Ayahuasca Talks

Judith and I share our thoughts on the true nature of the long and often challenging path of integration. It can become a way of life. We share about our patterns and how they often continue to emerge in different ways to remind us and to help us work on these things as part of our integration. It can be difficult when patterns emerge again and it's important to remember that we have made progress and that this is part of growth. We explain the importance of self-compassion, support and community.

We discuss a more expansive concept of illness that we discover through Ayahuasca. We talk about both individual illnesses and how this relates to the greater illness of humanity and the opportunities we have to heal it. The ACEs study that is known to the mainstream world of medicine indicates a clear connection between childhood abuse/trauma and illness. Dr. Tafur talks about getting to the root cause of illness and how this unfolds with medicine and work with various medicines including Ayahuasca. Conditions like depression and crohn’s disease can be messengers bringing into our awareness something deeper that needs to be healed. We discuss the importance of agreeing to move on once we have sufficiently grieved. Dr. Tafur emphasizes that people need to feel a sense of agency for them to be well and we talk about how spiritual practices can provide that agency.

Kyle shares his NDE (near death experience) and his spiritual emergence following this event. We talk about our individual experiences of spiritual emergence/emergency and Kyle provides an explanation of the difference between the two. We discuss the similarities between NDEs and medicine experiences as well. We talk about the pull that we often feel to be back in the blissful/peaceful states we can experience in NDEs and medicine/psychedelic journeys. We discuss the difficulties navigating spiritual emergence without guidance. Kyle reflects on what he has learned about spiritual emergence and different ways of referencing it such as 'exceptional experiences' so as to invite other ways of viewing these extraordinary states that many experience in such different ways. We touch on discovering our own unique and special gifts which can be an important part of our identity and purpose. Although spiritual emergence can happen spontaneously, it can also follow medicine/psychedelic experiences and this emphasizes the reason for not entering into these ceremonies or into psychedelic states lightly. We talk about fear of change and how change and openness is a healthy yet challenging part of this journey of personal and societal growth.

Sebastien Fouillade of Leadershipedelics & Rebecca Hayden discuss living more authentically. Plant medicine experiences often emphasize our uniqueness and how important it is for us to discover and honour our authentic selves – to live our lives accordingly and to reflect this in everything we do. We talk about our personal experiences of self discovery and the process of becoming more authentic. We discuss the resistance we encounter and how this and many other triggers along the way can be opportunities for growth and serve as sign posts to guide us in the right direction. We share about the gifts and possibilities that authenticity can bring to our lives and how discovering and using our unique abilities can help us create a more harmonious and rich social experience.

Xiaojue & Rebecca discuss the 'fawning' response to trauma which is a lesser known characteristic of trauma behaviour. They talk about their own experiences of this response and the impact it has had on their habits and personal growth. The discussion touches on different aspects and root causes of this response, everyday examples and the larger implications of this on a societal level. 

This special episode features a discussion about exploring and shedding the darkness within to achieve a more joyful and loving existence. Rebecca Hayden describes experiences of confronting and letting go of dark energies while in different states after medicine experiences. This is a discussion that took place with Michael Kokal in 2020 and delves into the possibilities of what can be achieved in meditative, sleep and hypnogogic states involving profound transformational confrontations with dark entities and the work that is achieved through doing this. This is also a discussion about the everyday experiences we have in this life that can be described as 'dark' and how doing this work involves letting go of these kinds of thoughts and behaviours which helps us to feel lighter and happier.

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This discussion is about healing from the inside out through challenging times. We talk about outer reflections of things that we need to heal - issues such as control which is coming up a lot now. We discuss moving through trauma into empowerment. Other topics such as shadow work and empathy come up as we discuss our own healing journeys and tools that anyone can use to help them through these difficult times. We end by emphasizing the power of humour and harnessing this to help us move through our healing journey.

Visit www.rebeccahayden.com for more Ayahuasca Integration content.

Katherine shares some of her story and how she came to practice personal sovereignty. We discuss the struggles and gifts that have come with this unprecedented time and share the lessons that most resonate because of it. We touch on things like 'psychic attacks', give everyday examples and reveal how even this kind of experience can make us stronger. We talk about our experience with depression and how it helped us heal. We discuss how we make decisions, conscious and unconscious agreements, personal power, responsibility and surrender.

Angela and I discuss connecting with inner wisdom to make sense of conflicting in–formation. Inner knowing always helps us recognize truth. We offer ideas of ways to connect with what is ‘yes’ or what our own truth feels like in our body or in our experience. We discuss how this is an exciting time as it is an invitation to grow beyond where we’re at now. We liken this time to the great detox and what we often experience as the Herxheimer reaction when we’re making progress. We talk about the importance of joy and allowing ourselves to feel this as a means to take us to a healthier state. Learning and growing can be joyful. We can achieve accelerated growth if we embody the lessons and principles we offer our children. We agree on how powerful it is to focus on the things that make us feel good and inspired, how this improves our inner state, which reflects outward. When we focus on what we wish to unfold in our lives, we at times will come up against how we get in our way, and this is the work of the healing path to achieve those things. We talk about the fact that when we aren’t ready to do this kind of work that the opportunities will continue to present themselves in our lives until we are ready or until we do. We talk about defensiveness, what we can learn from it and how we can respond in better ways that lead to better outcomes.

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Shannon & I discuss our current social polarization as an opportunity for us to confront and heal some underlying issues that have impacted our social experience for a long time. We talk about control stemming from fear and the conditioning legacy that is revealed through typical childhood and parenting experiences. We provide examples of how we can change this and how we can approach this time in a way that may help us to bring about a more harmonious existence. We talk about labels, how dehumanizing they can be and how much more we are than these limiting descriptions of a whole person.

Visit www.rebeccahayden.com for more Ayahuasca Integration content.