Imperial College Psychedelic Psychologist: Why You Feel Numb And How To Feel Alive Again | Dr Rosalind Watts

0:00If psychedelics were popular instead of alcohol, we would have a very different society. We have so many ways to distract or numb. That's bad. It's bad because when you're distracting and numbing, you're not processing your actual emotions. And this over time becomes mental illness. How can we feel them but not magnify them? One of the most important things we can do for good mental health is... Dr Rosalind Watts is a clinical psychologist and one of the best known voices in psychedelic therapy research. She led groundbreaking research into a treating depression using psilocybin, the active component found in psychedelic mushrooms at Imperial College London.

0:38She is the founder of ACR Integration, a community forum to create a deeper connection to self, our community, and the natural world. So psilocybin mushrooms have been used for depression, and MDMA has been used for treating PTSD. It essentially relaxes your threat-based system in your brain. I was in London, and there was a great big protest. I could see that they were looking for bonding they were looking for tribe, they were looking to feel better about themselves when I looked at those beer cans I thought if we had substituted that for a very low dose of something slightly psychedelic they might have looked each other in the eye maybe I want to embrace humanity rather than reject it what we found with psychedelic therapy is suddenly it's like the ego kind of starts to dissolve and then they can have all sorts of creative experiences.

1:28What is it about today's world that makes people more depressed than ever? Disconnection from self, disconnection from community and disconnection from nature. Individual therapy is great, but it is not a replacement for community. One of the strongest medicines that I don't think we pay enough attention to is...

1:53is. Dr. Rosalind, what is your area of expertise and what is it that we're going to explore today? So I'm a clinical psychologist, but I've been a psychedelic researcher for a long time now, 10 years, and also a connectedness researcher as well. And that's what we'll be talking about today. What are the credentials? What have you studied throughout the years to become an expert and a leading voice in this topic? So I did a doctorate in clinical psychology, which prepared me for working with people in mental health, in hospitals and in community settings. And then I worked at Imperial College in one of the first psilocybin for depression trials.

2:31And that was my training in psychedelic therapy, really kind of training on the job. And then since then, I set up my own community program. It's a psychedelic integration community. And for that, I had no training. That was just me finding some kind of creative desire to organize a community that I was not trained for, but have been learning by doing. Why is this important to you? Why do you want to help people feel better mentally? Oh, that's a big question. And I think it was an, I was surprised at myself wanting to become a clinical psychologist because I always thought I wanted to be a human rights lawyer.

3:17So that's what I always kind of, you know, studied expecting. But then I did some work experience as a barrister and I realized that the justice system wasn't actually able to help people in the way that I wanted to help people. so I could see that there were some problems with it. This is even, you know, decades ago. I remember I was doing some experience with the Crown Prosecution Service and there was a young woman who had been brought into court because she'd been stealing mail. And it was a repeat offence, so this young woman had been stealing mail again and again. and in the court hearing um the lawyer that was defending her explained the reasons why horrific horrific things had happened to this woman just the most awful history of trauma and abuse and i said to the the barrister that i was shadowing you know why why would why would this woman go to prison like the prison system is going to be the most horrendous thing she needs help she needs support she needs therapy she's stealing mail because of trauma and the barrister just looked at me and said I think if you're asking questions like this you need to be a psychologist not a lawyer so that was the beginning of my yeah path towards psychology wow what happened to her she went to prison she went to stealing mail stealing mail because it was a repeat offense and it was one of those things like three strikes and you go to prison I mean yeah I think the psych the the the justice system has got yeah many many flaws in it and I think the psychology system has also got many flaws but at least you're surrounded by people like in the national health service in the uk which is where i went to work before i joined psychedelic therapy you are surrounded by a huge task force full of people who really want to help and even though the systems themselves have some issues and some injustices at a structural level working with other people that really care about other people's well-being is a real privilege within your area of expertise in therapy what type of problems do people go and visit you for is it depression depression is the main one so for a long time i was working in so before i came to psychedelic therapy i worked in community mental health teams and depression was by far the most common problem that we saw often depression and anxiety together but often it's depression and anxiety and some trauma in there too.

5:57So a little bit of PTSD, which is post-traumatic stress disorder, and some anxiety and depression is quite a common presentation. So then when I went to work in the clinical trial, the psilocybin, the magic mushroom trial, it was people with treatment resistant depression that we were working with. So yeah, depression is the thing that I've been working with the most. What is it about today's world, which I believe is incredibly complex now, that makes people more depressed than ever? So I would say disconnection from self, disconnection from community and disconnection from nature. So our modern culture is incredibly insular.

6:41So for example, we used to eat meals together. We are social creatures. We are wired to eat together. And when we eat a meal together, we receive endorphins and social bonding. it makes us feel good. I think now 80 % of people in the UK eat lunch alone. So it's missing all of that opportunity for those feel good chemicals. And we see this in all sorts of other ways as well. So there is just loneliness epidemic in the UK, in the US, a friendship recession is one way I see it. Like we don't spend as much time with our friends as we used to. We don't have as many friends as we used to. In the US, there was like 1993 % of Americans didn't have any close friends.

7:29That's now 17 % people with no close friends. So there was a real social connection element, because social connection is one of the most positive things for your health generally, but also in terms of mental health. It's very difficult not to be depressed if you don't have enough social connection we spend on average seven hours looking at our screens now so what used to be about friendship is now what we used to spend with friends we now spend with our phones and so we get in these awful dopamine cycles of getting dopamine from our phones and then feeling a dopamine drop when we're not with our phones so we're all in this addictive pattern now and we're seeking these little rectangular objects for our source of meaning we used to sit together around a fire and be brought out of ourselves depression happens when your focus is too small when the lens of your life is too narrow and it's just on the self and when the lens can widen so you're not just focusing on yourself and your own mind and ruminating and thinking about yourself and worrying about yourself, when that lens is widened so that you, it's not just your head, but it's your whole body that you're aware of.

8:44And then it's your whole, it's your environment and the other people around you. That is, that's kind of the antidepressant that we need. What is the clinical definition of depression? So there are various different criteria in the diagnostic statistical manual of, you know, of how you would be get a diagnosis of depression it's essentially around a certain amount of time that you haven't been sleeping well it's a very biological definition so it's a lack of feeling joy and pleasure in life difficulty sleeping difficulty functioning essentially it's kind of that you're you're not able to engage in activities like you used to and you're not finding pleasure and meaning and then there's anhedonia which is a slightly different diagnosis which is this loss of pleasure, loss of positive emotions and feeling very flat.

9:33People often think that depression is about sadness, but actually everything I saw is that depression is about numbness. So it's about feeling the absence of emotion. And often people that are depressed aren't able to cry. They aren't able to feel a range of emotion. And actually they really want to feel emotion. Like they want to be able to cry and it's kind of let it off, like let off steam in that way. But it's all kept inside as this kind of tense, trapped feeling of being shut down and unable to access life. It's like life is, people often describe it's like there's a screen and then there's life and they can see that it's going on, but they just can't touch it because they are just behind that pane of glass.

10:19What is happening at the physiological and neurological level in a depressed brain? So the default mode, so I'm not a neuroscientist and my understanding of this is really kind of been, I suppose it was my work in psychedelic therapy that helped me understand this better. So this is one element of it. And a neuroscientist would say that there are lots more as well, but this was the understanding I got from psychedelic work. When somebody is in a depressed state, their default mode network is overactive. So the default mode network is the biological basis of the sense of self. It's kind of like the ego network.

11:00And it's about keeping yourself safe. So it's, you know, we have this whole range of information available to us. And the default mode network keeps your brain focusing on making sure you cross the road safely, thinking about what you want to have for dinner, looking after yourself. So you need a certain element of that. It's not wide ranging and creative thinking, it's kind of focused on the self. When people become very depressed, the default mode network seems to be overactive. And what that feels like to people is ruminating all the time you're you're you're constantly thinking about yourself maybe thinking that you're not good enough worrying about the you know the problems in your life and feeling maybe rejected socially or any other kind of depressive thought that then becomes stuck on a loop and so it's very difficult to even think about the world beyond your your living room it's you're stuck in a self-referential loop.

12:03And it's very difficult for people to break out of it. And people take antidepressants often. So antidepressants increase your serotonin levels. But antidepressants can be absolutely life-saving for some people. So not in any way minimizing the power of antidepressants for some people. But what a lot of people that I worked with said was that antidepressants made them feel numb. They made them feel like a zombie because what they were doing is they were kind of like numbing that feeling of angst and that feeling of being stuck and that feeling of being stuck in these kind of ruminative thoughts is a very unpleasant, distressing feeling.

12:42And the antidepressants for a lot of people feel like they just numb that down, but they make people feel a bit like a zombie. So what we found with psychedelic therapy is that rather than just kind of numbing the pain the psychedelic experience seemed to do two things on a neurological level it was deactivating the default mode network so people went from you know in a psilocybin session they take the capsules they have a trip and they go from you know before the psilocybin kicks in they're thinking about themselves and they're in that self-referential loop of the default mode network and then suddenly it's like the ego kind of starts to dissolve, the default mode network is opening up and then they can have all sorts of creative experiences.

13:27So they have a trip, they have a journey, and they often come back from that feeling opened up. And that is on a neurological level, their default mode network has been deactivated. But what's also happening for them is that they're having a deeply emotional experience because when that tight control of the default mode network loosens, it's like it's this kind of it's it's almost like what's a good analogy for it's kind of like a sergeant major keeping the system in control when that sergeant major gets told to go and you know sit go and have a cup of tea next door suddenly the control loosens and people can feel things so people that have been shut down emotionally for decades would be crying for hours sometimes they would get up and dance.

14:12They would feel this range of intense emotions that this strong default mode network like activation had prevented them from feeling. Before we deep dive into psychedelic therapy, you've mentioned that antidepressants are aiming to boost your serotonin levels, which then perhaps it hints that having a depression relates to having a depletion of serotonin levels, which serotonin is this feel-good hormone, neurochemical. Does depression come mainly from what we lived in our lives or is it mostly coming from a genetic predisposition? That is such a good question and it's something that I have wondered about and I think it's still an open question because I guess like so many of these things it can be both it can definitely be both and in terms of which one is stronger I think it's it's impossible to say so because every human being will have will have some kind of you know childhood experiences that are difficult to determine what the impact of those those things are so for sure there are there are people I know in patients that I've worked with where they seem to have had a very stable upbringing, stable childhood, and they have this very biological depression that is just something that seems to be handed down.

15:40But then, of course, if you've had a parent that had depression, that will have affected how they, you know, their kind of caregiving tendencies and your childhood anyway. So it's very difficult to tease it out. But one thing we do know is that when antidepressants were first kind of invented, there was this idea that depression was just low serotonin that if you improve the serotonin people won't be depressed anymore and that hasn't that hasn't proved to be the case because as i said before you know with a lot of people on antidepressants they describe it as a kind of numbing and then if they stop taking the um the antidepressants it it's yeah it's it's it's much more complicated than that and it doesn't feel for them like the antidepressants make them happy or not depressed it for some people it just feels like they're numbing and again not for everybody but i think with these things there's just such complexity every human being is a unique case and for some people exercise will be the thing that works for some people it will be a combination of nutrition and yeah but for a lot of people um by the time they've got to adulthood the the kind of depressive system has become so entrenched that it's it's very difficult to break out of

16:57I want to talk about psychedelics. What are psychedelics and what is psychedelic therapy? So psychedelics are compounds that are found in different plants and they can also be made synthetically in labs and we have the classic psychedelics so for example that's psilocybin and mescaline and DMT. And these are part of things like magic mushrooms. So psilocybin is the active compound in magic mushrooms. DMT is the active compound in ayahuasca, which people may have heard of as well. And then mescaline is the active compound in San Pedro or other cacti. So these are all psychedelic plants. There is a resurgence of interest in them at the moment.

17:48and we started studying psilocybin. Well, in the early 2000s, modern scientific studies started looking at psilocybin, again, having looked at it in the 60s, but then it was banned for a long time. So scientists have been studying the active compounds in these plants for, yeah, the last couple of decades. And psychedelic therapy is a particular approach that's done in labs and hospitals using capsules so somebody so the study I worked in somebody with depression would come in they'd be given some capsules containing psilocybin so it's as if they were eating some magic mushrooms but because we we use lab made synthetic psilocybin it could be we knew exactly how much they were having and that it was pure so that's all the modern studies have to use synthetic compounds or most of them do um and then they would lie on a couch for six seven hours with two therapists with them they would listen to a music playlist they'd have an eye mask on so they couldn't they were you know eyes closed and they would have a trip and the therapists i was you know i would be there with people and with another therapist too we would just sit there we wouldn't be asking questions or directing the experience and at the end of that day people would tell us about the experience they had and the insights they had and they would often describe this feeling of well it was very moving to see that people that had had depression for decades would would often not always but often come in the next day saying something has really shifted I feel much better and they often describe feeling more connected that's the feeling that people often described then are they feeling more connected forever after that one experience that's the very important part that the science is still not quite catching up with absolutely unfortunately it was absolutely temporary so So occasionally people will have one experience of psilocybin or DMT, and they will describe that their brain is reset and that they felt better after that.

20:07It's very rare. What's far more common is, I talked before about the default mode network and that kind of stuck down state, like highly controlled stuck system. And then it's like everything opens up, but then it closes down again. So if you think about it, one of my patients described it as, that psilocybin was like turning on the lights in a dark house. So that very constricted, shut down state of depression was like darkness, couldn't see anything, couldn't see his life. Psilocybin experience, the lights turned on, he could see everything. For a few months, he was going out with his family, going out into nature, being with his wife, being with his kids, experiencing life and then the lights faded so over time it faded and six months later maybe more like a year later he was back in his bedroom door closed back in the darkness so it's not an it's it's a temporary opening and to keep the opening that's when we need to do integration work to support someone to maintain that connectedness to self and to others and to living world but that bit hasn't really been researched yet so would you be able to describe to me so if i were if you were now to medicate me yeah in a controlled way yeah in a medical way how would i feel and for how long would i feel that way so it's different for everybody um and the first thing to say is that the actual experience you have could there's a whole range of experiences so some people have an incredibly difficult experience sometimes it's very painful people might revisit traumatic experiences people might experience deep pain people might feel like they've died sometimes died 10 times it can be very very challenging yeah um sometimes people are really like whatever their problem is whether it's depression or anxiety um people can feel like they're completely in that experience so that experience is totally amplified and really brought into focus so that can be very uncomfortable but there's always learning I think there's always some kind of learning and people often have a really beautiful experience or a very varied experience but whatever the actual experience on the day is like it would be very likely that the next day you would describe a feeling of openness so if you had been depressed for a long time and you'd felt very hemmed in and shut shut down you would describe a feeling of um of openness that your consciousness is somehow expansive that your your head is kind of freed and opened up you might also notice interesting you might notice your body more you might notice um so there's so interoception is the name that's given for your bodily awareness so how aware you are of like what your stomach feels like where your liver is like you know the kind of internal viscera of your body in our culture we're very shut down from our bodies and interoception interoception or a lack of it is a trans diagnostic factor for so many mental health problems so anxiety depression ptsd addiction having a reduced interoceptive capacity is linked to all of these things and if you have a psychedelic experience you are likely to feel your interoceptive capacity is increased you can feel your body you're also much more likely to if you were walking out of the clinic and down the road you would notice the trees you would notice the flowers you would see the greens in a more vivid way the smell of the flowers would be stronger so there's a sensory capacity that we're also very shut down from as well colors would would seem more vivid or may seem more vivid um and then in terms of you know as you walk out of the clinic and you go to the shop to buy a drink you would likely look at that person selling you the drink and instead of just giving them your card and walking out the shop you would look them in the eye and you would honor that person there's this beautiful sense that people really see each other and connect with other humans in this very deep way even if it's just for a fleeting moment yeah that in our culture again we just don't really look at each other and then you might also feel in the in the weeks afterwards a sense of meaning being more connected to the big questions of your life your purpose why are you here you might reassess some parts of your life your relationships your work your family you might make a few phone calls to people that you haven't you know spoken to for a while so it's it's connection it's connection to body emotions connection to the world around us connection to people it seems to me that when we are depressed based on what you're saying we have this very narrow vision of what our lives are.

25:23We think about work and our personal relationships with our friends, but it's quite narrow and we don't have that wider perspective. We lose the bigger picture. But when we take psychedelics, then we regain that perspective and we simplify also things in one way, right? Yeah, that's a great way of describing it. It's interesting because obviously they've, you know, psychedelics are illegal. They've been banned. Many of us grew up with a real sense of these substances being very dangerous, that they would, you know, fry your brain, that if you take lsd you know i grew up with all of these ideas that if you took lsd it would fry your brain if you took it a certain number of times you'd never you'd be psychotic and never come back so it's interesting how different the actual experience for many people of and especially at low doses so i think you're talking about a kind of a you know a smaller dose so that you can be interacting in the world which is different to in our study we gave people the equivalent of about i guess about like five grams of magic mushrooms which is a lot of magic mushrooms and for that you need to be you know lying down with the therapist and the music and safety but a smaller dose when people talk about having that when they're in nature or they're socializing people have described very positive effects yeah and and and a pretty good safety profile as well you know it's um especially in the lower doses it does seem to be it's a quite benign substance much safer than alcohol.

26:48Would you say people should take magic mushrooms or psychedelics for recreational purposes too or only for medical reasons? Well I mean I think if I was able to I mean obviously you know because they are illegal you can't it's very very difficult to suggest that you think people should take them recreationally and also it has to be said that there are some people with underlying mental health issues for whom psychedelics could destabilize them so people do become psychotic sometimes and especially if people are mixing it but I suppose if I had a magic wand and I could kind of change the way our society works I do have to say that if um I thought this the other day when I was I was in London and there was a great big protest and it was a kind of far-right protest and there were lots of men wearing England shirts and there was beer cups everywhere and I felt very sad looking at this kind of huge swelling mass of anti-immigration protesters it broke my heart actually but when I looked at them and I could see that they were looking for bonding they were looking for tribe they were looking to feel better about themselves in some way and that being part of a big brotherhood standing up for something was making them feel good but when I looked at those beer cans I thought if we had substituted that for a very low dose of something slightly psychedelic maybe not even psilocybin maybe MDMA which we haven't talked about yet but MDMA is the the bonding social one it's actually not a classic psychedelic it's actually an intactogen so it's a different category but it essentially helps people it's relaxes your threat-based system in your brain so it's very good for couple therapy um your amygdala is your threat system which is talking about mdma yeah okay so so that um your system of feeling like you're in danger or threat or kind of protecting yourself it relaxes that so it brings your barriers down when i saw that protest i felt like if there'd been a small amount of MDMA in their cups instead of alcohol, things would have taken a very different turn.

29:04And they might have looked each other in the eye and wanted to connect with each other and learn about each other. And they might have thought about the posters they were holding saying, you know, refugees go home and thought, actually, I'm a human being amongst humans. And maybe I want to embrace humanity rather than, you know, reject it. I do feel like on a social level, if psychedelics on a small amount recreationally were popular instead of alcohol, we would have a very different society. Is MDMA a psychedelic too? So MDMA is grouped in with psychedelics because it's used in psychedelic research.

29:48So MDMA is one of the biggest focuses of psychedelic research. So obviously lots of people will have taken MDMA socially and going clubbing and not really see it as a therapeutic substance. But MDMA, when used alongside therapy, has been incredibly efficient at treating PTSD. So psilocybin mushrooms have been used for depression and MDMA has been used for treating PTSD. And it's been used a lot in the States. They've used it with veterans that have PTSD after coming back from war. and it has shown amazing amazing effects so yeah i think um even though we've been led to believe they're really dangerous and actually mdma does have more health problems than some of the other psychedelics mdma if you took it too often it could lead to it so whereas psilocybin um if you take psilocybin you don't have what's known as a come down afterwards because it doesn't deplete your own serotonin levels it just adds extra in whereas with mdma if you take mdma it boosts your serotonin the kind of feel-good chemical but then the next day you have this loss of it so mdma needs a lot of care around it and can't be taken very often but i it's more similar to alcohol the difference is that alcohol gives you dopamine spike which is a different neurochemical and then the day after you have that come down you have a dopamine low and then with mdma you have a serotonin high and then the day after you have the serotonin low yeah but not with with magic mushrooms you don't get the same you don't get the come down in the same way no it's um people often describe feeling yeah kind of more opened up but i mean you know saying all of this it's kind of like it's easy to hear and think oh wow you know that will be that must you know i must try that but it you know it does need very careful like the answer to the question about whether it should be taken recreationally is if it was in very small amounts then I can see it having a positive impact but it's very easy for that small amount to be a bit too high and if it starts to have proper psychoactive effects on somebody then you really need to be in a safe place with a therapist and if if it's used unsafely and people took too much of it or they took it and they you know they didn't have the right kind of if people took too much of it with mental health um vulnerabilities um it can have very scary effects it's incredibly powerful stuff it's incredibly intense if you take a lot of it is it more intense than alcohol much more intense than alcohol so when you get drunk with alcohol you go woozy and you start to kind of you know things start to be a bit blurry but you're still yourself and you're still in the room that you're in even if you can't really see it but with psychedelics if you have a strong um a strong trip with psilocybin you know in your default mode network your sense of self is is deactivating your ego is dissolving you you are in a completely different you you maybe don't even feel like yourself you might feel like you've died you're in a different reality and it's not always sometimes it can feel clear and that you have a sense of a kind of being in another place but it can also just feel very strange very soupy very scary and what can happen is if people start to feel this sense of loss of control if you panic and start to fight it and resist it then it becomes like a then it becomes a bad trip it becomes like a nightmare because you can't fight it yeah yeah yeah yeah so I always think of it as like I once went bungee jumping yeah I'm not sorry not bungee jumping I went abseiling and it was like at school and they they make you stand on the edge of the cliff and they say okay here's the rope you have to let go of the rope and jump down the cliff but I was too scared I'm scared of heights so instead of jumping down the rope I held on tight and I slid all the way down the mountain and at the bottom my hands were bleeding because I had just held on.

34:05And that's such a good analogy for psychedelics because you have to close your eyes, you have to let go of the rope and trust and just let go. Just letting go is the big thing. And if you can do that, then you can have this experience. But if you hold on tight, you end up with frayed and bloody hands.

34:29What do most people misunderstand about psychedelics? I think one of them is the conception that they are, I think there's two major kind of misconceptions on both ends. The first, which would probably be more prevalent like maybe five years ago, is that they're really dangerous, that they'll fry your brain, that they'll make you go mad, which is just, you know, that was propaganda from the 70s and it's just not true. But then what's happened more recently is that there's been this resurgence of interest in them. There's been films about them, books about them. And now I would say there's this misconception that they will reset your brain, they will fix everything, that they're a kind of magic solution.

35:11And neither, neither of those is true. The reality from what I've seen is that they're a tool, they can, you know, like a knife, they can be used to carve the most beautiful wood carving and they can be used to harm. You know, psychedelics are, we call them nonspecific amplifiers, which means they're amplifiers of experience. but they're not inherently benign it's very much the setting that you use them in they will they're very intense they lead to these very intense experiences but they've been used in cults they've been used for all sorts of strange purposes as well in the past and so it's very much about they're only as powerful as the setting that you take them in and the intention that you're using them with and if you're using them for healing and you have good team around you a good therapist then they might really change your life but if you use them without intention they might be a bit fun but they're probably not going to lead to any long-term change and it's that intentionality and and integration it's about the experience opens you up so what it also does to the brain is it brings a state of neuroplasticity so it's it's um it's that feeling I talked about earlier of expansiveness that is neuroplasticity it's like this they call it the afterglow so in a type of neuroplasticity it's much easier for you to learn new habits your so one analogy for thinking of this is and this is from a colleague that I worked with at Imperial College so Mendel Kalem so his analogy is for talking about this like neuro neuroplasticity afterwards so when you imagine skiing down a mountain when you have depression and your default mode network is in its kind of constricted state it's like climbing up the hill on the ski lift and then you ski down the mountain and then you do it again and you ski down the same path and after a while the tracks in the snow are so deep that you can't ski anywhere else you are always skiing down the same path and that is your brain pathways becoming very entrenched a certain neural pathway becomes your your your status quo psilocybin he described as being like a snowplow so it comes in and it just goes default mode network deactivated everything just smoothed over so when you ski down you can ski left you can ski right you can go anywhere You can go to new places.

37:46So the neuroplastic window after a psychedelic experience gives you a few weeks or months where you can develop new neural pathways and new habits. You can change your life in that time. After one experience only. After one experience, yeah. If you couple that one experience with really focusing on, okay, what do I want to change in my life? I've got these weeks and months to really consolidate that change. That's when it starts to really work. Can you give me some example of those changes? What can people change if they take psychedelics? So you've covered, we've covered that it's good for therapeutic reasons, for mental health challenges.

38:22Right now you're touching upon that neuroplasticity. So what can we do with that? what can you do so i think of everything in terms of my research on connectedness so it's always in the three categories of connection to self connection to others and connection to nature so i would always recommend for people that in the in the time after a psychedelic experience well what i recommend and what i've spent my last six years focusing on is joining a community of practice so in our modern lives we have friends and we have family and we have colleagues but what we don't have is a community of practice.

38:57Some people might, if they're a meditator, they might be part of a kind of meditation community. But often these communities that you might go to see once a month, you know, or something like that. What I've seen is that people need to access a community of practice that is available to them whenever they need it. So not just once a month, but is there for them. So what that would look like is an online community of people that are all there for the same purpose so they're all saying we've had a psychedelic experience we all want to become more connected to ourselves to community to the world around us and then taking part in consistent practices so breathwork is excellent for keeping that openness and maintaining the benefits of psychedelic therapy so breathwork you might have heard of wim hoff um what is wim So Wim Hof is a breath worker who developed this particular approach to breath work where you do some very intense breathing techniques.

39:58And you're essentially kind of starving the brain of oxygen. Hyperventilating, sort of. And then you can access a very peaceful state. It helps you change your state of consciousness a little bit like psychedelics. There's some interesting research now on how breathwork experiences can mirror psychedelic experiences. But unlike psychedelics where it's like very intense and you can't control it, with breathwork you can go as deep as you want to go because you keep doing the breathing. And if you want to stop, you just stop the breathing and then you stay where you are. I wouldn't recommend it necessarily as an alternative to psychedelics because I think from what I've seen, psychedelics for so many people, psychedelic therapy is the big opening.

40:39but then breath work can maintain it so the other thing about psychedelic breath work is that it's free you can do it from home you can do it online with other people as long as it's done safely so i would always recommend a combination of breath work of sharing circles so sharing circles we many of us have individual therapy and individual therapy is great but it is not a replacement for community we used to be part of healing communities we used to live in groups of people where we had people that we knew people we could turn to um many layers of of support you know kind of kin clan it's that feeling of being part of a tribe we have evolved to need that and so having an individual therapist that you speak to for an hour a week that you pay to listen to you is is not hitting the same target as being part of a healing community so when I talk about a community of practice I mean a group of people that have come together to say we are going to share with each other be vulnerable with each other we are going to have conversations around healing and hold each other accountable so with individual therapy you you don't have that same accountability because your therapist kind of hears your version of events and kind of often will validate that but when you're part of a community you have other eyes on you so this whole idea of what can you change after a psychedelic experience it's about you know from an altered state to an altered life how do you conduct yourself in your relationships how do you show up for people and a community of practice if it's an ongoing one you're going to be there for a year or two years that's where we really see the change happen because you are you having these sharing circles where you go on an online group with you and maybe eight other people and you do it every week so it's it's kind of like and you might have your own individual therapist as well but in these sharing circles it's not just about you talking and your therapist listening every person witnesses everybody else so you you share whatever's coming up for you what's happening in your relationship what's happening in your consciousness what's happening in your symptoms of depression like what's happening in your work just whatever's alive and then crucially you witness eight or nine other people sharing as well and it's that experience of connecting to other people and being able to be there for other people so of all the things I've seen as medicine psychedelics antidepressants one of the strongest medicines that I don't think we pay enough attention to is the medicine of being able to hold space for another person because when you're feeling really bad about yourself when someone else asks you to be there for them you find a place in yourself that is wise and caring and trusted and valued by the other person and you instead of feeling like oh I'm so bad it's you know I'm always doing this wrong and everything in my life is going wrong which is a very depressive you know that thought loop is very common you you're like oh this person wants i'm helping this person you feel that connection and you feel that self-worth which is the best medicine so i think psychedelics are great for opening the door but then being a part of a space where you can really feel that genuine community that healing community that we've lost that for me is the thing that works the best where can we find these communities well i've made a good one that's what i've been doing um i mean i i i'm sure there are many you know i'm sure there are many people that are doing this kind of thing and many people are doing them in in in person but i when i left imperial the psilocybin for depression research i realized that our participants went home to their flats their apartments often isolated they didn't have any of this so I created started off very small just being for the participants of that trial and it has grown and grown over the years and then we opened it up for anybody because we realized that this was something that is you know anybody could benefit from because really what we're doing is we're introducing people to an ongoing rhythm of practices and spaces where they can become more connected to themselves and others and nature nature is the other thing i haven't talked about but nature connection is another very powerful medicine for feeling better and health um and so so yeah now it's opened up to anyone anywhere it's online so people can access it from any country and what what the the best thing about this community it's called ASA it stands for accept connect embody restore and the thing that this community does the best is it helps people make deep friendships the power of friendship is is extraordinary you know it sees us through the crisis points in our life it's it really you know deep friendship is something that you know many of us have got friends but they might be friends that we've had throughout our lives they might not share the same meaning systems there's something about finding friends that have the same interest the same value the same purpose so people that are exploring consciousness exploring psychedelics finding other people all over the world that care about community care about healing have had experiences that they're healing from and that they're all meeting together they they make they make friends and seeing those friendships form over time because it's a year-long process.

46:26I think it's that that I'm most proud of, I think. Talk to me about the model that you use in the program or the approach you said is the Acer. Yeah. Talk to me about it. So when I worked at Imperial, I developed the first bit of the model, which was accept, connect, embody. And that was because I did a piece of research where I interviewed participants of psilocybin for depression treatment that we'd done. And I interviewed them about how psychedelics had changed their experience of depression. And there were these two themes that came up, acceptance and connection. So the acceptance was people describing that in the psilocybin experience and afterwards, they were more able to feel their feelings.

47:17They were more able to feel pain. They didn't feel they had to numb or distract. Like we do, in our culture, there's so many ways to numb and distract, flicking on our, you know, scrolling on our phones, drinking some alcohol. Like there's just, we have so many ways to distract or numb. And that's bad. It's bad because when, when you're distracting and numbing, you're not processing your actual emotions. And you know, I talked to you before about interreception, your bodily awareness, when your bodily awareness is shut down, when you're scrolling, when you're smoking a joint, when you're drinking all of these numbing things you are not aware of what is happening in your body and this over time becomes mental illness it's disconnection and so what people described as this acceptance of emotion rather than avoidance of emotion what so that what that looks like is people with depression would have been very shut down for a long time partly shut down just from depression which can shut down your emotions but then also the whole range of um like habits they developed the crutches they developed so the gaming or smoke you know the crutches the the ways that they would find to numb all of those things were making them more and more shut down they'd have the psilocybin experience and they would suddenly feel this whole range of emotions that they had not felt for so long tears grief anger just during the high during the trip they'd feel loads of that during the trip but they felt it in the weeks and months afterwards too they were described a whole repertoire of emotion was opened up so suddenly they could feel things and what they described as being able to sit with those feelings one of the most important things we can do for good mental health is accept whatever emotion is there if we're angry let ourselves feel angry not act not acted out but feel it if we're deeply Really sad, feel the sadness, feel the sadness in our body, know what that sadness feels like.

49:20Grief, all of these experiences, it's healthy for us to feel these things and let them be there. As soon as we try and shut them off or we act them out, that's where they start to become problematic. How can we feel them but not magnify them? That's a very good question. So I think often people feel that if they let those emotions in, it's going to make them worse. but when we allow those emotions in and give them permission to be as big as they need to be we find kind of the opposite happens they in a way just pass through naturally because having this repertoire of emotions is just as natural as a human and these things will usually pass through it's when we try and stop them like young the psychoanalyst jung said what you resist persists it's when you try and stop them that they stay in one of the ideas from psychedelic therapy and from breath work i talked before about these breath work tools is that if you in a psychedelic experience or in a breath work experience which can be a bit psychedelic you say to the participant say yes to whatever comes up and if there's a big feeling make it bigger which is counterintuitive we feel like we want to shut it down if there's rage we want to shut it down sadness shut it down if you're given the permission to make it bigger what usually happens is that it will pass because you feel it fully and then it's done its job you learn the lesson from it you know why am i angry why am i sad and then it will pass through to become something else but we don't act on it but yeah i mean the thing with anger is is being able to feel that energy and the intensity there but not discharge that energy by hitting something um so often in psychedelic therapy experiences people are filled with like angry charge because if they've been harmed in their life they can access all of that and they can want to hit something and so that's why you know you need therapists there to keep you know keep people safe but yeah so the so the asa model the a is the accept which is all about feeling feelings and allowing them to be there that's the a the c is all about connecting so connecting to meaning connecting to purpose when you feel those deep emotions and you let them be there it leads to insight it leads to meaning you have a lesson so pain is a great teacher it teaches us what we care about and you know grief and love are two sides of the same coin when we feel deep grief it's because we really care about something and so when you really feel your challenging emotions and you're supported to feel them and there's someone to talk to you you're left with these insights about what you care about what matters and this is all the opposite of depression where you feel numb to all of that but engaging with your grief and engaging with your love is so much better for you than like numbing it away so that's the a and that's the c and then the e is embody and that's because i was trained as a talking therapist so i was trained just to work with people's thoughts and feelings but what we found in psychedelic therapy is that it's so visceral and embodied people would lie there and say like you know my left knee is buzzing or my right shoulder is throbbing like people's bodies were holding on to things that had happened and a lot of the healing process and the the process afterwards was people developing this somatic awareness of their bodies and what their bodies had been through and what their bodies were telling them our bodies encapsulating trauma in a specific part absolutely how does that work so this is the work of um Bessel van der Kolk he wrote a book called the body keeps the score it's actually now being questioned I think by another theorist but certainly what I saw in psychedelic therapy seemed to validate what he writes about which is that yeah we we store when we go through an experience we we have a visceral response emotions happen in the body so if something happens to us and our natural response is to want to flee or fight back but we're not able to that response gets kind of trapped in our muscles almost so sometimes it's psychedelics it's like people are enacting the movement that they would have wanted to do at the time if they'd been able like they want to you know if someone is harmed and they want to they want to hit back and so sometimes when people are able to go through these experiences, their body changes afterwards.

54:12They feel looser and lighter. Sometimes pain in the body seems to be trauma that has been trapped. So that's the A, C and the E. And this is all about psychedelic therapy. So this is what my patients reported in this research about what had changed. But then when the study ended and I realized that we needed a place for people to maintain the benefits because they had this openness and they had this neuroplasticity and how to keep people how to keep the lights on essentially and I realized that what we need is a community that has different rules to modern life where we can so this is the r which is restore and that stands for restore to the rhythms and patterns of nature so the rhythm and pattern of a forest so a forest is very slow it's cyclical it follows the winters and the summers, the trees are interconnected and they are in balance.

55:11So the way a forest grows is that these very healthy ecosystems, they're very resilient to storms and floods and fires because they are interconnected with each other at the roots. So they can go through all sorts of challenges. The forest is a place of deep resilience. And, you know, when we go into a forest we feel that feeling of like the slowness the gentleness the feeling of relaxation and then you compare that to a modern city where you've got all the artificial lights on there's no cycles there's no seasons it's just go go go it's fast paced you never stop and then we also live these very individual lives where we're very you know we live in our nuclear family units very separate we don't have the we don't have the try we don't have that that feeling of being part of a village and so I wanted to create essentially like an online forest or an online village like a place that feels gentle and so the R is basically this 12-month program where people can come and gently restore themselves to a more connected way of living.

56:27for someone that wants to restore for example and they live in a city incredibly fast-paced incredibly stimulated which is all artificial what would you recommend them so they can feel that restore that inner balance so one thing to recommend is an awe walk so there's really interesting research on awe the the emotion of awe so awe is what we feel when we feel tiny and we look up at a starry sky or we look at a beautiful you know if we're in a forest and we see that that feeling of awe is very good for our mental health and very good for for restoring that sense of perspective that we're just a little person in a big world and that there's beauty all around us so even in a city you can find if you focus on it you can find awe anywhere so if you go and especially if you can go to a park and allow yourself even if it's just 10 minutes to go and look at a flower.

57:26It sounds really silly, like we're surrounded by flowers, we don't look at them. But if you look at a flower and you look at the intricacy and you spend some time really appreciating the beauty and the symmetry and the colours, and then you walk along and you might, yeah, you might kind of look at some humans sitting having a picnic, but also look at the miracle of human life. You know, there's so much around us that is miraculous and beautiful. And when you choose to look through that kind of frame of the magic of life, we have this one life, we're not here for very long. And there is so much around us.

58:04I think that can take us out of the kind of, I have to remind myself to do this because I can get into a bit of a negative headspace about the state of the world and worrying about everything. And I really find that an all-walk can rebalance me looking at the wonder of nature. um another thing i would recommend is going to sit on a park bench on your own without a phone and start a conversation with the first person that comes along this is for the social connection bit it's it's a kind of lost muscle that we have in our culture we don't speak to each other anymore we don't look at each other if you sit on a park bench and just start a conversation it can be so beautiful you can have these meaningful meaningful moments with people that you might never see again it might be someone that's elderly and they lost their partner and they're really looking for connection it could be a mum that's really bored and lonely and is looking for someone to talk to so it can be it can just feel so good if you do something like that it releases a whole cascade of oxytocin and feel-good hormones in your system so that's another easy one i'd also say there is something about growing something so if you don't have a garden and you maybe if you you know you just have a windowsill you can still go and get a pot of compost and plant a few seeds and watch them grow again the miracle of nature it's so beautiful and it brings you back to an anchor every day watching the seed seeing that seeing it germinate and then you can go and plant it outside you can plant it in a park and just you know let it grow there and other ones I would say it's disengaging from the huge amount of time we are spending on our phones one way of potentially doing that is making a uh seat in your home a chair where you you set it up and you put a book about something that you love like maybe a nature book with beautiful pictures um you might put like some a smell that you like some essential oils and you might have like a if you've got like a massaging thing you know that you can plug in and sit on like a massaging shoulder thing or something like that there are also loads of um devices that help you calm your vagus nerve there's various ones that you can buy and if you go and sit in that chair you never take your phone there you're never allowed to look at your phone nothing no screens you just sit there and you breathe and you can put your hand on your heart and you can just you know say hello to yourself like literally say your own name and say you know you're doing well just give yourself that moment of of relaxation because otherwise we are full of cortisol we are full of the stress hormone because we're busy and we're stressed and we're on these dopamine we're on a cocktail of stress drugs stress stress chemicals and it can be it can break that cycle if you have somewhere to sit and feel the oxytocin which is the you know the bonding the love hormone and you can feel that for yourself you can give yourself a little hug you don't need anybody else there with you but all of these things they're sitting in the seat going for a park bench um going on an all walk all of these things are you can do it on your own a bit you can get more connected on your own but the best way of doing it is with a community of other people that want to do it because then you can just do it much more regularly i'm just trying to connect all these recommendations with your acer model so we a accept whatever it is that we're feeling and we don't push it down but we don't magnify it and we don't act on it but we do accept it and then we see it pass within us so it starts it peaks and then it fades away then we connect and then you said whether it's with ourselves so we have that that bench or that's it at home and then we hug ourselves we check in with ourselves we see how we are or we go outside and we talk to a stranger we connect with somebody else and then embody in the body this is where i i still don't understand it fully so if i feel like i have pain in my left arm because i'm not happy or i'm maybe potentially depressed what do i do with that should i go to should i get it massaged or should i just be aware of it so one tool that is accessible for people for all of these the all the a the c and e is music so one way to essentially the goal is with the body is to become more and more aware of things and to allow yourself to focus on what's there rather than pushing it away so that can sound counterintuitive with pain but be bringing awareness and breathing into a space and making a making a particular space of time for doing that so it's not all the time but making a space so you could go and lie down you could make yourself a playlist with music that brings up some emotion so some some music that might make you cry it's very important to cry like we don't cry enough we're storing all of this emotion crying is a really natural release it's very cleansing so crying okay is such an important human function because as us as men we tend to not cry at all and it's so it's it's one It's so sad to me that our culture has done that to men because, you know, I think that's, we were talking before about football.

1:03:48I think, you know, maybe meant something like a collective experience of football allows men to express emotion in that way. But it doesn't matter what gender we are. We all need to cry. We all need to express emotion and we need to let it flow through us. And if we don't cry, we're just holding it all in. So why is that bad if we hold it all in? so emotion that is trapped in the body ends up becoming shame or pain because we if we hold it in rather than letting out we we we hold it as if it's us as if it's something that we've done we all have had experiences and we're all going through modern life which is very stressful where we have experiences of anxiety and fear and anger this is just normal you can't be a human alive in 2026 and not experience some anxiety some anger and some confusion you know there's a lot there's a lot to feel those things about and if we are able to feel them and express them as tears especially if you can do that with others and that can be normalized as a as it you know doesn't make you weak it's a it's a important in fact it's the opposite to be able to cry with others shows such emotional strength the ability to be vulnerable is a sign of real emotional maturity so but but when we don't let it out as tears we hold it in as yeah shame or pain so i i think that music is a brilliant way to feel this so um you know i think one of the reasons why a lot of people are going to psychedelic retreats like ayahuasca retreats or mushroom retreats is because they have a chance to sit in a circle with other people, listen to music and to cry together because that's what happens in these circles.

1:05:35There will always be a lot of expression of emotion. And the next day, when people are talking about their journeys, again, there will be tears with everybody in the group. We'll have that. And it's normalized in that setting. It's okay to do it. But for, you know, for people that can't access that kind of thing or don't want to do that kind of retreat, setting up a system where you have a playlist that you make with some music that will make you cry lying down giving yourself half an hour breathing into your body you can do a body scan so you're breathing from your toes all the way up to your head and like really bringing your awareness to your body like the organs of your body as you're breathing any areas of pain or stuckness any like sometimes people will feel at their throat like a tightness or a heaviness in the heart or you know their hands if there's anger their hands might feel a heat wherever you feel any tension you just breathe into that place let any tears that want to come just come just breathe and feel and know that you're allowing yourself this time just to let the emotion flow through your body and then when that's done talk to someone about it phone a friend do some journaling but it's better to actually talk about it.

1:06:48Interesting when you're saying breathing into that part of your body is breathing in, focusing as if the oxygen or the air is going to that part of the body. Yes. Interesting, very interesting. And then the R is for restore, which in this case you've said we should go to nature and just like recharge our biological clock. And because it's, as you said, the city is very fast-paced, push, push, push, go, go, go. But then in nature, everything slows down and that's where our bodies feel, feels best. yes i mean there are so many reasons why i mean if you go to the the forest um there are chemicals in the leaves of the trees that have beneficial health effects as well so our nervous systems are kind of wired to the forest as well so it's really good for stress and relax to relax um and there is something about the scale as well feeling small in a in a larger place there's something about the or as i mentioned seeing something beautiful takes you outside of yourself one thing i've noticed as a psychologist is recommending nature connection to people that are depressed doesn't work so when you're feeling depressed someone says you go go for a walk in the forest you just you don't want to go but if you can go with somebody else that changes things and i felt this myself at like difficult times in my life i felt that feeling of like i just want to stay indoors i don't want to see anyone but if somebody can if you can go with a group of people especially a group of people that you can be really honest with you can speak openly with walking through a forest and sharing with each other about what's on your what you're carrying what's difficult is just the best therapy walking and talking through a forest with someone you can trust is is so beneficial it should be prescribed by gps and doctors everywhere and it's free and it's free yeah you've pioneered this scale which is called the what's connectedness scale what is it so based on the research that i did with the psilocybin for depression participants and all this other research i made a scale that has these three subscales so connection to self connection to others and connection to world and it's a validated psychometric scale so it's free to use lots of clinical trials around the world are using it but people can use it themselves in order to track their connectedness and it's got 19 items it's essentially a questionnaire but when a questionnaire is validated it means it's had lots of research on it to check that it's measuring what It's meant to be measuring.

1:09:26So of the first item, connection to self, is this embodied awareness. It's the ability to feel emotions. It's connection to your body, essentially. So connection to self isn't about like an idea you have of yourself or like your identity. It's connecting to your embodied felt sense of who you are. Then the second subscale is all about connecting to others. but it's about it's not just about your actual social relationships it's about your experience of belonging and feeling welcome in the world so so many of us and as a psychologist i cannot like the amount of times i heard people say that they just didn't quite feel like they belonged that they had a little bit of social anxiety that they you know even the most gregarious people the most kind of fabulous people the people you would never imagine feel this feeling of not belonging it's so common I hardly ever met anybody that said that they really did feel a sense of deep belonging it was very very rare and I think that's so much about the way we live now that we've become so atomized and separate but the second subscale is about your actual connections but it's about a felt sense of belonging amongst others and being welcome and it's also about feeling connected not just to the people you know or your you know your friends but feeling a connection to kind of strangers that feeling i told you about when you leave a psychedelic session and you see the the person in the shop and you pay for your drink and you look them in the eye and you feel a sense of like connection and honoring it's it's that it's looking at human beings all human beings in a different way um and then the last subscale connection to world this one includes connection to nature connection to a feeling of universal love like that there is a force of love in the world and that it's all around which is something that came from the psychedelic patients reports because they describe that a lot and there's an item about connection to a spiritual essence which again is something that psychedelic experiences can bring and it also describes a sense of interconnectedness.

1:11:40So the final item is, I have felt that everything is interconnected and that is something that again comes from psychedelic experiences that people describe, we are all one. You know, the hippies in the 60s saying we're all one. People often get that insight that everything is connected and that we are all essentially like a forest. All the trees are connected together underground. Are we all connected? in one way or another? We are. We all share. We're all kind of created from the same, you know, when astronauts go up and look at the earth and they see this bright jewel, they see that we have this one precious planet and that we are all living in the same place.

1:12:26And we are all, we are connected by so much. I think our society does a lot to push us apart. But yes, we are all deeply connected and we all require on earth and natural resources for us to be healthy. So in that way, we are certainly unified. We all need the same rivers and the same forests. For someone listening to this right now that feels disconnected to themselves, to others and to nature, we've covered a number of different things that they can do, but what should be the very first thing that they should do?

1:13:06Hmm. I think finding a person that you can speak to honestly and unburdening yourself of whatever's going on, even if that is just feeling deeply disconnected and having that witnessed by somebody. I think that's probably the most powerful and the thing that many people don't feel that they have. And most people will be able to find that person. It might not be immediately obvious, but actually we're all longing for it. So even if you don't have people, maybe I think it's fair to say that women probably have more relationships like that, where they feel that they can speak honestly about emotions.

1:13:49And men maybe feel like that's less available. but I think for most people if you are willing to be vulnerable and to state your need and to say you know would it be okay with you if we have a call um even if it's once a month initially and I'm just going to have the first 10 minutes and then you're going to have the second 10 minutes and I'm just going to say what's on my mind and what's bothering me and even if that's just that I feel very disconnected I'm just going to tell you that I feel disconnected and I'm going to tell you what that feels like and your job is to listen don't give me any advice don't try and fix me don't do anything other than just hear me with compassion and presence and then it's your turn you're going to tell me for 10 minutes whatever you can talk to me about the weather you can just anything you want to talk about and i'm just going to listen and doing that for each other is coming back to that what i talked about before in the kind of community healing where we're just alongside each other we're not i'm your therapist i'm your friend i'm your it's we're just two human beings together and we're just equal and we're just here to connect and it's by hearing each other's inner world that we can connect in that way because the moment we give advice is when we're not equals anymore right completely and it's really hard to do that especially if someone's like i find it difficult because i trained as a therapist but yes like reciprocal presence and And listening, it feels very validating to be listened to without advice.

1:15:21After sitting with people and listening to some of the most vulnerable moments of their lives, what have you learned about human pain?

1:15:32I think that we can take so much suffering if we are supported with other people. the experience of pain on its own is something that we can we human beings can take a huge amount of pain and when we are alone our tolerance our pain threshold is so much lower it's so much harder um we an experience of of emotional pain an experience of rejection or feeling like we're not good enough, those kind of things. If we feel isolated, these are the things that can just completely destroy us, can make us see ourselves in a completely different way. But if we know that we are part of a group, whether it's family, whether it's community, we are loved by people.

1:16:28No matter what mistakes we've made, we might get dumped, we might get sacked from our job, we might have some kind of painful thing happen, we might lose a loved one, we might get a diagnosis of a serious illness. If we have people around us that are with us, those things are so much easier to hold on to. But when we're on our own, those things become unbearable. Has your work helped you with your own vulnerabilities?

1:17:01The last years of the ACER community have. so I would say that quite typically maybe for a psychologist I had a lot of my own you know experiences of I had a lot to work on but by becoming a therapist you can in a way almost like avoid it by becoming the expert so you can helping other people feels very good and it's it it is a deep privilege to be able to help people but it can also stop you in a way from having to deal with your own things so I think initially I didn't sit with my own vulnerability enough even though I had therapy I don't think it really helped me get to the core but I think there's something about being part of this community um and feeling that sense of belonging and safety that has helped me to look at the darkest corners of myself the shadow parts and acknowledge them say yep i've got my messiness i've got my imperfections too i've got these things i don't have to pretend to be like i'm i'm i'm the person that doesn't have any problems i i don't feel like i have to pretend that anymore i feel like myself as a friend i try to hold space for some of my friends when they're struggling or they have problems and you know sometimes it also affects you emotionally because because you're hearing somebody's problem and you care for that person as a therapist you're constantly exposed to that and and you're asking and checking on other people and seeing how they are but we never ask ask you as a therapist how are you how do you feel that is how are you yeah thank you for asking it is true it's so true that people don't ask therapists a lot and that therapists might have their own individual therapy but we are carrying so much so yeah I'm gonna I'm gonna really I'm gonna answer your question honestly how am I so now when I answer that question how am I I think into how my body feels and I yeah I can these days I I do carry there's a sense of sadness that I have about some things in the world that are happening that make me deeply deeply sad that when I really key into how I'm feeling I can feel that there's a weight there um I can feel that my body is a bit constricted from sitting at a desk too much and not you know being in the forest enough but ultimately I feel a a steady a steady warmth that comes from finally I guess um truly feeling that I am part of a community um and that I'm held in that way that feels warm to me what is your definition of happiness connectedness connection my definition of happiness is faces around a fire in a forest where that you just have you have time you have nothing to do and you look at the faces of the people and you just think what an honor to know these people you know the joy of friendship I think probably for me happiness is friendship

1:20:20beautiful Dr. Rosan my last question to you is a question that we ask every single person that sits on that chair and it's very interesting to see the very different answers because all of you come from different backgrounds have different backgrounds but you're all experts in in your given fields so I'm very much looking forward to your answer if you had to compress all your knowledge into one essential piece of advice that we all must implement in our daily lives what would it be it's a it's it's something that I need to work on myself more so if this is still my growing edge so it's to be more like a tree so I've talked about the slowness of the forest and the interconnectedness of the forest and the rhythms of the forest and that we need to be more like that and I that's all there but Ram Dass I don't know if you've heard of Ram Dass is a spiritual thinker philosopher um that was part of the psychedelic movement in the 60s he said we should look at each other as trees so when you look at a tree and you see it and you see one that's like really spiky or you see one that's like really kind of like misshapen or you see another one that's like you don't think that tree should look different that tree should change you just completely accept the tree as it is in whatever shape it is but when it comes to human beings when we come across a human being that is very spiky or very you know it's we can feel so much sense of not accepting them as they are but I think the truth is that when we can really look at each other as trees and understand that whatever shape we're in it's because the winds blew us that way we lost our leaves because of the you know the storm maybe we've lost some branches there was a fire you know when we look at each other with that level of acceptance that's when that's when people open up and can actually start to soften is when other people look at us with acceptance that whatever shape we're in it's because something happened to make us that way so i'd say yeah look at ourselves and other people as trees with deep acceptance beautiful beautiful way of ending i've thoroughly enjoyed our conversation probably my biggest take is that we all need to be more connected with ourselves with others and with nature and that's a simple thing right it sounds very simple and probably is one of the most basic principles of mankind but i feel like we are we're losing this with the society that we're building so thank you for sharing all your knowledge and for helping us be more connected with one another we need more people like you in the world thank you for having me i've really enjoyed it thank you