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This definition scales to self love, romantic love, child love and environmental love. In This definition love is not a binary yes or no, it is a quantity and a quality.

A graph of my friends definitions of love. Except for Laura and Soorya there is little word compatibility so it’s important to first have an agreed definition

The Science

My definition of love is based on an inherent ability humans and many other forms of life have. Brains with enough complexity can mimic and mirror. This mimicking creates internal embodied models of others by activating our mirror system allowing us to understand other people’s needs.

Our brain has a very efficient way of storing data. We use the same neurons both for processing and understanding other people's movement and for creating our own movements. This makes a lot of computational sense because in general humans have similar bio mechanics. By mimicking someone we also get an internal snapshot of their emotional state and of their intentions and goals. We can compare the external state we are witnessing with our internal sensations. We can use this to decipher people’s needs. When someone yawns we yawn and the need for sleep is communicated and even helps us sync rhythms. This is the basis of empathy and love. It is also the basis for abstract learning like language. Babies can learn sign language before they are verbal and quickly learn the association between body language and reward or punishment. 

Another important thing to understand is that our brain with its 86 billion neurons is organized in various hierarchies that have various levels of agency. Our brain can parallel process but we only have one output. We can only do one action at a time. This many to one function is gated by a part of our brain called the basal ganglia. The basal ganglia is constantly inhibiting motor output which means the motor command needs to be strong enough to overcome the inhibition. I imagine all the different possible motor outputs as sperm racing to enter the basal ganglia, it's a winner take all competition. Some parts of our brain are sending motor outputs optimizing for very specific conditions and needs that don’t always benefit us as a whole.

Think of an addiction pattern as an extreme example. Parts of the brain can hijack our behavior to optimize for a specific need without caring how it will affect the wider system. These addiction parts can overcome the basal ganglia threshold faster than other parts. To foster self love we need synergies and open communication between different parts of our brain. We need to slow down some of the fast automatic processes so that our frontal cortex can catch up and give us more options. When we slow down we can separate needs from unhealthy tactics and be more creative about fulfilling our needs.

The same happens when we embody someone else's needs. We create an internal model that becomes part of our own system and thus when we work to fulfill these needs our reward system is activated. This is why mindfulness and being aware of your own needs is the first step to maximizing love.

I’m launching a biofeedback lamp with a card game specifically designed to utilize mindfulness to improve intimate connections: https://www.bringwisdomhome.com/

Self Love

Psychedelics Break Down Prior Knowledge

My first explorations of psychedelics were with romantic and sexual partners that had a lot more psychedelic experience than me. Both of them were amazing guides offering me safety and tools to navigate this mysterious new way of being. On my first full dose the thin veil of disconnect from others that was the basis of my reality had disappeared. But with that, other substantial walls were gone too. The needs that were repressed over the years, the parts of me that I judged as weak, pathetic or unattainable from such an early age that I didn't even know existed, started coming up to the surface.

Understanding Our Trauma Parts - Attachment Theory

Attachment theory, developed in the mid -20th century by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth explains how early interactions between infants and their primary caregivers can shape the child's emotional and social development and affect their adult relationships where they can recreate the same dynamic with a caregiver. Attachment styles are typically classified into four categories:

1. Infants with a secure attachment style tend to explore their environment freely when their caregiver is present, but become upset when the caregiver leaves. When the caregiver returns, the infant seeks comfort and is easily soothed.
2. Infants with an anxious-preoccupied attachment style may become clingy and anxious when their caregiver leaves, and may have difficulty being soothed when the caregiver returns.
3. Infants with an avoidant-dismissive attachment style may seem indifferent to their caregivers leaving and returning, and may avoid seeking comfort from their caregivers altogether.
4. Infants with a fearful-avoidant attachment style may display a mixture of behaviours associated with both anxious-preoccupied and avoidant-dismissive attachment styles.

Loving Our Traumas

Loving in community

Have you ever seen multiple Pendulums sync? I still have nightmares from trying to solve the differential equations that govern the synchronisation movements. The gist is that vibrational energy can transfer through a medium that connects the Pendulums causing them to sync. I think relationships can be similar. We can synchronise to each other's needs as long as we have a medium to transfer the information. It's up to us to build that medium not only with words and language but with our embodied selves.

Anthropologist Robin Dunbar, suggested that the size of the neocortex, the part of the brain responsible for conscious thought and language, limits the number of social relationships that an individual can effectively manage. According to Dunbar's theory, this limit is around 150, which is often referred to as "Dunbar's number."

While our current use of technology and social media might allow us to maintain a larger number of weaker connections, research shows it likely comes at the cost of less actual support and more feelings of isolation. I believe that with the use of feedback from embodied technology and psychedelics we can increase our tribe number. I grew up with Asimov's foundation, not the shitty tv but the books. I would constantly debate with myself around the dichotomy of potential human evolution presented in the book. Would it be better if humans evolved into a future with a more collective consciousness but lost their individuality and personal freedoms?

Experimenting with Psychedelics made it clear to me that the dichotomy in the books was false. Our brains have a potential of entering states of high social coherence and collective consciousness and then existing those states, integrating back into a single (very complex) entity.

We can become part of larger social systems while maintaining our agency.

Environmental love

We can only live a fulfilling life with community. We don't need to be fully sustainable ourselves, we need to build sustainable communities. If we love our environment and gift it our work towards reducing carbon emissions, increasing biodiversity and plant life our outcome will be much improved. Psychedelics in nature have been the most healing for me and helped shift my despair into love.

Many think psychedelics might help drive a more environmentally conscious society. Once again we need to remember that psychedelics can only open the door we need to walk through it, changing our lifestyle, speaking up and taking action as forms of loving our environment.

The post How to Navigate Psychedelics, Love and Attachment appeared first on Shashkes.

After watching the inspiring interview between psychedelic researcher and stage 4 cancer patient Roland Griffiths and mindfulness teacher Tara Brach I knew that after my first post about Birth Trauma the next one needed to be about death.

 

My Story

I grew up orthodox Jewish and I've seen first hand how fear of death and irrational stories about the afterlife can drive whole societies to self harm and abuse of others. My hope is that by practicing mindfulness and learning about psychedelic science larger parts of society can learn to accept our mortality. And with that acceptance we can start prioritizing our current life on this planet instead of an unlikely afterlife. 

 

I grew up being told that every year on a specific day (Yom Kippur), god judges people based on the set of rules in the Jewish books and decides who lives and who dies that year. I was taught that until I was 12, it was my parents that would be judges for my sins. If I had a penis my parents would be responsible for my actions for one more year until I was 13. On Yom Kipur when I was 6, I spent a whole day in synagogue praying in terror, afraid my parents would be killed for my sins. Even at that young age I resented god and realized what a sadistic cruel creature he was. While my friends, who didn't know how to read were playing outside, I was being punished for my intelligence and coerced to pray all day to prevent my parent’s death. 

 

The brand of jewish I grew up in didn't have a heaven and hell. If god judged you worthy, when the messiah came you would be resurrected to a reality where Jews ruled all the land and if you were not worthy you would be gone forever. By the time I was 7 I had decided that either all the adults around me were idiots or they were all lying to me. Either way, I had stopped believing in god and secretly began living a secular life exploring all the things that were forbidden for instance turning on lights on Saturday.

 

 

However my fear of death did not subside, it had started years earlier. I remember the exact moment I realized me and everyone I cared for would one day be dead. I was around 4 and we were on a family outing in a hotel. I was sharing a room with my sister. I was in bed trying to sleep when it suddenly hit me like a brick of wall. Everyone would be gone. I would be gone. 

 

 

 

Usually children's awareness of death is gradual but for me it was very sudden. I began crying and shaking hysterically, utterly mortified. I'm not sure what triggered the thought. It's likely I had been watching violent tv inappropriate for my age. When my mom checked in on me to see what was wrong she tried to comfort me by telling me not to worry "It won't happen for a very long time" she said. This did not help my 4 year old brain calm down and I remember crying until I was so fatigued that I fell asleep. 

 

All throughout my childhood and adolescence I would suffer from bouts of terrifying death anxiety, mostly before sleep. This would include heart palpitations and cold sweats, just about a full on panic attack. But after that first night I never told anyone again. Most times, after the initial panic subsided I would be left with a crippling terror in my stomach. I would sneak out of my room and from a hidden corner watch whatever dumb comedy my parents were watching on TV to keep myself distracted. Distraction was my main tactic of getting through this. Forcing myself to do something all the time so there would be no time or space for the terror to come. Once in my early 20's this happened while I was driving and I needed to stop the car on the side. I remember being well aware of the irony and internal conflict in that moment as I also suffered from suicidal ideation. How can I both want to die and be so terrified of death? 

 

Before starting my master's in cognitive neuroscience I spent 3 months at my dad's apartment on the beach in Cyprus catching up on the basics of neuroscience and reviewing my previous math studies. This was also when my mindfulness journey began. The many hours of various meditation training I was exposed to via my martial arts practices over the year were not benefiting me. I needed a deeper scientific model of how my brain and body interact to construct reality to actually start being mindful.

 

 

 

The Science 

The brain is an amazing multiple processor with 86 billion neurons that are organized in various sub networks with different specialities. That's why we can be in conflicting states. Different parts of our vastly complex network can be wanting, needing and optimizing for different things. Striving for a harmonic network where each part can at least communicate its processing to the global stage is how I define mindfulness. As babies being socialized we learn to inhibit our needs. We learn to hold in our pee or poop until we get to a bathroom. We learn to inhibit our hunger, our need for touch and later also our horneyness. For many people, myself included, this inhibition can become too strong fragmenting our neural network creating dissociation. The bottom up signals coming from our body can become so weak they are almost lost to the rest of the brain that could potentially make changes and act on these signals. This can lead not only to mental health problems but to physiological problems as well. For a great book on the subject I recommend the Myth of Normal by Gabor Mate.

 

The Myth of Normal

 

I remember how proud my mom was that she told people she had potty trained me by the age of one. Later in life between my religious upbringing and martial arts training inhibition and disassociating became a way of life. Over the last decade a combination of psychedelic, mindfulness and somatic therapy has put me on a different path. For me, Mindfulness started in those 3 months of preparing for my master's while taking short daily meditation breaks. I noticed some thoughts were totally encompassing "I” was fully in the story. Other thoughts would allow for some parts of the brain to do different things. "I" could maintain a distance. 

 

Today I call this resource awareness. Instead of perceiving an average calculation of everything that is going on "I" am more able to perceive how my processing power is distributed amongst various calculations. “I” am more able to notice which parts of my brain-body networks are doing what. How filled is my bladder? How do different parts of my body relate to each other in space? How much am I mimicking the person I'm communicating with? How many fast automatic processes are taking place and whether these processes are based on a past traumatic event? Notice the brackets around the “I”? Part of my mindfulness journey is learning how to quiet the verbal self processing networks. 

 

Our ego-self can be compared to the loudest kid in class that is also the slowest. Our ego-self often jumps up shouting "I have the answer" while the rest of the brain has moved on to the next question. Inhibiting this part is not recommended but finding ways for this network to do what it does best (meaning making and storytelling) while not interfering and trying to control the rest of the networks can be incredibly helpful. 

 

Meditating while focusing on your breath does not mean your ego takes notes, or if you are like me, freaks out about every muscle twitch involved in the breathing process as you try to map them all out in a logical sequence. It is the exact opposite. Meditation and mindfulness allow for ancient breathing pathways in your brain to get the reigns and resonate to other brain networks, while your ego self takes a step back and observes in owe.

 

Ego Dissolution and Psychedelics 

One of my main criticism towards scientific research around ego dissolution and psychedelics is the verbal questionnaires starting with "I experienced". My first ego dissolution experience happened in high-school and it wasn't due to drugs it was due to studying philosophy. 

 

"When our perceptual inputs are removed, as in dreamless sleep, in a coma, in death or under general anesthesia, our consciousness is extinguished and we are no longer present in the world".

 

These are David Hume's words from Treatise On Human Nature. For my 16 year old self reading these words and fully experiencing them was enough to shut down the ego brain for a few moments. An ecstatic sense of oneness washed over me only to pass and leave me with a sense that I had experienced something I could never fully grasp. 

 

The first time I tried psychedelics something similar happened, the verbal voice in my head went quiet. It was such a sense of relief. My brain and body were fully functional. It was easy to have conversations but when my experienced tripp sitter asked how I felt things turned strange. My verbal self was unable to answer. There were separate feelings and sensations being processed but the singular "I" networked that takes an average reading of these processes and invents stories about them was defused. 

 

This has happened to me quite a few times since. My brain becomes unable to understand the abstraction of a singular self. There is no “you” or “I”. We are only able to perceive lower level processing patterns. This was such a mysterious sensation that I decided to focus my studies on understanding how psychedelics can cause this. 

On stronger doses the sense of minimal self can disintegrate as well. Our brain's ability to differentiate what is our internal system vs what is our external world can break down. A massive sense of oneness or not being sure which hand belongs to which body is a common motif. Visiting this state can have immense benefits, reducing cognitive load, feeling connected to something bigger and even I believe increasing our learning my mimicking capabilities. Monkey see monkey do! Blending our sense of self with our community is the basis of how we learn and the basis of our empathy. However, it is not a sustainable state for a functional human. Often we need to be able to differentiate between ourselves and our environment in order to function. 

 

 

 

The Healing Combo 

While studying I continued to actively practice mindfulness as well as use cannabis and psychedelics to cultivate parts of my brain like a garden. Weeding out specific beliefs that were based on early trauma or my unhealthy upbringing and seeding beliefs and patterns coming from people around me that I admired. In one of those experiments I managed to gain some distance from the death anxiety pattern and perceive the calculation my brain was attempting to do. My brain was stuck in loops of Nothingness times Infinity in the brain of a 4 year old. With no understanding of abstractions of calculus this can be very anxiety inducing. Then, another day I was on a strong truffle trip in a little forest grove close to my university when I could feel the onset of the death anxiety pattern. I was terrified of the coming terror. Knowing what I know about psychedelics I was afraid I would re-traumatize myself or even totally freak out and require medical attention. But then, one of the seeds I had planted in my brain spoke to the rest of the brain very clearly. “You want to know what happens when you die? Here…” the voice said, while guiding my hand to touch the earth under me. “When we die we turn into this”. The rich texture of the earth filled my bottom up senses and my brain remodeled death.

 

 

Death is a process of in creasing our entropy. Bacteria and fungus break our molecules down to their basic building blocks and then with a little help from the sun's energy these building blocks get recycled potentially creating new life. I was part of this intricate and complex natural process and there was no uncertainties to be afraid of. 

 

A few weeks later when I sensed an onset of the familiar death anxiety I knew what to do. I put my hands back on the earth and let the earth literally ground me. It’s been a decade since that last onset and I have not experienced any death anxiety since. I needed a story about an afterlife, I think we all do, but I could actually connect to the science story. The more physics, chemistry and biology I learn the more in awe I am of nature and my part in the larger system. 

 

Throughout his interview, time and time again, Roland reminds the interviewer that his scientific and secular beliefs will not allow him to believe in a heaven, hell or even karma. He adds that his mindfulness training and psychedelic experiences are helping him be curious about his own death and stay away from crippling fear and depression. Roland was also incredibly authentic, admitting that he doesn’t know how long he will be able to maintain this state of joyful life. Dealing with pain, medication and the medical system is a difficult task even for healthy people. I’m rooting for Roland and for our society in general to find a way to gracefully face death.

Researches have linked the mystical experience with the strength of the therapeutic effect of a psychedelic trip. However, examples like Roland Griffith, Michal Pollen and myself show that one can get the benefits of psychedelics including a sense of connection and oneness while still maintaining our scientific outlook. 

 

 

Hopeful Death Beliefs? 

What happens in the process of dying? As a young teenager I used to believe upon death, some essence of me separates from my physical body but I outgrew that. My current hopeful story is that in the last moments of our life we experience a state of time dilation similar to what might happen on strong psychedelic trips. Our personal experience of time gets stretched to a subjective infinity as we jump from one memory to the other relieving parts of our life over and over. This motivates me to make awesome joyful memories and let go of painful ones. What we hold on to is what we are and the knowledge that we pass on is the gift we will leave to the world when we are gone.

 

 

 

 If you are interested in trying out a cutting edge mindfulness and meditation technology that was also designed to help us prepare and integrate for psychedelic trips, check out Wisdom.

 

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For my first blog post on my new site I thought it would be fitting to start at the beginning of our lives as individual entities. I’ll explain how these first few moments can impact our behavior long into adulthood sometimes in ways that are not beneficial to our adult selves. I’ll share how psychedelics can help us change unwanted behaviors. 
I think the first time I heard about birth trauma was at a contact improv dance event. I was skeptical and even judgemental, believing it an easy excuse for dysfunctionality. Only after completing a masters in cognitive neuroscience and going through several deep psychedelic trips did I realized how wrong I was. Understanding our birth trauma can be a path to improved functionality.
I will focus on my anecdotal story because most humans learn better from stories in hopes that you can find some practical learning for your own growth. I will augment my story with relevant research for those who want to delve deeper.
 

Can We Remember Our Birth? The science

There are two types of memory:
Episodic memory - this is what most of us think of when we think of memory. A narrative around where we were and what we were doing. The ability to recall specific events or experiences. This type of memory typically develops from around 2 years old and improves throughout adolescence and adulthood utilizing the brain region called the hippocampus. 
Procedural memory (sometimes called implicit memory) is the ability to acquire and retain motor skills and habits. Examples of procedural memory include riding a bike, playing a musical instrument and also simpler things like walking or crawling. Procedural memory doesn’t involve the hippocampus and is believed to begin earlier in life. How early? There is evidence that this memory starts from around 34 weeks of gestation after the fetus’s brain is developed enough that it can start multisensory integration and form feedback loops between motor output and sensory input. 
We learn what we are while utilizing these feedback loops and calculating statistical correlations between input and output. 
In the tight loud environment of the womb we push and turn and kick against the womb boundaries and start building our agency. The output of our motor neurons controlling our hand correlated with the activity of the neurons in the sensory cortex receiving the proprioceptive signals sent from our hand through the nervous system.
Slowly the complex system of our 86 billion neurons starts organizing itself, until it is able to form predictions. “If I do A, I will probably feel B”. “If I feel B I am probably doing A.” 
And then, all of a sudden, everything changes, our whole sensory world that was filtered by being in our mother’s womb vanishes and we are tossed into a world filled with so many unpredictable sensations. This might just be the most memorable moment of our lives when it comes to procedural memory.

There is one more thing to understand about our memory banks: whenever we “read” from them we also “write” to them, connecting our current sensory input with the previous learnt memory. Think about all the instances you heard your favorite song, how they connect and blare with each other. This is the basics of many trauma healing therapeutic modalities. From EMDR to Exposure therapy, we can bring up traumatic memories in safe spaces and override the procedural memory, the tightness in the body,  the
shaking, sweating or vomiting that can accompany PTSD. We can slowly learn to regulate but it’s not easy. 

My Story
My uncle used to tell me that as a baby I would bang my head on the floor and scream. Turns out, head banging can be pretty common in kids especially those diagnosed with autistic spectrum traits. For most it stops in childhood, for me this impulse returned in adolescence and my early 20’s especially in times of stress. Mostly I could inhibit it except when sometimes I couldn’t. The narrative I carried with me was that I was broken, a self destructive creature. It was only after I started somatic therapy in my mid 30’s while crawling and going through developmental movements that I remembered my birth story. I was stuck, banging my head on my mother’s pelvic for 12 hours until a MD managed to get me out. I messaged my mom and she confirmed it, I was born with a big dent on my forehead. I wasn’t broken, I was just holding on to an early procedural memory, an adaptive strategy stemming from my birth. I like to fantasize that if traditional birth practices were more common maybe I wouldn’t have gotten stuck to begin with but also enjoy attributing my stubbornness and relentless pushing towards challenges to those early moments.  There is interesting evidence that children born via cesarean operation have higher rates of obesity and asthma as these first moments impact our immune system and gut bacteria and perhaps even early learnt motor skills.  

Psychedelic Short Cut
Our brain remains plastic until the day we die even Alzihimer patients can form new procedural memories creating new neural connections. However, the majority of our plasticity happens early in our first few years of life. Various parts of the brain hyper connect at very specific times and then a pruning mechanism happens, whatever connections aren’t triggered by incoming input get pruned. Most of the research has been done with language identification. If we are not exposed to a language early in life our brain will forever react differently than if we were, even if later in life we become fluent speakers.

Psychedelics have the ability to bring back some of that lost plasticity, they can over connect different areas for a short period of time allowing us to create new feedback loops. Different psychedelics work in different ways and have very different risk profiles. My research is mostly focused on classical psychedelics such as Psilocybin and LSD, but other research shows Ketamine and MDMA have potential therapeutic effects (with a somewhat higher risk profile). In some psychedelic trips I would get glimpses of very early patterns but finding and replacing the exact procedural memory responsible for my head banging was harder than the movie eternal sunshine of the spotless mind would lead us to believe.

Yes And
My path to rewrite this specific birth trauma learnt pattern started with building an artistic shrine to these patterns in an attempt to connect them to visual-spatial processing. Then I began to use idea’s from Improv theater which are also reflected in the therapeutic modality called Internal Family Systems and Acceptance commitment therapy. Instead of trying to block or reject the impulse or sensation, I would try to accept it. However it was a dangerous impulse I add a an “AND” to it. YES I’m going to bang my head AND I’m going to put this pillow on the wall before I do it. Yes I’m going to bang my head AND I will do it on my bed mattress. Yes I’m going to bang my head AND I’m going to do it very very slowly and feel the full sensation of pressure in safe slow motion. I began exploring the impulse, expanding it and slowly stopped being afraid of it.
As I practiced this, the impulse led to one of many actions I could act out. But it still felt maladaptive. When I feel stress in my adult life it’s not because I'm physically trapped and there are so many more useful patterns that I could be doing. 

Float Tanks and Hot Tubes

I’ve always loved hot tubs and ever since I tried a float tank for the first time it’s become an integrative part of my wellness and self care practices. I even explored a dry float tank in NYC in hopes that it could be a more effective replacement for short mental health breaks (it wasn’t but it did still help with my lower back pain). The warm water and reduction of sensory changes quiets my over noisy bottom up sensory input. I feel safe and content. I’ve been thanking my mom for giving me what was likely a great womb experience which is far from trivial as many issues can start from lack of prenatal care.

It All Comes Together 

The singer/song writer Rachal Lark sings about hot springs and psychedelics. For me it was submerging myself in a jacuzzi in the Netherlands while on Psychedelics. In this altered state the noise of the bubbles and water sensation brought me back to the womb. Then, I opened my eyes underwater and the bright underwater light of the jacuzzi shocked and pained me. My procedural memory kicked in, I was in the womb and I needed to get out. It was terrifying. While my episodic awareness and memory was intact and I knew I was in a jacuzzi a stronger than ever impulse to bang my head on the jacuzzi wall emerged. Luckily all the somatic and therapeutic training kicked. “ok you want to get out but remember we now have a whole body and we can figure out where the way out is.” A new pattern came out of my body contracting and then pushing sideways and finally using my legs to break out of the water. It was an incredibly powerful experience.
A few days after that I felt a little twitch, the beginning of the known head banging impulse had arised. However, this time my body reacted with the new learnt pattern, contract, push sideways, expand. When I completed that pattern the impulse was gone and I felt something had changed.
It’s been months and the impulse has not returned even while under a lot of stress. Whether the narrative of my birth story is objectively true or an inaccurate story that fits the few data points I have is immaterial. What matters is that it helped me stop exerting immense mental effort to deal with this patterns, and instead make friends with it and teach my brain some new tricks!   

*This is a personal story and by no means a recommendation for a specific therapeutic modality. 

**I do dream of (and work towards) a future where psychedelics can be legally and safely combined with embodied wellness modalities such as yoga, massage and water therapies.  

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