Gabor Mate - Manifesting the Mind - Inside the Psychedelic Experience

so our next speaker is as close as it gets to someone who needs no introduction he's one of the busiest most in-demand people you'll ever meet he's internationally known for his remarkable insights and work to do with unity of the mind and body and health and healing and so I'm just going to directly turn the mic over to Gabor dr. Gabor mate' please give him a warm welcome Thank You Steven and.and to Andrew as well for again inviting this wonderful conference and considering what I might say today I thought well what is it that we're all looking for me and what are we all doing here and why are we all seeking these experiences in the last year and a half I've had experiences with ayahuasca which is the main teacher that I work with with psilocybin with LSD with 5ml DMT I'm at holotropic breathwork and I was think about what am I actually looking for somebody who we worked with with ayahuasca a woman whose name is Andrea sent us anemia when I say us I'm not using a Royal we I'm saying us group of us that she worked with an email about her teaching with ayahuasca I just read you a little bit about what she said after purging the floor continued but with a sense of evolution or transformation and as I went through it it transformed into a dragon this holds a very strong meaning to me when I found this forum I found self-love I was filled with so much joy and love for the first time in my life I felt amazing unconditional love for myself even just typing this letter I tear up tear up it took 34 years to finally love myself and I'd say that's pretty good if she could in 34 years she's way ahead of the game I asked her to hold on to this how to keep my dragon and this amazing love that I've discovered it was made clear honor thy self make decisions that strengthen you not weaken you release ego if you live to prove something to please others you will kill your dragon and a few other points that she learned but it's that phase about if you live to prove yourself to prove something to please others you will kill your dragon I just suggest that all of us that the dragon is her phrase that may not be a an entity or an image that personally resonates with you but whether it does or not what she's talking about Andrea is talking about is finding herself and connecting with her essence and I'm suggesting to you that all of us doesn't matter what we believe in tells us to do this work with the plant spirits what we are actually looking for essentially is ourselves and if looking essentially for ourselves question is why do we have to look what happened and how did this experience how does this experience with the plants substances help us find ourselves now as some of you know my work amongst others has been with addictions and in addiction there's a very interesting phrase that's used when you heal from addiction it's called recovery and recovery is another interesting word because we just take it for granted but but think about it for a moment what does recovery mean it means that you find something that you've lost you find something that you've lost but whatever you found couldn't have been destroyed and it must have been there all along otherwise you couldn't find it so what is it that people recover when they recover from say addiction well what they recover and I often ask this question and the spontaneous response including at a talk I gave yesterday is I found myself so people recover themselves which is exactly what Andrea is writing about you find her dragon she found herself and then the question then is how do we lose ourselves and why is it so difficult to reconnect and how do these experiences with the plants help us how do they facilitate this this reconnection and that question leads to the very essence of trauma because what I'm suggesting is is that it's trauma that makes us disconnect in the first place in fact it's not that trauma that makes us disconnect trauma is the disconnection and my friend Peter Levine who is one of the world trauma experts written a wonderful book amongst many other wonderful books called waking the drugged waking the tiger and he defines addiction he defines it trauma is the loss of connection with yourself this is a fundamental fracture a loss of connection to ourselves our families and the world around us this loss is often hard to recognize because it happens slowly over time we add that to these subtle changes sometimes without even noticing them and so trauma is not the external event that happens trauma is the impact of that event which is the disconnection from ourselves and because it can be subtle and happened over time we actually adapt in such ways that we believe we're the adaptations we start to think that we are the adaptations that we've come to as a result of the trauma of disconnection so we start to believe that we are the disconnection and we are the forms and manifestations that that disconnection assumes now this definition that Peter gives is also the one given by other great spiritual teachers Eckhart Tolle says basically all emotions are modifications of one primordial undifferentiated emotion that has its origin in the loss of awareness of who you are beyond the name in the form and that's associated with a sense of abandonment with a sense of incompleteness and he says the simplest word for it is pain but pain of course it's so nonspecific is that loss of self and my other great mentor h-honest writes the fundamental thing that happened and the greatest calamity is not that there was no lover support he's talking about in childhood let me pause here for a moment and tell you that as a physician I found that it doesn't matter what the ailment is the essence of it is the loss of connection to the self so whether you've got multiple sclerosis radical rheumatoid arthritis chronic fatigue colitis Crohn's disease chronic asthma cancer ALS it actually begins with a disconnection from the south I won't not have the time to prove that to you today that's a whole other talk I'm just telling you my conclusion about that I've written about it if you move to do so you can read about it but the essence of all this disease or disease is that this connection for myself and the result of the adaptations it's not that the disconnection makes us sick it's our adaptations to that disconnection that that make us sick so what begins as an adaptation and I'll tell you a little bit more about that in a moment ends up causing illness and whether that's physical illness or mental illness it doesn't matter it all comes to the same thing and the same with addiction so addiction is just another adaptation adept you know addiction you know some of you know I've worked in the downtown east side of Vancouver North America's most concentrated area of drug use and every person down there had been abused as a child and all the women I've worked with have been sexually abused all the men have been traumatized sexually or in other ways the addiction is not the problem the reason that we don't treat addiction very well which is a to say that we don't treat it very well as an understatement is precisely because we don't get that the addiction is not the problem the addiction is an adaptation and let me just give you my definition of addiction any behavior any behavior that gives you temporary relief pleasure that you crave and then you pursue despite negative consequences so that's an addiction any behavior drugs sex gambling internet relationships work whatever it is eating it's any behavior that provides temporary relief and pleasure and you crave despite the negative consequences so that's an addiction so let me ask you by that definition how many of you would agree that at some time another you've had some kind of a dick tip a turn in your life just raise your hands with you okay all right so let me ask some of you that are willing to say so and I'm not going to ask you what you addicted to or one of along but simply what did it do for you not what was wrong with it but what did you like about it okay so anybody yes give you gave you pleasure okay great thank you who else yes I'll say I don't wait ok avoidance of conflict thank you yes it eases the pain yes distraction from the pain ok great so thank you I mean I could go on but can you see that everything you said easing of pain avoidance of conflict pleasure these are normal human aspirations there's nothing wrong with any of them in other words the addiction wasn't your problem your problem is how come in God's on God's green earth you could find no pleasure something had blocked your capacity to experience pleasure and joy something had created so much conflict in your life that you had to escape from it something had given you so much pain that you need a distraction or relief from the pain and hence my mantra the first question is not why the addiction but why the pain and that that pain goes back to that original disconnection and so my other teacher a trauma says speaking about childhood the fun little thing that happened and the greatest calamity is not that there was no lover support the greater calamity which is caused by that first calamity is that you lost the connection to your essence that is much more important than whether your mother fought it the father loved you or not and by extension I'm going to make the perhaps astonishing statement that the fundamental problem was not that you're sexually abused was not that you were beaten was not that you abandoned not that your parents couldn't love you the way you need to be loved it's that as a result of all that you lost the connection to yourself that's the trauma so there's the external event than the impact and although it's impossible to have it happen this way but had you been beaten and abused but had that not resulted in the disconnect from yourself you would not have been traumatized and so that what are we looking for then is that reconnection with ourselves and the loss of connection itself is an adaptation why is that an adaptation because if it's so painful to be myself I better disconnect if it's so painful for me to be aware of my gut feelings and to be able to assert them and to manifest them and declare them I better disconnect from my gut feelings and it's that connection from the gut feeling which happens right in the body that's the trauma and then we spend the last of our lives trying to compensate how do we compensate well through addiction only compensated by developing certain personality patterns that then will somehow try to get us indirectly what we didn't get in the first place which is the love that would have allowed us to connect to ourselves so then we become our personalities at least we become we become who we think we are as a personality so if you didn't get the attention that you needed as a child just for yourself then you might become consumed by attracting attention then you don't be attractive all the time and hence the 30 billion dollar cosmetic surgery industry because people have lost the connection to themselves and now they want validation from the outside or you didn't get the approval you needed for we were now you want to win approval from others as a substitute you weren't valued for you were no you're consumed by measuring up to others expectations so that you can get your sense of value to what others think of you though other people think of you you weren't esteem for who you are now you're going to want to impress people all the time and then these are all adaptations these are all applications but mistake ourselves for adaptations and then because we couldn't be ourselves because being ourselves would have meant too much pain too much suffering too much vulnerability vulnerability the Latin word vulner re to wound our wound would be too raw we cover up a vulnerability by these compensatory mechanisms and we close our hearts I'm going to close our hearts we no longer know how to love ourselves or others I mean I only have pleasure or joy and then you have the statement by Meister Eckhart was the 13th century spiritual master who says a human being has so many skins inside carving the depths of the heart we know so many things but we don't know ourselves again that loss of self why 30 or 40 skins or hides as thick and as hard as an ox's or bears cover the soul and he says go into your ground and learn to know yourself there well why to develop these skins these hides these are the compensations these are how we try and protect ourselves from that woundedness and that same adaptation that same adaptation that helped us endure those early losses and primarily the loss of ourselves then become our burden then become our separation from the world that's the source of oil a nation and the problem is this doesn't only happen on individual level it happens in a social level because we live in a society that actually is profoundly alienated and we live in a society that actually validates our invalidity we live in a society that validates our false self so that not only do we develop these calm Satori mechanisms it's even that we rewarded for it so let's say you're deeply wounded person and you emotionally shut down so badly that your eyes go dead because you were hurt so badly you couldn't bear to look at reality and let's say that you're so scared of vulnerability that you're going to attack vulnerability wherever you see it and let's say that you feel so weak because you lost that connection to you to self that you have to have power and control you know what becomes of you you become Prime Minister of Canada that's a deeply traumatized person that was just displaced he is he is and and and now we've elected another one maybe not quite so traumatized maybe not quite so wounded maybe a little bit more connected maybe a little bit that's the best we can hope for but I'm saying is that the world rewards or in my case the world rewards my workaholism because looking at wonderful doctor always available for everybody for everybody except himself and everybody except the people that really need him close to him so the world rewards it and so as the author of the book and the Tibetan book of living and dying says the greatest achievement of modern culture is the billion selling of samsara samsara is the cycle of suffering and it's barren distractions modern society seems to me a celebration of all the things that lead away from truth make truth hard to live for and discourage people even from believing that it exists so not only do we suffer this trauma because our parents are unconscious or so hurt themselves but they simply couldn't help traumatizing us we then have a world that validates the falseness that validates the personality which was developed as a compensation for the loss and that's why it's so difficult and that's why even when people go into ceremony with a plant or with LSD which is not a plant but a substance or whole tropic path work or meditation and whatever experiences they have and there are experiences of tremendous insight that people can journey through through these various modalities the real difficulty is not in having those experiences the real difficulty is then how do you make that experience live in your life how do you manifest that insight in your daily living when the world is so intent of Rob on robbing you of of the to the very truth of things because the economy the capitalist economy depends on your false sense of self if you retreat to connect it to yourself you wouldn't blame most of the products that you buy at least you wouldn't be so attached to them you know I was in San Francisco three or four years ago and my wife and I were walking somewhere in a downtown area and we found this line of people four or five abreast right around the block so I said to somebody okay what's this all about what are you people lining up voices the iPad the new iPad just came out and I said okay I get it I don't I don't have an iPad you know I don't appreciate its multiple benefits but nevertheless I said okay I can believe that they applied is a wonderful instrument put why are you lining up I couldn't get it tomorrow that you know man you don't understand is the iPad I mean this guy actually thought and I've had the same thoughts relation to other products that this is going to somehow make a difference in his life so I mean this society just feeds off that so then let me tell you a few things that I've learned in this like little experience and I began to work with ayahuasca about eight years ago now I guess when my book and addiction came out and I kept getting these emails or of questions at my speaking engagements what do I know about ayahuasca and a healing of addiction and I'd say well I don't know anything about it really in next question and a week later another email or another inquiry what do you know about ayahuasca in the healing of addiction is it nothing next question and I finally started getting annoyed and I've I've said this before but I started feeling like Brian in a life of Brian have you seen that movie where where people think that Brian is the Messiah and I keep genuflecting and they keep you know wanting to worship Him and you see saying listen I'm not on the side leave me alone but finally get sick of it he says okay I'm the Messiah now off okay and these people come to me say how shall we off my lord you know and that's how I was with I okay I don't think what I was gonna off and then I got the message but maybe the universe is trying to tell me something I have it I do have a thick brain a very thick mind I was working with psilocybin this summer with a therapist in San Francisco and I did say to her listen you better give me a whole whack of it because I have a really thick mind you know but I got it there was a message here and and so that I began to work with it and I and I really see how it can help how can it help and not just ayahuasca but any path any substance and sometimes other paths that don't involve substances I mean they're one of the things I don't want to create here is the impression that I'm not one of these messianic believers in substances or plants I'm really Ahmad some of you may be I'm not I don't think they're the answers to the problems of the world I think it's too bad if they were because they're never going to be around enough for them and not enough people will participate in them that they're going to be the answer the answers gonna have to come from somewhere else and where the answer is gonna have to come from deep inside people because the truth is already there so the plants don't give us the truth the plant help us manifest and see the truth that's a great path but I'm not messianic about it but nevertheless since we're talking about plants and Anna and spirit how can they help us so the in two ways really well these two ways the first one when I first did ayahuasca because somebody said you know what you can actually do a ceremony up here in my Coover and some Peruvian shaman that I know I do actually Diego Palmer was up here and he was leading ceremonies and what an hour into it this beautiful music was playing and there were tears of joy and pleasure coursing down my face and I felt this tremendous love and it wasn't love there was love for particular people but it was much greater than that and what I really got was that this love is actually my essence which is not to say and the essence that I've been disconnected from all my life these skins that I've developed on my heart to protect myself on the pain because when your heart is open and the love is flowing you really can get hurt and last year in December in your lap are where I lead the retreats with ayahuasca I had the experience of my heart opening up and Trust connecting me with the universe and and I and I got that real that's the essence that that opening that open heartedness that love is our essence and if that's our essence why don't we realize it barson Stephen Harper realise it why don't the rest of us realize it is because it hurts so much when it's not reciprocated it hurts so much when it's not understood it hurts so much when it's wounded and so we develop these skins we shut down and specifically about addictions addictions like many other behaviors are all about escaping from the pain but if we realize that that love is really our very essence there's nothing to run away from what's there to run if you really get it and the other thing that the spirit the plant spirits can do is they can connect us to the experiences in a very deep way that made us run in the first place and so sometimes people talk about bad experiences with ayahuasca or or acid or or anything from my point of view when somebody talks about a bad experience two things are going on one is their personality their mind is judging the experience because the personality was developed in the first place to run away from the pain and all these things that we think we are they're just our personality which was developed in the first place as a compensation not to feel pain but secondly it also means that when they had that experience they didn't have the right guidance because in the appropriate context and this is where I think I probably not be the only one at this conference to emphasize this but whatever you do and I know some of your journey by yourselves I don't recommend it if you choose that you choose that but really I think we're such complicated complex beings in the Western world and there's so much cultural and psychological barrier between who we think we are and what we actually are that it's really safer to engage in these journeys with people that are experienced and somewhat wise in helping us guide guide us through it so when somebody talks about a bad experience I say no no you didn't have a bad experience what you had is an experience where you experience pain what you had was an experience when you where you were in touch with a lot of fear maybe even terror but that pain and not terror you've been carrying inside yourself all your life and you've been running away from it all your life it's not a bad thing to experience them it's only bad if you have no means to digest the experience to understand it to put into context and to move on for it so when I work with people with ayahuasca or when I go into an experience myself with some other guide whether with five a mio DMT or whether it psilocybin or whatever it is I don't care whether pain is going to come up the fears gonna come up terror is gonna come up in fact if it comes up so be it because it's only coming up because it's already there would I rather be aware of it and know it and revisit it with the awareness and the strength and the mind of an adult or would I keep myself still in denial of it so there are no bad experiences there only experiences whose meaning you haven't divined you haven't had the guidance to understand and you haven't had the support to integrate into your life so for me it's never about beautiful experiences entities songs beautiful colors if that happens that's great that's what you meant to have at that time I'm not putting that down but that can't be the intention the intention has to be the truth whatever the truth is and if the truth at that moment is painful that's great that's great because once we realize a our essence but first of all once we realize the degree of pain that we each carry the fear that we each carry let me give you a quote from Alma's he says the child is very open and can feel the pain and suffering going on in its immediate environment the child is aware of its own body and can also feel the tension rigidity and pain and the body of the mother or if anyone else he's with if the mother suffers the baby suffers too the pain never gets discharged the organism does not develop the confidence that it can regulate itself and that things will happen as they should and if the pain and suffering continues they will have a disintegrating effect on the organism and the child will experience organismic fear for it's very survival so when people at our ceremonies experienced terror I say congratulations you've gone back to your experience as an infant this is a memory this is not who you are and underneath that fear does that connect itself that knows no fear what's there to be afraid of when you connect it to everything so those are the two major dynamics that I find helpful in the plant spirit experiences first of all we get to find what we're running from the fear the pain and if we're fortunate enough then before or after we also get the experience the depth of who we are which also means we don't have to keep running and then the issue becomes then how do you incorporate that how do you integrate that into your life and so I have to emphasize here the importance of integration so don't expect the insight which is like a door opening to save you because it won't because you can add that experience in the moment under the influence of the particular substance that you've been working with but unless you were intent on taking that substance all the time which you can't then you better like to find way of ways of integrating that in that insight into your life and that takes daily work that takes daily work so the post ceremony or the post event the post experience integration is at least as important as the experience itself otherwise you're just going to keep going back looking for the say experience over and over again and nothing necessarily will have shifted for you there are some people with or without substances we're able to have a transformative transcendental experience that really does rewire them permanently but I've met very few of those people I've met very few of them if any I know some but for most of us it's ongoing work so the experiences can open those doors of perception they can give us glimpses or deep but momentary experiences of our two selves but then the work is to go back and keep clearing out all the accumulated debris that we've talked on ever since early infancy to compensate for the loss so when you understand my definition of trauma which has to do with that disconnect then you understand that trauma has many different manifestations there's a psychological emotional aspect of trauma which is that disconnect from the South and therefore also our relationship to the world so a traumatized person and by my definition most of us are traumatized we live in a different world we live in a world where we're alone we live in a world which is perhaps dangerous live in a world that's indifferent live in a world where - constantly having to work to validate ourselves that's the world we live in and the Buddha said very clearly that is with our thoughts with our minds that we create the world that's the world that we create the problem is this is the task for modern psychology perhaps this is where modern psychology can so usefully blend with ancient spiritual teaching is that before our minds create the world the world creates our minds and so we have to go back to who we were before the world created our mind and there's a mental health depression anxiety addiction psychosis these all beginners compensations you know I think hoggin depression be a compensation well let me give you an example let's say you have a two-year-old and she's angry with you incidentally if you do have a two-year-old and she's not angry with you you haven't done your job it's that simple because because she cannot have a cookie before dinner and she can't have a shiny knife to play with and she can't pull the dog's tail and she can't climb on the windowsill when the window is open you have to say no and two-year-olds like many of us as adults even can't distinguish between their needs and their wants so when you frustrate somebody's perceived needs they get aggressive frustration is the engine of aggression as my friend the psychologist Gordon Neufeld says so the child gets aggressively angry because she couldn't have that cookie nothing wrong with that so long as you're not threatened by the anger but what if you grew up in a family where there was rage a lot where your parents were in conflict rageful conflict and you have this intrinsic and innate implicit memory of fear whenever you experience or witness anger and then unwittingly you give the message to your two-year-old that good little girls don't get angry what the child is getting is not that good little school don't get angry but that anger the girls don't get loved and what would she do with the anger since she can't do without your love she cannot she's going to push the anger down what's the word for pushing something down depression and 30 years later should be diagnosed with depression and somebody will hand her a pill and that pillow pill not against I've taken them there they can be helpful but they're not the answer the answer is to actually what is it that I pushed down and why did I and do I still need to mothers to reconnect again with with yourself so the mental health mental health issues they all begin with compensations the tuning out of ADHD is not a disease it's a coping mechanism to deal with over running stress these temporary compensatory mechanisms become a source of pathology later on physical health means suppress your self in order to please others because of the mind and the body being one unit that are inseparable this is not my particular insight this is what science shows us and I was of saying to a medical colleague just a few minutes ago that the problem with medicine is we keep talking about evidence-based practice but we ignore much of the evidence and the evidence is that when you suppress emotions you're actually suppressing the immune system as well for the simple reason that you can't separate the mind from the body scientifically you can't and the consequence is then the immune system will attack you and now you have autoimmune disease like multiple sclerosis or rheumatoid arthritis or you get cancer that too began as a compensation that pushing down of emotion was how you compensated for your parents inability to handle your emotions trauma has then impacts on physical health on your relationships and finally of course it's got a spiritual aspect because and spirituality such a loaded word in the sense that we all loaded with their own particular meanings but I'll give you my own general understanding of it which is spirituality is the awareness that were not our personalities that were not just our bodies we're not just our thoughts and our emotions there's something deeper more eternal more connected about us and that connection is with the universe well when you traumatize you shut that down - so this is where the plant medicines can be so helpful and I've known people that are healing from significant autoimmune diseases that they were given up for dead by medical doctors people that are healing or have healed for multiple sclerosis from suicidal depression last year we worked with a woman in our retreat that had tried to kill herself 17 times what is the healing coming from well the very meaning of the word healing means wholeness let me become whole when we reconnect with ourselves I'll leave you the final quote before I take questions and comments thomas merton the spiritual teacher Catholic monk talked about surrendering conquering ourselves or allowing the spirit to conquer us so so the self conquest is not a willful act of self-abnegation but as actually is surrendering to something greater than we are as a Catholic you call that the Holy Spirit but you can call it whatever you want and he says in order to gain possession ourselves we have to have some confidence some hope of victory in order to keep that hope alive it was usually as some taste of victory we must know what victory is and like it better than defeat now at the very least at the very least this work with the plant spirits can give us a taste of that victory the investor can give us a glimpse of ourselves can give us a glimpse of reality and that can be the beginning of the path to healing thank you okay so as we haven't had any sessions with questions and answers yet haven't said anything about that our normal hope and expectation is that it be a question and not a statement because that can sometimes go on too long in this case it's up to gab or because we actually have a little over 15 minutes so I'll let him guide that but the other thing I want you to do is come to these microphones because everything is being recorded and just line up on either side if you want to ask a question thank you hi I'm rocky I'd like to know how could one me go about getting a treatment this word for treatment yes psilocybin weird one what does one go for a safe place to do that okay there are people here I think everybody sees you there are there are people here that work with all kinds of modalities including ayahuasca including a psilocybin so those of you that work with such substances and are willing to help this friend please meet him afterwards welcome okay it should go back okay whoever's next right okay yeah since I have myself free year old a beautiful little daughter yeah a question connected to to that kind of topic you yes scratched yeah what's your suggestion what what can I do better than what has been done to generations of little people before us well let's make it more personal in a sense of trauma that I described did you recognize yourself um yes I'm recognizing myself as the parent that gets angry and annoyed all right so that's what you can do because your anger and your annoyance your child will interpret only in one way yeah I realize which is that there's something wrong with her the child will not recognize you as being angry or annoyed she'll recognize yourself as being deficient and flawed yes because children are narcissists and I don't mean that in a pejorative sense I mean in the actual technical sense they think it's all about them so the best thing you can do for her is to do your own healing work it's just in really taking it on now you already are otherwise you wouldn't be here asking the question yeah - so your daughter is already way ahead of where you were at the same age because your parents Bobby we're not asking on this question themselves these questions were they probably not and I actually have to thank you to remind me to continue my personal journey that's what you can do for your child I will also recommend that you read one of the books I wrote on which is on parenting or hold on to your kids that will tremendously help you with your parenting but that's less important than the work you're doing on yourself I didn't understand yours okay I've written a book called hold on to your kids oh it's for parents okay it's I wrote it with a friend of mine who I quoted going you for the psychologists it's a very important parenting book I'll promise you that 100% but I'm also saying reading that book it's important but it's not as important as the work that you're going to keep doing on yourself okay oh thank you very much thank you thank you very much for your talk a few weeks ago I attended the Commish is the mic on okay okay thank you very much for your talk a few weeks ago I attended the psychedelic psychotherapy conference in Victoria you gave a wonderful talk there you cited the work of the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott it was really impressed with it today you spoke about compensation for early childhood injuries as part of trauma and it sounded to me very close to the work of Alfred Adler and I wonder if that is also someone you use in your work that's interesting because you may not know this but I'm actually in a play at the Vanquish Cultural Center and tonight is the last performance I portray myself it's not a big stretch but but but after but the play which is about which is about childhood trauma somebody asked the same question about Adler and my answer is simply that any work that I do any work that anybody does is always built on foundations that other people's are blade so Adler's awareness of family systems and all that certainly has informed my work but it's not that I follow him or any one particular discipline I just take what I can from wherever I can find it and then just shape it into my own particular formulation of it but yeah Adler is certainly there in the mix thank you Devin hi hi Gabbar just wondering if you could speak with us a little bit about when shame comes up and the origins of shame as you related to repressed emotion and how we might work skillfully with shame especially with these types of plant spirit medicines okay it's a great question thank you so I'll tell you about a psilocybin experience I had this summer and you heard you heard it last night at the play because you were there so but I'll tell it this to this group so I'm lying on them I'm in San Cisco on a speaking trip and I have a day off and so I'm using the day two psilocybin experience with a therapist whose name is Francois I'm at a friend's house and this is where I said to the guide you better give me a big whack with everything mind you know so she does and two hours later I'm lying there on the mat curled up like a baby sobbing and I'm looking at Francois realizing that her name is Francois she's a therapist I'm having a mushroom experience my name is Gabor I'm 71 years old and so on and so forth I'm fully aware of present reality but at the same time I'm in the configuration of a baby who's crying and all curled up tears are coming down my face and I'm looking at Francois and I know she's not my mother but she is my mother so I'm they were simultaneously and there's a dolt an infant and the difference between Francois and my birth mother is that this mother Francois can actually receive and hear my deepest grief which is my mother couldn't and that's why it is connected and I say to her Francois mother I said her I'm so sorry for every made your life so difficult so that's me as a six month old as a 1 year old Jewish infant under Nazi occupation with a mother whose parents died in Auschwitz and whose husband is away in a forced labor camp and her terror and her own happiness I take on as my fault I am so sorry for ever made your life so difficult that's the original guilt that's the original sin if you like that we all suffer from that we couldn't make our parents happy it's got nothing to do with anything we did and so that original shame goes back that early before we had any concept of right or wrong and shame when you think of what shame is what a shame look like here's what it looks like the neck falls down the neck is bent the eyes are averted and the body slumps that's a physiological state so shame is a physiological state which represents an over activation as a physician you notice it represents an over activation of a part of our nervous system called the parasympathetic nervous system as opposed to the sympathetic part or the willful part parts the parasympathetic has to do with slackness and vegetation and rest and so when this is overactive this is what we look like you can put a nine month old baby into a shame state long before the baby is any concept of having done anything wrong there's no formulation for it you can put a baby into a shame state the state simply by having the mother look into the baby's eyes and they have been locked in this attuned happy joyful mother infant interaction and the mother averts her eyes the baby goes into a shame state which is to say that shame is all about disconnection from love before you did anything wrong now when you reconnect with the love as I said I talked about guess what you're overcoming the shame so they the answer to shame is love not a whole lot of assurances don't worry but you did nothing wrong no the answer to shame is love and the absence of love we experience shame and for me that psilocybin experience was really instructive because I knew it intellectually already but this time I actually experienced it it um it feels like also when we have those adaptations and those protectors that come up the shame is sort of like it's it's guarding us against feeling that that shame and when shame is surfacing it's it's a good thing really it's a good thing as long as we can experience it with awareness yeah rather than rather than rather than be identified with it yeah yeah thank you thank you Devin Devin and Devin is talking here tomorrow right yeah hi hi there thank you I wanted was wondering if you could speak a little more to posts a ceremony integration yeah you mentioned that it was at least as important or you know significant part of the process of healing so just I was wondering if you could share based on your observations on your reflections what are some of the challenges people have with that and what are some of the ways you found to deepen and continue some of those insights and put them into daily living sure thank you so I mean one this does speak personally I've told the story before but I'm coming back from a retreat this is about five years ago coming back from a retreat to the ayahuasca that I facilitated that I helped to lead again you know I'm not and I was scary I don't chant I don't need ceremonies but I you know I lead the retreat and the whole idea of the retreat by the way is that just coming together for one night with a bunch of strangers or relative strangers drinking or participating partaking ceremony and then dispersing in the morning was never the idea culturally all these practices developed in a setting in a context of community and guidance so we thought well how do we at least partially recreate that so hence the idea of a retreat where people are together for a week and there's number of semanas together and they process and innovate as a group what happened with each of them but that's just a week so but anyway I'm coming back from to answer your question about how this connectedly becomes so quickly - I'm kind of from a retreat in Nelson which is where I was working at the time bit ceremony and I'm just absolutely enthralled with myself you know just how great and insightful I was and all these connections that I helped people make and just I must have really got it you know I find I finally got it and my wife picks me up at the 25th and King Edward at the skite registration and she just had a new haircut which I don't like and and life all of a sudden becomes not worth living you know so this is how evanescent it can be you know some no shining example of integration but at least I wasn't so first of all as much as possible have the experience in the first place in some kind of a context where you connected with people that you can stay connected to afterwards if that's possible create that context if you can or join a context where that happens number one number two stay in touch with the people we're finding now that and and Evon we just spoke and she's been in retreat with us and she'll help to lead the next one she participated I didn't at the time but Devon and another colleague did they had a skype group that meant that met regularly to talk about their experiences so keep it goal and keep the conversation going number two month to number three whatever you experienced in ceremony hang out with it afterwards do take five minutes a day and then it's all so easy but it's so difficult for people to even find the five minutes but if I take five minutes a day and take yourself back to what you're whatever you experienced and just be with it emotionally and physically and hang out with it so that it stays fresh in your mind and then have some practice that connects you with yourself be it yoga beat meditation be chanting be it music be it dance me whatever it is but have some practice of reconnection mindful awareness practice mindful awareness as much as you can so the long and short of it is and actually there's a real concern in the ayahuasca world at least that people do have these experiences but then there's no follow-up so there's some international initiatives now to actually set up online programs and online structures where people that have had isolated experiences can connect with others and get some guidance that hasn't materialized yet but I'm aware of them and I'm to some extent involved with them so that will also happen so all those ways thank you thank you okay I'm sorry yeah but we got to stop there okay very much right yeah please give them another thank you man thank you

Channel: Empower the Mind

Views: 297,865

Rating: 4.9135294 out of 5

Keywords: gabor mate, psychedelics, anxiety, depression, health, psychology, therapy

Id: ZdO-Nyk4-jU

Length: 58min 13sec (3493 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 18 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/hallgod33]

Powerful Gabor Mate