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In this episode, we explore the transformative potential of psychedelics and plant medicines like MDMA, psilocybin, and ayahuasca. David shares his personal journey with these substances, detailing how they helped him uncover and address deep-seated traumas and limiting beliefs.

David emphasizes the importance of integration after psychedelic experiences, cautioning against viewing these tools as quick fixes. This episode offers a candid look at the benefits and challenges of using psychedelics for personal growth and healing.

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Available on Amazon: A Changed Mind: Go Beyond Self Awareness, Rewire Your Brain & Reengineer Your Reality

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What We Explored This Episode

00:02:47: Evolution of Human Being

00:08:34: Mental Frameworks

00:11:45: DMT and Consciousness

00:17:04: Spiritual Growth Through MDMA Therapy

Memorable Quotes

"We all have blocks that are hard to access or that we're not aware of because the subconscious mind has suppressed them."

"These tools can support you in developing this practice. And a lot of people say, well, should I do it? And my answer is, well, do you want to? Because life provides us a lot of roads to the mountaintop, and ultimately, you do not need to use any of these medicines or tools if you don’t want to."

"I started using these tools thinking that they were the things that were going to heal me. I'm the thing that's going to heal me. Me in relationship and in faith with my higher power, the only power that there really is. That's what's going to heal me."

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Now Available: A Changed Mind Book

Hey, it's David. Welcome to A Changed Mind, a sanctuary for your spirit, a place where each and every episode I will remind you of certainty, of the goodness of future. I'm your friend, your host, your guide, David Bayer. You know, spiritual and personal growth can feel really hard, especially as you are becoming aware of your limiting beliefs and blocks, but haven't yet learned how to transform them. And a lot of people are using psychedelics and plant medicines to accelerate their personal growth, heal their traumas. But are these tools actually safe? Are they actually effective and are they right for you? Now, over the course of the last decade, I built a $30 million transformation coaching company and have self-experimented utilizing every form of behavioral psychology, somatic release, breath work, and these tools. And in this episode, I'm going to tell you how you can, if you choose, use psychedelics to heal the deep trauma that is still preventing you from feeling free to create the vision you have for your life. I'm going to be sharing with you the one thing that once I understood it really accelerated my personal growth and my healing by 10X. And the big misunderstanding around these tools keeps a lot of people who are using them stuck or worse yet, really creating a lot of unnecessary harm. And so if this is something that's been interesting you in this episode, you're going to hopefully get clear on whether or not you should use psychedelics or plant medicine in your healing journey, what the experience is like, what medicine you may decide to use. And I'm also going to be talking about any of the negative outcomes, downsides, doings. But ultimately, the goal here is to help provide you information on how to grow faster spiritually. And I'm going to be sharing a lot of my own personal experience, starting with this story of my first experience. I had felt an urge to explore using these kinds of tools and was first exposed to MDMA. And MDMA is known as the street drug ecstasy. This is something that I experienced in my youth when I was in college, but I'd never used therapeutically. And I had a friend who was a very troubled person who was living through a lot of trauma, dramatically transformed as a result of MDMA therapy. And so I decided to commit to six sessions of MDMA therapy. This was facilitated by a practitioner. And a practitioner is a very loose term. This was not a therapist. This was somebody who had been trained on how to facilitate an MDMA session, which simply consisted of supporting me while I was there, bearing witness to my experience, making sure that if anything, quote unquote, went wrong, that I was taken care of. And the experience for me was to blindfold myself in a quiet room with a playlist that she had. A friend of mine once joked, anybody can be a shaman. All you need is some ayahuasca and a playlist. As I dose very specific dosages of MDMA, and these were dosages that had been used in clinical trials, there's a tremendous renaissance going on now with a lot of people using some form of psychedelic. MDMA is what I would call a soft psychedelic and have a hallucinogenic experience. But it's actually, it's not a natural medicine like psilocybin and mushrooms or ayahuasca, which I'll get into in a moment here. It's a synthetic medicine that created, I believe, and again, I'm not a doctor. I'm just sharing what I think I know in my own experience, was a German doctor who had developed this chemical compound to help create intimacy between couples. And so here I was in a quiet room by myself with someone who could support me in case anything went wrong. And I took two doses of MDMA. The first dose was, of course, at the beginning and then about an hour later. And what I experienced was similar to what I experienced in college, this feeling of ecstasy, this incredible feeling of safety and excitement and adrenaline and a flood of serotonin in my system. And really feeling like I was on the beginning of a roller coaster ride. But unlike being distracted, like when I was out at the nightclubs in early 20s, I was just going within. And as I started feeling safe, I started having memories that I had never had access to. These were memories that were very uncomfortable. So while I was in this coon of ecstasy, I was also feeling a lot of these very uncomfortable emotions. One of the memories I had was as being a child and just feeling like there was something wrong with me. I actually started speaking out loud, as if I was a little child, there's something wrong with me, there's something wrong with me, there's something wrong with me. And it was a pretty extraordinary experience because as I was sort of chanting there's something wrong with feeling, that feeling, right, that so many of us have of not being enough or not being good enough or feeling like there's something wrong with. I watched as a timeline unfold and I saw my 17 year old self saying, there's something wrong with me, there's something wrong with me, my 23 year old self saying there's something wrong with me, there's something wrong with me. And memories that match, there's this something wrong with me. I remember being on the playground, kid in the fifth grade, I guess I must have been around, geez, I don't know, nine years old, 10 years old. And we had moved to a new school district far away from where I had grown up. And so I was on the playground with new kids. And I remember being pressed up against chain link fence, watching them play dodgeball on the dodgeball court. And that separation between myself and them and that shyness and feeling like there was something wrong with me. And so I had all of these memories start to emerge and these feelings throughout these different stages of my development, there was something wrong with me. And at this time, I think I was around 45, 46 years old, and I had been experiencing chronic health challenge. And so then all of a sudden, as my 45 or 46 year old version, I was saying to myself, there's something wrong with me, there's something wrong with me, there's something wrong with me. And what mine was this feeling of an absence of wellbeing, the experience of chronic health conditions that I was having saying there's something wrong with me. And so in this process, I had this extraordinary awareness that the limiting belief, this very core program that I had developed or learned that there's something wrong with me was actually manifesting in my body as there's something wrong with. Now I had something I could point to, see there's something wrong with, I've got neuropathy in my feet, I've got heart palpitation, I've got back problems, I've had a double hernia, there's something wrong with me. And I realized, oh my God, all of these manifestations in my body are actually not physical problems, they're psycho-emotional, their root is in a psycho-emotional standard, there's something wrong with me. And the experience within taking the MDMA, which lasted about four hours, was very like peaks and valleys. There would be these waves, and it was almost like a new chapter was folding. And so within this chapter, I also, as I bore witness all of these memories that I didn't even remember and all of these feelings that I had never fully processed, as I was feeling them and processing them, I also became aware that I learned this from my mom. My mother had a mother who was abusive to her. My mother clued it based on that abuse that there was something wrong with her. My mother grew up, or my mother modeled throughout childhood, and I learned that behavior. And my mom too had chronic, my mom was also manifesting there's something wrong with her through her body. And so this was a tremendous awareness. And then there's sort of this chapter, which lasted about 15 to 20 minutes, is one of the cycles of my MDMA therapy session, kind of colluded with ordinary release of emotion. And I felt this inner peace, I actually felt for the first time that there was nothing wrong with me at all, that this was just a great misunderstanding materialized into my life. And then I was using my life as evidence to reinforce this idea that there was something wrong with me and that I'd been caught up in this loop. And in the course of this 15 to 20 minutes, I realized none of that actually. And so my experience with MDMA, in particular, is that it helped me identify, I guess what I would say is we all have blocks that are hard to access, or that we're not aware of because the subconscious mind has suppressed. And of course, in order to transform them, in order to heal and grow, and in order to remove the resistance so that you can not only feel better in your life, but create more in your business, stop track talks, relationships, heal your body, or generate more prosperity and abundance, you have to become aware of and then work. So in order to transform them, you have to know what they are. Psychedelics put brain in a state of safe so that you access those memories. And oftentimes, even in the midst of the experience itself, you can begin to rewire the misunderstanding and go of trauma or the resistance. They've done some brain scans and brain studies of people who have used ayahuasca, which is also something that I've used in several ceremonies, is an indigenous tea. It was created by the indigenous people in the Amazon. So there's different traditions around it, Peruvian tradition, Ecuadorian tradition, Colombian tradition. And somehow, a thousand years ago, or thousands of years ago, the indigenous people found a way to combine a couple of different plants in order for a human being to ingest chemical called DMT to allow it to go through your system. We all naturally produce DMT in our body. It's a very long word. You can Google it, diothium, mexosome, again, not a doctor or a scientist, just a guy on the journey sharing my experience with you. We all have DMT in our body that is inactive. What's interesting, and I'll talk a little bit more about this in a second, is that you can activate the DMT stores in your body naturally through a very specific type of breath, have the same type of experiences that you can have using MDMA or psilocybin or ayahuasca without having to use any of these chemicals or medicine. But the brain studies that were done as people were ingesting ayahuasca and taking an act is that the DMT stimulated parts of the brain that are normally not active. And so as a result of that stimulation, other parts of the brain came inactive. And there's a set of components within your brain that are referred to as default mode. And the default mode network is essentially, as you develop as an individual in the world, you come in in a blank slate and you start learning through the experiences of life and giving meaning to the experience. And so you're giving meaning to the experience with a dog, a dog's friend, you're giving meaning to the experience of money as you observe it when you're growing up. And you experience a parent and their interaction with money, potentially it's like money is hard to make. And you're giving meanings to the experience you have of yourself, right? I'm not good enough, or there's something wrong with, or there's not enough time, or you have to make the right or wrong decision. And these meanings start to shape the lens through which you experience life and you become someone who is shaped by those meanings. And that becomes your personality. And you begin to think only within the context of personnel, right? We hear that from neuroscience psychology that we think the same thoughts over and over again every day. And so there's this construct created called the default mode network that is essentially, you can think about it as your Microsoft operating. And it's helpful because it's an operating system. So it allows you to operate with some level of function and to survive. But it's also very, very limiting. And so what DMT does in its act form is it stimulates different parts of the brain and turns off other parts of the brain so that the default mode network comes down. Essentially your personality relax, the protective mechanisms of your conscious mind go offline. And what's interesting is that as this change take place in your operating system, many people describe having what are referred to as hallucinogenic experience. Hallucinogenic experiences might be, you know, I had a conversation with a loved one who was passed or, you know, I felt God or I saw that it was an angel with wings. People refer to these as hallucinogenic experiences. I prefer the term entheogenic. Entheogenic essentially means an experience that is other than ordinary. Because hallucinogenic sort of implies that whatever it is you're experiencing in ceremony or in a session with these tools isn't really happening. But what I believe, it doesn't mean it's right, but I'm just sharing this with you, is that as the default mode network comes down, we experience extrasensory perception. In other words, we become very dependent upon our five senses. Our five senses are very closely oriented with this default mode network, very closely oriented with the way that we believe the world works and our perception of ourselves and our personality. And when these medicines begin to shift around the electrical activity of brain and your nervous system, we're able to tap into senses that we've always had, but that are not frequently used that are dormant because our predominant five senses have become so dominant over time. We know that other animals have other senses. They're able to see beyond the visible light spectrum. They're able to hear things they can't hear, and we know that there's information beyond our five senses.senses, we can look at like spectrography, spectrography, I think it's called, where we can like look at a plant and we cut off a leaf and we still see the energetic vibration of the leaf there. So there is, there's an entire world of information that exists around us at all times that we have access to when we're not locked into the traditional container of the way the default mode network or the mind's working and these tools allow us to start accessing that information. So for example, in an ayahuasca ceremony that I participated, again, almost like chapters in a book, there were peaks and valleys over the course of six hours. I took the ceremonial tea, the particular story I'm referencing is in Costa Rica where I worked with real shamans, not a guy with a playlist, a refrigerator with ayahuasca in it, but shamans who have come down through these lineages over a hundred, hundred, hundred years and who have used ayahuasca medicine for healing purposes because they believed or understood all physical symptoms in the body were unresolved psychological emotions that you didn't really have a health challenge, you had a spiritual. And in one of these ceremonies, I was able to have a very deep conversation with mom where she explained to me the pain that she suffered as a child and I was able to understand at a much deeper level why my mother is the way that she is. And in that conversation, I found a tremendous forgiveness and in the forgiveness for her, I no longer held resentments that I would hold cause all kinds of problems in my life. In that same ceremony, my favorite furry friend had recently passed. I had a chihuahua named Dexter. He was with me through my drug and alcohol recovery. He was with me with the before David and the David in his early thirties and the David after my recovery and personal growth. And Dexter had recently passed and I missed Dex tremendously and I had an experience where as I was touching my own face with my hand, my index finger started to rub against my cheek and all of a sudden I had an awareness cause I wasn't trolling it. It was just happening. I was surrendering to my body moving within this medicine experience that was Dexter licking my face and I just knew it to be true. And you know, is there value in that? There was for me. And so these tools give us access to information that we are blocked off from both because the mind develops a habit of time and locks in operating system and because a lot of these memories were pushed down into the subconscious mind along with the unprocessed emotions associated with it because we were threatened and it didn't feel safe because we experienced sexual abuse, physical abuse or emotional abuse, didn't understand how to process that properly. It got stored down into subconscious mind. Subconscious mind is like power generator that's determining the conscious decisions that we're making. It's really like the power that is reflecting itself out through our belief systems, our thoughts, our emotions and our actions. So it's reflecting back to us function of our life through health challenges or business challenges, relation challenge, want to be able to change our external reality. We have to be able to access this material that is the root cause of what we're materializing or manifest externally. And these tools can give us access to it. Now, one of the big mistakes that I see a lot of people making is that they believe that the psychedelic experience is break. And so they go have an experience where there is a feeling of breakthrough and then they go back to their life. But they go back to their lives not realizing, in my opinion, that the experience and ceremony or in the medicine work is to give you a glimpse or an understanding. And now there's a piece called integration that's very, very important. Your life is going to continue to reflect back to you these unprocessed traumas. Most of the time, the medicine doesn't resolve trauma for you. The medicine helps you become aware of what trauma is and may give you a deeper understanding of what really took place at that time. And so now you can take that information back to your life. But those habits and those patterns of emotions, thoughts, of electrical vibration, it's just still there. And so you're still producing undesired result, contrast experiences, life. And the medicine work that you do or the therapy that you do gives you access to be with that experience different. But it doesn't prevent the experiences occurring. And so most people think psychedelic experience is breakthrough. They go back into their life. They're not actually utilizing the information that they gain to work with the challenges of their life. And so the tension builds back up and they have to keep going back psychedelic. And so it's important to understand that these are just tools. They're not some sort of panacea cure-all. And that's the mistake that I see a lot of people make. There's a lot of information out there around, well, you know, people have been alcoholics or drug addicts and they go have one ayahuasca serum, siren session, and they never want to drink or pick up again. I've seen a different story. I've seen a lot of people who think that it's like a one and done and it's not. It's a one and now the work begins. Or for me, it was a six sessions of MDMA over the course of a year and slowly integrating what I had learned back to my real life experience. Because again, if your unconscious mind is producing the results of your life, if your unresolved beliefs, unresolved traumas are creating experience you don't want, of course you're creating lots of experience to do because you have a powered belief systems. But if they're creating what you don't want, then now the work is to take that education that you've received through the therapy or through the medicine and bring it into life. I had a friend who was a very successful CEO and she started getting into this medicine work and she'd go do a ceremony. She'd kind of blow off steam. She'd gain standings, then she'd back to work, then the tension would build back up and the next thing you know she's laying on some banana leaf in the Amazon, drink tea with some shamans. She did like, I don't know what it was, 40, 50, 60 ceremonies. She had this wonderful revelation which I think articulates this point really well where she came back one day and business was tense, things were building up and she's like, I gotta get down to the jungle and do some more medicine. In the process of ayahuasca, it's referred to as a ceremony because there's a lot of protocol to it, cleansing of the space, the shamans are working with you, there's indigenous music. It's really, for me, it's a very beautiful experience. It's referred to as a ceremony. So she's like, I gotta get down and do another ceremony and she had awareness that life is the ceremony. So life is the ceremony. Life is the hallucinogenic experience. You know, Einstein said, reality is an illusion, albeit a persistent one. You know, we're creating our own realities and we're having a very physical experience even though we know that the material world is made up of a bunch of things that aren't even really here, right? Like molecules down to atoms, down to photons, like we're really living in more of like this matrix-like reality of shimmering light, yet our senses are interpreting it to create a physical experience. So we're spiritual being having a false physical experience, that's the illusion. And it's the opportunity for us to do the work because as a byproduct fact that we create our own reality, we're creating circumstances, situations that when we meet them and when they trigger us, they bring up belief system in form of our reaction. And those beliefs are actually the beliefs created, they're the cause, not fact. And so once you have a new contact for what belief is really about, right, oh, there's something wrong with, and react to physical problems, now I can work. And this was a massive game changer for me in my own understanding because I started using these tools thinking that they were the things that were going to heal me. I'm the thing that's going to heal me in relationship and in faith with my higher power, the only power that there really is. That's what's going to heal me. That's what's going to make me rich. That's what's going to allow me to achieve my potential. That's what's going to help me create and nurture health, intimate relationship. Nothing outside of me is going to do that. These are just tools that give me a glimpse. And that's when I really started to 10x my spiritual growth. I realized that there wasn't something outside of me that was going to fix. I realized that these tools can be nice to give me access to information that then I have to put to work day-to-day experiences of life if I really want to create change. Because change comes from in the moment of experiencing something that is uncomfortable for you, learning how to relax, learning how to have a different experience. And that's a new rep. It's a new repetition. It's just like going to gym. This information that we gain and sometimes a little bit of the lightning of the load when we use these tools, whether it's psychedelics or plant medicine or MDMA, they give us access to doing more rep in our day-to-day. They give us a perspective, gives us permission to go, okay, I'm going to relax around. I know that my reaction right now is old habit. I know that the meaning that I'm giving this experience isn't true. Let me just breathe through. It's very much like a yogic practice. And every time we choose to do that, rather than react out of the old trauma or the old belief, it's a new rep in the direction of a down-regulated nervous. So we're learning how to, and this is very, very cool, take control of things that we thought we had no control of, like the functions of the autonomic nervous system, our heart rate, our breathing, our reaction, whether we move in fight or flight. We're learning how to become responsive, which is the next evolution of the human being, rather than react, which is sort of the mammal that we've been. And so these tools can support you in developing this practice. And a lot of people say, well, should I do it? And my answer is, well, do you want, because life provides us a lot of roads to the mountaintop, you know, ultimately you do not need to use any of the medicines, tools, if you don't want to. I have a lot of friends in recovery who absolutely will not use these tools because they look at them as drugs and they're afraid that they may become addicted. Now, I don't know, other than becoming addicted to thinking that ayahuasca is going to fix I do know some people who are probably doing too many ceremonies, but it is not a pleasant experience. You know, the ayahuasca experience is very different than the MDMA experience. The ayahuasca experience is a lot of purging and throwing up and crapping yourself. And I don't know anybody who gets addicted to that. I'm terrified every time I go into an ayahuasca ceremony because it's a, it's very challenging for me what comes up. It doesn't have the safe feeling of MDMA yet. I can see that there's been some benefit to it in my own experience, but you know, it's been five years since I've done any of this because I'm, I'm at a point now where I realized that, you know, my, my growth is up to me. It's not up to a pill or a posh tool. Those were, those were things that, you know, got me here. They're not going to get level. In fact, the things that are getting me to the next level are things like my 12 step principles for living, the work that we teach. And you know, if this is your first time on this channel, we've got a ton of videos, tools around personal growth perspective on human evolution. If you're not new to this channel, you know, you know that this is what I'm spending a hundred percent of time on. And as I mentioned before, there are other tools like transformational breath work. You know, one of my breath mentors, Alia Seavey, who comes to my retreats and intensives and works with my high level coaching client. I practice with her every, I don't know, once or twice a month. And when we get into deep breath work, we activate the natural stores of DMT that are in my system and have profound entheogenic experiences. You know, laying on my bed on Zoom, breathing 45s with having incredible releases and awarenesses, breakthroughs. You know, I've had breakthroughs sitting in extreme heat in my sauna. I had a recollection of a past life memory that gave me tremendous perspective on why I'm being reactive in a certain way in my life right now. And so that awareness is now some take into those triggerments and being with those triggering means different. Being responsive rather than reactive, certain meditations, certain yoga practices can also produce the same types of breakthroughs, the same type of results. So you know, this isn't for everyone, but I know that there are a lot of people who have, who have questions around it. And so I want to be able to speak into my own persperience. I would also say that the biggest, if not one of the biggest components of my spiritual growth and healing journey is being in fellowship with other people who are on the journey. I get that out of 12-step. I get that out of our whole human framework program and our community. Being with other people who are in a similar form of spiritual practice, who are learning tools and using tools, who can share with me their wins, who can also share with me their struggles. So it reminds me of the fact that we're all going to have good days, bad days. But connection is a very important part of this. There's energy to connect, you know, life itself is one big connected mate. And when we isolate, that's when we cut ourselves off from healing process as well. So I hope you love this episode. Thanks for joining me and allowing me to share all of with you. If you love this video, I'll give you a couple more here that you check out. And if you haven't yet, do me a favor, if you really, really love this episode, I want to get to work out to as many people as possible. If you're listening on the audio platforms on Apple, leave me a rating and a review. If you're on Spotify, drop me a rating. And if you're on YouTube, hey, thanks for being here. Subscribe, hit the bell icon. We can go deeper into the conversations matter. Thanks for joining me in today's episode of Change. I love you and I'll see you in the next one.