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“The medicine’s always with you. Until you realize it for yourself, it doesn’t matter who tells you that or how many times you drink ayahuasca,” says Kyle Kingsbury, former UFC fighter turned holistic health coach, on Mental Health in a Modern World. Kingsbury shares how his journey from the physical violence and discipline of professional fighting evolved into a lifelong quest for presence, self-mastery, and ultimately spiritual awakening. He peels back the layers of the “warrior” archetype, describing how true strength lies not just in discipline but in knowing what’s worth fighting for—and balancing that drive with the softer power of the lover archetype.

In this episode, Kingsbury details his transformation through martial arts, plant medicines, and deep spiritual practice, questioning the Western pursuit of constant addition—more hacks, more knowledge, more intensity—as a substitute for genuine self-understanding. From the dangers of awakening that outpaces integration to the pitfalls of spiritual ego and the necessity of real community and connection with nature, Kingsbury brings raw honesty and powerful lived experience to the table.

Tune in to Mental Health in a Modern World to hear why Kingsbury believes we can’t “add” our way to healing, why the strongest among us are often the most attuned to vulnerability and connection, and what we’re missing about real rites of passage, self-acceptance, and the wisdom found in simply slowing down.

5 Key Takeaways

This episode delivers practical wisdom for living with depth, purpose, and balance—here are five actionable steps to transform your life today:

1. Commit to Integration, Not Just Insight: After any powerful experience—whether plant medicine, therapy, or learning—focus on actively integrating the lessons into your daily life to create real, lasting change.
2. Master Your Shadow Through Self-Inventory: Regularly review your behaviors and patterns, especially those shaped by the warrior and other archetypes, to expose and work with your personal shadow.
3. Prioritize Community and Authentic Connection: Seek out and cultivate genuine relationships and participate in groups or circles that offer support, challenge, and authentic witnessing.
4. Balance Consumption With Contemplation: Slow down your rate of consuming information, create regular pockets of stillness and reflection, and trust when you feel the urge to pause or let go.
5. Reconnect With the Natural World: Develop a direct relationship with nature—whether through farming, sourcing your food locally, or simply spending mindful time outside.

Memorable Quotes

"The warrior faces life frontally. It doesn’t avoid challenge. When I was a kid, my parents would fight, I would shut down and freeze. But in school, when things got tough, I would stand up and fight. There’s a big distinction between crumbling and confronting life head-on."

"When your rate of awakening outpaces the pace of integration, the potential downside is you lose your mind. That’s probably the biggest one, and that’s the worst one by far. There’s nothing as bad as that; I’m not even sure death is as bad as losing the mind."

"The medicine’s always with you, and until you realize it for yourself, it doesn’t matter who tells you that or how many times you drink ayahuasca. It takes you actually having access to that point to recognize it. People can tell you over and over that you’re going to be successful or have all this going for you, but until you understand it for yourself, it’s meaningless."

Connect with Kyle

Website - https://www.kingsbu.com/

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/kylekingsbu/

Resources Mentioned

King, Warrior, Magician, Lover by Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette - https://amzn.to/4epm17G

Stealing Fire by Steven Kotler & Jamie Wheal - https://amzn.to/4uR23c5

Gene Keys by Richard Rudd - https://amzn.to/4frFJki

How to Eat, Move and Be Healthy! by Paul Chek - https://amzn.to/4uQYItt

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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Because they'll say, the medicine's always with you. And until you realize it for yourself,

it doesn't matter who tells you that or how many times you drink ayahuasca. Like,

it takes you actually having access to that point to

recognize it. People can tell you to your blue in the face that you're

handsome or you're going to be successful or you have all this going for you

or any of those things. But until you understand it for yourself, it's meaningless. 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. Kyle, welcome to the show, brother.

I'm so happy you started a podcast, Greg. This is phenomenal, and thank you for

having me on. You know, a couple. This is probably a month or two ago

when I had Salemi on, I was like, I get to turn the tables.

Because I've been on his show a couple times, and same thing with you today.

I'm like, I get to turn the tables with Kyle today. Get to put Kyle

on the hot seat. Yeah. So

one of the places I'd love to start is the

warrior archetype, which I know you've had

a long journey of, and I was just checking out your

archetype wheel from many years back last night, and I was like, oh, he's got

the warrior in his highest potential. And so

I would love to start by hearing a little bit about almost

like the arc of your journey with the warrior

archetype. All right, this is. This is. This could take the whole

hour or hour and a half or two hours or whatever it's going to be,

I guess, the easiest way to onboard that is. I fought a lot growing up.

My parents fought all the time, and. And I didn't have

words or language for it, but fighting was like the deepest sense of

peace and stillness for me. It was the only thing that quieted all the noise,

I didn't have. I didn't know what meditation was, hadn't tried it.

I'd never had plant medicines. I'd been in and out of therapy since I

was 7 years old and nothing like fixed anything because I was

still going home to constant headbutting and walking on eggshells

and not knowing when shit was going to hit the fan

later on. You know, read books like Stealing Fire by Jamie Wheel and you're like,

oh, that was flow state. Like I was entering flow state. And that's why I

felt peaceful and. And that

can happen, you know, like you raise the stakes high enough. That's why they talk

about people like Laird Hamilton on a 50 foot wave, right? Like he's not thinking

about his wife, Gabby Reese, he's not thinking about doing the dishes or what his

kids need. He's just there, he's fully in the thing and

presence. I'm fully present in that experience. Getting

into Eckhart Tolle stuff later, like, oh, that's. Yeah, that nailed it. That was it

for me. I thought I understood the warrior archetype. And it's

funny because I had one of my favorite intuitives is a woman named Mary Margrave

and she's out in Sedona. And, you know, I had this book

when we started Fit for Service. I was, you know, fought in the ufc, Director

of Human Optimization on it, took over their podcast, created supplements, but I was

the podcast host, kind of guided that company before they

sold. And then Aubrey and I started a company called Fit for Service, where we

coached people for about six years. And everyone kept talking about King, Warrior,

Magician Lover. And I was like, all right, this sounds like a great book. So

I buy it on my nightstand. I would put like the

next book I'm going to read. Almost like the queue, like it's just there calling

to me. I'm going to grab this thing and I'm going to read it. It's

up next. And it was there for maybe two years on

the nightstand, but something would always jump ahead of it. Something would always jump ahead

of it, but I just kept it there. And I had

my first call with Mary Margrave and she's like, do you know the book King

Warrior, Magician Lover? And I just started laughing because I was like, this has been

literally my next book for the last two years and I haven't read it. And

now I know I'm going to read it now, you know, and she goes, all

right, well, you know, you have a huge we all carry

these archetypes, obviously, and they're transferable to men and women, obviously.

And I'm sure we'll dive into this and your podcast is a better. You'll do

a better job of explaining this than I can. But not just like the Carolyn

Mace understanding of, like, our archetypes and the archetypes that are drawn to us.

But King, War, magician, lover, is like the parent

archetypes of all men, right? And so how these break down, where the

shadows show up, passive or aggressive, those kind of

things. And so it's a way to kind of encode and break down what it

means to be a man. And so I thought I understood the warrior archetype

as a fighter, you know, a guy who'd been the ufc, that kind of thing.

And she's like, you have no idea. You know, no idea. So she's like, here's

your homework. You're going to read the book. Read it one time through, just read

it, enjoy it, then you're going to read it a second time.

And, you know, she was a great teacher who taught me, like, the shadow is

anything that's outside of our purview. It's like you can't see it. Your ego won't

allow you to see it. You know, and when people talk about shadow work, there's

some ways to get there, but it's not as simple as just, you know, drawing

up trauma and trying to work on it in different ways. Right? And so she

said, if you, you know, one of the things the ego will do is it's

never going to let you know what you're doing wrong now, but

it can in hindsight, because you're not that person. So when he goes through the

book in the second time, take inventory. Say, was, Was I a high chair

prince? Was I a high chair tyrant? Was I? Was I? What of these things

showed up to me when I was younger? Was I the Don Juan

archetype in dating? If any of these things kind of stuck around

in previous relationships or in my youth, then you can

say, is there a pattern here? And is there potentially something

still happening now? So in a roundabout way, you can kind of work around

and see, like, what is the shit that I'm still carrying with me? And

it blew my mind writing all that stuff down and taking it in inventory, but

also just really educating myself on the warrior, you know, and there's

so many great lines in that book. I recommend it for all men. It does

transfer to women beautifully. You know, you substitute king for queen

high Priestess for magician, warrior for huntress. It's all the same

stuff. And again, you know, Mace's work and the stuff that you do, like, it's

a whole category of its own. But from an introductory standpoint in

Archetypes, I think it's a beautiful book. And so many things hit me

in the heart, you know, when it comes to the warrior in particular, like, the

warrior faces the life frontally. It doesn't avoid challenge. When I was

a kid, my parents would fight. I would shut down. Like, just, boom, I'm a

rock. I don't exist. I'm quiet. I'm in the room at school when shit hit

the fan. I was the polar opposite. I remember getting kicked out of kindergarten class

one day because I stood up. This guy told, you know, f you, and I

stood up. I was like, f you, Ryan. You know, and then I got sent

to the principal's office because he was mouthing it to me. I

stood up and yelled it at him. So I got kicked out of class that

day when I was 6 or 7, and that continued

for years. Fights on the playground, that kind of thing. But,

you know, face the life frontally is a. Is a very important

distinction, because for me, when shit would hit the fan, a lot of the times

I would either crumble or just. Just pretend nothing's wrong, you know? Like,

people always talk about fight or flight. It is fight, flight, or freeze. And I

was taught to freeze in those situations at home where I was, you know, where

I felt least safe. And oddly enough, that did

show up in relationships with female partners.

If I was getting yelled at, like, I would just boom. Just like. Like, it

was like I pushed the mute button on the TV screen, and he was just

stand there and take it. One of the next big iterations for me was the

understanding that the warrior and the lover are the

balancing partners, like on a cross. And the magician and the king

are the balancing factors there. If I have shadow warrior, whether

that's submissive or passive and aggressive or aggressive doesn't matter. It's

balanced by the lover. It's not balanced by me trying to be

more of an optimal warrior, right? And so those two go hand in

hand. And I found that very interesting. As a culture, we can tell where there's

shadow warrior, shadow king. We see it in presidents. We see it in the

military industrial complex. We see it in the villains in movies, you, the

Sith Lord, that kind of thing, abuse of power. But we also see it in

other things. Like, I see it in David Goggins I see the shadow warrior

who's, like, running from his problems to, you know, hasn't

sat. He hasn't sat with himself, whether that's an

ayahuasca or in deep meditation to actually be cool with not being

the guy who runs 50 marathons a year. And that's.

That's my look from the outside. I've never met the guy. He may. He may

be different now. I have no idea. But that's been my take on things. David

Goggins as an archetypical human. And maybe part of that's just, you know, everyone needs

a niche. So, like, I'm going to be this guy, you know, and that's how

I'll rise in fame. Alex Hormozi, like, I just started a.

A community on school. That's his company. But our Mozzie talks about

his marriage as a business partnership. I would never want

to anybody and consider that a business partnership.

Like, that's insane to me. And, you know, they had. They. Oh, would you want

kids? It's not that big of a deal. Do you want kids? Yeah, it's not

that big of a deal. So we didn't have kids. I do my work. She

does her work. We're working side by side. We're out there doing that. I'm like,

that sounds terrible to me. That's not the formation

of family. Think about archetypically, for women, there

are difference, you know, from a. From a lifetime standpoint. They have these beautiful

markers set in place from nature, right? At first, we just celebrated

my niece's first bleed. Her red tent, right? And it was only women

at the red tent. But, like, it's a big deal. Like, I wanted to honor

her for that. Like, this is so cool. You are the first young lady

in our group. You're no longer a child, right? You're stepping into this

different space when a woman. And. And only if a

woman gives birth does she enter into the mother. Architect, right? And

that comes on board full steam. And I would say, you know, that a lot

of conversations about this. I have no judgment either way. And I know people

who've gone through menopause and are on the other side of it. And I know

women who decided to go hormone replacement therapy and not go through it.

Right? But does that change anything from that

firewalk that takes place during menopause to become

a crone, to become the wise woman, does that change that? I don't know.

Right? We don't know. We don't know what we're doing here. We're just watching and

seeing what happens. But, you know, all that said, it's a really beautiful thing to

see that women have that built in for men don't. Right. And so I

think talking with our good friend Paul Check, like, there can be many things that

has to be layered. It's not like one of the. When we're 11 years old,

someone's going to take us away from our parents for a year, leave us in

the jungle and have all these rites of passage to turn us into a man.

We don't have that. So it must come in layers. And I feel it

is the warrior that says yes to that, but it's the warrior that handles it

well. And it's a well balanced warrior that has an

optimal lover. Right. Because if you have that balance

point now, you know what's worth fighting for. Now you know when's enough and when

is it okay to pull back. You also know, am I pushing myself too

hard or is this done out of love or is this done for any other

reason other than that? Right. And so I feel like the. The

complimentariness of the complimentary nature of the warrior and

the lover, when understood, is such a fantastic,

beautiful duo. It makes the knuckling up and going for it worth it

because you know the why. And also, you don't over exhaust yourself

in that space because you're just only driven by the warrior.

You know, there's no, like, taskmaster that doesn't let up. The taskmaster is

also a lover, and the taskmaster can know when to relax. So

I feel like it's a fantastic way of

embodying a lot of the things Jocko Willink talks about, like discipline equals

freedom, and then also coupling that in a more holistic

sense to where, you know, you have a deeper embodiment of where am I doing

this in the first place? Mm. I love how you

paired the warrior and the lover and the king and the

magician. Caroline. Mrs. System is, you know, you and I have

explored some of that. We also pair the child victim,

savage, who were prostitute with the king Warrior, Magician,

Lover. So the warrior pairs with the victim

because the warrior is either protecting victims or creating

victims. The magician is paired with the

saboteur because the saboteur also creates the

illusions that convinces you why you should

sabotage yourself. The lover pairs with the

prostitute and the king pairs with the child.

And so I really love how you created those pairs because you can look at

it in so many ways. And I remember also in King, Warrior,

Magician Lover, they talked about the journey from the

immature hero to the mature

warrior. And when you were talking about, you know, whether it's David

Goggins or some of these other public figures that really

attempting to embody the warrior, how much of it would you say

is really the hero, which I know is both of one of our

other archetypes? Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. I mean, when

you frame in that way, the hero is for lack of a better explanation,

it's like the childish version of the warrior. Right. It's the one

that, that maybe doesn't have the full understanding

of the lover. Right. If you have like this optimal warrior, it must be that

you have an optimal lover beside it. It's funny, somebody told me this the other

day, there's two types of rich people, those that want to buy the world

and control it and those that want to save the world. And I just started

cracking up because I met both sides of those coins and you might see certain

types in the World Economic Forum and things like that on the large stage. And

then also, you know, there's a lot of people in the Silicon Valley that think

their app is going to save the world for X, Y and Z. Or if

I just bus, there's still that the martyr shows up in each of those. But

yeah, it cracks me up thinking about the saving the world piece too. I'm sorry,

I don't even answer your question there. No, you answered it perfectly. Just in

terms of the hero being more of like the self

oriented archetype and the warrior being very

much oriented to the greater whole in its mature fashion.

Yeah, beautiful brother, absolutely. I'd love for you to touch upon because

obviously you've taken a deep dive into a lot of medicine work,

spiritual work. Has there been an

evolution from you starting out as you could say

the physical warrior into what we might

explore as a spiritual warrior? And how would

you maybe differentiate the two? Yeah, I mean,

when we understand the warrior, the warrior in many ways it's like a lifelong martial

artist and I consider myself a lifelong martial artist. A lifelong martial artist

is somebody who's just doing the work, keeping their blade sharp. There's no

finish line to cross. People get caught up with enlightenment. It's like enlightenment

comes, you can have that samadhi where like it's all figured out, all is

remembered, we are one. And then life comes back in and we go

back to some of the old ways and maybe there's an upcycling that takes place

that's a never ending game either. Right. Even if we became Enlightened, I

was able to hold that. That too would just be another place in

consciousness that I would hold in a never ending game of awareness.

So I think what it means to be a lifelong martial artist,

you know, and, and moving from the warrior archetype into the spiritual warrior.

There's a ton of parallels there. One is self discipline

and doing it. You know, as Mark Gaffney says, there are things that we do

that are, that are just for the sake of doing them. They're self evident.

Right. They need no explanation. Right. Like

you might. I'm just having a talk with my son, who's 11, about sex. You

know, he's asking, well, why do people do that if they're, if it's not just

for reproduction? Because you guys have only had, you know, me and my sister, you

know, and it's like, well, great question. It actually feels incredible. It's one

of the ways we know God is good. Could I just kind of laughed about

it? But it's self evident to any adult. Why sex? It feels

incredible, right? And the better you are at sexing, the better you are at loving

somebody, the better you are in a relationship, the greater that evolves

as well, right? Doing things because they are just for the sake of that.

I think there is something to that that we might start with as we begin

to take on the qualities of the warrior and we apply that to our physical

bodies, or we apply that to the work that we're doing. And then we start

to look holistically and see a greater picture, a greater sense of awareness unfolds.

And we can take those key ingredients of the warrior and transfer them

to a practice of meditation, the practice of yoga, which in gears from working

out into working in, as Paul teaches, so much of that stuff still

applies. And so much of that is still balanced with the

why, which must be balanced by the lover, right? If I'm chasing

after some type of notoriety, you know, like I got the Aladdin pants on

and you know, I got my own necklace and some other dope shit. I got

altars. It's funny because this room's just decked out with altars and stuff. I'm looking

at all my spirit animals up there. You know, I got art paintings in here.

And so I like to poke fun at it all. But is that for everyone

else or is that for me, right? Is that so people think of me differently?

Do I want to be thought of differently? That's a core question there.

And when we're in our authentic spiritual warrior, it's

Self evident. Like, none of this shit's for anybody but me. You know, I might

show my wife and kids, like, oh, this is my painting for the year. Here's

what I mean. What do you think? And there's joy in that, but it's okay.

If I was an artist and I was selling it or posting it, that's okay,

too. But the real understanding that this is my work, it's for

me to do. That warrior archetype fits in there perfectly. And so I think

from a plant medicine standpoint, it happened while I was in the ufc. I had

a boxing coach who was mixed Aztec and Mexican. He would take us out

to the Native American reservation for sweat lodges, and all of us would go. Guys

that you recognize from the UFC that were world champions at the time,

fought for world titles. John Fitch, King Velasquez, guys like that, we'd all go out

and we'd sweat together. And after a couple of years, I. I started listening to

different things and finding out about psilocybin mushrooms and ayahuasca. And I was like, hey,

man, when are we going to use on medicina? And he just started cracking up.

He's like, I've been waiting for you to ask, you know? And so we started

working with psilocybin mushrooms. And that was just a whole different ball

game, because now, you know, this was a guy teaching me about respect and reverence,

how to set intentions, how to pray. The fact that all

things are consciousness, like whatever is animating me is in everything.

It's in the plant. It's all alive. It's all awareness, and

there's no separation in that. And, you know, reading it is

one thing, but having a teacher distill this to me while I'm

cracked wide open in a sweat is a different way to receive that information. And

then finally getting to open the third eye and experience that for myself,

I mean, I had the best handholding ever. I didn't track that

initially. I thought like, oh, this is for everyone. Why do people keep saying it's

not for everyone? Fuck that guy. It is for everyone. This will change the world.

And I realized that I had a great teacher guide me through the

first, probably decade of my work doing that. And just a phenomenal,

phenomenal guy. Huizi, you know, he passed away maybe five years ago, but

just an awesome guy who, like, really broke that into us. And we started

working with ayahuasca as well on the reservation. And then I started traveling to

see, you know, different. The different places, like, how do they do it in Colombia,

how do they do it in Peru? And different spots and working with

different medicines and things of that nature. And there was a point, a

very valuable point in my life where I was working with those medicines, where

I would have a journal and I'd write down any big question I had that

I didn't think I had the answer to. I'd write it down, save it for

ayahuasca. I will save this for the big psilocybin journey. It was

maybe my third ayahuasca journey that was telling me to practice meditation and

yoga. We went once a month to the reservation for just day ceremonies

and three, three ceremonies in a row. I don't get new downloads, I

don't have fantastic visions. I keep getting do yoga and meditate.

And finally at the end of the third one, it hits, I'm like, why do

you keep telling me the same yet like, I hear you.

And the answer was, you haven't started it yet. And I was like, oh man,

God, that's so true. All right. And so I took like almost a year off

of any medicine, started practicing yoga, started practicing meditation

again. Like one thing I love in the Matrix is when the oracle says

whatever she told you, you know, like what Morpheus tells him. It's like what the

oracle said is for you and you alone. It's not for anyone else to hear,

right? And famously the oracle tells him he's not the one because that's what he

needed to hear in order to become the one. Right? So this isn't like

blanketed advice for everybody else. Go do yoga and meditation and stop

using plastic. And what funny when people come out of the thing and they say

we need to do this. I, I needed to do meditation in

yoga. And when I started practicing that, I sucked. I sucked at

both yoga. I got decent at being a better athlete. That

practice moved quickly and I had experienced some deep like

feelings of pec presence and inner peace lying in samadhi at the end

or sabasana rather at the end of a class. But I could never sit

still. I tried everything. I was off as guinea pig at on it and

eventually landed with a person named Emily Fletcher, who taught me, you know, from the

V style meditation, 6000 year old mantra

based meditations. And then I landed with, I think you might know him, he's another

buddy of ours, Michael Holt from Savage Insane. And that

dude took my meditation to a whole nother level. That's been a practice

that's taken over 10 years to really develop. But through

that practice it's shifted kind of my mindset on things. And there was one other

piece that kind of happened on the way that kind of shifted my ability to

go from it's all or nothing, you know, like, the ceremony is going to give

me all the information to, like, now I actually feel the medicine's always

in me because they'll say, the medicine's always with you. And until you realize it

for yourself, it doesn't matter who tells you that or how many times you drink

ayahuasca. Like, it takes you actually having access to that point

to recognize it. People can tell you to your blue in the face that

you're handsome or you're going to be successful, or you have all this going for

you or any of those things, but until you understand it for yourself, it's meaningless.

Looking at that. Richard Ruddo I had on the podcast years ago, he wrote the

book Gene Keys. He also wrote a smaller book called the Art of Contemplation.

And so he spoke about the Gene Keys are unlocked and they come to

us same as archetypes, either through the 3D in everyday

life, or they're unlocked through meditation, or they're unlocked through plant

medicines. But there's a gnosis that takes place, a remembrance of like, oh, this is

what that means. And it's full on. It's through every cell of the body. You

get it right? So he talks about the triangle of

consciousness. On one side, we have doing

concentration. We follow that line directly across and we have

being meditation. Where the two meet in the middle is when you bring

the meditative mind to the question and you sit with it and hold it.

That's contemplation, right? You don't think your way through it. You don't

use the left brain. You just let the right brain gently hold and

caress that thing and not need to know the answer. But when you bring it

up to your forefront with intention and hold it, the

odds of that showing up quicker in the 3D or in your meditation

practice are exponentially greater. And so

he uses that as a technique for Gene Keys. He uses that as a technique

for archetypes. But I also use that as a technique for answers

to any big questions that I need. I'm at a fork in the road. What

should I do here? That kind of thing. And what I found now, you know,

I still love the plants. I probably do maybe one big

journey a year. If I go to see Paul or another good group, I'll drop

in and we'll go deep together. But for the Most part, I'm meditating

every single day and I'm contemplating often, I'm walking in

nature often. And that routine that can be done

daily, those practices that I feel so

locked in in terms of like, not like production locked in, not Alec

turmoil locked in, but like locked into source in terms of my

knowing and my trust and that those answers come. And then our

buddy Paul Check, he sent me a really good quote once from Rand Maria Rilk,

and it was something to the effect of, like, don't demand

the answers to the questions that you have. Instead, try to live out

your life long enough to live the question. So that way,

live that answer. You understand it from all angles. Because if you were to

get those answers now, it may be damaging, right? They may not, you may not

be able to accept it or hold it. And so I've loved that thought process

too, because it speaks to divine timing.

Sometimes I don't. I'm not going to be able to handle that damn answer that

I keep begging for. And there's a reason I'm not understanding it yet, right? I

need a little bit more life experience in different ways for me to be able

to accept the truth of what that answer brings. And at the right time,

I'm going to get that answer. So I think, you know, being able to hold

that, working with Rudd's triangle of consciousness and then having

those daily practices has made it to where, you know, I, I,

I was not a junkie on plant medicines. You know, I mean, I always had

respect and reverence for the ceremonies. I followed Dieta to a tee.

I've also felt lately, I've been so called really to just these, what

are the other ways up the mountain? What are the other ways there? And I'm

doing my first vision quest. I'm in year two of that. That's no food, no

water for up to four days here on the land. Ken Katu's done like

19 sundances, comes out and guides us through that. You got two rounds of sweat

lodge to open it, then two rounds of sweat lodge to close it whenever you

throw it in the towel. That's been incredibly spiritual and beautiful. I'm

interested in darkness retreats. You know, I've done a lot of flotation and things like

that. And so I, I just, I want to be able to speak to these

things for other people because not everyone, it's true that not everyone should do

plant medicines. That's a sad truth, and it's a hard truth and something I learned

very brutally as a coach. And fit for service coaching 150

to 220 people at a time. Over the course of six years, we've had thousands

of people come through, and a lot of people would look at me and Aubrey

and Eric Godsey and Caitlin and put us either put us on a pedestal or

maybe they wouldn't. They just say, like, I want to do what these guys are

doing. But they didn't take the whole entire

construction of what we've done into play. Right. If you take

the Don Howard out of Aubrey or you take the Ritzy out

of my journeys, who knows where I'd be? I probably would have cracked mentally. And

so I've seen people crack and not come back, even in

this. The respect and reverence piece is not just the reverence you

have for that medicine. It is the reverence for the entirety of the container.

Who's guiding you? Who's holding your hand before this, during, and

after this? Who's helping you integrate it? What skillset have you built

up to be able to effectively integrate it? Oftentimes we'll say that

integration is habit change. You know, how

cool this. You know, let me tell you about this. Awesome. I got. I got

tons of memories of visions that are awesome that changed my life, but it's really.

How did that change me practically? That's integration.

And if I'm not integrating, then just like ceremonies three, four,

five. I'm going to keep getting the same messages coming to me and I'm going

to be the same person asking the same damn questions if I'm not actually trying

to work out, you know, whatever downloads are coming through. That's

beautiful. And one of the things that I was going to invite you to touch

upon, which you've done an incredible job of, is over

the last number of years, taken a deeper dive into the medicine world

and started studying with Hamilton and a lot of those guys

who really know what they're doing and being in

that space and being exposed to a lot more of

that world. You know, I was kind of shelter doing a lot of work with

Paul because you're always doing work one on one, and you're not like, going down

and doing group ceremonies and like, being exposed to kind of like. I

kind of felt like a. Like a kid who was homeschooled for like a

number of years, and now he's like, stepping into high school and you're like, what

the hell's going on here? But one of the things that I see a lot,

which I'd love for you to if you want to expand on it at all,

is obviously plant medicines can

awaken you very quickly. It can do years of work in

a few hours, as many of us know. But

what happens when the rate of

awakening outpaces

the rate of integration? When the rate of awakening

outpaces the pace of integration or embodiment, what

are the side effects of that? Great question. Well, I will tell you from my

own personal experience and what I've seen and gathered.

The potential downside is you lose your mind, right? That's probably the

biggest one and that's the worst one by far. There's nothing as bad

as that. I'm not even sure death is as bad as losing the mind. Especially

when people slide so far off the rails that you can't really bring them

back on. That's the toughest pill I've seen yet. And that

comes from again, taking all matters into your own self, not

having the integrative tools, not having the right people to hold you through it.

At the beginning, King worm, magician, lover, they talk about the sacred container

and writes a passage in how it wasn't just the, this great shaman

or teacher that was there. It was the literal structure of the temple that

was built that held it. It was all parts of that, right?

What goes into the medicine? We see that working with ayahuasca, how much

intention and respect goes into making the brew itself

is remarkable, right? And before each cup they're blowing

prayers in with tobacco, sending it into the bottle before they pour each, and then

they've blown it into each cup before it touches your lips like they are freaking.

Just raising the frequency that

to a level that I think it's. I think it's hard for us to grasp

with a Western mind. And I've started taking those principles to psilocybin

journeys too, with blowing smoke in and doing as much as I can to

prep in the same way. But you know, the knowledge base there is

vast. You dieta with a certain plant, a certain tree, something like that.

Like, you then become partnered with that for the rest of your life

and you learn that song so you can bring it in and call on that

into a medicine circle. There's a far different thing

happening when you do ayahuasca with a Shipibo shaman or somebody super

experienced like Hamilton, and they're singing to you,

guiding that feeling everybody at the same time instantly and

guiding the song to bring in these different elements to make sure that

your ride is as beautiful as possible, but also as safe

and productive as possible. Right? And they can steer you. I've had the timing

of shit like that is. Is insane. I once had three nights of ayahuasca

in Las Vegas. We, my wife and I were living there. We were only

there for four months, but I remember Dan Hardy, who was a fighter in the

UFC. He was a British guy, fought at 170, big mohawk.

He would go crazy. When Bruce Buffer would say his name, he'd be like, yeah,

he was just. He was awesome, dude. Covered in tattoos. He sat with me

for my very first journey with ayahuasca, he and his partner at the time. And

so I hit him up. I said, hey, man, I'm going to Vegas. If you

know anybody here that's doing medicine circles, I'd love to. I've just lost mine

in California. I'd love to be able to have something local. He said, absolutely. He

told me about a woman who flies in people, Shaman from the Amazon. And

even though it's in a house, like, it's all well done. And I was like,

okay, cool. And so this guy Lenore came in. He was from Pucallpa, Peru.

Youngest shaman I've ever worked with. By far one of the greatest, most

powerful dudes I've ever sat with. I think he was 25, you know, but he

had been working with the medicine. He started with tobacco at 5 years old,

and, like, it was it. It skipped a generation. But his grandmother taught him everything,

and the grandmother's grandmother had taught her everything, and that's how they had done it

in their family. Like, it was literally in his DNA to sit with this stuff.

And he had started since he was a little kid working with tobacco and then

working with ayahuasca at seven. So the guy had two decades

of experience by the time I'm seeing him at 25.

And, like, that experience blew me away because it

was so resonant, so visual. But also he had so

much command of the arena, you know, the space through his

voice and through song. He said, bring every instrument you can.

And so he had only seen a drawing, not a picture, but

a drawing of a harmonica. And somebody brought a

harmonica. And this dude was better than Billy Joel. It was in. It was mind

blowing. Everything was on the highest frequency. He played everything, the best I've

ever heard. That really spoke to the power of a person who's done that

work. But also, you know, when they're that tapped in, like, you could have handed

in anything and beauty would have come from it. In addition

to the hikaros, compare that to somebody playing

an ipod. Well, there's something lost already. You talk to anybody in music,

you have audio loss when it goes to MP3, you

have loss when it's played through a speaker, you have loss when it's played through

Bluetooth. You have all these different things that are kind of taking it and punching

it in a way that's not like live music. Those people that. The

peoples who have held those practices for thousands of years, you know,

they've really mapped the missing piece of that technology, which is in

large part where that gets missed. When you start talking about psilocybin studies

at Johns Hopkins, they didn't have that piece to the equation, right?

And it's not about ritual or about fantasizing about indigenous life

or any of that shit. It's just about, like, when you experience it for yourself,

there's a marked difference. And it comes with genuine wisdom and

embodiment of all the lessons that we would hope to gain from things like that.

The people that hold that, they can transmit it through the song. They could

transmit it through their vibration. And similar to, like, let's say, like if you

sat in front of Rondos before he passed away, or Yogananda or

Sri Yugaswar, any of these guys that you. Your presence could be

shifted just from being in the same field as these guys, right? So take

someone like that and now give them song, give them a potent

medicine, one of the most potent on Earth, to open up every

chakra and allow that to pour in. And you have the greatest potential

on Earth for shift to take place and positive shift. Now getting

back to the question on where it could go wrong. If you're not paying attention,

if you're not listening to the information that's coming in,

I think at best you're going to stay in place, right? You're going to

be like stagnant water that's not moving, it's no longer flowing, and that breeds

problems, right? And I also see in people, like, that's where there can be a

search because they're not continuing to do the work. They're asking for more

homework, but they're just not doing the homework. And when that happens,

there's some part of their psyche that recognizes that they're not doing the work.

That while they're saying, yes, give me more, they're not willing to do the

work and they're not putting one foot in front of the other and actually marching

towards their destination. It doesn't have to be long. Atomic Habits is one

of my favorite books. I interviewed James Clear Right after he wrote it. There's a

lot of great examples that come from football, playing football that remind me of that.

You know, he's talking about 1% better every day, right? And

so in football they say inch by inch, life's a cinch. Yard by yard, life

is hard, right? So when it comes to putting these things and embodying them,

it's just about marching tiny steps in that direction. But when people don't

do that, I think a fracture can take place. And maybe we call it something

else, maybe it's not a fracture, but the part of them knows that they're not

really doing it, that they're faking it. And when that

self doubt comes in, then the search deepens

for who am I? Right? There's a loss of knowing yourself,

which is probably the greatest gift that comes from these medicines is to remember who

you are. But when you're on the constant search, now

that search, and we see this a ton in plant medicine circles where people

are looking for an identity with the same regard of I'll be

happy when, right? So rewind the clock two, three

decades. Everyone that was born in America was taught white picket fence,

own a house, go to college, get a good job, stay at

that job for 40 years. And when you're 65, you'll have a 401k

and a pension and all this other shit. And then you'll be happy then, then

you'll get to travel the world. If you just bust your ass now, give your

body while you're young, you'll be happy when X, Y and Z takes place.

Most people now know that's a crock of shit. That's not how it works out.

But we still have that same framework embedded in us a lot of

the time, right? And including when we're searching for ourselves. When we, when that

search is strong enough and there is a little disconnect,

then we start to grab onto anything that we think is going to be cool,

that we think people will like. Ram Dass speaks a ton about this. You know,

in his lecture series Becoming Nobody. It's a fantastic audible book

series of his lectures over the course of 10 years. He talks about the

spacesuit. He's like, right when you're a little baby and you're like figuring out the

spacesuit, everyone's cheering you on. Look at he, he waved at me. Yeah, he

smiled. Oh yeah, he giggled. That kind of thing. Like as soon as you figure

out the levers of the spacesuit, you're cheered on constantly, right? So

he Said he always felt like people would come to him and say, oh, what

a nice spacesuit you have. You know, you look so great in that spacesuit. You've

done so much with it, getting your education and doing all this, you know, Dick

Albert, the PhD, and all this. And you were with Timothy Leary, but he

didn't feel comfortable in his facesuit. Right. And so I think

there's something to that. And it's not just about self acceptance.

It's about truly knowing yourself. And I see that

as. As a pivotal piece to the plant medicine game. Either you

accept who you are and you love yourself for that,

and you continue to work through all the trials and tribulations of being human and

being in this realm, and the realm is chock full of fucking curveballs,

or you continue to look outside yourself. And this is where I see

people gravitate towards a new identity. And that can happen

just overnight. One ceremony, you're like, I'm getting a divorce. I'm changing my

name, I'm dressing differently. I had a. My

dad's girlfriend for about 15 years, and I saw this happen too. She wanted

people to call her madre. She thought she was ayahuasca, spirit

in body. And I was like, oh, man. I could see,

like, seeing the similarities. I could also see saying, you know, we are one being.

And maybe there's no separation between you and ayahuasca.

Where I draw the line is you expecting other people to call you madre.

Right? Because that's fucking weird. And you don't act like ayahuasca,

nor do you communicate like ayahuasca, nor do you have the wisdom of ayahuasca.

So it's a little absurd to want us for you, everybody to call you

madre. But when I really evaluated that that was her searching, she wanted

to grab on to a new identity. She wanted something that.

That she could accept in herself. If people thought of her as this

beautiful shamanic woman, healer, fill in the blank,

then she could love herself. Right. She couldn't be happy until

then. Right? Because she didn't accept herself for who she was. She couldn't just

be a person she was born in. She couldn't be that person. She

didn't accept that person. And that's really sad to see that, because we're

given the option. It's not like plant medicines force you down a bad path or

force you to the good path. It's your decisions and your embodiment that

choose that path. Right? Yeah.

You know, sitting in a ceremony recently and one of the messages was

when spiritual awakening outpaces

emotional healing, you create a spiritual ego.

And also because I've, you know,

I've been guilty of this too, in the past, where you

receive such great insights, but when you don't

apply it, like you said, it creates a little bit of a fracture.

And from my experience, that fracture is actually an inner

critic. Yes, because the voice says, I know

better, but I'm not doing better. And so it

feeds the inner critic and it actually feeds the saboteur.

And it can almost create, like, this negative feedback loop because you create

almost like a shame cycle. Yeah. And

so this segues absolutely perfectly to one of the other

archetypes that I'd love to touch on with you, which is the

student and the student archetype

I remember you have in your house of work and health, which is just so

perfect, given the work that you do and the podcast that you have. It's like,

oh, my work is to learn. It's incredible. But what I'd love to

explore a little bit is something very similar to what we were

just talking about with medicine, which is the pace that information

is moving at nowadays. Like, I remember research

many years ago, I'm sure you've heard this, where the average person consumes

more information in one day than our ancestors did in a lifetime.

And so all of that information has to be digested, it has to be

assimilated, it has to be integrated. But obviously, we're

also experiencing the rate of. Of consumption

moving faster than the rate of integration.

So you being in the podcasting world and in

a lot of the fields of education and holistic health,

I'd love to explore that a little bit. You know, in the realm of the

student archetype. Like, how do you navigate that in terms of

the rate of consumption of everything that's

so available? You can have podcasts and books and courses and

anything you want, snap of a finger, but that also has to

be integrated, just like each medicine ceremony. A hundred percent.

Yeah. Great. Phenomenal question. When I. When we did the archetype wheel,

I was just. There was the two bits set out with a student being in

that. And then where is the highest potential? Where? I was like, fuck. And

also the saboteur being at the very. At the very end in the house of

God, I was like, oh, man, course that's there.

But, you know, like I spoke on earlier, where Gaffney says, like, you do some

certain things because they're self evident. Right. To me,

education was never that growing up. It wasn't self evident. It

was evident to me that I wasn't going to need this shit when I got

older. Why are we learning it? It was evident to me that I was being

taught a bunch of stuff that I couldn't ask questions on. And I had

just enough teachers that gave a shit about me and helped me along the way

that I was able to go to college and stuff like that. I'm not certain,

you know, re homeschool our kids now. I don't care if my kids go to

college. I really don't. But I've learned so much more

and thanks to Paul Check really planted that seed for me reading how to Eat

movie Healthy. It changed so much for me as an athlete. I

just asked, what else can I learn if one book can do so

much for my recovery, my state of well being, my gut health, all the

things, what else is out there? And that really lit the fire for my ongoing

education. And like Anthony says, you know, One of the 12 faces of Eros

or the divine is desire. You know, and that can be. There's a light side

and a dark side of desire, but when you listen to the calling, then

we're actually in. We're in that face of Eros, we're in that face of the

desire or the divine, rather. And so I've listened to the

calling on what I've been magnetized and drawn towards from an

education standpoint. And when I do that, first it was

all about performance and then it was all about how do I heal the brain,

right? So like from hyperbaric oxygen therapy to

meditation, to plant medicines, to fasting, to ketones to

whatever, right? I just absorbed it all and I practiced. That's one thing I always

give myself credit for. Something that drew me towards guys like Tim Ferriss,

Joe Rogan and many others, is that my buddy had a great

quote when we were growing up. Don't talk about it, be about it, right? It's

like these guys ran the N of 1. They were always guinea pigging themselves. They're

always trying shit before they speak on it. And then they'd talk about it and

then they bring an expert in. I got to meet Dr. Dan Engel, who wrote

the concussion repair manual. He's a close friend and beautiful curandero who's had, you

know, thousand plus journeys in the Amazon. He's incredible, really unique,

but, you know, so that desire, the listening to that desire called me to these

different places and at different periods of my life. That that was all there was.

It was all about Performance. And it was all about healing the brain. Then it

was all about longevity, Then it was all about, how do I find peace

now that I have all this health and all this other. And I don't feel

good, right? Plant medicines enter on a different way and then

different practices have come and gone. But to your point, on the rate on

things like that and the knowing that we have to, you know, you got to

chew and swallow and then it's got to go through the stomach and then the

intestines and then out. If you go too fast, that's going to mess the whole

thing up. And the amount of resources that takes. The

first time anybody does a water fast. You realize as your brain

shifts on like day three and you've got like a stream of ketones going through

your body, that you're like, oh, I'm not hungry,

right? And that's a weird sensation to lose all appetite.

And it's a weird sensation to see how the brain works because the

brain's now working off a different fuel. But

you have nothing moving from mouth to anus. And because

of that, there's so much free resource, right? We don't realize how much

that's constantly putting our body under pressure on a daily basis, right? Especially if we

snack. Something similar to that occurs when we start to create space

in our lives, whether that comes from meditation or getting.

Taking two weeks off to go to a journey at Solara in Costa Rica,

wherever that place may be. And that creating of space

is necessary to see where is my pace correct and where is it incorrect.

If I don't push the pause button, it's really easy to wind the

fucking clock up and. And you're slowly getting faster each day. So

the days are going by faster and faster and faster. I went out to do

a journey with Paul years ago and, you know, I'm going through his

library and I'm geeking out. I'm like, oh, you know, he's telling me about this

one particular spiritual master. And I'm like, oh, man, where's his books? And he's showing

me all. He's like, this is the one you'll like. I'm like, oh, cool. And

just ordering a ton of shit on Amazon. And I look at him and

he's like, how you been, buddy? And he can tell that I'm off. And I'm

like, it feels like life is just speeding up. Like I'm on the hamster

wheel and somebody just electronically turned it a little quicker than I want.

I can't get off but it's like, well, I'm running faster than I've ever run

before, but it just feels like it's moving quick. And he goes, you read essentialism

by Greg McCown? And I was like, never heard of it. He goes, make that

your number one book right now. He goes, make that your first book. Put it

in front of all the spiritual teachings. They're like, are you sure that this shit.

I really want to read this stuff. I don't really care about Essential. Is it

like. No, no, it's a spiritual book. And it was. But I remember reading that

and it put so much context. Like, Paul talks about the

your yes is only as valuable or as good as your no power of your

no. Right. And how do you take that into relationships? The big ones,

like marriage. The big ones, like you and your boss and your work environment. What

is it all for? How do I prioritize through perspective? This is what I signed

up for versus this is what you want me to do. Takes away from what

I signed up for and what I'm good at, right? So it allows us to

frame things in a very beautiful way that reminds us of why we're here. This

is what I. This is why I took this job. And so it invites more

conversation, more honesty with the self and with those

around us. But when we get to that point of understanding what is essential in

our lives and what is not, and then communicating those needs,

then we. Things start to line up in a beautiful way. And going through that

with the book and then talking with Paul about it was such a pivotal part

of my life. Because after that, I could see not just

from a consumption of information standpoint, but even from a work itself

standpoint. Where am I burning the candle at both ends? And what's the reasoning behind

that? And how do I slow down? And in large part, the slowing down came

from meditation, because I've had busy ass weeks. But if I can get myself

to meditate for 20 minutes. And now, thanks to Michael, I didn't be

anywhere on an airplane riding past year. While my wife's driving, I can lock in

and my kids think I'm out. I can hear that, oh, Dad's asleep and I'm

just freaking. Just full. I'm sleeping with one eye open.

Yeah. But I'm aware and I'm. And I'm deep. And

that creates a certain level of space that allows for reflection. It allows

for me to have a stop button that gives contrast to all

the doing. Right? And if I don't have that, that doing can get faster and

it can creep up. And I see with a lot of people getting more to

the point of, like, literally, how do I pump the brakes with, you know, my

desire to learn as much as I can and things like that. Again, I give

credit to Paul. He came out here. What are we talking about? We were talking

about my addiction to fiction books, you know, And I'm like, we're on a podcast.

They're actually sitting right behind me. And I'm like, I feel kind of guilty.

There's a part of me that feels guilty because all the books in this freaking

room, 90% of them are non fiction. It's before written language,

right? Story can awaken and inspire things in us that

nonfiction cannot, right? So diving into fiction, I'm like, is it. Is this just the

same as watching Netflix till 10pm? Like, is it if I just replace that

since I don't watch TV at night? And he said, even if it was

Netflix, there's a point where we recognize

in our education that there's a fullness, right? And if

we recognize that, we'll feel drawn

away from education, we'll feel drawn to some form of entertainment, we'll feel

drawn to fiction, we'll feel drawn to stillness or being in nature or drawn

to doing something else. And if we listen to that, that's

because our body needs a break. It can't keep eating more. So he's like,

you listen to that, get. Go through as much fiction as you like, and then

when you're called to it, come back to nonfiction. It's still going to be here.

It's not going anywhere. Some of that's a beautiful thing about people writing books. I

can interview a guy right after he writes the book, and I've already read it,

or I could interview a guy four years after he wrote the book. Beautiful truth

of that book still stands, right? Anywho, you know, Paul gave me permission

to pump the brakes on things like that. And fiction has really opened up an

entire new world of really phenomenal ideas.

Parallels. We do a lot of fantasy books and stuff. My wife even got me

into smut books like, what's her name? Sarah J. Moss, acotar, things like that.

And I think those are freaking hot and awesome and totally entertaining. But

yeah, all that said, I think it's different for each person.

But the two main things that I draw from your question are, is my pace,

Am I outpacing myself? Whether that's work or study

or any of it, am I outpacing myself? What can I do to actually

reflect on that, Let me push pause and then I can reflect. Find ways to

create space in your life, whether that's being in nature, walking around with your shirt

off. I love sunrise and sunset walks because, you know, the sunrise walk

allows me to frame what I have for the day and say yes to it

all. And the sunset walk allows me to look back on that, see what I

would have changed and reflect on that. So when I hit the sheets, I'm not

thinking about my day. I've already. I've already had time to reflect on those things

on every event, right? I've given space. And then the other piece,

you know, am I. Am I consuming too much? Well, if

you eat slowly, you can tell when you're full. If you're cramming in,

you don't get full. And I remember that from my college football days. I would

have to eat fast if I wanted to get 10,000 calories. In being 44 now

and not wanting to eat 10,000 calories nor not having the ability to process that,

I gotta slow down. But when I slow down, this is only the last few

years where I'd start to eat something and I could actually not finish my plate

and be okay with not finishing my plate. So that's a different kind of feel

coming from somebody who's always trying to gain weight growing up. But I think it's

super important to have those skill sets now. Considering the freaking metric on

Instagram, what percentage of your videos went past or of your

viewers made it past three seconds, that's like the major

metric your video did. Well, if most of the people watching it made it past

the three second mark, that's fucking insane to me.

That three seconds determines, like in the first three seconds, if you don't grab somebody,

they're just swiping away, right? That's where the attention span is and it

speaks to the nature of where things are going. And that's the counter to

that is books. The counter to that is podcasts. The counter to that is

real conversations. You may not have a podcast, but if you sit with somebody

or go for a walk and you've got 20 minutes to an hour to really

communicate, no phones allowed. That's what we're doing right now,

right? If it's somebody you respect and there's a good back and forth, those are

the best types of people to talk to because they're doing some cool shit and

you're doing some cool shit and you want to find out there's a genuine interest.

And that cross Flow is something that fills the soul. It's

something that's self evidently good. Right. You don't have to say, like, why was the

walk good? Well, I learned about xyz. No, the walk's always good to this person

because we're always exchanging great ideas and I genuinely want to learn

about them. So figure out ways to weave that into the schedule. They're

high priority. Right. Beautiful. You

know, a couple weeks ago, I was teaching a workshop on

addiction, and I was just sitting in meditation prior to and just

kind of asking my soul, like, what, what do we need to touch on today?

And I just saw just in my mind's eye, the

word addition. And then all of a sudden I get

this message. The word addition and the word

addiction are one letter off. And

you just take the C and you plug it into addition. You create

addiction. And the download was that

addiction is coping. The sea is coping through addition

and how much our culture, whenever we're

feeling off or whenever we're feeling like something's wrong,

there's something's off. We're always looking to add something.

It's always what's missing. What do I need to add? Is it a food? Is

it a supplement? Is it a course? It is a podcast? Is it a pill?

Is it a superfood? So there's always like, and I'm sure that's our.

Our cultural myth of consumerism is if you're feeling off,

consume something. If you're feeling off, add something.

And then, you know, I went to the number one book that sits on

my toilet is the Dao de Jing. And in the Dao de Jing, it says,

in the pursuit of knowledge, every day something is added. In the

pursuit of the dao, every day something is dropped.

I wonder if you want to touch on that at all. I'm so happy you

brought it up because I was just talking to my niece about. I don't even

know what brought it up, but we came across the subject of, like, the never

ending desire to add more, you know, and I think it might

have had something to do with the I'll be happy when you know, type synopsis

where there's this constant searching and longing for something better. It

applies to many fields, even biohacking. They're always looking for the magic bullet. Like, if

I just take this thing, I'll lift 150. I brought up Bruce Lee. You know,

similar to the Dao. Bruce Lee talked about, you know,

the. A couple different ways. One, he's like, you don't worry about

adding A ton of different things. Think about. If you're trying to change your life

positively, start eliminating. Focus first on eliminating the bad before you start

looking to add the good, right? Because the bad things are going to be more

deleterious than adding anything good, if that. Those bad habits remain.

Right. He also said, I'm not afraid of the guy who knows 10,000 kicks.

I'm afraid of the guy who's thrown one kick 10,000 times, right? Because

the guy who's thrown that one kick 10,000 times knows his distance, his timing, his

power. His body is perfectly adapted to throwing that

kick, and that's a kick that can do damage, Right? So if you think about

that from a martial arts perspective, that puts a lot into

perspective, too. Am I honing, sharpening the blade of this great skill

set that I've been given that that has to do with, you know, my exact

physical exterior. Paul talks a lot about muscle, insertion points and things like

that. When. When we first lifted together, he's like, I think he was

55 or 56 when I met him. No, he was

57. We were at Onit. He's like, let's get a workout together. And I was

like, fuck yeah, man. Kid in a candy store. First time getting to train with

Paul. All of on, it's watching us go through this workout,

and we start doing, like, overhead walking lunges, where we're holding, you know,

bottoms up kettlebells, which is pretty hard on the wrists and stuff with arms locked

out. Then we switched to just overhead press dumbbells, and we're going up in weight,

each set priming the nervous system. And our big finisher is going to be

barbell lunges. I've never done heavy barbell

lunges in my whole life, right? Being nearly 6 foot 4.

You know, we throw on a 45 on each side, so it's about 135

pounds. And I'm hitting, and I'm like, oh, this feels good. Paul and I are

both in barefoot shoes, so, you know, knees got to kiss the ground just ever

so slightly on. On the. On the wood planks. Racket, go to

185. Racket, go to two and a quarter. And I look at him like, how

far are you going to. Because I think I'll probably just do 275 today. Yeah,

I think he won. I think he. He didn't want to hurt my feelings, so.

Not that I was just like, dude, you can't hurt my feelings. But he went

up to two. I did 2:25 for a set of

two reps on each side. And I was fucking pumped. Like, I'd never

think I could do 2:25 with this length, you know? And he does

275 for six reps on each leg. And I'm like, damn. And

he goes, son, when I was your age, I was doing this with 315, and

I burst out laughing. I was like, there's not a chance in hell you're lying

because you're 57. He just did that six reps each leg with 275. For

sure. You were using 315. Like, well, you know, there's body mechanics

and stuff like that. And I was like, yeah, all that aside, there's.

He's a gifted person, and we each have our own unique

gifts to express, right? And so, like, if we work with those gifts, we can

make that one kick the 10,000 times sharp, where it's absolutely.

It's been perfected, and we understand our mechanics and the way that works within us,

and there's mastery that comes from that. So I think that framing that you give

us, I think is really important from the Dow,

you know, and. And of course, really, you know.

You know this, too, as a health coach getting out of the pantry, you know,

it's. Paul says, stop bullshitting yourself. Like, literally, like, remove the stuff that you know

is bad for you. Stop bullshitting yourself. Remove all the things that you know are

bad, all the things that are questionable, and just bring in the good,

you know, Then you can make additions. But first things first. First things first is

eliminate the bat. Yeah. Beautiful. One of the things

that. Or a couple of things that sounds like you've been up to

recently is, number one, building community, and number

two, living on the farm. And this

show is mental health in a modern world. And those are the two

big things that are missing in the modern world is, number one, real

community, and number two, connection to nature.

And so I'd love for you to touch on, from your

perspective, why community and

why a deep connection to nature is so

essential for mental health.

I'll give my opinion on the two. One of the things we come to understand,

it's funny, like, there's a large group of people that see how fucked up the

world is, and they want to be sovereign, they want to exit the system. And

people who really get it understand the interconnectivity of all of us. Right. And

that you can't live on an island. We're not designed to live in that way.

Right. We are, number one, we are all interconnected. Number two,

we're inseparable from the totality, right? So because that's a known

impossibility, what are the ways in which we can work together from an interconnected

standpoint to build a more beautiful world? And I'm seeing that shift take place

even within, you know, the sovereign communities. But there's always a

genuine desire to be seen and to see others. That's I see you right

in Avatar. Such a beautiful one liner, right where

I could name all the shit I don't like about the director. But you know,

that line gets it when you say I see you, right? If you really mean

that and you do see somebody, there is a certain amount of,

of witnessing of other where you recognize your namaste. The God in me,

the divine in me, recognizes the divine in you. What a beautiful way to

greet people, especially if you mean it, especially if you actually do see that in

them. And so I think community's always been a part of the game.

I think through individualism and the manifest destiny

and conquer the world, that kind of the ideology that there

has been gifts given to us through being able to push

and self improvement and all that. But it has come at the cost of

how we work tribally and how we understood each other and how we really held

those things. The hardest part of my life was when football ended. I was

the most depressed. And it happens to a lot of, you know, college level

players and pro players. Same thing happens in the military. And

when I really asked myself what am I missing, I knew I couldn't play football

again. Well, I'm still an athlete. That's there. I didn't realize it was an archetype,

but also I missed the camaraderie of having a team. Lifting

weights with the team in ASU was the peak experience.

Lifting weights at 24 hour fitness by myself was like beating off.

I mean there was just, it was like it, it kind of worked, but I

knew it wasn't the real thing. And so I got really depressed from that. When

I asked myself what I'm missing, I missed the camaraderie. I missed the camaraderie. I

missed learning something new. That's what brought me to mixed martial arts was I wanted

to learn something new each day and I wanted to have a team again.

Now you don't have to get punched in the head to have that. And then,

you know, for the last six years, being a coach and fit for service, some

people would come and go. A lot of people stayed. A lot of people stayed

for four or five Six years. And those are people that I. My

brothers and sisters for life. Great people. We're godparents to people we've met

from. That have kids that we met in Fit for Service. Super close

people. I met Ken Conti, the guy who's guiding us through our vision quest through

Fit for Service. You know, Fit for Service ended, but that

wasn't under my management. You know, I was a coach in there. And so

building digital community now, that's also going to have face to face events and

things like that here at the Farm. It's something that it

provides something for me that I didn't know that I needed. Like, in. Only in

its absence am I like, oh, shit. Like, I don't get this from the podcast.

It's great. The one on one, right? Especially we get to have a

conversation. I'm not helping people. Generally, people will listen to this

and that kind of thing, and maybe once in a while, somebody will come up

to me and be like, dude, that book you recommended changed my life. Or, man,

you told this one story. And I went to do this ceremony and holy shit,

thank you. That's an awesome feeling. But getting a direct line to

go back and forth with people and meet them where they're at and bring

people together and do awesome things like a sweat lodge or an ecstatic dance

that really crack our hearts open and allow us to sing and feel

and be who we truly are and witness them. Then the

icu, right, like there, there's a magic sauce to that that doesn't happen

anywhere else. It really doesn't. 2020 was our third year

fit for service. I think our second year fit for service. And we were planning

on going to Lake Tahoe and California side was a no, no. So we started

looking in Nevada. We ended up having an event there. It was like 20 people

at maximum in these different groups and things. And it worked.

October, we have an event in OB's backyard in

Sedona. And so we retrofitted everything. We brought in big tents,

like in Burning Man. All the speakers came out there, and Purangi

came to play live music. This first time in October, first time that whole

year playing live music. And a large percentage of people, it was

their first time hugging another human that year,

man. And that broke my heart, dude. Like,

so hard. Just so freaking hard to think about that. And

2021, the world still hadn't changed enough from what we know.

Charles Eisenstein came out to an event and he was like, you know, you can't

get this on Zoom like, we're meant to be in community. We're meant to

thrive together. We're meant to have the big powwow that brings

everyone together, where we can sing, we can celebrate each other, we can

have hard conversations, we can do shit that makes us better. We can bring in

the hormetic strength of the heat and the elements and the sweat lodge.

All those things make us better. And it happens face to face. It

happens in groups. I'm super excited to launch. It's called the Kingdom Within.

I'll give you guys a link. It's on School. It's 150 bucks a month. I

basically tune in once, once a month to drop a deep dive on

particular subjects that I find important with Q and A. And then two weeks

later, there's just a pure Q and A, ask me anything. And there's going to

be events and all sorts of fun stuff coming up. I'm super thrilled to get

to bring that back because I've had about 15, 16 months without it. And it's

like I didn't even know till it was gone how much I needed that. I'm

super excited about that. And then the farm piece, it was my hope that a

lot of people would want to do what I'm doing farming wise. And I think

a lot of people are tracking that, right? But whether it's building parallel systems or

coming into some sense of sovereignty, that shit takes money, right? It's not like a

free thing to be like, all right, I'm selling my house in Austin. I'm going

to get a hundred acres somewhere. It does cost money, and not

everyone's going to be able to provide that for people. Before

we lived here, I was going out to rome Ranch in Fredericksburg, 90 minutes outside

of Austin, and I jumped in for their bison harvest. Like, I know those

guys. I bought a half a bowl that fed my wife while our

little girl was in the womb, right? And fed Bear when he was a five

year old, six year old. It helped build his body, right? It repaired my ball

and my wife while she was creating life. Those are relationships too,

that bring a certain story and a level of connection that's been

missing. We don't know. We don't have a story when we go to the store

and buy hamburger, right? We don't know how many cows is it that's in this

piece of hamburger. It might be, or there's up to 80 in a single

McDonald's hamburger. You realize that, like, that's how much getting mixed together.

That's a lot of different consciousness. There's a lot of different entities that

didn't live well. I want to participate in the life and death

cycle of an animal. I want to know that animal. I want to care and

love and respect that animal. I want to provide as much as many gifts as

I can. We raise our own sheep here, Black buck, red stag, and they

all live well. We take care of them. We put down animals that are suffering

and give them to the coyotes and to the caracara. And everything feeds

back into the system of regenerative. So it's been a. It's been a beautiful thing

getting experienced that. But I tell people all the time, like, if you're not going

to have a farm, that's fine, but go meet your farmers. Go get

food and produce from the farmer's market. Know where this is coming from,

learn the story, go check it out. Then too, like, we have one of the

best raw milks I've ever had in my life is on delivery here. So

every two weeks, you know, we'd pick up like four or five gallons. And I

brought my kids out to see this farm. It's all Jersey cows. 300 acres, rolling

green hills in Schulenburg, Texas, called Strict. If you're ever in driving

in between Houston and Austin, go check them out. Super sweet old

couple. They've been doing it their whole lives. They're like in their late 60s, early

70s, but their animals are fricking pristine. Like you.

You're like, can I get out there and actually be with them? Sure, they'll nudge

on you. So I go out there and you got to brace myself. These giant

Jersey cows are rubbing their head up against my ass, like, trying to scratch the

top of their heads on my body. Like, they're the happiest, friendliest

animals, you know. And you go see the little baby calves like these, these are

animals that are living in joy. Drive up and down

Interstate 5 in California and somewhere between Fresno

and LA, or, sorry, Northern California and LA, you get

Harris Ranch. And it doesn't matter if your windows are up and you've got, you

know, reciprocating air that's not. You're recycling the air. Inside, you'll smell

Harris Ranch. And that's as. As nasty a

factory farm as you can get, you know, and just the smell of that, you

know, it's brown for as far as the eye can see. Animals eating

toxic food, standing in their own feces, shoulder to shoulder, no space.

It's a really hard thing to witness that and then to Go say like, yeah,

it doesn't matter. I'll save some money on beef today. It's like, no, I'll pay

a little extra because it's better for the earth, it's better for the animal, and

it's better for me. And I think that's something that's really cool when you understand

regenerative agriculture. It's a system that feeds back into

itself, right? It's constantly recirculating. And as that happens,

the microbiome of the soil gets bigger and stronger. The grass becomes

better and healthier. The animals eating that become bigger and stronger and healthier. And

then you consume those animals now you become bigger, stronger, and happier and healthier.

And that whole thing just continues to feed back into itself. And that's

what I want to support. I think it's a big deal to support that, whether

you have a direct hand in or not. Learn about it. And there's some good

documentaries. Food Inc. Kiss the Ground, Common

Ground. Those are all really good documentaries that speak to that in a very beautiful

way. Sacred Cow. Awesome one. So anyhow, that's my rant

on. Beautiful. Beautiful is all. You know, I think lastly

on the nature piece, is that the first time a tree talked to me when

I was on ayahuasca, I was floored. I was like,

I'm walking back from an outhouse and I have two really tiny

Mexican women carrying me back, you know, and they're like, couldn't be 5ft, even high,

4ft. And so we're walking and this

woman comes by and she always speaks Spanish and she's teasing me, and she goes,

she says it in Spanish. Then she says, the Hulk. The Hulk. And she's pointing

at me and I. To me. To her, I looked like the Incredible Hulk. And

I just burst out laughing. But then I get this whisper in my ear, feed

me. Feed me. It was a little. Just a whisper. And I turn, and

immediately it was like something hit. When you go to the doctor's office as a

kid, hopefully not anymore. And they do that knee reflex check. I turned to

listen, like something just said, feed, Feed me. And I look right at this tree

and there's mulak, wretch. Everything comes out on this thing. I fall down on all

fours, my body's shaking, I'm sweating into it, spitting into it.

And I asked, did you just say feed me? And the answer was yes. And

then all the rest comes up. And I remember telling our guide that, and

he was like, you know, you can't pour ayahuasca. On a tree, it does nothing.

It has to be activated. You know, some of the times we share the medicine,

but it's got to sit in there and cook a little bit, and then the

tree gets to have that experience. I've had multiple experiences witnessing, you know,

the vibrations of trees communicating with each other, but also the presence of

that. Paul talks about, lick your fingers and put your fingers on two different leaves

of the same tree and close your eyes and ask if you can share energy

with this tree. First time I did that, I was blown away because he's like,

look, yes or no is all you're going to get. The yes is an expansive

opening feeling. The no is a contracted, backing away

feeling. I've only had one tree give me a no ever, but it was like

I would end in the out twice. I was like, oh, sorry. First no. Okay,

okay, maybe I'm off. I don't know. But every time a tree said yes,

which is 99% of the time, like, there's a feeling of being lifted, full of

energy. There's a feeling of like. Like taking a deep breath, right?

And that's a very real, palpable feeling to. To have a

relationship. And I know those relationships can take place and. And that many of

the elders throughout all fucking cultures, no matter if your skin's brown or white,

all ancient cultures understood that all ancient cultures did live in

indigenous ways. They were indigenous to the land they were from, and they had a

deep connection to nature, a deep respect and reverence for it. And in knowing

that whatever's animating us is animating it. So what I'm hearing from you is

remembering the interconnection of all

things and remembering our place within it.

Yeah, brother. I mean, we see this in the Lion King, right? The circle of

life. We see this in. In when you hear the Lakota say aho

Mata Yasin. All my relations, all my relatives, right? They're not

speaking to every Kingsbury that came before them, right? They're speaking

to all their relatives. The wind, the sun, the stars, the cosmos, all

their relatives. The small, the seen, the tiniest, to the

unseen, and the biggest ones. Like, that's. We're related to everything. And that

prayer calling out that at the end is. Is making that prayer

available to the totality, right? It's connecting to all

those relatives. Beautiful. Kyle, thank you so

much for sharing your presence and sharing your wisdom. Anytime I get to drop in

with you is always a blessing. Oh, my absolute pleasure.

So excited that you're doing a podcast, brother. This is awesome. Yeah, thank you.

And so if people would love to follow up with you, learn more about what

you're up to, where would you like to send them? Yeah, go direct to the

school link. I'll send you a school link that they can go to find the

about page. Email me kyleingsbu.com if you got

questions. Kingsboo.com doesn't have a link over there, so don't try to use that. But

that's where you can read more about me and some of the work that I've

done. My podcast, Kyle Kingsbury Podcast, we're close to 500

episodes now. I've been doing that since 2017, so that's been incredible.

Long, long ride, but very educational, very fulfilling. You know, it's self evident to

me, you know, the why behind that. And yeah, I mean

that's, that's really it, brother. So I sent him to go to the school length

if you can. I'd love to see you there. But if you got questions, just

email me kyleingsbu.com Beautiful. Thanks for coming on the

show, brother. My pleasure, brother. Thank you so much, Greg.