The Trauma Breakthrough Big Pharma Doesn’t Want You to Know | with Justin Townsend

Michael Unbroken: In a time of unbelievable access to everything that you could imagine in your healing journey, from AI to in-person, to the next book, the next podcast, the next whatever it is, we all have an access to abundance. 

And one of the things I think that we have missed out on, probably dramatically so as a human race in the time that we live in, is the opportunity to get more grounded into earth, into plant medicines, and into the experience of touching spirituality through proctors that help us on our journey.

Something I have personally experienced and something that we're gonna get into on today's episode with our guest, Justin Townsend. Justin, my friend, welcome to the podcast. How are you today? 

Justin Townsend: Thank you, Michael. Very pleased to be here. Doing very well. Thanks. 

Michael Unbroken: Yeah, amazing. I'm so excited to have you here. Just for those who are popping in, and maybe they're a little curious about what I just said, why should anyone listen to today's conversation with us? 

Justin Townsend: Okay. I operate a western contemporary therapeutic model working with psychedelics in Jamaica in the Caribbean, but coming up on our 12th year, we treat a lot of guests that come through every year that have trauma. Our general observation is that the current accepted gold standard for treating trauma is falling short. It tends to be about symptom management and we often hear from our guests, there was only so far I could go in regular talk therapy. And so, we work with psilocybin, which is the active molecule in magic mushrooms, and it is very, very effective for helping people treat the root cause and of their trauma and relieve themselves of the symptoms that can manifest every, every day for them that make life very, very difficult to live.

Michael Unbroken: Where do we begin? You know, one of the things I think about a lot in this journey is we historically, let me rephrase that. For the last probably 50, 60 years, probably since the love movement in the sixties, mushrooms and psychedelics has been this thing about fun. At least that's how it's been portrayed.

You know, whether that be socially on television or movies, right? You kind of look at the hippie dippy guy doing mushrooms, going to Woodstock, and then that kind of like goes into the party phase of the seventies and the eighties. It's all about drugs and the nineties, now it's a party drug, something started happening, and again, I was a child, so I'm not super familiar, but it felt like something started happening in the early two thousands where it was like, wait a second. There's a medicinal property to this. Can you kind of give us a little bit of a backstory about the history of psilocybin, the way that you see it and its usage today? 

Justin Townsend: Certainly, I mean, it was Gordon Wasson, the famous banker that was featured in Life Magazine that originally in the 1950s went across to Central South America. He met what is now a very well known female medicine woman there, Gordon Maria Sabina. And he had his own experience and so he brought his experience and samples of the psilocybin mushroom back to the west of the 1950s, that got a lot of the anthropologists involved, the chemists involved, the pharmaceutical organizations in organizations involved, and that's really what brought it to the West with provenance.

Certainly arising out at that time you had the hippie movement and everything else that was happening there. You had the war on drugs in America, and that was maybe Nancy Reagan on a TV ad with a, with an egg and a frying pan saying, this is your brain on drugs. There's a lot of stigma around it MDMA is something that we know as a party drug, ecstasy and raves and that kind of thing. There was a lot of misreporting around the safety profile of MDMA and frankly around psilocybin as well. And so psilocybin was rescheduled and deemed to have no medicinal benefits and high addiction properties, which is untrue. It's a very, very safe medicine to work with. There was a wealth of research done in the fifties, sixties and seventies before many of these medicines were rescheduled, that scientists these days are falling back on and exploring. And then really from about 2000, the late two thousands onwards, the research was reinvigorated again within research groups within the hospitals like Johns Hopkins.

These medicinal trials were pristine. They were very well executed. And of course you take an, an organization like John Johns Hopkins with its pedigree and a very trustworthy organization. This really began the next episode of exploring psychedelic Substances as medicines. it's happening right now in the US whereby both Oregon and Colorado on a state level have made these medicines available to people, other states around the US are pursuing research or looking at bills to run through state, state government to also allow, I mean, New Mexico is looking at something. New Jersey's also looking at something. So we all are also the FDA back in 2016, 2017 actually gave psilocybin what's called breakthrough status.

Now, typically it takes a long, long time for any new molecule or medicine to become available through the doctor's prescription, the whole point of giving psilocybin breakthrough status was to accelerate that process. We all hoped that would've happened by now because it was, it was MDMA and psilocybin given breakthrough status. It's not happened as yet. There was some hope that within the new administration that it would be accelerated, but that's just fallen by the wayside. I think there's lots of other stuff going on. So there's been a bit of a slowdown on the federal level, but today, if people need access to psilocybin assisted therapy in a therapeutic environment, there's a range of options available that it is a spectrum if you like.

At one end, you've got the clinical trials if you wanna participate in one for depression, anxiety, PTSD following still with a clinical model, you have ketamine clinics. These are not a classic psychedelic, but ketamine is available, um, for many people. Now, at the other end of the spectrum, you've got the very shamanic indigenous approaches to working with psychedelics in a more ceremonial indigenous and environments moving further in towards the middle, you have the quasi shamanic retreat types, which is often Westerners dressed up in all the right garve and they have all the props, but by no means do they have the same degree of training and education experience as a more say a shaman would do, which would spend 20 years developing their skills. And then right in the middle of that, you have an organization like ours, which is a western contemporary therapeutic model, that means we have psychologists, therapists, protocols, a very heavy screening system. And it's, and rather than the typical power differential, which you would see between a clinician and a patient, we have a relationship that is mutually equitable.

Our guests come for us to, to, to us for seven days, the relationship that we build must foster a sense of safety and confidence in us, and we find that a lot of our guests have quite transformative experiences down here. I'd say about 40 to 50% of our guests alone arrive here with some kind of childhood trauma.

A big portion of which is, is sexual abuse trauma. But we've had guests down here that have survived plane crashes that have survived, murder attempts that have been kidnapped, taken hostage. We treat a lot of veterans down here as well, that have witnessed and participated in some awful experiences.

So that's where we are today, and that's what Micro Meditations does here in Jamaica. We run on average about 40 retreats a year each retreat is seven nights and eight days. The cohort size is between seven to 10 or 11 guests. We have a very high ratio of team members to guests. That's very important to us. So for every 1.5 guests, there is a professional experience facilitator working with them. There's often a licensed therapist or a psychologist, and we do three doses of the medicine throughout the week, which is one every other day, which increasing in dose and we are known for working with high doses where it's appropriate. And then our guests receive about 15 to 16 hours of group therapy throughout the week on each retreat as well. The group therapy always follows the next day. It takes about a half a day the next day. And then there's plenty of opportunity for our guests to work one-on-one with our therapists as well, all of whom, um, are very experienced working with psychedelics personally and with us, and that's our approach to this. 

Michael Unbroken: Yeah. And that's a far cry from, Hey, let's just go do some mushrooms and sit in the desert. Right. Which, you know, I'm not saying is necessarily the worst thing in the world someone can do 'cause I've certainly done it. But, you know, it is one of those things that I look at it and you know, one of the things that I feel like has been positioned a lot over the course of the last few years, especially, are the plant medicine.

I almost wanna call 'em vacations. You know, it seems like we've moved so far away from the medicinal practice of it in a lot of ways. Not to say that I don't know if, which is the median or not, but what I've seen, even in my own research before I went to an amazing, amazing facility to do a eight day ayahuasca retreat in Central America. I had researched for weeks Justin, some of these facilities, they clearly are about the cash. Let's get a hundred people into this space. You know, we've got two shamans and then like five volunteers who like are scout camp, right? Yeah. And then you have the other side of it, we're in the middle of the jungle. This is as like backwoods as you can get. You're sleeping in the netted hammock and you might get eaten by a jaguar, right? The opposite of it, which is the hyper luxury retreat super privatized. This is where the rich and famous go. These are the spaces that, um, you know, I think that you're having a luxury experience.

And the reason that I brought it up as like this psychedelic vacation is because even in my own research, that's kind of what it felt like. I ended up landing in a space that came as a recommendation of a friend, um, who went to one of the more high-end locations and. As I was there, I was actually really, really happy that I made the decision to spend the extra money because I felt safe. And you pointed to something that I think is really important and there's this safety that needs to exist in a therapeutic setting for people to actually have transformation. And I just don't know how you get there with a hundred or 200 people around a drum circle, all tripping balls like that does not rationalize in my brain.

Can you talk to me a little bit about your approach and why you guys decided to walk that route? Because I see, as a entrepreneur, like obviously, I'm like, if we can put a hundred people in here for $5,000 a pop, wow. But that's not service. Right. And so I'm curious, like take me through the grounds of building the business, because I'm actually really curious about where the intention began.

Justin Townsend: I've worked with psychedelics for over 25 years. And I had my very first Ayahuasca experience back in about 2001. That's before it was very well known. There wasn't much written about it except perhaps from the 1950s and sixties. And back then I was part of the European underground psychedelic movement. And it was not legitimate. It was not legal. We were flying in medicine men, medicine women from overseas and hosting retreats all over Europe. And so I gotta work with a lot of great medicine men and medicine women. fast forward, the reason why we haven't taken the shamanic approach, first of all to what we do is because from what I've witnessed and seen, you can drink ayahuasca or take psilocybin in a shamanic setting, and undoubtedly you will receive so long as you feel safe, the neurological benefits of that medicine. But at the same time, a lot of psychological material is gonna present itself from within you. And unless you have been truly enculturated in a central or South American belief system, then whatever material arises for you will be perceived through the lens of the shaman and that belief system, not much of which comports well to the western mindset and understanding of the world.

So that's why we have great respect for the indigenous shamanic approach, but it's not what we do back in the early days of micro meditations, it was very much the wild, wild west. It wasn't really a recreational retreat center back then. It was more experiential. So we didn't really have protocols, we didn't have therapists.

We had fairly large group sizes. And like I said, it was a wild, wild west. So when I joined about nearly 10 years ago, I was keeping a close eye on the Johns Hopkins clinical trials, MDMA work. And I realized that for the average Western mindset, we needed to create something that was very approachable and understandable. And so we took a lot of the original Johns Hopkins protocols. We modified them to suit group work rather than one-on-one individual work. And that's where we arrived today as for the, you know, I would never call coming to my meditations and working on your trauma or whatever, you have a vacation. And occasionally our guests do arrive under informed thinking it's gonna be a vacation, but it's a lot of work throughout the week that can also be quite challenging and exhausting, but well worth it on the other end.

When you think about medical professionals and the medical model, if you picture the caricature of the white coated individual, they often have quite a cool, aloof, professional demeanor that does not lend itself well to establishing a bond of trust in a safe container. Right? Nor does the kind of work we do fit well into the typical medical model.

So, you know, we eat breakfast with our guests. We eat lunch, we eat dinner with them. We are with them throughout the week through some of their most challenging raw, vulnerable moments. It's a very much a non-judgmental environment. So that safety container is about how much work we have done on ourselves, how authentically we can relate to our guests, and then they tend to connect very, very well with us as well, because we're living and working together for the week.

So it's a powerful experience. It was also important to me that we can track our outcomes. So, um, before our guests arrive, they'll be sent standard mental health rating scales for PTSD, depression, anxiety, and alcohol use disorder. And we know their baseline coming on retreat. We know what we're kind of gonna be working with here. We have very detailed information from their screening, and then after the retreat, when they go home, we send them those same mental health rating scales at month 1, 3, 6, 9, and 12. And so we track the outcomes on a longitudinal study 12 months out, and we've done that for a few years now, and we see that on average for generalized anxiety, social anxiety, PTSD.

And major depressive disorder. There is on average a 50 to 60% reduction in symptoms. And for many of those people that means they're no longer diagnosable with their condition. And certainly, when they first arrive here, they're often hanging on by their fingertips, and by the end of the week, they are able to begin to thrive and flourish again in life. We tend to find that some may come back a year later, they discovered that there's still more work to be done or deeper layers to be accessed, and so they'll go home. It's really important that they do the integration therapy part of the work. You cannot just have a psilocybin experience and not attach integration to this. And so they go home, they'll adapt their behaviors, adapt their lifestyle, lay down new ways of being. And once that's been done and they're beginning to flourish again, they'll often return 12 to 18 months later. And to your point that you made earlier that your friend recommended a place, I'd say about 25% of our guests are either referrals or family, friends, and that kind of thing as well.

So that referral thing's very important, at the same time, if you are new to the psychedelic space or you're just on the fringes of it and you're thinking is a psychedelic retreat, right. For me, it can be a very complex process to work through and it sounds to me like that's what you had to go through as well because what are psychedelics and how do they work?Which psychedelic is best for me? Is it ayahuasca? Is it Occi? Is it MDMA, whatever? Is it iboga? And then you've got, well, what kind of experience do I need? There's a two dose experience over there. There's a three-dose experience over there. There's a shamanic retreat in the jungle here, or there's a myriad of different decisions to be made.

And it's not easy to navigate that and arrive at the right place. There are quite a few wellness retreats that exist that tend to do low dose, two dose experiences, and that's not really the right kind of environment to go to if you've been dealing with treatment resistant depression or PTSD for the last few years.

Right? So, what we found of late though is that AI has been a very useful tool both for our guests and for us. I know AI can be a double-edged sword, but if you are used to engaging with say, ChatGPT about your mental health struggles and ChatGPT knows that maybe you have OCD or an anxiety disorder or something like this and it knows you well enough whereas before you had to go and do the ground up research and visit 10 to 20 websites and try and navigate, which is right for you. ChatGPT as an example, will shave down all of that research for you and give you the top two or three retreat centers that it would recommend based upon what it knows about you.

So that's been a quite a key factor in helping people navigate the psychedelic space as well. But we wanted to strike a balance that was authentic, real, and produced genuine outcomes that still is based in very safe protocols in clinical practice without appearing to be clinical, which is what we're not. If that makes sense. 

Michael Unbroken: In the beginning have a massive resistance to this. Early on as a kid, I kind of had this association with any kind of drugs being tied to addiction because the weird irony is my mother was a drug addict. My stepfather was, most of my family members were addicted to prescription drugs. I sold drugs as a means to an end, and I never really took them. I smoked a lot of weed, don't get me wrong, but I never popped pills. I never did cocaine. I never did so many drugs that I saw people doing, and so I always felt this massive resistance and this really weird thing kept happening to me where I was within some of these circles as I was in the Pacific Northwest in my late twenties, early thirties, where I would get invited to like these ayahuasca parties. I would say yes. And then something would inevitably always happen where like, I couldn't go, like example, I'm definitely allergic to cats. If anyone ever wanted to kill me, just throw a cat in my face, I'm gonna die. It's crazy. And I was getting ready to go to this one retreat or this house I should say.

And I text the guy and I say, Hey, do there happen to be cats at this house? And he was like, yeah, there's four. And like, so that kept happening to me where I was like, okay, it's not my right time. And what was interesting, I, I started to notice like the more that I was propositioned to go and do it, the more that the resistance started to fall. But that didn't actually happen until I changed the correlation that I had. And that correlation was kind of in alignment with what we're talking about, where I was like, this isn't about getting high, it's about the medicine. And that became a huge differentiator for me because there are, of course, the circles.

I met somebody years ago, she told me she had done ayahuasca a hundred times. I was like, okay, you're just parting at this point. You know what I mean? I don't know what you're on, but this ain't it. And so it was about this delicate balance of trying to find the space that I felt fit me, while also even for me as such an open-minded person, I believe I'm an open-minded person. It took a lot of accessibility to information. For me to kind of move through that space of this is where I see it doesn't feel like something people should do unless they're partying. 'cause they're probably drug addicts too. Actually, there's something medicinal here that I should take into consideration.

The crazy thing is I'm kind of one of those guys. There's no gray area in my life. I'm not that type and I don't try to fight it. So I'm either all in or I'm all out. It's very simple, very black and white. So, I'm living in Vietnam in 2017-2018, and the very first float tank center in Vietnam had opened.

And I'm a huge fan of float Tank, like they've been such a great, I kinda wanna go do one right now body's killing me, right? And I'm like, okay, cool. Go do a float tank, relax, fill the decompression, be in this healing energy. And so this guy opens one, we're chatting, he's Vietnamese. And look, in Vietnam, if you get caught doing drugs, you might as well say goodbye to the rest of your life. Like, let's call it what it is, and again, this is a very long time ago. Unfortunately, his facility is no longer open, but it was the first one. And so I go and we're chatting, I've been four or five times. And then in one of my sessions I just had this thought where I was like, you should ask him if he has, um, mushrooms.

If he has psychedelics. And I ask him, he's like, yes. And I was like, oh, I've never done this before. I'm gonna tell you a story real quick. I should have started with me saying, I'm gonna tell you a story. So we're in this. And he says, yes. And he goes, how much do you want? And I go, I have no idea. I've never done this before. He goes, cool, I'm gonna give you three milligrams. 

Justin Townsend: Probably three grams. 

Michael Unbroken: Three grams, yes. And I was like, I was like three grams. And I was like, okay, cool. Which is like a pretty substantial dose I would come to find. So I told him, here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna go take this. This is the next week. I said, I'm gonna take this. I'm gonna get in this float tank. I'm gonna leave the door unlocked, just come and make sure I'm not dead at some point. So I take the three grams I get in the tank, I'm laying there and an hour probably goes by before it kicks in.

And when it does, this really incredible thing happens where I get sucked into the ocean and as I'm in the ocean, I am swimming and I can feel the heat of the water all around me. I can feel the energy of the ocean moving around me and it's pitch black. And as I'm swimming, I start to see this little gold light and I start swimming towards the light. And it turns out there's this gigantic golden treasure chest. And as I swim towards the chest, it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. I mean, engulfs me, it's like the size of the Burge Khalifa and as I'm about to touch it, this massive giant blue octopus comes and wraps its arms around it and says, you're not ready to see what's in here.

And I got into a fight with this octopus and I'm like, f*ck you. You don't tell me what I get to see and what I don't get to see. Let me in. And we have some back and forth. And eventually it opens it up. It lets me in. Now I won't go into the story, but it, it took me into the worst moment of my entire childhood.

Right. And in that moment, what happened was, I went into the space of holding space for that scared child of me in that moment. Right. And said, I will protect you, and I got you. And I'm just like, bawling my f*cking eyes out in this float. I come back to, I get a text that afternoon from my friend Ryan, and he is like, come to Bali.

Justin, I am very anti Bali at this point in my life and on the backside of Bali, I'm still very anti Bali. And so I say, I don't know man, I don't know. And he finally convinces me, he's like, Hey, just come, I'll take care of everything, we got this amazing retreat. Come hang out for a week or whatever.

I go, the day I get there, I land, I get on a motorcycle. I drive into the sit to Chen. I go to meet him at lunch. There is a f*ck. I'll show you the picture of f*cking massive blue octopus on the side of this building. And in that space and time, even though Bali was kind of this crazy experience for me, it also was one of the most important spaces of time in my life because it's really where I solidified, Think Unbroken.

It's where I built this podcast. It's where I wrote the first book. It's where I started hosting my first trauma retreats. Everything came to that. And I gotta say, I think it was because of my decision to lay in that float tank with psilocybin and, and open up whatever is gonna be there for me. And so I tell that story just to say this. I went from this place of a deep embedded fear of doing it because I felt like it was a thing that probably was not beneficial to actually let me explore this and be open to what happens. And it being transformative and arguably one of the most important things that I've ever done, right? And so I'm curious when you're working with people who, man, they're hesitant, they're scared, they're like me, I have a lot of uncertainty about this. How do you help them decide what's actually right for them? Because this was a non-medicinal setting and I'm like, let's go.

Justin Townsend: Okay. Let me frame that. That's a beautiful experience and one that we get to witness that type of thing, that deep meaning, right? And also the synchronistic events of the Blue Octopus show showing up later. Let me frame that a bit for you. So, you know, when I'm running a retreat, I will often, we do a lot of psychoeducation down here. What's our guests to here? We just throw them in the deep end.

Michael Unbroken: If you can see that, I'm gonna show you real quick that, that's the octopus.

Justin Townsend: Yeah.

Michael Unbroken: Blue octopus side of the building. Crazy. I'll put that on the website guys. You can check it out. 

Justin Townsend: Okay, so there's components in the here of the hero's journey. So Joseph Campbell was the guy that was very famous for writing about all the myths around the world. And he came up with the meta myth, which is components that exist in most cultures over time, and the concept of the hero's journey. And at the end of the day, as you come, as you slay the dragon, which means you overcome your fears, you enter the cave, you go to the end of the cave, you'll often find a gold treasure chest. Okay? And in that will be something that if you've got the courage to look in there, you can bring back out with you back into reality again. That's gonna be a benefit to you and your tribe or wider humanity at large out of that comes when I speak to guests often, that which you need the most is in the place where you least want to look. So it sounds to me like as you're approaching this golden chest, you didn't have any inhibitions. There wasn't a sense of maybe dread or fear.

Maybe there was, but many of our guests locate somewhere like this within their psyche. It's an aspect that, that maybe it's something that happened to them in childhood that's been relegated to the unconscious mind. And when I say unconscious, I just mean it is below the threshold of your awareness. And it could, and you have a sense of when you approach this, that it could be scary and you need to overcome your fears to look inside the chest and find that treasure.

So we did a lot in myth down here. We deal a lot in narratives and ways of navigating this. We deal a lot in metaphor and analogy, but let me explain to you part of that education process. So there are three mediators if you like, to the psilocybin experience. The first mediator is cognitive insights.

Now what does that mean? There's a great analogy I can use to describe this. So imagine that you are sat on a circular stage on a chair and around you is a big red curtain, just like at the movie theaters. Okay, you've not taken the medicine yet. Now that curtain is open about three foot wide. That three foot wide gap represents everything that is within your awareness about your life, your history, and who you think you are as you take the psilocybin. And after 45 minutes, it begins to kick in that red curtain pulls all the way back and shows you everything or a lot of what's below your threshold of awareness, memories from childhood perspective, things that happen that you don't recall, that informed who you are today.

Now, at the end of the medicine session, that curtain will begin to close again as you come back to reality. But this time it will stay 10 foot wide and not three foot wide. And that increased gap represents a much better-informed view as to why you are the way you are and who you are for good or bad, the other mediator if you like, the second one is emotional breakthroughs. 

Psilocybin is known as an ab reactive, and it simply means it can bring that to the surface, which has the most emotional charge within you. An example of that may be, I was working with a gentleman that was raised in childhood, and it wasn't where it wasn't safe for him to express any of his emotions, let alone uncomfortable emotions as, as a little boy, right? Fear, sadness, anger, whatever. At 20, his father died and he went to his father's funeral, but all he felt was numbness. He did not have access to his emotions. Another 20 years later or so, in his early forties, he came to us on retreat with depression, anxiety, and some other stuff going on his second dose, he was taken back to his father's funeral and the emotions, the sadness, the grief, the sobbing that came out of him that he could finally feel is this demonstrates the power of releasing repressed emotions that we have in ourselves. And here's the thing, most of us don't like to feel our uncomfortable emotions and we've habituated sub actively suppressing them, right? But it's not just that these emotions tend to disappear into the ether they build up with, and there's over time and can create a downward pull of the psyche into depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues.

So you get the emotional release and many of our guests and report field getting so much lighter afterwards the freer. And the third, mediator is the much vaunted mystical experience. You don't need to be religious to have one. You don't even need to be spiritual. And basically what happens is guests on a therapeutic dose of psilocybin can often experience what's called ego dissolution, where their sense of self falls away and they open up to a sense of connectedness with the people, the world and reality around them, and they experience what's a may call God, source, creator, whatever you, however you'd like to label that. It's not just something that you get to witness in your mind's eye. It's something that you know and feel without doubt on every level of your being.

The reason why the mystical experience is important is because all the, all the research seems to show that if you have one, the long-term psychological outcomes are that much better because of it. So this is a kind of psychoeducation that we go through with our guests before they get here. We prep them, we get them down here, and yes, absolutely everyone is nervous to, scared on the spectrum to one degree or another. And you absolutely have to summon your courage because on, on therapeutic doses there's a certain amount of surrendering and letting go that you have to do. So the medicine can do its work. If you resist that, it can make it more challenging, that it needs to be, if you can drop into it, then the fruits are there for, to be gained.

So that's our approach towards how we do this. And the kind of experience that you described swimming in the ocean, I mean the o obviously it was a metaphor, right? Getting sucked out into the ocean. It wasn't, you are on a beach in Bali, and the high tide came in, that's a classic mytho poetic experience. Most clinicians are not trained in the mytho poetic experience, what the psyche reveals to you. 

Another case in point, we had a guest that said, okay, I found myself in my trip experience standing at the side of a river in like a subterranean underground cavern. There was a long boat at the side of the river. There was a guy in the boat at the back with like a hooded shore and a big side, and I knew I had to get into that boat. So I got in the boat and traveled and I went through to the afterlife. So these types of experience manifest all the time out of our psyche. They're not meaningless. And one of our roles is to help our guests interpret that kind of material as well. So there's a many, many ways that you can have the sort of cyber experience, but largely what you're doing here on a personal level is pulling out material from your psyche that is that you are unaware of that is nevertheless impacting your daily life today. Right? It could be something that happened in childhood when a, a parent shamed you, or a parent beat you and you developed maladaptive thinking about yourself as a child that translated into maladaptive behaviors as an adult.

Maybe you shy away from certain situations or you drink too much booze, or you're just out watching hours of Netflix every night. Whatever that maladaptive behavior is that's what we get to work with. And when you've had the psilocybin experience and you understand why the way you are, or you understand your trauma better and you've released the traumatic material, that's when people go on to thrive and flourish.

Michael Unbroken: Yeah, there's something really interesting that I think that happened for me, not only in that experience, but also in experiences of like doing ayahuasca experiences of doing other plant medicines. And it's always been, you know, when I decided that, Hey, this is the thing that I'm going to do, I came into them all with the willingness to allow. That was it. Like I was just like, allow whatever is gonna happen here, don't f*cking fight it because I've done.

I think one of the things that really had benefited me in all of the experiences that I've done is I had already been in deep psychological work for years. I had a therapist, I had a psychotherapist, I had group therapy. I was in different mentorships. I was in so much of the personal development work that it was like, this is just a another piece of the puzzle on the table. This isn't me trying to figure out where I start, right? So I already had some corners. I had some borders. Here's a pocket here that looks like a flower.

Here's a horse over here. I don't know, whatever puzzles look like, right? And so it was like these psychedelic experiences were just putting another piece of the puzzle into place where it belonged. And so you hear, 'cause I want to go into this for a moment, a big, big, big fear, probably the biggest fear, you can tell me you're the practitioner I'm not, but I always see that the biggest fear people have is the bad trip. They're like, I don't want to have the bad trip. I don't want to have that. Right? And I fortunately have not. I had a really f*cking insane one, right? And maybe for some people that I would call that bad for me, I called that deep reflection of the core root of myself that I need to be aware of so I don't end up doing things that destroy my life. 

And so I think that for me, I walked in with the willingness to be like, I'm going to allow whatever happens, whether it's scary, which one of them was like a horror movie, whether it's fun which was like the, I think it's really curious. I had like, the greatest orgasm of my entire life in one of them. Right. And then there was like, just so many like, variables of the spectrum that have existed as I was in these spaces. When you have people come to you and they're like, man, I know the trauma's in there, it's dark, maybe I have an inkling of it. Maybe it's totally blackened from my psyche. I know something is in there and I'm very scared. How do you approach that? Talk me through the entirety of that. 

Justin Townsend: Alright, that's a very good question. I'm gonna differentiate first between a bad trip and a challenging trip. So what you've alluded to here with regards to your posture as you enter these experiences is set and setting. Setting whereby the mindset that you are in, the openness, the allowing, okay, and the setting that you're in is ideally is a safe container where you do feel safe to be vulnerable and let your guard down.

So what does a bad trip look like? Let's pull out a caricature of one. Let's just say you've got some trauma. You don't know much about psychedelics. You decide to go to a music concert, you stop at the bar. On the way there, you have a couple of pints. You head off to the concert, you're in there, somebody hands you a fistful of magic mushrooms, right?

So you are already slightly inebriated maybe I'll have these mushrooms. So what can then happen is two things. When you do go through ego dissolution, it can feel like you are dying and that can send people into a panic. At the same time though, if deeply buried trauma material is arising from within you, it can create a very anxious state and panicky, right? That would translate into a bad trip. Okay? The difference here is this. What we see a lot of is, it's not so much our guests have to relive their trauma, but they have to re-experience their bodies first physiological and emotional response to their trauma. So if somebody, for example, was sexually abused in childhood they may have to re-experience feelings of powerlessness contamination, shame, disgust, fear at the same time, fragments of what happened to them. 

Memories are starting to come forth as well. And we educate our guests around this. We give them a context and a framework for it. And so they come into this prepared. Now, nevertheless, it sounds like you are incredibly brave and you had little resistance to being open and allowing, and one can in the weeks preceding coming here, or even the days proceeding, think I'm gonna allow, I'm gonna surrender.

And then you get here, but then on the day of the first dose, then you're sitting there ready to take the medicine. All of a sudden, you're a bit amped up. Right? And not so, you know, we all know the saying that, um, courage. Is not the absence of fear, right? You're gonna maybe feel a bit fearful and anxious, but you have to have the courage to do this anyway. And so in creating that safe container, in doing the psychoeducation in our guests feeling safe and confident in us, and us with them, that's what allow our guests, allows our guests to drop into these experiences. And yes, they can be challenging, but you know, living a lifetime full of repressed trauma is challenging and difficult on a daily basis.

You can come to Jamaica with us for one week, excavated all, which may be challenging and difficult at times, but on the other end of it, you are, you are mostly free and clear. I'm not gonna say totally free and clear but you'll have excavated out of your nervous system that causes you to hide from the world, that causes you to get triggered and activated all the time.

Whatever it is that's going, that causes your nightmares, your flashbacks, your insomnia, your alcohol use disorder. We just see all this, all of this just drop away, whether it's PTSD, or some of the trauma that people are carrying. So that's how I would differentiate between, um, a bad trip and a challenging trip. And it doesn't have to mean that each and every dose you have throughout the week is gonna be that challenging, there are beautiful euphoric deeply spiritual experiences that happen as well for a guest that comes with trauma. So people are often weighing up, you know what? I've lived with this trauma for so many years, whether I know it happened, or I have an inkling of it. I don't like the way my life is going. I'm just holding on by my fingertips. I've tried the gold standards. I've tried all the medications. So now I'm willing to experiment and try this. Is it worth it? And generally, on the other side of the retreat, it's pretty much transformative and people are glad that they made their decision.

Michael Unbroken: And I think that's a good segue into one of the last questions I wanna ask you 'cause this is where I think people are always leaning, and I think this is the part that the education probably lacks as a whole, uh, because it's really hard to measure. But I'm really curious, as much as you can put kind of a bow on this for us, where does the efficacy lie in this versus traditional medicine? You know, Newsweek released the report, you know what, five years ago now that SSRIs are ha less than half as effective as a placebo, which is like, whoa, that's crazy. And that we've been fed these drugs for years. Right? Right. We see a tremendous amount of research coming out in things like somatic works, like breath works and things of this nature. For whatever reason, and it's probably the reality that we still live in this massive fear, especially in the West about drugs part of that being about control, obviously, and from a government standpoint, which we're not gonna get into, but we can say that's a factor. Where does the efficacy land with a plant medicine and psychedelic experience versus a traditional medical medical system that is all but failing us right now.

Justin Townsend: So let's say you've had a trauma at whatever point in your life, you're not coping very well in the world, okay? Maybe you've got PTSD and your home is your sanctuary. You don't need it very much, but it ends up becoming your prison, right? Maybe you've got some maladaptive behaviors, you're gonna go to your doctor. Here's the thing, right? You spend 15 minutes with your doctor on average in America. And what the doctor should really be asking is, tell me about your sleeping habits. Tell me about your eating habits. Tell me about your health and exercise, and tell me about your relationships. Because therein and any adverse things we're experiencing in life, and therein lies where a doctor should be going. But they don't tend to ask those questions or make, ask their patients to make changes there. First, they're gonna write them a prescription for, say, an SSRI, the myth around it's more like SSRIs are only effective for about 30% of the population. But let's just focus on the word. What does effective mean?

The myth is that there is a serotonin or chemical imbalance in the brain, and you take this SSRI and it will compensate for that imbalance in the brain that's largely been proven to be untrue. Yes, serotonin does play a factor, but all these medications do is help you with symptom management. What they tend to lead to is a, is a much narrower range of emotional feeling and expression, both on the positive and on the negative. You won't feel as much joy as you could, and if you're angry, you won't feel the anger is as deep or the grief is deep. People are often numb from the waist down, they have zero libido. Okay? And so if anything, these medications just help you to manage symptoms to a certain degree. So at least you are able to function somewhat in the world, but you're often not thriving or flourishing at the same time.

If those SSRIs accompanied by a CBT or DBT therapeutic approach, then that's just teaching you to manage your uncomfortable emotions better when they arise outta your trigger or activation. There is some value to that psilocybin gets to the root cause of what is creating your depression, your anxiety, and it's often not just purely a neurological problem. What we see down here is that the majority of people's mental health issues arise out of either a current adverse event that's going on, loss of job,loss of life, something that you love, financial insecurity, or it could be a trauma or something that happened decades ago. And over time the depression anxiety is crept.

And so there is a neurological benefit to psilocybin. For example, there is a large scale network within the brain called the default mode network. And broadly speaking, this is where our sense of self and our wandering mind resides, many people have an overactive default mode network. Generally speaking, when you are focusing on a task, the default mode network is not that active.

It's when you are not focused on a task that the default mode networks becomes hyperactive. So what does that look like? It might mean you are lying in bed at night trying to sleep, and all you've got is the inner judge, the inner critic, the chatter, the negativity, the intrusive thoughts coming in. Or maybe you're at work and you say, you know what? I'm gonna go outside on my lunch break and land a retrieve for half an hour in the peace and quiet, and you lay down and that internal chatter just won't stop. Right? What about the groceries? Pick the kids up from school. I sounded stupid when I said this to this person. What are they thinking? All of that internal chatter arises out of a hyperactive default mode network. So psilocybin will. And this is a poor phrasing of it. Basically reset that default mode network back to its functional state. Again, its normal operative state. So that's what happens neurologically. And then psychologically, you are excavating all the repressed material within you and releasing that out of your tank of negative emotions that you've suppressed.

You're getting insights that you can now begin to make changes about your behavior. So there is a radical, radical difference in method of action of an SSRI versus say, psilocybin, and a radical difference in efficacy and outcomes as well. 

Michael Unbroken: That's amazing. Yeah. And I think that, you know, for every person it's going to be different. And I think one of the other things that I walked into this with as well as not just the letting go, but I had no expectations, man. I was just like, Hey, whatever happens, happens. And I think that that's something that helped and served me very well. Because sometimes, you know, you talk about this idea of ego disillusion, sometimes our egos are so driven by the idea of like, this has to work for me.

And then, you know, it is funny 'cause when I was on my Ayahuasca retreat, there was one person that, I mean, they did two dosages and nothing, they had no experience at all. And it's like, sometimes even our own ego can be so powerful that you can't even get to the medicine. And so I think that's really, really fascinating. And the human experience is so wildly strange. And the fact that we can go and eat some plant we found in the middle of the forest and then have a DMT trip and you know, it's really wonderful and it can be really healing. And one of the big reasons I wanted to have you on is to kind of demystify some of this, I think there's a lot of fear even still today about it.

I think there's a lot of indoctrination that the solution is pharmacological. Not saying it's not, but generally speaking it's not. And I think that a lot of people just don't know where to be begin on their journey. And so I want them to feel empowered to reach out to you to learn more about you guys and what you guys do. And so before I ask you the last question here, tell me where can everybody find you? Where can everyone learn more? 

Justin Townsend: So my piece is spelled MYCO, and ology is the study of fungi. So mycomeditations.com. You can certainly check us out on Google, come to our website. A lot of our guests will make inquiries and we do a lot of chatting with our guests up front before they decide to sort of sign up and come here. So we're very approachable very easy to talk to my good listeners, so mycomeditations.com, and you'll find a number of interviews and podcasts and shows that I've done on YouTube as well. So that's the best way to find market meditations and use AI is as a tool to help you navigate this decision process as well.

Before we leave, I want to leave a couple of maybe analogies or metaphors that your guests may you listen, may relate to. So one of them is, and it rises outta the book, how to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollen, which is about psychedelics. And what he said neurologically, and this is a great analogy, is imagine you're standing at the top of a snowy hill and you have your toboggan and you keep writing down the hill in your toboggan, creating multiple tracks down the hill.

Eventually those tracks fall into one main groove. These are like the pathways of our brain and our habits. So, and we become, we can become very entrenched in our habits and rigidity and ways of being. And so when you take psilocybin, it's like a fresh sheet of snow coming down, filling up the groove and the tracks, and now allowing you to pick a new route down the hill.

So I think that's always been a very powerful description of this. And the other one I'd give you is from, there's a King's College London scientist that works on psilocybin, and he said, when you've been traumatized and you have a very rigid way of navigating the world. Your mind, your brain is rigid. How you perceive the world is rigid. You said imagine that the mind is like a series of high mountain tops and peaks and crags and deep low valleys before psilocybin. You have very few ways to navigate through that landscape because of the high mountain peaks and deep valleys. When you take psilocybin, it flattens that landscape. Now you can find many, many ways to navigate again, and what is really speaking to here is the ability of psilocybin to allow you to see old things in new ways, make a more informed decisions about how you're gonna be and where you want to go in life. So that's another very, very useful analogy as well. I find that most listeners should be able to, could be able to relate to. 

Michael Unbroken: Yeah. I think that's a beautiful way to pave it, for lack of a better way to say. I think that's very, very powerful and I encourage people to come and investigate and learn more, whether or not you go to a retreat, I know that your team will have a call with folks and help them make the right decision for themselves. And of course, guys, if you go to thinkunbrokenpodcast.com you can learn more about Justin and what they do. My last question for you, my friend, what does it mean to you to be unbroken?

Justin Townsend: Good question. Unbroken is on a word that I get to hear very often, right? So I'm getting my head around the impact and meaning of it. There was that book that was written as well.

To be unbroken, I think we come into the world whole and complete already, and then life happens, and we become broken in that process, and we become accustomed to that brokenness because it's all we know. And maybe that brokenness is our comfort zone. Maybe it's ugly in that comfort zone, but it's what we know, right? And to become unbroken means to repair the fractures, to become more complete and more whole again, is what I'd say. And psychedelics are certainly very powerful in creating that sense of wholeness and completedness again, versus our fractured selves that are trying to just survive in life. 

Michael Unbroken: Yeah. Brilliantly said, man. Thank you so much for being here. Unbroken Nation, my friends. Thank you guys so much for listening.

If today's episode brought you any value, someone in your life may need it too, please share it with them. 

And Until Next Time, My Friends.

Take Care Of Yourselves. Take Care Of Each Other. 

Be Unbroken. I'll See.