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Kyle Kingsbury welcomes back Michael Trainer for a wide-ranging conversation about nature, healing, rites of passage, and connection. Trainer recounts being violently jumped at 12 in Spain, developing obsessive-compulsive behaviors, and choosing extreme “exposure therapy” by moving to Sri Lanka during civil war, where he was mentored by a seventh-generation healer in a secret Ayurvedic shamanic tradition and witnessed trance, ceremony, and what he describes as inexplicable phenomena. He discusses subsequent men’s work and grief practices, including guidance from Martín Prechtel and a four-year men’s group, plus synchronistic experiences with animals and indigenous ceremonies. Trainer introduces his forthcoming book, “Resonance: The Art and Science of Human Connection,” using music and coherence to address modern loneliness and help people “tune” themselves and find their community, while Kyle also shares about his “Kingdom Within” community and shares a plant-based approach to Texas cedar allergies.
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We'll go back to the podcast.
We've got my good buddy, an old friend,
Michael trainer in the house.
Michael trainer was on this podcast many years ago.
When I first got to on it, I believe,
out of Venice, I think he was living.
So really good crew out there back in the day.
And I think Michael's coming to here.
So we rehash.
You don't have to go back and listen to the old podcasts.
I'm like, give us the quick report
of what your life's work was.
And we go freaking deep in this podcast.
His story and what he's been up to
has been absolutely incredible.
He's been on one hell of a journey
since we last spoke.
And I can't wait to see what this dude has written
as an author.
I mean, I'm literally chomping at the bit
as a guy who devours books.
I have had a lot of friends write books.
And fortunately, they've been pretty damn good books.
At least not boring.
They've been informative, and they've been funny.
This one, I think, is going to hit.
I think it's going to strike the heart like an arrow.
So super, super proud of Michael.
He's an awesome person.
Tall, too.
Tall than I am.
Just a great guy.
Great guy, all the way through and through,
and he's doing great work in the world.
Share this with your friends, and enjoy.
Michael trainer.
Let's go.
Michael trainer, the return.
Thank you for coming on the podcast.
This is so cool getting you heavy here at the farm
for the first time.
Man, I've been hearing about it,
and I'm honored to be here, I'll say.
I love seeing you deeply immersed in nature.
Is there no better place?
There's no better place, you know?
It's church.
Yeah, I mean, even here, like in the office,
I love this office.
To me, it's a library, more than it's an office.
You know, it's like this study.
Yeah.
Called the office, but it's the study.
You know, if we were playing Clue,
but you see the plants in here,
or just like, I just love these guys.
I had these vines for some of the first house plants.
We got, we moved to Texas,
where these guys right here.
Yeah, they're super healthy.
I mean, I think that's, that's the thing, right?
These are like plants, and I think we as well.
We're kind of like thermostats, you know,
for our environment, and it's like,
when you see this plant, and it's shiny and happy,
you know, it's in a good place.
Mm-hmm.
I feel like with people, unfortunately,
I don't pay as much attention,
but this is well maintained and well loved.
That's for sure.
Yeah, well, the nature piece is the best part of it.
You know, I think that's what I've get into
is like even in a, in a office space,
or whatever you want to call it,
bring a nature in.
Yeah.
It's such a big component to my sense of well-being,
getting to hang with these little guys.
They're here working with our heart chakras
about right now as we're shooting the shit
and catching up.
Yeah, it's amazing how,
it's amazing how much plants just affect our overall,
I feel like psychology,
but also just our physiology, right?
We were talking a little earlier about allergens.
Like, I just escaped part of the reason
I left Los Angeles was because of the mold,
and the plants were what saved me.
The plants were, you know, kept me in a good way.
Yeah.
But without that, I was stuffed.
So you just moved here?
Is that correct?
Yeah. Okay, in the process?
Yeah, I'm in the process to be frank, actually.
This is quite beautiful
because I've been in the proverbial cave,
not a literal cave,
but proverbial cave for the last few years,
writing this book.
And so to me, I've been in my own little space.
So I've gone like deeply internal,
done some deep work as well, some medicine work.
Oh, yeah.
But yeah, this is honestly seeing you
is kind of my first little coming out of the cave.
Bob, so it's like an honor.
Yeah, man.
It's great.
Well, I just feel like you're such a heart-centered,
beautiful human, you know?
Thank you, brother.
Yeah, it's always an honor to be in your presence.
And I was like, all right,
you know, if I'm gonna come out of the cave,
let's go see Kyle.
But yes, long story short,
I've been on a bit of a walk about.
Like, that's fantastic.
What a dive into that is like the meat and potatoes
of this podcast, but give people a,
Europe, it's kind of hard to say what you do.
It's kind of hard to say what is in the LA sense of like,
oh, what do you do?
You know, it's very hard to say like what you do.
I know some of the viewer accolades
and things that you've done and I can say,
well, like, well, you know,
it's the Dalai Lama, you know, it's this and that, you know?
But it's kind of hard to say like, what do you do?
So tell us what you do and then tell us like,
where did that start to shift
where you wanted to give birth to this thing?
Because that's really what it is.
It's funny.
It is not the same as giving birth to a child.
Nothing could be the same as that.
However, writing is,
I'm creating a business,
creating any of these things can be the microdose
for a man of what that takes, right?
That level of commitment, that level of nurture,
that level of time and energy and resources
being devoted to one thing, right?
It's like, well, it's not the same.
It is similar in that it requires many of the same things, right?
And it can take you on a ride in many ways the same way, right?
Where like emotions run high and holy shit,
I don't know if it's gonna work
and second guessing yourself and all that.
But I'd love for you to break down for people.
What have you been doing
and then what led you to the impetus of,
hey, I have to give birth to this thing.
I gotta get this out.
Yeah, it's a beautiful question.
I think I'll give you the sort of the top line
and then I'll go into the nuance.
The top line is I feel like I've been
in a process of initiation for the better part of my life.
I was invited into a very rare mentorship
by seven generation healer in Sri Lanka
when I was 19 years old,
after being jumped by a gang at 12 years old
and developing some neuroses.
And the challenge was how can I go as deep into my fear
as possible to transcend the neuroses of the fear
that became the great medicine of my life,
which is the thing I love the most are people
and how we connect beautifully.
And adventure, nature, travel, being of the world.
My top line I would say is I'm a bridge between
what I've been fortunate enough to bear witness to
and to participate in through this initiatory process
from doing men's business with Aboriginal elders
in Australia to studying with a seven generation
your healer in Sri Lanka
in a secret form of Ayurvedic shamanism
to the honor of hosting the soul in this dilemma.
If I were to give the professional context
the thing that I'm most known for
is starting a music festival called Global Citizen,
which hosts 70,000 people on the Great Law and Central Park.
We've had everyone from Beyonce to Coldplay
and raised now to date over $40 billion
for programs serving the world's poor.
And I can obviously go deeper into detail there,
but what I've been doing for the last,
I would say five years is making sense
of the early formative experiences I started sharing,
but being jumped and being invited into these circles
that I didn't know why I was being invited into.
Well, let's unpack that a little bit too.
We're to describe the setting.
Because when I was young, you know what blew my mind
when I made it to the UFC.
How many guys didn't fight growing up that were in the UFC?
I was like, you gotta be fucking kidding me.
You didn't fight, you never fought growing up
until a pro fight or until an amateur fight.
That was, it wasn't everyone,
but it was a way or higher percentage
than I ever would have thought.
And I was like, damn, what drew you here?
Like you guys didn't fight growing up, that's crazy.
And now you're here, this is awesome.
Tell me about that, you know?
But I bring that up because even in that sport,
not everybody fought growing up, right?
And so like, there's plenty of people on this planet.
So when I thought it was speaking directly to me,
a Chuck Palnuck and a fight club
has never been a fight before.
How do you know anything about yourself, right?
And I was like, man, so many people.
When I watched that, I was 19 years old.
I was like, so many people have no idea.
Yeah, they remember how that.
And getting jumped is a completely different experience.
I got jumped when I was 17.
I still have a scar on the back of my head.
I show my kids.
Cause like, oh, daddy, your hair doesn't grow there.
I was like, yeah, that's sort of a beer bottle.
I get smashed in my head and having like 12 dudes
kick the crap out of me on a bush
and I just covered up and ate it.
Yeah.
It's like, why didn't you get him?
And I was like, well, daddy was drunk.
Daddy couldn't fight back and there was too many guys.
I just had to take it, I had to take it
and thankfully they didn't go extra.
You know, they could have done a lot worse.
But they beat my ass and I went home
and because I had been drinking,
the beer bottle cut was deep enough.
Like it wasn't going to heal on its own.
So I got up at 3 a.m. to go to the bathroom
and I leaned down over the thing.
I'm super lightheaded and while I'm going pee,
I can see blood dripping from my head.
You know, the toilet and I was like, oh no, that's still going.
It's been like four hours later.
So I was like, mom, she's like, huh?
What's up, boy?
I was like, I think I got to go to the hospital.
She's like, what'd you do?
I was like, well, she felt terrible.
You know, I was like, I was an idiot
and got smashed with the beer bottle
and I need stitches.
Anyways, lesson learned there.
But I'm curious to see like for me,
the fight was something that drew me into it
because it was my first experience of flow.
It was my only experience that I could access no mind.
Right, and there was no names for flow
or anything like this growing up.
But it was just like, oh, I feel peaceful.
I remember telling a therapist this one, I was seven.
I was like, I feel peaceful when I'm fighting somebody
because nothing else matters.
Nothing else in the world is happening.
Nothing else is more important.
Only this.
Only survival is the thing that I focus on
and I'm 100% in that moment
and there's nothing else on our thing.
Give me that.
And so I always track that I remember stealing fire
and I was like, that's why I fucking loved fighting.
It was the quiet button, right?
It was just like 100% presence, 100% now.
Nothing else matters.
And it was something that drew,
but because I had that relationship with it,
I drew me back like I wanted to.
I wasn't trying to go pick fights with people
but I was raised, you know, if somebody picks a fight
with you, you can stand your ground if you want.
And it was always like, all right, let's go.
You know, I'm happy time now.
You're taking me to my happy place,
getting jumps a little different, right?
And what that can encode in you, right?
Especially as a young person is incredibly different.
Incredibly different in how your sense of safety,
your sense of, and free, you know,
we're just listening to this right now.
There's no video here, Michael, you're a big dude.
You're as big as me, right?
You're a big fucking guy.
And it's taken me a lot of work, medicine work as well,
to be able to relate to someone like my wife,
who's, who's 13 inches shorter than me
and weighs half my weight.
And it's like, oh, dude, her experience in the world
is way fucking different than my experience in the world.
Her experience in the world as a woman
dressed up dancing in a pre-bay or something like that
in Vegas and then trying to make it to her car at night
is 100% different than me leaving the club
going to my car at night, right?
Fucking world of difference.
But having this piece, you know, at 12 years old,
that starts to encode differently as well.
Unpack that.
Yeah, I mean, I think what you said is powerful, right?
I mean, there's so many layers.
Totally interesting to think about how our trauma,
like what you said about fighting and being present
will really stuck with me.
Because I think there's something about,
and this is now over years of reflection,
but the actual essence of the story was,
I was 12 years old, it was my first time leaving home.
So it was my first time away from the proverbial nest.
And I went to Spain, I remember the last thing they said
is we're getting on the plane,
was don't get in any trouble over there
because things work differently.
Were you in Europe already?
Like where did you go?
We flew into Spain.
I went to a language academy.
So I grew up going to a public school.
I grew up in the city of Chicago in the heart of the city.
And I studied Spanish from kindergarten.
And so it was our first, my first experience ever leaving
the country.
I was in Micas in the Costa del Sol, in the Southern coast.
And it was the first night out and we went to a club.
And my host brother was,
they were drinking, I wasn't drinking, but they were drinking.
He went out, he had a coke,
and I saw him getting accosted by this guy.
And I basically went to go have his back.
I didn't know the guy, of course,
but I was staying in his home and basically went up.
And there was this guy basically
costing him for his drink.
And I stood up basically for this guy.
And what I didn't know is the guy that was accosting him
wasn't one guy.
It was 30 guys.
He was the town, I don't know if it was a gang,
I don't know what you'd fully call him,
but the next thing I knew,
I got a right hook to the jaw.
And then damn, like I was just being jumped by 30 guys
in a country I'd never been to first day in.
It was so intense that they actually forbade me
from actually going to school
because this guy was like so feared that they were like,
even though I was there on a study abroad program,
I couldn't even go to school.
And then he found me again down at the beach
and they threw you, got a bottle.
I got a rock basically taught, threw a rock in my head
and then had a bunch of people come chase me and beat him.
I actually held my ground and was okay.
And then the shopkeeper kind of stopped it.
But in essence, what he did was it made me,
it deeply imprinted this notion that travel
and other people were not safe.
And what wound up happening was when I kind of got
to the latter part of high school,
this kind of switch flipped and I developed basically
an obsessive compulsive personality.
I was like checking doors,
I was checking to make sure the burners were off.
And in Western psychology,
they were like, you have an obsessive compulsive disorder,
take this medicine, what have you.
And I was like, okay, yeah,
if I want to actually get rid of this, what do you do?
And they were like, well, what you do
is called exposure therapy.
You basically slowly confront the things that scare you.
So if you were scared of a snake,
instead of getting 10 feet away, you go nine feet away.
And you slowly try to get a little closer
and confront your fear.
And this is not dissimilar from initiatory practices
that boys have had,
as they've been shepherded in a manhood
for since time immorial,
but we just don't have those rights of passage.
And so that's been part of my deep inquiry over the years.
But in essence, what I did was I said,
all right, if basically exposure therapy's the way out
of this fear or this neuroses or this unwellness,
how do I do that?
And not being, I think you and I are probably
still in this way, not being much for the little
by little, I was like, all right,
well, how can I take this all out of once?
And basically I wound up, I was like, okay,
I grew up in Chicago, where's as far from my reality
as possible?
And I wound up going to Sri Lanka,
which is literally on the longitudinal line,
other side of the world,
a place where you and I, six foot four,
not small men stand out like a sore thumb.
And I lived in a village amidst the Civil War.
So the country was at Civil War at the time.
So you have this paradox of a Buddhist country,
predominantly Buddhist country,
amidst the Civil War.
So like on the end of every corner,
there's pillboxes, sandboxes with, you know,
guys with AKs, large caliber machine guns.
Was this a religious conflict?
It was without going to great detail.
It was religious, it was basically the legacy of colonialism.
When the British were there,
they exalted the minority, which was the tomals
into positions of sort of the middle class
to manage down, which they did across a lot of the empire.
And then when they left, they left the legacy
of democracy or voting,
but then the previously suppressed majority,
there was now tension after that.
It makes sense.
That's the vacuum.
And so it led to a Civil War far more complex than that.
But in essence, it kind of mirrored the paradox
that I felt within myself, right?
There was this element of like a deep peace
and yet at the same time, this tumult.
And so I wound up going to this place
because it felt like, it felt like the snake.
And I was like, okay, I gotta go dance with the snake.
Didn't want to, but I was like, that's what I gotta do.
That's what I gotta do.
And I wound up going there and Kyle, it was,
I mean, I haven't really shared much of this.
I mean, I'm still processing it now 20 plus years later,
but I saw things and witness things that you cannot.
I mean, you can proximate,
and you've dealt deeply in the medicine world.
There's lots of worlds beyond our world,
but I saw things that, to this day, I cannot explain.
People in Trans speaking languages,
they should not speak, know how to speak, you know.
Literal magic, and I wound up going to the,
my very first day, going to the ocean.
I was 18, 19 years old.
I go to the edge of the ocean.
It was like something on a National Geographic,
this 16 year old, brown, beautiful brown,
kind of Sri Lankan young man with a spear
and an octopus that literally look like a tiger
comes out of the crystal blue turquoise waters.
And he's got nothing on, but shorts and some goggles.
And he hands me the goggles.
And I was like, all right, so I guess we're swimming.
I don't know where we're swimming, but we're swimming.
And we swim out to this island.
And it was wild because this was technically a Buddhist temple,
but on the island, you enter into the liminal space,
and it was where they practiced,
certain practices that weren't,
that were pre-buddhist, shall we say.
And I climb out of the water with this boy,
with a spear, and a tiger octopus.
And there's a man basically crushing garlic and chilies
and a woman literally shaking,
like condom blay, like in trance.
And she's a Tamil woman speaking classical singles.
It's like if I came into your house
and I all of a sudden saw you shaking and invoking
and speaking fluent like ancient Greek or Latin,
or some language you've never even studied.
And the reason I know that is because there happen to be
like one of the foremost linguists on that island with me
that I was studying, they took the boat out.
And right after that moment,
where I was introduced to what's called Behoot the Video,
which is the occult form of Ayurvedic shamanism.
I wound up being invited to study with this man.
I wanted to study mask carving
because my great grandfather was a woodcarver.
And so for me, it was like, okay, I'll do like a week.
I'd love to do an apprenticeship with this guy
around studying masks.
And lo and behold, the mask was just,
it was the tip of the snake.
I had no idea what I was getting into,
but basically when, so in their worldview,
there was no word for privacy
and there was no word for possession.
So what happened when I got jumped was
there was a fundamental break from me
in the usness of life, right?
It was like now me, and I've never been in an octagon.
I think there is something I would imagine
deeply present, ladies you shared about that confrontation,
that existential, you know, there's a brotherhood
but also an existential confrontation.
And for me, it was like I got stuck.
I had gotten stuck in the existential confrontation.
And I needed to find the usness again, right?
And in Sri Lanka, amidst this civil war,
what I found with this man who invited me,
he was a self-generation healer.
He didn't have a son, he had two daughters.
And it was like, when I say that this is unusual,
like I've met people who were like,
and I didn't even know unusual it was,
they were like, you studied bhutavity
and I was like, yeah, they're like, how did you find it?
So it found me, they're like, oh, I've gone.
I spent 10 years looking for, we couldn't find.
I mean, real people, right?
And I was like, wow, okay.
And it's basically like the seal team six
of when you need to bring shit back together.
Like when the containers getting real fucked up
and you need like the real ones to come in,
that's what he was, that's what this man was.
You know, like we would say someone's a master,
something he was a master of like 17 things,
not egoic at all, because but that's what it took
to keep the container, you know?
And so when someone was out of balance,
which is for them, health was, or well being,
wellness was balance.
It was his role to spend weeks
preparing the space.
They would literally talk about plants.
They would build an entire, basically city
out of palm fraud.
They would make elaborate structures, flowers everywhere.
It would, you know, and they would put that person
in the center of the circle.
And then from sunset to sunrise,
they would create a whole ceremony
where that person was brought from the fringes, you know,
the outer lands, you know, where they were lost.
They would literally, spiritually and physically bring them
back into the heart of the circle
and seal their collective usness together, you know?
Like that was, that was the medicine of this place.
And by the way, no enviagians,
but people were deep in trance, like a level of,
a level of wizardry, a level of magic
that I still can't do justice to.
But somehow in the two years that I live with him,
I went from a dance with the snake.
I was no longer, I was no longer afraid in that way, right?
Like I had, I think, you know, since time immemorial,
young men have been shepherded into manhood by other men,
often through this existential confrontation, right?
Like the kind you may have had in the octagon,
for me, it wound up materializing in different ways,
but I was taken from boyhood, confronted
my greatest existential fear,
and through that was shepherded into a manhood,
a different, a different initiatory aspect of myself.
All right, guys, quick break to tell you about my brand new
community that is launching this year, the Kingdom Within.
This has been many years in the making.
I've had a lot of iterations of the things that I've learned
about and wanted to teach through Fit for Service
for six or seven years, coaching one-on-one clients,
literally thousands of people that have come through
my coaching and been shaped by me and who have shaped me.
So what is it about?
It's about the body, the body is a doorway,
it opens up all systems, the body is the temple.
It's about the mind as a system.
How do we categorically learn how to use the mind
so it can sit in the passenger seat, not in the driver seat?
And then how do we connect to ourselves, right?
How do we connect to each other?
How do we connect to our parents?
How do we connect to nature?
How do we connect to God in a safe way, right?
All of these things are critically important,
but the starts of the body and then we lead in with the mind
and then we dive into connection.
And the community is a field.
It is a container actively that supports this.
Everybody who joins this community
is going to be thinking along the same lines.
You will come there for your own reasons,
but everybody is coming with a willingness to grow
and a willingness to learn.
And with that, you have a container
that leads for potential transformation.
At the very least, the knowledge is going to be palpable.
And so I'll be teaching once a month on their webinars
on some of the most important potent things
that I think working from body to mind, to connection,
and beyond.
And of course, every other two weeks there'll be a Q&A
that will go, which will just answer each
and every one of your questions.
A huge resource list of every book
that I've ever read, the why behind it,
and where I think you should start
because a lot of times people get overwhelmed,
you get recommended two different books on sleep,
two different books on health, whatever the thing is,
where do you start?
Well, that's an important piece that only you can answer,
but I can help you with that.
And through a little Q&A and active back and forth,
you will have all the help necessary to launch yourself
into the best direction you've ever been
from a health standpoint, from a mental standpoint,
and from a life standpoint, because life is about connection.
It's about relationship and how I relate to myself
as well as others.
It's the name of the game.
All right, please join us at the kingdom within.
All you gotta do is go to Kingsboo.com
and you can sign up right there,
and I look forward to seeing you guys.
You wanna learn more?
We'll link to it at the top page of the show notes
and now back to the podcast.
Yeah, I'm just picturing like you.
You, your soul called you to like Dr. Strange.
You know what I'm saying?
Totally.
It is training, you know?
Dude, it was, I mean, one day I'll tell you more, man,
but the things that I saw with this man,
I, yeah, even now having been very fortunate
to sit in some pretty rarefied circles,
I still cannot believe.
Like it's, it was, and that's unfortunate,
I think, what we're losing, right?
Those, that occult, like that occult,
there are masters around the world
in all these different traditions, right?
And they still exist.
Do you think there's a good question on that?
Is this guy not gonna pass on his legacy
because he has two daughters and no sons?
Well, okay, it's more nuanced than that.
He's, it wasn't like, by the way,
I don't wanna paint a picture that he wasn't,
like we traveled to India.
His daughters went deep into dance
and they were, they were,
they were still absolutely part of the tradition.
I see.
But, you know, then I won't go too far field.
You know, there was a lot of existential forces,
which we're seeing around the world now.
His mother, for example, forbade him from dancing.
Like his father was the foremost,
one of the foremost dancers in the country.
And he had to teach himself dancing
by watching his father teach other children.
His mother actually burned.
So the traditional scriptures in that tradition,
like the traditional writing
was all these beautiful palm-fraud manuscripts.
They would take from palm trees and they would hand-write.
Like the Manastrichters, you go to Tibet now,
you know, and there's these ancient scriptures, right?
She literally burned them
because she was so entrenched in the colonial mindset.
She wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer.
She wanted him to go into a Western verified, you know,
you know, something that would be appreciated
by colonial society.
She didn't want him to be, you know,
she, in this Ayurvedic shamanic lineage.
Yeah, she didn't think much of it.
Correct. So he had to, his, he was also a defiant.
So his defiance was in spite of that resistance
initiating in that path and, and, and, and going deep down.
That's the soul's calling.
I mean, you hear the same story with, you know,
our Lakota elders, you hear it with, you know,
people in the Amazon, you know,
if you're fortunate enough to make it down there,
that like, in, and most of the people
that I've worked with in the Amazon
come are generational healers, right?
So it might skip a generation like this guy
I met, the youngest ever worked with as a guy named Laynaught.
He was only 25, but he started with tobacco at five years old.
His parents weren't into it, but his grandmother was.
And so, you know, grandmother, parents are out hunting,
doing their thing, and then grandmother saw
that he had a knack for it.
So she started working with them in tobacco
and the, the parents didn't squash it.
But by 21, this guy was one of the best shaman in the world.
To, to this day, I've, I, there are,
I wasca ceremonies that I've had, and there's a three with him.
Like the three with him were on just a whole different
wavelength.
And I mean that from the songs to the, to the instruments
to like, what this guy could do.
He had never seen, he said, as a gift,
brink, so he was somewhat non-traditional
for a, for a Pucalpa Shapivo shaman.
And that, he said, bring him me every instrument you can.
And so like that was the deal.
If you wanted to bring him a gift,
bring in an instrument.
And he played each of them at different times
when he was called to in the three nights.
He had only seen a drawing of a harmonica.
And this dude on the harmonica made Billy Joel look
like it was his first time.
It was fucking unreal, dude.
And you'd never, I could never think like harmonica
during a ceremony, it trusted me like it was perfect.
It was flawless medicine.
And that just came through him.
He was such an incredible person,
but he would say a lot of people that are younger,
because I see this dude, he's in Levi's,
and like a t-shirt.
And I'm like, oh, you're dressing like us, man.
Is that how it is?
And he's like a lot of the young guys dressed normal,
they dress like Westerners.
And a lot of them want to leave the area
and to get wealthy, because there's no real wealth there.
Unless you have, I don't know, it's kind of like
fighters wanting to start a gym,
but not having the money to start a gym.
The only people making money in the Amazon
are the ones that have like retreat centers
that are decked out for the most part
or people like Eleanor who get flown around.
But I could see that.
I could see Chase Ironizer's been on this podcast
and been here to pour sweat for us.
His uncle was the main medicine man for the Lakota
when JFK and Bobby Senior were working with him
on some different things from an environmental standpoint.
And so when RFK ran for president,
Chase tried to get him to come out,
but he couldn't do it, he was too old.
He said, I'm not going to come out, but you are.
Because Chase had followed, his nephew had followed.
His son did not.
His son decided to go to college and do something else.
Chase got a degree as a law degree
from a major university and in addition to that,
like wanted to hold on to all the medicine
he could from his medicine people.
So he's a unique blend of both.
But yeah, more and more, the attraction of doing
with the old and not really.
And the problem too with colonialism
is one of the main problems is that you don't see
the reverence and the respect for those gifts
that these people have, right?
You don't understand that there's a medicine there
that's far beyond anything alopathic and touch.
It's far beyond, I mean, if anyone I had a serious cancer
with the last place on earth that I'm going to fucking go to
is some hospital figure that out.
The last fucking place on earth.
Now I would take any shaman from around the world
and test to see where, who has had success in this arena
and I have seen people, cure cancer.
I have seen people that for legit nasty stage four stuff
come back and are perfectly cool
and it took them hard work.
It took them dig and deep into themselves
with the right practitioner, but they are free of it.
But buddy, Dr. Nathan Riley, the holistic OBGYN,
he's a huge Steiner study and studying antipersophic medicine
and he's also got his Western education and degree
and his MD and he said, the more he looks into it,
the more convinced he is that there's no such thing
as an only physical ailment, that everything is tied
to the emotional body, the astral body,
the aetheric body, the spiritual body,
that whatever layers beyond our physicalness exist,
that these are the originating points, right?
If we want to root something, it's not rooted in the body.
It is expressing in the body and we can take things
to help with that expression and changing and healing,
but ultimately healing must come beyond the body.
And so that to me really, really resonates
in things of that nature.
100%, I mean, this is going to seem far afield,
but I've just been going deep into oral health, right?
Which is like, no, I hear no one talking,
but it's not a sexy topic.
But lo and behold, realize that periodontal disease
has profound consequence on our heart health, right?
An incidence of heart attacks on brain health.
And also, obviously our mouth metaphorically,
the entry point from the outside world to the inside world,
it's in many ways our closest proximity to nature, right?
Because it's how we put our food, our medicine
into our bodies.
It's also how we speak out our words to the world, right?
And the last year, I'd say the thing
that I've focused on the most is his oral health.
Dude, West, West and A Price, you've heard of him.
You know, he wrote nutrition and degenerative disease.
He was a dentist who went around all over the planet
in the 1930s and he studied indigenous cultures.
You put his books right next to you.
You would probably love that book.
And so in reading, you know, Paul checks one of my mentors,
he quotes him all throughout how to eat moon be healthy,
shows pictures, you know, so these indigenous cultures
who had not been introduced to modern food,
had perfect teeth, they didn't have a word for cancer,
they didn't have a word for heart disease.
None of those things existed, right?
They didn't have high cholesterol,
they had none of that existed, right?
They didn't need those names because they just didn't happen.
And as soon as you introduced, you know,
the four white devils, which were refined sugar,
refined table salt, pasteurized homogenized milk,
and refined flour, that changed everything, right?
And how their teeth expressed,
they're all health problems, right?
Even in cats, they had a price did a thing
with the Francis Pottenger.
You can look it up, it's called Pottenger's Cats.
And as soon as these guys go off raw meat and milk
into homogenized cook stuff and cook food,
like they're within three generations,
they can't see, they're blind, they have,
you know, all their teeth fall out, like they're fucked.
That's just with cats, right?
And so, you know, something that's complex as a human,
you know, like how far can we go?
You know, in wondering about our fertility,
how far can we go down this road
without before we catch it and see what the issues are here?
But any price was on in this a long time.
He's actually in the Price Institute,
which is mostly about food and the medicine of nature
and ancestral wisdom, was birthed
out of this guy's understanding of that.
And he said, it didn't matter if you, you know,
you were an Inuit, living on 80% fucking fat,
and maybe only had blueberries once a month
in a whole year, or a pygmy tribe that was 80% yams,
but then had grubs and different things and worms
to get their protein, different sizes,
different parts of the planet, perfect health
until you introduce the standard American diet.
And that, the pictures don't lie.
I mean, that's something that like imprint in your mind,
seeing the importance of that.
And it was really cool that it was a dentist
that exposed that.
But yeah, I've been big and I've had a holistic
biological dentist, you know, that I work with,
that I've had on the podcast,
even just bring, you know, get into like the breathing
mechanics and things like that.
So much of our American faces are distorted
because we weren't given the right foods at a young age.
We weren't taught how to hold our tongue
to the roof of our mouth like we wouldn't meditation,
like sit properly.
And that affects your airway, it affects all sorts of shit.
You know, and there's cool workarounds for that, you know,
but it's, you know, books like Breathe by James Nestor,
James Nestor, Oxygen Advantage, Patrick McCown.
God, it was the other one, the jaw was another one.
I think they got into like all this therapy
that you can do or fall on a guy now that does like,
these own manual presses into the roof of his mouth
to try to space that.
And you can see his before and after in six months
of wild dude, how manipulatable that is.
Dude, you do jaw work, I don't know if you've ever done that.
That's it'll make you cry like nothing else.
It is unbelievable.
Yeah, I went to the human garage and cats
and did like an eight week protocol.
The first one was, was the jaw manipulation
and they put the gloves on and went to work for like an hour.
I mean, I mean, tears just flow.
Exactly.
Right under my eyes, like, I don't really like, you know,
I'm trying to keep it together and trying to breathe
and just tear, just running like water works, turn on.
That's right, unbelievable pain.
Yeah, because you said, you know, the body keeps score
and it does and we are obviously spiritually,
emotionally, all connected biologically.
There is no separation, right?
That's the great fallacy.
There's a great a text that I think you would love
that it just came to mind, which is the jewel net of Indra.
And it's an ancient, why-end Buddhist text
and it talks about the interdependence of all things
and how the world is a cosmic web.
And at each node of the meeting is kind of a gem
and that gem is the reflection of all things, right?
So that notion of the microcosm is the macrocosm,
which can be articulated in many ways
in many traditions is 100% the case.
And so we, whatever microcosm we choose to look at,
whether it be, like you said, like Samburu,
you can see like the, you know,
the generation of grandparents, perfect teeth, like you said,
and now with the introduce, it shifted, right?
Like we can see, and that's the physical change we can see.
The inquiry that I've been on even lately
is looking at the social and sociological impacts, right?
Because the piece that I saw, for example, in Sri Lanka,
or you see in the Amazon, you know,
I meant, well, I just hosted the Noke Koi
and it was their first trip ever out of the Amazon.
And I hosted them in Venice.
And I remember them talking about homelessness, right?
Which is wild, because you traveled other places,
like I was just in Indonesia and Bali,
there's no homeless, that concept doesn't exist, right?
And in these traditional and tribal cultures,
there was no homeless, because,
and that's what I learned in Sri Lanka, right?
If one person's out of balance,
the entire collective, the entire community is out of balance.
And so what the Noke Koi said that was so powerful,
and I remember asking him a question once, you know,
because obviously, you know,
walk around Venice, you're seeing,
we were there, we were there a few years back.
You know, you're seeing people who were on
met that in all kinds of, you know, mental illness, et cetera.
And basically, he was like, yeah,
there's a lot of people here with their spirits
moving outside of their body.
And it was such a profound and simple,
but powerful articulation.
And that's the piece now where it's like,
I've been an inquiry around is like,
how do we get back to re-appreciating
and reconstituting the whole that is the collective,
that the whole that is our social health?
Because just as we as individuals, right,
it's our mind, body, and our spirit are all,
there's also then, as you scale out, right,
as you go in the jewel net,
then it's also our family unit, right?
Like, so beautiful to see you and your partner
and your children, right?
And then you scale out, then you're a farm,
the ecosystem that you're a part of, right?
And then, you know, the community.
And we've had, we're in like the brave new world
in that regard, right?
Because since time immemorial,
we've been a tribal culture, right?
Like our well-being, our wellness,
has been oriented socially.
And I think it's Terence McKenna, who had a quote
that since 1992, our world has changed more
than it did in the previous thousand years, right?
But biologically, we haven't,
and psychologically, we haven't caught up to that, right?
Like, you get up in the morning
and read the newspaper all the,
I mean, we won't go into it, but all the,
no matter what day you're listening to this,
you know, all the crap that's happening around the world,
right? And there's a lot of it.
And it's deep, man, it's heavy.
And we also don't have containers for grief, by the way,
that's a whole nother conversation, right?
Like traditionally, we had a place where grief could live
and being born witness to.
There's a fantastic book real quick on that
from Martin Pregtl.
Yes.
The smell of rain on dust.
I've got it on my phone.
Yeah, I just want people to have that resource,
because Martin is like one of my greatest teachers
from afar, right?
They have never met the guy.
I've done deep work with him.
Dude, fucking, I'm not surprised.
Yeah, he is such a special human, though.
My favorite from him is the unlikely piece
at Kuchama Keek.
My boy turned me on to that one.
Christian, pity, shout out to you buddy.
Unlike the piece at Kuchama Keek,
I've listened to multiple times.
And it's a fucking,
there's so many gems baked into that book
that I grab something new each time.
But his understanding on grief and how to work with it
was what I brought him up, was like,
in the smell of rain on dust.
It's like, to me, it felt kind of elementary.
You know, and then I was like,
well, why everybody's hyped about this book?
It was like, oh, most people haven't grieved.
That's right.
Most people haven't come into contact for that.
And thankfully, the plants helped me
to recognize like, oh, if I need to move something,
I have to move it.
I can't fucking constipate myself emotionally.
I have to let that flow,
whether that sadness anger any of these things
in a constructive way, right?
Doesn't mean like, you did this to me,
like none of that shit,
but like letting those emotions come up
and feeling all of it, not chewing them away,
not saying I'll deal with it later,
but actually dealing with it as it arises
and letting that move.
And then it's like,
oh, now the fucking rainbow comes, right?
There's the light at the end of the tunnel,
but I had to go through that whole process
to get to the end, right?
And if we have forgotten as a culture to allow for that,
through all kinds of conditioning, men and women, right?
But the importance of that cannot be overstated.
And it's so beautiful you bring that up,
because I actually saw,
I had that on my phone.
I've been listening to it, the audio book.
And Martin Proctel came to me
during one of the most pivotal moments,
my dark night of the soul ostensibly.
I had moved across the country with my girlfriend
at the time, we've been together two and a half years.
Without getting into the depth of the narrative,
moved literally left everything my community
talked about social.
I was performing a couple of weather.
I had like my deep social bonds.
I was exhibiting in a gallery.
I had a great job.
My family was there,
left all that to be with this partner,
moved us across the world to a place I knew,
or across the country, a place I knew no one.
And within two weeks, she didn't come home for three nights.
She basically was cheating on me.
And that led me into this deep depth of darkness, right?
Like, you look under my sink,
the number of beer bottles, you know?
Like, anything I could do to numb myself,
basically I did.
And two things happened that were pivotal.
One is my father saw what was happening.
And grace of God took me through an initiatory weekend.
Where?
How old were you when the seven?
This was, I was probably 24.
So I'd come back from, that was the other piece.
I came back from Sri Lanka after having this incredible
mind-bending experience.
But like, psychological is like,
I had swam in the deep, you know?
It's like, I was, and I didn't yet have the full, you know?
I had some, I had some tools,
but I, you know, I was still contending with, you know, like,
it was like, on one level,
I had been thrown into like the maximal training, you know?
And I'd say still in some ways I'm processing that,
but in essence, that relationship was the grounding force.
And then I lost that ground.
Right.
And so my father, who had done early men's work,
actually did something called the New Warrior Training,
which was based on the sort of mythopoetic men's movement,
which I highly recommend.
I think now it's called the mankind project.
But I've been like, guys like Robert Bly.
That's right.
That's right, that's right.
And for me at the time, it was integral
because it was exactly what we're talking about.
So I did two things.
I did some deep work with Martin Proctel,
so I did some ceremonial work with Martin.
And he said to me, I went,
which I want to share on this podcast,
because because you invoked it,
and I think it needs to be shared,
he said to me,
pain is the horse that beauty rides.
Pain is the horse that beauty rides.
And for those who don't know,
Martin went through like,
he literally bore witness to genocide.
Like he lived in Guatemala.
He was researches story,
but he had gone through it.
Like, and the other thing he shared with me,
which was super powerful,
was he talked about sort of revolutionary work
and the impetus to want to change systems, right?
Because he was also a deep activist.
He was a spiritualist,
but he was also an activist.
And he said to me,
before I wanted to confront the forces,
you know, like,
I don't know, the vision I have in my mind
is like a Brock Lesnar just coming at,
you know, like all in like a Guns of Blaze.
And, you know, like,
but he's like,
and we had this notion of that's how we confront,
you know, we go after the forces, the evil forces.
He's like, now I wanna be the grass
that grows through the cracks in the concrete.
And I was like, wow, you know, like, okay.
So he was giving me little pieces
that I've held to this day.
And he said that the shit in life
of things you're experiencing right now,
if you process through the pain,
if you ride that horse that beauty rides,
that is the compost for the garden.
That is the compost for the garden.
And so my father,
seeing what I was going through flew out
and a group in that context of that training,
he was the only father there.
And he only father of men
who were going through that initiative where we can.
And he paid to volunteer to be there.
The degree to which that inspired other men in the work
was not to be underestimated.
And you know, he grew up basically, you know,
supporting, like he had guys in his group
who were in Vietnam and like witnessed, you know,
grenades being thrown in their helicopter
and watching either their best friends do.
I mean, like, talk about deep grief, you know,
and like shame and some of the deepest emotions, right?
And in that context, I finally had a container.
I won't go into the specifics of what we did that weekend,
but a container to confront that pain
and be witnessed in the grief, you know, naked, like exposed.
And to do that work and having now witnessed, you know,
been with the coast of South Africa,
literally men covered in white powder
about to be circumcised in the Netherlands, you know,
like by the, you know, the elders of the community
to be shepherded into manhood, you know,
being witnessed to other processes of individuation.
I think one of the things that were so lacking
and we now either have the grace to find in ourselves,
which I would argue you've done beautifully, you know,
from my knowledge of you, from your confrontation
and courage both externally and your courageous acts,
but also internally and your courageous acts.
But if we don't have a community or a place
where that's celebrated and born witness to,
I think what we find then is culturally and socially
is we have a lot of manboys.
We have all these like unindividuated men that are,
and by the way, you know, this context of course
exists for women as well,
but I'm speaking in this personally that are lost, right?
They're still in the hinterlands.
They haven't been brought back as I saw in Sri Lanka.
They haven't been brought back through the gauntlet by the way,
right, like being brought back is not a gentle process.
You've got, it's an existential reckoning.
Like you've got to confront your greatest fears
and potential death.
But on the other side of that gauntlet,
like you shared earlier, right,
there is that rainbow,
but in my experience, if you don't ride the horse,
if you don't ride the pain,
if you don't actually look at it,
like squaring the eyes and not existentially numb out, right?
Not spiritually bypass, not, you know,
as I was doing at that time, you know, drinking or smoking
or whatever it is, whatever you're,
preferred numbing agent is,
then you're stuck, right, you're,
like you body keeps squaring,
you're proverbialistic,
maybe that materializes as body ailments,
overweight, you know, like you said,
like the materialized, metastasized as a cancer,
socially you've got discord in your life, right?
Like in my view and what I learned from my teacher, Sri Lanka,
right, he said basically that health is the rhythm of the heart.
It's the heart rhythm, right?
And all of our hearts, right, from the moment,
from our mother, with the first nine months, right?
All we know is the beating of the heart, that's the drum.
That's the existential drum that we come into being with, right?
And we're in the darkness, right?
We're in the darkness, all we have is the beat of that heart, right?
And the beauty of when you, you know,
ceremonial work, like you're sharing, right?
Like you're reminded of that beat,
you're like brought back into that,
or deep, large work, right?
Like you're brought back into that womb into that darkness
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Unless we're willing to courageously,
you know, large work's not easy, you know,
like unless you're willing to courageously confront
the things that are your greatest pain,
then you're forever stuck in that stuckness, right?
You haven't, you haven't metastas metabolized it
as Martin says into that compost, right?
It's still the shit that you're carrying on your shoes
or wearing on your jacket or whatever.
And so I share that to say,
whatever you can do in my experience for those listening
and Martin Proctel's a great resource.
I love that you brought up.
The other two other books I would recommend
if is that I love Secrets of the Talking Jaguar.
And there's a my ancient Mayan text called
The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun.
I've got that one too.
That was awesome.
Yeah, what's up?
It's so good.
It's so good.
And he, at some point, you know,
he actually has like a mystery school
called Bolad's Kitchen in New Mexico.
If you, at some point you get a chance
to do ritual work with him, I highly recommend it
because to sort of bring this, that aspect.
So I did this deep mens work with my father.
And then I filed that up with four years of integration.
So for four years I got together with five other men
once a week and we witnessed each other
and our deepest shame, guilt, grief,
and it was free.
The commitment was to each other.
And for me, it was a sea change.
Like in the four, that four-year process,
that dark night of the soul lost boy Michael
to, you know, that's when I wanted
getting a full ride to Columbia, moved to New York,
launched Global Citizen, you know,
hosted all these incredible, you know, figures
and world leaders, presidents, prime ministers.
That would never have been feasible
if that four-year arc of deep confrontation hadn't happened.
And Martin was a huge reason for that.
But both in terms of intellectually but spiritually like,
we actually literally created offerings, right?
And there was a place where he talked about going
to a place where the river meets the ocean,
which for me is, and I imagine for many
is a deeply sacred place.
But I've had several of these synchronous experiences,
and I'm sure you have as well, Carl.
But I remember going and placing my spirit house,
this thing I've made through the course of the weekend
that was made to live through my tears, right?
It was an offering of all that I had let go and released
and also all that I was stepping into.
And I went, it was in Northern California,
in Mendocino, I went to this river as a sun was setting
and I placed this spirit house.
And as soon as I placed on the ground,
I kid you not, Carl, not a foot in front of me,
a sea lion came up, poked its head up, looked at my house,
gave me what I perceived to be a smile,
but just been the expression on its face.
But like, kind of gave this kind of popped up, witnessed,
and then went back through the river to the ocean.
And I've had a few moments like that,
but you're like, wow, okay,
when it more sover into the animal kingdom
and you're like, okay, all right.
Yeah, those things to me, I can count on one hand,
and they're some of the most special synchronicities possible.
You know, I call those a god nod, right?
Like that, when you get a god nod like that,
it's such a deep verification of the presence of spirit
and that you're held and that you're getting the nod.
Like, yeah, you're doing it, right?
You get the fucking thumbs up, dude, you're doing it.
Like that, that is, it's incomprehensible
to the non-believer, right?
It's just a coincidental type thing,
but it's like, there's no such thing as coincidental.
Like, you know, tell me the timing of that
with everything that Vlaiga went into it, you know?
And how many other times you've been in places like that,
where you didn't have a sea lion,
pop its fucking head up right next to you, you know?
Like, that just, like, it happened at that exact time
because it was that exact time that it was supposed to happen.
100%.
There was one, I'll share this also with you
because I think you'll appreciate it.
There's a group that you were talking about,
Chase Iron Eyes, and the sort of, which I have a deep,
I like when there's the bridge,
what I would call the bridges, right?
They have deep training in Western culture,
but they haven't, they're still deeply in reverence
for their indigenous roots.
Is it a friend of mine, who's Comanche?
And I got in the mail in Eagle Feather,
which is the most sacred, an invitation to the birthday,
50th birthday of the chairman of the Menominee people,
which is actually where I come from, from the Midwest,
where I live in Chicago.
That used to be Menominee land.
And at his ranch in a place called Sia in Cyril, Oklahoma.
And again, it was kind of this magical thing.
I don't know why I was invited, but I was invited.
And I showed up and had this incredible gathering.
I mean, like, there was,
Will Man Killer was there.
I think I might have conducted the last interview
before she passed into the spirit world
of her, and I was just volunteering,
helping him out, doing some media stuff.
And at one point, I had no intention or, you know,
like it wasn't there to do necessarily ceremony work.
I was just there for what I perceived to be a birthday.
And this man who holds the space in at Sia,
he's Comanche, but he went to Cornell and he's a scientist.
So he literally ships the plumage of all these birds.
And he single-handedly reintroduced the golden eagle
into the Smoky Mountains.
He's a eagle whisperer.
He breeds birds, literally like Javier Bardem
and Penelope Cruz reached out to him
to introduce the Spanish imperial,
maybe not reintroduced, but strengthen population in Spain.
So like he has literally on property, harpy eagle.
Like, so he has, so he's a scientist.
He literally has figured out how to breed birds
and reintroduce them into their native ecosystems
where they've been lost.
He's also fought the government.
He now is the repository for indigenous people
to hold their feathers because some ceremonies
were interrupted violently a hundred years ago
and that ceremony needs to close,
but they don't, it used to be the indigenous
had the literally petitioned the US government
to get the plumage for the feathers
necessary to complete that ceremony.
Now, outside of eagle feathers,
he holds the rights to ship those feathers
to whatever indigenous communities needs them.
He also holds the medicine bundle of Kwanaparkar
and is, holds the spiritual tradition,
he's one of the guardians.
And I knew a little bit of this,
but I wasn't fully familiar.
And there was a moment where I was,
I was creating some contents just to help them out.
They're non-profit and for whatever reason,
he had his bundle with them.
And the thing that I've slept under
for many, many years of my life,
I was gifted a dream catcher with three red-tail feathers.
And I share that because I'm surrounded by these eagles
and I was also given a golden eagle feather
outside of Temescal in Mexico.
So again, following these synchronous signs,
but I get stepped to with the medicine bundle
and he just starts to stoke the smoke
and he starts to bless me with the bundle.
And I kid you not call a wild red-tailed hawk,
flew five feet above my head
as he approached me with the bundle.
And again, no empty of gins,
it was literally just a prayer and a blessing with the smoke.
I couldn't talk for at least now,
I literally had to be walked to integrate.
Like it was one of the deepest medicine experiences
of my life and there was no exogenous substances consumed
like this was solely blessing prayer
and this man's medicine or for his connection to the lineage.
It was one of the most special experiences of my life
and it was so powerful because it was bearing witness
to those who have the wherewithal
to know how to work in this world
but are still alive and well in the next, in the other worlds.
And bridging those two and I think we need more of that.
Yeah, masters of both.
That's incredible.
Yeah, man, that's because he chills.
You heard me say that.
I just got my first red-tailed feather
for starting the vision quest here in the farm
from my brother, Ken Conti brought us something.
So I got on my walking stick right behind you
and talking about the red-tailed red-up top there.
Amazing.
Yeah, at least for me, that's a deep messenger.
Oh yeah.
Humming birds, I'll see out here or if I'm back
to help certain places with the red-tailed,
I take a pause.
It's like moment to pause and reflect on
what's wanting to be shared right now.
Absolutely, brother.
That's incredibly, incredibly beautiful.
Take it continuous on your journey
then I'm just popping, I'm like, remember.
Humming birds' stories are coming to talk to me
when my son was born, just all sorts of fun shit
that people probably think I'm a psycho for,
but it's like, there's no question.
100, how does it have, there's no question.
Continuous on your journey.
And I'm gonna lead to the imponence of writing this
and then talk about what this is all about.
You know, I love you.
Yeah.
So this is the first time speaking about it.
So I've consolidated some of these stories
and honestly, it's been my best attempt at taking the medicine
of this, you know, first 40-something years of life
and some of the extraordinary experiences
and processing them, you know, kind of in the kitchen
for the last five years and trying to cook something
that would be nourishing, you know, for the people.
And I wrote a book, it's called Resonance,
the Art and Science of Human Connection
and it's about the music that wants to live
in the space between us
and how we've become instruments for that song.
And that, what I just shared, for example,
though it's not the book, that story of the space being,
you know, what happened with me with the red tail
was the space between was respected.
It was, and it was danced with.
And that, that, what happened was
what I call in the book, the more was made present.
And the more is that existential possibility
that I believe is possible at all times.
Within each of us, but I think,
and this is especially relevant in this day and age,
but also in the medicine of us connecting, right?
In the medicine of human connection and the collective.
And what I've been gifted with is rare insight
into these cultures and societies,
which I know you have a huge shared reverence for as well,
wherein the integrity of the collective is still whole.
And unfortunately, I think many of us,
including myself in predominantly Western cultures,
are now deeply lonely, you know?
Deeply, deeply lonely.
And I've gone from moments of feeling
profoundly connected to dark nights of the soul, you know?
Like really confronting some heavy shit
and feeling totally alone.
And this is kind of a road map, you know?
I think there's a lot of writing out there about
why we're lonely.
This is a how, and not like a prescriptive, like,
do XYZ, and for 1090, not like, it's not like that.
It's using music as a metaphor to call you home.
You know, it's like you talked about the harmonica.
I know that song, I've listened to it.
And it's like, there's certain resonances,
there's certain frequencies that speak to us.
And so what I share is how we listen to the music
that wants to live through us,
and how we listen to the music between us
to know which songs are meant for us.
And who is our band, right?
I'm now in your band.
I'm, you know, I come in your house
and I'm embraced by your beautiful daughter,
greeted graciously by your beautiful son,
your incredible wife, right?
You have, which I deeply long to call into my own life,
but you've created this beautiful family, right?
And there, that's, that's your band.
That's, and you have multiple bands,
but that's your band, right?
And there's also your symphony, right?
Like there's, there, there are,
how do you find the people that are,
that are, that are, you know,
a grounded for a moment?
Think about the Beatles, right?
Just because everyone knows the Beatles.
John Paul Ring, they're all incredible musicians.
They all had, like, you know, they all could have been
incredible solo artists in their own right,
or chairs, they were.
But somehow the alchemy of their song together
created something more, and that more is the Beatles.
And all of us have been touched by it.
And I think there's something undeniable,
whether you're a Beatles fan or not.
You think of the music that is most resonant to you.
And when you're, and I created a music festival,
see 70,000 people, you know, all enraptured
by an incredible artist,
whether that be Coldplay or Beyonce,
all deeply present in that moment is something
you can't approximate, right?
One of the beautiful things about music
is it transcends all boundaries, right?
It's like, we can all appreciate a good song.
And with the Beatles, they created,
they were listening, what I talked about in the book,
is they were listening.
They were in the listening for the more, you know?
Miles Davis has a beautiful quote, which he says,
music is what lives in the space between the notes.
And in my belief are people, the people that are meant for us
are the people that listen to our music.
They're the people that are present for the space
between our notes.
And when we synchronize, like a great jazz musician,
we can improvise and create something beautiful,
something more, you know?
And it also depersonalizes,
because I think the other thing that's not really talked about
is some people aren't meant for us, right?
Like a lot of times, you know, people are like,
oh, that person doesn't like me.
I think now in the age of which we can go down that road,
but you know, social media, all the highlight reels,
all the proximate connection,
the artificial sense of, which only furthers
that sense of loneliness.
There's this, there's a lot of noise.
More noise than we've ever faced,
essentially as human beings, right?
What resonance is about is finding signal, right?
And holding to signal and not being distracted
by the fray of the noise that's trying to throw you off
your signal and finding the others, finding the others,
because it's literally physics,
and I actually break down just like we talked about
the deep indigenous stories,
but also the research on the science, right?
And how they come together, right?
Cochearance, how are nervous systems,
what do I have a breath word?
How are nervous systems literally come into syncopation,
how they sync?
You know, resonance in physics on a bridge,
if soldiers are actually locked up on a concrete bridge,
and all marching in exact synchronicity,
they can actually break and collapse a concrete bridge, right?
Like, that is an example of the more, right?
Like, it's not just, it's not one plus one equals two,
it's something exponential.
And to me, a Beatles is a great example of that, right?
Because those four created something more
than either one of them individually.
And it's my belief in what I write about in the book.
I think each of us, just like our fingerprint,
has a unique song that wants to live through us.
Not everyone gets to that song in this life, you know?
It's like the saying, you know, everyone dies,
but not everyone really lives.
And so what I dedicated the book to was,
how can you as an individual realize that fingerprint,
that song that is uniquely your own?
And how can you sing it such that the symphony
that is meant to support you beautifully,
can find you and that you can find your people.
The people that are, that truly see you,
the people that truly appreciate you,
the people that, like Miles talks about,
can listen to your notes,
but also the space between and find ways
to dance beautifully with those notes, you know?
And to create something together, that is more.
And I know I'm speaking kind of musically or mythologically,
but what I then go into is sort of the micro to the macro.
So how does one first tune their own instrument individually?
And then from a place of tuning individually,
how can we then slowly move out?
How can we start our band, you know?
How can we, from a band,
how can we move into family relationships, work relationships?
So, and to the point of symphony,
like what is our unique contribution?
What is our, and it goes into purpose, right?
Like that idea of how do we,
how do we step into that thing that is the more
that wants to live through us, right?
Stephen Pressfield, Elizabeth Gilbert,
Pressfield actually, who doesn't even read
other people's work, read it?
I was shit, to be honest, shitting myself.
He agreed to read, and he, so he's the,
he actually, he said it was outstanding,
he said I wouldn't change a word,
and that's my favorite living,
he said it's my favorite living author on the planet.
So that to me was like, okay, I can share it now.
But yeah, but basically it's,
it uses the metaphor of music as a way
to help you sing your unique song.
No, that is absolutely incredible.
I mean, I'm juiced to get into my hands on a coffee.
They're coming off the printer, brother.
I have, do you see, I just got to launch the May 5th,
and of course, can link to it,
but you can find resonance.
It's on Amazon, on Barnes & Noble, whatever.
I'll get you one for sure.
Thank you, brother, and I'll happily buy some support
because that's, you know, get you,
and then I can make a review.
Help, help, help you, help you in the game.
Dude, so much what you've covered is stuff
that's resonated with me over the years
and thinking of how I think about
kind of the larger game at play.
You know, coaching and fit for service,
it was almost always like, hey,
you're the most physically fit of all of us.
You know the most on the body.
You're gonna teach this shit, you know,
and that's where that'll be your corner.
And I got to teach plenty of other things
and the things that I'm drawn to are far beyond the body, right?
They're the conversations that we're having.
They're the exploration of consciousness,
the exploration of indigenous wisdom and practices
and how do those practices help us
make communion with God and make communion
with nature on a regular basis
so that the eye self is expanded in a different way.
The eye self can relate in a different way.
But to your point, you know,
I've always said the body is a tuning fork.
And until you're tuned correctly,
you will not interface with the external
in a way you want, right?
I mean, same thing, different language
at a buddy, Mark Englandon, who's an MLP guy
and he was just saying that, you know, in the NLP,
anyone who perpetuates the idea of being wronged
will remain the victim.
Their life will continue through law of attraction
or whatever you want to call that,
continue to bring them back up against victimhood
by giving them new reasons to be a victim still, right?
Until they transcend that and move beyond it, right?
I talked about this before,
but like, you know, everyone knows the story of,
you know, a woman who dates guy after guy
who's the same guy, different avatar, always abusive,
you know, and it's not,
it's only when she changes herself, does she transcend that
and then doesn't have that experience again?
She doesn't fix those guys, right?
She fixes herself and it's not that she had a problem,
like, right, I'm gonna be honest,
like it wasn't her fault for getting any of the shit
that happened, but as soon as she levels up,
that's no longer a part of her experience, right?
And again, that just goes back to like,
what is ours versus what is theirs?
If it's happening to me, I've called it in.
And if I take that level of responsibility for it,
then I'm not a victim, I have the power to change it, right?
I have to power the change it
through working on changing me.
And then in that of changing me,
I have the ability to create new experience in my life
that is more in alignment with what my thinking might
would say, that's what I want to have, right?
Yep.
And that goes into manifestation and all the stuff too
on in terms of like wanting something versus believing it
as if it is already there.
And, you know, taking that in, like when you change your,
what that actually means is,
I'm changing who I am internally.
I'm changing my frequency to abundance
or to happy, I'm changing my frequency
to being fulfilled in relationship,
even if I don't have the relationship yet,
because then from that place, I call in the partner
who mirrors that and says, oh yeah, you're my person
and I'm your person, right?
And it asks me how I know that, you know,
like, that was one of the biggest pieces
going through to spend this work
was calling in my amazing life.
Yes.
And, man, perfect medicine for me,
we've grown so much together, you know?
I bet.
There is so much together in 14 years,
it's fucking wild, but yeah, you know,
I think about like the heart coherence
from heart math and, you know,
butchenko breathing, you know,
it's equal parts in, equal parts out,
we'll raise HRV and you're like,
well, what's HRV?
Oh, fuck HRV.
That raises heart coherence, right?
That means that field is going to open.
That's it.
It's going to expand and when I'm around people
and I want to have this nice expanded field,
it's going to interact and engage
and bring up other people to have
that open expanded heart field.
That's it, right?
And that's something that's such a cool thing
to think about.
Last podcast I was talking a bit about,
is it Veda Austin?
Oh, the water is from the water.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.
Yeah, you know,
Alex Zeck turned me on to her work
and I was just blown away,
but we talked about, you know,
the photographing of frozen waters,
nothing new, right?
That comes out of Japan,
but what she was doing is she was taking that
to living things, like you can freeze egg white, right?
And so as a farmer here with eggs,
and I just told this story,
so I apologize and for bringing it up again,
but she found, you know, an egg,
a factory farm egg that had never seen real sun
and photographed that after four hours,
they egg white.
Then she found like a pasture raised happy hen,
she got that egg and she showed that
and they were completely different,
no different than the original photos of water
that were the waters hated or the waters loved, right?
That level of difference between the indoor egg
versus the pasture raised outdoor egg.
What's cool is she takes the one egg
that is the higher frequency
and puts it next to the other egg overnight
and then in the morning, both of them
have now raised their frequency.
And she sees how far couldn't this go.
She puts the one pasture raised egg in the middle
and 12 factory farm digs on the outside.
And the next morning, all 12 on the outside
are as good as the interior
and the interior is actually improved
because of the feedback of helping everything around itself.
It has improved itself even better.
That's right.
And like that's the fucking game, dude.
Now, Zach told me that, I was like,
damn, dude, that is the game we're in.
It is the game we're in and there's a lot of things there
like when you, it resonated too
when you talk about like some people aren't your people
and Paul Selig would say like,
we're totally allowed to have preference.
Let go of judgment, but absolutely have precedence, right?
That's a part of our personality.
It's a part of what we're drawn to naturally.
There's nothing wrong with totally.
And as Selig said, anyone you hold in the dark,
a part of you must stay there holding them in the darkness,
right?
If I can dem somebody, if I won't forgive somebody,
if I say like that guy is X, Y, and Z, and it's dark,
part of my consciousness remains in the cave
holding their hand there, right?
And so like forgiveness is about me,
more than it's about letting someone off the hook.
It's about relieving me of holding someone in the dark.
You know, so so many of these things kind of thread together
when you think of the game being played and heart coherence
and still having a choice in the matter
of what we prefer and what we wish to call in,
but also, you know, what resonates with us.
What is playing on the, you know, hand pans?
Like who's got two C note hand pans, right?
Can't play an A and a D, right?
We got them, they need to match.
If we're going to play together.
And it's like that makes sense too,
even from a sound perspective.
Tom, I'm just stoked, dude.
There's so many points you brought up there.
I was like, oh, this is fucking right.
I'm like, this is awesome, this is awesome, this is awesome.
Yeah, I think what you just,
I mean, you nailed it.
I'd be talking about simatics, right?
Like with the notion of frequency
and that being visualized in water,
which is life force, but yes, absolutely.
Across all biologicals, now the research,
which I talk about in the book,
but like the research around coherence is profound, right?
Like we know we've heard the research, right?
Like the equivalent, loneliness is equivalent
of basically smoking 15 cigarettes a day, like health wise.
Like there are profound consequences to our loneliness.
And unfortunately we're living, I think,
you know, not to get into whatever we just went through,
but I think the true pandemic that we're living through
is this epidemic of loneliness, right?
I think people feeling surrounded, more connected,
like theoretically, like in terms of social media
than ever before, but actually more disconnected
than we've ever been ever in the history of humanity.
And of course there are, you know,
there's great resources now,
especially around biological aspects, you know,
you can hear them on down, you know,
in terms of things we can do.
And there's still an assaults, obviously,
which we could talk about on our biology,
but there are things we know to do, to preserve,
to, you know, I don't love the word biohack,
but to hack our biology such that we can be resilient.
What I don't think people are talking about enough
and I hope resonance is the medicine for
is how do we socially approach that disease?
And that's what I saw with my teacher in Sri Lanka.
That's what I've seen, you know,
in terms of the success of global citizen
and how we were able to create a collective
and witness across all these wisdom traditions, right?
Is what are the ways that, I mean, you look at Annie
and I know you and I shared deep reverence
for, you know, authentic ceremony.
You look at Annie's ceremony,
what is the heartbeat of that ceremony?
It's the music, you know?
And it's, it's, it's, it's, again,
it bringing it back to my teacher shared
and also, you know, what we go back biologically, right?
Our connection, fundamental connection,
the first nine months of our life is with our mother
in the womb and it is, it is guided by that heartbeat, right?
And what I realized was in the dis-ease of the mental illnesses,
the imbalances, the loneliness that is also part
of, unfortunately, our modern society,
we've got to find our way back to that rhythm,
to that music, right?
To that heartbeat that, that brings us together
and recognize also what is,
and I think that's the other piece, right?
The discernment, like you said, beautifully, right?
Like, some people are, are, are not gonna be in resonance.
Sometimes you're gonna hit dissonance, right?
Like, and how do we at,
but how do we like, Marching Proct,
tell you, you know, share with me,
how do we turn the dissonance into resonance?
How do we, like you said,
how do we not stay holding someone in the dark
but actually move into, as the ceremony does,
move into the light of the morning
and actually be back in the grace of our song.
And I think that, that's the piece, right?
Is, how can we not just see ourselves as islands
but see how we exist with the entire geography around us?
And be, you know, I'm mixing metaphors now,
but we're, you're beautiful form, right?
One of the things I love was the phase of my life
where I studied permaculture and, and, and,
and Bill Mollison and, and, and closed loop systems, right?
The corn's beans and squash and how,
when we're in right relationship, when we're in the places,
I mean, even just being here, man,
like my nervous system,
if I actually think about it, like I woke up,
I feel, I feel exponentially better,
one connecting with you, just,
I think connecting with true friends,
two connecting with two friends,
true friends in, in, in nature, right?
Like, that's one of the principles I talk about in the book too,
is, is where the places where you can find your center.
Because it's only from our center
that we really truly can hear that,
which is meant for us, right?
And I myself have lost my center.
I'm multiple occasions, you know?
But like, I know from me, exactly this,
connect with the real ones,
connect with the people who, like,
you feel seen, heard, love, depreciated,
like people, like you,
also you're so, which I want to just acknowledge you,
you're such a, yeah, you're a big fucking dude,
but you're also such a, your heart is so huge,
you know, you, you're, you're super smart, but you,
but what I love about you,
if someone asked me one word to describe
Calcansbury, I'd say heart,
because you've got to such a big heart for the world, you know?
My father had that, and it's why I had such a deep,
deep, deep, deep, have such a deep, deep love for him, right?
It's like people would just light up around him,
like he was just, like, kids, animals,
like they just, he had resonance.
He was carrying that signal,
and he showed up for me when I was out of tune, you know?
When I was in, when I was in dissonance,
and he reminded me of the music,
and that's the thing that a true people do.
That, I call him the true people, you know?
It's like, and the true, I don't love the word,
the healer, shaman, it's now been so ubiquitous,
but I call him true people.
The true people remind us of the rhythm, right?
Of our mother's heart.
The remind us of who we are,
and where we can meet, where we can find the others, you know?
Where does that song live, powerfully?
And so, yeah, my hope is that the words shared
will remind people of where their rhythm lives,
and who are the people around them that carry that song?
Yeah, beautiful brother.
It's been so great, gosh, that's so great.
Well, likewise, man.
Well, we'll link them the show notes to websites,
all that fun stuff, and what are you doing now?
You moved here, what's the deal here?
Yeah, moved here, keeping a real talk, dude.
I just booked a ticket to Mexico just because, like,
I shared with you, and this is a powerful, like,
pragmatic thing, and not having anything to do.
I love Austin, but this last month has kicked my butt,
because I, until now, I may have the antidote in terms of,
but the cedar, I've never been allergic to anything,
and I was, I was, dude, I was feverish.
I was, I could not talk about HRV.
My HRV, and I was in Bali last month, was 60-something.
My HRV's been under 20.
Yeah, let's break this down,
because, like, a closing gift for everybody
that comes here, because I don't mind, like,
there's a lot of people that have come to Austin,
where I'm just like, yeah, the allergy's killing,
you should really leave and head back home,
but I, people like you that I love in a while here.
For the first people that I love and want to stay,
Dr. Will Tegel actually turned me on to this,
and it makes perfect sense if you've worked with plants
and with respect and reverence in different ways.
You're just like, oh, of course.
But I needed to hear it from them.
Basically, you have male plants and female plants,
female junipers.
You can take a berry if it's easy enough
to just pull out without effort.
If it's stuck on there, don't yank it off.
If it's ready to pop off in your hand,
that's a berry you can suck on.
Don't need to swallow it, put it in there,
talk to the plant, introduce yourself to the plant,
and see, you know, you want to stay here for a while.
You'd like to do good things here in this place,
and you may have permission to be here, as for permission.
With the male plant, which has a shit ton of pollen,
don't pull off the tree, green stuff.
Brown pieces will fall to the ground.
Plenty of times a year.
You pick up something brown off the ground.
You light it like you would sage,
and you just run that through your orric field.
You run it around your body, under your palms,
your armpit, basically like you'd sage yourself,
and then holding it, you know, down here at the Don Tien,
praying and speaking to that master plan as well,
saying, my name is Kyle Kingsbury,
my name is Michael Trainor.
I'm here now living this wonderful place.
You are the master teacher here.
Will you allow me to be able to work with you?
Will you allow me to be able to not have these allergies?
So I can remain here and do good work
that I need to have that I'm here for.
Whatever that prayer looks like,
just that communication line and the opening of intention
and the respect that you have for that plant.
Once that is received, it is like,
we don't have cedar allergies at all.
We don't, we don't.
My son got it real bad.
Both of us, born and raised in California,
my wife even took her a little longer.
It took her like a whole year of working with it,
but eventually there's no cedar problems for any of us.
My daughter was born here, but no cedar problems.
So, you know, it's a cool thing to think about.
And you'd be like, oh yeah, you could have cedar tea.
You could, I mean, it doesn't kick your ass
when we're in ceremony burning cedar in the lodge,
but.
Definitely not.
It's actually one of the most healing things around.
Right, but at the same time, you know,
this time of year is a different, it's a different thing.
And for outsiders, like, it will fuck you up, dude.
It's a whole, I mean, I know people
that were born and raised here
or lived here their whole lives that always leave
for the winter.
Excuse me, just because of that.
Instead of working with the plant,
but I'd rather look at the plant and have that done.
I just didn't have access.
I'm so grateful you shared it, right?
Because that makes total sense to me, right?
Like I even saw just on another level,
not necessarily a biological level,
but just being an Indonesia one of the things I loved
about being in Bali, you know,
without making a huge story,
but the authentic embodied spirituality
of the Bali's people, right?
They're making offerings every morning, you know?
Like they're, you know, they're, they're,
they're using the flowers with the water.
They're invoking the elements.
And in my own belief, yeah, exactly that, right?
When you're in a place, and I do my own offerings,
but, you know, make offerings to the place,
to the, to the, to the, you know,
we are inhabiting the land.
We are ideally just guardians, you know,
shepherding on other, other, other people's land.
Caretakers.
Caretakers, exactly.
Other people, other beings, et cetera.
So, so to do so with reverence.
But unfortunately, as we, as we shared earlier,
I mean, I would have loved to have grown up
in an herbalist oriented culture.
There's a, there's a school I actually just got
tuned into called the School of the Sacred Wild,
which I'm going to go check out.
But, but yeah, I, I wish there's so much wisdom.
I wish I had known, like what you just shared
is such, so profound.
I'm sure there's natural antidotes to any disease.
100%.
You know?
100%.
There is no question.
There's no question.
Like you, you were with an Amazonian,
and all that you walked through, you know,
they don't see just, you know, it's like they're seeing,
you know, think about like even just like,
how do the chakunas, how do they,
the level of depth of wisdom to know which plant
alchemizes with which plant to just a,
which result, how we're in right relationship in reverence.
That is, that is the goal we should all have.
Yeah, well, and that's, it's the possibility, right?
I think for, for you to have your experience
entry in Lanka must have just mined fucked your brain
in a way where you're like, holy shit, this is possible,
right?
And because you saw what was possible,
it changed what you could expect from the world, right?
It changed what you, you could experience in the world.
And I think for a lot of people that are so like,
they're certainly not listening to this podcast.
But a lot of people would say, ah, that's bullshit,
and you know, smudge yourself with this fricking plants.
I gotta do anything, right?
And it's like, but to have experienced it already, right?
On the other side of that, then you understand
to have had to talk with plants on plant medicine.
That is another way, like, I recognize your word conscious.
I can't talk to these vines right now,
and here words coming back to me,
but I can still talk to these vines right now,
and know that they're listening to every word
that I'm saying, right?
And I know they do have something to tell me,
and I can still tune in to them to feel into that.
Anyhow, the world is, you know, possibility has changed.
I think that's one of the best pieces
that I've gotten from my medicine journeys
is just seeing what's possible having that so expanded.
And, you know, really recognizing, you know,
when they say, ah, oh, you know,
Mataku Yasun, all my relations, it is all my relations,
everything I'm related to, it's not all my relatives
that have a Kingsbury or Whitrock
or whatever the last name of my family's carried,
it's like, all everything I'm related to,
the ground I'm on, the air that I breathe,
every tree and plant that I bring in this house,
all of it, all relatives.
You know, like, what does that relationship look like?
And so, I love the fact that you're diving
into this stuff in resonance, brother.
It's gonna be fucking awesome.
I can't wait to read it.
Thank you, my man.
It's such an honor to be here.
And yeah, I think just to close it out,
what you just said on all my relations,
it's like, if we actually,
like we've actually won the lottery, you know,
like I think what I get a lot of times,
what I'm gifted with when I'm really listening is that,
you know, I don't like the word,
personally awakening,
but I like the idea of remembering, right?
Like what the indigenous,
which I have such deep reverence for,
hold in that all my relations, right?
Is they remember that jewel net,
that interdependence, that interconnection
that we have with each other,
but also with all that is.
And I think a lot of the ills that we face
are because we've forgotten.
But my hope with the book is that it's an offering
to help us remember.
Beautiful, brother.
Thank you so much, Michael.
Thank you, brother.
Oh, yeah.
