I'm Jonathan and I'm left of center.
And I'm Rich and I tend to lean a little bit more
to the right, but the bottom line is,
is together we try to look for the balance
of what it means to be human in today's world.
All right, let's get started.
Welcome to the Living in the Matrix everyone.
I'm Jonathan, this is my co-host Rich, say hello Rich.
Hey everybody, happy Taco Tuesday.
Great to be back and wow, we've got a doozy this afternoon.
Yeah, today's gonna be an extremely interesting show.
For those who know me and Rich and to our friend Dave,
this is a very personal episode for the three of us.
And I wanna set the table of,
we're gonna be exploring this journey
probably in several episodes,
but we wanted to start with we as a group on the podcast,
I'm here with Rich and my friend, Dave Lloyd,
who I've known for probably about 25 years.
We happened to reconnect and decide to go
on an Ayahuasca retreat together.
And it was this last weekend and we wanna share
the experience and we're gonna answer a series
of questions that kind of carries us
through the whole weekend.
And this is extremely personal for me.
And I realized this is for me to even share this
is sort of a growth step because it's who I am as a person.
And this was one of the most interesting experiences
that I've ever had.
So first I wanna welcome Dave.
Dave, thank you for joining us on today's episode.
Thank you.
It's so good to be here.
And my heart is still full from the experience we had
just a few days ago.
And I'm just thrilled to be reconnecting
with the two of you.
Awesome.
Yeah, so the first question I wanna start with is
what made you choose to do this ceremony?
So, Rhys, why don't I start with you?
What made you choose to do the ceremony?
Well, believe it or not, I think timing
was the best aspect of it, right?
You had brought up this concept of going to Marin
and doing something that you thought was gonna be similar
and turned out to be different.
And then your friend, Dave said,
hey, we've got an opportunity to do ayahuasca
down here in Joshua Tree,
which of course is only three hours away from me.
But to go back to the original point of the question
outside of timing, I've been told on two separate occasions
by a complete stranger and a somewhat personal friend
who was in a post-construction,
deconstruction post-Christian group that I was in,
if I worked on my heart, I could change things.
So I'm on this plane coming back from Colorado
and I'm with this gal on the plane.
She's sitting next to me.
She's going to Bethel.
She's flying from Colorado into Sacramento.
I'm going to Sacramento to go back home to Rockland.
And after we start talking about theology
and stuff like that and knowing what Bethel is,
which is a very charismatic kind of movement church,
she says, Rich, can I just give you a word of knowledge?
She goes, God has your head, but he wants your heart.
And it just kind of floored me
because I've been a head guy my whole life, right?
Theology, doctrine, John Piper, defending the faith,
but I never really got into the way that I should have.
And then at this small group,
this post-Christian deconstruction group,
this gal literally said she had a dream about me.
Her name was Sherry and she says,
Rich, I had a dream about you the other night.
And if you were able to change your heart,
you would change the world.
So those two things were like, okay, I've got it.
I got to figure this out.
So how to best change the heart?
Mama Aya's got that possibility and capability.
So that's about to the heart and the body.
And that's why I was really ready to embrace the journey.
David, Rich, that was awesome.
I love that.
Dave, how did you join this threesome?
What's your story getting in?
Well, I'm in a midlife, I won't call it a crisis,
midlife transformation,
going through this most significant life changes people do
relative to family life, work life, financial life.
And as a result of a lot of personal change,
I'm seeking answers and I'm seeking answers,
as Rich said, inside of me,
but coming from outside of me.
And outside in this case is through an experience
with the Ayahuasca plant itself.
So what's bringing me to this is to look at fear,
to look at abandonment,
to look at how I'm not fully showing up as myself
or the self that I want to be soon,
because I haven't gone into my heart,
into my deep feelings of where that represents.
And so another way to put it is,
I really have taken the time to, I'd say,
enter that cave that I fear,
which holds the treasure I seek.
And the cave for me is the unknown.
And a lot of the unknown is around childhood.
Those things from my past that showed up in my adult life.
And so the weekend for me really represented
a form of death and rebirth.
Dying to those parts of me that no longer serve me,
no longer serve the family life and marriage life
that I was in for three decades.
And stepping into growing up.
There's a, I'll end with this,
there's a version of a Maya Angelou quote that says,
people grow, but they don't necessarily grow up.
And to grow up costs the earth, literally the earth.
And you find out what it costs us to love,
to lose, to dare, to fail, and maybe to succeed.
And so for me, it cost me the earth.
It was an incredibly impactful and challenging weekend
that I'm really grateful the two of you were there
alongside me during things in the middle of the night.
Things in the middle of the night.
It was wild, it was truly wild.
It was interesting, I'm so glad I let the two of you
go first, because I got to reflect and kind of pick out
some of the great things you were experiencing.
I realized for me it was, I've always been interested
in the idea of ayahuasca, because it's always been
presented as medicine.
And it's a ceremonial healing event that tribes would do
when their people were hurting and sick.
And that is a profound idea.
And I have always considered myself a psychonaut.
I have been willing, I like the psychedelic experience
in the idea that it produces, which is it turns off
your default mode network and allows you to sit
with all of your garbage and deal with it.
And I've had that on psilocybin, I've had that on LSD,
I've had that on ecstasy, but I had never done ayahuasca.
I was truly interested in it as a medicine.
And I was blown away by the idea.
And so I wanna shift to the next question, which is,
and I'll start actually, because I was going in
with a lot of energy, is what were you expecting to happen?
And so I'll start this one, because Rich, you said,
I was talking to someone in Moran about going to a group
and originally it was ayahuasca and UFO,
which is five MEO, is it five MEO?
Five MEO DMT, five MEO DMT, yep.
And that ended up getting completely flipped.
And I'm like, it doesn't feel right.
And then Dave said, I'm going to the one in Palm Springs
or in the Joshua tree.
And then you're like, I'm gonna go too.
And I'm like, something feels like it's happening here.
Like the three of us are trying to get together
and I was being pulled.
And I came with a tremendous amount of,
it was like, when I woke up at your house, Rich,
because I arrived at your house on Thursday night
and woke up, I was such in the zone in terms of,
I'm expecting something really interesting here.
And so I went in with a tremendous amount of expectation
that this was gonna be fantastic.
And it was a lot more than that,
but I'll share that in a little bit.
Dave, how about you?
What were you expecting to happen?
You know, I purposely went in with
no preconceived knowledge.
I didn't look on the web on what IAWASCA would do
beyond like a five minute chat GPT, you know, review.
I didn't watch videos.
I didn't read much.
I wanted to go in a little bit blind
in terms of the biochemistry of it and the experience.
As a result though, what happened
or what I was expecting to happen was insights.
And those insights came by having the right intentions,
which as you guys recall, that was part of the ceremony
is to come in with an intention.
And so my expectation the first night
was to step into wound, wound that,
you know, we all carry wounds from family life.
And so it was to look at how those showed up
still in my life.
And in particular, how I could on the second night,
create a space inside of myself
filled with love and joy
that allowed me to step beyond grief,
step beyond the present day emotions
that are not fully serving me.
So really it came down to wanting to feel things very deeply
so that I could feel other things very deeply.
There's this sense that you can't experience
the gold without the shadow, the good without the bad.
And so by going so deeply into the wound,
the emotion of that, those wounds,
it's allowed me just a few days later
to be able to see things, not permanently more brightly,
but have more access to the kind of the extremes
of emotional life.
So yeah, in a nutshell, it was just wanting some insights
and transformation, and I definitely got that.
Rich, how about you?
Yeah, for me, the irony of course,
for the ayahuasca experience is to go in with intention,
yet no expectation.
It's almost like a paradox if you would,
because it's like, I've got this idea,
but then I shouldn't expect it necessarily the way I might.
And so for me, my biggest expectation on night one
was to have Aya drop into the heart.
I actually remember the song,
Open the Eyes of My Heart, Lord, right?
Open the eyes of my heart, Lord.
Everybody, we all know this song, right?
And yet at the same time, like, okay,
I don't wanna talk about Lord and God
and my maternal figure.
This is mama Aya here.
So it was like, drop into my heart,
help awaken that part that I've been told
I need to tap into, and I've experienced
the need to as well.
And I think I've actually gotten there a little bit
over the course of the few years
with transcendental meditation,
does help you tap into that.
But the second night was, I wanted to lean into love,
love and spirit, and to show me what that looks like.
The irony, of course, with all this is,
we do wanna have this bright,
we wanna have these helpers come.
People hear about entities.
They think about this presence, and it's a bliss sometimes.
But at the same time, during some of the songs,
it talks about demons and angels,
and there's a darkness to it.
There's the darkness that comes, and this battle.
And I think we should always be open to that,
because that's the stuff we don't like to,
but sometimes that's the best part of it.
Nietzsche said, hey, beware of the demons
that get exorcised from you,
because they might be the best parts.
Oh, that's an interesting thought.
Yeah, that's what Nietzsche says, imagine that.
Oh, interesting.
And so let's jump into the first question,
because I think this is gonna be the,
the next few questions are gonna be the bulk of the episode.
What was the first night like for you?
And I don't wanna have us just go, let's just share.
What was the first night, and who wants to jump in?
Yeah, great, I can start.
So, you know, the first time for anything always
is such a sweet experience.
And going in with no expectations, really.
You know, taking that medicine,
you do about four rounds of it over four hours.
And going progressively deeper into the experience.
The first thing I noticed was,
it's a very visceral, very physical experience.
It's not like taking vitamins or some medication
that sort of you might not feel it operating in your brain.
This, you feel it.
We felt it in our gut.
I felt it coursing through my abdomen.
I felt the churning.
So there was a physical sensation that was very foreign
and yet so tangible, like something is changing
in real time.
So that was one is it was very physical.
It then got really uncomfortable.
Physically uncomfortable.
And they talk about the purge, literally vomiting.
And that took me about three hours into the morning.
So this was probably by about midnight or 1 a.m.
where I'm purging.
And that was a physical purge,
but it was really the concept is it's an emotional purge.
And for me, that emotion was
letting go of those parts in me that don't yet
love myself unconditionally fully.
And that was the purging.
And back to the reference to theology,
having grown up in a church setting
and with Christian theology,
I'd always conceptually and cognitively understood
God's love to be unconditional,
but it takes so many layers of human learning
to really internalize that.
So I felt that that purging for me was me allowing out
the parts of me that couldn't love myself fully
and letting in a deeper understanding
of loving my full self unconditionally.
So that was for me what the first night
sort of symbolically and tangibly represented.
How about for you, Jonathan?
Yeah.
Yeah, I will say I went in with a ridiculous amount
of expectation that it's gonna be great.
And I think I expected that to the point that I could,
that I think it deeply affected me
because I was stressed the entire two hours.
I was like, okay, what's gonna happen?
What's going on?
And nothing happened for two hours.
And I went back for a second shot.
So you take about a half of a juice glass or less,
depending on the dose size.
And mine was a large one.
It was half a juice glass and I drank it
and then nothing happened for two hours.
I didn't even get nauseous.
And people had already, one guy was in the zone in minutes.
15 minutes, yeah.
Yeah, it was kind of wild.
And he, but he, it affected him
and nothing's happening to me.
And I'm hearing people vomit and I'm here and like, okay,
am I placebo-ing myself or what?
What's going on?
Why won't this?
And I realized I was so stressed out about it
that it was just like, I was getting in the way
and resisting.
And then right when I kind of became cognizant of that,
I just went into nausea hard
because that's, it's a, it's,
the process is an act of suffering.
It's really, it's really interesting.
I was nauseous for probably the next two and a half hours
and just dealing with this resistance in my body.
I think I went in too hard for the weekend,
expecting too much and was almost like countering
my own desire to control it, you know?
And I have, and I realized, okay, I need to chill.
I need to completely chill.
And once I threw up, I, then I had the dreams
and the dreams were wild because you go into this
like third eye space where you're just visually seeing.
And it's not like when you close your eyes
and you see a little bit of red
and there's sunlight, maybe it gets bright yellow.
These are visual patterns that are like a screen
in your mind.
And all of a sudden I started seeing snakes
like the sentinel from the matrix.
It was just like all these snakes were coursing through
and I didn't feel attacked, but they were just there.
Like this was part of the medicine.
And then I saw a ton of fluorescent patterns
that are outlined in black.
So there was definitely a negativity,
but also a bright positivity mixed in.
And that sense of visual pattern was dominant
and I didn't have any real crystal clear,
like something Mama Aya brought to me that night.
It was much more me getting over my own sense of resistance.
Yeah, that's awesome.
And I know that Dave had a very, something similar
throughout the night until the very end, I believe.
I think part of that's ego as well, right?
We're trying to, we're looking around,
we're like, we're supposed to do this.
What's going on here?
No, I think we all went through the same battle.
Some people that are so sensitive
that after the first dose, it'll be enough for them.
And for all of us, we weren't there.
So I had my first dose just like you guys did.
I went back for my second dose and I went back, laid down,
started to feel a little nauseous
and it wasn't really enjoying it too much.
But then I brought in the component
that everybody needs to know about.
And it's something called a Rappei or Hape.
And it's a tobacco that's created like a snuff.
Anybody's ever watched Michael Pollan on Netflix
in How to Change Your Mind,
at the very beginning of one of the episodes, he does it.
And you see his head blow back
as she blows tobacco into his nostril.
So I said, hey, we're in the medicine.
I heard this is a good thing.
Let's give it a go.
And so I did do that.
And my God, it felt like somebody took a bullet,
blew it through my nostril and out the back of my head.
And I love the smell of it though.
It smelled good.
I had been taking tobacco.
So one of the reasons I wasn't afraid of this
is when I was in Greece and was in Istanbul,
I actually had a lot of cigarettes.
I never smoked cigarettes in my life.
I mean, I've bought my first pack of cigarettes.
I'm 54 years old.
I am a smoker.
I go back to my mat.
I lay down and all of a sudden I'm like, oh,
this is feeling kind of weird here.
I then believe it or not,
had very similar types of visions, Jonathan.
Reptilian, dragon-like kinds of snakes,
green iridescent scales that also writhed.
And I talked about this.
They writhe and they morphed into these really big,
thick, thorny things you'd see like in a
Sword and the Stone cartoon on Disney
or like Earthless Tentacles in Ariel
or something like you'd see in Snow White, right?
Where there was definitely this twisting and writhing,
this kind of pattern.
I then proceeded to vomit and hurl and inheave,
but it was a small amount.
Then I got up to what I thought was to be,
to go to the bathroom.
We're all supposed to be very hydrated
during this process.
Everybody, you'll learn.
If you do, I, talking to our audience,
you're gonna have a diet ahead of time
and you wanna stay hydrated.
So I go out, say hi to a couple of cool gals
and we kind of smiling.
And then instead of going to the bathroom,
I proceed to vomit more than I've ever remembered
in my life.
It was, I looked like a cylinder,
this big a volume of greenish bile.
That's what it feels like.
I left a mark.
I saw it the next day.
I watered some plants.
There should be some growth there before too long.
So let's just say that that was really, really,
really powerful.
And what I think was happening was that some of that
trauma, guilt, pain, demons that I had on my stomach,
that's the medicine actually working.
That's the beauty of it is that that writhing
that striving and that wrestling,
it then comes out and that's when the fun began
because then I'm looking up at the night sky
and because my vision is so terrible
and didn't have my glasses on,
I saw the moon, which was a half moon,
it turned immediately into this lotus blossom
or chasanthemum of light.
And then the weirdest thing happened.
I'm literally looking at the stars,
but behind everything is the backdrop
of a pixelated touch screen.
So any touch screen you've seen from an angle,
like on your Tesla or like on an iPad,
if you look at it carefully in the sunlight,
you'll see all these dots that are perfectly there
so that it can recognize as your finger moves
across the screen and it touches, it's there.
And it felt very Matrix X.
Like this is just a bloody illusion, this whole thing.
And yet the universe was breathing and moaning and moving.
And it was fun then because I was done with my purge
and I got to enjoy some of the fun part about it,
which is this really body buzz, right?
This body high.
And my interaction with these girls,
a couple of them by name, Ximi and Nikki,
we were just having fun at that stage
and we were just laughing.
And it was totally, it was just totally,
there was a communal kind of feeling
as we were going through this together.
So believe it or not, my first night was my best night.
So that was my experience.
Yeah, I actually, the second half of the night,
because this is gonna go to my overall feelings is
I had a violent, imagine a blowtorch out your butt
poop experience four times.
It was like I had drunk liquid Drano,
but it had a motor attached to it.
It was like, what is happening to my body?
Snake going out the back end, right?
Oh my God.
A sentinel blowing at your ass.
That is no joke.
That's exactly what it was like.
And Dave, did you have,
what was your purges like?
Yeah, well, I wanted to just comment
on a couple of things related to your comments.
One is there's few experiences in life
where there are no limits, where anything goes,
where anything is allowed.
And this was that.
As a man, not speaking for the two of you,
but I believe it's true for many men,
we spend a lot of our life controlling our emotions,
feeling the right ones.
Can't feel too angry in a workplace setting.
Can't feel too sad in this setting.
Need to control our emotions to,
and then there's another school of thought that says,
feel it all, let it all out.
Don't repress, let it all out.
And there's certain societal structures
where you can't feel it all.
Maybe in a therapy room, maybe on a hike,
maybe in nature, maybe in tears,
but this was a feel it all experience.
Anything was welcome.
And so that was a real relief because
there was a certain sense of being out of control
with what was going on.
And that is a very freeing experience.
I mean, there is such surrender
in feeling out of control yet safe
because the container was so safe.
What we haven't necessarily shared
is there was a lot of context set up front.
The leaders were extremely experienced,
a couple hundred experiences of this hosting each.
There was music, there was dancing,
there was a dark experience,
given it was middle of the night.
So there was this sense of being almost in a,
not in a womb, but a very safe experience.
And so that gave a lot of permission to, again, to feel.
And so I say all that to say,
there's something I'm starting to believe into,
which is that becoming the most emotionally released version
of myself is sort of a new aspiration.
How do I release those things that have trapped me,
kept me stuck and not buying into my own bullshit
around what emotion I felt
or what that life experience represented.
And this was that opportunity to let that go.
So that was powerful in a way
that I didn't think it would be,
that just the freedom to feel.
And so to answer your question very specifically,
the purge was disgusting.
I mean, honestly, I remembered back to,
being over the throne of a toilet when I had nausea
and it was that, but the disgusting part became,
I guess I would call it sort of beautiful
in that it was symbolic.
It represented something.
I was choosing to do this, not out of sickness.
I was choosing to have this experience
and granted not everybody purges,
but I think all three of us did both nights.
And it was a purifying, it was a very purifying experience
where one of the things I had heard ahead of time
was the purging is an emotional experience,
even more than physical.
And so I knew on the other side of the purge
was some version of awareness, some version of enlightenment.
And that absolutely was true with both times that happened.
I felt like the whole womb aspect was reverberating.
It was very much people were there to be cared for.
That's the medicinal ceremony quality.
Like as a, Rich, you and I and Davey, May too,
is looking back of ooh, an ayahuasca ceremony
or like, are you getting into something way out of bounds
for a lot of people?
And I went in expecting, expecting none of that,
but it was such a safe space
that all three of us could actually go through what we did.
And there was no shame in the room, you know,
where people were releasing shame,
but the leaders were so good at creating a safe space.
Bailey is one of the softest human beings
I've ever met.
He was absolutely wonderful.
I love just chatting with them even before we got started.
I knew I was gonna like that guy
and it continued to be just amazing.
I'll talk about night for the second night.
You wanna do the second night real quick?
I wanna ask a question about sort of idea of integration
in between, cause it hit me really hard.
So I loved your idea about Purge, Dave,
of is it's a releasing of something.
And the entire first night I was trying to figure out
what that was, like what was the awareness,
but it was all physical for me.
There was very little awareness.
I had some cool moments.
And then I woke up and then I had that,
I lost six pounds when I came home.
And, but it all came out of my body.
The next day I woke up and we're sitting in the living room
and I, and the idea of integration back into normalcy,
I felt so light and at rest, it blew me away.
And I wanted to ask you guys, did you,
what was your feeling that first night after?
What was going through your mind in the morning
or in the afternoon too?
So it's about 6 a.m. on the morning of,
and of course we're all tired.
Our bodies are physically drained from having been up
all night.
I wasn't, as you guys recall,
I wasn't really able to get a lot of sleep.
I think I ended up sleeping by about 9 a.m.
which that in and of itself was still an altered state.
But the, that first, that next morning, there was a relief.
Mostly that was the feeling of relief, like,
oh, I just, it was, the listeners may know
of the hero's journey, Joseph Campbell, the myth,
going into the descent, into the abyss.
It was that experience.
And coming out of that descent into the abyss
and coming out of that first day,
there was such a relief to say,
hey, I went through something really hard,
physically, emotionally, spiritually, with other people.
I made it through.
And it wasn't some lightning bolt of epiphany.
It was, oh, that was hard.
I got something out of it.
I'll formulate what it is, you know,
over the next couple of days.
But mostly it was, that was good for me.
The things that, you know, the quote we all know,
that which doesn't kill us makes us stronger.
There was that sense of, that was really hard.
Like if you've ever done a physical event like a marathon,
hey, it's really hard.
And you come out of it with some awareness.
It was that feeling of, oh, I got through that.
And so there was a resilience to it.
Like, oh, I'm a tough person here.
And the other part of it was,
it was nice to kind of be done with the first one.
Because then I think we all,
all three of us collectively said that,
oh, okay, now we know what it's like.
And it wasn't that we were gonna go in
and be performative for the second one.
It was like, oh, now we can sort of customize
what we wanna get out of it,
knowing a little bit of the mechanics of how it works.
And so there was a sense of, oh, I get it now.
Yeah.
So that was kind of fun to play with.
Yeah, I came out of the process through idea.
I just, I focused on community and the other,
believe it or not, even though there's a lot
of individual stuff that takes place.
I felt like, you know, we did a lot of work together, Dave.
Jonathan and I were helping you through a tough place
on that second night.
And there was this desire for that.
When I was wrestling the second night,
I felt the presence of the ups and the downs
of the community, of the actual,
inside that geodesic dome.
I felt that.
And this gal named Adrienne,
she affirmed that the next morning.
And the idea that even though we're wrestling with our own,
it's still, it's a communal thing.
When you start to realize that the ayahuasca ceremony
isn't just about a psychedelic or an emotional
or a body high, but it's about the music.
It's about a ceremony.
It's about a ritual.
It's about a community.
It's about nature.
It's about medicine.
It really starts to impact you in a way
that that's why it's transformative.
Think about this, guys.
There are people that there that have dedicated
their lives to it.
This is who they are now.
That's pretty powerful.
I mean, Timothy Leary, yeah, he did dedicate
his pretty much adult life to acid.
But Alan Watts, after he had his biggest hit of acid says,
once you get the message, you can hang up the phone.
So when you think about things like MDMA and shrooms,
these become like part of your life.
It's a part of it.
It's kind of one thing you do.
You enjoy it, but it's a compliment.
It's something that helps give you an edge
or helps you through some tough things,
or it helps you become more creative.
It's a helper.
In this case, this is for Lisa, for instance,
and obviously for Annie and for Bailey and for Jack
and for Hayden, this has become primal
because what they've started to realize,
this is something that could change the world.
This could literally transform.
If you do this in small communities
and the consciousness can shift and can heal,
this could be affirming for the planet.
So for me, that's the thing that I came away with
in the integration, Jonathan,
especially after that second night.
It was powerful.
You went in the second night really believing
that this is something much deeper than you had known?
Yeah, coming out of it especially,
because my purge the second night happened faster
because I literally, after I had a heroes dose
of the Rape the second time,
I literally just went right there.
I didn't even make it back to my mat, right?
And then what I did was because I had purged,
I said, well, let's go deeper, right?
You did yours a little bit later, but let's,
hey, it's our last night.
Let's go one more.
Bailey's like, rich, rich, rich, rich.
I'm like, oh shit.
And then we both agreed mentally or spiritually,
if you would, what the dosage should be.
I said, hey, I'm gonna trust you.
Omokasa shimasu, right?
This is like a Japanese place.
You're my sushi chef.
You tell me what you got.
Well, how are you feeling?
I go, well, I'm feeling X, Y, Z.
Well, what do you think?
I said, medium.
And then he goes, that's what I was thinking too.
All right, so then I went back
and rather than purging again,
because I didn't really wanna purge.
I wanted just some medicine to give me some fun, right?
I already purged, right?
I just literally, my diaphragm, guys,
my diaphragm on the right side,
I was literally couldn't breathe very well
the second two days.
It's finally gotten better,
but I was hurting physically because,
and I looked it up, I said,
can you hurt your diaphragm after violently vomiting?
And it was right there.
So after I did that, I went back and laid down
after I got my third dosage.
And then I just said, you know what?
I'm not gonna vomit this.
I'm not gonna ask for Rappé again,
because you can do Rappé multiple times.
I said, I wanna wrestle and strive
with this medicine this time.
And that's when I started to feel the ebb and the flow
and the heaving.
And later on the next morning, I asked Bailey, he goes,
dude, there's no right or wrong way to do that.
You wanted to rise in medicine,
that's you striving with it.
It's you working and wrestling.
And this is the, if I could bring one thing
out of this entire experience,
it is this ebbing and flowing and working
and twisting and striving.
And then to have that second,
because it was about me the first night
and the second night I just felt up and down.
The music would come and then the people would laugh
at the same time and then they would puke at the same time.
And then at one point it was quiet,
but everybody's just in their sleeping bag
and they're just tossing and turning
and you could just feel it.
And it sounded like a cacophony of people
and that was the medicine working,
but I just felt like it was a torrent of water,
but it was actually just people twisting and thriving
in their sleeping bags.
They were striving with themselves.
They were striving with the medicine
and with their demons and whatever.
So in that regard, I didn't have the same kind of almost,
this is the vision, this is the pain,
this is vomiting, it's coming out,
this is the linear path.
It was just this feeling of communal striving together.
Yeah, that's a good way to put it.
Dave, what about you?
Go ahead.
You, the two of you really invested in the community
and I really respect that
because you had the wherewithal to be in that space
with a lot of the participants and the leaders.
You know, I was in a very unique for me emotional space
and that second night, it was so vulnerable.
My intention going into that second night was,
A, it was to truly love the inner child,
but B, it was to look at the abandonment
and how that abandonment showed up was in a way
I would never have predicted,
which was related to having to let go,
having to let go of these structures in my life
that have held me up for three decades.
And in particular, it was cutting the cord.
And some of us may have experienced
a dark night of the soul.
And that second night was that for me.
It was so dark.
My thoughts were totally out of my control.
It was really difficult at about 3 a.m. in the morning
to be me and what I had to do was step into the community.
I remember pulling both of you aside and saying,
I need you physically right here with me right now.
And the two of you were there.
And I sought out the leader named Annie
and I said, I need help.
And she was right there and she sat with me
and she could hear me verbally and see me thinking
things that weren't serving me.
She said, you got to stay in your body.
Your thoughts are not your friend.
Yes.
Kept going back to the body.
She said, just stay in it.
She put her hand right on my solar plexus
with this shamanic energy and just held me there
as the two of you,
I still am emotional thinking about it,
as the two of you sat right behind me
with your hands on me.
And she said, just stay right here for about three minutes.
No words were exchanged.
She just sat with her hand on my rib cage
and just said, be in the body, be in the body,
be in the body.
And it was a purifying experience to just sit with that.
And then she did say, hey, I'm gonna give you this Rappei,
which is a grounding experience
and moved me cognitively into a little bit more positive
frame of mind, which was such a relief.
But I still then needed physical contact.
And I asked for what I needed,
which was just honestly to feel hugged, to feel touched,
because I was going through this sense of letting go
and forgiving myself and forgiving others.
And so that second night was profound.
It was profound in how much I was able to hold space
for myself by allowing other people to come alongside me.
And that the insight was that I went through something,
like I said before, something really hard,
but also I got to kind of a core wound
that I'd never had been able to touch before,
which was this terror, this terror of abandonment.
And to do that meant that I needed to not do it by myself.
And that was the magic of that night is through the chemistry,
through the physical presence of others,
and through kind of my own working through the mental
and emotional difficulties, I was able to say,
hey, okay, this is step one of looking at the wound
and that it doesn't define me.
So it was profound.
Yeah, I could jump off on a million thoughts
and what you just shared, because there's so many,
because we are all having kind of, like you said, Rich,
a communal experience.
And I really, the first night for me was all masculine.
It was me, it was ego, it was resistance,
it was hard physically, it was like an endurance event.
And then the second night was all feminine.
It was like this, and I'm sure a lot of people
felt other energies, but that's what I was feeling.
And the second night was pure compassion,
because there was a lot of people really needing,
but there was such an ebb and flow with the ceremony,
because we went from wailing, people were wailing,
crying, vomiting, moaning.
Pleasurable size, we heard.
There was also an ebb and flow, where people were,
we all got up and danced, and kind of went in
around the circle as they were banging the drums
and singing a song, and it was just,
it was such a positive energy the second night,
because people had the freedom to release their shit.
Because you realize, where can you go in the world,
other than a private counselor, to share your shit?
And everybody was literally vomiting
in front of each other.
It's like, the metaphor of it is so profound,
because we don't have these kind of spaces
in our lives very often.
And that's one of the real big reasons
I was attracted to it, is I've been in really
core healing spaces, and this is one of the most
profound healing spaces I've ever experienced.
When I went into the second day,
I was in a completely different frame of mind.
The first hour, I'm like, no matter what,
even if it's suffering, it's all gonna be good.
And I can get through it, and I had a perspective
of the first night, and I just relaxed.
And I just, I was in such a good mood, regardless,
and then the, I had a very, that's when I closed my eyes
for the first, I tried not to go to sleep.
I didn't wanna fall asleep,
because it makes you kind of a little bit drowsy,
but in a weird way.
It is.
I wanted to curl up in a ball and just pass out,
but I didn't want to.
I wanted to stay in the experience,
because I didn't want, I left the night before
at two o'clock, when I was done.
You went to bed.
Yeah, I went to bed.
And I thought, this night, I needed to take
a strong approach to my own,
I wanted to take that extra dose if I needed it,
to go into that space,
because the idea is you can keep doing it.
And so I said, I walked up to Annie, and I said,
what do I need?
And she called me, and she goes,
you need a hero's dose tonight.
And I said, okay.
So it was double of what everybody took,
because the previous night, it didn't kick in.
She goes, let's just go there.
And then I laid down, and I closed my eyes,
and that's when the color started,
and then it hit me.
Rich, you described that movement.
I saw an orb that was in the frame of mind right here,
and it was just constant dance of movement.
It was elegant movement, saying,
I have more energy than I know what to do with,
and I'm just enjoying life.
Everything is free.
I'm in complete freedom.
And all of a sudden,
I'm completely connected to that feeling.
And it reminded me of the first time I did LSD.
The source.
Where I felt source at a level that,
it was so profound that all of a sudden,
I don't know if I got scared, but I opened my eyes,
and then I closed them again, going, will it come back?
I wouldn't back.
I didn't know, it's like, I missed the vibe.
I got off the rail.
So I went outside, and I'm looking at the moon,
because the moon was just ridiculous,
and I leaned over the railing,
because the air felt really nice, and it came back.
And then it changed, but it was that sense.
And then I had a profound feeling of,
like imagine people in 2500 BC,
who have no real conception of God.
What did Abraham experience to feel that difference?
And they must've cowered in fear,
because I was realized the feeling was just pure good.
It was belonging, and it was a warm wrap of love.
And I remember not wanting to get disconnected,
but then I had an awareness of,
I see how people can get scared of that in history,
to experience God.
I felt like I experienced God in that moment.
Profoundly.
One of the top three most profound experiences
of God I've ever had, because it was penetrating.
It wasn't long, it only lasted probably about two minutes.
And then outside was probably another minute.
And then the rest of the night,
I went back into a wrestling mode,
because I was like, I wanted to go deeper.
So the second time I went back to Annie,
she said, or she said, what do you want?
And I said, you choose.
And she laughed at me again.
She goes, playing good medicine woman.
She closed her eyes and then she said, okay, I know.
And she took the smoke.
What was the smoke called, Rich?
The cigarette?
The Pappacho.
She took the Pappacho, and the practice is you suck it in,
then you blow it on the entity or the body,
and it creates a sense of protection and wellbeing.
And she blew it on me.
And instantly, no, Jack blew it on me for her.
And she was sitting in front of me
and she saw I'm gonna throw up.
She throws a bucket in front of me.
And I literally was like a crown
purging into the bucket in front of the entire room.
And it's all candle lit from behind.
And I'm like, oh my God.
But it was kind of perfect because I realized
it was a beautiful enough space that I didn't care.
Everybody was in it together.
There were no witnesses.
Everybody was a participant.
So everybody knew how I felt.
And they were all there to do that too.
And it completely transformed the purge for me
to this thing that it's also a bonding moment.
And then for the rest of the night, I just kept saying,
I need to figure it out.
So like, why did I really come there?
Because I had no awareness of,
and then I had moments with my dad,
a lot of moments with my son.
And they realized dealing with some primary relationships
and really wrestling through what it means to love
in those spaces.
And so the whole night was me then,
I went back three times.
And the third time I went back to,
or the last two times I went back to Bailey
because I felt like I was much more attracted
to the masculine approach for some reason.
That's what was going through.
I needed to choose Bailey for some reason.
And then I had, I never really had much purges after that.
I had two more episodes or two more doses.
And then it was over.
And I was like, oh, my goal was to stay the whole ceremony
and go all the way with what my intention was.
And I did that. Exactly.
And that was a, it was a beautiful feeling.
It really was.
So next day, wake up.
What are you guys feeling?
What was sort of that moment on the second day?
The ceremonies are over.
What showed up for you guys after that?
For me, there was a lot of joy and a lot of gratitude.
One, there was, even though there was one more night,
so you could do either one, two or three nights.
So some people were coming for, staying for a third night
and others were very quickly leaving.
There was a joy and gratitude of what we had been
through community together.
There was some sadness that, I saw people leaving,
driving in their cars, going away.
There wasn't a formal closing ceremony.
So there was a sense of,
there wasn't a closure necessarily as a community.
And so there was some sadness about that,
that this was sort of a one-time experience.
That this group of people that experienced
a spiritual community together for this dedicated moment
in time wouldn't be together again.
And so I remember as I see people driving away,
a couple of whom who I'd had really in-depth conversations
with and like, well, thank you.
And then the third thing was to eat.
Just the practical sense of, I was starving.
And in that process, nurture, nurturing myself.
And there was some sort of unpacking the experience
with a couple of other people, the two of you
and some others who had gone through it together.
But mostly, yeah, joy, gratitude,
and this sort of lifting.
The heaviness was gone.
There was this sense of light, a lightness.
So that was a real relief.
Rich, what about you?
What showed up after we left?
The next day.
The next day was kind of wild because at 3.30, I went to bed
and then at 6.30 in the morning,
I heard a trumpet being blasted.
And I thought Bailey was waking us all up
on what I thought was the last day,
bringing in the sun,
and the masculine side of things.
And then I realized that it's Adrienne's phone alarm
that's going off and poor Hayden was dying.
And so I got up, did my morning sun,
grounded, loved it, did some stretching.
And I noticed that one of the gals,
there was a gal that came with a Spanish gal was out there
and she was also enjoying the sun,
but she started doing stretching
on the actual physical asphalt.
And then I said, that doesn't look good.
So I went inside and there's the communal asphalt.
There's the communal aspect was still resonating with me.
Grab this mat, take it out to her.
And she goes, oh my God, thank you.
And then all of a sudden I flipped it.
It's too sad, it was black and it was green.
I put the green side down and she goes,
that's my favorite color.
It was just wild, right?
And so she got to do her stretching.
I ended up doing mine as well.
And then it just continued, right?
With helping out, getting stuff together, right?
Trying to help out in the kitchen, making this and that,
and making a big strong pot of coffee.
And for me, the communal aspect kind of continued, right?
And as I was leaving, I was looking forward
to getting back together with family
and sharing and processing.
And my son's gone through a terrible breakup.
All these kids have gone through these breakups.
So Hunter, my son has this close knit group of friends.
They went it all here and we just shared
till the wee hours of the night, like 11.30 late,
it was a school night and we were like, let's just go.
It's leaning and wrestling into moving in together
and dealing with girls and relationships and processing.
It was really cool because it felt like,
it was almost like an extension, right?
But without being on psychedelics.
And that's what I was hoping to continue
to get out of it going forward.
And I told Bailey that my second night wasn't as profound
as my first night, but it was still so meaningful,
so worthwhile and it was different, right?
It was just different.
And I told him, we need to do this again.
And if you talk to a lot of these people,
they've been, Whitney's done it 11 times.
This is something that requires multiple times
to continue to dig in, find those hidden blind spots
that you might not even be aware of
and to just wrestle and grow.
And so that's how I kind of settled into that stuff, right?
So yeah, I mean, that's kind of it for me on that day
and my way back in.
Yeah, I had a lot of, the second day,
I did not have enough sleep.
I actually took a dose at 330.
And so I was nauseous in bed for two hours,
just like, and the hard part about the nausea
is it would bring on heat sweats.
So you're feeling like your body's 120 degrees
and didn't want any covers, but you don't feel comfortable.
It was just, that whole last night was awful
because I was wrestling through some personal issues
and I couldn't get a sense of resolution about them.
But I still felt like I fought for them.
In reflection, it was the next day as we drove,
Rich, you and I drove back to Ventura
and then I drove home.
So I was in the car for eight hours and five.
I got to have a conversation with my son, my daughter,
got to go home and have some really great
family conversations that were,
I hadn't very, I had almost no feeling of anger
at facing my own problems.
And that was one of the things that led up to that.
Yeah.
So when I got home, I knew exactly what I needed to say
and it felt like it was completely embedded in love.
Like it was that same energy in that room
I was bringing home to my family and saying,
I need to translate that.
I actually said to my wife, I said, I want you to try it.
She was actually surprisingly intrigued by it.
Not mine.
Yeah, she didn't, well, maybe she could talk her into it.
But it was really a sense of,
I could see my kids doing this.
It's a value, we've all touched on it.
The valuable experience isn't just the healing,
it's the awareness that I can do.
That was one of the most profound things
that I took away from the whole thing
is I made it through the weekend and I sloughed off.
I got in the way on the first night,
but I fully went into it and I loved on the community
and it was an amazing experience and it was like, yeah.
So I would invite anybody to do this that I've ever met.
100%.
Yeah, I wanna add one thing.
There's a lot about integration.
There's a lot said about embodied, being embodied.
That to me was the big takeaway.
I now understand what it feels like to be truly embodied.
Like you can't have a medicinal experience
more embodied, somatic than this.
And so the experience was so total
in terms of not just brain, not just nervous system,
not just somatic experience.
It was this total integration of being embodied.
So the rest of that day driving home,
there was this, not like a Superman kind of feeling,
not manic, but this sense of, oh, I feel very embodied,
very full, very full in what I was able to experience.
And that's unusual.
That's unusual to have experiences that leave,
at least left me with this sense of that my full
sort of human experience was integrated.
Awesome.
Rhys, what about you?
What was your biggest takeaway?
I'd say my biggest takeaway,
and I think this is the power of it,
is that it is a communal, it's a communal,
it's a communal experience.
It's individually healing,
but the end result has to be transformation
and transformation communally.
I don't know, Dave, if you knew this,
but a lot of the warriors in the Amazon
would go on hunts or they'd go into battle.
And one of the ways they'd assimilate back into the tribe
is to do ayahuasca.
So think about that.
You've seen something violent, you've done violent acts,
you've eaten hearts or you've killed people.
And you take the ayahuasca and ultimately,
you're getting re-assembled back into the tribe.
That's the whole point, right?
How does Mama Ayahuasca create an experience so profound
that it not only is extant, you're showing it, right?
Somebody's gonna see you and they go, oh, you've changed,
or you've got some new ideas, or that's what's going on.
And I think that's part of it.
That's how it's going to spread,
just kind of like an Amazonian plant
and the forest kind of can spread, right?
So the idea, I mean, you think about Jesus, right?
If we're truly transformed by the works
and the Holy Spirit, we should have that kind of expression
as we go out and not be antagonists to the church, right?
There are people that are legalistic and live in the head
and live in theology and dichotomies.
And I think this one is definitely,
I think the purpose of it is to heal yourself
so you can heal others ultimately.
That's my takeaway.
You know, at the last day, Annie talked about
wanting to start a church and it's probably
the purest sense of church I've ever felt.
Oh yeah.
Like that sense of community is,
that you're talking about, Rich, is,
like it's on another level.
And I think it's because it was really great set in setting.
Like Bailey and Annie and the team did an amazing job
of setting it up and making it a great place
and a great place to be.
And I think that's the amazing job of setting it up.
But people came with a really high level of intentionality
that I have rarely seen in normal churches.
Like it was bad.
Serious.
Yeah.
Yeah, they were really serious.
Yeah.
I gave Timothy a hug the second morning.
It's like, Timothy was, as you guys know, Bailey's dad,
and he was just rustling, oh my God, both nights.
And he doesn't even know Young,
but he's reading archetypes about,
that Young brought up that some other talked about.
So I did really enjoy engaging with the community.
I remember talking to Nikki and to this gal named Simi.
I've got Simi's phone and I want to talk to her
because Nikki left the second day
without showing up that night.
And we're like, what's up with that?
We were gonna work through stuff together, right?
And so to me, that's the, yeah, this is it.
This is the way.
I have one additional thought two days later.
There's this Zen concept.
Before I was enlightened, I chopped wood and I carried water.
After I was enlightened, I chopped wood and I carried water.
Yeah.
And we don't leave our neuroses behind.
We just come from a maybe a wiser adult place.
And my big takeaway was this adaptive child
Terry Real for those that know of Terry Real
uses the adaptive child concept.
The adaptive child can stand down a little bit.
The wise adult knows a little bit better how to show up,
but I'm still chopping wood and carrying water.
Still each day, as all we all do as humans.
So this was a big forward step.
It gives me some more wise adult tools and yet life goes on.
And yet life goes on.
Awesome.
Rich, any final words?
No, I just recommend to the audience, if you're wrestling
and you've tried a lot of different things like therapy
or other psychedelics, I'd highly recommend
looking into Ayahuasca and making sure
that you've got a great community like we did.
The preparation, these guys at the Yagi Assembly
have sessions in Tucson, Ukiah, and of course Joshua Tree
and the level of structure and discipline and communication.
It was so, I mean, half the battle is the scaredness
that you'd have of doing something like this.
It's totally different.
And if anybody could have done a better job,
it's hard to imagine.
So kudos to the team, Bailey and Annie
and everybody else who assisted, that's what I'd say.
Agree.
Dave, any final words?
I think we all would wholeheartedly recommend it.
I think we would also recommend that you,
it's great if you can go with somebody
because it creates a richer experience.
I think it's also wise, I mean, you don't have to have done
other sort of transformational experiences, you know,
but it helps if you go in with something you're working on.
Many people there, there was a crisis,
there was a life change.
And so, you know, my recommendation is
don't be afraid of the unknown.
This is about as big into the unknown as you can step into,
but it is a, I think we looked at one point,
it's a 2000, 3000 year old tradition.
And so this tradition has been around cultures for millennia
and it's proven.
And so, yeah, my encouragement is to try it
and, you know, step into something
that maybe feels really uncomfortable
because there's a lot to be said for being uncomfortable
and finding that you can work your way through it.
Yeah, for me, it was one of the most profound things
I've ever experienced.
I agree with you guys, wholeheartedly recommend,
especially Bailey and Annie, they were amazing.
The whole process was amazing
and I would absolutely do it again.
Rich, would you do it again?
100%, I mentioned that.
Yeah, I've got to go back.
Yeah.
Dave, would you do it again?
Oh, without question.
Yeah, and I would do it, yeah,
I would do it three nights if possible,
though they, you know, a long weekend
because there is a compounding experience to it.
Each night builds on itself, so.
Yeah, so this has been one of my favorite,
I get to say at this time, one of my favorite episodes
because this one was really personal.
And Dave, thank you for being with us, Rich.
It was so good to hear your heart again.
I love sitting with you, brother.
That was both of you.
I love that process.
Thank you for doing the journey with me.
If you've never tried ayahuasca,
to me, it's the closest thing to medicine
I've ever experienced and it is a beautiful experience.
To all of our listeners, please,
we'd love to hear your thoughts on this one.
We'd love for you to step out of the shadows
and let us know what you think.
You can always connect on our website,
livinginthematrix.ai or on Instagram.
We'd love to hear from you.
Thank you for, have a great week, everyone.
It's Tuesday here when we're recording
and we just wish you the absolute best.
Peace and much love, everybody.
Thank you.
Thank you for joining us.