In our first TRUE CLIENT STORY series episode, we are sharing the remarkable transformation journey of Nicole Rigo. Nicole is a high-achieving registered nurse who recently initiated her plant medicine integration odyssey with psilocybin mushrooms earlier this year as a client in our Rise and Align coaching program. Facing chronic health issues that were being worsened by overworking, and feeling isolated and disconnected after Covid lockdown, Nicole began to have a blossoming suspicion that there must be more to life than rampant anxiety and dread. (Spoiler alert, there is MUCH more!) She began to feel called to work with plant medicine so that she could begin healing food and body image issues. Today Nicole is sharing about how she is working with medicine to make peace with herself, be present, and enjoy her life. By day, Nicole works as a registered nurse, but in real life, she is a beekeeper, wild food forager, and sea nymph cavorting along the Carolina coast. We love working with Nicole and seeing her powerful metamorphosis, and she's just getting started! 

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We are currently enrolling for Rise and Align Family, our 6 month Group Transformation Program with an 11 day ayahuasca and San Pedro retreat in Ecuador.  We start October 7th, and early bird pricing is good through August 15th! 

If you're ready to give yourself unconditional permission to feel, express, and be present so that you can find radical acceptance and true freedom to be authentic, this program is for you. To learn more, click here and book a free alignment call: https://mysticalheartcollective.com/retreats 

Join our Rise and Align 1:1 Program HERE: https://mysticalheartcollective.com/psychedelic-integration

Sacred Psychedelic Preparation Intensive: https://mysticalheartcollective.com/sacred-psychedelics-preparation

Can we talk about the easy magic of meditation? If you don't vibe with meditation, you might be thinking "Great. Meditation. AGAIN. When will people stop trying to force me to meditate?!?" Meditation is the practice people love to hate. And yet, out of everything we do and try and teach and share... Meditation is the base of the pyramid. It's the launchpad for everything we teach in our psychedelic integration containers. It's HOW we do literally everything in our own personal spiritual journeys. It is the way to stay connected to Source, and it is so NOT HARD!  

If spirituality were a pizza, meditation would be the New York thin crust. What are you going to do with all those toppings without the CRUST?!? There's no delivery system. That's just a gloppy mess. And spirituality doesn't have to make you feel like you're stuck with a pile of toppings and no crust. 

Meditation asks you to sit with your overactive mind and watch it. It nudges you into presence. It leads you into paying attention to and being in your body. Learning how to self-regulate with your breath. It shows you the way into a the role of being in charge of yourself and your attention. It enables you to put down all the distractions and be here now. It invites you to actually practice the presence you need to BE how you like to be in the world. As your aligned self. 

We challenge anyone who believes that you can't meditate to give this episode of The Psychedelic Integration Podcast a listen and maybe let it be easy and give it another try! We'd love to hear how it goes, you can connect with us here: https://mysticalheartcollective.com/contact

It might surprise you to learn that more and more military combat veterans are looking to psychedelics and plant medicines for help. For a lot of vets, returning into society is the beginning of a long and arduous process of coming back home to themselves. In one major study of 60,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, 13.5% of deployed and non-deployed veterans screened positive for PTSD, while other studies show the rate to be as high as 20% to 30%. As many as 500,000 U.S. troops who served in these wars over the past 13 years have been diagnosed with PTSD.

PTSD, C-PTSD, and other life-threatening mental health issues, including addiction, depression, anxiety, and suicide have been the result for military and police men and women serving in combat zones, and under dangerous working conditions as part of their jobs. This week on the podcast, we are speaking with USMC Veteran Ray Murphy, Founder of Warriors Healing Network. Ray is a U.S. Marine Veteran who served in Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm, and has since worked extensively as a consultant for law enforcement as a K9 unit trainer.  

Ray has firsthand experience with C-PTSD and the shortfalls of finding treatment and relief inside the system, especially through the VA. Earlier this year, Ray attended a plant medicine retreat in Costa Rica where he worked with ayahuasca in ceremony, and found it to be an effective treatment for PTSD in his own life. This healing experience led him to found Warriors Healing Network, a nonprofit organization that helps facilitate psychedelic treatment for combat veterans and police officers who have been diagnosed with PTSD and need financial support to access medicine.

In this episode, Ray shares about his own personal experience with PTSD as a military veteran, his many failed treatment attempts through traditional healthcare, and finally feeling called to experience ayahuasca for himself, which led to healing his PTSD. We talk about the hardships of being in military and police service, and how the traditional system is leaving people behind, which is why psychedelics are so promising as a treatment for this specific population.

Here at The Psychedelic Integration Podcast, we pride ourselves on being open, honest, and vulnerable about the struggles and experiences we have integrating and living life on the plant medicine path. In this work, you have to learn that it's ok not to be ok. It's safe to feel, to lean into difficult places, and that this is all part of the healing and expansion process. Today on the podcast, John shares his personal experience about letting go, releasing control, and surrendering to what is.

Spiritual service doesn’t mean you get to fly high and glide above problems and tough times. In this episode, you will hear an inside picture of what John has been experiencing in his own personal process. Some of you may know that earlier this year, he completed his 7 day vision quest in Ecuador. This experience opens the door to willingness, and since that time, he has been coming up into willingness over and over in daily life. 

The truth is that plant medicine and spiritual work have many peaks, and many valleys. You hear a lot about the peaks, and not as much about walking through the deep jungle valleys of your own emotional and spiritual process. These valleys can become very familiar, and in fact if you are wanting to be in service, you will be asked to learn the way out of the darker parts of yourself like the back of your hand.

You will continue finding the same lessons in different forms until you learn what you need to learn from it. Medicine will make you more sensitive to your feelings. Your hard feelings feel more intense, and you will become skilled at leaning into them. Sit with it. Feel it. And sometime in the process of doing that, the shifts will transmute the energy into something else. It's OK not to be OK, and sometimes that is exactly what you need. 

Does this resonate with you? If so, we’d love to invite you to learn more about Rise and Align, our 1:1 PLANT MEDICINE TRANSFORMATION MENTORSHIP where you’ll learn exactly how to identify the root causes of your energetic blocks and self-sabotaging behaviors so that you can stop judging and being hard on yourself and trust yourself and your intuition instead.

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Want to learn more? Grab our FREE Ultimate Quickstart Guide to Healing with Psychedelics and start learning how to get prepared for your next psychedelic experience.  If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review HERE. Positive reviews help us reach more people who are seeking transformation with psychedelics. You can write a review on Apple Podcasts by going to the Ratings and Reviews section and clicking on Write a Review. Rate us on Spotify!

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"I have a harsh inner critic." This is one of the most common challenges we hear from clients coming to work with us in our plant medicine integration programs. A savage inner critic is not just painful to live with, being super hard on yourself can manifest in the body as illness. So many of our most prevalent and mysterious health problems have roots in the mind-body connection. Many people suffering from chronic pain, stress illnesses, fibromyalgia, depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, and more, all have something in common... a brutal self-critical voice, perfectionistic thoughts and needing to be seen as a good person. It's no wonder putting all this pressure on yourself to be perfect is taking a toll. In this episode of The Psychedelic Integration Podcast, you'll learn about confronting your inner critic with psychedelics so that you can transform this negative habit energy into a powerful ally for change.

Join John and Sinclair as they share about:

The ugly truth about stress is that everyone hates it and it’s making us sick in a serious way. Stress looks different for everyone, and in this episode of The Psychedelic Integration Podcast, we are painting a picture of modern life that feels like treading water, where everything is about to go under. So many of our clients report feeling exhausted, angry, depressed, anxious, and under resourced to handle daily life. Put simply, stress is physical, mental, or emotional strain or tension. This daily struggle inside is seriously taxing the spiritual life that so many people long to experience. We’re stressed and we don’t know how to handle it. Sacred plant medicines and psychedelics are calling more and more people toward living life in a different way, and they can teach you ways to manage stress so that you feel at ease and healthy instead of overwhelmed and frustrated.

In this episode, Sinclair and John share about:

Shifting into a mindset of trust and faith, and working on your beliefs and… *gasp* …even changing them and creating ones that are more beneficial — this is the long term integration work of plant medicine and psychedelics. In this episode, we will dive into the mechanics of how to trust the Universe, change your beliefs, and find faith, even if you think all this spiritual stuff is mumbo jumbo. Finding faith and changing beliefs with plant medicine might seem impossible, but it is truly the path to finding deep meaning and living a purpose filled life. You have the power to decide what you believe and plant medicine can help you find your own soul and connect to a benevolent creator that is always on your side.

In this episode, John and Sinclair dig into:

Interested in working with us? Visit our website at https://mysticalheartcollective.com to get started.

Welcome to All About Grandfather San Pedro, our fangirl/fanboy love fest episode for the heart-opening medicine of the Andes mountains. Also known as huachuma and aguacolla, this healing mescaline containing cactus is not only fast growing and sustainable, it just might radically change your life. We don't get too into the chemistry or technical details here, this episode is meant to serve as a primer for anyone who is interested in working with this medicine in a retreat or ceremonial setting. To give you some tips and guidance on what to expect, how to handle the ride, and how to get the most out of your experience.

As usual on The Psychedelic Integration Podcast, we're sharing our personal experience and understandings that have come from years of building a healing partnership with this master plant spirit. We really love San Pedro, and this episode is dedicated to sharing some of the magic and healing that this cactus has brought to our lives.

In this episode, Sinclair and John dive into:

Interested in working with us? Visit our website at https://mysticalheartcollective.com to get started.

What does it mean to have “good vibes?” Why do some people seem to exude a positive, effortless good energy? Yet others (maybe even you?) feel like there’s a dark cloud following them around that they can’t get away from? Can you catch bad vibes? Is there a secret on how to create a good vibration in yourself? How do you “seal in” the good vibes after working with plant medicine? Today on The Psychedelic Integration Podcast, we are coming to you from the beautiful beach of Ayampe, Ecuador, fresh off many weeks of sitting in ceremony with our medicine family, soaking in good vibes. Is there a secret on how to create a good vibration? (And keep it?) We're determined to find out. 

In this episode we uncover the mystery of what to do in your own life to find your unique high vibration. We share about how plant medicines invite attunement to the high vibration that we ALL have inside us, and how to feed that fire. And as always, we talk about what gets in the way, misconceptions about how having a naturally good vibration works, spiritual bypassing, choosing to evolve beyond trauma, and more. Everything you need is already inside you, and this episode is going to show you how to tune into your own magic. 

Visit our website for the full show notes and links to listen: https://mysticalheartcollective.com/how-to-create-a-good-vibration

If you’ve been listening to The Psychedelic Integration Podcast for a while, you may have gotten the idea that healing with psychedelics is like, hard work, or something. It’s time to come full circle and reconnect to the real reasons we do this podcast or any of this medicine and integration work. “What’s Your True Why?” is an episode dedicated to singing the song of your heart.

No matter where you are today, something is calling you toward plant medicines. Maybe you want to hurt less. Feel good. Enjoy your life. Be more yourself. Connect with your soul purpose. Or maybe you aren’t sure just yet, but you know that something is missing. Maybe you feel stuck, blocked, or overwhelmed living a life that doesn’t resonate. Maybe you’re in pain, and you just want to feel like yourself again. Today we’re going to share about all the beautiful reasons why our hearts were called to heal with plant medicines. Why we continue to do the work with psychedelic integration. How Your True Why will change and evolve along with you. Why every minute of all of it is SO worth it. And to inspire you to ask yourself, “What’s Your True Why?”

In this episode, John and Sinclair talk about:

Learn more about working with us: https://mysticalheartcollective.com

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