--:-- Ryan Hanley: I'm just remembering, like, the first question I asked you, what's it like to be you right now? Now I have such, so much deeper of an experience of you. So the process that we just went through is a process called circling. What I was doing is asking you, what's that like? What's it like for you? Let's go. Yeah, make it look, make it look, make it look.
--:-- [Intro music fades in and out]
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The Ryan Hanley Show shares the original ideas, habits, and mindsets of world-class original thinkers you can use to produce extraordinary results in your life and business. This is the way.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the show. Today, we have a tremendous episode for you, a conversation with Austin Mao, the founder of Ceremonia, a plant-based retreat program that uses psilocybin and ayahuasca and other plant-based treatments to help us understand our trauma, deal with it, and move forward.
--:-- This is a dynamic conversation. And I know many of you who are listening to this probably hear psilocybin, you hear ayahuasca, you think scary, you think drugs. And my friends, these are plant-based medicines. That is what I believe. I talk about some of my own experiences with some of these medicines and what they've done and how I've used them to work through different things that I experience in my own life.
--:-- Austin provides a template of questions and insights that we can use, even if we're not engaged in plant-based medicine, to start to uncover and understand some of the traumas that live inside of us that keep us from moving forward. Even if you don't believe in any of this, even if this is something that makes you feel uncomfortable, understand that dealing with past traumas, dealing with blocks and obstacles that are wedged into our brain from our past is the only way to become the best version of ourselves, move forward, and make all our wildest dreams come true.
--:-- All right. My friends, if you enjoy this show, please subscribe wherever you're listening or watching. Leave a comment or a review. Let us know what you think about this type of plant-based medicine. If you've had your own experience, I would love to hear about it. I would love for you to share it. When we get into the episode, I share some of my own experiences, and I would love to hear how you have used plant-based medicine to move your life forward. I love you for listening to this show. Let's get on to Austin Mao.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Austin, so you asked me if I have ever done a ceremony or anything. I have never done a, I've never been part of a guided or formal process. I became, so I'll give you just the backstory for me and my experience with psychedelics, which is just psilocybin. All self-administered, but not in a party kind of way. I've never actually done them in the kind of the college, let's go eat some mushrooms and run through the woods kind of scenario. It was always with a purpose. And I did a tremendous amount of research beforehand.
--:-- I was diagnosed with hyperactive bipolar two years ago, had it my entire life, didn't know, just thought I was crazy. And I started searching for ways. And as I've gotten older, so for those of the audience that haven't, are new or haven't heard me talk about this before, hyperactive bipolar is basically like instead of going manic, depressive, manic, depressive, I go from manic to hyperactive, manic to hyperactive, manic to hyperactive throughout the day. So I never am depressed and my mood doesn't change, but I get massive energy spikes, which often lead to a lack of focus.
--:-- So what'll happen is I'll get supercharged, but with that supercharge, my brain will splinter and I'll have a thousand thoughts running through my head and it'll be hard to stay focused on one thing. And for a long time, I thought that energy was a superpower, which it is to a certain extent. But I didn't understand the negative ramifications that came from it, which was this in an entrepreneurial setting or a business setting, it came off as I was shooting from the hip or I was distracted or taking on too many tasks, et cetera.
--:-- Okay, so I went on a journey to figure out how to start to pull that in. And I did not want pharmaceuticals necessarily or I didn't want to go down that path immediately. I found fitness really helps and some other things that are kind of common, you know, going for walks. And I found that sauna and cold plunge, like heat and cold therapy really help with that a lot. And then I started researching psychedelics and I have done, I guess you'd call them two, I don't know what the appropriate term is. I call them kind of hero doses that I administered to myself, did a tremendous amount of research on the amounts and when and how and kept a journal and went through the whole process.
--:-- So I've done two kind of hero doses on my own. I also tried micro dosing for a while. And in all honesty, and this is why I'm so excited to talk to you. I found it to be the most potent solution to the challenges that I had of anything that I have done in terms of realigning my focus, realigning with what's important, realigning with my goals and my standards and values that I've ever had. So that's my experience with psilocybin.
--:-- And, you know, you used a term off before we went live with a recording that I want to kind of set my first question on. You use this term of self-mastery. Can we define that term? Can you define that term and talk about what it is, why it's important, and what that actually means for someone?
--:-- Austin Mao: Yes, absolutely. First, I just want to share my appreciation for your vulnerability. I imagine in this public forum, sharing your process has an element of healing to it and a recognition of how far you've come. And at the same time, it sounds to me like you've really led your life with intentionality and very purposefully sought to look much deeper into yourself to find greater wholeness and greater peace. So really just honoring—
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Not always, but trying to, yeah, trying to.
--:-- Austin Mao: Yeah. And we're all working on it, right?
--:-- Austin Mao: Rather than define self-mastery to you, what I'd like to invite is maybe a short process where maybe you can feel it and share how you feel. Does that work for you?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, I love it.
--:-- Austin Mao: Okay. So Ryan, in this moment, what's it like to be you right now?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. I am excited. I am focused. I am intrigued by you and what you have to share. And I feel very present in the moment with you.
--:-- Austin Mao: What does it feel like to feel present? What's that like?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: To me, it's both the greatest gift you can give yourself as well as the person that you're connecting with. It feels like wholeness, oneness. It feels like you are fully in the moment, that you're not reaching into the past or the future, that you're right here right now and you're the best version of what you can provide when you're present.
--:-- Austin Mao: Wow. That feels so deep to me. I'm just so curious. How do you experience wholeness?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: As someone who, as I explained, my brain wants to wander, in those moments I don't feel whole. I feel like I'm multiple versions of myself. I'm this past version of myself that I may like or dislike. I'm this future version of myself that I may like or dislike. But when I'm present, it's exactly who I am in that moment. It's just, you feel like you. You, this is what I am. This is what I can give to you. And what I can give to myself is, when you're whole, you're there, you're fully present in this moment.
--:-- Depending on how you define consciousness and your spirit or your soul, however you want to define it, and I try to think of it as a soul, it's there. You're in that moment. You're that thing. You're not letting your mind or your body dictate your actions. Your soul is actually dictating the actions.
--:-- Austin Mao: When I heard you say it's like the like or dislike, it sounds to me like in this moment, being here now, there's neither a like or dislike. You're just here.
--:-- Austin Mao: And the word that's coming up to me is acceptance.
--:-- Austin Mao: Does that land for you?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I think that really does. I would not have put that word on it, but hearing you say it, it feels, that feels right. If you're in the moments where I feel the most present, like you said, it's just me. I'm not saying, well, I could have done this or I should have done that, or I hope I do this in the future. It's just, this is what I am right now. And you just roll with whatever comes.
--:-- Austin Mao: I'm just remarking, the smile on my face is coming from the earlier start where you were sharing that what I would use the word like a fractured mind, you know, in the manic or hyperactive state. And then hearing you share that you're just me right now. I'm like, wow, what a contrast that is. I imagine that being for you. And I'm curious, what's it like to recognize that right now?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So it's been a journey that started in 2017. When, you know, I had a moment that I've explained on the show that we don't have to get into in which I was very unhappy with where I was and how I had allowed my life to get and I was very, very fractured, chasing things. So I talk a lot about status. And I actually got accepted for a TED Talk. It's called The Status Trap. And the core crux of it is that Maslow missed a step. There's a step before self-actualization in which we chase what we perceive others think we should be. And though it's not technically part of the hierarchy because it's not helping us improve ourselves, it's always there.
--:-- I think so much of the negativity that we draw into our lives is that step and not understanding that that's there. And when we can start to move past, what do I hope Austin sees me to be versus this is who I am and I will react to Austin as he reacts to me, you're able to be yourself because I would like for you to like me.
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--:-- Ryan Hanley: But if you don't, I can't control that. So there's no other way to be than exactly who I am. And reaching that state of mind has allowed me to move into places in my personal life, my relationship with my children and my career that I don't think I could have otherwise done if I hadn't done the work. Does that make sense?
--:-- Austin Mao: Yeah, I'm coming back to this place of like, you're being yourself in this moment and connecting with me in the dynamic impact of each other that's happening right now. Yeah. How do you feel? How does being yourself feel in your body?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It feels good because when I'm myself in my body, good is such a bad way to describe something.
--:-- Austin Mao: I know, you write and create content for a living. What's the sensory experience?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, no, it's, so for me, I read The Untethered Soul. I don't know if you're familiar with that book.
--:-- Austin Mao: Singer.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So I've always felt without being able to put words to it, like I wasn't my mind or my body. I couldn't have put those words to it. I always felt this disconnection between who I was, my mind and my body. And it wasn't until I read that book about five years ago that I was really able to verbalize the idea that your mind and your body and the voices and sensations that you feel for them are not you. They are data points that are meant to keep us alive and are important, but they're not who we are.
--:-- And when you're present in the moment, what I believe is your mind stops. You stop hearing the voice. You stop feeling all these crazy sensations. You're just, you're actually able to communicate as exactly who you are. And, you know, I know meditation helps with that. Fitness helps with that. There's a lot of different things. I do think that psychedelics and particularly the experiences I have with psilocybin help you do that. I mean, that was one of the things when I was microdosing that I found to be the most profound was during that period of time in which, you know, I was under the influence of that microdose. There was no voice in my head and I don't mean that in a bad way. I mean I wasn't hearing, "Oh, you should be doing this" or "Oh, someone like this does this" or "Oh, you're not working hard enough" or "You haven't talked to this person." It quieted that voice for me and it was really an awakening to say there are ways of not allowing this voice to influence my day-to-day activity, and it was a life-changing experience.
--:-- Austin Mao: So in this moment being with you, I'm just remembering like the first question I asked you, what's it like to be you right now? And what I got from that was present, right? And having explored the sensation inside of you, and now I have such a much deeper experience of you, right? We went from present to wholeness, to being yourself, to being connected with me, et cetera.
--:-- So the process that we just went through is a process called circling, right? Which came out of Gestalt therapy. And effectively what I was doing is asking you, what's that like? What's it like for you, right? And when you ask people, "How are you?" what are the most common answers you get?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Good, fine. Okay. Great.
--:-- Austin Mao: Am I right? And then what happens is if I hear "good" from somebody, I have an interpretation of what good means. And that's really my projection, my story. Right. But if I ask you, "What's that like?" I can ask you, "What's that like?" for a thousand times going deeper and deeper into your experience, unfolding more and more. And underneath all of that is what it's truly like for you right now. It could be so many different things that I could not have possibly imagined.
--:-- So to answer your question about self-mastery, this is something that I'm doing with you relationally, but we can do for ourselves. So going into the sensation of what it's like to be us at any given moment, aka a heightened sense of awareness, right? And being able to use that information in an embodied way to navigate ourselves towards a higher degree of connection, a higher degree of peacefulness, of joy, of loving kindness, especially when we're triggered.
--:-- And the process for that is first awareness. Awareness is diffuse. Like in this moment, if you just take a breath and feel into your body, you can start feeling the awareness of more than what you felt 10 seconds ago. If you bring that awareness to the space around you, your peripheral vision, the feeling on your skin, this is your awareness sensory, right? And then in the connection, in the eye contact that we're having, there's this awareness of the interconnectivity of both of us right now, the mutual impact that's happening.
--:-- The next step is attention. How do we put attention on something such as the most tender parts of ourselves, right? Especially when we're in the fight, flight, or freeze. So in our retreats, we do our final workshop before ceremony is a cold plunge. You talked about contrast therapy. Now, do you remember the first time you did a cold plunge? Correct me if I'm wrong, but your body was like, "Hell no, I don't want to go into this." Your body thinks it's going to die, right? And in that experience, it's where we wrap up all the tools that we facilitate right around awareness and intention to hold presence and hold the self-inquiry of "What is it like to experience this right now? What am I feeling in my skin? What am I feeling in my heart?" as the body and the mind is attempting to dissociate or to fight it, to try to grip on the cold plunge or try to flight, right? Try to run away from it.
--:-- So self-mastery equals holding awareness and attention with loving kindness, right? And so when we experience trauma in our life, now trauma can be a flash incident. We had a participant that was in the backseat of a car when his parents were killed in the car accident at the age of 10. That's an extraordinarily high level of traumatic incident. Trauma can also be over time, such as an upbringing in an abusive household. And these are very obvious and big forms of trauma, but trauma can also be living in a poor household, right? And having to always make cautious decisions around where to allocate time and energy.
--:-- When we have that, that gets stored in our bodies and our mind creates these protective parts to attempt to block out the pain. So self-mastery is having the skills to be with those tender parts of ourselves, to recognize when we are in a triggered state and to bring us back to what you just named: presence, being self, wholeness, etc. And many of our participants, when I ask them, "What's it like to be you right now?" after a ceremony during integration or through our workshops, the word that often comes to people's lips is, "It feels like home. Like I'm coming home to myself."
--:-- And so what we do here in Ceremonia is we facilitate skills that people practice in dyads and pairs. And then in the practice of those skills, they build their capacity, the capacity to hold more and more content, like hold more trigger, hold more information, hold more curiosity. And when you go into a psychedelic experience with more skills and with more capacity, you're able to go so much deeper into the experience. Does that make sense?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It does completely. Yeah. And what's really interesting is, you know, when I heard you share about doing psychedelics, doing psilocybin, by yourself and with intentionality, I think that's extraordinarily lovely. A lot of people don't realize that 12% of America does psychedelics a year. 12%. That's a significant amount of people.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And the vast majority of that, 99% of that, is in what we would classify as a recreational setting instead of a clinical or a ceremonial setting.
--:-- Austin Mao: Right. When I first did psychedelics, when I first did my first ceremony, I had already done psychedelics over a hundred times, burning man festivals in nature by myself, like the whole gambit. And when I went in, I had a chip on my shoulder thinking, "What could this possibly show me?" And in my first ceremony, I remember having this embodied sensation of feeling my mother's love and a warm embrace, drinking milk from her breast and feeling a level of unconditional love and safety that I did not remember ever feeling before.
--:-- Now, the way I like to explain it to people, I've never had a psychedelic experience or an awakening experience like this. Have you ever had a dream where it felt so real that you didn't even know you were in a dream? You were just living that experience. That's what a psychedelic experience is like. Right. And then the second part of that ceremony is I had a vision of introducing my wife to my father. My father had passed four years prior, and I thought I had properly grieved him, including with recreational psychedelics. I didn't even know that I was missing the missed opportunities that I would hold in my life to be able to share that with him.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Is that the preparation that you do? Because one of the things that you explained again before we went live was the level of preparation beforehand. I think people are maybe under the impression that you show up and you just start mowing down mushrooms and walking around and talking to people. Talk to me a little bit about, and this is, this I'd say was a big difference between the first time that I did a, again, I don't know what the appropriate term is. Maybe you could educate me on this. I again call it a hero dose more than a micro dose, but the first time I felt prepared, but I didn't have a notebook. I just set my stage, made sure everything was set up properly for me and then experienced it and it was good. The second time, because the second time I did more preparation, not what you do, and this is really what I would love to hear from you, but I was more prepared and I did have a notebook so that I could just jot down thoughts that came to my head and different things. And funny enough, I kept writing the same thing over and over again. But talk to me about how we prepare to put our mind in that place versus just someone hands us a capsule before we walk into the club or whatever.
--:-- Austin Mao: Absolutely. So first, I think it's really important to state that the psychedelic experience is like a focused microcosm of how you lead your life, right? And if you lead your life constantly in your mind and constantly in triggered states, you're going to experience that in the psychedelic experience, but have more tools and more, what in psychology we call self-energy, to be able to meet that with greater presence, with greater loving kindness.
--:-- So in life, life seeks to create life. And in order to create life, life needs safety. We are one of, humans are one of the few animals that when born, if our parents weren't there on day one, that would have been the end of us, right? And if you really boil down all decisions in life, it is aimed towards: how can I feel safe and how can I feel love? How can I feel connection?
--:-- So if you've heard of set and setting with having a proper set and setting in the psychedelic experience, what that maps to is the outer safety and the inner safety. The outer safety is how safe do I feel in my environment, with the people in the room, with the music, with the facilitators, with the medicine. The inner sense of safety is how safe do I feel being with myself? How safe do I feel being with my emotions, my stories, my beliefs that come up? If a memory pops up that I wasn't even aware of, that is a traumatic memory that my psychological system has suppressed, how safe do I feel to be with that experience?
--:-- And what we believe is the two most important aspects for safety: for outer safety, it's connection, human connection at a deep, vulnerable, and authentic state. Because then we feel like we're in a family, in a tribe that can hold and support us as we hold and support each other. And the second for the inner sense of safety, the best form of safety we believe is self-empowerment, self-mastery, a.k.a. I have the skills and the capacity to meet anything.
--:-- So everything that we do in workshops prepares us to have greater connection and greater self-mastery. And we have this philosophy, this protocol where it goes from the inside out. So you can only connect with other people to the extent that you are capable of feeling yourself. Because where true connection happens, as you had named, is me feeling me while I'm feeling you. And being attuned to the dynamic impact. For example, it's said that 70% of all communication happens through body language. And so if you pull out your phone and you start sending messages, what happens to the connection within us? What happens to the impact for me and how do I express that to you, both verbally and through body language or energetically?
--:-- So when we start from the inside, our first workshop is very simple. And we actually do things as simply as possible. We start with eye gazing between a pair and you can say only one of four things: "I'm thinking," "I'm feeling," "I'm sensing," or "I left." "I left" is like I dissociated from this experience. Do that for a minute. And what ends up happening is people, the download they usually get is like, "Oh wow, I'm thinking a lot" or "I leave presence a lot" or "I didn't even know that there's distinct elements of consciousness that sometimes I'm thinking, sometimes I'm feeling, and sometimes I'm sensing." Like most people aren't even aware of that distinction.
--:-- And then we go deeper into bodily sensations. So we start with a body scan, and a lot of this comes from both clinical and Eastern traditions of Buddhist psychology, et cetera. And so just feeling the heart, feeling the lungs, feeling the breath, so on and so forth, and just tuning into what it feels like in the body. And then after that, it's moving deeper into a sensory experience. So I'll walk you through something right now.
--:-- Austin Mao: If you hold up your hand or hold up your wrist and just pinch yourself.
--:-- Austin Mao: Do you have a judgment on that? Do you like or dislike that?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: No, no judgment. Not really.
--:-- Austin Mao: Right. But can you imagine that some stranger or someone you don't like comes up and pinches you on that same spot? What might happen?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: You'd be pissed.
--:-- Austin Mao: Yeah. You'd have a judgment on it. You'd dislike it. You'd want to push it away, right? Now, the exact same nerves are getting hit, right? The exact same sensory experience is happening. And yet what's happening in our mind is there is a judgment. There's a label and there is an aversion that's happening. Does that make sense?
--:-- Austin Mao: Right. Now, take your hand and push down on your chest right now. Do you feel like a weight on your chest right now?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Not really. I mean, you feel the pressure, but you feel the pressure.
--:-- Austin Mao: The pressure. Right. Often people describe grief as feeling like a pressure or a weight on their chest, right? Now we just created a very similar sensory experience. But in this case, when you put your hand on your chest, not much judgment. But if there's grief there, then wow, how hard is it to be with grief? Does that make sense?
--:-- Austin Mao: And so this concept of equanimity, being at the center between pleasure and between pain, which is where we find peace. It means being with the sensory experience while letting go of the judgments, of the labels, of the attraction or the aversion that we have to something. And so we start walking people through that process of being with an experience and holding that experience with compassion, with curiosity, "Oh, what's that like?" with equanimity, with presence. Does that make sense?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It does.
--:-- Austin Mao: You've used the word curiosity multiple times now. Talk to me a little bit about the role curiosity plays in understanding ourselves in your process. Because to me, curiosity is one of the most uncultivated, we'll call it a skill, I guess, that we as adults have. As children, we're curious about everything. And then we hit a certain point often, and curiosity goes away. We just start living. What role does it play in our day-to-day lives? How does it impact your work? You've obviously used it multiple times, so it must be important.
--:-- Austin Mao: So curiosity is the energy of openness, right? Of having an open mind. So this works on two levels, on the inside and the outside. And I'll start on the inside. First, I'm going to ask permission to interact powerfully with you on something that you've shared earlier around your bipolar. Can I do that?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: You have all the permissions.
--:-- Austin Mao: Great. So I heard you label yourself as hyperactive bipolar. Is that right?
--:-- Austin Mao: Now, when you label yourself something, there is a certain way that you start to experience your life and experience yourself. For example, I imagine that when you get into a state of having more scattered thoughts or more energy, you might say, "Oh, that is my bipolar hyperactivity." Is that right?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, I probably don't say that explicitly, but I have started to become aware of that sensation when it happens and knowing what it is, I guess.
--:-- Austin Mao: Totally. So curiosity in this particular case could be like, "Oh, I'm experiencing this thing. I watch my mind label it. And then I actually ask myself, what's that feel like for me? What's that feel like in my body?" And as we start tuning in, we're able to pay attention to the nuances that are in the experience and start getting out of the labels and out of the boxes, the frames.
--:-- Now there's a Buddhist teacher named Suzuki Roshi that was asked by a student. The student said, "I've been learning for years on Buddhism and I just don't quite get it all. Can you summarize Buddhism for me?" Suzuki Roshi, a Zen master, thinks for a moment and he says, "Everything changes."
--:-- Now that statement has extraordinary import. Because when we start to feel ourselves, when we start to feel our bodily sensations, we can start to tune in to the sensation of it actually changing. But when we fix ourselves on a label, then we box ourselves in to something static, that it's not actually changing at any given moment.
--:-- Now, what's really interesting is there is extraordinary evidence for every person's life that everything changes. For example, are you a different person than you were 10 years ago? Are you a different person than you were 10 minutes ago? Exactly. And if we look at the scope of our lives, every single thing that happened before led us to who we are in this moment. And so there is extraordinary evidence that things change. And yet when we feel anger, grief, guilt, shame, something happens in our psyche that believes we're always going to feel that way. We're going to feel that way forever. And then we can ruminate on it, et cetera.
--:-- So approaching that with curiosity allows us to tune in to the true truism that things are changing for us, that we are changing. And so the process of being curious is, if you're ever in the suck, the key is to zoom in or zoom out. Zoom in and be like, "What's that like?" or zoom out and be like, "Why is this happening for me?" instead of "Why is this happening to me?"
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I love this question. "What is that like?" I've already written it down three times on my notepad. I think this feels like a master key to unlocking so much of what you're saying because we can ask ourselves that question, right?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I love this question. "What is that like?" I've already written it down three times on my notepad. I think this feels like a master key to unlocking so much of what you're saying because we can ask ourselves that question. You asked it of me multiple times to start this podcast, but we can, and again, catch me where I'm wrong here. This is something it feels like we should be asking ourselves more often, even as we go throughout our day, even if as a way to start the habit, it's a reminder on our calendar just to stop for a second and say, what does it feel like to be me in this moment? What is happening?
--:-- Because one of the things that I learned, and I got tremendous advice from a mentor about five or six years ago. It may even be longer now. I can't remember. But he said, and we were just talking about business and life and different things that had happened in my career and things that I was unhappy about. And he said, do yourself a favor. Go find a counselor, just someone you can talk to. He actually advocated against like a licensed therapist. He goes, go find someone you can talk to and just meet with them every other week for the rest of your life and call it a life expense.
--:-- And what's been funny about that is because it wasn't just when there was a problem that I went and saw her. It was just whether everything was great or everything was terrible or somewhere in between. Sitting down and just talking about it forced you to take stock in where you were in that moment. And I've never framed it the way that you have and I think that's brilliant. But that has been such a change for me, such a monumental shift in the way that I view day to day because it's like just taking stock of where you are in that moment, just sitting down with her and going, geez, I don't have anything to bitch about today. Like if things are going good, you know, kids are good, life is good, business is good. And like living in that moment for a second where all of a sudden you find yourself with a smile where maybe an hour beforehand when I hadn't, when I wasn't speaking to her, I may have been ruminating on things that were trivial to a certain extent. It gives you almost that space to say, I'm actually okay. Like, things are all right. I woke up this morning. There's food on the table. The bills are paid. Like, I'm doing okay.
--:-- And that kind of takes me to my next question, which is the pace of life today, societally, is incredibly hectic. I didn't live in the past beyond my 43 years, so I don't know. I can't present it, but it feels like as much as ever before, life is very hectic today. There's a lot of things coming at us. How do we start to integrate? That feels like a major problem, right? And a lack of awareness around that. But how do we start to integrate these things into our lives? And we may say, I'm too busy to take a certain number of days and go to Ceremonia and sit with Austin and learn what he has to teach or whatever. How do we start to take stock in that? Where do we find these places in our day to reflect on these things, to ask ourselves that question?
--:-- Austin Mao: That's a great question. So one of the questions that we ask our participants in preparation, and I think it's maybe one of the most extraordinary questions that anybody can ask themselves, is how do you want to feel the moment before you die? Because whether you're a billionaire or you're a starving artist, we will all inevitably meet our end, whether it's on a golden throne or on a street corner. And usually the answers to those questions are what you might expect: peace, love, gratitude, proud. Those feelings that are at the inevitable end that we're seeking are the underlying feelings that we seek to live our life in.
--:-- It's just that what happens is the things that we do in our lives and the materials that we chase in our lives, we believe if I get this car or this house or this number of Instagram followers, I'm going to feel that way. If I work really, really hard at this mission of mine, I'm going to feel this way. But the key is, can we tune in in the present moment and feel that way organically, naturally within ourselves? In other words, can we look inwards instead of looking outwards for those feelings?
--:-- Earlier, when I heard you share around presence, I think I heard you say the word peace in there somewhere, right? That you felt peace.
--:-- Austin Mao: Which is the number one feeling that people seek to feel when they die. And it's what we seek to feel when we go on vacation and we seek to feel when we take a weekend off. We're chasing out at the external for what we can self-generate internally. So it's about flipping the script. Instead of have, do, be — aka I need to have things to feel a way, I need to do some things to feel a way — what if it's be, do, have? How do I feel this way now, not 10 years from now, not 30 years from now in our planning, how do I feel it now? And then in that feeling, what would my life be like if I lived from that feeling? So if I lived from a place of gratitude, if I lived from a place of peace, how would I live life differently?
--:-- I facilitated more than 500 individuals so far. And the first 400 of those were high-level founders. We facilitated Fortune 500 executives, founders of the biggest blockchains in the world, Silicon Valley unicorn executives and founders. There have been multiple M&As that have happened that have been on the front page of the Wall Street Journal that came as a result of founders coming through this program, discovering that they've been living their lives in such a frantic pace because they were chasing. They are already worth over a hundred billion dollars but they were chasing after something, and when they found that they could feel that thing now, they no longer needed to chase.
--:-- What they ended up going into — and this is my belief that I'm sharing, and I always like to preface my belief — is that what feels like the greatest dharma, the greatest purpose that we feel in life, is projecting out into the world the path of wholeness that we took ourselves. So for me that's plant medicine, for someone else it might be meditation, for someone else it might be sports, a flow state in skiing downhill. We had a high level founder go and be a ski instructor at Vail Mountain over here afterwards, making a little bit above minimum wage, but it was what made him so immensely happy. From the outside looking in you might be like, what the hell? Why would a multimillionaire go and do that? But if you would meet him, you would see that he is the happiest he had ever been in his life. How do you want to feel before you die? Happiness. He lived a life of that now.
--:-- What's interesting though, is there's a spiritual teacher named Adyashanti, another Zen teacher out of San Francisco. And he was asked a question: Isn't meditation one of the most selfish things you can possibly do in the world? I mean, you're literally just sitting there by yourself, not impacting the world. And Adyashanti thought for a moment and he said, I think it's the most selfless thing that you can do. Because what happens is when you meditate and open yourself up to life, what pours through is loving kindness, or what in Zen or Buddhism is called metta. And when we start living a life of loving kindness, the way we approach our friends, our family, approach strangers, approach our food, approach nature is from a greater reverence, a greater appreciation for what life has to offer. Imagine if we all had that and how we would approach climate change, how we would approach competition in business, how we would approach spirituality and religion if we all had greater loving kindness in ourselves.
--:-- To simply answer your question, how do we find time and space? It's your priorities. Do you continue the path of chasing outside? Or do you take the breath in the franticness of life to find yourself so that you can live a more whole life, more present life, more connected life?
--:-- We had one of the, a very high level founder who's on the board of many publicly traded companies, considered one of the top female CEOs in the world, come to our journey. She calls me two weeks in advance from the airport. And she says, Austin, I think I got to cancel because I have a private dinner with Prince Harry and the Duchess of York, Meghan Markle. And in my mind, I'm thinking, okay, that's a pretty important thing. But we spent the next 30 minutes discovering what's that like for her. And what she discovered is that this choice point that she was at is a choice point that she's been at her whole life. And she's always chosen the outside, always chosen accolades, the business, the impact, et cetera. And the whole reason why she wanted to even come to a journey like this was to investigate deeper for herself. So she canceled on the dinner. She came here five days later. She said it was the best decision she had ever made in her life. She now started other companies and living a life much more integrated. Her big takeaway was, I am love. And that's what she's now projecting out into the world through her incredible business acumen and resources. Did that answer your question?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, no, there's a few things in there that I think are phenomenal. One, when I first shared on this show maybe six, seven months ago that I had taken psilocybin for the first time, when I shared for the first time that I had taken it in the past. People said, why would you say that? What are people going to think? All these things. What are you trying to get out of it? Tons of questions. And it was wonderful because I got to share my experience with them and my reasons. But the feedback that I often got was, well, are you not serious about business anymore? Do you not want to be successful?
--:-- And what I tried to explain to them was, I want to be successful. I want to have impact. There are goals and accomplishments that I would like to achieve someday, but I would like to get there in the manner that you just described. I want to get there being a good father. I want to get there projecting energy and love and positivity and compassion. I think I can reach all those things and be the best version of myself. I don't have to carve myself into pieces that you read in some Forbes 7 checklist of what you need to do to be a successful entrepreneur in order to reach all those goals that I have. I have just as high and just as big of goals as anybody else. But I can do that in a way and in a manner in which I wake up every day and enjoy my life, feel good about who I am, feel peace and presence and connection. And both are possible.
--:-- I love that you're sharing this message about all these entrepreneurs and successful individuals. What I would like to have you break down or just comment on is, to me, this type of therapy, this type of process, program, this type of ceremony — I think people often say it's either for kids or for people that don't have anything going on in their life and they're just doing it to reach some form of higher whatever, and they kind of compartmentalize it that way. Or they say this is just for super successful rich people who have nothing better to do. And they put it in that bucket. To me, while both those groups may need it, there is this entire middle section of middle vice president in a company who has goals and wants it, but they feel like it's not for them or they're not in a place where they can take this on.
--:-- I would love for you — and you can pitch all you want here because I think it's important — how do we reach those individuals who are listening, who feel like they don't fall into one of those two stereotypical buckets? They want to live this way, they would love to add more presence and peace and love and compassion and connection into their lives, but somehow feel like it's, quote unquote, not for them. How do we talk to those individuals to help them understand that regardless of your status, situation, or where you place yourself on some hierarchy, this type of experience, this type of journey is going to move you into a better place and that it's not just compartmentalized to certain individuals or certain classes of individuals, if that makes sense.
--:-- Austin Mao: Totally. Absolutely. So we've now facilitated 200 people through Ceremonia. And tonight we start our 31st retreat in a little over two years. So we've had such a broad range of individuals come through. We've had teachers who are living paycheck to paycheck. We've had doctors. Our oldest was 76. And the 76-year-old is a professor emeritus of Harvard University of psychiatry and ran the entire Eastern Seaboard of psychiatry for the U.S. Army for 40 years, and was the director of two hospitals. We've had priests. We've had one of the people that sits on our board, an alumnus, was the president of Unity Church, a mega Christian church with over 3,000 members on the East Coast. So such a huge range of people. We've now facilitated over a dozen combat veterans that have healed traumatic PTSD. We've had politicians. We've had CIA interrogators. The range is extraordinary.
--:-- And what's really crazy, Ryan, is we can have people — combat veterans mixed with high-level founders mixed with teachers — in the same cohort. And everybody comes for their own reasons. But what ends up happening, and this is why we are incorporated as a church, we really lead this as a spiritual organization, is because we believe that the end point of psychology is the beginning of spirituality. And when you distill down all the reasons why you think you're here, it all comes to the exact same place for every single person. And that same place is love. Do I love myself? Do I love others? Do I love the world? And how can I be here to really feel that love?
--:-- The range of people that have come through, I think really speaks to the availability of this work. We're also a nonprofit and half of what people contribute here is tax deductible. And we're also legal, both at a state and federal level. State because of the Colorado's Natural Medicine Health Act, and federally because of the Religious Rights and Freedom Act, serving psilocybin mushrooms as a sacrament, like one would consume wine from the Catholic Church. So the availability of this is extraordinary, and the impact is — we literally guarantee a transformation. And you might ask, how do you define a transformation? It's self-defined. So we ask people in the pre-journey interview, if you were to experience a transformation, what would you hope to experience? Then we ask them afterwards, did you experience a transformation? 100% of the time people share that what they even in their wildest dreams hoped for was a fraction of what they actually got.
--:-- And it doesn't matter the box that you put yourself in. We have people that have come with complex PTSD, with treatment-resistant depression for decades. My mother came. And a month after she was here, she went in for a biopsy checkup on tumors that she had on her liver that could have been cancerous. And they disappeared. The doctors were baffled at how that could possibly happen.
--:-- We have someone who's an alumnus coming again tonight. In the first ceremony, afterwards he comes and he wiggles his toes at me and he says, Austin, look. Like, that's great, Judd. Like, how was your ceremony? And he says, look at my toes. For more than 20 years, I have not been able to uncurl my toes without extraordinary pain, without literally prying it open with my hands. I've been seeing specialists. I've been preparing to go into surgery for this, for what doctors could only think is rheumatoid arthritis. And after a single session, he was free of that. He realized he stored so much trauma in his feet and he's a combat veteran.
--:-- So if you are suffering at all — and the way I describe suffering is if you're not in a state of Christ consciousness or Buddha nature or however you want to label it of extraordinary peace and bliss at any given moment — then this is available to you. Do you want to feel that? And what's the priority for you?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I think people hear sometimes these stories of the feet unclenching or masses or stuff, and they may try to dismiss it. But my experience being what it was, the only way that I can describe it to people is like a veil was lifted. There's all this energy in the world that we may for different reasons, not be able to see. And certain individuals who go deep into meditation can start to pull that veil through that method. And there's many different methods, this being one of those methods for moving that veil. And when we remove that veil for a period of time, we're able to see and feel things that we just didn't know were there. And then being able to deal with them in a way that is very honest.
--:-- If I could take one thing away from my experiences, it's that it's almost impossible to not be honest in that moment when you're under that influence, when you're in that ceremony. The ability to lie to ourselves goes away to a certain extent. And the possibilities that then present themselves in terms of our body unclenching a foot that was clenched because the only way that it could compartmentalize whatever trauma was to do that. That's what was happening. Your body manifested some sort of trauma into clenching your toes as a way to compartmentalize it so you could get through the day. And when you can actually approach these things honestly, without the ability to lie to ourselves, you have the ability to deal with them.
--:-- I want to wrap and I want to be conscious of your time and of the audience. But I'll leave you with this very small, but hopefully powerful anecdote. It manifests in all different ways in our lives. One example that I've seen is I coach youth baseball. My son plays baseball, I coach. And oftentimes in competitive situations like that, you look at the other team as an enemy. Since I've had these experiences and since I've gone deeper and learned more and had the pleasure of being able to talk to individuals like yourself and go even deeper down this path, what I tell the boys is, sure, do we want to beat the hell out of this team and win this game? Yes, we do. But you can do it in a way in which you still care about the other team and you can still appreciate. I make friends with the other coaches. I tell them good game. If one of their kids makes a great catch or a great play, I'll come up and say, hey, congratulations on that. And our kids now will start, they'll get out and as they're running past the kid, they'll yell over, great play, man. They've started to pick up.
--:-- My point in sharing this all with you is that what happens is that positive energy starts to infiltrate so many aspects of our life that maybe we wouldn't even have otherwise been conscious of. It doesn't mean you're not going to be competitive or have goals, but it means you can do it in a way in which there's positive energy, there's love, compassion, caring, connection. You can want to win and still love, appreciate, and connect with the individual that you are competing against.
--:-- This to me is — I just believe in what you're doing so much. I believe in the power of it, the potential that it has to help people. And even if they never actually go to a ceremony, just some of the tips and things that you gave in terms of checking in with yourself, starting to be aware — just these simple actions as first steps can legitimately change your day-to-day life. So I appreciate the hell out of you, man. I think what you're doing is absolutely phenomenal.
--:-- If someone's listening to this and they are intrigued and they do want to go down this rabbit hole and they want to learn more, where do they go? How do they connect with your organization? How do they connect with you?
--:-- Austin Mao: First of all, just so much appreciation for being here with you and sharing so vulnerably with me and your audience. You can find us online at ceremoniacircle.org. And if you go to slash Hanley podcast, we're going to have a great offer for you — a self-mastery guide with some of the questions and some of the practices that I shared with you here on this podcast that'll be free to download. And if you want to join us for a journey, we're going to create a code for anyone listening to this podcast to get 10% off joining one of our webinars and then coming on. So would love to have anyone listening to this. And if any of the kind of exercises intrigued you, this self-mastery guide will support you and bring this into your relationships through greater clarity in yourself. I appreciate you guys.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I'll have links to everything Austin just mentioned in the show notes as well if you didn't pick up on it. And hey, I wish you nothing but the best. Please continue doing what you're doing. And if myself or my audience or my community can ever support you, consider us friends and resources.
--:-- Austin Mao: Thank you, Ryan. Appreciate you, brother.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Thank you. Let's go. Make it look easy.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Thank you for listening to The Ryan Hanley Show. Be sure to subscribe and leave us a comment or review wherever you listen to podcasts.
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