Latest / Radically Genuine / 221. A Yale MD on Angels, Telepathy & the Spiritual Root of the Mental Health Epidemic
Transcript
- Dr. McFillin (00:03.107) Welcome to the Radically Genuine Podcast. am Dr. Roger McFilin. Every human civilization in recorded history, separated by oceans, centuries, and language, seems to arrive at the same conclusion that we are more than our bodies. That consciousness extends beyond the boundaries of the human skull. That there are dimensions of reality invisible to the eye but accessible to something deeper within us. That death is not the end. That love is not merely brain chemistry, but a powerful energy. One that could be necessary for health, vitality, and a functioning society. That meaning is not an accident. That we have access and are guided by forces of intelligence that care about what happens to us. Angels, guides, or even loved ones that have passed. For thousands of years, this was not considered mysticism. It was considered knowledge. And then something happened. Western medicine built a model of the human being that stripped all of that away. No soul, no spirit, no non-local consciousness, no discussion of guides, angels, no gifts of knowing that transcend the five senses. What remained was a brain. A biological machine producing electrochemical signals. And when that machine malfunctioned, you were prescribed the drug and synthetic chemical made in a factory. The most important questions a human being can ask, who am I? Why am I here? What connects me to others? What happens when I die? Is there something accompanying me through this life that I cannot see? often declared clinically irrelevant, removed from the consultation room, pathologized when they became too insistent. And we wonder why we're experiencing a mental health epidemic, a chronic disease epidemic. What if the categories we use to define quote unquote mental illness tell us less about the nature of the human mind and more about the assumptions of the people who built the system? What if the voices some people hear aren't always symptoms to be silenced, but Dr. McFillin (02:30.517) Signals to be understood. What if telepathy, spiritual gifts, contact with guides and angels aren't delusions to be drugged, but capacities potentially to be mapped? What if the mystics, the shamans, the Kabbalists, the traditions that independently arrived at the same conclusion across thousands of years weren't primitive and confused? Post-materialist science emerging from prestigious institutions such as John Hopkins, Harvard, Columbia. Now Yale is beginning to take these questions seriously and the answers are not that comfortable for a field built on the assumption that matter is all there is. Today's guest holds faculty at Yale Medical School and is the co-founder of the Yale Mental Health and Spirituality Program, a bridge between Yale's Divinity School and its medical school. She's board certified, Stanford and Yale educated, and the author of Fulfilled, How the Science of Spirituality can help you live a happier, more meaningful life. She has studied Kabbalistic mysticism, shamanic tradition, the Buddhist meditations, and indigenous healing practices across more than 80 countries. She speaks openly about spiritual gifts, guides, and angels as clinical realities worth taking seriously about telepathy and intuition as legitimate forms of knowing about what psychics and mediums can teach us about conditions like schizophrenia. She's doing all of this inside one of the most prestigious institutions in the world. She is everything that the psychiatric establishment was designed to produce. And she has arrived at conclusions that the establishment seems to want to prevent. Dr. Anna Youssam, welcome to the Radically Genuine Podcast. Anna Yusim, MD (04:16.738) Dr. MacFillin, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here with you today. Dr. McFillin (04:21.135) Well, Dr. Yusum, you certainly are different and you're a product of prestigious institutions that I think traditionally, fundamentally, push materialism. At some point, I think this framework seems to have broken open for you. What happened? Anna Yusim, MD (04:39.15) Yeah, you know, you're exactly right. I was trained very traditionally. I went to Stanford University for my undergrad, studied biology and philosophy. Prior to that, I was going to be a mathematician, and I come from a long line of mathematicians in my family. So I came to this very honestly, in a way. Then I went to Yale Medical School and ultimately did my psychiatry training at NYU. And then interesting things started to happen in my life that I couldn't really explain using the paradigm that I was taught. of that, I tried to understand it and I tried to make sense of how do I reconcile experiences with patients, experiences in my own life that are completely different from the models of the mind that were once my bedrock and foundation of understanding of human beings, psychiatry, the brain and everything in between. And in reconciling those questions, just like you said, I came to some different conclusions from maybe the traditional bonafide Western medical structures, but the conclusions weren't so far left field that they couldn't be reconciled and understood by institutions like Yale etc. which is why Yale has been open to us working together and creating this mental health and spirituality center and program that I've been working on which is why I feel that also the timing is right in our world and right for us to better understand these very questions that you talked about and what I have made my life's work. Dr. McFillin (06:14.553) Dr. Yusumi, you probably don't know this, but you and I had a similar experience with a medium. Would you be able to tell that story? I'll share you then a little bit of my story as well. Anna Yusim, MD (06:25.582) Gladly, gladly. Can I ask a question? didn't ask this before. Is it possible for us to cut if needed? Perfect. just want to tell. Victor, Victor? Yes. I have a podcast You can do it in an hour and a half. Just take the pen and go because I'm doing a podcast now. an hour a half. Okay? Take the pen, okay? Okay, cool. Thank you. Dr. McFillin (06:33.071) course. Anna Yusim, MD (06:53.386) I have someone in my home, guess, I'm just letting him know that I'm on a podcast. He just came. So good. You'll cut all that. You're welcome to put it in if you'd like. If you'd like to hear me speaking Russian on air. Good, good. All right. So can you ask your, if you don't mind, if you could just ask your question again. Dr. McFillin (06:58.373) Okay. Dr. McFillin (07:11.845) Dr. Usim, you're probably not aware of this, but we had a similar experience with a medium. Mine led to spiritual awakening among other things. I'm curious to know if you're willing to share your story. Anna Yusim, MD (07:26.57) Absolutely. And at this point, I've had, because of my first experience, have had many experiences because I've sought out to understand how does this work and what's really going on. But the very first experience like this was, this was the time towards the end of my residency training when I was just starting to question things from a more spiritual perspective. It was perfect timing because my medical education was just coming to an end and little did I know my spiritual education was just about to begin. And so, I think I had gone to a lecture about the concept of soul. And the reason that I went to a local synagogue, I'm Jewish, but I'm also interested in, I feel like I'm a citizen of the world and interested in every religion. But here I had gone to my synagogue on a lecture about the soul because I had learned that my profession, psychiatrist, actually means doctor of soul. Psyche can be translated as mind or soul depending, right? But in all my time at Stanford Yale at NYU, no one had mentioned the soul to me once. How could I be a doctor of soul and not even know what the soul means, not have any training and education on it? So I felt like I had to educate myself. So I went to this lecture and coming back home, I felt pulled into the, almost pulled outside my world into this ice cream shop to have ice cream. Not that uncommon, I love ice cream. Okay, so I, you know, followed the calling, sat in eating my ice cream and this woman comes up to me. with a young child and says, I'm a psychic, I have a message for you. Can I give you a message? It's New York City. This kind of thing could happen anytime, anywhere. So I'm like, sure, give me your message. Looks relatively innocuous with her young child there. And then this woman proceeds to sit down and tell me all of these deep truths about my life as if she had known me from when I was born. Things that nobody can possibly know about me if they hadn't read my journal. It certainly wasn't on Facebook. It wasn't on the internet. And it was... just shocking to me. was like, what just happened here? How did this person I've never met who couldn't have read my journal know all these things about me, including the name of the guy that I had a crush on at the time that nobody even knew? I don't even know if that was in my journal. So that just led me to think these assumptions about models of the mind that I was taught, maybe things work a little bit differently in the world. And if so, how do they work? What just happened? That was the beginning. Dr. McFillin (09:49.413) So I had an interesting experience. This is about six years now. And I met with a woman who was a Christian, but also identify herself as a medium. And she was sharing very personal details about my life, about my father who passed, communicating from him through her to me about events that occurred that were really, they could only be described by him and I. were the only two people there, many which I did forget. And that was fascinating in itself. And I was a skeptic from the beginning, but she went on to tell me my guides were trying to reach me as a practicing psychologist. She said I was knew a lot about my work, my personal work that included the manner in which I worked with clients. This was cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavior therapy was the work I've traditionally done and have a center around this. And she was speaking about direct work with clients, even named the names of some clients, private clients that I was working with, described the nature of how I worked with people. It's very practical and said there was a whole aspect of the human experience and the nature of reality that I was missing and that my guides were trying to reach me. And she gave me a series of books, which started a process for me over years of meditation and stillness. And I have been able then to access that voice, that guidance. And it has completely changed my life path, my life purpose, and what I think is on the horizon for me professionally. I want to get a sense of your understanding of that from a science base, from what you've studied. I know that you've met with shamans and Kabbalists, Buddhist teachers, traditions separated by thousands of years. It seems like there's a rival at a certain conclusion about consciousness in the soul. Anna Yusim, MD (11:53.354) Absolutely. And I love that you had an experience like this that was so similar to mine in how it opened you and how it enabled you to reorient your perspective. And I wouldn't necessarily, I would say reorient, but certainly not throw out what you had known, but supplement it. Because I feel that, you know, what we learned in our training, Western medical training about consciousness, the nature of mind, the brain, neurotransmitters, that's so powerful and valid. This is what is known empirically through scientific understanding and double blind placebo controlled trials. This is so powerful and important and incomplete. And there are things that are unseen and unheard that are equally powerful and more difficult to measure using the scientific method. And these are the things that oftentimes we can infer through experiences similar to what you describe and similar to what I describe. And so I think that what I learned about consciousness, as your question is, is precisely that, that we have capacities to study certain things and certain ways and understand them in that vein. And that there is also at present a limitation to our capacities for other means of knowing and being. And that as we develop our scientific methods, hopefully we will be able to study more of those big questions as well in a more empirical way. We're trying very hard and the institutions that you talked about, including Yale, are at the helm of that, but we need more. Dr. McFillin (13:20.291) Yeah, I'm interested to know the work that you are doing to try to validate some of these post material concepts. Where are you now right now in your evolution? What are you really trying to ascertain and how are you setting up these experiments? Anna Yusim, MD (13:34.252) Yeah, so Dr. McFillip, I'm gonna say one other thing. My lighting is natural lighting. So if it gets to be to, what's the word, light, let me know and I can close it. So I just want to also give you that. Okay, cool. So you will let me know if it becomes an issue. Okay, so I think that's a beautiful question and it's such an. Dr. McFillin (13:46.671) Yeah, it looks great. It looks great right now. Anna Yusim, MD (13:56.256) important question, all the research that's being done to validate these important questions. There are numerous people doing that from numerous perspective. Myself, I personally am more of a clinician than a researcher, but I am involved in numerous research projects as well. And I can certainly tell you some of the fascinating work that's going on at Yale at Hopkins and at Harvard for some of these questions. I'll start with Yale. So the work at Yale is with many fold. Number one, we have Dr. Al Powers. Dr. Al Powers is a schizophrenia researcher who, as part of his control group way back in the day, started to use voice hearers who, unlike schizophrenics, actually were able to control the voices in their head and use them for the benefit of themselves and others, so psychics and mediums. And so his question was, What if schizophrenics and these voice hearers, these psychics and mediums, how do they differ if ultimately they're both hearing voices? One set of voices leads people down a downward spiral and unable to live the rest of their life without medication oftentimes. The other enables them to help people, to have deeper intuitive guidance and to be able to do something to elevate humanity in a way. So this is... the question that Dr. Powers is asking, and he's asking it in many ways. Before, the control group was the voice hearers. Now, he's also looking at the psychics and mediums as the experimental group and really trying to understand neurochemically and neurobiologically what is going on here. So this is one such question. have, so for the program and center that we're creating, we have a number of questions that we're also asking. One, question is Dr. Mark Potenza at Yale and Dr. Lisa Miller at Columbia. They're doing a study together. They've already done one part of that study, but it's looking at the neural correlates of spiritual experience. When you have a deeply moving spiritual experience and you think about it, you speak about it, you meditate on it, what part of your brain lights up and why, and why is that relevant? So that's another question that's being asked. Anna Yusim, MD (16:19.586) Then at Yale, we also have a psychedelics research program. So psychedelics I'm super interested in because not only do psychedelics offer a novel neurobiological way to address some of the most treatment resistant mental health conditions, psychedelics also offer a connection to spirit. And as you know, at Hopkins and a little bit at Harvard, they're starting to study not just the neurobiology, but also the spiritual questions. And so at Yale now we're starting to expand the focus. with our program in order to ask some of the spiritual questions as well. So, and you know, the questions are manyfold and they've been asked already. They've also been asked at NYU, they've been asked at Hopkins. The questions are, does the spiritual part of the psychedelic experience matter? If you have a spiritual experience, are you going to have more of a healing benefit for whatever it is that you're taking the psychedelic for, whether it be depression, anxiety, OCD, cancer, et cetera, then if you just have you know, if you take a lower dose or a subsensory dose, subsensorium dose, or if you take it but don't actually have a spiritual experience, if you have a different kind of experience. And so with respect to the studies that have been done at Harvard and NYU to date, the answer is yes. The greater the spiritual experience, the greater the healing benefit. And so we're doing some studies. hopefully soon at Yale. This is predicated on the funding for our center, so that are going to be expanding on those questions. So this is three studies. I can keep going, but I also, you know, I'm happy to talk about other studies, but this is a few of the important questions and how they're being studied. Dr. McFillin (18:02.533) No, that's fascinating. Actually, I've been following this research on psilocybin for quite some time in psychedelics. For someone who has worked with survivors of trauma for a few decades and been providing the cognitive behavioral therapies, generally speaking, prolonged exposure, cognitive processing therapy, as you're probably well aware, you know, there's kind of a moderate level of effectiveness. You know, there's a lot of people that we... just struggle to help under that kind of understanding of how to assist somebody, typical psychotherapies. And it can be long and difficult. And I have met people who have been able to resolve some of these long standing issues with one psilocybin journey. And so I'm curious for you as a clinician, have you been interacting with those individuals and what do you understand the mechanism of action? to be what has shifted, what has changed in that person after a journey. Anna Yusim, MD (19:03.672) I think that's such a great question and I too, like yourself, have had those experiences with patients having had a psychedelic experience and I'll talk about a number of different psychedelics. Psilocybin is certainly one where it's lifted their trauma or significantly shifted their relationship to their trauma in such a way that they can move on like they never have before. So I also do psychedelic experiences with my patients. I offer those in my clinical practice. The only legal psychedelic in every state is ketamine, and that's the one that I offer. So, you know, there's many different definitions of psychedelic. Altered sensorium is one such definition. By that ketamine is a psychedelic. By some other definitions, the 5-HT2A receptors, ketamine isn't, but it definitely fits under the prior definition. And I've had patients who've come in and what happens in the ketamine sessions is they're able to, in a safe space, go so deep and create that space of neural vulnerability to reprocessing and cognitive retraining at the same time that we're able to do sessions to kind of bolster up their ego strength, their meaning making of what happened. And then so there's biological, there's psychological. And I think that in the course of an experience like that, something very, very spiritual also happens. So it's a biological, psychological, and spiritual shift that happens in my patients. And I've had multiple patients like that, where as you've described, you can have a very profound and relatively fast healing from deep trauma in a way people have not before. So this is the experiences that I have personally been a part of with my patients. I've also had many patients Anna Yusim, MD (21:06.286) who have done psychedelics that perhaps are not legal in Manhattan, but they've gone to places where they are legal. And that is Ayahuasca. There's many places in South America where that is legal. There's Ibogaine. There's also places in South America where that's legal. Psilocybin, there's states where that's legal in countries in Europe and around where that's legal. And 5-MeO-DMT. So those are other experiences my patients have had that we have processed together. that have enabled them to move on. Like I remember, I have had one patient, she came in, she was this beautiful, amazing spirit, a nurse. And she at the time was dating a married man and was just stuck in this pattern, could not get out of it. And this was leading to so much hardship in her life and an obsessional attachment to the experience, to a man who was never gonna be able to unfortunately give her what she wanted. was never going to be able to leave and she felt powerless to leave the situation. And over the course of our work, one day she ultimately decided to go and have an ayahuasca experience. And that was the first thing that ever loosened her grip over this. She changed her life completely in the following year and is doing so many other things to be a healer to others, going through similar problems in other ways than she's ever experienced. So that's just like a little vignette, but there's so many like this. Dr. McFillin (22:35.366) Yeah, it's interesting because you used the word loosen the grip and I've kind of seen the same thing. It's as if we have this default mode network, this ego, their rules, their assumptions, and they seem to elicit fear. And the use of a psychedelic seems to disrupt that. As if there becomes a greater awareness of the interconnectedness of all things that you're a soul or your spirit and you're on this journey. And those rules established by history, sometimes by society, sometimes within your family, they begin to loosen up a bit and you begin to question those rules. And for example, maybe being in a relationship that's really unfulfilling and no longer feeling like you have to follow those expectations of other people in your life, which opens you up then to start making choices to get out of what has kept you stuck. So I see that as a piece. But there's this other spiritual concept I wonder if you are willing to comment on because I'm sure you've studied it and evaluated it. It's the concept of forgiveness. How important have you found that to be for those who have been suffering, whether it's post-trauma or just really struggling with mood, have you been able to incorporate that and understand that within clinical practice? Anna Yusim, MD (23:59.63) It's the most important concept, Dr. McPhiland. I completely agree. Absolutely. And forgiveness is such a powerful potent concept because to truly forgive others, you first have to forgive yourself. And forgiving others often goes all the way back to the earliest time in your life, including anybody, including early caretakers, parents, siblings, etc. who may have hurt you or not lived up to your expectations in any way. And then forgiving yourself for not having lived up to your own expectations, for betraying yourself, for making mistakes, for all those things that we can forgive ourselves for. You know, for our Yale Mental Health and Spirituality We just had a really interesting talk. We do these mixers between the Divinity School and the Medical School and we bring a faculty from each one. And we had an amazing speaker on addiction to revenge coupled with a speaker on the art of forgiveness. And revenge, unfortunately, an addiction to revenge, which sometimes comes from the highest levels of government and is purported and, you know, Dr. McFillin (24:56.623) and traffic. Anna Yusim, MD (25:09.79) validated as an appropriate way of dealing with conflict is something that is believed to be responsible for school shootings, mass shootings, and so many other things that are at the helm of our own anger and rage and keeping us stuck. And the antidote for that is forgiveness from a scientific standpoint, but also from a spiritual standpoint. We think that when we forgive others, We're letting another person go, perhaps not holding them accountable enough, but it's actually not true. What we're doing in forgiving others is we're freeing ourselves. We're freeing ourselves from having to drink the poison and waiting for the other person to die. We're freeing ourselves from having to hold onto something, thinking that somehow our anger and rage at another person is going to make the situation better or going to enable us through righteousness. to be validated in our experience. It's exactly the opposite. And I think forgiveness is one of the most powerful, powerful tools. And I also want to tell you my first experience with forgiveness was when I was doing work in Rwanda. And there was this amazing man, Jean Baptiste, who was the founder of Rwanda's Forgiveness Project. And Jean Baptiste was telling me his story when during the Rwandan genocide, his next door neighbor, who was of a different tribe, came. And because this is what they were told to do, the neighbor who his mother would feed every single day went and killed his own mother, my, you know, John Baptiste's mother. Unspeakable tragedy. And John Baptiste understandably and very humanely harbored rage and wanting to kill this man in his heart for many years. But then he realized that it wasn't doing him any good. And one day he went to the jail where this man was for the killings. And this man thought Jean Baptiste was gonna kill him. But Jean Baptiste fasted beforehand, he asked God for help, and that was the day he was able to forgive that man. And he had never, ever, ever in his heart felt that level of liberation. If Jean Baptiste could forgive the killer of his own mother in this way, whatever has been done to us, we are truly capable of forgiveness too. Dr. McFillin (27:27.693) I mentioned that work with that one medium, which I think guided me into meditation. And one of the things I learned is that when we are open to reality in a new way, that everything is happening for us, not to us, and that we surrender, to a loving God or a loving force or angels or guides that want to support your growth, that things will be placed in your path for that. And I was brought to this book called Radical Forgiveness from Colin Tipping. And I remember reading it and at the time working with some horrific trauma, sexual assaults that were... You know, just absolutely demoralizing and dispiriting. And people were having a difficult time, you know, recovering from that. And I felt so hesitant to introduce these concepts. And the major concept was this, and maybe you want to comment on it, was that we made a soul contract prior to coming into this life that even the ones that have harmed us have taken on. this responsibility to serve us, to see the world in a different way, that radical forgiveness, of course it is radical, is to break that energetic tie to the past, to that person who harmed you. And being able to maybe understand that even in the face of such horrific events, that the growth that can come from it is so incredibly strong. And we as a soul would choose such experiences in order for such growth. And of course, that's a very difficult concept to try to share. And I don't know if that radical kind of viewpoint of forgiveness is required, but I know this breaking the energetic tie to one's past and forgiveness is serving the person who is forgiving the other allows that person maybe to enter into what we call Dr. McFillin (29:39.003) post-traumatic growth and what can I learn and how can I grow from the experience? Any thoughts if you heard of radical forgiveness and Colin Tipping's work? Anna Yusim, MD (29:47.703) Yeah, yeah, I love this concept. And I think that one of the primary things that you're saying is that it's more than just the here and now and what happened, that they're actually in us trying to explain why did this happen? Why did this happen to me? What could I have done about it? That it's a much bigger story in question potentially, you know, and also in Kabbalah and in certain Judaic practices, there's the belief that Sometimes we have something that our soul needs to learn in a certain way. And our soul can learn that in many different ways through many different people. And sometimes a person is brought in to do something to us, which is actually for us. And it's not necessarily that it had to be them, but that we had to learn this and that person happened to be an available source of learning. And sometimes that learning could be very, very difficult and very painful and very hard. but it was our soul contract that needed to learn. And it ties also to this concept that, probabilistically, our soul can learn lessons proactively and reactively. Proactive is by us choosing to act against our nature, to do that which is more difficult, to identify what our default pathway may be and actually do the opposite, precisely because it is more challenging to grow. Reactive growth is growth through pain. That which we can't learn fully proactively, we're given pain in this lifetime to learn from. And this is the trauma, the hardship, et cetera. Now you can say, how about a baby who was sexually abused? Why are they given that? And it's true. These are sort of the unanswered questions of life that often don't have adequate answers that most people can be like, OK, I buy that. But some answers that have been given are that this isn't the only lifetime. And sometimes, In a past lifetime, something may have happened that needed a karmic rebalancing in this lifetime. Now, if you were sexually abused as a child, do you buy that? Does that help you? Sometimes yes, and sometimes no. It's a story, right? And so at the end of the day, we're meaning makers and storytellers. And so what's our story? What's the story that we're going to adopt that's going to help us overcome that? For everybody, it's a different story, and you have to figure out. Dr. McFillin (32:02.823) Okay. Anna Yusim, MD (32:10.913) What is your story that's gonna help you move on and be the best version of yourself? Dr. McFillin (32:16.327) Before we get into concepts like energy, frequency, manifestation, I want to ask you about the concept of telepathy. I had Dr. Diane Hennessey Powell on my podcast. I was exposed to her from the telepathy tapes, which was an amazing series. want to get a sense of how you're currently thinking about telepathy. Is this something that's continuing to be studied and evaluated? And what are you understanding about it? And how can you, if you could predict the future and how something like this is going to serve humanity, what are your thoughts on that? Anna Yusim, MD (32:57.933) Absolutely and Dr. Hedesee Powell's work is so interesting with telepathy in nonverbal autistic children super super interesting and the fact that they've created this amazing podcast around it is fascinating and I'm actually making a film right now on the subject of telepathy called an open mind we're in the process we've had 70 interview shot we are you know hopefully we'll be finishing it up soon it's a concept I'm super interested in for precisely the reasons that we've been talking about because it is one of those super senses that we have as human beings. And certain people are more telepathic than others. And I would actually say another synonym for telepathy is intuition, right? We all are intuitive in different ways. There's many different ways that we could receive intuitive information. Some people say that there is the four clairs, the four clairs of intuition, clairaudience. Some people receive intuition by hearing a voice. These are the voice hears and the psychics we talked about. Some people are clair-sentient. They will receive intuitive knowing through their body. They're going to feel it in their body if something's good or bad, or wrong, or they'll feel it emotionally. Clairsentience, claircognizance. Some people will receive intuitive knowing just by knowing. They don't know why they know, but they just know. And then there's clairvoyance, which is when you see something in your mind's eye. So you receive your intuitive knowing as a vision. It all makes sense, right? All very like it's intuitive, intuitively. understandable about intuition. And so you take that those intuitive capacities and realize everybody has them to different degrees. To what degree do you have them and what's your dominant intuitive capacity? Right? That's the first question. And then you realize that some people come into this world incredibly gifted with that. And sometimes their intuitive capacities are to a point where, you know, they can be a psychic remedial, they can read my mind, they are able to get visions and or this woman who was able to tell you things about your life. How was she getting her intuitive information? So you go from being very intuitive to being maybe telepathic to being psychic, et cetera. These are all on a continuum. And so it also makes sense with the telepathy tapes that Dr. Hennessy Powell was involved in that there are certain subsets of people who, because of other capacities maybe being forwarded, like they're nonverbal, Anna Yusim, MD (35:20.493) that certain capacities are then expanded. So non-verbal autistic children could be particularly telepathic with certain adults. So I'm super interested in this. even Sigmund Freud, well, way back in the day, his synonym for telepathy was thought transference. And so this is also a question. What are you picking up in telepathy? Are you picking up emotion? Are you picking up thought? So for Sigmund Freud, it was thought transference. And he was not someone. who was into Psy phenomena. He and Carl Jung actually had quite a rupture in their understanding of Psy abilities and of the mystical. But even Sigmund Freud said, because of all of his experiences with patients, that there is a kernel of truth in the idea of thought transference. Dr. McFillin (36:06.139) Fascinating. Do you believe that we are creators, creator beings, and that we have an influence on physical reality? Anna Yusim, MD (36:16.043) I believe, yes, I believe that we could and we do and certain people to certain degrees. And if this is something that, you know, people are interested in, they can develop those capacities. And so how can those capacity manifest? So for instance, I believe that the mind and body are very, very deeply connected and through people's minds, they can change their bodies. So this is one of the ways that we are creators. We could... through positive healthy habits, and this has been shown time and again, through positive emotional relationships, we could reduce our risk of cancer. We can enhance our longevity. We could be healthier. We can enhance our fertility, right? So this is one of the ways in which the mind can affect the body. Now there's another thing. What about, can I affect your body with my mind? There are incredible healers, energy healers, who've shown time and again that they're able to do this. This is often a gift that people are born with and they discover that gift and then they're able to give that to humanity. Can all of us develop that gift? To certain degrees, perhaps, if we, you know, but just like with everything, everyone comes into the world with certain talents and I might want to develop all my telepathic and energy healing capacities. But if I give 110 % and devote my life, I still may not be as good as someone with this inborn talent. And very interestingly, these talents are often genetic. So you find people who are very telepathic, and who are energy healers, and there will be people in their family who have passed down this gene. Their grandfather was a rabbi, or their grandmother was a healer who everyone in the village would come to, or her sister had premonitions. These are genetic capacities. They have a biological basis. It's super, super interesting. Dr. McFillin (38:00.037) It most certainly is. And one of the things that I have connected with and learned over my journey the past five, six years is that we are energetic beings and we are all interconnected, almost like we're a drop of water in a vast ocean, which is some of the things I've also heard from veterans or trauma survivors who've gone through these psychedelic experiences is that they understand the wonderment and connectedness of all things. And so I started really experimenting in my clinical work, things as simply as when I'm sitting there across from somebody praying for them, or generating light with inside me, with my consciousness and my focus and my attention, and then directing it to the person across from me without saying any words and being able to see. visibly somebody who's very dysregulated begin to adopt a more peaceful posture or somebody say they can feel that, like they can almost feel the love that is being directed. And I think we can trace this back biblically and with ancient texts and a number of things. So if we just, if we shifted our understanding of reality that we were affecting each other and You know, instead of just worrying or going back into the past or into the future as you're walking down the street and getting caught up in stories in your mind, what if you chose to just bless people or send light and love to them? Like to see that our ability to affect another person through this energy is much more powerful and that this is something that this is a lost knowledge or a knowledge that is really kept out of a kind of Western understanding of healing. And I'm currently writing a book around the healer and understanding all the mechanisms to influence a person's healing. Like it's kind of the wrong term to call us as healer because I think we have the inner capacity to heal within us, but we influence each other. So whether it's the physician or the psychologist or therapist or social worker or nurse doctor, whatever that may be, Dr. McFillin (40:22.809) is that there's a way that we can set up the conditions to influence healing. But the way the allopathic Western medical model currently works is we're often doing the opposite of what it would take to be able to create that healing. you know, I want to just get your thoughts on healing energy, love as an energy and the conditions that you think would best put somebody in a position to self-heal. Anna Yusim, MD (40:49.353) Absolutely. It's such a great question. And one of my supervisors was Dr. Henry Grayson. He did a lot of work in this area and has written books about this. And he was the first person that exposed me to these ideas many years ago. And the ideas were manyfold. Number one, that through the consciousness of one person, you can change a whole relationship. So he helped me to be a better couples therapist by teaching me how the concept of holding space essentially. And when I work with couples and even when I work with individuals who want to see change in their child, their husband, their wife, et cetera, I always teach them the concept of holding space, which is a very simple concept. And that concept is, oftentimes we see people as they are as opposed to as they could be. And for five minutes a day, five could be a lot, maybe starting with one minute, twice a day, being able to hold space for that person to be the best version of themselves as they can be. More loving, more whole, less addicted, whatever it is that they need. And when a person is holding space for their significant other or for a child or for someone they love, They want to invoke all of their senses. So what does that person look like, sound like, smell like, know, everything, invoke like feel, who is that person in their ultimate form? And how do you feel in the presence of that person? So it's like you're essentially planting a seed in the cosmos and holding space for one minute, twice a day for that person to step into the best version of themselves. This is something Henry Grayson taught me a long time ago. And I've been doing it with patience, with amazing results, because you're exactly right. That the consciousness of one person and the love and open heartedness of one person can change a relationship, can change the other person. We're infinitely powerful to do this. And we often think that we're somehow beholden to another. No. Anna Yusim, MD (42:49.395) creators we can create that for ourselves and for others. We can do that for ourselves too by the way. We can hold for one minute a day space for ourselves to step into the best version of ourselves. Dr. McFillin (43:01.359) Yeah, beautiful. I think this is the future when we start talking about mental health. Obviously, we're in a bit of a mental health epidemic, would you agree? As well as a chronic disease epidemic here in the United States. If you had to identify what you believe to be are the primary causes of that, what would you say? Anna Yusim, MD (43:20.545) think it's multi-fold. We are definitely in the midst of an epidemic. Whenever I think about causality in general, I think of a biopsychosocial spiritual framework. And I think that the causes of our mental health epidemic are precisely that. There's biological causes, which we can talk about. psychological causes, social causes, and spiritual causes. Biologically, I think that there is many things going on. I think that within society, there are biological factors that many people don't realize and recognize are actually contributing in many different ways to people's mental health issues. And biologically, that includes our diets, that includes the presence of ultra processed foods, excessive sugar, too much carbohydrates, and also a food supply that sometimes can have a lot of toxins in it and us being more and more affected by those toxins. The other thing biologically, and there's more evidence to this, is other aspects of our environment, even the EMFs and the fact that there's so much electromagnetic radiation that is becoming part of our world and the research is only beginning to come out on the connection between EMFs and essentially they cause clumping of red blood cells. can, you know, there's a lawsuit right now going on with EMFs and stroke that a colleague, physician colleague of mine is very involved in and EMFs and you know, certain kinds of cancers and EMFs and mental health conditions because ultimately it comes down to inflammation and there are so many inflammatory things in our life and that could be inflammatory emotions. and feelings and rage, et cetera, that we have, including inflammatory foods that we are a part of, including certain predispositions that we may have to process things in certain ways that leads to inflammation. So that's the biological factors. And there's many more. I just mentioned a few of them. Psychologically, I feel that we live in a culture that has a lot of finger pointing and blame and perhaps not enough responsibility. Anna Yusim, MD (45:28.951) taking responsibility and what taking responsibility for one's life entails is cultivating forgiveness, which you and I talked about, cultivating faith if that's relevant for somebody, starting to control and have more discipline over your mind, control your thoughts and have more discipline over one's mind. We think that oftentimes, you know, our thoughts are in control as opposed to us choosing what thoughts we digest and choosing what thoughts we may choose to leave out of the dialogue. And so those are a few of the things and unfortunately, know, victim mentality and finger pointing and blame. Those are very disempowering aspects of our psychology that are part of that. Then socially, there's a number of factors. And that includes social media and the problems with that, especially for adolescents and younger children, but also for all of us. It also entails lacking authentic deep connections to others, because we live in an individualistic society, which is very different than how most of the rest of the world lives. And the lack of social connectivity, authentic real connections has, you know, there's all kinds of correlations with every sort of mental and physical health condition. And finally, spiritually, we live in a time where a lot of people are questioning and where there's a lot of spiritual void and emptiness and people feel disconnected from themselves and from their soul. They don't feel meaning and purpose in their life. And those are some of the existential spiritual questions that also are responsible for this mental health epidemic. I can't just point a finger to one thing. I think it's where we are as a society. And I also haven't mentioned all the factors. can. turn that right off. And so I feel that those are just a few of the factors and there's many more. Dr. McFillin (47:32.48) Yeah, I that was very comprehensive. I often ask this question and I think that might have been the most comprehensive response to that that I completely agree with. I'm often talking with psychiatrists and mental health professionals who are very standard in the way that they understand and respond to the struggles of the human condition and it often gets like very medicalized. and use the use of a DSM and you know, I really do appreciate the spiritual aspect into that. My next topic area maybe a bit more challenging and it's somewhat new to me over the past few years. I didn't even fully understand it, but have been guided towards this, have read extensively on this subject. Some people are calling it like a five dimensional reality. Others call it unity consciousness. Other people refer to it as a collective awakening, whatever the language. Do you believe humanity is in the middle of an evolutionary shift in consciousness? Anna Yusim, MD (48:40.135) I, yes, I do, but I think that we're always in the middle of an evolutionary shift in consciousness. We are always growing by virtue of certain things that have happened with, you know, the pandemic and with this mental health crisis. I feel that the shift has been accelerated, but I think ultimately there's always certain societal factors that spur progress right now by virtue of polarity and polarization within governments, within our own country, within the human psyche. It's accelerated. And by virtue of that, more people are suffering. We have the mental health crisis and people are forced to awaken and to choose more enlightened paths if they don't want to suffer and to be ultimately in pain. So I think yes. more so than usual, but we're always in the midst of an evolutionary shift. Dr. McFillin (49:42.286) And this shift, to be more clear, includes an energy shift on the planet. So you're moving from a three-dimensional reality into a four-dimensional reality and then a final shift, which they often call the new Earth. in which there is unity consciousness. And what that leads to is an energetic shift within the body in which it can hold, which can present itself as spiritual awakenings, but could also in the exam room look like mania, could look like a delusion, some psychotic episode. Do you think psychiatry is understanding this or is your field generally still stuck in this kind 3D, over-medicalized, biomedical understanding of those types of reactions. Anna Yusim, MD (50:39.895) think that there are pioneers within the field of Western medicine that are looking to depathologize spiritual experiences that can present as mental illness and mental conditions. And however, the field is yet to catch up. And some of the leaders are Dr. Daniel Ingram, who is an emergency room. He'd be great for your podcast, by the way. He's amazing. Yes, yes, yes. Dr. McFillin (51:04.857) I'm writing his name down right now. Anna Yusim, MD (51:07.831) So Dr. Ingram is an emergency room physician now retired, who's also an avid meditator whose brain has been studied at Harvard. He himself has had those experiences. And essentially these are experiences of spiritual awakening where you overshoot the mark and can have either a psychotic break or a mania or something else. if you don't have the right people evaluating you and understanding what's really going on, you'll go to the emergency room. They'll diagnose you with schizophrenia and there you have a lifelong diagnosis and be on meds your whole life. But what if this was your body trying to get to a higher level, overshooting the mark a bit and what you actually need is grounding. What you need is grounding and to be taught how to get back into your body and back into your right mind and that you don't need to be on medication. So this is a subset of my practice. I have a huge subset of my practice devoted to this because I span the Dr. McFillin (51:42.431) Yeah. Anna Yusim, MD (52:05.215) interface of mental health and spirituality, a lot of people end up finding me who have undergone precisely these states. Dr. Ingram has created the Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium, which is individuals studying precisely this state. And his commitment is to teach emergency room physicians and other physicians about these experiences and which he calls emergent phenomena that could happen in the course of meditation with psychedelics in ordinary life, where you expand rapidly. but your body and mind doesn't really know how to catch up. So that could present and look as a mental diagnosis, but actually it's a spiritual awakening. You may need medication, you may still need medication temporarily or even long-term, but it's reconceptualizing how we see something like this and how we see it, especially like you're talking about Dr. McPhil in the course of our collective evolution as human beings. Dr. McFillin (53:02.808) Great answer. Yeah, thank you. Do you believe guides and angels are real? Anna Yusim, MD (53:08.277) Absolutely. Absolutely. I believe that there is so much that we as human beings cannot necessarily see, touch or measure. That is real. And you know, when I studied Kabbalah, I started studying it right at the end of my residency training, right after my formal medical education was complete. And I remember learning some of their principles and learning how they were in stark contrast to the principles that I had learned in medical school. One of the principles in medical school is that anything that is real can be touched and empirically measured, seen with the eyes, smelled with the nose, right? And we subject it to double blind control trials. That's science. The principle of Kabbalah was that actually that which can be seen with your eyes and touched with your fingers is 1 % of reality. 99 % of reality is unseen and unheard. That was a radical concept to me. And I started pondering this. mean that what I've learned, what I've devoted my whole life to understanding is just a tiny fraction of what's real. And I've been led to believe that it is all of reality. So that was like a radical paradigm shift. And I sit in between these two worlds. I'm a scientist, I'm a researcher, but I also am a spiritual being and a Kabbalist. And I also learn, you know, and think in that way. So what is true? And I think the truth is somewhere in between. The truth is both. That what we know and see can be seen and measured. That's the 1 % and then there's also a much, much greater world of angels, beings and all those other things that you mentioned. Dr. McFillin (54:40.723) If those exist, how do we contact them? Anna Yusim, MD (54:44.781) Great question. Different people in different ways. I think some people, it's very natural, they contact them because they will come to you in a dream. You will ask a question and you will get the answer through synchronicity or intuition. I think synchronicity and intuition are two very powerful ways of having contact with higher beings, with your guides, with spirits. Intuition is the internal way that you can sense it. You could just have a knowing. You could hear it. You could see it in your mind's eye. Synchronicity is in the external world. Synchronicity is a term coined by Swiss psychologist Carl Jung to describe the co-occurrence of two events that are non-causal. So I think about somebody and then they call me. My thinking about that person didn't cause the person to call me, but the fact that those two things happened temporally close together, was meaningful to me and that made it a synchronicity. A synchronicity is essentially a meaningful coincidence. Another thing, I have a dream about someone I haven't heard from in ages and I bump into that person on the street. Once again, a synchronicity, a meaningful coincidence. Meaningful coincidences, according to Carl Jung, could be the universe guiding you in the right way, especially if the meaningful coincidences are neutral or positive. A bunch of negative meaningful coincidences could be the universe saying, something's a little off. you might want to consider changing course. Examine your life and see where things are not exactly right. So in this way, intuition and synchronicity are two ways in which you can get that messaging, in which you can get that connection. Dr. McFillin (56:26.571) about stillness, the use of meditative practices, being able to shift brainwave states so forth. Do you think that's an avenue or almost like opening a portal to be able to connect the spirit? Anna Yusim, MD (56:39.981) 100%, 100%, absolutely. In stillness, think essentially stillness opens you to intuition. Like that would be the mechanism that I would purport that, you know, as how to connect. And stillness, your connection to intuition, and intuition being the voice of your soul, is necessary and possible by being able to quiet the often very loud voices of reason. and of emotion. Your mind and reason can yell. Emotion can equally yell, just as loud. But your still quiet voices of intuition is what you hear when you temporarily silence those other voices. And that's a way of connecting. Dr. McFillin (57:26.197) So let's talk about maybe its polar dialectical opposite. If we have angels and guides and these loving beings, do dark entities exist or dark energies, demons are sometimes called, do you think the energies of kind of that darker side of things of this planet or this plane that we're in, do you think those also exist? Anna Yusim, MD (57:51.085) Very much so. I believe that those energies also exist. have had patients who've had crazy experiences with things like that. People whose lives have been, you know, side swiped by this. And when they have learned the proper healing techniques and protection techniques, their lives have reconstituted. So absolutely. I think that there's many forces in the outside world, in the ether that are positive, negative, spirit guides, dark entities, all kinds of things that people actually have gone to great lengths to characterize, but it's not characterized by traditional Western medicine. And so I do believe very much so that that exists and that there's people who can help with that. There's people who've devoted their careers and lives to helping people overcome that. I've had to seek out those people because of patients of mine. And I have. a nice little Rolodex of people like that when that's necessary. yeah, you know, there's a cult, there's a psychiatrist at Columbia. He's a psychiatrist, but he also people come to him when they need exorcisms. So that exists and there is a need for that. And there is, you know, a number of professionals looking to span, you know, to cross over in both worlds and offer patients, whatever they need for healing on their terms. within whatever cultural context people find themselves. Dr. McFillin (59:19.063) This is a refreshing conversation for me because these are the conversations I'm able to freely have privately with professionals, but in a public forum, it's quite difficult for the standard medically trained professional or even mental health professional like psychologists in my field to enter into this type of dialogue. I'm just curious to know how you're perceived by your colleagues and if there's been any backlash to this type of discussion. Anna Yusim, MD (59:46.699) Yeah, I think it's a great question. And it was truly my fear because so I graduated from NYU residency and then I put up my shingle and started my private practice, right? And I started seeing patients and studying Kabbalah essentially for the next seven years until my book came out. And I had a lot of cases, a lot of very spiritually motivated cases that I wrote up in my book. So my book, Fulfilled, is 50 cases from my private practice that are both psychological and spiritual. I very deliberately chose not to be affiliated with any academic institution because I, at the time, because I really wanted to think independently and be able to put down my authentic thoughts into my writing and into my book. And that's what I did. But in publishing this book, I had a great fear, which is exactly what you're talking about. What if I am like, people look down on this, if I'm discredited, if I God knows what, right? But I was very lucky because a number of senior colleagues in my profession, including two former members of, two former presidents of the American Psychiatric Association, Dr. Pedro Ruiz and Dr. Rodrigo Nunez gave very high endorsements for my book. And then I had other senior colleagues like Dr. Laura Sederer write excellent reviews in psychiatric journal of the book. So that was very, very reassuring to me and wonderful to have senior colleagues supporting me, senior colleagues who aren't necessarily spiritual, you know, who just are good psychiatrists because I tried to write my cases up in a scientific, a matter as I could, including the spirituality, which was an important part of that. So then after this happened, I, after I wrote my book, I went around to different places. academic and non-academic presenting the ideas. And when I went to Yale, which is my medical school alma mater, some of my colleagues who I trained with, including Dr. Robert Rohrabach, who's a dear friend to this day, came and we started talking about my coming onto the clinical faculty at Yale. And I was thrilled to do this. And that's the last thing I thought would happen, that after writing this book, which was very avant-garde and in a way that I would be invited on the clinical faculty. Anna Yusim, MD (01:02:09.057) And I was thrilled. So I said, absolutely. And that's when Dr. Rohrabach and I started talking about starting this mental health and spirituality center and program. And then eventually Dr. Rohrabach talked to Dr. John Crystal, who's the chair of the department. We brought in Dr. Chris Pittenger and he and I together have been working for the last few years on the creation of this program and center. you know, I have not experienced being discredited or anything like that. And on the contrary, what I've experienced is, So many people just like yourself are saying that we need more of this. But the reason I think I haven't been discredited, et cetera, is because I'm not anti-science. I'm not anti-psychiatry at all. I'm a bona fide psychiatrist and I often have people come to me not interested in spirituality at all. I'm very scientific in my approach. I'm part of a profession that has certain standards that you have to live up to. I'm not interested in like, doing anything super, super aggressively, I'm interested in integrating two equally balanced systems, the system of Western medicine and expanding it with a more spiritual system that's often overlooked. Dr. McFillin (01:03:16.491) Thank you. mentioned something earlier that I'd be remiss not to follow up on. And it was around protections against those darker energies or entities. I've come across people who have professed to be able to see them, to observe them on others, including like an energy drainer, like that these dark entities can actually like attach to us. And in that form, they're sucking of energy or they're influencing us through thought. And I've been told about some ways to offer ourselves protection against it. I was just curious to know what you meant by ways to protect against that. Anna Yusim, MD (01:03:56.103) I think it's exactly that, it's exactly what you said. And I personally have had in my own life experiences of being attacked by dark entities. And like what can open you up to that, right? There's a number of things, but something that can open you up to that is somebody opening up the portals and like psychics and mediums, they open certain portals. And in those portals, if you're not protected, things can come at you. So there's all kinds of, know, things like that. People who are drug abusers and go to other realms, psychedelics can do that. Things can open you up to certain portals and channels that if you don't have the, and how do know if you have the protection or not? And what gives you the protection? You can think that you're a very hardy, strong person and still be very permeable. And you can be permeable if you're an empath, if you're a highly sensitive person, if you're just born with, that's part of like your makeup genetically that you have, you know, you can feel what other people are feeling and you're just a little bit more permeable than the average person. things can attack you. There's a lot of books written on protection and there's many different ways to do protection from, you know, I've heard from, you know, my Jewish rabbi colleagues wearing a Star of David can be protection, putting yourself inside a Star of David and spinning it, that could be protection, creating shields, you know, with, you know, all kinds of shields, having certain crystals. And then the other thing is you are most protected when you're biopsychosocial spiritual framework is strongest. So it's actually the protection comes naturally as you're doing everything to keep yourself biologically strong, sleeping, eating well, taking the right medications if you need the medications, know, whatever that is, psychologically having strong, like basically all the work that we're talking about, all of that protects you. But I think that this is also something that Western medicine really needs to understand because I think the Effect of that on people's lives is greater than we imagine. And we don't have the language and frameworks to study that. So I hope that one day that will change. Dr. McFillin (01:06:00.341) Yeah, think about the ramifications of this, that somebody comes in and maybe they're dealing with intrusive thinking, intrusive thoughts, and they feel like fear has overtaken them. Maybe their relationships are impacted. Maybe they have the same exact conversations that you and I are having around feeling like they have been taken over demonically, or there's like an energy that is like impacting their mind. Contemporary medicine. contemporary psychiatry is going to view that through the lens of a DSM. And they're going to pathologize that and then they're going to prescribe pharmaceutical drugs, ones with an array of adverse consequences and effects to them, which often can then exacerbate some of the symptoms they come in to see their physician with, which then continues to get pathologized and medicalized through that lens. It makes us step back a little bit and observe how we have unintentionally done harm by material science and not being able to incorporate what has been part of cultures for millennial. Anna Yusim, MD (01:07:19.873) think that that's exactly right. And I think that this is, you know, the fine line between that which is scientific. which could be seen, touched, observed empirically and subjected to double blind controlled trials and that which we don't yet have the means to touch, feel and see. And this is really where I think some of the greatest science lies is to create the technology to be able to experience. And sometimes that technology begins with the capacities of certain people who are able to be seers and to guide us and shepherd us into those capacities to see what the rest of us can't. But then to use eventually technology to help hopefully we all could see that we all could measure that this is something that maybe is beyond our capacities now, but eventually will be something that we also could subject to the standards of science. Dr. McFillin (01:08:10.879) Dr. Usim, this was a refreshing conversation. I feel so blessed to be able to have met you and been exposed to your work. For those who are listening, they want to follow you. They want to read your book. Can you promote yourself a little bit here? Anna Yusim, MD (01:08:26.807) Thank you so much, Dr. McFelden. I loved our conversation as well. The questions were amazing. I hope to meet you in person one day. So you could, if you're interested to learn more about my work or to work with me or to read my book, it's all available on my website, which is www.annayousam.com. And I work with people in a coach as an executive coach, as a psychiatrist. I do retreats often and I have a book. So I would love to work with you. Dr. McFillin (01:08:58.581) Dr. Anna Youssem, thank you for a radically genuine conversation.