Voices of Esalen Podcast

BJ Miller is a renowned palliative care physician, author, and speaker. Well known for his 2015 TED Talk ”What Really Matters at the End of Life,” which has been viewed over 10 million times, BJ is a thought leader in the field of conscious dying.

When he was a sophomore at Princeton University, BJ experienced a tragic accident that resulted in the loss of three of his limbs. He followed a path in the medical field, and fell in love with palliative care while in residency. He has been helping patients and their families ever since.

In this live conversation at Esalen Institute, BJ shares his insights on the differences between palliative and hospice care, the emotional and spiritual needs of patients facing terminal diagnoses, and the role of spirituality in end-of-life treatment. BJ also talks about his experiences working with patients and their families, how to help people come to terms with their own impending death, and how to help them become unstuck from a negative narrative.

One of the most fascinating topics discussed in this conversation is the role of psychedelics in end-of-life care. BJ shares his thoughts on the recent Johns Hopkins study concerning psilocybin mushrooms and end-of-life anxiety in cancer patients, where up to 80% of participants reported significant reductions in anxiety and improved quality of life.

As we wrap up the conversation, BJ shares his thoughts on how he sees palliative care evolving in the future, and what role he sees himself playing in that evolution. He also talks about how his online palliative care service, Mettle Health, will free him up to do palliative care the way he wants to do it.

Deborah Eden Tull is the founder of Mindful Living Revolution. A deeply experienced and respected dharma teacher, Tull is a spiritual activist, author, and sustainability educator. She has taught engaged meditation for over 20 years and trained for seven and a half years as a Buddhist monk at a silent Zen monastery. With a focus on post-patriarchal thought and practices, Eden integrates compassionate awareness into her offerings, bridging personal and collective awakening in an age of global change.

In this podcast, we’ll be playing a talk that Eden gave to the Esalen community on January 18th, 2023. In it, she explores the concept of duality — feeling special versus not special — and explores the impact duality had on the quality of her life growing up. She describes how it was this feeling of duality that ultimately led her to a spiritual path. Deborah also explores the shared nature of cultural conditioning, her own experience of navigating chronic illness, and how she was able to let go of the myth of self-improvement in order to tap into her own true nature, presence and essence.

Bill Donius is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book, Thought Revolution. In this book, Donius explains the science behind non-dominant handwriting and teaches how to incorporate this powerful technique into your personal life. Through the simple process of non-dominant hand writing, you can discover how to connect more fully with your subconscious right brain, unlocking hidden talents, reducing stress, and even healing from trauma. This episode is a bit different, in that we feature a process that Bill goes through with a Voices of Esalen listener, oncology nurse and meditation teacher Nicole Longbine.

Bill is also a member of the Esalen Board of Trustees. He spent 30 years in corporate America in a number of industries, including health care, television production, and banking. He rose through the ranks to become chairman and CEO of Pulaski Bank in St Louis, growing it eight-fold to $1.4 billion in assets. He serves on a number of boards including the St. Louis Art Museum, Maryville University, and Venture Cafe, and served a two-year term on the U.S. Federal Reserve Board as a banker appointee.

Adam Bramlage is Founder and CEO of Flow State Micro, a functional mushroom company and microdosing education platform. Adam has helped hundreds of people, from professional athletes to people suffering from addiction and depression, achieve results through microdosing in his private practice. This interview gives the basics of microdosing; it's a great primer for anyone just at the beginning of their journey.

Today we’re sharing a conversation that took place in October, 2022, between members of the Esselen Tribe of Monterey County and the Esalen Institute. Representing the Esselen tribe are Jana Nason and Stephen Vicente Arevalo.

Jana Nason is an Esselen and Rumsen descendant, and an enrolled tribal member of the ETMC. She is the nonprofit secretary, and serves on the Tribal Council as Tribal Administrator and Secretary, Publications Chair, and Cultural Resource Committee member. She also manages the Cultural Archeological Monitoring program and serves her Tribe in that capacity. She is dedicated to education, and protecting and preserving the cultural heritage and ancestral sacred sites.

Stephen Arevalo is an Esselen and Rumsen descendant. He currently serves on the ETMC Tribal Council as well on the Cultural Resource Committee. Stephen serves his Tribe on many levels and is a tribal cultural archeological monitor. He is deeply passionate about his ancestry and has started a language re-learning class for tribal members. He is an educational speaker, and an active community member.

Representing Esalen Institute is Douglas Drummond. Douglas serves as the Director for Healing Arts and Somatics and the Director of Community Alliance at Esalen Institute. He is also faculty. Douglas is originally from Aotearoa New Zealand and now makes his home in Big Sur, California in Esselen Territory, with his family.

Learn more about the Esselen Tribe at www.esselentribe.org/.

Tim McKee is publisher at North Atlantic Books, an educational nonprofit publishing house that collaborates with partners to develop cross-cultural perspectives; nurture holistic views of art, science, the humanities, and healing; and seed personal and global transformation by publishing work on the relationship of body, spirit, and nature.

Tim is interviewed today by S. Rae Peoples, Associate Director of Diversity & Inclusion Education at Tufts University. She has over 25 years of experience serving in leadership roles that revolve around social justice in the arts, education, political, and nonprofit sectors. Her expertise lies in advising organizations on how best to create internal conditions that allow equity, diversity, inclusion, and justice to flourish. Her opinions and writings have been featured in The Washington Post, Oakland Post, BlogHer, and YFS Magazine. A native of California with a Midwest upbringing, S. Rae is currently rooted in motherhood, love, and community in Somerville, MA.

To ground this interview, S. Rae People’s writes: “The conversation with Tim McKee, publisher for North Atlantic Books, is of unique importance particularly for white men who want to engage in the collective work toward racial justice. Both candid and coming from a seat of compassion, the conversation explores the distinct role and responsibilities white men have in moving the needle forward on racial justice — given their location within a racialized society where they are beneficiaries given the fact that they are both white and male."

Today our episode is an encore presentation of Michael Pollan’s keynote presentation at the 2019 Psychedelic Integration Conference at Esalen Institute. Pollan is the author of six New York Times bestsellers, including 2018’s How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. This tome has become a four-part Netflix show, also entitled How to Change Your Mind.

Pollan gives a great speech here, touching upon the pervasiveness of the human tendency to want to change consciousness, the ways that noetic understanding can add to healing on the psychedelic journey, the radical ways that plants can change us and change consciousness, and the ways that he remains a skeptic to some of the more grandiose claims of the psychedelic movement. A must-listen for fans and for newbies alike.

✧༺mirrored fatality is the nonbinary Kapampangan-Pilipinx and Pakistani-Muslim performance art duo of Mango and Samar, artists in residence at Esalen during the summer of 2021. Together we discuss the difference between non-binary and trans, how they share their rituals, altars, and medicine through DIT (Do It Together) experimental and healing noise punk, why punk as a genre is their musical choice, how fashion can be weaponized, why farming is a huge part of their lives and creative practice, how capitalism functions as the backdrop for their world, what an anti-imperialist education would look like, what they love about one another, how to educate, how they might react when they are misgendered, what they hope for Esalen's future, and much more.

We play selections of several of their songs throughout this episode. To support Mango and Samar, head to their bandcamp and check out their music.

In their words: "mirrored fatality’s performance activism allows them a safe space to release their bubbling, fermenting primal rage rooted in the settler colonialism, transphobia, racism, xenophobia, and intergenerational ancestral trauma they experience daily as nonbinary people of color. mirrored fatality’s intentions for their art is for Queer Trans Black Indigenous People of Color to embody their rage, disrupt the silence and isolation from existing in a white supremacist capitalistic apocalyptic world, and harness collective care, catharsis, and holistic healing. Join them in imagining the future we’ve been fighting for and experience mirrored fatality’s reflections to witness our highest, truest selves."

Dr. Brian Pace is a lecturer who teaches Psychedelic Studies at Ohio State University. He is trained as an evolutionary ecologist, specializing in phytochemistry, ethnobotany, and ecophysiology. He believes in grassroots drug decriminalization efforts and hopes to find alternative policies to the imperial drug war. For more than a decade, Brian has worked on agroecology and climate change.

Dr. Nese Devenot is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Institute for Research in Sensing (or IRiS) at the University of Cincinnati; an Affiliate Scholar at the Center for Psychedelic Drug Research & Education at Ohio State University; and the Medicine, Society & Culture Research Fellow with Psymposia. She also researches and teaches bioethical approaches to psychedelic medicine. She was a Research Fellow with the New York University Psilocybin Cancer Anxiety Study, where she participated in the first qualitative study of patient experiences.

Dr. Pace and Dr. Devenot are authors of a paper entitled “Right-Wing Psychedelia: Case Studies in Cultural Plasticity and Political Pluripotency,” a piece they created to rebut the common cultural assumption that psychedelics have the potential to improve society because of inherent characteristics that tend to point their users to a liberal, free-thinking ideology.

In the discussion that follows, they suggest that psychedelics are non-specific amplifiers of their set and setting, which, they take pains to remind me, is within the capitalist realm, and that contrary to the de facto cultural credo, conservative, hierarchy-based ideologies are quite able to withstand the face melting effects of a few hits of LSD. They speak about many cases where psychedelic users either remained authoritarian in their views or became conservatively radicalized after taking psychedelics. We also get into conservative thought leaders who happen to be psychedelic cheerleaders, like Jordan Peterson, as well as the moneyed individuals who are central players in the corporate psychedelic world, like Peter Thiel and Rebecca Mercer. I have taken the liberty of importing some clips that I found on YouTube of these famous folks up for discussion, in the hopes of better illustrating the points being made. Hope you enjoy.

More information akin to this can be found at psymposia.com.

Emily Ladau is a disability rights activist, writer, storyteller, and digital communications consultant whose career began at the age of 10 when she appeared on several episodes of Sesame Street to educate children about her life with a physical disability. Her writing has been published in The New York Times, CNN, Vice, and Huffington Post.

She is the author of Demystifying Disability: What to Know, What to Say, and How to be an Ally.

With co-host Kyle Khachardurian, Emily is the host and creator of the podcast The Accessible Stall.

Our interview touches upon representation of folks with disabilities in the media, how to make podcasts and other forms of media more accessible for all people, working from home and what that means in terms of creating inclusivity and equity in the workplace, how she feels about educating people about disability, and what people could do to meet her halfway, ableism and internalized ableism, tropes and cliches of disability inspiration, tokenization, intersectionality, and much more.

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