[00:00:01] Luke: So the first time I met you was after you poured a sweat lodge out on Aubrey's land a few weeks ago with Bobby Kennedy. And I've seen you perform before, but that was the first time I got to come up and give you a hug. And man, that was such a beautiful sweat. You were leading it, so of course my attention was on you, but I was really feeling into your energy, and I think I even told you this the other day when we ran into each other.

[00:00:33] Just the balance that you had of sharing deep wisdom, ancestral wisdom, and just holding chill space, and especially in a lodge where there was a lot of diversity. You had men and women in there. You had a lot of different ages. Based on some of the guys groaning on my side, I sensed it might've been their first one.

[00:00:57] Porangui: There was a lot first timers.

[00:00:57] Luke: There was some guys barely hanging in there. They didn't want to be the one guy that wusses out. And then over here to my left is freaking Bobby Kennedy, who's just a champ. And it was just such a special couple of hours that we spent in there. So after that, I've wanted to have you on the show for a while anyway just because your music's beautiful and you seem like such a great guy and have mutual friends and all that.

[00:01:18] But yeah, I was sitting in that lodge and I was like, I want to hear more of this. You just have such an interesting life path and beautiful Dharma and the world. So yeah, welcome to the show.

[00:01:29] Porangui: Thank you, Luke. Yeah, it's really good to be here.

[00:01:32] Luke: And as I was telling you, I've only been able to do this a couple of times because I've only had a couple of few musicians on, but I'm so glad you brought an instrument.

[00:01:40] Porangui: Mm.

[00:01:41] Luke: And I think a great way to start would be having you share some of your music with us.

[00:01:45] Porangui: Be honored to. The little instrument comes from West Africa. It's known as the ngoni. And this was made by a good friend of mine, Aruna, who now lives out in the desert between Phoenix and Sedona. So he made this one for me. It fits in an overhead. So it's a smaller version. The traditional ones would have a massive gourd that'd be huge, these African gourds.

[00:02:07] Luke: So you carry that on.

[00:02:09] Porangui: This one goes on the plane. It's exactly the dimensions of an overhead, so I had to max and design it just for that space, but yeah, this is the baby. So it's not as resonant as the big ones, but when I plug it in, especially for shows, it's got a spirit to it, and yeah, I'd love to offer a song.

[00:02:29] Luke: Real quick before you start, I'm so curious about interesting instruments. So there's no fret board.

[00:02:35] Porangui: No fret board.

[00:02:36] Luke: So is it in an open tuning? Is it tuned to a chord so that--

[00:02:40] Porangui: Sort of, yeah. This one particular, it's in an African pentatonic with a couple of adjusted notes to just give it some other colors. But yeah, you can tune them into-- it's an African harp essentially. So it's more like a harp, but different styles of playing it. Can be very percussive and much more different than just your standard harp playing. But yeah, it's the ancestor of the guitar in a way when you think about it, when you're tracing it all the way back.

[00:03:11] Luke: It looks very intimidating in terms of tuning it.

[00:03:14] Porangui: Yeah, it takes a--

[00:03:16] Luke: I'm like, that's a lot of tuning knobs on that thing. What is happening?

[00:03:20] Porangui: Yeah, takes a little time. But yeah, I'd love to just offer us a song to just set the energy here of our conversation and just welcome us all to space. So thank you all for being here with us today.

[00:04:01] [Music Playing] I'm on my way, on my way through the valley of my soul. On my way, on my way through the valley of my soul oh ooh. On my way, my only way. [Inaudible] Show me the way back home. Back home. Take me home. Take me home. Take me home. Ooh, eh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Ooh, ah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Take me home.

[00:07:28] Luke: Wow. Thank you. Oh my God. What would it take to get you to come start every podcast for me? How much are you making on tour? Let's talk. Oh, so beautiful, man. I was sitting there listening and thinking, can I talk anymore? I don't know. I'm done. Everything that needs to be said was just said, which is really, I think a gift of your music.

[00:08:17] Another thought that I had was I wonder how many tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people have had deep psychedelic experiences while listening to your music. Not that everyone that listens to your music is participating in that mode of travel, but a lot are. I know I have. So interesting to think the voice that was just playing right here has been in the field of so many beautiful souls as they're awakening. Do you ever trip on that?

[00:08:54] Porangui: I sit with that. I sit with that. I feel that. I've had folks come up to me and tell me, we put your music on when we were giving birth to our child. We put your music on when my father was passing away. We put your music on in the midst of the pandemic when we were terrified and didn't know what was going to happen on this planet.

[00:09:15] And I've had those reflections at different moments. So I always feel this thread in my heart, connection. Just this connection wherever I am that in any given moment, there's many in our collective field of human family that are- we're connected to each other. We're woven together in this beautiful fabric of life.

[00:09:40] I really feel that, like the strings of the Ngoni here, it's like all of us wear these strings. Our life is a string that is being played by the winds, if you will, of time and our ancestors. And we came here to bring through a song. All of us have a song of our heart that some of us have already found, and it's playing strongly, and that's our dharma that gets us up every morning.

[00:10:04] And some of us have yet to discover it. And some of us have too much scar tissue, perhaps. It's layered on where we have a hard time accessing it. And so every time I ever play, whenever I perform, whenever the recordings, and you could say the form of parenting-- I haven't had the honor yet to give birth to a human child yet, but I have given birth to a lot of musical babies, if you will.

[00:10:29] And so there's this form of fathering I've been able to enjoy and how to put them into the world in a really good way without it becoming, I guess, yeah, corrupted, for lack of a better word, distorted by the powers of the music industry and that whole system as I think you know because you used to live, I know, in LA and in that entertainment capital of the world.

[00:10:50] And so it's been a real journey to stay independent and to protect these babies so that I know they can get out there to the world in a good way and connect and resonate the hearts of others to then remember their own song. Because in the end, for me, that's the mission.

[00:11:06] It's like helping us to feel more connected to ourselves, more connected to the earth, more connected to one another, because by doing so, very much like we were talking about earlier off camera, it brings us back to that love that then really is the source of the world we know is possible.

[00:11:27] Luke: Epic. Do you ever get the sense that in prior lives, if you believe in such things-- I'm just going to assume that you do in your own way. Have you ever got the sense that you were also a musician before, before you came here this time?

[00:11:40] Porangui: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I think a few times. Yeah.

[00:11:44] Luke: I find it interesting to observe virtuosos, especially those that start really young. And I just think there's no way they just got that this time around. Sometimes you see young kids just shredding on whatever instrument. I go, there's just no way that isn't some training from the last time they were here or something like that. I guess sometimes in the family lineage the DNA wisdom or the DNA skill for something probably comes through too.

[00:12:15] It's very common that if somebody is really musically gifted, there's a number of people in their family that are musical too. But yeah, I always think about that, like, wow, how many times has this cat sat in front of a fire and played a drum or strum some kind of instrument or something.

[00:12:29] Porangui: Totally.

[00:12:30] Luke: Yeah. It's cool.

[00:12:31] Porangui: Yeah, no, I feel that. Both my parents were musicians, and they always laugh about retelling me as a kid. They'd say, because they'd have rehearse or they'd be doing a gig and they'd get me up there, they'd give me the maracas, the shakers. We're playing, and they couldn't get me off the stage because I just wanted to stay up there and jam.

[00:12:52] Luke: Really?

[00:12:52] Porangui: Yeah, yeah. They'd have a real hard time. [Inaudible]

[00:12:56] Luke: I going to ask you what your first instrument was. Would it have been maracas?

[00:12:59] Porangui: I think maracas is probably was one of the first ones. Yeah, for sure. Probably. It's like they say in Brazil, the greatest mestres in the Samba schools, it's like, you start with the chocalho or maraca, basically a shaker, you start with the shaker and then you end with the shaker.

[00:13:15] It's like the black belt. You look in the back of this epic, hundreds of drummers playing super precise, and in the back you see the master just like he's an elder, but he's just holding down the shaker. But every nuance of the way that he's playing that shaker, the swing, every subtle motion of all the muscles in his body has all the information that then is coded into all the instruments. And so it's just all right there in that shaker. So if you can play a good shaker, you can sit in with anyone.

[00:13:43] Luke: That's funny. That reminds me of when I was probably in my late teens and grew up listening to Led Zeppelin and the Stones and all those bands. And then I started to learn about blues, the music that they borrowed from, or in some cases stole from, to create that music, depending on how you look at it.

[00:14:01] But I started then going and buying Chuck Berry and Little Richard and Bo Diddley and James Brown and all the original artists. And one of the interesting things about early '50s rock and roll was Bo Didley. And there's the famous Bo Didley beat, like Pap, pap, pap, pap. Yeah, which later is like a George Michael song. It's like, there's a lot of songs. There's a famous U2 song that's got that beat. There's a few, once you know the beat, you're like, oh yeah, I know that.

[00:14:28] Porangui: Do you know where that beat comes from?

[00:14:30] Luke: No. You know?

[00:14:31] Porangui: Oh yeah. Yeah.

[00:14:32] Luke: Oh, no way.

[00:14:33] Porangui: That is clave in Afro Cuban music, Afro Caribbean music. We call that clave. Clave is essentially the instrument you play with the two sticks you often see in like a salsa band, for instance, more commonly, and they'll have these two clack sticks and you play them against each other and mopping [clapping].

[00:14:56] So that pattern is-- a clave translates to [Inaudible], the key. So actually, that pattern originates all the way back from Mama Africa. It's a very ancient pattern. Some people say that there's only one clave, but you hear it in different voicings and applied in different ways.

[00:15:15] But that pattern is like the key, if you will-- it's like the DNA code that holds together this whole universe of rhythms and feeling of music that translates a feeling. And it's the timekeeper. It literally keeps the time, and it gives you the feel and swing of the music.

[00:15:34] And so in salsa music, for instance, you'll either hear it, what they call a 3-2 or 2-3 clave. In other words, you'll start with like the Bo Diddley. That's 3-2. So it's one, two, three, one, two. But you could flip it. So start with the one. Pa, pa, pa, pa, pa, pa, pa, pa. And that's like often in salsa. You'll hear that clave. So the song clave.

[00:15:58] And so these claves, these keys, and we have them in Brazil too, but we don't call it clave in Brazil, in Portuguese, but it's the code. You'll hear it all over, like Samba and all the different rhythms and Afro Brazilian rhythms. That clave has this code. It is a key that will unlock the music when you understand it.

[00:16:18] It's the one part of all the band that tells everyone where you are in the music. Because often the music doesn't all line up on a one. It's all polyrhythmic. It all interlocks. And it's very by design. I like to say, you know a people when you know their music and their food and their language.

[00:16:38] There's like the three portals. And I guess when you say music, I also mean dance. So also the dance moves. But the music particularly, because the language, you have to spend a lot of time studying. The food you can get right away. You can get the flavor. But the music, when you start to tap into the music, you'll suddenly find-- and this has been my experience, I don't know if you maybe can relate to this.

[00:16:58] It's like you'll understand the cosmovision of a people through the lens of their music. Great example, when you listen to African music, you often hear many parts. It's very polyrhythmic. So meaning there's many parts that interlock with each other-- many rhythms. Polyrhythmic music. And of course, all of the African diaspora from North America to South America, we hear this polyrhythmic music.

[00:17:21] And so it's no coincidence, or at least I get curious, that they are polytheistic. They believe in many gods. They believe in animism. There's spirit in everything. Whereas when you go to, say, the Middle East and you listen to the rhythms of the Middle East, they're not polyrhythmic. They're monorhythmic.

[00:17:39] Everyone's playing basically the same pattern. They might translate on different instruments, but they're all playing the same part. There's not interlocking parts, which is curious when you think about all the great monotheistic religions of the world, Judaism, Christianity, all originate from those places, often desert regions, not forested, very barren terrains. So they reflect the environment. They reflect the music. They reflect their spirit and how they see and interpret the world. And so I offer that because it's pretty-- It's profound.

[00:18:08] Luke: What a trip. What about something like Gregorian chants or classical music, like Renaissance classical music? How does that reflect that?

[00:18:19] Porangui: Not polyrhythmic.

[00:18:21] Luke: Okay.

[00:18:22] Porangui: Definitely not polyrhythmic. They're coming from that mono-- yeah.

[00:18:24] Luke: That's so interesting.

[00:18:25] Porangui: It has main pulse that's carrying the whole thing, but the parts-- there may be parts that will interlock on some level. Let's say, it's complete devoid of some form of polyrhythm, but it isn't built by polyrhythm. That's not the engine room, if will.

[00:18:39] Whereas when you listen to African music or Afro Brazilian, Afro Caribbean, Afro Cuban music, jazz, even in the United States, all that swing, all that's coming from Louisiana, all those roots music is all coming from ancestral African music. And so you hear that polyrhythmic foundation to it, which makes it go.

[00:19:01] And so a lot of rock, a lot of the popular music styles of them were birthed out of that. They all took from that, electronic music. You listen to most electronic music nowadays, and I promise you, I hear all the time plagiarism of taking various patterns from traditional Afro diaspora music.

[00:19:21] So that's not a coincidence. It's because that music will take you into trance. It's by design. So that Bo Diddley, that da, da, da, da, da, da, da, it has something that propels you into the next measure. It propels you. It moves your body in a way that you can't fully comprehend.

[00:19:37] Luke: Right. There's an entrainment to it. Yeah.

[00:19:41] Porangui: And it trances you. So it's translating you. It's transforming you. It's taking you across the barrier of normal waking state into the other realms, the trans states. And that's healing fundamentally. So we feel that in our body. We can't cognize it completely, but you feel it. And that's where, like I said, music even transcends language. It becomes that universal language because it's embodied experience. You feel it or you don't feel it. It either grooves or it doesn't groove. And you know right away. It's like, this is really square.

[00:20:16] Luke: That is super interesting. I'm going to be vulnerable here. I've never been able to dance. I'm not inspired to do it. If I've ever tried to do it, I feel like I'm forcing it and it's like fake. I don't feel like doing it. It's like a part of the human expression I've never understood.

[00:20:32] Even when I watch people dance, I'm just like, I don't get it. It's a weird thing I have, especially as someone who loves music so deeply and plays a bit of music. However, that said, if you put on James Brown '70s music, I don't know if I'll dance, but I would have a very hard time sitting still.

[00:20:51] Something's going to be moving. And it's like, I guess I never thought about it, but the polyrhythms. There's so many different, not time signatures, but just almost such complex rhythms going on to the point, if you break it apart-- in fact, when I was a bass player, I really wanted to learn how to play funk bass, and you could buy this CD set, there was like James Brown rhythm section.

[00:21:15] And it was super cool because you could pan left and right and isolate the bass and the drums. And if you just listen to the deepest funk James Brown cuts on the drums, when you isolate the drums, it's so simple. It's like, that's the thing that makes me move? Ah. But then when you put the bass line in there, you're like, okay, now we're doing something.

[00:21:35] And then you have the contrast of the two or even three-rhythm guitars that are weaving off one another, playing totally different rhythms. And all of a sudden when you start adding it all together, you're like, oh, this is James Brown funk. But if you tear it apart, it's very simple. It's really interesting just rhythmically.

[00:21:52] Porangui: Now think of that metaphor for the way that we-- because I know you study supplements and different things like that. So how much we do this in the West. We isolate things. We take it out of the intelligence of the whole because we're like, oh, it's just, I just want the one thing.

[00:22:09] So it must be just the drum. That's the real thing right here. It's just the baseline or it's just the vocalist. And so we take something out and then we think, oh, let me 10X that, concentrate, and I'll give it to you. Now you've got that funky feeling right now, a potent funk.

[00:22:28] But in fact, it's lost it. We've taken it out of its intelligence of the whole. So I find it fascinating to look at the metaphor of music when we even think about wellness and healing as a whole. It's like, you really can't. You need the whole. The whole's where the magic is.

[00:22:43] It's the interaction of all the parts combined, having their right place in the wheel that creates the magic that actually transports us and heals us and makes us more whole. Literally, wholeness, wellness is what we're talking about. And yet we keep isolating, keep going back to this reductionist model, allopathic kind of model of like, let's isolate the thing. And we're missing the whole picture.

[00:23:08] And it's the fundamental piece why the music of life is getting squished and turned into the homogeneity and the monocrops of Big Ag and all of this. It's such a metaphor for the whole thing.

[00:23:19] Luke: There's a lot of modern music that's monocrop music, one-dimensional.

[00:23:34] Porangui: There's a parameter in the DAWs, the digital audio workstation, like the software that people used to make modern-day music, to record, especially electronic music because so much electronic music has now become mainstream, and it's called humanize. There's literally a knob. You have to turn it.

[00:23:41] If you just put something down on the grid, it's just going to be perfect like a metronome. And then you have to turn the humanize knob to be able to add the imperfection and the swing and the feel back into it, basically to move things on the grid. So it's not so [Inaudible]. So that feels actually--

[00:23:56] Luke: That's interesting.

[00:23:57] Porangui: So it's called the humanize.

[00:23:58] Luke: Can you use the humanized knob to say, like, create a backbeat where it's like dragging a little bit?

[00:24:03] Porangui: Yes.

[00:24:04] Luke: Oh, really?

[00:24:07] Porangui: That's how electronic producers have to do it. Unless they're really good and they're playing it live and actually make it.

[00:24:11] Luke: That's so interesting. That's one of the things I've observed in drummers. James Brown, he's had a bunch of different drummers who I can't name, but you think about that, it's like, it's right on time, but if you isolate the drums, it's behind. It's lagging just a millisecond. And that's what gives it that tension-- gives it that tension because everyone's not right on the same beat.

[00:24:36] Porangui: And it breathes.

[00:24:37] Luke: In fact, Keith Richards is probably my all-time favorite secular musician, talked about why the stones would swing so much. And he said that it's because he would create the rhythmic landscape with his rhythm guitar. Charlie Watts, the drummer would be following him, and then the bassist, Bill Wyman would be following the drummer. It's not always the way.

[00:25:04] A lot of times it's like you have a very solid drummer and everyone is following that. And he said, that's what gave it that buoyancy and that loose kind of beautifully sloppy sound when they would play live. It's like, if you were like a really uptight musician, you'd be like, oh, they suck live.

[00:25:20] To everyone else, they're just like, this is the best rock and roll ever. Because there's a danger in it. There's a spontaneity. It feels like it's about to fall apart at times. And it's like it makes you feel like you're seeing something for the first time even if it's satisfaction for the millionth time. They've played it since 1965 or whatever.

[00:25:37] But I always thought that was interesting to see how the timing can just be out of phase just ever so slightly, and it creates a completely different audio landscape. All right. The thing I was trying to get to was, because you were mentioning maracas, when I first got really into Bo Diddley, I realized that part of what made his music groove so hard was their maraca player Jerome.

[00:26:03] And he would play like, I don't know, four maracas in each hand or something crazy. And they put it really high in the mix. It's really prominent. Once you know to look for it, you're like, holy shit, this is like a whole maraca track.

[00:26:14] Porangui: [Inaudible].

[00:26:15] Luke: Yeah. And then he even made a song, bring it to Jerome, Jerome Green was his name, and he was like a really famous bad ass maraca player. And it's just funny because you don't think of that instrument as having, I don't know, virtuoso capacity, but that's what really made Bo Diddley's music. That, and the tremolo guitar. There's all this happening, and then the maracas. It's just magical.

[00:26:39] How many instruments do you play at this point?

[00:26:43] Porangui: How many instruments do I--

[00:26:44] Luke: Or can you even count?

[00:26:50] Porangui: One instrument.

[00:26:51] Luke: What is that? The human?

[00:26:54] Porangui: I play one instrument well. That's it. And then everything else is an extension of the one instrument.

[00:27:00] Luke: Wow.

[00:27:01] Porangui: That's been my journey with it. So it's like, for me, it's always coming back to cultivating my mastery of this instrument. And the deeper I'm connected and embodied, then I can pick up anything and make music. Whatever I can play becomes then a musical opportunity to create something with.

[00:27:22] Luke: When you play live, which I've only seen you once live, it was out at the VanDerBeek’s, and aside from just the great soundscape, it was really interesting to watch you. And it was totally unpredictable the way that you're just grabbing all these different instruments. And it seemed to be, to me, extremely spontaneous and just made up as you went along.

[00:27:46] Porangui: Totally improvised.

[00:27:47] Luke: It is?

[00:27:47] Porangui: Yeah.

[00:27:47] Luke: Oh, okay. So you weren't faking the spontaneous of it?

[00:27:53] Porangui: No.

[00:27:53] Luke: I was like, I don't think this is a set list. It's just like, he's just grabbing stuff. And then there's some backing tracks going on at the same time.

[00:28:01] Porangui: No backing tracks.

[00:28:02] Luke: No? That's all you?

[00:28:03] Porangui: That was all me.

[00:28:05] Luke: Are you even playing loops or anything?

[00:28:06] Porangui: I'm looping.

[00:28:07] Luke: Okay. Got it.

[00:28:08] Porangui: I use a looper, a pretty crazy looper device.

[00:28:10] Luke: Okay. So that’s what it was. All right. Because I'd see something would start and now there's a beat, and then guys--

[00:28:15] Porangui: Yeah. So I'm like a painter, a live painter. I'm painting with sound with the audience. So I'm responding to what's alive in the space, seen and unseen, the spirit in the room, your ancestors. I'm listening to all of that, and in that listening, again, the instrument, then I'm using the instrument to like, how do I bring that into form? How do I bring the formless into form? And so it's storytelling in the moment. And that's the magic of it for me. I don't want to play something that is dead, that's a track from another moment.

[00:28:49] How do I create that in the now and capture the magic of even your breathing in the room. And that's in the recording of that loop. And so I'm able to take that. Yes, I'm recording in the moment, but it's totally contextualized to what is happening right then and there.

[00:29:04] And that's the magic of it for me. And that's what tells me what to do next. Because as I respond to each of the things that are arising and what's alive in the space and where we are as living, breathing organisms, then I'm able to respond to that and answer the question.

[00:29:22] And then comes the answer, and then comes another question. And so it's this beautiful dialogue in a way. Essentially, it's like our conversation here, where we get to really create something that's so poignant and essential to that moment that needs to be expressed so that we can feel more whole. Back to what we were saying in the beginning, it's like, my goal is to leave everyone feeling more beautiful and connected and alive than when they walked in the space. And that's--

[00:29:49] Luke: Do you ever have a situation in which you're led through your intuition and creativity down a certain path and you feel the audience not resonating with it, like how a comedian will bomb on a joke? Do you ever experience a song in one of your performances not land?

[00:30:10] Porangui: Different degrees of that. Because when you're doing this, it's like you're--there's so many layers to this, but one of the important ones I find is like, essentially I'm offering my nervous system. I'm entraining a space to my nervous system. I'm offering a pattern. I'm offering a state of being.

[00:30:27] And so if I'm not coherent and I'm not in a rooted grounded place, like we had a really rough sound check and it was a really rough day travel, it takes a lot more. I have to work to really bring myself. I've gotten pretty good at this. So even when we do have hectic, like, oh man, the technology is failing, all the things are going awry, that's been my self-mastery school, is like, how do I stay centered? How do I bring that calm depth and connection to source through no matter what, even if all the tech fails, how do I recover?

[00:31:00] How do I continue to meet the moment? The moment is it's all failing. Now what? And so for me, that's really been it. Great example is I played in Vision Festival, this big festival in Costa Rica. It's a big transformational music festival that has a lot of-- it's very much in the jungle. It's [Inaudible], like we were talking about. And I was closing up the festival main stage, 10,000 people or so in the audience, prime time slot closing it on Sunday night.

[00:31:34] Luke: That's a lot of people.

[00:31:35] Porangui: That's a lot of people in the jungle. It's full vibes, and everybody was there. It was like the landing of the show of the whole festival. And I'm playing, and it's like 10 minutes left in my set. And all of a sudden, my whole rig goes out, no sound, nothing. The mic's dead, everything's dead. And I'm like, oh, great. Okay. I was like, ah. They think it's part of the show or something. I'm like, this isn't part of the show.

[00:32:01] Luke: A long drop beat.

[00:32:02] Porangui: A long drop beat. So I'm like, okay. And so they fortunately had a wireless handheld that they were able to get to work. And so they brought it out to me. And I basically walked out there and just got the whole audience to then sing. I broke them up into sections and we all sang it out into the end and brought this beautiful groove and this final song that ended up being the highlight of a lot of people's festival.

[00:32:25] That was like, man, the way able to turn that, what could be a failure, so to speak in that moment. And instead of freezing and being in a freeze response, able to stay regulated and be like, oh, everyone came here to experience the prayer of what I'm here to bring through.

[00:32:41] And we all want to see the same thing. So now we have the power. Even when the electronics all fail, it's actually us. We are the instrument. And so that was one of those moments where really the-- what do they say? The tire meets the pavement kind of thing, the rubber meets the road.

[00:32:56] And it ended up being this really magical moment. And fortunately they were on board because I'd already really won them over through the set leading up to that moment. So in that moment, everyone was just--

[00:33:05] Luke: Wasn't the second song.

[00:33:07] Porangui: It wasn't the second song. It might've been harder. I don't know. But I've had sets honestly, where it's been really challenging, has been when there's a lot of alcohol in the field, when there's a lot of, to be really blunt, I think cocaine in the field. Those two substances in particular, when they're in the field, there's a density.

[00:33:25] It's almost like a wall. I can feel an energetic wall where it's hard to traverse. It's really hard to reach across that invisible barrier, if you will. And I've had gigs like that too. And those are the ones where I really got to work because so much of what I do to do what I do, it's about co-creation with the audience.

[00:33:44] And so if I don't feel their nervous systems-- I'm sending out the dolphin eco location ping. If it's not bouncing back and it's just absorbing it just into this amorphous blob, that's really hard. It's really hard. Because then I have to generate it all myself.

[00:34:00] And I can do that, but I'm not a DJ where I can just, hey, I'm going to push this track. And now I know this track will do the thing. It's like I'm generating it all from scratch. And so those are the hardest ones. And I've had a couple of moments in that. And I pull some of my go-to tools, if you will, and my arsenal, or it'd be the didgeridoo, the yidaki.

[00:34:20] It's really good at cutting through dense energy. And so that's one instrument that I will often call upon. Sometimes I have a very large Tibetan prayer bowl that has traveled all over the world with me. And that thing also is an instrument that sometimes I'll strike to send out a real ripple that'll help people, like calling Ganesha and break apart and fragment some of that density so that then I can then send the sweet notes in to their hearts. And it's worked out, but it's sometime a lot.

[00:34:50] Luke: If anyone's at one of his gigs and you hear one of those instruments, you know you've had too much to drink. No more trips the beer garden. No, it's interesting that you bring that up because as I was telling you earlier when we were eating lunch, I quit drinking 27 years ago, not by virtue, just by necessity.

[00:35:10] And so over that time, it's been really interesting to observe the contrast in energy if I go into a group of people, and not if there's just a little alcohol, but if people are really partying, it's not ever been that ever actually at all that I want to drink or something like that, or that I'm judgmental on those people because I was the biggest drunk ever.

[00:35:32] But I don't really-- there's like a frequency. It's like if you tune a radio to a certain channel. Alcohol is a specific channel, and it's just not one that I'm able to tune into very easily. And so I'll feel, I don't know, just not that at home, or it's just not that fun. If people pass a certain threshold of--

[00:35:52] Porangui: Of intoxication.

[00:35:52] Luke: Of intoxication with that. And I don't know if I've been around people that I'm aware of that have been doing a bunch of coke. That would probably be even weirder for me. But yeah, it's funny. And even sometimes, which again is pretty rare for me, but if I'm somewhere and people are smoking a lot of cannabis too, I'm just like, can't really tap in.

[00:36:10] Porangui: There's a fog.

[00:36:11] Luke: Yeah. Versus if, I don't know, I'm somewhere and people are drinking some Wachuma tea or having various levels of mushrooms or something, it's like, even if I'm not participating, I feel totally chills, and I'm still in that frequency. It's really interesting how different mind-altering substances do have their own unique vibration.

[00:36:36] Porangui: Yeah, and they'll entrain us. They also entrain us into these other states of consciousness, which, for lack of a better terminology, I've experienced it as density. It's like you're in a swamp with some of them. Whereas with others, it's like you're on roller skates. Things can just flow really quickly.

[00:36:56] And I really speak as terms of the consciousness, like where is our consciousness at any given moment? What is our desired effect? A lot of times we drink in our society, often to like numb things. We don't want to feel all the things, or maybe we have the reason, like, I don't feel comfortable in social context.

[00:37:13] So when I have some drinks, I feel a little more inebriated, a little more easy. I can open up more, and I'm not so inhibited, that kind of thing. However, it comes at a cost. It's like, you may feel less inhibited, but you're also dulled. There's part of you that's dull and there's a density.

[00:37:28] And the more you drink, the more that dullness, that density will take on. And then suddenly it's like your motor response is slow, your consciousness, your thought process, the response is slowed down. And so musically, to meet that frequency, it's hard because it's like certain music doesn't really work with that.

[00:37:48] It's like with ganja, for instance. Reggae music pairs really well with ganja. It has a slower laid back-- the beat, like you were talking earlier, it's just behind the downbeat. It intentionally drags a bit, has this nice bubble bounce thing happening that you can just slide right into and pairs itself with that particular frequency of that medicine.

[00:38:12] Whereas I'd say cocaine, when people are doing that, it's very much like a very excited energy, which also has its density. It's an ego drug. It amplifies the ego for better, for worse. Some people might say it's super Ritalin or whatever, to you, how you use that.

[00:38:30] But the density that it creates is that you're so in your you. It's all about me. It's hard to be actually, at least from my experience, and I've actually never done cocaine, so I can't really speak to it from first person other than I've been in context where it's around. And what I feel in those places is that everyone is really just in their own nexus. It's almost like a narcissistic thing, so it's hard to connect, truly authentically connect. Because it's so much about let me tell you how great I am, is the experience I've seen in that, which is a trip.

[00:39:03] Luke: That's really interesting. We used to joke back in the cocaine days about, let's do some blow and solve all the world's problems. It's you have all these great ideas that the next day you're like, that was the worst idea ever kind of thing. Or playing music. We used to record music. Oh man, we really nailed it. And then you listen to the playback the next day and you're like, that was total shit.

[00:39:23] Porangui: Mm. Right.

[00:39:25] Luke: It's interesting in that way.

[00:39:27] Porangui: In the contrast, just to say, because I think people get the wrong interpretation of coca, mama coca, in the form of, let's say, mambe, or just having the coca leaves, having the tea, it's such a beautiful superfood. It's an incredible medicinal plant. It's such a beautiful teacher.

[00:39:43] Cocaine is, again, isolating the one thing, and then 100Xing it. So you just have this one molecule and then it becomes poison. Versus actually something that's really holistic if you could connect to the original plant, like the way the indigenous people would work with this plant. So I just want to name that too. Because I think--

[00:40:02] Luke: Very true. Very true. Yeah.

[00:40:04] Porangui: It's not to demonize any one thing. Alcohol too has its right application, I think, where it can be medicinal. But it's so easy to go down the wrong path, if you will. And not wrong or right. I don't even like those terminology, but more just like it's a frequency.

[00:40:19] And so just tracking, am I dependent on this frequency? Why am I going to this frequency? What's the deeper piece that I'm trying to fill, perhaps an emptiness, perhaps a pain that I'm not willing to look at in my body that this is helping me mask and basically cope with, but not actually heal from?

[00:40:40] Luke: When you go on tour, do you intentionally avoid festivals and events that are very alcohol-driven as a result of having that experience of that density that's so much harder to break through?

[00:40:55] Porangui: It's a great question. It's a point of challenge, for lack of a better terminology. I think in my career, my team and me and my partner and my management, managers definitely have been like, no, you need to play these big festivals.

[00:41:14] You need to play these things. It's the only way you're going to be successful. And yet we really do make a lot of effort to play non-alcoholic spaces. And so by doing that, for those who don't know, the music industry, and I say industry, little M, big I, it's an alcohol business, at least above board.

[00:41:35] That's the main thing that they're selling. It's not ticket sales. The big moneymaker is alcohol. And so the current existing infrastructure around the United States and the rest of the world is venues make their money from alcohol sales. That's the main bread and butter.

[00:41:50] And so they want alcohol vendors. You look at who are the big sponsors at the major festivals, mainstream festivals, and they're all alcohol sponsors. And so that's the big money. And so the circuitry, when you work with booking agents and you work with mainstream, the big talent buyers, they want to plug you into the existing circuitry of these venues that are in, that they own, that have bars and are like-- that's their model.

[00:42:14] So you're just content. They're just plugging you into this existing machine. And then you go through the circuit, you play the exact tour routes that are grooves in a record well worn in. And so when you break from that mold, when you're trying to do this, like what we've been really trying to do, we've been total pioneers.

[00:42:32] It doesn't exist. So you have to be willing to really work with a lot of community event producers and community spaces, halls, churches, places that have not been music venues. So then you're dealing with sound systems that you have to teach them. This is actually the kind of sound and lighting that we need to pull this off.

[00:42:50] So it's honestly missionary work. A lot of times we're working with people, maybe in the ecstatic dance scene, people who have a community organization, maybe a non-profit, and we partner with them to be like, hey, this is how we can uplevel the production so that you can actually meet the needs to create a show that has a high production value, without being a real pro venue.

[00:43:13] So it's a lot of extra work, and it takes all this extra effort. However, the reward is unreal because what happens is that as we do this in various communities across the United States and beyond, is that then they uplevel. So now another artist who wants to do the same thing can plug into this new emerging essentially circuit of non-alcohol venues and spaces and organizations, then are being enriched and empowered, and it's creating, and this is what I'm seeing, in our experience, traveling the world, doing this work, is that now there is a whole new wave of people who are really finding ways to drop into movement, sound, dance, community sober.

[00:43:55] And I mean sober, primarily without alcohol, is the main thing, I would say. There's definitely psychedelics still in the space. I don't think those have gone away necessarily, but there's overall I think a real intentionality to these experiences, and then bringing other drinks like cacao, elixirs, other kinds of superfood based, say, elixir drinks that help us feel more alive and awake and connected.

[00:44:22] And so what I see and witness is that on the dance floor folks are leaving these experiences feeling more healed, more whole. And so in this way, it is like a wave of healing that I'm very mission-driven. That's why I do this. It's not to play, get super famous and super rich.

[00:44:42] If those things come, then awesome. That's great. But I'm showing up, and I've been in this for a long time already, because my dharma is to be able to feel the coherence in the field of humanity to be re-inspired to be a human being on earth when I look out into the audience and I see people who are, in tears, goosebumped, heart open, feeling expanded, and they didn't have a drink.

[00:45:07] They didn't have any drug. They actually realized, and they have the epiphany. And people come to me. They'll be like, I felt like I drank ayahuasca, but I didn't have anything. But somehow the music actually took me there. The dance took me there. And when I hear that, man, that's fuel in my tank that helps me to really get up the next day and go do it again.

[00:45:25] Luke: That's beautiful. Yeah, I like this idea too of, if you're dealing with an antiquated system, as you said, the music industry, capital I, that's funny. Oh man, it's so true. But rather than whining and complaining about the way it is or fighting against it or trying to change it, it's like, cool. You guys just do your thing. Over here, we're building our own thing.

[00:45:47] Porangui: Yeah.

[00:45:48] Luke: It's like parallel systems. And then there's just such more productive energy in that. No one has to be wrong. You're just like, cool, this is a matter of preference, and you trust that there's a demographic of people that also have that preference. They want a more rich experience. And then the people that are just going to a concert to numb out and just become unconscious, great. That serves its purpose too, if that's what you're into.

[00:46:13] Porangui: If that's what you need, I don't want to say don't do that.

[00:46:15] Luke: Yeah. That's what I needed for a long time in my life.

[00:46:18] Porangui: Until you were ready. And it's like, there's just a moment. And that's the end of the thing. It's like, we need to build it, because if we just default to the existing structure, it's just feeding the same machine. It's by design going to create more of the same. And I'm not putting anybody down or anything like that, ever. For me, it's just witnessing in my experience. And I've chosen sobriety largely because I'm on a spiritual path. I follow something called the Red Road, which is it's no dogma. There's no theology. There's no church or anything like that. It's actually an indigenous way of praying and being. A lot of it comes from the Lakota tradition and the Sioux Lakota people. My particular elders that we sit with are Diné, Navajo, up in Arizona.

[00:47:05] But I've chosen that path to be a Sundancer and to carry a lot of these ceremonies like the Inipi lodge, the temazcal or the sweat lodge, like you experienced with Bobby. And for me, that's been a massive undertaking to follow that road. It's a really hard road, but one of the things you are asked to do is to choose sobriety, is to not drink specific alcohol for various reasons, the least of not which is many of our indigenous relatives do not have even the genetics to be able to process alcohol.

[00:47:37] So instant alcoholism, by design, so to speak, really results in major detrimental effects forms of-- yeah, kind of a suicide genocide energy with the whole people, which generationally has been a large source of trauma amongst our indigenous relatives in Turtle Island, the United States and other parts of the Americas and beyond.

[00:48:01] So we want to bring that. So for me, once I chose that I had to choose to let go of any drinking. I was never fully alcoholic or anything, but I'd enjoy a beer and enjoy some wine. But since doing that, and I'm eight years into that road, fully renouncing that for myself, I feel so much more turned on and connected and alive, and it's made me actually look at those patterns, the habitual patterns when I would drink and the context of the friends I would have that would be like, oh, I want to drink to socialize.

[00:48:36] That was the social medium. And it made me examine that for myself. And a lot of those friendships ended and dissolved. It wasn't a frequency, a vibrational match anymore. And it's so interesting. And then other friends came into my life that opened up other doors where I feel much more depth and connection and richness in the conversation and the empathy I share with them that we can talk about traumatic things, for instance, whereas my conversations, maybe when we're around drinking, it wouldn't go there.

[00:49:08] There just wasn't a depth that it would be able to seep down into. And again, not like it's good or bad or right or wrong. It's just, they're different frequencies. And so just like there's all the frequencies of the colors of the rainbow, there's all the frequencies in music, it's like, what is it that we want to entrain to?

[00:49:27] Because those experiences, those environments, a bar, say, a club, you walk into those environments, unless you are like a master, we're talking like Buddha level master, Jesus level master, you're going to probably entrain to whatever is the strongest thing in your environment. So if the strongest thing in the environment is this 120 BPM pounding your heart rate, if you check your vitals, you're going to be entraining to that.

[00:50:02] Luke: You just described my worst nightmare. Oh, my God. It's just funny though. You go through different stages in life. When I was a kid, just completely wasted and playing rock and roll and clubs, I was in heaven because I was in that frequency. And now it's like, oh my God. I don't even think I could watch much electric music. You know what I mean?

[00:50:18] It's like a singer, songwriter is like about my pace. So I'm playing a drum, or the music you just played, I'm like, yeah, I can vibe with this. It's quiet and mellow. Just different phases of life. But yeah, I think that that's an important part of it, is you don't have to make anything wrong. It's just like, what's right for you at that particular time in your journey.

[00:50:39] Porangui: And it may change, and it will change. I think that's the one for sure thing. It's like it's all going to change.

[00:50:44] Luke: It's funny though, you mentioned reggae. When East Forest was over here the other day, we were talking about-- because he plays a lot of keyboard instruments, I was like, do you play melodica? And he's like, yeah, of course. And I was like, have you ever heard Augustus Pablo, famous Jamaican dub artist, who is like the Jimi Hendrix of melodica? And he never heard of him.

[00:51:03] So I was like, yes, I'm going to turn you on to the dopest melodica music. So after he left, I put on just a Spotify playlist of that music and I cranked it up. And I was like, man, this is like the feeling of when I was a kid when I would smoke weed. It's like, it is that frequency, but I didn't have to smoke weed to still be in the field.

[00:51:20] It's just like, oh, I can get that field just from that backbeat and the bass and the fucking delay on the melodica and on the snare drum. And it just has this trippy, specific flavor to it. And it will take me there if I want to go there, but the minute I turn it off, it's over. I'm not laying in bed all paranoid five hours later going, when does it end?

[00:51:43] Porangui: You hit on something really important with that. It's like the states of consciousness that a lot of different substances will take us to, different music will also take us to those states. And often you'll see them paired together, but you can actually reach those with just the music.

[00:52:00] That's why I say, sometimes when I'm playing like an Icaro, say, that might come through in one of these improvisational channeled flows when I'm performing, that's where I'll have people be like, wow, I felt the plants. I felt abuelita. I felt grandmother. And so it's like she's there.

[00:52:16] She's always there. Once we've imbibed in these work with Santa Maria, ganja, Santa Maria is another name that we give her in Brazil, when we feel her, she has a frequency. And so when we connect to that through the music and we can feel that in the music, that intelligence of the plants is always with us.

[00:52:34] And so we're reactivating. By resonating the water in our bodies, we can reach those states. I studied neuroscience back when I was an undergrad at Duke University, and I had a stint working in a neuroscience lab after I finished school, and it was a Brazilian-led lab, Miguel Nicolelis, who's a very renowned neuroscientist working with implants in the motor cortex.

[00:52:58] We had rhesus monkeys that had these implants and they were moving like robotic prosthesis at MIT. At that time, that was in the early 2000s, that was the cutting edge. All that tech is, of course, continued to evolve since that time. But when I was there, a good friend of mine, his name is Siddhartha, he was a capoeirista.

[00:53:14] We used to play capoeira together, and we would spend time with each other in these deep conversations. And he would explain to me, it's like, we have all of this endogenously, all the things that all the plants do. The reason why the key lock works, that we actually have the effect that it has, whether it be ganja, whether it be mama coca, whether it be ayahuasca, dimethyltryptamine, it's because we already make all these molecules. It's already here.

[00:53:43] And so music has the ability, if you will, like the clave that we spoke to in the beginning, to unlock this endogenous laboratory, if you will, within ourselves, which will take us into those frequencies and entrain into those frequencies ourselves. And this is something we used to talk about, Siddhartha and I. It's what happens, the next level medicine, which we haven't even gotten there yet. I think we're on the precipice with the whole psychedelic movement and more, is training our own nervous systems how to be able to access it.

[00:54:15] Maybe it's the cold plunge. I know in your field, in the biohacking world, ultimately it's like, how do we reach those states with just what's built in. Coming back to your first question, how many instruments do you play? It's really the instrument. And so the mastery of our instrument then speaks to the depth and the richness of the music we create with our life, whether or not we call ourselves a musician.

[00:54:41] Luke: Beautiful.

[00:54:43] What was it like being a kid and being multicultural, spending time in Brazil, Mexico, Southwest, US? How did all that happen? I find that interesting.

[00:54:53] Porangui: Yeah. I'd love to say, wow, it was so romantic and beautiful and amazing. It was tough. It was really tough. And I say this because, yeah, I had a pretty traumatic childhood. Went through a lot of difficult experiences because I never fit in anywhere. And when you're a kid, what do you want the most?

[00:55:14] Luke: It's all that matters.

[00:55:15] Porangui: You just want to be accepted. You just want to fit in. And I was always the odd one out. See, I'm pretty guarito. I'm pretty light skinned and was the blondest in my family. They actually thought that my mom-- that I was kidnapped maybe from another family because my mom is dark skin.

[00:55:32] She has green eyes, but she's Morena. And my father is Moreno. He's from Mexico, and my mother is from Brazil. But my father's father was actually from Oklahoma, from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and he was Scotch Irish and Choctaw Indian. And so he had this mix and his last name was McGrew. And so he was this big Irish Oaky. He was in the military and worked on the first radar.

[00:55:58] So he was very engineering mind kind of a person, but he spoke amazing Spanish. He spoke fluent Spanish. You see this big Oaky guy and then he starts speaking in Spanish, you're like, what? My family was a total paradox. I grew up with Spanish, Portuguese, and English, trilingual family, and I bounced back and forth.

[00:56:16] I was born in Brazil, and my father brought us back to the States, to Arizona when I was little, but they ended up splitting when I turned three. And unfortunately, my mom hated the United States. She didn't like American culture. It was just like too intense for her. She really wanted to raise me in Mexico.

[00:56:32] And so she took off with me and my dad-- the custody thing. And I ended up bouncing back and forth for a lot of my childhood until I finally stabilized kind of school in the United States, in Tucson, Arizona. I did some of my elementary schooling, and kids are cruel, man. When you have a name like Porangui, I heard it all, all potential iterations of my name.

[00:56:55] Luke: I just thought of one.

[00:56:56] Porangui: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I bet a couple.

[00:56:59] Luke: Not that creative, but I never thought about it until you mentioned it.

[00:57:01] Porangui: Go for it. What is it? What is it?

[00:57:02] Luke: Porange.

[00:57:03] Porangui: Oh, Porange. Oh, that was a classic.

[00:57:05] Luke: They never could do my name. The best they could do was Luke Puke. And I always thought that's cheating. It should be Luke Puke. Puke doesn't really rhyme with Luke, so I was never that offended. So I was like, it's lazy.

[00:57:16] Porangui: It's lazy. It's lazy. Not that creative. Yeah. No, I got all of the names. And so the teachers often thought that-- I was always stuck in the back of the classroom-- this kid's trouble. Because I was, I think, trying to compensate for all of that. I was very social. I was always thinking, pretty creative kid.

[00:57:38] And so I was always coming up with things, and it was just too much. The teacher didn't know what to do with me. And in fact, in fifth grade, this school bully, he was really picking on this little girl whose mother was lesbian, and I really defend her. And I got into this whole fight with this kid and I punched him pretty hard and gotten this thing, and they pulled me out.

[00:57:58] They said, he's going to amount to nothing. They had this whole counseling session with my dad at the time. And so I didn't fit in. And so my father ended up working for-- he was in substance abuse. He's a substance abuse counselor actually, and getting transferred to work at Adobe prison, which is a prison up in the Phoenix area, juvenile.

[00:58:20] And so he went up there and so we moved to Phoenix. And I got this opportunity where my grandparents, my father's father, the Oaky I was telling you about, they needed help. They were getting in their older years and they already needed some support. And so they said, hey, why don't you stay here with us?

[00:58:38] Because my dad was going to move again, getting transferred again, and they said, there's a school here. It was a Jesuit school, actually. And they said, we'll help you go to the school. We can't afford the whole thing. It's an expensive school, but I had gotten a scholarship, and so they covered the rest of it.

[00:58:53] And then in exchange, I would help them, just take care of them at the house and stuff. And so that ended up being my high school years. And for the first time in my life, they gave me the papers, the application just to apply for the school. And so because I had access to it, I changed my name.

[00:59:08] I didn't put Porangui. My dad wanted to name me actually, João, when I was born, João Quetzalcoatl. And my mom spoke with a pajé, a medicine woman, a friend of ours, and she was like, don't name him that. That's too much karma to name after Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent.

[00:59:27] And so that's why my mom gave me the name Porangui, which is a Tupi-Guarani name, Poran meaning beauty, and Ngui is like one who moves, so moving with beauty. And so I had this crazy name. So I had the papers and I wrote Johnny McGrew, because my last name was McGrew.

[00:59:44] And so no one knew. I went to the school, no one knew me, and so they just thought I was American, just Johnny McGrew, a good old-- no one even ever asked the question, like, where are you from or anything? And I basically shapeshifted. And my grades went from being failing, marginalized, all of my grades up till then, and suddenly I graduated top of my class with full ride to Duke.

[01:00:09] Luke: Wow.

[01:00:09] Porangui: Honestly because I think people suddenly perceived me completely differently, which allowed me to then thrive in this environment in a way that I'd never been able to before, like a new chance.

[01:00:18] And on my graduation, when they were calling the names for the diploma, they called my name. They had my full name on there, and they're like, Porangui. And they called me up to the front. And I graduated top of my class and I had composed a song that I ended up playing for my whole student body as a goodbye.

[01:00:40] And it was an all-boys school. Brophy was a Jesuit all-male school. And so I got to play this song that really spoke to my journey, if you will, of having to shapeshift to be able to find myself again, and then reclaiming my name when I left there. And so it was just such an experience of having to go through that metamorphosis and hero's journey of sorts to be able to find myself again.

[01:01:05] And then, of course, my name has been a treasure for me ever since. But I had to really go through that and see how society really does-- the way in which people perceive us and then how that opens or closes doors to us. And so, yeah, it made me have to call upon a level of resiliency in myself that I'm grateful for till this day.

[01:01:26] So to your question, it was amazing. I'm grateful. I'd never changed anything about my childhood. But man, there was a lot of rough moments in there that now make me have the fortitude to show up the way I show up in the world and be the leader that I am. And I think through my music and through my healing path that I don't think that I would have been able to do had I not had the average child experiences that I had.

[01:01:49] Luke: It's such an interesting rite of passage, a long and convoluted rite of passage, more so than in some traditional cultures where it's a week or a weekend or a vision quest or something where you go from a boy to a man or a girl to a woman. It's like an extended--

[01:02:06] Porangui: It was extended.

[01:02:07] Luke: Sounds very challenging. I don't feel so bad because I always felt like an alien as a kid and was always different. Didn't do well with my grades and was always in trouble. But I was like just a regular white kid amongst the rest of them. So I had no excuse. That sounds like a rough journey.

[01:02:25] One thing I've heard you talk about, which I think is really brave and really important is, the topic of circumcision, which is something I've covered pretty extensively on this podcast, because I feel that, in this country specifically, is just, I'll just say it. I think it's an act of sexual violence, and I feel very strongly about just anatomical rights for all people.

[01:02:52] And in this country, a lot of different theories on how it happened and why it happened, and we don't need to go into those, but I'll just say I think it's a net negative for society and for the individual. And I can speak only from my own experience of having chosen to face that trauma and really unpack it quite a bit.

[01:03:13] Porangui: Yeah.

[01:03:13] Luke: And like you, I don't know if I'd do anything different because I am who I am and everything that I went through, good or bad or ugly, has been part of the journey and has forged me into the man that I am, which I like most of the time. That said, I'll preface it by saying no shame to any parents who hold different beliefs and made choices that you might now regret.

[01:03:35] Every parent can do whatever they want to do. It's none of my business, but I will speak this to light. But what's interesting about your experience with it that you've talked about is that it happened for you much older. You're the only person I've ever known of, or now know personally, who had that experience after infancy. So if you're open to it, I'd love to unpack that with you, if you're willing to go there.

[01:04:02] Porangui: Yeah, I'm willing, of course. Thank you, because it's not a common one I speak to, but it is. For lack of a better term, I look at it as a rites of passage, and truly it was. And there are very intentional rites of passage in various cultures where there is mutilation involved, where there is piercing or scarring of some form.

[01:04:29] So it's a twisted one, to say the least, that I went through with this. What had happened to me, my mother was in Brazil because I was there, and my father was trying to get us to be able to come to the States because he wanted me to be born in North America, for all the reasons, just to make life easier. But he couldn't do it in time.

[01:04:52] And so I was born there, and in that process, my mother was able to then make the final call about whether to circumcise me or not. Had my dad been present, he may have chosen for me just to be circumcised right then and there. He had gone through his own trial and tribulation with being circumcised at the time when he was a little boy.

[01:05:09] I think he was a little bit older. He wasn't an infant. He was like two or three. But they gave him a plum because they didn't have the anesthetics and the local painkillers that you have nowadays in the hospital. So he had a plum to suck on. So I know my dad also has a crazy story when he was circumcised.

[01:05:26] So he just came from a place of, I never want my child to go through the pain that I went through, the difficulty I had. My mother was from the belief that it's not necessary. We don't need to circumcise. That's mutilation. She already had that really clear. She was very holistic in her outlooks.

[01:05:44] You could say my mom was very much a hippie, I guess, for lack of a better terminology. She had run away from home at age 17 from a household of eight, a Brazilian family. My grandfather was a cowboy, basically equivalent of a cowboy in Brazil, ran cattle in Minas Gerais.

[01:06:07] And my grandmother was pretty hardcore raising all the kids, kind of farm life. And my mother was the black sheep of the family. And so she was always rebellious and didn't vibe with all the default doctrines. And so she ran away from home early on, ended up joining a street theater troupe, was an activist, traveled all through Chile, Bolivia, Peru, and eventually made her way to Mexico, which she was part of a troupe that would do Paulo Freire's work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

[01:06:36] And so they really practiced theater as a form of revolution. And so she was pretty deep in that world when she met my father. And so she was actually off touring-- they were touring as a big Latin American troupe-- when she met my dad. So that just give some context like my mom's orientation.

[01:06:53] My father was a Chicano essentially. What I identify at that time as very much Chicano, Mexican American, born in Mexico, really raised in the Southwest, United States, and very much rooted in the culture and believer of culture being a lens to heal us, and the arts, especially, being a means of how we can heal ourselves and connect to the authentic within ourselves.

[01:07:20] That society would have us not on a shun. And so he'd use the arts all the time, working with people with substance abuse, with gang violence. He would address that by, hey, what happens when you give children some clay? What happens when you give them some spray paint? And like, hey, let's make a mural. Hey, let's paint this. Let's do this. Let's create masks and then talk about what are the masks we're hiding behind. So that's my folks.

[01:07:43] Luke: Your parents were deep.

[01:07:44] Porangui: They're pretty deep people. I'm so grateful.

[01:07:46] Luke: No wonder you didn't turn out to be a stockbroker or lawyer or something.

[01:07:50] Porangui: The irony is that they wanted me to be a doctor, for sure, because I was the first in my family to go to an Ivy League, and I had this full ride. And so they were like, you're going to be a doctor. Because I'd always thought I'd do that, I was always called to the healing path.

[01:08:01] Luke: You kind of are a doctor in your own way.

[01:08:03] Porangui: In a way, I still kept that.

[01:08:04] Luke: Medicine man.

[01:08:06] Porangui: Yeah, in its own right. So I didn't do that. And I started that path at Duke, but I quickly saw that the allopathic model just was fundamentally flawed all due respect to all the medical doctors. And I have many friends who are MDs, and I've got friends who are NDs. And I've looked at both those paths, but what I saw when I was in that model, and I shadowed in the intensive critical care unit for third degree burns at Duke medical in pediatrics, so working with these kids flowing in from all over the South with major burns.

[01:08:39] And I would work with these docs, and basically they'd just look at the chart and they'd hand me the chart and they wouldn't even like acknowledge the child. And that really touched my soul in a way that I was just like, I'm going to spend how many years in school to do that? And I couldn't do it. And I thought that's why I got into neurosci. I thought, well, I still am really curious in this question of how does music in the mind dance?

[01:09:01] I was already investigating this question when I was at Duke, and eventually that led me to see that-- and then I found out, oh, no, neuroscience is actually you're in the business of sacrificing animals to the gods of science, lots of animals. There's a whole zoo underneath the neuroscience lab at Duke.

[01:09:19] So many horses, ferrets, monkeys, you name it, not just rats and mice, and they're all destined to die for a study that may or may not get published. It's a thing. And I'm a vegetarian. I grew up--

[01:09:34] Luke: I learned that today when I said, what do you want for lunch?

[01:09:37] Porangui: Exactly.

[01:09:38] Luke: I had to really think about it. I was like, oh man, salad with some salmon. Good. We're good. We're both happy.

[01:09:44] Porangui: Yeah. And so for me, it came down to the question-- sorry, there's a lot of tangents here, but I feel I'll weave them back together. The question for me has always been, I want to be connected to where my nourishment comes from. It's like, so if I'm not willing to sacrifice an animal, have a relationship with that animal, and kill it in a good way and then prepare it and then eat, by honoring it, knowing it was honored, I don't feel comfortable outsourcing that work to someone else who likely, especially with industrial farming practices, it's unethical for me.

[01:10:17] I wouldn't do it. How would I have someone else pay someone else to do that? So that's my own orientation. Of course, to each their own. And I do think it's worth asking the question for any human being, would you do it? Would you be willing to slaughter that animal and to prepare it?

[01:10:34] Luke: I was a vegetarian for a very long time for that same reason.

[01:10:38] Porangui: Yeah.

[01:10:40] Luke: It's a tough one to reconcile.

[01:10:41] Porangui: It's a tough one to reconcile.

[01:10:42] Luke: Eventually I went hunting just to have a closer relationship to that experience. And somehow that was, even though I didn't continue hunting and it's probably not something I'll pick up as a hobby, but it gave me a little bit more broad understanding of that exchange of energy and life and the movement of energy in and out of bodies, where I was like, oh. For me, it was like, I have to be willing to at least go there and have a tactile experience of that or I would feel, I don't know, hypocritical or not fully facing what that means.

[01:11:26] Porangui: Yeah.

[01:11:27] Luke: But your point, I have still thought about that a lot. Because it's like, if I go to a farmer's market here, shake the farmer's hand, ask them questions, I can gauge their level of openness and honesty and see what reverence they have for the animals that they're raising and killing to make burgers for me, that would be my preference, but it's not always convenient.

[01:11:50] I'm having a bunch of friends over tomorrow and I'm like, oh, man, I missed the farmer's market, so we're going to order shrimp in the grocery store, and it might say regenerative and this and that, but it's like, I haven't been to the farm. I haven't looked the farmer in the eye, so I don't really know the karma attached to that. It's something to definitely ponder. Anyway. Carry on.

[01:12:07] Porangui: No, thank you. And it's energetic. At the end of the day, it's an energetic. You're imbibing in that. It's going to feed your body. The frequency of whatever did happen, whether we know it or not is going to be in your body, and it's going to be ripple out from your body.

[01:12:22] It's just energy in the end of the day. It's music. It's all vibration. So at least invite everyone to at least have the inquiry rather than just defaulting to the status quo and like this is just what you do. I can't be bothered.

[01:12:39] Pink Floyd said it. We've become comfortably numb. His lyric catches it. It's like it's inconvenient. And so this inconvenience, I invite us all to lean into it because probably one of the biggest things I've learned from the Red Road and the indigenous ways of spiritual practices, is that most of the greatest medicine that we can harness as a human, as a leader, as a medicine person, for lack of a better term, the word shaman is thrown around a lot, but ultimately it just means being a world bridger.

[01:13:14] And to be an effective world bridger, meaning one who can be able to be a messenger between the seen and unseen realms-- In Quechua, they call that Chakaruna. And so to be a Chakaruna, to be that world bridger, which I very much feel has been a calling on my life, and I do that on stage, I do that off stage, you have to be willing to be in uncomfortable places. You have to be willing to go to the discomfort and to find the comfort in the discomfort, to find the peace.

[01:13:41] And it's in those places where we get tumbled like the rock in the river, where we actually become smooth. And we actually have the depth and the richness and the ability, the fortitude to then be able to show up as leaders when things get really tough. And I don't think I could do that had I not been through those experiences.

[01:14:01] And that goes all the way from the hardcore nature of like being a Sundancer, and going through that ritual, sacrifice, all the way to the nuance of like, hey, just taking the extra time and effort to find out where my food's coming from. Am I connected to my food or not?

[01:14:18] And it's not convenient, and it's really hard when you're touring. Gosh, super hard. You're traveling. You have a really tight schedule, so then trying to eat really thoughtfully. And sometimes you can't, but it's like you still bring that intention and that care, and we have a conversation. It takes a little extra time.

[01:14:36] Luke: Dude, you just reminded me of the one period in my life when I was touring with the band. We had a little following in the UK, and I was a vegetarian at the time, and so we're on the road, on the freeways and everything. And it was actually really cool because the fast-food joints, like Burger King and stuff, this is back in the early 2000s, they would all have not the gross veggie burgers, but these really good black bean burgers.

[01:15:02] They're actually really tasty. So I'd be like, man, this is cool. I can go over there and eat. It's still crappy fast food, but it was actually tasty, and I didn't have to eat meat. So you'd either eat that or you'd eat Indian food. That was it.

[01:15:15] Porangui: The Indian food in England is amazing.

[01:15:17] Luke: Yeah. Amazing. I stopped eating Indian food when I came back here because I was like, why did all the good Indian cooks move there? It's weird. The Indian food in the UK is way better than you'll ever find, at least that I've ever found in the States. It's a strange phenomenon. I don't know if it's closer to India. What happened? I don't know. But yeah, you're reminding me of that, how challenging it can be to follow a dietary regimen when you're on the move.

[01:15:41] Porangui: Yeah, for sure. It takes a commitment. And so it's something we really do. We're thoughtful about where we're planning our tour route. And we try to do that advanced planning. But again, it's like trying to have that connection, if we can, to eat local, if we can, to support farmers that are in the area.

[01:15:56] And you're always making that effort and does require that extra care. And so all of that to come back to the journey of going through it being 10 years old and getting circumcised was not easy. So basically, I was at a place, as a small boy, where it was like I was having trouble pulling back the foreskin, and my dad was really worried.

[01:16:23] And so he took me to the doctor, normal MD, general practitioner, and they basically were like, yeah, you probably should just do it, just get it cut, because if he can't pull it back with ease right now, it's just going to probably get worse as he gets older, was like the line that he fed my dad.

[01:16:37] And my dad being concerned at that time-- and then my mom was like, don't do it. You'll be fine. It's going to correct itself. But my dad being worried because he didn't really have the education at that time to know, he just knew that, gosh, I don't want him to have trouble with this later in life.

[01:16:53] And so from that place of concern, he agreed to go through with it and basically asking me. I didn't know. As a 10-year-old, all I knew is it was painful to have the doctor try to pull my foreskin back. And it wasn't pulling back easily. And so I didn't know.

[01:17:11] And so I was like, okay, I guess they're saying that this is going to make it work and be okay, as a young boy. And so I agreed really not knowing what I was agreeing to. And so the surgery, when they did it, I remember they had me count back. It was strawberry flavored. I still remember it viscerally, the whole experience.

[01:17:31] They had me inhale to take me under, and I was counting back from 100. I don't know, maybe I got to 95, and then the next thing I remember was the most horrible pain, to this day. I can't describe it. It's ineffable. The level of pain that I felt in my body was off the scale right here in my genitals, the most sacred place in my body, sacred organs in my body.

[01:17:58] And I woke up in a hallway on a stretcher, like on a cart stretcher thing, no one was around. And this nurse came over and I'm like, God. I think I'm screaming at the top of my lungs. And this nurse comes to me, and God bless that nurse, wherever she is, because I think I said things to her that you shouldn't say ever.

[01:18:18] And I think I said that to her and I unfortunately directed all of the horrible pain I was feeling in my body. And I don't know my vocabulary at age 10, but whatever I had in that lexicon of that age, she got the full brunt of it, unfortunately, because I didn't know. I was just like, what's going on? And why? Just feeling super violated in the deepest of ways.

[01:18:39] And so then they basically had stitches around the head of my penis and had to take me back. And basically the doctor was like, you can only take baths probably for the next month or more until this gets to a good place where it's healing, the tissues are healing.

[01:18:57] And man, I had to miss school for a good chunk because I couldn't put any clothes on even. Because having any clothing would obviously rub against it, the stitches, and it was just horrible. And sitting in a bath, just getting into the water, anything touching it at all, just was super painful.

[01:19:16] It's like someone sticking a knife in your genitals. It's unreal. I don't have language to describe what that was like. But then the aftermath as it got better was that the word got out-- you remember that bully I told you about earlier, the one that I got in a fight with, he found out I had had a circumcision.

[01:19:38] And so then he took it to task to really try to shame me and embarrass me at school for having gone through this really horrible experience. So for me, it was just a real lesson in all the ways just how cruel children can be in that way. And just really, again, having to find the fortitude-- because for me, I think one of the core wounds that I deal with, and it became then a strong suit for me, is that I'm all alone.

[01:20:08] And then the counter that was like, if it's meant to be, it's up to me. It was like these two little archetypes, if you will. So it was this resilience that I had that I cultivated as a young child, having to like, I have to do it. I have to make it happen. If it's going to be, I have got to make it happen, which was a superpower as a child. Of course, has gotten me in a lot of trouble as an adult, especially in my relationships, with my beloved. You know what I mean?

[01:20:33] And just with others, not allowing people to get close to me, especially to my heart, because it's like, I'm not sure if I can trust it. And so this has been part of my inner work that I'm ongoing, work in progress. But that's one of the pieces, was really learning how to be able to love myself and have compassion for myself, and being able to give myself that love and acceptance and to be able to really look at the shame and then release it.

[01:21:04] You know what? This isn't mine. That 10-year-old in me, I'm able now to take him in and love him and show him compassion. And it's crazy. And I still have stitch marks on my penis from that suture line that I was hit with as a 10-year-old. Fortunately everything works great. But it's that reminder.

[01:21:30] Luke: Oh, I know. I know.

[01:21:32] Porangui: And so when I think about babies who don't have a choice, have zero ability to speak for themselves, and to have that happen right there off the bat and to think that, oh, they don't feel it. Better to get it over with now. It's like, man, I can tell you, it's horrible. And I know in my bones and in my groin, in my genitals, that that is leaving an imprint of violent perpetration at the onset of life.

[01:22:04] And so when we then think about as men in our society, who've been circumcised, when you are coming to life and to the feminine and to the masculine and showing up in life already from a place of deep core wounding that you don't even remember, but your body does, how does that color the way that we show up then as leaders, as entrepreneurs, as teachers, as police officers, as you name it, politicians?

[01:22:36] How does that always function at this level of the root where we are coming from a place of already being violated? And then how does that then show up in distorted ways in the way that we show up with the feminine and all of her forms? Whether she'd be identify as male or non or in all these different forms. How does that show up in how we make policy, in how we treat the greatest feminine of all, our Mother Earth?

[01:23:00] And so I think, and I suspect why it's so easy to see the earth is just a resource to be taken from, to be raped, to be stripped of. We can just feel okay with that because we were essentially violated right out the gates.

[01:23:18] Luke: I often say, if you want a society filled with men with more sensitivity, it might make sense to not chop off the most sensitive part of the body. How the masculine, we can be so calloused and unfeeling and lack empathy, lack compassion, and just charge through life mowing over anything in our way, I think it has a lot to do with that personally in this country. It's just a travesty.

[01:23:51] So I appreciate you sharing that. These things are vulnerable, and even for me, I've done a lot, a lot, a lot of healing around that, and it's still not something I'm super comfortable talking about. But I guarantee you, I don't know this, but I suspect, with pretty high degree of certainty, that at least one baby boy whose parents heard this podcast will live his life in the body that God gave him. Maybe even more.

[01:24:20] Porangui: Yeah, yeah.

[01:24:22] Luke: A few tens of thousands of people are going to hear this conversation. And again, no shame to parents. This isn't like about a guilt trip.

[01:24:28] Porangui: Many don't even know.

[01:24:29] Luke: It's a change of perspective. Okay, we've been looking at it this way from this side. Let's just move over across the room and look at it from over here and see what it looks like. If it fits, if you like the view from that side, if it feels better in your heart, maybe make different decisions. And if not, then that's your karma. That's your journey. That's the kid's journey, and it was part of yours in a different way than it was part of mine.

[01:24:54] And I really honestly don't think I would have it any different because it's part of my gift. All the pain that we go through that we were able to persevere through and overcome and transmute into love, it's like, I don't know, if you don't have suffering, you don't have the experience of transmuting that into love. You might have different ways of expressing love and cultivating love, and if you can take something really painful and dark and turn it into a gift, there's a lot of power in that.

[01:25:21] Porangui: So much. That's really it. It's that alchemical force. That's that resiliency that I think is at the core of like one of our most redeeming qualities as two-leggeds, as human beings.

[01:25:35] Luke: As two-leggeds. I like that.

[01:25:36] Porangui: Yeah, the two leggeds. Yeah, it's one of our most redeeming qualities, is that we can take poison and alchemize it into love, alchemize it into medicine.

[01:25:45] And I think we see that in nature. You see that in the serpent nation, the crawlers. Serpents know how to do this. Snakes know how to do that. King snakes can eat a very venomous snake and transmute its poison. And in fact, the kingsnakes carry the anti-venom. That's one of the best sources of anti venom.

[01:26:04] Luke: You just reminded me of one of the coolest things I ever saw in nature. It was in Lake Powell. I was probably in my early 20s. And I came upon a Kingsnake eating a bigger rattlesnake, just munching it whole. I was like, damn, Kingsnakes are badass.

[01:26:18] Porangui: They're pretty badass.

[01:26:19] Luke: Because we used to catch them when I was a kid, the black and white stripe ones, and you were always paranoid it was going to be a coral snake. I don't think we had the poisonous version of it, but yeah, they're so beautiful. I love those snakes. How is your relationship with entheogens, plant medicine, psychedelics, evolved over the years?

[01:26:38] Porangui: Yeah. Great question. It's been through a lot of different iterations. I'm sorry, dad, I hope this is okay. This is a vulnerable share, but my father tells me this story. Both of them, I mentioned they met in Mexico. So the place where they met is a very, very special place on the planet.

[01:27:01] It's in the part of Mexico in Chiapas in a place called Palenque, which is actually Mayan ruins there. Probably one of the oldest and most incredible Mayan cities that was swallowed by the jungle. Exists there. Only about 3% has been excavated. And my father was there at that time.

[01:27:19] He was actually doing art at that time. He does leather burnings where he'll burn into leather these Mayan glyphs. He studied this, and he used to do this. He brought this back as an art form to that area at that time, back in the '70s. And my dad was there working on this.

[01:27:35] And there's a mushroom that grows there, psychedelic mushroom, is a San Ysidro, which will grow there often. It comes up a certain time of the year when the rains come. It'll grow in the cow pies. And so my dad at that time, he still tells me the stories, like how him and my mom met.

[01:27:51] He was in this place called Bano De La Reina, which were these queen's baths, these beautiful waterfalls, cascading waterfalls. The water there has travertine, so it fossilizes things. If you left your toothbrush there for a month, you'd come back and it'd be like stone. It's really surreal water, magical place.

[01:28:07] And he was there, and he says he'd just taken some of these San Ysidro's, and he had a friend who was visiting him, and he said his buddy was sitting across the bank of this river, these waterfalls, cascading waterfalls. And he says, I was sitting there, and he says, his buddy started to point at the water right where he was standing on this big stump.

[01:28:27] And my dad looked down, and I think he said the mushrooms were just starting to kick in. And he says he was pointing there and he looks down, and sure enough there's this freaking snake, this water snake that was coming right towards him, right to where he was standing. And my dad says, I had this moment where I had to really feel into-- I was feeling the medicine coming on and he's like, do I confront the snake?

[01:28:48] Do I run away from the snake? What is the right thing right now? Feeling all these existential questions come up and he thought, I need to get out of its way. I don't think I need to do that right now. So he gets on up the waterfall, he climbs up the waterfall to the next pool, and he looks down, and this vibora went right into the stump.

[01:29:05] It was it's home. And my dad thought to himself, he's like, I wonder if a snake can crawl up a waterfall. He's thinking to himself and he's going through this whole process with the snake and his mortality. And he said, in that moment, he turned around and my mother was bathing in the waterfall that he had just climbed into.

[01:29:23] And that's essentially how they met. And from there, essentially, they became lovers not long after that. And they invoked me, I don't know, a few days later. And so that's how I came to be. Thanks to, in a way, the serpent we were just talking about, and these honguitos, these mushroom people, Los Niños, as they're called, which are the children.

[01:29:42] And I think that's significant, Los Niños, because they carry an innocence to them, the mushroom nation, the mycelia network, especially the psychedelic mushrooms. They have this innocence to them.

[01:29:57] They have this innocence into the energy that they carry and the frequency, and they bring us into a vibration with deep understanding, embodied knowing of rebirth and death, death and rebirth. And so they constantly connect us to that, because they literally are born out of death. It's where they come from. And so they're the bridgers of this.

[01:30:16] In fact they're essential for all life to happen, and some even say our nervous system, our brains themselves are an evolution of this mycelial network. And so I feel a deep affinity to ongitos, to mushroom people, and they were probably one of my first psychedelics that I ever imbibed in myself, which happened much later. I was pretty straight-laced going through school. I came from a family where there had been a lot of addiction, from some of my uncles and others in the family.

[01:30:45] I think that's probably when my dad went into substance abuse therapy. As a therapist, there's a lot of that. And so I'd gotten the sense that, hey, you know what? I see this is a propensity in my family. I'm not going anywhere near it. So I stayed really clear of all substances. I didn't even smoke a cigarette.

[01:31:00] I've yet to smoke a cigarette. I was smoking tobacco ceremonially, but never smoked. And so I had that orientation and deep respect. And I went into one crazy thing. I'll share briefly this little side story, is like in high school, when I went to the Jesuit school, I, in Brazil, would go out dancing all the time.

[01:31:21] I love dancing. Dancing was my primary language to express myself. And when I came to the States, you had to be 21 or older to go out dancing, be at clubs and bars and all these things, but you couldn't go out and dance. And so I really struggled with this, and even my aunt, my dad's younger sister, she would sneak me into the gay clubs, because they were the only ones who would let me in. They'd be like, oh, he's cute, and they'd let me. They wouldn't card me.

[01:31:43] Then she'd be playing defense all night, because everyone would be trying to-- I was like fresh meat. And so it was this crazy experience, but I love dance music. I love the trance that I would feel with it and being able to just get into that dance, and I wouldn't drink or anything.

[01:31:59] I just love dancing. And fortunately, I met a good friend who became an ally in high school who was a raver, and I didn't know what the rave scene was. And this was in the early days. This was a '94. Dance music, all of that, was very underground still, may be in bars and clubs, but as far as the rave scene, it was still very much not on the radar for folks.

[01:32:23] And so he took me to my first underground party, which was in Phoenix, Arizona, in this underground parking garage in downtown Phoenix. And he's like, don't worry. He's like, it's totally chill. You're going to love it. And so he took me to this place, and we went to it. And I remember getting there and I was like, where the hell are we? It's like no cars. And I see this guy standing and there's some stairs. I can just hear this, going off, and I'm like, where are we going?

[01:32:48] And he's like, no, trust me. He's like, you're going to love this. So we go down into this place, and I fell in love with the culture of it because it was very much-- at least in those early days, there was a purity to it. Like everyone was there. There wasn't alcohol in the scene. There was definitely ecstasy and other substances in the scene, but there wasn't anyone pushing it in your face, and people were there to dance.

[01:33:12] Everyone was there to just express themselves and through dance. And I really love it. And there was no vibe of like, they're trying to hook up with you. They're trying to hit on you. It was just really clean in that way. And so I ended up falling in love with it. And we'd go out to in the desert. There'd be a lot of desert events like that, underground parties like that.

[01:33:30] And eventually that led me to have my very first psychedelic experience, which actually was with MDMA. He always would ask me, do you want some? And I'd be like, I'm good. And I just would have a jug of water and I'd be dancing for hours. Everyone thought I was on something because I would just be ripping, dancing, doing flips going off.

[01:33:45] Because I train capoeira and I loved doing my body. So everyone thought I was on-- but I just be having a good time, which is water. And finally, there's an event called basics. And I remember it was out in the forest near Strawberry, Arizona, pine forest.

[01:34:02] And it was back in the days where you'd get a text to on a pager. They would then tell you what number to call to then get a checkpoint where you'd get then a map that then would take you to the checkpoint where then you'd get another direction from somebody of where to go to super hide the party.

[01:34:17] And we went there and there was this sound system called the shredder sound system, which was this 52 huge base cabinets. And so we get there and we're like, I think we're lost. We're in the middle of forest. Where are we? And finally we start seeing these semi trucks.

[01:34:31] We start seeing some cars, and we get in there, and it's incredible, like laser beams flying out of the trees. And we're like, wow, this is most incredible thing we'd ever been to at that time. I walk out, and it was just incredible. This huge sound system in nature, outdoors, in the forest, and it was just like, okay.

[01:34:49] He's like, do you want some now? And I was like, well, if I'm ever going to have it, this feels good, not in a dark club or something, but actually here on the land. And so we split one. It was liquid E back then. And so I had half of it. And it opened up something where I danced harder than I'd ever danced before.

[01:35:06] And I never can forget. There was this moment when the sun was rising and I went over and I sat with this giant tree. It's a big pine tree, and I sat at the base of it, and I watched the sun rising. And as it rose, I felt my whole body melt and melt into the root system of the tree. And I literally, for the first time, felt God without the Jesuits telling me, hey, this is who God is.

[01:35:31] And even I would go in the summers and spend them with my mom up on the res in the ceremonies and Sundance and them telling me great mystery. This is God. And so I had all these different questions like, well, who really is this creator? And in that moment, I felt it. It all made sense.

[01:35:47] Like, oh, they're all talking about the same thing. They just have their own lenses. It all just made sense. But it wasn't like an intellectual thing. I felt it in an embodied way like I'd never felt before. And that opened up a whole path for me because on that drive home that day, the day after, I really got clear.

[01:36:02] I was like, oh, I need to learn how to DJ. I was like, I want to do this. I feel like connecting through this music, creating this experience for others. There's a medicine in this. There's a healing in this. And that put me on my path. Eventually got me to actually get my first turntables, my techniques, my 1200s.

[01:36:19] I borrowed my grandfather's old record player at first. I got a RadioShack mixer. I started making mixtapes, and that put me on the path of like, oh, performing. I never thought of like to be a performer, but I knew that what I had experienced is something sacred that I wanted to be able to offer to others.

[01:36:37] And that really started on my road. So it came in through DJing at first back before everyone was a DJ. It was like in the early, early days. And ironically, my father was a radio DJ back in his early days. He started the first bilingual radio station in Arizona.

[01:36:52] Luke: Really?

[01:36:52] Porangui: Yeah, actually in Phoenix. Playing all kinds of funk and Latino hits and mixing them with Brazilian bossa nova and jazz. And yeah, he was already doing these mashups and doing bilingual programming, switching between Spanish and English.

[01:37:06] So it was a beautiful way that it wove me back in. And actually, when I went to Duke, that's how I paid my way through school. I was also DJing for the frat and sorority parties on the side. And then I chartered my own organization there that ended up being called Groove Productions. And our whole goal was to create non-alcoholic, non-Greek events that would actually be able to bring in DJs and other underground people from like the rave scene, but actually do it in a university context to offer an alternative to the Greek scene.

[01:37:37] And at that time, Duke was under a lot of attention because there'd been a frat brother who had died of aspirated vomit. So there was a lot of heat on Duke. So Duke was actually very open. They're like, we need to find other programming for students. And so when I presented it to them, they funded it. And it was unreal.

[01:37:54] So we actually threw the first rave essentially in the Sarah P. Duke gardens. It was amazing. We brought fruit and all these things and made this whole experience where we brought the Greek scene into the underground scene and brought them together in a common way.

[01:38:09] It was really beautiful. And I was in an African ensemble, a drumming ensemble. We brought the capoeiristas, and it was like this merger, if you will, of all these different threads of all the hats I wore up to that point, which I'm still doing now. The irony is that was 2000.

[01:38:26] And so fast forward now 24 years, I'm still doing it. For me, I've left the DJ thing, of course, and came back to the organic live thing. But it's still about creating the experience where we can come into a space intentionally and leave it feeling more connected, more whole. I hope I answered your question.

[01:38:47] Luke: What a cool life. So interesting. Yeah, you answered part of the question. You answered the part how you got your beginning working with medicines.

[01:38:59] Porangui: Oh yeah.

[01:39:01] Luke: How has that evolved over the years in terms of just different types of experiences, depth, breakthroughs, pauses? How has that journey worked for you? Because it's so individual for people. I shared mine with you earlier, which was a lot of missteps early in life, huge break for a couple of decades, and then much success ever since.

[01:39:26] Porangui: Totally.

[01:39:27] Luke: So I'm always curious. And I share with you too, the ongitos, man. I remember having experiences where my first realization was, wow, these are my little friends. They were my friends. And then there was a deeper understanding. They were actually my family. We were related. And it's like even when I see them on my lawn, just, I don't know what kind, I don't eat them.

[01:39:51] I don't know what they are, but I see those little guys and I'm like, oh, it's just like our little kids growing in the lawn, and they're going to sprout up. They'll be gone the next day. You know what I mean? Or in a couple of days. And so, yeah, so I was reminded of that, how special those strange little creatures are.

[01:40:06] Porangui: They're incredible, and they have so much to teach us, even the random ones. They pop up in all kinds of places.

[01:40:13] Luke: I was out in California last year, and I've always heard about them growing in cow pies. And friends that lived in Oregon were just like, oh, you don't need to buy shrimps. You just go out in the spring and pick five pounds. So we were at this retreat and I found some up on the hillside, and I started just hunting for cow pies.

[01:40:30] I was having so much fun, took them to my room, dried them out, and then I started texting photos of them to my friends that know about these things, and they were like, no, that's not it. Don't eat those. I was like, I swear they look like it. And there's a couple of different opinions. One guy's like, did they turn blue when you bruised them? I'm like, I don't think so.

[01:40:50] So I decided to err on caution, but that would have been my first wild foraging of psilocybin, but it was unsuccessful. But yeah, the question is, I don't know what have been maybe the most impactful experiences you've had that have really given you deep healing or insights?

[01:41:07] Porangui: Been so many. Yeah, to encapsulate it. So first experience, I didn't see coming, but it came in that way through MDMA. Fortunately, it was really clean. I'm pretty sure what I had at that time, which was a blessing, because it could have been all kinds of things. It was in such a early moment in that scene.

[01:41:27] The next experiences that really were pivotal for me was probably with onguitos with my dear brother, Siddhartha, who I mentioned earlier, neuroscientist. And so we would go out into the Duke forest and we would drop into a ceremony together, sitting out there on the river. And really deep philosophical-- because he was such a brilliant mind.

[01:41:53] He was doing his postdoc in neurosci at Duke. And so we would have these conversations about like, what is really happening? What is really happening that we even can have this experience right now, that this can open up this portal? And that's when I got the big insight in teaching of death and rebirth.

[01:42:10] Onguitos are these teachers of life after death. They're showing us that life never ends. Life continues. And so death isn't this thing to be feared. It's actually the thing to be celebrated. And that really helped me at that time because I was still sitting with death. It's like this had a negative connotation in my life. My grandfather had passed on. I'd lost several really important individuals for me in my life.

[01:42:36] And so that helped reframe all of that. And I was dating at that time, a Brazilian partner who had come up from Brazil to be with me actually when I was finishing Duke. And she was from the northeast of Brazil, Nordeste do Brasil. And she was an initiate in a lineage known as the UDV or União do Vegetal, which is a church in Brazil that their primary sacrament is ayahuasca, what we call ayahuasca, the daime.

[01:43:04] And so I went with her on one of our trips to Natal in Northeastern Brazil to go sit in a ceremony. And she hadn't been in a ceremony in a long time, but they were old friends of hers. And so they're like, please come. And so many people might have different experiences or know of ayahuasca in different ways. There's many, many roads or lineages with grandmother.

[01:43:27] But usually the commonality is that there's two main constituents of the plants, the vine and the leaf, which are combined to make the brew. And the name and how it's done and then other helper plants that might be added, there's different ways in the Peruvian side and lineages, more shamanic lineages in that way.

[01:43:47] Often the context will be sitting in the darkness in having more of an individual experience, but most of the churches and the lineages in Brazil, it will be with lights on, and actually it's more as a collective experience, which is pretty different for those who've never experienced that. They're like, what,? How would you even do that? I don't want anybody to see me.

[01:44:09] Luke: Yeah. I've heard of that too. And I'm like, how do you stand up? Because don't some of those involve--

[01:44:16] Porangui: Sometimes you get up and dance. Yeah, yeah, totally. No, exactly. So you'd really learn how to dance.

[01:44:21] Luke: Maybe that's what I need to break through that limitation or at least perceived one.

[01:44:26] Porangui: It's so beautiful. We went UDV. You do sit, but you're leaning back in your chair. And the hardest part honestly was the fluorescent lights. They had fluorescent lights.

[01:44:39] Luke: Ooh.

[01:44:40] Porangui: That was rough. Yeah, that was really rough. And I didn't totally know what I was getting to. I knew, but I didn't know. And there there's nobody tracking your buckets. There are no buckets in fact. Everyone's just sitting. And so I didn't totally know what I was getting to.

[01:44:58] And so I ingested in the beautiful medicine, and the mestre started to sing this hymn basically in Icaro. It was so beautiful. And I went right into the vibration. And I closed my eyes because the light was so intense with the fluorescent lights, and the vision-- I'll never forget it.

[01:45:18] It was my first experience with this teacher plant. The vision came to me, and literally I saw my head was a seed pod, a big seed pod. And all of a sudden I saw my head opening and the stars in the cosmos pouring out of my head. And suddenly I realized I was puking all over the floor, and I just leaned over and I was purging all over the floor and everyone's like, ooh, new guy. But it was the most beautiful purge of my life.

[01:45:49] Literally I watched the whole cosmos, like the Big Bang just on the floor. And then as I came to my senses that I was in the room with fluorescent lights and everybody was sitting there like, oh crap. What do I do now? And someone, fortunately they were very kind and generous with me. They came over and helped clean it up, but there was a moment of definite shame and like, ooh man, that was a super rookie move.

[01:46:16] But it was so profound, and I'll never forget that first experience because it really set me on another layer, if you will, of my journey with enthogens, with the plant teachers. My mother in a lot of ways was an herbalist, not formally, but she always worked the plant medicines.

[01:46:35] So I'd always had a real affinity with various plants and would work with them for healing in various ways. And we had different friends who were pajes, medicine people of several tribes in Brazil, also in Mexico and in Arizona and Southwest. And so for me, plant medicine wasn't foreign to me at all, but I'd never worked with grandmother, with ayahuasca in that way until that moment.

[01:47:01] And what it showed me and what I later would learn, and of course I've sat in now, I think pretty much most of the lineages, as I understand it, from the Santo Daime, Umbandaime, which essentially brings in a lot of the Afro Brazilian ceremony into it that come from Candomblé.

[01:47:19] So in Umbandaime, often there's drumming. We'll play for many rounds with dancing as part of that, and there's also a possession mediumship where people will, will receive spirits, in their body, which that's a whole universe into itself. All the way to say the more Mestizo, Shipibo, other lineages from Peru, where you have a very different orientation and where it's much more individual work in the dark.

[01:47:46] And so having had now all those experiences, which have taught me over the years, and being steeped in it and trained in it now, also singing and playing music for ceremony since that time forward, yeah, my outlook and my orientation to it whenever I go back to grandmother and to a lot of these teacher plants, I get the same message now from them.

[01:48:12] They're like, what are you doing here? Have you done the things that you know to do? Have you integrated? And I get a bit of a scolding these days. So my general orientation now is like, keep doing the work. I don't actually need the plant teachers anymore.

[01:48:30] Not say I'm perfect or anything like that. It's more of a place of like, I am at a point where it's like, I know what I have to do. It's chop wood, carry water, and like, have I done it? Yay or nay. And it's really clear. And so whenever I sit anymore, they give me the scolding.

[01:48:49] So it's like I go with a lot of humility always when I go back. Yeah, it's like, it's beautiful. It'll be beautiful experiences. Knock on wood, I've never really had a bad trip ever. I've had challenging trips, but they've always been opportunities for me to just look at stuff that I needed to look at.

[01:49:09] And at this point in my life, it's like I access those realms and I'm tapped into those realms pretty constantly and through the music. The music's always taking me back, and so they're coursing through my veins, and that's coming through me then in the channel when I'm bringing through the music.

[01:49:26] And so I'm able to call upon them as allies when I'm in a dense festival energy where there's all kinds of mixed substances in the field. And so I'm able to call upon them as allies to come in and lace the space, if you will, to help people get a healing, because they're open. Whether they realize it or not, they're open.

[01:49:46] That's why they call alcohol spirits. You're open. And so what are you entraining to? Because your energetic body is wide open. So that's why parasitic organisms, entities can come in and literally occupy us if we don't inhabit our space. And so it's very important. In American, I say American, North American, United States mainstream culture, we don't talk about that stuff. That's weird stuff.

[01:50:14] That's voodoo and all that stuff. But those ways are very much deep, deep scientific, have their own science, their own technology that are very, very much understood and practiced and mastered in other lineages, whether that be from Ifa, originally all the way back from Africa to the various also indigenous peoples who knew how to work with mediumship.

[01:50:38] So it's not a new thing, but I know it's more fringe thing still to the mainstream. But it is something to be aware of, and it's not some X files thing. It's like, no, this is a real thing. There's spirits, and they will come into your being when you're leaving yourself wide open.

[01:50:53] Because yeah, you need to have discernment and protect yourself. There's various tools that we use that I've been trained to since I was a little boy. It was like even taking baths with salt, coarse salt. Actually you bathe yourself in salt to be able to pull and clean your energetic body, your physical body and energetic body.

[01:51:15] Luke: It's funny you would naturally delve into that because my last question was, I always want to be responsible when I talk about this particular topic because I'm so stoked about it, and I think, well, I ever want you to just do it all the time. On an exercise, you said discernment and prudence.

[01:51:31] So my question was around, yeah, what are some of the things that people would maybe be-- which you've spoken to some degree, but people would be advised to be mindful of, some of the risks involved for people who hear a podcast like this and go, wow, I want to do that level of healing, or I want to meet God that I've heard about and has remained a mental construct?

[01:51:52] I want to have a tangible experience of that. So there's so much benefit to be had, but I know that I did it very recklessly earlier in life and caused myself a lot of harm-- I don't think anyone else, but definitely my own psyche-- put myself in some pretty dangerous situations and just a lot of darkness and weird shit, and when I was in really vulnerable places on LSD and whatever else.

[01:52:17] So what would be your cautionary advice for people who are curious and not yet experienced or people who are putting their toe in the water and getting maybe overly enthusiastic about that kind of work?

[01:52:29] Porangui: Thank you. I think that's a really good question. And definitely right now in the context of what's happening with the psychedelic renaissance, if you will, I feel like it's probably very important more than ever, because you have a wide variety, I guess, a spectrum of novice folks getting into this space and wanting to learn and feeling excitement.

[01:52:55] And you also have a lot of novice folks who are feeling called to then also be facilitators and to provide these experiences, who have a weekend with Grandmother Ayahuasca and then they're like, oh no, ayahuasca told me I'm a facilitator. How many times does that happen?

[01:53:12] Luke: Dude, every time I've sat with medicine, I think I'm going to be a facilitator the next day. Thankfully I come out of it and I'm like, what? No, dude. You don't have the training.

[01:53:24] Porangui: There's a reason. There's a reason why so many like to be actually a mestre, whether in the Brazilian traditions, a master of ceremony in those ways, whether you're in the UDV church, or whether you're a curandero, vegetalista, essentially shaman, for lack of a better word.

[01:53:46] In the Peruvian, for instance, traditions, lineages, or Columbia, or Ecuador, there's a reason why they have to do a very lengthy process of apprenticeship and dieting, dieta, as they call it. There's a reason for that.

[01:54:03] The parallel that I know from my experiences is Sundance. Sundance is one of the rituals that we have to undertake when you want to become a medicine person, when you want to carry that chanupa. Chanupa is commonly known as the peace pipe.

[01:54:20] But that pipe, which isn't just a pipe, it's a very powerful tool for healing and unifying and translating prayers. And so to work with that at all, to do it correctly, and there's people who, of course, pour a sweat lodge, work with that Chanupa, offer the pipe, who've never done any of these traditional ways.

[01:54:42] They just go and they buy it at a trading post and like, there you go. Just like there's like folks who got their hands on some ayahuasca and they'd be like, hey, I'm going to pour this for you, and we'll make a prayer. It's not to say that it's good or bad.

[01:54:55] It's like, I'm never going to tell someone, don't pray. It's like freaking a, pray. Because the more people praying, the better, I think, in the end of the day. As long as you have that right intention, yes. However, be careful. Know what you're doing with. And I really invite you to find teachers, find the lineage, be connected to the lineage.

[01:55:14] There's a reason for this because in the lineage, just like we were timing back in the beginning of our conversation, you can't isolate these things from the whole. The whole is what carries the actual medicine and all the tools and all of the wisdom, the knowing, the body of knowledge. It's not a coincidence that we say that in the language and the expression, body of knowledge. It's not just knowledge.

[01:55:37] There's a body of knowledge, and the body of knowledge is embodied, and it comes through the lived experience of having gone through really difficult things and learning from a master, man or woman, or non-binary, because that mastery, and of course the plants themselves are the teacher, the master teachers.

[01:56:02] Same thing in the Red Road. The master itself is the chanupa. The chanupa is the teacher. And they all link back to the original pipe that was gifted from the white buffalo calf woman that still exists to this day and is protected and held. And so all of our chanupas link back to that original one that was brought by the white buffalo calf woman as a tool to connect and allow us to heal and create communication and common understanding.

[01:56:27] It came with all these ceremonies and rituals. So if you just take that thing out of context and try to just, oh, now I've got this thing, you miss actually the power and the embodied wisdom that is there for you to be able to be effective and to do so with mastery. And so same thing goes with the plants.

[01:56:48] And so I understand now. At first I was like, why do you have to go through the Sundance to be able to pour a lodge? I just want to pour a lodge. It's like, it's a sweat. I'm just going to sweat. Some hot rocks, put some water on it. No big deal. And now that I've been through this as a dancer now of-- I'm coming on my seventh year as a dancer, and I've been supporting since I was a little boy.

[01:57:09] My mother was a dancer for eight years from when I was very young up until I was 16. So eight to 16. And I've come to understand that you have to go through the rites of passage of that process because that is what prepares you to be able to receive the actual wisdom. So the body of knowledge, and then there's the wisdom, which comes only through the actual experience of having walked through the fire.

[01:57:35] And I'm jumping between two different parallels here, but in the context of the Sundance, having gone through a ritual where you have to fast for four days, no food, no water, you're dancing in the heat of the sun and the peak of summer, and you are doing so, then you're offering your flesh through a piercing ritual, part of the ritual.

[01:57:55] There's many rituals within the main ritual. There's many prayers within that prayer to ancestors, to those passed on, for healing, for abundance, being able to connect with the divine through the music. All of these are woven into the fabric of it.

[01:58:12] When you look at any one of the lineages, whether it be the Shipibo, whether it be the Mestizo way, whether it be the Santo Daime, whether it be the UDV, they each have their own roads that you have to walk through and diet and prepare your body and your vessel to receive the actual deeper teaching. They don't just give it to you all at once. You couldn't handle it all at once.

[01:58:35] Luke: It's not a weekend seminar.

[01:58:36] Porangui: It's not a weekend seminar. It just isn't.

[01:58:38] Luke: You just reminded me of the first time I prayed with peyote was with my wife, Alyson. And it's actually our third date. It's a great way to get to know someone. And I'd never been in a ceremony that was that, for lack of a better term, strict, like no sleeping, no laying down, no leaving the space, all of this.

[01:59:00] And it was, of course, beautiful, but challenging for me in that there was a lot of formalities and rigidity, what I perceive to be rigidity, the intentionality. But more than anything, there were so many rituals upon rituals upon rituals upon rituals. It wasn't just like, okay, we're starting the ceremony. Here's our prayer. Drink some medicine, and then we'll see in a few hours. It was just like, okay, now we're doing this.

[01:59:27] Now we're doing the flower blessing. It was just on and on and on. And it was amazing. But for someone like me who just wants to be freewheeling and, in times of my life, lack discipline, it was challenging. And I don't know that I was fighting it per se. I think I was pretty good at just surrendering to the process, but it wasn't until afterward that I was able to see the gifts and see really the purpose of all of the rituals upon rituals upon rituals within the ceremony.

[02:00:02] One of which being the shaman, I don't think they call themselves shamans in this case, but the facilitators, during the flower blessing, Alyson and I, we knew each other as friends, but we're on our third date, and they call us up to the altar, and they married us.

[02:00:14] You are now married. And it scared the shit out of me because I'm trying to be mindful and take it slow. I had the best of intentions, and it really was a beautiful opening in our relationship because the experience Alyson was having was much different than what I was having in that marriage. And then we got to have a great conversation about it later, which led to us becoming a couple that weekend.

[02:00:38] But it was a really informative experience for me and just seeing like, oh, this is no joke. This isn't a game. These prayers mean something. This fire means something. Every song means something. It's taking us somewhere. Going outside for the sunrise means something. There's a depth to it that I think is easy to miss if you're not really looking for it. Otherwise you can just-- as I said, for me, I'm like, yeah, why do we got to do all this stuff? Just give me more peyote. You know what I'm saying?

[02:01:10] Porangui: Yes.

[02:01:12] Luke: And especially that one for me, I think has been a huge ongoing lesson in that-- I just sat with ayahuasca a couple of weeks ago, and I would say that was my most challenging medicine experience ever, not because of like pain I had to face or anything. It was just physically brutal. And I could not understand what was happening because I've never had that happen before.

[02:01:36] And so with the early lessons in peyote and the lesson a couple of weeks ago was in trusting the teacher, the medicine, even when it's subtle. Because I don't want to be just knocked on my ass. I'm cool in the extreme range. It's just how I'm wired. In the subtlety, that's where I start to resist a bit or doubt.

[02:02:02] And my trust is much harder to grasp or to practice in those moments because I'm sitting there like, when's this going to happen? And I'm ignorant of the fact that this is what's supposed to happen. It is happening. It's not happening in the way that I want it to, or think it should. And I'm comparing it to situations in the past where the last time it was this other way.

[02:02:23] I like that better. All of that comparison, the expectations of, where are those insights? Where's God? Shouldn't I be seeing God? All the things, and I learned so much in hindsight working with peyote in that very traditional regimented way.

[02:02:40] But it took some time to unpack it after that. And Alyson would catch me over the years and I'd be like, I don't like peyote. It's brutal. And she's like, dude, did you hear what you just said? Take that back. And I was like, shit, thank you. True.

[02:02:54] Porangui: Yeah.

[02:02:55] Luke: It, at the time, wasn't what I thought was going to happen, these expectations. So I love that you bring in that intentionality and the historical relevance and the cultural through the eons of human beings participating in these ceremonies and rituals. There's much more there than I think you could ever even unpack in a lifetime, no matter how often you sit and who you sit with. It's like, this stuff is deep in our DNA, and it really deserves respect.

[02:03:29] Porangui: And I appreciate you sharing that about Hikuri. He's such a powerful grandfather teacher.

[02:03:39] Luke: Ass-kicker, dude.

[02:03:41] Porangui: Yeah, for sure. It's different than ayahuasca. Its own frequency that teaches so much. And that ceremony, especially in the tipi meetings in the traditional, whether you in the NAC way or in Wirikuta, with the Huichol people, the way that that's held, the way that that teacher is brought through, it's definitely not a ceremony of like, oh, this is like a vacation.

[02:04:08] Luke: We're just hanging out.

[02:04:09] Porangui: We're just hanging out. Definitely not.

[02:04:11] Luke: Yeah, I remember going outside to pee, and if I was out there too long, someone would come get me and be like, we'd to welcome you back in the tipi.

[02:04:18] Porangui: That was nice they let you go out and pee. Sometimes they don't let you go out and pee.

[02:04:20] Luke: Really? Oh, so I had it easy.

[02:04:22] Porangui: I've had to hold that eight hours and you're like, oh.

[02:04:25] Luke: I just remember leaning on a back jack and trying to pretend like I'm not sleeping.

[02:04:30] Porangui: You had a back jack?

[02:04:31] Luke: Yeah.

[02:04:32] Porangui: Oh, you had it really easy.

[02:04:32] Luke: I did. I had a [Inaudible].

[02:04:33] Porangui: Yeah. For sure. We've had to sit up on knees the whole time.

[02:04:36] Luke: Are you serious? It was in Joshua Tree in the winter, and it was freezing. And I'm in there with five parkas. It was challenging. But the gift of it, it's like I got a wife.

[02:04:50] Porangui: No, no, it's true. You did.

[02:04:51] Luke: There's no way it could have unfolded the way it unfolded without all of the magic that was taking place and just everything coalesced in a very specific way to facilitate the opening of our love. So I'm always grateful for that.

[02:05:07] Porangui: The cadence of that ceremony is so specific and perfect. The way that everything comes in and out and the way that the fire is tended and the coals, you receive the designs and the coals. It is the fire. The fire and the Hikuri is the chief. That's who's driving the ceremony.

[02:05:27] There might be a road man or road woman, but that's actually the chief. That's who we refer to as the chief. But the way that the whole ceremony is architected and the way that it's held by the whole community is the healing. That is the healing.

[02:05:43] It's like really, in the end, the entheogenic, physical response, if you will, of the journey is only a very small part of that. It's actually more about the architecture of that and how we are then made open and receptive to then receive the intelligence that's coming from the elementals.

[02:06:03] It's really about the elementals, about the element of fire, the first water that comes in, the way that the wind is moving through and the air is circulating through the tipi itself. And of course the earth element and that beautiful half moon, crescent moon bridge there that is the walk of life itself.

[02:06:18] The bridge as you pass through the journey of your life, beginning to end, and passing through with a beloved in this case. That's why I share, like--

[02:06:31] Luke: That's a whole podcast in and of itself. Probably a few of them.

[02:06:34] Porangui: A few. And so just to your question, I would just say to those out there who would like to travel these roads, I just invite you really, especially now as, like I said before, we're in the psychedelic renaissance, vet your teachers. Vet your facilitators. Make sure you don't just sit with anybody.

[02:06:54] Really be mindful. Don't just do it because I really want to, and this is the first thing that shows up. I really encourage you to take the care to really sit with people from the original lineage if you can. I believe that myself. There's a lot of folks who've studied with someone who studied with someone studied with someone, but go to the source.

[02:07:15] For instance, I'll give you an example, like Iboga. I really want to sit with that teacher. It's been calling me for many years, but it hasn't been the right moment. And I'm waiting to go sit with the Bwiti people, to go to Africa and be able to sit with them.

[02:07:32] And I've been waiting, and it's coming closer. I feel it's imminent. And my good friend, Dr. Dan Ingle, which you know, Dan just was initiated by the Bwiti people this last year, and it's really profound. I'm feeling that call. And so I really appreciate going to the source. And again, doing that in a good way. Don't do it in a way that's colonizer extractive. How do we do that in a good way?

[02:07:59] But I think it's really important. I think there's something to be said about that, to be able to receive the whole of that frequency of the intelligence, the whole embodied knowledge of that that you can receive it directly from the people and not in a diluted way.

[02:08:14] Luke: Also sets the standard. It's like calibrates you for what a legitimate, tightly held, integrous container looks and feels like. I think that's one way to fortify yourself if you end up in a situation or to help you vet people that you might sit with or be able to even intuit and invite, like, who are they? What are their names? Let me look at their Instagram or whatever.

[02:08:40] And you're like, eh. You get that feeling. I've had that happen a number of times where I think, ooh, this sounds cool. And then I feel and I go, well, I don't know. I sat with the Shipibo people. They've been serving medicine every night for 25 years.

[02:08:53] Porangui: For generations.

[02:08:54] Luke: Yeah, for generations. We don't even know how long, how far back.

[02:08:58] Porangui: Before recorded history.

[02:08:59] Luke: And it's not like trying to make a hierarchical system or something, but there is something to be said for the traditional nature, and there's a reason why these traditions have subsisted. And I think it's a great way to set your template, to calibrate yourself to that, and then move out from there.

[02:09:16] But that's your foundation. If I, for example, having had that very traditional, few first experiences with peyote, I think if it wasn't like that, I would probably feel like, eh. I don't know. It's a little sloppy.

[02:09:32] I think I'll just be more picky in a good way about how I would sit, having had that be my first experience. It's like your first experience of anything. If you're sitting with a master painter, music teacher, whatever, then that becomes your baseline and how you move forward rather than just starting out willy nilly and winging it. And then you're going to be set on a course of winging it that could be less than perfect.

[02:09:59] I want to share one other thing with you, which I think is valuable to some of the listeners, hopefully. So I was telling you earlier, I was sober for 22 years, like very avid meditator, yogi, 12-step programs, every self help program, every freaking workshop, every healing modality under the sun.

[02:10:22] So I had all kinds of therapy, worked through a lot of stuff, and had become a pretty well integrated person, done a lot of healing. So in other words, I had a pretty solid moral character by that time, you would hope. In 22 years, you better evolved a bit.

[02:10:40] And I did, not that I was perfect, but I was a reliable, solid, integrous, honest, loving, kind person, most of the time, not doing any shady shit. And so when I went and sat with medicine over those first couple of years, and I had such deep healing that made me even more morally sound, gave me an even closer relationship with my values, and made me even cleaner. And anything that was a little bit funky had to be dealt with, because that's what happens.

[02:11:14] You face all your shadows. Because I became cleaner and more refined, more mature, more open to love and all those things, I naively thought that that's the way it is for everyone working with medicine. I haven't had any negative experiences myself, but been shocked to hear that someone is marketing themselves as a facilitator or shaman and then abusing people or weird shit like that happening.

[02:11:45] And I have had some interactions with people that work with medicine a lot, and their energy doesn't align with me. And I feel like a couple of them have been pretty far out of integrity, just objectively. And it's been a learning process for me to not just trust that everyone has had the experience of refinement that I've had just because they work with medicine a lot.

[02:12:05] There's a lot of wacky people out there working with psychedelics who are still all shadowy and fucking weird, to be honest, which I'm a little naive and bind sometimes to things like that. I think just because it's just in my nature. I'm high empathy and I give people to benefit the doubt. It's a shadow side of my kindness and compassion, which is a beautiful thing.

[02:12:29] But the shadow side of that is being gullible and naive. And I've been a little bit gullible and naive around the medicine space because I just have taken for granted that you tell me you sit with medicine 50 times, I'm like, oh, you're trustworthy. I guess I automatically trust you because I figure you've gone to the depths and cleaned out all the muck in your shadow.

[02:12:48] And it's like, not everyone has. And people are picking up entities and all kinds of weird stuff. So that's been a lesson for me that I think is important to share, is just like, don't think someone's enlightened just because they've drank ayahuasca 150 times. Like you said, the real work is in the integration outside of the ceremony itself.

[02:13:09] Porangui: A lot of shamanigans. There's a lot of shamanigans.

[02:13:13] Luke: That's funny. So I just want to speak to that.

[02:13:15] Porangui: Be wary of anyone who calls himself a shaman. I think that's one of them. I think is one of my metrics. I always track that because, same in Capoeira, in the old days, you wouldn't self dub and say, I'm a mestre. Now I'm a mestre, a karate dojo. You know what I mean? Now I'm a karate black belt.

[02:13:36] The community is who dubs you this. You can't just proclaim it yourself. And so in the old ways, who was the shaman? Who was the medicine man? Who was the pajé? They were the people that everyone knew had the healing knowledge and was a healer from the time they were a little child.

[02:13:56] They already had this ability, this gift, and it was already seen. Before they even knew that they had it themselves, the people already saw it in them. And so often it wasn't something that they could just suddenly say, today I am this, proclaim it. And it's something that, because of the way society is organized nowadays, we don't live in the village anymore.

[02:14:16] It's easy for these things not to have this inherent vetting process that was already there when we lived in more of a tribal unit. And so now in our society, that's why it's like it. So it's really easy for people to become perpetrators within that space, especially when it's a fringe space that now has a lot of energy pointed at it because it's becoming more mainstreamy.

[02:14:39] I see that happening. And so there's a lot of folks that will abuse that and take advantage of that. And not even consciously. These folks really think they're doing good work, but they're actually not prepared to really hold the space and to help people when they're in a crisis.

[02:14:56] And this is what I was getting at with before. Now I understand why I have to go through the Sundance ceremonial process to be able to even pour a lodge. Because that literally tempers me. So now when things are going easy and everything's great, it's when shit hits the fan.

[02:15:13] It's when things really go into a crisis. Someone has a psychological break. Someone really freaks out. Do you know the right Icaro? Do you know the right plant to call upon? Do you know the right thing to do in that moment to bring them back to themselves, to help weave them deeper, to help bring the trauma up and actually release it and integrate it?

[02:15:31] Luke: I've been trained as a spiritual EMT.

[02:15:35] Porangui: 100%. That is exactly right. That's why it's like, we don't just give anyone a scalpel, like, here you go.

[02:15:41] Luke: That's why I don't serve medicine, even though I really want to, because I just love the field. I love that experience. Every time I work with Bufo, I'm like, I'm definitely supposed to start doing this tomorrow. Where can I get this stuff? I'm going to start inviting people over. We're going to do this every day. And then I'm like, eh, I don't think I'm quite ready for that.

[02:15:59] Porangui: People ask me all the time, do you serve? Do you serve? Do you serve? And I'm like, I serve the musical medicine. I already knew early on, and she showed me my path. I could do that. There's been opportunities and doorways and great teachers to apprentice with, but it's always been like, what I'm actually here to do is to serve the music medicine.

[02:16:18] That is the ceremony. And so I can do that at a festival. I can do that in a large stage or a small intimate gathering or one on one. And for me, the reminder is that in my own orientation to it, is that we are the medicine. Music is medicine. If we can remember how to access this medicine through just our own experience in this human body and be able to connect to that resonance and coherence, and we don't actually need to imbibe in something, that is actually really powerful.

[02:16:54] Because it came to me early on in my path with the entheogenic plants that there isn't enough ayahuasca to wake the whole world up. We would totally decimate the forest 10 times over before we'd ever get critical mass tipping point of enough people to have drank ayahuasca to have an awakening experience.

[02:17:10] And so that insight really led me to see like, actually, we need to be able to create and foster ways for people to access these states with just what's built in, with just what is free, what's here. And that's what actually got me to really start to hone in on that. So we have a platform called Music is Medicine, and it's been something my partner and I, we've really been developing for some years now. And part of that is we do retreats, in-person retreats anywhere from 25 to 50 people.

[02:17:38] Luke: Don't you guys have one coming up?

[02:17:40] Porangui: We do actually, yeah.

[02:17:41] Luke: Oh yeah, this will be out before that. Boulder and Utah, September 24th through 30th, 2024? Do I have that right?

[02:17:51] Porangui: That's right. The end of September.

[02:17:52] Luke: Okay, cool.

[02:17:53] Porangui: And it's going to be in Boulder, Utah

[02:17:54] Luke: Oh, Boulder, Utah.

[02:17:55] Porangui: Boulder, Utah.

[02:17:56] Luke: Boulder, Colorado and somewhere in Utah. Okay. I looked at the dates. I was like, how are they going to do it in two places at once? Boulder, Utah.

[02:18:02] Porangui: Boulder, Utah.

[02:18:03] Luke: And what's the website where people could find out more from?

[02:18:06] Porangui: Just porangui.com. My name.

[02:18:07] Luke: Oh, it's on your main site.

[02:18:08] Porangui: P-O-R-A-N-G-U-I.com. And then we're doing one in Estonia earlier than that in July for anyone in Europe or wants to come over to Europe. But we've been doing at least twice a year. And these retreats basically are six, seven-day deep dive into this work, which I do workshops too often.

[02:18:26] When I present at different events, festivals, I'll teach a workshop as well. And in the workshops, a little mini taste of it, but essentially it's about honing our ability to be the instrument. So it's for all levels. It's for folks who are touring musicians, all the way to someone who's terrified of their own voice.

[02:18:44] And it's really powerful to get us together and to work in circle to actually access and open up the field much like the plants do, but being able to do it through music, through sound and vibration, through dance. It's been this really powerful curriculum that's been evolving over the last several years.

[02:19:03] And I love it because I literally have people come in and we're just like, wow, I had no idea this was here all along. It's right here. I don't have to go to some store and buy something. It's like, it's right here.

[02:19:17] Luke: Beautiful. Well, we're going to put all that you guys in the show notes at lukestorey.com/porangui. I got one last question for you. It's a three parter. Who have been three teachers or teachings, philosophies, etc., in your life that have influenced who you are today?

[02:19:32] Porangui: Three teachers. Wow. Okay. The three I would give you Bobby McFerrin.

[02:19:41] Luke: Interesting. That's unexpected.

[02:19:43] Porangui: Bobby McFerrin, master, been one of my greatest teachers and inspirations. Truly a Jedi master. While we have him, go see him if you haven't seen him yet in the flesh. He's struggling. He has Parkinson's. I know he's getting to a stage where he won't be able to tour anymore, but if you can see him, go catch him.

[02:20:05] I've had the honor to study with him and be in circle song with him. Truly, as far as true mastery, embodied mastery of being able to be in complete improvisation, being able to create music, and ride the surfboard on the edge of annihilation, and being able to channel total genius from the divine through as a hollow bone, he's got it. Bobby McFerrin.

[02:20:32] Another teacher that I would also say, let's see, would be, several. I would put out there, comes to me is Mr. [Inaudible]. Mr. [Inaudible], who was one of my teachers of capoeira, one of my mestres and early on in my path studying capoeira. And what he really passed on to me, which I still work with to this day is the power in capoeira.

[02:21:08] For those who don't know, capoeira, is an Afro Brazilian martial art/dance form. It came out of slavery in Brazil about 500 years tradition and much older in the way that that originated from Africa. But then as the way it was expressed during slavery is it was had to be this martial art training form that was disguised as a dance.

[02:21:29] And it's very deep. It's very symbolic. Because in capoeira, it's not about actually taking out your opponent. It's about showing that you could have taken out your opponent. And so it's the symbolic power. It's like symbolic victory over someone. And actually, the real victor, if you will, the real winner, not that there is really a winner or loser, but the winning is when you have mastery over your body.

[02:21:55] And so it's the mastery of being able to be just as effective on your hands as you are on your feet. Be able to be totally dominating of gravity itself and be freed of gravity. And in this way, the slave in the roda, or in the circle, becomes the master. So it's the inversion of this slave-master dynamic.

[02:22:14] This axis is inverted literally physically and symbolically. And you're not a real capoeirista until not only you can do all the incredible movements with your body and question and answer in this like chess match, but also by playing and dominating all the instruments. So you have to be able to play and be musical in all aspects. No other martial art has music as a fundamental pillar of the--

[02:22:36] Luke: I didn't know that. That's really cool.

[02:22:37] Porangui: And it's so cool because the music speaks to the game. So if there's two players in the game, the music is informing the game. So the mestre, whoever's leading the beating bao, it's like a bowed instrument, one monochord instrument with a gourd.

[02:22:51] They'll be playing, and they're going to sing a specific song. For instance, if you have a big guy and a little guy playing, they might sing a song like, oh, Siri boto damelera nu shan boto boto, damelera nu shan. Oh, Siri boto. Siri is a little crab. Damelera is a giant tree. And the lyric is saying, the little crab knocked down the big tree.

[02:23:10] So he's invoking this game, showing the underdog being able to take down-- it's not about the size of the individual, but their cunning, their ability to think on their feet. And so, yeah, one of my great teachers I would say would be him. And then my third teacher, I would like to really offer to my father.

[02:23:32] My father, Gustavo Eduardo McGrew, who's been an incredible teacher to me. He's really taught me probably one of the core lessons and leading questions of my life. How do you leave it more beautiful than you found it? And that has been something that he's taught me ever since I was a little boy that has lived with me every day. It's the question I still lead with.

[02:23:57] And it connects very much to a Diné concept, the Navajo concept of Hozho, which is translated loosely as beauty way and how to walk in beauty, how to bring beauty, not narcissistic beauty, but the beauty that leaves this world more radiant and full of life. How do we bring that to our relationships, the way we communicate? How do we bring beauty to any place that we enter? How do we bring more understanding? How do we bring more grace? And so, yeah, I'd say that's my third.

[02:24:32] Luke: Well, brought beauty to this podcast episode, my friend. Thank you so much, dude. So glad I was able to catch you. It's difficult to catch people on tour. And when I ran into you the other day, I'm shy about asking people to be on the podcast for some reason. It's something I'm working on, but I was like, ah, I'm just going to ask him. He's probably on tour. He'll say no. And you're like, yeah, I'm actually here for a few days just chilling. And I was like, wow. Okay.

[02:24:55] Porangui: It's so rare.

[02:24:56] Luke: Yeah. Sure, I looked on your site. I'm like this dude's touring a lot. So I feel really blessed to be able to spend some time with you, and thanks for coming over and doing the whole Saturday lunch and just chilling. It's been really fun to get to know you.

[02:25:09] Porangui: Yeah. Thank you.

[02:25:10] Luke: You shared so much wisdom with the audience too, and I'm sure people are just going to love this. So thank you so much.

[02:25:15] Porangui: Yeah. Thank you, Luke. Honored to be here with you all.

[02:25:17] Luke: Cool.