Introduction:
Coming up on this episode of The Doctor’s Farmacy.
Dr. Alberto Villoldo:
We cannot separate the biology from the psychology or the spirituality anymore. These sacred plants have come from a very feminine, shamanic tradition. And we are trying to use them in a very masculine, patriarchal, reductionistic environment. And they still work. They’re magical. They’re fantastic. But we need to know the biology behind them.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Welcome to Doctor’s Farmacy. I’m Dr. Mark Hyman and that’s farmacy with an F, a place for conversations that matter. And if you’ve ever heard about shamanic healing or energy medicine, if you’ve ever wondered about how to heal your soul, well, this conversation is for you because it’s with my close friend, an extraordinary scientist, shaman healer, someone who’s healed me many times in many ways, Dr. Alberto Villoldo. He’s an international bestselling author, who’s researched the shamanic healing practices of the Amazon [inaudible 00:01:03] for 25 years.
He actually connected with the Incas, who’ve been hiding in the mountains for 500 years and come down about eight years ago, connected with them and learned their ancient traditions, has translated them into practical tools for all of us to heal and heal our souls and our bodies and our minds. He’s really an extraordinary man. He’s the founder of the Four Winds Society, an organization that’s dedicated to bridging ancient shamanic traditions with modern medicine psychology. He’s been on the faculty of the University of Chicago, Columbia University in New York. In fact, my daughter took a class with him at Columbia. This is funny. He’s a fellow of the Explorers Club, which is extraordinary group out of New York city, which Darwin and all these people were part of. It’s pretty trippy.
And he has also written more books than I have, which is pretty extraordinary in itself, including Power Up Your Brain, Shaman, Healer, Sage, Mending the Past and Healing the Future with Soul Retrieval, The Four Insights, Courageous Dreaming, One Spirit Medicine and his latest book, Growing a New Body, which actually something grew out of work we did together, running retreats around the world, healing people with both functional medicine and shamanic healing, which go together. And now he’s got a new book called The Wisdom Wheel: A Mythic Journey through the Four Directions, and we’re going to have the best conversation. So listen up. Welcome, Alberto.
Dr. Alberto Villoldo:
Great to be with you, Mark.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Well, you’re in Chile. I’m in Massachusetts. It’s really pretty awesome. And you have been such an important part of my life in my own journey in discovery, of my own healing through both physical and spiritual channels. And I know that you’ve written a lot of books, but this new book I think is especially important because you’re bridging the gap between ancient wisdom of the shamanic traditions, of the ancient Incas and the ancient tradition of shamans in south America and even globally, and the modern science that we now know about health and longevity and functional medicine. And as we both move through our careers, you are becoming more of a functional medicine doctor and I’m becoming more of a shaman and we’re meeting in the middle.
Dr. Alberto Villoldo:
Yeah. That’s a big middle space that we’re meeting in, Mark. For example, now we’re looking at Alzheimer’s, dementia or heart disease as the diseases of aging, and we’re looking at aging as a disease, as an illness, and we’re trying to heal the aging process. And that’s exactly what the shamans do, except that they begin to see aging as starting the first day of your life, not later in life so that they only have one illness and one cure. And that’s [inaudible 00:03:55].
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah. That’s amazing. Tell us about that. What is that? One illness, one cure.
Dr. Alberto Villoldo:
One illness, one cure. And we have 155,000 different illnesses in Western medicine and a different cure for each one of these. And the one illness is disconnection. Disconnection from your life purpose, from your community, from your soul’s journey and from nature, especially from nature. And the one cure is that reconnection to nature, to your calling and to spirit. And then that accelerates any intervention that you make.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah, so true. I mean, being belonging is so much part of our human DNA and it reminds me of this book by E. O. Wilson who recently died, who was a socio biologist from Harvard, who wrote many books, but one of them was called The Social Conquest of the Earth. And it was about our social nature and our need to be connected to each other in order to survive as an evolutionary part of our DNA. And the individualism of America has really created so much disease. Disease, loneliness, disconnection, and isolation. And I don’t know if you know this, I’m sure you know this Alberto, but loneliness is the biggest risk factor for almost all disease and death. And isolation is such a huge disease risk factor.
And I remember this one experiment that I read about, which it was awful, but they basically took these monkeys that were born at the same time. And one of them got love and attention from its mother and care. And the other one was just isolated and given little food under the cage and the monkey that was isolated got old and decrepit and diseased. And they had exactly the same food, exactly the same environment, except for no love or connection.
Dr. Alberto Villoldo:
Yep. This is it. Not only do we get that love and connection from each other, but we get it from nature with nature. And nature, we think that nature means the forest and the trees, but for the shamans, nature is also the invisible world, the invisible world that is populated, that’s alive. And it’s the same quandary that the physicists were facing when they thought that the entire universe was visible and observable. And then they discovered dark matter, which is 95% of everything. And they understood now that 95% of reality is invisible. And for the shamans, this is the same applies to our day to day experience of reality. What we call reality that we perceive with the senses is only 5% of what’s going on. And the other 95% is natural. It’s also natural, but it’s invisible. It’s part of nature.
And our reconnection with the invisible world, whether it be the inner world that we access through meditation or the outer invisible world, what we call the quantum field, the energy field that we’re all part of is an essential part of our reconnection. And that’s what restores health from the perspective of the shamans that I work with because they differentiate between information and wisdom. Information is data. Information is knowing water is H2O. Wisdom is being able to make it rain. Information is having a diagnosis. Wisdom is being able to heal. It’s empowering. It allows you to dream your world, your health into being and not just have more data, more data points.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah. It’s powerful. And you came upon this, you were an anthropologist and you went to study these cultures, but you very quickly became aware that there was a lot more there than just some archaic, historical relic, but that there was really living wisdom and living traditions that we need in our culture to heal us. And your work has been really a lot about that. And I love it if you could tell us, because the shaman sounds like in top of your mind, rattles and feathers and chanting and it’s almost like blood letting or some ancient, stupid thing that primitive people did, that there really isn’t very relevant to us today. But in fact, it very much is.
And I just want to share a story, and it may sound a little crazy to people because it even astounded me. But I think you remember when I came back from Haiti and I was working in Haiti during the earthquake, and then I went back a number of times, and I came back from one of the trips and you were at my house. And I said, “Alberto, I don’t know what’s going on, but I don’t feel right. I have no energy. I feel completely depleted. I feel like something’s really off. I’ve never felt like this in my life.” And using your tools and your way of seeing and this ancient technologies from the shamans, you were able to tell me what was wrong. And do you remember that? You remember what you said? Do you remember what you found? Do you remember? Can you share that story?
Dr. Alberto Villoldo:
I do.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Or if you don’t remember, I’ll tell you. Okay. So tell us, tell me what was your end of the story? Because it really profoundly woke me up to a different realm of healing and a different way of understanding the world.
Dr. Alberto Villoldo:
Well, what happened is that you had brought back someone from Haiti, an undocumented alien but in the invisible world. You had this little boy that had died. And perhaps in an operating room or as part of the terrible earthquake had accompanied you, had come back with you. This happens with very compassionate people, that they’ll pick up these stragglers, that they bring home in the same way to bring home a stray dog, and this little boy that didn’t know that it was dead, had attached himself to you. And when I tracked for you and I saw the spirit of this little boy there, I had to help him to cross over into the world, the spirit, and then he left your field and he was no longer feeding on you and attached to you and wanting his mother. So he found peace and you did, too. I remember at that point, your mood changed.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Totally. It wasn’t just my mood. It’s so dramatic for me as having a severe migraine headache one minute and the next minute not having a headache. And my whole energy shifted, my brain shifted, my body shifted. I was shocked because I love you and I love what you do. And I had many journeys with you, but I was like, “Okay, this is cool. But I don’t really get it. And I’ve never really experienced…” I don’t know, this sounds weird, but like, okay, I’ll go along with it. But then I experienced it myself and I was like, “Holy cow.” And you really track this in my body. And you use these ancient techniques of being and healing to actually heal me. And it reminded me of also how we heal in community.
And I remember being in Nepal when I was in my 20s. I was in a medical expedition with Johns Hopkins, looking in public health research in this village. And after we did our work during the day, at night I would go up and hear about these shamans. They call them [inaudible 00:11:02] in Nepal. And I heard there was going to be a healing ceremony. So I went up and I just sat there. And there was the entire village gathered around the sick person. And then they had the shaman there doing the work on this person, but the healing was done in community. And the same thing in native American tribes when someone is sick, it’s a community problem. When someone has a rifted relationship, they heal it in community. And we’ve just become so isolated.
And maybe we go to our therapist, but we really have to understand these traditions have so much to offer us. And this is really why you wrote the book, The Wisdom Wheel: A Mythic Journey Through The Four Directions. So tell us a little bit more about what is a shaman and tell us about the first time you entered the Amazon and how you embarked on your own shamanic journey. And so take us back to that time. Give people a sense of what this is.
Dr. Alberto Villoldo:
the shaman mediates between the visible and the invisible world, but they were the first nutritionist. They were the first herbalist. And the Amazon is nature’s pharmacy, but it’s also, these are all of the different planned foods that heal. This is healing through your foods, through your plants, through your primarily a plant-based medicine. And they understood the plants that exercised death from you. I remember when I was in my mid 30s-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Exorcize, not exercise, right? Exorcize.
Dr. Alberto Villoldo:
Exorcize. Yeah. You healed the death that lives within you. So in my early 30s, I was with the shamans in the Amazon. And this woman is shaking a rattle and looking at me and saying, “Alberto, the death is very strong within you.” I was hoping, she’d say, “Hey, the life force is really strong within you.” She said, “No, the death is.”
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Wow.
Dr. Alberto Villoldo:
“We have to get the death out of you.” And I said, “Sure, do it right away. How do you do that?” Se said, “Well, you eat these particular plants.” Now, these are plants that are rich in polyphenols. And what she was talking about was what we today call senescent cells, the zombie cells in your body. So here’s one of the crossovers with the ancient medicine. So of course, we get rid of senescent cells with quercetin and fisetin. But these are the same polyphenols that she was using to get my body to eliminate these cells that are neither living nor dead, but are still producing toxic signals and eventually lead to cancer.
So the basis of the medicine of the shamans is that if you create, and I’ve heard you say this so many times as well, create the conditions for health, then disease goes away. And the shamans who can maintain the health of the village, because they see sickness as happening to a community, but manifesting through one person, through the individual. In the same way, the family therapists see that there’s an issue in the family, but the identified patient is a child usually. And they want to fix the child instead of fixing the whole family. So illness happens to an entire community and in this case to an entire humanity that we’re seeing, but it’s manifesting through an individual and you have to heal the entire community, the entire village, the entire ecosystem because the understanding is that as the fate of the earth goes, so goes the fate of you and I, of each one of us. And we cannot be healed if the earth is not healed, if our ecosystem, if our garden is not vibrant, we’re not going to be vibrant so that we are interconnected with other.
And today we know that we have electrons. We have a particle state and a field state. And this is the particle state, which is separate, but the field state interconnects us with each other. And with everything we truly are one in our energy field state. And I asked one time, one of the shamans, “Well, what is this energy field state?” And he said to me, “It’s who you are after you die. It’s who you were before you were born. It’s going to be your luminous body, your luminous energy field that keeps creating physical bodies from lifetime to lifetime.” And then I said, “Okay, I want to learn about this stuff, teach me about it. And then after a few months of training, I asked the same shaman, “What’s with all of this teaching about the invisible world? What’s the purpose of it?” And he said to me, “The object to all of this learning is to discover how to get out of this life alive.” I said, “Wow. Sign me up. Sign me up.”
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Wow.
Dr. Alberto Villoldo:
So I didn’t believe in light, in reincarnation. I didn’t believe in any of this stuff. I trained in psychology and anthropology and I directed a little laboratory at San Francisco State, where we were looking at the brain and how to create health. So I wasn’t into any of this reincarnation stuff. And he said to me, “Well, why don’t you go ahead and cover your bases anyway, just in case, just in case. What’s the risk of not learning about this?” And I went, “Okay.” And then that’s when I started becoming not only an anthropologist, but shaman.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Amazing.
Dr. Alberto Villoldo:
I always used to hide that. I said, “Ah, I’m a medical anthropologist.” And today I tell people, “I’m a shaman, I’m a modern shaman. And by the way, it’s Dr. Shaman.”
Dr. Mark Hyman:
It’s so funny because we teach together. And it’s so funny because I talk about the more of the subtle energy field and healing in my work and just ways of accessing that and you talk about mitochondria and the science and I laugh. It’s like all the worlds intersect. I think there’s a book by Fritjof Capra years ago called The Tao of Physics, really about how the mystical world and the scientific world are really the same. And it’s true. There’s also The Tao of Biology. And that’s essentially what we’re talking about is the mystical realms of human creation. And Einstein said, “I don’t want to know the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know the thoughts of God and the rest are details.”
And so in a sense, we’re looking to the mind of God, how are we designed? How are we intersecting with the plants and the environment around us? And then I just finished researching my book and writing my book, Young Forever. And I was just blown away by the ways in which these plant compounds interact with our biology to activate longevity switches. I mean, how do they know? It’s like, wait a minute. And I just like, “Wait a minute. How did this work?” It’s like, okay, you need vitamins and minerals and stuff, but actually we need all these plant compounds called phytochemicals. And there’s 25,000 of them to activate different parts of our healing systems. And that’s what you teach. And that’s a lot of the work that you do.
Dr. Alberto Villoldo:
Yeah, absolutely. Our friend, Dean Ornish did the science of how these polyphenols in plant phytonutrients switch on the genes that create health and silence more than 500 genes that create heart disease and breast cancer and dementia. Amazing. And you asked the shamans, how did you know that these plants that they call the sacred plants, not the teacher plants, the teacher plants or the psychedelics, but the sacred plants are the ones that are the epigenetic modifiers, the ones that create health and silence the genetics of disease. And I asked them, “How does you know that these plants did that?” And they said, “Well, the plants told us. The plants told us. The plants told us, stupid. Don’t you talk to the plants, Alberto?” And there’s a story that I love, which is when the conquistadores arrived in Peru, they met with the Inca, with the ruler who was a shaman. He was a divine being. And the priest gave him the Bible and said, “This is the word of God.” And the Inca took the Bible and put it to his ear. And he listened and he listened and he threw it on the ground.
And he said, “What kind of God is this that does not speak? When did your God last talk to you?” And the priest said, “Well, 1,500 years ago.” And he asked the Inca, “When did your God last speak with you?” And the Inca said, “This morning at breakfast.” So they still speak to the rivers and the trees and the plants and the animals and the rivers and the trees and God, and the plants and the animals speak to them like they did to us when we lived in paradise-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
That’s incredible.
Dr. Alberto Villoldo:
… before we were kicked out of the garden of Eden. And we are the only people in the planet. Westerners are the only people in the planet to have ever been kicked out of the garden of Eden. Nobody else was. Everybody else was given, the Buddhist and the native Americans and Sub-Saharan Africans were given the garden to be the stewards and the caretakers to the garden and to speak to the rivers and the trees and the animals. And particularly the animals because the animals were sacred. The word animal comes from anima from that word, the Latin and Greek word for the soul. They’re the soul of Gaia, of the mother. The shaman lives in a world that is animated, that is animistic, whereas we live in an inanimate world. We can barely talk to each other much less to the animals than to the trees.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
It’s true. Incredible. Well, I want to take us back a little bit to how we use all this because not all us are going to get to go to the Amazon and work with plants and shamans in the middle of the jungle in Peru. But you say that by learning about this ancient shamanic wisdom, we can heal disease, we can eliminate suffering healing, grow a new body. You say that we can grow new bodies, that resist disease,, heal quickly and age really differently through modern day shamanic ritual. So what are those rituals? What are those practices? In the wisdom wheel you talked about them. Can you share just a little bit more about them?
Dr. Alberto Villoldo:
Yeah. I go into depths about this. In the wisdom wheel, but for example, our ancient brain, our limbic brain, our mammalian brain that we share with all the mammals, this brain needs ceremony and ritual in order to change. So you cannot change your mind until you change your brain. And this brain requires a rite of passage. That’s why we have ritual and rites of passage in every culture in the world. They knew that in order to have profound change, you needed to have a rite of passage with a community witnessing it. And that’s when the brain changes, but you also needed to have the neurotransmitters in order to be able to change your brain. Let me give you an example of these serotonin. I mean, serotonin, we know 85%, 90% of it is produced in the gut, and this is a neurotransmitter that we call the happy molecule and that your brain, your pineal gland turns into melatonin so you can rest and sleep.
And if you don’t rest and sleep, you’re not going to heal. You’re not going to age well, you’re going to die young and with dementia. So we’re serotonin depleted, deprived in our culture because our guts are broken. So the very first nature that we need to connect with, an ecosystem, it’s inside your gut. And we know that. We know that we begin with repairing the gut and the programs that we teach together, we begin with the gut. This is the forest, the ecosystem. And then when you provide the brain with serotonin, you’re able to switch on higher brain because higher the brain, the pineal gland will methylate serotonin, which is a tryptamine and add two methyl bonds to it and turn it into dimethyltryptamine, which is DNT, which is ayahuasca, the most powerful psychedelic known to humans.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Called the God molecule. Right?
Dr. Alberto Villoldo:
Absolutely. Yeah. And this is why-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Actually, is what happens when we’re born and when we die, our brain releases this molecule.
Dr. Alberto Villoldo:
Absolutely. And when we make love. Don’t forget that. And when we dream. That’s why, when you’re dreaming, you can have the most amazing dream in the world. And while you’re dreaming and it looks perfectly natural. A couple of nights ago, I dreamt with my dad and my dad had passed away 35 years ago. And in the dream he was younger than I am. And in the dream, it felt perfectly normal. I didn’t go, wow, that’s really weird. That’s because the brain is producing tryptamines. And these are the bliss molecules that allow you to create psychosomatic health and not psychosomatic disease. Because for us today, as modern shamans, all disease is psychosomatic and psychosomatic means psyche and soma, the body and the soul, the body and consciousness working together to create health. So that’s in a nutshell, the basis of what this book is about and what the teaching of the sages, of the indigenous peoples is about.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
It’s so amazing, Alberto, because when I went to medical school, psychosomatic was a pejorative word. It was like, oh, it’s in your head. We used to have a really terrible thing we used to say, as doctors called it super tentorial, meaning, it means there’s this thing in your brain called the tentorium, which separates your lower and upper brain and mainly it means it’s in your head, up your brain. It’s all psychological. It’s not really real. It’s not a real medical condition, but actually the opposite is true that our brain and our soul and our mind are all connected to our body. And in ways that are now understandable, replicable, we can examine these very, very sophisticated, functional MRI imaging testing. And we know the biochemistry of what’s going on with our biology when we’re in relationship and when we’re happy, when we’re not happy.
And it’s not this abstract phenomena. And it’s quite amazing to see even this whole idea of social genomics, which I actually came up with this word as a result of my work in Haiti, that our social connections, our social relationships are actually what drives our gene expression, drives our health and we thought that for example, chronic diseases, we call it NCD, non-communicable disease, but it’s highly contagious. It’s not infectious, but we know that if your friends are overweight, you’re more likely to be overweight if your family’s overweight. And we know that our social connections and our social threads are more important than the genetic threads in determining our health and we can actually now measure this. And if you Google on PubMed, which is the national library medicine [inaudible 00:26:59] in the social genomics, you can see this enormous amount of science about this now. How you can create inflammatory genes by having an inflamed relationships. You can actually totally heal your body through having healing relationships that cuddling actually improves your epigenetic expression.
Dr. Alberto Villoldo:
Even if it’s with your dog, even if it’s cuddling with your pet. And this is the part of the problem is that today we have taken nature and domesticated it, and we have pets. And what the shamans have, they have power animals, but they are in the invisible world, which to them it’s as visible and as engageable as the visible world is for us. And this is part of our reconnecting to nature, reconnecting to that invisible realm. I’ll tell you a story. I was in the Amazon one time, deep in the Amazon, working with the shamans, because I wanted to learn the plant medicine. And early on in my research, I was funded by a pharma because the Amazon is nature’s pharmacy and big pharma wanted to discover the next cure for cancer. And the problem was after months of research and back waters at the Amazon and villages that had never seen a light-skinned person before.
And the kids, when I got there, the kids would run up to me and they would rub my head to see if the white dirt would rub off. And after months of spending time with them, I came back to my handlers and they asked me, “What did you find? What root? What bark? What leaf?” I said, “None.” Because these people have no cancer, no dementia and no heart disease, zero or minimal. Until they begin to eat like us and live like us then they get sick like us and begin to die like we do. But when I was there, I was telling people about the shamans, telling them about bugs and the bad bugs that you don’t want to have, the bad bacteria that are invisible to us. And they said, “Oh, you mean like spirits?” And I go, “No. I mean like bacteria.”
And they said, “No, no, no, no, we can’t see it. That stuff doesn’t exist. You’re making it up, Alberto. They’re spirits.” So the two months later I went back and I took one of the laboratory microscopes with me. And as soon as I got there, I took a drop of rainwater, put it in a slide, put it in the microscope and called the people in the village and said, “Look.” And they go, “Oh my God, this is a world.” It’s like when you first go scuba diving or diving in the ocean, you see this whole world down there. They went, “Wow. And these things are alive.” I go, “Yeah, they’re the invisible beings I was telling you about.” The problem is that we don’t have the microscopes to look into the invisible world. We do have them, but they’re not legal with the United States.
And these are the teacher plants, these are the ayahuasca, the [inaudible 00:30:13]. These are the sacred plants of the ancients that you find in every culture that give you a glimpse into this invisible world. Now, you don’t need to use the plants because the brain produces these chemicals endogenously. You just need to have a practice that will get you there. And that practice is called meditation. That’s meditation. It’s stilling in the mind, it’s quieting in the mind so you can experience that expansiveness of communion with all life. And then you understand that the Cosmos is living, that the Cosmos itself is conscious and you go, ah, okay. And if you spend a little bit more time in those and doing that kind of research and that kind of science, the spiritual science, and we’re capable of doing that. You uniquely so. And I’m sure you know this Mark, but out of the 40 million species in the planet, there are only three of them that don’t have a death program in their DNA.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Really?
Dr. Alberto Villoldo:
Every other species has a death program. 39.99 million of them die when they’re no longer reproductive viable. When the female can have babies, she’s eliminated in nature. There’s no menopause in nature, there’s no grandmothers in nature, not for very long, but three species, humans, orcas, whales, and dolphins don’t have a death program. And these are the three species that have the biggest brain to body weight ratio. They have grandmothers. Grandmother orcas teach the young how to communicate and how to hunt. And the human grandmothers used to teach us how to become civil and educated. And we’re taking part in an experiment in longevity. Nature selected the three of us. And remember, biology’s experimenting all the time and we’ve been selected to take part in an experiment in intelligence. And intelligence is what the ancients called spiritual-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
I don’t know how we’re doing. I don’t think we’re doing that great [inaudible 00:32:26].
Dr. Alberto Villoldo:
We’re not doing well. No. We’re failing. But intelligence is what the ancients call spirituality, not religion. Religion is different. Spirituality is about exploration, it’s about epigenetics, it’s about growing a new body, it’s about becoming a new human disappearing in the planet today. And that the shamans call homo luminous, no longer homo sapiens, but homo luminous. Well, we are living in the fifth extinction event in the earth since the dawn of life in the planet. There have been five extinction events. The previous one was 65 million years ago when a gigantic asteroid hit the earth and eliminated most life forms. And during extinction events, mother nature takes your foot off of the break and steps on the evolutionary accelerator, huge rapid accelerated development.
Evolution ceases to be guided by the laws of Newtonian physics and begins to be guided by the loss of quantum physics. Biologists call it quantum speciation, suddenly new species appearing very rapidly. So in normal times, evolution happened in between generations. Your children would be smarter or better looking than you were, but during quantum evolution times, evolution is so accelerated. It happens within generations. It’s you and I. We’re taking part in an experiment in evolution and in longevity, but it requires wisdom. It’s driven by consciousness. It’s driven by intelligence. It’s driven by spirituality, by an experience of communion with the divine, with the cosmos, that experience of oneness.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
So how do people get that? Because if people, I can imagine listening, going, “Well, that sounds really great and I kind of buy it, but how do I personally figure this out for myself? Because I’m not a shaman and I’m not in the Amazon. I’m living my life and trying to make best with what I’ve got.” How do people actually start to incorporate the principles of what we’re talking into their daily life?
Dr. Alberto Villoldo:
Well, to do that, you need to upgrade your brand. You need to step up to the higher brand, not to that limbic brain that’s territorial, that’s looking… You meet someone. You’re looking at them as a possible partner, date, or is an enemy or an adversary. You need to step up to the higher brain that runs in a different fuel. It runs on fats and not on sugars. It needs the beta hydroxybutyrate, one of the keytones to operate. And it needs the neurotransmitters that are produced by your gut flora. It comes back to the work that you do, Mark, which I love. I love how you have taken us through this jungle of what the hell do I eat? And it goes to your gut. You got to support your gut, restore your gut, produce a serotonin, a neurotransmitter so you can sleep, rest and create the bliss molecules and have that experience of oneness.
You don’t need to go to the Amazon. You just need to repair your gut and change what you eat and begin to become the new human that homo luminous, that has been prophesied by all of the shamanic cultures. And we get to take part in that experiment and we get to be the ones that we’ve been waiting for.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
It sounds like there’s a great number of us out there who are trying to push this story out there to tell the story of how we awaken, how we heal, how we repair. And at the same time we see around us such darkness. We see the regression of civil rights, of human rights. I think almost 30, 40 years ago, 70% of the world live in democracy, now it’s 30% of the world. And we’re going to see the same time of the rise of consciousness, the decline in consciousness and fear and isolationism and nationalism. And it’s a little scary. And I see this in our own country in America and I think it makes me nervous and I feel I register in my nervous system. And I wonder, what’s the antidote to that for people?
Dr. Alberto Villoldo:
Yeah. Yeah. Shamans don’t have an antidote to that, unfortunately. I wish we did. I wish we did. And the whole political system is corrupt. They say that we are living in the time of the greater people of Kali Yuga of the Pachacuti. They call it in the Andes when the gates of hell have been flung open. And all of these critters are now in government and running the show and strife and violence. But the beauty of it is that the gates of heaven have also been flung open. And we have the opportunity to embody that wisdom, become that new human and witness the old human dying out, dying off. And we have to do what we… and to alleviate suffering and to communicate the message that you are what you eat, that you can live sustainably in the world, but it’s set up to each one of us to make that choice to.
And right now we are in the fifth extinction event. It began about 10, 15 years ago. There are more species disappearing in the planet today than in any other previous extinction event. So we have to do that exercise of that experiment of N is equal to one where you have to be part of that experiment in becoming homo luminous. And my experiment of N is equal to one is called Alberto. Yours is called Mark. And if you don’t do the experiment, guess what? You get to be in the control group. And the control group is the statistics, the 35%, the people that die of cancer, of the dementia, say if you live to be 85 and you will, you have a 50% risk of diagnosable Alzheimer’s, at the age of 90, the risk is 75% and we’re all going to live to be a hundred.
So we’re living in the midst of an extinction event and we have to accept that, that there’s going to be die offs. There’s going to be massive upheaval and resettlement. And this is part of the process we’re in, that was avoidable, but we’ve damaged the planet so badly that we’re now in the renewal, in the process of the great upheaval. And that’s just what’s happening. We have to try to make a difference in every way we can.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Absolutely. You’re doing the work. I’m doing it. I mean, the Four Win Society and your work of training healers and getting the word out and helping spread positive light, helping people wake up to who they are, help them reprogram their biological software, which is what I learned from this amazing concept I learned from you that we can literally upgrade our biological software, just like a computer and have it run better by changing how we live, what we eat, our relationships, our movement, our connections, our nutrient intake, phytochemicals, all these things are ways to upgrade our biological software. And at the same, we’re in this beautiful time of science advancing and our understanding of how to extend life and how to improve our biology and heal our minds. And particularly the psychedelic Renaissance that’s happening now about healing trauma.
And I want to talk about that in a minute. And at the same time, we’re in the worst of times. And I literally ended my book, Young Forever with a quote from Charles Dickens, “It was the worst of times. It was the best of times.” And I both have hope and I both am disheartened by what I see. And I’m living in this dichotomous framework of life where I both feel very excited and hopeful, but I’m also like, see what’s happening in this country with riots now. And I’m just like, wow. It’s nuts.
Dr. Alberto Villoldo:
Let me give you a personal experience. For example, I remember in my 40s, I could barely do 15 pushups. Man, it was hard. And now, now I do a hundred pushups. Yeah, I’m transforming my body. I’m in better shape today. I’m 73. I just came back from climbing the mountains in the Andes, hiking up to 16,000 feet. So we can grow new body. We can become part of that experiment. We can take that quantum leap and do what we can to help others. But the shaman say, you have to do it at four different levels. At the physical level of what you eat, of what you eat and of how you interact socially, they call that the level of serpent. And then you have to do the work of Jaguar, the level of Jaguar. And it’s helpful to think about these as Russian nesting dolls, that the higher levels inform the inner ones.
The level of Jaguar is the mind, and you’ve got to find inner peace in the mind. You’ve got to find love. You’ve got to give love, share love. You’ve got to love yourself. And this is where trauma occurs at the level of Jaguar and the level of the mind. And you have to heal not only your personal trauma, but we know from epigenetics, that the trauma your grandmother experience is playing out in your life today. The native Americans call the seven generation effect that it lasts for seven generations and it’s in the body. The body keeps score the trauma from surgeries. We know that if you have a C-section, for example, that the body cannot tell the difference between the knife of the surgeon and the knife of the mugger, even though you may be anesthetized. There’s trauma in the body. We need to heal from trauma. You need to do the Jaguar medicine. And this is what the shamans excelled at.
And then you need to do the hummingbird work. Hummingbird is the archetype of the heroes journey. The hummingbird is the one that drinks only from the nectar of life. And Mark, I spent so many years in psychotherapy, working on myself, on my craft. I couldn’t do the hummingbird medicine because the shaman say, “Hey, Alberto, it’s okay to have some weeds in your garden, plant fruit trees.” They used to call me a weeder. They would say to me, “You’re a weeder. We’re gardeners. But you’re a weeder. Your garden is weed free, but nothing grows in it.” So I was so used to working on my stuff that even my hummingbird on the way to the flowers would stop by the dun pile. And now we have to learn to really choose our friendships, choose our relationships and be involved with people that nurture our soul and drink on the nectar-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
That’s the hummingbird work. Yeah.
Dr. Alberto Villoldo:
Hummingbirds migrate from Brazil to Canada.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
[inaudible 00:44:10].
Dr. Alberto Villoldo:
They go on the epic journey. They’re not even designed for flight, but they represent that heroes journey, saying yes to your calling. What did you come here to do besides to be in therapy and be successful? What gives meaning and purpose to your life? What did you come here to give? You got to find a map, that’s a sacred map and not only a professional map or a success map or an achievement map. What’s your sacred journey about? And when you discover that, then that become a cascade effect to the lower levels, and it begins to inform your mental health and your physical health. Wow. That hummingbird medicine is important. But let me go back to the Jaguar, because I keep my Jaguar-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Is there four medicines? There’s Jaguar, hummingbird. You said four, right?
Dr. Alberto Villoldo:
Yeah. Serpent, jaguar, hummingbird and then Eagle. Eagle is the energy medicine. So Eagle is about awakening your vision. So Eagles have no obstacles. They simply fly higher. They realize that whatever you see in the world is a reflection of an inner map, that everything you perceive as a projection of a map of reality that you have. And if you could change that map, your reality changes, which means that at the lower level, that we’re projecting onto the world, our own negativity, our own shadow sides, and we have to own them. And at a higher level, it means that whatever you are perceiving is your projection. And you can perceive beauty. You can dream the world into being with beauty. And this is the very high level shaman work.
And it’s the energetics, so that you can heal the energy field, that you can heal… That we’re energy beings, that you got to begin with your mitochondria, that your mitochondria are not only your energy factories, but they control the death clock. And you got to restore and repair your mitochondria, that you got to restore and repair your field, and that you have not only the particle state that we all know, but the field state, the energy field state, and that’s where the work becomes really a lot of fun.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah. So then you’ve got the serpent. You talked about the Eagle, the Jaguar, the hummingbird. Tell us about the serpent.
Dr. Alberto Villoldo:
Well, the serpent is the body, is your nutrition. It’s what you eat, what you put in your plate. This is absolutely essential. And I love the work, how you have brought such awareness, Mark to the conscious choices that we make and what you put at the end of your fork will create health or disease. And this is the most fundamental. And today I go into whole foods and I see all these beautiful, beautiful foods that are coming from depleted soils, and that don’t have the micronutrients or the minerals that the body needs to regenerate. So the very foundational is what you eat, what’s in your food.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
It’s so powerful. So these four archetypes are such beautiful ways of thinking about healing across the dimensions of being human. And I just love it as a framework and it really is a shamanic framework. And it’s just so helpful for us today, because we’re so disorganized about our thinking about how we need to navigate this world, how we need to create healing for ourselves. I want to loop back to the Jaguar medicine because we’re right now experiencing this psychedelic Renaissance. And I literally just met this man who was the CEO of Sandoz, which is some big pharma company, it’s a European pharma company. That was actually the company that had discovered LSD, one of their scientists discovered LSD. And he now is going to be the chairman of MAPS, which is the multidisciplinary association for psychedelic studies.
In other words, it’s a scientific group that is looking in rigorous ways at the use of psychedelic medicine for healing trauma, PTSD, depression, for going through the process of dying, for healing all kinds of sexual trauma, everything from iboga, to ayahuasca, to psilocybin, to MDMA, to what they call the tote or 5-MeO. And there’s just so many of these kinds of medicines. And you’ve been doing this work for so long and I’ve done this work with you and it’s been so helpful for me. And I think people are maybe scared of it, wondering about it, but I just met this man this weekend who’s family, he was a Hungarian Jew and 150 of his family members died in the Holocaust. He says, “I know every one of their names. I know every one of their names in Hebrew and I live in a constant state of trauma of fear and anxiety and PTSD.”
And he is made to adapt, but his biology is registering this and I see it. I’ve never really talked about this. You’re the first person I’ve told this to. And I’m like, wow. And I think that the traumas that we have either from this life or ancestral life are actually real. And now we’re understanding them. There was a beautiful article in Scientific American that talked about the biology of trauma that happens in past generations, from Holocaust survivors. And now from the 9/11, women who are pregnant during 9/11 and their babies and offspring and what they experience. And they’re able to measure changes in cortisol and receptor function for trauma and stress responses. And it’s like, now we’re understanding that actually this is not just psychological but biological. So can you talk us through how some of these plant medicines and these compounds from the ancient world that have been used for thousands of years in these cultures can be now brought into our psychiatric world and our emotional healing as well.
Dr. Alberto Villoldo:
Yeah. First, let me tell you the plus is that these plant medicines are extraordinary. They rewire the brain. They repair the damage that’s been caused by trauma. Now, all of these plants work on the serotonin receptor, on the serotonin one receptor. So the problem with the Western use of these plants is that we’re trying to put them into a Western medical, psychological context. And we’re forgetting about the sacred, we’re forgetting about the element of the sacred. And the second one is that we’re not doing… When I was in the Amazon, for example, working with the shamans, with the plant medicine, they would have me do a dieta, a diet. And when I looked at what the diet was, it was supplying the brain with the raw building blocks to repair the hippocampus. We know that the hippocampus, which is where you store memories, you have new experiences.
The hippocampus is what allows you to wake up in the morning with a person you’ve been married to for 40 years and go, “Wow, who is this wonderful being I’m waking up with?” And if your hippocampus is damaged, you’re going to wake up and go, “Who is this person in my bed? Get him out of here.” You cannot have a new experience. So what the dieta of the shamans did was to repair the hippocampus with serotonin, with the DHA, with blueberries, with the plants that we know repair the hippocampus in six weeks. And we know that. We know that BHA, breast milk for example, is 40% DHA because a baby brain needs it to grow. DHA will trigger the production of brain derived neurotropic factors that increase your production of neurons. We have stem cells in the hippocampus that every day manufacture around 1,500 neurons.
If you step on the accelerator, you can manufacture many more because we have stem cells. You switch on to production of stem cells and repair the hippocampus, and then you’ve repaired the hardware to run the new software that’s being offered to you by these plants. So the fallacy is that we’re looking at these plants as chemicals, and we’re not including the context that we need to maximize their possibilities, but still we’re getting tremendous benefits in, and they will be approved very shortly for PTSD, for a number of treatment of a number of the diseases.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Well, you’re saying just blew me away, Alberto. I’m sorry to interrupt, but I had an insight when you were talking that I’ve never had before, which was that these compounds, I always thought opened up your spiritual consciousness, your psychological healing, your spiritual healing. But what you said just made me really aware that the compounds in these plants also heal the structure and the biology of your brain, not just the psychology. So it’s like a double benefit. And I’m like, holy cow, this is actually right because from a functional medicine perspective, I know that phytochemicals from food we eat does this, but why wouldn’t I think that the phytochemicals in these ancient psychedelic plants also do a rewiring? I have back issues my whole life. And I recently had an injection in my back and they used ketamine in the injection. I’m like, “Why are you using ketamine in the injection, which is a psychedelic associative drug?” And they were like, “Well, it actually increases the neuroplasticity and neuro connections and helps to grow new nerves and heal the nerves.” I’m like, “Wow.” And so I think this is really what you’re talking about.
Dr. Alberto Villoldo:
Well, this is essential because we cannot separate the biology from the psychology or the spirituality anymore. The sacred plants have come from a very feminine shamanic tradition. And we are trying to use them in a very masculine, patriarchal reductionistic environment. And they still work. They’re magical. They’re fantastic, but we need to know the biology behind them. And all of these psychedelics are basically working on serotonin receptors. And if you have enough serotonin in your gut to support the repair of the brain structures, then you’re going to really get amazing benefits. So you got to also change the diet and not just administer dimethyltryptamine or the psilocybin. We got to learn to eat properly. You got to support the body. You got to support the brain. But now, we can get the same results by increasing the endogenous production of serotonin, but much more slowly than you can of course, when you give mega dose of DMT or psilocybin. I was really lucky to have met Albert Hoffman, the discoverer of LSD.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yes. Yes. Wow.
Dr. Alberto Villoldo:
And actually we were in a meeting in Baso 40 years ago, and we were invited to one of the neuroscientist room for an experience. And everybody was being offered mind altering substance psilocybin, but we get to Hoffman. And Hoffman says, “I don’t do anything stronger that LSD.” But the amazing thing, Mark is that all of these substances, they’re receptors in the brain for them. And the reason they’re receptors is because the brain manufactures them endogenously. So the shaman say, okay, you had your experience with ayahuasca or with mushrooms. You know the pathways. You’ve rewired the brain for bliss. Now let’s support it with your diet, but even more than with your diet with fasting. So go into a vision quest, support it with your fasting so that you can begin to produce these endogenously.
And then you begin to repair your brain, repair your sleep. You’ll begin to sleep better. You’ll begin to lower your production of cortisol and adrenaline that’s produced by the limbic brain, the ancient Neanderthal brain, and you’ll be able to create health. And then you create health. Then you take control of your health destiny. And so the important thing was to be sure you didn’t get stuck in Jaguar because eventually Jaguar medicine was designed to take you beyond death, to an experience of the death of an old self and the birth of a new self. To ne, that’s literally the birth of homo luminous that’ll have even a new body, because you cannot just have a new psychological self without a new biological self. And then you had to bring it to hummingbird. What’s your new life map? What’s your new life journey about? I know you and I have been speaking about how… What’s our new life map now that we have done well in our fields, in our careers? How do we create a bigger vessel that’s more sacred?
And then you got to bring it up to eagle so that you awaken your vision of what you were born to do here in this life. What was your mission, your purpose? And not a lot of ego inflation. This is not about self aggrandizing. We have too much of that. With deep humility, what is it that you came to be part of, of sacred dream that humanity has the opportunity to dream together at this time a great crisis?
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah. It’s amazing, Alberto. Actually, I have a little bit of a different theory. I mean, all that you said about the four archetypes of animals, the serpent, hummingbird, eagle and the jaguar are so important as a framework for understanding. It’s all in your book, your new book, which I think everybody needs to get. It’s really an extraordinary book, The Wisdom Wheel: A Mythic Journey through the Four Directions. But you know what? I have a little bit of a different framework because as a doctor, and you mentioned this early on in the podcast, you said Fisetin helps to kill the senescent or aging or zombie cells. Now I’m thinking, there’s no endogenous pathway for strawberries. Right? And so my theory is that we co-evolved with these plants and we use these molecules in our plants to activate different healing systems in our body.
And we just need to get back to that. And so yes, there may be certain things that are natural receptors for opioids, right? For morphine or for endo cannabinoid system. We actually name the system after marijuana, cannabis, endocannabinoids and stuff. The opioid receptors, we call them. They’re not from opium poppies, right? Those are true, but there’s so many of these phytochemicals and we don’t naturally I think have all these. Are these molecules that are in the plant world that now I’m uncovering and you’re uncovering the science, uncovering about how we actually can these compounds turn on longevity switches, heal our bodies, heal our brains, repair us, like Fisetin for example, or Crocetin that you mentioned. These are just staples now in my diet and also in my supplement regimen. I call it symbiotic phyto adaptation, like we’ve co-evolved symbiotically and adapted to eating these plants.
And now because our diet sucks, we’re not eating these plants. And that’s why we see our health degrade, our psychological health, our physical health, our emotional health, our spiritual health, all degrading because we’re not eating these plants or taking these plants.
Dr. Alberto Villoldo:
Well, yeah. Let me jump in on that because polyphenols, polyphenols are part of the phytonutrient. There’s a nutrient side and then we have the polyphenols that are the genetic switchers that begin to flip on the genes for health and silence the genes for disease. The polyphenols are produced by a plant as response to stress or to predators. So it’s a defense system. The Flavonoids, the Quercetin, the Fisetin. The plants are producing this and even the psychedelics. So I remember being in the high desert in Peru, working with shamans and work with the San Pedro cactus, and they would stress the cactus, expose it to don’t give it any water to stress it. The minute you stress it, it produces these protective or defensive polyphenols that when we ingest and begin to switch on the genes for health, but also switch on the NRF2 detox pathway.
This is the pathway that activates the NRF2 protein that’s normally bound to the cell membrane that are like the Navy seals. And when they’re turned on, they migrate from the cell membrane to the nucleus and begin to, again, flip on the genes for health, the protective genes you begin to produce glutathione again, super oxide. The antioxidants that the body will shut down at age 35, because this is part of a legacy of a biological program that predestined us to die after reproduction. But that we have overridden with our longevity program at these three species, but it still operates in us. So we kickstart the production of the antioxidants. So glutathione, superoxide, and suddenly we have this hormetic effect that’s dose dependent, where we have this tremendous repair processes triggered by these plants.
And that the shamans identified the ones that we don’t use the strawberries or the Quercetins in the Amazon, because they have other plants they use. And we don’t employ them here because we can’t get them at the reliable dosages. But this symbiotic relationship that you talked about with the plants is extraordinary. And we still depend on them to create help.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
I do. We don’t talk about these essential nutrients, but they really are essential if we want to be healthy.
Dr. Alberto Villoldo:
Yeah, totally. And they’re not only essential, they’re indispensable. We cannot do without them. And if you look at the plants that we have adapted to iceberg lettuces, for example, it doesn’t taste like anything because we’ve adapted to their phytonutrients, pseudo polyphenols. But if you look at arugula, at arugula, we haven’t quite adapted to it completely. And it has had beautiful little tangy taste. So plants that we’ve adapted to, we call that food. The ones that we are adapting to, we call them spices. But the very high polyphenol content plants are the sacred plants, the olive oil, for example, the so rich in the polyphenols and the flavonoids. But yeah, we have to get rid of those zombie cells, because from the shaman’s perspective, this is the death that lives within you.
And we have to exercise that death. And today we know how to do it. That’s the beauty of it. We know how to get rid of these cells that are wreaking up because they’re still, their mitochondria are huge, they’re bloated, they’re producing chemical signal, cytokines, chemokines that are turning nearby cells into senescent cells and the wreaking havoc in the body. And we don’t know how to measure the zombie cells, but we know how to get rid of them.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah, that’s true. Yeah. It’s so true. And your work, your books, I mean, whether it’s Growing a New Body or the new book, you’ve written, The Wisdom Wheel, it’s a map for how we do this. And my books do the same thing. We come at it a little differently, but we end up in exactly the same place. And Alberto, I just want to thank you for your almost 50 years of dedication to this work for bringing the wisdom of the ancient traditions and of the Amazon and the Incas into an accessible form for most of us and helping us learn how to start [inaudible 01:05:21] our life in the way that creates healing across all of our elements of our life. So thank you for the work you do, Alberto.
Dr. Alberto Villoldo:
Thank you.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Everybody listening, make sure you get a copy of The Wisdom Wheel: A Mythic Journey through the Four Directions. It’s out now, everywhere you get your books. If you love this podcast, please share with your friends and family on social media, leave a comment. Tell us about your journey. How have you awakened these archetypal spirits of these animals in your own life? Whether it’s the serpent, the jaguar, the hummingbird, or the… What was the last one?
Dr. Alberto Villoldo:
Eagle. Eagle. The condo. Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
So thank you so much. And subscribe wherever you get your podcast, and we’ll see you next time on The Doctor’s Farmacy.
Outro:
Hi, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you’re looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you’re looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their, find a practitioner database. It’s important that you have someone in your corner who’s trained, who’s a licensed healthcare practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.
