Cultivating Intuition: Ways to Navigate Life, Business, & Healing

Podcast Highlights

• Dr. Albright offers a guided meditation on the body, energy and breath
• Defining intuition—our “natural state”
• How intuition applies to a coaching practice
• Dr. Albright’s 4 key elements to increasing the skill of intuition
• How intuition can be woven into psychedelic journeys and integration
• How intuition plays into peak performance
• Dr. Albright’s practice using plant medicine to cultivate intuition. Lastly, her vision of the future of coaching and intuition

Show Links

1. Dr. Albright’s Website
2. Holon Experience by Dr. Albright & Dr. Drew Pierson
3. Ben Greenfield (Episode 55)

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Podcast Transcript

0:00:00.1 Paul Austin: Hey listeners. Welcome back to the Third Wave Podcast. Today's guest is Dr. Amy Albright, Executive Coach, Strategic Advisor, and Founder of Holon Evolution.

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0:00:12.1 Amy Albright: Knowing that there is this vast resource of all, and knowing that we're designed to navigate that to have the information come to us, it's an incredible resource to leave on the table just outright and never pay attention to it, and then the question becomes, how deeply do we want to invest into it; and, maybe, what's limiting us in our capacity to enrich and really open our intuition for all of life and in our coaching practice?

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0:00:46.1 PA: Welcome to The Psychedelic Podcast by Third Wave, audio mycelium connecting you to the luminaries and thought-leaders of the psychedelic renaissance. We bring you illuminating conversations with scientists, therapists, entrepreneurs, coaches, doctors, and shamanic practitioners, exploring how we can best use psychedelic medicine to accelerate personal healing, peak performance, and collective transformation.

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0:01:21.3 PA: Hey listeners, I am so excited to have Dr. Amy Albright on the podcast today. Her talk is the one that she gave at Third Wave's Virtual Summit, which took place in May 2022. It's phenomenal talk, it goes about 45 minutes in length, including some Q&A, and Dr. Amy Albright goes deep into the role of intuition in coaching. She really unfurls what is intuition, how do we actually gain access to our intuition and then how does that show up within a coaching container. Dr. Amy Albright is also a faculty in Third Wave's coaching certification program, and so you're really gonna get a focused, lasered-in look at the potential of intuition, of magic, of creation within any sort of coaching container. I brought her in as my own executive coach, about two and a half years ago for Third Wave, and she has also been a key strategic advisor and now she's also a faculty for our training program. So, this is a talk, a conversation, a podcast that I think is gonna bring a lot of magic into your life. So who is Dr. Amy Albright? She is a new sort of oracle. She stands rooted in logic-based, science-driven work and can also see into the worlds beyond.

0:02:47.1 PA: With offerings ranging from neurofeedback, intensive retreats to advanced coaching of visionaries and changemakers to an upcoming launch of her mystery school, Dr. Amy Albright has worked for two decades with high caliber individuals to change lives and scale businesses in powerful and integrated ways. At the core of all of her offerings is her practical and science-based approach to intuition, which she both lives by and teaches.

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All right, that's it for now. Let's dive into this talk from Third Wave's Virtual Summit that was given by Dr. Amy Albright. I hope you enjoy this talk as much as I did when I first had the chance to listen to it.

I'll let you take it away.

0:05:17.3 AA: Yeah, sure. Well, I know that it has been an amazing Virtual Summit with so much information, so many beautiful, different influences from these different speakers, all the beautiful questions and the richness of the community in their contributions as well. So, I would actually, before we begin talking about intuition fully, invite us into an energetic experience, one that opens intuition and naturally opens the state of... The experience of oneness, not just the concept and the construct of oneness. But before I do that, I do wanna key up and just talk about what we're going to talk about after so that you know that you do wanna stay tuned and so that it can also be included into this breath that we're about to do, into this experience, we're about to have together. So, like Paul said, I will be teaching on intuition, I feel like that has been my predominant skill set, even though I have skills developed in business and in natural medicine and a host of other modalities as well. I feel like intuition is the through line that helps me to guide not only my life, but my business, my practice, and has been the key to not only my success and my successes, but also my feeling of success, basically my feeling of joy, my feeling of being connected and having meaning.

0:06:46.2 AA: So I'm happy to bring to you today some more insight basically on how to cultivate intuition and how that can play into a coaching practice. So, the biggest training will be intuition and what it is and how it shows up. Why intuition is natural? Because a lot of us maybe have some conscious or subconscious blocks around it, how it already plays a role in our coaching and in our practice in general and in life, and then having some really... Basically, I have three key ways that I offer to anyone, regardless of who I might be speaking to, to really develop and cultivate the skill of intuition, because they are literally skills to be developed. And then I do have a couple of my... My favorite ways that I have worked with the medicine in my own journeys to be able to cultivate an open intuition. So I'll be sharing all of that with you, but first, I would love to invite us into an experience. So, this is, I call it a distinction different than meditation because we're actually working with the energy anatomy. And we're going to be working with the breath to link into the energy anatomy to basically open up and allow for, like I said, the experience of oneness.

0:08:00.3 AA: So, not just the mental construct, but how do we actually experience that in our minds, in a spacious way without the thinking about it. But the awareness feels like it settles on to an experience of oneness, how do we experience that in our physical body and how do we experience that in our energetic body? So, this breath is very powerful and I'll be guiding you through a few steps. So wherever you are right now, if you're driving, obviously don't close your eyes, but if you're somewhere safe and this feels like a thing that you would like to do, I invite you to participate very fully. This breath by itself has the capacity to change people's lives quite dramatically. So, I'll invite you to please close eyes. Just notice that you have a body and that it's breathing and don't do anything different, please. Leave the breath just as it is, and just notice. Noticing how all your body feels, noticing how the breath flows, if it's feeling a little choppy, just noticing. Good. Now, for anybody that knows me, you know I like to play. The world of creativity and play are so key for developing intuition and opening up the extraordinary senses and the aliveness.

0:09:19.2 AA: So, we're about to play, just so you know. Now, I would love for you to feel and sense your skin as it surrounds and envelops your entire physical form, largest organ of the body. Good, and you're just tuning into the skin, including on the scalp, on the hands, the feet, the back side of the body. Good. And now in the spirit of play and imagination and intuition, I'm going to invite you that you could sense the billions of pores of skin that you have, all at the same time. Like I said, you better be in the mood for play 'cause you can't do it with your mind. Yeah, good. So, we're just going to feel and imagine that we can sense all of those pores and that now we just ever so gently and sweetly glide the breath through those pores of skin, in the entire... Well, covering the entire body all at the same time. Good, gentle sweet breath. We're not efforting, just enjoying breath. Good. The exhale is just going to do whatever it does. Right now we're just focused on the in-breath and its sweetness and experiencing or imagining the tactile sensation of air moving through the skin over the entire body, through those pores.

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0:11:20.4 AA: Good. You have a body and it's alive and it is vibrant and it is interconnected to everything, and you might be noticing a shift in how your physiology feels, maybe tensions, dropping away, maybe the pace of the mind slowing down, just enjoy a couple of more breaths and then we'll move to the next step. Inhaling through all of the pores of the skin concurrently including the scalp, hands and feet. Good. Now, I'd like for you to imagine and feel into the sacrum bone, which is the large triangle bone at the base of the spine. Beneath the sacrum is the tailbone. And the sacrum and the tailbone have a lot to do with safety and security. They are very much linked to our primal nature, and if you think about it, we do have a tailbone, much like many other mammals, and when we move through life, sometimes our tail with our tail bone get a little tucked in, we begin to behave like a dog with a tail tucked between their legs, maybe from particular traumas, maybe from belief structures, maybe from just the rigors of modern life. I invite you right now just to bring a sensation, a color, an image, something to the tailbone area, maybe it's just the awareness.

0:12:55.9 AA: And allow for that tailbone, even if it's just in your mind's eye or pretending to shift back a little bit to be like a happy dog with a tail out, just a smidge. No need to move anything on a physical level, if that doesn't feel correct, it's more the intention. Good. And the other thing that the tailbone does is it serves as an energetic antenna, and it connects us to earth energy very powerfully, so by re-calibrating and just enlivening this area, we're actually really tuning to the wisdom of earth. And here with eyes closed, I'll explain to you a bit about what the breath part is doing if we bring our awareness back to the breathing through the skin. What I've been shown is that by breathing through the skin, what we're doing is we're actually opening and enlivening the energy body that exists about a foot away from the physical body, and what I've learned over the years is that when this layer of our auric or energy, energy body field, gets shut down, that we go into pretending. We pretend that we are disconnected. We pretend that we are small. We pretend that we are alone. We fall into all of the illusions that basically lent to the suffering and also lent to the relative incapacity to create, to be joyful and to really live out our full purpose and mission.

0:14:38.4 AA: So as we recalibrate our energy fields by shifting the tailbone ever so slightly, allowing for that happy dog kind of feeling, tuning to the earth and then also as we allow for our skin to be breathed through, much like an infant, if you watch an infant breathe. So just feeling and experiencing that right now and allowing yourself to, as you breathe through the pores of the skin, feel into that energy body around you, whatever that means to you, it might be a sensation, might be a coolness, maybe you already were experiencing this. Good. All right, fantastic. So, let's have another breath or two, and in a moment, we will be transitioning and then I will fill everybody in some more on intuition. Good. Thank you for having that shared experience with me and I hope you enjoyed it. All right, so I love to approach the world from a very non-linear, non-logical place, as much as I love to approach it from a linear and logical place. So, this is part of how I have a foot in two worlds, I know how to help people scale businesses go through major business change, I can do the practical world things of being a doctor and herbalist and being able to also weave all of this other information that's basically just more data.

0:16:14.4 AA: Intuitive information is just... It is more information, and then it gives us all better choices to move from. So, what intuition really is, is it's a felt sense knowing, and we have it in our body, it comes to us, not from any obvious deliberation of the mind, but through some more felt experience, some more subtle experience. So, it can come in a hunch, it could be the thing that puts all the things together, it can be as simple as an image, which you may perceive as a memory in a certain moment, it could be a whisper, it could be a knowing, a felt experience in the body. There's basically an endless numbers, an endless numbers of ways, specific types of ways that information can come in, and all of them are valid, and all of them are beautiful, including those of the mind, but we're going to be focusing on the intuition that reaches, and in its capacity far further than the mind. The way that I like to think about the framing of this is that the mind can know what the mind knows and it works with information that is typically more in the 3D world, it's the felt objects, it's the known things in the intellect, and it works with memory and recall, and it definitely has the capacity to put together bigger gestalt items and be able to solve problems and our minds are beautiful instruments.

0:17:53.9 AA: When I feel into what exists inside of the totality of the all, what I realize is that we have this vast resource and that we can't possibly know what all there is to know, and that by basically utilizing the mind, definitely, but also making it a dedicated practice to really, in a daily practice way, decide to cultivate that intuition and that capacity to pull in resources from the all... I don't think of intuition as dropping into the heart and living from the heart, I think that it includes the heart, but I think that it actually includes all of it, the entire physical energy body, all dimensions of self and all dimensions of creation, concurrently.

0:18:45.1 AA: And that also includes the mind. But thinking of the mind as maybe one of the colors of the rainbow, the spectrum that's coming through rather than the predominant force. The trick with that is that we have led our lives, most of us have been trained societally or whatever else, away from the intuitive capacities. And the problem with that is that we've moved away from ourselves. Essentially the intuition is our natural state. It's something that was there in the hunter and gatherer days, if you think about it. How did they know where the game were? How did they know if this berry was poisonous or not? Now, maybe they just tried the poisonous berry and found out the hard way, I'm not saying that that didn't happen, but how did they actually learn all of the different ways that those herbal medicines were to be applied and developed these incredible bodies of understanding? I do believe that it came from intellect, but I also believe that it came directly via downloads or agnostic knowing.

0:19:44.0 AA: And how did... How did they know for instance, back in days when we lived closer to the land where there was a snake ahead of them in the bush, maybe they felt it before they saw it or heard it. So intuition is a part of our epigenetic wiring, and I believe that unfortunately, due to major things like colonization and basically the stripping away of a lot of the indigenous knowings throughout the entire world, that we have moved away from our lens of seeing the world as a life interconnected and being intuitive beings inside of that state. So intuition, as we cultivate it is actually a way to honor our ancestors, even if a lot of the heritage, the traditions, the languages have been lost. It's an amazing way to reconnect to, I would say, not just to nature or to each other in this time, but really through all time, because the information is that unlimited. Nonetheless, here we are, and we've been taught to think with our brains moving information in front to back, we are taught to push on the steering wheel of life to try to get it to drive faster, to accomplish more, and we basically are on information overload.

0:21:06.1 AA: One of the things that I think is one of the greatest inhibitors is not just that we are taught to maybe fear culturally, at least intuition or to judge others who are intuitive, but that we are taught to over-achieve and to take in far too much information. And in that input of information, let's say from the 3D world, we're actually drowning out the information from the unseen world. So in our daily lives, we lose track of our own inner voice because we're constantly bombarded with TV, podcasts, conversations at work, and just the whole multitude of everything that are coming in as inputs. So there's a lot of good reasoning why we have basically this atrophied limb, I sometimes liken it to waking up one's intuition at the depths of it can feel for some people, like the climb back from recovering a limb once it's been broken and casted, and then the cast is removed. You can imagine an arm or a leg that you've seen in the past, and it is... It looks beyond repair. The bone is mended, but it is wasted away. And it actually takes very little time to grow all of that back, and eventually it doesn't ever seem to have been missing. And I would like to invite us into the framing that that is essentially what's happened to our intuitive capacities, and that that intuitive capacity is truly and genuinely designed to be ours, and it can be revitalized very quickly.

0:22:41.6 AA: So let's talk about intuition inside of coaching now. So even if we've gone to the most logical question and answer driven structured coaching trainings as a part of our lineage, if that's what we have studied, if that's what we're comfortable with and familiar with. Ultimately, it doesn't really matter that that's maybe the heritage, because the way that we apply these things is actually via intuition. So if you're in the middle of a dialogue with a client, how do you know when to pause and have another statement or another sentence or another question happen in the middle of that particular dialogue, even though the client's wanting to continue forward and talk about the next thing. How do you know... Maybe you have a feeling in your gut that something needs to be said about that topic that was talked 10 minutes ago, and that somehow that topic goes with this topic and you're not sure exactly how yet. But as you have that next breath, something occurs to you and then you speak out into the space and then the conversation shifts, the client has an insight. So I believe that we're all doing intuitive things all of the time, and it's just kind of the need basically to name that and so that we can become better, that we can practice the intuitive skills that maybe we weren't taught as a part of our coaching programs that we've gone through.

0:24:04.4 AA: I certainly don't think that we were taught intuition inside of any formal education, if you've gone to mainstream schools. I think that a lot of mainstream education trains it out and... So how do we already do it? We already are, we know when to pause, we know when to look deeper, and we know when to go back. We also may hear the resonance of their voice or our own voice as we're listening to what they have to say. And if they are basically trying to convince themselves of something that isn't really real, you can hear the resonance of their voice or the constriction of their vocal cords. Basically what we're using with intuition inside of our coaching practice is we're enlightening our emotional intelligence is one layer of what's going on. And the more emotionally intelligent that we are, typically the more fulfilled, we are as humans and also probably the more successful that we are as coaches. So it really the intuition is like an enhancement of that emotional intelligence inside of a coaching practice. And then maybe we wanna just talk for a moment, we're seeing also intuition happening in our lives just regularly and routinely. Maybe we get an insight about what's really going on with one of our kids, or we get a download about one of our friends while we're in the shower, or we have some other little things happen. Most likely, most of us are omitting or under-playing or not listening to the majority of signals.

0:25:35.4 AA: Now, why would I say that? I believe in everybody here this... But what I know, this is something that I have experienced is that probably for every 50 insights that I get, I might be able to consciously recognize one, and that's why later on in time, someone will say, "Oh, I actually knew that that was gonna happen," but they didn't consciously acknowledge it at that moment. Or I knew that that was that person's true colors, and I just didn't... I didn't trust my gut in that moment. So a lot of the times we see these intuitions either with our clients or in just in our general lives after the fact.

0:26:13.5 AA: So knowing that there is this vast resource of all, and knowing that we're designed to navigate that, to have the information come to us, it's an incredible resource to leave on the table just outright and never pay attention to it. And then the question becomes, how deeply do we want to invest into it, and maybe what's limiting us in our capacity to enrich and really open our intuition for all of life and in our coaching practice. So I've developed an understanding of what it takes to make this happen. So the key elements to increasing the skill of intuition that are helpful for anyone, the first one really has to be desire. Desire is what ignites the solar plexus, it is what puts passion into the way that we frame the world. And the desire for these skills to open and to be able to interpret them is the fundamental thing, because without that fundamental desire, we really don't have... We don't really have enough fuel and enough raw working material and enough space inside of all of the rest of the inputs of our life to be able to find the intuition and know what to do with it.

0:27:33.1 AA: The next one would be trust. So trust is what anchors us into safety. Can we trust that we are equipped, that this whole epigenetic ancestors saying actually applies to us and that we can develop the skill. Or another element of trust is, do we trust that we can hear the right things or know the right things, or feel the right things and be able to apply them responsibly? I wanna be really clear that the application of intuition inside of a coaching practice, please don't be of the place of, "Well, my intuition is telling me, and so therefore it's what's real." That is not a responsible way to work with any of this, and so... Yeah, that is not... That's not what we're advocating here.

0:28:25.0 AA: The third one is to be on a constant pursuit. So if you are looking for and noticing intuition as it comes through either in your practice or in life, you are more likely to continue to find it because that which we are seeking for. If you're inside of a room and you're looking for your phone, then you're more likely to find your phone. If you're just wandering around the room and you're not looking for the phone, you may not see the phone there, you may not see that object there. And that it's much the same way with intuition. It's bringing our attention to it again and again.

0:29:05.1 AA: And then the... And then another really important part is to continue, the fourth part is to continue to reinforce to yourself where you find things. If there is a serendipity or if there is an insight that is on point, be excited about it. And maybe even reflect on, How did you create that? Were you in the right mood was it... Is it a certain setting thing? Did you have the right head space? Were you calm enough that day had you had the right amount of sleep? And of course, there is a ton that can be said about all of this. Essentially peak performance and developing intuition are the same thing. Because if we have a peak physical performance, anything that we can do to get ourselves into that state with diet, exercise, eliminating toxins et cetera, we're basically upping that capacity for intuition. Okay, so we have desire, we have trust, we have looking for it, and then we have reinforcing it.

0:30:09.3 AA: So those four are good for everyone. And including bringing that into the conversation with your clients, if you desire to help them to improve their capacities and intuition. I think that the last topic really is, so how do we work with the medicine. For those that are working with medicines right now, I'm sure that you have had incredibly mystical or lovely healing or some sort of amazing shift in order for you to want to be a part of all of this. And I know that you probably are also, if you're on this call wanting to help others in some sort of a leadership capacity as a coach or a guide, or whatever that is. So how do we really bring the... It's two intimate worlds together, and they actually never were separate, but I'm just going to speak about them that way for a moment. One is, is the space of a psychedelic experience, and the other is the space of someone's intuition or their very innate and embodied experience of their own spirituality. So how do these things actually intersect or how are they actually woven basically as one?

0:31:27.6 AA: So to take that giant topic and to put it into something simple, because we do have time constriction. What I would like to offer is that when someone... If you are desiring to open your intuition using the medicine to use, the two basic things that I love to use, one is offer an intention or a prayer. So I always get very clear on what is my intention. This is a very, very intentional practice for me, this is sacrament. How do I proceed with full intentionality? And as a part of that, I know that there are things that I don't know and I am consciously and intentionally reaching out to the worlds beyond, or some higher part of myself or the powers that be, or the essence of the medicine or... All of those things at the same time. And what I'm saying is, here I am with this level of awareness, teach me, heal me guide me, show me the way. I desire for my intuition to be opened, I want from my capacities as a woman, as a healer, as an intuit, as a powerful positive force of change on this planet, I want to grow in all of those ways. And I basically surrender anything that is blocking and receive any and all messages that will help me in these any capacities, including my intuitive capacities.

0:32:50.7 AA: And I offer that as a prayer or as an intention. And what I feel like that allows is for a greater permeability for this information to flow through. Okay, now I might then have my experience in which I have an insight about, let's say I don't know something to do with my sister or I have something... This feeling in my throat that then opens into an insight around it, I have to continue to express myself fully. Okay, awesome. Those are the experiences during the journey, and then what do I do with that after? So making sure to draw the through line from the intention, which was the prayer and the offering about opening to intuition and to the powers that be. And now I'm going to go back through and look at those same topics and say, Okay, how is this topic with my sister or this topic with my throat in fully expressing myself, how are those things related to this topic of intuition. And if I do as the medicine has instructed or as I have seen during this time, what will that do for my intuition? And I say yes to it. And I don't have to understand it at all consciously, but basically framing and contextualizing all of that information and the beauty and the alchemy that takes place inside of, I say yes to my intuition, and then thank you for helping me with my intuition. And continuing that cycle as often as I feel called to the medicine, that's been just really massive.

0:34:23.6 AA: The medicine is incredible at basically not only making these intuitive insights little whispers, but deep and profound multi-sensory and maybe even psychedelic experiences in that regard, like kinda the classic psychedelic experiences. So that the opening that's there is actually just a moment in time. The journey space, the way that I utilize it is that amplification, and then what I'm doing in the in-between spaces of the journeys is basically re-dialing into all of that access because we have biologically, all of that access available to us. I'm not familiar with every single entheogen at molecular and neuro-chemical level, but I am pretty sure that with most of them, we can generate either an identical or a similar experience endogenously inside of our own body without substance. So why not also utilize that and go ahead and tune into what that experience is and be able to live inside of that experience between the journey space as a practice of increasing intuitive capacities. And also increasing joy, connection and all the other amazing things. Okay, I am ready.

0:35:46.9 PA: You're ready?

0:35:46.9 AA: I am ready. Let's do Q&A.

0:35:55.4 PA: And the first question is from Aqua Marina is that the real name? Aqua Marina Marina. It's double Marina. I think the question is basically around, where is training for this sort of thing, for enhancing intuition? If someone's interested in deepening this practice, where can one learn that? How can you learn that? The process.

0:36:21.9 AA: Well, one way is that I'm a faculty member for the Third Wave coaching training program. So I've had amazing feedback with even the amount that I've been able to just weave into this cohort's experience of the training. That they've really had an opening, so that's awesome. And I'll also be helping in an even deeper way in the future, so that is one possibility, and beyond that, I honestly... I don't know that I can recommend any other programs, unfortunately, but what I can say is that I will be launching more of what I call my mystery school teachings in the fall, and that the format for that will be kind of a combination of retreat and online setting. And then immediately right now, I also offer a retreat where it's mystery school teachings combined with some pretty hardcore neurosciences, it's an applied neurosciences retreat. And I do that with my colleague, Dr. Drew Pierson, and it's extremely scientific and also extremely intuitive, all woven together. So you can check out more on that at dramyalbright.com or at holonexperience.com.

0:37:39.2 PA: Which is the link that we have above. And I went through that immersive in October of last year, and it uses something called neurofeedback to help tie up different parts of the brain and you create more cross communication and all those yummy nerdy things.

0:37:58.6 AA: Yeah. In a longer talk, I would have geeked out on it, but we didn't have time to do that.

0:38:02.6 PA: Totally. Yeah, we don't have time to do that. And Amy, so, for our next coaching program, which we had about 100 people who were in Jared's Q&A today, Amy will be a core faculty in that. So she'll be leading a pod of 12 students through the entire coaching program. And then will also be on our retreat. And that's what she was referring to earlier. So the next question is from Chloe, who we met in LA a couple of months ago. Now, Chloe it's good to see you.

0:38:28.7 AA: Nice.

0:38:29.1 PA: Amy, would you be able to speak more to the intuition being the same as peak performance?

0:38:35.6 AA: Oh, sure. Well, what I mean is that when we're... It's not necessarily that it is the same, but that it is... That when we are cultivating peak performance, we are also potentially then cultivating intuition. So, removing biological barriers, removing junk food, processed food, inflammatory things from our diet, getting enough sleep, any kind of biohacking stuff. Like, if you guys are into ice baths or whatever it is that you love to do. Any and all of that are important. I'm a big advocate also of at least experimenting with going gluten-free and dairy-free. I know it's not that much fun in the beginning, but I've just seen so much lift for that for most people.

0:39:17.6 AA: And basically, when you get your body into... It's your body and your brain into a very, very peak performance state, that's when a lot of what I call kind of the fog over the windshield lifts. A lot of people deal with some low grade brain fog or a pretty intense brain fog on a regular basis. Or if gut health isn't correct, you can't really produce the neurotransmitters that you need in order to access these states. So those are just some basic examples of why we want to not just take care of our body as like this thing that we drag through life and just kinda get by, but actually strive for peak performance. Because the body, if we're not caring for it correctly will actually be an inhibitor for transcendent states and intuition in general.

0:40:08.8 PA: Thank you, and just to reflect back a few things that we've woven throughout the summit, we earlier talked about inflammation and the role of chronic inflammation or being in inflamed states. And that often creates that fuzziness or that noise, that both harms our intuition and then also often harms our performance. And so, my experience has been that the things that dampen intuition are the same things that are going to basically impair overall performance and that the two go hand in hand as we move into deeper hill.

0:40:41.4 AA: Definitely. Yeah. And also, I noticed somebody mentioned removing toxic people... Removing anything that's toxic. Like, if it's not the vibration or the wavelength that you wish to be moving toward, then I would recommend moving away from it in a clean way, so it could be zero content stuff that you might watch on TV or movies or whatever, or negative things even. Basically, the less noise that there is, the less toxic relationships that you have, the more space that there is for everything else. Yeah.

0:41:21.5 PA: Beautiful. So, we have a few minutes left, so we probably can do a few more questions. The next question that I have for you is, what have plant medicine or psychedelics specifically taught you about intuition? How did it further help develop or clarify or add another layer of complexity that you think has been insightful or helpful in your own practice?

0:41:42.8 AA: Yeah. I feel like a lot of people that I hear to start off with a story like this, "Well, I tried them in my 20s and it didn't go the same." [chuckle] So I really had to figure out what they were about, and I would say in the more recent years as I've been working with them, I really use it... Like, kind of like what I was saying, I'm constantly accessing intuition, and I... Because I do this with my work, I'm often accessing it for other people. So, what I found is that a lot of the times, I'll actually want to, let's say, draw a card from my Goddess deck or something like that for myself. I would never do that for a client, 'cause I feel like I can see so much clearly... More clearly outside of me. So I think that for me, I've really cultivated it, because I had already worked so much so without using any entheogens for a long time to cultivate intuition without it.

0:42:37.5 AA: Now that I'm using entheogens for my own practice, I'm using it mostly to cultivate intuition for myself, because I feel like that's the blind spot, and... Or that's where the blind spots really are. And I'll often write out a list of questions of what I know that I know how to answer, which I believe is everything. Like, even if it seems the unsolvable, I'll write out a list of questions and get really super clear on maybe three to five different things, areas of my life that I want massive insight and clarity on. And then I might leave those alone and not look back at them, and then the journey takes me to go and answer those things, or it could be that I actually open up my journal and look at those as prompts and just look at one, you know?

0:43:22.9 AA: I think anything taken in in that space has to be taken in in a very... In writing, it has to be very small. So it's like taking in one and then dropping deeply into a state of teach me, heal me, guide me, show me the way, and allowing for myself to receive real-time healing and insight and really dive deeply into that space. And then it can be followed with a question of how do I track this? How do I open to all of this more in my day-to-day so that the medicine and higher self can work together in that concert to know how step by step as all of these things go, to continue to unravel if something is feeling wound tight or if it's not quite right. Because it's not... Sometimes these bigger topics are not just a moment in time, but things to be solved over time.

0:44:19.7 PA: Beautiful. Well, we have one last question, and then we will wrap up for today. So I'll just end with a final question, I suppose. Like, what most excites you about the future of coaching, the future of intuition and coaching, and how psychedelics and neurofeedback would play into the development of that future?

0:44:44.8 AA: Yeah. So I've been working in peak performance, I mean, even before I graduated from school, I was working with professional athletes and other top performers. Then it turned into more executives, all of that. And I realized at some point in my journey that the reason that I love working with peak performers is because I have this deep desire to continue to grow and evolve and to push the limits of what's possible. I am not content. And I think that I'll probably speak for most of us on this call. We're not necessarily content with what's been handed to us, and we want something more, and we know that more is possible. And what I love is that, these entheogens truly are medicines, they're gentle even if they kick your butt in a certain moment, and they can help us to heal and deeply fall into a place of safety and trust and evolve very, very quickly.

0:45:43.4 AA: So that in combination with intuitive coaching where needle in a haystack clients are like... And they're just talking about whatever, and you're like, That right there, that's the thing we're gonna talk about. And you pull that out, and then boom, you can create a massive shift in being able to work with coaching. Because we're not getting paid for our time, even if that is how we're technically getting paid, we're getting paid for impact. And I'm looking to how do we create the biggest impact. Because we have a world that's desiring some healing and we have basically a new world order to create together. So, in order to get there, it's going to take all of the tools and resources. The psychedelic aspect was a later piece for me, because I didn't know if I wanted to... I mean, in full transparency, I didn't know if I wanted to get up and talk about it, right? It is like a whole another thing to talk about it. But then I decided that I couldn't...

0:46:38.7 PA: Until right now.

0:46:40.4 AA: I know. [chuckle] But then I kinda decided I couldn't. I mean, there's nothing... I need to at least share my experience, because if I don't, it's too much holding in my voice and it is not serving this global and deep transformation that I know that we are all co-creating right now. And then with the neuro feedback, that was the other piece that you asked, that's really... It's applied neurosciences, and I've been a neurosciences geek since I was a teenager. And what I love about that is much the same thing, it works in a very, extremely different way than the plant medicines, but the effect is much the same as far as transformation in ways that the individual can't even conceive of for themselves. And with neurofeedback, it's highly, highly specific. It is like, this little square inch of your brain right here is over active or this part is under active, or there's a traffic jam happening and the conversation between the coherence is out.

0:47:37.6 AA: And really being able to tune that up and calibrate that is an incredible gift, and it just helps to move everybody forward. So, intuitive coaching, my own use for myself with the psychedelics and then my use with clients for the neurofeedback has been incredible. Yeah, as a combination to moving forward.

0:48:03.1 PA: And there's lots of... What I've talked to the people who have attended over the weekend is this concept of psychedelics as a skill, and so how... Something like microdosing would be potentially a great adjunct to a non-psychedelic modality like, neurofeedback. And the way that I always described sort of the differences between the two was like, neuro was much more like you're fine-tuning an instrument, and that the brain is the instrument. With psychedelics, it's much more like the koi pond has become unsettled and you kinda gotta wait until the things settle back down once again to see which fish end up where, if you follow that far.

0:48:44.9 AA: I like it. Yeah.

0:48:47.1 PA: So there's a... It's a bit more... You know? And that's why when... Even Ben Greenfield talked a lot about. Well, how do we support the brain, 'cause it's quite a heavy load when we're working with psychedelics sometimes and it requires additional support. Okay, one more question, just 'cause I can't help it, 'cause this is the last question really of the summit today. And it's a great question, Daniel. Daniel's a medicine facilitator, he's also an executive coach, he's also from Brazil, and Daniel works with somatic practices of Tibetan Buddhists. And he's wondering if you could speak to the role of the body in your intuitive practice?

0:49:24.4 AA: Oh yeah, thank you. You see, that's the thing is that I wish that we had had so much more time because there's so much. I anchor all of this Daniel into the body. I am... Without the root of all of this intuition into our body, we become kind of like a kite that we let go of the string and we're just blowing around out there. I think that's a lot of... Kind of that goes to what Dave Burns was saying earlier, a lot of the dangers that can lie if we're not really grounded, and however we take that grounding. For me it's through the body. I receive a huge amount of information through the body, I help others to learn how to receive information. The body is basically calling out to be heard, that's what illness is. If we're not hearing it soon enough any kind of... I'll say a disconnect or pathology of the energy body or of the mind crystallizes into the physical form. But we also can just get tensions in the body, we can have a relaxation into the body and those tell us things.

0:50:24.6 AA: And if we learn how the energy body and the physical body are connected, we actually have a massive template of understanding all of this information. It's like the body is basically a human dash, we have a human dashboard that tells us exactly what's happening, but we haven't been trained in how to perceive and then make decisions based on that. So I'm excited that you do somatic work, because I know that you are... That means you're also on team body. And that's amazing, and I wanna encourage everybody to just really explore and pay attention to, because our bodies are holy temples and they are telling us things all of the time.

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0:51:03.4 PA: What a beautiful way to end this epic summit. Thank you, Amy, for dropping in and sharing your joy and beauty with everyone and intuitive knowledge. It's really been a pleasure to have you.

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