44: Lorna Liana on integration coaching and harm reduction in the Psychedelic Renaissance

Entheonation
Plant Spirit School
Plant Spirit Summit

LSD
Tibetan Buddhism
The Nyingma Institute
Dharma Publishing
Lucid dream
California Institute of Integral Studies
Ayahuasca
Chacruna
Caapi
Syrian Rue
Mimosa Hostilis
DMT
Robert Tindall
Susana Bustos
Wasiwaska
Jararaca snake
Huni Kuin
Jamie Wheal
Entheogen
NLP
Wachuma
Dr. Gabor Maté
Compassionate Inquiry
ICEERS
Condor Eagle Festival
Rupert Sheldrake
Maria Sabina
DMT study
Pscyhable
Psilocybin
Bufo
From Shock To Awe
The Way of the Psychonaut
The Song That Calls You Home
Neurons to Nirvana
How To Change Your Mind

Giancarlo: [00:00:00] Hello. Hi. Welcome to this new episode of the Mango TV podcast. Today I’m very excited to have Lorna Liana. Lorna is the CEO of Intheonation, a media company covering psychedelics, modern shamanism and visionary culture. My favorite topics. She’s also the founder of the Planet Spirit School, an online school offering workshops, programs, and one to one mentoring to individuals and professionals in the psychedelic and plant medicine sector.

The Plant Spirit [00:01:00] School Integration Coach Certification Program is designed to help plant medicine practitioners become thrive integration coaches in the psychedelic renaissance. Her latest venture, Plant Spirit Journeys, offer community oriented, culture based plant medicine healing retreats. In collaboration with Indigenous Wisdom Keepers, plant Spirit Journeys are designed to support integration professionals in cultivating their antigenic skills so that they may rise as leaders of the Renaissance.

Thank you very much for being here. 

Lorna: It’s such an honor to be here. Thank you for the invitation. 

Giancarlo: Yes, thank you. And your work is so important. You know, people think that you know the psychedelic renaissance. will just unfold harmoniously and smoothly by itself. But, you know, you need, uh, you know, this plant, you know, um, ontologically, they really belong to a different world.

So we really need to people like you to, to, um, to help [00:02:00] creating the structure and the container to integrate this, this, uh, practice in the Western world. So thank you for that. Um, let’s start from the beginning. So. I would like a little bit of your biography. Where were you born and how, you know, how did you get interested in plant medicine?

Let’s go a little chronology of your, of your background, if you don’t mind. 

Lorna: Well, gosh, um, I don’t know exactly where to start with the whole life story because I’m a international person, but I would, maybe I’ll start it in the beginning of my entheogenic awakening. So, um, at least 

Giancarlo: tell us where you 

Lorna: were born.

Oh, goodness. I was born in Ohio, but I didn’t live there. Yeah, so I was Don’t put down the Midwest. My wife is in the Midwest. I love There are so many changemakers 

Giancarlo: in the 

Speaker 4: Midwest. 

Lorna: It is true, but I think I would have ended up a different person, which is why I consider myself to be from California, the state that made me the adult that I am, with all of its [00:03:00] ideas, lifestyle, and, um, innovation.

Yeah, 

Giancarlo: but the, but the drive you had to leave was caused by, you know, by, by, by being born in the Midwest. 

Lorna: I’m not entirely sure. It was driven by my parents who decided to move to Hong Kong. 

Giancarlo: I see. And then I grew up in Hong Kong. How 

Lorna: long were you? I was there for about 10 years. In Hong Kong? In Hong Kong, yes.

From 0 10. Um, no, from age eight, so we left the United States when I was eight. We lived in different states, so we started in Ohio, then moved to New York, New Jersey, and then moved to Taiwan, then to Hong Kong, then I went to university in Washington, D. C. My parents moved to Shanghai. After I graduated from Shanghai, I, um, graduated from university.

After I graduated from university. No, in Washington, D. C. In Washington, 

Giancarlo: D. C. 

Lorna: So, after I graduated from university in Washington, D. C., I moved to Shanghai and had a [00:04:00] bit, bit of a, I moved to Shanghai and had a bit of a wake up call and then decided to move to California because I was starting to dream about going to California to study Tibetan Buddhism.

Giancarlo: Yeah, but so that’s, sorry, because this is, this is the thing I’m interested on. Can you elaborate on the wake up call? 

Lorna: Gosh, well, the wake up call was a bit tragic, actually, because the wake up call involved probably my first love in university, right? And this was an individual that actually turned me on to psychedelics.

He was half Belgian, half American, spoke fluent Chinese. We fell in love in university. He was also a deadhead, and so he gave me my first hit of LSD. 

Giancarlo: Grateful dead fan, yeah. 

Lorna: Yes, at that moment, my perception of the Grateful Dead completely shifted from redneck music to something completely out of this world, right?

So funny. [00:05:00] But I wasn’t quite into the Grateful Dead yet, so I went, I was a raver, so I went to an underground rave with my friends while he went off with his friends to a dead show, and it was in this underground rave. where I had this experience of oneness 

Giancarlo: with LSD, 

Lorna: with LSD. It was great LSD and first 

Giancarlo: time, 

Lorna: first time, first time, trails everywhere, K street, underground rave age, 19, 19, 

Giancarlo: 19, 19, beautiful, beautiful.

Lorna: Yeah, and so then, um, having experienced universal love and oneness in a rave that I never thought was even possible as a facet of human existence, I kept doing psychedelics in order to get back to that place, but I didn’t have the psychological groundedness to be able to really [00:06:00] And interestingly enough, I had great connections with people that had access to high quality MDMA and high quality LSD at that time.

And, uh, so the medicines that I was receiving were certainly, uh, you know, top notch. But I needed to do the psychological work to be able to really gain the benefits from it. And as psychedelics do, they tend to bring up past unhealed traumas to the forefront so that they might be healed. And I didn’t have the support.

If you recognize them, yeah. Right. I didn’t have the support at all. And when I was realizing, when I realized that my relationship with the psychedelics was not really a good one. Intuitively, I knew. I mean, it wasn’t really, yeah, it wasn’t really healthy. It wasn’t really, [00:07:00] it didn’t really have the support system.

So I did go to a psychotherapist in, uh, University, the university psychotherapist, to let them to, you know, seek support related to some of my unhealed traumas from my past. 

Giancarlo: That came out during the psychedelics? 

Lorna: That came out during the psychedelics. So predominantly because I struggled with suicidal ideation for a long time.

Wow. 

Giancarlo: As a teenager? 

Lorna: As a teenager, because I went to a British school in Hong Kong and I experienced daily racial harassment that I internalized and I had come to this belief that I didn’t belong in this world and that there was something inherently deficient about who I was as a Chinese person because it was a colony at the time.

Giancarlo: Yeah. You know, this is very common in teenager today. 

Lorna: Yes. Yes. And what I experienced was the trauma of colonization, essentially [00:08:00] systemic racism. Yeah. And because it was a colony still until 1997. Or just not belonging. Yes, you know, it’s interesting. There’s there’s a pervasive sense of not belonging in the world that I think is an attribute of industrialized society, but then there’s also the intersectional trauma and pain of having a system that indicates that some group of people is more uh, 

Giancarlo: Accepted.

Lorna: Accepted, superior, the people, and everyone else is an other. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. 

Lorna: Right. So I had the unhealed trauma of suicidal ideation, of internalized racism and oppression, colonization that was being brought to the surface. Yeah. And so when I shared with the university psychotherapist what I had been realizing and how I was realizing this through my use of LSD, he looked at me and said, LSD is bad.

Giancarlo: You were pretty precocious in your understanding of your [00:09:00] psyche because we’re talking 20, 25. You already understood that this LSD was bringing out this thing about your childhood and the suicidal ideation. Were you able to self diagnose yourself? 

Lorna: Well, I don’t think at the time I realized it was, this is how psychedelics work and this is why psychedelics are considered to be breakthrough therapies that have the potential to address the global mental health crisis that is taking place.

It’s getting worse at this time, right? But back then I didn’t really know. I just knew that I had it. A deep inner problem that needed to be resolved. So what I ended up doing was, I decided to stop doing any drugs. Because the therapist 

Giancarlo: was not helpful, he said stop immediately LSD. 

Lorna: Well, he, yeah, there was something that was, that was not resonating well with me with that advice.

He said, it’s bad, stop. And then I was thinking, how could something that connects me with universal oneness [00:10:00] and cosmic love. One of the most biggest, most brilliant peak experiences of my life. How could that be bad? Because fundamentally it was healing. That transpersonal experience. The feeling of ultimate belonging.

Unity. All of us are in this together. And there’s nothing that exists other than love. So I couldn’t really reconcile his belief that this was fundamentally bad. While that spiritual state was so profoundly transformational and healing. So what I decided to do instead, because I realized that the psychedelic exploration was destabilizing me, and that deep down inside I had this big underlying trauma that I needed to resolve, I decided that, I realized that there were three possible pathways.

The first pathway, conventional pathway, was talk therapy. [00:11:00] I kind of find talk therapy to have limited efficacy. The second pathway, antidepressant drugs. I didn’t want to be dependent on pills for the rest of my life. And the third pathway was to gain mastery over my own mind. And so that’s what I decided to do.

And so I went deep into Tibetan Buddhism and began to immerse myself in the scholarly study of ancient Tibetan texts. And study with different Tibetan lamas. And um, and then eventually I moved into a Tibetan retreat center in California and stayed there for three years. 

Giancarlo: Wow. Which one? Where? 

Lorna: The place is called the Nyingma Institute.

And it was started by Tarthang Tulku. And there are a number of non profit organizations related to his His, uh, work, yeah, Dharma [00:12:00] Publishing, Yeshe Day Project, which works on the preservation of ancient Tibetan texts and distributes those texts to the Tibetan community in exile in India and Nepal and, um, yeah, and the Nyingma Institute, which is the meditation center based in Berkeley.

Giancarlo: Yes. Go on. Then you went, after the three years, master of your own mind. Oh, okay. 

Lorna: So going back to that wake up moment, right? So I, so university, you know, realizing relationship with psychedelics, you know, not really so great. And then I graduated and I moved to Hong Kong. No, wait, no, I graduated, I moved to Shanghai, where my parents had moved, and I attempted to establish my postgraduate career there, but it was really feeling like it was not my place, first of all, because I fundamentally had an interest in spirituality, but post communist China was a very [00:13:00] materialistic place.

Most of the people that were there were trying to tap into this. incredible market opportunity of a post communist country with people that were dying to spend money and buy consumer shit, right? So I went there and found a hotel job. It was not really all that exciting. But then somewhere along the way, I had gone to a networking event of University, American University graduates and then I met somebody who worked in the same company as my ex boyfriend who had given me the LSD and when I asked her, Hey, do you know this person?

It was kind of interesting. She said to me. She started sharing with me all of these details about his life where it was as if somebody, yeah, it was, it was a complete stranger who understood details about his life [00:14:00] in Shanghai. And then she was telling me that he had died and he had fallen out of a window.

And that was a moment that was really a bit of a wake up call for me because just a month before I had a really profound lucid dream where he had visited me to apologize. And, um, and in that dream, when I saw him, it was kind of, I was opening door after door after door, trying to find him, and then the last door, he turned to me and said, and apologized, and then I forgave him, and then I had this incredible feeling of grace, and I woke up with that feeling of having, it was very discernible because the dream was also very detailed, And then the feeling was so powerful.

It was like waking up and being golden glitter, you know, divine dust was being rained upon me. And so I remembered that. And then a month [00:15:00] later, she told me that he had died around the time that I had the dream. And so then it really made me question, what am I doing? Why am I, is my, the purpose of my life just to make as much money as I, as I possibly can so that I could buy.

Stuff and have two cars and kids and then work until I’m 70 and then I die. I mean, is that really what it’s about? So I started to really question the purpose, my purpose, and in feeling into that purpose, I had this intuitive sense that I needed to go to California. So I moved to California. and didn’t know anybody, tried to establish myself there.

Within six months there was an opportunity to move into this Tibetan retreat center as a work study program and I did that and I stayed there for three years. 

Giancarlo: Amazing. And so when, when that finished you were how old, more or less? 

Lorna: Well, I would say that I was In [00:16:00] my early 20s, in my early 20s when that happened, and then eventually I left there too because there were some dynamics with the spiritual community that were, to be honest, quite cultish.

I had an opportunity to really focus my life and dedicate a huge amount of time to be able to meditate and study, which was a beautiful blessing and a privilege. But I also saw that there were dynamics that felt a bit unhealthy, which was a blessing. Also leads to certain reservations I have today about the expansion of psychedelic churches, especially in the United States, right, because there might be a potential for abuse there if there aren’t any checks and balances within the organization.

But going back to that journey, I spent some time after leaving the retreat center in the social enterprise sector and then the high tech sector, and then eventually I became, I got connected [00:17:00] to a group of Transcribed psychotherapists in training that were going to the California Institute of Integral Studies, which is one of the universities that has the leading, one of the leading psychedelic training programs in the world.

Giancarlo: Stan Grof was teaching there. 

Lorna: Yeah. And, but this was before I knew anything about psychedelic therapy, before these students. Graduated and became psychedelic therapist. Yeah. 

Giancarlo: But you were attracted to the transpersonal 

Lorna: Yes. 

Giancarlo: Format. Yeah. 

Lorna: Yes, and, and largely because this one individual announced at this birthday party that she was opening up a group of people that would come together every month to work with.

ayahuasca. And it happened to be a birthday party where we had the opportunity to announce what we were excited about, right? So there’s a very hippie style San Francisco, um, gathering. And so, yeah, it was really lovely. So we got a chance to hear about everyone’s different, exciting projects. And so this person, my dear friend, Marlo, had announced that she [00:18:00] was opening up a circle for a group of people to come together and together as a group over a period of a year or so continue to sit together.

Drinking ayahuasca. So I didn’t know her at all, but I approached her three times, and that triggered her internal decision making process. When somebody asks three times, then she says yes. So I asked her three times, was invited into this group, and was introduced, was introduced. Inducted into the world of ayahuasca with a non traditional analog brew that included chacruna, cappi, Syrian rue, and mimosa hostilis.

Giancarlo: All together? All 

Lorna: together. All together. It was wildly visionary. It was completely unlike any So 

Giancarlo: chacruna and mimosa for the DMT, and the cappi and the Syrian rue for the inhibitor. 

Lorna: Yes, yes, I believe that is the, I’m not really an [00:19:00] ethnobotanist, a pharmacologist, but yeah, two of the plants had the DMT, two of the plants had the inhibitor.

Yeah. Yeah, so that was a wildly visionary journey, completely profound, life changing. The realms that I visited in that world with such precision and clarity were unlike anything I’d ever experienced, and it was also profoundly healing, the visionary state itself. And yeah, and so it was that awakening. I sat with this group for several months, and it’s funny because they were also just beginning, and there were a lot of things that looking back were not entirely ideally safe or contained.

For example, they did overdose everyone. And it was a bit of a shit show. And now having learned more about what it takes to hold a safe container and what we teach in the plant spirit school, that experience was not that at all. [00:20:00] But 

Speaker 4: it worked for you. 

Lorna: It worked for me. I died. That was my ayahuasca death experience.

I think that’s also a profound experience that One can have, but it does involve drinking more ayahuasca than you can expect to tolerate, right? And, uh, and it can be a bit terrifying. And, yeah, and so then, at a certain point, several months in, after sitting with this group on a regular monthly basis, I felt inspired.

You would drink? Every month. Every month with the same group of psychotherapists and training, healers, you know, California hippie. That was 

Giancarlo: early on. That was, you’re like, at this point, you’re like in your late 20s, maybe? It’s 

Lorna: like, at this point, it was kind of Which year was it? It was like 2003, 2004. And then, one of the members of the group, um, His name is Robert Tindall.

He had, was writing on, he was working on a book. [00:21:00] It was then unpublished. It was called The Jaguar That Roams the Mind. His former partner, Susana Bustos, um, also is a faculty member at CIIS right now, teaching about the healing, um, the healing, Um, paradigms of the indigenous curanderos in Peru. She did her PhD with Juan Flores Salazar of Mayantuyacu.

So they were part of the community and I was feeling really called to go to Brazil to experience the living wisdom tradition with the indigenous, the living wisdom tradition of the ayahuasca with the indigenous who were the ancestral. caretakers and stewards of this medicine, of this knowledge. And he gave me the second chapter of his then unpublished book, The Jaguar That Roams the Mind.

I get to Brazil. I decide, I’m in Florianópolis. So I get to Brazil, I’ve got one month [00:22:00] off, and I’m trying to decide, do I hang out in Floripa? Because I was having a really good time, and it’s a bit like the Brazilian Santa Cruz, California. Or do I go to Acre, which is really far away from 

Giancarlo: Alberto Luna is his center in Florianopolis.

Eduardo Luna. 

Lorna: Yeah, so I just, you know, didn’t yet go attend his retreat. I was originally going to, but then Rescheduling didn’t couldn’t make it. So I ended up in Florianopolis anyway, and as I am journaling at night in front of in the patio of the hostel that I’m staying in, something in my intuition tells me.

And I look up, and I see a snake slithering up the stairs, completely silent. That snake had diamond patterns on its back. I watch it come towards me, [00:23:00] towards the picnic table that I was sitting, where I was sitting, and I got up and backed away, and it curled up right where my feet were. were. I sketched that snake and then the next morning I spoke to the retreat center owner and I was like, Hey, I saw the snake and it came up to me and I backed away, but I could have stepped on it if I hadn’t noticed it.

And he was like, that’s a jararaca. That’s one of the most venomous snakes in Brazil. The jararaca is one of the most venomous snakes in Brazil. And if you get bitten by the jararaca and do not get to a hospital to receive the anti venom within about an hour, you will die. I was like, oh, great. Well, it went into the kitchenette over there.

And so then I decided to email Robert, whose chapter of his book I had. And this was before the time of instant messaging, but he happened to be online at [00:24:00] a, um, internet cafe. outside of Juan Flores Salazar’s, so in Pucallpa. So he was staying in Juan Flores Salazar’s retreat center. And so in that moment, he was in Pucallpa at an internet cafe.

And so he’s answering me in real time. I was like, I don’t know if I should go to Acre or not, but I saw the snake. He was like, Lorna, go to Acre. Snakes have medicine. And indeed, the jararaca has medicine because that venom is used to provide the essential ingredients, the essential chemicals needed for anticoagulant medicines that are used around the world in most major hospitals.

Yeah, so it’s one of the tragedies, I guess, in terms of the fact that the drug development company that developed that Anticoagulant medicine never gave any royalties back to Brazil. So there is a sensitivity about [00:25:00] biopiracy along those lines around forest medicines, which I understand completely. But, in that journey, so I decide to go to Acre, and then I ended up getting invited to join two documentary film teams to document the Festival of the Royal Hawk, which hadn’t been celebrated as a tribal nation by the Huni Queen in 30 years.

And so we flew to Jourdan, well we flew actually, no we flew to Tarawaqa and then took two boats, three boats, five days to Jourdan. And yeah, that was a journey that completely changed my life. I was traveling with a group of people who I’m still connected to now. The person, one of the main people in one of the documentary film teams, his name is Chai Fernando.

He’s now a [00:26:00] member of Kudawaka. And yeah, so from that experience. He went on to be a medicine musician and spaceholder. I went on to be a psychedelic media publisher. Because during that time in the forest, after drinking ayahuasca for about four months with the Huni Kuin, with the Santo Daime community of Sildamapia, I started to receive a message from the forest around me, inviting me to step into my purpose and that invitation was to leverage emerging technologies to preserve indigenous wisdom so that ancient wisdom can benefit the modern world and emerging technologies can benefit indigenous people.

Giancarlo: Like a cultural exchange. 

Lorna: Yeah, so you know, technology, knowledge exchange, whatever that might look like. But I’ve been following that mission all these years. So that was your 

Giancarlo: download in your, those four months with the uni queen. And then [00:27:00] in, um, in my PR, you felt that you want to dedicate your life in helping, um, regulate the fair exchange between this practice and the West.

Lorna: Yes, I would say that what was significant for me, which is also something for anyone out there to consider, is that these sacred medicines have the potential to connect us to a deeper purpose, to why we came here. to this planet as spiritual beings having a human existence and when you drink enough of these medicines, if you drink enough of this medicine, and if you’re practicing this, the spirituality around this medicine in a grounded and in a high integrity, grounded way, then it can really open up new aspects to your life, connect you with your purpose, a sense of meaning that leads to a [00:28:00] lifetime of epic adventures and a life of absolutely no regrets.

Giancarlo: Absolutely. That’s very well said. That’s very well said. What might happen sometimes, and I’m sure we’re going to get into it, is that, and I would say seven, eight years, very often, maybe we would go, we had like a full on, I called, we had an ayahuasca practice. We, we would drink, you know, maybe doing two retreats a year plus some weekends here and there.

I think we drank, I don’t know, maybe a hundred times a year for like seven, eight years, my wife and I, and she was doing the work and she was getting better. In, in, in, in addressing her childhood stuff, I was more interested in the peak experience and the psychedelic glow in the morning, you know, and, and she’s, she was doing the work of turning the peak experience into plateau experience and, and bring the wisdom in [00:29:00] everyday life.

I was not really doing the work. So I felt, you know, Jamie will says that there’s now an epidemic of people, they call it, um, bliss whore. And the peak experience a dick addict and that’s, that’s a risk. You know, we know many people that keep on going back to do these ceremonies without really applying, you know, and sometimes I feel this plant medicine that like teachers and like any other teacher who takes the time to teach you things.

But if you don’t. Learn them and, and, and, and, and apply them, then the teacher lose interest in you and, and I took me a long time, but I finally realized that, you know, I was not getting anything because I was not really applying it because it’s for me, at least it was very difficult to get into this, you know, the, the, um, The ontological world of the indigenous wisdom is so [00:30:00] different than the West.

It’s very, you know, it’s very hard to integrate. You know, the indigenous wisdom, when they talk about the river, they truly feel that that’s my brother. They have this animistic concept that everything is connected. They have a truly understand of how connected we are. They have a truly understand of the other realm.

Of where we come from, where we might go, and they know how to interact in the secular materialistic Western world. If you talk like an indigenous, they label you as schizophrenic and they sedate you. So, you know, I was living in New York. I would go to the Amazon to two, three times a year and then You know, sometimes I can’t remember someone said, it’s like you take the flintstone, you take a caveman, you put in one day in Manhattan, and then at the end of the day, you say, okay, let’s integrate that.

It’s impossible. You know, it doesn’t know what all this means. [00:31:00] So, so that’s, I just wanted to comment on that because sometimes. what you hear nowadays, and that’s your job. You started a school to help people to integrate. So of course I want to, I want to hear from you, but sometimes I feel that, you know, sometimes integration takes a long time and also to take full advantage of this medicine.

People really needs to understand that they have to change their view of reality to take full advantage of that. They can’t keep on doing. the ego driven life and then keep on doing the ego dissolving practice. They keep on doing this Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. During the ceremony, they feel the ego dissolvement, they connect with the greed, but then they don’t know because also the shaman don’t have the language to teach them how to take this teaching of ego dissolvement and greed connection into everyday life.

And then Um, sometimes [00:32:00] if your everyday life include an office and a work and a hierarchical dynamics, which is all based on ego satisfaction, how do you reconcile that? I want, I want to hear your take now. 

Lorna: Well, so I first of all want to agree with you that integration does take a long time, especially if you really want to embody the transformation and the outcomes that you really deeply desire.

It is. A lot of work and continuous reprogramming your neural pathways, which are considerably more neuroplastic after the psychedelic experience. So the best time to start transformation to begin to truly heal is when you’re Your wounds to be able to change any types of self destructive patterns or self limiting narratives is the time after the ceremony and to be able to do that with the support of another individual, [00:33:00] because, hey, how disciplined are we right?

It really helps to have somebody else who is familiar with entheogenic states and who has tools. techniques, knowledge of different transformational modalities to be able to support you in that journey for a period of at least three to six months. For example, when there were two highly traumatic and stressful experiences in my life, I intentionally went out and sought an NLP coach to work with me in tandem with My ceremony work.

And at that time, I was drinking ayahuasca by myself. I was solo journeying. I’d go off for like, you know, do a solo journey maybe once a month. And then in between that time, I worked with an NLP coach to help me overcome and forgive. Overcome the incident and forgive the person responsible for the things that happened.

And the work was [00:34:00] so powerful that by the end of our six month time together, I had completely released myself of any emotional triggers, any underlying resentments, any anger that I had towards that person, to the point where I felt like if they were sitting right in front of me, I would have asked them, Hey, how are you doing?

Are you okay? And the resources that were stolen from me by this individual, I felt myself actually deep in my heart, energetically giving those resources to him because he needed, he was not well and needed them. that more than I did. 

Giancarlo: The shaman. 

Lorna: Well, no, no. So I had, um, uh, so 

Giancarlo: the guy, the sitter. 

Lorna: No, it was, um, no, I was, um, involved in a project with somebody who ended up breaking into my house and stealing things.[00:35:00] 

because they were addicted to crack, and I did not recognize that they had addictive challenges. Okay, so it 

Giancarlo: has nothing to do with the, with the, with the plant medicine. Well, it 

Lorna: did it. Well, it happened because I was drinking alone at the time, and I hired the NLP coach to work with me in between. And so that was the incident that I was trying to heal from the sense of violation.

of having somebody that I trusted break into my house and steal from me. I see. Yeah. The feeling of lack of safety. So this is why I think that the integration work is really the most powerful when you have somebody supporting your integration process over a period of time. 

Giancarlo: Someone from some western tradition?

or someone from the indigenous tradition. 

Lorna: If you’re a Westerner, probably somebody who is Western because they understand Western society and your mindset and the stresses and traumas of Western industrialized society. Yeah. 

Giancarlo: And also everyday life. If [00:36:00] you, if you live in a city, if you go back to work in a city, It’s very difficult for an indigenous shaman to help you integrate how to integrate these teachings into everyday life in New York, Washington, London, right?

Lorna: We have a deep need for bridge keepers, service providers and theogenic service providers who are culturally aware, who understand both modern therapy, therapeutic approaches and shamanic. approaches, ancestral shamanic approaches. And this goes to, um, another perspective that I really feel quite strongly about, which is, I think that the indigenous ancestral wisdom path has a lot That we can benefit from, um, as well as so the two worlds of ancestral wisdom and psychedelic therapy, [00:37:00] they can be really powerful when you integrate both approaches.

And let me give you an example around that. So just recently, I went to a conference of psychedelic therapists, Europe’s leading psychedelic therapists. I went to a conference in the Netherlands and we shared a ceremony. Which 

Giancarlo: they’re almost underground, except in Holland. 

Lorna: It was legal, legal truffle, legal truffle ceremony, right?

So totally above ground, transpersonal therapist, psychotherapist conference. But where 

Giancarlo: is it legal? Like Spain? And Holland, and that’s it. 

Lorna: Well, it’s not even really legal in Spain. No, sorry, 

Giancarlo: Portugal. 

Lorna: Portugal’s also decriminalized, right? So decriminalized is not the same as legal. So it’s important to understand the nuances of your local laws, right?

Especially when it comes to monetary exchange, because then that’s narco trafficking. 

Speaker 4: Yeah. 

Lorna: Right? So, anyways, this conference in, um, in the Netherlands really [00:38:00] exemplified the importance of integrating both approaches because it was a group of Europe’s leading psychedelic therapists in a Oaxacan velada ceremony using legal psilocybin truffles.

And so the whole space was conducted in a way that was both ancestral but also modern because there was a music, uh, there was a sound journey, um, being facilitated by a sound journey musician that whose purpose is to hold space for a and theodenic transformation. 

Giancarlo: Which in the Oaxacan tradition they don’t have.

Lorna: Which the Oaxacan tradition doesn’t have, right? So we had the Oaxacan altar, we had prayers, we had the sound journey, and a group of psychedelic therapists from Europe. And there’s something that is really profoundly healing on a deep spiritual level that I feel that this type of container can really offer.

That psychedelic therapy in a clinic, in a room with [00:39:00] soft lighting and blackout Shades and music in, you know, through your Bose headphones can’t necessarily address in a really deep way. So psychedelic therapy can be profoundly helpful and healing, but then it’s the ceremony, it’s the prayer, it’s the music, it’s the collective intention that really grounds that healing down to a spiritual level, which can open up portals to other experiences.

Doors of, through the doors of perception, right, alternative experiences that are very much a part of humanity’s capacity for consciousness expansion that I feel that, um, we don’t really fully appreciate in the psychotherapy or medical model. world. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. 

Speaker 4: Interesting. 

Giancarlo: Okay. [00:40:00] Let’s go back to your storyline a little bit.

Um, at which moment do we have the birth of intonation? At which moment did you become a real psychedelic media publisher? 

Lorna: Well, I must say that my first Online magazine was born after I got back from Brazil. I got, I went back to the United States and was ready to report to duty, to spirit, to learn how to leverage emerging technologies.

But I had zero. Technology experience. The only thing I could do was send email by pressing a button, right? So then I started to learn how to build websites, and I built my first online magazine. It was called Maridi. net, and I built it on Joomla, which didn’t really survive. WordPress is now king, right? So yeah, and so in going out and trying, so I was having all kinds of issues building this website, and I didn’t know what I was doing, so I started to [00:41:00] go out to all these technology networking events.

to ask some of the web developer type people, Hey, I’ve got this issue with my landing page looking really weird. And this was during the Web 2. 0 revolution. So, all of that networking actually led to a career in emerging technologies, um, uh, leading Enterprise 2. 0 initiatives at a, um, Top technology company in San Francisco.

So I did that, that for a few years. Just in the forefront of social media. High tech. 

Giancarlo: And you put Prime Medicine on the side for a bit. 

Lorna: I just, I, the, the, the, Maridi. net website wasn’t really going anywhere. Wasn’t really attracting traffic. Wasn’t monetizing, right? So I was in corporate for some time.

Working in social media. Emerging, um, Web 2. 0 technologies. And. Eventually, I decided that I needed to figure out how to make money online so that I could go [00:42:00] back to Brazil and spend long stretches of time in the Amazon with the indigenous, and so that became my mission while I was in corporate. Figuring out how to monetize websites, figuring out how to build a consulting agency, and so eventually, fast forward, I took all of the skills that I learned around emerging technologies and new media and put that towards, um, building Entheonation, which started as a podcast with some of the leading psychedelic experts.

Giancarlo: Wow, which year was that? 

Lorna: Gosh, that was in 2014. 2014, yeah. Yeah. You 

Giancarlo: were early on doing Ayahuasca, doing a podcast. 

Lorna: Yeah, one of, I was one of the earlier podcasts, now everyone’s got a psychedelic podcast, but we moved to a different model, so we’re doing more virtual summits these days, that are live events with a lot more engagement.

Speaker 4: Online. 

Lorna: Online, yes, online. Um, but yeah, so took everything I learned, poured it into creating a media platform, started as a podcast. This time I knew how to [00:43:00] drive traffic. And then I started to, I cracked the code to having a psychedelic business that doesn’t involve selling psychedelics. And that is info product marketing, essentially courses, workshops, conferences, online programs.

Giancarlo: Yeah. And so are you satisfied? So tell us a little bit. Let’s move to the second part of the conversation, more into your, um, your professional life. Um, so now into your intonation was occupying most of your time. It was a full time job. 

Lorna: Yes, it is a full time job. For a while I was doing. Kind of running two different businesses.

One was to transformational coaches, build an online business that is location independent, because I was living as a digital nomad for about six years, growing my business, living in, I lived in nine different countries. And, um, but at a certain point I [00:44:00] decided that it was a bit too much to do two different, to serve two different markets, so to speak, and so I decided to put all of my attention into Entheonation.

And, um, that’s been an evolution of learning what it is my community wants and being able to create offers and programs that speak to their needs. And, um, helps them resolve their challenges. And so that’s been a real process that I currently help clients with. Because we can have an idea about what people are willing to buy or interested in, right?

But if you’re not really listening to what the market wants, you can easily launch a program that people don’t want to buy, that you like, that you would do, you would buy, but other people won’t. And then you’re, you spend all that time building that program and then you launch it and it launches to crickets and nobody buys it.

And you’re back in square one. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. 

Lorna: Yeah. 

Giancarlo: But so just. Clarify for the audience into your nation into [00:45:00] your means God within right and and they use this term in, you know, Antigenic for the psychedelic practice as a as a as a sacrament So when you say into your nation, you’re thinking about a nation that that that has a sacred practice 

Lorna: Yeah, so Entheonation is a play on words, so it means the process of awakening the divine within.

And it also refers to a nation of people that are in the process of awakening the divine within. 

Speaker 4: Interesting. 

Lorna: So we speak to a community of plant medicine people that engage in the spiritual use of ancestral medicines, largely plant medicines and fungi, rather than MDMA, LSD, or ketamine. Or capsules. Yeah, wachuma as well, exactly.

So, yeah, so that, those are our people, plant medicine people. 

Giancarlo: And so, NTNation now curates a series of online events. How many per year? 

Lorna: Well, we have a [00:46:00] large virtual summit that we try to do at least once a year if we have capacity maybe. twice, but it’s really a very big production that invites expert speakers that are multidisciplinary that share their knowledge, experience and research with the community.

So we have in the past attracted a range of about 17, for the online conference, which is called the Plant Spirit Summit. And then we have smaller, um, online workshops and events throughout the year as well, uh, related mostly to topics of professional or vocational interest. For example, how to become a professional tripsitter, or ayahuasca safety and harm reduction.

And we also, um, introduce the community to different modalities that are popular in the psychedelic sector like, internal family systems. 

Giancarlo: But so just curiosity, but so who, how do you, [00:47:00] how do you pick your teachers to teach how to be an ayahuasca sitter? What kind of, what kind of class qualification do they need to have to be allowed to be also to be effective in teaching that?

Lorna: That is a very big question. And that’s a question that I like to invite people to really ponder because our education system is. colonized in a certain way, because when you think about it, these ancestral medicines have been used for at least a millennia by indigenous peoples, right? And many of the indigenous wisdom keepers don’t even have college degrees.

And yet in our Western culture. world, you know, westernized world, um, that places an emphasis of increased respectability, credibility and trust on the academic university education. It basically does not recognize the wisdom and experience that You know, [00:48:00] the, these living traditions have to bring to the table, right?

So does a person with a PhD, is that person more qualified and credible than somebody who’s been working in the underground for 20 years? So these are questions that I, that I bring to the, 

Giancarlo: bring up. You want my answer? I mean. Um, the expert of ayahuasca are expert with the, you know, the invisible world.

And this is not, it’s not something you can study in the university. I agree. That kind of knowledge comes from lineage and practice and, and, and so that’s why I was, I was curious to see, you know, how do you choose them? You know, I imagine this like people would have. Some sort of indigenous blood and indigenous lineage and maybe work in the Amazon for a long time.

But then also have people that have both. They have 20 years in the jungle and then maybe some, you know, [00:49:00] transpersonal psychology degree that then can integrate. There’s been a recent scandal now, right? So a company just went bust. They were like licensing people. What’s the name? Synthesis. Synthesis. And I remember my friend was like, Oh, you know, I’m doing a certificate.

I was like, but who’s giving the certificate? A bunch of white men. Also, they did even, you know, maybe 20, 30, 40 years, this psychedelic Western white psychedelic sitter, they will have the experience because of the practice. But now it’s just a handful of underground therapists. I think this is a profession that has not been developed, he’s developing now.

Lorna: It is. It’s a, we’re at the, we’re at the bleeding edge of this exciting new professional sector. 

Speaker 4: Yeah. 

Lorna: But, you know, from my perspective, I think it’s important to have people with different skills and experience. So for the plant spirit school integration code certification program, we select, [00:50:00] um, We tend to have more faculty that have experience serving clients because our students want to work with clients and support them in integrating entheogenic states.

So we don’t really gravitate towards the PhD or the researcher that’s authored a whole bunch of university and academic papers. No 

Giancarlo: scholars, more like therapists, hands on therapists. 

Lorna: Both, you know, even also in people who are non therapists who have been working in the underground or working in Peru, supporting People that are attending plant medicine retreats, you know, as space holders, as retreat organizers, and then also as integration.

Yeah, with practical experience. Exactly, exactly. Because all kinds of weird scenarios arise, and you’re going to need to know how to deal with it. 

Speaker 4: Yeah. 

Lorna: That’s the most important thing. 

Speaker 4: Yeah. 

Lorna: And then when it comes to trying to invite, um, the perspectives of indigenous, that’s something that we absolutely love to do.

We do need translators. that can help with translating [00:51:00] Spanish or Portuguese, because a lot of the indigenous wisdom keepers don’t speak English very well. So that’s another piece of, um, the, yeah, another approach that we have. And our retreats, Plant Spirit Journeys, we intentionally partner with indigenous wisdom keepers so that our students or aspiring integration practitioners can have an embodied experience ancestral medicines within a cultural container.

Giancarlo: Yeah, that’s so interesting. This work that you’re doing is so important. You know, what, what I’ve witnessed myself that worked very well is to have two people. So, you know, Gabor Mate, he was hosting retreat in Yelapa, Mexico. together with a shaman, a Shippibo shaman who has done the work with the Shippibo for a very long time.

And they would work together. So you will have the ceremony at night with the Shippibo rituals. And then during the day you would have [00:52:00] Gabor group therapy working on, you know, the compassion inquiry and childhood trauma. What do you feel in the body? And that worked because sometimes you would see Gabor, you know, navigating the psyche of the participant and finding energetic, uh, maybe energetic notes that then the shaman would also find a night, you know, there was like a nice tandem that worked well.

But that’s because Gabor has a, an approach, which is, you can almost call it energetic because his whole idea is that this childhood trauma, they create an energetic armor that then can be dissolved by doing the somatic work and moving them through the body. So, so the, the Gabor Matter Compassion Inquiry, I think it can be integrated very well with the plant medicine world.

But you know, when, when you [00:53:00] get this like, you know, more Freudian Manhattan upstate psychologist. That is all here. That’s become almost, you know, ontological incompatible, you know, if you think about it, this psychologist, you know, when it’s almost, it’s two different words, like it’s in traditional psychology.

It’s, it’s secular. You cannot bring God into it. You can’t even, you know, we’re talking, you can’t even invite the client to offer a coffee, right? You, you can’t have contact in outside world. You can’t mention God. There’s no empathy, there’s no hugging, there’s no rapport. That’s, it’s the more I have to be detached to the extent that I cannot even have a coffee with you.

There is no spirituality because we’re in secular environment. Whereas the pity is all about, you know, trusting the shaman and, and open up. Due to the trust with the shaman, with the therapist, and it’s all about surrender to a biggest force. So they’re almost like [00:54:00] cannot be more incompatible, right? So it is really challenging to reconcile Western psychology with, with plant medicine, but, but you’re, you’re, you’re doing, you’re doing it.

Tell me, tell me more. Tell me more. Well, we 

Lorna: like to work with therapists that also have a understanding and respect of the unseen world. They’re out there. Exactly. Yeah. 

Giancarlo: Exactly. The idea of the, of the, but what about, what about, so to what extent your co, your, you know, certification coach need to subscribe to this idea?

of a cosmic intelligence, of a divine design. 

Lorna: Well, our school integrates modern therapeutic approaches with ancestral shamanic approaches. So, because here’s the thing, right? These transpersonal

inducing entheogenic medicines have a tendency to [00:55:00] open up an individual to paranormal experiences. Now, how do you address paranormal experiences from a purely psychotherapeutic framework? It’s very difficult, right? 

Giancarlo: It’s just impossible. Right. 

Lorna: Yes. 

Giancarlo: You just label us as a psychotic and they give you medication.

Lorna: Or it’s just an aspect of yourself, which, you know, could certainly be true, but the individual’s experiencing it as an external force. You know, if you’ve ever heard of those stories of people going to ayahuasca retreat in Peru and bringing home entities, and now the entity is hanging out in the living room and they don’t know what to do about getting rid of the entity.

And so then that’s where shamanic approaches can be effective, which may involve blowing mapacho smoke at it and or certain kinds of practices and prayers that can be quite efficacious for people. And so to be able to have that kind of respect opening appreciation for ancestral techniques that haven’t who’s who can’t be that can’t be measured by [00:56:00] scientific measures that can’t be measured with scientific equipment or clinical studies or any of that because it’s all non ordinary states of consciousness.

Giancarlo: Yeah. Yeah. Anyhow, well done for doing this work is so important, but so where are you at now in your life with all this, um, your different business and, uh, what’s, what’s next for you? 

Lorna: Well, I mean, I feel that. We still have this mission to be able to expand awareness of the importance of, um, the healing benefits of ancestral plant medicines when used with respect, responsibility, and integrity.

Integrity, yeah. And one of the things that I’ve been noticing in the plant medicine community, certain problems that are much more prevalent in the plant medicine [00:57:00] community than in psychedelic therapy world. And these are, um, first of all, um, the absence of integration after a ceremony. So how often have you been to a plant medicine ceremony?

That’s amazing. And then after that, It’s just done, like there’s no community, you’re completely on your own, you know, even like sometimes you’re like having the most horrendous purge outside and nobody comes to check in on you from the core community. So there’s a lot of that happening and I feel that, um, I, I feel really inspired to use my platform to leverage my company and my school to be able to.

increase an understanding and appreciation for why these plant medicine circles, these entheogenic churches, um, that are being hosted everywhere actually, could be really powerful focalizing centers for community building, but also integration support. So we want to really work with [00:58:00] plant medicine people and help elevate their, um, their leadership abilities to serve in their own communities.

Big problem. So important. 

Giancarlo: Thank you for doing that. 

Lorna: Yeah, yeah. Thank you for seeing that. And the second really important thing is, um, big problem, sexual abuse in the plant medicine sector. And there is this, um, you know, cultural clash. Sometimes you have wisdom keepers coming from cultures that are much more machista, and they don’t understand the importance of maintaining sexual boundaries.

Um, with themselves and the people they’re administering medicine to. And this is where having that hybrid co facilitation team of Western space holders, could be the venue host, could be the organizer, could be their community, plus the indigenous wisdom keepers working together as a team. That can be really powerful because then there can be some expectations and boundaries set for the visiting healers that may not understand Western [00:59:00] culture and what’s considered to be appropriate, inappropriate, abusive, you know, that kind of thing, right?

And then the third piece that I also see, which is not necessarily recognized as much, but the propensity for financial abuse. So one thing that I see often in the plant medicine community, is, let me give you an example. I was at a retreat center. Retreat center had, um, works with indigenous wisdom keepers, just really strong partnership with different indigenous pageus, so to speak.

And, um, And then this retreat had a number of high level people with tremendous abundance and influence from Europe, um, the United States, Turkey, and we were all there in a collective prayer to explore how we might be able to further, um, healing, um, Consciousness, a shift in the political, [01:00:00] um, the policies around, uh, psychedelic, um, psychedelic use, the drug laws, essentially, and, uh, and during this retreat, in the middle of it, the chief was sharing a need to be able to fund a particular project in their village, and um, um, uh, and to fund this project.

You know, I get that there is a need in the village and I get that indeed everyone there like would love to support and all that within maybe 30, 30 minutes they raised 15, 000. Right. However, um, in the psychedelic therapy world that would be considered out of integrity because everyone’s in a highly suggestible state.

States, suggestible states, and to raise, raise large sums of capital with people before the retreat’s over is considered to be, yeah, like financially manipulative. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. Opportunistic. 

Lorna: Yeah. You know, but of course, you know, everyone wants to help. Yeah. And, you know, the [01:01:00] organizers didn’t see it that way and I get that, you know, but I think, you know, how do you address those issues and how do you introduce or invite a better way?

Giancarlo: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So important. But you know, I see years Geronimo and Ben, they’re doing good work. They just came out with a, with a, with a workshop. on how to, um, you know, on how, how to facilitate a ceremony following this principle of integrity and honesty. And, um, yeah, this is very important. Thank you so much for your work.

But so, um, and where are you personally, what’s your relationship with this entheogenic? Are you still checking in with the medicine once in a while? Do you have a regular practice? Where, where is your relationship with that? 

Lorna: Well, these days I tend to sit in ceremony with community. So if there are indigenous pages that are traveling who I know and have a longstanding relationship with out of respect, honor and love for them, I [01:02:00] will.

Make do my best to participate in their ceremonies. 

Giancarlo: Ayahuasca and mushroom and wachuma. 

Lorna: Yeah, so you know, it kind of depends, right? So just recently I went to the Condor Eagle Festival in Brazil. Yeah, 

Giancarlo: Alto Paraíso. 

Lorna: They are My spiritual family, it felt so good to be reconnected with everyone. Oh my goodness.

And it was like quite a lot of ceremonies, right? So yeah, so something like that is a lot of Medicine consumption within a short frame of time. Yeah, and then other times it might be I might be busy working Following my purpose building my business, you know and offering educational programs and that is, you know, that involves my time and energy.

So it may be months before I have another ceremony. Yeah. Because remember the most important work is the integration work between the journey. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. Yeah. I just, I just got a bit of nostalgia because I think I went to the very first Condor Eagle. I think it was 2008 maybe. And then I [01:03:00] went every year for the first two, three, four years.

And he was at the very beginning of my exploration and there was so much excitement and and hope and mystery and, uh, and there still is, but the movement is more mature now, you know, but back then it was like, Oh my God, I discovered this, you know, say Santo Graal or something. I thought it was like, uh, anyhow, I just wanted to share that.

Um, listen, dear Lorna, we passed the one hour. Let me, um, a little bit of practical thing. Okay. So people listen to us. They want, uh, so who are your clients? People that want to know more. People that want to serve medicine, people that want to learn, can you address the different category of people that, you know, are interested on your work and tell them where to find the different things, the different websites?

Lorna: Absolutely. So our Ideal, [01:04:00] our ideal clients, students, customers, people that are the most interested in the programs that we offer, they tend to self identify as plant medicine people, people that are feeling a calling. They’re often receiving messages, invitations through their dreams, through their journeys, that they’re meant to be serving.

Now in a much bigger way. So they’re looking to be able to parlay their years of experience with sacramental plant medicines to an above ground, more visible vocation, especially now that the psychedelic sector is expanding. And there is this Um, exciting emergent service, um, service sector. And those people might be transformational coaches, executive coaches, people that already have a, a coaching business that have been practicing using plant medicines for personal spiritual reasons that now want to bring this transformational modality to their own clients.

[01:05:00] So existing coaches, um, executive coaches, because. leadership, um, ayahuasca and other plant medicines can be really powerful leadership tools, authentic leadership tools. We also attract people that are psychotherapists that don’t want to maintain their license because it gives them more freedom to work as a coach, especially as an integration coach, because in the United States and in other places, psychotherapy is a licensed profession and you can Lose your license and be penalized if you are found to be guilty of administering controlled substances to your clients or even advocating that they break the law and procure controlled substances.

So some of the psychotherapists that want to be working in the psychedelic sector may choose to let go of their license. We also have, um, attracted to the Plant Spirit School, uh, doctors, nurse practitioners, and, um, [01:06:00] uh, holistic healers, Chinese, uh, traditional Chinese, um, medical medicine practitioners and, um, you know, folks that consider themselves to be shamanic practitioners.

We work with people that primarily want to share the healing potential of ancestral plant medicines, such as ayahuasca, huachuma, and psilocybin, and they’re not as interested in working with MDMA. LSD or ketamine. And these are people that are, that really value indigenous wisdom. They value cultural experiences.

They see that these cultural experiences, the shared collective prayer, can be profoundly healing in ways that are deeper than clinical therapy. 

Giancarlo: Can you elaborate on that? Why do you think that? Why the cultural framework is more, can be more effective? 

Lorna: Because I think the cultural framework [01:07:00] recognizes an aspect about ourselves that Western science denies.

It is our capacity for expanded, non ordinary states of consciousness. And our, um, our reality or, or lived experience as spiritual beings having a human experience. Right. We’re not just a walking brain with emotional emotions that are controlled by brain chemistry, right? There’s you know, and these medicines open us up to a lived experience that there’s something so much bigger than what we see with our basic senses our five basic senses 

Giancarlo: a Consciousness field 

Lorna: a consciousness field that is sacred.

Yeah, that is divine that is unified. Yeah 

Giancarlo: And which is not produced by the brain. 

Lorna: Yes, that is not produced by the brain. 

Giancarlo: It’s a divine primordial field that the brain connects [01:08:00] to. You know, the brain is not, it doesn’t produce consciousness, it regulates consciousness. It’s like a radio, it’s like a TV set.

You know, the signal is out there, but the brain allowed to connect with the frequency but doesn’t. create the frequency. That’s my belief. And that’s the back this big difference between the believer and nonbeliever, right? In the secular materialistic world, they think the consciousness epiphenomenon of the brain, right?

You ask scientists and neuroscientists, traditional neuroscientists, they, they publicly, they would say, you know, there’s no evidence that there’s any conscious out there. When the brain reaches a certain level of complexity, it creates consciousness, you know, the stand growth and, and, and, and, and many consciousness, um, um, researcher believe that, you know, if you believe that there is some sort of life after that, then, then you believe that, you know, [01:09:00] consciousness is not created by the brain, but it’s out there.

So to go back to why. And I completely agree with you that, you know, San Pedro Ayahuasca, they have thousands of years of practice. Why can that be more effective than maybe a ketamine or a substance without a cultural tradition? You know, Rupert Sheldrake would say that those thousands and thousands of years of practice created some sort of field, like a morphogenetic field.

That when, it’s like even going to a church, when you enter a field that has been done similarly for thousands of years, it’s like an accelerated tunnel to the field. You know what I mean? Have you heard about Rupert Sheldrake’s morphogenetic field theory? 

Lorna: I have not heard about that theory. 

Giancarlo: Yeah, you would love it.

You would love it. 

Lorna: Well, I also want to bring up the, the Phenomena of the spirit of the plant and the fungi, and this is [01:10:00] something that the indigenous recognize as the plants and the fungi being even more ancient beings with considerably more wisdom than humans. And so it’s that relationship with the plant spirit and, you know, I don’t know how many times.

You may have experienced the consciousness of the ayahuasca, the consciousness of the huachuma, the consciousness of the psilocybin, and then compare that with an experience on MDMA or LSD. I feel like those psychedelics increase potentiality. But I don’t ever feel that there is the spirit of the MDMA. I just feel like I’m talking to my higher self, but with the plant medicines, I feel like I’m in communication with another entity.

And that’s also a very interesting distinction. 

Giancarlo: It’s fascinating. But, you know, there is this story that, um, when, uh, they gave Maria Sabina, um, curandera from Mexico, um, synthesized mushroom, [01:11:00] synthesized salasabin, she said, yes, there is spirit. 

Lorna: That’s interesting, but is it the 

Giancarlo: complete spirit? Maybe or maybe spirit calm.

It’s very complicated. And now recently this researcher from the Imperial College of London They’re doing a study with extended states DMT I 

Speaker 5: just saw David Luke at the conference 

Giancarlo: David told me that they just discovered that there is one mushroom that produce a compound to basically, uh, distract the worm, more than distract them, to sedate the worm so the mushroom can eat them.

And this compound is molecularly identical to ketamine. 

Lorna: Ooh, fascinating. 

Giancarlo: And so, so all of a sudden, yeah, I mean, you know, Rick Dublin from MAPS, he says that, um, you know, if the molecular structure is [01:12:00] identical. Who cares if nature made it or the lab made it? 

Lorna: But yeah, but the natural organisms have so many more compounds that are part of its ecosystem.

The 

Giancarlo: entourage effect. Yeah, the entourage, exactly. So 

Lorna: then you have to ask yourself, like, what role does the entourage play? 

Giancarlo: Yeah. Yeah. But so, this is so fascinating, this conversation. I think that, um, you know, because so many people wants to Okay, let’s finish, let’s finish on um, you address very clearly who are your customers, where they can find you.

Lorna: You can, if you’re interested in our training programs, go to plantspiritschool. com If they’re interested in the conference, plantspiritsummit. 

Giancarlo: com Anything else? If they’re interested in integration? 

Lorna: Well, so the integration training program is hosted on plantspiritschool. com. But if you just want general information [01:13:00] about plant medicines, psychedelics, they can go to entheonation.

com. We have loads of articles, eBooks, podcasts there. 

Giancarlo: Amazing, amazing. Again, thank you so much for doing this work. Okay, let’s conclude. I would like to ask you this. Okay. Like even my brother, for example, he hasn’t done, you know, he’s five years younger, has done any mentee agents in his life. Few months ago, he did the DMT and he was not prepared.

He was, he was intense. You know, he never spend any time. It doesn’t have the ontological. knowledge to integrate this out of body experience in going and seeing the pyramid and whatever you saw. And so for him, he was a little bit of a shock and you know, we spoke, I helped him integrate and now a few, six months has passed by and now he’s saying, okay, so now I would like to revisit.

My question is [01:14:00] to someone who has no experience, but is bombarded by the media about, you know, there is, there is a, there is a counterculture. There is a, there is a, there’s a movement now, right? The plant medicine movement. You know, if you Google plant medicine, there is conference books. Um, you know, there is so much happening.

What recommend if someone who doesn’t have any prior experience with this plant medicine, and decided to, okay, I want to try, what would you recommend they do? 

Lorna: Well, so I think it just depends on the type of person, right? So there’s people that will do their own research and then they will read up as long as much as they can.

So I was one of those people. I read up as much as I could and it was. quite a while before I met people that I trusted who could help open the portal for me, right? But if you don’t have that [01:15:00] greater community of people, let’s say you don’t have a bunch of hippie friends who can introduce you to the person that grows the beautiful, sacred, magic mushrooms with prayer and song, um, Then maybe you might want to actually look for a professional that can support you in the preparation and the integration and help you find a community or a facilitator or a retreat center that you can Go to for your experience.

And 

Giancarlo: where do they find the professional? 

Lorna: There are directories So for example, I helped launch a directory called psychable. com. That’s P S Y C H A B L E Yeah, we’ll put it on the show notes. Yeah. Yeah, so I led the minimal viable product launch for that company and, um, most of the people that are listed in that directory are, um, psychedelic friendly or working as integration therapist or coaches.[01:16:00] 

Giancarlo: Or I was thinking maybe to recommend one of these legal retreats in Holland or in Portugal. There is this Silos Abin retreat. I forgot the name now. It’s like three, five days. The legal. They do, uh, quite a thorough selection process, um, acceptance process integration. Have you heard of anyone that would you recommend?

Lorna: Yeah, it’s a bit tricky to recommend retreats, kind of like it’s tricky to recommend shamans. Like one person’s guru is another person’s sex predator, for example. Yeah, but you know, the legal 

Giancarlo: one, the legal one. 

Lorna: Uh, there’s some problematic legal ones too that have like And like phenomenal reviews that have all kinds of shadow and underneath that you wouldn’t necessarily know unless you know the people that work there.

So that’s kind of why I’m a little bit more reserved, but I think fundamentally, you know, it’s it’s guiding the person in for an integration specialist. It would be. involve guiding the person to make the best choice for [01:17:00] themselves. And that also involves choosing the medicine that would be most effective in helping them resolve whatever problem they want to resolve or achieve the desired outcome they want to achieve.

Right. And so that is medicine based and not, and you know, in the places where there are legal retreats, they, it might only be legal for a particular medicine like psilocybin. or ayahuasca in Peru. So, so it has to really start from what are you trying to resolve? 

Giancarlo: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, you, you have a very good answer.

It depends what type of person you are. Do you, are you more doing your work on your own or trusting someone? And two, why are you doing it? Is this, do you have some symptoms that you want to address? Or is just for Life improvement. Do you have, you know, debilitating symptoms, you know, depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation.

Do you have, you know, um, anorexia? Um, [01:18:00] and so it’s difficult because, you know, my wife is a psychotherapist and, uh, sometimes, you know, her clients, they want to explore things, but then they own psychologies. They’re not open to it. They don’t understand it. So it’s very tricky. But what do you think about the very simple advice to just, you know, find the right professional, find the person you trust, don’t be in a hurry.

Spend time with different facilitators, sitters, see which one you feel comfortable with, but then just go gradual. You know, don’t do five grams of mushroom immediately. You know, do start with one, integrate, then you go to two, then you go to three. You know, ayahuasca is a bit more tricky. For some reason, ayahuasca is the one that you never know what’s happening, right?

But I think for example, mushroom is more predictable. 

Lorna: Yeah, I mean, the thing about ayahuasca is, you know, the dosages can really vary in effect for different people. Because of the density. Well, you know, How it’s cooked. It depends on so many factors, like how [01:19:00] it’s cooked, but also how open you are. So you could have, like, the same dosage for two different people, and then one person doesn’t feel anything, and the other person’s, like, journeying for hours, right?

So, um, but I do think that, you know, starting gradually, so you familiarize yourself with the effects and how to navigate, because I think, you know, for example, when it comes to really strong psychedelics like bufo, I personally think that it’s, it’s, you know, could be better for a lot of people to ease into it.

Start with microdosing it first before you do your breakthrough bufo experience, which can be quite terrifying for people. And then you end up traumatized for months afterwards, right? 

Giancarlo: Particularly, I know five people personally that I had the after effect for months, like, you know, negative, negative flashbacks and fear and feeling attacked.

Yeah. Having me was a tricky one. So I would start, uh, I would start small for sure. And then if you allow me a little promotion on Mango TV, there is Neurons from [01:20:00] Nirvana. That is a good introductory documentary. There is this, um, shock to all for therapeutical use, uh, the song that brings you home about again, um, history of a, of a, of a, of a kid going through a shamanic awakening.

Um, I forgot now, but we have a section on, on psychedelic medicine. 

Lorna: Mm hmm. Yeah. My friends are in that too. So yeah. How delightful. I haven’t seen. These movies. Yeah, but I look forward to it. 

Giancarlo: Yeah, and then and then it’s not a mango TV, but my friend Lucy Walker Adapted Michael Pollan book for Netflix on how to my god amazing.

Yeah. 

Lorna: Yeah, that’s a really great series. I was very Pleasantly surprised. Yeah, but there’s a part of me that’s just kind of like, okay I were this is like watching a documentary about my work 

Speaker 4: Yeah, 

Lorna: and sometimes you want like some distance from working it but then I watched and it was like wow This is really good.

And I watched it with my dad too. Yeah And at one point, my dad was like, Lorna, [01:21:00] so these micro doses, do you know where I could 

Giancarlo: get some? Actually, that’s not, you were saying, you were saying with Favemio to start micro dosing, but maybe with everything, I would start micro dosing. Maybe start with the Fadiman protocol of psilocybin micro dosing.

So buying the, the Fadiman book on, on, on. On, on this protocol of microdosing. I think it’s 0 15, 0 15, uh, two days in a row every four days, something like that. And, and, and just try that. This is something that you can do on your own because it doesn’t, you know, microdosing really means subception, so, so you are not really feeling it.

It has an effect on your life. But when you take it, it qualifies microdosing me that is sub perceptual, so maybe that’s the advice. Start with microdosing. 

Lorna: Yeah, it’s definitely easier to go to work on a microdose. 

Giancarlo: [01:22:00] Okay, great. Lorna, thank you very much. It’s almost 1 hour 30. Is there anything that we haven’t covered that you want to mention?

You sent me a few notes. I don’t know if we covered that. 

Lorna: Yeah, I feel good. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much for the opportunity. I feel we’ve shared a lot. And yeah, I feel like we had a moment to share a lot and, you know, thank you so much for having me on your show. 

Giancarlo: Pleasure, pleasure. And we’ll check again next year and see how things develop on this crazy psychedelic renaissance.

Lorna: Yes, absolutely. Thank you very much. Peace. All right. Bye for [01:23:00] now.