Donna Quesada: How do we upgrade the brain? You’ve mentioned the importance of upgrading our brain.
I know in your book, you mention DMT. Could you speak of that a little bit and how we do that in our own lives?
Alberto Villoldo: Well, A couple of different ways. The first thing is, we have to repair the damage that has been done to the brain. By pesticides, by stress… by distressed hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. And the damage center is known as the hippocampus. And the hippocampus is where learning happens. If your hippocampus is damaged, you stop learning. School is out. If your hippocampus is damaged, you wake up with the person that you’ve been waking up with for the last ten years and you go, “who is this person in my bed? My God.” If your hippocampus is healed, you wake up with the same person and you go, “wow, who is this incredible being that I’m waking up with this morning?” So, if your Hippocampus is damaged, as you get older, you become an angry, old person. If it’s not damaged, you retain your curiosity… your exploration. The hippocampus is essential for exploration. Exploration… discovery, is the key quality to spirituality that nature looks for. So, we upgrade the brain through certain supplements. Like the omega 3 Fatty Acids. In six weeks, you can repair the hippocampus with clinical doses of BHA. And these are the omega 3s that we used to get from fish. But today, all of our fish is farm raised, and it has no omega 3s. So, that is one way to do it. The other ways are your spiritual practice… your meditation… practicing kindness… generosity. It’s another way to upgrade the brain. The super-nutrients that I talk about in my book, One Spirit Medicine or Grow A New Body… They are all brain regulators.
DONNA: You also talk about the role of myth. That part of the reason that we are continuing in our unhealthy lifestyle is because we are subscribing to myths that no longer serve us. How does that fit in to this decision to live in a new way?
ALBERTO: Let me tell you a brief story. I met this old medicine woman in the Andes, one time. “What’s with all of this study that one has to do to become a shaman? With all of this training?” She said, “You know, Alberto, the object of shamanic training is to learn how to get out of this life alive.” So, you don’t want to be unable to be clear headed and vibrant in your later years. You want to be able to wake up, become enlightened, which is not the goal… It’s the beginning. That’s where it all begins. That’s where the journey starts. So that you can take it with you into infinity. So, to do that, while we are in a body… we need to upgrade the brain. We need to repair it and upgrade it. And we need to be able to entertain the big questions. The big questions are “Who am I?,” “Where do I come from?” and “Where am I going?” And you cannot entertain those big questions if your brain is broken or you are healing from trauma. It’s very difficult.
DONNA: So, what would be an example of a myth that we have to let go of, if we are going to move towards enlightenment and healing?
ALBERTO: One of those myths is that we were kicked out of the Garden of Eden. So, we were the only people on the planet that were kicked out of Eden. The Aborigines weren’t and the Sub-Saharan Africans weren’t. The Native Americans weren’t. They were given the Garden to be the stewards and the care-takers. But, we believe that we are outcasts. And that we can’t talk to God anymore. And that, when we were kicked out of the Garden, this voice said “You have eaten from the fruit of the tree of knowledge and now it lets you eat off the tree of life, everlasting.” So, as we are being kicked out, the voice says… “It curses the earth because of you… woman!” And, to the man, it says, ‘With the sweat of your back, you will take your fruit from the earth, and it will grow thorns and thistles for you.” You know, on page one of our mythology, we develop a really terrible relationship with the feminine. If he curses the earth because of woman, then our mother, Mother Earth, is not going to support us. She’ll grow thorns and thistles. Where as, for the Shamans, spirit says, “your mother, the earth, will grow mangos and papayas and strawberries for you.” So, we have to shatter this myth that we are outcasts… that we don’t belong here, on this planet… that we are bereft of a mother and a father… that our mother doesn’t support us. As a good Catholic boy, I learned The Lord’s Prayer: Our father…. who are not here… who is somewhere else…? No wonder we have so many mother and daddy issues!
DONNA: And the masculine and the feminine… and the discord… With regard to our relationship with the divine feminine, how can we restore this, on a collective level? This relationship with the feminine… with the earth?
ALBERTO: We know there is no such thing as the divine feminine because we know that the earth is cursed because of women… and this is the serpent! Wow. What a myth! Talk about getting in trouble with this myth. What happened about 6000 years ago is that the masculine displaced the feminine.
DONNA: How did that happen?
ALBERTO: About 6000 years ago, you have the dawn of agriculture. And with agriculture, you get grains and gluten and you get warfare and you get religion. I’ll let all of those three things come together. In Europe, it was the wheat. In the Americas, the corn. In Asia, the rice. The grains turned into sugar, which damaged the brain. The religion, which says, “give us our daily fats and proteins…” And then, you get warfare because prior to that, we were hunter gatherers and the land had no value for us. But, as soon as we begin to farm, the land is valuable. And we want to take our neighbor’s land. So, the farmer becomes a warrior, 6000 years ago. Agriculture, warfare and religion… Traditions were decimated at that point. And what you have before that, in Europe for 35,000 years… If you put your shovel at the right strata, you would find these paleolithic Goddess figures. The divine was the feminine form. But then, 6000 years ago, the masculine decimates the feminine… destroys the temples of Hera. Apollo becomes the dominant God in Europe. And you have the beginning of warfare. The history of Europe for 35,000 years. There is not a single incident of warfare. And then, starting 6000 years ago, the history of Europe is the history of war. World War 1, World War 2, The 100 Years War, The 30 Years War. The War of the Roses and on and on and on.
DONNA: And it’s directly parallel with the change in our relationship with agriculture…
ALBERTO: Well, agriculture becoming mono-culture. Grain based… and the exodus of the feminine. Today, the Goddess and the feminine is returning because we have exhausted the masculine paradigm. It’s killing us.
DONNA: Yes. So, do you have hope that we can continue to move in this direction, where we start to recognize our relationship with the earth, and restore that relationship with the feminine energies on our planet?
ALBERTO: I think we begin by embodying that divine feminine. By embodying The Goddess.
DONNA: So, it starts here (in the heart).
ALBERTO: It starts in the heart. The masculine requires prayer. Prayer too, requires offering and sacrifice. What should we offer to the Gods to appease the Gods or please them? The feminine is about embodiment. By your body becoming the temple of the Goddess. And this is what creates health. And this is the basis of Growing A New Body. When you awaken this Goddess life force within you, spirituality and health are the inevitable product of this.
DONNA: And never before, have so many people been sick. I’m thinking of the people in Christina Northrop’s forward in your book. It’s so poignant. And I am going to quote, one more time, from your book. This is from her words. She says, “the average 65-year-old in the US is on six prescription drugs… with the focus on keeping death at bay rather than making life worth living.” A doctor herself, she corroborates what you are saying, that somehow, medicine cannot take us down a healing path. When did doctors lose their relationship with being a healer? I’m sure this is all involved or related with what we are talking about.
ALBERTO: You know, Chris Northrop actually came and did our Grow A New Body Program, in our retreat center in South America. What has happened… I remember from being an anthropologist in the Amazon in my early 20’s… I was actually funded by big Swiss pharma. And they were trying to discover the next breakthrough cancer cure that would make me famous and rich and everybody else happy. The villages I went to had no cancer. No heart disease. And no Dementia. No Alzheimer’s. Zero!
DONNA: Wow! Our number one killer and you are saying it didn’t exist.
ALBERTO: A hundred years ago, there was no Alzheimer’s around. There was no cancer. There was no heart disease. These are the illnesses of the west… of our diet and our stress-filled lives. Today, if you live to be 85 years old, your odds of having diagnosable Alzheimers is 50%. If you live ‘till you are 90, your odds are 75%. We want to be able to live long and healthy lives and know who our partners and our children are. This is the west. This is what is happening in the west. And we are coming to the end of medicine, as we know it. The end of the masculine medicine, for example, traditional masculine medicine treats cancer by killing and cutting or poisoning it. Chemo-therapy, surgery or radiation. Shamanic Energy Medicine says, “wait a minute.” Many cancers are the body’s best attempt to come back into balance. But, it is a misguided attempt. I was speaking with Russian scientists and they were telling me that when they are doing studies on tumors, that many tumors are filled with heavy metals… lead, aluminum, mercury… Many tumors are filled with heavy metals, and it’s the body’s attempt to get rid of them. And of course, we are fighting the symptom, instead of trying to guide the body to healthier ways to detox and eliminate these poisons. So, we have come to the end of medicine, as we know it.
DONNA: That is profound. So we are, in as sense, going to learn how to be our own healers through prevention?
ALBERTO: Yes. Prevention is the key. Prevention is like changing the oil in your car. Treatment is like changing the engine. It’s a lot more difficult. We know how to prevent Alzheimers. We know how to prevent cancer. It’s in Grow A New Body. It’s in my new book. We know how to do that, but we don’t know how to treat Alzheimers. We don’t know how to treat cancer. We don’t know how to treat dementia. It’s untreatable.
DONNA: Where would one start, on your plan, which you outline in your book Grow A New Body? Would it be to detox?
ALBERTO: You know, the first step is to detox. We are all born with a bucket inside every one of ourselves. And this is where the cell puts poisons and toxins. Some of us have a bigger bucket and some of us have a smaller bucket. If you have a smaller bucket, you get sicker earlier. Once your bucket fills and begins to overflow then we have disease. And that is when western medicine steps in. What we want to do, is empty the bucket before we get disease.
DONNA: How do you empty the bucket?
ALBERTO: You empty the bucket by detoxing.
DONNA: And how do you do that?
ALBERTO: Well, you have to go on a diet. Eating clean. Clean water. Clean Air. Clean food. And then, working with the natural detoxifiers that will help the body to eliminate. But you have to do it carefully because we have such a store of toxins that you don’t want to begin to mobilize them too quickly.
DONNA: Wow! And so, is fasting a big part of your program?
ALBERTO: Fasting is part of the program because that gets you into autophagy, which is the recycling of cellular waste. That’s the key. Ketosis. Burning fats for fuel. Autophagy… And eliminating cellular waste. And then, you have to begin by eliminating the sugars… Get the sugars our of your diet. And then, cutting back on protein.
DONNA: That’s interesting. When most people hear that word ketosis,which you just mentioned, they are thinking, burning protein. But in your approach, it’s more about burning fats. Would that be correct?
ALBERTO: Well, you don’t actually burn protein. You burn fat or you burn sugar. So, you have to cut out the sugar, so you can begin burning fat. And really, severely cut back on proteins if you are over thirty. Because we don’t need that much protein. Protein in the next few years will come out as the new smoking. And we are poisoning ourselves with excess animal protein.
DONNA: Well, I know when I first gave up animal protein, which was many years ago, it was still a new idea. People still had the idea… where do you get your protein? And, I think we are moving in a direction of knowing that we don’t need so much.
ALBERTO: We need very little protein. So, the next year, you could live on the protein that is stored inside the cells from, basically,garbage. Damaged, mitochondrial, cell parts that have been replaced, but not eliminated. The cell will recycle 98% of that. And that is protein. So, if you can begin to detox, the cell will get rid of two to three percent of the broken parts and recycle the other 95% to 98%. So, you can actually use protein that is already inside the cell. It doesn’t need to go through your gut, your digestive process. The minute you begin to eliminate toxins, you also recycle the protein that is bound into broken cellular material. And you use that to create new life. And you feel fantastic. We have enough of that in our bodies to not eat protein for the next three or four months.
DONNA: So, it’s like living on reserves for a while… it’s part of the detox process?
ALBERTO: Absolutely.
Read and watch Part III Here: Awaken Interviews Alberto Villoldo Pt 3 – Wake Up, Grow Up And Then You Show Up
Read and Watch Part I Here: Awaken Interviews Alberto Villoldo PhD Pt 1 – Begin To Dream The World Into Being
Buy: Grow A New Body
