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“It's the whole Dionysian Apollo dilemma… We don't value this sort of just oozing with, like, some sort of naturalist phenomenon that maybe came to you through a walk in the woods or standing under a waterfall and picking fresh fruit off of a tree or just trying to eat some flowers or berries from a bush. Like, ugh, who said that was okay to do?” says Nathan Riley, Western-trained OB-GYN, who joins Mental Health in a Modern World to share how a journey through plant medicine—guided in part by legendary shaman Hamilton Souther—upended his traditional medical training and transformed his understanding of birth, death, and our collective crisis of embodiment.

A trailblazer at the intersection of holistic health and psychedelic medicine, Nathan Riley recounts his leap from pharmaceutical and surgical protocols to Amazonian wisdom and deep ceremonial work with psilocybin and ayahuasca, where practical and mystical insights now inform everything from postpartum care to the existential crises surrounding parenthood. He delves into the humbling lessons learned as both practitioner and student; the surprising, intuitive healing that emerges from surrendering to these master “allies”; and why reclaiming sovereignty over our bodies may be the most revolutionary act in today’s world.

Tune in to his powerful conversation with Greg Schmaus for a candid exploration of how ancient plant teachers—and the simple act of being in our bodies—hold the keys to meaning in the modern human experience.

5 Key Takeaways

Unlock transformative healing and deeper self-connection by embodying these insights from the conversation:

1. Develop a regular practice of intentional plant medicine or psychedelic ceremonies to foster personal growth, humility, and direct guidance from inner wisdom.
2. Set clear, authentic intentions when entering any ceremony or healing space—ask the plants or your own subconscious specific questions and state your desired focus for maximum clarity and empowerment.
3. Make yourself truly available for spirit, intuition, and deeper insight by cultivating stillness, subtracting distractions, and spending time in nature or silent space.
4. Reconnect with your body’s natural intelligence by tuning into somatic signals, emotional releases, and intuitive guidance, especially during moments of challenge or transition such as birth, parenting, or grief.
5. Trust and honor your unique path—embrace remembering who you are at your core, rather than constantly seeking external validation, gadgets, or additions to fill internal gaps.

Take one of these steps today: set aside time for stillness, reflect on your true intentions, or simply listen to your body's wisdom. Transformation begins with one choice.

Memorable Quotes

"I made an agreement with myself that every two to three weeks I would do a deep dive with psilocybin, nourish my own mushrooms, set up an altar, and have a conversation with the mushrooms to set intentions. Initially, it was very hard—months of just going through my own stuff. But at some point, I started the ceremony by talking to the mushrooms out loud and saying, 'I want to see your playful side' or 'I want to know how you want me to comport myself to be able to offer this medicine in a safe environment for others.' And then they show you."

"When you’re in the river, you’re not going to die—not with these medicines. There’s a part of you that might be left behind, but that’s stuff I didn’t need to carry as baggage anyway. There are strange allegories that come through, and it’s a full send—surrender, leaping into the waters and treading for a while, instead of grabbing onto a rock for dear life, just letting the current take me downstream."

"What’s most important is that many Eastern mystics have seemed to be on board with this for centuries. Since the age of enlightenment, if it’s not measurable, it’s not important—that, of all things, is just not useful to me anymore. There’s nothing more than you in this moment. If you want the world or your life to get better, you have to be willing to just be."

Connect with Nathan

Website - www.bornfreemethod.com

Instagram - www.instagram.com/nathanrileyobgyn

Resources Mentioned

Abundance Archetype (program by Jason Picard) – https://jasonpicard.org/abundance-archetype/

Sanctuary (offerings and teachings by Hamilton Souther) – https://www.bluemorphointernational.com/sanctuary

Connect with Greg

Website - https://www.healing4d.com/

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/4d_healing/

YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@gregschmaus

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-schmaus-22929589/

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Mentioned in this episode:

Embark on The HTM Journey

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Embark on The HTM Journey

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We've never been incentivized to be in our bodies.

It's the whole Dionysian Apollo dilemma.

We have this well boundaried, well figured man

who's out there doing the man thing. And then there's this other man that's

very androgynous, that's got maybe rolls of fat and is just

engorging themselves on grapes and indulging in

everything that comes with nature's bounty. Like, ooh,

that sounds gross. We don't value this sort of just

oozing with, like, some sort of naturalist

phenomenon that maybe came to you through a walk in the

woods or standing under a waterfall and picking fresh fruit off of a

tree or just trying to eat some flowers or berries from a

bush. Like, ugh, who said that was okay to

do? In a world moving faster than our minds were designed to handle,

mental health is becoming one of the defining challenges of our time. Welcome to

Mental Health in a Modern World with holistic health practitioner

Greg Schmauss. After overcoming severe anxiety and OCD

in his own life, Greg dedicated the past decade to helping others

heal through a fully integrated approach to mental health, combining

lifestyle coaching, psycho emotional healing, mindfulness,

and archetypal work. Over the years, he's facilitated thousands of

sessions guiding people back to peace, clarity, and a deeper

connection with themselves. Each week, Greg shares powerful solo

insights, conversations with leading voices in holistic healing, and

immersive live coaching sessions that take you inside the healing process

itself. New episodes every Friday, follow the show and start

reclaiming sovereignty over your mind in a modern world. Here's

Greg Nathan. Welcome to the podcast, man.

Good to see you again, Greg. Thanks for having me. Yeah. I was so excited

to see you on one of Hamilton's calls a few weeks back.

Yeah, Hamilton. What a guy. Yeah. I don't want to say he took me under

his wing because in essence, we're all kind of under his wing. He's, like, kind

of speaking to the world. But I had, like, a little

epiphany, you could call it, with actually the help of Jason Picard.

He. He took me through a BUFO experience, and it was a

very small, like, relative to what I've done in the past with psychedelics. It was

a relatively, like, brief, you know, quote unquote easy sort

of thing. But the set and setting were just so that it felt like

love pouring in. And there was all this, like, religious iconography,

which is not typically my jam, but it's a part of

Jason's journey. And. And anyways,

for those who don't know Jason Picard. He has this great program called

Abundance Archetype. Everybody should check it out because he's a really interesting cat. But

he, he's a friend of mine and we did this experience and I remember leaving

feeling like this message like you need to learn from plants, you need to sit

with plants. And I wasn't using plant medicines. I toad

five meo and am I supposed to be doing something with this? And I thought

maybe that means I'm supposed to be doing herbalist work or whatever. And then it

was like, no, it's not that. It's the thing that maybe I haven't been

avoiding. It was like the tool that is hard to harness

as a tool. It's not learning what an herb does or a plant does.

It's, you need to go deeper and sit with these master allies, these, these

mushrooms and ayahuasca. And that's exactly where it led me.

So I have a lot of, you know, credit to do to, to,

to provide back to Jason that the first person I called was

Hamilton. And Hamilton Souther is a, he wouldn't use this word, but

he's a, a shaman living in, in Peru. He's a

medical vegeta lista, which is what I'm training to be now. And

I called him up because I was like, I'm getting this calling, man, I think

it's time. And he was like, yeah, you've probably always been getting that calling

and it was just a matter of time before you kind of situated in that.

And so I'm a Western medical doctor trained to do surgery and

pharmaceuticals and all this other stuff. And, and what I kind of

rounding out my understanding of that calling is that there's

just certain things that you can't do, a lot of things you can't do

with the most medical approach. There's a lot of things you can do I couldn't

do in these strange worlds of birth and death, which is where

I focused all my medical training. And,

and you know, he was like, well, let's get to work.

And, and that's how, you know, I get invited to those calls that you get,

you know, that you're sitting with. And I'd be curious, Greg, are you also looking

to do more work and maybe start facilitating that? Is that your journey

too? Yeah, I started Palchak was my first

introduction to psychedelics and plant medicine work. And a few years

ago I, I started assisting our mutual friend Payam's

ceremonies. Oh yeah, uh huh. So I had been assisting

for about three, three or four years, his ceremonies.

And last year, he and I were

facilitating together a small men's group. And one of my

clients who sat with us in that ceremony

had a few years back, sat with Hamilton, and he

mentioned it that weekend. And when we were in ceremony, I just got

that intuition that I need to study with Hamilton.

And so I had reached out to Hamilton, had a conversation with

him, and he said, look, if you want to join the academy, like, love to

have you. And it was just a full yes. Earlier this year, I

started that. That journey. And it's really been beautiful,

really taking some of the principles of his

teachings and working with Sanctuary and a lot of his offerings

and bringing that into the ceremony work that I was

assisting in, but now moving into kind of a different role.

For me, psilocybin has been my greatest

teacher. Same for me, that's the medicine that

when I work with it, it's just such a

beautiful relationship of

learning, of discovering. There's for me just so much

humility that I feel when I'm sitting with those teachers.

And just the wisdom that pours in for me is just

invaluable. And my. My work has been a lot of

mental health and working with the psyche and working in the

archetypal realm. And psilocybin has really

connected so many dots that otherwise were

missing. Yeah. And so, yeah, I'd love to

hear your journey in that realm as well.

Yeah. I mean, you and I are very similar in that regard, where there's

a deep humility to the work as well, where it's like, gosh, I'm going to

start doing this now. Like, and you've done your. You have your

whole. All of the programs you've developed, you've been focusing on

doing this a certain way. And then I don't know if this is true for

you, but for me, it's like you hit a point where it's like, I can't

go any further here. I need to find some other path. It's like walking up

a stream on a trail and you have to cross a river.

And it's like there's nowhere to go unless I go backwards, which sometimes we

do, and we look for other trails, and those get us just so far. And

then we eventually have to cross this, like, bubbling,

you know, raging rapids is sometimes what it seems like.

And the questions I had are like, where do babies come from? Like, what is

birth? What is death? Where do we go? Where do we come from? This mental

health stuff just. It's just crippling Our

society. And sure, it's a societal issue. It's not

like a deficiency in psilocybin or psilocin or

DMT or whatever. However, you know, however, when you start

to have those experiences and you start deepening your relationship. I love that you use

that word with the plants. They start to pull back layers of this

veil that is very thin for me right now. So much so that some of

the insights I'm getting through these journeys are like

directly practical things that I then try and they work.

So I don't think that there's like necessarily a right or wrong

way for me to go about this. It's just a full send

surrender. Leaping into the waters and then treading for a while

instead of grabbing onto a rock for dear life, just letting the

current just take me downstream. And maybe there's a trailhead down there,

maybe there isn't. But I know I'm a strong swimmer, I can get out of

the river at any time. And, and it's

also kind of like knowing like, hey, this is controlled like this,

this. I don't want to say it's a simulation, but like, when you're in the

river, you're not going to die. Not, not with these medicines. There's

a part of you that might be left behind, but that's stuff that maybe I

didn't need to carry as baggage anyway. So there's these strange

allegories that come to, you know, come through and, and

for me that I,

I sort of made an agreement with myself that every two to three weeks I

would do a deep dive with psilocybin and that I nourish my own

mushrooms. I have access to all of that. I set up an

altar, you do the sage, you do all the things and then

you have a conversation with the mushrooms and you set some intentions. And,

and, and that initially was very hard. It was like

four months maybe of just going through my own stuff. And that's what people

call like a bad trip where, you know, you take three and a half grams

or something and you're just rolling around kind of crying, maybe reaching out for

something. And there's just this desperation feeling. It was

never really quite a desperation for me, but a lot of people feel that. So

I'm just saying that to reflect that back to people. Like, it's not easy work.

But what was interesting, and this is where the actual like facilitator

process comes in, is that at some point it was like, you know, I'm tired

of going through the stuff like from my Childhood. I'm

tired of going through this weird dance that my mom and I do or the

past stuff with my dad, who he's since passed away, so there's no resolution to

that. Anyways, I would literally start the ceremony

by talking to the mushrooms, like out loud and saying,

hey, I want to see your playful side. Or hey,

I want to know. I'm doing this now. Like, I'm in here, I'm with you.

I need to know what you want me to. How you want me to

comport myself in order to be able to offer this medicine in a

safe environment for other people. And then they show you, like, the Council

of mushrooms or whatever it is. And that's a really neat

thing, isn't it, Greg? Where you, like, actually can get like a direct

response at times. I'm glad you

brought this up because one of the experiences that I've had

until working with Hamilton is

I always entered ceremony with medicines just

open to whatever they had to share. And

a lot of times it would go back to childhood. It would go back to

emotional processing and stuff like in my system that still needed to be

worked there. And I get that. Yeah, yeah. But then hearing from

Hamilton, where it's like, you can tell them what you want.

It's like, hey, I want to work on this, or I want to focus on

this, or I want answers to this. Right. And there was so much more,

almost like spiritual agency that you

are allowed to bring to the relationship

that now, for me, I feel so much more empowered

going into the ceremony. Like, I am stepping into

a relationship and, yeah, this is what I would like to get out of it.

And as long as it's in integrity, they will

participate in that. I love that. Like now you're not just

get like getting thrown around the tide, so to

speak, of consciousness, you're able to really use intention

and create that relationship with more sovereignty.

Yeah, yeah. There's really no control here.

It's more of a setting up the

path. And then when you're in, you have to let go and just go down

the path. You've asked for the path. And so if you go in thinking,

I don't want to do this, I don't want to do this, I don't. You

might be unintentionally setting a path that you really don't want to have. And that's

what I think. The fear piece that Hamilton actually speaks quite a bit about.

Like, what are you afraid of? I'm

afraid of having a bad time. Well, buckle up, buckaroo. But if you're actually

afraid of. Maybe you're not afraid. Maybe you go in and you're like, I'm really

excited to learn to meet a new ally. Like a new spirit animal or

something, which has happened to me now several times. And I

document it in my journaling. I draw them and I like, there's these strange

figures. He's like, oh, yeah, I want to know all the allies. Hamilton. He's like,

there's like infinite number of these little things that are a part of. I think

they're little slivers of our own psyche that emerge and then they actually

can be used in different ways. But if you ask the right questions and

you set the right intentions, and it's all in integrity, it's all

authentic. It's not like, hey, mushrooms,

like, you're not negotiating. They're like, well, like, we're not gonna. First

off, they're not gonna give you more than you can handle, which kind

of draws into. Into my sort of consciousness or my

awareness, this notion that, like, God doesn't give you more than you can,

you know, can carry or whatever. I'm not a Christian, but. But there's that essence.

And I do wonder if a lot of those ideas came out of, you know,

some of these psychedelic experiences back in the day. And we won't get into, like,

was that. What's that guy's name? The immortality key guy? Yeah, yeah.

That the original Eucharist was maybe a psychedelic. Yeah, something. I mean,

there's very compelling reasons, I think, for us to believe that, because what you

can see here is the veil starts to thin. You're no longer

you. Greg's no longer Greg. We're in some other space. And you

have an infinite, unlimited, I should

say, range of opportunity there to ask

the right questions. Even in the ceremony, you can get clarification on things. And

so the work of working with Hamilton now, I'm.

I'm honing those skills. And even in

offering ceremonies to others, which I've started to do, but very, very

humbly, I don't charge money for it. It's like for a really good

friend's 50th birthday, I just did something for him. And.

And you then also start to pick up on even. Even a low dose

of mushrooms, like, I don't know, maybe like 2 grams or something, and they're on

like a 3 and a half, 4 gram dose or something. I have my full

composure, but I'm still feeling like, whoa, that veil is really thin right now. And

you start to Get a feeling like, huh, we need more Kapal over here. Or

we need a different type of music or we need to shake some rattles or

we need to maybe play something on the tarongo. Like there's all these other elements

where you actually start to be able to move and play with that energy. And

then they come out and they're like, I don't know what you were doing, but

that was amazing. And it doesn't seem like you're doing anything. You're just

intuitively kind of feeling your way through the space, not just randomly making noise or

randomly doing this or that you start to actually pick up on. Like, I think

we need this. And then you try it and you feel something move away

from them. It's really, really beautiful. So that's the journey right

now, Greg, is every couple weeks heavy, you know, heavier and

heavier doses. Call these meso doses, like a 4 gram dose. So it's not

more than 5 or 6, which is when you get into like, I'm melting into

the floor land. But there's enough there where I'm like, I have

to lay down and I have to like really kind of compose myself because it

is a bit of a treacherous, you know, uplifting there.

And then you go for as long as you need to go and, and then

you reconcile it, you start journaling it and then you improve. Yeah,

there was one. One other thing I'll say is that these direct,

practical things that are coming through now are quite interesting because

deep inside of me, let's say, I have a deep longing or a deep

yearning to help my wife with a problem. And then like

a, an implement will come through and then I will try it and it will

work like something locked up in her pelvis or something like that.

Using a rattle to this particular song at this cadence, after

wrapping her belly with like a postpartum, like a cotton wrap, you

know, around her abdomen, really, really tight, the mushrooms will say directly, like,

you need to help her come back together, come back to center. And that sounds

like a bunch of woo, woo, whatever kind

of stuff. But they're like, if you do it this way, it'll help her come

back to center. And we try it and it works. So my wife had

like this really, really bad back pain and it was probably related to

iliopsoas tightness, which is a big muscle that runs from your lower back down to

your like mid thigh. And it helps flex your, your knee towards your,

towards your chest. And it's a part of your, the hip flexors as we

call them. And after having babies, I think this

has been like a. A tightness for her. And you could. You could look at

it as a pelvic issue, you could look at as a musculoskeletal issue alone.

These muscles oftentimes are the. The place where a lot of emotional

stuff gets stored up. It's very emotionally sensitive part of our body, the pelvis, which

is the second chakra, it's the root chakra. It's like this whole. Even the solar

plexus is involved here. And so in your work, I'm sure, I mean, this is

like a big part of what you do. So we've got all this emotional stuff

tied up based on stories we've told ourselves, based on things other people have

imprinted into our own energetic bodies and into our minds and in

our souls at that level. And so you could go to the PT

and they'll do some work. And the acupuncturist, they'll do some work. You could get

some hydration and electrolytes, magnesium, breakthrough, like, whatever it is. And that

may help, but what's actually going on in here? And so when

I was given this message, I said, let me try this. And I laid her

down and I immediately took this rattle and put it. I

was told, put it halfway between the heart and the uterus and just press

there. And then at this point in the song, it like, even told me, pick

up the rattle at this point in the song, you're going to go,

like, on that spot. And immediately my wife, well, afterwards,

she said, when you put the rattle there, it was a tender spot. She's like,

I don't know why I would have pain there. It doesn't make any sense to

me, but it was like, oh. And there was a bit of an emotional release

just from having the rattle in that spot. And then we're going up and down,

up and down, up and down at this particular cadence. This beautiful

Peruvian. I wish I knew the name. Her. Her name. But this Peruvian

charangista, this little charongo, this an Indian.

And she's playing this song. It's like eight minutes long, and the whole time I'm

rattling. And she

said there was this crazy emotional release during it. And it could be. My

skeptical mind is it could be that her husband, who loves her so much, is

just taking time to care for her. That's a part of it. But there was

also, she said, a very physical something happening just by having the rattle in that

spot. And the second time we did it, it was like overly sensitive. So I

had to just like kind of, kind of roll the rattle on her belly.

The reason I'm saying all this is that I, I don't know if we have

a mechanism that explains why that worked, but it did work. And now

it's on us to say, well if it worked, let's try to

reproduce that. And if that then becomes a tool that I've learned in less

than a year of really deep, a deep intensive study on this, so

to speak, experiential study on this, then you can imagine how

somebody who grows up, let's say in the Amazon, right? I'm not comparing myself

to a shaman, but somebody, a small child who's sort of been gifted

with some extra sensory perceptibilities in the Amazon,

is raised with ayahuasca, for example.

And they're just learning these things, like they're just

getting told the jungle has this to offer and there's this plant and

there's this way of being and there's this way of eating. You just develop

all of these tools over maybe 60 years and then you're a 70

year old quote shaman and you just know what to do.

Like oh, Greg has this issue, let's do this thing. Oh, that didn't work well

in my experience. Then we do this thing after that and maybe that will help

resolve it and maybe you need to come back again. But you can imagine

how over so many years of studying medicine and surgery, you learn all the

tools. Well, if you study this and experience this for so many years, you,

you broaden a toolkit that is very un, very

dissimilar to what we learn in the western sciences, so to

speak. But it's just as scientific, it's empirical and

through oral tradition, many of these people were saying, hey, you don't even need to

experience it. I know this other tool. And then, well, I have this tool and

you have that tool and they're all exchanging this information. That to me is so

much more interesting and exciting than what I had been doing for most

of my 20s and 30s. Yeah, I'll stop there.

No, it was really beautiful what you were sharing. And it's so

resonant with one of my experiences over the last few years.

Stepping into, in assisting and co facilitating

role is taking like you said, like

1, 2, let's say grams of psilocybin and stepping into that

role as facilitator. There's

this intelligence that's within you

that's now just directing you and it's like, oh. Like, it's

like I know exactly what needs to be done. I don't know how I know

this, but I know I need to put my hand here. I need

to use my breath this way. I need to use this rattle in this way.

I need to place a little Palo santo right here and

press on this part of the body. And all of a sudden, it's like I'm

just being guided. I'm being moved in a way that I

have never felt like or experienced before.

And, you know, even, like, working on people's bodies,

because I was a massage therapist for a long time, and working on

people's bodies with psilocybin was just a whole nother experience

of being moved to how the body needed to

receive therapeutic touch. And

it was such a profound experience the initial few times where you were just,

like, receiving instruction and you were just moving

accordingly. And I asked the

medicine once. I'm like, this is really profound. Like, how.

How can I really apply this and integrate this outside

of ceremony? And the message I received is, you're already

doing it. You just don't fully trust it. And it

removed the barrier of mistrust in

myself and in my own intuition. And it was almost

like this. This idea of, like, unconscious competence, of,

like, let me show you what you're already doing but

aren't aware of it. And let's remove the barrier

of mistrust. And now, like, the channels are open.

Yeah. And it was really, really beautiful to come to

that awareness.

It kind of sounds like growing up. Yeah. In, like, the opposite

direction, though, because, like, kids, you've got a bunch of

stepchildren, correct? Four, maybe three.

Three, okay. Yeah. And when you see these little kids, they're not

trying to perform for themselves or anybody else. They're literally

just letting their bodies and minds be guided by something.

And there is some fancy there. It's not just that they're seeing real things

and that they see the grid and we don't. I mean, maybe. Maybe babies. I.

I don't know who. Who knows? It doesn't really matter. But they

haven't yet. The point here is that they haven't yet been conditioned to do

things based on somebody else's expectations. So

if you were to. I mean, pretty much every. Every level of our

society, there's like, an instruction book imposed

upon you, and you're conditioned to read that instruction book for everything from

paying taxes to whatever

navigating civil responsibility to, I don't know, tending

a garden. What's your yard supposed to look like you're supposed to have short grass,

not just to have an edible forest in your front yard that goes against

the whatever city, you know, regulations or.

So there's this like myriad of things that tell you not to trust

yourself is kind of important. And in my work in birth, this is like a

big part of what you have to work on families with. And I still don't

have a clear answer for people, but there's no right way to have a baby

and there's no right way to die either. And

for many women, we beat these drums. We're like, you need

to stand up for yourself and advocate for yourself. And meanwhile, they've had maybe

33 years of listening to somebody else to

approve of how they're living their lives or what they're, you know,

agreeing to. They're, they're, they're consenting to or what

they're declining. And then you add to that layers of community

whereby you don't want to become excommunicated because you did things differently. We saw

this happen during COVID People are just not used to listening to their

own internal compass and to

harp on the parenting thing again. I read this book by Alfie Cohn called, I

think it's called Unconditional Parenting. And he, he makes this point

the whole, his whole thesis in this book is that when we

guide children, especially at these young ripe ages,

to do the things that we want them to do using a risk

reward system, we're basically telling them you have to fawn

for the affection of superiors in order to

not only be valuable, but also in order to

survive. So cast out your own internal

sort of moral compass of good and right and wrong.

Do it this way and you'll, you'll be okay. And so we see

that in the path to becoming a doctor. Like the doctors are such

compliant people. They have been so good at saying yes sir and yes ma'

am their whole life, that when you get to the point where you want them

to change their practices or you want them to maybe open their minds to home

birth or something, it's just not possible. They don't even have a

framework. Even if there is a little something, a little glimmer

of like maybe that is a good idea. They've been so conditioned to look to

other authority figures as a means of

finding guidance for how to, to do their job or to live their life.

Yeah. And when you're in these mushrooms and you start getting this stuff coming

through, it's. I agree with you. It's sort of like, are the trees

always that green? Like, I even feel like we have,

like our senses are dulled because it's too

exciting to see the woods and hear the power of nature. So let's

just like, condense it down into this very

pinpoint lived experience. Now how do we

trust that, like, those insights that you're getting are true or not? I, I

don't know and I don't really care. Yeah, if it works for Greg

and it feels right to Greg, maybe we should honor that. Greg intuitively

feels like this is the right way to go. You know what? I actually need

to go this way. But Greg is being told, go that way. And Greg,

go for it, man. Go for it. Do that thing

or receive that, that medicine or,

I don't know, bend over and smell that flower. Something really good's gonna happen.

And we do this to little kids, going back to the kids. We have

places to go. You can't be doing that. You can't be doing this. And they

might be exploring, like, pollen for the first time

on, you know, some flower that's in the garden. So

something guided them there, like, let them do that. There's some reason that

they're smelling this flower. And it's not just to learn about pistols and

stamens. It's that there's something there that is moving

them towards doing this thing. And we've gotten so caught up here.

The biohacking space, the doctors of all types. It's not

just the mds, it's the nds, it's the chiropractors.

Everybody's so caught up here because they want to create that new viral

reel and that new marketing scheme that's going to get them a little extra

business or help them outshine the others when we really need to be

dropping into here. This is where all of those feelings come from.

And we've never been incentivized, Greg, you know, this is better than anybody.

We've never been incentivized to be in our

bodies. You know, it's, it's the whole

Dionysian Apollo dilemma. We have this,

this well boundaried, well figured man

who's out there doing the man thing. And then there's this other man that's

very androgynous, that's got maybe rolls of fat and is just

engorging themselves on grapes and indulging in

everything that comes with nature's bounty. Like, whoa,

that sounds gross. We need this. We need

regimented, articulated

intelligence, not this other thing, which is also

intelligence. We just don't value it. We don't value this sort

of just oozing with, like, some sort of

naturalist phenomenon that maybe came to you

through a walk in the woods or standing under a waterfall, which we just did

at Havasupai Falls, or going and picking fresh fruit off of a

tree or just trying to eat some flowers or berries from a

bush. Like, ugh, who said that was okay to

do? Right? So, anyways, I'll. I'll stop there. Again.

Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. And what was coming up for me, as you're sharing is just

the filter that

societal familial conditioning creates over

reality and how over time, we see

a narrower and narrower and narrower lens of

perception. And how, from my experience,

what these medicines do is they give you a moment of removing the

filter. And I know we talked a little

bit about what we're learning. Like, we're learning all these incredible new

things, but I think it's more of a remembering.

We're more remembering the things that we

implicitly knew but forgot because of the filter.

And so I feel as though these medicines

are helping us remember the things we forgot

rather than learning something new. One thing I'm really curious about

is because so much of your work, really, your.

Your entire professional career has been around the two most

important transitions, and you could say ceremonies,

which is the entrance and the exit, the arrival

and the departure. And so I would love to hear how your

work with these plans has begun to shape or

reshape your work with those two

ends of the human experience.

It's validating in some ways, and in other ways, it is

made. Has made it far more confusing. I'm still desperately

looking for some answer to where babies come from.

And yet there's, like, little hints of it when you're in these

ceremonies. So ayahuasca is interesting. It's different from

psilocybin. And so, yeah, let me relate to

ayahuasca for a second. I hadn't ever done used ayahuasca or

sat with ayahuasca for, you know, all the

years that everybody's been talking about psychedelics. It just was never a

calling for me. It was never like a, hell, yes. So I was

invited. It was always like, do you want to do this? Maybe I

should pursue it. And it was never really there. And then. And then, you

know, as soon as I met Hamilton, my wife actually had already signed me up

for an ayahuasca retreat, because I was like, you know what? I think I'm ready.

And then the epiphany with Jason came. And then I talked to Hamilton. I was

like, it's funny. I'm going to sit with Ayahuasca in a couple months when I,

you know, had kind of started this training.

So I went down to Costa Rica and, you know, you take a big cup

and then you take more. And then, like, when you take more, it's like you

go over the edge and some weird stuff starts really happening.

I don't even know if I would have needed to go the extra cup. But

at one point, I mean, I'll give you this example. And

this actually does tie into even Rudolf

Steiner's kind of worldview. And actually what's, what's funny is

the story I'm about to tell. There was a signal that came through that said

Steiner was right. And I don't know if that was me telling myself that

or if it was from the council, the Ayahuasca Council in this case, but

at least about this thing, Steiner was right.

So I

entered a direct dialogue with. I don't know, people would say God,

and I'm not sure if that word is suitable because it doesn't really matter what

you call it. There's this access to

literally everything. And in the dialogue, it was

like there was this new model of how life is created. And it

was a very passive process almost that, like, the universe

or nature can't help it. And

I don't have this model yet dialed in, but since you asked about the

birth thing, if everything is being created passively, and I have a

story about becoming a plant as well, which actually validates a little bit of this.

But I was said, it was told to me, okay,

imagine that there's like a, a creative impulse.

It's almost like, like a, like a sky hook being dragged. And

it's, it's just bound to pick up something on its way. Like, it's.

It's bound to pick up something. What is it, what is it going to pick

up? It's going to pick up a song which is this feminine property

in the universe, and then that song is going to be molded. And if you

want to look at, like, staffs of, you know, musical notes, this is

not only the notes, but also how the cadence,

how that music was going up and down the scale,

maybe the bars. Like all of that boundary making is

the masculine. And with the feminine, you get the song. With the masculine, you actually

get the, the. The musicality of it. And.

And yet there's a creative impulse that's kind of pushing this forward. And so

when you get the masculine and feminine rolling around you end up with this

product which has masculine and feminine, feminine qualities

and we call it music. So I'm

still working on that model. And how the. The feminine, like

a female body in the womb, space, this center of life force energy,

the urus, how this actually plays in. But I don't think it's

any different from what happens when new stars are formed in the sky,

in the, in the cosmos, whatever. And so

I don't know if I was fully, like, when I took the second

cup, this is just one of the ayahuasca experiences. There was a one

cup. I got this interesting little, like, literally on a whiteboard. Greg. It

was pretty wild. And then I took the second cup and the voice went

away. And then something more came through and I became a plant.

And in the jungles down there in the tropics, there's

so much noise, there's so much growth happening.

And the council was like, this is what

it feels like to be a plant. And it was like being stretched

in every direction, every cell or whatever. I don't really

believe that there are cells until you're dead. But there's a living

protoplasm, this thing that is Nathan. I could feel every bit

of myself vibrating and being pulled in some

direction. They were like, do you see, like, how connected the plants are?

Like, we have been here for so long

and you guys come in, you're brand new here. The

animals were here first, and then the humans came. And you guys are pretty special

because you're the youngest ones here and you haven't yet learned how to

cooperate with nature. You are not separate from. You were a part of

this. And when you learn that, everything else will change your entire

worldview of how this story that we've told us, humans being the shepherd

of planet Earth, that's nonsense. We're like the babies, they're taking care of us

and just making sure that our mistakes are corrected and

we're guided in some way or the other. And. And so we can get into

like, environmentalism or anything. I. I was, you know, it was sort of like, yeah,

you poison the stream and the frogs, they call back their population,

and then other organisms go in and clean up the stream, and then the frogs

come back. Like, we're all in this together. You guys don't have that

much power. You're babies and you're knocking over blocks

and we're just picking them up. That was kind of the message. The reason that

those two things connected was. It was even like, you can't break

a branch off and expect that we're going to even notice because we are constantly

creating. There is an impulse to create

every moment of every day. For time immorium,

there is creation happening everywhere, from the subatomic all the way

up to the cosmic. And you guys feel so

important. You guys feel like everything you do is so relevant.

And it is relevant, but it's not the whole story. Like, we're

not here juggling whatever humans put out there. We're

trying to just keep you guys from killing yourselves.

And if you do kill yourselves, that's fine, you'll be back. Like, that's just how

this process works. So feeling that that passive

creation process for me really drew into quite

a bit of what I would regard as probably a part of

what's become pre and perinatal psychology. I'm not sure how familiar you are with that,

but Stan Groff, Tom Verney they were just describing

what a baby might remember while in the womb or before

coming into the womb, and then pontificating based on

observations for children that develop into adults with various, what we call

mental health disord, even anxiety and depression and

unwillingness to work on hard problems. Like all of this stuff struggling in school.

In other words, all of this stuff they were able to associate with not only

how were the babies conceived, but how the babies came into the world. And

many people are remembering what happened in the womb. We're not supposed to remember that

or what happened before they were in the womb. And we get into the spirit

babies conversation. So all of these really abstract themes

started coming together. And then when I started having these experiences with

some of the plant medicines, including mushrooms, it wasn't just. It wasn't just ayahuasca.

It was like, oh, maybe babies and mothers do choose each other.

That's fine, maybe. But what's more important here is there is a passive

creation process. There's this impulse to procreate

that is not really in our control.

And if birth is not in our control, then death can't be in our

control either. Because when one door closes, one door opens. I don't know which one's

first. Doesn't really matter. We're talking about the immaterial or the material

that there's this magical thing that is happening where we get from a little whiff

of time, like a little blink, we get to be in this physical

form and whatever happens afterwards is fine. There's going to be this

creative impulse for not us like me maybe

to be reincarnated, but Some essence of me to be

reincarnated. Because essence just isn't destroyed. And when people

say you come back as a butterfly, it's not like Nathan's going to have wings

and be like, oh, my God, this is great. It's. There's some essence of Nathan

and the butterfly. Which is why when your father passes away and you're getting visited

by cardinals, maybe there is something to that. I don't know

what's most important, Greg, and then I'll. I'll shut up for a few minutes, is

that many of the Eastern mystics and the Eastern philosophies have

seemed to have been kind of on board with this

for many, many, many, many centuries. And so since

our. Whatever you want to call it, the age of enlightenment, this

sort of age of this scientism, this thing, if it's

not measurable, it's not important. That of all

things, is just not

useful to me anymore. It's useful if you chop off your arm and

I need to put it back on or something. It's not. Go to a different

type of doctor. That's not me. But anyways, let me. I'll just pause there. I'm

sure there's a lot coming up for you. Well, it's really, really beautiful.

And actually what was coming up for me was before we got

on to recording, we were talking about the darkness. Yeah.

And my time, my time in the darkness was so much about

going back into the womb and going back

into what felt more like a cosmic womb. And

by day, I'd say by day three in there,

Started to really tap into this

creative energy of the cosmos

and how the real intention and the

real kind of basis of the cosmos is creation.

We're here to create. We're creative beings.

And how much our Western culture

and modern society has turned us into

consumptive beings. Yeah. And

how the whole model of consumerism

has disconnected us from our own divinity,

because our own divinity is creation.

And coming out of the darkness, all I

wanted to do was create. I didn't want to consume, I

wanted to create. And now integrating

back into modern society, I

see how strong that gravitational pull into

consumption is and how much that

disconnects us from our connection to source.

And so really just. Just a beautiful

reminder of that

deep, deep desire to create.

And that being the, I think, what is

called the will pleasure of God, which is

creation. Can I add something, please? Go.

Yeah. You had mentioned before we started recording, you mentioned there was a deep feminine.

Or you. You alluded to it here, too. This Deep feminine quality

to being in the darkness. Yeah. And we brought up, like, sleep

or not sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, tanks, and.

And how, like, profound it can be. And people are talking about the magnesium and

this and that. Like, no, it. It is really neat to just not have any

sensory input except for maybe like a little bit of a

water feeling, like I'm a little wet, but even that kind of goes away in

the tank. I haven't done the darkness retreat yet, but I'm leaving tomorrow for

Aspen for this. And what you shared about this feminine

quality in this sort of impulse to create, which I also

had experienced so deeply in.

In Costa Rica, It.

It actually really pays. It should turn our

attention to not just the importance of creating

life, but to creation in and of itself.

And the fact that you had said that it was a deeply

feminine property really draws into question a lot of the

feminist notions of, like, what's important about

women. And so I'm not going to go down that path too far.

But there is a feminist author named Camille

Paglia. I don't know if you heard of her before. No, I haven't. She wrote

a book that you would really love. What I know about your work, it's called

Sexual Persona. It's like 36 hours on audible. It's a

big book. It's actually quite dry, too. You take it in small sips.

But her whole thesis is that most of what

we see in civilization is due

to men's desire to try to show

that they can be creative, too. And so

there's a line, I think it's from her book, but maybe it was somebody

paraphrasing her work. But it said something like, there will never

be a female Shakespeare. For the same reason there will never be a female Jack

the Ripper. Women don't have to do spectacular things

in order for their magic to be known. And when we say magic, we're

not talking about mystic, we're talking about magic tricks. There is a magic trick

that a woman can do in creating a human being inside of her.

That is practical magic happening in front of your eyes. Which is

what drew me into this work to begin with. The mystical is more of

the intuitive kind of feeling your way through

and getting the insights from here and there. Like, that's really,

really great, too. And it doesn't discount or

it's not exclusive to magic. But without even

trying, a woman can create life.

Now, I'm not saying it's not an effort and all that. Like, that's not what

I'm saying. It is it is an impulse that when it gets picked

up and it's maybe facilitated by something from the man and

something from the woman meeting, that's all fine and dandy.

The men can't do that. And if you imagine like years and

years and years ago that you see this magic trick happening,

what can men do that's even comparable to that? We

can write the greatest poetry. We can come up with incredible

literary works that survive 600 years.

We can build bridges and skyscrapers

and bank accounts and

whatever bit blockchain.

We can do all of this really cool. And most of it is done by

men. Does that mean that women are not competent? No, it's because men are trying

their very best to show that they're also a little magical.

And whether you think that's magic or not, it's not really the point. Women are

gifted, this. And so why would women have the impulse to create

skyscrapers? They have the ultimate impulse inside of

them at all times. There's something

really beautiful, Greg, about what you said about being in the womb, where you actually

get to feel that again. And maybe men

also have this, but they haven't ever been incentivized or

rewarded for tuning into it. And maybe we never will have

it and we shouldn't have it, but it certainly does bring into

reverence our relationship to the feminine. This incredible. And I

wouldn't even say it's just the feminine, it's the impulse that happens to live

inside of women and not men. At least this time

around, I don't have that impulse. So the

whole Jack of the Ripper thing is what and whatnot is. Is an interesting allegory

because it's like we men do these incredibly big,

sometimes terrible things because we want

the world to know that we are special, too. And women don't have to prove

that to anybody. Yeah. So when we get into archetypes and we

get into all this type of stuff, it's like the story of Iron John and

all of that. It's quite interesting that, like, women kind

of just like, can just brush it aside. My wife is a great

example of this. Like, I don't need to do an Iron man

triathlon. I'm a fucking woman. I give birth.

Yeah. We're far more Dionysian than Apollonian,

which is so interesting. Yeah. We're. We're in this

desperate search for our own innate sense of

value. Yeah. Men. Men are men. Men, men. Yeah.

Women have that built in. And it's just. It's right there. And

I could see how Us men can become overly

ambitious, overly performative, overly in pursuit

of this, which can become this externalized

sense of value in the world, which I do think archetypally also goes back

to our experience of our father. But I was actually in a ceremony

two days ago with our friend Payam and with a small

group of men, and I was working with this young man, beautiful

young man, on his innate sense of value

and how a lot of it gets externalized. And we were all in medicine

together, and all of a sudden this bee

flew into my awareness. So this beautiful

bee. And the bee flew

into his root chakra

and the beast said to me, speak these words

to him. Root your value

in your being.

And how a lot of times when we

externalize our value, we become the

bee that leaves our center, that leaves

our kind of our root, and goes and tries to

pollinate a million different flowers

trying to prove its value. But the bee

said, come back to your root and root your value

in your own being. And

it was just. It was a beautiful play on words. Yeah, totally. The

bee. The bee, yeah.

And the other piece that was coming through in that

moment was also when we're trying

to pursue this externalized sense of value, we're trying to

search for our sense of belonging.

And the bee also said, remove the longing

and root in being, and you have that word

belonging. And it was just. It was so poetic

and so simple and so beautiful. And that's what I love

about the medicine, is when. When spirit is speaking.

It's not complex when spirit

is speaking, it's simple, but in its

simplicity, it carries so much power

and almost a poetic nature to it.

And I find also we as humans, we love to complicate things,

but just the simplicity of what the bee spirit,

or what I perceived as the consciousness of the bee

and what it had to offer in terms of our innate sense

of being and value. And rooting in that was just. Was

really a beautiful moment for myself too. Just

as. As a man, as a masculine being.

Yeah. I just shared with one of our men's at born free method. We have.

This is like my pregnancy fertility pregnancy postpartum

parenting support program. And we have a men's group that meets every couple weeks.

And I had just shared there was like a little prompt somebody had put in

the Telegram thread. And I said, you know, it was basically like, what

was the prompt? I don't know. My response was, you know, I'm not sure at

what point I'm going to be okay with feeling like I don't have to

be relevant, you know, and we use all these excuses

for why we need to do more things or make more money or, I don't

know, post again on Instagram or whatever. And it shared, like, it's a

little bit of an insecurity for me because it's like. Like, do I have to

be 65 and the world just stops looking at me because I'm now an older

person that I have to get comfortable with being, like, less

relevant or. It's not so much that I want more,

Greg. It's like, shouldn't I be

wanting more? Shouldn't I be doing more? It's that. That thing that nags so

much of us and so many of us. And

what came to mind for me when you were speaking is that, you know, people

want to go into this, like, pathway to ascension. You know, they're gonna

live in an ashram for so many years, and then suddenly

it'll work. What came to mind when I was hearing you speak about

the belonging thing, that. That piece is so beautiful, and you're right.

So simple. But, man, can you unpack that? I'm going to be chewing on that

for my whole flight tomorrow to Aspen. So thank you for that little

gift. What came to mind was this guy, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche.

Have you heard of this guy? Yeah. So his whole story, for those who know,

is he was, you know, selected very early on in Tibetan in

Tibet, as you know, he's going to be a llama. This is going to be

like, a big deal. And he did. He came into the robes and live that

life. And then, of course, in this. This is like at the time of

the civil rights movements and Vietnam protests and the, you

know, Summer of Love, like, that whole thing was happening in the United States, probably

a very exciting time, but also very confronting for. For

society. And he was like, I'm going to go to the United States, and I'm.

I'm creating this story myself. But he did go to the United States, and he

left his robes there, and he was received a lot of criticism. But I imagine

it was like, if I believe all of this stuff, I should be able to

go into the heart of the beast and. And see the delusion

and see the temptation, and I should be able to work through it. And he.

He self imploded. But what's interesting about what

he would say in the way he went about it is that some of his

closest followers thought he actually did it intentionally in order to prove a point.

Like, he died of alcoholism at 47. That's like how his story ends.

But his, the people he was teaching were people like Tapema children. And Ron

Dass was one of his students. I mean, like, this was a big not name

person who doesn't get a ton of credit because he, quote,

imploded or he, he caved and he wasn't living

it out. And there's a story where he is holding a beer on stage. He's

so drunk that he like can't even make words. And then he drops the beer

and he looks at the audience and says like, oh, accidents

happen, you know, and then he just gets, he just starts getting so like

belligerent that staff comes and carries him off the stage. And while

he's seemingly passed out, he looks at one of them and opens his eyes and

says, how did I do? And then closes his eyes, smiles, and

like gets carried off. So there's something funny about this guy where

it was like he wanted to push it as far as he could and he

did. And then he fell apart. That the falling

apart was almost like the ultimate lesson he could have given to his students. And

whether or not he did it intentionally is like, I don't know, maybe I'm romanticizing

it, but there's a lot of people there in his circles that it felt like

he was trying to, to get people to

reflect on their own stuff, you know, what

are we going to do about the violence out in Vietnam, man? Well, I want

to talk about the violence in this room. It's another quote from him.

And so what he was doing is showing everybody a big

giant mirror and saying, look at who you are.

And there's another story where he throws everybody's weed. Bring your best weed.

We're going to go to the new temple. And he throws it all into the

fire and talks about self delusion. So complicated

character, this Chogyam chumpa. But the question of

like, we're on the linear path to ascension, he would say, if

you're asking that question, you've, you're already on the wrong path

because there is no path to ascension. There is only right here,

right now, what is going on. And it has

nothing to do with what you're being told to focus on in the media or

on Instagram or on, on this podcast

that you're missing the point if you're looking for the answers externally

to who and where you should be going. Yeah, and

what's so interesting about what you had said about the this B experience

is that I actually feel like all of these psychedelic

medicines, they're. They're actually becoming the second.

This new renaissance of psychedelics was actually

perpetuated by the plants. They actually want

us to succeed because if we don't, there's going to be a

whole bunch of other stuff happening ecologically and everything else in

the world. And they want us to be. They're like, well,

let's try teaching them in this way. And then you have these direct

experiences and people are like, well, it was your imagination. I'm like, yes, it was

my imagination. And Jung would say, that was very, very helpful to be able

to articulate what I experience. It's not fanciful like children. Samuel

Coleridge distinguishes between imagination and fancy. It's not

just fancy. There's something real that happened for you in that be.

In that message that came through. It's up to you now to take it,

be present with it. And that actually is the path to ascension, whatever

ascension actually even means, because it certainly isn't just being a monk in

robes and Tibet. I think that there's more to it than that, even though

that's what the New Age movement wants us to believe. There's actually something so deeply

unique in the unique genius that's expressed by Greg

Schmauss or Nathan Reilly or your wife. My wife, like my

children. Your children. Like, there's something really unique there. And I'd

mentioned Steiner before. Steiner. This is. Everything that he

teaches is like, there is nothing more than you in

this moment. Then if you want the world to get better, if you want your

stuff to get better, you have to be willing to just be.

And that's where I think the darkness is going to be the most challenging. Going

back to that. Yeah, beautiful. And when you were just

sharing that, I was once again taken back into the

darkness. And I went into the

darkness with one question, and it was a question

that was posed to me by a shaman that I've worked with for

many years. And the question was,

what is my original frequency? That

was the question, my original frequency before

I. I didn't have more than just those words. What is my

original frequency? And

I spent four days with that question.

And on the last day, I

felt like I touched it. And it wasn't something that I could put into

words or describe, but it was a feeling, it was a

sensation, it was an experience within myself. And the reason I

bring this up is when you were talking about where do babies come from?

And you were mentioning this idea of a song,

and song being music and music being

frequency, and that each Person

coming into this incarnation, into this

dimension, with their own song, with their own

music, with their own tone, with their own frequency.

And so that was a big moment for me of

really feeling now going forward from the

darkness. When am I in my original

frequency? What am I doing? What's the environment that I am

in? Who am I with? You know, what am I

experiencing when I feel as though I'm touching that original

frequency? And that was a huge moment

for me. That's beautiful, Greg. Keep going. I'm just.

I'm, like, staring out the window, just letting my imagination, my, like, kind of

heart run with that. That's

a few days later when I came out of the darkness

and I was just in meditation and I asked,

what else is there for me to know about my original

frequency? And I just

had a vision of a deer.

And when I went into ceremony after that, one of the

things that was coming through is that the deer as an animal

is the animal that most closely matches my

original frequency. Do you feel that to be true?

Yeah. Yeah. And so the deer,

as an ally, has been one of my greatest teachers.

So much so that I was recently sitting

and I was in a deep process. And, you know, when you're either

in medicine or a deep practice, and the body releases through

shaking, a lot of times, whether it's like, in your abdomen or

your extremities, a lot of shaking. It's big practice in qigong.

And I was in this process of shaking and releasing. And I opened my eyes,

and 20ft in front of me, there was a deer staring right. Right at me

in the eyes, and it was shaking with me.

And it started taking its front right leg.

Leg or. Yeah. And started pounding it and making this.

Almost like there was like an aggression, like a little, like,

anger. It was kind of like a power move.

And I actually stood up and backed away.

And in that moment when I stood up and backed away, I started laughing because

I got the teaching. And the deer was like, you're afraid of your

own power. I'm mirroring you back to you,

and you're trying to retreat away from me.

Oh, Greg. And I just laughed, and I sat back down

and I said, thank you for the teaching. And a few minutes later, the deer

just walked away. And so it

just. A lot of dots connect

when you make yourself available. And that's

the last thing on my. On my monologue that

I will say is I feel as though what

the medicine offers, what going into ceremony

offers, but even just going into the darkness or in silence,

what we're doing is we're making ourselves available.

We're available for spirit. We're available

for guidance. And living in a world

with weapons of mass distraction,

people are not available. And so

that's a big thing for me is

when it comes to spirit, I'm not going to be a moving target

anymore here. I'm going to be available

by sitting still and

giving spirit an easy target to hit, and it

just comes through availability. And so that.

That has been the last thing that I would say, has been a huge,

huge message for me, is how available

are you? And it's inversely proportional

to how distracted you are.

And I'll. I'll pause there.

Yeah. What's probably most fresh and

kind of moving through me right now is I think.

A lot of people probably listening to your podcast, a lot of people that come

to my podcast, even a lot of people that go to our favorite, you know,

our Mutual friends podcasts are looking for some answers.

And it's so easy to market

a new device or a new. Even like a new program,

like a new step. Follow these steps and you'll get better at this thing.

Even the idea of taking medicine, like plant medicine,

it's all, like, rooted so deeply in

materialism. So what's coming. Coming to me

is like, we're all, like, harping on the right

nutrients and the right food and fish oil is good for you, and then it's

not good for you, and then Shilajay is good for you, and then it's not

good for you, and then Pepto, it's just, like,

so boring and uninspiring.

And yet, you know, you just shared some really profound

insights that require nothing external. Yeah. It's

not even measurable. In fact, it might even be laughable

because of the way that society views those types of shares.

I mean, you have to be careful. You don't just start sharing that with somebody

on an airplane. Right. Because they're probably going to scooch

over a little bit and think you're a total weirdo. And yet somehow going back

to what you had said about remembering it feels like

probably like, oh, that's right.

This is who I am. And, like,

man, there isn't a comparable amount of therapy

or gadgets or supplements that could get Greg to feel like that.

And so what I'm not saying is we're doing it wrong. What I'm saying is

everybody has their own path. And I actually think that the weapons of mass

distraction have also

preyed on our need to have for somebody else to have

an answer for us. Don't pay attention,

don't go inward. Don't spend too much time sitting

and contemplating or not contemplating and just being.

Edmund Knighton always brings up the fact that like you can't go anywhere on the

earth and it's quiet. And what most people hear is there's

airplanes or there's cars or whatever. It's ah, there's so much civilization.

Civilization's not the problem. If you go into the woods, there's a lot of civilization

there. It's not human civilization, but there's nowhere even in the

dead of winter that it's completely silent. There's something there to be

heard. And you've just been told that whatever you're hearing isn't relevant

to you, it's not a part of you. But man, once you're, you become

available for spirit. Those little things,

call them coincidences if you want. It doesn't really matter to me. But those

little things start to emerge. We're like this. There's always a white

butterfly around. What is going on with this white butterfly or moth or

whatever? This is where I feel like people who are just

spending more time outside without their headphones on, they're just out there

being bored, if you want to call it that. In their garden in the

woods in Havasupai Falls. We were just

hiking there. Like you have no self service. You're just talking. Maybe you're not talking,

you're just hearing the dirt under your boots. There's something

really spiritual about that, which is maybe why the Japanese

prescribe forest bathing or something. But when

you're really honest with yourself, there's so much out there and it's scary as

hell to start hearing the jungle or hearing the forest or

hearing the stream. Because there's something that I think is

we attune to that is a remembering of that power that you

described. And I think many of us are so

happy to outsource that power because we don't know how to

harness that power. It's really

scary to be a man and to know how big and strong you are at

times. And yet like the strongest people I know.

Kyle Kingsbury is a great example. He knows how to harness that strength. Like he

would never hurt me or you or his wife or his kids. But

God, he could rip my freaking head off without even,

you know, batting an eye. He's just big, strong, incredibly

just muscly guy.

So we become so afraid of being who we are that we outsource even our

identity to Somebody else tell me who I am, who I'm supposed

to be. Because if I was to really be who I.

Who I'm. Maybe I. I am. Maybe it's not a deer. Maybe it's a. I

don't know, a python. I don't know. I don't.

That's pretty darn scary. It's pretty darn scary to have this.

Like, I'm gonna just do what feels right right now. I want to do

whatever is calling to me at this moment. Because the world expects you to

be something that maybe you don't even feel is intuitively in alignment with who you

are. Yeah, that. That deer story is great.

Beautiful. You know, when you're talking about the Omegas and the

shilajit and the peptides, you know. Recently starting to

outline a new course on addiction. And

I was just kind of sitting and contemplating. I was going with it,

and I realized that the word addiction is one letter off from the word addition.

It's the word addition with a C. And I

was like, oh, addiction is just a perpetual

coping through addition. You know, every

addiction is just adding something, adding something, adding something.

More of something, more of something. And we're conditioned

to always believe in our culture that if something's off, add something.

If something doesn't feel right, add something. But what we're

talking about is a perpetual process of

subtraction. Darkness is the ultimate

subtraction. It's the ultimate

removal of everything that's getting in the way of that

availability that we were just speaking of. So,

really so grateful for this conversation.

We got to meet up in person at some point. Maybe it'll be through payam.

But I've really loved this. This has been like a really, really nice time just

to reconnect and to. To be curious together.

That's all that it is. There's no answers. I don't think we came to a

single conclusion about anything. About the world, about ourselves.

Yeah. But there's some comfort sort of mutually

in being aware of how

aware we can be and the sort of curiosities

that arise when you're just a little bit more aware. I think that

is something we can conclude that we can agree on. And it opens up

a can of worms for the next 50 years that we're here. Maybe as

to, like, when is it enough? Like, I don't know. And maybe it doesn't have

to be anything more than it is now. And everything I do

from this point forward could just be becoming more

aware and more present, more still and more grounded.

Maybe that's enough. Maybe that's. Maybe that's where we're headed. Nobody's going to

advertise that on Instagram that's not marketable into a Netflix show or

not going to make me more money necessarily. Or maybe it will, but that

sounds really nice. It sounds really nice to be doing more of this with you.

Same here. Any closing

remarks, insights, contemplations, anything

that's present for you? Just that you might want to

leave our listeners with. I mean, they have plenty to chew on, that's for

sure. I just want to check in and see if there's anything.

Yeah. Excuse me.

I. I haven't really talked about why I think

that the medical. Medical vegetalista route is. Is

appropriate for me. But what I will say in

my final remarks is that there are a variety of things that arise

in this procreation process. This thing about

having kids and raising your family and, and when you become a

parent, it's very isolating. It's very lonely. And

we have all these. These psychiatric disorders, you know, we call them

postpartum mood disorders, everything from postpartum psychosis to postpartum

depression. And then there's naturally a traumatic

element of childbirth. And so these are the big areas

that matter the most to families. And yet we don't have answers for them.

We just say, go speak to social worker, maybe. Maybe go to a pelvic floor

physical therapist or whatever. But what we're really lacking is

in society is like real community around the

magic of bringing children into the world. And so much so that women

are expected to not only have kids, but then go back to work in so

many months and still make money and still look, you know, beautiful

and still do all the things. Like we all know this stuff. And so without

society changing, I think it's very, very hard for women and

families to do well in the postpartum space. That's. That. That's a given.

Having said that, I think that we have quite a bit of

tools, or I shouldn't say we, people who are working with

psychedelics have far broader toolkits

that could be very useful not only for

families getting into their bodies, this sort of embodiment

work, and working through that stuff maybe before, during,

or after having a baby. And I mean that maybe even during,

maybe you're on ayahuasca or mushrooms during your birth. Like,

that's not maybe for me or for you or for anybody else, but I am

open to that possibility because giving birth into a world that

feels like a sick Society doesn't feel like what most people really, really

want. There seems to be something we're missing. And it's not just

less vaccines and all this other boring, low hanging fruit. It's

our society needs to shift its perspective here. But then

we also have birth workers who are coming in and they're

indoctrinated into a system of control and many of them want so badly to

peel out of that, but we're stuck up here and we need to get into

here. And that's where I think these plant medicines actually are the most

useful. And if I was most honest with myself, I am not useful or valuable

to society as a person person who does surgery or prescribes pharmaceuticals

or whatever, does procedures, does biopsies.

There's plenty of people doing that. What I think

everything that we've talked about here, I think that some of these technologies, if I

can call them that, that where they're not being utilized and maybe where they

can best be utilized is actually in the birth space with

doulas, ob gyns, midwives, birth workers of all sorts

and families in order to help, help them remember who

they are, help them become re. Infatuated with the living

essence of, of whatever it is that comes up in the darkness, with stillness,

with solitude, with groundedness, with

nothing but sunlight on your skin. And, and so

that's where I'm headed. Those are closing remarks in order to, to,

to preface maybe the many chapters that

are to come. But I, I do think great that what you're doing and what

I hear you speaking to, it's refining itself into

a really, really fun sandbox

where we can go deeper into these conversations and we can, we can

maybe humble, humbly, just say, I

don't know, let's as a community kind of work on this together.

And if you don't have a means of, of nudging you out of

these sort of oppressive systems of control, which they all are. And

we get a lot of benefit from control. Like there's no doubt that we have

money and we have shared streets and we have clean water because of

society. But we're also missing out on the opportunity to remember that we're not

separate from, we are a part of nature. And the plant medicines can help just

nudge us just a 1 degree off of what we think is

normal in order to appreciate that maybe this is abnormal.

And if we're going to build something together and become

cooperative contributors of our larger ecosystem

of the cosmos, whatever, that we have to start somewhere. And I think in this

birth space. I think that's a really right place for us to just

validate that something doesn't feel all that right and

that maybe drifting over here and jumping into the waters

could be. Could be really, really cool. Very refreshing.

Beautiful. So Nathan, I just want to thank you for

what's rising up in me is for bringing the sacred

back into the two most important ceremonies that

all humans go through. Yeah.

Thank you Greg. Yeah.

Where can people find you? They'd like to learn more, connect with you, work with

you. Oh, just send me an email.

Nathanaelovetholistics.com I got too many websites and other things

but if you send me an email I do all of my own. I don't

have an assistant. I just a dude with kids and a great wife.

Nathan, beloved holistics.com is my email. Just start there.

Beautiful. Nathan, thanks again for coming on the show. Thank you Greg. It

was a. A real pleasure. Thank you. Beautiful.