When you ingest mushrooms, you are ingesting universal wisdom.  They detox your body physically, emotionally & spiritually, and whatever you ask, or are willing to explore, you will get the answer to --ready, or not.

Join me in Connecting Old-School Wisdom with Modern Functional Medicine as we discuss healing cancer, mushroom medicine, and the Eclectic Triphasic Medical System.

Before we dive in, thank you for having the bravery to face your shit and heal yourself by listening to this show.  

Because we are talking about truth, freedom & real shit on this show, its exposure & reach are being censored, so thank you also for having the bravery to like (Apple), share (Spotify) & subscribe (Youtube) to my channel to help this information reach the people who need to hear it.

Facing Your Shit & Healing Yourself is more than just this podcast, it is a movement.

Join the #FYSHY movement with a one-off donation or become a member for as low as $5/month & receive exclusive art, be featured on the show, submit questions for guests, and more.

So who am I and why did I decide to create this show?

Well, after unraveling all of the medical & pharmaceutical lies I had been told about my endometriosis, I educated myself, and I was able to heal myself after 17 years of debilitating pain.

My experience inspired me to actually live my art, so I created an ongoing art series about it called, Every Phase––where I create artwork that illustrates how I healed myself as I live by the phases of the female hormonal cycle. Just look for the Every Phase VLOG episodes on the podcast as I recreate select pieces of the series as an animated mini-series The artwork shows what's happening in the brain and the body during each phase and reveals how to biohack & leverage this energy in your life. 

I am actually living the art, so it's about more than just healing. The writing and art discuss truth, freedom & our current financial & healthcare system slavery–and the way out.  Learn more by subscribing at meredithochoa.com

While you’re there, grab a personally signed copy of my award-winning augmented Reality (AR) interactive book, Face Your Shit, Heal Yourself.

So all of that to say, even though I was lied to for years by doctors promoting big pharma, I was able to find experts who helped me achieve the impossible. This space introduces them to you.

Today we are chatting with mushroom expert, Oscar Sierra of Sierra Botanica & Collaborative Medicine

Oscar is passionate about the Patient-Centered care approach of the Eclectic Triphasic Medical System and has been practicing this way for over 9 years.

He holds a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Georgia in Nutrition Science and an Anthropology minor in Traditional Medicine. Oscar also completed over 3,000 hours of hands-on training and national board exams to earn Board Certifications in both Herbal Medicine and Acupuncture. In addition to his ongoing continued education in Chinese Medicine, Oscar also studies biomedical and systems engineering fields of Functional Medicine and Wholistic Oncology.

Oscar found that his background in martial arts, where discernment and knowledge of pressure points are used to subdue opponents, allowed him to easily transition into acupuncture to help restore balance in medical practice. The concepts he learned of Balance, Yin & Yang, Meridians, Qi, Flow, the 5 Elements, and precision remained unchanged as he pivoted into the Medical Arts.

At his full-time private practice in Sandy Springs, Oscar is typically compounding custom herbal formulas for patients or giving an impromptu discourse in the lobby. In his free time, he loves mountain biking, playing music, going on herb walks with the Georgia Herbalist Guild or Mushroom Club of Georgia, or attending and giving lectures. He has professionally provided services in the Atlanta area for over 12 years.

Learn more & connect with Oscar:

https://sierracollaborativemed.com/

MOJO Health - Cancer Healing & Information Database

✅CHAPTERS

00:00:00 Introduction

00:06:14 #1 Oscar's Medical work with Mushrooms

00:13:10 #2 Origins of Medicine in the US

00:16:07 #3 3 things to look at for treatment of disease

00:21:55 #4 Blowing up 'healthcare'

00:29:44 #5 Mushrooms for Cancer Treatment

00:41:26 #6 MOJO nonprofit for cancer patients

00:49:37 #7 Biohacking with art - cookbooks, music & mushrooms

00:58:57 #8 Connect with Oscar

If you liked the episode or you think it would be useful for someone else, please leave a review on Apple, Spotify, Youtube, or (especially) podchaser

If there is a woman you know who is struggling with period pain, the foundation of how I healed myself began with reading Womancode & In The Flo by Alisa Vitti.

You can also pick up a signed copy of my printed book with a list of resources and doctors that helped me, and remember, as always...

The truth will set you free.

ALL art + photo services

podcast insta = @faceyourshithealyourself

art insta = @meredithwochoa

Youtube= ANOTHER F*#%ING ARTIST

Facebook = ANOTHER F ING ARTIST

Linkedin= Meredith Ochoa

Twitter=AnEffinArtist

subscribe to the ANOTHER F*#%ING ARTIST substack newsletter

[00:00:10] Oscar: herbalists like me that like mushrooms and herbal medicine that have been saying the same stuff for 20 years, no one gives a shit about us.

[00:00:30] Oscar: at Stanford

[00:00:51] Oscar: Then people are like, wait, hold on now! What these cuckoo herbalist and hippie people have been saying for a long time is true?! About Big Pharma, the FDA, and the corruption, and how the government isn't all about protecting me and my health? What? Yeah.

[00:01:40] Meredith: Before we dive in though, I sincerely want to thank you for having the bravery to face your shit and heal yourself by listening to this show. Because we're talking about actual healing, which isn't profitable for our current healthcare or financial system, its exposure and its reach are being limited and censored.

[00:02:28] Meredith: So, who am I and why did I decide to create this show? Well, after unraveling all of the medical and pharmaceutical lies I had been told about my endometriosis, I educated myself and I was able to heal myself after 17 years of debilitating pain. My experience inspired me to actually live my art. So I created an ongoing art series about it called every phase, where I create artwork that illustrates how I healed myself as I live by the phases of the female hormonal cycle.

[00:03:29] Meredith: The writing and the artwork discuss truth, freedom, our current financial and health care system, slavery, and the way out of it. Learn more by subscribing at MeredithOchoa. com. So all of that to say, even though I was lied to for years by doctors promoting big pharma, I was able to find experts who helped me achieve what I thought was impossible.

[00:04:18] Meredith: He holds a bachelor's degree from University of Georgia in nutrition science and an anthropology minor in traditional medicine. Oscar also completed over 3000 hours of hands on training and national board exams to earn board certifications in both herbal medicine and acupuncture. In addition to his ongoing continued education in Chinese medicine, Oscar also studies biomedical and systems engineering fields of functional medicine and holistic oncology.

[00:05:17] Meredith: At his full time private practice in Sandy Springs, Oscar is typically compounding custom herbal formulas for patients or giving an impromptu discourse in the lobby. In his free time, he loves mountain biking, playing music, and reading. Going on herb walks with the Georgia Herbalist Guild or Mushroom Club of Georgia or attending and giving lectures.

[00:05:45] Oscar: So yeah, that's the nature of the justice system in America.

[00:06:01] Meredith: totally understand. Sounds like they need to take some mushrooms. I'm sure there's plenty you could recommend.

[00:06:14] Oscar's Medical work with Mushrooms

[00:06:31] Oscar: all right. So, the path that I'm on is pretty exciting one. I get to help, I get to dive in and I'm a really cognitive person. Like I'm really good at doing this

[00:06:41] Oscar: better or worse, much to the chagrin of. Some ex girlfriends who fortunately I'm still friends with, I have a knack for doing this really well.

[00:07:15] Oscar: signs and symptoms in terms of. Oh, yeah, I eat this and,now I feel that, or, my pulse is fast or it's thin or it's thready. it's weak, it's deep, it's a bowstring, it's a cottony, mushy, or it's not even there, or it's irregular or irregularly irregular. These are the low tech signs and symptoms that helped me put together the puzzle that I love putting together as a clinician every day on a case, typically no one else can figure out.

[00:07:51] Oscar: but the mushrooms more recently in my adult life could have helped me that the psychotropic mushrooms have helped me get into more of that feeling.

[00:08:21] Oscar: and there is room for expansion of the awareness that has nothing to do with facts, figures. Logic or cognitive intelligence, although that stuff's great.and they're not mutually exclusive, but, my own personal journey that I have for myself is to not just be really good at this, but to, to try to feel more stuff and intuit more things and being in the flow when I'm playing my sax. And I'm not, I don't remember what scale I'm in or what sharps or flats or that it's a Dorian thing or a pentatonic thing. I'm just, as we say, as musicians say in the pocket. So, but sometimes I, I use this to get in the pocket and that's okay.

[00:09:40] Meredith: It's one you're talking about energy a little bit ago. It's all one Fucking energy field. if you really want to boil it down, like space, everything, and that's actually how I was really drawn to mushrooms, recognizing the mycelium network structure and how that. Is in space, how that's in, that's what we will become when we die.

[00:10:31] Meredith: I'm talking about, I'm not talking about necessarily like Reishi or Lion's Mane or some of the other ones that you know, you just go and get in your local coffee now, which we'll also discuss, but I had telepathic experiences with mushrooms and they got to live that through my body. So it's like communicating with an entire network and really being able to tune in to everything else.

[00:11:19] Oscar: It only took me 45 years.

[00:11:32] Meredith: we experience it as linear, but it's all happening at the same time, truthfully. It's much more circular than it is linear, but it's both in our experiences. And we're in three places all at one time, at the same time, the mind, body, spirit complex. I love that you have that little guy.

[00:11:51] Oscar: forgot this was in my hand.

[00:11:56] Oscar: Someone just, I think one of my patients just gave me a very cute little bookmark.

[00:12:01] Oscar: That's a tiny little mushroom.

[00:12:09] Oscar: Sometimes when I'm talking to patients on Zoom, I'll just be like, oh yeah, tell me about those symptoms.

[00:12:14] Oscar: so,

[00:12:15] Oscar: Just to see if they notice.

[00:12:40] Meredith: Yeah.yeah.

[00:13:10] Origins of Medicine in the US

[00:13:30] Meredith: those would be now labeled as natural or more holistic. And then you have the pharmaceutical, Western medicine, symptom treating, catastrophic treatment, also call it. The long term murder care plan split in that industry in health, I'd love to know your thoughts on that a, but then also the history of this.

[00:14:09] Oscar: So I learned about the eclectics mainly from my main teacher and health influencer, he's a legitimate, herbalist that's been doing this for 25 plus years, Donnie Yance.

[00:14:56] Oscar: S., especially here in the South, where I am, after the Civil War, because of a little thing called the blockade. So, most meds were coming from the North, and when the railway and other forms of egress and ingress of goods. Mostly, the meds were coming from north. So when they ran out of meds, but people were still getting diarrhea and snake bites and headaches and everything else, the doctors, the physicians said, Hey, Creek, native American lady.

[00:15:52] Oscar: And so the eclectic triphasic medical system espouses this, Hey man, whatever works. so long as it works, it's appropriate. It's, you have more benefit than risk, and you're addressing the whole person. That's cool, man.

[00:16:07] Oscar: Triphasic because it is three different lenses of looking at different things.

[00:16:36] Oscar: and the joint pain to the orthopedist or however you want to do it, you just make sure that the person is good. The second circle is the environment. And this, we use this for cancer, but this could be the same model could be applied for anything. so you look at the person, you address those things, you look at their environment, are they, sleeping with their cell phone underneath their pillow with a wifi router underneath their bed and, inhaling paint fumes all day as a painter or sitting next to a printer somewhere and inhaling printer ink,their physical, chemical, and social environment.

[00:17:27] Oscar: So we look at the social, chemical and physical environment, the electromagnetic environment, and you ask questions around it. I work with a guy named Ted here that goes out to my patients homes with an EMF meter, like Ghostbusters, and tries to find where the EMF producing ghosts are and do something about it.

[00:18:04] Oscar: So 10 different women might have a colon cancer. But within the scope of the genomic analysis, one has a K RAS mutation, another one has a P53 mutation, another one has a, N RAS mutation, another one has a ERBB2 mutation, or one, or all of them. So those things can predict what pharmaceuticals, botanicals, nutraceuticals, dietary, and lifestyle.

[00:18:52] Oscar: It is. Arizona, Sedona or something. And, they have a pathology that is ERBB2 positive, which makes something called HER2 new, which they check for in breast cancer, but they don't check for in prostate cancer or colorectal cancer, any number of other cancers that can have a HER2 new mutation. And so, there are drugs like Herceptin or Pergida or HER2 that target these mutations.

[00:19:38] Oscar: It might help them make GABA, which is gamma amino butyric acid. Butyric acid is from among other things, butter. It's a four carbon fatty acid that helps you make GABA, which helps you feel more calm. and we say is GABA tenergic. So that addresses one of the many things in the person's fear of what's up with you?

[00:20:14] Oscar: To their internal tissues and gaba, or more specifically butyric acid. Not so much gaba, but butyric acid mildly inhibits her two new, so then it also targets the cancer and it feeding off of her two new. So when this one particular scenario, this one intervention kind of killed three birds with one stone, their anxiety, their dryness, and their HER two positive cancer.

[00:21:01] Oscar: It gets absorbed extremely quickly by passing your liver. Yeah. And it gets systemic real quick. it's true that the GABA thing and the HER2 new thing.so that's the fun part of like, what is the fewest number of interventions that we can put in this jam band that can have the biggest effect on this person, their environment and their pathology.

[00:21:51] Oscar: or, what the details of your cancer are, the standard of care, or as,

[00:21:55] Oscar: Christopher Hobbs, the famous mycologist friend of ours, who we were hanging out with not long ago, would say corporate medicine is just a one size fits all, and it's there to enhance the profits of huge corporations like Pfizer and the companies that make the pharmaceuticals and the chemotherapy, and also the corporations that sell procedures, like the surgeries and the biopsies and the radiation treatments and all those things,they're just missing the bigger picture and the artistry of, you know, medicine and looking at, uh, people in their, Individual scenarios,

[00:23:13] Meredith: You, you're, you may grow a beard. your body's going to go into a fake menopause, which causes a plethora of other issues. You're basically guaranteed to get Alzheimer's all kinds of other crap shuts down,Brain communication with all your whole infradian rhythm. Your whole cycle is just shot right from 13 years old.

[00:24:03] Meredith: And now we're actually finally dealing with that. The first. Legislation ever actually dealing with this issue of GMOs, psychedelics being suppressed in medicine, a myriad of the things that we've just talked about. It's sad that it got here, but the silver lining is people have really had to educate themselves and have had to be in positions like, holy shit, I'm gonna die to actually learn the truth.

[00:24:52] Meredith: And in the meantime, there's commercials about, just go on this pill and you might die, but the disease will be gone. What are your thoughts on this system? Where it's going?how it got here?

[00:25:18] Oscar: This was, I saw him speak live at Emory University back circa 2000.2008, probably seven or eight. And, he said, if you're, if you think that the system is broken, that the healthcare system is broken, I'm here to tell you otherwise. And everyone's what, are you claiming that it's not all messed up?

[00:26:07] Oscar: so when we think about health, we, if we really wanted to do good, we would think about, what is this going to mean for the cell?

[00:26:34] Oscar: So,

[00:26:51] Oscar: And,maybe we would have a more conscientious society, I'm looking forward to creating some change. Not so much within the system because I think it's so fucked and far so far down a line that, it has so much momentum going in one direction that is not helping health at all.

[00:27:24] Oscar: But when a white, top of her class at Stanford Medicine and her brother, a white well to do, Harvard Business School graduate, both see the writing on the wall and see the zoom out from their minutiae of treating patients at Stanford and zoom out and be like, wait, and then zoom out even more.

[00:28:08] Oscar: Then people are like, wait, hold on now. What these cuckoo herbalist and hippie people have been saying for a long time is true. About Big Pharma, the FDA, and the corruption, andhow the government isn't all about protecting me and my health. What? Yeah.

[00:28:28] Oscar: I'm not so much in favor of reforming it as much I am of just letting it run itself into the ground and starting Somewhere else entirely that doesn't have anything to do with the prevailing system, the system that we have, although I suppose it could be possible to pull up out of this nosedive.

[00:29:10] Oscar: For at least the big pharma slash big oil.and the,the senators and congressmen that are in the pockets of those guys, but. But anyway,I'm really, I'm excited, more excited than I have been in a long time about politics with RFK, somewhere in the mix and, and this will be fun.

[00:29:34] Meredith: but

[00:29:44] Mushrooms for Cancer Treatment

[00:29:49] Meredith: Shit's about to blow up for them. And I'm here for it. I'm fucking here for it. I've been waiting a millennia for this. What I'd like to go back to. When you were talking about cancer and really your work with cancer and mushrooms and your unique method of growing mushrooms, how you're using this for cancer treatment.

[00:30:22] Oscar: Yeah. In fact, she's going to be here in a minute to my office. Julie Stevens. So to answer the first part of the question, I'm involved, with a company that's been growing mushrooms for over 35 years.

[00:31:08] Oscar: we've had a third party tested compared to the bigger players in the marketplace for Mushroom nutraceuticals or pharmaceuticals as they call them. So we've done this in an extremely small scale. We're looking for investors to help us, make it at a big scale for both, nutraceuticals, pharmaceuticals, as well as foods or, mushroom sushi that we've made.

[00:31:59] Oscar: So the stuff that we made is all natural has a ton of protein cause it's made with this mushroom protein stuff. So we were growing in a way that no one has ever grown, but extremely small scale out of someone's house. So that's super exciting. so I do employ, mushroom medicine in a clinical practice.

[00:32:37] Oscar: I've been running that for a long time and sometimes I'll go forage and there's come back with a huge basket of Turkey tail

[00:32:45] Oscar: I'll get that to my patients to decoct and brew up. Or, we have some local growers that will grow some reishi, some turkey tail, some, uh, uh, lion's mane, some, cordyceps are all pretty local double extract.

[00:33:22] Oscar: I just ate some

[00:33:25] Oscar: hen of the woods by Taki. Mushroom, which is, and it was, it's probably one of the most delicious mushrooms I've ever eaten. And it was just growing on a friend of mine's tree out in his front yard. So,

[00:33:40] Oscar: Yeah. and, we got together with, another clinician friend of mine who that day had found some lion's mane heresy marinaceous.

[00:34:12] Oscar: So it's made community,they get it to me and I get it to the patients. I introduce people to, mushrooms that they've never heard of. we get them through chemo and or radiation with almost no side effects to where, my patients are running marathon literally, 10 K runs while they're in chemo treatment.

[00:34:46] Oscar: And they've done only two treatments or three treatments where it's minor, like treatment number six or seven. And they're complaining about, how slow they're five or 10 K is. And everyone's what do you mean you're complaining, like you're on. You're running and yeah, I'm running, but I'm slower than usual.

[00:35:04] Meredith: Incredible. And what would you say for people that, they don't have cancer, they don't even have an autoimmune, but they're interested in, maybe they're feeling like they have low energy, maybe have hormonal imbalances. They're coming to see you. They want to get started with mushrooms.

[00:35:41] Oscar: I would say exciting that you are getting started and, and your interest has been peaked, from the microscopical standpoint and mushrooms, And, if they're my patient, I would dial in the energetics of the mushroom to the energetics of the person.

[00:36:15] Oscar: Every day, your shiitake, your portabella, your white button mushroom, which is the same thing, your chanterelle, your oyster mushrooms, those are all, also fine, like they're good eats as Alton Brown here in Atlanta and Marietta says, and you can't really go wrong with them,in really any scenario.

[00:36:52] Oscar: that's a good safe bet. it covers, who's not anxious and who doesn't have a cardiovascular issue or lung issue. that pretty much covers most of America. if you don't have anxiety, you probably have some chronic lung or upper respiratory issue and you get,post nasal drip or chronic sinus congestion or quaff, whatever.

[00:37:32] Oscar: this is maybe not a great fit for them. cordyceps is another nice one that is a little bit more young kidney young. So if someone has a low libido is tired, maybe has chronic lung issues as well. You can dial in some cordyceps and you can mix it with the reishi and maybe some botanicals and obviously the diet and lifestyle and other nutraceuticals.

[00:38:12] Oscar: The second part of the question is there's so much crap out there. There is tons of crap out there in terms of quality and in terms of quantity. So, it's cool that there's coffee and gummies and, lotions and, God knows what every, chocolates. and it's getting, mushrooms in the faces of people more and more, which is cool.

[00:38:49] Oscar: So you go to a personal trainer and they're like, yeah, so we need to do all this stuff and you're like, how about we just do one curl for my bicep, once a week. And the personal trainer is going to be like, well, that's not going to do anything. why are you paying for that?

[00:39:27] Oscar: That is to say that the amount of beta D glucan and,A or B, if it's a Eurasium. Or these other compounds that exist individually per mushrooms are extremely low. It's also largely a substrate, you're growing mushrooms on rice and guess what's in your coffee rice, very little mushroom.

[00:39:53] Meredith: yeah,

[00:40:11] Oscar: Yeah. That you could add to, some Coca-Cola product. And you're actually getting into the therapeutic range with these concentrated, products that are chock full of, pharmaceuticals.or it could be gummies or, food items, sushi, the sauces. the sky's the limit. they don't taste great, but they don't taste that bad.

[00:40:48] Meredith: Yeah, it's the earth.

[00:41:08] Meredith: And that's the coolest thing about mushrooms. And when you have that quality, you're able to really get that and really communicate, not only with the earth, but with the mushrooms themselves in that way, I'd like to go back to your nonprofit Mojo. Oh, yeah. So

[00:41:26] Oscar: Mojo is launched. we had our launch party already and it was already like a hundred people.

[00:41:37] Oscar: she's one of my cancer patients who has become, so she came to, she's my age. She came to me in my office. I didn't know her with stage four, inoperable, chemo resistant, colorectal cancer.

[00:42:14] Oscar: We both love music and she's, her thing is like the jam band scene. She's been to hundreds of widespread panic shows and fish and debtor company. And, she got me into Billy strings. Which I freaking love. And we go to see concerts probably twice a week since we've been best friends, we started a nonprofit together, Mojo Health, to basically remind, patients and caregivers and physicians that there are more options besides your classical and, I don't want to say traditional, I want to say conventional approaches of just, poisoning you with chemo, burning you with radiation.

[00:43:08] Oscar: It's never a great idea, but it can be an okay idea in very few cases. And so we remind people that, okay, if they're Suppose that they're not going to go, the natural route, they're going to do the traditional, I'm sorry, the conventional route of chemo radiation surgery. you can have fewer side effects if you dial in the alpha lipoic acid.

[00:43:41] Oscar: So there's that, and there's also, okay, there are some things that are, more offensively, cytotoxic to cancer cells. And if you know the person, the environment, and the specifics of the cancer itself, you can dial in the specifics as to you're going to target BCL2 or P53 or the mTOR pathway or PI3K with these six toolboxes.

[00:44:26] Oscar: So there's a website. And you can go and type in your cancer and type in your symptoms or type in your chemo, and it will tell you, Oh, okay. I'm concerned about neuropathy. bam, you hit the button. It tells you how to mitigate that. I'm concerned about diarrhea there. Here's how to mitigate that across toolboxes, foods, botanicals, nutraceuticals, other things like chiropractic or acupuncture that's specific for diarrhea.

[00:45:09] Oscar: What we'd like to do is benchmark the healing experience. So is there a study that says that if someone with a KRAS mutation that has, this, the mold in their environment and runs anxious and puts, ashwagandha in their water every morning with a little lemon, do they fare better with overall survival or, adverse effects from, conventional therapy or a higher quality of life?

[00:46:05] Oscar: Maybe we find out that it doesn't help and it's a complete waste of time. That's cool too. But no one is looking. And so part of the goal for Mojo is to create this database scrubbed of personal information and just says, Hey, I put some lemon in my water every morning, these are, this is what kind of cancer I have.

[00:46:57] Oscar: It's, it sucks that they're going through it, but they want to, they typically, especially if they have a good experience. They want the next guy to have this. And so that's what Mojo is about is enabling every individual person to be part of a whole community to benchmark the data, to then be able to come back and say, out of the 10, 000 people that have colorectal cancer in the last two years that plugged their information in Mojo.

[00:47:37] Oscar: Interesting.

[00:47:40] Oscar: resources. we all love music. If you look closely, almost every page has a, what do they call it? A cookie, a hidden gem of something that has to do with a grateful dead lyric or a Billy Strings lyric. Or, widespread panic lyric. And so there's that too.

[00:48:18] Meredith: Actually, I feel like even more beneficial that it isn't like this double blind placebo clinical trial. Hell yeah, let's go, let's have that in the future, but it's literally I'm saying this from my own real life experience, and I think at this point in time, because people have been lied to and gaslit by the medical community, and just the integrity has been just destroyed for so long, I actually think it's more valuable To have that, to have what you're talking about as we, the people, because that's the only way that we're going to restore any kind of trust, not only in healthcare, but just in our own agency, in our own body and getting to know and listening to what our body's saying.

[00:49:27] Meredith: Can you guess what it is? It has to do with art. It is a biohacking with art question. Are you ready?

[00:49:37] Biohacking with art - cookbooks, music & mushrooms

[00:49:58] Oscar: So I'm not a very good musician, but I'm a musician at heart. So it would have to be music and, and I would layer in different instruments according to just reminds me of the cookbook that I want to make. At some point I want to make a cookbook because I don't know of a great one that takes into account the science of,nutrients and, phytochemistry and flavonoids, with the energy of cucumbers cooling and mint is cooling and up and diaphoretic and,butter is moistening.

[00:50:58] Oscar: So every ingredient would have. An instrument. So as you sizzle onions, it's like a shaker, like a little, and if it's like a Latin recipe of tacos or enchiladas or something, it's like you layer in the instrumentation with the layering of instruments. the health and mushroom experience is usually not static, like it's layered.

[00:51:34] Meredith: yeah,

[00:51:36] Oscar: Yeah. So I would. Choose a different instruments to be layered in. percussion is primal and so there would definitely be some percussion and it wouldn't be necessarily complex.and I would orchestrate,and for me, usually the psychotropic mushroom experiences are with other people and they add their own energy and flavor.

[00:52:16] Oscar: Just that person being there is so comforting.

[00:52:21] Oscar: And so I would add in some, a little playful,flute or something in there at times. And then,this kind of.maybe double bass and cellos of some soothing grounding kind of energy.I would orchestrate and I would associate the instruments to people and to depth of experience and, maybe make it playful, but also a little serious at times.

[00:52:50] Meredith: That's the key to really everything in life. Have fun. You may as well because the shit's happening. Yeah, you may as well enjoy. That's awesome. I haven't actually heard an answer like that. Yeah, I haven't actually beautiful and I love the idea of connecting sound with what we're putting in our mouths with food is nourishing,it's sound healing.

[00:53:26] Oscar: It sounds good. Yeah. But we have some say in that. So I can relate to it a whole lot. you do the visual artwork. which is cool. but that's not my first thing that, that I experience and feel and think of, by the way, do you know, there's some people.

[00:53:48] Meredith: Is that, I do. Are you talking about like tasting color? that's synesthesia. Okay. What's this thing you're talking about?

[00:54:07] Oscar: Someone says, think of a lemon. You can see a lemon, except for these people. They cannot see a lemon. And a lot of them don't know that they can't see a lemon or they don't know that other people can. No one has told them that people can. Other people,they close your eyes and say, okay, think of a Beatles song.

[00:54:43] Oscar: These same people, can't remember a face, so they have a hard time remembering people or,the sounds of someone's voice because it's auditory or some people have both. I know someone has both visual and auditory aphantasia, so that kind of blows my mind. And I wonder, it does, there ought to be a study on, psychedelics, be it mushrooms or something that, maybe help be a crutch to see the, these people can understand the concept of a lemon when their eyes are closed and they make it maybe see the word lemon spelled out in their head, but that's not the lemon, they can maybe remember a time that they felt a lemon in, in their life.

[00:55:36] Meredith: Psychedelic. So we can see lemons. I love it. Yes. It would be very interesting and necessary. I was just talking about that.

[00:56:05] Meredith: People retain information, they can absorb it. And to have all of those, to at least include, which it sounds like your biohacking with art project would, it's, it makes it just sink in deeper. it's very integrative.

[00:56:30] Oscar: They didn't know that people could hear these things. They didn't know that people could see. And I didn't know that people couldn't. And so we were both shocked at the same time for entirely different reasons. But it's just a reminder for us to, to remember that other people are not exactly like us.

[00:56:53] Meredith: And that's actually, our differences bring us closer to others rather than further away. Just like puzzle pieces fitting together. That is what the polarities and everything are for, for understanding the wholeness and the oneness.

[00:57:23] Oscar: it's something I'd like to do every week, but, she didn't know music at all, didn't, can't tell you if it's a Beatles or Metallica playing, no clue.partly because she grew up sheltered in a, Christian, situation, homeschooled, and partly because she just can't remember a damn thing about whatever she just heard a second ago, butmaybe because she has these aphantasia things and it's interesting.

[00:58:05] Oscar: And to your point, awareness precedes change. You mentioned earlier of how, a greater awareness around something can enable us to change. So, and give us avenues, there's always a silver lining. I don't always pretend. Or purport to know what the silver lining is, but it's there somewhere.

[00:58:24] Meredith: Oh, yes. Perfect. Perfect. Ending point. It has been such a privilege, like I said, to chat with you, just thank you for sharing your wisdom for sharing, your knowledge about mushrooms, about just your experiences. It's been absolutely incredible and so so so real most important part Tell us where people can find you learn more about your work Of course, we'll list all of this in the show notes, but where can people connect with you?

[00:58:57] Oscar: Yeah. Thank you The thing I'm most proud of is the mojo health org. That is more joy That's because why not whatever is chemo cancer or a hangnail Do whatever it is with more joy. So mojohealth. org is the nonprofit, lots of resources on there. Julie wrote a book. We have an EMF protecting blanket.

[00:59:33] Oscar: I don't have internet or wifi, but my neighbors do. So I can't control what they do.so there's mojahealth. org and then there's, my clinic, which is Sierra Botanica, and Collaborative Medicine. So, the website I think is sierracollaborativemed. org. I'm in Atlanta, more specifically Sandy Springs, Georgia, just north of Atlanta.

[01:00:10] Meredith: Hell yeah, Everyone go check all of those awesome resources out.

[01:00:38] Meredith: Bye.

[01:00:40] Meredith: If you liked this episode or you think this show would be useful for someone else, the best way you can show your support is to share it on your social media outlets with

[01:01:01] Meredith: YouTube or on Apple Podcast and pick up a signed copy of my book about how I healed myself from endometriosis on my Instagram at Meredith w Ochoa. Thank you so much for listening and for having the bravery to face your shit and heal yourself.