Inside the World’s Only Licensed Ayahuasca Retreat

Nick Urban [00:00:01]:
You’re listening to High Performance Longevity. The show exploring a better path to optimal health for those daring to live as an outlier in a world of averages. I’m your host, Nick Urban, bioharmonizer, performance coach, and lifelong student of both modern science and ancestral wisdom. Each week we decode the tools, tactics and timeless principles to help you optimize your mind, body and performance span things you won’t find on Google or in your AI tool of choice. From cutting edge biohacks to grounded lifestyle practices, you’ll walk away with actionable insights to look, feel and perform at your best across all of life’s domains.

Nick Urban [00:00:51]:
Today’s guest runs the only ayahuasca treat in the world that’s actually licensed as a medical facility, a real license from the Costa Rican Ministry of Health. If you’ve never heard the word ayahuasca, here’s the short version. It’s an Amazonian plant medicine. Two plants brewed together. Traditional healers have used it in ceremony for thousands of years. Today, people are using it to work through trauma, addiction, depression and a whole lot of other stuff. It’s a small unregulated industry of underground retreats around it. Some of them are great and some of them are dangerous.

Nick Urban [00:01:32]:
The place we’re talking about today is actually in none of these things. It’s called rythmia. It’s in Costa rica. They have four doctors on staff, 12 nurses, a paramedic on the floor for every ceremony, and they turn away 22 people every single day on medical grounds. Running the medical operation is Dr. Jeff McNairy. He has a doctorate in psychology and a master’s in public health from ucla. For rythmia, he was working in psychiatric units in Pasadena.

Nick Urban [00:02:04]:
Then he served as administrative director of Passages Malibu, the high end celebrity re rehab. He’s on the show today because almost nobody talks about plant medicine that actually looks at it through a clinical scale. Jeff, welcome to the podcast.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:02:20]:
Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to talk about what we’re doing in Costa Rica. It’s very exciting.

Nick Urban [00:02:25]:
Yes. So set the stage for someone who has never heard of anything I just mentioned before. In your own words, what is ayahuasca? What actually happens at arrhythmia week, and what do you wish more people understood before they even started to consider it?

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:02:42]:
Ayahuasca, as you mentioned earlier, is a brew. It’s like a. It’s a tea that’s made up of two different plants. And these plants grow in the Amazonian basin of South America, predominantly And these plants have been used, as you mentioned, for thousands of years from indigenous tribes in those areas. And what they do is very interesting when you drink it. So the active ingredient of ayahuasca is dmt, which is dimethyltryptamine. That molecule is in our bodies already. It’s also in all living things, mammals, plants, everything around us has a certain amount of DMT in it.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:03:22]:
And the other plant that’s, that’s used is the vine, and that is a monoamine oxidase inhibitor. So an MEOI as we call it in the medical field is very important in this drink because if you were to drink a cup of just pure liquid dmt, your stomach would digest it and break it up and nothing would happen. So the MAOI turns off the stomach enzymes temporarily so you can absorb the DMT into your body. So a lot of people ask, like, well, if I have DMT in me already, why would I want to drink a little extra? Well, the reason is because DMT is naturally released into our bodies during a couple different times in our life. One of them is when we’re born, one of them is when we die. And then it happens throughout life during lucid dreams, when moments of intuition, feelings of connection with other people. And so unfortunately, in a western framework of living, we’ve blocked the natural channels and reservoirs of DMT release in the body. And we’ve done that through environmental conditions.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:04:25]:
I grew up in Los Angeles. A lot of breath, breathe a lot of smog, and there’s pollution also. Eating poor food, thinking negatively and stuff, just kind of like the western grind that we all go through in life. Those have blocked some of the natural sources of DMT release. So when you drink a cup of ayahuasca or a little shot glass as we give people here, so about 2 ounces, what happens is that ayahuasca lubricates and activates your natural reserves. So then what happens is you connect with yourself first and then with your surroundings, whether that be nature or other people. And you really get to access parts of the brain that I’m sure we’ll talk about where you’ve stored up a lot of emotional baggage. And that’s why it’s so great for trauma, depression, anxiety, all these mental health issues, as well as some physical issues like autoimmune conditions that we can also talk about.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:05:22]:
So rythmia is a place that provides this ayahuasca medicine, as we call it, plant medicine, four nights a week and for a week long program. And with that ayahuasca session or those sessions we provide workshops, classes, integration, a way to understand this modality. And we’re learning from the ancient tribes of South America on how to administer this in a way that can be beneficial for people. Because we all know nowadays in the world there’s a lot of adversity, there’s a lot of trauma, there’s a lot of wars going on. Everybody seems kind of. There’s lost vibe and people are working too much, not taking care of themselves. So this is a way that people can plug back into themselves and be happy and see what’s really important in their lives for themselves and their families.

Nick Urban [00:06:12]:
Yeah, I think when most people picture plant medicine retreats, they’re thinking of a hut in the jungle and just one shaman that’s working with them. On your staff, you have four doctors, 12 nurses, paramedic on the floor for every ceremony and over 260 staff. What does a null Tuesday look like? Arrhythmia. Who’s on shift, what are they doing and what’s not in the picture?

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:06:37]:
So in addition to that medical team that we have, we also have 45 shamanic practitioners. So in the. We call this place that we serve ayahuasca called the Maloka. In the Maloka, it’s an enclosed area. And Tuesday morning they wake up and the guests do yoga and then they go to a meditation class. Then they go into a class that helps them understand sort of metaphysical concepts. The Reverend Michael Beckwith from the Agape Spiritual center is a partner of ours at Rythmia and we teach his curriculum a couple times a week. So on Tuesday is one of his classes.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:07:15]:
And then around 3 to 3pm we have an integration class. Because if it’s Tuesday, Monday was the first ayahuasca session. So Tuesday they’re probably experiencing some things and maybe a little confused or they might feel great or they might feel not so great. So that class from 3 to 4 every afternoon helps people understand what they’re going through and it gives some strategies on how to deal with it. So around 5.30pm, people line up again outside the Maloka. They go in, they have a mattress that they’ve picked out that’s very comfortable with pillows and blankets, and they have a bucket where they can throw up in if they need to. Now why would anybody throw up? Well, the reason is because ayahuasca creates a psychosomatic response, which means that an emotion that we’ve held inside of us for a very long time starts to develop physical symptoms. So if I have anxiety since I was a kid and I’m holding it in over time, I’ve developed a bad back or I’ve, or I have lupus or I’ve developed some autoimmune, other autoimmune conditions.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:08:18]:
I’ve, I’ve held in this emotional process because I didn’t feel safe to let it out. I didn’t know how to let it out. My family didn’t teach me or I just didn’t learn it. And when you drink ayahuasca, it goes into your body and finds these areas of emotional storage and it releases them. And that’s where people might throw up some. And about 50% will throw up at least once while they’re with us for the week. Or they might go to the bathroom very frequently. We have seven bathrooms in that maloka.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:08:48]:
Or they might yawn these deep, deep yawns, which, that’s my favorite way to, as we call purge. Yawns are great. And there’s other ways like sweating and different things. So that night goes on from 5:30pm until about 1 or 2 in the morning. And during that evening, prior to, people have three opportunities to drink ayahuasca. And some people drink all three times or some people drink just once or maybe twice. And it, it depends on how you’re doing, how you’re feeling. We always tell people that when you, if you can hear the calling for the second cup, then you should get up and go take it.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:09:23]:
And if you don’t hear it because you’re in your process, then you’re okay and you don’t need to take it, just keep going. So we have about a 5 to 1, 6 to 1 on the high end, usually a 4 to 1 ratio of staff to guest. So there’s a lot of the shamanic people in there watching you, knowing, you know, what’s, where you’re, where you’re at with the process. They’re talking to you, they’re making sure you’re okay. And that’s where the paramedic is. He’s, he’s hanging around there. And also our medical doctors are. One of them’s on call every night and one, our main medical director lives on site actually, and I’m on call as well.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:09:59]:
And they rarely need me, you know, because this is a very safe process for those that are medically cleared. And so at the end of the night, the people wrap it up. You know, the ayahuasca is fading, the process that they’re feeling. And then they get taken back to their rooms and they sleep A little bit and. Or maybe they journal a bit of what happened. And that’s a typical Tuesday. That’s what it looks like for us.

Nick Urban [00:10:22]:
And thinking back to what you were saying about the psychosomatic experience and the ability to, like, attach physical characteristics to emotions and to stuck traumas and stuff like that, this has been like knowledge that the communities with ayahuasca and other plant medicines have known about for a long time. And it seems that it predated what any of the research said. How did they come about figuring out that’s what was going on?

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:10:50]:
I think what happened was there was a lot of studies done with veterans of the military because the reason why they looked at the veterans, as opposed to people that, let’s say, had childhood trauma, is because the childhood trauma, when it’s unearthed, can be triggering for people and it can be dangerous, and it can put them in harm’s. Harm’s way. And so if, unless you have a really great support system, the childhood trauma thing is tough to look at. So the best way that they were looking at this sort of emotional connection to a physical symptom was with veterans, because they’ve had recent trauma. And so what’s happened when you’re in a war. And we can liken this to people that aren’t veterans, like, if I’m under stress or I’m in a trauma moment. So we’ll use the veterans as an example. If I’m fighting a war, my emotions would absolutely get in the way of my survival.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:11:44]:
I can’t feel the fear not. I can’t feel the worry, the empathy, the doubt, whatever it might be that I’m feeling in that moment, I have to push that out of the way into the amygdala. And the amygdala part of the brain is where we store this emotional baggage. So I can fight or flight in that moment, and it allows me to behaviorally survive. And then that war ends, or that trauma moment ends, or that trauma era ends, whatever it might be. And then I’m supposed to air quotes, I’m supposed to feel the emotions and let them come out and process them and let them get them out of me. But we know in the Western world, especially with veterans, that doesn’t happen. And so then they come home from war, or we go about our lives in business or whatever, with family, and we’re holding on to all this baggage.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:12:31]:
So the reason they were able to notice in the vets that they let this go through an ayahuasca session or multiple ayahuasca sessions is because how they behaved with themselves afterwards. So the follow up that continued after the vets did it were very, was very important because their addiction disappeared in a lot of them. Their depression symptoms dramatically reduced, if not completely went away. And about 85% of the people that had depression and were on meds and came off meds to do this do not go back to their SSRI medication. So there’s been some tangible data that shows that there’s an actual result for people. And in the veteran community, they call it PTS because they don’t believe that it’s a disorder. They believe that it’s a symptom or a condition. So I like that framework.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:13:21]:
So that’s, that’s kind of the studies and what they’ve looked at. For people with this psychosomatic realization, it

Nick Urban [00:13:27]:
must be kind of difficult to untangle. Like how do you know it’s that specifically? And it’s the fact that they’re processing the emotion versus other things that it could be. Also, perhaps they’re just like, they see life differently after this and it has nothing to do with their previous life experiences. I mean, it seems to me like it’s, it’s fairly obvious that it has to be like working through things that have stuck with them. But I think a lot of people would say that they had this experience they saw affected them in a moment, then they moved on and then it was behind them. And of course, like, there’s the symptoms that. No, actually it’s still with them, but they might not ascribe it to that particular cause. Might be, okay, I just had this and that.

Nick Urban [00:14:05]:
I just, I just feel depressed now.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:14:07]:
Yeah, then. And there’s, there’s a concept in this whole process called synaptic plasticity. Because if I have a knee jerk reaction to a certain event in my life, like let’s say again, the veterans, a great example. So if I hear bullet, bullet shots, if I hear gunshots, then I immediately go into this mode of, of self, self protection. Now if I’m at home and I hear the lawnmower start up and I get that same response, that’s not serving me very well. So I need to reframe a new neuron pathway that doesn’t represent fear when I hear a loud sound. And so again, we can liken this to lots of things for different people, even if they’re not vets. And so the intention that the person has prior to the ayahuasca session is extremely important.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:14:54]:
So the veteran would say, okay, I don’t want to be jumpy when I hear a loud noise, like, that’s just that simple. And then what happens is they drink ayahuasca. That’s their intention. And then the amygdala gets tapped into through a process that activates the SigMar1 gene or get too technical with genetic stuff, but there’s a gene that, that ayahuasca activates that allows a synaptic connection between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. And what happens is the emotions that are stored there come forward to the prefrontal cortex, where we have our logical, rational, conscious self. And then I remember things, or I might have a visual of it, and I release it through that purge. So sometimes that process surfaces, things that are very upsetting and can lead to sadness and anger or guilt and all these things. And that’s, that’s part of the process.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:15:48]:
And so often people during the week will say, you know, on Wednesday, middle of the week, I feel worse than I ever did before this. And that’s true because you’re no longer blocking that emotion. You’ve let it surface. So what we teach people is how to keep working through that and to release it. And sometimes things that are very profound happen in the middle of the day, way after the ayahuasca session ended, because you’ve opened up, as I call it, like this Pandora’s box. It’s all flowing out. So with time and support and integration, post rhythmia, post ayahuasca, that is a critical step to continue on the pathway to not kind of backtrack or go back to the old ways.

Nick Urban [00:16:30]:
That seems like a chocolate colored broccoli approach to me. Chocolate covered broccoli approach, where you’re coming for the experience. And at the same time, what you’re getting is perhaps something invaluable to the rest of your life, which is like, okay, something happens to you, traumatic or difficult or sad, there’s a feeling that goes through your body and here’s what you actually do with it. Because you can cover a lot of ground in a ceremony or a series of ceremonies. But then also what happens when the ceremony ends, when you go back to your life and then six months pass, a year passes, like you actually have the tools. Are you equipped to handle things on your own so they don’t actually get lodged in the subconscious, in the nervous system, in the amygdala, and instead you can work through them and process them at the right time and live less encumbered by some of these things.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:17:19]:
Yeah. And it’s very Important that the, that the guests have an aftercare program. We actually have a 13 week integration program that everybody automatically gets. It’s an app on their phone called Our Life. And with that app comes weekly group therapy. One on one coaching. Thirteen modules of videos that I did that show how to get, integrate what they’re, what they learned and to remind them of the tools that they have to deal with life differently in a more productive way. There’s also breath work in there and there’s also guided meditations and a lot of other really cool stuff.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:17:52]:
And it’s all free to the guests except for the one on one coaching costs a little bit, but a lot of people don’t really even need that. And oftentimes people after about two weeks after their experience with ayahuasca, they might take a little bit of a dip because they’re trying to re acclimate to their job or to their family, to their environment, to. And we give people tools, especially during that two week period to have a daily practice. Talk to some people that you met at Rythmia or they are supportive in your life, eat super clean and healthy, avoid alcohol. And we’re talking about the next two weeks generally and then have things like breath work and other tools. Meditation, I like to just use exercise and surfing. Like that’s what I do to integrate because I’m connecting with myself, connecting with nature, connecting with my body. And so the follow up that we do at six months, we have some amazing data that shows that people are still in the zone and still feeling amazing in about, you know, I’d say about 30% of our guests return and when they return it’s, it’s often because they’re bringing a friend or a family because their friends and family saw wow, you know, you changed, something’s up, right? So they often come or they, they feel that the guest feels that they hit a crossroads and maybe they, they made some poor decisions or something or they want to go deeper.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:19:08]:
So we have an alumni program that teaches deeper intentions and additional curriculum. We call it the nine and there’s nine new intentions that we show people.

Nick Urban [00:19:17]:
Okay, you guys clearly have a comprehensive process here. Go back to the other end of the life cycle before people actually even encounter you. After as soon as they encounter you, there’s a good percentage of them that don’t ever make it. I think if you turn away around 22 people every single day on medical grounds alone, what’s that screening actually looking for? And who’s the person that you have to say no to that would surprise the listener the most.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:19:42]:
The good news is that out of those 22 people that we turn away daily in the phone room, lots of them can still come down the road when they taper off of certain medications. So because of the maoi, the monoamine oxidase inhibitor component of Ayahuasca, there’s certain contraindications, especially with psychotropic medication. So SSRIs for depression, those are contraindicated. You can’t be on those. You have to be 30 days at least off of them. Also benzodiazepines, which are anti anxiety medications, Xanax, Valium, Klonopin, those types of things, you have to be two weeks off of those. It’s very important to taper. If you’re on a daily regimen of any of those, you have to taper with that safely with the, with your prescribing physician.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:20:26]:
Also, there’s heart conditions that are contraindicated. For example, if someone has an irregular heartbeat, which, which is funny because it’s called arrhythmia. So if you have an arrhythmia, you can’t come right. So that’s pretty funny. So arrhythmia means in sync with yourself. Arrhythmia means out of sync. So if your heart has an irregular, out of sync heartbeat, we don’t want you to drink ayahuasca because the surface of your heart has receptors that the MAOI can interfere with for somebody that’s not in sync with their normal heart rate. And if people have had open heart surgery or they’ve had a pacemaker placed, that’s something that’s not safe to do.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:21:04]:
Ayahuasca. Now there’s mental health conditions that are also contraindicated. Bipolar one versus bipolar two, I’ll tell you the difference. But bipolar one means that somebody is often in the, in a manic state. So they’re hyper spending or hyper talking or hyper using drugs and alcohol. So they’re like really in this escalated sort of psychiatric sort of space of mania. And those people are often on psych meds, hopefully that bring them down into a, a mood stabilizing zone. And those psych meds are contraindicated with ayahuasca.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:21:39]:
So we don’t want people to come off of those psych meds to come here because during that 30 day off period, they’ll definitely flip back into mania. So that’s why it’s not a good protocol for somebody. Now bipolar two is very different. It’s mostly depressed. There might be A manic episode every once in a while, like a couple times a year for some. Sometimes it’s a couple times a month. So those people we can deal with. And so we don’t have that now.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:22:05]:
If somebody has schizophrenia, we don’t have them come either because the, the amount of care and sort of supervision that would be required is, is just, it’s very, it’s a lot. And so my background in the psychiatric hospital in Pasadena that I worked at, you know, I, I know how to handle those, those types of people. And by the way, they’re amazing individuals. They’re just going through a lot of different stuff that’s, that’s neurological. And another thing is type 2 diabetes now, or, I’m sorry, type 1 diabetes. Type 1 is from childhood. Usually. It’s what you, you’ve, you just inherited it most of the time.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:22:41]:
And so that is a contraindication because we can’t monitor your blood sugar effectively during the ayahuasca process because you have to fast each day and not eat dinner because you might throw it all up anyway. And so we want you to be clean in your system. And that doesn’t work for type one diabetics. So those are the kind of the main categories that we don’t have people come to rythmia for.

Nick Urban [00:23:05]:
And before arrhythmia, you were running rounds and locked psychiatric units in Pasadena. Then you were the administrative director at Passages Malibu, which is the celebrity rehab. That’s like a polar opposite. It’s the most Western, most clinical, most pharmaceutical heavy end of mental health. How does a guy with your background end up the chief medical director of an ayahuasca retreat in Costa Rica? Was there a specific moment?

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:23:31]:
It’s a great question. And I was becoming increasingly frustrated with the protocols that I was taught in school. And I was observing all these people, whether it was in the locked psychiatric units in my private practice or at Passages Malibu, where people were just replacing addictions for other things on a ton of meds and not getting anywhere. I believe that the Western medical model is amazing at stabilizing people. So somebody’s really high risk and let’s say they might be self harming or neglectful of themselves, the medical model of the west can help stabilize them. But the next step is healing. And the Western model is not good at that. For people that have addictions and mental health, like depression, anxiety and trauma.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:24:17]:
And so I was having all my clients basically hit dead ends. And it’s expensive to do all those things. It takes a long time. I Remember I had a patient that told me, you know, I thought therapy was going great. And. And at the five year mark, she said, now I trust you. Now I can go deep into my process of trauma. I was like, what? What? Like, it’s been five years.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:24:40]:
Now you trust me. So you really have to build rapport with your clinician over time if you’re really going to dig deep. So what flipped me was seeing Jerry Powell, who was a client of Passages Malibu, come through the doors. He was very difficult. He was a disaster. He was on drugs, he was doing alcohol. Just a mess, totally inappropriate person in the world. And he hated himself and he didn’t really know why.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:25:05]:
So he went through the rehab, he got rid of his Demerol addiction, which was his goal. So that was good. But he left and he continued to do alcohol and still womanizing, just. He was still a mess. And so he got turned on to plant medicine from an aftercare shaman therapist that we would refer people to at Passages. And then this dude came back from Costa Rica, where he did this the first time and sat with the medicine and he was a totally different person. And I was shocked. And I was actually very skeptical because I’d never seen anything like this.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:25:36]:
I just knew the Western model. I didn’t know about plant medicine. And I was like, well, he’s in the way, as we call it, the pink cloud, where everything’s wonderful, but it’s a delusion because you’re not really going to progress long term. You just feel great in the moment. I thought Jerry was in that sort of pink cloud vibe. So it didn’t end, though. He continued to be happy. And this went on for a while.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:26:01]:
And I was like, wait a minute. This is actually something that worked. So I went down with Jerry to Costa Rica in 2014, and I tried the plant medicine myself, and it blew me away. I healed some childhood issues that I had some trauma from the neighborhood I grew up in, in Los Angeles. I just had all this clarity. I thought, wow. And Jerry and I both decided at that point we wanted to offer a different tool to people that have maybe hit dead ends with the Western model of meds and therapy and things like that, that they could, those that qualify medically could. Could do this in a safe, medically licensed facility.

Nick Urban [00:26:39]:
We’ve talked a lot about how it can be used for trauma, for addiction, stuff like that. In a previous call, I hope it’s okay to mention this. You told me that you and Jerry make business decisions by drinking ayahuasca, holding the Same question, and then comparing notes. Walk me through a decision where you two got different answers and what did you do?

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:26:58]:
Yeah, so this is a Bowiti tribal concept from their council in the Congo area of Gabon, Africa. We learned. We learned this from a shaman from that area that we’re really good friends with. And he told us that in their tribe, if they have a big decision to make about anything in the tribe, they’ll do that. They’ll have one chief go and participate in plant medicine, get an answer, and then another chief will go a different day or even a different whatever place in the jungle and do it and see if their answers compare. And if they don’t compare, then they have to keep going deeper and maybe, you know, look at it in a different way. So, Jerry, I really liked that. And so we adopted that practice at Rythmia.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:27:41]:
So an example would be, you know, a really simple example would be yoga. So we. We offer yoga not every single day of the week. We used to, but we. We were seeing that a lot of people weren’t going on Fridays and they weren’t going on, like, Monday morning so much. So we thought, well, maybe we should. We should eliminate yoga. But we didn’t want to just, like, nix it without having a reason.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:28:04]:
So we went into an ayahuasca session, and one of our intentions was, are we. Are we having yoga? Too many days? What should we do? And there’s a concept in ayahuasca called consulta, or consult, where you get some information downloaded into you. And it sounds crazy, I know, but what it. What it represents and looks like for people is a lot of different things. For me, it’s just a clarity of thought, and I just have my own thoughts come that are. That kind of answer the question. So I go, okay, cool, yeah, you know what? Monday’s not going to work. Friday, they’re exhausted.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:28:37]:
Makes sense. And so that’s my answer to Nick’s Monday and Friday, for example. So then we. I asked Jerry how he. How he did. He didn’t tell me beforehand, and he says, oh, yeah, last week I got the same answer. So I’m like, okay, cool. So that’s what we’ll do.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:28:52]:
Now, if we get conflicting answers, what we do is we say, okay is our own baggage that we’re dealing with individually getting in the way. And oftentimes it is because we’re human, you know, and so we’ll. We’ll often involve a third person, one of the shamanic staff, to help us and get a third opinion. So we’ve we’ve built the entire company of Rythmia on that concept of consulta and getting these answers from our ayahuasca experiences. So it’s kind of funny because people will say at the end of the week, man, you guys have done a great job. This is a cool place. I’m like, hey, just thank you. I don’t know, think the plant medicine, because it’s not, it’s not us doing this, it’s.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:29:30]:
We’re, we’re a vessel to receive this information, to create a program that’s really safe and, and productive for the people that come here.

Nick Urban [00:29:37]:
Yeah. Downloads are one of those things that have a negative stigma around them. But then again, everyone has flashes of insight that just appear in their mind. Either a visual or a thought or something. It’s actually a very normal experience.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:29:52]:
Yeah. And I think the field of psychology got really away from that type of thinking because. For good reason actually, because in the 70s when they were doing regressive trauma therapy, there were, the therapists were found to some of them to plant thoughts and, and events that were not accurate and especially regarding trauma. And so the field, you know, it was a lot of liability prone issues. It was hurting people more than helping. So they got away from that type of downloadable sort of remembering memory stuff. And only until recently, the last decade, they’ve started to look at trauma in a way that’s more therapeutically beneficial. So for us, I believe that at Rythmia we have a way to understand those sort of downloads that come or those consultas.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:30:42]:
And oftentimes, you know, we, we just focus on the emotion that’s surfacing for people when they go through something because sometimes these visions or these thoughts are nonsensical. And like, what does that even mean? Like, and it’s impossible sometimes to interpret it, so we don’t even try to. We just say, how did you feel when that was happening? When you saw the rainbow jump over the mountain and the whale threw up, you know, a house? Like, what, what did you, how did you feel? And the person says, oh, well, I felt extremely unsafe and concerned. Okay. Is that a theme in your life? As a matter of fact, it is a theme in my life. Oh, okay. So when was the first time you felt like that? Oh, you know what? I think I was about six years old. I think when I felt that way for the first time because my mom got pregnant, I thought I was going to be on the outs and my little brother that was coming was going to be like, now the focus of the family And I got really worried.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:31:32]:
It’s, oh, okay, so who has that made you become? Oh, it’s made me become somebody that’s very guarded. I don’t trust people. I operate in this buffer zone between me and the world and that’s what we get to with people and that’s where we help them work on that and heal.

Nick Urban [00:31:48]:
Seems like whether using and working with assistance or not, if you’re able to feel something like that and have noticed theme that’s currently present in your life and then go back to when the first time you felt it was. Unfortunately a lot of it does actually link back to early in life or just following the thread back is a good way of like figuring out where the origin of this is.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:32:11]:
The 12 year old mark for all of us is when the developmental stages of adolescence sort of ends. And so what happened? Obviously there’s more growth and development neurologically until about age 25, but from 0 to 12, there’s these milestones that we have to hit that involve safety, involve emotional connection, that involve individualization from our moms to us that we’re two different people. There’s all these different things that have to happen and it’s a vulnerable time and we’re just, we’re all human, trying our best. And sometimes there’s things that we don’t get to meet in that emotional sort of pathway, in those steps that are good for a healthy person to exist. And so a lot of, like you said, a lot of the trauma, a lot of the events that we’re dealing with now are often from childhood. And that’s, that’s a part, that’s the reason, because we’re super vulnerable in those, in those moments.

Nick Urban [00:33:04]:
Dr. Jeff, have you and Jerry ever gotten a shared mutual download? And it was just wrong. Like clearly in retrospect, the ceremony just didn’t yield the results that you thought it was.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:33:17]:
Yeah, that happened. Now it’s interesting because at the time we thought exactly what you said, like this didn’t work out for us, this was wrong. But over time we’ve learned that that was actually a message that we didn’t have the, the openness to look at. So, for example, we first started off our plant medicine sort of journey with a plant called iboga. And iboga is from that part of the Congo I was mentioning earlier from the Bowiti tribe that are connected to the pygmies in that part of Africa. So we were going to start a program in Costa Rica with the iboga root bark and the, the total alkaloid extraction process, that. That is how this medicine is. Is given to people.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:34:02]:
And we had downloads that, yeah, this is going to be great. Open up this place, use these shamans from the Congo and all this kind of stuff. And then what happened was I filed the license with the government to administer this. And they immediately came back and said, that plant doesn’t grow in Costa Rica. You have to only use indigenous plants from here. I was like, oh, what? And so we didn’t know what to do. And this was before we opened and stuff. We’d already put a lot of money into the program.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:34:28]:
We were like, overwhelmed. Like, what are we supposed to do now? Like this. We can’t do this here. And so that’s where we went back to the. To this. The process, participated in the ceremony and said, what are we supposed to do? And that’s where the download came to go into what they call the mother, which is ayahuasca. And so the. The.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:34:44]:
The iboga is called the stern grandfather. It’s kind of cool. So the stern grandfather just tells you what to do. It’s like blunt, right to the point. And then the mother is more loving and nurturing and sort of kind of the. The. The best way to describe it is it’s kind of like, might not tell you exactly what to do all the time, but it can. And so it’s just more of a maternal energy that’s.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:35:06]:
That’s beautiful for people, especially with trauma. So we shifted into an ayahuasca ceremony and then started participating in these with shamans from different parts of Latin America. And we became familiar with that medicine. Took us about two years to become kind of familiar with it. And we were seeing really good results with the people we were working with. So that’s when we shifted. And that was, I think, an interesting time of rythmia, when we were going to use iboga, but then we changed and used ayahuasca. So that.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:35:35]:
That was a download that at the time, we were just like, we’re not doing this right. Something’s wrong. You know?

Nick Urban [00:35:40]:
So on that end, when something does go wrong. Cause it’s easy to see how this can go, right? Say someone has an unexpected manic episode in the middle of a ceremony, and you reach for what I assume would be risperidol. What is that actual situation? Like, how do you know it’s mania? Not just a really intense experience?

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:35:59]:
Yeah, it’s a great question. So my background in the psych unit and medication management I’ve been doing for decades before I came to arrhythmia helped me sort of understand that there is a medical protocol we can use, but we have to assess the patient obviously before we give them any sort of psychotropic meds. So if somebody, you know, we’ve had a lot of people from southeast Asia come to arrhythmia, they don’t diagnose the person with bipolar one like the way we do. They don’t even have that definition over there. And so they look at it in a more Confucius based society, which is more about the group process as opposed to the individual process. And so somebody might have a western model bipolar one, but they just don’t, they don’t claim it, they don’t recognize it, so they get torhythmia. And then how do we distinguish between a manic episode that’s related to bipolar, which is a serotonin escalation, versus somebody that’s just going through a lot and releasing things? It has a lot to do with how they behave in the next six hours after an ayahuasca session. So the level of behavior that’s delusional, that doesn’t make a lot of sense, tangential thinking, paranoia, that kind of stuff, it’s very easy to recognize from a psychological viewpoint based on what I’ve been going through in my career before arrhythmia.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:37:17]:
And that’s where somebody, we bring them into the clinic. We have an urgent care on site 247 staffed by medical team. And that’s where we continue to observe them. We might give them an IV to help with their hydration. And if they’re still in this delusional space, we might give them a very small amount of the, of that psychotropic medication, respirol maybe. And, and again, with their consent, we have to have informed consent on this. And so oftentimes they’re not interested, you know, so, so we just, we just like let it, we just let it chill for a bit. We often tell them you got to sleep and you got to eat.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:37:52]:
That naturally brings down serotonin. Sleep is the best thing possible for it. But it’s often hard if they’re in a manic moment. So we just observe them, watch them, and eventually they sort of notice like, you know what, I don’t like feeling like this. This is uncomfortable. And then they’ll take the respiratory and then that makes them go to sleep. They sleep for two and a half, four hours, they wake up. And 99% of the time they’re totally back to baseline.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:38:16]:
And so we don’t have them drink any more ayahuasca. We just continue to do integration, follow up that we help them with an aftercare plan. So, you know, our medical team is amazing. You know, we’ve had 23,000 people through our doors. So we’ve seen patterns and things that we can recognize. And so the, the manic episodes that happen that are legitimately medically related and neurologically related, we’re able to recognize those very quickly.

Nick Urban [00:38:41]:
You mentioned in a previous call that we had that certain foods can. People can kick people out of certain states. What are those foods and how is that working?

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:38:51]:
Dark chocolate, which I love, often helps people deescalate the DMT response that we’ve found. Also bananas, which is sort of like an interesting thing because bananas also work in the ibogo world to help people kind of deescalate and so things that have a high antioxidant level of food that’s healthy. Also there’s certain, we don’t serve any cow based products at Rythmia. It’s super healthy, organic, often it’s all gluten free, often vegan and vegetarian food. We do have some fish and some chicken, but there’s certain meats that also have that chemical. But we don’t serve turkey here and turkey is one of them that can help. But we don’t, we don’t serve that here unless it’s Thanksgiving. We might.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:39:40]:
But getting the stomach to start to kind of get back to normal where it’s pro, where the Maoi is again working again is what we’re going for. Because once the MEOI is active then you can start to process the, the DMT and you break it down quicker. So that part is what we’re shooting for with people. Also hydration and a lot of coconut water, which is delicious. So it’s, it’s a nice, it’s a nice way to kind of come out of it and have some yummy food, you know?

Nick Urban [00:40:11]:
Yeah, sounds good to me. Dark chocolate, bananas, coconut water, all. All above.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:40:17]:
Yes.

Nick Urban [00:40:18]:
I want to understand the chemical composition a little bit more. I think I read years ago that the probability of shaman in the rainforest, encountering the two different necessary plants, I guess vine and plant to combine to get what we now call ayahuasca was like 1 in 1 million, something like astronomically low probability. What exactly is that? And have modern science like, has modern science looked at replacing that MAOI with another one, say perhaps weaker or stronger maoi? I know that’s probably frowned upon in the ayahuasca community, even consider Such a thing?

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:41:01]:
Yeah. Well, you know, it’s interesting because the shamans that we work with, they, they’ve taught us from their lineage traditions that a jaguar communicated to them, you know, thousands of years ago and showed them how to mix the two plants. Because it is so random. Like you have this vine growing and then you have these DMT rich plants, leaf based plants. How the heck did they know to put them together? Drink it? I mean, it sounds ridiculous, but there’s an oral tradition from that part of the Amazon that, that a jaguar was gnawing on the, the vine and then went and ate some of those leaves. And then the jaguar became docile and became laying on its back and looking around, you could, and the shamans could pet it and it became like this sort of domesticated, you know, vicious thing that was very calm. And so that’s where they, they saw that that was what had happened and they started to do it themselves. Because the one thing about the indigenous tribes globally is they’re very connected to nature.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:42:05]:
And that’s a big part of why those groups don’t suffer in the same way that we do in the west with different diseases and illnesses and stuff is because they’re very, very plugged in to the ecosystem as members of it. And so it’s pretty cool that, you know, a jaguar, you know, showed these guys, you know, and women and this tribe what to do. And oftentimes a vision for some people will show up and there’s, there’s big cats there, there’s jaguars, ocelots, different kinds of like pumas, you know, it’s very cool. So it’s, it’s got a lot of folklore and tradition to it and mysticism and that part makes it really fun and interesting.

Nick Urban [00:42:43]:
Yeah. And then on the other end of that, I know it’s, it’s not considered a best practice, but has research looked into combining other maois, aside from the harmaline, with, as it’s called, vine and things like, perhaps like a really weak one, like methylene blue, something like that, or something else that’s natural, but also a different mechanism of maoi.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:43:04]:
Yes. And again, I think that like you mentioned, that’s would be, let’s say, controversial in the shamanic community. But I am a big fan of doing that. I’ll tell you why, because I would love a shaman, indigenous shaman, to go in front of Congress and explain what’s going on and then get things passed legally. But that’s just not going to happen in my lifetime, I don’t think. Maybe it will, hopefully. But what is going to happen for the progression of these plant based medicines in the United States and other parts of the world is that we have to study them and the viability of them and how they’re actually working a biochemical process. So meois, there’s different types, there’s different chemical based ones that are already in a lot of prescription based medicine.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:43:51]:
Also, like you mentioned in methylene Blue, there’s a lot of things that are getting some traction that are showing the benefits of not just the harmaline and alkaloids, beta, beta carboline alkaloids in the vine, they’re looking at these other ones that are showing the ability to use a substance that naturally would be broken down in the body. There’s a concept in medicine where there’s a substance outside the body. It’s called analog law. And a substance outside the body is not an illegal substance. But then when you ingest it, it activates and kind of shifts its molecular structure and becomes an active substance. So there’s a lot of medications right now that are DMT analogs that are not DMT outside the body, but when you take it, it activates it. And that’s used for migraines. And so migraines are naturally healed for a lot of people.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:44:48]:
That’s, that’s what they report to us with ayahuasca. It’s wild. Now if you look at the history of medication in general, whether it’s of course opiates or psychotropic meds or any sort of meds, they all go back to a plant based structure. So it’s very rare. There are some, but it’s very rare that a person in a lab just makes this random thing out of nowhere. And it has happened, but most of it comes from a, a lineage of nature and plant based molecular structure.

Nick Urban [00:45:16]:
That’s so interesting. I had no idea And I definitely would not advocate combining an MAOI and a pro pro drug of DMT and, and see what happens. That sounds risky. Interesting.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:45:29]:
I agree. I agree completely.

Nick Urban [00:45:32]:
Interesting. And then I also think at the same time we’re looking and getting like narrowing in on the biochemistry that we understand so far. But I also think you can’t really just reduce the entire experience on Ayahuasca. It’s just a combination of this one or this two or even this fifty or a hundred different like biomolecules and you combine these. That’s what’s responsible for the whole experience. I think there’s probably a lot more going on. You want to make close to understanding.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:45:55]:
Definitely, definitely. Because, you know, there’s a. There’s a spiritual component that people report having, and there’s a part of the brain that we don’t. Obviously, there’s lots of parts of the brain that we don’t understand how they function. And, you know, there’s a lot of people that come to Rythmia, they’re agnostic or atheist, and they’re not looking to find a higher power or anything like that. And they are really attracted to the scientific side of this. And on a Thursday afternoon, or, sorry, Thursday morning, I teach a class that has a lot to do with the science behind this. One thing we’ve learned through some research that’s going on in the UK is that there’s an epigenetic component to Ayahuasca.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:46:35]:
Because when you’re transcribing your DNA for cellular division or things your body might need, it’s. There’s a messenger RNA molecule that’s being built as it reads the DNA strand. And so you can methylate and histone coil your DNA, meaning that it won’t transcribe certain parts of your DNA if those parts are problematic. So if I have, let’s say, I don’t know, Crohn’s disease. So I have a. In my DNA, I’m producing probably a thin mucus lining in my intestines. I’m producing allergen response to certain foods. And I don’t want to.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:47:09]:
I don’t want those to be coded for anymore. I want those to just disappear. So what I do is I have to do three things to have that epigenetic process begin. I have to have an intention. Okay, so I want to cure Crohn’s disease, and thank God I don’t have that. But number two, I need to be mindful of that intention. I hear that word a lot. I don’t like that word.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:47:26]:
It gets misunderstood. But what mindfulness means is just to be present and thinking about it. So I’m here to heal my Crohn’s. That’s what I’m going to do. I got 36 events this week at Rythmia that can help me do this. But some of them are meditation, some of them are yoga, some of them are ayahuasca, some of them are breathwork, whatever, and I’m going to heal myself. So that’s being mindful. Then the third one is you meditate on that intention.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:47:51]:
So that’s for me. I run 5k on the treadmill every evening. That’s my Meditation, it doesn’t have to be anything complicated. Some people actually do meditation like the traditional way. But ayahuasca is a great meditation because you’re, you’re connecting with yourself and focusing. So when you do those three things in any setting, your DNA is responding. And that’s the latest research that we’re seeing out of some labs in the uk and, and for those people that really resonate with that, it’s amazing. But it still doesn’t explain necessarily that spiritual side, that part that’s like hard to define, that’s kind of out in the ethers, you know, and a lot of the shamans would call it the God molecule.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:48:33]:
You know, there’s even a book named that, that’s really popular that explains this is the chemical that connects everything, the stars, humans, the atmosphere, the plants, the ocean. Right. It’s all connected through this process. Is, is the belief.

Nick Urban [00:48:51]:
I guess my question here, have you ever considered running a epigenetic biological age test on participants before and after, say a month before they go to arrhythmia, and then again say three months afterward to see if you see any like, tangible reductions in biological age, which would be measuring their epigenetic methylation health?

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:49:10]:
Essentially we haven’t looked at specific research to do an epigenetic study, but we are very much interested in it. And the studies that we are collecting and getting ready to do and building an assessment protocol are more mental health related, whether that’s depression or anxiety. Because right now the studies that are out on ayahuasca show a dramatic decrease in depression symptoms. But we would love to be able to look at the, the brain scans, the epigenetic component. The problem is that’s a very expensive process and, and we need to get funding for that because we’re not, you know, we’re a for profit business that barely breaks even. And so it’s. To have that study happen is very complicated. But we’re working with some physicians that do some other studies with Dr.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:49:58]:
Joe Dispenza, and they’re looking at biomarkers that are targeting, whether it’s cancer, inflammation, other kinds of things, genetic health conditions that are problematic. And they’re looking at that in a meditation framework with those protocols. But for us, we want to do at some point in the future a blood draw pre and then look at the biomarkers and then after ayahuasca week, then take another blood draw and see what got addressed. And, and so what we do know is happening because we’ve done, I’ve done it myself, with me is that the inflammation markers dramatically drop. So ayahuasca helps with that healing internally and there’s a lot of studies that show that. So I think the next phase of psychedelics, even though Johns Hopkins had a lot of those studies with psilocybin, which was amazing, the next phase will be these types of studies with, with ayahuasca, definitely with iboga. Since the President just wrote an executive order to look at legalizing ibogaine for people in the United States, which is amazing milestone. So there’s going to be this type of stuff coming out soon and other jurisdictions that we look at as a company to maybe open up down the road.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:51:14]:
These places require that type of research. So we’re really excited about it because that’s my background is, is doing research, medical research. When I was at ucla, I did a lot of that. So this is, it’s, it’s very exciting. So we’re looking for funding and, and hopefully down the road we’ll be able to do something like that.

Nick Urban [00:51:31]:
Very cool. It’s interesting to hear. Inflammation. I, I wouldn’t expect that that would help with inflammation, but after you, you describe that way, it makes sense. You said a minute ago that about 30% of folks come back and they’re alumni, but join you guys again as guests. That means that more than that percentage must be having good experiences because only a percentage of people actually come back even if they’ve had a great experience.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:51:54]:
Yeah. So we, we measure success at Rythmia by achieving the three intentions that we teach people. So show me who I’ve become is the first intention. Merge me back with my soul at all costs is my second one and third is heal my heart. So we, we teach people how to have those intentions. And people often have their own intentions, which is great. We, we, we recommend they do so. But if they, if they work on those first three, all of the other intentions are often met through that.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:52:26]:
And so sometimes there’s. Now at the end of the week we give them an exit survey and we call it did you get your miracle? And what we mean by that miracle is a triggering word for a lot of people. What, what, what we mean by that is did you meet those three intentions? And so last week we had 97% said yes, which was just one person did, said no. And they’re staying a second week to hopefully get it last the previous week 100%. The last week before that a hundred percent. So our six month average is 98% of people get this. And so for those people that didn’t get it. Those are some that come back.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:53:04]:
But like I mentioned earlier, people that come back often want to bring their friends and family or they want to go deeper themselves and they did get their intentions met first time, but they, they really want to keep going because obviously there’s a, an infinite amount of, you know, self work and self realization and progress that people can do. So they’ve found this to be an effective tool for it. But what’s funny is after people go through the week of Rhythmia, they’re like, I’m never doing this again. Because it is a lot of work, it is hard. But like I said, 30% come back and it’s great to see everybody again. We’ve been open 10 years, so we know a lot of our, of our guests that come and it’s really fun to see everybody.

Nick Urban [00:53:42]:
Yeah, the people who have no experience with it, they haven’t looked into it all. It seems like the image is that all these hippies are over here, they’re getting high, they are unpredictable members of society. Just like recreationally using this stuff every single day. How did that stereotype come about?

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:53:59]:
Back in the 60s, the Vietnam War protests were often that group you’re mentioning and they were using a lot of psychedelics and LSD and marijuana and all kinds of different stuff. Yeah, psilocybin. And the, the government of the United States was saying, we got to stop these protesters, we got to stop these people falling out of line. So we’re going to squash their psychedelic access. And that’s where they banned all this stuff and they demonized it. And so they have even had a Geneva convention in the 70 early 70s that put DMT on the list of Schedule 1 substances that people that nobody can use because it doesn’t have any benefits for humans. So what’s happened over time since then is there’s been an underground, like you mentioned at the beginning of the, of the podcast, a grassroots sort of using of these things because they’re actually helping people in a really dramatic way. So Rythmia is a place where anybody from all over the world has been here.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:54:59]:
And it’s definitely not like a hippie sort of. You know that we get plenty of old deadheads that come here, of course. Right. But, but there’s, there’s CEOs, there’s moms, there’s dads, there’s super high net worth people, there’s celebrities, there’s also average Joes like me, guys that grew up in the hood that don’t have don’t come from money. Like, we have a scholarship program that lets people. We’ve given out a million dollars in scholarships in the last couple of years. And so we want everybody who qualifies for this but also has the drive to do it to be able to come here whether they can afford it or not. We’ll get you here at some point.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:55:34]:
So I think that that hippie sort of. It’s drugs. It’s. It’s just, it’s a waste of time. It’s just these dropout people that. That is fading with. With the help of the psychedelic revolution that. That is going on right now in society.

Nick Urban [00:55:49]:
Yeah. And I know you also run an annual special operations veterans only week. What’s different about the room full of 60 special forces guys on Ayahuasca compared to a regular arrhythmia week?

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:56:01]:
Yes. And it is, it is awesome. It’s really, really intense because the special Ops guys, compared to the general military group who we’ve had a lot of them to, the Special Ops guys are often very controlled in their personal behavior because they were obviously in situations that were extremely difficult. And so those guys are actually the perfect candidates for this because they don’t have any place they can trust. They don’t have any environment where they can let out their emotions. They’ve learned to squash those things. So what happens during that, that yearly week and the next one is September 6th for the special Ops guys, they really, really connect with themselves, often for the first time. Because to be in the Special Ops, you kind of have to have a certain type of personality.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:56:52]:
And that type of personality often isn’t about an emotional process and letting out things. It’s about containing those things. So these guys need it more than anybody else. And it’s a beautiful week because if there’s so much healing going on, there’s a lot of. There’s been a couple documentaries, not from us, but from other places that show how the veterans do. Now, I had a veteran that wasn’t Special Ops, that was a medic. And he had so much trauma from the Iraq war. And he was a.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:57:21]:
He was a difficult case, but he had a great breakthrough. He sent his wife here afterwards, he’s come back a second time. He had this amazing experience. But the thing, you know, people often think, well, these guys are going to have flashbacks. They’re going to. They’re going to flip out. That’s not what happens. Because with ayahuasca, you’re in the.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:57:39]:
You’re collaborating with that plant medicine. You’re using Your intentions, you’re telling, you know, you’re talking with yourself, with your ego. There’s a lot of things happening that you can manage it in a way that’s really productive. It’s very rare when somebody just like flips out and you know, becomes dangerous to themselves or something. It’s very rare.

Nick Urban [00:57:59]:
So barring medical conditions, say someone has no medical conditions they’re aware of. And it seems now, based on your description of the special ops, it’s not going to be right for all people at all stages of life. Like, I wouldn’t necessarily want to get more in touch with my emotions right before I deploy and I’m on the front lines. That might not actually be a good idea. It might cause injury or put people around me and myself at greater risk. Are there other circumstances when someone should keep this in their back pocket but then perhaps wait until after to explore it further?

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:58:34]:
Yeah. So if somebody’s undergoing active trauma, so they’re, they’re in a traumatic environment, kind of like the military. And the good thing about the military, these special ops is they’re not on active duty currently. So this is banned in the military. Unfortunately they’re looking at some, some pilot programs for vets. So anyway, that, that hopefully will be something they can use during military. But like you said, you gotta be really careful cause you don’t wanna trigger an emotional response that can get you killed. Or in an average Joe like me, what can happen is if you’re in a abusive relationship or you’re in a job that is really oppressive, or you’re in a community that’s oppressive, like, like my community, what I grew up in, you don’t want to become vulnerable.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [00:59:19]:
And vulnerability is often what people are afraid of because when they were vulnerable as kids or in these environments, they did not get their needs met and they got either hurt or cut off or abandoned and abused. So what happens is these people are not going to open up in the same way. And we don’t really want them to if they’re actively undergoing trauma. So what’s interesting is that we have people that come and they’re trying to get the courage to get a divorce or quit their job. But we have to work with those people very closely on site to give them tools to do it in a safe manner. So I would say, you know, the best case scenario would be somebody gets out of that relationship or quits that job and then in the aftermath of this emotional chaos, then they come to rythmia because they’re not going to be in that triggered environment of abuse.

Nick Urban [01:00:12]:
Unrelated to this, you had a coach, a canoe coach, and he was your spiritual mentor for 35 years. What did you learn about ocean racing that you haven’t through your previous work and through plant medicine?

Dr. Jeff McNairy [01:00:28]:
Yeah, so I grew up paddling Hawaiian outrigger canoes. And my family started the Marina Del Rey Outrigger Canoe Club in 1967. And it was formed from the Kahanamoku son, Sandy Kahanamoku, who came over from Hawaii. He was the son of Duke Kahanamoku, and met all my family, uncles, cousins, and they were all surfers and lifeguards. And then they started this club. And so we often paddle between islands in Hawaii and also in the coast of California, from Catalina island into the Newport harbor and up and down the coast in other parts of the world. Actually, Tahiti, of course, is big there. So during the molokai’, Ihoe, which is the final sort of championship race from the island of Molokai to Oahu, every year that’s a 50 plus mile race, takes about six, seven hours.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [01:01:17]:
It’s very obviously very intense, a very rough channel. The Kaiwi Channel is super rough and problematic. But in that experience, I would often tell people when I would finish that race that I just reset my life for that year. It’s like a cleansing process that happens. And there’s a lot of sort of philosophical beliefs that explain that if you can have this very intense physical sort of task, that you can recharge your batteries per se, and you can get rid of all the emotions that are not serving you. So in Hawaiian culture, they don’t navigate with their eyes out there in the ocean because oftentimes you can’t even see land. They navigate with their, with their gut, with their, with their stomach, and that’s what they go by, feel. And so the feel is a big part of what translates into the paddling.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [01:02:11]:
And when you’re placing your, your paddle and pulling and moving that water, you become a part of that system, which is this huge ocean. And there’s a spiritual component that you feel halfway through that race and you’re totally plugged in. So this is a cleansing process that I really learned way before any of this stuff that I’m doing at Rythmia or anything in my life that I ever had before, because it’s so intense

Nick Urban [01:02:35]:
physically, whether it was that or something else. What would you say that the Hawaiian framework for healing gets right? That they understand that we in the Western model, the traditional Western model, don’t

Dr. Jeff McNairy [01:02:50]:
understand or get wrong My dissertation for my doctoral program was Native Hawaiian healing practices for adolescents. Native Hawaiian adolescents would have addictions or behavioral health issues. And so when I was in Hawaii, I worked with the Department of Health and I was assigned Native Hawaiian kids who were struggling in school and in society, often in and out of juvie, and maybe had substance abuse issues or family domestic violence things happening. So what I learned by working with these, with these kids and their families was that if you can establish a strong sense of identity and if you can connect with your roots, your ancestors, and the cultural norms of your society, your self esteem will grow. Because when your self esteem is low, that’s where you’re vulnerable. And as we know, in Hawaii, the land was taken from them. Their. Their queen Liliokalani was imprisoned.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [01:03:45]:
I mean, it was just this horrible thing that happened, you know, way back in the day. And so the Hawaiians lost their identity in certain components. Now there was obviously lots of groups, lots of hui groups that were fighting that system, but the overall vibe was their identity was taken. And so my protocol working with these kids was absolutely not one on one therapy in an office that would have gone absolutely nowhere. So my therapy with these kids was actually amazingly fun for me too. We get them into outrigger, we get them into hula, we get them into taro patch cultivation. Taro patch is a very spiritual endeavor in connection with the land. That’s the poi comes from taro.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [01:04:29]:
And so we would have them do these cultural practices often connected to Kamehameha schools, where I was one of the volleyball coaches there. I also taught at the University of Hawaii Lab High School. I was the chemistry teacher. So I had all kinds of access to really cool stuff at the Bishop Museum, which is the cultural museum of Hawaiian History. And. And what I noticed was if the more these kids and their families engaged in these cultural things, they became grounded in themselves and then they had more respect for themselves and they didn’t want to hurt themselves and they didn’t want to do anything was. That was out of line. And so my numbers went through the roof on improvement.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [01:05:08]:
Less juvie, less relapse, less. All kinds of behavior issues went out the door. They were doing much better. And so the government that was federally funding this program, they came in, they were very curious about what I was doing, because it was like this huge spike of improvement out of nowhere, in their opinion. So I showed them what I was doing. And then they officially took that protocol of cultural connection and implemented it in the Department of Health in Hawaii, mostly with The Diamond Head Family Guidance center that I was working out of. And so that was my dissertation topic. And so I have that published.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [01:05:43]:
And it’s a great way to look at life for all of us, not just the Hawaiian culture. That was a great one to understand and know, but also to have that as a framework that self esteem is a huge issue in healing.

Nick Urban [01:05:57]:
Yeah, I think it’s one of the foundational layers. Well, Dr. Jeff, we’ve been rolling for about an hour now. Thank you so much for your time. I got a couple more questions for you before we part ways. What is one thing that you’re currently working on that nobody knows about yet?

Dr. Jeff McNairy [01:06:09]:
Ah, so what I can say about that is that we are actively engaging in additional rythmia locations. I can’t say where, but I’m just letting people know that this is expanding because as we move forward in a way that’s medically safe and has policies, it actually has a protocol to administer this plant medicine in a safe manner with measurable objectives. This is spiked the interest of a lot of different governments in different parts of the world. So right now I’m the guy that. That works on the licensing of rythmia with the Costa Rican Ministry of Health. They’ve licensed us every five years on regular. And so I’m using that background to then apply and work with different governments in the world to hopefully expand Rhythmia into a global brand that people can use to get past things that are holding them back as a. As an alternative modality than the Western medical model.

Nick Urban [01:07:11]:
What is one book that every guest at Rhythmia, or any guest considering plant medicines in general, should read before they undertake it?

Dr. Jeff McNairy [01:07:21]:
You know, there’s a. There’s a book that one of our practitioners here wrote, Ben Decker, and it’s on the practice of plant medicine combined with meditation. Ben Decker is a meditation expert. He works with the Dalai Lama, who’s in India at the moment, and he goes and he writes forwards to his books. So I would say there’s a series of books that Ben has created that are all match perfectly with our program. So if you just look, go on Amazon, look up Ben Decker, about five books will pop up that you can really get yourself prepared for this process. Because if you just show up cold, I mean, you can still have some great responses to this program. We call it the Rhythmia Way.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [01:08:08]:
But if you can prepare, you’re even gonna have that more of a deeper, meaningful experience. And we send people something called the Dieta, which is a way to eat, a way to think A way to feel like we tell them, don’t go watch Friday the 13th horror movie right before coming here. Right. So get your mind in a good place. Get your body in a good place. So Ben’s books reflect that same sort of spiritual sort of progression you can do prior to coming here.

Nick Urban [01:08:36]:
And then what is one thing, the one thing every plant medicine retreat in the world should be doing that almost none of them do what they should be doing?

Dr. Jeff McNairy [01:08:47]:
Every plant medicine retreat in the world should be maintaining super healthy boundaries between the staff and the guest. I hear repeated stories from out in the world where the shamans or the assistant team take advantage of the vulnerability of people there going to their retreat. This is completely unacceptable. It’s often illegal in many countries and it’s something that I don’t tolerate. Coming from the mental health background in psych hospitals and rehabs and stuff. Clients are very vulnerable in those positions of healing and they have to become vulnerable to heal. Same thing at Rythmia. People are healing from a lot of stuff that’s been going on in the past.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [01:09:27]:
It is highly inappropriate to have any sort of relationship with a guest. So we don’t allow that at Rythmia. It’s not allowed. And so I think a lot of places don’t really have that firm boundary. And it’s something to very much be aware of if you go to a place like out in the jungle, which again, can be amazing, but you have to be really on your toes, you know, to not get into a bad situation that could be dangerous.

Nick Urban [01:09:53]:
Good reminder. All right, Jeff, we will wind us down. If people want to connect with you, I know they can find Rithme. I’ll have a link in the description for this episode. There’ll be a phone number as well and other ways they can get in contact. They want to connect with you. What do you want to send them?

Dr. Jeff McNairy [01:10:08]:
I would like them to go to my Instagram page, Dr. Jeff McNairy, or go to the Rhythmia page on the Internet or we also have a Facebook page. Either any of those ways to get a hold of me, you can send me a DM or you can send me a text. There’s also email connections that you can do. You can talk to our our phone room that will answer questions. So any of the social media platforms as well as the Internet will help you.

Nick Urban [01:10:34]:
Jeff, thank you so much for joining me.

Dr. Jeff McNairy [01:10:36]:
Thank you so much for having me. This was awesome. I appreciate it.

Nick Urban [01:10:39]:
All right, bye, everybody. Take care.

Nick Urban [01:10:42]:
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