Podcasts about di tao

Industrial Design, Creative Inspiration & Personal Projects! Today, we chat about the new Lego Titanic set, the psychology of color and what we would do if the podcast was sponsored by Lego. On today's episode of “The Process” we discuss: Lego Titanic Giant Lego sets The psychology of color Di Tao's brand identity design project Running into a group of monks RMCS Dilly-Wak cargo ship model Roommate Grace got married Sponsored by Lego All the links, all the time! Industrial Design, Creativity & Inspiration! For Industrial Design related business inquiries: Big Design Company Website: www.bigdesigncompany.com Big Design Company email: hi@bigdesigncompany.com Follow us on Instagram! @theprocess__podcast https://www.instagram.com/theprocess__podcast/ Zak Watson // LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zak-watson-48618517a/ Behance: https://www.behance.net/zakwatson Website: https://www.zakwatson.com/ Dylan Torraville // LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dylantorraville/ Website: https://dylantorraville.com Portfolio: https://dylanjtorraville.myportfolio.com/ Behance: https://www.behance.net/dylantorraville Send us an email to hi.theprocesspodcast@gmail.com if you have any questions or want to reach out! The Process is a podcast created by industrial designers Dylan Torraville and Zak Watson. Dyl and Zak are picking up microphones to chat about their experiences in design school, personal projects and navigating the creative process. Oh yeah, and there will be some sweet interviews with other designers and friends too.

The words Di Dao (Di Tao) is a concept that most of our SuperFeast community would be familiar with, as it's the way we source our herbs. Di Dao herbs are of the highest quality and grown with integrity to ensure optimal, powerful healing properties. For a herb to be classified Di Dao, it must have been grown in its natural habitat; Which means the right region, soil, and microclimate for that specific species. The beauty of Di Dao herbs is they perform optimally, much like the human body when it is holistically cared for and nourished the way it needs to be. In this episode, Mason chats with Jansen Andre on The Awoken Athlete podcast about SuperFeast's commitment to Di Dao sourcing, herbs for optimal performance, and a holistic perspective of the nuances that affect performance within the body at all levels. Mason details the integrity behind Di Dao sourcing and how it ensures the livelihood of micro-farming stays alive; Continuing the wisdom and teachings of Di Dao within communities. Whether you're an athlete or not, we're all being physically, emotionally, and mentally pushed with our hectic, under-nourished lifestyles. This episode addresses the best herbs for lifestyle support and performance on all levels.      " Di Dao. Going to the spiritual homeland of the herbs and buying and growing them there. Far away from industry. You're getting the spore or the seed from that area and making sure it's a particular microclimate in which it grows. This is based on texts over 2,000 years old that tell you how to do this."   - MasonTaylor     Mason and Jansen discuss: Qi and performance. Cordyceps and performance. Adaptogens and performance. Jing, Qi, Shen; How they work. Comparing Di Dao and organic. Preventing injury and exhaustion. Jing; nourishing a solid foundation. How to take SuperFeast tonic herbs. Di Dao; growing, sourcing, and integrity. Disease, healing, and building the body back up. The colonisation and institutionalisation around healing ourselves. Performance in business and the freedoms of staying investor-free.   Who is Mason Taylor? Mason Taylor is the founder of SuperFeast. Mason was first exposed to the ideas of potentiating the human experience through his mum Janesse (who was a big inspiration for founding SuperFeast and is still an inspiration to Mason and his team due to her ongoing resilience in the face of disability). After traveling South America for a year, Mason found himself struggling with his health - he was worn out, carried fungal infections, and was only 22. He realised that he had the power to take control of his health. Mason redirected his attention from his business degree and night work in a bar to begin what was to become more than a decade of health research, courses, education, and mentorship from some of the leaders in personal development, wellness, and tonic herbalism. Inspired by the own changes to his health and wellbeing through his journey (which also included Yoga teacher training and raw foodism!), he started SuperFeast in 2010. Initially offering a selection of superfoods, herbs, and supplements to support detox, immune function, and general wellbeing. Mason offered education programs around Australia, and it was on one of these trips that he met Tahnee, who is now his wife and CEO of SuperFeast. Mason also offered detox and health transformation retreats in the Byron hinterland (some of which Tahnee also worked on, teaching Yoga and workshops on Taoist healing practices, as well as offering Chi Nei Tsang treatments to participants). After falling in love with the Byron Shire, Mason moved SuperFeast from Sydney's Northern Beaches to Byron Bay in 2015. He lived on a majestic permaculture farm in the Byron hinterland, and after not too long, Tahnee joined him (and their daughter, Aiya was conceived). The rest is history - from a friend's rented garage to a warehouse in the Byron Industrial Estate to SuperFeast's current home in Mullumbimby's beautiful Food Hub, SuperFeast (and Mason) has thrived in the conscious community of the Northern Rivers. Mason continues to evolve his role at SuperFeast, in education, sourcing, training, and creating the formulas based on Taoist principles of tonic herbalism.   CLICK HERE TO LISTEN ON APPLE PODCAST    Resources: Mason Instagram SuperFeast Instagram SuperFeast Apple Podcast The Awoken Athlete Podcast Mind and Body Peak Performance with James Newbury (EP#106)    Q: How Can I Support The SuperFeast Podcast? A: Tell all your friends and family and share online! We'd also love it if you could subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes. Or  check us out on Stitcher, CastBox, iHeart RADIO:)! Plus  we're on Spotify!   Check Out The Transcript Here:   Jansen Andre: (00:00:00): All right, Mason from SuperFeast, thank you so much for coming on The Awoken Athlete podcast today. For those of you who don't know, Mason runs a beautiful company called, SuperFeast, which is based around tonic herbs. Do you want to give us a little introduction, Mason, about what you do and how did you even start?   Mason Taylor: (00:00:23): Yeah, thanks for having me on. As you said, SuperFeast is about to turn 10 years old. So I've been doing it for a while now. The majority of the time when I started out, what I wanted to end up doing was Taoist tonic herbalism. So it's that style of herbalism that springs from the classical texts of Chinese Medicine and gears more towards prevention, the cultivation of life, the cultivation of potential, having the ability to not fall into early degeneration and wasting away, which is what we see as the norm in the western world.   Mason Taylor: (00:01:01): And even though I was really interested in performance, I had that drive in my early twenties when I was exploring this to see what was possible for my body. I was really curious in that, from a business sense getting into herbs, I was really interested in the trajectory that I was on towards the 70 year old self and 80 year old self. And the only place, at the time, especially around herbalism, I could see conversation or I could see terminology around how to get into a lifestyle flow utilising things like herbs that in a western sense and even in a modern Chinese Medicine sense is used just for symptoms. If there's a problem, respond with medicines, with herbs.   Mason Taylor: (00:01:48): The Daoist approach, had a conversation of how to cultivate life so that you can put the odds in your favour more and more and more not to end up in practitioners' offices. Not that I'm averse to it. I like working with practitioners as well, but not end up institutionally dependent. I will go into terminology a bit later in describing what these, so the three foundational treasures are, in the body. So the elements that make up what either keep you functioning and stop you from degenerating, keep you large over your life and then ensure that your best self is coming through, is Jing, Qi and Shen.   Mason Taylor: (00:02:28): And I just had conversations and practises in herbal usage around how to ensure that we really guard these treasures. That just really translates to hopefully, if it's maybe a little bit more or a lot more when we enter into our elder stages. Which of course then is going to mean that throughout our entire life we're a bit more robust and healthy. When we get to those later stages, you've got a relatively strong body. Your bones aren't wasting away. That's the Jing.   Mason Taylor: (00:02:56): You're hormones in a foundational level, are able to stay adaptive and if you don't have Jing, it's what people waste away with hectic lifestyles, no sleep and all that kind of stuff. You've got lots of Jing when you're a kid and that's why you burn it at both ends, but then people keep that up and they don't adjust and they don't get wiser as they get older, therefore their bones start wasting, their hips, their body has no strength. They lose that foundational energy. That's Jing energy.   Mason Taylor: (00:03:24): And so we want to make sure that that's safeguarded as well as our Qi. That's what enables us to stay mobile and regulate our heat, regulate our fluids, move us. Basically put the spark in the machine. Living Jing is just like, just say your body is just this machine of potential and flesh and if it's not animated, it's just sitting there, you need that thing to be rock solid. You need it to be really strong and have a lot of genetic potential. That's your Jing. And then you put a spark in and it comes to life and you can move through the world and animate through the world and regulate all the functions of the body. That's the Qi.   Mason Taylor: (00:03:59): That's the other thing we want to be nice and strong in our body throughout our entire lives and then the point of that is the Shen. Which is essentially if the heart's really healthy, the heart fire, which is not just the physical heart. If all the organs are really working well and showing that the emperor that is the heart, is really flowing, then throughout our lifetime, our consciousness, our virtuous nature, are part of us that's determined to be less of an asshole and more of an awesome person that isn't projecting all over everyone and actually has the capacity to learn from experiences, go through psychological developments, let go of ideologies, step more into our own truth, so on and so forth.   Mason Taylor: (00:04:43): That comes forth and what you see then is if the Shen's really allowed to express as you get to 70 and 80 and 90, what you see in people who are just, you know, they are these people that have evolved themselves, they're not vomiting their opinion all over everybody, they're not resigned, they're not resentful, they're not fearful, they're not unable to forgive, stuck in their ways. They can be fun, they can take the piss out of themselves and they're someone who's not a burden on the family. Not that I'm not judging these things, but it's like, that's the whole conversation.   Mason Taylor: (00:05:20): That's a very diluted one around this concept of Taoism and then get rid of the word, Taoism, ancient Chinese philosophy kind of stuff. It's just humans that were just like, how can we can just make this... Just keep us healthy for as long as possible and it's not deity based. You don't have to buy into a religion or anything like that. It's just around your own potential and your own discovery path. And that's what I started to discover before I started SuperFeast and I was like, that's... I wanted to get into herbs and then I discovered there were these herbs that were in that longterm focus and intention, so I just jumped in then and I didn't focus on the herbs back then, because I didn't think there was a market for it.   Mason Taylor: (00:06:00): And then I did actual markets for years and then people were coming to me with bigger and bigger intentions around their health and I was like, well, the only thing that's really going to help from what I can offer, at least, medicinal mushrooms like Reishi, tonic herbs like Astragalus and the Lion's Manes and Ho Shou Wus and all these really, the precious herbs, the Taoists call them. The superior herbs. They call them the messengers from heaven.   Mason Taylor: (00:06:25): And so over the years I just kept on adding them in and I've started doing a few formulas and educating people about this style of herbs that is more folky and it's not about, a lot of the time, practitioners and especially modern Chinese practitioners are like, "No. Herbal practise is for us. We dish out the herbs." Like this and you can't meddle with that. And you go back to the classics and there are these herbs that are like, these are really safe. And really beautiful. And can be used with a little bit of education, as long as you're determined to keep on listening to whether you can use these in everyday life.   Mason Taylor: (00:06:59): And that's the point of it. Take out the colonisation and the institutionalisation around healing ourselves and keeping ourselves healthy. And so I educated more and more about that. And then at some point my wife, now wife, joined me in the business about five years ago. We started taking it a bit seriously, because I have a bit of Peter Pan syndrome and I run off doing whatever I bloody want all the time. And then we took it seriously and it started really taking off and now we're a decent enough company, still family owned in Mullumbimby here now. I started off in Sydney.   Mason Taylor: (00:07:28): And yeah, we have a bunch of formulas and really, a bunch of crew here, working and helping us manifest the mission to help people just take that little bit extra control of their body. Feel that sovereignty and their capacity to not just cross their fingers about not getting sick. And then also as well, having longterm intentions and just having relationships with these herbs. They're really beautiful. I mentioned a few there. It's like the Schizandras. I don't have Ginseng, but the Ginsengs, these herbs that everyone would have like... We started the Cordyceps. These herbs are, yes, they're adaptogens and people are using them in a really cool way to help their body become more adaptive and to get greater output.   Mason Taylor: (00:08:18): That's when you look at them as an adaptogen herb, a Westerner. This is an adaptogen that's going to help you adapt and get better output. And that's sick. But that's an agenda based kind of in, output, what benefit to me. And that's cool as well. I don't mind that, but an adaptogen herb, like Schizandra or Ginseng is a herb that's going to help you. It has a non-specific effect in the body. So you don't know where the markers in the body are going to go or where the energy is going to go. You just know that it's going to harmonise more. And so it's not just going to take the immune system up and stimulate it, for example.   Mason Taylor: (00:08:54): It might lower it in some situations, like autoimmune conditions. And then it has an accumulative effect on the body. So the longer you take it, the greater effect you see. And this is how the Russians describe adaptogens. And then also, it has a non-toxic, non-harmful effect on the body, which is basically what 2,000 years ago, the first medic, Shennong, was like, hey, these are the herbs you take that are non-toxic. But then, yeah, so adaptogens good, people are using them.   Mason Taylor: (00:09:22): But then tonic herbalism and Taoist philosophy and then you take away the Taoism, it's just the philosophy of having a relationship longterm with this herb to help a dream of your own or a vision of your own health stay present throughout your life. And you're an athlete and you can see a lot of athletes all of a sudden go, I really want that potential now, and it's a strong intent, but I also, I'm starting to realise that I don't want to come out the backend of my professional athletic career and be flogged.   Mason Taylor: (00:09:49): And they start thinking about their 50 and 60 year old self and so, the terminology around tonic herbalism starts helping to align your outer actions and your lifestyle to that longterm intention as well as taking a shit load of Cordyceps or whatever now, to in order to get a really good workout and recovery in this instance. So yeah, that's kind of a long way of answering your question.   Jansen Andre: (00:10:15): So, yeah. Overwhelming, but you mentioned and I know on your website that these herbs and plants you source are ancestral to China. But I read you kept it that way except for Cordyceps. Is there a reason for this?   Mason Taylor: (00:10:33): Cordyceps is in China. It's just the wild Cordyceps is really rare and expensive and unsustainable to meet the demand. And so there's a technology there to ferment it in a broth and so, still then, it's the only one, so it's our only mushroom that's not grown on wood, grown outdoors, that kind of thing. We've got a very specific sourcing philosophy that we take very serious and Cordyceps is the only one that isn't strictly Di Dao. For that reason, but we just do our best. We've got a really unique broth recipe.   Mason Taylor: (00:11:05): It's why our Cordyceps is unique and isn't just like all the other CS spores in the market. And we've got a team of herbalists who tend to it and we don't grow on grain which is a big for me. A big no no. And I definitely don't have hardcore judgement of everyone that grows mushrooms on grain, but I don't personally agree with it, because it's not the native food of a mushroom. The native food of a medicinal mushroom is wood. And there's an alchemical process that occurs when that mushroom is growing through the wood. It has an enzymatic reaction with the wood. Is eating the carbohydrates within that wild wood, right.   Mason Taylor: (00:11:45): Quite often, people are like, it doesn't really matter. You can grow on grains and oats and coffee and some people even grow on paper. And it's cheap. What we do is expensive. And having integrity a lot of the time and upholding in the sense of wanting to uphold a tradition is really expensive and a lot of people are like, look, it doesn't matter. There's similar biomarkers in the one grown on whatever, even like a [inaudible 00:12:10]. And that's what the scientific community goes, you can just pick out, that's what scientism does. You go, I'm going to pick out one variable to justify that ours is just as good as the others.   Mason Taylor: (00:12:22): But then if you go back into true science, which is thousands of years of usage and subtle understandings through thousands and thousands of practitioners and people that have laid down the foundations for science to then jump in and create variables on this kind of herbal system, there are certain things that aren't measured yet, that they are aware of. Like you need to do a complete, full extraction of that herb so that it's not just that one beta glucan or chemical that you're justifying the awesomeness of your product with. There's undiscovered chemicals which are symbiotic to the entire reason that this herb is being revered for 5,000 years knowingly. And probably further back than that.   Mason Taylor: (00:13:16): And that's why we just kind of let them speak for themselves. People often find a really science data, we're data driven, but a real, pick a variable and market it kind of product and then people are like, that's good. And then they'll kind of want more, because they don't want to just trust that it's good and good stuff's happening. A lot of people will find our stuff and then they'll take it and there's a little "je nais se quois," a little special something that's present in the herb that they'll go, oh, it just feels a bit different. And yeah, when you get longterm, you feel more safe and comfortable taking something that is complete and it's been grown in the way as close to possible that our ancestors and our immune system have evolved taking it.   Mason Taylor: (00:13:58): And so there's a special little softness and trust that you can ease in and as well, then placebos start getting activated which just means you're not anxious and tense and just you're not trusting the mind's data and believing in marketing. You can feel that there's something with substance and essence going into your body. And that's why, and I'm definitely not the only one doing it, this is a very ancient tradition, growing herbs Di Dao. Going to the spiritual homeland of the herbs and buying and growing them there. Far away from industry. You're getting the spore or the seed from that area and making sure it's a particular micro climate in which you're growing in. This is based on texts over 2,000 years old that tell you how to do this.   Mason Taylor: (00:14:47): And people are like, oh, but it's not organic. And it's like, yeah, you can buy organic certifications very easy and I like organic certification, but the way I... I could go organic really quickly. Or I could drop, I'd have to pay through the nose. It's exorbitant what these people expect me to send out there. It's a big business which is I'm like, well, I don't need to get you out, just pay you thousands and thousands to go to every single little micro farm. And these are micro farmers. These are villagers who we're growing from and that's why organic farms are these huge growing operations, which are really good and can do high output.   Mason Taylor: (00:15:30): And they're doing it really well, a lot of the time, but they're doing it in a way that's not, you can't go right up into the mountains and grow in that capacity. And you can't do it with wild wood in that capacity in order to cheaply be able to just get that person out to certify organic, that big farm, indoor lab that you're doing. As good as it is. And I really, like a lot of my friends who are competitors who do that, because they're then able to do actually do mass market stuff. But for me to go organic, I'd have to dramatically take a back step in effectiveness. Because I'm a little, first of all, I'm a small company and we also support people in the village, say where we're growing Reishi.   Mason Taylor: (00:16:13): Like one of our farmers, Mr. Li, is training other people in the village so that there's actually jobs locally. That's localising the industry. It's keeping it traditional. It's keeping it family owned. It's not this huge herb, these overarching companies that own all the farmers and tell them, like me having investors telling me you can't do it that way. You need to work this way. And I'm like, no, no, no, but we're going to lose the integrity and they're like, look, it doesn't really matter. If people don't know about that standard that you set and then majority of people won't really give a shit. And we're like, no, but I give a shit and that's the same with the farmers. They give a shit upholding this tradition and they know if they produce the best Di Dao herbs and we have people who know how to test that, try it.   Mason Taylor: (00:17:00): I know how to test it, try it and go, hey, the quality is, this never happened, but I've done it before when I was doing my testing of right in the beginning of knowing that they say that's Di Dao, but that's not true. And you grill them. They go, oh yeah, that's actually a commercial spore that we're growing with. It's not a wild spore, Reishi, from the area in which we're growing, because that's hard to do. And so, yeah, it's a very difficult thing to do, growing in this way. But it connects you to something. It connects you, you're going back to the source of these, why these herbs were revered and so those farmers that are growing this way know that there is an impact, a viability of their product, if they make it the absolute best possible and don't compromise.   Mason Taylor: (00:17:53): They know that there are companies like mine that will buy that top notch Di Dao product. And so we get a little, we get Mr. Li teaching a young woman locally, how to grow Reishi and the first few years she might not be doing the absolute best, but there might be a little bit of crème de la crème that we will be able to buy off her in the beginning. And we've got people going out there and making sure the area is clean. We test in TGA labs for pesticides, metals, aflatoxins, all and beyond, and then all these things that actually aren't needed to be tested for, but we do, in China and in Australia.   Mason Taylor: (00:18:32): And so what I would need to do for organic is send out this guy who charges thousands of dollars in order for me to maintain this little thing that they think is a marketing hole in one, is having an organic symbol. And pay him a thousand dollars to go this woman's farm, check it out, pay them, whatever, three thousand dollars a night for them to stay over the night and then go back and do some other little testing in order for them to go, yeah, I'm going to tell you what you knew already. It's good. There's no pesticides in the area. And is that worth it in order to support the localization? It's good, I want to support this woman, but I'm not getting enough Reishi, but I want to support her.   Mason Taylor: (00:19:17): And so these are the nuances of behind the scenes of how our company works. And I know you started talking about Cordyceps and we just went into discussing why it's a good question, why isn't Cordyceps at that same level as the other herbs. And it's just because we can't leave the crop in abundance. It's like Reishi. We don't do Reishi wild anymore. We did when we started. And now it just got too popular. Before it became an issue, we opted out and went to the best possible farming practise. And we've done that with Schizandra as well. In the beginning it was just like, there's just no way we're going to be able to ever get through this much wild Schizandra that's in Changbai Mountain and sure enough, yeah, actually when this probably doesn't seem too healthy.   Mason Taylor: (00:20:03): And we work with good local governments. We move provinces in China if they're irresponsible with the land management which I know people who like China, that's not true, actually no, it is true. There are local governments, some that are like ours, that are really harshly regulating the population of pine trees or the amount of pine nuts that are up in the Changbai forest and soon to be the only amount of Chaga that's been harvested in order to maintain and preserve. So we work with that, but then go beyond that just to make sure we don't strip the environment. You've got to leave it better than you found it.   Mason Taylor: (00:20:44): So yeah, we've gone now to, I think, the majority farming of... You know, it's still incredible Schizandra. It's still in the wild. It's still the most amazing Schizandra being pumped out, but it just makes it a little bit better for everyone. But yeah, I can't do that with Cordyceps. So do that in a broth.   Jansen Andre: (00:21:03): So you're adjusting, from what I gather from that, determining, depending on how popular or how much of a certain thing you're selling, you have to go back and look, is it possible to keep getting it from the same source?   Mason Taylor: (00:21:21): It's a never ending analysis. So the biggest at the moment is Chaga. So the last time I was in China, we were going up to Chagang to harvest Chaga up in, near the North Korean border, it's a mountain called, Changbai Mountain, a national park there. And they were just moving in the direction of, it sounded like there were some, the way it worked is the guys that would go in, they'd go on week expeditions to go and harvest Chaga, because it's quite deep where you go and they've been doing it for 20 years, at least.   Mason Taylor: (00:21:56): So they know how to ensure that they're not stripping so much that they're not going to have a crop for the next year or in five years and 10 years. A lot of them are getting their kids ready to do this as well. But now it was getting popular, so we're like, okay, it was getting a few two minute noodle harvesters, as I call them. As always. Going like, I can do this. But the barrier to entry seems to be holding. It's a skillset that can't just be, people just can't all of a sudden know how to go and find the Chaga. There's snakes and shit and people are scared of going there and doing these expeditions. So the barrier to entry seems like enough, but I've already talked to my team over there and been like, let's just watch it.   Mason Taylor: (00:22:47): Because North American Chaga is not being managed really well. Now it's starting to, but it's not a sustainable harvesting of Chaga that's going on in North America and people think it's the same happening in China. And it's not at that point yet and the government's also about to start regulating and licencing the people that can go in to this particular area to harvest Chaga. They've already done it with pine nuts and it's really, they're not just a little slap on the wrist. You get really scorned if you go and break those rules.   Mason Taylor: (00:23:17): And so yeah, we haven't had to do that yet for Chaga, but I've got a back up source that's my second favourite place to get Chaga from, if need be. But yeah, that's an example of keeping our finger on the pulse. And with Poria, for example. Poria, really not well known in this kind of, in my community. Maybe my community a little bit more, but a really popular Chinese herb. Not so much in the adaptogen community, Poria mushroom isn't really well known. And it requires pine to grow and so wild pine is what you want. And the primary place to grow Di Dao in the centre of China, the government wasn't regulating the harvesting of pine.   Mason Taylor: (00:24:05): And so, even though the people we would work with, we're pretty sure, especially because they ended up moving with the operation, but they were adhering to harvesting methods that weren't going to be stripping the whole ecosystem. The government wasn't regulating it and so there were people around taking advantage and it leaves a bad vibe on it and so you don't want that vibe. And you can't do Di Dao if you're involved in something that isn't going to sustainably leave the environment as it is. So we went to our second ideal place to grow Di Dao down in Jinlun province.   Mason Taylor: (00:24:41): And there, the government harshly regulates for each person how much pine you're going to be able to go and harvest. Where you can harvest. Ensuring that you're planting and contributing back to the replanting to the extent where it's like we'll go and trek up and ask you to show where you've harvested yours and then if they find anything else in the vicinity, they'll investigate it and have it be marked as being a particular farmer's quota. And so those are the things that go in behind the scenes that people don't realise to actually grow a Di Dao herb and that's why it's hard.   Mason Taylor: (00:25:15): You can imagine, it's like oh, screw this. Well, let's just get pine from a domestic pine farm. But that's, of course, it's so easy and that needs to be happening to an extent, because you can't give the world how much Poria it needs of all wild pine. But there is a way and maybe it stops at some point. I don't know. Maybe at some point I need to just have, all right, here's the Di Dao range and then here's the other range. Here's the one that's maybe a little more for widespread consumption. But yeah, at the moment we don't have to do that. But yeah, that's everything that kind of, the other stuff that goes in behind the scenes.   Jansen Andre: (00:25:56): Very interesting. It seems like a very intense and long process as well as people putting their lives on the line in terms of wild animals and nature and stuff to go and forage and harvest these herbs. I just want to strip it back, right back for people that are unaware of adaptogens and herbs. What would be a reason that somebody would consider taking medicinal mushrooms or tonic herbs and what are the main few that you focus on at SuperFeast that you would include in say, your average person's daily consumption that you would consider the most important. Considering we live in such a Yang, fast lifestyle.   Mason Taylor: (00:26:51): Good question, man, good question. There's many directions I could take why people take tonic herbs. I'll start seeing if I can rattle them off and not distract myself. So clinically, the tonic herbs in general, a lot of them are used in formulas in order to overcome particular disease states. But I leave that to a practitioner. The intention of tonic herbalism isn't, and my formulas, for instance, isn't to treat disease states.   Mason Taylor: (00:27:27): But when you're in that instance where you're working with a practitioner, say how they would use it is perhaps they would get you onto medicinal mushrooms alongside a treatment... A really good example is chemo. There's a lot of people who have identified that you can take medicinal mushrooms alongside the chemo. So a lot of people are out there going to medicinal mushrooms, specifically for the treatment of cancer. And there are institutions researching that and there are countries that utilise that in their actual conventional medical system. But that's something that we're not at that place yet.   Mason Taylor: (00:28:11): But there are a lot of practitioners that have realised that having medicinal mushrooms going into conjunction to cancer treatments like chemo and radiotherapy, the intent there being to ensure that the body isn't destroyed by the treatment itself. So keeping the immune system adept, strong, activated. So that's one area where people might use tonic herbs or a practitioner might use tonic herbs.   Mason Taylor: (00:28:38): In the convalescence stage of a disease, so the healing and the building back. So after you've undergone... Someone with, I'm just trying to think of an example, if someone's gone through two years of hyperthyroidism and they've been undergoing lots of little micro herbal treatments and hormone therapies and they get to a point where they're feeling, okay, I don't feel like I'm sick anymore, but those years absolutely wasted me. And took it out of me mentally, spiritually, emotionally, physically. And so at that point tonic herbs are going to have a lot to do with the rebuilding of the body, right? That's when they're really beautiful and tonifying. They can tonify functions of the body.   Mason Taylor: (00:29:28): There's also, we could say the same for preparing for big surgeries. Preparing the body for huge medical treatments and that doesn't just have to be things like chemo. There are a lot of herbal treatments or even someone who's sick and flies over to Mexico and is getting that hypothermia treatment and they're doing the oxygenation of the blood and they're doing lots of colonics and whatever it is. Those take a lot out of the body. You need a lot of strength and so people would use tonic herbs to strengthen the body and prepare it in those instances.   Mason Taylor: (00:30:06): Then there are people who are looking to, they're looking to prevent injury, prevent acute illness, thinking about just preventing illness in the future, preventing exhaustion creeping in the future. They watch their parents' minds kind of waste away, their brains kind of waste away or the bones waste away. And so there's an intent around prevention. And a lot of people are starting to realise that there is this class of herbs that are basically herbal foods that can assist you and might not be perfect and there's no guarantees, but it's like, why are we going and upgrading the quality of our water from tap to filtered to maybe the best spring water we can find and adding in some hydrogen.   Mason Taylor: (00:30:58): Why are we going from yeah, cool, I'm getting organic veggies from the health food store to try and include some wild foods in your diet. It's because you're upgrading and potentiating and trying to get these habits to norms that will mineralize the body and potentiate the body. Tone the water of your body into this beautiful crystaline substance that can help you maintain a high quality of life for longterm. And that's the same with tonic herb intention. And so there's that instance.   Mason Taylor: (00:31:31): There are people who will take it further from the Taoist intention who want to cultivate longevity. And that can be the longevity of your ability to undergo big psychological evolutions and initiations. So a lot of people have the strength to really get past maybe that leap from 50 years old. It's going to take, all of a sudden everything that you'd identified as important and what makes you up, becomes less important internally to you. But you don't have the ability to let go of that identity, shed the skin and go into that next phase of your life. Because it's scary and I don't have judgement of that.   Mason Taylor: (00:32:17): I've had to learn. It's been tough for me, even just going, feeling from 30 and becoming a new dad and identifying with being one particular way and then all of a sudden having a business and needing to land, basically. And not just be flying off with the fairies and so on and so forth. All these different little changes and shifts that happen throughout our lives. To be able to move through them with a skip and a step. That takes a lot. And just in order to ensure that our bones stay healthy. People want longevity for the sake of making sure the kidneys are healthy. The kidneys regulate the bone marrow, the brain, the dewy substances.   Mason Taylor: (00:32:54): The brain in Taoism is considered marrow. So ensuring that that aspect of the body is supported by its core organ so that we have greater capacity to think in really complex ways and feel in really complex ways when we're older. Basically, all that comes down to in Daoism as an intention, is cultivation of life. Cultivation of the treasures. Our Jing, our Qi, our Chen. And cultivation can literally be as we burn through it. Because you only have a certain amount of Jing, say, like the wax of the candle. As you burn through it, you add a little bit more on.   Mason Taylor: (00:33:30): Well, that's actually adding a little bit more, it's more so keep living off Qi. Keeping living off breath, diet, the herbs and that's the energy you use to get through the day and you don't have to take the wax off the candle and put like a coal burning oven. And get your energy in a non-sustainable way. If you burn through your Jing too early, you're going to not have the foundations the thrive. And you might live a long time, but people are really dying a long time.   Mason Taylor: (00:34:02): So that whole intention around longevity in that sense, which our culture does not value as much as, really supporting people to become elders, in a sense that they're healthy and that they're in this capacity to share their wisdom lovingly and willingly with younger generations. That doesn't exist that much. You need to take that into your own sovereign intention. And so in that sense, that all comes down to there are transformation of energy going on through your organs at all times as it continues to circulate. And that transformation is Yin Yang, Yin Yang, Yin Yang, Yin Yang.   Mason Taylor: (00:34:47): And that's just your capacity for your Qi to transform smoothly and constantly, which means you're going to constantly have emotions and they can constantly transform and lead you in places where you can get a little bit of a virtue going. And then the fear comes back and boom, boom. So that's all that. And then when you go in on that, that's the five organ system, the Wuxing, five elements. Even though the elements is a rough translation. So the whole point is to ensure that the energy is moving through the heart and the spleen and the lung and the kidneys and the liver and it's able to just transform.   Mason Taylor: (00:35:28): Yin Yang, Yin Yang. And that's like that fire Qi. It's just a Yin Yang transformation of Qi going from substance, from something of Yin and consolidation to the Yang through expression and movement in unique ways. And in the heart, it kind of like, ah, that reminds me of fire. It feels like fire and in the spleen, it goes to the spleen. That's really earthy and soil kind of phase transforming through the kidneys. It's like, ah, it's got that water quality. It's just a feeling of what's out there is also in here. But it's really simple. Just, your lifestyle just keeps it going. Just keeps it transforming.   Mason Taylor: (00:36:10): And if you're transforming smoothly, you're not wasting your Jing, Qi and Shen. And at some point you can cultivate your Jing, Qi and Shen. The idea, so you're less of an asshole and more of an awesome person when you get older and you're quite healthy. So that's another intention there. And that's probably the reasons why people would get attracted to it and then now it's as well. People are just, I need my brain to be on this morning, so I'm drinking Neural Nectar. This incredible herbs supporting that marrow of the brain and other areas that I know translate to me feeling sharp and there's blood flow through the marrow. I can feel wit and cloudy and supplementing of the kidney energy that's supporting that what we see as mental capacity.   Mason Taylor: (00:36:54): So in a Western sense, the Nootropics. They're just helping me nourish the brain, getting some L-dopa in from the Mucuna. Helping me to regulate my moods, so on and so forth. So I also have very micro, not a lot of the time, probably an 80/20 macro intention to micro intention. But there's a micro intention today, because I've got this podcast and I'm having someone on mind, I want to make sure that I can talk and think in really lateral ways without using what's actually not there to be used. You know what I mean?   Mason Taylor: (00:37:31): And so there's that as well. And that's kind of where it falls, you know, take Cordyceps before you work out so that your lung is nourished in full Qi flow, so it can function in its Western pulmonary capacity, blood oxygenating capacity, in a better way. While it nourishes the kidney energy and balances out the Yin Yang in the kidneys which is where strength and endurance and power emerges from, if that Qi is flowing. And so do a little short term. Yeah, have that Cordy before an event so that I'm feeling really incredible and that little bit of extra capacity. But then eventually, that becomes, huh, I can embody that at all times and not have reliance on the herb to do it in an immediate manner. Yeah.   Jansen Andre: (00:38:19): So back on what you were originally just talking about with Cordyceps and different types of adaptogens, what about an athlete? What would be the most useful kind of tonic herb or adaptogen to use to increase performance, prevent injury and be mentally sharp and clear for everyone listening. Say, for instance, someone was about to go and compete, about to go and do an endurance event, in the lead up to the event, would you say use it for four weeks to gain, I know you were saying before it's accumulative as well on the body. What's kind of your thoughts on that and timeframe with consuming something like that to get the best benefit of it so that when it comes to race day, you're ready?   Mason Taylor: (00:39:18): It's sooner the better. Day before is awesome as well. The intention is, maybe people can relate with say, their breath work. Maybe they're like, oh cool, I'm going to start doing some breath work for this event and wow, that really helped me get prepared and I feel like I had greater output and recovery during the event. I'm going to do that again for the next event and then the one afterwards, they just never stop the breath work, because it's like, ah, this helps me feel good all the time. And all of a sudden it becomes like drinking water or having a smoothie or whatever.   Mason Taylor: (00:39:56): That's generally where tonic herbalism is going to land you and you'll realise it's got three intentions, they say. A really direct one in order that you might pick up the usage of particular herbs, which I'll get into soon, before an event in order to ensure that specifically your lungs are really potentiated and your kidneys as well are really potentiated during the event. So you have a high athletic performance while you're actually in there.   Mason Taylor: (00:40:23): So that's the first and then you might pick up some of those herbs at the beginning, in the weeks leading up. Then you're going to have herbs for your recovery to ensure that you haven't, you want to ensure that you in flogging yourself, you're not "flugging" the substance of your body. And I'll get into those as well. And then there's going to be just your everyday regular intention, like taking your medicinal mushrooms, like a Mason Taylor:'s Mushrooms blend that we've got.   Mason Taylor: (00:40:50): It's got a lot of herbs that will help potentiate you for the event, but you might not have that association. In the lead up, you might want to go focus on things like Cordyceps and Astragalus and the Qi herbs and the Yang herbs to help you get ready for that. So that might just lock into a... And then when I'm just between events and I'm just wanting to keep myself healthy and going, then I'll take my Mason Taylor:'s Mushrooms or there might be something else that you're interested in, like Schizandra.   Mason Taylor: (00:41:16): Ironically, all the tonic herbs are going to help. But some of them just have the brand and the proclivity to help an athlete perform much more. So let's have a look at where you're going to be at in the build up and I've mentioned them already. There's going to be a combination of, a lot of the time it's the Jing herbs and the Qi herbs which people are going to be more attracted to when wanting output. And that is also going to depend on how sustainable your recovery is in training and your lifestyle is in training.   Mason Taylor: (00:41:54): If you are really good at sleeping and really good at taking days off and really good at getting into your parasympathetic nervous system regularly, and not feeling fearful. You're not an athlete, you're not looking for performance out of fear constantly, because you're not an enough, you know. There's an actual, really soulful intent that isn't, your identity isn't dependent on the outcome. That shift's going to mean that your athletic intentions aren't going to leak your Jing as much as someone that is doing those things.   Mason Taylor: (00:42:30): So not to put, that's all of us. We're all learning through this process of getting into the dojo and a lot of the time, while we're younger we're not going to be very good at it, so a lot of athletes really like the Jing herbs. So the Jing formula, Cordyceps is another amazing one. I'll even throw Schizandra and the Beauty Blend that we've got over at SuperFeast into that one. It's going to really ensure that you actually have the substance in your kidneys to feed the power and the strength and the adrenaline.   Mason Taylor: (00:43:04): When you're leading up into that, Cordyceps kind of takes the reins. I know, I don't like, I'm pretty a lot of people fall into the tonic herb space who do like Yang herbs, like Deer Antler Velvet, there's a tonic by ant that people will get into or it might be Tongkat Ali and other beautiful tonic herbs. Siberian Ginseng, Rhodiola, these are those going over towards these Yang tonic herbs that will take the substance of your body.   Mason Taylor: (00:43:34): So it will take, say, the water of your body that holds all your power and strength in the Yin of the kidneys and the Yang will start heating it up and turning it into vapour in your body. And so that you become really lubricated and that power and that potential in the water is spread through the entirety of your body and germinating the Jing so that you can really express. That's what the Yang is about and why you're going to be attracted to those Yang herbs.   Mason Taylor: (00:43:59): A lot of the time, a primary example is the Cordyceps. And that's why Jing herbs are really popular going in, but if you are feeling really good with your lifestyle and your recovery and everything, at some point you'll see a switch go over the main herbs that you're going to use to prepare for are the Qi herbs, like Astragalus, Ginseng, White Atractylodes, Codonopsis, even Poise. And they are like, so I've got a Qi formula which people will, all of the athletes will go, yeah, Jing. Oh my God, the Jing and the Cordyceps, that's like, I need these and I can feel them feeding me.   Mason Taylor: (00:44:39): But at some point they click over into, they feel like they've got a good flow that they're always ready to perform and then they go, uh huh, now I just need to bring a refinement by the way that I animate myself and I move myself and they start tonifying. And this is an interesting one, because the Cordyceps is a Jing and Qi tonic. And this is why it's the perfect intro for people. But then they start adding in Astragalus and the Qi formula and all of a sudden their lungs' ability to bring in vitality and energy to the body, so it can animate itself and not get fatigued, that's what becomes more important and you've always got the foundation of your Jing through your lifestyle and maybe taking of Jing herbs in your recovery stage. Does that make sense?   Jansen Andre: (00:45:28): Yeah. Yeah, wow. I was literally just about to ask you about the Qi blend. As you describe on your website, the Energy Blend, but it is a slower building effect on the body in terms of stimulant and hit as per se.   Mason Taylor: (00:45:43): Yeah, it's a slower build, because most people don't have the foundations within the kidneys in order to really get the most out of their diet and their spleen to produce Qi and the Qi that you're extracting from the air. But that is the true, they combine the Gong Qi that you get from your food, from cooking your food and the Gong Qi that you get from breathing. Your body harvests that and combines that and then there's Yin Yang expressions of that.   Mason Taylor: (00:46:20): One goes to the surface of the body and it's known as your Wei Qi and the other goes through the organs and the meridians and charges the organs so that you've got daily function. That's constantly happening. And so it's a more direct Qi, but in the beginning, people need to experience their own Jing, because everyone's trying to just have heaps of Qi energy immediately without having the foundation. So they need to take the Jing herbs, they need to learn how to sleep and recover and being Yin, because otherwise see what happens. People are constant heating up all their waters and creating vapour. What happens if you don't replenish the water?   Mason Taylor: (00:46:56): Boom, you become deficient. And so once you do have that good flow, so I like talking like James Newbury, the crossfit guy in my podcast, because our first podcast, he was just like, it was all recovery. And I was like, yeah, good message. And so for a lot of people listening, Jing's going to give them those, holy shit, I feel so good on the Jing. And they think it's giving them this energy. But no, it's all of a sudden you're plugging holes and you're not used to the holes being plugged and you're not used to holding onto the water. You're used to constantly needing to replenish the water.   Mason Taylor: (00:47:31): I don't know what that is in the athletic community, but it's like energy drinks, coffee. Doing all hardcore Yang breath practises so that you've got some oxygen coursing through your veins and so you start becoming less dependent on these extreme ways to get energy into yourself. But once you've done that, to an extent, not that I don't like these things. They can just be done sustainably. Once you've done those, then you start doing the Qi tonics and then it starts, you really start feeling the quick vitality come back.   Mason Taylor: (00:48:04): But it's just a really good way for people to know if you're not feeling like there's a... If you can't feel with the Qi herbs that you've got a really good, slow build of energy occurring, it's like, okay, maybe I don't have the foundation. You can do your Qi herbs, your Qi blend, alongside Jing herbs, Jing formula. There's no rules. You make your own way. I need to make rules so people feel like they have a framework to enter, but really, you can just go slow and steady.   Mason Taylor: (00:48:32): There are no rules in tonic herbalism. It's your herbal practise, but then that's why we're here to help you as you go. Change the framework to make it more unique, but I also have to give a general one when you're entering. And yeah, so then at that point the Qi herbs is what you find eventually, it's the bridge. The Shen is what connects you to the heaven. Your virtuous nature, your kindness, your generosity. Which is also really at some point in your athletic career, you realise it's really important to cultivate as well, right?   Mason Taylor: (00:49:10): Your ability to accept. Your natural ability, so on and so forth. Staying humble if you're like an absolute maniac and naturally the best ever. That Shen, heavenly, virtuous nature is really a beautiful thing that you're going to need to cultivate as well, so maybe your Shen herbs is something as well that you take in the aftermath in order to process. How did I feel when that person that I used to be better than has started beating me? How am I feeling about that? And processing that. That can be the Shen blend in herbs like Albizzia Flower, Asparagus Root, Reishi, Pearl or Oyster Shell. Again, not plant based, but these are those herbs and they've got a Chen formula there.   Mason Taylor: (00:50:00): And it can be part of the Shen formula, because it's not vegan, then just Reishi on its own and even again, like Schizandra is also a really beautiful shen tonic in itself, but you can sit and contemplate, how did I feel about that win? What does that win mean to me? And how can I, what is now my, did it feel vacant? Did it feel amazing? Chen is really that processing stage as well, so that can be really useful and that, but that's the heavenly. The earth based, just being a physical body is the Jing. And so a lot of the time you will see Taoists and people who get really just clicking to auto mode with the herbs, will just constantly be on the Qi tonics.   Mason Taylor: (00:50:43): And that's the mushrooms as well, mostly. Munda mushrooms, like the Chaga, Lion's Mane, Poria, Reishi to an extent, Maitake, Shiitake, Turkey Tail, Tremella, they all have a proclivity for regulating water in the body through a spleen function and heavily a lung function, heavily a regulation of Qi through the liver function, so they're seen as those middle to good Shen, Qi, Jing. Qi is really helping you translate and be that bridge between heaven and earth, which is what the Taoists see that we are, bringing virtuous nature. Generosity, kindness, love, infinite love, to the absolute physical realm. And where we've got the capacity through Qi to bridge those two dimensions.   Mason Taylor: (00:51:34): And so you'll find people in automatic mode. You'll click into just taking medicinal mushrooms and Qi herbs. And that will just be keeping you, because that just keeps the spark in the machine. Your lifestyle's keeping the machine healthy and not flogging it and recovering. You know you've got a Gong to put in practise and maybe spending time in nature so you're naturally cultivating that Shen a lot of the time, because you have a desire to be as good a person as you possibly could be. Not that good, bad has anything to do with it.   Mason Taylor: (00:52:03): And so you just take the Qi to kind of, so that you're getting the most out of your breath, the most out of your food. You have a good diet. You're not too stressed out all the time, so you can actually breathe. You don't have to do crazy where I'm half breathing all the time in order to get that breath. Although they're really cool as well, all of a sudden your whole lifestyle's geared towards keeping the spark in the machine moving and keep everything regulating so you're evolving and just living as harmoniously as possible.   Mason Taylor: (00:52:32): And then at times you might spill over and go, cool, I'm in winter now. I'm getting off coffee for 30 days and taking Jing. We've got a 30 days of Jing challenge. And you go, cool, I'm going sit and really consider my kidneys and my fear and look into the deep waters of my body and cultivate that Jing. That kidney water energy where the Jing is kept. You have to look at your mortality at that point, what that means and see what arises from that fear. Feel like, oh, what was useful fear? Just actually keeping you alive. And then where's it irrelevant or irrational fear? So there might be times when you go really deep into the kidney Jing herbs for that emotional intention as well.   Mason Taylor: (00:53:17): And then you're kind of like, cool, now I just need to not think about my tonic herbal practise and just click in a order with the mushrooms and the Qi herbs. Or whatever. For a long time, people are going to just be clicking into just, oh cool, I'm just taking Jing herbs. And that's fine as well. Again, there's no rule, but you just got to listen and check in every now and then to adjust.   Jansen Andre: (00:53:39): So let's talk about a framework. It's obviously an intuitive kind of practise of taking these herbs, but say for instance someone is constantly jacked and hyped all the time. They're not focusing on their breathing. They're not doing meditation and they're constantly tired. But they want to find that inner Qi and they want to get back to ground zero and get grounded. What would you say, how would they all start to include these to channel that?   Mason Taylor: (00:54:11): I mean, okay, so let's look at your really, if you're really looking at longterm, that that's your identity and you don't really know your body and you don't really know the path back to harmony, because you've gone too far off into power lifting or the triathlons or whatever it is. And a lot of the time, and I've been there heavily with my identification of being this perfect, healthy specimen. I've had a long time as a raw foodist, pretty much a vegan vegan, it was kind of where I was coming from. And it was really great for me, but at some point I went way too far off centre into my own ideological dogma.   Mason Taylor: (00:54:53): And then I just in tracking back took a long time. And I enjoyed that process. So it's like, if you're willing and wanting to do it on your own, then very good. But it's going to be a slow process and it's going to be a matter of you slowly getting the terminology that can help explain where you're at. Maybe that's a Western terminology, maybe that's a classical Chinese Medicine terminology of whether it's a Yang deficiency, primarily, or a Yin deficiency or maybe it's just like in a hyper way, your inner sympathetic nervous system creates excess cortisol, maybe.   Mason Taylor: (00:55:31): It doesn't matter what. You need a terminology and a framework to take you back to centre. And if you're too far off it's just, cut the time and go find a classical acupuncturist or maybe a really good naturopath who can do your markers. And so that way, just to start with, I'll say that, because if you're feeling a bit lost and anxious about it, that's a way, in a grounded way, to do it with tonic herbalism is really good, but it's a big stab in the dark that might not actually hit the specifics for your treatment.   Mason Taylor: (00:56:06): Because that's potentially, you're on a trajectory towards early degeneration or not. And so although it might be like a lot of lifestyle factors, like adding in some tonic herbs, starting to getting some Jing yoga in or some Qi Gong into your practise, like all these kinds of things, they're going to be lifestyle things that you're going to want to work on. At the same time, your proclivity and need to go that extreme, is something that you'll need to address. And you need to get really in touch with your body. So although it's not seen as a real symptomatic illness or anything at that point, you want a practitioner. Because you don't get too many opportunities in your life where you clock onto that intent to come back into harmony and live in harmony for longterm, and you want to take advantage of that opportunity really quick and really work with someone to get an understanding of exactly who you are and what your body is and how it relates.   Mason Taylor: (00:57:01): And a classical acupuncturist can really help you go like, look, you're... You know, for me, me and a friend, we both are entrepreneurs. One of us is more geared towards a Yang deficiency, the other more towards a Yin deficiency. For me it's a Yin deficiency, for him it's a Yang deficiency. And so, just little things for him are really specific. For Yang it's sitting on the surface of the body and you go and do extreme saunas. You're wasting, you're releasing all of your Yang. And so it's not really a useful thing to do and so maybe getting in the sauna without having that excess sweating.   Mason Taylor: (00:57:35): So those are little things that where it's going... And for me it's otherwise. For me it's the end action of the substance and the Yin of the body, is what I'm constantly needing to adjust my lifestyle to cultivating. I'm not someone as well who does run on Yang. I'm a very Yang type person, but then I'm able to see over the last four years, at some point I hit this, I had an identity about being this outspoken, I'm this huge personality and I'm Yang and I'm achieving, but at some point what clicked in, which is something that's on all of my charts, if you look at my human design and my astrology and all those kind of things, at some point I need to come back and do a cave and reflect over the last few years. It's far out.   Mason Taylor: (00:58:24): I've been constantly drawn back to just being in darkness and in a hovel and I've kind of judged myself for doing that. And going like, why am I doing this? Why my like is, why am I not out achieving? So on and so forth. But when I start actually working with, I can actually, whether it's through a bit of therapy, a practitioner or majority is just getting my own reflection back into forgiveness of myself and love of myself constantly. I know when it's like, now I need a little click on the ear to stop whinging and get up and do something which you know is right for yourself. Or when it's like, hey, you've got to listen to yourself right now.   Mason Taylor: (00:59:04): And in that instance it's because I've gone really towards Yin depletion and so for me then I just kind of, then I need to find my way and to live sustainably so that I don't chronically do that to myself and then have to have these episodes where I just can't see anyone. That's not a healthy way to be. And so you've got to listen. But, and then coming back to the fact that someone's being extreme in the athletic world. Just generally, you're going to want to start getting onto some Jing herbs, because generally, you would have depleted yourself.   Mason Taylor: (00:59:40): The Jing formula I've just got there is a neutral balanced Yin Yang. It doesn't throw you through fire in any direction. Generally really good for the population to start, giving you the experience of your kidney water Qi flowing so that you can feel that you're not wasting anymore. You're not leaking it. And then with that you maybe notice a distinction around ah, maybe I should drop some coffee and maybe you can just do some good sleep and then so that's a good entry.   Mason Taylor: (01:00:06): And then the mushrooms. Because they're just so all over the place regulating of the body and protecting of the body. It's like a formula, like the Mason Taylor:'s Mushrooms formula, if you want capsules, like the Mushroom M8. And other brands as well. If anyone ever has any questions about other brands, I'm not precious. I just do SuperFeast, because I learned, I had a problem for years and years about talking about my own company. I don't know why, this is my thing.   Mason Taylor: (01:00:34): I didn't like having products and felt uncomfortable with it, but I can see people listening to me, listening to this podcast, SuperFeast is there as a place for them to access these really precious herbs so I do just talk about it in the SuperFeast context, but feel free to send me others if you just want me to give you a heads up on different things.   Mason Taylor: (01:00:54): The mushrooms are just, they're in every organ. Like a formula like that, they're in every organ. They're immunologically getting yourself potentiated and modulated and so a lot can just start going right when you get onto the mushrooms. And you just start there. And you do two months and you start with a quarter teaspoon of the extract powder and then you maybe get up to a teaspoon. Some people are more sensitive, they like just a half a teaspoon. Some people, whether it's the Mason Taylor:'s or the Jing formula, some people are like, my body wants two heaped teaspoons a day. Is that okay?   Mason Taylor: (01:01:28): So, yes. Listen to your body. And that might happen for a week. Sometimes people do that for two months. I took mushrooms, two tablespoons of mushrooms of Chaga and Reishi for two years, basically, straight. Every day. Pretty much. But that was because I'm very extreme. Always very excess too. I found a pendulum, my pendulum doesn't swing so far anymore, but that's my personality and what I needed to do in order to initiate myself into the world that I'm in right now and really understand the mushrooms. But what's important, is as much to listen to that part of you that wants to up the dose, is to listen to that part of you that knows when it's time to down the dose.   Mason Taylor: (01:02:10): And not, because the tonic herbs are beautiful and you don't form

Primal Alchemy's mission is to bring you the most cutting edge tonic herbs in their most bioavailable form. Founder Chris Storey introduces us to the range, and shares with us what Di Tao sourcing is, and why every product is tuned to 432hz.

Primal Alchemy's mission is to bring you the most cutting edge tonic herbs in their most bioavailable form. Founder Chris Storey introduces us to the range, and shares with us what Di Tao sourcing is, and why every product is tuned to 432hz.

#10 On this week’s episode, step into the game and learn how to level TF up with the Matrix Assassin girls and their guest Chris Storey, the CEO of Primal Alchemy (a visionary holistic health and performance brand) and host of Primal Alchemy’s Red Pill Initiation Hour podcast. Chris is the ultimate go to person for bio-hacking, peak state human performance, supplementation, and lifestyle optimization. He strives to accelerate the evolution of consciousness by helping others become the ultimate versions of themselves by maximizing their physical, mental, and spiritual capabilities.  Topics discussed include: How Chris built the Primal Alchemy brand, his experience becoming a Freemason (now ex-Freemason), trips to Antarctica and the Himalayas, Di Tao sourced products, water structuring, how to navigate the Super Human Optimization Map, The Monroe Institute, detoxing the body, the veganism agenda, ancestral diets, GMOs, benefits of eating locally sourced foods, The Farsight Institute, false light, soul catchers, the Enneagram personality test, shifting consciousness, exiting city life, and so much more.  You can find Chris: IG: @primalalchemyukWebsite: primalalchemy.co.ukEtsy store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/PrimalAlchemy?ref=shop_suggThank you for deliberately rendering us into your reality and stepping into the game! Follow us on Instagram: @MatrixAssassinsThis is the beginning of an incredible journey and we thank you for joining us as we all #AssassinateTheMatrix togetherIntro Music: https://bit.ly/3sls42b

Today we talk with Health educator, speaker, tonic herbalist and founder of SuperFeast, Mason Taylor.Mason has spent over a decade in the trenches of all areas of holistic health and goes to the extremes to uphold the Di Dao philosophy in all the tonic herbs & medicinal mushrooms SuperFest has to offer. He is the host of the SuperFeast Podcast and the Mason Taylor Show where he dives deeper into the world of all things health & tonic herbalism.What we cover:Going through seasonality in life Being out of sync with natureProblems with picking apart wise traditions Reductionistic approach vs holistic approachWhat are the Superior herbs & mushrooms? What is the Di Tao philosophy & the SuperFeast approach Is Organic better vs sourcing from ChinaUnderstanding the extraction process of mushrooms & herbsIs SuperFeast Ashwagandha standardisedLimitations of a dogmatic approach to lifeParting message from MasonWe hope you enjoy it!Brought to you by our sponsorBARKLEYS(15% OFF with code HOLISTIC15) Revolutionary first of it's kind blue light blocking glassesResources & Links:SuperFeast(10% OFF with code HOLISTIC10)SuperFeast PodcastSuperFeast InstagramThe Mason Taylor ShowMake sure to SUBSCRIBE so you don't miss out on any of the episodes, and if you enjoyed our show, please take a moment to RATE & REVIEW our podcast by clicking the link below, as it'll help us get this information to more people like you. Thanks!https://ratethispodcast.com/livingholisticallyLearn more by following us on Instagram @liveholistically.auOr for more info about us and what we docheck out our website See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Julze is a part-owner of Teelixir, a tonic herb company focussed on providing the highest quality organic medicinal mushrooms and tonic herbs on the market.Head to www.teelixir.com to find out more. If whilst listening to this podcast you want to give medicinal mushrooms a try, head to teeelixir.com.au and use the code sweatitout15 to receive 15% off your order.

Welcome to a special episode of The Red Pill Initiation Hour. On this episode Primal Alchemy creator Chris Storey presents to you the accumulated effort of 2020 at Primal Alchemy with a brief introduction to the new Fuel of the Gods & Transcended Herbs supplement lines.On this episode, Chris explains the new Prana Charged process, a revolutionary way Chris has invented to infuse the complete Primal Alchemy range with orgone energy, the perfect unification of ancient ancestral wisdom with 21st century science, learn about ancient mystic orders that safeguarded these sacred energy sciences over time and how Chris has adapted these teaching into the brand. Chris also explains the Di Tao sourcing philosophy used when sourcing the best herbal extracts in the world used in Primal Alchemy formulas. Chris then explains the brand new product line launch, giving you some deeper understanding of every ingredient used in the new products. DISCLAIMER: 100% chance of waking up your third eye and becoming WOKE AF.BONUS: use code "redpill" for 10% off all purchases on primalalchemy.co.ukLINK TO NEW PRODUCTS: https://primalalchemy.co.uk/collections/all-supplements

We're absolutely thrilled to have acupuncturist Jost Sauer back on the pod today sharing his cosmic insights. In today's chat Jost and Mason explore the role of intuitive understanding in the Chinese Medicine model, and how going beyond the linear into the realm of the energy field and consciousness is a key factor in healing. Today's conversation is deep and insightful, Jost is an absolute wealth of knowledge and wisdom, sharing his experience as both a practitioner and student in a easy and accessible way. Dive on in to challenge your analytical mind and expand your cosmic awareness. "With being human comes obligation, and the obligation of the human is to free our blockages. If the whole planet frees the blockages, we are in Paradise." - Jost Sauer Mason and Jost discuss: Intuitive understanding as a foundational pillar in Chinese Medicine. Chinese Medicine and the energetic realms. Five Element Theory. Human beings as energy beings. The soul as our human blueprint. The physical organs vs the energy organs; the Western and Eastern concepts of what these are and what they embody. The life/dealth, Yin/Yang cycle. The importance of a daily Qi practice to creating harmony within the body, mind and spirit - consistency is key here. The definition of health - "my perception of health is the ability to transform symptom into flow." Jost Sauer The body as a crystalline structure. Tonic herbs as messengers from heaven. Fad diets and intermittent fasting. The link between your level of health and your capacity for intuition. Using herbs and practice to clear obstructions in the meridians and energy body.   Who is Jost Sauer? Jost (aka the lifestyle medicine man) was born in Germany in 1958 and is an ex-hippie, anarchist and drug runner turned acupuncturist, popular author and healthy lifestyle expert. His background includes competitive skiing, body-building, and ironman training, but after post-drug suicidal depression led him to martial arts and the study of TCM, he discovered the power of Qi, the cycle of Qi of Chinese medicine and that a natural rhythmic lifestyle holds the secrets to anti-ageing, health and success. Jost has been using lifestyle therapeutically for his clients for over 20 years. Jost is an expert in Chinese Medicine, which he lectured in for over a decade at the Australian College of Natural Medicine, he has been running successful health clinics since 1991, initially specialising in addiction recovery, and has treated tens of thousands of clients. His passion is sharing his ongoing discoveries about making lifestyle your best medicine through his books, blogs, articles, workshops and retreats.   Resources: Jost Website Jost Facebook Jost Instagram Jost Youtube Clock On To Health Book   Q: How Can I Support The SuperFeast Podcast? A: Tell all your friends and family and share online! We’d also love it if you could subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes. Or check us out on Stitcher :)! Plus we're on Spotify!   Check Out The Transcript Here:   Mason: (00:00) Bro, welcome back.   Jost: (00:01) Yep, thank you Mason.   Mason: (00:02) It's so good, man. I had so much fun last time, and... well I'm just stoked that you ended up down here, Bangalow way. We're not back at work yet, but as soon as I knew you were going to be in the area, I was like "Yeah, I'm coming out of my shell," to come and rock another podcast with you.   Jost: (00:18) Yeah, awesome.   Mason: (00:21) How's it been going over... You're at the Starlight festival?   Jost: (00:23) Oh look, I love the Bangalow Starlight festival. I love festivals in the first place because it allows you to meet a lot of people from all different walks of life. And the people connection is crucial. Because obviously in Chinese Medicine, everything is contextual, nothing is absolute. And you can write a book about Chinese Medicine, but unless you meet people and you actually establish a relationship, Chinese Medicine really doesn't work and the beauty of those festivals is you meet people from all different walks of life and you can really meet what goes on in their life and you can find something that is of value to address. Chinese Medicine is... The reason I love it so much is you can... It's so versatile, you can apply it to every situation. And it's a medicine that is designed to evolve and to take you constantly to new levels.   Mason: (01:13) Some of the books are amazing but they're 2D, right? What you're talking about is blowing out that web, of that connection, that invisible web, into a 5D reality, which is the nature of the medicine. If it's 2D, and stays within an institution or a hospital or just one particular context, you're not going to get that full experiential nature of what it is.   Jost: (01:34) No, it's a colorful language. It's a colorful medicine. It's a many thing that goes far beyond the scope that we perceive in our conscious reality. Chinese Medicine, it comes from the energetic realms, it comes from the spiritual realms. So it comes from Qi, it comes from... By the time it's channeled down, and funneled into this narrow red bend reality, it has lost a lot of its meaning. The idea is to expand our horizon and consciousness, again in order to bring the whole complexity of Chinese Medicine into application. And that requires, obviously, thinking outside the box all the time. It requires for you to actually not go linear, because if you go linear you limit the medicine. And the beauty of this medicine is, you can go into any situation and if you're open to it, you always know what to do. Because the intuitive understanding is like the prime element of this medicine and we need to train that.   Jost: (02:40) The intuitive understanding, it's not the something that belongs the conscious mind, it belongs to our energy field, and our soul. And Chinese Medicine has got its origin in this spectrum of the energy field, and understands that the blueprint for everything what we see is in the energy field. And basically, everything that's going to get developed and discovered and invented, already exists in the ether. So, the Chinese already tapped into that. For it to exist in the physical, it must have its origin in the energy field. So, the good thing about that is that in Chinese Medicine, we don't have that doom and gloom thinking. So, a lot of people think, our earth is going to collapse.   Mason: (03:36) Yeah, there's not that ambiguous... That anxiety that comes from the ambiguity of the unknown, right? There's no crisis mode, as you said.   Jost: (03:48) Yeah, no, absolutely no, totally no. Because the fact is that we always find a solution.   Mason: (03:51) Yeah, and that's not just in-   Jost: (03:53) Because there are always people who would tap into the ether, it will not stop. The whole idea of Chinese Medicine, what we experience in the physical reality, is based on the five elements. The water nurtures the wood, the wood feeds the fire, the fire becomes ash, which is earth, the earth evaporates, air, clouds, it rains, it's water, it feeds the wood. It's a cycle that will continue forever. So, that's the biochemistry within the physical, but how to direct the five elements is obviously the mind, it's obviously our perception of where we are going to take that. And that intuitive understanding that takes us to direct the five elements comes from the energy field.   Mason: (04:37) So let's talk about that. You were talking about training your intuitive nature, because that's something that in the West, it seems to be the biggest struggle with taking on, in fullness, Chinese Medicine over into the West, is taking it outside of an analytical, complete system. That's what is happening in the West, everyone wants to still... We talked about it in the last podcast. We started talking about pathology, disease classification and all those kinds of things which doesn't necessarily... You can do it side by side with traditional Chinese Medicine.   Mason: (05:10) However, you try and take Chinese Medicine and make it work through the lens of Western pathology... You're going to basically cut out, which is what we do with surgery all the time, you're going to go and cut out that intuitive nature that is that 5D colourful, living web of medicine that Chinese Medicine really is. So, how do we transfer into a modern time and train that intuitive nature, and bring with it not just this... In the West a lot of people are like, "There's always a solution, always something is going to happen," But it's kind of "Cross my fingers and hope it works," verses when you really are tapped in and your intuition and your nature of where to take your five elements and where to take the healing for yourself and others is coming from a real energetic realm that you're plugged into, right. So that you're not kind of hoping, it's not like a belief system, it's just like, "Well, this is a reality."   Jost: (06:08) It really exists.   Mason: (06:09) It exists, and that's a reality. So how do you train tapping into that reality?   Jost: (06:14) Yeah, you can't use your academic mind for that. Obviously, that's why this is not possible with our daily practice.   Mason: (06:20) Yes.   Jost: (06:21) So, in Chinese Medicine, it states over and over, we are energy beings. Our energy field is structured by the meridian system and the acupuncture meridians and the organ structure exists in the energy field, so every organ is an energy organ. So that means, it's already within us. So, as a soul, before we incarnate, before we come into this physical world, we already got all the instructions about what to do, it's like a survival kit, like a mission statement, a full on instruction manual. It's in each of the energy organs. And the energy organs in Chinese Medicine are the ones, as we talked in the last podcast, are written in upper cases, to differentiate it from the western organ. So-   Mason: (07:09) And it's very important. I just want to reiterate that, that's why we we'll say, "Liver wood," to make sure that we're hitting it, that we're not talking about the lower case 'L' liver organ and that's it. It's a very... as you're saying, it's the entire encapsulation of that wood element, and it happens to be called the Liver.   Jost: (07:31) Yes. Look, the spiritual hierarchy, which the Chinese refer to as heaven, which is governed by Tao, which you could say is God. So, they have created the physical, and they have put in meditators between earth and heaven in order for it to develop, and this is what the souls are. Our souls, when we incarnate, are equipped with our mission, we know exactly what to do. We are given all the instructions for it to grow. The spiritual hierarchy want the earth to become better, it's the plan. The mission is for the earth to become a beautiful planet, that's the aim. We will not destroy this, because there is always really good souls coming in with instructions in the energy organ of knowing exactly what to do.   Jost: (08:18) So, the example I use is, someone was 50 years of age, who gets a new iPhone. They don't know what to do because the iPhone, or the smart phone is not coming with an instruction manual. So, what do you do? You give your phone to your five-year-old niece. And she immediately shows you how to use that phone. So the instruction of how to use that phone is already in the energy field of that young child.   Mason: (08:45) Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Jost: (08:46) Yes? They already understand, before they incarnated, they already had all the instructions. So they look at iPhone, iPad, bang, they know what to do.   Mason: (08:54) Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Jost: (08:55) Yes? So obviously we don't have that, at my age I didn't have that in my organ system, I have to learn it, I have to acquire it, but the young child has it and they get it. So, we constantly got souls coming in with information in the energy organ that will have all the solutions in order to bring the earth to the next. Because this is why, like at Bangalow, you meet a lot of conspiracists, and a lot of people who believe in doom and gloom, and there's a lot of people from the surrounding area that run around and tell you, "This is it, the earth is going to collapse next year."   Mason: (09:30) Very pessimistic, yeah. Very. And I've been there as well, it's a very analytical place. But that doom and gloom, it's hard to get out sometimes when you think, "But this is the reality of it, and if I look away from it then all of a sudden I'm going to shut down and become one of the sheep." Verse, by broadening your awareness of what is actually going on.   Jost: (09:50) Yes. It will not collapse. Why? I mean, it took the spiritual hierarchy billions of years to build all this, they've got a big plan, they've got a big mission, they know what they're doing. The fact is, it's regulated by Yin and Yang. The physical is always subject to Yin and Yang. That means creation and destruction co-exist. That means, for us to move to the next, there will be destruction. Of course we see the destruction, but the destruction is not the end.   Mason: (10:16) Mm-hmm (affirmative)   Jost: (10:17) You know? It's the beginning of the new. It's a transformation. Like in therapy. 40 years in my work as a therapist, in order to make someone healthier, in order to transform, you destroy a lot. Like in my training in Chinese martial art, we create a new body.   Mason: (10:33) Mm-hmm (affirmative)   Jost: (10:35) Yeah? I create a new body, every day I train I create a new body. But in order to create a new body, I destroy the previous aspect of my body. That means I'm always in pain. Yes? I'm always destroy an aspect of my body. It's like body building of a car. If you want to get a new panel done, you destroy, you wreck the car first and then you put new panels on. So, the earth goes through that process, it's an evolution.   Jost: (10:58) So obviously, if we don't understand the process of transformation and if we aren't have the intuitive understanding develop that means we are aligning with the energy field, we can get trapped in destruction. We can get trapped in the observation of "It's destroying itself." That means we are so trapped. And this is regulated by the physical body, and unfortunately, the Liver energy is responsible for that. If the Liver Qi is stagnant and the Liver Qi doesn't move, that means you actually... It's not moving proper, it can get stuck. Because the Liver is directly going to the Heart, to the Fire Element, and that's where your perception of awareness comes in. Your mind perceives by the Heart. If the Liver Qi is stagnant, the mind gets stuck on one aspect, it gets stuck on the destruction, it can't see the creation, it can't move on to the next.   Jost: (11:55) So now you see doom and gloom. You see Yang but not Yin. So you see a Yin Yang symbol but only with the yang. And so Liver Qi stagnation is unfortunately a by product of a lifestyle. So a lifestyle, if we don't develop the skills to make the Liver Qi move, we cause Liver Qi stagnation. Liver chi stagnation can come easily from inappropriate way of living. For example, marijuana, pot, impacts on the Liver. If you smoke regular, what it can do, it can actually stop the Liver Qi moving. So what happens now? It becomes a staccato towards the Fire. Now the mind can't perceive the next so it gets stuck on the destructive aspect. It sees Yang but not Yin.   Mason: (12:46) Yeah.   Jost: (12:47) Marijuana can do that. I've been observing drugs for a long time, and this is one of the side effects of pot that it can make you stuck on only perceiving Yang, not Yin. And that means now you can see it's going to get doom and gloom, it's going to destroy. Now you perceive reality, "The earth is going to die." So, the fact is that all of us actually know exactly what it's about and we just need to get to the intuitive understanding of our body, and that requires the Qi to flow. If the Qi flows, that means it goes through all the other organ systems, now we've got access directly to our energy field, now we have access to information about our mission, we suddenly understand. So this is where it goes into, we need to do the practice every day. So we need a daily practice. So, yeah.   Mason: (13:43) Well this is what I like, I mean, this is a nature of Chinese Medicine that's highly made that transfer over into the West, but not fully, is that one that, if we're talking about Liver Qi stagnation, are we going to just unlearn how to understand that and just bring into our household an understanding of what that is, or are we going to go to a practitioner. Okay, we can go to a practitioner and get some needling and get things moving.   Mason: (14:07) But as you were saying, daily practice, procuring your own ability to keep your own Qi moving so that you become your own practitioner. And then, I think from looking at that Yang side of things, whether it's conspiracy, or... we're always looking for solutions, with Yang it's doom and gloom so we're looking for like, how do we right this wrong. And so, right the wrong is the mentality of "I am a patient, I need to go to a doctor, I am sick, I've got a symptom, I need to right this wrong." And then when you do get the Qi moving, and you have the Yin, that accumulative energy and that calm and that still energy of the Yin, you can start to... The mind, the Heart energy can move and the mind can start moving towards not so much as a problem solution and what I'm fixing in myself every day with my practice, but something more exploratory, something more cultivating, something more exciting.   Mason: (15:00) So, with the daily practice. Let's have a look at that simplicity, because that's something I like hitting again and again and again with everybody. So theoretically, what does it feel like for you, when you get there and you say "Okay, there's the potential for Liver Qi stagnation, however I am in here in a not solving problems, in a not fixing myself state of mind." What is your state of mind? Are you exploring yourself? Are you looking for longevity? What does it feel like?   Jost: (15:32) I look for to free my energy field. Okay, so our job as human beings, in order to be of benefit to creation, that means we are of benefit to others and ourselves, so we benefit creation. In order to be beneficial to others and to life, I need to free my obstructions in the meridian system. So if my acupuncture meridian are free flowing, I am without... Without a deliberate action, I am good to others, I'm not planning to be good, I'm naturally good. So I'm not deliberately good. I'm not going and making a conscious decision to be good, I'm automatically good because my energy flows freely, I'm automatically embracing the situation from the best perspective, and I'm naturally considering the person as a friend. So our job as humans is to actually clear the blockages in the meridian. So I don't have actually a future thinking, because I've been doing it for so long so I perceive myself as a soul, a soul doesn't think future, because it's infinite.   Mason: (16:43) Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah.   Jost: (16:46) I'm in the present, yeah? Because that's the only thing that matters to the soul. So I don't actually go far into the future, maybe I should but I can't actually go in.   Mason: (16:58) Maybe for a bit of fun.   Jost: (17:01) The fact is that every morning when I wake up, the only thing that concerns me is the blockages in my field, and I know exactly there are blockages in my large intestine meridian. If I don't correct them, it can't control my Wood. If it can't control the Wood, I will have irritability and crankiness, that means I most likely will harm someone by saying something rude, or I feel irritable and cranky and angry, that means I harm myself.   Mason: (17:30) Mm-hmm (affirmative), are you a Lung constitution? A Metal constitution?   Jost: (17:34) No, no, it's a fluctuating system anyway.   Mason: (17:38) Yeah, of course.   Jost: (17:39) It's like... Now that's like a general approach. Every morning, I know exactly, I'm going to look at whatever the obstructions are-   Mason: (17:48) What's your process of... Just scanning?   Jost: (17:50) Yeah, it's scanning, yeah. So, the dominating symptom, that's what I mean with "It's fluctuating." So it's not a dominating element, there is always a dominating symptom, and the symptom in Chinese Medicine, the symptom belongs to the body, it's subject of the physical body but it doesn't belong to the soul, it's not property of the soul. The energy field does not know symptoms, the soul of our nature is pure awareness, joy, bliss, but the soul incarnates into the physical and that means it matches itself with the central nervous system of the physical body and that causes symptoms, that's pain. And that's sensory, and that leads to thinking. So, in the mornings, I will always wake up to a dominating thinking, a thought, and a dominating symptom. So it could be a pain in the knee, it could be... With me, obviously because of my injuries from when I was hard into sport, so usually injuries come up like an aching knee, aching hip, something like that. Or if I worked too much in the day before and I got too intensely involved with transformational processes with my clients, I have energy stuck from that previous day and that gives me a squeezy sick feeling in the stomach. And so, whatever it is... Or I feel lethargic, or depression, whatever.   Jost: (19:19) The fact is, whatever is dominating, I sink into that. And then I use my body to clear the meridians. So I hold onto that symptoms, I don't drink coffee. I don't do anything to override the symptoms. I love coffee, but I drink coffee when I don't need it.   Mason: (19:36) Yeah, that's the way. Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Jost: (19:38) Yeah. It's just a... I love coffee, I love cake, I love everything, I love red wine. That's the beauty of living that way is that you can enjoy everything, I'm not trapped in you need juice diet, I'm not trapped in any diets. If you put the focus on clearing your energy field first, you are in charge of substance. That means you know what to do because you don't need it. So if I wake up and drink coffee to get going, I override the symptom, I'm giving the instructions now to the body and to my energy field, and I don't actually want to clear that. So what happens now is, I actually stop getting access to my information about my intuitive understanding. So if I wake up and get straight into coffee, into sugar, into distractions, into cigarettes, or meeting people or having a call-   Mason: (20:34) On the phone?   Jost: (20:34) Yeah, on the phone. What happens now is I'm actually stopping, what happens is I stop the internet connection to my energy field. So it's like I got my computer but no internet connection. So my energy field has got all the information. To access that information, I need to unblock the obstructions in my energy field first.   Mason: (20:59) And you're using your physical practice to do that?   Jost: (21:01) Yes. This is the beauty of... If you love yoga, you do yoga. If you do core training, you take core training. If you do stretches, you do stretches. If you love TRX ropes, you use TRX ropes. If you love martial arts, you do Tai-chi. It's really irrelevant what practice you do as long as you know why you do it.   Mason: (21:22) So talk a little bit about that. Are we talking about intent here, like if you have an intention to move through? And what you were saying before about whatever deficiency or blockage we are experiencing that day, and watching to see if you know or if you don't... We all know it really well, because we know where we get emotionally hung up during the day and we know where we lack a bit of compassion or empathy or where we get angry at people. For me, it's criticism, and it's mostly... It might come up as criticism for others but I feel that if I go a little bit further, I can feel that real hectic criticism of myself that it's emerging from. But I know that's my blockage, right? And that's an interesting thing, it was a good reminder from you the other day. I can't remember what you said specifically on Instagram, but you were like, "Look, there's no bad people or bad emotions, it's just an energetic blockage."   Jost: (22:09) Yeah.   Mason: (22:09) Right. Super fascinating. So you're saying, no matter what your physical practice is... Because I like that approach as well. It doesn't really matter what your... Everything can be your spiritual practice, everything can be your energetic practice.   Jost: (22:20) Yeah, everything is a spiritual practice, as long as you know what you do. You need to know why you do it. So if you understand that what the practice is, from a physics perspective, exercise is like piezoelectricity. It acts on crystallization and the obstructions in the crystalline arrangement. So what happens is that when we have a blockage in the energy field, that blockage is, as physics has identified, is in fact a crystalline arrangement. It's like... Your acupuncture point is in fact a crystal. So if the energy is not moving through it's because a crystalline arrangement has been. That's what pain is. When we try to avoid pain, and don't move in a certain area with our body, we actually enhance the obstruction, and that becomes a crystal, it's like crystal. And that crystal is memories, it's full with all kind of memories about issues, whatever that is.   Mason: (23:24) So that is crystalline, sedimenty, like a deposit within the-   Jost: (23:31) Yes. When you use Chinese massage therapy, which is an enormous, complex field, which takes... in China, you study medicine first, then you specialize in Tuina, which is the Chinese massage therapy. So all up, seven years, eight years before you are actually allowed to work on people. And what they do, they sit on the point with the knuckle, and they know exactly, "This is a crystal." So what they do is they apply piezoelectricity on that point. Piezoelectricity means, you are putting pressure on the crystal. If you apply pressure on a crystal, the energy that's inherent in the crystal will now be released. That's the sister of the cigarette lighter, the electric cigarette lighter. In a cigarette lighter, you have a crystal and you put pressure on it, the energy, and it gets connected to the gas that becomes the flame. Cars used to have a piezoelectricity. Piezoelectricity is a physics fact, everyone can Google it, it all comes up.   Jost: (24:34) But our body is also piezoelectricity, it's a crystalline arrangement. When our meridian system matches with the central nervous system, that merging becomes crystalline, it's a crystalline arrangement. So the meridians have got different pathways to the nervous system, but the crystalline arrangement is the result of the two. And it's the process of the energy with the central nervous system, the blood flow etc. So the crystalline arrangement doesn't belong to the soul, but it's incarnate and matched with the central nervous system, it becomes crystalline. So that's why when you sit on a certain point it can transmit energy all the way up the other part of the body.   Mason: (25:18) Yeah, right.   Jost: (25:18) Yeah, and so this is where death point striking in kung fu comes into, we know exactly what point to hit. In that moment, you hit the acupuncture point and the blockage in the crystal now gets reversed and it stops the flow and people die. Death point strike, it's called dim mak. So obviously it takes decades to study and learn and by the time you master this art you have no interest in applying it.   Mason: (25:47) Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah the way it normally goes.   Jost: (25:49) But healing is exactly the same thing. So the healing, the Tuina, the Chinese massage therapy, understands that the blockage is the cause of the problem because that crystal stops the energy being taken to the energy organ and stops the energy from the energy organ to be moved to the other parts of the body. It basically physically stops intuitive understanding to be developed. So the question we started at the beginning is how to develop intuitive understanding, the answer to that is, to free the meridians of its blockages and that means we have to go into the crystalline arrangement and actually free the blockages. Because once you have the blockages free, that means your senses, your awareness merges, your thoughts meet your soul nature and the awareness of your soul nature now influences your thoughts. Suddenly your thoughts are generated by your soul awareness rather than by conscious mind, reflection, analysis.   Jost: (26:58) So instead of going into using your conscious mind and you're looking at a rational formula, your thoughts, if the energy flows freely to the energy organ, because the crystalline arrangement has been taken care of, what happens now is that your thoughts are influenced by the awareness of the soul. Means when you talk to someone, you suddenly know... You just suddenly understand, you suddenly see a blue print of something. For example, if someone talks about a problem, and you suddenly know. That's what the seer is used in therapy, like in the old days when people had a problem, they had to see the shaman. The shaman was able to connect his thoughts to the soul awareness and suddenly saw, suddenly knew what to do.   Mason: (27:51) It's so simple as well. That was the thing... When I was first getting into it, in talking to you about it, it's real electric and romantic and it's amazing and the language can go... You're like "Oh whoa, you do this and this and the thing goes into this and goes into the energy organ," but we all know the experience. If everyone listening, and I mean, even for myself, this is a really familiar place, when you just have those days when you're moving your body a few days in a row in a way that is unblocking whatever needs to be unblocked, right? Its not like a mental idea of trying to get fit or trying to fix myself in any way, I'm just moving, enjoying that movement, exploring my body.   Jost: (28:32) And you get unblocked, that's all it is.   Mason: (28:34) Just unblocking. And then after a few days you get into a little bit more of a flow, because maybe you've been sleeping a little bit better and just eating a little bit better and all of a sudden you're popping and the ideas start coming to you and you're talking to someone and as you were saying... Everyone knows this experience, maybe I can feel what they're going through a little bit, I can relate a little bit and then you just have a really nice conversation and that person comes off feeling a little bit better. It doesn't need to get much more complex than that, that's like that flow state of a day.   Mason: (29:03) I think what's for me where I've always got tripped up is I've gone... I've thought it needed to be more complex than that and I thought I needed to work harder and I needed to move more and do more Qigong or do more stretching or more standing meditation to compound it verses just allowing it to be a nice, gentle consistent building over time and really going, and sure, Mason, that you can relate, you're going nice and slow and steady enough, and you're going to be able to keep this up for the next four, five, six decades. And that's something I'm really coming back to at the moment, just how simple it is and how simple the intention, in all its complexity, just to be, just to get tapped into your intuition, a little bit, doesn't need-   Jost: (29:48) The key is consistency.   Mason: (29:50) Far out, isn't it.   Jost: (29:51) It's consistency is the key. The latest discoveries in performance sport therapy, it's all about, you never go to the extreme, but it's consistency. When people look at my body, they always know, because I'm very conditioned and they always go like, "My god, you must be hardcore in weight training and things like..." Firstly, I don't touch weights. But it's about... The people "How do you get the cut look, how do you get so cut?"   Mason: (30:17) "How do you get chiseled?" Yeah.   Jost: (30:18) How do you get chiseled? Consistency!   Mason: (30:20) Yeah.   Jost: (30:22) Every day! Consistency! Years after year, consistency, that's the key. I'm not strong, I'm consistent. But in the consistent, you become strong.   Mason: (30:32) You become really strong.   Jost: (30:32) Yes, that's it. So, I'm not going for the strength, I'm going for consistency, then the consistency over time, that makes you strong. It's a totally different approach, in Taoist view.   Mason: (30:41) Well you completely bypass the mental idea of what strong is, as a gain and as something to own, and you start awakening this phenomena of strength from your body, right?   Jost: (30:52) Yeah. You don't go hardcore, for example if it says 50 kilos on the bench press, I would do 30. I mean, I don't do bench press. But the idea is to... In case you would do this, yeah. So you never go to the extreme, but you're going to do it every day. And that's the key. This is where a lot of really incredible physiques, like the Russian sport conditioning, they are leaders in the field.   Mason: (31:19) Insane.   Jost: (31:20) Unbelievable what that dude.. Pavlov one of my heroes, I love their bodies, let's talk about it here, this Russian sport condition. But those guys, they're in their seventies, they've got incredible physiques, they're 80 years old, they've got physiques like mindboggling. Their key is consistent. Every day, every day, every day, just build and build and build. Because what happens is, this is where, if you every day honored, you de-obstruct the blockages, you free the blockages. What happens now? The energy field is coming in. The energy field always rejuvenates the body. This is the key to longevity. You see, the physical body, which in Chinese Medicine we call Po, P, O. The physical body is destined to die, is temporary, but the energy, which we call Hun, H, U, N, is infinite. So the energy always rejuvenates the body.   Jost: (32:14) So when we talk about longevity, the interesting thing is my focus is not longevity, my focus is the obstructive blockages, but that leads to longevity. My focus is not strength, my focus is consistency that leads me to strength.   Mason: (32:28) Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, amazing.   Jost: (32:31) So it's always a secondary outcome. So my goal is always a secondary... It's almost like a secondary outcome.   Mason: (32:40) Yeah. Which takes a lot of strength within itself. To be able to hold your focus enough, and not get caught up in that... And not get invalidated right away, especially.   Jost: (32:53) Yeah, the beauty is that you develop the skills enough that after a while you just don't... I don't buy into people's... I mean, you've got eight billion people on this planet, and as soon as the soul incarnates into the physical, and that means it matches with the nervous system. In that moment, the soul experiences thoughts, so obviously that leads to an opinion. So that means we've got eight billion opinions on the earth. You can't follow people's opinions, you've got to find your own way here. And the Buddha said, "Don't believe anyone, not even me." And so I don't buy into anything. When I read something about diet, whatever, I just let it go by. But it's the energy field by that shows me where it is, the intuitive understanding needs to be, that's the key element. And interesting thing is, intuitive understanding can be only developed if you live healthy.   Jost: (33:53) So the next answer to the question how to develop intuitive understanding is to be healthy. So the interesting thing is that the intuitive understanding will not come to you if you unhealthy.   Mason: (34:03) Mm-hmm (affirmative), if you're unhealthy, yeah.   Jost: (34:05) Just because someone says "I have an intuitive understanding," you don't know where that comes from, it could be thought process from the physical body. The physical body is very limited in its knowledge, yes? So you can't go by that. So just because something comes in, you don't know what it is. But the fact that... The healthier you are, the more you know.   Mason: (34:24) Mm-hmm (affirmative). I guess what you were saying is that there's variations in health as well. I mean, the difference being, can you be on a explore what real blossoming health is for you...   Jost: (34:42) Okay, my perception of health is the ability to transform symptom into flow.   Mason: (34:48) On a daily-?   Jost: (34:49) That's health. Because that means, whatever level you are, your health is an indicator how you transform your symptom. So you're 80 years of age, and you've got a symptom, like creaky back or achy bones, you can't get out of bed. But, you transform that, and you get out of bed. That's health.   Mason: (35:06) Or even like further internally, right, if you're looking at anxiousness, obsessiveness. That's the most difficult thing, I think, that's where you see... It's where I've caught myself in the biggest trap and going like, "Right, I'm really healthy, and then I'm physically healthy and now I'm going to maintain this state of health." And then all of a sudden, because I've got more energy, it brought up my own self-awareness of my own blockages. I was talking about that criticism, and all these things. So all of a sudden at that point, you look down the barrel of going, "All right, I thought it was hard to overcome physical symptoms. Far out, now I'm going to open up a can of worms of going..." Without pressuring yourself, because there's this all this pressure to become a perfect human when you're in this world, and you're hanging out at Bangalow Starlight festival, you've got to have your sainthood on. You can't be... Can't admit that you're an overly angry person or an anxious person. There's like a cachet that comes with being in the scene.   Mason: (36:16) But the reality of it is, without... Yeah, you got to be working on your, make sure your back isn't hurting, make sure you're stretching so that these physical symptoms aren't going to get you. But then going in and working on transforming that nature of yourself which is super critical or paranoid or whatever that is. That takes a lot of energy. I feel like, that's where a transparency on, and knowing that it's okay to still have these reactions and still have these things that come up.   Jost: (36:49) Yes. We can't not have symptoms, it's not possible. Because every day, our job as humans is to expand the current state of the earth. And it will be regulated by the hierarchy, who has given us information in the energy field of what to do. So the earth will expand. Our job is to keep doing that. But while doing it, while we grow the earth and grow ourselves, we also, that means we are subject to Yin and Yang, that means we also experience destruction. So while I create, all day... Today I focus on creating, tomorrow when I wake up, I experience the destructive aspect of creation. So if I override that, ignore, I'm actually going backwards. That's what they're saying. So what that means is, I'm moving towards my physical body, rather than towards the soul. That means, now, as I move to my physical body and I become more and more the physics... But then I go to a health fair like Bangalow Starlight festival and I'm supposed to be a healer and a soul person, and if I'm in the physical body and not in my soul... If I'm in the physical body but not naturally in my soul, that means I now have to project. I have to do a conceptual view on who I am. That means I have to project, I can't be natural, I have to project. So now I live a double life. Yes?   Mason: (38:19) Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, and all... Now you feel like... Now who are the fraudulents.   Jost: (38:24) So now I have to project to be the saint, whereas in fact I'm stuck in the physical. But the fact is that every morning, I wake up to be the sinner, and after my practice, I am the saint. So if I wake up and don't deal with my physical symptoms, of course I get more and more trapped and it becomes in brackets not the saint. So now I have to obviously project to others that I am the saint, whereas the beauty is once you start constantly de-obstructing, you don't actually care what you project to others, you become free of that need. I'm totally free of the need to project, because I deal with that in my morning practice and then I don't care what other people think of me. I just actually don't give a toss what other people think of me. Yeah?   Mason: (39:13) Yeah, liberating, yeah.   Jost: (39:15) And people who know me know that. I learned that from the masters that I studied under. They don't live in the eyes of other people, they don't live as an accord with your expectations, yes?   Mason: (39:32) Mm-hmm (affirmative)   Jost: (39:33) They are eccentrics, they follow their path. If that suits you or not, that's your problem.   Mason: (39:36) I feel ya, I'm like... That's like-   Jost: (39:40) But you're never obnoxious, you're never bad because your energy is flowing freely so by nature you are compassionate. You're just in a slightly different way than other people think you should be, but you don't care.   Mason: (39:52) I mean, it's refreshing having someone... That's always when you go, "All right, I'm going to start... I'm in the presence of someone that's I want to procure some Shen here some wisdom but without the obnoxiousness, like not... because when I was growing up, in the West, it was either... I'm someone who is very self-aware in the sense that I'm very aware of that it's all made up. Other people looking at me and other people judging me, that's been my whole life, that has been my biggest weight on my shoulders. And then, what I could see, what was projected in the West most of the time were those people that, especially when I was young, those people that didn't care what other people were thinking of them, comes with a slice of obnoxiousness as well. And so as a young person, especially watching a lot of shitty media, maybe do I just need to be obnoxious? And then you play around with that and go through all those kinds of areas and then you get to this point when, as you were saying, awareness of this nature of right, and you can get consistency and clear that energy and, as I say, the whole point of taking the herbs is ideally to become less of an asshole and more of an awesome person. Would that kind of be it?   Jost: (40:59) Yes, that's the point.   Mason: (41:00) That's the point.   Jost: (41:03) Because herbs, herbs act on obstructions and the blockages. That's why herbs are crucial, that's why your mushrooms, your medicinal mushrooms, all that stuff, ashwagandha... It's your first step, it's essential. It's always superior to food because herbs act on the crystalline arrangement more in a concentrated form than food would do. So the example I use is herbs act on crystals, crystalline arrangements and the obstructive blockages like dish washing liquid would act on greasy pots. If you have a greasy pot and you want to clean it, you can scrub that pot under hot water all day, you go nowhere. One drop of dish washing liquid and bang you take it off. And that's to me like a good serve of ashwagandha, a good serve of astragalus, a good serve of good mushrooms, put it all together, have the tea after your morning practice. It flushes the meridian and it de-obstructs the blockages like dishwashing liquid would act on greasy pots.   Mason: (42:09) I like that. Okay so when with the crystalline arrangement, can you explain to me again the process of are we helping to align that crystalline nature or actually clear-   Jost: (42:19) No, we... The clearing of the blockage, the clearing of the crystal means you apply pressure on the crystal.   Mason: (42:25) Right.   Jost: (42:25) So that means you put yourself in a... The whole principal of the pyramids, of the Egyptian pyramids is the center of the fire, where it meets, it's about the pressure of the "Phwoar!", you're going right in. When you look at the "Whaaa!" Sorry.   Mason: (42:26) No, go for it.   Jost: (42:38) When it's really deep concentration practice, what you do... Your whole awareness, your consciousness, everything and your body becomes like a pyramid and you're compressing inside the center of fire, and that means that in that moment what you're doing, you're putting... You're applying a three dimensional pressure on the crystal from all different angles, all around. And in that moment if you apply pressure on it, like "Phwooar!" In that moment the energy naturally gets freed and now it shoots out, and now it frees itself. So you keep going, keep going, keep going so the crystal which maybe starts the size of a one inch radius, diameter, and then eventually becomes like a little coin. So initially it starts like the size of an apple, and eventually it becomes the seed of a poppy seed.   Mason: (43:29) Mm-hmm (affirmative)   Jost: (43:30) Yeah? So if you sit with this, you could de-obstruct the whole body in a sitting of 16 years, according to the knowledge of the Vedas. You can become enlightened in 16 years if you just sit there for 16 years and de-obstruct every blockage. And that moment, enlightenment means, the energy just flushes through your body, according to their view of that whole thing.   Jost: (43:54) So the obstruction is the crystal, the pressure is three dimensional. So that's why it's something we need to be engaged with, so we can't just do it... We need to use the body for that. I mean, some people can do it without a body, but it takes a lot of training. Yeah, some of the Tibetan Buddhists in the Himalaya obviously don't use... But they're so strong. I studied under some of those guys, unbelievable strength. I mean, I'm pretty fit and I look at those guys and my god. It's not like... They don't do this visualization technique that you learn in New Age, you know this...   Mason: (44:34) They're like actually living it and doing it. Effortless effort.   Jost: (44:39) They are in a constant applying pressure on the crystal three dimensional constantly.   Mason: (44:46) Yeah, right.   Jost: (44:47) They can sit in 40 degrees, minus, just with a loin cloth. And the pressure on the crystal is so strong, it emanates the energy, they are actually hot and they melt the snow. And I've seen those guys and it's unbelievable training. So my training is with the Chen Tai Chi, and it focuses, it does the same thing so when we do the stands we focus and every body becomes like... You just unite with every meridians. So after about 20 minutes you can feel very meridian system, you can feel every blockage and you are just fully engaging with every obstruction, with the main obstruction, and you can feel in that moment you are just completely applying pressure on it.   Jost: (45:29) So this is something we are all trained to do, we are all programmed to do. We just have to introduce to the initial techniques and we will find it. That's the beauty of that. We all have that in our energy field. Everyone who is physical form, in human body, already has the instructions in their energy body how to do this. You just have to start.   Mason: (45:56) You just have to start and not think about it too much. You just have to... Yeah. I mean, that's always my trip up, I'm like "Should I really, should I be doing that technique, should I move on from that technique a little bit, maybe that's not..." And I'm like sitting down and just watching myself... And it's not even sabotage, it's well intended to an extent but it's just... You overthink it and it's just like "Dude, just do something."   Jost: (46:23) But before we start the practice, we are always dominated, our awareness, we are thinking, we are in the body. So, when we start the practice, we are in the body. Of course we don't want to do it.   Mason: (46:36) Yeah.   Jost: (46:37) You just... I've never had a day, I've never had a morning I woke up and said "I can't wait to get into it." Every morning it's a struggle, it's a battle. Because you wake up, you're in the energy field. Now you don't want to get up. This is why the Chinese called it "From the senses, to mind, to Qi." So when I wake up, every morning, I get immediately confronted with the sensory. What it means is, I don't want to get up, I want to give in to the pleasure of sleeping, I want to roll over, I want to stay in bed, I want to give into my senses. So I know I have to use my mind, to push against it. And my mind says, "I have to do business, I have to do work." Yes? So that's the step, that gets you out of bed.   Jost: (47:27) However, the Taoists say, "From the senses, to the mind, to Qi." So, meaning, we wake up, we resist the senses, that means we don't give into the pleasure to stay in bed. We use the mind to get up. But now we're using the mind to move towards Qi. So we don't use the mind to go to work, we don't use the mind to get to the computer and write, we don't use the mind to go on Instagram. We don't use the mind to argue with other people. We use the mind to force the body into a posture. And once the body gets into a posture, automatically, you start de-obstructing the meridian fields. Now the intuitive understanding is coming into it, that means I'm starting to feel good.   Mason: (48:12) Mm-hmm (affirmative)   Jost: (48:13) Yes? So, now I understand what to do, I can follow. But I can't follow unless I'm in there. Of course, every morning it's the battle from the senses, to the mind, to chi. In the Western world this is the real battle because for getting out of bed, then you have to battle business.   Mason: (48:33) Or social obligations, communications....   Jost: (48:36) You have to battle... Yeah, it's like the mind wants to immediately ride, get involved, do stuff. Because when I wake up, I finally get out of bed, I immediately want to "Oh I've got this idea, I want to write this down, I want to go on my iPad and write this idea down, I'm just awesome, I've got this perfect understanding... I've got to write this." Of course I want to check my emails. But no! From the mind, to Qi. So I use the mind to put the body into the posture that allows piezoelectricity to happen, that means I de-obstruct the blockages.   Jost: (49:13) Once I de-obstruct the blockages, I now go into Qi. Now I am soul awareness, of course, and now I... That's joy and once I'm in there, I don't want to stop. Difficult to start, very difficult to stop.   Mason: (49:31) And then you need to use your mind like "All right, come back down to earth, mate!"   Jost: (49:36) That's why I'm always late, because once I'm in there, I can't stop. I'm always late, for the Bangalow festival, supposed to be there at a certain time. I'm always late because I'm fully immersed in my Qi, in my practice. I can't just lie, "Yeah, I've got plenty of time."   Mason: (49:53) Yeah, right.   Jost: (49:55) Plenty of time. It's too good. But when I wake up, oh I don't want to do this. And then when I'm in there, oh this is good, I don't want to stop.   Mason: (50:05) Do you share practices from your Tai Chi lineage and do you share the forms or the postures anywhere outside of a workshop?   Jost: (50:19) I have a lineage I follow, I follow the Chen Village.   Mason: (50:23) Do you teach that?   Jost: (50:24) No, I don't teach it.   Mason: (50:25) Oh you don't teach it, right, right.   Jost: (50:29) I study Tai Chi, and I practice. So my lineage is Chen Tai chi and that's the oldest Tai Chi, that's the original Tai chi.   Mason: (50:38) Yeah, that's how it was fascinating when we got into that last podcast, yeah.   Jost: (50:41) I just tell everyone, just give it a try.   Mason: (50:44) How would they give it a try?   Jost: (50:45) Yeah, well the beauty of that is there are Chen schools everywhere these days.   Mason: (50:49) Yeah, right.   Jost: (50:49) They're everywhere. You just pull it up on Google, it comes up. 50 years ago, you couldn't find it.   Mason: (50:54) It just exploded, didn't it.   Jost: (50:56) This is the best time to live because you can find access to any technique anywhere. There are courses about Qigong like for $9 or $14 on Udemy. It's mind boggling. There are masters who are showing you every move. Like Chen Xiaowang, one of the greatest master in the history, Tai Chi master, his power is unbelievable. And you can constantly research him on YouTube. 30 years ago, for hundreds of years ago, it was fiercely guarded. Now it's available for everyone.   Mason: (51:29) Boom! It just opened, yeah.   Jost: (51:31) We live in... We've got everyone, everything is available. So everyone's got a smart phone, so on a click and on a swipe of a digital device, you have instant access to the latest technique.   Mason: (51:44) It's insane, that's insane. That's how I feel. Sometimes I walk into the warehouse here, and I look at the herbs sitting on the shelf, and I know the story... The adventure over thousands of years, of that herb. Thousands and thousands of that thing in a particular little area, the hermit's understanding it and working with it to... Maybe there's a village or some grandmothers who just hold onto ensuring that they know how to go and harvest it and introduce it to their children, and the family. And then all of a sudden it becomes famous and the Emperor's just send out and horde all of the reishi mushroom or all of whatever it is. And then Mao coming in, somewhat beginning to destroy the Taoist approach to herbalism. Yet there is just a couple of masters who bring it through, and then one of those masters teaches it to a student that goes over to America.   Mason: (52:43) Then all of a sudden someone "Boom! Bang!" And all of a sudden... Not realizing as well that the people who have guarded these lineages and these martial arts and these herbal practices and even just growing methods, really fiercely the integrity. Which is sometimes the hardest thing to do but yet you still just have to get involved, get an understanding of the terrain and then you can learn what quality movement and quality herbs... You just get a little bit of understanding, you just need to get moving to begin with. And then all of a sudden, we've got astragalus, ginseng-   Jost: (53:17) In supermarkets!   Mason: (53:21) But, everywhere! I look at how many-   Jost: (53:21) I saw it in IGA the other day.   Mason: (53:24) That's like, well some IGA's-   Jost: (53:26) A big bottle of astragalus, I couldn't believe it!   Mason: (53:28) In Maleny, where were you?   Jost: (53:29) No that was in Sunshine Coast, in IGA! Beside toilet paper!   Mason: (53:31) Far out. I mean, that's like when the first... I think Maleny was an IGA that two years ago, they asked me to come and do a talk, and they had sold like 150 tickets through IGA to come and learn. And I wasn't told... I'm kind of, we'll have to... We should do an event together one day. But when I do my talks, I'm probably similar to you, you just start and like "Ba ba ba ba ba." But I'm not going, reishi is good for this, we'd go on through Jing Qi Shen and each have a little chat about it. And there we are sitting there with a supermarket conversation, supermarket customers coming in and learning about this stuff. It was mind-boggling. And to be able to get Di Tao like wild oak reishi, spring fed reishi from high mountains around places like Darby Mountains in IGA's in Maleny, IGA's in supermarkets all over the place. And for a mum of four to whose here living in the suburbs of Australia to be getting access to these Jing herbs and then at the same time they can put away five minutes to study one of the most ancient Tai Chi practices in the world because they just went and had a look on YouTube. Phwaor!   Mason: (54:50) We are so inundated with choice as well, that is what trips people up is that there is some much choice and so many, like, "Am I going to pick the right path?" It's just like, "Just get going!"   Jost: (55:01) Just get going, yeah.   Mason: (55:03) Far out, you just got to get going. And every month you have to remind yourself of that, right? Or every day, you kind of need to start afresh, yeah?   Jost: (55:11) It doesn't matter where you start, whatever makes the most sense to you and whatever you are most drawn to. I would always say the easier way is to just get herbs, get energizing herbs first.   Mason: (55:22) What are your top energizing herbs?   Jost: (55:24) I would probably always say if you want to get the ball rolling, get astragalus as your base. Astragalus has to be your basic. Then you want astragalus and rehmannia with it. And then siberian ginseng, or maybe ren shen, which is like... because according to my observation, the tens of thousands of people I've worked with in my time, and it's 40 years spanning now. That combination helps everyone.   Mason: (55:58) So good.   Jost: (55:59) Yeah. The beauty of the ashwagandha and astragalus combinations and the rehmannia is that they actually adapt to the situation. So if you've got too much Yang, it's going to focus on the Yin first. So if you're too hyper, you're going to get sleepy first.   Mason: (56:15) Well that's an interesting thing with ren shen especially, but even astragalus. But people go, well with astragalus people go like "Okay this is an energizing tonic," and they get on to it and like "Bzzzzz..." and they're like "This was supposed to give me energy," it's like, "Sorry, mate, it's too intelligent. It knows what you bloody need, and it's taken you in that direction."   Jost: (56:34) It's so intelligent. And the Veda's say that ashwagandha can actually be taken by itself. My personal view on that, I find it works best if you have a combination of ashwagandha, astragalus, rehmannia and ren shen.   Mason: (56:53) Well generally with those really strong Jing tonics you need a Qi tonic there to keep everything moving.   Jost: (56:59) For me it works because then you've got the Spleen, Stomach, Lung combination in there too. And then you can put the mushrooms with it, and then we get onto the mushrooms, the reishi, the cordyceps, and obviously my favorite one, the lion's mane.   Mason: (57:13) Yeah, you love it, eh?   Jost: (57:14) Yeah, should be every day, everyone.   Mason: (57:17) That's good. We've already stocked up on lion's mane but I want you to try, I've got a... I don't know whether it'll be out by the time this podcast comes out but I've got a Qi blend coming out with codonopsis, white atractolydes, astragalus, poria, bit of gynostemma in there, turkey tail, and some jujube and I'd like to get your feedback on that.   Jost: (57:39) Yeah, it's really important, all this stuff is... The reason I'm saying all that is, once you start with herbs, you get a feel good very quickly, and if you feel good, you feel inspired to do things. So if you go to Tai Chi school, to a class as your initial step and move, you may get bored very quickly, because it's such a slow learning curve. And then you give up very quickly, so I'm always like, do the radical approach first. I've always liked doing things radical, like just whack it, cause some chaos, yeah.   Mason: (58:16) Or feel that it works.   Jost: (58:16) Yeah, go feel it.   Mason: (58:20) I'm like that big time as well. I used to say this all the time to people, whether it's with physical practice or herbs, or hydration even, little things like that. I call it activating the placebo. So with these herbs people are like "Do they work?" I'm like, "Well, let's think about it. Over at least five thousands years these herbs have been used, and there are tens of thousands of herbs used in China and out of those there's like 50 herbs which are considered tonic. That are, as you were saying, the messengers from heaven that are helping us to basically clear blockages. And they can just be taken every day, simple, not about symptoms, they work.   Jost: (58:56) Yeah. I'm glad that I have now turned 60, I'm 61 years of age, because I can actually use my body as an example that it works.   Mason: (59:07) Yeah for sure.   Jost: (59:08) And, when I was 40 and telling everyone herbs are good, I didn't have really much weighing in my work because I was still young and fit. But once you turn 50, 55, aging hits you. And that's when you know that those herbs work. Men at the age of 60, they know. They've got the aging. There's very few who really are very fit and healthy.   Mason: (59:34) There's even few within the community that are practicing herbs and Qigong, because it just goes and shows that you can't just do the herbs, you can't just do movement. Your whole life needs to be engaged in this practice, right.   Jost: (59:50) Yes. But a good way to get started with that is with herbs. But when people say "Do they work," that's what I'm trying to say. Look at people who are in their sixties and seventies who have been taking herbs for a long time, there are the examples. Don't go by what papers say. I remember that when I was at College and studied Chinese Medicine, over 30 years ago, I already realised I need to take herbs every day. Intuitive understanding for my practice. And then I thought "You can't do this every day, you've got to stop, this is...   Mason: (01:00:25) Too toneifying.   Jost: (01:00:27) Yeah, just like, bang. I just followed my own intuitive understanding.   Mason: (01:00:30) Oh yeah.   Jost: (01:00:31) Yeah, and so I'm at the level now where I can prove to people it works. So I say, "Look, this is my body at 61 years of age. I'm able to transform all kind of symptoms because of the herbs." So I tell everyone, if you want to get guidance by herbs, and you're not sure if they work, look at those who have been taking herbs for a long time. And you will see a different person. I can tell people who take herbs, they look different. They've got different skin. My skin is not someone who is the ordinary 60. And it's not because of genetics, it's got nothing to do with this, because my father died very early. So I don't have the genes for longevity.   Mason: (01:01:20) You don't have the Jing?   Jost: (01:01:21) That's what there... I actually got the opposite, I got weak Jing. I got a lot of injuries, I got like all kind of crippling injuries in my knees from when I was hard in sport. So, the fact that I constantly transform my symptoms, I actually an example, I can see the proof of this medicine. So if someone doubts it, then I say "Okay, compare a 60 year old or a 70 year old person who takes herbs regular with someone who doesn't. You've got entirely different skin, entirely different body, entirely different muscular structure, entirely different ability to transform symptoms." Because health is the ability to transform symptoms. Health is not the absence of symptoms, that's what people misunderstand. They always look at me and think, "Oh, you don't have the issues that I have." I said, "Fuck, man, I've got heaps of issues. But I transform them." And I do lots of herbs to transform them. Lots. Not like a little bit. My car is full with, there's herbs everywhere, you should look in my bag, there's herbs everywhere. I take herbs every three hours, I take always somethings, there's always something. I take bamboo, then I take a bit of hoelen then I take a major four. I'm always something, I'm always wheeling and dealing my body with maybe a little bit of this, maybe a little bit of that. Always a little bit. Consistency. Always just, maybe three flowers.   Mason: (01:02:46) Yeah, I was thinking about maybe... It's such a nice way to invite the plants and the mushrooms and the flowers and the barks into you-   Jost: (01:02:54) Yeah, they're a part of your life. They're given to us.   Mason: (01:02:54) Mm-hmm (affirmative)   Jost: (01:02:55) They're given to us in order to strengthen us. It's just like in Taoist philosophy the herbs are superior to food, it's the most important thing. Eventually the Taoist masters stopped food at all and only do herbs. I don't want to go that way because I love eating, but I don't use food to balance Yin and Yang, I use my herbs. Yeah, of course I eat essential foods. I always have a good breakfast out of grain. I always loved oats, I have good grains every day, I have good protein source every day and I enjoy and I eat really good cakes few times a week and I love good coffee. So I feast.   Mason: (01:03:40) You're living!   Jost: (01:03:42) I live it.   Mason: (01:03:43) "I feast," yeah.   Jost: (01:03:45) So I'm not into the juice diets, I'm not into fasting, I do intermittent fasting?   Mason: (01:03:49) You don't?   Jost: (01:03:49) Intermittent fasting, I do.   Mason: (01:03:54) You do, right.   Jost: (01:03:54) Yeah, I do intermittent fasting, I always have 12 hours between eating, every day.   Mason: (01:03:59) So you're doing breakfast and dinner?   Jost: (01:04:00) So I stop about, say I stop 8:00pm eating, I don't eat until 8:00am next day, or 9:00am.   Mason: (01:04:06) Oh okay, right.   Jost: (01:04:07) So, I usually have a minimum of 12 hours to 13 hours. Th

Today we're in for a real treat, Mason chats to Dr Molly Maloof. Dr. Molly is a physician, technologist and entrepreneur. Dr Molly aims to cultivate a global wellness consciousness and promote a preventive, predictive, participatory and personalised field of medicine. One that creates health, increases quality of life, and enhances human resilience. Dr Molly is a passionate speaker and an abundant source of information in her area's of expertise. Tune in for the download.  Molly and Mason discuss: The medicinal use of psychedelics. Spirituality and meditation. Grounded "enlightenment". Clinical medicine. The importance of "Jing" herbs and "adaptogens" in our modern society. Holistic entrepreneurship and life satisfaction. The practices essential for bone health. Food preparation and sourcing. Sovereign health.   Who is Dr. Molly Maloof? Dr. Molly Maloof’s goal is to maximise human potential by dramatically extending human health span through medical technology, scientific wellness, and educational media. Her fascination with innovation has transformed her private medical practice, which is focused on providing health optimisation and personalised medicine to San Francisco & Silicon Valley investors, executives, and entrepreneurs. Molly's iterative programs take the quantified self to the extreme through comprehensive testing of clinical chemistry, metabolomics, microbiome, biometrics, and genomic markers.    Resources:  Molly's Website Molly's Facebook Molly's Instagram Molly's Linkedin Molly's Twitter   Q: How Can I Support The SuperFeast Podcast? A: Tell all your friends and family and share online! We’d also love it if you could subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes. Or  check us out on Stitcher :)! Plus  we're on Spotify! We got you covered on all bases ;P   Check Out The Transcript Here: Mason:  All right everybody, joined by Molly Maloof, my new mate, who I met in Arizona earlier this year. Thanks for coming on the pod. Molly:  Thank you for inviting me. Mason:  Absolute pleasure. I really, really enjoyed your talk. There were a lot of interesting talks at that weekend event at Revitalize. I think the trippiest and weirdest, that left me just like, "Huh," and I got it in a good way from a couple of them. But the Whole Foods CEO, founder guy. Molly:  I loved his talk. Mason:  Yeah, that was a very interesting one. He's a, yeah, interesting guy. I kind of was a little put off by his, like how when Whole Foods saw Amazon it was love at first sight and they were swept off their feet. I was like, "What?" Molly:  And the funniest thing about the technology and the tech scene is just how many parallels there are to modern dating. And the best VC firms really court that 1% of startups that they really, really care about, but they ignore everyone else. There's literally so many parallels to how you date and how companies are founded and formed. It's like everything in life's relationships at the end of the day, you know? Mason:  I'm just trying to get my head around that, because I just didn't grow up in that world. Even when I was doing my international business degree, I just didn't listen and studied herbalism. I'm not... SuperFeast ... I'm just never, SuperFeast just isn't going to date anyone. It might have relationships. I might have a couple of little flings here and there, but because I'm not in that world it was so interesting. Mason:  Anyway, your talk was really cool. You guys, like you were on that panel talking about psychedelics. Molly:  Oh man. I mean I'm fully out of the psychedelic closet by now, and what's cool is that I was just at Burning Man and I saw some amazing, amazing talks by founders of MAPS. Rick Doblin spoke about being after this movement for 40 years. He has been working for 40 years to get psychedelics approved, and we are really close. Well, you know, mushrooms have been decriminalized in Oakland, and people don't know this, but they're selling mushroom chocolates in Oakland. Dispensaries are selling mushrooms. I think that's actually positive as long as people are safe with their dosing. But we're going to see I think the same kind of movement around the medicalization of these, as well as the- Mason:  Recreational. Molly:  Recreational use of these happening in America. I think both are needed and both are valuable experiences, but the important thing is safety. That's one thing I really wanted to get across on stage at the conference, was whether or not these are legal or not legal right now, whether or not you use them in ceremony or recreationally. Whether or not they are used for medicinal purposes or spiritual purposes, the whole goal of this is that no one gets hurt. Molly:  They can be dangerous drugs. If you're not prepared, if you're not in the right situation, right environment, right headspace, right part of your life span, they can be really damaging. So I was really happy that there was a place to talk about them with some pretty forward thinking people and some people who've also suffered from addiction. So it was important to have the balanced perspective, but at the end of the day I think the end conclusion was that there's definitely a place for these in wellness. Mason:  Where are you using them? Like is it clinical, is it just waving the flag? I feel like there's a because, because recreational came up, and I like your take. I think a lot of people keep it very clinical when they have these conversations, and of course it's not because we need to be having many types of conversations. We don't want them institutionalized as well, but almost you can start looking at the perceived social value and then the need somewhat of a structure. I mean you have the complete kind of somewhat like, say, left view that it's just open doors and it's just like whatever. Everyone goes nuts. Then there's that right view, which is a little bit more of that like, "Create a full solid structure and get the pharmaceuticals involved." Mason:  Then there's that middle ground, and a lot of the time, especially if you're going to be in a clinical setting, I can see how some things might be standardized and it can become under those regulatory bodies. But then almost it's the outside of that, when you go more recreational, it's like having the maturity as a society to create that somewhat of structure, for lack of a better word, rules that keeps everyone healthy and keeps everyone understanding it and not just separating it within society. So yeah, where are you falling with it? Why are you talking about it? Molly:  I mean I talk about it because I use them for spiritual purposes. I use them for social purposes, and I use them for medicinal purposes. I do refer people to healers who administer them ceremoniously in an environment of safety and security and careful dosing. It's not legal for me to currently administer them myself as a doctor, so I just make referrals to people. I just connect people and say, "Hey. This person I trust. You can trust them. They're good people. They're not going to harm you in any way." But it sucks, because they aren't legal yet I can't fully prescribe them, but I have prescribed ketamine for medicinal purposes. You can do that in America legally right now. They are psychedelic. It is the only legal psychedelic right now. Mason:  Is the research of ketamine around PTSD mostly, or what's going- Molly:  Actually it's depression and suicidality, which are frankly killing a lot of people right now. America is suffering from a lot of despair deaths is what they're calling them, which is deaths due to homicide, suicide, or self harm. That could be addiction or other means. So for me, I see a lot of that in Silicon Valley. There's a lot of misery, and it sucks because it's a place of so much abundance. You're like, "Geez, if this is the future, we're not heading into a good direction right now." But also a lot of panic. Molly:  People are definitely panicking in a lot of ways in America, for good reason. I mean there's like a mass shooting every week. A lot of people don't feel safe going into public spaces. A lot of people don't feel safe walking around San Francisco. A lot of people suffer from anxiety disorders, so people are turning to these medicines for panic and to feel ... For the tryptamine, they want to feel held and loved. For the ketamine, they want to feel like they can disassociate from reality because it's too much for them to handle at the moment. Molly:  So that's not necessarily a good thing. I mean it's not necessarily a good thing that we have an environment and society that's suffering so badly that people have to disassociate from it in order to maintain their sanity. But it's definitely a better option than taking opioids and dying from an overdose, which are killing a ton of people. Purdue Pharma basically said that they were going to be paying out something around the number of like $11 billion to 2,000 people for this class action lawsuit against them for especially misleading people about the addictive nature of Oxycontin and other Purdue Pharma opioids. Molly:  So shit's hitting the fan in America, and things are not good. So what I'm really interested in and fascinated by, and I just did a tour of New York, LA, and San Francisco, I live here, is just the number of people that are coming together in community and experiencing psychedelics in a space of ceremony. Which is really the traditional format of psychedelic use, in most indigenous communities and societies, is using them in the context of connecting with community. Frankly I think that's really a healthy and safe way, as long as the Shaman that's administering these knows what they're doing. Molly:  It could be transformative, but it could be problematic if people don't have a resource for integration or if they take the wrong dose in this environment. Which I recently saw happen, and I know a person who experienced a psychotic breakdown. So I think it's always important when we talk about these medicines to recognize the benefits and the risks, because they definitely go both ways. At the same time, I would say that largely what I'm seeing is 99% of people who are using these that I know personally, are using them in positive and healthy, fruitful ways. About 1% of times you're seeing casualties and you're seeing damage and you're seeing problems. Molly:  So I think they're largely carefully dosed and administered very safe, but if they're not, they can be really damaging. So it's important to mention that 1%, because that's what everyone sees in the news. But I just read a great article in Vice about how if everybody were to take psychedelics and think about the environment, we wouldn't be in this huge problem we're in right now, which is people not thinking about the effects of their actions on the environment. What's happening in Brazil is a great example of a lack of awakening in a large population of people. Mason:  Yeah. I think it's really important to remember just how low impact and low risk these psychedelics are, but that's in comparison to the gnarliness of the pharmaceutical industry of course. I think that's pretty evident at this point. It's not paranoid. I mean there was, just released in a journal was a study just on Paracetamol here in Australia for the 10 years, I think ending in like 2017. I'll have to look it up and see if I can find it, but I don't know exactly what the numbers were, but it was in that ballpark of like 400% up in heavy liver damage and deaths massively on the rise, and that was studying hospital administered levels. So that's happening here in Australia. Mason:  I think that kind of stuff hitting the news a little bit more is great, but then if we start looking at upgrading towards the use of psychedelics in many fabrics of society, I think the duty of care, I like that you mentioned that 1% because the medicine is in the dose and the medicine is in the efficacy, in the style of dosing. Whether it's going to be in a hospital setting hopefully eventually, but then outside when we're looking to psychologically center ourselves, most of the time people in a proper dosage and a proper environment are going to be able to find that. But I quite regularly ... It's been awhile since I've been in that world, since I've been in the Amazon experiencing [inaudible 00:10:48] up in the hills of the Andes and so on, so forth. Mason:  I've heavily integrated them, but I just think ... I don't know whether I've just got that, people have the memory of me doing that, but I still quite regularly get people writing to me who have gone way too far down the rabbit hole and essentially end themselves disassociating from reality. Which I definitely felt, I wasn't excessive, but I definitely felt myself having a disassociation from reality and just essentially flying with the condor most of the time. Molly:  Right, but you can see the same thing in meditation and- Mason:  Oh, for sure. Molly:  Any type of spiritual pursuit- Mason:  Dude, when you mentioned it on stage, I don't know if you heard, I was the one that cheered. [crosstalk 00:11:36] Molly:  Oh my God, I [inaudible 00:11:37] that was you. Mason:  We know people that have got into vipassana... Molly:  I'm in this whole place right now where I'm really on this spiritual path and I'm experiencing some really profound spiritual experiences, but I'm also aware that I need to keep one foot in reality. I've got a life to live, I've got patients to cover. I've got a book to write. I've got goals to achieve. So I think the real dance of this modern sort of enlightenment movement is figuring out how to be in the state of enlightenment and an effective person in real life. I'm like, "That's my goal," is I'm having these breakthroughs and I'm also getting back into my email and I'm getting back into my life. I have all this work to do, and it's like I want the work that I do in my spiritual life to benefit my actual life, and I want them to be integrated. Molly:  This word integration keeps coming up a lot, and I think it's this concept of psychological and spiritual balance, with what's happening internally and what's happening externally. That's the way that I would describe it, and I just made that up on the spot. But there's definitely a desire for spiritual pursuits in a world that's feeling really uncertain. Frankly, everyone's turning to astrology apps because they're all so confused about religion and who to trust and which institutions to talk to and what- Mason:  Yeah. What should I do with my life, there's an app for that. Molly:  Yeah. Exactly. And should we even reproduce in a world that doesn't seem like it's going to be around in 20 to 50 years. There's a lot of real serious scary questions happening right now in reality, and I think there's a desire for ... There's kind of two types of people. There's people who are going to seek answers, and there's people who are going to be like, "Whatever. I don't know if I'm ever going to find them. I'm just going to try to live my life as it is." Whatever way is fine for you to live. Molly:  I dated a guy who was the latter, and I'm more of the former. I think former's first and latter's second, right? Mason:  Yeah. I mean that's something interesting as well because I'm really, again, I don't know why I found myself doing that 1% as you are, trying to do that duty of care without trying to come across as a stickler. So I love the ability to seek, but then this is where I think people enter into that spiritual world, and I'm going to be very general here, I do love both of these realms where you're seeking spiritual growth and possibly heading into that psychedelic space. Again, the medicine is in the dose. How much seeking you're doing verse how much are you ... Even outside of hardcore, gnarly, long term mindfulness meditation camps, outside psychedelic world, how much are you doing your chop wood, carry water every day. Mason:  This has been something I kind of have struggled with is having my practice somewhat daily, that solid space where I'm consistently learning to come back to my center. What is my center, coming back to a state where I can possibly be parasympathetic when I'm activated, yet my muscles are calm. This is something I'm personally working on at the moment with my friend who mentors me in movement and everything that comes with it, and really expanding that capacity to not be permeated by all these external opinions and really find a place that's tangible and palpable you can sink your teeth into making those decisions. Mason:  Will I have another child, you know, and feel comfortable with those decisions. Because that incessive seeking, you know going to the app, going to astrology, what everyone is doing is just trying to scrape off the top without going right down to the source. Where is this, what the fuck is this philosophy? What does it mean? Molly:  Right, yeah. Right. They've got to take a lot more work to do that. Mason:  A lot of work, and it's not Instagram-able a lot of the time if you're going that deep, and there lies the problem. Molly:  I mean I'm going on a meditation retreat in two weeks, and I'm basically going to meditate for five hours a day. I'm not going to have a phone or a journal, and I'm going to have to deal with all of the desires that I have to write and to think and to produce and to integrate and to analyze, and all the things that drive me on a daily basis. I have to confront those and basically be like, "Molly, you just can't. You're just going to have to sit here. This is what you're supposed to do. This is a challenge, and it's going to be probably one of the hardest challenges." Molly:  I'm not fully prepared for it, but I'm also the kind of person who just likes to do things that she's not fully prepared for, see what happens. Mason:  Yes. Oh I love it. I'm like, "Can't wait to hear about it." Before we- Molly:  Hopefully I don't lose my mind, but I'm pretty sure I won't have one. Mason:  Maybe lose it just for a little bit. That's okay. Molly:  Usually what happens is I end up in a blissed out state and I'm just like ... Everyone's struggling and I'm like, "Ah." But I think this might be harder. I think this might be really hard, so we'll see. Mason:  I do love it. I like the integrated approach, to use the I word. Again, I'll just quickly leave, because since we talked about that psychedelic community, I absolutely love, don't get me wrong, I feel ... I don't know, I can speak for myself anyway when I was deep in it. There is somewhat maybe a subtle that, you know, we found the superior healing method. So whatever you seek, we will seek it in this world with the medicines that we drink. The plants will heal us. I guess you can sometimes maybe see a bit of disdain for any other healing modality kind of come up, that it might be supplementary but it won't be the biggest thing. Mason:  I think something as simple as therapy can be ... In meditative work, yogic work where you start really un-rustling everything, your plant medicine work, and if it really comes up, this work where I think it's going to take time to integrate that. I think for a lot of people, I think finding a nice level therapist or some other modalities to really bring you back off that arm of development that is the beautiful teachings of the plants and come back to your center. Molly:  Yeah. Mason:  Anyway, just wanted to kind of touch on that because I feel ... Yeah, I've had increasingly recently a lot of people are honestly on a soul retrieval journey after going down the rabbit hole. Molly:  Yeah. Mason:  So this kind of is all coming into a wider breadth of work that you do. Molly:  Sure, yeah. Mason:  You're an MD. I was talking to you about how your style of work ... Well, you mentioned it's really old school. Molly:  Yeah. Mason:  It's an old school kind of doctor. So you have a select amount of patients. You have a few patients as well you said who you've taken on special cases. Molly:  Yeah. I mean I basically have two types of patients. I have the personalized medical research on one end. These are like the weird cases that I just get paid to figure them out and figure out why they're sick and why they haven't been fixed yet by the healthcare system. Usually it's complex chronic disease, so it's got its roots usually in a severe health breakdown that was proceeded by usually some psychological stress that really damaged their immune system. Molly:  Usually when someone's under a significant amount of stress and physical threat or psychological threat, if it gets to a certain level, your mitochondria get damaged to a point where they can't defend you anymore. So your immune system is downstream over your mitochondrial function. It essentially just throws off your energy production systems. It throws off your immunity, and infections get in. Then they can further damage your body. Molly:  So usually it's always this horrible stress, massive infection, and then they were never the same after. So now you have to sort of reverse engineer their bodies to get back into a state of balance and health. It's a lot of work, but it's like the most satisfying work to do, because you're dealing with somebody who may have been sick for years. You're like, "Okay. I'm going to fix this." Or somebody who's got something that no one's figured out. You're like, "All right, we're going to figure this out together and we're going to get you better." Molly:  So I love those cases, but then I also have cases of people who ... Frankly, everyone in America wants more energy, okay? So I figured ... Funnily enough I was trying to study health over the last 10 years, like what is health, how do you define it, how do you measure it. In the process of studying health, I discovered that health is about capacity, and capacity is about capacitives. Capacitives is literally making and storing a charge in your cellular membranes, in your mitochondria, that is an electrochemical gradient generated by the food you eat and the way that you live your life. Molly:  It literally charges your cells with energy. That capacity enables you to do work, to run your genetic functions, to express your genes, to produce proteins, to do anything else that your body needs to do, like make hormones. So I've kind of just been going back and back and back and back ... First principles, like what is health, what is energy, what is capacity, and how does that relate to our daily life and our daily function. What are the things that damage that function? Molly:  So that's really where my research has come into play and why I started teaching at Stanford, because they were like, "Hey, our students are some of the most talented in the world, but they're also the most stressed out. So how can we give them a course that could actually help them produce more capacity to do greater and better work?" So I had a class of about 23 people, and it ended up being 20 hours of lectures. I read in I think the last two years I read about 1200 papers. So I've been digging deep into understanding how is energy made, how is it used, how are your energy systems destroyed, and really trying to marry this Eastern ancient philosophy of Chinese medicine and Qi, and then marry that with Western science and come up with my own beliefs around what I call and what's known in the literature as health span. Molly:  Which is how do you extend life as long as possible without disease. To me, it's all about understanding what are the major causes of disease, what are you most likely to get, and what are the things that you can do in your daily life now to avoid these things from happening. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I test everything on myself first. So I've learned about what it means to make a lot of energy, which is essentially making money in your body, but I've also learned how to spend a lot of energy and burn yourself out. Molly:  So I have had multiple rounds of burnout in my life. I had a pretty close call this summer where I was really overdoing it, and I had to take a step back and say, "Oh shit. I'm not living the example right now. I'm really doing too much." Funnily enough, the biggest signal to me this summer was actually the people I was working with were not feeding my energy, they were draining my energy. The thing that people mostly don't realise about health and life is that the quality of your relationships determines the quality of your life. So if your relationships suck, then your life is going to suck and you're going to die young. If your relationships are healthy, you're actually going to live a longer life. Molly:  So it's so fundamental to aging well, is like surrounding yourself with people that nourish you and doing work that makes you come alive, you know? Mason:  So yeah, hell yeah first of all. Molly:  Yeah, thanks. Mason:  I'm keen to dive a little bit into it. You know, well health span I like. I like that you bring that up. I mean that's something that everyone just looks at life in a block term. I don't know when I started hearing that term, maybe in the tellomere books, when that was getting really trendy. It was at the end of that term of life for the [inaudible 00:23:48] when you no longer can reproduce cells a lot of the time, along with other degenerative diseases, you enter into the death span. That's for the last however many decades of your life that the medical system can keep you alive. You're in the death span. So I like that, that's a very tangible goal, to keep yourself in that health span. So we'll get into those principles, but in terms of your work, I mean you work for like year long blocks, like a lot of- Molly:  Six months to a year minimum usually. It's because you need that amount of time to change someone's life. You need that amount of time to take someone around the corner, because behavior change is hard. Mason:  And you go to their homes and work, right? Molly:  Yeah. I go to them. I go to their offices. I email them every week. I talk to the client that is sickest on the phone every week. I just literally created a nine page report on the fly for a client who had like 10 questions for me. She's fairly healthy, but she just wanted some answers and she wanted to understand Ayurvedic doshas, and she wanted to understand ... I was like, "Well here, let's talk about why Ayurvedas might be useful. Let's talk about why it may not apply to a Western body, and why there's some major issues in some of the nutritional recommendations that they have. Also let's talk about how, no offense to India, but they're not doing so well in health." So if this worldview is so effective, why do I see so many sick Indians? I'm just not convinced that tons of grains and tons of dairy is the answer to health. Mason:  Well especially like it's not going to be raw dairy, right? It's not going to be raw fermented dairy. Molly:  No. We're not getting raw fermented dairy. We're not getting non GMO grains anymore. We're getting all this garbage food, so you can't always apply these ancient technologies to modern life unless you can actually have ancient traditional food preparation. And you need to soak and sprout those grains too, and people aren't doing that. So I should've mentioned that in that report, but yeah. It takes a lot of work to do. I'm not against it, and I actually think that the doshas are really valuable for fitness recommendations, because the endomorph, ectomorph, mesomorph is very similar to the ... The ectomorph is very similar to the ... I have to- Mason:  Kapha, Pitta, Alpha. Molly:  Yeah, exactly. So you can actually look at these types and you can- Mason:  Is it, no, not alpha, vata. Kapha, Pitta, Vata. Molly:  Yeah, Pitta is more like mesomorph. Kapha I believe is more like ectomorph, and endomorph is like the last one. Point is that there's body types, and there's those skinny people who have these amazing metabolisms who could literally just crush carbs and they're fine. Then there's the people who are like they even look at a carb, they gain weight, right? Those people legitimately have slower metabolisms than the person who's got the faster metabolism. Then there's people like me who are in the middle, where if I eat carbs I gain weight, if I cut the carbs I lose weight like that. So it's literally I'm lucky. If I lift weights, I get muscular. If I don't lift weights, I get lean. If I do cardio, I get lean. Molly:  So it's all about this balancing of your energy and your metabolism with these patterns that we're seeing with people, that can change by the way, depending on your genetics and your location where you're living in and what you're eating. But anyway, so yeah. So there you go. Mason:  Well I like that you're working ... So you're obviously working, because you've got executives and tech people and kind of high flying CEO kind of clients as well, so it's a nice balance. But obviously they're going to be dealing some of the time with something debilitating. But as well, like if they're not going to- Molly:  Oh yeah, sometimes they just want to be really healthy. So I was writing this book called The Hour Between the Dog and Wolf. It's about the biology of trading, and I am working with a hedge fund founder who is kind of like a character off of Billions, except for a lot nicer. So he was having a bad year, and when you lose, you have high cortisol levels and you're in a fear based state and your testosterone levels tank. Molly:  When you win, your testosterone levels go up and it's like, "Boom." So there's this effect on your body and your biology that can literally change your performance, and your performance can change your biology. So I was trying to get this guy back into a state of high testosterone. So I was like, "Look. Your testosterone sucks. You've had a bad year. We want to get you back into a place where you're winning again." Molly:  So I got him to start weight lifting. I got him on a different type of dietary style. I got him to start doing certain things with his supplements, and low and behold, his testosterone doubled and he's in a much better place right now. So it's cool when you can teach a person about what's going on inside their body, give them certain behaviors to do, have them implement those behaviors, see the labs change, and then the person's like, "Oh my God. This is fucking awesome." Now this [inaudible 00:28:45] Mason:  So with the initial testing, because I think it's like a lot of people ... As we talked about before, I like that you're offering somewhat of a bridge, but a legitimate bridge. Not just like a, "I'm a health coach," bridge- Molly:  I'm a data driven ... I mean I am looking at the body as a very complex machine that needs multiple ways of attacking different problems and balancing different energies. Some of the energies by the way are not always physical. Sometimes this stuff is spiritual, and I have a questionnaire to identify where in your health do you have the biggest problems. Sometimes a person's health is actually, it's a spiritual problem. They really have had some sort of awful life event that has just set them on a course of really bad luck and bad experiences, and they need to focus on that and not on biology. But a lot of what I do and what my bread and butter is is biological health optimization. Molly:  So looking at the body from a molecular perspective and saying, "Okay. This is your lipid panel. This is what your LDL particle numbers look like. This is what your diet looks like and this is why your diet has changed these numbers. This is what your carbohydrate metabolism looks like. This is what your amino acid metabolism looks like. This is why you have an imbalance in amino acids. This is why you need this one specifically versus that one. This is why your cortisol levels are off and you're completely exhausted and you need some Jing herbs to revitalize yourself because you're literally burned out." Molly:  Or maybe a person needs detoxification because they've gotten super high mercury levels from eating way too much sushi, which was me last year in Japan. Then sometimes I'm looking at the microbiome and saying, "Okay, we need to get you on some personalized probiotics because your microbiome is totally imbalanced and we need to get you back to a better state. If you don't get into a better state, you're gonna develop inflammatory bowel disease because you have early markers of that." So it's a lot about prediction. Molly:  This concept of P4 medicine, which I really like, that Leroy Hood coined, and it's personalized- Mason:  What's this called? P- Molly:  P4. Personalized, predictive, preventive, and participatory. I really like it because it's a framework of thinking about medicine before things become full blown disease. Full blown disease is hard to reverse. I mean you are dealing with pathology on a molecular level that is like a broken building. It's a lot harder to fix that than a building that's got a water main leak that you're like, "Oh shit. We got to fix that water main leak, but if we fix it it's not going to completely collapse." Or like a building that has, like you're in the kitchen and there's a grease fire. You got to put that out now, because if you don't that's going to set this whole thing on fire. Molly:  It's really about ... Or maybe the building just has some ice and you're like, "Okay look, this building needs some upkeep. It needs some better cleaning." Just go fast, fast more often. Clean out the garbage and you won't have all this crap growing that shouldn't be growing. So I really look at the body as architecture, and I look at the architecture as like are you building your body out of marble and really good quality steel or crappy materials that are going to break down once a big storm hits. It's about looking at the parallels between nature and your own physiology, because you are a microcosm. You are in yourself a living, breathing organism that is basically changing constantly. Molly:  If you're not doing regular tuneups, you're not going to know when things are not working out well. So I did my own labs this summer because it'd been about six months since I'd done them. I was like, "Ah shit, my microbiome has been definitely affected by my stress levels and my diet. I need to increase my protein. I need to decrease my saturated fat. I need to change my probiotic regimen and I need to detox." So I started doing that about a month ago, and I'm already feeling like holy shit, so much better in one month. It's astonishing how just knowing what to fix and going after those areas is so much more effective than throwing darts at a wall and hoping something sticks. Mason:  Well I like that you're providing that service that's that bridge between you taking it on yourself and understanding the patterns of your body and being able to affect it, and basically get on top of little symptomatic responses and grease fires that come up. But the other side of that is where most people are trying to bridge between, is like the practitioner office, whether it's a naturopathic office or even possibly with a GP. Is MD just like, or is it GP? I don't know if you have GPs. Molly:  General practitioner. I'm a general practitioner. Mason:  Oh you are? Okay. Molly:  I'm the most general of practitioners, because I literally do so many things. I'm super broad. Mason:  Yeah. I think GP is that 15 minute stint in the office [crosstalk 00:33:44] Molly:  A primary doctor for the most part, but also anybody who's not board certified in one area is a GP for the most part. So I'm not a primary doctor. I'm not the doctor you call when you've got the flu. I am the doctor that you deal with when you want to improve your health or dig real deep into why you are so sick. Mason:  Well that is something I think a lot of people, yeah, you're providing that ... The amount of data that you go into, that bridge to go, "Right, you don't want to end up in any of these clinics or offices. You want to be taking complete understanding and responsibility for the patterns of your health." So you take people essentially through that program, and then when they come out the other side, from the sounds of it, they're incredibly informed about the way their body works. So I think- Molly:  Yeah. It's a lot of education. Mason:  Yeah. So you're using a lot of testing, which I really like. I think perhaps people listening ... I think it's something that is quite available. I think DNA testing, microbiome, and you're doing hormone panels, is that right? Molly:  Mm-hmm (affirmative). Hormone panels, microbiome testing, nutritional testing is probably the most valuable thing I do is literally just testing the body for vitamins and minerals and neurotransmitters and carbohydrate metabolism, fat metabolism, markers of dysbiosis, markers of oxidative stress. Like looking under the hood. Then just basic labs, like organ system function, anemia, hormones via blood and urine, and the whole hormone cascade. Then looking at certain specialty labs if necessary, like immune system function. What else am I doing? Molly:  I do some panels of infectious agents, just because viral infections are pretty common and yet overlooked by a lot of doctors. They just did not teach us to test for viruses when we were in medical school, even though they're super common. Mason:  Well I think that body of work is coming up in the literature. It's like there's been a lot on stealth infections recently. Molly:  Oh yeah. Mason:  The amount of times that it is going to be a stealth viral infection- Molly:  Oh yeah, or intracellular bacteria. Like syphilis, Lyme Disease, mycoplasma, those are nasty. Mason:  Well and I think what's happening a lot of the time for people who ... I was speaking to a practitioner over here, and she kind of solidified the idea that you start getting better on one front and you start feeling fantastic because you've gone after perhaps the spirochetes involved in Lyme, but then you've had a viral infection that's been sitting there dormant waiting for the health of a cell to get to a particular point that it can use it to reproduce its agenda. Then all of a sudden you start going down again. So that's for a lot of- Molly:  These things are nasty. You got to get their whole life cycle. You've got to look at the life cycle and be like, "Okay, how can I interrupt this? How can I interrupt this?" That's why antivirals concurrently with Lymes treatments are really important, because as your body starts activating and your genes start getting expressed, those viruses get into your genes. They get into your own genetic code, those assholes. Mason:  Yeah. Yeah, they are. They're opportunistic. Molly:  They're so smart. Mason:  That's why I think even with Lyme, it's like Astragalus, Japanese knotweed, Cat's Claw, that's why they're constantly being thrown out there. They have that cross section where they can be such effective antivirals. Even just having- Molly:  That's amazing. Mason:  It's just like even having that in your lifestyle, speaking of getting to understanding symptoms and understanding- Molly:  What are those called? Which ones did you mention? Mason:  Astragalus or astragalus. Molly:  Yeah, astragalus and- Mason:  And Cat's Claw. Molly:  Cat's Claw. I didn't realise Cat's Claw was an antiviral, but I think that makes sense. Mason:  Yeah, big time. I mean you can think like especially in the Amazon, if you're going to need an antifungal in your diet because you're going to have fungus bringing you down. So that's the Pau D'Arco. Then you combine that with the amount of viral activity that's going on there within that sopping wet jungle, that's where the Cat's Claw is probably ... It's one of the primary medicines if you get in there, especially one of the primary clinical medicines, but also for me it's one of the primary preventative medicines that I just kind of keep on rotation. Molly:  Amazing. Mason:  It's like I had to take it off SuperFeast, and this was- Molly:  Why? Mason:  It's just really hard to get a good source at the moment. Yeah, the quality's just getting a bit crap. I've now found someone that's working with some small tribes who are basically doing Cat's Claw in that Di Tao style. That's how we source herbs, Di Tao. It just means getting it from their spiritual homeland and crafting it in a way that leaves the environment better than when you found it, and also just like- Molly:  How do you pronounce that? What is that thing you said? Mason:  D-I, Di. Molly:  D-I. Mason:  And then Tao is T-A-O. Molly:  Tao. Mason:  Yeah, Di Tao. Molly:  Oh wow. That is the greatest thing. Mason:  Well I mean it's just a sourcing philosophy, I mean just being able to get the wild thing and procure it yourself, that's like if you're doing that yourself then that's essentially the most ... That's Di Tao to the absolute extreme. You don't need to label it Di Tao, that's just you getting your herbs. But in trying to describe to people how, like say we're sourcing Chinese tonic herbs, Di Tao it's kind of more of this living and breathing sourcing philosophy that's ever moving. It's not like organic is static. You tick boxes and then you can put a stamp on. Mason:  Di Tao, you're in constantly trying to get the growing or sourcing, whether it's foraging wild or growing it in a farm, closer to its original state. You're ensuring that you're not using irrigation, definitely not using anything like a pesticide or external soils or anything like that. But has a lot to do with making sure that you're in regions, whether they're mountainous or valleys or whatever it is, to atmospherically just make sure, and temperature wise to make sure that you're going to get a herb that has the most punch. Basically ensure that the herb has the Jing, Qi, or Shen within it. Then you constantly go down to make sure that you have the full spectrum extraction of the herb that just keeps it all together. Molly:  Amazing. Mason:  That's kind of like Di Tao. So yeah, hopefully we'll have a Cat's Claw soon, because we found someone basically doing it in that style over in Ecuador, which is like [crosstalk 00:40:29] Molly:  I mean, so I just got into Chinese herbs a couple years ago because I went to Erewhon Market in LA, and I was having a really exhausted week. I was just so tired, and I saw these elixirs. They were selling them for like $16.00, and I was like, "All right, well I'm in town. It's a fun thing to buy, an elixir from Erewhon, so we're just going to- Mason:  It's the funnest way to break the bank when you're in LA. Molly:  It's so great. You just drop $100 easy, like no problem. All the prepared stuff they make, that's the best by the way. They bake the best kale chips in the world. But the point is I had this elixir, and I remember just being revived, like totally revived. I was just like, "This is absolutely astonishing how good I feel right now." So I ended up buying all the separate ingredients of this elixir because I was just like, "I'm just going to have to make this regularly to get my Jing back." It was all about Jing herbs. I remember just feeling like, "This is the answer." Like as somebody who has the tendency to ... When I make energy, I just want to go and spend it. I mean my sister said, "Molly, if you're not working, you're partying." I don't party that hard anymore, but I have had a tendency to just burn the candle on both ends because I really enjoy life and I really want to feel alive. Molly:  I try to simmer down a little bit, but then I end up going back and doing stuff. But man these Jing herbs, it just revived me. I remember thinking, "This is so incredible that I just discovered this whole new world of medicine." There's apparently 50 Chinese herbs that are like the traditional- Mason:  The tonics. Molly:  Yeah. Mason:  A few more but there's like [crosstalk 00:42:09] It depends. There's a few official stories and things people have picked up and run with. Tonic herbalism and superior herbalism, it's wider than just like, "These are the top 50." It's a system. There are herbs which are considered superior that are there to basically ... That's about nourishing life, but some of them aren't the absolute top. Some of them are just somewhat supporting and bolstering to those and make it possible in that tonic herbal system. But basically, yeah. [crosstalk 00:42:41] Yeah, coming from that world of like Truth Calkins put together that Erewhon tonic bar. He worked with Ron Teeguarden. So yeah, that's like I definitely know that well. Molly:  Yeah. But I mean the hard part was, is actually I couldn't get ... For this tonic I couldn't get deer antler velvet. I was just like ... This is how I found out about your company, as I was like, "I can't get any deer antler velvet. There's literally no one in the world that I can get this from." Then I was like, "SuperFeast." I remember when a friend of mine from Byron Bay told me about your company. So I went online and I bought it and had it shipped. I was just like, "What is this magic?" I don't know the shelf life of it. Do you know the shelf life of it? Is it pretty decent? Mason:  Two years. Molly:  Okay, cool. I can still use it then. But yeah, it was this magical ingredient that I wanted to find. Then I saw you guys at the conference and I was just like, "Oh my God. His mushrooms are here for free. There was this whole room of free swag." I was just like, "Mason's Mushrooms are free? Like how come he is giving these away. This is so valuable. This is the most valuable thing in this room." I took like three bottles. Mason:  Yeah, good. I was hoping you would. I'm glad you got the deer antler. Molly:  I have a story for you. Mason:  Oh yeah? Molly:  I had a girlfriend who had not had her period in like a year because her husband is dealing with cancer and she was in a really serious stress state. She started taking your mushrooms and she got her period in a month. Mason:  So good. I love those stories. It almost brings a tear to your eye. Molly:  I know. Mason:  Because when you understand the repercussions of that that actually means- Molly:  Yeah. I was just like, "She needs adaptogens. She's in way too much stress. She's not in a state where her body can reproduce and she needs to get into a state of calm again." Honestly I saw her in a few weeks after she started the supplements I gave her, and she was like a totally different looking person. It was amazing. People don't realise that the stressed state, the body will always prioritize survival over reproduction. So there's a lot of women complaining of not being able to reproduce and having all sorts of hormonal dysfunctions, and you ask them about their lives and they're like, "Well I'm not stressed." It's like everyone is so complicit with the level of stress that we have that no one believes they're stressed anymore. Mason:  Yeah, that's it. Molly:  It's like, "I'm super high stress." Even I was in the state of denial even six months ago. Because I was doing a startup, I was working as a doctor and I was teaching at Stanford, and I was just like, "Yeah I'm not going to lower my stress anytime soon because this is what I do. I'm a top performer." There was a point where the world, the universe, my body was just like, "Oh just wait. Just wait. Give yourself a couple more months of this." I got around to the summer and I remember looking in the mirror being like, "You have exhausted yourself. You look exhausted, and it's time for you to take a step back and start recalibrating this stuff you're doing because you just performed a lot, but you just ran a marathon. You need to chill." Mason:  Yeah. You can never stop recalibrating and reading those patterns man. Molly:  You have to keep listening and listening. Mason:  There's so much clinically about stealth infections, stealth inflammation. Stealth stress isn't something, and you exactly said it, and I kind of sometimes just ... There's so much going on and I'll just run at a million miles an hour, and I know I have had the capacity to do that in the past, and especially when I've had my practices in place that I've been able to maintain that level, and at the moment ... I'm really reevaluating at the moment, especially I'm at the back of three weeks just with Aiya while Tahns is over studying in the States. Just with that, little things just get lost within the personal practice, and yet I don't take ... I just allow them to be eliminated and just, as you did as well, just a million miles an hour and all your projects and everything, and bit by bit that stealth stress starts to creep in. You go, "You know what? I'm okay. I'm actually not that bad." Mason:  Then the accumulation that starts to occur within your nervous system, within the endocrine system, and then if you have a high standard, which is what I like about your work in teaching this, understanding that optimal general high standard that you have for yourself, and that reading these subtle symptoms and then knowing that you have the ability to utterly change the flow of your lifestyle, that's where it lies in the begining. Molly:  This is the power of, and this is really the whole aim, is recognizing that there is no magical day where you're going to be optimally healthy. There's this constant rhythm of life which is always changing, and there's going to be times where you're going to be pushing it hard, and there's going to be times where you have to recover. If you don't, it's like athletes. I told everyone, "Look everyone, I'm on an off season right now." My off season involves writing a book proposal, traveling, speaking abroad, running my practice, but frankly, and I'm going to incorporate a company and get it started, but I'm not going to be overextending myself during this two month period. Molly:  This is about restoration. This is about recalibration. This is about reconnection with my community and my family, but it's not about always being go, go, go, go, go. It's about recognizing everybody can take a break. You can take a week long vacation once a quarter. You can take a day off once a week. You have to give yourself time to recover. That is the natural style of life. Life is not constantly always stormy. There's times of calm and there's times of stress, and if you don't follow those patterns and you're always in the storm, then how are you ever going to recover? Molly:  You're going to use up all your resources. This is really the core of health. It's about recognizing that you're going to build capacity and you're going to spend it. You're going to build it and you're going to spend it. It's like having money in the bank. But your major goal should always be, "How am I making compounding interest decisions that lead to better and bigger capacity so I can handle more and so I can actually do more without breaking?" This is how you level up in your life. It's like you don't push yourself and waste your energy completely, you reserve some of it in the back and you invest that energy in things that are going to build you up. Those adaptogens, the food ... They're not cheap, but they're worth investing in. Molly:  The food you eat, like I spend double what most people spend on food, and I also fast more often than most people do, so I probably spend about the same. But I'm doing these practices to build my capacity, and I'm doing these things that I know are going to lead to better health long term. So that's really the main message of what I'm trying to teach people. It's really about what is the minimum number of healthy things you can do to optimize your health so that you have this constant state of, "I'm still in the process of moving in the right direction of health," even though you're not always going to be at the highest performance state. Mason:  I completely agree. I always, again, whenever I talk about this ... It's absolutely true, and it doesn't matter how many times people hear this simple message, and I feel like you've put it quite a bit differently. But I always, I hear within myself the not possible-ness. I've worked with a lot of mums especially over the years, and you're feeling that's like ... If anyone's feeling that, it's not just mums of course, it's everyone, but that bogged down. For me it was a young man wanting to not grow a business but go and create the best educational resource. Mason:  I realised for me what was making it not possible, which was I feel like most people needed to kind of have on the side as an acknowledgement, when they hear this ability that you need to be able to maybe take a day off, do these kinds of things to keep you at optimal, is that you really need to go in and do some work to see where your societal or family programming has really put in some values that aren't actually yours. Because that's where, like the moment me and Tahns really realised that just, or for myself as well, I was just set to maximum velocity. Just in the business for example, I'm just like, "It's not possible to just slow down." It's just like there's so many things to do. It's just like, "Well how about we just don't do them as fast." Mason:  It's like with expanding to America, this is ... Tahns is like the GM of the company. She's copping that burden essentially if we go really quick, and for us to get to the point with a bunch of other decisions, we've over the last years realised, "Why are we trying to go so fast? We're not compromising our sourcing or anything like that, but why don't we just slow the fuck down? Why don't we just learn the real why of why we actually want to do these things?" I immediately just realised that that programming from the current entrepreneurial scene that I'd decided to take on myself, and it's- Molly:  Totally. It is. And everyone's miserable and they act like, "Oh look at me on my Instagram how fucking awesome my life is." Everyone's so unhappy underneath it all. You're like, "Actually the people I want to spend my time with are those entrepreneurs that are content, those entrepreneurs that are saying 'I do this because I love the work,' those entrepreneurs who basically inspire me to continue to grow in every direction and not be ..." The thing that really sucks about the entrepreneurship sort of mentality is that there's a lot of people who are just dopamine and novelty driven. So there's a sense of like it's never enough, and if you let that permeate your life of it's never enough, then you'll never be happy with your partner. You'll never be happy with any company you've built. You'll never be happy with your cofounder, and you'll always find a reason to find something wrong with your reality. Molly:  Frankly, no matter how big of a success you can have, you'll never be happy with that level of success either. So like when I finished teaching at Stanford this year, I thought, "Okay. The next obvious thing I should do is just found a tech company, because that's what you do in the Valley. You just found tech companies." I immediately- Mason:  That's so wild to me. Molly:  Oh totally, right? I was like, "Okay universe, I need this type of cofounder. Give it to me. I need literally someone to do this and this for me," and the next couple days I found these guys. They actually contacted me and they were like, "Hey we're looking for a doctor like you to work with." I'm like, "Well funny, I'm looking for co founders like you." You've got to be really careful with how you ask for things, because you may get them, and then when you get them you may not actually like them. You can end up ... I just think that there's this super fast mentality of everything has to go so fast, everything has to be so so quickly found. A lot of things in life take slow and tender caring and nurturing to build. Molly:  There is this desire I have of building something slowly and methodically, carefully, and not being chained to venture capital money, which I think is part of the reason why everything is so ... People think that they have to grow so fast, and they're so unhappy. There's frankly an unhappy relationship with venture capital. But at the same time, I think there's never been a better time to be an entrepreneur, so I'm not telling people not to do it, but I think the thing that I've learned from watching people is seeing who's doing it right and then who's maybe not doing it so right. Maybe who's doing it in a way that just isn't actually bringing them life satisfaction, you know? Mason:  Yeah. I like to think of it like who's doing it unique, because of course everyone's going to be [inaudible 00:54:48] Molly:  I love that, because I mean there's definitely enough people doing it in a way that's like, "Drain your energy. Drain your capacity. You'll deal with it when you exit." There's a lot of that. Mason:  I love it. Hey, since I've got a bunch of other things I want to talk about, but I know we're probably like- Molly:  Part two? Mason:  Yeah, maybe like ... We'll do a part two for sure. I've never done like this before, but how about like a fire found? Is that what they're called? Molly:  Oh yeah, sure. Mason:  All right. So everyone just know that these are huge topics and probably maybe on another podcast we'll get a little bit further into it, but I just want to get fire round recommendations and takes on first bone and teeth health. Molly:  Oh yeah, okay. Your bone and teeth health has everything to do with your diet, so if your diet is high in sugar, you're going to decay your mouth because you're going to grow the wrong bacteria in your oral microbiome and they're going to produce acid. That acid's going to break down the enamel, and that's how you're going to get cavities. So cut the sugar out of your diet. If someone hasn't told you to stop drinking soda by now, give me a fucking break. I'm sorry for cussing, but soda does not belong in the American diet or the Australian diet or any diet of human anywhere in the world, period, end of story. Okay, off that rant. Molly:  Minerals are really important. You get them from usually high quality sources of water. You get them from fruits and vegetables. You get them from meats. You get them from healthy foods. You need minerals. Shilajit's a cool source of minerals that I started taking, just be careful with the dose because if you have too much Shilajit you will get way too energized. [crosstalk 00:56:23] Mason:  Yeah, I mean it's a weird industry as well. It's getting pretty unsustainable that one as well. There's a couple of good ones, I think like Omica. But yeah. Molly:  Does Shilajit go bad, because I feel like it looks like it never goes bad like honey. Mason:  Yeah. I mean it's kind of like that. If you have the tar, then it's got like a long shelf life. Molly:  I don't think it goes bad. I feel like it's got to have years. Okay, other teeth things. People don't floss. Flossing is the key to good teeth. If you don't floss your teeth, you're going to have basically a large amount of surface area that's never been touched. So that's like not brushing your teeth. That's gross, so gross. I love oral health. I could talk about it for hours, but the quality of your diet will determine the quality of your teeth. Mason:  I love it. I saw on your Instagram that you're just making up a nice juicy broth for yourself, always going to help as well. Molly:  Yeah. Broth is so good because you need those minerals from the bones. Mason:  Well let's look really quickly, let's just like ... I wanted to talk about this a little bit more, but one of the things I really love about your, especially your Instagram, is your focus on food preparation. I assume it's something that you focus a lot in the work that you do. Molly:  Yeah. Food is everything, food prep. I mean sourcing, I source like a chef because chefs know where good food is made and sourced. So people don't understand that there's markets everywhere. Go to the market, get your best food, and then keep your plants alive. Plants want to live. Certain plants want to live outside the fridge, certain plants want to live in the fridge. Most plants that have stalks want to be in water, so you should put them into water and then put them in the fridge, because they want to stay alive. Molly:  Other plants like leaves want to be in like a greenhouse, so you put them in a bag with a piece of paper towel, and it'll keep them alive in a way that won't let them die. Make some sprouts. Sprout your own sprouts. They're super easy to do. Ferment your own foods. Mason:  Just get in there, yeah. Molly:  Just get into your community and get into local eating. Local produce is the highest quality nutrient value for your buck, and eat organic. Frankly it's just better for you. It doesn't have as many pesticides. But if you can't eat organic, still eat fruits and vegetables because it's still better for you than not. Just avoid the dirty dozen in America. Then with meat it's all about the sourcing. It's all about the quality. Grass fed, pasture raised, grass finished. Do not eat grain finished meat. Wild fish, know your fishmonger. Talk about where the fish comes from. Molly:  Choose sustainable fishes and don't over consume. We can all fast more. We don't need to eat every day, turns out. Humans don't have to eat every day. You can cut your grocery bill just by not eating as much. Nuts and seeds generally like to be soaked and sprouted, just be aware that you're going to get a lot of anti-nutrients. I overdo the nuts and seeds. This is a known problem. If somebody out there wants to give me advice on how to stop doing this, I don't know how ... I don't have the answer because it's my biggest issue right now and I still consume lots of nuts and seeds, and my Omega 6s are too high because of that, so that's a problem. Mason:  A lot of almonds in there? Molly:  Too many almonds. Mason:  Almonds, I think it's a thousand to one ratio of Omega 6s to 3s. Molly:  All right, I'm just going to cut out almonds. I'm going to cut out the almonds. That's the key is the almonds. Mason:  Yeah, just try the almonds and then see how you go. I love it. I mean I hit that message every time. Here everyone's integrating, like listening to the SuperFeast podcast, a lot of people are integrating tonic herbs into their kitchen. But what I like is for them to ... It needs somewhere to land within the kitchen. It needs a real culture. Just on, like crossing over to even psychedelics and Michael Pollan. His later book kind of rocked the world to change your mind, but he's a food journalist. I think we spoke about him. Are you a fan of his work? Molly:  I know him. Yeah, he's awesome. Mason:  You know him? Molly:  Yeah. Mason:  He's the legend, right? He's such a- Molly:  He's a legend. Mason:  After everything that he's researched, his whole thing comes down to just prepare your own food and know where it comes from. Molly:  And eat mostly plants and a little bit of meat if you want some meat. Mason:  But yeah, eat real food. Not too much, mostly plants. Right? I think that's it, unless ... Yeah, I mean I know there's a lot of contention in the diet scene no matter what, but that personal food preparation you can never come away from it. Molly:  The key is learning these basic techniques, like basic techniques. Get a blender, blending ... Everyone likes baby food, I don't care what you say. Purees make everything delicious. Broth plus vegetables equals magic. Just make baby food, just make it. You'll love it, I promise you. Just make purees. Mason:  I got to use my blender for something but hot chocolates one of these days. Molly:  Right? Make your own cacao. Make your own ... I don't know, just make your own stuff. It's not hard to make. Just learn to use a blender, learn to boil water, learn to roast, learn to saute. These are basic techniques. Mason:  Learn to slow cook. Molly:  Slow cooker. Oh yeah, slow cooker's got to be the easiest thing in the world. Mason:  Got to be the easiest thing. Molly:  Honestly just follow a recipe. Once a week learn a new recipe. Just teach yourself. Then make salads. Salads are dumb, I mean you just got to chop shit and make a dressing. Mason:  I love it. Look, final question before we bring this home. If people are going to start getting to understanding the patterns of their body, the symptoms of their body, I know you work with a lot beyond that. You look at emotional reactivity. There's a lot here for people when taking sovereign control of their own health to get on top of. Molly:  Yes, sovereign control of your health. Mason:  We've talked about the testing which people can go and find a practitioner. I know I'm kind of like back ... Need to kind of get on top of that, it's been a while since- Molly:  Try to find Genova Diagnostics. They're my favorite company. They're a global company. They're easier to find in England.

Mason Taylor is a health educator, speaker and podcast host with a special interest in sharing how to navigate the evolving world of health and its many paradigms to create a unique and potent health philosophy and personal practice; an approach that helps people to feel safe, balanced and vital in their body. He is the founder of SuperFeast, purveyors of the world's finest tonic herbs and blends.My family and I use these incredible herbs from Super Feast and we deeply value the #BeyondOrganic quality. Check out the range at:https://www.superfeast.com.auCheck out the videos of Mason on the land from where he gets the Super Feast herbs from:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qohn4VfZTg0&list=PL-7czygRimYmgUdYt89FZnLLvSxeY0UUbFollow Super Feast at:https://www.instagram.com/superfeast/Have a listen to the Super Feast podcast here:https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/superfeast-podcast/id1437097644?mt=2Notes:- The principles of tonic herbalism and Di Tao.- We do not need to enter into a degenerative decline state like what's considered 'normal' in our culture. These types of herbs can assist us is staying in a regenerative state.- Different types of medicinal mushrooms, uses for deer antler, oyster (micro ground pearl), and other incredible herbs that can assist us in living the most balanced and vital life.- How to keep your immune system strong and resilient.If you'd like to support this podcast please visit:https://stuartwatkins.org/podcasts/Support the show (https://stuartwatkins.org/podcast/)

This week, we’re joined by Mason Taylor, a thought leader, professional speaker, tonic herbalist, and writer who inspires and teaches people to once again become enchanted with their body, life, and health.For the last 7 years, Mason has been teaching about the benefits of medicinal mushrooms and Taoist tonic herbs. He founded his own brand of powdered extracts of tonic herbs and medicinal mushrooms called SuperFeast. Carefully sourced from wild regions of China and Inner Mongolia, SuperFeast products are comprised of purest, highest quality, all-natural ingredients. You can check out their blog to find educational articles about health and nutrition and explore awesome recipes of shakes, brownies, elixirs and so much more!Mason also hosts two podcasts. The SuperFeast Podcast started back in September 2018, and it dives into and dissects topics such as tonic herbalism, brain optimization, and Jing energy. On his other podcast, The Mason Taylor Show, he interviewed thought leaders, visionaries and change-makers in many areas of life to share with you their latest Insights, distinctions and actionable advice relevant to the journey of health. There are over 40 episodes of inspiring educational content on diverse subjects with interesting guests for you to check out.Having spent over 15,000 hours studying the field of health and transformation, he employs education, vulnerable conversation, and deep connection to help people discover who they really are and what they are here to do in the world. His clients stop living in an illusion about the environment and the world they live in. They discover not only how to resolve health problems, but they get the clarity and confidence to explore their aspirations.Connect with Mason:Website: https://www.superfeast.com.au/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/maseface86Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/masonjtaylor/Mason’s Story of Inspired EvolutionMason shares with us his journey from getting interested with and studying herbalism in his last year of studies, to having his own brand of medicinal mushrooms and tonic herb products. Back in 2011, he started SuperFeast with the intent of spreading the word about the importance and benefits of adding plants and medicinal mushrooms to your regular diet. Back then, these ideas were much less popular, hitting the highest point only in the last couple of years. The cultivation of these sacred plants coming from eastern cultures ideally follows the philosophy of Di Tao. While it’s difficult to translate, it basically means “sourced from its spiritual homeland”, with practical benefits of Di Tao being related to the effectiveness of the herbs and also improved appearance and taste. It is a subject people are not particularly aware of and it concerns proper ways of sourcing and harvesting plants and mushrooms.“It’s important to ensure that it doesn't hit fad vibes because overarching is a philosophy of integrating therapeutics, botanicals that have been harvested in particular ways, connected to the elements, connected to nature.” - Mason TaylorHe further explores potential issues with the subject of medicinal mushrooms becoming a fad and the unfortunate side-effects of opportunists getting involved with the business.“It’s the opportunists that come in late… and they don’t understand this mature perception of what it takes to leave the earth and the environment better than you found it and make sure you’re actually circulating where you’re getting your crop from.” - Mason TaylorThe Benefits of Medicinal Mushrooms and HerbsMason goes into details of just how and why are these medicinal mushrooms and tonic herbs a great way to boost your overall health. Using a very holistic approach, he is very down to earth and rational regarding the benefits, fully being aware that health is not about adding one or two things to your diet and experiencing magic-like improvements. Having said that, he is also extremely focused on the empirical evidence coming from western influences, all the while respecting the ancient traditions and anecdotal evidence that has been in the eastern culture for centuries. The knowledge acquired in both anecdotal and experimental form unequivocally points to the effectiveness of medicinal mushrooms.“These things aren’t cures, they’re not silver bullets but they are herbs that definitely help the immune system, especially medicinal mushrooms, to unite itself and get more sophisticated and that’s been proven empirically.” - Mason TaylorLooking at the whole picture, medicinal mushrooms can help you develop sovereign immunity and Mason sees one of the reasons in the connectedness we have with them in terms of evolution, to the point where we’re in some sort of symbiotic relationship with them.“We’ve co-evolved with mushrooms, 100%, and so they are a part of us” - Mason TaylorAttaining Sovereignty and the Slipperiness of Wisdom Diving into the dynamics and the multidimensional nature of intention, we discuss Mason's views on attaining sovereignty and the essence of wisdom. He emphasizes “slipperiness”, a characteristic that highlights the ability of a system to adapt, integrate and incorporate different bits of knowledge into something that will become relevant and effective.“Wisdom is gooey, wisdom is non-judgemental, wisdom is minding your own bloody business and then having enough perception of the environment around you when it’s appropriate to share with potency and, ideally, a smile on your face.” - Mason TaylorMason also invites us to be non-judgemental which he perceives an integral part of wisdom. A common mistake people make is that an over-development in one area of knowledge is somehow an excuse for exerting judgment towards other fields, one they’re not trying to understand. Less judgment would definitely benefit us all as a society and Mason inspires us to act be more open and cooperative with the words:“Don’t be a disruption when it’s not a useful thing that the society can use to evolve itself.” - Mason Taylor See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Mason is travelling through China visiting the pristine mountains and valleys where we grow and forage our tonic herbs and medicinal mushrooms. Right in the middle of these experiences, he is dripping with the awareness and perception of the Taoist tonic herb tradition that emerged on this ancient land and the majesty of the herbs, and he shared this passionately in this podcast.    You are going to learn all the ins and outs of the wild foraging and conscious farming operations of medicinal mushrooms & tonics and how to ensure you’re sourcing the absolute greatest possible tonic herbs. If you are buying your herbs from SuperFeast, you will learn why our products work so well and are superior in quality. If you’re not sourcing our herbs you will learn the questions to ask the people providing you medicinal mushrooms and herbs to ensure you are not being swindled into buying an inferior product.   We will take a journey into the roots of this herbal philosophy and learn when the split occurred away from traditional healing towards a reductionist approach to healing and herbalism (towards modern medicine), and the consequences. Mason covers what is needed to become an integrated practitioner that keeps develops expertise in the prevention and optimisation approach to health that tonic herbalism and shamanic Taoism is rooted within.    In this episode we will cover: Why prevention beats treatment every time The origins of Taoist tonic herbalism What Shen Nong had to say about where to source herbs Di Tao as the ultimate way to source herbs How to ensure your herbs stay heavy metal and radiation free Why wild chaga is superior How to grow the best schizandra ever Why modern doctors have got it wrong How Traditional Chinese Medicine lost its way  Why mushrooms grown on grain are the worst ever The two types of people that grow mushrooms on grain How to make a herb more adaptogenic through conscious farming  And heaps more! 

Today at SuperFeast headquarters, Mason and Tahnee talk all things Taoist tonic herbalism. What the heck is Taoism? Don’t worry, by the end of this discussion, you’ll be all over this ancient philosophy (especially when it comes to herbal practice!) SuperFeast prides itself on respecting the ancient tradition of tonic herbalism that emerged through the Orient and respecting the ancient wisdom from those before us. Mason and Tahnee dive deep into how the ancient tonic herbalists lived and how we, the modern human, can learn and incorporate these practices into our daily lifestyles. Exactly how does our current Western lifestyle affect us? The lifestyle which disturbs our circadian rhythms and promotes us being out of flow with the natural cycles of nature? Short answer - degeneration and ageing; we’re here to change that. Listen to join us on this mission. In this episode you will learn: Taoist tonic herb philosophy Macrocosm vs microcosm of herbalism Why women should have as much sex as they like The formula for good Qi flowing through the body What Qi is and how it animates you Our approach to diet Why we search for the path of least resistance in health and herbal practice Why an adaptable mind allows for epic health How to become a ‘somanaut’ through the tonic herbs Why separation from nature is the root cause of illness How to prevent having “flabby” immune systems Transformation through these herbs Why we’re dropping reishi bombs of consciousness around the world Why longevity isn’t an overnight phenomenon We provide good quality, epic, non-irradiated wild herbs - based on Di Tao principles Tonic herbs are multi-directional and their benefits accumulate over time Quick overview of the three treasures Qi, Jing and Shen - more in future episodes! One of the missing links in Western philosophy, the energetics of herbs About Mason Mason Taylor is a wellness educator, host of The Mason Taylor Show podcast, professional speaker and retreat facilitator. He is a passionate tonic herbalist and founder of Australia’s leading tonic herb and medicinal mushroom provider, SuperFeast. Mason is dedicated to teaching people of all walks of life how to embrace and benefit from the healing forces of nature as they create a unique and dynamic health philosophy. A long and happy life is the intention. Mason also brings a refreshing and cheeky sense of humour to his talks, podcast, and life, because longevity relies on a good belly laugh.   About Tahnee Tahnee McCrossin is a student of the body, weaving the ancient healing traditions of Yoga and Taoism with somatic exploration and modern scientific understanding into an integrated system that supports longevity and self-healing of the body-mind-spirit. Through her work as a yoga and meditation teacher, chi ne tsang practitioner and health researcher, she is striving to reunite the modern body-mind with the spiritual and psychological wisdom of the ancients. She is grateful to be a current student of Mantak Chia, Paul Grilley and Michael Tierra.     Resources SuperFeast Websitesuperfeast.com.au (sign up to the epic SuperFeast newsletter for 10% off your first order!) SuperFeast Instagram@superfeast Mason Instagram@maysonjtaylor  Tahnee Instagram@tahneemccrossin SuperFeast Phone1300 769 500 SuperFeast Emailteam@superfeast.com.au - got any podcast ideas? Let us know ☺! Mason and Tahnee are learning with Michael Tierrahttps://planetherbs.com/ Shen Nong The Divine Farmer’s Materia Medica https://www.amazon.com/Divine-Farmers-Materia-Medica-Translation/dp/0936185961 Q: How Can I Support The SuperFeast Podcast? A: Tell all your friends and family and share online! We’d also love it if you could subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes.  

Hey Superfeasters, today marks the inaugural SuperFeast podcast and we are super stoked to say the least! SuperFeast founder Mason Taylor shares airtime with his work and life partner, Tahnee McCrossin. In today’s introductory podcast, Mason and Tahnee cover everything you need to know about SuperFeast, themselves and what you can expect from this epic podcast. This includes how SuperFeast was born (literally from Mason’s mum’s spare room) and explore an umbrella view of the herbs, what they are, how to integrate them into your daily life and the countless benefits that arise from working with the herbs. “It’s not just about putting a powder in your smoothie it’s about connecting with the energy of something from the earth that has its own intention and its own consciousness” - Tahnee McCrossin In today’s episode we will cover: Who are Mason Taylor and Tahnee McCrossin? The personal journey that lead to SuperFeast’s creation in 2011 Why we are so into medicinal mushrooms Adaptive herbs and how they support and nourish the bodily systems (our core philosophy) Why we chose to work with herbs that support conscious and constitutional shifts Learning about the magic of these herbs knowing they’re not a silver bullet Tonic herbs are aligned with natural rhythms and long term health upgrades The herbs have their own intention and connection to the source We love our SuperFeast community! Why we source herbs Di Tao Purity of SuperFeast herbs – wild and no fillers SuperFeast core values and intentions Reconnecting with an ancient herbal system The crazy benefits of sourcing wild and semi-wildrcrafted herbs Practical uses for the herbs and daily integration About Mason Mason Taylor is a wellness educator, host of The Mason Taylor Show podcast, professional speaker and retreat facilitator. He is a passionate tonic herbalist and founder of Australia’s leading tonic herb and medicinal mushroom provider, SuperFeast. Mason is dedicated to teaching people of all walks of life how to embrace and benefit from the healing forces of nature as they create a unique and dynamic health philosophy. A long and happy life is the intention. Mason also brings a refreshing and cheeky sense of humour to his talks, podcast, and life, because longevity relies on a good belly laugh. About Tahnee Tahnee McCrossin is a student of the body, weaving the ancient healing traditions of Yoga and Taoism with somatic exploration and modern scientific understanding into an integrated system that supports longevity and self-healing of the body-mind-spirit. Through her work as a yoga and meditation teacher, chi ne tsang practitioner and health researcher, she is striving to reunite the modern body-mind with the spiritual and psychological wisdom of the ancients. She is grateful to be a current student of Mantak Chia, Paul Grilley and Michael Tierra.   Resources SuperFeast Websitesuperfeast.com.au (sign up to the epic SuperFeast newsletter for 10% off your first order!) SuperFeast Instagram@superfeast Mason Instagram@maysonjtaylor  Tahnee Instagram@tahneemccrossin SuperFeast Phone1300 769 500  SuperFeast Emailteam@superfeast.com.au - got any podcast ideas? Let us know ☺! What are tonic herbs? https://www.superfeast.com.au/blogs/superblog/tonic-herbs-what-are-they What is Di Tao? https://www.superfeast.com.au/blogs/superblog/what-is-di-tao   Q: How Can I Support The SuperFeast Podcast? A: Tell all your friends and family and share online! We’d also love it if you could subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes.