David Berceli is an expert in trauma intervention and conflict resolution. He is the creator of the Tension & Trauma Release Exercise program and is the founder and CEO of Trauma Recovery Services. He has a background in social work, psychotherapy and therapeutic body-work and spent two decades living and working in the Middle East and Africa, providing trauma relief workshops and designing recovery programs for international organizations. Today we talk about the embodied nature of trauma and how tremoring can help us recover from traumatic experiences.

Mike Jay is a writer who has written extensively on the history of science and medicine, with a particular focus on psychoactive drugs. His books on the subject include Emperors of Dreams: drugs in the nineteenth century, High Society: mind-altering drugs in history and culture, and Mescaline: A global history of the first psychedelic.

Bia Labate is an anthropologist who specialises in the study of psychoactive substances, drug policy, shamanism, ritual and religion. She has a Ph.D. in social anthropology from the State University of Campinas in her native Brazil and is author, co-author and co-editor of over 20 books as well as many peer-reviewed articles. She has organised many important conferences in the psychedelic space and is the founder and chief executive of the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines. She is also the Public Education and Culture Specialist at MAPS and is an adjunct faculty member of the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). Today we talk about many aspects of global psychedelic culture with a particular focus on Ayahuasca.

This week on the podcast I discuss my approach to the intentional and therapeutic use of psychedelics.

Anil Seth is a professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex and a leading expert on the neuroscience of consciousness. He is the editor-in-chief of the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness and is also the co-director of both the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science and the Canadian Institute For Advanced Research’s program in Brain, Mind, and Consciousness.  He has a new book coming out called Being You.

Gay Hendricks is a psychologist, writer, and teacher in the field of personal growth.  After completing his PhD at Stanford he went on to become a professor of Counselling Psychology at the University of Colorado.  With his wife Kathlyn he founded The Hendricks Institute which offers seminars and workshops on the topics that we discuss today.  Gay has authored dozens of books by himself and with Kathlyn, including Learning to Love Yourself, Conscious Breathing, Conscious Loving the Big Leap and most recently the Genius Zone.

Karl Friston is a theoretical neurobiologist and Professor of Neuroscience at University College London. He is also an honorary consultant at UCL’s Queen Square Institute of Neurology and is a fellow of both the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Royal Society. He is also the most cited neuroscientist in the world. As an undergraduate at Cambridge University he studied natural sciences, with a specialism in physics and psychology, and went on to train as a psychiatrist. He first rose to prominence after inviting multiple techniques for analysing brain imaging data and later turned his attention to developing a unified theory of the brain; the Free Energy Principle.

In this episode I explore mental health and its relationship to stress.

Jussi Jylkkä is a philosopher and psychologist based at Åbo Akademi University in Finland. In 2008 he completed a PhD in philosophy at the University of Turku on the relationship between language and reality. He then began studying the hard problem of consciousness and had a transformative mystical experience. After becoming frustrated that he couldn’t express this insight in words, he moved to study psychology and, in 2017, he completed a second PhD at Åbo Akademi University, this time in psychology. His research interests include consciousness, psychedelics, Zen philosophy, metaphysics and epistemology, all of which we talk about today.

Amanda Feilding is a drug policy reformer, lobbyist and research coordinator. She has been an advocate for psychedelics since the 60s and, in 1998, founded the Beckley Foundation. The foundation supports neuroscientific and clinical research into the effects of psychedelics on the brain and mind and has been behind many of the scientific breakthroughs in the psychedelic renaissance, including first trial of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression and the first ever scans of the brain on LSD. Today we talk about all the great work that Amanda and the Beckley foundation have been doing over the years.