The Theradelic Approach: IFS, EMDR, & Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy

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Episode 232

Sunny Strasburg, LMFT

Paul F. Austin welcomes Sunny Strasburg, LMFT, to discuss utilizing IFS & psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy through the Theradelic Approach.

Sunny discusses her multidisciplinary background and how she came to develop her unique therapeutic approach. She incorporates various modalities such as Internal Family Systems (IFS), Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), and the Gottman Method in her work. Sunny emphasizes the importance of personal psychedelic experience for therapists and the need for ethical and well-trained practitioners in the field. She also shares her vision for the future and the challenges of scaling psychedelic therapy while maintaining integrity and respect for the mystery of the psychedelic experience.

Sunny Strasburg discusses the Theradelic Approach, which combines Internal Family Systems therapy and psychedelic-assisted therapy. She explains how working with internal parts can lead to self-compassion and coherence. Sunny also shares her experience facilitating Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy retreats with IFS founder Dick Schwartz, and how they help leaders in various industries lead with self-energy. The conversation then delves into the importance of ethics in artificial intelligence and the potential impact of psychedelics on the AI space. Sunny reflects on the lessons she has learned from plant medicine and emphasizes the importance of being in service and awe.

 

Sunny Strasburg, LMFT:

Sunny Strasburg, LMFT plays a multifaceted role in the fields of psychology and psychedelic therapy, encompassing education, consultation, authorship, and licensed psychotherapy.
Her notable literary achievement, "The Theradelic Approach: Psychedelic Therapy: Perspective, Preparation, and Practice," features a foreword by Dr. Richard Schwartz, the creator of the Internal Family Systems model. Through this work, Mrs. Strasburg distills insights drawn from her experiences as an educator, entrepreneur, and psychotherapist.
Sunny's professional journey encompasses proficiency in Internal Family Systems and archetypal psychology, alongside certification in Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). As a graduate of Pacifica Graduate Institute and the California Institute of Integral Studies, Mrs. Strasburg holds additional certifications in Psychedelic Assisted Therapy and Research, with specialized knowledge and training in Ketamine, MDMA, and Psilocybin Assisted Psychotherapies.

Sunny is the originator and lead educator of The Theradelic Approach, a model of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. Her collaboration with Dr. Richard Schwartz and other prominent figures has led to impactful trainings and immersive retreats.
Converging the domains of Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP), Internal Family Systems (IFS), and Jungian psychology, Mrs. Strasburg has formulated innovative principles and methodologies that elevate therapeutic practices and the conscientious use of psychedelics within clinical frameworks.

Sunny's expertise finds expression in prominent conferences like The Psychedelic Summit 2023, Psychedelic Science 2023, SXSW 2023, and the 2023 Expanded States of Consciousness Worldwide Summit. Moreover, her contributions extend to engagements with the 2021 EMDRIA Worldwide Virtual Conference, and her involvement spans diverse platforms, including The Theradelic Approach training, Three Cups Psychedelics, Journey Clinical, Inbodied Training, EMDRIA UK, and the Boston Trauma Conference.

Podcast Highlights

  • Introduction and background
  • Exploring IFS, EMDR, the Gottman Method, & the Theradelic Approach
  • Addressing gaps in psychedelic therapy training
  • The importance of personal psychedelic experience for therapists
  • Understanding trauma mapping
  • Dosage and frequency in ketamine-assisted therapy
  • Working with internal parts using IFS
  • ketamine-assisted psychotherapy retreats for leaders
  • Psychedelics, AI, and ethics
  • Lessons from plant medicine
  • Being in service and awe
  • Resources and trainings

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Podcast Transcript

0:00:00.0 Paul F. Austin: Hey listeners, welcome back to the Psychedelic Podcast by Third Wave, connecting you to the leaders and pioneers of the psychedelic renaissance. This is your host, Paul F. Austin, and today I am speaking with Sunny Strasburg, the CEO of The Theradelic Approach.

0:00:14.9 Sunny Strasburg: I was training clinicians in psychedelic therapy and really seeing the blind spots that weren't being talked about enough. Everybody is talking about set and setting, how to do trip sitting or facilitating, how to do integration. And I felt like those things are important, but there's so much more to it. And how do we train clinicians to be really, really adept at working with psychedelics and in particular trauma? Because trauma often emerges. So now I'm training people in The Theradelic Approach and really pulling all these threads together to make some kind of tapestry of healing, hopefully, and inspiration for people at a time that feels like we really need it.

[music]

0:00:56.2 Paul F. Austin: 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.

[music]

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0:02:36.5 Joseph Anew: Whether you are a health coach, a nutrition coach, a relationship coach, or an executive or leadership coach, as a results-driven professional in the coaching space, the quality of the tools in your toolkit matter. Psychedelic medicines are humanity's most potent tool for personal and professional growth and transformation, and can be used to significantly amplify the results of your work in almost any coaching domain or existing framework. Coaches that add psychedelic medicines to their businesses in the next 12 to 18 months will be amongst the first to unlock and really pave the way into the future of transformational coaching. Which is why our founder, Paul F. Austin, has worked tirelessly over the last several years to create the most comprehensive psychedelic coaching certification program in the world today.

0:03:29.3 Joseph Anew: This certification program covers it all, from the science of transformation and behavior change, to how to best prepare, advise, and integrate your clients on their psychedelic journey, to know how to consciously step into the right medicines, dosages, protocols, and experiences for your clients' goals, and to ensure your business is positioned optimally to navigate the present legal landscape. It's all included in the certification program. And best of all, certified coaches are included on Third Wave's professional directory upon graduation so that clients around the world who are seeking non-clinical, non-medical, professional help can find your business based on your geographical location. For more details and to enroll yourself now in the next certification program cohort beginning soon, please visit psychedeliccoaching.institute today. That's psychedeliccoaching.institute.

0:04:29.6 Paul F. Austin: Hey listeners, this is Paul F. Austin, Founder and CEO at Third Wave, and today I'm excited to bring you an insightful conversation on psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. My guest is Sunny Strasburg, who plays a multifaceted role in the fields of psychology and psychedelic therapy, encompassing education, consultation, authorship, and licensed psychotherapy. Her notable literary achievement, The Theradelic Approach: Psychedelic Therapy, Perspective, Preparation, and Practice, features a foreword by Dr. Richard Schwartz, the creator of the internal family systems model. Through this work, Mrs. Strasburg distills insights drawn from her experiences as an educator, entrepreneur, and psychotherapist. She is also the originator and lead educator of The Theradelic Approach, converging the domains of ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, internal family systems, and Jungian psychology. Mrs. Strasburg has formulated innovative principles and methodologies that elevate therapeutic practices and the conscientious use of psychedelics within clinical frameworks. In our conversation, we explore the makings of Sunny's unique approach or perspectives in the field of psychedelic therapy in general as someone who approaches this work through multiple modalities. We talk about the importance of personal psychedelic experience for therapists and the need for ethical and well-trained practitioners in the field.

0:05:50.5 Paul F. Austin: We then go into Sunny's vision for the future of this field and the challenges of scaling psychedelic therapy while maintaining integrity and respect for the mystery of psychedelics. Finally, Sunny reflects on the lessons she herself has learned from plant medicine and emphasizes the importance of being in service and in awe. This is a really great conversation. I think you're gonna learn about IFS, internal family systems, ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, even the importance of ethics in AI and the potential impact of psychedelics on that space. Before we dive in, a quick reminder to follow the Psychedelic Podcast wherever you listen or subscribe to Third Wave's channel on YouTube so you never miss an episode. And if you'd like to further support what we're doing, you can rate the show, leave it a review, and share it with someone in your life. These are simple and small actions, but they really do help to amplify psychedelic awareness and shift the cultural conversation around these powerful medicines. As always, you can dive deeper into this episode with show notes, links, and a full transcript, just follow the link in the description wherever you're listening or watching. All right. That's it for now. I hope you enjoy my conversation today with Sunny Strasburg. Sunny, I appreciate you joining us for the podcast.

0:07:01.5 Sunny Strasburg: Yeah, I'm happy to be here, Paul. It's nice to see you.

0:07:04.6 Paul F. Austin: So right before we went live, I expanded my attention a little bit and saw this beautiful piece of artwork in the background. And if anyone is watching this on video, they'll also be able to see that. And what I love about your approach is how, let's say, multi-disciplinary it is. You're an artist, you are a therapist, you are an entrepreneur, I would consider you to be even a medicine woman, however we define that or whatever that is. And so, you hold a lot of different pillars within yourself. And there's a lot of complexity there. And so I'd love to just hear a little bit more about how you came in to all these aspects of yourself. Something that you work a lot with is IFS and parts work. When did you discover that you had all these beautiful aspects of self, these gifts that you could bring to the world? Tell us a little bit about that process of coming into your full, I would say, being or becoming.

0:08:13.8 Sunny Strasburg: Wow, what a lovely question to be asked. Thank you. I feel very seen right now. [laughter] Wow, how do I answer that? I was an artist at a young age and originally went to art school. I actually worked in video games. That was one of my first jobs as an artist.

0:08:29.0 Paul F. Austin: Wow. Another...

0:08:29.5 Sunny Strasburg: Yeah. I was an animator. I was an animator for 3D animator, and character design. And I really felt like there was an emptiness there. I didn't feel like there was a lot of meaning. And I was into psychedelics pretty early on. I had early experiences in Latin America with various psychedelic medicines and felt really... I knew right away that they were healing, I knew they were powerful and they so inspired me creatively, definitely. But through the course of my life, I felt like making art was too solitary and I didn't feel like it gave me a lot of meaning and depth. And so I went back to school actually to become an art therapist at Pacifica, which is a school that focuses on archetypal psychology and Jungian psychology. It's an amazing campus that hosts the library of Joseph Campbell, the mythologist, which was incredibly inspiring for me. And I found that I really loved doing therapy much more than I expected. So I went into doing therapy. I've been blessed throughout my life with being trained by incredible mentors. There must be something in my astrology chart where I pull in these incredible mentors and teachers. I trained with John and Julie Gottman in the Gottman Method, and I was doing couples therapy, which was very gratifying.

0:09:49.9 Sunny Strasburg: But I kept coming to this place where the couples are just shut down in trauma and would be flooded in trauma and couldn't really relate to each other. So then that inspired me to get trained in trauma. I trained with Bessel van der Kolk. I trained and got certified in EMDR, which is an amazing method. And then, internal family systems. Trained in internal family systems. And all the while I'm doing these retreats where I go to Latin America, I lived in Costa Rica for a while, and doing plant medicine work and knowing that those medicines were incredibly potent, and never thought that those worlds would come together. So I had this very interesting... I've been in this portal lately, Paul, where I got trained in psychedelic therapy the minute I could at CIIS, and then I went on to train at COMPASS and Synthesis and MAPS with Annie and Michael Mithoefer. And then I also developed a company with David Starfire, the music composer, and created music and meditations for psychedelic journeys, and we were purchased by TRIPP, purchased our company PsyAssist. And what was so funny was I was back in the situation where I was, almost like a video... The whole video game thing that I did years earlier suddenly woo itself back in. It's funny how life is that way.

0:11:12.0 Sunny Strasburg: But now I'm focusing more on The Theradelic Approach. This last year I wrote The Theradelic Approach, because I was training clinicians in psychedelic therapy, and really seeing the blind spots that weren't being talked about enough. Everybody's talking about what's set and setting, how to do trip sitting or facilitating, how to do integration, and I felt like those things are important, but there's so much more to it, and how do we train clinicians to be really, really adept at working with psychedelics and in particular trauma? Because trauma often emerges, and so that's been a focus of mine recently, is helping people taking something that's very qualitative and subjective and trying to turn it into a teachable approach has been such an amazing creative endeavor. And so inspired by Dick Schwartz because he does this so beautifully with internal family systems. And had again, with mentors is this blessing of working with Dick directly. So now I'm training people in The Theradelic Approach and hosting retreats with Dick Schwartz and other people, hosting retreats in Latin America and really pulling all these threads together to make some kind of tapestry of healing, hopefully, and inspiration for people at a time that feels like we really need it. [chuckle] So there's your answer to that question.

0:12:35.9 Paul F. Austin: It's good opening.

[laughter]

0:12:36.4 Paul F. Austin: Yeah. That gives us some room to plan. So I...

[laughter]

0:12:40.6 Sunny Strasburg: There you go. Let's dive in.

[chuckle]

0:12:43.3 Paul F. Austin: John And Julie Gottman, Bessel van der Kolk, Annie and Michael Mithoefer, Dick Schwartz. This is like a celebrity A-list of...

[laughter]

0:12:54.1 Paul F. Austin: Therapists who have pioneered...

0:12:57.3 Sunny Strasburg: Absolutely. [chuckle]

0:13:00.6 Paul F. Austin: Various modalities and treatment. So I just wanna first acknowledge the potency of being able to learn from these people. I would also say for myself, finding and meeting great teachers is so important on the path of anyone who's a seeker. And to be well-versed in these various modalities, I think, is very interesting, And that's... Just from a very tactical perspective, I'd love to go there next because you mentioned the work that you did with John and Julie Gottman, you mentioned EMDR, you mentioned IFS. Can you tell us a little bit just about each of those... You also, I think, mentioned archetypal psychology. Just tell us a little bit about each of those techniques, maybe a minute or two about what those techniques are, and then how did those techniques inform The Theradelic Approach?

0:13:56.4 Sunny Strasburg: Sure. Yeah. The Gottman Method is all about relationships and how to communicate. And that, it's a beautiful methodology that gives you very practical tools. So what I've taken from that is non-violent communication and how powerful that is, so I weave that into my group experiences. I'll tell you what I've taken from it because there are huge... It's a huge conversation for each one of these.

0:14:25.4 Paul F. Austin: Yeah.

0:14:28.2 Sunny Strasburg: EMDR is bilateral, either tapping or eye movement is what everyone knows about EMDR, but there actually eight phases to EMDR where you take clients through a process of metabolizing un-metabolized trauma, and it's very effective and it's not really a talk therapy. And that has been very inspiring because when I originally got trained in it, I remember Bessel talking about how this is a different therapeutic technique, it's not like you're talking. And I think that has really helped me understand how psychedelics work because it's not a talk therapy, you're not... It's not a cognitive behavioral thing. And EMDR is really powerful, to interweave with psychedelics. I talk about this at length in The Theradelic Approach. There are certain phases of EMDR that are very effective weaving in to the psychedelic experience, the preparation, the trip, and then the integration.

0:15:28.3 Paul F. Austin: Okay.

0:15:29.1 Sunny Strasburg: And because people are more open during the psychedelic journey and their protective systems are softened, for people that have very acute trauma, it's really hard to get them in what's called the window of tolerance to be able to process trauma without being over-stimulated and without being hypo, having a hypo energy where they're just flat and dissociated. And particularly I'm talking about ketamine, 'cause ketamine is the legal psychedelic that therapists work with. Keeping them in that window where they can process through and do the phase for the eye movements or the tapping, in the integration phase of ketamine where the ketamine's worn off but they're still in that open space, is very, very effective for helping move the trauma processing along. My clients will say it's like having 10 sessions in an hour.

0:16:23.5 Paul F. Austin: Wow.

0:16:25.0 Sunny Strasburg: And then even more, what I'm using more and more these days is internal family systems, because it's so conducive to psychedelic processing. Internal family systems is based on this idea that we are made of many different parts, many different personalities. And they're in different categories. We have parts of us that are managers that manage our day-to-day life, we have parts of us that protect us, that get defended and those can become really, really extreme, these protectors can get really extreme, like substance abuse kind of stuff, or extreme rage or whatever. And then we have other parts that are exiles that are really young, vulnerable parts of us that have been hurt in the past, and the protectors tend to be in front of the exiles. And so when you're working with the system of parts, and there's a whole methodology of how you go through and work with IFS, but when you use that with ketamine, for example, or other psychedelics, the psychedelic does the work of softening the protectors.

0:17:23.7 Sunny Strasburg: And then the conversation is around getting permission from the protective system to go in. But then we can get in to the trauma areas and really do potent work using internal family systems with those exiled parts, helping them work through trauma. I really see that we're in this epidemic of mental illness worldwide, we're traumatized, we're anxious, we're depressed, we need something that can help, and these medicines are here to leverage the potency so that we can really do some really beautiful therapy work with them. And so that said, and what's so important about this conversation, Paul, is to add, with more power comes more responsibility, and it's really, really important that we're ethical and that we're using these with integrity, that we're well-trained and we know what we're doing. So as a therapist and talking about The Theradelic Approach, this is really the orientation, is that there are some things that are non-negotiable around working with psychedelics with these methodologies and knowing how to use them and what's best practice.

0:18:33.9 Paul F. Austin: Let's go into that a little bit because you've mentioned this already in that, The Theradelic Approach. And before we went live, you mentioned you're rolling out a training program, a certification program that I think is rooted in this Theradelic Approach. What were the gaps that you noticed and observed maybe in other training programs? And how is it that you've created The Theradelic Approach to address some of those gaps to ensure that you're doing the best work possible with the therapists that you're training?

0:19:06.9 Sunny Strasburg: Yeah. And it's interesting because we're all in this area and we're creating it as, it's like we're building the plane as we're flying the plane, right, in this whole industry.

0:19:16.0 Paul F. Austin: It's emergent, very emergent.

0:19:17.4 Sunny Strasburg: It's amazing, right? And so, it's... No shade on anyone, it's just that we're all learning this as we're working together. And it's great to have a foundation. All the trainings that I did, there was this foundation of, "Okay, this is what preparation is, this is how you set for people, and this is how you... And you're allowing them to integrate." And it was just always the same thing. And I would leave those... I was teaching these programs with people and I would leave feeling like, how does a therapist take that and really put that into practice, and giving therapists actual tools to say, "Okay, in this preparation phase, this is when you do trauma mapping and this is how you do trauma mapping. Before you do the medicine journey, you take time and you do phase three of EMDR floatback technique. Here's how you do that. Here's how you do internal family systems Parts Mapping, or a trauma timeline."

0:20:15.1 Sunny Strasburg: And so, there are actual tools that people can learn that are really pivotal in certain moments during the whole process. So then you're taking out the subjective, good facilitator or good trip-sitter or whatever, and you're really teaching people solid tools. So that's really the goal is, how do we create a teachable method that then is scalable? 'Cause we're in this huge need to get tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of therapists trained so that they can meet the demand of the mental illness challenges that we have, and the struggles that we have worldwide.

0:20:56.5 Paul F. Austin: And so what I'm hearing is, the core methodologies that are part of The Theradelic Approach are EMDR and IFS. And it almost... And this is just what I'm hearing, and please feel free to clarify if you wish, and that the unique aspect that you're bringing is the precision of when and how those are used as part of a psychedelic-assisted therapy session.

0:21:22.4 Sunny Strasburg: Correct. And I would add in...

0:21:24.1 Paul F. Austin: Sessions, we could say, right?

0:21:27.7 Sunny Strasburg: Yeah. And I would add in, archetypal psychology is the... It's like the mother [chuckle] of them all, I think. And it's interesting, I have a lot of discussions actually with Dick Schwartz about this, that... It's taking me back to when I first learned about archetypal psychology and dream analysis, I thought, "I'll never get to use this in therapy." But as soon as I started doing ketamine, hosting ketamine journeys, wow, it was like I was doing dream analysis all the time with my clients. So, archetypal psychology is definitely woven into that. And I have this unique method that I've developed where I look at the symbols that the parts using IFS language have presented to the journeyer, and how to work with that material to metabolize it and make sense of it as part of the hero or heroine's journey. So all of these bits and pieces, these eclectic approaches are pulled into The Theradelic Approach to say, "Here's this whole methodology that have these different inspirations, but this is how you do it, and here's when to do these different things." So it's really, you pointed out being a painter, and the art of things, and I really see myself as the art and science of psychedelics. I'm really trying to pull those things together to create something cohesive.

0:22:46.4 Paul F. Austin: Yeah, because with frameworks, right, we can better teach others, we can provide context, or training on objective approaches that we know will have repeatable success across a broad client population. IFS is a great example of this, EMDR, psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy is a great example of this. And inevitably, the efficacy of any therapy or coaching is also determined by the quality of the individual who is creating the container, and the presence and the depth, their capacity to listen. Which is why, I think you and I both agree on this, that it's so critical that those who are doing deep work with others in the psychedelic space first know and understand the territory themselves. That they have some familiarity with the psychedelic landscape internally, because it is quite unique compared to, let's say, CBT, Freudian talk therapy, psychoanalysis. It opens up a landscape that I don't think is as clean-cut necessarily as prior therapeutic approaches.

0:24:04.9 Sunny Strasburg: I love that you said that, and I couldn't agree more. Jung said once, we can only take our patients as far as we've gone ourselves, and that's very, very true. I personally wouldn't have anyone sit for me who hadn't had at least 10 journeys with the medicine that they're serving, because I want someone to hold space for me, who knows the territory. And I really imagine when I'm working with the medicine that that's one of my co-therapists. I'm a therapist, and the medicine is a way more powerful and better therapist than I am. And so thinking of that like a collaboration, and the way that you work really well with someone else when you are a collaborator is to deeply know that other energy, know how they work in different situations. So, yeah, I think that it's imperative that therapists have their own journeys.

0:25:00.7 Sunny Strasburg: Early on when I was being trained, I won't say the group that I was being trained with, but they were saying that therapists didn't need to have any experience with psychedelic medicines. And I completely disagree with that. There are so many times where I'll have a client that's struggling in their session, and I'm there for them, and I'm holding space for them, but I'm trusting that they're going through this process and they'll reach out if they need something to me. If you didn't know that, and you didn't know about the medicine, you would think that they were in anguish or... You know what I mean? You just have to know the territory. It's like, why would I go to someone to be my travel agent that had never left the state that they lived in? Why would you do that? [laughter]

0:25:45.5 Paul F. Austin: Or learn jiu-jitsu from someone who just watched YouTube videos or read books about jiu-jitsu or... Right.

0:25:52.0 Sunny Strasburg: Absolutely.

0:25:52.3 Paul F. Austin: The examples are endless in that way that, from an integrity perspective, it's really important that those who are offering this work have traversed the path themselves. And I think it's one of the, both considerations and concerns about how quickly psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy has and will continue to grow is, you and I have both been working with plant medicine for years, years and years and years. And a lot of the therapists who come in, even if they've had an experience or two, that may not be necessarily sufficient, sort of like checking a box. I think it does require some maybe dark night of the soul, or some more challenging experiences. So people go, "Okay, I understand how powerful this is. I also understand how much respect and reverence these medicines require. This is not something to be held lightly necessarily. This is deep and powerful work."

0:26:54.2 Sunny Strasburg: Thank you. Yeah, I agree. And I think that it's not just medicine work or psychedelic work, it's important that we do our own work and see our own therapists. Who we are in our being and our essence is sensed on some level when you sit for another person. And so being... Having worked through your own material. At Pacifica, we were required to go through 100 hours of personal therapy before we could graduate.

0:27:17.7 Paul F. Austin: Oh, interesting.

0:27:17.8 Sunny Strasburg: And I was surprised to learn that most programs don't require that. And I know a lot of therapists that have never been to a therapist themselves. And that seems pretty wild to me.

0:27:28.3 Paul F. Austin: Oh, that's interesting.

[laughter]

0:27:31.1 Sunny Strasburg: Yeah. Yeah. I think it's not just knowing the medicine and understanding the medicine, but understanding ourselves. And working with our own countertransference, or in other words, our own parts that come up when someone is struggling, being able to be in a place of deep compassion, but also not allowing ourselves to get hooked into that so that we lose a sense that we're here to help another person, this isn't about us. I think in the archetypal sense, it's like I have one foot in the underworld, and I have one foot up above in the middle world, and I'm navigating that polarity, and I'm always remembering that there's the middle world, so I don't get lost in the underworld with people when they're in it. So, all of those things are factors. And those are really qualitative. It's like, how do you teach that? It's challenging.

0:28:31.1 Sunny Strasburg: This is why ayahuasceros and ayahuasceras have people apprentice for years and years and years with hundreds of journeys because you need that level of understanding. This isn't... This kind of, I know I said scalable earlier, but it's something I really grapple with is how do you scale this thing? There's no quick fix. And there are unpredictable things about psychedelics. We're never gonna get to this point where it's like, "Okay, you're on this Disneyland ride, and it's gonna be totally predictable, and we're gonna take out all the hard things for you." Companies are trying to make psychedelics without the hallucinogenic properties.

0:29:03.4 Paul F. Austin: Subjective transference. Yeah.

0:29:07.2 Sunny Strasburg: Crazy to me. It's just like this is what being human is, this is part of the journey. The dark night of the soul is part of it. Yeah.

0:29:11.0 Paul F. Austin: Well, and this is part of the healing as well, is being in touch with the mystery, the uncertainty, the unknown. That so much of, let's say, our trauma or so much of our challenges in modernity is that we have a high degree of convenience, everything is supposedly figured out. We think of everything as linear. And when we start to work with psychedelics, we come to realize that there is a dramatic imbalance in both our individual and collective psyches when it comes to, for lack of a better term, these masculine and feminine archetypes. We're over-masculinized as a culture. And psychedelics often open this more feminine window of softness, vulnerability, deep connection, uncertainty, the unknown, the mystery, and that can be in and of itself where a lot of the release and surrender comes in when we work with these medicines.

0:30:12.8 Sunny Strasburg: Yeah, I love how you articulated that, and it's very true. And I think that's really the issue. When I went to Psychedelic Science this last year, there was a lot of talk about how we're gonna monetize this, how we're gonna... And it's thinking about these things, and it's a very masculine model. And it's not predictable. And there's something really beautiful about being with more questions than answers, with being in the mystery, like you said. And that's really imperative as humans that we have those experiences. Something that happens to us, I think, one of the inspirations for me to become a psychedelic therapist was I would go to these retreats in Costa Rica, and I was assisting, and people would have their minds blown open and be so... Like see the divine. And then they'd have to go back to the United States and go to a cubicle in Minnesota on Monday. And they were freaking out. And so I was trying to help them do integration work there at the center before people were going home. And it was interesting 'cause it was the early 2000s when we were talking about this. And now we're seeing that this is more and more the conversation in the States about how do we integrate these experiences for people?

0:31:28.6 Sunny Strasburg: But then you have to pull the lens out, Paul, and say, "Well, is that really kind of more reflective of problems in our culture?" Like Jiddu Murti said, it's no measure of sanity to be sane in an insane culture. And it's kind of like that where I think psychedelics open us up and say... And show us like, "This isn't the way that humans are meant to be. We're not supposed to be driving all the time. We're not supposed to be hustling and making money and competing with each other and being socially isolated and on a glowing rectangle... Staring at a glowing rectangle all day. We're supposed to be in nature. We're supposed to be in community." And these medicines give us that glimpse, but then that incoherence of coming back into our daily lives can be really, really painful for us. And particularly people that are sensitive and smart, they get it. They say, "Wow, this is... This world that I live in is challenging for me." And so as therapists, I think we have this duty to help people make sense of that, right?

0:32:23.9 Paul F. Austin: And this speaks to... The psychedelic renaissance, we call it the third wave of psychedelics, is really just getting started. And what you touched on a little bit is like, there is gonna be a lot of demand, and we do have to figure out scalability. And we also have to balance that with the organic, natural, I would even say mycelial growth of the ecosystem, because we are so conditioned into looking at next quarter or next year or the next three years. And a lot of what Indigenous wisdom and Indigenous elders teach is, this isn't about the next three years, this is about, let's say, the next three generations or the next seven generations. And so building with that in mind then allows us to go the transformative, the awakening that's happening when people work with psychedelics is so helpful on an individual level.

0:33:31.3 Paul F. Austin: And ultimately, how do we orient that energy towards creating a new paradigm of how we live, how we interact with the natural environment, how we choose to pursue certain works, or whatever that is. And so, I wanna ask one more, more technical question. And then I'd love to get into the retreats and experiences that you have been hosting and are starting to host and unpack those a little bit more because it's super fascinating and interesting. One thing you mentioned about when we were talking about EMDR and IFS was trauma mapping. And that was a phrase I'm not sure I've heard before, at least I'm not necessarily that familiar with. So I'd love if you could just unpack that a little bit more. What is trauma mapping and its relationship to healing?

0:34:23.8 Sunny Strasburg: Okay. Yeah. I wanna give credit where credit is due, but I don't know where that term comes from or if I made that term up, I'm not really sure. So if someone knows, maybe they can put it as a comment. But the way that I see that is, you can't know everything. Every week, I have clients that have trauma that they have not remembered emerge during a ketamine journey. However, it's really important to do proper assessments and understand what you're working with as a facilitator, because trauma comes up, those protectors are softened and memories can emerge in the psychedelic space. So trauma mapping is this idea of preparing the client and you for what's coming up. And it kind of dictates, it doesn't kind of, it does dictate when we're able to do the medicine session. So I never rush into medicine sessions. I take time on the front end to really prepare the person to enter the space. And I found that people do much better and have much... It's like go slow to go fast, is something we say in IFS and that's very much the case here. So really getting a landscape, a trauma map of what has happened, what have been significant life events.

0:35:39.3 Sunny Strasburg: You can do things like the ACEs intake test. You can do an assessment like that and see what people's childhood trauma events are, and you can do that as a therapy session. With EMDR, there's this technique called floatback where you take this matrix of how it feels in your body, what you believe about yourself and the emotions that are connected to it. And it's almost like this interesting little molecule that then has several different memories that are attached to it, and you can float back through time and through their memories to see where that originated. And you get to what's called a cornerstone memory, which is the first time that they experience. For example, "My boss gives me the side eye and I get a pit in my stomach and I feel like I'm not good." "Okay, so tell me other times you felt that." "Oh yeah, I felt that with my girlfriend. I just had this conflict with her. And then when I go back, I felt that in high school from my shop teacher. Going back, oh, I remember now that my dad would give me the side eye like that and I would feel this pit in my stomach and say, 'I'm not good enough.'" So you're really looking for those patterns of behavior to see what the landscape of trauma is, so that you can then work with those protector parts and make sure that they're ready to go into deep, the deep journey, a deeper psychedelic journey, because those things can emerge.

0:37:03.4 Sunny Strasburg: And I'll use... It's interesting because as I do this trauma mapping with the floatback technique, for example, so let's say the belief is I'm not good enough, then we work toward, okay, well one of your intention for this journey is, I'm really good. I'm really good enough. And having that positive intention for the journey, and then seeing what comes up for the journey and then integrating what came up around that belief. I'm really good. I'm good enough. Right? Does that answer kind of what, yeah.

0:37:34.4 Paul F. Austin: Thank you. It does. It does. And a couple other questions are coming up from that. One is, if you're working with ketamine in sort of a therapeutic container do you immediately start with a high dose and it's a consistent dose across the board? Do you start with a lower dose and sort of slowly ramp up to see how the client responds? How do you navigate, let's say, dosage and even frequency if working with ketamine in a therapeutic container?

0:38:08.0 Sunny Strasburg: That's a great question. So I'm a therapist. I'm not prescribing the ketamine. I'm working closely with a medical provider who's dictating the dosage. But from a therapeutic point of view, I generally like to do low dose first because of those protectors. So what happens in the IFS lens with ketamine and ketamine is a beautiful molecule in how creative we can be in therapy. And it's almost like a different drug at different doses and different routes of administration. So you and your team, your healthcare team can be really creative to provide the best support for clients, right? So I really like... If someone has a lot of trauma, let's say, and we've done EMDR and we've done IFS work and we're ready for the journey, and we've talked to the protectors. And they come in, I say, "We're gonna do a low dose of ketamine so that your protectors are just softened enough, but they're hanging out and they're just in the room with you watching what's going on. They're not totally off duty and asleep. They're kind of just hanging back. And how does that feel to your protector system?" So we do a whole meditation process around that. Okay, that feels good. We feel ready. And then on a psycholytic dose of ketamine, I can actually talk to the client. They're able to engage and I can do IFS work where we're able to access the exiles more readily and we're having this dialogue. So...

0:39:39.2 Paul F. Austin: How much is that, a psycholytic dose? Would it be 25 mgs with a lozenge or 50, or does it depend?

0:39:45.1 Sunny Strasburg: Yeah. I mean, I'm hesitant to say since I'm not a prescriber, but I would say that she would generally prescribe like 50 milligram lozenge or a 20 milligram injection. But I'll give you an example. I had a client that... I mean, this is so great for people that are really afraid of losing control or having a bad trip. This is a wonderful way to work. So she was in the space and she kind of has her eyes closed and she'd open her eyes. I would do this IFS process with her, and she was stuck on this concrete wall, or like a brick, a stone wall. And she was just sliding along the wall in her internal vision. And it was terrifying to her. She couldn't get off of it. She felt stuck on it.

0:40:27.4 Sunny Strasburg: So she's talking to me, and of course I'm realizing, okay, this is a part that doesn't want her to go past the wall. Right. It's a defender. And so we just worked with that. Okay. Get curious about that. How do you feel toward the wall? What do you think... Ask it, what its job is? And the wall started talking with us. My job is to keep you from going into this place I don't want you to go. So as we're working with it, it was so interesting, Paul, because then this beautiful window opens up all of a sudden, okay. The protector's letting us see past it. So then she's communicating, "Oh, there's a window I can barely... It's really small. And then it's opening up. Oh, I can see there's a little girl in the courtyard." Right? And obviously this is... I'm thinking, okay, this is her exile, but I'm letting her come to that.

0:41:10.9 Sunny Strasburg: I'm just kind of midwifing the conversation along. And so then we got into this beautiful experience of her communicating with this exiled part. And then as the ketamine's wearing off, I'm saying, "Bring in that part that was showing you the wall and just let it know what happened. Let it know that we were able to talk to the exile and just make sure it's okay and if it has anything, it wants us to know about how that experience was." So you're really working with all of these different parts and having really a lot of respect for all these parts instead of forcing anything. Right. So then once we do that, then to answer your question, Paul, then I would go into a deeper experience if they were ready for it where they would have like a mid dose session.

0:41:54.6 Paul F. Austin: And as a therapist, what do you find is the bridge that closes the gap between awareness and integration? So in other words, having been through therapeutic containers myself, in therapy, there can be quite a bit that we come into awareness around or early childhood trauma. The reasons are for me it was, I was emasculated by my mom and I didn't realize it. So how is it that these approaches, IFS, EMDR, ketamine-assisted psychotherapy help for clients to actually go, not only am I aware of that, but I've healed that and I've integrated that, and I am that much more now solid and present because of it.

0:42:46.8 Sunny Strasburg: Yeah. That's really where the rubber hits the road, isn't it? We can have all kinds of insights, which I see like talk therapy is like, you get all these insights, but then it's like, well, I'm still kind of doing the same thing. So from the IFS perspective, what's really remarkable about it is you're not... When you're in talk therapy and you're talking about trauma or you're talking about your childhood, you're talking from a protector part. And that part, that really vulnerable part is not given a voice. And so through the process of IFS, we're actually asking that vulnerable part that's been exiled and been locked in the basement and hasn't been talking to you except when it comes up and does crazy things and make you react. Right. And then you bury it back down into your underground again. We're actually welcoming those parts to give them voice. And there's something that's so different about that once they feel heard, once they can become unburdened, there's just this huge shift in your life.

0:43:48.7 Sunny Strasburg: It's quite remarkable. And it's not just like, okay, we do this IFS session and you're done. And okay, you're fixed. You have to go back in and have those conversations with... On your own between sessions. So when I do just straight, IFS without psychedelics or with psychedelics, I'm telling people, okay we got... You started this relationship with this 3-year-old part. It's not like you just meet the 3-year-old part, and then you never talk to her again. You go in every day and ask her what she needs. You invite her into your life. You ask her to come into your dreams every day. You ask her what she needs.

0:44:25.4 Sunny Strasburg: And that invitation of engaging with that part for weeks after, really helps metabolize whatever is going on. I think Dick says to do it for 32 days in a row or something is his recommendation. But it's really remarkable how when you start working in this way, it's very... IFS is very psychedelic without any medicine because it actually feels like you're talking to these beings that exist on some plane of reality. And I've asked this Dick Schwartz that, and he said, yeah, it's real. It's not like you're just fantasizing about this. There is a part of you that's a 3-year-old that's stuck in 1970 somewhere that needs to be rescued. And you bring those parts into your life today. You rescue them from being stuck in the past, and you bring them with you today. And that, that process helps metabolize whatever they've been holding.

0:45:22.5 Paul F. Austin: The metaphor this reminds me of is when I was reading, I think it was either Stan Grof's work or Jung, or maybe I was reading both at the same time. There was often sort of this conversation around when we start to work with psychedelics, the subconscious, the unconscious gets opened up. And I think the metaphor I remember was like, kinda like you go into the basement and like clean out the skeletons that might be in there. And that's not a great way to frame it. But I remember that being the conversation that in our conscious mind, we're aware of what they say 10%, which is more or less the tip of the iceberg. And when we start to work with psychedelics or even internal family systems, EMDR, all of a sudden that aperture broadens. And what I'm hearing from you is a lot of that integrated healing comes from welcoming all aspects of self and saying, no longer will I exile these parts or pieces or stories or narratives. No longer will I be ashamed of them, no longer will they sort of lurk in the shadows of who I am. But instead, shine the light, bring them in, acknowledge, welcome, love them, and make them, or invite them to be sort of a coherent part of this full self, because I feel like coherence. We talk about integration. Integration really means wholeness. And so creating coherence between all these parts feels like, oh, this is when I can show up with my full self. I don't need to be ashamed or afraid of any aspect of who I am any longer.

0:47:06.7 Sunny Strasburg: Yeah, it's interesting because when you say, no longer am I going to shun these parts, no longer am I going to be ashamed, those are actually other parts of you. [laughter] So what's interesting about that conversation is yes, and it's just like doing family work. When I have a family in my office that I'm working with, and the young child has been blamed for everything, and no one wants to listen to the young child. So I get to this place where I say, yes, I wanna hear you, and I'm listening to you. What happens to the other system, they get constellated and want to protect or want to deny or whatever. So I have to create an equal relationship with all of these different parts. And understanding that all of our parts evolve perfectly for the inputs and outputs that we've experienced in our lives. Right?

0:47:50.9 Sunny Strasburg: So there's no... Like Dick's new book is No Bad Parts. It's this idea that none of them are inherently bad. And so you're continually working with this labyrinth of parts and saying, okay, and then this made me, I wanna blame myself for being so mean to my exiles. Okay, what does that part have to say? There's curiosity toward that. So I loved what you said about coherence, because that is really, the idea is that the self compassionate, calm, confident self is like a conductor of an orchestra. And when all the parts are unburdened and in flow, you have this beautiful symphony that works together. We're working with all of these different parts. And that's really the work is can you come into a place of coherence with your internal ecosystem? Coming from Gottman, I'm very big into attachment theory. Like secure attachment. And the way I think about IFS is the goal is to create secure attachment within the internal ecosystem.

0:48:53.8 Sunny Strasburg: And old ways of thinking were, well, I as a therapist am gonna be this transitional secure object for you because you had this crazy childhood, so you're going to securely attach to me, and then somehow that's gonna transfer to you. And it's like, no, what my job is, is I'm midwifing your own internal secure attachment. That's my function and I'm stepping out as soon as I can. And with the aid of psychedelics, there's this beautiful way that self-energy comes on board and helps create that secure attachment. So I'm just kind of midwifing and facilitating that secure attachment within the internal ecosystem.

0:49:30.3 Paul F. Austin: Fascinating. I love that metaphor. The midwifery, the doula...

0:49:33.8 Sunny Strasburg: Yeah, for sure.

0:49:36.2 Paul F. Austin: Of coherence. Okay. So we've spent a lot of time talking about therapy therapeutic approaches, and yet this is by no means the only thing that you do. We've already talked about you as an entrepreneur, as an artist, as a musician even. And for the last, correct me, because I don't know precisely year or two, you've been hosting IFS KAP, ketamine-assisted psychotherapy retreats with Dick Schwartz in Santa Cruz. And it's essentially internal family systems affecting change in the collective sphere through self leadership for business leaders and technology, entertainment, healthcare, and psychedelics. I'd love to just hear sort of the origin story of how did this retreat come about? And in which way does facilitating this retreat allow you to expand outside of the strictly therapeutic approach?

0:50:35.9 Sunny Strasburg: Yeah, thank you. It started... Dick Schwartz and I were training a group of clinicians a few years ago and talked about activism and what it would look like to take IFS outside of the therapy office and out into the world. What would it look like? He and I were really interested in talking about what would it look like if some of our leaders in the world weren't leading from trauma and fear and anxiety and these young exiled parts, but wonder if they were leading with compassion, connection, confidence. And so we developed this idea for these retreats to bring leaders together that suffer from anxiety and trauma, and help them lead their organizations with more self energy and using ketamine to help leverage that. And it's been really, really amazing. It's so potent because so many people that are driven to succeed in that level of success have parts that are very, very insecure that are... And they are protectors that are overcompensating for however they felt like they weren't good enough and so they're driven to be hyper performers.

0:51:51.5 Sunny Strasburg: And so working with these leaders that have big spheres of influence and helping them be more connected to the people that they're leading in all kinds of different spheres. I think about... I was working with a director who as we were working together, had this realization and he had this whole history of creating a lot of violent media. And as we were working together, he said, "Wow, I didn't realize that I was doing that from this 8-year-old boy that was so angry my whole life because my dad was so cruel to me." And so we did that exile work, and then it became a conversation, what does it look like for me to create media that feels like it's coming from a place of compassion?

0:52:40.7 Sunny Strasburg: And then he had parts come up that were like, no one's gonna want that. Everybody likes you for doing the vi... And so we're doing this work around that and think about the influence of that if media wasn't so fear driven and violent. But we had media that we were turning to that was looking toward a hopeful future instead of constant bombardment with apocalypse media, right? [laughter]

0:53:00.1 Paul F. Austin: Right.

0:53:02.4 Sunny Strasburg: So it feels like really, really important work. And we're working a lot with people that are leaders in technology. And something I'm really passionate about is helping the narrative around an artificial intelligence because that's so impactful right now. And helping leaders... So much of this is invisible to us. We don't know what these companies are doing. We're not privy to it, and yet it's affecting all of us, and it's going to affect all of us increasingly. It's gonna be huge. It's gonna be just a complete cultural shift coming. And so what does it look like to talk to these leaders in artificial intelligence about ethics and morality and what they're creating and what that means to all of humanity and to the geosphere, right? To the whole ecosystem. And that's something that's a real passion project for me right now. And I know for Dick too. Yeah.

0:54:02.1 Paul F. Austin: And what's your sense, how might psychedelic work? How might IFS work for those who are pioneering in the AI space help to create a context for the healthy integration of artificial intelligence into this?

0:54:15.9 Sunny Strasburg: Well, it's kind of circling back to our conversation earlier where so much of what we're experiencing right now in the modern world is this competitiveness and jockeying to get to the front, and almost like an arms race. Like the AI is really in an arms race right now, where it's like, if we don't do the other guy's gonna do it. And so really pulling the lens back and saying, what happens when you feel completely connected to nature? What happens when you feel like consciousness is in all of us equally, and that none of us are better or worse than anyone else, but we're all in this together? And creating that context of really immaculate connection to everything and everyone through the lens of compassion and then saying, what does that conversation look like now? If you're directed with that self energy, what happens now? And if you bring whole groups of people together to have these conversations where they're influencing each other in that space, then what is that narrative? So I'm really curious. I don't know the answer to that. I'm really curious about what could happen, what's the potential there? And we're seeing some amazing things as we're working into this space, but I feel really hopeful that it could bring some healing. Yeah.

0:55:37.0 Paul F. Austin: Yeah. And I was at Wisdom 2.0 in April. It was hosted in San Francisco, and Sam Altman spoke with Jack Kornfield, and Jack is a mentor of Sam. Sam has done meditation retreats with him. And they didn't talk explicitly about psychedelics, but Sam is involved in the psychedelic space. He's a main investor behind, I forget the exact name now, but one of the psychedelic companies Journey collab, I think. He's done psychedelic work himself. And it does feel important that this technology that will influence and affect everyone does have some sort of, like you said, ethical underpinning to support life in general, life of the homo sapien and life of what it means to be human. And we're able, ideally to find a balance there where artificial intelligence can sort of help us to navigate the complexity of an increasingly interconnected world without making us extinct basically.

0:56:49.0 Sunny Strasburg: Right. Yeah. Yeah. I listened to a really amazing interview with Mo Gawdat, who is talking about the inherent biases that are in AI. And it's like where are the voices of women. Where are the voices of indigenous elders? When you talk to ChatGPT, it's like talking to a Stanford male graduate. Like that's the interaction. So those biases, when you have a whole world that's going to be based on an extrapolation of that who's being left out of that conversation, right?

0:57:23.0 Paul F. Austin: Yeah, how do we leave them out?

0:57:24.8 Sunny Strasburg: It's very parallel to the psychedelic world because this is something that we're grappling with in psychedelics is like extracting these medicines out of indigenous practices, and going full forward without acknowledging or any reciprocity or the holistic view of where those come from. And so it's so important to have voices that challenge that paradigm, because the White upper middle class male paradigm isn't the only voice that's there. And I'm very passionate about bringing that. When I do my retreats in Costa Rica, I don't pour the medicine. The people that come from that culture pour the medicine that I have been apprenticing for decades pour the medicine. It's really important that we honor those practices.

0:58:13.6 Paul F. Austin: That was sort of the final question that I wanted to ask you too. It's like we haven't really explicitly talked about it yet, and that's more or less what wisdom or lessons or what teachings have you received and integrated as a result of your, let's say, plant medicine work rather than the sort of therapeutic or ketamine work? What has that contributed to your approach and evolution?

0:58:44.3 Sunny Strasburg: Well, it's definitely... I was probably an atheist for a lot of my life and...

0:58:47.0 Paul F. Austin: Oh wow.

0:58:50.4 Sunny Strasburg: And materialist. And always grappled with that though, I had a very mystical side too. But ultimately it's like, oh, well, we try to comfort ourselves with... And ayahuasca definitely showed me that there is much more intelligence than that we can even perceive in our monkey brain. [laughter] There's just like so much more. And that there's an intelligence and a consciousness that connects us all. And that's been very, very informative and humbling. I think... My prayer a lot is how can I be in service to the medicines, and how can I be in service to this little blip of time that I'm here on this planet? And how can I help, how can I spread the message? How can I be a voice of healing for people that are suffering and helping them connect to their families and to their communities, and activate them to have purpose in their lives. And that's been a great compass for me, you know? Yeah.

0:59:52.2 Paul F. Austin: When it goes back to what you had talked about earlier, which is when we're working with these substances or medicines or drugs or whatever you wanna call them, there is sort of an allyship or symbiosis with them. And I think this is particularly true with some of the more indigenous plant medicines like ayahuasca, like San Pedro, like psilocybin mushrooms, that these plants or fungi have an intelligence. There is a spirit. There is sort of a reverence that indigenous cultures have developed with them. And that even in just the humility of recognizing that, and being with that is such a great teacher that certainly Ketamine, MDMA, LSD is one of my favorite psychedelics. These are all beautiful medicines and incredible medicines. And the complexity of some of these plant medicines, because they... Like ayahuasca comes from two different plants in the Amazon, psilocybin has hundreds of components.

1:00:58.4 Paul F. Austin: There's just sort of a different, I think not better, but different relationship that we end up developing with some of these medicines and that can be for great benefit. And some people would say like that they have personalities and that they have requests, and that people would say ayahuasca can be very jealous. And so it's a potent power to work with, which is of course why apprenticeship and years of experience is really required to understand how do I... How am I in allyship with such a potent intelligence and medicine?

1:01:41.7 Sunny Strasburg: Yeah, each psychedelic has its own signature. Ketamine is really interesting 'cause I kind of feel like it's like open source code where it takes on the energy of whatever's going on. And ayahuasca definitely seems like she, that's how I experience her, has an agenda that's its own thing that I'm showing up in her world, and her intelligence is so vast and so great. As you're talking though, I think it's really easy... When we have these amazing experiences, it's really easy to have this sense of ownership or possessiveness as these limited beings that we are, and think that we know everything. And then to go out and proselytize our way, oh, you have to work with my shaman, and my place is the only place, in this possessiveness that we get. Because we've been so impacted, and we have these parts that feel so impacted by this beautiful medicine.

1:02:34.5 Sunny Strasburg: And I think if anything, I just have more questions and more awe with working with plants that I realize that the more I know, the less I know. And the more vast the mystery is, and there's something, and it makes me almost choked out, there's something really moving to me to know that there's something that's so much greater than me, and any of us that we're a part of, and that's ushering us along in this grand unfolding of consciousness. And the gift of being able to witness, my consciousness, being able to witness life like God or goddess looking at itself in this moment right now is... That's just so awe inspiring to me that... So I don't know. I think that the best way that I've found to work with these medicines is just to be open and to be curious and to be in awe, in awe. What am I to do and how can I help? It seems like the only question really.

1:03:42.3 Paul F. Austin: Like, use me. That's how I felt too when I first started working with LSD many years ago. I'm like, "I'm in, let me know how I can help." And I think being in relationship...

1:03:54.5 Sunny Strasburg: And look at how you're helping, that's beautiful. You stepped in. Yeah.

1:03:57.8 Paul F. Austin: Must've been good acid. But there is something, me... Like you said, there is something very meaningful and purpose driven about when our lives become so transformed how can we not contribute back in a way that helps others on a similar path? And like you said, there are myriad ways to do that. There's thousands if not hundreds of thousands of ways to do that. And that's of course, those are the growing pains that we're currently going through now. We're trying to figure out how do we navigate this as a globalized western culture with these very potent medicines that have incredible lessons to teach us.

1:04:39.7 Sunny Strasburg: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. And we're all figuring it out. What is... We're all walking each other home. It does, it feels like that we're all figuring it out. And right heart, right intention, compassion, and figuring it out as we go and stating what we think is working and then being open when better information comes. Always being open.

1:05:02.3 Paul F. Austin: Always being open. Well, thank you Sunny for sharing so much today. I feel like we covered such an interesting array of techniques and stories and anecdotes and science. So if folks wanna either get your book, if they're interested in your retreats where can we point them if they wanna go learn more after this episode?

1:05:29.5 Sunny Strasburg: Yeah, the books, it's on. I just released the Audible version. The Psychedelic Approach is on Audible now, on Amazon paperback. And then yeah, I have some trainings coming up. I'm doing a training for TPN on January 8th, so one and a half hour free, so anybody can attend. Momentum events the end of January, it's a deeper dive into the Theradelic approach. And then the only in-person that I'm doing training this year is Three Cups Psychedelics at 1440 in May. Really excited about that. Dick Schwartz will be teaching and we'll have Rick Doblin there and Camille Barton and many other amazing luminaries in the space for people that are ready to go into a deeper learning with these medicines. And yeah. And then I have ongoing retreats. You can check out sunnystrasburgtherapy.com, and sign up for my newsletter and I announce all the things there.

1:06:25.2 Paul F. Austin: Great. So sunnystrasburgtherapy.com.

1:06:30.5 Sunny Strasburg: Yeah.

1:06:31.5 Paul F. Austin: The Theradelic Approach just released on Audible, and the Three Cups Psychedelics will be hosted at 1440 in May, and we'll post a link to that as well. So again, thank you for joining us today. This is a fun, fun convo.

1:06:45.2 Sunny Strasburg: Yeah, super fun. Thank you.

1:06:52.1 Paul F. Austin: Hey listeners, Paul here. I hope you enjoyed our episode today with Sunny Strasburg. Remember to follow the link in the description to go deeper into this episode. And you can continue the conversation with us in Third Wave's Community at community.thethirdwave.co. What you think of this conversation, what did you learn? Did you have more questions for us? Let us know in Third Wave's Community, our free platform, where you'll find support, meaningful discussion, and some education resources and providers across our global ecosystem. That's community.thethirdwave.co. All right, that's it for now. See you next week.

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