091 Shannon Duncan: Author and Entrepreneur

Shannon Duncan is an entrepreneur-turned-author and advocate for emotional healing, best known for his books on mindfulness and trauma recovery. His early success as a multimillionaire entrepreneur led him to the realization that material wealth could not provide lasting fulfillment. This personal journey inspired him to write Present Moment Awareness, which offers practical tools for living mindfully and cultivating inner peace.

Duncan’s latest book, Coming Full Circle, reflects his exploration of trauma healing through psychedelic experiences. Drawing from his own multi-year journey, he candidly shares insights into the challenges and breakthroughs involved in using psychedelics for deep emotional work. His writing is grounded not just in personal anecdotes but also in a desire to provide clear, realistic guidance on the potential and limitations of these treatments, especially as interest in psychedelics grows.

In this conversation, Cam and Shannon explore the profound impact of psychedelics on healing trauma and personal growth. They discuss the importance of finding qualified guides, the different types of psychedelic experiences, and the necessity of preparation and integration in the healing process. Shannon shares his personal journey with psychedelics, emphasizing that while they can facilitate healing, true transformation requires commitment and the right support. The conversation also addresses the challenges within the psychedelic renaissance, including misinformation and the role of social media influencers.

Shannon's info:
Order Coming Full Circle on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1959254049
Visit Shannon's Website: https://shannonduncan.com/
Follow him on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shannonduncan_author/

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Transcript

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Today on the Trip Sitting podcast, we welcome Shannon Duncan, who is an entrepreneur and author of Present Moment Awareness and his latest book, Coming Full Circle. I had the pleasure of reading Coming Full Circle, and it offers a really powerful blend of memoir and practical insights into healing trauma with psychedelics. Through his own journey, he unpacks the risks, rewards, and deep emotional work involved in using psychedelics to heal.

So get ready for a conversation that explores transformation, vulnerability, and the path to true emotional healing.

Welcome to the podcast and I appreciate you coming on today. I've been really looking forward to this. Yeah, me too. I want to start by going way, way, way back, if you wouldn't mind, to your first book, Present Moment Awareness. And I'd love for you to talk a little bit about that and what inspired that book. And then we'll kind of move on to more present day stuff.

sure. Yeah, boy, present moment awareness last year had its 20th anniversary, which I guess I'm old enough to have a book that old, but it doesn't seem like I should be.

And that was a book at a time where I was discovering self-awareness. was discovering what it means to be more present in the moment and being, know, and so was at that time Eckhart Tolle's book, The Power of Now was really big and I enjoyed it, but I'm such a pragmatic person. wanted something just kind of what's the most basic this could be made? What's the most basic?

example of being present to the moment could you summon and that's kind of where that book came together. Originally it was designed around you know before we before we had phones with apps and stuff like that we just had phones and pagers as regular cell phones with buttons so you couldn't run apps and so I had this little device made called the focus tool and you'd wear it kind of like a pager and it would go off randomly between 20 minutes and two hours apart and when it did you would do the exercises from the book just

you know, kind of like the meditation we just did, you just settle in and notice what you're perceiving. And that was pretty cool. And people seem to really like that. just recently had somebody write me and ask me if I had the old instructions for it, because they still had theirs and it still worked. And I that was pretty cool with the focus tools and app now. Anyway, so it started off as the book, Present Moment Awareness, started off as the instruction manual for the focus tool.

And it just kept growing until it just kind of became its own thing, became its own book. And I originally released it on Amazon and it hit 16th on Amazon very briefly, very briefly. before I knew what a big deal that was, that was a big deal. know, was that when Amazon was actually just books. I can't remember. wasn't 20 years ago. I think they had other stuff and not like they do now.

But anyway, yeah, so it peaked at like 16th on Amazon, was cool. Then plummeted after that, as most books do. But yeah, that was a cool thing. I got to travel around quite a bit. and I originally self-published, but then Eckhart Tolle's publisher approached me and asked me if they could take it over. And I'm like, all right. I didn't really know what that would mean, but then they...

Got me into some opportunities for speaking and presenting and doing book signings and all that kind of stuff. Did you ever get to meet Eckhart Tolle? No, I never did. That would have cool. That would have been cool. Did you ever ask? Or it would be boring, I'm not sure. Yeah, sure. Just being, being present, being still, being very now. So did you find like when you were, I mean,

I assume read the power of now and then also in the creating of present moment awareness, like what shifted for you in that time when it comes to your own healing?

You know, it was early in my healing process. I was working in therapy and I was looking at other modalities to see what that would help. you know, I had quite a bit of childhood trauma weighing me down. And some of it I was aware of and some of it I wasn't yet aware of. And some of it had been locked away pretty powerfully and didn't come out until many, many years later. But I found practicing

bringing myself back into the moment, like noticing when I'm checked out, noticing when I'm in my head, noticing when I'm wrapped up in some emotional turmoil of some kind or another, some emotional distraction, bringing myself back just over and over and over again, it was a really powerful practice for just being aware so that my emotions, whatever emotions were being turned up in the moment, because I was triggered a lot back in those days, weren't necessarily reality.

You know, I could, I could have a better perspective on what I was feeling and how I was perceiving. And so that was, that was really the value of it for me at that time. Gotcha. So then fast forwarding a little bit, when did you really start diving deep into like the healing of, you know, some of that past trauma and, doing, doing that work and also how did psychedelics play a role in.

that once you started going down that path? That's a great question. So during that time, I was experimenting with psychedelics a little bit before that, before writing Present Moment Awareness. And I talk about that in the book a bit. Somebody introduced me to LSD, and I got to see the really powerful, internal reflective nature of insights and how amazing those could be.

And like so many, I kind of thought that insights were what you get from psychedelics. That's how you heal, that's how things get better as you get these insights of understanding and you see yourself from a different perspective or your life problems from a different perspective. And it was helpful and it was healing, but it didn't ultimately change anything. And so, you know, after present moment awareness was out for a while, I had some life changes happen and I just sank into a deep funk.

A deep depression for many years, I really struggled with that. I struggled with suicidality. I, you know, I worked with psychedelics trying to help myself. And I would take them and I would wonder, okay, what new insights am I going to get now that might help me? And, know, and I was always focused on that. And it wasn't until about five, almost six years now, six years in November, I got introduced to,

I had wanted to do DMT for a long time. You know, I heard you can see these elves and you travel to fantastic lands. And I thought, holy crap, that sounds amazing. I want to try that. And I heard about a guy doing DMT up in the San Francisco Bay area offering group settings. And so I signed up and I went to do it. And when I got there, it was much more formal than I was expecting. You know, we had these classes on how to breathe through this little pipe and there were six

participants there, but we would each go in separately to have our experiences. but we were kind of together before and talking about our intentions and, and I didn't know at the time that the DMT they were talking about was five MEO DMT, which is a completely different drug, but it very, they're very commonly because they both have DMT in the name. get confused and I didn't know there were two things at that time. And so I went into have my experience with that and it just,

One, on some subconscious level, I knew something powerful was wanting to happen because I was feeling a lot of fear and I've never felt any fear before for doing any kind of psychedelics, even ginormous doses of like mushrooms or LSD. I could just always just jump in and go do it. And all of sudden my heart's racing and I'm thinking I might get up and run out of the room or maybe I'm going to throw up. I'm not sure what I'm going to do. I tell my guide, man, I'm really scared about this. And he put his hand on my chest and he just encouraged me to

And he said, me know when you're ready and took a couple minutes and got my shit together. And then I hit the pipe and as soon as it started hitting me, we're talking just milliseconds of time. knew that this wasn't what I thought it was. I accepted in that moment that, okay, this wasn't the elf DMT that I thought I was going to be doing. And I could feel like myself coming apart at a cellular level.

But really what I was feeling was my emotions opening up and the shit that I would always keep locked away inside started, started moving. And I had this intense burst of terror and then I was just gone. And when I came to, I was laying on my side and I was sobbing and I'm somebody that has a very hard time crying. And I was just sobbing like I've never known before. And my guide was there and he had a woman there helping with, and she just kind of snuggled up next to me and gave me some comfort and

That was the most cathartic thing I'd ever felt in my entire life. And it was from that experience, like, man, psychedelics can reach deep if you let them, if you have the right setting. And so I worked with that particular guide and we did a couple of years of me going up there eight hours away, once a month. We did a couple of years of me going up and doing monthly deep sessions. We worked with MDMA, we worked with mushrooms, we started layering in ketamine with those.

Usually on the way down after a while, we would do some five MEO on top of everything else as I'm coming down off the other stuff. And it was powerful. It was, I was moving this stuff that had never moved in therapy and never moved in typical psychedelic use. And that's really one of the things I wanted to share in coming full circle is there's this whole other realm of working with psychedelics that isn't about insights. Insights are putting your toes in the water compared to what's possible.

And if you're open and willing, you can go swimming in the ocean instead of just putting your toes in the water. And it's intense and it takes a lot. takes a lot of commitment to go through it, but it's the most rewarding thing I've ever done in my life. mean, my life and it's not just, didn't experience change. Like most people are like, I did psychedelics and it changed my life forever. You know, is this, it's, that's always out there. Right. And it's just like, well, people have a lot of big experiences and they feel like, well, this is all there is.

And they have no idea. And then they turn around and say, well, I'm to be a psychedelic guide now. And so the marketplace is just flooded with knuckleheads that have no idea what they're doing, but they really think they do. And so I put together Coming Full Circle to share what it looks like to actually facilitate authentic change, authentic change in how you operate at the most fundamental levels of who you are, how your body reacts to situations in your life before you're even consciously aware that they're starting to, starting to react.

It changes at that level. Just how you perceive is shifted, which is not going to happen with just insights. And so that's a big part of what I shared and coming full circle is that understanding. if somebody's thinking about approaching psychedelics to heal, they can have that in mind. So much incredible stuff that you just touched on, that we're going to dive deeper into. So.

The first thing that I want to touch on there is kind of regarding the different types of psychedelic experiences that people can have. And it's something that you talk about in the book, but I'd love for you to elaborate on what those types of experiences are and how they might even actually play with each other sometimes. Sure. Yeah. so, know, the, the, anybody that's just played around with, with psychedelics, maybe at a music festival or you're hanging out with friends or

you're burning man or camping, that's recreational, right? You're there to have a good time. And I have, and many people have had powerful insights come through, powerful understandings. Sometimes you don't know what's happening, but you break down and cry and you let something go a little bit and that can feel really good, a little bit parser. Powerful experiences can happen with the recreational use of psychedelics.

And it's just interesting. think, I think people that explore psychedelics to explore their own psyches, whether it's in a recreational setting or not, I think that they just become more more interesting people. So get more, more intricately connected. Interesting is a, is, is I think, I think a good word for it. I've certainly met some really interesting people in, in, in the fish lot. Well, sometimes they can get a little weird. Yeah, sometimes they can, they can.

Sometimes it can turn kind of pseudo spiritual or yeah, sometimes it can take on kind of a context and a narrative that gets really strange. But people that just kind of go in and then they just come back to their everyday life and they don't make big stories about it, but they reflect on what they experienced. I think that that that makes deeper, richer, more interesting humans than, than those that just have their life and this is what it's like, and this is what's true. And here we go. You know what mean?

Yeah. But, and then after recreational is, in the book, what I called expansive, expansive experiences. That's where you're going into it, intending to be expanded, like a spiritual experience. lot of, a lot of retreats are like this. And, sometimes they call them healing retreats, but they're, yeah, you know, reserve judgment on that, guess, but it's, expansive is just moving into a space that's bigger than your everyday self.

and you get to have these insights about yourself, these views of yourself from a higher perspective. And those can be life-changing, those can be very helpful. Sometimes those can be healing. Kind of intertwined with that is ceremonial use or ritual use, which there are cultures that have used various psychedelic substances in a ritual way for millennia, rites of passage. That all fits into expansive use.

You know, expensive use is going into it with an intention, not just of having a nice time, which usually you're planning to have a nice time. It's maybe a little challenging at times. It's the overall experience is meant to be positive and uplifting and good for you. that, you know, most psychedelic therapy fits into that. Most of what gets offered as psychedelic healing is that, and it is that because the person offering the facilitation, the guidance.

has never gone deep in themselves. So what they're offering is just what they know. And believe it or not, the space they hold really affects where you can go in that journey. And then beyond that is what I call medicine work. And medicine work is where you intentionally go into the dark and scary places, your own shadow realm, if you will, what Jung would have called the shadows, the shadow realm.

And you're confronting the difficult aspects of yourself with the sincere intention that you're helping yourself to heal. And in the book, I talk about how I reflect, I think of those wounded places within myself, those shadowed places within myself as younger aspects of myself. I kind of got their development arrested and they're kind of held separate from me largely, but sometimes they get triggered and then all their defense mechanisms come out and that's where the problems get caused, right?

Medicine work is about going down there and finding those places and not trying to get rid of them You're never trying to get rid of anything But that's all part of you and then you find this young wounded part of you and give them the support They needed when their wounding happened. Let them express. It's a somatic expression Let them express everything that they need to express and you find that as they express over time

They get more translucent. They get less solid, less real. They're the need for the defense mechanisms or diminishes. And eventually they just reabsorb into the whole of you. And they aren't this separate wounded thing anymore. And that's what real healing looks like. That sounds like parts work on steroids, like IFS. Yeah. know, IFS, some people seem to like it. My experience with people that have gone through it is they get way too cerebral. So they're up in their head with the

It's like it's the whole Buddhist thing of the finger pointing at the moon and you start focusing on the finger and not the moon itself. And you know, those, those mental images of these aspects of the self become the thing instead of actually working somatically in the body. And I've seen it happen again and again, you know, even people in journeys, they're talking, you know, they're talking up here in their head, you know, conceptualizing instead of being authentically in their body and letting things happen.

And so, yeah, I'm not the biggest fan of IFS. I think as a way to wade in and get familiar with your inner world, it's probably pretty good. Then people, it becomes almost dogmatic. They just get so distracted. Get wrapped up in the parts and like trying to figure it all out. are pointing at the thing, right? The concepts of the finger pointing at the moon and they get so focused on the concept that they're not actually in touch with their body.

which is the only way these parts can heal. IFS and healing and psychedelics are a little contraindicated is just from my perspective. Working with something like Hikomi or somatic body experiencing, that's more helpful, I think, because you're also in touch with those emotions, but you're observing and allowing them to open and express in your body and you're not making any externalized concepts about them. And that I find very, very helpful. Gotcha.

So within these different types of, I guess, states that you can experience, something that you also touch on that I really enjoyed reading about and just put like a good framework to it is the different types of facilitators or guides that you might come across and like what the different levels are for somebody who might be helping you through one of these psychedelic experiences.

Sure. Yeah, you know, there's, well there's trip sitters and hopefully a trip sitter is deeply experienced in whatever medicine they're sitting for. So, you know, like if they're sitting for people doing mushrooms, hopefully they've had some extensive trips of their own on mushrooms. So they can have an empathetic connection with the person they're sitting for and their job is just to keep that person comfortable and safe. And, know, if things get challenging, they can just help, you know, calm them down and keep them in the, keep them in the body and breathing and you know,

bring it back to a pleasant experience. There's facilitators that host groups and neither trip sitters nor facilitators are set up to purposely sit for people processing trauma, like real trauma. But unfortunately, a lot of these people weighed in thinking they can sit for anything and they cause a lot of problems, they do a lot of damage.

And so you can have facilitators that facilitate group experiences. And I know a lot of those kinds of people and, most of them realize that, okay, what we're doing is just give it's a psychedelic tourism. Really it's, you know, people are coming here to have psychedelic experiences together. And sometimes it gets challenging, but mostly it's very pleasant and I can hold space for all of that. And then there's like coaches, you know, you're working one-on-one with somebody, but your, your intentions are really around. God, I don't know what to do with my career or I can never find the right partner.

for a romantic connection and I just want to see my life and myself more clearly so maybe I can clean house a little bit and do better with that, you know, that kind of shit. Setting goals. You know, so I know people that, you know, do MDMA for that and they have a loyal client base and they'll love them for that, but they don't, don't serve people with trauma very specifically. And if they notice somebody seems to be emerging trauma, know, signs of trauma, then they refer them out. Yeah.

and then there's, so, you know, these are all my labels I put on it because there's nobody's really gone out. And usually if it's somebody works with psychedelics, they just work with psychedelics, you know, differentiate it. Right. But then there's psychedelic guides and that's where it can start getting deeper. My first guide would have fit into this. He wasn't really set up to work with trauma, but he did a pretty good job early on. But as things got deeper for me and we realized it was really, really intense, that's when I went and found what I call a medicine guide, somebody who's.

specifically working with trauma. And it's somebody who's had their own trauma and they've done deep work on it themselves. So they know what it is. They've done deep, deep work on psychedelics. They've trained under a mentor. They're educated about working with trauma and how it's stored in the body and how it's released from the body and what that looks like. And that's, that's my current guy that I've been working with the last few years. And, you know, that's a human being. just adore that holds all my secrets that,

You know, I've placed more trust in than I've ever placed in any human being in my life. And, yeah, we do amazing work together as it's really something. And so medicine guide is the one level and whether somebody is a licensed psychotherapist or not is not a indicator of if they should be working as a medicine guy. Cause there are a lot of people that are,

Licensed psychotherapist that I would never even send my worst enemy to to work through trauma Even if I really really didn't like that person. I wouldn't say I'm gonna get they're gonna get wounded. They're gonna they're gonna be harmed I Sit in on these some psychedelic facilitator groups like there's some monthly meetings where we get together and people talk and I'm just Sometimes I'm having to you know, push my jaw closed because I can't believe that the shit these people are saying

And it's just like, how are you facilitating? I don't care if you're a licensed therapist. You have no business sitting with psychedelics in this way because the shit you're saying is just nonsense. And that's one of the big things I really wanted people to understand with coming full circle is to one, understand what it looks like to actually heal with psychedelics, but two, to understand that there are a lot of well-intended, severely misguided people.

that think they know what they're talking about when they talk about psychedelics and healing with psychedelics. And I think they're a big shot because they're a guide that have no business doing this work. if I had to, if I just based on my own experience of moving through this population of guides, I would say 90 % of them have no business doing this in any way whatsoever. And even less than that, have any business sitting with people processing trauma.

There's just people go and they have these big experiences. And one of the first thing, if you've never had a guided psychedelic experience, one-on-one, one of the first things that happens, if you had a powerful feeling experiences, you come out of it and there's this glow and it reflects off of your guide. And you look at that guy and you just have such awe and gratitude. And for so many people, it's like, I want to be that guy. I want to be, I want to be like that. want somebody to look at me.

And that's the number one thing that brings people in to be psychedelic facilitators. The number one thing that is whether they'll admit it out loud or not, because everybody devolves into, I just want to help others and all this. the number one thing is this gives them a sense of meaning. gives them a sense of purpose. gives them a sense of importance. It gives them a sense of feeling powerful. But, you know, at best, what the people sitting with them get is benign and at worst as they get

deeply traumatized because this person has no idea how to hold that space. And I talk about this quite a bit in coming full circle. So if somebody is looking for a guy, they know what to look for.

What do you think is, I guess, somebody that might be new to psychedelics, like what are the things that they can be looking out for if they are searching for a guide or searching for a place to go to have these experiences to make sure that they are not working with somebody who is probably very, very under qualified to be doing this, but on paper looks great. And it's hard if, you know, again, if you're not used to this space, you don't really.

No, because you don't know what you've done. course. Yeah, you know, yeah, you can have somebody that's a PhD and, you know, and a psychotherapist and been doing it for 15 years and then working with psychedelics for 20 years and shit on paper, they look great. And maybe they are. But I mean, one of the most fundamental things is how much deep work of their own have they done? Because I can't tell you how many guides I've met that have three experiences, five experiences.

If they have less than 100, they shouldn't be touching this. They have less than, and I'm being serious, I mean, if they have less than 50 or 100 deep experiences going deep into themselves and they understand the difference between the power of having insights versus the power of somatic expression, you know, if they have you coming into an office where it's expected you're going to stay quiet the whole time because there's a dentist right on the other side of the wall.

or there's people walking up and down the hallway, they don't know what they're doing. Because sometimes the experience on psychedelics needs to be loud. And if you can't scream or curse or cry or just be comfortable to let it all hang out no matter what it is, you're not in a place that's safe for you to do real work with psychedelics. mean, know somebody that does psychedelic retreats, he's got this beautiful dome, but he's got a neighbor that's very close. And so everybody's always told, you gotta keep it kind of quiet.

You need to scream, scream into a pillow, but shit, if you're deep in a psychedelic moment, you might not think to scream into a pillow. It just comes out. so, you know, it's tough because there's these people that are well-meaning, but they just don't understand what this really is and what it really looks like when you start moving real trauma. But nothing usually actually changes for a person in their life if they're not allowed to go deep like that. If they're not given the freedom to express in any way that they need to.

Yeah. So what are maybe some of the questions that people should be asking these people before they potentially step into one of those spaces? What qualifies you to be a psychedelic guide? if you're specifically looking for somebody to hold space to very intentionally process things are traumatic or very difficult for you. You know, what qualifies you to hold this kind of space?

What kind of your own psychedelic experiences have you had? What kind of guided psychedelic experiences have you had? What do you think is the anticipated benefit of doing a session like this with you? And if they come back and they're talking about insights and understandings, then you know you're dealing with somebody that's never really gone deep. They don't understand the difference. Yeah.

And in coming full circle, I give a whole long, there's a whole chapter on these questions to ask. I can't quite remember them all off the top of my head, but that's, that's the idea is, is you come up with some good questions because you're just really trying to understand, has this person done actual deep work themselves? Do they even know what that means versus just having psychedelic experiences and getting insights and, you know, what kind of growth have they seen in their life from doing this work? Cause you know, if you're working with somebody that's

had some psychedelic experiences, but they're basically the same as when they started, you know, what are they really offering you? You know, there's, there's this, there's this cheerleading that happens in the psychedelic scenes. Yeah, just do the psychedelics and your life will get better. Do the psychedelic. You hear this shit all the time, right? Especially the social media influencers, I just like the more they post, the less they know. Yeah, more they post, the less they know. That's, that's just a good rule of thumb for garnering information off social media about

about psychedelics. just kind of like pause right there and talk about, I mean, that what you're touching on is like psychedelics are not the thing. Psychedelics are a tool to help you heal the thing. And so, you know, and it's not like you even necessarily need psychedelics to do that. I think psychedelics can certainly help and they can accelerate the process, but

what you're really trying to solve for is something that is very outside of the realm of just psychedelics. Well, psychedelics can help get you out of your own way. Yeah. Like, my experience was I was intensely defended against going up against coming up close to certain memories, certain feelings, and no amount of talk therapy was ever going to get me in there, right? It's never even got me close.

But coming with MDMA, all of a sudden I was less fearful. I was more open-hearted. And so I was able to start getting into these deeper areas, using the different drugs, using the different layers of the medicines. I was able to get in deeper and actually have access to things that were not accessible. That's why there's so much success in treating veterans PTSD. The intensity of the terror that created that PTSD, their mind won't go back there by itself.

And no amount, no amount of meditation or talk therapy is going to going to make it better. And that's just been proven out for decades, but they can go in with MDMA and all of a sudden they can have a conversation about what happened, a conversation about their feelings and they can feel safe. So the psychedelics kind of are the point, but only if you're willing to do the work. They'll help open the door. They're, different shaped keys that open doors, but you've got to be willing to go through it and you've got to be willing to sit with.

and breathe in and express out anything that wants to show itself from there. And sometimes that's very challenging. Sometimes it's easy and beautiful and sweet. And sometimes it's very fearful and challenging and hard. But the more you surrender into the process and allow it to happen, that's the value of working with psychedelics in this way is they give you access that was not granted before. And that's all they do. They give you access. So how important to you is the idea of

the preparation and then obviously the integration afterwards. it's absolutely essential. Preparing. That's why I like the Haikomi. That's why I like the somatic body experiencing because it can get you in touch with these wounded places within you and give you a felt sense of them. You can kind of get a sense. You probably can't see if I'm pointing to myself down here. You can see where it lives in your body and you can connect with it. And then when you speak your intention, you're speaking from there instead of from up here.

It's not a concept. It's not something that sounds good. It's what needs to happen. And that's, then I talk about that a lot in coming full circle as well, but connecting to those wounded aspects and allowing them to express and just getting a sense of what needs to happen. And then you take that, you take that felt connection into the journey with you. And then man, that just, it's like a laser beam straight, the whole day just stays on target with that.

You take it in there, this is what I'm working on. can feel it. And you stay working at that and it just expresses and opens and shifts and changes and maybe other stuff comes too. But I've never had a journey that's strayed from my intentions when I'm connected to my body, to where it's trying to heal. And then of course, integration is essential because you come out and you've churned up a lot, but that emotional energy keeps moving. So you need a way to keep moving with it and working with it. And that's where a good therapist is really helpful.

body centered therapy is really, really helpful. state keeping your body physically active, just keeping the energy moving and not just shutting down and getting very still, which is very easy to do. those, those are all essential for getting the most out of the psychedelic experience. Cause really the, you, you, you start it with setting your intentions and getting prepared, but then you, you really cross the starting line.

in the session, but then that keeps unfolding for weeks or even months after. a lot of people just kind of tend to go back to their normal life. They get home from a journey and they just go back to the same TV shows they always watch and listen to. And they just kind of put themselves back into the state they were before. Yeah. Really staying present and listening to themselves and giving themselves a gift of some space and some attention. Yeah. And that's, that's the, the idea of, doing the work, which is what

psychedelics can help with but like it's still us that have to make the conscious choice every single day to show up and continue to do that work that you need to do and heal yourself. the door as long as you point the door out. You so you you find where the door is locked where you're stuck. You're feeling into it. You're connected to it. Psychedelics go there. They help you open that door because it's your intention to go there and then everything that moves through is you processing.

That's how it works, but it actually works. There's so many self-help fads that come through and so many things that are very cerebral, very up in the head and people are like, I'm doing so much better. But then when life gets challenging, they go back to their old defense mechanisms, their old coping strategies. And so nothing really changes. That's like getting the insights from psychedelics. Very often, nothing much changes when you really get challenged. It comes back to...

what your body knows how to do, but working deep in this way in medicine, work with psychedelics changes how your body meets challenges. That's how you know that you're really growing. Your things are really changing is how your body starts responding even on an unconscious level before you even know what's happening is different than it was before. And that's where you know that something real is happening. Yeah. And I do want to touch on the fact that

as you're going through this process, and I guess this is my experience, but like, you're going to make mistakes and like, you're probably going to like fall back into some of those same patterns, but it becomes much easier to notice it before you get too deep into them and simply notice like, shit, I'm going back again. Okay, wait, center myself. Okay, now what's, what's the new path I'm going to take, but like, you're going to continue to fall back. Yeah, I was speaking more over time.

Yeah, for sure. have these experiences and like a year later, two years later, you notice that you just respond differently. It's like, shit. In coming full circle, I talk about expansion and contraction, how it's normal to come out in a very expanded state and everything feels so different. Then you can kind of feel things settling back in. It can be a little distressing, but if you just relax and realize that it'll contract in and it'll open back out again, it'll go back and forth a little bit, but it'll settle in a state that's more open than you were before.

And then over time you tell you it's like three steps forward, two steps back. And over time you keep getting that extra step, right? And that's, that's how growth happens. Yeah. So what are some of the biggest challenges you see in the general psychedelic Renaissance that, that we are experiencing in, in, in the United States now? And I guess some of the biggest red flags and then also some of the good things that you see that are happening as well.

Sure. Yeah. So some of biggest challenges is there's just a great deal of nonsense and you see it with anything big that comes through social media, right? So somebody says one thing and somebody listens and hey, that sounds great. I'm going to repeat it, but I'm going to embellish it a bit because you know, I think this sounds right too. And so they'll say it different and it's like telephone game. so information just gets really skewed.

And you get people that get on teen psychedelics, so they're gonna, you it's like getting on a political party. They're just going to endorse anything about it and only the good things, not the bad things. And so, hey, you're gonna get 30 years of therapy in a day with psychedelics. And hey, this is, if you wanna cure your depression, just take mushrooms and just, there's a great deal of dramatically, dramatically oversimplified misinformation.

that's getting passed off as knowledge. And unfortunately that's the kind of shit that gets the likes, that gets the thumbs up. So more and more people get to see it. And if other people are reinforcing it and it's just, there's just a lot of misinformation. And I think the other thing that's really challenging are the influencers, you know, they're publishing books and they're, they're,

You know, they post daily to social media because they want to build a presence. They want to make a name for themselves in the psychedelic scene. And so they're following the playbook of constantly posting things that get likes because that's how they work with the algorithm to build their name and build a presence and get more, more followers on social media. But unfortunately, the things that get likes aren't the things that are really helpful with psychedelics saying that psychedelics are easy and they should be accessible for everyone.

Hooray, we're all healing now and it's a march towards Nirvana and just all the nonsense. That gets likes and you throw in a bunch of spiritual cliches. let's talk about abundance now and let's tie in all the spiritual stuff with psychedelics. That also gets a lot more likes. And now I'm gonna put some kitten memes up and just whatever. It's a mess because the loudest voices are the least qualified to be speaking.

And the people I know that are the most qualified to speak are too busy helping people to heal to be dealing with social media in that way. And that's one of the biggest problems is just the voices that are out there cheerleading the movement are pushing just a ton of misinformation. And that's one of the reasons I tried getting back on, I was away from social media for over 15 years and I came back to LinkedIn to promote Coming Full Circle, but I couldn't stand it.

They just churned my stomach every time I'd come on and I'd see a 21 year old talk about how now they're a psychedelic facilitator because they went to some weekend classes and did some stuff online. And I'm just like, God, God. But they post every day. So people take them seriously. And it's just, it's just, it's just scary. It's actually really scary that people think that you can.

You know, back in the day when CrossFit was new, people would have never had muscles before were going to CrossFit and all of a they've got deltoids and they're like, my God. So they take out a second mortgage on their house and they open a CrossFit gym. No training, no background in exercise physiology. They don't have years of their own exercise experience. They just, they got super hyped up about it and they saw an opportunity and they get to feel important being the leader of this thing and writing the workout of the day every day.

So they open a CrossFit gym and those are the gyms where people were snapping their shoulders out of socket and snapping their spines doing dangerous exercises. And it's just the same thing over and over again. But the fad of psychedelics will pass and hopefully a lot of these people will settle out and go do whatever the next fad is and leave the people that know what they're doing to help others. Positive side, we continue the movement.

keeps continuing to try to get this accessible and paid for by insurance for veterans and people with PTSD. Keep stepping very slowly forward to being a viable treatment option for other people with trauma, treatment resistant trauma. It's concerning because, you know, what is viewed as good legal practice is too limited to actually be really useful.

you know, what they, what they do for maps is it's helpful for some people, but not, you know, for three sessions, but beyond three sessions, if you want to keep doing the work, you're going to need a different protocol. You're going to need a different, and unfortunately, the only way to do that now is in the underground. And then you got to navigate finding somebody that knows what the hell they're doing. Well, finding somebody in the first place and then finding somebody that actually knows what they're doing. Yeah.

This is kind of random, like, what is your take on ketamine therapy?

I am a fan of ketamine for doing the work. I am not a fan of using ketamine similar to how people use antidepressants. Like we're just gonna put this chemical in your system and it's gonna do something magical that we have to be honest, we have no idea what that might be, but it does something. And then you're gonna feel better maybe if you're in the 60 % of people that respond to ketamine in this way. And then there's take-home ketamine with remote guidance. I'm, I,

I strongly feel that any kind of psychedelic telehealth, know, psychedelic support via Zoom, psychedelic tele support via phone is criminally negligent. And those people should go to prison because they're just taking advantage of working the numbers to keep people buying ketamine to ship to their home. And they're also creating addicts. Ketamine isn't physically addictive like heroin, but it is definitely psychologically addictive.

And just sending that they've, I've already, I've already heard about people get this coming home, but they run out soon because they start taking more to deepen the experience. And then they start looking for it on the street. And unfortunately, some of them are crossing it with fentanyl and that's got its own problems. the way psychedelic, the, the ketamine treatments, like the pump and dump clinics where you go in and they hook you up to an IV and a chair and they come in and shine a flashlight in your eyes over 20 minutes. There's, there's no benefit to that.

I mean, maybe somebody will see a little relief from their depression initially, but you're not healing anything. You're just doing symptom treatment for something that wears off very quickly. there are some ketamine clinics where you go in and it's like a group experience and it's more ceremonial and everybody has a very deep experience, but it's held pretty well. And I think that those can be marginally helpful. That's more in that expansive experience. but I personally have worked with large dose ketamine.

in one-on-one guided therapy sessions and I saw a huge benefit. mean, massive cathartic releasing and profound shifts and changes right away in my life that have endured months now. So ketamine is a powerful tool in the psychedelic toolbox. It needs to be used properly and properly supported and it needs to be in a guided, I think it needs to be in a guided ceremony.

just like you would do for MDMA or mushrooms or anything else. How important do you think like that the ceremonial approach is in general to doing like deep healing medicine work? You know what, I was just using the term ceremony and it's not a session. You know, like my own when I am sat for and when I sit for others, which is very rare, I'm highly, highly selective who I'll work with.

We sit down and we do sage and not because I think sage does some kind of magical something, but it's just another level of setting an intention that, before the sage is the outside world and me when we're doing the sage, I'm just letting go and my guide is letting go of anything that doesn't have to do with this work we're doing right now. And then at the end of the session, we sage again and we close the session. That's about as ceremonial as it gets. Yeah. There's, there's no spiritual anything.

with it. It's me going through the process and my guide is there. I personally am very vocal, very verbal through a lot of my works and my guide's always there to reflect back to me and witness and listen and be present without getting in the way. And she's just beautiful about that, really. And she's also there to help me if I start getting too much up into my head, if fear becomes a big issue, you know, she'll come over and she'll start working on the vagus nerves in the side of my neck, the beagle nerves.

reminding me to breathe and just getting me through that part and then I'm back in the work and we're back at it again and that's the value of a really good guide. Yeah. And so that's as ceremonial as it gets. I think if it gets too wrapped up in pseudo spiritual nonsense, especially homemade stuff by whoever the guide is and whatever mismatch the self-help books are on their shelf, that gets problematic because then it puts expectations on the participant instead of just letting them have their experience.

Yeah, like it creates dogma. makes it the experience much more dogmatic and tries to put them into a particular, you know, way of way of thinking. Yeah. Yeah. And that's dangerous. I've heard of guides, you know, bringing all sorts of nonsense from political affiliations to do shaming someone for not being vegan to just, and it's just those are the people have no business at all working with psychedelics in this way. Yeah.

I'm just thinking back to my first experience sitting with ayahuasca and I went to the to the jungle in Peru and the both of the the corndero and the corndera I just I had no idea what the fuck they were doing they were speaking Spanish the whole goddamn time like I like it it didn't make like they were clearly not trying to tell me to do anything at all they were just like you know we're gonna be doing this and you guys are gonna be doing this and we're gonna be holding the space but that's kind of it yeah

And I just remember like, you know, afterwards there were all of these other, you know, conclusions that I, that I were coming to and all of these things that I felt within me that I genuinely never felt before. And then when I was speaking with, with a facilitator, it's like, yeah, you know, if you're, if you're curious about that, here's a resource, if you want to read up on this. but they did a really, really good job of not trying to guide us into any particular direction or way of thinking and looking back at it. Like I'm very, very grateful for that.

Yeah, that's because I need a lot of people now to that's that's a very good guidance Ayahuasca is a tricky one, especially in a group. I've done it a couple of times and for somebody who's come through, you know significant early childhood drama Ayahuasca is a real motherfucker. I mean it is it is tough and being in a room with people and feeling

not free to scream if you need to scream, you know, a lot of this reflection and self restriction comes into play. and so I found it marginally helpful for me. And I actually have at the end of this month, I've, I've gotten referred to a very, very good person that facilitates highly trained many years working with her own guru or not guru, but, God, what's the word I'm looking for?

and healer, in South America. And so I'm doing a private one-on-one with Hiawaska. So I can just let it all hang out, let whatever needs to move, move without having to try to think about restricting myself to see what else I can get out of it. Yeah. But interestingly, last November I went to Peru and did it. and when it I was recommended to this place and I kind of felt like it was really more set up for tourists. Some people knew newer to psychedelics and it's.

But I was really stressed about the caffeine things. I'd always been a caffeine addict my whole adult life. And I got a really doozy of a headache going into the first ceremony. And they told the maestro about it and he did something, whatever it is he was doing with the brew before he gave it to me. And I'm like, yeah, whatever. But it was crazy because I took it. And as it was coming on, I sat up and I felt like this line scanning down my body. And above the line, the headache was just

And then below it was still there. And so by the time the line scanned me, the headache was completely gone. And the next day they gave me little bit of green tea to forestall a headache. sips, two sips felt like I drank three lattes. I mean, it hit me instantly too. Like my whole neck tightened up and my scalp tightened up. And that was last November and I still can't drink caffeine. It completely reset me on it. I can't explain that. Yeah. There's, there, there are some things like when you meet genuine

healers that have especially a lot of like the the South America ones that like have been doing this work in the jungle and their lineages for you know, their grandfather and grandmother was doing this and their great grandfather and all of that. Like they they they have the ability to do some things and understand the way that different plants can work within the system to a level that we cannot teach in Western society. It's just like we're not there. You know, I'm

one of the least people you'll ever meet. And I'm just mystified by that experience. So it's just, it's, it's a crazy thing, but I've had, I've had other psychedelic experiences. were talking about the expansion and contraction, but I've also had a psychedelic experience really deep. mean, deep cathartic working from the Soma working from the shadows.

that has shifted things that months and years later have never contracted back. So it's always different. You shouldn't expect a miracle, but miracles are possible. Yeah. So before we leave here, I want to just turn it over to you one last time, really, and if there are any things that you feel that are alive for you right now that you would want to share with the audience, I'd love to just give you the floor to share whatever's on your mind.

You know, it's my usual schtick that, you know, psychedelics aren't a miracle cure, but they can absolutely help if you're willing to do the hard work. If you're at a place where it's just like, man, I don't know how to move forward anymore, which is where I was. If I hadn't had the experience that showed me that psychedelics could offer help, I don't even know that I'd still be alive. I was just in a really bad place.

If you're willing to do the work and you're willing to sit with uncomfortable things, can do a, you can come amazing distances in healing and growth and in seeing new versions of what's possible for you. Real healing is available if it's properly held and you come into it with a proper mindset and understanding of what you're doing and why you're doing it. And so there is hope.

And that's, that's the thing that I think psychedelics give us over any other form of, of psychiatric treatment today is actual hope in this lifetime, in this, in these years that you're living now and not 30 years in the future for something different, for new possibilities to open up for you. And that's all there. If you understand what this is and what qualified support looks like, which is the whole reason I put.

Coming Full Circle together was so people could understand what that is and make the decision if they want to do that or not. Aho, my friends, aho. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Shannon. I really appreciate it. thanks for having Coming Full Circle was a phenomenal read for anybody that is looking for a phenomenal book that just touches on a lot of what we talked about today. Definitely give that a read. Much love to you, my friend. I appreciate it. Likewise.

Thank you everybody for listening and thank you again to Shannon for coming on the podcast. That is all I got for you today. If you're interested in getting in contact with me, shoot me a DM on social media or send me an email at Tripsittingblogatgmail.com. If you want to collab, if you want to sponsor the podcast or really just talk about anything, it's always open. So appreciate every one of you. Love you all. We'll see you next episode.