[JOE]: This is the Practice of the Practice podcast with Joe Sanok, session number 446.
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As we dive into this series about psychedelics plant medicine and Ayahuasca, Psilocybin, and MDMA just wanted to remind you that these drugs are illegal in the United States. Many people have died from using them and I am not a doctor and I never took a chemistry class and this podcast is not an endorsement to do any illegal drug. Please do your own research and be safe in whatever choices you choose to make.
Well, thanks so much for joining me in this series. It is really interesting to kind of talk to people about their experiences, to talk with them about the research, about the psychological benefit, all these sorts of things, really for us to understand it and then make our own choices as clinicians. You know, things are changing rapidly here in the United States around not just cannabis, but even, you know, looking at what was voted in Denver and you know, has been on the ballots in a number of other States in regards to different psychedelics. And so, I think it’s important as therapists, no matter what your beliefs are. I mean, you own your own business, you get to think for yourself. I’m not trying to convince you of anything by doing these interviews, but I do want you to be educated on just what is being done in the research, what are people’s experiences, how it’s done right.
If you have clients that you know, say, “Hey, you know, I want to go do Ayahuasca or I’m going to do a psilocybin session with a guide,” for you to have a general working knowledge of that, whether or not you feel like that’s something you support or don’t, I think it’s important just to have that knowledge. And so, we’re continuing the psychedelic series even though we’re receiving some pushback and people that maybe don’t love it, but you know what, we’re going to proceed until apprehended.
In today’s Practice of the Practice podcast, we have Davi Rhein. Davi is a shamanic healer, speaker, coach, and he’s empowering others by sharing conscious language, mindfulness, and healthy diet and movement practices while also introducing new paradigms for relating with self and others. Davi, welcome to the Practice of the Practice podcast.
[DAVI]: Thanks, Joe. It’s great to be here.
[JOE]: Yeah, I’m really excited to have you here. We’re doing this series about psychedelics because so many people are asking me questions about this, how do you incorporate it into their clinical work or even just understand it. And some people are also just like, “I didn’t even know that was a mental health thing.” So, we’re talking about that, but before we dive kind of into Ayahuasca and that journey for you, tell us a little bit about your clinical work. I was going through your website and like kind of looking through what you do and it looks like a really amazing modality that you’ve developed.
[DAVI]: It is. It’s the most effective thing that I found and I traveled all over the world seeking out teachers, seeking out modalities in the attempts to heal my own body and then to learn how to heal other people’s. And eventually, I found Matthew Hunter who is presently my business partner and together we developed this modality in which functionally you separate every muscle from every other muscle in the body and all of the soft tissue, all of the ligaments, all the tendons. Our body has a tendency to stick to itself. Fascia and myofascia is an incredible structure that has a lot of properties that allow movement. However, if we don’t move, the myofascia will stick to itself, will sort of intertwine and inter-tangle with its own structures, which is why almost everybody that you meet today has their shoulders pulled and rounded forward, has their hips in a forward anterior locked position. And there’s so many structures that crisscross and run parallel to each other that are supposed to have freedom of movement and they simply lose that freedom if we don’t move in creative and full range of motion ways. So, part of it is physically separating them, getting in there with our thumbs and our fingertips and peeling the layers apart and the other part of it is teaching people how to move in their fullest range of motion so that this problem does not reoccur.
[JOE]: As I was reading your website, just from a copywriting standpoint, you’ve done such a good job in articulating what, you know, kind of the first person that gets there is going to be thinking. So I felt like within just a couple paragraphs to understand the two therapists there and what you’re doing and you’re clothed and just all of the things that I would have questions on, you did an awesome job of just writing through what that experience is like for the patient.
[DAVI]: Thank you. That’s great to hear. Yeah, dynamic restructuring is unique. It’s new. There’s really no reference class where people oftentimes ask us, “Well, is this a massage?” We go, “No, it’s not a massage. This is not a spa treatment.” It’s not supposed to feel good while it’s happening. In fact, generally speaking, the worse it feels while we are doing it, the more progress is being made because there are areas of your body that have not been touched, that have not been mobilized for, you know, depending on your age, it might be 30, 40 years that there’s a nerve trapped between two muscles that have not been touched. So, the process of creating freedom and separation there is certainly going to be concerning. It’s going to be intense. A lot of people use the word pain, although I try to stay away from the word pain because there are so many associations and connotations between pain and injury. And in this case, it’s not the pain of injury. It’s the pain change that has a lot of metaphors and corollaries with our emotional bodies, our emotional lives, and spirituality, that growth is not easy and it doesn’t feel good. But afterward, we get to enjoy all of the benefits.
[JOE]: Yeah, and these are long sessions? They’re not just like a half-hour session.
[DAVI]: No, we do generally five to eight hours of bodywork continuously with two therapists at the same time. And the reason for this is that if you resolve a problem in the legs, but you don’t resolve the problem in the upper body, the adhesions in the upper body that are holding the body in a specific shape will cause the lower body to revert to its prior condition. So, we view the entire person as a single unit, their physical body, their emotional body, their mental and spiritual, their belief system, all of it needs to update simultaneously. I use the comparison of a computer. You don’t download 25% of the new operating system and try to run it. You have to download the whole thing and then you also have to install new software packages that run on the new operating system. It is a full update. It’s why we call it restructuring instead of just bodywork or massage because the physical, mental and emotional structures change in a permanent way and create a new possibility for how you’re going to live your life and how you can move physically and mentally and emotionally.
[JOE]: Yeah. You know, as I was reading through your website, I really wished you were in Traverse City because you know, I have a bad back where I fell snowboarding when I was 19 years old, had back surgery, and it’s like I have these flare ups once in a while and I’m kind of in the middle of one and I can just tell that it’s the muscles locking up more than the actual kind of internal stuff. And so, when someone isn’t able to maybe come to work directly with you and I know that that’s probably the single best thing that they could do for that kind of restructuring, what are even some movements or things that we’re not doing as humans that we just need to do more of so we don’t get into these situations with our physical bodies?
[DAVI]: Sure. Well, if you’ve reached a point where you’re already in pain, a certain amount of self-myofascial release is possible using foam rollers, using lacrosse balls, or other tools. What you need to do is not just to press on the muscles, but to find the boundaries between the muscles and to gently tease them apart from each other. In your case, if it’s a low back thing, odds are really good that there are significant adhesions in your hamstrings along the back of your thighs, the IT band along the outside of the thigh where it runs across the vastest ladder house, which is a big flat, broad muscle. There needs to be space and movement there and there’s really no movements that you can do to unstick a structure that has become adhered.
There are movements you can do absolutely to prevent it from happening in the first place and that would be a lot of movements that we would put in the category of dance, taking big step backwards with as much external rotation from the hip as possible, bearing weight into that leg and feeling how the muscles engage against each other to draw your body in a rotational way to face a new direction. The same with stepping backwards with an internal rotation. If you look at the movements of ballerinas, they have this huge range of motion from their hips and in our daily lives we basically have our hips oriented in the same direction, forwards all the time. And even when walking, a lot of people have lost the ability to move their hips while walking and so it becomes almost more of a, like a waddle, like falling forward onto the foot and then turning the whole body and falling forward onto the other foot.
We have found ourselves into a way where we are adapting to what our bodies are capable of doing and just trying to get along as humans. You know, how can I stand up and sit down, how can I face forward, how can I have my chest and my head at the appropriate angle so that people don’t look at me and ask what’s wrong with you? Because given the position of most people’s hips, and this is from sitting down too much, driving too much, having this flection at the hips so frequently, if their spine was in a healthy shape, they would be leaning forward 30 degrees looking at the ground and people would go, “What’s wrong? Are you okay?” And so, the compensation is then to crunch the lower back and to pull the body back and up so that the chest and the face are facing forward, and yet this causes so much dysfunction in the lower back.
This is why we see such a frequency of disc problems and bulges and herniations because of all of the compression through the lower back. Because people are following this social necessity of standing upright. So, that’s why if we, if someone comes in with a back problem and you just go straight to the back and you try to address it, you might alleviate their pain for a couple of days. But if you don’t address the legs, which is the source of the problem and the hips, which are truly the source of the problem you won’t get them to a place where they can have a posture that is both functional socially and also healthy.
[JOE]: Wow. This is so interesting. When did, because I feel like there’s some really interesting things that regarding the body but then even the way that you kind of speak about it, that it’s not just the physical body, that there’s more to it than that? Take us through your story of how this work connects with your medicine work.
[DAVI]: Well, I think that this work and the medicine work have a lot in common in terms of delving into repression. We have all of us a series of injuries from our earlier childhood. Most of us played sports or the very least ran around a lot because we were children and if you have say, pulled muscle in your hamstring when you were growing for many, many years ago that formed a scar tissue that limited movement there and then potentially also trauma, whether it’s sexual trauma or some sort of violence from your parents or whatever, we are really, really good at repressing. We have to survive, we need to function in society, and so constantly thinking about these things that happen in the past is not super productive. And so, we’ve all been taught, put on a brave face and don’t delve back into the pain, pain is bad, just forget about it.
And both the work that we do at dynamic restructuring and also the work that Ayahuasca facilitates is to access the unconscious mind to go deep into the past, into our experiences, to understand why our current behavior patterns are there or how our current behavior patterns are derived from the experiences that we’ve had. We have these big beautiful brains that remember everything and our conscious mind only touches a very small part of that. So, we see a lot of similarity between the sort of ceremony, journey work that Ayahuasca facilitates of many hours of potential discomfort and increasing awareness and being in what you might consider a painful situation towards the goal of having a stronger, healthier, higher functioning body and mind. So, when I discovered Ayahuasca, it felt to me like a perfect complement to the physical work that we do, especially when done in combination to have the body restructured and then immediately afterwards to go into a medicine ceremony. I think is one of the most powerful things a person can do for their health.
[JOE]: Hmm. So, when you were first looking at doing an Ayahuasca ceremony, what kind of research were you doing? How were you kind of understanding it and what was helpful in the lead up to your first Ayahuasca ceremony?
I had heard about Ayahuasca years and years ago and was curious about it. I have a fair amount of experience with other psychedelics but not in ceremony, usually recreationally like a burning man. So, having heard about this medicine that is used only in ceremony, I was intrigued and I understood that there was benefit for me there, although I also had this limiting belief that I needed to travel to South America to have this experience. So, I was saving money and waiting for the time of my life when I could, you know, put everything aside and leave for two weeks and go and do it the proper way. And then I met several people who I trusted, who shared their experiences of experiencing the medicine without leaving this country. So I did some research into that, I spoke with the people who are serving the medicine, understood that it was an incredibly respectful and spiritual practice that they are connected to the traditions of South America, that they’ve met with the shamans of South America, that they know how the medicine is meant to be served and how to hold space for it.
And I felt that it was, that the door was open for me to have this experience sooner than I was expecting. And then when I did the medicine I didn’t know this until I actually did it, that you are basically having an internal journey from, at least the way this circle that I sit in practices, you lay down on a mat, on the floor, you close your eyes or can put an eye mask over your eyes, there’s music playing and the experience that you have is totally internal. I don’t open my eyes, I don’t stand up. I don’t look around. I allow my mind to go deep into itself and a lot of stuff, a lot of past processing, which I don’t spend a lot of time doing in my conscious waking mind. I sort of got to a point where I was like, “Why should I be so focused on the past? There’s so much happening in the present”.” I’m a meditator, I’ve done vipassana meditation, so I’ve become very focused on being present and I think there is a lot of value in being present. However, deep investigations of how my mind works because of the past experiences that it’s had that it hasn’t fully processed and cleared, that’s incredibly valuable too. And it increases my ability to be present and to be self-aware, which is really beautiful.
[JOE]: So, what would someone, when they come to their first ceremony, just take us through, for someone that doesn’t even know what to expect, what that looks like?
[DAVI]: Sure. Well, after everyone has kind of gotten settled and set up their space, there is a circle and the facilitator spends at least an hour, sometimes as much as 90 minutes explaining what we’re going to do, everyone’s given an opportunity to introduce themselves and to share their intention around why they’ve come to the ceremony and then questions are taken. And then not long after that, we circle up again. And there are other medicines served in conjunction with the Ayahuasca, oftentimes [inaudible 00:17:07], which is the ashes of the MoPoTsyo, the tobacco plant that grows native indigenously in the Amazon rainforest and the jungle. That is a medicine that is actually blown through a pipe up a person’s nose and is observed through the mucus membrane and the nose, which the first time I received it was quite uncomfortable just because I had a lot of associations around things going up your nose being bad.
[JOE]: Sure.
[DAVI]: And I’ve gotten used to it now and it’s actually, it seems to me to be, if you want to commune with the spirit of the tobacco plant seems to be a much healthier way to do it rather than inhaling it into your lungs. And then there’s basically a period of noble silence throughout the night. So, after you’ve drank the medicine, you would lie down, close your eyes, and you’re asked not to interact with anybody else. And of course, the Shaman will come around and help individuals who seem to need help and might ask you how you’re doing and if you need more of the medicine. And that’s about it. It’s not complicated. The philosophy seems to be, let the medicine guide the experience more so than any person guiding the experience and many people will speak about, and I can share my own personal experience that it does feel as if there is a grandmother present with you telling you things.
The very first time I drank the medicine, I had the experience of basically this old woman coming to me and saying, “Would you like to see the inside of your mind?” And I said, yes and she cracked open my skull. It wasn’t painful, it was just, I felt the mind opening. And she took my brain out, set it down on a table in front of me and opened it like a scroll and then guided me and said, “Hey, look at this.” And I said, “Oh no, that’s a period of my life that has a lot of pain and trauma. I’d really rather not look at it.” She said, “Well, sorry, we’re going to look at it.” It was magic. And I realized that there was a person in my past who I thought that I had forgiven and that I was really still holding some resentment and that resentment was not part of my conscious mind, but it was definitely in there. And I don’t know how it would have been affecting me because all of it is unconscious.
And she showed me a series of events that happened close to 10 years ago from this other person’s perspective. And I was able to empathize with and forgive that person and feel this lifting, this lightness and gratitude. And I cried and it was a really beautiful experience. I’m not a person who cries all that often. I’ve cried on this medicine a dozen times. It’s incredibly liberating. So, yeah, I would say that it is a totally different class of medicine and a different type of experience than any of the other psychedelics that you probably have tried if you tried them in recreational settings. It’s very, very different, both because of the medicine itself, because of the intention setting and the container in which it’s served and also because of the fact that you’re not interacting with anybody else. It is very much your experience and it’s powerful.
[JOE]: Now, being in a group setting, is there ever a time when someone has stuff going on that then, like it spreads amongst the people? Like if someone’s having a very negative experience, does that ever affect other people or is it pretty locked down where people stay in their own world?
[DAVI]: Well, it’s impossible not to hear the other people. So, I would say most ceremonies, somebody is crying or screaming or having their own sort of intense experience that others are aware of. And what the facilitator says is everything that happens in this space is what’s supposed to happen. Don’t restrain yourself. If you feel like your body needs to cry, needs to laugh, needs to scream, as long as you’re not speaking to another person, you can let yourself express yourself however you need. And you know, there was one recently where a woman was crying for maybe two or three hours. And for me at first, it was triggering in a way that I wanted to go help her because I am a helper. I always identified myself as a person who helps and heals others, that is there to support. And I had been told, “Please don’t do that. Please don’t get up, don’t open your eyes, don’t try to help other people. They’re having their own experience.”
And for me, it was an incredible opportunity to sit with that part of myself that wanted to help her so badly and look into where that comes from and why I feel that way and whether it’s for her or whether it’s for me and to just be in deeper relationship with this behavior pattern that up to that point, it was largely unconscious. And then during the sharing circle, the next day, we all have an opportunity to tell the others for maybe three to five minutes each about sort of the big lessons and takeaways from our experience. And there were several people who said that hearing, that crying took them back to trauma from their childhood, that they were then able to process effectively. And it’s impossible to know if they would have been thinking about those things, if not for the presence of a woman crying in a way that sounded very much like a small child crying. So, we do affect each other’s journeys, not intentionally and everything that happens is what’s supposed to happen. So, I think that there’s probably also a great value to doing this medicine in isolation. I’ve never done that, but I would like to try at some point. And I think the group experience is also very beautiful and valid.
[JOE]: So, what do you feel like it’s done from a long-term effects’ standpoint in regards to openness or kind of going deeper into your own psyche? What are the longer-term effects of it for you?
[DAVI]: Well, to be totally transparent, the longer term, I don’t want know because I’ve just been using this medicine for about seven months now. So, in my opinion, the longer-term would indicate a period of years rather than months. What I can tell you is in the seven months that I’ve been using it, I have learned better how to embrace all the parts of myself. I feel a lot more self-love and self-acceptance. I’ve also gotten a lot better at understanding the motivations behind a lot of my actions. I have changed a lot of my social behavior patterns rather than trying to have a lot of friends. I’m deepening relationships with a smaller number of people and seeing a lot more value in that. I’m not as afraid anymore of speaking my mind, I’m not as afraid anymore of asking for value for the work that I do. It’s shifted me in a lot of ways and really empowered me in a lot of ways. I feel like I know myself better and I’m more willing to be totally authentic in my interactions.
[JOE]: Has your vipassana meditation, did that come out of this experience or were you doing that before and how has that changed your meditation practice?
[DAVI]: I did vipassana back in 2011, 2012. It was quite a while ago. So, I’ve been meditating for a long time. I would say that using Ayahuasca medicine made me feel more about why meditation is so important. When I do meditate now, it’s actually gotten easier. I think that the vipassana is similar to Ayahuasca and that these very, very long periods of sitting and not moving and not reacting gives us access to our unconscious mind and if you do enough vipassana meditation, you may even achieve a state that is similar to an Ayahuasca state. So, now when I sit and I meditate, I get to that place much more quickly and I understand the value more.
[JOE]: I want to ask some questions that I think maybe particular audience members might have. So, I’m thinking about those that are substance abuse counselors and their whole training has been, you know, if it’s illegal you shouldn’t do it. How would you want them to maybe think through Ayahuasca or psychedelics differently than maybe their training has happened?
[DAVI]: Sure. Well first to address the legality. Ayahuasca is protected as an indigenous spiritual traditional medicine. It is a religiously protected ceremony. Ayahuasca is not the sort of medicine that I would ever imagine a person using recreationally. It’s just too intense. Like I can’t imagine drinking Ayahuasca and trying to go to a social experience. It would be totally, totally incompatible. Now there are other medicines like psilocybin mushrooms that are illegal, although not anymore in Colorado or in Oakland. So, the laws are slowly changing and I believe they will continue to change in favor of access to these plant-based medicines. So, people who say, “Oh, well this is illegal, you shouldn’t do it,” and they associate these psychedelics with other drugs that are habit-forming and highly addictive, what I would say is, I have sat in circles with a number of people who after Ayahuasca stopped drinking alcohol, stopped smoking cigarettes, stopped using cocaine. It’s the sort of thing that is more likely to free you from your addictions than it is to cause an addiction.
And it’s not habit-forming itself. I mean, I Ayahuasca is two plants. The first is an MAO inhibitor. So, MAO is an enzyme in your stomach that normally would process and digest DMT and your body produces DMT naturally. So, if you just were to take this first plant, which is actually the Ayahuasca vine, you would potentially have a very subtle experience of more vivid imagery and maybe more clarity of your thoughts, just experiencing the DMT that is already latent in your own body. I don’t refer to it as a drug. I always refer to it as medicine because people have such strong connotations around what a drug is. Did that answer your question?
[JOE]: Yeah, yeah. I’m wondering for people that are interested, so I’m thinking, a lot of my audience has been reaching out about how they’ve read Michael Pollan’s book or they’ve, at least they’re thinking more about this either personally or they’re thinking about it for their clients. For that group, what do you think they should know, what are resources, what are mindsets for people that are just kind of like, “This sounds interesting, but I’m not sure I’m all in yet?”
[DAVI]: Sure. You know, I haven’t done that much reading myself online about it. I’m not sure what the best resources are. I spoke directly with the people who had experienced it and with the people who are serving the medicine and for me that was enough, also knowing that this was a medicine that has been served traditionally for thousands of years. So, I know that there are some websites online that have huge, broad categories of information about psychedelics in general. For example, there’s Arrowhead if you Google that I know that they have a ton of articles and information about basically every substance that you could possibly put in your body that has a psychoactive effect. So, if you want to do some internet-based research, I would start there and —
[JOE]: Yeah, I’ve found there’s a TV show called Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia that is on Hulu, that’s been an interesting kind of, he looks at the actual compounds and the science behind it, but then also really goes into anthropology. Michael Pollan’s book, also, Timothy Ferriss did a great interview with Michael Pollan about just the history of psychedelics, which yeah, from even just reading Michael Pollan’s book and hearing some of this I went from, well that sounds interesting to really feeling like, wow, we are so far behind because of the Nixon administration and the politics that got wrapped up in this. But I think it’s healthy for us as a community of therapists to learn about it, to debate it, to have different perspectives respectfully, but to also say we don’t have to just accept the world, maybe how it was handed to us either.
So Davi, the last question that I ask every guest is if every private practice owner in the world were listening right now, what would you want them to know?
[DAVI]: Every private practice practitioner in the world? I think I’d say, we live in a world where most people have gotten to a point where they need, they need professional help physically for their body to function in a healthy way. It is certainly possible with a degree of work having been done or if you start when you’re young enough to live a very long, very healthy life without another person ever needing to get in and restructure your body. But because of our, the ergonomic conditions of our culture, we are all to a certain extent trapped in our own bodies. And so, the current healthcare system does not account for that. It does not enable people to seek out care with their current insurance systems. We need to shift the paradigm to where preventative care is the norm where a person would on a monthly basis go in and have some deep tissue myofascial release work done starting from a reasonably young age to counteract all of the challenges that we have. So, my philosophy is that as a culture, we need to shift what’s considered normal in terms of self-care. And there’s quite a lot more that needs to be done for the body to be healthy than people think. By the time you have a pain condition, it’s gone pretty far.
[JOE]: Oh, that’s so awesome. Davi, if people want to follow your work, learn more about the work that you do, what’s the best way for them to connect with you?
[DAVI]: So, our practice is called Dynamic Restructuring. You can find us at dynamicrestructuring.com and also within the next, my goal is by January 1st I will be launching a podcast called the Change your Beliefs Podcasts and you’ll be able to find that by visiting changeyourbeliefs.com. At the time that that goes live, Joe, I’d love to have you on my show.
[JOE]: Oh, that’d be wonderful. Yeah, this episode will go live right around that time, so we’ll make sure we have links to all of that in the show notes. And thank you, Davi, so much for being on the Practice of the Practice podcast.
[DAVI]: Thank you, Joe. It has been fun.
[JOE]: Some really great information in this about Ayahuasca and personal experience, not mine, but Davi’s. But I think it’s really important for us to kind of have these discussions and to have conversations, you know, at Killin’It Camp to even discuss with people who live in Denver, how things have shifted for some of their clients. It’s just important information for us to be aware of. So, if you want more resources you can always head on over to practiceofpractice.com. We have tons of resources there. Also, if you haven’t joined the Pillars of Practice free e-course to help you grow, scale, start your private practice, we have two different e-courses. One is free all for people starting a practice and the other one is free and for people growing your practice. So, go check that out pillarsofpractice.com.
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Special thanks to the band Silence is Sexy for your intro music. We really like it. And this podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.