Jayne: [00:00:00] I want to walk outside. Okay.
Ben: [00:00:04] Are you sure?
Jayne: [00:00:06] Am I sure? I have a garden. There's nobody in it. Do you mean am I sure I want to walk outside?
Ben: [00:00:12] It might be noisy, but it probably won't be.
Jayne: [00:00:16] There's nobody out here and it's really nice out. I need to get some air.
Ben: [00:00:22] Alright, Jayne Gumpel, are you're ready for a retake?
Jayne: [00:00:26] Sure.
Ben: [00:00:27] So, I learned something new about you today, but before we get to that, you, how's it going in this crazy time?
Jayne: [00:00:35] I'm okay. How are you doing?
Ben: [00:00:37] I'm good,
Jayne: [00:00:38] Let me go back in the house.
Ben: [00:00:39] Well, at least you got two minutes of outdoors.
Jayne: [00:00:42] Yeah. I was out there before. It's beautiful outside.
Okay. Shoot.
Ben: [00:00:46] Oh yeah. This is much better. I would love to do a lot of my online stuff from out in nature and the Poconos and stuff, but it's… the technology isn't good enough, so. Okay. We're back now. I got you. Good. So how, how's it going through this? Are you, I know that you, last time said that you've been talking to a lot of people about anxiety. People have a lot of anxiety right now. Is that what's going on still?
Jayne: [00:01:16] Well, as you can imagine, you know, anybody that's watching the news. I try to minimize watching the news so that I can just stay grounded and then I can be a better support to other people. I have a lot of people reaching out to me, that colleagues, friends, clients.
So, I feel called upon to try to be my best self, even though I have anxiety too, you know, you know, going like this to my head. Do I have a fever? I have a thermometer, you know, I mean, I'm just like everybody else. But volunteering and talking to people really helps me stay grounded. Plus, I have everything I need, so I have no intention of leaving my home.
Ben: [00:02:02] How are you helping people with anxiety? What's the first thing you do?
Jayne: [00:02:08] It's a really simple take-your-seat guided meditation, and it takes maybe about three minutes, and it's just an opportunity to drop from, you know, the little Pacman of thoughts. Into the breath and into the body, and that helps manage anxiety, how it helps manage stress.
Ben: [00:02:33] Can we do it three minutes?
Jayne: [00:02:35] Sure.
Ben: [00:02:36] Good, guide me and everyone listening.
Jayne: [00:02:42] So this is a practice that I use every time I start a session or a meeting or some kind of a group or a workshop, and it's called the practice of arriving, and it's an intentional practice to cultivate being present. So, allow your eyes to close, or if you feel more comfortable, you can look down in front of you.
And the reason why you close your eyes or look down in front of you is it, it minimizes distraction. So, I find it really helpful to close my eyes and aim your attention at the feet. So, dropping from the thinking brain to sort of the sensing brain, noticing the feet on the floor. Okay. Like, how do you know your feet are there?
What are you sensing? So just noticing those sensations of contact with the floor and then move the attention up the legs to the knees.
To the thighs to the butt in the chair. So sensing into the lower body as you take your seat and arrive here in this moment and then sensing into the whole sitting posture from the feet all the way up the body, up the torso, up into the shoulders, arms, hands, fingers. You know, lots of sensations to notice in our hands and fingers: hot, cold, tingly, throbbing, warm, wet, dry. Those are some examples of sensations.
And noticing the head balancing on the spine, well, sensing the whole-body posture.
Arriving here in this moment.
And now aiming the attention at the breath. So, focusing on the inhale and the exhale.
You know, sometimes I like to say coming home to the breath. Breath in and breath out.
So, in this practice of arriving, we're paying attention on purpose in a particular way, in the present moment, without judgment, so just as each moment unfolds. And in this moment aiming or attention at the breath.
And aiming the attention at sound.
What sounds you're noticing in the room? Outside the room?
And aiming the attention at the temperature and texture of the air around the body.
So, choosing to be present to arrive here. Opening the sense doors.
And we'll close the practice with three deep intentional breaths in through the nose and out through the mouth.
And then when you feel ready, just allowing the eyes to flutter open or raising the eyes up if you're looking down.
And can you tell me what, what do you experience?
Ben: [00:08:31] Well, it's relaxing. So how does that work? How does that mindfulness trick of three minutes reduce anxiety? How does that--first of all, how did, yeah, how does it work?
Jayne: [00:08:53] Well, how does it work? So, you're paying attention in a particular way on purpose, right?
So, you're, you're focusing the mind, which I find for myself is already helpful because sometimes I tend to be very scattered in my thinking when I'm, when I'm anxious about something. So, dropping into an awareness of the body really helps me center myself. So I'm more body-mind aligned. And that helps.
And I think something very powerful for me that I get out of this practice is I learn, you know, again and again that I'm not my thoughts. And that's a very powerful lesson because I'm very attached to my thoughts. And you know, my thoughts drive the narrative and the narrative often drives, you know, the anxiety.
So just by simply taking my seat and choosing to focus on my feet on the ground, I'm already helping myself.
Ben: [00:10:00] And it is it, I'm just temporary or. you know, when we, I mean, mindfulness is kind of a, is a form of, let's say, meditation or the other way around maybe, but you don't have to do it. Do you have to do it at your regular practice like every day or certain amount of hours per week for it to work?
Does, does it, does it, is there a way in which doing this affects like one's entire day?
Jayne: [00:10:41] So the, you know, the evidence is there. The research is there that if you put, you know, eight to 10 minutes a day over the course of, you know, maybe eight or 10 weeks that there's going to be, change is gonna occur. So, it doesn't take a lot.
Of course. If you sit for a half hour or for 45 minutes every day, you really are stretching that muscle. A lot more of that muscle that, that, that cultivating that capacity to be present, to focus in a particular way on purpose, right? So, you're cultivating your capacity to be focused. If you sit longer.
But if you practice, for example, the stop practice, stop, take a breath, observe, proceed STOP when something stimulating comes into your fields of awareness, that feels a little uncomfortable or reactive. If you apply the medicine of mindfulness, the stop practice, it can mitigate a lot of the anxiety right then and there and mitigate, you know, a lot of the cortisol, the adrenaline.
Pause, so that any reactivity that might've spontaneously followed the stimulus is mitigated by the STOP practice. And so then you have a choice about how you want to respond. And when you have a choice, the odds are pretty good that you're going to make a better choice. Right. And not just operate on your default mode or fight flight.
So, I think that's pretty powerful.
Ben: [00:12:34] I love that quotation that I think miss-attributed to, I think it's, I'm forgetting the name of where, like, yeah, I don't think it really was Viktor Frankl. Everybody thinks it was. Who's the guy that did the seven…? Oh, I forget Steve… Stephen Covey! I think it was actually Stephen Covey who said it, but it's the, you know: “between stimulus and response, there is a space—"
Jayne: [00:13:04] Right, “and in that space is, your choice and in your choice is your freedom.”
Ben: [00:13:11] Right. It's a great thing. So, you studied with Jon Kabat Zinn, right, to learn Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction? When did you start mindfulness work? Like way before it became like a popular in the popular consciousness?
Jayne: [00:13:27] Right. Well, I became interested in it in the sixties and seventies when I was very young and sort of in the, you know, hippie, free love, free spirit kind of movement. And I, I experimented by getting to know a few different gurus and learning to meditate with different gurus. Guru Maharaji being my first guru, and guru Muktananda, who was a very special human being and Siddha yoga and I, I found meditation or the idea of it to expand one's consciousness. really helpful in my life. And so I moved in and out of that over the years.
But in the, I would say maybe 15 years ago, I became a more serious student of meditating on a, on a daily basis, you know, as sort of a, a practice or a way to, a way to be in the world. And then I am really interested in mindfulness because mindfulness is a way to, it's sort of a life map, you know? It's, it's a way to be present in the world.
And because I'm a psychotherapist, I think I can say this, for the majority of psychotherapists who are sitting with clients all day long, we've developed a natural mindfulness just sitting in the space and holding the space. And dealing with our own egos or countertransference, we've naturally become, you know, very mindful people, I think as, as healers and as practitioners in the healing arts, really cultivating that capacity to be present to someone else's narrative without getting mixed up in it.
I think, you know, that's really helpful. I'm not sure if I answered your question, but, but, you know, I've been interested in it my whole adult life.
Ben: [00:15:34] And one of the things you're engaged in now is trying to figure out how to bring it into the school system, right?
Jayne: [00:15:42] Yeah. So I have a nonprofit organization called Access Mindfulness. My son actually named it. And I liked the name a lot. Access Mindfulness, because it says what we mean, which is we want to make mindfulness accessible, accessible to everybody, not just people who have $500 to take an MBSR class, but to kids as an everyday part of their education.
And it should be free. So we want to make, we want to make mindfulness available to all kids from four years old, all the way through high school, that it's an integrated part of their life journey at school, which, you know, kids spend a lot of time at school.
Yeah, so we, so we created Access Mindfulness Because of my passion to bring, well, first of all, it started with my interest and passion and working with adults in the school system because I have a lot of friends who are teachers and they became teachers as a calling. You know, if you went to view a hundred teachers, I bet 60 or 70 of them would say I became a teacher because I felt called to do it.
So, it's an advocation, you know, and after five years, they're, they're out. After three years, they're looking around, scratching their heads like, why did I sign up for this? This is awful. Especially in the New York City school systems. In the public schools, they are so stressed out, and for them, it's really not so much about education, it's about classroom management. You know, they have kids who are on all kinds of medications. They have overcrowded classrooms. They don't have enough resources. They're very stressed. So I thought, well, let me, let me bring access mindfulness into the schools and work with the teachers and the adult staff, the social workers, the school nurse, the lunchroom monitors, you know, the teachers.
And we found it really difficult to break into the DOE. They're just not very receptive. They have their own programs. Each district is like a little fiefdom. So, we've gotten to know a lot about the politics of the school system here in New York city, and it's been, and we give our services away for free.
So, you would think they would want us, you know, but it's been hard. And, and when we do get into a school, which we've probably been in about 50 schools, all the teachers end up saying, "okay, well this is great, but how do I manage my classroom when my students spits in my face," or "I'm afraid for my life?"
Or, you know, they come from such a horrible family, or they're in foster care, or they're doing drugs, or they have a concealed weapon, you know? And so, you know, we, we would have to give them some interventions or some ideas about how they could manage the stress in the classroom. Then we decided the best thing to do would be to partner with organizations that train teachers to work with the kids in their classrooms.
So, we investigated all of the training programs. We chose what we thought were the three best for three different age groups, you know, primary school, middle school, and high school. And we interviewed the CEOs and we asked if they would partner with us and train our staff. To, to be able to teach the kids because it's going to be, it's, it's really challenging to, to get the teachers in the public schools or the superintendent or the decision makers to give teachers the time off and the money to take the training.
So we're training our staff now to actually go into the classrooms. So one of the organizations is the Inner Strength Foundation, which is founded by Amy Edelstein. She is an amazing, super-human being. And she created a, a program for the 11th grade in Philadelphia. So, she's trained over 7,000 kids, and she has her own teachers that she's trained.
And so. She then can go into the school system and say, this is a 12 week program. We have the teachers; this is what we want to do. We need the 11th grade, we need, 12 classes. And, she's been very successful. It's called the Inner Strength Foundation, and it's social justice, equity, and mindfulness. And I love her and her philosophy.
And she's worked really hard to create a really evidence-based program. So she's one of our strategic partners and David, the co-founder of Access Mindfulness is taking her training right now as we speak.
And then we have a program called Peaceful Kids. The CEO was Georgina Manning and she is from Australia. And she has created an amazing program with wonderful graphics and workbooks for young kids. Four years old, five years old, six years old in Australia. She's in over 700 schools. And it's based on social, emotional learning, and also mindfulness, but it's geared towards, so it's very colorful and creative.
Very short term: two-, three-minute, one-minute exercises and she's very successful and she's never been in the state. So we, we asked her to be our strategic partner and we brought her here to New York and she did a whole training program. And, she was supposed to be here now, and she had to cancel the training, to train more of our staff of Access mindfulness.
And then we also partnered with, Trish Broderick, PhD, who created a program called Learning to Breathe, which is for adolescents. And she's brilliant. She's with U Penn and she wrote this curriculum 25 years ago. she was a colleague of Jon Kabat-Zinn's. So we've taken her training, we've assisted her.
She's a really good teacher, very knowledgeable. And so she's for that middle population. So we've got our bases covered. And so we're growing Access Mindfulness as a 501c3, this became our strategy and we're sort of, you know, we're stalled at the moment for obvious reasons, but we're sort of in the middle of that.
Ben: [00:22:40] Cool. so you have 'em the big plans for that. It sounds like you're, you're, how, how many, people do you have working with you in New York city?
Jayne: [00:22:50] Well, so when I first started the organization, I was looking for one person to help me and I put an ad out on Indeed and Idealist. And I got 250 resumes in three days.
So, I got this idea, well. Wow. Let me have a meeting at my house and invite the people that would be qualified or interested in, let me start a mentor program. So I got back to all those 250 people I interviewed, maybe, I dunno, 30 or 40 I had a meeting at my, in my office in the conference room, 25 people showed up and I created my first mentor training program.
It's sort of just evolved, right? It unfolded out of what happened, right. And, I loved it. It was fantastic. And so, I created a 90-minute orientation called, "What is Mindfulness and Why is it Important in Schools?" And it's a PowerPoint that's experiential and didactic. And I trained 25 people how to deliver the PowerPoint with poise and intelligence and how to connect to a group.
So, we did a lot of group, you know, skills training, and we bonded as a community. It was a very powerful experience. And then I did another one after that because the group that I trained the first time, they were great. They were very dedicated, but most of them could not give up time during the day to actually go into the schools and run the orientations, because most of them had jobs. So that was a kind of a faux pas. So we, the next go round, we, we made the training during the day, so that we recruited people who would be available at 2:30 in the afternoon or 8:30 in the morning or you know, for a development day.
And, so we had more success then, with our field placement experience getting these people in front of teachers. So, we have about right now, I would say that we can really count on maybe seven or eight people.
Ben: [00:25:07] Awesome.
Jayne: [00:25:08] That we could call upon to go into any school in, in the city, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, who are capable of and now skilled at talking to anywhere from 25 teachers to 150 teachers.
Ben: [00:25:29] So the, that's the next phase will be once the quarantine is over, you need to negotiate with each superintendent or is that....
Jayne: [00:25:43] It's very daunting. The recruitment process is very frustrating.
Yes. We have to, we have to negotiate with the principal or the assistant principal, or, we've had a lot, we've had a lot of luck with the licensed mental health professionals that are part of a cohort, partnered with the Department of Mental Health and Hygiene, and the DOE. So we've had some luck with those folks.
And so they, you know, they introduced us to the principal. but we, we've since decided that instead of putting a lot of time and effort into doing the orientations, we're going to try to find just a couple of schools that we can infiltrate on a more, on a deeper level and offer the teacher training, bring teachers in, work with the teachers.
Once you get your foot in the door and they trust you, then other opportunities will manifest. Right? And our, our desire is to do this either for free or with grants or with corporate sponsors.
Ben: [00:26:55] That's all very amazing. And, I can't wait to see this flourish after the schools start opening. You also have lots of programs for adults, right?
Jayne: [00:27:10] Well, we teach Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, which is an eight-week course. We teach a program called work joy, which we developed for Cornell University for their 10,000 employees and that's a 90-day mindfulness and work-life balance program. That is one day or one-and-a-half days on-site.
And then we follow people for 90 days with individual one-to-one sessions and Zoom sessions. We also did a program in Moscow and we were to continue that, but because of the coronavirus it's, you know, it's stalled. But we got hired by a mining company to work with. They have 20,000 employees and, they're dealing with some safety issues, and so they thought mindfulness would be helpful.
So we went there for a week, about four months ago.
Ben: [00:28:04] Wow.
Jayne: [00:28:05] Very interesting, very exciting work. Cornell Weill is hiring David to do a mindfulness program for their resident, their surgical residents, surgery residents. So we are in different places doing different things.
Ben: [00:28:22] And what's the difference between mindfulness and meditation?
Jayne: [00:28:28] So, meditation could be a very specific way to--either concentrative or insight, right--I, like, I mean, they're sort of interchangeable. But if I had to define what their differences might be, mindfulness is more in a particular moment, the quality of attention that you're giving something that's happening in the moment.
Meditation is a more intentional, perhaps more formal, practice to either walk or sit. Or lie down, and practice for a sustained amount of time. You know, my, my meditation practice is a half hour of what I call open, well, I don't call it, but, open awareness. And then I do a 15-minute walking meditation in the garden. So, I do 45 minutes and I do that every day. So, it's a sustained practice.
An example of a mindfulness practice of, yeah, mindfulness practice might be what we just did. Take your seat, but it also might be a quality of attention that I give someone when I'm listening to them, or it might be focusing on what I'm eating in a certain way.
The colors, the shapes, the texture, the taste in my mouth. The chewing, the swallowing. So, sort of being very present, moment to moment as an intention. That's like some mindfulness practice.
Ben: [00:30:05] When we first, when I first worked intensely with you, was, involved like marriage counseling. And, one of the things I'll never, I'm indebted to you for is the, is a kind of mindful listening, but it's, you know, it's called like "active listening" or "intentional dialogue," which is a, it's like a very structured way to, would you consider that almost a mindfulness practice or, is that big part of how you're teaching adults still?
Jayne: [00:30:36] So, yeah. I'm glad you brought that up because it's a very powerful part of couple’s therapy, which is for sure it's a mindfulness approach. I call it "noble communication" and "mindfulness in action" or "relational mindfulness," which is how to stay present to receive someone else's subjective reality, even if it feels directed at you when you disagree with it. How do you receive that in the safest, most compassionate way possible?
So, you're kind of practicing containment and you're aware of your reactivity without attaching to it. So, I teach a lot, I do a lot of couple’s therapy, half my practice, and I teach all of my couples mindfulness. We do take-your-seat ritual for every single session. As we start the session, we do an appreciation.
We end usually with the gratitude, and then I work with each person as they're listening to the other. I work with them to become aware of their own reactivity, their own narrative, the room, subjective world, and their urge to merge with their partner in a way that. You know, because it's a power struggle, right?
So we work a lot with being, staying differentiated and using mindfulness really as the modality of practice.
Ben: [00:32:03] And one of the big eye-opening things I learned from you is, well, how marriage or a couple’s therapy is almost a completely opposite type of therapy than typical individual therapy. Because instead of it being about feeling free to like, unload or to say what's on your mind, it's more about, you know, very careful training in how to listen to somebody else and that's the key. And to me, having seen prior to you, many, a couple couple’s therapists, it's amazing to me how few seem to understand that major difference.
And I think there's a, I don't know if it's been happening in the profession, but it feels like these are almost two different professions, or at least anybody that wants to do couples therapy has to have almost a completely different type of training than what they would normally get through talk therapy.
And also just one other comment: this is so needed, not just in intimate conversation or, you know, but it would be so beneficial for every politician to be trained, you know, and just every human to learn these skills, to be able to, listen to someone with a different set of values or a different set of beliefs.
You know, in some ways without learning these steps, I don't know how you, how you could negotiate being in a room with somebody that you're having a problem with.
Jayne: [00:33:39] Yeah. Well, I think it is a very specific kind of training, and that is how to hold the space for two people who are really challenged to empathize and validate each other, because they're in the power struggle.
So, it's really a process. It's a--I become the facilitator of that. And so, it's not about taking sides or people being right or wrong or telling them what to do, but really helping them listen with an open heart and mind so that they can get past, the reactivity.
So, I really enjoy working with couples because when you help two people. Create a safe scaffolding around their relationship, a communication process that is deep and broad and safe and trustworthy. I mean, miracles happen when it comes to the healing process. Even when people decide to uncouple using it as a process to do that, it's very sacred.
So, I really enjoy it, because it's incredibly effective. And you know, I see people who are married 20 years uncover things about each other that they didn't even really quite understand before. So, when you slow things down and you make it safe enough to really listen in a noble way, you can learn a lot about yourself, can also learn a lot about your partner.
And, that's a beautiful thing to witness.
Ben: [00:35:21] That's amazing. And, and I.
Jayne: [00:35:24] You know, if only the Palestinians and the Israelis could do that, right. If only, if only the politicians, if only, you know, we, we, we're not a black-and-white world. You know, we're not yes or no, up or down, where we have to learn how to live with dualities.
We have to recognize that reality is subjective, and we're all stuck in our own matrix that we make so real, and it's just subjective reality, you know? And I think this whole quote "coronavirus experience" is going to bring us to our knees when it comes to really understanding that as human beings, we really do have to listen to each other.
We'd have to help each other. We have to, we have to come together as a global community. And so I find noble communication, that's the foundation for healing the planet.
Ben: [00:36:23] And we've got to listen to mother nature a little more too.
Jayne: [00:36:26] We have to listen to mother nature a lot more. You're right about that. Wow.
Ben: [00:36:30] You work a lot with executives too. That's how we first met, where you're, you work not so much with teams, but with groups of executives, right? And helping, you teach them all these skills that we've been talking about, or is it all--
Jayne: [00:36:47] Yes, of course. Because you know how to listen is an essential skill with how to help somebody face their issues and in leading their company. Right? And a lot of CEOs are so busy, they're so stressed out, they're so used to having to, you know, it's lonely at the top, that they lose a lot of their capacity to be relational, you know? but when you get a group of CEOs or business owners together and you help them listen to each other, a lot of that passes on to, you know, their employees.
And, you know, one of the important things that I teach leaders is, you know, how to ask a good question. So, a good question is not, “have you considered firing your assistant?” You know, that's not really a question. And, but if you're really interested in listening, it really changes the way that you ask about things also.
Ben: [00:37:49] And, and being a CEO is such a, like a intense relational position, you know, where you're dealing with a board, you're dealing with your, I mean, you're the person that is responsible for the employees, for the board, for the customers. You know, and it's so easy in that position to be, to feel the stress and to tune out a lot of that relational stuff so that you can meet your bottom line and keep the production going and keeping, you know, payrolls and all those kinds of things. And it's almost, like, an impossible thing and it's so easy to let go of the relational nature because oftentimes those relationships are super stressful.
Jayne: [00:38:34] Yeah. Or one might think, who has time for that, you know?
Ben: [00:38:40] Yeah. And the latest thing I've learned from you today from that you sent is that you are also sent me a link to fluence8. What is that with psychedelics?
Jayne: [00:38:51] So there's an emergence of research on plant medicines and psychedelic medicines to help people with PTSD, addiction and depression. that would be MDMA, which the street name is ecstasy, psilocybin, which is a mushroom, and ketamine. Ketamine is, right now in clinics and available to, you know, the general population. Psilocybin and MDMA are not yet there in clinical trials.
Ben: [00:39:25] What's ketamine from?
Jayne: [00:39:27] Ketamine is, it's a dissociative. It's an anesthesia--
Ben: [00:39:32] From a certain plant?
Jayne: [00:39:35] No, no, no. It's a chemical.
Ben: [00:39:37] Oh, I see. But it's a psychedelic?
Jayne: [00:39:39] Yes. It's considered a psychedelic medicine.
Ben: [00:39:42] But it's a synthetic?
Jayne: [00:39:44] Yes.
Ben: [00:39:45] Okay, so it's a synthetic, like LSD?
Jayne: [00:39:48] Well, it's not like LSD, but yes, it's synthetic.
Ben: [00:39:52] But not ayahuasca?
Jayne: [00:39:53] No. Ayahuasca is two, is a plant medicine and it's actually two plants. It's the root of one plant and the leaves of another and psilocybin is a mushroom. And--
Ben: [00:40:04] But you're not working with ayahuasca as well?
Jayne: [00:40:08] No, I'm not working with any of them. I do psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, so people who are interested in, they're going to go off and do a trip, if they want to come into my office and talk about their intention.
So if they want to do some integration work, I can make myself available for that. I don't prescribe people, do not do it in my office. I don't send them to the underground, but I do walk them through a very thoughtful conversation that includes resources so they understand their expectations, their mindset, the setting that they're considering, and then after they do their experience, if they want to come into my office and talk about it, then we do the integration work again after their experience. You know, did it meet your expectations? What was it like, you know, help, you know, what did you, what did you learn? and that's a really wonderful thing to avail to, to help people, to create a space like that, to help people integrate their psychedelic experience.
Ben: [00:41:13] And how did that start with you? When, how did you start, working on that with that?
Jayne: [00:41:19] Well when I was a hippie doing LSD, eating mushrooms out of cow plops in the Andes in 1972.
Ben: [00:41:30] Have you integrated that in your profession for all these years, or is this a new trend that you're, you're responding to?
Jayne: [00:41:39] Well. No. I know. I mean, I, there are people from time to time have come into my office over the years who've done LSD or psilocybin, but I would say it's the last five years that it's becoming, much more highly regarded as and healing, science, right. As plant medicines as an opportunity for spiritual awakening. For spiritual healing, for healing, post-traumatic stress disorder, like the, the, the young men and women who've had multiple deployments, they suffer from severe PTSD. And MDMA seems to really help them much, much better than any other approach.
So, and we're talking about serious research here. We're talking about. Johns Hopkins, Columbia, NYU, we're talking, you know, the top leading scientists in the world who are really paying attention to this and partnering with the FDA to do qualified trials. And a lot of these are in, you know, third trials, and I think psilocybin will probably be much more available to the general public within a year.
Ben: [00:43:02] Well, it's my understanding from meeting Michael Pollan and others is that the experimentation on this stuff, which started in the 60s at Harvard and stuff, got quashed by the federal government.
Jayne: [00:43:14] That's right. And then, you know, there were a lot of shenanigans that went on and they didn't protect the integrity of the research, and so it got shut down in it's prime and became illegal.
Ben: [00:43:28] Well, and it was being used for very nefarious things by the federal government.
Jayne: [00:43:34] That's right. And you know, it's not, it's not true. It doesn't cause chromosomal damage. It doesn't, it's not addictive.
Ben: [00:43:41] Reefer madness.
Jayne: [00:43:43] You got to pay attention to the set and setting. You've got to know what you're doing.
You have to have guidance. You know, there's a lot to be said about doing it. If you want to learn, you know, if you're interested in journeying into a non-ordinary state of consciousness, it's not the kind of thing you just, you know, pop in your mouth and go for a walk through the city.
Ben: [00:44:09] I mean, I suspect that the legalization--
Jayne: [00:44:12] I'm sure people do that.
Ben: [00:44:14] Yeah.
Jayne: [00:44:15] Well, I would not
People do all kinds of things, but I'm sure with the, I mean, there's, as you say, recently there's been an explosion of research, but not just research has been an explosion of experimentation, you know, both by individuals as well as in the academic community.
Well, I think it's coming at a very opportune and important time for the planet.
Ben: [00:44:41] Yeah. Thank you very much for talking. We covered all kinds of great stuff. So hopefully now comes the magic button of making sure this is recorded.
Jayne: [00:44:58] Yes. Well, don't tell me if it's not.
Ben: [00:45:01] Okay.
Jayne: [00:45:02] Be well.
Ben: [00:45:03] Bye.
Jayne: [00:45:04] Take care of yourself
Ben: [00:45:05] Alright, you too. Thank you.
Ok,
Jayne: [00:45:07] Bye, Ben.
Ben: [00:45:08] Bye.