Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:00:08] You look at what? Triggers, physiological stress in people, it's uncertainty, lack of information, conflict, and loss of control. We're living in a society that imposes uncertainty, imposes lack of genuine information, loss of control, lots of conflicts. These issues are social, they're societal, they're manifestations of a toxic culture.

Luke Storey:  [00:00:40] Before we get into this episode with Gabor Mate, I've got something incredible to share with you. I've joined forces with over 100 other like-minded creators in offering a massive collection of content to help us become more self-sufficient in these rapidly changing and insane, and definitely uncertain times. It's called the off-grid homestead bundle, and it's truly an epic offer of immense value.

The off-grid homestead bundle is a collection of over 100-plus high-quality ebooks, online courses, and guides for only 50 bucks, including my EMF home safety masterclass, which is itself over six hours of training. Now, if you were to buy all of this content separately, everything we've all contributed to the bundle would cost over $6,000 in total, seriously. So at $50 you're getting a 99% discount. And as nuts as that sound, there is no catch here whatsoever, other than the fact that the bundle offer begins September 16 and ends September 25, 2022 when all of the resources will go back to the regular price.

There's literally everything in this bundle for living a life of freedom, resilience, and sustainability. Here are just a few of the topics covered: EMF mitigation, of course, as I mentioned, how to start homesteading and live off the land, permaculture, organic gardening and holistic garden planning, foraging for mushrooms, maple syrup, nettles, and herbs safely and sustainably, seed starting and seed saving for flowers and vegetables, canning and food preservation with water baths, pressure canning, and sugar free methods, self sufficiency and thriving off grid with smart solar powered solutions, online income, Instagram monetization, Airbnb rentals, and how to make money from a homestead, urban gardening, and how to start a micro homestead from your apartment, creating chemical free cleaners, detergents, and home products from natural ingredients, composting methods and how to repurpose scraps in your garden, organic farming, beekeeping, and animal care, natural remedies, medicinal herbs, and home remedies for a sovereign medicine cabinet, prepping emergency preparedness, and how to survive in the wilderness-- I need to learn that one myself, natural beauty and how to make your own skincare and beauty products from plants, farm to table recipes, including sourdough baking, brewing, fermenting, and cheesemaking, sovereign womanhood, homebirth, breastfeeding, and holistic postpartum practices, and even how to start homeschooling, nature groups, and forest schools and much more-- pretty crazy, right? Tons of information.

Now, remember, this is just a fraction of the content included for only $50 as there are over 100 different courses, ebooks, and how-to guides in this bundle. And like I said before, there is no catch other than the fact that this offer ends soon. All of us creators have come together to offer this amazing bundle. And we all agreed on doing a 99% discount to give something back to the community. And that community, my friends, is you. But again, it's only for nine days that we can offer this bundle for $50.

So if you're interested in the topics I mentioned, to become more self-reliant and independent, don't sleep on this one. The multitude of incredible thought leaders that created these courses, programs, and ebooks are offering their best life lessons at an enormous discount. And I'd say it'd be pretty tough to find this level of value combined in one collection at anywhere near this price. So if you're ready to join the movement of a more regenerative healing and holistic future, this is an offer you'll likely never see again.

My closing question to you is this. Are you ready for more empowerment in your life? I know I am and I know many of you listening are. So here's what you do. Go to lukestorey.com/offgrid, that's lukestorey.com/offgrid. Registration is only open again September 16 through 25, 2022. Takes about three minutes to sign up. And once you do, you get instant access to all the content so you can start to build your knowledge base and get down with some deep learning. Again, go to lukestorey.com/offgrid to get access to everything, including my EMF course for only $50. And by the way, you can also find this link in the show notes for this very episode on most podcast apps.

This is the Life Stylist podcast Episode 432, and I'm your grateful and faithful host Luke Storey. Today's highly anticipated guest is none other than Dr. Gabor Mate. We'll discuss in-depth Breaking the Epidemic Cycle of Trauma and Addiction to Find True Healing and Liberation. Your show notes for this one can be found at lukestorey.com/gabor, G-A-B-O-R.

And for those listening who are new to Dr. Mate's work, here is some info on his very prolific career. A renowned speaker and best-selling author, Dr. Mate is highly sought after for his expertise on a range of topics including addiction, stress, and childhood development. And rather than offering quick-fix solutions to these complex issues, Dr. Mate weaves together scientific research, case histories, and his own insights and experience to present a broad perspective that enlightens and empowers people to promote their own healing and that of those around them, including all you listening to this podcast.

After 20 years of family practice and palliative care experience, Dr. Mate worked for over a decade in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside with patients challenged by drug addiction and mental illness. And he's also the best-selling author of four books published in over 30 languages and someone for whom I hold the utmost respect and esteem.

Now we go deep in this one, perhaps a little too deep for my comfort personally, but in the end, I think the value to the listener will make any vulnerability I endured worth every minute of it. Here's a few things we talked about. Dr. Mate tells us about his new incredible book called The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture, the truth about how early childhood experiences actually shape the brain and thus our behavior moving forward, framing addiction as an attempted solution rather than the root cause issue, the commonly overlooked difference between being addicted to a drug and using it recreationally.

Gabor also explains the false blessings of addiction as experienced by the addict, taking responsibility for addiction without adopting a victim narrative, Gabor's unique perspective on the role of plant medicines in addiction recovery, and we also spend some time exploring my personal history of childhood abuse, trauma, and the almost two decades I spent in the bondage of addiction, and some of the tools we've both found effective in breaking free from this cycle.

If you or someone you know is struggling with an addiction of any kind, or any unresolved trauma, I highly recommend this episode. It was a very personal show for me as someone who's dealt with both of these issues throughout my life. And this interview in and of itself was deeply affirming and healing for me. And so my hope is that it does the same for you or someone you know and care about. And I encourage you to please share it far and wide if you feel called to do so. And with that, let's roll out the red carpet for the one and only Dr. Gabor Mate on the Life Stylist podcast.

Gabor Matte, welcome to the Life Stylist podcast. Man, I'm so happy to speak to you today.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:08:00] Thanks, Luke. Great to be here.

Luke Storey:  [00:08:01] Yeah, this is an exciting moment for me. People that follow me on social media know I was posting my anticipation of this conversation. And I want to start by just thanking you personally for your work and how much it's benefited me and my understanding of not only addiction and recovery, which I've been in for over 25 years, but really tying in-- it's not only the relevance, but the critical understanding of how trauma is at the root cause of this issue. And so I don't know the way you put things together. I was just listening to some of your other podcast appearances today. And I was just like, I'm most frustrated like, why didn't I hear this when I was 2, 3, 4, or 5 years sober because there was so much suffering even after I had been--

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:08:52] But if I can make a distinction, you were not sober, you were abstinent. I know it's playing with words, but for me, sobriety is a broader, more grounded, present-based serene wisdom, whereas abstinence is not using something. Abstinence is good.

Luke Storey:  [00:08:52] It's a start.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:08:56] A lot of people are abstinent without having really fun themselves, without having really grounded themselves. So I make that distinction. So I would probably say you were abstinent, and that must have been great and also difficult for you. Sobriety takes a lot longer.

Luke Storey:  [00:09:34] Yeah, well, there was a point at which I was really doing a lot of research. I would get a dictionary and look up every word in the AAA literature and just trying to understand the 12 steps. And at one point I looked up the word sober and there's a multitude of definitions, only one of which describes the absence of alcohol. The majority of the definition is around sanity, soundness of mind, clarity of thinking, sound decision making, things like that. And I remember reading that and going, "Oh, I definitely don't have that." to your point.

But before we get into all of that, you've got a new book that will have come out shortly before this podcast episode is released called The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. I just got the galley pdf of it a few days ago. And so I've been speed reading it on my computer, but perhaps you could share with the listeners who are familiar or not familiar with your work, what you get into in this new book.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:10:36] Well, as a medical doctor, I have always been asking the questions as to why things happen, and why are more people dying of addictions these days, overdoses. Why are more people diagnosed with anxiety, depression, ADHD, why is the incidence of autoimmune disease rising? And what I've come to understand is that most ailments and illnesses, whether mind and body-- most I say, not all, but the vast majority-- are not isolated biological entities that happened to a brain or to a heart or to an intestine, or to an immune system, or the nervous system, but they happened, first of all, to a whole individual, with their own history. And that history takes place in the context of a multi-generational family, and that family lives in a culture.

So what I'm saying is that-- and really, what I'm going to say is not new because indigenous always understood that mind and body can't be separated and that the individual can't be separated from the environment so that when somebody has an addiction, like your history of addiction, or for that matter, mine, it's not just an individual problem. It reflected our lives, what happened to us. And what happened to us occurred in the context of our families. And that family existed in the context of culture and history.

So what I'm seeing is that the causes of most illnesses and ailments of mind and body are not just individual, and certainly not just biological, but also emotional and it's also psychological, and also social. So to understand why people get ill and how they should heal, we have to understand the whole society. And what I'm also saying is that if in a society, more and more people are getting ill, like in the United States, 70% of adults are at least on one medication-- 70%, 40% are on two. Well, if that's the case, given the interconnections between mind and body, and the individual and the environment, we're not just looking at the illness of a particular organ or person, we're looking at a culture that is basically toxic.

And what I'm saying is that this society by its very nature traumatizes people. It traumatizes people because it doesn't meet human needs. It goes against them. And we raise kids in a way that traumatizes them. We give birth in a way that traumatized a lot of mothers and infants. We have politics that is very traumatizing. So I hope that in a few words, but this is an encapsulated nutshell version of what I'm saying, which is to understand human health and illness and healing, we have to look at the overall context. So that's my basic point in this book.

Luke Storey:  [00:13:44] Yeah, I enjoy the way that you're-- it seems that with this latest work, you're zooming out into the macro on things that you've been talking about in the more micro, viewing the human mind, body, spirit as one living being, one entity rather than this mechanistic, oh, you have depression, there's a pill for that. You have cancer, there's chemo for that, but how can we treat the whole person and that perspective that it's not just each individual that has become ill and is on all these medications, but that it's the culture.

And you know and I know and I think what's so beautiful about where you're going with this is that the interconnectedness of us in terms of consciousness, we are one body as a species, and not only our species, but all species, all living biology, and just the nature of everything within the cosmos. And so it's a cool approach. I think that's really powerful to start to zoom out and look at the living system of life itself. It's really beautiful.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:14:49] An American physician friend of mine, his name is Lewis Mehl-Madrona. He's a part indigenous Lakota in his background. And he told me that in the Lakota tradition, when somebody gets ill, the whole community gathers and says, "Thank you, your illness is manifesting the dysfunction of our community, and your healing is our healing because you're not separate from us."

The startling thing is that intuitive wisdom has been more than documented by modern science. So we have all kinds of science-- and I bring this into the book-- that shows that you can't separate the mind from the body, and you can't separate the individuals from the environment. My brain is connected to your brain, and how my brain functions has an impact on your brain. And if that's the case, I have a chapter called you rattle my brain. You know the Jerry Lewis song, You Shake My Nerves and You Rattle My Brain?

Luke Storey:  [00:15:44] Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:15:46] Well, we do shake each other's nerves and rattle each other's brains because our nervous systems are connected. And that means that our bodies are connected, just like you suggested before, so that illness and health are interconnected from one person to the next, and society to the next, to all of society. So for example, we know that a Black American woman, the more experience of racism she experiences, the greater her risk for asthma.

So that means that the inflammation of her lungs and the narrowing of her airways has to do with the social phenomenon about inequality and racism. And these have biological effects. Or children whose parents are stressed are more likely to have asthma. So the emotional stresses of the parents translate into the physiology of the child. So it's all interconnected. And this is pure science. And what's so weird, you might say, is that even though the science has been established and documented for decades, and decades and thousands of research papers showing the unity of everything, the medical profession completely ignores that information.

When you go to see the average specialist, they'll never ask you about any trauma you had, even though there's a significant relationship between trauma and inflammation. They never ask you about stress even though there's a significant relationship between stress and the onset of most illnesses. They'll never ask you about your relationships, how you feel about your job, even though we know that the job environment has physiological impacts on people. So what I'm saying is there's this whole science that demonstrates the ancient wisdom, but we don't look at it when it comes to medical practice, for the most part.

Luke Storey:  [00:17:41] Yeah, it seems as though Western medicine is-- I don't know how many years, it's difficult to quantify-- maybe 15 to 25 years behind the actual research.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:17:53] 100.

Luke Storey:  [00:17:54] 100 years. We have so much exciting research that's developing now. Specifically, I'm thinking of the valid research around the therapeutic use of plant medicines and psychedelics. And it's like, oh, man, the research is really encouraging subjectively and just seeing what's observing this third wave Renaissance, but thinking, man, how long is it going to take the medical establishment to catch up to what people are experiencing?

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:18:20] Well, here's the thing with me. I have a chapter in the Myth of Normal on psychedelics, both my own experience and also what I've seen and participated in and have helped people with through the use of psychedelics. I'm not waiting for the research to be all done because I'd be dead by the time it is. The bills of the gods grind so slowly when it comes to changing attitudes and changing legal facts. 

The reality is, although I'm not a psychedelic evangelist, I don't think they're the answer to everything, I've seen people heal significantly from physical illnesses and certainly mental health conditions through the judicious and wise use of psychedelics in the right context. It's one of these conversations that is more and more in the Zeitgeist, but the physicians are usually the last ones to hop on board.

Luke Storey:  [00:19:20] Yeah. I understand that. I'm often critical of the system "as it were" quotes and quotes, but also it's not the individuals within that system. It's the way the education system and everything is set up leading one into practice as a physician. It's how are you going to have time to keep studying current research, for example, if you're trying to pay off student loans, and you have to support a practice or clientele. I see how the system is stacked against innovation when it comes to the medical practitioners.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:19:57] I'll tell you another startling fact. I know you're interested in trauma because you're in history and recognizing that your addiction was based in trauma, as all addictions are based in trauma as our most chronic physical and mental health conditions are based in trauma. But the average medical student doesn't hear a single lecture in trauma in all the years of education. They might hear a little about PTSD as a special condition. But PTSD is only a small, narrow speck on a wide range of traumatic experiences.

So they may hear in psychiatric training something with PTSD, but they will not understand that trauma can cause inflammation, that trauma can damage our chromosomal functioning, trauma can affect our genetic functioning, trauma can affect the nervous system, the gut, the heart. In a Canadian study, men who were sexually abused as children had three times the rate of heart disease. This is not to do with smoking or drinking, just the trauma of sexual abuse.

And so despite all these demonstrated facts, the average medical student does not get a single lecture on the breadth and depth of trauma as it affects health, and the importance of dealing with it when it comes to healing. Not only that, the medical education itself is often very traumatic for people. It's a very harsh education for a lot of people. I'm not [Inaudible 00:21:37], but a lot of the doctors I talked to, interviewed for this book, they told me how difficult and even traumatizing their education was.

As a matter of fact, when you look at studies that look at the chromosomal aging-- and you can do this of people over time-- the chromosomes of medical students age faster than those of other people of their age because of the stress of medical training. So medical students are trained to ignore their own needs and their own stresses and their own traumas. How are they going to go out there and deal with the traumas of others? It's not their fault. It's the system, like you said, system.

Luke Storey:  [00:22:19] Yeah. Wow, that's interesting. Well, let's go ahead and weave into trauma and its relationship with addiction. Strangely, I've not done as many shows focused on addiction as I would guess because it's been such a huge part of my life. I think because I'm on the other side of it for quite a while now, I lose touch with the fact that many people are still suffering in that way. So I think I'd be doing a disservice to those like me that were in bondage and can't find a way out through the conversation with you. So maybe just as an overview, what's a brief explanation in your view of how we could describe emotional trauma as it pertains to developmental years specifically?

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:23:09] Well, first of all, bondage-- the word that you used-- is an appropriate word because the word addiction comes from a word for slavery in Latin. So we're actually talking about bondage.

Luke Storey:  [00:23:22] That was my experience 100%.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:23:27] So let me define it. Let's just walk through this if that's okay. Let me define it for you. I'll give you my standard definition of addiction, which are given in the Myth of Normal. So addiction is characterized by any behavior in which a person finds temporary pleasure or relief, and therefore craves, but suffers negative consequences in the long term. And despite those negative consequences, has difficulty or unwillingness to give it up. So craving pleasure relief in the short term, harm in the long term. Difficult giving up, that's what addiction is.

And what you'll notice is that contrary to the usual automatic thinking, I didn't say anything about drugs. I said any behavior. So yeah, it could be cocaine, crystal meth, heroin, alcohol, nicotine, caffeine. It could also be sex, gambling, pornography, shopping, work, the Internet, cell phones, online gaming, anything that a person finds temporary pleasure or relief in or suffers negative consequences and can't give up. So that's the first point. That's what an addiction is.

Now to approach your question about trauma. So let me ask you a question. And this is a question I ask everyone that I work with or speak to about addictions. You probably talked about your addiction, but I don't know what specifically you were addicted to. I don't need to know. But my question is whatever it was, what did you like about it? What did it give you temporarily?

Luke Storey:  [00:25:13] My addictions were about 90% of the list that you just offered. I think what it provided me was-- I would have given you a different answer when I was a year sober, but I think now it was almost effect similarly, a fraudulent sense of--

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:25:34] No, you didn't know that. You didn't know it was fraudulent. What was it that it gave you at the time?

Luke Storey:  [00:25:39] A sense of being safe.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:25:42] Okay, safety.

Luke Storey:  [00:25:43] Yeah, a sense of being safe and a connection to myself, the ability to be with myself with less suffering.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:25:54] I'll tell you how important what you just said was because the essence of trauma is disconnection from oneself. And so safety and connection to oneself, those are wonderful things, aren't they?

Luke Storey:  [00:26:05] If they don't come with the dire consequences of addiction.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:26:08] In themselves, they're wonderful.

Luke Storey:  [00:26:10] Yes.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:26:12] So in other words, the addiction wasn't your primary problem. Your primary problem was the lack of safety in your life and the disconnection from yourself. So addiction comes along to solve a problem. No, it creates more problems, of course, that's obvious. That's the nature of it. But it begins as an attempt to solve a problem, in your case, a problem of disconnection and a lack of safety.

So to think of addiction as a disease is completely wrong because it didn't start off like that. It started off just as an attempt to get something that you really needed, that your organism was born to experience. Your organism was born to experience connection to yourself and safety. When infants are born, they expect to be connected to their bodies and know their feelings. And they expect to have safety. That's the evolutionary nature of a human infant.

And so then the question is, how did you lose that connection to yourself? How did you develop this lack of or sense of lack of safety? That's what trauma is. In other words, what I'm saying is that addiction is always in every case, a response to trauma. And that trauma usually occurred-- not usually, always, whether people know it or not, it occurred in childhood.

So that's the connection between trauma and addiction is that addiction itself is one of the ways that a person tries to deal with the effects of the trauma without looking at the causes of it. Now, I would make a broader argument and say that mental health conditions and physical conditions are also rooted in similar coping mechanisms, which are responses to trauma. I could talk about that later. But I'll answer your question about trauma now if this answers you already. You get me going in the subject and I can really--

Luke Storey:  [00:27:43] No, I love it, dude. I love it. My show is a long-form show. I don't like sound bites. I like to go deep.

If you're a regular listener of this show, you've probably heard about the many benefits of cold therapy or ice baths by now. I've been doing the ice baths just about every day for many years because it just makes me feel so incredible. But it's not just me. The scientific community is onboard as well and they've proven that cold therapy improves recovery and performance, elevates mood and brain function, helps alleviate depression and anxiety, activates the nervous system, works great for pain management, and reduces inflammation. And it even improves heart rate variability.

The Ice Barrel is a cold therapy training tool that makes it easy to include ice baths in your routine without spending thousands of dollars to do it. This Ice Barrel, guys, is super cool, no pun intended. It's portable and lightweight, which makes it easy to move and even travel with. It's also compact, which makes it great for apartment dwellers or those with limited space. Plus, it provides you with the ability to sit in an upright position. It's also got an easy drain system, and they have a natural water stabilizer that keeps your water fresh for longer, which is really handy, trust me.

But the biggest benefit for many of you listening though is its affordability. I worked with Ice Barrel to get you Life Stylist $125 off so you can try it for yourself. Just go to icebarrel.com/luke and use the code LUKE. They also offer a 30-day money-back guarantee, which is really rad. Again, that's icebarrel.com/luke and use the code LUKE to get $125 off. And keep in mind that you can pay as low as $90 a month for your Ice Barrel with Klarna financing. And just so you know, I threw that link and code in the show notes as well, icebarrel.com/luke.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:30:03] So the first chapter in the book is actually about what is trauma and what it isn't. So the word trauma comes from a Greek word for wound or wounding. So trauma is a psychological wound. So if you look at that wound metaphor, what is the nature of a wound? Well, if you're on an open wound on your body and you touched it, it would be severely hurting you. So one aspect of trauma is when you touch it, even remotely, even decades later, you feel severe pain.

Without going into the details, but I had the experience of being separated from my mother when I was a year old. I tell the story in the book, but that was to save my life under the natty occupation in Budapest in 1944, which means that I had an abandonment wound. Anything that even vaguely resembles it-- anything that my wife does that makes me even vaguely in touch with a sense of abandonment, I will react as if it was happening fresh all over again and if that was a one-year-old baby. So in the first sense, trauma is this raw wound that hasn't healed.

On the other sense, when you think about the wound metaphor, wounds scar over. They form scar tissue. Scar tissue protects the flesh, that's good, but it's rigid, it doesn't grow. So you stop growing psychologically. It's not flexible. So we tend to respond in rigid ways and predictable ways. So somebody pushes a button and are you like a machine. You can predict how I'm going to respond when a certain button is pushed. It's hard, so there's less feeling in it. So I'm not so aware of my emotions, my real emotions. So people harden, and scar tissue has no nerve endings. So as I said, there's no feeling. So that's the nature of trauma.

Now, the biggest trauma, the original trauma is disconnection from yourself. Now, why would you disconnect from yourself? It's a coping mechanism. So let's take a two-year old kid who was-- one of the indispensable essential needs for human infants to develop in a healthy way is the freedom to experience all their emotions. And we have emotional centers in our brain for rage, for anger, for grief, for fear, for play, all kinds of things.

In order for these circuits to develop properly and in a coordinated fashion, we have to have the freedom to experience all our emotions. That's just the need of the job. But what if the parents have listened to a whole lot of psychologist-- I could name some very famous ones-- who tell you that anger in a child should be punished? Within the child in order to-- the child has the choice to make choice, not a conscious one, but a life essential one. Do I please my parents so they will accept me and love me? Or do I express my emotions at the risk of my parents rejecting me?

Which choice do you think the kid will make in every case? It's to comply and to suppress their feelings. What's another word for suppressing something? Depressing it, pushing it down. One of the consequences of that pushing down is depression later on in life. That's what depression means. You push down your feelings in order to be accepted by your family and your society.

Now, that means you got disconnected from yourself, from the actual gut feelings and emotions. So one of the biggest traumas is the one that you identified right off the bat, which is the disconnection from yourself. And you disconnect from your body, from your feelings, you don't trust the world. Now you don't have a sense of safety anymore. As an infant, you're held. And as a child, you are accepted and nourished. You have a sense of safety. But the world is-- it might have dangers out there, but there's a sense of safety that I'm okay. I can take care of myself, and I'll be taken care of. That's what safety means. Safety doesn't mean there's nothing dangerous out there. Safety means that I'm connected enough to my community and to myself, that I'll be okay. Well, a traumatized person doesn't develop a sense of safety. In fact, they develop a sense of fear and anxiety.

So trauma also affects how the brain develops because the human brain develops under the impact of the environment. And the most important input into the physiological development of the human infant's brain is the quality of emotional relationship with the caregiving adults. I'm not giving you my opinion, or insights. I'm giving you modern brain science. So when there's traumatic situations, all these things get interfered with, including how the child's brain develops. And I'll just say one more thing, and then I'll stop this rant.

Luke Storey:  [00:35:37] It's great, man. I'm all ears. I'm already coming up with 20 more questions as you speak. So please carry on.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:35:44] All right. You don't want to have to overt terrible things happen to hurt a child. So you can have physical, sexual, emotional abuse, all the identifiable adverse childhood experiences that have been shown to potentiate illness and addiction and mental ailments. But you can hurt children, not just by doing bad things to them, but also by not giving them what they need. So children are born with certain definite needs that evolution has prepared us to accept. As I was saying before, if those needs are not being met, children are wounded.

And the kind of trauma where there's physical, sexual, emotional abuse, like with all of my patients, when I was working in addiction medicine, those are easy to identify. People can remember the things that happened that shouldn't have. But people have trouble remembering what didn't happen but should have. So there's two ways to traumatize people with what I call the big T Trauma, which is easy to identify, but then there's a small t trauma, which is just you weren't seen for who you were, you weren't accepted. Your emotions were not taken seriously. And you might say, what's the big deal? That's an adult question. To a one-year-old, to a two-year-old, those are huge issues and they're very hurtful. So that's my little--

Luke Storey:  [00:37:15] Man, it's so rich, thank you. There's so much in there. So just backing up to the last bit you added, which I think is so important, especially for people who don't remember their childhoods as being particularly traumatic and end up in a cycle of addiction, for example, and having sponsored countless men in addiction over the years, when I was really involved in that aspect of recovery, I would say the vast majority of them had significant capital T Trauma that could be easily identified. But there were always these mysterious cases to me, wherein someone had two loving parents, they were middle class or upper class, they didn't have financial stress, and nothing quote-unquote, "happened" to them.

And so I started to see, it's as if like, trauma isn't necessarily what happens to you, but sometimes what doesn't happen for you. There's something missing there. And to me, that's really tricky because it just seems harder to root out. I can look at my childhood and there's touch points that are so obvious because the abuse was so acute and my life hits such a destructive trajectory as a result of each of those impasses that it's really easy to track back with just a modicum of self-awareness and self-honesty, but the ambiguity of that say, something like neglect, just emotional unavailability of a caregiver, or something that's obtuse, it's harder to see. I think that's even more challenging. How would one identify their trauma if it wasn't something that dramatic, but they're seeing the destructive patterns that are common to someone who's endured trauma?

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:39:00] There are two ways and it's not that difficult. In fact, I give talk to hundreds of people at a time, sometimes thousands or more. And I issue what I call the happy childhood challenge. I say let say if anybody in this audience has had an addiction, or a mental health problem, or chronic physical illness, but they thought they'd have each other, or you want to come and talk to me, takes me three minutes-- and I've done this hundreds of times, three minutes, you just have to ask the right questions. So that's one way, just a yes or no question. And in the book I talk about this, the happy childhood. And I'll give you the key question in a minute.

But the other way, is, I'm going to ask them, when was the last time you were sad with somebody in your life? The degree of upset usually has nothing to do with the present. It's the past showing up unconsciously, emotionally. And then I can trace it back to what happened in childhood. So the thing about trauma is-- just to refine my definition, it's not even what happens to you, or what doesn't happen for you. It's what happens inside you. That's what a trauma is. The wound happens inside you.

It can happen because something happened or because something that should have didn't happen, but the wound happened inside you. And it's not difficult to identify people's wounds, just by asking them a little bit about their daily lives. When your spouse didn't want to sleep with you all night, how did you feel? Well, I'm speaking for myself. And I would go into a silent rage and totally withdraw and just get despondent. I'm talking earlier, like, a week ago not. No, I'm talking about years ago.

Well, that had to do with a sense of not being wanted as a kid. And it's not a question of whether my parents love me. I love my kids. But I know I pass my trauma on to them. So the parents can love you, but if they're stressed, and if you have a sensitive child, you're going to absorb their stresses, and you think it's all about you because kids think it's all about them. So if the mother is depressed, the child will take that personally. Even already in the womb, if the mother's emotionally distressed, that affects the child's brain. We know this from our cancer studies.

But the question I always ask is, and I've yet to hear a different answer, okay, your parents loved you, you went camping, they came to all your sports games, they run a PTA and all this kind of stuff. Really sad or upset as a kid, who would you talk to? The answer is always going to be nobody or maybe my friends. Well, that's the sign of trauma because the child is meant-- have you ever met a one-day-old infant that didn't let the parents know how they felt?

Luke Storey:  [00:42:25] Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:42:26] So something happens to most of us where we're born fully expressed and fully demanding of our needs being met and then we learn to isolate and to keep it to ourselves. That's a sign of disconnection, that disconnection is a trauma. So that's what I see in just about every case.

Luke Storey:  [00:42:44] In the interest of service to anyone listening who has had a similar history, it brings to mind something I've really explored quite courageously, especially in the last few years, and that was some sexual abuse that I experienced when I was around five or six. It's not something that I dwell on, but it's something that has been revealed to me as one of the most impactful experiences of my life. And largely, one could say negative, although that has been transmuted into many gifts and the ability to help other people heal and heal myself. And ultimately, through the addictions, a deep yearning and necessity to have a relationship with a higher power.

So I don't look at it from a dualistic, oh, that was bad that that happened to me, but to the point that you were just referring to, for many years in my life, I thought that it was what had actually happened to me in terms of somebody trespassing my boundaries so deeply, but I've also come to the realization that-- and as you said, it wasn't what happened to you, but what happened in you, I think a lot of the hurt was actually that I had no way to hold it and there were no adults around because I didn't tell them that it had happened. But there were no adults around to help me contextualize and heal that in the time period in which it happened and the subsequent period afterward.

So this very strange, invasive experience takes place, which in and of itself is, I'm sure harmful and confusing and damaging the brain and all the things that you described, but it's like then I'm a five, six-year-old kid that is just completely filled with shame and developed into a whole early lifetime of secrecy and hiding and dishonesty because I didn't have the wherewithal to express something of that magnitude to my caregivers.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:44:53] No, that wasn't the-- I'll tell you something. There's so much in what you just said and you've got about 85% of it. But there's a 15% that's missing and that's crucial, which is-- let me walk you through this if that's okay.

Luke Storey:  [00:45:13] Please.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:45:13] The day you were born if you were upset or hurt or lonely, did you cry?

Luke Storey:  [00:45:19] Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:45:21] What about the second day of your life?

Luke Storey:  [00:45:23] I'm sure, yeah.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:45:24] Okay. At what point did you learn that you're all alone, that there's nobody there for you to talk to? You got kids, right?

Luke Storey:  [00:45:32] Not yet, hopefully soon.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:45:35] All right. Well, if you had a child five years old, and somebody even looked at them the wrong way, never might touch them, even looking at them the wrong way that made them feel uncomfortable, who would you want them to talk to-- the five-year-old?

Luke Storey:  [00:45:50] Yeah, to me. Absolutely.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:45:52] Okay. Now, if you found out that your five-year-old had had this uncomfortable experience, and didn't talk to you, how would you explain that?

Luke Storey:  [00:46:04] God, if I were the parent, as my more conscious self probably feel a tremendous sense of guilt or--

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:46:18] But I'm not asking you about how you would feel. I'm asking you, how would you explain why your child isn't talking to you? How would you explain it?

Luke Storey:  [00:46:28] I would explain it in that they didn't feel safe to do so.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:46:33] Remember your sense of safety?

Luke Storey:  [00:46:35] Mm-hmm.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:46:35] It preceded the abuse. The original trauma wasn't the abuse. The original trauma was the loss of connection to your caregivers. That's what made the abuse possible. Are you following me?

 Luke Storey:  [00:46:49] Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:46:51] Not only that, the abuser knew that already before they laid hands on you. The abusers got a laser vision. Let me tell you, they have laser vision, whether it's a physician abusing their patients, a psychiatrist abusing their clients, or a spiritual teacher exploiting their followers, whether it's a politician hitting on their staff, whether it's Bill Cosby who serially abuses all these women, gives them drugs, and then sexually invades them, they know who's available and who isn't.

And what creates that availability is not that the child or the adult wants it, deserves it, expects it, but that the abuser can tell their lack of protection. That's why they get away with it for so long. And their lack of protection comes from the disconnect between the parent and the child. So one thing is that the original trauma originated in your parents'  unavailability to you. That's what made the abuse possible. It wasn't your incapacity to talk about it. It was the unavailability of anybody to talk to because you must-- can I ask you, how long did it go on for?

Luke Storey:  [00:48:08] The first time I think was probably a couple of different occasions in the one that I was referring to, and then there was a second time when I was quite a bit older that I think I had the wherewithal to stop it at a certain point, but there was an attempt by a groomer, guy playing big brother, taking me and this other kid to the movies and ballgames or whatever and then attempting it. But the one that really stuck, I think was the first one. And I don't think--

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:48:42] Was just one time?

Luke Storey:  [00:48:43] I think it was a couple of times. The memories around it are vague.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:48:47] A couple of times over a period of days or weeks?

Luke Storey:  [00:48:51] I think probably within a period of a couple of months or something like that. It was a babysitter.

 Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:49:00] Okay, now, I'll tell you something. If you're a parent that's attuned to your kid, even if this happens, you'd know it right away, you'll sense there's something different about the kid. So what that tells me about your parents is that they were traumatized themselves. They were disconnected from their own gut feelings, otherwise, they would have noticed that there's something off with their child. Secondly, the child would have gone to them right away. Thirdly, if they were attuned to their child, and the child] trusted them, it would never have happened in the first place.

So this is where we get into the multi-generational nature of trauma because the parents themselves would have had to be traumatized in their own childhood to be that disconnected. So they weren't available to you because I'm sure they love you. I'm sure they try to do their best. So despite the love and despite their fondest intentions, they still end up oblivious. That speaks to their own disconnect, and that speaks to their own trauma. So trauma in this sense is always multi-generational.

Luke Storey:  [00:50:10] Yeah. Well, it's interesting because having now healthy relationships with both my parents and us openly discussing things like this and exploring mutual healing and understanding, my dad wasn't really in my life because my parents were divorced. But my mom was my primary caretaker at this time, and she did, in fact, observe my behavior change radically after that in terms of just behavioral problems and fighting and lighting fires. I was just a wild man and had previously been a really-- I don't want to say obedient-- but a really sweet, mellow kid that didn't have disciplinary issues or anything like that.

To that end, she shared something with me recently that is just-- I'll probably get emotional saying it, even though-- I guess it's part of the healing process, and there's been so much healing and understanding and forgiveness of all involved around this, but she shared something the other day that I didn't know. And she said that when I was really young, prior to say, five years old, I was only attracted to little boy toys. I wanted to play with trucks and tools, and toy guns, and I was really into these masculine aggressive toys, as many boys are just onto inherently. 

And then she said, around that time, I abandoned all of those types of toys and all I was interested in was teddy bears. And I became obsessed with these teddy bears and naming them and had to have them with me all the time for comfort. And it was just so huge for me to hear that and to be able to reflect back to that younger self, which is still part of the self that's here talking to you now and just really express more love and compassion for myself in that experience.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:52:05] Yeah, well, I'll tell you something. I wrote this book, The Myth of Normal with my eldest son, Daniel. I couldn't have done it without him. And believe me, I passed on my trauma to him. So us being able to work on this book together itself is a sign of real healing. In fact, the next book we're going to write together is going to be called, Hello Again: A Fresh Start for Adult Children and Their Parents. This is a workshop that we do together. But we've had to do a lot of work, and I've had to do a lot of remedial parenting for my kids because I passed my trauma onto them. I didn't mean to, but I did. And my wife didn't mean to, but we did. So this is a very common story.

Luke Storey:  [00:52:57] Have you ever wondered why some people get really sick while others only have mild cases? Well, researchers say the answer can be found in your gut health. A study published this year suggests that people with leaky gut and other gut symptoms may be at higher risk of severe illness. You know what I'm talking about? In fact, more than 70% of your immunity is created in your gut. Why does this matter, you might ask? Well, even if you're doing everything right, you will still be exposed to viruses and bacteria. It's simply unavoidable. It's just how the world works.

Now personally, I've had a lot of leaky gut issues over the years and have made some huge improvements lately. I recently found an insanely cool product called Biome Breakthrough. Biome Breakthrough is the only formula that can repair compromised gut lining. So it helps to rebuild with the right probiotics and prebiotics and activate the four critical pathways to super immunity. It eliminates bad bacteria, feeds the good bacteria, and gives your immunity the strength it needs to fight off viruses. It's a really cool stuff.

It also comes in two flavors-- chocolate carnivore and vegetarian vanilla. How I use it is I just throw this stuff in whatever morning drink I make-- hot or cold. And it tastes delicious or not noticeable in some cases, and also mixes easily with pretty much everything. So power up your immunity today and try Biome Breakthrough risk-free by visiting biomebreakthrough.com/luke. And, of course, I got a code for you. It's LUKE10. That gets you 10% off any order. Again, that code is LUKE10, and the website is biomebreakthrough.com/luke. And listen, if it doesn't work for you, these guys will give you your money back within 365 days of purchase. Totally risk-free. Awesome, works. Check it out

To me, this is fun. I love understanding the nature of the human psyche and the human being in all of its form. So if I get emotional or it's like, there's something that's like, ooh really hits, to me, I just lean into it because I know that's where freedom lies. It's just being able to really face and explore and work through anything that comes up. But I want to circle back to something that you referred--

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:55:22] Can I jump in something?

Luke Storey:  [00:55:24] Yeah, sure.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:55:25] The reason I smiled just now, is because you reminded me of something. When you said about the importance of going to get emotional, it's not that we get emotional, we are emotional creatures. In fact, our emotions develop before our intellect as it should. So the intellect is based on a scaffolding of emotions. So it's very important that we get the emotional part right. But the reason I laughed or smiled when you talked about getting emotional, is do you know Jim Doty at all, Dr. Jim Doty?

Luke Storey:  [00:55:52] No, I don't.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:55:53] He wrote this book called The Magic Shop of the Heart, I think it's called. He's a neurosurgeon at Stanford. And he wrote this bestseller called The Magic Shop. And he was traumatized as a child and became a successful neurosurgeon, doing all things and purposes to be successful. But all this trauma then starts showing up in his life. Anyway, so Jim has gone through quite a transformation. He has become from this stern match, or like, he looks like the difficult, big, handsome, powerful-looking character, he looks just like a neurosurgeon should look like in a Hollywood typecasting situation. 

But when I interviewed him on stage, he starts crying. And he finds these tears rather easily. And the reason I laughed or smiled when you talked about getting emotional is because a psychiatrist once watched Jim Doty talk and he got very emotional on stage. In other words, he became a human being. And a psychiatrist comes out to him and says, "Dr. Doty, come and see me for two or three sessions. I can help you with this. I can fix this."

Luke Storey:  [00:56:00] That's funny.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:56:18] So it's like, there's something wrong with people getting emotional.

Luke Storey:  [00:57:17] Thank you for that. Over the course of hosting this show for the past six-plus years, I think there was a point at which I just said, you know what, I just want to be vulnerable and real because I think that's where the magic is. I know that's where it is, for me, going back to my years in recovery, and the compassion and just being seen and heard and understood by other people who were being honest about their experience and vulnerable about their experience, it gave me license to start to emerge in that capacity myself. And that's where my healing has come from, it's in that. So thank you for that validation there. I appreciate it.

But going back to something you were talking about earlier, of losing the connection to oneself, about four years ago, I began what has been-- I don't want to say consistent, but a periodic exploration into-- responsibly, I might add, into very intentional, ceremonial use of plant medicines, psychedelics, etc. And it's not something I'm ashamed to talk about because it's absolutely, truly revolutionized my life. I don't know that it would do that for everyone. But for me, it's been my experience, undeniably. But the first journey I took was a four-day ceremony in Costa Rica with sitting with Ayahuasca.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:58:43] [Inaudible 00:58:44] by the way.

Luke Storey:  [00:58:44] This was yeah.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:58:48] I have my issues going there, but that's another story.

Luke Storey:  [00:58:51] Well, it was good for me at that time.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [00:58:55] It's an introduction, isn't it?

Luke Storey:  [00:58:57] Yeah. And at that point, it was just, I had been stone-cold sober for 22 years. So it was a huge leap in many ways, not only just being willing to explore the unknown, but also just to push the boundaries of my more traditional confines of what is sober and what's not. But anyway, to the point, in one of those nights, I didn't set the intention to deal with this, but all of that childhood abuse really came to the surface, and I was able to explore it from so many different angles. And it was so beautiful and so deep to observe, but the main takeaway, as I was processing this and reliving some of that experience was, at first, the realization came to me as, God, how profoundly I had lost my inner sense. My inner sense had been stolen from me.

And then the way that that medicine in particular works with me is it often does these word plays where it starts turning words upside down and mixing up words and giving me new interpretations of their meaning as they're presenting. And what came to me immediately then was that not that I lost my sense, but that I had lost my inner sense, the sense of who I was. And that was the real injury, to your point of what you were illuminating earlier is that I left my body and really never came back until decades later when I was fortunate enough to get sober and start to learn how to reintegrate and become my full self and know my true self again.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [01:00:41] Yes, losing your body, of course, is a defensive response. When it's too painful, unbearable to be in your body, you lose your body. You disconnect from it. That's a very common experience. And we don't even know it because it's automatic and it's subconscious. And in The Myth of Normal, I do have a chapter on psychedelics, including my own experience with it and the reconnections. And I talked to Rick Doblin, who I'm sure you know. He's the head of MAPS, the organization that really promotes the research and legalization of psychedelic healing and therapy.

And what he said was very succinct. He said that what psychedelics do is there's a membrane between our consciousness and our subconscious. And so that in your subconscious, that memory of abuse lived. And the moment it live, it almost last like a puppeteer that pulls your strings, but it's invisible to you. We think we're free, but actually being told by these unconscious strings. I react to any hint of what I believe is rejection from my life like a puppet on the string. There's no conscious present adult person there.

But how Rick put it is that the psychedelics can remove this membrane between the conscious and the unconscious. Also, you see what you've been hiding in your subconscious. And you said it very beautifully, actually, not only do you see the hidden pain and dynamics that had to be unconscious for you to survive, but you also see the beauty that was never lost, that inner sense. You never lose your inner sense. That's the thought point. You just lost contact with your inner sense.

And addiction, for example, we talked about recovery. Well, what does recovery mean? It's meant to find something. But you can't find something that's not there. And you can't find something that was ever destroyed. And therefore what you recovered was your inner sense. You recovered yourself. That's what you found. And so psychedelics in the right context, they can remove that membrane, and all of a sudden, information is available to you that before was opaque if at all, even in your consciousness. But there it is. But you're there as an adult. [Inaudible 01:03:23].

And you went to that place consciously to choose that experience. And you did not choose your abuse experience in childhood. But you did choose to go somewhere. Now, let me witness my truth as an adult because I know I have the capacity to handle it. And you did in the place that made it possible for you feel safe enough and supported enough. So apart from any issues I have with that particular place, people have had great experiences there and elsewhere, and it's because of the power of the psychedelic to remove that membrane and let you experience yourself when I've had the same experience.

Luke Storey:  [01:04:01] Yeah, there is such a treasure trove, in that realm. I could go on and on about the experiences I've had, but one of the most fascinating elements of that type of work for me has been to be in that,-- for lack of a better term, that quantum space where it's just consciousness just exploring itself is to not only have figures for me, a lot of traumas have emerged that I didn't even know were traumas until it was shown to me in medicine ceremonies. People that I presumed in my childhood that they never really did anything wrong. And then I see, oh my God, that person actually really harmed me, but not only being able to see and also to fearlessly-- well, sometimes fearfully, but doing it anyway to really feel the depth of some of that hurt.

But what to me is the most fascinating of all of that, I think is what seems to be in moments, the conscious ability to really bring my awareness into my mind and actually rewire my mind and heal my mind whether it's me, God, medicine, whatever is doing, it doesn't matter. But I know that in those experiences something was happening. And how I know that is because in integration as those peak experiences have subsided, and I came back to my householder life, those triggers that you described, many of them are totally gone. Things that would have sent me in a complete neurotic tailspin five years ago are simply just not present. It's like those connections in the brain have been disrupted or something in the most positive sense.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [01:05:50] Absolutely. Yeah. And I just want to reframe what you said a little bit, if I may. The triggers are not gone. I'll tell you what is gone. When we talk about being triggered, "Oh you triggered me," what's a trigger? A trigger is a very small little thing. The reason it works is because there's ammunition there and explosive material. So the triggers may still be out there, but the ammunition is gone. The explosive charge is gone.

Luke Storey:  [01:06:21] That's so good, dude. I love that. That's good. Yeah, it's such a beautiful thing to be able to observe the results of doing some work and more than anything, just grace. I think when we present ourselves to whatever we believe to be our creator, consciousness, God, source, and really in humility, and willingness, and really all the-- it's funny, all the principles from the 12 Steps is what I've used in psychedelic experiences as a framework by which to make it all make sense and create a model that I can work in, in a productive fashion. And looking at the after-effects of those experiences is so rewarding because it reminds me that there is a benevolent force in the universe and that if I truly avail myself to it, it's there for me.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [01:07:18] Well, when earlier you said there's a God, need, and medicine, grace, I would say it's all of the above. And in the book, I talk about a case of a woman with severe autoimmune disease, so much so that all she could do is lie in bed like rigid money. She just wanted to die. She couldn't get out of bed by herself. She needed to be helped to get out of bed. She could only get along in a wheelchair if she was pushed. She just wanted to die. She was in so much pain. And she had no prognosis to survive. She got in touch with me about 10 years ago now.

And we talked. And we talked about the traumatic nature that she had this autoimmune condition. It was scleroderma which means hardened skin. The tissues just hardened up. Tremendously traumatic childhood, but none of the doctors, of course, ever asked about that. None of the medicines worked, but they gave her another Western medicines. In her case, they didn't. They can sometimes work, but in her case, they didn't. She does Ayahuasca. That night she stood up by herself for the first time in months. And she's just come back from her umpteen ceremony. Her and I are still talking and she's writing an autobiography. She's won some poetry contests and writing contests. And she's very alive. And she continues to deepen her experience with the plant, also in Costa Rica.

But it's not just addiction. She had a physical illness that literally made her immobile. Now, from a Western medical point of view, this is nonsense. It's unbelievable. But it's very straightforward. It's not that the plant healed her physiology, it's that the plant put her in touch with her real self. And that loss of real self was a source of autoimmune disease because when you push down your emotions, you also push down your immune system. And when you push down your anger, it turns against you. When you push down your anger, it can also turn the immune system against you.

So she was one of these hyperfunctioning really nice, very hyper-responsible people really stressed at her job at Harvard. And then this disease comes along and says you can't do this anymore. And then to the plant and through all kinds of other self-work, she finds herself. How do I notice it is true? Because I talked to her doctor in Boston who validated this whole story. Now, in Western medical terms, it's one of these unexplained spontaneous remissions. 

But there's nothing spontaneous about it. She did the trauma work. And especially with the help of the plant, she go deep enough to do it. But not just the plant, she have all kinds of other work as well. So what I'm saying is that healing is available. And what she did is she recovered herself, just like you recovered yourself. Now, I don't think the plants are for everybody and nobody should be forced or badgered into using them. And there's all kinds of other ways to get to come to know yourself. But, boy, it's a powerful modality.

Luke Storey:  [01:10:47] My nana, as we used to call her, used to constantly tell me how important it was to get proper sleep. She knew, of course, that I was burning the candle on all four sides in my early years. But what did she know? She only lived to be 99 years old. Now, it wasn't until many years after her passing that I began to take her advice and really put a lot of study and discipline into my sleep hygiene. So if it helps you sleep better, I've probably tried it, but nothing and I mean, nothing has improved my sleep more than regulating temperature.

And science tells us that the best way to achieve and maintain consistent deep sleep is by lowering core body temperature. Well, our homies over at Chilli Sleep make the coldest and most comfortable sleep systems available. They make the OOLER, the Cube, and the Dark Pro sleep systems, which are water-based, temperature-controlled mattress toppers that fit over your existing mattress to provide your ideal sleep temperature. Now I've used all three of their devices over the years and they all work incredibly.

But I've been using specifically their Dark Pro for the past few months and it is awesome, especially in this insane Texas heat. The Dark Pro even has an app that lets you set a sleep schedule so you can change the temperature from cold and even to warm on demand. Plus it has airplane mode to stop the EMF once you set it up, which, of course, I'm a huge fan of. So to get your sleep on track here's what you do, head over to sleep.me/lukestorey to learn more and save 25% off the purchase of any new Cube, OOLER, or the new Dark Pro sleep systems. Now heads up, this offer is available exclusively for you Life Stylist podcast listeners and only for a limited time. So again, get over to sleep.me/lukestorey and get your sleep dialed in.

Well, this is it something that I-- I wouldn't say I struggle with, but something that I try to be mindful with and also honest at the same time, especially as someone who is-- well, I guess I have my own version of sobriety that includes the use of psychedelics periodically. But I'm not addicted to any drugs, I would say at the moment other than nicotine, which has been a little bit of a recurring issue for me. But the drugs that were problematic for me, alcohol, crack, heroin, etc, there is not a chance in hell that I would ever, by the grace of God touch anything like that ever again for the rest of my life. The commitment is beyond a commitment. It's a non-negotiable soul contract that I have with God that I believe is how I got sober in the first place and with myself.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [01:13:36] And it's also probably that you just don't need them anymore.

Luke Storey:  [01:13:39] Yeah, exactly. If you don't have a headache, why would you take a bottle of aspirin? But the point I was getting to was how to address this topic of the intersection between-- my guy came to fix the fence right in the moment we're recording. So if listeners can hear that grinding, just work through it. The intersection of the healing and intentional use of psychedelics and plant medicines and addiction recovery, I think is so fascinating. And I know I'm not the only one in the world thinking of this, but just as a subjective person who had the experience of being sober for a very long time, and then, in this warp speed in the past four years, just working through things that honestly traditional therapy and the 12 Step model and all the things, I just couldn't touch certain things on which I was stuck, primarily around intimacy, sexuality, relationships, romantic relationships, that healthy attachment, it was just totally out of my grasp.

I could read every book on it, go to any kind of group therapy, all the things and I was just stuck. So I have to be honest and say there were things that those experiences have helped me work through and paradoxically have, I would say I secured my sobriety even more so than it was before I ever took plant medicine. I'm even more committed because as you said, at least partially so because there's even less of a need to anesthetize myself because I'm more free than ever.

So my question for you and I don't know if you have a pat answer for this or not, but maybe we could explore. I only have the point of reference of being sober and very committed to my recovery program for 22 years and then entering that realm. So to me, I felt safe and I could trust myself at that point, but I've also met people like your woman with the hardened skin issue. I've met people that did 5-MeO-DMT, one time when they were still addicted to drugs, and were struck sober and have been sober for years, just from one experience. So it's really interesting.

Let me just wrap it up by saying, the interesting part of it and the paradox to me is that in the traditional model of recovery, which is bonafide and worked for me, it's about complete abstinence from all mind-altering substances. Yet Alcoholics Anonymous itself that was founded in part by the co-founder Bill Wilsons experience with belladonna, which is a plant medicine, when he was in a mental hospital having withdrawals from alcohol. And then later on, I'm sure you're aware explored LSD. So there's this elephant in the room in recovery of where psychedelics play a role and how. Do you have any input on that? I know it was a long rant, but--

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [01:16:34] No, no, no, I do. I very much appreciate what you said about the 12 Steps. The 12 Steps in themselves as steps, I think they're essential for life. Never mind you're addicted or not addicted. Who will not benefit from recognizing the smallness and the powerlessness of the little ego and looking for their higher power? How are they defined? Who will not benefit from a moral inventory about-- I've heard others owning it, and resolving not to do it. Who would not benefit from a commitment to help others in a way that honors their individuality and their boundaries? These steps are marvelous life wisdom, are they not?

My problem with the 12 Step Movement is they've been very slow, and they remain very slow to recognize the tremendous importance of trauma. You can go to 12 Step group for years and not talk about trauma. And sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. It depends on which group and who's in it. But overall, there's no organizational and understanding of trauma, even though Bill W, who you mentioned himself, was a traumatized child abandoned by his parents. So that's a strange omission that I think leads people short of the help that they need, in many cases, number one.

Now, when it comes to psychedelics, they also have a misunderstanding. For example, when I was working in addiction medicine, some of my patients were on methadone. Now, methadone is an opiate, it's addictive. But it doesn't give you a high when you're using it in the right quantities. It just keeps you from going through heroin withdrawal, which is a horrible thing to go through. But a lot of them felt afraid to mention that in the 12 Step groups because the 12 Step groups would be critical of them being on any substance at all, even though the substance made it possible for them to do the healing work.

Same with the psychedelics. They have this idea that a substance is a substance, mind-altering substance. No, the issue is why we're using it. Using alcohol and cocaine, or crystal meth, or heroin, whatever people use it to go to sleep, to, as you said, anesthetize themselves. People use psychedelics in the right context. They're not using it to anesthetize themselves, to escape from themselves. They're using it to get to know themselves. They're not using it to run away from pain. They're using it to embrace their pain. So it's a totally different context and a different intention.

And these things don't create dependence the way that say, alcohol or heroin does, or cocaine does. So it's a really an understandable one because substances are substances, but it has to do with your intention, as we say, the set, which is your mindset, and why you're doing it. And it has to do with the context, which is the setting, so it's set and setting. If you're using it to grow and heal, and to get to know your pain, and to get to know your true self, rather than to escape from all that stuff, and if you're doing it in the right context with the right leadership, where you get support before doing it and after, it's the very opposite of using substances in an addictive way, just the very opposite of it.

Luke Storey:  [01:20:10] Yeah, I'm laughing to myself as you speak because I'm thinking about my early history with psychedelics, which was quite robust. I used to follow the Grateful Dead around a bit. And I would take acid and mushrooms in an effort to escape my suffering. And that would ultimately end me up in these really bad trips where I was suffering even more because I couldn't escape myself. and then I would just drinking and try to dampen the effects of the psychedelics. So that's the only way that I knew those earlier in life, but I'm laughing to think if someone were to sit in a properly held container with an eye mask on with some facilitators and taking Ayahuasca if you think you're going to escape your problems doing that, I've got an Island property in Idaho to sell you. But yeah, I mean--

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [01:21:09] Not only that, you're going to puke your guts out in the process.

Luke Storey:  [01:21:13] Exactly. Just thinking about God, I can't imagine how any of those-- I guess everyone's different, but each time I go through one of those experiences, I feel complete. And it's like, yeah, it's often beautiful, but it can be intense. And I think, okay, I'm probably good forever. And then some months go by, and a ripe opportunity presents itself. But there's always-- it's not a fear, but it's, for me a healthy respect, that this is not something to play with. This is not something to try to use for even if you're not in pain, just for fun, or recreation or escapism. This is just for myself. I'm not shaming other people that use medicines for whatever they want.

But, man, I have to be very intentional and very brave and courageous to enter into that space because I know for myself, I have to be willing to really look at whatever comes up. And there's no running away from it in that scenario, which is, as you indicated, so different than something like alcohol or an opiate or methamphetamine, cocaine. I never had any sort of self-realization in those experiences. In fact, it disconnected me from myself even further.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [01:22:30] Yeah, now, there's only one warning that I want to put out for all the good that they can do. And I acknowledge them and write about them. They're really a much small part of the overall human experience. And so many of the problems that we face are social in origin. They have to do with who controls and who owns, and who makes decisions about the lives of millions of other people, about who decides what to do with the environment. It has to do with stress in a culture. When I talk about stress in the book, when you look at what triggers physiological stress in people, it's uncertainty, lack of information, conflict, and loss of control.

We're living in a society that imposes uncertainty, imposes lack of genuine information, loss of control, lots of conflicts. These issues are social, they're societal. They're manifestations of a toxic culture. And so as much as I have benefited from and have advocated for the use of psychedelics as a healing modality, I really keep my eye on a large picture of what happens in society as a whole and what are the issues that social, cultural, economic, physiological, psychological, emotional, affect people's lives? And how do we address the larger issues. And that's why out of the 33 chapters, one is devoted to-- just like 3%, one is devoted to psychedelics. It's an important chapter for me. But I do want to warn people against putting all their eggs into that one basket.

And when I wrote that chapter on psychedelics, I spoke to Michael Pollan, who wrote How to Change Your Mind, and DVC right now about psychedelics. And asked him, was he surprised by the response to his book. And he said he was especially on the part of people in the medical profession because he expected them to see it as sort of woo woo and nonsense, but he was surprised by the positive interest because he says, a lot of doctors, psychiatrists, they've realized just how thin our toolkit is, just how inadequate our methods are to deal with people's chronic mental and physical health conditions.

So part of the enthusiasm for psychedelics is a reflection of the poverty of Western medicine. And for all our wonderful advances for incredible technological achievements, for all the miracles medical science can perform, which are undoubted and astonishing, for the most part, we're very poor at dealing with people's larger issues and life issues. And so part of the success and even interest in the psychedelic modality is a sign of the general weakness of our healing professions in what is really a toxic world.

Luke Storey:  [01:25:42] It's like our culture is so broken that when one little ray of hope emerges, it's easy to get overexcited about it and just single that thing out as being the solution because it's so bleak on the landscape in general. One little blight of hope is like, oh, my God, this is everything. And I think there's an innate response for someone like me also who's been stuck in many ways for so long and you have these awakenings. And it's easy to be tempted into proselytizing and thinking, this is what everyone needs to do, when I don't believe that's the case. Once I come back into my day-to-day life, I think yeah, a lot of people maybe even with serious mental health issues and things, it could be the worst thing ever for them. I don't know.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [01:26:29] But not only that, Luke. It's also the practical reality that you could afford to fly to Costa Rica and pay for that fairly expensive-- it's not unreasonably expensive, but it's expensive. And so you could afford to take the time away from work or whatever. It's also a matter of privilege in our society. And I'm never going to lose track of that because I tend to forget, we tend to forget that some of us are much more privileged than others. And we get to play in realms or explore modalities that are just not available for most people. That's another reason why I don't look to psychedelics to save the world because let's look at the context.

Luke Storey:  [01:27:23] Yeah. Well, that's a good point, the access factor, which I know a lot of people and-- MAPS and different people that are legitimate organizations that are pushing that ball down the field, access is increasingly a part of that conversation. What's really interesting about the access is that the substances themselves are exceedingly affordable. It's like you can buy enough mushrooms for $25 to send you to the moon, but it's more the facilitators in the structure and as you said, the set and the setting, that's what cost money because if you have a qualified therapist leading you through an MDMA or psilocybin ceremony, you're with them for multiple hours, maybe two of them in the room, and it's going to cost you more than that $25 for the raw materials, it's more the support. So I think that is a really important factor. Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [01:28:17] Well, tonight, I'm actually going to the premiere of a movie about mushrooms.

Luke Storey:  [01:28:21] Oh, really?

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [01:28:21] It's called Dosed 2. There was a film called Dosed, which is about the woman healing her heroin addiction through the use of mushrooms and Iboga, Ibogaine. I was in that film. You might want to check it out. It's called Dose. They've had quite a good international reception. Dosed 2 is being premiered tonight. And I'm going to the premiere because I was also in this film and people will be asking questions here in Vancouver. Dennis McKenna-- and maybe you know Dennis McKenna.

Luke Storey:  [01:28:51] Sure.

 Dr. Gabor Mate:  [01:28:52] Yeah, so he's in the film as well. He'll be there tonight as well. The story is of a woman with terminal breast cancer who some years ago was given one or two years to live. Four years later, she's still alive. Now she's one of these types-- I talk about this in The Myth of Normal and also in my previous book, When the Body Says No. The people that get breast cancer are tentatively people who suppress their healthy anger, who are disconnected from themselves, who are always taking care of everybody else, compulsively thinking of everybody else's needs. And that creates a lot of stress for them, and that stress potentially is malignancy.

So Laurie, that is her name in the song, she's typically one of these extra nice people, always about others and so on. But then she's faced with this diagnosis where after two major surgeries, the cancer is still there. So she does mushrooms. Typically, the first trip is all about, will my family be okay? She just can't think of herself. And she actually learns you know what, that they'll be okay. The cancer comes back and she decides to then do another trip with mushrooms. This time, am I going to be okay? And she finds her connection with the universe and with herself. And she knows that whether she lives or dies, she's going to be okay.

But also she realizes that all her life she has not been herself. She has been disconnected from herself. And that disconnection, she has not been authentic. She was born authentic, but as a result of her childhood influences, she has to disconnect from her authenticity in order to be accepted on light. And this is what I call the tension between authenticity and attachment, attachment, being the relationships that we depend on. Authenticity is knowing our gut feelings and be able to express them and act on them.

There's this tension, just like there was a tension for you when you were being abused. Your gut feelings would have told you to run away or to fight back. But could you afford to run away or fight back? Well, you couldn't. So you had to suppress those gut feelings. So we get disconnected from ourselves. So Laurie got disconnected from herself through the psychedelic experience and the mushroom and through other work she's done. She realizes that whatever time she's left, whether it's a day, whether it's a year, whether his thing is she's going to be herself for the rest of her life.

And so she says something that you I think alluded to as well, at some point, you began to look at your addictions as a teacher, not just as a disaster to have survived, but as something that has led you into pathways that now inspire you and inspire and help others. In the book, I have a chapter called disease as teacher. Not that I recommend addiction or physical illness to anybody as a way of learning, it's just that when they show up, if we can actually delve into them, there's so much to teach us that can enrich our lives. That's what Laurie found. So she's going to be authentic for the rest of her life. And she says that's more important than all my life last.

Luke Storey:  [01:32:11] Wow. Wow, that's so beautiful.

Back in the '90s, my friends used to call me a health nerd, drinking smoothies, taking vitamins, doing saunas, colonics, and all the old-school health practices. Well, my commitment to health has never wavered since. And lucky for me, the innovation over the past two decades has been incredible. We just live in an unprecedented time of opportunity when it comes to taking your wellness into your own hands. And one of my non-negotiables is getting a daily dose of red light.

There are dozens of clinically proven benefits from red light therapy, and I've experienced many of them myself. Most importantly, I'd say, cellular vitality and energy, which is why I'm so committed to my daily Joovv red light sessions. Aside from the obvious benefits, I've been recommending Joovv for years because the quality of their devices are simply the best. Their modular design allows for a variety of setup options that gives me the flexibility to use them how I see fit.

Now, I personally dig the full body modular system myself because I can blast myself with powerful red light all over my body very quickly. But Joovv also makes many sizes like their handheld device, it's called the Joovv go, that's really great for targeting specific areas of your body, like hurting joints or sore muscles. But no matter what Joovv device you use, the benefits are definitely there. To get in on this red light magic, hit up joovv.com/luke. And heads up, right now they're offering all of my listeners an exclusive discount on their first order. Again, that's J-O-O-V-V.com/luke, and use the code LUKE at checkout for your qualifying order. Some exclusions, however, do apply.

Yeah, I really do. It took a while to find this perspective, but I really do have an immense degree of gratitude for my past. In a broader sense, just because I really love my life, and I'm learning to love who I am as a man even more, and maybe if I would have had different experiences and not became an addict, I would have loved my life in that parallel reality, and that parallel reality of who I became, but this is the way it happened. And I think because of the suffering that I experienced as a result of the addiction, there was really no other choice but to in a very earnest sense, seek God just for lack of a better term. There were no other options left.

And in so doing, I found God which really is just finding myself as an expression of that. And also the drive, the empathy for others suffering, and the drive to serve has the net benefit of making life so rich. It's everything. There's no other point to the whole thing other than service to me. And I would have never come to that realization or subjective experience if I was still living in the self-centered, narcissistic trap of addiction. But that trap of addiction is what led me to becoming at least an increasingly selfless person. It's just another one of those paradox. So I couldn't be happier that I was an addict. It was brutal. I hurt a lot of people and really hurt myself. But man, what a tale to tell the grandkids someday.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [01:35:54] Until the end. To my ears, what you're talking about is, who are we as human beings. Because in this society, one of the toxic myths that are normalized is that humans are by nature selfish, and aggressive, and competitive, and hostile. This is our nature. So when somebody does something bad, we say, "Oh, that's just human nature." But when somebody does something good, do we ever say, "Oh, that's just human nature?" We don't say that. And yet, how we evolved, we're communal cooperative creatures. We couldn't have evolved any other way. Were we rugged individuals, selfish, and aggressive, and competitive and brutal, we would not exist as a species.

So what you're talking about, to my mind, is that you found your true nature. If you find your true nature, naturally, you feel satisfied and inspired. So that's just one of the toxicities of this culture is what the next people believe about who they actually are, which is contrary to who they really need to be and who they really are. So when people go through the suffering, whether it's through physical illness, or mental illness, or life crisis, or whatever it is, in the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver, which is North America's most dense area of drug use by far, and that all these patients, all of them had been severely abused in childhood. They're laden with HIV because of drug use, hepatitis C, and so on. But the statement I heard so frequently from these street dwellers, was, "Doc, if I ever beat this, I'm going to dedicate the rest of my life to making sure that nobody else has to go through what I went through." So that drive to serve that you talk about is so innate to us. And, again, one of the limitations and harms of this culture is that it makes us believe that somehow we're different and that we should be different in order to succeed.

Luke Storey:  [01:38:04] That's a really beautiful distinction. Rather than having the perspective, I've learned how to be selfless and be of service. In other words, I've learned over time how to be a good person, but in fact, maybe what's happening, we're unlearning those ways that are inauthentic to who we actually are. And back to your word recovery is that we're actually just getting back to what was supposed to be there or was there in the first place.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [01:38:35] You just summed up the intention of my whole book. You really have.

Luke Storey:  [01:38:39] That's so cool.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [01:38:40] That's the whole point. How did we lose it and how do we get back to it? That's the whole point. It's not about learning how to be this or that. It's about learning how to be who we actually are. And you talk to anybody, yes, anybody. Monday feel better when you selfishly grab something, and you've profited off somebody else's loss, and you've-- or when you've done something generous and compassionate. And 99.9% of people feel-- I feel so much more peace, my guts are so much more at rest, my heart is at peace, there's more ease in my body when I do what is of service to others. Why? Because that's our true nature. That's actually our true nature.

Luke Storey:  [01:39:30] Beautiful. For people that have been listening to this, Gabor, that are either finding themselves in a realization that they have unresolved trauma, and it's manifesting as destructive patterns in their lives, whether or not those patterns are showing up as addictions-- I would say that most of us are addicted to something to some degree. Many people think, "Oh, I'm not an addict." There's a junkie over there and they're on their phone all day long refresh, refresh, refresh, I know this to be true for myself. Outside of the realm of plant medicine, healing, and things like that, what can you leave people with in terms of effective modalities of actually getting to that? I know many people have tried talk therapy and have gone in circles and haven't been able to really affect lasting change in the way that we're describing today. Do you have any low-hanging fruit that you could share with people in terms of what direction to go?

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [01:40:32] Well, I do. If anybody's still serving enough, but the book has 33 chapters, eight of them are about healing.

Luke Storey:  [01:40:39] Awesome.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [01:40:40] So it's about techniques and ways of working with yourself. So that's one thing. The problem with most talk therapies, which includes most cognitive behavioral therapy, and all the current fashion, they don't talk about trauma. So it's not a question is talk therapy, good talk therapy can be very effective, but it has to be trauma-informed. There's a lot of therapists out there that don't understand anything about trauma. They never had the training. It's all about behaviors and thoughts and ideas and problems, but not about what's the real nature of human beings and how are they traumatized

So it's not a question of talk therapy. It is a question of what kind of talk therapy. Furthermore, talk therapy that's only about talking and doesn't regard the body-- trauma happens in the body. That disconnect that you experienced, Luke, happened in your body. It wasn't just in your mind. It happened in your body. I interviewed if you know the writer Eve Ensler who wrote The Vagina Monologues and other wonderful plays and books, she calls herself V now. She calls herself V because Eve Ensler is the name given to her by her father who raped her repeatedly when she was a child. She no longer wants to be identified with the name given to her by this abuser.

She's an incredible artist, and she had cancer. She had cancer of the uterus, stage three to four cancer of the uterus. She was saved by Western medicine, but also she was saved by a realization that she has to deal with her trauma. So she has and talks about disconnect from the body. She says when somebody incests you, you disconnect from your body. She said, "After the operation, they took out 70 lymph nodes and several organs." And she was lying there in hospital with all these tubes in her body. She says, "I was back into my body and I was overjoyed to be back in my body." She says. So trauma happens in the body. Any therapy that ignores the body is just not good enough.

There are all kinds of modalities of therapy. I could list a whole bunch, this wonderful method called internal family systems developed by my friend Dick Short, there's compassionate inquiry, which I developed. We teach it to hundreds of therapists around the world, and people can look it up online. It's also available for private use. There's a film about my work called The Wisdom of Trauma that people can watch online. It's just www.wisdomoftrauma.com. There's EMDR, there's a wonderful literature now, there's Bessel van der Kolk Classic called the Body Keeps the Score, which is all about trauma. It's not an easy read. But it's the number one bestseller for years now which shows you first of all, the value of his work, but also the Zeitgeist which is turning towards understanding trauma. Another book called What Happened to You by? Bruce Perry and Oprah came out last year. So there's more and more literature on trauma now. There's more and more modalities, I would say that any modality that does not recognize and delve into trauma is not going to fundamentally get you through to where you need to be.

Luke Storey:  [01:44:05] Yeah, it's definitely been the case for me. Well, we're going to put, of course, a link to your new book, The Myth of Normal and we're going to create some show notes and put all of the things that we discussed here today in those show notes so that people can follow up on that because you've really given us a really nice overview here I think of this topic. It's been amazing for me. As I said, I was really excited to talk to you. Just listening to your voice, reading your books, it's like oh, man, this is going to be incredible, and it has been. So thank you so much for your generosity of time. My closing question for you, sir, is who are three teachers or teachings that have influenced your life and your work and or your work that you might share with us? I know you just rattled off some authors and stuff, but if there's something even more broadly speaking that has really made an impact.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [01:44:58] It reminds me that line from that song by American Pie where he says, "The three men I admire the most, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost."

Luke Storey:  [01:45:10] That's great. I didn't even know that lyric was in that song. I probably heard that.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [01:45:13] Yeah, the three men I admire the most, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. I could talk about the great spiritual avatars that have come along in the life of mankind, to instruct us and to inspire us and to guide us. I could talk about the Buddha, I could talk about Jesus, I could talk about Krishna. But that's probably not who you're asking about. You're probably asking about real people.

Luke Storey:  [01:45:39] Oh, no, no.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [01:45:40] So I have to start with those three.

Luke Storey:  [01:45:46] Pretty good. Three.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [01:45:48] Rumi, the Sufi poet. In terms of modern people, there's a man called AH Almaas, A-L-M-A-A-S. And he's a psychological thinker and spiritual teacher. I call him all the time. He's influenced me a lot. And he's the one who said that the greatest catastrophe is not that there was no love or supporting each other. The greater calamity, which was caused by that first calamity is that you lost the connection to yourself. That's much more important than whether your mother or father love you or not.

So in terms of that loss of connection to oneself, and the fact that we have an essence to connect with, and you and I touched upon that, I can thank Almaas, A-L-M-A-A-S for that. In the medical world, I've been very grateful for the work of Daniel Siegel, a psychiatrist who came up with the concept of interpersonal neurobiology, which means that we affect each other's neurobiology, and therefore, actually our biology to get into connections. He's got a new book coming out in the fall called Interconnected. I love his work. I've learned a lot from him.

And I'd have to say, when it comes to trauma work, the work of Bessel van der Kolk really explored and illuminated the ways to understand trauma that has informed my own understanding. So I can name others, but yes, with three, those are the three teachers that I would-- I would also throw in Eckhart Tolle whose spiritual teachings have meant a lot to me. And so--

Luke Storey:  [01:47:45] Me too. Yeah. A couple of years into my early sobriety, I got that book, The Power of Now. I got it on the CDs and the book. And I had never even heard of any of those concepts. I was so clueless. And it's fun to explore a teaching like that and to start to apply some of those truths. And then some years later, I read his stuff now I'm like, oh, yeah, of course, it becomes part of your working model of life. So yeah, but he had such a massive impact on me as well. Really good stuff. On that note,  before I let you go, do you think when he described the pain body he was essentially talking about the culmination of your trauma?

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [01:48:32] Yes. Something that we should have a conversation with regard because I think that's absolutely true. And I think he could say more about that. And I think if he said more about that, that would help-- not that he hasn't helped a lot of people already. And you and I are acknowledging his impact, but I think it could be that much more impactful. That's something someday I would love to have a conversation with him about.

Luke Storey:  [01:49:01] I hope you do.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [01:49:02] We both live in Vancouver. I've been to his talks but I go there to learn. But yeah, I think the pain body is very succinct and I think very illuminating formulation of the impact of trauma.

Luke Storey:  [01:49:19] Yeah, cool, man. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been just a real treat to get to know you a bit and to absorb your wisdom and experience. I really appreciate it. I'm going to put as I said, all the links to your books and all the things in the show notes so we can support you and keep you writing these books that help so many people, myself included.

Dr. Gabor Mate:  [01:49:39] Luke, thank you so much. It's such a pleasure to speak with you.

Luke Storey:  [01:49:42] Likewise. Wow, just wow, what an illuminating conversation. And I got to say this one was such a blessing for me personally, as someone who's benefited tremendously from Dr. Mate's vast body of work. And although I generally see myself as more of a student of life rather than a teacher, there was a very special moment shared after the interview wherein Dr. Mate conveyed some very powerful words of praise and appreciation to and for me. Sometimes it's difficult to see what you've overcome, and perhaps more importantly, who you've become from one's own subjective experience. So it was incredibly meaningful for me to receive his support and appreciation for the work I have done and continue to do to evolve and overcome limitations, whether real or imagined.

And to build on the momentum of this episode and the topics discussed, next week, we'll be speaking to second-time guest Danielle LaPorte on Episode 433. She'll share how to be loving despite adversity and pain and how this spiritual practice can change your life in the most powerful of ways. Until then, I'll be seeing many of you next Friday, September 23 at the modern Nirvana Summit here in Austin, Texas. And I got to say, I can't wait to see some of you listeners there and give you all a big hug of appreciation because without you, I couldn't do what I do.

And if you don't yet have tickets, here's what's up, visit lukestorey.com/events where you can get yourself 15% off your ticket. I'm going to pop in here for a minute to remind you to sign up for the off-grid homestead bundle for only $50 between September 16 and 25, 2022. You can find the registration link at lukestorey.com/offgrid. Now I joined over 100 other thought leaders and creators who have contributed high-quality ebooks, video courses, and guides on how to live a sustainable and self-sufficient life. 

And when we came together, we all agreed to contribute this content for 99% off retail. Why? Because we believe in how important it is to get this information out there to people like you. I know I'm going to devour the stuff that's in this program because there's literally everything in this mega content bundle for living a life of freedom, resilience, and sustainability.

As a reminder, here are just a few of the topics covered. First, we've got EMF mitigation, of course, that's why my EMF home safety masterclass is included in the bundle, and that thing in and of itself is over six hours of video content. Plus you'll also learn some highly valuable and timely life skills like how to start homesteading and living off the land, permaculture, organic gardening, wild foraging, seed starting, canning and food preservation, self-sufficiency with solar-powered solutions, creating online income and monetizing Airbnb rentals, urban gardening, creating chemical free cleaners, composting methods, organic farming, beekeeping and animal care, prepping and emergency preparedness, sovereign womanhood, homebirth, breastfeeding and holistic postpartum practices, and even how to start homeschooling. And that's just a fraction of the stuff included in this bundle.

Here's what you do to sign up, go to lukestorey.com/offgrid to get access to everything, including my EMF course for only 50 bucks. Again, that's lukestorey.com/offgrid, or just click the link that appears in your show notes on most podcast player apps. But don't forget registration for this thing is only open September 16 through 25, 2022. So I highly recommend that you get signed up right now, it's lukestorey.com/offgrid. Thanks again for listening and blessings of the highest order to you and yours.

‍