EP05: Transforming limiting beliefs with psilocybin therapy

Negative beliefs are the ones that actually can stop us from becoming our true self and from going for goals, from improving our life, from having better relationships. Welcome to the ShiftWid and Podcast. I'm your host, Alice. I'm from the Inner Shift Institute and I'm here to guide you on a journey inside of your mind. Our podcast is a platform for catalyzing both inner and outer shifts using the power of psychedelics and powerful therapeutic tools. Welcome to your new beginning. Welcome to your new life. Today, my guest is our amazing team member, Kauo Pankard, who is a mindset and transformation coach and energy healer and a psychedelic facilitator. And she's part of the Inner Shift Institute since several years. And today, we're going to speak about how negative core beliefs can influence our life and our mental health and how to change them using cytosyben-assisted therapy as a tool. Hi, Kyle. Nice to have you. Hi. Lovely to be here with you. Thank you. And before we start, can you tell us a little bit about yourself, how you got into this field of psychedelic healing and how you became a coach? Yes, well, there were three questions. One, where to start? Well, in the past, my first career was in photography, but I was always interested in other people's lives and understanding why people do what they do and why they don't do what they actually want to do more in life. And to make it short, this brought me to the studies of anthropology and this brought me into a job where I helped women, long-term, unemployed women to find a job again. And we worked a lot of our social competencies about limiting beliefs as well. And during that time, I found out that there actually better ways to help people like we were quite restricting and helping them. But we were publicly funded, so we couldn't experiment too widely with the methods how to help people. So that's when I decided actually to start wanting to be self-employed, to have more freedom about how I can work with people. And so during that time, during that job, I did coaching courses and I did a lot of other courses about non-violent communication, hypnosis, systemic coaching. And this has developed further into energy healing. Yeah, and then one day I got the offer from Alice to work for the Inner Shift Institute. And I was very happy and very happy and very content with that because there was something I wanted to do for a longer while. And it felt like I could bring everything I've learned and all my practices into a work I deeply believed in and a work which could really bring deep shifts into people's lives. And you've had already had a lot of experience with psychedelics already? Yes, I had experimented myself with psychedelics before. Firstly, a little bit more recreational, but I always felt then that I was quickly overwhelmed by the people around me. I've quickly felt this is something I really want to do by myself. I need intimacy, I need privacy. I can't have people talking to me. So from the very beginning, I felt like recreational way is not ideal for me because I'm quite a sensitive person. Yeah, and that's why psychedelic therapy was, yeah, I was very interested in early onwards. Thank you so much. And we are very happy to have you in our team and you have guided so many people through psychedelic journey since then and have changed lots of lives and your specialised, your speciality is and you know, because you brought that already with you is these core beliefs. And that's why I wanted to speak with you today about these limiting beliefs or negative core beliefs. And can you tell our listeners somebody who has never heard about this? What this actually is and why does this important in our lives? How does it influence our lives? Well, core beliefs is something that basically determines how we make decisions and how we show up in our life. And core beliefs is something that we learn from early onwards in our life. So we learn a lot of our deepest core beliefs. They are formed in our childhood already because when we don't have logical thinking yet, which is below the age of five usually, we are just pure emotion and we just react from emotion. We try to make sense of the world. We try to make sense of how our caretakers, our parents react to us by just body language, by the things they say, by the way, how they show up for their lives. And so we interpret their behaviour. And this is how we form these core beliefs. For example, a child that falls and hurts itself and starts crying when a parent might react always with like, "Oh, that's nothing." Or you didn't hurt yourself. Then the child gets the information that what it is feeling like the pain or the surprise that is wrong. And when it experience that over and over again, it believes that, "Oh, I must be wrong because the other person shows me that I didn't hurt myself, so it can't be right." So the child starts to mistrust itself and creates this belief, "I'm wrong." Or maybe in other situations like, "I'm not important." And this can obviously go on in school when we have teachers who dislike us or when we are told off all the time, it can continue in relationships. So we build beliefs over time and we don't only build negative beliefs. There are a lot of positive beliefs we build as well. However, the negative beliefs are the ones that actually can stop us from becoming our true self and from going for goals, from improving our life, from having better relationships, for changing into a better job or things like that. So that's why it's important, really beautiful and necessary sometimes, to look into, "Okay, where is the blockage? Where do I stop myself from evolving?" From being the person I actually want to be and the person I am in my heart. Yes, and it's the core beliefs. If you have negative core beliefs or positive core beliefs, about yourself can make such a difference in how you show up to the world, how you show up to, like in your career, for example, somebody who is very successful has the core belief that they can believe in themselves and that they have abilities to move forward. And somebody who feels like they cannot move forward in life and they kind of sabotage themselves all the time when they move forward, they would have benefits so much from looking at their core beliefs and what do they actually think about themselves in their co-op subconscious mind and how they are acting because of it. And that's why it's so powerful to look at these core beliefs and then also change them. So can you tell us a little bit about how to change these core beliefs in psilocybin ceremony, like why is psilocybin ceremony so powerful and how do people change these beliefs in the psilocybin ceremony? Well, the people, like the clients who come who consciously want to change a core belief in the psilocybin ceremony, they obviously come with that intention that they want to change core beliefs about themselves. Sometimes they are very much aware of the core beliefs but it can also happen that they are not aware of the core beliefs and how it shows up how I have experienced that with clients is that it can happen in different ways. Some people just suddenly they go through their journey and they are very open, they are very vulnerable and they might face emotions or also emotions with memories attached and they get to this core feeling, like sometimes to the inner child or to the to the moment in their life when that core belief was created. And then I just help them for being there for themselves and for being present with that emotion and grieving it and maybe also grieving that that they have believed that for so long. I had a client she had this core belief that life has to be a struggle. And so it happened that the journey psilocybin showed her when that started. She was a professional musician and her mother was a music teacher and it started like that. Obviously there were a lot of expectations on her, a lot of pressure and struggling became like something she thought she was worth it when she when life was difficult when she was struggling. It gave her a lot of self worth, it gave her a sense of being like deserving and with the absence of struggling she was scared that her life would be boring. And so she found out all these patterns in during the journey that was a beautiful thing. So for her the journey really laid out all these knowledge in front of her so that she could make sense of why she used it. And when she and then she felt this strong feeling that there was no need for struggling which was in the first moment hard for her to accept because she identified so much with the struggling. Yeah and then I gave her the invitation to grieve that she didn't know it before that she didn't have to struggle so that she could actually express her emotions about not knowing before that there was actually no need for struggle and And she could then forgive her younger self or apologize at her younger self for being so hard on herself for all those years. And then she could actually let go and not feel guilty or shamed by not having known this earlier. So this is one example how it showed up for a client which, yeah, sometimes it's easy in a way that when we bring the intention, it just flows through us in these ways. And as a facilitator, we can obviously guide the client a little bit in having to express those emotions, but also offering options. I remember my very first Silasiva experience where I did not have the intention to look at the Nekor belief. I was just doing it in a conscious way, but my intention was just to get to know myself better. And at this time, I had a depression and I didn't, I had tried therapy and I was not really finding out like a way out of it. And in this psychedelic experience, my first psychedelic experience with magic mushrooms, I was shown that I had the core belief that I am alone and that I am that it was not really true. But it's so interesting if you have that core belief, it's like you're looking through like you're observing the world through a lens of that core belief. So you're pointing, you're focusing on all the moments in your life where somebody's leaving you alone, but you completely not seeing all the opposite experiences of where you're being supported and held and where somebody is there with you in that experience of life. And so going through the psychedelic experiences, the magic mushroom really showed me that I was not actually alone, that there was a lot of support around me, but it was also showing me that I felt so alone because I was letting myself be complete. Like I abandoned myself in moments of, you know, like feeling intense feelings, I would abandon myself. So that will create this feeling of loneliness too. So that was my first psychedelic journey. And it really transformed my life because I got to know this core belief and I also got to know that it was true. And then comes of course the integration work. Sometimes the psychedelic experience will give it to you and you feel it to the death of your core and you're just going to, from there, from that moment on, know it is true forever, this new core belief. But sometimes there's also some work to be done afterwards. So you felt, you have a felt experience that opposing belief is true. But now the old belief tries to creep back in because you have gotten so used to it all your life. So how do you support clients when they had had this realization of a new core belief, a positive core belief about themselves and the integration process? That's often quite necessary because as you say, some people have, during the session, during the journey, they feel at their core, they feel the change. And for some people, it's like the core belief just becomes, just get this awareness during the journey about the core belief they have. And then afterwards we need to do this in integration. So there's a couple of different ways or maybe three different ways I work with transforming core beliefs in integration. I use my energy healing techniques to support the change of the transformation of the core belief. That's one thing I often do. I sometimes do that in during the journey as well. And then I work with two different methods which are slightly similar. It's just one which uses more our head in finding out. And the other one is more that a guide declines through a sort of feeling meditation to tap into deeper layers of what's about all the emotions which are stored in this limiting belief. Because obviously there's a lot of emotional charge in the limiting belief. And the more we become aware of all the things that are part of the limiting belief, like of the emotions of maybe additional thoughts or limiting beliefs which are connected to it or also of the behavior patterns which are attached to it. You know, it's like I had for a long time the limiting belief. I'm not allowed to do what I want. And so each time I had an idea and I would share it with my partner, he was like, no, don't do it because it wouldn't work or whatever. And then I just felt so angry. And I was just blaming it. And I was just totally stopped myself from doing what I wanted. So going into like allowing myself to feel the emotions and to understand the pattern like blaming him would then be a pattern I would do or actually then not do what I wanted to do like avoiding is also an action in that sense. So creating this awareness of our patterns of all the actions and the avoiding behavior which is attached to the limiting belief is very important to create an awareness for this. So that's the first step I would do with the client and then we try to go into the opposite. It's like, okay, how would you like to behave or how would you like to feel? And then we look into those things. And then at the end we create or let the client himself or herself come up with an idea of how a new belief could be because this is way more powerful than that they can create something that fits to them, that fits their language, that fits and that it is a new belief which they can feel in their body is something doable. It's not like the affirmation which we don't believe in that doesn't work. A client really needs to have to create a new belief which the whole body can believe that something they actually can believe in. And that might be a first step and maybe a few months later they're ready for the next step, the next new belief, like the next level which takes them in the right direction. Exactly. And then life can be completely transformed. Like we can shift so much. Like when I change the core belief, I'm alone. I really started to see how much I am supported and then also I automatically let go of the relationships that I didn't feel supported and attracted more where I felt supported and it's because when you changed out in our core belief you also really changed the way that you show up in the world and the way that your emotional to react, your emotional reactions change and the people you want to have around you change. Yeah, I think so many of us have to core belief I'm not enough. So if you can change that belief that I am enough can you imagine how different you show up to the world and to life and to friendships and to your relationship if you actually believe you are enough. And such less emotional reactivity, like you said when your partner says something, like if you have that core belief, I'm not enough and your partner says something that they didn't like, you might have a very strong emotional reaction. And if you believe I am enough then you would just be able to answer and say, "Oh, interesting, you didn't like that. Okay, let's see how we can maybe find a way to make it work for both of us." But if we have these core beliefs then we have very strong emotional reactions and as you said, and there's such a strong emotional charge to it because we felt these beliefs were integrated in our brains, our children when we were still emotional beings. When I believe, like, when I for example believe them unworthy, I would just never stand up for myself. I would just never set a boundary because I just don't believe that I'm worthy to do that. So I would just let other people cross my boundaries and I would just never do what I want to do. Now and I don't have any power over my life, I'm just like basically copying the life of other people and just being lived by others and I don't really take conscious part in my life or in my existence. And even like, yeah, the belief, I'm not good enough, I have the feeling like everyone has this belief somehow. And just because we all have the same beliefs, they can show up very different for everyone of us in our lives. Like, you talked about a person who might be very successful in their job, I found out with some people as well, they're like people who are successful in their job can also have that belief. I'm not good enough. And that's why they're successful. They're probably still proving their parents that they're good enough and they're very successful because they're still trying to prove that because that's what we do with the limiting belief, limiting beliefs kind of makes us always look for proof that the belief is right. And we most of the time we believe that our limiting beliefs or all our beliefs are the actual truth. And we don't understand that it's not the truth that it's just a belief and that there's nothing to do with the truth. And I guess that's the first thing we need to understand before that we are actually willing to change it because when we haven't understood that, we might resist changing it because we just don't believe that we actually worth it. We don't believe that there's a possibility that we could be worthy. And that's why a psychedelic experience can be so beautiful because it often brings us exactly to that place and shows us our blind spots. We show us a view of ourselves from a different perspective and that's why it's so powerful and often brings us to our limiting beliefs and shows us that we are enough and that we are worthy and that we are a good person and makes it feel us on really on an emotional level because we can't understand on a conscious level that we are enough but we can just keep telling ourselves I'm enough I'm enough I'm enough and just not believe it so if we go into a psychedelic experience we can feel it on an emotional level and then it really sinks in and then with some tools and integration work we can really integrate that into our subconscious mind as a new belief. Yeah exactly a lot of people come and sometimes they would say after a session is like yeah but I kind of knew that before and I was like yes but just because you understood it with your head it's like when we're reading books or whatever our head might have understood that it's not true that we are not good enough but our inner child hasn't got it yet our body all ourselves they haven't understood it yet so we haven't embodied that yet and psychedelics like a psilocybin therapy really helps us to bring that new belief or that yeah into every cell of our body so that we can really embody it and only then can we actually change our behavior change our actions change change our patterns but as long as it hasn't been embodied we know our head knows but our body hasn't caught up with it it's like we're still in our old pattern. Yes and that's when you when you say things like I don't understand why I keep ending up with the same toxic relationship it's because you have a core belief some core belief of maybe not being worthy for a healthy relationship and so you keep choosing partners that will treat you that way like on a subconscious level it's not like you go and and see like oh I'm going to choose a partner who's going to treat me in a bad way but subconsciously you're going to feel drawn to the ones who are going to treat you in a toxic way because they also feel that lack of self-worth that's caused from this from this inner core belief and so changing these core beliefs can be absolutely life-changing and having better relationships is more successful career better better life quality and the relationship tells yourself like the relationship you have with yourself that you just show up differently for yourself it's so beautiful when you get to change this and yes psychedelics of psilocybin in particular can be so helpful to making contact with these parts of yourself like well I didn't even know I have them you know I knew okay I I have a problem feeling worthy but being in contact with a part of myself who really is so weak and vulnerable it's actually a really beautiful thing to feel and and I found it always so impressive when I get into contact with that because I think like wow I just didn't even know that there's a part of me feeling that way it's like it gets maybe so suppressed or maybe so used to over the years yeah it's a beautiful way to tend like to take care of yourself and to tend to your needs by making contact with those parts that feel unworthy or not loved or alone lonely and to actually yeah to heal those parts and to hold space for them to to be compassionate with these parts of ourselves and to bring them back into life and psilocybin is just really good at bringing here and helping you reconnect to these parts just I don't know something that's more powerful than that absolutely yes it's it's really incredible how we can access our really most like the deepest depths of ourselves with this medicine and yeah I've had so many changes life changes through it personally and like so many hundreds of people that we have guided through we have seen their life really change in such an incredible transformational and deep way in a very short time frame of course integration word is important but there is it's no wonder that many people say psychedelic therapy or psychedelic is like 10 years of therapy in one in one day and I would not necessarily agree with that every time but I believe the people that say that are the ones who have had therapy for 10 years already so they are very well prepared going into the psychedelic experience and because they're so well prepared and that's always something that I I have seen happen for so many people is the things that you have understood in a conscious level in a therapy session then you feel it on a body level on an emotional level in the psychedelic session and that's why it's so so powerful because that's the only way that real change can happen is you have to feel it on a body level in an emotional level I know you know it's also sometimes a client comes and says like yeah I have worked yeah I have worked on this already in therapy so I'm over this you know I've this has been transformed this has been healed and then during the journey this topic comes up again and I found out oh there are actually deeper levels on which it hasn't hasn't had any effect on yet so as you say you know people have done a lot of therapy yeah for them it just can bring this healing onto a much deeper level so that they can fully embody it and come out really strong afterwards yeah so as we're coming to the end of this podcast can you tell me how your work with core beliefs and psychedelics has changed your personal life yes I think on quite a few levels I just pick one example I used to be very much a people pleaser and so saying no and setting boundaries was for the biggest part of my last life not an option and Silas I haven't helped me to get in touch with my boundaries and with my anger most strongly and that has also resulted in really feeling like after the journey in a month after really feeling this fear that when I say no that I would be abandoned and not loved so in my case or in this example the limiting belief showed up more strongly afterwards after those sessions in combination year with feeling fear when boundaries could crust and because it helped me to be in touch with that so much and to bring up this awareness of it I was then very well prepared it helped me to prepare to start setting those boundaries and doing something about that and to talk with my partner in our relationship or with a situation with friends so that I could actually start setting boundaries because I took these emotions serious and it helped me create a more loving relationship with myself and to stand up for myself and to set those boundaries for myself so it definitely has approved my relationships and the relationship to myself and to my partner and to other people around me as well strongly yes yes yes great and then we can if we can actually set healthy boundaries we can have such more healthy relationships with others around us I guess I think some people do still believe that they have this fear that setting boundaries will make their relationships worse because they feel like they have to over give to have have that relationship in their lives but it's actually not true and so that's really beautiful that we could change these beliefs and and create better relationships through setting boundaries yeah it's such a beautiful power for playing to do so thank you so much for this conversation and for this podcast it was really beautiful to have you here and very interesting to talk about core beliefs and how to change them and how to influence our lives I hope that our listeners enjoyed it too and I just want to invite everyone to subscribe to this podcast if you'd like this so you can listen to our other episodes as well and you can find us on social media under the Inner Shift Institute so we're looking forward to seeing you there and thank you for having me here it was a pleasure it was fun yes it was fun so thank you and have a wonderful day here you too bye bye thank you for listening to the shift within podcast if you enjoyed today's episode be sure to subscribe for more insightful conversations keep asking keep understanding keep shifting within and see you next time in the next episode