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[0:00] Tonya Pinkins: Hi, this is Tonya Pinkins, and you're listening to my podcast, You Can't SAY THAT, The Show Where You Can on the Broadway Podcast Network.

[0:12] Tonya Pinkins: I am very interested in mental health. Um, probably because I grew up with a mentally ill parent, and I didn't know that until I was an adult. And I don't know if that influenced my becoming an artist, but I think a lot of artists have mental health issues. Um, I often have met many artists who I'm like, boy, if it wasn't for the arts, you would be in the penitentiary. Um, there's something about creativity that is uh at the extreme of human behavior. And I think that artists who are people who, for me, they're they're high priests and priestesses who uh carry the weight of the souls of the world and allow people to vicariously experience things. So I've I have a number of podcasts I'm doing about uh mental health and and varieties of therapies and methods, some that I've worked myself and some that I haven't. And continuing in that series is my wonderful guest and new friend, um, Elizabeth Arnold. Welcome, Elizabeth.

[1:16] Tonya Pinkins: Elizabeth is a mixed media artist, a clinical psychologist in private practice in Greenwich Village. She holds an EDM from Harvard University and a PhD in clinical psychology from Teachers College, Columbia University. She trained as a researcher, then gravitated towards clinical work. Her experience encompasses PTSD, combat stress, symbolic communication and schizophrenia, inpatient and residential work with children and adolescents, and special issues pertaining to children and adolescents with HIV AIDS. She is also a believer that plant medicine is the hope for the future of our planet. And let's just start right there. Welcome, Elizabeth. What is plant medicine?

[2:15] Elizabeth Arnold: That's a very good question. Plant medicine are things that have been growing organically on our planet, um, kind of since the beginning of life. Um they seem to have a wisdom and a healing capacity that we are maybe just catching up to with all our kind of newfangled psychopharmacology and um and western modalities.

[2:40] Tonya Pinkins: Can you name some plant medicines?

[2:42] Elizabeth Arnold: Uh well, I think um they're often called entheogens.

[2:45] Tonya Pinkins: Okay.

[2:45] Elizabeth Arnold: Um, the more psychedelic varieties that would be psilocybin, um, and a kind of mixed brew called ayahuasca. I think those are getting a lot of prominence as current treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety, alcoholism, and other addictions. There are also numerous um non-psychedelic ones, no, psychedelic sananga.

[3:09] Tonya Pinkins: Exactly.

[3:09] Elizabeth Arnold: The vomitivos, you know, exactly hundreds of plant medicines. It's considered um master teacher plants. Um, and I think it's very timely as kind of part of our culture, and you know, the natural world seems to be in a state of um threat, that there's a lot more attention happening with kind of organic plant medicines. People have said they're coming out of the jungle in a way on their own volition. They're needed now.

[3:40] Tonya Pinkins: What brought you uh to therapy as a profession?

[3:44] Elizabeth Arnold: Oh, that's such a good question. Oh wow. Well, there are so many different ways to kind of untangle that knot. I would say the one that comes to mind first is that I would always, as a child, wonder what does it feel like to be that person or that person? What's their interior monologue like? What's going on in there? What does it feel like to be in that body? Um, and then as I got older, um I started to realize in the culture that I was raised in, how much had to remain unsaid and what that could do.

[4:17] Tonya Pinkins: What culture were you raised in?

[4:19] Elizabeth Arnold: I was raised in a kind of traditional Ashkenazi conservative slash orthodox Jewish culture, very strict gender roles and boundaries, very fixed ideas about what a female could and couldn't do. Um, and a very limited stream of what was acceptable to be able to say out loud. So actually, there's a lovely podcast title to be invited to. So uh so I realized what happens when so much of what you feel authentically has to stay bottled up inside and what that can do to a person's emotions and how it can skew things. So I think that also led me to a kind of multi-determined path of like helping other people find their own voice became really important to me.

[5:02] Tonya Pinkins: Have you found your voice?

[5:04] Elizabeth Arnold: Interesting you asked that. Um I think it is just beginning to emerge.

[5:10] Tonya Pinkins: And how can you tell?

[5:13] Elizabeth Arnold: I can tell because and I'm not gonna do it here, but because I was singing in front of a group of people for the first time in my life.

[5:19] Tonya Pinkins: Give us a little taste.

[5:20] Elizabeth Arnold: I cannot do that yet.

[5:21] Tonya Pinkins: Oh, maybe towards the end.

[5:23] Elizabeth Arnold: Yeah, okay, at the end, we're gonna move up to a little taste, a little taste.

[5:27] Tonya Pinkins: So I'm looking forward.

[5:28] Elizabeth Arnold: Okay.

[5:29] Tonya Pinkins: So bad.

[5:29] Elizabeth Arnold: Okay.

[5:31] Tonya Pinkins: So you we know you paint. I mean, I know you paint because I've seen your beautiful painting, and you think that there's some artistry that's also gonna come out in another kind of way.

[5:40] Elizabeth Arnold: I think one of the things that's lovely about aging is that you get these plateaus in life where you can kind of see all the different dimensions, all the different versions of yourself that you've been, and you can kind of tie together themes. Um that I believe is kind of something that's happening right now.

[6:00] Tonya Pinkins: Tell me more about this tying together themes.

[6:03] Elizabeth Arnold: Well, I think I'll just speak for myself, but I think it is generalizable that who we may be in our 20s as young adults and then our 30s and 40s. Um each of those versions of oneself, especially as a creative, as an artist, you're constantly evolving and changing and trying to stay authentic to who you are. Um, there are common things. I think you could recognize yourself in each of these decades, but it feels to me like each has a at least for me, a particular tone, um, an environment that it unfolded in that I unfolded in. Um pieces that were being explored and then maybe left to the side while something else got explored, like creativity got put down for a while while there was a responsibility for parenting.

Um so you know, different like like pulling taffy, like different parts of one's spirit get pulled in different directions. And I feel like one of the one of the lovely things about aging, and there are plenty of things that are not so lovely, um, is that you get a vantage point sometimes where you can see all those different parts or you know, are one whole, and you can kind of access the different you know dimensions of oneself in a really lovely way.

[7:17] Tonya Pinkins: Now, um you and I met in Peru.

[7:20] Elizabeth Arnold: We did.

[7:22] Tonya Pinkins: And uh we have journeyed together. By the time this podcast is heard, hopefully people will know what journeying is. But if you're coming to journeying um through this podcast as your first introduction to my podcast, journeying is um how we describe um a ceremonial um participation with a plant medicine, um, having uh set an intention, and then um ingesting the plant medicine, and then waiting commonly in darkness, sometimes alone, sometimes with another group of people, but everyone is going on their own personal journey. I often think of it as very intensive uh psychotherapy, like you can do in a night uh what you might do a lifetime projecting onto other people and fighting with them about your projections onto them, you face the very thing in yourself in the journey.

[8:28] Elizabeth Arnold: I would agree with that. Um I think that psychotherapy is an amazing and beautiful and sometimes life-saving tool. Its primary modality is words, it's verbal, even though you are in the room with somebody and there's so much that does happen non-verbally and through you know deep eye contact and creating a safe container. When you're talking about things like trauma or things that happened with the idea of cumulative small tea traumas over time, um experiences get lodged in the body on a cellular level that's not always accessible with words. And so this idea of journeying and going you know into one's um cellular memory using the medium of a plant medicine can have a profound effect that it might often take a decade to get to with a traditional talk therapy.

[9:23] Tonya Pinkins: Tell us me more about that, because I had never heard it described in that way.

[9:28] Elizabeth Arnold: Um I think that, for example, um, if we look at the whole body of research around attachment theory, um it's modeled on kind of mother-child, early caregiver, child or infant interaction, um, where the mother's system, or I'll just say the primary caregiver system, limbic system, um, has to be in some state of regulation, internal calm in order to be attuned to this other being who's now dependent on you. Um, if that person's um nervous system is not regulated, say they have their own uh unfinished business, or they're living in a war zone, or they're living in a you know, a situation of domestic abuse, or they are just under anxiety of losing their job or things like that, they're not going to be able to regulate um their child, and that child is gonna grow up a bit dysregulated. Um something like a plant medicine can give you a curative experience, can kind of give you an experience of calm and safety at the level of a nervous system reboot.

[10:44] Tonya Pinkins: Really?

[10:44] Elizabeth Arnold: Yeah.

[10:45] Tonya Pinkins: That's been my experience.

[10:47] Elizabeth Arnold: Now you're saying this happened for you, or this is something you've witnessed in other people, or you felt that you've received that kind of nervous system reboot.

[10:56] Elizabeth Arnold: I have um seen it in other people, and I have personally experienced that sort of reboot of uh almost kind of reworking my own childhood memories um in as you're describing, like in uh ceremonial environment in a circle, which becomes like your tribe and tethers you um while you're journeying. Um, but I've had the experience of feeling like I was being reparented in a secure way, and it it um kind of penetrated to the level of I felt like I was being given um experience of secure attachment and walking through my own development from that vantage point. And that hasn't left.

[11:39] Tonya Pinkins: I'm shaken when you say that because um one of the things that uh came up for me while we were in Peru, um I'm a rocker. I rock. I was a latchkey kid, and so I would come home and I'd be alone, and I remember I would go and I'd climb in the bed and I try to just get myself to go to sleep. So if the monster or anything came, I just wanted it to like kill me in my sleep or do whatever it was gonna do in my sleep. And um, you know, I just need I was just wanted to sleep through whatever it was gonna be and know what it was gonna be. And I rock and I rock myself when I'm uncomfortable. And um, on this uh trip, I realized that rocking actually is another entity, and that rocking is like my friend.

Rocking is my comrade that I can trust and depend on. And while I was journeying, there was a point where my experience was that all my ancestors and all of the plants sort of surrounded me, and we were in the maloka. The maloka is the room where you you do your ceremony, and there's insects and there's roaches, and I'm scared of those things. And so I was not comfortable. And I was rocking just to keep myself comfortable in a place that I was very not comfortable. And there was a point where the ancestors and the plants said, you know, we understand that rocking is with you, but we can hold you. And I was like, mm-hmm. And they're like, no, can't let us hold you. And I was like, mm-mm, mm-mm. Mm-mm-mm-mm. And then, you know, I like maybe let myself be held for a breath.

[13:19] Elizabeth Arnold: Yeah.

[13:20] Tonya Pinkins: And it was like, okay, we can move them. Like, but you know, we can actually even breathe you. And it was like, it's just too terrifying. And I remember it was maybe I would try like one breath, and the most I got up to was about 10 breaths. I was like, nope, let me get on back to rocking. You know, is that what you mean? Is that the kind of thing?

[13:35] Elizabeth Arnold: Yeah, because they're kind of um doing something that is the mark of really good parenting, which is called scaffolding.

[13:43] Tonya Pinkins: What's that?

[13:43] Elizabeth Arnold: Which is they're taking you from whatever developmental level you're in, which is self-soothing by rocking.

[13:49] Tonya Pinkins: Just make me cry right now.

[13:51] Elizabeth Arnold: Okay, go ahead. Just go ahead. And they're saying, yeah, you can go ahead and do that, but we're gonna hold you. And it's in those moments that you let yourself experience being held, you didn't need to rock. But then you need to go back and touch base to what you're used to. And then you can kind of venture out again. But they're saying, you know, we're not gonna pull anything out from under you. We're gonna give you this scaffold that you can start to put more and more weight on, and when you're ready, it's here. And that's really good. Like it's it's amazing you were able to have that experience.

[14:21] Tonya Pinkins: Okay. And I think I heard you on the side of the Maloka going, uh-uh. I know that was you now. You said something to me that you saw something, you know, that happened in my journey, which it's journeying is so crazy if you've never done it before. Like you listen to other everybody's journey is so unique, so different. You often have integration sessions the next day where people share, and like, you know, sometimes you don't have anything happen. Like you could take the medicine and nothing happens, you go to sleep, and you know, you'll be listening to other people, and you're like, they sound crazy to you.

[14:55] Elizabeth Arnold: You're like, what the hell are they talking about? I don't know what that is. And you think you're crazy when something happens to you, you don't know what that is, but maybe this is maybe I made this up. You said you witnessed something with me that I thought I witnessed.

[15:09] Tonya Pinkins: Do you even remember what you said you thought you witnessed? It was all across the room.

[15:13] Elizabeth Arnold: Yeah. I felt very connected to you because you are so strong and confident in your voice, and that was incredibly inspirational to me. And there were times when you were singing, uh, kind of at the tapering down of different ceremonies, where that gave me the strength to try my voice out, like using yours as a, you know, um, a platform. And um, so I felt a connection to you energetically, and you were kind of across the room, the Maloka, you know, this round, beautiful ceremony space. And there was a point at which I think I saw you physically sitting up and really shaking something out of yourself. And it was, it seemed like uh incredibly painful spiritual process. And it felt real, like what you were going through, and the kind of empathic connection that I felt like it felt like something was trying to come out of you, and you were trying to birth it out of you because it was not yours, it was not pure, and it was um had been weighing you down. So I think that's what you're talking about.

[16:24] Tonya Pinkins: Oh yeah. I mean, yeah, that is it. Um, my experience of it was like maybe on like the second ceremony, I could I met a demon. It would have it was in form. Demon, it was a demon, it was in form, it was on my ancestral line.

[16:41] Elizabeth Arnold: Sure.

[16:42] Tonya Pinkins: And I remember saying to this demon, you are not going past me to my kids. You it's it's stopping with me. And after ceremony, the next day, I was like, you know, something was like, you know, your kids have to do their own battles. You can't do your bat their kids' battles for them. Like that's fine and dandy. But on that that night that we were just talking about, I felt like I purged that demon off my line. Now, whether it's gonna go meet somebody else later, I felt this thing. It was like it was almost like a cockroach demon, and its tentacles were trying to wrap in the space between my ribs and hold on to me, and it was like the sounds and was coming out of me and the bile coming out of me. I felt like I purged a demon off my ancestral line.

[17:28] Elizabeth Arnold: Yep. That's the thing with this sort of medicine, and you know, to our audience listening right now, you know, in the middle of a New York City day or wherever you are, this sounds a little out there, but um, you know, there is now um a huge wave of research that is looking at um what's called epigenetics and the idea of ancestral trauma and as our country and our culture becomes much more um conscious of racial trauma of um inequality and how that can you know cripple um a spirit and how that gets passed down you know how Holocaust survivors pass on anxiety disorders and all kinds of fears to their offspring who didn't experience running from you know um oppressors um what you're talking about has validity and I think over the next decade it's going to be taken seriously I think one thing that we are learning and can learn from other ancient cultures is that there's a whole spiritual element to our lives that this culture has has hacked off.

[18:44] Tonya Pinkins: So even us being able to talk like this freely on the radio um you know it's a little bit controversial because other people can't see this it's easy to dismiss you know as you know crazy um but I think as more and more people um see that there are articles written there's stuff you know in in Forbes magazine almost every month now on journeys um you know Silicon Valley is microdosing you know so that they can kind of think outside the box in terms of creativity, studies are coming out about how careful use of what these substances called entheogens um with guides can actually help people let go of traumas and you know really decrease measurable symptoms of depression, can stop addictions. So what you're saying is very real and will become, I think, more and more uh integrated, that sort of spiritual way of talking about pain and the kind of emotional bondages that we all come, we don't come in with, but that our environments teach us.

[19:55] Elizabeth Arnold: Now you are new sort of to the plant medicine journeying thing. Like what brought you to it and what's kept you in it?

[20:03] Tonya Pinkins: Good question. Um I had a patient referred into my um private practice who was a shaman, and she came in for help in a very specific area.

[20:15] Elizabeth Arnold: Tell us what a shaman is.

[20:16] Tonya Pinkins: A shaman is somebody who has in my experience worked with um plant medicines and has kind of one foot in the civilian world and one foot in a more spiritual world, or they have access with these substances and then over time not needing the substances in order to perceive things maybe differently than a civilian person would.

[20:45] Elizabeth Arnold: So they might read energies, they might listen to somebody's story and pick up on their body language in a way that leads them to regard maybe part of that body as holding traumatic memory at a cellular level. So they're they're reading things differently. Um and so this person actually didn't need, you know, to talk about that aspect of her life, but she was having trouble in a very concrete relationship. And so we worked together in a very focused way. It worked out very well. And at the end of it, she said, you know, I think you might be interested in a kind of immersion retreat for medical professionals and for therapists. And it was at a retreat center in Costa Rica called Soltara, which at the time had been around definitely less than a year.

And the retreat was being led by a medical doctor named Dr. Joe Tafour, who wrote an incredible book called The Fellowship of the River. And it was also co-led by an anthropologist named Bia Labate, who is Brazilian. She is kind of the founder and I guess CEO of a nonprofit called Chakruna. That name is one of the it's a leaf that's combined with the vine to form the ayahuasca group. So the two of them, you know, brought a bunch of uh researchers, therapists, body workers, doctors down into Costa Rica, and we had um, I think it was four uh Shipibo tradition ceremonies with integration, which means you go through these ceremonies and then the next day you gather as a group in the same Maloka, and each person shares their experience. It becomes very emotional and you bond at a very deep level because you know, when you're vomiting with you people, you really get fond of each other in a very um profound way.

[22:45] Tonya Pinkins: So that was my first introduction, and I had experiences in those four ceremonies that led me to make phone calls to family members that have been excommunicated to understand that I have the power to repair things. It led me to be sitting back in my office, you know, in the weeks following integration, asking questions of even some very long-term patients of mine, but asking questions from a different vantage point. So I would be listening to a familiar story or a recounting of a family or a marital experience. And I would think, well, this is a question I would have asked before. But now I've had this experience of like secure developmental upbringing. You know, I've had I have an experience of like, well, what would be the healthiest possible question to ask?

And I'd ask from that vantage point, and the person would think about it differently. And I started to notice around between weeks six and eight of my integration following these ceremonies that patients were making huge changes in their lives. And I was like, holy shit, you know, my um my experiences, my journeys were changing me. My presence was different. And if you think of, you know, you go back to the idea of attachment theory and attunement between a parent and child. The idea hypothesis is that one person can, one person's nervous system or one person's limbic system can regulate another's. So my limbic system is now a bit different. And I'm I guess you'd say vibrating at a different frequency.

And it was allowing people to emerge in a different way. And that sold me. And so since then I have been really taking as many opportunities as I can to immerse in the medicine to learn how to help people with integration of their own experiences. And it feels like this is a life's work now.

[24:47] Tonya Pinkins: Yeah, I mean, there were about four therapists there. There was one therapist who was taking about 40 days from her practice to stay there. And uh the I talked to her and I talked to another therapist, and each of you related that from your the changes in yourself from doing the medicine, you were seeing changes in your practice and in the people that you work with.

[25:05] Elizabeth Arnold: Absolutely. I'm interested in where does this whole idea of that someone's limbic system can regulate someone else's come from? I'm fascinated by the idea of that.

[25:12] Tonya Pinkins: I mean, I think it's wired and it's hardwired into every living creature's biology. If you watch every animal parent and child, you know, that when this means that these poor kids that were taken away and we've got down in these cages, we are like we're just turning them into monsters or something, because they don't even have a limbic system helping them unless they're somehow figuring out how to connect with other caged kids. We have uh destroyed their um initial potential by ripping them away from the person that could hold them and help them regulate. I think we've done them a crime that is um beyond tragic and it's evil and that sort of thing.

[25:57] Elizabeth Arnold: Yeah, I think they're, you know, people that have gone through trauma, you know, whether it's wartime or whether it's, you know, a horrific experience like our government is doing to people. There is the hope for repair, but it's like if you take a sapling, you know, a tiny tree and you hack at it when it's young, it still has a chance to grow, but it's gonna grow with uh a bend in it that's at its the base of its trunk. I do believe that life is driven to try to find the sun and that people do move towards light when given the opportunity. Um but you know, if you look at cultures that have been traditionally war-torn, there is the chance of you know, each generation's trauma and post-traumatic stress does not allow forgiveness and calmness. It never stops. And so that's the danger that when you traumatize more and more people, the cycle just um exponentially continues.

[26:58] Tonya Pinkins: Do you think that, like by your doing medicines and me doing medicines, are us just being in the world with other people? Do you think that that is even you know, having a good effect or planting a seed of can we regulate the people in our environments?

[27:12] Elizabeth Arnold: That's a great question. I mean, ideally, you and me, we go down to DC and we put some of this in the drinking water. That's how we make change. Anyway, given that we cannot do that, um, I do think that there is a wave coming. I think the in the original kind of psychedelic wave in our culture in the 60s um was a bit too ego-driven, and people were not ready for that. I think now the kind of forces of um, you know, to be black and white about it, of like good and evil are kind of um they are facing off. I do think the whole idea of organic medicines that come from the earth and have the power to help each person who experiences them, you know, feel a kind of universality, not just to the living world and plants and the sky and things like that, but to each other and to you know, each person's self and their own history, and if you think more, you know, across the ancestral span, you know, to one's soul's journey through a lifetime um I think there is hope you know very much so in with these medicines so you've now done it how many times?

[27:46] Tonya Pinkins: 31.

[27:46] Elizabeth Arnold: 31 times yeah um you've been back a month yeah still more change is still more growth the last um experience I found pretty grueling physically um I feel like I'm just recovering from that so now I feel the um integration is starting to happen and flourish but um you know we went through a kind of mandatory fasting and then a very very you know at least for me I had a very um restricted food intake for about 10 days and I'm a you know I'm a food person I'm always cooking and you know it was really interesting to you know take food out of the equation to just eat the bare minimum so that you didn't faint. But I definitely came back feeling weak and kind of um it's been a couple of weeks just to get my bearings get my strength back so now I'm starting to feel like okay I've got my bearings like wow that was an incredible experience and I do feel um quite different but I haven't gotten traction in exactly what that is.

[29:29] Tonya Pinkins: Okay. I'm Tonya Pinkins that was part one of my conversation with psychologist Elizabeth Arnold come back for part two.