Episode Transcript
[00:00:13] [Intro]: Welcome to Brainforest Café with Dennis McKenna.
[00:00:21] Dennis McKenna: Today, it's my pleasure to welcome Luke Jensen to the Brainforest Café.
Luke served in the Marine Corps for six years and two years in the National Guard, deploying to Afghanistan with an airborne infantry unit. After his deployment, he faced severe ptsd, a loss of purpose, and a transformative dark night of the soul.
Seeking healing, Luke explored various modalities, eventually traveling to the Amazon Basin in Peru to experience ayahuasca.
This profound encounter brought him personal healing and a spiritual awakening, revealing the vast interconnected nature of the universe.
Inspired by this experience, Luke delved into shamanism, including rediscovering lost Northern European traditions.
Along his spiritual journey, he encountered neural feedback and QEEG brain mapping, quantitative electroencephalography, brain mapping, and recognized their transformative potential for healing and spiritual growth.
What he calls spiritual neuroscience or electronic yoga.
These tools became central to his evolving vision.
In 2019, Luke met Dr. Richard Sutar, whose mentorship profoundly deepened his understanding of consciousness healing and the neurological foundations of spiritual development.
Since September 2023, Luke has been leading retreats in Peru's Sacred Valley, combining diverse healing modalities into a unique and transformative experience.
He has also conducted groundbreaking research using QEEG brain mapping to study plant medicines, including the first longitudinal study on Ayahuasca and the first brain imaging study of Wachuma. Through these studies and future research, Luke hopes to deepen humanity's understanding of plant medicines, consciousness, and spirituality.
His work aims to inspire a greater recognition of our spiritual nature and the boundless potential for personal and collective transformation.
Luke, it's my pleasure to invite you to the Brain Forest Café.
[00:02:56] Luke Jensen: Hey, Dennis, thanks for having me on.
[00:02:57] Dennis McKenna: And there you are. We see you in Luis's place in the Sacred Valley.
So thank you. Thank you so much for making time.
We can just get right into it. I guess you've had quite an evolutionary journey stemming from your own personal situation, and now you're bringing neuroscience and traditional medicine together, looking at these sacred medicines, particularly wachuma and ayahuasca.
So tell me a bit about your work and where that's led you.
[00:03:37] Luke Jensen: Yeah, Dennis, Yeah. Thanks again for having me on.
It has been a journey. I was in the Marine Corps, then I joined the National Guard. I was deployed to Afghanistan, and after I got back, I went and tried ayahuasca and was a part of soul searching. Look for my path. At the same time, around the same time, I had my first brain map done to me, a QEEG brain map. And after that brain map they showed me on a brain pattern for PTSD or anxiety.
And it was very empowering for me at the time because I realized that I could work on it and train it through what they called neurofeedback. So this sent me on a course of reading tons of books and realized that not only is plant medicine very spiritual, but there's an application with the neuroscience. And that's what we were, and that's what I started studying, because everything's really a brain pattern. So meditation's a brain pattern. Shamanic states are certain brain patterns. And I started looking to this field more and more, and I was called to this part of the process of human potential, I would say. So, yeah. I've been living in Peru for the last four years. My first time here was 10 years ago. I've been back and forth for a long time, but permanently for four years. And I've been using the neurofeedback brain training, QG brain mapping, and then working plant medicines too. And also, like you said, the research has been really important to gain insight in what these plant medicines are doing, how they help heal the brain, help heal trauma, and help us reach different levels of consciousness.
[00:05:07] Dennis McKenna: Right. So did you study neuroscience after your deployment, after you left the military? Did you go to school to acquire these skills or did you acquire them on your own?
[00:05:21] Luke Jensen: Well, for the first five years, I just read every book I could find on it. And then I showed up to the international conference for Neurofeedback and I was just a person with an idea.
Most of them were like PhDs or researchers or medical doctors.
And my idea was combine the two. And I met my mentor, Dr. Richard Suter, and he said, I told him, hey, my ideas combine ayahuasca plant medicines with QEG brain mapping. He goes, I have no way to meet someone like you, help train you. So he's one of the top people in the field of neurofeedback. I'm so honored and blessed to have met him. It's been a life changing journey and I've been working with him every week. We do a meeting every week for the last five years. So I have a lot of experience now understanding brainwave notes that, okay, so he got it.
[00:06:10] Dennis McKenna: He could see the merits of bringing these technologies together.
Has he been to Peru to participate with you in any of these events or is he. No, he. At Torp.
[00:06:24] Luke Jensen: He has. He has not been here. I would love him to come down. I'm kind of like a field researcher in some ways. He goes, he goes hey Luke, everyone that does this stuff, they're in clinics, they don't have the time or availability to go in Peru and start brain mapping people. So.
But I would say he's very interested in Zen Buddhism. He has a lot of experience with meditation, decades of that.
And he also is very familiar with shamanism. So he himself has been involved in these fields, even though he hasn't been directly to Peru.
[00:06:55] Dennis McKenna: Okay, but he is familiar with these altered states from plant medicines, is that right?
[00:07:02] Luke Jensen: Yes, he was involved in this. He's in his 70s now, so he's involved in the 60s and LSD and he was part of that maybe first wave of psychedelics in the 60s and he was heavily involved in that period.
[00:07:17] Dennis McKenna: Okay, well it sounds like he's the perfect mentor for you. You're very, very lucky to have found him. You know, so what, what I looked at the, the two papers that you published, one on Wachuma and the other one on Ayahuasca. And it seems that both of these plant medicines show a unique profile, not at all what was expected.
And each one is unique and the findings, the response are different from each other. Ayahuasca and Wachuma are both plant medicine, but they cannot be equated to each other. They are somewhat difference, at least in terms of the brain mapping response. Is that correct?
[00:08:10] Luke Jensen: Yeah, it's very interesting what we're seeing in plant medicine. So the brain seems to heal in different ways. They're needed. I think one thing we saw with ayahuasca that I think that was interesting, that needs further research, is that it helps with focus and add.
We had one person come in with the classic brain pattern for ADD and they had self reported symptoms of ADD and that pattern was gone completely and sort of self reported symptoms after three ceremonies. So, so I think that's one issue that people haven't really looked at that you know, that this can help with focus. With Ayahuasca, I think there's general trends where they both heal as needed in the brain. So they both help regulate the brain in a healthy way.
I don't think that's too discussed yet in the field. I think most people look at like the networks and network connections and how those are changing. But if you look at it over time, we're seeing those differences and changes over time. Like what, what's, what does that person, where is their brain dysregulated and how does it become more regulated and more healthy? And we're seeing that, that wherever they need to be regulated at that's that's where we helped at. Does that make sense?
[00:09:16] Dennis McKenna: It does, it does, yeah, to a degree. So it seems that the, the application of Q EEG and these other neurofeedback techniques can be used to kind of track the changes, the changes that are reflective of a therapeutic response, sort of the reestablishment of equilibrium or systems that are out of equilibrium.
Whereas the acute measurements after the session are looking at neuroconnectivity and those sorts of things. They don't give you a picture through time because as we often say, the real work begins on the plane home from the ceremonies. Right. I mean people come out of these ceremonies and it's not like they're fixed. They are actually at the beginning of a long process of healing.
And presumably the brain changes that take place in that post ceremony space that's in effect where the real healing takes place. And would you agree with that?
[00:10:33] Luke Jensen: Right. I think one of the biggest things we see with plant medicine is increases neuroplasticity, allows the brain to change.
[00:10:39] Dennis McKenna: Right.
[00:10:39] Luke Jensen: A lot of the brain to change. It creates novel solutions and that period change lasts past that ceremony, it lasts when they get home. So this is a really critical period for people to take up a new habit, whether it's yoga, qigong, meditation or something to help them keep on that path, a spiritual path, and keep that change moving forward. That's really beautiful of the beauty of plant medicines.
[00:11:03] Dennis McKenna: Right, right. So you, you, you, you don't have to keep taking plant medicines or you, you would not necessarily not take them, but the, the changes that are taking place, which you now have the ability to track using these technologies, can that be used in effect to structure this therapeutic protocol? I mean, can you follow these patterns and say, you know, well, it's time to go back to the whale, it's time to return to the medicine to get further, further healing. Or is it because I assume it's not a one time thing. It's not that you take these medicines and suddenly everything is fine. It is a process.
[00:11:58] Luke Jensen: Yeah. I think what we're doing now will give lots of insight to that. I think this is still the beginning stages of exploratory research to find out how long these plant medicines last reach people. I think questionnaire studies are very hopeful, hopeful and I think that the brain mapping is very important. So the, what we do with Qs from the neurofeedback field, we can attract effect like psychological states. We can see depression, we can see anxiety, we can see markers for this. So we can see Those things lifting. And that's the really powerful thing with what we're doing. And then we can also see what will be challenged in the future. So the really neat thing about neurofeedback is, or the brain mapping is I could see, like, okay, this person has these patterns, and this would be a good meditation for them when they get home. This would be a good, you know, maybe microdosing might be good for that certain brain pattern. So the idea is to kind of coach them what would be good for them when they get home and help the integration process.
And then, yeah, like, we could actually track and see maybe what plant medicines might be good for people too. Maybe different ones have different effects. We're still at a very early stage in that kind of research. Some might be good for addiction, some might be good for ptsd.
We're still figuring all that out.
[00:13:12] Dennis McKenna: Right, right.
So it seems that this ability to measure actually lets you track this process as the changes take place.
And it's remarkable that, that these two plant medicines, the Wachuma and the ayahuasca, are both psychedelics, but they seem to work in a different way in terms of the way that they enable a sort of relief from these symptoms. I mean, it's remarkable that the neurofeedback and the brain mapping lets you see the pathology as it develops through time, but also lets you see the resolution of the pathology. Pathology as your healing, as your healing progresses.
[00:14:02] Luke Jensen: Yeah, I think you're touching on, like, probably one of the most important point, if not the most important point, because we can see how trauma is stored in the system.
I think this will become very important down the road for science because there's a famous book called the Body Keeps the Score. And the body holds trauma in itself, but the brain holds trauma. The brain compartmentalizes trauma different ways.
So, for example, when you look at a QEG brain map, I can see a brain that's too busy overworking. That's how it's holding trauma. Some people might contain trauma by worry or disassociation or daydreaming. And these are brain patterns that hold that trauma in so that person doesn't feel that. So as that trauma is released, they start feeling more and those patterns change.
So this is, at one hand, give us new insight into trauma and how it works, how it's stored in the brain. And you're right, how it's released, I think it's very powerful and very, very interesting. I think in the future, this. This will be very important to understand the process of Healing. And this is why plant medicines or spiritual practices or that kind of soul work is healing at a deep level, which is different than possibly a pharmaceutical drug. And that's. I think that's what we're seeing a difference in.
[00:15:18] Dennis McKenna: What about conventional psychotherapeutic approaches to trauma and PTSD and this sort of thing?
Do you see?
I mean, people who have experienced these things, there's a reason that they seek treatment outside the conventional frameworks is because the conventional frameworks don't work often or they're not effective. So people are led to seek treatment with psychedelics, for instance, and that sort of thing. Do you think that in a conventional therapeutic treatment protocol, with or without psychedelics, you'd see similar changes going on or.
I guess the question I'm getting at is how important is the ceremonial context to this, the shamanic aspect of this?
Because this is not something that's brought into the clinic very often.
[00:16:18] Luke Jensen: Yeah, no, I think it's very important. The shamanic aspect is very important.
With the brain mapping. Yeah, you could track traditional therapies. And the reason I went into Ayahuasca the first time is because I wasn't too confident in the results.
I think also you have to understand brain function and, you know, how this works. So the reason that psychedelics are so powerful, because it literally opens up different networks, it allows people to think in novel ways and novel solutions.
So traditional therapy, if you look at, like Freud or those early on people you lay on the couch, and then they'd often go into these hypnagogic states because that's where the brain can access trauma and heal itself. I'm not sure if that still goes on the same way, but there's those deep states. We need access. So whether it's through psychedelics or shamanic drumming or things like this, we need to keep the brain and brain function in mind, how trauma is released. So I think that's really important.
[00:17:18] Dennis McKenna: What differences are you seeing between Wachuma and Ayahuasca that in terms of the response, what stands out for you about the differences in these two plant medicines and.
And based on that, what would be the most appropriate way to approach the use of each one? Are they complementary? Are they. I mean, should you use both of them? Not in combination, of course, but as part of a therapeutic treatment protocol, or are you better off sticking with one and experiencing over time what. What it can do?
[00:18:05] Luke Jensen: Well, I think now we get into the subjective realm, the plant medicines, so we can see certain things with brain mapping, but the subjective Experience is unique to each person. So in some ways people might be called to watchuma, or some ways people might be called ayahuasca. In our retreats, we do three ayahuasca ceremonies and then at the end of a retreat, we do a chuma ceremony to kind of tie everything together. And that ceremony is a hike. We're people experience nature. Whereas ayahuasca is for that often that deep soul work, that deep going to the unconscious.
So I think a lot of times it becomes, you know, different for each person. But I think as we. I don't think the research is in yet to know the major differences, what it could do. We're the very early stages of this.
I think also we're still at the early stages of tracking it long term. Those studies do not exist yet with brain mapping. No one's tracked out three months or six months after a ceremony, what changes are still there, what changes revert. We don't know that. So I think we're still the early stages of that. I'm really hopeful to see what that would look like, but I don't think we know completely yet.
[00:19:09] Dennis McKenna: Right.
You need to effectively follow this throughout the whole process.
How do your, the people who come to your retreats, I guess they know what they're in for. I mean, I'm wondering how do they feel about being wired up to machines while they're having these profound spiritual experiences? Are most people receptive to that? Or you spring that on them when they show up, they say, well, you have to put this thing on your head and take this thing.
I suppose most people are probably receptive to the idea once the are convinced.
[00:19:51] Luke Jensen: Well, it's very interesting. So we don't actually use it during ceremony, during retreats. We do a pre map for the retreat and a map after the retreat, and we track time. So we don't really want to mess with the sacred space unless we're doing like a specific research project, you know, and that we often have volunteers for that.
[00:20:08] Dennis McKenna: Okay, you could do braid mapping prior to the sessions and then follow up with several sessions measuring the changes over time in the.
In the.
In the brain map to track the progress.
[00:20:26] Luke Jensen: So in our retreats, we do nine days when they first arrive, we do a brain map. The day before we leave, we do a brain map. So in that short period of time, you know, first brain map, second brain map, there's a big change for people in that period of time, and the neuroplasticity dramatically increases. And with this tracking change over time, we can See markers for depression go down, anxiety, and like I said, even focus can improve head trauma. We've seen really powerful improvements with that. So in a short period of time we can see a large change in neuroplasticity and how the brain's working, which is really cool.
[00:21:06] Dennis McKenna: So it seems these are very useful tools to kind of correlate, I guess you could say, or an objective measurement of what's going on in the brain coupled with people's subjective experiences that they are actually resolving some of these issues that they're there to deal with.
[00:21:31] Luke Jensen: Yeah, no, I think that's really important because the Western mind's often very skeptical. I was very skeptical when I arrived in Peru that and did plant medicines. And my, when I first did it was like, was this just in my head? Was it a hallucination? Did something really happen?
And for a lot of people, we can show their brains changing and we can show that neuroplasticity. We can show them, you know, how they look differently, their brain looks differently. That can be very validating to a lot of people. And that's really cool. Part of the process.
[00:22:01] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, that's very convincing. I mean we like, we like objective measurements and we like gadgets. We like some way to objectively represent this. Right.
So I looked at some of your videos for the retreats. Those short videos.
You don't do only plant medicines. You do a kind of a holistic approach where people do like physical exercises, drumming, other types of exercises and, and practices.
Do you use the brain mapping during those or how does all that fit in?
It's not. Well, maybe it is common, you know, more about what the practices are down there, but usually my own experience is with ayahuasca retreats, very limited experience with Wachuma.
Uh, but usually, you know, there's not wrestling involved. There's not, you know, things.
How does that fit into your therapeutic approach?
[00:23:12] Luke Jensen: Yeah, so the first retreat I did in Peru 10 years ago, it was an adventure tour style retreat. So we went out, we saw the country and we were on a canoe every day in the Amazon. And it was really, I really appreciated that. You know, I didn't want to like necessarily sit at a retreat center. I wanted to go out and have that adventure that was my personality and I thought of as a model for many years after that.
And basically we've included things that have changed our lives, our retreat.
So the ayahuasca has been very powerful, Machuma has been powerful, but the, the brain mapping and neurofeedback is very powerful. Super denary treat. We have acupuncture in a retreat, and we have jiu jitsu. And I started jiu jitsu a couple years ago, and it's so powerful and so healing. It's a martial art, and it tests you every day. It forces you to test your limits and know who you are.
And it's been very beautiful. I really appreciate that. And some people are a little apprehensive about the jiu jitsu, you know, like going into a plant medicine retreat. But we. Wherever anyone's skill set is at, we work with them and they learn a couple moves, and if they want to go back and learn more or start that sport, they can. The idea is to bring all these different things in that have helped us and also to help ground people. So we have adventure hiking. We take people out into the mountains to meet, to meet these communities that are really, really high up in the Andes that you never, ever meet. I live in stone houses, so you actually get to see the country and appreciate the world that we live in. And I think all those things are important. So oftentimes with ayahuasca, you have these ideas, epiphanies, but it's important to bring to earth and ground them. That's what we're doing. If a lot we do with the martial arts, with the. The hiking, all these things come together to help ground and bring those lessons, Bring those lessons back.
[00:25:03] Dennis McKenna: That makes sense and give you a better appreciation for the cultures that you're.
That you're in and how they view the world. And, you know, because most people's daily experience, you know, they're not on ayahuasca, they're not on Wachuma. These are special occasions. And the rest of the time, you know, they are in whatever we choose to call ordinary waking consciousness, which of course, is not ordinary at all. Very fact that we're conscious of all is kind of a miracle. And.
But I can see how certainly my own experience with psychedelics, I can.
You know, it does give you an appreciation for nature and the connectedness of everything. And that's a very important thing. I mean, I think that is a sort of revelation that people come back with.
And if nothing else, they come back with a renewed appreciation of their connectedness and the importance of our place in nature and the context, the traditional context in which these plant medicines are utilized, because it is kind of alien to our Western worldview, this whole context. But if you can come into this and then with a tool like the qeeg, and you can relate that to something that Westerners are, rightly or wrongly, like that objective measurement. They like some external validation, I guess you could say, thinking maybe their own internal affirmation of what's happening to them is not enough. Well, it is enough, but it's good to have confirmation from an independent source. So it's very valuable to be able to do this.
[00:27:16] Luke Jensen: Yeah, no, I. There's so many things there, but I think experiencing the culture is so important.
These plants, these medicines are from these cultures. Right. And so to go out and experience them and see how they live, I think that's so powerful. And it reminds us of, in the Western world of all the gifts we have and the abundance that we have to appreciate that. So I'm really happy with, you know, our. How we interact, the whole community. But also, like you said, nature. Nature is so powerful. You know, after a week of ayahuasca ceremonies, you come out into these wide expanses in the mountains and it's just you. You feel differently, you feel connected differently. That's really important. And with the, the brain mapping the qs, I think, yeah, the experience is enough, and it's beautiful. And it's also interesting to put some science to it and see what we see. And it can be really powerful for people.
There are those skeptics, you know, and a lot of people are skeptics and don't want to be skeptics, but this is kind of how we're built. We're just built that way in Western society. So I help that skeptical mind and help them take that leap and go, hey, this, this is validation behind it. And my hope is to build these databases up enough by working with retreats that maybe will have a thousand brain maps one day or pre and post and just have that evidence there.
And from my point of view, you know, a lot of these retreats say we change the world one person at a time. That's true. But what if we have the research, what if we have the data and then we show that, you know, that's, that's, that's really how you can, like, make another impact in a larger way and have other people look at the plant medicines that might not have before.
[00:28:55] Dennis McKenna: Right, right.
No, it's good to build up a data bank of results, particularly in something like this where it's so hard to keep a handle on it because you're dealing with people's subjective experiences and those are not easily stuffed into some, I guess you could say, conceptual box.
The model fits, more or less, but the, the electroencephalographic measurements provide that external bar that you can compare it against.
Have you had.
So do you keep in touch with people that come to the ceremonies and follow their progress weeks or months or years after they get this treatment?
Do you have a database of these people that you're in touch with?
[00:29:55] Luke Jensen: Well, right now we just have the pre map and post map of our retreats. No one's done the longer term brain mapping. I definitely want to do that study and do that research.
We just have to figure out how to do it because most people come to Peru, they stay for a retreat and they leave. So we're going to find out some way where they can do a brain map back in the United States or wherever they're at after they come back. So I have some ideas so far, people I want to work with in the States, but that's still a project that needs to be developed further.
[00:30:26] Dennis McKenna: Right. Is this something that could be done using remote. I mean could. You could make the measurements and you wouldn't necessarily have to be in the room or be in the clinic with these people to gather this kind of data?
[00:30:44] Luke Jensen: Actually that's a really good point. I never really thought about doing that. You know, it's a really good point. So technically, yeah, we can mail them a unit, they could put it on and then, you know, we coach them through the mapping process. It's not too difficult.
Originally I was thinking about partnering with maybe possibly different clinics that have the technology in the States, potentially like Oregon or Washington, you know, where people might be coming down more often and then tracking them as they get back. That's a really good idea too is to be able to maybe mail them something and track them as they integrate.
[00:31:18] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, I would think you'd be able to find some clinics that would be interested in that. For example, clinics that are providing ketamine therapy and that sort of thing. I mean this would be just, I mean it just not that you would measure ketamine, but that they sort of have the, the facilities and the mindset that you have to track this process through time and they might well have these kinds of setups.
So that's one possible way to approach it.
[00:31:53] Luke Jensen: Yeah, that's a good point. That makes a lot of sense.
[00:31:56] Dennis McKenna: Have you extended this to other psychedelics?
[00:32:01] Luke Jensen: The brain mapping?
[00:32:03] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, the brain mapping. If you tried it with other things like LSD or DMT or things like that, I guess you can't, you have to stick with natural medicines. But any, anything to say comparatively about these other medicines?
[00:32:23] Luke Jensen: So so far, mushrooms, we've done a little bit with that and microdosing, done a little bit with that. I think we want to do more with DMT peyote. There's definitely more work we want to do as a future planned studies actually did coca leaves. We're brain mapping that right now. I don't think anyone's actually ever QED and studied coca leaves yet or something we're working on right now.
Basically we're in the Sacred Valley of Peru. So the big things would be ayahuasca, Wachuma, coca leaves, sometimes mushrooms. That's what we're working with now. But possibly we might travel for other projects too.
[00:33:01] Dennis McKenna: Right.
So you anticipate just keeping on and doing this more and doing more retreats.
Is that the plan for now? And accumulate as much data as you can and publish. I see both of these papers have been published and they will get noticed presumably when they're published.
[00:33:25] Luke Jensen: Yeah. So especially the Wachuma paper because no one's ever brain imaged that. There's so little research on it. When people look it up, that comes up pretty quick. Other people have told me, which is really neat.
I'm really glad to be part of that process.
So I think, yeah, the one. We're gonna keep running retreats because that's the beauty of what we do. We love working retreats. I love, I have an amazing team and I love running retreats and it's such a beautiful part of that process.
And then yeah, we have the want to keep pushing the research. That's gonna be really important.
That's a lifelong mission goal as well. I think both those things are really important. So yeah, that's, that's what we're doing and that's what we're called to do and it's a really beautiful process. So.
[00:34:09] Dennis McKenna: Okay, very good. How, what, what have you, how much of this work have you done with mushrooms?
What are you seeing with mushrooms that's. That stands out for you?
Are they similar to Wachuma and ayahuasca or what's different about them or unique if anything?
[00:34:30] Luke Jensen: Well, I think mushrooms, it's really beginning research, but I think it would help calm the brain and I think microdosing can help people with what we call power level issues like the myochondrial function or ATP production might be down in that certain brain system.
So I think microdosing mushrooms can be really powerful for that group. And we'll look at that more because that's a big pattern that we've run into the neurofeedback community when a lot of times people have a head trauma or severe emotional trauma. Over time, the. The resources, the brain aren't as activated as they should be. The mitochondria aren't working where they should be. So we need to find ways to increase the energy levels in the brain and bring it back up to a healthy level. I think mushrooms can really help out with that.
I think we're just looking to that research.
Another thing I forgot to mention, my friend does a retreat with tobacco, and that actually had a really powerful effect. I was kind of surprised because it's not like a classic psychedelic, but they did a dieta with tobacco, and I saw a change with that too. So we're seeing lots of things and we're just. In many ways, we're just starting.
[00:35:37] Dennis McKenna: Tell me about that. What would you see about. With tobacco? Was it similar to the psychedelics or.
[00:35:44] Luke Jensen: I think a lot of these things, they seem to help move the brain in a positive direction. And actually it was Luis, our filmmaker, that you know very well.
It was him I tracked with tobacco dieta. And you know, some people, they have different brain patterns, but we can see, like a busy mind. Calm down. That's what I saw with tobacco dieta. So it was in dieta, they're also in isolation.
So this is exploratory research. This isn't like a clinic where we have like one set alkaloid that we're studying. We're studying the wholeness of the approach, like you said, the shamanism as well. But we did definitely notice that the system was more calm after tobacco.
[00:36:24] Dennis McKenna: Right. It's very interesting work that you're doing. And you're a pioneer. You're on the frontiers of something.
Thank you. The confluence of neuroscience and shamanism. We always sort of anticipated that it would come to that. And you're making it real. I think there's always, as you mentioned, there's a lot of skepticism, but skepticism cannot stand up in the face of evidence.
And that's the virtue of science, is it tries to approach everything with a skeptical, sort of a skeptical mindset. You know, that's the idea of the scientific approach. And then you seek data and you're finding, you know, you're putting actual data, and that is answering the skepticism. It's showing, you know, people can talk subjectively about their experiences a lot, but every. Every experience is unique. And what I think these measurement tools give you is an objective experience that. That's harder to knock down to the skeptics than it's actually evidenced.
Do you think?
I mean, something that stood out for me in reading both of those papers that I read, I didn't read all of them in detail. I read basically the introductions and the conclusions. But it seems that both of these plant medicines, Huachuma and Ayahuasca, are rebalancers. They reestablish this equilibrium, but they do it in a different way.
Each one seems to focus on or direct healing to particular deficiencies, and the outcome is similar, but the mechanism is somewhat different. Or is that a misinterpretation of what's going on here?
[00:38:41] Luke Jensen: No, I think we're looking at outcomes that are similar because as we remove trauma from the system, the system goes towards equilibrium.
So this is a really interesting finding because this can help everybody, basically. You know, I mean, as long as they're not schizophrenic or those other things, they're not ready for the medicine. But looking for healing, this can really help in a profound way.
And that's what we're seeing. And as far as the mechanisms go, that's kind of like a different area of the. Of the science that other people are going to have to look into. Because we're looking at the brain waves. It's probably something about the chemistry that is still being dealt with. Right. The. All the alkaloids in Wachuma, because Wachuma has mescaline, but probably has like, I think it's 40 other alkaloids in it as well.
[00:39:26] Dennis McKenna: Right.
[00:39:26] Luke Jensen: So this is. This would be a science that will be explored for a long time out to find out what exactly is going on. But you're right, the outcomes look very similar because each in each way that the person's finding healing and their nervous system is finding healing. So this is why when people come out, like, they feel more relaxed, they feel less on edge, but also the cognitive function increases, which I find very interesting. So we think about this. We think of depression lifting, I think anxiety lifting. We think about how the brain works. The emotional brain is. Is the. The core of the brain, the cortex, those upper structures are on top of it, the cognitive structures. So you heal the emotional brain. Their cognitive abilities will increase, their memory might get better, their focus might get better. All these things improve when emotional brain's healed and everyone has some level of emotional trauma. So when you heal that, it allows for the whole system to work more effectively.
[00:40:19] Dennis McKenna: That's interesting.
Yeah, it works on all levels. And I'm kind of not surprised that it also improves cognitive functions.
I mean, if the brain works better, basically it makes the brain run better and that's going to affect cognitive functions as well as the emotional traumatic functions. And so I think you're doing great work here. You're developing some tools that are going to be very useful going forward for this research.
And then the whole area that perhaps you're going to explore or you have these tools so you can apply them to plant medicines, but then you can apply them to other modalities such as sound immersion and that sort of thing, maybe in combination with plant medicines. It'd be interesting to see what results come out from that kind of treatment.
[00:41:24] Luke Jensen: Yeah, no, I think one of the things we want to do is you mentioned these different modalities in a retreat. We were interested in sound healing and yoga and how these other things work. Right. We want to bring everything to bear for school's healing, especially with people with PTSD or war veterans. And we don't want to limit it to one thing. We want to like, hey, what works? And with the brain mapping we can figure that out. That's been really cool. And we actually have done some studies with sound healing. We do notice a difference in the brain maps.
[00:41:54] Dennis McKenna: Oh yeah, and what are you fighting there?
[00:41:57] Luke Jensen: Yeah, we see the system relax, something similar. So we, we notice the modern brain, the modern person is over aroused. It's very common to have over arousal. So what we've seen is that overarousal relax and our system relaxed with some sound healing.
That's been really cool.
[00:42:15] Dennis McKenna: Not so surprising.
Well, I think with all the concerns about, you know, there's great deal of.
There's a great deal of concern about the mental health of veterans, you know, and that seems to be an opening and there's perhaps more concern and more talk about it than there is actual support. But that might be an opening, that might be a way to get formal support for this kind of work. I mean, if you have ambitions to do that, ultimately you have to kind of to do bigger studies. It takes more funding, it takes institutional affiliations of some kind. But I think these are powerful tools and the publications that I looked at and that you're continuing to come out, hopefully this will get noticed and you'll be able to seek support if that's the direction you want to go.
[00:43:20] Luke Jensen: Yeah, Dennis, I think you're right. I think that the veterans are very important. I think everyone deals with trauma, but in the culture people talk about veterans a lot and they're looking for solutions.
And I think that the VA system has let veterans down in many ways.
So people are looking for Alternatives, Veterans looking for alternatives. Veterans are forming their own communities to see alternatives. I think you're right. This might be a way for the public to maybe look at this differently and maybe funding as well. Like you said, I think in the end, we are going to need these bigger studies and bring bigger projects. And right now it's very preliminary. I think there's a lot more we can do.
[00:43:58] Dennis McKenna: Right, right.
And unfortunately, in this particular political climate now, the, you know, government, at least in the States, is busy dismantling science as much as possible. And so it's, you know, it's always been a challenge to get funding for this kind of thing, and now it's even more difficult.
But on the other hand, the US Is not the only country where this kind of research is going on. So it might be possible to get funding, maybe even from Peru. There might be organizations in Peru that could support this, because unlike the States, Peru recognizes ayahuasca, at least as kind of a national treasure. And many clinicians in Peru are familiar with it. They recognize its value.
Peru doesn't have a lot of funding for research, but they might be able to, you know, they might be interested in supporting this. And then there's also, there's quite a bit of ayahuasca research going on in Brazil as well. So, you know, but I think you just keep on doing what you're doing and keep publishing and making sure people know about the work you're doing. You never know when somebody will come along and say, this is cool. I want to support this, and that's the way it progresses. That's the way science goes. So very good.
It's good. Thank you for sharing all this with me. It's very interesting project you're working on.
[00:45:45] Luke Jensen: Yeah, Dennis, thanks for having me on. And part of that outreach is being podcasts like yours. I really appreciate that because you never know who might be hear this or who might be interested in this. And I really think that the study that we're doing and what we're seeing with planned medicines is allowing us to see trauma in a different way.
We're seeing how trauma stored in the system like we talked about, when we're seeing how trauma is released from the system.
[00:46:09] Dennis McKenna: Right.
[00:46:09] Luke Jensen: That alone is very, very powerful. I think that this could really change the way we view healing and view medicine. So I'm really excited about the future. I'm super happy what we're doing, where I'm at, and thank you for having me on. It's been super interesting talking to you.
[00:46:25] Dennis McKenna: Well, thank you, it's been a pleasure. I think you're developing new paradigms that are going to be usable for the decades to come. I mean we need tools like you're using to really sort of bring some structure to the development of psychedelic based therapies. And that's what's happening. It's gotta be more than just people go to a session, they feel, you know, relieved and then. And then what? You know. So these provide mean to actually.
Actually kind of put that process into context and ultimately facilitate better healing. So thanks so much for talking to me and we'll get this up here real soon. Is there anything we didn't cover that you wanted to be sure we did or.
[00:47:19] Luke Jensen: Well, yeah, just what you said, that last part, Guinness. I think you're right that the.
We bring science to bear not just in psychedelic healing, but consciousness itself. We explore the universe, we explore the micro realm of the atom. But consciousness is such a mystery and the psychedelics are giving us insights into this and plant medicines are. Now we have this brain mapping. I really think the 21st century can be that the new frontier as human consciousness. I think bringing all the tools to bear upon it is very important.
[00:47:51] Dennis McKenna: Consciousness is the big enchilada, consciousness is the big mystery of neuroscience.
And hopefully all these tools and intelligent use of psychedelics and other medicines and these sorts of things will bring us closer to understanding what consciousness is.
We all experience it, but nobody knows what it really is. So you're putting pieces in place, you're putting the puzzle together and that's really valuable work, Luke. So I wish you all the best. Keep us posted and we'll continue to track what you're doing.
[00:48:40] Luke Jensen: Yeah, thanks Dennis. Just one last thing. If people are interested in my studies, they can go in neuroenlightenment and tiwaz Awakening like the rune, the warrior rune. T I W A Z Awakening is our retreats too. So thank you so much.
[00:48:57] Dennis McKenna: Good work Luke. Keep it up and we'll be talking.
[00:49:02] Luke Jensen: Thank you Dennis. I super appreciate it.
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