Tansy Rodgers (00:13.752)
Welcome back to the Energy Fix, a podcast dedicated to help you balance your energetic body by diving deep into the sweet world of all things health and spirituality. My name's Tansy and I'm an intuitive crystal Reiki energy healer, energetic nutrition and holistic health practitioner, and a crystal jewelry designer. It's time to talk all things energy. Let's dive in. Before we dive in, a quick...
holiday note for you since time is approaching quick. If you've been thinking about giving support instead of more stuff this year, my gift certificates and gifting services are available through December 22nd. After that, holiday gifting shuts down so that I can rest my own nervous system too. You'll find all the details linked down in the show notes. You can either go to tansyrodgers.com or beucrystals.com or
you can reach out to me directly and I will hook you up. All right, let's talk about mental health in a very different way. Today's guest is Keith Kurlander. He's the co-founder of the Integrative Psychiatry Institute and Integrative Psychiatry Centers and the co-host of the Higher Practice podcast. He's been a psychotherapist and coach for over 20 years and his work
lives at the intersection of integrative mental health and psychedelic therapy education. Keith's own story started with a near suicide at 19 and after a psilocybin experience which led him into a long deep journey of understanding mental illness potential and what truly helps people heal he discovered that he was completely devoted
to teaching methods that aim to address the root causes of mental health struggles, not just managing the symptoms. In this conversation today, we get into things like the deeper drivers of mental health issues beyond a simple quote unquote chemical imbalance story. We talk about how integrative psychiatry looks at biology and trauma and lifestyle and spirituality altogether.
Tansy Rodgers (02:34.796)
And we also dive into where psychedelic assisted therapy fits into the picture and where it doesn't. And how we can hold both caution and curiosity when it comes to new tools for healing. As always, this is education, not personal medical advice. And nowhere here is an invitation for self-medicating. The goal is to give you language and context and hope.
so that you can ask better questions and feel less alone in what you're going through. If you've ever felt like traditional mental health support only scratched the surface for you, I think this one's going to crack you wide open and really land. All right, here is the conversation with Keith Kurlander. Let's dive in.
Tansy Rodgers (03:30.478)
Welcome to the Energy Fix Podcast, Keith. Thanks so much for being here today.
Thanks for having me.
We're gonna be having an awesome conversation today. One that I feel has been more of a buzz has definitely been a part of the conversations that have been coming into my world. But I love how we're going to put a little bit of a spin on this and really talk about the mental health side that also goes in conjunction with the psilocybin therapy potentials.
the do's, the don'ts, the what to watch out for, and also how to make the experience something that is truly healing and beneficial for you and your life and where you're at now. So before we get into that conversation, I want to know, is there a word or a phrase that you're really embodying right now and connecting to that feels important to you?
Yeah, I would say that gratitude as a concept and practice is something I've been thinking a lot about this year.
Tansy Rodgers (04:45.196)
And why gratitude? What makes that so pertinent for you right now?
Well, it could be a time, a condition of the times we're in potentially of a lot of turmoil around us and exposure to turmoil in the news. And I don't know, but this particular year, it's just been really rising in me that it's very important to stay really connected to a state of gratitude. And I believe that gratitude is actually a
an inherent state. It's an essential state of being rather than a created or a manufactured state. So I think that gratitude is something we return to when we're and relaxed and feel secure. So my practice is more around returning, I think I would say to the state versus kind of telling myself I should be grateful for something that I'm not.
I love that because so many gratitude practices really emphasize this doing concept, this pushing concept, and sometimes it doesn't always feel very authentic.
Yeah, think it's often coming from avoiding challenges in oneself where we sort of force a moment of a feeling, you know, sort of making ourselves feel a little high of like, well, look at how great this is or that is, I should be grateful. But I think gratitude is much, it goes so far beyond that kind of mental.
Keith Kurlander (06:34.424)
Jiu-Jitsu, I don't really think you need to be that in that much of a wrestle with oneself to enter it. I think gratitude is an acknowledgement of being alive and it happens when we slow down in ourselves. you know, there's conditions that we could be in that would make it harder to enter that state. But I think when we're able to enter that state, we...
a overwhelming sense of gratitude just emerges. And so I've been connecting to that as sort of a practice, I think more so this year than previously.
How do you personally return home using gratitude as a way to return home rather than avoidance? How does it feel different inside of you?
Well, I avoid plenty of things. So as many people do, but I do. So I think I'm, I know what I'm avoiding. I mean, I think there's often a resistance in me or a, you know, I'm checking out maybe, you know, it could be numbing out. mean, mostly I do that. I don't know. It might be watching a show or social media scrolling or something. I that's, that's mostly where it's happening for me.
pretty productive, efficient person at this point, but, but I can also do it just avoiding feelings. that, that's common for me. I'm very more of an intellectual type, so I can easily avoid tension or feelings. but what I have come to see, I think over time is when we relax into our full
Keith Kurlander (08:28.992)
sensory, emotive, and cognitive experience, where motion typically will move and if we can do it, it's easier said than done sometimes. But that's where I think just taking a breath and coming internal and being with oneself, I think what naturally emerges is gratitude. Again, sometimes it's hard. Some people are really stuck in ruminative loops about their self or other people.
you know, sometimes you can't drop below that. But I when we can drop below that, it often emerges.
Yeah. I love that. And you know, you said you said it's easy. Sometimes you numb out to we all do. Right. That's part of being a human. all numb out at times. But I find I find personally that if I do not out, it's usually to to mask to make tolerable some of those emotions like anxiety or depression. Right.
And so when we look beneath the symptoms of things that we label like anxiety or depression, what root patterns do you start to see most often? Maybe it's biological, relational, spiritual. What root patterns do you see the most often and how do you tell which one is really driving the bus?
That's a good question of which one's driving the bus. Well, there's many root causes to mental health conditions. However, with that said, there is one root cause that is more ubiquitous than the rest, would say, and that's trauma.
Keith Kurlander (10:26.798)
Trauma is a process in the body, not naming the event specifically, but trauma is process in the body. would say that your nervous system is in a traumatic experience or process is a better word. It's probably fairly true among all these disorders we have that that's happening to some degree, but there are a lot of root causes in it.
It shouldn't be overlooked. you know, the body has a lot of, can contribute to a lot of courses, the hormonal system, the digestive system, your neurological system, all these systems have major, major impacts on your mood and mental health. that if you go to a mental health provider, usually whether it's a therapist or a,
a psychiatrist or you're going for meds, they're not often going to talk to you about the conditions in your body that are likely a huge factor. So there's conditions in the body, there's conditions in the nervous system, which is in the body, but it's a more central controller of the body. And then there's conditions outside of your body. There's also the mind in your psychology, and then there's conditions outside of the body, which...
the way you interface with the world around you, your relationships, your connection or lack of connection to the natural world. All these things are factors, but they're not something to get overwhelmed by. mean, there's, you know, we all are human, we're all struggling to some degree. We could talk more about what really is a mental health condition, but when you have a roadmap of what are the causes, you can start to be like, well, I can address that, you know, and.
I think that's what's lacking for a lot of people is a roadmap and even knowing what's causing the problem.
Tansy Rodgers (12:33.004)
Well, let's talk about that first before we expand on that. What is mental health condition?
So I would say that mental health and mental illness is a spectrum. So you're somewhere on it and you're moving along the spectrum at any given time. So that's the first thing, it's a spectrum. And then there's very, when you get into the mental illness part of the spectrum, there's more severe.
Illnesses issues you could be facing so when we talk about depression or anxiety for instance the two most widely Attributed attributable mental health conditions on the planet They are What are they they so So if you take it from a medical model, which is how it's talked about That's how you'll be introduced to it in this world typically from a medical model. They're
to conditions that have a list of symptoms. And primarily the symptoms are behavior-based. There's also some emotional mood states attached to those disorders. But there are terms that describe a set of symptoms. And there's an issue with that approach. There's a strong, a big issue with the approach. It's useful to some degree. It's helped us in research, in clinical research.
in pharmacological research, it's definitely helped, because you can measure symptoms changing. But the problem is it doesn't talk about the underlying process that's causing the symptoms at all. And not that every description should do that, but we've gotten very reductionistic in health care. especially in mental health care, we tend to go...
Keith Kurlander (14:35.192)
You have this condition with the symptoms, we'll throw medication at it, or even maybe you'll do some therapy, but we're not looking at the underlying processes in a more robust, integrative way. And so that is an issue. So depression has a list of symptoms, know, whatever it is, maybe you're lethargic or you're low self-worth or, you know, whatever it is, you're perpetually sad. These don't tell us a lot about what you're struggling with. They tell us about a list of symptoms.
doesn't really explain the struggle and the cause. So I'll pause there.
Well, okay, so let's now come back to that point where we put the pin into the conversation and talk about those root causes now that we understand mental health and the spectrum that is on the mental illness side of the spectrum. If you had to map root causes that bring us into the mental illness side of the spectrum and map it onto one page, you know, maybe it's traumas, inflammation, sleep, dead, microbiome, you
whatever you see contribute, what tends to really cluster together in human beings, not necessarily textbooks, but in human beings that you've experienced in with your work?
Yeah, well you named many of them. So at our institute, my co-founder and I, we sort of formulated it on a page. We think about it as four categories of being, which would be spirituality, the mind, the body, and your lifestyle. And then you have all these subcategories of processes.
Keith Kurlander (16:22.86)
that can that are root causes or contribute to again they're sort of like they contribute to the spectrum of where are you and how could you fine tune it or adjust it right and turn a volume turn a turn the volume up or down spirituality being more about your connection to other things other than yourself in a much bigger way it might be a higher self it might be nature i think
a lot of fundamental meaning making, even though we have a mind category, we tend to put, we tend to think of it under the spirituality category. Because really fundamental meaning making or essential meaning making is a better word. And so it drives your life about who you are and how you see the world, what you believe about, why we're alive.
Or don't believe about it and how you're to move through your life and how you're going to relate to challenge and opportunity and then mine being more of the house of one psychology, but also we think of it more to as the nervous system aspect of it and the mood and emotional system And so we want to look at trauma there
for sure, and we could talk about trauma. Trauma is a whole thing, so we could talk about trauma. What is trauma? Why am I even saying the word? And it's a kind of a buzzword everywhere, but what does it mean? And then the body being the systems you mentioned, some of those things that you mentioned. But you gotta look at each system too, and the body, because there's different issues in each system. Metabolic issues is a massive contributor to mental health issues.
at least in this society and many others, we have a major metabolic problem in this society. There are studies that show up to two-thirds of people are pre-diabetic. It depends which studies you look at. So that's a pretty big deal because your brain needs fuel. It needs clean fuel to operate properly. And if you're pre-diabetic, it's hard to get that clean fuel.
Keith Kurlander (18:45.046)
And then there's all the other systems, other types of hormonal systems and your gut. Obviously you need to be able to digest the nutrients that you need to feel well and see things clearly and have energy on and on. And then your lifestyle being how you're interfacing with the environment.
And just to be clear, for those who aren't quite sure exactly what you mean about metabolic health, could you describe what that means since you emphasized that?
So metabolic health is how you process energy. But when we think about it, we think about insulin and how you're processing sugar and do you have stable blood sugar? Most people are functioning in a state of glycosis where they're using sugars.
for a lot of their energy versus like ketosis, which is a very nuanced thing. And if you're not processing that well and you're pre-diabetic, you might be spiking your blood sugar all day long. You might have low blood sugar when you wake up in the morning or very low like hypoglycemia or very high. And so you're not stable energetically from your fuel source.
This is a very common problem when and if your brain isn't of a stable fuel source, it would like be putting in the wrong Octane it'd be think of like putting in either way too high of an octane or way too low of an octane in a car that can't really barely runs off of it, but it does yeah, you're be like stepping on a gas and backfiring and Sounds awful and black smoke coming out of the thing and you're moving along But you don't look so hot on the road. That's a lot of us
Keith Kurlander (20:41.998)
including me. So I think it is a major factor. But there's many. There's many. the more we can educate ourselves, the more we can reorganize in a system that isn't set up to keep us organized right now. I mean, I don't think it's one person's fault. It's just where we are in modern humanity. But we can learn enough.
to figure it out.
And that was perfect. I talk about metabolic health and how that relates to your mood stabilization, to your overall brain health all the time. But I love how you explain that, that it goes way beyond just the balance of our blood sugar and insulin and the sugar side of it, right? Like it's so much more. So I love how you explain that. Now let's pull together.
Let's pull together. We talked root causes. We talked about the spectrum of mental health. And I want to take that now and merge that with the whole concept of psilocybin. Now you shared that psilocybin experience at 19 nearly took your life. What did that season really teach? First off, tell us about that. what also, what did that season really teach you about screening and setting and
why psychedelics might not always be universally healing for everybody at certain stages that they're at.
Keith Kurlander (22:23.8)
taught me that psychedelics are not universally healing for everybody. That's the one thing it taught me. It taught me many things. well, I was 19. I'm going on 50 now. So 30 years ago, it was my one sort of a kickoff into adult, into young adulthood. I was 19. was in college my sophomore year and I took psilocybin for the first time.
and left my friends after an hour or two and went into my room. And I'm in a high rise building, UMass Amherst. So there's very tall apartment buildings there, dorm rooms. And I got very flooded by a lot of overwhelming feelings of how miserable I've been my whole life.
and how shut down I've been and how scared I've been and how desperate I feel and how alone I feel. And I proceeded to walk over to the window and thought I was going to jump out. I was like, this is how I've always felt. I don't want to feel this anymore. And I would say that that was actually true. It was how I always felt. It was just amplified because it was on psychedelics. They amplify feelings.
And they were already strong enough to amplify to that point. So these were not, this was not like a hallucinatory experience of how I had been feeling. It was an amplification of how I'd been feeling. And probably a little too much of an amplification in that setting for sure. And then I, what happened was I had a hallucination of my five-year-old sister who started yelling at me.
to not do it and it's not fair to her. And I broke down and I was freaking out and crying and I crawled back over to my bed and I just held on for the whole night. And then it started a very robust healing journey for me around my mental health issues that decades long where I made it my whole mission in my career and myself to look at, why do we all struggle like this?
Keith Kurlander (24:47.778)
Not everyone struggles like that, but why do we struggle and what can we do about it? Is there a better way? Are there things that can help? So that's where it started.
And what's so fascinating is that it brought you to be doing the work that you're doing right now, where you're doing education on psychedelics and psilocybin, and you're even promoting it at times and opening up to that opportunity and that experience. What, what bridge that for you? Like what, because that must've been very traumatic, you know, and, and especially for your first experience.
what brought you around and allowed you to see that it could potentially be very healing?
Yeah, that's another good question. mean, I was, so I, I mean, from sort of like the psychedelic, psycho not space, I haven't done that many psychedelics, but I've done a fair share in, after that point in waves of you, but, really mostly almost entirely like really trying to see if they could help me. and what I came to realize that took a long time.
to figure out was that psychedelics were amplifying trauma in me. And it just took a long time. I mean, it wasn't that language then in any sort of mainstream and not even in most therapy circles. There still isn't it in some therapy circles on understanding of trauma, of what it really is. And so it took me a while to understand that's what was happening. So I see psychedelics
Keith Kurlander (26:36.812)
Now I'm a little more unique on the sort of a couple standard deviations out, I would say about exactly what happens to me on psychedelics, but it happens to others. But often during sessions, which I have experienced later in much lower doses, I just have to take a lot less than most people. There's an edge where you can process trauma or process other.
things inside of you that is unique to psychedelics. can happen in ordinary talk therapy. mean, I've was predominantly a talk therapist, ordinary consciousness talk therapist, right? So those things happen there and it can happen with trauma modalities and all of that, but something with psychedelic therapy where you enter non-ordinary states and your brain changes and,
something else can happen, you can start to sometimes do some work that you can't. So I sort of came at it from a different angle than many where I was like, wow, this was really showing me I had trauma. And I had maybe one or two actual psychedelic therapy sessions too later, much later, where it was like actually doing that healing work. And I was like, the power of doing it as psychedelic therapy is incredible.
And there are risks. also I think there needs to be caution around just going out and experimenting. You don't know what you're going to get and then you could get flooded and overwhelmed with some old trauma and now you're there. But so if that happened and you got through it, that's, know, then you can go do some work on it. But so I come at it from more of like a protector angle of like, this is, we should protect this medicine.
and it's very useful and done well. And it's not for everyone, that's for sure.
Tansy Rodgers (28:38.114)
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When your nervous system is regulated, everything works better. You have more focus, your hormones are more balanced, your digestion is better, your mood is more stable. Healing isn't about doing more. It's actually about less noise so your body's own intelligence can do what it's built to do. Sessions are available in person if you are local to where I'm at or distance worldwide. Both are powerful.
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Tansy Rodgers (31:00.822)
And I want to talk about some of those red flags in just one moment, but let's go back to something you said. You said that there is an edge where you can address trauma. Would you say that that edge is where the effectiveness of microdosing has come in? In small amounts like that, I mean.
So not in the technical term of microdosing. So microdosing is at the level where you don't feel a psychedelic experience per se. You might feel slightly altered. We're talking about very small doses when we talk about microdosing. Microdosing is a little more analogous to, and people would not like that I say this, but more analogous to taking an antidepressant.
You're using medicine and doses that don't strongly alter your consciousness that either could uplift you or make you focus better. They're more analogous to sort of like ADD medicines or antidepressants when you microdose. Not that that's wrong. There's also not a lot of data yet on microdosing to
know from a scientific perspective, I would say, whether we could hang our hat and say it's definitely, you know, consistently doing that for people enough of the time. So, microdusting is its own kind of thing, which is, I would say, more of a, it's more of a long, for some people, they do it on a long-term intervention scale. Again, it's not highly researched, so we don't know.
necessarily what that does over long periods of time, but it's a different intervention than a psychedelic therapy intervention. It's a different tool and intervention.
Tansy Rodgers (33:03.951)
Can you tell us or speak on what the difference is between those two tools?
Right, so the microdosing is mostly what I've said, which is more of you're using a medicine in order to achieve a state of being, potentially in a consistent manner through your day. And that might be, it might be depressive symptoms, it might be focus issues, whatever people are doing it for.
Psychedelic therapy is a short-term intervention to cause a disruption in the way that you feel and think about the world. So the way you feel in yourself and the way you think about yourself and the world around you. So it's a much more abrupt intervention and strong intervention than
let's say microdosing would be in some ways. But the upside could be very powerful. With ketamine therapy, there are people who were suicidal for months or longer. And during their session, daily suicidal thinking for months or longer went away and stayed away for a long time during the session.
And that's not seen anywhere else, that kind of result. I mean, that's very radical. It doesn't always go that way, but it can happen. It does happen. People who are stuck and depressed for a long time, they can come out of it in a couple sessions. So psilocybin research shows that with depression. MDMA research is showing some pretty cool stuff with, again, this gets into our whole trauma versus...
Keith Kurlander (35:05.422)
symptom thing, but PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, people who were really stuck for a long time from serious traumatic events that happened to them and then trauma in their system. They do this treatment series with MDMA. And again, you look at different studies, 60, 70, 80 % of people, symptoms going away. So.
LSD, we're seeing some positive research for anxiety. LSD is entering or has entered phase three, which is the final stage in the FDA. So all that to say we have these different medicines, some work a little differently. They work differently on your biology. They work differently in terms of the type of psychedelic experience that are caused by them, but they're all
create a psychedelic experience where you start relating to yourself from a different perspective than you have before, Sometimes that can be very challenging. Often it's very healing and reparative.
Yeah. And so I can completely understand now why there may be contradictions or not contradictions, contraindications for some people to not be experimenting with this medicine because of how intense it could potentially get. So let's talk red flags. What kind of red flags should really pause this psychedelic work?
I mean, psychosis isn't generally a good fit for psychedelics. It usually just amplifies it. And you know, you'll see within the community of people who struggle with psychosis, some of them are using psychedelics and it can get really unwound. There's medical contraindications based on the medicine that you're using.
Keith Kurlander (37:17.594)
so there's that whole world of stuff. there's bipolar disorder can sometimes get aggravated potentially from MDMA.
So there's different contraindications there. And that's why it's always nice to work with a provider who can actually do a proper screening. And of course, some of these medicines aren't available legally, which most of them aren't available legally. So getting a proper screening is hard to come by with some of these medicines. But ketamine therapy is available legally through prescription. So that one you could get a screening for.
Tansy Rodgers (38:05.74)
And yeah, and so if they're not, well, if some of them aren't legalized, number one, but also number two, maybe your symptoms make more of a contraindication for you. Do you find that there are some potent non-drug levers that can help to shift and transform into this healing depth that these psychedelic
the psychedelic therapy could actually bring you to. I don't know if it's like sleep or breath or whatever it might be.
Yeah, mean, my own journey, I've worked with so many clients over the years who have dealt with so many things and I dealt with a lot of stuff. And it's never just one thing either way. Like even if somehow psychedelic therapy is in your repertoire of tools you're gonna use to become a more fulfilled human being, an integrated human being, it's not gonna ever just be that one tool anyways.
So there's so many tools and it just depends on what's going on for the person. In my 20s, yoga was my life. So I was super into yoga. It wasn't very popular yet. It was the late 90s, early 2000s, and when I started. And so, you know, that is an interesting tool because that can also
If it's practiced in certain ways yoga can be a trauma modality basically Because you're you're working with the body and you're working you're you're bringing presence and attention to your sensory experience where there is There is triggered like Q dependent associations of sensation to an old event
Keith Kurlander (40:08.352)
And so the sensations are from that old event. So when you start to bring presence into the body, whether it's numbness or, or a vigilance sensation, you can actually decouple the old event from it, from that area in the body. And then, you know, that might release and could release trauma that way. That's called bottom up therapy and trauma. That's like the term.
A lot of therapy modality stuff comes from different traditions. And so some of the trauma work we find, there's some ancient technologies that have been around that add to that repertoire that we have. So there's many things I would say for people. And I think it's about trusting, listening deeply. You know, the first hardest thing when you feel kind of crazy is
You feel like no one can understand what it's like to be inside of you, which they can't, but you also feel like there's no way out of the puzzle. so anyone that's really struggling doesn't feel like there's a way out of the puzzle or they'd already be out of the puzzle basically. So the first step is finding a deep source of trust in yourself and commitment that you're going to go after it. No matter what the cost, you're going to go after that.
You know, you're going to go after finding what's going to help you. and you're going to keep trying. And if you have that level of commitment, you will find the next tool that, you know, integrates you further and integrates you further. And I think that's the path of being a human. Like we're going to keep integrating more and integrating more. And eventually the frame doesn't, it becomes, you typically move through a frame of I'm, ill injured and ill and broken.
to this weird being in this flesh that is evolving and growing and rising up. So there's usually a shift in mindset once certain levels of integration happens.
Tansy Rodgers (42:26.99)
Yeah, feel like it's becoming more more common that people just gravitate towards these bigger healing tools. And when I say bigger healing tools, I mean things like psychedelic therapy or something that's along that lines. feel like people are gravitating towards that more because they're finding that some of these other tools maybe aren't, they're not,
They're it. They're not getting it out. They're not getting out of the puzzle that they're trying to get out of and not that they're ineffective. I really question if this push in holistic health and this push in spirituality and this push, this over commercialization of all of these things really takes away that connection for so many people. So like the root healing of some of the most basic concepts.
just get missed, making it harder and harder and also making it easier and easier for a person to stay stuck in that puzzle. it? it? Do you see that?
Well, sure, I agree with that. I mean, I think we'll confuse the matter if we can, you know, like we will make a big mess and confusion out of anything, including healing. So, and that mostly comes from, you know, we're highly driven through reward-based systems. And so we'll follow the quick fix, we'll follow the reward, we'll follow the dopamine.
In the wellness space, there's a lot of dopamine to be had, you know, so we'll follow the things that give us a little rise for a moment. But, you know, the deeper, long-term steady behavioral practices is what's going to make the change. So we'll do that and that happens. But, and then the flip side of it, I think too, is there's plenty of good stuff out there. And so the commercialization has exposed us to a lot more things than we've ever been exposed to.
Keith Kurlander (44:35.054)
So that's the positive side of it is, you know, we get sort of flooded with all this information, but we start to see things we wouldn't have seen before and be like, what's that? I'll check that out. So I guess there's a curse and a blessing in it all, but yeah.
Which is why integration is really where the magic happens, right? Like it's it's it's so important Keith do you feel that there is at least in the work that you do or in what you've seen or what you recommended Do you feel if there is a gold standard? Integration plan that you really gravitate towards and that you see has been highly effective for a lot of people
You mean integration with psychedelic therapy? Perhaps. Or integration in general?
Integration in general, but I would love to hear your take with the psychedelic therapy side of it as well.
I was strangely involved with integration with psychedelics, with clients before anybody was talking around me about psychedelic therapy. Because I think people found me because of my own experience. And so they, I don't know, I just sort of attracted a lot of people to me 25, 20 years ago that were
Keith Kurlander (45:59.022)
um, needing help with integrating psychedelic experiences. Um, I don't think there's a gold standard with integration. think that there are, I think training really helps. think being aware of the different, lots of different outcomes that can happen to people after psychedelics. you're sort of have an eye out for certain things. And, um, but you know, you generally speaking integration, the therapist,
is large in large part bringing the modalities that they are very familiar with to the process. But then having another knowledge base of like, is this person kind of a little bit high right now? Are they on a sort of little high run for a couple of weeks after they had this experience and it kind of elevated them a little bit, their energy state. And now they're like, I'm going to quit my job.
I'm going to leave my marriage. I'm going to move to Costa Rica. You how many times I've heard that one. I'm moving to Costa Rica is a big one. So, and that's okay. And it may actually turn out that that's all the next move, but there's a sort of art of guiding people, of just helping them land the plane first in life, you know, with anything. It's like, let's land the plane if you're to make this decision.
be grounded. So that's psychedelics. think in general, integration is really a great word for healing, which is integrating different parts of ourselves, integrating our behaviors with our values. That's key. That's overlooked a lot. You know, if you want to live an integrated life, you have to
you have to bring the pieces back together that feel sort of shattered to kind of bring the picture back into form. So I think integration is a good word for life.
Keith Kurlander (48:10.187)
Yeah.
When you started to integrate some of the psychedelic therapy into your own life, what did you notice? What did you notice started to shift personally for you? Maybe within the first couple days to weeks? I'm curious to see what you noticed and maybe a timeline associated with that.
Well, as an individual, I've only had psychedelic therapy done to me a couple times. But you probably, if you've been a client of psychedelic therapy, it's not going to be that many more times than that on average. mean, maybe it's two times, maybe it's six times, maybe it's 10 times. But someone who's done psychedelic therapy like a hundred times, that's a different thing at that point. So I'm probably more of the average.
I mean, they were very, very powerful experiences that...
I would say the general takeaway for me is I have more permission to be myself after the experiences.
Keith Kurlander (49:25.486)
I felt more self-permission to be myself.
And isn't that really the end goal of all of it?
It's definitely a good one. would say, mean, there are, you know, it's not, it's definitely a good one, right? Like there are people that I think are doing that. Um, they just happen to be sort of expressive and don't have that filter. But I think that is one that, um, a lot of people carry. It's a burden. A lot of people carry of sort of being themselves and following their self and expressing themselves. So I think it's definitely a big one.
Which is why the whole concept, the whole conversation around authenticity and speaking your truths is such a big conversation.
Totally. And it's also a very interesting one right now. There's a lot of people speaking things to each other. And, you know, it's sort of like what is truth, but it's a big conversation right now in this country. It's a very big conversation. Freedom of speech, being yourself, speaking what you want to say. That's a huge conversation right now.
Tansy Rodgers (50:43.032)
Yeah. Well, in your clinics, what objective changes do you start to track or do you notice is different when people are starting to shift beyond the, feel like I'm more myself or I can be myself or I felt amazing? Are there objective things that you start to track?
Keith Kurlander (51:08.494)
Well, I mean, having done this a while, I'm not practicing right now actively. I do some coaching still here and there. But over the years, one thing I would notice is years later, they would bump up into me and thank me so much about how much they've changed. So that's when you kind of are like, okay, good. I don't know if I was noticing it as much, but I think as a client and a therapist, you get a little locked in.
to sort of the typical usual sort of thing that's happening. But there are other things. mean, I've seen people, know, huge shifts in the way they do relationship, maybe securing, have beginning into a secure functioning relationship with a partner and they hadn't had that before. They were just used to relationships ending quickly or just so much turmoil and fighting and stress.
And they found a new way of being in relationship and a new partner. I've seen people, you know, change careers or move through it, or move up in their career in ways that they didn't think was possible. Those are obviously factors. think behavioral things, I've seen, you know, people shifting how they eat and how they exercise and how they sleep.
And these are hard things to change, right? you know, change is typically slow in our lives, specifically behavior change. But you can see them and I don't know, sometimes it's, who knows what actually causes the change. I think that's sometimes a mystery. You know, it's like all of a sudden someone is now
changing that thing and they've changed and it's like, what actually caused that? don't know.
Tansy Rodgers (53:14.112)
I think too, as you were talking, I wrote down here that it feels like walls are being knocked down. This expansion of consciousness, like you're gaining more confidence in general. That's everything that you just described. It just feels like that person was able to expand and embrace life a little bit deeper, making steps to make positive change.
Totally, I think that's a good way to describe it. Yeah. Do you have an experience of that in your life? Because I think that's an interesting way to think about it, which is sort of the confidence of engaging the world around you, kind of increasing. Is that something you've kind of had?
Yeah.
Tansy Rodgers (54:06.19)
Yeah, and I say, as you described it, I could feel that within myself because there's many things within my own life that have helped, that have outside of psychedelic therapy, that have really helped to expand myself and have helped to heal me on that kind of level. And when you were talking, I could think of certain points in my own life of where I had that same kind of feeling.
while you're in the moment, it didn't necessarily stand out. But it was years down the road, I didn't necessarily have a therapist that I could come back and say, thanks a lot, this helps so much, right? But I can look back and say, I see what that did for me. Wow. Okay, now I see the change.
Totally. Yeah. mean, the hindsight thing is cool where it's like, you know, years later, you're like, it's so amazing how our narratives change over time of what happened to us. I mean, we create stories in part to be prepared for what's in front of us. And so sometimes those stories,
are limiting stories because we have fear associated with parts of our past. And so we engage the world looking for the thing that's gonna happen that we don't wanna have happen again. But like you're talking about, it's also interesting how as we evolve, even our experience of our history changes.
And then you have to ask, did your history actually change? If your experience of history changed, did your history change alongside of it? And so on some level it did. mean, you know, it's all a memory anyways system. so we actually can, you know, people talk about this. We actually can change the past.
Keith Kurlander (56:23.594)
as we change our future, we change our past. And so our past becomes way less limiting as we change into the future. And it becomes more of a source of what's propelling us forward into more health, healing, opportunity, fulfillment, these things. So yeah, it's an interesting thing how that happens over time.
Yeah. And that goes very deep depending on where you're at and what your belief system is in spiritually of how your future can change your past. But even in something super basic and super easy to understand, perception, perception, you know, as you grow as an individual, as a human being, as a soul, as you shift your perception,
looking back and seeing that maybe old stories and narratives that you told yourself completely are different now that you've evolved into this more healed self, right? Automatically it shifts. Yeah.
just shifts and the story that you used to tell about when you were a kid and this was the story you told and now you're telling a different story about when you were a kid. I mean it has components of the old story but it's actually kind of a different story from the person who's listening and that's amazing so you're basically rewriting who you are and I think that's the
There's something consistent in who we are that maybe is stable, there seems to be, but then there's also, if we're allowing ourselves to evolve, who we were is evolving too, which is kind of mind-boggling. Who we were in the past is evolving, or at least our memory of it is, once we allow ourselves to growing and transforming.
Keith Kurlander (58:35.458)
Yeah.
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Tansy Rodgers (01:00:15.838)
You know, and even to expand on that kind of coming back to the whole psychedelic therapy concept and this expansion that we're seeking, this rewriting our history that we're seeking to heal. When someone is going through psychedelic therapies, and I'm very curious about this because I have many acquaintances and friends who have done psychedelic therapies of different sorts, and they come back to me, they tell me experiences.
I'm curious how you really differentiate between a true insight, a true life-changing shift versus maybe a euphoric projection that's not really going to survive into the end of the week. How do you know that difference?
Keith Kurlander (01:01:08.906)
I like that question. Well, I don't know that there needs to be a difference. They're both experiences that you could extrapolate meaning from whether it was a euphoric insight or something that feels relevant later or is actually relevant to your life later.
But it's an important question. I think it's, I think one place to look is whether you're getting impulsive or strategic. And I think that's how you can start to differentiate. If you start responding from the insight with impulsive action that
produces some gratification in the immediacy of the action, but it has no real long-term vision of how it connects the dots. It doesn't have a strategy to connecting dots down the road. It's not leading toward a vision down the road. It might be either trying to get relief from discomfort as the sole mechanism.
So think impulse, facility versus strategy is one thing to look out for. And that is something you can go beyond the psychedelic therapy session with, because the question is really important that you're asking, which is how do you know when something is a fantasy, you could say, or an inflated insight versus something that
is a practical grounded kind of download about what to go do next. And that I think is the same thing in ordinary life. We have plenty of fantasies that are not grounded in reality about where to take our lives. we sometimes act from them from impulse. They lead to impulses. And you'll often find that people who have a lot of fantasy
Keith Kurlander (01:03:31.63)
who actually act on the fantasy a lot with impulsive moments. You know, you often see they're gonna have the opposite, which is impulsive moments into distraction, too. You know, addiction, distraction. So strategy's different. Strategy is we have a vision of where we're heading. We may have an insight that is connected to that vision that's in the future.
And it's, but that future is usually experienced as it's already happened. Like we know the difference intellectually, but the brain can't tell the difference. So there's usually less doubt with a true vision. And there's usually strategic behavior. So that means that there's behaviors that would feel challenging to do.
you would still do them. And those challenges are embraced in the pursuit of that vision. And so insights can come in that process of like, this is the next step to get one more step closer to that. Even if it's hard, I can do it. So I would say, I don't know if that totally got there, but something like that.
No, that was perfect. That was perfect. And as you were talking, I was thinking that impulsivity versus strategy, the strategy really helps you to stay out easier from bypassing some of those emotions like grief and boundaries and, you know, all the adult choices that we need to make. When you said strategy often is rooted in the things that are uncomfortable, but you still do them anyway.
That's a big, to me, that's a big indicator between that and just impulsively trying to implement these things that you think were these great downloads when they just end up fizzling a little bit later on.
Keith Kurlander (01:05:39.874)
Totally. My daughter, she's seven, is already clued into this. Kids are clued into this. And if you're aware of it, they'll talk about it. And she said recently, like, she was talking to me about how she'll go to dance class multiple times a week and go to singing lessons. she doesn't, it's hard, she falls, she doesn't get the notes right.
She tells me this and she's like, but I don't care that I'm failing at it because I want to do it and I love it. And she'll say that to me. And then she'll tell me about other things she doesn't want to do. And she complains and she hates that she has to do it because they're not connected to her vision at all. And there's ways to work with that, but they're not connected to her vision. And so she doesn't embrace the challenge.
And so we see this in kids, we'll see, know, adults are the same way. and so this, this, this kind of, inflated insights or, or fantasy, they're often not grounded in vision. so you, you typically don't sustain those behaviors is the problem. maybe you do it for a week.
You know, where you're like, okay, now I'm gonna be this disciplined person that goes to the gym twice a day, whatever it is, right? And they do it for like four days and then, I missed a day, but I'm doing it tomorrow and they do it tomorrow and then it's like the next day, I missed the next day. And, cause it's not connected, is why. When we have these things connected to our vision, it's so much easier to embrace change.
It's really hard to embrace change if we don't have a vision for where it's leading us.
Tansy Rodgers (01:07:36.704)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And you use the word grounded multiple times so far, and that feels like it's a really important word in this conversation to be doing these kind of medicines and therapies from a grounded place. So I know, at least in a lot of the clients that come into my world, they're very high functioning.
but they're dysregulated and their nervous system is all over the place. And maybe their microbiome, their gut health is not very strong and their moods are feeling volatile at times, right? Like just things are out of sorts. If someone can't downshift their nervous system, do you feel that psychedelics still help them?
It can help them downshift their nervous system. That's why you need to be grounded in that case as the facilitator. So you can kind of be an anchor through the process, but it can help them downshift. It does that sometimes. I mean, that's why, I mean, if you look at the, know, LSD with anxiety, mean, anxiety is definitely a downshifting situation.
In some ways you might say depression is an up-shifting situation, either way, if we talk more generally, people who are dysregulated, they're not grounded, they're not anchored to their life, they feel disconnected, they feel shaky. It can help in that situation. It does depend, but it definitely can. A lot of people feel that way who go to psychedelic therapy in clinical research or in, you know,
it's ketamine therapy around the country. Like people generally don't feel grounded and you know, at ease at all. So I think it can help. It definitely can help. Does it always? No. Are there cases where it may make you more agitated? It does happen. That's why hopefully you have a therapist if that happens.
Tansy Rodgers (01:09:49.329)
Do you feel that there's a certain kind of protocol to help pace somebody in those situations so that it doesn't get worse than what it is?
Well, there's protocols that are studied. And, you know, I think those protocols are, you know, have lots of different people coming for them. But again, many people come not feeling grounded. So they feel whatever we're saying is not grounded. Maybe we're talking about some level of agitation or we're talking about some disconnection from
consistency in their life or they're not anchored to a purpose or they don't feel connected to in their relationships. mean, there's a lot of ways not grounded can show up. would say that, you know, depending on the medicine, these things are researched in different protocols and they generally speaking, we're seeing positive results. Um, so I think overall it can help when it doesn't, when it aggravates a person.
In psychedelic therapy, most people in the provider world have the framework that there's no bad trips. I agree with that. I think that it's sort of antithetical to the process to hold a view that something bad happened to you in life even. mean, if we're stuck in a bad, the problem with that, the horrible things happen to people, but the problem is when we're stuck in a good versus bad.
memory or good versus bad experience in general. We've basically cut off a lot of our life that we're labeling as bad, shouldn't have happened, I shouldn't have been the person every step of the way, I should only have been the person some steps of the way. And that's not integrated. So even though it's hard and very, very horrible, challenging things happen to people, it's not integrated to sort of have a bad versus good thing. So you're gonna carry that forward.
Keith Kurlander (01:11:54.082)
And when you experience the next thing that's bad, and it's a spectrum, and we experience bad things all day long with that perspective, I didn't like how that person talked to me, I didn't like that the person cut me off in the road, I don't like, you know, when my partner said that to me, you know, take out the trash and with a tone, you know, now we're getting not present to so many aspects of our day, because they're bad, they're wrong, they shouldn't happen. So, I think with psychedelic experiences, things can aggravate you and...
There are times where, that might not be right to do it again. Like, okay, this isn't a good fit for you. And maybe you learn that about that. And that's true. I think that does happen sometimes. but other than those instances, I think it's like, we're going to continue to help integrate what came up that caused more dysregulation. Why did it cause more dysregulation? What happened? was it too high of a dose? Maybe. Was it, was it
the trauma in you that this is what happens when the trauma gets turned up in you, get dysregulated. Probably. It's probably that. So now let's use some tools to teach you how to turn it down and learn from it. when you know, you're not in the medicine, right? Or cause that's not going to go away.
Yeah. Well, that leads me to really think, you know, with all of this potential for needing extra support, because like you said earlier, you know, there may not ever be a bad trip. It just is depending on what you are being shown and being able to see what you're ready to be able to see to move forward, perhaps, right?
Yeah.
Tansy Rodgers (01:13:44.802)
This field is commercializing really fast. It's more and more talked about. There's more and more practitioners out there. I would love to hear what you think ethical guardrails really are that are important and should be standard in order to keep people safe. And I would also love to know, where do you think we're cutting corners right now as this is commercializing faster?
I mean, training is a key guardrail. You wanna be trained and not assume. One thing that happens, I think, for a lot of therapists, if we're just talking about the therapy side of psychedelic therapy, a lot of therapists, they have their modalities that they were trained in, and maybe they're going for a new training. But there's the aspects of the job that you're sort of picking up.
in life, in your own healing journey. you, you know, there's a new angle. You're not like only practicing something out of a textbook ever really. it's like, this is how you practice that technique. Like that's not a reality. So like a lot of people are just sort of winging it to some degree, you know, of like integrating a knowledge base with just practical life experience and growth in oneself. So what you got to be careful with psychedelic therapy with
more so than ordinary therapy because you're not hopefully doing psychedelics like that. And so you don't have that level of learning happening. And there's a lot that can happen on psychedelics that you're not going to be ready for as a provider to keep someone safe and to know what's going on to some degree.
You know, when to intervene and when not to intervene. Less intervention is often more with psychedelic therapy than what you're normally used to. So, guardrails, like suggestibility is a factor on psychedelic therapy. You gotta be a little mindful of that. In more so, like sometimes more so than ordinary consciousness therapy, people's
Keith Kurlander (01:16:06.336)
resistance to chest ability can drop. Now that can be positive to help them move through a way of thinking, but you can also end up feeding something, somebody that doesn't fit for them. That's a guardrail of being trained there. Touch is a huge factor around how to do therapeutic touch properly with psychedelics. And then
Of course, knowing oneself as a provider and doing personal growth work so you don't end up crossing a major ethical boundary with someone is a huge factor and it happens all the time. Um, you know, it's, it's a factor. It happens sometimes too without psychedelics where providers cross these boundaries, but, um, there's a lot more going on in the space of psychedelics. So I think all these things matter. And then.
I think safety is a big concern. mean, what is the medicine? Where did you get it? How do know it's in there? What's the setting like? All these things matter in terms of guardrails.
And what do you mean by setting exactly?
like where you're doing it.
Tansy Rodgers (01:17:25.966)
got it, okay.
Yeah. Where are you doing it really matters. and then, know, you have state initiatives that like Colorado and Oregon, well, and others now, but that are, we could say to market, like they're actually here. You could go do it where you can get psilocybin therapy or psilocybin services in Oregon. It's more of a personal development, service in Oregon. Colorado has a mental health function of it in there.
So those states have developed these very elaborate guardrails and they are so elaborate that it's actually very difficult to operate within them. And we have operated within them for many years now since they've been around. And it's very difficult because there's so many guardrails. And so I think overall the guardrails are pretty good actually what they've developed.
It's also very hard when there's so many guardrails. So I don't know where this all goes. I actually think a federal FDA approval will be.
hopefully are a good way to go with some guardrails that will be probably way less intense than the guardrails that are in place at the state levels right now. But they'll have enough guardrails that hopefully we can find a path where it's very accessible to people. There's so many guardrails now at the state levels it's actually becomes an access issue. It creates a barrier to entry from a financial perspective.
Tansy Rodgers (01:19:02.988)
Yeah. And I want to expand here in one moment on clinicians, advice for clinicians here in just one second. before we get away from this concept of FDA approval, number one, you think, do you see in the future that this could very much expand into being legalized, number one? And number two, do you feel that
Do you feel that with the acceptance of that, that that will allow more research to be done to really see the effectiveness that this medicine could bring forward?
So if we're talking about FDA approval where we have a drug that's approved for a medical treatment, I think we're almost there. I think it's likely we're going to see that in one to three years. We may not, but there's probably multiple drugs we will see, three to four different applications.
psilocybin, LSD, MDMA, with different biotech companies, multiple ones trying different things. So I think we're likely going to see that. I mean, maybe we don't, maybe the research falls apart at the end of phase three, but it seems unlikely to me. We did get a rejection on MDMA in 2024. That was the first Lycos therapeutics.
applied for their drug and it got rejected, they're in a whole process right now with the FDA of like, how's it going to go? they, is there some other track? Do they have to do a whole new study? So that's not a hard rejection. So I think we're close. And I think then we'll see many more. And then access-wise, it's going to open up access. mean, it's going to be so wonderful.
Keith Kurlander (01:21:12.558)
because then we're going to have insurance companies paying for treatments and it will be highly regulated, but it's going to increase access. I think in 10 years, know, your neighbor all done psychedelic therapy probably. And it's just going to be another psychotherapy modality that so many people just choose as an intervention at some point. There probably won't be ever as wide ranging as like
CBT therapy, but it will be a huge modality. And I think it will be just a part of the cultural experience of like, that's one thing that people do. And a lot of people do it. And I think that can shift some needles, shift the needle a little bit in culture too. You know, when you do it in such a container of like, I'm going there to do, look at myself. I mean, that's a big deal. That can help us out here.
Is it gonna fix everything? No way. I mean, we've got a lot of things that need fixing right now, but it could help us look quite a bit.
I think that this medicine is one that can really change the face of human, dare I say human evolution, but just human health in general, for those who are not contraindicated, of course, right? But I feel that this could absolutely be a game changer for so many people that are dealing with levels of trauma or levels of
mental health stuff that just isn't being addressed with other therapies. Yeah.
Keith Kurlander (01:23:02.766)
For sure. I mean, I think it's the tool we need. And then we'll have new tools later. But right now it's a good one. It's got a little bit of a sort shotgun approach to it. You don't know what you're gonna get. It's not like a precision laser tool yet, but it's pretty cool.
Trail
Keith Kurlander (01:23:32.012)
way different than the main tools we're using to add to the sort of, you know, toolkit. And it's an amazing tool. And then we'll have some pretty cool new tools soon, I think, coming that will be life changing too. More precision based tools. Yeah. Yeah.
Before we move into some rapid fire questions and bring this beautiful conversation to a close, I'm curious for the clinicians out there, before even touching psychedelic work, what skill do you wish that every therapist had before the psychedelic work that most trainings still really under emphasize that you think could really shift the healing that their clients have with them?
I think having an understanding of trauma as a core, I mean, if we're going to look for any sort of model that I think trauma is a framework, just like ego development theory and all these other theories you're trained in school around. Trauma psychology is a very important basic understanding of how humans function and behave. And so I think that we need more training there.
And, you know, trauma doesn't need to be thought of as a pathological disease. It's a spectrum of a survival instinct that, you know, can, the survival instinct can be turned on too often. And then we get more more traumatized. So...
or more of a traumatic pattern if it's being triggered too often. So I think it's that basic understanding of having a framework for the way people respond. We're really just taking a framework of how the animals respond that we call humans. there are instances of animals having trauma in the wild even, but
Keith Kurlander (01:25:54.55)
It's a lot less than the amount of trauma we see in humans. So I think we have to have an understanding of why that is and how do we help people with that. And see the function of it too. You know, we want to respect the function of why it exists, but then also how do we help people regain control in their lives? So I think that would be the core thing that I think.
would be really helpful. It's not just therapists. This would be a critical educational piece, I think, many medical professions for sure. There's many professions that could use this training. Learning, because it teaches us empathy, it teaches us how to collaborate better with people and understand people better.
I think trauma psychology is still young and we still think of the word trauma as like an excuse from a more broader social perspective when we hear the word. I think it's still thought of as an excuse for whatever you're having struggle with. But I don't think it needs to be thought of that way. I think it could be thought of a shared human point of suffering.
that we can collaborate around and help each other grow around.
I absolutely agree with you. think that that is something that is not emphasized as much. I I agree. think that it needs to expand through way past just clinicians on a therapist level, but medical professions and so forth and so forth. So yeah. All right.
Tansy Rodgers (01:27:51.406)
Before we wrap it up and find out where you're hanging out, where people can get in your world, let's do some rapid fire questions. I want to just kind of end this on a fun note. Get into your head a little bit more and just see where you come up with these. All right. Are you ready? There's only three of them. They're easy. They're easy. All right. Number one. Well, I say they're easy.
Alright, let's do it.
Tansy Rodgers (01:28:15.426)
but I'm not the one answering them. So number one, what is one liner, what's a one liner that you say to your nervous system on really hard days?
Keith Kurlander (01:28:39.662)
That's not what's really happening.
That's a good one. I might steal that one. That's good. All right. All right. Number two, what is a book that has changed how you see healing for you?
Keith Kurlander (01:28:57.838)
There's been many, but since we talked a lot about trauma today, when I read Waking the Tiger, was a Peter Levine's book. That was a big book for me in terms of healing and my own healing journey.
I literally just picked that book up a few months ago. It's in my pile.
No. good.
No, that's good. right. And number three, what is a red flag you catch in yourself first? Like what is that red flag that pops up for you that you catch right away when you know you have to shift?
when I wake up in the morning and the first thing I say is, shit.
Tansy Rodgers (01:29:54.062)
I so can appreciate that.
Heh.
Good one, good one. All right, I love it. Keith, where can people find you? Where are you hanging out? What's going on in your work right now?
psychiatryinstitute.com is a good place. That's the integrative psychiatry institutes website. There's a lot of great resources on there. Even if you're not a professional, there's a lot of cool stuff in there. Our podcast is, there, of course it's in all the podcast places. That's the higher practice podcast. So there's that. I'm an Instagram and could always come find me there.
So out and about in different places.
Tansy Rodgers (01:30:47.27)
those links will be down in the show notes so make sure you jump on down there click on those links get into Keith's world. Do you have any last words that you would like to lay on the hearts of the listeners for today?
Keith Kurlander (01:31:06.638)
that your greatest gift is still emerging from you and it's committing to allowing that gift to keep coming into the world is necessary.
nature produced you for a reason and we can
we could all, you know, use each other's gifts more.
Tansy Rodgers (01:31:41.986)
Thank you so much, Keith. Thank you so much for this work and this education that you're doing. And thank you for sharing your heart and your passion with us. Thank you.
Thank you. Thanks.
Tansy Rodgers (01:31:55.704)
What an enlightening conversation with Keith. my goodness. I want you just to take that moment now to see.
what shifted within you, what moved. Maybe it was the idea that your mental health story is more than just symptoms that you need to manage. Or maybe it was hearing how biology, trauma, lifestyle, and even spirituality can all be part of the same picture. Maybe it was both and just filled with curiosity. Regardless of what it was, make sure to jump down to the show notes, get into Keith's world, and you can find all the ways to do that.
Now, as we part for today, I want to leave you just with a few questions to noodle on and be with as you transition into your week. Where have you been treating your symptoms like the enemy instead of signals from a wiser part of yourself? And what kind of support team do you actually want around for your mental health, maybe as people's practices or practitioners?
And finally, where can you give yourself more compassion for what you've already survived?
If this conversation gave you a new perspective or made you feel a little less alone, it would mean the world to me for you to share it out with someone who's been struggling and might need a different lens to look through. And while you're doing that, why don't you leave a rating and review? It helps to grow the show and I appreciate it so much. Thank you so much for listening today and for being here and being part of this journey.
Tansy Rodgers (01:33:39.618)
next time, keep spreading that beautiful energy you were born to share.
