Great Podcast! I’ve been thinking about mental health and alternative therapy for a while. One of the things, besides foiling, that I often try to spread around, is awareness of how effective psychedelics are. I’ve personally done in one afternoon with MDMA what would take years if ever with traditional therapy. Check out How to Change your Mind on Netflix. Daily meditation and nature time, yearly psychedelic journeys. Good stuff.
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Great podcast! Shared it with some folks outside of foilers. I like how Joel framed mental health as an everyone-problem in that we all experience some degree of mental challenge throughout our lives. Need to remove the stigma around it so more seek help. Great job Erik driving and contributing to a fantastic podcast. So many good points throughout. Agree with you FF that there are a lot of effective options including MDMA that help to expedite the process.
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I thought of Michael Pollan (author of How to Change Your Mind) when I was listening to the podcast as well and exchanged some thoughts with Erik on the topic. When Joel was discussing how flowstate kept the mind fresh and broke the mind out of its engrained routines (paraphrasing) it really reminded me of this metaphor that Michael Pollan often references in his interviews (quoting Mendel Kaelen):
“Think of the brain as a hill covered in snow, and thoughts as sleds gliding down that hill. As one sled after another goes down the hill, a small number of main trails will appear in the snow. And every time a new sled goes down, it will be drawn into the preexisting trails, almost like a magnet.” Those main trails represent the most well-traveled neural connections in your brain, many of them passing through the default mode network. “In time, it becomes more and more difficult to glide down the hill on any other path or in a different direction. “Think of psychedelics as temporarily flattening the snow. The deeply worn trails disappear, and suddenly the sled can go in other directions, exploring new landscapes and, literally, creating new pathways.”
i would call flowstate a physical/metaphysical gray area and its pretty fascinating that this area can be accessed through methods as diverse as experience (like foiling) and substance (mushrooms).
I don’t have a lot of personal experience with these types of substances but I love Michael Pollans writing and I thought that the overlap was uncanny. Cool that others noted the same reference.
The interview was excellent and provoked a lot of thought.
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I really like the idea of normal life run on set programs (like sled tracks) and flow state being the removal of those programs. Very similar to MDMA, your pupils even dilate like crazy, except with the latter you observe your life and thoughts with an open mind instead of the moment. It’s actually technically not a psychedelic, but rather a heart opener. And an eye opener in the sense that you see the walls you had up, when they are gone. Like ambient noise that suddenly stops.
The metaphor that came to mind after my first journey(that almost definitely saved my marriage)was this: Your brain, as you grow up, becomes a poorly played game of Tetris. If you go into a journey with ceremony and intention, the medicine takes out the pieces that don’t fit, and puts them back so they do. That’s the magic of it. It’s not a pill you take forever, it flips switches that stay where you want them. Honestly, if I was a dictator, I’d mandate it.
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Also the conversation about guys made me think of this:
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Fantastic interview, especially enjoyed the talk about flow states and default mode networks, as well as the perception of time including the Erik’s description of fractional relativity lifespan. Another interesting concept to explore is “time-dilation” which is defined as essentially expanding your experience of time/slowing it down.
This was great.
Regarding social media, I’m really grateful to Erik for setting up this forum as an alternative venue for the surfer foil brain discussion. I do wish more of the conversations that happen on IG would get directed to happen here instead. Seems not.
Instagram feels like such a toxic social media platform, I can absolutely feel the FOMO negative feeling addiction dopamine machine kick in whenever I use it. I found it ironic that Joel gets bummed out by people saying “wow your life looks so perfect”, if he primarily posts “insta worthy” perfect day stuff. I get it that if it is your business then you just need to post one dimensional insta stuff, but that is playing their game.