Luke Storey: [00:00:02] I'm Luke Storey. For the past 22 years, I've been relentlessly committed to my deepest passion, designing the ultimate lifestyle based on the most powerful principles of spirituality, health, psychology. The Life Stylist podcast is a show dedicated to sharing my discoveries and the experts behind them with you. Kelly Brogan, here we are face-to-face for the first time.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:00:29] So great. It feels impossible to believe that we haven't met. I still can't get over it.

Luke Storey: [00:00:33] Yeah, because we've done two remote podcasts before, right? Yeah. You've been on the show twice. And I mean like time and space are illusory to a certain degree, so when you drop in with someone on a Zoom, you're with them, but there's still a time delay and there's a certain, I don't know, lack of sharing that field. Yeah, yours were great. And by the way, one of yours, I think it was the last one we did is like in my top five of all time, so thank you for getting me listeners.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:01:08] I might have been particularly angry that day. People are into that.

Luke Storey: [00:01:12] But anyways, so thanks for texting me like, hey, I'm Austin, let's hang out. 

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:01:12] Yeah, it's a total pleasure.

Luke Storey: [00:01:17] My version of hanging out is putting mics on someone-

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:01:20] Strap in.

Luke Storey: [00:01:21] ... and just catching up. But I have a sense, because we just had a preliminary podcast of talking about things that we can't talk about publicly, which is always the case or most often the case, but I find like if you and I just went to coffee, we would probably have about the same conversation we're going to have, so here we are. First off, what's new and exciting in your life? What's happening that you're stoked about in today's strange climate?

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:01:51] I'm in a very major transition in my life, and the darkest, tightest squeeze is behind me, just by, I would say, like a month or so. And as I'm sure you can relate and everybody knows, it's a spiral process, right? So, there are like contractions and expansions, and contractions, and sometimes, the contraction earns the illustrious title of Dark Knight. And that window that I went through, I'm not alone.

I know a lot of people who've been through a very challenging moment that I find typically to be characterized by this sense of letting go of something that you formerly thought would kill you to lose, and finally getting to the point of recognizing that you can't get what you thought you could get from that place and that you have to let it go or leave. And it's the same sort of landscape as my patients I worked with, who finally recognized that they couldn't get what they thought they could get from the medical system, and they had to leave, and it feels existentially terrifying.

I think it's archetypal, like it's the human journey. And it doesn't matter what your particular loss is, whether it's a relationship, or a family dynamic, or a literal loss, like a death, or leaving a system or organization, there's this sense that you might die because of it. And I went through that, and of course, there's always hidden gifts and gems that sort of wash up on the shore of that very rugged terrain.

And I'm in the phase of claiming those, I think. And for me, it's looked like a kind of play and a kind of, I don't know, like budding relationship to part of my child self, maybe even parts of my childhood that I didn't have any active dynamic with, and also integrating that into my adult sexuality and sensuality. And seems like an unlikely pairing, like a childlike play and adult sensuality, and for whatever reason, that bridge of connection has brought me even simple experiences of making a dance video, or going to a new class, or playacting something with my kids that I wouldn't have otherwise bothered with, or I don't know, just bringing a levity to my life experience that I would have experienced as judged by others, but really was my own self-condemnation previously.

That feels really enlivening, like it's like a whole new energy, and flavor, and color, has come into my lifescape. And I don't know, I guess it's kind of defined by I guess like saying yes to my creative impulses, like all of them. So, if I want to make a meme or write an essay, I mean, there's that old hat for me, but then if I want to sing a song, if I want to go to a new class, if I want to maybe try on a new kind of—I love to dance, trying a new kind of dance, or wear a different thing, or whatever the creative impulse is, even if it's like I adopted a dove recently, like whatever it is, just to say yes.

And for me, that's been a way of showing myself the kind of love that I hope to experience going forward in my life, which is the resolution of my program that I'm too much, right? So, if I carry this belief that I'm too much, and therefore like to be tolerated, rather than embraced or really loved, then I'm probably relating to myself that way, right? And so, I'm probably smalling and mitigating like whatever this intensity is I bring or my unfiltered like big mouth or whatever.

Yeah. Like I'm going through life that way, and so to resolve that I think begins with saying yes to my feminine creativity, that impulse that we all have within, and not that it's so dualistic or binary, but being my own masculine container that says like, I got you, go, do that, make that, create that, and you can be insecure about it, or confused, or let it swirl around, and I'm here, I'm here holding this, like it's going to be more than okay.

Luke Storey: [00:06:43] Sometimes, I wonder if the dark nights of the soul ever expire, tou know what I mean? Like I find myself at times just going, okay, like I've done enough work, really, like-

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:06:57] Where's my Gold Star debit?

Luke Storey: [00:06:58] Yeah. It's like, do I have to go through another thing? But I have to say, and it sounds like you're having this experience that having weathered some pretty gnarly storms, as most human beings have, that you mentioned levity, there's a certain levity present in those struggles that I find to be hopeful.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:07:21] Yeah.

Luke Storey: [00:07:22] Like I've had some really gnarly challenges in the 3D world around this house that we're endlessly renovating and things like that. Quality problem, acknowledged, right? There are many people with worse problems than, hey, I bought a really cool house, I'm making it cooler. But as stressed out as I've been, and at times, as I've allowed that sort of victim mentality to pervade, there's still kind of a lightness to it.

I'm not taking it that seriously, A, because nothing really is that serious in the long term, right? But B, I know that it's like my perspective on it is that I'm extracting lessons from it that I'm going to be continuing to integrate for the rest of my life. And those are, like now, part of my tool belt, ah, when this thing happens, I have a choice, I can take responsibility for how I respond or react to it, and therein I find value that lessens the suffering, in the midst of it, right?

Because I'm going, hmm, this is very uncomfortable, and I might not be able to make myself feel comfortable, but I can extract value from it now rather than after the fact. In five years, I don't have to look back, and go, oh, I see why that bad should happen to me, it was because I was supposed to learn X, Y, and Z lesson, but to actually be able to integrate and appreciate the lessons in it, even when one is incredibly uncomfortable.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:08:50] It's a fine balance, yeah. I mean, I wrote in my last book this phrase that suffering ends where meaning begins. And I didn't actually think, I was like, who, where did I get that from? And actually, I put it in quotes and searched it to see where, because I'm very attributional. I was like humiliated in med school by an attending who like accused me of—accused me.

She was accurately describing that in a presentation, like I didn't credit her with a study she was doing properly. Anyway, I was totally humiliated, and I'm pretty hard to embarrass, like my shame is very deeply buried and inaccessible, and it just stuck with me. So, anyway, I'm very attributionally oriented, and I look this up, and the only search results were me and Viktor Frankl. It was like super strange that this idea of

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:09:43] meaning-making has been with me for some time. And I think the shadow of it is that it's a defense for me, it's an intellectual defense, so I can get out of the experience of intolerable emotions as soon as I understand why they're happening, right?

Luke Storey: [00:10:00] Oh, right.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:10:00] Like this makes sense because, and it shortens the duration of my time with the emotions that are being served up, right? And obviously, we know about emotional alchemy, when you sit and you're just co-present with your fear, with your rage, with your shame, with your grief, you just sit with it, you're with it, doing nothing, just with it, it shifts, right? So, maybe it's like a sensation here, and then maybe it comes up here, and then maybe it drops down here, and then it kind of disperses, and then within minutes of this type of storiless practice, it changes.

That's the etymology of emotion, That's the nature of it. And I find that I am so—I mean, psychiatrists are very pattern recognition-oriented people to begin with, and there's probably many reasons I went into this field, but I find that I'm very good at finding, recognizing the pattern, understanding why this is happening, seeing the sort of grand design, the poetry of it, and I wonder, sometimes, if that's an escape hatch, because you just did what a lot of us do. It's like you're having this experience, it's upsetting, frustrating, challenging, and you're invalidating your experience, like as you're talking about it, right? Because it's like a first-world problem or whatever.

Luke Storey: [00:11:24] Yeah, totally.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:11:26] Which, of course, I would do the same thing probably. And the truth is like emotions—I think the truth is emotions are emotions, right? So, that's how you're engaging whatever emotions are coming up for you in the 3D. For me, it might be through this dynamic or this relationship. For somebody else, they lost their job, and for somebody else, their dog passed. And the situational details, like the circumstances, are only relevant in a social hierarchy of who is entitled to pain and suffering, right?

And they're not relevant otherwise, because the grief, or frustration, or inadequacy, or powerlessness, maybe, that like could come up is probably the same exact visceral experience as what I might encounter, looking at elements of the current psyop or whatever, like it doesn't matter, really, because the emotions are the emotions. And when we try to make sense out of them and justify them, that's a huge thing I've been working on recently, is just to understand the ways in which we self-betray and we self-abandon.

And one of the chief ways we do that is to imagine that our emotions require explanation, justification, and a reason to be, right? They have to make sense, otherwise they're probably wrong. And if you're like me, you were raised to experience your emotions as fundamentally wrong. The problematic, especially that so-called negative emotions. So, of course, we're going to find ways to collude with the understanding that our emotions are not really meant to be there, so how can we get them gone as soon as possible?

Luke Storey: [00:13:15] That's so interesting. It brings to mind something that, I don't know, I've just naturally been doing throughout this process, because part of it is like, okay, let me zoom out and see the big picture, which is what I was describing, just going, oh, okay, I can see that this has some utility in my life, right? And maybe even beyond that, seeing how some things are being brought into my experience, because they are asking to be transmuted. There's maybe, for me, like the inability to advocate for myself, and people-please, and kind of go along with even though something doesn't feel right. It's been a huge pattern for me for reasons that would take us-

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:13:56] To you and all of us, yeah.

Luke Storey: [00:13:56] ... six hours to explain. So, there are things that are, ah, okay, there are insights there, but that doesn't negate the emotion, so what I've done periodically is just go in my car, and just fucking scream, and just get the frustration out, because having a rational explanation for it or finding value in the journey is there, but that doesn't mean that you're not holding it in your body.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:14:23] Absolutely.

Luke Storey: [00:14:24] Right? So, that's a really good distinction. I didn't even realize I was doing that until like you just explained that. I was like, hey, good job, Luke, good job, good job. So, find the lesson and get that shit out of you, so you can actually move on and not be-

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:14:35] There are separate things. I like to think there's an order of operations, because it's like enter through the upset, right? So, whatever the hell you're upset is, like you're on the grocery line and somebody else or you are not wearing a mask, or you lost something important, or what does it matter? Whatever is the hot spot in your life, literally, whatever it is, on a Monday is where you enter.

And that's why the work is probably never done, because, likely, if we are in the experience of our body, it's either going to be a felt disturbance, like our heart starts racing, we don't really know why we're uncomfortable or it's going to be a top-down like thought, thought to body kind of experience, where we're like, why did you do that? This is unfair. I can't believe this is happening.

Luke Storey: [00:15:23] Right. Like self-talking, the inner dialogue.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:15:25] Yeah. And then, your body gets on board, this is an emergency, like I remember from when I was six that the way out of this is to withdraw, or avoid, or fight and yell, or whatever your adaptive strategy is. But if you can stop, literally stop everything you're doing for like 30 seconds to 3 minutes, I would say, when you first feel that upset and just be with it, like go sit in the bathroom with the door locked or sit in your car and literally just be with it.

And sometimes, I say to myself like, I'm here, like I am here with you. And I've learned a lot from sort of Jungian concepts and practitioners that have carried on his legacy, that to identify the parts of us, so what is the part of you that is experiencing that upset? And can you engage with that in a kind of dialectic? Can you engage in an experience of co-presence with that part? And in the almost like personification of these different aspects of ourselves, we can understand how the war was always in here. It was never with that outside individual entity circumstance trigger. Yeah.

Luke Storey: [00:16:43] That's interesting. As you describe that process, I realized that that's what I do in my relationship, not with—well, it is with my emotions, but my emotions as they pertain to reacting to, say Alyson last night was a great example. Last night, super late, after I got home from hanging out with you and Tara, and I got an email from this landscape design company and they had all of our 3D renderings, which I've been waiting for and I'm super excited about.

I was like, "Honey, check this out", and I show her, and I think she's going to be like, oh, my God, great job, honey, this is beautiful, you crushed it, like thanks for putting this together, and she was like, "Why is the fire pit right there? I need pool space", or whatever, you know what I mean? And I mean, honestly, I think she was just tired and it wasn't time to like go into that. She was in a totally different phase of her day or night.

And so, it wasn't a big deal at all, but she got a little fiery and a me of the past could have also internally gotten fiery, not know how to hold that, and then now, you have like two feminine energies going like [making sounds], so I've just sort of trained myself to breathe, and just go, hmm, my heart rate just went up a little bit, right? It's like, oh, I feel—do I feel criticized? Did I not do a good job? And it's just in a few seconds, I'm able to just go, oh, she's kind of tired and now is not the time to bring this up. It's like something so small could turn into something so huge if one doesn't have the ability to diffuse that within themselves and just hold space for the other person's experience.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:18:19] And I would say, you're ready to be with yourself sufficiently, where the personalization of these kinds of dynamics is not necessary for you, right?

Luke Storey: [00:18:30] Right.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:18:31] So, you can't do that for yourself when you're not ready to do that for yourself. I mean, I always tell my girls like, I can only love you as much as I love myself, and I'm like literally just learning how to do this, so it makes me want to cry, like so sorry that I've only been able to give you what I can give myself. And I think the reason it makes me want to cry is like that we have this innate sense of like what's possible in terms of connection and that exhale, like finally, like, oh, I'm home, I'm okay, I'm safe.

Like this is what I came here to experience, is the union through the separateness, and it's here. And sometimes, it can feel so far away, and when you have that like cognitive dissonance of like, wow, I don't know how to love, I only know how to control, strategize, manipulate, and try to secure, like build this straw house and hope that nothing blows it down. And when you have the awareness that that's not actually it, but you don't know how yet to experience what you know is possible, that is such an uncomfortable window of life.

I would absolutely say that's where I am in my life. And so, when you're in the experience with Alyson, and you take it personally, and you feel like, look at all that I just did, my blood, sweat, tears, and my time and energy, and you don't appreciate it, and I could never please you, and you always criticize me, and like whatever, I'm just riffing on it, and you're experiencing her as your bad mommy, you're projecting that parental figure onto her, you need to experience that.

It's not a problem. Like you're experiencing that because you're not done with that experience of your bad mommy, right? And you will continue to experience that, whether it's through Allison or the lady at Costco, you will continue to experience that until the moment when you are ready to recognize that through personal responsibility, through presence to your own emotional experience, and through a real willingness to look at—like a curiosity, right?

Like a willingness to look at that aspect of yourself that is your bad mommy, right? It's in you. You're putting it out there. And to really take the piss out of owning that. Like when we get comfortable with being wrong, what if you were wrong about the fire pit? What if she's right and you actually—whatever, like, okay. When there isn't this very rigid good, bad object, like the good, bad split that we're socialized around, when that can relax, and you can be yourself, and still be wrong, and still be bad, for whatever reason for me, experiencing myself through others as bad, right?

Like if people think I'm selfish, like that's a big—like it's a criticism I own, like I'm a recklessly selfish person or whatever, like even publicly, that I condone selfishness and my work is dangerous, because I'm promoting this like self-absorbed, self-centered worldview, where everybody just cares about themselves and they don't wear a mask, because Kelly says, like as if I'm saying this, that you should just do you, like whatever.

I don't care if people think I'm a bad person, that it doesn't get to me, but if people think that I'm wrong, I'd rather die. Like for me to be right, and I used to do it through science, that's why I have books with hundreds of scientific references, and I recruited the entire arsenal of PubMed to validate my worldview, and I do it interpersonally through like my inner litigator, like my inner attorney that always has my perspective and all the bullet points about why I'm right.

So, if you think about it, probably most of us fall down on one side or the other, but this concept that if we are bad or we are seen and experienced as bad or wrong that that somehow is an existential level threat to our beingness is an illusion, right? So, when we can get more comfortable experiencing ourselves as wrong or bad, something eases. And we get to experience a fluidity of our own sense of self and our self-concept that is hugely liberating to an extent that no longer distorts our behavior, right?

So, like if you in that moment could just be with the idea that she actually thinks you did a bad job, not that she thinks this, but maybe she thinks you did a bad job, and you made a mistake, and you did it wrong, but you actually think you did a good job, right? Like can those coexist? Can she be her own individual, having her own individual experience, and you also be that? And is there a bridge, and what does that bridge look like? Well, probably, it doesn't look like one person winning about a truth or reality.

The fire pit is in the wrong place or it's in the right place, it's probably not going to be found through the debate about whose narrative is correct. And that's obviously where we get into the realm of like empathic bridges and attempting to connect through totally disparate realities. And obviously, in the world scene, I mean, this is the invitation, right? Like how do we bridge across the divide of realities that are totally non-complementary and maybe fundamentally incompatible? What does that look like?

And that's why this idea of complementarity is like really interesting to me, because it seems to be a way for the segregation of domains of expertise, and gifts, and energies that can coexist without competing directly for primacy or dominance in the same realm. Like how do we organize even societies so that there are these different, I don't know, worldviews that coalesce in different arenas? I certainly don't know what it could look like. I mean, I know that if I cannot and will not wear a mask, and if I'm in a room with somebody who requires that I do so to feel safe, how can we be in a room together? I can't figure it out. It's like the ultimate riddle, right?

Luke Storey: [00:25:54] Totally.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:25:54] And yet I know that we are meant to be in that room together, even if, for a time, we choose to leave the room, right?

Luke Storey: [00:26:02] Yeah. Because how do you reconcile being a "good person" and care about other people, but negate your own sense of feeling unsafe by participating.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:26:15] And what your needs are.

Luke Storey: [00:26:16] Yeah. My needs are oxygen, and to be able to express myself through my face, and smile, and laugh, and connect, and speak.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:26:28] And interpersonal needs, right? So, we have bodily needs, and then interpersonally. I mean, for me to see someone's face covered in this way and all that I've made it mean is very painful. I mean, it violates a personal need that I have. And so, we get into the weeds of like so many dimensions of physical, spiritual, psychological, interpersonal needs that seem impossible to meet in the same space and time.

And I think that's part of the gift of this, is like really beginning to look at all of these ways we were unready, or I'll speak for myself, I was unready to really dive into, to understand the hidden dimensions of the victim consciousness that can hide in entitlement, that can hide in altruism, and that can hide in dynamic relationship. I mean, I, like many, think that relationships are how we will—mastering relationships and exploring the suffering and pain that seems inherent to relational conflict, that's the way out.

That's the way to the new world. That's the way to this sort of third path, or middle way, or whatever you want to call it, is going to be through these individual relationships, because I, like so many, at the beginning of this, two years ago, like saw it coming and not because I'm like clairvoyant, because it was well-documented on the internet, what these plans were, and then it was just go time.

And as soon as everything started, I felt I had a good understanding of what was happening, and it wasn't what we were being told is happening. And so, of course, I start running my mouth about that, and I spent a good number of months sleeping very minimally, researching very maximally, and like sounding the alarm. And then, I started to meaning-make, right? Then, I started to recognize like, okay, I think the people who are going to get it and see it this way do, and is there much more to—like what really more do I have to say?

And I've been very interested in shadow work for many years, and I started to recognize, okay, so if I have issues with totalitarian tyrants or even hierarchical models, then how am I exercising that in my personal and professional life? And so, I started to, like I rerecorded all the videos to my like signature program, and I stepped down as CEO of my company, and I started to look at the ways I was like telling my girls to like eat their broccoli, and try another bite, or like your room is a mess, or whatever just like subtle, judgmental comments, just whatever, like as if I know better what their room should feel like, it's their room, or I know better how they should eat.

Luke Storey: [00:29:48] So, you started to examine your own micro-tyranny?

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:29:50] Exactly. 

Luke Storey: [00:29:51] Right.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:29:51] And there wasn't a ton of it because this has been my jam for a while, is to like I've never punished my children, for example, never, and it was still there. Like there were still subtle ways that it was active. And then, I started to look at all of the incoherent aspects of my lifestyle, and like the Amazon, and my smartphone.

Luke Storey: [00:30:18] Tell us about your smartphone, because we're hanging out last night, and I looked over, and I was like, "What is that phone?" Because you mentioned it to me, you're like, "Yeah, I'm kind of hard to reach, because I have a different kind of phone". I was like, "Oh, shit, shilajit", I mean, it's not a flip phone, but it looks-

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:30:30] Like a hipster flip phone, it's called a light phone. I'm not necessarily endorsing it, because it kind of sucks anyway.

Luke Storey: [00:30:37] L-I-T-E?

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:30:37] L-I-G-H-T.

Luke Storey: [00:30:39] Oh, okay.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:30:40] And there's a couple, I have a new one coming soon, Mudita, it's called. But anyway, I'm still figuring that out. My relationship to technology does not feel coherent yet.

Luke Storey: [00:30:55] Mine either.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:30:56] Yeah.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:30:57] It's ultimate addiction.

Luke Storey: [00:30:58] I mean, I'm looking at the oligarchs, the Jeff Bezos and all these characters, and yet, Zuckerberg, I'm live-streaming on Facebook and Instagram right now, and have an iPhone. I order almost everything I need from Amazon. So, I'm like, oh, god, it's this, I don't know, I'm still like dancing with the devil, and I feel like as a person, generally speaking, I have pretty high integrity, at least for what feels good and integris for me, but there is a lack of congruence there, because there are certain conveniences and services that I find to be useful, so I find myself rationalizing it well.

Let's just take like live-streaming on Facebook and Instagram, those evil bastards, it's like, well, okay, I'm sort of playing with the other side and their sandbox, yet is the net benefit of my doing so uplifting mankind in a more meaningful way? Like is it going to make a difference to that system, to that beast if I personally opt out and start advocating for other people to do the same? Like is that going to serve the greatest good for all creation, more so than me just kind of doing my work in a Trojan Horse capacity, and like, yeah, I'm kind of still in this system, and I'm not trying to be deplatformed and have no ability to reach people?

So, is the net result of that me contributing more positivity and more awakening to more people? And am I able to do so in a bigger capacity having a smartphone than if I got myself a light phone, and could only text and call people, and have no access to apps or whatever? I mean, I don't spend a lot of time laboring over this, I'm just keeping it moving, but I'm so staunched about some of my positions. And I've never put the thing up my nose, I'm never doing any of that, if I have to go somewhere that requires that, I don't go there, I'm not doing that.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:33:01] It's clear, yeah.

Luke Storey: [00:33:02] So, there are like hard lines that are just metaphysically non-negotiable for me, but then there's the gray area of this stuff I'm describing, it's kind of like, yeah, I'm still in the swamp a bit. It's like kind of waiting it out until there's viable alternatives there that can still serve my needs. So, yeah, I don't know, it's interesting.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:33:19] Yeah. I would say that what you just described, a lot of us have had that inner dialogue, of like, well, this and that, and balancing, and rationalizing. That's the inner attorney, right? Because on some level, not to like, whatever, put you on the spot, but you want to feel right about your choice, right?

Luke Storey: [00:33:37] Yeah.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:33:37] So, you're making sense out of it, so now, you can still feel okay about it. I don't think there is an objective like sovereign lifestyle, right? I don't think there's an objective way to exit the matrix and build this new Earth. I think that it is an inside job. If you feel a disturbance, which I did, actually, it was less about like track and trace and being a part of the machinery of cyborg humanity than it was actually about like the addictive elements of my smartphone.

Luke Storey: [00:34:16] Wait. Where's my phone?

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:34:17] Exactly. And when I would find myself, it was really like one day, my youngest daughter yelled at my other daughter, I used to use this app, Voxer, or whatever, and she yelled at her because Sophia, my eldest, was trying to tell me something, and my youngest, Lucia, was like, "Sophia, she's Voxing", like she was defending my like time with my phone against my other daughter's attention.

Luke Storey: [00:34:48] She was justifying your lack of presence, right? 

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:34:50] Yes. "She's Voxing, like don't bother, Mama, she's addicted to her phone, and we're here to support that", right? And then, I noticed like I was like in the bathroom and like I never cruised on social media. It was always work addiction, right? So, I was in the bathroom, like answering emails in the bathroom, so my kids wouldn't see me on my phone, and that inner disturbance, like that inner sense of what I am doing, like it's an inner integrity, right?

It's not like, oh, I'm fighting the man and I'm here with the man on my phone. Yes, there's that. I don't think that's the way. I think the way is when you get that whisper inside that says something does not feel empowering here, like you're split, then just go in, check it out. I mean, when I got off my phone last year, a year ago, and I haven't traveled, I haven't gone anywhere. It's been easy. I have a computer.

Luke Storey: [00:35:49] This is your first trip, right?

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:35:49] Yeah, I have a computer, right? So, like I can do everything, Telegram, Instagram. I can do everything on my computer. And there are all these hacks, and I'm not the first one to do this, I wrote like a little ebook on like the way to do it. It's not-

Luke Storey: [00:36:06] Oh, we'll put that in the show notes.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:36:07] Yeah, it's through my membership.

Luke Storey: [00:36:09] Yeah. Oh, it's only in the membership?

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:36:11] Yeah.

Luke Storey: [00:36:11] Okay. We'll put that. Okay. We'll put your membership in the—the show notes will be lukestorey.com/kelly for those listening. So, we'll put a link to your courses and where people can find this.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:36:21] Yeah.

Luke Storey: [00:36:21] I mean, I was just perusing your site in preparation for the interview, and I was like, oh, my God, the sheer vastness of all of the free content on there, I mean, I could have I could have written manuscripts for 20 interviews, you know what I mean? Does urine therapy really work, or is it a scam? I was like, I actually want to talk about that, because I used to do that, and I don't know if it worked, but yeah.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:36:42] Yeah. When all the censorship stuff started going down, I was like, you know what, I want to be with people who are into this stuff, talking about this together in a walled garden so that we can all exhale and actually be in the messiness of trying to figure this. So, we have this thing called the Sovereignty Series, and it's like, raising your own chickens, and growing your own food, and looking at crypto, and digital investments, and then also this smartphone thing, and it's vulnerable to go into these spaces as a novice.

And to do that with other likeminds who are on the path, it just feels better. But yeah, I mean, to me, the most compelling question, I actually was asked this the last time I traveled two years ago, I went on a silent retreat with Adyashanti, and he asked this question, I think it's the most compelling question I've ever been asked, and I ask it all the time now, which is, I don't know, I'm paraphrasing, but what do you know—about your relationships, about your life, whatever, what do you know that you deeply wish you didn't know? That's it, right? That question puts you in touch with your intuition and your habit of self-betrayal in the same moment.

Luke Storey: [00:38:08] Wow.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:38:08] Right? Because-

Luke Storey: [00:38:09] When you said that, my core wound immediately came to mind, interestingly.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:38:16] Yeah.

Luke Storey: [00:38:17] I mean, do I, in an awake, cognizant way, wish I didn't know that? No, but fundamentally, you know what I mean?

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:38:24] I wish it could just go like this.

Luke Storey: [00:38:26] There's a lot of grist for the mill in that wound, and it's the catalyst for so much evolution, but there is still a part of me that's like, oh, God, I wish that was repressed, because it's something that, I won't say so much has to be dealt with, but it's fundamental to who I am and has shaped so much of my life, often in the past, quite negatively.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:38:46] Yeah. And there's probably concrete examples in your three-dimensional life right now where it's really relevant, right? And so, it might be like, oh, I need to leave this relationship, or I'm not showing up for my daughter the way I should, or I really should stop drinking, or I really should start eating meat, or I really should stop eating meat, I mean, whatever it is, there's a little voice down-

Luke Storey: [00:39:17] Start eating meat.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:39:20] That's a whole other topic, actually. As one of the great international advocates for red meat-eating for the past decade, I'm a year-and-a-half vegetarian now.

Luke Storey: [00:39:30] Are you really? 

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:39:31] It's super confusing?

Luke Storey: [00:39:31] Are you feeling okay?

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:39:33] Surprisingly, yeah. I actually don't feel any different.

Luke Storey: [00:39:36] That's funny, because when we planned dinner, I knew you as an advocate for red meat, and there's a really great like grass-fed meat place near here called Carve, and I was going to go there, because everyone always likes it, but it was far away from where we're all staying and stuff like that, so we got a place with options. But that's interesting. I always joke about that, because I was a vegetarian for 10 years and my health suffered terribly.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:40:00] Every patient I have ever worked with came to me, I mean, some eating standard American diet, vegetarian or vegan. I mean, I literally was like running a Manhattan-based reform center for vegetarianism, and the very basic diet that I promote, I mean, it's not like rocket science, it's a red meat forward, I would say, dietary approach. I mean, I have published literally history-making cases of the resolution of chronic illness. I mean, as far as I know, I published the first case on the resolution of Graves' disease through lifestyle medicine ever.

Luke Storey: [00:40:42] Wow.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:40:42] Right? That's not because it's the only one or the first one, but I took the time to publish it and we have dozens of these. So, I know that this approach is game-changing, and I couldn't make sense out of the fact, and I had Hashimoto's, and I healed myself through incorporation of red meat, and obviously, elimination of gluten, and dairy, and other things. But I wasn't meditating, I wasn't exercising, I didn't do anything else. I just changed my diet at the beginning. And yeah, so as a part of this like Sovereignty Series thing, I started raising chickens and I adopted two cats, as we were talking about earlier, and that was the end for me, I never ate meat again.

Luke Storey: [00:41:24] Wow. That's so interesting. 

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:41:27] Shit. It really threw me, because I was—I still am. I mean, I'm probably a year-and-a-half in, and I don't know what's going to happen to my health, and this is certainly not for health reasons, and I started to develop this, I don't know, kind of like ideology around diet, where I think that we borrow the prana, we borrow the energy, we borrow the nutrients, whatever dimension you want to look at it through, from animals when we need that, and that there are stages of connection to our own like product-sourcing, our own—obviously, we know there are breatharians in the world, like obviously, we don't need to eat, so it's way more nuanced than macronutrients and Omega-6, 3, 9 fatty acid. I mean, there's more to the story here. We all know that there is a dimension of consciousness that can be applied to our relationship to sustenance.

Luke Storey: [00:42:38] Right. And that fact is generally outside of the conversation of like, what's the best diet? Like I hate talking about diet.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:42:49] Oh, my God, no, I never do either. There's no point.

Luke Storey: [00:42:51] But anyway, whether like you can provide data that supports eating whatever or not eating it, outside of that, you have Neem Karoli Baba, you have Muktananda, you have all—I mean, I would think of like the Indian Saints and sages, and they're reported to, sometimes, not eat, not sleep. 

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:43:11] For decades.

Luke Storey: [00:43:12] Yogananda, like you hear Tom Knowles talk about him, he's like, "Yeah, he would maybe kind of nap for like an hour in the evening, and then just awake serving people the whole time", right? So, there have been humans on record that have gotten energy from other sources, right? And it didn't matter if they were paleo, or vegan, or carnivore, or whatever. Like they're so outside of that, because their consciousness is, I don't know, I guess maybe elevated might be the right word or tapped in, in a certain way that just negates all of that lower-level debate on what you actually put in your body.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:43:47] I think the debate is like all of these ways that we recruit science and rational mind to justify our impulse, our feelings, our intuition. It is another form of self-abandonment. I don't need to convince anyone. I don't need to prove to anyone what is aligned for me. And that's why I never entered into the nutrition, paleo, vegan debate. And I have many vegans who are not fans of mine, for sure. In fact, the most vitriolic emails we've received over the years have been from the vegan community, for sure.

Luke Storey: [00:44:18] Well, now, they can like you again.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:44:19] Oh, my God, I don't even care who likes me. It doesn't matter.

Luke Storey: [00:44:23] We're going to announce it here, guys.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:44:24] Oh, my God. No, I'm not a vegan, I eat my chicken's eggs.

Luke Storey: [00:44:28] That you were pissed at Kelly before, she's exonerated, she's now joined your team partially.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:44:34] Partially. 

Luke Storey: [00:44:34] Except for the eggs.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:44:35] Except for the eggs. Yeah. No, but I mean, I think, again, it's that inner alignment. My mentor, Nick Gonzales, always said, "Patients will want to eat the diet that heals them". They'll want to eat it. So, every time a vegan or vegetarian would sit in my office, and I would say, listen, here's the diet you're going to do, you don't get a second appointment until you have a month of literally no bullshit, not one moment of cheating, not one molecule of gluten or dairy for one month and the rest of it, and I'll see you on the other end, and they would light up like a Christmas tree at the idea of having a burger.

Luke Storey: [00:45:10] Yeah. I've been approached by many people, predominantly females, that are really struggling with being vegan, and they're coming to me with kind of permission, because-

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:45:22] Permission, they're in that split.

Luke Storey: [00:45:24] And my go-to is always bone broth. I'm like, hey, like that animal died anyway because people wanted to eat its muscles. So, those bones are just going to be made into dog bones unless somebody boils them and you drink it, you know? And that usually starts giving people the vitality that they've been lacking enough, where they're like, okay, steak, you know what I mean?

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:45:44] And my approach was like steak tonight.

Luke Storey: [00:45:47] Oh, yeah. Well, yeah.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:45:49] No easing in, and I found I never had to convince anyone. It's this metapermission to follow that inner rumble. I don't know. I wish I had a better word than rumble, but that is all I ever provided to anyone. I mean, even Ali Zeck that we both—yeah, who was like a public former patient of mine, an incredible sage on this plane at this moment.

Luke Storey: [00:46:12] Her son, Alec.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:46:14] Alec, yeah.

Luke Storey: [00:46:14] Yeah, he's in my top three, what do you call it? Tweeters. I'm like, he's got great, concise ideas. I suck at Twitter and no one listens to me there anyway, but I go on there sometimes and I always look for his, they're great.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:46:28] He's amazing. Their family is like-

Luke Storey: [00:46:30] Yeah, very articulate.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:46:30] ... such a gift to this plane. And I often talk about how—I mean, her story, she's a published case, but her story is extraordinary, and I encourage anyone to explore her phoenix rising experience. And literally all that I did for her was to look her in the eye and feel it deeply in my heart as I said to her, "You're not crazy". That's it. It's literally it. I mean, this woman was like off and running, like that's all she needed, to validate that little voice, that little inner knowing that it needed a little like sort of enclave to hold it, need a little containment.

And so, yeah, so when I got that rumble inside that was like, you're done eating animals, I try to make sense out of it, but I think if I continue to do so, then my paleo diet would have become wrong for me, right? And maybe I would have gotten sick as my body attempted to remind me. If it is aligned, which it was, for all those years of my recovery, then it's the right one for me, right? So, it's just that coherence. It's getting into a state of your actions, your words, and that deep, deep inner knowing, that rumble inside being all in the same tip.

Luke Storey: [00:48:04] That ultimatum that you give your patients reminds me of something Dr. David Hawkins talked about. He was a psychiatrist for 50 years, had a huge practice in in New York, and then became a spiritual teacher, but he told the story often about, in his clinical practice, if somebody came in with, I think it was depression, like with chronic depression, that he would give them the ultimatum that they had to go get a dog, a pet dog, and he wouldn't treat them until they got the dog for two reasons.

One being that dogs carry an energy field of unconditional love. They calibrate quite highly, consciousness-wise. Yeah. And the other was that in many, if not all cases, depression is sort of a focused self-centeredness and selfishness, where one is so self-absorbed, oh, I'm the worst person ever, whatever, and that having to care for a dog would often be their medicine, would bring them out of that, because then they had to think about and participate with something other than themselves relationally. I thought that was so cool.

So, eventually, I wasn't depressed, I was feeling fine, but I got a dog, in part because of the way he would describe that. I was like, huh, if my life could be even more rich and full, and have even 1% more of the energy field of love present, why would I be worried about picking up poop, or having to find a sitter or whatever, inconveniences I had sort of projected onto this idea of having a pet. And now, this freaking dog, I mean, I would say we're more like on the codependent side of things, like I'm like, I got to be with the dog all the time, maybe a little slight pathology there, because like I'm really obsessed with this dog, but like I can't imagine how I lived my life for all those years without a dog up until I was, I don't know, 45, 46, or something.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:49:56] Absolutely.

Luke Storey: [00:49:57] It's my first one, I'm like, oh, my God, why didn't someone tell me that when I was 22 or whatever? 

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:50:03] I wasn't ready. I mean, I adopted Mushu, my cat, two years ago. Two years ago. And that was a deep dive—because cats are very different, as you know, and there was a deep-dive introduction into another kind of love that I hadn't experienced, because he will not be controlled. I mean, cats are notoriously, fiercely independent, right? And I mean, he like hid under the bed for two months, and this poor cat has a lot of trauma in his history, and I couldn't feel love from him, like I couldn't feel like he loved me.

And I was obsessed, I'm still obsessed with him, totally obsessed, like caring for him, my whole life was like collapsed into this dynamic, and I didn't feel like he loved me, like he wasn't showing me that he loved me. And it was like an exercise in this sort of leap of faith into connection that isn't apparent in the ways that I am used to witnessing it.

Even as a mother, for whatever reason, I guess I've still been exercising some forms of control-based love, where my kids, I don't have to say it maybe, I don't know, but they do what I want them to do. My kids are so chill and amazing, and I just have not experienced that like—whatever I experienced with Mushu, where he does what the hell he wants to do, and it's often not what I want him to do, and I am still here loving him anyway, like even though he doesn't show me love in the ways I want him to, and it's so wild.

Luke Storey: [00:51:34] And it's so funny you bring that up, because Alyson brought a cat into the relationship, Jelly, and he's older, too. He's like 15, so he's absolutely not going to do anything you want him to do. I mean, he doesn't wreck anything. He doesn't act out, per se, but I still-

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:51:52] He's non-compliant.

Luke Storey: [00:51:52] Yeah, I still fool myself, and I'll grab him like, I feel like I want the cat to sit on the bed and be cuddly right now, like never one time if I put him anywhere, and he's been like, yeah, I like this. If I put him anywhere, even on his cat scratch thing, where he likes to hang out a lot, which is unfortunately by the Wi-Fi router, strangely enough, anywhere I put him, he just immediately—he doesn't just move, he runs from that spot, and I'm like, oh, this is so interesting, because Cookie, by contrast, I mean, you can just, any time you want, flip her upside down, rubber belly, she just turns to jello, like all she wants to do is just cuddle and be obviously near me, and now, Alyson even, almost to the same degree. But yeah, the cat is a really interesting relationship to see, and also, to see like those impulses, I mean, they're not that relevant, but I do want to control my experience with the cat, right?

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:52:47] Yeah.

Luke Storey: [00:52:47] I want the cat to do this right now, because it makes me feel good, and he's like, nope, doesn't feel good to me, bye, which is a great lesson for how I interact with other people, because out of my own fears at times, I do have the tendency to want to control, especially as it pertains to other people's health and behavior, because like I have a selfish fear of something happening to them, or them getting sick or harming themselves. It's like, yeah, I care about them, but if I look a little deeper, it's out of my own, like I don't want to ever face pain if they're in pain, because otherwise, if it didn't pain me for someone I love to be in pain, I wouldn't care what they do and I would never try to control them, you know what I mean?

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:53:28] And it's also, I think, the rescuer dynamic. I'm sure most people know about the Karpman like victim triangle. Yeah.

Luke Storey: [00:53:39] I never made that correlation, but that's true, yeah.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:53:41] Yeah. I mean, that's the sneakiest form of victim consciousness and control-based attachment, is the rescuer—I feel is the rescuer dynamic, because that's where it's also socially engineered, our coerced compassion and virtue-signaling, and this idea of appearing to be a good, caring individual, offering yourself for the betterment of others, like even-

Luke Storey: [00:54:12] That was one thing I wanted to get in. As I predicted, I haven't looked at my-

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:54:16] You haven't even looked at-

Luke Storey: [00:54:16] No, and I knew that would happen, but there were things I wanted to discuss, and that's one of them. I do want to get into that, but before I forget, I want to congratulate you on making it onto The Disinformation Dozen list. I'm just so proud of you, and I'm going to admit here on this recording, I felt a little envious when all of you were included in that.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:54:40] It's such an arbitrary posse.

Luke Storey: [00:54:41] I'm joking, but I was like, God, am I not doing something right? I should be on there. I really don't want to be. I have enough problems, but what's that been like in your journey? For those that don't know your story, you can go back and listen to the other episodes. I think it was number 91 and 230, if I'm not mistaken. We'll put them in the show notes. But there, I think especially in the first one, we talked about your journey of being a straight-laced accredited psychiatrist, totally indoctrinated into the system, found flaws in that, and eventually ejected yourself out of that and became Kelly Brogan the rogue.

But what has it been like seeing yourself, and you don't seem terribly bothered by it, which is amazing—when did the censorship start to appear and when did you start to be vilified on such a grand scale, A? And B, how have you been able to love yourself through that, and reconcile that, and just stay grounded without that egoic attachment to disapproval or that egoic fear of disapproval and being ostracized? I mean, that's such a deep rooted thing within us.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:55:56] Yeah, it's interesting. Well, I'll answer, okay, so it was June, I remember it must have been three years ago that the Google algorithms changed and I was like wiped completely.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:56:11] I had like first page, which anyone who's done this organically over years of writing, writing, writing, and SEO, and all that stuff, I had first page results for a number of things, including weird searches like gut brain searches and like psychoneuroimmunology and whatever, and I was just wiped. And so, now, anything that is relevant of the hundreds of essays that I've written cannot be found unless you put kellybroganmd.com in the search, which of course, nobody's putting when they're searching, a new concept.

Luke Storey: [00:56:43] It's funny you mention that, because when I was getting ready to prep for the interview, I just searched Kelly Brogan, and I was like, where's her main website? It was on the first page, but it was all the way down. I'm like anyone else that has a public persona or that's been around as long as you have and are as popular, like the first thing is going to be your website.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:57:08] Yeah. And it's more problematic if you're like, what are the dangers of antidepressants during pregnancy or whatever? And you type in antidepressants, first of all, it auto completes in a biased manner, right? And then, you can't find information that is available. And I explained at the time to my daughter, I was like, it's kind of like if you go to the library, and you don't know that the librarian has populated the entire library with her favorite books only, and you're going to go to that library thinking you're at a public library, but it's like literally her personal collection, and you might not go to the library if you knew that.

So, when that happened, that was a bummer, and it was the beginning of my awareness and recognition that it's game on, and I am playing in their sandbox, like the interwebs are theirs, right? And I can either throw sand around in their sandbox or I can start to energetically, psychologically, professionally, and otherwise, personally like get out, right? Like start to get with this idea of the choices that I do have and starting to envision, so what if my whole site was eliminated? What then? And that what if game is a good one, I think, to play, to explore, like all of the hidden boogeymen in our fear closet, right? So, what if I couldn't play digital games anymore? Like what would I do with my life? 

Luke Storey: [00:57:08] I think about that often.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [00:58:52] Yeah, it's just a thought experiment.

Luke Storey: [00:58:55] Especially now, they're going after Joe Rogan, the Godhead of all things podcasting, and I'm like, hmm, when they first—the first thing that I noticed that kind of sounded the alarms was when in perfect unison and concert, they deplatformed Alex Jones. whether you like Alex Jones or not, whatever. Like unfortunately, for some that hate him, he's been right about a lot of stuff over the years in his own unique way.

But when it was so carefully orchestrated and he was just nuked from everything within 48 hours or something, I was like, oh, shit, here we go, that's the domino, right? Because you can get someone like that who's so controversial that, generally, people, unless they're ardent conspiracy theorists, aren't going to put up a fuss or really notice. Most people are going to be like, Yeah, Columbine, fuck him, or whatever, which all of that was fake news, by the way, too, if you research it.

But when that happened, I started to sweat a little bit, I was like, oh, okay, how long before it gets out of the fringe and comes into the mainstream? And now, you see with Joe Rogan, I don't know if you saw this big debacle with Neil Young, which was funny, because this morning I saw it was exposed, the entity that bought 50% of Neil Young's catalog for, I think, $150 million recently has very intimate ties with Pfizer. Anyway, who knows? But to the point of like feeling that or exploring that thought, what am I going to do if, when I saw the Joe Rogan thing, I was like, okay, I've got to start thinking about that a little bit more, like what would I do?

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:00:34] It's a good experiment, yeah.

Luke Storey: [01:00:36] Would I do private coaching like in here in Austin or what? Like how could I share-

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:00:41] Maybe become a salsa dancer.

Luke Storey: [01:00:42] Yeah, how could I share my gifts? And if my presence was shrunk right by the powers that be, how would I reach people? What would I do?

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:00:53] And what comes out of that inquiry is, I think, an awareness of whether or not—maybe an awareness of the depth of commitment to this being a benevolent universe, right? So, if you believe that this is fundamentally a benevolent universe, then it's all going to be exactly what you need, the support you require for your next iteration will show up, and there aren't victims who get punished, right?

And it can smoke that out if we have anxiety, fear, and stress around these what ifs, right? So, if you do, then it's an invitation to make contact with like, I'm on a carpet ride, like on a magic carpet ride, and I'm only going to experience that which I actually want to experience. That's my worldview. Not even need to, but actually want to. And so, there were dimensions of me that wanted to experience.

I could actually make very easy contact with the parts of me that enjoy being seen as like a rebel renegade, like badass, like how that was acculturated in my childhood to be like a legitimizing vibration, kind of like having a big mouth Italian-Irish, like that was like the way you survive in my family, was like to be right, rhetorically right, like to win the argument. And it started to evolve. I mean, in 2016, I had like aerial shots of my house with death threats because of a homebirth article that I wrote, or at least it was triggered by that from Jezebel and these other like pharma-funded feminist outlets, and I was called an ableist and like all this crazy shit.

Luke Storey: [01:02:45] Wait, I have to interject there. So, there was some perspective of feminism that had a problem with you promoting homebirth, like I can't think of anything more feminine, female-empowering.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:02:59] Oh, yeah. No, no. That's not the unilateral perspective at all. But it was also my perspective that women might want to reconsider taking psychotropic meds and might want to reconsider taking birth control. And so, this campaign around calling me an ableist was born, and I never heard that word, but actually-

Luke Storey: [01:03:20] Nor have I.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:03:20] Yeah. So, it has almost like eugenics derogatory implications, but at its core, my sense is that it means that I believe that anyone can do what I think I can do, so I'm an able-ist, right? Anyone is able. And I was like, you know what, that's true. That's true. And I have found-

Luke Storey: [01:03:40] Guilty as charged.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:03:41] Right. In this benevolent universe that I choose to live in, that actually, all of the criticism that I've been levied has at least a grain, if not like a huge boulder of truth in it.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:03:52] No one has ever lied. They can make up all sorts of shit. Nobody has ever lied. I mean, I've been called an AIDS denialist. I've been called out for how much I charge in private practice. True. It's all true, right? Like you may not like it, you may take issue with it, you may judge my character, then that character assassination, of course, is the weapon of the scientism war, but it's not like slander and libel in even the sense that it could be, so yeah.

Luke Storey: [01:04:29] That's interesting. Yeah. Like in the realm of politics, there's a lot of slander and libel. There's a lot of slinging of untruths to demonize and delegitimize the other.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:04:39] Maybe I don't know about it, but I haven't experienced it.

Luke Storey: [01:04:42] That's very interesting. Yeah, that's interesting. I think I noticed kind of a bit of a split when this convid thing rolled out, and I was pretty outspoken about my opposition to it, or at least questioning it from the beginning, and then when the George Floyd thing happened, there was another little bubble of that, because I wasn't toeing the line and I wasn't doing what people told me that I should be doing.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:05:10] Right.

Luke Storey: [01:05:11] I was responding to it according to my heart, and intuition, and how I felt. But what's been interesting is that, and I don't know, there's no way to quantify like how many people I lost that were into my work or what I'm doing here, but there was a bit of pushback in some criticism around my perspectives on these things, and it was a little unnerving, not much, because I just believe in my heart that I'm doing what I believe to be true and being in integrity.

I know when I'm out of integrity, it feels like shit, and that didn't feel that way. I felt like, no, go harder, that's the message I got. But when people are like, you suck, we hate you, you're whatever, it's not that comfortable. Even if you know it's not true, it causes you maybe to question yourself, but the interesting result of that was, and continues to be, that the people that have sort of stuck with me, that listen to my podcast, that are now—the really daring ones are my Telegram channel, lukestorey.com/telegram.

Enter at your own risk. It's very fear porn. It's the alarm that I'm sounding that I can't sound anywhere else. But people actually were more, how do I say it? Like the people that were into the stuff I'm doing became even more loyal, and even more empowered, and even more supportive, because they were witnessing the fact that I was willing to take some arrows and speak my truth. So, it's like almost

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:06:36] And then, the arrows wane, because the coherence of your field is organized.

Luke Storey: [01:06:42] Right. There's kind of like a pruning of the people that I probably couldn't reach anyway. They're not my people. They're going to watch CNN or wherever they get their information, and good for them. I'm not trying to like convert people, I'm just speaking what I believe to be true at any given moment and hopefully admitting when I find out something wasn't true, oh, shit, I made a mistake about that, I'll do my best to correct it, but weathering the storm of like disapproval is so worth it, when on the other side of that, like you have your tribe, and you get each other, and there's that system of support, and camaraderie, and the strength in numbers, right?

It's like, no, we're not alone, I'm not alone, the world is a benevolent place, and there are tons of other people that see it that way, and we're just going to live our lives as if all of this is serving a purpose that we don't quite yet understand, and we're just going to keep doing the right thing to the best of our understanding. So, it's, I don't know, the deplatforming, and censorship, and all of that kind of stuff has a very positive impact in terms of concretizing you and your clan.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:07:49] Yeah. Well, that's what I was joking about, was that at a time where I've been deplatformed off of Facebook, and the Google algorithm, and of course, other forms of shadow-banning and follower-pruning that happens on Instagram. It's like every week, there's like 8,000 more just dropping off, whatever, and I've been at the same number of followers for two years.

Luke Storey: [01:08:13] Me, too. Yeah, me too.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:08:14] Whatever, I still like to post my dance videos there. That this Disinformation Dozen thing, I mean, for me, it was like there have been some folks who have been very interested in criticizing my works, some younger men, and it's always had the feeling of like little boys like pulling my braids on the playground.

Luke Storey: [01:08:38] Are you talking about like these Beta male conspirituality guys, oh, my God, insufferable.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:08:44] Yeah, it's sad. I feel like they masturbate to me regularly. And that's sweet, but it's not where I'm going to—I don't care. It does not—it's funny and sweet, but there seemed to be some connection, because I wouldn't otherwise necessarily put myself in the 12 people who are putting out. I don't even put out vaccine-related information. I mean, I have tons of it on my site, but it's not been my focus, because I don't know that we make decisions about vaccines based on science any longer.

I think that we're in a moment of deep trauma-based mind control, and if you are making decisions for or against vaccines and you're doing so with great passion from either side of the aisle, you're doing so from your trauma. That's my belief. And so, what, I'm going to show you my published paper on the psychobiology of vaccine adverse effects? Like you can't engage through your executive mind when you're in your limbic.

And so, I've been very chiefly interested in smoking out the aspects of pontification of these authorities through vilification or compliance, right? It's the same energy. And then, what it could look like to relate to what's happening through the mixed psychology, the good, bad object coexisting, as we were talking about earlier, of the sovereign adult, like what does that look like? And so, that's what I've been talking about for many, many months, so how did I end up on that list other than whatever, these wankers?

Luke Storey: [01:10:20] I find that the categories of the woke cancelers, right? You have the establishment, right? So, there's people in media, there's people in the pharmaceutical industry that are aware of a Kelly Brogan, and they're like, ah, we've got to talk to big tech, we've got to get her off Facebook, right? There's that kind of the powers that be in their concerted efforts to keep counter-narrative silent. What's interesting to me, like just socially, is people like those guys who maybe they are incentivized, who knows? In the beginning of this thing, I forgot about this for a while, but I got an email asking me to promote the vaccine and that I would get paid for it.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:11:02] Wow.

Luke Storey: [01:11:02] Yeah. And I mean, I'm like ready, I'm at the keyboard, just like, oh, you motherfuckers. you know what I mean? And I think it was Alison at the time, was like, "Dude, don't engage". Like I was tempted, like what's that going to do if I send them some seething email anyway? So, maybe there are some people that have podcast, social media accounts that have been co-opted and even are funded. I'm sure that exists. But with those guys in question in their mom's basement, it appears on their videos, like funny, funny stuff, like what is it psychologically? There's some crazy like major projection. It's like super shadow projecting.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:11:46] It's about mommy.

Luke Storey: [01:11:47] It's like this stunning lack of self-awareness that someone who is literally trying to make a career out of being an online troll, like if you talk about like one of the lowest levels of human consciousness-

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:12:03] Bottom feeder.

Luke Storey: [01:12:04] Yeah. It's like an online troll is something that is—that's disparaging if you would call someone that like, oh, he's an online troll. It's like not cool or something that one would aspire to, and there are these people that are literally like trying to make a brand out of being online trolls with the purpose, I assume, to protect other people from people like you and I.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:12:30] It's the rescuer. It's the same thing.

Luke Storey: [01:12:32] But like what's going on there that you could be so blind to your own unhealed trauma and shadow that you literally spend like your time and energy obsessing on your videos and commenting on them? They did one on me the other day, and frankly, I was flattered. I was like, finally, you guys found me, I've been doing this shit for seven years. And I even posted, I was like, please do a podcast about me, I actually listen to that podcast, sometimes, with like a morbid curiosity just as a psychological, I don't know, almost a study, like what is this thing? It's so interesting to me.

And I don't think they're going to do it, because I'm not famous enough or something, but I'm just looking at it, and they're not the only ones, there are other people like that, but like how much pain does a person have to be in interpersonally inside themselves to motivate them to literally spend hours and hours a day to try and tear someone else down, when you could take that energy and actually build something yourself?

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:13:28] Of course, but you don't know that you have that creative power until you know you do. And so, you opt for the surrogate hit of blame, and judgment, and finger-pointing. It's not different than what I used to do and what many activists still do when we obsess about the government, and the FDA, and the AMA, and the Faucis, and the Gates, and all of their every moves. I mean, it's still the same vibration of, I don't like what you're doing, you should change, this is bad.

Luke Storey: [01:14:06] That's funny. So, I'm like confused as to what motivates these people, and I'm like, I do that, too. I love it. I love it.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:14:12] Sorry to point that out.

Luke Storey: [01:14:14] That's great. No, that's great, because I do. It's falling for duality, you know what I mean? It's what it is. That's when I see myself getting pulled into that, where I'm like, oh, someone has to stop this Bill Gates or this Fauci, like not that I'm trying to stop them, but I might illuminate some things about them that could cause people to question their-

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:14:33] Yeah. And you do you, you speak your truth, but the moment that you need someone to change or something to change in order for you to feel empowered and okay, you're in victim consciousness. And to my mind, I mean, I've said this a million times, like it's the only human pathology. It is what causes injury and harm, and if you want to use the word evil, which I certainly don't use lightly, I believe that it emerges from the field of victim consciousness and nothing else. So, I mean-

Luke Storey: [01:15:08] So, how does the perpetrator's behavior and actions, how is that motivated by a victim consciousness, like victim consciousness that's unhealed within themselves or just that dynamic that in that duality, there has to be a perpetrator and a victim, and the perpetrators are just playing that role, because there are so many willing victims?

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:15:29] Right. Well, the perpetrator feels victimized themselves or they wouldn't be feeling entitled to aggressive recourse, right?

Luke Storey: [01:15:37] Oh, okay.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:15:37] So, it's called Karpman triangle, the drama triangle, victim triangle, and there are three angles. There's the victim, right? So, when you're in this poor me, no fair, can't believe this is happening again, that like this is horrible, my life sucks like moment, you're the victim, right? And that's-

Luke Storey: [01:15:57] To me, it's when I text someone FML.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:16:01] 100%. That is the banner waving over.

Luke Storey: [01:16:04] And I catch myself, I'm like, don't put that in writing. I'm like, I'm just feeling that, I have to express that right now, fuck my life, this is so frustrating.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:16:11] Exactly. That is the banner of the victim's moment.

Luke Storey: [01:16:15] And I'm sorry, God, for discounting the gift of my life, but yeah.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:16:18] Don't apologize because it is—well, I mean, I can explain where I think it comes from, but it's not just my idea, like this is the perpetuation of child psychology into adulthood, and it's not a wrong, it's a natural consequence of not being initiated into adulthood, that we carry all of this fear-based experience of power being outside of us into our adulthood, and that's an illusion that we resolve as we adult, as we mature. Yeah.

So, there's a victim, and often, many people enter that through none other than the medical model, right? When you get a diagnosis and you experience this, oh, my God, this is so scary, this is so unfair, I can't believe this is happening, why is this happening to me, like the cancer diagnosis, or whatever? And you triangulate, right? So, you triangulate with a rescuer, who is, themselves, in victim consciousness, because they believe that they only have worth, power, legitimacy, they're otherwise victimized by the circumstances of life that say, you are unlovable and unworthy. They only have that when they are helping, saving, or otherwise controlling someone else's experience, right? 

Luke Storey: [01:17:44] Oh, right.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:17:44] And they are reifying that person's victimization, because they're implying that they can't otherwise help themselves. So, the psychology of you're a victim, and secretly, I'm a victim, I just don't want to show that or talk about that, is very alive in that connection. And usually, the rescuer in this case is the doctor, right? It's the medical system. But this can be outside of, obviously, the medical framework.

I mean, if my girlfriend can't pay her rent, and I just wire her three grand, I am the rescuer in that dynamic who is imagining that she can't figure out the meaning of why her life has reached this financial screeching halt, and she can't divine her way out of it, she doesn't have what it takes, so I'm reifying her victimhood, enabling it, supporting it, structuring it. And then, I'm also engaging this inner belief that I am unable to experience love, connection, approval, or my own personal power unless I am managing another's experience and giving something that I may not actually want to give otherwise, right?

So, I'm showing up to that dynamic as a good person who does for others. And I'm not doing that because I am a good person who does for others, I don't believe in that, I don't believe in altruism. I'm doing that because it's the only way I know to meet my needs. I cannot meet them directly. I cannot say I really want your approval, and can you give that to me? Right? I say I will earn your approval by paying your rent, right?

Luke Storey: [01:19:28] And even maybe ingratiate you into an unacknowledged contract.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:19:34] Yes.

Luke Storey: [01:19:35] Right?

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:19:35] And that's why consent is so important, right? If I say to her, how do you feel if I pay your rent? And she said, well, that would be amazing, and I'll pay you back in three months. That's a completely different consented aware engagement and you can still smoke out the rescuer, because if you would feel resentment if somebody didn't express or experience gratitude,

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:19:59] then don't do it. 

Luke Storey: [01:20:00] Totally. 

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:20:01] Then, don't do it, because you're doing it manipulatively.

Luke Storey: [01:20:04] That's great, yeah.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:20:04] And that's actually how I ended up coming up with my fees in private practice, which in Manhattan is very normative, but nonetheless, I charged what I would charge if somebody hated me for what I did for them, because I worked my ass off in that practice, and it was, oh my gosh, a huge energy commitment, and I needed to get to a place where it was neutralized energetically. And if I was not appreciated for what I offered, then I would be okay with that.

And because money is energy, it kind of worked out and ended up helping me to see where I would otherwise have been investing, and giving, and answering that phone call or staying in a session 10 minutes over, whatever, doing things, little microabandonments that could only be bounced out through appreciation, gratitude, and an experience of a kind of love that I didn't know how to ask for directly, of course. And you could argue it's not even appropriate in the professional setting, but I think these are operative in every dynamic.

Luke Storey: [01:21:10] When you say you don't believe in altruism, is that based on the idea that when we participate in something altruistic, there's an inherent feedback of benefit to ourselves?

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:21:26] That's the only reason we do anything.

Luke Storey: [01:21:27] So, like I give someone an exorbitant tip, and I think, oh, man, poor kid, he's been working his ass off, it's a plandemic, et cetera, I'm going to give him 50 bucks when I only need to give him 20 or whatever. So, that would be an act of altruism, but really, I guess you could say I'm doing that because it makes me feel good.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:21:46] What if he's offended by that, actually, and he feels belittled and degraded by your tip?

Luke Storey: [01:21:52] Right.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:21:53] Do you still feel good about doing it? 

Luke Storey: [01:21:57] Right. Because there's a presupposition that he is a victim of his job and I'm now White male savior, or whatever, I just have to throw the White male thing, because it's so popular-

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:22:08] Let's get that out of the way.

Luke Storey: [01:22:09] ... these days, right?

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:22:11] Right. So, if you were doing it for him, then it wouldn't matter how you experience his reaction. It's that relevant variable, but you're not doing it for him, in my opinion, you're doing it for you, and not because you're like a selfish, shitty, evil person, because we are wired with needs and we will meet those needs without exception. That's all we're doing every day.

And this is like spirituality, like why do people go into spirituality? Why are they attracted to the practices, and the approaches, and the technologies of so-called spirituality? Because they want to feel better, right? Like that is why anybody does anything. Not because they're fundamentally good person who's here to share their overflowing cup of shakti with the world. I mean, it's like-

Luke Storey: [01:23:08] I know very few people, very few, if any, that are seriously—I mean, seriously surrendered into spiritual growth, where like that's the only path, that haven't arrived there without the motivation of abject suffering.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:23:26] Yeah.

Luke Storey: [01:23:27] I meet them every once in a while, because I interview so many incredible people, many of whom are spiritually oriented. See, every once in a while, someone's like, "Oh, I've just always been this way. When I was a kid, I was just interested in this stuff-

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:23:36] Yeah, I have a friend like-

Luke Storey: [01:23:36] ... and my parents were really healthy and everything was chill, and I just like it", and I'm like, what? Freak of nature.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:23:44] Totally.

Luke Storey: [01:23:45] Almost everyone had trauma, addiction, failure at something, and they're like, okay, nothing here in the Earth realm is providing the answers that I need, so I'm going to go into the metaphysical realm and see if I can find it.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:24:00] It's all pain mitigation strategies. And that's why like personally, when it comes to like substances or behaviors, even cutting or whatever, I don't identify the behavior or the substance, obviously, as the problem. It's a pain mitigation strategy. Sometimes, being a patient is a pain mitigation strategy. I mean, I worked with many women who would get to the end of our work together, and my intention for my patients was always for them to never be a patient again, literally, ever again under any circumstances, so you're pharma-free for life, and that's not just your psychotropics, and you don't have a need for that dyadic experience of the doctor-patient relationship.

You really don't. And they would get to that threshold of like flight into the wild, unknown of Dr. Free Living, and want to crawl back into the nest, right? Because there are so many things that we get out of our pain mitigation strategies that are not conscious, obviously, and we're not aware of them, but they're working. They're working until they don't work. That's why you do what you want to do. I'm a big believer in doing exactly what you want to do until you want to do something different. And that's how you end up actually restoring the connection to your own inner drive, your own inner desire, and your sense of alignment.

Because as kids, what we want to do, we're fundamentally conditioned to believe, is wrong. And that is on a behavioral level, like we want to go outside, or we don't want to eat our dinner, or whatever, and don't do that, and do that, but then also in emotional level, what are we told when we cry? Stop crying and calm down or go to your room until you know how to talk to me, or whatever. It's just this divorce, this like fracturing between our sense of connection to movement in the world and an awareness that we can't trust ourselves to know what's best for us to do.

Luke Storey: [01:26:03] When you say that you've never disciplined your kids, and I'm not yet a parent, I'm working on it, just the-

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:26:10] Hope you're enjoying the working on it part.

Luke Storey: [01:26:13] ... Prospect—yeah, it's not bad. The prospect of being a parent has always been terrifying to me, because there are so many unknowns and there were so many things that I just didn't learn experientially as I was parented, right? But I can't imagine a kid acting up, just lack of a better term, jumping on the couch, they're about to spill something, they're being loud in a place where it's not appropriate, like what do you do if there is no disciplinary action or repercussions for their behavior? If their behavior is out of line, like what does one do? What do you do? I find that fascinating.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:26:50] I think there's a metaorientation that delivers a very different experience, right? Like if I am—because I started in my sort of like fuck the man path before I had my first daughter, I already was.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:27:11] Interested in doing everything differently, right? So, my kids have never had pharmaceuticals, and had natural births, and whatever. And I was interested in parenting paradigms, mindful parenting, these kinds of things that were a fundamental divergence from, obviously, the ways in which we were parented, which are punishment and reward-based.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:27:34] There's an amazing book called Unconditional Parenting by this guy, Alfie Kohn, and he talks about-

Luke Storey: [01:27:38] Oh, noted.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:27:39] Yes. It's very excellent. To disabuse us of the impact and inculturation that comes not only from punishment. I mean, that's kind of obvious, right? But even from sort of like, I don't know, it's like a pursed lip kind of like restrained disciplinary approach, like timeouts, for example. And we're not hitting and screaming, but there's still this kind of like control-based interaction with your child's behavior. But then, also, praise, right?

So, if I praise Little Sally for giving a blueberry to Billy, and I say, that's so nice that you shared that blueberry with Billy, now, she has an externalized reward system for sharing, and the reason that she's going to share a blueberry in the future is because she gets approval from her mama, and not because it feels good to share, and that's why she did it in the first place. It feels fundamentally good to connect to another child in that way.

Luke Storey: [01:28:43] It's like the precursor to virtue-signaling.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:28:47] Virtue-signaling. What you're laughing at is 100% true. That's where that comes from. It's where it comes from. It's the parentification of the watching eye of the government or whatever that ultimately is Mommy, I call it Mommy Medicine and Daddy Government that we are longing for this approval to be seen as good. And there are like infinite assumptions, like why grandma should, wear a mask for grandma, or whatever, get your vaccine for grandma, or whatever, as an example or emblem of the virtue-signaling concept, you should be doing this, sacrifice yourself for the greater good or for the vulnerable, the immunocompromised.

And there are so many assumptions in there, right? Like that I'm a good person if I do a good thing for someone else, even if it's a bad thing for me. That's an assumption, right? That like one wrong and a right make a right, right? And so, who is right is more important. Who is more vulnerable? Well, the assumption is that, for whatever reason, I might not want to wear a mask, whether it's that I was gang-raped as a as a child, and partially suffocated, and putting anything over my face brings me back to that moment, or it's simply that I don't like to do anything uncomfortable when I don't want to do it, right?

Like whatever in the range of things, or maybe I have some respiratory compromise that makes it difficult for me to breathe through one, or whatever, it doesn't matter, that that could be valuated against someone else's fear and put—like triage, and put into some metric, right? So, we all pray at the altar of safety and avoidance of death through the lens of germ theory, but there are so many assumptions in that simple suggestion that you should wear a mask for grandma, that that have not been consented to, or clarified, or even exposed to the light of day.

I mean, Implied in that is that we both believe that germs cause illness. Implied in that is that masks are effective. Implied in that are our many assumptions about my fears being less important than hers. And so, the roots of virtue signaling absolutely originate in conditioned childhood experiences of good and bad behavior. But I think for me, the big reveal was like, oh, wow, it's not just punishment, it's praise.

And so, I dedicated myself early on to visiting, because this is my major wound, is that like my—not just me, obviously, but like my feelings don't matter and I can't be trusted for what I think, right? And so, when I have a feeling and I'm in a relationship where someone's feeling about my feeling takes the mic, I'm back in the wound space of my childhood, right? So, how do I resolve that?

Well, I resolve that by, when my child has a feeling, I contain my own experience, I become the vessel, the masculine vessel for my own inner feminine, and I cross the bridge, and I visit with her experience first. And it's not about my experience of her experience, I am the adult, right? I didn't get that as a child and I don't know that most of us did. And my nervous system is healed enough, my awareness is online enough, and my spiritual dedication to ending this cycle is fortified sufficiently, where that is my number one priority, right?

So, like I had an experience just the other day, because I've been doing a lot of, yet again, more inner child work, never ending, and have become really interested in like two questions, right? So, like what is the primary disappointment that I experienced as my father's daughter and mother's daughter? So, you do this with both parents. If you're having relationship issues, you focus typically on like the opposite gender if you're heterosexual, but you do it with both.

So, what is the primary disappointment? Pain, trauma, challenge, right? Like what's the number one thing you didn't get? And then, what was the desire underneath that? Right? So, what is the number one thing you want, still to this day, to experience? And I sat my kids down, and I asked them that, I said, like what is the thing like I did super wrong in your childhood? And my kids are almost 13 and 10. And then, I said, "What is it that you want that I'm not giving you?"

And they were super like, "Oh, I don't know. Do I have to tell you?", or whatever, "Can I write you a letter", or whatever? And I was like, I want to know now. I want to know yesterday so that I can work to give this to you, and I said, I don't know that I can, because I can only love you as much as I love myself. So, I don't know that I can. And I'll tell you that the feedback that I got from one of my daughters was devastating, like truly devastating.

And not because it was anything like I didn't really know or whatever, but it gave me the feeling like I'm failing at being a mother and I'm failing at giving her an experience that's fundamentally different from mine emotionally that I had as a child. And that's apparently what I think I came here for, was to like end these cycles in my family, and to finally learn how to love, and to finally experience love and offer my children an experience of love in this lifetime.

And it was like super basic feedback about like kind of the subtle ways in which I make it not okay to have a different opinion, for example, or whatever, which I already know that's operative. It's like I don't need to yell, or punish, or spank, or whatever for the subtle experience of my energetic reign to be very constraining for my children. And that was my moment, where I was like, Kelly, this is it, like this is your moment in your lifetime, maybe like literally the most important opportunity you've created for yourself for you to put your defensive shit aside, nobody cares right now about your story, about all these things you did, because that's always how the victim shows up. It's like, after all I've done, how dare you? Right?

Like all of the work I have done to wake the hell up, all of the things that I've done to show up for my kids differently, psychologically, physically, medically, like spiritually, I feel like you, like it's like a full-time job, just trying to develop my consciousness and awareness, and to heal, and integrate and to not feel appreciated for that, which, of course, I am, my kids show me appreciation all the time, so it's not rational, right?

It excludes the awareness of the appreciation and it's a focus on this criticism or perceived indictment. And how can I put all of that aside and literally cross the bridge to be with her experience of me? And that's it. So, if she thinks I'm selfish, and this, and that, or whatever, the horrible—not that she said this, but like let's say your kid says, I hate you, you're the worst dad ever, right? He's like five. Can you go over, and be like, wow, you must be super upset to say that to me, like what's going on?

The point being that can you just be with his experience or her experience emotionally, and show up to validate that and give a shit about what they're experiencing more than you give a shit about what you're experiencing internally? Not because what you're experiencing doesn't matter, but because you know how to hold yourself. You don't need your child to hold you. You don't need your child to be the stabilizing force for your internal emotional world.

Luke Storey: [01:37:25] And if you make them that stabilizing force, you are fucking that kid up.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:37:31] You're perpetuating the same shit we're all healing from. It's the narcissistic extension, where your child, whether it's because they need to get As, I mean, I'm running a super weird experiment with my kids, because like 4.0, went to MIT, and Ivy League Med School, and all this stuff, and I'm second-generation Italian, and anyone who has immigrant parents knows that you kind of need to validate and prove that it was worth it for them to leave their motherland or whatever, and a lot of times, it's channeled through achievement, and a focus on performance and whatever else. And I got really into the unschooling movement, and took my kids out of school, and I don't want them to go to school. I don't believe in that model any longer.

Luke Storey: [01:38:18] Good for you. Your kids are stoked.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:38:21] That's what you would think, but there's a plot twist, which is that after-

Luke Storey: [01:38:25] I mean, in the long term, not that they enjoy that process, but just looking back on how damaging school was for me, I'm like, oh-

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:38:32] It's an indoctrination camp, obviously, and part of the unschooling model is that they drive decision-making around what they want to do to learn and expand, and both of my kids decided that they wanted to go back to school. I was like, what? No. No, you're staying home with me and we're going to do like Tuttle Twins, and learn about libertarianism and whatever else. And so, now, they go to school and I'm blessed to have a local option that is very aligned with my value system.

However, I don't check their homework. I don't even know what the hell they're doing. I have nothing to do with it. So, it's their gig. And there are many who say that by the age of like 12, you have the intellectual capacity to participate in pretty much any adult endeavor that you might be interested in, and my eldest was an example of that. She had a business and a job before she went back to school, and it all atrophied on the vine, but whatever. And they are in charge of whether or not their grades matter. I literally don't care. It does not matter at all to me, has no value.

So, I'm like totally segregated that otherwise very charged field of the transitional object of like grades. I mean, it's super interesting. And for them, it like kind of matters, but also not like with huge importance. So, when you can allow your kids to internally locate a sense of value and worth, then they figure out whether something actually is an accurate reflection of that inner dimension of value. And it's only when it's externalized onto authority figures that we learn, and practice, and become habituated to self-abandonment, which of course then we experience in our primary romantic relationships and dynamics, and then blame others for that which we are doing to ourselves, ultimately.

Luke Storey: [01:40:46] As so it goes.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:40:47] And so, it goes. Exactly.

Luke Storey: [01:40:49] I want to ask you. Thank you for that. I took big notes on that. Okay. I'm very interested in parenting right now, like I'm probably going to do a bunch of shows about it. Actually, I do have a great one coming up, I'm going to record. One thing that I am often mystified by is how many spiritual leaders that are well-respected and seem to be quite conscious and awake have been duped into going along with this system. I don't know that much about Sadhguru, but as an example of someone-

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:41:26] There are many examples, most examples.

Luke Storey: [01:41:28] ... Deepak Chopra, whoever, there are so many people that have kind of toed the line, and I think like, how could you meditate for so many years and not see through this? And then, not only those leaders, but some of these very well-respected institutions, like Esalen and Omega Institute, I mean, I think, yeah, a close friend of mine got invited to do like a workshop at, I think it was Omega. And right on their website like, you got to have the thing to come in here, and I'm like, what?

Like head-exploding emoji. I'm like, you guys, it's like a lot of the boomers that were so anti-establishment. I mean, Neil Young, case in point that were so anti-establishment, and free-thinking, and spiritually introspective, and brave, and courageous, and curious that were so easily brainwashed. I don't understand that. Like how does that—from your perspective, I mean, you're not all-knowing, but what is going on with that? It's this cultural phenomenon that is just so confusing to me.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:42:30] Yeah. For me, it was not confusing, because I wrote a blog years ago called Open Letter to the Spiritual Community. And I did so because of how many self-appointed spiritual gurus and teachers were endorsing and promoting, even defending antidepressants and other psychotropics. And I felt, at that time, confused, because I said, okay, hold on a minute, if our emotional experiences, and our internal darkness, and our relationship to adversity and challenges is itself the grist for the spiritual mill, then why would we ever avoid, suppress, bypass, or otherwise reject that?

Isn't the whole point that the journey is through, not around, beneath, or somehow running in the other direction? Isn't the nature of the spiritual process and so-called like consciousness elevation to resolve that good-bad split and to come into coherent integrity? The good-bad split is the assignment of bad feelings as bad and good feelings as good, but I thought the whole goal of spirituality was to understand it's all a part, right? It's all essential. And that also applies to the body, doesn't it? Right? Like since when is illness a bad thing? What is a bad thing? Isn't a bad thing just an experience of our container being too small to hold what it is that we more fully are? Right?

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:44:23] So, it needs to break, right? Isn't that what adversity and challenge is? So, I, at that point, resolved the cognitive dissonance through, really, an understanding of the role of Cartesianism, right? Like the role of the casting out of the spirit or the soul from the body. So, this duality, right? This is the meat suit. This is where the sinful, dirty things happen. And out there is God, and divinity, and transcendence, and true connection, and love, and light.

It's all in the spiritual realms. And how do we access that? We transcend this. And Steiner and others would talk about that as a fundamentally Luciferian concept, right? To transcend this material realm to experience God, versus myself and others who feel that—and we were just talking about this earlier, that, actually, the means of experiencing your divinity is through this body.

This body is your spirituality. They are the same. And so, when I started to understand, okay, well, there are many, many centuries, actually, of, well, through one historical lens, now, I don't believe anything I've ever been taught, everything requires like a caveat of like history, and media-making events, and even people like Alex Jones, it's just like a psyop around every corner.

But anyway, this idea of the body and the spirit as being separate, we've been in acculturated around that for—I mean, the body, as machine, is the foundation of allopathic medicine, right? So, your experience has no meaning, your symptoms are purposeless, nuisance, and death is to be avoided at all costs, and that's how we define health, it's the absence of death. It's you're surviving, right?

It's not about thriving, or vitality, or an experience of meaning in your life or your personal narrative evolving and developing. It's not about any of that. That's why nothing really matters, but this material concept of genetic-based health and managing it through the gifts of the pharmaceutical industry. So, when you look at the way that the New Age, so that's how I refer to it.

The New Age has potentially even been engineered, if you want to believe in such things as social engineering, how it's been engineered to capture a certain segment of this society and to strategically control concepts like health and healing, and mindfulness, and meditation, and self-work. You can see how this has already happened in other realms, like naturopathy and midwifery, where these ancient, if you want to say, practices and frameworks have been captured, and green-washed, and given licensure and all sorts of regulatory entitlements and funding for the low, low price of complying with all of the more overarching belief systems of scientism, right?

And the most dominant belief system of our time is the allegiance to science. I mean, look at people like the Dalai Lama has been shilling for vaccines and putting polio vaccines into kids mouths for many, many, many years. I mean, there's been this hierarchy of world religions where scientism has always been at the top, and that's by design. And germ theory specifically and its role in the allopathic belief system is, of course, coming into the fore right now.

And it is predicated fundamentally on the belief that the invisible badness, so remember that good-bad split, the invisible badness is out there. It's the problem. And if you are to be the good person, remain the good person, which of course, we want to, right? Like Sally giving the blueberry to Billy, if you're to remain the good person, that you need to be, in order to feel safe and like you can secure love, because otherwise, you might be exposed for being a bad person, you'll never be loved, and you'll be rejected and abandoned, then you're going to do what is required of the good person to stay away from the bad stuff, right?

Which is the germs, the illness, death, all the rest of it, and you're going to comply and be obedient. So, to me, when the health food stores, and the Omega Institutes, and I can think of like maybe one or two exceptions, the spiritual gurus, started to capitulate to the dominant narrative and start shilling for the vaccine, and virtue-signaling, mask-wearing, and everything else, to me, that made sense, because they probably only ever related to spirituality through this body spirit split, where there wasn't an awareness.

I mean, that's literally why I wrote Own Yourself is literally for the spiritual community to start to understand how and why the body is a spiritual expression of beingness. And you cannot separate the two. You can't put antidepressants in the body while you're exploring your spiritual dimensions of relating to sadness and grief, and weaving it into the fabric of your life story.

Luke Storey: [01:50:10] So, there's this polarized position, where one side on the New Age side is kind of having a reductionist approach to spirit is all that matters, the whole you are not your body, you are not your mind teaching of meditative practices. And then, on the other side, in the allopathic medical system, that's all you are, right?

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:50:38] Yes, exactly.

Luke Storey: [01:50:39] So, both sides are kind of doing the same thing and discounting, and meanwhile, in the middle, there's this bridge where you are both, you're everything. 

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:50:46] Right. And Steiner put forth a rubric, where that's arimonic, and the materialist-reductionist is arimonic, and Lucifer is on the other side, and Christ is in the middle. I mean, however you want to conceptualize it, these polarities and this triangulation is not new. And I think personally, from my perspective, spiritual bypass, as it's often referred to, it's the most dangerous force at play, because it's the wolf in sheep's clothing, right?

Like if you're somebody who believes that your body is to be managed and genes are the determination of your health experience, and that death is a horrible thing to be avoided, and that this is essentially like a machine waiting to break down, that you need mechanics to maintain, then it's internally consistent that you would subscribe to everything that's on offer in the dominant narrative.

Go do that if that works for you, right? And if you're like, my body is infinitely wise, like it knows how to heal, and I just have to create the conditions for that, and I'm going to establish my entire life in coherence with that approach, and psychology, and spiritual worldview, and no, thank you on pharmaceuticals, I'm good, and actually, no, thank you on doctors in general, and if I experience symptoms, I'm going to go in with a curious mind and I'm going to unpack the message from my soul to my mind that my body is delivering me.

And I'm going to do that through German new medicine or through other modalities that are going to support my allegiance to my own body. I will not betray my body, because I am my body, right? And we betray our bodies whenever we want our symptoms to go away or be different. We see them as a problem, right? So, if you're in that camp, then none of this has any relevance. Like medicine, my kids have never been to an emergency room or a doctor.

It has no relevance to our lives. I'm not fighting it like, oh, Tylenol is bad, never, never. It's literally not relevant to our household. Okay. So, that's another camp. That makes sense that you just don't do this whole thing that's happening, right? You don't put the thing up your nose, because you don't need to know about a positive or negative test of something that you don't even believe in, like it's not relevant.

But the middle camp that I affectionately refer to as the New Agers, like this camp seems to be borrowing from both polarities, masquerading as more aligned with the health sovereign spiritualists on some level, but then also insisting that disease is bad, that germs are dangerous, and that death is to be avoided. And I think it's because so much of New Age spirituality is still founded on this good-bad trauma split that is acting out through the dimensions of spiritual bypass and avoidance of suffering, avoidance of pain, avoidance of looking at how our unseen motives are actually causing harm.

I mean, have you ever seen somebody like screaming online or whatever, like screaming at somebody about how they should be wearing a mask? Like that's how they're expressing like deep concern for the human experience, health and wellness, and like our interconnected fabric of responsibility to one another. It looks like that, like hostility? That incoherence always reveals itself, right?

Whenever our unseen dimensions of selfishness and self-servingness are not made conscious, they become felt by others, right? And that's how we end up being exposed for our motives that we refuse to look at, because we can't own our selfishness, our laziness, our inner cheater, our inner manipulator, like we're all of these things. We are all, all of these things.

And when we pretend that we are spiritually superior, or ethically or morally in some like high horse and we know what is best for others, that was a hard bridge for me to cross, because as somebody who's been in the vaccine activism realm for many, many years, especially when it comes to children, like I felt like, no, I know what's best for your kid, your kid should not be vaccinated.

And when you can get to a place where you actually don't don't assume that you have any idea what somebody needs to experience, literally no idea, when I see a child in a mask, there's some part of my heart that goes into like spasm to this day, two years later, and there's this other part I can recruit that says, you know what, I have no idea what that child needs, what that child signed up for, what that child's karma entails.

And that's not to say that I stop feeling, because I do think the dehumanization is a very essential part of this agenda rolling out as planned and predicted. However, it is to see the separateness and to like offer a reverent gaze even when I want something to be different. It's like that I vow experience of separateness that is totally essential before we come into the oneness, right?

Because when we come into the oneness of the fabric of the greater good, before we've established ourselves as separate entities, it's a mess. It's like liver cells being in the eye cell region, like we have to get organized into the mandala or we will not function as an effective sort of vessel. But I do think that spiritual bypass and the ways in which we are engaging it in our own lives personally, like the ways that we are flying into transcendent experience, or identifying as spiritual, like, oh, everything's this way for a reason, like before we want to actually feel the pain of a given situation, it becomes just an elaborate addiction, an elaborate escape tool.

And that's why I think it's like very problematic, but it's also perfect. Like if you take your vaccine to go on Esther Hicks cruise or whatever, and you outsource—I mean, literally, I heard that that's being required. And you outsource your agency around your body and your decision-making to your spiritual teacher, you may have the opportunity to learn that there are consequences to that, right? Like maybe it's a time where we cannot outsource to any teachers, to any gurus, to any doctors, to any masters, to any authorities any longer in a way that is fundamentally self-violating and self-betraying without there being consequence.

And maybe a vaccine is not self-betraying or self-violating to one person, but again, it's that inner rumble. Like do you have a little sense of like, oh, I wouldn't otherwise do this if she didn't say it was good? And then, you self-betray, you self-abandon in service of securing connection. That's really what it is. It's connection, approval, a sense of safety. And I think that those microself-abandonments or macroself-abandonments have bigger and bigger consequences now in the modern moment. That's an amazing part of what's happening.

Luke Storey: [01:58:34] I find myself oscillating between, and less so this side than the other side, between this is the end of the world as we know it, evil is winning, they're going to win, and it's only a matter of time before they break my door down and throw me in a camp. I mean, that's like at the worst place that I could go. Thankfully, I don't live there much, where I'm intending to live more of the time is a very zoomed out perspective on this absolute perfect drama that creation has provided us, this incredible duality. There's no other way to phrase it.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:59:25] Polarity, too, I like.

Luke Storey: [01:59:26] Yeah, where everything, even the things that I think are wrong and should be different are exactly the way they're supposed to be. And so, if I lean more into that, that it is a benevolent universe, and that it's all good, not spiritual bypass, but really reconciling that-

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [01:59:46] No, but really feeling that, yeah.

Luke Storey: [01:59:47] ... as the ultimate truth, that Christ consciousness, call it what you will, pervades, and that this is all inclusive of that, even the things that I deem to be wrong, evil, dark, right? The interesting thing about finding that home there is the motivation to still do good. It's like if none of this matters, and this is all just kind of this game, this chessboard that's been created so that consciousness can experience itself in this vastness of contrast, then why do anything right? You know what I mean?

Not like be a bad person, but just like, God, is it worth kind of the fight or the perceived fight that I'm putting up? Like maybe I just live my life and just don't worry about any of this shit, which is kind of more where I lean into, but then I find myself having a conversation with someone like you. and I have my notes, and I'm like, those people watching this video, they need to hear this shit, they need to think like we think, you know what I mean?

There is, if I'm honest with myself, this savior kind of, although I'm sure my influence in the world is minuscule in the great scheme of things, but I'm like, man, if just one person hears this conversation today and they rethink their relationship to their body, or to the medical system, or to the oppressive governments that are now imposing upon us, that maybe I save that one person, but to your point, who am I to say that that person needs to be saved? Right?

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:01:15] Right. And are you worth anything if you don't save anyone?

Luke Storey: [02:01:19] Right. Yeah, totally.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:01:21] Are you still somebody even?

Luke Storey: [02:01:22] Where is my value derived from? Right? But seeing that kid in the mask and saying that's wrong, I mean, I love that perspective. There's a great Shakespearean quote, that's—I mean, this is the only spiritual teaching I probably ever need, "There's no such thing as good or bad, only thinking makes it so", right?

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:01:39] Yes.

Luke Storey: [02:01:40] So, if everything is really neutral and arbitrary from a non-dual perspective and where I get caught is when I buy into one side of that polarity, so is the answer not for each individual perhaps that seeks this kind of level of peace and fulfillment in their life to really find that middle path, and surrender judgments, and surrender positionalities of what they think they know, what's right, what's wrong, and just follow that calling within one's body and within one spirit as what seems to be the best indication of the best path forward, the thought, the feeling, the deed of the highest good according—as close as I can get to that. Like what serves the highest good, not only for myself, but inclusive of all creation? And just putting one's focus on what I think that is and perhaps fine-tuning one's ability to navigate to that line, to that center line of your own truth, your own integrity of your own infinite love, not your infinite love, but the infinite love.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:02:48] I went, I think it was-

Luke Storey: [02:02:50] I mean, to me, life gets so much more fun when I just go zoom out, zoom out, zoom out, 30,000 feet, not far enough, well, I don't know if space is totally real, but let's say as I go up to the edge of the firmament, or whatever it is, and just go, oh, I see, and this has happened to me a number of occasions smoking Bufo toad, the 5-MeO-DMT, where it's just like, I mean, I wouldn't want to get into that conversation, but I can look at the dualistic judgments I have about events, and people, and places, and everything that's going on, and like in those moments, it's so clear to me that it's all so perfect, and then it's also just—it's designed with such perfection that it doesn't need my intervention, you know what I mean? Like I've even had experiences that were once you come out of it, you're like, wait, was that real? But I mean, even seeing people like a Bill Gates, a Fauci, a Hitler, a Mussolini, a Mao, whoever, and like they are executing their role with absolute perfection that it's almost beautiful. Not that I condone-

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:03:53] No, of course, I understand what you're saying.

Luke Storey: [02:03:54] ... their thing, but they're not wrong. They're supposed to be there. And if you got rid of a Fauci, duality would just go plunk, and pop another one in there to do their job until consciousness, by and large, is elevated to the point, where that extreme, perhaps, this is just a hypothesis, that that extreme expression of duality is no longer necessary for consciousness to then evolve into a higher level.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:04:19] Right. But the only thing that you can control in that entire scenescape is your own experience of your internal world, and bringing into awareness that, which was obscured from your own consciousness. So, those judgments, that's why when you feel this upset, enter through the upset, those judgments are of projections of parts of you that you don't know how to love yet, because you don't understand, right? Like if I have a part of me that says I am selfish, right?

I am selfish and I better hide that, because I won't be loved if anybody sees it, then I have another part of me, the critic, that makes sure that I keep that selfish part in check so that I preempt anyone else seeing it, and I'm going to say, no, don't do that, why didn't you offer her a ride? You're so selfish. Like whatever, that's wrong and bad. But I need to understand that I'm going to judge that selfish part in whomever else outside of me until I see what that selfish part actually is doing, why she exists, how she has served me, maybe I grew up in a household where like it was every woman, every man for themselves, and that was literally the only way I could survive, because nobody gave a shit about me, right?

And that selfish part is holding all the pain of that, literally, for decades, and when I reconnect to that part as valid, offer approval, like Louise Hay style, if there's anything you can do for yourself that will change your entire life, it is to offer yourself approval and validation for everything you do. Everything you are, everything you do, get super, super, not only comfortable with and tolerant of, like the ways in which you do stupid things, you're an asshole, you're like mean, and cruel, and selfish, and manipulative, and whatever, but actually approve of it.

Like offer approval to why you are doing that, to the part of you that can find no other way to feel safe and to survive, right? So, to like resolve judgment because it's the right thing to do is to bypass this beautiful experience of collecting the pieces of yourself that hold really intense emotions that just want to be felt. And like I said at the beginning, that also hold these gifts, these creative impulses that irrepressibly come forth when you start to cohere around like the bigger dimensional experience of yourself as having—it's like an inner circus, I say. It's like this whole wild thing going on in there.

Luke Storey: [02:07:07] You got that right.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:07:07] But I was going to just propose like to questions, too, because we are habituated around struggle. I'll speak for myself. It's a habit of struggle that I have been like generating an awareness of. I went to Naples with some girlfriends for my birthday last year and it was at a time when it was like super masky still in Miami. And we went to Naples, which it's like the partisan psyop, right? So, Miami is like a blue city and Naples is—this is, I'm sorry, Florida, is a red city.

Luke Storey: [02:07:44] Thank you. I was thinking Italy.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:07:46] I know. I don't know. I like assume everybody is in a Florida-centric mind. And I went there and no one was wearing a mask. No one anywhere. And for me, this was like, what is happening here? It was such a different experience, then the energy was like very laid back and totally chill. And I actually embarrassingly found that I didn't like it. I like didn't like it. Like I found myself almost like, well, now, I don't know who's on my team, because I'd been in this like, the mask thing has been big for me, what it's symbolized, and I'd been in this like struggle against it, and now, all of a sudden, I was like relaxed, and I just couldn't orient, and I felt uncomfortable.

And obviously, when people start to meditate like often, they find that their anxiety is like heightened, because calm is associated, or harmony, or stable conditions are associated with like danger, right? Like we have these mixed associations and couplings, somatic experiencing calls at that, from our childhood that need to be unwound. And so, I think when you talk about being dragged off to like a gulag or whatever, like go into that, spend time like with that what if, like we were saying digitally, like just explore it, like really, really go into the worst, worst-case scenario.

What is your worst-case scenario? Like your family or woman getting dragged off, and whatever, what is it? Because it's holding a lot of your energy—the avoidance of it is holding a lot of your energy. So, explore that worst what if, and then the most interesting work I've done personally is exploring the best-case scenario what if. Do you even know what that is? Right? Like what actually do you want?

Luke Storey: [02:09:44] Well, you don't arrive at that if you're just refreshing Telegram feed, you know what I mean?

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:09:48] If you're focused on the fight-

Luke Storey: [02:09:51] Like focus on what you don't want. It's that thing, too, just metaphysically. It's like putting so much energy in what you don't want. I mean, I think part of it is just there's a dopamine addiction to bad news and fear, and you're just like, oh, what else is going wrong? But it's also the false sense of security in knowing what's going on. Alright. Let me see whether—okay. The truckers in Canada, okay, I kind of see where things are.

It's like if I hadn't known anything about any of this the whole time, my life would have not changed one iota, literally, except maybe I want to go in and get a juice at Erewhon, and they're like, sir, you have to put this thing on or an airplane. But literally, other than that, my life is just getting better, and better, and better all the time, but because I'm aware of the suffering of so many people and how the oppression is affecting so many people in a more quantifiable way than it happens to have affected me-

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:10:46] That's a very, very slippery slope, that anonymous victim. 

Luke Storey: [02:10:50] It's like, yeah, there's like this, oh, I'm feeling the burden of the collective for all these people suffering, but then to totally just live my best life and be happy, there's like a survivor's guilt thing that happens, right? It's like even saying like, my life's better than ever, and then I think of, oh, fuck, what about those people that lost their job, or they had to get the thing, or-

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:11:10] But you don't know in the totality of their experience what that even represents, and to project yourself into their experience and imagine what it would be like for Luke to experience losing his job, because he didn't take the jab or whatever, it's magical thinking. It's childlike, magical thinking, really. And so, that's why I've used this-

Luke Storey: [02:11:31] I love you, dude. So good.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:11:31] ... this term called reality tubes, right? Like everybody has their reality tube, and everything that happens, this is my belief system, in your reality tube is totally internally consistent with that reality and the dimensional consciousness that your embodiment is representing. So, for me, and I did this for many years as an activist, so like literally probably abandoning my own children for the anonymous victimized child, obsessively focusing on my role in saving that child, it's part of the spiritual bypass technology.

It's part of the rescuer or victim consciousness to imagine that it is my role to secure a sense of savior energy, secure a sense of righteousness, secure a sense of goodness, secure sense of worth and validity through serving in this way when it's literally like an imaginary space. If you know someone, I know—first of all, I literally don't know anyone who's vaccinated in my life. It is not in my reality.

Okay. If you know someone who's being dragged off to a gulag, it's part of your reality. Responding to that is going to be an important thing for you to sort out, how you want to show up, as a warrior, as a fighter, as a defender, as a savior, like maybe you want to avoid it, you want to hide in your closet, however you show up to what's happening in your actual three-dimensional reality.

So, laying claim on our three-dimensional reality is one of the most audacious forms of radical activism you can engage right now, because of the metaverse, because of this virtual space, because of social media, because of all of the ways we are in this endless projective labyrinth of unreality. If your real life is showing you pain points, turn towards those, and of course, turn inside, to look at what they are inviting you to reclaim and connect to in yourself. If your life is not showing you pain points, stay in your lane, like stay in your life, because you have no ability to truly know, and that's sort of the shadow of empathy.

I don't know how else to put it. Like when we imagine through projection that we—and call it compassion, that we know what it's like to be in someone else's circumstantial reality and that we're going to help them make it different. Now, if somebody asks you for help, that's one thing, but one of the ways to resolve this like spiritual bypass impulse so many of us have is to actually never offer help that is not requested, right? Don't offer your perspective on life, don't offer your information like unsolicited to somebody.

Luke Storey: [02:14:18] Would you please tell a lot of people I know that?

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:14:21] Right. I know. I mean, trust me, it's like taking a lot of restraint on my part.

Luke Storey: [02:14:25] And I'm sure I used to do that, I think quite a bit, and then, I don't know, somewhere along the line, I kind of learned that lesson. But it's funny you mentioned that, because right now, one of the things I'm working on myself as I kind of build my social circle here in a new place, and living somewhere for 30 plus years, and kind of just having everything easy in terms of my social life.

I find that the thing I struggle with most, yeah, it's pretty consistent right at the moment, there's something for me to discover or learn about this, maybe it's just advocating for myself and declining, but I find a lot of people want to constantly teach me things, like people start giving me like spiritual lessons and telling me how the world works, and I have literally not asked one question.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:15:11] I've basically been doing that for the past 2 hours.

Luke Storey: [02:15:13] No, but I'm asking you.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:15:15] I know you're asking. That's the difference.

Luke Storey: [02:15:17] It's like an invasive kind of—I think it's just kind of, I don't know, it's an ego positionality or something, right? And I think I find it even more difficult to stomach. It's usually men, and most often men that are considerably younger than I.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:15:34] That's interesting.

Luke Storey: [02:15:35] Yeah. And it's like, dude, like you don't need to pontificate, like I didn't ask for your worldview, or if you ask me like, "How are you doing?" I'm like, "Oh, man, I'm doing good, I'm working on this thing or that thing." "Well, here's what you need to do." And I'm like, I did not invite you into my house, metaphorically speaking, I don't know why it's becoming so triggering and intolerable for me that I think I'm being called probably to just be radically honest, and say, hey, I really appreciate your wisdom and that you feel called to share it with me, but I'm just really not interested. If I have any questions, I'll let you know.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:16:13] Yeah, that's beautiful. That's beautiful. I do think that that's on-

Luke Storey: [02:16:15] And having the courage to possibly lose their good favor or approval, and being in my own integrity, in that I'm speaking the truth in a way that's hopefully not too abrasive or hurtful, but that really is my truth, because I'm sitting there, and I'm kind of nodding along, and inside, I'm like, I've got to get the fuck out of here, this is so uncomfortable, I feel like I'm being assaulted by someone's ego who wants to prove themselves to me, or to other people listening, or whatever, and become like my teacher. And I'm like, Dude, you're 30, like get the fuck away from me. Like you can learn from children, I learn from my dog, but it's like a different type of teaching. It's like some weird-

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:16:56] This is spiritual ego, yeah.

Luke Storey: [02:16:57] Yeah. It's like when the ego socially wants to assert itself and position itself in the hierarchy, right? And maybe they see me at a position and they want to like dominate me almost in a way, totally subconsciously, but I'm not playing that game. I'm not trying to be the 51-year-old elder that comes in and teaches them. I've already played that game. I grew out of it, hopefully. So, I'm just trying to hang out and have a burger, man, you know what I mean?

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:17:27] Or they have the program that they are invisible, worthless, unlovable unless they can help someone.

Luke Storey: [02:17:34] Oh, yeah.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:17:35] Right?

Luke Storey: [02:17:35] Right. 

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:17:35] And like if you look at human interactions through the lens of like everyone is mitigating their pain, everyone is running programs that they are fundamentally worthless and unlovable unless they do exactly what they're doing, which could be avoidance, it could be entering into this like egoic, narcissistic sort of dynamic of I know best, and it takes—as many expressions as there are individuals, and if we look at it through that lens, then, really, we kind of release them to their shit, and then you get to sort of say, does this work for me or not? And the only problem arises when you don't stick by your own boundaries, right?

Luke Storey: [02:18:16] Totally.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:18:16] Like when you self-abandon and you self-betray. And that's why I've been so focused on this concept of how we resolve that self-betrayal, when you feel that little tap of like, I want to get the fuck out of here, and you honor that, you respond to that, you hold space for that being real, there's no problem. But it's like if we're appeasers and we have that part that says, okay, if you don't appease, people don't like you, people judge you, it's uncomfortable, you're going to feel rejected, you're going to be alone, you're going to die in like a corner, and then we have the part that says like, our child self, I think, we have the part that says, this is how this feels. Do you care?

You've not seemed to care for most of your life how you feel. This is how this feels, it feels bad, right? This feels bad. And how do we reconcile those two parts? Well, it's usually to, as you just modeled, like compassionately express a boundary, compassionately say like, this doesn't work for me, not like a dick, and not with energy of a no, which is essentially the same energy of a grasp, but with a sort of like, hey, dude, like I'm good, I got this, don't worry, I'll let you know if I need you, right? Like there's a way to express your no and also stay connected that we have not been modeled.

Luke Storey: [02:19:41] Right. It's a bit of a skill to be honed.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:19:44] Yeah. 

Luke Storey: [02:19:46] Yeah, it's interesting. Thank you for traversing that with me. Yeah. It's like it's becoming kind of challenging, and I think why is because I'm not honoring that part of myself. There's that I'm getting fidgety and uncomfortable, and then I'll try to rationalize it, well, what, they're just like sharing their gift or whatever, like just hold space for them. It's like, no, but I didn't—that's fine, but it doesn't feel good, I'm not enjoying this.

And like I just want to, I don't know, I think amongst, I don't know how it is with women, because I'm not a woman, but amongst men, there's a lot of self-awareness that's required to just learn how to hang out and just be equals, and not like jostle for position or to cave underneath to a lower status. It's like just to have true equality I find men are often very challenged by.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:20:36] That makes sense.

Luke Storey: [02:20:37] It's just like I don't want to be in the role of being the wise teacher unless someone asked me, then I really enjoy it. I sponsored a lot of people in recovery, like I played that role out, and it benefited me and a lot of other people, but I just want to walk in a room, and shoot the shit, and like hang out and relax, why do we need to be—and I think it's prevalent here, a lot of people are coaches. I mean, Austin is a hub for people that have gifts and philosophies that they want to share, just beautiful, and I love awake people, but yeah, it's become quite a thing with me and Alyson.

I talk about it a lot, because I come home, and I'm like, I'm exhausted. The other day, I came home, and was like, because Alyson is a real introvert, classical introvert, and I don't think I am, or at least wasn't, I came home, and I was like, she goes, "How was it? Did you have fun?", I'm like, "I'm exhausted. I think I'm turning into an introvert." Like I don't want to sit there and talk to all these people unless we can just be on the level, and real, and hang out. This doesn't have to be such a production.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:21:39] And then, you start to be able to discern whether or not, like as you heal this connection to your inner yes and no, you start to be able to discern whether or not somebody can actually provide you what it is that you want, right? And if they can't, you go elsewhere. So, like so much, I think, of what is being clarified for us now on grand scales, like can I go to the medical system to source healing?

Is that on offer there? Right? Like can I find and experience the love that I know I need and I know how I experience it through my partner? Is it actually on offer here? What about my mom? Like can she actually give me this thing that I've been longing for since childhood, or whatever, or is it literally not available and I know in my bones that at these places, what I want is not available, and I'm insisting that it should be? So, when that discernment muscle is strengthened, it becomes this sort of like dispassionate navigational system, where you say like, I want something, it's not available here, going this direction, right?

And it's not a condemnation, it's not blame, the whole victim thing is done, drained from the room, and it's very freeing, and it's freeing into this space of Jungian individuation, where we each become our whole integrated selves. We are aware of our personal gifts, and we are aware of our vulnerabilities and our shadow realms, and then we can relume the fabric of our togetherness that is really only available when we're not blurring and bleeding into each other. And I mean, like even here, I have had to pee for like an hour. Okay? The whole time we've been talking-

Luke Storey: [02:23:28] I was wondering about that.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:23:29] Literally, I'm like, okay, well, maybe there are five more minutes, and maybe that's fine, or maybe I should just get up, but I've never done that before in an interview, and so maybe that would like mess with the flow, like it's in all of these microinstances and it's not like I'm going to like beat myself up about this for the rest of the day, but it's an awareness of like you had to pee an hour ago, you're going to sit, also because you told me I could, I'm going to go, and there are 100 rationalizations for why I didn't do that, and then there's an awareness that I blurred us, like a blurred us, because I was like, this is what you need or them, or whether like this is what they need, and it's better for them, and what does it cost me?

That's always my cue. What does it cost me? Like you said with that dynamic, like, oh, it's not a big deal, I can just do it, like what does it cost me? But I do think we're entering this realm where authenticity and real-time realness is the only currency we're going to feel as true, and everything else, it's coming so virtualized and so CGI, like our whole dimensional reality that that felt experience of a yes or no, or like, am I here, and what do I want, and what do I feel? Where do I end? And you begin sentiently, it's all we're going to be able to rely on, because the rest is so captured, right?

Luke Storey: [02:24:49] Yeah. The Mirage is really well-produced.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:24:52] Yeah.

Luke Storey: [02:24:53] It's interesting that you mentioned authenticity in terms of the interaction between you and other people, right? When you were talking earlier about one of the ways in which you prefer to be like the worst accusation, or it could be that you said something that's not true, right?

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:25:16] Yeah.

Luke Storey: [02:25:18] For me, it's authenticity and like being real. Like I am not terribly bothered if somebody thinks I'm ugly, fat, stupid, call me anything, but call me fake, and I'm like, that rubs me the wrong way. But in thinking about those interactions that I described, I have been being very fake, because I'm sitting there feeling uncomfortable and the authentic response is, I'm feeling a little uncomfortable, I'm going to walk over there, be by myself, or talk to another person, but in effort to maintain that approval, and not offend someone and all of those things sitting there, and going, oh, interesting, and I'm like, this is not fucking interesting at all to me.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:25:55] So, you are being fake, exactly.

Luke Storey: [02:25:56] Yeah, totally.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:25:57] But it's always that way. The only reason that I am so concerned about being exposed, and honestly, not on the public stage, in my personal relationships, like really, for whatever reason, I'm wired not to give a shit about, no offense, the anonymous, like public things, does not get like, the Disinformation Dozen, none of that bothers me. I literally don't care. In my personal life, especially in relationships, like super, super sensitive.

So, the reason that I think the being wrong thing is so huge for me is because I literally have been programmed to believe that my feelings, and my intuition, and even my truth, my personal truth don't matter and are probably fundamentally mistaken or wrong on some level. Like I can't trust myself. How about that's the summary? I can't trust myself. And so, what do I do? Because I believe that I can't trust myself, I'm not to be trusted, I come up with all of these reasons to validate and explain why I'm right.

So, that whole like dog and pony show of like why I am right is itself a betrayal. Like I've left the post of my own heart to defend and validate myself, which I would not need to do at all if I actually believed, truly, that I am right. Does that make sense? So, if I'm so concerned that I'm being exposed as wrong, that's a good thing, because it's pointing me in the direction of my own belief that I am wrong, not that I am actually wrong, but it's my belief that I fundamentally am not to be trusted, and I need to heal that inside myself.

And the way that I've started to do that is that when I actually feel something, I express how I feel. In relationship, I'm talking about, like I say like I feel scared or I feel—that's usually scared, but I feel hurt. I don't like that. This didn't work for me. Like I need to do the—just super basic sentiments like a kid would say, right? And I leave the litigators brief on the side, at least for a little while, because then what I feel is already right. And that's the only thing in the room.

I'm not bringing in all of the defensive arguments, which are, themselves, only evidence that I don't actually believe that what I feel is true and right enough, so I have to prove it. I have to validate it. I have to have all these reasons. And my mind comes online, as we were saying earlier, I stop feeling anyway. So, it's a self-violation. So, it's like perfectly designed like to show us, our sensitivities, our fears are perfectly designed to show us how we are our own perpetrators, like how we are actually actively doing this to ourselves already, or we wouldn't be sensitive to that fear.

Luke Storey: [02:29:05] Yeah. It's such a gift to be able to begin to tune into your body for the yeses and nos. It's not even a no. It's almost like, when the body speaks, I'm thinking again in like a situation in which you find yourself to be uncomfortable and cagey, it's not even the feeling of a no, it's a feeling of a not yes, because the feeling of a yes is so pronounced, just like, oh, this feels good. When you texted me yesterday like, "Hey, I'm in town", there wasn't one second that I was like, I don't know, let me feel into this, I was like, oh, Kelly's in town, fuck, yeah, let's hang out.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:29:40] Yeah, it's clear.

Luke Storey: [02:29:40] Yeah, just boom, it's a yes, whereas a no for me, I think, and sometimes, may be easier to miss, because it's not a strong no, it's almost neutral. So, it's about kind of determining—it's like how kinesiology works, right?

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:29:53] Yeah.

Luke Storey: [02:29:54] It's like there's no yes and no or a truth and false, so there's only truth or not truth, right?

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:30:00] Yes.

Luke Storey: [02:30:01] So, it's that kind of thing, is like listening to the nervous system when the nervous system is like true or yes, feels good, this is love, versus the absence of those feelings would be what I would construe to be a no. But even that, the lack of those attributes makes a no feel very uncomfortable, in and of itself.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:30:22] And also, the nervous system piece is very real, like you can't establish a stable relationship to the embodied. Yes, or not yes, or whatever, like you can't establish that unless, in my opinion, your neurobiology is stabilized. And that's why I'm a big believer in the Maslow's hierarchy. Like first, the lifestyle choice is not only because you declutter so much of the inflammatory signaling and everything else that is rightfully on board because of your wrongful lifestyle choices, but also because choice is our superpower.

It is our way out of victim consciousness. And when you start to—I don't need to tell you this, when you start to recognize the power of your simple daily choices, you're conferred. It's almost like you're like anointed in your adult consciousness. So, you are conferred this awareness and felt experience of like what I choose makes a difference, and sometimes, a really big difference.

I changed my breakfast, I changed the time I go to bed, like I changed the water I'm drinking, and I feel different, so my choices matter. I have impact in this sphere, I'm not the child, the helpless, dependent, powerless child like I thought that I still was. And then, once you do that, then to explore your dissident relationships and your secret traumas you've never talked about, and to look at the fact that you hate your freaking job, or whatever, that becomes so much more available because your nervous system capacity literally can contain states of so-called negative affect with such greater power.

It's not available just because you want to be able to experience joy and expansion, your nervous system may not be ready for that. And so, you titrate, that's a somatic experience in concept, too, you titrate into that. You work to hold expansive states. You work to hold—for me, a lot of it was like holding grief, and shame, and sadness without needing to go into my mind immediately, or otherwise fix it.

Luke Storey: [02:32:39] I think that many years of pretty consistent and committed practice to Kundalini yoga helped me a lot with that, and they would talk about that. It's in the teachings, and I'm kind of like, yeah, whatever, like I listen to the teachings, I'm just like, I just feel good after class, you know what I mean? I'm going to just keep doing what feels good, but retroactively, I've seen like, oh, man, specifically, even going into some really intense plant medicine and psychedelic experiences after having done Kundalini yoga for a few years, I think that was kind of like my gateway into those experience.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:33:10] I agree. My sadhana practice, what I started in 2015 after my mentor died suddenly, I started a pre-dawn practice inspired by my Kundalini teachers at the time. And because of that, I started to go to bed, as we were talking about, early, because I was waking up at 5:00, and so I was like, well, I guess this means I can't stay up until 2:00, and my entire system shifted, like my diurnal rhythm and everything shifted because of that, and my capacity and experience of so-called stress totally changed. Like I felt rewired by that one choice. It's so amazing.

Luke Storey: [02:33:48] Yeah. I highly recommend that to people that can get over the accoutrement. Like some people, I'd bring like the homies in there, they're like, "What the hell, man?" I was wearing white, and these turbans, and the chanting, and I'm like, "I know, I know, just clock how you feel right now, and in 90 minutes, check back in", and almost pretty reliably, they'd be like, "Yeah, it feels good". And it wasn't for everyone, but to me, the lasting thing was that sort of toning of the nervous system, like being able to just withstand deeper work and not fall apart, and specifically in ceremony.

I mean, I just remember like I can't believe that I'm holding what I'm experiencing right now, the places I'm going, and the depths of my soul and shadow that I can actually be physically present to this and hold this shit, things that I ran from my entire life, the amount of energy that I had expended, just trying to, don't feel that, don't feel that, and then to go, bring it all on at once, pull up the dump truck, and just let it rip, and to be able to actually watch the body just undulate, and go [making sounds] okay, okay, we got this, we got this. Yeah, crazy. So empowering. Maybe a lost rite of passage in some cultures that might have been present on a hunt, or some kind of ceremony, or who knows what that I didn't get that I invited into my life later.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:35:10] Yeah, visiting the edges of what you thought your self-concept was attained by, and breaking through, and recognizing you're still yourself.

Luke Storey: [02:35:19] It's like that whole die before you die and you never die thing, you know what I mean?

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:35:24] Yes.

Luke Storey: [02:35:25] To be able to like walk through the valley of the shadow of death, kind of, I mean, the real dark nights of the soul, not necessarily like a period in your life, but those instantaneous ones, where you're invited to really be honest with yourself and to explore. And if your body is on board for that, you can get a lot more done.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:35:43] Yeah. And I mean in Vital Mind Reset, in my program, I have a very secular version of these medical meditations, kundalini meditations. It's three minutes a day. Three. And so, I mean, it can be revolutionary in what your nervous system can experience with this dedicated commitment to these practices. I really am a believer.

Luke Storey: [02:36:07] You know what's funny—and we'll wrap it up here in a minute, because now, I'm just going to start shooting the shit in less meaningful, perhaps, ways. I was listening to Jordan Peterson on a podcast a couple of days ago, and it was Joe Rogan, it was like 4 hours, but like he's just intellectually stimulating enough for me to listen to for that long, and at the very end, he said he's been practicing Kundalini yoga, he and his wife, for like 18 years every day. I was like, What? That, I would not have attributed that practice to that person. It was a little bit of a-

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:36:39] I always enjoy those dissonant matches.

Luke Storey: [02:36:41] Yeah, very dissonant. I was like, but yeah, I gained a little more respect for him. I said, man, that's not an easy path. Oh, okay. I do have one last question for you, and actually, it's not true, I have maybe two, maybe three. This one might be hard to answer quickly, so forgive me in advance. Okay. To me and many other people, it's abundantly clear that this thing that they call a disease going around is not what we're being told.

I don't pretend to know what's going on, I just know something's fishy and I'm not going along with any of it, yet there seem to be a number of people over the past couple of years that have been ill with something. The mysterious part about that to me is that the flu and cold don't exist anymore, which is very suspicious, because how did we eradicate the cold and the flu all of a sudden?

Okay. That's the elephant in the room. But any time I kind of lean into this idea that like maybe this whole thing, not that there was something made in a lab, fabricated, but maybe that the whole thing is fabricated kind of like on the outskirts of the narrative to the point of a David Icke, that's like, no, just people get sick and it is what it is. It's all these environmental factors and there is actually no virus, right?

But then, I'm always, well, what is it? I was sick a couple of years ago. It's pretty gnarly. I thought it was a bad flu, and then I got some blood work done for another reason, and they did like an antibody test, and it showed up this antibody, but the thing I still can't get past is this scientific method of inquiry, wherein a virus is isolated, and a well host is infected, and they'd see if they can make it spread, Koch's postulate, right?

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:38:40] I mean, that's how I pronounce it, Koch's postulate.

Luke Storey: [02:38:42] Koch's postulate. When I interviewed Dr. Cowan the first time, he explained all that, and I was like, okay, cool. I just have such a hard time understanding how so many well-meaning and I'm assuming scientifically brilliant in some cases, if not educated people, don't acknowledge that that's never happened. That's the thing I can't—I'm just like, I don't get it. Is it only these fringe weirdo scientists over here that believe in that postulate, and therefore everyone just ignores it, because it's like outdated and lame, or is that legit?

So, that's kind of, not even the question, of more the premise for germ theory versus terrain theory, because it seems, and I don't fully even—I haven't formed thoughts about what that means entirely, but if terrain theory is really the predominantly valid theory of how our bodies work and how we interface with our environment, then that would just throw kind of all of that out the window and none of what we're seeing would be true at all. I don't know how to formulate that into a question, forgive me.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:39:53] No, I mean, I could talk about this all day. It's arguably the most important aspect of what is happening, and that's why my friends like Tom Cowan, and Andy Kaufman, and others are so preservative on this particular point of whether or not a virus has actually ever been any virus.

Luke Storey: [02:40:17] Yeah, not just this one.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:40:18] Not just this one.

Luke Storey: [02:40:19] Yeah.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:40:21] Isolated and shown to be a causal vector of human pathology. If we don't back up enough to that question of literally what makes people sick, and to answer that question to an extent that feels scientifically valid, then we are literally throwing sand around in the psyop sandbox on all sides, right?

Luke Storey: [02:40:47] Right.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:40:47] Whether it's the engineered bioweapon, whether it's the pharma, I mean, this this dimension of it, as somebody who has abdicated pharmaceuticals entirely, the ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine arm of entitlement, it's like the Stockholm Syndrome entitlement to the abuser's prized possessions or whether it's believing that there's actually a novel pathogen that's causing excess morbidity and mortality. It's all mad, like this is just a silly mess if you don't back up enough and ask the right questions.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:41:24] And I was already, I think, trained around this through psychiatry, and the chemical imbalance theory of mental illness, and the fortuitous experience I had being exposed to the work of Peter Breggin, and Joanna Moncrieff, and David Healy, and others before me, Irving Kirsch, who had helped me to disabuse myself of this idea that, let's say depression, but it's really any so-called mental illness, is caused by chemistry. If I didn't inquire that deeply, I would still be prescribing fish oil and St John's-wort for depression-

Luke Storey: [02:42:05] Yikes.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:42:05] Right. And debating about the data that shows that they're just as effective and side effect-free, rather than the understanding that I've come to around this invitation that so-called mental illness actually represents to reclaim yourself, and to come bring your soul online, and to come into this body with mastery and agency. So, if we don't ask this question, we can stay in the habit of fighting these smaller fights.

Luke Storey: [02:42:41] Totally. This is like the Democrat-Republican thing, right?

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:42:45] Exactly.

Luke Storey: [02:42:45] The whole dichotomy is set up to create that , to create the platform, wherein you have a group to identify with or belief system to identify with. Meanwhile, like let's zoom out, the whole thing is bullshit. The whole thing is a game and it's like a chess board that's been created, and we're like, I'm on the black side of the chess board, and it's like, oh, my God, we're getting so duped.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:43:09] That's right. And so, why that's the first thing I'm curious about is have you interrogated your understanding of the so-called immune system? Have you interrogated the history of virology? What do you understand about the evidence that exists or doesn't to prove that contagion is a real thing? Our understanding of an invisible particle jumping from one person to the other through mid-air, and including non-modal, inanimate, non-living particles that we call viruses, invading a host, infecting them, and causing symptoms, and associated morbidity and mortality, do you know about the evidence base for that?

Have you interrogated that? Right? Maybe you have and there is science to support pretty much anything, because it's subjective interpretation, ultimately, that gives a meaning and confers importance to whatever our pre-existing belief system is. But the nature of science, as Tom and others have said, is, and Stefan Lanka is a very important figure in this, it is to disprove itself.

That's the whole point. Like a good scientist actually endeavors to disprove their outcomes, to find all of the ways that their outcomes may not be valid, and that perpetuates the process of science. Science is a process. It's not a destination. There is no, that has been debunked or the science is settled. That's scientism. That's dogma. And so, when you start to recognize the.

Luke Storey: [02:44:46] Yeah, because science by its definition can never be settled, otherwise it's not science, right?

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:44:51] It's all in plain sight, and that's why we can't get our pennies in a bunch about it, because it's just-

Luke Storey: [02:44:56] It pisses me off, though, I have to admit. Like there's a part of me, wants to fight it, and just run around and slap people, like wake up.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:45:03] I know, and we are here to speak our truth and represent that, don't hide from that, and to recognize, as I have, because this is all available information, and I wrote a whole ebook with colleagues about how the AIDS so-called epidemic was the forerunner, all the same players, all the same scientific aspects, and public and social propaganda. Literally, that was the rehearsal. Now, we're in the actual play. It's exactly the same.

So, it's been available to anyone who's interested to learn that there is more to the whole like virus or even bacteria causes illness story than we've been told. And that serves the agenda, and serves the pharmaceutical industry, and serves the biopolitical control mechanism that is infectious disease, and has been at least since World War II, if not before, this idea of pandemics has been potentially operationalized to control segments of society that are deemed undesirable for maybe since the inception of social structures. I don't know.

However, the information is out there, so why don't people know that a virus has never been isolated or shown to cause illness? Why don't they know that? Why isn't that out there? It's not known and it's not embraced because of what it would mean to let go of the concept of infectious illness, the concept of microbiology, the concept of virology and associated germ theory. What it would mean to let go of that means that the entire house of cards of allopathy false. It's a very big thing, right?

Luke Storey: [02:46:56] I think that's why it's too hard for most people to grasp, because it's like the flat earth versus sphere earth thing, right?

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:47:03] Exactly. 

Luke Storey: [02:47:03] It's like it's the cognitive dissonance of having to stretch your mind around the idea that 10s upon—I mean, in the case of—the shape of the earth is even more, but let's just say like germ theory, I don't know, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of intelligent, well-meaning people got it wrong, and many of them intentionally, perhaps, right? It's like, how do you even hold that, because then your whole worldview begins to crumble, if they lied about that, what else are they lying about? Right? Which is like 9/11 was my big red pill back in the day. That's when I was like, wait, what happened? Show me that video, rewind that, wait, what? There's no plane at the Pentagon?

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:47:43] Exactly.

Luke Storey: [02:47:44] Wait, then this whole thing is fake. Luckily for me, I think I had the moral courage to face that and continue to do so, but I'm sure for-

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:47:54] And it's part of coming home. It's part of coming home to your locus of control, as within you, right? Like it's part of understanding my senses, my experience of reality, that is my truth. I will not abandon that in service of a dogma that tells me otherwise, right? Whether it's looking at heavenly bodies, like spinning around us and being told that we're the ones spinning around it, or whether it's seeing that I drink from my daughter's cup when she's got snot running down her face, and somehow, I don't get sick, but, oh, I'm sure that germs still cause disease most of the time, but sometimes not, and no more questions, please.

That cognitive dissonance, it's a part of the mechanism of the psyop, right? It's a part of this—I mean, if these controllers, if you will, are anything, they are psychological masters. Master. They have a grasp on the inner dimensions of our psyches that we can only aspire to in this lifetime. I'm working on it. But it's all perfectly woven for a grid of control that is elective, that is consensual, no one is being forced to do anything here, that's not my belief system. We consent to it through many ways, like Amazon and our smartphones, and entitlements-

Luke Storey: [02:49:16] Yeah, or putting on a mask.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:49:16] Yes.

Luke Storey: [02:49:17] It's like you see these messages about stop forcing kids to put on masks in school, and it's like, A, no one's like physically forcing them, probably in most cases, the parents are allowing that to happen.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:49:34] Yes. And you have a choice. And it's whenever we feel that we don't have a choice that we are in the illusion of victim consciousness. We always do. Even if it's just how we're narrating the situation, we retain that control. It's part of being in this human body. So, however, what I want to say is part of I think what helps folks think about—think beyond germ theory, right? So, I no longer believe that nature causes illness, period. I don't believe it.

So, that includes microbes. That includes whatever we're calling parasites. That includes everything. So, if I don't believe that and I don't believe in contagion, then you can sneeze and cough all over me, and it may be—okay. Gross and contamination by germs are two different things. It could still be gross, but it doesn't mean that I'm worried. So, I live my life, I do not worry about catching anything from anybody.

I actually don't worry about getting sick, period, including things like cancer or whatever, because why? Because I have a new paradigm. So, when you are robbed of one paradigm and there's not a net to catch you, that's actually like an act of aggression that you might impose on someone. That's like insisting that somebody look deeply into their sexual abuse history when they don't have a spiritual framework of—like for me, I believe we incarnate, we choose our parents, and we choose our traumas, and we work with them in order to have certain experiences of contrast, that we actually came here to have.

That spiritual worldview helps me to understand and contextualize suffering that otherwise might blow me into a million bits to revisit, right? So, if you're going to move beyond the germ theory paradigm, then what's going to catch you? What's going to hold your understanding of why do people get sick? Are people actually getting sick in a new way in the past couple of years? Right? And what's causing it? Do we even know? Do we need to know? Like what is the new framework?

So, there are—in my estimation, this is how I talk to my kids about it, like a lot—and intuitively, like when you ask children, they have a lot of native ideas about what causes illness, right? And so, I talked to them about a couple of different frameworks, right? Like nutritional deficiency, because I was taught about something called Keshan's disease by my mentor and it was like this cardiomyopathy that was like sweeping through a part of China, right?

And it was assumed that it was caused by some coxsackievirus, like an infectious agent, and the vaccine was on the way, and then through some sort of like epidemiologic investigation, it was like questioned whether or not it was actually infectious or potentially nutritional, and they found that the only people who experienced this so-called infectious illness were those who were in selenium-depleted soil regions, like regions with selenium-depleted soil, replace the micronutrient and all was well.

And there are infinite examples of—not infinite, but there are many, many, many examples of what we once thought was infectious, we now understand to be a discrete nutrient deficiency. And all of that is to say that we assume that when there is a co-located phenomenon of so-called pathology, that it's spreading now because of how we've been infiltrated, but we don't assume that there is an experience of environmental co-exposure, whether that is, again, nutritional and food supply related or environmentally sort of like induced, or whether it's toxic exposures, whether it's radiation or some sort of the water supply or some sort of environmental exposure that is non-natural, that is toxicant—there is toxic rather than toxicant-related.

And so, this co-exposure model to me was like really brought home personally, because I went to Cartagena with some girlfriends. When was it? Right before the pandemic started, so January 2019. And there were seven of us, and we went, we had a great time, and we flew back, and five of us on arrival, including myself, got so sick in a way I have never been sick before. Now, I was like literally eating McDonald's, and Snickers, and Twizzlers my whole adult life, and I never got sick.

I never have taken a sick day in my life ever, and I was unhealthy. So, it's also important to recognize that you can paradigm-shift out of this idea that sickness is bad, or that sickness is a problem, meaning acute illness. And you can step into the paradigm that it's a detox strategy, because what do we do when we're sick? We sweat, we snot, we diarrhea, we throw up. As Tom and others would say, we liquefy our water and we eliminate toxins. That's how we do it.

So, it's an up-leveling. It's an upgrade. It's a detox. There's a way you can reframe these symptoms as being essential, and my worldview is the body doesn't make mistakes. So, whatever my body is doing, it's doing. And it's doing because it needs to be doing, and I don't need to take 100 supplements or whatever, I can support it, not fight with what's happening, right?

So, anyway, we all get super sick, and again, sick in kind of a weird way, because normally, a cough is productive, like I just said, and I had like this dry cough that I've only ever associated with like radiation pneumonitis from my medical school training and sort of like strange to me, right? And five of us got sick, two didn't. We all have kids, and partners in community, and we're interacting, and it was like a whole week-long thing, not one person in our communities or our children got sick. Now one. That's probably 75 people or so.

Luke Storey: [02:55:43] After you came back, you mean?

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:55:44] Because the five of us are sick in bed.

Luke Storey: [02:55:46] You guys are supposed to be vectors for disease.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [02:55:48] Exactly. And this disease, whatever this disease is, if you want to look at like the anosmia or the dry cough, I mean, honestly, the characterization of this is like morphed to the convenience of the agenda, so it's like a silly thing to think of it as like discrete or new as described, and yet people are having experiences, many that seem somewhat novel in symptom profiles, I'm not going to deny that. I don't know.

I mean, if people feel like they're having new kinds of illnesses, then maybe they are, but that doesn't mean that there is an invisible pathogenic vector that's been identified and showed to be causal. And not even remotely close, like literally not the first step of that scientific process has been engaged. So, maybe all we know is that something is going on and the more logical explanation is that it's a co-exposure. And that little example I just showed, I would only dismiss if I choose to outsource my truth and reality of what health and medicine is to be understood as to some authorities that say, well, obviously, it's infectious, that's an infection, that's the flu that you had, and it's spread from person-to-person.

Well, why didn't it—so any exception to these dogmatic rules deserves investigation, right? Because it's not true. If it's not true in this one instance, then it's not true, period. So, there is an evolved model of the truth that is required to contain these aberrant phenomena, right? So, there's the exposure to environmental toxins. There are nutrient deficiencies. And there is an incredible amount of research on the nocebo effect, and the psychology of fear, and the ways in which, literally, it's the bone-pointing of indigenous people.

Like the ways in which we literally make ourselves sick through the belief that we are or will be. That is not fairy tale psychology. I mean, I've written tremendous amounts of material on the nocebo effect. It is more real than many pharmacologic interventions. And one of my favorite, I'll just quickly tell this study, one of my favorite studies is on Prozac, right? And this cohort of people who have been treated to remission on Prozac for their depression, and they are told that they're randomized into two groups.

They're either going to continue their Prozac or they're going to be discontinued. And because of the fear, the nocebo effect of being discontinued, both groups suddenly experienced symptomatic statistically significant depression, including Sally, who is taking her blessed 40 milligrams on Wednesday, entered into randomization on Thursday, still took it on Thursday, and now, she's, let's say by the following week, feeling acutely depressed.

How do you explain that if not that her belief and fear that she would be robbed of her life-saving, life-giving pharmaceutical overrides the actual mechanical anatomical pharmacologic effect of that substance. Okay. So, to me, one of the most compelling frameworks that I was introduced to, I don't know, maybe four years ago or so, is German new medicine, right?

And I don't know if you know much about it, Melissa Sell is a colleague of mine who has really like brought it into vivification for me, but I don't want to like represent myself as some ambassador or even particularly knowledgeable, although I do want to point people in the direction of of her work, and it's a very German approach, but this this approach to understanding that there are psychic origins, so your perception, okay, that's what I mean by psychic, origins that translate into biological programs that are there for a reason, for adaptation purposes, that then results in, at the moment of their reversal result in healing symptoms. So, through this model, when you have symptoms, the crisis is already completed, finished, metabolized psychologically. Like everything, the body's already adapting and the symptoms are just like the healing phase by the time you see the symptoms.

Luke Storey: [03:00:17] Oh, interesting. 

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [03:00:17] And that applies to cancer, that applies to infection, and in this model, there's no such thing as metastasis. There's no such thing as contagion. And it's not just like an idea, like the guy who created this model, basically, I think there are like 40,000 CT scans or something that he did to identify the brain-based locus of every single one of these conflicts and how they translate biologically.

And it's like, for example, like if my daughter has symptoms of like a urinary tract infection, and I'm like, oh, well, she must have E coli that are invading and infecting her. I don't even remember how I used to believe. Anyway, and through the German new medicine model, she had a territorial conflict, right? So, I'm divorced, I've moved a lot, so something happened where she wasn't sure what her territory was.

And then, I helped her understand, okay, we moved, and everything's cool, and you're good, and you're safe or whatever, and then the ways in which, literally, her urethra effaced to allow more urine to come through to mark her territory, this is an animalistic biological program here for our survival and adaptation to crisis, perceived crisis or shock, starts to heal. And what helps with the healing?

The saprophytes, the microbes that shapeshift pleomorphically, like that become all different kinds of microbes, so it's not this idea that there's only this bacteria that is never this, that is never a fungus. So, there are many, many decades of research into this idea that we have these almost spores that shapeshift as needed to help our bodies restructure. So, imagine reframing our whole understanding of microbiology as these agents are there to help us literally.

And they are never there pathologically. They are never there to invade and harm us. It's not even a thing. And that's not to say that there aren't complicated phases of healing where you've basically been in this adaptation stage for so long that it's not going to work out for you, right? Like you didn't help yourself enough and you're ready to expire. Okay. So, like it's not to say that there's no such sort of like bystander effect of the Candida, or the pertussis, or whatever being a part of the process that wasn't able to correct ultimately, but it is to say that they are not causal, and that paradigm shift is massive.

So, in this model, let's say there are E.coli there, and if you went in and you looked, you might find them, but they're there to help with the restructuring of the urethra back to its normal diameter, for example, as the conflict has resolved. And that's just one example. There are hundreds of examples of explanations. You can go to learninggnm.com and you can find like all sorts of understandings of any symptoms that you have or any diagnoses that you have through a completely different lens that is ultimately, extraordinarily empowering and fear-releasing, because not only is there nothing to worry about, but your body is already taking care of it.

And by the time you know about it, like all you have to do is support what's already underway, right? And so, when you have these different ways of looking at symptoms, looking at illness, looking at what's happening, you start to see like, why did I ever think it was that? That's like the least logical explanation about what's happening. And then, you have people like Stefan Lanka who did these cell culture experiments recently that I think are very important, and they've been done before him and he's replicating them.

And it's basically looking at this idea that what we are calling in cell culture virus-based pathogenic effects is actually what he calls the psychopathic effect. It's actually the effect of all the shit that is applied to these cultures, antibiotics, and they're nutrient-depleted and all these other factors that are applied that necessarily cause this toxic extrusion from the cell culture that necessarily caused this effect.

So, that's called a control, right? When you do the same thing with the snot, like with the infectious material, and then you do the same thing without it, and you have the same effect, why would you ever say it was because of a so-called germ, right? So, this, I think, is compelling, and I also feel for people who are like him, who are going back into the fray, trying to disprove, and trying to say like, no, it was never done right, I don't think we're going to find redemption through the institutions, right?

Like it's like that Bucky Fuller quote, like you can't fight the existing reality, you just make your new one, obviate the relevance of this, and just get going on what makes sense to you, and focus on that. So, I don't know how much effort it's worth—like if I tell you, I meet you at a cocktail party, and I'm like, you know what's really crazy, has anyone ever told you that like maybe contagion isn't what we think it is? And somebody might be like, oh, my God, are you serious?

I've always wondered that, because like I was around my sister when she had the flu and I was like totally fine, or like the Cartagena story, and they feel expanded by this possibility to make sense out of something they've always known to be true, which is there's more to the story than this whole contagion thing and being afraid of other people's bodies thing. It's just not right, right? Like something's not like adding up there, then there are all these resources and Andy Kaufman presentations, whatever, to support that understanding, and that's great.

That's why I've written books. It's just to support the intuition of people, who already grok, right? But if you're told that, and you're triggered, and afraid, and offended, probably, you should stay in your worldview. And it does not serve you or my energy to bring you like reams of evidence and my 50-page ebook on AIDS and COVID to take that from you.

So, that's why I just am not sure, I'm glad that Stefan Lanka is doing these experiments, and I'm glad that people are doing this sort of like myth-busting, and I think we're like in this real moment, where you just like touch on something, and if it's a yes, like amazing, this whole new dimension expands. But if you touch on it and you want to like fight and scream, and you get all triggered and upset, just stay where you are, right? Like I don't know. I mean, it's kind of like simple in the end.

Luke Storey: [03:07:03] Yeah. Yeah, it is. Wow.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [03:07:05] I always wonder, like my thing about our colleagues is like, especially the ones who are still talking about COVID cases as if they don't know about the test, like as if they don't know about the test fraud, and Kary Mullis, and they don't know about PCR, and they're still talking about more or fewer cases, or more cases after the vaccine, or less, like all of this, they're in that data mill playing the game of COVID is real and the cases are identified through some real mechanism, and the virus exists, and it's been shown to be distinct and novel, whatever, all of these assumptions, they're so intelligent sometimes, and I'm like, but has anyone ever shown them or discuss with them like this concept of Koch's postulates?

And not even to say that Koch's postulates is some like dogmatic truth, but it's just this logical concept that you need to be able to take this pathogen from a sick person, put it in a healthy person, they need to get sick themselves in the same way, and the pathogen needs to always be in the sick person and never in the healthy person. That's rational. That's logical. And then, there's a scientific method that's very elegant to support that, and it's just not been exercised, right? So, I always wonder like, do they know that? And I always feel this compulsion like-

Luke Storey: [03:08:18] That's why I asked you the question, because I always wonder it, too. And also, even yesterday, I was watching a video of someone talking about this, and really intelligent guy, a leader in this space, and he's talking about the number of cases and the number of deaths, and I'm sitting there going, yeah, but the cases are like, that's not valid data, nor are deaths, there are all kinds of shenanigans going around, that both of those, right?

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [03:08:46] So, either he's playing the game, and he wants to speak their language and play the game with their rules and their arena, their tools, or he just doesn't know and he's never been exposed to it. Because in my early years of vaccine activism, I was a total germ theorist, and I talked about things that are like risks like SV40 and whatever, risks that are germ theory-based risks of vaccines, if that makes sense, right? So, I was like fighting against vaccination using their rubric and their playbook unconsciously.

I just didn't know. I never had been exposed to this sort of level of inquiry around germ theory. And so, that made sense to me. So, I was in the camp of like perpetuating that without knowing that there was another framework to step into. However, I wonder if, sometimes, people know, and then they're playing the game, because they think it's the root and they think this is too radical. I mean, I've been uninvited to like many speaking event in conference because of this particular topic, like it's too radical to suggest that germs don't cause illness.

Luke Storey: [03:09:58] It's too long of a stretch for people to—where I'm at with all this stuff, and the not knowing kind of keeps things interesting, you know what I mean? Like the big one, again, is like the flat earth versus round earth. And I'm not like a flat earther, I'm also not a round earther. Like have I been to space? No. And what if it's both and what if it's everything all at the same time? Like if I-

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [03:10:24] I like to get clear, I know my best friend is like very agnostic about a lot of things. That's a little like destabilizing for me.

Luke Storey: [03:10:30] But like listen, like I'm looking at Alyson's lovely book here. I'm looking at you and this, and I perceive this to be like solid matter. It's not that from another perspective, right?

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [03:10:40] 100%, yes.

Luke Storey: [03:10:41] Subatomic, quantum, none of this is what I think it is. So, like who am I to say this thing that we all appear to be sitting on right now is one way or the other? And maybe it's all ways and maybe no one really knows what it is.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [03:10:55] Yes. And that's why I've become very, very deeply interested in deception, and the role of deception in our abandonment of her own perception. And I focus mostly on what I'm certain is not true, right?

Luke Storey: [03:11:14] Right.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [03:11:14] What I'm certain is not true, and that's pretty much everything I've ever learned, like literally. It's pretty much everything, and I know a little thing about health and medicine, but as I venture into these other cosmology, and history, and finance, and education, I mean, I'm a novice like swimming around in these deep waters and I still find the same patterns again, and again, and again of who is in control of the dissemination of information, why they might have done it the way that they did, to what end, and how it served to cause this rift between us and our experience, between me and my experience of my inner compass, and it's the same damn story again, and again.

So, I'm interested in exposing to myself and whoever is interested in listening like what I am certain is not true. Like to my mind, every media-making event in media-making history, like TV, and radio, and that kind of thing is a false flag. That's how extreme I have come to believe. Because if you need to believe that media is there to disseminate information to the masses, that sounds crazy. And that sounds like conspiracy theory on steroids.

However, if you reframe the understanding of what media is, what it was created for, that's the only perspective that makes any sense. So, it's like when you zoom out to it's like when you see that you're in a theater watching a movie, it's not like devastating and crushing, and, oh, my God, the cabals, it's like, oh, my God, I'm watching a movie, I'm watching a movie this whole time, I can just get up and walk out the door, watch another movie.

And it's liberating. Like now, like I watched a video recently that Tom Cowan did on cells, cell biology, and he basically says, he makes a compelling argument for how maybe cell structures are like a total—maybe there's not even such a thing as a cell, literally. Okay. I went to medical school. I dissected human bodies. I stained cells. I like had a job in college where I like cut up rat brains, and stained these neurons, and like I've been in the cell-based theory of human anatomy.

I even referenced it a little bit ago, that's liver cells, and eyeball cells,and whatever. And at this point, it's exciting and fun to me to like touch on the things that I could have been totally wrong about, because it expands into that unknown. I can hold that. That's fun for me at this point. It's not devastating. But at an earlier stage in my personal trauma work, it would have been—first of all, I couldn't even have perceived the opportunity to engage the dissonance, and then it would have been, again, robbing me of something I needed to survive emotionally and psychologically to abdicate the understanding I had earned or participated in and what it represents to have related to the authorities that handed it down to me in this idealized projection, right?

So, once you do your mommy and daddy work, and you understand that the bad mommy and the bad daddy are within you, and you heal your relationship to those parts, and you stop needing other people to give you the love that your mommy and daddy didn't give you, then everything becomes sort of like this—it becomes a game, like a fun game. I don't know. And it's really drained of all that charge.

Luke Storey: [03:14:52] Thank you for draining the charge for us, Kelly. I got one more question for you. It's from a listener. And I often like will post on Instagram like, hey, I'm interviewing so-and-so, and I feel bad, because I never get to them. 

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [03:14:52] It's rhetorical.

Luke Storey: [03:15:07] Yeah. So, there were two, but I think this one, the first one we've covered, which is—yeah. Anyway, this one is, what advice would you give to your 30-year-old self?

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [03:15:19] Oh, my God, my 30-year-old self. I love that question. So, that was before my awakening process began, because I'm like only probably 12 years in. I don't even know who this guy is, George Addair, but I love this quote, "Everything you've ever wanted is on the other side of fear". And I have found it to be true again, and again, and again, and again. And I'm sure you've had people tell you this, too, like I've had people be like, oh, you're so courageous, thank you for speaking out in the world and doing what you do, and that is not how I experienced myself. I do this because I enjoy it.

I need to do this. I enjoy this. Like it's a catharsis for me. This does not require any courage at all, literally. None. I experienced my courage, and it's funny, because I was talking to my girlfriend, Tara, about this the other day, I have this inner like ledger keeper, right? It's like this is part of me that wants credit so badly for my spiritual work, right? Like if you want me to feel your love, respect, and appreciation, you'll tell me like, Kelly, wow, I really see you've been doing a lot of work.

Okay. That's it. Not about my books or like—that's what you'll say to me. And it's because the courage that I have experienced myself as exercising has been in these moments where I feel terrified of like psychic and emotional obliteration, abandonment, like irreversible rejection and betrayal, loss, and I go forward into it, I move towards it. I have that conversation. I show up vulnerable, and I ask my daughter, what the hell am I doing wrong? Like that kind of stuff.

Like that is when I experience how much stronger I am than I thought I was, and I experience, sometimes, the confirmation of what I was most afraid of, like somebody really isn't there for me, or they really can't love me, or they really don't like me, or want to be, or whatever it is, and somehow, I'm okay anyway. And my experience of reality and my experience of myself like grows and expands to hold this new self-concept.

And so, I would say like all of these things, all of these secrets, all of these aspects of yourself you feel you need to hide, they will be exposed, they will be seen, and it's going to be more than okay that there is an experience of liberation on the other end of relinquishing that habit of hiding. That is going to be literally like delightful. And then, it becomes like this way of being in the world, where it's actually like I said, like it's exciting, just like it's exciting for me to experience like the moment of awakening from deception, it's exciting for me to make contact with like these parts of me that I thought were like so heinously shameful that I had to hide them literally from my own self, let alone everybody else.

And I think, also that like—I mean, I look at pictures of myself when I was like 30, I don't know if you have this experience, I don't know what you look like, but I find myself to be more attractive, like energetically and literally physically, now than I was then. And I like myself more now. I find myself like more dimensionally like rich, and complex, and interesting. And there are so many more people who don't like me in the world now than they were then.

And like I'm still healing dynamics with my family of origin and I'm still trying to understand like who are my ride or dies, and like who am I in the world, and what is—it's not like I have any like clarity, or certainty, or like anything's been concretized, it's just this like experience of my soul coming into my body, like my soul is safer now in my body than my soul ever was, and that there's evidence, there's like little breadcrumbs of evidence that I'm moving in the right direction.

Because I think that when you get to this place where you trust your fundamental relationship to yourself, you know you're going to tell the dude like, listen, brother, like I'm good, I'm good on this advice, or I'm going to tell you, listen, Luke, I got to be so bad, or whatever. Like, you heal that dynamic, you start to recognize that as you meet your own needs, as you show up for yourself loyally, and you say yes to all of these like weird and wacky ways that you like impulse through into life, then that gets mirrored.

It's just like the breadcrumbs start to like—like I said, the arrows stop coming. Like it starts to sort of feel like, oh, wow, this feels better. This is more interesting. It feels more safe. It feels more okay. And so, I think that's the paradox. Like as you meet your own needs, as you show up for yourself, as you learn how to love yourself, like you get that more from the outside, the world becomes safer.

My experience of the plandemic now versus two years ago, it's like night and day. I don't even—it's like I can barely care what's in the news stream anymore. And it was like I was living in a world where I was going to be hauled off to a gulag. Like at any moment, my children are going to be force-vaccinated in front of my face, and now, I don't need to live in that world, probably because that inner tyrant is projected less onto the outer tyrants, right? Like I've learned to understand that that's in me.

Luke Storey: [03:21:44] It's part of your cloak of invisibility, yeah. I think there's something, really, to be said for that in terms of how this thing affects us or not and how much we interface with it is really knowing truly that you're unfuckwithable, and that like no harm can come to you, even if harm did come to your physical body, per se, or your quality of life, but like who you really are, what you really are is impervious to attack. Yeah.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [03:22:15] And that you always have choice.

Luke Storey: [03:22:16] Yeah. Yes. Hot damn, sister. This was a monster. This was a beast of a conversation, to your credit, so thank you so much for making the time. Man. I just love you. you're just so cool. funny, brilliant. The conversations we've had before have just always left me feeling really charged, and hopeful, and informed, and you're just awesome. Thank you for being who you are.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [03:22:40] No, it's such a pleasure. And like I said, I mean, must be that soul family thing, because it's such a familiar energy. It's like really wild.

Luke Storey: [03:22:49] Yeah, likewise. Well, thanks. And I'll see you tonight for dinner.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [03:22:53] Alright.

Luke Storey: [03:22:54] Alright.

Dr. Kelly Brogan: [03:22:54] Peace.

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