March 11, 2025 • 45 mins
Western science gives us names for the things that we know – the things that we can see and feel and touch. But it’s always been skeptical of the things we can’t measure. This skepticism dates back to Europeans’ first contact with indigenous cultures in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, and the unfamiliar medicine that they found there. Today in the west, those healing modalities are often still characterized as “alternative.”
Mexico City-based integrative psychiatrist Dr. Carmen Amezcua is passionate about psychedelic plant medicine – treatments that are still stigmatized and misunderstood, even though they’ve been shown to be effective at treating depression, anxiety, and PTSD. But she prefers to describe her treatments as complementary, not “alternative.”
In this episode, somatics coach Holiday Simmons says somatics can help us reconnect to our intuition – the knowledge of our ancestors. Dr. Carmen Amezcua says western psychiatry doesn’t get to the root of our issues. And both say that ceremony is how we connect with ourselves, with nature, with our pasts, and with each other.
LINKS
- Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
- Southern Soul Wellness: https://southernsoulwellness.com/
- Dr. Carmen Amezcua: https://carmenamezcua.com/
- This Is What Ayahuasca Does To Your Brain
- Psychedelics, the Law and Politics - UC Berkeley BCSP
- Psychedelics and Neural Plasticity: Therapeutic Implications - PMC)
- ‘Authentic’ ayahuasca rituals sought by tourists often ignore Indigenous practices and spiritual grounding
- Magic Mushrooms Are Most-Used Psychedelic Drug; As States Change Laws, Federal Policymakers Face Urgent Questions | RAND
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Basket Case gets into some heavy topics about mental health.
But keep in mind that I'm not a mental health professional,
and this show isn't a substitute for medical advice. And
while you're listening, take care. My neighbor in Mexico City
is a practicing psychotherapist. He's also a temascalero, a community elder,
(00:20):
and a spiritual teacher who leads temescal ceremonies. In pre
Columbian Mexico, these ceremonies were considered healing. During the Spanish conquest,
many temascal structures were destroyed by the Spaniards, but the
tradition survived. Yam BENI, there are fifteen of us crouching
(00:43):
to enter the round, low structure. Inside, we make a
circle around an empty pit. Outside, large rocks have been
heated by a fire. We call those big rocks Abuela's grandmothers.
And when they're carried inside and deposited into the open
space between us, we greet their arrival with songs of
(01:03):
respect and gratitude. Then the door is pulled closed and
we sit in darkness. Each person says their name and
why they came. I say, I have come to grieve.
Water is thrown on the rocks to make steam. The
herbs in the water burn my eyes. Robin while Kimmerer
(01:26):
is a botanist and indigenous scholar and an enrolled member
of the Citizen Potowotomi Nation, and in her book Breeding Sweetgrass,
she writes that ceremony is a way to build and
nurture relationships, not just the ties between people, but the
connection between the community and the natural world, and ceremony
is one of the ways that she and all her
(01:47):
relations maintain their cultural practices. In Kimer's words, ceremonies are
the way that we remember to remember. Ceremonies are how
we remember our responsibilities to the earth and to each other.
It's dark, too dark for anyone to see me, so
(02:09):
I allow myself to weep, to sob silently. I release
what I've been holding in a silent scream, and by
the time we open the door again, I'm lighter. This
is basket case anxiety. I'm nk.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Yes that, Robin Kimer lane ceremonies are to help us
to remember to remember.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
This is holiday. Simmons a Somatis coach who lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
I know he's a fan of raiding sweet grass, and
so I called him to talk about what ceremony means
to him.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Any type of service, any type of fellowship. You're getting
together with a group of people and having a shared experience.
I mean, we're sitting simultaneously experiencing the same something, whether
that be pouring of water on hot rocks and sweat lodge,
or this incredible choir all in Unison, all of that,
(03:10):
to me is a ceremony.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
Though we've spent a lot of time living in the
so called coastal cities, Holiday and I both have deep
roots in the South. Holiday's parents were from the Mississippi Delta,
where he's spent a lot of summer vacations as a kid.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Part of my choosing of moving to Atlanta, i was
in New York at the time, was to get back
to the land. I was like, I'm disconnected. I need
to get back to some of that knowledge. And so
all of that informs my own personal healing as well
as the type of practitioner I wanted to be. I
knew I wanted to be something holistic that connected people
(03:44):
not just to their traumas in this moment, and not
just their parental issues, but back you know, their ancestral wound,
and not just the various sources of the wounds, but
the various sources of the antidotes and the healing tools,
starting with the earth and starting with their breath and
what their body was saying.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
Holiday was once a psychiatric social worker and he led
a program for unhoused people with mental illnesses. Now he
runs Southern Soul Wellness, the wellness collective informed by his Black,
Cherokee and Southern lineage.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
I don't know if a school of thought, but I
have a classroom with thought around the merging of these
three wellness modalities like traditional mental health therapy, counseling, psychiatry, psychotherapy,
WU medicine like yoga, acupuncture, meditation, reiki, weat lodges and
(04:36):
making an altar and ancestral reverence, and then clergy the
cloth in church. So I find there's like three separate
prongs well. Historically people feel like they can only do one.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
Somatics is not an alternative to traditional Western therapy or medicine,
but it can be complementary to both. As a Somatics coach,
Holiday combines aspects of talk therapy with physical movement in
order to anything the connection between mind and body. He
does do virtual one on one coaching, but somatics is
typically practiced in a group.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
And I just called it medicine because it is I
think one of the things that keeps people going to
services and to ceremonies and other large gatherings. It is
that collective aspect of being in the same room experiencing
the same thing moving, chanting, singing at the same time.
(05:28):
I called it medicine because it is quite healing to
the body.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
Through somatic practice, you can heighten your awareness of sensations
in your body and your awareness of what Holiday calls
conditioned tendencies. These conditioned tendencies are aspects of our personalities
that we didn't necessarily choose, but they are passed down
to us, imprinted on our DNA model, to us through
relationships and often reinforced by whatever social constructs we have.
(05:53):
And to be living in this conditioning cuts us off
from our longings from a wildly free and creator of
inner voice and learning to hear that voice, connecting to
our inner knowledge, desire, longings, the erotic aliveness, whatever you
want to call it, is at the core of somatic practice.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
I think what actually makes us unique is intuition is
this capacity to feel and tap into things that aren't
right in front of us, that haven't yet happened, that
already happened, that we don't remember, that happened in another lifetime,
and it's not actually in our face. All of these things.
(06:36):
It's such a powerful gift that I think we're all
born into, mostly all socialized out of, and really strengthening
one's own intuition can go a long way. I feel
like our world, our society for quite some time now,
has operated under a significant phenomenon of a brain body split,
(07:00):
and our methods of responding to such trauma and oppression is,
at least in the Western camp, is also organized within
a brain body split.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
From the first episode of this season, I've really wanted
to talk about this, that mind body split. It has
roots in the Enlightenment. That's the period of time at
the end of the Middle Ages, after Europe's cultural Renaissance.
This was during the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Renee Descartes
was an Enlightenment philosopher who usually gets credit for this
(07:34):
idea that the mind is separate from the body. The
Enlightenment was an intellectual movement and its intelligenzia rally behind reason,
individual rights, and human progress. They were really into skepticism,
which is how we got the scientific method, with its
insistence on empirical evidence, on the things that could be
measured and observed. So science was seen as a way
(07:55):
to improve society and liberate humanity from ignorance and superstition.
But enlightenment thinking also justified Europe's colonial expansion. When European
travelers traveled to Africa and the Americas, those trips were
framed as scientific expeditions. The purpose of the trips was
to classify plants and animals and the human societies that
(08:16):
European explorers encountered. When they got there, they looked upon
those groups of people and called them uncivilized, which meant
they were in need of European education, European religion, and
European science and technology, and which completely ignored the fact
that those societies already had education, spirituality, and technology of
(08:37):
their own. And then, as is often the case, European
scientists feigned superiority over the indigenous people that they encountered
on their colonial exploits, and they also at the same
time just freely ripped off indigenous knowledge including knowledge of
medicine and other healing modalities to use for their own
economic gain. The residue of these early colonial practices persisted
(09:00):
for a long time, and they justified institutions like slavery
and Indian boarding schools, both of which violently enforced assimilation
and tried to erase culturally specific practices. So it's thanks
to indigenous resistance that indigenous knowledge persists. Robin Wall Kimmerer,
(09:21):
the indigenous botanists that Holiday and I were talking about earlier.
She says, science names the things that we know and
shows us the limits of what we know, but science
doesn't always name the things we don't know, the things
we can't or haven't measured. So even though science itself
is fallible and subjective and shape shifting depending on the context,
(09:42):
the historical moment, or the political or economic necessities of
the time things we've seen throughout this season, certain kinds
of knowledge are still stigmatized. And a highly relevant example
of this is that in the nineteen eighties, right as
many New Age wellness practices were becoming mainstream, people started
calling those things wu wu, and to this day people
still say something is wu to dismiss alternative healing and
(10:05):
spiritual beliefs on the supposed basis that their effectiveness isn't
supported by empirical evidence. Even I say it when I
think not saying it means I won't be taken seriously.
But mind you, mindfulness, yoga, meditation, acupuncture. These are all
things that were once considered wu that are now fully
integrated into the mainstream wellness industry, while practices like somatics
(10:27):
and plant medicine are still considered alternative. So what can
we take from all this. There's a lesson here about
the kinds of knowledge we value in the West, and
about whose knowledge has historically been mocked or worse demonized,
or worse criminalized or worse erased, and how that informs
which healing modalities will be skeptical or afraid of. So
(10:49):
after this break, let's get into it with a story
about an integrative psychiatrist from Mexico who wants to bring
alternative medicine to the masses. Berb I found out about
doctor Carmen Emescua from a friend. He had seen her
for ketemine treatments after a long, hard summer with depression,
(11:12):
the kind of depression that routine antidepressants hadn't worked for
We met for coffee and he told me about the experience,
which sounded to me surprisingly psychedelic, although ketamine, as I'm
sure you know, is a tranquilizer and not technically classified
that way, but in certain ways, his experience with k
infusions was familiar. It reminded me of my first time
(11:34):
eating a hero's dose of mushrooms, the emotional pain rising
to the surface of your consciousness, the dream logic of
the whole experience, and afterwards, the feeling of purification and potential.
I wept violently during that experience, so much so that
I scared the person who had given me the mushrooms
and she had to leave the house. It was an
(11:54):
experience that brought me closer into contact with my grief
than I had ever been. It brought me closer into
contact that with my true hidden self. And I know
it's sort of a cliche to say, but whatever, It's true.
That solitary experience changed my life. Nicole, but doctor Carmen
(12:32):
Carmen's private practice in Mexico City. I climb a few
flights of stairs, hence my heavy breathing, and please don't
come for my accent.
Speaker 3 (12:51):
I'm doctor Carmen AMSCA. I always say that I'm a mother,
I'm a cook, and I'm a self proclaimed sociophobic. I'm
a mother who has raised a nerd virgin child who
is on the spectrum that has difficulty with attention, and
that too, has totally defined my professional practice for the
last ten years.
Speaker 1 (13:12):
Carmon shows me into the room where she meets with clients.
It's cozy and there are mushrooms everywhere, stuffed mushrooms, and
a chair across from us, and the art on the
walls hanging from Carmen's ears. We both setle onto a
couch away from the windows. Carvin folds her legs beneath her.
She has a lot of tattoos, something leafy on one shoulder,
(13:32):
a flower on the other. We spoke to each other
in Spanish, so that's why you're hearing a voice actor.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
Now.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
I'm a non traditional doctor. I do something called integrative psychiatry.
It's a really different model, a model that works on
four pillars, the spiritual pillar, the pillar of the body,
of the mind, and the medicine of lifestyles.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
Guided by those war pillars of integrative psychiatry. Today, around
sixty percent of Carmen's practice involves unconventional.
Speaker 4 (14:06):
Treatments, no conventional.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
Lament alternative what we, for lack of a better label,
often call alternative medicines.
Speaker 3 (14:17):
Well, I think that the philosophy in which I focus
as a professional has to do with the fact that
we are beings that are not separated in this mind,
this body, and this spirit, and with the understanding that
that worldview is a worldview that is also very shamanic,
very connected to the earth, very connected to nature, with
(14:40):
the elements, and that has led me to observe the
human being in a much more holistic way, a more
complete way, less separatists, less human centric way, and maybe
a little bit more animistic, more mystical, and with a
more ceremonial toneremonial. I've been a mental health patients, well,
(15:00):
so I've also tried to come from a place of empathy.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
The story of Carmen's life, the story that she tells me,
begins with her father.
Speaker 3 (15:09):
The story of my father is a pretty sad story
because he was literally kidnapped by the Legionnaires of Christ.
I don't know if you know them.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
As a boy, Carmen's dad was taken from his parents
and from Mexico, and then he spent basically his entire
youth as a companion of a Mexican priest who was
the founder of an ultra conservative Catholic order called the
Legionnaires of Christ. In twenty nineteen, this priest was accused
of sexually abusing dozens of children and teens and his
care including Carmen's father.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
My father left Vatican as an adult, almost ready to
be ordane as a priest. Although my father went through
all this history of abuse, he returned to Mexico. He
married a woman from a family that was also very Catholic,
and the environment that was born into was a traditional,
close Catholic family.
Speaker 4 (15:57):
Katholica and theo we believed in.
Speaker 3 (16:01):
God, but there was an absolute disconnection.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
Carmen's parents sent her from the home of her closed
Catholic family to a traditional all girls Catholic school, but
Carmen was always drawn to her dad's side of the family.
They were artists, writers, musicians, free spirits, and Carmen wanted
to be an artist. She wanted their more open, more expressive,
more queer ways of being. But also on that side
(16:26):
of the family there was a history of chronic illness
and addiction. Many of those relatives died.
Speaker 4 (16:31):
Young Nasli Valencia.
Speaker 3 (16:35):
But I was born into a family with a lot
of ambivalence. There was always this disconnect in my family,
and I put those pieces together as I grew up.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
Carmen was a teenager in the fall of nineteen eighty
five when a powerful earthquake shook the city centers.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
State Lando or Mestoy Mariano.
Speaker 4 (16:56):
The statim blandom Ferte.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
Sliding entire rooftops, off apartment buildings and into the street,
turning entire buildings into mounds of debris as broken gas
manes erupted into fires. The earthquake left ten thousand people
dead and many thousands more people injured or homeless. The
city was collectively devastated.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
I lived in the Roman neighborhood. Virtually everything around my
house disappeared, including my school. I lost friends, I lost people,
I saw buildings falling. I mean, it was a phenomenon
that broke my head and gave me post traumatic stress.
I was thirteen years old, fourteen years old, and well.
That happened in a cascade of many, many other crises
(17:44):
and more pain, including the loss of my father so
that made my head sort of fragment, and I became
a young woman with tremendous anxiety, with tremendous depression.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
Carmen's dad was only forty seven when he died, and
then her grandfather died as well. Carmen felt herself cracking
under the weight of grief and trauma.
Speaker 3 (18:07):
We're talking about the eighties where mental health was completely stigmatized.
Talking about a psychologist, it was like, you're crazy.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
Now.
Speaker 3 (18:16):
Psychiatry was something completely outside of the norm, and obviously
I didn't have that kind of support.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
Regardless, she was desperate to make sense of her pain,
to lessen the weight of her distress, so she looked
elsewhere for answers.
Speaker 4 (18:29):
We Bo scandal, and.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
I went looking for it in art. I went looking
for it in mantras, in the prayers of other religions.
I started getting into other types of philosophies, such as shamanism,
And while following this path, I arrived very serendipitously at
medical school. I didn't want to study medicine, but I
had promised my father.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
Carmen had promised her dad she would study medicine, that
she would learn how to treat and prevent the kind
of illness that had led to his immature death and
the death of so much of his family. So she
enrolled at Mexico's largest university in the early nineties.
Speaker 3 (19:09):
I came from a private Catholic non school for women,
and then I entered Niversitata de Mexico, and for me,
that was my first psychedelic trip. I mean, entering that
universe where I had so much freedom, where I had
so many voices, so many thoughts, so many philosophies, rich people,
(19:30):
poor people, people of fairy color, freedom, diversity, men, women,
So it was delicious for me. Beyond the medicine that
I honestly didn't study, I spent my time in philosophy,
in history, in politics, in architecture, I spent my time
in the cinema. I mean, it was a very beautiful
(19:50):
period where I grew as a person, and I feel
that in the end it also marked me in my practice.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
Despite her propensity for skipping classes and her major, Carmen
was an excellent student and after she graduated, she went
to grad school at the National Institute of Psychiatry, where
one of her first internships was in the field of
psycho education.
Speaker 3 (20:10):
And without me knowing. Those were my first steps towards
what I do today, which is integrative psychiatry. And what
is the first pillar of integrative psychiatry spirituality. Your spirituality
is what is your life's purpose, What do you connect with?
What is your intention of being in this world? That
(20:31):
is spirituality being able to listen to this inner voice
that tells you where to go, what path to follow.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
Now.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
A big part of Carmen's work is education and advocacy
around alternative treatments that help patients connect with that. In
her voice, she's kind of a thought leader on the
psychedelic potential of treatments like MDMA and katamine therapy, treatments
that are still stigmatized and misunderstood even though they've been
shown to be effective at treating depression, anxiety, and PTSD.
(20:59):
But as a lies means psychiatrists, Carmen prefers to describe
for treatments as complimentary, not alternative, and so.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
We go about executing it piece by piece. The complimentary
this is a therapy that takes longer than usual. In
other words, I always say that there are two types
of paths, the short path and the long path. The
short path is what I was taught in traditional psychiatry
is to silence the pain of depression or to silence
(21:26):
the symptoms of anxiety with anti anxiety, anti psychotic myths,
or antidepressants. But that's not going to fix the root
problem of people's trauma, the mental problem.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
Going deeper, all the way to the root of the
issue can sometimes require a more intensive intervention than conventional
psychiatric medicine can provide.
Speaker 3 (21:45):
And it's very nice in an integrative psychiatry how we
emulate or try to do things similar to shamanic medicine.
Why because if we look at what shamans do, shaman's
working community, shaman's connect with natures, Shamans respect animals, Shamans
work with the different elements of the earth. They do rights,
(22:07):
they do rituals, they dance, and shaman's work with plants.
And it's something that a traditional psychiatrist is never going
to talk to you about. The power plants, the psychedelics
that we are going to address as well, they're also
a part of the spiritual work of the mental work,
the work of the body and lifestyle medicine.
Speaker 1 (22:28):
Carmen's first experience with the possibilities of psychedelic experiences happened
while she was still a graduate student.
Speaker 3 (22:35):
Experience. My first experience with psychedelics was with ayahuasca. This
was in Peru, and it was in the Amazon jungle,
and obviously I wasn't looking for that. I mean, I
was a tourist and explorer, seeing crocodiles, spiders, snakes, macaws, monkeys.
And then one of the days we went out for
a walk.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
On that walk, Carmen was approached by one of the taitas,
an elder in the community and Peru, tita is a
term of endearment that means grandfather, but it's also a
title that denotes respect for healer or shaman, specifically one
who leads ayahuasca ceremonies.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
He told me, don't you want to take this medicine.
I said, no, I'm not going to be taking any medicine.
I said, you're crazy.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
Ayahuasca is a bitter, ceremonial tea. It's known for causing
nausea and spectacular or possibly disturbing hallucinations, and it's a
group activity. Carmen insisted she wasn't interested.
Speaker 3 (23:31):
And he insisted until the third day, and he tells me, please,
you have to talk with your grandmother. You have to
have contact with this medicine. And he told me, I'm
not going to charge you anything, but you need to go.
You need to go. They're talking to you. I ask
you please to take this trip with me. And it
(23:53):
seemed to me, I mean, kind of impossible that someone
would give me something for free there, but his invitation
was very genuine, and at that moment, I really swear
that I felt that call and I said, Okay, I
have to go, and it happened. The next night. I
(24:17):
went on a hike. We took a panga to see
some alligators and we saw some minibats. They were hitting
my head on the way, and something told me everything
is going to be fine. Don't be afraid. Everything is
going to be fine. And that's how I arrived at
the Ayahuasca ceremony in the middle of the Junglesia. It
(24:44):
was a story that we came not only from this
life and the life of my ancestor, but from other lives,
and they showed me different layers different from this reality.
And I go through this archetypical journey, typical of the Ayahuasca,
(25:07):
where you first entered the underworld. I saw my dad.
I talked to my father. I saw him, I smelled him,
I held his hand. I talked to my grandparents. They
were all there, and since we had been closed, I
have been waiting to tell them something. I was able
to talk to them. I was able to close those relationships.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
And then there was another layer.
Speaker 3 (25:30):
And then well, it was this journey of the puma
across the earth, through the present, through what is earthly,
through what is tangible. They showed me the land breathing,
the animals that you can imagine in the middle of
the Amazon.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
And then there was another layer, and.
Speaker 3 (25:49):
They also showed me this is a type of psychiatrist
you want to be. I mean, this is the doctor
who you want to be. They showed me how the
health system was making a sicker, how there was no
way to treat people and help them heal with those medicines,
that that was a paliative, and that it was not
(26:09):
going to deeply impact the people, that I was not
taking into account the spirit of the people, that I
was forgetting about God or the gods. And then I
also saw myself a little in this work that I
do now connected like seeing a panorama. I call it
drone vision where you can observe who you are beyond
(26:31):
what you were able to see. Here, you can see
everything around you. What are you doing, where do you
come from?
Speaker 1 (26:37):
What?
Speaker 3 (26:37):
Where are you standing?
Speaker 2 (26:39):
Why?
Speaker 3 (26:39):
Mental health and flying allowed me to observe that that
was the way in which I needed to do my practice.
And I leave that trip very moved by what the
plant had given me and well how I surrendered. In
(27:00):
the end, it was for me a turning point in
my life. I said, what is this? I have to
understand it. Why don't they teach us this?
Speaker 1 (27:20):
In psychiatry, drinking ayahuasca induces a physical purge. For some cultures,
the puking is a welcome sign of repressed emotion. Leaving
the body and psychedelics also increased the brain's neuroplasticity, its
inherent capacity for growth and change. Carmen was generally an
anxious person. When she arrived in Peru, she was traumatized
(27:44):
and grieving, But back home in Mexico, she noticed that
the effects of her trip were continuing beyond the single
mind altering experience.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
I healed many things. I was coming from a horrible
post traumatic stress disorder where I lived in anxiety I
can tell you that from that moment on, my anxiety
dropped sixty seventy percent. I didn't feel at tension in
my body.
Speaker 4 (28:10):
I didn't bite my nails, I felt happy, I felt connected.
Soon CAMEO important decimo.
Speaker 3 (28:18):
So it was a very important change. So I stopped
doing impulsive things that hurt me a lot. And that's
where my career as a psychonaut began.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
After the break, Carmen's adventures and consciousness expanding continue with
help from her favorite power plant and mine. Her ayahuasca
(28:51):
trip in Peru had been a fork in the road,
but Carmen felt a pathway forward was obvious.
Speaker 3 (28:58):
And well, A little by little, I began to understand obviously.
I studied how to consume.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
From the beginning. Carmen approached her adventures in plant medicine
with careful curiosity as a student, and as she studied
the plants, their histories, their effects, she also continued to listen.
Speaker 3 (29:17):
It was like a magic want telling me this has
to be done with respect. To do these recreationally for
you No, and today I tell you I respect it
very much.
Speaker 1 (29:30):
In the US, psychedelics, both natural and synthetic, gained cult
status thanks to cult figures like party boy journalists under S.
Thompson and LSD evangelist Timothy Leary, who both endorsed tripping
in the nineteen fifties and sixties. But as the countercultural
vibes of the sixties wore off, US President Richard Nixon
signed a law banning psychedelics in the United States, calling LSD, psilocybin, cannabis,
(29:54):
and heroin unsafe for general consumption. That law slowed down
research into the potential therapeutic uses of psychedelics for decades,
and then in the nineteen seventies, the war on psychedelics
went global when the United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances
made it illegal to sell, buy, or use psychedelics in
most other countries, although it did include exemptions. Some countries
(30:18):
argued for the right to keep their medicinal plants legal
for certain indigenous groups. That's why in Mexico, bayote, a
spiny psychotropic native cactus, is still legal within a ceremonial context,
but exporting those psychedelic compounds is against the law, and
as more and more people travel to Mexico, Peru, Ecuador,
and Brazil in search of emotional, spiritual, and sometimes physical healing.
(30:42):
A market has emerged for a kind of spiritual tourism
where hundreds of thousands of consciousness seekers converge in psychedelic
retreat centers all over Latin America. I honestly don't want
to judge that it's not my culture to gatekeep, and
I know there are a lot of people who have
really benefited from access to psychedelic therapy, which is increasingly
available in the US, and Carmen has made her life's
(31:04):
work to bring this technology into the mainstream because she
knows firsthand how much it can help people. But she
also told me that Mexico's traditionally ceremonial plants have suffered
from ecological and cultural extraction from deforestation and damage to
the landscapes where the plants grow, and when the cacti
are over harvested, there's less and less of it left
(31:26):
for the cultural groups who have used it selectively, sparingly,
medicinally and ceremonially for generations. As a doctor, Carmen has
helped people with their post ayahuasca integration processes, but she
doesn't work with ayahuasca herself. She doesn't work with payote either.
She doesn't belong to an indigenous group, and she believes
(31:46):
that those plants should not be used outside of a
ceremonial context or by people who lack intergenerational knowledge of
how the plants are cultivated.
Speaker 4 (31:56):
It's also not ceremonia.
Speaker 3 (31:57):
This is a ceremony of Laswicholis and Los Marakamis speaking
of colonialism. Why am I going to steal their medicine.
Speaker 4 (32:05):
That's my point of view, Gonelongo.
Speaker 3 (32:09):
But with the mushrooms, well, that's another story.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
Yeah, mushrooms are kind of a different story. In parts
of Mexico, they've also been used for ceremonial purposes, and
they've also been exploited and appropriated by foreigners. But Mexico
is also home to the highest biodiversity of psychoactive plant
and mushroom species in the world. It's estimated that there
are more than two hundred thousand species of fungi throughout
(32:35):
the country, and most haven't even been classified yet. Carmen
also prefers mushrooms because mushroom cultivation is more ecologically sustainable
compared to, for instance, bayote cacti. For one single button
of fayote, you'd have to harvest seven or eight mature plants,
and those plants take between fifty and seventy years to
(32:55):
reach maturity. The ceremonial uses of the plant reflect that tempo,
and that's why Carmen believes that peyote was never meant
for old fashioned, big business exploitation. But mushrooms can be
grown at home and in just a few weeks. The
mushrooms that Carmen uses for treatments are usually sourced directly
from my cologists, people who study and cultivate mushrooms.
Speaker 3 (33:17):
So that's how I got to know each one of them.
Although my baptismal plant was ayahuasca. My teachers are mushrooms.
I mean, I know them perfectly. We get all along
very well. We have a beautiful relationship. I know their science.
They accompany me everywhere. They have given me the best
trips of my life and the deepest lessons of my existence.
Speaker 1 (33:41):
In Mexico, between twenty and fifty varieties of mushrooms produce psilocybin,
the ingredient that makes them hallucinogenic, and as far as
we know, only about a dozen of those have ceremonial uses.
But outside of a ceremonial context, psychedelic mushrooms are still.
Speaker 4 (33:56):
Illegal lavesventa and MISI.
Speaker 3 (33:59):
And so the disadvantage in my country and in many
countries is that the mushroom and silocybin are on the
list of the most dangerous narcotics and they don't allow
us to work with these substances at a medical level.
It continues to be an illegal environment that as a psychiatrist,
exposes me to being jailed with a sentence that could
(34:22):
be almost the same as Chapobusman. In other words, the
sentence could be the same because I would be charged
with drug trafficking. But I see these small cules as healers.
Speaker 4 (34:36):
For me, they are medicines.
Speaker 3 (34:38):
So you're never gonna see me at a concert in
Silosivina or eating a tab of LSD because for me,
it was a very resounding message that this is for
healing and you have to learn this to heal. In
other words, I'm absolutely respectful because I repeat for me,
they are medicines and the way I apply them with
(35:00):
my patients because they are patients as medicine.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
Carmen's patients go through a thorough physical and psychological vetting process.
Speaker 3 (35:09):
Yes, I do it because I'm qualified. It is a
medical environment. These medicines increase blood pressure. They can affect
the heart rate, So if you didn't know you had
a dangerous arrhythmia, you could die. If you didn't know
you had uncontrolled blood pressure and your blood pressure goes
up thirty percent, you can get an embolism. So there
(35:31):
is a risk. So I would never do it alone
because I really take care of you. I give you
water and food. If you were to have a crisis
or a bad trip, there's someone who can help you
get out of it.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
She says psychedelic treatments aren't for people in crisis, and
she also won't recommend them to people with the history
of psychosis in the family, or people with bipolar disorder
or borderline personality disorder or other very serious mental illnesses.
There's too great risk of doing more harm than good,
of inducing psychosis or mania or a serious mental health crisis.
Speaker 4 (36:06):
Is the consultorio not Latin and see you.
Speaker 3 (36:10):
The people who enter this office don't have it so easy.
It's not a simple path. But when you get to
know the person's history, understand where they come from, who
their ancestors are, what their present traumas are, you can
prepare them for what they're going to encounter. You are
going to come across things that have to do with
you and your family, that have to do with what
(36:33):
you experienced in life. And I call it the navigation process.
I mean, what is your canoe like, how are your ores?
You have a life jacket, where are you going to
use it once you're drowning? How do you come up?
And that's a process that we generally apply to any
psychedelic So that aligns you a lot and really helps
(36:54):
you to reduce this anxiety. Sometimes it takes me three months,
four months to prepare someone and it is a very
very gradual preparation, very.
Speaker 4 (37:07):
Soft SOUTI very loving amor asta.
Speaker 3 (37:12):
Until people feel prepared and say, okay, I'm ready, I'm
ready to get into the river and let's go to
the canoe. And there are people who arrive and they're
clear about I would like to heal this trauma. I
haven't been able to quit this addiction. People are extremely
(37:33):
clear about what they want from this work, and when
they are not so clear, part of what we do
is help them reach that intention, form that intention, and
that sometimes lead us to group work.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
Although Carmen does meet with Patience one on one. Most
of the time, eighty percent of the time, the work
she does is part of a communal experience. She calls
these communal experiences ceremonies to honor the tradition of consuming
psychedelics in community with a guide. And once she and
a client have decided together that the patient should join
a group, the fifteen or some members of the group
(38:08):
neeed to form a collective intention for their trip. And
she told me that a lot of times the members
of the group will discover that they each have come
for similar reasons.
Speaker 3 (38:17):
Nat these medicines have an inner wisdom, and the medicine
decide who goes. Have you heard that the medicine calls you.
That call is something like an announcement. The call is
to heal your mother, or the call is to hear
(38:37):
your paternal line, or the call is to heal the
abuse you experienced. And soon says, so there is always
a group intention. We always work on the individual, and
we work on the group and something beautiful is formed.
This is group healing work.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
This is.
Speaker 1 (38:58):
After the experience, she guides patients through individual integration process
where they can take advantage of the medicines benefits. It's
helpful way of generating new neural pathways, which makes it
easier to form new habits and let go of old ones.
And then there's the clarity that freshly uncovered in her
wisdom can provide. The ceremonies make it possible to remember,
(39:18):
to remember.
Speaker 4 (39:24):
Phenomenon.
Speaker 3 (39:26):
And it's a very interesting phenomenon that people who consume
psychedelics tell you, I'm connected to the Earth, to the other,
to the universe. And then they decide to stop using,
They decide to start taking care of themselves. They decide
to start a better relationship with their partners, with their children,
with their families. The most interesting thing about these medicines
(39:50):
is that they also connect you with the ancestral. That is,
in chromosomes, you have genetic information from your parents, but
also from your grandparents, but also from your great grandparents,
your great great grandparents, and so on until very very
very very far back. And something that it seems very
(40:14):
beautiful to me about these medicines is that it is
not only your own history of the present, but like
all the stories of your past. In my case with
Mexican blood, colonialized from the indigenous, from women, from matismo,
from pain, from abuse, in the case of my father.
And that's why I think they are such powerful medicines,
(40:36):
because they are not only there for you to make
you connect with your present God and your present voice,
but with all those ancestral voices that tell you, hey,
this trauma is not yours, the trauma of racism is
not yours, the trauma of poverty is not yours. And
(40:57):
that recognition, well, part of my job is in and
helping people that they can begin to connect with them
with the great great grandparents, great grandparents, grandparents, parents. The
medicine asks you what your pain is, and when we
review all of this, the medicine shows you where it
(41:18):
comes from, and that is to alleviate the pain.
Speaker 4 (41:22):
In les missive machine.
Speaker 3 (41:25):
And in the images of this psychedelic trip. This pain
carried generation after generation because of alcoholism, violence, abuse, the screams,
the absences, the premature deaths that would not have happened
in a traditional therapy environment, probably because we wouldn't have
seen it.
Speaker 1 (41:49):
They say that when you heal yourself, you heal seven
generations forward and back. For some of us, for Black Americans,
for any group of people cut off from their language
and their land, or any group has had their cultural
traditions erased. Sometimes we think of the disconnection between mind
and body as a kind of colonial injury, an ancestral
wound to heal. When we think of colonization, we're filled
(42:11):
with the sense of loss. When I talk to Holiday,
he told me that being conditioned away from our intuition
is sort of like dissociation. We stay disconnected as a
way to cope, and that disconnection can have consequences for
our wellness. Coping isn't healing. We say seven generations forward
(42:31):
and back to acknowledge that time is not linear. We
say it because we're part of a chain, a lineage.
We're connected to the past, and we have a responsibility
to the future. So when you heal yourself, it reverberates
outwards like ripples of water around you.
Speaker 3 (43:00):
I see that my father died at forty seven years old.
I'm turning fifty, so I've already cleared that barrier that
many of his brothers, many of his ancestors, could.
Speaker 4 (43:10):
Not overcome or not then it was because.
Speaker 3 (43:13):
They did not have a voice right. Well, this issue
of death at a very young age due to autoimmune diseases.
What are autoimmune diseases? Things we keep quiet about things
we don't say. So if you look at my family,
there are autoimmune issues that have been recreated for generations
because they were people who had to keep quiet about abuses.
(43:35):
They had to keep quiet about a series of secrets.
Speaker 1 (43:38):
In order to survive.
Speaker 4 (43:43):
Correspond.
Speaker 3 (43:44):
So now it's my turn. What is my responsibility now
that I know it? Not to remain silent? So my
voice is this, okay, yago is I'm not going to
be silent.
Speaker 1 (43:57):
Carmen sees her work as a bridge between two worlds,
the world of conventional western medicine and the world of ancient,
pre colonial tradition, the medicine that's always been here.
Speaker 5 (44:07):
So yes, today my life has passed between these two
worlds in the shaman world, the world of respect, the
world of nature. But also I have this disguise of
psychiatrists that allows me to dialogue with lawmakers and senators
in my country, that allows me to be a professional
(44:28):
doctor with a professional license, with a certificate in the
United States, who can start a serious conversation in order
to modify laws, to decriminalize medicines, to.
Speaker 3 (44:40):
Use them appropriately in a clinical setting. I didn't want
to be a doctor. I would never have imagined being
a psychiatrist.
Speaker 4 (44:49):
Be oil.
Speaker 3 (44:53):
But today I thank the universe and serendipity and the
gods for putting me where I am, because today I
am very happy doing what I do.
Speaker 4 (45:02):
Plants.
Speaker 3 (45:03):
I am very committed to plants, especially the plants of power.
Speaker 1 (45:14):
Baska Case is a production of molten Heart and iHeart Podcasts.
This series is hosted produced in sound designed by me
Mk Nicole Kelly. I co created the show with Jasmine J. T. Green,
who's also our executive producer. Our voice actor in this
episode was Anna Taran and I translated my conversation with
doctor Carmon a Mesqua. Production assistants by Ammani Leonard. Adrian
(45:36):
Lilly is our mixed engineer. Our theme is blue and
orange by Command Jasmine. Our show art was created by
Sinay Rolson, fact checking by Serena Solin. Legal services provided
by Rowan Maren and File. Our executive producer from iHeart
Podcasts is Lindsay Hoffman.
Basket Case gets into some heavy topics about mental health.
But keep in mind that I'm not a mental health professional,
and this show isn't a substitute for medical advice. And
while you're listening, take care. My neighbor in Mexico City
is a practicing psychotherapist. He's also a temascalero, a community elder,
(00:20):
and a spiritual teacher who leads temescal ceremonies. In pre
Columbian Mexico, these ceremonies were considered healing. During the Spanish conquest,
many temascal structures were destroyed by the Spaniards, but the
tradition survived. Yam BENI, there are fifteen of us crouching
(00:43):
to enter the round, low structure. Inside, we make a
circle around an empty pit. Outside, large rocks have been
heated by a fire. We call those big rocks Abuela's grandmothers.
And when they're carried inside and deposited into the open
space between us, we greet their arrival with songs of
(01:03):
respect and gratitude. Then the door is pulled closed and
we sit in darkness. Each person says their name and
why they came. I say, I have come to grieve.
Water is thrown on the rocks to make steam. The
herbs in the water burn my eyes. Robin while Kimmerer
(01:26):
is a botanist and indigenous scholar and an enrolled member
of the Citizen Potowotomi Nation, and in her book Breeding Sweetgrass,
she writes that ceremony is a way to build and
nurture relationships, not just the ties between people, but the
connection between the community and the natural world, and ceremony
is one of the ways that she and all her
(01:47):
relations maintain their cultural practices. In Kimer's words, ceremonies are
the way that we remember to remember. Ceremonies are how
we remember our responsibilities to the earth and to each other.
It's dark, too dark for anyone to see me, so
(02:09):
I allow myself to weep, to sob silently. I release
what I've been holding in a silent scream, and by
the time we open the door again, I'm lighter. This
is basket case anxiety. I'm nk.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Yes that, Robin Kimer lane ceremonies are to help us
to remember to remember.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
This is holiday. Simmons a Somatis coach who lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
I know he's a fan of raiding sweet grass, and
so I called him to talk about what ceremony means
to him.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Any type of service, any type of fellowship. You're getting
together with a group of people and having a shared experience.
I mean, we're sitting simultaneously experiencing the same something, whether
that be pouring of water on hot rocks and sweat lodge,
or this incredible choir all in Unison, all of that,
(03:10):
to me is a ceremony.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
Though we've spent a lot of time living in the
so called coastal cities, Holiday and I both have deep
roots in the South. Holiday's parents were from the Mississippi Delta,
where he's spent a lot of summer vacations as a kid.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Part of my choosing of moving to Atlanta, i was
in New York at the time, was to get back
to the land. I was like, I'm disconnected. I need
to get back to some of that knowledge. And so
all of that informs my own personal healing as well
as the type of practitioner I wanted to be. I
knew I wanted to be something holistic that connected people
(03:44):
not just to their traumas in this moment, and not
just their parental issues, but back you know, their ancestral wound,
and not just the various sources of the wounds, but
the various sources of the antidotes and the healing tools,
starting with the earth and starting with their breath and
what their body was saying.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
Holiday was once a psychiatric social worker and he led
a program for unhoused people with mental illnesses. Now he
runs Southern Soul Wellness, the wellness collective informed by his Black,
Cherokee and Southern lineage.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
I don't know if a school of thought, but I
have a classroom with thought around the merging of these
three wellness modalities like traditional mental health therapy, counseling, psychiatry, psychotherapy,
WU medicine like yoga, acupuncture, meditation, reiki, weat lodges and
(04:36):
making an altar and ancestral reverence, and then clergy the
cloth in church. So I find there's like three separate
prongs well. Historically people feel like they can only do one.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
Somatics is not an alternative to traditional Western therapy or medicine,
but it can be complementary to both. As a Somatics coach,
Holiday combines aspects of talk therapy with physical movement in
order to anything the connection between mind and body. He
does do virtual one on one coaching, but somatics is
typically practiced in a group.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
And I just called it medicine because it is I
think one of the things that keeps people going to
services and to ceremonies and other large gatherings. It is
that collective aspect of being in the same room experiencing
the same thing moving, chanting, singing at the same time.
(05:28):
I called it medicine because it is quite healing to
the body.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
Through somatic practice, you can heighten your awareness of sensations
in your body and your awareness of what Holiday calls
conditioned tendencies. These conditioned tendencies are aspects of our personalities
that we didn't necessarily choose, but they are passed down
to us, imprinted on our DNA model, to us through
relationships and often reinforced by whatever social constructs we have.
(05:53):
And to be living in this conditioning cuts us off
from our longings from a wildly free and creator of
inner voice and learning to hear that voice, connecting to
our inner knowledge, desire, longings, the erotic aliveness, whatever you
want to call it, is at the core of somatic practice.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
I think what actually makes us unique is intuition is
this capacity to feel and tap into things that aren't
right in front of us, that haven't yet happened, that
already happened, that we don't remember, that happened in another lifetime,
and it's not actually in our face. All of these things.
(06:36):
It's such a powerful gift that I think we're all
born into, mostly all socialized out of, and really strengthening
one's own intuition can go a long way. I feel
like our world, our society for quite some time now,
has operated under a significant phenomenon of a brain body split,
(07:00):
and our methods of responding to such trauma and oppression is,
at least in the Western camp, is also organized within
a brain body split.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
From the first episode of this season, I've really wanted
to talk about this, that mind body split. It has
roots in the Enlightenment. That's the period of time at
the end of the Middle Ages, after Europe's cultural Renaissance.
This was during the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Renee Descartes
was an Enlightenment philosopher who usually gets credit for this
(07:34):
idea that the mind is separate from the body. The
Enlightenment was an intellectual movement and its intelligenzia rally behind reason,
individual rights, and human progress. They were really into skepticism,
which is how we got the scientific method, with its
insistence on empirical evidence, on the things that could be
measured and observed. So science was seen as a way
(07:55):
to improve society and liberate humanity from ignorance and superstition.
But enlightenment thinking also justified Europe's colonial expansion. When European
travelers traveled to Africa and the Americas, those trips were
framed as scientific expeditions. The purpose of the trips was
to classify plants and animals and the human societies that
(08:16):
European explorers encountered. When they got there, they looked upon
those groups of people and called them uncivilized, which meant
they were in need of European education, European religion, and
European science and technology, and which completely ignored the fact
that those societies already had education, spirituality, and technology of
(08:37):
their own. And then, as is often the case, European
scientists feigned superiority over the indigenous people that they encountered
on their colonial exploits, and they also at the same
time just freely ripped off indigenous knowledge including knowledge of
medicine and other healing modalities to use for their own
economic gain. The residue of these early colonial practices persisted
(09:00):
for a long time, and they justified institutions like slavery
and Indian boarding schools, both of which violently enforced assimilation
and tried to erase culturally specific practices. So it's thanks
to indigenous resistance that indigenous knowledge persists. Robin Wall Kimmerer,
(09:21):
the indigenous botanists that Holiday and I were talking about earlier.
She says, science names the things that we know and
shows us the limits of what we know, but science
doesn't always name the things we don't know, the things
we can't or haven't measured. So even though science itself
is fallible and subjective and shape shifting depending on the context,
(09:42):
the historical moment, or the political or economic necessities of
the time things we've seen throughout this season, certain kinds
of knowledge are still stigmatized. And a highly relevant example
of this is that in the nineteen eighties, right as
many New Age wellness practices were becoming mainstream, people started
calling those things wu wu, and to this day people
still say something is wu to dismiss alternative healing and
(10:05):
spiritual beliefs on the supposed basis that their effectiveness isn't
supported by empirical evidence. Even I say it when I
think not saying it means I won't be taken seriously.
But mind you, mindfulness, yoga, meditation, acupuncture. These are all
things that were once considered wu that are now fully
integrated into the mainstream wellness industry, while practices like somatics
(10:27):
and plant medicine are still considered alternative. So what can
we take from all this. There's a lesson here about
the kinds of knowledge we value in the West, and
about whose knowledge has historically been mocked or worse demonized,
or worse criminalized or worse erased, and how that informs
which healing modalities will be skeptical or afraid of. So
(10:49):
after this break, let's get into it with a story
about an integrative psychiatrist from Mexico who wants to bring
alternative medicine to the masses. Berb I found out about
doctor Carmen Emescua from a friend. He had seen her
for ketemine treatments after a long, hard summer with depression,
(11:12):
the kind of depression that routine antidepressants hadn't worked for
We met for coffee and he told me about the experience,
which sounded to me surprisingly psychedelic, although ketamine, as I'm
sure you know, is a tranquilizer and not technically classified
that way, but in certain ways, his experience with k
infusions was familiar. It reminded me of my first time
(11:34):
eating a hero's dose of mushrooms, the emotional pain rising
to the surface of your consciousness, the dream logic of
the whole experience, and afterwards, the feeling of purification and potential.
I wept violently during that experience, so much so that
I scared the person who had given me the mushrooms
and she had to leave the house. It was an
(11:54):
experience that brought me closer into contact with my grief
than I had ever been. It brought me closer into
contact that with my true hidden self. And I know
it's sort of a cliche to say, but whatever, It's true.
That solitary experience changed my life. Nicole, but doctor Carmen
(12:32):
Carmen's private practice in Mexico City. I climb a few
flights of stairs, hence my heavy breathing, and please don't
come for my accent.
Speaker 3 (12:51):
I'm doctor Carmen AMSCA. I always say that I'm a mother,
I'm a cook, and I'm a self proclaimed sociophobic. I'm
a mother who has raised a nerd virgin child who
is on the spectrum that has difficulty with attention, and
that too, has totally defined my professional practice for the
last ten years.
Speaker 1 (13:12):
Carmon shows me into the room where she meets with clients.
It's cozy and there are mushrooms everywhere, stuffed mushrooms, and
a chair across from us, and the art on the
walls hanging from Carmen's ears. We both setle onto a
couch away from the windows. Carvin folds her legs beneath her.
She has a lot of tattoos, something leafy on one shoulder,
(13:32):
a flower on the other. We spoke to each other
in Spanish, so that's why you're hearing a voice actor.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
Now.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
I'm a non traditional doctor. I do something called integrative psychiatry.
It's a really different model, a model that works on
four pillars, the spiritual pillar, the pillar of the body,
of the mind, and the medicine of lifestyles.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
Guided by those war pillars of integrative psychiatry. Today, around
sixty percent of Carmen's practice involves unconventional.
Speaker 4 (14:06):
Treatments, no conventional.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
Lament alternative what we, for lack of a better label,
often call alternative medicines.
Speaker 3 (14:17):
Well, I think that the philosophy in which I focus
as a professional has to do with the fact that
we are beings that are not separated in this mind,
this body, and this spirit, and with the understanding that
that worldview is a worldview that is also very shamanic,
very connected to the earth, very connected to nature, with
(14:40):
the elements, and that has led me to observe the
human being in a much more holistic way, a more
complete way, less separatists, less human centric way, and maybe
a little bit more animistic, more mystical, and with a
more ceremonial toneremonial. I've been a mental health patients, well,
(15:00):
so I've also tried to come from a place of empathy.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
The story of Carmen's life, the story that she tells me,
begins with her father.
Speaker 3 (15:09):
The story of my father is a pretty sad story
because he was literally kidnapped by the Legionnaires of Christ.
I don't know if you know them.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
As a boy, Carmen's dad was taken from his parents
and from Mexico, and then he spent basically his entire
youth as a companion of a Mexican priest who was
the founder of an ultra conservative Catholic order called the
Legionnaires of Christ. In twenty nineteen, this priest was accused
of sexually abusing dozens of children and teens and his
care including Carmen's father.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
My father left Vatican as an adult, almost ready to
be ordane as a priest. Although my father went through
all this history of abuse, he returned to Mexico. He
married a woman from a family that was also very Catholic,
and the environment that was born into was a traditional,
close Catholic family.
Speaker 4 (15:57):
Katholica and theo we believed in.
Speaker 3 (16:01):
God, but there was an absolute disconnection.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
Carmen's parents sent her from the home of her closed
Catholic family to a traditional all girls Catholic school, but
Carmen was always drawn to her dad's side of the family.
They were artists, writers, musicians, free spirits, and Carmen wanted
to be an artist. She wanted their more open, more expressive,
more queer ways of being. But also on that side
(16:26):
of the family there was a history of chronic illness
and addiction. Many of those relatives died.
Speaker 4 (16:31):
Young Nasli Valencia.
Speaker 3 (16:35):
But I was born into a family with a lot
of ambivalence. There was always this disconnect in my family,
and I put those pieces together as I grew up.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
Carmen was a teenager in the fall of nineteen eighty
five when a powerful earthquake shook the city centers.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
State Lando or Mestoy Mariano.
Speaker 4 (16:56):
The statim blandom Ferte.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
Sliding entire rooftops, off apartment buildings and into the street,
turning entire buildings into mounds of debris as broken gas
manes erupted into fires. The earthquake left ten thousand people
dead and many thousands more people injured or homeless. The
city was collectively devastated.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
I lived in the Roman neighborhood. Virtually everything around my
house disappeared, including my school. I lost friends, I lost people,
I saw buildings falling. I mean, it was a phenomenon
that broke my head and gave me post traumatic stress.
I was thirteen years old, fourteen years old, and well.
That happened in a cascade of many, many other crises
(17:44):
and more pain, including the loss of my father so
that made my head sort of fragment, and I became
a young woman with tremendous anxiety, with tremendous depression.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
Carmen's dad was only forty seven when he died, and
then her grandfather died as well. Carmen felt herself cracking
under the weight of grief and trauma.
Speaker 3 (18:07):
We're talking about the eighties where mental health was completely stigmatized.
Talking about a psychologist, it was like, you're crazy.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
Now.
Speaker 3 (18:16):
Psychiatry was something completely outside of the norm, and obviously
I didn't have that kind of support.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
Regardless, she was desperate to make sense of her pain,
to lessen the weight of her distress, so she looked
elsewhere for answers.
Speaker 4 (18:29):
We Bo scandal, and.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
I went looking for it in art. I went looking
for it in mantras, in the prayers of other religions.
I started getting into other types of philosophies, such as shamanism,
And while following this path, I arrived very serendipitously at
medical school. I didn't want to study medicine, but I
had promised my father.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
Carmen had promised her dad she would study medicine, that
she would learn how to treat and prevent the kind
of illness that had led to his immature death and
the death of so much of his family. So she
enrolled at Mexico's largest university in the early nineties.
Speaker 3 (19:09):
I came from a private Catholic non school for women,
and then I entered Niversitata de Mexico, and for me,
that was my first psychedelic trip. I mean, entering that
universe where I had so much freedom, where I had
so many voices, so many thoughts, so many philosophies, rich people,
(19:30):
poor people, people of fairy color, freedom, diversity, men, women,
So it was delicious for me. Beyond the medicine that
I honestly didn't study, I spent my time in philosophy,
in history, in politics, in architecture, I spent my time
in the cinema. I mean, it was a very beautiful
(19:50):
period where I grew as a person, and I feel
that in the end it also marked me in my practice.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
Despite her propensity for skipping classes and her major, Carmen
was an excellent student and after she graduated, she went
to grad school at the National Institute of Psychiatry, where
one of her first internships was in the field of
psycho education.
Speaker 3 (20:10):
And without me knowing. Those were my first steps towards
what I do today, which is integrative psychiatry. And what
is the first pillar of integrative psychiatry spirituality. Your spirituality
is what is your life's purpose, What do you connect with?
What is your intention of being in this world? That
(20:31):
is spirituality being able to listen to this inner voice
that tells you where to go, what path to follow.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
Now.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
A big part of Carmen's work is education and advocacy
around alternative treatments that help patients connect with that. In
her voice, she's kind of a thought leader on the
psychedelic potential of treatments like MDMA and katamine therapy, treatments
that are still stigmatized and misunderstood even though they've been
shown to be effective at treating depression, anxiety, and PTSD.
(20:59):
But as a lies means psychiatrists, Carmen prefers to describe
for treatments as complimentary, not alternative, and so.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
We go about executing it piece by piece. The complimentary
this is a therapy that takes longer than usual. In
other words, I always say that there are two types
of paths, the short path and the long path. The
short path is what I was taught in traditional psychiatry
is to silence the pain of depression or to silence
(21:26):
the symptoms of anxiety with anti anxiety, anti psychotic myths,
or antidepressants. But that's not going to fix the root
problem of people's trauma, the mental problem.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
Going deeper, all the way to the root of the
issue can sometimes require a more intensive intervention than conventional
psychiatric medicine can provide.
Speaker 3 (21:45):
And it's very nice in an integrative psychiatry how we
emulate or try to do things similar to shamanic medicine.
Why because if we look at what shamans do, shaman's
working community, shaman's connect with natures, Shamans respect animals, Shamans
work with the different elements of the earth. They do rights,
(22:07):
they do rituals, they dance, and shaman's work with plants.
And it's something that a traditional psychiatrist is never going
to talk to you about. The power plants, the psychedelics
that we are going to address as well, they're also
a part of the spiritual work of the mental work,
the work of the body and lifestyle medicine.
Speaker 1 (22:28):
Carmen's first experience with the possibilities of psychedelic experiences happened
while she was still a graduate student.
Speaker 3 (22:35):
Experience. My first experience with psychedelics was with ayahuasca. This
was in Peru, and it was in the Amazon jungle,
and obviously I wasn't looking for that. I mean, I
was a tourist and explorer, seeing crocodiles, spiders, snakes, macaws, monkeys.
And then one of the days we went out for
a walk.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
On that walk, Carmen was approached by one of the taitas,
an elder in the community and Peru, tita is a
term of endearment that means grandfather, but it's also a
title that denotes respect for healer or shaman, specifically one
who leads ayahuasca ceremonies.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
He told me, don't you want to take this medicine.
I said, no, I'm not going to be taking any medicine.
I said, you're crazy.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
Ayahuasca is a bitter, ceremonial tea. It's known for causing
nausea and spectacular or possibly disturbing hallucinations, and it's a
group activity. Carmen insisted she wasn't interested.
Speaker 3 (23:31):
And he insisted until the third day, and he tells me, please,
you have to talk with your grandmother. You have to
have contact with this medicine. And he told me, I'm
not going to charge you anything, but you need to go.
You need to go. They're talking to you. I ask
you please to take this trip with me. And it
(23:53):
seemed to me, I mean, kind of impossible that someone
would give me something for free there, but his invitation
was very genuine, and at that moment, I really swear
that I felt that call and I said, Okay, I
have to go, and it happened. The next night. I
(24:17):
went on a hike. We took a panga to see
some alligators and we saw some minibats. They were hitting
my head on the way, and something told me everything
is going to be fine. Don't be afraid. Everything is
going to be fine. And that's how I arrived at
the Ayahuasca ceremony in the middle of the Junglesia. It
(24:44):
was a story that we came not only from this
life and the life of my ancestor, but from other lives,
and they showed me different layers different from this reality.
And I go through this archetypical journey, typical of the Ayahuasca,
(25:07):
where you first entered the underworld. I saw my dad.
I talked to my father. I saw him, I smelled him,
I held his hand. I talked to my grandparents. They
were all there, and since we had been closed, I
have been waiting to tell them something. I was able
to talk to them. I was able to close those relationships.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
And then there was another layer.
Speaker 3 (25:30):
And then well, it was this journey of the puma
across the earth, through the present, through what is earthly,
through what is tangible. They showed me the land breathing,
the animals that you can imagine in the middle of
the Amazon.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
And then there was another layer, and.
Speaker 3 (25:49):
They also showed me this is a type of psychiatrist
you want to be. I mean, this is the doctor
who you want to be. They showed me how the
health system was making a sicker, how there was no
way to treat people and help them heal with those medicines,
that that was a paliative, and that it was not
(26:09):
going to deeply impact the people, that I was not
taking into account the spirit of the people, that I
was forgetting about God or the gods. And then I
also saw myself a little in this work that I
do now connected like seeing a panorama. I call it
drone vision where you can observe who you are beyond
(26:31):
what you were able to see. Here, you can see
everything around you. What are you doing, where do you
come from?
Speaker 1 (26:37):
What?
Speaker 3 (26:37):
Where are you standing?
Speaker 2 (26:39):
Why?
Speaker 3 (26:39):
Mental health and flying allowed me to observe that that
was the way in which I needed to do my practice.
And I leave that trip very moved by what the
plant had given me and well how I surrendered. In
(27:00):
the end, it was for me a turning point in
my life. I said, what is this? I have to
understand it. Why don't they teach us this?
Speaker 1 (27:20):
In psychiatry, drinking ayahuasca induces a physical purge. For some cultures,
the puking is a welcome sign of repressed emotion. Leaving
the body and psychedelics also increased the brain's neuroplasticity, its
inherent capacity for growth and change. Carmen was generally an
anxious person. When she arrived in Peru, she was traumatized
(27:44):
and grieving, But back home in Mexico, she noticed that
the effects of her trip were continuing beyond the single
mind altering experience.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
I healed many things. I was coming from a horrible
post traumatic stress disorder where I lived in anxiety I
can tell you that from that moment on, my anxiety
dropped sixty seventy percent. I didn't feel at tension in
my body.
Speaker 4 (28:10):
I didn't bite my nails, I felt happy, I felt connected.
Soon CAMEO important decimo.
Speaker 3 (28:18):
So it was a very important change. So I stopped
doing impulsive things that hurt me a lot. And that's
where my career as a psychonaut began.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
After the break, Carmen's adventures and consciousness expanding continue with
help from her favorite power plant and mine. Her ayahuasca
(28:51):
trip in Peru had been a fork in the road,
but Carmen felt a pathway forward was obvious.
Speaker 3 (28:58):
And well, A little by little, I began to understand obviously.
I studied how to consume.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
From the beginning. Carmen approached her adventures in plant medicine
with careful curiosity as a student, and as she studied
the plants, their histories, their effects, she also continued to listen.
Speaker 3 (29:17):
It was like a magic want telling me this has
to be done with respect. To do these recreationally for
you No, and today I tell you I respect it
very much.
Speaker 1 (29:30):
In the US, psychedelics, both natural and synthetic, gained cult
status thanks to cult figures like party boy journalists under S.
Thompson and LSD evangelist Timothy Leary, who both endorsed tripping
in the nineteen fifties and sixties. But as the countercultural
vibes of the sixties wore off, US President Richard Nixon
signed a law banning psychedelics in the United States, calling LSD, psilocybin, cannabis,
(29:54):
and heroin unsafe for general consumption. That law slowed down
research into the potential therapeutic uses of psychedelics for decades,
and then in the nineteen seventies, the war on psychedelics
went global when the United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances
made it illegal to sell, buy, or use psychedelics in
most other countries, although it did include exemptions. Some countries
(30:18):
argued for the right to keep their medicinal plants legal
for certain indigenous groups. That's why in Mexico, bayote, a
spiny psychotropic native cactus, is still legal within a ceremonial context,
but exporting those psychedelic compounds is against the law, and
as more and more people travel to Mexico, Peru, Ecuador,
and Brazil in search of emotional, spiritual, and sometimes physical healing.
(30:42):
A market has emerged for a kind of spiritual tourism
where hundreds of thousands of consciousness seekers converge in psychedelic
retreat centers all over Latin America. I honestly don't want
to judge that it's not my culture to gatekeep, and
I know there are a lot of people who have
really benefited from access to psychedelic therapy, which is increasingly
available in the US, and Carmen has made her life's
(31:04):
work to bring this technology into the mainstream because she
knows firsthand how much it can help people. But she
also told me that Mexico's traditionally ceremonial plants have suffered
from ecological and cultural extraction from deforestation and damage to
the landscapes where the plants grow, and when the cacti
are over harvested, there's less and less of it left
(31:26):
for the cultural groups who have used it selectively, sparingly,
medicinally and ceremonially for generations. As a doctor, Carmen has
helped people with their post ayahuasca integration processes, but she
doesn't work with ayahuasca herself. She doesn't work with payote either.
She doesn't belong to an indigenous group, and she believes
(31:46):
that those plants should not be used outside of a
ceremonial context or by people who lack intergenerational knowledge of
how the plants are cultivated.
Speaker 4 (31:56):
It's also not ceremonia.
Speaker 3 (31:57):
This is a ceremony of Laswicholis and Los Marakamis speaking
of colonialism. Why am I going to steal their medicine.
Speaker 4 (32:05):
That's my point of view, Gonelongo.
Speaker 3 (32:09):
But with the mushrooms, well, that's another story.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
Yeah, mushrooms are kind of a different story. In parts
of Mexico, they've also been used for ceremonial purposes, and
they've also been exploited and appropriated by foreigners. But Mexico
is also home to the highest biodiversity of psychoactive plant
and mushroom species in the world. It's estimated that there
are more than two hundred thousand species of fungi throughout
(32:35):
the country, and most haven't even been classified yet. Carmen
also prefers mushrooms because mushroom cultivation is more ecologically sustainable
compared to, for instance, bayote cacti. For one single button
of fayote, you'd have to harvest seven or eight mature plants,
and those plants take between fifty and seventy years to
(32:55):
reach maturity. The ceremonial uses of the plant reflect that tempo,
and that's why Carmen believes that peyote was never meant
for old fashioned, big business exploitation. But mushrooms can be
grown at home and in just a few weeks. The
mushrooms that Carmen uses for treatments are usually sourced directly
from my cologists, people who study and cultivate mushrooms.
Speaker 3 (33:17):
So that's how I got to know each one of them.
Although my baptismal plant was ayahuasca. My teachers are mushrooms.
I mean, I know them perfectly. We get all along
very well. We have a beautiful relationship. I know their science.
They accompany me everywhere. They have given me the best
trips of my life and the deepest lessons of my existence.
Speaker 1 (33:41):
In Mexico, between twenty and fifty varieties of mushrooms produce psilocybin,
the ingredient that makes them hallucinogenic, and as far as
we know, only about a dozen of those have ceremonial uses.
But outside of a ceremonial context, psychedelic mushrooms are still.
Speaker 4 (33:56):
Illegal lavesventa and MISI.
Speaker 3 (33:59):
And so the disadvantage in my country and in many
countries is that the mushroom and silocybin are on the
list of the most dangerous narcotics and they don't allow
us to work with these substances at a medical level.
It continues to be an illegal environment that as a psychiatrist,
exposes me to being jailed with a sentence that could
(34:22):
be almost the same as Chapobusman. In other words, the
sentence could be the same because I would be charged
with drug trafficking. But I see these small cules as healers.
Speaker 4 (34:36):
For me, they are medicines.
Speaker 3 (34:38):
So you're never gonna see me at a concert in
Silosivina or eating a tab of LSD because for me,
it was a very resounding message that this is for
healing and you have to learn this to heal. In
other words, I'm absolutely respectful because I repeat for me,
they are medicines and the way I apply them with
(35:00):
my patients because they are patients as medicine.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
Carmen's patients go through a thorough physical and psychological vetting process.
Speaker 3 (35:09):
Yes, I do it because I'm qualified. It is a
medical environment. These medicines increase blood pressure. They can affect
the heart rate, So if you didn't know you had
a dangerous arrhythmia, you could die. If you didn't know
you had uncontrolled blood pressure and your blood pressure goes
up thirty percent, you can get an embolism. So there
(35:31):
is a risk. So I would never do it alone
because I really take care of you. I give you
water and food. If you were to have a crisis
or a bad trip, there's someone who can help you
get out of it.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
She says psychedelic treatments aren't for people in crisis, and
she also won't recommend them to people with the history
of psychosis in the family, or people with bipolar disorder
or borderline personality disorder or other very serious mental illnesses.
There's too great risk of doing more harm than good,
of inducing psychosis or mania or a serious mental health crisis.
Speaker 4 (36:06):
Is the consultorio not Latin and see you.
Speaker 3 (36:10):
The people who enter this office don't have it so easy.
It's not a simple path. But when you get to
know the person's history, understand where they come from, who
their ancestors are, what their present traumas are, you can
prepare them for what they're going to encounter. You are
going to come across things that have to do with
you and your family, that have to do with what
(36:33):
you experienced in life. And I call it the navigation process.
I mean, what is your canoe like, how are your ores?
You have a life jacket, where are you going to
use it once you're drowning? How do you come up?
And that's a process that we generally apply to any
psychedelic So that aligns you a lot and really helps
(36:54):
you to reduce this anxiety. Sometimes it takes me three months,
four months to prepare someone and it is a very
very gradual preparation, very.
Speaker 4 (37:07):
Soft SOUTI very loving amor asta.
Speaker 3 (37:12):
Until people feel prepared and say, okay, I'm ready, I'm
ready to get into the river and let's go to
the canoe. And there are people who arrive and they're
clear about I would like to heal this trauma. I
haven't been able to quit this addiction. People are extremely
(37:33):
clear about what they want from this work, and when
they are not so clear, part of what we do
is help them reach that intention, form that intention, and
that sometimes lead us to group work.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
Although Carmen does meet with Patience one on one. Most
of the time, eighty percent of the time, the work
she does is part of a communal experience. She calls
these communal experiences ceremonies to honor the tradition of consuming
psychedelics in community with a guide. And once she and
a client have decided together that the patient should join
a group, the fifteen or some members of the group
(38:08):
neeed to form a collective intention for their trip. And
she told me that a lot of times the members
of the group will discover that they each have come
for similar reasons.
Speaker 3 (38:17):
Nat these medicines have an inner wisdom, and the medicine
decide who goes. Have you heard that the medicine calls you.
That call is something like an announcement. The call is
to heal your mother, or the call is to hear
(38:37):
your paternal line, or the call is to heal the
abuse you experienced. And soon says, so there is always
a group intention. We always work on the individual, and
we work on the group and something beautiful is formed.
This is group healing work.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
This is.
Speaker 1 (38:58):
After the experience, she guides patients through individual integration process
where they can take advantage of the medicines benefits. It's
helpful way of generating new neural pathways, which makes it
easier to form new habits and let go of old ones.
And then there's the clarity that freshly uncovered in her
wisdom can provide. The ceremonies make it possible to remember,
(39:18):
to remember.
Speaker 4 (39:24):
Phenomenon.
Speaker 3 (39:26):
And it's a very interesting phenomenon that people who consume
psychedelics tell you, I'm connected to the Earth, to the other,
to the universe. And then they decide to stop using,
They decide to start taking care of themselves. They decide
to start a better relationship with their partners, with their children,
with their families. The most interesting thing about these medicines
(39:50):
is that they also connect you with the ancestral. That is,
in chromosomes, you have genetic information from your parents, but
also from your grandparents, but also from your great grandparents,
your great great grandparents, and so on until very very
very very far back. And something that it seems very
(40:14):
beautiful to me about these medicines is that it is
not only your own history of the present, but like
all the stories of your past. In my case with
Mexican blood, colonialized from the indigenous, from women, from matismo,
from pain, from abuse, in the case of my father.
And that's why I think they are such powerful medicines,
(40:36):
because they are not only there for you to make
you connect with your present God and your present voice,
but with all those ancestral voices that tell you, hey,
this trauma is not yours, the trauma of racism is
not yours, the trauma of poverty is not yours. And
(40:57):
that recognition, well, part of my job is in and
helping people that they can begin to connect with them
with the great great grandparents, great grandparents, grandparents, parents. The
medicine asks you what your pain is, and when we
review all of this, the medicine shows you where it
(41:18):
comes from, and that is to alleviate the pain.
Speaker 4 (41:22):
In les missive machine.
Speaker 3 (41:25):
And in the images of this psychedelic trip. This pain
carried generation after generation because of alcoholism, violence, abuse, the screams,
the absences, the premature deaths that would not have happened
in a traditional therapy environment, probably because we wouldn't have
seen it.
Speaker 1 (41:49):
They say that when you heal yourself, you heal seven
generations forward and back. For some of us, for Black Americans,
for any group of people cut off from their language
and their land, or any group has had their cultural
traditions erased. Sometimes we think of the disconnection between mind
and body as a kind of colonial injury, an ancestral
wound to heal. When we think of colonization, we're filled
(42:11):
with the sense of loss. When I talk to Holiday,
he told me that being conditioned away from our intuition
is sort of like dissociation. We stay disconnected as a
way to cope, and that disconnection can have consequences for
our wellness. Coping isn't healing. We say seven generations forward
(42:31):
and back to acknowledge that time is not linear. We
say it because we're part of a chain, a lineage.
We're connected to the past, and we have a responsibility
to the future. So when you heal yourself, it reverberates
outwards like ripples of water around you.
Speaker 3 (43:00):
I see that my father died at forty seven years old.
I'm turning fifty, so I've already cleared that barrier that
many of his brothers, many of his ancestors, could.
Speaker 4 (43:10):
Not overcome or not then it was because.
Speaker 3 (43:13):
They did not have a voice right. Well, this issue
of death at a very young age due to autoimmune diseases.
What are autoimmune diseases? Things we keep quiet about things
we don't say. So if you look at my family,
there are autoimmune issues that have been recreated for generations
because they were people who had to keep quiet about abuses.
(43:35):
They had to keep quiet about a series of secrets.
Speaker 1 (43:38):
In order to survive.
Speaker 4 (43:43):
Correspond.
Speaker 3 (43:44):
So now it's my turn. What is my responsibility now
that I know it? Not to remain silent? So my
voice is this, okay, yago is I'm not going to
be silent.
Speaker 1 (43:57):
Carmen sees her work as a bridge between two worlds,
the world of conventional western medicine and the world of ancient,
pre colonial tradition, the medicine that's always been here.
Speaker 5 (44:07):
So yes, today my life has passed between these two
worlds in the shaman world, the world of respect, the
world of nature. But also I have this disguise of
psychiatrists that allows me to dialogue with lawmakers and senators
in my country, that allows me to be a professional
(44:28):
doctor with a professional license, with a certificate in the
United States, who can start a serious conversation in order
to modify laws, to decriminalize medicines, to.
Speaker 3 (44:40):
Use them appropriately in a clinical setting. I didn't want
to be a doctor. I would never have imagined being
a psychiatrist.
Speaker 4 (44:49):
Be oil.
Speaker 3 (44:53):
But today I thank the universe and serendipity and the
gods for putting me where I am, because today I
am very happy doing what I do.
Speaker 4 (45:02):
Plants.
Speaker 3 (45:03):
I am very committed to plants, especially the plants of power.
Speaker 1 (45:14):
Baska Case is a production of molten Heart and iHeart Podcasts.
This series is hosted produced in sound designed by me
Mk Nicole Kelly. I co created the show with Jasmine J. T. Green,
who's also our executive producer. Our voice actor in this
episode was Anna Taran and I translated my conversation with
doctor Carmon a Mesqua. Production assistants by Ammani Leonard. Adrian
(45:36):
Lilly is our mixed engineer. Our theme is blue and
orange by Command Jasmine. Our show art was created by
Sinay Rolson, fact checking by Serena Solin. Legal services provided
by Rowan Maren and File. Our executive producer from iHeart
Podcasts is Lindsay Hoffman.
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