In this interview, we dive deep into the life and work of Adam Walker, a registered psychologist whose journey is shaped by his roots in skateboarding, music, and meditation. Adam is passionate about fostering an inner sense of self that not only cultivates personal truth but also helps others discover their authentic selves. His eclectic background informs his therapeutic approach, which includes neuroshamanism, EMDR therapy, Internal Family Systems therapy, mindfulness practices, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), and integrative therapies.
Through his private practice, Adam provides support for a wide range of issues such as complex trauma, anxiety, PTSD, chronic stress, parenting challenges, depression, grief, and relationship difficulties. His unique blend of therapies is tailored to meet the diverse needs of his clients, emphasizing the importance of authenticity and understanding in the therapeutic process.
Adam’s professional journey is complemented by a rich history in various sectors, including Child Protection and Community Mental Health. His interest in psychedelic-assisted therapy and research on the benefits of skateboarding showcases his commitment to exploring innovative approaches to mental health. As a devoted father and husband, Adam’s dedication to aligning with others through genuine connections shines through in both his personal and professional lives.
This episode promises to unveil Adam’s insights on how embracing authenticity can lead to profound transformations in our lives and relationships. Tune in to discover how you can cultivate your inner truth and connect with others on a deeper level.
https://innersensepsychology.com/
Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: A lot of the patterns in our nervous system that are our challenges emotionally can often be patterns that we’ve inherited.
Sometimes the patterns come from things that we’ve experienced in this body, in this life, but other patterns we’ve actually inherited, either through our own personal family or through the actual culture that we’ve been born into, through our actual genetics and through our DNA, through our ideology, if we like, we inherit heaps of patterns.
And Western psychology doesn’t really say a whole heap about this, other than Carl Jung actually having the balls to say that there’s this collective unconscious that creates these shadows that we need to. We need to work with.
[00:01:47] Speaker B: Welcome to Super Normalize, the podcast where we challenge the conventional, break boundaries and normalize the seemingly supernatural. Join me, C.J. barnaby, in the liminalist space to explore less charted realms of existence and to unravel the mysteries of life experience. Each episode, I’m blessed with the opportunity to talk to regular people from across the world where they openly share their understanding and wisdom in service to others. If you’re looking to upgrade your life, you’ve come to the right place. Be sure to like and subscribe, and I’ll bring you great transforming conversations each week. My treasured viewers and listeners. If you have a life story or healing modality or unique knowledge you’d love to share, reach out to me at Supernormalized Roton Me. Let’s together embrace acceptance of the supernatural and unusual. What it really is completely normal.
[00:02:38] Speaker C: Today on Super Normalize, we have Adam Walker. Adam Walker is a registered psychologist whose journey has been shaped by skateboarding in his roots, in his early days, music and meditation. And he’s very passionate about fostering an inner sense of personal truth. And his background in skating and doofing and basically it’s like alternative culture has really informed his work in a really beautiful way. And he’s very passionate about how he expresses that. And we talk about shamanism, neuro shamanism, emdr, we talk a little bit about mdr, we talk a little bit about authenticity and the importance of that as well. So you better listen all the way to the end of this one. It’s really, really good. And the things he pulls out and puts together in such a certain way is really, really, really enrapturing. So enjoy this show. Thank you very much.
Welcome to Super Normalized Adam Walker. Adam, you’ve been in psych now for how many years?
[00:03:55] Speaker A: In psychology?
[00:03:56] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:03:59] Speaker A: Well, as a professional, I’ve been a registered psychologist for seven. Seven years now.
But prior to that, I Was at university studying psychology for nearly 10 years before that.
And I have always had a deep interest in the mind and in psychology, so. But professionally working as a registered psychologist for about seven.
[00:04:29] Speaker C: What actually drew you to that field? I mean, often people have something happen in their lives that push them in a certain direction. What happened for you?
[00:04:41] Speaker A: Well, the story goes that.
So I grew up as a skateboarder.
It was an activity that for me really helped me learn and embody balance.
And it was just something that I felt that was an important activity for me. And because I was a skateboarder, I had lots of other friends that were skateboarders and I could see how important it was to them.
And simultaneously I had society and culture telling me that I was a criminal and a deviant and a rebel for doing this activity.
[00:05:24] Speaker C: Because you do a sport.
[00:05:25] Speaker A: Because I’m doing a sport. But I had lots of experiences, cj, where people treated me like a criminal. They, they, they literally stereotyped me and treated me really poorly as a young skateboarder.
So when I was in my early 20s, I was in a little town called Ellie beach in the Whit Sundays. And Ellie beach was in the process of building a new skate park. And so I was working for a shop at the time, sold a bit of surf wear and skate stuff. And the lady that owned that store was part of the Chamber of Commerce. And so because the council was going to build a new skate park in LA beach, she said, I’ve got this guy that works for me that’s a skateboarder, he might be able to help out. And so I got involved and I helped sort of developed this skate park in Ellie Beach. And at the time there was also accreditation course. It was the first ever coaching accreditation course in skateboarding that was ever being offered by the Australian Sports Commission. And so the Whitsunday Shire Council funded me to go down to Brisbane and do that first ever accreditation course. And I came back to the Whitsundays. We built this new skate park. If you’ve ever been there, it’s. It’s adjacent to the PCYC in LA beach there. And I just started doing these coaching clinics.
And it was amazing, man. Like, I just had so much fun, you know, it was so rewarding. And then one day I had this mother come to me and say, Adam, I don’t know what you’re doing, but, you know, my son, he’s been, you know, much more happier. He’s doing his chores at home, he’s making new friends, he’s Getting better grades at school and he’s got adhd. I don’t know what you’re doing, but just keep doing it. And something sort of sparked in me from, from that interaction and that was that there was something going on here that for kids who would normally be not well behaved, you know, not do their chores, not, not be very socially inclusive, not do very well in school, that this sport was helping them. And something just clicked in me. And so that is what took me to come to university because I wanted to try and study it. I wanted to see if there was some substantial evidence that skateboarding actually helped people with adhd.
So that’s the surface reason that I went. I went to go and see if skateboarding actually could support people with adhd.
As I went through that process, I also got exposed to anthropology. And so I ended up studying psychology and did my honors in psychology and became a registered psychologist. But I also did a social sciences degree and majored in anthropology and so started studying shamanism and altered states of consciousness through my anthropology degree.
And it just opened up my mind and my whole world to, you know, the. There is various different things that interest me in this world. And so I fell back on the degree of psychology and became a psychologist as a job.
But my interests really are quite various and psychology is only one tiny slither of my personal interests.
[00:09:02] Speaker C: Okay, so what, what are you most interested in?
[00:09:06] Speaker A: Well, I’m.
Yeah, it’s. It’s really. It’s supporting, it’s supporting co creation is. Is what really fires me up. Supporting working with other people to help create a world that we would prefer to be in. So to work with people who can have conversations with me about what co creating even is, to be able to have discussions with people about the difficult dynamics and energetics that we’re finding ourselves in in our particular time in this human story. It’s to learn how we can support each other, to transcend the narratives and the stories of trauma and limitations that have been embedded into our nervous system so that we can actually become the real beings that we really are. That’s what fires me up.
[00:10:03] Speaker C: Yeah, that’s cool.
What inspired you upon that path that to find that point of co creation? I mean, it must been something that made you just wake up to that.
[00:10:17] Speaker A: That’s a really, that’s a really helpful question.
And. Yeah, one that I haven’t been able to talk about a lot.
And the direct answer is actually because when I was young I had my own experiences of trauma which left me feeling really isolated and Alone.
So I have endeavored to support creating or co creating a world where people don’t feel alone anymore.
[00:11:00] Speaker C: Yeah, that’s very important.
It’s part of the reason why I do this podcast. Yeah, that’s why I call it Super Normalized.
[00:11:08] Speaker A: Yep. Yeah, I can relate to that.
[00:11:11] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I grew up in a sort of space where I had contact with spirits. I had contact with all sorts of things happening all the time, and I thought that was normal, but as soon as I talked about it to other people, you know, they glaze over and say that’s different or that’s odd, or to get cast as the weirdo and things like that. And yeah, that took a big toll on me when I was a little kid, you know, because, you know, you think, oh, my God, what’s wrong with me? You know, and it’s a bit of a burden to carry that around. And for me, that led me into different patterns of abuse. Self abuse, like using drugs like alcohol at first and then. And then marijuana and things like that.
And yeah, that was just a mask or, you know, self medication to try and, you know, stave off the pain of not being able to actually be me.
[00:12:02] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:12:03] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But over time, that works. That works itself out. And I will actually say that for myself, it actually was psychedelics that helped a lot with that, plus a lot of meditation.
[00:12:16] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Well, I can certainly relate to that as well. In my own experience, psychedelics have been instrumental in helping me not feel so alone.
And also meditation has been a very, very instrumental practice for me to be able to learn how to actually study myself and get to know myself so that I don’t feel so alone.
[00:12:40] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. I mean, part of my practice when I was young, too, was also ecstatic dance. And I used to go to raves and also, like, I went to a few doors. I didn’t like them at first, but one of my friends is a promoter and he pulled me along to a really good one with some Russian performers that perform live. It was fantastic. And, you know, when you hit that ecstatic spot, you know, when you’re dancing and I used to go straight, like, most of the time I’d have, you know, you know, visions and everything and massive release of, you know, you would.
[00:13:12] Speaker A: You’d have visions. Did you say?
[00:13:13] Speaker C: Yeah, I have visions without stuff. So, you know. Yeah, because I’m just so, you know, in the moment and lost and entranced and.
Yeah, yeah. So that. That’s.
[00:13:26] Speaker A: Where was that, cj? What area I was in Sydney at that time?
[00:13:30] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I was in Sydney. I actually went to my first stuffs up in northern New South Wales, up in the main area.
So back in the late 90s up there, there was pretty much a dwarf every second weekend. And you just got up and you’re like, it’s happening, let’s go.
You know. So, you know, when you go to these things, you know, you just, you dance and people just see that you’re into the music and they know that that is a connection point. Like it contract. People look at you, you look at each other like you just agree in that moment. That was perfect at that moment, you know, and you grok. You know, that’s the old term that they used to use is crocking.
[00:14:14] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:14:15] Speaker C: That shared moment of deep connection through music and dance. And yeah, for me, that was a way of connecting into the world.
[00:14:25] Speaker A: I’m curious, do you still go to ecstatic dances? Do you still go to raves?
[00:14:31] Speaker C: I, I don’t go to raves because, yeah, I haven’t really found any, you know, and also that style is sort of a bit too fast for me. You know, I prefer more of like Detroit sort of techno and tech house and things like that. Now if I go to an indoor sort of event. Yeah. But most of the time I ended up going to a thing called ecstatic dance, which is actually run by a couple that I know appear in Brisbane. And it’s great. It’s. Everyone is just there for the music and for the body movement and it’s. Every time it’s a great release and it’s very connective as well.
[00:15:07] Speaker A: So you feel, you still feel that you can achieve that same level of connection that you were able to achieve back in the rave days?
[00:15:15] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it’s definitely close to my heart dancing.
[00:15:23] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was really interesting. I was just in Bali and went to an ecstatic dance there.
[00:15:31] Speaker C: Oh, yeah, cool.
[00:15:32] Speaker A: In Ubud. Yeah. And it’s.
I’ll just say it has a bit of a different vibe to it because it’s extremely commercialized ecstatic dance.
[00:15:46] Speaker C: Oh, okay.
[00:15:47] Speaker A: And everyone there’s really all dressed up and it’s very, very much quintessential, kind of sort of woo woo kind of ness. It’s beautiful. And anyone that hears this now that, yeah, don’t, don’t mean to offend you, but yeah, it’s, you know, it was really, really amped up, the ecstatic dance in, in Bali.
[00:16:13] Speaker C: Okay, that’s interesting. So it has a patina of popular culture that.
[00:16:19] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it’s a good way of putting it. Yeah, I know, putting it.
But of course we have some really great ecstatic dancers up here. I’m in Cairns and we have great ecstatic dance community here. And yeah, we have some fantastic experiences on the dance floor. And it’s my only real experience of dancing and connecting with others now too.
[00:16:41] Speaker C: Yeah, no, it’s a good thing. It’s a good thing. And yeah, people bond in those moments of really good sound and really good movement. So, yeah, I totally relate to it. So how is your interests in skateboarding, music and meditation influence your therapeutic practice?
[00:17:01] Speaker A: Well, apart from the story that I just told, skateboarding led to inspiration, inspire me to. To study psychology and if. And if I may just sort of carry on with that, that topic. Now, skateboarding as an activity, as a practice is espousing the idea of flow.
Flow as a term that famous Russian psychologist, Czech Mahali created. Flow, as we understand it, is this feeling of. Of not having any worries that we. We move in this sort of divine way that is not. It’s not thought about. There’s no cognition involved. There’s no stuckness. You know, it’s very fluid and it’s divine. It comes from this place that is not.
It’s not structured or scripted. It’s just flow.
So this, this idea of flow is something that I learned from skateboarding. You know, I mean, dance is probably an epitome of flow as well.
[00:18:23] Speaker C: Yeah, for sure.
[00:18:24] Speaker A: But on a skateboard, if you don’t understand flow, in a given moment, you will fall off and you will hurt yourself.
So skateboarding is an extremely valuable craft and art in that, you know, it’s an activity that we can practice and just learn how to do the basics first and fall off, learning balance and flow. But we don’t have to do that on a big vert ramp. We can start off doing that on. Just on the flat ground, and we can slowly and incrementally start building up more complex movements that then also we end up being able to balance. And so we end up learning very symbolically how we can create flow out of first simple movements that we might do as humans. But then as we keep progressing through skateboarding, we can learn and assimilate and embody the idea that we can also flow with very complex movements as well.
You know, some of the complex movements that people do on skateboards these days are just mind blowing.
So. So this idea is actually extremely central to therapy.
So if I can Just establish that therapy in itself, it requires flow, the therapy. If we could just quickly just, I guess, capture a bit of a definition. You know, therapy is a process where we have stuck energy in our body, and that stuck energy is causing us dis. Ease or disorder or some other kind of dysfunction. And the idea of coming to therapy is that we can unblock that block so that things can flow again.
So that feeling of flow, knowing what flow feels like in the body, that is absolutely so central to my work as a therapist, because knowing what it feels like is essential for me to know whether or not we’re actually doing any work, whether we’re doing any therapy, or whether or not we’re feeling blocked.
[00:20:43] Speaker C: Sends to me like, you’re almost talking about a sense of tuning into a.
A space of intuition as well.
[00:20:55] Speaker A: 100%, man.
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I guess. I guess we could probably pull it apart in, you know, probably infinite different ways, but. Yeah. And any quality that is entangled with flow, like intuition, is. Is all part of this. This matrix as well.
[00:21:18] Speaker C: But.
[00:21:18] Speaker A: Yeah, that’s.
[00:21:19] Speaker C: Sorry, I enjoyed your description there before of. Of skateboarding and how flow works with that, too, because it sounded like it’s almost like you’re actually doing a mindfulness meditation, but that’s active.
And in doing so, you know, when you’re in the in between, because you’ve got flow 100, man, and if you. And if you fall out of it, you literally fall off.
[00:21:40] Speaker A: You literally. You. You literally hurt yourself.
[00:21:43] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:21:45] Speaker A: If you think too much, if you’re like, right, you know, now I’ve got to snap my tail at this exact moment on the coping, and then I’ve got to use my body and I’ve got to tweak this. Like, you can. You can think about that before you do it, and you can map it out, but if you think about it too much while you’re in the process, you will fall off.
So being in the flow of that trick in that moment is the only way that we pull it off. And this is why skateboarders skate, because it’s that. That’s the feeling that we’re. Look, we’re going for. And then. And then we, like, dream up some even more crazy technical stunt and go. I wonder if I can feel that same feeling of flow by doing this crazy maneuver. And then we map it out in our head and go, okay, well, we’re going to need to do this and do that and move our body at this motion in this direction at this moment, but then in the moment we got to do it. We got to let go of all those instructions. And it’s the same with dance. You can think about, I’m gonna. I’m gonna do the funky chicken or I’m gonna move this way and all the rest of it. But if you think about it in the moment, you just look like a fool. You just let go of all of those plans.
[00:22:56] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:22:56] Speaker A: And so, yeah, skateboarding has been extremely helpful, not only in my practice as a therapist, but in my life to understand flow. You know, this. This also can extend to, yeah, my relationships. You know, when I’m. I’m feeling stuck in my relationships, like, I know what that feels like. And. And I think we all learn this same principle in our own ways. For me, skateboarding was the medium through which I. I kind of really learned that. And in. In the question that you asked me, that’s how it really. It helps me. The other thing that really helps me in my practice as well is how in skateboarding, we can incrementally learn skills, which is very, very similar in therapy as well. So, for example, when you start first starting to learn how to. How to skateboard, most. Most people understand what a kick flip is. No, we. A kickflip is actually quite a technical trick. You have to actually ollie the board up out of the air. Then you have to kick your foot off the side of the board, which rotates the board, and then you have to land your feet back on the right side and then land back on the ground.
So that’s actually quite a technical trick.
So the first thing you have to do is learn how to roll.
The second thing you have to learn how to do is be able to pop your board. So ollie. The third thing you have to learn to do is kick your foot off. The fourth thing you have to learn to do is actually pay attention to how the board rotates so you know when to push your feet back down. And then the final thing you have to learn how to do is be able to land and then stay on your board. And so you can incrementally learn each bit of that trick and then put it together.
So in a similar way, people might come in and see me for therapy, and they might not have any idea how to regulate their nervous system.
And so we might have to start with, okay, well, let’s just learn the basics of. Let’s say what it feels like to do a big, long, extended exhale. Let’s practice that.
Yeah, and what does that feel like? And let’s start there. And we learn that little skill. And then the next time I see them, we might then look at box breathing. And then after that we might build, bring in, you know, tapping, and then after that we might bring in some bilateral stimulation or some other technical therapeutic skills or tricks, and we can incrementally slowly learn skills how to regulate our nervous system.
[00:25:38] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.
[00:25:40] Speaker A: So that incremental building up skill sets is also something that skateboarding is really helped bring into my. My therapeutic work.
[00:25:48] Speaker C: Awesome. Yeah, makes complete sense.
[00:25:50] Speaker A: Meditation, you know, this has been so important to my. My work as a therapist, mostly because for me, meditation is an active practice of being able to learn how to be equal, even though we’re emotional. So my main practice of meditation comes from the vipassana tradition.
And vipassana meditation is literally just learning how to put your attention inside and scan through your body up and down for an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening.
And what we’re doing as we do that is we’re literally studying ourselves.
And as we study ourselves, we get more familiar with the patterns of our autonomic nervous system. We get familiar with the patterns of how our mind just suddenly starts thinking about something right in the middle of a meditation. Now we get familiar with how our ears pick up on a sound that distracts us right in the middle of our meditation.
And then the practice that I practice in my meditation is to identify that I’m thinking about something or that a sound has just distracted my attention and to notice that and then to bring it back to scanning through my body.
And for me, this is such an important skill to be able to learn that we can have conscious control over our autonomic nervous system.
So even though I’m not a vipassana teacher and I’m not allowed to actually teach vipassana meditation in my practice, being able to teach people the simple process of mindfulness and being able to bring conscious attention to, for example, their breath or to practice paying attention to what they’re paying attention to.
This is absolutely central to therapy and something that I use every day in my work. So whether it be teaching people how to actually sit and be still and observe inside so that they can develop that as a practice for meditation, or whether it be somebody comes in to my clinic and they’re really dysregulated because something bad just happened to them before they walked into the session and it’s time to calm down their nervous system. So we sit, we might sit and actually meditate together and practice together. So it’s a very central part of therapy because it helps us understand how to regulate our nervous system, and it also helps us learn how to study ourself inside.
[00:28:46] Speaker C: When did meditation start working for you personally and in such a way that you noticed it?
[00:28:55] Speaker A: So I first had benefits from meditation when I was 21 years old.
I’m now 46. When I was 21, I had the privilege of studying Wing Chun kung fu.
I was living on the Gold coast at the time, and. And some friends of mine had started going to this kung fu academy.
And I just felt called to go and check it out.
And I immediately was drawn to it.
I’d watched Bruce Lee films growing up as a kid.
I’d always been interested in martial arts. I’d trained karate when I was a kid and was really into ninjitsu as a teenager and making swords and all that sort of stuff. But this particular time of my life when I was 21 was a particular volatile time in my life.
Without going into the details of the story, I was working for some gangsters. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was working for some very dangerous people.
And I just felt like I was in danger a lot. And so feeling called to go to this academy so I could start learning how to protect myself just became, you know, really central to my life. And I started going and training six days a week at this academy.
And my sifu, sifu, Tony White, he introduced me to this idea of meditation. Now, at the time, the meditation that he introduced me to was very simply a guided visualization meditation.
And, you know, I now understand it more as being simply more of a mindfulness exercise that he guided me through, because I have my own very strict definition of what meditation is now, which for me is what I just shared that I learned through Vipassana.
But the experience that I had was this guided meditation that my sifu offered me was quite a simple guided visualization of starting in a forest, following a stream to the Great Tree, and then going inside the Great Tree, and then going down a staircase into a cave that’s under the Great Tree and going into that cave, and that cave being fully covered in crystals, beautiful clear quartz crystals, and that I could go there anytime I wanted to and sit and just be, you know, safe and be protected sitting there in this cave under the earth. And so this became a refuge for me. It became a place that any time I felt tension or, you know, just sadness or fear or any negative emotion, that I would literally picture myself being in this underground cave with all these crystals, with all this beautiful light emanating off these clear crystals, charging my light body. And I found it very helpful because it helped me relax and that’s what started it for me.
[00:32:21] Speaker C: Nice.
[00:32:22] Speaker A: It wasn’t until 13 years later that I went through a divorce. I was going through a divorce and my whole world came crashing down.
Lost my business.
I was working for the university at the time, lecturing and tutoring. So I pulled away from my academic work that I was doing. I had a skate shop at the time I lost my skate shop, you know, didn’t get to see my kids every day. And so everything crumbled. My whole life just basically just turned upside down.
And I went to therapists, I went to coaches, life coaches. You know, I went to some like Reiki practitioners and all different sorts of people and they all helped to varying different degrees.
However, I then had someone encourage me to why don’t you try Vipassana? It’s 10 days silent meditation and it’s completely free. You can go and do it and if you decide that it is valuable you can donate afterwards. And I just went, what have I got to lose? And so I went down to Blackheath in the Blue Mountains and I did my first ever 10 day Vipassana course and it changed my life forever. It was hard. Sorry, I’m allowed to swear.
[00:33:52] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:33:54] Speaker A: It was really hard, it was really intense.
But I came out of it having had the first 10 days of my adult life where I actually got to experience some stillness and that for me begun my studies in Vipassana meditation and I’ve yeah, done five 10 day courses since. I’ve served as well serving is working in the kitchen of Vipassana course. I also run, I co run the far Northern Queensland Vipassana group and host regular Vipassana meditations here in my, my clinic and also a group meditation once a month for the FNQ Vipassana practitioners and have sort of taken it very seriously and it’s been an incredible platform of peace and stillness in my life.
[00:34:55] Speaker C: Wonderful. Yeah.
What role does authenticity play in your work with clients?
[00:35:05] Speaker A: Well, it is kind of like a switch for that flow we were talking about before.
That’s the best way to answer that question.
And so I can feel it like if I’m not being authentic there is no flow.
[00:35:32] Speaker C: And what if they’re not being authentic? Does that affect the flow too?
[00:35:35] Speaker A: If the person that I’m working with is not being authentic, there’s no flow.
If somebody comes in to see me and they, you know, say Adam Like I’m having a challenge around this particular topic.
And we start by really unpacking that topic.
And when we really are genuinely curious about unpacking challenges in our life, you know, we can ask ourselves the question as to why it’s challenging. And our body will tell us.
Unless we’re being not authentic, unless we’re not actually interested in asking the right questions. If we’re not actually interested in making the changes, then we won’t be authentic when we ask that question.
[00:36:26] Speaker C: What does authenticity mean to you then?
[00:36:31] Speaker A: Well, to me it’s a practice.
It’s a practice of being able to let go of the patterns that would disconnect us from source.
And I expected that’s a probably pretty trivial response that you’d like to.
[00:36:59] Speaker C: No, I would. No, I would not say that’s trivial in any way whatsoever. Beautiful. I think that I’ll leave it there then. I think that’s the deepest way to say it. And I mean. Okay, so let’s just say if you have that disconnection from source, what is source?
[00:37:15] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
And so for me, source, Source is this ultimately this flow we’re talking about. It’s the, it’s the, how could we say? It’s maybe the noun of this flow. It’s the description of the thing that is flow is source.
But you know, really like the, like flowing is the verb. It’s the doing the source.
So yeah, I believe source is all things like it. It is the animating, the animating essence of our whole universe. So that includes our personal lives as humans. It includes the essence of the rivers, of the trees, the mountains, of the flowers, and of the animals. It includes the essence of all the planets, of the solar systems, of the Milky Way, and all of the cosmos that we have a relationship with. So to me, source is, is everything. And we just really refer to this term source because it gives us some kind of ground that we come from someplace.
And I think that that’s important as well.
[00:38:37] Speaker C: Yeah, well, it gives a sense of belonging for sure.
[00:38:39] Speaker A: It gives us a sense of belonging.
[00:38:42] Speaker C: It makes me think also that it makes authenticity seem to me that it’s actually being in accord with universal intention.
[00:38:52] Speaker A: Yeah, I love that.
I love that. I mean that we, we could certainly unpack, you know, definitions to the nth degree.
[00:39:04] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:39:05] Speaker A: And you know, whether intentions, you know, is a, is a conscious practice that someone has pre planned is a whole different conversation. But I, I certainly love that from, you know, what, what we’re feeling, what we’re sharing right now. In this conversation makes sense to me.
[00:39:26] Speaker C: Can you explain some of the therapeutic framework frameworks you use and how they benefit different issues?
[00:39:34] Speaker A: Yeah, sure, sure.
So, yeah, when we, when we say therapeutic frameworks. Yeah, I think it’s probably important to maybe give that a little bit of definition first.
[00:39:47] Speaker C: Yeah, for sure.
[00:39:48] Speaker A: So as a registered psychologist, you know, I’ve trained in lots of different areas, so I’ve done my degree in psychology.
But a four year degree in psychology, you know, involves statistics, it involves the history of psychology, it involves, you know, the types of areas that professional psychologists might work in. It doesn’t actually really give you the skills to become a psychologist. The degree is really just the foundation.
And so after you’ve finished doing a degree in psychology, you then need to actually develop skills so that you can be a psychologist and actually support people therapeutically. So that requires further study in the field of psychology.
At the moment, there is generally a pathway where you do four years of studying at an undergraduate level and you have to do a fourth, fourth year either of honors or postgrad pass, but then you have to do two years of supervised practice. And supervised practice means that you need to actually have a job and then that you have a supervisor that watches over you in that job. That supervisor would then also give you advice on the skills that you might use and develop in that, in that two years. So that you then are developing your actual, your qualitative skills of how you actually support people.
And so that sometimes can go on for many, many years at two years minimum, but it can take many, many years. And so depending on who you have as a supervisor, they will have different frameworks of how they help people. Some people might have a framework of helping people by doing some yoga, for example. Other people might use a framework where they’re using a particular type of talk therapy that includes talking about particular areas of human psychology, relationship styles, for example. And there are many different frameworks that psychologists have developed to be able to work with people over the years. So in the course of my training, I have studied several different frameworks of practice. And so to share with your listeners what those key areas that I’ve studied are, essentially they are internal family systems, EMDR therapy and neuroshamanism are the frameworks that I really use.
[00:42:54] Speaker C: What’s neuroshamanism? That sounds cool. I mean, the other ones are cool already. I know that, but I got to know about neuroshamanism.
[00:43:02] Speaker A: Absolutely. And I’m really, really pleased that you asked because this is quite a new term.
And I Need to credit my teacher who, who coined this term.
This is Dr. Alberto Vialdo. So Dr. Alberto Vialdo is a Peruvian man who, he did his training in traditional medical anthropology. So Western, Western university type training. He also did his training in psychology, and he ended up running a psychology lab in Peru only to find that psychology only looks at one level of the experience of being human. It’s only one layer of the mind.
And because he was Peruvian, he had this ancestry where as he was working in his psychology lab and noticing how what psychology was trying to offer people was only one level, he started thinking about his ancestry, which as a Peruvian man was the indigenous shamanic cultures of Southern America. And so he eventually shut his lab down and literally went out into the Amazon and trained with Amazonian Shamans for about 20 years.
[00:44:32] Speaker C: Wow.
[00:44:33] Speaker A: Then he essentially joined these fields together. CJ so he comes from psychology and medical anthropology as a western trained scientist, but then went out into the Amazon and then trained and did an apprenticeship with shamans in the Amazon jungle. And so he is now joining these two worlds together.
So neuro shamanism is a term that he has coined, which is very literally the bridging of Western psychology and indigenous shamanism.
[00:45:20] Speaker C: That’s cool.
[00:45:22] Speaker A: So that’s the, the literal answer to, to your question. What, what it is?
[00:45:29] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:45:30] Speaker A: Do you want to ask anything more about that?
[00:45:32] Speaker C: Yeah. What. How do you use that in your practice?
[00:45:35] Speaker A: Yeah, really, really curious to know. Really great question.
And I’m only going to really be able to share so much.
[00:45:44] Speaker C: Yeah. Just a framework, no identifying information.
[00:45:47] Speaker A: Absolutely.
But a simple way that I might be able to start giving you some ideas is that in my shamanic training, Dr. Alberto Vialdo has taught me many different practices that come from his lineage of indigenous shamanism. And one such practice that you may be familiar with and some of your listeners may be familiar with, because it’s a common shamanic practice, is to honor the four directions. Have you heard of this practice?
[00:46:23] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, I do it.
[00:46:24] Speaker A: So for any listeners who don’t understand this, this is a practice where we literally face the south and we honor the south. And the direction of the south is the direction of the serpent. And when we practice honoring the south, we’re literally calling in the medicine of the serpent. And the medicine of the serpent is literally a learning that we can share, shed our past like the serpent sheds its skin. When we honor the south, we’re learning to shed our past when we face the west.
In my teachings, the west is the direction of the jaguar and the medicine of the Jaguar helps us face our fears, to be fearless, to walk our path with courage. So when we’re doing therapy, know if we don’t learn how to let go, you know, that’s not a good start in therapy. But once we do let go, we need to actually learn how to move forward with courage. Right. So I hope this is already starting to give you some ideas.
[00:47:26] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.
[00:47:27] Speaker A: The north. And when we’re really studying and, and, and working with the direction of the north. The north is the direction of the hummingbird. And the medicine of the hummingbird is that hummingbird is a bird that can be still in the middle of flight. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen pictures of its wings going a million miles an hour, but the hummingbird is calm and collected, so it can put its beak into a flower and get nectar.
So the hummingbird is all about precision, being precise in what we do.
And when we work with the north, like, we can learn that after we let go and we move forward with fearlessness, that we need to be precise on our journey as we move forward.
When we work with the east, we’re working with the medicine of the eagle, the condor, and the eagle. Medicine is all about being able to learn how to rise above any, any challenge, any obstacle, and then see with perfect vision the way forward. You know, this is what the eagle can do. And so after we’ve learned to be able to let go of our past, we can then walk forward with courage.
We can then be precise in our actions, and we can use our vision to be able to know exactly where we’re going.
[00:48:56] Speaker C: Perfect.
[00:48:57] Speaker A: So this concept alone is something that helps me work with people, because if people come in and see me and they’ve already learned to let go, but they can’t go forward because they’re afraid, well, then we need to learn how to actually work with jaguar medicine.
And I will literally work with this person by facing the west. I will literally work with this person in my room. And I’ll. I won’t explain all of this. I won’t go into the complexities of it all, but we’ll literally start turning our bodies and turn our chairs towards the west. And we’ll start just talking about, you know, what courage is, what fearlessness is.
[00:49:43] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:49:44] Speaker A: If we need to understand precision, I’ll do that to the north or to the east.
Other ways that I use. This is every day when I come into my space here, where I’m talking to you is my clinic.
And every morning before my clients arrive, I literally Stand in the center of the room, and I honor the four directions, Mother Earth and Father Sky. This is part of my teachings. This is part of what my teacher has taught me to help me be able to know source, to have a better relationship with Source.
And just by doing that as a practice, it sets my room up in a particular way that creates a more conducive space to healing. So that when my clients come in, they feel something. And clients will literally come into my space, C.J. and they’ll, like, new clients will come into my space and they’ll just go, this feels really weird, man, in here, like. And I’ll say, is that okay? And they go, yeah, it feels really good. I’ve never been to a psychologist that feels like this before.
And I know it’s because, like, I’m setting these intentions.
[00:51:00] Speaker C: That’s right.
[00:51:00] Speaker A: I’m using this shamanic practice to literally create a container of protection, of strength, of courage, of precision, and of sight in this space for them, building the.
[00:51:14] Speaker C: Space and holding the space.
[00:51:15] Speaker A: So I hope that gives you a few ideas. But. But there is something that I also want to bring in here, in answer to your question that I’m finding exceptionally important in my work when it comes to neuro shamanism.
And this is the idea that a lot of the patterns in our nervous system that are our challenges emotionally can often be patterns that we’ve inherited.
Sometimes the patterns come from things that we’ve experienced in this body, in this life, but other patterns we’ve actually inherited, either through our own personal family or through the actual culture that we’ve been born into, through our actual genetics and through our DNA, through our ideology, if we like, we inherit heaps of patterns.
And Western psychology doesn’t really say a whole heap about this, other than Carl Jung actually having the balls to say that there’s this collective unconscious that creates these shadows that we need to. We need to work with.
You know, and I’m so grateful for Carl Jung’s for implanting that seed in the Western mind, because at least people are open to me saying that, you know, this fear pattern that you’re. You’re telling me about, you know, it might have come from be like before you were born. And we can use Carl Jung as a little bit of a bridge to help people understand that.
[00:52:59] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:53:00] Speaker A: But nothing in my Western psychology training has really offered me anything to really be able to work with people to help with this.
But shamanic practices do. Shamanic practices include how to work with, for example, chords, energetic cords that are connected to organs that we might have brought with us in this life and how we can use items to be able to cut these cords and to be free of these patterns. Yeah, these kind of practices were not offered to me by Western psychology, but they were offered to me in my training with Dr. Alberto Violdo. And as I’ve become more familiar with other shamanic practices, you know, it’s central to all indigenous wisdom.
And this is something that I’m really starting to find beneficial in my work because clients might come in and they say, you know, Adam, I’m having this really hard time with this pattern with my partner, for example. This dynamic happens and then we always end up in this fight. And we might be able. We might go through many, many sessions and we might talk about and unpack and we can do certain bodywork, breathing practices so that they can learn to regulate their emotions with their partner. But it still happens. The patterns still happen. And so now I’m able to start like exploring with those clients. Well, okay, we’ve explored all the patterns that we consciously can track in this body, but it’s still happening. So might we consider that this pattern that you’re dealing with with your partner actually comes from before this lifetime and it might go back seven generations and people are really starting to be open to exploring their psyche in this way? I have to admit, I have to be a little bit careful with the language I use. So if I get too kind of shamanic in my language, that can often shut people down or make people put up a wall.
Same if I use two spiritual type language. If I become too woo woo in my work, it can often bring up, you know, a wall for people. They can become a bit resistant. So I do have to balance this. So I’m still a Western psychologist, but, you know, would they be open to considering other ways of dealing with these patterns that they’re telling me that they have? And some clients are, they’re very straightforward. And they’re like, no, I’m not, I’m not interested in anything weird. But I’ve got to be honest, cj, I reckon I could count those on my hand. Most people will say, adam, I’m open to anything.
I’ve tried so many different things and I’m open to anything. And cj, I really feel honored to be able to share with you in this context that this is one of the reasons I keep on doing this work is because I have so many people that come to see me and they’ve got a massive trauma background and they’ve seen dozens and dozens of psychologists, but they some for some reason end up in my room and here I am doing some sort of weird shaking rattle thing with them and all of a sudden they’re feeling better and they go, adam, I don’t care what you do, like you’re helping me. And I’ve seen, you know, 40 other psychologists and they’ve never done that to me before, but just do it. It’s fine.
[00:56:45] Speaker C: What works, works.
[00:56:47] Speaker A: So yeah, that, that, that like helping bridge people, I feel is really why I’m bringing this into my work. And to get back to you to your question, being able to bridge Western minds into being open to more indigenous wisdom is really what neuroshamanism is doing for my practice, my work.
[00:57:12] Speaker C: Beautiful.
What.
How do you see the emerging field of psychedelic assisted therapy evolving in the future?
[00:57:23] Speaker A: Well, I see that it’s gonna. I believe it’s going to play a big role mostly in the sense that I really do believe that Western psychology has kind of gone as far as it can go in terms of what it can do to help people.
And people are still really unwell.
There is just so much unrest in our society. So clearly the field of psychology has only helped so much.
And I would even go so far as to say in some cases it’s probably made things worse.
[00:58:08] Speaker C: Right.
[00:58:10] Speaker A: I do believe that there are a lot of registered psychologists out there who do not do their own personal work, who do not understand this concept of authenticity that we talked about earlier. And they are literally just practicing psychologists as a job. And they’re just going through the motions of the therapeutic frameworks they’ve been taught.
And this has potential to do more harm than good.
[00:58:41] Speaker C: Well, you would see that in your feedback from your clients that have.
[00:58:43] Speaker A: I do. And the field of psychology has done its best to try and contain this, you know, to create all these different steps to. To contain it. Like for example, if people say that they practice an evidence based framework, you know, that just means that there’s been enough research so that if you do this step, this step and this step, then you’ll get the outcomes that the people that did the research will get and you get those same outcomes. And if you follow those steps, sometimes you can get positive outcomes.
But if you actually learn what authenticity is and you do your own work and you start work, like learning how to work with spirit and understand source and all the things that we were discussing before, you realize that every single client that presents to you has their own story. And just by doing this step, this step and this step, and this step, the therapy that you’re offering them is not personalized, and you’re only offering them then just a generic solution to something. And no generic solutions ever help people at a personal level.
And that, and, and I hope that in what I’ve just said, it doesn’t come across like I’m throwing psychology under the bus completely, but that can still help people for sure. But it’s only going to help to a certain degree.
So getting back to, I believe that the field of mental health needs a really big shakeup because of what I’ve just said, that this build of psychology, it can only help so much. And I believe that psychedelics are the catalyst to being that shake up that this discipline needs.
So to me, so without getting into all the nitty gritty of it, psychedelics, they physically act on the serotonin 2a receptors, in particular parts of the prefrontal cortex, which help relax the forms of what we have come to think reality is.
And this includes what we believe our self is, what we believe, you know, society is, culture is, and all the structures that we live in. It relaxes that part of the brain and gives us an opportunity to get out of our default mode network.
And our default mode network is the structures of what we believe reality is. And so psychedelics relax this, it relax the parts of the brain that lock in place our default mode network.
And when that default mode network is relaxed, well, then we have the capacity to start thinking about reality in new ways, start considering, you know, how things could be instead of how we think they are.
So this is a very, very important tool for psychology because most of what makes people unwell is that they’re stuck. We talked about it before. There’s, there’s energy in their body that’s stuck, making them think the world is a particular way and that that’s the way it is and that there’s nothing we can do about it.
When the world is a particular way and we can’t do anything about it, that becomes very depressing, it becomes very anxiety provoking. If that’s, if the world is stuck in a, in a, in a default mode, that sucks.
That’s horrible. Where people don’t treat each other with kindness.
Well, then we’re stuck in that mode that becomes our, our default mode. And this produces anxiety, this produces depression, this produces psychosis, this produces borderline personality disorder.
And in order to be able to get beyond the structures of the mind which keep that stuck, we need to be able to relax those structures of the brain that keep that formation, to keep it stuck. And psychedelics are a brilliant way to relax those parts of the brain that keep all of those structures in formation.
So I, I believe that this is going to help a critical mass of people understand that that’s what we, we need to be able to be. Well, we need to stop thinking the way that we’ve always thought, because if we always think the way we’ve always thought, we’ll always be where we are now.
[01:03:42] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:03:43] Speaker A: And nothing will change.
And I’m really proud of Australia and the TGA and Mind Medicine Australia for all the work that they’ve put into being able to reclassify the scheduling of MDMA and psilocybin so that we can start moving towards a future where psychedelic assisted therapy may become available.
[01:04:06] Speaker C: Nice.
[01:04:08] Speaker A: I think that will take a little bit of time before it’s integrated properly into the public, the public health system. But changing the classification, the rescheduling of MDMA and psilocybin is the first step in the process of making it available for people who really need it. Who really need it.
[01:04:31] Speaker C: Yeah. I’ve got a story about a guy that really needed something like that in the past. I used to work in a shop and way back in the day when a certain plant was available, which was a psychedelic plant, it came into the shop and he wanted to try it because he’d been depressed for 76 years, and he got it and he tried it and it actually lifted all of his depression completely and he was totally amazed. And like you said, it actually worked in that way on his brain to release all of the parts holding all together and allowed him to have another, better life.
[01:05:15] Speaker A: Yep. Yeah, that’s right. It gives us the opportunity to experience something different.
[01:05:24] Speaker C: What advice would you give to someone struggling with complex trauma or anxiety? Anxiety.
[01:05:33] Speaker A: Advice.
My advice would be don’t struggle alone.
[01:05:38] Speaker C: Exactly.
[01:05:39] Speaker A: Don’t struggle alone.
Like a lot of what we call complex post traumatic stress disorder comes from relationship damage, and that could be from a caregiver, you know, the way that they treated us or said something to us once, and then that creates negative core beliefs inside of us. And so a lot of, a lot of what is complex trauma is relational based.
So we can’t, we can’t just magically resolve something that’s relationally caused in isolation.
We need to do it with another human being so that relationships take on a whole new meaning. Very similar to what you just said about the guy with depression. He’s had depression for seven years. He only knows that Takes a psychedelic and it changes the way that he experiences his reality. Yeah, so we’ve got complex ptsd and we’re experiencing all the symptoms of that complex ptsd. We’re experiencing them alone.
Well, when we reach out to another person and have a different experience where a relationship isn’t abusive, where there is a relationship where someone’s actually kind and they don’t want something from me in return, like this, this then gives somebody with complex PTSD a different experience of relationships. And then that starts. That default mode starting to change again, like I was talking about before, but that’s really just the beginning of it. And ultimately, once we’re brave enough to reach out and start actually doing some therapy, we might learn some techniques where we can start learning that having complex PTSD means that we have an injured nervous system.
An injured nervous system. And the symptoms of an injured nervous system are that the nervous system can’t just magically regulate itself.
That’s the symptoms of an injured nervous system.
And so when we first reach out to someone and we can have a relationship where we feel safe enough, where once that person actually teaches us, hey, you’ve got an injured nervous system, well, then we can actually start learning some emotional regulation skills, breathing, tapping, working with parts.
There’s so many different tools we can use that helps us learn that we can consciously start regulating our nervous system. And the reason that we need to do that is because we’ve got an injured nervous system. If we’ve got complex ptsd, once we learn that we can consciously regulate ourselves by learning these skills, we start getting a bit of hope, we start getting a little bit of, you know, trust in ourself that I actually, I can look after this body. I can do this.
And then we can start the journey of tracking the patterns behind the complex ptsd. The complex patterns might manifest in these core beliefs. I’m not loved, or I’m unlovable, or I’m in danger or I’m not safe.
And once we start learning how to track these patterns, we can then use techniques to be able to desensitize and then reprocess those patterns. And the way that I do that is with internal family systems therapy and with EMDR therapy. So we didn’t get the time to really talk about those, but I would encourage people to Google them. They’re really important therapeutic frameworks that are quite.
They’re widely used now in therapy, Internal family systems and emdr, but they’re two tools that once we learn how to track the patterns of our Complex ptsd. We can change them and transform them.
[01:10:07] Speaker C: Perfect.
Well, Adam, you guessed it right. We actually have come to the end of our show, and it’s been a fantastic talk.
[01:10:14] Speaker A: I’ve really.
[01:10:15] Speaker C: Everything we’ve covered, it’s been great. And your passion. Your passion for your work is. Come through so beautifully and what you’ve shared. I’m certain people want to contact you or talk to you with something. So. Yeah. Can they come to your website? Do you have a website, or where can they find information about you or any of the writings or anything that you do?
[01:10:38] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I’m actually quite minimal on social media and online at the moment, but I do have a website that’s www.inner sensepsychology.com.
innocence is spelled I N N E R S E N, S E.
And then psychology. So in a sense, psychology dot com. Easy. There is a.
An inquiry form on the website, so you can always send me a message through that inquiry form through the website, and it’ll always come to me. And, yeah, really happy for anybody that is hearing this to contact me, even if it’s, you know, to follow up with anything that I’ve shared that we’ve discussed here or if people are looking and are interested in working with me professionally. And I do have a fairly strict screening process, so I don’t take on everybody that contacts me, but if people are interested in working with me, please, to be clear about that. And I would certainly consider that if I have the capacity.
[01:11:57] Speaker C: Awesome. Thank you again so much for sharing, Adam. And. And, yeah, well, I’m sure we’ll be talking again in the future.
[01:12:05] Speaker A: Awesome, brother. It’s been a real honor. I really appreciate the opportunity. You know, I think having the opportunity to do this has made me realize that often in my work, like, I, you know, I sit here in this space helping people day after day, and sometimes it gets a little bit isolating. And having this opportunity to speak about my work and I guess reconnect with that passion is incredibly valuable to me, CJ So thank you so much for that opportunity.
[01:12:36] Speaker C: You’re welcome. It came right through, for sure.
[01:12:39] Speaker A: Awesome, brother.
[01:12:39] Speaker C: All right, I’ll just say goodbye to listeners.
Well, that was an awesome episode with Adam. I really appreciate his passionate delivery of his understanding of his work. And as he said, he does feel a bit isolated in his work sometimes, and to be able to talk about it in a new sort of way was really good for him. And you could hear his understanding of what he’s doing and how he likes to work with people. So if you’ve enjoyed today’s show, reach out to Adam directly and say that you did. That’d be really appreciated. That’d be really nice that he actually gets some feedback directly from the listeners. And if you’ve also enjoyed today’s show and you wish to show some. Some goodness back towards me, please like and subscribe. If you’re on YouTube and if you’re on any podcast app and you think somebody should hear this, please just click that share button and make sure they get to hear it. Share the show to anyone you can, because, you know, that’s the way we actually get more listeners. And also I get to record more episodes and find really great people. So thank you very much for listening. Until next episode, it’s bye for now.