in humanities and social sciences. And from his perspective, he would invite us to sort of set down that sharp distinction and to just understand religious experience in general to be much more mad than we usually want it to be. As a practicing clinical psychologist yourself, that's not necessarily the viewpoint that you're going to bring into your. Into your clinic. But let me just ask you, how sharp do you think the distinctions are between a mental health crisis and just a really potent spiritual experience? Are you able as a clinician to draw on particular factors that help you to draw that line?
- [38:56]
Nick Canby
So, yeah, I think that's a really good point. And maybe I should have mentioned earlier. I think the decision to include both trauma and mental illness and meditative and psychedelic experiences in the same sample was intentionally meaning to blur that line, because I think those are often separate conversations about, like, you know, there's a literature on phenomenological psychopathology that looks at, like, these types of experiences within the context of pathology. And then there's a whole literature on, like, spiritual and religious experiences that looks at them in that context. And there's not really a lot of scholarship that bridges those two. And I think it is really fascinating to see how much overlap there is. Willoughby and Jared wrote an article called Progress or Pathology? Asking that question, like, how do you know if something is part of the kind of contemplative path or if something is pathological mental illness? And I think they came up with 11 ways of distinguishing. But I believe that their general kind of conclusion was that maybe that's not really the right question. The right question is, like, how do you know when someone is in need of additional support? Which is a bit more of a functional answer rather than, like, does it fit into one box or another? I think that also, like, there's a lot of misconceptions about what psychological disorders are. And not only misconceptions, but, like, different narratives about what they are. Because the medical model often frames psychological disorders as basically diseases where there's like, a particular problem in your brain and you can treat them similarly to a physical disease. And I think that most more emotionally based psychological disorders are, like, really don't fit very well into that way of understanding. And if you really look into, like, how they're categorized, like, technically, the dsm, which is like the taxonomy of psychological disorders, basically just a very wide variety of categorizing all the different ways that people can be either distressed or impaired. And. And as a clinician, mostly you just have to know the category to get insurance, to reimburse. That's how I think about it. This is just people in need of help for various reasons. And you kind of have to say, like, oh, are you in need of help with more depressive symptoms or more dissociative symptoms or more manic symptoms? I mean, I think that ultimately they're more descriptive of just like people in distress for whatever reason and not being put into a sort of medical box that someone has for the rest of their life. Being more of like a acute problem that can often be solved through therapy or medication.
- [41:33]
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- [43:04]
Pierce Salguero
So what I'm hearing you say is that, you know, somebody might be having visions, be hearing voices, might have no sense of self, might feel that they're one with everything or what have you any any sort of different kinds of religious or spiritual experiences and still be quite functional and not be in need of support and be perfectly capable of living an ordinary life with a job and family and so on and so forth. And really, who's to say that person is mad if they're not seeking support? If they don't appear to need support, then carry on. And the distinction between religious experience and psychological problem doesn't need to be applied right there. Where it needs to be applied is when somebody is in need of support and they come to a therapist's office and they need to to figure out the billing and then at that point it's okay, we need to apply a diagnosis which one is the best criteria and let's do that. But at that point it's more of like you Said a functional distinction, not a epistemological distinction. Right. Like you're not necessarily labeling this person as their experiences as being an illness per se. It's just we're doing, we're labeling that for practical purposes of getting reimbursement. Am I being too extreme in the way that I'm characterizing?
- [44:10]
Nick Canby
Well, okay, so I think I mostly agree there's a slight caveat there. I think this is, I believe, a correction of the current DSM for sort of historical wrongs that were too pathologizing. So in the past there was more of people considered unusual or abnormal were catholicized and seen to be like having an illness, whether they were functional or not. And so the current kind of mental health professions are trying really hard not to pathologize weirdness. Or if someone is doing just fine with their life, there's no reason to classify them as having a mental illness. And also there's a big emphasis on understanding norms can change a lot based on cultural context. And there are certain types of experiences that might be totally normal within a certain religious or cultural context. That being said, though, there is a bit of a caveat around especially mania and psychosis, because sometimes people feel like they're doing great and are actually really impaired in ways that they're not fully able to acknowledge. And that usually is something that affects their like close friends and family in ways that their friends and family might be saying, hey, you have a problem, you need to get this checked out. But they might not be fully on the same page, especially if they're within like acute kind of mania or psychosis. And so I think that's where it gets a little bit tricky. Like that would be maybe they're not distressed acutely in that situation, but they still might be impaired. And in more unusual cases, people have to be like involuntarily brought to a hospital, especially if they're like at risk to themselves or others and things like that.
- [45:46]
Pierce Salguero
So pivoting then to talk about Cheetah House a little bit, let's talk about how these ideas can form the clinical side of what you do.
- [45:53]
Nick Canby
So Cheetah House is a nonprofit organization that provides care services and also education to people with meditation related challenges, broadly defined. And I'm part of the care team there, which is composed of Willoughby, Britton and me are the only psychologists who work there. We also have, though a number of other peer supporters, some of whom have master's degrees in mental health. Others are people who have had meditation related challenges themselves and have worked for through Them and are now making themselves available to support meditators in distress. So we see a pretty wide range of people. Because it's an online organization and all of our appointments are through video. We do encourage people to like find like medical care within their area. But finding mental health care for people who've had meditation related challenges is often not easy to find. And so we provide education and some support just around often understanding like what has happened to people and helping them figure out what they want to do about it and what kinds of remedies or sources of support would be helpful for them. So it can be open ended. And I usually check with people about what their individual story is and how I can best be of support to them. It's definitely not a sort of one size fits all model. But yeah, we're kind of like officially kind of consultants for people just to get some orientation and education around like this topic that is not very well known about.
- [47:24]
Pierce Salguero
So we're saying Cheetah House. This is cheetah as in the cat. But there's a Buddhist pun being made. Can you explain that to our listeners what the pun is?
- [47:34]
Nick Canby
Yeah, so the pun is from bodhicitta like awakened mind or awakened heart I believe is the translation.
- [47:41]
Pierce Salguero
So what kinds of interventions, let's say, or techniques or practical advice is Cheetah House giving to sufferers of meditation related effects like loss of self? I mean, are you prescribing or suggesting recommending certain modifications to practice? Are you suggesting particular techniques, approaches? Are you just listening, providing context and somebody to talk to or what's the range of things that you're, that you're providing to these people?
- [48:13]
Nick Canby
Most commonly the first. And just to say, I think all of this is usually very personalized because there's also quite a wide range of different types of problems that people come to me with. I think that one of the things though that I often talk to people about is either slowing down or stopping their meditation practice. Many people find that continuing to practice makes their problem worse. You know, just slowing down or stopping their practice often helps a lot and sometimes is is something that people are really reluctant to do. Another kind of an approach that Willoughby Britain really pioneered, the Cheetah House calls it scaffolding. And it's based on a kind of a cognitive science theory called self scaffolding, which is basically the sense of self and emotions are like scaffolded on exterior sources of support. So it's the opposite in some ways of many meditative practices are about cutting off what's out, outside, and, like, just going inside and relying only on, like, your interiority for support. And so scaffolding would be intentionally developing, like, preferences again, for, like, noticing things that you like in the external world or noticing things that you don't like, intentionally developing a sense of, like, agency, of, I want to do this, I don't want to do that. This especially is, like, very useful for people who are feeling very kind of, like, numb and blank and distanced from themselves and kind of, like equanimity, but not a positive equanimity of sort of, like, everything is gray. And so I think that kind of the underlying theory here is that the way that people are practicing the meditative techniques that they're doing can often, like, over train them in a certain direction. And so if that is causing problems, you can kind of, like, train your mind in the opposite direction to sort of undo that in certain ways. And that's where it gets really personalized, I think, is figuring out, like, in what way they've overtrained a certain thing and how can you pull that back.
- [50:08]
Pierce Salguero
So in that respect, then what you would be doing at Cheetah House would be the opposite of the kind of Dharma teacher advice that would say, the only way through this is to continue forward with the practice. You're helping people to back out of where they've gotten to, reconstructing the self that they have lost now through this scaffolding process.
- [50:31]
Nick Canby
And I want to be clear that that's usually only when it seems necessary. I also try to be very careful to not give people that advice if they aren't asking for it or, you know, if people want to take that approach of going forward, then I will affirm that too.
- [50:46]
Pierce Salguero
Would they be coming to you in the first place? I mean, it seems like the people who would be coming to you would be the people maybe who are more inclined to get themselves out of the situation they're in and don't trust what they're being told by the tradition.
- [50:57]
Nick Canby
Typically, yes, I think that that is where it's a little bit self selecting. Because if someone is getting great advice from their teacher, then maybe they're not going to go to Cheetah House at all. And I hear a lot of times when that doesn't work well for people where people try to say, or a teacher says, or their tradition says, the only way through is forward, and they try and just get increasingly destabilized and then eventually come to Cheetah House. There might be certain circumstances where that is good advice, but I'm not usually seeing it. It's not that I am ideologically opposed to that ever being the case, but I typically don't see it as very helpful.
- [51:32]
Pierce Salguero
So tell us, what's your first thing you do when you. When somebody's assigned to you or somebody you know, you're meeting with them for the first time and they really are in severe psychosis, severe depersonalization, spiritual emergency. Right. Like a severe acute situation. I mean, you mentioned earlier that you try to connect people with medical resources in their area, but in terms of what you're able to offer them, what's the first line of intervention?
- [51:58]
Nick Canby
First, usually, like, it's hard to really do anything else without getting a sense of their symptoms, what happened to them, like a bit about their story. And even if someone's pretty acutely distressed, I think that's still pretty important. I think that the situations that are most acute and severe are when someone has like acute psychosis or acute mania. And those are situations where there's really not a ton that I can do to support the person. Because psychosis and mania are states of mind where you're really not able to think very clearly. And you can't really do therapy with someone or talk to them on a rational level if they're acutely manic or psychotic. And I think that usually is a situation where they need like hospitalization or medication to stabilize them out of that state. And then once they're in a more stable state of mind that they can engage in more talking through it or strategies to figure out what happened to them and all of that. But those situations, there's not a ton that I can do besides just telling someone, like, I think you really need to go to the hospital, or talking to their family members and urging them to go to the hospital. I think that with dissociation, it's a little bit more nuanced because dissociation is. It's distressing. Like it doesn't feel good to feel empty and numb and like you don't have a sense of self. But it's not dysfunctional. In the same level, people can often function pretty well in life or reasonably well. Not to say that it's easy, but it's not something that people usually are hospitalized for unless they're like suicidal or. Also there's some people with energy related somatic experiences. People have like really intense, like flows of energy going on in their body. And that can also be really difficult to manage. Typically. I will offer a bit of education about how what we know about These types of problems and what are some possible solutions. And then sometimes people will want to work through that with me or someone will work through that with like trauma therapists sometimes, or I'll give some ideas for other sources of support around that issue.
- [53:58]
Pierce Salguero
So just out of curiosity, because you mentioned it, what is the psychological framework through which you can approach, approach energy related symptoms? I mean, we, we as part of this series are talking to Chinese medicine practitioners and Tibetan medicine practitioners and other people who are, you know, working with patients, working with people who have symptoms from meditation or spiritual practice that have these energy type symptoms. And they're working within a paradigm that really understands energy as a phenomenon and how to work with it using acupuncture needles or yoga postures or breathing or whatever. But presumably that's not the foundation from which psychology comes at it. So what is the interpretation? What DSM category would energy flow deviation be categorized under? And how, how do you understand that as a psychologist working within that kind of framework?
- [54:48]
Nick Canby
So yeah, I think that there's like a different worldview there because psychology typically doesn't really, I mean like a more materialist view of reality doesn't really believe in like energy in the same way that like many Eastern worldviews do. So I think that the way that a lot of my lab has conceptualized this is that internal bodily energy, subjectively experienced, can kind of be very similar to physiological arousal if you are experiencing like a very heightened buzzing energy throughout your whole body. That actually does a lot of parallels if you look at like phenomenology of that, to experiencing like strong levels of anxiety in your body. It's anxiety is kind of a physiological arousal response. So we have this like fight or flight system arousal, not like sexual arousal, it's more of a biological term, but basically meaning like your stress hormones and your adrenal glands are fully activated. And so I'm a little hesitant to kind of line them up like one to one, because I think that within many, probably Eastern systems of medicine, there's a wide variety of ways that you're bodily energy can show up differently. And so I would say that some of those states though could still correspond to certain psychological disorders. Like people who are depressed often feel like their body is really heavy and slow and weighed down. People who are anxious often feel like there's like a buzzing energy in their body or a tightness in a certain part of their body. Sometimes people within mania or psychosis have really unusual feelings of like bodily energy moving around their body that also lines up pretty well with like kind of a trauma view too, that sometimes people experience emotion stuck in their body. And by sitting with certain body sensations, sometimes certain emotions will come up. There's also even like neuroscience to tie that together, that the part of the brain called the insula encodes bodily sensations and emotions. And so by paying attention to certain bodily sensations or sort of activating the same part of the brain that like, also keeps track of emotions. So I guess that's kind of a roundabout way to say that, you know, those are very different frameworks of like, health and well being. I don't think that they line up like one to one, but I think there's a lot of ways of conceptualizing similar things using more of a kind of scientific framework.
- [57:12]
Pierce Salguero
We're not making like a one to one correlation, either one of us are. But it, it seems to also relate to a theme that's come up a couple times already, which is similarities at the phenomenological level and then differences in how it's framed and understood and the worldview behind it and so forth that can really organize, let's say the underlying phenomenology can be constructed into a whole sort of experience and a whole world, but that there's a lot of underlying similarities in the phenomenology to begin with.
- [57:41]
Nick Canby
Yeah, I think that phenomenology can really offer a lot of interesting connections. From what I understand, a lot of Eastern traditions are a bit more subjectively focused in their ways of like, creating frameworks of understanding.
- [57:53]
Pierce Salguero
Yeah, I think that's true. I think there's also, like, I do see how observation of phenomenology leads to construction of worldview and construction of ontologies and epistemology as well. Right. So. So because the body sensations feel a certain way, therefore there is something called chi that works, that flows through something called meridians in your body. And here's how it works. And then they become. It becomes a model of reality built from the ground up from phenomenology, up from body sensations and the way that they're experienced up instead of being built from what you can calculate mathematically, let's say.
- [58:29]
Nick Canby
Yeah, absolutely. So there's this field of phenomenological psychiatry which is basically asking the question, like, what does it feel like subjectively to experience different types of mental illness? And when you look at them from a really subjective stance, which is not really the more mainstream view, but I think really fascinating, that kind of aligns a little bit better with some views of like bodily energy. I will mention too, there have been a couple of really interesting taxonomies that have come out of phenomenological psychopathology. There's one called the examination of anomalous self experience, and there's another one called the examination of anomalous world experience. And they were conducted with people who had schizophrenia or schizophrenia spectrum disorders, I believe, which is a little bit wider than like just the particular diagnosis of schizophrenia. So they classified different types of unusual experiences of self and world. And what's really fascinating is that many experiences that many people would consider to be more spiritual or religious are within those taxonomies. And so I think that just, just shows how much overlap there is, but also how much you can look at these types of experiences in different contexts and you often end up finding some of the same things. I just thought of that too, because I believe like, flows of body energy is like one of the things that are in those taxonomies also.
- [59:46]
Pierce Salguero
And again, flows of bodily energies are the signs of very high level spiritual attainment in some kinds of practices. Right. Like, so it. Within certain Taoist or yogic circles, those are very desirable attainments. Right. That one wants to have.
- [60:03]
Nick Canby
Yeah. You know, on that note too, I think, just to clarify also, like, the fact that these experiences are found in psychosis, I don't take to be evidence that they're like always a problem or always pathological. And I think we touched on that earlier. But like, one kind of approach that I really like actually is from a type of therapy that is a little bit newer, but it's become one of the sort of gold standards within psychology now called ACT or acceptance and commitment therapy. So it is very clear about not only the sort of therapeutic approach, but what the philosophical foundations underlying that are. And so the philosophical foundations underlying that are an approach called functional contextualism, which basically is that instead of asking if something is true or not, that maybe clinically the more important question is asking, like, does it function well in its context? And so I think that's also a really good frame for this sort of overall subject matter of like, if you're looking at advanced Tibetan meditators who have shifts in body energy, you can ask, does it function well in its context? Probably for the most part, yes. And if people are having a similar experience on the psych ward, probably no. So anyway, I just, I find that a really helpful way of framing it, personally.
- [61:15]
Pierce Salguero
Yeah, I find that quite helpful too. I mean, one of the things that we've been exploring on the podcast over the last year or so is just divergent epistemologies. And worldviews and just. Just how to navigate them. As primarily, the listeners to this podcast are modern people who were raised in a scientific kind of world and have. But also either through family or through their own heritage culture, or through their academic study, have also learned and been exposed to radically different viewpoints from Asian medicine, Asian religions, and so forth. And just how do we reconcile these seemingly irreconcilable models of reality with one another? Do we interpret that one in terms of the other? Do we combine the two together in some new hybrid? And I like the suggestion that you're making, which is, why don't we just throw out, you know, these, these epistemologies, or why don't we hold them really lightly and just look at actually their functional, their functionality in certain particular contexts? And yeah, that strikes me as a productive way to navigate this thicket of different worldviews and incommensurable ideas.
- [62:19]
Nick Canby
I really like that. And one addition to it too, is that, and this is according to the ACT model, but when they're talking about context, they're also talking about the particular kind of goals and values that the person has. And I think it's a really good point that if you ask if something is working well or not, the criteria of how you evaluate working well versus not working well has a lot to do with what you're trying to do and why. And so that being a big part of not only the worldview, but also someone's individual goals and values.
- [62:48]
Pierce Salguero
Yeah, as well as their social context, too. Because your own individual goals and values are always in relation to the community as well. For example, you mentioned Tibetan monks being in a very different kind of society. Right. Within a monastic community than somebody living in contemporary America. And what may be functional in one place may not be at all functional in the other. What may be functional in one culture, one kind of family circle or one locality versus another might be quite different. Yeah.
- [63:15]
Nick Canby
I also think that's like a big issue that I see at Cheetah House is people who sometimes are not very clear about what they were looking for. Or people get really into something and maybe they think they're looking for one thing, but if they really look more deep inside, they realize they're actually looking for something else. And so I think motivation, I think, matters a lot. And the concept of enlightenment for some people can seem like just the sort of wish fulfillment of anything you project into it. I'll be richer and happier and more successful and have achieved the ultimate goal in some way if I just get Enlightenment people really think through what were they really looking for. Sometimes it's quite different from maybe what the more Buddhist view of enlightenment is. I find that that's an interesting kind of issue to explore as well. Coming back to that concept of like the person centered care that really ideally we're working on just this person is in distress and how can we best help that person? You know, as a psychologist too, I think it is really important to clarify who you're working for. Sometimes an analogy, like if you're working with a family or working with a couple versus working with an individual, like if you're working with the individual, usually the care is designed for that individual's well being. Whereas if you're working with someone in the context of a couple or a family or something, you're thinking about the whole family. And so just to draw that analogy, like we're mostly working with individuals who are in distress and just trying to do whatever is best for their well being. Not necessarily treating Buddhism as a whole as the other client in the room.
- [64:49]
Pierce Salguero
Well said. Yeah, you're not there for the Dharma, you're there for the patient, the individual. How did you come to get involved with this project in the first place? Maybe with Cheetah House in particular? Why were you drawn to non self? And I'm assuming you probably had a meditation practice beforehand, maybe had tasted some of these kinds of experiences that you can have and that that drew you into the research or is that not the case?
- [65:12]
Nick Canby
That's more or less the case. I have worked with Willoughby, Britain's lab for quite a long time actually. I first joined in 2012 when I was fresh out of college myself and then kept leaving and then coming back for various reasons. I also worked with her when I was in grad school and then and as her postdoc and then now I'm finished with that and working at Cheetah House. So I've been part of her team for over a decade now and I think that along that long trajectory my interest has evolved with the interests of the team as a whole. So when I first joined her lab, it was really appealing to me that she was studying mindfulness and meditation while having more of an interest in like Buddhist philosophy than many other labs which are more secular. And I was interested in meditation myself. I had done some like Goenka style Vipassana retreats and later got a bit into Zen and some forms of Tibetan Buddhism and yeah, spent some time in various sort of spiritual and religious contexts and was really interested in that in A personal experience kind of way and also really interested in mystical experiences or kinds of ways of dissolving the ego. Yeah. Then, you know, I think I just over the years learned a lot more about the topics and it nuanced my perspectives in a lot of ways. That kind of brought me to Cheetah House over time. I didn't come to Cheetah House because of my own negative experience personally, although many people do, but a little bit more as like a researcher and clinician.
- [66:38]
Pierce Salguero
All right, we'll put links in the show notes for Cheetah House and for your research and for other things that we've talked about here, but just to put it in the audio as well. What should somebody do if they are having a crisis? If they're having a meditation related crisis, how do they connect with Cheetah House? What should they do?
- [66:56]
Nick Canby
Yeah, just going to the Cheetah House website, www.cheetahouse.org. there are consultations available. You can book a consultation with either Willoughby or me, or a member of the CARE team, a peer supporter. If you have trouble affording the fee, we offer financial assistance, so please don't have that be an obstacle. We also do provide a support group where people often can come once a week and just meet other people who've experienced meditation related challenges. And there also is a Cheetah House education arm where we have a bunch of online courses that actually some of them are now offered for CE credits for people who are in mental health professions on these types of topics. To learn more about meditation related challenges, both if you have them yourself and also if you're a mental health provider and want to learn to better treat people who have these types of challenges. So a number of resources are available through the website. In other words.
- [67:56]
Pierce Salguero
Yeah, great, we'll definitely link to that. Thank you so much for being on Nick, presenting us with a different take than we have done so far. We have a lot of guests on our podcast in this series that are coming from various different Asian traditions, Buddhist, Taoist, Chinese medicine, Tibetan medicine, etc. But getting your perspective as a clinical psychologist and how it is to work with people from within this framework was great. And also really this deep dive into the self and what it's like when that collapses or when that disappears or stops working the way it normally does is really an interesting take here.
- [68:34]
Nick Canby
Thank you very much, Pierce. I really, really appreciate being on the podcast and really engaging conversation. I really enjoyed it myself.
- [68:51]
Lan Le
That's it for today from us at the Black Barrel Podcast. If you're listening to us on one of our partner podcasts. You can subscribe directly to us for ad free episodes or look us up on substack to check out members only benefits. This episode is hosted by Pierce Alguero and produced and edited by me, Lan Le. Our music is by Jonathan Pettit. Until next time, be happy, be safe, and be well.
- [69:41]
Pierce Salguero
And Doug.
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Pierce Salguero
Fascinating.
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Nick Canby
It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
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Pierce Salguero
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