May 14, 2025 • 33 mins
This episode starts with struggling through meditation, a transformative ayahuasca experience, and the subsequent profound changes in life. Jake initially disciplined to a fault, had difficulty meditating, but an ayahuasca ceremony sparked significant spiritual experiences, including conversations with God and dealing with deep-seated trauma.
The journey included bringing friends into similar healing experiences, navigating their reactions, and ultimately finding a path to inner peace.
Jake’s ceremonies involved laugh-filled moments, intense emotional and physical releases, and a resolution of lifelong anger.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
So I am, I'm in my garage meditating, and before I went to ceremony, I was not a good meditator.
I was actually fired by my meditation coach because he said you're too disciplined.
And that's why meditation is a struggle for you.
And at the time when he said it, I was like, that makes no sense to me.
(00:22):
I'm trying to figure it out too.
You can see this when I would go to meditate, I would get in my little legs crossed position, hands on the knees, and then I would sit there and meditate and just go hello? And I'm just gonna brute force my way into this meditation.
Okay.
I'm just gonna furrow my brows and concentrate and that's the meditative state is going to happen.
(00:44):
And it did not.
Okay.
And he said, meditation coach was like, yeah, good luck, Godspeed.
Hope it works out for you.
But you can't be helped by me.
Gotcha.
And so I'm sitting there meditating, and now meditation works perfectly easy.
In fact, it works so well that for the first three weeks I meditate, I close my eyes, I relax and I drop into it.
(01:05):
And I'm so pleased with myself that I've dropped into the meditative state that I'm like, ta-da, I've done it, I've meditated.
And then of course it immediately goes away and I'm like, I'm sorry.
Hold on.
Wait a minute.
I'll do it again.
And then it doesn't work.
Then it takes me about three weeks to stop from patting myself on the back to tell myself like how wonderful I am that I've meditated, that I can actually.
(01:26):
Do the meditation, like success is too big a barrier for me to deal with, to actually be able to continue meditation.
that like an, is it an ego that comes in I think it's one of those things if you've ever tried to do something and then it doesn't work, and then it finally does work, you're like, ta-da.
Yeah, I did it.
And I think that's kinda what it was.
It may have been an ego thing as well Hey I finally did the thing, so I'm there.
(01:49):
I'm meditating one morning and as I'm meditating at my ayahuasca ceremony I was talking to God face to face.
We were having a full blown conversation.
When I meditate, the voice of God occasionally comes back to me and talks to me, and one morning he's talking to me and I had as a reminder, I had told chaos as we were coming home I am never doing that again.
(02:11):
That was wonderful.
Terrible.
I'm grateful I did it.
This was in truly enriching, it's changed my life.
Let's not do it again.
As I'm meditating, the voice of the Lord comes back to me and says, you have to go back.
I was like huh.
So maybe 1, 2, 2 more times.
Ah, more like seven or eight.
(02:33):
I was like, good.
Golly, like, how messed up am I? Like I knew I was a tough case, but I didn't think it was gonna take eight to get me to, to the center.
So I'm like, do I get a, do I get a punch card? Is there like an ice cream at the end? What do I get here at the end of this? It's just start going.
Okay, so at my first ceremony I was given the message that I needed to bring two friends back specifically.
(02:57):
Okay.
One's name is Fancy Bird and we'll call the other one Wilbur.
Okay.
So Wilbur is my best friend from Arkansas, and when I come back from ceremony, he is the first person I basically do my integration with him, and then I call him and say, Hey, I'm going to tell you the story of what happened.
And just so you know, I don't believe any of this either.
(03:20):
So if any point you wanna stop me during this story and go, that's bs.
Just realize I too believe it's bs.
Okay.
But it happened.
So I tell him the story and later on he didn't tell me then, but years later, he was one of the people that I need to bring back.
Okay.
And I said, Hey, you, you've gotta come with me for this.
And he's yeah, no.
not about it.
(03:41):
And I was greatly disappointed.
And what I didn't realize at the time was that like I'm 45 at the time, I think I'm 45.
And he said in my entire life, I've never heard fear in Jake's voice.
And when he was telling me that story.
He was afraid for you? I was afraid.
Oh, he could sense you were afraid.
while I was telling the story, I was overcome with fear.
(04:02):
And he was like, what? And this is he's literally my childhood friend.
He would see me after my mom had beat me up as a little kid.
My hair's messed up.
My face is bloody and I'm still just a defiant little kid.
Like I am like, Hey, I'm I don't know when, but I'm gonna get you back.
So even as a little kid taking a beating, I'm like.
Nope not accepting it.
(04:23):
So it was like, yeah, whatever it was that made Jake afraid, I want no part of that.
Not a way to sell that.
No hard pass.
So that was an unsuccessful sales call to one of the two people who I was supposed to bring back.
And I go and meet with Fancy Bird, who is the second person who I'm supposed to bring back to ceremony with me.
(04:46):
And we're gonna have street tacos.
And I sit down to have the conversation with him and the only thing in my mind was like, Hey, I met God, and he said, I should bring you back to this, so you have to come with me.
And I was like, ah, yeah, that may not be the best approach.
Like I may need to set a little groundwork here before I spring the whole Hey let's go do some ayahuasca together.
(05:10):
Okay.
This thing that you've never heard of, you've never done a psychedelic, you've never done drugs, you're a lifelong.
Government, employee what could possibly go wrong.
So we have the conversation and then I get to the end and I'm like, yeah, and God told me that you're supposed to come back with me and do this with me.
And he is okay.
(05:30):
What kind of was he religious? Did he also have a connection with God at all or I do not believe so.
Okay.
We've never had philosophical discussions But certainly never about the divine or God Okay.
The But he was also a friend who for the last year and a half, I'd been doing like a once a week wellness check to make sure he hadn't killed himself.
Hey let's make sure if Fancy Birds still among the living here.
(05:53):
Fancy bird.
Needed some healing.
Fancy bird needs some healing.
Okay.
he's got some challenges.
No, I wouldn't have thought of that on my, I don't believe I would've thought of that on my own.
Okay.
I had other people in my life who were as equally effed up and didn't get the message for them.
So I recruit my brother, some other guy and me and chaos are gonna go back.
So we all jump in the Ayahuasca assault vehicle, the Honda Odyssey minivan.
(06:15):
Gonna be one of my questions.
I'm like, you flew, right? No, we didn't go to Cabo this time.
we went to Ensenada.
Okay.
Which is just.
An hour south of Tijuana.
So we drove there.
Much more convenient.
Yeah.
And my thought was, I'm gonna prepare 'em as best I can because there's really not a lot of resources at the time For how to prepare for this.
So I do the best I can to prepare them for Hey, this is how we need to get set up for success here.
(06:39):
And my plan is I'm gonna take them to the ceremony, them out of the car, and then I'm gonna go get a hotel room.
So that's my plan.
Okay.
I'm gonna yeet these guys outta the vehicle.
I'm gonna get a hotel room.
I'll be back in the morning.
As we're driving to the, where we're gonna have the ceremony the facilitators, basically we form a little mini caravan and we're driving there and we start going up a dirt road into the mountains.
(07:06):
Okay.
And we're going up this dirt road for a while.
And then they open a gate, everybody drives through and they close the gate and lock it.
And then we drive for several more miles.
We open another gate, go through that gate, close it, it's like a compound.
And lock it.
Yes.
the car? Are we okay? Yes, because we are nowheresville.
Okay.
We are up in the mountains and off the coast of, and they're locking gates behind us.
(07:28):
So we finally get to this compound slash ranch where we're gonna have the, ceremony and chaos is just tickled pink.
'cause he's no escape now for you, bud.
I was like, no there isn't.
I am.
I'm here.
Yeah, I'm stuck.
I am distraught.
I'm not happy about this, but I'm also resigned.
(07:50):
Played, Lord.
Played nice.
Backed me into, as Winston Churchill used to say, Americans will always do the right thing after they've tried every other option.
that's not the truth.
will do the right thing after I've tried every other option and tried to get out of it, I'm going to do the right thing.
So we get ready for the ceremony, we do our things.
(08:13):
We're much better prepared just facilities wise, get everybody set up and, the ceremony begins.
We drink the tea, we lay down.
My brother does not drop in.
I think he's had three cups and still hasn't dropped in.
The head shaman comes over and does some work on him.
Bam.
He's off and going.
(08:33):
Me and Fancy Bird are laying right next to each other and we have a two hour laughing fit.
That we are just laughing and falling and slapping the ground.
And I'm not saying it's like a little he chuckle it is a ha like we are way outta line.
(08:54):
Like we are ruining the ceremony for everybody else.
My God.
And after about two, like every once in a while, we'd be like okay.
We'll be serious.
We'll be serious.
We pull it together, get serious, get spiritual with it, and then.
Two minutes later, one of us goes and starts snickering, and then the other one starts laughing and then we're off and running again.
just ruining this ceremony.
(09:17):
after about two hours of that, we finally calm down, we start doing our work.
I go through two hours of trauma releases where my body will go into a full body contracture.
Sometimes I have a memory of the trauma and sometimes I don't have the memory of the trauma, but like 100% of the muscles in my body are tensed up and contracted for anywhere from 10 seconds to three minutes.
(09:41):
And then it'll release, then I'll be off for a minute and a half, and then my body will seize up again and it'll relax and it'll seize up and relax.
And it does that for about two hours.
And after about two hours, I'm like, man, we gotta be getting close to the end.
Like how much trauma can I be carrying? This is a lot, this is a lot of hard work.
(10:02):
This is uncomfortable.
it's emotional.
I don't like these memories, and the voice of the Lord comes back to me and says, you're five.
I'm like, what? This was all before the age of five.
That's why you didn't have memories, because you were too young to remember it.
Wow.
I was like, huh.
Can I tap out and we can just, can we move on to the next part of the program and then we'll come back to this trauma another day? Yeah, sure.
(10:27):
We can do that.
And so move on to a different part.
I deal through some things with my ex-wife, my kids other relationships in my life, what I'm gonna be doing with my life.
'cause I'm basically unemployed now trying to figure out like, Hey, what is it? What is it I'm here to do? For the most part I'm having a beautiful ceremony and always at one of these ceremonies, it seems like there's a woman somewhere.
(10:50):
We're in a big circle, two or three people deep.
There's probably 50, 60 people at this.
Ceremony.
Wow.
More than I thought there were.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Most of the c like our first ceremony in Mexico was definitely an oddity in that there were so few people there.
I think that was one of the smaller ceremonies.
That we ever went to.
From that point forward.
And there's always some woman on the other side of the circle.
(11:11):
Sounds like she's way off in the distance and it just sounds like she's getting murdered.
Like she is going, she's crying, she's screaming, she's weeping, she's wailing, and I don't know what's going on with chaos.
But chaos hasn't dropped in yet and we're a couple hours in.
And the head shaman Martine brings the fourth cup to him.
And says, now you will see the magic.
(11:35):
And Chaos like, all right, I'm here for the magic.
Whatever.
Takes his shot, lays down, chills out for a little bit, and then finally he stands up and screams, shot the fuck up bitch.
And dj, record scratch ceremony is completely quiet and.
(11:56):
I giggle 'cause what else are you gonna do? And I lay back down, close my eyes, go back into my experience and I'm completely unaware of anything else that's happening in the 3D world at this point.
Apparently that was chaos is like tapping of the lecter and saying the show is about to begin and chaos went through a three or four hour just absolute struggle where he is battling a dragon and he is trying to get.
(12:25):
These chains off of him and trying to get him off the dragon, and he's fighting the dragon and trying to wrestle the dragon and ride it, and they're just going through it.
So after about two hours of this, my brother comes by and kicks me on the foot.
I'm completely unaware.
I open my eyes.
I'm like, yeah.
And he is your boy's over there, Michael Phelps on the ground, and I turn over and look at chaos and he's got a, he's laying face down on his yoga mat.
(12:50):
His arms and his legs are off his yoga mat and he is beating the earth, like he's swimming.
Like surf paddling yeah, like he's surf paddling, except he's just in dirt and he is just, oh my God.
I'm like, I look over at him, I'm like, good for him.
And then close my eyes and go back to my work, and every once in a while I'll come out of it.
(13:10):
The voice will come to me and go, Hey, you need to tell chaos this.
And I'd come out of it and I'd say something, and then I would just close my eyes and go back to doing my work.
I remember at one point I popped out and started doing a play by play.
Like it was a boxing match and he was losing and did it in the voice of Howard Cosell.
You did not.
I'm like, this is an absolute beat down.
(13:32):
I can't believe that the commission is allowing this fight to continue.
That's funny, dude.
so we're having a great time.
One of the things I yelled at him was I go, Sergeant.
Damage report and he's his shorts are ruined.
I go damage assessment.
He's I should have wore cotton.
(13:54):
And then he goes back to his work and I close my eyes and go back to my work.
So We were rowdy.
Okay.
We were rowdy and other than the woman screaming, Mexicans largely suffer in silence.
They're very Catholic.
They're very, okay, we'll just quietly suffer.
And we did not suffer quietly.
So at the end we were not everybody's favorite.
(14:16):
They have a big group share where everybody talks.
At the end, we shared about our experiences, and then when it came time for chaos, everybody was like.
Leaning forward and looking at him like, tell us what happened.
We gotta hear this story, man.
And he shares the story about the Dragons and the fight, the chain, the everything that was happening.
Oh my.
And yeah they were not pleased that we had been there.
(14:42):
I was like yeah, we American.
Sorry, sorry about that.
And fancy birds talking to us.
And I was asking him what he was laughing about and I said, I had the image of us as two little kids in our rooms laughing and then having dad come down and go shut up.
I'm like just enough time for dad to get back to his room for us to start laughing again.
(15:05):
And he said, I saw you talking to me.
He said, Jake, I saw you as a big bear.
And I was like, oh like a big grizzly bear.
He's no, more like blue.
I was like, oh man that is not the spiritual image I was shooting for.
(15:25):
I was shooting for something a little more majestic.
He's yeah, you're a big bear rolling around the floor, playing with your toes farting, burping just rolling around and being silly.
Burn necessities.
You're not wrong.
That's funny.
And then he told chaos.
I saw you as a big eagle and cass's I'm an eagle.
You say a majestic eagle.
(15:46):
He is no, I'm more like a cartoon eagle and I forget which cartoon.
Like the buzzard from Yeah.
From Bugs Bunny with the big Adams apple.
So yeah, he took the starch out of both of us, but chaos has held on to being the majestic eagle.
He still rolls with that today.
And it unfortunately for me, even though I told him in that first ceremony Hey, get.
(16:08):
Enjoy that buddy.
'cause it's never happening again.
It's happened multiple times I think.
Just to keep me humble.
So then we go home.
Everybody is So how is your brother's? Younger brother, okay.
I'm the oldest of five, so this is my second youngest brother.
Okay.
The third, the middle child of the family, his.
(16:28):
Ayahuasca ceremony was beautiful and we go to do Buffalo afterwards.
We do five M-E-O-D-M-T afterwards again.
Okay.
Fancy bird doesn't wanna do it.
He doesn't.
Okay.
A beautiful experience.
It is, terrifying and horrifying and just incredibly difficult and not as terrible as the first one, but I feel like I'm falling down a mountain that's about an 80 degree slope where I'm hitting things and bouncing and rolling and cartwheeling, and I'm outta control and I can't stop anything and I'm just getting beat up by the side of this mountain.
(17:00):
Okay.
That's.
The first part of the experience afterwards.
It's light, it's love, it's beautiful, it's ecstasy.
There's bliss, like there is beauty on the other side but the buy-in is pretty terrible.
When my brother Ben does his buff and the shaman came over and put his hand on his chest or something as he did it, he looked at me, he goes, Victor, I love you.
(17:25):
And reached up and grabbed Victor and gave him a big hug, and he goes.
I'm gonna pee all over you, man.
And Victor starts like swimming his arms in he's get away.
Nope, not gonna pee on me.
So Victor finally gets outta Ben's grasp, and then Ben lays there for a couple minutes and he screams, fuck you, mom.
(17:45):
I'm calling the police.
And then stands up, like he's just all bowed up with anger and he is I have to pee.
And then walks outta the circle into a field.
Takes his pants off, stands there for a couple minutes, doesn't pee, and then comes back to the circle and just sits down with no pants, no freaking leg.
(18:07):
And then the shaman's kinda like looking at Ben in his head like that was a good one.
Loading the pipe for the next one.
funny.
So we go and have fish tacos in Ensenada.
Afterwards, as we found this taco stand ended up becoming a staple for us.
And I take a, we get a group picture taken of us and we send it to Fancy bird's wife, and her first reply is, are Ben's pants on inside out? she notices me.
(18:33):
Yeah.
And then the second message is, I've never seen him smile that big.
Aw, but talking about her husband.
So that was, that's really cool.
It was beautiful.
So we go home from that and now I'm like, all right, I've got six to eight more of these ceremonies I need to do, let's get 'em done.
God told you to do some stuff.
let's fast track this.
(18:53):
Okay.
So now I'm like, oh, I can help other people with this.
So I just start recruiting people.
Hey, I'll take you down there.
I've got everything set up.
I got a program that I've come up with.
I've definitely figured out what not to do.
Yeah.
So lemme tell you what you can do.
Okay.
And set 'em up with a much better logistical setup when they go down there, so they're not just laying on the dirt, rolling around in it.
(19:15):
'cause after that we looked like we had been.
Rolled around a mountain.
Okay.
was no like padding blankets, pillows, nothing.
We did not come very well prepared.
Okay.
We had a yoga mat.
Okay.
Okay.
Yeah.
And with chaos beating the earth, me and him rolling around we looked rough.
So we class it up a little bit before the people that we're bringing.
(19:36):
bring a change of pants.
bring a Definitely bring a change of clothes.
Bring some wet wipes.
Yeah.
That's mission critical.
Maybe toothbrush, like we have a whole little old kit for him, but good.
Hey here's a brown cloth so that when you puke, you can wipe your face with it because it's brown.
You won't see the stuff all over it.
Less freaking out.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Gross.
So we've got 'em set up.
So I'm recruiting people to bring them back.
(19:58):
And for the first year, I like to joke that I was like a chiropractor in the 1970s.
I was like, Hey, you gotta come to Ayahuasca.
It'll make you taller.
Your teeth will be straighter.
Your kids will behave better.
This will probably cure bail pattern baldness.
It doesn't matter what ails you.
this is gonna make your life better.
Okay? So I was a little over the top.
(20:20):
Okay.
A little over the top.
And just started networking and recruiting and bringing people back.
And I'm doing other work, but I'm also like, just trying to make this, hey maybe my thing's to bring people to ceremony.
Yeah.
And it's a tough ask.
Ayahuasca is not nearly as well known back then as it is now.
(20:41):
People had heard of it, but not a lot.
There wasn't a lot online about it, so we do several more ceremonies.
I don't remember the third one really, but we do the fourth one.
And the fourth one is where I finally bring a resolution to my anger.
And I don't remember during the ayahuasca portion of the ceremony, I remember asking, is it time for me to go to the bathroom? And spirit going, no, it's not time yet.
(21:09):
I'm like, all right.
How about now? Nope.
throughout the time.
And at one point, one of the things I remember from that ceremony is I was talking to another girl in the ceremony, except we were just whispering to each other.
And I would whisper something and then she would whisper back and we would talk.
And at one point I thought she was like a mat away from me.
(21:31):
Okay.
And I opened my eyes and looked and she was about 20 yards away.
Oh wow.
And it is an interesting thing at ceremony that it is a.
It's an individual experience, but it's also a communal experience and like networks of people form.
There's the overall network of everybody, and then there's a sub network of people where some people connect more than others and then a sub network under that.
(21:54):
So her and I had that kind of connection, which was a unique experience.
Which does, when you don't believe in that sort of stuff, it was a little weird at first.
Oh, she also had the same Hey, we were whispering.
Yeah.
Okay.
So she was just whispering back and forth to each other.
That's so weird.
Yeah.
I was laughing at one point.
She's like, why are you laughing at us? I'm like, I'm not laughing at you.
I'm laughing at me.
(22:16):
This isn't about you.
But ceremony ends.
It was beautiful.
And the sun's up.
Everybody's moving around.
People are doing stuff, and then the voice comes to me and says hey, it's time to go to the bathroom.
I was like, oh, all right.
Let's go.
So I go in there and take a just a life-changing dump.
(22:37):
Okay.
Like it feels like everything beneath my Adams apple just fell out of my body organs and all of I, it was, I was like, wow, that was, every moisturized cell is squeezed to the, yeah, that was something.
And it said, wait.
And I'm like, wait, what else could there possibly be? And as I'm sitting there, I can feel energy being pulled from everywhere in my body.
(23:01):
It feels like it's coming from my hands, my toes, my feet, and it's just getting pulled into the center of me.
And after about five or 10 minutes of that, I taken another, not quite as epic, but fairly epic dump.
And I was like, whew.
All right, we're good.
Okay.
So clean up from that mess, and then it's time to do the bufo Okay.
(23:24):
And normally, because we're in Ensenada at this time, we have a four to six hour drive home, we gotta get across The border, the longer you wait on Sunday to go across the border.
The longer the line gets.
So we're usually pretty Hey we need to get this going.
Yeah.
Everybody else lives here.
They'll be home in 15 minutes.
Can we go first? Yeah.
And normally they say yes.
And today they didn't.
(23:44):
Oh, everybody else went first from our group, but me.
Okay.
And literally every time Martine would come over with the buffer, I'm like, all right, it's time.
Let's go.
Let's do this.
I'm really nervous and anxious about it.
He would walk up to me and then as he would get close to me, he would turn and go to someone else and serve them the buffer.
Okay.
And does that until I'm the last person left.
(24:07):
Okay.
And then he goes and gives me the buff.
And when he gives me the buff you're cross-eyed looking at the pipe and I'm seeing him work in the pipe.
And I remember drawing off the pipe and we're in a grove of trees.
And the next thing I remember, I wake up and I'm in the sunshine.
It's sunshine where I'm at, and I look around and chaos is next to me.
(24:28):
And he is got his hand on my chest.
I'm like, Hey man.
How you doing? I was gonna ask you the same.
Okay.
I'm like he's you back and I'm like, not really.
could you ground me? He's what do you mean ground you? I'm like.
I don't know, throw some dirt on me or something.
So he kinda a cat just kicks some dirt on me.
(24:49):
Okay.
And his wife is with us and she comes over and picks up a handful of dirt and just draws lines down my body.
Like I'm a stick figure with this dirt.
And I lay there and I feel much better.
interesting.
Whew.
I feel really good.
My shirt's missing.
My shorts are about half torn off.
(25:10):
I've got an enormous egg on the top left side of my head.
Ooh.
And I start looking around and my hands are bloody.
My elbows are bloody.
One of my shoulders is scuffed up.
Both knees have road rash on them.
One of my hips is busted up and one of my ankles has quite a bit of carnage on it.
And I was like, What happened? What? What was that? And he's you don't remember that? I'm like, I don't remember anything.
(25:35):
you went down and started thrashing and turning around and beating the earth and just like flailing all over the place.
You destroyed a cozy coop, a tree.
You took out a bird bath.
A bench.
What? And looks like you tore up about a quarter of an acre of grass here.
what the hell? Up, beating everything up.
(25:57):
I was like, oh, that would explain why I don't feel very good.
And we gotta go.
We're late.
We gotta go.
Like, wow.
So we get in the ayahuasca assault vehicle.
I'm just covered with dirt.
I can't find my one flip flop.
So I'm I look like it's been a hard night.
Wow.
And that was the last time I was angry for two years.
(26:21):
That was just the end of my anger.
Wow.
Yeah.
What'd the bird bath do to you? It was there.
I also love the.
The wife of who was chaos.
Chaos wife.
Yeah.
She just is listen I don't think she probably has ever poured dirt on anybody.
She just said, this is something we're gonna need to do right now.
Yeah.
Just picked up a handful of dirt.
(26:43):
It was super beautiful.
Like just instincts of this lady who cares and loves for you.
Cool.
I like that.
rub some dirt on.
And I also like that he had his hand on your chest and be like, you okay bro? You're like, yo, why wouldn't I be okay? He was like when you take a look at yourself in the mirror later you're gonna want, he was sitting there next to me and I think he was trying to hold, maybe hold you down to keep the safe.
He was also trying to hold me down.
Yeah, sure.
Like I was getting I was heading towards a concrete slab and he was like, yeah you gotta keep him away from the concrete slab.
(27:08):
And when I came home from that I pooped black for two weeks.
Wow.
And when I say black, I don't mean it was dark.
No it was tar.
It was tar black.
Googling online.
Hey, why is the color of your poop change? Which I don't recommend like any Google search you do for poop is not going to end well.
There's so many possibilities.
And majority of them are not good.
Did they say street tacos from Ensenada at all? They did not.
(27:30):
Okay.
That was my first guessing when you, what I eventually got Was that it's releasing bile from your liver.
Okay.
And in the Old Testament when they talk about anger, they talk the bile of their anger.
Oh yeah.
And so it was like, oh, I was releasing all that rage from my liver for two weeks.
(27:50):
And during that, two weeks after the ceremony, every once in a while, I'd be at my house by myself.
Everything's fine.
And I would just fly into a Rach.
Okay.
Like stomping around my house, going outside, stomping around the yard, throwing shit around, angry, no memories, no reason.
And then it would pass.
And that, that went on for two weeks and then at the end of that two weeks, it was another two years before I was angry again.
(28:15):
Wow.
So I was pretty happy with that was when people were like how do you deal with anger? I'm like I don't know what the textbook, you poop.
You poop it out.
I don't know what the textbook version of it is.
And I don't know that you wanna do it the way I did it.
Yeah.
But that was a beautiful experience.
A pretty freaking beautiful story.
I love that.
One day I am just gonna come up and put dirt on you.
I don't think in general it's not gonna I don't think we're in the clear.
(28:37):
Just raise an eyebrow at you.
Yeah.
That's awesome.
And so could other people that you were around, did they start to say something, there's something different like there.
Yes.
Could they tell that there was like a p like a more of a explain.
Tell me about that.
'cause I think you don't know certain things that are happening to you until your loved ones or people close to you, or something changed.
(28:59):
Yeah, there's something different.
I had a picture taken and posted it online and it's like a 300 comment roast fest of my friends alternately roasting me and going.
What, why are you like what's going on in this picture? Why do you look like this? they could tell from the look on your face.
(29:19):
Just the look on my face.
They were like, huh? Why do you look like Santa Claus? What's, what do you, yeah.
What do you look like? Grizzly Adams.
What's going on? Why has this changed? And when I owned CrossFit gyms, I was famous for not hugging.
Under no circumstances were you going to get a hug from me.
The most intimacy you would get is a fist bump.
(29:41):
I think someone did try and hug me once and I just stood there straight with my arms by my side and looked forward like a kitten being cleaned no.
And I met one of the people from my gym at a restaurant randomly and went out and gave her a hug and said, Hey, I'm actually at the wrong restaurant.
I gotta go and left.
And then later on she got in the group chat and she's I met Jake today at a restaurant randomly.
(30:02):
And he hugged me and everybody was like, you're a liar.
No he didn't.
No he didn't.
And I was like, that must've been somebody else.
I wasn't at that restaurant.
I ate over here.
She's you liar you admit that you hugged me.
I was like, alright, you got me.
I hugged you.
Any other people in your life in direct relationships? Kids like Yeah.
Yeah.
my kids, I don't know that they noticed, but our house was just a lot more peaceful.
(30:24):
Yeah.
Because I was peaceful.
Yeah.
So the kids weren't.
Wound up.
And then one time I came home and I wasn't angry, but I was stressed out and immediately the kids were all wound up and I was like, oh, I did this.
Okay, yeah.
I need to go get myself centered and grounded, and then my kids will be better.
I don't need to yell at them.
I'm the problem here.
And years later Kim my partner in the breathwork business and life partner, she had gone to.
(30:52):
A dinner date with a bunch of her friends.
And they said, Hey, are you still dating that guy? They're like, yeah.
And they're like, is he still angry? And she sat there and thought about it for a minute and she's no, he isn't angry now.
She mentioned it.
He's, I can't remember the last time he was angry.
So she comes home, she tells me the story, she's.
All happy with herself.
(31:12):
Hey, did you know you're not angry anymore? And I was like, yeah, I'm pretty well aware of that.
I'm aware of what's going on inside me.
and I said, yeah it's actually been two years since I've been angry.
And she's what? I'm like, you just now noticed that I haven't been angry for two years.
He's oh, okay.
I go just so in the future, when you make shifts.
(31:33):
And it's been a week and you've asked me if I've noticed, just realize I've got another 103 weeks before I need to get around to recognizing the shift you've made in your life.
So every once in a while when she makes a shift, and I'll bring up like, I've got another year and a half before I need to recognize this in you.
Could you tell when you drove? Yeah.
People driving is, it's you.
(31:55):
You get in a car with somebody who's angry.
And you may not see it every day.
Yeah.
But when you get in a car, yeah.
A beast comes out.
Yes.
And it's I'm the only one that can hear you right.
As your passenger.
Are you mad at me? And they're like, no.
What are you talking? And I'm like, I am getting yelled at right now.
Even though you're calling other people a Muppet, I'm the one who feels like a Muppet.
(32:18):
I don't understand what you're so angry about.
I will say sometimes in traffic it gets annoyed.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I would still get annoyed, but it would be like a normal person.
Oh this is frustrating, but sure.
I would deal with it as a frustration and like, all right let's move along.
Yeah.
That's neat.
There was an incident much later on where me a friend who was a Marine and another friend who had literally just fought for like Bellator's heavyweight title, so he is a legit.
(32:48):
Monstrosity of a human being.
We're in the car and we're leaving breath work and a guy cuts us off to get onto the highway and I'm like, okay.
It just dropped back a little bit and then go to speed up again.
And as I speed up, they cut us off again.
And I'm like, that had to be an accident.
So I drop back and try and go the other way and they cut me off again the third time, clearly, intentionally.
(33:12):
So I just let off the gas and roll back and.
Slow way down and just let them get way, way far ahead.
And the friend who's Marine has known me for quite a while and he is looking at me.
He is this is different.
I go if I let him get a mile ahead of me, he'll only get there a minute before us.
(33:33):
He's true.
But it would be very satisfying to have the three of us get out of the car.
He's could we just kick his ass anyway? Can we just slap him around a little bit for old time sake? We don't need to.
It's fine.
Yeah.
So I am, I'm in my garage meditating, and before I went to ceremony, I was not a good meditator.
I was actually fired by my meditation coach because he said you're too disciplined.
And that's why meditation is a struggle for you.
And at the time when he said it, I was like, that makes no sense to me.
(00:22):
I'm trying to figure it out too.
You can see this when I would go to meditate, I would get in my little legs crossed position, hands on the knees, and then I would sit there and meditate and just go hello? And I'm just gonna brute force my way into this meditation.
Okay.
I'm just gonna furrow my brows and concentrate and that's the meditative state is going to happen.
(00:44):
And it did not.
Okay.
And he said, meditation coach was like, yeah, good luck, Godspeed.
Hope it works out for you.
But you can't be helped by me.
Gotcha.
And so I'm sitting there meditating, and now meditation works perfectly easy.
In fact, it works so well that for the first three weeks I meditate, I close my eyes, I relax and I drop into it.
(01:05):
And I'm so pleased with myself that I've dropped into the meditative state that I'm like, ta-da, I've done it, I've meditated.
And then of course it immediately goes away and I'm like, I'm sorry.
Hold on.
Wait a minute.
I'll do it again.
And then it doesn't work.
Then it takes me about three weeks to stop from patting myself on the back to tell myself like how wonderful I am that I've meditated, that I can actually.
(01:26):
Do the meditation, like success is too big a barrier for me to deal with, to actually be able to continue meditation.
that like an, is it an ego that comes in I think it's one of those things if you've ever tried to do something and then it doesn't work, and then it finally does work, you're like, ta-da.
Yeah, I did it.
And I think that's kinda what it was.
It may have been an ego thing as well Hey I finally did the thing, so I'm there.
(01:49):
I'm meditating one morning and as I'm meditating at my ayahuasca ceremony I was talking to God face to face.
We were having a full blown conversation.
When I meditate, the voice of God occasionally comes back to me and talks to me, and one morning he's talking to me and I had as a reminder, I had told chaos as we were coming home I am never doing that again.
(02:11):
That was wonderful.
Terrible.
I'm grateful I did it.
This was in truly enriching, it's changed my life.
Let's not do it again.
As I'm meditating, the voice of the Lord comes back to me and says, you have to go back.
I was like huh.
So maybe 1, 2, 2 more times.
Ah, more like seven or eight.
(02:33):
I was like, good.
Golly, like, how messed up am I? Like I knew I was a tough case, but I didn't think it was gonna take eight to get me to, to the center.
So I'm like, do I get a, do I get a punch card? Is there like an ice cream at the end? What do I get here at the end of this? It's just start going.
Okay, so at my first ceremony I was given the message that I needed to bring two friends back specifically.
(02:57):
Okay.
One's name is Fancy Bird and we'll call the other one Wilbur.
Okay.
So Wilbur is my best friend from Arkansas, and when I come back from ceremony, he is the first person I basically do my integration with him, and then I call him and say, Hey, I'm going to tell you the story of what happened.
And just so you know, I don't believe any of this either.
(03:20):
So if any point you wanna stop me during this story and go, that's bs.
Just realize I too believe it's bs.
Okay.
But it happened.
So I tell him the story and later on he didn't tell me then, but years later, he was one of the people that I need to bring back.
Okay.
And I said, Hey, you, you've gotta come with me for this.
And he's yeah, no.
not about it.
(03:41):
And I was greatly disappointed.
And what I didn't realize at the time was that like I'm 45 at the time, I think I'm 45.
And he said in my entire life, I've never heard fear in Jake's voice.
And when he was telling me that story.
He was afraid for you? I was afraid.
Oh, he could sense you were afraid.
while I was telling the story, I was overcome with fear.
(04:02):
And he was like, what? And this is he's literally my childhood friend.
He would see me after my mom had beat me up as a little kid.
My hair's messed up.
My face is bloody and I'm still just a defiant little kid.
Like I am like, Hey, I'm I don't know when, but I'm gonna get you back.
So even as a little kid taking a beating, I'm like.
Nope not accepting it.
(04:23):
So it was like, yeah, whatever it was that made Jake afraid, I want no part of that.
Not a way to sell that.
No hard pass.
So that was an unsuccessful sales call to one of the two people who I was supposed to bring back.
And I go and meet with Fancy Bird, who is the second person who I'm supposed to bring back to ceremony with me.
(04:46):
And we're gonna have street tacos.
And I sit down to have the conversation with him and the only thing in my mind was like, Hey, I met God, and he said, I should bring you back to this, so you have to come with me.
And I was like, ah, yeah, that may not be the best approach.
Like I may need to set a little groundwork here before I spring the whole Hey let's go do some ayahuasca together.
(05:10):
Okay.
This thing that you've never heard of, you've never done a psychedelic, you've never done drugs, you're a lifelong.
Government, employee what could possibly go wrong.
So we have the conversation and then I get to the end and I'm like, yeah, and God told me that you're supposed to come back with me and do this with me.
And he is okay.
(05:30):
What kind of was he religious? Did he also have a connection with God at all or I do not believe so.
Okay.
We've never had philosophical discussions But certainly never about the divine or God Okay.
The But he was also a friend who for the last year and a half, I'd been doing like a once a week wellness check to make sure he hadn't killed himself.
Hey let's make sure if Fancy Birds still among the living here.
(05:53):
Fancy bird.
Needed some healing.
Fancy bird needs some healing.
Okay.
he's got some challenges.
No, I wouldn't have thought of that on my, I don't believe I would've thought of that on my own.
Okay.
I had other people in my life who were as equally effed up and didn't get the message for them.
So I recruit my brother, some other guy and me and chaos are gonna go back.
So we all jump in the Ayahuasca assault vehicle, the Honda Odyssey minivan.
(06:15):
Gonna be one of my questions.
I'm like, you flew, right? No, we didn't go to Cabo this time.
we went to Ensenada.
Okay.
Which is just.
An hour south of Tijuana.
So we drove there.
Much more convenient.
Yeah.
And my thought was, I'm gonna prepare 'em as best I can because there's really not a lot of resources at the time For how to prepare for this.
So I do the best I can to prepare them for Hey, this is how we need to get set up for success here.
(06:39):
And my plan is I'm gonna take them to the ceremony, them out of the car, and then I'm gonna go get a hotel room.
So that's my plan.
Okay.
I'm gonna yeet these guys outta the vehicle.
I'm gonna get a hotel room.
I'll be back in the morning.
As we're driving to the, where we're gonna have the ceremony the facilitators, basically we form a little mini caravan and we're driving there and we start going up a dirt road into the mountains.
(07:06):
Okay.
And we're going up this dirt road for a while.
And then they open a gate, everybody drives through and they close the gate and lock it.
And then we drive for several more miles.
We open another gate, go through that gate, close it, it's like a compound.
And lock it.
Yes.
the car? Are we okay? Yes, because we are nowheresville.
Okay.
We are up in the mountains and off the coast of, and they're locking gates behind us.
(07:28):
So we finally get to this compound slash ranch where we're gonna have the, ceremony and chaos is just tickled pink.
'cause he's no escape now for you, bud.
I was like, no there isn't.
I am.
I'm here.
Yeah, I'm stuck.
I am distraught.
I'm not happy about this, but I'm also resigned.
(07:50):
Played, Lord.
Played nice.
Backed me into, as Winston Churchill used to say, Americans will always do the right thing after they've tried every other option.
that's not the truth.
will do the right thing after I've tried every other option and tried to get out of it, I'm going to do the right thing.
So we get ready for the ceremony, we do our things.
(08:13):
We're much better prepared just facilities wise, get everybody set up and, the ceremony begins.
We drink the tea, we lay down.
My brother does not drop in.
I think he's had three cups and still hasn't dropped in.
The head shaman comes over and does some work on him.
Bam.
He's off and going.
(08:33):
Me and Fancy Bird are laying right next to each other and we have a two hour laughing fit.
That we are just laughing and falling and slapping the ground.
And I'm not saying it's like a little he chuckle it is a ha like we are way outta line.
(08:54):
Like we are ruining the ceremony for everybody else.
My God.
And after about two, like every once in a while, we'd be like okay.
We'll be serious.
We'll be serious.
We pull it together, get serious, get spiritual with it, and then.
Two minutes later, one of us goes and starts snickering, and then the other one starts laughing and then we're off and running again.
just ruining this ceremony.
(09:17):
after about two hours of that, we finally calm down, we start doing our work.
I go through two hours of trauma releases where my body will go into a full body contracture.
Sometimes I have a memory of the trauma and sometimes I don't have the memory of the trauma, but like 100% of the muscles in my body are tensed up and contracted for anywhere from 10 seconds to three minutes.
(09:41):
And then it'll release, then I'll be off for a minute and a half, and then my body will seize up again and it'll relax and it'll seize up and relax.
And it does that for about two hours.
And after about two hours, I'm like, man, we gotta be getting close to the end.
Like how much trauma can I be carrying? This is a lot, this is a lot of hard work.
(10:02):
This is uncomfortable.
it's emotional.
I don't like these memories, and the voice of the Lord comes back to me and says, you're five.
I'm like, what? This was all before the age of five.
That's why you didn't have memories, because you were too young to remember it.
Wow.
I was like, huh.
Can I tap out and we can just, can we move on to the next part of the program and then we'll come back to this trauma another day? Yeah, sure.
(10:27):
We can do that.
And so move on to a different part.
I deal through some things with my ex-wife, my kids other relationships in my life, what I'm gonna be doing with my life.
'cause I'm basically unemployed now trying to figure out like, Hey, what is it? What is it I'm here to do? For the most part I'm having a beautiful ceremony and always at one of these ceremonies, it seems like there's a woman somewhere.
(10:50):
We're in a big circle, two or three people deep.
There's probably 50, 60 people at this.
Ceremony.
Wow.
More than I thought there were.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Most of the c like our first ceremony in Mexico was definitely an oddity in that there were so few people there.
I think that was one of the smaller ceremonies.
That we ever went to.
From that point forward.
And there's always some woman on the other side of the circle.
(11:11):
Sounds like she's way off in the distance and it just sounds like she's getting murdered.
Like she is going, she's crying, she's screaming, she's weeping, she's wailing, and I don't know what's going on with chaos.
But chaos hasn't dropped in yet and we're a couple hours in.
And the head shaman Martine brings the fourth cup to him.
And says, now you will see the magic.
(11:35):
And Chaos like, all right, I'm here for the magic.
Whatever.
Takes his shot, lays down, chills out for a little bit, and then finally he stands up and screams, shot the fuck up bitch.
And dj, record scratch ceremony is completely quiet and.
(11:56):
I giggle 'cause what else are you gonna do? And I lay back down, close my eyes, go back into my experience and I'm completely unaware of anything else that's happening in the 3D world at this point.
Apparently that was chaos is like tapping of the lecter and saying the show is about to begin and chaos went through a three or four hour just absolute struggle where he is battling a dragon and he is trying to get.
(12:25):
These chains off of him and trying to get him off the dragon, and he's fighting the dragon and trying to wrestle the dragon and ride it, and they're just going through it.
So after about two hours of this, my brother comes by and kicks me on the foot.
I'm completely unaware.
I open my eyes.
I'm like, yeah.
And he is your boy's over there, Michael Phelps on the ground, and I turn over and look at chaos and he's got a, he's laying face down on his yoga mat.
(12:50):
His arms and his legs are off his yoga mat and he is beating the earth, like he's swimming.
Like surf paddling yeah, like he's surf paddling, except he's just in dirt and he is just, oh my God.
I'm like, I look over at him, I'm like, good for him.
And then close my eyes and go back to my work, and every once in a while I'll come out of it.
(13:10):
The voice will come to me and go, Hey, you need to tell chaos this.
And I'd come out of it and I'd say something, and then I would just close my eyes and go back to doing my work.
I remember at one point I popped out and started doing a play by play.
Like it was a boxing match and he was losing and did it in the voice of Howard Cosell.
You did not.
I'm like, this is an absolute beat down.
(13:32):
I can't believe that the commission is allowing this fight to continue.
That's funny, dude.
so we're having a great time.
One of the things I yelled at him was I go, Sergeant.
Damage report and he's his shorts are ruined.
I go damage assessment.
He's I should have wore cotton.
(13:54):
And then he goes back to his work and I close my eyes and go back to my work.
So We were rowdy.
Okay.
We were rowdy and other than the woman screaming, Mexicans largely suffer in silence.
They're very Catholic.
They're very, okay, we'll just quietly suffer.
And we did not suffer quietly.
So at the end we were not everybody's favorite.
(14:16):
They have a big group share where everybody talks.
At the end, we shared about our experiences, and then when it came time for chaos, everybody was like.
Leaning forward and looking at him like, tell us what happened.
We gotta hear this story, man.
And he shares the story about the Dragons and the fight, the chain, the everything that was happening.
Oh my.
And yeah they were not pleased that we had been there.
(14:42):
I was like yeah, we American.
Sorry, sorry about that.
And fancy birds talking to us.
And I was asking him what he was laughing about and I said, I had the image of us as two little kids in our rooms laughing and then having dad come down and go shut up.
I'm like just enough time for dad to get back to his room for us to start laughing again.
(15:05):
And he said, I saw you talking to me.
He said, Jake, I saw you as a big bear.
And I was like, oh like a big grizzly bear.
He's no, more like blue.
I was like, oh man that is not the spiritual image I was shooting for.
(15:25):
I was shooting for something a little more majestic.
He's yeah, you're a big bear rolling around the floor, playing with your toes farting, burping just rolling around and being silly.
Burn necessities.
You're not wrong.
That's funny.
And then he told chaos.
I saw you as a big eagle and cass's I'm an eagle.
You say a majestic eagle.
(15:46):
He is no, I'm more like a cartoon eagle and I forget which cartoon.
Like the buzzard from Yeah.
From Bugs Bunny with the big Adams apple.
So yeah, he took the starch out of both of us, but chaos has held on to being the majestic eagle.
He still rolls with that today.
And it unfortunately for me, even though I told him in that first ceremony Hey, get.
(16:08):
Enjoy that buddy.
'cause it's never happening again.
It's happened multiple times I think.
Just to keep me humble.
So then we go home.
Everybody is So how is your brother's? Younger brother, okay.
I'm the oldest of five, so this is my second youngest brother.
Okay.
The third, the middle child of the family, his.
(16:28):
Ayahuasca ceremony was beautiful and we go to do Buffalo afterwards.
We do five M-E-O-D-M-T afterwards again.
Okay.
Fancy bird doesn't wanna do it.
He doesn't.
Okay.
A beautiful experience.
It is, terrifying and horrifying and just incredibly difficult and not as terrible as the first one, but I feel like I'm falling down a mountain that's about an 80 degree slope where I'm hitting things and bouncing and rolling and cartwheeling, and I'm outta control and I can't stop anything and I'm just getting beat up by the side of this mountain.
(17:00):
Okay.
That's.
The first part of the experience afterwards.
It's light, it's love, it's beautiful, it's ecstasy.
There's bliss, like there is beauty on the other side but the buy-in is pretty terrible.
When my brother Ben does his buff and the shaman came over and put his hand on his chest or something as he did it, he looked at me, he goes, Victor, I love you.
(17:25):
And reached up and grabbed Victor and gave him a big hug, and he goes.
I'm gonna pee all over you, man.
And Victor starts like swimming his arms in he's get away.
Nope, not gonna pee on me.
So Victor finally gets outta Ben's grasp, and then Ben lays there for a couple minutes and he screams, fuck you, mom.
(17:45):
I'm calling the police.
And then stands up, like he's just all bowed up with anger and he is I have to pee.
And then walks outta the circle into a field.
Takes his pants off, stands there for a couple minutes, doesn't pee, and then comes back to the circle and just sits down with no pants, no freaking leg.
(18:07):
And then the shaman's kinda like looking at Ben in his head like that was a good one.
Loading the pipe for the next one.
funny.
So we go and have fish tacos in Ensenada.
Afterwards, as we found this taco stand ended up becoming a staple for us.
And I take a, we get a group picture taken of us and we send it to Fancy bird's wife, and her first reply is, are Ben's pants on inside out? she notices me.
(18:33):
Yeah.
And then the second message is, I've never seen him smile that big.
Aw, but talking about her husband.
So that was, that's really cool.
It was beautiful.
So we go home from that and now I'm like, all right, I've got six to eight more of these ceremonies I need to do, let's get 'em done.
God told you to do some stuff.
let's fast track this.
(18:53):
Okay.
So now I'm like, oh, I can help other people with this.
So I just start recruiting people.
Hey, I'll take you down there.
I've got everything set up.
I got a program that I've come up with.
I've definitely figured out what not to do.
Yeah.
So lemme tell you what you can do.
Okay.
And set 'em up with a much better logistical setup when they go down there, so they're not just laying on the dirt, rolling around in it.
(19:15):
'cause after that we looked like we had been.
Rolled around a mountain.
Okay.
was no like padding blankets, pillows, nothing.
We did not come very well prepared.
Okay.
We had a yoga mat.
Okay.
Okay.
Yeah.
And with chaos beating the earth, me and him rolling around we looked rough.
So we class it up a little bit before the people that we're bringing.
(19:36):
bring a change of pants.
bring a Definitely bring a change of clothes.
Bring some wet wipes.
Yeah.
That's mission critical.
Maybe toothbrush, like we have a whole little old kit for him, but good.
Hey here's a brown cloth so that when you puke, you can wipe your face with it because it's brown.
You won't see the stuff all over it.
Less freaking out.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Gross.
So we've got 'em set up.
So I'm recruiting people to bring them back.
(19:58):
And for the first year, I like to joke that I was like a chiropractor in the 1970s.
I was like, Hey, you gotta come to Ayahuasca.
It'll make you taller.
Your teeth will be straighter.
Your kids will behave better.
This will probably cure bail pattern baldness.
It doesn't matter what ails you.
this is gonna make your life better.
Okay? So I was a little over the top.
(20:20):
Okay.
A little over the top.
And just started networking and recruiting and bringing people back.
And I'm doing other work, but I'm also like, just trying to make this, hey maybe my thing's to bring people to ceremony.
Yeah.
And it's a tough ask.
Ayahuasca is not nearly as well known back then as it is now.
(20:41):
People had heard of it, but not a lot.
There wasn't a lot online about it, so we do several more ceremonies.
I don't remember the third one really, but we do the fourth one.
And the fourth one is where I finally bring a resolution to my anger.
And I don't remember during the ayahuasca portion of the ceremony, I remember asking, is it time for me to go to the bathroom? And spirit going, no, it's not time yet.
(21:09):
I'm like, all right.
How about now? Nope.
throughout the time.
And at one point, one of the things I remember from that ceremony is I was talking to another girl in the ceremony, except we were just whispering to each other.
And I would whisper something and then she would whisper back and we would talk.
And at one point I thought she was like a mat away from me.
(21:31):
Okay.
And I opened my eyes and looked and she was about 20 yards away.
Oh wow.
And it is an interesting thing at ceremony that it is a.
It's an individual experience, but it's also a communal experience and like networks of people form.
There's the overall network of everybody, and then there's a sub network of people where some people connect more than others and then a sub network under that.
(21:54):
So her and I had that kind of connection, which was a unique experience.
Which does, when you don't believe in that sort of stuff, it was a little weird at first.
Oh, she also had the same Hey, we were whispering.
Yeah.
Okay.
So she was just whispering back and forth to each other.
That's so weird.
Yeah.
I was laughing at one point.
She's like, why are you laughing at us? I'm like, I'm not laughing at you.
I'm laughing at me.
(22:16):
This isn't about you.
But ceremony ends.
It was beautiful.
And the sun's up.
Everybody's moving around.
People are doing stuff, and then the voice comes to me and says hey, it's time to go to the bathroom.
I was like, oh, all right.
Let's go.
So I go in there and take a just a life-changing dump.
(22:37):
Okay.
Like it feels like everything beneath my Adams apple just fell out of my body organs and all of I, it was, I was like, wow, that was, every moisturized cell is squeezed to the, yeah, that was something.
And it said, wait.
And I'm like, wait, what else could there possibly be? And as I'm sitting there, I can feel energy being pulled from everywhere in my body.
(23:01):
It feels like it's coming from my hands, my toes, my feet, and it's just getting pulled into the center of me.
And after about five or 10 minutes of that, I taken another, not quite as epic, but fairly epic dump.
And I was like, whew.
All right, we're good.
Okay.
So clean up from that mess, and then it's time to do the bufo Okay.
(23:24):
And normally, because we're in Ensenada at this time, we have a four to six hour drive home, we gotta get across The border, the longer you wait on Sunday to go across the border.
The longer the line gets.
So we're usually pretty Hey we need to get this going.
Yeah.
Everybody else lives here.
They'll be home in 15 minutes.
Can we go first? Yeah.
And normally they say yes.
And today they didn't.
(23:44):
Oh, everybody else went first from our group, but me.
Okay.
And literally every time Martine would come over with the buffer, I'm like, all right, it's time.
Let's go.
Let's do this.
I'm really nervous and anxious about it.
He would walk up to me and then as he would get close to me, he would turn and go to someone else and serve them the buffer.
Okay.
And does that until I'm the last person left.
(24:07):
Okay.
And then he goes and gives me the buff.
And when he gives me the buff you're cross-eyed looking at the pipe and I'm seeing him work in the pipe.
And I remember drawing off the pipe and we're in a grove of trees.
And the next thing I remember, I wake up and I'm in the sunshine.
It's sunshine where I'm at, and I look around and chaos is next to me.
(24:28):
And he is got his hand on my chest.
I'm like, Hey man.
How you doing? I was gonna ask you the same.
Okay.
I'm like he's you back and I'm like, not really.
could you ground me? He's what do you mean ground you? I'm like.
I don't know, throw some dirt on me or something.
So he kinda a cat just kicks some dirt on me.
(24:49):
Okay.
And his wife is with us and she comes over and picks up a handful of dirt and just draws lines down my body.
Like I'm a stick figure with this dirt.
And I lay there and I feel much better.
interesting.
Whew.
I feel really good.
My shirt's missing.
My shorts are about half torn off.
(25:10):
I've got an enormous egg on the top left side of my head.
Ooh.
And I start looking around and my hands are bloody.
My elbows are bloody.
One of my shoulders is scuffed up.
Both knees have road rash on them.
One of my hips is busted up and one of my ankles has quite a bit of carnage on it.
And I was like, What happened? What? What was that? And he's you don't remember that? I'm like, I don't remember anything.
(25:35):
you went down and started thrashing and turning around and beating the earth and just like flailing all over the place.
You destroyed a cozy coop, a tree.
You took out a bird bath.
A bench.
What? And looks like you tore up about a quarter of an acre of grass here.
what the hell? Up, beating everything up.
(25:57):
I was like, oh, that would explain why I don't feel very good.
And we gotta go.
We're late.
We gotta go.
Like, wow.
So we get in the ayahuasca assault vehicle.
I'm just covered with dirt.
I can't find my one flip flop.
So I'm I look like it's been a hard night.
Wow.
And that was the last time I was angry for two years.
(26:21):
That was just the end of my anger.
Wow.
Yeah.
What'd the bird bath do to you? It was there.
I also love the.
The wife of who was chaos.
Chaos wife.
Yeah.
She just is listen I don't think she probably has ever poured dirt on anybody.
She just said, this is something we're gonna need to do right now.
Yeah.
Just picked up a handful of dirt.
(26:43):
It was super beautiful.
Like just instincts of this lady who cares and loves for you.
Cool.
I like that.
rub some dirt on.
And I also like that he had his hand on your chest and be like, you okay bro? You're like, yo, why wouldn't I be okay? He was like when you take a look at yourself in the mirror later you're gonna want, he was sitting there next to me and I think he was trying to hold, maybe hold you down to keep the safe.
He was also trying to hold me down.
Yeah, sure.
Like I was getting I was heading towards a concrete slab and he was like, yeah you gotta keep him away from the concrete slab.
(27:08):
And when I came home from that I pooped black for two weeks.
Wow.
And when I say black, I don't mean it was dark.
No it was tar.
It was tar black.
Googling online.
Hey, why is the color of your poop change? Which I don't recommend like any Google search you do for poop is not going to end well.
There's so many possibilities.
And majority of them are not good.
Did they say street tacos from Ensenada at all? They did not.
(27:30):
Okay.
That was my first guessing when you, what I eventually got Was that it's releasing bile from your liver.
Okay.
And in the Old Testament when they talk about anger, they talk the bile of their anger.
Oh yeah.
And so it was like, oh, I was releasing all that rage from my liver for two weeks.
(27:50):
And during that, two weeks after the ceremony, every once in a while, I'd be at my house by myself.
Everything's fine.
And I would just fly into a Rach.
Okay.
Like stomping around my house, going outside, stomping around the yard, throwing shit around, angry, no memories, no reason.
And then it would pass.
And that, that went on for two weeks and then at the end of that two weeks, it was another two years before I was angry again.
(28:15):
Wow.
So I was pretty happy with that was when people were like how do you deal with anger? I'm like I don't know what the textbook, you poop.
You poop it out.
I don't know what the textbook version of it is.
And I don't know that you wanna do it the way I did it.
Yeah.
But that was a beautiful experience.
A pretty freaking beautiful story.
I love that.
One day I am just gonna come up and put dirt on you.
I don't think in general it's not gonna I don't think we're in the clear.
(28:37):
Just raise an eyebrow at you.
Yeah.
That's awesome.
And so could other people that you were around, did they start to say something, there's something different like there.
Yes.
Could they tell that there was like a p like a more of a explain.
Tell me about that.
'cause I think you don't know certain things that are happening to you until your loved ones or people close to you, or something changed.
(28:59):
Yeah, there's something different.
I had a picture taken and posted it online and it's like a 300 comment roast fest of my friends alternately roasting me and going.
What, why are you like what's going on in this picture? Why do you look like this? they could tell from the look on your face.
(29:19):
Just the look on my face.
They were like, huh? Why do you look like Santa Claus? What's, what do you, yeah.
What do you look like? Grizzly Adams.
What's going on? Why has this changed? And when I owned CrossFit gyms, I was famous for not hugging.
Under no circumstances were you going to get a hug from me.
The most intimacy you would get is a fist bump.
(29:41):
I think someone did try and hug me once and I just stood there straight with my arms by my side and looked forward like a kitten being cleaned no.
And I met one of the people from my gym at a restaurant randomly and went out and gave her a hug and said, Hey, I'm actually at the wrong restaurant.
I gotta go and left.
And then later on she got in the group chat and she's I met Jake today at a restaurant randomly.
(30:02):
And he hugged me and everybody was like, you're a liar.
No he didn't.
No he didn't.
And I was like, that must've been somebody else.
I wasn't at that restaurant.
I ate over here.
She's you liar you admit that you hugged me.
I was like, alright, you got me.
I hugged you.
Any other people in your life in direct relationships? Kids like Yeah.
Yeah.
my kids, I don't know that they noticed, but our house was just a lot more peaceful.
(30:24):
Yeah.
Because I was peaceful.
Yeah.
So the kids weren't.
Wound up.
And then one time I came home and I wasn't angry, but I was stressed out and immediately the kids were all wound up and I was like, oh, I did this.
Okay, yeah.
I need to go get myself centered and grounded, and then my kids will be better.
I don't need to yell at them.
I'm the problem here.
And years later Kim my partner in the breathwork business and life partner, she had gone to.
(30:52):
A dinner date with a bunch of her friends.
And they said, Hey, are you still dating that guy? They're like, yeah.
And they're like, is he still angry? And she sat there and thought about it for a minute and she's no, he isn't angry now.
She mentioned it.
He's, I can't remember the last time he was angry.
So she comes home, she tells me the story, she's.
All happy with herself.
(31:12):
Hey, did you know you're not angry anymore? And I was like, yeah, I'm pretty well aware of that.
I'm aware of what's going on inside me.
and I said, yeah it's actually been two years since I've been angry.
And she's what? I'm like, you just now noticed that I haven't been angry for two years.
He's oh, okay.
I go just so in the future, when you make shifts.
(31:33):
And it's been a week and you've asked me if I've noticed, just realize I've got another 103 weeks before I need to get around to recognizing the shift you've made in your life.
So every once in a while when she makes a shift, and I'll bring up like, I've got another year and a half before I need to recognize this in you.
Could you tell when you drove? Yeah.
People driving is, it's you.
(31:55):
You get in a car with somebody who's angry.
And you may not see it every day.
Yeah.
But when you get in a car, yeah.
A beast comes out.
Yes.
And it's I'm the only one that can hear you right.
As your passenger.
Are you mad at me? And they're like, no.
What are you talking? And I'm like, I am getting yelled at right now.
Even though you're calling other people a Muppet, I'm the one who feels like a Muppet.
(32:18):
I don't understand what you're so angry about.
I will say sometimes in traffic it gets annoyed.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I would still get annoyed, but it would be like a normal person.
Oh this is frustrating, but sure.
I would deal with it as a frustration and like, all right let's move along.
Yeah.
That's neat.
There was an incident much later on where me a friend who was a Marine and another friend who had literally just fought for like Bellator's heavyweight title, so he is a legit.
(32:48):
Monstrosity of a human being.
We're in the car and we're leaving breath work and a guy cuts us off to get onto the highway and I'm like, okay.
It just dropped back a little bit and then go to speed up again.
And as I speed up, they cut us off again.
And I'm like, that had to be an accident.
So I drop back and try and go the other way and they cut me off again the third time, clearly, intentionally.
(33:12):
So I just let off the gas and roll back and.
Slow way down and just let them get way, way far ahead.
And the friend who's Marine has known me for quite a while and he is looking at me.
He is this is different.
I go if I let him get a mile ahead of me, he'll only get there a minute before us.
(33:33):
He's true.
But it would be very satisfying to have the three of us get out of the car.
He's could we just kick his ass anyway? Can we just slap him around a little bit for old time sake? We don't need to.
It's fine.
Yeah.
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