[00:00:00]Luke Storey:  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. Welcome to the Life Stylist podcast, you two.

[00:00:27]Kole Whitty:  We're so excited to be here.

[00:00:30]Tah Whitty:  Thank you. Glad to be here, bro.

[00:00:32]Luke Storey:  You crazy kids, I'm glad to have you guys.

[00:00:33]Tah Whitty:  Glad to be here, man.

[00:00:33]Luke Storey:  So fun, man. I can't believe I finally made it out to Austin to hang out with you guys.

[00:00:36]Kole Whitty:  Totally.

[00:00:37]Tah Whitty:  Yeah, man. Welcome home.

[00:00:38]Luke Storey:  Thank you. It seems like, yeah, we were going to do some stuff together during the Paleo f[x].

[00:00:45]Kole Whitty:  Yeah, that would have been April, and then life happened.

[00:00:48]Luke Storey:  Yeah. Goddammit, really, dude. Wow.

[00:00:51]Tah Whitty:  Like pandemic, riots.

[00:00:54]Luke Storey:  Yeah. Did you guys ever see the riots here?

[00:00:56]Kole Whitty:  We did. 

[00:00:57]Luke Storey:  You did? 

[00:00:57]Kole Whitty:  Yeah, we did. 

[00:00:58]Luke Storey:  Before burning stuff and getting past-

[00:00:59]Kole Whitty:  Not to the same degree in New York did or LA. It was starting to. It was another symbol in our life personally, where we were going to live on 30 acres down at the pyramid, where we were the other day. And so, we were going to go down there and live on the property because our lease was up and we were moving into a new house. And so, we were leaving downtown as tear gas is being thrown literally in my rearview mirror, we're driving to live on a retreat center. And I was like, this is my life now. Like I'm actually leaving the chaos behind to go to a safe space for myself. And that's been my life, right? Has been like really leaving the trauma drama of my experience in the rearview mirror.

[00:01:37]Luke Storey:  Yeah. I like that you guys talk about that a lot, actually, not evading riots, but I think those of us that are interested in growth can really get caught up in the story. And there is such a fine balance between addressing your trauma and really deep diving into those recesses that are scary and painful. But then, at a certain point, you kind of got to come out, and get productive, and get above ground, and focus on those things that you want rather than what you don't want. So, I love that about you all's work. As I've started to dive into it, I'm like, oh, okay, I see what you guys are up to here.

[00:02:18]Tah Whitty:  Thanks, man. Yeah. It's really about being present. There's the back story, which is the past, and there's the fore story, which is the story that's in the future that may never happen, and then there's the ongoing story. So, what we are doing is writing the ongoing story and staying super present in the now, so we don't get lost in the, oh, this happened to me. When people ask us about it, we bring it up, but we don't get lost in that space. Some people, all of their significance is wrapped up in their past. And so, my significance right now is wrapped up in my now with this beautiful woman here. That's my space, to be here. And then, we create the fore story in the ongoing now.

[00:03:00]Kole Whitty:  Unlike the foreskin, which sometimes has to come back up for healing.

[00:03:04]Tah Whitty:  Yeah.

[00:03:05]Luke Storey:  I worked on that in my last mushroom journey. 

[00:03:08]Tah Whitty:  Yeah, can pull that back.

[00:03:09]Kole Whitty:  It's a thing.

[00:03:10]Luke Storey:  Oh, man. Do you guys know Brendon Marotta?

[00:03:13]Tah Whitty:  No. 

[00:03:13]Luke Storey:  Guy here in town.

[00:03:14]Kole Whitty:  Yeah. I just met him and his wife, I think wife/partner with Deb and Brendan Jaeger not too long ago actually.

[00:03:22]Luke Storey:  Speaking of foreskin, he produced a movie, or I guess, produced and directed a movie called American Circumcision. And I had him on my show maybe three years ago, shortly after it came out, but I don't know if he's still in the advocacy role, but he was like, hey, here's the thing that's pretty fucked up that we're doing, maybe we should look at it. But that film like just, oh, my God, speaking of like the trauma, a huge part of my journey to watch that film, and then interview him, and start to research that thing that had been done to this body, and go like, huh, wow, this is like, I thought I had some problems, now, we're getting to the real stuff. 

[00:03:59]Kole Whitty:  And I think that's the power of awareness, is it's like, it's not that it's going and looking for the things that are wrong, it's observing when there's a resonance that there's something there and not resisting the resonance. And it's like, for me, my life started to get more ease when I started to allow the resonance of discomfort to be there and not try to push it back down, because I spent most of my life pushing it back down, afraid. 

[00:04:26] Because I had a lot of trauma and stuff that I was afraid if I fully opened that, would that engulf me into just like a massive trauma response that I would never come back from psychosis, was the frame I looked through. And from my relationship with Todd, was actually able to let all of that repressed emotion of my whole life come up to the point where there was, one day, I just screamed for him to come help me and I actually allowed myself to go through what society would call psychosis.

[00:04:59] And he physically contained me, not restrained me, but was just making sure I didn't hurt myself. And in that moment was when I started to understand that our fear of people going through psychosis, our fear of the discomfort of witnessing someone expressing that way, is that repression that we're all trying to do to ourselves of the inconvenience of human emotion. And when Tah allowed and supported me actually fully expressing, because he's a big, beautiful, strong man who can keep me safe, it only took a few minutes in its fullest expression, and then he just held me.

[00:05:38] I went kind of like limp from exhaustion, just cried, and then he just took care of me for a couple of days and let my system reset. It was literally a nervous system reset that was necessary. And if it hadn't have been for all the work that we've done in all of his years as a nurse in New York City, I mean, he has seen it all through his own experience in hospitals, and then just his individual experience, that's when I learned to safety. That's when I really learned unconditional love and acceptance.

[00:06:10] And I think that that's something we started bringing to our work because we did our own individual work, a lot of it. And then, how we were able to hold space for each other in sovereignty together has translated into other work that's like the most powerful work. I don't have medical conditions anymore. I used to have a slew of them that are supposed to be chronic or for your life, and I don't. And so, for me, it's like the fact that we're all sitting here is miraculous. At this time in a pandemic, we all found our way to Austin, Texas, in this moment, is like through that plus the 300 trillion cells present with us right now is just incredible.

[00:06:50]Luke Storey:  Yeah. I think it's an interesting convergence of tribe and community right at the moment in this town. It's really, really interesting to kind of immerse ourselves in this. And I don't know, it's like a third political party is emerging in a way, because I'm like, these are people that think logically, kind of like conservatives, but care about social issues like liberals. There's this middle way where people are really interested in healing and in absolute inclusiveness, not in a politically correct way, but in a real heart-centered way.

[00:07:28] And it's been really interesting to just meet folks like you and so many people have gravitated here during this time when so many other places on the planet are going into full tyrannical control, grid, matrix, insanity. So, to be out here and just have a bit of space and breathing room has been really, really wild. There are so many different directions I want to go here, and I don't know, I'm just not a traditionalist, so I never like to start with, so tell me your back story, but I know a bit of each of yours.

[00:07:59] And so, as much as I don't like to do a traditional interview, I think it's worth going there very briefly, because I have so much in common with both of you. And I like to explore commonality and see how we both got to where we are now. I related a lot to your story, the bits that I've heard as related to a dysfunctional, and I'm going to put words in your mouth, you correct me wherever I'm wrong or whatever your version of the story is, but dysfunctional relationship to sexuality. That, interfering with intimacy, safety, closeness, addictive tendencies in that realm. And then, your story. I think we had different drugs of choice, perhaps. 

[00:08:40]Kole Whitty:  I was mostly all of them, but go on.

[00:08:41]Luke Storey:  Yeah. My drug of choice is more, what do you got? That's my drug of choice. But you went through addictions, and as you said, all these health challenges, and then overcame that in some similar ways. So, I know that in my own experience, the true healers are people that have healed themselves. And in order to heal yourself, something's got to be wrong in the first place. So, maybe I'll start with you and just get a truncated version of, what was your breaking point? What was your bottom, where you went, you know what, 360, I'm out? 

[00:09:19]Tah Whitty:  There is no one 360 space. There were several layers. There was so much I was buried under. There wasn't any one place. I was constantly looking to work on myself. But it all is centered in my ideas around my mother not approving of who I am, what I do, and how I flow, and how I function inherently. So, there is a tremendous amount of shame around my interaction with my mother, and me being born so close to my brother, and hearing from my mother that I was a surprise baby, they didn't plan for me, I created the idea that something was wrong with me, so I had to prove to my mother that I was worthy of her love.

[00:10:04] So, everything in my life was driven around proving to my mother that I was worthy of her love and that I wasn't doing anything wrong. So, I did a lot of lying. I did a lot of posturing. I did a lot of stuff to hide who I was my entire life based on that relationship with my mother. There was a lot of dysfunction in my household with my brother physically abusive to me, calling me stuff, caused me to question my sexuality, led me into a lot of experimentation as a child, as a preteen.

[00:10:37] And that led me into very, very hyper sexualization. I did a lot of playing in sex from the time I was 13 with girls and women from when I was 13 and until ongoing. My sexuality is ongoing. But I am in a space of sovereignty of my sexuality right now, where before, I was not. I had given my sexual sovereignty away to a lot of dynamics. And it got me into a place where I was paying for sex, I was having sex with five or six people without paying for it a week. And on top of that, I was paying for orals and all of this other wild stuff in my life. It was pretty bananas.

[00:11:23] And I graduated from nursing school at age 20. And it was interfering with my cognition and being able to hold space at the hospital because I was exhausted from doing all of this stuff. And so, I was driving around New York on my off nights or after my shifts paying for head, it was crazy. And so, I was looking for connection. There was a relationship that I had when I was 16 with a girl who was rather young, who her oral game was absolutely crazy. And that's where I got my love for oral sex, from her. She was crazy. And it was absolutely crazy. Are you cool with shits and stuff like that? 

[00:12:05]Luke Storey:  Yeah. 

[00:12:06]Tah Whitty:  Okay. I was holding back. She was crazy.

[00:12:09]Luke Storey:  I've accepted that I might get censored off the internet at any given moment. I'll deal with it when it happens.

[00:12:14]Tah Whitty:  She was crazy. Head is my favorite thing in sexuality, and on both directions, but to receive is just, that's my space. That's my space, bro. 

[00:12:22]Kole Whitty:  It's his space. That's his medicine. 

[00:12:25]Tah Whitty:  That's my space, bro. I don't need food, I just need some good head. Anyway, it's a great head. So, it all came to a head when-

[00:12:33]Kole Whitty:  No pun intended. 

[00:12:34]Tah Whitty:  I love you so much. It all came to a cap or a point when I ended up breaking up with this girl and being with somebody who my brother wanted to deal with. And so, she called me up one day and told me that she had sex with my brother. And I was standing, and talking to her, and she asked me if I was mad, I told her no, and we got into this whole long conversation, and she asked me if I ever wondered why somebody her age could give head the way she did, and I said, no, I never did.

[00:13:10] And she said, well, would you like to know? And so, she told me, and she told me in a nutshell that her mother's Black, and her father's White, and her father hated her mother for having a Black baby for him. And so, he would invite all his friends over on the weekends and he would make her give them head and have them fuck her. And so, this was where I learned my greatest sexual joy, from a horrible situation like that. So, it was a tremendous amount of shame that I carried around wanting to have oral sex. 

[00:13:50] And so, I did a lot of it in the shadow and hiding, and I wouldn't have it with the women that I was involved with because I was ashamed to ask them for it, because within myself, it was all the secrecy. And so, this led me into this spiral of seeking sexuality and seeking sexual connection in this way, well, into my 30s almost. And yes, my late 20s is when I finally stopped. I ended up going to sex compulsives anonymous, all of this stuff, and what I was really looking for was connection, the connection that I had with her. Like we had a very deep, very loving connection.

[00:14:26] Our sex was very deep. And as young as we were, it was very, very connected. It became the model for my sexual experiences. Still to this day, like everything is held up against that as a barometer. And so, I never got that depth of connection for a long, long time in my life. And so, I was looking for it and I thought I could find it through sexual experiences that were on the low, that were on some real grimy underground situation. And I never got to get to that space. So, it caused my body to get into a really rough place. I already had insomnia. I had insomnia from age 14 until, what?

[00:15:04]Kole Whitty:  Forty-two? 

[00:15:05]Tah Whitty:  Until forty two. So, like almost 30 years, I had insomnia. And so, it wreaked havoc on my body, on every interaction and situation that I had. The reason I stopped going to sleep is because I wet the bed until I was 14 and I decided that when I was going to high school that my brother wasn't going to tell anybody else that I peed in the bed, so I stopped going to sleep. And so, it became a physiological habit for me to just not sleep. And so, I was up all the time.

[00:15:37]Kole Whitty:  It was pretty crazy to witness. When we first started seeing each other, it wasn't just that he would like toss and turn, he would fall out completely into a deep sleep, but he would hit this like trauma response of fight or flight, that he would literally jump out of bed in a complete panic. 

[00:15:56]Tah Whitty:  And put my clothes on. And I was crazy.

[00:15:59]Kole Whitty:  It was crazy. And then, it would scare me because I'm dead asleep, right? I'd never witnessed that before. I'd been with people that couldn't sleep and some restlessness, something like that, but this was like some next level craziness.

[00:16:13]Tah Whitty:  Three hours, four hours tops a night, I was getting. And it was destroying me. And so, all of this, while I was still a nurse, I'm working 12-hour shifts at the hospital saving people's lives. Yeah, man. And it was crazy. And I'm a musician, so I'm touring with my music. I'm doing all of this stuff and not sleeping. And I'm still exercising, and I'm still doing all the stuff, doing my best to take care of my body. It was crazy. And so, my whole organism was dysregulated, my mental processes, how I dealt with constructs, and people, and my relationships, all of these things were so jumbled up. 

[00:16:48] It was hard for me to function. And so, I started to really see how dysfunctional the healthcare industry was. I was watching what was going on with SARS, and with West Nile virus, and with MERS, and all of these pandemics that have happened in the background that nobody saw that I was seeing from the inside. And I was seeing how this stuff was being managed and I was watching how the healthcare industry was starting to get monopolized into these small companies.

[00:17:16] And I was seeing how it was, you get healthcare the way we say you get healthcare, you don't get it. And I was watching all of this stuff happen and it was causing a lot of discord in my body because I had taken this oath to do no harm, right? That's the Hippocratic Oath that I promised to do no harm, is the first words. And I would feel like I was harming everybody. So, here we go again with more of this dysfunctional situation with my body.

[00:17:39] I'm feeling inauthentic like I'm lying and it led to a lot of really terrible physiological situations that got me to a point where I fractured my spine and herniated disc while I was at the hospital and I couldn't walk for three months. I had personal training clients that I couldn't train anymore. I couldn't work in the hospital anymore. I didn't want to tell anybody because I was ashamed, right? I was self-sufficient, Mr. Self-sufficient Man, right? And I was all of these things and I did not honor myself.

[00:18:08] And so, I came into a collapsed space. And if that's the biggest collapse space right there, that was the one where everything was falling apart. And that's where, actually, I was in the eight-year relationship that had just closed. On the day that I hurt my back is the day that she was like, hey, I'm out of here, pal. So, like everything opened up at that moment. And I was actually doing fitness challenges with Kole. We had just started hanging out, like really deep hanging out and stuff. And so, Kole introduced me to psychedelics, and she was like, hey, I know what's going on with you, I know where your heart is, I know where you could be really expansive.

[00:18:50] And I was like, what is it? And she's like, well, you go sit in a circle, and you take these plants, and you go off into the psychedelic realm, and you find yourself. I was like, oh, you want me to do some drugs with White people? I ain't doing that. And so, I trust this woman more than I've trusted any person in my life because she's held me safe. And when she came into my life, I was able to be honest with her more than anybody I've ever experienced in my life. And so, I got to tell her a lot of the secrets that I had never told anybody. So, my body started to relax.

[00:19:23]Luke Storey:  Oh, God, what a relief, right?

[00:19:24]Tah Whitty:  Oh, my gosh, man. And my body started to relax. And that's when I started to go to sleep. The first time she came and slept over my house, she brought Henry with her, a little Chihuahua, and I just went to sleep, and I was like, oh, it's Kole's fault that I went to sleep. And it turns out, when I went back over the time, I had told her so many things at night that I had never told anybody, secrets I was keeping in my body. And they were accepted and she didn't flinch. And then, my whole body just relaxed. And that's where I started to open up and really see that honesty was a place that I could explore.

[00:19:56] And then, going into the psychedelic spaces, I started to pull together all of the self-work, all the books that I've been reading, self-help, all the things that I've been looking to remedy, the fixed person that I perceived was broken, and I saw that I was just in a space where I was out of alignment with what I deeply felt in myself. And when I got aligned with what I deeply felt within myself, that's when things started to get easy, and started to open up, and my body started to remedy itself. And I'm telling you, man, the body that I have now and the body that I had 12 years ago, completely different organism, man. I'm amazed. I used to wear glasses. I don't wear glasses anymore. I had thyroid issues. I don't have thyroid issues anymore.

[00:20:36]Kole Whitty:  And it goes deeper than just you don't wear glasses. He was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, so he was told he'd be blind by 40. And so, when I met him, there were times we'd be out to dinner, this is before he had done any of the work he's done now, and there were times I could see how he was looking at me, it looked like he was memorizing my face. And I would feel this deep sadness because it felt like he was walking around like he was running out of time to see, to do, to be independent, and that was crushing for me at times. 

[00:21:09] Because on one hand, to say, stay in the moment, be present, and then also considering this looming future of what he won't be able to see, and being independent, and being a hip hop artist, emcee, and deejaying, and all of that, what would that look like then? And it's like, I could see, and I told him this, that when he broke his back, I said, I can see where you are. I had walked through a lot of this labyrinth, and a lot of this maze that I saw him in, and conditions that I told couldn't be healed, and I'm a miracle, and I have friends that are miracles, defy everything science and medicine says is possible.

[00:21:47] And I did it multiple times. And so, as I sat and I witnessed him, when I could see, I could see him looking at every freckle, I could see him observing every like wrinkle, or blemish, or whatever, and everything to him was beautiful. And I could feel that feeling underneath of deficit, of losing, of running out of time. And I really think that that contributed as well to his not sleeping because he was working at the hospital, nights, personal training in the morning.

[00:22:20] He taught boot camps, then he'd go sleep for maybe a couple hours in the afternoon, then he'd do classes and personal training clients until he went back to the hospital at 7:00 or 8:00, and work nights. And so, to be on this side of it, and the facilitator I've been sitting in circles with I brought him to, said to me, Kole, I just want you to be mindful not to get sucked into his tornado.

[00:22:47] Because I've rescued people in the past and this was a huge lesson of trust for myself to set boundaries and parameters, because where is that line when you want to support someone in their growth? Right? And I sat with my boundaries, and I sat with creating that, and it was the first time I asked him to come to the group. He literally said, man, that's a hippie White people shit, no, not happening. And I wasn't going to push it. 

[00:23:15]Luke Storey:  What was the medicine? 

[00:23:17]Tah Whitty:  Sassafras. 

[00:23:17]Kole Whitty:  Yeah, Sassafras. So, heart-opener, serotonin-releasing, and he had a terrible experience. So then, I had all my guilt, shame. I finally got this man to trust me, right? And I'd never brought anyone to a group before. And so, I was feeling all those things.

[00:23:35]Luke Storey:  You would never expect it with what I would say as somewhat mild. 

[00:23:39]Kole Whitty:  Super soft. And they did light. 

[00:23:41]Luke Storey:  And it's heart-opening. It's not like a visual-

[00:23:45]Tah Whitty:  I have no idea what any of that meant. 

[00:23:52]Luke Storey:  ... where you're like, the walls are melting. It's not that.

[00:23:53]Tah Whitty:  I had no idea what any of that meant and it was a huge experience for me. Even though I was uncomfortable and it was frightening for me, it opened me up to a lot, including the recognition that I was a control freak. I was looking to control everything, everybody's view of me, my posture, how I show up, how everything is going. I was this puppeteer and I was manipulative beyond manipulation. And when I got to sit in that space, I got to relax, I got to fall into a different space that I had never been into before. And that opened me up. That's where all the cogs came together when that happened.

[00:24:26] That realization that I was like, man, I'm a control freak. I have no idea that I was a control freak and it's a subconscious controlling of everything. It's not even in a space of awareness. How many people have we worked with now that have this control that they don't even realize that they're doing, that they're manipulating everything around them for some reason or another that they are unaware of. And when I realized that that's when the floodgates open, the next two weeks was this huge opening and everything started to come together. And that's how we got to where we are with the work we do now together. It's been awesome.

[00:25:02]Luke Storey:  Wow. Thank you for sharing all that and your vulnerability. I think it's such a beautiful time we live in now with independent media such as this, and the media you guys produce on your podcast, and all the work you're doing in the world, is like every time someone tells their story in the way that you just did, and for some people, that's going to be a little too much information. Probably not people that listen to this show, but you know what I'm saying? Like some people are ready to like go there, some aren't, but I'm one that is ready to go anywhere you can go, I think. I mean, that was tested the other night. 

[00:25:35] That honesty for me is that is the space where I have found the most healing in my life, in being honest, man. And so, the people that can rock with it will rock with it. The people that can't, they'll come to it when they can.

[00:25:48] Yeah. But it gives people permission. I think that's what's great. I mean, I remember listening a few years ago, I think it was like the Lewis Howes podcast. And I mean, he's a pretty like all-American, I don't think of him as like a racy guy, you know what I'm saying? He's not an edgy kind of dude, but whatever it is, I listen to his podcast and he was talking about a sexual abuse that he endured as a kid and how he was dealing with it, and I'm like, bro, you're on your podcast right now. 

[00:26:14] I'm like, you realize this is out and people are listening to it. Yeah. And it's not like I didn't face things like that in my life, but it never occurred to me to talk about them publicly in a way that was so vulnerable, and so raw, and real. But someone like that with a really big audience kind of gave me permission. And then, I would start to drip out a little more of the story, you know what I mean, and be a little more trusting of the space, even though it is public, as we are now live streaming on all these three different things right now.

[00:26:43] But it's like you tell your story, then someone's like, oh, damn, my relationship with sexuality is perhaps something I could look at. Dude, if I would have heard you talking like you just did when I was 35, I could have saved myself and probably a lot of my partners a lot of pain because I didn't realize I was unconsciously seeking escapism, pleasure-seeking, validation, ego-feeding, avoiding love by having sex. I didn't even know that was a thing until someone said that I was like, oh, my God, that's why I had so much sex. Not like sex like the next guy, but it was a buffer to vulnerability. 

[00:27:16]Tah Whitty:  Yeah. Vulnerability begets vulnerability. And when I started this work, when I started in the psychedelics, I started to find out that I was a control freak and had all of this stuff led to me being open, I got on Facebook, and I just started unloading and crying on Facebook, and all this stuff. But the thing is, when I started unloading, people started getting worried. Some people started to get concerned. Like my family was like, you need a therapist. People were like, yo, you bugging, how are you saying this stuff on Facebook?

[00:27:45] Don't do that. This is only reserved for certain people. And I was like, no, I'm telling this to everybody. And the amount of phone calls, messages, stuff that I got from men that were like, thank you, I never knew anybody else went through anything remotely close to what I went through. Can I share this with you? Ask her, man. I was on the phone for, after those videos and stuff, 24 hours straight talking to people, holding space while they were crying, and listening to them, letting them be.

[00:28:14] And as a man, this man, that I can only speak for this man's vantage point, there are too many other men out there that are suffering from being lonely. And that doesn't mean being alone in a corner by yourself. It means being lonely because you are alone in your articulation of your truth, because shame is blocking you from being able to speak about not who you are or what you are, but something that happened to you or something you participated in, in the past.

[00:28:40] Once we can get that stuff up and out, we don't have to hide that, the body can be free. The body can actually heal itself because it is in ease. And ease is the opposite of disease, not healing, not health. Ease is that space where we heal. And so, when people can be honest with—man, I'm all about being honest. Man, I have no problem speaking my truth to anybody. And if people don't like it, there's seven-and-a-half other billion people that you can manage yourself with, you don't have to deal with me.

[00:29:08] But I'm about being honest so that I can inspire honesty in other people, and show, and give them a space where they can really be honest, and have that honesty welcomed in all of its iterations of anger, joy, frustration, being lost, anxiety, whatever it is, is welcome here. And not on my clock, on the clock until it runs out. You know what I mean? So, that's why I'm honest the way I am, bro. And thank you for realizing that in your space with that other situation, so that you can bring that to other people, particularly men. And I'm not saying that women don't need this kind of honesty, but we have been fortified into this space of hiding and holding strong, whatever that means for society's sake. And we don't need that crap anymore, man.

[00:29:54]Luke Storey:  Yeah, I agree. Thank you.

[00:29:56]Kole Whitty:  You're so hot.

[00:29:57]Tah Whitty:  Thank you, baby. I love you.

[00:29:59]Kole Whitty:  I love you.

[00:29:59]Luke Storey:  And I like, Kole, what you were saying about how, when in relationship, when you're—there's a lot there to unpack. I mean, part of it, I think, is learning discernment so that you know with whom it's safe to be vulnerable, and open, and honest, right?

[00:30:18]Kole Whitty:  Yeah. So, we work with something called the roadmap to intimacy. And the first step is tolerance. If you can't tolerate your emotions, your space, the people in it, to even conceive of having that with someone else, it makes it near impossible. It doesn't mean you can't still have a nice time. So, it doesn't mean stay alone to do your work. It means awareness around where you're operating from. And as I expanded my ability to tolerate my own emotions, then I was able to hold space for his emotions without them becoming my responsibility.

[00:30:52] And I think that that was something that was the biggest gift in this relationship and was the most challenging for me. We say all the time, our relationship is easy. Our marriage is easy. Our individual work within the construct of the relationship is where it can get a little dicey or a little crunchy sometimes, but the entity that is the marriage is perfect. The love that is the marriage is perfect.

[00:31:18] And so, the challenging work for me was actually recognizing at times, I'm projecting my old story on him, and old relationships, and old energies, and to take responsibility for that, to actually have him look at me, and be like, baby, I love you, I'm on your team, this isn't my shit, and him just wait. And let me sit in my discomfort, in my reflection, because we have communicated as authentically and honestly as we could, and have been able, and that's expanded over the last eight years.

[00:31:51] And that was the most confronting part, was to know that he was correct. Not right, but that he was correct in his assessment of what I was going through. And so, to the big shifts for me in this relationship was to get out of the cycle of self-shaming, of where I should be because of all the work I've done, where I should be as a woman, where I should be as a wife. We're both divorced before. It's our second marriage. Things I said I wouldn't do again and different structures coming to present themselves to me, and to say, I said I want an open, honest relationship that is full of unconditional love, whether we are together or not.

[00:32:42] Our proximity has nothing to do with our love. Our title of marriage has nothing to do with my love for him. And to keep bringing myself back was the challenge. To speak with love, when we first got together, I would get loud. My relationship before him was a really loud Israeli guy. So, our dynamic, I had habits I was coming into this relationship with that were not functional for him. And for him, if someone comes with a very aggressive, loud energy, that's his shutdown, peace out, I'm out of here.

[00:33:05] It's not safe for him. And so, we had to negotiate those a little bit, right? We basically started having something we call upside down bed, we put our head at the foot of the bed, play chill music, and we would just talk, and say, so what happens when or here's what's happened in the past, how would you handle that? And this what happens when got us in the habit of curiosity. Before there was a problem, we were coming up with the plans for it.

[00:33:35] And so, that helped us to identify where our individual shit is, where are our boundaries, and saying like I said to him, if you approach me with a topic that could be triggering for me, if you can just remind me you're on my team because it's going to feel confrontational and I know my propensity to get defensive in that particular space. And so, he'll actually come and he'll hold my face in the ways that I requested, not in his determination, but in how I would need to receive it.

[00:34:10] And he'll say, Baby, I love you, I'm on your team, this isn't my shit. And then, that's where I pick up in self-responsibility. And that's why our relationship is so easy. We don't save each other either. If he's in a space, he is free and supported in experiencing the vastness and juiciness of every version of him. And I'm not going to crawl into it and swim around in it anymore. And that was a choice we both made quite a while ago. And that came to a head this year that Tah really needed support.

[00:34:45] We rallied some of our male friends here in Austin that showed up for him within an hour, Keith Norris being one of them, our friend, Oni, being another. And they rallied for him and he needed to fully express his anger the way he had held space for me. And when the women showed up, the partners, they said, Kole, how are you doing while he's going through this? And I just got this grin on my face, I was like, I'm amazing because it's not me this time.

[00:35:17]Luke Storey:  Well, I think that's the real indicator of autonomy and two sovereign beings creating the third entity of the relationship. I come from a long line of enmeshment and co-dependency. And it's just the way I was wired from experiences I had when I was a kid. Like I'm close to you, you're feeling something, there is no way for me not to be in that shared experience. Not empathy.

[00:35:43]Kole Whitty:  No, I'm in it.

[00:35:43]Luke Storey:  Yeah, I'm actually experiencing the same thing. Not like, oh, I know what that feels like, I've been there before, not compassionate, but like I'm suffering because you're suffering, which is really unhealthy, obviously. 

[00:35:55]Kole Whitty:  It didn't work well for me.

[00:35:56]Luke Storey:  Yeah, brutal because it's hard enough just being you with your own shit, right? If you're a sponge for everyone else's experience and you can't differentiate yourself as a single point of consciousness from them, it's a rough go of it and so triggering too, because then it's like, you can't even hear at that point that it's your shit, right? Because it's both of ours now. Because we're not single points. We've come together in this muddy, muddy way. So, that's a really great distinction.

[00:36:30]Kole Whitty:  Well, that was a powerful thing from plant circles that I learned was how to discern what was mine and what was somebody else's. Because I was so present in the experience, someone over here starts purging, or screaming, or whatever, and initially, I could feel that, right? I could feel like emotional trigger, and trauma responses, and all sorts of things coming online to protect me and actually learning that there were times I removed myself from the ceremonial space so that I could see if it's mine, because I was trying to figure out what's wrong with me in all these feelings, because I didn't actually understand you could feel something that much.

[00:37:07] I understood the concept of empathy. I didn't understand that I could, if someone felt nauseous, I felt nauseous. And so, with all my health conditions, it was near impossible to try to heal mine when I was basically taking on others, too. Because then, it's not just diet, it's the whole environment. And so, being in the plant space, it was able to remove myself from the ceremonial container and all my sensations are gone, all of those feelings. All of a sudden, I don't feel like I need to purge. So, what's that about? And so, it brought the, hmm, I wonder.

[00:37:45] And just by having that pause, because part of my story growing up was that a deep shame that there's something wrong with me and everything is my fault. And so, in a ceremony space, if I'm not feeling good, it's because I'm doing something wrong, I'm not listening, I'm not surrendering right, I'm not letting go right, that just showed up in the psychedelics phase too. And so, through different teachers and through different circles, by the time I got to Tah, I had this stunning reflection that had done their work, that could take radical self-responsibility and hold me up to the desires I had for myself, not his design of myself.

[00:38:27]Luke Storey:  Beautiful. How did you fix your eyes, dude? Was it like a spontaneous thing just through journeys, and inner work, and balancing of the energies, or did you do a specific protocol, routine, modality?

[00:38:41]Tah Whitty:  Well, I mean, there was a couple of things. There was a decision that I wasn't going to go blind. That was a decision that I had not made. I had decided that I was going to find something outside to fix my eyes instead of looking inside, and deciding that, no, I'm not going to adhere to a diagnosis that was given to me by somebody who has an idea of stuff based on trends and symptoms. So, that was the number one thing. Number two was to be supported by somebody who actually believed in me. 

[00:39:14] That was it. But that decision, I would say, is the number one thing. There was a journey that I went to the last time I wore my glasses. I had this burning urge to scream out, my name is Tah and I will not be pacified. And I screamed it out really twice. Like I called for the facilitator and I asked her to bring all the guys that she could to hold the space because I felt like I was going to hurt somebody. And so, they all surrounded me and I screamed.

[00:39:46] I mean, I have never roared like that in my life. And I cried, man. And I cried. And after that, my eyes just seemed to level out. And so, it was the last day I wore glasses. And so, yeah. So, we had been doing some work around, Kole had found this book called Stem Cells Heal Your Eyes, and I had been taking stuff to stimulate stem cells. And I had been getting into a different type of rest cycle because your eyes are kind of expendable for your body.

[00:40:15] So, I had been going into the protocol that Kole had introduced me through that book and really getting my nutrition into a space where my body was able to relax enough to bring up all the subconscious things to the surface. And I had a lot around my name from when I was a child. My birth name is Brian. And every time I heard that name, I would get nauseous my entire life. And so, as a kid, even as a little kid, I had different names that I would tell people that was my name.

[00:40:45] And until my parents came in and corrected them, that was what they called me. And so, when I got to a point where I found a name that resonated with me that really felt awesome, like the sound, ah, right? Tah, like that feels awesome. And it resonated really awesome for me. I still wasn't owning it because I was protecting my mom from her not liking the fact that I didn't own the name that she gave me. And so, once I released myself from—again, this was a huge a huge part of opening with my eyes was letting go of all the past stuff that I had, the constructs that were restraining my body that had to do with pleasing my mother.

[00:41:22] All of this stuff was a decision that I had to make with no more. And around that same time, I let go of my mom. And so, I let go of my mother, I let go of my need for her approval, or my desire, or my programming around her approval, and it opened me up. When I took my name that day, it opened me up into a space where my body was able to just settle into who I am and what I am. And so, my vision, my projection of my potential was always there, but my sight wasn't aligning with it because I had closed my ability to see my potential.

[00:42:00] And so, when I opened it up that day, that's when everything started to shift. And so, I never put my glasses back on. And I just recently passed my driver's exam with no glasses for the first time in my life. Like when I came out of the DMV, I was like, Kole, I just passed with no glasses, man. And she was like, what? I was like, no glasses. Because like I can see a whole page. I mean, I can't read your handwriting too well.

[00:42:25]Luke Storey:  Yeah, most people can't, even I.

[00:42:28]Tah Whitty:  But I'm not squinting to look at it. No. I used to squint to look at everything. Like Edie Sedgwick over there on the—I couldn't read that before. Like this is all without any kind of procedures, without any medicine, with me getting into a space where I'm congruent, and I've decided to be congruent, and I've decided to be honest, and at ease in all of my space, and to have fun, and to explore, and to grow, and to be in cahoots with my environment.

[00:42:57]Luke Storey:  Wow, that's dope. Thanks for sharing that. When I interviewed Joe Dispenza, I asked him, he has these—I don't want to call them his devotees, it sounds a little cultish, but his followers. Okay. People that go to his retreats and stuff sometimes will have these spontaneous healings. They go into the quantum realm and they have these coherence healings. A bunch of people get around the one person, entities come in the room, these 12-foot tall beings like some crazy ass shit and someone will have epilepsy, or Parkinson's, or cancer, or whatever, and [making sound] they're healed, right? Like for real. Like old down south, that healing revival, the preacher, where they tie a rattlesnake. 

[00:43:43]Kole Whitty:  When they throw them across the room to heal them, like get them on the face and throw them up the stage. 

[00:43:48]Luke Storey:  Old ladies get out of the wheelchair. That kind of stuff happens to these things. And I asked him, I said, what's the thing? What's the secret sauce? Because you do all these breathing exercises, these deep meditations, but I'm like, what's the thing that tips people over? And he said, Luke, it's when they make a decision, a firm decision, no ifs, ands, or buts, this is what's happening, I am healed, period. When people get to that level of infinite decision, then that's when those things happen. It was beautiful to hear that. I mean, that's been the case for a number of things with me. I've not yet been able to do with my eyes, but you're an inspiration.

[00:44:28]Tah Whitty:  Thank you, man. There's a moment of clarity that I can compare it to when I made the decision. Have you ever seen Minority Report? 

[00:44:35]Luke Storey:  Yeah.

[00:44:36]Tah Whitty:  So, there's this one scene where the guy has all of these photos of all these kids on the bed, and Tom Cruise goes in, and he sees a picture of his son, and the whole prediction was that he was going to murder this guy. That's why they were chasing him around. And he looks at it, and he goes, oh, no, I'm going to kill this man. And the conviction that he had on his face, like it was just, he had made that decision and there was nothing that was going to stop him from killing this guy.

[00:45:07] And so, when I decided that day, that day when I said, my name is Tah, and I will not be pacified, there were so many decisions that were made in my organism, I don't know how to describe it other than it is a really hard-edged decision that I have not gone back on. I will not flub on this. I won't go back on it. It's a decision. And these are the decisions that I make in my life every day. And they don't have to be hard or tenuous. It's just a decision and that's it. It's just like, when you're going to decide it, it's done.

[00:45:39]Luke Storey:  Yeah, that's a beautiful principle in the 12 steps, and the third of the 12 steps, you make a decision to turn your will in your life over the care of God as you understand them. And I had a guide once as I was exploring my early recovery and he would give so much emphasis to that spiritual principle of making a decision. And the way he would describe it is we could talk about something all day long. We have an idea.

[00:46:05] Let's say we're in Austin. We want to go to Corpus Christi. It's just an idea until we make a decision, we're going down there. No, we're going, then next thing you know, we're picking up the keys, we're back in the car, we're in the car. Now, it's in motion. But until absolute 100% decision has been made to proceed or recede, ain't nothing happening. It's just a powerful and simple principle. It's really beautiful.

[00:46:31]Tah Whitty:  Yeah, man. And being in that decision is an ongoing situation. Like if I fall back on it, if I decide to fall back on it, I can feel my eye shift. So, it is a constant decision to be in that space. It's like it's a constant decision that we want to be in this relationship. We decide every moment that we want to be here. Every moment, I'm like, I want to be here. Yeah, I want to be here.

[00:46:53]Kole Whitty:  Well, that's well-reflected, you're still in this.

[00:46:55]Luke Storey:  Oh, my God. Really?

[00:46:56]Kole Whitty:  Yeah. Because we said this from the beginning, if you don't feel you are worthy, I'll never let you go. If you decide this isn't where you want to be, I will never chase you.

[00:47:07]Tah Whitty:  Yeah. It's an ongoing decision. And I don't attach myself to the outcome of my decision. I have decided that my eyes are perfect. And as I decide my eyes are perfect, I don't know if my eyesight has rectified itself or my organism has come into cahoots with how my eyes aren't allowing me to see things differently. I don't know which one it is. I don't care. It doesn't make a difference to me. It doesn't make a difference to me. The clarity that I have around it is what makes the difference.

[00:47:37]Kole Whitty:  Well, it's the change of perception. We can sit and say that it is my eyes that see, we don't actually know that that's true. We know that there are certain ways that it perceives that we call sight, but as far as the organism in itself, I don't know if it's the cells within my whole face and my arms creating an image or how much of it is actually the sight of my eyes. Because Tah has a thing where, especially when we're working very proximal to people, he can raise all of his goosebumps, and he can tell through sound and through smell what's happening in their body.

[00:48:09] Like if you could see his arm now, he can pretty much raise them at will. And he can tell when someone's basically shifting into a heightened state because their smell changes, their pheromones changes. And so, it becomes a superpower. There's always a compensation of the senses. So, part of the gift, the story I've created was since his eyes were functioning the way that they were functioning before, it caused his organism to evolve or become more attuned in different ways.

[00:48:40] And so, it's such a fascinating idea that so much of what we call science is true until it isn't true anymore, and we keep finding even deeper into cellular level, and then there's deeper than that, and there's deeper than that. And so, even as we go into every expansion of our own personal work in relation to other people, we recognize that everything is true until it isn't, that the only truth that we know is that all truth is relative.

[00:49:09] And so, telling the truth is like the most important thing to me, and then when we get into talking about the dynamics with a partner where they're not really telling their whole truth, most people can't even sit with the discomfort of that. And so, physical dysfunction is often a distraction from emotional discomfort, where it's like, oh, well, if I can just project that there's something wrong with my eyes, then that can help me escape other internal things of what I don't want to see.

[00:49:39] And so, like when you start to look at what is the function of a body part, eyes see things. Is there anything you don't want to see? Is there anything you're afraid to see? And really just self-reflecting in those questions as you answer those questions, then the body no longer has to give the cue because the body can only deliver ideas through sensation and experience. So, the more that we started going, okay, so it's around sight. Is there anything you don't want to see, you're afraid to see, you're afraid you won't be able to see? 

[00:50:11] And start from this self-awareness and the body starts to reacclimate. Why are some people going through these crazy medical feats that are absolute miracles when other people have issues, they just go to a regular doctor and something bad happens. So much of it has to do with what the deep truths of the organism are, and then we see it as like—we even talk to our biome, right? All the bugs in the cells and the viruses, regardless of what kind, I do intentional ceremonies to work in harmony with those too, with my body. And so, in psychedelic spaces, with plant medicines, animal medicines, I am talking to my body first, right? 

[00:50:57] Is there anything that we are afraid to see? Will you show me so that when I go into a psychedelic environment or into spirit, that my body can help me the conduit for the messages? I can say they come through source and God. I can say I am source and God. And ultimately, for me, what difference does it make? It doesn't to me, so it's like, what are the messages? What do I want to experience? What is coming up? And as we sat with those questions with him, that's when it started to open up and change. So, is it that his sight is opening up? Maybe, but it doesn't really matter. 

[00:51:34]Tah Whitty:  It doesn't make any difference. The fact that I can perceive is a gift. And I'm so grateful for my ability to perceive that I'm even sitting here. It's awesome. So, I always encourage people who think that there's no hope to make a decision, man. And regardless of what it looks like in the moment, you have decided and you are not wavering on your decision. 

[00:51:58]Kole Whitty:  And what support do you need to stay in the decision? 

[00:52:01]Tah Whitty:  And how do you create a team of people around you to fortify that decision? If you start to fall off, hey, hey, hey, let's get back on it, what do we need? How do we do this as a community, as a family, or whatever you want to call it? And the people around me have been a tremendous support in me deciding with my eyes to keep them where they are and expand them even more. 

[00:52:25]Kole Whitty:  And that's the integration process. There's the deciding, what is the integration of the decision? What's the integration of the realization in a shamanic ceremony, or in a realization from a Tony Robbins event, or whatever? Without the integration process, like you said, it's still an idea. And it might have given you a nice little hormone kick for a minute to feel good, but that's still an instant gratification, not something that's going to actually get the system congruent with the experience you want to have, which is why we watch with a lot of entrepreneurs. 

[00:53:00] They'll go from ceremony to ceremony every month because they have the realization, they do not apply the realization, they don't leave the relationship that's not functional, they don't have the conversation with the business partner that they're really not in alignment to that business anymore, whatever it is, we call it your life team. Who are the people that support the transformation and the evolution of you? Who are they? It can be a coach. It can be a biohacker.

[00:53:31] It can be a physician, a best friend, your mom. That's cool. But until you get clear on where you are, it's like GPS. We couldn't have found our way to here today if we didn't know where we were starting from. And getting that attunement first, getting really clear on that is how, but then we find mentors, then we find your podcast. We find the breadcrumbs to find our path in the way that's resonant. And I think that a lot of people really don't explain what integration is.

[00:54:00] It's not just talking about the experience afterwards, it's, what is the application of the knowing? Who do you need to tell? And I think that a lot of people don't take it to that step, because if they tell people, then they will be held accountable, and then they really would have to step into it. And most people are afraid of their own power, which is why something like an AA and NA wasn't functional for me. There was still a deep disempowerment of the self because I was still not stronger than the substance.

[00:54:33] And now that I realized what I was really missing, substances actually were giving me connection and the only way I'd ever experienced it before. Once I identified what need the substance fulfilled, I just needed to fulfill that need. So, it was through connection. It was through authenticity, and people that could accept me and not judge me for stuff that I had done. And so, as I grew through the AA process, as I worked for the UN, and teaching about substance abuse education, and doing shows like The Montel Williams Show and all the big publications 20 years ago, what I saw is that we weren't getting to the hurt, we weren't getting to what was causing the dysfunction.

[00:55:15] So, okay, we get them to stop abusing cocaine, but now, they're drinking 46 cups of coffee, smoking two packs of cigarettes, and eating a shit ton of sugar because the system is still trying to consume to fill. You can't fill a black hole of despair, sadness, and disconnection. And that's why animals are so potent for so many people is it gives that connection. And I recognized even in animal rescue, I would go, and volunteer, and take in four or five rescues, and they destroy my house, and whatever, I was still trying to make up for everything. I was trying to save myself in all the lost cause dogs, especially pit bulls. No shocker.

[00:55:58]Luke Storey:  I know the type.

[00:55:59]Kole Whitty:  Yes, I think that's probably a lot of the listeners are the types.

[00:56:02]Luke Storey:  Yeah. If you're listening and you rescued a pit bull, keep that shit on a chain you can control, I'm just going to say that. I swear to God. Now that I have my little dog, I think I showed you guys, it's similar to you all's dog. Her name is Cookie. Maybe she's a little fatter, got a little fatty because she won't have to go to therapy ever for that. But yeah, I'll be walking her, man, and here comes like some 5'2" girl, no offense to the girls with the pit bulls, but like you ain't big enough to hold that dog back. And like [making sounds] I was like, God, why do you adopt a dog like that if you can't handle it? 

[00:56:34]Kole Whitty:  Well, I mean, for me, animals are always an expression of the owner. And for me, I had pit bulls that were amazing dogs and I knew what I was taking on. It's like anything, it's awareness. Even in saving the dog, I knew the goal in having the animal was so that it could be placed in a home safely. And people don't save themselves, so the idea that we can just save an animal, and not spend the time and intentionality on ourselves, saving animals was a distraction from me doing the work on myself.

[00:57:04] And what I realized, one of my big aha coming home, going to church moments for me was when I realized that I was trapping myself and saving four or five animals at a time with the idea that I was trying to save things that were helpless. And when I started to see the animals as a reflection of me, as I started to do my own healing, oh, wow, look at that, I started to make more money. Guess what animal rescues always need? Money. And so, when I looked at the bigger picture of the contribution I wanted to make, the more money I make, the more animals I save.

[00:57:39] When I was saving four or five, just between dog food and vet bills, I couldn't afford anything else. And so, it was the acknowledgement. If I really get clear on my intention, then that means I'm going to have to push pause, I got down to only two dogs because the others found their homes, and it was dialing in on myself because my greatest contribution is finance. There is not a nonprofit on this planet that is not in need of more finance. And so, I realized like that would be the gift to the animals I wanted to save, but it was really me avoiding doing the work on myself. And maybe if I saved enough dogs, that would help save my soul.

[00:58:18]Luke Storey:  When you guys started exploring, I guess you were a little later into the plant medicines and whatnot, Tah, what was the turning point, though, for, I guess, you guys working together where you started to facilitate and guide people through journeys? And also, how has that evolved? I know based on our brief conversation before we recorded, you moving more into kind of training facilitators-ish or something like that. 

[00:58:42] So, I'm just curious kind of what that journey has been, because like you're saying, when it comes to getting down to the root of things, I was sober for a long time, had a great life, successful career, very happy, but there were still areas in which I was stuck, primarily around relationships. Like the kind of relationship I have now, the kind that you guys have. So many expanders in my life now are modeling that kind of healthy connection, but that was just like, I always say, the last frontier is when you really dropped. 

[00:59:13]Kole Whitty:  Died?

[00:59:14]Luke Storey:  Yeah. I mean, not just the physical body, but that you're okay with not existing anymore in any form, I guess. So, there's always a further surrender and a further merging with God. But in terms of the human realm, like that really was the piece that was like hitting against the wall, against the wall. And the plant medicines over the past couple of years have just revolutionized my entire life. And speaking of honesty, it would be dishonest to minimize that and act like that hasn't been the case because I'm a sober guy.

[00:59:45] Like I don't drink or do drugs. A lot of people have find that dichotomy, I think, hard to swallow because of the traditional recovery paradigm, it's about complete abstinence. And that was my first 22 years. Complete abstinence, nothing. Coffee, cigarettes, porn, sugar, three pints of Haagen-Dazs in the early days of recovery. I guess the difference between recovery and sobriety, I'm totally going off a tangent here. I'm going to reel it back in.

[01:00:11] What I'm getting at is I would like to explain my experiences and the growth I've had in that realm responsibly and encourage people to really do their due diligence, to say the least, because it's a slippery slope. And it can be incredibly healing, transformational, but I know at least one person personally that kind of went off the rails and is having a little bit of hard time getting back to this place. And that was pretty scary for me. So, what's the journey been for you guys in the world of journeys? What are the medicines you've taken? What have they done for you? Which ones have you served? How did you get to that point? And where are you going now?

[01:00:54]Tah Whitty:  Okay. Well, since you started, start with your journey.

[01:00:58]Kole Whitty:  Well, I mean, there's always going to be a lot to it, for sure, right? The thing was, because I was coming from the sobriety background, because I had worked for partnership for a drug-free America, I'd spoken at not all, a good large amount of universities, and schools, and all this stuff, my biggest thing was feeling like, how dare I go do and even consider this type of work? Because it felt like then I would have lied to and discredited anything I had ever done or said before that. 

[01:01:31] And my entire existence had been built on the significance of my story and surviving a coma from a drug overdose. And now, you're inspiring. And I didn't graduate from high school, but I was making six figures by 21 on my own. Like all of these things that on paper, should have made someone happy, and I realized that even as I would speak and go through 200-ish a day after they'd been filtered as a 20-year-old, I didn't have a therapeutic background as far as any sort of education. 

[01:02:03] And I realized I was trying to make up for everything I wasn't. I was trying to make up for anything I'd ever done wrong. And I could only see the people I wasn't saving. And so, I stepped out of speaking when I recognized that this was another way I was just killing myself, and being hard on myself, and that I was connecting to them through trauma and through pain, which was actually increasing it and almost getting the roots deeper into my system.

[01:02:32] And so, I said, I'm going to step out, and do my own work, and hopefully, I'll come back someday from a "healed perspective" so that I can inspire people to get there. And so, it was about six years that I was out of speaking. And I was a bartender, and sold motors and generators, and worked for T-Mobile, and like all these really bizarre, all over the place careers when my body wouldn't do it anymore, and that's when my healing crisis came, was that my body was like, remember, you said you stopped so we could look at our shit?

[01:03:09] Well, now is the time. And that came to a head. I was 26. I was at Disneyland with my ex-in-laws, and after a couple hours, I sat on the ground and I just started crying. The physical pain I had in my body, the swelling in my knees, I was like, if this is what 26 is, I'm not interested in 46, or 56, or beyond. And I was so inflamed, miserable in a marriage that wasn't functional that it had to be just the right combination of everything for me to even consider psychedelics, because I had not only the societal conditioning of substance abuse and the DARE program in partnership for a drug free America, I had my parents' fear because my parents were there for my coma.

[01:03:54] So then, it was the family construct, then there was the religious construct, then there, all of these things on top of it, if it wouldn't have been the exact friend at the exact time and just enough synchronicities in life for me to ignore, I wouldn't have done it, right? But it calls to you when it's time, and there is a dance between seeking it out and it finding you. It's kind of both dance that's always happening.

[01:04:21]Luke Storey:  Pardon, a brief interruption. It's that same dance, I think, I'm always playing with in another way, because I want to tell everyone in the world to go smoke DMT right now, like honestly. Like even sitting here talking to you guys, you guys said you hadn't done it, and I'm like waiting until the end of the interview, so I could be like, you guys, alright, straight up, like we got to talk. But karmically, that's not my job. I'm not God.

[01:04:45]Kole Whitty:  Yes. And the thing is like the sharing is the radio signal. And to me, the times that it's dysfunctional is when all the sharing is done, and not any of the warnings, or considerations, or questions someone should ask or could ask for their sovereignty and to check in with themselves because that's something that I've witnessed. And we've done other DMT. There's lots of other plants and animals on this big, beautiful world we live on.

[01:05:13] And what my biggest message in doing the plant work was that because my work was meant in this third dimension, for me to spend a lot of time outside of it would be like a theme park. Like I would go to experience it and it would be interesting, but that there wouldn't actually be any benefit for me to do any more exploring outside of my body and outside of the third dimension. And that's when our business—because we were personal trainers before and we saw how emotionally it showed up in people's bodies. 

[01:05:45] So, as I got into my first plant journey, it was hysterical because the facilitators from Peru, and he also is versed in body language, and psychology, and all this stuff, and I went to lean back, and I was trying to like look natural so he couldn't read my body language, and I know it just made it worse, and in that experience, that the one outcome that's all I needed was to let myself off the hook for being an addict anymore because I was still wearing that as an identity.

[01:06:19] And I realized that I wasn't the person that had been the addict. I had changed and evolved in so many ways that that person wasn't even there anymore. And so, for me, to continue to hold on to it, the message I got was, well, you were a toddler once, do you still say I'm a toddler or a recovering toddler? No, you grew up. And so, my first journey, that was the gift, to say, I'm not an addict. I have tools now. I have community now. I have resources and places to go. I will never end up in that place again.

[01:06:51] And if I start making decisions that look questionable because I was very honest with everyone reflect that to me in case I'm missing it, in case my body and some old habits start to creep in. So, that's what kicked off my initial one. But for the first six years before I started working with Tah, it was really about getting my body repatterned from physical pain. So, the facilitators that I would work with, the goal was just to bring my body a sense of peace so that I could memorize the sensation of being at ease, because I'd had so many broken bones, and so many traumas, and fibromyalgia, and endometriosis, and all these things that were creating a system of pain that, neurologically, my brain was hard wired for pain.

[01:07:40] And so, my first four years was almost primarily just to teach my body how to relax, just to memorize an anchor with music, the sensations of pain free, the feeling of space in my joints so that I could then practice it outside of the shamanic space. So, it was then bringing awareness to what pain-free is because I couldn't perceive it before. I might notice a moment sitting in the car of like, oh, wait, there's no pain. 

[01:08:13] And pinning it, recognizing it, and then seeing how long I could be in that pain-free moment, it might only be 30 seconds at first, but after my pain crossed the threshold of five out of 10 and it got below a five out of ten, I was like, wait, does this mean pain-free is possible? And when I found out pain-free was possible, that was my commitment to facilitation, was that with all that needs to transpire with humanity for evolution, pain is the biggest blocker of contribution and connection.

[01:08:45] And so, it was like, I'm here to help any person who is doing the work, who is changing the environment, who is really showing up in the integration of the truth and the knowing of being able to step out of, yeah, it's hard to stop eating some foods and it's that important, all the changes I had to make. Shockingly, my American diet of fast food, and Ambien for dinner, and energy drinks to wake up, and those big like cedar-helmed bottle of wines every night. So, the bravest act that comes through this work is letting go of things you think you love to learn what love is.

[01:09:27]Luke Storey:  Yeah, that's beautiful. It brings me back to the first moment a couple of years ago that I drank my second cup of ayahuasca in a ceremony. The first one for those that haven't done it kind of just gets you in the zone, you're getting ready, but then that second one [making sound] . And man, I mean, I thought about it for months because I was a sober guy. Like I'm going to a program. Like I sponsor guys. Like it's a thing, it's an identity, but a much looser one than it had been because it had been a couple of decades and all that.

[01:09:58] But then, I will never forget the freedom I experience when that medicine hit me and I knew that I could trust myself. I was like, I'm good, this is good, I'm fine. And it was just like, oh, my God. Because I was like, I'm an addict, I'm an addict, I'm an addict, can't do this, can't do that, not to say I'm going to go out and recreationally try to smoke some heroin this weekend or something, but it's like, I still have my non-negotiables absolutely out of it, but it's because they put you to sleep.

[01:10:37] Those things, they took me out of who I really am. And I guess, difference between a drug and a medicine, really, is a medicine can bring you right set and setting, can bring you more into who you really are, but that moment of surrendering that identity and that there was a label for myself. And it was a while, and I don't even know if I've crossed this, it's like, well, how do I even describe what I am or my approach to drugs and alcohol? Because I wouldn't say by the strict confines of sobriety that I'm sober because I take mind-altering substances from time to time.

[01:11:13]Kole Whitty:  But when you look at how many substances are mind-altering, like sugar, sunlight, they alter your mind. And so, this was actually something that came from Dr. Dan Stickler that was a big changer for me and my perspective, because I used to be a purist of like, I only do natural things, I don't do LSD, whatever rules I had assigned, and then we started talking about the integration of the organism, and just, if I'm clear on what I want and I put my options out on the table, whether it's a plant, a substance, a sugar, a food, a person, an environment, what puts me in alignment to the experience I want to have and what takes me away. 

[01:11:52] Even if I separate the idea of vibratory is higher than or lower than, and remove any hierarchy, if I just say that it's all perfect as it is, what is in service to what I desire. Not what I deserve, what I desire. Because for us, we even shifted from saying plant medicine to saying power plants. We work with teachers and allies that our plants for the personal empowerment of my contribution to this planet as chosen by me, called by, we can say whoever, whatever. 

[01:12:23] At the end of the day, when I removed the need to judge or discern one is better than or worse than, then I didn't make excuses for sugar or like weird things. Stevia does not work in my system. It doesn't like it. But that's not a "bad substance." It's not functional. So, when I started saying, what is this functional for, what is this dysfunctional for, how does it align in my past and just stay in that decision, then I was free of the shame device. The shame device was what was the most destructive in my organism.

[01:12:58] And we say all the time, biohacking is cool, biointegration is key. If you're not integrating with your environment and building intimacy within the organism, the environment that the organism lives in, they no longer became a need to discern if anything was right or wrong, that's a human construct. Only how do I want to feel does this, assist that, or support that, or not, and life got a whole lot easier. 

[01:13:27]Luke Storey:  I had a conversation with one of my mentors who is a really profound, long-time sober, 30-something years meditation teacher. And he called me one day after I very publicly was doing ayahuasca and all the things. And the phone rang, and I was like, oh, shit, I'm busted. You know what I mean? Because I hadn't really talked to anyone in my recovery world about it, because it's just like, how do you even contextualize that? It's just unless someone's had the experience, I don't know that you could even go there.

[01:14:00] Anyway, the phone rang. I'm like, oh, shit, I'm busted. And he's like, hey, how's it going? Well, I hadn't talked to him in a long time and I never told anyone in my recovery circles that I was going to Costa Rica, not because of judgment. It's just, I didn't want the experience tainted by any guilt, even unknowingly or unintentionally going, really, dude? Well, what about blah, blah, blah? No, I know what I'm doing, I know why I'm going there, and I know this is what I'm supposed to do.

[01:14:23] I don't know how to explain it. Anyway, I picked up the phone. He said, hey, so how are you doing? So, good, good, man, in a great relationship, career's going great, life's really sweet at the moment. And he said, yeah, I kind of heard the grapevine, you've been exploring some psychedelics and stuff. And I said, Yeah, yeah. He said, well, tell me about it, I'm just curious. And he was really calling because he was curious. He had read Michael Pollan's book, and he was going, huh, there's this whole thing happening here, I'm very curious about it.

[01:14:49] I don't know if he was cured because he wanted to participate, but he just wanted to talk, I think, firsthand to someone and how it related to sobriety. And at the end of that maybe 23-minute call, like how I closed it, I said, you know what, man, it's a really odd thing, because if I know if I were using a certain set of chemicals right now, my life would be devastated, destroyed, everything I built would be gone. I would have no relationship with my family, loved ones, friends.

[01:15:20] I have lost my home. I would have lost my career. I would have lost my health. I would just be, by every metric, completely floored. I just know because I've done it a million times. Yeah. I was a different person, but kind of not. Like I think if I smoked crack right now, the outcome would be pretty similar. It wouldn't be good. So, I said, yeah, it's weird, man. I said, wow, I never thought about it, but every area of my life, it's so much better than it's ever been. 

[01:15:51] And that doesn't happen when I'm using. And that's the thing. It's like, it's not a defense. It's just like, it's just the truth. And my relationship with Alyson and just everything, every area of life that you could judge like, is this improving or not? We're going the other direction. It just is. I don't know. It's wild and it's totally counterintuitive. But I think that's what I got from what you're saying, is just like, is it adding to your life or taking away from your life? And sometimes, little things take away from my life and I'm willing to take the hit, you know what I'm saying? 

[01:16:24] Like some sugar, or some Instagram-binging, going into Twitter, political Twitter for a couple hours just freaking out about the virus, and whatever, the election shit, like I'll go there kind of knowing, alright, I'm getting some dopamine shit right here and I'm just going to roll with it, but I'm less and less interested in those compulsive kind of hits. And in the sex realm, like so many kind of addictive compulsive tendencies, I didn't even do anything. I was abstinent for almost two years. That was a good start in breaking some of those patterns, but it's like I don't have to think about that now. It's just like, it's balanced, it's healthy. 

[01:17:03]Tah Whitty:  Right. It's what are you using things for, the idea of using drugs, right? You're a user. People who are on computers are users, right? The language that we tie into these things can be very dangerous. When we use the word medicine versus drugs, and, oh, no, this is medicine. And I hear people say this stuff all the time, but they use the medicine in the same way that somebody else is using a drug. And it's detaching yourself from a title or a polarity. And what is the substance functional for?

[01:17:34] I have a friend that uses cocaine every Thursday. He has a ceremony and he journeys with cocaine. And this is his space. And one of the reasons that he's in that space is because I never judged him when he was using. And I would always, do you want me to be around? And I was the first person that he was really comfortable doing his substance, and he started to establish a relationship with it and where he was going. He wasn't fighting to connect with something. He was actually connecting with it. And so, he goes into this space and it's a whole setup. There are lights. There's incense. There's all this stuff. There's music. There's setting. There's intention.

[01:18:18] And he goes in and he has his connection with it. And he finds these really expansive spaces with cocaine. Okay. And this is a possibility for all things. And I'm not telling people to run out and go do cocaine with intention. I'm not saying that. But the stigmas that we've been placing on things are functional for what, right? When you look at LSD in the '60s and the '70s, when you look at mushrooms, all of these things were slapped with the title, street drugs, and they were abandoned and pushed into the space. And now, all of a sudden, they're in Vogue and it's medicine.

[01:18:52]Kole Whitty:  But the same happens with rape or hape. It's a plant medicine. It's also highly addictive. So, if you aren't aware of that, just because you use something with intentionality, when your nose starts bleeding, your body's trying to tell you, maybe let's take a break. 

[01:19:07]Tah Whitty:  And it's, what are you using things for? It's just like, Kole was talking about with food. What are you eating food for? Are you eating it strictly for pleasure? Are you using it for pleasure or are you eating it to fortify your organism, and to uphold it, and to create new skin, and new nails, and stuff that fortify and protect you from the environment or falling down? Are your bones strong enough? Are you eating processed stuff that's just giving you a quick fix of pleasure?

[01:19:33] You're getting a dopamine rush from this stuff. What are you eating? What are you utilizing? What are you breathing this stuff for? Why are you filtering your water? People have these water filters. They have no idea why they're doing it and if they're being manipulated by a system for finance or whatever. Are you intimate with all of these things? And when you get intimate with a substance, and that's what we call all of these things, they're substances, they are of this planet, whether we manipulate them in a chemistry lab, or we grow them in a forest, or against a tree, or whatever, in their backyard, or hydroponics, they're all substances. How are you becoming intimate with that substance?

[01:20:07] And are you intimate with the feeling or what's going on in your body with how it's shifting you, with how it's altering you? If it's not altering you, what are the feelings that you're having? Are you writing the stuff down? Are you journaling? Are you making yourself the experiment or are you just having things happen to you? These are all potentials. And as I've moved into my life, we have released the judgment from everything and everybody, that's where I've started to really become able to find compassion and consideration for all the people and the things around me.

[01:20:37] And as a nurse, where I was brainwashed that anything outside of what the pharmaceutical companies was creating was the devil. I was brainwashed, man, into the idea of drugs. Now, when people say drugs, my body, I can feel it in my body as my body starts to resist. Anything that's titled a street drug or anything like that, there's a resistance. And I've been moving myself into a place where I'm unraveling that. It took me a lot to have my first journey on Sassafras, the wildest thing, a lot.

[01:21:06] That was probably one of the most courageous things I did, and I'm glad I had a person to keep me safe and a whole container of people that actually kept me safe in that space so that I could realign myself into something that has actually helped me to expand in ways I never would have considered if I was leaning into the healthcare industry and who's been jacking people up in front of me for 25 years. So, for me to be able to be in a space to realign my idea of what a drug is and what people are doing in the shadows, I've watched people have more transformations, and explorations, and growth in psychedelics than I ever have at the hospitals ever. 

[01:21:42] And like we've had clients come and work with us without psychedelics that are not working with us with psychedelics, but have worked with psychedelics on their own that are off medications, that are off all this stuff, their relationships are realigned, all of these things are happening because these people are utilizing these substances with intention. And when you move into a space where you remove all the stigmas and all the nonsense from all of this stuff, and just see it for what it is, what does this do?

[01:22:09] We have all this wonderful science that has showed us how these things coincide with our bodies. Can you lean into it? Can you get off Facebook for an hour, and go, and research the stuff that you're doing for an hour a day so that you can see what coincides with your body, the plants that work for you? There are certain plants you can put in your house that change the whole vibrational frequency in the house that stop all of the harmful bacteria from getting to you, all of these different things, man. When we start to really look into substance without all the stigma, that's where magic happens, man. 

[01:22:40]Luke Storey:  I can only imagine some of the miracles that you guys have seen. It's pretty common that if I'm in a ceremony, I'm thinking like, man, I got to learn how to serve this medicine. Like I want to just be witness to the miracle as creation accesses us through these different molecules. It's such a fascinating realm to me. I can imagine you guys have really seen some pretty incredible stuff. 

[01:23:07]Kole Whitty:  We do. I think that the really incredible stuff is the bravery afterwards, when people make the decision, when they take the step. Like we had one girl one time that was like, that's it, I need to end the relationship. And she called like two hours after she left, she's like, well, it's done. I was like, whoa, whoa. Because usually, we say, no, don't make big decisions like that, give it a few days, let it breathe. Sometimes, seems really true in the moment, and then there's the truth of everything going into it.

[01:23:36] But the hole at the end of the day, the only reason I feel like I really do this work is so that more people will come out and have fun with me. So, that means if I've got to get the shovel and help you get the shit out of the way so that we could get you out of the driveways, so we can go do something, I'm in for it without doing it for someone. It's that I know the depth of pleasure I'm able to experience in my life now because of working through a lot of traumas.

[01:24:02] And it took multiple containers. And I think that's the important thing, is finding a container that is resonant in your current process. Maybe where you want to be, but there's a few things for me that are huge red flags. And that's one if the person uses a lot of shame language. If you don't dare to right or prepare right, it's going to ruin your experience. Just things that are very definitive like that are things that I watch for because that means they're may be serving from a space of a pedestalization.

[01:24:33] And so, if that pedestal exists, for me, I'm more likely to go into a self-shame, I'm not good enough space. So, asking yourself these questions ahead of time can really help in those spaces, but it's like when you go into a shamanic or like we say that we're woo-adjacent. So, we love all the woo-woo. We got the feather cleansings and we've studied with a lot of tribes, in Medicine Man, including deros, and all this, but we're really woo-adjacent, which is why we work with so many like biohackers and physicians, is because we can speak to the science of what happens on a neuroplastic level when I can take someone into a visualization during a ceremony so that we can actually rewrite their physicality and the actual like brain programming, the instinctual intelligence of the body. 

[01:25:22] For us, the body is the metric of congruence. No matter how much mindset work you do, if the body isn't congruent, it's giving signs all the time, injuries that don't heal, headaches again, can't sleep, a little restless, whatever it is, for us, to help people learn the language of their body, to help translate that with them is the miracle for me. What I get to witness is cool, but I know that even I can't imagine.

[01:25:47] And we tell people all the time, the greatest gift I have is to be a witness to someone, to watch their relationship change because they realize they've been treating their spouse like shit, to see them go back and really learn presence with their kids, like to me, those are the miracles that we're surrounded in every day, which boost our gratitude and people that can hold space for us because we don't pretend that we aren't in our own shit. In fact, the people in our circles will be like, will you call me when you're freaking out? I want to see. I'm like, alright, I hope you're ready. Buckle up, buddy, because when it comes, it's a dragon.

[01:26:24]Luke Storey:  It's a doozy, man. And I'm glad you went there because this is where I'm going with it too, the aftereffects of the journeys and how people's families, their whole families have shifted, up to their parents and grandparents, down to their kids, their kids' friends, all of these things start to happen. There's this exponentiating of expansion in all directions. We've had people come off of diabetic medications, high blood pressure medications, people's eyesight changing. We've had people's hearing situation shift, speech impediments change.

[01:26:59]Kole Whitty:  Make millions of dollars more off of the same products they were already using. Like it translates in everything. I think that part of it is it's leaving the space open that the miracle may not happen in the journey. It will happen after the journey if you'll keep reminding yourself what it takes to show up for the miracle.

[01:27:18]Luke Storey:  I remember when we did the preparatory call with you two and myself when I was going to come out here and journey with you guys, and there was a lot of emphasis on the body. I remember that. I don't remember the details of the call, but I think it's interesting. They're like very interested in how I'm doing in the body and what that's like. And I see a little bit now, for someone who's like such an avid biohacker, I don't really care about the body that much. It's like, I just want to get the bodies to get the soul where I'm trying to go in terms of my evolution. But I did have one really powerful experience back home with psilocybin and MDMA in which my body started doing this thing, man. 

[01:28:00] Like my legs, I had these like hip problems and lower back problems that my hips are super tight, started like undulating, and just having this, I don't know, some trippy Kundalini shit going on. It was wild. And I'm like, I'm not doing it. The shaman who was leading me, I'm a slow metabolizer of medicine, like I'm always the last one in the maloka. I'm like, what? The ceremony's over? You guys are tripping. Like I'm just going in. Like I just scratched the surface. I'm ready to like do this shit. But anyway, he had to leave. He's like, I'm so sorry, this is really awkward. Are you okay? And I'm like, no, no. 

[01:28:37]Kole Whitty:  He's like, I have a Facetime in 10 minutes.

[01:28:41]Luke Storey:  No. He's like, I have a medium. Like I had no idea you were going to go so long. No one ever does. I'm like, that's me. So, he leaves and my body is just doing this thing, man. I was like, oh, my God. And I saw where the pain came from. It was abuse when I was a kid, I was like, oh, my God. And there was this whole relationship that I built with my body. And I had so deeply dishonored and ignored my body as its own living entity. It was just like this thing I got to drag around, it's just utilitarian, like an old, beat-up car. It's like, I don't give a shit about that car.

[01:29:16]Kole Whitty:  Opening the other car, is taking meters off on the side of the street.

[01:29:19]Luke Storey:  And I was like, oh, my God, I'm so sorry. And there was this beautiful, beautiful awakening of the body. And I thought in that moment, since these energy movements were so powerful that it was going to be one of those healings. And then, like I was going to have full range of motion in my hips, like I was like, oh, my God, it's finally happening. I'm getting one of those like Joe Dispenza healings. And then, I still was moving even when I got home.

[01:29:44] And the next day, it was like happening a little bit. And then, I went back to the old form. So, it was this profound experience of acknowledging my body as its own living entity. And I don't know that I've been able to integrate that so much. It was like, oh, my God, here is this thing like I love you so much. I'm so sorry. And then, came out of the experience, was like, eh, I didn't get spontaneous healing, back to business as usual.

[01:30:10]Kole Whitty:  Well, the thing is, the is process-oriented. And so, we can have a big spiritual realization, and in certain ways, that can immediately translate, but like I said, it took me four years for my body to repattern itself from its way of being. Paul Chek talks about this or has in the past as well about athletes even after an injury is healed, that they still have the gate of the injury, because from, say, hobbling for a while, it creates a new muscular system or a new pattern that it's holding, the body is still holding.

[01:30:40] Now, what I learned in the psychedelic space was that the plants or the spirit, however it translates for each person was the opportunity for me to see what's possible with my continued support. Something that in retrospect now, we make way more money in fractions of the time. People talk about an abundance and manifestation, how I view it is that I spent so much time supporting this radio signal tower that it takes less effort to broadcast further.

[01:31:16] And so, as I started doing ceremonies where I would close my eyes and literally talk to my cells, and be like, so this is the direction we're heading, guys, this is what we're looking for, and I had a moment in Austin, I guess it was in our old house, so maybe last fall, November maybe, that I was in a journey that Tah and I did together, he and I, and I had the moment that I shot a flare gun up in my mind. And I said, alright, world, if you need me, I am here, come and find me.

[01:31:48] And that's when we changed. Like if you look at our social media following, it's very small, but the thing is we are very clear in what we're broadcasting. Not what we're doing, but who we are. And people, if they see something within us that they want, they reach out, and say, hey, I'd like to talk to you. The what we do is irrelevant. It's that people see something within our skin, our eyes, the way we carry ourselves that is so tangible that especially now with how isolated humanity is, that it's like whatever that is, I want it.

[01:32:23] And as we started to move that every cell in this body is energy and when I work together with this energy, it becomes a force that always feels amazing. And there's no way I could have ever had that as the goal. It was more, first, it was suck less, suck less, cool. Now, it just mostly sucks. Now, it's just like, half the time, it sucks. Alright. It sucks a few times a day to, all of a sudden, it was like, even the moments that the pain can come back, I know it's only a signal and it's my reminder to pause. 

[01:33:00] And the gratitude I have for my body of like, wow, what a fantastic metric system to let me know to slow down and check in. Because when you're in a race, when you're at some of these like high-speed racing that a lot of our friends here in Austin like to do, breaking is as important as the gas when it comes to winning, and not to compare this to winning so much as obtaining objectives. If my goal on this planet is to support the freedom of as many people as possible, it's not going to come through what state in the US they live in or what political system they live in.

[01:33:41] What I can do is help them free their mind. And when I look at someone like Nelson Mandela or some of the people that survived like the Rwandan Holocaust and people that have inspired me, it's all of them. It was a freedom and a connection to God in their mind, and letting go of the ideas, and the expectations, and anticipations that were the anchors dragging them to the bottom of the ocean, and I realized that I had been disassociating from my body because it felt like a prison, because of the pain. 

[01:34:14] And in going back to my body and really reconnecting to it in the way that I have, the deep gratitude that I have for my body now, it is an honor to pause for every breath. It's an honor to witness someone in their energy because it is the container that perceives it, not my spirit. My spirit doesn't have a feeling, my body does. That's the hormones. That is the man behind the curtain pushing all the shit, or woman behind the curtain, or being, creature, whatever, that when I started to see the gift that the body is, that's when everything started to change.

[01:34:55] That's when the diseases let go because I really started to be in my body. And before, I feel like I was squatting in it, like shitting on the rug, because who cares? And there's a broken window over there. Like to me, to fully cherish this body is the greatest gift and I could die tomorrow knowing that I had the fullest experience of being human. And that's pretty okay.

[01:35:21]Luke Storey:  Thank you for that. What about you? What's happening in your body with the medicine work and the various experiences that you've had and continue to have?

[01:35:32]Tah Whitty:  Oh, man. I mean, starting off with that first sassafras experience was pretty expansive for me. And I stayed in heart. I stayed working in heart stuff for a good six months before I explored into anything else. And then, after that, I exploded into something called mah, which is mushrooms, and ayahuasca, and cacao.

[01:35:51]Luke Storey:  Whoa, damn.

[01:35:52]Tah Whitty:  Yeah, it's pretty awesome stuff.

[01:35:54]Kole Whitty:  Well, it's slightly different. It doesn't have the chacruna, so it's the vine with mushroom. That's a whole other podcast episode.

[01:36:00]Luke Storey:  Wow. Damn. 

[01:36:02]Tah Whitty:  Yeah. And so, my exploration started to expand and I started to learn how to navigate that space. And so, dude, when Kole and I were were operating, people would bring us to journeys, because people would gravitate towards us, and we'd help move them through processes, and get them to start integrating while they were in the journey. And so, people would have us, they would want us at their journeys. So, we kept them safe. And all of this stuff started to happen and open up.

[01:36:33] And so, I explored a lot of different plants in the lineage that I was working with, and it helped me to really start to understand the difference between body, spirit, heart, and mind, and the different plants that open you up into those spaces. And so, once I started to get into that space, I started to feel more connected, people started asking us to come out to more and more stuff.

[01:36:56] And so, we would go to the events and we would help people move through stuff, but when my processes would come up, there is some times my processes would get a little bit loud. And me being in this position where I was helping people, some of the facilitators, number one, they didn't like that I was moving people through stuff, that at first, they were bringing me the stuff, and then it was like, oh, well, no, I'm the person in charge here. So, the way I was helping people move through stuff started to give people egoic challenges. Both of us started to give people ego challenges.

[01:37:33]Kole Whitty:  We were a bit too much for a lot of people.

[01:37:35]Tah Whitty:  And then, if I was in my process, and my process, I moved a little too much or I cried a little too loud, it was scary for the new people, and I was getting hushed. So now, I was in a space where I was getting hushed. 

[01:37:42]Luke Storey:  Oh, that's brutal. 

[01:37:43]Tah Whitty:  Yeah. And so, I was being hushed. 

[01:37:46]Luke Storey:  God, you're so vulnerable when you're in a journey. I'd never want to be told like, yeah, tone it down, like what? Bad trip. 

[01:37:53]Tah Whitty:  Tone it down, go in the back room where we can't see you, stuff like that. And so, we started to we started to kind of back away from a bunch of different communities. And people were like, where are you? We'd love the way you work, and we always felt safe with you, and blah, blah, blah, when are you guys going to start doing some stuff? And we were like, oh, we're not really looking to facilitate. And so, we ended up going to Peru in 2015 and we got married on top of Machu Picchu Mountain. 

[01:38:25]Kole Whitty:  It was amazing.

[01:38:26]Tah Whitty:  Amazing. And that's where we first encountered wachuma or San Pedro for those who are more familiar by that name. And it kind of changed. We experience ayahuasca and wachuma during the same trip. And the grounding, and the connectivity, and the depth of wachuma kind of took Kole into this really, really, really deep place. And I love it. Like wachuma is pretty awesome. And so, we started to explore that with ourselves. And that's a space that we started to explore. Kole went back to Peru for three weeks.

[01:39:05]Kole Whitty:  Just to study with some of my teachers, yeah.

[01:39:10]Tah Whitty:  Just to study wachuma. And so, a huge gift for her to be able to go back and explore in that depth. And I was exploring. I explored on my own by myself at home. And so, we started to get into this space, and then people were like, you guys are going to facilitate anything? So, we started to do some small groups of people, and people were like, oh, my gosh, this is what I've been looking for. And so, it's not blasting me into outer space and it's helping keeping me grounded, but I'm still able to be expansive and bring stuff to the surface. This is unlike anything I've ever experienced.

[01:39:46] So, people started asking us to do more and more around this stuff. So, we started to organize trips to Peru. We started to bring people out there and we started to really get deep with folks in that space. And so, that's what expanded us into really getting into the facilitation space. And so, we started to explore more and more, and deeper and deeper, and people started to commission us for groups, and they would bring us out to places to do groups. So, that's basically how we got into the facilitation realm from my vantage point.

[01:40:14]Kole Whitty:  But I mean, even in personal training, we were facilitating. It's like when you realize that all the work we've been doing in body, we were doing that with clients as personal trainers, we were never just the show up, and you work out, and you leave, if someone showed up and they're frazzled, I'd pat the bench, and be like, sit down, let's talk, because you're going to get hurt. This energy that you're showing up in and you're still trying to prove something over here, this way of functioning is going to be a problem. So, it was something we always recognized.

[01:40:44]Tah Whitty:  But I'm just tying together the plant space. So, when I had gotten hurt, I was doing personal training and I couldn't train anymore. So, when I first re-opened my training space, I have a private studio, and I would do one-on-one sessions with people, and they would be locked door sessions. And what I started doing was putting my clients in front of the mirror and having them talk to themselves before the session. And so, I would watch.

[01:41:11] So, based on all the things that happened when I hurt my back, and I saw how much emotion there was in my back, and when that relationship with the woman I was with was over, my back started to release, and all of the pain and stuff started to lighten, and all of these things started to come around with my body, and I saw how my emotions were affected. And so, I would put my clients in front of the mirror and I would have them talk to themselves. Talk to yourself. 

[01:41:32] And the stuff that would come out emotionally, I would see it show up in their bodies. And I would see a shoulder drop or something happened. So, I would put them through the training session and I would ask them something about the emotional stuff that came up during the mirror, and I could see the decompensation in one arm or whatever. So, I was like, this is really interesting. So, I started to put together all of my triage stuff from nursing, and I started to ride the chakra map even more. 

[01:41:57] I did that when I was nursing, but I started to ride the chakra map even more and see what was showing up with these people, with their back pain, and their shoulder pain, and all these things, and I started to see where there was a tie-in with the emotional situation. And I started to get them to emote, cry, or laugh, or yellow, do whatever, and then see if there was a decompensation, and the decompensation would go away a lot of times. And so, I started applying all of this stuff. And I brought it to Kole, and she was like, oh, whoa, this is crazy. And so, we started to bring it into journey spaces with people and started to-

[01:42:29]Luke Storey:  Wow.

[01:42:29]Tah Whitty:  Yeah. And so, there's a way to get in with somebody and their body will talk to you without their mind. And so, we can watch people's decompensation patterns happen when they're getting emotional. And so, we can kind of tune in and find out where their ailments are hiding in an energetic space. And then, Kole has all these things, these tools that she uses to open up people's fascia and stuff during during the journeys, and it actually helps them to release stuff energetically, and then repattern the nervous system around the new position where the body is. I mean, we get in.

[01:43:03]Luke Storey:  I'm in. Let's do this.

[01:43:07]Kole Whitty:  Well, even the most recent one was actually bringing a shibari artist. For anyone that doesn't know what shibari is-

[01:43:13]Luke Storey:  Oh, the Japanese bondage stuff? 

[01:43:14]Kole Whitty:  Erotic. Correct. And we don't do it with psychedelics because we don't need to, right? Psychedelics bring an altered state. So, once someone's done that work, I just need to get them to an altered state, and I can neurologically, physiologically help reconfigure their nervous system. 

[01:43:30]Tah Whitty:  The way they want it to be configured.

[01:43:31]Kole Whitty:  Correct. And so, it's a sensory modulation. That's what psychedelics do or part of what they do. And you can see it on my Instagram, some photos at least, I brought shibari artist and she was a professional dom for 10 years, plus her understanding of archetypes, and energy work, and Kali, and just everything magical. I actually scoured the world. I knew there was something in rope journeying that was outside of what is traditional BDSM kink and that people are aware of in that space, but it's an entry point that is, again, sex and shame. And that's another integration process I'm really attuned to and excited about. And so, we brought this shibari artist out here, and our friend, Keith Norris, shares his story very publicly. Ex-military, ex-football player, super controlling. 

[01:44:25]Luke Storey:  He's a badass guy.

[01:44:25]Kole Whitty:  He's a badass guy and you couldn't touch near his neck. And any feelings of constraint would throw him into a fight or flight response. And so, with everything, with the shutdowns and all of that, he was very much functioning in a hypervigilant state as a result of that constraint. And so, I saw the opportunity. And he's like, the idea of this scares the shit out of me, so I know there's something there. Because I know there's no real danger and how uncomfortable it makes me tells me there's something there.

[01:44:56] And I know that from all my work with ayahuasca and some of these other plant teachers. And so, in the session with him, I was playing shruti box and doing medicine songs. Our friend, Deb Jaeger, who, her and her husband have this amazing NLP—well, their own version, but it includes NLP. She was doing subconscious work while he's in it. And the only altered state coming is because he's blindfolded, so it causes the body to go in. And the body's habit of hearing that kind of music and those kind of smells, it knows the ritual. 

[01:45:32] And so, it allows the surrender. And I mean, he had huge breakthroughs. It was incredible. And what it came down to is that, now, we were able to rework with his body so that he doesn't have that sensation anymore. And by working with the hormones, which is what dominatrix do. And anyone, if you've never explored working with a dom and you have physical pain or whatever, I can make recommendations of people I trust that do plant work and understand, really, the body that there is so much intelligence that when we clear that in body, it changes everything. 

[01:46:11] Because when we're reliant on mind alone, we are reliant on willpower. And that means the second we get to a threshold, our body is going to go back to the old habits because our body is comprised of millions of habits. And so, even in having a realization in a plant ceremony, when we involve semantically the body, we've done that with TRE, which is a somatic modality that's powerful in itself, but you need to be trauma-informed if you're going to start to do body manipulations because things can come up. 

[01:46:44] For us, there's nothing we're afraid of. We've had people with history of psychosis. We're not afraid of it. It's, what is the person's infrastructure for support? Because if you come to me and you are in an unsafe environment, me, doing all the work with you and putting you back in an unsafe environment with these realizations will make it worse. And that comes from just the experience of it. But in doing fascia release, and having music, and engaging the senses, you are creating more opportunity in so many different things for the body that it is open to perceiving differently.

[01:47:22] Plants are just one tool to start to teach that. Once you teach that, now, it's rare that I journey and it's unless I can't get to it. But with the tools that we've developed, we can, through conversation, get me there. And through my body sensation or him doing body work, these are just another tool. It's a perspective. You can get that through coaches. You can get that through NLP. You can get it in lots of different ways, but the stuff through body and some of the work I've been doing with doms this year as a client of doms has been life changing for my body.

[01:47:55]Luke Storey:  That's wild. I would never think of that. 

[01:47:58]Kole Whitty:  I knew it without knowing it. When you start following a path, people are like, work with this person. I'd go to their Instagram, I'd be like, nope, not that person.

[01:48:08]Tah Whitty:  The thing that psychedelics on a physiological level, we create habits. Our bodies are a bag of habits, chemical habits, physical habits, structural habits. Everything is a habit. And we create habits in three ways. One would be by repetition, doing something over and over again, and so you can add some grooves into your nervous system, into your body. The second way is by impact. Bam, you can bypass the repetition and just get into an impact. Get into a car crash, you'll never forget that for the rest of your life. It's etched in. And then, the next time you hear screeching, your body is habitually protecting itself, right? 

[01:48:43]Luke Storey:  Yeah.

[01:48:43]Tah Whitty:  So, that's impact. The third way is repetition and impact. That's like a kid getting hit over and over by a parent, right? That's repetition and impact. So, you groove things in that way. Psychedelics kind of mimic impact. Okay. And when you're in a psychedelic space, the regulatory parts of the brain that would be in the habit formation space, which would be the task-positive space are turned on and the task-negative or the default mode is turned off. And so, you're in the habit-forming space when you're in the psychedelic realm, right? 

[01:49:18] So, when you do something over and over again with that impact, you have impact and repetition, you etch something in even deeper really quickly. So, this is why psychedelics are great for creating new habits, and when you have an impactful psychedelic experience, it gets etched into the neurology. And that's why people have these transformations and they have this new life because they've actually created a new neurological space that overrides all the old patterns, right?

[01:49:45] So, this is the science behind it that people are not talking about. And when you etch that stuff in there, it becomes more defined. Now, if you go back into your old life, and you go back to the old patterns over and over again, you're just going to etch yourself back into the old space. So, once you start and you make that habit space in psychedelics, it's important to integrate that afterwards. And this is a huge part of what Kole and I work with people, is to make sure that you have a team of people that are supporting you that know how to keep that etch going so that that groove doesn't—so you can groove something into being a habit, then you can groove something into being a lifestyle, and then you groove it into being a personality trait.

[01:50:25] And personality traits are not permanent. You can create new personality traits, but you've got to groove them in there. And so, psychedelics, this is why microdosing is great because you can do it from a subperceptual space and you can really etch stuff in there when you're intentional with it. So, that's the wonderful thing about the work that we do with helping people integrate, is that they're actually integrating these experiences from a place of sovereign awareness, not a place of, I'm not moving it into you, you're grooving it in yourself. I'm swinging you back around, hey, your intention was here. Is this still your intention?

[01:50:58]Kole Whitty:  We're almost like we're the lane assist. Like we're not driving the car, but if you set the sensors and you hit the lane, we're like, hey. 

[01:51:04]Tah Whitty:  Get back in the lane, bro.

[01:51:06]Kole Whitty:  You wanted me to reflect, and if that's changed, that's cool, too, but I'm just here to let you know, like there is a line over there you asked for.

[01:51:11]Luke Storey:  Well, that impact in repetition, it's interesting. That really supports the importance of set, and setting, and space holding, right? I mean, I can only imagine being in—well, actually, I don't have to imagine. I had a lot of bad trips back in the day, LSD, mushrooms, et cetera, and just did not plan, was doing a lot of other drugs at the same time, just end up—like I remember once I went to a concert way out in San Bernardino and I took a bunch of acid. And we stopped in downtown LA on the way home to Hollywood to try to find some heroin. And we're frying balls just driving through every ghetto of downtown LA going, chiva, chiva, our the window like straight could have gotten ourselves killed so badly in the middle of the night.

[01:51:57] I couldn't find anything, so we settled for crack. So, here I am like on acid. I remember I had this friend, Willie, who was a brilliant trumpet player and we didn't have a crack pipe. So, we get back to my place. We got some probably fake crack, but whatever, and we didn't have a crack pipe, so we used his mouthpiece from his trumpet. And even in the depths of that, like on acid just going, oh, my God, here's this beautifully gifted musician and his talent is being reduced to us smoking crack. Like that's the shit I would do on psychedelics. Talk about like a depressing scene, and then it's gone in five seconds, of course, and you're like, who can drive? No one. Like that shit scars you. 

[01:52:42]Kole Whitty:  You explaining it, I was like, oh yeah, I had a life like that.

[01:52:44]Luke Storey:  Yeah. And so, I mean, that's an extreme example of like the wrong way to create impact, and scar yourself, and traumatized yourself and others.

[01:52:53]Kole Whitty:  Well, it does happen in shamanic circles too, though.

[01:52:56]Luke Storey:  Yeah, that's what I'm getting at.

[01:53:00]Kole Whitty:  And without like calling one out necessarily, but these are still humans. Alright. These are still humans and structures. And it doesn't matter whether it is a "ayahuascado" that is a shaman, who, it's been carried down in their family nine generations in the jungle, these are still people that can develop egos. And then, especially now, with the internet and cellphones, more and more in indigenous cultures, they crave to be American, or Americanized, or similar things.

[01:53:29] And there is a lot of predatory shit that goes down. In Peru, there's something called gringa hunters, where they literally go after American women, not with the intent to hurt them, but knowing that if they talk about their shaman, and within them, and we've had past lives together, and all of that stuff, they have American women move down there, have a Peruvian baby. They don't stick around. They get some of the financial benefit of being with an American woman, and then they keep it moving.

[01:53:57] This is not an uncommon thing. And that's why it's important as you go to explore this kind of work, not to pedestalize or make someone a God. They are still a human regardless of what expression of God or force they currently are, that at the end of the day, it's about being the master of your own perspective and whatever that perspective may be. And for me, the intent is to continue to grow in awareness and that what I do with that awareness is my choice.

[01:54:30] It's just that also knowing there's a lot of shame in spiritual circles. And if you aren't attuned to the language of shame, you don't even recognize it's being used on you. And what that looks like is, oh, man, I had a terrible experience or I didn't have much of an experience, and I had four cups of ayahuasca. Well, then it's something wrong with you. You must not have dieta'ed right or you had too many expectations, so this is your fault. There's a difference between responsibility and fault. 

[01:55:00] And there's a difference between you didn't do something right, and what's your relationship to doing something right or expectation? The questions come differently when the intent is to build awareness versus to diagnose. And so, it's something to be mindful of as you discuss. And our intention moving into 2021 and beyond is not teaching people how to facilitate, how to ask questions, how to discern between an instinctual no and a fear no, because your gut, if you're not eating well, your gut instinct can be based off survival versus what could actually be in support of you. 

[01:55:42] And we decided if we were going to talk about how we could most be of service, it would be to help people learn how to discern and ask questions to determine who is their person for now in this part of the evolution because of all things in my own self-righteousness at times. It's like, we don't help youth not have children in their teens by teaching abstinence. We already know what happens there. And I perceive the same to be true for psychedelics as we evolve. 

[01:56:14] And as this world, and our mental health, and all of that increases as far as need, that to hide psychedelics is like trying to be the gatekeepers of madness and we're denying people that we perceive as mad from having these plants, when really, this is a madness they live in, that they already know how to navigate better than we do, or a lot of us do, or I did. And so, this evolution for me is helping people to get clear on what they're looking for to identify their teacher, to identify what plant could be most supportive in some sort of framework. So, not necessarily how to facilitate versus how to get clear on what you're looking for in the space so that you can find somewhere safe to explore it.

[01:56:59]Luke Storey:  Well, that's a really great segue, and I think we'll we'll wrap it up with this, because I've covered these topics quite a lot on the show. Because as I said, it's been such a huge part of my growth and happiness last couple of years. It was really easy with the first couple, because if you want to go to Costa Rica, I went to Rythmia. I did a full report from there about the whole ayahuasca experience, did the same thing at Soltara. So, if anyone approaches me, I get DMs from people like, hey, do you know a guy?

[01:57:27] You know what I mean? And I'm like, well, yeah. I mean, I did a whole podcast comparing Soltara and Rythmia for that type of ayahuasca experience. As you sure know, there is an infinite number of ways to experience that. But for like a safe, legal, what I think is a pretty solid way, those would be two places. But when it comes to wachuma, the Bufo toad, psilocybin, things that are technically illegal in the United States, it's underground stuff. And so ,people will often ask me like, hey, how do I find someone? You talk about these things on the show, I want to do it. What would you recommend for someone like that, that is in earnest with the best of intentions, wanting to explore, but the legalities make it tricky, and finding someone you can't trust, and all that? 

[01:58:17]Kole Whitty:  Totally. The first legality is I am not suggesting anyone go out and do any illegal activity according to where they live. Great. Now, we've cleared that. That is not the intention. And recognizing my desperation at my points, that was the least of my concerns, so I will speak from my own personal experience that there are circles all over the place. If you start looking on Facebook in groups, and ask, and learn, and discern, and check maps, and go to events around psychedelics, and join clubhouse where there's more groups talking openly about psychedelics, you'll find your people.

[01:58:52] My concern is always, not everyone needs a facilitator right away. They need someone to make sure their physical body stays safe. Okay. And so, again, in a perfect world, everyone would be trauma-informed, and they'd be a psychiatrist, and they'd be able to talk to Dr. Dave, and they'd have all this accessibility, do your research and know you're doing the best that you can. And if the best you can do for yourself in one moment is just to have one friend sit sober with you to ensure that you are safe, and you start light, don't start with a hero's dose without someone that can help facilitate you.

[01:59:31] Start with microdosing protocols. There's companies like the Third Wave that you can get their microdosing protocol, and immerse yourself in the learning and the intentionality you have for yourself. This is your body. This is your life. And that intentionality will reflect in the teachers you find. So, if you're in a rush to have the experience, that's going to show up. If you're intentional, that's going to show up in a line itself.

[01:59:59]Tah Whitty:  My advice for anyone that's looking to find people that are doing this kind of work is to not go and, hey, man, I want to get into a mushroom journey. Do you know anybody? Or, do you do mushroom journeys? I'd like to go to your mushroom journey. The people who are solid facilitators are not going to lean into you. It's establishing a rapport and a connection with people. Like really, you want to establish a relationship with these people. All the people that come to work with us, we establish a relationship with beforehand.

[02:00:31] It's why we onboard them and all of that. Coming from a person who's looking to find a facilitator, establishing a rapport, hey, how are you? What's going on with you? What's happening in your life? Blah, blah, blah. If you figure out or know that they're in a circle, talk to them, get to know them, start to really invest yourself in that person, and then ask questions, hey, well, I'm looking to do some expansive work, but would you happen to have any ideas on how you could direct me in that space? 

[02:01:01] When people are safe with you, they're be able to open up into that space. But if you're just going out, I have people that come to me all the time, hey, man, I'm looking to do shrooms, and I'm like, I can't help you. I will not help you with that. That's not a space I'm leaning into. There's a recklessness that this work for me, it needs to be fortified and protected. And when people are reckless and they bring reckless energy into things, it can cause a disruption.

[02:01:25] So, I'm inviting people who have been, and I know I've been reckless in my life, scale back a little bit and really evaluate what tripping into a space, to to trip in, and being able to ask, and establish rapport and relationship with people. Even if you know people that have gone to journeys and stuff, they will be protective of the communities and the environment in the work. Just, hey, man, I want to do some stuff, I want to do what you're doing. Slow down.

[02:01:54]Kole Whitty:  Yeah, relax a little bit.

[02:01:55]Tah Whitty:  Slow down. Really slow down and get intentional with it. And this is where the intention starts. Are you rushing into things or are you looking to be safe? And your safety is of the utmost importance for all of this stuff. So, if anybody that's listening, if you're listening, if you're looking to go into this, take your time. Vet the people that you're interested in working with. Establish a relationship with them. 

[02:02:16] Don't be transactional with it. This is not transactional work. This is stuff where you get into it, you create a system that supports you, and you expand with it and integrate. And if a person that you're going to start working with does not offer integration support, that's a red flag for me. Absolute red flag. I would not lean into anybody that's not going to at least be there to listen to something that comes up for you.

[02:02:41]Kole Whitty:  Yeah, agreed. And thank you for saying that, Tah, because it is something that will get Facebook messages, when it's like, hey, I'm just wondering if you know someone in the United States, in Arizona that I could do ayahuasca with? We're like, bro, first of all, you're talking about people's livelihoods, so if you haven't done enough research to know that there is a level of care. These are people that are working underground.

[02:03:04] These aren't people that because of the infrastructure we live in, that they can openly say it. And so, like Tah said, approaching it with care and realizing that these are people that are doing work that is not recognized by the United States in any of the states as something they're really supposed to be doing. And so, by having that care, and asking, even if you think someone is a facilitator, ask them if they have another way to contact them with questions. 

[02:03:35] They'll direct you. And when you come in, just because you want something, then you're usually going to attract the facilitators that just want your money. And not that they don't care about the process and the genuine desire is there, if they're in need of money, then you are in need of a place in the journey. That's the energy you're met with. And as you come to it with intentionality and consideration, that's usually the energy will be met with.

[02:04:04]Luke Storey:  Beautiful. Thank you for that. Yeah, because a lot of a lot of people ask now. And I'm like, God, I hate to rob anyone of the opportunity, but at the same time, it's not really my lane to be the intermediary there.

[02:04:16]Tah Whitty:  Yeah. And as a facilitator, if you're listening to this as a facilitator, and people approach you this way, and you don't want to turn anybody out into the ether, establish a relationship with them. Hey, man, listen, what's making you interested in this? Get interested in the people that are inquiring. I think there are a lot of people who are in trouble spaces who are desperate, who are looking to move into something right away. 

[02:04:39] And when facilitators completely block them or that's not the kind of person I want to go into, you can establish a relationship with somebody without turning them into the darkness. And evaluate, see if there's somebody that you can refer them to after they start to open up and connect with you. If they're willing to stay in that connection, stay in the connection, roll with them. For me, this is a global thing. I'm working on shifting the whole planet.

[02:05:05] So, if there's somebody that I don't think is in the space to work with me, I'll get to know them. And as we get to know and expand, then I'll refer them out to somebody. I know somebody who's doing something, let me put you in touch with them. And if it's a fit, then you all work together. If it's not a fit, then just let me know, and if something else comes up, I'll refer you if I have something else.

[02:05:28] This is where you start to establish trust in yourself as a facilitator, and in the people that you're working with, and in your skills of communication, because it does get a little dicey when it's like, oh, when the guilt complex comes up, oh, I feel bad, this is another person that needs help, and I'm not helping them, I'm turning them away. Be mindful of yourself, and your feelings, and how you navigate these spaces. It's a really awesome space to help people move through. 

[02:05:51]Luke Storey:  Awesome. Thank you. I got one last question for you guys. 

[02:05:54]Tah Whitty:  Sure.

[02:05:55]Luke Storey:  Who are three teachers or teachings that have influenced your life and your work that you might recommend to the listeners?

[02:06:04]Tah Whitty:  Favorite teacher as well. There's Bessel van der Kolk, who wrote The Body Keeps Score. Gabor Mate, who wrote When the Body Says No. 

[02:06:25]Kole Whitty:  You quote Yoda all the time. 

[02:06:27]Tah Whitty:  Oh. And Yoda. Yeah. Yoda is probably one of my greatest teachers on this planet or off this planet. In my imagination space in 1981, he told me something that has resonated for me my entire life, and it's something that I teach all of my people, and it's do or do not. There is no try. And there are so many Yoda quotes that have just been my mainstay, so I would have to say that Yoda is one of my greatest teachers. So, thanks, George Lucas.

[02:06:58]Luke Storey:  Nice. Alright. How about you?

[02:07:02]Kole Whitty:  I mean, there's so many. And I feel like, now, every person in front of me ends up being a teacher. And so, I'll just kind of pull who comes to mind now. One of them is a wachumado in Peru named Mallku. You can find him at wachuma.net. And he was one of the first people to say to me, tradition is beautiful and tradition is a prison. And if we adhere too closely to tradition, then we're not allowing the evolution and we are evolving technologically, emotionally, intellectually, and really teaching me the true depths of cultural appropriation versus cultural consideration, and how when we expand in our current awareness, and make sure that everyone is inclusive, and everyone is being fed, then none of those things exist that we differentiate, and that we dissect, and compartmentalize. 

[02:08:01] So, him for one. Another big one I would actually say would be growing up Mormon and the teachings of Christ. They always resonated really deeply for me. The question doesn't come anymore for me whether or not Jesus Christ as a person existed, but how he exists. And really, that was a deep truth for me, what I learned about the teachings of Christ. And it was something that was not being reflected in the environment where I was, which is what made me not feel like I trusted humans.

[02:08:37] And so, I would actually say the teachings of Christ, as translated by the humans that wrote the stories, was very resonant for me and becomes more true as I get older outside of the religious doctrine so much as the teachings. And then, the last one would actually be you, Tha. Not Utah, the state, you, Tah, sitting across the table. I have never met someone that is so considerate.

[02:09:05] And that actually teaches me what it is to be unconditionally loving through the way that you have been with me and every person you come across, I have never seen you cut someone short that needed attention in that moment. I have never seen you not embrace someone, or hold them, or take time for them, even the times I really want to go to bed, but you just have to ask one more person, how are they really doing in that moment? But honestly, you embody the love that I didn't even know was possible. And to watch you continue to grow into that and allow it yourself is an honor to witness.

[02:09:52] And you are my greatest teacher, not just the reflection of, but the brilliance that you channel, and the schematics you write, and the weird voices you do, and your total weirdo, which is amazing. But you are my greatest teacher. And I don't have to be your wife or your partner for that. I told you ever since I met you, I am ride or die for you. With me, without me makes no difference. I will always honor, cherish, and value everything that you have to say. Even though I talk a lot, I still hear everything you say. And I appreciate you and thank you for trusting me or we wouldn't sit here now. Thank you for trusting yourself. And thank you for allowing people to see the brilliance that you are.

[02:10:52]Tah Whitty:  I love you.

[02:10:52]Kole Whitty:  I love you so much. The sweetest like creature ever is him.

[02:11:01]Tah Whitty:  Thank you.

[02:11:01]Kole Whitty:  And it's an honor because it's softened me a lot. When we met, I was the very dominant Alpha female, and I still love that about me, and he's taught me a softness that I didn't know.

[02:11:23]Luke Storey:  I wish there was a way for me to know how many people are crying right now. If there was like an app, like are you crying right now at two hours and three minutes? So beautiful, you guys, man. I know the feeling that you're expressing and that you're receiving so well. And it's a new feeling for me and it's sublime.

[02:11:42]Kole Whitty:  It's so good. And that's why even this year in shutdowns and all that, to be able to look across and see him, I was like, the world exists through him. And so, everything that happens, happens, but I don't take a moment for granted that I can physically touch his hand. And I had one love that I lost to leukemia, and even though we weren't together anymore, when I had a heart ring on, that I sit on his casket as it went into the ground, and in that moment, made my decision, I would never let my love go unexpressed again, because I hadn't told this man how much I loved him. And that was a gift of that loss to be so present in this one that every every bit of his heart, every breath, every goosebump, everything to me is perfection. And the rest is a cheesy way to say what we make it, but the sheer fact that I can actually still touch him is the gift.

[02:12:47]Luke Storey:  Damn. Beautiful. Well, listen. There's nothing else to say after that.

[02:12:53]Tah Whitty:  You can find us at Tah-

[02:12:55]Luke Storey:  Yeah. That sounded so bad that the transition from that to like, man, what's your social media? Follow these guys. Alright. We're we're going to put all your stuff in the show notes. You guys can click on the app that it can go right to your social, and website, and offerings, and retreats. And you guys are doing so much, so you're findable if people get in before things sell out and all that. 

[02:13:17]Kole Whitty:  Yes. We're always accessible. We've created a life that makes us accessible. Just reach out. We do the best that we can intention wise to get to everyone. We don't have a team. We stepped away from what is scalable because we are where we are. And it feels really good to be where we are and we're not in a rush to change that. And anyone that has resources and support, or wants to be involved, or whatever, like we're all about collaboration, and growth, and what we call condor energy. It's the age of the condor, and the eagle is here. And anyone that knows what that means, reach out, and let's collaborate, and do some epic shit.

[02:13:59]Luke Storey:  Sweet. Yeah. Thanks for joining me again.

[02:14:01]Tah Whitty:  Thanks for having us.

[02:14:02]Luke Storey:  Yeah, a real pleasure. Yeah.

[02:14:17]

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