Bonus – The Art of Allowing: Psychedelics, Breathwork & Expanded States of Consciousness with Patty Nagle (311)

0:01So you talk about intention. You talk about things like what is the difference between MDMA and psilocybin and when might one be a better substance or better serve the person at that moment in time? Because there's no wrong answer. They're just very different experiences. And then you talk about practical matters. Are there any questions, concerns, fears? You do. The other big thing is does the person do an intake? Like, do they have a form where they're collecting information about you, including prescription drugs? If someone doesn't have an intake process, big, big red flag. And these are all things that you take for granted, but there's people that are out there doing it that you can call them up and be with them the next day.

0:45And it's like, well, wait a second. So proper preparation, including an intake process, being with the person in the space. This is part of the setting. and available for integration. Integration is just as important as the experience itself.

1:03Patty Nagle: Hope you enjoy a preview of this full episode published exclusively as a bonus for our incredible online neuro nerd community. This group is the backbone that keeps this podcast thriving. And you can find out more at therapistuncensored.com slash join.

1:23Hey, you guys. while we know relationships are wonderful, they are also really hard. Many of us believe that they shouldn't be, that if we have good connection and good communication, things will just go smoothly. But it's really that belief that can make us feel stubborn and even more hopeless. So relationships take work. It does for Sue and I. We can make it look easy. It's not. And one of the ways is because many of us, we differ. We differ in what activates us, what makes us feel threat, the expectation, and it's these differences that are held in our body, not our thoughts. And they influence how we talk, how we love, how we fight.

2:00So holding that belief, if he or she or they could just understand me, if they love me, they do something different, is not really true. And we're talking about relationships with your partner, your teenager, your mother-in-law. So Sue and I have created an online course that can help you understand yourself and those you love in a different way. This is not just for therapists, it's for everyone. Although the good news is if you're a therapist, you can get CEs along the way and all of you can use the visuals and the worksheets individually, or you could even use them in your own private practice.

2:34So while the course is based on our book, Secure Relating, Holding Your Own in an Insecure World, it is definitely not a replication of the book. We talk directly to you. You learn how how to understand more deeply your attachment, those you love, the neuroscience behind it, and how to build secure types of connections right now in your everyday relationships. Rather than changing one another, y 'all can shift together in very important ways. It's very powerful. We're getting great reviews. Check it out. It's at therapistuncensored.com slash BAS, therapistuncensored.com slash BAS. The BAS stands for Beyond Attachment Styles, The Science of Growing Secure Adult Relationships.

3:22And by the way, the cost of the course is about the amount of one individual therapy session, and yet you get hours and hours and hours of what we think is extremely valuable information. So check it out. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Therapist Uncensored. So good to have you here with us. And I have a very special guest that I think that you're going to learn a lot from and who has helped a whole lot of people that I know. Patti Nagel is a licensed mental health counselor, a certified breathwork facilitator, and founder of The Great Allowing, a community and body of teaching basically devoted to doing less and trusting more.

4:00Welcome to Therapist Uncensored, Patti Nagel. thanks Sue so glad to be here yeah so I brought Patty on because she has personally helped so many people that I know and love and and you know challenging situations and I know you have a lot to teach and people you know can like I want you to get your cup of tea or your cup of coffee and saddle up part of this is because part of what you do is not just traditional psychotherapy be. But before we get into some of that, you have a community and a program, The Great Awakening. Can you tell us kind of the great allowing? Yep. Allowing, awakening. It's so interesting, right?

4:45Those are both expanded states. So can you tell us, first of all, just describe yourself just a little bit for the listener, kind of place yourself in space and everything, and then get us started on how this all began for you? I'm Patty Nagel and I live in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I'm originally from the East Coast. So that says something about me. I always say you can take the girl out of New England, but you can't take New England out of the girl. So I've been out here for over 25 years. And about 25 years ago, after I moved out here to Santa Fe, this is such a Santa face story. I read a book called The Eagle's Quest, and it was about a guy who did ayahuasca.

5:27And I thought, oh my God, I've got to do that, having no idea what ayahuasca was. That's the deep end. Yeah, it is. I would not recommend anybody starting with that. And I did not start with that. But I found someone who was quite reputable in the sort of that realm of psychedelics, to be specific. And when I met with her, she's like, yeah, I'm not sure that's where you want to start. And so we talked and I actually chose to start with a much more benevolent substance, MDMA. And that was more than 25 years ago. And I hadn't, I had not had my young adult recreational phase with psychedelics. My life just wasn't conducive to that.

6:12So this, I entered it kind of in a way, and most of my experience is in a healing context. So the way that this work is being done now with psychedelics, the resurgence of it, that became my healing path. First of all, it opened up a whole creative side to me that I had kind of repressed. I won't go into that story, but for good reason. but after I started committing to it about 15 years ago I started getting these kind of downloads about surrender initially it was like Patty you got to learn to surrender okay that's the way the psyche works that's what I needed to do to become more whole but surrender kind of rubbed me the wrong way it had I was gonna say to tell a woman to surrender or to submit is this tough but I get I get what you mean, though.

7:03Yeah. The connotation was giving up, throwing the towel in, failure. And as soon as I acknowledged that, the psyche shifted and it became about, okay, well, what about allowing? What about practicing allowing? And so for the last 15 years, I've been on my own personal journey around how to stop doing so much and allowing more. And it's been really profound. And people can really resonate with that term allowing to some extent. But essentially, allowing is the opposite of efforting. And I think in our particular culture, we put a lot of value on efforting. Like my motto up until I was 40 was where there's a will, there's a way.

7:52And it served me, but there was a cost to it. And so over these last 15 years, I've been cultivating, and believe me, it's not easy, the capacity to allow. And people will kind of get cynical about it, like, what am I supposed to do, just lie around the couch and just wait? And I'm like, actually, no. Allowing in and of itself is a choice. It's an option, right? So it's not about just waiting. It's about choosing not to effort so much and trusting more, sometimes in something bigger than ourselves. So that sounds absolutely terrifying. Yeah, it is. It's disorienting for people, including myself.

8:33But then I, you know, that's every time I go into an expanded state of consciousness, it was this download about allowing. I finally was like, you know, can we go somewhere else? Shut up already. Yes, already. And so then I then I realized, oh, I'm supposed to actually bring this out into the world. This is what I can offer, right, is offer people the capacity to allow. And so that's turned into online classes and a community that's forming around that. So that takes me to the here and now. Well, it's an antidote to this sort of our corporate culture, this patriarchal power overworld, all the stuff that's happening nationally, you know, and co-person, my partner and another therapist, Delinda Spain, are doing something called Brewing Vitality, which just reminds me of this, that a very, very small community, but just people getting together as an antidote to this.

9:38But this is, I really particularly like that this quickness or this productivity, even when people respond to you, like, what, well, what do you do? Do you just sit there? It feels like that that sort of reveals, like, if you're not doing, who are you? Yep. And I grew up. I have a funny story about my mom. My mom, you had to keep doing. It didn't matter what you were doing. Just keep doing. There was no opportunity growing up to just be. So that became my default mode network. Just do. And that manifested in my life in a lot of different ways. But man, it's exhausting. And we just keep thinking we have control over everything.

10:21That's a fantasy, right? Yeah. Totally. Yeah. And you had told a scenario about your mom and your dogs. Yeah. Should I tell my story? Yeah. Yeah. This is the origin story. So my mom passed a year ago, but she was an amazing woman, but she was always moving, always doing. And she would come and visit me in Santa Fe. She lived in San Miguel, Mexico for the winters for about 20 years. And she would come up to Santa Fe on her way down there and on her way back. And one time she came and it was about this time of year, spring, and she drove me to work. And I left the dogs home with her. And then she came and picked me up.

11:00And in an attempt to open conversation, I said, you know, how was your day? Oh, it was good. I built a stone wall. I did this, this, and this. I mean, she was very productive. And then I said, well, how are the girls? Meaning my two dogs. And she said, they're good, but all they do is lie around. And I kind of looked at her and I said, what? She said, yeah, all they do is lie around. So I finally went up to both of them and told them to go outside and find something to do. And I just was like, you what? I said, mom, that's what dogs do, especially this time of year. They're big for a coach. She goes, That's all right.

11:37It's not healthy. So she put one on a weed eater. Yeah. But it's, you know, I tell a therapist that and it saves me five years of explaining my mother. That's enough, right? So, but that's how I grew up. So you had some powerful programming to unwind that then is amplified certainly in our culture, in this economic world of doing, doing, doing, doing.

12:02Patty Nagle: Thanks for listening to this preview of bonus content. If you would like to continue with the episode or to support free worldwide access to important material like this, you can join our online community for as little as$5 a month at therapistuncensored.com slash join. Thanks.