Psychedelic Facilitator: Ayahuasca activates your personal agency. It was never just the medicine

In this episode of Soft + Savage, Jessica Francis explores ayahuasca beyond myth and spectacle — into the body, the story, and the work of real healing.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:25

Welcome to Soft and Savage. I am your host, Louise Levin. If you are interested in our conversations, please subscribe and like and follow our channel. So my guest today is Jessica Francis. I met Jess a little over six weeks ago at uh Soltara in Costa Rica, where we were doing an ayahuasca ceremony with indigenous Chipebu healers. And uh I found that her intellect and her understanding of the mind, the body, the spirit, the medicine was breathtaking. And so I wanted to share her with you.

SPEAKER_01 1:04

Of course. I'm really, really flattered to be invited on, Luis. Thank you for having me. Um so I started out not working with plant medicine in any type of capacity. So I I mean, I at school I studied English literature, and then I went on to be an investment banker, and I kind of had no interest in this kind of tradition, or it was never something that I saw myself doing, but life kind of had other ideas for me and things evolved. Um I had my I grew up, my mother was very sick, and she died when I was 22, and then in those aftermath of that, I was kind of very hedonistic and taking a lot of recreational drugs, which I actually found hugely therapeutic. And and the first time I ever drank ayahuasca was in Colombia in 2012 during a very hedonistic time. Um, and it was really not the right time for me, but a seed was certainly planted, and then a couple of years later, I'd done my first yoga training. I decided that I had to clean up my life in various ways and start to make shifts. Um, and I was in India and met ayahuasca under very different circumstances, which just started a path of real genuine transition and healing in my life, and so yeah, it's been a beautiful journey. So then I came out here to Costa Rica to work with ayahuasca again and knew with new eyes and new experiences. Great people, great people.

SPEAKER_00 2:24

And you came there. What didn't you go to uh the Temple of the Way of Light in Peru? Weren't you there before?

SPEAKER_01 2:29

So I worked, yes. So I started working, I decided to go to Peru, and I didn't just want to go and do a retreat. I understood that I had to spend some time and with the medicine and in the process. So I went for the best part of a year, I worked at the Temple of the Way of Light in the um Peruvian Amazon, and they work again exclusively with Shipibo healers. Um, and I dieted at the end of that year, which means going into isolation and ingesting very little food. I spent six weeks in almost complete isolation and just working with plants to see what kind of help they could be. But so much work was done during that process with the plants that I needed to do to understand what it meant for my life, and it was very much a redirection of that something was off in the way that I was living. So I'm very, very grateful for that redirection, even though it's not something I would have ultimately selected for myself. Um, but yes, I worked in Peru for a year and now I've worked in Costa Rica for the for the last year, pretty much most of the last year.

SPEAKER_00 3:22

And so what are you seeing happening in this world now? Because I know being a therapist that what's happening is it's finally the the plant medicines and the psychedelics are starting to gain credibility and they're being taken out of the darkness. And and you're you've been you've been doing this with the Shipebo healers for you know for a very, very long time. And now I think that there are different groups of people who are starting to use the medicine and try the medicine. And I think people come to it for a number of different reasons, whether it's spiritual or whether it's therapeutic or you know, recreational. So and and and what are you seeing happening in that world?

SPEAKER_01 3:59

Certainly, the psychedelic renaissance is alive and well, and at the moment science seems to be leading the way because of the results that organizations like MAPS and people such as them are having with these the trials, the clinical trials for the use of psychedelics with specific PTSD, depression, anxiety. And there is a rising tide of mental illness, you know, we are a sick society, and these these medicines can be helpful. So I definitely see the emergence of them as a positive thing, and there's a huge therapeutic application for psychedelics and for plant medicines. And sometimes people keep those things very separate, and sometimes there is an inevitable crossover, but in those terms, I mean. But I do feel, I mean, as Tim Leary was saying it since the 60s, 70s, that set and setting are so critically important in the way that these things are used, you know. So I have a long-standing history now with with ayahuasca, and I've kind of on paper inadvertently become a bit of a walking cliche of an investment banker turned yoga teacher drinking ayahuasca and on some form of spiritual path. You know, I sound quite annoying on paper, and I it keeps me humble in realizing that there is this cliche associated with the next thing that's going to save the world and the next thing that can be the panacea. And there is no such thing, and yet these medicines enable us to have true realization. You know, I feel like so much of the work of ceremony is to sit with oneself in the dark with our life experiences and to hold what the capacity of to increase our own capacity to hold our own suffering ultimately, you know, and with that capacity comes this increased sense of self and this grounding and the seat of oneself that can then be carried forth and we can hold steady to um what is needed in the world. So I I see the psychedelic revolution as being timely. I don't think it's any coincidence that some of these medicines are coming out of the jungle and spreading far and wide. And equally, I think I said this to you last time we spoke that there's a very valuable baby and more and more murky bath water the more this this revolution comes to pass. You know, something can now be commodified, there's a value to it, people want to invest, people are rushing to take psychedelics and thinking that everything's magically going to be better as a result. And I truly don't believe that I've ever gotten rid of or fixed a single one of my own neuroses or my problems in all these years of drinking medicine, because it doesn't, that's not really the point for me. It's actually just this this understanding that the more we come to know, because under brain scans with psychedelics, you know, there's this all this idea that when we take psychedelics, we are experiencing this heightened brain activity and all this big trip that we're on. But actually, there's not particular more brain activity, but more brain interconnection. So in a normal waking state, it's just the peripheral parts of the brain within each um part of the brain is speaking within itself. Whereas under the influence of psychedelics, in parts of the brain that don't typically connect are connecting on a far more um recurrent basis. And so you can see on these brain scan imagery, it's so stark the contrast between a normal waking state and a psychedelic state. And so then this big giant cliche of you're connecting to yourself, it sounds can sound trite, but actually physiologically that's exactly what's happening. And so we do come to know ourselves better, and we do come to see that we are a part of something beyond ourselves, and that's so important because this culture of the cult of the individual that's been created with the capitalist economy that we all live in has done us a great disservice of separating mind from body and separating individual from environment and separating one from another, and that we're we are encouraged to live to strive solely for ourselves and maybe our own loved ones, but not to care about other people in a genuine way. And I think what the psychedelics enable us to do is to realize that we're all a part of the web of life, you know, and the tapestry of whatever this is that we're all up to here. And I don't pretend to have the answers, but I I I feel with me, with I Drink Ayahuasca, is I've never had the big Gabo Matea who I've studied with. He calls the big trips, the blockbuster trips, the big enchilada. And I've actually never had that experience. But for me, the profundity of this path is this it's a cellular lucidity, it's a real clarity of understanding that I'm a part of something bigger than I can understand. And that that awe, that sense of wonder is enough for me to realize that this is the value of psychedelic medicine, as far as I'm concerned, that it's this holding our own capacity, increasing our own capacity to hold ourselves, I guess.

SPEAKER_00 8:24

So, how does the process unfold? If you were to take someone through this and explain to someone what it is that they're going to experience from an ayahuasca ceremony?

SPEAKER_01 8:33

Yeah, from a psychological, yeah. So the the dietary, the physical diet that we undertake, the abstaining from sex, the abstaining from alcohol, abstaining from um too much social media, all these dense energetics that we are so accustomed to in the in the modern world, the more we can clear those out, then the subtlety, the subtle body start to awaken and they start to go deeper through how ayahuasca can penetrate. So, and the mental body, you know, the mental the so many of us have so little discipline of the mind and so little my practice of mindfulness, we are ultimately practicing mindlessness the most of the time. And so people often find in ceremony that they'll they'll kind of hit against their thoughts and they just can't, it can become a mental purge sometimes. This racing thought can actually be a clearing of the mind, but often it is just this the the the fortress of thought that we have confined ourselves in, most of us as modern-day humans with devices and stimulation at every turn is it's hard to penetrate. So the more practice of meditation, of calming oneself, of coming to stillness that we can cultivate, the more benefit we will get from the process because the more able we're therefore able to be with what's what's occurring. Um, so yes, the preparation is so important. And so many people get such benefit from the preparation before they consume anything, you know, and that just that, just taking your Instagram away, just removing yourself from mass media as much as you can and clearing the diet, eating less meat, eating less sugar, you know, less stimulants, less caffeine, these things, getting it. Precisely, pharmaceuticals, exactly. And and again, everything people come here with kind of bags of supplements that they think are just not important. They can continue to take their herbal supplements, but everything has an impact. Everything you're consuming is affecting your physiology in some way, and we're just so accustomed to it, and as I say, so densely polluted, tend to be on the physical level that we don't realize how um how much obstruction we put in the way of these subtle energetics of plants. Because the plants are they are very subtle in their energetics and they're they're incredible in what they can offer, but they can't do the work for us.

SPEAKER_00 10:33

Well, and Sephora, who who is my daughter who came with me and did this with me, is a plant person. She's called the seed hunters. She works with seeds. And she said to me right after the first ceremony, she said, Mama, this is so amazing. She said, We think we're so brilliant, and the Western medicine is so brilliant. But she said, You ingest this plant and it goes into your body. And it and it's essentially a diagnostic because what people talk about is that the plant teaches you whatever it is that you need to know.

SPEAKER_01 10:59

So and the plants, yeah, they are incredible. And most, a huge percentage of modern pharmaceutical drugs are analogues of Amazonian plants, you know. So there's a reason that we should be listening to the indigenous people of the Amazon who tell us that these plants are master healers. There's there's a reason they have a knowledge, they have an understanding that's old, so much older than we can conceive of in the way in which we pass down tradition. You know, tradition is the memory of a culture, and they have such long-standing traditions, and there's a way, there's a reason that the things are done in the way they are. Um and we've lost so much of that in the in the West. It's not even West of here, it's it's in modern civilization, you know, capitalist economy has has deprived us of so much of that traditional reciprocity with plants, just reaching this tipping point culturally of okay, we have to start to recalibrate and to come back around, otherwise, you know, bye-bye human species, potentially only hope.

SPEAKER_00 12:01

Yeah. And I think just look yeah, I think just looking at it from a mental health perspective, that a lot of the pharmaceuticals just mask they're palliative and they just mask what it is that the people are experiencing. And I think that that psychedelics, that these psychedelics really have the potential to be curative as opposed to to palliative.

SPEAKER_01 12:19

Yes, yes. The psychedelics, along with the work of of committing to that process, you know, I think that it's so important that both things go hand in hand, the set, the setting, the preparation, the integration, you know, people come back to the other.

SPEAKER_00 12:33

Well speak a little bit about integration because that's important. And I know that you're a devotee of Gabor Mate. And I know that you've you've worked with internal family systems and you've done EMDR.

SPEAKER_01 12:43

So how do you how does one integrate after they've they've taken the medicine or so I think one must be prepared for disintegration to happen first, to disintegrate in a lot of ways and to be willing to let things fall apart.

SPEAKER_00 12:56

And it's also not just up to the medicine. I was reading one of your blogs and you quote Graham Hancock, who says that it's not the drug, it's not the ayahuasca. I I forget what the rest of the quote is. Is it is it from Rick Doblin, you mean?

SPEAKER_01 13:09

On my on my website?

SPEAKER_00 13:10

No, no, no, from from Graham Hancock. He was he wrote about him in one of your blogs, and he says that it's not just the ayahuasca, it's it's how you integrate the ayahuasca into your life and what you do. That yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:21

Yeah, absolutely. And Rick Doblin, that's because the quote I was thinking of is on my website of um Rick said it's not it's not about the substance, it's about the therapy that the substance helps make more effective. And I thought that was so true. It's like, yes, he sees that with MDMA, you know, he's so long um standing and so forward thinking in his, and he's well aware that the substances themselves are not enough, and they won't, they won't, they won't do it on their own. But psychedelic assisted psychotherapy or psychedelic assisted integration practices, all of these things are they are providing tools and ways in which we can come to a more clarity of consciousness and and a better sense of ourselves. And I think that's people are really waking up to the fact that that's needed, you know, and how how simple and yet how complicated we've made it, it how simple it is and how complicated we've made it, you know.

SPEAKER_00 14:09

But I think it does provide you an opportunity to just to just step out of your own world and give you another perspective. And I think that unless you have that, that there's really no way of understanding a difference and and a capacity for doing a paradigm shift. So yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:24

And to have the awe, you know, the wonder that's instilled in the process, definitely. Like I, as I say, my experiences have never been, you know, people talk about the big visions or they meet different entities or they're into outer space and they have surgery from the aliens, they meet Jesus, you know, these are visions that people have, you know, and that's never been my experience. And I'd be lying if I said I didn't quite want that, at least once, just know what it's like, you know. But for me, it's this people always say to me, Well, how come you've kept coming back so many times? You know, why are you still doing this? But because again, that's not the point, is these these big visions that they're lovely, but they're they're not going to do the work for you of day-to-day integration and living the understanding that you come to to um to see by this process. And so, um, yeah, for me, it's always been just understanding that the the very compacted, you know, we have this, I like to say the geology of ourselves, these rock formations of habit and personality and character traits, and we've been reinforcing and reinforcing and reinforcing for you know 20, 30, 40, 50 years by the time we come to these medicines, and they start to untangle that, they just start to create a bit more space and a new way of potentially seeing ourselves or understanding our experiences. And Gabble's work is so much about early childhood experience and how that sets the stage, you know, first three years of life, and even in the in the womb, again, we we are these creatures of movement, of gestation, and we it's a chemical cocktail that we're in. So if your mother was hugely stressed during her pregnancy, you that imprint's in you, you know, they can they can scan newborn infants, the brains, and know whose mothers were stressed in pregnancy and whose weren't. It's no coincidence. And the ACE studies, the end of adverse childhood experience studies are just so telling and how they see that the more traumatic events happen to young children, the the more likely they are to have all sorts of pathology later in life. And it's not surprising. You know, Gabor talks about that we were kind of all making all this fuss about reinventing the wheel of basically coming to determine that if you treat children well, they'll be all right. If you love them well, they'll be all right. And if you don't, then they're gonna have problems, you know. And it's like, yeah, no shit. Like what but it we've kind of complicated things to such an extent that this now has to be scientifically proven. Um, and it's this people sometimes don't understand the kind of the attunement and the care that is. I just see in this work so many people not having this loving, caring attunement from uh early infancy and how necessary that is, right? And it's the same analogy of if a newborn infant is crying, the mother picks up the baby and soothes the baby, but the mother doesn't get attached to the infant's pain unless the mother herself is very stressed and doesn't know how to regulate herself, and so she gets panicked by the infant's suffering. But a mother who is attuned, who is who is stable, co-regulates the baby because you you're sympathetic to the baby's suffering, but you're not um indulging the suffering. You're regulated, you know that actually they're fine, they're healthy, they're gonna be just fine. And that's the regulation that so many people were never given consistently through their lives. So it doesn't have to be some big, huge trauma that happens, although that does happen to a shocking amount of people, but just this consistent nurturance that was missing for so many people, and then they come here and I just see the more that I'm able to give that to people, and it's I don't do the work for them, I just am able to anchor them through the process, yeah. And that's what they need, and it's this and I think for me, hearing the stories that I do through this work, it's it's just tragic what people go through in their lives, and I couldn't do this work if I didn't have that regulatory effect uh of faith. You know, I don't I don't even like the word spirituality, it's annoying, and now it's become yet another commodity of something else that we can sell. But having faith in something far bigger than me and so far beyond myself, and that ultimately there is a everything is resolved in some way or other, and people can pick that apart as much as they like and say, but you know, this can't the world can't be perfect if this is happening and this is happening, and I just I see that it's bigger than that, and then I'm I don't who am I to say how it should be? And so that faith and that groundedness of I'm not gonna enjoy my little human incarnation sometimes, and I'm gonna fight with it and I'm gonna wrestle with my own realities, fine. And yet, I trust that there's something bigger, you know, and I'm a part of whatever that is, and okay, here I am, and so that I can regulate through that, and then I can through that regulation, I can regulate, you know, it's this, it's it's kind of this um oh, what was that? In inception, you know, this kind of layering when layering of I don't know, it's trippy, it's super trippy, but it's wonderful as well.

SPEAKER_00 18:48

So speaking of so when someone comes in, bringing it back down to the when somebody comes in and they have a quote unquote bad trip, this is what people talk to me about. When I came back and I told people what I have done, they said, Oh, I'm terrible so terrified of doing that, because what if I have a bad trip? And you know, my understanding of that, and my my perception of that is that a bad trip is just, you know, it's a I don't know if you've read the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It talks about karma because it's Tibet. But people bump into veils, and if they're terrified of going through the veil, then they come back and they're incarnated, they're reincarnated at a very, very low level. If they go through the veil, they get incarnated to the next higher level. And I think that life is is like that as well. I think that you hit one veil after another, and when somebody has a bad trip, I think that they're just hitting a veil. And if you can hold them and you can help them get through that veil, that they will be more free and less anxious and less depressed and less Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:41

What do you think? I I agree. I think it's I think a there is no such thing as a bad trip. I think a bad trip is just a difficult experience that was not well held. Um, and I've in my life been fortunate that my experiences have generally been pretty stable and my mind has been very much my friend. But I have had an experience once where I accidentally took a too strong a dose and I was actually at a music festival and had it was the and it was actually I heard Timothy Leary talk about taking LSD as like taking swallowing a thousand encyclopedias because suddenly you're receiving information on so many levels, right? And it's so true that I just had this rush of sensitivity, and I was looking around at everybody in this crowd, and I was sort of seeing, okay, you're you look like you're having a great time, but I can see all of your fear, all of your pain, all of your vulnerability, and it was just this the masks of kind of were falling, or it was sort of this, it was like a horror show, and I saw what could happen in that moment if if I didn't have an anchoring of a meditation practice, a breath practice. And I so I went back to my tent and I was just grounding myself and breathing through it, and I knew I would be okay. And again, it's that understanding that I know that I'm safe and I know I'm okay. But if you don't have that regulatory capacity, you don't have anything to hold on to, then you'll you're often running to crazy town and you feel like you're never coming back, and then they would be, yeah, terrifying. I could see how that it was really valuable for me to have that experience of seeing where that switch could happen and being able to bring myself back, but um understanding that so many people don't have that capacity because again, we don't have practices.

SPEAKER_00 21:08

And I think that that's the value of a proper integration after you have you have experienced the medicine.

SPEAKER_01 21:13

Yeah, yeah, because not if you're and even during ceremony, yeah. Because, like you were saying, if people have very difficult difficult experiences here in ceremony, that's my role is to sit with them. I can't do the work for them, but I can sit with them through that moment and I can hold their hand and I can breathe. And the more I have that deep, steady breath and that abiding presence, then they can it's a uh they talk about you know the vagus nerve, there's co-regulation, they talk about it with somatic experiencing of that co-regulatory capacity. And again, that's what the mother does for the child is in that groundedness, in that presence, in that in that centering, it's an energetic resonance that somebody feels safe, and then they can so this is why I think things like MDMA sometimes are a better medicine depending on what the person is working with. So sometimes people will come here in such a state of hypervigilance because of the things. That happened in their lives. And sitting alone in the dark with ayahuasca isn't necessarily going to be that helpful for someone who is terrified, who is just on high alert and has had too much, too much, too much, whose nervous system is just on high alert at all times. It's not necessarily going to be helpful. So something like MDMA, where it upregulates your prefrontal cortex, which is your self-regulatory capacity, and downregulates your fear response if you're amygdala, that medicine is so much better suited to somebody who is just stuck, just frozen by the trauma of their lives, you know. And also MDMA assisted therapy tends to have two people with one client. And so you have a huge amount of holding. Whereas ayahuasca is tends to be kind of a more personal introvert process, in introspective process in alone in the dark.

SPEAKER_00 22:44

You describe Peru in I was reading your blogs before I before I came on with you today. And you were describing Peru. It's a wonderful, wonderful land. And I but a lot more difficult environment, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 22:55

But I love the Amazon. Oh my god. And to go and drink ayahuasca there was I mean, the Amazon is hilarious, and it is it's gnarly, it is it's carnivorous, it wants to eat you, it will consume all your nutrients happily if you stand still for long enough. You know, it's it's and I loved it for that. I mean, it was disgusting. I'm English and I don't deal with that kind of climate at all. But I had all these different skin funguses, and I had an insect lay eggs in my third, and I had all this like relentless because I was so sweaty all the time. I became like a walking science experiment with just all this skin abnormal. Oh, it was horrendous, but amazing because of just the it's so alive, you know. And I going from from the Amazon back to London, it that was shocking to me because it was like this is really they're talking about the concrete jungle, and it really is, you know, it's that all the different kinds of organisms coexisting and intertwining and all the kind of chaos and how it all interrelates somehow and it all kind of still sustains itself. It's it's exactly the same, but the Amazon is so alive that it gives so much energy.

SPEAKER_00 23:54

Well, you were talking about Rick Doblin and MDMA, and of course, he is the person who is trying to bring um psychedelics from out of the shadows and and and you know pass them through the FDA and make them legal. And I wonder because MDMA is a synthetic, it really, and it really is not an hallucinogen, why it is that he chose that particular drug to to to to you know to move the acceptance of psychedelics.

SPEAKER_01 24:20

I I would imagine, because I think some people don't like to consider MDMA as a psychedelic, but I agree. I think it is it's really important um to promote the use of that of that medicine because it's so good for trauma. There's a TED talk called Is MDMA Psychiatry's Antibiotic? And it's by Ben Sessa, who works, he's a British guy, he works out of Bristol, and he talks about exactly as I described earlier: the MDMA, the typical um trauma is a an upregulation of your fear response and a downregulation of your self-regulatory capacity. And trauma, sorry, MDMA, he says in the in the TED talk, if you could create a drug to combat trauma, it would be MDMA because it does the exact opposite of that. So it upregulates your self-regulatory capacity, your prefrontal, and it downregulates your amygdala, which is your fear response. And so the two things just sort of slop together, and then it's it doesn't fix everything. But he says it's like putting on a life jacket to deal with your trauma. And again, as I described with ayahuasca, sometimes I feel like it's an incredible medicine, and just the insight that it can give is extraordinary. And yet you are sitting alone in the dark with whatever comes up for you, and for some people that's just not it's not helpful. And I know with with MGMA, with veterans, they're achieving huge, and we had a veteran retreat here last year, which was incredible to be able to be part of that work. But for some people, or a lot of people, even as a starting point, I think MGMA is a really beautiful medicine to just start to see how substances can be really helpful in um in healing. Again, it's another term that just gets thrown around and overused, but healing is to make whole, and so many of us are so fragmented. Like EMDR, I found huge benefit from, and that's a very, very simple technology, but just amazing in how it allows the brain to recalculate and recalibrate scattered memory. You know, there's there's so many ways in, and that's why I love these therapies that I did talking therapy for years and and achieved some result and good result from that, but it's this sort of living from here to here, it's mind to mouth forever. And the body holds the imprint of everything. All of our lived experiences are held in the body, and psychedelics enable us to get more into the kind of the viscera of what's happened, and somatic techniques are a way to help to integrate them. So moving as why I open a fitness yoga and fitness studio, you know, moving things through the body is so important. That the shaking, the tremoring that happens with ayahuasca and that we can induce in a in a normal sober state is is so therapeutic for the body. So Peter Levine's work talks about um, well, there's there's an approach called TRE, which is trauma-release exercises, which is essentially this shaking. But Peter Levine speaks a lot about this: that any mammal that's pursued by a predator, once it's safe, it will tremor, it will shake to discharge that um the stress response in the moment, you know, to just deal with it in the moment, to not be holding that imprint of the charge within the body. Um and that happens a lot with people with psychedelics, especially with ayahuasca. And I really see it as this kind of like you get a rope and you tight it, you wind it tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter. And again, it's over years and years and years of holding what we don't allow ourselves to fully integrate. And once we start shaking, it's this once you let that rope go, it's just gonna for years, really. When I drink ayahuasca, I'm shaking like a leaf every time. And it it's it's it enables that discharge, you know. We're so wound up, we're so everybody just wants to just relax a little bit more, you know, and we're just we carry so much as humans that we keep so much, we stuff it away in the body, and then we get sick and we don't see that this these connections, mind and body are just they're so aligned and always have been, you know.

SPEAKER_00 28:03

What do you think about people who are microdosing any of these drugs, whether it's ayahuasca or osilocybin?

SPEAKER_01 28:10

I don't know an awful lot about microdosing. I've tried it a couple of times, um, and I think for me it was it just it gave me a heightened sensitivity at a time when I had some very difficult things happening, so it wasn't the right time. Again, having that knowing it's the right time in your life to be able to do that kind of work is is important. But I have a lot of friends that swear by microdosing, they have huge, wonderful results from it. But I do feel like for a really therapeutic application, the macrodosing is is is the way to really lean in and to go deep with oneself, sort of, and then potentially microdosing beyond that to sort of maintain that tuning in with the plant and the effect, but or the substance in its effect. But um, yeah, most people I know that with microdosing it's it's psilocybin, and so I guess mushrooms are not actually even plants, they are aliens. They're amazing, whatever they are, but they're not plants and they're not humans. Um yeah, I I would say if it's therapeutic that you're looking for, then to to to go take the bigger doses and go through that ceremonial process and sit with that medicine for a period of time first. But again, I don't know an awful lot about microdosing, so I don't want to.

SPEAKER_00 29:29

And you were also talking about set and setting before. And I know that there is a huge movement that is it's called psychedelic tourism. And there are these people that are setting up places where supposedly um, you know, temples where people can take ayahuasca and they'll bring in a supposed Shipebo healer. I don't know if it's really true or not, but uh, you know, there's people in Detroit and people in Miami Beach and people that are just that are just catering to what do you think about that?

SPEAKER_01 29:59

Yeah, yeah. I've had that in the UK. People asking me, you know, do you have any recommendations? Oh, my so-and-so is having a ceremony at their house. Do you think I should go? And I'm not I, you know, I never want to disparage people that I've never met, but I equally would never recommend going to someone that you're not so sure is equipped, you know, especially something like ayahuasca. That really the cosmology of the Shibibo is really intricate and is fascinating, you know, and I I don't know it well enough to do it much justice, but I understand that I don't know, and I would never dream of serving somebody ayahuasca and think that I could I could hold them through that process because sometimes, most of the time, probably wouldn't have necessarily an adverse effect, but you are opening up a level of sensitivity and opening up a world of experience that if you're not really rooted in yourself and you haven't learned how to navigate within that space and done your own initiations of the Shepubo trained for years, years and years and years in isolation in the jungle or working with diets to dieting specific plants because it isn't just ayahuasca that they work with in ceremony, they are bringing in the energetics of all sorts of plants that they themselves have developed relationships with, and kind of they like to think of it, they have it in their like tool belt or their toolboxes, and whatever they see is necessary in front of them with it with a client, that's the plant that they're going to be offering and be singing out to you to um again, it's a subtle energetic, so your subtle body. They're when they see you in ceremony, they are not seeing you sitting there in front of them, they're seeing your energetic body, so they'll see where those blockages occur. And Eastern mysticism has been speaking. This Chinese medicine talks about things being the obstruction of the blockage of qi, Ayurveda talks about the same thing that we have these blockages in the system, which is what causes disease or disharmony or mental illness, whatever it is, that these everything that we believe about ourselves to be a problem is an adaptation. You know, at some point it served a purpose, at some point it was intelligent, but the human organism is infinitely intelligent. And I think this is another part of the process is that people kind of outsource their own potential to ayahuasca and that the plant does all the work for them, but we don't realize that what happens is we drink this plant, and what is activated is our own potential, that this human animal, this we're so used to kind of walking around in these meat suits that we don't appreciate that uh just inexplicable miracle that this human vehicle is. You know, we're just sort of so used to being in it that we we could never even hope to conceive of some kind of technology that is this human experience. So honoring that, you know, honoring our own potential and allowing the plants to teach us through that own potential is is again it's empowering, it's understanding that it's it's you who does the work.

SPEAKER_00 32:40

And aren't there healers that take the medicine themselves when they're sitting in front of someone who's who's yes? So whether the Shipibo tradition Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:48

So traditionally the Shipibo didn't drink, the healers didn't, the healers were the only ones that sorry traditionally with Shipibo ceremonies, the healers were the only ones that drank medicine. The clients wouldn't drink, they just come and they receive the work because they don't need you to drink to be able to see you in the way that they do once they consume the medicines.

SPEAKER_00 33:08

So yes, that's that's very true. And another practical question, because I as you said, when you do this and you come back into the real world, you know, there are people that are looking at you, and one of the things that everybody said to me is, Oh my god, you're gonna go down this road and now you're gonna start doing this, and you're becoming gonna become addicted to psychedelics. So, but isn't it true that that that the more you take, the less you need?

SPEAKER_01 33:29

Yes, yeah, and also the kind of the less ayahuasca is not a particularly pleasant process, you know. It often brings us very much back to our visceral, carnal, animal bodies, you know, a lot of shitting, a lot of throwing up, a lot of very much being in the in the meat of human existence. So I don't see it as something that is gonna be particularly addictive. Um there's so many ways of sexuality. That's yeah, there's just ways in which we you know, the Eastern traditions have been telling us for thousands of years that we can regulate our own physiology, and we have stopped listening long ago, and so yeah, we are addicted to sex, we're addicted to our phones, we're addicted to food, to whatever it is that we shove down to kind of suppress and depress. Even the word depression is this rising tide of depression on a global scale, and to depress something means to push it down, and it's just the the simple fact of the more we try and hide from ourselves and deny ourselves and resist what is uncomfortable in ourselves, we perpetuate our own suffering so completely, but just not being able to hold our own pain. And that's what ceremony and the work of psychedelics really gives us again is this the capacity to start to hold our own experiences and be less afraid of them and stop running from them because what we resist persists and what we push against we're stuck to forever. And so we're just perpetuating all of us and and and ricocheting around our lives and just finding all these ways in which to distract ourselves from. I know I say we retreat into the mind because the moment is often challenging, and what the psychedelics enable us to do is to connect to ourselves and to hold our own reality a little bit better. Um, yeah, and I I you know, I Gabel wrote a book called When the Body Says No, the Cost of Hidden Stress. And I always use this analogy with groups is that you know, if you trip over in the street or you're on your bicycle and someone nearly hits you, you get this surge of adrenaline or you feel the stress response, the charge in the body. And we don't appreciate that all the constant nagging anxiety and worry and overthinking and analysis that we're all doing to ourselves every minute of every day, most of us, that is having an impact on your physiology at all times. That is stress, you know. And we it's against this analogy of the frog in water that if you put a frog into boiling water, it's gonna jump out immediately. If you put it into cold water and heat it, it's gonna boil alive. And so many of us are at boiling point with the stresses in our lives, but we just have they've accumulated over so many years that we don't realize the impact that they're having. And so this pairing back, the work of psychedelics is to turn in, to pair back, to just retreat. You know, we go into retreat, to retreat from our lives and to create a space in which we can have a look and just sit with ourselves. And again, this people speaking about the imprint of peace that comes, and that's oh, nothing really profound happened, but I felt really peaceful. And I don't know what we're all thinking is supposed to be happening, but if we can just imprint a bit more peace, you know, a bit more tranquility, a bit more love for ourselves, and love not being this mushy gushy, kissy, kissy love, I love you, but it's an enduring, tenacious capacity to care about ourselves and other people, and that that's that's what's needed, you know. That's love is all you need. Beatles have been saying it.

SPEAKER_00 36:46

So we only have a couple of minutes left, and you have given the you have given psychedelics the elegance and the dignity that I knew that you would, and I thank you very much. If someone wants to get in touch with you or they want to see, they want to learn about the work that you're doing, how do they get in touch with you?

SPEAKER_01 37:00

Or how do they um so my website is the easiest way at this point? It's www.jessica-francis.com. Um yeah, or on Instagram, my handle is jessica.mary Ann M-A-R-Y-A-N-N-E. I'm not a very prolific Instagram user, but I was always happy to receive questions or if people need any support.

SPEAKER_00 37:24

Thank you, thank you, thank you so much, Lisa. Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_01 37:28

There's so many things I thought about saying, and I don't know if I said any of them, but I just was rambling away, and hopefully some of that was useful.

SPEAKER_00 37:34

We'll have to do this again. Yeah, I hope so. An open invitation to do this again. Thank you, thank you for my experience with you, and thank you for doing this. That's a pleasure.

SPEAKER_01 37:44

Really, really so much love for you, Louise. Thank you so much. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 37:47

Bye-bye.

SPEAKER_01 37:47

Have a beautiful day. Thank you. Bye. Bye.

SPEAKER_00 37:52

Thank you for joining us on Soft and Savage. If you enjoyed our conversations, please subscribe and press like. And if you have any comments that you'd like to share with us, we would appreciate that.