The Crackin' Backs Podcast

Beyond Talk Therapy: Dr. Eva Nowakowski-Sims on Psychedelics, Somatics, and Why the Body Keeps the Score

• Dr. Terry Weyman and Dr. Spencer Baron

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Dr. Eva Nowakowski-Sims: Where Psychedelics, Trauma, and Somatic Therapy Collide

She’s a PhD, a licensed clinical social worker, a certified yoga teacher, and a psychedelic-assisted therapist. She lifts weights as therapy. She breathes, moves, and guides with intention.

And in a world still stuck on surface-level mental health solutions, Dr. Eva Nowakowski-Sims is flipping the script—inviting us to go deeper into the body, beyond talk therapy, and into the sacred space where healing actually happens.

In this raw and revealing episode of the Crackin’ Backs Podcast, we dive into a conversation that challenges conventional therapy models and explores what it means to truly heal trauma—through the body, through breath, and yes, through psychedelics like MDMA and psilocybin.

What You'll Learn in This Episode

  • Why talk therapy alone often falls short—and what finally made Dr. Eva say “there has to be more”
  • The controversial but effective use of psychedelic-assisted therapy, and how to separate healing from "drug culture"
  • What trauma-informed weightlifting looks like—and how strength can unlock emotional breakthroughs
  • Why yoga, breathwork, and somatics are essential for releasing trauma that words can’t reach
  • The visible and visceral signs of real transformation in the therapy room
  • How trauma shows up in the body—and how movement can help move it out
  • The systemic barriers to healing and the ethical questions surrounding access to these powerful tools
  • What Dr. Eva tells people who feel like they’ve “tried everything” and are still stuck
  • Her vision for the next generation of trauma therapists—and the outdated mental health beliefs we must leave behind

This isn’t therapy as you know it. This is real, embodied healing—from someone who’s walking the talk.


 Learn More About Dr. Eva Nowakowski-Sims:

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LinkedIn : HERE

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Dr. Spencer Baron:

What do you get when you combine a PhD, a social worker, a yogi, a trauma informed weightlifter, and a psychedelic therapist, you get Dr Eva Nowakowski Sims, a radical healer, redefining what medical healthcare looks like in the 21st Century, in a world where talk therapy often hits the wall. Dr Eva dives deeper into the body, into breath, into psilocybin, MDMA and movement to unlock healing where words just fall short. She's not just talking about trauma. She's helping people feel through it using cutting edge psychedelics and some ancient somatic wisdom to help clients reclaim safety in their own skin. Controversial sure is transformational without question. This episode pulls no punches. We're talking trauma tripping, and why the Body Keeps the Score, especially when the mind won't. Welcome to the cracking backs podcast. Let's get into it, viewers and listeners. She's a PhD, a social worker and a yogi, a psychedelic assistant, assisted therapist, and yes, she also uses trauma informed weightlifting as therapy. So what happens when you mix ancient body wisdom, cutting edge psychedelics and no BS, trauma with this informed lens, you get Dr Eva. Nowakowski, Sims, welcome to the show.

Dr. Eva Nowakowski-Sims:

Well. Thank you very much. I'm super excited to be here with you and talk a little bit about some of my experiences and a little bit about what I know and potentially could help a lot of

Dr. Spencer Baron:

people out there. I love this. That's what we're all about. So let's talk about trauma. Let's talk about trauma tripping and why the Body Keeps the Score even when, even when talk therapy fails, what do you do?

Dr. Eva Nowakowski-Sims:

Oh, gosh, I haven't done talk therapy for many years. I've been in clinical practice now for for over 20 years, and I probably stopped talk therapy over 10 years ago, and have really been incorporating a whole lot more of the body, specifically somatic practices, movement, weight lifting. There isn't a session that goes by that I don't first move the body, and then once the body's a little bit of like has some regulation to it, people are feeling calm and ready to talk. Their brains are centered and they're able to think clearly. That's when the real problem solving happens. So our sessions will always start with a little bit of body movement.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

What? What was that moment that you realized that, you know, talk therapy is just, you know, not enough well.

Dr. Eva Nowakowski-Sims:

I mean, I've worked with some really tough populations. Most of them have experienced trauma. And when we think about trauma, my you know, education and experience has been that trauma doesn't just sit up here. It, without a doubt, lives in the body. So in order for us to figure out how we're going to deal with it, how we're going to help people move through it, we can't just focus all of our intervention work up here, but we have to figure out how to first, kind of incorporate the body first. So working with people who have been traumatized and asking them questions in session, they'd look at me and say, I have no idea what to tell you, or you might simply ask them a question as simple as, how are you feeling today? And the answer is, I don't know, and that's a very real answer for people who have experienced trauma. So when I was going nowhere, very quickly, I learned that there had to be more out there, and being supported by university that is a trauma informed program gave me opportunities to have lots of education around trauma and trauma informed care. And my area of specialty has always been the body and movement, so I figured it was time to kind of bring that into the therapy sessions and see if I could get some better effects with that. So that's how this all started, not where it landed, but it's all where it all started

Dr. Spencer Baron:

was there, you know, it's funny. You think about therapy, therapists and therapy, you think about the traditional, you know, that couch that they lay on the and the therapist goes, or the psychologist goes, you know, tell me, how did it all start? So I'm asking you, How did it all change? You know, how did you bring movement? How did you think to bring movement into this? And then I want to ask you how you brought psychedelics as as a secondary part of this.

Dr. Eva Nowakowski-Sims:

About 10 years ago, I myself, you know, love yoga, and am fascinated by the, you know, how quickly it could change my mood, and started to kind of, you know, do some exploration on my own of the research in terms of how yoga was very fastly becoming evidence based practice for treating trauma. And then, you know, had gone through a couple of different certification programs, first got my my yoga teaching license, and then went back and did a certification in. For yoga for mood management, which is really interesting to think that there's different yoga poses and different breathing practices that you could utilize to shift how you feel. And once I had gone through that, along with trauma sensitive yoga training, I figured, hey, let's see what this looks like in clinical practice, and see whether or not my clients are going to respond better than they had in the past. And I can tell you, it's not an easy shift for a lot of people, especially since I was probably one of the first people that was doing this about, you know, my gosh, five to eight years ago, when we say to them, Hey, they're they're calling you up, and they're saying, I've got this past trauma and I need some help, you know, kind of healing from it. And I say, sure, you know, show up in yoga clothes.

Unknown:

How novel. I love it.

Dr. Eva Nowakowski-Sims:

Novel and a little bit kind of intimidating too, as well. It's an incredibly intimate experience between myself and the clients, and it takes a little time to build some rapport and trust. But I can tell you that even the days when clients show up and they say, I don't think I really want to move today. Let's just talk. I say, no problem. And 30 minutes in, they're like, Okay, let's move to the yoga room. Wow. So inevitably, it always kind of finds its way back. And then what's also really kind of cool about it is majority of the actual work, the trauma healing, happens on the yoga mat. We very rarely make it back to my office, and we just sit and talk in that space, and it just becomes, you know, such a powerful healing experience. And in some ways, people don't have to even talk at all, and they get such a benefit from it.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

So let me imagine, okay, so they come in, they're wearing their yoga outfit, they have some trepidation, because they don't know what the heck you're gonna do next when you when they succumb to the idea of going into the yoga room, which is interesting in itself. It's not like go from the couch to the floor, it's go, you go to the yoga room. What do you have? What do you have them do first? And I mean, give me like an initial stage. When did they start talking to you?

Dr. Eva Nowakowski-Sims:

Oh, absolutely. It isn't something where, you know, we step into the yoga space and we do, you know, a 50 minute, you know, vinyasa class. It's nothing like that. It's a very different style of yoga than probably what most Westerners are used to. It really is very gentle movements matched with breath, spending a lot of time in each movement, paying attention to sensations that they're feeling in the body. So I do a lot of psychoeducation up front with just kind of teaching them a little bit about how emotion tends to live in the body and where different emotions could be found. And then we play a little bit around with whether or not they're capable of experiencing sensation in the body, because for a lot of trauma survivors, they don't know what it feels like inside of their body. They're not able to, you know, offer really, you know, deep and rich descriptions of, you know, what's happening inside of my body because of the natural disassociation that happens as a result of trauma. So I'm teaching them, through sensation words, how to notice what's happening inside of the body. For the first time in a long time for many of them. And one of the ways that I do that is very simply, just, and it's a nice kind of little warm up activity, is we lay on the floor and I ask them to flex their foot and to tell me what they sense, what they feel? Oh, I don't know. Well, let's go a little bit deeper. What's happening with your shin right now? Is there any burning? And I'll offer some, you know, maybe some suggestive horses, they're burning. Is there stretching? Is there lengthening? Is there a little bit of pain? But is that pain tolerable? So I'll go into a place where I'm giving them a language where they've never, ever understood what that felt like before, teaching them what to sense and how to sense inside the body. And then what we do is we incorporate it over time with breath work, showing them how, if we are able to engage our breaths, we can tolerate that lengthening, that stretching, that little bit of pain, just a little bit better. And what that does is kind of teach the body and the brain how to kind of titrate in and out of difficult situations, difficult emotions, so that they can gain some confidence over it, so that the next time it shows up for them, they know how to come back to the breath. They know how to come back to recognizing what's happening inside of the body, to be able to continue to kind of tolerate just a little bit more each and every time.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

I got to ask you, and I know that this is going to be near and dear to Dr Terry patient that may have a an injury, a chronic injury, or or or headaches or neck pain or something like that. And, man, it's not complicated. It's not there's no disc injury. Or could it be emotionally generated?

Dr. Eva Nowakowski-Sims:

Oh, absolutely. And part of what would be a really interesting find there is without any manipulation, see what happens in terms of the intensity of the brain of the pain after they go through a seer. Of deep breaths with an elongated exhale, where they do some box breathing, and then kind of assess whether or not the pain level is the same or different before any manipulation happens. So it might be kind of like a little supplemental tool to support shifting and moving back and forth.

Dr. Terry Weyman:

You know, it's so funny, you you mentioned that because we had a guest that did what's called foundational training, and he has a thing called decompressive breathing. And I had a patient with a neck problem that I'm like, I don't feel anything out. And I stopped adjusting necks a while ago. I do it once in a while. Now I focus more on the mid back and breathing techniques, because, you know, his head sits on this little pistol, and I go, that's not the problem. That's just where you're feeling the pain. And everybody wants to go after where the where they feel the pain, nine times out of 10 is somewhere else, right? So I looked at and that breath work. I'm fixing more neck problems, and I'm never even touching the neck anymore. So it's really amazing that you even brought that up. Thanks.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

Spencer, sure, what about, what about? You know, I've heard stories about, like, massage therapists, like, or deep tissue, or, oh my gosh, what's that? Deep Tissue? Some deep tissue. And somebody about Rolfing. Rolfing, yes, that they'll, they'll go over an area, and the patient starts crying. Yeah, there

Dr. Eva Nowakowski-Sims:

is a connection there, without a doubt. And what's

Dr. Spencer Baron:

really you take it, don't you? Like, what do you do when you find that out? I mean, where do you go with that?

Dr. Eva Nowakowski-Sims:

Well, I part of what I do in utilizing different yoga postures is I look for the spaces in which there might be a whole lot of contraction in which emotion tends to kind of get stuck. So when we think about women, we have a tendency to hold a lot of our suffering and our hips. The psoas is the longest muscle in the body, right? But we also know it carries the most amount of tension, stress, suffering and pain. So if we're doing, you know, kind of like a pigeon pose, where we're giving an opportunity to really kind of open that space, or an extended butterfly, where we're really kind of allowing those hip muscles to kind of very slowly and gently open up, and then once they're completely open, start to kind of bring the legs slowly together until the knees touch. You'll start to see a lot of shaking. And we know that shaking is a completion of the stress cycle, so that's ideally, sometimes what we're looking for to kind of give us an indication we're moving through something so, you know, just like we say on yoga or, you know, in life, we welcome the release. We we welcome the crying, we welcome the expression. Because for a long time, people have never felt safe enough or knew how to kind of express those emotions and that difficulty.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

Ever, ever. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. What do you say? Okay? You find it. Yeah, I know. I know you find a spot or a move or a physician, you you feel like, okay, we're on to something. How are you facilitating it? What are you saying to them?

Dr. Eva Nowakowski-Sims:

I'm going through the experience with them, so I'm not doing anything hands on, you know, anything from a trauma informed lens wouldn't involve me ever touching a client. It's me kind of guiding them through my words and then also going through the practice too with them. I find that sometimes people get really self conscious if we're just sitting and watching. So I engage in the practice with them as a way to kind of build connection and rapport, but to also to kind of let them know that that this is, this is something safe, that I wouldn't take you through, something that was too overwhelming, that I thought you couldn't handle, but, but that I'm kind of, you know, what we call co regulating the experience with you as you're going through it. So it's, it's, it's kind of like a great workout for me. If I'm going through four or five different sessions throughout the day, I get to do a lot of a lot of my own work and a lot of yoga along with them as well.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

Okay, but now you're on to something, and then how do you communicate or verbalize with them, you know? How do you draw out? Like, is there, what if they have a memory flashback, and when they're in a certain pose or something? Is that what you're looking for? What do you it

Dr. Eva Nowakowski-Sims:

doesn't tend to be very verbal. It's more of an experience. So it's part of just kind of, and the other part of it too is, is, is an awareness piece, and being able to kind of recognize that I've got something difficult going on in my body right now, and it doesn't feel very good, but if I use my breath, I know I'm in a safe space. I know I'm supported. I'm able to get through it, and that's how we kind of retrain the brain that, you know, we can handle difficult experiences in our lives and the body too. Do, and the body gets the physical, you know, and you know, emotional release that it's been looking for.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

I have a patient for you. I can't wait to tell her, Okay, that's a whole nother interview. Let's go into psychedelics. I know that we're really anxious to hear how in the world did you throw in they're obviously having this renaissance. So what tell me about where that found its place in your world?

Dr. Eva Nowakowski-Sims:

Yeah, it's been a journey. So, you know, I started with yoga, and then found my way into weightlifting, which is, you know, I'm a part of an initiative trauma informed weightlifting that does a lot of research around how weightlifting is an incredibly healing experience for people who've experienced trauma, many of who would prefer to go to the gym and pay that membership than pay a therapist. And you know, I think just because I've always been so interested on what's the next thing coming down the pike, what it is, is it that, you know, is the next way of kind of healing where we don't have to talk psychedelics came into my worldview about five years ago. And, you know, I'm a researcher before I'm a clinician, and I tend to kind of, you know, look to evidence based practices as as the things to guide me in terms of what comes next. And I've been reading just a whole lot of the works by maps in terms of the clinical trials with MDMA and how effective it had been in healing PTSD and significantly less amount of time than any amount of CBT or any amount of even somatic practice, for that matter. And after the research, found a certification program and did a 10 month certification program, and then started doing clinical trial work. And I've been doing clinical trial work with psychedelics now for almost four years. So I've dosed pretty much every medicine out there. And I think that beyond just you know, the incredible positive effects that I've seen, what I really love about doing this work psychedelic assisted therapy is that it really brings the intimate humanity connection piece back into the therapist client relationship. For such a long time, we were trained as clinicians not to touch the clients. We were trained, you know, to sit so far away from them and be this objective person like you said that asks about their their upbringing and their childhood, and what's really beautiful about the work that I've been doing, and why psychedelics are such a natural transition, is that it really is, the connection and the relationship coupled with the medicine that makes the difference in the lives of the patients that have had an opportunity to do it in clinical

Unknown:

trials.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

That is pretty interesting, and you get, do you get any pushback from your other therapists, or any resistance from your

Dr. Eva Nowakowski-Sims:

peers? So I have to tell you a funny story. When I started sharing with the university and everybody how psychedelics were going to become my area of expertise, I thought that I was going to show up on Monday to a drug test. I'm teasing. I don't do psychedelics myself, but what was really welcoming and exciting was the fact that I have had a tremendously positive response from absolutely everybody you know. Of course, you're going to have people who there's a lot of myths. There's a lot of stigma associated with psychedelics. Many people still believe them to be drugs, and are very concerned with misuse, which I think is a valid concern, and it's definitely part of the work that we do when we do psychedelic assisted therapy, you know, and from a policy kind of perspective and a practice perspective too, you know. But part of my mission, you know, at this stage, in addition to the clinical trial, work is really kind of, you know, educating people about the potential of psychedelics and really kind of helping to move the needle from these are drugs, they're dangerous. Nobody should do them to tell me a little bit more, show me some of the research, and then talk to me a little bit about the experiences that you've had and how they've been helpful for the people that you've worked with. So really, kind of wanting to, kind of, you know, just educate and really, kind of just really address the stigma and myths that are out there currently.

Dr. Terry Weyman:

You know, I've read a lot of books about the sea asylum and the different effects of mushrooms and how it's almost like you create a not a different reality, but it's like you the traumas now you watch it like a movie instead of living it and but I've also read, you know, it can create a false sense of reality, and it can if you don't do it right. And that's why I'm always very intrigued in. Know, with having it guided by someone who knows what the dirt, versus just having a trip of the house of the party can What is it actually, since you've experienced it, people, I think, are very curious and, and I know the background with Nixon and all that, and where were the schedule five drugs? But where did it was it actually feel like? And can you describe how like if you're watching somebody shift in their body, they're shifting their voice and and as a person has gone through, what does actually feel like for that person listening right now?

Dr. Eva Nowakowski-Sims:

Yeah, absolutely. I want to just, you know, step back to kind of address something that was a really important point that you made, which is that when we think about doing psychedelics and psychedelic assisted therapy. There's two things that are really important. It's called set and setting. The first is set, and that's where your mind is at when you're going to be taking the medicine is so if you're showing up, really anxious, afraid, you're showing up, you know, to really take a macro dose in the middle of a high school exam, not a good idea, you know. And the second part of it is setting where you're taking the medicine and who's with you, guiding you and supporting you through the entire experience and journey. So without those two key and critical parts, you're right, you can have a really bad experience, which then really, kind of, you know, sets up this belief system that these things are bad and dangerous and you shouldn't do them, so as long as you, you know, done it right, you know, and with somebody who's skilled, and, you know, really knows what they're doing, and you know, at this point, they're only Available legally through clinical trials. So you know what you're, you know, truly getting, then that's becomes a really important part of what the outcome is going to be.

Dr. Terry Weyman:

All right, on that note, let's talk about, you know, trying to go against what you know, the media and TV. You see, we've seen shows on Netflix about mushrooms and and the use of psychedelics. And then as recently as Aaron Rogers and his show of going down and doing his taking his medicine, almost like he's and for the layperson, it's almost like these people are trying to find themselves, you know, and going down to having these experiences with these shaman and all that. And so it, I would think, as a somebody who's clinical trying to use trauma, is that a hard thing to to to to talk to people about because they're like, Oh, this isn't free me, that I'm not a hippie. I'm not trying to find myself and all that, versus no, this could really help you. How do you balance the media and what they're seeing on TV, and going back even to Nixon, going, well, this is all a hippie drug, and I don't like hippies when actually we've had guests on the show used it for really strong therapy to get themselves back on track in life. How do you balance that conversation?

Dr. Eva Nowakowski-Sims:

I think the first part is acknowledging that you know that whatever it is that they're feeling, you know, and oftentimes it's fear and anxiety of the unknown, and really kind of letting people sit in that space for a minute and honoring that within them, rather than shiftly trying to change them and tell them that they're wrong. And, you know, just getting really curious about where is it that that that that thought or that pattern of thinking comes from, you know, so that they themselves can really kind of spend a couple of moments in reflective awareness of, you know, why do I feel this way? Or why do I think this way? You know, and helping them, you know, in that beginning space. And then the second part of what I do is I offer a lot of the evidence. You know, there's a lot of clinical trial published research that talks not just about the effectiveness, but also about the safety. And then thirdly, we acknowledge that this is still in very much an exploratory stage that we don't know exactly you know what the outcomes are going to be. And that's why we continue to kind of collect all of the data to be able to kind of answer all of those questions that so many people have. That's why we have an incredible gratitude for the people who are willing to kind of do the clinical trial research, for the people who are willing to share their experiences both the positive and the less less positive, or the ones that are challenging and difficult. Because I think the more information that we have, the easier it is for us to figure out how we can utilize these medicines in different way and with different people to have the most positive outcome. You know, psilocybin right now is one medicine that we're using for depression. There's a couple of different clinical trials that might use it for PTSD or anxiety, but for the most part, most of the research, the clinical trial research, will take one indicator and focus that medicine on just one indicator. When we think about PTSD, which is typically the diagnosis associated with trauma that mostly has MDMA, or a derivative of MDMA, which I've worked a whole lot with, which is called methalone, which is a little bit different than a pure psychedelic. MDMA is an empathogen, and what that means is that it's an opener. It's going to open you up to feeling and to connection and to just being able to find joy when you haven't necessarily felt that in quite some time. So that's a lot less intimidating than jumping into like LSD or psilocybin, that's going to have that very kind of, like, self reflective, you know, ego dissolution, you know, blast you out of this world kind of experience. So that's why, you know, they're very careful with thinking about which type of medicine matches the symptomology or the experience that you're having, and how is it that this is going to help you best at this time,

Dr. Terry Weyman:

when you look, when you look back on even you mentioned LSD, and when it was originally being it was actually a mistake in the lab, right? And and when you, when you saw the effects, and where the original creator of LSD, and how this mistake turned into something great, and then you have Leary coming in and and it started going another path, and all sudden, it was always designed to help people's mind and help depression anxiety. Wasn't designed to be a trip of a 60s house on the beach with kumbaya being in the background, right? And so how we saw this shift of what was supposed to be into this, this time magazine, hippie culture, and now with maybe RFK and some of the stuff, it's maybe coming back to where there was originally designed to do, to help people. And I've always said that if God put it on the earth, it's probably good for you, versus if it was made in a lab. And so how do we get back to what it was originally designed for, and get this middle cookie out?

Dr. Eva Nowakowski-Sims:

Well, I really think it's thanks to, believe it or not, Rick doblins work with maps. You know, they've spent a lot of time and money over the past 20 years, really, kind of, and you spoke of Renaissance early on in our conversation, spent a lot of time and really, kind of just beginning to kind of take a look at these compounds and medicines, you know, as just that medicines, rather than as drugs. And there's this saying that I absolutely agree and love that says, you know, what's the difference between a drug and a medicine? Well, if you're using a substance to escape because there's something going on in your life that you don't want to face or you don't want to deal with, so you're engaging in this substance to escape that that's a drug. But if you're looking to go deeper and to really explore what's going on and get curious about it, and spend the time and reflection and willing to do the work to say, I want to do something different. I want to be different. That's a medicine.

Unknown:

Oh, I love that. Nice.

Dr. Terry Weyman:

All right. On that topic, you already talked about, brother, work. I want to stick with this. You sat with many psychedelic sessions and to get us off this, it's only for going down to the Amazon or Mexico or South America and have like we saw with Aaron Rodgers, but it has really good, intense, emotional terrain. Can you describe a moment from a therapist in the United States that that even surprised you, and you went into something so profound that people need to hear that not just some guy laying on a mat in the middle of the jungle, but there was something amazing that you witnessed, that that people can grab onto.

Dr. Eva Nowakowski-Sims:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's, there's been, there's been many, you know, and the work that we do as psychedelic assisted therapists, there's three phases. The first is preparation, where we spend a whole lot of time really kind of building rapport and connecting with the participants so that they feel really comfortable with with us guiding them through that dosing day, and then also becoming really comfortable with understanding what their trauma is, what it is that they want to shift and change. What intentions do they have for bringing, you know, the medicine into their lives? And then dosing day is pretty intense, you know? And it depends on the medicine. Different people have different experiences with different medicines. You know, my experience with psilocybin is majority of people are going to just lay on the couch. Here we are, the return to the couch, right on the yoga mat. Interestingly enough, I've done a significant amount of and I think that's another reason why I so closely aligned with this is because I've done so much somatic work. It's probably one of the most guiding practices we use in psychedelic assisted therapy. Is somatic work, ifs, which is, you know, internal family systems work. There's no CBT anywhere in this, you know, process, a lot of it's driven by polyvagal, which is an understanding, a theory, which is an understanding of nervous system work. And. How we need to be regulated in order to kind of have an optimal experience. But dosing days with psilocybin, a majority of people will lay on the couch, and then they'll vary in terms of the intensity of the emotion. So they could be crying hysterically one minute and then just start laughing hysterically the next. But it doesn't involve a whole lot of of movement movements, one of my my research areas. So I'm very interested in how different psychedelics, you know, engage in movement, you know, as part of the healing process. LSD is definitely a lot more engaging. And LSD right now we're using for anxiety, believe it or not, that's typically the indicator that a lot of the different sponsors are holding on to, is LSD for anxiety, you know, but that one is, like, a whole much there's a lot of like, reality checks for in that one, everybody like, is this real? Am I real? What's going on here? So it's a very interesting kind of dynamic to just be like, yes, all of this is okay and normal and real, and just very reassuring for them in terms of what they're going through. Everybody's like, Am I doing it right? You're doing it perfectly, right? You know, a lot of people are afraid that they'll do or say something, you know, because, again, we're very egocentric people, so they're afraid of how they're going to be perceived. So it's just kind of getting them ready to kind of, you know, welcome any and all experiences and to let them feel reassured that there's nothing they could say or do that I haven't seen before. So, so LSD is a whole lot more kind of like, you know, just checking in, but lots of giggles with LSD. And I'd love to giggle along with them. I think that's a way that makes them feel comfortable in that experience. And I get a lot of endorphins released from getting to laugh all day with them too, as well, and then with five Meo DMT, that's blast you off into another world. And oftentimes, people who've had that experience, which is oftentimes for trauma or severe depression, they feel like they're dying. And they'll scream out, am I dying? I'm dying. I'm dying. And it's an interesting, you know, way to kind of reassure them through the experience that you know, it's okay, it's all okay. But that's a one that has an incredibly fast turnaround, where they'll dose one day completely devastated and show up the next day smiling. My life is great. I don't know what's happened, but my life is great. And then the MDMA, or the meth alone, is a tougher one, because when you work with PTSD, there's so many guards up when you've worked with trauma, it takes so much to get people into a relaxed nervous system, body space, that it's a very gentle medicine that you know is going to just slowly start to like, unfold the pieces of an onion, so that every you know that one requires a few sessions, most of the other ones are usually one or two. But it's so interesting to see how they show up as different people every time we dose. Can remember one of the things that somebody told me in one of the, you know, the MDMA meth alone sessions, was that, you know, my trauma is always here. It's always with me. It's right in front of me, but it doesn't hold me up anymore. It doesn't stop me from doing the things that I want to do in my life. And I thought, wow, that's just so incredible to be able to say, push the trauma away. Because I think a lot of times that's what people think is going to happen. It's just going to put it away, and it's never, ever going to show up, or it's not going to exist in your life anymore. But what psychedelics do is they teach you how to live with your trauma, to live with your depression, to see your anxiety as a strength instead of a weakness. So we're not changing them. We're not, you know, making them different people than who they were before. We're just giving them a different outlook on how they see life

Dr. Terry Weyman:

when things spend just You said something earlier, and now it's just clicking to see somebody like you. These are medicines to take it with your buddies in the house. It's a drug and it's the same substance. And I think people mud them together. But if it's done with somebody who's trained, you just explain when to use each one. And if you don't understand what you need for what you're feeling, then you are a drug because you're hiding. But if you use it for what you need with somebody like you, it's a medicine to heal them. Is that the right thought process?

Dr. Eva Nowakowski-Sims:

Yes, and sort of Yeah. And part of what I always tell everybody, because I feel like, Oh, I've done mushrooms before, or I've done MDMA before. And I'll say the experience recreationally is very, very different than the experience therapeutically. So you can't compare the two unless you've had that therapeutic experience. It's, it's, it's literally. Like night and day, there might be some of the emotion or the feeling that feels really similar, but the overall experience is completely different. So I first encourage them not to kind of compare the two. The second is that, you know, I think a lot of people, especially with all of the media and, you know, all of the talk about how, you know, psychedelics are the answer to everything. Are figuring out how to kind of find this stuff on their own and going out and doing it, and not thinking about set or setting, or not having that person you know there to kind of guide them in a very, you know, loving, gentle, you know, kind of way, not asking them all of the right questions at integration to help them make sense of all of this new neural pathways that have been flooding their brain like crazy for the past 24 hours, you know? So I think that they're seeking that help, but they're missing the key and critical pieces. So I don't think it's it's drugs and they're trying to escape. I think in those situations, they're looking for help any which way that's available to them, because we know these things are not available. They are schedule one drugs, and if you're caught with them in some states versus other states, you could get in trouble, you know. So I can't fault them for wanting to better themselves. So I think the intention is still that they're wanting to get better, but unfortunately, they don't have the resources in the full package to be able to optimize the benefit.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

I wanted to ask you about a acronym you use, CBT. I mean, Dr Terry, you sounded familiar with it, is it?

Dr. Eva Nowakowski-Sims:

CBT? Oh, cognitive behavioral therapy. Okay, so we train a lot of clinicians. It's usually one of the ones that we train to say, you know, you have a negative thought which then affects how you behave, which then affects, you know, how you know, how you think about yourself, you know. And yes, we definitely know that's true. But it's the same idea that if you've got this negative thought on a feedback loop where it keeps going and going and going, just telling it to stop is not going to work, so you've got to figure out how to interrupt it in a different way than talking to it.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

You know, it's interesting, because I'm seeing a pattern here, like even Dr Jennifer on a that we talked about who talked about past life regressions on a different show. She said that her massage therapist, her massage therapist, was asking her questions and didn't know how to navigate her through and it almost left her in a bad space, whereas she is able to give you, you know, bring you through a past life regression, and it's monitored, or the right questions are asked to really facilitate. So what you're saying means a lot is, you know, it's guided. You know, it's, it's a it's a medicine, and it's guided. So with that said, you know, you talk about the, you know, the psychedelics and the somatics, and, you know, imagining to myself, you know, how would somebody, is this only accessible to certain types of people or, like, the the you know, ones that you know are privileged or not? I mean, how? How does somebody engage in this kind of a you know, program or process?

Dr. Eva Nowakowski-Sims:

Yeah, absolutely so. Right now, there are clinical trials going on throughout the country, and you can check out, you know, which clinical trials, I think it's like clinical trials.gov or something like that. That's a website that lists all of them and find out locally whether or not there, you know, is somebody that's doing it in Fort Lauderdale, Siegel trials, does a lot of psychedelic clinical trials. That's one of the companies I worked for. And then also in Orlando, CNS, that does this work, you know, in Orlando and in Jacksonville, there are doing psychedelic work out of the University of South Florida as well. I feel like those are the only maybe UCF picked up a study too, you know, but Florida has quite a few locations where people can participate in clinical trials. They're all paid clinical trials. Just like any clinical trial, there's a lot of exclusionary criteria. So it's not an easy thing to get in on, because inevitably, there's, you know, one thing that could kind of exclude you, but it's definitely worth kind of exploring and seeing what's available in terms of the different types of, you know, diagnoses that you might have and where you might fit in as a good match for that clinical trial. And then the other part of it too, it's a lengthy process. What's really cool about psychedelic work in terms of clinical trials is that, you know they recognize that, and this is the nature of clinical trial work. You get the medicine, you don't, right? It sucks if you don't get the medicine. But there's many different sponsors that are now offering the medicine through an opal. Label period. So as long as you can spend your time in the study and you continue to qualify, then many, many participants who may have gotten placebo, we don't know, you know, they don't know. We don't know it's double blinded, but if they stick around, they definitely can get to the open label period, and we'll get the medicine at that time.

Dr. Terry Weyman:

You mentioned Florida. Are there other states that are really on the forefront of this? And there's, and what are some of the worst states? They're like, not even talking about it, and it's like, still taboo.

Dr. Eva Nowakowski-Sims:

So, you know, the only thing that I can kind of, you know, guide that is, you know, by policy, in terms of what states are already starting to kind of bypass federal and, you know, create their own state rules and laws around utilizing these medicines. We know that. You know, Oregon and Colorado are both, you know, offering psilocybin and opportunities, you know, for people who are suffering, we know that New Mexico has picked up, also a task force to start to look at and do some work. Texas, believe it or not, has done, put in $50 million for Ibogaine, for veterans to be able to kind of help them with their opiate addiction. Ibogaine is an incredible medicine and has been incredibly effective with helping people with addiction. We know that Maine is also another state that has recently, I think, looked to kind of, you know, approve some laws to bypass federal a lot of other states have bills on the table. Unfortunately, we saw Massachusetts got, you know, turned down this past election year. But every state is going to have probably some type of access to clinical trials, you know, I in it. And, of course, probably some of the more progressive states will have more active sites going. There's still some sites that I've worked with in Arkansas, in Kentucky, you know that when we go to trainings for different studies, that they're there, you know, also offering clinical trial kind of work too, as well. So some of the states you wouldn't think would be doing this work are absolutely doing it, but just maybe not with multiple sites like you might see, and you know, a few of the other states that are looking to get this, this going quicker,

Dr. Terry Weyman:

you know. So she hasn't mentioned my state at all. Larry Spencer, huh, what's your state?

Dr. Eva Nowakowski-Sims:

California? Oh, you guys are the underground. That's why

Unknown:

we did bet the hippie, yeah,

Dr. Eva Nowakowski-Sims:

it's happening. It's definitely happening in California.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

Funny, that was great. You know, it's funny. I recall a time I went to chiropractic college in Texas. I had three roommates. Two wanted to drop acid and go to Galveston beach, and the myself and the other roommate were responsible, and we were the ones that were going to watch over them so they tripped. We lost them both in the middle of the night. We had no idea where that one we found in the back of an abandoned pickup truck, and the other one we found in a in a in somebody else's lounge chair. And I just think to myself, because they were both some of the smartest students in the class that if you would have been around during that time, you could have facilitated a breakthrough for them. I think it's really but, you know, this was obviously, you know, they got it illegally, you know, the acid. But you know, that's just it was. It reminds me of how it was so it was so pervasive back then that, you know, all the, you know, tripping and things like that, and now it's become an acceptable form of medicine. It's really neat. So we're working toward it.

Dr. Eva Nowakowski-Sims:

We're working toward it. I mean, there's still a lot of work to be done, and I think it's dangerous to say that, you know, it is the cure for all you know, because then it does it, you know, it doesn't allow for, you know, things like misuse that are very much a possibility with some medicines more than others. And then also to, you know, thinking about people who go through and take the medicine and don't get the benefit from it. I mean, we've, we've had that kind of happen too. So it's not to say that everybody who takes it is going to get better. There's still a lot of work to be done, you know, through research and, you know, recognizing what type of person this works best for, you know, and I'm happy to say that the work is continuing, and it looks like it'll continue for quite some

Dr. Spencer Baron:

time. What is your angle. When you talk to somebody who's tried everything and the system's failed them and they're coming in desperate, how do you have that conversation of bringing them to this idea of tripping,

Dr. Eva Nowakowski-Sims:

tip tripping, you know? I'm not doing a whole lot at the individual level, but I am doing a whole lot at the systems level. So one of the reasons I got involved in there's an organization called up that is a philanthropy organization out of you know, partnered with 1440 in California, over there in Scotts Valley, who does a lot of financial support to educate nursing faculty and social work faculty. One of the things that was really important to me as we were doing this, you know, and even in the clinical trial work, is what I was going to see in the problems that we're seeing in Oregon and Colorado, is that it's really expensive, you know, if we think about my time, you know, to be able to do preparation dosing, and then, you know, two integration sessions afterwards, it can get really expensive. And a lot of the models had two therapists in the room. So, you know, when we think about whether or not this is something as it's designed, that's cost effective and equitable for all, it's just not, you know, and the other part of it too is, once it does roll out, is it going to roll out, you know, with insurance or not? So, you know, it was really important to me to kind of, you know, as a social worker, to take these issues on and really think about how we can make this available to everybody, not just those who can afford to pay for it. And how do we make access to training more affordable? My 10 month certification program costs $10,000 and we know there's not a lot of social workers who, once they graduate from a program, we're going to be able to afford that. So when I was out there doing the work, I was looking around, and I was like, psychiatrist, psychologist, maybe an LMC, you know, an LPC, or this or that, but there weren't a lot of social workers. And we're the ones that care about equity, we're the ones that care about social justice. We're the ones about that care about bringing this, you know, to anybody and everybody, versus just those who can afford to pay for it. And that's when I came in contact with upep, who is this philanthropy organization that is educating Social Work faculty and nursing faculty from across the country. And they just did their first session in partnership with usona, which is a big sponsor for psilocybin research. And they train 63 faculty from across the country, and what they do is they take all of this information, and what they ask is that you bring it back to your respective programs, and you incorporate it into your curriculum. I did a study last year looking at social worker attitudes towards psychedelics, and, you know, amongst minority social workers, there was still a lot of, you know, misbelief that this was medicine, but, you know, or that it was something that could be beneficial. And you know, it became a really important part of my mission to be able to kind of educate social workers, especially bipoc social workers, about psychedelics, so that they could turn around and go back to their communities and be the advocates for this work. So super excited to be able to kind of incorporate this into our curriculum at my university. Super excited to also be continuing to work with up and continuing to kind of train future social work faculty and nursing faculty. And also, I think we're thinking about bringing in medical doctors too, so that that, you know, education is the key to first way to kind of be able to dispel the myths and really engage more people. And, you know, the positivities of this work. The other problem that I've had is that I publish a lot in this area, but my publications take forever to get out there because there's nobody to review it. There's no social workers to review it. So, you know, a typical publication might take four months. This might take almost a year to get done because they can't find anybody to review it, to give me any feedback on it. So it's just another reason why I feel really strongly around needing to really kind of prepare social workers to do this work, you know, once, hopefully. FDA approves.

Dr. Terry Weyman:

Oh, that's I love, I love your passion, and I love your mission. And one of the, you know, I saw a meme the other day, and it said, show these kids tripping smoking dope at Woodstock and the and the comment was, these are your grandparents and and it because a lot of kids nowadays don't realize their grandparents and parents were pretty cool back in the day, right? But you're now, you have this big back then you have the big social interaction of what these medicines, drugs did, so you're fighting that from a social standpoint. And then this younger generation is coming up and maybe going, Oh, I don't know that world, but I do know this world of maybe helping me and watching people like Aaron Rodgers can go through that and having shows on Netflix. How do you take this fear of the word psychedelic that freaks people out? Can you start with breath work and movement? Will it do this? Same thing for the brain that psychedelics will do. And can you start with that and then maybe integrate it in, once they get comfortable with that mindset, thought

Dr. Eva Nowakowski-Sims:

process? Oh, absolutely. Have you ever done Holotropic breathwork? You can get to an non ordinary state of consciousness just simply by breathing, you know, way higher than you could with any psychedelic you know. So if somebody is really uncomfortable with a non ordinary state of consciousness, which is basically what's happening when you're taking a psychedelic, then you absolutely can create some, you know, very fast kind of breathing practices that will get them a little bit kind of lightheaded and give them, you know, maybe a little bit of visuals just to kind of, you know, get familiar with what that feels like. The other part of what I find really helpful is that if I'm that supportive person that's there to kind of guide you through this process, and I reassure you that whatever comes up, we're going to do it together, that you're stepping into the world of unknown, and that's okay, because I'm going to be right by your side for it. That tends to also kind of help too with people who have a lot of fear and anxiety about doing doing a psychedelic but there's something that you said earlier that, you know, I feel is really important. It's another part of, you know, my mission, and what I'll continue to kind of do work in and that's harm reduction work, you know, I've got a child in college, another one getting ready to go to college, you know, in a year. And they, you know, Hey, Mom, does psychedelic work. So these are conversations that we have pretty regularly. And I come at it from a stance with my boys around harm reduction, you're going to be faced with these opportunities in college, and it's really important that you know what you're faced with, and you do it in a way that you're not causing any kind of harm. And that is, I think, a really important message that we're starting to see at a lot of the festivals year round, because festivals are becoming really, really popular amongst young people, and, you know, middle aged people, older people too. And I think we need to, you know, teach people how to take care of themselves, rather than put themselves into dangerous positions. And, you know, it's something that I'd like to see happen more on college campuses. We hear unfortunate things about all of these kids dying, which just breaks my heart in pieces. And I feel like if somebody was there to just kind of educate them on this stuff, on and on how to either, you know, if you're going to do something, do it responsibly, so you're not taking something that's laced and dangerous, or, you know, know what you're taking, and do it in the right set and setting, you know. So I'd love to see more colleges and universities embrace a harm reduction model, you know, we see it at, you know, events like Burning Man, I've, you know, volunteered with Zendo for quite a few years, and just, you know, holding space for people who are going through a difficult experience. You know, I've done it at a couple of different festivals, and I'd love to be able to kind of just take that model and the educational, the really important educational parts, and share those on college campuses. It's not pro drug that's not what we're doing here. What we're doing is helping people make choices from an educational space. And hopefully, if they have that education, they're going to choose not to do something irresponsibly.

Dr. Terry Weyman:

I'm so glad you mentioned Burning Man and and what's those other you mentioned festivals. They're, they're the, almost like the EDM or whatever music that is pounding. And people just go there and they trip. And you see people walk around half naked or naked, and they just like all these trips. And it's kind of like, when I mentioned Woodstock, is kind of like it's transformed into a modern Woodstock and thought process, and people are still trying to escape and all that you're trying to transform a new generation of therapists. And how do we approach trauma, and how we look at life, what's your sacred cow or your your out? What outdated trauma belief that still drives you crazy? And what do you want to change how the new trauma therapist starts thinking about dealing with this population? Yeah.

Dr. Eva Nowakowski-Sims:

I mean, I feel like, unfortunately, a lot of people who have experienced trauma carry so much guilt because they feel that there's something wrong with them that you know, no matter where they go, there's always somebody to tell them what they've done wrong or what they should have done differently, or they're, in some ways, you know, responsible for it. So a big message that we spend really emphasizing when we do trauma work is that it's not you know, you know what you did. It's what happened to you that's created this, and you're not abnormal. But it's the trauma that was abnormal that absolutely, in some way, had an impact on your life. So once they can start to kind of shift that change, then their nervous systems start to relax a little bit, and they don't show up with those fight or flight behaviors that were oftentimes seen from clients who have a lot of trauma. You know, the fight trauma response. Clients are the ones that show up. They're difficult, they're defiant, they don't want to do anything. The ones that never show up to their appointments. That's a flight trauma response. So if we can train. Clinicians to understand trauma, how it lives in the body, how it shows up in their clients. They start to look at their clients from a completely different lens, and they start to see them as human again, rather than as somebody with trauma. And I think once we're able to connect with people on that human level, that's when the magic of healing can happen.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

Potent, all right? This is the time of our show that we go through something called the rapid fire questions. Okay, not sure if you're privy to it, but let me share with you we do this during every show. We ask five questions. We really get you to get on your toes and answer rapidly, hence rapid fire. So I have five questions for you. Are you ready?

Dr. Eva Nowakowski-Sims:

Eva, I'll try my best. All right, here we go.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

You are a yoga teacher, but also a weight listing advocate. What songs blast in your headphones when you're lifting heavy, and would your yoga self secretly laugh at it?

Dr. Eva Nowakowski-Sims:

Backstreet Boys, I want it my way, or this way. I'm all about you know the beat boy groups back from the 90s.

Dr. Terry Weyman:

Have you seen him at a PC? Him at the sphere in Las Vegas? No, I hear, whoa. You need to go. If that's your jam, I need to go.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

I might go too, because I love them, all right. Oh, I love it, great. Answer question number two, if you owned a really large boat, like a yacht or something, what would you name it?

Dr. Eva Nowakowski-Sims:

Dump all my cash in this. Dump all my cash here. Something. Boats are always breaking.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

That's why they say the best boat is somebody else's anyway, the day

Dr. Eva Nowakowski-Sims:

you sell it, the happiest day of a boat owner's life is the

Dr. Spencer Baron:

day, right? Wow. You're doing great. Question number three, you co authored studies on psychedelic therapy and social work. If therapy were a fictional superhero, let's say, What would therapist Eva powers look like, and which villain does she fight?

Dr. Eva Nowakowski-Sims:

Gosh, so I am a fan of, like, all things girl power. So I love the Powerpuff Girls. So I feel like the ability to kind of, you know, zoom through the air and just kind of clear out all the negative thoughts of people's heads and instead place them with beautiful pictures of like flowers and hearts and love.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

Is she not great man, I love the Powerpuff evil. Next question number four, all right, you mean, I love this. You've guided people through some of the most intense emotional journeys imaginable. But when, when you're off, off the clock, let's say what's one small, almost silly ritual or indulgence, maybe something totally un psychedelic or unclinical that makes your heart feel most grounded and alive.

Dr. Eva Nowakowski-Sims:

So I eat dessert after every meal, breakfast, lunch and dinner. So having something sweet after every meal is absolutely brightens my day, and then after a long day of work, watching nonsense TV is probably my release. So I'm probably watching some stupid housewife show or something like that,

Dr. Spencer Baron:

eating my bonbons. Oh, my God, perfect. A reality finish the day with a reality show. You didn't, you didn't live enough reality during the day, right? I need more drama. Oh my gosh. Actually, have, I bet that they could do a TV show. A TLC could do a TV show in your office. I'm sure.

Dr. Eva Nowakowski-Sims:

Oh my gosh, yeah, my life would be a fun one to watch. That would be for

Dr. Spencer Baron:

sure. Last question number five, Emma, here you go. What's one piece of advice you've gotten that still resonates with you to this day?

Dr. Eva Nowakowski-Sims:

Oh gosh. You know, live in the moment. We have a tendency. And the people that I work with and even the people in my lives will live in the past, and we call that depression, or get stuck in the future, and we call that anxiety. So if we could figure out how to simply just live in this moment, then we would figure out that it's a beautiful place, and we could be happy all the time.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

I gotta tell you something. It's interesting. That was just a therapy moment for me, because on my playlist I have a lot of old songs, and I sit there and drive to work and wonder why I think back to moments that I regret or I feel bad or I miss or something. And I go, why am I listening to this stuff? So you're absolutely right. Listen to very good that was a beautiful piece of therapy and a great answer to the last question number five. Oh. Evan Nowakowski, Sims, thank you more than you know for being on today's show.

Dr. Eva Nowakowski-Sims:

Oh, this is a blast. I appreciate you guys being interested. Psychedelics and hearing a little bit about what I'm doing, all the best. Thank you so much.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

Thank you for listening to today's episode of The Kraken backs podcast. We hope you enjoyed it. Make sure you follow us on Instagram at Kraken backs podcast. Catch new episodes every Monday. See you next time you.