Spirituality Vs mainstream medicine... How could they work together? (transcript)

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Episode Transcript:

Lian

Spirituality and mainstream healthcare often seem very much at odds, very mutually exclusive, certainly for those of us perhaps that have felt unmet by mainstream healthcare or even let down. In this episode, you'll hear me share my own story of experiencing 15 years of chronic facial pain that mainstream medicine wasn't able to help me with and yet...

spontaneous spiritual experience did. So this was a fascinating conversation for me personally, but I also think for so many of us that have been on similar journeys and have now found ourselves in perhaps more alternative means of healthcare, of healing. So in this conversation, Dr. Daniel Ingram and I explore his work with the EPRC and the ways that they are really bridging the gap between and these are quite some gaps between spirituality, magic, science and medicine. How can these things interweave in a way that ultimately serves us all? Let's dive in.

EPRC, e -Phrenomenon Research Committee. Yes, thank goodness. I think I did say that right.

 Lian

Hello, Daniel, a huge warm welcome back to the show.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

Hello, delightful to be here. Thank you so much for doing this podcast.

Lian

Oh my goodness, entirely my pleasure. And we were just talking about the last time you came on the show was, I think, 11 months ago, so definitely last year sometime. And in that episode, which was a really, for me, a particularly personally, one of those really satisfying ones, because we were talking to talking about that intersection of magic and spirituality, which is something that's really consumed much of my experience and thoughts over, particularly the last decade. And so this episode, it feels perfect now to look at one of the things I know is absolutely your passion and a big part of your work, which is bringing, what I might call this, that blend of say, magic and spirituality is one thing with science, with healthcare, and understanding like, why would we want to bring those things together? What's the benefits of doing so?

what have you discovered in that work, which it for me is so fascinating. I think in order for there to be really any reason to be in magical or spiritual practice, I think to a large extent for me is how we can use that to serve others. How is that actually serving for ourselves and for the world in terms of bringing us back to wholeness? So this is such a fascinating topic.

Can't wait to dive in. So let's begin, I guess, just to, and I'm sure some of this we would have touched on in the last episode, but for you, what brought you to seeing there was this kind of place where these three things could come together and obviously healthcare and science typically belong together, but not really, the spiritual side of things. How did that happen for you?

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

Great.

So I generally talk about the three Daniels, and I may have talked about this last time, I can't remember, but so Daniel number one is this kid who started having what some you might call mystical, magical, energetic, dream, et cetera, phenomena as a kid. And I had my first major explosion of consciousness and first traveling out of body and some weird energetic and mood stuff around age 14 or 15. And...

I luckily had the good sense not to tell my Harvard, Yale, Harvard trained pediatrician father what was going on with me. He's a delightful person and a really kind and smart man, but he now admits based on his training and experience with these things, he very likely would have done something that would have not helped, meaning like get me a bunch of workups and put me on meds and maybe thought I was crazy and all of that kind of stuff.

Lian

I'm sorry.

Mmm.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

which is obviously a problem. So my interest in this begins in my origin story. So that's Daniel one. And Daniel one went on to study meditation and go on to retreats and do all kinds of stuff and write a book and get into magic and all that stuff. And then Daniel two is this kind of hyper compartmentalised side of Daniel that was also super materialist even while doing all these things. So from a kind of parts work point of view, the materialist parts of my...

Lian

Hmm.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

self that were really into advanced modern physics and chemistry and regular physics and electrical engineering and eventually ended up in public health school doing a lot of biostatistics and study design and training and then eventually medical school where during the second year where we talk about what can go wrong, the psych section was a little bit uncomfortable for me and about 10 of us. There were probably about 10 people in my class of 160 people.

Who had these kinds of experiences and we kind of found each other, and there may have been more and they just didn't say anything, but we managed to kind of find each other when they were describing things like schizotypal, you know, personality and those kinds of stuff, it was like, hmm, better not talk much about this stuff because we all had beliefs, experiences that would lend themselves to a pathological diagnosis, even though obviously as medical students, we were pretty darn functional and contributing to society and stuff. So,

Lian

Mmm.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

didn't really fit the story of mainstream medicine at all. And mainstream medicine's answer to pretty much what most of us would have described as our experience would have been either doesn't exist and or is crazy needs meds. And so that was Daniel number two. And then when I managed to graduate from clinical practice or retire about six years ago, then Daniel number three really began to emerge, which is trying to figure out how these two Daniels,

Lian

Hmm.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

had great, incredible, amazing, and also sometimes very challenging experiences that did not at all fit the narrative of the clinical mainstream in terms of trajectory, progression, healing opportunities, transformations, upgrades of consciousness, and kind of what at all another meaning system of what it might mean and what you might be able to do with it practically and what functionally it might mean in terms of me as a person.

And so how could these get along a lot better? But also how could the methods of science and the clinical perspective, and particularly medical ethics, which is the big thing. So medical ethics, like, you know, we have a responsibility to treat people well, to do good, to avoid harm, but also to have a lot of respect for people and their autonomy and their ways of thinking of the world and using that to establish therapeutic relationships and to figure out what adds value to people's lives and care.

Lian

Mmm.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

not only in terms of dealing with potentially challenging or strange experiences, but also helping to provide upgrades for the inevitable challenges that life can throw at you. Are there meaningful ways to improve people's resilience, their equanimity, their peace, their ability to be loving or kind or good community members or appreciate interdependence or be good citizens on the planet in the biosphere, et cetera. And so these are part of some of the transformational potentials that...

Lian

Hmm.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

can come out of a lot of this stuff, but that the mainstream clinical world is very, has a very, let's just say, beginner understanding of, some very basic meditation techniques and some very simple kind of light end of the, shallow end of the pool, I should say, promises. And so that was how I ended up in this business. And then before I knew it, there were a whole group of us that were gathered around this idea, really in some ways catalyzed by my friend Dr. Julieta Galante, who is a senior postdoc at Cambridge University in the Department of Psychiatry with an MD and a PhD and a public health degree and a lot of training who also found it probably inadvisable to talk about her most important and beneficial and sometimes challenging experiences which came to her in a yoga tradition. And so why is it that with double doctoral degrees the Department of...

Lian

Hmm.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

psychology at Cambridge, one couldn't talk about some of one's most important inner experiences and their value and potential range of meanings. I ended up helping to facilitate this group, which eventually became collectively, we formed the Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium, which was dedicated to helping with all of this, to doing all of the steps, all of the many, many steps over many decades.

To upgrade the relationship between the clinical mainstream, the scientific mainstream, and the deep end of human experience through all of the horsepower that the group brings, which includes neuroscientists, and psychiatrists, and lawyers, and media people, and other researchers, clinicians, of various types, educators, et cetera, across the wide range of disciplines that you need to do all the steps to reach all of the parts of the system that hopefully can allow the global clinical mainstream to have a vastly more skillful, upgraded, sophisticated relationship to the deep end to help everything related to it go vastly better.

Lian

Oh goodness, there's, yeah, no, it's fabulous. What I was really present to at that moment was the way that, because I am in a position where I get to hear a lot of people's stories of, I guess you could say becoming their medicine, them being able to serve in the way that they're uniquely designed for, it often has this like,

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

Kind of a long story, but that gives a lot of detail.

Lian

a union of these different parts of them, like when they are fully able to bring all parts of them to bear in like one focused way. I've noticed that, that's when we're really in the sweet spot and it was like your story's such a great, such divergent part, such a wonderful example of that, so I was just appreciating that in a more kind of meta way I suppose, as well as really appreciating the need for the work that you're doing and

I don't think I told you this story when we were recording last year. And it just came to mind as an example of, because I'm not in a medical, although I'm a Shamanic Healer, I'm not in the kind of mainstream medical profession. And so I'm listening through the lens, I guess a bit more like someone who potentially could be a patient within some system or other, as I was back.

15, 20 years ago when this story I'm about to share with you began. So for reasons I won't go into, I had a sort of traumatic event that resulted in me having this kind of mysterious chronic facial pain. And over the course of 15 years,

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

Hmm.

Lian

I saw all kinds of different medical professions including dentists, doctors, all sorts of things and you know just ended up with one of those like diagnosis which was basically like we don't know atypical facial pain and I even had a root canal at one point so I was so desperate to I mean it was this intense burning pain that I just could not seem to touch with any form of you know

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

Mm.

Lian

I tried all sorts. So I went down the whole mainstream route, then tried various forms of, you know, things like hypnosis and stuff like that, but nothing made a difference. Until seemingly completely unrelated, upon the death of my father had, I guess what you could call is a kind of form of awakening. And as part of that, the pain just vanished.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

Wow, yeah, there you go.

Lian

Yes. And so 15 years of trying absolutely everything and then this awakening did it, which is now 14 years ago and it's not come back.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

Yeah, I've heard a bunch of stories like this and actually had a few experiences, not quite that dramatic and long lived of curious pain things, tensions, weird stuff that resolved. And there are a whole bunch of these stories, like Goenka who founded one of the biggest insight meditation tradition centers in the world, Essen Goenka. He apparently had migraines that were cured when he started meditating, same kind of thing. Yeah.

Lian

in the world, he apparently had migraines that were cured when he started meditating. Oh sorry my sound seems to have gone a bit funny. I think it's clicked back in. Yeah what's happened there?

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

I think I'm coming out of your laptop. Cause I now hear you as an echo.

Lian

I'm using my husband's um, AirPods because my speakers appear to have just died. Why have they done that?

Ah, I think you're back in my ear now. Yes, you are, yes. Yeah, sorry, would you mind just responding as you did from the point where I finished, if you don't mind?

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

Am I? Cool. Yes, the echo is gone.

Sure, yeah. Wow, A, I'm really glad that your pain resolved. Sorry about the death of your father. But it's actually, I've heard a lot of these stories and actually had a few of these sorts of experiences myself where some sort of meditative or spiritual, energetic, whatever process resolved some pain thing. But also there are a bunch of these stories like S.N. Goenka, G, who created one of the world's largest meditation organizations, the Insight tradition, apparently started meditating and it just cured his migraines, they just went away. So, and I've talked to a whole bunch of other people who have had these, and facial pain syndromes are really complicated, right? They can drive you totally crazy as a clinician, obviously, and even more as a patient if you have them. But clearly some component of at least some of them

Lian

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

are in this realm of territory that I think of, and a bunch of other pain syndromes are as well. So rhomboid and trapezius spasms, rye neck things, there are all kinds of stuff that clearly arise at certain phases of meditation predictably and resolve at certain phases predictably. There are a bunch of these actually. And so I actually think from a mainstream clinical world, there are a bunch of these sorts of things that really don't seem to a clinician, is that woo or weird?

Lian

Hmm.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

that may yet have what I would think of as emergent modalities or solutions to them that are waiting for us to discover, just as you did.

Lian

Yes, because it just for me took me on this whole quest of like what happened there? There's something in what I experienced that has value, has meaning, can be of use to other people and it kind of took me actually deeper into the more kind of spiritual aspect rather than you know.

I think at this point I've sort of long left the sort of mainstream way of thinking about these things behind. But I'm still fascinated in, you know, people like you, the work you're doing to kind of join them back up again. So how...

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

Right, because imagine if your doctors knew some way to facilitate such an opening process that healed you. That kind of thing, right?

Lian

Yes.

Exactly, because there is, you know, it's too much for coincidence that it wasn't because of that event that happened that created the relief from it.

But how do you intentionally create that? That's the question, isn't it? Which I guess is part of what you're in the work of. So what does that work look like? How are you going about it in the work that Consortium does? How do you ultimately make a real difference in the care that people get?

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

Yeah, so that is the big question. The first thing I'll say is it's a big plan. We have a really big plan. It's hundreds of pages. It's detailed in an incredibly elaborate white paper that if you really want to know the details, you can go to the thetheeprc.org. And you can click on the white paper link and you can read till your eyes bleed, basically, because it does go on and on. So I'm going to squinch that extremely elaborate plan of how you do 30 to 40 year global systems change.

Lian

Mm. Hehehehe.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

and make it as condensed as I possibly can, realizing that it's a very simple summary. So you start with the state of the art. What do we currently know? In order to change the system, you really have to understand the system. And when I say the system, I should really say the systems, because you have to understand not only the mainstream conversation, like how do we get the diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and where do these things come from, and where is their history, and what's the logic behind things like that.

And then also you have to understand the conversation that's been going on parallel in the spiritual, mystical, magical, what I'll call the emergent world. And what do we know from that? So what are the meditative technologies? What are the described experiences? What are the warnings? What are the opportunities? What does this world say is possible? And then you kind of have to understand the previous at least 140 years of attempts going back to the cosmic consciousness kids in the 1880s and 90s and through William James and then the...

Lian

Hmm.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

relaxation response people and the early transpersonal people, Abraham Maslow and Jung and people like that, and then working through to where is all that conversation gone in terms of today. So you kind of have to understand all of that and the literature behind it, and even just that is a big project, right? Obviously there's a lot of traditions, a lot to know. And then once you kind of have that.

Lian

Hmm.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

foundation, you have to understand the phenomenologies. We're taking kind of a naturalistic approach in the sense of like the naturalists in the 1700s and 1800s wandered out into the jungles and forests and cataloged butterflies and rocks and stones and insects and plants and all kinds of things. And they just were like just very descriptive. And they made all these incredibly elaborate diagrams and.

Had, you know, if you've been in a good natural history museum, you see all these blocks of different types of wood, and they came up with taxonomic systems to sort of describe these. And so we're kind of doing the same thing with this world, basically building the phone book, the mass—for people who even remember what a phone book is—massive big detailed list of what's all the stuff out there. What do people describe taking a phenomenological approach, which obviously borrows from subjective experience and the strengths of the clinical world

Lian

Hmm.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

to relate to people who are having subjective experiences. I've never been able to measure pain, as far as I can tell nobody else has either, but people can describe it. And so that kind of comfortable, that sort of comfort with firsthand methods or first-person methods, descriptive methods, phenomenological methods, is the real strength of the clinical world when it comes to this. So.

Lian

Mmm.

Mmm.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

So you then, you basically, you just look for every description you can, you interview lots of people, and you look at all the texts and figure out what is the phenomenology we're trying to make some kind of sense of. And then you kind of have to put some, attempt is, if you're defining a specialty, which we're really doing one of the first steps in really defining a new clinical or medical specialty or scientific discipline, is to say, okay, now what are the kind of the boundaries around that, or sort of loose boundaries around that, not as like fixed things, but like to at least say, this is what we're studying.

Lian

Hmm.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

So we're working on that. We've got some articles actually in press right now that are helping to create that sense of what, because we're talking about that effects that are like energetic, whatever that is, and temporal and social and based on perception, existential related to the question of a self, and motivational and volitional and somatic. And so all those different categories of experiences and you kind of need to know what you're talking about. So that's the whole process.

Lian

Hmm.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

Once you kind of have done that, or in parallel with doing that, you can also do things like neurophenomenology. Like currently we do have some technology to measure like what's going on in people's brains, not that brain is mind is meat is whatever, but there are clearly some correlations between brain something and what's happening, and genetics and epigenetics and biochemistry and neurological receptors and those kinds of things, neurotransmitters. There's gonna be something that's part of the mix there. And...

Lian

Mmm.

Mmm.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

So like, can you do some of that work? And can you understand some of the underlying physiology? And while you're doing all that, once you kind of have a sense of some of these, like maybe for the challenging experiences, and I don't wanna needlessly emphasize those, like what are the things you might, how to kind of diagnose them? Can you put those into meaningful categories of challenging things? Like let's say your face pain was in this category. Well, how can you sort of define that and then...

once you've got definitions for like diagnostic categories for not only challenging things, but also positive things. So diagnosis we usually think of as pathologizing, but diagnosis can also be for like happy things, like for pregnancy. Hopefully pregnancy is generally a happy thing. It's how we all got here, right? And hopefully we don't think of pregnancy as pathology, but it's certainly a valid medical diagnosis. This woman is pregnant, right? So, and.

Lian

Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

So in the same kind of way, we can have diagnostic categories for things that are descriptive and hopefully have some hint of then an underlying physiology that somehow loosely or strongly relates to them. And then also management and cultivation stuff. So once you have diagnostic categories, you can create management and cultivation strategies and kind of formalize those to begin to establish a pattern of clinical care. And so for like, you know, like someone's having a real dark night or whatever you wanna call it, I don't know what the language will be, how do you...

deal with that, or if someone's having an energetic thing, or someone's having, you know, they just took a psychedelic and now they don't think of themselves as a human being or even existing or something days later. And some stuff I've had friends that stuff like this has happened to. What do you do for that to add value to their lives? That's helpful, that doesn't cause harm, that does increase value, et cetera. And then once you've got those things, you can actually do epidemiology. So epidemiology is the impact on various diagnoses on populations.

Lian

Hmm.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

How do these things increase resilience and mental wellbeing in the face of a mental health crisis? How do some of these experiences potentially challenge people as they cast them out from their ordinary worlds and they go wandering around the landscape trying to figure out what the heck happened to them? What are the economic and social and functional impacts of this on people's lives and society on healthcare systems? And then kind of in parallel to that, like the very specific considerations of mental health is kind of its own project. So like,

How does this interface with things like the DSM-5-TR and the various categories of things? Do peak experiences, are they the same or different from or sometimes overlap with manic episodes for example? And then specifically, we've got a whole project related to psychedelics and then we've got other projects that relate specifically to anthropology. So how do all of the various tribes as I'll call them?

Lian

Hmm.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

relate to this, like the MBAs, like what are their needs in terms of incorporating this into their systems and their calculations? What are the civil servants and their needs? What are the insurance companies and their needs? What is the pharmaceutical industry and its set of needs? What are the clinicians, the mainstream? What are the alternative clinicians and their sets of needs? What are...

Lian

Mmm.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

various, so I'm talking mostly the systems needs, but also individuals needs, what are different communities needs as they relate to healthcare systems. And what's their story there? Like how is their, potentially have their interactions with healthcare systems been traumatic and how do we do some healing there? So there's a lot of anthropological, sociological needs and those relate very strongly to linguistic needs. So getting the language of this right, like transpersonal psychiatry is amazing in terms of what they've tried to do from a certain point of view. But again, as I've said on numerous previous podcasts,

Lian

Mmm.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

I don't like or really appreciate the capacity of all of their linguistic choices to scale globally. Like the word Kundalini I use all the time is a fantastic word. I've used it a few times even today in casual conversation and might even use it here. Do I think it scales globally? No. I think it freaks out both the Muggles and the Abrahamic religions and probably other people. So like, you know, so a fascinating word doesn't scale. And our concern is really what does scale?

Lian

Hmm.

Mmm.

Hehehehehehe

Mmmm

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

And then we have a number of what we call the special projects. The special projects are like, how do we relate to things like military, security, space, with this stuff happening? Imagine what happens if someone with their finger on the trigger of weapons systems is having some of these experiences. How do we relate to them skillfully? Someone on a space mission, how do we relate to them skillfully? Picking up signals like this of people getting into this territory in a way that might be troubling.

Lian

Mmm.

Mmm.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

the security industry is understandably very interested in things like this. And how do we make sure that goes as well as it can without becoming something additionally like some tool of unfortunate control or pathologizing or marginalizing groups, those sorts of issues and balancing the concerns of a lot of people. So we call it special projects for those kind of special topics. And also, how does this relate to big data like social media and what you can crowdsource from that and how do you do that ethically? And then finally, the value and impact project.

Which is like evaluating what we've done. Have we made a difference? What did we help? What did we harm? What did it cost? How can we sort of look at what we've done from, are there metrics that apply to this? And if so, what are they? And then how do you incorporate this basically into all the textbooks and clinical care standards of medicine, psychiatry, emergency medicine, psychology, social work, neurology, et cetera.

And how do you even maybe textbooks for people in high school health classes in case they run into this stuff? I started running into this stuff when I was, you know, late junior high school, early high school era. And it would have been nice if I had at least known something about it. I think that would have helped me. So those, that's kind of like the big overview of the plan and then how do you find the money? That's another big question. So, and how do you build the teams and how do you create the communities and how do you have the messaging for all of this? How do you do all the committee work and.

Lian

Mmm.

Hehehehe. Mmm.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

and politics, how do you reach governments? So there's a lot of steps in this, but it gives you a kind of a sense of the thing.

Lian

Yes, my goodness. As you began speaking, it was so clear that the only way to really affect change in the way that you're talking about is to go to that level of depth and breadth. And the more you were speaking, the more I was like, oh my goodness, that's so needed. I'm so glad it's not my job to make that happen. And there's people like you making that happen, but I can really see all of what you spoke about is needed. My goodness.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

Yes.

Yes. with a great team I should mention. So it's like obviously totally impossible for one person, might be impossible for a big team, but at least we have a big talented team of people across the world from a lot of perspectives and points of view and cultures, et cetera, languages.

Lian

Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mmmm

Yes, bless you all for doing that, my goodness. So there's a couple of things that occurred to me as I was listening to you that are slightly sort of random disparate things, but caught my attention. Some of which I think we might have touched on in our last conversation. So one of them was the topic of neurodivergence. So I think when we spoke last, I shared with you that I was diagnosed with autism a few years ago and it understanding that about myself but also understanding aspects like researched aspects of autism in terms of you know the what's going on at a brain level. I think I may have mentioned to you, you may already know the it seems as though the hyper the autistic brain hyper metabolizes DMT, which of course is known as the spirit molecule, which then kind of suggests like, ah, so maybe that's why again, speaking personally, I had experiences that were you could say kind of mystical that were really terrifying because I had no context for them and which also were kind of part of what I now understand as shamanic sickness and as I was listening I was like my goodness that's a whole nother area on top of what you were talking about kind of like where does neurodivergence fit into all of that how does things like shamanic sickness fit into all of that

And then I was also, you mentioned this, you were talking about how when we set foot on the kind of like more sort of spiritual magical paths, that in itself, because again, we very much lack the context from which people can understand like, oh, this is the path I'm on, these are, you know, these are the things to be aware of. And I know both personally, but also within my community, that can be really challenging as well.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

Mm-hmm.

Lian

being with all of that opens up to us, comes into our awareness that's not typically spoken about, known in kind of our mainstream culture, that's a whole other thing. So you might for example, like in my instance, I was cured overnight of this atypical facial pain and then like blown wide open to like understanding, oh my goodness what even is reality now? So I'd love to hear your

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

Mm.

Lian

they're kind of woven together but I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

Yeah, thank you. That's a lot of great topics and great things to have thought about.

Starting with the normalization one, which is really important. So hopefully we normalize a lot of these experiences and make it vastly easier to talk about them. We believe that with a vastly more accepting culture and the ability to have conversations, that will facilitate a lot of healing, particularly if there's vastly better high quality information available out there in language that hopefully globally scales that people can find and relate to. So yes, but the lack of that when I was a kid no language for this stuff and really had never, you know, didn't know that anybody else had this and really had no context for it. It was super confusing. Yep. And very challenging. And I've talked to thousands of people who felt the same way and were really happy when they started finding, right? That in and of itself is so healing, that normalization and then connection with other people and resources that relate more skillfully to this. And so that's the first thing. Neurodivergence. I am clearly a touch neuro-atypical as anybody ever met me or talked to me for very long has noticed, right? Exactly where I am on what spectrum, I don't know, but clearly I'm definitely a touch different. Not that everybody isn't different in their way, but I'm probably farther out than a lot. And my veils are also thin.

Lian

Doesn't really surprise me.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

I'm prone to having these sorts of experiences and have since I was quite young and that range of why that is and understanding something of that and how to relate to that is definitely very important to me, right? It's part of my journey and figuring out like the genetics and the epigenetics and the predisposing factors and the cultural factors, nurture, nature, et cetera, that help contribute to all of that very, very important. And obviously, you know, from a certain point of view, everyone is kind of neurodivergent,

What is normal, really? Everybody's dealing with their own fascinating and unique, unless they're a twin, set of combinations of...

various things that make us who we are, as well as the way we were brought up in a thousand or a bazillion, actually I should say, environmental factors, too many to easily quantify. And so that does mean that we do have to have a lot of respect for the uniqueness of everybody's perspective and experience while simultaneously recognizing there are some patterns to this stuff. There are some things we can know and kind of define and categorize as...

rough as that process will be. And that's why we sort of adopt what I call loose clinical perennialism or rough clinical perennialism in the EPRC is there are patterns to the highs and lows and energetic openings of the stuff that do look a whole lot alike as you start to get more of these stories. Let's see here. Okay, so I talked about normalization, neurodivergence . What was the other one? Sorry.

Lian

The, so it's kind of interwoven with both in a way, shamanic sickness. And that, if I can just define what I was meaning, I know you know this, but I guess, you know, just for the context of this making sense within the conversation, for me, there was something that was a kind of another level of

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

Oh yeah, that one.

Lian

depth of understanding and healing it provided for me to be able to make sense of both the neurodivergence and the kind of like strange mystical experiences and then the kind of very you know big challenges I'd had in all sorts of ways in my life and then for them to kind of converge with this understanding not that I necessarily call myself a shaman but they kind as being shamanic sickness and part of that kind of initiation of me ultimately doing the work I do now which includes shamanic healing. And so whilst this might be you know only a small subsection of people I think because it is in its own right is a kind of intersection of many of the things we're talking about in terms of it's someone doing healing work and working with the you know mystical, magical, magical things we've been talking about and again I think it's people who have experienced these things but again because we lack that understanding culturally that can really benefit from understanding this about themselves and being able to then ultimately like put that to use. So I'd love to, it's not necessarily that I'm expecting you to know huge amounts or have lots to say on that but I'd love to hear anything you have got to say.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

Yeah, so first, having had all kinds of unfortunate and complicated energetic perceptual stuff happen over the years, particularly before I knew what was going on, but even after when I started meditating intensively, in some ways it actually got worse for a while in sort of cycles and phases. We actually have a person on our team, C. Piers Salguero, who studies chi sickness in the Chinese tradition.

And in Buddhism, and there's actually, it's basically what you would think of as shamanic sickness in terms of its symptomatology. I don't mean to say it's perfect one-to-one correlation, but it's in that same family of ways of thinking about things, and actually I have trying to fundraise for a study he wants to do on this, because apparently there's a lot of information in old Chinese texts that has never really been fully translated or mined for its potential clinical and phenomenological value.

And you find lots of this in the Indian literature, right, and other literatures, certainly in the Southeast Asian traditions. And you also find stuff that really looks a lot like that if you look at the Christian mystical literature in the same kind of way. So that's this rough clinical perennialism of seeing the same kind of idea.

Showing up again and again and again across traditions of some sort of healing crisis opening and then Challenge, you know, you find this in the work of Joseph Campbell and the hero's journey to the underworld of discovery and trial and mysterious illnesses are actually curiously correlated with all kinds of openings and things and so it's a theme you just that keeps popping up and definitely needs a whole lot of study and

So I'll just start with that. What are your thoughts?

Lian

Well, first of all, I love what you've just shared there. I had no idea that it was experienced in what sounds as you say, like it's not to say they're absolutely the same phenomena or the same way they show up, but I can totally see that it makes sense. Ultimately, these are human beings.

just in different parts of the world with different traditions, different cultures. So that's fascinating and I think as we spoke about in our last episode, my then teacher, Jez Hughes, you'd read his book about, yeah, very much so. And I think there's something again,

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

Oh yeah, and chatted with him. Delightful person.

Lian

within that understanding, whether we call it shamanic sickness, or as it's been talked about in these other cultures, it feels part of, you know, all the work you're doing, it feels an important part of it. Because really, that was the role of these people, you know, throughout history and all the different parts of the world was in some ways, like bringing these things together in a way that we've ultimately forgotten in our culture now. So it feels as something important to a

It's like, what can we learn from that? That is it is it is part of what you're doing with your work with the I'm going to say the initials wrong if I try and say it now, but the work you're asking. Yeah, so I'd love. But yeah, I wonder. I wonder how that might kind of weave into that work you're doing, because it feels as though that like there's.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

EPRC, yes, again. Yeah, we didn't do dyslexics any favor speaking of neurodivergence, yep.

Lian

an aspect of that that, you know, they could be seen as the beneficiaries of that work, but I also see that they're potentially people who can help with that work.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

Yes, definitely. And that's actually, there's a bunch of different things in there. So one of the things I'm going to sort of highlight that you hinted at is the timeline, right? So the timeline, the standard progression as I see it is, you have some opening or you face some set of challenges, something seems to be going wrong and eventually you kind of figure out how to deal with that as you go.

Along and then having been through that process and having figured it out for yourself, some non-trivial portion of people begin then helping others with that same sort of journey as they usually connected with community. They also got some other perspectives, they learned some tips and tricks, and then there's the natural thing of wanting to then help others coming up in it. So common in so many fields. And so that's the sort of the first thing of just acknowledging the arc and trajectory of that. And also figured out language, figured out a way of experiencing it, and also relating to it better. You can kind of vibe with it, which brings up one of the deeper questions is, can you train people who have never had some of these openings or experiences to really skillfully relate to them or even recognize them? Which is actually one of our big questions, because there's a whole, like, you know, my friend Gino.

Lian

Mmm.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

My friend Gino is like, you know, I don't think that the clinical mainstream is gonna really get this. Like it's gonna be, you know, wizards for wizards and witches for witches and muggles for muggles and like, and I do understand that point of view because I, in looking back on my own life, was kind of one way and then I was another way and then when I really got trained in this stuff, I became kind of a third way and the third way I think was better relating to these things and seeing the patterns and identifying it. That said.

In clinical medicine, we actually get very good at recognizing patterns of things we've never had before. Like I've never had a migraine that I know of, but, and migraines can present all these super weird ways. Like sometimes there's not even pain, like which is, you know, sometimes there's just like speech problems and memory loss, and one of your eyes isn't seeing right or something. That's your migraine, right? So it can do a lot of weird stuff, but you get better like, ooh, maybe that's a migraine, and then you can figure it out. So.

Lian

Hmm

Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

So I think this stuff is trainable by pattern recognition, even if people haven't had it, because we actually do stuff like that in clinical medicine and clinical practice all the time. Not that, you know, and what I would at least like is people to be able to say, okay, that's one of those weird energetic things or whatever, one of those emergent things. And then at least being able to refer to the people who may be way more likely to have had these experiences for themselves.

Lian

Hmm.

Mmm.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

And thus, in theory, might be able to go to a whole nother level of depth and relating to people skillfully and being able to tease out the nuances of it. But at the very least, to have ordinary clinicians be able to go, okay, yeah, that's one of them weird things. Go talk to the people who do weird stuff. That would be great. That would be a major upgrade. And then having, basically building that specialty. So we're laying the paper trail right now in the academic journals, hopefully.

Lian

Mmm.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

to build and define a new specialty that in the clinical mainstream that can own this, can study this, can be who you refer people to it. Because one of its problems actually, doctors don't like admitting things they're not very good at handling. And even if you aren't good at handling it, if there's someone else in the system who's good at handling it, it's like, oh, we're gonna refer you to a cardiologist or something. You know, that feels, and then that's like, patients like that and you like that. And the same kind of, we're gonna refer you to a.

Lian

Hmm

Mmm.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

fill in the blank of the name of whatever specialty owns this, eventually, however we language that. And so that's empowering, and it makes it way more likely that the system that will adopt this is if we can build that deeper level of expertise where we can demonstrate competence and value and have the system go, OK, yeah, we definitely want to incorporate that. That's useful.

Lian

Mm-hmm.

Mmmm

Hmm. When you were talking about, that really makes sense, and when you're talking about, you know, us being able to recognize patterns of things that we've not experienced before, it was reminding me of, I don't know if you're familiar with the Noetic Institute's work. Yes, that's right, yes.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

Institute for Noetic Sciences?

Yeah, they're an ally of the EPRC. And yeah.

Lian

makes complete sense. So I've interviewed Dr. Helene Wabe a few times and much of the conversations that we've had have been about phenomena that are really experienced by everyone.

And we kind of call them these impressive names that seem as though, you know, channeling, for example, or telepathy, as if they're kind of things that only a few people might experience, but actually when they are studied in a way that allows people to recognise that they're actually experiencing those things, it turns out often they're very common to all humans. And I was thinking how that is probably the true, it's true to a large extent with much of the kind of things that we just describe as so mystical or magical or spiritual, they're actually things that all humans can experience and perhaps experience more of when it's beneficial.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

Yeah, so A, really appreciate her work and the work of IONS, so they're natural partners. And I think I have switched to being out of your speakers, by the way. Yep.

Lian

Yes.

Mm-hmm.

speakers by the way. I have again haven't I? I've just uh...

Okay, we're almost finished but I've just popped, I think I've just gone back in. We'll edit all these parts out by the way but yeah thank you if you wouldn't mind picking back up again from where I finished.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

Yeah, good.

Good, so I really appreciate her work and the work of Ions and their obviously very natural allies in helping to normalize these experiences. And that's one of the reasons we're using terms like emergent phenomena rather than anomalous experiences. It's like they're all these different sort of like attempting to be kind of more scientific and not use like words like spiritual and mystical which are very hard to define and get very political. And...

But then things that say this is an anomalous experience or an unusual experience, I don't think those are actually even close to true. I think nearly everybody has had these. And if you start looking around at surveys of like, how many people have seen a ghost? It's a weirdly high proportion of the population have actually seen a ghost or had some encounter with a dead loved one or something. And so, and then, so exactly for that,

Lian

Yes!

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

That those kinds of reasons, yes, these are just human experiences that we don't really understand how they arise, which is why we use the term emergence. The reason we prefer emergent phenomena is because this thing out of chaos math and physics, which basically say you've got properties manifesting in a system that you can't predict from the underlying things you know about the system. Just based on what we know about serotonin receptors and norepi and neurons and whatever, we can't predict. Predict people having some of these experiences. So they are to us very straightforwardly properly labeled as emergent phenomena rather than anomalous experiences for the end and for the reason that again, tons of people have these things if you start asking the right questions in the right setting. And I've flipped to your speakers again.

Lian

It has, I don't know why it's doing this, my goodness, it's gonna be a dog's dinner to edit this, but at least I think we will have ended up with a good enough audio to make work. Apologies though. I've no idea why it's doing it because I'm not really changing anything. Okay, yes, that really makes sense. It's brought me to a final question which

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

That's right.

Lian

Right at the beginning you were saying that one of the real benefits you can see with the work you're doing is that whereas at the moment someone could for example go to some sort of like alternative practitioner whether it be you know a shamanic healer or someone working with psychedelics, something outside the mainstream and of course it's not regulated and you know it being in that work myself I hear all manner of horror stories and you know real harm being done.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

Not that harm doesn't, horror stories don't arise out of regulated industries and professions as well. They do. But. Yes, I hear you. Mm-hmm.

Lian

Yes, they do indeed. And the, and so there's part of me that's like, yes, it really makes sense what you're talking about in terms of if we can, we can bring some sense of, you know, ethics and regulations into these fields, that makes sense. And I was recalling one of my friends does work, how can I name this?

He runs a big online community, which is very much kind of just, it's very much peers who one way or another use psilocybin in service of healing, to come together to sort of share their experiences as a community, support each other, but very much kind of not, not from a lens of like, here's a professional who's, you know, like, doing this and you're there sort of higher up the hierarchy and you're paying them. His philosophy is like this is something that should be egalitarian, should be free, should be something that we work together as a community. And so that came to mind in the this is the challenge. It's like simultaneously there's real benefits that come from the regulation and kind of like this is how it ought to happen, but then we also potentially lose something which ultimately is, as far as I can see, almost like a human birthright to have access to these things, to be able to recognise the place of, you know, whatever it might be, whether it be connecting with teacher plants or practising different forms or traditions that allow us to kind of enter trance or meditative states, there is something in that potentially could be lost without the tension being placed there. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

Well, I think the risks of professional overreach and professional like grabbiness and saying nobody else can do this are real. Like professional societies do this kind of thing. But hopefully in the same way that there is psychiatry, the MD, and then there's also psychology with the PhD or the masters or whatever. And there's also social work, which lends its own perspectives to this.

Does similar work. And then there's a whole variety of different schools of that. And there's people who are licensed in different ways, and there's people who are also life coaches, and also whatever, they're really doing mostly psychotherapy. And so hopefully the creation of a medical specialty that also is empowered and with good knowledge and licensing and regulation to do this well,

I very much personally hope they don't then get super grabby and say, nobody else can do this. We are the only people who can whatever. I'm very, very nervous about that. But having something in the mainstream that can help with this rather than help work to own all of this itself. Yeah, the tension there is real and the risks are real.

With what I will call an ignorant and potentially adversarial clinical mainstream. I just don't think that's a good idea at all. So hopefully we can do this without them becoming too grabby and too control-y.

Lian

Hmm

Mmm.

Mm, thank you so much. We are up on time. This has been such a rich conversation. I'd love to hear before we close, if you would, your vision. You're like, where do you see the work you're doing ultimately taking us?

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

Wow, in an ideal world, the global clinical mainstream would have at least a sophisticated understanding of the best of the practitioners I've run into who have been helping people with the deep end, usually bringing in a wide range of systems and tools and tricks in really skillful ways for, I know people who have been helping people with this for 50 years helped literally tens of thousands, maybe a hundred thousand.

people to relate more skillfully to the deep end. And so we do have living models of what this looks like when it goes really well, what this looks like when it's highly knowledgeable, highly experienced, very mature, using a range of sophisticated systems that they themselves, those systems of which have been developed for thousands of years, some maybe even literally tens of thousands of years, in the case of like certain indigenous peoples.

Lian

Hmm.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

So bringing and who bring that to people and add tremendous value to their lives that just is so many iterations and generations beyond what the clinical mainstream currently knows. So if they could even get like a, if the global mainstream could even have a quarter of that would just be absolutely incredible. But also to have done way better science. So like, you know,

There are honest questions and debates and disagreements, even between very skilled practitioners. You know, there's a lot of room for conversation. And I think science has a role to play in helping to figure that out. And I think it will be cool to have a better understanding of some of the underlying physiological aspects that contribute to this genetic aspects, epigenetic aspects, biomarkers and all of that.

And biofeedback, I think, is a really cool thing. We're going to get more and better at, as we understand better some of the brain regions related to these things. Not that I think that will replace deep practice. I don't, but it will certainly be part of the mix and it's already here to some degree in coming. And so those are some of the upgrades, I hope, that are vastly more equitably distributed across populations rather than just knowledge that is in the hands of a few or languished in a way that doesn't scale or...

you know, behind closed doors or behind, you know, or just only people have access in that tradition, that doesn't suit with...

Lian

people have access in that tradition, that doesn't suit with.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

Go ahead.

Lian

Note to self, never use these for a podcast. Okay. So it just, if you wouldn't mind just picking up like from a sentence or so back, if you wouldn't mind.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

Yeah. So really we hope that these kinds of knowledges and capabilities are vastly more equitably distributed to everybody who needs them around the planet, rather than just held in certain traditions or behind certain paywalls or only limited access to people who just don't have enough time to help all the people who could possibly benefit from their sort of knowledge. So that's what we hope the global clinical mainstream looks like in rough terms.

Lian

Hmm, well, again, I just feel so, so glad, so blessed that you and people like you are doing the work to work towards that vision. It really is, as you were talking, I was like, that does feel possible. It does feel possible. As you say, it's a big, big task, but it does feel like that's where we're going. It really does.

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

It can be done, a lot of people, a lot of money, a lot of time. Oh, and if any of you listening, by the way, have any idea where the money comes from, it is a limiting factor. We have a lot of team, we've got a lot of talent, we do need more cash. So reach out to me at info at ebenefactors.org, which is the charity that supports all of this. It's a 501c3 registered charity. So happy to talk to you about how you can support this. Thank you.

Lian

Any of you listening by the way have any idea where the money comes from it is a limiting factor We have a lot of team. We've got a lot of talent. We do need more cash So reach out to me at info at you better factors dot o RG Which is the charity that supports all of this to 501 C3 registered? charity so happy to Talk to you about how you can support this. Thank you

Oh wonderful, thank you so much. This has been a really wonderful conversation Daniel and is there any other anything else you'd like to say in terms of links or anywhere else that people can find you in your work?

Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH

Thank you. Thanks for all your work.

Yeah, well, the EPRC, first of all, you can find the work of the team of the EPRC at thetheeprc.org. You can find the charity that supports this, ebenefactors.org. You can find my own personal stuff at inte and you can find the Dharma Overground, which is a community I created to help people talk about some of the stuff at dhar You can find one of my books at mctb.org.

And so that's a good start. I should also mention, by the way, in terms of fundraising, I am not asking for anything for myself. I actually don't get any money for this project. In fact, I philanthropically contribute to the efforts. So I'm not getting paid for any of this when I'm raising money. It's not asking for any cash for me. It's asking for money for cash for the many other scientists and clinicians who do need some compensation for their time to do this good work, because they need to eat. So thank you.

Lian

Oh, thank you so much

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