The Mind Mate Podcast

Zach Jewell has always had a passion for bringing people together and creating a positive encouraging space. He was a youth minister for 8 years while he was earning his undergraduate degree in Business Administration. After transitioning from non-profit human services to several years in the for profit sector for some valuable life lessons, Zach has redirected toward his greatest passion, helping others live their best possible life. Zach can be found @intothe_darkblue ISBN Services Are you in the process of writing your first book? Have you just finished your manuscript but aren’t sure how to take the next steps? ISBN Services will take care of everything for you: from interior formatting, ISBN registration and exterior graphics design, ISBN Services will turn your book into a professional product in both paperback and e-book formatting—just send them your manuscript. And the best part is: you’ll get to keep all royalties and publishing rights too! Visit www.isbnservices.com to get your book professionally published and use the checkout code MINDMATE for 10% off.  The Find Your Mission Course The FYM is the complete immersive experience and integrative approach that comprises the majority of my psychological training. It’s a deep dive into identity, past traumatic experience as well as refined, tailored tools to help you transform pain into immense clarity and purpose; you can use the strategies for the rest of your life, like I do! Included in the four week training is a series of weekly journals and course content. Find out more at www.tomahern.mykajabi.com/find-your-mission and you can use the code PODCAST for 10% off.

Joseph has worked with a wide range of individuals. This includes coaching children with ADHD, teens transitioning to college, adults seeking improved mental focus/performance, and elderly searching for life’s purpose.  This experience, his personal “revelations” and research led him to the work of Swiss Psychologist Carl Jung. A rather synchronistic journey in itself (a story to be told some day). Through Jung’s work, Joseph was able to connect his findings and personal philosophy to Carl Jung’s ideas of individuation, synchronicity, the conscious EGO, the personal/collective unconscious and the Self.  Since, Joseph has focused his personal research on Jung’s work in order to bring it forward to our times today. In July 2021, he produced his first lecture series on The Red Book by Carl Jung which received over 50,000 views on YouTube. Connect with Joseph: Instagram: @humbleumedia Connect with Tom Ahern: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tom.ahern Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tom.ahern.life Medium: https://medium.com/@tom.ahern YouTube: https://bit.ly/2shhVqM Podcast: https://anchor.fm/the-mind-mate-podcast

Heidi is a psychotherapist, counsellor and speaker with 18 years experience in mental health, with a focus on trauma therapy. Heidi has worked in the US and Australia delivering therapeutic services to clients across the age and cultural spectrum. She works in private practice in Melbourne, delivering online courses and webinars to equip parents, individuals and schools with tools to implement the change they desire. Heidi was born and raised in Los Angeles. She now lives in Australia with her husband and two daughters. ***Guest Social Media*** @heidirogers_

East Forest is a multidisciplinary artist, producer, and international leader in underground sound meditation.  His work explores living authentically within a modern context through an introspective methodology that weaves together elements of electro-acoustic live music, nature, technology, brain science, and guided meditation.  His "ceremony-concerts" utilize a skilled instrumental repertoire to create space for an emotive inner journey.  "IN: A Soundtrack For The Psychedelic Practitioner, vol. II" is the latest chapter in his ever-evolving career, which includes over 25 albums, including 2019’s album-length collaboration with spiritual pioneer Ram Dass, the five-hour-long psilocybin soundtrack "Music For Mushrooms: A Soundtrack For the Psychedelic Practitioner", and collaborations with artists Jon Hopkins, Typhoon, Laraaji, Dead Prez, Nick Mulvey, Peter Broderick, DJ ANNA and more.  As a trailblazer in the global wellness movement, he offers guided meditations, retreats, a weekly podcast (Ten Laws w/East Forest), and talks that guide students through a brain-body approach aimed towards non-religious and grounded spirituality; he is a faculty member at the Esalen Institute and has worked with Google and Johns Hopkins neuroaesthetics project, Wavepaths, Consciousness Hacking, TED, Field Trip Health, is the co-founder of JourneySpace.com, and more.  ***Guest Social Media*** IG @eastforest | FB/YT,TW @eastforestmusic

The topic of this week is all about Expectations. They can either be highly damaging or wonderfully motivating. If they're challenging and fair, they will pull you forwards; if they're subconscious drivers, derived from the opinions of others, they will overwhelm you and make you feel worthless. Expectations can be placed on us by our parents. They can also be placed on us by the societies and communities that we are a part of. Some expectations are good: Thou Shalt Not Kill is a ripper! But the ones you should really pay attention to are the ones that either consciously or subconsciously influence the vision you have for your life. Who said you need to go to uni and study? Why are you working the job you hate? Why aren’t you good enough? Why won’t you ever be good enough? If you are feeling like a failure or that you’re constantly falling behind, ask yourself what it would take for you to be enough - and then consider why, when and how that expectation became the norm. The expectations you place on yourself need to be fair, loving and realistically challenging. If they’re not - or if you constantly feel unworthy (or like a failure) - write down who you think you need to be, and where / when you think you began thinking like that, and consider whether those expectations are working for you or against you. Life’s too short otherwise.

The great Johann Hari is back on the show promoting his latest book "Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention". This book is absolutely fantastic, from the front to the back. I personally believe Johann has touched on the most pressing issue facing our contemporary world as it bleeds into many of the problems our societies face. In fact, our ability to think deeply—to observe our impulses, emotions and thoughts—is the very thing that promotes and sustains democracies; so yes, this is seriously important stuff. Johann Hari is a writer and journalist. He has written for the New York Times, Le Monde, the Guardian and other newspapers. His TED talks have been viewed over 70 million times, and his work has been praised by a broad range of people, from Oprah to Noam Chomsky to Joe Rogan. He lives in London.  About the book: We think our inability to focus is a personal failing - a flaw in each one of us. It is not. This has been done to all of us by powerful external forces. Our focus has been stolen. Johann discovered there are twelve deep cases of this crisis, all of which have robbed some of our attention. He shows us how in a thrilling journey that ranges from Silicon Valley dissidents, to a favela in Rio where attention vanished, to an office in New Zealand that found a remarkable way to restore our attention. Crucially, he learned how - as individuals, and as a society - we can get our focus back, if we are determined to fight for it. This is a really important show guys and one I truly think you will get a lot from; so please have a listen and let me know what you think about our ability to pay attention as a society as well as what we should do to reclaim it.

Welcome to episode 145! A client recently asked me about the best ways to reduce his anxiety at work; we spoke about how different tools work best at different times. She told me how he would do his best to sit with his fears and stress, but sometimes they got the better of him. So, I asked her to rate his anxiety levels on a scale of 1-10, and then asked him what his different tools were for the different numbers on the scale. She didn’t have a variety of tools . . . We spoke about how different intensities of anxiety require different tools because - as this video discusses - if the anxiety is at a 10 and the “bath tub is overflowing” - there’s no point simply being with it; or in other words, trying to stay calm whilst watching the bathroom flood. If your anxiety is at a 10: move. Dance. Get up out of your seat and shake your arms. Walk. Exercise. Anxiety is energy and at that level, that energy needs to go somewhere. In my opinion, meditation is a preventative practise; it’s not necessarily the best thing to do when you’re in the middle of a panic attack. When you’re at a 10, then it’s about working with the body, not so much the mind. Please reach out if you’d like some clarification about your own anxiety! And remember: view your emotions like water in a bath!

Writing helps with the consolidation process because writing (hand-thinking) slows and filters thoughts emanating from significantly affective experiences into coherent analytical structures. Put simply, we slow the mind down because we can’t write as fast as we can think and that slowing down helps us formulate our opinions, conceptualisations and assumptions. Additionally, by doing so, we remind ourselves that the past is the past, not the present. The degree to which the past shaped or dramatically influenced our lives is open to interpretation and depends on our current emotional states. Expressive writing, therefore, is a call to cultivating greater self-awareness. “The neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux and his colleagues have shown that the only way we can consciously access the emotional brain is through self-awareness, i.e. by activating the medial prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that notices what is going on inside us and thus allows us to feel what we’re feeling.”  Writing helps integrate emotionally charged experiences and beckons (forces) us to contemplate our lives, and how they came to be. The future, once the past has been reconciled, is ours for the taking. We can end those shitty chapters and write new ones, akin to who we’d like to become. 

Snippet From Chapter 20 of my Book: Echoes From The Past! "I tried to find my purpose for far too long. I read every book, watched every YouTube lecture and demanded that each of my therapists and counsellors show me the way to liberation and fulfilment. The thing is, “your purpose” doesn’t exist. It won’t every exist. “Your purpose” is a marketing ploy designed to keep you attached to an idea that will always keep you searching, unfulfilled and lost. Your purpose isn’t your purpose. Your purpose is purely and simply what you’re interested in right now and who you want to be—which is another of saying “what you want to be doing”—in six months’ time. Chase the “you” in six months. Don’t worry about five or ten years. Our brains aren’t equipped to conceptualise such illusory spans across time and space; but the “you” in six months is practical and relatively tangible. The cool thing about the “you” in six months is that you really could become that person. They’re not that far away. Chase them down! Maybe they’re only six months ahead of you in their savings; in their training, writing or relationship status. Beat them!" 

Bee Mohamed is the Head of Patient Advocacy & Engagement of Astrid, the first female-led dispensary in Australia. She made her mark in the medicinal cannabis industry in 2019 when she joined Canopy Growth Asia Pacific as the Stakeholder Relations and Advocacy Manager (Asia Pacific) and saw the regulatory barriers patients faced in Australia in accessing medicinal cannabis. Prior to the cannabis industry, Bee was the inaugural Chief Executive Officer of ScriptWise, a not for profit organisation dedicated to prevent the harms associated with prescription medication dependency and overdose. Working closely with both patients and families affected by this issue, the organisation was successful in bringing changes around the issue such as: commitment by the Federal Government to implement a nation-wide Real Time Prescription Monitoring system (RTPM), rescheduling of codeine-based medications (in 2018) and to introduce best practice in prescribing opioids. She holds a Master in Social Science (International Development) and has worked in both the public and community sector for close to 8 years. Her true passion is to influence health policies through patient-led advocacy and engagement in improving access to progressive medicines. ***Social Media*** https://astrid.health/ @astrid.dispensary #medicinalcannabis #plantmedicine #astridhealth