Ep. 76 - Modern Shamanism with Kelly Nezat

[Music] Somehow we think everybody knows what's going on in our head and everybody agrees with us. This is synchronicity. This is synchronicity. This is synchronicity. This is synchronicity. This is synchronicity. [Music] Welcome to episode 76 of synchronicity. My guest this week is Kelly Nezat. Kelly, super cool guy, got to know him over the past few months, but he runs a couple of organizations both on Facebook, Everyday Shamans, and Soul Lab, both really cool things. You'll hear about those in this podcast. But before I get there, I want to tell you about something that's going on soon. And when I say soon, if you're listening to this before April 10th, 2017, then that's what I mean by soon. If it's past, then it's already happened.

What are you doing? How are you not listening to these in real time? But April 10th, here's what's going on. And this is a limited thing. I'm not trying to be marketing about this. I'm not trying to create the illusion of a time frame or something else, but I am beta testing my new online course and project called Creative Evolution. I've been working on this for, I was thinking about it last night, and I hadn't. I was like, "How long have I been working on this?" It's been about four or five months of actual work and research and writing and putting together and speccing out and getting feedback and doing surveys and really fleshing out what this is going to be and what is Creative Evolution.

It is an online course and online community designed to help you start and or maintain a creative practice. So if you're interested in writing, making music, painting, creative projects, or just collaborating with other people, this is intended to help you with that. What is a beta test? That's what's happening on April 10th. I want to work through all of any of the potential kinks in this course before I release it to the general public. Even though they're going to be limited classes when it is released, I want to make sure that everything is good. I'm hoping to get about 10 to 20 people. I have about seven confirmed for this beta course and it's April 10th. And what you do is you sign up, you pay a small amount. I think I'm going to charge $50 for the beta course and I'm thinking the regular course is probably going to be between $100 and $200. There's going to be information about this next week in the podcast. I'm kind of planting the seeds now. If you're interested about what I'm talking about, want to find out, want to participate in the beta course, send me an email at no@syncpodcast.com. Next week I'll have a URL that's easy to remember if you actually just want to sign up right then. But I can kind of give you some more information before it's going on. So I'm pretty excited about this. It's been a lot of work. There's been a lot of frustration and difficulties like any creative project, not any, but most. This can evolve when you're working on something. And so I basically put myself through the ringer in terms of creating this 13 chapters, 13 exercises. There's four weekly chats. Like I said, the private community.

And I basically put myself through these exercises to see if they worked, to see if they made sense for me. And lo and behold, they did. My creative output now is really, I'm happy for one of the first times in my life. I get in a podcast out every week. I'm working on music every single day. I'm writing more than I ever have. I'm collaborating with people, doing live events. Like everything is kind of clicking. And it's not for some magical reason. And it's not because I'm particularly talented. It's because I've just been focusing and putting my energy in a consistent manner every day for now at least a year. And it's really starting to pay off. So I was really impressed with kind of, you know, some of the strategies that it helped me and thought I would share some of them. And also the intention behind it is to have a community of people who are like minded, right? People are really committing to their creativity and doing stuff. So I'm going to stop rambling about creative evolution right now. There'll be more news. Like I said, if you have any questions, shoot me an email. No, at sync podcast.com. But now I'd like to move to Kelly and his at. So Kelly, man, this dude just gets cooler and cooler. The more I talk to him and learn about him, he's working on some incredibly interesting and in depth projects. Essentially, when you hear something like everyday shamans or soul lab, you may have some connotation of what that could mean.

But in our conversation, you'll hear that what Kelly is really getting at in terms of some of these shamanic realms is akin to Carl Jung's collective unconscious. The idea that there is this repository of energy, archetypal energy kind of exemplars, they're called sometimes that exists in our unconscious. And there's kind of a reservoir that we can all tap into. This is something that Joseph Campbell kind of got to in his monomyth, right, the hero's journey. This is a myth or a kind of a pattern or a cycle that is reflected from all over the world, well before mass communication, well before cultures were interacting with each other. There was this organic outspreading of this mythology that kind of emanated. Well, it had different guises and kind of masks on it.

It was all kind of pointing to the same thing. And we'll get into Joseph Campbell's monomyth in another episode. We'll dedicate to that. But Kelly is basically exploring the intersection of creativity, alchemy, union, dream analysis, shamanic work from all over the world. And he makes a point in here and he pointed out after the fact, so I'm gonna give him, I'm gonna help him out here. He says something about entheogens and kind of plant medicine. You know, he didn't want to sound like he was being pejorative and he told me that he says there can certainly be a valid way of pursuing any type of inner work or soul work or whatever you want to call it. But that he felt there was kind of this trendiness to them now that maybe was circumventing what was going on. In addition to working on this stuff, Kelly also was involved over in Europe in the early days of acid house, which if you know anything about me, I started getting into electronic music the late 1990s. So it was a bit past the beginning of the acid house scenes in the late 80s and 90s. Basically, these were parties where yes, there was ecstasy and yes, there were drugs, but it was this new form of music emerging from young people all over the world. You know, and it was just like, it's super cool. And it's still to this day. I wish I could come up with a better term or superlative than super cool. But there's something about the music that evolved from house and techno and real house and techno, not this EDM stuff that has given it a horrible name. There's something really, really pure and awesome. And I'm sure it extends to all forms of music. I know it does as a fan of most types of music. But there's really something interesting about the wordless kind of hypnotic rhythmic electronic music that evolved there. And Kelly, Kelly, we kind of talked about that a little bit. He was a DJ over there.

I used to DJ in New York City and have some very good friends in the electronic music scene. Always enjoy going out, even though I don't go out that much anymore. I wish I did. Man, love electronic music. I don't know how I digress. Anyway, I'm getting off track here. How about we just get to the episode. Does that sound good? I think that sounds pretty good. So without further ado, here is Kelly Nissat. Cool. Well, thank you for coming on. I know we've just recently connected. But it's been pretty great getting to know you and tuning into what you're doing. My first contact with you was through everyday shamans, but you also run Soul Lab. And I guess before we get into kind of all of that stuff, I'd like to hear from you in your own words kind of how you got to do. How did you get to the place where you're doing all of this now? And please be as detailed as you'd like.

I can be pretty detailed. I know. As you probably have noticed. Well, how do I begin? Maybe I'll begin backwards in a certain way. Much of this journey that I've been on has that I'm on now is an answer to or it's answering a lifelong question of who we are, what we are, why we're here, and what this is all about. And it's something that I have been acutely aware of. And considering since I can remember thinking or remember dreaming. So it's been something that has never been far from my mind or my thinking. You know, when I was younger, it certainly stood out a little bit. And the way I managed it in the past was to simply sort of couch that and sublimated to some degree this interest in what's more than this, what's more than what we're seeing in the world. But it only grew as I got older and especially after I graduated high school, it kind of came to a bit of a climax where, you know, I was asked to choose a profession.

And I tried. You know, I went to college and I tried psychology and computer science and architecture and a host of things and, you know, I'd bless you at a certain age here. At that age, at 17, it just, it was, it was disheartening for me because none of it sounded right. My initial instinct as a kid, I think from age five onward, growing up Catholic, I wanted to become a priest. I loved ritual. I loved the mass. I still do, although I don't attend too much for various reasons, part of it having young children, but also part of it being, you know, the sort of my threshold for homilies has diminished greatly.

So I grew up with this intention of being in ritual and I thought, okay, if there's going to be a profession in the world that could sustain me, my dad was an engineer, I couldn't do that. This would be one that I could really groove on and really find important and something that sustains me and keeps my interest. So I, in high school, I went to an all-boy Catholic school and fantastic college prep school, terrible in terms of encouraging young men to become priests because it really sort of, for me highlighted the fact that this was not my path early on, even though it had been a lifelong ambition and sort of a thing that I said, well, I'm ready to meet this calling. So I left high school at 17 with not a clue what I'm going to do. The thing, the platform in which I thought I was going to live out my life and live through and that would sustain me in return was bashed at 13 when I went to high school. And certainly by 17, you know, being of age and being around, you know, women and, you know, being in the world, it was disheartening. I really didn't know what I was going to do. So college life for me was an expression of a feudal exploration of all these different avenues that would all reach their climax pretty quickly. As soon as I started to understand a bit about their motives and about what kind of lifestyle they engendered, it wasn't for me. No judgment beyond that. So a lot of that led me on an existential crisis of, you know, a big proportion. I left everything that was familiar to me. I left my small, insular, Cajun world and I bought a scout and moved to Boulder, Colorado. And I had no idea what it was that I was becoming or what I was doing. And there was really, at that point, it was more existential than it was, you know, there was no carrot. It was more of a stick at that point.

So like what were you doing out in Colorado? I was doing everything from waiting tables to DJing. DJing was a big part of my life. The club scene, there was a small club in Baton Rouge where I was in college at LSU that was extraordinary. It started off as punk and then moved into 80s dance music and early house music and it became a refuge for me. I was a month other folks who would equally consider themselves a bit of the black sheeps of the world. And although I'd never considered myself that because I was so well attuned to accommodating the world and assimilating into it, that you would have not guessed that I had this feeling about myself.

But it was amazing being around all of these young gay kids and young kids that considered themselves punk or alternative or, you know, this was sort of pre-Goth and all that other stuff. But it was really fulfilling in the sense that we were, you know, I felt like it was a place where I could really be free to explore, you know, what I was as a person. You know, it was a time of exploration but really it was a time of shedding the old identity and along with that came that, you know, all of the prerequisite dark nights of the soul that, you know, we're tearing down the egoic structures because, you know, it started setting all up. But it was perfect in all its imperfections and, you know, I ended up breaking up with my girlfriend or vice versa, actually, and, you know, that catapulted me out of that small world of Baton Rouge that I realized no longer.

Once I had left Baton Rouge, I should have never come back. So my journey was one of finding myself, you know, my dad, I remember talking to him when I was living in London and doing some DJing and doing some, you know, it was during the asset house period in the late 80s. Yeah, that's so cool. And he's saying, you know, what's going wrong with you, son? You know, you know, life is tough. You get a job, you get, finish your education, first of all, get a job and deal with it. You know, and all I can remember, I was, I was a little bit shocked in that moment thinking, if you had any idea how challenging it is to not just grab something familiar, something easy, something tried and true, and just go with it in place of this existential trip where I'm saying, I'm just going to put myself out there and see what shows up.

Yeah, that's a little harder, just a little bit. Yes, it's a little bit harder, but he couldn't appreciate that. All he could see was my bumper sticker that said, "Why be normal?" And, you know, he just couldn't fathom, you know, my process and nor could I, but I could appreciate that it was my process and that I was okay with the unknown. So at some point, I remember being in the club in in Brixton and beautiful club called the fridge. And in the midst of that, in holding this space with all of these amazing people, I saw this ocean of, of, of synapsing beings, most of them, of course, were on acid, but, or ecstasy to some degree, but mostly acid at that time. And all of a sudden, I said, "Aha, I want to do shamanic work. This is, this is where I like to be." But there came a point pretty quickly, you know, after the initial sunrise tours out in Epping Forest, where we had four to 5,000 people, six to seven DJs. And it was a beautiful time. It was the beginning of the acid. It was kind of in the midst of the acid house, but it was the beginning of the original raves that we called them sunrise tours at the time. And it just, that's where I felt at home.

There was this open, this, this exploration, this breaking out of these familiar, all too familiar modes of engaging each other. And it's opening up to something bigger. And I liked what I experienced and I wanted to pursue that. But as one of my clients in Boston, who's a tool cool Rinpoche, Lama Karmas said to me, he said, "Yeah, well, you were, you were holding ceremony." And they were just, they were just dancing. And I said, "Well, I don't know if that's necessarily true." But there was a part of that that I felt, you know, a bit estranged because it was sort of true at that time that after the party and everyone's coming down on, you know, Sunday afternoon or Monday morning, and they're talking about the, the, the cool chick they hooked up with or, you know, how visual their acid trip was. I started to realize that there was a bit of a, there was some separation there that for me, it was something different.

So can I, I don't want to cut you off because I know you're kind of in the middle of recapping my original question, but I do, I do want to touch on this quite a bit because I had a very similar experience with electronic music. At the time, I was really getting into it. It was the mid to later 90s, right? So this is when, at least in the United States, it hadn't really emigrated over, right? But we were seeing at that time kind of like the superstar DJ filling out stadiums like Greenfields and stuff. So it had been around. It had long since evolved from the acid house days and kind of, you know, places like the Acienda and all these other seminal places that kind of like, you know, introduced a lot of people to this type of music. But when I was into it, I got involved with an organization called Buzz Music in Washington DC. And this was right around the time when the United States government was actually putting into play something called the RAVE Act, which essentially characterized places where electronic music was being played and like warehouses as crackhouses, which meant they could go in and essentially shut down these places because they're saying it's a crackhouse, right? All they'd have to do is find one person with any drug and they could accuse you the entire place of like facilitating drugs. So I remember delivering petitions to like Congressman, that was like one of my first jobs on an intern there. But what I really bring this up for is this is well before I had tried ecstasy. And I also was too young to be drinking in these clubs. So I was going in stone cold sober at like 10 o'clock at night, coming and listening to DJs and leaving at like eight, nine in the morning, like stone cold sober, like about not a thing in me. And I remember that was my first kind of taste of like, this is some communal experience. And of course, there were people on drugs. And of course, there were people totally whacked out of their mind who are just there trying to have sex and hook up and be in some altered state of mind. But I also got the sense that was being communicated through oftentimes this wordless music was something else entirely. And there's clearly a primal nature to a lot of this electronic music because the four on the four, four beat, it's like a heartbeat and everyone kind of taps into that. But what I've noticed and the other reason I bring this up now, why have I compelled to cut you off is there's a there's something happening right now, at least in the form of music that I'm primarily drawn to and not what's being characterized as EDM these days, but there's this weird vein of kind of psychedelic. They call it, it's not really exclusively, but Burning Man has become very associated with so playa house. And it's this very kind of esoteric psychedelic weaving of sounds and musics and kind of, it reminds me a lot of shamanism.

And it really, really, really is starting to come out through the music. And we're seeing people explicitly explore these themes through the music and through them talking about it, which to me, I just bring it up because I think there is a very substantial connection between the type of music you were playing, what I'm listening to now, what's still going on and kind of this deeper shamanic work, which you're you're talking about and kind of playing out. Absolutely. No. And please, you know, cut me off anytime. You know, as I say to clients, you know, this is an interactive experience. Otherwise, I will pontificate. You know, I kind of sorted out early on, like in New Orleans, there and in Louisiana in general, back in the late 80s, when a mid 80s, actually, around 85, when ecstasy was still legal and readily available, that's my entry. I think my entry actually was, was acid. And I think I was seven, well, I was 17, I was in college, maybe 18 at the time. And going through what I was talking about earlier, that really challenging time. So for me, it offered an escape from something that could have gotten ugly, you know, being trapped in a place that I didn't want to be.

And it opened me up to something more. And then the ecstasy part of it definitely was, was huge for me in that they're not just myself, but the people around me, I felt like it was tuning us all into a similar strain of being in communion with each other. And what I loved most about it, I didn't care how it came about the fact that people were hugging and loving on each other. And, you know, it wasn't just about sex. And sex actually was very challenging to a concept. But it was about, Oh my God, I love you. I know I just met you five minutes ago, but my God, you're beautiful. And you know, that just fit my nature that had been sort of contained or restrained, you know, because of the needs or the common way of being. This burst that wide open, I'm like, Oh my God, a crack of light shining in, you know. So what I started to notice Noah was after going from that phase, which was definitely more kind of the early house, deep house, definitely very sensual.

And it's all about, Oh baby, I love you and the pesh mode and and really good rhythms. But then I go to London, and it's, you know, it's a it's a whole different strain. And it's, it's not going to the the second and first and third chakras, it's going up into these higher chakra ranges. I love you. Yeah. You know, instead of people getting in and writhing in this organismic orgasmic sort of way, they were extending their arms out like robots and kicking their legs out. And at first, it was very well, it wasn't very pretty until, you know, I, I imbibed and then went out there and on the dance floor and extended my arms like they were doing and moved it to this, this music that all of a sudden something new started to come in. This, this sensual idea of sort of this, this, um, Una Hapili self, this basic primal guy in self, that the ecstasy definitely elicited this acid house movement was was going for something a little bit more synaptic in terms of how we're relating to each other. And it's saying, look, extend yourself out there and field the the phenomenological realm around you. Don't just go into this inward thing, but or even into this sort of, you know, what is that the very erotic thing, but go out and really kind of explore this phenomenological realm that you're in. And so I started, I really could appreciate the music at that point. So I started to realize that every movement has sort of its insignia drug to it, you know, and for a good purpose. So, you know, all that said, what I'm seeing is, and I've been around the ayahuasca movement since, since I moved to Santa Fe in 88. And I've seen the, the shifting tides of it. And it's moved so far into common vernacular, and common mythology. And, you know, everybody's doing it, you know, Silicon Valley, everybody's 10 times, at least once. And that's their form of shamanic induction, which, you know, ironically, I, in my practice with everyday shamans and with my teachings and the rest, you may find it awfully ironic, but I advocate something quite different than a drug-based or plant-based methodology. My method is, is like, they all say with the Tibetan monks, they'll give them d'attur or one time, or maybe once a year, so that they can see, oh, my God, there's this phenomenological field that is this crystalline field. It's like this Arab-basque world of geometric awakening and, and, you know, along with their traditions, they can tap in and, and, and psycho navigate through all these fields. But the rest of their time is spent in discipline and devotion to the art of, I call it psycho-navigating. They would call it maybe something quite different. But that's what I advocate, especially in reaction to a lot of this movement that says, you know, when they come to my workshops, some kids come in and say, I'm so excited to be here. What kind of plant medicine are we going to take?

Right, right. Like if they come together, part and parcel, well, I want to touch on this too, because I think this is really interesting. And it's funny because I, let's say I have a friend who made a microdose solution, not too long ago. And my friend is purposely not taking it until they're done with a project. They're working on a creative project. And the reason my friend is not taking this is because I don't want there to be, or my friend, I don't know why. My friend doesn't want there to be any kind of jumps to conclusions or leap in logics that this happened because of this. So this whole idea of using external substances or plants, and just to be clear, I've mentioned this many times on the podcast, in case anyone thinks I am not advocating for plant allies, I consume marijuana every single day of my life. It is my plant ally. I know the benefits it gives me. I am not saying we shouldn't be using them. However, especially with new things, especially with ayahuasca and things that are kind of pitched as this is going to give you some sense of an internal and external world that you may not be familiar with. And that's going to ideally, you know, promote some type of change that's going to be better for you and the people around you.

I think it's important to recognize that that is an option. That's something that anyone can do at any time if they feel called to do it. But we also possess the tools endogenously, not only to create these chemicals. Let's not even talk about that. But really, like you said, psycho navigate ourselves. And I know this because I have taken LSD before and had experiences that watched me into other worlds for months at a time. And LSD was out of my system. You know, it wasn't there. It was gone after like two days. The half life is not very long. But that proves that we have access without outside substances by definition. We don't need them. I'm not saying we shouldn't use them, but it's not something that like, Oh, the only way we're going to figure this out is if you go on an ayahuasca vision journey, the only way you're going to figure this out is if you become like a sadu and smoke every single day, you know, that's not that's not, you know, I don't it's we're kind of balancing between these substances are okay, and they can be incredibly helpful. But they're not you don't need them. It's not like you have to do this. So don't go seeking out because you think, well, this is the way I'm going to do shamanic work. So it's interesting that people would come and not not hard to believe at all. When people think of shamans, I think most people are thinking either of a South American or Native American kind of person with like a headdress or like some staff and like going around and going into trance and, you know, with the aid of some brew or something. And there's obviously I'd love to hear from you, but there's many other ways to view shamanism. Absolutely. None of my teachers in the shamanic realm do any form of plant medicine, not in psychotropic sense. So, you know, one of the things I remember was reading Carl Jung, who I've read extensively since I was young. He said, you know, one of his critiques to Aldous Huxley was he says, look, my man, you know, you keep taking that stuff and you keep opening up new worlds. And you're, you know, you're going to have a hell of a hard time integrating that into the reality in which you've been born into. It's sort of like what's his name? The director who said, he says, you know, everybody's trying to figure out the meaning of life. And Woody Allen said this. He says, everyone's trying to figure out the meaning of life. And I'm still trying to figure out Chinatown. You know, so there is something to be said about, you know, Terence McKenna once said, look, you know, even a scientist only looks through, peers through the telescope or the microscope occasionally, the rest of the time it's been analyzing and dreaming it out like Einstein would advocate. So, you know, you know, without trying to sound like a hypocrite, because I'm, you know, I've gotten a lot and a lot of what I've understood and what a lot of what I'm sharing comes through in ways that I can't even begin to consciously appreciate the importance of. Not to say that the plant medicine isn't a part of it, but I think we tend towards these external crutches, whether it's a guru, whether it's plant medicine. And the, you know, and it's, you know, to be more specific, these external plant medicines aren't without their challenges. And this is a very, and I apologize to all listening, because I think it's a very unpopular idea. But this idea of going and taking something external in is like putting a program, like putting a floppy disk into your, your, your bio computer.

And you're running the system. And it's, it's a great thing. But at some point, you know, it kind of looks to me like, you know, the computer starting to believe it's the program. Now I say that in, in contrast to the approaches I've learned, whether it's the dalish dark room retreat where there's no light. I just heard about this. Someone in the Synchronicity Group, someone asked about 10, you know, day retreats. And I mentioned Goenka and Vipassana. And then someone brought up these dark retreats. And I had never heard them. And I've just been finding out and reading about them. Oh, it's tremendous. I did a three week dark room retreat. So there's absolutely no light day or night for three weeks. And each week is a different phase of the, the shamanic training. They call it con and leave fire and water or water and fire. And, and it's this learning how to first cleanse the vehicle, your body, your energy field.

Then the next phase is to create your energy body to journey with. And then the next phase is to actually go into other realms and journey with that. So there's, what I love about the dalish approach to shamanic practice is there's process to it. And it's, and it's anybody can jump into it and develop, you know, on their own terms. But what ends up happening after a day or so of, of no light is that the pineal gland, which produces melatonin and we, we theorize, and I think correctly, that it also produces dimethyl tryptamine. Right. When there is no light, it is not true, a triggering this circadian rhythm is right to, to create this melatonin cycle. So instead, it starts producing what, what seems to be clear by methyl tryptamine. And so now you're engaging in an endogenous approach to, to going into these altered states, which is again, the way I advocate whether it's through shamanic breath work or through, you know, other forms of breath work or through darkroom retreats. The, the key is for me, when you can engage this endogenous access point, you are tapping into something quite different. Right. And it's clear when you do it, it's not the same, it's not hyper reality, like you would if you were doing a heroic dose. And that's, you know, and it's different, but there's something about that that has a sweetness to it and a very, it takes on a different characteristic, it's almost as if Noah, we then are tapping into our, if I can use this term, our own morphogenetic field of humans. So the dimethyl tryptamine, if we looked at it maybe closely enough and not stripped it down to this molecular structure, we would see that rather it is a gooey field of that's coming genetically through and holding, you know, tapping us into how humans tap in across this wireless connection.

It's like the, the, the physical and esoteric manifestation of the interconnectedness of humans. I believe so. I think it's, I think it's a way we can tap into that access point. Let me ask you this, not to cut you off again, but where is this relate this to something like Jung's conception of the collective unconscious? I think it is a collective unconscious. Okay, cool. That's okay. I just wanted to get that explicitly out. You know, I mean, I don't, I personally don't think it. I experienced that. Okay, great. Good. Good. Good. So you can, you can call it the Akash, you can call it the Akash, Akash, it's all the same stuff. Same thing. Okay, great. We just use, I see it is almost like, you know, Robert Anton Wilson talks about reality tunnels. I see that there, if there is a kind of main vein, right, a kind of like an ingredient system, if there are these main vessels that of reality tunneling that we go through, we each tap in through a different little, you know, welcome, you know, like every temple has its doorway, you know, and the doorway that you go through is going to have an effect on when you when you get into that main vein, it carries through. So in that way, Tibetan shaman is going to be meeting a lot of Tibetan guides and Tibetan deities. And so it creates a sort of, you know, the very kind of familiar faces what we tap into has an effect, the way we get into it, whether we're going into the Andean shamans, and we're seeing all these Andean, you know, Jack wires and all these other things, or we're tapping into it through breath work in our, in our office. And it's a whole different realm. So this is one of the distinctions I point out and say, look, this is all well and good. And this gets me into the everyday shamans work, where, you know, and choosing that name was not my choice. It was my guide's choice in the dark room retreat. My guide said, this is what you're going to be doing. And you're destined to, you know, to alienate yourself. And well, that was my terms. But it's real, because every day, it's for everyday living, but it's for everyday people. We need to get beyond this notion of, as is Anton Ali says, intro Ali, rather talks about, he says, look, there are these holy people.

And they're doing amazing things. And they are really exemplifying the exalted state of the shaman. That remaining true, we are not going to focus on that. We're going to focus on that shamanic impulse that is rising up in our own culture, yes, in our own way. And that is where we're going to focus. And, and in our way, in this way of doing it. And so, you know, I could see this kind of play on words that my guides were, were sort of forcing on me. And I started adopting it carefully, because, you know, worrying about, you know, people perceiving it as plastic shamans, or this or that, and a cultural appropriation. But far from being that, Noah, it did the opposite.

It freed up that and said, no, this isn't about being going and, and, you know, wearing headdresses and all this other shit. I mean, it's great if you do that. But if, you know, it kind of looks a little funny if you're white. Do you know that there is a synchronicity Facebook group where we post cool things and interact with each other? And it's totally free to join. It's no subscription service, just hanging out and having a good time. If you didn't know that, find it. Find us our trip on Facebook or go to syncpodcast.com. Look at the menu. Click the Facebook group. Come on in and have a good time. Okay. Back to the episode.

And it's, it's also starting, you know, clearly acknowledging cultural appropriation and what that implications of that could be. And I'm typically, I'm not overly sensitive to that, because I think, you know, if your intention is aligned, you know, however you want to express it, that's okay. But the key there is getting your attention aligned with what you're actually doing. But there's, there's something that I think is really important here that you're touching on with the everyday shamans concept is normalizing this for people to approach from their regular day to day lives is something that I personally feel is incredibly important. I think a lot of really, really smart people are turned away when things get too weird, whatever that means for them.

And that, that's, that's good and that's bad. I mean, I think that, that gets people to find the things that are going to work for them. But also we're, we're, we're competing against in a lot of ways, those of us feel like that with kind of what McKenna referred to as the cudgel of culture, right, where we also have this other side where we're not just naturally coming up with our idea of what normal looks like. We're being fed constantly everywhere and idea, conceptions, I, you know, feelings of what normal is. So that let's just take that as a fact and not say that that's the worst thing in the world. It's not a, I don't think it's a great thing, but it's going on. So trying to find some space and I love that you use the front, the term holding space. I honestly don't know where I picked that up from, but I started on either one of those memes that pop up, right? Oh man, it's so weird because I started using it to describe my buddy Sean Dunn who does these incredible documentaries where he really just goes out and interviews people, but people you wouldn't really expect to have valuable things to say or gain insight. So he went to a Trump rally before he was elected. He went and interviewed juggle those people who listened to the insane clown posse, he went to Oxiana, West Virginia to interview drug addicts and opium addicts and you find out that like these people are people, of course, but they have rich, engaging stories.

They're not one dimensional as we often like to think of them. And what I started saying is like you're holding space. Like that's why your documentaries are so good because when you get someone who's marginalized in culture and can provide a space where they can be themselves and there's no kind of phoniness or they're putting on an act, like you're seeing real shit right there. So I love that you kind of referred to, you know, when you were DJing to as holding space because that often to me when I've DJed in the past and you get into one of those moments and you create that and you can kind of sense that people are tapping into what you're putting out. That's exactly what it feels like. And I think, you know, as a broad general theme of what we're talking about, whether it's everyday shamans, whether it's this podcast, whatever, the more we can hold space, in kind of a way that is sacred, but yet not alien to people. So it doesn't feel like some ritualistic like, now we're going to do something weird. Like, I think that is incredibly important.

And quite frankly, what's needed and also to take it one step further, I imagine why many people have incarnated at this point in time in Western culture, because this is, this is something that, you know, takes a little bit of thinking and planning to kind of understand why this may be happening. Why are we having this conversation now? Why are you doing the work you're doing? And I think this all kind of interlocks in a really nice way. So just wanted to point that out. Yeah. I love what you said. And by the way, I love that interview you did with him. Oh, he's so good. Yeah, it's so cool. I wish I kind of felt like I was there. And, and it's, you know, every one of your podcasts I've listened to, I'm like, I don't know Noah, but I know Noah, he's like a brother, you know, it's so refreshing because, you know, all too often, you know, if we don't come together in this way, which is a whole purpose of Solap and everyday shamans, if we don't come together in this way and share this common sensibility, this burgeoning sensibility, that was always there, you know, the idea of redemption is that you're really earning back what you already had. You just got to earn it. And that's kind of what we're doing. And, and I, you know, I've always been, even when I was young, I was always the advocate for and the fierce defender of the underdog, the man out. Maybe on some level, I knew I was that way, even though no one else would have seen me that way. There is, you know, it taps into this notion of, of understanding or being able to see the sacred within the profane or the misting within the mundane. Yeah. And, and, and I think that's, you know, my love, my teacher, my first teacher, Luada Bray, when I was held was I was in Seattle in undergrad. And she rescued me from this dark shaman. Anyway, I know I want to hear about this, but then I'm definitely going to have to probe you about what goes on with dark shaman. No, God. Yeah. Well, yeah, that was my initiation. I was, I, after leaving London, I'm like, I put it out there. I am going to, this is what I'm here to do.

I don't know what the fuck that means or how that happens. But I did read a book once that says, the only way it can happen is if you're really meant to be that and you, they'll find you, the teacher will find you when you're ready. That's right. And so I, you know, I'm like the monkey at the gates of heaven and they say, well, you're not really on the list. And I said, well, it's okay, but I want in anyway. So I put it out there and he shows up. So, Luada, I lost that train of thought with Luada, but she, no, I didn't. She, she said to me, she said, look for, you have a very straightforward way of doing this work, but you need to recognize that they're shaman are healers or medicine people in every walk of life. Right. She said, look for them. Be aware that it's not just putting up a, you know, you know, putting up a shingle and saying, oh, you know, come and pay me or come and do trades or come and do it free because I don't need the money sort of thing.

She said, no, every, we're, you know, lawyers are doing it. They're integrating it into the work. Artists, musicians. Right. So that set me on a course that I started to look for that. I started to look for the helpers. And I started to see how and all these different fields that was the truth. So for me, the goal of everyday shamans and certainly even more so with a very general overarching concept of Solab, which is, you know, out the alchemy of we're our own laboratory and we're soul building is that I want for all of these awakening empaths out there to know that there are plenty of outstanding ways to augment their empathic notions. And I for one want to help gather all that gather all that wisdom in a place where it kind of increases their chance of synchronicity. Right. So this is a big part of what this is all about is, is being able to, to, as we said before, of hold space for this transformative process to happen. Right. And I think it's a big one, Noah. If I may go in on this tangent, we have been separated. We have been marginalized. We have been, you know, like the millennials and all the rest, we've been reduced to this joke. And it's an orchestrated minimization and, you know, sort of a denunciation of our, our awkward beginnings and saying, well, you know, these are just errant kids who don't want to fucking work. These are kids who have lost their way. They don't know the value of hard work. They don't know what it is to self sacrifice. They don't know what it is to, to engage the work a day world and just suck it up and do it. Right. Instead of encouraging a person to, to engage, which is obviously a collective function. Right. We put it off as ADD, you know, you've got attention difficulty disorder, whatever you call it, deficit decision. Yeah. Yeah. So, as I was in my, I was in a clinical psychology program and working towards this, you know, trying to figure out what my dissertation was going to be. And all of my colleagues, a lot of them rather, were, were engaging in ADD because there was a lot of money and a lot of research in it. And, um, and it quickly, and of course my testing skewed all of their, their scores, you know, like, dude, why did I let you take this test? Because now all of our data skewed, because I was off the chart. Um, but what I realized this was was instead of pathologizing, which is one of the unfortunate functions of our westernizing of psychology, which is about psyche, right? It's supposed to be about the soul, but we've turned it into this clinical method of pathologizing. And instead of looking at what is it about the, this collective rising where we're no longer so cellular and, and tribal that we're beginning to open ourselves up to, well, what are they doing over there? What are they doing out the window? What are they doing in Mexico? What are they doing in Australia? What are they doing in this tribe or this belief system? So I started to understand that it, if it were ADD, it was really attention to divine design that we are all tapping into something of a bigger collective movement. And so the challenge was and is still that it's not a dysfunction, a deficit of by any stretch. What it is, is a dysfunction and deficit within our culture within the way we teach. We don't know how to teach to, um, to this culture. No, we don't. I mean, this is, this is a clear. I mean, I feel like anyone who's gone through the education system in this country, and I'm sure it's not to somewhere in other countries, although I'm sure there are varying degrees of improvements and not good things in other places too. Um, I mean, one of the reasons I got in trouble at school a lot is besides the fact that I felt that a lot of the stuff was boring, it just seemed like there was no real practical application that I had come across in my life. I mean, I started taking LSD, uh, when I was 15, I remember going to a school, a summer program at Berkeley College of Music, someone had it there, either my eventual alma mater, but I someone had it there. So I was in Boston or just tripping knots and just like totally like life changing experience. Of course, at 15, your brain is going through changes anyway, when you include LSD into the mix, God knows, but I can imagine. Yeah, a lot of neurotransmitters activating very quickly. Um, but you know, it school always seemed very restrictive. And then, you know, this is something that comes up again, because I have a nine month old son, you know, eventually when I start thinking about how we're going to put him through the educational system. One of the reasons we chose to live here is the school system here. The public school system is good. There's some Waldorf schools around and there's some other more kind of holistic kind of integrative options, but most of them cost money, right? It's not something that's set up for, for public schools to deal with. But yeah, I mean, what people, this is a famous Alan Watts thing. I put it in a song once where, you know, we basically teach, we put people, little kids on this track and we say, you're going to learn this, hear a little kitty kitty, come follow me, you're going to learn this, and then you're going to go to middle school, and then you're going to go to high school, and then you're going to go to college and get a good degree, and then you're going to be a professional, and then you're going to make all this money, you're going to start a family. And then when you're done with all that, you're going to look back at some point in your life and go, what the fuck did I just do? Like, what happened?

Was I the person who was deciding that I wanted to do this stuff? And I think now what we're realizing aided and abetted by technology and also hindered people, younger generations, all the people I meet 25 and younger, I'm 33 right now, they do not approach the world in the same way that we did. And obviously they've kind of grown up with screens in front of their faces and the internet, you know, the world at their fingertips. But more importantly than that, I think there's a quality, and I'm not trying to generalize every single person here who's younger, 25 or younger, but there's an inquisitiveness and a kind of understanding that we shouldn't just take things at face value, which also can be preferred in a fucked up way and co-opted pretty easily, because it's really easy to create disillusionment when you realize you're kind of in a system that's broken. What's harder to do is recognize that stuff is broken, and then also try to kind of co-create something that will work. But I do notice this, I mean, when people are going through the educational system, the idea that we have to be tuning in to exactly what we're being taught, and if we don't, then there's something wrong with us, and then we have to go and study something called ADD and ADHD.

It's just crazy. And I also look just to bring another layer to this is I also look at mental illness through a very similar lens when someone has a schizophrenic episode or is diagnosed as bipolar as I was once. It's a very limited framework we're looking through, and we'd be wise to look at how these frameworks came to be, what systems they emerged from, and have those systems served as well since they've emerged, because most of the lenses we're looking through are educational systems, American psychiatric associations, the medical community, and you can argue there are incredible, incredible benefits to each of those institutions, but there are also some incredibly restrictive and limiting and potentially destructive elements to them as well. So, you know, it's one of those things where if you start looking at it from different perspectives, I remember having a conversation, I think it was with James Altisher, a very, very good self-help blogger, and you know, I told him about an experience I had had, you know, a very psychedelic, transcendental experience, and he's like, you know what's funny is if you would have that experience in India, you know, they would say like you just got like a really special thing that happened to you, and like they would be like bringing you like gifts and like all this other stuff, and it wasn't to say like, oh, I should have been born in India, it's just that it's very important to recognize that something we take as a fact may just be a culturally induced kind of psychosis or delusions, and I'm not saying everything is, but this then again puts the emphasis on us cultivating awareness to investigate these things, just to be like, does this this actually make sense? Is this story that I've been told here line up with my direct experience or kind of like the inner pole of what I'm hearing? So, yeah, I think the education thing is a huge, huge component to this.

Well, yes, absolutely, and you brought up a really important point because, you know, if you look at, you know, historically, which is a big part of the clinical program is I was in a developmental lifespan development program that was based on this bolder model of kind of quasi scientist practitioner model, and we're looking at, you know, the development of developmentalist of all the different theories that came through, right? Well, and in that in and of itself is an interesting process, because we're really, again, putting everything on this linear logical placement and kind of pitting them up against each other, which, you know, it's good fun. But, you know, one of the things that, you know, when I had this big dream that I that started all of this for me with the, with this model that I developed over the years, the idea was that we're not, when we look at everything on this logic, this sort of linear logical formatting, it pits everyone up against each other. But when you put them in a circle and see that, you know, they're all looking into different facets of the same crystalline reality, and each facet brings a different perspective, like a kaleidoscope. Yeah, none of them are incorrect, but none of them are necessarily sufficient either. Or the whole picture, right? Right. They can't. But if you began to back up a little bit and see, you know, what each one that behavior is that the, you know, the cognitive, the, you know, the humanist and all the rest, when you start to look at them with a soft eye and start to look at them, almost kind of like pixels, right? They all start in concert together informing something between them all that that's a space for Solab that, and this is what kind of the gift of this retrograde process for me in grad school was, was that I'm learned, I had to go in and learn what the systems were that determined how we saw ourselves. So whether we like it or not, our popular culture, if you, if you watch that wonderful BBC documentary, Century of Self, it gets into very much with Bernays and public relations in Freud, they decided for us what we were going to be. That's right. Now, at that same time, I have a, I bought a first edition Yung, a book on Yung alchemy in psychology, and it had this wonderful folded paper in it from the New York Times book review. And it was talking about Yung, it was from 1942. And it was espousing Yung's concept of taking on the mantle of self-evolution as the primary process of cultural development.

And saying, Yung is heralding in this new level of awakening after the darkness of World War II, it was just coming, you know, was that kind of coming into an end? And a problem is so much, but what did we do? We took rather, and this is an unpopular opinion as well, but we took on Freud. I know. Why did we do it? Well, because of... Waterforce kind of. No, it fucking sells Noah. Yeah. It sells to make people, you know, just as Bernays found in public relations in PR, which they used to call, what did they call that, the office of Propaganda, so they realized it held a nasty connotation, which... Well, you know, they realized in advertising that all these people coming back after World War II, at some point, they're going to have everything they need, and what else are you going to sell them? And to sell them based on need is a losing proposition. You had to sell them based on desire. And the only way you can do that is to tap into that id impulse. And so we... I think a big part of the reason we took this on, and that could be way of field on this, but it seems as if instead of taking a culture that is alchemically self-responsible and advocating, even for the common man, which we all are, in our own uncommon ways, of self-responsibility to get our own shit together and to really look at the elements of our experience, and at the very least, to look at it.

Well, blasphemy. Blasphemy. How dare we do such a thing, like, look inside of ourselves to figure out what outside means. I mean, no, I long said this. I actually... I had a kind of like a brief Freudian appreciation moment a couple of years ago when I developed a neck pain, what I thought was a herniated disc, and three people in three days recommended I'd check out Dr. Sarno. Dr. John Sarno. And, you know, he has this whole theory of that these things are actually related to unconscious emotions and things we can't process, and they physically manifest in some physiological way, and he has a whole system for it. But, you know, he... he really credited Freud, you know, for his understanding and working of how the unconscious could have... Now, that said, I have typically been a Freud-Basher for most of my life, just because I think that he... one of his mistakes or missteps in terms of identifying the unconscious, which is a tremendous thing to, you know, write about and understand, even if it's not totally right, is that he thinks he extrapolated his personal experience and his personal psyche and kind of made it what everyone the universal psyche was. And I think there's a little bit too much about sex there. I think there's a little bit too much about kind of complexes and neuroses, not that we don't have those things. And which is why when I discovered Jung at a very young age, you know, it made... it was just like a revelation. I was like, "Holy shit, wait, what this guy is saying? There's a reservoir of all symbols, all archetypes, all things that we collectively tap into." Like, I had to keep rereading it because I felt like...

I was like, "What is... this doesn't make sense. Wait, this guy was a respected psychologist? Like, he wasn't like some fringe weirdo?" So I always lament the fact that our culture kind of headed in that direction. And then this always gets into a very interesting kind of, you know, discussion, which I don't want to delve too much into, but this whole kind of conspiratorial who's running who, what's the agenda. And I think what ended up happening and where we are now is whoever may have had the original agenda, Bernays and propaganda and all of these things, it became at a certain point where the people running or thinking they were running these things just completely lost control of the ship. And I think there are few people who actually really investigate or try to understand why things are happening, how symbols are being used to promote, you know, actions and activities. And there are clearly people who understand this, ranging from people, you know, who understand like neuro-linguistic programming and basic stuff like that. But I just feel like now it really is incumbent on everyone, you know. Of course, people listening to this, they're going to be skewed towards it, but everyone to kind of really start to try to investigate what's going on inside of them. So without pontificating too much, I want you to talk a little bit about this spiral and kind of the idea of Solab for my benefit, for other people's benefit, because it's an incredibly interesting concept. And I saw your overview and your group and have been reading about it, but I would love to hear from you kind of the conception of it. And then what I'm thinking is, since we'll probably wrap this up in the next like 10, 20 minutes, maybe on a future episode or a discussion we can do together, we can kind of delve into each of the aspects of the spiral and kind of how this fits together and can help people. Thank you. That would be fantastic.

So, you know, I think, you know, when to wrap up the Freudian thing, I think until you can own your limitations, you can't legitimately hold the high ground on any of this. And Jung pointed that out and you know, Freud was an incredible projectionist. I mean, if you're talking about insignia drugs, you know, it's not unknown that he he favored cocaine. That's a yayo for the Freudian. And my brief period in LA, you know, was exemplifying that that somehow we think everybody knows what's going on in our head and everybody agrees with us. And to top it off, Freud, his stepmother was just a few years older than him. So, you know, to him, his mythology was real. And, and if you look at it from a young, if when Jung's analyzing, he said, yes, for you, my friend, it's real. But for you then to take that to the next level and say it's real for everyone, it's sort of like the challenge of our culture. Stop, you know, shooting on me, you know, you know, hold that for yourself.

So, here's the concept of Solab and the spiral model. It came out of a neat, well, it came from this vision I had, which was, you know, way too far of genetic or something to be able to be explicit about. But coming out of that, just like coming out of a great journey, things just seem to come clear. The idea was that I had been studying alchemy in Jung for many, many years, but to bring it all together in a substantive way, an elemental way that wasn't that would speak to my journey. My guide said, look, here's something, my inner guides, I should say, said, this is for you to navigate what you would call the realm of ADD. We are transitioning in our culture. There was a time when we were in this stage of rooted down hierarchical living, where the master was known as the person who did the tradition to the tea. We are, that's when the world was solid in that framework, that that type of civilization was holding strong and true. It's obvious to everybody at this point, and it has been to many of us for a long time, that that reality has been crumbling.

For those people that are hanging on to the roots of that dissolving riverbed, it's going to be very uncomfortable. It's going to be very painful. And so the idea is how to be able to let go in a good way that you don't just spiral out. Jung said, it doesn't necessarily matter which system you use, but that you have a system. And I've always held that, I'm like, what the hell does that mean? Until I started to understand, oh my God, I've got a system that works for me. So the system came through, and basically what it is, it looks like a medicine wheel, it has the four directions, essentially, but really it's the four elements. Fire is big vision, it's creative endeavor, it's ritual, it's burning man in the middle of it anyway.

But in each of these elements in fire, in water, which is about emotions and in the world stuff, and in the earth realm, which is about coagulation, things coming together, and the realm of the air, which is about relationship and getting your head around things, being mindful and being conscious and cognitive. Each of these elements have their beginning, middle, and end phases. There's an impulse in the fire realm to wake up, and it's a hero's awakening. And then there's a movement in the middle, which is a fixed realm aspect in terms of astrology, which says, okay, that the hero woke up and says, oh my God, I have this hypothesis or big vision. The middle of it is saying, oh my God, now I'm in grad school, how did I get here? Okay, I've got to deal with it.

And they show it as like a big circle with a dot in the middle, as opposed to an arrow shooting up like fireworks, which is the first phase. Third phase is this spiritual integration phase where you have been out and playing and explored and expressed yourself in the world, kind of like Burning Man. But now you're integrating that, you're taking it back home and you're spiritually integrating that, you're putting faith in it, you're ritualizing it, and you're changing because of that, and they show that as a spiral. So it's a circle and a vector wedded together. So in each of these phases, there is a beginning, middle, and end to teach one of them. But in alchemy, there is this progression. Fire is a calcine show. It takes your inspired vision, your big desire, your big fantasy, and it burns away when you bring it out in the world. What's bullshit about it? So it's burning away the draw of what's not really gold there. I thought I was going to go into clinical psychology and go in and rescue all these mentally ill people by coming up, being able to theorize what is the kind of operative aspects of shamanism and do that in a really great clinical way. That was absolute bullshit. They didn't even want me talking about Carl Jung much less. It's going to say like that. So the first phase of fire is really visionary, but it contains a lot of desire, because when you're in your center in that vertical axis, that Y axis, like why are we here? When you're in that state, whether it's way up there in the higher self, I'm a cooler self, a way down in the lower basic self or in the middle in the conscious self, when you're in your center, you're all fucking things, you're everything. And it's cool, because nobody can tell you you're not. It's not until you venture out into the world. The fire will then burn away what doesn't come back. So that's what I put my model through. And it's been 18 years now. I've used it in private practice. And I've used it as an implicit model as a navigator.

I always put screens up around my clients like a minority report. It's just a way to interact and let my intuition speak to me, just like you would with your laptop. So it held true and it grew and evolved. And what it really does do ultimately, Noah, is it helps my client see in a visual way, which most of my clients are, how to navigate between the fire of becoming in a big vision, the water of inner vision, and why am I doing this, the earth of bringing it together and the air of bringing it out. And that's sort of the cycle that medicine will have going around and connecting the elements. The spiral is the truing, the distillation. One is the synthesis of the element. The spiral is the symbol of that part of us that comes deeper and deeper towards the center of self and world where you're no longer going way out there. But you're coming, you're going through the elements in a more refined way. And if you look at it as a spiral on a piece of paper, and you can imagine it's actually looking down at an apple and it's going into the torus. So that's the nature of this work has a lot of significance. But I can offer it in a way that brings it into a simple model that keeps it from being overly heady, complex, esoteric, and my clients get it. So Solab is at the heart of it, is this elemental model that the goal is, I want to bring Tibetan Buddhism, I want to bring the wisdom from Taoism, I want to bring the wisdom from neuropsychology, I want to bring the wisdom from theotropics, I want to bring it all together. But if I tried to do that, we would have this cacophony. Each individual discipline is so organically developed and so explicit that even to begin trying to explicate them with throw everyone off, much less try to bring them together. So what I see with this model is that if you look at what are common, the common elements of all of our experiences, our everyday experiences, we have a spiritual side, we have an emotional side, we have a mental and a physical side, we all share that. And if you invite everyone to speak to what's in common, then everyone can appreciate what the Tibetan monk has to say. Everyone can appreciate what the Taoist master or the neuro linguistic program has to say in these unique areas.

And even more so, they start to see all of these different ways of perceiving as pixels on a fabric that is holding this crystalline reality. So something new can come through. I'm looking for what's between us. As Martin Booper said, God is more between us. So laugh for me as holding space and bring in your wisdom, but do it in understanding that this isn't about, you know, just saying, well, this is what is real for me. Say what's real for you, but understand that what we're really looking for is what is coming through between all of us, the dialectics of it. So that's so lab in a nutshell. Well, I mean, that's an amazing, I know very brief description of what is obviously a very important and substantial concept and system there. So thank you for that. And I am very serious about in future conversations, maybe drilling down and kind of, you know, looking at each element and, you know, other other ways to approach this. There's, there's a ton of stuff there. But we're going to wrap up, we're going to artificially end this amazing conversation, which could go on for, I'm sure hours and I'm sure we will at some point. But let's go to my last three questions and my final question. And then we will talk soon. So what is your favorite color? Green. Cool. What is your favorite number? 21. Cool. Why 21?

You know, it's something that I had in sports growing up, whether it's football or soccer and, but 21 has always held a very magical significance. And yeah, I see it and not only in numerology, but I see it pop up all over the place. It's a number that brings a great comfort to me. And, you know, I see it not only in the perfection of the seven, but also in the triune relationship and the three sevens. And it's there's something about it that it's just a number that makes me smile. It's a good number. I was thinking about it as you were talking, there's a lot of ways to look at, you know, you can do matria and that's up to three. You can also look the two and the one, the one and the two. It's very cool. I'm with it. What's your favorite animal?

My favorite animal. God, that's a really good one. I've got so many. I would say at this point, it's my favorite for now. You know, I work with power animals a lot, which is, you know, whatever you think about that, but they always show up at these key times. And I've been working with this monstrous black bull and he's phenomenal. He's teaching me so much about being grounded being earthy instead of being this sort of scorpionic magician, you know, shaman. He's teaching me how to be on the planet, connecting with others and being all about being on this planet, being a good dowelist. So I would have to say a buffalo or a bull.

I love it. And I think that's it's something when you mentioned the earth element. It's something in my past that I think I have often overlooked the earthbound responsibilities and kind of the integrative stuff to how to live in this world. I, you know, I imagine this is a big part of why I have a wife and a family now. I needed some tethering because I can watch off into interesting places. So I think that's where we connect. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff there. Okay. And last question, what's a practical tip that you could share with listeners that has helped you in your life? To drop out of your head and into your heart and to receive, listen and let it come to you, as Alan Watts would say. And as my love Peter Gabriel would say to receive and transmit. I love it, man. Kelly, thank you so much for coming on. We'll be in touch sooner rather than later. And yeah, man, thank you. Fantastic. Thanks for this opportunity.

No, I was a blast. Of course. We'll touch base soon. Fantastic. Thanks, brother. Bye bye. [Music] Thank you for listening to this episode. And thank you for listening past the music. That's pretty cool. For those of you interested in music that is happening on this podcast, meaning the music that I make, I'll be releasing some music in fall of 2017. So thank you for every to everyone for who's been encouraging and saying nice things and giving me the confidence to do that. So I really appreciate that. Thank you to Kelly for coming on. A reminder, go check out what he's doing with Soul Lab and everyday shamans. Really cool stuff. You can find out more about him and what he's up to on the podcast episode page for this podcast at syncpodcast.com or minepodnetwork.com.

That goes for both places. You can go to find this stuff out. Thank you to everyone who has rated and reviewed synchronicity. A reminder, you can rate without revealing. You don't have to write something. You don't have to be witty. You don't have to come up with some nice thing to say. You can just rate a review. I just do a rating. And the reason I'm thinking about the reviews is like out of review. I'm going to read you this review, right? Bear with me while I pull up this review, because I would like maybe if we could get this to be the not most recent review. And I appreciate it. It was actually a four star review, which I don't really understand why it was. But I'm going to read it to you. And you can tell me what you think about this review. And I appreciate it.

G.G. Satnam 108. Here we go. "I wouldn't be a jerk and give it three stars, but I felt like it. This podcast is way," I was all caps, "over hyped." And I think these reviews are either friends or paid for. Although I admittedly admire anyone trying to improve people's lives through spirituality and expansion. That's a four star review. So thank you. I will admit that I think I actually was paying for reviews in the beginning of the podcast. I think it was like a dollar. I would send someone. I think like three people did that. They're like, "I reviewed it. Pay me my money." And I was like, "Here's a dollar." But other than that, I think genuinely these are all real reviews. So if you want to kind of balance out what's going on with the reviews in this podcast, you know, it's free. I'm not asking for anything else. If you want to donate, be my guest. Patrick, you know what's up. Thank you, my friend. But, you know, maybe, maybe balance this out. Maybe, maybe help G.G. Satnam 108. Understand what's going on. I'm kidding, of course. But really, if you can do that, I appreciate it. So that's it for this week. I'll see you guys next week.