0:00:00.7 April Pride: Hey, I’m April Pride, your host. This is the show for women who have an open and curious mind, and this is a show all about women changing their lives, thanks to altered states. Today, we have something special for you. In place of an episode produced by The High Guide, we’ve swapped episodes with our other favorite podcast about psychedelics, Field Tripping, a podcast about epic, personal, spiritual and business journeys on and in psychedelics. I was first introduced to Field Tripping through the Field Trip app, a handy pocket high guide, so to speak, featuring music to trip to and a journal to track specifics related to your psychedelic experiences, dosage, intention, insights. Beyond the app and the show is Field Trip Health, a North American chain of clinics offering ketamine-assisted therapy to qualified patients and with a mission to bring the world to life through psychedelics and psychedelic enhanced psychotherapy. I look forward to sharing more on ketamine for treatment-resistant depression and what I’ve learned about this modality as it relates to women in future episodes of the High Guide.
0:01:17.5 April Pride: In today’s episode, the host of Field Tripping, Ronan Levy, who also serves as the co-founder and Chairman of Field Trip Health is in discussion with Dr. Julie Holland MD. She’s a psycho-pharmacologist psychiatrist and author whose books include, Ecstasy: The complete guide and the pot book and most recently good chemistry. In this episode, Julie sits down with Ronan and Field Trip Health’s Chief Psychologist, Dr. Dominique Morisano to discuss their thoughts on the stigmatization of the soul in medicine, and among other things, the implications of the current psychedelic renaissance we’re experiencing today. My favorite part of the episode is when Dr. Holland and Dr. Morisano share their thoughts on ketamine and its place in psychedelic assisted therapy. If you’re considering ketamine treatment, check out Field Trip’s website at fieldtriphealth.com to start your research, and you can sign up for an evaluation to see if you’re qualified for treatment in one of their clinics. Enjoy the show.
0:02:28.0 Dr. Julie Holland, MD: So this issue of equity and access, we should probably mention that there is such a thing as racial trauma, the people who are experiencing micro or macro-aggressions related to their race, these people are traumatized on a daily basis, and it would really be great if we can focus on treating victims of racial trauma and to show that things like ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, psilocybin assisted psychotherapy, MDMA assisted psychotherapy, that these things really have the capacity to help heal.
0:03:00.0 Dr. Dominique Morisano: And also building capacity in BIPOC communities like to be the therapist and be the people working.
0:03:08.1 Dr. Julie Holland, MD: Definitely.
[music]
0:03:13.3 Ronan Levy: This is Field Tripping, a podcast dedicated to exploring psychedelic experiences and their ability to affect our lives. I’m your host, Ronan Levy. It’s my pleasure to welcome Dr. Julie Holland to the podcast. Julie is a psycho-pharmacologist, psychiatrist, and the author of the books, Moody bitches and Weekends at Bellevue an observing memoir that recounts tragic, comic and moving case file stories from nine years in the psychiatric emergency room in New York City. Julie is an advocate for the appropriate use of consciousness-expanding substances as part of mental health treatment, and she’s a medical advisor to MAPS studying MDMA-assisted psychotherapy in the treatment of PTSD. Julie is a worldwide expert on street drugs and has appeared on the Today’s show over 25 times, as well as Good Morning America, CNN, Dr. Oz, the doctors, VICE Media and more, currently, she’s a forensic consultant for drug-related cases, a lecturer and in private practice in New York.
0:04:21.7 Ronan Levy: I’d also like to welcome Dr. Dominique Morisano back to the podcast, Dominique, is Field Trip’s Chief Psychologist and joined us on the episode with Dan and Devojka from Operators. Dominique is also a big fan of Julie’s work, so this is gonna be fun. One of the questions that immediately came to mind as your name popped up, and this is just a totally random question, but you identify as Julie Holland MD as opposed to Dr. Julie Holland, is there any reason for that? Like what’s the thought process? ’cause I know a lot of people are sensitive about being called doctor or comma MD, and I’ve never really understood the narrative or the mindset behind it. I’m just wondering if that was a conscious decision or is it something that you happened into?
0:05:04.6 Dr. Julie Holland, MD: It’s pretty long standing. My grandfather used to jokingly call me Dr. Julie Holland MD just to make sure he got it on both ends, it was that important to him. But I think one of the reasons why I identify myself that way on podcasts or webcasts is because sometimes I’m the only physician in the group, and I like to identify myself as like somebody who’s a medical doctor, who is a physician who likes to think they understand the body and the way it works, and that I’m gonna have a different approach. And I have a really biological approach, as much as I like to talk about soul and spiritual practices and things like that, so I’ve got a real sort of bio-psych, psycho-pharm perspective, so I just sort of like to identify myself visually, so people know that that’s kind of probably where I’m coming from.
0:05:51.7 Ronan Levy: Well, no, that makes a lot of sense. And you just touched on one of the things actually I wanted to get into later on, but as you raised it, let’s just dive into it, which is, how do you integrate the biological and the spiritual, emotional, less objective kind of conversations, it’s I think the most important thing we can be doing and something I’m a big proponent of not being a doctor, how do you draw those kind of lines and how do you integrate them, and I imagine it creates a lot of conflicts at some points in your lives. And I’ll just give an example that is close to me, ’cause it happened to one of my best friend’s wife, she’s a pediatric neurologist, she was a pediatric neurologist at Stanford, and she wanted to take her research and the traction of how touch and hugging after a traumatic incident can have an impact on the healing process, and Stanford basically said No, and basically took away her tenure and now she’s doing other things, and I think she’s truthfully much happier doing these other things, but it’s a story that I imagine resonates with you along your journey as well, so I’d love to hear your thoughts about all of that kind of stuff.
0:06:57.1 Dr. Julie Holland, MD: It’s funny, one of my earliest papers in college was called the need or wish to be held and how that plays out in behaviours and it’s actually… She should be studying it, I’m sorry that Stanford didn’t see how important touch and hugging and being held is to the body and our physiology, and how resilient we are against trauma, I guess, to some degree. So, I mean, you were asking how I sort of reconcile the soul part with the medicine part, and the last book that I wrote, it’s called good chemistry, and the subtitle is The Science of connection from soul to psychedelics. And it was really hard for me to put the word soul out there, I felt like I was outing myself by using the word soul as a psychiatrist.
0:07:37.3 Dr. Julie Holland, MD: And whenever I was in my office talking to a patient, if I said soul, I would do the air quotes, or I would say, “I’m sorry, I’m using this word,” I would some sort of preface destigmatization of my using the word before I used it. And I learned over time that it was completely unnecessary and I should just chill out, people are comfortable with this idea between soul cycle or the movie Soul, or there’s so many products that have the word soul in it, now that at least in terms of our capitalist society, we’ve glommed on to soul and defamed it a little bit, but in psychiatry it’s not a word you’re supposed to use. You’re not really supposed to talk about spiritual awakenings or spiritual processes or rituals, or so many of the things that we inevitably talk about when we talk about psychedelics and psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, you’re not really supposed to talk about in psychiatry, but one of the reasons that I wanted to put that subtitle on the cover is that it’s time we talk about it.
0:08:35.5 Dr. Julie Holland, MD: It’s useful to talk about it, the truth is that there’s a certain amount of soul sickness that happens in people who have panic attacks or depression or addiction, or compulsive eating, or compulsive shopping, or compulsive sexting and cheating on their partners. When you look at a lot of what drives pathological behavior, there is an element of sort of soul sickness, and if that you can kinda get right with your purpose and get right with what brings you joy, what really has meaning to you. And that’s really like, What feeds your soul and… Sorry, but that’s the reality.
0:09:10.1 Ronan Levy: 100% I agree with that. I’m curious to go a little bit further in terms of your personal perspectives, which is… And it’s just something I find incredibly fascinating. And the conversation that goes around it, about the idea of being a materialist or a dualist, which is like, Do we come from our soul or is the soul kind of a construct of our brain, because in my journey and in the work I’ve done personally, one of the hurdles that or one of the person I work with really forced me to confront was it works a lot better when you just don’t suspend your disbelief around the idea of a soul and a future self and a higher self and all that kind of stuff. And actually get past it and lean into it and accept it as a reality as opposed to a construct, and that’s certainly hard for me, and I’ve spent a lot of time with it, and I suspect it’s going to be extremely hard for a lot of people who are starting to go down this road, and I certainly think that psychedelics are a great springboard to maybe even getting past the hurdle, but I think a really valuable tool is understanding people who have gone down this road and their perspectives and their honest truths around this, which is maybe it’s a construct or maybe it’s real, but curious to know where you land on that question.
0:10:25.4 Dr. Julie Holland, MD: Well, it sounds like you’re sort of getting at what my own perspectives or my own experiences have been, as much as I feel compelled to say that I would like to acknowledge my privilege where I’m sitting from, and also acknowledge that I am sitting on land, stolen from the Lenape people, I would also like to acknowledge that I have a history of getting in touch with what feeds my soul and what makes my heart sing from a pretty young age, when I was a teenager growing up in the ’70s in the suburbs of Boston. I was a drug researcher really from a very early age, but I didn’t know that that’s what I was, and I certainly grew into my role, being involved in psychedelic drug research and being a medical monitor.
0:11:07.2 Dr. Julie Holland, MD: I was always obsessed with medical safety from a very young age, but I also had this sense that it wasn’t really playing with fire and that these were powerful tools that if you read the manual and put on your goggles, you could avail yourself of the power of these tools. So I had lots of experiences in really formative years, people say I dabbled as an adolescent or whatever, but the truth is that adolescence is when a lot of stuff really kinda gels and sticks for people, and it’s an interesting time in brain development where your brain is sort of Marie Kondo-ing, does this spark joy or should we get rid of it? And there’s a lot of pruning and cleaning up that goes on.
0:11:47.0 Dr. Julie Holland, MD: The prepubescent brain is just a sponge taking in a lot of stuff in on a very deep level, and then the adolescent brain is sort of trying to make sense of it and getting rid of things and sort of narrowing the definitions of things, so for many people, that early experimentation that happens, that stuff is in there pretty deep. I don’t know what you were doing in seventh or eighth or ninth grade, but whatever you were doing then… You still know how to do that. I don’t know if you were learning to skateboard or play a saxophone, but I guarantee you that if you learned it around puberty, you can still do it in your sleep, practically, that stuff really gets hard-wired in deep and so for me, really to be honest, some of the stuff that got hard-wired in deep was my ability to learn from psychedelics. So I feel like I come about it naturally, I know it’s hard for people to sort of out themselves as psychonauts.
0:12:38.6 Ronan Levy: It’s part of the platform that I wanna provide through this podcast, and a lot of the work we’re doing, it’s like for the people who cannot out themselves as either psychonauts or spiritualists and really, I would say modern spiritualists, which is, I don’t come across as a hippie… Maybe if you listen to this podcast people will I think I’m really out there. But I think in most day-to-day conversations, I can come across as pretty normal and pretty relatable, even though that’s some of the views I have, I think a lot of modern western life would be like, You’re weird. Right, and they use that word very consciously. And then so this is a real platform and an opportunity, and I use it as much as I can to bring about that conversation and saying, it’s okay to talk about your soul, it’s okay to talk about your future self, it’s okay to talk about your higher self and not just use those as conceptual constructs, but to accept them as truths and not be necessarily afraid of that, but I will ping-pong the question over to Dominique as well, to get your thoughts on this.
0:13:35.9 Dr. Dominique Morisano: It’s a really interesting question, and I guess I’m still at the point where Julie mentioned being maybe with the air quotes with my clients, because I have a lot of clients that very strongly identify as atheist and not just atheist, but strong atheist, and so I try to leave space in my work with people to kind of think about maybe not soul, but connection to this planet or the state that we’re in, or a community of people, or something bigger than themselves, even if it’s not a soul per se, but when people mention soul and work with me, I jump all over it, to be honest, and I really love that and I get to run with it. And so I have found it’s been hard not to think about soul in work with psychedelics and in work with alternate states of consciousness, because you become so… I guess directly faced with it.
0:14:34.5 Ronan Levy: Yeah, no, I totally hear you. And it came out of a conversation with someone who went through our treatments, and she related to me that she had never tried psychedelics, at least larger doses before, but after she had had her ketamine experience, she found that she found the profound in the mundane and it totally… It really resonated with me because to some degree it’s like, yeah, there’s a lot of things that happen with psychedelics, but anyone who’s found that kind of beauty in something, everyone knows that energy, if you… Whatever you wanna call it, that feeling of just being totally engrossed by something truly magical or beautiful or whatever descriptor you wanna put around it.
0:15:15.6 Ronan Levy: And it’s like when you’re in that space, it’s almost impossible to let all of those things that cause anxiety and depression and all of the mental health conditions that we talk about really start to infiltrate, and it’s hard to stay in that space, but touching that experience, even briefly, I think can be totally transformative. I’ve talked about how I think beauty is a transformative energy when you experience it, it changes you, and it doesn’t have to mean aesthetically beautiful, but you know the feeling of something that’s beautiful and on an energetic level, and it’s part of the things that’s so exciting about psychedelics but it takes the conversation a little bit further of like, Is this just a biochemical experience or is it actually something truly profound.
0:15:58.1 Dr. Julie Holland, MD: Even if it is just biochemical and physiological, it can still be truly profound, and when you talk about the experiencing something magical in the mundane I think about dishabituation, which is something that also happens with cannabis, you can approach something with fresh eyes, I do consider cannabis to be sort of a minor psychedelic, it has a lot of features of psychedelic, I would say that high dose THC is pretty much psychedelic, you do end up getting sort of a tickling of a 5-HT2A receptor. There’s a dimer, there’s a dimerization that happens between the CB-1 receptor and the 5-HT2A receptor, if you give it enough THC. So this idea that cannabis is psychedelic, I think there’s real physiological fact beneath it, but anyway, my point of this is that what cannabis… One of the things that cannabis does, besides being a great anti-inflammatory, and we all know that psychedelics are also great anti-inflammatories, like it’s this idea of fresh eyes, right. That you’re dishabituated and you look at something as if you’ve never seen it before, so that increases the likelihood that you will find that magic and beauty just because of the novelty, it’s more engaging, you’re more likely to take another look.
0:17:07.2 Ronan Levy: I had that experience recently when I had used some cannabis and I just got the sense that drugs almost work like a filter, they filter out certain energies or certain resonances and open you up to feel or see different ones or see the other things in a different light. And that can be true about psychedelics, that can be true about cannabis, truthfully, that can be true about alcohol and probably some more destructive drugs as well.
0:17:27.5 Dr. Julie Holland, MD: As much as I would say. I’m not the hugest fan of ketamine. I think ketamine has… It’s like the best thing we have right now, one of the best things I can say about ketamine is that it’s legal, it’s allowing us to create the infrastructure, to create the framework, and to get people comfortable with the idea that you can take a medicine to help you have a better therapy session. I mean, Ronan, Dominique and I, this is not news to us. We get this is the future, but for people who’ve just never even heard of it, it’s really like a paradigm shift, it’s like a disruptive way of doing psychiatry, like What, you don’t take a daily dose of the medicine every day so that you don’t mind the way your life is like you take a big dose of something, so you can really look at and fix your life… And what’s great about ketamine is that because it’s FDA-approved because everybody’s comfortable with it, maybe even your insurance will reimburse you, it’s getting everything in place for what’s coming next, which will be so much better, which is MDMA assisted therapy, psilocybin-assisted therapy. You think ketamine is impressive? Wait till we show you what really works.
0:18:33.9 Ronan Levy: I agree. That’s always been the foundation of what we’ve been building at Field Trip. And truthfully, my attitude has changed and evolved even since we started, which I always saw ketamine as a stepping stone to the future of psychedelic therapies with psilocybin. But having witnessed the transformations that we’ve experienced in our clinics so far, I see it as just one piece of an arsenal. It’s kind of like you don’t go to the heaviest antibiotics for someone experiencing infection, you work up to it. And so I’ve really kind of opened my mind that ketamine is an amazing and powerful tool, it’s relatively safe, and it’s a great easy entry point into this kind of exploration.
0:19:13.9 Dr. Dominique Morisano: I guess there’s all kinds of approaches. Some of my more scientifically identified clients are very stern with me about this, so we [chuckle] honor where that is. I wanted to follow up on the ketamine piece because I was also in that kind of mind frame even before I started at Field Trip, and my thoughts and opinions have changed so hugely over the past year in witnessing all of the stories and seeing the patients change profoundly, and I have so much more respect, and I guess, care for Ketamine now than I did a year ago, and it blew my mind a little bit ’cause I had come in with a particular, I guess, bias and perspective, and then when I actually saw how it was being used with the IM and the kind of experiences that people were having, the really deep plunging that took place, and the way that therapists were able to work with people to pull the insights and the stories, it was… I don’t know, it’s been very incredible. One therapist described it this morning with group session as like magical.
0:20:21.5 Ronan Levy: Two questions, how much flack did you get for the name Moody Bitches on a Block? Did you get any push back on that? ’cause I think it’s awesome. And then secondly, and I’ll just leave it with you to go into this. Can you take us into the understanding of the Yin and Yang? ’cause I think for… And I’m gonna speak on behalf of a lot of men. As soon as they hear anything to do with feminine, they think of feminism and they get their backs up. And I see what we’re talking about, which is, it’s not feminism, it’s about feminine energies and what that means, and how we can all kind of move towards a more balanced state in a way that I think is healthy and productive, and recognize the effects of chauvinism being what has imbalanced those masculine and feminine energies.
0:21:02.9 Dr. Julie Holland, MD: You’re right to ask those two questions together because they are absolutely connected. So I had a really good book proposal for a book called Moody Bitches, and everybody I showed it to, every agent, every editor, every publisher. They loved it. Everybody loved it. They didn’t wanna change the title. They thought it was perfect, they thought it was funny and sharp and edgy, but when it actually got published, nobody wanted to walk around with a book that said Moody Bitches on it, and I assumed that it was the Bitches that was an issue, but I have come to see that it is actually the word moody, which was more of a trigger for people that they didn’t wanna identify as being moody. Anyway, it was totally a joke. I’m very jokey, I love to make jokes, it’s my defense mechanism. I’m usually being kind of sarcastic and tongue-in-cheek, but you can’t tell when it’s printed on the cover of a book, so people didn’t know that I was trying to be funny. But I think that this issue of Yin suppression and what my partner Jeremy likes to call the cancer of Yang.
0:22:05.3 Dr. Julie Holland, MD: First all, I don’t usually say feminine or masculine energies, because if you just think of Yin or Yang, try not to think of gender at all, really, that Yang is the sort of penetrative energy, it’s like the bullet or the arrow that goes out into the world. There’s a vector to it. It moves, it penetrates. Maybe shoot first, ask questions later, that’s kind of a Yang energy. And then a Yin is more hanging back, let’s be receptive, let’s see what’s going on before we just act impulsively, let’s gather information, let’s integrate. It’s a receptive kind of energy, it doesn’t necessarily have to be women or men. I’m a Yang woman married to a Yin man, so we can disengage these things from gender. But what’s happened in our culture for a long time is that boys were told, “Don’t cry, be a man,” but what I made the case in Moody Bitches is that eventually those messages that men were getting, the women started getting to, “You’re in a man’s world, so you’ve gotta be Yang and you’ve gotta go after what you want, and you can’t be emotional and you can’t hesitate.”
0:23:12.5 Dr. Julie Holland, MD: And so we’ve all been getting these messages that to succeed in a capitalist society, you need Yang energy, and so now we are imbalanced. And one of the things that psychedelics do, and one of the things that cannabis does, and one of the things that sex does and cuddling does, and meditation does, is it puts us in this sort of Yin, receptive, rest, digest, reflect, repair kind of a state instead of fighting, attacking or running away, that Yin energy allows us to stay, instead of attacking or fleeing, it allows us to stay. It allows us to stay in the room with our lovers when we’re having hard discussions, it allows us to stay with ourselves when we want to escape through drugs or alcohol, or food or sex or shopping, and so we need more of that Yin energy and it has nothing really to do with men and women. We are out of balance, we are very Yang heavy, there’s a cancer of Yang, and if you look at things like the military or fraternities and hazing or board rooms, there’s this sort of culture of growth at any cost, which in medicine by the way, growth at any cost, unrestricted growth, that’s what we call cancer. It’s not sustainable. Yin is sustainable, Yang is that you’re depleting your resources.
0:24:38.9 Ronan Levy: It does not need to be framed in terms of genderization, in terms of masculine, feminine. But one of the things that I’ve been thinking about is the implications of that distortion, of the heavy overweight of Yang, particularly in men, has also correspondingly created I think a counterpoint of the Yin in women, you see it particularly in professional context, it seems to be a common theme that women are afraid to ask for promotions or ask for raises, whereas men don’t. It’s not exclusively so, but that seems to be a common theme, so there’s lots of implications of how this plays out that does affect, not uniformly, but does get expressed I think a lot through gender in our society.
0:25:20.1 Dr. Julie Holland, MD: I think it is important to have not just a gender balance and a showing up of people from the BIPOC community in the board room. But you really need like a yin presence in the boardroom. It’s true if it’s just a bunch of Yang women and a bunch of Yang men, you still don’t have much balance, but I just… Unfortunately, I think we’re still in a place where people do not prize yin energy, where they don’t prize people who kinda hang back and aren’t immediately in the game.
0:25:50.3 Dr. Dominique Morisano: I think I identify with Julie, I think I also have a lot of yang energy, but one thing that’s helped me bring more yin into my life has been meditation, ’cause I’ve been doing that every day now through the pandemic, and it really allows me to stop shooting from the hip as much and to kind of think, take a step back, process the situation in the whole and then kind of respond rather than react, but it is true, it’s not necessarily as valued, and I think yin voices tend to get muted.
[music]
0:26:31.0 Ronan Levy: In my conversation with Julie, we touched on the topic of yin and yang, or masculine and feminine energies at some length, and I think it’s a very important conversation to have, but I also think it’s important to not jump to some of the obvious conclusions that one might tend to jump to out of that conversation, specifically being, “Let’s fix this, we just need more yin in this world.” The truth is, I’m a big believer we need a better balance between yin and yang, but before anyone jumps to any action, I say, chill out. As important as it is to recognize that more yin is needed, what I think is more important is to recognize that it’s easy to confuse symmetry with balance, that symmetry of Yin and Yang should not be the goal, but rather the balance of the two should be.
0:27:21.1 Ronan Levy: And to achieve balance, sometimes asymmetries are needed. In fact, I would argue that most of the significant modern achievements in humanity and medicine have been achieved by a heavy overweight in yang or masculine energies, and that’s a wonderful thing. As a species, we are living longer than ever, less people are in poverty or hungry than ever in history, and we have built technologies that are pushing the limits of objective physical reality, and much of that has been built on data, knowledge, creation and action, all typically Yang energies. But we’re also starting to see cracks from this imbalance of Yin and Yang, we are living longer, yes, but as evidenced by the global mental health crisis, we are pretty miserable.
0:28:06.1 Ronan Levy: We have created amazing wealth and technologies, but we are also pushing the limits of what our round blue and green planet can provide. And so before we rush to fix the under-waiting of yin energies, which ironically would be a very yang thing to do, let’s start by taking a moment to just realize that we need a rebalancing and sit with that even for the briefest of moments, because as Tom Robin says, It doesn’t matter how sensitive you are or how damn smart and educated you are, if you’re not both at the same time, if your heart and your brain aren’t connected, aren’t working together harmoniously, well, you’re just hopping through life on one leg. You may think you’re walking, you may think you’re running a damn marathon, but you’re only on a hot trip. The connection’s gotta be maintained.
[music]
0:28:58.1 Ronan Levy: So Julie, you’re a doctor, you’re an academic, you’re an author. From my read of things, and I certainly have not been able to go deep on all of your work, but from what I’ve been able to glean, you’ve really been at the forefront and a very powerful voice in a lot of subjects that are taboo or weren’t necessarily ready for the current time from feminine power and the balancing of the yin and the yang, to the cannabis, to psychedelics. Want to ask, what’s getting you out of bed this morning? It seems like you’ve been ahead of the curve on so many things. It’s like, what is the next thing? Or is like, is that enough right now?
0:29:38.5 Dr. Julie Holland, MD: Somebody asked me recently because she was in a position of power and she’s like, What can I do for you? What can I get you? I was like, Thank you. But I was like, I’m a middle-aged mother of two, I’m a 55-year-old woman, and I have… A lot of things that were really… That were getting me up in the morning for decades, finally have taken on a life of their own and have their own momentum, and I don’t need to push them anymore, and it’s incredibly gratifying for me to know that these things that I’ve been pushing for for 30 years, they’re gonna happen. They are happening now, and I can pull back a little bit. So what I’ve been really focusing on this past pandemic year is connection, oxytocin, how disconnected we are, how entrenched in our laptops and phones we are. I’ve been making music every day with my husband, and sometimes son and sometimes daughter, that’s turned into a daily discipline that we’re posting a song a day on Facebook and we’re recording music every day, and I’m going out in nature a lot. And my husband and I are really…
0:30:42.7 Dr. Julie Holland, MD: The thing that we are focusing on… Because Jeremy has been really patient, and I’m like, after this book… Okay, one more book and then we’ll do this. So he’s like, now is the time. So what we’re really focusing on now is diads, couple-hood, how incredibly challenging it is no matter how spiritually enlightened you think you are to stay in a relationship, to stay married, to come up against their vision of you over and over, like a mirror, basically. When you’re in a relationship that somebody’s always throwing a mirror up to you, you don’t always wanna look in that mirror. So we’re trying to put something together about couple-hood and we’re… I think we’re really trying to write a book together, Jeremy and I.
0:31:22.3 Ronan Levy: What are your thoughts about what is happening with the current psychedelic renaissance? I think there are some suggestions about calling it a telescope process, but what do you see that you like and what do you see that you don’t like about what’s happening? And what gives you heartburn and keeps you up at night, and what gives you a lot of hope and joy through what’s happening right now?
0:31:42.1 Dr. Julie Holland, MD: What keeps me up at night? Really, it’s the territorial pissings. It’s the land grabs, it’s the intellectual property, it’s very Yang behavior, it’s very capitalist behavior, it is not communal or social or yin. We all have these lessons that we’re supposedly learning from psychedelics about how we’re all one and love is the answer and everything is interconnected, and that separation is an illusion. These are all the basic things that you learn in a mystical experience, then we go out into the world and say, “This is mine, you can’t have it.” So, anti-competitive practices, patent, disputes, all the stuff that’s good… Yeah, I don’t think that you can patent psychotherapy.
0:32:25.5 Ronan Levy: And what gets you happy? Like where do you see things going extremely well and being like… Besides the fact that it’s just happening, which is certainly, I think, something to appreciate.
0:32:36.4 Dr. Julie Holland, MD: One of the things that gets me happy, seriously, is about 30 years ago, I went to the Chairman of Psychiatry at Mount Sinai Hospital, a guy named Ken Davis, who is now the CEO of Mount Sinai Medical, he’s really risen through the ranks. But I went to him in 1992 right after the FDA allowed Charlie Grob to give MDMA to healthy normals, and I went back to Sinai and I was like, “We need to do MDMA research. This is happening. It’s big, it’s exciting.” And he was just like, “There’s no way we’re ever doing that here, it’s not gonna happen. Not in my backyard.” Flash forward 30 years later, and Mount Sinai Hospital is creating a center for psychedelic studies and looking at trauma and psychedelic psychotherapy. I’ve been in touch with Rachel Yuhud, and I keep saying, if there is a ground-breaking ceremony, if there is a party, I wanna be there.
0:33:18.4 Dr. Julie Holland, MD: And then the other thing that makes me happy is when women are getting recognized and when women are being given the same sort of platforms that the men are getting. If you watch a documentary about psychedelics, any news story about psychedelics… And I love these guys. I’ve known Rick like 35 years or something crazy like that, since 1985. I love him. He’s done a lot. He gets a lot of credit. He should get a lot of credit. But you know who’s behind Rick? You know who runs maps? It’s a bunch of women. Do you know who runs Hopkins? Any time you kinda peel back the curtain, the guy who’s being interviewed and taking credit is… There’s a lot of people behind them that they deserve some time in the spotlight, so that would make me happy if more women were being featured.
0:34:03.8 Dr. Dominique Morisano: Yeah, I really second a lot of what Julie said about the issues with the competition and secrecy, and just like that territorial-ism, and I’m really working with a lot of people to try to combat that, I would say, and try to keep that spirit of what we’re doing, that connectedness, that kind of joint mission or shared vision alive. I think what’s also been a sticking point is a lot of confusion and maybe disagreement or lack of light on issues around accessibility and cultural considerations and appropriations and use of religion and spiritual traditions, or lack of use of them, and integration of those two things in research and in practice. And I’m really hopeful that we can figure out a way to open the space up for everybody who needs it, and honor all of the different paths that people are coming towards this point on.
0:35:14.8 Dr. Julie Holland, MD: Yeah, I think the accessibility issue is really a big deal, access. The people who are the most marginalized, most traumatized, the most in need of this medicine, are in many cases, the people who are least likely to actually get it.
0:35:28.8 Ronan Levy: Yeah, it’s a big challenge and it’s something that we talk about. I don’t have a great answer about how you go about doing it, there’s no simple answer as far as I can tell.
0:35:39.5 Dr. Julie Holland, MD: Well, I do think one big hurdle that if we can get over, will really make a difference, is insurance reimbursement. I get that not everybody has health insurance, but if we can start with creating a CPT code to actually get reimbursed by insurance companies, and obviously more people need to be insured, or God forbid we should just have national health care, but then it becomes much more accessible to many people. So this issue of equity and access, we should probably mention that, there is such a thing as racial trauma, the people who are experiencing micro or macro-aggressions related to their race, these people are traumatized on a daily basis, and it would really be great if we can focus on treating victims of racial trauma and to show that things like ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy, MDMA-assisted therapy, that these things really have the capacity to help heal.
0:36:37.0 Dr. Dominique Morisano: And also building capacity in BIPOC communities, like to be the therapist and be the people working.
0:36:46.3 Dr. Julie Holland, MD: Definitely.
0:36:46.3 Ronan Levy: Question I have, and it may be an inflammatory, but I’m asking it just because I’m still trying to wrap my head around that, is like, I read somewhere a quote that said, there are many ways to victimize a person, and one of the most insidious is to convince them that they’re a victim. And it comes to the question of trauma, which is, yeah, there is racial trauma, there’s no doubt about that. Maybe everybody is a victim of racial trauma, I don’t know. One of the things I get concerned about is, if I don’t perceive myself as a victim of racial trauma, I don’t like to be categorized that way.
0:37:16.2 Ronan Levy: And again, I’m speaking from the perspective of the successful white guy in this world, so my perspective is probably very skewed, but it is one of those things that I wrestle with, which is, in the context of Field Trip, it’s like I don’t wanna call any of our patients patients, because just by calling them a patient, you’ve created a narrative about who they are and where they are, and it’s putting something on them. Same with saying someone’s a victim of trauma, it’s kind of like the old expression that, by physics, bumblebees shouldn’t be able to fly, but they don’t know that, so they go ahead and keep on flying. And I’m just always kind of thinking about, how do you balance that? Or maybe it doesn’t need to be balanced, maybe I’m entirely wrong in thinking that there’s a conversation there, but I’d really be curious to hear your thoughts on that.
0:38:01.2 Dr. Julie Holland, MD: It is a good point. Even just saying, doctor-patient, you’re disempowering half of the people in that group, so it’s true that the word client really gives people more power. And I also sort of think about everybody has some trauma, and even if for some reason you had an amazingly perfect childhood, you may have epigenetic trauma. Maybe Ronan you had an easy time of it, but your great-grandfather was murdered in a pogrom or something. There are still situations where even though you don’t have it too tough or maybe you feel privileged, if you go back a few generations, you were persecuted. So there is this issue of epigenetic trauma, but I do agree with that, you wanna empower people as much as possible, and you don’t wanna assume that somebody is the victim of anything, unless that is how they’re identifying it, because it does take away their power for that narrative, I agree.
0:38:56.0 Dr. Dominique Morisano: And the impact of trauma is often on the resources that someone has to face that trauma. And so 10 people could be at the same event or have the same thing happen to them, and they may have very different responses based on their genetics, their epigenetics, their resilience strategies that they’ve developed, their coping skills, the sourcing and community around them, and so it’s really about never putting trauma on someone, but being there to receive it and support when someone wants support.
0:39:29.9 Dr. Julie Holland, MD: It’s a great experiment, it wasn’t my experiment, but this idea that everyone is being traumatized at once with COVID, it’s an evil experiment. But everyone is affected. Unless you don’t believe in it, maybe then you really have no trauma at all. You’re like, “What? There’s no virus, this is a hoax.” And then you go about your business and you’re fine. The fact of Covid is applied evenly, but the effect of covid obviously isn’t applied evenly, and so it is sort of an experiment to see how people handle trauma and my patients who are privileged and have money, and they’re seeing a private psychiatrist. Some of them handle it better than others, but almost all of my patients, if you scratch a little, I’m okay, I’m okay, but then you scratch a little more and it’s like, “Well, I have gained 20 pounds, or, well, I’m smoking pot every day. Or I’m drinking every night. Or eating junk food, I never used to do that.” You do start to get a sense of how people are dealing.
0:40:29.9 Ronan Levy: It is a huge global experiment that’s happening right now, and I agree with you, it’s like everyone’s affected by this, you can’t, even if you’re a denier, you know people who aren’t deniers, and therefore it’s affecting your relationships. And so that’s a universal experience right now to some degree, and it’s like as negative and as traumatizing as it has been, I also try to see the silver lining in this, which is like it is forcing people to confront their demons, it’s basically brought all of your issues, or not all of your issues, but some of your issues have come to the surface, it’s smacking you in the face, and it’s time to deal with your social anxiety, it’s time to deal with your financial anxiety, it’s time to deal with your agoraphobia or anything else. And so it’s also been a great pause in a very productive way, and it sounds like… You touched on this earlier, Julie, but I’d love to go into it a little bit more.
0:41:18.5 Ronan Levy: It’s like, I’ve spent a lot of time because a lot of my shit came up very early on, humans are remarkably resilient, and so like everyone’s probably found a pretty good new groove, even if it’s not ideal, and certainly I have… But at the beginning, there was a lot of stuff coming up for me, and out of this, I feel like I’m actually had a lot of growth. I feel like my relationship with Stephanie, my wife is that much stronger, even though at times it was that much more rocky. My relationships with my friends have gone deeper and as we’ve gone through this process together, so it sounds like you’ve resorted to singing as your mechanism to find growth in this, but I’m curious to know what you’ve really found or what came up for you as you’ve gone through this process.
0:42:05.8 Dr. Julie Holland, MD: Well, I did put on a little weight, I will admit, not a lot, but I definitely am allowing myself to eat Cheese puffs and Cheez-it crackers and chocolate, stuff that I never ever eat. Pasta, bread, never eat it. I’ve been eating it for about a year, not crazy, but just that seems to help balance things out somehow, so I soothe myself orally as many people do, and then I’m just… I’m trying to do cardio, but mostly the two things that have really saved me are I get out in nature a lot, we’ve got 12 acres of woods against 60 more acres of woods, we’ve got a lake across the street, a really beautiful swamp. Wetlands are gorgeous. There’s lots of birds. So I have access to nature. And speaking of nature, I have access to cannabis, and for me, a little bit of well-placed cannabis really helps with resilience and sort of stress tolerance.
0:43:03.9 Ronan Levy: Dominique what about you? What kind of awarenesses have come up for you?
0:43:08.0 Dr. Dominique Morisano: I am working too much probably, I think it’s interesting, I’m having my own healthcare providers confiding in me about their struggles, because I think this point of it affecting everybody is really true, I see everybody and all the care providers really struggling, and a lot of my friends that are mental health practitioners too are just like I’m burnt man. And so, taking extra good care has been something that’s been absolutely non-negotiable throughout this period, but it’s challenging. A lot of us don’t have the balance that we used to have with different kinds of activities, things getting us out of the house, for me, getting outside into sunshine every day has been really, really, really, really important. I think actually, your point to social anxiety before, like all my clients with social anxiety are having a ball this year ’cause they do not have to deal with it at all. And so I’m a little worried about post-pandemic when that kinda comes full circle again.
0:44:12.4 Dr. Julie Holland, MD: Yeah, the other thing that I wrote about a little bit in Moody Bitches, I touched on in the last chapter was that if you dig down a little bit, people who really care about environmental issues are in mourning for the planet and afraid of what’s to become of the human race. That sort of thing. So I think that all that stuff is really all still there, it’s just people, they don’t talk about it, they’re not in touch with it, but it’s almost like one of these background apps that’s always sort of running, is that on some level, you look around and you know it’s not sustainable. The way that we’re treating the planet, it’s not sustainable, and so that makes me a little bit anxious and depressed if I tap into it.
0:44:52.4 Ronan Levy: Julie, you’ve been very generous with your time, and I know Dominique, I asked this question before, so you don’t have to weigh into it, but the title of this podcast is Field Tripping, epic trips and psychedelics, and one of the things that we’ve touched on in passing, I think in this conversation, but I’d love to go a little bit more explicit, is helping people understand that psychedelic experiences A, aren’t these always hugely revelatory moments where you meet God or you meet aliens and everything is different, but it can actually be very, very constructive and meaningful and incremental to your lives. So one of the questions I ask all guests is like, what has been one of the most important lessons or takeaways that you’ve taken out of your psychedelic experiences in the past?
0:45:37.6 Dr. Julie Holland, MD: Let’s see, I am the God of my own universe was a big one. When I was in high school, I really had a very strong sensation in an early trip in high school that reality is what you make it and I can decide what the rules are, and it’s also this idea that everything is connected and I am connected to everything. And Alex Gray talked about once, this idea that there’s a universal lattice work of sort of electric energy that connects everything, but I had a sense of everything being sort of connected, but me belonging in that connection, I am a child of the universe, I have a right to be here, I’m just as important as that tree, that kind of thing. So just sort of the interdependence of everything, but I have to say that actually my most profound experiences, as much as I would love to say that they came from LSD or psilocybin or 5 MeO DMT or Ayahuasca, and I have had very profound psychedelic experiences, but the thing that really shifted a lot for me was my MDMA, my early MDMA experiences and really getting a better sense of sort of self-analysis and how I tick and what makes me work, and just I felt like I was sort of got a user manual a little bit and it just… It was really, really useful information for me.
0:47:01.2 Dr. Dominique Morisano: One thing that comes up in this conversation is honestly, that some of my most profound experiences have been from alternate states of consciousness that aren’t necessarily psychedelic, like substance induced, but I think there’s all different kinds of experiences for all these different states, but in breath work and meditation in nature and in states of flow and all of these kinds of things, as well as with psychedelics, that feeling of connection like that, it’s like these universal things that come up, the feeling of connections being part of something. And also having that in the same ways that you guys were talking about the partner as being the mirror, like having that experience often be the mirror as to what’s going on with you in any given moment in a time period, and I feel like these experiences put you face-to-face with whatever you need to work on and whatever is still keeping you stuck and holding you back, and then that integration is so important. So it’s almost like a map for me to have these experiences and to say, “Okay, time to go in again,” and it’s not… Not that it’s necessarily fun.
0:48:13.1 Dr. Dominique Morisano: In fact, it’s often very hard and you have to garn up some courage and some bravery to go there and say, “Alright, I’m ready to go, I’m ready to learn again. Prepare. Launch. Alright, here we are. Okay.” And then taking the space after, taking the time after to really get into yourself, really be creative and spend some time processing what just happened. What insights did you gain? And then how is that gonna impact your life? Is that gonna change anything? I once asked a group of people in a pool, this was at a breathwork retreat, what has changed for you as a result of doing psychedelics or doing breathwork? What actually has changed for you in your life? Well, what do you do differently now? You know, and people actually had a hard time answering it, and so I try to bring that to my own spaces like… What do I want to be different as a result of this? How do I want to interact with the world differently? And what do I want to change in the world?
0:49:17.0 Ronan Levy: Yeah, and the truth is, it’s ineffable, it’s like, it’s not necessarily being able to point to… Like, this is how my life is better. It’s like, I just feel better. And that should be good enough, but in our society, it really often is not a good enough answer, but maybe it should be.
0:49:32.8 Dr. Julie Holland, MD: Yeah, well, I think it’s hard not to sound like a hippie when you are coming away with universal truths, and honestly, I will say as for the hippies, the hippies were right, the hippies were right about kombucha and sprouted greens, and the hippies were right about micro-biotic eating and the hippies were right about free love and all sorts of other things. So it’s too bad that sounding like a hippie is such a terrible thing, because I think that the more that we can approximate hippie behavior, the happier we’re gonna be.
0:50:02.9 Ronan Levy: I’ve long felt like I was a hippie in a previous life, ’cause I’ve always been so fascinated by so much of what that experience must have been, but on that note, I wanna thank you so much for joining me and us on the podcast today, I’ve incredibly enjoyed it, I’ve found it to be incredibly insightful and immersive. So thank you and keep up the good work, and I’m gonna check out some of your music online, and I can’t wait to hear about the forthcoming awareness and insights, about what it means to be in a dyad. Also a word I don’t think I’ve ever used in conversation.
0:50:37.2 Dr. Julie Holland, MD: But now you will, it’s a great word.
0:50:42.5 Ronan Levy: After sitting down with Julie and Dominique, four key things stood out to me. First, the world needs more people like Dr. Julie Holland, Julie is credentialed, thoughtful, considerate, and frankly, right on most issues, she advocates around. She is a force of nature that blends Yin and Yang in a way that creates powerful, meaningful impact. On that note, even though I agree with so much of what Julie said, there is one area in which I disagree with her on slightly. But that’s probably more a limitation of the conversation than probably what she meant. Julie seemed to suggest that the world needs more Yin energy, the energy is associated with conception, reception, contemplation and awareness, as opposed to the Yang energies of creation, knowledge and action. If you have trouble conceiving what these energies are, just imagine the stereotypical image of little boys and girls. Boys, and this is not an absolute statement by any stretch, tend to be more gregarious, destructive and loud, girls tend to be more reserved, quiet and contemplative.
0:51:45.0 Ronan Levy: This is not a perfect analogy, but it helps one understand the difference between Yin and Yang energies. In any event, where I disagree with Julie is that she says that the world needs more Yin energy. My disagreement is that a more accurate statement is that each of us individually needs a better balance between Yin and Yang, feminine and masculine. Having five billion people heavy on Yin and five billion people heavy on Yang would not serve us as well as having 10 billion people on this planet well adapted at integrated, logic and emotion, that’s the balance we are trying to achieve. On that note, I think it’s important that we come to recognize how religion has played an important part in how the imbalance of Yin and Yang occurred. Julie mentioned the term religious trauma, here’s how Tom Robbins articulated it. To diminish the worth of women, men had to diminish the worth of the moon, they had to drive a wedge between human beings and the trees and the beasts and the waters, because trees and beasts and waters are as loyal to the moon as to the sun.
0:52:53.5 Ronan Levy: They had to drive a wedge between thought and feeling. At first, they used Apollo as the wedge, and the abstract logic of Apollo made a mighty wedge indeed, but Apollo, the artist maintained a love for women, not the open unrestrained lust that pan has, but a controlled longing that undermined the patriarchal ambition. When Christ came along, Christ who slept with no female, Christ who played no musical instrument, recited no poetry and never kicked up his heels by moonlight, this Christ was the perfect wedge. Christianity is merely a system for turning priestesses into hand maidens, Queens into concubines and goddesses into muses. And to be clear, I’m not trying to criticize religion, though I frankly do have many concerns about modern religion, but this is an opportunity to learn from the past. Finally, my favorite moment in our conversation came out when Julie said, the hippies were right, and I have always been a fan of what the hippie movement was and stood for despite it losing its way. But even I was always hesitant to be so declarative on the subject fearing backlash, I will be no longer.
0:54:00.4 Ronan Levy: The hippies were right on so many issues, as Tom Robin said, like the Arthurian years at Camelot, the ’60s constituted of breakthrough, a fleeting moment of glory, a time when a significant little chunk of humanity briefly realized some moral potential and flirted with its neurological destiny. A collective spiritual awakening that flared brilliantly until the barbaric and mediocre impulses of the species drew tight once more the curtains of darkness. Right on, man. Thank you for listening to Field Tripping, a podcast dedicated to exploring psychedelic experiences and their ability to affect our lives. I’m your host, Ronan Levy. Until next time. Stay curious. Breath properly. And remember, every day is a field trip if you let it be one. Field Tripping is created by Ronan Levy and produced by Conrad page. Our researcher, it is Sharon Bella, special thanks to Quill and of course, many things to Dr. Julie Holland for joining me today. To learn more about Julie and her work check out her website, naturalmood.com, or follow her on Twitter @Bellevue Doc. Finally, subscribe to her podcast and sign up for the newsletter at fieldtripping.fm.
