Plant Medicine as Technology: Healing Spirit, Trauma, and Society

Podcast Introduction and Guest Bio 0:00

The past has been filled with a lot of difficulty and also tremendous and great turmoil, and that our ancestors have experienced incredible turmoil. And so we need an opportunity to create change, and whenever change is occurring, that is our opportunity. And part of what's going on right now is a great dystopian narrative. The problem with the dytopian is that it compresses and it reduces the intelligence of our imagination. We go into a place of fear and we try to rationalize the nature of that story.

It's a very potent story and an incredible mythology. So we need the healers to utilize the nature of their practices to be able to keep the imagination open for themselves individually, but also collectively. Because we out-innovate the dystopian narrative. We create the change that we would like society to become. Welcome to the To Curious in Me podcast. I'm Dr. Ali Ahmed. And I am Dr Surya Rapan. 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. Hello. This is the Two Curious MDs podcast. I'm Saraya Raman, and I am here today with Maestro Hamilton. Thank you so much for being here, Maestra Hamilton, I just going to run through a small bio of yours, which can be found at Blue Morpho Academy, if anybody's interested in looking you up.

Today's conversation promises to be quite a journey through psychedelic history of a sort, you know, because you've really been involved in this field for over 20 years. At least that's what I see from your timeline here is 2002 when you entered apprenticeship, um, in the Amazon. And now, so you are a trained master shaman who received his training from Julio Llarena Pinedo. Is that correct? A renowned healer in 2004, he became the first westerner to be recognized as a maestro medico vegetalista.

Amazonian plant medicine expert, Petalisa, which is a title of distinction in the field of plant medicines. Your experience encompasses 20 years using sacred plants to help clients improve their lives, and you've worked with over 15,000 individuals during this time. You also work with high-profile clients for the past 20 years, offering coaching services. And through Blue Morpho Academy, you are training those of us who want to serve as sitters, coaches, facilitators, and master facilitator. You've made this your life's mission.

So thank you so much for being here on the Too Curious, Empty podcast. Meister Hamilton, we'd love to have you.

Maestro Hamilton's Path to Peru 3:01

Thank you, so, much. It's a pleasure to be here, Soraya, I'm really grateful for this conversation. Yeah, thank you so much. We'll just dive right in, you know. What was happening in 2002 or what led you, what was the path for young Maestro to find his way there? Yeah, in 2002, I had graduated from the university. I'd studied anthropology and I came from a Western medical background family. My father was a plastic surgeon and my mother a nurse. And we had been through a variety of all of the kind of trials and tribulations that somebody goes through in their youth.

But I also suffered depression and had difficulties through different kinds of childhood abuse and was looking for something beyond what was available at that time. And kind of spontaneously I had a spiritual awakening that happened right then in my early 20s. As part of that, I got really interested in meditation, but it was the shamanic arts that were really more parallel or akin to the experiences that I started to have. So it turned into a journey that led me down to Peru. When I was doing meditations, I had really clear communication and visions that I needed to go down to Peru and that there was something important waiting for me there.

And ultimately that was an apprenticeship in the visionary arts in Amazon and ultimately has led to the last 20 plus years of both plant medicine and service. Yeah, beautiful. You heard the call and the Call came through in this way that we call spiritual emergence, right? How old were you at the time? The awakening happened when I was 22 and I went to Peru just after turning 23. I just want to linger on that a little bit because in pediatrics, where Dr. Alia Emeth and I practiced for 20 years, you know, we do have so many young people who go through a spiritual emergence experience and may get mislabeled as pathologic, have you had experiences where you've, because you supported so may journeys, what is your framing around that experience when it happens in one so young and especially spontaneously like it did with you?

I think the way you mentioned things getting mislabeled is really important. And I that when it happened for me, there was very little in my community and in the collective understanding to describe the experiences that I was having. I now think that awakening of consciousness is a process that we're in now as a collective, as species. It's also becoming more normalized and accepted as something that people are experiencing and go through. And for me to address it, I ended up doing two things. I immediately put myself into counseling to get one perspective, and I immediate went and saw a shaman to another perspective.

And both came back to me, luckily, that the experiences that I was having were just experiences themselves, not more or less than that, And I had to learn how to deal with them, but it wasn't labeled as pathology, which was, very supportive. I think we have a tendency when we don't understand something and it's moving somebody out of the mainstream expression of culture, that it is very easy to pathologize that. And in the case of shamanic awakenings and spiritual awakeners in that way, often there is a quality to them that runs parallel or akin to certain kind of behaviors or characteristics that are pathological.

And so I think it merits a real study and observation of the individual to see if they're having mental health difficulties or if something expansive is taking place in their consciousness and in the world view and perspective. And if it is, we can look at our ancestors and our ancestral cultures and their traditional cultures to see that they knew what to do with people like that.

Spiritual Emergence and Early Awakening 7:01

They actually trained them, they had a path for them. There was an important place in society for then. And it took neurodivergent people and also people having these kinds of awakenings and gave them immediate purpose, which was to utilize that quality of themselves for the benefit of the collective. how beautifully put and just seeing the difference you must have experienced from going from a culture where there was no framework for it or a community around it to a cultural where it radically shifted your perspective and gave you this really just a way to look at it that kept room for self-compassion open, for not pathologizing and feeling broken.

That's the part I think that I find over and over again, is that's what we're healing. That we are healing that story of brokenness, where people have been told over, and experience that, oh, because I'm this way, or experience the world in this, way or I behave in where I speak, in the way I look, that there's something wrong with me. And I just love how we can go back to our ancestors, really just have to read between the lines of how everything went and the plans show us. I think the plants are really holding up a mirror to us in some ways to say, look what had to happen for you to be here right now.

to be able to even have these thoughts. And so I just am in gratitude for how that journey went for you and how you've continued to carry that on. What does it take to become a maestro medico vegetalista in the Amazon? Because I've only been doing this for like two years and I'm tired maestro. That's a great question. What does it take? First, it takes being recognized as having a potential talent and being invited into apprenticeship. In my case, that took a little over a year and a half of being observed by the maestros in the community.

I was expressing interest and was allowed to participate in different rituals and ceremonies, but I wasn't allowed be taught. It's a time of application of both your applying to the desire to learn, and also for them to apply their understandings to you. And then once you're accepted into apprenticeship, typically it takes somewhere between five and 10 years of training. And the training is continuous. There's no vacation or break from it. You go through a series of rites of passage as well as going through series trainings and an extensive number of ceremonies.

So typically somebody will go to hundreds of ceremony. and participate in the consumption of the plant medicines that many times. And you're also expected to at least once or twice consume all of different medicines you may prescribe or you might offer to somebody as part of their treatments during the training itself so that you have a personal awareness and understanding of interaction with those plants. Then you go through extensive dietas, which are these fasts. And during this time of fasts, you are restricted from many of the common foods that you would eat.

And, during that time you drink non-psychoactive medicinal plants that are considered to have a transformative effect on you, that supports you in your ability to, have clarity in you visions, to be able to diagnose through those visions. and to be able to supported by the essential nature of the forest itself. There's a quality of deep energetic interaction as much as utilizing the plants in the form of tinctures and teas where you're consuming the active compounds. And so there's this very unique blend of recognizing both the consumption of a plant and this incredible pharmacopoeia that the forest allows for.

There's hundreds and thousands of medicinal plants that are known and utilized in these fashions. But then there's also a recognition of what they call spirit, which I think translates to your essential energy and the need to treat that aspect of you. And so I found it really interesting that when children have trauma, they consider that a spiritual illness. They treat the spiritual wellness immediately upon trauma and it doesn't accumulate over time.

Amazonian Apprenticeship and Training 11:30

And then if an adult experiences a physical trauma like a broken bone or a damage to a joint, They'll heal the joint or they'll feel the bone and then afterwards they will treat their spirit or their essential energy. Oh, that's beautifully put. As I'm listening and I am envisioning the rigor of this training is what stands out to me. We talk in medical circles about residency training and how rigorous that is. And I think that level of rigor is necessary. I really respect the methods that you've described where it's an apprenticeship.

It's like you're applying for it in this way in which you have been tested. and you're ready. And I love how that shows the care of those around you who were, you know, your maestros. I think that that is the process of medical education and education of a healer because you yourself have the parts of yourself healed as well and do your own work before you could even go out there and be there for the healing of others. At least that's the first step. You know? And, I, think in our Western medical That's the brain, the cognitive, materialist, and we don't educate the body.

And that's one disconnect that we experience as healers. The other thing that you're describing is that, you become one with the technology that your using. in a way, if I may call plant medicine a sort of technology, right? It's a tool, it's something that you can connect with, you could learn about, explore, categorize. And that's what the Amazonian healers have done for generations upon generations, is they've really tested these things out in their own bodies and their minds. So you call this a research project of millennia long.

that we are now at the tip of that spear, it's entering into our collective consciousness that this is possible, that you no longer have to go out into the jungle to do this. Tell me, I mean, as you are going from this experience of having experienced this medicine in the energetics of the Amazon, where the medicine is, just kind of like the birthplace of this kind have experienced, but also mostly read and, you know, kind of framed from my own self what this kind healing is and how you beautifully described it.

Like, the spirit needs to heal when there's been trauma in the child. And in adults, a spirit may be the secondary thing that heals. That's really resonating with me right now for how this medicine interacts with the trauma to the Spirit that can happen. through any number of things that we can experience where the death of a parent, the breakup of the family, actual attachment trauma that can come from not having adults that take care of you or care for you. As a pediatrician, I say repeatedly nowadays, oh my gosh, they spent more than 20 years in pediatrics.

You know and so my interaction wasn't as deep with adult in their journeys and now in the last two years I've actually kind of taken that other route of looking at people's childhoods from the lens of their adulthood. And there are so many places where people carry that brokenness into their adult hood. And that's what we're talking about here, right? Is that spiritual healing, that we arrive on this plane whole, spiritually whole as children, and there is something that renders that apart. And unless we heal that first part, no matter what other healings we do, we haven't really healed.

Is Yeah. I mean, first I love the idea that the plant medicines are technology and I think that's just an incredible way to think about them. And I of it as a discovery by humans of this incredible technology that comes from another kingdom of life and something that we didn't understand. When I first came to the Amazon, It was presented in this way of we can utilize these substances to have extraordinary abilities and expect repeatability and consistency and association with that. And so I think to frame them as a technology is a beautiful way understanding them and helps us understand not only their use as very important tool and a tool that's been important for thousands of years, but also how we understand that we're in a great age of the sharing and globalization of our technologies.

And so it's an incredible time to be able to see not only how we can use information technology to have a conversation spanning continents, we could have these plant medicines now actually being studied and understood from a scientific perspective and being embraced in Western cultures and seeing the impact that they can have. And I think understanding them as a technology both mystifies them and demystifies at the same time, it makes them approachable. And I love that, because I think that that's the true nature of them.

It's only been an interesting and rare moment in history where for the last 50 or 60 years there was a compression against them And because of that, a reduction of the ability to utilize our science to understand them. And now we're going to get that ability, which I think is fascinating. I that there was incredible results in the labs in Silicon Valley at Stanford in 1950s and early 60s before. there was a shutdown of that science and study that was being done and we're going to be able to see that now.

And when we bring that awareness and understanding to what we've learned in the last 50 years in psychology and psychiatrics and much more holistic understanding of health and how to create health in individuals, we can see while we go through developmental stages, we carry those developmental stage within us. And so as soon as we open up the psyche, what we may be adults, there is still the youthfulness, the infancy within, us there's still prepubescent, they're still all of the transformative transitions that we went through.

What we might not be thinking about it all the time, in the subconscious and unconscious there are drivers of our behavior and our feelings that are unresolved. And these have a unique way, as you said, to present a mirror to immediately open us to the subconscious and unconscious and allow us a moment of reflection and awareness and a lens in which to be able to view ourself that we normally don't have that our Western educated mind doesn't allow for. And in that also the presence of that aspect, that's technology and real medicine to create a transformation.

Plant Medicine as Technology and Healing 18:30

It's not just the ability to witness it, but it's also to evolve, mature, heal, and really develop a new internal expression of ourselves that can be more whole and also much more supportive of the life that we want to live now. And I think that this is a great opening and a Great Renaissance of they use of these plants as a technology. So I just really loved that. Yeah, oh my gosh, as you're talking about the development and the unfolding, that's exactly what we see when we're healing childhood wounds, especially in young adults.

I just see their development kind of proceed. It gets halted because of the trauma. And then when remove the blockers, it just kind flourishes. So just this idea that we are, and it's opposite to how we were taught in Western medicine, which is that this inner healer, right? This kind programmatic part of ourselves that is oriented towards flourishing. If all things remain equal, if the person has all the different experiences and all of the connectivities that need to happen to support it, they will proceed.

And then even in the elements in times of trauma, there is even kind of a workaround. Some of these ways in which we dissociate during trauma and that we hold for the rest of our lives actually started from a place of like, well, I'm trying to save myself. I try to hold on to something that's outside of the trauma, and hold the drama alongside. And I am learning now at this age and having been in this kind of training that there's an intelligence in our body. And it brings me down to the first time when I encountered in my medical training the cadaver that they have us dissect, and the human body and all of its just exquisite design.

You can't but marvel at how it all kind of works. and staying with that marvel instead of breaking it down into a list of symptoms and a lists of signs. And, you know, we barely even touch the body these days, whereas, when we were trained like 25 years ago, touching the bodies was a great way of getting information from it, then those kind of things. I know that in this kind plant medicine, your also getting the information form the bodys of a person, as a shaman, a healer, tell me how you're reading the body.

Tell me what does that look like? What does it feel like?" It's a great question. One of the first things that we learned was how to diagnose. and it's one of the hardest things to do. You're in the forest, there's very little support outside of what's immediately available, you don't have any other kinds of sensors or x-ray, any kinds scans, et cetera, not even blood work. And so you have to be able to somehow figure out and discern and diagnose one illness from another when many can seem almost identical in symptoms that are presenting.

And so the shamans through the visionary work learn how to go into vision and actually read how the body is emitting and what you can see from the Body itself in the visions themselves. And if you've had a psychedelic experience where you have been calm enough to be able to really look at another person, you see a very different view of them than what You see with your normal eyes. And they actually learn to read that as a kind of scan and diagnosis. So one of the first things we learn is, is this something we can heal or is it something that we cant?

Is this is something needs to be sent to, you know, either a Western medical location, a hospital, et cetera. But I can give you a great example of this. A man was brought to me about 15 years ago. He could barely walk. He was carried in and he was laid on our floor. And I went into ceremony that night. He wasn't in any condition to be able to drink any plant medicine. So he's just there, but we were going to hold a plant medicines ceremony. We tried to make him as comfortable as possible. And I went into the ceremony and as I when up to him when we were finally in full vision, I was able to just looking at his his hip where he was having the problem and by putting my hands on his head and just palpating that.

this was not something for us to treat and that he actually had an abscess in his femoral head and That he had a deep infection and he needed to immediately be sent to the local hospital He was a person of very little economic means and so I actually paid for him to go and his surgery And it was exactly right. He got the diagnosis that he needed. They was taken in, they did x-rays. they found the abscess and they opened up his hip and cleaned out the infection. And then he recouped and he saved his leg and was able to walk.

And so the body tells you and there's this awareness that you develop over time in these altered states of consciousness. But to understand that there is great clarity in them, sometimes more clarity than we can have utilizing the mind based in deductive reasoning. And it was an art that the medico vegetalistas have used in the Amazon as a form of diagnosis for, you know, thousands of years. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's how we came up on all the knowledge we have in Western medicine. When we these textbooks where it's like observation, palpation, you look at the redness, these were observations that then got written into books, but where did they start from, right?

Was from healers who had all of these ways of connecting. And I feel like what you're talking about is attunement. You're talking about an attunement to the way that a body gives off the signs and the signals that we could always read, right? Whether it's in the quickening of the pulse, the flush of skin, you know, just kind of way the person is walking or breathing or conversing or looking at you in eye. And I feel like that is something that I've taught in pediatrics because in pediatric, your patients can't talk to you.

So you really have to be good at looking at a baby and going, do you have meningitis or are you just gassy? And I feel like I'm resonating with that because after a while of doing that, you know, at first it's really difficult. At first, right, like you are kind of trying to understand what the difference is that you're asked to be perceived, to perceive. And over time when you get it, it becomes kind like, okay, confirmation, multiple variations. All right and then you don't even have to think about it.

you just have to kind of pay attention. So I feel like what you've done is that healers art of attuning your senses, you know, your ability to use this technology in a way that, doesn't need a lot of tools. As you said, it's very basic in that way. What's a misconception that people have about working with medicinal plants that you wish you could correct? I think one of the biggest misconceptions is that they're scary and that there's a lot of fear about them. And I, think when they are used responsibly with people who know proper dose and as you're saying, how to be able to read somebody to know the condition

Reading the Body Through Vision and Attunement 26:00

they were in and the kind of treatment. that they're not scary at all and that their one of the most potent and powerful ancestral medicines that we have ever had. And, you know, the archeology and anthropology that sits behind these cultures has demonstrated that, they've been used for thousands of years. So I think it's an understanding that. They're, not, scary, at, all, but they do take you to a place where you have to confront your own fears. and to understand how fear plays out in the nature of your own psyche, and, to learn how to calm down and self-regulate your nervous system, in that way that they're a really powerful and incredible technology to show us more about ourselves.

And so I've been hearing in the culture around them, especially in plant medicine space, less in and around ketamine, but in a plant medicines space a tremendous amount of fear about the nature of the hero journey and the ego's journey of experiencing them. And I think that it's a misconception that rather it is an opportunity to understand more about ourselves. And that we have the best experiences when we're in the calmest state about and to go into a deep meditative state. And so I think that I would like to see the culture embrace this in a way that moves beyond the fear-based narrative and really starts to describe the aspect of the visionary state that people enter into and the value that that has for them when they find that really calm place within themselves.

And as you say, that inner intelligence, the inner technology that the human body turns on and is a miraculous first experience for people. Absolutely. What we call the placebo effect that comes into play whenever we're trying to test when something is working. 75% of a lot of medications is about the possible effect. Something within us has to turn on the inner healing intelligence for something to be effective. I'm just being called to recognize also that when you're talking about this fear, we're in such fear right now.

And you are right that plant medicines and ketamine are markedly different. They work in different ways. You know, I worked for ketamine for about 10 years in the sedation space and I wouldn't believe for two years that it was a real psychedelic. I was like, no, it's an anesthetic. But it proved to be like Thomas the Train Engine. It's like the molecule that can. it does so many little, enough of the little things to create this really interesting psychedelic experience that I think for most people who are in the materialist Western mindset and are not looking to change their mind, It can give a little bit of safety because it's shorter acting.

It's got a few of those advantages, but it is really interesting. We're still getting to that same place of connecting with the inner healer, only when we get silent. You're absolutely right. That's one of the things that I've learned that is so important is that meditation and We know that the science is also showing that when we look at the brains of long-term meditators, and we'd look the brain of people on psychedelics, there's so much overlap there that we can't but wonder that, we've kind of found our way back to this ancient technology that's existed in many cultures.

When we quiet ourselves, when they quiet our nervous system, quiet thoughts, our mind, that there is another part of us that can connect with everything and has an intelligence. And in some ways the plant intelligence and our own intelligence are kind of speaking to us, kind getting together and speaking us. I'm wondering what role do you think plant medicine will play in the future of leadership and innovation? That's such a great question. Plant medicines are going to hold a greater role in the future of leadership and in innovation.

And I think they've had a big role already, but it's been underground and not really talked about. So there's this opportunity where we're at this convergence of information technology and artificial intelligence and this open push to describe a desire to create technology that merges with consciousness or new consciousness. And it's still very prophetic. It's called artificial super intelligence. But there are companies in the world seeking that right now and looking for a way to be able to make that happen.

And I know that certain people in that industry are actively utilizing all different kinds of plant medicines to try to bring forth the innovation necessary. to understand this and I think as we get into the idea of greater performance and expansion of consciousness, we see once again that plant medicines are being sought and thought of as a way to be able to bring forth those experiences. And so there's an opportunity here for humans to grow once, again, with this plant intelligence that you're talking about.

And I also like to take the perspective of asking the plants as well, how they feel about being part of this great movement. It's not just a single species doing this, but rather this intercultural interspecies opportunity.

Misconceptions, Fear, and Inner Healing 31:20

And it's such a unique way of thinking about how we consume food as a way you know, ingesting the medicines. And in the form of plant medicine, it's also interesting that the use of them comes in a way that's very food-like. People eat them or they drink a tea made of, et cetera. And so I see this merging taking place and I think they'll have a much greater open role now as the stigma starts to fall away of their importance and how many leaders have been utilizing them and, uh, how may more will.

Yeah, absolutely. I think I'm feeling the kind of opening that we feel when we come into this psychedelic space is like... Wow, there's a lot here that's converging, that overlapping, it's kind of connecting in a way that is almost speeded up. Because of the nature of these technologies, I'm really interested to hear that plant medicines and artificial intelligence are kind playing together. And there are some energetics that are shifting because they're playing In a way, it gives me hope and it also asks me to ground.

So as I'm starting to kind of head into the final portion of this, I want to also, you know, lean in a little bit on because you speak to, we both speak, to young people in the healing spaces. Who are training who are healers who have heard that call to heal themselves and others and we know so many of them and You know one of the things that i'm very aware of is that we're in a time of great turmoil and trauma because of all the Things that were talking about were also in great moment of rupture that is happening and how to hold space for that ruptured, how within our own neurobiology you had mentioned grounding and other practices.

How are young people who are thinking of themselves as healers to take care of them selves and what have you learned about that path of the healer that has kept you in this field. As I know, this is a really difficult path, but also a very worthwhile path of the healer, which doesn't end until the day we die. You know? We never stop being healers. I think it's a job you never retire from. My parents were also healors. And I come from a lineage like that where it is deeply felt identity and a core value.

So how would you say you addressed that or learned about that? times of great difficulty and turmoil, that's the time for the practices to have their most merit and importance. And so what I love about the plant medicine path is that you learn how to work with the plants medicines to help you through the difficult times. and how to be able to stay grounded and recharge. And when I think on a larger scale, this is the time for the people that identify as healers to step forth and provide an example for others to realize that in the face of great fear, great turmoil and great conflict, that's an opportunity for great change.

I would like to share an idea that the world needs a lot of change and evolution, that the past has been filled with a lots of difficulty and also tremendous and great turmoil, and that our ancestors have experienced incredible turmoil. And so we need an opportunity to create change, and whenever change is occurring, that is our opportunity. And part of what's going on right now is a great dystopian narrative. The problem with the dystopia narrative is that it compresses and it reduces the intelligence of our imagination.

We go into a place of fear and we try to rationalize the nature of that story. It's a very potent story and an incredible mythology So we need the healers to utilize the nature of their practices to be able to keep the imagination open for themselves individually, but also collectively.

Leadership, Innovation, and the Future of Plant Medicine 35:40

Because we out-innovate the dystopian narrative. We create the change that we would like society to become. And we can't do that in opposition to the nature of how society is, and it's part of that narrative to create polarization and opposition. So we have to be in our heart, we need to understand that this is a continuous evolutionary process that also includes the earth. and that we have a very sacred and a important role. And it can be very difficult at times. To embrace that and share that with others and be honest about that, and to utilize the practices that help us ground and help relax, help stay in the heart and stay compassionate.

in the face of these great fears and think that especially in emergence of technology the way that it's happening now, at a time of great transition and change, that this is our opportunity to be able to create the future that we would like to see. And we can do that individually and we could do it within our families and collectively. If we do enough of that, individually, and in small collectives, then that can become a much greater narrative. I think it starts to impact upon the collective mind And there's philosophies around the idea of a collective consciousness.

And instead of making that abstract, I think we can look at that in a very real way through the ideas of the social graph and our communication, the kind of content we create, media we put into the world, and the way that we decide to gather in person and share in the intimacy of real human interactions during this kind of time. And when we do that, we find that the dystopian narrative falls away and our humanity once again blossoms and once, again, comes forth. I think that this is the greatest time for that and we need our youth, especially the younger healers who are coming into this, to feel empowered and to feel like this is an incredible time to be alive and be supported in that and know that they have decades of both service and work to do, but also positive evolution and change that we can create together.

And I think when we approach this from that perspective, that we have a better chance of making that change that would like to see, but we also have way to sustain what we need as healers within our communities to be able to support the people that were there to help. Oh, beautifully said. We'll let that settle for a minute. Because I've had this notion that when in this battle of good and evil that we're in right now, if we think about it that way, the dystopian narrative and we know the mechanics of how we get into it, it's our primal nature to get fascinated by it.

There's a part of our amygdala that creates coding when we look at a shape that encodes it as either safe or not safe, right? And so when were in fear, our amygdala kind of goes to that level instead of being in a relaxed space.

Healers, Turmoil, and Collective Hope 38:50

In a relax space, you can tell when you look the shape you've got some time to decide whether that's an enemy or a friend and you actually have more narratives to choose from instead if you're kind stuck in that dystopian narrative and everything looks to you through that lens. Is this a friend or a foe? And we can kind of really see how that narrative has controlled, you know, a large elements of our population is seeking to control even more and more, all of the crises, the meta crises that are happening.

And so the only thing we have control over is our bodies. and the internal element of peace that we can reach within that, and just doing that can change. And as you were speaking, I felt that kind of mushrooming kind-of feeling of little pockets, little communities of holding that safe space, of really grounding and saying, oh, this is worthwhile. This is why we're here, to be with each other, no one needs to go hungry, no needs go friendless, that we're in a relationship. And I'm brought that, you know, the plant intelligences that are around us teach us this all the time.

Our plant-intelligences invite other beings to live within them. They're never by themselves, they have their conglomeration of millions and billions of beings as are we. So also remembering that element. And as I'm kind of, you know, kind sitting with just this beautiful moment that we've reached in our conversation, Lystra, I just want to thank you for how clearly you just articulate in a way that also feels it's doable. That we speak with hope, that this grounded confidence through your lived experience and hopefully soon through my lived experiences.

I'm still in a process of retraining, unlearning, and so I have learned so much in my conversation with you today. Thank you so for sharing all of your stories and all your thoughts and really beautifully articulated ideas that really bring us to this moment of community connection, hope, and hope for a greater conscious awakening that we're in the process of and how we can hold ourselves and each other together. So thank you so much for just allowing me to engage and for our audience to hear you.

Thank you Oh, thank you so much as well. It's been a pleasure. 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, to 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. Post a comment with a question or curious inquiry that you have and seek to explore or learn with us.

Stay curious and we'll see you next time.