The Healing Capital of the U.S.

IN 1900, WILLIAM JAMES said that there’s another consciousness that exists in this world around us. I see it every day when I take my dog for a walk. My dog smells a world I don’t smell and hears the world I don’t hear. Bats do, birds do, butterflies do, octopi do, whales do. There’s this whole narrow spectrum we live in with our minds controlling ourselves. It’s very useful when it comes to making a living and building communities and making scientific discoveries. But there comes a time when you think, wait, is this all there is?

My first LSD journey was very much like returning to childhood. Sounds became colors, trees could move, and ravens could talk. It was filled with wonder. But there’s also this wondering: What’s my life about? How do I connect better to other humans? How do I dissolve barriers between me and other people and the world around us?

Psychedelics have been used in ceremony by indigenous communities for millennia, as a way of connecting people both to each other and to the Great Spirit, God, the Creator, whatever. Ceremonies go deep into who we are. They help us through birth, help us through difficult times, help us get married and buried and baptized. We’re initiated in ceremonies. My movie Cast Away was about a guy who was completely connected in his life, then disconnected — it’s almost a metaphor for a psychedelic journey.

These journeys take spirituality out of the control of organized religion. Not that you can’t also feel it in faith traditions, but it’s a personal connection to the divine without mediation by priests, ministers, or whoever. Quanah Parker of the Native American Church said, You white people in your churches get together and talk about Jesus. We gather in our tepees and talk to Jesus. He talks to us. It’s the difference between reading a recipe for green chile and the tasting green chile.

The Enchanted State was the recent psychedelic conference here in Santa Fe. I would say the vast majority of the speakers were from New Mexico. There’s something going on here with people coming from all different backgrounds: from Asian medicine, from Indigenous practices, from the Tibetan Book of the Dead and ancient Indigenous cosmologies and customs and shamanism all the way to physics. A lot of the people have come in the last three to five years, all independently drawn here, I think, by some energy. People who’ve come to Santa Fe or New Mexico have been more comfortable living with mysteries, or have been seeking mysteries, or have become increasingly dissatisfied with the certainties of most of ordinary life.

Psychedelics aren’t for everyone, and therapeutically, they need to be done very carefully. And these feelings, these journeys, this awareness, it’s not just limited to psychedelics. Some people get them in extreme sports when they get in the zone. Some people get them in near-death experiences. People get them in spontaneous mystical experiences. Some people get them in medical crises. The veil is there, and the ability to see a larger consciousness permeates throughout every culture. The phenomenology of it is undeniable.

At the same time, we really need to look at what the negatives of psychedelics might be and adjust whatever we’re doing to account for them, to minimize harm. But the potential for good — through the melding of scientific and medical research with the personal experiences and spiritual searching — has been amazing, with so many talking about being cured of addictions, or PTSD, or depression or anxieties, and experiencing something larger than themselves.

When you take psychedelics, one of the things that keeps coming across is, I’m just a drop of water in the ocean, and we all — every one of us — is the same drop and the same consciousness. We’re all sacred. Once you see that, and once you think that every human being has a piece of creation in them, it’s very hard to live by that idea of us and them. It’s very hard to dehumanize other people because you see the humanity in everyone.

So, when you have these experiences, you come out hungry to develop a practice you can apply in daily life. It’s not about the psychedelics, it’s about what you learn. Interestingly, these explorations have brought me back to the beautiful and deep and mystical side of Christianity. Others find it in Hinduism, Buddhism, Sufism, Judaism — the strands or paths or ancient traditions that help incorporate these kinds of visions into living a better life. Because if you don’t live a more compassionate, open, creative, loving life, what’s the point? — Bill Broyles

ANDREW WEIL

M.D., INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE

The Enchanted State, the recent psychedelics conference in Santa Fe, sold out. Are you surprised at the new interest in psychedelics?

What I’m surprised at is that it’s taken this long.

You know, 60 years ago, there was very impressive research documenting the therapeutic potential of psychedelics. And that got completely shut down. And we are only now beginning to see some movement in this area. Obviously, some of that has to do with the number of people who have had personal experiences with psychedelics.

Even before COVID, when I was traveling a lot and lecturing, anywhere I was in the country, whether I was talking about nutrition, integrative medicine, or healthy aging, I would get questions about psychedelics. Where can we get them? How do we use them? There was tremendous interest in this, and it has penetrated mainstream culture to a remarkable degree.

Yet in the Controlled Substances Act, these drugs are in Schedule I, in the same class as heroin.

Schedule I is like the roach motel — substances check in but they never leave. Schedule I is defined as substances that have high potential for abuse and no therapeutic potential.

I mean, how absurd. First of all, the therapeutic potential of these things is awesome.

And in terms of the abuse potential — first of all, let me define terms. I think these are among the least toxic agents known to medicine. You can’t kill anyone with LSD, there is no lethal dose you can calculate. Most of the drugs that are used in medicine have therapeutic indices of only five or ten times greater than the therapeutic dose, which produces adverse symptoms and sometimes death.

One of the most important lessons we’ve learned from studying these medicines is that the experiences that come from them are products of the drug, set, and setting.

Drug includes the dose, the nature of the substance, how it’s administered.

Set is the expectations of the person taking it, both conscious and unconscious.

Setting is the environment in which the substance is taken, both physically and psychologically.

The combined effects of set and setting can completely reverse the pharmacological effects of the drug. You can give amphetamines to people under conditions that make them fall asleep. You can give sedative drugs under conditions that cause them to become alert and stimulated.

So you cannot underestimate that. And I think that Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) were some of the first people to really point out the importance of set and setting in psychedelic experiences.

But the good news about that is that you can control the potential for psychological harm by attending to those variables. So I think that concerns about abuse potential of these drugs are very overblown and easily managed, and there is no rationale for having these in Schedule I. We should work to get them out of there because that is a major obstacle to having these become more widely available for therapeutic use.

When did you first experiment with psychedelics?

I first took mescaline in 1961. And since then, I have had many experiences with all sorts of psychedelics. Some horrible, some wonderful. I have tried many different things. I’ve been on Sasha Shulgin’s short list for trying new molecules he’s made, and some of them worked and some of them didn’t.

The first lesson I’ve learned from those experiences is universal consciousness.

What came as a great surprise to me, given my scientific background, was the awareness that everything is conscious, that consciousness extends beyond the human brain, beyond any physical body. And I have come to have a sense of that in almost every psychedelic experience I’ve had.

I was in a beautiful place in Baja California, and I was aware of energy streaming through my body, which I could see. It was corpuscular, it was flowing, and it was self-aware. And it went from me into the rock that I was lying on, into the barrel cacti that were growing over the rocks, into everything. And I had this very strong sense that what I was perceiving was the basic energy of the universe, and it was conscious.

My personal belief as a result of these experiences is that consciousness is primary, and it organizes matter into more and more complex forms in order to know itself better. That way of thinking is an anathema to materialistic scientists, especially to neuroscientists, who teach that consciousness is the product of chemical reactions and electrical activity in the brain, and therefore ceases when the brain dies.

This view is called panpsychism, meaning that consciousness pervades everything. In the past few years, it has become quite respectable. Even in academic circles there are books written about it, there are academic conferences on it. It is still a minority position and still really annoys the materialist scientists. But it is gaining popularity.

I think some of that must be that more people have had that experience that I’ve had, which I don’t think I would ever have had if I had not used psychedelics. So that’s the first major lesson that has informed my life, my thinking about medicine and health and healing.

The next lesson I came to see very powerfully: that external reality can be changed by changing internal reality. That is, by making changes in your consciousness, things behave differently toward you.

That has enormous implications for medicine. I think the great deficiency in conventional medicine, which comes from the scientific materialist paradigm, is the belief that the only thing that’s real is that which can be seen, touched, and measured. That if you observe a change in a physical system, the cause has to be physical. The idea that there can be non-physical causation of physical events is not allowed for in that scientific model.

One of the most interesting courses I ever took was a course in medical hypnosis at Columbia University for physicians. As a result of that, I’ve come to work closely with clinical hypnotists and refer patients to them, and I’ve seen just astonishing results from that.

But as I said, I think this is one of the great deficiencies in conventional medicine. Although there have been probably three or four decades now of very solid research on mind-body interactions, and there are many therapies based on the assumption that the mind can affect the body. Those therapies are very marginalized in conventional medicine, even though they’re very cost-effective and time-effective for both patients and practitioners.

I’ve also experienced mind-body healing. You’ll have to forgive me if you’ve heard this before — it’s been retold many times. Some years ago, 60 Minutes did a profile on me, not very flattering. They attempted to ridicule alternative medicine by telling this story about how I lost a cat allergy by taking LSD.

I grew up being very allergic to cats. If a cat came near me, my eyes would itch and water. If a cat rubbed against me, I’d get hives. So I just avoided cats because I was allergic to them.

And one day, I think I was 28, I took LSD in a beautiful outdoor setting with some friends. It was a wonderful day, I just felt terrific, and in the midst of this, a cat jumped into my lap. And I had an immediate reaction of defending myself.

And then I thought, Oh, this is silly. And I relaxed and started petting the cat. I had no allergic reaction, and I’ve never had one since.

The instantaneous disappearance of a lifelong allergy — that’s remarkable, and it made me very happy. So I thought, what else might I be able to change? Around the same time, I’d also been told I had very fair skin and could never get tan. My experience of being in the sun at the beach was that I turned bright red, sheets of skin would peel off, and I’d be white again — nothing ever changed.

So also around this time when I was 28, I think this was again with LSD, on a wonderful spring day, I was lying naked in a field in the middle of the day. The sun was overhead, and I thought, This is silly. Why do I think of the sun as my enemy? And so I relaxed.

The next day, I got the best tan I’d ever had, and I have ever since.

That’s a little harder to explain than the cat story, but it also must be mediated by the immune system. In some way, the change in consciousness is transmitted by the nervous system and affects the behavior of melanocytes in the skin.

But these two examples — and I could give you many, many others — having had these experiences, I have to say I’m very disappointed that all of the talk about research on these drugs is focused on mental and emotional disorders.

I think there is tremendous potential for psychedelic use in physical medicine. You know, I would start with things like allergies and immunity, which are easier to measure, before jumping to cancer and other difficult things. But I think there are so many chronic conditions in which the blockage is in the head — that somehow people have accepted a certain way that their body is. And if they can have even a few minutes of seeing that it’s possible to experience their body in a different way, that can open doors to healing.

Now, I’ll tell you one other story, which I think is illustrative of this potential but also a caution about it. Also at this period of my life when I was 28, 29, I was starting to practice Hatha yoga, and there was one posture that I just could not get: the plow pose. You lie on your back and raise your legs and try to touch your toes behind your head.

I got to where my toes were about a foot from the floor, and I had excruciating pain in my neck, and I just could not make progress with that.

One day, I think also on LSD, my body felt so light and elastic, I thought, Gee, I want to try that pose. So I was lying on my back and lowering my feet, and I thought they had a foot to go, and they touched the floor. I couldn’t believe it, so I raised them and lowered them again.

The next day, I tried to do it sober — I thought I was going to break my neck, and I had excruciating pain. But now I knew it was possible. If I had not had that experience, I don’t think I would have persisted at it, but I did, and in a few weeks I was able to do it normally.

I think this is one of the great potentials of these medicines. They can show you possibilities, but they don’t give you information about how to maintain those possibilities. And you may have to find other ways of doing that.

Obviously, this is a subject of great meaning to me. I am absolutely delighted that this is all happening here in New Mexico.

And I hope this is just the beginning. It’s not just LSD — there’s this whole range of substances out there that have tremendous potential. They have very low risks of abuse and toxicity, and it is an urgent priority to make them more available.

I could go on and on about this.

AMY WONG HOPE

FACILITATOR, EDUCATOR, AUTHOR

Tell me about your personal experience with psychedelics.

My personal first experience was around a fertility issue. Regardless of how good my psychotherapist was — and I had a very good psychotherapist — I really could not get to the core answer for myself.

In 2012, I was undergoing a question about how long to pursue issues around infertility. A friend suggested that I experiment to find an answer using psilocybin mushrooms. It was through that experience I found clarity around what my real reasons were for wanting to pursue having a child, and also accepting the possibility that having a child might not happen for me at my age.

That put me very much at peace because despite having a very talented psychotherapist, that psychotherapist couldn’t help me get to that answer. But having an experience with psychedelics helped me get to that answer and really hear what was right for myself.

Do you sense a new interest in psychedelics?

The research that had been done since the Psychedelic Renaissance really accelerated around 2010. There was a change in the FDA leadership, and they reached out to Dr. George Greer and said, My gosh, I noticed that you testified about the use of MDMA for the treatment of someone who was having severe pain in their terminal illness.

Dr. Greer is very well known. He and his wife treated people with MDMA before it became illegal. They learned from Dr. Leo Zeff, a Jungian psychotherapist who taught George Greer and many others in the field about psychedelic-assisted therapy.

Dr. Greer was advocating in front of legislators: Please don’t schedule MDMA as Schedule I. Please keep it in Schedule 2 so you can keep researching it, because here’s what it did for my patient: This patient was suffering from severe pain from a terminal illness, and the only time this person experienced alleviation from this pain was when he used MDMA.

Despite the testimony in front of Congress, they still scheduled it as Schedule I. This is what happened with all the psychedelics. And all of the research stopped for like 40 years. Then some of these original researchers began to educate other scientists who picked up the work in the early 2000s. By 2010, there was a lot more psilocybin research happening, a lot out of Johns Hopkins, NYU, University of Wisconsin, all showing psilocybin was effective at treating depression and substance use.

That is what allowed state legislators to start considering state psilocybin programs. It took another ten years until 2020-2021, when Oregon and Colorado started passing laws for state psilocybin programs.

Today, the mainstream knows about this because they’ve read Michael Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind or watched his Netflix special. What inspires me is that I’ve met so many people who held onto the promise of psychedelics as a healing modality since the ‘70s.

In New Mexico, we have Diane Haug, who carries on the legacy of Stan Grof, a famous LSD researcher from the ‘60s who focused on death and dying stages. She and Grof created holotropic breathwork, a non-psychedelic way to experience those transcendent states. I thought, this is a movement I want to continue to contribute to.

You’re Director of the Psychedelic Studies Certificate Program at Southwestern College in Santa Fe. Tell me about New Mexico’s new psilocybin bill and what you’re doing at the college.

The state’s psilocybin programs and the legislation of psychedelics in supervised contexts are not a perfect model. There’s bureaucracy involved, and for the states to create a state psilocybin program, they’re creating an exception to the Schedule I status. They’re allowed to do that because the FDA has said this is a breakthrough therapy for depression, distress from terminal illness, and PTSD.

That means that the state is going to want it done under supervised context. That means you have to have all sorts of systems in place for accountability of those facilitators and training of those facilitators and making sure those facilitators are disciplined if they don’t act ethically, because people are in extremely vulnerable states when they’re under the influence of psychedelics.

In order to ensure safety, the state has to make sure that there are a lot of rules and regulations in place, as well they should. And yet, in the state of New Mexico, and in the Southwest in general, since the ‘60s, there’s been a ton of use of psychedelics for healing without any of these rules and regulations. The hope is with the regulated model that any harm that’s being done to anybody is reported and that those providers lose their license, and that there would be protections for the people undergoing this very delicate transformation process or healing process.

That’s where The Southwestern College Psychedelic Studies Certificate Program comes in. My thought and belief is that an educated public — meaning those people who want to journey, and those people who are psychotherapists, and those people who are just concerned citizens can learn the critical thinking skills and what variables need to go into making a decision for themselves about psychedelics. This is an ethical framework for really examining power dynamics, consent, and safety with the use of psychedelics.

People who are interested in doing psychedelic work sometimes think that psychedelics are a panacea, and that just taking the psychedelic is going to solve any issue that they have.

Psychedelics are a non-specific amplifier; they allow you to take a microscopic look at what the issue is and what contributes to the issue. Sometimes, because we’re not thinking with our regular default mode network, that allows us a novel perception of issues and challenges where people might be feeling stuck. That’s what depression is — it’s a stuck default mode network.

If we can get people out of feeling stuck, whether it be addiction or PTSD or trauma, there’s astonishing opportunity. A psychedelic journey or a psilocybin journey is a step in looking at whatever challenge they’re dealing with anew.

You have had experiences that fundamentally changed your life.

Absolutely. And you know what? Psychedelics are not what actually changed my life. The experiences I had were catalysts for big realizations, almost like seeing a meteor straight across the sky.

It can happen in regular psychotherapy. But regular psychotherapy or continued coaching work can work after and can very much be a great accompaniment to the psychedelic journey, because if people do the psychedelic journey without integrating it, they can sometimes continue to just seek the realization of the psychedelic journey over and over again, but not actually change their life.

I think that really good psychedelic integration after the journey is about saying, what are the realizations that are so important to you, and how do you want to be mindfully integrating those in the moment-to-moment awareness?

I’m really a visionary clinician. I’m an educator with all of my clients, too. I want them to be empowered about what’s going on in their neuroscience.

ANDREA ROMERO

NEW MEXICO STATE REPRESENTATIVE

How did you get here?

I’m from northern New Mexico. My parents divorced when I was about 10, and my dad always lived in Santa Fe. And my mom moved up north into Española, into the valley, and thus began my sort of Norteño journey into living in La Mesilla, Chimayó… So I’ve had this great opportunity to live in various valleys, and certainly to understand a lot about our opioid epidemic.

A lot of people suffering, sort of quietly. It was happening around us. The Walgreens up the road from my house was one of the largest pill mills in the nation for OxyContin. And it just really opened my eyes to how our community was targeted by opioids and the ravages still exist in a lot of different ways.

So you went off to Stanford, studied political science, and became a lawyer. Now you’re a politician and were a speaker at The Enchanted State, the psychedelic conference in Santa Fe. What does New Mexico have to do with it?

I think when we think about New Mexico as a place of experimentation, of a place where people feel really free to be themselves and to find community in that sort of self-experimentation and, you know, whether it’s through the arts or through their scientific study, whatever expression that you have; New Mexico finds you. When we talk about, you know, reindigenizing New Mexico, respecting the land, respecting each other, having this real integrated life with our landscape and our nature, there’s this connection that many of us feel to nature. And psychedelics bring us back to that reconnection, to Earth, to each other, to one sort of spiritual center. And we’ve learned that Indigenous people were always using psychedelics, plant medicines to help people see themselves and to help people grow away from affliction, away from addiction or shifting their paths. That’s when we think about breaking cycles of trauma.

I think the opportunity starts with breaking the stigma of needing support, mental healthcare, care for oneself. I grew up with: don’t tell anybody you’re sick, don’t tell anybody you’re suffering. We’re strong people. We’re self-assured. So how do you de-stigmatize the fact that people are suffering to the point where they’re self-medicating, to the point where they’re addicted? And this form of care is actually so much more culturally appropriate because it helps you see yourself without a doctor prescribing, being an imperial presence. Like Western medicine: I’m smart, you’re not. Oh, and you need to pay me to give you information about your body.

Which is a hierarchy that we’ve never enjoyed as New Mexicans. It’s like, don’t tell me what to do. So this is a totally different approach to care, a totally different approach to how to heal yourself, how to understand your own journey. I’m still unpacking this new idea, because we’ve also been indoctrinated with all of the madness in the world from reefer madness to the war on drugs, to all these things that people have really suffered with, truly.

And part of the stigma is that psychedelics are a bad drug, Schedule I stuff. Same category as heroin. So, the most extraordinary thing is how successful it is.

The success rate of using psychedelics against addiction is way better than traditional methods. We’re talking about an 80% efficacy rate against opioid addiction with one treatment. This is absolutely transformative for the amount of money that we spend on Medicaid every single year alone.

80%? How statistically reliable is that number?

We can trust, hopefully, the peer-reviewed studies. When you get data like 80%, with a thousand people, you want to be able to verify that too.

So the Medical Psilocybin Act was based on a rigorous group of medical professionals, community, caregivers, preventative care, harm reduction — all of these folks got together to say, what if we set up a medical grade community for psilocybin treatment? What would that look like? They studied it for a year and passed it through the legislature to help galvanize this group. It was unanimously passed through the legislature.

We have a bill now that they crafted on policy that says, if we were going to set up a psilocybin medical psilocybin program, here’s what the protocols would be, but we need to learn from practitioners. We need to set up rules, we need to set up regulations. That’s essentially what the act does. So it’s in a controlled setting that you can use psilocybin, specific to certain forms of care that will qualify. PTSD, depression, and certain traumatic events qualify. And again, it’s prescribed by a medical professional.

I’m still trying to help people understand that this is not some crazy drug. Veterans and folks of all walks of life are seeing results. We’re still going to have to do a lot to help break down those stigmas.

Have you experimented with psychedelics?

I have not.

How is this going to affect our economy here?

New Mexico has always been a great forum for scientific and medical discovery, so it’s going to open up a world to people who can have treatment, but who also feel like they’ve landed in a community that is open to people healing in a way that is okay to talk about.

ELLEN PETRY LEANSE

NEUROSCIENTIST

What is your personal experience with psychedelics?

Like many people early in life, I had some experiments with friends in my college years. However, I did not continue psychedelic experiences. I left college and had a 45-year career in technology working at companies like Apple and Google and became very interested in the neuroscience of creativity and innovation, which is what started me on my path to neuroscience.

As I worked with people in the valley and beyond, I was frequently taken aback by the way that people used psychedelics to see things that they were not seeing in the conventional realms where we all did business.

So, for example, Steve Jobs spoke fairly openly about his experience with LSD and how it helped him understand things that were not available to him in ordinary states.

I saw a correlation between people who were creative on an outlier level, and people who spoke openly about using psychedelics, specifically LSD, but other psychedelics as well. However, I was raising my family; I was a hardworking single mom, and I did not experiment further with psychedelics until I was in my 50s.

In my 50s, I became very curious based on all I was learning about the brain. And I had more than a hunch, but some informed understanding that psychedelic experiences could allow us to see through or beyond the conditioned filters of reality that say: this is who we are and this is what is. And psychedelics could expose us, as in the doors of perception, to a broader realm of what the experience of reality might be.

At that point, I entered into psychedelic experiences intentionally in order to really feel and see what was possible with my brain and my cognition in a non-ordinary state. Those early experiences were so astonishing that I began to study and even explore how can we use psychedelics to invite people to live in better ways through being more creative, more whole as humans, more tuned into spiritual possibilities and realities, to be more in touch with a fuller state of consciousness.

I went in specifically to ask, how might these things help me understand the way the brain is working? Because in ordinary states, I am so limited in what I perceive and experience; maybe I can bring a little bit more of that spiritual/consciousness/expansiveness to my everyday life.

What exactly happens to the brain when you take psychedelics?

When we enter psychedelic states, we are activating and deactivating different ways of receiving and perceiving information than we are in an ordinary state. Now, this is really not within the gates of perception. The eyes aren’t changing, the ears aren’t changing. The taste, smell, skin isn’t changing. It’s really happening in the way that the brain is processing the incoming information.

My way of speaking about it is to say that we are getting beyond or beneath the conditioned filters that we have been told all our lives: this is what a tree looks like, this is what a bird looks like. This is what music feels like or sounds like. We are experiencing the world around us in a very different way.

Dr. Alison Gopnik is a researcher at UC Berkeley, and one of the things that she does is study perception in children who are younger than three. These children, because they do not have learned and conditioned associations, look at the world with a sense of awe and wonder, where not everything makes sense in a conventional way. They’re still learning.

She talks about this with a beautiful metaphor: the lantern or the flashlight way of seeing the world. In the lantern way of seeing the world, which is the way you see before you’re three years old, you’re just looking at a realm of endless possibility with very few literal connections.

You see a butterfly, but you don’t have a literal sense of what a butterfly is. You just see this magnificence. You hear the sound of water, and it’s what is this wondrous sound? But you haven’t figured out what it is yet. You’re still learning.

After that, you move to the flashlight. You see a butterfly, you go, That is a butterfly, it flies, it had a cocoon once, it was a caterpillar. You’re in a literal world.

Now, when we enter psychedelic states, we are going back to the beginner’s mind, the child’s mind, where anything is possible. We can bring experiences from that beginner’s mind back to the real world once the experience is over.

Is there a chemical response that allows this to happen?

If we look at what these substances do, they are actually changing two things, at least two things in the brain. One is they are probably changing or reprioritizing certain neurochemical signals and transmitters and rewards that keep us living our ordinary lives in our ordinary ways. And, because of the way that they can change the chemistry between different sorts of synaptic bridges and passages, they are changing the way information is received and processed.

There’s a reason that Michael Pollan calls it How to Change Your Mind. It is actually changing the way you receive and perceive stimuli from the outside world and the way that you weave or align that with your lived experience and narrative so that you are in a psychedelic experience making sense of the world in a very extraordinary way.

This has transformed your life. Can you give concrete examples?

All day. First of all, it’s given me a lot more faith and trust in something that’s much bigger than myself, which has relieved anxiety and worry about everyday life and longer-term life. It has made me profoundly more curious so that I question what I experience, and thus am able to take in more information to get a fuller and more complete picture.

In my coaching work, it has helped me key into the level at which societal and cultural conditioning shape a limited framework of what people are capable of, so I can talk with people about achieving more in terms of their human potential, their ability to create an impact.

I can cite direct psychedelic experiences for helping me understand that, but I can also go back to things that I learned in the ‘80s from Steve Jobs, who was a very active psychedelic experimenter and practitioner. If you look at Apple, some of the people who shaped that movement, they were all trippers. It was Stewart Brand with The Whole Earth Catalog. Psychedelic experimentation has long been correlated with expansions in human perception, consciousness, and creativity.

I mean, can you think of one thing that you think wouldn’t have happened with Apple without that perception? I don’t think Apple would have happened without that perception, that expansiveness; they experienced it directly through psychedelics, and it showed them there was a whole lot more potential to what reality could be than the one that we’re told reality is. Steve spoke about this again and again; he would talk about how everything that has been invented in the world has been invented by a human, and our ability to see beyond the worlds and regulations of ordinary life is what allows us to change the world and to invent a better world.

So we have problems with re-animating the same old narratives in our brain, right? People are stuck in the narratives of themselves, the narratives of their family, what they learned…

We don’t have to be defined necessarily by biography or circumstance. These are the things that tell our brain, This is who you are. And psychedelics help us see beyond that.

And they connect us to something so much larger than we are taught, at least in Western culture. A lot of Indigenous cultures never lose that connection, but in ours, especially as we go through a very linear sort of spirituality, we lose the context of who we really are as humans, as expressions of consciousness.

Why the sudden interest in psychedelics?

I believe that with all of the things that have happened in recent decades, in the way that we’ve shaped life in the Western world, there has been an aggregation of trauma. All long-surviving human cultures — and by long-surviving, I mean any that survive more than 5,000 years — had ways of acknowledging, processing and dissipating trauma through ceremony; even proactively assuming that trauma was going to come, and this is what you do every year to make sure you’re getting it out of your body.

By doing that, they prevented it from aggregating both in their cultures and in their RNA. And RNA is part of the genetic code; it causes us to inherit trauma from past generations. So any trauma that we don’t dissipate in our lives, we aggregate not only to the culture around us, but if we’re reproducing, we genetically convey to our descendants.

And this treatment allows you to process trauma?

I think ceremony and therapeutic use of these treatments can allow us to process trauma. I’m not going to say that you should just drop 100 mics and go up on a mountaintop; but if you are going into a directed and intentional psychological or therapeutic experience, you can very actively process trauma.

In these psychedelic experiences, things will come to you beyond what you could have figured out for yourself, and often, even when you’re not guided by a therapist, help you face these traumatic issues.

The recent psychedelics conference was here. Why New Mexico?

We have experience with our large Native population. These people have mastered ways of surviving for tens of thousands of years and have had to face challenges far beyond what we face even in these crazy times, right? They have come up with ceremony that helps them feel connected to something larger than themselves, not just a psychedelic ceremony, but all kinds of different rituals, storytelling, and practices. That is embedded in the culture of our state.

And then I would also say that because of the richness of the culture here, many scientists, many alternative life seekers, and many consciousness seekers have come here. And by the way, if I’m not mistaken, we have one of the highest PhD ratios in the entire country, right?

There’s so much intelligence here, cultural and scientific intelligence that I think makes it the perfect place for us to think different. And we do. Think different is a Steve Jobs salute, right?

I believe that my psychedelic experiences have fueled a deeper faith than I would have had without them, that makes me never give up what I believe are true human purposes, and that’s for us to get better and to solve big problems.

Now, this does not mean I am an unrealistic optimist. This does not mean I don’t lose my shit in certain situations where things are reprehensible to me. This does not mean I won’t take a stand when I see injustice. But it makes me believe that we will get it right over time, and I call that faith.

I have a belief that there is more to this thing than meets the eye, and I can completely validate that through the lens of neuroscience. It gives me fuel to lean into the things that I believe are worth being and having as human beings. And I don’t think I would have had that without psychedelic experiences.