Ayahuasca and the Higher Self: The Healing You Can't Rush - Episode 332

Welcome And Why Solo Episodes Sandy Kruse 0:02 Hi everyone, it's me, Sandy Kruse. Welcome to Sandy K Nutrition Health and Lifestyle Queen. For many years now, I've been a trusted voice for people in midlife and beyond who want a deeper, more honest conversation about wellness. One that includes the physical, the emotional, the mental, and the esoteric.

Most episodes are solo now because I want to bring you thoughtful research, lived experience, and grounded insight without noise or bias. And when I do bring on a guest, it's because their work genuinely adds something meaningful to the conversation. Here we explore the full spectrum of what it means to be well, how the body functions, how the mind heals, how the spirit expands, and how all of these layers shape life lived with clarity and joy. Thanks for being here.

And if this show resonates with you, please follow, rate, review, and share it. It truly helps the message reach more people. Hi everyone, welcome to Sandy K Nutrition, Health and Lifestyle Queen. Today I'm going to talk all about ayahuasca, the trends, the higher self, because you hear this term thrown around a lot on social media.

And then I'm going to talk about the healing that you can't rush. Now, I am going to say that these definitions do come from me, but they come from a lot of wisdom around them, if that makes sense. So I read a lot about these philosophers and these theories and these psychologists and psychiatrists about what the higher self is. And I'm going to give you my definition because they're all a little bit different.

I'm touching on ayahuasca and the trends of ayahuasca for healing and why it might not be for you and why you can't really rush healing. So it's a little bit of a complicated topic, but most of you know who follow me, I always look at health from a holistic W H O L E holistic perspective, body, mind, spirit, soul. It's why my podcast is always saying research can't support everything. And the more that we realize that we need to understand our own resonance and that so much power in our wellness resides within us, then you'll get it.

Why I started my podcast this year to be more solo episodes. I did that because in this space of wellness, I've been here for a long time. I've been in the space for nine years, but actually, as a podcaster over six, I started my podcast in February 2020, right before the pandemic. And the space of wellness has changed dramatically from a place where there was a lot of integrity and ethics, and really this, you know, a lot of heroes journey people coming out and saying, wait a minute, I went back to school to learn about this, and now I can speak about this because I went through this.

Most of you who follow me know I had thyroid cancer at age 41, and now I have gone through menopause. I am 56 years old, and I am a thyroid thriver. And I talk a lot about the mindset and I talk a lot about health as it relates to all aspects of our wellness. I am an English literature graduate.

I do have a Substack. I love to write. So follow me there, sandycruz.substack.com. And then also I am a registered holistic nutritionist after I had thyroid cancer and my daughter had cancer at the age of five.

That most of you know my story. Just go ahead and use AI. Look me up. Look me up.

I've been around for a while and I do have a hero's journey, but I also have the credentials to back up what I speak about because I am a college-trained, registered holistic nutritionist. You hear a lot of people use the term nutritionist and they took a weekend certification. It's not the same. I also have multiple certifications in wellness as well.

And I am a certified metabolic balance coach. So now that you know all this, you know what I'm going to talk about. Hit subscribe wherever you are listening. If you do that, you're supporting an independent podcaster, which there's very few of us around.

I don't have a big machine behind me pushing all my content out, which is why I'm about, oh, four weeks behind in my YouTube stuff because I do it all myself and I am primarily passion over profit, which is the whole point of what I was saying 2026. I changed directions. I don't have as many guests. I will have guests on occasion if I feel it really contributes to the conversation that I'm having, but I am also a researcher.

It was one of the credentials I had to graduate in over 80 and it's to learn how to decipher research. So I'm like, why am I bringing people on to give you a coupon code when the research can be biased? We all know that for almost anything that I can prove, I can also disprove with research. And, you know, a lot of times people show you what they want to show you.

So I'm showing you and coming at you on this topic today without bias. I'm just talking to you about a topic that I feel is really important. How many of you know of somebody who went to the jungle to heal and came home and from at least from your perspective, set their whole world and their whole life on fire? So he or she drank the medicine.

Within weeks, they left their marriage, walked away from the life they knew and built, burned it all down all at once. And depending on who you ask, that was either the bravest thing that they did or the most destructive thing that they did. And so I've been sitting on stories like this for a while because here's the thing that nobody tells you about cracking yourself open. You don't get to choose what's inside.

And I'm going to get into the subconscious, I'm going to get into some of the fallacies of what people are told that 80% of your thoughts are subconscious thoughts. I think I probably said that before because it's one of those widespread sayings that you'll see on social media. This is why podcasts like mine are so important that you keep listening to more than just the 30-second clips. I have recorded with three thought leaders in the space of psychedelics, ayahuasca, whatever it is.

I think three different podcasts. Just go on sandycruz.ca and you could probably look up psychedelics, you could probably look up ayahuasca or psilocybin mushrooms, whatever. You'll be able to hear those interviews. Now, now that you know all of this, who I am, um what I'm gonna talk about is I'll start with ayahuasca.

Higher Self Defined Without The Hype Sandy Kruse 8:08 So I'm gonna hold two things at once, which is always my favorite thing to do. On the one side, there's the higher self. What is it? Who is it?

Is it even real? And on the other side, I'm gonna talk about ayahuasca, which is this ancient Amazonian brew that has become a Hollywood and wellness industry and biohacking trend, a supposed shortcut to enlightenment. And I want to ask the hard question underneath all of it why it might be genuinely good for a few people and genuinely not good for most people. I personally have never done ayahuasca.

I'm not anti, I believe that it's an individual choice, and I'm not here to sell it or sell retreats or scare people off of it. Um I can't see myself doing it because I have no problem going through the hard shit. I don't believe in fast tracking my health and my healing. I'm gonna say my healing more than my health.

And I'm deeply suspicious of anything that promises you that you can do that because I think it comes with risk. So I'm coming to this topic as an observer, holding it at arm's length, the researcher, not the evangelist. Okay let's first get into the higher self. I think you're gonna find this interesting.

And the the thing is, is that ayahuasca claims that it will connect you to your higher self. So I'm not gonna hand you a textbook definition. I'm gonna tell you what the higher self means to me, and then you can go and do some research and and see what resonates with you. But for me, the higher self is a reflection of your soul, it's the part of you that knows where you've been and where you're going, your whole history, this life, and everything underneath this life.

And I learned that definition from Brenda Farugia of so brilliant.ca. I always give her a plug because she deserves it. She's an amazing person who I've learned so much from. I'm gonna say, you, you know, it because I say it's this, it knows where you've been, your whole history, but it's not some judge in the sky keeping score of everything that you do wrong.

It's actually you. It's the widest, deepest version of you in your true essence. And it's the one that never forgot who you actually are before all of those negative beliefs were formed, before all of those opinions of others, or even things that, you know, I still work on, you know, before, you know, I was told I didn't even know what a thyroid was, by the way, when I had thyroid cancer. I'm like, what the hell does this thing do?

And I was 41 years old, and I'm like, oh, so the thyroid manages your metabolism. So that means I'm gonna be fat for the rest of my life. And oh my god, everyone gets fat when they hit menopause. I know I'm kind of going off here, but that's what I mean by your higher self doesn't see that.

These are things that are formed later in life through whatever means. So the higher self doesn't work alone either. Your higher self is in constant communication with your guides. You hear guides a lot, right?

Your spirit guides, your team, whatever word lands true for you, it doesn't matter. But that's how it helps you move through this world. It's the nudge, it's the person who shows up in your life at exactly the wrong right moment. It's the pull towards something that you can't explain, or that quiet no that you feel in your body a full beat before your brain can tell you why.

That to me is the higher self. It's not a concept that you memorize, it's a relationship, it's the part of you that's already home, talking to the ones who are helping you find your way back. So the guides. Some might ask, where does your intuition fit into all of this?

Your intuition isn't your higher self, intuition is the channel, the higher self is what is coming through it. Think back to how you know, you know, you talk about um communications with your guides to help you move through this world. Well, how does that how does that help actually reach you? See, this is a little bit of a complicated topic.

You're not gonna get a phone call, you get it as a pull towards something that you can't really justify, a quiet no in your body before your brain has a reason, a knowing that arrives without an argument attached to it. That arrival, that's intuition, it's the delivery system. The higher self is who's sending the message. Intuition is how it lands in a body walking around down here on earth.

The higher self doesn't come to you as intuition, it comes to you through it. Same way a voice isn't an actual phone, the phone is just how the voice reaches you. So, why does the higher self use intuition and not plain thinking? Because thinking is the ego, the narrator, the part that reasons, defends, weighs the pros and cons, wants proof for everything.

The higher self can't get through that channel. A narrator would just argue with it, so it comes in underneath the reasoning mind, a felt knowing is a great way to describe it. That's actually the tell. Real intuition shows up without the mental chatter.

If you had to talk yourself into it, then that was the ego. If it just landed quietly, whole, it came from somewhere louder and wider. Now, one thing to note there are often two things that people lump under intuition. One is your nervous system reading a room in milliseconds, that fast subconscious pattern matching from billion-bit basements.

Okay, I'll talk about basements. And that's real and it's biological. The other is the deeper transmission, the higher self, the guides. And here's what I love: they're not in competition.

You could say the first one is the equipment that the second one uses. The higher self reaches you through the same quiet sub-vernal verbal channel your body already uses to know things before you can explain them. And then the basement isn't just storage, it might be the receiver. Your intuition isn't your higher self, intuition is the channel, the higher self is what's coming through it, and your higher self and your team are who's on the other end, and your only job is to get quiet enough to read it.

How many of you are quiet enough? Now, if you want to hear or read more about the higher self, start with Plato, go to Carl Jung, Ralph Waldo, Emerson. He talks a lot about the over soul. If you want to look at what their definitions are, they're different, different centuries, different languages, but every one of them circles to the same knowing.

You are much more than your ego. And a lot of people live just in their ego. Now, even with all those brilliant people in my corner who kind of get me, I know some of you are still sitting there going, Sandy, okay, that's lovely, but where's the science on the spirit guides? And I'm gonna say that there isn't any.

And it's something that I say in my podcast all the time. I'm always about science and soul. And we cannot always explain everything with research. And not all research is applicable for all people.

So you can't put a soul under a microscope, you can't run a placebo-controlled trial on your guides. So I'm not gonna dress up my beliefs in a borrowed lab coat and pretend that the research has caught up there because it hasn't. And that's that. Intuition, Ego, And The DMN Sandy Kruse 17:45 So let's get into the brain.

And here's where there's some science that you can rely on. So the brain network is called the default mode network. I've talked about this in my podcast, all about neural nets. So they call it the DMN.

It's what fires when you're not focused on anything in particular, replaying the past, rehearsing the future, telling the endless story of me, me, me, me, me. Researchers increasingly increasingly call it the seat of the ego, the narrating self. And back in 2015, Fernanda Polano Fontez and colleagues showed with brain imaging that ayahuasca quiets this. Okay, when it goes quiet, people describe what's called the ego disillusion.

The narrator finally shuts up. Robert Carhartt Harris built a whole model around this in 2019 in the journal Pharmacological Reviews called Rebusts. Psychedelics loosen the brain's white knuckle grip on the story of me, and everything underneath gets louder. So I'm not telling you that science proves the higher self.

I'm telling you something I find far more interesting. The thing standing between most of us and whatever's underneath the soul, the guides, the deeper knowing is that nonstop narrator that runs the show up top. And ayahuasca has a way of reaching in and switching it off, which sounds like a shortcut straight to the sacred, doesn't it? And that is exactly where this gets dangerous in my mind, depending on who you are.

Because before you switch off that narrator, you would better understand how much is waiting underneath it, or you better be equipped to handle it. How about that? The Basement Analogy For Subconscious Sandy Kruse 20:06 So if the higher self is everything underneath the narrating voice, I have to ask the obvious question how much is underneath? How much of you is running in the dark without you?

You've probably heard the wellness version of this 95% of your mind is subconscious or 80%, whatever I said right at the beginning. I'm going to be straight with you because that exact number that's always quoted on TikTok, on Instagram, is not real science. There is no study behind that stat. It gets repeated so many times that it sounds like it's proven, but you can't actually measure it that way.

And researchers who've gone looking for the source come up empty. So here's the twist: the real science is more jaw-dropping than that slogan I just said. Picture your mind, and this is where the basement comes in, okay? Picture your mind as a house with one small window and a huge dark basement.

I love this analogy, you guys. The window is your subconscious mind. It's the part reading these words, the part that thinks I'm hungry, the part you call me. Sandy, me.

The basement is everything else. Your heartbeat, your breathing, every habit, every stored memory, every reaction that fires before you've decided anything. Now the numbers, and these are stunning. The sense is taken somewhere around one billion pieces of information every second.

Now, this is from a 2024 study out of Caltech published in the Journal Neuron with the unforgettable title, go look it up, The Unbearable Slowness of Being. And out of that billion per second, your conscious mind, the little window, handles about 10. Ten out of a billion. Our brains are slower than the internet.

There's an older version of this study, too, from physiologist Manfred Manfred Zimmerman, made famous in the book, The User Illusion. Roughly 11 million pieces coming in, about 50 reaching awareness. The exact figures differ, but the story doesn't. So throw out this 95%, 80%.

The honest picture is even bigger than that. You are consciously aware of a sliver of a sliver of what's happening inside of you. The window is tiny, the basement is enormous, and make no mistake, the basement is running the show. That tiny narrating window, that's the ego, the default mode network, DMN, the me.

The vast dark basement, that's the subconscious. Okay? The thing your higher self language has been pointing at all along. And the slow doors, okay, meditation, therapy, prayer, breath work, those let a little basement light up at a time, gently at a pace you can hold.

Okay. So the light just kind of comes, it creeps in, right? So now here's what ayahuasca does with that. Remember what we said?

Ayahuasca quiets the DMN, the default mode network. It turns down that narrator. So in this picture of the house, it doesn't gently crack that basement door open so you get a little bit of that light in at a time. It blows the door clean off its hinges.

And all at once, everything stored down there in the dark comes flooding up the stairs to a conscious mind that was probably not really built to handle about 10 more than 10 things at a time. Do you see what I'm saying? Which brings me to this whole episode. Not does it work?

It's really, do you really want to open all of it all at once? So, what a flood like this can do to the nervous system. And remember, I'm gonna pause here. This is not everyone's experience.

It can happen with some. I'm gonna explain who this can happen with more likely. And if this is something that you want to do, make sure that you actually have proper intake. I am not giving you any medical advice here, no mental health advice, no advice whether you should do this or not.

I'm just giving you the research and the reasoning why you may want to do it, why you may not. Okay. Window Of Tolerance And Integration Sandy Kruse 25:32 So your nervous system has a limit and it's not a suggestion. The psychiatrist Dan Siegel has a name for the zone where healing actually happens.

And he calls it the window of tolerance. It's the band where you're stirred up enough to feel something real, but not so overwhelmed that you break. Inside that window, you can process, you can integrate, you can heal. Integration is a massive part of healing.

And if you do go on one of these um, you know, psychedelic retreats, they talk about that. Your guide, if you're with somebody who's really legit, I interviewed one guy, his name is Matt Zeman. He's written a book on it. He's very professional in his approach.

So make sure that that's what you do. And if you want to listen to my podcast with him, go ahead. Go over the top of the window, and your nervous system flips into fight or flight. The flood, the panic, the racing heart, the too much.

Drop out the bottom and it goes the other way. Numbness, freeze, shutdown, far away feeling. It's called disassociation. Neither of those is healing.

Both of those are your body slamming on the brakes because it got handled more than it can handle. It got handed more than it can handle. And this is exactly why the people who actually understand trauma heal it the opposite way from the flood. Peter Levine's whole mess it method, somatic experiencing, and Bessel van der Koelk, The Body Keeps the Score.

I have that book. I think I have two copies. Uh, work by what's called titration, a drop at a time. You touch the hard thing, then you come back to safe.

Then you touch, then you retreat a little, then rest. Never the whole ocean in one night. Now hold those true truths side by side. Ayahuasca can throw the basement door wide open, a billion pieces, rushing a 10-piece window.

And your nervous system only heals a drop at a time inside its window of tolerance. That's the collision. That's why some people don't have just a hard night. They come home dysregulated for weeks or months.

It usually isn't that they saw something too dark, it's that they opened too much too fast for a nervous system that was never built to be flung open like that. The plant overrode the one thing healing actually really likes, it's called pacing. You can't flood your way up to safety. Your nervous system has never once worked that way.

So when someone asks me, should I do ayahuasca to heal faster? This is the science sitting under my whole answer. The whole appeal is speed. Open it up, get it all out, be fixed by Monday.

But your nervous system doesn't heal on that timeline. Now, let's talk about the plant a little bit. What Research Says Ayahuasca Can Help Sandy Kruse 29:15 The landmark study that I'm going to talk about is from 2019, published in Psychological Medicine, led by Fernanda Pahalonofontez. Again, out of Brazil.

It was the first controlled trial to test a psychedelic treatment-resistant depression. In treatment-resistant depression. So people who just didn't do well and didn't respond to standard antidepressants. It was a double blind randomized placebo-controlled study.

29 patients, pretty small, a single dose of either ayahuasca or a placebo measured on two standard depression scales. The results: a rapid antidepressant effect, visible one day after a single session. And the gap between the ayahuasca group and the placebo group didn't shrink. It widened from day one to day seven.

There's more from the same research program. One analysis found ayahuasca modulated BDNF. Some of you might have heard of this brain-derived neutropic, neutropic factor, which is the neuroplasticity single signal. I've talked a lot about the rewiring, neuroplasticity, rewiring the brain.

This is the fertilizer for new neural connections. And go re go listen to my podcast on neural nets to understand it a bit better. And a separate 2019 analysis by Zeifman and colleagues looked at the trial's impact on suicidal tendencies. So the mechanism is coherent.

The same DMN quieting, the same loosening of the rigid self that people describe as spiritual, that appears to be what opens the therapeutic window for someone with severe treatment-resistant depression under clinical conditions. This is not woo. It's a real and rapid effect. So remember, this is proven to help those in certain circumstances with certain conditions.

Under a microscope, screened, supervised, single dose, real depression. Maybe this works for some people. But because ayahuasca is an MAO inhibitor, I just want to mention, again, this is for you to discuss with your own practitioner, whoever that is, or therapist. Medical Risks And Lasting Aftereffects Sandy Kruse 32:10 Combining ayahuasca with anything that raises serotonin is the single biggest medical risk.

And many of these retreats have counselors, therapists, whatever, who do the intake form to make sure that you're not on them because it's genuinely dangerous. SSRIs and SNRIs, they're the most common antidepressants on earth combined with ayahuasca can drive serotonin to dangerous levels and trigger serotonin syndrome, which is confusion, high fever, racing heart, seizures, and it can be fatal. So it's not only antidepressants either. Ayahuasca can just raise your blood pressure.

So people who already have cardiac disease are warned. Then there's conditions like schizophrenia, bipolar, that could be significantly worsened. And then, you know, the thing is that there is a lot on the fact that things can go sideways in these retreats. And that's why I say be very careful about who you decide to do this with if this is something that you want to do.

What they did find in this global public health study in 2022. This is with holy 10,836 people across more than 50 countries. There's acute physical adverse effects, mostly vomiting. You see that all the time.

In about 70% of people, um, that's 70% of people are puking. I think that's commonly known. 2.3 of those people need subsequent medical attention. Adverse mental health effects in weeks or months afterwards were reported by 55.9%.

About 88% of those people framed those hard mental effects as part of a positive process of growth and integration. But 12% had to seek professional support for them. So it's that whole thing about cracking open. And in a 2025 reanalysis of that same data published in PLOS PLOS Mental Health, found the screening relevant piece.

A prior history of anxiety or depression was associated with more adverse mental states afterwards, which means the very people most likely to reach for this hoping for relief are on average more likely to have a rough ride. Okay, now let's talk a little bit about this. And a lot of people don't know about this. There's a study from 2023, 608 people who reported difficulties that lasted beyond the trip itself.

The most common lasting difficulties were anxiety and fear, existential struggle, social disconnection, and depersonalization, feeling unreal or like the world isn't real. The durations are the part that should stop everyone. In my mind, it stops me. Well, there's many things that stop me.

But for roughly a third of these people, the problems lasted for more than a year. For about a sixth, more than three years. And who knows if they kept following them. A follow-up in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies in 2024 ranked them the single most prevalent lasting difficulty at 72% was social disconnection, feeling cut off from the people around you.

That the that's that's what I talked about at the beginning: the empirical shadow of that person who comes home and can no longer stay in their marriage. And in my podcast recording, we talked about seeing the things that you can no longer unsee from trips like these. While the plant can accelerate the opening, it cannot accelerate the becoming ready. It's like I said, to see the things that were unseen before all at once.

That basement door swinging open. So ontological shock plus no integration can equal a blown-up life. The damage in the research rarely comes from the trip itself, it comes from skipping the part that you can't rush. The question that matters isn't does ayahuasca work?

The question is, can you handle seeing what's inside yet? And sometimes the honest answer is no, not yet. And that's not a failure, that's wisdom of knowing what's right for you. So why do people rush?

Because sitting in the hard shit period is agony sometimes. And we've been sold this idea that there's a version of healing that skips it. There isn't. There's just the door that opens faster than you're ready to walk through.

Let's too much in. And you know, we kind of come from this society. Think about it. You know, most of you have seen that comic.

It's like a comic picture with two signs. One, I can't remember exactly what it is. One sign it refers to the fact that, you know, healing is going to take slow or whatever. Another one is take this one pill and you're going to fix everything.

And the lineup for that is huge because nobody wants to do the work. This is part of the work. Celebrity Trend And Unregulated Retreats Sandy Kruse 39:04 So let's get into the Hollywood of it all. So, how did an Amazonian sacrament that indigenous cultures held for centuries become a red carpet flex?

Let's talk about the trend because the trend is the exact inverse of everything the research says makes this safe. The public disclosures are a long list now. Will Smith wrote in his 2021 memoir that he'd done it around 14 times. Aaron Rogers has openly credited it for his mental health and his career.

Miley Cyrus, Megan Fox, Lindsay Lohan, Chelsea Handler, Gwyneth Paltrow, or maybe Gwyneth Paltrow didn't do it. Might have been something that she just talked about on her uh her series, her goop series. It has genuinely gone from the Amazon to the red carpet in a lot of ways. One celebrity count account that actually supports what I'm saying is Prince Harry's.

He was explicit that he would never recommend it recreationally, but framed it as potentially valuable specifically for someone carrying severe grief, loss, or trauma, and only with the right people. And that's that whole good for some, but most not distinction. And notice it's the rarest version of the celebrity take that we hear about. I hadn't heard about this.

Most of these celebrities just describe the fireworks. And here's the the mechanism and the actual danger of this trend. Celebrity testimony makes ayahuasca look like it's a quick fix, a wellness accessory. Biohack your your spirituality, biohack your way to your higher self.

So the boom of the trend is largely unregulated. And that's probably the other issue. Is there's no, you know, not to say that I think everything should be regulated, but you know, this who's a fake, who's not? It's really hard to tell and know.

And a lot of things can go wrong if you're not sure and doing your homework. Who Might Benefit And Safety Nonnegotiables Sandy Kruse 41:46 So the maybe, I'm gonna talk about the maybe, severe trauma, and the ones who can't open at all. Okay, because I think that's the extreme of another problem. And maybe under medical supervision, therapist, whatever, maybe it can help you.

Because I understand PTSD from a different perspective. My grandfather had PTSD. So I want to hold space for the other side of what I'm talking about because I've been pretty pretty candid in my belief on just going and doing some ayahuasca in Costa Rica. I believe that this can genuinely help people, and maybe it's not even ayahuasca, and you have to speak with your own therapist.

There are people who are so armored, combat veterans. I did interview one, survivors of severe abuse, people locked so tight around their trauma, they can't access anything any other way. And for them, a forced crack might be the only door. And a lot of clinicians believe this, and I believe that it might be true for some.

But let me be straight where the evidence actually is. The strongest psychedelic for PTSD trial data is on MDMN, MDMA, not ayahuasca. The ayahuasca for PTSD work is early and it's much thinner. And here's the tension that makes this genuinely hard, like a hard call instead of a clean yes.

And you have to speak with a qualified therapist about this for you is the exact population I'm describing, severe trauma, highly defended, overlaps heavily with the group that the survey data flags as most at risk for adverse effects afterwards. So The people who need that crack may be least able to survive the groundlessness without a serious clinical container, which is why I say maybe maybe, but you have to have a container. You have to have somebody who understands you and these plant medicines. So I'm not going to leave you with like just this warning.

If someone you love is going to do this anyway, here's what the research says a real container looks like. The non-negotiables, and I have recorded about this. I explained, Matt Zeman, I think is very responsible in this area. Genuine medical screening, a full review of medications, especially the SSRIs and cardiac history, any personal or family history of psychosis or bipolar integration support that's built in before and after, not just the ceremony itself.

Because remember, the healing is in the integration and the data is clear. That's where people either might recover or fall apart. A vetted, verifiable, experienced facilitator, not a stranger, not a name off an Instagram ad. The setting that is dangerously a setting that is not dangerously isolated with a real plan for medical emergency and time.

Not a shortcut, not a rushed weekend. Slower Doors To The Higher Self Sandy Kruse 45:45 But here's what I want to leave you with. You do not need a plant to meet your higher self, and the work is not easy, but Young called it individuation, and it takes a lifetime. The mediators quiet that same default mode network with nothing but their breath.

The higher self isn't waiting in the Amazon, it's the underneath the narrating voice of your own head. And there are slower and safer doors to it. And those doors don't ask you to gamble your life, your marriage. Remember, ayahuasca and plant medicines, it can crack you open.

And the only question that has ever mattered is the one I started with. Are you ready to see what's inside yet? And all at once. If the answer is not yet, that's that's your answer.

So if this episode helped you, if it stirred something in you, please do me a favor and make sure that you share it with a friend. Do not, you know, do not go and take this as any kind of advice. I want you to go and speak with your own therapist, maybe share this because a lot of the research is cited in my podcast. And I just want to thank you for being here.

Um, every week I come here with compassion and empathy on topics that I feel are just so important to so many of us. So I want to thank you for being here, and we'll see you next week. And always, always know, get in touch with me. Instagram's the best place.

Sandy K Nutrition everywhere. Thank you. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Be sure to share it with someone you know might benefit.

And always remember when you rate, review, subscribe, you help to support my content and help me to keep going and bring these conversations to you each and every week. Join me next week for a new topic, new guest, new exciting conversations to help you live your best life.