How can Music and Sound be the “Hidden Therapist” in Psychedelic Healing? with Shane Aspegren

Introduction to Shane Aspergen and Sound Healing 0:00

my one-on-one sessions with people are largely about the bulls on the body. It's about moving energy through the buddy, it's directing people's attention to their somatic experience, which is really, you know, when you have a bull on your buddy it is impossible to escape. a scary way, it's beautiful. But also, we do work with titration and pushing people into their edges and zone of comfort. And part of that can be really beautiful with traditional somatic techniques as well. Yeah, like not only down-regulate the nervous system, but sometimes a lot of shit comes up when you're doing this and its energy is moving through the body and we're holding stored stress and trauma in the body and it's a really beautiful tool to help move it around a little bit.

With the wisdom from holistic, alternative and these conventional medicines, we are here to challenge the status quo. We're curious about the connectivity and complexity between diverse fields of knowledge as it relates to consciousness, chronic illness, mental health, resilience and beyond. Learning more about art and science of healing or listening to stories of extraordinary healing. You're in the right place. Let's dive in. Welcome to another great episode of the Two Curious MV podcast where medicine is more than science.

It's story, art, connection, and integration. And today we're here with Shane Aspergen and to talk about sound healing. I'm going to let Simi introduce him. Thank you for being here, Shane. Thanks for having me. Well, Shane Aspergen, in addition to being a wonderful friend and neighbor and fellow healer, is a somatic sound facilitator and embodied integration coach. He's also the founder of Ondo. A musician and multidisciplinary artist for over 30 years, he brings nearly two decades of formal study across vibrational sound, trauma-informed somatic work, and the preparation and integration of non-ordinary states.

His work is grounded in nervous system awareness and relational safety, a spacious, steady container for processing and integrating transformative experiences. He's a collaborator with Polymedicine as a somatic sound facilitator for ketamine sessions and leads ongoing group work weaving sound, sometic practice, and embodied inquiry. Thank you so much for being here, Shane. It's, it's wonderful opportunity to get to know you better, to really share what brought you to this work. And, you know, I just want to start with the first question.

You've had a long career as professional musician and multidisciplinary artist. I believe Bright Eyes was your group that you're a part of and have toured and lived internationally and really did a lot of learning from different traditions and different skill sets. So I love that, you bring all these different tools and this amazing amount of knowledge, and then you decided to step into somatic and holistic work. So if you want to talk a little bit about how that transition happened, and we'll get started.

Yeah. Thanks to both of you. Yeah, it's a good place to start, right? How does one, with my background, end up doing this work? But yeah, when you say decision, It wasn't really a decision. It just kind of organically happened over the course of many years. And that kind of goes back to the early 2000s when I was first practicing yoga and I first got into yoga through just asana and wanting to exercise and was leaving there feeling like amazing. And then over the years I got more into the meditative aspect and did my first teacher training in 2008 somewhere in there.

And I had been deepening that practice and kind of, you know, I think that was the origin of my somatic work, was me dealing with a lifelong, yeah. anxiety, depression, just trying to find ways to cope with that. And so I would say for a number of years, it was more of a coping strategy and it's more like, okay, how can I use these tools to feel better and to like feel less anxious? But even when I did the teacher training, I was really focused on my career. I wasn't a touring musician at the time.

It was making records and touring a large part of the year. Then we moved to Hong Kong. My family and I moved Hongkong. We'd been living in Europe for eight years. So I grew up in Nebraska. This is just a step back. And from the Midwest, but I lived in your free years and then we move to Honk Kong after a short stint back in the US. And there I was really going back more into the multidisciplinary aspect of my work. I'd always been kind of a multisciplinary artist, but earlier in my career, I really focused on music.

And in those years in Hong Kong, Yeah, I was just working in more of the contemporary art space. And through part of that, there was one collaboration and one series in particular where a artist friend of mine and I had this collaboration where we were doing all these different projects. We started really digging deep into the healing, researching healing aspects of sound, but also mythologies. you know, origin being in Hong Kong, we're both American, but he had roots in hong kong. But we were doing this project based on like, how did these practices that kind of became part of the 60s counterculture and America, you come to be and then like, what does it look like migrating back into Asia?

So that was kind of our lens at the time. But I was, so I doing all this and I making these sound baths or kind sound installations that were intended to received as soundbaths. But I was doing it in a completely different context. It was more in gallery spaces or we had these big public interventions. And so I really digging deep into that research. But at the same time, I still overworking and just obsessed about my work and not living a very holistic lifestyle as well. I went through this period where I was just, yeah, dark night of the soul, let's call it.

And it really caused me to not only deepen some of practices that I had, but also go deeper into the sound healing aspect that had been kind of dipping my toe into and kind incorporated into artwork. But prior to that, I'd always see my creative practice and the holistic practices as two separate things. And it was during this time that I really started to deepen everything. I also came into working with sound as a way to actually just be able to work with sounds again, because I had really stopped doing music for a while.

It was super burnt out. When I stepped into some deeper training in sound healing at that time, it kind of, well, first I had this just aha moment where I really felt like, oh, okay, this is what I'm doing now. And it wasn't really a question. It was just like okay this makes sense. You know, it was for me as well, but also the change of perspective of, you know there's a lot of ego wrapped up in being a musician and being an artist and working with other musicians and artists and a a of conflict coming from that.

And I think the moment when I had this shift of a perspective, of like, oh, how To be of service to other people in this other way was also deeply healing for myself as well. And funny enough, I was just hearing a podcast of somebody talking about how they felt that service, this term service work is actually very, um, very self-involved because, you know, ultimately like we're kind of like doing that for ourselves, but everything's about relationship, right? And so, and yeah, now everything I do, everything always really has been about relationships, But I think the lens has shifted and that led me to create Ondo as a platform.

And I was still in Hong Kong at the time that I created that, We moved to Los Angeles in 2022. Kind of pandemic was still happening in Asia and it was over here. But yeah, I relaunched Ondo and have continued deepening that work since then.

From Musician to Somatic Sound Facilitator 10:00

Yeah. Tell me about how you chose Ando. That answers your question. Yeah, beautiful weaving together and like really realizing, but also your own journey coming back to healing your relationship with sound. And I love how he brought it back into relationship. Yeah, it's actually a beautiful word. I was texting with a friend of mine who was actually in Doe from Hong Kong, but he was back in the US at that point. And I had all these different ideas, and nothing was kind of landing right. It was my friend who kind of threw it out there.

He said, this is the Esperanto word, which is basically just, it comes from a Latin root for wave. So in French, we have owned, and Italian I think, but they're all kind with that root. And I really found that to be like, I just liked the way that the word looked. and obviously what it meant. It was very meaningful, but it also just had this minimalist. Yeah, I wanted to call it something other than myself, because I didn't really want my identity to be as wrapped up in it. And I also didn' know where it was going to go, and I don't want to limit that.

So I want it to have a word. I mean, you've done this with Paula Madison as well. I love that, the wave, right? And when it almost feels like there's an opening and you said, I didn't want to limit where it wanted to go. And I loved how sound travels through space and there is like this really wonderful evocation of a wave that just continues and rings, that resonance. Continues or merges into everything else. Yeah, even the word kind of resonates, like ondo, you know, has that kind, of you can feel the sound and the words together.

Yeah. Which kind brings me to my question about sound. Sound is interactive, sound is felt, sounds is experienced, it has a language, there's so many so many ways to experience this sound. So when we talk about somatic sound facilitation, how does that differ from typical sound bath or music therapy? Yeah, it's a beautiful question and complicated. We could talk it about it for a long time, but I think the When I use that term somatic sound facilitation or somatics on bath or any combination of that phrase, it's really pointing to the physicality of the experience.

Obviously, sounds working on all these different levels, right? We have the auditory, just the listening. And for meditation, that can be amazing, even a mindfulness meditation which is more, you know, dualistic, like using the breath, pointing your awareness towards an object of attention. We can use the breathe, we can used sensation of the body, but we could also use sound. That's one aspect. And then obviously the sound is being received by our brain and there's the whole brainwave states. In theory, we can entrain the brain to move into certain brain wave states and through things like binaural beats or even simply listening to gongs and singables because they create these microtonal oscillations that maybe aren't sustained in the same way that binaral beats are, which maybe I should explain what a binal beat is when you take two frequencies that are almost identical, but you can move them say six or 10 hertz apart from each other and pan them into one ear and the other through headphones and your brain hears the pulse in between the two.

So it creates a third rhythm. And that's something that you can just entrain that is continuous and can go on for forever because you're using static sine waves. But, you know, when we also talk about waves and everything with the instruments, with these vibrational instruments We have these same microtonal rhythms, but they're less controlled. They're always weaving in and out of each other. Even one gong can produce so many different tones that as you play it, it starts to create a music of its own.

I think each gongs I like to think of has a song and every time you reinterpreted. I know what my gongs song is, but it's never the same twice, if that makes sense. But then the third aspect, there's this intentional listening aspect or deep listening, and then there are the brainwave states where we can kind of help move the body into more relaxation. And then there's also this somatic aspect, which is when your question asking about somatics sound bath and how that differs from, say, there are a lot of people who are just playing singing bowls at the end of a yoga session or something.

It is deeply relaxing, but it's very different from what I do. what I'm doing with the bulls on the body, like, which, Saraya, you've experienced, and maybe you can speak a bit about what that feels like. But a lot of my, well, my individual sessions, one-on-one sessions with people, are largely about the Bulls-On-The-Body. So it's about moving energy through the Body, it is about directing people's attention to their somatic experience, at which is really You know, when you have a bull on your body, it's impossible to escape the, you know.

And I don't mean that in like a scary way. It's beautiful. But also, we do work with titration and pushing people into their edges and zone of comfort. Part of that can be really beautiful with traditional somatic techniques as well to really Yeah, like not only down-regulate the nervous system, but sometimes, a lot of shit comes up when you're doing this and its energy is moving through the body and we're holding stored stress and trauma in the buddy and it's a really beautiful tool to help move it around a little bit and help people just become a bit more aware about that as well.

Watching you work, I have to just say, watching you working is fascinating because you are working, you're moving around the room. The bull is being set next to a person's head or next their feet. Different bulls are being rung at different times. There's a soundscape being built up. And everybody kind of gets to be in the soundscape. So your body gets be held inside what feels like a sonic container, you know? And in that it's kind gentle, it shifting, its moving. And I think one of the things you mentioned that, what is it like to in a somatic sound facilitation?

Is it tricks the mind in some ways to get out of ordinary default state. You know, there's something that starts up where you're in the imaginal all of a sudden. You're you in a deeper relationship with your body and you are not just noticing what's happening, but your mind and body are kind of you know, playing with each other. The body's saying, I feel this, the mind saying oh, this reminds us of this. And then there's kind of like the signal sent back going, okay, This is cool, just stay with it.

You know? And like you said, there is a tolerance even being built. Your maybe sometimes working with somebody who is very uncomfortable with being in their body or they have a lot of anxiety and the body has been a place where that anxiety has lived for so long that other sensations sometimes feel surprising, right? And it's just when you evoke that difference, it really, I think, is moving into that place of neuroplasticity. It's like the body loves newness. The mind, body, the neurological system responds to newiness.

And so that reset, a patient that we worked with that had peripheral pain, you know, peripheral nerve pain and that reflects sympathetic dystrophy, which was a constant state of chronic pain that was debilitating. I remember you doing bowls. I Remember you're doing tuning forks while the person had a low dose of ketamine and something about the interaction of what's happening the peripheral nerves with the ketamine and the glutamate surge plus what is happening with The sound created a reset and we know that ketamin does that you know and that has been a fascinating phenomenon to me and We've also seen that sound is also used in psychedelic therapy very centrally.

Can you talk a little bit about that? Then maybe we can delve a bit more into how sound interacts with our bodies in the regular state and maybe in a psychedelics state. What's the difference you notice? As you're talking, all these things are coming to me. As you're bringing that back up, of course, this is anecdotal and this was one person's experience, but it was a really profound story for both of us, I think, to have this feedback about the synergy between sound and ketamine. I wish that there was more research on this and I hope that we can be part of more in the years to come.

So we have more data for other people as well. But one thing that I was thinking as you were talking was I was just thinking about preparation integration for sessions. As you mentioned, we do when we're working with sound during a ketamine session, it's always quite low dose and we are keeping people embodied. We don't want people dissociated or off. we want them to still be in the body and still to be able to really receive the vibration. It's not that their body is not going to receive that otherwise.

But I think where I like to be more ambitious is really in that nervous system work with people prior to and after a psychedelic medicine session. So that way, they're getting used to, you know, this is just we can do, as you said, we take people into a non-earning state. with just sound, with the use of the bowls and the gongs and that's quite beautiful. It's good preparation and it also has that possibility to really work with people and their nervous systems prior to the session and also as part of integration afterwards.

What Somatic Sound Facilitation Feels Like 22:00

I'm very curious about the perception of sound as it makes it, because, you know, I tell patients, You don't hear with your ears. You hear it with you brain and you're perceiving sound all the time. Sound is really an interpretation of your world experience or your external world. And it's a perception. So what have you noticed in that, in the work that you do with facilitation, the effect of that perception has on healing. It brings me to intention, you know, because I think that the intention and set and setting and all these things really play so much into how somebody receives the session and also creating a safe container for people because you first and foremost, I think for all of us, but I know for myself, my first priority is to make sure that the person feels safe and to create a safe container.

But then part of that is like setting intentions and understanding intentions. And I thing different intentions or no intention at all, you can take the same sound and place it in, well, also context. I should add context to that, A lot of people say to me after a soundbath, I felt like I was in a sci-fi movie for a while, you know, but then like another person might say, You know you take the same sound and you put it in the sci fi movie and it evokes one thing in body and in mind. And you took that same sounds and put somewhere else and somebody might says it's noise and then you can take another sound to put in sound bath and someone might said it was the most ethereal thing I've ever heard.

So I think that All of those considerations play so much into how we receive. I think that sound is another, it's one beautiful tool in, but there are other, you know, other jewels, like even, Ketamine is as another jewel and combining these things have different. outcomes as well, but always with that relational safety aspect first and also really making sure that a person is as much as possible on the same page and that we understand each other. How do you both feel about that? Yeah, getting to know the person is so critical, absolutely.

And I love that you include that, and it's not just about the sound, it is not about just the experience. It is real about how it landing for the people and meeting them where they are at. I loved that question about perception, because one of the things that we notice after, let's say, a ketamine journey is people are very sensitive. You know, we get so many calls from people who say, yeah, I did a ketamine journey, but it was like an hour away from my home and then I had to take a car. And just being in the car, being that vibration made me feel so ill.

It's almost as if psychedelic therapy scrubs clean and opens up channels that otherwise are dulled. You know, nerve endings that are kind of just dulled from this constant everyday barrage of background sound that we're in, you know. Traffic noises and television noises, and beeps, we are constantly blocking off, right? The brain is also always working to block off sound, protecting, pick the things that relevant. And so, over time, I'm becoming very aware that maybe the way we live is in kind of like this isolation box of sound.

And then what psychedelics kind do for us is give us a little bit more of that sensitivity and ability to open up. Sometimes that can feel too much if we go back into the chaos. But then when you're in beautiful sound, when your in sound that's really, like you said, amplifying, each gong as you ring it is kind like having those, you called it micro, I think I said microtonal more. Microtonal, right? And that's absolutely right because waves interact. Or micro oscillations. Right. And it's happening in a very natural, organic way because sound interacts organically and there's eddies and microtonalities and just this kind of additive elements that we respond to differently.

We respond natural sound differently than we response to maybe digitized sound or sound that's just kind of like not got the human experience in mind. It's more about just, you know, like white noise, for example, or things like that. And I'm really beginning to understand that sometimes psychedelics open us up in even that way where our perceptive mechanism shifts into, you know, being able to tell the difference between somebody's voice tone, right? Like some of the ways in which sound and socialization can really interact is, sometimes people misinterpret tones of voice.

For example, people misinterpret cues from their relationships. So I love how you bring sound and relationship in because what we're trying to do is tune us back into what's more productive, what more real, connecting with the nature of what is coming at us, which is sometimes beautiful sound. But we just close it. I want to ask you, what drew you to this intersection of sound and psychedelic-assisted work in particular? What was that like? because I'm really curious about what we're learning now about psychedelics and sound and the brain and sounds.

I mean, there's a paper out there called, you know, music is the third therapist. And I remind people that, hey, remember music, is hugely important. Yeah, I've seen that circulating also. That's right, so tell me more. The hidden therapist. Yeah, I was reading a paper because what we're doing at our center is looking at brain EEGs and we are trying to see what changes in consciousness from a state of conscious awareness to an altered state consciousness in a psychedelic state to the post integrative state mind.

But how does music, because we were having to write up a proposal on this, and well, how would music be affected on the EEG as somebody's listening to it and changing? I mean, it's not just they're consciously listening the music as we know, cause it does activate all areas of the brain. Music is one of only things that activates all cortical structures in the It's felt, it's experienced, the frontal brain, all the temporal brain and parietal, and all of the different sensory components of brain are activated.

But what can happen in a psychedelic state, as the psychedelics state is another kind of opening and changing of the networking connectivity. There's several papers on that, so I'm kind of curious as a musician, being a music and now being an artist as well as somatic healer with sound, what has been your experience with witnessing the effect that sound has in that experience of healing? Wow. So there is a lot there. I think there's like multiple questions in that. And even as you're both talking, I was like thinking of all of these different things that I wanted to circle back to, like silence and the noise that we block out in our everyday life.

the different and and like what is sound and what does music and you know where is that line between those two things and yeah and maybe i'll start there and then we can kind of like yeah because i think it kind you know, my interest in this work and how I came to it, you it really is just part of that longer arc of the story that I started to tell. I wanted to be in service and share what has been really valuable for me and my own personal healing with other people. And that's really what led me into the work.

But then it's just like, it just keeps unfolding and unfolding. and talking about this, what we've been talking and sound as physical vibration and as something you feel. Music is also something that you can feel, that is physical vibrations. But it's very different. And I think in this work that we're doing, it is important to kind of understand both. A lot of my interest in in his work with sound, and hopefully this also answers some of the later part of it, is I've spoken with other people who do sound bass, a very different intention than I really started out with.

When I was really starting out doing big sound bass, I wasn't really interested in making it pure sound and not ever veer into the territory of what we might perceive as music or anything that got to be too repetitive or that we could latch onto because I wanted to create a journey that didn't feel like music. I want it to even without medicine to be a journey in itself. But then I've spoken with other people who said back to me, like, oh, that's really interesting because I want to make people cry and I wanted to evoke as much emotion in them as possible.

And my perspective has always been, well, let's see what the sound evokes on its own. Because I think music can be manipulative, like I don't use that word lightly, you know, evocative, let's say. And I in psychedelic assisted care, we know. I mean, were talking about this, about the paper that's going around right now and all the research and, I dunno. many people who don't agree that music is such an important part of the experience, and it really can change the the, experience. And silence is part, of that too, you know.

I, I think that the interplay between these three things are also really beautiful. The inter play between sound in its more pure vibrational state and then also music. And I think that's what's interesting about the work that we're doing with very low dose work with the vibration or higher dose is more music-led. I'd see it as like sound as I've said 10 minutes ago, being really useful for preparation, for integration, and with the right care. And I can't stress that enough. You really have to be intuitive and to really understand that the person or people that you're with or are in an Alter Say and they are much more sensitive and vulnerable to this.

So that's why I lean more to the side of caution of like going music directed sessions, sometimes low dose with vibrational if and when that is appropriate for the client and their totally on board with that and want that. Yeah, but then just this other aspect of silence which is I see silence more in this non-dual perspective where silence is the underlying aspect under everything else. In our experience as humans, there's never really anything such as silence, but it's always there.

Sound, Psychedelics, and Perception 35:00

Everything else is just kind of appearing and disappearing within this whole context of the background of silence. I guess getting into a pure meditative state is you can really feel that. And I think silence can also be really useful in medicine work as well. Thank you for bringing that understanding of the ground of reality that's always there, but maybe covered up. And so sometimes when we can peel those layers, when can really get into that meditative state, it's so healing. We know this, that when you can drop into being in coherence with that energy or that vibration or wavelength.

Tell me, is there a moment with a client or in a session that captures for you what this work can actually do? Like, what have you observed or noticed? Well, my mind goes directly back to this scenario that you brought up with the client and the foot pain. But also, I mean, nothing's coming to me, no direct examples coming, to be apart from what comes all the time is, you know, people who say, like, after a session, I'm using air quotes here, or like I have such a hard time meditating. But this is I just feel like in the meditation, and I am the mediation.

And I think that that is probably the most common feedback that I get about this work is that, and as I said, with the sabbatic aspect, it is kind of, you know, flooding your body. And so it's not really escapable when you're in this session and people really love it. You know? They really loved to just have their entire body vibrating. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that we're pediatricians, we've taken care of babies. We always talk about when a baby's crying or is colicky, like vibration. There's so many ways in which parents would try to put that.

The old way was put the baby in a carrier and put it on top of the dryer, right? And the baby falls asleep, there's something elemental. Or the car ride. And comforting. The car right, like when you take a baby out on a car and they fall asleep. Something is being triggered, some state is been triggered that is a switch. as effective as any meditation. And that's where we're working at, right, is that there's an innate ability, there is an innate network that we can reach through, yeah, the somatic feeling of the vibration.

Thank you for making that distinction that sound is not always heard, it's actually felt. And that you're actually going for not just the way it sounds, but the weight feels as well. And different elements of that can be enhanced or harnessed. That can also be disturbing too. I mean, I think of the example of my neighbor, you know, who has a very, uh, maybe doesn't have a muffler on the truck. Every day, every single day at 6 a.m. Even in the summertime, there's somehow a need to warm up the car for 10 minutes.

I'm on the other side of the house in my bed and I can feel this. You know, another example of how the setting and perspective change how I'm receiving the thing. And also, yeah, I mean, practice equanimity, but it's hard. Yeah. It's challenging you in the way that we know that, you know, life can be challenging to really double down on your practice and notice and recognize what's coming up. Beautiful. When you're a little on sleep, it's a different story. And in ketamine work and psychedelic work, we talk about this term synesthesia where sound is felt in a very, and you actually experience sound in the very different way, in different sensory way.

You may interpret it to color, you may see it, may feel it. It's a whole different understanding of that sound or that perception of sound that you're hearing. Yeah, and that happens often in just a normal sound bath as well without medicine. A lot of people are like, oh, I was seeing, you know, a lot times people like I'm seeing blue and green. What does that mean? It's not for me to say. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that synesthesia can be triggered. Absolutely. So let's jump right into integration. You're launching the endosomatic integration circle at Pala.

What can we expect from this? What is being created here and what is been offered? to patients and clients and other people who may be interested in this as a way to integrate their psychedelic journeys or their healing journeys that they may have had, not just ketamine but other modalities as well. Right. Yeah, thanks. Thank you, first of all, for this beautiful program that you're creating at the clinic. And my intention with that integration circle is to have an ongoing group that people could come back to.

I would really love there to be a sense of community, a since of people who want to integrate over time. And really, I'd like to emphasize that integration just isn't the day after your session, but it can go on for weeks and months and sometimes even longer. And my plan for this is to, it will be kind of organized around somatic sound, But it's going to be a shorter time at the beginning of the session. So it'll be probably just a short amount of time with bowls on the body. And I think depending on how many people are there, we may do some breath work or other somatic practices.

And then I'd really like it to be more of a community sharing circle style for at least a fraction of that time as well. It's going to evolve like everything else, so I may start out with seeing what happens and seeing the kind of feedback we get. the duration, the length of the sessions, and whether people want to have more time for the sharing. Yeah, so let's see. Thank you. I'm really looking forward to it. Yeah, thank you for bringing that because, you know, we've done that in both facilities where we had group events and this ability that becomes important, right, is that we can do psychedelic healing in isolation.

You know there's a Western model of quote unquote healing that is really about the person, the individual, that reinforced idea of that disconnect from the collective. And now we have this the psychedelic healing modality that as a person continues to engage with their psychedelics healing, a capacity opens up to share and to be reflected back. And what we notice in indigenous healing traditions is that it's always in community, it is always within a framework of others who are also going through a similar thing.

So thank you for bringing this idea that the sharing circle is important because articulating what's happening to you, you know, feeling heard and seen, and then normalized, right? Like, I'm not the only one suffering in this way. And oh, that person has done some of this healing work. I may be in the start of my journey, but oh wow, they've been doing it for a while. That gives me hope. that gives me an understanding that if I stick to this, if i continue to learn about myself and work on my trauma and engage in this way, that I will get to a different place.

So I feel like what we're bringing together here is really kind of a counterbalance to that isolation. It's really, you know, bringing what we know works, which is you've got to be in the collective. You've gotta feel like you're part of something. And when we're after, post psychedelics or while we are doing it, we feel so open and so vulnerable that I think Part of the disservice that's done in this kind of medical model that spreading everywhere here is that sense that, oh, we can just plug the psychedelic in into the Western, you know, kind isolationist mindset, and that is going to work somehow.

You know, um, and it may work temporarily, but we're not going to see these lasting changes. We're going see. These like really embodied. Um, And then you bring in that relationship. So relationships build up over time. And can you speak a little bit about that? Like what brought you to, you know? Centering relationship in the work that you're doing in. That way. Huh? I. It's hard to pinpoint because I think it's just such an embedded part of somatic work in general. And I this work that we're doing, whether in the clinic or elsewhere, but I I see it as that relationship is, as you just said very eloquently.

I don't know if I can say it much better, but I think that what you said about normalization is extremely important to be seen and be heard by other people and to being in a relationship with other and build those relationships and not to isolated, made to feel like I'm broken. And I that so much of our Western model is of what's my diagnosis, you know, and what can I take to fix that? And that usually just means like we're masking the symptoms and not getting to the underlying problem. And I think that a lot of issues come from relationship too.

So I think that everything is about relationship. And I'll go back to kind of my non-dual aspect of viewpoint of the world is that it's all a relationship, there's nothing in this existence that's not about relationships. I mean, I'm here because of this air that I am breathing and this water that drinking and the water becomes me. But I think that our mindset is very much not that. We're taught so many things as young people. And so I thing part of what needs to be healed often comes from relationship.

Then I that the way to heal that is also through relationship, if that makes sense. See that there's a thread running through here, even through your creative work. And you mentioned it a couple of times is that this can be hard, you know, that the idea of not bypassing what's hard of metabolizing difficult experiences rather than escaping them. You mentioned a little bit about this model that were, the reason why maybe community is important is because it allows us to do difficult things because we feel supported versus when we're isolated.

We really want to escape. Like there's so much of what's happening right now that is about escaping, feeling our feelings about what is happening to us. Absolutely. Yeah. So how does this going to show up in how you approach integration? So what your approach when you're bringing that in? Well, yeah, I mean, talking about spiritual bypassing, right? It's like not addressing or not integrating the shadow or the more difficult aspects. And I know personally, my biggest healing happened when I felt really dysregulated after an experience, and I needed to slow way down and just really trust and go into the somatic practices.

That's hard. I try not to use the word work because I think it gets overused, but I that it's part of the process is to acknowledge what is there and what's difficult and really put it in the light. Yeah, you mentioned like the thread in my creative work as well. Like I have a recent release that's called Spiritual Cannibalism.

Integration, Community, and Relationship 49:00

And it kind of comes from that. I took it from a title of a book from now I'm blanking on his name, but a yogi. It was written a long time ago and I don't even You know, I haven't even read the book, but I like heard about like this. I was listening to somebody to talk about this book and about the concept of this, and I'm like, oh yeah, that's it. It's like the opposite of spiritual bypassing. We have to cannibalize. So we have turn this into energy in our body. And I think that that. Yeah, also what's beautiful about moving energy through the body while we're doing this and having these somatic practices and whether that's sound or yoga or any number of other things, hiking or, you know, and I think that these are all things that are suggested to people to do.

as part of integration. I think that that's the hard, the difficult part is like sticking with that and to keep those difficult things in the light and really find a way to integrate that into your life. I looked it up because I had to know it's by Swami Rudrananda. Yes. It's called spiritual capitalism. Rudi is his name for sure. And it was written in 1973 and this idea that we can be with life in all of its complexity and accept it all. I love how as a healer, stepping into this role of healers, We see that a lot when people engage in their own healing journey, this idea of service or I've learned something about healing.

This is one particular thing that I learned that, I know and I can then now bring it to others as well. It's such a beautiful kind of cycle of the healers journey. You know, we can talk about the hero's journey, but there's the Healer's Journey. And over and over again, We see that happening in this way where people engage with a certain kind healing modality. They discover its meaning for themselves. The apply it. The proof of the pudding is there. You really know that it works and you become an expert in it.

And then there's some opening in the heart, which says, I don't want to keep this knowledge to myself. I want help others with it because I know it work. So it's just this lovely, and I just want bring that in that you held this space really well, holding resonance and dissonance, sound and music, and even silence, which is the absence of it, but it's not nothing. It's really everything. And just those non-dual ideas that really we can flow in and out of and really where we really accept everything about what it's like, this full spectrum of life that we can engage in.

We're talking about neuroscience, we're taking about brain waves. One of the papers that kind of came out recently was that scientists, neuroscientists are understanding that sound or music or the structure of sound and music the mathematical aspects of it, really have a lot to do with the structure of the brain. The way sound is organized and the way the brains are organized, we can actually lay those two things together on top of each other and see that they have lots of correlates there. Which to me is just like we are talking about an evolutionary, you know, part of ourselves that's really basic in our evolution is this relationship to sound, right?

When we talk about a mother in the child's belly, what is being transmitted through that amniotic fluid and being entrained into the brain is so important and how people can sometimes You know, really recognize that, yes, singing and bringing that human voice, the human touch, it can convey so much love and emotion and belonging and all those things that we're looking for. So, I feel like this conversation is really kind of circled around to like, don't forget that. Yeah. Thank you so, much for bringing it in.

And it really brings it to, you know, this idea of sound and the effect of sounds. It's not music, it's sound. And the difference, I think, um, happy to learn that there is such a big difference between sound in music. and if somebody was starting out with working with your, what would you want them to know? Um, they came to you with this, idea using sound, in their treatment. I think I mean, I feel like we've touched on a lot of that. So just to kind of like, yeah, resummarize, is the question like more in terms of ketamine work or like medicine work?

Medicine work. Yeah. I really think, again, that I want to stress that it's such a beautiful tool for preparation and integration. Um, That's what I would really like to communicate with people is that if they are, especially if, you know, are timid or like hesitating about the session and do have a dysregulated nervous system, that it is a really beautiful way to kind of work with that relationship of getting in touch with the nervous, system getting, in-touch with a body, getting more comfortable with very gentle, non-ordinary states that can be shut off immediately.

And also to be seen and to have this relationship and create a safe space for somebody to explore this prior to the work. I think that that's what I find to be missing in a lot of work. I mean, Sarai and I were talking prior to the recording about clinical work and how it can be really cold and it could be very clinical. What I really appreciate about Pala is that it's not that. It is a clinic, but it is very warm. You've gone to great lengths to to make it warm for people and not feel clinical.

And you also spend a lot of time with people. You do integration, you do preparation with. I've heard some other stories that are not at all that and in both clinical and other settings as well. So I think that that's what I'd really like to communicate is that it is can be a beautiful tool to use for preparation integration. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much for bringing this knowledge. I know we just touched the surface here because there's so here about Eastern traditions and to be in a sound bath is a different experience than talking about it.

And so I this podcast is limited in that way. However, how can people find you? Where can they come and experience what you have to offer and learn more? Yeah, so if you're in Los Angeles, you can look me up, ondoholistic.com, O-N-D-O, H- O L-I-S-T- I-C, dot com. All of the social, well, Instagram and a couple of things, but not all of them. Also at ondoholistic, which I think you could find in the show notes. And then you could find me at Paula Medicine Clinic in Pasadena. I work with a lot of different studios and other kind of spaces, a lots of wellness studios, even members clubs, Soho House, for example, yoga studios.

And I travel occasionally as well, and I do one-on-one private sessions out of a space in Highland Park in Los Angeles. So that kind of covers most of it, I believe. I think so. Thank you so much. We're off to a great start here with bringing more intentional sound healing to the psychedelic space. And I'm really excited to see how that changes the healing journey for our patients. So thank you for being here. Yeah. You. Oh!

Closing Thoughts and Where to Find Shane 1:02:00

You. I don't know what to do. Oh. Ommmm It's been a long time. Amen. you you Thanks for joining us on the Two Curious MD podcast. We hope today's episode inspired you to ask new questions and explore fresh perspectives. we challenge you ask us those unasked questions that you're curious about in your medical practice, condition, health and wellness. If you enjoyed the podcast, don't forget to subscribe, share it with somebody just as curious and leave us a review. It helps us keep the curiosity alive.

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