Beauty in the Break
Beauty in the Break is a new podcast that explores the powerful moments when life shatters—and the unexpected beauty that follows.
Hosted by public speaker Cesar Cardona & filmmaker and poet Foster Wilson, each episode dives into conversations of healing, transformation and resilience through self-awareness, storytelling and mindfulness. Whether you’re navigating change or seeking inspiration, this series uncovers the common threads that connect us all, to help you achieve personal or professional growth.
Beauty in the Break
How Psychedelics Changed Our Lives
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In this episode of Beauty and the Break, Foster and Cesar explore psychedelics (in particular psilocybin mushrooms) as tools for healing, consciousness, and perspective shifts, weaving together personal stories, neuroscience, ancient spiritual texts, and modern research. Through storytelling and reflection, they discuss ego death, non-duality, mindfulness, meditation, and the science of psychedelics, revealing how these experiences can expand compassion, soften fear, and help us break through our own barriers. This episode offers an honest, nuanced look at psychedelics, not as an escape, but as a doorway into presence, meaning, and embodied understanding.
In this episode they explore:
- The first mushroom experience that changed everything
- Ego death and why it softens fear
- Psychedelics and the brain: what science actually shows
- Mushrooms vs meditation: the “leaf blower” metaphor
- Seeing the world like a child again
- ADHD, overwhelm, and embodied knowing
Also mentioned:
- Cesar’s online meditation class at DEN Meditation
- Cesar’s Growth Mindfulness meditation practice
- Beauty in the Break episode What is Healthy Screen Time? (dopamine/serotonin)
- Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic & Consciousness Research
- Psychedelics vs. Placebo brain map image
You can also watch the episodes on YouTube.
If you enjoyed this episode, take a moment to follow Beauty in the Break on your favorite podcast app and leave a review—it really helps!
Reach out to the show—send an email or voice note to beautyinthebreakpod@gmail.com and be sure to follow on Instagram and TikTok.
Cesar Cardona:
- Receive his newsletter Insights That Matter
- Get guided meditation from Cesar on his website
- Listen to music from Cesar + The Clew on Apple Music and Spotify
Foster Wilson:
- Buy her poetry book Afternoon Abundance
- Learn about her postpartum services
- Receive her newsletter Foster’s Village
Created & Hosted by: Cesar Cardona and Foster Wilson
Executive Producer: Glenn Milley
This episode is brought to you by Arlene Thornton & Associates
So I take these mushrooms, I'm 14 years old, and I have this massive epiphany.
I was having a deep conversation with my friend, and I said, wait, wait, hold on, I need to eat this cracker.
You lied to His Holiness the Dalai Lama? And he just laughed it away.
I suddenly turned that around, and I was like, oh wow, how I'm seeing him right now is how he sees me.
And that's how I could see me too.
Welcome to Beauty and the Break.
Here we explore stories of how barriers are broken, both within ourselves and within the world.
I'm Foster Wilson.
And I'm Cesar Cardona.
This is a home for you, questioning the rules you inherited and choosing your own path forward.
We are here with you on this messy and courageous journey.
Let's dive in.
Welcome back, everybody.
We're back.
We're back.
We're back.
We're back.
And we're back.
We're back.
Season two of Beauty and the Break.
It's here.
We're here.
We're here, and so are you listening.
Thank you for being here.
I hope wherever you are, you are in a comfortable, calm, peaceful place.
This is going to be fun.
I am so excited about this episode.
Gosh, there has been a lot going on lately.
Dude.
So much.
Dude.
In our personal lives, in the world, and in our personal lives.
Yeah.
I want to congratulate you because you got the residency at Den Meditation.
Thank you.
Yes, I did.
As a matter of fact, there is a meditation company that is quite known in Los Angeles that does
meditation classes, does meditation for businesses, does them online.
And I got brought on board to do Zoom meditations for their company on Mondays at 8.30 in the morning,
West Coast time.
However, the best part about this, in my opinion, is that if you buy the class, you can watch that
Zoom anytime you'd like.
Yeah.
Which I think is fantastic.
Yeah.
They have an unlimited membership, too, and all kinds of things like that.
But it's very exciting.
And you get to do your growth mindfulness meditations with people, which has been very
well-received.
It's been quite well-received.
Excuse me.
It's been quite well-received, tongue twisters.
I do meditation.
I don't do linguistics.
There is so much that I've learned from this in a multitude of ways.
The growth mindfulness is a way to get you more centered in your body and your mind.
So then when you go out into the world, you have these tools that I give you at the end
that you can use when you're working or living with your family and so on and so on.
So I'm really honored that they saw my creation and said yes to that.
Yeah.
That's a really big honor.
It's Den Meditation, D-E-N meditation.
Yeah.
We can put a link in the show notes.
Oh, true.
But yeah, congrats.
You have lots of different meditation classes now.
And it's just like growing and growing.
So I'm really happy for you, baby.
Thanks, dawg.
Yeah.
And today, I've wanted to talk about this for so long on the show.
I think in the beginning, when we were first naming episodes that we could do, this was
probably your first three that you mentioned.
Yeah.
Because I love when we talk.
So we're going to talk about psychedelics.
Yeah.
Say that.
Say that.
In particular, mushrooms has been our experience with psychedelics.
You always give a story about how you got started.
I always get the late bloomer story about how I came to mushrooms much, much later in my life.
But both are very palpable and deeply, deeply affected for me.
It's deeply affected my entire perspective on the world, the universe, humanity, being here on this earth.
It's been incredible.
Yeah.
I feel a little validated that we live in a time now where everyone's talking about it.
And there's studies about it as well.
I was a participant in one of the surveys for a college in Vancouver for microdosing.
And Johns Hopkins has done a lot of work in Berkeley and UCLA.
I feel really vindicated, I should say, because when I was 14 was the first time I did mushrooms.
I remember I had this magazine I found.
I don't remember how I got it, but I had it.
And it had a list of all of the drugs on it, the unhealthy ones and the psychedelics as well.
I remember reading the one about mushrooms and it told you like what it was and how it'd been used in history.
And there's all these religions that do it and all this iconography and something about that resonated with me.
And I said, that's the one I want to do.
Now, I also want to say that I am not telling somebody to allow their 14 year old to do psychedelics.
But I did.
Not optimal, but it is what happened.
I got a bunch of these mushrooms from Gainesville, Florida, because I lived in Jacksonville, Florida.
And Gainesville was like a farm area.
You could pick up a lot of mushrooms off cow patties.
And this kid and I, who's my age, we planned on doing these mushrooms.
I'll never forget this part because we started taking them together.
We took them on a Saturday.
My mom was at work.
She's going to love hearing this.
I made some tea and then I put the tea away.
So when my mom came back and went to sleep, he and I would drink the tea.
We're drinking the tea.
It's like, I don't know, 11 o'clock at night or something.
And I started to feel like giddy and strange and weird and whatever.
And then the friend of mine started getting very giddy and very silly.
And it took maybe an hour for me to realize something deeper was going on here.
Something that's not just, let's just have fun.
Like two kids sipping beer from the fridge and refilling the beer can with soda or whatever, you know.
But I could recognize that he wasn't having that same awareness of it.
He was just being silly.
So I made a note to myself.
I'm going to hang out with him until he crashes.
And then I'm going to see what's going on here.
And that's what happened.
I remember at some point he just passed out.
And in my brain, I legitimately went, okay, what's going on here?
Because something was hitting me at a level that I could not put words to.
I mean, there's grown adults who can't put words to it, let alone a 14-year-old who can't put words to it.
Yeah.
So I take these mushrooms, I'm 14 years old, and I have this massive epiphany.
And I can't put any words to it.
Now, lo and behold, at this part of my life and all the stuff that I read, I realize, oh, you're right on point to what you need to be doing.
Because the Upanishads say, he who doesn't know, knows.
He who says he knows, doesn't know.
And I had no idea what was going on, right?
And I sit with that the whole night in this feeling.
And I'm purposefully not using descriptions of it now.
So you listening, you in this mystery listening to this, not being able to understand what I'm saying, you're closer to how I felt at that time.
Unless you've done mushrooms on them, maybe you do now.
And then you're nodding your head a lot.
You're like, mm-hmm.
And I use this word purposefully.
It raptured me.
From my body to my mind to my spirit, everything.
And somehow everything made sense.
And I felt a part of everything.
There was a giant yes about everything.
Everything just felt like yes.
As a matter of fact, yes.
Whatever I was watching on TV, whatever I felt, good, bad, neutral, it transcended all of those.
And all of it was just a participation in it.
I remember I ended up getting some more mushrooms after that.
And some were about a month later, so I had to do them by myself for obvious reasons.
And I did it with just that intention.
First thing first, you start taking mushrooms and the walls start doing what's called breathing.
They kind of pulsate in and out.
I was laying on my back and I had a blanket on my knees.
And just the depth perception changed.
And it felt like that my chest was the road leading to the mountains that were my knees because these were raised.
I had to remember that I, no, no, no, this is my body.
I wasn't on the, you know.
And then I went to my room and put some headphones on and put on music.
And every single song, it all was perfect the way it was.
Yeah.
I started crying for these songs.
Not because it was, I understand the song.
It's, no, no, this song is perfect right here, right now.
And that epiphany just skyrocketed me.
But I didn't know what to do with it.
I was also a black kid in the South.
And everybody I knew was, especially they were black, they were like, what are you doing?
We smoke weed around here, homeboy.
Yeah, right.
We drank around here.
What you talking about?
But I knew something was there.
And I held on to that until I got older.
I literally have a note right here in my notebook from one of the times that I did mushrooms.
And it says, literally everything is beautiful and perfect exactly the way it is.
Yeah.
Yep.
And you're describing exactly the same thing.
Precisely.
Decades apart.
And it goes even further because there are whole cultures who take these psychedelics and talk about the same exact feeling.
That have no connection to each other.
That have the same feeling.
People smoke weed.
They act differently.
They drink.
They act differently.
They do other substances.
They act differently.
This one somehow has been a constant feeling for diverse cultures.
Now, some people, of course, have problems with it as well.
So I'm not saying that it's perfect for any and every person.
Nor am I suggesting anybody should take it.
But to say something so abundantly clear from a 14-year-old to a, what will be, 40?
40-year-old.
38.
38.
Yeah.
There's something deeper there.
Mm-hmm.
I have so much more to share, but I want to know a little more about that part for you, that everything.
And more, if you want to say.
Well, needless to say, if you know me at all or if you've listened to the show at all, you could probably guess that I did not do mushrooms at 14.
Didn't even drink at 14.
So, no, I don't think any time in my life up until about 37, 38, I don't think I was ready for mushrooms.
Did you know what they were?
Not really.
Okay.
I mean, I don't, I was never someone who was into substances.
I was never someone who liked the feeling of being out of control.
Okay.
It makes a lot of sense that I'm sober now.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
I think that I wasn't ready.
And there's a lot of different reasons to do mushrooms and a lot of different intentions that people can have.
But I finally felt like I was in a spiritually, I was circling spirituality in some way.
That I felt, for me, I had an understanding of the universe in some vague sense that was bigger than what I had ever believed before.
And that had to do with years of reading, reading, reading books and listening to podcasts and listening to tapes and trying to pull apart from all of these.
Different texts.
What I felt was true to me and felt like this was, this person was saying the same thing as this person was saying the same thing as this.
And that all makes sense to me.
And that is what I believe.
Right?
Right.
I didn't have a sense of my own spirituality before.
So mushrooms, I felt ready to take mushrooms with a friend of mine.
We went up to our cabin and she was kind of like my guide.
She didn't dose like I did.
She micro-dosed, but just to kind of get on the same wavelength.
I had micro-dosed before.
Never really affected me much.
I didn't, a lot of people like micro-dosing mushrooms.
I didn't really have that.
It just didn't ever, I've had it multiple times and it's just never fit for me for some reason.
It's interesting how that works.
And I think sometimes you don't know what you're searching for if you have only had a small amount of it.
Yeah.
So maybe it's some of that perhaps.
Yeah.
You take a lot and then you take a little bit.
You're like, oh, I know what is and what isn't here.
I know what I'm feeling and what I'm not feeling here.
Yeah.
Because you've had so much.
But if you just take a little bit, I don't know if you'll recognize the differences.
Yeah.
I knew I wanted to.
It was a leap of faith to do so because I don't like feeling out of control.
And I knew there was some element of that.
But I really trusted my friend.
She had done a lot of mushrooms before intentionally for healing purposes, to kind of purge some things,
to release a lot of things.
I didn't feel like I had a lot to purge, but I did feel like I needed to understand more of something.
I did have some fear about it, for sure.
The first takeaway that I had was I understood my children in a new way.
I started seeing the world around me in such a playful, beautiful way.
The tropes are true.
If you're on psychedelics, you could just look at a tennis ball for like two hours because there's so much.
You can see so much more.
All of your receptors are on, right?
You could talk more about this, about receptors in your brain.
Yeah, that's a whole image about that online that you can see.
But like more of your receptors are online.
So if I'm just looking at a boring old tennis ball that like normally I wouldn't give it two seconds,
like I could find so much detail, nuance, beauty in this tennis ball.
But I happen to be in the mountains with this gorgeous view.
So I was just like, it was like I was luxuriating in the beauty of nature.
I didn't want to take in too much at once.
It was like I just wanted to focus on that one tree and how many layers of colors were in that tree and how beautiful it was.
And I remember I laid for like the first hour.
And then I sat up off the day bed to see the view.
And it was like, holy fuck.
Like everything was so intense and beautiful.
But the reason I understood my children better was because I think children are so much closer to where they came from because they haven't been on this earth that long.
In this iteration.
In this, right in this iteration.
Depending on who you're asking.
For sure.
In this iteration.
They just came from whatever came before this.
In my opinion, it's, you know, some other place.
And this world in which I was in was almost like that place.
That place beyond.
And I think that children see the intricacies and the beauty and the wonder of the world so much clearer and so much easier than we do.
Sometimes our kid, our youngest, will get up in the morning, say nothing, sit at their little spot at the breakfast table and stare out the window for like five minutes.
And I'm like, I get it now.
I know what you're doing.
I know what you're looking at.
I remember laughing because I was like, at the time, one of our kids was having a, building a fort underneath the dining room table and building this intricate maze of roads and things for their toys, whatever.
This whole thing.
I would be like, come to dinner, come to dinner.
And I, when I was tripping, I was like, oh, that's laughable for me to ask them to come to dinner at this time.
They are immersed in this world.
They never want to leave the tennis ball.
They're just in the beauty of it.
And so, gosh, I took that with me.
I see it all the time still, years later, that when they become raptured in something, I remember that like I have that ability too.
Yeah.
Because it's you and I talking and we're using these words like everything and all and beautiful and this and that.
It comes across as if maybe we're being like hippy dippy or it's all roses.
It's not necessarily just that.
It's the simpleness of things as well.
Even the bad things also.
But what's deeper than that, in my opinion, is that, and I'm going to skip way ahead here.
When I got spiritual and deeper than that, actually, beyond spirituality.
When I started reading the Upanishads, which is an old Vedic text from about 5,000 to 10,000 years ago, they're talking about these things.
Yeah.
These old texts are saying these things in metaphors over and over again.
And then they have things like the non-duality, which means all things in this world are actually not made of anything separate.
It's not even one because that's an end.
It's just not separate, which is hard to wrap your mind around.
And these swamis and also a lot of Tibetan monks are now talking with quantum physicists because they're saying the same thing about string theory and quantum entanglement.
When I started reading those texts, it gave me words for that mystery that I did not understand when I was taking mushrooms at 14 years old.
When I started reading the Upanishads, when I started meditating, when I started reading a lot of the phrases like Shunyata in Tibetan Buddhism,
it reminded me of all the things that I felt and intellectually could process at 14 years old while doing mushrooms, but I couldn't put to words.
So it's so beyond just taking mushrooms and then everything is beautiful.
It's all the things.
That's why that whole Eastern culture has the yin and the yang, because it's the realization of the duality of life, good and bad.
And the moment you recognize that they all work together because they aren't two is when everything opens up for you.
And I think what I've gathered is these meditations and these spiritual practices, it's like raking the leaves off your front yard, but then mushrooms is like a leaf blower.
Yeah.
And it just expedites what you're doing there.
It's a supercharger.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's why I felt like I needed to be, I was glad I was in the place I was when I did it for the first time.
Right.
How I would describe it is everything I read and I understood cerebrally.
And I was like, this is what I believe.
This is how I feel that this, you know, the world exists and this is how the world operates.
The universe and the beyond and all of that.
That's kind of what I think.
It then became informed in my whole body and my whole body understood it and was like, yes, it's a knowing.
Now I know.
Now I have this sort of confirmation because I felt it.
I felt it in the, what the plant does to you.
I felt all of what's there, all of these receptors online, right?
If we were on mushrooms all the time, no one would get anything done.
Yes.
So it's like we can't live in that world all the time.
Yes.
Yes.
But there's a, there's a few things for that.
One, getting things done is a construct to our society, right?
It's to our animalistic behavior, right?
So two things, which is, here's the duality again, because you're right.
If we all did it, we totally, we would be spacey and we'd go place and we'd question all the things.
And we would have a society that would look much different.
Very.
It wouldn't be as structured and industrialized as we have here.
And, not but, there are so many theories, like the stoned ape theory, that says that some of the leaders of tribes and their shamans would take these psychedelics.
To see beyond the modern and current boundaries of their times.
The barriers of their times.
Yeah.
And they were able to break through that.
Because mushrooms, and there's studies for this now, and there's examples and polls and surveys for all this stuff.
Mushroom has been known to do what's called ego death.
Right.
Taking your ego and diminishing it.
And ego is what tells you what is and what isn't.
The two different things.
And it puts boundaries out.
When you break that through, you can see things clearer.
It's also been shown to help people induce more compassion.
All of the best leaders in our time, since the beginning of human nature, the best leaders, the most productive and efficient leaders, have been brave and compassionate.
The bravery stops the compassionate from making you a doormat.
And the compassion stops the bravery from becoming arrogant.
And mushrooms do that for you.
You find a place in yourself to want to do anything.
And also understand that there's a oneness here.
And that yin and yang sits with you in your life.
Now, most importantly, I forget how I got on this point.
Do you want to talk a little bit about what the science behind it and what it's doing to your brain?
Because you really gave this, you told us this once, and I just found it really fascinating.
It's nuts.
And we will put it up on maybe the show notes or on social media or on our Instagram.
There's a multitude of studies.
And I'll try to go through this as quickly as I possibly can because I, again, feel very vindicated for it.
Ironically, I spent so much time doing mushrooms in my teens and early 20s that now I'm like, I'm good.
And then society is doing it.
I'm like, yes!
Come on, guys.
It's great over here.
I'm not going to have any.
No thanks for me.
Maybe once in a while.
But I'm good.
A few things.
One, there is, and you can look this up online and just look up psychedelics, brain neurons, placebo.
And then you'll see these two circles.
Both circles are really colorful.
One circle has these 15 to 20 lines going from one in the circle to the next.
And those are representative of about, don't quote me on this, about a million neurological
communications happening from one dot to the next.
So if there's 20 of them, then you have that much, whatever that math comes out to.
And that's the placebo effect.
People who have told they were taking mushrooms.
And then the other circle is ones who actually took it.
And there's about 200 lines going from one into the next.
It is so much.
And also, you have areas that previously weren't communicating with each other.
So it's not just more in the regular conversation, but it's more happening in places that weren't
communicating otherwise.
That opens you up to seeing things clearer in the world, to see obstacles from a more dynamic
perspective, to overcome those obstacles, to overcome situations, to see your own self better.
It just goes on and on and on.
Maybe break down some barriers in your own life.
Maybe break down some barriers in your own life, especially if you have an ego death.
Right.
You start to realize that all the things you believe, all the things you've been told are constructs.
And they work temporarily, but they were made up.
We made them up.
We made up every single thing that we have in this industrial society, from traffic to
taxes to baseball, you name it.
And it's very enjoyable because look at how chill we are.
We don't got to worry about a tiger biting our ass or anything like that.
But it is made up.
What's more important than that is our conscious awareness of it all.
We can participate and play in this.
This image right here of Shiva, which is behind me, is the personification of dancing in the
ring of fire.
That is life.
Because in life, there are things that are dissatisfactory.
But to go back to these studies, they showed those neurological studies.
There was another one, and they had a group of people do these psychedelic tests.
A small percentage of them came out and said, that was the worst experience of my life.
I don't ever want to do it again.
The other percentage said, this was one of the best experiences of my life.
I am, my whole life is different now.
Those scientists went back a year later and interviewed all of them.
The ones who said they had the worst experience said, it didn't change my life at all.
I just don't ever want to do it again.
The ones who did have the mind-blowing experience have said, my life has changed nothing but the
better.
And then they went and interviewed their coworkers and their family and their friends.
And they said, I noticed a difference in them as well.
Wow.
Now, of course, they did it with them under supervalence, with therapy, and on a controlled
environment, and being aware that you should or shouldn't do it.
But my gosh.
Johns Hopkins and the professor, Roland Griffiths, who passed away recently, has done studies
for decades on this.
And it's found that it's helped people reduce alcoholic addiction.
It has helped people with terminal cancer accept their finality in this life here because they
feel the bigger picture of who they are.
It's helped people with depression as well.
Some people have taken them a psychedelic journey and had therapy and went off of their antidepressants
for a year.
Mm-hmm.
These things are showing up in this day and age in 2026.
And I think it's absolutely beautiful for it.
Mm-hmm.
And so you and I are talking.
I'm going to come back to you about how beautiful this thing is and this and that.
Well, now we have the data for it.
Yeah.
Not to mention five to 10,000 years before a whole hundred plus books were talking about
this experience without the mushroom.
Mm-hmm.
And all of them are just tying together to break us through what we think we should
or shouldn't be doing.
Yeah.
I was trying.
I know you-
I was working hard over here to keep that thing short.
You have a lot of data on this.
I've seen you give like a whole presentation impromptu to a group of people that didn't know
they were getting a presentation on mushrooms.
But the image is really, the image of that study is still in my brain and we will post it
on our social media because it's a really powerful image.
Just to look at it and to be like, oh, I see how many more receptors in my brain are now
online during this experience.
And what I have loved about mushrooms is that I didn't need a ton of experience with it.
I've done it twice.
I'll probably do it again.
But once I do it, I'm like, I'm good for a while.
Like here at least if I, you know, I'm also totally fine never doing it again because I remember
so much of what I learned while I was taking that journey.
It's not something like with alcohol, you black out, you forget.
Right.
Oh, that was fun.
And now I'm regretting it.
It's like I, it stayed with me.
And there are lessons that I keep coming back to.
The second time that I learned a lot the first time.
The second time I did mushrooms was with you.
I actually got up the next morning and wrote down all of the things that I remembered and
I, that I learned.
And I pulled it up yesterday when I was prepping.
Yeah.
Oh, it's so good.
I'm so glad you didn't tell me you were going to do that.
I prepped when I was prepping.
I wish I'd done it with the first time because I can only recall a few of the things, you know,
the big things.
But I have pages and pages of things that I, I didn't even remember really until I went
back and revisited it.
Have you read it just now before you, before we were taping this?
Yeah, I read it yesterday.
You have read it?
Okay, cool.
So it starts with the words, a trip home.
And that was something you said to me because you said, I said, are you excited to do mushrooms?
Like before we did, are you excited?
Cause you've done it so much.
And you said, oh, it's like seeing an old friend.
That's how I feel.
I'm looking forward to seeing my old friend again.
And I was like, I don't really, who, like, who are you talking about?
And as soon as everything kicked in, it was like 30 minutes into taking him.
I went, oh, right.
This is home.
This is not a home.
Like I miss it when I'm not here.
It's just, this is where I came from.
And every bit of nature was speaking to me.
Not all at the same time.
It wasn't like overwhelming or anything, but everybody was, everybody, the trees.
Every being.
Every being was, had this deeply grounded, authentic, calm energy.
It wasn't coming to me in words, but it was coming to me just in this knowing in my body
of what that tree wanted me to know.
The words I wrote down, the first words I wrote down after like the title, which was a trip
home, was this here is everything.
And at the time I was dealing with so much of a like brain that wouldn't stop working.
I had recently discovered I had ADHD.
I had recently aware of my mind just kind of spinning out over all the choices I had and
overwhelm and the fear that I was doing something wrong, that I was missing.
I still feel this way sometimes.
Like, am I missing the cues of the universe?
Like trying to get me to go somewhere?
Am I missing something?
What am I missing?
Am I doing it wrong?
Am I doing anything right?
And this knowing from the beyond, from the space that I was in there said to me, exactly.
Everything is exactly the way it needs to be.
Everything is beautiful.
Everything is perfect.
You can look over there at that mountain and that's perfect.
And you can look over here at the wall and that's equally perfect.
There's no wrong choices.
Nothing is wrong.
Everything is perfect.
And this here is everything.
I don't even think I, I don't even know why that's what I wrote down, but I just was like,
don't forget that.
This here is everything.
Is everything in this one moment.
In this present moment, everything exists.
I could feel it in your body language and I could hear it in your voice when we were having
that journey together.
You, there was a, if you could have a newborn baby, just be put right into the body of an
adult, though they can have words and experiences.
You were like that.
You were, you were pleasantly flabbergasted by everything.
You were just like, what?
Whoa, what is this?
And is this how this feels?
And you were curious and like, oh, I love that color there.
That's like a hot pastel.
And like, you said all these, like really, you said hot pastel.
Don't, don't chuckle at me because I made a joke out of it afterward.
It was very like, you started describing these things and these moments and your thought process.
And we got to a point where we took that same day bed that you talked about previously
and we put it up to the railing at the end of the deck.
And we propped our show arms up on the deck and put our chins on our wrists like how kids
do when they're like watching TV or something.
And we sat there for an hour at least just talking, just being joyful at the participation
of this world, good or bad.
Because we went into the kitchen afterwards and had conversations about things that we don't
agree with in the world.
And how fascinating that it's still showing up in this world and how fascinating that
somebody can, or some bodies can do things that are divisive and still tap into something
as good as somebody can tap into something that's good.
Yeah.
And there's a, there's a beauty there of recognizing the participation and the sorrows of the world.
I could feel you tapping into that so much that, that, that day and that evening.
I felt like I was a part of the universe who was watching humanity and life happen.
I was going to say I felt like God, but that's not what I mean.
I don't mean like I felt powerful.
I felt like how God, how a God, a universe, uh, the, the, the higher power of a source,
how that being that entity would feel about us as humans.
It was like, Oh, darling, like, don't worry.
Everything's perfect.
You know, what's even perfect.
You're worrying.
Yeah.
You're worrying is perfect.
You're so cute.
You're so adorable in your little humanness, in your human body, in your human, like,
concerns, like, Oh gosh, everything's perfect.
But like, I don't even need to tell you to do anything differently because how you're acting
is exactly how you should be acting.
Right.
We would watch, we saw quails walk by.
Yes.
Well, we saw a lot of birds flying by.
Birds were flying by like crazy.
Yeah.
And then those two quails just strolled by.
Strolled by.
And it was comically romantic and precious all in one.
It's like the folly.
It was the folly of life.
Just their characters that the characters of these animals.
But I likened it out to all humans in the world.
Precisely.
I came back to LA and was like, look at people.
Look at this thing.
Look at this thing doing it again.
Look at these people.
Look at this person angry.
Look at them doing it again.
Yeah.
My gosh.
And also, look at me.
I'm being angry.
I'm not too.
Yeah.
I'm also that as well.
That sort of, you know what else is beautiful?
Your worriedness is in the smile that I would see in monks that I would talk to.
Right.
Oh, right, right.
Monks in particular, especially Tibetan monks.
You bring them anything and they just start smiling at it.
And it's not a smile like they're happy, that they're happy that you're suffering.
There's a smile of like, oh, there it is again.
There it is again.
And in certain elderly people, like the ones who have lived a life, you can watch them hear
a story and they're like, hmm, wow.
Yeah.
Good or bad.
There's some deeper knowing of this is life.
Yeah.
This is the existence that we have.
This human experience, as dark and as light as it can be, is precious and beautiful.
Can you tell us the story about the monk who got COVID or that you had COVID?
Oh, yeah, that's right.
So I got taught a lot of Buddhism by this Tibetan monk.
And he is in the same temple as his holiness, the Dalai Lama.
Tibetan monks are like monkeys.
They're so silly.
They're wild.
There's videos of them playing basketball and laughing at each other when they trip and fall.
They're just wild.
He and I would go on a Zoom call and they are 13 and a half hours ahead, which I never
understood what that's about.
That's so weird.
Try to have a phone call.
Try to set a time for 11.45 PM with them and see how that works.
This was in 2020.
We get on the call.
I have COVID.
And this is before vaccinations, before anything.
I get on the call.
I go, hey, how's it going?
He goes, hello.
And his very thick accent, he barely speaks English.
And I said, I have COVID.
And he goes, right.
And I was like, you motherfucker.
What are you just, are you laughing at me?
You know?
And he wasn't laughing at me.
He was just, oh, here it shows up again.
Yeah.
I just, here we are again.
And fast forward to some, I worked with him for a while.
And of course, meditation and all these things, which what I'm saying is that the meditation
made me realize those things, just like mushrooms, you just in a slower pace.
I have people in my life now that they'll come to me with their stresses.
Can you believe that?
And I'm like, as a matter of fact, I can believe that.
As a matter of fact, I can believe that.
Yeah, sure can.
You know?
He was hilarious.
He also screened His Holiness, the Dalai Lama's phone call once.
He's got a direct foot line to the Dalai Lama.
Direct.
And he was teaching.
He told me this story.
He was teaching a student one-on-one on Zoom.
And a couple of days before he told the Dalai Lama, there is a cream at the market down the
way that can help with the bottom of your feet because His Holiness walks around barefoot
quite often.
Tempa.
Geshe-la Tempa is, I should be saying his name, by the way.
He is talking to his student and there's a phone call that comes up and it's His Holiness.
And he looks at it and he declines the call.
Who declines His Holiness' call?
He finishes the conversation.
The next day he's at, they're getting, they're in lunch after their meditations.
And he says, His Holiness walks up to him and says, hey, I was at the market.
I was trying to find that cream for my feet.
And I called you.
And he goes, oh, I must have just not got it.
He lied.
You lied to His Holiness, the Dalai Lama?
And he just laughed it away.
Oh my God.
Laughed it away.
And I go, well, that's lying is a part of a Buddhist precept.
He's like, well, it's actually, and I'm paraphrasing, goes, it's lying about what feats you've had
in your life about meditation.
And I go, okay, you're going to teach me this lesson today because I thought I was just telling
non-truths.
And it depends on what lineage of Buddhism you ask and determines that.
But my man didn't answer the phone call to His Holiness and then lied to him about it.
When you've done as much meditation as he has and or if you've done enough psychedelics
to understand, like it all just falls away at some point, all of these things.
Of course, it all matters.
And it's all just like, it's all just a show we're watching in some respect.
There's a line that's a really good line that is a Tibetan Buddhist says about human existence,
about this realm we live in.
The bad news is you're falling through space.
Like falling fast, rapidly.
You're falling, falling, falling.
The good news is there's no ground.
Yeah.
And that's precisely how everything feels now.
Mushrooms got me there.
And then the meditation and the Buddhism and reading the Upanishads gave me words for it.
And then I could actualize it and go into the world with it finally.
But they worked together in that way.
I'm reminded of, do you remember when we went back inside and ate soup?
Yes.
Oh, it was so good.
One of the things I'm struck by about psychedelics.
I'm going to give you an impression of you, by the way, for that.
Yeah.
Okay, good.
We'll continue.
One of the things I'm really taken with is that there is no ability to multitask.
There's no desire to multitask when you're in this phase.
I don't know.
You're right.
Oh, my God.
Good point.
Yeah.
I remember the first time when finally I got hungry after a while.
I was having deep conversation with my friend.
And I said, wait, wait, hold on.
I need to eat this cracker.
And then I just ate the crackers so slowly because it felt like a sacrilege to rush, eat this cracker
while I was talking to her.
I wanted to enjoy the conversation and I wanted to enjoy this cracker.
And so we just like pause and I just like ate a couple of crackers and just enjoy the heck
out of them.
And then it was like, okay, let's go back to that because there's just, there's more time.
There's more space than we think.
There's more time.
You say this all the time.
Nothing is urgent.
We don't have to rush it.
I still am guilty of doing this all the time.
I'm multitasking all the time.
And so do I as well.
It's just, you know, over time it goes away.
It's what we do as humans, but it's a nice little reminder of like, it's not urgent.
Let me just enjoy this cracker.
So when you and I were together, we went and had some soup and my God, was it the best soup
either of us had ever had in our entire lives.
But what I remember about that is that I was looking at you.
And then the whole time before that, we were looking out at nature and we were kind of
like talking, but we were looking out at the world.
And then we were kind of coming down.
So it was a little less intense and we were just going and going and talking and talking.
And I just found myself staring at you.
Actually, I want you to eat the soup.
And I didn't want to eat the soup yet because I wanted you to enjoy the soup, but I wanted
to enjoy you eating the soup before.
I didn't want to do it at the same time.
I didn't even want to multitask that.
So I am just watching you eat the soup and enjoying the fuck out of it.
And I'm just thinking, he is so beautiful.
Like physically, yes.
Like all the things we know, you're a gorgeous man.
But it was like your humanness was beautiful.
Your eyes were lit up.
You were enjoying this thing that was so beautiful.
I understood your perspective on the world so much better when I did this trip with you
because you see a lot of this in the world.
You keep a lot of this with you in the world.
It's the gift shop for me.
Wherever I am, I just try to take something with me into my regular world.
It's like going to the gift shop before you leave the place.
But you're exceptionally good at that.
I mean, what our kid does looking out the window at the world, you do that every day too.
You stand in the sun and you receive it.
And you have wonder.
And so I understood you so much better doing this.
And when I looked at you and I saw your beauty, I went, oh, this is how he sees me.
That's right.
Because you tell me all the time, but my prefrontal cortex is like, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever.
I'm going to believe what my insides believe.
Like my internal subconscious beliefs.
All the stuff you've been told growing up and whatnot.
Yeah.
I suddenly turned that around.
I was like, oh, wow.
How I'm seeing him right now is how he sees me.
And that's how I could see me too.
It's beyond beautiful from an aesthetic standpoint.
There's a deep, blissful beauty that's there.
There's a deep, sublime beauty.
That's what I'm typically talking about.
I have to live in this world.
And so I use the words that we all know.
Right.
But if I could, I would use words like sublime beauty.
Or I would say there are no, I can't.
I can't even do it.
You know, I would, I'd be here all day trying to say one particular phrase.
And then how I go about the world every day is with that.
And gift shopping those things.
You made a really good point, by the way, about maybe not ever doing it again or maybe.
It reminded me that in addition to all of these other cool benefits and all these other things that we're seeing that are, that's been fascinating about it.
Is that other substances outside of the psychedelics, pot, coke, meth, alcohol, whatever.
They are all dopamine activators.
They give you dopamine, which is an addictive chemical.
Which we've talked about in our previous episode.
Yeah.
For screen time.
Mushrooms, psychedelics, but particularly mushrooms and DMT, they just activate your serotonin receptors.
Mm-hmm.
It doesn't give you serotonin.
It makes you make more serotonin.
Mm-hmm.
And serotonin is a non-addictive compound.
Oh, cool.
So not only are you getting this revelation, but the next day it's not like, I need more.
I need more.
It's not that.
Mm-hmm.
So on average, majority of people don't have the desire to want to do it again.
They don't have the desire to need to do it again, I should say.
And that is a life hack, my friend.
Mm-hmm.
Because this whole society wants us to keep coming back.
Right.
But the famous line for psychedelics is, once you've got the message, hang up the phone.
Mm-hmm.
Hang up the phone.
Why are you on that call still?
Mm-hmm.
I call psychedelics a remembering.
Mm-hmm.
Because nothing that I learned was actually new.
I felt like I just am remembering something that I forgot.
You look precious.
It feels to me the closest I can get to actually crossing over into the beyond and coming back.
When you say ego death, it's a similar experience.
Sometimes when people say, I had a near-death experience, right?
They could see the beyond and then they go, oh, right.
This is how this is.
So many of them don't even want to come back because it felt so good wherever they were.
And I do believe that we are spiritual beings having a human experience.
Yeah.
That is probably the fundamental belief that I have spiritually.
And to experience something that seems new but to remember it all is wild and wacky for our human brains.
Yeah.
Anybody listening to this right now who is not familiar with this, they're like, what are you talking about?
Exactly.
And the funniest part is that-
Two hippies just talking about mushrooms.
But there are people who haven't even done mushrooms who have just meditated or just had an awakening of a near-death experience.
And they're like, I get it.
I get it.
Oh, yeah.
We separate so much.
We don't need to separate it.
They are a part of the same thing.
Uh-huh.
And there are people, I think there are magical people in this world who didn't really get the whole society is putting all these constraints on them.
And they are adults who still operate with this childlike freedom.
And I don't even know how they get it.
I would call them creatives.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
Artists in the world.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And they're just like, I'm stabbing my fingers because it's like, they're just jumping from one thing to the next.
Like, it's all good.
It's all good.
I have a friend who trusts her intuition so deeply that she will wake up one day and go, I don't need to be in this city anymore.
Let's go.
And she and her husband just the next day fly somewhere else and be like, okay, we're here now.
We're in Thailand now.
And we're just going to make this work because, I don't know, my intuition said that.
She has that childlike freedom.
Everybody has their own way of getting there, the people who found it.
And I think some people just never lost it.
Yeah.
I would agree.
I would agree.
We have to remind ourselves how much of these things that we've kind of put in this society to keep us safe and calm and certain and familiar.
And again, all beautiful.
But the payoff for that, the sacrifice, the money you're spending, the currency you're spending of that is the forgiveness of the lack of separation.
In my opinion, metaphorically speaking, that's what the Garden of Eden is in Christianity.
That's what Jesus is saying as well.
That's what Moses is saying in the Old Testament.
That's what Rumi is saying.
That's what the Buddha is saying.
That is what Vishnu is saying.
And every one of these practices they're saying is they're going back to the understanding of the non-tuness of this society, of this world, of this being.
Because you are more than that.
You are an awareness.
You are not the body.
You are awareness.
When you see a meme or a quote on Instagram and you're like, God, yeah, that resonates for me.
What is that?
You know, it's probably by a poet.
It's probably by, you know, Rumi or something.
And that's what we're talking about.
Even if you've never done psychedelics before and never intend to, it's that like, oh, that makes so much sense.
And it feels comfortable in my body.
And I don't feel that way all the time.
But I want to be like that.
I want to understand the world in that level.
There's something that you remember about that.
When you see that and you're like, I'm saving this.
I'm saving this post and coming back to it.
Because there's something there for me.
Truly, truly.
They're all vehicles.
That's the real note is the rake is a vehicle to get the leaves out.
And so is a leaf blower.
And then so is poetry.
So is music.
They're all vehicles to the same sense of awe in the world.
The Upanishads say the moment that you recognize you feel an awe of a mountain or an ocean or a breeze, you are one in that moment with Brahma.
And Brahma for them is the ultimate source of all of this.
Every single thing is just a vehicle of us getting there.
That's why the line from Ram Dass, we're all walking each other home is so important.
I think that's why the Wizard of Oz is still so relevant for things like Wicked as well.
Because we're finding out that where you think you're supposed to go to get the thing isn't there.
It's right where you've been this whole time.
Home is where the heart is.
There's no place like home.
There's no place like home is where the heart is.
And I think mushrooms are kind of an expediter to get you there a little quicker than that.
If done right.
Because I never planned on doing them for parties and hanging out.
And it was always, I'm going to do these and figure this out.
Even when I was in a gang.
About a year later after taking those mushrooms, I joined a gang.
And I still was dipping out by myself and doing mushrooms to try to understand what is this?
And I just couldn't explain it in words.
I definitely couldn't explain it to anybody around me.
But only until I was about 17 or so was when it started to click for me.
And I started understanding it at a deep, deep, deep, deep level.
That when I would think about it, it would make me giggle.
And still couldn't put words to it.
But it didn't ever leave me after that.
I found Jung after that.
I started reading about archetypes after that.
And I started writing music.
And it just started to make more sense for me.
And now we come to this point in my life.
Where if you want to do mushrooms, I'll do them with you.
But on my own accord, I don't feel the necessity for it.
And this is not a space of bragging.
It's a space of a realization.
I got the message.
Hang the phone up.
Hang that phone right up.
Now I can just go along with this message.
Where I am, wherever I stand, is the sublime beauty.
Is the bliss.
It's right here.
Yeah.
What is it?
I wrote it down.
This here is everything.
This here is everything.
I appreciate you for sharing your story with us.
And for going on that journey with me.
Because I'll remember it for the rest of my life.
Absolutely.
I love doing any and everything with my best friend.
Well, thank you for listening to Beauty in the Break.
Psychedelic episode.
Psychedelic.
I'll need my wah pedal.
Get my guitar over there and start playing.
Well, as usual, please, please be kind to yourself.
If this episode spoke to you, take a moment and send it to someone else who might need it.
That's the best way to spread these conversations to the people who need them the most.
And if you want to keep exploring with us, make sure to follow Beauty in the Break wherever you get your podcasts.
We'll see you next time.
Beauty in the Break is created and hosted by Foster Wilson and Cesar Cardona.
Our executive producer is Glenn Milley.
Original music by Cesar + the Clew.
