What Are You Carrying? Trauma, Healing, and Connection in Hard Times

Opening on psychedelics and healing mechanisms 0:00

Right now, when we talk about psychedelics, we're almost talking about at the same level as people are talking cancer therapy, which is immunotherapy. Something about activating the body's own systemic mechanisms to create healing. In the way psychedelic are also doing that. And so in the psychotherapy, you become more free to follow whatever the MDMA invokes, whatever is coming out of the patient. So you trust that, You know, and we've seen that in ketamine therapy is that if we just kind of don't try to force on like a rigid structure, where the patient's material takes them becomes their journey and it kind unfolds in a way that the psyche is ready for.

Podcast intro and welcoming Simi 0:40

Welcome to the To Curious MD podcast. I'm Dr. Ali Ahmed. And I am Dr Surya Ravan. 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 a relief to consciousness, chronic illness, mental health, resilience and beyond. learning more about the art and science of healing, or listening to stories of extraordinary healing. You're in the right place.

Let's dive in. Welcome to the Too Curious, Abdi's podcast. Supermedicine is more than science. It's story, art, connection, integration. This is a space for the curious. And today I'm going to put Simi on the spot. Oh boy. She is in the limelight and the lights are shining and she's on stage. And she is going to talk to us about the retreat that we're planning, ancestral healing, and all the things that she does that amazes us. Thank you. Well, you just kind of will be on the spot. We had a guest cancel, which sometimes gives us the opportunity to be well dressed on a Sunday afternoon.

I've been ready for the camera. And so Alia, ask your question.

Swan card, retreat energy, and ancestral healing 2:00

I'm happy I am sitting with some cards. So I pulled a card today and maybe I should start by reading that. Because that can maybe give us a little bit of calling in our intuitions. So I love using this animal spirit deck. It can sometimes be spooky. Gives us the swan card, which is really pretty. Can I see? Can you see, can I show it up in here? It's the water element and it's a swans and I think it really will speak to this element that we're in right now. Trying to flow with the moment, right?

And sometimes when unexpected things happen, somebody cancels, plans change, things don't turn up the way you thought it would, there's an opportunity for creativity. So the swan card today shows us that there is effortless creativity, a sensitive mystic and elegant power. The swans represents heightened creativity in Hindu mythology, the goddess Saraswati, The embodiment of language, creativity and artistry rides on the back of this graceful creature. The Swan is ready to take us there, to the fluid realm of writing, creating, and reflecting.

This potent and healing energy is not to be taken for granted or taken lightly. When the Swan card appears, your soul is calling for attention, for solo time. An inner voice is waiting to heard, an inner vision likely to revealed. when in balance, infinite creative power, when out of balance agitated, snippy, or lacking vision, I can relate, to bring it to balance. Solo time and writing, right? Solo Time and Writing. And so what does a retreat mean? A retreat is solo time. You can do a Retreat by yourself or with other healers like yourself, or a friend.

I've always loved doing retreats. So for me, this retreat that we're planning is just a very special treat on another level too. Yeah. I do want to bring up what we talk about a lot, which is ancestral healing and generational trauma. And I want bring this up because in the times that we're in currently, it seems to be that, we are still cycling through the same generational drama that's just is perpetual. It makes me kind of sad that when we were at the MAPS conference, We talked about zero net trauma, I remember that.

talking about trauma and recurrence of trauma that perpetually persists. And this has to do with not just, you know, what's happening in the world these days, but what is happening within families and what happening with the infrastructure of our human condition. and our own story to why we do this work. And we don't really get to talk about that too much. I thought we'd just take this opportunity to really bring that to light. So what are your thoughts on what's happening in the world and what is happening within that?

infrastructure of healing. Big questions, right? So I think we're talking about the reality of early 2026 when we don't really know what's happening with global peace, global conflict, and global economic collapse. When we dig a little bit deeper, it looks like there's this big, bigger story underlying. There's these forces that have been operational for 2,000 years in the Middle East. And they come from these, you know, You call them ideologies. You called them story of origin. It's who they are.

Like this land is ours. No, this Land is Ours. We originated from them. And you see the fight of two brothers, basically, because when you talk about all the Abrahamic religions, they have one root, and they split off into three different perspectives, alternative paths. And so we find that there are rifts where brother against brother, like between our cultures, your culture, and my culture.

Middle East conflict, trauma, and collateral damage 6:00

Just for the audience, I want the audiences to really just ground in on where our backgrounds are, specifically yours, because Dubai is where you grew up. It's very dear to you because there's a lot of history there, which you're describing. I lived in Dubai, in Abu Dhabi for 10 years and came back. And, you know, it's a center point of the world, I believe, in a lot of ways, because, of course, a whole lot happens in that region and continues to infiltrate into so many parts of our work. So back to now, what you were saying.

Yeah. I mean, kind of unavoidable. You're right. Like, we are of a generation in which We've kind of seen this divide from different sides because of the outsider status. We're not embedded within one culture. we've had third culture, fourth culture experiences where you can really see sometimes that the same conflict is seen differently from both sides. And when you see that, you recognize that oh, it's really about the story, right? It's a story that people are living. It what gives them meaning.

And, when things get to the point of those red hot button topics, religion, identity, belonging, those are places where there's ready kindling to be lit on fire, as happens in even any families, Right? You have two brothers, they grow up, They have their own families. There's always going to something underlying. And you recognize that, yeah, there's going to be things that we can lob across each other's, you know, across the divide, and that can get people riled up, or we could try to understand each others' perspective and see that there is also opportunity for coming together and understanding.

I grew up in Dubai, you're right, and I grow up at a time when it was before the big kind of buildings came up. And so it's the late 70s, early 80s. My parents were physicians. We were on this compound in Sharjah, right next to the beach. It was this beautiful place where there were doctors from all over the South Asian countries, South India, Pakistan. all parts of India. And my parents were from Bangladesh, and it was just kind of, well, everybody's coming together and everybody is working. There's Arabs, there's Egyptians, you know, Persians.

We're all trying to get along and understand each other. To me, I felt like I saw the best of humanity. as a child in that respect, where we were all inviting each other to each others' homes, and sharing our food, sharing, you know, our culture. And so I got like an insight into like, oh, this is what Lebanese family life is like. Oh, that's what Egyptian family is life like and this what, what people's stories are Palestinian. So it was just like a very interesting place to grow up where you see that Islam is not one big thing.

It's many, many different versions of it and everybody's speaking it in a different tongue. I mean, I think that's one of the things that people forget is that at the heart of Saudi Arabia, where Mecca is, if you go there and you're circumambulating around the Kaaba, you hear so many versions of what people are saying when they are chanting. And it's beautiful. There's a moment of recognizing unity, right? Which I thing is when we scratch below the surface of political divides, we get to the part that all these religions are talking about unity.

All these religions are talking about oneness and of humility, right? And Islam's submission is such a great idea. The Jews and the Muslims, they speak almost the same language. It's salam and shalom. So it's just like for us to be in this moment where we are now looking at a Middle East that's throwing bombs at each other. is to look at a conflict created out of the kindling between two brothers, right, and external forces because they're sitting on the biggest pot of oil that's easy to tap. Yeah.

So yeah, you know, so the Middle East oil prices have gone up, tension is everywhere, people are worried about even just surviving and water and access. A desalination plan should be taken out by drones and millions of people in the Middle East, some of our friends and family members are going to be scrambling and we know what that's like you know to hold both and is like a really big thing but I think that where we're at here is And it's collateral damage everywhere you look. Everywhere you looked, it was collateral damaged.

How many people are being brought into this conflict with or without their consent? You know, we're talking about the military, resources, money, human lives, neighbors, the whole world. and our planet. I mean, do we even think about the environmental effect of war on the planet? The destruction. My husband does TNT and part of his work in water and environmental engineering has been remediation of soil with T&T in it. Wow. With detonating, you know, nitrous. Yeah. And dangerous, yes. Working on that.

So there's so many layers of collateral damage that we're talking about. Yeah. I mean, when I was growing up there, the seas of the Straits of Hormuz were absolutely crystal clear, emerald green. You could see fish in it from a boat. It was just magical, you know, and now they're putting mines in. So, right now, as we're doing the work we do and we are trying to understand how can we meet this moment without getting pulled in by the negativity of it, pulled by destruction of, because I think what we're learning, you and me, from dealing with people who have trauma, is that trauma needs to be processed.

Trauma can't be passed on to the next generation. You know, we cannot allow that to happen because it can easily be passed on to the next generation. I think that's what's happening. Like, you know in Iran when the school that was bombed, I mean, We just passed-on trauma to another generation and our kids are going to have to deal with the consequences of what just happened. Right? Like everybody's versions of reality have now encompassing and we're not stopping it. That's the thing. Nobody's stopping.

So with that, You know, as more trauma is moving us away from the dream that Rick Doblin had at MAPS 2023 of net zero trauma by 2030, I think what it forces us psychedelic practitioners to do is actually double down. Double down because we know that the amount of trauma being caused has actually accelerated just in the last few weeks. and the consequences of it we know are going to be devastating, and we have the tools like MDMA, ketamine, psilocybin, ibogaine, to really stop the consequence of this trauma from manifesting in our bodies, in the environments, our children's bodies.

Psychedelic therapy, PTSD, and group healing 13:00

I think as pediatricians, We are also dealing with multiple assaults on various fronts. You know, vaccines being taken away means that more children will die. The Epstein files means more that children have been damaged than we were ever aware of. And I think in psychedelic healing, when we deal with people who have depression, and then we notice that, oh, wait a second, has anybody ever asked an ACEs score from this person? And they do their ACE score, which is the adverse childhood event score.

And lo and behold, It's across the board showing you that this child didn't have enough to eat, didn' have one person in their life to care for them. Somebody abused them, they had a parent who was addicted. I mean, all those things that add up to what you're talking about, which is that intergenerational trauma and how our healthcare system is not equipped to handle it. When you talk about the integrative medical model of how we can support a healing nervous system, with, you know, testing, with targeted, precision support of that metabolic system, and that everybody's metabolic systems is different, everybody trauma's different and everybody temperament and lifestyle and all of this is all different.

And how that needs kind of like this multi-modal ability to diagnose, you know, treat and manage. I think this is where we're at with psychedelic medicine, in the way that I've learned in last year of all these conversations we've had. And I'm really excited to kind of support other healers who are working in this field because I thing because we know that these modalities work. and we see them work in our patients every day. We have to give ourselves permission to also use these modalities to heal, you know?

And I think because the opposite of that or what's at stake is that we have a, for example, in this country, a healthcare system and a health care workforce that is being decimated. was traumatic. You know, you talk about nurses being attacked, the pit I think is doing a fantastic job of showing the consequences of this breakdown and we have to support, heal, so we can continue to hold what's coming, right, and what is happening. So with that in mind, I have an outline for our first pilot mind waller retreat.

So, and I'm going to just be talking about how I like to take what's normal. Before we do that, because I think it's important what you just said for our audience as we move on to talk a little bit about why we're doing the retreat and the importance of that retreat. resiliency. And I think when you mentioned the ACEs, and I had a patient who is a veteran and was at the verge of, you know, I mean, has already has a lot of existential kind of crisis because of what's happening in the world. But this just added on to the active PTSD, not post, but active, PTSD.

I understand that this is really, really challenging for you at this time, as it is for so many people, and it's palpable. You can feel it, see it in every which way. At first, you know, a few months ago, we had to search for these things like this. And yet, now it�s everywhere. Really, what it comes down to is continuing to heal yourself because you're building on that resiliency that you have, that trauma that your experience. This is where you mentioned speaking to a bigger audience here in psychedelics.

This is where connection, this is we're really listening to each other, really truly listening and learning about each, other from perspective, from story and using the science of healing to actively heal. No, we don't have to wait. We can actively heel as we do this. because this is a long path ahead of us. So thank you. Thank you for that question. I really love that we are walking this path together and also inviting others and finding others who trust us with holding the space and creating the conditions for healing because we've been honing that practice.

It's a daily practice and Yeah, there's a lot to offer to each other. And, you know, as you're talking about evidence, this paper that I'm reading, that's really fascinating to me about, when you talk about psychotherapy and MDMA or ketamine, right? And I think when we talk trauma, the most of the research has been done in MDMAs, so sometimes I might be talking MDMa. But the only legal aspect that we can work with right now is ketamine and there are some mechanisms that kind of bridge over as we see because ketamin is also used in PTSD.

But some of the papers that are coming out are asking the question of like, okay, so, you know, we have psychotherapies like prolonged exposure and CBT therapy that know work in PTSD. How do you frame MDMA with that? Is it about putting in another element into a process that's all about the psychotherapy and has that structured ability of the psycho therapy and the MDMA and you kind of sprinkle that on? Or is it that the mdma itself adds a different element to how the psychopathic process works?

And therefore, we can't just put that layer onto the process. We kind of have to see, OK, what elements of it serve the self-healing mechanism? Because MDMA activates the body's own internal healing mechanism. So right now, when we talk about psychedelics, were almost talking about at the same level as people are talking cancer therapy, which is immunotherapy. Something about activating the bodies own systemic mechanisms to create healing. In the same way, psychedelics are also doing that. And so in the psychotherapy, you become more free to follow whatever the MDMA invokes, whatever's coming out of the patient.

So you trust that, and we've seen that in ketamine therapy, is that if we just kind of don't try to force on like a rigid structure, where the patient's material takes them becomes their journey, and it kind of unfolds in a way that the psyche is ready for. So in some ways, it's trusting that means that that person is read for that material at that time, because otherwise it wouldn't come at the time. And our job becomes about maybe making that safe enough to look at. and accompanying and kind of supporting that unfolding that needs to happen.

And in my mind, what then brought up was when you do this medicine in a group, right? Because that's one of the formats that is coming up really strongly as a signal in the data as well, that one-on-one therapy is great, you know, it's high intensity, needs two practitioners, sometimes even three. But when you do a group model, there's actually an added layer, like the sum of the parts become greater than the whole, what becomes available is more. And what we see from that, I think, is that with the psychedelic experience in a crew, that individual identity, starts to just shift a little bit into a collective identity.

So you kind of see an identity shift happening, even just in the group, right? And when we do group process over weeks, yes, that happens, the individual identity starts become part of a group. In MDMA and psilocybin and especially, and ketamine too, That happens within the one session. And what I think that brings is that then you're part of the collective intelligence. You're kind of tapping into the wisdom of all four people, let's say. Four people are in a healing container. And that's very powerful, especially when you have the ability to invoke each individual person's ancestry, their own healing powers, their own capabilities and knowledge and wisdom, right?

And especially when you have other things between them happening. Let's say you a group of people who are healers, but also mothers. Or you you group people are who healer and mothers and, oh, they all have children who about to leave the nest. You know, their kind of stepping into their next stage of their life. So that kind of also is something to think about when you're designing a healing container is like, what is coming up? What are some of the layers that are showing up and just paying attention to that, just like an arising and putting language to, that can kind So I also want to bring up this idea that with the recent kind of publications on this where group therapy and individual therapy was provided to Jews and Arab Israeli citizens.

This is published after 2023 in October, I think is how ketamine and how treatments like this can really help the community at large,

Consciousness, mystical experience, and embodiment 22:00

even enemies sitting side by side and sitting with each other's story and letting down kind of that default system of protection or barriers and really speak to their true essence of their human condition, which is where psychedelics really enhance, like you said, that brings up that element of what's good, the immunotherapy that's treating that human spirit without all of the cancer malignancy that is in the body. Right, separation. Yeah, exactly. Really look at that. Exactly. That's so beautiful, because I love that when you talk about people who have thousands of years of a story, of lived reality, ancestry, heritage, land being taken away, things happening that were real, that have become part of identity.

But how powerful is the psychedelic experience then for being able to get us past that? barrier, right? That would take us like a hundred years to like start to work through in a peaceful way. But here's a way to kind of springboard into, oh, actually on this one level, we're the same. Like you and I have experienced this in the ER, let's say, and this is a very famous ER episode from back in, you know, when the early seasons of ER. Right? You are, right? It's like, I don't know if you watched it.

George Clooney. Yes, exactly. Anthony Edwards, George Cluney. You see these situations where in Chicago, it's the South Side, there's a policeman that just came in and he's been shot. Oh, and the person who shot him, who's gangbanger, also comes in. And the whole episode is about you know, this ethical question that some of the characters start to have, like, they start judge one and support the other, and there's like a really real clear understanding is like it doesn't matter. When you're dying, when your body is, you now, injured and in distress, basically when you are injured, I think, your animal body's injured.

We forget those things, we leave those to the side because then it becomes about what's the most correct action. What's the most judicious thing to do? When you have limited resources, how do you parse them out between the deserving and the not? And those are some of the biggest questions that, you know, people who are medicine's on frontier, like all these, red cross, everybody who's going to all of these hotspots right now. And in some ways, resource constraint is something that Americans are not used to thinking about.

But we're already seeing like Cuba just went into a situation where there's going to be zero electricity. There's no transportation, you know, just this weekend. So like we have actual literal cities having to then imagine the resource constraints, right, of not being able to provide just the basic clean water, things like that. It's like, yeah, I'll leave it at that, Yeah, there's so much that weighs on this practice of connection, this weighs in on the practice, of really having each other, witnessing each and working at that deep conscious level.

Where can it take us? And I'm hopeful. I am hopeful in the long picture of things. There's hope always and even despair. It's when we lose that connection. When we isolate, when really run away, avoid. You know, that trauma response, which is such a natural response to have, but when you're really knowing that this is trauma happening right now, knowing my trauma will be to run away, what can I change now? What's the pathway that I can create now before I have to? you know, result from that usual pathway that I would take.

And just that thought, right, just the thought that, I want to open up a new possibility, signals to your own brain, and the new neuronal pathway does get opened up, BDNF does gets excreted because there's uncertainty, there is a question. You know, just even on that level, and we are, even in like, as we say in ketamine, you know? One of the most common things people say is like oh, what did you notice? It's like I have these triggers and usually what I notice after I've had my ketamine therapy or I'm feeling, I had a few sessions, is that I get a little space between my trigger and response.

Right? Just to think for a second, okay, do I a different thought I can have right now? I can see what's happening, I know why it's happened. And that's that crossing between the mind and a knowing and the way of knowing that is called embodiment. Because I'm safe, sitting in my office, just working, and yet I am having a trauma response because I saw something on my phone or somebody mentioned something. and I can feel my heart racing and my palms getting sweaty. And what I think we're doing with these psychedelics is just slowing down that trauma response just enough to allow that alternate pathway to build up enough time so that when that starts to happen, you have this alternate path with this other thought.

I feel like that's another piece. The other thing that I will say in response is I We have a fallacy in the way we think about the future, which is that we that it's all linear, right? The things get destroyed, oh, we're going to have to rebuild, and it is all going be just like one foot in front of the other. But actually, reality is not linear. It's a spiral. Right? And one of most interesting things about mathematics of like the Fibonacci spiral, is you could do the same habit like for six days in a row and almost feel like you didn't see any change.

But on the seventh day, something will happen and that shift will happened, right? And we see that with ketamine therapy too, it's like you do it, you have a little pump, and then you get to a certain level and we know that in our nervous system, there's something such as an action potential. We know the human body works in that kind of threshold ways. And so that's the other piece that I'll tell people is like sometimes when we're working on something, I just feel like nothing is moving. Just putting one foot in front of the other, in-front of other.

And then all of a sudden, you know, especially people who, I see people like my son, he plays drums. So he'll notice this. He's like, ''I'm just practicing, and I'm doing this.'' And all the sudden it clicks and it works. I like that's it. You know? So what did you learn from that? Oh, i just got to practice. Okay, okay. Just trust, right? And just trust. That difficulty is not a problem. Difficulty is actually pointing you in the direction of what you need to work on. And I love that, you know, about kids is you can really talk to them about what's it like to just try something and not be against yourself, right?

Adults sometimes we're so against ourselves. Can you say that again? Yeah, what it's like try to something? And not being against your self. But instead be for yourself. Right? Because adults will be like, oh, I tried, but it didn't work. And that's the core of depression when we say to ourselves over and over again, it becomes kind of like an identity. You don't even know you're doing it. So amazing to talk to you because there's so many layers. You're so vivid in your language and yet precise and also very, very like I said, layered of all kinds of metaphors and insights.

I think it's just, and you get it, you know, there is this part of what you just spoke about, which was, that threshold. or whatever number, whatever you call it. I call that kind of liminal. And I know you like liminol. Yeah. Liminal is where we get into this state of transition and where things start to change. Maybe the human conditions story is 500,000 years old, and we're just in some part of that. Because we're just that big and small at the same time. That's so beautiful. Absolutely. And I love how we can see that story from that scale as well.

and that brings the humility of like, yeah, I don't know everything and I have all the answers and know that I've tried this and tried that and it hasn't worked. But it's a matter of what we see our patients work towards, which is like trusting. trusting themselves, trusting reality, and trusting that they have what they need. That they can gather what, they call to what needs to happen. So I love this work for, you know, creating those containers where we can step into a different way of being.

Because I feel like our everyday mind, our default mind is a constant state of suspicion. A constant, state-of-defense, right? Who say what? Only because I think it becomes that way. It becomes and it doesn't have to be. And we have only to think about why is that? What happens in that switch? In adolescence, when it's like, I can't do it. I don't want to. No one knows me. Before that, they were like oh yeah, that's cool. That's neat. The child just switches. What is that? I mean you know you talk about on the near biological level there's like a period of openness and creativity and like what do you call it critical periods of learning right and then there is the pruning right that happens in that late adolescent and early adulthood so be careful what you prune down to right.

And would you need to re-prune again? What did you cut off that shouldn't have been cut-off? And that it's an unconscious, sometimes an un-conscious process and not a conscious process. So pruning correlates to trauma or not? That's an interesting situation, because it's like what is being pruned, what's not being reinforced, is prune away. So I think if somebody grew up with a lot of trauma in their life, sometimes in the younger life what you see in a young psyche is it kind of splits off, dissociates, right?

And kind just minimizes that trauma, in some way just to be able to have a sense of self that's healthy. And then when they grow up, and the pruning occurs, there's a question now, okay, which one do I prune off? Am I this good person or am I the person that the trauma happened to? And if they don't have language or a place, and that's why sometimes when people go to college and they suddenly have a chance to kind of explore themselves, that is when sometimes a collapse can happen. Because all of a sudden, I don´t know who I am.

And I do not have anything to hold on to, psychically. Especially because in those two parts, you can't talk to each other. Like, for example, if there's so much shame and guilt and trauma between those two parts they can't talk, they don't have a conversation. They come out in ways where it's like firefighter responses, like maybe some outward ways or some inward damaging ways, right? So is this what the world is experiencing right now? Yeah. Dissociation? Yes.

Dissociation, resilience, and carrying trauma 33:00

That's exactly it. Is it the switch between because we were like this and then we're like, this, and something is being pruned away because of our conditions and the World? And what brings us back to ourselves? What will bring back this planet to its sense of selves? You know, we only respond to real consequences. And I think the real consequence is becoming more and more real, right? So we know that what we're... Do you mean we are only responding to fear? Oh, fear. I mean, survival. You think about it, every psychedelic journey, that is good for you is gonna start with a really difficult aspect where you will either feel humbled, you know, because you've done ayahuasca and you're puking and going to the bathroom at the same time, and then you just feel like an earthworm at that point because that's what you are on the scale that the medicine takes you to.

Or you're going to be shown suffering, immense suffering like eons of humanity suffering and be showing that actually this is what humanity has always been about. That's where the yin and yang of all of it exists. It's just like suffering. And transcendence kind of have to coexist. So if we're intelligent enough to know this as beings, we are intelligent to enough know Right now, the trauma is happening. What's real, what's not real? You know, who is who? Who is the victim and who's the perpetrator?

We know this right now. And do we respond in this way? He just brought up this huge piece of what dissociation is about. Greater minds than mine, Harvey Schwartz, one of them. have talked about dissociative identity disorder, trauma, and this victim-perpetrator and accomplice kind of triangle, right? And how each of us at any time can be in any of those three perspectives, we can the victim as well as the perpetrator, you know? and how sometimes part of it is the theater of relational healing can sometimes evoke that we all have those aspects within us.

which is where psychedelic healing gets really interesting, you know, is, for example, like these stories, so there's this story of, I think you're right, on to something with the dissociation because of how much trauma everybody's experiencing right now. More patients with dissociations are approaching psychedelics therapy, and I do believe there is a way to balance and maybe even learn from the patients who live in harmony and dissociation, you know, have been able to harmonize the dissociative parts.

That has a lot to teach the rest of us. I think I'll leave it at that. Yeah. Well, I'm particularly intrigued by what's happening in that psychedelic experience that you're describing as a healing benefit. Is it a question of consciousness because it's an altered state of Consciousness that you get to? Is It a state altered consciousness? Should we person to person human to be human thinking about consciousness versus the material trauma? I think it is both. You know, I, think its like you can't separate the two.

How does connecting with the greater consciousness, for example, heal our trauma. I Think that's the question you're asking. is how does, you know, that connection, and I think greater minds than mine have written about it. And I we're seeing it, right? I first of all, is there evidence of it? There is evidence, especially the Johns Hopkins trials from Roland Griffiths were the first to demonstrate that. You know, those who found the greatest benefit to their treatment-resistant depression from one dose of psilocybin were the ones that described it as being a mystical experience or one of the top five, you know greatest, more significant experiences of their life.

and so those are like, you know, when a child is born, right, or you get married, like those, are some big experiences in our life where you graduated, so these experiences that heal us are at the level of these peak experiences and that peak experience have something for us, something that we can gain from and I think The way we live, the people who are chasing peak experiences, whether physical or emotional or intellectual, are always growing, always evolving, more resilient in the way that you've said.

So there's something about mystical and peak experience that does something for us in organizing ourselves. And what are the coping mechanisms during that resiliency, in addition to that sense of compassion that can be shared or empathy or connection or that connection of unity and external and internal unity, and in that mystical process of psychedelics that you can heal, but you could actively heal it. You have to wake. We can talk about healing right now as a planet. Go to your neighbor, go to you friend, to somebody you don't know and have a talk and connect whatever consciousness level we can connect at.

That's it. That I think the part that we talk about in integration is like bring that cosmic, you know, the thing that's kind of ethereal to the material, right? How do you capture the things that are happening kind within you and inside you, and make it come outwards? Well, we know that the mind is embodied. You know, the changes of the mind will eventually show up in the body. You can't help it. It's like, oh, you healed your trauma from sexual abuse, and now you walk differently in your body because you're more comfortable, maybe.

And that makes a difference to how your day goes, your energy flows, how you take care of yourself. how you can then bound, you know, kind of protect yourself also against further trauma. Because trauma is another one of those things that works on the same Fibonacci spiral, which is that, the more accumulations and you hit an end, right? Like, so the football players, NHL, why did it take the NFL? Why did you take them so long to become stricter about imaging all the CTE? right? What's the word for it?

Chronic, you know, brain fibrosis and kind of inflammatory, basically an inflammatory condition of the brain that is a chronic inflammation that affects the connectivity and creates conditions for Parkinson's and dementia and early death in some of these athletes, right. Pruning, extensive spruning. Right. Too much pruning Yeah. Thank you. This is such an engaging, I mean, healing conversation because here I was sitting before this podcast thinking about what can I do to distract myself right now from the news?

I can do my taxes. I could sit here and go through my account, the bills. And I would so distraught inside.I could feel it in my body. Because I've been carrying this and feeling this from patients and myself and families and what we're hearing on the You said something. Yeah, you said, something carrying, right? Carrying. So that's the thing that we are becoming aware of is that, we're all carrying something, carrying. And what do you want to be carrying? Do you wanna be caring the news? You wanna to carrying the way you're feeling?

And when we get to carry it, what can we do with it? So I'm gonna ask the audience. What are you carrying then? So I would say that I think one of the ways in which we can get around to that question of what are you carrying is let me help you carry it. Let me carry with you. that alignment, connection, alignment. Let me make space for you to describe what you're carrying. One of the things that I love is art making. And I was just seeing that, you know, the great artist Monet, when he became so old that he couldn't paint, they would just give him paper and scissors.

and he would cut these beautiful large shapes and then he'd just put them up on the walls. Like creativity, right? Like as simple as just scissors and colored paper, it's not complicated, you know? But it is about describing your experience in all these different ways. So that we can see each other. Yeah. Some of the things that I was going to bring to our first retreat is like... Retreat? Mindwala is starting a retreat. I hope the audience knows that the 2 Curious MD is a collaboration of MindWala.

LLC, Simi and I's last year, I think it was June, right? June 2025, we signed an agreement on Mindwala and brought in Pala Medicine with Shah Minds. And it is about the mind and the wala, the people, you know, mindwale means mind people. I'm a person of mind, Mind Wala. And I know that this is something that has deep meaning for you, and I think that is also, you know, kind of bringing up some of the threads that we have in our retreat. But, I, think a retreat can be built in all sorts of different ways.

There's no one size fits all, but I there are elements that have both learned from all the different retreats and the training that's we've done, where there's some best practices, right? of how to hold a retreat. There's set and setting, there's altar building, There is bringing in creative materials, even bringing the idea of, what do you call it,

MindWala retreat vision and invoking intentions 43:00

like bringing fire and earth and wind and water and the different elements. And I really want to focus in on this idea about embodiment and how our whole conversation has kind of led to Okay, you know, there's changes, things, this transformation, how do you make it real? How do make material, right? Like you just said. There's this great book by Jack Cornfield where he talks about after the ceremony, the laundry. Right? It's very humbling. It is like after the ceremony, the laundry. So what's your laundry, right?

Like, what are you trying to wash? You've done this beautiful work, this ceremony and now comes this. Here's the laundry. Here is the real part. And that's as important, if not more important. I love that, you know, part of what I've learned and what we've learnt from a lot of all the people that we have been learning from, all of these mentors is just that you have to walk the walk. You have do it for your own healing so that can bring that to others. On this healer's path is where I think things kind of become more powerful.

Like what comes towards you is what's meant for you, right? Like you think back to the challenges you've had in this last couple of years, you know, people lost like some of the trauma that has happened to your clinic, Right? Let's bring that up. And how you held it. You held that. Yeah, I can still cry. yeah, yeah. and you got to let that go, not go but you gotta honor it And you've got to acknowledge it. And I think there were beautiful lessons at the time that we talked about that I really think, you know, bears repeating.

Yeah. Some of the greatest art and some of greatest work and of some greatest poetry and greatest literature plays really speak to this beauty within despair and the healing that happens right there. drop between beauty and this. Oh my gosh. There's a little drop. And there's an opportunity and seeking that opportunity, and seeing that. So Mindwalla is our attempt at building connection with ourselves, with our people, people who are curious, of course, because you've got to be curious. I hope this becomes more of a movement and there are so many more people doing this as well.

Connecting with those groups. Absolutely. I think you and I bring this lens of narrative medicine. We've done narrative-medicine workshops, we've the body maps of emotion, We read poetry, done writing, made art, and all those pieces have really informed how a retreat of this kind, for example, really needs a little bit of structure, right? Like that ability to flow between structure and openness. It's like we're building something together. But, you know, I was just talking about how, like, people like Joe, for example, Joe Tafur, medicine man on both the Western as well as the Indigenous lineages is bringing together both sides, and doing such great work.

So I'm just really excited to talk to all these different people. And then also, i think for healers, the question is, well, what's your work? Right? Yeah. And that level of like, okay, in five, 10, 15 years, where do you want to say you, you know, were coming from or where were you going? And how do evaluate that? I think that's really powerful. Actually, the notes I wrote to myself about this have to do with how you say, speak into your intentions. Like, I say that. You say the word into quite a bit.

Yeah, oh, like can you speak to or speak in to? And at first, I was just like a little taken back about that because I'm like, Oh, that's that. Because, you know, when we talk about things, it's like in a paragraph in formalized way. But when you say into it, like Oh no, its activists right here. Right. Yeah. And that is a really nice way because when I thought about this, I was like, okay, when you bring together this individual to collective consciousness in a group, you've got that identity shift.

Now all four people are kind of connected, all these different layers. And I even thinking of this way of weaving that we have, of bringing together safety, protection, alliance, and then that purpose leading to speaking your intention, right? But I think this is kind the word is invocation invoke right just like you say in right into invoke meaning like wake it up bring it out of something like the power to bring into being and so i think it's intuitive spell casting i really think putting your intentions strongly into words, and we've heard our patients say this over and over again, right?

It's how deeply you've thought about your intention, how strong it is, or how badly you want it. I remember Richard Woods saying that so crystal clear, he was like, no, you gotta really want, it can't just be a casual intention. And I think he's right about it because it has to do with creativity and how that's unlocked. That's why Bad Bunny is so popular right now. Absolutely. These kids are onto something. All these kids, like, follow your passion. Follow your passions and trust and be yourself, right?

Like, he is so himself. It's like the biggest... So himself and so amazing. Like draws in so many people. He's drawn in to so much curiosity. The most well-loved character on this planet beyond, who's worried about being shot, though. Yeah, and that's the sad part. But showing us, right? So I think these young people, this cohort of kids that, you know, are growing up right now, all really learning on this other level that they're powerful and magical. And I Think part of it has to do with the fact that we are living in this liminal space right Now, where that shift is happening.

Like time is going by in a different way. there are more possibilities. There's an acceleration. It's the year of the fire horse. there's a moment of shift, you know? And so when you speak powerfully into a powerful moment, those two things can only multiply and amplify, right? So I really am kind of... I just got an idea of The Logo. I've just gotten an Idea of THE Logos. The background has got to be a firehorse. And this, the colors all have to, like your hair, a little bit with more red. I like it, I liked it.

And it's got to this flow, and that's going to be our logo, because it is the year of Invoking. This year. Every year, Mindwalla will change its logo because based on what that calling will be for that year or that period of time. So, Invoke is year the fire horse. MindWalla is here to stay. 50 episodes and going. Thank you so much. This has been really fun. 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.

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.