speaker-0: What we need more of is care and support and community. We don't need less of that. That's the stuff that actually helps people heal. It's the fundamental need to belong. It's about belonging. And that's when people feel loved, when they feel accepted.

speaker-1: So true, so true and very relevant now being out.

speaker-0: In the world and finding like-minded others is really when they can move beyond therapy and that takes a lot of time.

speaker-1: Welcome to Stand in the Circle with me, Dr. Roslyn Watts. I'm a clinical psychologist, researcher, and founder of Acer Integration. This podcast is about how we get connected in a culture that pulls us apart. We talk about the hardest experiences of being human and the circles of care we have needed, couldn't find, and are searching for now with stories from people who've lived it and researchers and practitioners. Healing in community is the old way. The work of our time is to rebuild our connectedness to ourselves, to each other and to the living world. Hello and welcome to Stand in the Circle. Today we have Michelle Baker-Jones. Michelle is a therapist. We worked together as therapists on the Imperial psilocybin for depression trials. Ten years ago we began and since then Michelle has a private practice, private therapy practice, but also has been working in many different psychedelic clinical trials and really developing. some really quite sophisticated expertise and very important perspectives over that time. So Michelle, thank you for coming.

speaker-0: It's an honour to be here, lovely to see you, Rose.

speaker-1: So we're to talk about your whole journey today, Michelle, and we are going to talk about connectedness. We're going to think about standing in the circle with the three levels, standing in the circle with yourself, standing in the circle with others, standing in the circle with the living world and how that might have changed for you over the course of your life and how therapy may have added in. awareness and practices and how psychedelic therapy guiding may have also added in other layers of awareness and practices. But we're going to start at the beginning. So the Michelle that I know now is someone who is deeply, deeply tuned into relationship. That's kind of what I think of you. I think of you as a real expert in relationality and what it means to be in relationship. When I take you back to the girl you were before, what did disconnection look like for you when you were growing up?

speaker-0: ⁓ Yes, so for me, I suppose the pivotal ⁓ moments of disconnection or separation was something that I experienced from age five when my parents separated. So there's divorce and separation in my background. ⁓ And that had a huge impact on me. So my mother ⁓ moved out and I didn't see her for around two years approximately. So that I'm sure that was hugely sort of traumatic. I do remember that I sleptwalk a bit at that time. And I don't think there was much of a gap between my father kind of moving in somebody new and my mother also started another relationship with my now stepfather. So there was this kind of very strange switcheroo that happened. ⁓ So yeah, there's definitely that complexity in my background. ⁓ And yeah, so that's there. That's been part of my experience. ⁓ But perhaps for me, the thread that has kept me kind of going was very much friendship. ⁓ And I've always, think maybe because of the precariousness of my childhood, been very adept and quite discerning. on who I choose to be my friends. and I've had some incredibly deep and good friendships that I feel have kept me, yeah, kept me connected in times of difficulty, for sure.

speaker-1: And I know that you had a very, very precious friend, in your teens and early twenties. Could you tell us a bit about Didge and also the loss of Didge and the impact that had on you?

speaker-0: Yes, so for Didge and I, Didge's parents also were divorced, ⁓ but still living together, so that was difficult. ⁓ But I met Didge around the age of 14 and we, I suppose, perhaps we merged a bit. We were very deep friends. ⁓ I feel like we ⁓ helped each other to grow up, basically. So we grew up together. ⁓ And at one point, Didge actually came to live at my house with my parents ⁓ for a couple of months. And then we went to university together. ⁓ So I lived with Didge at university and then after university too for a while. It was only when my husband came along that our relationship, ⁓ yeah, we stopped living together. But the loss of Didge Yeah, was huge for me. I think she was around 35. So we had a very firm, strong friendship for about 20 years. in fact, I suppose one of the key elements of my friendship with Didge that has some relevance perhaps to my psychotherapeutic and indeed my psychedelic practice is that we took LSD together at Glastonbury when we were 18. And I think the context of having such a good friendship, even though was the chaos of Glastonbury, ⁓ enabled us to have a wonderful time. And we met some wonderful people who looked after us. So I think, despite being cavalier and teenager, ⁓ the strength of that friendship and the trust of that friendship enabled us to have a good experience. So yeah, that was quite pivotal. And I wonder if, you know, I started ⁓ unconsciously processing some of the separation, the losses of my earlier childhood with those first psychedelic experiences. They definitely were very meaningful for me.

speaker-1: And looking back, would you have, if you can remember, was that in this, was that a kind of therapeutic aspect to them or was it more of a kind of felt sense? ⁓

speaker-0: time I had Timothy Leary's book, The Psychedelic Experience and some really bad audio tape. So ⁓ I definitely felt ⁓ that there was some processing happening, a sense of self developing from that. ⁓ And the connection, think that was the, it's like my world sort of blew open through the people we met from at Glastonbury at that time. ⁓ And sort of coming from a small town, Abingdon, going to secondary school, it's sort of people at university and people we met at Glastonbury Festival. I remember going to a two-week ⁓ kind of folk festival in Devon, which was pretty much based around a campfire and people singing songs and making stew. And remember that being, there's something so idyllic about that. And that was through people we met at Glastonbury. So it really, yeah. my world sort of imploded and expanded. Both our worlds did at that time. So yes, when I think of those diagrams of connection, it certainly happened in quite a real world way for me at that time.

speaker-1: How do you think anybody, anyone around you was kind of observing you would have seen you change at that time? Like how do you think it changed you?

speaker-0: Yeah, there may have been, you know, I probably went through that evangelical psychedelics will change the world, solve everything, you know, that ⁓ which, which I imagine probably led me to working in this field for sure. But they that only came back after doing my therapy training. So it wasn't really that sort of came back. So it's always there, I suppose, in my history. But in terms of how it changed me, I think I went deeper into things. was looking for meaning very much. I was a meaning maker anyway and I was studying philosophy at university at that time. But I moved from sort of traditional Western philosophy to more esoteric philosophy and that kind of, yeah, maybe opened me up to the subculture more of, I don't know whether it would be considered more woo-woo, but just, yeah, really experimenting at that time. But yeah, it's very difficult to know how you change, you know, and how other people might have noticed how I changed thinking about. I think I was just very curious.

speaker-1: And another thing that we've talked about a lot before is attachment styles. I know that you're focusing a lot at the moment on attachment styles in your own journey and also with clients. Could you reflect a bit on your attachment style kind of from your younger years and maybe how that has changed and yeah, maybe how that's changed over time and what's Mmm, what's that?

speaker-0: So I would classically say that I would have a more avoidant attachment. ⁓

speaker-1: And actually maybe explain the different types for anyone listening who hasn't heard of it before.

speaker-0: Yeah, it sort of attachment styles have kind of developed from Bowlby ⁓ and he was looking at really how mothers, at that point it was mothers and children interact and sort of, I think, yeah, just looking at how children ⁓ demonstrated their attachment style. ⁓ So the four types are ambivalent, avoidant, disorganized and secure. so disorganized you would get if you had a very kind of traumatic childhood where perhaps the parents were abusive potentially. Avoidant, more unavailable parents, which sort of meshes with my very young parents and the divorce and the sort of lack of being available that I experienced. So in a way you down regulate your needs so that you don't risk rejection really. So it's all about really wanting to belong and how we feel loved and accepted. And then the more anxious ⁓ attachment style is that constant need to be ⁓ connected to the others, not feeling as if, yeah, like fear. I suppose if you had unreliable, again, ⁓ parents who were a bit volatile, then you can develop a more anxious attachment style. And then secure is when you have the perfect parents that are attuned and misattuned to you, but in just the right amounts, ⁓ which is very rare. And I suppose the interesting thing about attachment styles is that we're not just one. We can be like different attachment styles with different people, and they're not fixed. can also move towards and secure, which means, you know, like, In quite a few of my relationships, I probably would be unsecure, but I do have the traits of a more avoidant attachment style, which is something I, you know, I'm mindful of in my work with clients. ⁓ And yes, recently I've started doing an MA course where we went, we did the adult attachment inquiry. And ⁓ the point of that process is to sort of go back and think about your history, but in doing so, you kind of recognize how you might ⁓ recount kind of parts of your story that seem quite coherent and ⁓ sort of old. And then through the process, you might have new insights because you might kind of make connections in that process that like for me, what was really interesting when I was talking about, I suppose, Maybe some of the neglect, some of the unavailability of my parents ⁓ was the sense that I was looking for the Goldilocks relational, which really helped me recognize why, as you said, the relational has been so important to me, this sense of getting it just right. of course, that's going to be different for everyone, like what everyone needs. ⁓ But for me, ⁓ yeah, it's been very central to who I am as a person and how I think therapeutically. relational counselor and the MA I'm doing is all about relational psychoanalysis. So it is really key to who I am and how I work.

speaker-1: And the Goldilocks, that's really interesting to hear you talk about this. I've heard you talk about it before as well, but I think it's such an interesting idea. the, the, the attunement, the getting it just right. And I've certainly experienced that as your friend that you're very, very attuned and very good at really doing that. Like it's really, really quite an amazing skill. And obviously you're a parent as well, which I imagine kind of adds into that skill of attuning. Do you think that this is why you became a therapist because you wanted to be able to give to others what you knew was so important or if not that, can you talk a bit about the different factors that led to you training as a therapist? I know it was a second, you did another career first.

speaker-0: So, mean, yeah, I think clearly that the archetype or the trope of the wounded healer ⁓ and this kind of, for me, I suppose, my way of dealing with maybe the lack of connection as a child or feeling attuned to enough as a child was to move to my head and I became very cerebral and... very fascinated by philosophy and books. So I was a voracious reader. ⁓ But maybe actually through my use of psychedelics, I recognized that there was this tendency of going deeper and deeper into like abstraction that I felt left me like a little kite flying up in the air. And there was something about how do I, you know, connect with my feelings, connect with my body. ⁓ And so I think all of this was unconscious, but perhaps my desire to be there for others, you know, inherently means I have to learn how to be there for myself and what that involves. And so, you know, I've been quite ⁓ interested in embodiment and feelings, and maybe there's something that I felt discomfort with myself. So to offer that space for others is also an opportunity for me to learn how to do that for myself. You know, I very much see myself as being alongside, not being the expert and my willingness to sit with the discomfort of not knowing and being with difficult feelings is what I hope I can bring to other people so that they too can learn how to do that. for me, creating that trust is the really, so even though I might get it wrong, I might miss a tune. If I'm willing to acknowledge that and make a repair, then we can build a space that feels safe where we can work things through.

speaker-1: And that brings us nicely into psychedelic therapy. Some of these things like trust and the embodiment and the fact that people often have difficult moments and really require that ability of somebody to really sit with and to not be in that kind of expert position to sit alongside and to be there through. I suppose there are many ruptures in psychedelic therapy, just in the sense that someone is often going through quite a kind of jaggedy experience. So it might not be a rupture with the therapist, but they are having ruptures in their consciousness and then you're there as the kind of space of stitching it all together, I suppose, with them. Although I'm not sure if that's such a good analogy.

speaker-0: Cheat all together. Weaving. think weaving. Yeah, we all the strands for sure.

speaker-1: weaving together the strands. so coming back now to the beginning of the Imperial trial. So last episode we had Ruth who was part of the trial as a participant and casting your mind back then. And obviously since then you've been working as a guide, a psychedelic guide on many more psychedelic trials, working with all sorts of different medicine substances, which maybe you can give us a whistle stop tour. But also as you do that, I'm also really interested in what is something that you have come to believe now that perhaps you didn't believe when we started. So when we met each other in that pub as volunteer guys on the psilocybin for depression trial, the first one, and we went in with our kind of hopes and our motivations for doing this work. Yeah, how now 10 years later? Do you feel what, tell us, give us a bit of your journey and also tell us what you believe now that you didn't before.

speaker-0: Well, mean, I would say that my, my ⁓ the allure of psychedelics was very much this sense of it takes so much time therapy to kind of work with people to build that trust. And then, know, that often the shifts are experiential. So for me, there was something about, you know, I can work with people for years and the shifts can be so slow. So I suppose I did kind of see psychedelics as a potential catalyst and perhaps also believed a little bit of the narrative of them as a magic bullet, you know, because I know that they'd help me. So I was, yeah, fully kind of naively thinking, perhaps they really can, you know, do all that work for us that we need them to do. And, you know, we did have remarkable results. And I think as a team, we were incredibly idealistic and it felt like we were on the verge of something new. ⁓ But at that time, we also did quite probably the longest sort of prep and integration or very substantial prep and integration because the safety part was so necessary and we had to demonstrate efficacy. because that was really sort of pivotal in the work we were doing then and we were kind of figuring it out as we went along, you know, and your work helped develop the protocols after, but there was that looseness and that capacity for us to be human beings with, you know, with everyone in that space. So, and my experience, you know, and then I went on to work on the DMT trial where we took your kind of work and we built on the ACE model and we just added the transpersonal and the relational because DMT is a shorter acting psychedelic and it felt like We still need, you know, all the stuff that the ACE model brings, but just to expand on that because you have a lot of transpersonal experiences and the fact that it is such a quick experience, the relational actually being also just equally important, not this sense of you're taking this psychedelic, you don't need all that other stuff around it. I suppose the prep and the integration. So I suppose what I've learned is that there's something about where we were pivotal as therapists and clients and clinicians in shaping the treatment that as soon as money came into the field, there was a pivot. And it's like money and the FDA and ⁓ pharmaceutical companies thinking about patents, how the relational and the care kind of gets side wiped and renamed from ⁓ psychedelic assisted therapy to dosing support monitors. to, you know, there are trials now where there is no therapy, but yet they still want therapists in the room. So for me, it's been quite eye-opening to experience that being a pivotal kind of voice in the field to this kind of sort of biological reductionist ⁓ kind of treatment that almost is saying you don't even need therapists in the room. You don't need people who understand psychology or can build trust, you know, it's almost, or they're asking us to do that. They're still asking therapists to be in the room, but they're just renaming what we're doing. So, ⁓ yes, it's been quite shocking to experience that. And for me, I suppose the crucial part is in order to have a deep psychotherapeutic experience, that trust, like in traditional therapy, that working alliance. people need to feel safe in order to have these very deep and meaningful experiences. just, I mean, I just know that with traditional antidepressants, we've already done this before. They were always meant to be alongside therapy. So are we going to really do that again? You know, are we going to really replicate that problem of let's minimize the care and take it away. And in fact, what we need more of is care and support and community, you know, as Acer is doing, we don't need less of that. That's the stuff that actually helps people heal. You know, and I'd like to get to the point where I wouldn't need to be a therapist because, you know, we can all learn to support each other, but it feels like we're going further away from that, not nearer to that.

speaker-1: Thank you. It's, yeah, sometimes kind of, I mean, obviously, we know how, you know, big systems work and how, you know, how kind of I suppose in a capitalist system, it's going to be about money at the end of the day. Like we know that, but it does still kind of sometimes surprise me that, you know, in all the conversations we have about it, it just seems so obvious that the care is so, so, so important. And yet this, does feel like it's quite, I'm not sure how much kind of, I don't know how to say it, like how much pain there is at the loss of it in the rooms where things get kind of decided. Is it a painful relinquishing of something that is deeply valued because of logistics? Or is it that maybe some people haven't had life experiences where they've so desperately needed care and connection? So I know that from your you know, from your life, from your childhood, and I know that from my own, you know, both, we both had parents that got divorced when we were five and, you know, like we found in community and in friendship, almost like complete salvation, like, you know, we shouldn't, we used to be very, we used to kind of shout from the rooftops about psychedelics and obviously now we're a little bit more cautious. But one thing we would always be, so what's the word? What's the word, Midge, where you like really... Evangelical. One thing we really can be evangelical about is connection and friendship and what a medicine that is and care and care. And so it kind of amazes me that ⁓ it all surprises me or saddens me that this really important layer of a psychedelic session, which is feeling this safety and trust and care and when you're going to be going through this sometimes really quite terrifying experience, what's your sense about why this layer that we value so deeply is being kind of lost?

speaker-0: Because it's hard to measure, basically, and traditional science likes to measure and define, quantify. And it's, it's the fundamental need to belong. It's about belonging, you know, and that's when people feel loved, when they feel accepted, they feel connected, and the difficulty is measuring it. And because we can't measure it, it feels like and it causes issues in a capitalist system that wants to quantify and protocol and define everything. you know, that, that, I don't know whether it's the I thou moments, the moments of meeting, the reparative moments, the moments of feeling held, of feeling seen. They are, you know, very much now moments that are hard. We can try to language them, but you know, they're incredibly difficult to quantify but that doesn't mean we should get rid of them. That just means they're the kind of glue that we need.

speaker-1: So one sad shift I suppose in a way is the shift from ⁓ I suppose psychedelic therapy in the room or having a guide, having a therapist and now having a, did you say session monitor?

speaker-0: Yes, so it's a dosing session monitor, where your job is to ⁓ not provide therapy, but to be kind of friendly and open, but make sure you don't kind of follow any therapeutic leads. But you're still providing a regulating calm abiding presence, which is also foundational to therapy. you know, I think it's a lot of it's semantics, quite frankly, and when they do the trials. Without therapists, think then they can really test whether that's needed or not, you know, with some just general people off the street sitting in the room.

speaker-1: I wouldn't want, I wouldn't want to imagine having a situation like this without a therapist present. Those are brave people. ⁓ But that brings us on to the other kind of, ⁓ I suppose. Well, so you say they're going to look at having not, like not having therapists. And so then the question in my mind was like, how are they going to know if that, you know, the impact that has, because often the impact of psychedelic experiences comes in much later. So the other thing that I talked about in this podcast in the second episode, I mentioned John, who was in the film Magic Medicine. He was in the first hit of cyber trial that we worked in and about his experience and the experience of many people that we worked with in the trials was that he talked about the lights going on and then the lights going out again when he kind of went back to, you know, in the months and in years after the trial, the depression came back. So what is your sense around this? Because I know that clinical trials don't, they only measure for a short period of time. They don't measure like a long term follow up period. So I just wondered what your sense was about that because from where I'm standing it's like there is the issue around the level of therapeutic support in the session itself, which feels to me like it's super important even if it's very logistically difficult. But then For me, probably even more importantly, it's about the level of aftercare and community support and connectedness in those quite sensitive raw months afterwards where the headlines might say, psychedelic experiences, one of the top five experiences of your life, and you're going to be fixed, your brain will be rewired. But we know that it's often quite a long, tender journey of healing that takes a long time and requires a lot of support and that people are really opened afterwards. So yeah, just any reflections from your work, Michelle, like I know that you've kind of, you work with people sometimes therapeutically one to one afterwards. What have you noticed in terms of that lights going off again?

speaker-0: Yeah, well, it certainly happens. People can have incredibly powerful, potent experiences, but, you know, and I've worked with a few people that have come from different trials in a long-term therapy way, because even though they've had insights and they've had this opening, they might still lack community or connection or significant others in their life. And without that sort of know, and some of them might be people who presented with depression or might have more complexity than just standard depression. without, I suppose, you know, and that's why we developed those integration groups initially, because we saw the shortcomings of the trials. So that, you know, that very first integration group was to like, if we want the benefits to be sustainable, we need to provide the holding. And of course, Acer is an extended version of that. ⁓ So yeah, I mean, I And maybe I don't see the people who have the one and done, but my sense is they're probably very few people who, and they were probably quite robust, quite well supported in their communities anyway, or had, know, they might have their own therapists. So I, yeah, for me, it, yeah, that sense of the magic bullet just doesn't feel like it really has any currency. just, you know, I've, I've been working, I've worked with people who have you know, ongoing psychedelic experiences from the trials and they've worked with me for years. So afterwards, so, and a lot of it is still about finding connection and community and a sense of belonging. And, you know, as a therapist, I can be that constant for them in their life and provide that to a degree. But for me, it feels like the groups or going to groups or being out in the world and finding like-minded others is really you know, when they can move beyond therapy and that, that, you know, often that takes a lot of time. sending people back to homes where there are, you know, there's poverty or oppression or systemic issues, you know, it's almost, yeah, it feels unethical, I suppose, to give people psychedelics when they don't have the structures to support them afterwards.

speaker-1: So true, so true and very relevant now for thinking about Trump's executive order, bringing psychedelic therapy in, but also recognizing, you know, his cuts to healthcare at the same time and you know, that dynamic, it feels like this lesson that we really do need to bring connectedness into our communities and societies before psychedelics can safely be kind of rolled out in any positive way. And that message doesn't, it feels like we're still a long way off that message being fully heard. maybe it won't be, maybe they will be rolled out before we've had the chance to like nurture the infrastructure of our communities with more support systems and more connection. And we'll just have to like make it up as we go along. But yeah, it feels like we're both seeing, seeing the same thing. And it reminds me of being very many years ago, I don't know if you remember it when we, were at a conference. And were on the very first trial. We'd just started working as guides and the very first Imperial trial and we sat on the grass. I think we were skiving one of the talks and we sat out on the grass. And it was like this moment of like, we're going to need a bigger boat, like in Jaws, know, the film Jaws. We're going to need a bigger boat. remember just seeing what we'd seen in the trial and seeing that people needed support afterwards because we were getting emails, you know, like I...

speaker-0: you

speaker-1: I'm feeling raw again and I need more support like months afterwards, like I need support what's available. And then we saw all these people at this conference and all this kind of, you know, amazing excitement about these interventions. But I remember at that point we were like, I think we need to start a group. need to start an integration group. Okay, ⁓ so I wanted to think again about your journey and think about the starting to think a bit now about the levels of standing in the circle. And I know that you lost your mom a few years ago, and that through that process of grieving your mom, so another big, big, big loss of your life that this time, trees were helpful in doing maybe some things that people can't do. don't know. Tell us a bit about your process with trees.

speaker-0: Yes. So, ⁓ well, it's been interesting because both in ⁓ my MA that I'm studying right now and I have studied the bardic grove and I'm in the middle of the ovate training, but not, I've kind of had to put it on pause because there's only so much training I can do at once. ⁓ I used to go and sit in a green gauge tree, I think when I was around eight or nine, because my house was quite full and chaotic. ⁓ And I would find respite in that tree. ⁓ I, ⁓ while back, I did, I think maybe 10, 10 sessions of IFS. And I had quite an interesting moment where I remember this sense of, I think, being in that tree and just feeling loved and seen and worthy, ⁓ which was a strange experience, sort of like having that sense of like, ⁓ maybe the tree was a sanctuary for me that I went to ⁓ in my youth. And I grew up in a hamlet, so there was a lot of nature around and I would often go off and just lie in the grass and have moments to myself basically, maybe being a bit of an introvert, I needed those. And sometimes they weren't possible at home. But through my ⁓ druids training, I found a tree in Richmond Park, which was a sort of opened up tree, which you could actually sit in. So was a bit of a cocoon, a bit of a womb maybe. And I would do a lot of my little rituals of part of the practice and training with this tree. became my space where I would go to. yeah, so my mother died like three years ago, quite suddenly in an accident. It seems like There seems to be a thread with my mother. suddenly disappears, suddenly dies, and there's this shock in my system, basically. ⁓ And I think around the time, or not long after, the tree that I would go to for solace and do my rituals kind of fell back. So it's like the center of it ⁓ went in. well, and it was only through talking to you, I think, at some... event, I can't remember where we were, that I recognized that I hadn't been back to that tree and I'd realized the fact that this tree had sort of symbolized something steady and secure for me. And it had fallen through and almost actually become an oak door, which is a very potent symbol in Druidry, which I hadn't realized at the time. I hadn't realized that, but there was a real, yeah, real brief around the loss of the tree, the loss of my mum and the fact that nature, even though I'd kind of seen it as a steady holding ⁓ element in my, in my, I suppose, my history, that even though the door of it, the back of it had fallen through, the tree was still there. So I think part of me had sort of dissociated from the loss in a way, dissociated from what had happened. And your reminder of, of, of, the tree's there and there's something going on here, why are you avoiding it? Enabled me to go back and reconnect with, well, nature is just demonstrating the lessons that happen in life and the tree's still there and the memory of my mother is still there in my heart. And the fact that it become now a door rather than a womb or a cocoon. Yeah, so there's something there about having that connection with nature as a And that, you know, when you really tune into it, that it's such a great teacher really. ⁓ And even, you know, my avoidance of it was really something about me just finding it hard to sit with the loss and the grief. ⁓ But it's, yeah, it's definitely been a constant for me in terms of finding peace, finding sanctuary. I walk a lot around Richmond Park and it reconnects me to myself. nature, think being with nature, I take a lot of photographs of nature and I think there's something in that kind of meditative process that connects me to nature and to myself. I am, yes, that's, yeah, so I do see Aesir, though I haven't done it, but I feel like it probably is like modern day Druidry really, that sense of, yeah, how we connect to ourselves and nature being that constant teacher really.

speaker-1: And so when you think of the three, so the three levels of standing in the circle, so you've mentioned about your, and your nature photography is so beautiful, and that this is one way of connecting both to nature and connecting to yourself, but thinking, really zooming out and thinking about these three levels. So in this podcast, we're talking about the three levels of standing in the circle and The first level is standing in the circle with yourself. So that's really your connection to yourself with your emotions, your feelings, true feelings, your body connection. Then the second level is standing in the circle with other people, with community, feeling that same feeling of belonging, feeling included, feeling witnessed, being able to witness others. And then the third level is standing in the circle with the living world, the interconnected web of life and feeling part of that. When you think about all those three levels, which do you think you find the hardest and which do you think you trust the most now? What feels strongest and easiest for you?

speaker-0: I think my connection to self is pretty good. My connection to the living world. I think as an avoidant, sometimes groups find a little bit challenging, but I feel like maybe the psychedelic community, the therapist community, I suppose that depth of connection that I crave, I do find belonging in those communities. But there's something maybe about my, I don't know whether it's introversion or avoidance that maybe just connecting to others, anyone is perhaps still difficult for me. So that would be my growing edge of how can I just, you know, ⁓ be myself with anyone and yeah.

speaker-1: Thank you. And then my last question. If you could say one thing to your younger self, so the Michelle, the very young Michelle going through your parents divorce and your mom leaving and all of that, those years of all of that, or after the loss of Didger, at any point when you were dealing with these losses that perhaps then at those younger years you didn't understand in the same way that you understand now, what's one thing that you wish that someone had said to you or one thing you could say to yourself that would have helped you at that stage where you were really grappling with the loss that I imagine felt just kind of completely overwhelming?

speaker-0: you I mean, it sounds a bit trite and I don't think I would have understood it, but it's just recognising that that pain and suffering. It's like a gift. It's like, I don't know, I'm thinking pestle and mortar and how the suffering helps create the compassion in a way and the understanding of others. But I don't know how I'd articulate that in a way that my five-year-old self would understand. Maybe it would just be a hug. So it wouldn't be words. It would just like a very long hug.

speaker-1: It reminds me a bit of the tree that represented your relationship with your mother in the womb that was blown open and that kind of breaking open through pain and loss that we become a tree that's got like a big open heart because we're kind of blown to pieces but it's a resting place for others, someone's resting and that when we haven't been through those things we're still a kind of, we're closed, we haven't been, our heart hasn't been blown open.

speaker-0: It's that, yeah, I suppose be willing to have your heart broken really, isn't it? Again and again and again and again. No! Even though it hurts all the time.

speaker-1: Yeah, maybe that yeah, willing being willing to have your heart broken. I think that's, that's beautiful. Michelle, thank you so much for your time and your friendship. you're with them. Thank you everyone for listening. We will have information in the show notes about some of the things we talked about, for example, I meant to say before that IFS is internal family systems. We'll have a little note about that. We'll have other notes about other things that we've talked about, attachment styles. We'll have notes about what's going on in Acer at the moment and how you can get involved with what we're doing, our events. And yeah, and there'll be sources of support as well for if you're going through a difficult time, we'll always make sure to include those in the show notes too. And we thank you for listening and we'll see you soon.

speaker-0: Thanks. Bye.