The slow drip, and the shortcut

Trailmark 29 · 1 May 2024

Simon
Brown

Twenty years on the cushion, and a meditation I did not see coming.

Trailmark audio

Episode 29 · 1:42:35

A friend of mine has listened to every episode of Trailmark, the way good friends do, and his most useful note was that they all hover around the same few topics. He knew how big I was into meditation and wanted to know why the show never went there. Simon Brown was my answer. I had been watching his videos for a few weeks, and he joined from the UK at seven in the evening, delighted that the clocks had gone forward and it was still light out. After six months of cold, wet, grey weather, he told me, he had forgotten there was that much colour in the world.

Simon has been a practising Buddhist for a long time and has twenty years of meditation behind him, a good share of it spent, by his own account, striving to be the best meditator going. Things changed when practice and ordinary life stopped being two separate activities. These days the practice is catching himself in the middle of a reaction, and he used me to demonstrate. In the old days, he said, if Ray called him a doofus in an argument, he would have walked away with the whole story running: Ray's wrong, Ray's always wrong, Ray is such a pain. Now he tries to notice what the barb actually touched, knowing it is nobody's fault. I have never actually called Simon a doofus.

I had come with a question that had been bothering me since I started reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead: whether the idea of a physical heaven is something the ego built. I warned him it was a little shocking. He said he was prepared to be shocked, then answered with a question of his own. If he could find no fixed self anywhere in his own experience, what exactly would get transported? He admitted that did not really answer mine. When we reached non-duality he told me there is no such thing, and instead of arguing the point he offered to walk me through it right there. I closed my eyes. Feel your hands, he said, and now the sounds, and where is the separation between them? I could feel my fingers interlocked and my thumbs pressed together, and hear my computer humming off to my left. I could tell the two apart, but I could not find the line between them. I told him I had not expected that to happen today at all.

Partway through I had to get one question off my chest, so I asked whether he had any experience with psychedelics. Yes, he said, and he probably would not say much about it. The trippy experiences and the boring ones come and go the same way, and the path he follows is about feeling that insight when you are off them too, rather than booking the odd holiday in mushroom land. He had been eating sweets along the way for a sore throat, and wanted me to know he is not a sweet addict. Before most recordings I sit for ten minutes waiting for my heart to settle. For this one I didn't need to.

Trailmark 08 · 1 July 2024

Matteo
Pistono

A surfboard fin on Christmas Eve, and a long exhale he first learned in Kathmandu.

Trailmark audio

Episode 08 · 1:42:15

Listen on Trailmark

I found Matteo Pistono the way I find most guests, which is by sending far more emails than seems reasonable and counting on about half of them coming back. I was reading Florence Williams's The Nature Fix, she posted about his book on Instagram, and I wrote to both of them. Only after he said yes did I look him up properly and learn that he bikepacks, so we had two things to talk about instead of one. By the time we spoke I had spent three weeks with Breathe How You Want to Feel, expecting the woo end of breathwork and getting respiratory science. He had done two minutes of breathing before the call, had a cortado going, and a little way in asked whether we had actually started the podcast. We had. It records the second a guest joins.

I told him how I got into breathing, which is how a lot of younger people got into it: a man from the Netherlands with a thick accent and a beard who walks around shirtless. For a while I did rounds of Wim Hof breathing every night before bed, anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour, then a guided meditation to fall asleep. And you slept, Matteo asked, twice. I slept, though I had read afterward that you are not supposed to, and he was kind about it. Breath works like medicine, he said, and the dose matters. At the start of COVID he was doing three rounds first thing every morning, already wound up by the news, and the rounds pushed him into fight or flight on his way to work. One of his teachers had a better picture for it. Throw a whole bucket of water at a slab of granite and all you get is a shiny rock. Drip the same water on it slowly and the granite cracks.

He was surfing by himself in Southern California on Christmas Eve when he wiped out, got tangled with his board, and the fin went into his leg just below the knee. Stabbed, he was careful to say, not cut. He could see blood coming out of his wetsuit and feel the adrenaline arrive. Before trying to fix anything he sat up on the board, put his tongue on the roof of his mouth, closed his lips and made two or three long exhales, then caught the next wave in. On the beach he looked properly, it was bad, and his heart rate went straight back up with a cliff still to climb. So he stopped again. Matteo, he told himself, you've got to get it together, nobody's here. There is a phrase he grew up with for exactly that: you have to take part in your own rescue. His wife picked him up and took him to the emergency room to get sewn up.

The breathing he learned in Nepal and Tibet thirty years ago came paired with contemplating death, and for his first six months in Kathmandu he sat every day across a small river from the cremation pyres. At eight, out collecting firewood in Wyoming with his father and brother, he ran from a falling beetle-killed tree and it came down on top of him, pinning him and tearing the skin down his back. He remembers floating toward circles of white light with no pain at all, then his brother screaming his name and the dog barking, and then his ribs convulsing as his body breathed him back. He does not call it a near-death experience. He went up to the door, he said, and it did not open. At the end he walked us through two minutes of four-seven-eight breathing, then mentioned that slowing the breath like that after listening to something helps it stick. Hopefully, he said, that happened just now.

Trailmark 14 · 22 November 2024

WaiFung
Tsang

A psychologist who went to the jungle expecting woo, and found a procedure.

Trailmark audio

Episode 14 · 1:14:02

Listen on Trailmark

WaiFung Tsang was my first conversation after two months away from the microphone. School had taken over, and I spent the week before rereading Michael Pollan and some Terence McKenna to get my head back into it. WaiFung is a clinical psychologist based at King's College London, born in Hong Kong, with half his life there and half in London. He also plays in a band, which is part of how he came to do harm-reduction work at festivals. The research arrived through a psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital who was paying for a study of indigenous ayahuasca use out of pocket and said, more or less, you have to come down and see this. That was eight or nine years ago, and it has snowballed since.

Before anyone drinks anything there are weeks of preparation, with no salt, sugar or oil and one more rule I will leave to the episode, and WaiFung has noticed the plants seem to give you points for trying. At the centre where they work with the Shipibo, preparation includes a purge. You drink the thick red sap of a tree called dragon's blood, then water, gallons of it, and you throw up red until it runs clear. The first time he did it, an orange afterward felt like ten cups of coffee. They also collect stool samples from the veterans in the trial and bring the lot back to the lab. My own contribution to the science of diet was that judges hand down harsher sentences when they are hungry, so if you ever end up in court, go right after lunch.

Going in as a scientist, WaiFung expected something fairly woo woo. What turned up was procedure: if this happens, you do this. The team works under a board of indigenous advisors, elders who tell them where to look, whether that is the singing in the ceremony or the dream space, and a curandero is a named author on their paper about nature relatedness because the idea was his. When they explained an epigenetic finding to him, a change in a gene involved in encoding memory, he was not surprised. To him it was the clearing of ancestral lines, which is the work he already does. The current study, with the charity Heroic Hearts Project, follows military veterans with PTSD through ayahuasca retreats over five years. Some of them arrive having tried everything else, and say plainly what they will do if this does not work, which he admits is very difficult to hear.

For all that, WaiFung is wary of the people most excited about the field. The evangelical ones, certain this is the answer to all your problems, remind him of someone at the door with a book asking whether you know the truth. I don't know, man, is roughly the reply. The same loosening shows up in the brain with deep meditation, with falling in love, with learning a language or travelling. And every lesson he took from the plants, the interconnectedness of things and the care about how you move through the world, is already there in his father, who turned eighty-four a few days before we recorded and has never tripped once.