0:00:02 - Mark Henderson Leary

Welcome to Practice Freedom. What if you could hang out with owners and founders from all sorts of healthcare private practices, having rich conversations about their successes and their failures, and then take an insight or two to inspire your own growth? Each week on Practice Freedom, we take an in-depth look at how to get the most out of both the clinical side and the business side of the practice, get the most out of your people and, most of all, how to live the healthy life that you deserve. I'm Mark Henderson Leary. I'm a business coach and an entrepreneurial operating system implementer. I have a passion that everyone should feel in control of their life, and so what I do is I help you get control of your business. Part of how I do that is by letting you listen in on these conversations in order to make the biggest impact in your practice and, ultimately, live your best life. Let's get started. Welcome back practice leaders. 

You're tired of hearing me say I'm excited about this episode, but man, this one is good. If you are interested, curious or have heard or not, if you've heard of psychedelic therapy and you don't know what it's about, this is the episode for you. So talk to Ben McCauley just a great guy and a pioneer in building a practice around psychedelic therapy. Really, and let's just be crystal clear, psychedelic therapy helping people with therapy for mental health, emotional health, doing very powerful work, maybe entertaining, but it's not for entertainment value at all. And so a great sort of overview primer around psychedelics in general. In fact, I knew this was going to be a subject that I couldn't shut up about and couldn't stop asking questions, so we broke it up into two episodes. This is part one. Part one is strictly the primer on psychedelic as a therapy, so you can get those questions answered. And then the second episode I just it's a little shorter the second episode, we dive into his mindset as a leader. So both great episodes. I encourage you to listen to both in separate times. 

But for the first one, if you're just interested at this point about understanding what ketamine in particular is as a therapy, which is a great proxy for a lot of psychedelic therapy, we is as a therapy, which is a great proxy for a lot of psychedelic therapy. We talk specifically about that Awesome episode. Truly, what Ben is doing is pioneering and what he's had to do is invent a lot of things and to create a business model that works, that makes it possible to get the therapy out and really create a structure, as opposed to just hiding in a closet or doing individual one person hanging a shingle trying to get this done, really creating a structure, as opposed to just hiding in a closet or doing individual one person hanging a shingle trying to get this done really creating a scalable model. I think you'll really enjoy learning about this if you're not exposed to it. If you have some exposure to it, I think you'll learn something new about how ketamine is delivered and his approach and there are more. We'll talk about this in the episode. There is more than one way to do this, but in the episode there is more than one way to do this, but I think this will be very eye-opening for you. 

I want to get out of the way, but of course, don't forget that if you are stuck, if you're trying to build a practice, trying to build a business, and you are envisioning a great, healthy culture with a great leadership team making a huge impact, but you're stuck for some reason, please don't stay stuck. Please reach out. Practicefreedomcom slash schedule. Love to take a few minutes to talk with you about a first step, a next step to unlock the potential for that great organization. Without further ado, it is my privilege to introduce Ben McCauley. Oh, let me not forget DeNovo Therapy in Lubbock, texas, so be thinking of that if you're in the area. He's a great resource. His organization is a great resource, again, without further ado, ben McCauley. Well, ben, I'm so grateful to spend some time with you and talk about a subject that I have become fascinated with. Thanks for taking some time, man. 

0:03:40 - Ben McCauley

Yeah, thanks for having me here. I'm really glad we ran into each other at the finances that conference. Yeah, the healthcare transaction conference yeah, thanks for having me here. I'm really glad we ran into each other at the finances that conference. Yeah, the healthcare transaction conference yeah, in Houston, I just happened to sit next to you at the table, so it was meant to be. 

0:03:52 - Mark Henderson Leary

You know, and I think it was so interesting that, learning about your business in psychedelics at that time it was something so foreign to me. I didn't have any idea how to compartmentalize, I had no understanding of what it was, but it just kind of sat in the back of my mind. It was months later I suddenly had context and so I reached out to you and said, hey, can you explain this to me? And, man, did you ever crush it? You really explained to me what's behind the curtain. And so you know I can certainly prompt, as somebody who's recently been exposed to what's behind the curtain and what I thought was outside, that I had questions about ketamine in general and I wanted to know how it related to other psychedelics and how to choose. That was such a bad question, like if somebody were looking for how to choose their psychedelic, how would we do that? And you're like, well, let's take a step back. And so, man, you know, take me back to that moment, take a step back and start kind of explaining. 

0:04:48 - Ben McCauley

Yeah, sure, In a perfect world we'd have access to any of these medicines and those of us that are working in the psychedelic industry that's essentially what we're fighting for is a psychedelic aware society where we have access to different medicines and we can treat people with them. But since so many of them are still illegal, that leaves it in a strange limbo where some people have access in the underground and a lot of people don't, and a lot of people don't know what all of this stuff is. And so along comes ketamine, and ketamine is a beautiful psychedelic. There are people that would argue that ketamine's not a psychedelic and they would list all of the mechanisms of action and serotonergic and they could have these conversations about receptors that you know if you're splitting hairs puts ketamine outside the category of a psychedelic. But it's really not. 

From an experiential perspective, it works the exact same way that psychedelics do, in the sense that it creates neuroplasticity. 

Arguably, it causes growth in the dendrites and in the brain and we've seen that in animal studies and correlated it with glucose studies with ketamine. These are radio isotope tag glucose molecules in humans, where we see which parts of the brain are using the energy. So, regardless of the specific categorization, the fact that ketamine works on the glutamate system instead of the serotonin system. Functionally it acts just like a psychedelic. People have an altered states experience where they're able to see themselves, experience themselves in a larger sense, have insights about their lives spontaneously and come back and integrate those insights, hopefully in a supported model with sitter-guided support and also, hopefully, psychotherapeutic support. So ketamine is legal for us to give to people and if we can do it underneath a psychedelic model of care, then it becomes a psychedelic medicine. There's a lot of nuance and dosing and strategy around that that I can get into, but so ketamine allows us to deliver psychedelic therapy to people in a legal framework inside of a medical client. 

0:06:55 - Mark Henderson Leary

You know you're just sort of touching on things that really blew my mind. The first was when you described the difference between the medical model and the psycho-spiritual model, and I think one of my bigger preconceptions it's not even a misconception, it's a preconception I think there's a third model, the recreational model, and that is sort of like and I think that's worth calling out Because I think that very much colors the preconception of somebody who's like you're saying this is medicine, this is medication, I know what medication is and it's when I go to the pharmacy and somebody hands me a bottle of pills. I take something. I feel literally nothing and yet somehow I feel better. 

And now you're telling me about these experiences that involve things that sound a lot like recreation, and then I think I honestly this is my opinion and I'd love you to weigh in on this I like recreation, and then I think I honestly this is my opinion and I'd love you to weigh in on this I don't love what cannabis culture has done for this potential impact, because I don't think a lot of the cannabis leadership and optics tell a story of real power. It's about, maybe, real freedom, but in the psychedelic world there is some freaking power to heal. That is well beyond what I see, anything in the cannabis side. So you know, talk to how you walk somebody through like hey, this is way more than like a bottle of pills, like take two in the morning and see if you feel any better. Is it a little less pain in the knee? Like I tried a couple more days? It is not like that at all. 

0:08:22 - Ben McCauley

No, it's a completely different model of care, not like that at all. Yeah, no, it's a completely different model of care, and that's something that people don't understand about psychedelics is that, yes, we need a medical infrastructure to be able to safely deliver the medicine, which requires all of the things that you think you need in a medical office, but we also need psychotherapeutic support. So if you imagine your Venn diagrams, you have the medical one and the psychotherapeutic one mixing together and you're operating inside the nexus of those. But really the psychedelic model of care transcends those two overlaps and becomes its own model. And, to speak to what you're asking about, you need both. 

And in psychedelics the power dynamic is flipped to the patient. So in the traditional medical model, the physician is the authority, rightfully so, because of their education, and the patient doesn't have to understand how the medicine works in their body. They don't have to understand anything about dose, they trust the physician, they trust the person that's saying you need to take this medication for this long, have this procedure and these are your chances for success. And a lot of times we really like it in medicine when those success rates are binary, when we can look and say you had an infection. You didn't have an infection and that makes our outcomes really easy to measure. In the psychedelic model of care, that's completely switched the authority is on the person that's taking the medicine and what we're trying to do is create an environment. This is set in setting which I can come back to. We're trying to create an environment that supports an experience where the patients or clients' internal healing intelligence, their wisdom, can come out of them and serve up content that their system needs to work on next. So we need safe medical infrastructure. We need psychotherapeutic support that's specialized for how to work inside of an altered states environment, an altered states experience. 

It's different than normal psychotherapy and if we can create that safe environment and give the person an experience with the medicine, then, yes, all of these physiological mechanisms are happening. It's doing all of this stuff in the brain that has potential to help and does help with mental health conditions, the way we think of them as a diagnosis. But it's also an experience that they're having. And this is unique to psychedelics because other psychotropic medications they don't have an experiential component, it's just a physiological component and for those that they help, that's great, and for a lot of people they don't help. 

But psychedelics capture both of those components and we know that our mental health conditions whether it's condition or whether it's just how we're experiencing ourselves in the day-to-day it is an experience also and we're sure it has physiological components and it has spiritual components too, and in our experience those aren't differentiated the way that we differentiate them as we study them. It's like psychology is one field and medicine is another field. In our lived experience they're all combined into one and psychedelics treat all of the different domains of that. They treat or address the physiological component, the psychological component and the spiritual component of that person from that person's phenomena or perspective. They're really unique in that way and so we need the safety of the traditional medical environment to deliver the medicine in a safe way. 

But the model of care is totally different. It switches the authority and puts it on the client. What we're doing as people, supporting that experience, is receiving what their system delivers to us, what that internal healing intelligence gives us for material, and then working with that client to process and work with that material. It's nuanced because a lot of times when people have a mental health condition or just conditions of life living, it can be hard. They think that the thing that they need to fix is X. But when they get into it and you dig into it, it's really something else. But you don't know that until you get all of the stuff that's in your way kind of out of the way. And psychedelics help us clear some of that stuff out of the way and then oftentimes, intuitively, instinctively within ourselves, we're able to see what might be a better avenue for healing or what content is next for us. And if we can be encouraged to follow that as a trailhead for our lives and for our work with ourselves, then we can actually heal the things that our system needed us to heal, rather than targeting something that we thought we needed to target. 

Does that make sense? 

0:12:54 - Mark Henderson Leary

Yeah, for sure. I mean. I think what I'm learning is that there are as many psychedelic experiences possible as there are people times the amount of experiences they could have, so infinite. Right, it's like music, but if I were to summarize it, it would be the most common formula seems to be the ability to unpack the attic and closet of all the things that are hidden in there in a way that doesn't overwhelm you, so you can assess it and then make a plan to organize it, as opposed to creating trauma by like seeing and looking at things that you can't handle and also keeping those things hidden. And so it's like either or right. I think the most common description is like I made a discovery that I didn't know was there, and it's so interesting? 

0:13:42 - Ben McCauley

Yeah, and you know I'm a big proponent of psychotherapy. I've been in psychotherapy, I work with a bunch of therapists and therapy is really good and sometimes, when it doesn't work, you end up with a PhD and all the things that are wrong with you, but you don't feel any better. And, yeah, you can dig through and look at the events again and again, and again. But something else needs to shift. There needs to be a piece of insight around that and how you're working with yourself and living today. 

0:14:12 - Mark Henderson Leary

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That kind of touches the nerve of, I think, a lot of people because the way people describe it they talk about the acceleration, they talk about like 10 years of therapy in one week, or three years of therapy in one day, like made so much progress, and it kind of sounds a little bit like instant fix. Yeah, that is not the case. 

0:14:30 - Ben McCauley

No, it's not the case at all, and the instant fix, like that concept, goes back to the traditional medical model Give me an antibiotic and it clears my infection. I have a binary outcome on the other side and I know that it worked. But when we're talking about humans living life and experiencing life, whether we're talking about a diagnosable mental health condition or not we're talking about someone who's dynamic and growing and living and changing in their life, and so when we treat that quote, we can look at it as a problem that needs a solution and that actually can perpetuate the problem, because the more you define it as a problem, the more it needs a solution, the more you create the polarization of the condition in itself, whereas with psychedelics, we give the person an invitation to be their own authority within their own system. 

0:15:24 - Mark Henderson Leary

Yeah. 

0:15:25 - Ben McCauley

And they deliver content and they're able to work on content and then, in a supportive environment, they're able to process that content. And it won't be a quick fix, but oftentimes they feel a lot better and then they're oriented towards how to be with themselves in their daily life a little bit differently. And so I say people all the time like psychedelics are fertilizer for the nervous system. In a sense we need some, but we don't need too much, and fertilizer isn't going to fix all of the problems that the tree has. But a lot of us have grown up in environments where we don't need too much and fertilizer isn't going to fix all of the problems that the tree has. But a lot of us have grown up in environments where we didn't have the love and support we needed, and a little bit of that within ourselves goes a long way, especially supported by a safe environment. 

0:16:10 - Mark Henderson Leary

So I want to do two things. One is I just want to address language. Every time I've had a conversation not every time, many of the times conversations have come up about psychedelics the first response is, oh, micro dosing, and I'm like that's interesting, how that is, what is sort of the brand. And then I want to kind of address sort of the language and description and comparison and I'd like to walk you, walk us, through an experience, like if the patient comes to you, like what's the lifecycle look like? So make this really tangible, sure, sure sure. 

0:16:36 - Ben McCauley

Yeah, microdosing is a conversation for what we would consider like the underground world, with psychedelics. There are people that are microdosing psilocybin and LSD. It's probably a lot more common than you think, and microdosing is a little bit of a medication model. Technically, when you microdose, you should be taking a sub-perceptible amount of a psychedelic. So if you take a microdose, you should be taking a sub-perceptible amount of a psychedelic. So if you take a microdose, you shouldn't feel it. 

If you take a microdose and you feel it, it was too much, you should be able to live your life, operate a vehicle, do social things without having any concerns, and what people describe is that they often have a lift in their mood, or their ability to be creative is greater, or they're able to process problems a little bit smoother, almost like what would have been a speed bump for their process is not a speed bump anymore, or what might have been stopping at a light for a long time for their process instead is just like a quick stop sign and then they can move through. I'm not sure how much I can share more about microdosing. There's a ton of information online for people to look at. It's not a psychedelic experience exactly. It's using a psychedelic medicine in a medical sort of way a sub-perceptible dose and people find that it really helps them with their depression or their bipolar. There's lots of reports online about it. 

0:18:04 - Mark Henderson Leary

It's like a medication model and I think that's probably worth attributing that. The idea of the true, I guess and that's where I'm maybe sort of struggling to language the polarity, like the microdosing model is like a sustained continual, like. I take two in the morning every day. It's part of my routine. I take a little pre-teen when I work out. You know it's like pre-workout Okay, fine, it's like an ingredient in your life. But there is the other side which is like no, we are trying to solve picture, we are trying to level this up and get you to a new place. That is sort of self-sustaining. 

0:18:40 - Ben McCauley

Yeah, a larger psychedelic experience is. It's almost like if you were going to give fertilizer to a tree that hasn't been fertilized in a long time and you're going to have a bigger experience that's going to take longer for you to process. And one of the things that I would like to just iterate to the audience is that integration is a huge piece of that and arguably don't do it without integration. Integration is the process of taking this big experience that you're having and then figuring out how it works in your life over time. So integration is a little bit like chewing cud, where you go back into the experience and you look for more material that's there for you and you process it a little bit more and you're asking yourself how am I different now that I've had this big experience? How am I different in this moment and in this moment and in this moment and with these people, and how does the experience that I had with myself inform how I'm living out in the world? 

0:19:33 - Mark Henderson Leary

yeah, it's like you know, you continue with that attic unpacking model. It's's like we spent six hours three hours, depending on the psychedelic experience unpacking all this crazy stuff in the attic, stuff I didn't even know was there. Then we put it back in the attic, potentially organize it or whatever, and now we're back to our daily life. And so the experience was that unpacking and repacking, and now you're left with the memories of man. I remember seeing that doll, that doll. There was something about that doll, and so that's when the work begins. You're not taking more medication at that point. You're sort of processing and asking and experimenting and feeling. 

0:20:06 - Ben McCauley

Yeah, psychedelics are a nuanced medication, like sometimes I use the example of lidocaine. You can give lidocaine locally to anesthetize and inject and do a suture or for a laceration or something, and you can give it systemically, but it's a cardiac medicine. So psychedelics are like that. Microdosing is one way to use them. It is a little bit more of a medical idea in the sense that you're taking it every day or technically you're not supposed to take it every day. You get receptor saturation with it and so you're skipping a day or you can look it up. There's a bunch of different protocols for how to do that, but having the larger experience is something different. 

0:20:45 - Mark Henderson Leary

It's just a different use of the tool so walk me through academy experience, it archetypically, especially talking about intention setting and and however you do that in your model and the integration, really, really want to land those points, because I think that the mass perception is like it's about the drug experience and that is what I'm understanding and seeing that that's really like the least important part of it. I mean, I guess it's not exactly what you described, but walk us through it. 

0:21:10 - Ben McCauley

Yeah, I'd like to say a little bit about the drug experience. You know, in our society we kind of don't have a conceptualization for someone who's having an altered states experience. That isn't just quote getting high or getting drunk. We're fine with alcohol in general, but really as humans we need altered states experiences. We seek them out all of the time. We seek them out when we drink. We seek them out when we eat, when we go to fine dining. We're having an altered states experience Sporting events. 

0:21:40 - Mark Henderson Leary

So the belief is that Watching a movie, would you totally lose yourself in a movie Totally, totally. 

0:21:47 - Ben McCauley

Yeah, we're looking for these all of the time. So if we can reorient to this idea that having an altered states experience or a trans experience is a fundamental human need, then we can change our pathologization of it from getting high to accessing something that we actually need as humans, but just like any tool that can get misused and does and has in lots of communities and can cause problems with addiction or abuse. That's just one end of a spectrum, actually, and it's a mistake to focus all of our attention on that one end of the spectrum where things go wrong and miss the rest of the spectrum where things go right. And so when someone comes into the clinic, we're saying yes, you have a fundamental need for a trance or an altered states experience, and if we can give it to you in a safe way, then your inner healing intelligence will serve up material for you. And that actually takes a lot of pressure off of us as providers. We don't always have to know the right answer. Actually, we don't need to know. We just need to be open enough and reflect back positive regard and neutrality to that person so that their internal wisdom can serve up what they need. 

In order to do that, we need to educate them, and so when people come to the clinic, we spend an hour with them talking about what to expect logistically, by coming through what the experience is going to be like a little bit like how to prepare for it. You can't completely say what it'll be, because each person's going to have their own, but we can give people generalizations. That helps them feel safe so that they know what to expect. They go through about an hour of that and then from there they choose an IV model or a ketamine-assisted psychotherapy model, and that's specific to our clinic. 

Other clinics do it different ways. There are clinics that don't use the psychedelic model of care, that just deliver IVs, and there are some clinics that only do ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. Because of the market and the region we're in, we do both, and we do both in a supported way, and so I'm going to go through it as if they decided to do ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, and so at that point they're going to have a medical history and physical where we're going to check them for mental health and physiological rule-out criteria. We want to make sure that it's safe for them to receive medicine and, of course, having an H&P is what establishes them as a patient with us and from there. As long as they're safe to receive medicine physiologically and psychologically, then they're going to choose one of our therapists to work with and schedule a session. 

0:24:19 - Mark Henderson Leary

How important is that choice, that there's like a resume vibe kind of yeah yeah, actually yes, Because so we're. 

0:24:28 - Ben McCauley

The way that we build the systems within the clinic is to follow the psychedelic model, and that means that we, as much as we can, we defer to the client to make decisions for themselves. Not only is this honoring their internal healer, it honors their autonomy and it honors their voice and we want to encourage them to have one as much as they can and different people have that to different degrees, based on their experiences and their mental health stuff. We ask them to look at a list of therapists and to pick one that they think will work for them, which is kind of again the first step of saying your autonomy and this matters. Look for someone that you feel like you're going to vibe well with and go from there. So when they come in for their first appointment, after that we do a physical check. We check their vital signs, make sure there hasn't been any changes just like you would expect medically. Check their vital signs, make sure there hasn't been any changes just like you would expect medically, and then we deliver an injection of ketamine. The therapist at that point has a chance to visit with the client. 

Set an intention. An intention is like a compass heading for where you want your experience to go. But an intention is something that you hold really loosely, and so the analogy that we like to give is imagine you're going to float a river. The river is the psychedelic experience or the ketamine experience. The intention you set is the dot getting out into the water. The intention helps you transition from land to water or, in this case, from normal waking consciousness to an altered states experience. It's important to have an intention and know what things you might want to work on, but it's also something that you hold really loosely, because the journey is going to go where it goes, and that's the river. Once you drop into the river, your goal is to flow as much as you can with the experience, and the river is going to take you where it takes you. It may take you where you thought you wanted to go, that you wanted to work on your injury with your mom or whatever happened in your life, but it also may take you to somewhere else, and usually does take you other places, and when you get to those other places on the other side, most people go okay, yeah, that's what I really needed to work on, Actually. I just didn't know that it was there. So the intention setting is really important because it helps you transition into the experience and it gives you kind of, like I said, a compass heading. But once you're in the experience you're in a flow state, so you go where it goes. In our clinic the therapist supports all of that. So the therapist supports the intention setting piece and the therapist supports the experience. 

We do an initial ketamine injection. At start People wear an eye mask For most psychedelic medicines. I think probably all you want at least some sensory deprivation which helps the client go inside and work with the content that's inside. They can be really beautiful externally, don't get me wrong. It can be really beautiful to interact with the world and there's nothing wrong with doing that. But in psychedelic therapy often the mask is used to help the client go internally and work with internal content. And then we play music in the room and music gives the experience motion and forward movement. That's a really important part of any psychedelic experience. 

Actually, Especially with ketamine, without music the experience is just really void and black and empty, which speaks to the medical use of it as an anesthetic at high doses. But we're using sub-anesthetic dosing and within that below anesthesia range there's an entire continuum of psychedelic experiences there that have beautiful efficacy for mental health. So the client's having their experience. The therapist is in the room with them. They may talk a lot through it, they may not. They may talk some and not. It's almost like you're having a lucid dream with ketamine, because it's an aesthetic. This is kind of the personality that it has as a psychedelic that's different from other ones. With MDMA you're not disassociated in a sense there's a lot of nuance to that word but you're more in the room. Just to briefly, I'm using that word in a medical context. 

0:28:24 - Mark Henderson Leary

Medical disassociation, Therapeutic disassociation, is something else I'm glad you made the distinction because I had been sort of loosely associating those words. 

0:28:33 - Ben McCauley

Yeah, yeah, and you know, in psychotherapy we think of disassociation as a bad thing someone's doing in order to drop out of their experience, to try to keep themselves safe while something's happening. 

0:28:42 - Mark Henderson Leary

Disconnection, for safety purposes, from what's going on, yeah. 

0:28:46 - Ben McCauley

And then there's physiological disassociation, where you're giving someone anesthesia. That's a different thing and actually, from a psychotherapeutics perspective, what I would argue is that disassociation is happening on a spectrum. So you have the negative quote negative or protective mechanism of disassociation when something's happening. But it also has a whole positive range, which is what we're getting into when we talk about trance or we talk about altered stakes experiences and that people need those. That's the positive range of a disassociation experience. Actually, let's see, I lost my train. 

Oh yeah, so the therapist is sitting with our client and as the client works through material, the therapist is there to support that. Often the system the client system will serve up material and the therapist will help capture that, and then, as the medicine is wearing off, the therapist then can capture that and then, as the medicine is wearing off, the therapist can work with that material, specifically with that client, and help integrate that. That can happen in the session and does happen in the session. And then sometimes people need separate integration sessions too, and so we offer those for support. How long? 

0:29:49 - Mark Henderson Leary

does a typical session last. 

0:29:51 - Ben McCauley

Yeah, two to three hours. Sometimes we schedule them for two in our area, but there are other clinics that schedule them for three to four. Ideally they would be three to four, but our market here, generally people, won't tolerate longer sessions, especially with the way that it drives up costs. So we do them for two. We find that sufficient, but oftentimes if we have a client that's willing to do it, we'll do them for longer. 

0:30:16 - Mark Henderson Leary

Yeah, the integration needs as a concept more, as in general color. It's very intangible and hard to understand until you've been through it. 

0:30:28 - Ben McCauley

It really is, and this speaks to something about the experiential component of psychedelics. You're not going to know what skydiving is like until you jump out of a plane. It doesn't matter how many books you read, it doesn't matter how many videos you do, until you jump out of a plane, you're not going to know what it's like. Psychedelics is like that. So it is something that's hard to explain if you haven't done it. Integration, arguably, is as important, if not more important, than is as important, if not more important than the psychedelic experience itself. And there is a risk of people having psychedelic experiences and they can get a lot of healing and growth from them and then not integrate from them, and then they still have a lot of the main issues maybe in their life or things are coming back up and they might think that they can run back to the psychedelic again to get some relief. That's not necessarily bad. Relief is not necessarily bad. 

When we talk about an altered stakes experience, some people think of that and they think, oh, they're just getting high. No, they're not. They're seeking relief, like as a human, as a living entity, we move away from pain. That's one of the definitions of something that's alive, actually, and so seeking relief in and of itself isn't a bad thing, but when we seek relief alone, without growing and changing with it, that can become a problem. Helps us take the things that we saw and learned and move them into our life in an embodied and practical way so that we're growing and changing from the experiences, and that's what makes it really stick and help the person with their life. Actually Does that track? 

0:32:08 - Mark Henderson Leary

Yeah, for sure, and I love what you said about that, because I think that there is that balance between I just need to get away from the pain, I'm flooded, I'm overwhelmed, like I just I'm not able to be present, be aware, tolerate this, and I need some relief is a practical consideration, highly subjective though, because that's, I think, where the nuance is, and I think that's built into the psychedelic mindset, at least in the practitioners that I know that it is you're trying to use the experience to give you the capacity to do the work itself, not the other way around, and so that's the mindset of you know, now I'm addicted, like well, that's exactly what we're talking about. 

Like we got more relief. I need more relief. Oh, the relief is perfect. It's like no, the relief is an enabler to get you into the actual journey to do the work, and if you're ever stuck, we want you to go back and get unstuck. But that's not the point. The point is to be on the actual journey of healing. 

0:33:04 - Ben McCauley

Oftentimes we need relief just to have a safe enough space within ourselves to be able to access painful content. 

0:33:11 - Mark Henderson Leary

Yeah, exactly. 

0:33:11 - Ben McCauley

You're not going to analyze your burn while your arm's on the stove yeah. And people that come into the clinic a lot of times they're here because of the intense amount of suffering that they're in yeah, and ketamine offers time out from ordinary mind is one of the research publication phrases An experience of the self in the larger sense, often from like an observer perspective, where you're able to see yourself and how you're interacting in your life, and relief creates the space where you're able to have that insight. Actually, it's a really important component. So when I have conversations with people, I really try to move the needle on thinking of it from this pathologized sort of way of just trying to get altered or get effed up or get high. No, we need to provide relief and as a provider in this space and a practitioner in this space, we can see when our clients are just using it to get relief, and even that's not necessarily bad. Like you take a blood pressure medicine every day, you're not trying to necessarily get relief because you're not feeling what it's doing, but you take it every day so that it treats the blood pressure. You take an antidepressant every day hoping that it provides relief, and ketamine, in some senses is no different. 

We do have clients that they come in and there's relief, as all their system will allow them to access. That they come in and there's relief as all their system will allow them to access, because of their particular mental health conditions, how their nervous system grew up in a context, what kinds of nutrition and love and support they got as a child or didn't get. Usually, actually, relief may be all that their system can muster. Yeah, that's not necessarily bad, and so we see people that come in once every month or two months and they'll'll do a treatment and they get the relief they need, but they're not showing any signs of craving. They're not showing any signs of wanting to use the medicine to bypass. 

Most people won't want to use a psychedelic after they have one. Actually, the experience is so intense and so rich that most people won't seek it out again for a while. It's naturally limiting Now, just like any distribution. There are people that will fall into the tail of that, that will flip it and will seek it out for different reasons that maybe not are healthy For sure. That happens, and so that risk is there and as a provider, we just watch for that with our patients and we don't see it very often. Most people, when they have the experience, they say, oh my gosh, that was really big. I learned so much, I don't need another one of those for a while. 

0:35:51 - Mark Henderson Leary

Yeah, and I love the way you describe that because I think that a lot of the way this is described for my marketing. I mean, there's a lot of effort to try to rebrand psychedelics, right. We're trying to like get it out of the dark ages from the 60s and 70s and the war on drugs mentality and there's like look, it's non-addictive, you know it solves forever and all these kind of things and it's like well, a lot of times, yeah, I mean, any tool is nuanced, right, yeah? 

0:36:16 - Ben McCauley

Yeah, any tool has nuance and psychedelics have nuance. It's foolish to say that they don't have problems sometimes, of course they do, but it's a problem also to go the other direction. That's what happened with the war on drugs is they just went to the total prohibition direction and blocked all research actually on them, which was a huge mistake, and put us behind by decades and decades, if not centuries. Yeah, the power that they have for healing is so potent. We need them. But we need them to be delivered in a safe way, yeah, and not just put into Kool-Aid and then people are taking them and don't know what they're taking. That's incredibly unethical, you know, yeah. 

0:36:56 - Mark Henderson Leary

Yeah, yeah, and I think that's a huge benefit of the medical model, because it knows how to do things like assess for risk, you know use evidence-based. 

But it is interesting. I do think you know you explained for me a couple months ago this polarity between what you described as the psycho-spiritual model, which I have come to interpret as sort of the traditional millennia of shaman, spiritual, sacred ritual probably a better way to describe it and that is still not even in the conversation. And I think there's this, really this important coexistence of like. We're going to be reductionist in the medical model, we are going to get tons and tons of data about a handful of things and then, beyond that, that psycho-spiritual world, there's millennia of hundreds or thousands of plant medicines that are not going to see the light of day for most people, but it's still there and has this wide, wide like. If you open the door on psycho-spiritual, what's below the surface, the number of plant medicines you have never heard of and will never hear of is mind-blowing. 

0:37:53 - Ben McCauley

Yeah, as a species, we've only been doing this science thing for a little while. You know, it's relatively new and it's bought us a lot of beautiful things. I mean we're having a conversation over technology that's being recorded in the cloud. I mean, all of that is magic. If you were alive 100 years ago or 200 years ago, you'd be seeing what we're doing and have no idea how we're doing it, and so, yeah, there's something to be incredibly thankful for. That science does what it does for us. But we kind of threw the baby out with the bathwater when we threw out the spirituality piece. And as a species, we're fundamentally spiritual in some way, unique to each person, unique to each tribe, each community, each region. But it's there. By labeling things as savage or barbarian, a few hundred years ago, we threw those things out and we're missing it. Actually, we're missing it and we desperately need it. 

Offer us a spiritual experience that is derived from within ourselves, that respects each of our unique makeup and how we experience ourselves from a spiritual perspective. And that's part of the unique power of psychedelics is that they're treating each I'll say body loosely of the person's being. They're treating the spiritual body, they're treating the psychological body, they're treating the physiological body also and not just dissecting them all out. And, like I was saying at the beginning, as we're having a singular experience, actually as a person, it's not dissected out. And the flow we know this too the flow I mean, yeah, it's a fractal. Psychedelics teach us to flow. They teach us to flow from within ourselves and they teach us to flow within life. Yeah, it's a fractal, you know, psychedelics teach us to flow. They teach us to flow from within ourselves and they teach us to flow within life, actually to life in the larger sense. 

0:39:41 - Mark Henderson Leary

Yeah, and I would love to even you know, I think I want to close this portion pretty soon, because I want to. We're going to break this into two episodes and we'll talk a little bit about the business model side of this. This conversation could go on and on and I'm totally restraining myself. Yeah, I feel like I'm just getting warmed up absolutely. 

Maybe we can have a whole series about this, because I think that maybe sort of a segue question would be. I think there's so much richness into what you said. At the same time, as a former skeptic, spiritual like, I thought we were talking about medicine and I wonder what that does for perception and skepticism and disbelief about, like what. This is just another excuse for some hippies to like create a church about some and they're gonna get high and look, now they've got a medicine way to get high and become one with god and and I'm like, yeah, I get it, I totally. That would make perfect sense to me without having been exposed to what really goes on. 

0:40:41 - Ben McCauley

Well, that's that. That for sure is happening all over the place. Everything you just described is happening. But but again, like looking at one demographic and then blanket applying it to the entire concept is a logical fallacy. 

You know, I'm in West Texas doing this and I'm treating people that are generally often conservative and come from a Christian background, and so the thing to tell people is that psychedelics are a nonspecific amplifier of self. So when someone has a psychedelic experience, if they come from like for our population here a Christian background and they experience love, they experience a sense of the divine inside of a ketamine experience, they're going to attribute that to God in the way that they understand it. So it's really beautiful, actually, because it works within the phenomenology of each individual. So if someone comes into that and doesn't have that type of spirituality, they have another kind, or they don't have one, that's actually fine, because the psychedelic experience is just going to amplify who they are, yeah, and hopefully who they are inside in an authentic way, not necessarily who they think they are, or they go in pieces. 

0:41:58 - Mark Henderson Leary

Because a lot of the description. I think that the experiences of people who have had massive transformative psychedelic experiences, I think are oftentimes the worst way to invite people into it, because the way they self-describe oftentimes is very jarring and very Can be. And they're like no, no, it was great, you know, it's's like didn't sound right the way you described it. No, it was, you would love it. But one of the, I think the the most common self-description is like oh, and when she came back she was so different, like a different person. It's like no, not different person. 

0:42:29 - Ben McCauley

Like hopefully more authentically who she was already on the inside when you unpack it. 

0:42:36 - Mark Henderson Leary

it's like no, no, I didn't realize I was in my own way and I was trying to do this and I was blind. And so there's this release of self that is noticeable, that is so true, and you have to like really kind of interview both parties, like the friend and the person. 

0:42:50 - Ben McCauley

They say, no, I wasn't like a different person. 

0:42:52 - Mark Henderson Leary

It was like I was finally my true self and that connection we were trying to have was finally possible, and it was such a breath of fresh air for both sides to see more of what they already appreciated with freedom and love and all that kind of stuff, as opposed to like, oh wow, what's your new name? 

0:43:07 - Ben McCauley

Yeah, right, that's incredibly well said. It's incredibly well said. You know, people are reading and hearing all kinds of stuff about people's big psychedelic experiences online, and what I would tell someone that's just learning about this is you know, hearing those and reading those is fine. If you need to do that in order to kind of get a feel for what this might be like. I mean, we want to make sure, when we're making decisions for ourselves, that we're making good decisions and we're being safe, so respecting the parts of us that need to do that homework and research and the fact finding. Yes, absolutely do that and don't apply those experiences to yourself. You're not going to have that experience. You're going to have your experience. 

0:43:47 - Mark Henderson Leary

Yeah, yeah, I think that that's a big sort of teaching is the letting go process of what is? 

your journey and intention setting. And I wonder how that applies, because I think a lot of the stories I've heard especially like people taking week-long intensive trips to South America and doing ayahuasca and they come back with sort of like the one and done, and it was exactly what I did there becomes sort of this expectation that I'm going to replicate that exact experience and for a lot of people they're like no, no, the first experience didn't do a thing for me, like nothing. 

0:44:17 - Ben McCauley

I had to really kind of find some patience. 

0:44:19 - Mark Henderson Leary

And then, oh, the second one. That was really where I found it, because I was looking in totally wrong places. 

0:44:24 - Ben McCauley

Yeah, to compare the spiritual and physical kind of perspectives of this. You know, we don't know like psychedelics are, like discovering the microscope, and there's a famous quote you can look up later about how psychedelics are, the microscope for the mind. Imagine if we were alive when the microscope was first discovered and we were just learning about antibiotics. We know a lot more about antibiotics now. We can gram stain them, we can culture them, we have antibiotic resistant, right. We are in the early days with psychedelics antibiotic resistant, right. We are in the early days with psychedelics. We don't always completely know which one is gonna work with a certain person's neurology or system or psychology, right? 

0:45:05 - Mark Henderson Leary

To me the metaphor would be like if you go on the golf course with like a handful of golf clubs, you gotta learn what each club does. But in psychedelics there's like a thousand different clubs. 

0:45:16 - Ben McCauley

They all play golf but they like they hit the ball in a different way, totally, totally, because it's different tools from a medicine perspective and from a spiritual perspective. What someone might say inside the spiritual part of the psychedelic world is we can treat each medicine like a quote, patron saint. They have a different personality, they have a different personality, they have a different approach, they work differently in people's lives at different times. And what you find doing this work in the field, in a community, is that if we bring in the underground let's just say we're assuming we have access to all medicines is that a certain psychedelic would work for a person for a certain period of time and then another one might work for a different period of time in their life and so their relationship with that medicine is changing all of the time. 

And that's actually a really big component of the psychedelic model is to say that you have a relationship with this medicine. Actually, you can use it in a dishonoring way. So like using it to bypass your work, for example, would be a dishonoring way, and I know that that's not a way that we think about medicine. But I'm trying to list the medical sort of rationale next to the spiritual so that you can see a little bit how both are happening, and whether or not you orient towards one or the other is fine. Both are happening, and whether or not you orient towards one or the other is fine. You know different people are going to orient towards different sides of that and that's fine. 

0:46:41 - Mark Henderson Leary

Both are happening regardless well, you just said something about the dishonoring. If you're an athlete, you're, if you're a runner, and you figured out a medication that takes the pain away, but you haven't figured out your running form problem. That's causing the pain in the first place. You know that's. That's not the, the ideal like do you want to run your best? Do you want to run your entire life? The advil is not. You know, is a tool, but it's not the solution. 

0:47:04 - Ben McCauley

Do you go get a gait analysis, go do figuring out how to how to solve the problem that's a great example, and so in the psychedelic world we call that spiritual bypassing, where instead of working on the content that you got last time and instead of getting with a therapist and doing some of the hard stuff that you need to do with yourself, you skip all of that and you just go straight to another mystical experience with a psychedelic and it provides relief, which isn't bad, and it can be a problem for some people to do that, but overall it's not doing this in a clinic. We're able to work with people. Actually, if that happens, it doesn't have to be a problem. 

0:47:41 - Mark Henderson Leary

Man, I think that's a great place to end, because if we don't, we won't end. Yeah, we won't stop. Yeah, yeah, great, I just. I'm so grateful for this as a sort of primer. I'm just excited to get some feedback from people and see what people respond to on this, because I think it's just so interesting and powerful and just a wide open universe of new opportunities and what just seems like one discipline, it's like, oh, the psychedelics, it's like no, there's a whole universe back there that I think can be unpacked. 

There's a lot, it seems to be a lot of enthusiasm and inertia, to opening it up and I guess we're looking forward to rescheduling MDMA. That's sort of the next significant step. Assuming that comes through, well, we'll get there. So let's wrap it up for now and I'm grateful for the time. That's it for now and I guess I should record a conclusion to this and then we'll go from there. 

So if this was helpful, please get this in the hands of friends who might find this useful. Spread the word and create the conversation, because in the healthcare space there's lots of innovation left to be done, lots of inspiration, lots of people to be healed, and if you're in the entrepreneurial community of healthcare, we want you to know that there is a very vibrant community, people who are very enthusiastic of all aspects, from the innovative side to just doing really good customer service and creating a great experience with very traditional care. So give us feedback, share this with people who can find value and if you're ever stuck, I want to help you on the journey. Practicefreedomcom slash schedule. We'll see you next time on Practice Freedom with me, mark Henderson-Leary.

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