You're listening to IOSCA podcast.com. Some people had a really tough time. It was hard. They had to go through it. Some people had a wonderful, loving time. You do this now on a, you know, on an ongoing basis. People sit around the circle and there's two things, three things that come up regularly, right? One thing that comes up is to a person, gratitude to a person. Have you had a person come to a ceremony that doesn't feel a sense of gratitude after? It's almost impossible. What are people grateful for their grateful for the opportunity to have tapped into a larger version of reality than our mundane day-to-day sense of anxiously driven, goal-directed games that we play? The other thing that often comes up is a sense of love, love to life, love for our family, love for our loved ones, whoever they are. That's almost always accentuated when we go around and talk to people after sharing money. And the third that comes online is the sense of our own inner boundaries and how we have now a felt sense of being able to transcend that. In this episode of ayahuascapodcast.com, I interview Eric Kaufman. We talk about psychedelics, spirituality and entrepreneurship. We talk about conscious leadership, ego, myopia, and how psychedelics can help you unlock your unrealized potential. Enjoyed this episode? Welcome to ayahuasca podcast. As always, with you, the host Sam Believ. Our guest today is Eric Kaufman. Eric is executive coach. He's a keynote speaker. He's a facilitator. Is the author of four virtues of leader and leadership breakdown? There's two separate books. He's a CEO of Sagarica. He coaches executives from Verizon, Facebook, Sony, and more. Eric, welcome to the show. Thank you, Sam. The lineup to be with you. Eric, let's start from from your life journey. I know it's a pretty fascinating one. How you how you started your spiritual path, how you went corporate for a while and then went spiritual again. And then came back with some some gifts. Can you talk to us about that? My life journey, you know, it's interesting because the life journey is easier to look back on and say, oh, this has happened, that to look forward out. And this is what I want to happen. But I'm grateful for the way it's turned out. I, you know, my age and spirituality was on deck when I was a young person. When I was, I remember being a child and being fascinated by these concepts that the adults were talking about. I didn't know if the concepts were, but I know how they felt, you know, the concepts of transcendence, the concept of a dimension, a greater than our own, the concept of human connection that isn't just transactional. And then I spent my 20. So from age 19 to 37, 32, I spent living in a spiritual community. And in that period of time, I went to college, graduate college, went to work a 3M, I do work at Corning, big American companies. And so, you know, I was toggling the spiritual and corporate at the same time. And finding the two worlds to be sometimes very incompatible, certainly back in the 80s and 90s, the Qingwali compatible. And at some point I decided this is enough. A man can no longer tolerate this kind of distinction, and I'm going to go all in for the spiritual life and I gave up my whole sort of worldly life, went into a very austere spiritual experience. And in the midst of that, I had this revelation that actually my spiritual life would be served. I would be served as a human being in this lifetime with the wife and children, service and community. And that's when the integration worked with the start of happening, right? How do I bring these two worlds together? And I've been doing that for, I guess, 25 years now, stitching it all together. I think I'm doing a better job now stitching it together. And I did 10 years ago, 20 years ago, but that's some of the nature of long practice, right? You get more integrated. Well, that's a very notable goal to do to help people stitch, stitch those two own incompatible things together, you know, as a founder of my own retreat, which is not just a business, but a very spiritual one, I find it difficult sometimes to navigate the spiritual side of things and the money side of things. Those seem to be two very different mindsets. And the reality of the society we live in now is that you have to combine both because if you don't, you lean hardly, you lean heavily to one side or to another. What have you discovered? Or I know you coach some very high level executives and not not necessarily spiritual businesses, but how do you help them? It should do spirituality into their business. And how does it look like, you know, from the outside? And it's an interesting concept to reflect on sort of the assumption behind your question, right? Because I think you said, it's difficult or you said it's treated separate. Oh, no, no, you said in our society, right, that the money and the spirituality held separately. If you look back historically and culturally, it has been, you know, there's been a distinction between these two pieces throughout history and all cultures. The way the monks salt for it is that they basically would walk around with bowls and they would bank from their food so that they could practice their, you know, spiritual practices, but being supported, we have to physically be supported, right? We have to eat, we have to wear clothes, we have to breathe clean air. So the distinction between spirituality and money is a popular one, but I don't believe it's as necessary as we make it out to be some. I'm kind of curious about your reaction to that before I get into anything more material to you. Can you concede that the distinction you're making is potentially a false dichotomy that's perpetuated by cultural misunderstandings? So I personally understand that in the spiritual work that we do, for example, the shaman has to have his hectares of ayahuasca where he has to pay workers to help maintain the medicine. Then he needs help to cut the plant, prepare the medicine. It's a very economic activity and it requires funding. So I also have to have a property that has to be well-tended. We have a team of 23 people that provide the amazing service for people to counter my retreat, so I understand that money is absolutely necessary. But some people don't understand it. So I get a lot of negativity thrown at me, especially by local Columbians, because they kind of assume like, you know, why are you charging money for this? You know, they kind of assume that spiritual stuff has to be free, or at least people like to hide that it's a business and you need to pay money and you need to pay taxes. And they hide it by saying, you know, it's not a price, it's a donation. And I like to be open about it. And for that, I get some negative feedback. But what I try to explain to you is that in business activities, in, let's say, finding people and promotion, some spiritual traditions don't approve of that. For example, I know a lot of medicine facilitators that say, you should not promote. You should not, you know, collect reviews or pay for ads and stuff like that. So I personally think that I find the good balance, but there is definitely this stigma. And I also find that, let's say, what I'm thinking about marketing or what I'm thinking about business side of things, I need to be very careful with money, not to spend too much. And it's basically the opposite of the generosity, what the opposite of that feeling, you feel when you drink ayahuasca, you know, that everyone is connected. But in that case, you know, in perfect world, you would just work. But here you need, and if you don't, then it just all falls apart. So that's what I mean, there is some separation. So that's a thank you for sharing that. I would share two things in response. One, there's a distinction between spiritual practice and spiritual life. So I'll come back to that, right? I want to make that distinction and then I'll elaborate. The other one has to do with, you know, philosophy or personal preference. You know, there are, so let me go to the first one. Spiritual practice versus spiritual life, right? Spiritual practice of the things you do, whether that's ceremony, whether that's meditation, prayer, getting on, you know, praying at the altar, whatever your spiritual practices are, those practices are intended, you know, to cultivate a certain way of being, which is in your spiritual life. Once your spiritual life becomes embedded, maybe the word we use here is integrated in your expression on that spiritual life is of infinite dimensions, right? So to say marketing, management, hiring, culture, team, how do you all the meeting, right? Things that seem so pedantic, so mundane, so, you know, mechanically business life. That's just life. That's life when you want to organize something, right? There's different ways to organize it, but life requires some form of organization. The fact that we have a body that has distinct as an organization, the ecosystem has organization, the universe, the stars move in orbits, right? There's order and structure of things and that's just life. That's nothing to do with anything but plain reality. How you conduct yourself. That's the spiritual life, not just a spiritual practice, right? So to me, the question isn't how do you, you know, is there a distinction between money and spirit? No, it's all energy. It's all life. The degree to which we are living an integrated spiritual life that is bigger than just spiritual practices, that determines how I dispense the life, how I run the meeting, how I hire somebody, how I fire somebody, right? You're running a business at some point. Somebody's not a good fit. Either they will exit or you will have to let them go. They're just not a good fit. Does that mean you're cruel and heartless and mean? No. Can you let somebody go as a spiritual practice? Yes, you're still going to have to let them go. So I find the conversation about, you know, money versus spirit to be a conversation that's sort of fundamentally engaged in a polarity that doesn't have to be there, right? So the spiritual life, what does it look like to be a conscious leader or spiritual business person? It looks like you're still going to run a business that how you treat your people, where you apply your money, how you do your marketing, the level of integrity, you know, can you can you demonstrate the things that you hold to be dear? And the answer is yes, you can. And it's hard. Spiritual practices are, I've been meditating for 38 years. And for some reason, when I get up in the morning and I go to meditate, it's not like automatic, like, yeah, get up, sit down. There's still a choice I have to make because there's a little part of me that would rather do something else, you know? And so these are the, this is the spiritual life, right? Is the devotion to a set of ways of being, including how you run your business. So I'll pause there. But I guess before I pause, I'm going to emphasize this question about money versus spirit is such a popular question. I just think it's the wrong question. Yeah. And thank you, the first question is in of itself sort of a Christian biased, false dichotomy of heaven and heaven and earth. And if we look at it for more from a plant medicine perspective, where it's all interconnected, it's not heaven and earth. It's just the infinite interconnected web of existence that has infinite ways of manifesting itself with a, with a filament and a line of consciousness running through it to make choices. Thank you for me personally was, uh, it was helpful and I can, I can feel the coach in you and I can feel you coaching me, which is great. I think I would not be able to afford your coaching. Otherwise so, uh, you mentioned meditating for 38 years. That's a long time. I'm 36. I just started 36 last week. So that's a long time meditating. So talk, talk, talk to us and talk to our listeners about your, your meditative practice. Why do you do it? How it helped you, uh, because we are now and, uh, how have, uh, psychedelics, if they have played the role in your meditative practice? You know, why I meditate has changed over the last almost four decades. I started meditating because I was, uh, I was a total mess. Um, I was a 19 year old, pretty messed up. You know, I just got kicked out of college. I was, um, doing very poorly. I was not focused. I was not directed. I was, I was not in any demonstrable way making choices. They were alive with my highest good, nor did I know what my highest good was. So meditation at the outset to me was a bit of a life raft, right? I needed to grab like to something that would help me stay afloat than the choppy sea of my life. Um, once I was able to get on top of the meditation raft, to stay afloat, the motivations changed. Right. Now it became more about the ability to be more focused, more present, more intentional. As my meditation practices continue, it really deepened into more of a, for lack of better work, kind of spiritual dimension, which means I meditated for a long time and with a very strong, um, focus on listening, not just listening to the sounds around the room or more, the sounds outside of the structure, but can I attune myself to the signal that is more subtle than the noise? And that means what's the direction of my life? What is the right action to take in this moment? How should I behave with this person? Um, what should I dedicate myself to? Meditation became this brilliant sort of way to raise my antenna of consciousness and be able to detect the, the signal of what's true and right for me amidst the noise of not just the world outside, but the world inside. And then as I progressed further, I realized that meditation was actually this remarkable gene where one of the greatest muscles that was being cultivated is a muscle of agency. Agency, the ability to be to make choices in my own life and my sort of description of what I think unlike midi is at a very achievable level is to be a conscious being a choice, a conscious being a choice. And if you meditate in any tradition that you meditate, you're sitting there making this choice to continue to hold your attention in a particular way. So you're cultivating the agency muscle. And I find that in particular with medicine, right? We're going to do a ceremony, classically what we do, perhaps you do this at your retreat as well. This is some intention set it, right? What is the, what is the, what is the direction that you're asking to be moved in by this additional field of possibility? When it opens up, otherwise you walk into that field of possibility. Anything and everything is online. So how, how, how will you have some kind of a sense naked device? And that's what intention does so well, right? And this meditation to me and I think to many people has proven to be this wonderful way to cultivate that muscle of agency and intention. So then what regard the ceremony you set the intention and then with the intention has to come some willingness to surrender because it was only about what I want. Why the hell did I show up to this place, right? And if I don't want anything, well, then everything can come at me and I might do overwhelming. So that imbalance between being intentional and then the open pliable and available to what's coming online that to me is where the meditation becomes so functionally helpful. And when it comes to medicine, right, learning to have that sense of agency and intentionality and then entering into the medicine journey with the capacity to return if I'm overwhelmed or if I'm feeling lost and still attend to where the medicine is taking me, that combination to me is golden. I wish everybody who does ceremony would be required by whatever laws that don't exist, you know, to cultivate their meditative capacity before they go on to ceremony. To me, that comes first, not second. So it's less about how did the medicine help my meditation? It's more how did my meditation make medicine more impactful and richer experience for me. I think what you're describing is what we like to explain as, you know, their set and setting, but there is a third S which is a skill. And I think it's partially, it's a meditative skill or the skill of agency to control your experience while you're on psychedelics. So it is a meditative practice to guide yourself, which is not easy to guide yourself in that space. Can you tell us about, let me give you a quick example so to make this practical, right? I have sat lots of ceremonies and it's not unusual in the ceremony to have this like upwelling in the gut, right? This energy rising up, which often expresses itself as as retching. So, and you might know this and now other people who know this, but in my experience, I can sit with that, you know, upwelling in the gut, which is almost inevitable. But the meditation experience has me understand the movement of energy to the body. I can pay, I've been, I've been doing this long enough to be able to be with whatever happens and not reject it. And what I found for the past 20 some years is when that experience happens and I can just settle into it, not reject it, not resist it, but it's not even embrace it. Just be one with the sensation that energy can move up and out without retching. It just is energy that moves up and out. It has other ways to off gas without having to physically retch and that's not better or worse. But it is working with energy in a very direct way, right? Because when we're sitting in ceremony, energy is the name of the game in some ways, right? And so the meditative capacity to have the wherewithal to not only be sensitive to the energy, but to flow with it as it moves means that we are then brought online with the medicine to places that are quite subtle. So in your journey with medicines and meditation, can you tell our listeners the story about you locking yourself in the wooden books? Sure. I'm amused if you're pulling it out. That was a secret for like 37 years and I shared it in one podcast now. I'm happy to share it. Yeah, I spent many years meditating and I spent many years with medicine work. Now to be fair, my teachers did not condone medicine work because the traditional spiritual practices and orders in particular in the Zen tradition that's not that's not encouraged, it's not actually that they don't look favorably upon it, but I was who I was and I am where I am. And so I got to a point where I really wanted to test, this was in my sort of late 20s, and I wanted to see if I could in fact get to the point where the ego structure, my sense of identity would dissolve to the point that I wouldn't reconstruct. It's a dicey experiment to pull off, but I felt like I could do it. So I actually built to your point, this wooden box is admittedly slightly larger than the coffin because I could actually sit in it. I couldn't lie in it, so I'm six foot five, I'm a long guy. I built this box too short to lie in, just enough to sit in, as I apply wood and a heavy box, and then I fastened for 24 hours, so I'd be cleaned out. I shook naked, I stepped into this box and had a lid, latches, and locks on it. And I had two of my colleagues, Michael and Rob, who volunteered to take shifts and stay with me there for the 12 hours that I was going to remain in there, and then I took a couple of hits of acid and stepped into this box with a towel on the wood, so I wouldn't get smitchers in my butt, but an embolle for urinating, and proceeded to stay in there for that day, going through an entire journey, sitting up, locked them in a black box with no light. That was the experience, I don't know that I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to try it, but there's a certain level of terror, if you can imagine, just be locked in a box, period, is not really something that most of us go towards, not that I'm crazy about it. Being locked in a box while on a real strong LSD trip is illuminating. Were you able to care fine to dissolve your ego completely, and what did you learn from that experience? I'd say it's fascinating how hard one can push yourself, and then what pushed you to do that something in you? Oh, it pushed me to do that. I was a flocked about a word, or to use my wife's words, my wife's a psychologist, she says, I was a spiritual zealot. I wanted to transcend, I wanted to swim in the oceanic lap of the divine beings. I wanted to be free of the constraints of my own sense of smallness and limitation, and a lot of that meant I wanted to kill the ego or dissolve the ego. To your question, what came of it? No, the ego did not dissolve or die. It's well online and intact. For a brief period there, I was, in fact, beyond that, in a transcendent state, and I think many of us would take these kinds of journeys, we'll find ourselves transcendent, beyond the ordinary. But what came out of it, in many ways, was this tremendous sense of confidence, right? Because if you could imagine, I don't know how many people can play with the symmetry, but it's fairly terrifying. The terror is not conceptual, the terror is an animal body level terror, right? I'm locked in a black box. I'm naked, I'm hungry, and all my senses are tripped out by these chemicals running through my system. It's terrifying, right? And to sit there and breathe through the terror was profoundly liberating on the back end of it. Because what it put me in touch with is some new level of ability that at that point I didn't know I had. I suspected I did, which is why I set this up, but I didn't know. And the ability to sit with that kind of terror certainly better when I then went off into some of the more radical things in that. But it has served me as a human being. In my relationship with my wife, as a father to my children, as a coach to my clients, as a member of the community, I was just a man walking in the woods. So that was one. One was sort of, and I've come to say that fear is the gatekeeper to power. And the power that we feel, you know, when we do a ceremony and we feel that power coming online, and it is the power that is not just my physical, biological power, but it's a sense of suddenly being lit up and connected with the universal light force. And that power is actually light itself coming online. To have the opportunity to navigate to the terror and feel that power and know that I am okay, that I can make it. This was incredibly liberating. So that was one. The other was this remarkable learning that no killing the ego is off the table, not an option. So what is the option? The option is some level of maturity that I've spent, you know, the next 30 years going after. Yeah, making making peace with the ego instead and managing it and instead of destroy it completely, making it a little prettier. I like what you say about fear every time before going into I was concerned when I still feel some level of fear. And I think it's just natural because you never know what's going to come up. But all this experience, and we talk about ego, you have this phrase that I that I really like. And you talk about ego, myopia. Can you talk to us about that? Sure. Yeah, I came up with that term a few years ago, as I was trying to understand what is the what is the barrier here, right? So when I realized I'm not going to kill the ego, I'm going to mature the ego. So what is the issue? So I came to this term ego, myopia, not being able to see and manage the ego. And at this point, and you know, and to your point, my day to day work with executives and executive teams, you know, I say the number one barrier that's your executive effectiveness is ego, myopia. So we have to correct that into myopia, not going to kill it, not going to destroy it, not feel like a trial, right? I have made the effort. Nor is it about just making a nicer prettier, it's about really cultivating and expanding our sense of consciousness, our state of consciousness. And that ego, myopia can be softened, right? We can be, you know, not being able to see it out the able to manage means we haven't cultivated at least two things to see it, we have to be more self-aware. And to manage it, we have to be more self-discipline. And self-awareness and self-discipline are the first two stages that were in that corrective action towards ego, myopia, which turns out to be quite difficult to do solo. I learned that as well, as much as even self-awareness requires outside. It's a little misleading, right? Because it's self-awareness as though I'm just aware of it within the self, but it is dynamic. My self, my ego, is a dynamic construct that came from family. And the way it keeps refining is with other people, as well as our own personal work. But the sort of the symptoms or the signs of the ego, myopia of being corrected is there are two things that starts to happen to this ego construct. It doesn't break, it doesn't go away, it doesn't disappear. But there are two features that would demonstrate this ego, myopia of softening or that this being corrected. And I refer to that as the ego becoming more porous and more spacious. More spacious, meaning that it can hold more contradictions, it can hold more, you know, what would appear to be incongruent elements. They're not incongruent, they're only incongruent from a social construct. I can be both angry and happy. I can be, you know, motivated and doubtful, right? So the more spacious the ego is, the more constructs can be in that space and we're not so crammed and forced to just be one kind of person. And when the ego is porous, it means thoughts, ideas, and especially identities can move out in and out, right? I am not bound by who I was 10 years ago, five years ago, there's porosity, right? There's movement through the boundaries of identity. And that to me is the maturation of our ego state is that we become more spacious and more porous. And so then our idea, our construct of self can hold more and can adopt and lose things more dynamically. I like to explain to people and that's how it feels from my point of view that when you work with strong doses of psychedelics, your ego does go away and does get dissolved for a period of time. And then it gets reconstructed again. So it comes back to normal. But however, in this process of reconstruction, you're built it slightly nicer every time. And what you're explaining is maybe slightly bigger and slightly more open because you work with the executives and, you know, high level people, there must be extra large amounts of ego. That's just natural because that's that's ego that brings them to those results. Do you often find that there is resistance to your, to your advice or to your trading? Or do they always listen? I was invited to give a keynote to a private gathering. It's 120 CEOs of mid-sized market companies. And the title of my keynote, this is just about three weeks ago, the title of the keynote was ego check, how to unleash the next level of executive effectiveness. So 120 CEOs that are running businesses, you know, north of $20 billion. I'll sit in there to your point, right? That's a dicey conversation to get right into it. And they really got the message and they got in there. So partly it's how we how I deliver it, right? As far as having big egos, there's a lot of confidence, there's a lot, and there has to be confidence to pull it off. You're an entrepreneur, right? And as an entrepreneur, as a man who's sort of running an organization, you are pitting yourself against the odds because the likelihood of success is pretty slim. So there has to be a certain level of confidence, right? Drive, belief in self that would have you say, "Yeah, let's do this." And I don't, this is not a comment about the retreat industry or about the medicine. It's just a comment about life. 90% of businesses will simply disappear. So the odds of success are stacked against us. So to pull off and sustain a business requires a certain level of confidence that was, I think you're calling big ego, right? But the other thing that comes with that is some level of, if you're an entrepreneur, if you're a business, you're running a business, you have a certain level of deferred gratification. You have had to learn to plan for the long term to set things aside, to do things in order to treat people in a certain way. So those are all elements of discipline. When I talk about self-awareness and self-discipline, right, to get to the point where you're actually running, there's a certain level of self-discipline. And without self-awareness and self-discipline, the first two steps of our spiritual evolution, it's difficult to get to the next steps like self-acceptance and self-love, right? And so there is something in the community of folks who have spent years cultivating this that that is, that's available to be transferred into another domain, right? If you think about the people who are starting the spiritual path, a lot of the initial efforts are, can I even control myself at some level? Can I make some choices that look like, you know, intentional choices? And so while there might be, I'm not going to any executive and sort of tapping them about having an ego, I'm having a conversation about what's the next level of happiness? And I'm not saying you have to get rid of the ego, I'm saying, how do you cultivate more consciousness? And so, and the people who engage with me are selecting, they're self-selecting, right? The people who don't want to hear about this, I can engage, right? The people who do, we're going to engage. But is there resistance? Resistance is a really interesting question. I don't actually get resistance. And you might say, how the hell are you not getting resistance? Because for me to judge something as resistance assumes that I have a position contrary to theirs and I'm pushing or pulling and they're trying to push or pull against me. What I have is signals. Somebody is what's called resistance. It's either readiness, understanding. And if I can help with the understanding great, and the readiness might not be up to me. But I don't see resistance in people. I see readiness or understanding. And I can work with that. So you talk about conscious leadership, right? And you're there in the room of higher than 20 leaders. Some of them might be conscious, some not. First of all, and explain to our listeners, what is conscious leadership? And then how do you train them? How do you help them become conscious? And why would a leader want to become a conscious leader? Why would a leader want to become a conscious leader as a fabulous question? I ask myself, but it's in a question a lot. There has to be some personal motivation, right? There has to be something that is switched on. And oftentimes what's switched on is a sense of desperation or frustration, right? What we're doing isn't working. The way we've been playing the game is a sufficient. Our tools are not getting us to play sufficient for what? Usually there's a search for some kind of contentment or some sense of personal freedom. It's not why so many people show up to your space. And so the why people want to be conscious leaders is sort of on us. It's on them. I don't know that I can force somebody to want to be a conscious leader. The how and what is a conscious leader by at least the way I construct it and the way I've learned and the way I pass it on is a conscious leader is somebody who's correcting their ego, myopia. And to correct ego, myopia, there's a sort of a triple triad of teachers that we go to work on. And I refer to them as wisdom, love, and power. And to me, that's the work of cultivating conscious leadership. It's the work of cultivating our consciousness, right? Turning out our wisdom, turning on our love, and turning on our power. You could say they're always turned on. Yes, but are they clear? Are they aligned? Are they integrated? Wisdom is our capacity to see below the surface and beyond the obvious, right? Wisdom is this understanding of the interconnectedness of all life. Love is the, you know, is getting without expectation. It's all the features that have to do with the nurturing heart and with kindness and compassion to others at the self. And power is our ability to live with purpose and relaxed presence. You know, the ability to show up not with power to over people, but this connection to the life force and then the expression of that life force in our unique way. And when wisdom, love, and power are activated, the ego, myopia is diminished. And so consciousness rises. And as consciousness rises, the executives and folks to make decisions from that place that looks increasingly different than just the ego, myopic self-serve and need to be right, the need to be light, the need to have might, turns into wisdom, love and power. Beautiful. And how can the psychedelics help leaders to maybe discover their, that their ego is bigger than it should be and maybe find that desire to be more conscious and to also, you know, unlock their, their unrealized potential. So it's the end of the ceremony. I was down in the north. You can go to sleep, you got to do whatever you're going to wake up the next morning and you can do an integration sort of wrap up circle, some kind or another, right? I think these are fairly standard features of a ceremony. Regardless of the individual experience that people have, some people had a really tough time was hard. They had to go through it. Some people had a wonderful, loving time. You do this now on, you know, on an ongoing basis, people sit around the circle and there's two things, three things that come up regularly, right? One thing that comes up is to a person, gratitude, right? To a person. Have you, have you, have you had a person come to a ceremony that doesn't feel a sense of gratitude after? It's almost impossible. I don't know, maybe you have not every ceremony, but in the retreat, they will come up at least once. Right. There's a sense of gratitude. And so what are people grateful for? They're grateful for the opportunity to have tapped into a larger version of reality than our mundane day-to-day sense of anxiously driven, goal-directed, you know, games that we play. So gratitude is one. The other day that often comes up is a sense of love, you know, love for life, love for our family, love for our loved ones, whoever they are, that's almost always accentuated when we go around and talk to people after ceremony. And the third that comes online is the sense of our own inner boundaries and how we have now a felt sense of being able to transcend it, right? And so you can see, right, how does that help? When somebody who's my optically focused on the P&L driving the team, driving to results and is caught up in this anxiousness on the day-to-day effort to make the impossible possible. And then they drop into the field of possibility, they come out of the skin of their limited boundary and they touch upon, and this to me is what the medicine does so dramatically, right? You physically, emotionally, mentally, embodied contact with a vast field of possibility, with the interconnectedness of life, you come back from that and it affects the way you are thinking and feeling and reacting to people around you. And I think from that perspective, what the medicine does is it gives us a glimpse into what's possible in a way that's very difficult to glimpse under normal circumstances. And when somebody has, we did a workshop a few years ago, there was no medicine involved, it was called the alchemical executive. There were 12 executives for three days and they went deep on this sort of personal exploration, no medicine. But still with the right coherence and the right set of processes and the right environment, there's a transcendent experience that happens. About a week later, I got a call from one of the participants and she said, "What the hell did you do to me?" I said, "What do you make?" She said, "One, we got rid of all the plastic in the house. Two, I went out and bought an electric car." I said, "For the record, we never talked about the environment. We never talked about plastic. We never talked about EVH. We were doing deep personal work." What happened to this amazing woman, C-suite leader in the Fortune 100 company? What happened to her? She came online. This personal work actually helped her dissolve the sense of separation and she had a felt sense experience of the life force and the inevitable interconnectedness among everyone. And then when she went back home, she wanted to start doing the obvious things that would express the sense of stewardship and responsibility and kinship with life. So she got rid of plastic environment, electric vehicle as step one and two, right? That to me is what the beautiful thing is. Once we get in touch with her, it's so different than the preacher from the pulpit telling you that God is telling you to be nice, to be kind. Well, hallelujah to all that, but that's intellectual. When you have a felt sense experience of the connection, that changes your perception and their consequent behavior. And that to me is the excited part about this work. Yeah, I can't imagine, you know, it's hard for anyone to integrate their psychedelic experience or transcendent experience of any form. But if somebody is an executive and they have to not only change their own life, but then a life of this group of people and this big organization and that sounds very, very complicated to do. In your own journey, I watched some of the testimonials from the executives you work with. And one of them called you at a lightning coach, because I think the angle you take is very different from normal coaching. It's more about that spiritual side. So can you talk to us about, first of all, enlightenment? Have you felt that you ever achieved it or is it a goal? And then, what do you think about people calling you that? I think she's sort of selling it, but I appreciate that she put it on the deck. I can call herself whatever the hell I want, but I have a wife and two daughters, right? So there's a bullshit detector I live with. When I was in my 20s, I was hell bent. That was my spiritual zealot, right? I was going to be enlightened. I have ever, you know, two years of today, and my teachers, my teachers, community, and it was one of the dormitops that I went staying at night. And I actually, at one court, raised my hand and said, you know, I ain't going to be enlightened within five years. And sort of drew a wave of laughter from all the students who've been there longer. And I thought, well, you guys are just losers. So now, close out 40 years later, I stand while they laugh. My notion of enlightenment when I was a younger person is different than it is now. My notion of enlightenment was essentially a desire to be free of the pain and suffering that I was experiencing, emotional pain, sense of alienation, not really fitting in, feeling insecure. All those things I thought enlightenment would just be the opposite of that. So there's two things I have to say about that one, I'm certainly more enlightened than I was, but I'm not, you know, whatever, you know, even in Buddhism, there are four different types of enlightenment, right? So I might be in sort of level two if I'm lucky. But I've also changed my perception of it. So one, I've mentioned to you, my goal is to be a conscious being at choice, which to me is more of functional definition of enlightenment. And to the high bar that I that I invite people to and that I have striven towards striven that I've worked towards over the last few years is really the level of self acceptance. Because I think so much of what I wanted from enlightenment was a psychological release. And to me, much of that has to do with our ability to arrive at a deep, loving, embodied experience of self acceptance. And we are from birth trained to be in self rejection, self criticism, insufficiency, awkwardness, insecurity, and to arrive in a place where we can be a self acceptance is going to feel a lot like enlightenment, because one of the features of self acceptance, and I'll speak to for my own experience off from, you know, academic perspective, is this remarkable sense of contentment. And that's what I was looking for as a young person to when I was looking for, and liking it, I wanted to be content. I didn't know that line, we're just in that time, but self acceptance has yielded a level of contentment. My inner critic is done. There is no air critic in me. The anxiety is gone. I don't stress. There are things that are difficult and challenging. There are moments when I'm doubting myself, but self acceptance and contentment. If I never reach anything higher than that in this lifetime, this is more than I would have expected in my life. You were aiming to kill the ego and you missed up, but you killed the inner critic. I didn't kill the inner critic. We danced to the point of blending. We integrated. I didn't kill it. I haven't killed anything. My pursuit of killing turned out to be a lethal boomerang, because at the end of the day, Sam, there is no ego. There is no inner critic. It's just me. We use all these terms to externalize it and deal with it with some cognitive fashion, but there is no ego. There is no self-critic. There's none of that. It's just me. And the work isn't to kill anything, because that lethal intention is a boomerang. Who am I killing? Me. And so the action is an action of love. And love looks like blending, and blending looks like integration. My inner critic got reintegrated into the general gestalt of my ecosystem of being and dissolved, dissolved that energy, but didn't kill it. Beautiful. That's a great way to understand it. And in your spiritual journey, you mentioned that eventually you had through a year of meditation in the cabin, your counterization, that the true spirituality is having your family and living in community. Can you talk to us about that? And how did it go for you, you know, years later? I didn't realize a true spirituality was any of that. I realized that for this man, Derek, me, in this lifetime, the next spiritual adventure, the growth would come with wife and children, with service and community. It wasn't that the monastic life is not true. It just wasn't right for me. And I didn't conclude this sort of rationally, because I sat down with the journal and came up with this idea. This was a profound revelation. And I should add deeply undesirable. When I got that message that I should leave my spiritual sort of cloister and have a wife and children and living community, it was very aversive to me. I didn't want to do that. I was convinced at the time that children would steal my spiritual energy and that the wife would be a distraction and that life and business would just be trash and mundane and I wouldn't be able to be enlightened. So it wasn't a welcome message. But years of meditation and spiritual practice, I have impressed upon me that when I get that kind of download, I will pay attention and I will follow. And so yeah, my wife and I have married to 25 years. I'm a 23 and 21 year old daughters who are these gorgeous creatures navigating the matrix with great skill. And what I didn't know that I can say now is when I left my spiritual order, and as you mentioned, at the time I was living, it was a year in silence. So I was in a cabin I built in the mountains. I was sliding the bigger version of that box, but still very isolated and very eventful for the year of meditating up there. When I left, I realized that I had learned how to touch upon the fringes of God and experience direct access to spiritual dimensions, but emotionally I was a bit of a moron. And relationally, I didn't know how to ground that spiritual energy into the day-to-day mundane experience of chopped word carry water. And so I didn't know at the time it took me years to figure this out, but this message is compulsion to stop sitting cross-legged and sort of attuned to the transcendent and begin to apply that into the really intense and maddening experience of being married and having children has been a profound lesson for me of love and patience and compassion and nurturing in a way that being a monastic wouldn't have taught me. I don't think me, this is not a universe of statements about Eric, and I think it's true for many people, but I didn't marry a woman who would just be a servant. I married a partner. That's hard. That's hard because it's going to require, you know, all this discussion about ego is not theoretical when you live together, love together, raise a family together for quarter century. And it hasn't been easy necessarily or smooth, but my wife's amazing, my kids are they have their own challenges and spiritual path, but they're beautiful, amazing young women. And I'm profoundly grateful for the download and grateful to myself for listening. You know what they say if you feel like you're rich to enlightenment and go visit your family for a week. It's kind of similar to that, but in your case it was actually starting a family. You talk about family and the community, you talk about meaningful communities. What is a meaningful community? And you know, how should we, why should we have more of them? Heaven feels like a kind of a critical question, I think at this time. It's always been important, but, you know, we live live, I forget the name of the Surgeon General of the United States a couple of years ago, I'm only a couple of years ago, maybe four or five years ago, he made this declaration that there's a pandemic of loneliness in the United States. And it may not just be the United States, but that's what it was referred to. I, you know, in my experience of community, there is a, you know, there's a lot of references to community where groups of people gather together. When you said the word meaningful, the way I distinguish that in my own experiences, a group of people has a shared interest. A community has a shared fate. And the distinction is, is material, right? The shared interest means that we can dive in and out at will and we can participate and we can learn and grow and exchange ideas and information. A shared fate means that when you're happy, I feel the happiness. When you're sad, I'm hurt when you need something, I provide it to you and I need something you provide it to me. I think that's a level of community that is more traditional as in the older, you know, the older versions of our own societies, right? And why is it so critical these days? We exist in relationship and when those relationships are solid and shared fate, right? When I feel that I'm actually being held, supported, cared for, known, observed, attended to, there's more life force in me. I feel more ready to face the world and together we can face the world more meaningfully, more lovingly, more powerfully. And the general construct of our modern society is disempowering, you know, from the time we're born through school and higher education work where our meticulously and consistently being chipped away at our sense of greatness and our sense of power. And a community can help us regain that sense of meaning and power and live a life that's not any bigger or louder, just authentic. And when people go to their grave, many of them wished that they lived an unconstrained life i.e. an authentic life. And sometimes it's difficult to do that alone. Community can be agreed. Look, it's communities that keep us from being authentic. It's communities that can encourage us to be authentic. And when you're asked about spirituality and enlightenment, self-acceptance is one measure of a sort of enlightened journey and authenticity, the ability to really flow through the life force, the divine power that pours through us so we can touch upon and ceremony, bring in day in and day out. It's not just ceremony that it's done and it's done in our day-to-day activity and the community helps us hold that line, hold that energy and live that life of expression, of devotion and honoring to the divine that can come through us. Yeah, I agree with you completely about the importance of the community. People come here to Loirea, to drink ayahuasca to get healed. But what we notice is at least a half of the healing, if not more, comes from the community. Just when we create that culture of mutual support, people start reflecting in each other and they start supporting each other and this is tremendously healing. So I am also excited myself to build the community as well. I kind of see that I'm working on this now as the motto is, come for ayahuasca, stay for the community, have a place for people to come and live and work, be happy, be supportive, be loving, and yeah, we need it. We're very lonely as a society and sometimes all you need is 15 more people and a bonfire and a good conversation and the healing will come. Aho. Eric, thank you so much for this conversation. I think a lot of people find it very entertaining and very informative, especially people who are in business and want to be more conscious as leaders. Where can people find more about you and maybe any last message you would want to share? My website is sagatica.com. S-A-G-A-T-I-C-A, sagatica, from a Latin word sagasadas, which means wisdom or the sage sagacious, so sagatica is a play on that word, sage or wisdom. sagatica.com. Obviously I'm on the link to Eric Kaufman. I'll link to him. Check out my books that, to your point, the four virtues of a leader and leadership breakdown are practical applications of this conversation. My any parting words, I would encourage folks to give up the effort to kill the Negro and to do everything in their power as a spiritual practice as a living practice to leverage whatever practices and whatever medicine or to come closer and closer towards that place of self-acceptance because that is path to peace. Thank you, Eric. Beautiful words. Thank you for sharing. And yeah, guys, stop trying to kill your ego. Eric, try it. It doesn't work. Just love yourself. Now, thank you. Thank you for listening to Iowaskapotcast.com. I hope you enjoyed this episode and I will see you in the next one. As I hope you enjoyed this episode, if you like our podcast and would like to support us in psychedelic revolution at large, please follow us and live alike. Whenever you're listening to this podcast, nothing in this podcast is medical advice. It's intended for educational purposes only. [Music]
