On this episode of Health Gig, we are joined by Jonathan de Potter. After leaving his job as a strategy consultant in corporate America, Jonathan founded Behold Retreats, a company providing psychedelic treatment to high-performance individuals. As a thought-leader in psychedelic plant medicine, his priority is to guide others to maximize the benefits and to raise education and awareness on the subject. In addition, Jonathan enjoys meditation, surfing, and bold new ideas. We are thrilled to have him on this week’s Health Gig.
SHOW NOTES:
[03:56] I was shown my mother's face and all of the most powerful emotions, joy, pride, shame, anguish. And then instance by instance, over the course of my life, how I had individually caused those emotions, that I was seeing it from the third person. So I was actually watching myself having these experiences throughout the course of my life and seeing moments where I was bringing absolute joy and pride to my mother, which is amazing and beautiful, and then the opposite, which is such a humbling and profound experience to be seeing the positive and negative effects that you can have on others.
[06:20] The common underlying element is that these are very powerful, very healing medicines that amplify what's happening in our subconscious, and they amplify our access to identify, process, and resolve some of the stuff that might be there hidden in dark corners.
[08:12] When I shared before impatience, frustration, and anger that had a basis in some of my childhood trauma, some of my repressed and suppressed childhood trauma.
[08:22] And so these medicines reconnect parts of the brain that have been compartmentalized away. All of a sudden, we regain access to that memory. All of a sudden we understand a lot more about ourselves as a result of unlocking that memory.
[09:19] So when we speak about seven years of growth in seven weeks, it's a bit of a marketing term. Right? But what we're talking about is unlocking the rest of your neural capacity and being able to heal and process that over the course of a seven-week program.
[09:51] It's so important and so sensitive in relation to this work as it grows exponentially in terms of popularity, that people understand that these plant medicines or psychedelics generally are not necessarily positive. I'm actually not pro psychedelics, as it were.
[11:20] This is a process of surrender to the universe.
[15:59] So when we hear about shamans or we hear about witches in different places that colonialism has gone through, clearly they were doing something so bad that we had to wipe them all out. Right? Because that's generally the story. So there's increasing evidence that what was actually happening is that we were wiping out these plant medicine traditions. Which was a meaningful component, keeping people connected to their own source, their own divinity.
[17:49] There's a lot to be gained in the scientific research and understanding from the spiritual guidance and input that is available through people who have done this work as a result of their own learning and their own experiences.
[21:04] So pretty much every single one of these retreats is rated as five stars. So that tells us two things. Number one, it tells us that these are very profound experiences and that people are having very positive experiences. So that's the first thing. Now, the second thing it tells us is that the review system is fundamentally not serving its purpose, given the depths and given the complexity of this work.
[23:56] For a lot of us in this world who are doing quote-unquote. Well. Accepting help is actually a new paradigm. There's a lot of strong people out there who are providing help to their families, to their teams. But for them to actually accept emotional help and very deep emotional help is actually a new frontier for a lot of leaders.
[28:05] Conditions vary for people, but generally speaking, people feel amazing after one of these retreats because the medicine is doing work on a physical, mental, emotional, spiritual level. And so it has really harmonized the cells in the body. And so we can really feel this vibration throughout our body.
[30:11] Am I against recreational use? No, not necessarily. But would I ever do it myself also no. Because these are such powerful and sacred experiences. And so to think that someone could be walking into Coachella and then all of a sudden unlock their childhood, it's like, wow.
[33:54] This is such important work and it's gaining so quickly in popularity that when there's a resonance there between what we can do for people, there is an understanding of like, OK, I'm coming and I'm getting on the next plane. And it's often that we have to slow them down a little bit because there's mental and emotional work to do ahead of the plant medicine.
[36:42] I've maybe peeled three or four layers of the onion, this onion. Some of the teachers that are out there are on much deeper layers of the onion. They've been doing this work for decades. Some of my teachers, they've actually run out of teachers and they're still learning themselves.
[37:16] We're being shown that the path that we're on at the moment is out of sync and out of balance with some of the higher levels of the universe. And so everything is going to come back into balance necessarily. Now, how we navigate that is obviously up to us individually and collectively. But fundamentally, in the end, nature will be put back
QUOTES:
The common underlying element is that these are very powerful, very healing medicines that amplify what's happening in our subconscious, and they amplify our access to identify, process, and resolve some of the stuff that might be there hidden in dark corners. -Jonathan de Potter
They're very motivated to help other people shift other people, expand their consciousness and deepen their relationship to sell relationships to others, and just add their beauty out into the world. That's what's exciting about this work. Is it just peeling away layers of what we are not so that we can see what we are? -Jonathan de Potter
It's very profound. People always describe these experiences as irreducible to natural language. Any attempt to do so is the failure of human language. -Jonathan de Potter
If we peel everything else back and we do the work at a high level, we do the screening, we've got the right medicine, they're well prepared. We do all of that well. This is all safe for pretty much one hundred percent of the population. Like one of our practitioners, he's been doing this work for thirty years, never had an acute case. -Jonathan de Potter
I've maybe peeled three or four layers of the onion, this onion. Some of the teachers that are out there are on much deeper layers of the onion. They've been doing this work for decades. Some of my teachers, they've actually run out of teachers and they're still learning themselves. -Jonathan de Potter
