One Spirit Medicine
Ancient Ways to Ultimate Wellness
Alberto Villoldo is a fascinating blend of medical anthropologist and practicing shaman—having explored, practiced and taught these ideas for decades. Alberto walks us the healing wisdom at the nexus of ancient shamanic wisdom and modern science. Big Ideas include how (and why!) to optimize our gut-brain, removing two of the most toxic things in our diet, adding superfoods and detoxing from news and TV while cultivating stillness.
Big Ideas
- Your Inner TyrantDon’t feed it.
- Your Gut-BrainIs as important as your head-brain.
- SugarThe most deadly kitchen toxin.
- GrainAnother toxin to be removed.
- SuperfoodsSpecifically, cruciferous veggies.
- News + Talk ShowsTime for a detox.
- Death and LifeAre always in balance.
- Cultivating StillnessTo allow the vision to come thru.
“One Spirit Medicine is based on ancient shamanic healing methods going back to our Paleolithic ancestors 50,000 years ago, backed by the latest breakthroughs in modern neuroscience. I first encountered these practices many years ago, during my fieldwork in the Amazon and the Andes. But these traditional practices are being confirmed today by what we’re learning about the body and the brain. For the last decade, together with physicians Mark Hyman and David Perlmutter, I’ve offered this program to clients who come to our weeklong retreats for detoxification and healing. They leave with body and brain restored. Now, in One Spirit Medicine, I offer you an opportunity to grow a new body using the same techniques…
One Spirit Medicine can help you avoid the illnesses that are ravaging civilization today. The shamans of old were masters of prevention. You do not have to be gravely ill to root out physical, emotional, and spiritual suffering and restore balance to your life. Using the principles and practices offered in these pages, you can feel better in a few days and begin to clear your mind and heal your brain in a week. And in just six weeks you can be well on your way to a new body that heals rapidly and ages gracefully, and a brain that supports you in forging a profound connection with Spirit and experiencing a renewed sense of purpose in life. One Spirit Medicine can give you all that, just as it gave it to me.”
~ Alberto Villoldo, Ph.D. from One Spirit Medicine
This is the third Note we’ve done on Alberto Villoldo’s great books. The other two: Courageous Dreaming + Power Up Your Brain. Alberto is a fascinating blend of medical anthropologist and practicing shaman—having explored, practiced and taught these ideas for decades.
This book is his distillation of how we can heal ourselves by taking a healthy dose of One Spirit Medicine. If you’re interested in the nexus of ancient shamanic wisdom and modern science as it relates to healing and flourishing, I think you’ll love the book. (Get a copy here.)
I’m excited to share some of my favorite Big Ideas so let’s jump straight in!
Download MP3
Download PDFThe message of One Spirit Medicine is that you don’t need to track down a shaman to find Spirit, or look outside yourself to find health. You only have to look within. That’s where you will receive One Spirit Medicine.
Get the Book
Listen to the PodcastDon’t feed the inner tyrant
“When the mind is behaving tyrannically, it’s running unconscious software belonging to the ancient limbic brain. The limbic brain is focused on survival, and when we’re in its grip we see danger everywhere and respond like a trapped animal. Often known as the mammalian brain, the limbic brain is driven by the Four Fs—feeding, fighting, fleeing, and fornicating. These primitive survival programs are activated when we fuel the brain on processed grains and sugar. The limbic system is the same region of the brain that craves sweet comfort foods when we’re feeling insecure.
The limbic brain’s obsession with food and sex, its craving for mind-dulling drugs, and its bias toward aggression, emotional withdrawal, and other destructive behaviors can be overridden by the neocortex, the ‘new’ brain, which allows us to learn, create, envision new features, and make plans. The neocortex is programmed for beauty, whether it’s found in a Mozart concerto or an elegant mathematical solution.”
Step 1 in our One Spirit Medicine protocol: We need to upgrade our brain.
And, as Alberto advises, we need to quit feeding our inner tyrant and turn on the circuitry that overrides our fear-based brain.
How do we do that?
We start with nutrition.
Specifically, we start by removing the most toxic foods that make it difficult for us to connect to something bigger than ourselves: sugar and flour.
More on them in a moment. For now, here’s more on why this is so important:
Your Gut-Brain = Your second brain
“Consider this: You have a second brain in your gut, and it’s every bit as important as the brain in your head. This second brain is a network of more than 100 million neurons that communicate directly with the brain in your head. The neurons form a latticelike sheath surrounding the entire alimentary canal, or digestive tract, the nearly 30-foot-long tube running from your mouth to your anus. This sheath isn’t concerned with poetry, love, philosophy, or whether there’s life after death. Its main preoccupation is the daily grind of digestion: breaking down food particles to extract the nutrients, absorbing those nutrients, and then eliminating waste. It’s an enormous job, yet all this neural firepower isn’t dedicated exclusively to digestion and elimination. The vagus nerve—the longest of the cranial nerves—snakes up through the body from the gut to the brain, carrying a variety of vital information.”
100 million neurons.
IN YOUR GUT.
Every time I read that I’m blown away.
You have a second brain. And it’s every bit as important as the brain in your head.
Alberto calls it your gut-brain and it’s constantly communicating with the brain between your ears.
Get this: “The gut-brain produces—and uses—95 percent of the serotonin in the body. Serotonin is both a hormone and a neurotransmitter. It plays a crucial role in developing our forebrain, which processes our emotions. Serotonin also enhances the growth of new neurons in the hippocampus, the part of the limbic brain that regulates the fight-or-flight systems. The hippocampus enables us to have new experiences and learn from them. Both the forebrain and the hippocampus have to be functioning optimally for One Spirit Medicine to work.”
Alberto goes on to make the point that serotonin, the “happiness” hormone, is chemically similar to DMT, “the spirit molecule.” He believes that serotonin plays an important role in the creation of DMT—allowing us to access higher states of consciousness in which we perceive the inherent interconnectedness of our existence.
Check out the book for more on that.
For now, KNOW that if you experience ANY emotional, mental or physical challenges, it’s wise to start the healing process by looking at what you EAT.
Might sound weird, but the growing body of research is unequivocal—if we want to optimize our lives, we need to start by optimizing our gut-brain.
Get the gut-brain right and the head-brain follows and we have a solid base from which we can most powerfully take the next steps in our actualization.
Let’s take a quick look at the two biggest gut-brain toxins:
Sugar: The most deadly kitchen toxin
“The most deadly toxin found in nearly every kitchen cupboard in America is sugar. The typical American adult consumes 150 pounds of added sugar a year, including fake sugars like aspartame, saccharine, and sucralose, and high-fructose corn syrup. Processed foods are sources of much of this amount. Even foods we don’t think of as sweet—like catsup, peanut butter, and yogurt, often contain sugar or sugar substitutes.”
Want to get your brain right?
Get rid of the sugar.
Here’s how John Ratey, MD puts it in Go Wild (see Notes): “Annual per capita sugar consumption in the United States was 5 pounds per person in 1700, 23 pounds in 1800, 70 pounds in 1900, and 152 pounds today. This is why we talk about sugar when we begin talking about what ails us. Want to go wild? Here’s how. Don’t eat sugar, not in any form. Not sucrose, not pure cane sugar, not high-fructose corn syrup, not honey, not in all those other polysyllabic chemical names that reveal industrial processes rooted in corn: maltodextrin, dextrose, sorbitol, mannitol. Not apple juice. John thinks this is one of the hidden causes of childhood obesity, even in households where there is very good parenting.”
Quick check in: How’s YOUR sugar intake?
What can you do to optimize starting today?!
The toxic effects of grain
“Genetic engineering isn’t the only way in which toxins from food can harm the gut-brain. Globally, we’re faced with new diseases caused by widespread reliance on a grain-based diet. One of the problems is that the wheat we’re eating is not the wheat people ate even 75 years ago. To eliminate famine in places like the Soviet Union, the post-World War II green revolution introduced a high-yield dwarf wheat containing 20 times more gluten than the old European strains, thereby altering the composition of the bread we’re consuming. (Gluten is a protein that gives dough its elasticity.)
… the harsh truth is that we all have become gluten intolerant to a surprising degree. Gluten is found in most grains, including wheat, rye, and barley, but the human digestive system hasn’t evolved to function well on a grain-based diet. So grains have become toxic to many of us, and our grain-rich diets are damaging the gut-brain.”
Alberto wrote another one of his books, Power Up Your Brain (see Notes), with neurologist + nutritionist David Perlmutter, MD.
Here’s how Perlmutter puts this in perspective in Grain Brain (see Notes): “There is little doubt that one of the largest and most wide-reaching events in the ultimate decline of brain health in modern society has been the introduction of wheat grain into the human diet. While it’s true that our Neolithic ancestors consumed minuscule amounts of this grain, what we now call wheat bears little resemblance to the wild einkorn variety that our forebears consumed on rare occasions. With modern hybridization and gene-modifying technology, the 133 pounds of wheat that the average American consumes each year shares almost no genetic, structural, or chemical likeness to what hunter-gatherers might have stumbled upon. And therein lies the problem: We are increasingly challenging our physiology with ingredients for which we are not genetically prepared.”
Sugar and flour.
Sugar and flour.
Sugar and flour.
To re-cap, we used to eat miniscule amounts of sugar and flour.
The average American now consumes 150 pounds of sugar and 133 pounds of wheat.
THAT’S CRAZY.
(Almost as crazy as the fact that the average American watches 34 (!!!) hours of TV every week but we’ll leave that for another chat.)
Now a good time to reduce/eliminate your consumption of sugar and flour?
Superfoods to the rescue
“Among the healthiest of the superfoods are the cruciferous vegetables, which include broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, and kale. (Cruciferous doesn’t refer to a property of the vegetables but rather to the petals of the plants, which grow in the shape of a cross.) High in fiber and antioxidants as well as phytonutrients, cruciferous vegetables activate the Nrf2 detox system inside cells and turn on the longevity genes.”
Alright.
So we’ve talked about a couple of the primary things to remove from our diet.
One of the top things to add?
Cruciferous veggies.
Here’s how Joel Fuhrman, MD describes their benefits in Super Immunity (see Notes): “Cruciferous vegetables are twice as powerful as other plant foods. In population studies, a 20 percent increase in plant food intake generally corresponds to a 20 percent decrease in cancer rates, but a 20 percent increase in cruciferous vegetable intake corresponds to a 40 percent decrease in cancer rates.
Twenty-eight servings of vegetables per week decreases prostate cancer risk by 33 percent but just three servings of cruciferous vegetables per week decreases prostate cancer risk by 41 percent.”
So, pick up some of these guys on your next trip to the market: bok choy + broccoli + Brussel sprouts + cabbage + cauliflower + celery + collard greens + kale + mustard greens!
P.S. Fun historical fact: “Broccoli originated in the Mediterranean and is mentioned in ancient Roman texts. Commonly used in Italian cooking, it first came to America when Thomas Jefferson brought it from Europe.”
Detox from news and talk shows
“From television and Internet alone, we’re exposed to more stimuli in a week than our Paleolithic ancestors were exposed to in a lifetime. And we’re continually running to keep up with the new information, to the point that we’re chronically exhausted. I can’t count how many times I have heard someone say, ‘If it weren’t for caffeine, I wouldn’t get anything done!’ Nature designed the brain to deal with only one lion roaring at us at a time, not the entire jungle turning against us. Now, however, our brain is too overtaxed to spend time sorting through all the data, much less looking at it with fresh eyes and deciding what is or is not a crisis, and what, if anything, needs to be done about it.
The media bring us news about wars and devastation happening in distant lands, but our fight-or-flight response operates only with local coordinates, and doesn’t understand far away. When we read about some catastrophic event, the thinking part of our brain grasps that it’s happening at another time and place. But the brain perceives images nonverbally and much faster. So when the hippocampus, which regulates the fight-or-flight response, is presented with streaming video of an atrocity, it registers it as happening now and nearby, and goes on high alert. The more damaged the hippocampus is by stress and toxins, the closer and more threatening the danger seems to be.”
First: This is worth a re-read: “From television and Internet alone, we’re exposed to more stimuli in a week than our Paleolithic ancestors were exposed to in a lifetime.”
WOW. That’s stunning.
And get this: In The Upside of Stress (see Notes), Kelly McGonigal tells us “Stress caused by the news, as opposed to stress caused by your life, is unique in its ability to trigger a sense of hopelessness. Watching TV news after a natural disaster or terrorist attack has consistently been shown to increase the risk of developing depression or pos-traumatic stress disorder. One shocking study found that people who watched six or more hours of news about the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing were more likely to develop post-traumatic stress symptoms than people who were actually at the bombing and personally affected by it. It’s not just traditional news programs that instill fear and hopelessness; stories of tragedy, trauma, and threats dominate many forms of media. In fact, a 2014 study of U.S. adults found that the single best predictor of people’s fear and anxiety was how much time they spent watching TV talk shows.”
Can you believe that?!
People who watched 6+ hours of TV news about the Boston Marathon bombing had more PTSD symptoms than people who were ACTUALLY there!!
* rubs eyes *
Follow that up with the research that discovered THE #1 predictor of someone’s anxiety and fear was how much time they spent watching TV talk shows and you have a VERY strong case for drastically reducing/eliminating excessive news + talk shows. (But only if you want to be healthy and happy. :)
How are you doing on that front? Any room for optimization?!
Death and Life are always in balance
“The forest undergrowth and canopy can’t grow unless the soil is replenished by the decaying bodies of dead plants. Even the jaguar will die, feeding the tree that will feed the monkey that the next jaguar will feast on. The balance of life in the forest wouldn’t be possible without death, just as we can’t live in a state of harmony with our environment unless endings are a part of our lives. Things have to die for new things to be born. Death and life are always in balance.”
In the final section of the book, Alberto walks us through the wisdom of the medicine wheel and the mythological journeys we all must undergo as we take One Spirit Medicine.
Embracing the cycle of life and death is an essential part of the journey. We need to remember that our lives are filled with cycles of deaths and re-births. Challenges that force us to die to our old identities fuel our growth just like death fuels the forest.
Of course, that’s not always pleasant. But seeing the importance of the process is a big part of the process.
Cultivating stillness
“One of the most effective ways of quieting manic mental activity and finding stillness is to pay attention to the space between breaths. It’s in the pause—the moment between inhaling and exhaling—that you find stillness. Breathing is an autonomic response, and we can’t stop it altogether or we die. But we can change the rate of respiration. Breathing practices, many of them ancient techniques, are designed to bring the mind into a state of tranquility and balance. We have the power to cultivate equanimity by consciously controlling the breath.
As you cultivate stillness, everyday challenges will cease to assume crisis proportions. When you’re able to take a more expansive view, the world becomes a place of abundance that supports a rich and rewarding life. The frenetic race to get ahead gives way to an awareness that life doesn’t have to be a struggle. In the North, you are called to bring beauty, healing and peace to yourself and the world. How to best carry out this mission may not be immediately apparent, but as you continue to practice stillness, it will be revealed to you. All you need to do is make a commitment to healing and then let Spirit take care of the details.”
So, we know that we’re destroying our well-being by constantly consuming the 24/7 newsroom+ talk show coverage of every tragedy going on in every corner of the globe.
The alternative? We need to cultivate stillness.
We need to create the space for our highest vision to crystallize. And we just can’t do that if we have jumper cables attached to our brains via obsessive overstimulation. (It’s kinda like removing sugar + flour and replacing them with cruciferous veggies, eh? :)
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