You’re Not Broken: Why Healing is Possible for Everybody | Mark Hashimi

In this powerful and deeply moving episode of Man: A Quest to Find Meaning, James sits down with psychotherapist and shamanic practitioner Mark Hashimi to explore how true healing happens when we go beneath the surface—and how ancient wisdom and modern therapy can work hand-in-hand to help us rewrite the unconscious scripts we’ve carried since childhood.

Mark shares his own journey through trauma, burnout, and addiction, and how psychotherapy helped him understand his inner world while shamanism reconnected him with something deeper: the soul. Together, they explore the emerging field of psycho-shamanic therapy—a fusion of psychology and energy medicine that acknowledges both mind and spirit.

You’ll learn:

• 🧠 How trauma fragments the psyche and soul—and how to gently reintegrate.
• ✍️ Why our childhood “scripts” run the show—until we become conscious enough to rewrite them.
• 🌀 The difference between therapy and shamanism—and why both are needed for true transformation.
• 👁️ How EMDR helps process trauma by mimicking the brain’s natural REM cycles.
• 🕯️ Why daily ritual, dance, and nature are powerful tools for grounding, healing, and reconnection.
• 🐺 What it means to “rewild” yourself in a world that’s disconnected from spirit.
• 🌿 How intention + presence = healing, even in the smallest of practices.
• 💔 Why relationships are our greatest mirrors—both for pain and for growth.
• 🧬 That healing is possible, even after addiction, collapse, or years of emotional suppression.

This episode is for anyone navigating burnout, heartbreak, spiritual awakening, or deep personal growth. Mark’s message is clear: healing is possible—and it often begins by listening to the quiet whisper within.

Transcript

0:00

In this episode, we talk about how healing is always possible with the right support. We take a deep dive into psychotherapy and shamanism and how they are two sides of the same coin and how your current script was written in childhood, but it can still be rewritten. Welcome to Man: A Quest to Find Meaning, where we help men navigate modern life, find their true purpose, and redefine manhood. I'm your host, James, and each week, inspiring guests share their journeys of overcoming fear Embracing vulnerability and finding success. From experts to everyday heroes. Get practical advice and powerful insights. Struggling with career, relationships or personal growth? We've got you covered. Join us on Man Quest to Find Meaning. Now, let's dive in.

James: 0:58

All human beings can heal with the right support in place. Good morning, mark. What do you mean by this

Mark: 1:06

statement? Hi James. Thanks for having me. Yeah. What I mean by this statement is that every single human being with the right support in place. Can heal and become healthy well and recover from anything and everything. But in the the Western modern medical model will teach us that we are born with this illness and we can't do anything about it. And we'll live with it. We'll live with it until we die. But more ancient schools of thought that look at the root rather than the symptoms believe that we can all heal with the right support in place. And what we need to do is broaden our perspective of health, wellbeing, and healing in order to really benefit from that.

James: 1:51

It is funny you said that'cause I was chatting at the last podcast a couple of hours before and we were talking about laughter and humor and what came to mind was, I was, I just remembered his name, Norman Cousins. So he had a terminal illness told by doctors. He would never, he wouldn't recover from it. And he spent the next, I think six months watching comedy and humor and the doctors, I think they went to reexamine him again. And that illness disappeared.

Mark: 2:21

Yeah. Yeah. I know the book by Norman Cousins as well. And yeah essentially what happens is your body moves out of the sympathetic nervous system fight flight where trauma gets stuck in the system. And when we start to laugh and enjoy life, we enter into rest, recharge, and recover, and the body can heal.

James: 2:40

Yeah, it makes sense because I think. As a society, as a world, actually quite often there's obviously with news, with everything that's going on with, yeah, there's quite a lot, there's a lot of anxiety, there's a lot of fear out there, and I think this is my own personal perspective. A lot of these, a lot of these suppressed emotions can cause a lot of our illnesses.

Mark: 3:03

I completely agree. The co, the c the culture that we are born into and that we internalize and then unconsciously live out, keeps us locked in our trauma. We have to break free from our cultural conditioning to really process and let go of trauma. Completely agree.

James: 3:21

Can you tell me about yourself? What is your story?

Mark: 3:25

The summary is like many people stroke, most people or everybody that I meet really on this planet I've had a turbulent upbringing. Lots of religious confusion as a child, which led me to having this innate an endless curiosity and desire to understand, what's behind the veil, what's behind the curtain that we call the physical world. Everyone just seems to show up in life by working, eating, sleeping drinking, repeating. And so I was always curious about, what else is there? As a result of my early childhood issues, I've experienced neglect, low self-worth. I had relationship problems in my twenties, which later manifested into high functioning burnout. And I used to numb myself through alcohol and drugs. So long story short, this is a very summarized version, I decided to retrain as a counselor or psychotherapist, counselor and psychotherapist. So counseling and psychotherapy really helped me through that journey. And counseling and psychotherapy is great for meaning making. And what I mean by that, it's great for giving us awareness and understanding why am I the way that I am. And around the same time, I was also exploring different healing modalities. Some of those less mainstream modalities. And I've always been drawn to how did our ancestors do this? How did they heal because they were around for hundreds of thousands of years. So how did they keep us alive? So I started to walk the shamanic path too. And interestingly, during my psychotherapy training, I would talk about spirituality and shamanism and my peers and my teachers would say things like. Healing is a bit too woowoo. Come on. You don't get healed from going to see a healer. You need to do years of deep psychotherapy work to change. And then when I started embarking on my shamanic journey and doing shamanic training, I was faced by my peers and my teachers saying. Psychotherapy's a waste of time and a waste of money. Why go and see a psychotherapist for a year or two years plus when you can go and get a healing? And so I realized that in the psychology world, there was this spiritual stigma. I was coined as being woo from time to time. And then I realized that in the shamanic world, there was this psychology stigma. And both psychology and shamanism, spiritual healing and psychology, they're trying to do the same thing, trying to heal human beings. So why is there this split? So I decided to bring the two worlds together. I created conscious psychotherapy and out of rebellion really, I coined the term psycho shamanic therapy, which integrates. Both magic from both areas to facilitate healing on the level of the mind, the body, and the soul.

James: 6:21

Let's start at where you said, why am I the way I am? So why are we the way we are when we are born as babies and yeah.

Mark: 6:33

From a psychology perspective we're born a blank canvas in this world. And then life happens between the age of Naugh and seven years old. We're in a very we're in like a hypnotic state when we're younger and we internalize everything that happens around us. I. We start to paint on the canvas all of our life experiences and this in psychology. This is called our script. So when we are younger, between the age of Naugh and seven, we write our script and our script is made up of any beliefs we have about ourself, others in the world. I. Based on our early childhood experiences, and that's the idea of script is at the heart of psychology, at the heart of neuroscience. From a shamanic perspective, that's also true, but we might carry in other, I. Experiences from past lives as well. So it's, we're not born a blank canvas from a shamanic perspective. There might already be some ink on the canvas. Nonetheless, the idea is that, when we grow up, our script is outside of our conscious mind, so we're not aware. That we are even operating from our script. 95% of our waking life is defined by our unconscious script programming from those early childhood years. And if we're not aware of why am I acting like this? Why am I responding, why am I feeling like this? Then we just carry on in a negative feedback loop until the day that we die. So Psychotherapy's really good at stopping and looking back at our script to make meaning. That's what I mean by meaning making to understand. Okay. This is where this feeling comes from. This is why I act this way, this is why I keep having these repeat experiences in relationships.

James: 8:08

Yeah. And then you could add another nut to the boat, as you're saying, with past lives I've done quite a lot of work with past lives, and what I'm realizing is there's lots and lots of trauma which comes up from there, which then creates into this life.

Mark: 8:26

Exactly. Yeah. And there's a lot of debate as well, depending on your cultural frame of reference as to whether past lives are really true or not. But what I say to my client is, or my clients are, it doesn't necessarily matter if it's true. The story exists within you. So if your current story within you, whether it's from a past life or from this life, what we are gonna do is we're gonna reprocess it so that you can live a more happier and more fulfilled life.

James: 8:55

So if there's somebody who's just come out of a breakup and is in serious turmoil or anxiety, fear, that kind of thing, what can they start to do from a psychotherapy point of view?

Mark: 9:09

First of all, I would say reach out for some support because we, we, in the culture that we're born into, we're unconsciously taught to keep calm, carry on, be strong, big boys, don't cry, water off a duck's back, keep going. You're made of tough stuff. But we know that actually we, we are supposed to be living in tribes around people that can help us, can listen to us, can hear us. Talking is a form of purging energy. Talking is a form of releasing negative energy that might be stuck in the system. Talking to a professional can help us make meaning of what, okay, what went wrong can help us express our distress, be heard, be held, have a corrective experience in that relationship. But also, if it's a repeat pattern, like it's part of our script that's impacted that breakup, we can begin to understand what role did I play in it and how can I be a better person?

James: 10:02

Yeah, that makes complete sense. And then the reason I brought that up first was because that's where I started and that's where the podcast has come from and why it's here is basically being at that lowest point after a breakup. And relationships, I feel are probably one of the, the biggest things to cause this anxiety, to cause this deep pain. Because as a human being, we get so caught up in wanting love that perhaps we didn't get from childhood, that we look for that person outside ourselves. Oh yes, that person there, she give me all the love I need. But later on when it ends, suddenly that idea of that look that we were receiving is suddenly gone. And so you mentioned about our ancestors and how we were in tribes and we talked, I actually was mentioned a bit about this early, didn't I? And I feel as though when we, if we went back probably, I reckon probably a thousand years, would you say? And we're in our own tribes. Yeah. We had our own support network. We had people to lean on, we had people to support us. A little deeper into the ancestral tribes and stuff.

Mark: 11:19

The idea is that. You talk about rel, you talked about relationships as well and how you were first embarked on this journey and this podcast due to your relationship failures in the past. And it's the same for me. I think it's the same for many people we're born into a relationship in life. We don't even realize that we're a separate entity until we're a couple of years old. So we're born into close relationships in life and we need relationships to survive and thrive. And in the modern world, there's this we live in this bizarre culture where we leave our families. And we've become fragmented and there's lots of trauma. But it, we know that the model was very different a thousand years ago, less than that, where we would've been born into our tribes. And and they would've been our close confidence, our therapists, the people that we would've drawn. Drawn to for support. And so we've lost that relational aspect of living in today's world. And if you look at statistics on loneliness and isolation, which can then link to things like suicidal ideation, they're on the rise. We are living in a loneliness and isolation pandemic, and that exacerbates and causes anxiety, depression, grief. So relationships for me are. Fundamental to healing and relational psychotherapy is really important because lots and lots of trauma in today's world happens in relationship if we think about it. And having a relational therapist can give you a corrective experience in relationships. So relationships are so fundamental to health, happiness, wellbeing, and recovery.

James: 12:55

That's definitely, it's I think re relationships when they're great. When they're going downhill, they're going downhill. And I feel as though we get so caught up. Like we get told, especially in the spiritual world, we get told to love yourself, but then people dunno how to love themselves. How? Because they've never been taught. But then there's this idea then that. You can see on TV or on the news, a lot of men killing women, and it's down to the fact that they don't know how to control their emotions. They don't know what to do next. They feel lost. I'm not justifying GI at all, but it's this idea that relationships can be at this point where they just break us. And we don't know how to fix ourselves because generally there is no way to fix yourself. It's about going in and get, getting to know yourself. But you are saying about our traumas, which are quite often what causes these patterns. Can you go what's a trauma?

Mark: 14:04

Yeah sure. Okay. What I'll say about the whole thing about relationships and, inappropriate behavior that manifests in relationships. It all comes back to script. Just going back to what we said earlier, it all comes back to the beliefs we hold about ourself, others in the world. So in my practice, we're always gonna be looking at what core beliefs have led you to where you are. And if we can change the core beliefs, we can change the script. If we change the script, we can change your personal reality or your personality so people can change with the right support in place. Going back to what we said earlier, and so when, then, what is trauma? From a therapy perspective, trauma's defined as an experience or set of experiences that overwhelms a person's capacity to function in some way, and that might be cope, coping emotionally, psychologically, it can impact your body, your mind, your spirit. In, interestingly, in psychology when we look at trauma, it's thought that there is what's called a split in the psyche or the personality, and that split creates some parts of the person's psyche to be inaccessible. For functioning in the here and now. What that means is bits of us get cut off and dissociated, we become fragmented. Yeah. Trauma and fragmentation go hand in hand from a psychology perspective. Now Shamanism in Shamanism, so shamans were the first healers on the planet. They were looking at this for a different part of their brain. Psychologists and psychotherapists look primarily through the left brain, the analytical and the rational brain. Whereas Shamanisms use their right creative brain, which is all about creativity, meditation metaphor, the mythic, and they would define trauma as soul loss. And what they would say is that when we experience trauma. Bits of the soul actually leave the body. It's a bit like, when we die, death is the ultimate soul loss. The whole of the soul leaves the body. And if somebody has a near death experience, they might experience that an outof body experience temporarily. When we have any type of trauma. Bits of the soul or bits of the energy body can leave us. Now interestingly, if we go back to what I said about psychotherapists, they talk about the psyche becoming split, and the ultimate aim of psychotherapy is to reintegrate those parts through talking. But shamans talk about the soul becoming fragmented or lost. And the ultimate aim of shamanism is to bring that part back. So as I'm describing both of these different modalities, you'll notice there's a bit of a similarity here. They're talking about thing, but one, but the psychologists and the psychotherapists today are looking through the left brain, the rational brain, and the shamans of yesterday. We're looking through the creative right brain. So if you look at the symptoms of trauma. Or post-traumatic stress. Oh, by the way as well, I just wanted to say before I talk about that that we also need to expand our perspective on what trauma is. So any stress can be trauma. Anything we experience. The reason that there is so much trauma in the world that isn't looked at is because we think trauma has to be what we call big T trauma. It has to be, catastrophic events, abuse war terrorism. But we know that. What's called little Ty trauma, which are, is emotional neglect, which is relationship breakdown as a child, which is arguing, which is excessive levels of stress, is just as detrimental to our body. There's a nice metaphor. It's like we've all got a trauma cup. Everyone's got a trauma cup when they're born and it's empty. And what happens is every time we experience a little bit of neglect. A little bit of discomfort, a little bit of anxiety. That trauma cup starts to fill up and fill up, and that can be from big T traumas or little t traumas. So trauma is cumulative. Everybody has experienced different levels of trauma. And once we bring that into awareness, then we can do something about it. But last thing I'll say on this is interestingly, the symptoms of like trauma and post-traumatic stress are emotional. Numbness. Disconnection, feeling like I'm not fully here, spaced out, anxiety flashbacks. And then when I did my shamanic training and the teacher was talking through the symptoms of soul loss. He was saying emotional numbness. Disconnection. Feeling like you're not fully there'cause you're not, you've lost a part of your soul. Disconnected flashbacks. So they really are the same thing, but one's looking through the level of the mind, the other's looking through the level of the soul. Make sense?

James: 18:44

Yes. So just to clarify, the psychotherapy way of seeing trauma is through fragmentation, but you lose you. You lose part of that fragmentation somewhere. And. And then the shamanisms way is that the fragmentation is it leaves the body.

Mark: 19:03

Yes, exactly. So the psychotherapist says that you dissociate a bit of you, a bit of you becomes inaccessible, meaning you dissociate or you you, you like create a wall to protect yourself from experiencing that trauma. The psyche creates a wall to protect yourself. You dissociate from that trauma and become numb. Whereas the shaman says you don't create a wall, it actually leaves your body. And my job is to go and get it back. And there is medicine in both modalities. But my thinking is imagine a world where we bring them both together, where we do both of those things at once and that's what psycho Humanic therapy's about.

James: 19:39

Yeah. Okay. So for people who perhaps can't afford to have any things like therapy sessions, how can they start to bring these parts back?

Mark: 19:52

Yeah, good question. We are, we've forgotten as human beings, that we're animals and we've taken, we've domesticated ourselves as human beings. So we live in a concrete world sheltered from the natural elements and nature. So one of the quickest ways we can start to recover is to spend as much time as possible in nature. Secondly is to begin to slow down. We live in a world where we're going at a thousand miles an hour. We don't have time to think. We've got information coming from everywhere. So to try to cultivate a little bit of slowness and a little bit of stillness in your life because when we are slow and we're still, we can then hear the body that speaks to us in whispers and understand what we need. So nature. Slowing down stillness. I would say talking talk. You don't have to talk to a therapist. You can talk to. Thinking about your support network, going back to the importance of having a tribe. There are so many people out there that, that have experienced what you are going through fact and a lot of the time people think I'm all alone. No one will understand. And that's just a self-limiting script belief in itself because you are not alone for lots of people that understand. So finding your tribe and talking to people as well. And then there's all the obvious things like, nature, exercise, movement, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, that are probably a bit more mainstream.

James: 21:18

So you thing is, you said about so if nature and slowing down, I think that's so important because slowing down gives you space to receive and especially. And I think I've mentioned it a few times as a podcast with people where men especially are all about do. So there's no time to breathe because, or if they're not doing something, they're thinking about doing something. But as soon as you create that space, that relaxation to do some to create that space, it's funny how you suddenly be coming to receiving mode. And when you're in receiving mode, I feel you allow stuff to come in. Whether that's guidance, whether that's whether it's just enough recovery time to heal what you need to heal, or you might even get the idea that you might understand, oh yeah, that's what I need to do next. And I think it's. Nature as well. Being in nature, it's just something about nature that just gives, just brings you back to you and yeah, I find dance. I love to dance, so I started doing, three years ago I started doing a static dance and. It actually came after another breakup. And the dance for me is it allows me to feel whatever I need to feel. So if, for example, I've got a sensation here in the chest, I allow myself, that could be anger, it could be resentment because you're mentioning earlier about. Trauma and how trauma hasn't got to be big. It just could be a little bit over time and I feel as though sometimes we can feel that little bit just there. So then we can allow yourself to move the how the body wants to move and dance. And I feel quite often it releases. I.

Mark: 23:05

I completely agree. Yeah. So trauma is stored not just in in the brain, but in, in the body, in our organs, in our cells, in our tissues. And it gets stuck'cause the body doesn't know time, like the brain knows time. So trauma can get stuck in the body. So movement can be really helpful. Dance can be really helpful. I used to DJ when I was younger and I've recently reconnected with. With DJing and dancing and playing music, playing dance music. And I love it. It's healing because it allows me to release the traumas that I've accumulated through the week. So yeah, finding what's right for you. Some people that I work with who might define themselves as having an A DHD brain, they might say I can't meditate'cause I can't concentrate. I find that like shamanic guided meditations can be really useful for them as well because those meditations are. Are quite busy meditation, so they speak to that brain, but also bring the healing that's needed. So it's about finding what's right for you. I always invite my clients to think about wellbeing and recovery as a journey of exploration. It's like just, yeah, it's you've got the rest of your life to, to continue to heal and recover and think about it as a journey of exploration and find what's right for you.

James: 24:22

What was right for you? How did you what kind of things did you find that really helped you to release your own traumas?

Mark: 24:29

So for me, in the initial stages it was talking therapy. Actually speaking to somebody completely separate from me about some of the things that I felt were really scary and shameful to talk about. And then what happens after a little bit of time is that shame is completely decommissioned and you realize that there's no shame in, there's no shame in not feeling okay. We can all. Experienced that. So I would say top of the list is that EMDR therapy I found really useful as well, which I integrate into my work, which we can talk about a little bit if you'd like to. Yeah. All of the shamanic work I've done I did some, I did a, I did an amazing course a few years ago in in Dartmore, in Devon, called the Old Way. Which was reconnecting with our, an re reconnecting with the way our ancestors lived. And that was all about hunting and gathering and living in nature. And so that was incredibly restorative, but like in ways that I couldn't possibly imagine. Yeah, and music's been massive for me. I'm really, I love my music, I love my medicine music, I love my dance music. And to just gets you into that wave, that wavelength where you can just, be free, I guess so, yeah. Yeah. Walking, moving Nature Dartmore. Yeah. The list goes on.

James: 25:42

We go a little bit deeper into the shamanism and nature.

Mark: 25:46

Yeah, sure. Yeah. So should I just speak to that then?

James: 25:51

Yeah.

Mark: 25:52

So Shamans, were the first healers on the planet. So you think about the Western medical model, it's only really been active for the last 200 years, but we know we've been around for hundreds of thousands of years. Archeological evidence of shamanism dates back more than 40,000 years, and they served in a unique capacity as the healers, the doctors and the therapists. The first therapists on the planet, if you like, were shamans and the term charman means to see it's one who sees. What that means is it's one who sees into the spirit world. And now we now understand from a quantum physics viewpoint that the spirit world is actually the energetic realm that that our physicists might talk about. So you could say that shamans were the first quantum physicists on the planet as well. Again, looking at it for a very different lens. So they were, they would be the people that their tribes would go to if they were struggling with any illness or ailment, and the shaman would've undertaken usually what's called a shamanic journey, where they enter into an alternative state of consciousness. Usually using drums or rattles to slow the brainwaves down into theater and to undertake a journey and bring back energetic healing for themselves and for for their tribes and for the planet as well. Yeah, and there's also a distinct crossover as well when you think about how. The shaman operated and how Freud, who was the first, or the one, one of the grandfathers of psychology operated. So what Freud identified was that if he was to lie his patients down on hi on his couch. For a period of time, they would begin to relax into a theater brainwave state where your brainwave slowed down. It's like a hypnotic state that we enter in just before we go into deep sleep and deep dreaming where the brain is really moldable and susceptible to to suggestion and to healing. And so Freud would lie his. Patients down so that they could make meaning of their experience in this really relaxed hypnotic state. But that's old'cause shamans would be using this theater healing state from the dawn of time to to bring back healing for the, for their clients themselves. So there are just, there are so many crossovers with shamanism and psychotherapy. It's unreal. But yeah. Does that give you a bit of context about shamanism?

James: 28:22

Yeah. Yeah. Because I'm feeling. So for a long time I've assisted going into Shamanism, but I feel as though the move the is a big shift in my, in myself, which feels it's going towards shamanism. Obviously I mentioned about doing the Sacred Man, sacred Woman Retreat have spin on and it's almost about rewilding ourselves back to. Tribal and ritual times, and I feel at this moment is a deep connection with myself and the actual panic and how it's almost I feel like it's a step now where I need to step into shamanism itself.

Mark: 29:06

Great. What, very often what you hear is that people will get the calling. If they are to embark on this journey, it's like shamanism is all about intuition and when you are ready to embark on the shamanic journey of yeah. Of energy healing and spirit connection. So it sounds like you, you might have that calling for that type of work. Now

James: 29:28

It's more I feel like I have a, there's a lady who helps to heal. I have a healing session probably once a week or once a fortnight. What's going on for me is the idea of dragons. It's a lot of dragon energy and the fact that I get very overwhelmed by certain places and with regards to energy. So there's quite a lot of places around here that have got the actual ground look quite a lot of negative energy, and I get my energy gets sapped.

Mark: 29:58

Wow.

James: 29:59

In these places. So it's almost this fire dragon. It seems to be it's there, it's around me all the time, but it's more when I'm in on the earth being able to, in that moment, to weave that energy into the earth.

Mark: 30:14

Wow, that sounds pretty phenomenal. And if you were to go and see a shamanic practitioner and take that idea to a shamanic practitioner, it would be about working out metaphorically, what that dragon energy represents to you, why it's showing up in your life right now, how you can harness that as a guide to, to direct you and to help you heal yourself, others in the planet.

James: 30:38

Yeah just even it thing, it's just even talking about that on the podcast, it's quite for me.'cause obviously this podcast has been aimed at people who are just starting off. So I have to be, I have I've always been careful about what I speak and not going too deep, but I feel as though. There's a, there's now there's a need where us as human beings have to step into our truth and to speak our truth and to be able to stand in our own power regardless, because maybe just maybe those people are just starting off actually need to hear this.

Mark: 31:19

Exactly. Everything you share will resonate to a certain group of people that are listening and will always, like attracts like. And so there will be, yeah. People listening to your story and having synchronistic, Yeah. Reactions to what you are, what you're saying, and, very often we get caught up in I remember when I first started embarking on the Shamanic journey, I would be thinking what's real? What's not real? Is it me? Am I imagining it? And then you forget that, life is a dream. How are we here, we're all dreaming this up together. And we spend so much time in the waking dream wondering about what's real and what's imagined. It's like it's all imagined and it's all real, and it can all bring information. And so it is, it's about. For me, it's about reflecting on it all nonjudgmentally with curiosity and wondering what does this mean and why is it showing up in my life or in my psyche right now? It's like it's accepted in it. It is more accepted in the mainstream culture to talk about these energetic forces as archetypes. An archetype being, like a familiar. Sign or symbol that might show up in the collective unconscious. So we've accepted that to somewhat degree in the collective that we live in now. But if we talk about those same archetypes as spirits, then people can sometimes have a reaction to that. But they're two sides of the same coin and it's all a dream. And so be interested in it all is what I would say. It's all information.

James: 32:48

Yeah. Yeah. So those people who are, what are some of the misconceptions with shamanism?

Mark: 32:56

I would say one of the main misconceptions is that lots of people think, okay, I, lots of people might think, I don't want to go and see a shaman because I don't want to take plant medicine like ayahuasca, masculine, psilocybin. But 90% of shamans and shamanic practitioners around the globe do not use plant medicine. So it's, I think that's an important. Myth to bust. Another one is that people believe that it's completely woo. It's all about. Feathers and drums and rituals and magic rather than deep psychological and spiritual change. And another myth is that people believe that it must be exclusive to specific indigenous cultures and it can't really be meaningful for people outside of those cultures, but. There are, shamanism is modern now. The modern shaman as well doesn't necessarily need to use a drum and a rattle. The modern shaman might use a mouse and a keyboard. Yeah. I would say they're probably the main three myths that I would list that need to be busted.

James: 33:57

Oh. How do, so if somebody who doesn't have a clue or sees it as woo, how do you explain it?

Mark: 34:04

So if somebody doesn't, so if somebody doesn't have a clue or sees it as woo, then I rebrand it. It's a little bit like you think about think about the movement of mindfulness. Over the last 10 years, mindfulness has become massive and mindfulness is meditation. Rebranded mindfulness isn't, mindfulness has been around for, again, for thousands and thousands of years, right? But it's meditation rebranded and it fits with our cultural lingo. So if somebody isn't open to shamanism, I'm not gonna force anyone anything down anybody's throats if they're not up for it. But I might say to somebody, okay, let's do some. In fact, very often I don't use the term in my practice, I might say we're gonna do some meditations into the unconscious and into the super conscious. That's how I might label it, because that's what we're doing. But if I was living, 10,000 years ago, a thousand years ago, I would be saying we're gonna journey to the lower world and the upper world to bring back healing and meet with some spirit guides. What I'll say now is, are you up for doing a journey into your unconscious to meet with an inner guide, or shall we journey into your super conscious to meet with your future most developed self? Two sides, same coin, but because of the cultural frame that we live in, we, we have to update our terminology to make it fit and make it accessible. Yeah. Yeah. It's about, it's branding and marketing, right?

James: 35:23

Yeah. Everything is, if you can have all this stuff you can be really good at anything, but if you wanna create a business, you've gotta be able to market and sell it. Sell it.

Mark: 35:32

Exactly. Yeah. And it's just, it is just speaking to the main, it's speaking to the majority of people out there and finding the right accessible language in today's world, but it's exactly the same or broadly, the same sort of processes that you might undertake just for a slightly different lens,

James: 35:50

I feel pulled to go and talk about spirit, but not in the sense of. S all ev. Everybody's a spirit in a sense. That spirit is within us. Can you go into a little bit more detail in that inside that?

Mark: 36:13

Yeah. Yeah. Maybe we just start with the idea in quantum physics that everything is energy and that if you were to, if you were to measure anything and everything on the smallest possible scale, the plank scale, what you identify is the what you are made of, what your microphone's made of, what my desk is made of, and what my glass of water is made of is the same thing, pure nothingness. Energy. So we're all energy. This is all energetic. We're all living in an energetic matrix or an energetic dream. So that's the first thing to say is that I would say we call it energy nowadays, but energy is spirit. And so our ancestors would, quantum physicists recognized that. Energy is intelligent. There is intelligence in energy, and our ancestors would've said that our spirits are intelligent and spirits take form. So again, just think about it like we're looking at it, looking at the same thing through different parts of the brain. The left scientific analytical brain looks at the plank scale, looks at energy and the right mythical creative brain looks at spirit and talks to the energy and has a conversation with it back and forth. So that's the kind of. That's what I would say about Spirit to bridge those two worlds together. And then there's the idea in lots and lots of ancient healing modalities that we have a physical body and we have a spiritual body. Or we have an emotional body, a physical body, and a spiritual body. So we have a soul, we have a mind, and we have a body. And so trauma can happen on all three of those different levels. So if I was to fall over and cut my knee, ouch. I've hurt my knee, it's bleeding. If that was really scary and I needed to go to hospital, I'm, I might impact my mind as well and might develop some post-trauma. And if that was really distressing, I might experience some soul loss. So everything can happen on the level of the soul spirit, the level of the mind, and the level of the body. I just try to look at all three of those levels together'cause they're all interlinked rather than separating them all off. But the idea is that disease or illness that happens on the level of the soul can impact the mind. So the soul impacts the mind and disease and illness that happens on the level of the mind can impact the body. So the mind impacts the body. That's called psychosomatic illness or psychosomatic health. So all three are interconnected. Everything is energy, I would say. And and yet we are spirit. Everything is spirit.

James: 38:55

Yeah, it is. So I feel as though we collect very often. We're complex beans. There's so much going on, and if everything's energy, that all almost makes us, it makes us one. So we're all, they're all oscillating at different frequencies. We're all interconnected, we're all interweaving. And I feel as though it's so easy to get lost in the idea because to think, to look physically at myself and this mic, we're separate. And so as human as human beings as society. We get caught up in the idea of seeing only what's around us. Yet, that kind of steps into the idea that everything starts from the inside out, from the inside out. If everything's energy, we are almost infinite. And so if we're infinite, we have the ability to do anything. To a certain, to, to a certain extent. And I feel as though when we are able to explore deeper inside ourselves, we are able to understand and create, to create ourselves on a more deeper level.

Mark: 40:23

Yeah. I love what you are pointing at there and Absolutely. It's yeah. We've ex we've created this dream or this experience of separation so we can experience ourselves separately, but we are all one. I'm drawn to talking about the alion, which is ancient, an ancient hermetic text, which predates the ancient Egyptians. In fact, much of ancient Egypt was built on the principles of the Alion and the Alion teaches us that we are all part of the all. And. And the purpose of life is all about health, healing, and wellbeing. So we can come back to ourselves as one. It's a big, huge, long journey, home of many lives, back to the all. But we're all in this collective dream, this big, huge mind, the mind of the all. And later religions have then called that various different names under the guise of different gods and different beings. But the ancient Alion text. Teaches us that we are all in the mind of the all. We are all part of the one, and we're all on a journey heading home.

James: 41:26

How can people start to explore that a little bit deeper? Because as seeing everything as one and being infinite. Our rational minds. Yeah, rational minds can't put a concept to that. Because it doesn't know what infinite is. So how do we drop into ourselves to start to be able to explore that in a little bit deeper level?

Mark: 41:54

I think it's, I think it's like, it it's very unique depending on, now lemme take a step back from that actually. It's I don't think, I don't think our minds can't comprehend it. I think our minds can comprehend it. I think the culture that we're born into teaches us not to comprehend it. It teaches us, we don't talk about death, do we? Very much in our culture? No. We fear death. So we consume, we buy, we become obsessed with this world. Not realizing that this is just. A drop in the ocean and we are infinite beings and there isn't really any such thing as death. It's all an illusion. It's all a dream. Death is the beginning. There's what? What follows? Death is always rebirth. We know that. And if we look into nature, and so I would I point come back to the idea that we have to break free from our cultural conditioning, which is all about scarcity and limitation, and start to then explore and research some of these ancient. Ancient ways of living and being and thinking. And what that does is that starts to expand the mind. There's a saying, the mind is like an umbrella and it best works when it's open. We need to open our minds, begin to open our minds. And that can be different. For different people. Different people can have an awakening triggered by different events, but I would say if you're curious in, in what we are talking about today, begin to explore. Begin to explore, and you will find the magic that's right for you.

James: 43:27

There's a group I am a me, a member of to do with abundance, to do with prosperity, and. One of the questions that was mentioned is about how am I being out of alignment with my life? Because I think with regards to this world, we do things just because we have to. We feel we have to, shall I say, we feel we have to be do that.'cause you have to make money. Like arranged marriages, we feel we have to marry that person because we've been told by our parents, and there's this i, this idea for myself, is that or not idea For myself it's, it is an idea and I feel as though sometimes if we can figure out what's in alignment with who we are. What isn't, and we can decipher between them both. Then we're able to step into a life which is more aligned, who we are. So we're gonna have more abundance, we're gonna have more happiness and love in our life. I'm not gonna say it's gonna be all roses, but we're gonna feel happier in ourselves. And I think that's probably the key for my own self to happiness.

Mark: 44:51

Yeah, and I'm pleased you mentioned the word alignment. So after I've finished EMDR trauma work with my clients, we do a shamanic type exercise called the Realignment Journey. And the realignment journey is essentially an exercise we do together that teaches people to. Critically and empathically assess everything that they have a relationship with in their life, or the consumables or the material things or the people, and to work out whether that is bringing draining and depleting them or energizing and nourishing them. If it's energizing and nourishing them. It's a, it's. It's aligning you closer to where you need to be. And if it's draining and depleting you, then it's taking you away from where you need to be. It's a great exercise that we do to realign ourselves energetically.'cause everything in the world either drains and depletes us or energizes and nourish us to get us back on, on track to what we really should be doing on this planet, which is looking at healing ourselves, others and the world.

James: 45:57

What is EMDR?

Mark: 45:59

So EMVR is a fantastic type of psychotherapy called sorry, which stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. A bit of a mouthful, but what it means is this, right? So do you know, do you know if you've had a stressful day and you're like, oh God, I just need to go to bed, and then you go to bed and you wake up, you feel better. Yeah. Like a good night's sleep can help you. The reason for that is because when we go to bed at night, when we are in the deepest sleep. Our brain enters into what's called REM, rapid Eye Movement, and your eyes move from left to whilst you are sleeping right whilst you're in your deep sleep. That's rapid eye movement. What happens in the brain when you are when REM happens in your deep restorative sleep is both hemispheres light up at the same time, and any stressful memories in the brain are filed away in the filing cabinet. So stress in the brain gets stuck in the limbic system, which is like raw, emotional part of the brain. And when we get a good night's sleep, it gets filed away and we wake up and we're like, oh, I don't feel stressed anymore because nature has done its thing. Sometimes when we experience, I. Too much cumulative trauma or something that's really traumatic in the day. A good night's sleep doesn't do it. Doesn't do it justice. That memory is stuck in the limbic system. It's stuck in our organs and our tissues. The REM hasn't worked. It's not been enough. So EMDR, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. The client will typically tune the sorry. The therapist will typically tune the client into the traumatic incident or memory or feeling in the body, and they will do some eye movement reprocessing. So the client will follow the therapist's fingers and what that does whilst they're awake. What that does in the therapy room is it's, is it lights up both hemispheres of the brain. And it files away traumatic memories into the hippocampus where they should be.'cause they're stuck in the raw emotional mode. Now, honestly, the so it's one of the primary recommendations for acute trauma on the NHS. Now, and in some reports I've seen up to a 90% success rate. I offer it in my I've offered it in my practice for a few years alongside shamanic journeying and healing and long-term talking psychotherapy and. I'm just seeing more and more success with it fast. It really does get to the core of the traumatic issue for lots and lots of people. So there's like a high level overview of MDR R does. Does that make sense what I've shared?

James: 48:34

Yeah. Yeah. So basically what our sleep would usually do, yeah. But if it can't, if our sleep can't do that because for whatever reason, then EMDR. You can use that to do the same job.

Mark: 48:50

Exactly. Yeah, you can think about it like this. The brain is a little bit like a computer and what happens is so you've got do you know in, do you know in your computer you've got ram your here and now memory. So right now we've got the here and now memory between you and I can see you talking to me and listening to me, and you can see me talking to you. And what happens is my brain is automatically pressing save and filing that away in the hippocampus. So every, a bit later on, I can reflect back on this conversation and think, oh, that was a nice chat with James.'cause it's all saved away and filed. And if someone jumped through that window and threatened me right now, my, my brain might forget to press save because actually something else becomes more important. I need to. Look after myself, so my body will release adrenaline and cortisol. I'll enter into fight flight, and so the memory of that person coming through the window might get stuck in my raw emotional part of the brain. It's terrifying. So I'll go to sleep tonight, but my brain hasn't pressed save. And REM isn't enough, so EMDR can help. Reprocess that traumatic memory. So it's filed away appropriately because when we experience trauma, the brain becomes too busy and doesn't press save, doesn't file away memories as it would do effectively.

James: 50:07

Make sense? Yeah. It makes, that makes sense now. So what kind with regards to the people at home who are listening, what kind of things, what kind of shamanic practices can people start? And would be great for a morning routine or a daily routine, daily practice?

Mark: 50:27

Yeah, I mean there's lots that people can do. There, there's a great. There's a great exercise you can do in nature to clear your mind which we did on the old way, which I've taken into my practice, which is a 10 minute, 10 minute exercise called your sit spot, which is go into nature and find a sit spot. Find a spot where you can sit down for just 10 minutes. You can do it every day or a couple of times a week. And the idea is to sit in nature. For 10 minutes without your phone or anything like that, and just soften your gaze and really become aware of your peripheral vision. So you focus on one point, maybe it's a tree, maybe it's some kind of a plant. Maybe it's the sun setting in the evening. But you focus on one point and you really focus on your peripheral vision.'cause what that does, so when we're in our fight flight stress we are tunnel vision. We are tunnel focused. When we begin to relax, recharge, and recover, our vision expands so we can relax, recharge, and recover by focusing on our peripheral vision over here. But the idea is if we can relax our vision. And sit in this sit spot, we begin to notice things in nature that we would've never noticed before. As our brainwaves slow down and access into theater, nature starts to come closer to us. Birds start to land in front of us, and squirrels start to run out of their little hiding place because we're no longer a threat because our brainwaves have slowed down and matched nature. So it's a great way to connect to nature, doing a 10 minute sit spot. I really love that. Other thing you can do is shamanic journeying. You can get into Shamanic journeying. Something that I teach people in my in my practice we do a course called the Mind Reset, and we teach people about psycho shamanic journeying. So learning about how to journey. And I would always recommend to get some guidance with journeying, but embarking on that, you can do a 10 minute, 10 minute journey where you connect with your inner or outer guides for health, healing, wisdom and guidance. That can be a great exercise to get into. So yeah, little nature exercise there. Or just maybe building like a little a little altar that you can go to. Once a day and light a candle and yeah, send some loving thoughts to the people that you care for your ancestors, anything like that slows you down and connects you with who you are, with, where you've come from with nature, with your in inner world, your outer world is is a great exercise to start with, I'd say.

James: 53:02

I last one because I think we've lost the idea of rituals and I think rituals is so powerful. Like the week, this weekend, this week, a five day retreat has been on, it was all about rituals and how and the power of rituals. We almost think, we almost see. I feel though some people almost see rituals as magic going like a cadavers and then a person disappearing. But it's not it's intention setting. I think, you set it, you have a ritual, like a fire ritual, and you set the intention for good and peace and gratitude and. Healthy healing for people around you.

Mark: 53:50

Y yeah. I'm really pleased you mentioned that. The ultimate, the foundation of shamanism is everything is intention driven. So intention, everything starts with intentionality. When you do a shamanic meditation or a journey, it all starts with an intention. And yeah, I think it's a really, an even simpler practice. To start with is to wake up, to close your eyes, maybe light a candle and or some incense, and to just start to repeat your intentions for the day. Really nice. Yeah.

James: 54:24

Can you finish off Mark as telling us what is it that you do and how can people get in contact with you?

Mark: 54:33

Sure. Yeah. So I wear a few different hats. I do a lot of organizational corporate work but in my psychotherapy practice I've got a website and a business called conscious psychotherapy.com. And I do. I work with lots and lots of high functioning professionals that might have experienced burnout and unprocessed trauma, and I help them completely reset their central nervous system. We do a we've got a program called the Core Self Reset that looks at healing on the level of the mind, the body, and the soul. Integrating psychotherapy with EMDR, with shamanic practices. Recently started running retreats in nature, which, is just a magical backdrop for some of this work. And do some group work do some one-to-one work. Yeah. So you can check out my website, conscious psychotherapy.com or you can find Conscious psychotherapy on LinkedIn or on Facebook or Instagram. And yeah, reach out if anything's interested you today or if you've got, any other questions.

James: 55:35

Very much, mark.

Mark: 55:37

Great. It's been great to talk with you today, James. Thanks so much, mark. Yeah,

James: 55:41

absolute

Mark: 55:41

pleasure. Alright, you take care. Bye.

55:46

Thanks for tuning in to Man a Quest. Find meaning if today's conversation sparked something in you, take a moment to reflect, then take a step. Remember, real growth comes from action, not just insight. If you found value in this episode, share it with a friend. Leave her a review, or reach out and let me know what resonated. Your feedback helps shape the journey we are on together. For more conversations like this, make sure to subscribe and stay connected. You can also follow me on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn for updates, tools, and upcoming guests. Remember. It's not about having the answers. It's about daring to look.