Hey, humans. How's it going? Susan Ruth here.
Thanks for listening to another episode
of Hey, Human podcast.
This is episode 444,
and my guest is Austin Mao.
Austin is the cofounder of Ceremonia, a nonprofit
antheogenic
church in Colorado.
I had to say that slowly so I
got it right. As a leader in legal
and safe psilocybin
mushroom and ayahuasca
retreats, Ceremonia uses a synthesis of science and
shamanism
in partnership with plant medicine to guide people
in spiritual, mental,
and physical well-being.
We had a great conversation. Austin's super fascinating,
and I'm excited for you to hear this
one. Check out Hey Human Podcast for links
and to learn more about my guests in
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Thank you for listening. Be well. Be kind.
Be love.
Here we go.
Austin Mao, welcome to Hey Human.
Hey, Susan. Thank you. I'm gonna start asking
where you're from originally and how growing up
shaped you into the path that you're on
now. So I'm originally from Los Angeles or
a suburb from LA. My parents divorced when
I was less than one years old,
and I grew up primarily with my mom.
You know? So I I run retreats, and
I'm sure we're gonna go in go into
that. We run psychedelic retreats. One of the
questions
that we often post people on the first
night,
just as a means of introduction is, like,
what is the early childhood memory that most
defines who you are today, or maybe most
impacted who you are today?
For me, there's a memory of when I
was around eight years old, and my mom
was broken down on the floor sobbing.
And at that age, I had no idea
why she was crying, only that she was
in pain, and
it was my responsibility
to save her from that pain. And so
I sang to her as a kid, trying
to console her. And I think in that
moment,
there was this savior complex that was born
in me, you know, particularly directed towards the
feminine,
like wanting to
help people,
in my life.
But
that was very much in the shadow for
so much of my life. And where I,
you know, where I gave that energy
was from a place of altruism, you know,
from self sacrifice,
sacrificing my energy. Martyrdom
type? Maybe you could, you could say a
little bit of that. But ultimately, you know,
there's this, this term in psychology called parentification.
And it's this idea of, of that the
child now has to take care of the
parents. And, and that's really how I grew
up. My father
didn't have a
high school education.
He was like a poker dealer in a
casino in Los Angeles, you know?
And I used to think that he loved
money more than me. And in fact, the
way that he would express his love to
me is by giving me money as a
kid.
I grew up with
this need to, like, earn my father's love,
while my mom raised me, giving me so
much
blessings and love, and I could do no
wrong, and it was just complete positive reinforcement.
So fast forward
to my adult life, became a multi time
entrepreneur,
really became
good at,
not working,
which meant that I
was making, you know, a high 6 figure
income working four hours a week from anywhere
in the world, culminating in having the largest
Airbnb company in Las Vegas. We're hosting 2,000
guests a month There were portfolio of houses
that I owned. And then I found plant
medicine.
Recently, I was in a speaker training because
I'd give a TED talk,
and we were asked to tell stories of
who we were before, who we are now,
etcetera. What I learned there is that I
couldn't really even use the stories
from before I tried medicine
in a ceremonial context, psychedelics and ceremonial context,
because I had changed so fundamentally
that that it wasn't like I was writing
a new chapter of my life. It was
a it was like a complete sequel to
who I was.
Your question is, you know, how did my
formative years make me who I am? It
all kind of got wrapped up in what
I do now, which is to say
that I, you know, now I am also
devoting my life to
helping people,
but from a place of, I think, greater
mindfulness and skillfulness
than I used to, you know, from a
place of self sacrifice and burning out now
and doing it in a more, I think,
considerate and
and tactful way. When you were doing the
Airbnbs
and had that empire,
which you still may have that empire, but
back then, were you happy?
Or were you feeling like
there was something missing?
You know, it's funny.
There's a spiritual teacher that you may know
of, Ram Dass. Right? Love me, sir Ram
Dass.
Love you, sir Ram Dass. Exactly.
And he has this line that says, you
know, who are you in the privacy of
your own heart? And someone else that kinda
came up with him, Joseph Goldstein,
gives the line, who are you when you're
sitting on your toilet? Right? Like, what are
your most private thoughts during that time? So
from the outside looking in, I was living
a Instagram life. I was humble bragging on
Facebook and Instagram, the photos of cars and
houses and travel and blah blah blah.
But on the inside, I was rudderless.
I did not have direction in my life.
There's this book that we have people read
when they come through Ceremonia, called The Second
Mountain,
and
the author David Brooks distinguishes between happiness and
joy. Happiness is this fleeting, like, pop a
bottle of champagne, win you an award, do
something good.
Great. You're happy for a moment,
but joy is something deep and pervasive.
Right? It's something that
lasts,
much longer than the moment.
And so I would say that I had
many moments of happiness. And in fact, what
I was doing was chasing happiness by going
to exotic destinations
and
whatnot. But I didn't have joy in my
life.
I didn't have purpose.
I didn't have values systems, and I didn't
have relationships
that nourished me. I often think of plant
medicine as bringing us back to a place
of remembering. I myself have not done Ayahuasca.
I've done mushrooms maybe
two or three times. It worked once. The
other two times, everything just got real sparkly.
But I haven't done it in the sort
of context of
purpose
other than
finding
a moment of joy.
But I do believe that
plant medicine, considering the source of it, it's
facilitating
a way back to the truth of who
we are instead of the idea of who
we are. Yeah. Totally. I, you know, I
liken it to the feeling
that that maybe anyone has felt here,
of feeling the most alive you've ever felt.
So think like
falling in love for the first time, or
skiing down a mountain, or
solving that problem that's been or getting the
big paycheck or something like that. The most
alive you've ever felt, combined
with the feeling of being home.
Coming home
with your dog wagging its tail after a
long trip, and that feeling of, like,
ah, here I
am. And that's such a they're, like, polarized.
Right? Like, one is has this extraordinarily exuberant
energy and another has this very relaxed energy.
But imagine both of those combined.
That's the feeling that people often feel
or describe feeling when they come through
this experience.
And it goes to show you, it provides
what we call,
again in psychology,
an index experience. It's like, Oh,
now I know what that feels like. Like,
I know that's possible.
Then you can start aiming your life like
a compass towards that.
Did you experience
plant medicine
first
and have it give you an epiphany
and then move into these spaces? Or did
you think, oh, this is an interesting thing
to do, this sort of ceremonial type scenario?
And then how did those two things
meet? In order did you have to go
through your own healing first or were you
healing along the way? I guess is more
specific?
My consciousness journey, if I were to pinpoint
when it began,
it was about eight years ago when
I heard that my father was diagnosed with
cancer. Mhmm. And I spent the last his
last six months of his life bedside with
him. In that time,
you know, I had been estranged from him.
I would see him maybe once a year,
and we whenever we would talk, maybe once
every month or two months
over
Skype or over FaceTime,
it'd be a quick, hello, how are you
doing, what'd you eat for dinner,
how's life, okay, great. You know, a super
short call. And I imagine that many of
your listeners may have relationships with their parents
that
can be similar, you know. That experience taught
me something because
he learned
what is truly valuable in life, that it's
not the money that he hoarded.
It's not
the the property. It's the
it's the love, the connection,
the experiences
that
we have in life.
So after he passed, you know, I went
through a deep grieving process, and it wasn't
until
four years after that
that I had my first
ceremony experience. In that case, it was with
Ayahuasca.
Now,
when I sat with Ayahuasca,
I had already had over a hundred psychedelic
experiences, many years of Burning Man,
festivals,
camping trips, etc. I went in with a
chip on my shoulder thinking, what could this
possibly teach me that I haven't already seen?
And I'll share with you because I I
just heard you say that you you had
some experiences, and one worked, one didn't. Something
like twelve percent of America uses psychedelics a
year. A lot of people don't realize that.
It's it's a very staggering number.
And for those that have used a psychedelic,
whether that be in college or whether that
be therapeutically, whatever it is,
the
gap between normal waking consciousness and
what you experience in a psychedelic is so
big
that it's already called ineffable,
which means I literally couldn't explain to you
in words in a way that you could
understand it. Right?
The gap between
recreational
or solo use of psychedelics and a guided
or therapeutic or ceremonial container
is
equally as big,
and I had no idea about that.
And so my first ayahuasca experience,
you know, in the first ceremony out of
three,
I
felt embraced by my mother and felt the
warmth of her love to a capacity that
I had never remembered feeling
before. And it felt
like divine.
Then I had a vision
of introducing
my then wife to my father who had
passed years prior.
And I didn't even know I was missing
that in my life.
Because,
wow,
you know, like,
in the grieving process, of course it grieved
the memories that we had, I didn't know
to grieve
the unopened
possibilities
of the future. Right?
So I came out of that ceremony and
I was like, hallelujah, I am healed, I'm
ready to go home, where's my Uber?
But
there were still two more ceremonies.
The next morning, we did a workshop,
and
we were asked to recount an early childhood
memory, very much like you just asked me.
And I could barely pick out anything. It
was a complete haze.
So I went into that ceremony with the
intention of investigating my memories,
and I took a very large dose, in
this case,
and I started reliving my memories in vivid
detail going back and back in time. I
mean, I could remember turning my locker combination
in high school, like flipping pages in the
book and reading passages. Like, you hear about
photographic memory or you see movies of,
a beautiful mind or something like that. Right?
Like, that was me living that experience.
And I went back and back and back
in time until I was a child under
sheets,
and then I felt horny.
I popped up on my yoga mat in
the middle of the jungle. There's 49 other,
you know, entrepreneurs and founders next to me.
And I'm like, what the heck could this
be? And when I went back in, I
realized that I was sexually touched
by my mother's boyfriend
when I was four years old.
And I had no idea. My mind had
completely repressed it. And my mind threw the
baby out with the bathwater
because
it repressed all memory.
So then I started going forward in time
in this vision
with the new knowledge of not only
the sexual trauma, but also
the knowledge that my mind would repress long
term memory,
and everything started making sense. Like I had
sexual confusion as a kid, a bully as
a kid, you know, as a teenager.
Just my relationship with the feminine
and and and sexuality was was so marred,
so so complex.
And I couldn't hold on to relationships because
or even hobbies because I I just would
simply forget
the beautiful memories that I would create within
them.
All the way to the present moment where
I'm lying on this mat in the middle
of the jungle, and I woke out of
it with tears in my eyes,
and I told the facilitator
about this, and she says, Oh my God,
I'm so sorry. And I said, No, no,
no, you don't understand. I feel like I
was cured of Alzheimer's.
So that
ceremony
heralded the beginning of the rest of my
life, what I call the renaissance of my
life. That was about four and a half
years ago.
And since that time,
I've been on
an accelerated
and extraordinary healing path.
Going deeper and deeper into myself. And then
being in service, you know? If you look
at every major spiritual tradition,
they agree on certain things, whether it's Buddhism
or Christianity or Hinduism or Islam,
one of the things they agree on is
that service
is a path to
a spiritual experience,
the experience
of self, of God. And where my healing
path has taken me is to be deeply
in service to the same path of healing
that I took to find myself.
And so my story that I'm sharing with
you now,
you know,
I've shared on stage,
to thousands of people,
I've shared on the TED stage,
but it's not unique.
Because now I facilitated more than 500 individuals,
and I can tell you,
like,
we have a ninety six percent rate of
people saying it's the most life changing experience
of their of their life.
And what I've been witness to and what
I've
what I've had the blessing of of being
able to hold people through
is their version of this too.
Yeah. So my healing journey
started back then. It continues now, and it
also cascades into the healing that I get
to be in support of for so many
people.
Is your mom still with us?
Mhmm. Yeah. She actually came to retreat
last year,
and
through psilocybin,
she was able to kick twenty five years
of depression. She was on antidepressants
for twenty five years,
and and no longer takes them.
When you come to a realization like the
one you had from four years old,
did you feel
like you needed to talk to your mom
about it at all? Or was it, were
you able to process it in, out, and
through
without
going back to that?
First, I'll share my my
what happened for me, and then I'll share
what what often happens for people. You know?
For
me, I
told my mom, she initially met it
with criticism,
and some anger, which I don't fault her
for because
underneath that anger was a lot of guilt.
I'm sure she blamed herself for that, even
though that's not at all her fault.
And I think that also triggered something in
her, because my belief
is that
this runs through our family. It's ancestral,
as is often the case with any kind
of trauma people have.
I went through a process of integrating this,
but where it began, which was really interesting,
a lot of people think like, Oh, you
come to a realization like this,
this has got to mess you up all
sorts of ways. Or
man, how come you're not so pissed off
at that guy?
Who is still alive. It's because as soon
as I realized it, I experienced an extraordinary
amount of gravity. And I was so grateful
because
the mere knowledge of it filled in the
gaps of who I am.
The understanding of who I am.
And so we like to say, all love
begins with self love. And it's really easy
to go
to healers, and they're just like, just love
yourself, bro.
And you're like, but how?
And really,
where love begins,
and again
this is something else that many spiritual traditions
agree with,
is where love begins
is through the experience of the present moment.
Of being here what Ram Dass calls being
here now. And experiencing this now in all
of its
infinite
depth and glory.
And because I was experiencing that moment
now
in the jungle, and experiencing myself in such
capacity and so much more understanding,
I was filled with gratitude at everything that
ever happened in my life to lead me
to that moment
of revelation.
Including all the stumbles, including all the falls,
including all the betrayals, including all the hurt.
Like, all of it led me to who
I was at that moment.
And all of it led me to who
I am right in this moment talking to
you now.
What happens for a lot of people is
they go through a process of integration. Integration,
we say, is like the most important part
of this work because you can have this
extraordinary
helicopter ride to the mountaintop of consciousness,
but if you come back to life and
you're still an asshole, what's it all for?
Right?
And so where integration
happens is
that's where the rubber meets the road. Like,
how do we bring
this insight,
the the felt sense of,
what some many people describe as enlightenment or
deep amounts of peace and love and harmony?
How do we bring that back to life
where we're,
you know, on Zoom calls or working on
a cubicle or, you know, having deadlines
and
whatnot,
or sitting in traffic. Like, how do we
embody that?
And that's a process.
And that's why there's such an extraordinary difference
between doing psychedelic work or doing transformational work,
it doesn't have to be with psychedelics,
attempting to do that by oneself versus having
some level of guidance through the process,
and curriculum and structure.
Because this stuff is hard, you know? We're
not just rewiring
our own neural pathways, we're remapping
generations
of patterning
that we've gotten from our parents and their
parents and their parents' parents, you know? And
I think ceremony
is integral to that because it puts the
sacredness
around it. It gives it a gravitas.
I did a cacao ceremony
a few months back,
and
it came up at the beginning of the
ceremony that it was gonna be about mother
wound.
And I too believe that ancestral trauma,
especially through the lineage of the mother, is
very
much a thing.
And
it was an
incredible
experience. It
all day long. I didn't know how long
it was gonna take. I went in with
zero expectation.
Got there about 03:00, ended up leaving around
midnight.
It was just me and the facilitator.
And
it was so powerful, and I felt so
released from a lot of I I came
to some realizations. I felt very released.
And weirdly,
the next day, my mom called. She and
I have historically,
you know, a tenuous relationship and such. But
she called me the next day, and it
was like she was a totally different person
with me.
And I thought, is it because I'm different?
Or did that work Mhmm. Travel through this?
See, this gives me shivers to travel. And
I know it sounds woo woo and all
of that, but that it traveled through my
DNA.
And because I'm of her and she's of
her mother and all that, did it go
on through the whole
lineage,
which I love to think it did.
So powerful.
Yeah. You know, this
we're still
trying to understand
what's happening here. I was just on, Richard
Branson's island for his first Psychedelic Summit,
and it was gathered scientists,
advocates,
funders, and then ceremonial. We're now one of
the leading institutions in The US.
We represented facilitators.
And so lots of presentations on the science,
the neuroreceptors
that are hit, critical periods of learning,
you know, how it works with addiction, so
on and so forth. And then the advocates
talking about getting access to veterans
and whatnot.
But what is often missed in the conversation,
with
the very left brain approach,
is this mystical spiritual domain
that we have
no idea
what's actually happening.
And part of the reason why it's missed
is because often when you engage in that
kind of conversation, you start
the void starts getting filled with a bunch
of dogma and beliefs. And ultimately,
like what we're,
you know, trying to do here at Ceremonia
is provide you
the framework so that you can discover your
own belief, your own truth, what feels right
for you. So as an example, you know,
one of the
aims that we have
to to get people to feel is the
feeling of self empowerment.
We always tell people before ceremony,
you know, you can ask us questions,
you can you can try to talk to
us, but by and large, our answer is
going to be only you know. So one
time I went to the bathroom, you know,
in our in our retreat center, you have
to go up some stairs to the bathroom.
When I when I open the door and
come out of it,
right in front of me is,
is one of the participants, his name is
Eric.
And Eric looks at me, he's like, Austin,
should I go to the bathroom?
Now this guy,
you know,
got up off his mat,
walked a distance, which probably felt like an
eternity to him,
climbed a little stairs, and is standing in
front of the restroom door. Right?
And so every part of me wanted to
say, well, of course, you made this whole
trip all the way here. Obviously you came
here to use the bathroom.
But instead, I said to him,
Eric, only you know.
And he looked at me, and he's like,
yeah. You're right.
I do know.
Now the next day during our integration circle,
which is a circle where we share our
experience,
he would then share that that was the
most important experience of his life.
Because all his life, people have been telling
him what to do, and he would listen
to it.
But in that moment,
what really hit him is that he has
the inner gnosis
to
intuit
where he's going and what he wants to
be in his life at any given moment.
And there's a saying that I love,
sometimes my intuition leads me wrong, but it's
the only thing that's ever led me right.
You ask the question like, what is,
you know, what
is this really happening? Is, you know, I'd
like to think that
my family member has had some
ancestral message that has come through.
Who knows? But only you know. Well, and
I love the idea that
it matters and it doesn't matter. That's very
Ram Dass. It's
that this is the thing that's so frustrating
about religion to me is that whatever is
good for a particular person,
that's great. If that's working for you, that's
wonderful.
That doesn't mean it has to work for
me. And
and we do walk a path that is
so connected and yet so individualized.
It can be confusing,
obviously. That's why I chuckled so hard when
you said, what the heck's going on?
Nobody knows.
And there's a beauty in that in that
unknowing.
I'm I'm all also often, I'm curious your
thoughts on this,
perplexed
by
those who are
as afraid of their own joy as they
are of their
anger.
What's that saying? It's like the devil that
you know
is
often easier than the Yeah.
What is it? It's, the devil you know
is is better than the one you don't.
In other words, if you're
you live in such comfort of the knowing
even if it's terrible for you.
Exactly.
Exactly. So one of the first things that
we ask when when people come into our
coaching container
is, are you ready to approach this with
a thick with a change mindset or a
fixed mindset? Because if you're here
to make a change in your life,
that means that you have to be ready
to question
the things that you've your patterns. Right? Your
default
that you've done. And we liken it to
scientists often use this metaphor that you're skiing
down a hill and you keep skiing down
the same tracks.
It makes it pretty difficult to
like veer off that track. But imagine fresh
powder for those skiers out there. It's beautiful
because you can carve new tracks.
What happens within the psychedelic experience is that
the mind opens up its pathways that you
can carve new neural pathways.
So that
if your brain would go from point A
to point B to point C to point
D, now maybe you can go from point
A to point D, or D to G,
or G to Z, you know? And so
you can retrain and rewire your brain literally
to remap
how you would experience
joy
or anger.
We had another participant, Christina, who came.
And in the ceremony, in the first ceremony,
she was walking to the bathroom and I
was following her and then she collapsed and
I caught her.
And her whole body was limped kind of
like Gumby, but she was still very cute
and sweet and said, Oh, I'm totally fine,
I'm fine. She was obviously not pretty much
dead weight as I propped her up.
Second ceremony, something very similar, also collapsed.
Now,
Christina originally came
because she had been in and out of
the hospital for digestive issues. There was this
big curiosity of, like, what's going on here?
Then we did a workshop
where and not to not to give it
all give it away to all your listeners,
but we did a workshop called reparenting,
where the workshop is two people holding each
other to gentle music for fifteen minutes,
role playing
being the divine parent and the divine child.
In other words, what would it be like
if you just allowed yourself to be held
by your parents? It often produces a lot
of tears. Like, we're talking about this cognitively,
but in the moment, it's an incredible experience
because how often have we allowed ourselves to
just be held for fifteen minutes straight? Try
this at home with your partner, by the
way.
It's an amazing experience.
After that, she realized you know, I asked
the question, like, when do you feel the
most safe as a kid?
And she realized that when she felt the
most safe was when she was sick. Because
at that moment, that's when her mom would
take care of her.
And so her body learned
to it clicked for her. Her body learned
to get sick in order to feel love
and safety.
So when she would feel unsafe, immediately, let's
get sick. Third ceremony, she was vibrant, dancing,
singing,
and ever since,
those physical elements have largely gone away. To
your point, many people
can have a discomfort
with
certain feelings of joy or peace or love
because they're like, what is this feeling?
What's even deeper than that is our body
keeps the score, our body stores
the experience of what's familiar to us. And
it can store decades of stress.
It could store
generations
of
pain,
trauma, of blame,
of shame, you know? Psychedelics doesn't have to
be the answer, but but you know, in
my opinion,
it is the best answer that we have
right now
for an accelerated path of healing.
When you work
in these spaces
and
hold that kind of energy,
how do you
decompress from it? How do you cleanse yourself
from it? And also,
you mentioned
the savior complex. How do you keep in
a detached way, especially when
such
huge
things are happening all around you? How do
you keep your ego from going, yeah, I
did that. You know? I was with Richard
Branson. I'm cool. How do you detach from
that space?
Well, first I'll say I'm still learning on
both those subject matters, detaching and also the
ego. I'll be the first to admit
that pride has been my biggest
shadow. Coincidentally, it's a little bit of a
tangent. Pride exists to hide shame.
AKA shame being the parts of us that
carry the burdens of I'm not enough or
I'm not good enough. Right? And so I'll
inflate my chest and be like, no, I'm
actually amazing. That's just an aside. I like
being nerdy about psychology. No, that's a very
good point, I think, to make. I'll target
the first, the first part of your question,
like, how do I decompress and how do
I re articulate it? How do I make
sure I'm not taking on too much? And
I learned something from Doctor. Thupten Jinpa, who's
the translator to the Dalai Lama and a
prominent Buddhist monk himself.
And he has something in San Francisco called
the Compassion Institute. Through a combination of speaking
with him and speaking with Doctor. Richard Schwartz,
who created Internal Family Systems,
the fastest growing psychotherapeutic framework now, and the
one most often paired in psychedelic assisted therapy,
this idea of compassion versus empathy.
Empathy
is, if you're crying, Susan,
I
am crying with you. I'm feeling your feelings
as you, with you, and I'm in it
with you. I used to lead every
interaction that way.
And I was good at it, you know?
I was good at feeling other people's feelings.
And
I would then pat myself on the back
and be like, damn, I did a good
job by really feeling your feelings. But then
I would get so drained that I would
barely be able to walk after a retreat.
Like, I was exhausted.
And then I learned from
Doctor. Jinpa and from Doctor. Schwartz
that empathy is a protective part. It's actually
a part that tries to protect me from
feeling myself,
which is very interesting because the more that
I feel you, the less I'm able to
feel myself, which which is the impact that
you're having on me. And whereas empathy is
a protective part that is energy depleted,
energy subtractive,
compassion is an aspect of self with a
capital s. This is under the IFS model,
which is infinitely available.
And so you would look at, you know,
there's a story of the Dalai Lama. He
was at a conference, he was at this
hotel
over the course of three days, right? And
he was the featured speaker. Thousands of people
attend, and they listen to the Dalai Lama
speak. And afterwards,
the Dalai Lama goes to his assistant and
says, please gather all the staff at the
hotel. So 150 staff line up
in front of him.
And one by one, he greets every person
and asks how their day is,
you know, and expresses gratitude to them. This
takes hours.
And every single person had his complete and
full attention.
As if at that moment, they were the
most
that person was the most important person in
the world to him.
Then he gets on a plane and he
goes to the next talk. And so you
might ask yourself, like, how is it possible
that someone of that age has that much
energy?
And it's because
the amount of compassion that he has, the
amount of compassion that doctor Schwartz has is
so
available. It's so expansive
that it's actually energy additive. They can have
less sleep and have more energy than most
people.
I use that as inspiration to discover that
well of compassion inside of me. And now
the way that I hold the container is
if you are deeply crying, I'm
not
crying with you. I am being very present
with you, I'm breathing with you, and I
am pouring my compassion into your experience.
Thich Nhat Hanh, who's a prominent Buddhist monk
I was just gonna say this sounds very
Thich Nhat Hanh. Yeah. He wrote about 118
books, passed away something like two years ago,
and I love his definition of compassion. He
says it's the want for someone else not
to suffer.
You know, I've been in spaces where I've
seen
the deepest amount of pain,
like humanly imaginable, you know, combat veterans or
people that have suffered tremendous abuses,
and they're reliving it in front of me,
you know, just like I relived my experience.
And to be and I'm able now finally,
like, it took me a long time to
develop this skill and I'm still learning this.
But to be able to sit there and
just
give them my presence and my compassion
without,
you know, being in it with them. Does
that make sense? It does. It feels like
the difference between
going into someone's space and holding space for
them. Yeah. Yeah.
You know, a lot of times, like,
if you see your friend crying,
what's the typical thing that most people do?
They're like, Oh, put a hand on your
shoulder,
and, Oh, it's okay. Don't cry. It's gonna
be okay. You know, as facilitators,
part of our training is to ask, why
am I doing that? Why am I putting
my hand on someone's shoulder?
And the real answer
99 times out of 100 is, it's not
for them, it's for me.
Or my ego tries to convince me that
it's for them. Because in that moment, there's
some part of me that is uncomfortable with
them crying that doesn't want them to cry.
But have you ever had a really good
sob after that really good sob? How do
you feel?
Awesome.
Awesome. Exactly.
The reason why you feel that way is
because that sob has been locked up inside
of you for God knows how long.
And now it's finally allowed to release.
And so
if I put a hand on your shoulder
as you're crying
and say, oh, you don't need to cry.
It's gonna be okay. And then you stop
crying. I may have just robbed you of
that experience of being able to release something
that's been trapped for a very long period
of time.
And I did that not for you. I
did it for me. This is why it's
such a problem that boys are told they're
not supposed to cry.
Oh, totally.
Yeah.
I love crying.
I'm a good crier,
but I used to suck at it before
because I was a man.
Yes. Right. I've been to
various energy working
scenarios
where
the facilitator
step back as I
I would call it a primal cry,
you know? And,
boy, it feels like
hundreds of pounds are lifted and hundreds of
years are lifted when you come out of
something like that. It's such a release. Totally.
Yeah. But, I mean, this is my argument
for saying this is why we go
to the movies or read a book or
listen to music because sometimes we don't know
how to get to those spaces,
and
they are our conduit into that release.
And in our brain, we're like, oh, no.
No. I'm just crying about the movie. But
what you what you're actually doing is you're
mirroring, you're feeling
that mirrored
experience,
and
it allows you to
make that release. I'm a huge believer in
being emotional
in those spaces. Because I I think it
does. It does the work. Yes. Yes. And
I also have opinions in that sometimes we
go and seek it out. And we seek
it out out out of a a form
of masochism. Like, we wanna feel the pain.
Absolutely. I mean, there's a lot of confusion
as,
love and and fear slash hate, how those
two things,
what they feel like. And and
especially with parent parent wounds, when you grow
up thinking,
when those two things get so convoluted
as to the meaning
of them and then you seek them out
in other relationships
and
all hell breaks loose. That's certainly
not an uncommon
thing.
Mhmm. Yeah. Tell me about Yeah. What steps
led to creating the facility.
And
I think a lot of people would be
like, well, why aren't you supposed to go
off and be in a jungle to do
this versus going to Colorado, which by the
way is a beautiful state.
Yeah.
Prior to
founding Ceremonia
in 2022,
I was the director of one of the
most well known Ayahuasca retreats in the world
based in Costa Rica called One Heart. Through
One Heart, you know, I was part of
around 300,
individuals' journeys, mostly
founders and entrepreneurs.
What I observed in that experience, like, they
produced an extraordinarily beautiful experience, and I will
forever be grateful to them.
Extraordinarily
curated, well intentioned,
really best in its class at what it
does.
And
it was missing something tremendous.
And the way that I discovered that it
was missing is because despite
doing ayahuasca
dozens of times myself,
despite being deeply in service, despite
devoting a lot of energy of my own
to that path,
I was suffering in ways that I did
not understand
how to get out of.
And I did not have
I didn't even know what to look for
in terms of support.
And how to get out of it myself.
And I'm a pretty smart dude.
So, you know, for me to have spent
that much time and energy in
a container that professes to provide
deep and long term healing,
that I
was still clueless as to what to do
to get out of these
very
painful things that were happening in my life,
well, I went on the path of self
discovery. And what I figured out was
that
we don't have to reinvent the wheel.
There are previous maps
to this, and they come from mindfulness and
psychology. I have a podcast, it's called Modern
Enlightenment, and we have the luminaries from the
psychedelic and spiritual space coming onto our podcast.
And before the podcast, I explain to them
what this podcast is about. And I say
to them, a hundred years ago,
if you wanted to pursue the path of
spiritual enlightenment,
you'd have to become a horny monk on
a mountain.
But now we have all these different tools.
We've got breath work, we've got neuroscience, we've
got psychedelics, we've got so on and so
forth. Retreats. Blah blah blah blah. Right? So
how do we get to enlightenment? Right? What's
the optimal pathway there?
The because what ends up happening is is
psychedelics is is just an accelerant.
It's a catalyst. When Maharaji, which is Ramdas's
teacher or Ramdas's guru, when Ramdas gave him
five hits of acid
of LSD,
Maharaj is like, that's interesting, give me five
more.
So now,
you know, Doctor. Richard Alpert, AKA Ram Dass,
gives him another five.
Maharaj is now in ten
doses of LSD, which
is exponential.
And then he says, this is a plaything.
In other words, what Maharaj's waking life
what he was experiencing in his waking life
was more than ten tabs of LSD.
And really, in fact, probably more than LSD
could possibly even get person two.
In other words, the path of meditation and
mindfulness
already has a map for where we're trying
to get to
within the psychedelic space. That's data point number
one. Data point number two is psychotherapy.
Psychotherapy,
we're now in the third stage of psychology.
First stage was Pavlov,
ring a bell, dog salivates, human must be
the same way.
Second was cognitive behavioral therapy, which is CBT,
which is
I'm gonna say affirmations and I'm gonna be
able to change my mood, largely disproven. And
now the third wave is a more integrated
model. It began with a form of therapy
called acceptance and commitment therapy,
which was a which was,
a psychotherapeutic
or clinical model of mindfulness.
And so now we have gestalt, IFS,
EMDR, like lots of different forms of therapy
in this third wave
that are effectively saying the way to healing
is the experience of the present moment. We
all have trauma with a lowercase t or
a capital t. We all have stuff in
the past. We all have anxiety or
fears of the future, but what really matters
is how do you experience it now?
Because now is the only time it exists.
You feel anxious about, you know, what you're
gonna do in your retirement
or your wedding next week?
Well, you're actually experiencing that anxiety right now
in this moment. How can you be with
that experience
The greater mindfulness and skillfulness.
So
I started to learn
these tools.
And the way that I learned
it would be
I would meet somebody
with an
embodiment of something that I would want. It's
like, wow. You are so much more peaceful.
You're so much more present,
compassionate,
sensual,
tantric, whatever it was. I was like, how
did you get that way? And they said,
well, go and try this thing. And so
at that time, my partner and I would
go to a training or retreat almost once
a month, all over the world.
Right. We had the freedom and and both
the time and money to be able to
do that.
And it very rapidly, like, learned a huge
toolset
of not just theoretical ideas, but really embodied
sense of, like, how to work with these
things.
And we took the best of I took
the best of the best of these workshops
from various different programs,
stitched it together,
iterated on it, and now that's what Ceremonia
is. We've run now like 36
retreats in two years, a little over two
years, which is an incredible amount of retreats.
And every single one is different from the
last because we still keep iterating,
improving
on this model.
And the model is effectively the same path
I took, just more compressed. The idea is
you come here to learn skills.
The skills of being
with your own experience of self and then
the present moment, AKA self empowerment,
and being with the other,
like in a community,
AKA connection.
You practice these skills
in workshops,
and you grow your capacity to to meet
your experience.
So that when you go into the psychedelic,
something that would normally trigger you, let's say
a trauma with a capital T comes up,
let's say you're a combat veteran and you're
reliving an experience of your friend dying in
front of you, which we've had, instead of
fight flight or freezing in that moment, you
now have the skills and the capacity to
meet it with greater fullness. And then boom,
what that does is instead of what would
normally become a bad trip,
now has the opportunity to become
fuel
for your transformation,
for your deeper understanding of yourself.
But here's the kicker. Here's the best part.
While that experience is valuable,
the most valuable thing is that you did
it
and that you know how to do it
because you're gonna go home to life and
life is going to continue to life.
You know, Buddhism says, everything that you love,
you will lose.
We will lose our parents. We will lose
our loved ones. We will lose our pets.
We'll lose our jobs. We will lose it
all
to time. And so how do we prepare
ourselves for the continuation
of life and its inevitable loss? The way
that we do that is through the same
mechanism, through skills and capacity, through mindfulness and
skillfulness.
And so by practicing this on ourselves
in a psychedelic, we're able to then translate
that into the three d world
and integrate that into our life. I mean,
I spent a lot of high school on
LSD, but, it obliterates
the
the guards at the gate, which is also
helpful when you're trying to get into those
spaces. How do you know when people come
to you
which pathway is the pathway? Whether it's
psilocybin or ayahuasca? Because those are two totally
different
beings.
Totally. Well,
I'm gonna first answer
more generally and then, and then
that specific question.
How do we know what pathway is the
right pathway?
What I've discovered is no matter if you're
a starving artist or you are a billionaire,
and we've had those two kinds of people
in the very same circle, everything funnels to
the same place, which is this question,
do you love yourself? Can you be with
what is?
Be with this experience now. Now as to
the question of psilocybin versus ayahuasca,
we get asked this a lot.
We have different levels in ceremonial. Our level
one is with psilocybin, our level two is
with ayahuasca.
And the reason why
that's the case
is because ayahuasca is typically held in a
very shamanic container. So for you to become
an ayahuasquero,
at least
one that I might recommend to somebody, would
require you to go train in the jungle
drinking ayahuasca
a few times a
week for years,
and
then apprentice for years in ceremonies, and then
finally you conserve medicine. So to become Ayahuascaro
is
a lot more than getting a PhD
in any subject matter. The benefit of that
is that you're getting,
when you sit with Ayahuasca,
assuming the shaman or the facilitator is
a good one, and by the way, I
know hundreds of facilitators, I only trust six
of them, and and the ones that serve
medicine here.
But when you're sitting with someone, you're getting
their lineage, the oral traditions and their training
that's been passed on through thousands of years.
There's a lot of beauty in that, but
there's also baggage in that. Because it includes
dogma, it includes their beliefs.
So I often say to people, one way
to discern whether a facilitator is spiritually safe
for you is to challenge their beliefs.
They say, you ask them, what do you
believe in? And then the follow-up question is,
how do you know that to be true?
And if they get triggered,
please run away because it's very likely that
they're not gonna create the room for you
to discover your own beliefs. So when you're
in a container where the facilitator is carrying
their own baggage
and serving you medicine,
it's really important that you as a participant
have enough skillfulness
and mindfulness, right? AKA the training that we
provide off the medicine,
for you to be able to discern what
is true for you.
In other words,
if you have an experience, the mind attempts
to make meaning out of that experience.
Attempts to put form into that meaning. So
one of our alumni is the president of
Unity Church, a mega
church in The U. S. Mega Christian church.
Right?
So he has an experience,
and he experiences Christ consciousness. We had someone
else who's Muslim. He has an experience,
and he experienced Allah. We have someone who's
atheist that comes in. He has an experience,
and he has something that he can only
call spiritual
spirituality. My point is,
it's with Ayahuasca,
it's more challenging for you to discern what
is yours
because
of the impression from the outside, from the
shamanic history and container. With psilocybin,
the kind of training well, you know, we're
one of a few licensed center a few
centers in Colorado be approved to train and
license facilitators here under Colorado state law.
And so,
our training program is nine months long, and
then you can serve medicine.
In a perfect world, I would make that
much longer, but of course accessibility and so
on and so forth. The point is, people
can
have
the level of training from the get go
to be able to
make room
for everyone else's beliefs
more easily with psilocybin.
Psilocybin versus Ayahuasca, I would say
I advocate for doing psilocybin first
with
training
so that you can
have the tools to support you,
and then Ayahuasca after that because
it's an absolutely beautiful medicine that
is my teacher. I just
would caution people to do Ayahuasca
right off the bat because it's so easy
for the mind to assign the healing agent
to something outside of themselves. Oh, it's the
shaman healing me, it's the music healing me,
it's the medicine or the plant spirit healing
me.
The danger of that is when you go
home,
that same process can be ingrained, and so
now suddenly when you have when life continues
to life, you're like, damn, where's my shaman?
Or I need to drink Ayahuasca.
Or
the flip side of the coin is victimhood.
Oh, it's something outside of me that's causing
me to feel this way. Mercury's in retrograde,
therefore that's why I'm an asshole.
Right. You know?
Yeah. So everything that we're doing is aimed
towards
people feeling their own heart.
How does Austin,
the man,
live
a life
outside of Austin, the facilitator
and the
person who
is present and
in it, not of it. They how did
you have an ability to detach even from
the detachment
to just,
you know, chill out, eat popcorn, and watch
a movie in your own life? Not literally,
but
metaphorically speaking? Yeah. Totally.
You know, I don't preach from a pulpit.
I I'm
human, and I do human things. Yesterday,
I was at
a party at my friend's bar, and, you
know, and I go to Burning Man,
and, you know, I date, and I
I'm of course a man.
And I'm still on my path too. You
know, a really big part of this work,
in my opinion, is to bring the fullness
of our own being, even as facilitators,
into the container. So that we can model
vulnerability and authenticity.
As long as like,
you know that we got you,
AKA like we got our shit together enough
that we got you.
I think that's
that's as long as there's that,
then,
I advocate for all of our facilitators to
bring
everything. And just as we would expect
or advocate for the participants to do themselves.
May I ask your dad's name? I like
to say the names of the people who
have passed so that they have their immortality
intact.
Yeah. His name is Jeff. Jeff. Hi, Jeff.
What do you see
moving forward
for your work? Will it
is there room for expansion in this kind
of work when you know that these tools
at your disposal are
so powerful.
I mean, I think working with veterans and
people with PTSD
and and survivors,
how do you grow without growing too
big? How does it not
become,
a caricature of itself? You know what I
mean? We're an extraordinarily unique organization.
Most places, if you were to go, let's
say, ceremony, you come in, you shake hands,
a group of people, two hours later, you're
tripping together.
The upside is, that can be pretty inexpensive.
Like in Denver, you can find a ceremony
for $250
a night.
And then
you go home at that night, or you
sleep on your mat that night.
The downside is that you're effectively doing spiritual
and psychological surgery
on yourself.
And
what is so important in that case
is how safe do you feel? There's a
sharp limit to how safe you can possibly
feel doing things with strangers that you haven't
met or talked to. And so, you know,
what we do here is,
in addition to the mindfulness and skillfulness, the
training that I shared with you, is we
build connection and we build community.
We gather every Sunday in perpetuity
as a community, all our alumni, and we
get anywhere between ten and fifty people at
a time
to come and we practice
our tools.
We practice being in community and relationship with
each other. What's really important to me, my
goal, is that this model that we've created
to provide some level of training and then
provide community for people that are undergoing this
transformational process, this model
doesn't stay unique to us. That it is
widely available and is the standard
for the field at large.
And so, you know, I'm part of the
legislative process
in Colorado,
or one of the few centers that will
license people.
And, you know, my goal is to teach
people this model, and eventually open source this
model, so that facilitators of the future
can know that there is something, like, available
that provides
deep and durable healing beyond
what
we as facilitators can provide one on one.
And that's through
tools, that's through peer support, that's through community.
There's a limit to how much I can
help people. I still get messages from people
like telling me their challenges and and whatnot.
And I can't save everybody anymore. You know,
that's what I try to do with my
mom
and the woman in my life. And so,
you know,
my goal here now is is to spread
this model.
Do you have scholarship for people that can't
afford
maybe to to attend?
Absolutely. And and what I would say is,
you know, go on our website,
ceremoniacircle.org,
sign up for a breakthrough call. We might
move to webinar format soon,
and have the conversation. And we do what
we can to support you through a combination
of scholarship
and
payment plans.
We also have,
we're also about to release a
microdistant course called Awaken at Home, where it's
a more elongated program. Right? A three month
program where you're learning the tools and you're
micro
microdosing and going through a coaching container.
There's lots of options that we're gonna make
available.
I'm assuming those things are done on Zoom
or some sort of a video conferencing,
as well as the check-in you were talking
about of community?
Yep. Yeah. Absolutely.
God bless Zoom.
It's made the world smaller.
Austin, I really appreciate your time. This all
is is fascinating and something that I personally
am incredibly interested in.
My hope,
regardless of how people find their way to
themselves,
that this will be a continual process for
humanity.
We desperately need
it. And I know it's scary,
but
it's my hope. Thank you so much, Susan.
This is this is beautiful.
Thank you for sharing your gifts to the
world.
Would love to have you in one of
our retreats. Let's set that up. Oh, absolutely.
I'm
I'm ex I've already before I even
when I got your information,
and I said, absolutely.
I would love to talk to Austin. And
then I started looking at the website, and
I've been sending it out to people like
crazy.
I wish I could I wish my parents
would do something like this. But, again, I
know that
these are the types of things that it
will do no good unless you're ready. And
you never know
you never know what might happen, for sure.
I mean, that's the beauty of life. But
I never thought I would do a cacao
ceremony. I thought, Wait, I drink hot chocolate?
What do you mean? You know? And it
was so powerful.
But I might not have been in a
place where I could have accepted that kind
of medicine
if I had done it any other time.
You just never know when those doors open,
and then the walking through it is a
whole other process.
Totally. Yeah. Totally.
Thank you for listening, everybody.
Thanks, Austin.
Thank you, Susan.
Great. Review and subscribe to Hey Human Podcast
wherever you get your podcasts.
Thanks.
Bye.