What is plant medicine and what does it have to offer for the individual and for the human race?
Plant medicine takes on many names and forms. Generally, it's a natural hallucinogenic that when used properly helps one reunite with their soul. It's my personal belief that all souls are designed to split. The splitting, forgetting, remembering and ultimately remerging is the heroes journey. Done right, this journey produces the greatest pain, joy, destruction and satisfaction that, in the end can be laughed at in retrospect. From the perspective of the rearview mirror it was a slow-motion car wreck turned into a comedy. It's the most beautiful thing, it's what life is all about. And I was pretty good at it, meaning I really knew how to screw things up.
How has plant medicine helped you?
In all honesty, it saved my life. It reengineered me from the ground up. Done properly this stuff will scare the living daylights out of you. On a good one, in the morning, you don't know if you're happier to be alive because you've been dead all night or you're just happy to be a part of life. I was a real wreck. A bad dad, a terrible husband and a dishonest partner. It made me into a different human being. Quite honestly, even my pictures are different. If someone sees me from 20 years ago they would never even know it was me. I am a person full of faults till this day, many faults. But, you can count on me with your life. I have the kind of integrity that I used to be envious of. For me, I am living Jimmy Stewart's wonderful life, and that is the truth.
What is Rythmia?
Rythmia is a spiritual carwash. It's a place where people come to remerge their souls. I watch them check in on Sunday and watch them check out the next week a different human. The cool thing is, I know that the rest of their lives are going to be different. What makes our place kind of cool is that 95.12% of the people that check in electronically report that they had a miracle during their stay. Six months later 97.55% of those folks say that this miracle is still working in their life and that this was the week that changed their life.
What do you think the driving force is behind this sift in perception that's happening around psychedelics and plant medicine?
Whether you are micro dosing or doing full on journeys, something has changed. Kids are what's changing this whole thing. When I was a young guy all I wanted to do was drive cars and have sex with girls. Everything other than those two things were a waste of time to me. Kids now are so much smarter. I talk to young people who were questioning the origin of their soil. I mean young people, 15, 16 years old are asking the greatest questions ever asked. What am I doing here? How did I get here? Why do I feel like I don't fit? What better questions to ask. If you think your parents have the answers, in the most general terms you're wrong. If you think you can get those answers from the TV or organized religion I gotta tell you it's not there. The answer is in you, the thing that's blocking you is you, when you remove the you from you, you get the truth. There's a lot of ways of doing that, yoga, breath work, meditation and even conventional therapy. But in a world where you can ask me any question and I can have an answer in the amount of time it takes me to type it, people don't want to spend a lot of time doing things. All of the arts that I just listed are wonderful but take years to master. There is a shortcut, that shortcut is the truth, and that truth is in the plant you are about to take. It doesn't lie, and it's not an easy event. The more that people get disillusioned with big cigars, fancy cars, diamond rings and all them things the more that plant medicine is going to flourish. The more people understand that big Pharma cures nothing the more they're going to turn to psychedelics. In the medical field we've gotten really good at mechanics, they can put your fingers on in ways you can't even imagine, the commend bones with titanium that are better than the original but as far as curing disease nothing really new has happened. Plant medicine, the merging of the soul is one of the greatest healers of anything.
How does a psycho spiritual journey effect ones life after the experience is over?
We've had over 7,500 people complete our program here at Rythmia. Here are the overriding things that I see most often. A complete loss of the fear of death which allows one to experience life for the first time. The feeling of walking along with the merged soul. People explain it like having spent their whole life caught between two FM stations and finally clicking into one stereo. Life gets much easier from a position of the truth. After being merged, you demand the truth from yourself and you expect it from others as well. You can find yourself watching the news with a discerning eye and getting to the truth without making people feel bad about who they are or what they think.