Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life Podcast. I hope everybody's day is going beautiful. I hope the sun is shining. I hope the birds are singing. I hope the wind is at your back. I have with me a friend of mine, a friend of the show. She's got her own podcast and she's an incredible individual, Psychedelic Conversations. Ladies and gentlemen, with me today is Susan Gunner, a visionary at the forefront of the psychedelic renaissance, an era seeking to reconnect humanity with its essence, heal trauma, and expand our consciousness. As a holistic psychotherapist, Susan has dedicated her life to exploring the mind's transformative potential through integration practices, meditation, and psychedelic therapy. Her platform, the Psychedelic Conversation Podcast, has become a sanctuary for seekers and skeptics alike, hosting profound discussions with some of the most innovative thinkers in psychedelic research, healing, and integration. In an age marked by isolation and uncertainty, Susan's work invites us to reimagine wellness, exploring the ways psychedelics can usher in holistic... grounded and lasting change. Today, Susan joins us to share her insights on how the movement may not only shift individual lives, but has the power to reshape the cultural landscape as we know it. Susan, thank you so much for being here today. How are you? Thank you so much, George. It's an honor and thank you for having me. I'm doing great. I'm looking forward to this conversation. Thank you. Absolutely. I'm stoked you're here. You know, it's I've been following your page and a lot of your work and some of the visual metaphors that you have been putting out are breathtaking, not only in the imagery of it, but the way they transcend imagery and make me feel. And I've seen the comments and I know other people are doing that, too. Before we jump into that, like what what inspired that and what is the process behind that? Yeah, this is great. I mean, I, I mentioned a few times in some of my comments as well. So about maybe now, nearly a decade ago, I was going through my own personal, you know, unfolding in my own transformation and exploration, consciousness exploration journey. And then the insights and the process was so potent and it was so intense and it was so, at the time, so real for me. I didn't have anybody to listen or share. I didn't have anyone. When I first started, I mean, we're so lucky now at this time of the psychedelic renaissance with the movement and the therapeutic approaches and a lot of mentors and facilitators are so much more informed and grounded. Yes, there are issues out there, but let's look at the positives. We know so much more now. And at the time when I started my journey, I didn't have any. So then one day I saw this image that was so powerful and it reflected what was going on for me. And the insight, the idea came that I could post today's vibe, like a title, today's vibe. And I could literally share what was going on for me on the day with the image, because the images are very powerful because they're kind of like Gothic and dark. If you think about it, they're not, despite maybe the comment, I mean, the today's vibe in its originals, form and intensity and the message is it's quite dark and it relays what it takes to go through a spiritual awakening. It relays what it takes to heal and break out of our template. So that was kind of my own journey. Every day I started posting, which kind of helped me. It was helping me, right? It was mine. It was my, it's almost like my public journal, right? And then it caught attention. then obviously now it's become something, it has its own energy, it has its consciousness. And over the years, it also now become my client's journey. Like now my clients go through their own processes and I get inspired and through what I'm witnessing, I then now post today's vibe. So it's kind of, that's the background story really. I get this. There's this question that comes to mind and I just want to, I'm just going to pose it out here and see what you have to say, but growing in darkness, what is growing in darkness? What does that mean? So I have a soul brother. He says, why are we so scared of the darkness, right? Because as humans, we do. We want to strive and light. We have this love and light and intentional positive vibes everywhere, love and compassion. But then if we look at the depth of what this is about, it is not that much of a love and light process. you know, breaking out of our imprint, breaking out of our conditioning and programming, it's gonna shake up some, you know, systems in our psyche, in our system, in our body. And like I said, my soul brother who I work with, he says, why are we so scared of the dark? If you think about it, he says, heart is also inside your body in the dark. Right. So that was like a beautiful validation of the true processes of healing transformation and spiritual awakening. That's the journey that always somehow requires us to walk through some deep, dark, uncharted territories. And it's going to feel really dark and intense and lonely as well. So again, the today's vibe, for example, that's why it's so gripping because it's the truth. There's a universal truth in this, even though sometimes I get challenged. You know, I get challenged, George, by people privately messaging me, saying to me, can you stop posting those dark, dark messages? You are perpetuating more problems. So we have that too. I think that that's the, on some level without being offensive to those people. Like I, I think that that is like a, That shows how powerful it is. You know, when I think about some of those images, like I can't help but see the language that goes with them and how it's tied, like breakthroughs and breakdowns. Like these things are so connected. If you're not going to break through, you're going to break down until you can break through again. I can't help but think about the way psilocybin grows in darkness and it makes all these connections in darkness and then it breaks through to the light on some level. I get goosebumps when I think about it. I think those images are so necessary and they're so provocative and they're so helpful to growing and they're so open to interpretation that they speak directly to the individual's journey. I hope you never stop posting them. Thank you. No, I will continue, of course. It never affected me at such a level to avoid posting. Because I also know that I embrace those messages because that means it's triggered something within them. That means it's working. That means it's working, right? Because the whole point is to, like you said, the images can... relay you know they say an art can relay thousand words without you know any language you can literally penetrate through on a cell level right so and the the whole point of those uh post quote combination is is to rapture at some level create some rapture so that the dismantling can start yeah it's I think it works on so many levels it's I think it speaks to the time we're in the time of transition. It speaks to the relationship with uncertainty and the unknown and, and maybe some new sort of archetypes that could be percolating on the corners of which existential existential motherhood. Maybe we talk a little bit about this project that I keep seeing percolate in your feeds and these ideas you're talking about. I know you've got a big speech coming up, but I was wondering if you can maybe give us a teaser and talk about it and, and, Put that out there. Yeah, of course. Thank you, George. So this is so close to my heart. It literally makes me nervous to talk about, to be honest. Yeah, it really makes me nervous. It's taken me so many years to begin to even start sort of like sharing glimpses of what this is. And this is very much tied to my own personal journey and I know it's tied to many, many of my own clients and other people that I'm connected with. So, you know, beyond the therapeutic work with the psychedelic medicines, beyond the those amazing benefits and neuroscience and all these amazing things that we can sort of make sense of what they are. There is something else that they do that it's beyond our comprehension, which is they break us down. They break our perception. They break our belief systems. They break the imprint. So there is a concept that I talk about, which is birth imprint. So the birth imprint would be... that we're all born carrying similar, let's call it template or similar sort of formation, genetic or emotional or on a cellular level. We form through in our mother's wombs, right? So what we have, the birth imprint is, is the formation that happens in utero And it carries memory. It carries a lot of material content that is passed through the mother, through the generations, through the lineage. So it's kind of passed through womb to womb, right? So that's the imprint. So all of us, we carry that. Every single human being, we have a birth imprint. We have our predispositions. We have our However, the formation that we went through, that process of formation in the utero is our birth imprint. You know, it comes with, like I said, transgenerational content, memories, lots of different things, combination of everything put together. And then. when we're out in the world, this birth imprint with predisposition then becomes the canvas that then we go on living and seeing and perceiving the world through the lens of this birth imprint. And then, especially once we are out in the world, by the age of three, we have already developed layers and layers and layers as a result of this birth imprint through a very unique predisposition lens that we think that it's us, but it's not. It's a formation of survival systems, formation of predispositions, vulnerabilities, very unique specific vulnerabilities that we may have. All of this is formed in utero. There is an incredible documentary that's out there already. It's called In Utero. Our listeners may be interested to take a look. It's a private production, and it's one of the resources that I use for my own programs and the work that I do. It's one of our foundational resources. And in this in utero documentary, we have most incredible qualified, incredible psychologists, psychiatrists, geneticists, neuroscientists, and people who are really looking at our early life and the formation of life and the formation of identity from a very young, from a fetus to let's say by the age of three. By the age of three, can you believe it? This formation is concrete. So then, from that on, we then live the rest of our lives through this lens that we operate from the same conditioning, same vulnerabilities, the unique experience, right? And then... Of course, life then, it's a bit like the manifestation of whatever you focus on. We talk about all this quantum physics and quantum fields. I mean, lately, I've been really enjoying Hoffman's content, saying that what you think, you think the reality is not the reality. It's your own little headset, he calls it, right? So I almost want to say the birth imprint has its own little lens, right? looking out into the world and perceiving the world as the reality, but it's not. It is sort of like projected or manifested through that birth imprint. So now, coming back to this archetype, and how does this imprint come to being? How did the formation of this life happens and the root of this? understanding there. So this has been coming through many, many, many guided psychedelic journeys and experiences and also neuroscience and all my own research put together, as well as, you know, I'm a student of, lifelong student of Stan Grof, Dr. Stan Grof and his perinatal matrices and the way that he proposed a new cartography for psychology where He also says that most of our adult life and our experiences and our emotional systems and survival systems are mostly formed in, again, in utero and also the duration of the clinical birthing is what causes, it's the ultimate trauma, basically. It's the ultimate trauma. And people who have complicated births and experiences, then that becomes their predisposition and vulnerabilities going forward. So how do we now bring all this together and bring a perspective, a hypothesis that I call it, of course it's always subject to revision and I'm willing to look at it from a different angles. But at the moment, what I see is that it came to me as the existential mother archetype. I think the greatest predisposition that humans have, it's that deep knowing that we come from somewhere. We come from somewhere into this being. There is a physical body that we experience, emotions. There's a three-dimensional reality that we are very much immersed in. And there is a deep existential knowing that we come from somewhere, and that is the mother. So if you look at all the esoteric traditions, there's always this goddess or there's some mother. There's a very archetypal feminine energy or feminine concept that we all seek, desire to be nurtured by, to be held, to be loved. We all seek this, right? So there is this deep knowing that we come from somewhere, right? So in our small mini-me world, we come from our mothers obviously you know our mother is the channel you know we come through them and they happen to be the portal for us to come into this physical reality but the thing is like a deep down like we know there is a great great mother out there there's an existential mother out there there is a bigger you know, feminine archetypal energy in the form of mother that we all dream of, which is unconditional, you know, nurturing, you know, life-giving. And we all desire to be held and loved by this mother, right? And there is like in every human psyche, there's a snapshot of this image of a perfect mother out. But the reality is the mothers that are little mini-me world mothers, our own mothers, the portals that we come from, unfortunately, they haven't been able to give us this fantasy, the snapshot of this goddess of a mother. Because we don't come from conscious mothers that are fully conscious when we come to this world. I mean, even that speaks to my own journey. When I had my two boys, I wasn't conscious. That's kind of the paradox of life, right? It's almost like I know there are so many movements out there now that they want to educate women and educate them and really help them become super conscious when they have their children so that we can sort of minimize and eliminate some of the suffering. But so far, interestingly, I haven't really met people that had this fantasy sort of image of a mother. So happens to be that all our mothers had us when they were going through a lot of stress. They were going through a lot of life's challenges. They were young. They were trying to figure out themselves. And there was a lot of limitation and also the era that we were born in, right? You know, if there, if you look at the Gen X and Gen Z, like all these generational, um, list of generational, um, categories, think about it. We come from generation, like two generations back, there was war. Our grandparents, great grandparents, you know, they had to deal with atrocities, like beyond comprehension. There were famine, there was, you know, some of, like, if you look at the world, we're so lucky to live in a civilized sort of Western setup, maybe. Sometimes it's easy to dismiss and criticize the Western civilized world. But if you look at it, you have your light switch, you have your hot water. If you look at some of the countries, still to this day, there are third world countries that these privileges are not there yet. And mothers are really struggling to take care of their babies, to give them the best they can. So that is the disclaimer that we need to always remember. And that's kind of like also honoring every single mother out there because ultimately they are doing their absolute best. So now from here, if we were to segment into it, George, think of the babies when they're born or when they're in the utero, like a developing fetus. Think of them as little bundles of life. Their survival system is so fresh, so intelligent, supremely intelligent. And they sense the three-dimensional world with like a hundred times on psychedelics. Like imagine psychedelic journey, but the babies are in it at a hundred times more intense feeling, sensing, receiving. So just imagine that. That already puts us at a very disadvantaged place of the growth, to healthy, balanced growth. Because imagine, sometimes I work with a lot of trauma healing. People come for a lot of understanding trauma, and we do a lot of trauma work. And sometimes people have some very, very painful stories about their mothers and early life, right? But then if you think about it, look, I mean, look at Dr. Basil van der Kolk, the way he speaks about trauma. He says, sometimes like your mother will give you a look and that look can mean so many things that in itself can create a trauma in a child. And the mother is unaware because mother may be stressed and she's thinking about something else and she's got something else on their mind. And sometimes, you know, if you look at infants or the babies, you know, they roll off the couches. Think about that. The mother turns their back and then you see a baby rolling off the couch. The impact. And this baby then goes on for the rest of their lives in fear of heights, falling, whatever it is, feeling unsafe. So that's the predisposition of the babies until the age of seven. They say the window closes by the age of seven. But between the life in utero and between age three, the identity is already formed. And this is influenced by the mother. And there is a specific archetype that is within each woman, within women, that is not always kind, not always nurturing. and not always there for the children. And they find it very difficult. They find it very difficult, very challenging to be a mother. So in one of the, I think one of the delusions that we have as a society that all mothers are designed to have children, have babies, and they're all intrinsically and naturally and organically, they know what to do. And they are naturally caring and nurturing and life-giving. But that's not true. So many women are under pressure of not speaking this. They feel shamed. They feel guilty. They feel like they cannot speak, that they cannot take care of their children. They cannot be there. They cannot be present. They find it overwhelming and they find it too much. These are the conversations that we're not having because there is this societal expectation that put on women that is already crushing them. So when we don't address these things and when we don't look at them honestly, what happens? It gets pushed down into the unconscious. And then it manifests itself in the collective in various sort of dark ways. Like we have mothers who then are not kind to their children. So that's a very specific archetype that I'm talking about. The archetype is unconscious and it's very disconnected, dissociated. It's in that supreme sort of survival. And it's very protected. So that's the archetype I'm talking about for the women that they have. Some people call it dark feminine. Some people call it dark goddess. Some people give it sort of different names. this archetype um some people call it like um you know you know you have all these different sort of variations and permutations of this dark feminine we can call it dark feminine but I have a different name it was sort of revealed through these experiences and I think It's also in, maybe, this was touched slightly in one of Stan Grof's books. There's two books, The Way of the Psychonaut, I think, in one of them. it was depicted in one of these sort of drawings by a client or a patient who undergone a LSD journey, LSD assisted therapy. And it was drawn by this patient, I think a mother who looked like a spider and it was devouring mother sort of like it was kind of depicted in that way. So yeah, so the dark, we can call it dark feminine for the context of this conversation. So that's the archetype that is within all women that can be dormant and it can be activated through stress, through survival, difficult life, trauma, disconnection, and all of these challenges can activate this dark feminine archetype. If it goes unchecked and it becomes very dangerous to society, to themselves, to their children, to everyone. So that's kind of in a nutshell what I wanted to share. That's kind of like a preview. There's a lot more to that, of course. What are your thoughts so far? It's... I can't help but think about my relationship with my mom and so many people I know and this feeling that maybe the relationship you have with your mom Like it comes from so much deeper, like maybe the maybe like sometimes I feel shame or I feel guilt. And maybe these were the feelings my mom had when I was being born. Maybe this feeling of not being enough is just an echo of how my mom felt or beyond that, how my grandma felt, you know, and it's just this idea that I don't even want to talk about because it's so taboo and it's so painful that like. I can see it pushed down there and I think it's mine, but maybe it's not mine. Maybe it's ours. You know, it's, it's beautiful and it's, it's a lot to take in and just, and just that short amount of time after hearing this, but it definitely gives me a fertile soil to have some ideas come out of. I think it's, it's beyond projection if that kind of makes sense. Yeah, yeah, totally. So if we were to go into a little bit more. Yeah, please. So I think the reason I'm nervous to talk about this is because it's a taboo, right? Traditionally, historically, we all come from a womb, we all come from a mother. Therefore, some religious context, some, you know, if you look at historically, this is taboo to even question and talk about your mother's motives. Because we are forever in debt because of life-giving human that we have, which is privilege. And therefore, it's such a paradox because we cannot investigate. We cannot reflect on... I mean, look, Dr. Gabor Mate, he's doing a great job talking about this attachment wound. It's all desensitized, George. We have to speak it from a very professional and sort of like lighter way. It's an attachment disorder or attachment wound, something like that. But then that's it. So then, okay, that's an attachment wound, but how does it come into becoming an attachment wound? Obviously the child feels disconnected. Child cannot connect or feel like they are nurtured or connected to the mother, right? If the mother is disconnected and dissociated, then this growing little brain in the heart going to need to latch itself to somewhere to a nervous system that is healthy. I mean, you know, there is this whole history of somatic therapy and nervous system regulation or nervous system dysregulation. There is so much has been written and explored around the body, body as the temple or the gateway to healing, which is also my journey, which also I'm trained in. You know, we do breath work, we do yoga, we put our bodies in sort of rites of passages. You know, we put ourselves under pressure, like Temazcal, for example. Historically, we've been putting our bodies under pressure or some way or another to really release, reconnect, and regulate our nervous system. But in the trauma-informed approach that I am trained in, The nervous system regulation is not something you can do on your own if you haven't been modeled in your infancy. If you haven't, like the way that the babies learn how to regulate themselves when they have a grownup who is regulated, grounded, calm, around them, because that's how babies learn. They learn through modeling and mirroring. I mean, I don't know about you, but I haven't had those kind of grown-ups around me. Absolutely not. They were too stressed. My grandma, like all the females around me in my life at the time of me being an infant, I had no one around that I could tell you they were regulated and calm and mirrored me so then I so when we don't get that it doesn't become a concept like you don't even know what you don't know so you then go through life with stress with anxiety and you don't know what's happening like people come to psychedelic work sometimes saying I'm stuck I'm blocked I'm panicky I feel unsafe. I don't, I, you know, a lot of complex PTSD and so on. Yeah. Right. And they don't know that this, this could be something like this, this could be a concept that they are really struggling. So one of my favorite things to do in, for example, guided psychedelic journeys is that making sure as a therapist, I am fully in my body. And I am fully aware of my own nervous system and then my own breathing at all times. Because if I can do that, the person in the session can then tune in with me. And then, you know, we talk about critical windows being open in that session. Then they become malleable and they're in their hyperplastic states. Then they can breathe. learn what they have missed in their early lives. It can be as simple as that, really. I'm reminded of a language beyond words. There's something contagious about that state that allows people to learn about themselves. And you're right. I can't think of a whole lot of people in my family that were given the tools to be grounded. Everybody was in a constant survival mode. Now what? I had a friend come over, a family friend come over to the dinner table yesterday, and he was from Laos. And he says, you know, George, there's a fundamental difference in the same question. And that question is, what are we going to eat today? When I lived in Laos, the question was, what are we going to eat today? There's no food. What are we going to eat today? And when I moved to the United States, the question was, what are we going to eat today? We want fish. You want chicken. You want pork. What do you want to eat today? Like you said, if you don't know, you don't know. But those are two radically different questions. In that mode of survival, it's really tough to break out of that mode if you don't even understand that you're in it, right? Mm-hmm. Totally, totally. So, you know, there's, I mean, there's a lot that we can go into. But one of the things that I love about, for example, Stan Grof talks about it, Ken Wilber talks about it, right? Ken Wilber, for example, one of my favorite small, like a snippet that he has on YouTube, he says, you know, for example, meditation practices, right? He says, if, let's say, if a female is suffering from a borderline sort of disconnected, dissociated states, right? And then they pick up meditation practice. And then they sit there comfortably, completely like gone. fully immersed in that meditation. Is that really helping? No, because that is something that they know how to do already. Disconnect and just, you know, be out of the, like these out-of-body experiences. So, you know, sometimes we talk about tools, meditation, breath work, and different somatic practices that could really help people awaken and reconnect and so on. But that's not true. Because I could be somebody so disconnected and dissociated, living neck above. And for me, meditation can be not so much a helpful tool. For example, it could be something else. I know breathwork can be more powerful because it kind of stimulates the whole chemical. It kind of activates the chemicals that normally are dormant. I get that. But still, a breathwork can send somebody into a panic attack too if they feel so unsafe. And so again, we talk about combining these tools and methodologies in psychedelic experiences or guided sessions. To be honest, I'm changing, like my whole mindset is changing currently towards that now. Because I am really, I wanna look at the ground zero of where this person is. their wiring and their relationship with themselves and also their relationship with others. What is their understanding of a relational context? Do they feel safe with other people around? A lot of people go to retreats and group settings and so on, but do we really understand what these people are experiencing when they're exposed to other people, other nervous systems in the space? Can we really look at each individual as a holistic container and their wiring and their perception and their predispositions and their relationship with maternal caregivers? Can we talk about these questions? Is it okay? When is it okay for us to ask how is their relationship with their mother without offending them or without... You know, like I said, there's taboos around us, and people usually laugh when you ask, what is your relationship with your mother? Because that was, you know, decades ago. I don't know. She's fine. Oh, he was okay. You know, it's really difficult to really go there. So, yeah, it's about peeling the layers so that we can really go into understanding this human, this container, what is really going on in their psyche, in their system, in their nervous system, emotional landscape? What is really going on? Because their connection and their understanding or the way they relate to themselves usually is how their mother relates to themselves. Because this is an imprint that is sort of passed on womb to womb, then we carry so much of it from our mothers that it's unspoken of. It's never been looked at it in a way that it's helpful. And it's helpful so that we can not to blame them. So the reason it's a taboo because a lot of people feel so guilty and ashamed about questioning their mother. Yeah. So it's a massive block even to go there. Yeah. Yeah. You know, you start thinking... First off, thanks. I got a lot of ideas I'm processing right now. Like, is the relationship that you think you have with your mother or the relationship you don't have with your mother a lens through which you see relationships in the world? Is that how you think the world is treating you, how your mom treated you? You know, is it this sort of... deep projection that it just is blowing my mind like it's it is it's a lens when I start using that as a metaphor like does my mom treat me like this or is this the way I think the world treats me is that is that sort of an uncovering right there of of of what this might be Yeah, totally. So the whole point of the existential mother hypothesis that I've been working on is, okay, so now we know. So we know. It's in plain sight. It's not a secret anymore. There's Otto Rank. I think Stan was influenced by Otto Rank. And we have Bowlby. If you look at the whole history of psychology, we have Bowlby. We had so many different people that researched attachment wounding or how the attachment dysregulation comes to being. And look, it's not a secret anymore. We have so many books written about this. And so... Where do we go from here? Now we know, okay, fine. We, we get it. We mature human beings. We have an open mind. We don't mind looking at this, right? We want to look at our mothers and their imprint. Where is their imprint come from? Obviously the grandmother. So then the, then their grandmother, and then their gra it's, it's, it's a whole lineage like this, right? So where do we go from this? How do we handle or how do we approach it so that we can turn this into a helpful, deeper understanding? Right. Bring it to therapy. We want to bring it to therapy without the judgment, without the, hopefully, any negative connotations. Yeah, exactly. Shame seems to be the gatekeeper anyway to even go there to ask these questions. I know. Shame is real. It's the ground zero of our deepest blocks into investigating anything, really, to explore ourselves. So now I'm going to give you a quick example how I see it. Please. OK. Okay. This is going to trigger a lot of people. Again, when, when I say this, I'll tell you why it's, it's a lot to do with the genders as well. So historically we have, look, if it triggers people, cuz we're in the time of conscious evolution, consciousness evolution, where we're heading towards a non-binary states, right? We want to be neutral now. We don't want to be identified as a man or a woman. We want to kind of dissolve the boundaries. So we want to go direct to the, you know, there's a direction that we're heading towards, which is a non-binary states, right? which is now, because of this, it's going to make it even more difficult to discuss this, because what I'm about to say actually addresses the binary, the male and the female biological history. Historically, we can call it archetypes, shall we? Because if people are really offended by this, let's call it archetype. That kind of takes the edge off a little bit. So I want to call it the female archetype and the male archetype. Historically, this is the reality. We cannot dismiss and think that this is not the way it is. It is. So there is the duality, the three-dimensional experience. What is it? It's a dualism. Black, white. I mean, come on, male, female. So we have this historical biological formation. And this formation happens in the womb, right? So when a female baby is being formed in the womb, mother's system knows this. A mother's system can feel and identify whether they're having a boy or girl. Not everyone. Some women say, no, that's not true for me. I never really thought about that. Yeah, true. But I'm saying in general terms, right? So when women are having female babies, the system is like, relax. It's another one of us. Cool. Chill. Another female is being formed. So this is not so much a threat to the survival system of the mother, the unconscious part. You know, we talk about the dark feminine archetypal unconscious, you know, part of the mother that is not threatened by a female baby forming in the womb, but they're very much threatened by the male biologically growing in the womb. So when a female baby is born, they already have the same similar survival systems, which is a dark feminine. In the tiniest infant baby, female baby, you have the same dark feminine archetypological state of, I call it supreme survival system. For me, dark feminine archetype is actually the supreme survival system. And the reason being is because it is the, it's almost like the by-product of a biological human coming into this world with a womb. If you are being born with a womb, it is a by-product. You have it, it's in the baby. It is the by-product of the womb because this level of survival intelligence was to, to protect the offspring. Cause you know, there's a, there's a evolutionary intelligence there so that this, this female body will eventually hopefully will bring a life to this world. Therefore it's almost like coming with this, um, uh, extreme sensitive survival system. already built in intrinsically. And then you have a male baby growing in the womb, which is a complete different biological system. Mothers usually know this is a different biology that is growing in the womb, therefore there is a process that happens because to the unconscious survival system of the mother, this is a threat. So therefore, the pruning and the compromisation and the whole trajectory of the biological formation already is shaped and formed in the mother's womb already, which then, I mean, if you look at some of the... concepts out there, we have, we have like types of males, right? We have an alpha toxic, you know, violent, externally violating males. We have beta males that are very internally destructive, internally addictive, and sort of slowly killing themselves. Mm-hmm. Right. So, and there are, I don't know if you heard of concepts like castration, emasculation. Yeah. Yeah. So, without the language, without conscious, deliberate you know, doing, there is a slow process that happens in the womb where the male already feels in a certain way about themselves when they are out in the world. Yeah. Yeah, so, yeah. I mean, in healing spaces, there are lots of concepts out there, like a mother wound. You know, people talk about healing the mother wound, for example. But my understanding that mother wound is only applicable to the women. Women carry a mother wound. Men, not so much. They may say in words or concepts of mother wound, but it's not. For men, it's more like mother contract. Because the dark feminine archetype, the unconscious survival archetype part of the mother would need the male child to serve her for the rest of his life and her life. That's the deal. Unconsciously, this is not something that we are aware of that is happening. So if you allow yourself to look objectively in society, you will see very interesting relationships between mothers and sons and then the mothers and daughters. Very interesting, very different, very unique. Yeah, it brings up a lot. I remember there was a saying in our family that said, a son is a son until he takes a wife. A daughter is a daughter for all of her life. It brings up so much, Susan. Like, I think, you know, my son was stillborn, and he had a different RH than my wife. And I studied just superficially the idea, the way in which one body can attack another body. But I never thought about it from the angle of male and female. And sort of, like, I can feel it. Like, I can feel it. the animosity from my mom on some level the the unkept anger and the anger that I have towards my mom on some level that I I dare not talk about you know it's shameful and I can you know, it's, but it does, it causes a giant problem. It causes a giant conflict and no one ever talks about it. Cause how can you say, look, I hate my mom. No one wants to say, I hate my mom. Like it's a horrible thing to say, you know? And what about your mom? Cause I hate my son, you know, like on the same level, like on some level. It's kind of mind blowing to think about that. And it is taboo. Like, how do you bring that to a conversation? How do we bring that out in the open? No one wants to see that, right? Like, it is an incredible thing to think about. But I think if people are honest on some level, people have felt that, right? Like, you can feel, and just look around our planet. Like, it's happening right in front of our eyes. Like, this is explosion of the unconscious, right? Yeah, totally. What do we do? What are you going to do with this? Yeah, where do we go from here? Well, we need to be educated on this. And we need to, for example, did you know the highest crime or highest death of children caused by the mothers? in civilized countries. I don't know about other, but this is a fact. This is out there already. What does that mean? The highest informality rate? Yeah. In children, usually caused by the mothers. Accidental... Somehow. Somehow. It's there. And... I've been researching some of the indigenous ways of dealing with birth, pregnancy, and aftercare of babies, for example. So there are traditions out there in the world, indigenous, that they would not leave the young woman alone with the baby until the baby is around seven. There's a wisdom in that. Because like I said, there is a lot of pressure put on women in the West thinking that they have it. Somehow they're super moms and they can do all multitasking. They can do everything and nurture them and be there and be conscious and be present. This is absolutely not true. When a woman has a baby, they go through a very deep level of transformation. It's an initiation. They are forever changed. So they have to deal with that loss and the grief. Because once you become a mother, you're no longer... Your past self is just gone. And they need holding. They need education. They need spaces to grieve, to... to come to acceptance. But what do we do in the West? We kind of like throw them into like isolated homes where they're alone. They have to deal with this because intrinsically all women they know, doesn't matter how much they're on Instagram and they all, doesn't matter how much within two months they want to get back into their genes again. It doesn't matter. Intrinsically they know that they have literally left behind something enormous and that needs tending to and to be grieved and accepted and integrated. So yeah, there are a lot of like, and even when I was younger, I remember, I remember when I was younger, when my aunties had babies, I remember like several elder female figures would be around them all the time. But by the time I became a teenager, that's kind of like now, like history. It doesn't happen anymore. And what I see now, especially with clients, like they go, imagine like they go hospital, there's all sterilized, come back and then, Most of the time, the husband needs to go back to work or the partner or the boyfriend, whoever is the partner or spouse, they have to go back to work. And now this mother is left alone, isolated with this tiny little life. And yeah, so this is the level of pressure. So we need to, again, you know, coming back to what do we do with this? We need to, I guess, education and also creating spaces for women to hold them in their transition and help them build resilience capacity and understand that this is an initiation in their part, a transformational journey. And then, you know, yeah, create therapeutic processes, whatever it takes, love them, hold them. I mean, I look at my own personal journey, and it was devastating. It's very isolating. So a lot of women quietly suffering like this around the world. And then on top of that, you know, some women decide not to have children. And then now they also get judged and you know, crucified for that decision. It's an interesting dynamic that we have in the West. Maybe everywhere, but I'm just sort of generalizing from my own... Because of where I live and my own perspective. So think about... I just want to kind of reiterate about the mother wound in women, because this is really important for us to understand why is it, why is it mother wound for the women, but not men so much, right? So, and it's all to do with the biological chemical wiring. So imagine a mother is completely disconnected and hollow. And then has a female baby so this female baby is like craving for connection craving to connect with the mother and be held and be nurtured but no one's there absolutely no one's there no one's home so this in itself creates this deepest deepest hollow void like a vortex of a state internally in women that they forever crave this holding this nurturing mother this you know the image of a perfect mother that will one day come and rescue them or hold them or guide them but they're not there you see So that's what I call the mother wound. It's like living. There's an author. She's really great. She has a sentence. She says, mother wound is like living with a heartbreak. And that's what a lot of females, they go and drink, you know, twenty ayahuasca cups and they do all kinds of work, but they cannot deal with this hollow emptiness. It really is like living with a heartbreak. And that's to do with lack of mothering, lack of mentoring and mirroring. Because women, the females, they need mirroring. They need another female to mirror, model, and help them to connect and guide like a mentor. So this hollow sort of mother wound feeling, the heartbreak, it feels like a betrayal in women. This feels like a betrayal, existential betrayal. Therefore, if you look at women when they come into this self-work and therapy, they actually resent other women. They carry this deep, deep lack of trust in other women. Where is that coming from, right? They don't trust their facilitator. I mean, women on the surface look like very social butterflies. They have many friends and girlfriends they hang out with. But really deep down, when things get serious, they don't trust none of them. They're very protected in that way. So for the men, it's a contract. For the men is a contract, meaning that men find it very difficult to invest in a relationship when they carry this mother complex. I mean, some people call it mother complex, but I call it mother contract is because the more in a survival system a mother is, the more she controls the son, the more she feels fear, the more she feels threatened by the world and she feels unsafe, the more she will emasculate the male child and control and dominate. That's just given. And also, for example, the mother contract for me is like a psychological agreement between mother and her son. Right? So meaning that a son will, for whatever reason, feel completely emasculated by the mother when it comes to their legacy, stepping into their life's purpose, you know, investing in a full-blown happy relationship, having their own family, nurturing their own children or bringing up a family. There will always be like a sort of like a fragility around that, that men feel. Yeah. It's a very psychological thing. In psychology, most of these concepts are discussed as a mother complex. So men will have that. And that kind of is their biggest block in stepping into their own life's purpose and mission potential, their own potential. Yeah. I think that there's... Buddhist saying or a saying from the Far East that says someone can't become enlightened until their mom dies they're gonna kind of feel like that's that block on some level like what yeah actually when you know it's it's interesting you said that because from my understanding mother contract dissolves when the mother dies But here's the thing, George. A lot of men, when their mothers die, they actually drop into a deep depression. They really do. They feel completely lost. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's devastating, I'm sure. Yeah, I know, it is. It's devastating because, I mean, our listeners would probably be like, oh, my God, it's devastating if there are mothers out there listening to this. I don't want to emasculate my son. How can I – How can I not do this? I don't want to do this. I want my son to be fully potentiated and go out there in the world, live a life, fulfill their life's mission and purpose and journey. How do I do this? How do we do this by working together? And you know, the good news is another female can help a male dissolve this contract forever. a spouse, a girlfriend, even a female friend can help a male dissolve this contract by being there, by seeing them, by empowering them, by really, you know, helping them to fully actualize. But the thing is, it's very difficult because if you look at the relational containers like dynamics, For me, romantic relationships are containers. What is so interesting for a guy is that they'll go and find a female that resembles their mother, which then kind of adds to the triggers, adds to the problem, adds to the frustration and overwhelm. But yet, I mean, if we really look at this as a container for transformation, a spouse can really help a male dissolve that mother contract, but they, they need to be super aware of this mother contract first to help their partners. I get like the image of like a Venn diagram, like a man has, he's got his mom, like he's in the, he's got this one circle here and this other circle here and they're kind of dividing like cells. Yes. Yeah. How does that, you have two sons. This must be something you deeply think about. Absolutely. And this is why I'm here because I have two sons. This is why this hypothesis, I call it the archetypal existential mother archetypal concept exists. Really makes me nervous to talk about. Yeah. Right. Because this is so close to my heart. Right. This is my own personal journey. I have two sons with a huge gap in age. One of them is an adult. He's twenty eight. Right. So. The second one I'm doing so much better because he's younger and he kind of came when I was in the midst of my own self exploration and transformation. So imagine like my first son just took all of the hits. Yeah. And this is the work that we've been doing together. Like, he's very much aware of this, actually. He's very much on board with it. And he was only seventeen when he said to me, we had an argument. He was only seventeen, George. This was not long ago. He said to me, I know what's going on. I said, what is really going on? Like, you know, he said, I know what's going on. He said. I'm an emasculated son of a lineage where women wear trousers. That's what I said. And I said, what do you mean? What do you mean? It was a shock. I said, what do you mean? And he said, um, He said, well, look at you. Look at my grandma. Look at, you know, the women in our lineage. He said, where is my dad? Where is my granddad? Where is my uncle? Where are these men? He said. And he was only seventeen. So that was a moment of like a massive breaking open, which then led me into this rabbit hole of investigating what is going on. Yeah. Yeah, it's truly a personal story. Thank you. It resonates not only with me, but so many people I know. I'm at a loss for words just trying to take it in for a minute. Yeah, yeah. Thank you for receiving it. Thank you for receiving it. Thank you for being open-minded. Thank you for allowing this conversation to happen in this way. Appreciate you. Vice versa, I... Like, I would just like to add, if that's okay. Yes, please. So I love the movements that are happening currently with women-led, you know, female-led movements happening currently, like... circles and sisterhood gatherings and you know womb healing goddess awakening like these kind of concepts are always out there at the moment there's retreats there's psychedelic work for women so many different movements are kind of coming together which I love but honestly this work is not about waking up the goddess or healing the womb in any way. This is really about healing the mother womb in women and helping men dissolve their mother contracts. This is the ground zero of what we need to do. Because women are all, at the moment, we're at a time where women are quite empowered. I think we need to stop carrying and dragging the historical victim. We need to. We need to. I mean, in order for us to go forward and really dissolve this political dynamic or gender politics or gender dynamics, historical. This is a historical thing that we're carrying and it's about time that we need to dissolve it now. We need to stop doing this whole activism on patriarchal system and so on and so forth. There are reasons why we have these kind of toxic systems or the authoritarian systems in place. There are reasons. Because women are forever afraid to speak. They're forever run in this supreme survival states. I'm not dismissing the historical, what's been done. But I have a whole other hypothesis for that. But it's for another day. But all I want to say is that we need to really realize that This is not about empowering women and waking up the goddess, honestly. This is really about coming back into our center as a woman, as a man, and really work together and really awaken to our own true essence. It's nothing to do with goddess or being a goddess, honestly, or a king or a queen. This is all about being truly authentic and breaking or breaking away or breaking or cracking open from these survival systems that lead and drive us and determine our actions and decisions and how we live, how we breathe, how we make choices, how we create families, how we bring children up. This is what we need to deal with. This is where we need to look at. This is what we need to do. really abandon and really empower us to regulate our survival system so that we don't feel threatened anymore. So that we feel safe within ourselves. And we, you know, come to this holistic whole being states. That's what we need to do. Yeah. It's It's so much to take in. Like it's, it's so much to celebrate, but then it's also much to see how much work is left. You know what I mean? Like on some level I hear it and I'm like, it is dark and deep as that is. Hey, we're here. We made it. We made it here. Okay. Like there's room for a huge celebration. And I understand like, here's the goddess party or here's everyone coming together and celebrating this sacredness, but okay. How long are we going to celebrate? We got work to do. You know what I mean? Like there's a lot of people suffering. And it's difficult to hold those two things together. You know what I mean by that? Like to see both things true at once. Like it's so easy. Like you said, to see that binary. Okay, it's this. It's this. No, mm-mm. It's a true pair. It's both of them together. And I think that maybe on some level, Susan, like that's what – like I see it in our circle and a lot of people talking about different themes about seeing. But I see this sort of – I wrote it down over here. Let me – I think I – it's – We talk about the quickening or we talk about these two scenarios happening, but maybe that's a mirage. Maybe the true accelerating is merely a shifting our awareness to perceive change differently. Maybe that is what it is. And that's really hard. It's really hard to talk about some of these things that you're talking about. It's hard for me to think about it in my own life. Like, it makes me want to cry on a lot of levels, you know, to start reimagining the story that I had told myself or the society has told me or my mom or my aunt Julie or my my sister or my niece that committed the died of an overdose. Like, it's a lot. It's heavy. Do you, is this, is it something that is the, I guess it doesn't matter if society is ready for it or not. It's right here. I guess like, I guess, I mean, how does one become ready for such awareness? Like how do we, how do you prepare for such truth? And this is why, today's why. As dark and as intense as it gets, it's the only way. It's the only way to really drop into the depths of what it is and then grow from there. Build capacity. I think to me, psychedelic medicines, beyond their beautiful benefits, George, for me, psychedelic medicines are beautiful tools or allies that can help us build capacity so that we can go and investigate these kind of real life, real stuff that needs our attention right now. Okay, we didn't have the capacity before. We were too, maybe not resilient enough, maybe not aware enough, maybe not fully actualized enough. But now the medicines are coming. They're cultivating us. They want us to build resilience capacity so that a strong nervous system, a strong spine... You know, in my work, I don't see psychedelics as a tool to... you know cultivate positivity I see anyone beyond the surface level of why we come to psychedelic work I always see as if you are called to psychedelic work be ready because you will be invited to grow a new spine we need a new spine to hold this level of truth so that we can look And deal with it. And process it. And integrate it. Yeah, we need it. This is what we need to do. Collectively, this is what we need to do. Yeah, we need to just break away from, break out of this delusion. And, you know, yeah, really get to the ground zero of what we're doing here. And yeah, all of us, we need to do this together. You know? Yeah. It's like our rite of passage, our birthright, but like it's happening in a real time right now for those willing to participate. Do you think this is a fear of it, of us not making it through this rite of passage? Absolutely, because there is a beautiful psychoanalyst, Julia Kristeva. I was introduced to Julia through a really good mentor and a friend of mine. He said, your work seems to be very similar to Julia Kristeva. I didn't know about her. And she talks a lot about the abject relation the existential reality of what is it to be a human, the blood and the gore and the pain and the suffering, like what is it to be a human? And she really goes way deep into that, into a collective abject relationship where she says probably, I don't know if she says this, I need to find, but I'll say it from my own words. I think she says, hence why we have the urge to sterilize the abject relationship. What is it to be a messy human being? Therefore, we want to sterilize it and make God a male. Because female is all the blood and the gory and the birth and the death and the whole mess of it, right? So I think her whole philosophy or teaching was about how we want to run away from the reality of the messy humanness. So we create gods in white clothes, in the white clouds, because we don't want to look there. Yeah, and then our relationship with death is almost like far out there in the future, somewhere that happens, but we have no idea how it happens. We'll find out when we get there, kind of. But some of us, like yourself, you know, George, has given us the gift of sharing your own experience with that, rebuilding relationship with loss and grief, rebuilding relationship with what it's like to be a messy human at the very ground zero of it that's the capacity we need to accept and be humbled by it and be okay with this experience and then somehow rebuild a new perception so that we can see everything as a sacred this is how we're going to do this everything is sacred and we will accept everything as it is And we'll let go. That's the ultimate letting go and surrender, right? You know, talk about surrender. I mean, what do we surrender to? It is that humility, the letting go of control is the surrender. Rebuilding our relationship with it, with all of it, the whole messiness of it is the surrender, right? And that's what we are invited to do when we work with psychedelic medicines. And if we don't do this, my take on is that life will do it for us. Life will do it for us. We can hide, we can run, we can do distractions, and we can do so many different things to avoid and look away. But unfortunately, sadly, life will do this for us. Yeah, otherwise. So yeah, I think we're at the time of great... awareness, coming to a much deeper awareness of what it is to be alive. Yeah. Yeah. I can't help but feel the relationship with uncertainty unfolding. And, you know, I alluded to this earlier, but it is, you know, it's sort of like living with a wild animal and you have to build a relationship with it. It's so hard. Like I, you know, to, to leave the world of certainty, you have a job, you have a relationship, everything's taken care of. You have benefits, you have health insurance. Oh, look, you made it. But like you just have the training wheels on. You know, it's like, and they're all coming off for everybody simultaneously. Like, are you going to ride or are you going to fall? And the good news is you're going to do both. You know what I mean? You're going to do both of them. You want to do it consciously or you want to try to do it unconsciously? Like, it's really hard, though. It's scary, Susan. Like, I mean, you know, I get it. I can't help but think that there's a generational shift to like when I see such. When I see such a large group of like the baby boomers approaching death and so many unrealized dreams, I can't help but feel that in the collective unconsciousness. I was speaking with a doctor, Dr. Brad Stewart. And him and I were talking about doing this sort of program where we go and we find people in palliative care that know they're going to die. And we get them to speak to us about what is it like to have a foot in both worlds? Can you please tell me? your worst fears. Can you please tell me where you messed up? Can you tell me these transgressions that really bother you? And he was a he was a palliative care doctor for thirty years, and he has got these amazing stories of like real wisdom of, you know, he talks about discovering, taking the covers off. And then there you are, all these things that you think you have, like discovering is not an idea. It's taking things off and discovering yourself so that you can be alone with the things that really matter. Like I feel it, Susan. I feel it in my bones and my fingertips and the relationships that I have. Time is whatever that means. Time is whatever time means, but it's here and it's staring at us. Yeah. Yeah. Talk about palliative care. You know about Stephen Jenkinson? Tell me. I don't know. His title is a grief walker. He was in palliative care for children's hospital, actually. And he talks a lot about he's an elder and he talks about how to die, how to learn, how to, how to prepare, how to die in a way, way that you leave, uh, you know, a legacy by dying in a way that is authentic. And how to be an elder, how to hold space for younger generation, and how to bring the deaf, build a relationship with it. And then the grief, how to grieve, how to hold space. He's incredible. Yeah. So I'm so glad that he's a baby boomer and he talks this way. Yeah. I often see this thing that comes up in my life where there's so much money that's spent on rejuvenation and life and youth, and it's held in such a high regard. And it's such a paradox because the people that want to... On some level, I'm not at that age and there's still a lot of things I don't know anything about. I'm very naive in some ways, in a lot of ways probably. But I could understand the need to want to stay alive longer. But it seems to me the way to stay alive longer is to pass on your wisdom so that it lives forever. And I wish we had more of that. I'm so proud and I love so many of the people... in my life that have taught me things that are elders to me but I still think we're lacking from a means or a tradition or a way for people to talk about to the next generation on someone there's like this giant disconnect between the the elders or the the the older generation the younger generations and it seems they're at odds on so many levels and I just think if we could find a way for them to talk for the older generation, to talk to the younger generation in a way that's meaningful, not condescending, not disrespectful, but wholesome. And like, here's where I really, here's where I really fucked up right here. I, this was, this hurts me today. This is killing me. And I, and everything else has fallen away. Those are real lessons that like the youth would listen to and be like, Oh my God, that's my mom crying. Or that's my grandmother crying. Like, what are they crying about? Let me hear, let me listen. And I know it's vulnerable, but like those conversations were starved for. Yeah. Yeah. My own thought process on that was how can we build relationships? wisdom lineages, like how can we build like movements and communities where we have a, we have a levels of lineage of like different age groups where, I mean, women, I meet young women, they are starving for a older woman to hold them and to guide them, to mentor them without falling into this competition or dismissiveness. How can we then build this lineage like elders? How can we become elders? How can we live cyclical again? Like you said about, you know, there's an industry of keeping people young for investing in youth, but... I mean how do we accept that life is cyclical and if I'm in my fifties then how can I accept that I now in the in the cycle of my life where I am moving towards becoming an elder and that should be okay why am I why should I be upset about that Yeah. I think it's an honor to make it, it's a milestone to make it to fifty and then preparing to be an elder for a younger generation. There's nothing more meaningful than that. Shouldn't be, you know, uh, yeah. So that probably going to be the solution, building communities that we can, you know, build a, a wisdom lineage across all generations. Susan, our conversations, they move me in so many beautiful ways. I feel them at the very core. And I'm really thankful for your friendship. I'm really thankful to get to have these conversations with you. Thank you very, very, very much for this. Thank you. Thank you, George, for having me here. Thank you for your kindness. Thank you for your generosity. Thank you for being a, you are someone, you know, you give so much value to people. You know, you're a human of value. And I love that. And that's what we need more of. We need those kind of people like you out there giving so much value freely, generously. to other people, giving them platform, giving them voice. And you're very curious and genuine about wanting to know it, and you really dive into it, you take notes, and you really kind of investigate it. It's not like superficial, like, okay, we're here for a conversation, let's see where it goes. No, you really take this seriously, and I appreciate you for that. Thank you. I feel like everybody comes on as a teacher, and I... I wish more people would – it's really been helpful for me. And if people hear that, just think about everybody that comes into your life. What can they teach you? Thank you for those kind words. It means a lot to me because that's what I want it to be. I want it to be contagious and I want people to walk away and have something that they can hold and use and like this new cool tool. Look at this thing I got. Hang on briefly afterwards. Everyone else within the sound of my voice, I love you guys. I appreciate and I hope that everybody, if you're going through some tough times right now, we all are, but just know that it's necessary and to try to build a relationship with this thing called uncertainty because it's trying to help you as well. That's all we got for today. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much. Have a beautiful day. That's all we got. Aloha. Before I go, where can people find you? What do you have coming up and what are you excited about? Amazing. Thank you. Quickly, psychedelicconversations.com is my website. I'm everywhere. Gosh, I think I'm everywhere. Every single social media platform. I love connecting. I'm there anywhere. Thank you so much again, George. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that's it. Aloha. Bye.