#4: Justin Townsend, CEO of MycoMeditations - Journey into Psychedelic Retreats, Healing Trauma, and Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life.

Are you curious about psychedelic retreats? Join us for an insider’s perspective with Justin Townsend, CEO of MycoMeditations, the oldest and largest psilocybin mushroom therapeutic retreat center in Jamaica. We discuss the process of safety screening, and the potential of using psychedelics to overcome trauma, ease depression, and reconnect with our authentic selves.
  
Justin shares his personal journey, from tech startups, to the European psychedelic underground, to learning and teaching breathwork and meditation, and then joining MycoMeditations in Jamaica.  Having facilitated thousands of healing journeys, he shares how these retreats can provide unique insights into our individual and collective human condition. We probe the metaphysics of consciousness and healing and examine how psychedelics can influence belief and faith, which can alter our physiology and bring greater understanding and meaning to our lives.
  
 As we conclude our conversation, we reflect on Carl Jung’s concept of Individuation and Integration, and the transformative stories of guests at MycoMeditations. We discuss life and work in Jamaica, and highlight the importance of surrender and authenticity. We invite you to immerse yourself in this captivating world of psychedelic therapy – a world that promises to challenge, inspire, and transform.

Caution: DON'T CONSUME PSYCHELICS WITHOUT CONSULTING YOUR PERSONAL TRUSTED HEALTH PROFESSIONAL.

Timestamps
0:17 Exploring Psychedelics

13:32 Psilocybin Retreats and Group Therapy

25:49 Background and Path to Psychedelics

40:59 Psychedelics, Mystical Experiences, and Therapeutic Potential

42:15 Roland Griffith's 3 Mediators of Psychedelic Experience

49:55 Bad Trips vs Healing Journeys

53:35 Therapeutic Healing and Transcending Rationality

1:02:16 Approaches to Trauma and Memory

1:05:26 Parental Fantasy Bond Trauma

1:13:49 Exploring Consciousness and Metaphysical Perspectives

1:21:55 Meaning of Life Questions

1:29:59 Carl Jung's Individuation and Integrating Your Shadow

1:32:33 Life In Jamaica

1:39:40 Legacy and Authenticity in Psychedelic Healing

1:45:19 The Concept of Letting Go

1:49:04 Next Episode: Psychoanalysis, Short Story Writing, and Meaning with Dr. David Merrill

Transcript

Dirk: 0:17

Welcome back meaning seekers to episode four of Developing Meaning, the show where I, your host, Dirk Winter, speaks with colleagues who are therapists, psychiatrists, healers of various kinds about what they have learned from their clinical work about meaning and how they think about meaning in the lives of their patients and in their own lives, so that we can extract principles and learn from that and build more meaning and purpose into our own lives. If you're enjoying this show, you can support us for free by subscribing on Apple podcasts and Spotify, and you can leave a rating or a comment we had very much appreciated. Today, I am very excited to present to you a conversation with Justin Townsend, who is the CEO of MycoMeditations, which is the oldest and largest psilocybin retreat center in Jamaica, where psychedelic mushroom experiences are legal. Maybe you have had friends or acquaintances who have gone on psychedelic retreats ayahuasca retreats or psilocybin mushroom retreats or various other psychedelic retreats. Maybe you have done this yourself or thought about doing this. Maybe you've read Michael Pollan's book How to Change Your Mind or seen as Netflix series, and if you haven't, I recommend those.

Dirk: 1:38

Psychedelics seem to be everywhere in the news these days, at least news about mental health, consciousness, self-help, and you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who has more experience, is more knowledgeable or thoughtful about this topic than Justin Townsend. Today we are going to talk about how this whole thing works. What is the experience like if you go to a retreat center like his or his retreat center, how he screens for safety, what happens at these retreats in terms of the nuts and bolts, and also how this experience can heal trauma and potentially help with depression, with anxiety, as well as create a new perspective that can be especially helpful with finding meaning and purpose in the second half of life, which I find particularly relevant to me, and Justin has quite an interesting story of starting out in Europe and entering the tech world and then moving into the underground psychedelic world and learning about breathwork, and then ending up living and running a psychedelic retreat center in Jamaica. He has learned a lot along the way about how to become in touch with our authentic selves, how to find that true embodied sense of meaning and purpose, and so I think you're really going to enjoy this interview. So just to recap very briefly and provide a bit more context for this episode, I want to remind you that in the first episode we talked with Annette De Broil, who is an expert in felt sense and right brain, interoceptive, body based embodied knowing, and this is an important building block of meaning having some kind of a system to connect with our body and our felt sense. And in the next episode we talked with medically assisted dying expert, dr Gene Marmareo, about how to find meaning at the end of life, and the topic of awareness of our mortality, death and avoiding denial of death is another essential building block that I'm sure we'll get back to. Today we are adding a third tool that can be helpful in finding meaning, which is psychedelics. I think you're really going to enjoy this episode.

Dirk: 4:05

Before we dive in, I do want to say that this is serious stuff. Psychedelics will change our brain, will change our plasticity. They can change our brain for better and for worse, and if you are considering doing this yourself, in addition to thinking about the legal aspects, really really think seriously about the potential positive and negative consequences and talk through this with your own trusted healthcare people. A couple of quick definitions before we start. The default mode network is the network of brain regions that was identified maybe about 10 years ago. This is a extremely important new discovery relatively new discovery. This network is the self referencing network that generally we have running all the time, where we reference how our environment is relevant to ourselves. This network gets shut down by psychedelic medications, by meditation. There are number of ways to shut down this default mode network. When that shuts down, there can be a feeling of vastness, connectedness, losing oneself, and that is relevant for psychedelic experiences and for this conversation. And then I also want to reference MAPS, which is the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, which has funded a lot of the research that has brought back clinical use of psychedelics. So let's get into it.

Dirk: 5:42

This conversation starts with Justin asking me about who else has been on the show before him, and we quickly move from there. So please enjoy my conversation with Justin Townsend. I have interviewed. I started off interviewing colleagues, people my classmates and people have gone on to do have done very interesting things. The most recent people I interviewed was one woman is Jean Marmorano. She is a family doctor who started the assisted suicide or the assisted dying program in Canada and she wrote a book called the Last Doctor, and so she is sort of an end of life expert. So that was quite an interesting to see sort of her experience, her story. So absolutely.

Justin: 6:44

I've got a few thoughts on that as well. Actually, my only point there is that I think medically assisted death is a very good concept, but now making it available for those that have mental health issues, especially like eating disorders or extreme PTSD, and yet Canada won't let them try psychedelics first, as a last resort, before they move into medically assisted death. That's tragic in my mind. Credit to your doctor friend, credit to your family doctor, but the fact is that Canada has only allowed extremely limited use of psychedelics, and so you've got 30,000 people being medically assisted with death every year in Canada, many of which have mental health issues that could otherwise be given the opportunity to try psychedelics before death.

Dirk: 7:31

Well, I met her at the ketamine training, so she is very much in favor of having psychedelics be a component of that evaluation.

Justin: 7:40

Absolutely yeah.

Dirk: 7:42

Thank you. Yeah, so I interviewed a woman, Annette DuBreuil, who is an expert in Focusing, and Eugene Gendlin, who is the guy from University of Chicago who came up with the term felt sense, and if you look at Bessel-VanDerKolk's Body Keeps the Score. Really, what he says is you have to work with the body and he goes through all these different approaches that I never learned in my training. And Eugene Gendlin he came up with the term Felt Sense and he was a philosopher at University of Chicago and, looking across therapy modalities, he found that the thing that protects people getting better is having a felt sense experience.

Justin: 8:43

Yeah, I mean Bessel-Van der kolk is one of our heroes down here in Sephora's therapeutic approach and a lot of my therapists are obviously trauma-informed but have done lots of somatic type modules, all the IFS somatic module as well. But here's the interesting thing whenever my guests say, yes, I've read, the body keeps the score. I said but are you aware that sometimes the mind can hide the score and then by the end of the week they know exactly what I'm talking about? Very cool. Yeah.

Dirk: 9:17

All right. Well, this is great. I'm so happy to be talking with you and, in terms of sort of an overall outline, I'm excited to have a wide ranging conversation. I was thinking of starting just talking about how you and I got connected a little bit and hearing about what you have built with my meditations, meditations and I have brain snafus and then your story your personal story and then also how, yeah, all this healing wisdom that you've accumulated, and then talking about your take on meaning of life.

Dirk: 10:04

So, just to sort of begin, we met because one client of yours had a little bit of a difficult experience. And then you found me to do a psychiatric evaluation and I have recently become very interested in psychedelics. I did a training in Ketamine. I went to the maps conference this is very new to me, but I'm very in classical psychiatry, Columbia, working a lot with schizophrenia bipolar. So I evaluated the person they're doing well, but I also felt like, oh, wow, what you guys are doing is so cool. So that's how you and I are doing it now, Absolutely.

Justin: 10:57

And let me just say from our side, Dirk, it's been a pleasure getting to know you. So from our perspective, we I mean just when we take people on retreat we end up declining about 30% of all applications. So we have a very, very rigorous screening approach. But occasionally, of course, the occasional guest is going to sit through either with something that's undiagnosed or latent or they've lied about, and in this case it was a guest that one of my licensed therapists and psychologists here thought was demonstrating possibly some Schizoaffective disorder type symptoms as well as some other symptomology that we were concerned about. So we declined the dose for the rest of the week and recommended a psych evaluation and the rest is history, I suppose.

Dirk: 11:43

Yeah and and. So maybe just say a little bit more. I know you've, you know you have to talk about this on your website, but you have a week long treatment program. Maybe just paint a picture when, when people go, what happens? What are the experiments?

Justin: 12:01

So micromeditations is a cyber assisted therapy retreat center based in Jamaica, in the Caribbean. It was first established in about 2014, 2015. But back then it wasn't really a therapeutic model at all. It was more of a recreational type model. The original founder, who's no longer with the company, was doing sporadic retreats throughout the year and bringing residents from the US across the Jamaica to experience this. So fast forward. I joined the company in 2017 as an advisor.

Justin: 12:33

The original founder moved on and I've got about a 20 year history of working with psychedelics, amongst other things I've done in my life. And so, in observing what was happening with the Johns Hopkins research back then and everything else, I decided I wanted to build what I hoped would become the gold standard, or something resembling a gold standard, but still a cyber assisted therapy in a naturalized retreat setting using group work. And so the first thing we did was look at all the existing protocols going back to the sixties and the fifties and the seventies, and then some of the more modern protocols coming from organizations like maps and also Johns Hopkins. Most of those protocols were based on at least two mental health professionals working with one patient over a period of time, and obviously so we took what we thought was the best of the best practices and then we modified those for group work and we've tailored them accordingly. And so our guests come down for a seven day retreat, they will have three doses of psilocybin throughout the course of that week, every other day, and the rest of the week is taken up with group therapy and all a combination of both group therapy and individual therapy. On average, each client and I will go back and forth between using the word clients or guests we certainly don't call them patients Each guest will receive on average about 20 to 30 hours of group therapy throughout the week and, as needed, one on one therapy as well.

Justin: 14:05

And so the reason for the three doses is we realized quite early that there is no one size fits all when it comes to psilocybin, and so over the years we've tried to eat a one dose experience retreat, a two dose, a three and a four. The four doses seem too much. The one and two doses seemed not enough, and three seemed to hit the mark for most guests most of the time, and that's certainly been our experience up until now. So we will have served by the end of this year approximately 2000 guests, a total of around about 6000 doses of psilocybin.

Justin: 14:44

We do a lot of data collection that feeds back into our protocols and our ongoing training. We collect rating scales before the guests arrive, self reporting around PTSD, alcohol use disorder, anxiety, depression, so forth, so we really have a good understanding of their baseline before they arrive. Before the retreat begins, the team will have a pre-retreat briefing, discuss the guests and who's coming and then we will begin the week and then, once the guests finish the end of the week and they go home again, we continue on with the rating scale measurement as a longitudinal study. So at months one, three, six, nine and 12, those same guests get sent the same surveys to complete and of those that continue to participate, as far as 12 months out. What we see right now is that certainly for PTSD, a clinically significant production of PT symptoms by an average about 60%, and very, very good outcomes as well for depression and anxiety and alcohol use disorder that are at least in line with the outcomes from the research facilities, if not better.

Dirk: 15:55

That it's a neat model and I'm thinking about my own experience at the ketamine training which was with Wolfson's group and Van der Kolk was there and it was a one week model at the Menla retreat center with an oral dose experience and then an IM dose and a day of rest in between, and the group experience is just so powerful. So I'm 52 and like I have, like all these new best friends from this. You know we're all sort of building this and learning and so I am curious about I mean I love the group model and curious about how do these people then stay connected? Is this?

Justin: 16:48

how does this?

Dirk: 16:50

play out socially.

Justin: 16:51

Absolutely so. I sometimes look at gas, at what's happening back in the US and Europe. Spent 10 years plus living in the US and even longer in Europe, and I see how much polarization and division there is. And yet what I get to see every week on retreat, week in, week out, is, as these groups come together, of strangers is the absolute best of humanity shining through, and the level of connectivity that these guests have with each other throughout the week is just incredible. And so, yes, absolutely.

Justin: 17:22

One of the things that we do is we use WhatsApp as a communications tool for each retreat group, and that begins about two weeks before they arrive and the guests will start to get each know each other and on that WhatsApp group that persists throughout the week is we're using the WhatsApp group to organize breakfast, lunch, dinner, massages and so on, but then that WhatsApp group stays alive after that group goes home, and those groups are very active with each other. There's lots of meetups happening, so there's a lot of ongoing community that arises out of these retreats as well, and we have a worldwide WhatsApp group that everybody goes in all of our former guests. Then we have regional ones as well and big cities like Denver, New York, Boston, where we have a lot of guests. We have localized groups there too, and they're always meeting up, getting together. Even at the Denver conference, the MAPS Denver conference, they about 20 or 30 of our guests got together there, had a big meal and met up with each other.

Justin: 18:17

So, yeah, it's absolutely incredible and I think I don't know what to compare it to, to be quite honest, but the you know a lot of these guests are very nervous and anxious when they get here and then we get them to share their life stories and that's and they're often telling life stories and secrets about themselves.

Justin: 18:37

Deep, dark secrets are not even their most loved ones and best friends and family members know about. And yet they come here and as part of the healing, we ask them to begin to share about these life experiences and what they've been through. And it's there is, there is nary a dry eye in the room as we're doing that and the the defenses come down very quickly, especially so when we're working with someone Simon and that connection that exists between the guests is just incredible. And then, as they prepare to dose, everybody is a little bit nervous and anxious. Of course, they're entering into the unknown. What will arise from my unconscious mind and at the end of the dosing day, when they all come back together again, it's a real sense of accomplishment and they've, and they're continuing to bond very well.

Dirk: 19:24

Yeah, I, I was blown away at the, the bonding that that can happen in this. So I, I I'm imagining what you're describing and it seems really neat. How do you, how do you think about safety? For I know you, you screen out 30%, who you screen out, and then how do you sort of set the, the context and the setting to create sort of the maximum safety at, because we are taking down everybody's defenses.

Justin: 19:59

Right. There are multiple dimensions to to answer that question. The first way in the screening process is it's quite a lengthy process and a very detailed process and there are three stages to it. What we definitely do exclude is anybody with a personal or first degree family relative personal history with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia or any other form of schizoaffective disorder. We're going to screen out anybody that's potentially cluster A and certainly cluster B from the DSM five.

Justin: 20:34

It's not so often that we have people down here with, should we say, personality disorders such as narcissism or borderline, but we do occasionally have guests that show up down here with strong borderline trades and strong narcissistic trades and we and we have to screen them out because, as you're probably familiar with your practice, they can be very disruptive in group work. These individuals, the risk of creating rejection, failure, abandonment type scenarios as we go throughout the week and having them spin out is quite high, and so we've learned the hard way that we've got a. There are certain question sets that our therapist is used to tease out whether somebody has these kind of underlying traits or not, and so we will exclude primarily cluster A and cluster B candidates as well. And then, as we're going through the video interview process. If the client is there are certain gives and tells that we can always tell if somebody's not that stable, and so that's our application process and, like I said, we screen at about 30%. Now there is some you know there isn't too much research that exists on the internet that I've seen that speaks to the risks of, say, set aside in activating mania with somebody that has bipolar one, for example. But there was recently a study that was done from a US university where they reached out and did a self reporting survey. So they said anybody out there on these social media platforms, from Reddit to Facebook to TikTok, they went out to everybody that had, say, for example, a bipolar diagnosis of some kind, and they surveyed about 2000 people and they said for those of you that have a bipolar diagnosis and have also experimented with suicidine, how many of you had an adverse reaction of some kind? And the self reporting numbers came back as high as 30% and that to me, is substantial. So to that end, that's the reason why we screen those people out I think there will be protocols developed in the coming years that will allow people with bipolar disorder and other conditions to work with psychedelics, but that's not something that we are doing.

Justin: 22:48

And then maybe it's been three months since they've been through the application process and they've booked, and then maybe they'll start to communicate with our operations team before they arrive on retreat and sometimes, when that happens, their guard is down and there'll be certain tells about their behavior that might be a bit alarming to our operations team. They will inform the therapy team and there'll be a follow up interview. So that's the. That's just getting people here. Obviously, it's disappointing to have to decline people, but we're not going to take risks with anybody's safety. So, as it comes to the rest of the safety throughout the week, let me tell you first of all that, as I say, gold standard, we've developed a what we feel is a Western, contemporary therapeutic model.

Justin: 23:28

What does that really mean in practice, beyond the protocols that we use and the therapeutic approaches that we take down here? It means, excuse me, that we have a psychiatrist on team that's available 24 hours, seven days a week. We have MDs on call as well, and then the typical retreat constellation is normally a retreat leader that is typically a licensed therapist. The retreat leader is supported by a lead therapist for that retreat also a licensed therapist. And then we have facilitators, and those facilitators can be, according to experienced, senior facilitators or just normal facilitators. Again, the majority of them are either licensed therapists or licensed clinical social workers, and then we do a lot of ongoing training with them down here.

Justin: 24:16

It's our own training modules, and before anybody can progress the position of lead therapist or even retreat leader, there are many hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of direct experience they need to gain first before we'll appoint them into that level of responsibility.

Justin: 24:32

As you look at the ratio of team members to our guests, if a retreat size is typically around about 12 individuals, then we will have around about eight, nine or 10 facilitators to support that group, and that might seem top heavy, but again, we are not taking risks with anyone's well being down here whatsoever.

Justin: 24:51

Aside from that, we have a retreat manual or handbook that's a work in progress that details everything that we do here, from first contact with the client all the way through to the final integration they leave so laterally. We have everything detailed and then diving deep down into how we assess for dose, how we deal with certain situations, maybe how we treat depression, how we treat anxiety, how we look at PTSD, how we look at alcoholism. There's a lot of variables that we have to take into account. We standardize as much as we can down here, but at the end of the day there's still lots of variables that we cannot standardize for, and so there's a lot of judgment calls, if you like, that are made as we go, based upon a combination of the experience of the team members, and so we say some good intuition as well.

Dirk: 25:42

So that gives me, gives us a bit of a picture, and we'll get back to it. I'm curious now, sort of about your own personal story and sort of leading to you being here right now and having created this, so maybe starting just very beginning where were you born?

Justin: 26:04

Okay, I was born in a small town called Kidlington in the parish of Oxfordshire in the United Kingdom. So basically, if anybody asked me that question, I'd say Oxford, UK, that's where I was born. After that, I've actually lived outside the UK longer than I've lived in it, and so that included probably 11 or 12 years in Germany and another 11 or 12 years in the US, and then lived in Jamaica here since about 2018. So I am not your typical psychedelic practitioner. I think the typical psychedelic practitioner these days is either a therapist, social worker, psychologist or psychiatrist. They seem to be occupying that space. I think rightly so for most scenarios. So my background is this is that I originally I was born in 1971, I'm a year or two younger than you. I came up through the 70s and the 80s. I have had a 20 plus year corporate career behind me. 25 year corporate career what?

Dirk: 27:10

sort of corporate career, was it?

Justin: 27:13

So I was working at the intersection of startup companies and venture capital.

Justin: 27:18

I was originally at college when the internet first happened in the UK and I wasn't really happy with what I was studying and where I was going, which was more engineering oriented.

Justin: 27:27

The internet came along and I dropped out of college and moved straight into the world of internet in the very, very early days and working with some companies of a pioneering in that space, I ended up building a couple of companies, selling them, growing a couple of companies, failing at a couple of companies. That was good for my humility and then working across many, many different industries and in the end I mean, for example, before I joined Myco I'd been advisor to a number of different startups. But I was also working as the head of innovation and entrepreneurship at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York and that's where I worked at the Institute for Next Generation Healthcare, where we were looking at healthcare 10 to 20 years out and I was working with a lot of bioinformatics specialists, big data specialists and genomic specialists there and, as they were making new discoveries, helping them commercialize those new discoveries and turn PhD scientists try and turn PhD scientists into business people Not as easy as it may sound.

Dirk: 28:31

No, no, but that's an interesting and relevant piece of background for you now, and I'm very interested. I love psychiatry largely because of people and stories, and how do we sort of shape our lives and get to a place where we sort of realize our potential and find meaning, and so that's, I think, relevant background. I'm also now curious about the psychedelic path when? Did that come into?

Justin: 29:00

the story line.

Justin: 29:01

So this is the other parallel path. That was the path that was in the shadows for the majority of my life In the corporate world. I was becoming increasingly a square pagan around whole and becoming more and more sensitive to the world that I was in and having to perform within. And then the psychedelic path began with recreational use of mushrooms in my late teens. That frankly scared the life out of me. But at the same time I'd suffered from some rather chronic anxiety and depression in that period and through a lot of my early 20s and, more by luck than by judgment, recognized that the mushroom sessions were having a positive impact on those conditions. I'd also been down the route of SSRI use and, should we say, other anxiolytics to manage my anxiety and it had become numbed out. The usual story there.

Justin: 29:56

And so fast forward, I began a meditation practice and solitude, as much work on myself as possible. I, like you, very interested in the human condition, both individual and collectively, and the psychology, and realized even back then that so much of how I was viewing the world and living my life and how I was at the time of victim of my own circumstances was so much to do with my own psychology. But I was a little boat adrift at sea on a vast ocean of the unconscious below me, but not realizing that at the time, and subject to all of its currents. So fast forward again. I continued to work with mushrooms. I had my very first ayahuasca experience in the year 2000. Ayahuasca contains the molecule N, dimethyltryptamine, nmdmt, and that, really, accelerated by meditation practice, was remarkably healing for me and I continued to engage in a few more ayahuasca ceremonies when did you do that?

Dirk: 30:56

first ayahuasca ceremony.

Justin: 30:58

Yeah, that wasn't taking off to the jungles of South America and traveling eight hours down the Amazon. That was part of the European underground psychedelic movement. So there were medicine men and medicine women, along with some great clinicians working together that were being organized by a bit of a ragtag group of people, and we were hosting these ayahuasca ceremonies all over Europe on the underground.

Dirk: 31:23

So you had already become part of this European underground scene at that point.

Justin: 31:27

I went from attending ceremonies for my own well-being to being asked to help facilitate those ceremonies. And then eventually, as these organizations that were setting up these retreats, if you like, as part of the underground were doing more and more business, they got into some financial trouble because they were having to fly people in and put deposits down on hotels and locations. They asked me to help them out financially and I said yes, but now please teach me everything you know.

Dirk: 31:56

And the round peg in the square hall. Can you say a little bit about what?

Justin: 32:01

that was what that was was. I was pretty good at what I was doing in my corporate world in the corporate world, but I was constantly having to compromise my integrity. The higher I was within the organization or the more venture capital money I raised, the more responsibility there was, the more I was being constantly required incrementally in many cases to compromise my integrity as a person. That could have meant half promises to employees, unkept promises, just business deals that were not as optimized as they could have been. They didn't switch. You know, it was just. It was a constant compromising of my integrity. I had a young family, a daughter as well, being asked to travel all the time, just be away from my wife and kid, not have any balance in life. It was becoming increasingly more and more uncomfortable for me. So that's the square peg in the round hole the older I got the worse it got.

Dirk: 32:56

Do you remember the moment where you said maybe psychedelics can help me with this?

Justin: 33:03

No, it didn't happen like that. Actually, the way that happened was so to just to continue briefly on the psychedelic path, I don't want to for one moment say I did the typical indigenous native apprenticeship that one normally does when you're working with psychedelics from a shamanic perspective, but I did get to work alongside some great medicine men, great medicine women and some great clinicians, and I learned a lot from that method through working with Ayahuasca. Okay, fast forward again. I moved to Germany and there I learned holotropic breath work. I then taught it for a couple of years and I then went on to facilitate holotropic breath work four day long retreats and so these two paths ultimately crossed over in 2017 when I joined my meditations.

Dirk: 33:53

I want to hear a little more about that. The Ayahuasca sounds fascinating. In working with the shamans that was in England.

Justin: 34:02

That was all over Europe, originally beginning in the UK.

Dirk: 34:05

And then the holotropic breath work I also find fascinating and I just finished reading. I saw Stan Grof at the maps and maps was so fun for me because it was like a Michael Pollan Disneyland with all these characters come to life and their followings and Stan Grof is one of them and I was kind of blown away by the way of the psychonaut and I've been sort of following breath work for a while now. I read the Nestor book Breath.

Justin: 34:42

Yeah, pretty good.

Dirk: 34:44

And then Wim Hof's book. There's a psychiatrist at Columbia, Richard Brown, who developed a breath, body, mind bringing a qigong, used to do more fast breathing techniques but now it's slow breathing, a coherent breathing, and I've done sort of the level one teacher training with that and is so powerful, your breath is so powerful, there's so much that we can do with it.

Justin: 35:21

And it can be incredibly powerful. I've seen a lot of very powerful catharsis and emotional processing happen over these four day long retreats with breath work and it's actually a good alternative to many pharmaceutical interventions, if you know sort of mild depression, mild anxiety. A consistent practice of breath work not only can can not only lead to good, strong, powerful catharsis and maybe the clear, the recognizance and clearing up of maladaptive behaviors and perspectives, but also seems to really vitalize people as well, really gives them a sense of vitality if they keep the practice going, and clarity in life as well.

Dirk: 36:02

How do you contrast a breath experience and a mushroom experience?

Justin: 36:06

It's like comparing a bullet to a artillery shell. I'd say the bullet is the breath work and the artillery shell, the big 105 millimeter cannon shell, is the psilocybin and I think as well those psilocybin the one, the one great thing, one of the great things that Roland Griffith said and Johns Hopkins is that what he likes about psilocybin is its trans diagnostic advocacy, its ability to target so many different mental health conditions, and we know all about now, or we're learning more about, how psilocybin impacts us on a neurological level as well as on a psychological level. So I just think that psilocybin is much more multifaceted than breath work, but breath work is a good, consistent practice to have as well. That certainly supports ongoing work with psychedelics as well.

Dirk: 36:53

Do you have a theory about why psilocybin is so effective in such a wide ranging way?

Justin: 37:02

Theory. There's so much new science that seems to be coming out every week that, as I established a new theory, I need to keep correcting it or dismissing it altogether. Wide okay. So a theory. I think many of the illnesses that we see today are diseases of despair not all the time, but a lot of the time but it seems to be a certain sickness within society, and this maybe points more towards the meaning part of life and the meaning part of the interview that you wanted to do.

Justin: 37:37

And we are so as a collective. We are so disconnected from ourselves, we're so disconnected from other people around us, we're disconnected from the world around us. Technology seems to be advancing at a rate faster than society can keep up with it. We've seen what happened at the internet that should have been very democratizing and liberating and ended up delivering social media which, for certain demographics, has been absolutely devastating. Adolescent teens especially. We spend more time now looking at our phones. I mean looking around us, it's the attention span is getting shorter and shorter. We're seeing the ability for there to be, should we say, social contagion happening via the use of the internet and social media is almost like rocket fuel for pre-existing mental health conditions. And so why do I think set aside is effective? Because it reconnects us back with ourselves again, ultimately and helps us reconnect back with others. Yes, we see the neuroplasticity that comes from set aside and that's massively helpful. We see the reset of default mode network, which has a huge impact on people's well-being and mental health.

Justin: 38:52

As we look at what's called the, if you like, the AB reactive properties of psilocybin this maybe speaks to Bessel van der Kolk's book the Body Keeps the Score we see that a lot of people are knowing the hold on to a lot of the physiological and emotional responses to trauma that they've been through. This brings them down strips into their vitality, so, as psilocybin helps them to go through an AB reactive process over long-forgotten trauma and then release all those repressed emotions that are associated with that trauma, so we see conditions like alcohol use disorder clear up, depression, clear up, anxiety, clear up. So psilocybin is just multifaceted. As far as I'm concerned, there's a great.

Justin: 39:35

There used to be a therapist back in the 60s or 70s that wrote a book called I think it was called the Secret Chief or the Secret Surgeon, and what he says about psilocybin, just on the cognitive level alone, is that imagine that you're sitting on the middle of a circular stage and around you is a big red curtain, like at the movie theaters, and you've not taken the medicine yet.

Justin: 39:56

Now this curtain is about three foot wide right and the three foot wide gap represents all your truth and knowledge and absolutisms about you and the world. You then take the psilocybin and slowly the curtain pulls all the way back and reveals to you all the truth and all the knowledge and all the absolutisms, and you have these big while moments and understanding and cognitive insights, both on a personal level, on a philosophical level often, and then, as the medicine leaves your body, a few hours later, slowly that curtain will begin to close, but this time it won't remain at three foot wide, it'll remain at 10 foot wide. And that points to the enhanced, increased perspectives that we now have arising out of these psilocybin journeys. And again, that goes back to recognizing our maladaptive behaviors, maladaptive perspectives, how we navigate the world. When we have these insights, we can now integrate them and when we leave retreat and go back home, begin to lay down much healthier behaviors, for example.

Dirk: 40:59

I feel like I had sort of a mini version of that experience with ketamine, and it's much shorter right the Ketamine is an hour or two and I went into the retreat nervous thinking, oh, am I going to fall in love with this? Am I going to get all those questions?

Dirk: 41:22

And not having much of a psychedelic background. I think I tried it once in college in a camping kind of situation. But the feeling really is this shift of perspective and then wondering about it Like, oh, I want to do that again. But it's more like, hmm, I'm really and, yeah, I think these are exciting tools and being able to turn off the default mode network and connect with our body and shift our perspective and open up critical brain windows and plasticity and all of that is exciting. And yeah, we don't have the mechanism, the full understanding yet.

Justin: 42:15

but the experiences. Yeah, it's incredible. I mean again to quote Roland Griffiths. He says there are three mediators to the psilocybin experience. Number one is the cognitive insights, number two is the emotional breakthroughs, the powerful classes that happens. And number three would be the mystical experience.

Justin: 42:34

And so there's a lot of interesting discussion within scientific and research and there's a lot of scientific circles and psychiatric circles around the mystical experience. What is it? How do we measure it? But what is known is that, despite not understanding the action of the mystical experience, what is known is that if you have a mystical experience, the long term psychological outcomes are that much better because of it. And where else has that been used? Well, we know that with the 12 step AA program there's a lean towards the so-called higher power as a mechanism. Right, we know it's effective within the 12 step program, no matter what your religious beliefs are or not. So many of our guests have a mystical experience down here to one degree or another. Throughout the week we used the nationally recognized mystical experience questionnaire to rate that experience and we can see, undoubtedly, the impact of these experiences have on our guests are absolutely positively life changing. So we work with these mystical experiences all the time and around about 40% of our guests. That's another core component to this work with psychedelics.

Justin: 43:44

But I think the interesting thing in the future will be this I mean, imagine you had a patient come to you and they said look, I've had a big psychedelic experience. My mental health now feels fantastic. It's been a week. I'm free of anxiety, the inner chatter in my brain has all gone away, my chronic worry and catastrophizing has stopped. I feel ready to take on the world again. But I had this amazing mystical experience that took it beyond the personal and into the philosophical, the cosmological, the metaphysical.

Justin: 44:16

Now, if your answer is a psychiatrist is well, isn't that great that this hallucination delivered that outcome for you. The likelihood is that your patient would just shut right down. Now I can see how somebody could deliver that kind of answer. Yes, your hallucination did deliver this outcome for you. Wonderful for you.

Justin: 44:37

But it kind of devalues the experience and most, if not all, of these mystical experiences, whatever they are, are deeply meaningful and deeply powerful and as yet modern psychology, psychiatry, therapy, doesn't really have the language or vocabulary to talk about this therapeutically. The what's it called the Worldwide Psychiatric Association is now beginning to recommend guidelines within psychiatry the use of metaphysical understandings along the lines of. You shouldn't be shutting down these types of experiences, but rather offering your patient to be like a menu of different metaphysical understandings and frameworks that they can look to to better help them understand and create more meaning out of their experience. So that's going to be just one area that modern psychology, therapy and psychiatry will be dealing with over the coming years how to frame it, how to talk about it, how to understand it. And you've not been taught it, you've not been educated around these experiences as part of your traditional training. So how does it even fit in?

Dirk: 45:46

Yeah, it's hard to get get our head around it. And we are meaning seeking creatures. I always sort of I mean from my own sort of existential. I feel like I went into this field because I had my own existential distress and wanting to sort of connect with people and see, well, you know, we're all going to die. We all are trying to make meaning. We're answering questions about you know what? What are the spiritual dimensions? How should we spend our time? And I want to learn and connect and I also appreciate science a lot and I think it's clear that belief and faith change our physiology and can be extremely helpful. And I'm extremely excited now about bringing a broader perspective into this and connecting with ancient faith traditions. People have been treating trauma and for thousands of years and, yes, I think the medical model is too narrow and so how do we? How do we broaden that? I share your question about that. I don't have a great answer yet, but it's fun to yeah, I think what's going to be different with psychedelics?

Justin: 47:20

I suspect what will be different. I mean, how many dinner parties or cocktail parties do you go to, dirk, where there's somebody saying, yes, I was depressed for 10 years but these great SSRIs really helped me? Maybe quite rare, but how many dinner parties or cocktail parties have you been to or will you go to in the future when somebody says, yes, I was depressed for 10 years. I went on a psychedelic retreat and it completely cleared up my depression, or mostly cleared up my depression, and I have a whole new lease on life. Now that kind of discussion is happening more and more and more amongst the population.

Justin: 47:55

The virality, the way that the healing benefits of psilocybin and other psychedelics is spreading amongst the population at large is quite substantial.

Justin: 48:06

And so, as the FDA approves psilocybin and MDMA, probably initially for limited use, it's going to be interesting where you have patients going to their doctors saying I've got depression, the doctors going to prescribe the first line of defense or the gold standard, an SSRI of some kind or an SNRI, and the patient is going to say, no, that's just a bandaid, I don't want your SNRI or SSRI, I want the psychedelic, and I think you're going to have this huge up swelling from grassroots, from patients, rather than the top-down prescriptive mode coming from doctors or psychiatrists Initially. I suspect that will change over time. But at the same time there's going to be huge demand for psychedelics but not enough supply. There's not going to be enough qualified, trained and experienced clinicians to meet the demand within society, whether it's MDMA or psilocybin. And it's going to take quite some time before those that could administer psychedelics have the requisite experience beyond the theory and the training, but the experience to really create maximal efficacy when they work with a patient or a client.

Dirk: 49:19

Yeah, I feel like it's an exciting time. It's also, I think, people feel nervous that the animals are out of the barn. We have the tiger by the tail. People are off the grid. They want this. They're doing it on their own. There's going to be some negative experiences. Yeah undoubtedly In having it all or so much of it off the grid. Concerning Absolutely.

Justin: 49:55

But that does point to the need for ongoing education and harm reduction education amongst the population at large. Because you're right, if it's too expensive and it's out of pocket, the expense is too high. If you cannot be prescribed it by your psychiatrist or your MD, then people will revert to the underground Absolutely. And as more and more people use it, there'll be more and more adverse reactions and adverse events and so-called bad trips. We don't do bad trips down here, michael. Many of our guests have challenging experiences, very challenging experiences. But I want to talk for a moment about the difference between, say, a bad trip and a challenging trip. A lot of it's connected with set and set being the mindset that you have before you take the psychedelic and setting being the environment and how safe you feel in the location that you're in and with the people that you're with. So a bad trip might be okay. I'm off to a grateful dead concert. I stop at the bar on the way there. I have a few pints of beer. I get to the concert. I enter. There are 20,000 people there. They're all random. I don't know anybody.

Justin: 51:04

Somebody comes along with a bag of mushrooms. This is Paige, you want some? I've never had mushrooms before. I'm a bit disinhibited from alcohol. I take that mushroom, those mushrooms, and I eat them.

Justin: 51:14

What likely then happens on a therapeutic dose of mushrooms is a default mode network will start to come offline, commonly also known as ego dissolution or ego death, and for many people it can feel like they are dying. At the same time. If deeply buried, repressed trauma starts to arise as part of the ab reactive feature of psilocybin, then the combination of ego death and deeply buried trauma coming up will lead to a panic, anxious state and the person's going to spin out and spiral the drain. Then you call the paramedics and they come along with a benzodiazepines and brings the person back down again. Bad trip, poor set, poor setting. What could be a challenging trip might be the fact that around about 40% of our guests that come to micromeditations have some kind of childhood sexual abuse. Of that 40%, some are very aware that it happened, but the majority are often unaware or only have the slightest inkling that something may have happened, and so typically by the second dose, that guest will start to recover memories of the trauma and their body will start to go through functional seizures, or what used to be called, I think, psychogenic, non-epileptic procedure. I'm so glad they renamed it to functional seizures. But the body will start to convulse and again, according to the book, the body keeps the score.

Justin: 52:42

When a trauma happens, the body will often hold on to a lot of the physiological and emotional responses to that trauma. So when our guest is going through that catharsis they will report that there are memories coming back. They will report through their olfactory senses I can smell the alcohol on the breath of my abuser. As they're going through this process, they will start to report feelings, contamination, powerlessness, fear, terror. They can smell the alcohol on the breath of their abuser. If they've got images, they can see the glassy, drunken eyes of the abuser. This is a very, very common scenario that we have down here. So, taken in its entirety the memories to the way the body's responding to what they're verbalizing, expressing that trauma being released from the body and they will go through this catharsis.

Justin: 53:35

Is that challenging?

Justin: 53:36

Yes, it's very challenging to go through for many.

Justin: 53:39

But once they come out the other end of that and they've rid themselves of most of this repressed material, then obviously a lot of our therapists here are trained in childhood sexual abuse and a specialist their trauma informed and we will then work very closely after the experience with that guest, helping them understand and integrate and then get them ready to go back home. And if they have an existing therapist that's specialized in childhood sexual abuse, that's great. But if they don't, then we maintain contact with them. We'll allocate a therapist to them for a few weeks after they return and get them set up with a therapist that's specialized in childhood sexual abuse so they can continue to work through and process and integrate all of that as well. So that's the difference between a bad trip and a challenging trip. We don't do bad trips here, but it's very common that we'll deal with out of 10 to 12 guests. Three to four to five will have some pretty challenging experiences down here on any given retreat, but they feel like a million dollars afterwards Sorry, go ahead.

Dirk: 54:46

That's a nice explanation of the difference of using these medicines in a therapeutic context, using them recreationally. And I do get a lot of people who sort of say, oh yeah, I used it and it was horrible, you know, as whatever, a teenager in my 20s and insert sort of to have that explanation. I think is is important and I also saw that in that like little ketamine week that I did, where I would say maybe 80% or maybe not even that high. It would be sort of 50 people in a room, 25 people help being taking turns, being the sitter and being the journey person and most of the people would have sort of a very positive seeming experience. I did, but some people it looked like that it would they were really kind of wrestling with stuff, crying, convulsing and afterwards with the processing. It really all of them had meaningful experiences, positive it became, became positive through the processing.

Justin: 56:13

Right. And another way to look at this is so many of these individuals have no idea that this trauma happened to them at the age of five or six, or seven or eight or nine. The, if you like, disassociative properties of their amnesia right have been so powerful. So they will come down here and maybe they're in their 50s, successful female businesswoman and high functioning, but maybe has some maladaptive behaviors and maladaptive perspectives, maybe has a poor relationship with alcohol and is cycling through relations, romantic relationship patterns where 18 months in she realizes oh, I've hooked up with another abuser. This person is narcissistic, they're controlling me, they're physically or sexually attempting to abuse me. Why? Why do I keep doing this, right? So this is all the the outcome of the early, early trauma that happened to them.

Justin: 57:12

And so when they go through this experience down here and they go through this catharsis, they begin to piece it all together and understand it. There's a huge revelation, there's relief. There's obviously some distress at times. There's often well, wow, how can I, with such a bright intellect, not have known that this? How did my mind hide this from me so effectively all these years? And so there's that, that process they have to go through. There's a cognitive dissonance piece right. But then, once all this material is out, they just feel so much better, so much better and after a bit of processing and integration the relationship with alcohol changes. They seek healthier relationships in their romantic lives and they start to clear up their maladaptive behaviors and just live a much more mentally, emotionally and physically healthier life, and spiritually in some cases.

Dirk: 58:07

I for sure, as a psychiatrist, see lots of people with repetitive bad choices.

Justin: 58:13

I myself have made repetitive we're all guilty of that, yeah.

Dirk: 58:17

Yeah, and so there's and sort of speaks to this, this podcast that I come from a world of sort of like left brain. We're going to use our intellect, we're going to understand it.

Dirk: 58:33

We're going to be rational about this and do you know, cognitive, behavioral things or dynamic talk, therapy things, but there's this whole piece of like. All this information is is inner body and and so bringing that, that together. I don't know if I'm, you know, being articulate about this, but but I have sort of this right now. This is like a felt set, like I can't. I can't really explain it, but I have a feeling of there's a different level when we, when we connect with the felt sense of these experiences that were right.

Justin: 59:26

And yeah, I would say to that because I've struggled, I've struggled to find the language around this over the years, because what you're describing is a feeling that is not rational. Right, this felt sense is not rational, but to call it irrational is also incorrect. I would say the phrase that I've arrived at is trans rational. It transcends right, trans rational. So this sense of felt sense and what you know, what we often see down here is what I would call embodied knowledge as well.

Justin: 59:58

So when you have these big peak experiences on psychedelics and it goes beyond the personal, into the philosophical and the cosmological it's not just an intellectual understanding, it's deeply embodied knowledge and it's felt. And it's the same with these mystical experiences. You don't just you don't just see something and it's happening and you and you think this is mystical. It's the entirety of the experience, across all five senses and more. And people often report, following these peak mystical experiences, that it seems familiar and it feels like home or it feels more real than this waking reality feels as well. Now, of course, we have to go on a lot more than how people feel about any given thing, but I've but to differentiate between a deeply felt sense and embodied knowledge and a trans, rational understanding is quite different from I feel any given way on any given day, right.

Dirk: 1:01:00

Yeah, yeah, I like the embodied knowing versus the verbal intellectual understanding.

Justin: 1:01:09

And here's an example of that. So when we're working with somebody that's maybe beginning to recover memories in very, very early childhood okay, that they think could have some sexual molestation there Sometimes they will regress in age. It's very common to see a client regress, but they will use words like icky or yucky to you to describe the feelings in their body about how they felt about the molestation or the abuse. So once we get to hear language like ickiness and yuckiness and we see people are regressing, that's another interpretation lens as well. One thing I do want to say, though, is that any of your audience that have ever got involved in, for example, clinical hypotherapy will be aware that there's a lot of talk and debates around the concept of false memories as well, and we've seen plenty of examples of false memory historically, and so what I want to make clear is that our position here, when a client is recovering these memories and going through catharsis, is we would never say to them because this is what you're experiencing, therefore it definitely happened.

Justin: 1:02:16

Our approaches do no harm. So what we are more likely to say is that clearly, some trauma has happened to you. We may never understand where or when or why that happened, but let's work with you now to help you work through that trauma and go through this catharsis and process this trauma. We're never going to say to a client oh so you're recovering some memories of abuse. This definitely happened.

Justin: 1:02:37

It's just not the right approach into this Now. Interestingly, when those guests leave and go home and we maintain contact with them, they will often have a conversation with family members and it does turn out that nine times out of 10, where these false memories have been recovered, that there's been some validation of that within the family. It was a dark secret or there was an uncle or close family friend that was actually a known abuser 20, 30, 40 years ago. So I get to personally, if you like, try a nice pink bow around the end of that situation, because we deal with a lot of childhood sexual abuse down here and we always follow up whenever possible with our clients to find out whether this was a genuine event that happened to them. In most cases it is, yeah, I think.

Dirk: 1:03:20

So the big discoveries now, along with psychedelics, the default mode network and being able to sort of turn that off, but then also getting into how memory works and the different components of memory and how memory the word memory in our mind and the word memory in a computer should really be totally different words. They're not at all the same thing. We're not just writing down ones and zeros and digital, making copies. Every time we bring something up, we are changing it and we're changing brain structures.

Justin: 1:04:06

Exactly, and when we're recalling a memory, we're recalling a memory of a memory each time, and so maybe here's something interesting. So when somebody's been traumatized and they've been through disassociative amnesia, they've disassociated 20, 30 years later when they're here and they're recovering memories. If it's been a series of abuses, often it's not a series of memories that come back, it's fragments of memory of different events all merged into one. So where there's been disassociation, that's often how these memories will come back. They're vague, they're very real and embodied, but they're just fragments and they're all mixed together many, many cases, and they're not in any particular order. However, that's because the person has been disassociated. When this happened, where there has been denial and we see this a lot down here we see that denial is equally powerful, for, if you like, misremembering, that's the correct phrase here and what we'll see where there's been denial is because there's been no disassociation, there's just been the denial.

Dirk: 1:05:19

Are you mean by denial the person is not aware of it or family has said no, this didn't happen.

Justin: 1:05:26

Denial as in maybe okay. So one example might be what's it called parental fantasy bond trauma. Our guests will show up down here and we begin the first conversation. They'll say tell us about your childhood, tell us about your relationship with your parents, this kind of thing, and they'll often be oh, I had a wonderful, loving childhood. It was very normal. My parents both loved me. It was an absolute delight.

Justin: 1:05:52

And then, as they're going through their sessions with the psilocybin, memories are being revealed from early childhood that account to the story they've constructed for themselves as an adult. They may see that what they thought at the age of six was a very devoted, loving mother was actually was a helicopter parenting, devouring mother who was not selfless in her love but was selfish in her love, and that was normalized for the 60 year old child that only wanted its parents love and attention in whichever way they received it. That became normalized behavior at the age of five or six, right, and they just carry this on into adulthood. And so, as they're having the mushroom sessions, they're having memories and understandings of their childhood that are completely different from the stories they told themselves. Does that kind of make sense?

Justin: 1:06:45

And that's the parental fantasy bond trauma. So it's not disassociation, it's a form of denial, and my point being here only that denial is equally as powerful as seemingly disassociated of amnesia in our ability to not recall, but secondarily, you can generally tell when denial is present, because what we see here is the memories do come back in chronological order and they're often crystal clear, whereas that's not the case with disassociated amnesia. Does that make sense? What's your cycle? It's so fun to think about.

Dirk: 1:07:18

As you're talking, I'm thinking about how we organize memories and how we basically, during the day, we have experiences and we file those away based on sort of the meaning and the impact. And so if I were to ask you, what did you have for lunch two Thursdays ago? Nobody can answer that question, but if you were sitting in a diner and a car came through the window, you would be able to tell me every little thing that you had ordered. And so our mind picks up events that are meaningful and especially things that are sort of emotionally tagged. And so then when we dream, we chop these memories into little pieces and we file them away and we sort of represent them symbolically, and so we have these clusters of memories and then sort of taking apart the repressive mechanisms that the defenders are, sort of opening this up and then reworking pieces. If there's a traumatic memory, then maybe the emotional piece is just so intense that it just be.

Dirk: 1:08:46

EMDR people talk about this a lot and reworking components of memories that are sort of too distressing, so this is very fun for me to think about and have a huge role in understanding this and it's going to be exciting to follow.

Justin: 1:09:06

So I mean, I'm familiar with EMDR and it's, for example, brain spotting as well, is a technique that we're seeing being used more and more. It's not uncommon to see a guest, when they're processing trauma, to see their eyes flickering from left to right or up and down as they're going through it as well. It's really quite interesting to observe. But going back to the denial piece as well, again we'll have people show up down here that realize that they are in the clutches of a narcissistic relationship, be it a parental one or a romantic one. But they're so enmeshed with the person and maybe they were raised by a narcissistic parent and they've continued this pattern on through their adult relationships that what they deem to be normal is actually quite abusive, controlling and everything that goes along with a narcissistic type relationship. And here they will start to understand that and know it. And so what you know? And again, here's an interesting piece where you take the psilocybin and you're lying there and you're having your experience. It's not just a case that you are witnessing something on the screen of your mental field. Guests will often use language like I was taken and shown this, or this was demonstrated to me while I was in my trip, or I was told to look at this scene or look at this series of events by some other agent within me that was not myself. That's hugely fascinating as well. And then guests will often say yep, I had it. Separately from that, I had a very common to have an experience of a voice, and the guests are sometimes the mushrooms were speaking to me, or God was speaking to me, or the aliens were speaking to me, or a dead family member was speaking with me.

Justin: 1:10:55

Now I am personally radically agnostic about whatever that is. It could be an autonomous complex, it could be a repressed aspect of the psyche. Who knows? We will work with whatever it is if it's useful and helps us achieve a healing end. What it is, why it is how it is. I've given up trying to understand that there are better people out than me out there to try and understand that. I've been down many rabbit holes and it's amazing to me the amount of woo, woo that appears in the dosing space. I mean, we are positioned as a therapeutic model with science, evidence and research base, and we absolutely are. That's how we operate down here, and yet the material that comes up for people is beyond scientific, it's beyond rational often, and then we have to find ways of framing that and working with it. It's very interesting.

Dirk: 1:11:46

So, yeah, I'm curious about how your own spiritual journey and where you fall and you say you're radically agnostic and I feel like I've become much more wide open. So at the MAPS conference Andrew Wilde talks about he's a panpsychic and we're just sort of these radio receiver, conscious, conscious. That's his perspective. And then there I'm curious about, you know, stan Groff, who is brilliant and he has these ideas about, about archetypes and and I don't know, I think so personally, you know, I moved from being, you know, loosely Catholic to then just sort of immediately thinking that's all kind of ridiculous, to now being, I think, very, very open. Not, you know, I don't like sort of the fundamentalist take on things, but I think each, you know, taking each sort of spiritual pathway and finding sort of metaphorical truth and applying it to myself.

Dirk: 1:13:23

But yeah, I'm curious what we're where you see yourself, and how has this influenced you? And your take on spirituality.

Justin: 1:13:34

I'm gonna call this a work in progress, so it's not a fixed definition or a fixed idea. Okay, and it's something that's evolved for me over the years, but it became pretty clear to me early, early on in my years of working with ayahuasca. You can look at this from the physics perspective. You can look at this from the metaphysical perspective. It seems to me that the juncture that we're at with physics and science right now is a move, is a slow move away from scientism and materialism and more towards a metaphysical understanding that points towards something that resembles, maybe, analytical idealism. That's not too dissimilar to panpsychism, but it revolves around his consciousness primary or not. Does consciousness arise out of the brain? In other words and I think there's been enough science done that calls that into question that consciousness is a field that doesn't arise out of the brain. It's the other way around. It's almost like the everything material around us arises out of consciousness. Consciousness is the axiom, is the seat, the foundation on which everything else resides. And so there's a metaphysical philosopher known as Bernardo Castro, who has both the PhD in computer science and a PhD, I think, in philosophy. That's done a lot of the leading work with other scientists on analytical idealism, and the basis there is that there is this vast sea of undifferentiated consciousness that exists. This is where the paradoxes come from. It's nothing but contains everything, it's always been there, and that everything material arises out of that, including humanity. So, if anything, what happens is is before we are born into the world we exist in this undifferentiated field, and when we're born into the world, we disassociate out of it. When we die, we reassociate back with it again and therefore everything that we see is a, is a, is a mentation, it's a mental field. So that kind of leans more in the direction.

Justin: 1:16:00

I've had many psychedelic experiences whereby I have seen, if you like, the physical being born out of the non physical, not the other way around. Now, that doesn't mean that when I have these experiences, like a running for the hills and start fossilizing this, I don't I keep it very much within myself. It's rare that I would even say anything like this on a podcast, but I'm just giving you a general feel for my own experiences and the many hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of subjective experiences that my guests have told me about over the years as well. We cannot prove a dream A dream. Can you measure a dream with science I would call a dream collective. What would they call it? And a collective into subjective understanding. Right, we all know that everybody dreams, but can you prove it with science? I don't think so.

Dirk: 1:17:00

I like Dan Siegels, so he wrote this book Developing Mind. He's a neuroscientist and psychiatrist and really interesting guy. But consciousness he defines as embodied energy and definitely that it's not just. You know, where is consciousness? It's not, it's not in our brain, you know. That's clear, you know, because our brain extends through our whole body. But then you know, is it limited by this? Our skin? That's not, probably not. Our energy field extends beyond that.

Dirk: 1:17:37

And then there's these little circles of consciousness, like there's, you know, that sort of the IFS. You know, a part of me thinks this and a part of me is sitting here imagining what you're thinking. And you know, you know there's sort of these different conscious fields, I guess, within us and then together, you and I, you know where we are, sort of one conscious field right now and what's happening between us, you know, creates probabilities of things happening in the world are not happening. And same with a larger group. Right, you have a whole big group of people and there's sort of a consciousness, there's sort of like a whole group consciousness. So I like your I forget the term that you used- Un-differentiated field of consciousness.

Justin: 1:18:30

Well, and so here's the other thing when you have these mystical experiences, these peak mystical experiences, common to that is a sense, a very, very deeply felt sense of connection with oneness, that we're all connected and that we connect with this one mind, this one consciousness. Okay, that is for some people God, some the creator, some the source, some a field. For some it doesn't exist at all and that's completely fine. But when I I often have a lot of very cerebral, material reductionist scientists types down here that are completely atheists, that by the end of the week I no longer atheists. So that's interesting.

Justin: 1:19:10

And then if you look at the studies where they've taken priests and rabbis and given them psychedelics, these priests and rabbis were able to, prior to their experience, were waxing lyrical about God and the way God operates in the world according to their map of their religion, then they have these experiences and what you see afterwards is a lot more humility, because whatever they experience as God in the psychedelic space does not at all map to their religious dogma. And whether God is a white guy, grandfather like figure with a beard on a cloud, or how they think their God is represented, that's not what you get to experience in psychedelics. It's a fundamental shift away from that creating God in their own image, right, but somehow a human kind of thing. It's so far away from human. They struggle with that to begin with, but they have a lot more humility following these types of experiences. Whatever it is, they experience in that oneness.

Dirk: 1:20:23

That's cool, yeah, so, yeah, so maybe all that.

Justin: 1:20:24

Yeah, what's making you laugh? What is it? You're trying to get your head around there.

Dirk: 1:20:31

Well, I think this, healing the idea of I'm part of this oneness, there's a connectedness, a greater connectedness, a greater meaning, sort of a feeling of that. It just feels sort of positive and wonderful and also hard to really put it to words right. This is sort of this noetic thing with psychedelics where it's hard to sort of make a statement and then not have it be like sort of a platitude or trite, or I think Michael Pollin talks speaks well about this.

Dirk: 1:21:15

We're all connected, we're all one and sort of being really having an embodied felt sense that this is meaningful. But it's hard to sort of just communicate it Absolutely.

Justin: 1:21:28

Yeah, how do you put it into words? The ineffable right. You've got to have that experience and I've seen the most skeptic individuals come down here, the most skeptical hard line material reductionist scientists, and without fail, generally by the end of the week, that has shifted. This hard line material reductionist view has shifted substantially by the end of the week, each and every time, without fail.

Dirk: 1:21:55

So let me ask you some sort of meaning and meaning of life questions, and this is going to be, this is going to do sort of a sentence completion format, and I'll start the sentence and you finish it Okay. So first, according to me, Justin Townsend, the meaning of life is. The meaning of life is the meaning of life.

Justin: 1:22:29

That's not, that's not an easy thing to answer, dirk. That's you see, it's as hard as it is for me to talk about the ineffable oneness is as hard as it is. To narrow down the meaning of life to one sentence is gross.

Dirk: 1:22:49

Feel free to elaborate. Okay, any direction you want.

Justin: 1:22:53

Okay, all right, very metaphysical layer. We are all. All. All eight billion plus of us on this planet are all versions of the undifferentiated field, exploring itself and exploring the world itself.

Dirk: 1:23:18

And so exploring our version of the field.

Justin: 1:23:21

Yeah. So if you were the creator, if you were God and you were everything and nothing all at the same time? What's experience? You create little human beings out of the field. They go out, they have their experience over life, they learn, they suffer. Some don't learn at all, they would. At the end of life, you die, you return to the field with all of the experience and everything you felt and that contributes back to the whole again. Something along those lines, I guess.

Dirk: 1:23:51

It's a little bit of a silly question, but I appreciate your answer.

Justin: 1:23:56

And I try not to give you a silly answer.

Dirk: 1:23:59

No, I another sentence.

Justin: 1:24:03

The most meaningful thing that I did yesterday was an integration with a client that had been through some sexual abuse as a child and worked on healing that on this retreat and it was a follow up integration to see how they were doing. I love to do that with my guests and that was very meaningful.

Dirk: 1:24:26

Can you say a little bit more about that experience or in general, or what makes that so meaningful for you?

Justin: 1:24:33

I think yeah, it makes it meaningful. So I am very, very I consider myself and my team very privileged to witness and participate in the amount of healing that we get to see here, week in, week out. I mean, we're running between three and four retreats a month. Right, that's 30 to 40 people on average down here with, often with very intractable, acute mental health conditions. They're just holding on by the fingertips, they're coping in life. They've tried every other medication, every other mental health approach and nothing has helped. And they come down here full of hope because they've heard about psilocybin, and so we and so what we get to see is transformation, and I don't want to use that word like transformation.

Justin: 1:25:18

I think sometimes the word transformation is overused, but we do get to see. I mean, look, our Jamaican, our Jamaican staff. Right, we were living in rural, we live and work in rural Jamaica, okay, and many of the staff that work for us barely leave the parish that they grew up in, let alone anywhere else beyond Jamaica. And they and they've, they've witnessed our guests on these locations coming over many, many years, and the way the Jamaican staff body is when they arrive here they look like they're walking dead, but when they leave they're alive again. So again, I cannot understate how the difference between when they first arrived to when they leave it's massively transformative, and so that that to me is is very, very meaningful. Every week, and it never gets old, it never gets old.

Dirk: 1:26:08

Awesome, yeah. Another question If I, derek, come to you and I say, Justin, I feel like my life doesn't have meaning. I'm really struggling. What is the main thing that you would suggest that I do?

Justin: 1:26:27

I would ask you, first of all, whether you, what's, what's the framework that you use to navigate the world, right? What's I mean? How do you? Are you simply born into the world as an accident? You're the victim of all these malevolent forces happening around you. I mean, nature is a moral. It's both beautiful and it's terrifying, right?

Justin: 1:26:49

So what's your view on life? What's your metaphysical understanding of life? Do you have a religious one? Have you been raised with? Have you been traumatized as a young child and into believing that every time you do something wrong, hell is waiting for you, right? What's the lens through which you see life? Is it atheist? Is it agnostic? Is it religious? Is it metaphysical?

Justin: 1:27:12

And many, many people don't. They don't have any. I mean, yes, we have a lot of guests that come down that have been raised in fundamentalist, fire and brimstone Christian type belief systems. We've had Mormons down here that are leaving the Mormon religion. So there's a not unsub substantial amount of our guests that do have a strong religious background and upbringing that has traumatized them, but many just seem to be going through life. Many of our guests are just going through life with no sense of greater purpose or meaning in the world beyond get through the first half of life, carve something out right, get an education, get a career, get married, have the two kids the house on the hill, the white picket fence, the beautyó, married two kids. And they'll say I've arrived right. And it's a tendency then to want to hold on to everything that they've got right and think about retirement. And I think we have very good models for the first half of life, right, education, career, married kids, that kind of thing. But to think that that linear approach for the second half of life is still appropriate, I don't think it's the case. I think many people just try and hold on to what they've got the safety, security, the financial stability but they're missing out on, if you like, the call to adventure.

Justin: 1:28:33

And there's a quite a well-known Jungian psychologist or analyst called Jim Hollis that wrote about what's called the adaptive self versus the natural self. We've all got a natural self within us. We see that mostly with indigenous, native peoples. They are spontaneous, they're intuitive, they live in the moment and, yeah, they are more nearer to nature than we are nearer to nature, right, if you. You know, nature itself is intuitive, is spontaneous, it's self-correcting, mostly like indigenous peoples are, and we as modern Westerners, have most of that repressed and shoved down within us, because it's the adaptive self, the ego right, that we are mainly tethered to. And so, as we reach this mid-part of life, there's often a struggle between the adaptive self and the natural self. The Natural Self wants to take you on a call to adventure to leave behind everything you've gained and take some risks and head off overseas. Or go to Jamaica and run us to the cyber retreat, you know. And if you resist that call for the natural self, people often become quite unwell mentally, emotionally, spiritually. And so I think we in the West are lacking a collective set of purposes and meanings and reasons, and I think there are numerous ones that you can pick from, not all of which are mutually exclusive, but are often compatible with each other.

Justin: 1:29:59

Carl Jung has the concept of individuation right. He says spend the first half of your life creating a healthy ego. Right After that, integrate what's called the shadow aspect of your personality, in other words, all the things about yourself you don't want to admit to, some of which you do know, most of which you don't know. And what he's speaking to there is all the unconscious patterns we have that are influencing our daily choices and decisions without us knowing so. Integrate the shadow. And then, if you're a male, the next stage is bring the feminine aspect of your personality into balance. And if you're a female, bring the male aspect into balance. And then finally, as we are getting gray, whiskered and white-haired, you become the wise old man or the wise old woman. Now, that's a lovely framework. You can take it or leave it. It's one way that you can look at life. I would say it's never that linear and it's a lot messier than I've described, but I tend to agree. If you're male, bringing the feminine aspect, bringing the nurturing, communicative, loving, compassionate side of yourself right and work on your shadow, integrate your shadow.

Justin: 1:31:12

Another thing that Carl Jung said. Well, at least it was claimed that Carl Jung said this, but I've heard that he didn't. But I'm going to paraphrase it poorly. He said until you make the unconscious conscious as in your unconscious patterns conscious, they will play themselves out in the world around you and you will call it your fate.

Justin: 1:31:36

Now, when I first heard that, it was a big wake-up moment, but it was also terrifying because it caused me to think about all the times I thought I'd be the victim of my circumstances, right, and I was being tossed about by the world at large and all these malevolent forces. But so much of it was my own making and my own creation, arising out of my unconscious patterns formed in childhood, that I had internalized and they had become me. And so, yeah, and it does seem like it all plays out in the world around you. If you're unaware of it, you will think, well, that's just my fate, I'm a victim of circumstances. But you do the shadow work, you work on the shadow, you bring out these and you bring into your awareness your unconscious patterns, how they've formed, how they've impacted your life. You then can make a decision to alter those patterns for much more healthier ones, and so, therefore, you become less of a victim and you have more responsibility for your path in life.

Dirk: 1:32:33

So, yeah, that makes a beautiful summary of young and who I've only sort of recently started getting you know, appreciating, and I think that's a really nice framework for development and for our tasks at each stage. And I'm curious, the starting the retreat in Jamaica how does that feel right now and are you full time there? With your family, and what does life feel like on the island and from the rat race?

Justin: 1:33:16

I've been living here since 2018-19 with my wife. My wife is the operations director for the company and we both stay out of each other's lanes, so it's a real gift to be able to work with my wife. I love living and working in Jamaica. I love the Jamaican culture, the music, the people, everything about it, the food. I'm very fortunate that I live on the beach here, so about 30, 40 yards to my right is a lovely blue Caribbean sea and nice white sands and Nairia soul insights, which is really nice. I have about 30 to 35 therapists or psychologists as part of our team, of which there's about a third that live down here where there's at any one time, and the rest rotate in and out.

Justin: 1:34:00

It's quite different from living in, say, new York, in Manhattan, or in Berlin, germany, or the usual luxuries that we're used to, and, of course, the instant gratification of Amazon delivery is turning up on your doorstep the next day. We don't have down here. It's a much simpler life. I don't have a television and we just love it. Being in and around nature and working with suicide in week in, week out is just wonderful. I do miss family, my family's back in Oxford. My American side of my family is back in New York. We miss them all. But it's just and so for me.

Justin: 1:34:36

How does it feel? It feels like I've arrived. It feels like this is what I'm supposed to be doing. It feels like if you ever played Tetris and all the shapes just fit exactly where they're supposed to. That's how it fits. It doesn't feel like there's one piece that's out of place, whereas many times in my life I felt like I'm kind of going in the right direction. Most of the pieces are in, but the rest of it's not fitting well and there's something missing. Now they all fit together. I can see what's going on, I can see what was missing and it feels complete and it feels whole. And I'm very much kind of in the moment kind of person.

Justin: 1:35:16

I don't try and plan too far ahead. I tend to let things unfold. I control the big moving pieces because I have to. I'm running a business. So in the linear sense, I let everything unfold as much as they can do and let the solutions emerge, kind of detached from specific outcomes. It's a very kind of Taoist approach rather than a linear approach. It's very much things are all just happening as they need to and the solutions will emerge and should problems arise as they will, as they always do Don't worry, don't fret about them. Just deal with them with your normal sense of preparedness and expertise as and when they arise. Don't spend too much time worrying about them. But I get the benefit of resetting my default mode network at least once a month, so I don't get to worry too much about the future or demonstrate too much about the past.

Dirk: 1:36:09

But yeah, I think that's a beautiful story of having the business background and the personal struggles and then learning the psychedelic work and then really create. I mean there's so many pieces of meaning and finding our place in the world, being creative, using our skills, being connected with nature all of those and many more and having a big positive impact on people seeing transformations. It's a beautiful story.

Justin: 1:36:45

Yeah, but I must say that this one of the things that does come up with me but it's less and less over the years is a slight bit of imposter syndrome Because, okay, I've surrounded myself with great clinicians therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists but I am not licensed. I don't have a background in mental health. Yes, I run the company as the CEO and yes, I am also a retreat leader, but I know my limitations. But that's why, when I'm running a retreat, I have therapists and psychologists around me and I delegate the integration therapeutic work to them. But it's a different skill set to be doing therapeutic integration work. It's very different to be working with somebody on a dose day that's got 10 to 12 grams of psilocybin in them. There's nothing in the therapeutic training or psychological training or psychiatric training that equips you to deal with somebody going through a powerful catharsis over the course of six hours, and sometimes a violent one as well.

Justin: 1:37:41

Okay, so that work I particularly enjoy.

Justin: 1:37:46

I've learned what I've learned from working with great clinicians, but I still feel a bit of imposter syndrome because many of my guests down here about 20% are psychiatrists, are doctors, are psychologists and therapists and I'm used to being the patient and going to them and they write the prescription and they tell me what I need to do and they help me think through and, based upon all the dedication they've given to their training, all the sacrifices that they've made to become the master of their craft within the US or Europe, and then here's me with maybe a 20 plus year apprenticeship across a variety of different esoteric and not so esoteric fields.

Justin: 1:38:26

So that's what I'm saying. It does wake in a little bit of imposter syndrome in me, because I do have a great deal of respect for these psychiatrists and psychologists who have done the time, have spent a great deal of time educating and they're doing great work themselves but, I think, have a limited set of tools. So I'm really hoping that we are empowering and educating and training the next generation of mental health professionals to work well with these substances.

Dirk: 1:38:53

So yeah, yeah, I think what you're speaking to for me is I always get sort of excited and then I want to learn a whole new thing, and then I can relate to the imposter syndrome and my thing is, then I'll actually do things and get degrees and that doesn't. I think you're your personal model of continuous learning, but also doing and in setting up a collaborative structure that you know we life is limited, we can't be experts in everything, and so having those collaborations is the way to go.

Justin: 1:39:36

Yeah, I agree Totally.

Dirk: 1:39:40

Couple more questions. Sure, after I am dust and gone, the thing that I most want to be remembered for Okay.

Justin: 1:39:54

So I don't think that our legacy is necessarily than our names on the side of a building or the monetary resources that we leave to our children. I think it's the values that we've instilled in ourselves and instilled in our loved ones and the people that we come into contact with. So I like to think I've had a substantial impact, alongside my team, over the years of helping people in their healing journeys and their transformations. Those individuals go back to their families and their friends and that has a cascading effect as well. I think we've done our little piece here at Micron Meditations, jamaica, to help move the psychedelic industry forward in all the right ways with the protocols and how we do things. So how would I like to be remembered? I think it's the good work we've done here with Micron Meditations, with our team, and the values that we've helped instill within our guests and the healing and transformations that we've helped them achieve for themselves too.

Dirk: 1:41:06

Nice answer. This is the Tim Ferriss billboard question. If you had a way to get a big message out to everybody, or to lots and lots of people, is there a message that you would like to share?

Justin: 1:41:23

I'll tell you the message I got from my last psilocybin trip. Now, I am known for being quite a direct person. Direct but gently delivered. I'm not an asshole, I'm not a tyrant, I'm not a bully, but I believe in directness. And so and I'm known for that, and I had a psilocybin journey recently and what came through that was the phrase no more pretending. And when I told my wife she was like but you're already very direct. So what does that mean when you say no more pretending? So I think what I would say here is that billboard would say no more pretending. And what I mean by that is is just more specificity, more directness. Speak your truth. I always believe that truth delivers the best possible outcome, even if, for me, in the short term it can create some friction or some less desirable circumstances. So something along the lines of truth, both old. Stop pretending, be direct, stop playing games, just be real, be authentic. Ultimately, be authentic. That's what it should be. Two words be authentic as you possibly can be. Thanks, courage and humility.

Dirk: 1:42:38

I love it. Yeah, it's not easy, but that's that's the goal it is.

Justin: 1:42:42

But here's the thing right. We don't down here, we don't have weeks and months to work with our clients and build confidence and trust in a relationship. We have seven days, seven days, and we we've all of my team members have developed the art of building that connection very quickly and being very authentic and very honest very quickly. Our approach is directive versus non directive, it's more of an intervention versus not an intervention, and that requires authenticity and great communications fields as well. So, yeah, we emulate that down here somewhat.

Dirk: 1:43:21

So I'd love our conversation and getting to hear about. I feel like this has been great. Is there anything that you want to cover now? I'm happy to talk again in the future, but I, I, I am more.

Justin: 1:43:38

I mean there is such a range of content we could talk about in the future.

Justin: 1:43:42

I think you know one of the big observations, one of the biggest struggles that most people have, no matter what they come on retreat with, is relinquishing control.

Justin: 1:43:52

So when you take these large therapeutic doses of psilocybin, there isn't much that you can control.

Justin: 1:43:58

But as the onset of the experience begins and you feel the medicine coming into your body, it can feel foreign, it can feel uncomfortable and you're feeling often strange sensations you've never felt before and you and this is a powerful substance that's coursing through your body and a lot of people are going to get quite anxious and and but you are required to surrender and let go and it seems very counterintuitive to do so, especially when ego dissolution is happening and you're thinking that you're dying.

Justin: 1:44:29

It almost feels like you have to allow yourself to die. So I think a lot of focus for the future is on is on educating people about the amount of surrender that they have to have when they come, when they have these experiences, and also what it's required of the facilitator that's working with that guest or patient to create the best setting possible and the best mindset so that that guest can ultimately begin to surrender and let go into the process and relinquish control. Once they've crossed that threshold and they're in, it's not so much of a struggle anymore, unless powerful materials coming up. So relinquishing control is the big piece and we need to spend a lot more time focusing on how to educate people around that and how to have them ease into these experiences as gently as possible.

Dirk: 1:45:19

That's an important, yeah, concept, and I remember I don't know if I was rolling griffids or car hard Harris, but but talking about this concept of letting go in in these modalities, and that's that's part of their protocol, and that's that's an important piece. That, and what is that mean? What if I let go? What is it?

Justin: 1:45:41

Yeah, and because what happens, is it? If you resist, right, it's? Oh no, it's happening, I feel it. And you see, people white knuckle right, if you've not done your job well, even if you have done it well, people are going to resist anyway. And they're going to try and fight it, and but often no in each and every case, the more they fight it and resist it. It's almost like the cyber meet, an equal opposite force. And so the more you resist, the more of a struggle you're going to get into with some of the cyber.

Justin: 1:46:09

So, learning to relax and surrender and let go, once you've done it a few times, it does get easier, because you know you're going to let go but you're always going to come back. And so once you've done that a few times, a little bit easier for the ego, because ego is going to say you know, oh, my God, make it stop, stomach pump, get the stomach pump, make it stop, get a benzodiazepine, something like that. It's going to create all sorts of chaos and paranoia, potentially, and all sorts of issues, but so getting that little, that voice, to go away and to not pay so much heat is key as well. Yeah, the, the ego does not want to be displaced. But it's the ego aspect of ourself that resides, if you like, partially within the default mode that works the self referencing aspect that does not want to be displaced. But it has to be displaced for a while for this treatment to happen. And for those of us that think we are our egos, it can be even more of a struggle.

Dirk: 1:47:11

Where can we all learn more about? About you and in micro meditations.

Justin: 1:47:18

Certainly.

Dirk: 1:47:18

You have your website.

Justin: 1:47:19

So we have the website mycomeditationscom. We also have a small presence in social media from Facebook as well, and there's a number of podcasts that have exist, but I suppose the main place is myco meditationscom. Lots of research and information there. We are very proud of the fact that on the TripAdvisor platform we have around about 245 star testimonials written by our guests. It's the same for Google reviews. These are long testimonials and many of our guests, before they come to myco meditations, will read every single testimonial at least once. They often find a version of their own narrative, their own story, in there, with the reasons why guests came to us. So anybody that's interested in reading about a person's transformation, they'll find it on TripAdvisor and other locations. I think it speaks well to the the operation that we have down here and the great outcomes for our guests as well.

Dirk: 1:48:19

Well, it's really exciting to hear about what you built and I'd love to come check it out sometimes.

Justin: 1:48:26

You'd be very welcome, dirk, and should any of your audience be interested in training or coming to live in Jamaica for a few weeks and every few months, please don't hesitate to write to me. Justin, at myco meditations, we can't just have people down for a week or two. That's not the model that we have. But if anybody has kicked their teenagers out and is now in the second half of life and is maybe feeling a call to adventure or their natural self, creating some pressure within them to take off and do something different, and you don't mind spending a few months or weeks in Jamaica, we'd love to see you down here. That's awesome. Thank you, dirk.

Dirk: 1:49:07

So I really enjoyed that. I hope you did too. Thank you for listening. Please hit subscribe on Apple podcasts and Spotify and consider going to developingmeaningcom to sign up for a monthly newsletter. I hope you join us again next month when I speak with my friend and colleague, psychiatrist psychoanalyst Dr David Merrill, and we get an insider's look into how psychoanalysis works and who it might be helpful for, and we also talk about fiction, writing and meaning. So that's a great episode. Stay tuned and until then, I hope you have a meaning filled, meaningful month and, as always, if you figure out the meaning of life, let me know. Thank you,