You're listening to lyahuascapodcast.com. This is what all tribal and indigenous and Eastern medicine traditions are about, which is understanding how stress and trauma are stored in the body and injury are stored in the body, and then how to release them. So if we think that everything's stuck up here, and we neglect this, then we're not actually solving the problem. And many of us were taught that the mind and the body are separate, but that's not true, right? Modern neuroscience is shown very clearly, the mind and the body are connected, and that the somatic experience is directly connected to the mind experience, and the mind experience is connected to the somatic experience. So if you are mentally or emotionally unwell, and you don't do anything about it, your body will get sick. And if your body is unwell physically, and then you don't do anything about it, you will also become emotionally and mentally unwell. This episode of ayahuasca podcast, I have a conversation with Dave Rabin. We talk about how psychedelics work from the neuroscience perspective, neuroplasticity. We talk about studies Dave has conducted. We talk about apolar neuro, a wearable that is helpful to soothe someone going through a deep and difficult psychedelic experience. We talk about group work with psychedelics versus individual work, and we talk about topic of legalization of MDMA and more. Enjoy this episode. This episode is sponsored by Loire, ayahuasca retreat. At Loire, we combine affordability, accessibility, and authenticity. Loire, connect, heal, grow. Guys, I'm looking forward to hosting you. Hi, guys, and welcome to ayahuascapodcast.com. As always, with you, the host, Sam Believ. Today, I'm interviewing Dr. Dave Rabin. Dave is a psychiatrist. He's a neuroscientist. He is a psychedelic assisted therapy pioneer, and he's also co-founder of Apollo neuro wearable device. Dave, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me, Sam. It's a pleasure to be here with you. Dave is an expert in so many different fields, and there's so many things we can talk about him, but I would like to first ask you, Dave, how did you get into this line of work and specifically started working more with psychedelics and mental health as well? Sure. It's great for us to start. I am a physician and a psychiatrist and neuroscientist, as you mentioned, and I've been studying chronic stress for many years and the impact of stress on illness, particularly things like PTSD and traumatic brain injury and chronic pain disorders, mental health issues, and working with a lot of veterans in the community. What became very clear to me in between 2010 and 2012, when I was spending a lot more time working with these populations in the hospital and the outpatient clinical setting, was that our treatments we were taught to use that were available like Paxil, Zoloft, anti-depressant therapies, and other psychotherapies and things, while sometimes were effective, they were not effective in most people long-term. The statistics now have come out showing something like 70% of people who have post-traumatic stress disorder who receive these current treatments that are available are not responding to treatment long-term. Over 70% of people never get better once they receive a diagnosis of PTSD in the standard population, and it's even worse for veterans. Seeing that our patients were really struggling, I started to look outside the box at other techniques and tools that were available, everything from natural techniques like breathwork, meditation, yoga, soothing touch, soothing music, service animals all the way through to psychedelic assisted therapy, and then of course including technology that falls in between, like biofeedback, neurofeedback, and neurostimulation techniques and things like that. And what became very clear was that when you look at everything across the board, all of these different treatments or potential treatments that psychedelic assisted therapies, even going back to 2012, were having a much better impact with just a few doses of medicine than any of the other tools we had available by leaps and bounds, like double the benefits in many cases than what we were seeing in the world with the standard of care treatments. And as I started to see these early studies coming out in 2012, they were very, very promising and it made me realize that I've always had a passion for studying consciousness and dreams and meeting making and how that impacts our lives. And so when I saw this work coming out in the psychedelic space and started to be published in world-renowned journals and then saw that this was having an impact on people with severe mental illnesses like depression and PTSD, I realized that this was the opportunity for me to be able to study consciousness and meaning making and mental illness together that psychedelic medicines were kind of this gateway to that field and that it was actually having real transformative impact on people. And so it was around 2012 when I decided to study psychedelic medicines and mental health full-time and then just continue on from there. Thank you for sharing your story, Dave. The key word you mentioned many times is the long term. Like as a neuroscientist and now obviously knowing everything, you know, what do you think happens with psychedelic that you have this experience and then somehow it stays with you long-term for some people for years and some people their life has completely changed forever. What is the process there? That's a really great question. I can't say that we have all the answers yet. There's a lot of research still going on but I can tell you that from all the research, the neuroscience, mental health research that's been done so far, we have a lot of clues. So the two major clues are number one that psychedelic medicines enhance neuroplasticity and learning. So if you think about the brain as like a organ that's filled with different trails and the trails are like paths that are well cut out between different neurons and different parts of the brain, then what and you look at Eric Candel's Nobel Prize-winning research on how memory works. He won the Nobel Prize for this in 2000 but was doing the work for 50 years before that with a number of other people. What's very clear from that work, the main conclusion is that when we practice doing anything, we get better at it and we get better at it because we're strengthening neural networks in our brains in those pathways. If we don't practice doing things, we don't get better at them and it doesn't strengthen our neural pathways. So to give you an idea of what that means, if you are if we're taught growing up to think about ourselves as not good enough all the time and we start or not worthy of love or not being worthy to society, etc. any of these things, every time we think about ourselves in that way, we strengthen the neural pathway between our identity center of our brain and our fear center of our brain because we're thinking about ourselves with a perspective of fear and threat, meaning if there's something wrong with me that I'm not sure I can be safe with myself or trust myself so then that strengthens the connections between my sense of self, my identity center in the front of the brain and my fear center in the middle emotional part of the brain. So if you imagine now 10, 20, 30, 40 years later, you've been doing this and thinking about yourself the same way for your whole life because that's what we were taught, then we don't necessarily know there's another path that we can take for our brains and for our thought process. So when you would introduce and then learning and breaking those old patterns of thought become hard, the more tightly they're entrained, the harder it is to break them. So it requires more effort. So when you apply a psychedelic medicine in the right safe context for people, and I'm also an MDMA trained and ketamine trained therapist and we do this work with ketamine in the clinic was PTSD all the time, what happens is that people have a sudden recognition of hey, I've been thinking about myself in the same way as being not good enough for years or decades. And there are all these other paths, there are all these other ways that I can think about myself, like the amazing feelings I'm having in my body right now are feeling so good and so safe in my body. This is a feeling that's unfamiliar to me, but I really like it. So how do I get back there? How do I start to train myself again and to relearn how to love myself rather than to fear myself? And so a lot of the work around psychedelic medicines that is so transformative for people involves the psychedelic medicine, amplifying molecularly safety pathways in the brain that are pathways that are in trade in grain and they're hardwired for our whole lives, what we just haven't been using them so much. And so when you introduce a psychedelic medicine and boost activity in those parts of the brain, when you're in a safe therapy, safe facilitated setting, it could be with a shaman, a well trained lineage trained shaman, or it could be with a therapist or two therapists, but you're in a safe place, you feel trusting, you feel like you're able to be present and let go and just lean into the experience and connect with whatever that experience has to share with you, all of a sudden that safety pathway gets amplified and you have people have a recognition that's like, wow, I don't remember the last time I felt so safe in my body, or I do remember the last time I felt so safe in my body, it was when I was a little kid. And then that amplifies all the pathways around learning and relearning how to feel like ourselves safe in our bodies. And so then that accelerates, it's like a psychedelic medicine is working a lot of ways like a learning accelerator, a molecular learning accelerator. So you're just like adding a little fuels of learning engine in the brain. And then that just speeds everything up, at least for 72 hours afterwards, for most psychedelics, sometimes longer, and that benefit extends over time. So it just, it's just like accelerating the learning and habit change, habit reforming restructuring process that we can all do normally, but it takes a lot longer, a lot more work to do without help. So that's number one. And number two is when is the study we, I mentioned that we published in February of 2023, showing that when you have somebody with severe PTSD, their cortisol receptors are not functioning properly, which is work that came out of Rachel Youta's lab from Yale and Sinai decades ago. And now it's been replicated and shown that if you experience severe PTSD and you have a diagnosis, then you are more likely than not to have a cortisol receptor that's not functioning properly. And you can measure it by looking at these epigenetic methylation markers on the receptor. So not, so not only is the feeling of not being safe stored in our neural connections in our brain, it's also stored in our cells, it's stored inside the core of the cell on the DNA that regulates the way our cortisol receptors are made. And the way our cortisol receptors function, and the cortisol receptor is one of the least most important receptors in the stress response pathway. And that pathway of stress response is important for regulating fear and safety. So you can see the connection here. So when you, what we showed in that February study is that, which is a five year long study, that we showed that when we look at the subjects who have been through the MAPS MDMA assisted therapy trial, the phase three trial, when you compare their epigenetic cortisol function markers before they receive MDMA, and then after three doses of MDMA with a 12 weeks of psychotherapy, you start to see that there is a repair of the cortisol receptor functioning and methylation patterns that's more consistent with the way the receptor looks when it's not modified by Trump. So that is what we think contributes a lot to the long term benefits of psychedelic medicines because epigenetic changes stick around for years. They last for a very, very long time. They can even be passed down to our offspring. So the fact that you can rewire a neural pathway is really interesting, and it's related to the epigenetic pathway. But once you start modifying the epigenetic pathway on the DNA layer, that's creating long term changes that start to, that start to stick for a very long time. So it's almost like, if you think about it, it's like, it's called like epigenetic memory. So it's the storage of information on the DNA layer. And MDMA assisted therapy, you've done properly in the MAPS trial, not only starts to repair the cortisol receptor and if functioning and methylation markers, but the amount of repair is directly proportionate to the amount of symptom improvement. So now we have a direct line between looking at what's happening on the cortisol receptor in the DNA, and how much better are people getting, and we can start to predict from one to the other. So that is really fascinating, because that's the first clue we've ever had about there being epigenetic regulation that can be controlled or modified by psychedelic assisted therapy that actually creates markers that last for months, years, decades. So that's kind of what the science has shown so far that we're continuing to evaluate. That's a great explanation. Thank you, Dave. We see all the time here at Loire because people in the ceremony, they all of a sudden realize like, oh, I just figured out I need to love myself, but all of a sudden those words actually mean something. So there, something happens in their brain, you know, that just makes that realization. And a lot of times it's those cliche phrases that we hear over and over again, but this time they actually mean something to people. And what you talk about it's because of the feeling, right? Like if you say, if you're told to love yourself, but you don't know what it feels like to love yourself, then it's like throwing, it's like throwing darts in the dark. You don't know where the bullseye is. You don't know what it's supposed to feel like, right? But if you, if the psychedelic medicine and the therapy session or the or the ceremony give you that feeling of what it feels like to love yourself, then all of a sudden you connect the meaning of the words, right, going back to what we were talking about earlier with meaning making. You're connecting the meaning of the words. I love me. I love myself or self love to the emotional feeling, which is called embodied knowing. It's not just knowing up here. It's knowing through your whole body. So once you make that connection in your, in our brains and bodies between, I love myself and I know what it feels like to love myself. Now these are connected. Now it becomes easier to access that because you have a feeling target to aim for. Does that make sense? Yeah. So that's, that's the first thing you said in the second part about chronic stress stress receptors in the body. I never heard about this before, but it makes a lot of sense because recently here we had the training for somatic experiencing and it's, and I was it's evident how sometimes people process trauma and their, their body starts shaking and they start releasing something. So I guess maybe that's the, that's the way it looks from outside when, when this, this reset happens. And I don't know, do you know anything about that or is that somatic? You know, have you heard about somatic experiencing and just generally the the top, top bottom approach to mental health or bottom, bottom up approach? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's exactly what I'm talking about. So it's the idea that the mind and the body are connected and you can, you can store trauma in our bodies, like most of us do. Just if anybody's read the body keeps the score, right? That's what this book is about. But this is what all, this is what all tribal and indigenous and Eastern medicine traditions are about, which is understanding how stress and trauma are stored in the body and injury are stored in the body and then how to release them. So if we think that everything's stuck up here and we neglect this, then we're not actually solving the problem. So it's so, and many of us were taught that the mind and the body are separate, but that's not true, right? Modern neuroscience has shown very clearly the mind and the body are connected and that the somatic experience, somatic meaning body experience is directly connected to the mind experience and the mind experience is connected to the somatic experience. So if you are mentally or emotionally unwell and you don't do anything about it, your body will get sick. And if your body is unwell, physically, and then you don't do anything about it, you will also become emotionally and mentally unwell. So they're directly connected, they're not sacriple. And it, this is one of the most common fallacies of modern mental health and science is that people forget this, they forget that the mind and body are connected. So they are connected. So once we understand they're connected, then the somatic body experience becomes a critical essential component of healing that we don't do that much with in Western mental health care, but it's actually critically important. It's like fundamental to the whole healing process. So we do a lot of work with people, which is called somatic experiencing, which is helping them understand the feelings in their body. Where are those feelings coming from? What are they trying to tell you? Without judging them, can you interpret any information from them and try to understand what these feelings are trying to tell you? They're not good or bad. They're just feelings. They're just signals to you. And so then how do we reinterpret that? And most of us were not taught how to interpret our emotions from our body. So having that relearning opportunity to understand, hey, these are just signals trying to tell me to something one thing or another, let's interpret what the signals mean rather than, oh, I see the signal coming in. I don't like that signal. I'm just going to shut it down. Right? Those are very, very different approaches. So it's not about ultimately whether we like the emotion or not, the emotions there and it's there for a reason. The trick is how do we quickly feel it, process it, understand it, and allow ourselves to get the information we need to get from the emotion so that it can pass. And then once we do that, the emotion passes and we move on to the next one. But if we resist it, then we get stuck. Yeah, it's like you're driving in a car and you get a check engine light and you freak out and you take a black marker and just paint over it. And you keep painting over all the lights that come up instead of going to the mechanic and the problems accumulate. But it's really great because like I kind of had this understanding of mind, body, and obviously they're all psychedelics in it, but it's nice to know that there is also a scientific study. So thank you for being a part of that and conducting them. You mentioned neuroplasticity, right? So what I like to say to people that are leaving retreat is that neuroplasticity and that suggestibility state is somewhat neutral, right? So you can also use it in a negative way. So if you have a bad habit, then you keep reinforcing it in those plastic days where your brain is very, very malleable, then that it can like attach to you even stronger. So can you talk a little bit about that? And also like in you mentioned that it's the therapy plus it's the psychedelic plus the therapy or in case of a traditional setting, it's the psychedelic and it's the integration. And where we're going with all this, yeah, with the people's experiences, it's not like we talk about the positive option where they realize this nice emotions. But what about when it goes to the sort of negative direction and then we can kind of link it to your devices, the Polyneur or if we could somehow use them to take people to the positive direction. So it's not really a question. I'm just kind of like throwing it out there. Let's see what you want to talk about. Sure. So I think, you know, it comes back to this theme of safety and the idea that psychedelic experiences, psychedelic medicines are non specific amplifiers of awareness and learning. So that means that they amplify our awareness of all things, not just good things and joyful things, but can also be sad or challenging things. And if we're in an environment that we is not safe for us, or we perceive threat from the environment, even threat like somebody in the room is judging, can be threatening, right? Then we're not going to feel comfortable to allow some of this stuff that is vulnerable to us or traumatic to come up the challenging stuff. But that challenging stuff sometimes wants to come up. So ultimately, when we talk about the word neuroplasticity and learning, neuroplasticity is a fancy neuroscience word for learning. So people are learning all the time. There's for your whole life, you're learning for the whole life, your neuroplastic. But there are certain parts of your life, like childhood and psychedelic states and other states where learning happens more. And those are states that we call neuroplastic states, because learning is amplified. So learning and neuroplasticity are synonymous words. We use them interchangeably. But the point is, to your point, that you can learn anything. You can learn stuff that's good for you in great habits and change your life where you can reinforce bad and old habits or pick up new bad habits and and mess things up. So that's why the therapy is so important and the safety because the therapy is the or the ceremony with is the guidance that sets a framework, a structure or a space around the individual who's experiencing the medicine to have a like guide posts down the right path. This is what you're here to learn. That's why intention setting so important, right? You're not going in to the psychedelic experience blind with no idea what's going to happen. You've done some work in advance. You ideally thought about it and unpacked some stuff in advance with your therapist or with your ceremonial leader. And then you know what you want to get out of this experience or you at least have some idea. So you have these guide posts around your experience that help to keep you in the realm of safety so that you don't have to be afraid or shut down anything that comes up to the surface. You can let anything that comes up come up because it was meant to be there. So that's where the therapy comes in. And then the therapy is critically important because it creates these long lasting results for people that last a really long time because it helps them integrate, like you said, and unpack the challenging experiences when they have them and then understand how to reinterpret them from a perspective of safety and then pull them back into their regular life. So that's what we call integration. And this is critical. And people who have been through psychedelic experiences that are highly guided with a well trained facilitator and who have been through or facilitators who have been through psychedelic experiences recreationally without any facilitation will often say that they don't like the experiences are so different that they believe that the therapy actually contributes something like 70 to 80 percent of the effect. So that's way more than the drug that only leaves 20 to 30 percent for the drug. 70 to 80 percent they're saying is the therapy. And that's a broad and common report. So that is just testament to how powerful the therapy is to set the foundation that the psychedelic medicines build off of the way that the reason why and so safety is really important because that helps to restructure the brain and to learn around safety and to reduce the unwanted danger threat response, the stress response that trauma might have caused. And it creates an accelerated relearning of safety that facilitates healing because healing can be painful and vulnerable. So it requires safety to be activated. Safety activates healing. Threat and stress and fear suppress healing. That's just how our nervous system works. That's how every single mammals nervous system works and possibly every animal with a nervous system. So this is critically important to understand. And Apollo that you see me wearing on my chest is a tool that we developed out of my research at the University of Pittsburgh. It's a wearable that delivers soothing vibrations to the body that feel like deep breathing or feel like getting a hug. And it is extremely calming and safe feeling to the body. And it's the first technology that actually is being used with psychedelic medicine other than music. So we're it's being used in integration after MDMA. It's being used in people doing ayahuasca ceremonies. It's being used in ketamine clinics and thousands of patients over the last few years and psilocybin treatment as well. And so this is a really interesting tool because it helps people when they haven't learned the breathing techniques or the meditation techniques or master the self-regulation techniques and they're having a hard experience. They can literally just turn their Apollo on and it will ground them back into their bodies and help them navigate the challenging experience. And we use this all the time in our psychedelic therapy sessions and it's extremely effective which is really exciting. Yes, so I can definitely see the potential for let's say some some of the people that come to the retreat that you know they may be more on the they're very worried about negative experience. And even though the certain setting here is extremely safe and very beautiful and very conducive for for the healing and we spent first 24 hours just preparing people for their ceremony. So there's a lot of trust building between the team members and the group members. So in that formula that you said you know that therapy does 70%. I don't know the exact numbers but I would say it's like an equal share between the medicine itself, the certain setting, then the group dynamics because also people heal people and then the integration or the therapy and and together if you if you do it right that comes really nice. But what I am personally very curious about is trying trying your device on myself you know and then seeing how how it works in the ceremony to maybe give you that little extra support to go deeper to allow yourself to go deeper and like not not freak out. So that's really interesting. I know you're you're a big fan of MDMA and get them in assisted therapy but I was surprised in the beginning of this interview that you said you also conducted a study with IOSCA. I would I would be curious to know what differences or similarities have you observed in those different modalities and yeah what are your thoughts and for me personally is like how can we take sides of one thing and make the other side better to create this more holistic and basically just the best version of healing for people? Yeah that's an interesting question. I'm actually fascinated by all psychedelic medicines that have been studied. I think there is a huge potential for these medicines for healing and recovery and really transforming our entire society to being one that's more compassionate, more graceful, more accepting, more loving of each other and more collaborative most importantly right, more adaptable because the more we work together the longer we survive the better lives we all have. We've known about that for thousands of years. The only reason humans are still on the earth is because we've worked together towards a common goal otherwise we would have been eradicated a long time ago. So this collaborative adaptation concept of seeing each other as human first rather than for our differences and fearing them is critical and that is a really interesting thing that happens with all psychedelic medicines is pretty much when they're used properly in guided settings is that people have this sudden recognition of oh my needs are actually very similar to everybody else's needs we all for before we need anything else what do we need we need food we need water we need air we need shelter we need love and connection and acceptance by our community we need sleep right those are the things we all need to survive everything else is extra so when you think about that first which is what psychedelic medicines kind of ground us and it helps us to recognize that we have a lot more in common than we do different and when I started to see that experience in my patients and then from studying these medicines in research what I realized was that what's fascinating is that as our as a scientific culture we have a pattern and a habit and so some extent a bad habit of separating every single drug because of their molecular structure and when you look at ketamine and mvma and psilocybin and lsd and alaska and all these other peyote mezcalin etc molecularly they are all different they activate similar parts of the brain but they're all different and they work different dmt works differently right so like these are all different so when you just look at the molecule it's confusing to understand to think about how they have so much in common but when you look at their effects and the way they actually are used and how to get the best outcomes of patients they actually have a lot more in common than they do different and so this has been a huge passion of my work is not just looking at mdma and ketamine but what do these modern applications of psychedelics in the western model have in common with the traditional application of psychedelics in the ancient models with psilocybin with mezcalin peyote cactus sampadro and with ayahuasca how are these similar to what we're doing now because those have been used for thousands of years and we've only used the modern psychedelics for 100 years if that right so that is kind of where i started and the reason why i started there was because from studying starting in 2012 when i started studying mdma and psilocybin and ketamine therapy and seeing the benefits people were getting what i realized very quickly is that i went i had to go back and look at ayahuasca and psilocybin and sampadro ceremony styles and what i found was that the way the ancient people on these indigenous cultures deliver ayahuasca sampadro and psilocybin to get the best results are actually very similar to the way that we get result best results with ketamine and mdma and psilocybin in our models and the the commonalities are it's just it's just one or a few doses over an extended period of time there's always facilitation and guidance there's always preparation and integration there's always uh safety as a core component of the experience and we're always talking about resolving and processing trump right so whether you're doing mdma or ketamine therapy or psilocybin in the western model in a clinic or whether you're doing ayahuasca or psilocybin or sampadro or peyote in the jungle you or the desert the whole purpose of what you're doing is to increase your awareness of past challenges that and traumas that have held you back and stifled our energy flow so that we can process them bring them to the surface for processing and resolve them and heal and what i went down to do a research study in 2017 with the shapibo people in Peru which is one of the oldest and most well respected south american ayahuasca tribal lineages that does a lot of medicine work with ayahuasca and tobacco and other things what's fascinating is that when you ask them what do you think ayahuasca is doing to people when they're healing they say we're salt we're fixing their trauma and that the ayahuasca brings the block that's the block like trauma is blockages to our energy flow and that it's stored in the body and that when you when a person takes ayahuasca and the shaman is present the shaman is able to watch somebody's energy flow and see where their energy is getting stuck they can see the different parts of the body where the energy flow is stifled or not moving properly and then what they do is they sing yikaros they sing by taking what they're observing in the individual and taking what they're getting from what they would call like the spiritual plane and they're channeling that into vibrations sound waves that shake up the trauma blockages and dissolve them so the energy flows more freely and when you look at what we do with mbma assisted therapy or ketamine therapy in the western trauma treatment model it's the same thing we're using music we're using we're doing trauma trauma surfacing techniques doing somatic body techniques it's all the same stuff so i think what's fascinating is that these are actually all these substances and medicines are much more similar than they are different and the western culture actually has a tremendous amount to learn from these traditional cultures that have been doing this for thousands years and doing a really good job and doing it in groups which i think is also really important i think the group therapy actually works a lot better than the individual therapy and we're starting to figure this out now in you know group ketamine and psilocybin experiences with first responders and some early studies and in the u.s and canada so this is really interesting but i think the takeaway for everybody is all these medicines have much more have much more in common than they do different they all work in similar ways they all make us more responsive to music and to in vibration in the environment and music steers the experience set in settings steers the experience the safety steers the experience and then we can understand by looking across the medicines of what they have in common and then start to use that information to understand how to get more out of them for people and use them more safely and affordably in the western thank you dave that's um that's a great explanation i must say i'm really surprised to hear from you as a neuroscientist um terms like energy flow and uh i'm really curious to to see what is your understanding of it but obviously working with the ayahuasca for example and and i have uh an indigenous shawan that comes from a long lineage of shamans as well in colombia they have a tribe called inga there's five tribes here that work with medicine primarily but ingas are one of the most musical tradition actually because the because a really rare case in colombia that the shawan is also a singer uh i know in peru it's really common but um if you ask a shawan how does medicine work you know they'll they'll use terms like it's uh it's a plant spirit that works through if you ask a scientist they will say you know neuroplasticity and um there's there's many different ways to explain how it works but i i personally i'm coming now to this more holistic approach of understanding there's there's different levels there's you know the the physical body the the mind the the thoughts and then there's also the the spiritual body so um also as a neuroscientist like what how how would you maybe explain what is what is the spiritual side of that healing is there is there anything we understand as of now because if somebody knows it must be yeah i mean so you know western science i i've been fascinated by consciousness and spirituality right spiritually for many years spirituality is a core component of consciousness it's existed for as long as human beings have been on the earth so we can't deny it right just like the mind and the body connection exists and we denied it for a long time but it's still there it's the same thing with the mind body spirit right the spirit is still there it's still a thing that exists whether we admit that it's there or not it's still there so and it has an impact on us and we know that people who have belief in a higher power or who have belief in something bigger than them have generally more happiness and better lives and they live longer and they struggle with illness less because there's something that's driving them with hope and and belief which is very powerful that's bigger than them they know that they don't take everything personally right there's just they're different there's a difference there and i think this is really what the you know going back to what we were just talking about with spirituality spirituality is a very sensitive topic a lot of people get judged for being spiritual a lot of people get when they say they're spiritual they get associated with modern religion that's very like indoctrinated and and it's different than spirit and religion is like a doctrine it's a dogma of rules you're supposed to follow spirituality is personal it's your thing and i think if you go back into ancient traditions what's really interesting is that even Hippocrates who was the father of western medicine and the other ancient traditions in Ayurvedic yoga traditions indigenous tribal traditions they talk about spirituality differently in that it's like a very personal thing and that there doesn't need to be anybody between you and spirit in the western religious model there's a priest or a rabbi or an imam or somebody who's a gatekeeper between you and god or you and divinity you and spirit right in ancient traditions there's no gatekeeper except you and that true spirituality which i think is very beautiful is actually you just loving and connecting with yourself and that trauma is often when we call trauma as if we if we think about trauma from the shippibo perspective as energy blockages or blockages to our energy flow if you imagine that we have we all have an energy we have human energy inside of us it's moving around we know that it's there we have a hard time measuring it but we know it's there it keeps us going every day right that energy could be flowing like this or it can get gunked up and start to slow down and then just stop right and say normally it's flowing if you just imagine it's flowing from the earth from the ground to our feet and then up to our heads imagine it just like stops in our stomach and get stuck or it stops in our chest right or it stops in our solar plexus and doesn't come out so that's a very simple kind of metaphor or example but i'm just trying to oversimplify it to make it easy for everyone is that trauma stifles or blocks energy flow and we need our energy to flow freely from our feet out the top of our heads so that we can function with our full potential and access all of ourselves so if our energy is blocked by trauma we're not accessing our full self we're missing a bunch it's stuck here or here or here so the so why this is interesting is because what the what many of the sha people shamans believe is when you that true divinity true access to spirit unfettered unblocked access to spirituality comes from inside of each of us that we all have the ability to access our spirit and to access our connection to spirit higher power divinity our fullest versions of ourselves just by looking inside and just by nourishing that connection and admitting that it's there first we have to admit it's there right you have to admit that there's something more that i want that to explore here then you start to explore it you start to nourish it you start to do spiritual healing practices maybe it's yoga stretching breathing anything that connects you with yourself a little more every day and what you what people find is that when they start doing these techniques they access something as a part of themselves that is effectively uh for lack of better word divide it's it's a part of ourselves that's higher than the part of ourselves that's just doing our daily tasks of daily living in self-care and uh work every day it's a part of ourselves that is uh quite you know perfect for lack of a better term we don't perfect not a good word because it doesn't perfection only exists in the spiritual and universal realms but uh not really on earth but ultimately accepted nature um but the spirit is like the perfect part of us that's always there that is in sync with nature and when we're disconnected from it or blocked from it because we haven't nourished that part of ourselves then we are effectively disconnected from nature right we're disconnected from the harmony of everything that's going on around us and what does that do it creates dissonance like an orchestra that's all playing at the same time but out of two and so we lose that connection and that connection doesn't become as useful to us we become disconnected from an or worse case dissonant from it so it's vibrating at a different rate that we are and we are don't even realize what's happening or that it's there that we can access it so it's a so what happens that causes a trauma of self-denial self-denial and self-rejection is one of the core traumas that we all face as human beings so for us as human beings accepting our mind-body spiritual connection is really a fundamental part of healing and it's actually nourishing our own connection to ourselves not going through uh a religion organized religion not going through a rabbi or a priest or or some kind of religious leader it's about recognizing that hey when i quiet my mind and focus on my body and take care of myself i have access to my own connection to spirit and that's personal to me and nobody else can tell me what's right and wrong about it it's my connection and when we start to recognize that we all have that ability then all of a sudden that connection becomes natural and we can train ourselves to access at any time and it becomes a source of energy and power for us so to me that hasn't been studied as well in western medicine because it's very very hard to study but ancient medicine techniques have studied this for a very long time and so we know there's something there do we know exactly how it works no but we know there's something there and we know involves the mind-body not just the mind and not just the body it involves both and there's also a spiritual part of us that's critical to that process thank you thank you dave that's a beautiful explanation i must say it's very refreshing to hear spiritual conversation like a reasonable spiritual conversation from a scientist and i think that's what psychedelics are going to do for us as a society you know because i personally was a marine mechanical engineer i grew up non-religious uh zero spirituality all the way till i had my first i wask experience and from that on my understanding started to rise but what i personally understand is what i personally understand now after all this experience is that spirituality is inevitable it's like being born is a spiritual process and even dying is a spiritual process and everything in between no matter how much you try to ignore it the question is what do we do with it right and even even if you look at some higher levels of science it's now kind of coming to the questions and it starts to look it starts to sound more and more like spirituality and the deeper you go right because like it is in the end just the whole like mind-body and spirit and it's just a whole we just kind of like in our simplicity and our ignorance as human beings we tried to like separate things so we can better understand them but in that process we kind of like break away the whole picture another thing you mentioned was you know group therapy and how how much better it is well we do mostly group retreats here 15 to 25 people but we occasionally do private retreats and then those are more private and more exclusive and more expensive but they're not more powerful i've been observing it over and over again like the there is some magic with with the group work especially with psychedelics as in somehow one plus one is three in this setting there's there's this um magnetic magnification effect any in your work with group groups have have you noticed that or maybe is there any way to explain it apart from just like human connection what do you think about that why is why is group work more powerful i think group work is more powerful because you have like a team of people that you're going into it with who all start who who all um have a lot in common and you don't necessarily know how much you have in common until you go into the experience with these with this group of people but we actually have a tremendous amount that we can learn from each other in these states but and before and after because one of the biggest challenges and one of the biggest trauma reinforcers that makes healing from healing hard is that we think we're gonna love right like many people have suffered extreme hardship extreme challenges in their lives trauma they've never been able to actually talk to anybody about it honestly and how they fell so if you don't feel like you're able to communicate and get out what has been hard for you then that makes you feel alone and makes you feel like you're the only one going through what you're going through all of a sudden when you go into a group experience you sit down with 10 12 only other people and you're sitting there and you're listening to everyone's experience and what they're coming in with and you realize every single person sitting in this room feels the same way that right every single person in this room has had hard things happen to them that they also didn't feel comfortable telling anybody else that also made them feel as alone as I thought I was but now I know I'm not alone because all of these people are here with me experiencing the same thing so my experience has commonality and it's that experience that commonality of experience that that actually makes it easier to heal because we realize that it's not just us right like it's not personal that I'm struggling right now look at all these other people who are also struggling right look at and some of them may have maybe struggling more than me and some of them may be struggling less than me but they're all similar struggles and so I can I can start to see and become aware that of the common ground that we all share and that I'm not alone in this struggle all of a sudden you have a team of people who are going to be who are in the struggle with you who are also going through the processing of it and coming out the other side with you so you have like colleagues you have you have a team and it's that it's really that team healing experience I think that contributes a tremendous amount of people feeling safer in their experiences that end up feeling safer before and after that gets people longer lasting better results right away but also longer lasting outcomes in the future because people that last for a long time because people feel more connected and it's disconnection that makes healing hard because disconnection or perceived disconnection because we think we're disconnected or we're not accepted that makes us feel unsafe so again safety is a foundation so the more that we can bring people together to reinforce us as a safety the more that we can help heal each other in our communities as groups and the groups then start to emanate the results of the healing out to their own communities when they go home right so if you heal like 20 people in an ayahuasca ceremony then all those and you integrate that all those people go home they're all still in touch with each other they can still integrate afterwards as a group and share common experiences the struggles of returning home the struggles of getting back to their regular lives what that looks like why is it hard what's easy what strategies work for me what could work for you and you have a team you have a family right and we know that healing in the communal setting is always traditionally you know more effective when you have a team and you don't feel alone than when you do and the problem with solo therapy even though it works is that sometimes people feel like it's just them still that they're the only ones right and so that's why I think the group therapy is really really important yeah the the key for communal setting is vulnerability and it's a societal problem because instagram and social media and everything is just taught us to to be pretend somebody who we're not and it basically it's a block in this healing so last question before we wrap it up slightly on a different topic but I know you're you're very passionate about this topic legalization of MDMA I know you're you're in the forefront of this what is what is happening and what do you think is going to happen so we don't really know what's going to happen I'm not sure when this interview is coming out but the FDA is it is supposed to vote on MDMA assisted therapies clearance or approval for use of patients based on the study results some time in August 11 or just shortly thereafter I think the main thing to understand for anybody who's listening is that if anybody has not read the clinical trials results that have been published in multiple multiple articles in world renowned journals such as nature medicine it's very clear that the results from the MDMA trials for PTSD with just three doses of MDMA and 42 hours of psychotherapy over 12 weeks have better results than any medicine or therapy we've ever seen in the history of psychiatry for any mental illness so we're seeing like something like 70 to 88 percent response rates meaning 70 to 88 percent of people are actually responding somewhat to treatment and then we see 50 to 70 percent remission rates meaning long-term benefits where people are no longer meeting diagnostic criteria for PTSD so that is incredible and the FDA advisory committee that did a early vote on this subject did not seem to take the results into account or even review them they didn't really comment on the results and how groundbreaking the results are they just were they just voted that they believe that it's safer to live with PTSD than it is to receive MDMA assisted therapy which couldn't be more false people with veterans with PTSD have twice a suicide rate of the average population general public with PTSD has higher suicide rate in the average population these people cost sometimes tens of thousands of dollars a year to treat and they're extremely sick so with the so the FDA committee the advisory committee which is only had one member of the FDA audit that put together this preliminary vote on the review of the trials which is supposed to be an objective review on June 4th of this year said that it's safer to live with PTSD than it is to receive MDMA assisted therapy which based on the results that I just mentioned to you from the trials is directly contradictory to what any doctor who practices in the space or anyone who knows anything about these trial outcomes would say because the trial outcomes with MDMA assisted therapy again are better than anything we've ever seen in the history of psychiatry by a long show so it was very surprising and unexpected and frankly short-sighted for the FDA advisory committee who's not the FDA they're the advisory committee that advises the FDA but for them to say something like the risks outweigh the benefits of MDMA assisted therapy given what we're seeing given the epidemic of PTSD in this country given that we don't have any other good treatments that work better than 30 percent of the time of our veterans it was a really out-of-context vote and I frankly a lot of clinicians a lot of researchers have written to the FDA and have been cited in articles over the last couple months saying blatantly that the committee was off base and that they don't know what they're talking about there's only one person on the committee with psychedelic experience there's only one person of the committee with a background and maps journey with the FDA so the committee was definitely off base and it was really surprising and so if anybody's interested in learning more about this you can check out the latest news on the subject on the psychedelic report on Spotify and Apple podcasts we've been covering this for the last several weeks since June 4th but ultimately what the latest news has shown is that up a group a radical group known as symposia has publicly admitted that they are trying to squash the MDMA trials because they don't believe that veterans have a right to healing and in medicine these people are not clinicians they're you know people who don't see patients they don't understand the Hippocratic oath I don't think or what treating patients means but as clinicians and doctors we take an oath to treat everybody regardless of who they are that everybody deserves healing that's like the fundamental basis of practice of medicine in every tradition everybody deserves healing the criminal justice system can take over after we heal them but everybody deserves healing we can't we can't judge who deserves healing and who doesn't everybody deserves healing when they're in need so this group has decided to write a bunch of letters lobbying this FDA advisory committee which they then admitted after the committee released their vote saying that they wrote specifically telling the committee to not approve MDMA because they're concerned about the dangers meanwhile all the dangers that we know about have been publicly admitted by mass to the FDA so everything that we know about has been reported this group has been saying that we that that there's been all this extra danger that was not reported that they are claiming to report and there's no definitive evidence of that and that's been brought to light to date that there's anything that knew that wasn't reported so ultimately the objective FDA advisory committee that voted down MDMA they were not objective they were lobbied by aggressively lobbied by a radical anti-capitalist anti-veterring group that wants to see MDMA fail and they don't care what the societal impact is they consider veterans to be white supremacists as they've publicly stated which is wild never heard that before and that veterans don't deserve the right to heal because they're part of the capitalist system so I think we as a culture as a society whether we're looking at this from the indigenous tribal perspective of healing or they're looking at it from the western perspective of healing the FDA being part of the western model we need to very critically evaluate the science and the results from the clinical trials and the way we're treating patients today how poorly those treatments are working and the way we could be treating patients tomorrow with the help of things like MDMA assisted therapy and really make a critical assessment of is it actually safer to live with PTSD untreated than to take the to have MDMA assisted therapy provided by a trained provider or is it safer to get MDMA assisted therapy from a trained provider right and I think when you actually evaluate that question and you actually look at the study result it's very very clear that it's safer to receive MDMA assisted therapy from a trained provider according to the maps protocol maybe the two duct maps protocol but it's safer to do that than it is to live a life of PTSD untreated so that's the vote that's coming up that's what we all need to be aware of and this is what we should all be talking about right now because it's nothing is more important to the future of mental health than getting MDMA over the line with the FDA right now yeah this is frustrating to say the least yeah people definitely who listening to this should go write some comments and hopefully we can talk about more enough that they will listen and because legalizing MDMA eventually will lead to legalizing more plant medicines and psychedelics in general and the better future for our world as a society so they thank you so much for this episode I know you need to run now and it's been extremely valuable and extremely interesting where can people find more about you or maybe more about the apollo neuro or other things you'd want to share sure so you can find me and thanks again for having me the pleasure you can find me at my personal website at dr dave.io we also have our clinic website apollo.clinic you can find me on socials i'd love to hear from you on instagram or twitter at dr davett rabin and you can find apollo neuro at apollo neuro.com or wearablehugs.com and for anybody who's listening who has an iphone you could download the apollo neuro app for free on your iphone and then try it on your phone for free as a demo and we're happy to share that with anybody it is very fun to try and it upgrades your phone for free on us to deliver soothing therapeutic vibrations that were actually we didn't talk about as much but they're inspired by our studies with shapivo shavans singing ikon rose to the body so this is a big part of the work that we do is really bringing together ancient knowledge with modern science and apollo is the manifestation of that so we really encourage everybody to try it out it is a game changer for psychedelic experiences we've never seen anything like it and the folks who are using it in trials have never seen anything like it and it's very exciting so check it out always feel free to write to write to me write to us we'd love to hear you think and hear your experiences and if you want to learn more about what's going on right now with the MDMA assisted therapy trials and to stay up to date with the news you could check out the latest on the psychedelic news at the psychedelic report on spotifying and apple podcast thank you david uh guys thank you for listening to i wasca podcast as always with you host sam believe and i will see you in the next episode i hope you enjoyed this episode if you'd like to support us and psychedelic renaissance at large please follow us and leave us alike wherever it is you're listening share this episode with someone who will benefit from this information nothing in this podcast is intended as medical advice and it is for educational and entertainment purposes only this episode is sponsored by lwaira ayahuasca retreat at lwaira we combine affordability accessibility and authenticity lwaira connect heal girl guys i'm looking forward to hosting you
