The Permission Slip

I'm joined from Austin by Ashley Carmen, a licensed marriage and family therapist and the founder of the Psychedelic Guide Network (PGN), where she trains practitioners in the ethics and interior work of guiding others through non-ordinary states. Ethics isn't the sexy part of psychedelic medicine, but Ashley makes the case that it's where the real transformation happens, for guides as much as for the people they serve. Ashley traces her path on two tracks: a childhood without much honor or respect, a connection she made during an ayahuasca experience, and a clinical career where hundreds of hours of required consultation showed her what was missing in the psychedelic space. Her own road to the medicine ran from mushrooms on a pizza in sixth grade, to witnessing substance-induced psychosis in inpatient rehab, to finally answering the call with intention in Tahoe, then training with MAPS and the School of Consciousness Medicine. From there we get into Kylea Taylor's InnerEthics model, which asks practitioners to look at the motivation and intention behind everything they say and do in the journey room, and then we get very practical about how to find a safe guide. I share some of my own experiences as a guide, including times my projections crept into someone else's journey. In this episode, we talk about: Why inner ethics beats a rulebook, and how it becomes shadow work for practitioners The practitioner as the container, and what a "clean container" really means How medicines amplify attraction, projection, and a guide's need to feel useful The questions to ask a facilitator, and why operating in isolation is a red flag Why a guide who won't tell you what you're taking is violating your sovereignty Co-facilitation, group ceremony ratios, and who should avoid solo journeys Integration, aftercare, and why three prep and three integration sessions is the minimum Why the FDA is only one umbrella over psychedelic work, and the case for standards for coaches You can find Ashley, and PGN's free monthly live events, at psychedelicguidenetwork.com . Special Guest: Ashley Carmen, LMFT.

I'm out in the lovely suburb of Hinsdale, Illinois, with Dr. Devon James, owner of Within Reach Healing. Laura O'Malley, my guest earlier this season, kept telling me I had to go see Devon, so I did, and I've been back half a dozen times since. Devon is trained as a chiropractor, but she concedes the chiropractors probably wouldn't let her back in the club, so I like to call her a witch. She's fine with it. Devon has just built out a gorgeous, 2,900-square-foot space in a quiet wooded setting, a big step up from her first office of under 500 square feet. Her vision is a true one-stop shop. During COVID, her patients leaned on her for everything, and when she'd refer them to the best people she knew, they'd tell her it was too far to drive. So she brought those people next door. Her team now includes massage therapy, orthopedic and pelvic floor physical therapy, mindful facials, sound healing, yoga, life coaching, a bioscan unit, and soon nurse practitioners and a psychotherapist. When I was in Sedona in 2021, I sat in meditation thinking, "We need a Sedona in Chicago." This place is pretty close. We dig into applied kinesiology, the muscle testing Devon learned in chiropractic school, where every muscle connects to an acupuncture meridian, lymphatic and vascular points, a nutritional need, and even an emotion. Take the psoas: it shares a meridian with the kidneys, its main nutrition is water, and the kidneys' emotion is fear. That's why Devon has zero protocols. She asks each person's body what it wants that day, then pulls from 17 or 18 techniques, including TBM, quantum neurology, and remote energy healing. She tells the story of the seminar where she saw a flash of her teacher's past life, helped heal his shoulder, and learned that most practitioners don't actually hear their patients' bodies talk to them. Devon is open about where this all came from. Her father struggled with alcoholism until she was about ten, and she learned to sense his mood from miles away and keep the house calm. She started her own healing work at 19, went through a divorce, spent eight years in therapy for complex PTSD, and recently had her therapist tell her she was healed and didn't need her anymore. It was far less triumphant than she expected. We compare notes on growing up hypervigilant, on dissociation and falling asleep as a defense, and on how a secure, loving relationship with her partner Aiden gave her the footing to do the deep work and, after losing $40,000 on a building with toxic dry-cleaning chemicals underneath it, to build this place anyway. We also talk about who she sees: people with chronic and autoimmune illness who've been to many doctors without answers, survivors of abuse, and especially kids, including children on the spectrum and non-verbal kids she says communicate with her telepathically. She built an indoor play cottage so kids are upset when they have to leave and parents never have to apologize. Finally, we have some fun with her idea for a "healing carnival" open house, complete with a passport to wellness, raffle tickets, and blind muscle testing. In this episode, we talk about: Within Reach Healing and Devon's vision of a one-stop wellness center Why Devon was trained as a chiropractor but works nothing like a typical one Applied kinesiology, muscle testing, and how each muscle connects to meridians, nutrition, and emotions Why there's no protocol for low back pain, and why she asks each body what it needs Discovering her intuitive gifts at a TBM seminar, and the science of intuition as pattern recognition Remote energy healing and the bioscan unit that picked up a family argument from across the world Growing up with an alcoholic father, hypervigilance, and complex PTSD Getting "fired" by her therapist after eight years, and what healed actually feels like Dissociation, panic attacks, and learning to let feelings pass through Working with chronic illness, abuse survivors, kids on the spectrum, and non-verbal children Losing $40,000 on a building and building her healing center anyway Supplements, muscle testing yourself, and why bodies change The sway test, blind testing, and a healing carnival You can find Dr. Devon James and her team at withinreachhealing.com and on Instagram . Special Guest: Dr. Devon James.

I'm joined by Norwegian-American multimedia journalist and photographer Marian Siljeholm. She reached out to a group we're both part of, looking for people with transformational MDMA experiences for a graduate project, and that's how we met. Marian is upfront that she's a relative newcomer to this space, but she came to it the hard way: through her own search for something that would finally work after a lifetime of therapy. Marian tells the story of growing up in a home ruled by fear, and of the ways that stress showed up in her body for decades. She describes work as her "drug of choice," and the month when her relationship, her housing, her health, and her career all fell apart at once. A sleep specialist who admitted he couldn't help her handed her a business card and pointed her toward psychedelic-assisted therapy. She walks me through her first low-dose MDMA journey, the shift in her relationship with her mother, and the deep gratitude she felt afterward. She also tells me about her second, far more physical journey, in which she released years of stored pain. We also talk about the reporting project that grew out of this. Marian interviewed 45 to 50 people across several continents, along with researchers and clinicians, including Judith Herman, who coined the term complex PTSD. We talk about why so many people with such different lives told the same story: nothing else worked, and this did. We dig into why complex PTSD still isn't in the DSM, why our system is built for pills and acute care rather than process, and what it would take to bring this work in responsibly. I also share some of my own experiences, including my frozen shoulder and the body work I've been doing. In this episode, we talk about: How Marian found psychedelic-assisted therapy through an unexpected referral Why she couldn't think or talk her way out of a nervous system stuck in fight or flight What her first MDMA journey opened up, and why her second one built on it The gap between medicine that works and a system that isn't set up for it Complex PTSD, and why we need a shared language for trauma before we can have an informed conversation about the medicine Managing expectations, integration, and why it's a catalyst and not a quick fix Breathwork, rest, and what it means to finally feel at home in your body You can find Marian's photography at mariansiljeholmphotography.com and on Instagram . Special Guest: Marian Siljeholm.

I'm kicking off Season 3 of The Permission Slip with one of my favorite people on the planet — Conscious Channel and happiness coach Laura O'Malley — for our third conversation on the show. This time we're celebrating her debut book, Becoming You (Lisa Hagen Books), out September 29th in print and e-book. Laura never set out to write a book. Back in 2023 she began typing out answers to one simple question for her guides — "What's most important today?" — and sharing them with clients. When the Collective told her it was going to be a book, she said fat chance unless they dropped it in her lap. They did, and I got to play a small part in how it landed there. We wander (squirrel!) through a lot of territory: why every one of us is channeling all day long — our ego, our soul, or something higher; why you can't talk, think, or trick your nervous system into feeling safe; how getting quiet and present is the only way to actually receive; and why embodied belief is so different from believing something in your head. We trade stories about canceled flights, furrowed eyebrows as an early-warning system for anger, feeling fine after 10-hour drives, finding money on the sidewalk, always finding parking, and the Chinese money frog. Laura also has a real-time realization about where her lifelong habit of always looking happy came from, and we talk about why so many kids today feel so much, what it means to have chosen our experiences from a higher perspective, and why everyone needs a woo crew. Then the Collective comes through to answer my question about whether Becoming You should be read aloud — and to remind us that there's no one-size-fits-all, that you're a different person every time you open the book, and that the whole point is to soften your nervous system into peace. You haven't done anything wrong. You've just been programmed. I'm always thrilled to have my friend and my favorite channel, Laura O'Malley, in for a chat about all things metaphysical. This episode kicks off Season 3 with our third conversation to celebrate her first book, Becoming You. It's a collection of daily messages she channeled simply by asking her guides, "What's most important today?" We talk about getting quiet, becoming present, why you can't outthink your nervous system, and how contrast and triggers are gifts in disguise. And of course, the Collective drops in to have their say. Link to her book: Link to the "Aura" app she mentioned: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/aura-wellbeing-copilot/id6749313216 Special Guest: Laura O'Malley.

I'm in Austin, Texas with Ken Moench, founder of Moench Method Bodywork, which has four locations around the city, and author of Every Baby Hurts. I had just spent about three hours on Ken's table, and I'll admit I was tenderized. So I asked him to explain what he actually does, and why it did something for me that years of massage, myofascial work, dry needling, chiropractic, and physical therapy never quite managed. Ken walks me through his method: pressing into a tight muscle to temporarily block its blood supply so it lets go, then moving it through its full range of motion until the pain signal shuts off. He explains why muscle relaxers and painkillers never touch the fascia, why the work has to start at the root of the chain (the hip flexors, the psoas, and the low back), and why my flat-on-my-back sleeping and side sleeping were quietly working against me. I also share what happened when I finally slipped into deep REM sleep in the middle of an afternoon. Ken's path here is not what you'd expect. He was an industrial electrician who worked on barges along the Mississippi and the Intracoastal Canal, until a layoff in Baton Rouge sent him praying for direction. He became a physical therapy aide at St. David's Hospital in Austin, went to massage school at night, and started getting people out of pain faster than the hospital's physical therapists could, so fast that the doctors nicknamed his work "marrow massage." He tells me how he combined three rudimentary weekend classes into the technique he has now taught his team for more than 30 years. Then we get to the book. Ken tells the story of his infant grandson, who screamed through every diaper change, and what he found when he put his hands on the baby's hip flexors. A second grandchild, who seemed perfectly calm, led him to the thought behind the title: if that baby hurts, every baby hurts. We talk about pre-birth posture, why every culture has swaddled infants, and what Ken sees in older adults who end up curled and stooped. We also talk about the practice itself. Ken says the average client comes 2.4 times a year, and that the team celebrated when that number went down. He shares stories about Austin FC, a hurdler who won gold at the Pan American Games, and a big-league pitcher whose fastball went from 82 to 98 miles an hour. He explains why most of us stretch the wrong way, and how he trained for a marathon by stretching only to the first hint of tension. Finally, we get into his work on dogs, including the nearly 170 foster dogs he and his wife have taken in. In this episode, we talk about: What the Moench Method is, and why the pain fades even while the pressure stays on Why the work starts at the hip flexors and moves down the chain, and why I needed the posterior chain done too How sleep posture, side sleeping, and flat surfaces can shorten muscles overnight Ken's path from industrial electrician to physical therapy aide to massage therapist, and the prayer behind his method The story behind Every Baby Hurts: two grandchildren, two sonograms, and one big idea Pre-birth posture, swaddling, and why older adults end up stooped Why Ken tracks average visits per client, and why he wants that number to fall Athletes, from Austin FC to Olympic-level competitors, and what flexibility does for speed and strength The right way to stretch: warm, sweaty muscles, the slightest tension, and deep breaths Working on dogs, hip dysplasia, and Ken's no-charge policy if he can't help You can find Ken at moenchmethodbodywork.com and search Moench Method on Instagram and Facebook. His book, Every Baby Hurts, is available online and through Barnes & Noble and Amazon. Special Guest: Ken Moench.

Neil Gehani is the founder of Mind Lumen, a nonprofit working to close the trust gap in psychedelic care by making ethics observable, measurable, and accountable. He's also a co-signatory of the Hopkins-Oxford HOPE consensus statement and author of "Ethics Without Borders" in The American Journal of Bioethics. In this episode, I talk with Neil about: Growing up in a military-style boarding school in India, separated from his parents for years at a time Arriving in the U.S. alone at 16 with almost no cultural context His career in Silicon Valley tech and the personal crises along the way A life-changing unplanned psychedelic experience at the Oregon Eclipse festival in 2017 The three-year search for a safe, ethical therapeutic guide that led him to found Mind Lumen How Mind Lumen certifies facilitators and retreats using a practical, weighted ethics scoring system The real difference between decriminalization, medicalization, and commercialization Drug-checking and harm reduction resources like DanceSafe and anonymized testing models (Portugal) The Asian Psychedelic Society, a community he built for Asian-American psychedelic users Living with ADHD as a "condition" rather than a disorder, and what it means to live a "blissful" life Connect with Neil: mindlumen.org | mindlimen.substack.com | linkedin.com/in/gehanineil Special Guest: Neil Gehani.

I'm joined by Cindy "Seer" Anderson, founder of Soulpiphany and creator of Your Spirit Guide on Speed Dial®. Cindy is a self-described mad spiritual scientist who spent more than a decade testing whether spirit-guide communication can be clear, reliable, and teachable — and she brings that same practical, skeptical-friendly approach to our conversation. We talk about her path from corporate marketing and real estate into full-time guide work, the moment everything changed on June 5, 2014, and the "fingerprint signature" she teaches her students to help them recognize their own guidance. We dig into discernment, boundaries, and what to do when something feels off, plus some genuinely moving success stories from people she's worked with. We also talk about her free Call Your Guide Challenge, and wrap with a conversation about AI's (limited) place in spiritual work. If you've ever had a knowing you couldn't explain, a gut instinct that turned out to be right, or a voice in your head that didn't quite feel like your own — this one's for you. Special Guest: Cindy Anderson.

Marisa Skolky wears a lot of hats — transformational doula, psychedelic guide, expressive arts therapist, professional singer — and in this episode she walks me through how she got to all of them. She grew up in New Jersey immersed in music and theater, and spent 16 years quietly struggling with bulimia while climbing the ladder as an assistant vice president at an insurance brokerage, making music videos for underwriters and sneaking sound bowls into business meetings on her lunch break. It took an ibogaine flood in Costa Rica for years of accumulated tools — Reiki, hypnotherapy, IFS, somatic work — to finally take hold. We get into some of the wilder edges of her healing story: an ayahuasca ceremony that appeared to heal a fractured tibial plateau overnight, and a DMT experience that put her back inside the moment of her own birth. Marisa also breaks down the five-part framework — identify, confront, release, change, grow — she uses with clients, blending expressive arts, somatic practices, and ritual (letters burned in fire, seeds planted during a journey, physical totems made by hand). We talk about the difference between crying into your chest and actually releasing energy out of the body, why so many people are afraid of their own anger, and what it looks like to build a life — and a business — around energetic integrity. She leaves me with a recommendation I'm passing along: Nathaniel Branden's "Six Pillars of Self-Esteem." Special Guest: Marisa Skolky.

For this episode, I'm joined by Michele Phillips, who's spent decades helping corporate leaders reconnect with the parts of themselves they check at the door every morning. Michele traces her own path from a childhood "peacekeeper" instinct through a late-20s awakening sparked by books like Many Lives, Many Masters and the Seth material — handed to her, unexpectedly, by corporate mentors and clients. That expansion eventually led her to write Happiness Is a Habit, built on Martin Seligman's research into learned optimism, and later to a second book focused on nervous system regulation. We get into what she calls the "natural high" — the idea that most of us reach for addictive quick fixes (scrolling, shopping, drinking) the moment we feel even slightly uncomfortable, instead of learning to soothe ourselves the way we'd soothe a crying baby. Michele walks me through her "ladder up" technique for shifting emotional states one rung at a time rather than expecting a leap from depression straight to joy, and we swap notes on flow states, Landmark Forum, and the language habits — banishing words like "try" and "but" — that shape how we experience our own lives. The conversation moves into energy versus time management, why she thinks corporations in their current form are unsustainable, and how AI might actually be a mirror for our collective consciousness rather than just a threat to jobs. We also dig into gender roles in leadership — the narrow band of emotions men are permitted to show, the double bind powerful women face, and why Michele started hosting a monthly "goddess gathering" to help women reclaim emotional intelligence as a strength rather than a liability. It's a wide-ranging, warm conversation about alignment, agency, and what it actually takes to write your own outcome. Special Guest: Michele Phillips.

Dr. Peter Grinspoon is one of the most credentialed guests I've had on this show — Harvard Medical School instructor, primary care doctor, addiction specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital — and yet he's remarkably candid about his own reckoning with addiction. Twenty years ago, he lost his medical license for three years after becoming addicted to prescription painkillers, driven by the unrelenting pressure of medical training and practice. Five years into his own recovery, the same board that monitored him hired him to help other physicians walk the same road, and that experience eventually led him into addiction medicine and cannabis clinical work full time. Peter's relationship to cannabis is also deeply personal. He tells me about his older brother Danny, who used medical cannabis to manage chemotherapy-induced nausea in the early 1970s — right as Nixon's drug war was ramping up — and how it let Danny eat, keep weight on, and come downstairs to play with his little brother before he passed away from leukemia. That memory sits alongside his father's legacy: psychiatrist Lester Grinspoon, whose 1971 book Marijuana Reconsidered argued that criminalizing cannabis caused far more harm than the drug itself — an argument borne out by the roughly 20 million arrests for simple possession since, disproportionately affecting Black and brown communities. We get into the real clinical picture: cannabis's proven uses for chronic pain, insomnia, anxiety, MS-related spasticity, and chemotherapy side effects, especially for seniors navigating the toxicity of alternatives like opioids and NSAIDs. But Peter doesn't sugarcoat the risks either — teens, pregnant or breastfeeding women, and anyone with a personal or family history of psychosis should steer clear, and heavy daily use can trigger a brutal condition called cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome. He's candid about addiction too: cannabis absolutely can be addictive, just rarely fatal, which changes the calculus on how urgently it needs treating. The conversation ranges from Carl Sagan's secretly-authored essay on cannabis and creativity (published pseudonymously as "Mr. X" in his father's book) to the dangers of hyper-concentrated botanical products like 7-OH kratom, to his frustration watching big cannabis conglomerates start to resemble Big Tobacco. Peter's writing a novel now, after three nonfiction books — including his memoir Free Refills and his most recent, Aging Well With Cannabis — and throughout, he keeps returning to the same core belief: harm reduction, nuance, and treating people with compassion rather than judgment. Special Guest: Dr. Peter Grinspoon.

I'm back with another episode of The Permission Slip, and this time I'm joined by Jeremy Robinson, a medicine sitter working out of beautiful Northern California. Jeremy's story starts long before he ever sat with a client — a latchkey Gen X kid raised in a strict fundamentalist household, quietly absorbing bullying rather than fighting back, until he ran away at eighteen and spent a year and a half homeless in Los Angeles, sleeping in unlocked cars on dealership lots. We trace how that early self-reliance carried him into a high-stress, high-hours corporate career — the kind that costs you six years of your daughter's childhood without you noticing — until COVID forced him home and the wall he'd been running toward finally arrived. Jeremy describes sitting by a pond, recognizing the shape of depression, and the moment he realized suicide had quietly become the only option his mind could see. That's the moment that scared him into calling his doctor, and the start of a very different road. From there we follow his journey into the medicine world: six weeks of talk therapy, then ketamine that cracked him open in ways he never expected, then MDMA and EMDR work that finally let him see his own father wound clearly, and eventually psilocybin, which stripped away every identity he'd built until only a steady, unwavering candle was left. We talk about what it meant to have a guide who never once assigned him meaning — who let him arrive at his own truth instead of handing it to him — and how that principle now shapes his own work with clients. Jeremy and I get into the practical and ethical texture of this work too: how he handles touch and consent in ceremony, how he vets whether someone is really ready for the medicine, why he always starts with ketamine before moving to MDMA and psilocybin, and how he pairs newer clients with people further along in their healing so no one has to carry their journey alone. We also talk honestly about the shadow side — the myth of the instant cure, the client who spent a year hitting himself with a sledgehammer before he could finally lay it down, and why this work is called "the work" for a reason. We close on lighter ground, trading notes on indigenous music traditions, the Huni Kuin tribe's medicine songs, the despacho prayer ceremony, and Sundance — reminders that this path, however hard, is also full of beauty. Special Guest: Jeremy Robinson.

I'm joined this week by Joanne DiMaggio, a reincarnation specialist, researcher, and author who's spent over 40 years helping people uncover the past-life roots of their present-day pain. Joanne grew up in Chicago's Bridgeport neighborhood in a devout Catholic household, and I loved hearing how her earliest questions about faith and fairness — asked in religion class and met with detention instead of answers — set her on a lifelong search for a bigger framework. That search led her to Edgar Cayce, Ruth Montgomery, and eventually The Search for Bridey Murphy, the book that cracked reincarnation wide open for her as a teenager. We talk about how she built her career from there: joining Edgar Cayce's A.R.E., founding her own past-life organization, earning her hypnotherapy certification, and later a master's in transpersonal studies. Joanne walks me through her two areas of focus — past life regression therapy and soul writing, a channeled form of written meditation she learned traces back through figures like Mozart. I shared my own recent past-life regression experience with her, including how the information came through for me not as imagery (I'm aphantasic) but as a distinct, located sense of "hearing" answers. The conversation gets especially compelling when Joanne shares case studies from her research — a man whose arthritis was confined only to his thumbs, traced back to a Civil War cavalry soldier who used his sword to disable enemy soldiers without killing them, and a woman with chronic sciatica linked to a past life as a jealous ballerina in revolutionary France, whose victim turned out to be her daughter in this lifetime. We also get into soul contracts, why some souls choose disability or hardship as a teaching tool for those around them, and why she sees a roughly 35% rate of spontaneous healing once clients understand the origin of their condition. Joanne closes by sharing what's next for her: a new book, Why Are There So Many Cleopatras?, answering the most common questions people ask her about reincarnation, and a new podcast called Healing Through Past Life Exploration. Joanne DiMaggio, MA, CHt, is a respected expert on the topic of reincarnation and Soul Writing.™ A member of Edgar Cayce’s Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.) since 1987, Joanne earned her master’s degree in Transpersonal Studies and her Spiritual Mentor certification through Atlantic University. She has published numerous articles and presented talks on past-life exploration, the pre-life planning session, and Soul Writing™ to global audiences. In addition, she has been a guest on nearly 100 radio programs and podcasts. She conducts private past-life regression and Soul Writing™ sessions via ZOOM. For more information, go to: www.joannedimaggio.com Special Guest: Joanne DiMaggio, MA, CHt.

I'll be honest — Salvia was a plant I'd never tried and mostly knew through the lens of chaotic internet videos. So this conversation with Christopher Solomon cracked something wide open for me. Christopher came to the States from Johannesburg at fourteen, studied psychology and finance, and spent years in a database job he found soul-crushing before finally following the thread that had been tugging at him since high school: a deep, ongoing relationship with Salvia divinorum. We trace his whole arc in this episode — the bizarre early experiences, the moment an "intrusive" inner voice told him to meditate first and changed everything, the female salvia entity who told him she'd always been there, and the day a small dose seemed to dissolve a physical lymph node that had stumped his doctors. From there we get into the real heart of his work: low, titrated doses, somatic awareness, and treating the plant as something that demands silence, stillness, and respect. Christopher shares how Salvia affects the default mode network more than any classic psychedelic, why it pairs so well with meditation and somatic therapy, and how he guides clients through Zoom sessions for everything from crippling anxiety and depression to inflammation, arthritis, GI issues, and insomnia. We also talk honestly about the contrast with ketamine — reverse tolerance versus addiction, "diminishing returns," and the importance of listening when a medicine tells you to back off. Whether you're a curious psychonaut or someone exploring gentler tools for healing, I think you'll come away seeing this plant in a completely new light. Christopher Solomon is a somatic Salvia guide, teacher, and inventor of a pipe that aids in the mindful exploration of Salvia Divinorum. Incorporating lessons learned directly from Salvia and as a student of somatic psychotherapy, Christopher is pioneering techniques to use Salvia as a therapeutic tool for guided self-healing, meditation, and introspection. Christopher lectures about the proper, intentional, and therapeutic use of Salvia, offering a blend of scientific, esoteric, and therapeutic perspectives. He also cultivates a medicinal Salvia garden for use in his therapeutic practice with clients. His main goal is to teach people how to use Salvia for themselves in a manner that is supportive, informative, and empowering. He has a B.A in Psychology from the University of Texas at Dallas, and received his training in somatic psychotherapy from the Hakomi Institute of California. You can find Christopher at salviahealings.com and through his community, the Somatic Salvia Network, at somaticsalvianetwork.com. Special Guest: Christopher Solomon.

Katie Simons came to the healing world the long way around. With a doctorate in pharmacy from Idaho State University and ten years inside the Veterans Affairs Healthcare System — working in internal medicine, medication safety, and eventually as a patient safety manager — she had every credential the western medical world could offer. And then COVID happened, and the whole thing cracked open. In this conversation, Katie and I trace her origin story from pharmacist's daughter to closeted psychedelic explorer to full-time medicine guide and hypnotherapist now based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her first psychedelic experience — an epiphany on MDMA at a Phish show in her early twenties — cracked open a question she couldn't put back: Is this how happy I could actually feel? That question lived quietly alongside her professional life for years, until burnout, a divorce, and a first encounter with ayahuasca in 2022 collapsed the compartmentalization for good. We get into the pharmacology of psilocybin and MDMA — including a remarkably clear-eyed look at the actual risks (and frequent fearmongering) around drug interactions with SSRIs and SNRIs. Katie brings her clinical background to bear here in ways that feel genuinely useful and grounding, not alarmist. We talk about harm reduction for solo journeys, what to look for (and watch out for) when seeking a facilitator, and why psychedelics aren't a replacement for the inner work — they're a tool that breaks the chains, but you still have to walk out of the cave yourself. We also explore somatic breathwork, hypnotherapy, and the subconscious belief systems that keep the nervous system locked in survival mode long after the original wound has passed. Katie's framework for what healing actually means — not the absence of hard feelings, but access to choice — is one I keep turning over. And I get honest about my own stumbling blocks: the addiction to suffering, the pressure to perform as someone who's "done the work," and the places where my own nervous system still has the wheel. This one goes deep. I'm grateful Katie was willing to go there with me. Special Guest: Katie Simons.

I first crossed paths with Luke Lindstrom at a Paul Selig workshop last fall, and from the moment we started talking I knew I wanted to get him in front of a microphone. Luke is 28 years old, grew up outside of Detroit, and by his own description was barely functioning by the time he finished high school — isolated, angry, lost in pornography addiction, and cycling through therapists who never asked the right questions. What turned things around wasn't a prescription or a traditional talk therapy breakthrough. It was a somatic therapist in Texas named Steven Terrell who looked at Luke in their very first session and said, simply: you are so angry. That moment of being truly seen cracked something open. From there, Luke's path wound through Loyola University, Sivananda yoga, a deep immersion in the channeled teachings of Matt Kahn, and eventually his own emergence as a conscious channel — someone who describes the experience as a kayaker being guided by a stream, personality and divine intelligence meeting somewhere in the middle. He's built a YouTube channel and social media presence around that work, and he posts multiple times a week. What I find most striking about Luke isn't the channeling itself — it's the lived honesty he brings to everything adjacent to it. He talks openly about pornography addiction and the years it took to genuinely resolve it, not through white-knuckling but through learning to meet himself with love and curiosity. He talks about being 28 and never having been in a romantic relationship, and he doesn't frame that as a wound — he frames it as clarity. He believes you can't receive a real partnership until you've stopped needing one to feel whole. We also go deep on his day job as a peer support worker in a mental health residential facility, and what it's taught him about stigma, humility, and the razor-thin line between stability and homelessness. Luke's perspective on the unhoused people he encounters — both at work and around his Old Town neighborhood — is one of the most grounded, unsentimental expressions of unity I've heard on this show. He's not theorizing about oneness. He's making friends with the guy outside the grocery store. We also touch on Ho'oponopono, Paul Selig's attunements, somatic body work, the chemical imbalance myth, antidepressants, judgment as a form of avoidance, and the way pain in the body just wants to be acknowledged. A rich, wide-ranging conversation recorded on Valentine's Day — the first day of the Fire Horse in the Chinese calendar. Felt auspicious. Special Guest: Luke Lindstrom.

LeRoy Gordon's life reads like no one would believe — Cabrini Green housing projects to Walter Payton High School, college athlete to police officer, pro wrestler on Canadian and international tours to yoga teacher and men's circle facilitator. In this conversation, LeRoy opens up about growing up without a present father, enduring physical and emotional abuse, and the core wound of needing to be seen that drove everything from his athletic pursuits to his relationship patterns. We dig into how he almost joined the Navy SEALs out of sheer restlessness, how a CM Punk sighting at a WWE show finally gave him permission to chase his childhood dream of pro wrestling, and how the pandemic brought that chapter to a close and cracked open a new one. LeRoy shares how Landmark Forum was his first real taste of sitting with other people and processing what he'd been through, how an MDMA ceremony on his birthday helped him finally connect with his mother in a three-hour conversation that changed everything, and how ayahuasca and men's group work took him even deeper. We also get into his experiments with polyamory and how the radical communication it demands made him a better partner across the board, his recent ADHD discovery and how it reframed decades of restlessness and relationship patterns, and how Reiki, tarot, and yoga have become the unexpected through-line tying it all together. LeRoy is now leading his own men's circles, teaching yoga at Fourth Movement Studio in Logan Square, and building something that bridges the worlds of physical transformation and inner healing — and this conversation is a front-row seat to how he got there. Bio LeRoy Gordon is a fitness coach, yoga instructor, and men's group facilitator in the city of Chicago. After over six years of working the professional wrestling circuits of the US and Canada, LeRoy shifted his focused from his physical pursuits to healing his heart and mind with the help of men's work and plant medicine. He has led men's circles for nearly five years. He hopes to guide and inspire men to be the most open hearted and authentic versions of themselves so that they may continue the work of reducing harm and helping our communities thrive. Email: Leroygordoncoaching@gmail.com Instagram: /royflashgordon Threads: /royflashgordon Substack: https://sovereignsols.substack.com Special Guest: LeRoy Gordon.

In this episode, I sit down with Wendy Perkins Schoef — ADHD coach, microdosing guide, and neuro pleasure coach who specializes in working with solo entrepreneurs. Wendy shares her remarkable origin story: raised by a single Catholic mom in LA, navigating an ADHD brain through college and careers spanning real estate, biometrics, and web development, before finding her true calling after a divorce sent her on a journey of sexual self-discovery and eventually into orgasm coaching and nervous system work. We dig deep into her holistic framework of Goal, Set, Setting, and Intention — the foundation she uses whether she's helping a client build their business, choose a microdosing protocol, or regulate their nervous system. We talk about the differences between psilocybin and LSD as microdosing tools, why LSD is a "non-specific amplifier," and how the right substance choice depends entirely on what's going on in your body, mind, and environment. We also get into the profound connection between sexual energy and creative energy, the jaw-pelvic floor link, yoni dearmouring, the stigma around prostate work for men, and harm reduction resources for those exploring psychedelics. Wendy also opens up about parenting her son Max, who was born with a brain injury, and how that experience has deepened her understanding of the nervous system and shaped her approach to her work. About Wendy Wendy is an ADHD microdosing and neuro-pleasure coach, researcher, and co-host of the Psychedelic Revelations podcast. She works with brilliant, creative, capable people who are also a little bit fried—navigating chronic stress, ADHD, burnout, or all of the above. The ones who’ve read the books, tried the supplements, made the to-do lists, and yet still feel tired but wired, overthinking everything, spinning in place while their responsibilities grow by the hour. Wendy’s approach is rooted in a core belief: your nervous system is sacred, pleasure is a birthright, and ADHD symptoms are signs of a dysregulated nervous system—not a broken brain. Through microdosing support, nervous system regulation, embodied practices, and a BIG helping of tech support, she helps people remember their own divine intelligence and step back into who they truly are so they can make the impact in the world they’re meant to do. Her work blends research, lived experience, and a deep reverence for the body’s wisdom to support transformation that actually lasts. Website: https://thesuccessdoula.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wendygoesdeep/ Instagram: https://instagram.com/thesuccessdoula Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@thesuccessdoula Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thesuccessdoula TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@wendygoesdeep Special Guest: Wendy Perkins Shoef.

Karen Kubicko grew up steeped in Catholic school traditions — but something always felt bigger just beneath the surface. In 11th grade, on her first day at a new public school, she heard a voice tell her she'd had a past life with a complete stranger in the hallway. She dismissed it. Decades later, that moment makes perfect sense. In this episode, Karen walks me through the pivotal experiences that cracked her open: a near-fatal emergency C-section that may have briefly stopped her heart, a vision of her deceased grandparents holding her newborn daughter, and years later, a car accident in which an archangel took her on a tour of what felt like her future. Each experience deepened her abilities and ultimately led her to train directly under renowned psychiatrist and author Dr. Brian Weiss at the Omega Institute in New York. Today, Karen offers "whole soul readings," past life regression sessions, intuitive development classes, and Reiki — all aimed at helping people identify and clear the root causes of patterns that are holding them back in this lifetime. Whether it's recurring abusive relationships, irrational fears, chronic anxiety, or a general sense that something is missing, Karen's work helps clients trace those threads back to their source — and release them. Our conversation goes deep on several fascinating topics: How past life regression works and what a session with Karen actually looks like The empath problem — why highly sensitive people absorb other people's emotions, how childhood trauma (hypervigilance, unsafe environments) keeps the "feelers" turned all the way up, and practical tools to dial them back down Discernment — how to tell the difference between your own inner voice, ego chatter, and genuine intuitive guidance Spirit guides and channeling — Karen's experience receiving information, and how she sets clear boundaries with the beings she works with Dr. Brian Weiss and the origins of past life regression therapy — how a skeptical psychiatrist accidentally regressed a patient 5,000 years and changed the field of healing forever Manifesting and timeline choice — the idea that every moment offers a choice between vibrational states, and how awareness of that gap between stimulus and response is itself a form of freedom Karen and I also connect the dots between indigenous wisdom traditions, empathic experience, and the growing global awakening — weaving in references to Paul Selig, Bashar/Darryl Anka, and the power of trusting what you receive, even when it first shows up as a horse and buggy in your living room. This is a beautiful, wide-ranging conversation for anyone curious about the soul's journey across lifetimes — and how understanding that journey can heal the one you're living right now. About Karen Karen Kubicko is a past life hypnotherapist, and intuitive psychic reader passionate about teaching and helping others heal through working with their spirit guides, angels, and healing the patterns found in their own past lives. She is the author of: Life Is Just Another Class—One Soul’s Journey through Past Life Regression, an account of 16 of her own past lives and Making True Love—Healing Relationship Patterns Through Past Life Regression which explores common root causes of relationship issues, plus provides insight on how to heal these patterns so you can find true love. Karen also utilizes her psychic skills to intuitively see someone’s whole soul experience including their past lives. Karen completed the Past Life Therapy Professional Training course with Dr. Brian Weiss. She received her hypnotherapy certification through the National Guild of Hypnotists. She has personally remembered over 200 past lives and has helped numerous others remember their own past lives. Connect with Karen Email: Karen@KarenKubicko.com Website: www.KarenKubicko.com Book a Personal Session: https://calendly.com/karen-kubicko YouTube: @KarenKubicko ~ https://www.youtube.com/@KarenKubicko Instagram: @KarenKubicko ~ https://www.instagram.com/karenkubicko Facebook (page): Karen A. Kubicko ~ https://www.facebook.com/KarenAKubicko LinkedIn: Karen Kubicko ~ https://www.linkedin.com/in/karen-kubicko/ X (Twitter): @KarenKubicko ~ https://x.com/KarenKubicko Pinterest: Karen Kubicko ~ http://pinterest.com/karenkubicko/ RedBubble (art & merch): Karen A. Kubicko ~ https://www.redbubble.com/people/KKubicko Karen can be seen supporting her youngest child on the LMN Lifetime television show Ghost Inside My Child (S2 E1, 2014). For more on Karen Kubicko, please visit: https://www.karenkubicko.com/about-karen/ Special Guest: Karen Kubicko.

In this episode, I sit down with Pascale Falempin—former professional dancer, Pilates instructor, and breathwork facilitator—to explore the path of embodiment from a deeply lived perspective. Pascale grew up in Corsica, surrounded by nature and simplicity, before stepping into the intensity and cultural expansion of Paris and eventually into a career in dance. What unfolds is a story that will feel familiar to many: a gradual disconnection from the body in pursuit of performance, achievement, and external validation—and the eventual return. We dive into the intelligence of the body as something far more than mechanical. Pascale speaks to the subtle ways the body communicates, how trauma and conditioning get stored, and how breath becomes a direct access point into unwinding those patterns. This is not about forcing transformation—it’s about listening, allowing, and creating the conditions for the body to reveal what it already knows. We also explore the paradox of modern life: being highly functional yet deeply disconnected. Pascale shares how her work integrates movement, breath, and awareness to help people come back into relationship with themselves—not as an idea, but as a felt experience. This conversation moves beyond concepts. It’s about the lived reality of embodiment, the courage it takes to feel, and the quiet power of coming home to yourself. Pascale can be found on Instagram - @powerhousepascale Special Guest: Pascale Falempin.

In S2•E3, I speak with Christopher Sunyata, a former medical device engineer turned Buddhist meditation teacher and men’s coach based in Boulder, Colorado . We met at an Osho-inspired Deer Tribe workshop in Cave Creek, Arizona—an intensive container exploring sacred sexuality and polarity work . Christopher shares his origin story: • Raised Catholic in Decatur, Illinois, bullied through childhood  • A sensitive kid who later became a college rugby all-star—yet carried a fractured internal self-image  • A near-death suffocation accident in childhood that left a deep imprint in his nervous system  • Ten years of Jungian analysis, divorce after discovering an affair following a mushroom journey  • Intensive Buddhist practice and eventual immersion in embodied tantric work We explore how women’s somatic intuition became one of his greatest teachers—how feminine bodies read tension, contraction, and presence instantly . We discuss: • Why resting as “open awareness” makes men more trustworthy and attractive  • Breath-rate recovery and training the parasympathetic nervous system  • Why meditation, psychedelics, and sexuality all intersect as portals into death practice and ego dissolution  • His extensive work with plant medicines, including 5-MeO-DMT  • Sexual practice as spiritual practice • The difference between effort-based “techniques” and relaxed energetic openness • How men can access sustained, non-ejaculatory, full-body orgasmic states • Why relational polarity requires stability, not performance • The nervous system as the foundation of spiritual and relational growth Christopher’s central thesis: A man’s depth is revealed in how much intensity he can open through—without collapsing, grasping, or dissociating . We also explore how shame around sexuality has been weaponized socially and spiritually—and what happens when that shame is removed. This conversation bridges: • Trauma work • Buddhist meditation • Tantric polarity • Somatic nervous system regulation • Psychedelic awakening • Masculine leadership It’s an unapologetically honest conversation about embodied masculinity in a time when many men feel disconnected from purpose and presence. Special Guest: Christopher Sunyata.