Destiny: Dee Dee Goldpaugh, Embrace Pleasure

“A compelling, radical exploration of psychedelics’ healing potential.”—Kirkus Reviews

Explains how psychedelic experiences offer a way to reconnect with the body, reclaim pleasure, rekindle joy, and reawaken to love

Explores how psychedelics can support our sexual healing and offers a range of psychedelic integration techniques and somatic exercises to help release trauma and foster insight

Shares recent research on trauma and case studies from more than a decade of professional clinical work as well as lessons from the author’s own healing journey from sexual trauma and PTSD

In this groundbreaking book, psychotherapist and psychedelic integration expert Dee Dee Goldpaugh shows how the profound healing and restorative effects of psychedelics can help us heal our sexuality, reconnect with pleasure, find wholeness, and feel good again.

Sharing recent research on trauma and case studies from more than a decade of professional clinical work, Goldpaugh explores specific ways psychedelics can heal sexual trauma, enhance sexual pleasure, and deepen our interpersonal connections. Goldpaugh looks at MDMA, psilocybin, ayahuasca, mescaline, 5-MeO-DMT, and other psychedelics and offers a range of integration techniques as well as somatic exercises to help foster insight and apply the lessons learned during psychedelic experiences to everyday life. Goldpaugh also examines the methodology behind psychedelic-assisted therapy and how readers can safely navigate risks and explore their own healing at home.

Revealing the transformative power of embracing pleasure for healing sexual trauma, this book provides an essential guide to psychedelic sexuality as a path to healing and love.

Dee Dee (they/them/theirs) is a psychotherapist, educator, consultant, clinical supervisor, author, and activist. They are the Clinical Director of Chrysalis Integrative Psychotherapy. Dee Dee has taught and published widely on the topics of psychedelics, sexuality, trauma, gender, and spirituality. They have been a leading voice in the development of Psychedelic Integration Psychotherapy techniques, specifically with survivors of trauma and have published the first article to appear in an academic journal, Sexual and Relationship Therapy, exploring the intersection of sexuality, spirituality, and psychedelic healing. Dee Dee is a clinical supervisor for the EMBARK psychedelic-assisted therapy approach. They offer Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy as part of the team at the Woodstock Therapy Center and facilitate ketamine-assisted psychotherapy retreats. They have also completed the MAPS training in MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. Dee Dee is the author of the forthcoming book Embrace Pleasure: How Psychedelics Can Heal Our Sexuality being published by Inner Traditions in Summer 2025. The are a member of the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicine’s working group for Women, Gender-Diversity, and Sexual Minorities. Dee Dee has been a presenter in the Sex Therapy Collaborative and a faculty instructor in the Trauma Therapy program at the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy. They have presented at the Interdisciplinary Conference on Psychedelic Research (ICPR), The Alt Sex Conference Speaker’s Series, The Center for Optimal Living, Ante Up! and are contributing author in the book Queering Psychedelics. They have been featured in articles by Vice Magazine, Chacruna, The Albany Times Union, Medium, Brides, Psymposia, Refinery 29, and Psychology Today. Dee Dee runs therapist consultation groups in Psychedelic Integration Therapy. Dee Dee holds a Master’s Degree from the Hunter College School of Social Work. They have received training at the C.J. Jung Foundation and the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy. They are fully trained in EMDR through the Parnell Institute and offer EMDR in their practice and have additional training in Internal Family Systems Psychotherapy. They have years of professional experience in the LGBTQ community and in community mental health in Brooklyn, NY working with an extremely diverse client population.  Dee Dee has additional training in shamanic healing, bioregional herbal medicine and has attended intensive guide training through the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy guides. When not in the office, Dee Dee is a painter, musician, activist, hiker, meditator, and voracious reader (in no particular order!)

https://www.deedeegoldpaugh.com/

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:12):
Welcome to Destiny. Now here's your host, Cliff Dunning.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
Mm hmmm.

Speaker 1 (00:47):
I always a quate sitar music to drugs, and in
this context it's plant medicines, hallucinogens, psychedelic And it's really
the format and the prelude to our program today, which

(01:07):
is a different kind of application of psychedelics. We've had
people like Graham Hancock and Bob Straussmann talking about DMT.
We've talked about ayahuasca. Oh my god, how many people
have we had on about ayahuasca. And I have to
admit I have not used the drug, haven't tried it.

(01:30):
I'm still in preparatory state. It may not be in
this lifetime I try it. But these psychedelics are important
for a number of reasons. They open up pockets in
our brain for creativity, for healing, for vision quests, for
spiritual growth. I mean, the list goes on and on

(01:51):
and on. We've had people on the program presenting a
variety of uses of psychedelic and if you've been listening
for the last few years, you know how we can
apply psychedelics to our daily life. Here in northern California,

(02:13):
we're close to the Silicon Valley. There are engineers that
are microdosing DMT, that are microdosing would you believe LSD
and making fantastic claims about powerful creative energy visioning and
using it to really further their careers. We come full

(02:37):
circle today with psychedelics and sexuality, which is a really
interesting topic, but not just pleasure sexuality, but healing trauma,
healing trauma from abuse, sexual abuse, and perhaps relationship abuse.

(02:57):
It can be a variety of things, and this is
the topic today. Hey, this is Cliff, your host of
Destiny and my guest today has been using psychedelics in
a very very positive therapeutic manner and finding very very
profound healing effects and also openings. When I say openings

(03:23):
people who are blocked who have issues with creativity, because
when you're sexual, you're expressing, you're expressing a form of
creativity as well. And I've always said, and of course
I wrote a book called Cannabis and Sexual Ecstasy for Men,
when you have an orgasm, that is the epitome of creativity.

(03:46):
And that's why there's a lot of people that say
we have to have an orgasm like once a day,
which is I think pretty tough if your working soul
like me, because you know, you come home, you don't
want to even think about and form of coupling or sexuality.
You want to just decompress. So but you know, we

(04:08):
want to consider these plant medicines. And we know that
the indigenous people, the natives of various parts of the world,
use plant medicines for uh spiritual awakening, for community with
the higher levels of spirits we've heard, We've had people
like Graham Hancock talking about connecting with various animal kingdoms

(04:33):
while they're on ayahuasca, and so it makes sense that
we would have a program on psychedelics and sexuality. So
today's program is Embrace Pleasure, How psychedelics can heal our sexuality.
And my guest is d. D. Goldpaw as the year

(05:00):
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(05:43):
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(06:05):
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You deserve the mental health that works with you, not
against your budget. We've had a number of different authors

(09:58):
over the past few years talking about psychedelics, and we're
talking journeying with ayahuasca. We have had people talk about DMT.
In fact, that's been in the news lately with a
number of people who are working with DMT and finding

(10:19):
various entities and other types of phenomenon. Today we're talking
about psychedelics and sexuality. We're introducing a new book called
Embrace Pleasure, How Psychedelics Can Heal Our Sexuality in. My
guest today is d d Goldpa, and let me tell
you a little bit about DDI. She is a psychotherapist,

(10:41):
an educator, a leading voice in the development of psychedelics
or I should say psychedelic integration psychotherapy. We'll talk a
little bit about that. And I had a chance to
look at this book, and I have to tell you
it's very well written, not only because this is something
that I have not heard about psychedelics in sexual healing,

(11:04):
but also just for its general information and overview. So DEDI,
welcome to Destiny. Great to have you on the program.

Speaker 2 (11:11):
Thank you so much for having me. Cliff, I'm thrilled
to be.

Speaker 1 (11:14):
Here talk about psychedelics and sexual therapy, or I should
say in therapy as a whole. I have understood that
you can use psychedelics in microdosing, you know, so you're
not too out of balance, But how do you integrate

(11:34):
those two?

Speaker 2 (11:36):
Sure, well, I think I'll go back to sort of
how you introduce this interview the topic of psychedelics, sexuality,
and pleasure. Despite the fact that psychedelics have sort of
emerged into the mainstream as something that's getting folded into
acceptable medical treatment, is certainly part of our mainstream culture
more than it ever has been. These are particularly taboo

(11:59):
top and to my knowledge, my book is the first
by a major publisher that addresses these issues right, how
psychedelic impact, how psychedelics impact our sexuality, and how we
heal through pleasure. So you started to talk about microdosing
and perhaps other ways of taking psychedelics. So just to

(12:23):
define this for our listeners, microdosing is not actually a
new phenomenon at all. There's some evidence that this existed
in indigenous cultures traditionally and was primarily used to heighten
the senses for hunting. And there was a wave of
interest in microdosing, I don't know, fifteen years ago, primarily

(12:48):
coming on a Silicon Valley for exactly the opposite reason,
which was to optimize performance in creativity. So it's a
really interesting place to start the interview because whereas I
cover microdosing in the book as a phenomenon, my approach
to psychedelic healing is actually quite the opposite, and it's

(13:09):
founded on this idea that the psychedelic experience has value
in and of itself, that the ways we are impacted spiritually, emotionally,
and physically by psychedelic experiences has the potential to profoundly
change our relationship to our personhood and to our sexuality.

(13:31):
And the experience of taking psychedelics itself is an erotic
experience because it is somatic. It puts us in touch
with the divine, and those are deeply spiritual erotic experiences,
and the pleasure of the experience itself is healing. Microdosing

(13:52):
on the other hand, not to put it down in
any way, because people mental health is impacted in really
positive ways by my redosing, but it's looking at these
medicines as something that could be integrated into our life
for the purpose of mental health versus how will we
changed on a large scale through the experience of pleasure,

(14:13):
embodiment and connection with spirituality.

Speaker 1 (14:16):
M amazing. I should have mentioned before we started that
I wrote a book a few years ago called Cannabis
and Sexual Healing for Men, And.

Speaker 2 (14:27):
I've heard of that book.

Speaker 1 (14:28):
I Oh really, I think it's the same publisher you're with,
Inner Traditions, right, yeah, oh yeah, it was Barren Company,
which is one of their companies. But one of the
things that I discovered is that cannabis heightens sexual pleasure,
and I had never thought about And you list the

(14:50):
various types of psychedelics kennamine as well as masculine piote
d mt LSD as a form of sexual enhancement. I mean,
because they're so powerful, how do you work with them
in a way that allows for enough expressions so that

(15:14):
you to get sexual pleasure.

Speaker 2 (15:18):
Yeah. It's a really interesting question because my work really
focuses on the post acute effects of psychedelics. So there's
different ways to think about psychedelics and sexuality, And one
is sex on psychedelics. So what is the experience of
adding a psychedelic to a sexual experience? And I do
write about that in the book, But the area of
interest that is much deeper for me is how are

(15:41):
we changed as sexual people because of our psychedelic experiences.
How does it make us more connected to our partners,
more embodied, more present in our sexual experiences. So, you know,
I do write that there are some medicines that people
have seemed to experience as libido enhancing or sexuality enhancing

(16:05):
LSD being one of them. And again as a therapist
for example, to give you the opposite side of this.
You know, I work clinically in my psychotherapy practice with ketamine,
but I'm certainly not working with people who are having
sex on ketamine. But what they may be doing in
my office in a you know, controlled clinical context, is

(16:28):
addressing issues about their sexuality, particularly sexual trauma, that help
them to feel as though they are more healed sexual
people in the world. And so many medicines can be
profoundly helpful with that.

Speaker 1 (16:41):
Yeah, And I gotta say, for those of you listening,
Dedi's book is outstanding in its coverage of these different psychedelics.
But also, and we'll talk about this in a minute,
she has great case studies which we'll bring up a
little bit later. Talking a little bit about your personal

(17:02):
journey as a I guess you could call it a
sexual trauma victim. Was this part of your work, or
is this a foundation for your work and to go
to school become a psychotherapy and to focus on sexual trauma.

Speaker 2 (17:18):
Well, like many therapists, I have a deeply personal investment
in the work that I do. So yes, I am
a survivor of sexual violence. That's something that I've really
empowered myself to talk about publicly, and I do so
because I want if there's any message that I have
for people, it's to see that healing is possible and

(17:39):
to stand in the world as an example that terrible
things might have happened in your life and there is
the possibility of healing that is always accessible to us.
So it felt very important to me to sort of
own that publicly, that this is part of my history.
So I had treatment resistant PTSD for quite a long time,

(18:03):
and I tried many different approaches to healings, certainly traditional
talk psychotherapy. I got very deeply involved in Eastern spiritual practices,
which were very helpful to me. I was a very
diligent meditator, as I remained to this day, and there
was a certain point in my healing trajectory where I

(18:23):
was introduced to ceremonial psychedelic medicines, And when I say ceremonial,
we often think of the healing of trauma as occurring
only in clinical contexts with psychedelics, because many people are
sort of familiar with psychedelics as a recreational tool or
psychedelics as a clinical tool. And for me, the experience
was quite different. I was very lucky to be able

(18:45):
to go to Peru and experience plant medicines in a
ceremonial context. Fantastic and there many times I've been to
Peru now, and this offered a legal, safe way to
experience medicines that had been held ancestrally for generations, and

(19:08):
those experiences there at the beginning of that journey, there
was a lot of hard work that I had to
do about confronting the traumas that I have experienced, and
those were really hard experiences. It took a lot of
work in integration and took a lot of persistence to
actually work through all of that trauma. But really the

(19:29):
foundation of the book takes off from the perspective that
in the West were often told that healing happens through
hard work, that we might encounter psychedelics in a clinical
context or otherwise, and it's about confronting terrible things that
have happened to you. But in my healing journey, there
was a particular healing point where I had done all

(19:53):
of that hard work and I had a ceremony in
Peru with San Pedro medicine, which which is also known
as what Chuma medicine, and the active component of that
is mescaline, and that's really been the medicine that's been
the most heart healing for me. And I remember this
day of being on this mountaintop and for the first

(20:13):
time feeling so alive in my body, so connected to
the earth, connected to the other people I was with,
without any thought of trauma at all. And that is
the moment that I realized that that was actually the healing,
that the hard work that I had done in those
previous ceremonies led me to this point where the real

(20:33):
healing was about being connected to myself, the earth, and
to the divine again in this way that was so
deeply pleasurable. So when I undertook the process of writing
this book, that was really the message that I wanted
to convey, is that there's something beyond the hard work.
There's a reason to keep going and that reason is

(20:56):
the reconnection of pleasure in your life.

Speaker 1 (20:59):
Wow, sexual pleasure is a huge deal for the body.
It's released as hormones. We know a lot about it,
but there's a lot we don't know. Would you say
that these psychedelics, these plant medicines provide a shortcut for healing,
another way to access the body, the mind, the spirit

(21:21):
and integrate them in a way that brings you to
the problem quicker and resolves it, perhaps well not necessarily
resolves it, but helps you understand it, which I think
is where the healing is. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (21:36):
Yeah, So I'm holding onto your question, and I preemptively
want for our listeners to go back and just define
how I talk about pleasure in the book. So, the
concept of pleasure in general, I think is one that's
really misunderstood because it's a word we use colloquially all
the time, and it can mean when we talk about

(21:56):
something that's pleasurable, it could mean eating a food you like,
It could mean kind of disappearing into your phone and
scrolling on it. Now, I am not trying to make
the argument that those types of activities which I put
under the umbrella of leisure are going to necessarily be healing.
They have their utility right, because sometimes it can actually

(22:18):
be very relaxing or helpful to us in some way
to disengage from life. So I'm not anti leisure. But
the pleasure that I'm talking about that I think can
lead to the healing that will address in your question
is actually when we have the experience of being awake,

(22:39):
mindfully tuned to the present moment, with an experience of
savoring the sensual. So it has to be something that
is embodied, alive and wakes us up to how good
it feels to be in our human experience, which is
something when people experience trauma or really anything just being

(23:00):
a person in this world, we can become very disconnected
from the pleasure of our own humanity. So when we
take this a step further to address your question directly
about sexual pleasure, erotic pleasure or sexual pleasure, I think
is probably one of the most profound and heightened forms
of pleasure we have, and paradoxically, it's also the form

(23:23):
of pleasure around which we feel the most shame. So
one of the reasons I focused on sexual pleasure in
the book is because I think almost all of us
walk in the world with something within us that needs
a little healing around our capacity to own our right
to sexual pleasure. So I think when we endeavor to

(23:45):
heal that we can actually access really deep parts of
ourselves that we can become cut off from psychedelic medicines.
I think research does tell us that they have multiple
different quality that are shown time and again in different
research studies to support connecting to this type of pleasure

(24:07):
that can be relationship enhancing, that can heal our relationship
to our bodies, that can make us more attuned to
sexual pleasure in sexual experiences, and those categories are that
psychedelics induce the equality of openness, meaning we have more
capacity for fantasy, we have more cognitive flexibility. Psychedelics are

(24:28):
also empathy enhancing, so we have greater capacity to be
in our relationships and feel empathy for ourselves and other people,
which makes us more connected. Psychedelics also are mindfulness enhancing.
So what's really interesting. There's a sex researcher I really
respect named Lori Brato, and she wrote a book about
sexuality and mindfulness, and what she found is that people

(24:51):
we're not experiencing as much pleasure as possible because we
are so habituated to multitasking, we actually are unable to
focus on the sensations and queues that can turn us on,
that can make us feel alive and awake in a
sexual experience. So psychedelics are tools in deepening all of
these categories which can lead to sexual keeling and enhancement

(25:14):
of pleasure.

Speaker 1 (25:18):
We're going to take a short commercial break to allow
our sponsors to identify themselves and will return shortly with
my guest today, d D Goldpa discussing her new book,
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(27:49):
She is a psychotherapist who uses psychedelics in her therapy
sessions to release sexual trauma. I kept hearing in my
head orgasm orgasm. Is do these psychedelics induce orgasm easier

(28:12):
or is it just part of the process that you're
going to have an orgasm on a regular basis. That's
a big deal.

Speaker 2 (28:21):
Yeah, yeah, And it's a really interesting question because some
of the people that I interviewed for the section of
the book that are personal accounts from some of the
authors of those personal accounts that I interviewed or named,
and some chose to go by pseudonyms, but some people
do talk about the experience of orgasm during psychedelic experiences

(28:44):
as being deeper, spiritual, completely transcendent for them. And as
a sex therapist, when I'm working with clients, I often
find that getting people to focus more on the experience itself,
on the attunement to sensation in their body is helpful

(29:07):
for them over single mindedly focusing on orgasm. So most
people who are having sexual experiences want to have orgasms,
but in fact, more satisfying sexual experiences can happen when
we're savoring the entire experience instead of just this one
part of it. So broadening people's sexual scripts, helping them

(29:30):
to be more present and attuned in sexual experiences is
one of the strategies that I use as a sex therapist.

Speaker 1 (29:37):
Fantastic, All right, So I come to dit, I come
to your office, and I come with my partner and
we're having issues and we sit with you and so
forth and so on. When do you begin to integrate
the plant medicine? How does that work?

Speaker 2 (29:57):
Well, that's also a really interesting question because right now
in most places in the United States, psychedelics, most of
them continue to be illegal.

Speaker 1 (30:07):
Exactly that was my next question.

Speaker 2 (30:10):
They are federally illegal, right, so we have certain decriminalized
places within the United States where there's more flexibility. I
do not live in a decriminalized state. I practice in
New York State. I live in Woodstock, New York, perhaps
the most psychedelic small town in all of America, and
yet these medicines remain illegal. So what I can work

(30:32):
with as a tool is ketamine assistant therapy. That is
a legal, medically supervised intervention that I work with under
medical guidance with a physician. On the other hand, many
clients come to my office. I would say the majority
of people that are coming for any kind of therapy
that addresses psychedelics are not doing the psychedelics with me.

(30:56):
They are coming for psychedelic integration therapy, which means that
they are using these medicines on their own and they
are coming for therapeutic support. They're either using them independently,
they are experiencing them with guides or sitters, or they
are going to retreats or ceremonial contexts outside of the country.

Speaker 1 (31:17):
Okay, so let me understand it. So you're you're there
to as a therapist to find the trauma or the
disease in the relationship and working to ease that. And
then you're saying, are you saying I suggest that you

(31:37):
use this retreat e ketamine retreat or are you I mean?
I don't want to get into the I do want
to get into the legal legalization we can. Yeah, when
do you bring in the suggestion of using the plant medicine?

Speaker 2 (31:56):
Legally, I can tell a client you are an exibing
symptoms for which I think a medical evaluation for ketamine
would be appropriate, right, because that is legal. Now if
they say I want to do ayahuasca, this becomes a predicament, right,
because I can't guarantee safety in an unregulated context. So

(32:19):
the ethical boundary that I've set as a therapist is
I don't recommend or refer clients to practitioners or contexts
that are currently illegal. And this is why creating legal
pathways to these medicines is so important, because it is
not stopping anyone from doing them, it's only making it
more dangerous. Oh interesting, So to protect my license, right,

(32:42):
I don't tell a client you should go out and
get this substance that is illegal and do it. If
a client says, hey, I just had a huge bushroom trip,
and I need to make sense of that with a
knowledgeable therapist. I'm your person, right that is a place
where you can come to my office and I can
help you make sense of an experience you have had.

Speaker 1 (33:00):
Oh, very good. So you're actually helping them define the
experience that they're having on a plant medicine. Yes, with
their partner or individually.

Speaker 2 (33:09):
With their partner or individually, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (33:11):
Okay, fantastic, that is fantastic. I have to say this
that I haven't tried ayahuasca. I'm on the fence about
it right now, but it is so powerful and it's
so transformational that it's almost like you're not supposed to
be in control. And so do you suggest that people

(33:31):
use an intention that's kind of a software application to
the hardware, hardware being the app the drug itself, and say,
you know, my intention is to do this and have
this experience for a healing or what.

Speaker 2 (33:48):
With ayahuasca, particularly when I write about ayahuasca in the book,
it is an extremely powerful medicine. And the first thing
I would say is that people should have a lot
of discernment about whom they sit in a nyahuasca circle with,
because an ayahuasca circle that is held by someone who

(34:09):
is a lineage holder with the rights and responsibilities to
hold space for that particular medicine. It requires a tremendous
amount of training, spiritual and training related to safely holding
the space. And the truth is ayahuasca has proliferated around
the globe in so many ways that there are many

(34:30):
people that are undertrained, and it can be a particularly
dangerous medicine when it is not held well. With ayahuasca,
I think what you're really pointing at is that there
are some medicine experiences that can be overwhelming, profound, beautiful,
even terrifying at times, and there's something about them that

(34:51):
requires us to surrender. So how do we get ready
to surrender? And I would say the first step to
rendering in a way that's therapeutically useful to us is
that we know we are safe to do so, which
is why it's so important to find a safe context.
Intention is the other piece that you asked about. In

(35:13):
the psychedelic assistant therapy world, people love to talk about
intentions and to me, intention and it's like saying, I
need this medicine to give me this, I want to
feel less depressed. I want to feel healed in this
particular way. That's not a bad thing. I mean, it
is completely understandable to me why somebody going through all

(35:34):
of the of the trials of finding these contexts and
undergoing these ceremonies would want something specific for themselves. But
I exercise a lot of caution around intention, and I
encourage my clients to define intentions broadly about what they
would like to invite in in the experience. So instead

(35:55):
of saying I don't want to feel this way anymore,
would invite a question that has to do with being
curious about yourself, I would invite an intention that might
say I'd like to be more open to intimacy, or
I'd like to understand more about my blocks around my
sexuality or something like that. So you know, I personally

(36:18):
feel like and the way I write about it in
the book is like our intention is like our north star.
So if we start to feel lost in an overwhelming experience,
we can come back to this star and think about
where we want it to head in all of this.
But it isn't it shouldn't be what defines the experience itself.
Like that psychedelics can be surprising.

Speaker 1 (36:41):
It's funny you mentioned intentions where someone will actually form
a question or an intention that is kind of like
almost negative. I don't want to have this experience anymore.
I don't want to feel bad about myself anymore. I
don't want to, you know, be depressed all the time.
That's like that I was. I was never think my

(37:01):
idea of an intention is a very positive forward as
I keep using the term software because it's you're using
this tool to ask the plant medicine to work with you.
It's kind of like a heads up ahead of time.
So in your practice, and I'm curious, would you say

(37:24):
that your clients are a mix of people that have
sexual dysfunction, sexual trauma, or they just want to have
more connectivity with the relationship.

Speaker 2 (37:35):
Mm, well, I'm not an interesting career phase right now.
I mean, I have many years of experience as a
psychotherapism going into my eighteenth year of practice, so I've
probably I mean, I really couldn't say the number, but
it's got to be over somewhere in the five hundred

(37:58):
to one thousand range, right of individual people who I
have seen over time, right for at least some kind
of therapy to context, and they have been vast people
with sexual dysfunction issues, people with relationship issues, people with trauma.
But as I moved through my career sort of where
I am right now. I'm at a place where I

(38:19):
have a number of long term clients that I've been
working with for a while. I do a lot of
supervision and consultation, and of course writing and teaching are
big parts of my career now. But when clients come
to my practice some of the more common issues that
I feel that I really specialize in. I do see

(38:41):
people for sexual dysfunction issues, but I think looking at
our relationship to sexuality, into our relationships in general through
a spiritual existential lens, and healing trauma through a spiritual
existential lens is really sort of where I shine as
a therapist. There are a lot of really well resourced

(39:01):
therapists that do sex therapy for issues of sexual dysfunction.
But I feel like where I've gone in my career
and where I feel the most connected to my work
is when people are really asking themselves, who do I
want to be in this relationship or what do I
want my relationship to my sexuality to be? And that

(39:21):
might be about disrupting harmful narratives that we internalize about ourselves,
to really looking at blocks to intimacy and learning how
to open our hearts and connect more deeply to love.
Because to me, at the end of the day, is
as cheesy as it might sound, love really is the
most important thing. And if I can help my clients

(39:44):
to feel more love in their life, that is a
job well done.

Speaker 1 (39:48):
But you got to admit that having good sex is huge,
you know, Yes, of course, good sex is huge. I
want to address something that you have in the book,
which is how do psychedelics address something like ed or
frigidity in a woman, unresponsive sexual sexuality, things like that.

(40:13):
I mean, I can't. It's really something that when you're
lost in the plant medicine, it's like what do I
grasp on to? You know, in my mind, I have
this feeling that you're in the room with the couple
or with the individual and kind of guiding them along.
But maybe that's too much to think about. I'm just
curious about how that works.

Speaker 2 (40:34):
Yeah, I mean the practice of sex therapy and even
psychedelic therapies don't necessarily include any kind of I do
give people somatic exercises, but it's exercises they're doing in
the privacy of their own homes and then we're talking
about it, right, So I'm not actually present for that part.

(40:56):
Although there's disciplines such a sexological body work where people
do work much more hands on with people, that is
just not part of the discipline of psychotherapy. So you
mentioned ED. That is a really interesting one because the
majority of men who experience rectile issues is it has
a psychological ideology. So that means that it is not

(41:18):
coming from any kind of physical dysfunction, which could commonly be,
for example, circulatory or cardiac problems. That is, if you
have ED and it does have a physical ideology, it's
a big indicator you might have something going on with
your heart, for example. Most men who experience it, it
has a psychological basis. So there's almost no research about

(41:44):
this in psychedelic science, but we're starting to explore this
and point in that direction. But what we do know
is that psychedelics can radically shift how people feel about
themselves as sexual beings are open to new ways of
being sexual, and they can be very anxiety reducing. So

(42:05):
a lot of men with a reptile issues really, what
it's coming down to is ruminations. Right, they are in
their head and not their body. There is relationship dissatisfaction,
or they're not asking for what they want, right, There
could be It varies based on the individual. So it's
an interesting way to look at it because we really

(42:26):
don't have research that says particular sexual dysfunctions respond to
psychedelic treatments, which we may in time, but what we
do know is that the underlying psychological reasons people experience
sexual dysfunction can be improved greatly by using psychedelics. Now,

(42:49):
you mentioned the word frigidity, and I think that is
actually an interesting one to look at because one of
the things that I do write about in the book
is a case example of the treatment historically of frigidity
in women with LSD. Now that term in sex therapy
has evolved to a term called hyposexual arousal desire disorder,

(43:15):
so the term evolved clinically, but the idea, right that
we do have some really interesting case examples, and there's
one that is quasi famous. That was a woman who
presented with a problem with frigidity who was treated psychiatrically

(43:35):
with LSD, and she wrote a memoir of her experience
with being treated with LSD, and I have to tell
you it is a very very interesting read. And this
comes out of the early psychedelic experiments of the fifties,
before these were scheduled substances, before we had the Controlled
Substances Act. Now, when you look into it a little

(43:56):
bit more deeply, what's really interesting is kind of a
time piece that pathologizes female sexuality and really points to
that there is a right way for women to be sexual.
And thankfully, I think we've evolved a lot beyond that,
because if you look at these old documents from the fifties,
they very much point to if a woman is not

(44:18):
satisfying her husband in a certain way, she is suffering
from a problem. Doesn't look like any of the social
these social circumstances that might suggest why a woman in
the nineteen fifties or even women today might not be
so incredibly jazzed about their sexual lives with husbands when

(44:40):
it's all vectored towards their pleasure.

Speaker 1 (44:42):
Right.

Speaker 2 (44:42):
So again, I think, like, what the interesting evolution in
the field is, you know, the way psychedelics can help
us to actually discover our own relationship to our sexuality
and ways to be more generous and connected in our partnerships.

Speaker 1 (45:03):
We're going to take a short commercial break to allow
our sponsors to identify themselves and will return shortly with
my guest today, Did Gopa and her new book Embrace Pleasure,
How Psychedelics can Heal our Sexuality. Will be right back.

(46:03):
Did Gopa is my guest today. Her new book Embraced
Pleasure highlights psychedelics plant medicines as a form of therapy,
and she uses kennamine in her own practice. This is
another form of therapy and it is proving to be
very effective with a number of clients. Fascinating. Have you

(46:29):
studied the work of Rick Strassman and his DMT studies
on He doesn't get into sexuality at all, And this
is my next I'm forming my next question, which is
why hasn't more studied been attempted by these clinics on
plant medicines and pleasure.

Speaker 2 (46:50):
Well, I think that that goes back to one of
the very first things that I've mentioned is that it
is still an incredibly taboo topic. There are a couple
of research studies out that are really extraordinary in the field,
and two that I want to point to is the
work of Tamaso Barbara at Imperial College, which was a

(47:14):
really beautiful comprehensive study on psychedelics and sexual satisfaction, and
another by Daniel Krueger that was really looking at psychedelics
impact on people's sexual self perception. The reason that this
is not studied is because, first of all, it is
incredibly hard and incredibly expensive to run psychedelic clinical trials

(47:36):
because in general they are not being funded by the government.
They are being funded either by for profit pharmaceutical companies
or academic institutions. And the highest level of priority is
not sexuality and pleasure. It is finding specific molecules that
can treat specific mental health disorders so they are patentable,

(48:00):
can be marketed. And I don't mean to sound cynical,
but I mean that is the truth of the clinical
research world. So this really interesting research that you see
emerging around sexuality, and I think there's going to be
a lot more of it coming out, are really being
done by researchers who are in academic contexts, who are
interested in exploring these questions. And honestly, these these preliminary

(48:25):
kind of groundbreaking research studies I think are paving the way.
There are smaller ones that are people are doing more
qualitative or observational studies, and all of that will start
to multiply over time.

Speaker 1 (48:37):
Wow, uh, I don't trust big pharma when it comes
to psychedelics. I don't trust uh. You know they're going
to synthesize ayahuasca one day and it's going to be
a mess. I just it's not going to be something
you want to use at all. Talk about kennamine in

(48:59):
your personal journey. You you're a practitioner who uses it
in your own healing. What's the high, what's the feeling?
And how do you address you? I don't want to
say your well, I will say your sexuality or your
issue using ketamine.

Speaker 2 (49:22):
Well. I am a ketemine assisted psychotherapist and straight up
ketamine has not been part of my personal healing journey.
I have experienced ketamine treatment in my training as a
kedemine therapist. So thankfully you know their opportunities as a
practitioner to receive treatment, so we know how to adequately
hold space. Yeah, right, as you should. And I know

(49:46):
that this is a debate in the field, but I
will come down very very clearly on the side of
people who operate as psychedelic assisted therapists should have experience
with psychedelics themselves, and I strongly hold that opinion. So
ketamine is a surprising one. And I began to use
it at my practice because that was what was legally

(50:08):
accessible to me. And I'll be honest with you, I
didn't feel any kind of heart connection to it. It's
not a medicine that I felt offered me profound healing.
But I thought people really are benefiting from it, and
the research is there to support this, so why wouldn't
I offer it? And much to my surprise, I've learned
that there are ways that you can create a container

(50:31):
around ketamine within the context of clinical practice and guidelines
that can be very sacred for people, that can help
people to achieve expanded states of consciousness that could help
them deeply connect to themselves. So the experience of ketamine ketamine,
I should say for our listeners first, is it's a

(50:52):
little bit like the Pluto of psychedelics, right, It's kind
of like outside of the psychedelic solar system. It's there,
but it's not really one of one of the classic
psychedelics or one of the ones that we kind of
keep in our pantheon of medicines. It's a dissociative that
is used as an anesthetic, And what was discovered is
that in a certain dosing range, there's like a mid

(51:15):
range where ketamine induces an altered state of consciousness that
unique from other psychedelic experiences. Can almost be dream like.
It can induce visions, it can induce a sense of
connection with the divine in some cases a sense of
disconnection from the body, which is unique. And it can

(51:39):
also have different effects at different dosing levels. So a
full psychedelic dose of ketamine might put someone into a
dissociated state where they feel connected to the universe, and
a very low dose of ketamine might mean that someone
in my office can sit and talk and have a
psychotherapy session, but do so with many of their defenses

(52:02):
being lowered. And specifically, the way I think that this
is very helpful around sexual healing and sexual trauma healing
is that I have found optimally dosed ketamine can relax
the physical body to an extent that topics or memories

(52:22):
that are normally extremely activating for someone, they are not
feeling it in their body in the same way their
body isn't starting to tense, their heart isn't starting to race.
So what I find with my trauma clients is that
they're able to have a psychedelic journey, the experience of
which is helpful for them and the content of it.
But as they're coming out of the ketamine medicine, we've

(52:45):
got this therapeutically optimal time to talk where they are
extremely expanded and relaxed, but they're still lucid and able
to communicate in therapy. So they're very interesting.

Speaker 1 (52:59):
Yeah, so it kind of sets the body from the mind,
separates them and a person can actually function and actually
respond in a very clear status.

Speaker 2 (53:11):
Sounds like there's also some colleagues of mine who I
respect deeply who are really innovating in the area of
ketemine assisted couples therapy, and I've also facilitated ketemine assisted
couple's therapy retreats. And one would think, like that doesn't
feel like an obvious fit, but I was very surprised

(53:32):
to see that ketamine can really disarm people so that
they have their experience of journeying together and then they're
able to connect as a couple in ways that they
normally could not so, I will say I do think
certain psychedelic medicines are a better fit for certain people
or certain problems. And we certainly don't have the clinical

(53:54):
evidence to suggest any psychedelic could be healing for any problem.
But I do suspect that people who have psychedelic experiences together,
that go through a journey experience and then share that
with each other, that that is an essentially heart connecting experience.

Speaker 1 (54:11):
H amazing. Talk a little bit about sexual trauma, Define it,
but also what are the levels of sexual trauma? Because
it doesn't necessarily have to be physical. Someone could be
as a child, influenced by a parent, a guardian, or
somebody who's who's doing inappropriate things that trigger this trauma.

(54:35):
So give us the definition.

Speaker 2 (54:37):
Yeah, Well, in the book, I use what's a relatively
controversial definition because we have to first start with the
idea that we have a clinical definition of trauma that
for someone to meet the diagnosis of PTSD, there are
certain clinical symptoms that they have to experience over a
period of time. I understand why we need diagnostic criteria

(55:01):
and why that is important, but it is not the
framework that I rely on most heavily in my practice.
Of working with human beings. The way I think about
sexual trauma is any experience that we have in our
lives that prevents us from being able to access pleasure
that impacts our sexuality or that impacts our sexual self perception.

(55:24):
And the most important part of this is in an
enduring way. We have negative experiences all the time. We
might have experiences with a partner that don't feel good
to us at all, but our nervous system is capable
of actually metabolizing a lot. Right. We can have something
that's not a great experience and we get over it,

(55:44):
we move on with our lives, and it might not
be thought of as something we want to have happened again.
But it's not necessarily a trauma. So what makes something
traumatic is that it stays with us and it begins
to define how we see other experiences and the levels
of trauma that you mentioned. It's really easy to identify

(56:05):
the traumas that we might think of as the quote
unquote big ta ones, and that might mean sexual assault,
being sexually abused as a child, But we are also
on the other end of that spectrum, steeped in a
sex negative culture that's giving us constant messages about the
right way to be sexual, about who we're supposed to
be as sexual people. We might be shamed for certain

(56:28):
expressions of sexuality and those can actually create really enduring harm,
and I consider them sexual trauma or slash sexual violence
as well.

Speaker 1 (56:39):
How do we know when we've been traumatized? In other words,
if you are traumatized as a young person and you've forgotten,
what are the signs?

Speaker 2 (56:50):
That is a really complex question, because one of my
areas of clinical focus is psychedelic induced recovered memories of
sexual abuse is a huge issue. It is a very
complicated one and it is one that can it requires
a lot of delicacy to talk about it ethically.

Speaker 1 (57:11):
So are you saying that psychedelics can actually extract the
source of the trauma.

Speaker 2 (57:18):
Well, there is currently some very interesting research being done
in this on the scientific side of things, So I
think one thing, this is an incredibly in depth topic,
So I'm going to attempt to talk about it in
very simple ways. We can, as children experience inappropriate sexual

(57:42):
events and at the time not experience them as terrifying
and in fact not even know that they're sexual, and
so those memories can be stored away we are not
walking around feeling like we're traumatized until later, as adults,
we remember the experience, and when it's recontextualized as inappropriate,

(58:07):
it can become traumatic. So that is an experience where
a person essentially doesn't repress, but forgets an experience and
then later is reminded of it. The interesting piece of
this is that in laboratory studies, we have no evidence
for repressed memories, meaning that a person could have a

(58:28):
horribly traumatic thing happened to them and then repress it entirely.
The clinicians in the field report continually that they experience
this as true incredible in their clients, that people can
indeed have experiences that are deeply traumatic, and then those

(58:48):
experiences are later unearthed, either through psychotherapy or in psychedelic experiences. Now,
what gets really complicated is that we have this legacy
in the nineteen nineties of this phenomenon where therapists were
suggesting to clients it sounds to me like you were
sexually abused, rather than the clients coming forward with that information.

(59:11):
This created a frenzy of false accusations. It harmed a
lot of people. So this sort of the memory wars
of the nineteen nineties are very much in our cultural
consciousness around this issue. So what we see in psychedelics

(59:32):
is that there is a couple of different things on
both sides of the coin. I have worked with many
survivors who have had experiences, usually in more intense psychedelic states,
where they recover a memory of being sexually abused, and
that memory comes through either somatically, meaning they have a
sense of knowing in their body, or they experience a

(59:55):
narrative that they see depicted visually. For some of those people,
they come to realize that that was indeed a memory
that did indeed happen to them, And some of my
clients conclude that it was not something that actually happened
in the way they saw or experienced it, but it

(01:00:15):
represents feelings that were part of their childhood. Some clients
even come to believe that that has to do with
an ancestral memory. I mean, this is getting into the
more of the shamanic, right, So some clients that I've
worked with believe that they were having a real memory
that is not their memory. So it really creates this
situation for clinicians who are really undertrained in this area

(01:00:39):
and want very desperately to either endorse or deny that
these memories are real or not, and therapists can't do that.
All we can do is sit with our clients and
try to support them ethically and help them to understand
and to decide for themselves what it is, and then
how do we go about healing from that, because the
experience of having this recovered memory be quite traumatic in

(01:01:01):
and of itself. And the last piece that I feel
is really important for listeners to hear is that psychedelics
can induce suggestibility, which means that we're in a psychedelic state,
we are more suggestible to outside information. So if somebody
were to suggest or there was something in the environment
that led us to be predisposed to have a recovered memory,

(01:01:30):
it's conceivable that that could happen, which is why ethical
space holding in diligent psychotherapy is really of the utmost importance,
because our minds are more flexible and suggestible in this state.

Speaker 1 (01:01:44):
We want to take a short commercial break to allow
our sponsors to identify themselves, and we'll return shortly with
my guest today, did Gopa presenting her newest book, Embrace Pleasure.
Will be right back Didi Goldpa is my guest today.

(01:02:45):
Her new book, Embraced Pleasure, highlights microducing of various psychedelics
otherwise known as plant medicines, and follows the indigenous tradition
of working with healing and therapeutic effects. I'm so glad

(01:03:07):
you brought up ancestral healing because this is a very
big theme right now in your practice. Do you see
this bleed through of unknown traumas or fears or psychological
states that are not present that could have been generational

(01:03:28):
handed down from the parents, from the grandparents and so forth.

Speaker 2 (01:03:32):
My personal opinion is absolutely. I think the epigenetic research
that's emerging right now that we actually can genetically carry
trauma from previous generations is starting to substantiate the idea
that this is scientifically credible. And what feels important to
me as a therapist is I'm not interpreting that for

(01:03:53):
a client. I don't say to my clients I'm wondering
if this could be ancestral trauma. Well, people start to
wonder that when peg start to be curious about it
for themselves, I am absolutely there to deepen that inquiry
with them. Another piece that I've been exploring that I
just think is a really uplifting opposites to the idea

(01:04:16):
of ancestral trauma, is how we may be epigenetically encoded
to ancestral ways of knowing, because I feel like we're
in a moment on planet Earth right when we're facing
some really dire political circumstances, and at the same time
people are becoming so interested in consciousness movements and learning
indigenous technologies and trying to learn more about their own ancestry.

(01:04:40):
I mean, I feel like that is incredibly present with
us in our culture, and for so many of us,
our Earth based ancestral traditions are lost. So if we
can carry ancestral trauma, we can also carry ancestral knowing,
which means inside of you are into suative ways of knowing,

(01:05:01):
how to connect with the earth, how to work with plants,
how to create ritual that our ancestors knew you have
it as well. So because if you can carry the bad,
you can also carry the good. And I am particularly
interested with learning how to turn that on in people
and help them to connect into these ancestral ways of knowing,
which is also part of your birthright.

Speaker 1 (01:05:23):
That was my next question is as a therapist, How
do you provide tools for someone who's dealing with an
ancestral trauma. I mean, I, off the top of my head,
as a lifelong meditator, help them understand the importance of meditation.
But that could be minor if it's a really big issue.

Speaker 2 (01:05:45):
Yeah, well, I can say that internal family systems therapy
has some really elegant tools for dealing with legacy burdens,
meaning things that we carry that are part of our ancestry.
So there are some therapeutic modalities that acknowledge and have

(01:06:06):
tools within them for addressing ancestral traumas. For me, I
feel like when a client is receptive to it, developing
ritual practice can be one of the most profound ways

(01:06:27):
that people can can address ancestral trauma. And so what
that can look like is it doesn't have to be
a ritual that has any particular religious form, It doesn't
need to look like it's ceremonial per se. But ritual
can be symbolic practices that help us to either deal

(01:06:48):
with that burden that we're carrying in some way. It
can be visualization, It can be writing a letter and
burning it. It can be creating an altar in the
woods that honors the experience of that ancestor. But something
that we do to mark in some way that we
are releasing an energy that we have been carrying. It

(01:07:09):
has a profound psychological effect, and my personal opinion is
that it also has a profound spiritual effect.

Speaker 1 (01:07:16):
Yeah, that was my next question. It sounds like you
do understand the components of spirituality and you are are
you integrating that into the practice that you have.

Speaker 2 (01:07:31):
Well, I approach spirituality in a very pragmatic way, So
when I am working with a new client, I am
listening very carefully for how they talk about spirituality. So
if someone is using the language of God, that's the
language I'm using. If somebody is talking about ancestors or
certain kinds of trans personal practices, that's what I'm mirroring

(01:07:54):
back to them. And if somebody says I'm not a
spiritual person at all, I say, okay. But the way
I'm thinking about the spiritual domain in our work is
fundamentally around the question how connected are you? How connected
are you to the earth? How connected are you to
experiences of the ecstatic experiences of the divine? So honestly,

(01:08:19):
nobody people who come in and say I am not
a spiritual person at all. I believe all people are
spiritual people. I think that I respect that in people
because most of the people that tell me that, when
I get them to know them well enough, the core
of it is that they have been traumatized by organized
religion in some way.

Speaker 1 (01:08:39):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (01:08:40):
So I am not going to be the person that
forces that on them again. But helping someone to connect
to their spiritual self is really addressing that question of connection.

Speaker 1 (01:08:52):
To me. Yeah, the books called Embrace Pleasure, How Psychedelgics
can Heal Our Spirituality? And my guess today has been
d D GOPA. As we conclude, d D, can you
give us a couple of case studies, obviously without naming
names of people who've come in and worked with you,
and your suggestions on the plant medicines.

Speaker 2 (01:09:18):
Sure, I will take some of these. I do in
the book talk about clients, but they aren't real clients.
They're all composites. It felt very important to me too,
and I say that in the forward of the book
that the case studies that are in the book are composites,
because I feel like what happens in the in the
privacy of psychotherapy is really sacred. So the stories are

(01:09:42):
stories that are the stories of many clients that are
sort of composites under a fictional facade, if you will.

Speaker 1 (01:09:51):
Interesting you did that, yeah, yeah, because I was going
to pick out a couple of people in here.

Speaker 2 (01:09:57):
I thought, well, I mean, you can certainly ask about it.
But the stories in the book that are actual people
is a chapter later in the book that our first
hand accounts of people I interviewed, and those people are
not my clients. But there are some particularly beautiful, beautiful stories,

(01:10:19):
one of a woman calling back her child self and
healing from sexual abuse she experienced as a child with ayahuasca.
There is also a range of ages. I interviewed Charlie
and Shelley Shelley Winninger, who are a very prominent couple
in the psychedelic community here in New York City, and

(01:10:43):
they're in their seventies, and they talk very much about
how psychedelics have shaped their sex life and their experience
of love and their relationship together. I interview somebody who's
actually quite a good friend of mine, who is a
Rabbi who's a transper, and talks about their experience of
gender unfolding through their psychedelic experiences, so I really just

(01:11:07):
have That was some of the most beautiful part of
writing the book was hearing people's personal stories that they
were willing to share with me. But you can absolutely
ask me about any of the case studies you'd like.

Speaker 1 (01:11:17):
I didn't want to do that because the book. You know,
you have a lot of work in this book, and
I didn't want to go with page twenty two. You know,
that would be just a little too much. You mentioned
the trans community, and I'm here in San Francisco. It's
very big. I don't I don't follow it. I mean,
I have a couple of friends that are trans, but

(01:11:39):
that's a really challenging position to be in society. And
I can imagine. Do you have clients that are dealing
in that situation?

Speaker 2 (01:11:51):
Yeah, I mean I specialize in working with the LGBT community.
So the interesting thing about transness is I think the
hardest thing about being trans is living in a country
that is persecuting trans people.

Speaker 1 (01:12:05):
Now right, now, Yeah, you're right, yeah, And that talk
about trauma. You can't go out and be yourself. I guess,
you know it's crazy, you know.

Speaker 2 (01:12:16):
I tend to think about all queer identities as having
a really divine aspect to them, because queerness in any
way is some expanded state of personhood, right, and being
queer trans it's really about celebrating parts of yourself the
society normally thinks of as different, aberrant, unnatural, and standing

(01:12:41):
in your power and saying, not only is this who
I am, but this is one of the best parts
of who I am. That's what really a queer affirming
or trans affirming perspective is. So yeah, I mean, I
think there has been a lot that's probably beyond the

(01:13:02):
scope of what we could say on this podcast about
the intersections of LGBT identities and psychedelics. And one piece
that I can touch on briefly, which I do touch
on in the book, unfortunately, is that there has been
a legacy of psychedelics being used for conversion therapy.

Speaker 1 (01:13:20):
And yeah, so say conversion therapy. It's like someone's homosexual
and the physician wants to make them heterosexual, giant what
are they called that? Conversion therapy?

Speaker 2 (01:13:37):
Correct Social conversion therapy is a really tricky topic because
many people have the perception that it's an involuntary treatment
inflicted upon queer minners by clergy, and that is one
way that conversion therapy happens. But many of the case
studies we have in the psychedelic litter point to voluntary

(01:14:04):
treatments that LGBT individuals voluntarily undertook in order to change
their sexual identity. So any treatment that a person provides
that is aimed at changing the sexuality or gender identity
of another person, whether it's voluntary or involuntary, is conversion therapy.

(01:14:28):
And we have so many mountains of clinical evidence to
tell us that conversion therapy, whether voluntary or coerced, is harmful.
The percentage I don't have the statistic right on the
top of my head, but a large percentage of people
who have experienced these treatments become more depressed, more anxious,
more suicidal afterwards. So to me, part of the reason

(01:14:54):
that it's important to shine light on this and psychedelics
is so that in this moment we can create consensus
as psychedelic therapy is gaining traction that these treatments were harmful,
that they are harmful, and that the psychedelic community needs
to have consensus that psychedelics will not be used in

(01:15:17):
this way.

Speaker 1 (01:15:17):
Again, Wow, yeah, that's heavy. If someone's feeling less than
that the community, that the society they live in is
not happy about their sexual identity, and they start taking
psychedelics thinking that that's going to be the solution. That's terrible.

Speaker 2 (01:15:36):
And you're right.

Speaker 1 (01:15:37):
The church and medicine, Oh boy, I can't imagine. That
must be tough. DDI. It's been a real pleasure having
you on the program. How can people learn more about you?
You have a website? Give us your website.

Speaker 2 (01:15:51):
I do. Indeed, the book has a website, and if
you would like to read it, and I hope that
you will, you can go to Embrace Pleasure dot com.
There's many different buying options. You can read more about
myself and my work. I also have a personal website,
which is ddegoldpod dot com, and you can connect me
with me in that way.

Speaker 1 (01:16:10):
Did you must have a YouTube channel with videos? Come on, now,
what's going on?

Speaker 2 (01:16:14):
I don't I'm really just getting on this.

Speaker 1 (01:16:16):
So I've spoken you need to have a video page, girl,
Come on, No, but I've.

Speaker 2 (01:16:21):
Been sitting in my house writing this book through a
long time.

Speaker 1 (01:16:28):
No, it's uh, you're a natural, and get a camera
in your face and uh, let's see some video because
that's another way of I mean, I'm learning the hard
way too. There's a whole generation that won't listen to
a podcast and list it's on YouTube, so you got
to consider that.

Speaker 2 (01:16:46):
Well, if this airs tomorrow, I will say, if you
happen to be in the New York City area on Saturday,
I'm doing an event with my colleague Mitzi Bautista at
the Brooklyn Psychedelic Society and it's going to be a
really interesting offering and it's going to be a dialogue
that takes in the perspective of Western psychedelic traditions and

(01:17:08):
indigenous traditions to try to talk about right relationship to
these medicines. And it's going to have audience engagement, music,
somatic practices. So if people happen to hear this podcast
and they happen to be in the area, we would
love to have you.

Speaker 1 (01:17:23):
Well, podcasts will be out shortly twenty four hours. Are
you promoting that and just locally or are you promoting
it will be like aired or streamed in some way.

Speaker 2 (01:17:35):
No, it's going to be a closed event that will
be in person only, because we hope it'll be an
intimate experience with the people who attend, But if you
happen to be in New York City, you can check
out the Brooklyn Psychedelic Society website and learn more about
the event.

Speaker 1 (01:17:48):
Psychedelic Society. I like that. It sounds very cool. Ddy
much success on this new book. I love the cover,
I love the material, and I think you got something
going on. In fact, I have a prediction. I think
there's one or two more books that are coming forth
very soon.

Speaker 2 (01:18:04):
Am I right, I've got some I've got some things cooking.
I'll say that.

Speaker 1 (01:18:09):
Fantastic. Hey, real pleasure having you on the program.

Speaker 2 (01:18:12):
Thank you, Cliff. Take care.

Speaker 1 (01:18:22):
You have to read this book, Embrace Pleasure, because she
gets into great detail about using psychedelics, and I mean,
I've always heard about using them for microdose sessions for
creativity and for working with mood alterations and things like that.
But dd is working in a special environment and she's

(01:18:46):
very very talented and very on board on what to use.
And I'm not a real expert on canemine, and I'm
wondering just how that affects you because it's it's a anesthetic.
It's a general anesthetic that they use in surgery. So
what's the dosage and what's the application? And can you

(01:19:10):
take too much? Can you take too little? How do
you gauge you? Those are all things we could have
talked about. But you need to read the book. It
just came out. You can get it on Amazon and
all the details are on Amazon. Also check out her website.
Her website has a lot of information and she's great.

(01:19:31):
I thought she was very very well informed and presented
a really strong case for working with trauma. So there
you go. Hey, if you're enjoying Earth Ancient's Destiny and
Earth Ancient Special Edition, please consider becoming a subscriber. For
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(01:19:52):
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(01:20:15):
of digital books. I think we're about fifty plus right now,
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(01:20:35):
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go to Patreon dot com Forward slash Earth Ancients. Okay,
that's it for this show. I want to thank my
guest today, Dd Goldpa, coming to us from New York.
As always, the team of Gel Tour, Mark Foster and

(01:20:57):
Feya Pavar. You guys rock all right, take care of
you well and we will talk to you next time.

(01:22:00):
And I