Ros: The main thing that my decade long journey has taught me and the reason why I'm making this podcast is a deep faith that humans, given the right conditions, will connect deeply to each other. That we are medicine for each other. That the loneliness so many of us live with isn't who we really are, it's the conditions we've been put in. Welcome to Stand in the Circle with me, Dr Rosalind 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. There's a lot to be angry about in the world right now. The people with the most power are using it in horrendous ways and the crises are real and we need to stay informed about all of it. But we can't let rage be the only thing we feel and we can't let the news be the only thing we hear. We're not built to hold that much grief alone and we can't change things on our own. We need to get connected. This podcast is a place to come for stories of people who have found ways to get connected. It's not easy in modern culture, surrounded as we are with ways to numb and distract and become more and more isolated from our neighbours. But my guests and I will describe ways that they've moved from numbness to feeling, from isolation to belonging, from disconnectedness to connectedness to themselves, to community and with the living world. And what we focus on grows. So tune in, stay angry where it matters, but come here to remember the connectedness that is always available to us, even when it feels far away. This is Stand in the Circle. I'm Dr. Rosalind Watts. Welcome. I'm a clinical psychologist, and for the last 10 years or so, I've been asking that same question, what actually helps people feel more connected to themselves, to other people, and to the living world? I've been working in psychedelic clinical trials and research and more recently in a community I started called Acer Integration where people from all over the world join for a year long process of becoming more connected. Before I get into today's episode, let me tell you what this podcast is and the journey you'll take with me if you choose to listen. So Stand in the Circle is about how you can become more connected through the ups and downs of life, starting from where you are right now. Each month has a theme, one of the kind of experiences that crack people open. Depression, cancer, menopause, addiction, anxiety, loss and grief, relationship difficulties, eroded communities, PTSD, the pain of white supremacy, burnout. Every one of these is a place where life cracks people open. And in modern culture, these are places that you might be walking through alone. Each month we'll spend four episodes inside one of those territories. So the first episode, like this one, is me walking us into the month. The second is a conversation with someone from the ACER community, someone who's lived in that place, who'll tell you what disconnection looked like for them and how they became more connected and what they do now in the moments where they lose it again. The third conversation is with a thinker or researcher or practitioner who spent their life working in that space. And then the fourth episode of the month is me again answering questions that you send into the website. So this first month, the territory is depression. In this first episode, I'll introduce the what, the why, the who of Stand in the Circle, and I'll then tell my own story about my own times of despair and a moment where I understood in one night how disconnected I actually was. A night where I screamed into a maple tree in the rain for a few hours. and then started writing what became Asa. And I'll explain why I think we're in the middle of a bigger shift in how human beings understand healing away from the individual model and back towards the communal one. I'll describe two shapes that I think explain a lot of what's wrong and a lot of what's possible. That's the pyramid and the circle. And I'll give you a one minute practice called three hands that is the smallest version of standing in the circle. And we'll come. back to this practice regularly on this podcast. And in next week's episode, I'll talk about what it's been like to watch people with depression get better and become more connected to themselves and others and nature with the help of psychedelic medicines and how sometimes the depression comes back. Ongoing ways to stay connected aren't available. We'll look at the moment we're in with psychedelic medicines right now, why it matters and what's missing. And then in episode three, I'll be in conversation with Ruth, who participated in the psilocybin for depression trial in 2019 that I worked on and who has spent the years since walking the long road of integration. And in episode four, to wrap up our first month, I'll be with my friends and colleague, Michelle Baker Jones, who's been a therapist on multiple clinical trials and who has her own story of disconnection and connection to share. The main thing that my decade long journey has taught me and the reason why I'm making this podcast. is a deep faith that humans, given the right conditions, will connect deeply to each other. That we are medicine for each other. That the loneliness so many of us live with isn't who we really are, it's the conditions we've been put in. Take those conditions away and put us instead in a safe and caring circle that meets regularly over time and connection and kindness just grow. It's been happening in ASA for years now. We've had so many new groups join and the same thing always happens every time. And so I can't help but believe in human beings' innate capacity to connect as equals with each other's wellbeing genuinely in mind and to believe that that kind of connection is medicine. So my own journey with this begins when I did my clinical psychology training in the early 2000s and the model I was taught was the individual one. So one therapist, one client in a room, 50 minutes at a time working through what was wrong. and a lot of good work can happen in those rooms. But the idea that healing is something you do privately with one paid professional is maybe 100 years old. Before that, for the entirety of human history, healing happened in community. And I remember having one training module on something called community psychology, and it absolutely blowing my mind. But there weren't many jobs as community psychologists. So I went to work in hospital. After a few years, I felt quite sad about the state of the mental health system and the limits of individual talk therapy. I was at the time struggling with a condition called PMDD, which I'll talk about more fully at a later date, but I couldn't access any support for it. I was offered antidepressants and I did end up taking St. John's warts, which helped a bit. But what I needed was people to talk to about it. I had a therapist and it helped a bit. but I was still basically struggling alone with it. And after having my daughter and the immediate breakdown of my relationship with her dad, my PMDD got harder to manage and I threw myself into my work even more because helping others gave me a way through. It gave me a purpose and a path through the dark times. It felt important and meaningful, but it did mean that I was often neglecting myself even more. And when I was on maternity leave with a tiny baby, I found my days so difficult and exhausting and also mind-numbingly repetitive. And I was so isolated. And it was in that moment that I started reading articles about psychedelic therapy, often late at night whilst I was breastfeeding. And to my luck, there was a psilocybin for depression trial that was happening down the road from the houseboat that I lived on. So I really stumbled into working as a volunteer trip sitter. at one of the world's first psychedelic therapy research centers when it was still tiny. And I sat there in the hospital room alongside these people, brave people who would treatment resistant depression and were willing to take the risk on this wacky magic mushroom intervention because they were desperate and because nothing else had helped. And I saw it offer something much more powerful than talk therapy. If you haven't heard about psychedelic therapy, essentially the patient has a session in the clinic. with a therapist present or two therapists, and they take a psychedelic like MDMA or psilocybin or Ibogaine to amplify the therapeutic process and to help them open up more. And it's often very intense and hopefully offers a breakthrough. And what people often describe happening that I hadn't seen in talk therapy is a sudden and intense experience of feeling deeply connected to themselves, to other people, to the living world. That word kept coming up in session after session until it became the focus of my research and led to a measure called the What's Connectedness Scale that measures a person's connectedness and that includes connection to their own body, their emotions, other people, both loved ones and strangers, and connection to nature and to the world and a sense of meaning and purpose about why they are here. Psychedelic medicines have always been about connectedness and they've always been communal. in the cultures that have carried them for thousands of years, they were embedded in community. Not something to do alone, something to do with the support of wise elders and many co-travelers. The medicine wasn't the center of the work, the community was. And what I came to believe working inside the trials is that we can't take that away. Psychedelics need community to be held safely and to be able to integrate the experience afterwards. You need to have time. and space and support from people who understand what you've been through so that you can reflect and learn and make changes to your life. This is what it actually takes to integrate the peak state experience of connectedness into a more connected life. Otherwise, if we just go from a big opening experience back into ordinary, busy, pressured, isolated modern life, the connectedness often fades. So I guess I've come to see psychedelics as a gateway drug to community. They can help us remember perhaps the most important thing. for humans to remember right now, we need each other. Psychedelics can open up both the longing for connection and the ability to connect. And in recent years, I've seen through the ASA community what deep community belonging can do. Some of our members have never taken psychedelics. They joined after a heartbreak or a loss or an illness or something that broke them open and left them needing community and connection. However people find us, whatever made them open up in the first place, the thing that helps them stay open is the embodied knowing that they are part of a community that will walk alongside the messy path of life with them. just because you had a big aha moment or a breakthrough doesn't mean that life gets simple, sometimes quite the opposite. There will be ups, downs, twists, turns. A journey of healing and growth is a spiral journey. It's not a straight line. It's snakes and ladders. There will be times when you go backwards and fall and feel lost. And whatever brings a new ladder or opens a new door for someone, it's community that walks you through it and stays by your side when you inevitably fall down or shut down again. It's people you trust that will be there celebrating with you on your sunny moments, witnessing your fear when you feel out in the cold. People who stay for all of it. So that's a bit of the what of the podcast and the why and now the who. What kind of people might get something from listening? So firstly, anyone who is feeling disconnected and maybe you suspect that the loneliness, the numbness, the running on empty feeling that so many of us live with. isn't a personal failure, it's the natural consequence of living in a culture that wasn't built for human beings to thrive in. And the data backs this up. So in 1990, 3 % of Americans said they had no close friends. By 2024, that number was 17%. And around half of UK adults now say that they experience loneliness. So if you're feeling it, you're not alone in feeling it. We are in the middle of an epidemic of disconnection. And the data also shows how bad it is for us. The US Surgeon General published an advisory a couple of years ago saying that social disconnection is as bad for our health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. That's how bad it is for us, yet that's what the structures we live in feed us. So like me, you might be starting to realize with considerable rage how much of what we've been told is wrong with us. is actually a response to the structures we've been living in. You might be someone who's had a moment where you felt really connected, where something in you cracked open and then maybe it closed again and maybe the feeling faded. It might have been a retreat, a psychedelic experience, a breakthrough in therapy or a heartbreak or a big loss, some kind of dark night of the soul where you suddenly knew what really mattered. You felt more awake and then life closed back in and you're left wondering What happened to that version of you? Whoever you are and wherever you're here, I am so happy that you are. And as I said at the start, I do think that we're in the middle of a shift in how human beings understand healing. Let me explain what I mean by that. We are seeing the limitations of the individual medical model of mental health as if emotional distress was the same as a broken leg. In the individual medical model, when you are suffering, when you have emotional distress that's been going for a while and you're really stuck, you go to see a therapist or you are given medication, or maybe you do your meditation, you fix yourself in some way and then you return to your life. It sees healing as an individual project. And I don't think that that model is wrong. ⁓ As I said, a lot of really great work can happen in therapy and meds, medications, even mental health medications can absolutely save lives. But I think this model is a small fragment of a much older, much bigger, much fuller, much more vibrant picture. And I hope that this podcast will be one voice in a growing chorus saying community based healing is not alternative. It's the default. It's what humans have always done. The thing that's alternative, the thing that's strange historically is the idea that you should do it alone. So this isn't a self help podcast. It's a we help podcast. And actually it's not even we help. It's we remember we are, we are. So I hope you'll feel supported by hearing from people who've been in the kind of low places that you might have been in or someone you love. has been in. I'll always ask them what they wish someone had told them in their darkest hour. And that's the circle too because in the circle it goes both ways. Your questions will shape what we explore and what you're struggling with becomes what we will look at together. So if something I say doesn't sit right or if I miss something important or if you want me to go deeper on something, write to me. This isn't a one way thing. So that's the intro. That's what we're doing and why and for who. And now I want to tell you a bit more about my story, including that night where I found myself screaming into the roots of a tree in the rain. So for most of my life, I was by any external measure doing fine with a career as a clinical psychologist that I'd worked really hard for. And I was lucky that the breakdown of my relationship during maternity leave coincided with the research happening in Imperial College London run by Professors Nutt and Carhartt-Harris. And it was really also right place, right time for me to do early research that revealed that this theme of connectedness is a very important factor in how psychedelics were helping people feel better. And I went on to be lead therapist and one of the first randomized control trials looking at psilocybin for depression. And it was the most hopeful thing I'd seen in my career. People who'd been numb for years, sometimes decades, sitting up after their sessions with glowing faces, having often had pretty intense experiences, sometimes beautiful, sometimes really challenging, and sometimes not helpful, but so often describing this feeling of connectedness to themselves, to other people, to the living world. So that was my outer life, researcher of connectedness. And my inner life at that same time was something else entirely. I was a single mom living on that houseboat and I was running on fumes. I'd come home from the clinic at seven in the evening and my mom would hand over my little daughter and run for her train. and I'd do bedtime in the washing and I'd sit zonked on the sofa with the chocolate bar and I'd watch a TV series where the characters felt like friends because I needed actual social connection but I had zero capacity for it. I didn't have time to organise social connection and I didn't have energy to actually do social connection so I settled for the pretend version like so many of us have got used to doing. And I wasn't... I wasn't falling apart, but I was just not feeling alive either. I was just staying afloat and I was depressed. And then as I mentioned at the start, the PMDD. So that stands for premenstrual dysphoric disorder. And we will have a whole month looking into it in future. But for now, suffice to say that in the few days before each menstrual cycle, I grappled with feelings of intense fear. desolation and self loathing. And I'd been having that since my periods began when I was 14. So I'd got really used to masking it. And I found that being a therapist really helped me because I could forget about myself and just hold the space of empathy for someone else's pain in a way that I guess I'd wished I'd had that space held for me. And I found that the PMDD deepened my awareness of suffering in a way. But it was a dark place I would visit every month, sometimes with a destructive impact on my life. And then I would come back from that descent and then I would be fine for the rest of the month until the next time. It was really exhausting. And single parenting on a houseboat, heading up the trial, holding the responsibility for a large group of people who themselves were carrying a lot of pain and were having psychedelic experiences in my care and it was an intervention that is very intense, very new to modern medicine and frankly not risk-free. So I was working really hard, really busy, doing, doing, doing, motivated and inspired, putting a lot of pressure on myself to do this important job well. And behind it all I was just so lonely and it was just this irony of writing papers about connectedness and being so disconnected myself. And also around that time I started getting a real sense of how our participants were doing long term. In the months and years after their psilocybin experiences, they'd often go home with a new sense of connectedness. And a year later, some of it would have faded, if not a lot of it would have faded, because they would return home to modern life, pressure, isolation, back to the overwhelming to-do list, the phone, the screens. no one to talk to about what actually happened to them, no warm, accepting circle of people to sit around the fire with. And I realised they were needing the same thing that I was needing, the circle. And I thought about how giving people psychedelics without them having access to that kind of integration support doesn't show up as problematic in the studies because they usually just measure outcomes for the first six months. So the later fading of connectedness doesn't get picked up. But those participants will so often be seeking further psychedelic sessions and needing to find their own integration support, as my guest Ruth in a couple of weeks will talk about. And as I said at the start, giving people just the drug without community is so different from how psychedelic medicines have been carried in other cultures for thousands of years, where the medicine was one piece of a much larger container. So what we were doing was the opposite. We were taking the medicine and leaving the container behind. And that has an impact on how sustainable the positive impact of psychedelic medicines will be and also has an impact on safety. These experiences are often so intense and afterwards people are sometimes feeling so raw, confused, so open. Imagine open heart surgery without aftercare. You wouldn't send someone home with the wound still raw and no one to call and just offer them one or two follow-up sessions. But that's a fair description of what happens in those trials because they're medical trials. They don't have the infrastructure to offer the kind of circle of care that is needed. But then the pandemic, our trial had to stop. Many of our participants couldn't even access their one or two allotted aftercare sessions. So a colleague of mine, Michelle Baker Jones, you'll meet her in episode four, and I set up a weekly video call for the participants. It was a drop in sharing circle, just so the participants had somewhere to meet each other and be together. And I would sit there at my laptop watching the faces on the screen. watching strangers become friends and watching people say out loud things that they'd never said in their whole lives. And I'd feel this warmth in my chest and this reminder that humans, given the right conditions, will connect. We've just been living in conditions that teach us to do the opposite. And an interesting thing is that this was happening on Zoom. And often I think of tech as one of the reasons that our society is so disconnected and it is. And so before COVID, I would never have wanted to offer a sharing circle online. But I've been amazed by the depth of connection that can happen online. It moved me so much seeing that circle. Also, I'd spoken to a psychiatrist and a few psychologists about setting something like that up and I heard the same message. A sharing circle for people with depression. It won't go well. They will make each other feel worse. But that's not what happened. maybe partly because they'd been opened up by psychedelics, but some of them were depressed again and all of them were going through the ups and downs of life. But they walked through the ups and downs of life together every week for months. And those circles offered really something different to therapy because it's not just you talking and the therapist listening, it's you talking for your bit, but also listening to others and feeling empathy for their challenges. It takes you outside of your own stresses. So empathy is medicine, receiving it, yes, but also giving it. It makes you feel so good. It makes your own heart fill up warm and glowing. It feels like a natural flow and it brings that feeling that Bell Hooks describes, that healing is an act of communion. And it's this feeling that we're all in this together. And I have to admit that watching that community grow and share with each other, I longed to be part of something like that for myself. because on top of the usual stresses, the overworking, I was also moving towards a kind of crisis of meaning that was going to change everything. So around that time, the wider psychedelic field that I was working in was changing. Money was moving in and I knew that in future the shape of the work would have to bend around the shape of the system funding it. And I felt protective of psychedelic work. I felt protective of the spirit of psychedelic work, the soul of the work, you could say. kind of work that's been carried for thousands of years by people who knew how to hold it and it was now in danger of being turned into something else. I kept thinking about a Mazatec medicine woman that I'd read about called Maria Sabina. She lived in a village in Mexico in the 1950s and we'll talk about her properly next week but the short version for now is that her magic mushroom ceremonies ended up without her consent in Life magazine in 1957 and that led to her magic mushrooms being sent to a Swiss chemist. And there is so much that is wonderful about that because that chemist made synthetic psilocybin, which is what we were able to give those participants in the depression trial, which changed many of their lives. And we'll talk next week about how recent changes in the US mean that psilocybin therapy is going to be available to so many more people who really need it. But going back to Maria Sabina, when her mushrooms got synthesized, the molecule traveled, but the culture that knew how to hold the medicine with reverence and humility, didn't. And so I knew the story of Maria Sabina. And when I started working in psychedelics in 2015, I'd hoped that the psychedelic therapy revolution was going to honor indigenous wisdom and honor the really important aspects of this sacred form of healing. I mean, I was so idealistic. But by 2020, I could see that psychedelics were going to be extracted from their context, just the active ingredient without all the things around it, like community and aftercare support that I think are needed. And one night watching all of that happen around me and the tiredness from pouring and pouring out from a cup that didn't get filled from so many responsibilities I was carrying alone and from numbing myself with TV and junk food and from the weight of my monthly PMDD descents, all of it caught up with me at once. And I had been in a zoom meeting and I just closed my laptop and I walked out into the rain. And as I walked, I felt rage rise up in me. The rage of generations of women, the rage of the earth, the rage of any person that has ever stood for care and watched the system choose profit instead. And I was marching. I was trying to get far enough from the house where my daughter was so that I could scream because I had so many silent screams inside that had been building up. And as I marched, I kind of stumbled into a maple tree that was in my path. And I don't know why it's not something I've ever done before. but I stood right against the bark of the tree trunk and I put my hands either side and I let out this guttural roar for ages. All of it, the grief, the rage, the years of holding it all together and I let it go into the bark down through the roots. I let it go and I felt something I hadn't felt in a really long time held by something ancient and solid and strong and deep. Because trees are totally connected. Tree roots weave together underground. They share nutrients, they feed the ones that are struggling. And forests have been surviving drought and storm and fire for 400 million years because of their connectedness. And clinging to that tree in a crumpled, wet, muddy mess, I understood. I felt in my body what connectedness actually is. because I was held in a circle of trees and my pain and my rage were held in that circle and that solid presence, solid silent presence was exactly what I needed. I didn't want any advice or fixing. I just needed to be held in a strong circle to not be alone, to be held and witnessed. And somehow it was trees in the rain that really held the sound of that scream and that really did that for me. And as I clung there, totally soaked through, I felt an instruction, stand, stand connected, stand in a circle. I walked back inside and then the next morning I started writing the structure of AESA and I wanted it to be an accessible place of connectedness for anyone who needed it. AESA stands for Accept, Connect, Embody, Restore. And AESA Compestra is the official Latin name for a field maple. So AESA is a year long cycle. that the whole community follows together. It's inspired by something called the Celtic Tree Calendar, which we'll delve into another time. It has 12 trees, 12 months, and each is teaching a different way of being with yourself, with others, and with the living world. And there are different kinds of circles people can drop into every week. through the year, we have big gatherings and small gatherings, and it's open to adults anywhere. You don't need to have had a psychedelic experience, although many people have. You just need to want to connect more to yourself, to community and to the wisdom of trees. It's an online hub, but also supports people who want to go deeper to create what we call islands of connectedness in person in their own neighborhoods. And I really want you to know that if you hear this and you think I need that or someone you know needs that, we're here. You can apply any time on our website and the doors to the community open twice a year in April and October. We'll meet people from ACER in future episodes and hear their stories, but... To get more connected, you don't need to join ASA. This is something anyone can start to do. And that's what this podcast is for. We'll talk about learnings from the ASA community and other teachers and communities and focus on how you can apply those learnings in your own life. How you can learn to stand in the circle. So that's how you can learn to stand in the circle. So that's the story of how ASA began and how the night with the maple tree turned into a community. Now I want to show you two shapes that we'll keep coming back to. And once you see them, you can't unsee them. So I keep talking about the circle. But I want to be clear that that's not any one specific form of community. I'm talking about the circle as a shape, a geometry that we need to bring back into our lives. And one way of defining what that means is to think about its opposite, which is the shape of modern culture. And that's the pyramid. The pyramid is hierarchical. There's a top and a bottom you climb. You manage your image, you hide what's hard because showing weakness might cost you your place. The pyramid runs on a low constant harm of fear, the fear of falling to the bottom, the fear of being excluded. And most of us were raised inside the pyramid. I was, I was born in the UK in 1981, raised in a culture that was very hierarchical and competitive and anxious. And I used to, I used to go shopping for clothes at the weekend instead of playing in the forest like I could have done. And if my mother had said, we're going for a nature walk, I would have groaned and said, I need to go and get the latest jeans instead. The pyramid did great work with me. I watched the adverts, I wanted the thing I wanted to fit in. And the pyramid shapes us to be consumers. But we are remembering the other shape, the other way of being together. In the circle, people face each other instead of facing forward. Vulnerability and honesty is worth more than performance. And listening is more important than speaking. And the question shifts from how am I doing to how are we doing? So to stand in the circle is to choose in any given moment to choose the circle posture instead of the pyramid posture. To tell the truth about how you actually are standing in the circle with yourself. To let yourself be witnessed and impacted by other people that's standing in the circle with others. To tell the truth about how you actually are. To let yourself be witnessed and to witness. Standing in the circle is something you start to do a tiny bit and then a bit more and over time it becomes a way of life. Because I want to give you something that you can do today to start and you can do it any day, anywhere and it only takes one minute. It's called three hands. So first you put your hand on your heart, take a few moments to tune in to how you're feeling. Breathe into your heart and when you're ready, just name what's there. You don't have to change it, you just give it a name. So that's step one, hand on heart, naming. how you're feeling. And then step two, your hand holds the other hand. This is to remember that you're not alone in feeling what you're feeling. Whatever you're feeling, others are feeling it too. And whatever your current relationships, whether or not you feel you have community right now, you're part of a movement of people everywhere who are re-stitching a long lost fabric of care. You don't have to know how you'll be part of that. Just by listening to this, you already are. And then, Third hand, hand on something alive, something from nature. It can be a plant in the room or a window you can open to feel the air or a glass of water or a stone or a twig from a tree or a pet. Remember you belong to something greater and hugely powerful. The elements, fire, water, air, earth. You belong to that. That is a practice. Three hands. Three levels of the circle, heart for the self, hands together for community, and then hand on the living world for the power of the elements. So when do you actually use this? Well, here are some examples that might work for you. So the first is when you catch yourself reaching for your phone. Not because you need it, but to get away from something. That reach that we all do so often is a signal. You can pause and you can do three hands instead. You can still pick up the phone afterwards if you really want to, but do the practice first. The second time you might use it is in transitions in your day. So the end of the work day, the school pick up, the moment before you walk through your own front door, the seams of the day where usually you just barrel from one thing to the next. One round of three hands that you do in that gap can really change what you carry into whatever comes next in your day. And the third time you might use it is for anyone listening that holds space for other people. So the moment right after a session, a client or a hard conversation, that moment before you reach for the next thing, that's the moment you've just given someone your full presence. And it's exactly the moment you're most likely to skip giving any of it to yourself. So that's your cue before the next thing, three hands. So that's the smallest version of standing in the circle. And it's the bedrock practice of this podcast. Three hands, three levels of the circle, heart for the self. hands together for community, hand on the living world for the power of the elements. One minute, anywhere, anytime. It's a tiny practice. It's just a way to keep remembering. The first hand, hand on the heart, is a doorway into becoming someone who is honest and kind to yourself. You start by being honest about what you feel. Instead of numbing it or swallowing it, you begin to notice which of the things you do are nourishing you and which are numbing you. You spend less time in your head ruminating and more time present in your body. You stop overriding the signals, hunger, fatigue, the need to cry. The structure of modern life is a wind and your connection to yourself is a candle flame and you need to build something around it to keep it lit. This reminds me of a woman in our ASA community, Lisa. That's her real name. She's given me permission to share. So Lisa is a social worker and for years she taught regulation tools to her clients, breathing, grounding, body based practices that calm the nervous system. She knew all the science. She knew what worked. And she had no real practice of her own. And she told me that she'd been raised in a family where crying was weakness and a kind of emotional stoicism had been just the air she breathed growing up. So even though professionally she was telling other people about the importance of feeling, privately she'd been overriding her own signals her whole life. And then her mother became ill. And in that long time of caring, caring that asks everything of you. she really needed the practices she'd been teaching for years. And what creating that structure did was keep her present with her mother, with her grief, just with herself through the whole journey. And so rather than collapsing into numbness, she was able to hold that presence. The second hand, hand in hand, this is a doorway into sharing your true feelings with a caring, ongoing community, being witnessed and witnessing others. witnessing we've talked about it a lot now but it's really when another person gives you their full presence without looking away but also without giving advice or trying to fix anything they just stay they just listen and then it's your turn to do the same and there are very few spaces for this in modern culture and a regular long-term space for it with people you trust is genuinely life-changing and you need it. Dasha Keltner is a researcher of ore. at Berkeley and his research shows that human nervous systems regulate each other. So when you're in a circle with people who are calm and attentive, your heart rate slows, your breath deepens, your stress hormones drop, your warm fuzzy bonding hormones all increase. I told you earlier about the early zoom sharing circles that we started after the psychedelic trial for participants to connect. And what I noticed week after week was that someone would say something true and you could see the faces of all the other people just soften. and there'd be a nod or a hand on the heart or there'd be a wet cheek. And the person speaking would also visibly change, shoulders dropping, breath slowing, from relief, from resonance, from being seen. And therapists need this just as much as their clients do. So there's a woman in our community, Brandy, a psychotherapist from Oregon, and she's also given me permission to share. She's been in private practice for years. She spent a lot of time face to face with one person at a time in her office listening to other people's truths for years. But she didn't have a place where her own were heard. So she joined Acer thinking she was coming to learn tools to support her own clients. And within a few weeks she realised, oh, I actually, I need this for me. I needed this all along. So many therapists need this. So many doctors need this. So many parents need this. So many people full stop need this. We are starving for it. And it would honestly change the world more than psychedelics, more than any medicine, if every person had a regular space of mutual witnessing where they could speak their true feelings and hear other people do the same. The third hand, hand on nature, is a doorway into connection with the living world, which may be the most powerful gift you can give yourself. It's the one most easily dismissed, the one that can sound a bit hippy-dippy. until you realise that it's actually the most well evidence of the three. So research across nearly 20,000 people found that just two hours a week in nature was associated with a markedly greater likelihood of reporting good health. Belonging to the living world means stopping seeing nature as a thing to look at and understanding that it's what you are. And it means that you're amazing because nature is amazing and so, and you are nature. Suzanne Simard's research on forest is some of my favourite science in the last 20 years. She showed that trees in a forest aren't in competition with each other, as I mentioned before with my maple tree. They're connected underground by mycorrhizal networks. They share water and chemical communication signals between them. So a mother tree feeds her saplings through the soil and older trees support sick trees. The forest isn't running on survival of the fittest, it's running on connectedness and reciprocity. The whole thing is a circle. That night I screamed into the field maple tree for a long time. I thought the gift was the feeling itself, that feeling of being held by something deeper. But actually the other gift that it gave me was that after that night I started noticing trees. The trees outside my window, the trees down the lane. Just knowing the names of the trees and knowing which tree was which helped me remember that I was part of a living world, not floating above it or trundling along beside it. And for the days when getting outside feels impossible, even listening to nature sounds is real. physiological benefits, lower stress hormones, a slower heart rate and a settling of the nervous system. So Finn Petscher, who is the composer in our ASA community, he has made two pieces of music. One is called Dawn and one is called Dusk and it's music that he's created woven with birdsong and nature sounds. And it's really for the to listen to at the start and the end of your day. You can just listen for a few minutes. And there's a link in the show notes about how to access them if you'd like to try this connectedness practice. Even two minutes can weave a little bit of that forest steadiness into your busy life. So we're coming to the end of the podcast now. And I also wanted to say that if you are feeling very disconnected right now, you might not be able to do three hands. The check-in with yourself might feel unbearable and the hand holding the other hand for that sense of belonging to a wider movement, that might feel impossible to believe. And the contact with something alive, it might just not help. You might try it and it just doesn't do anything and that is okay. The honest first step, if any of this feels too far away, is to find a circle that can hold you while you start. And that might be reaching out to people in your life who can support you. And it might be that sharing your feelings with the organisation Samaritans could be the circle that you need right now. Samaritan's volunteers are trained to listen without judgment. They're at the end of the phone anytime and they want to hear from you. So in the UK you dial 116 123 and in the US you dial 988. And there are more numbers in the show notes for other countries. So if you are sitting with despair or you're feeling really shut down, please know that you're not alone. And if talking to someone feels like the last thing you want to do or you worry that they won't want to listen, please try it and see if it helps. So we're coming to the end of the podcast and here's what I've spoken of today. I told you the story of the night I screamed into the maple tree and how that was the beginning of ASA and the beginning of my understanding that we're not meant to do this alone. And I said, I think we're in the middle of a shift in how human beings understand healing away from the individual model and back towards the communal one. From self-help to we help and the community-based healing isn't alternative. It's the older, deeper default that we've just forgotten. I talked about the two shapes, the pyramid, we were raised inside, and the circle that we're learning to step into. Standing in the circle is a posture, a practice, a way of being together that we have to keep choosing in small moments every day. And I explained the three hands practice, hand on heart, hands together, hand on something from nature. And I told you about the shape of the podcast going forward. So these monthly cycles with weekly episodes exploring types of experience that can crack people open in the hardest ways. We'll talk about standing in the circle. with the most challenging things of our time. And each month we'll have a solo episode, then guests, then questions. So please do submit questions. I won't be able to answer them in writing, but I might pick that topic for an episode. And if I can see that a lot of people are asking about the same thing, then I'll definitely cover that. We'll keep coming back to the theme of connectedness and standing in the circle. And psychedelics will be a regular theme too, as so many of the challenging things that we're going to be exploring have people working on psychedelic interventions to support them on that journey, which is really exciting. So next week, it'll be me again continuing the month of looking at standing in the circle with psychedelics for depression. And then next month, we will be opening up a new territory and we'll be standing in the circle with the impact of cancer. I will share about my diagnosis of the BRCA gene and having a double mastectomy a year and a half ago. And then in the following episode, there'll be conversation with a member of the ASIC community who's been impacted by cancer and what standing in the circle means to them. And then after that, I'll be talking with Ivan Beauson, who's doing research into psychedelic therapy for cancer patients and his observations about connectedness and how connectedness helps. So this is how we begin, not by waiting for the culture to change, but by standing up for connection in small ways, slowly getting more connected to ourselves, each other and to the living world in the place where we are now. We are creating an island of connectedness in a sea of chaos. And research shows that you only need three and a half percent of a population to stand together for something to shift the whole system. So let's stand together for connectedness. One of my favorite quotes from Ilya Prigogine, when a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order. I hope this podcast can be a little island of coherence in the chaos of your week, a place to come back to, to remember together. And if something in this episode resonated, please share it with someone that you think might appreciate listening to it. And if you want to know what we're up to in Acer, please check out the links in the show notes. So thank you so much for being here and see you next week. I'm Ros Watts. Stand in the circle.