A Personal Note From Orion

Welcome, Stellar Life tribe! I’m thrilled to bring you another enlightening episode of the Stellar Life podcast!  This week, I’m joined by Deanne Adamson, a visionary coach and founder of “Being True to You.” Deanne shares her profound insights on the importance of going within to understand personal beliefs, intuition, and purpose and how these can shape a truly stellar life.

Deanne Adamson is dedicated to the pursuit of self-improvement and personal growth. She focuses on identifying ways to become more patient, reliable, and compassionate. Understanding that attachments to material possessions and specific outcomes can hinder one’s true self, Deanne continually examines her inner life to release these impediments. By authenticating her value system and examining what she worships and holds true, she aims to align her actions and beliefs more closely with her authentic self. Through this introspective journey, Deanne strives to embody the values that define her true essence.

Deanne also unfolds the “hero’s journey” and the pivotal role introspective work plays in personal evolution. From small steps like meditation to immersive experiences with psychedelic therapies, this episode is a treasure trove of wisdom on how to truly connect with oneself and live authentically.

Thank you for being a part of our Stellar Life family. Remember, self-care, reflection, and stepping up to your dreams are your gateways to an extraordinary life! So, without further ado, let’s dive into the show!

In This Episode

• [02:58] – Deanne Adamson recounts her childhood on a farm and its influence on her empathy and emotional intelligence.
• [06:51] – Deanne describes her journey from mental health counseling to founding Being True to You.
• [09:04] – Deanne delves into psychedelic therapies, especially ibogaine, and their holistic advantages.
• [14:44] – Orion and Deanne discuss personal experiences with ketamine and altered states of consciousness.
• [22:13] – Deanne highlights strategies for dealing with feeling stuck and the significance of embracing all emotions.
• [24:08] – Orion shares her experience with virtual flotation tanks and their role in introspective work.
• [31:20] – Deanne explains the importance of internal belief systems, self-awareness, and their potential negative impacts.
• [38:11] – Deanne outlines small steps for internal work such as meditation, yoga, and spending time in nature.
• [44:49] – Deanne presents her top three tips for living a stellar life.

Jump to Links and Resources

About Today’s Show

Thank you for coming here to share your wisdom with us, Deanne.

Thanks for having me, Orion. It’s a pleasure to be here. I look forward to our talk today.

Awesome. Before we begin, can you share a childhood memory that made you feel great?

Thank you for starting with such a cute question. I had a good childhood, so I have so many good memories. The best memories I have are of living on a farm. It was around eight years old. My dad bought a farm. He was in a different industry. But to give us a good childhood, we bought cows, sheep, goats, chickens, turkeys, cats, and dogs. We kind of bought everything; it was just such a sweet experience. It was hard for me as a child to get up at 6 AM and do chores, but we loved it. 

We just loved having purpose in the family and taking care of them. I’d have to think about a specific memory, but those things draw me back to childhood—our responsibilities were being on the farm, tending to animals, tending to each other, and tending to gardens. Living off the land was one of the golden memories that I took from childhood. Thanks for asking that.

Our emotional connection can be hindered when we pay so much attention to screens.

Thanks for sharing. That’s amazing. So beautiful. We live in an area with many farms, and I often take my little one to the farm so he can interact with the animals. He’s not as into it as I was when I was a child, but he loves it. He still enjoys himself. He would rather watch a science TV show. But I do my best to connect him to nature and animals. It’s very special for a child. Do you think living on the farm gave you more empathy and care toward humanity and humans?

People ask me in my adult life, “How are you the way you are?” It’s not my academic studies. I think it comes from childhood. I think it comes from my parents, upbringing, and farm living. You develop so many skills when you have to manage so many things and when you have responsibilities that you have to tend to. It is different with our younger generations now. We’ve had such lucrative times with our generation that our kids just haven’t had to work hard. 

With the children, a lot of times they are indoors, they are on screens, fascinated by videos. But if something doesn’t need the child, there isn’t a responsibility. Then, there is a lack of work ethic, skill, and an emotional connection. Emotional connection can also be hindered when we pay so much attention to screens. So that’s great that you’re taking your son outside and connecting him with nature and animals. Many things make us who we are as adults, but when I look back at my childhood, I just think about all of my experiences, and it was hard.

I guess it was a lot of new challenges and new skills. But, yes, you learn how to connect deeper with the land, with animals. It increases your emotional intelligence—your capacity for empathy and compassion—because you feel that as a kid. You might not feel it for your siblings because you’re always fighting with them, so you’re just like, “I don’t care what they’re going through.” You just don’t have that sometimes. It depends. But with animals, you do. You start to feel what they’re feeling. 

When I read Charlotte’s Web, I felt like this was me. It was like me trying to save the pig from getting slaughtered. I literally went through that same story. I connect many of my early childhood experiences to who I am and where I am today.

Yes. How do you help people? What is a little bit about your company?

I started a company called Being True To You in 2010—a very unique company. I was the very first company of its kind. Before that, I was in mental health counseling. I have always had a passion for helping people. I went through a psychology degree and then a mental health counseling degree, and I was so excited to help people. Then I got into my profession, and I was like, “Man, I just felt very limited in what I could do because of the diagnostic treatment model and people getting medicated.”

In fact, some people didn’t even really want to get better. They just wanted to be medicated. That was a turning point in my life. I was about 29 years old and thought, “I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want to be a counselor. I want to do something different.” So, I went out on a limb. I had no experience in business. I think I took two classes in college on business and marketing. I dropped out of both of them. It just wasn’t really in my wheelhouse. But I was passionate about helping people and wanted to explore a different way. 

I started Being True To You as a coaching company because I could help people outside the medical model. Then, I met someone very unique. I thought, “Okay, I want to help young adults figure out who they are sooner in life, find the path of the true self and just sort of wake up.” Looking back at my teen years, I saw my bad decisions and that my value system and moral compass were essentially skewed. For me, the most important things in life were popularity and having fun, which wasn’t necessarily true for me now.

So I thought, “I’m going to help young adults wake up, work through their stuff, and find their passion sooner. It doesn’t take until the end of their twenties, thirties, or forties. In any event, young people just weren’t ready to do that deep work. I ended up meeting a friend of a friend who did a very unique treatment. This is a treatment called ibogaine. Have you ever heard of ibogaine?

Is it coming out of Africa? Is that iboga?

Yes.

A friend of mine did it, and she raved about it, but I didn’t know anything about it, so I didn’t either.

I want to help people. When you start a business, there are different prospects. You’re feeling into the different avenues. Something told me, “Go to Mexico and try this out.” I went to an ibogaine center in Mexico. Now,  in Mexico, these are detox centers for drug addiction. Boga is this powerful and thermogenic psychedelic medicine that’s been used by the African tribes, specifically the Bwiti religion, for hundreds of years. They’ve used it as a rite of passage.

They use it on their hunting expeditions. They use it to treat cases of neurosis, which we would understand as depression or anxiety. It’s been around for a long time. In the 1960s, there was a group of people addicted to heroin who were just recreationally trying some things. They took ibogaine, which is a derivative of iboga. It’s basically the main alkaloid of iboga extracted, and then it’s put into a sort of synthetic pill. It’s not synthetic, but they synthesize it and put it into a pill format. It’s the actual medicine. 

I started Being True To You as a coaching company because I could help people outside the medical model.

They took ibogaine, and it cured their heroin addiction. They came out the next morning, and they tripped all night long; it was this wild trip, and I’m sure they had taken, like, entheogens before, but then on the other side of it, there were no cravings, there was no withdrawal, and there was a restored drive to live. These guys were just like, “What did we find here?” So they ended up patenting it in the ’60s, and then they were doing underground research. 

Then ibogaine was scheduled as a Schedule 1 drug in 1971. So, it kind of pushed all the research underground. Some countries allow you to use experimental medicines, and Mexico is one of them. If somebody’s in a life-threatening situation, you’re allowed to use an experimental medication to save their life. People with opiate addiction are in life-threatening situations. They’re walking that thin line between life and death, so they can do it. Mind you, this was 15 years ago when I started. Things have changed. 

I go down there to this clinic, and I’m watching these American guys and women and Canadians fully addicted to heroin and opiates. Not all of them got addicted to street drugs. A lot of them got addicted to pain medication after surgery, and one thing led to the next. And so these good people coming down here who are well-meaning, have children and careers and some lost people.

As I was watching, I thought, “What am I seeing right now?” I’m seeing people go through this 24-hour experience where you lay in a bed with eye shades and headphones, have music on, and do it overnight. You start the treatment at 9 or 10 p.m., and it goes overnight. The first 12 hours are the main part, and then it’s another 72 hours to really wear off. In any event, I was pretty amazed. 

I ended up building a whole company on the window of opportunity that came after ibogaine. This grew to so many other things, which I can just share really quickly. There’s a window of opportunity after you take psychedelic therapy, and that is a chance to interrupt negative thinking, bad habits, and addictive habits, that’s for sure. And then a person can sort of get a running start at a new life. I saw that these people were coming out who hated themselves, didn’t believe in God, and were very estranged from their families. 

If you asked them about their goals, they would become visibly angry even thinking about that. “We felt hopeless,” like everything you see with someone struggling at the bottom. After one night, they would come out of this experience and say, “Oh my gosh, I miss my family. I want to go on a spiritual journey. I feel so happy. I want to turn my life around.”

And I just thought, “What is going on?” So, I started coaching people in the aftercare program after they had gone through this treatment. Then we started doing before-and-aftercare, like prepping them for it and supporting them afterward. We started getting calls from the psychedelic community around the world. People everywhere said, “We hear what you’re doing. Can you guys provide before-and-aftercare for us?” 

We started supporting many of these alternative, indigenous international clinics and then started training people. We were the very first company to start doing psychedelic integration coaching. So, we started a training program because the counselors I had hired and the people I had hired were not getting it.

Whatever we're creating in our lives, to some degree, is manufactured by ourselves. Doing the work means observing our outputs and asking: Is this true? Is this positive? Is this healthy? Share on X

We don’t know what to do. I started a training program ten years ago. Now, we’ve trained 1500 people and certified over 1000. It’s been a great experience. We work with professionals, and literally, people from every demographic are coming through our training to understand what psychedelic therapies are. What do we need to know about it? How can we support the process? Whether we’re in the medical field, we’re not. That’s what I do. I run Being True To You.

Then it launched this whole thing of doing preparation, integration for psychedelic therapies, really understanding what psychedelic therapies are and why people are using them. What are the risks, contraindications, and things you need to know going into this work? And then, what’s the bigger point? And that’s really what Being True To You is. It’s not about psychedelic therapies at all. It’s about the path of the true self. It’s about connecting with what’s most important to you in life. It’s about diligently working on one’s heart and character to elevate oneself, not externalizing the problem and solution and looking for something outside oneself to save oneself. So it’s splintered off into so many directions.

We coach individuals, train coaches and professionals, and train and serve these retreats and clinics. Currently, we work with ketamine centers. I don’t know if you’ve heard of ketamine treatment. We do their before-and-after approval. 

Ketamine is an anesthetic that they use in surgery, essentially. When you go in to get surgery, they’ll give you ketamine. But they have found that if you give just a little bit and you don’t give the whole amount, it puts you in an altered state.

I had ketamine, and I didn’t even know. That’s kind of cool. 

Me too. I’ve had it six times in six surgeries, and I didn’t know. But, if you give me small doses, it puts you into this altered state where you can see your life from a meta-view. So instead of being behind all of your emotions, where it can be difficult to have clarity on what’s going on, you kind of get to break out of that space, go above and just look at yourself and your life and your mental activity, and see, “Okay, how is everything that I’m putting out leading to the outcomes in my life? What can I learn from this? What conclusions can I draw?” So, anyway, that’s a little bit about what we do. It’s unique, and it’s interesting. If you want to dive into any part of that, let me know.

What do you think happens when someone goes psychedelic? Do they get into spirit realms? Do they connect with their higher selves? Do they connect with their guides? Do they touch God? Do they dissolve into oneness? What do you think it is that rewires the brain to such a degree that a person with an addiction can stop their addiction within a few hours?

There’s a connection between mind, body and spirit, between thoughts, emotions and behaviors, and between our subtle body and our psyche.

I can give you kind of the explanation, scientifically, of why ibogaine is able to do that, and then the rest of it is just in the eye of the beholder. So, with ibogaine specifically, when you ingest ibogaine, it turns into a protein called noribogaine, and the noribogaine will then saturate the opiate reward system. It’s hard for them to know exactly what’s happening, but their understanding is that the ibogaine is going to clean out all of the cell receptor sites that are going to be corroded with long-term drug use, and they clean it out. 

Then, noribogaine will plug itself into the receptor sites. As long as it stays in place, noribogaine will confuse the body for a few months, making it think that the opiate reward system is satisfied when, in fact, there are no opiates in the system. By the time it wears off in 90 days or so, the person will not even notice, and they will not need opiates. So that’s what we understand is happening on a biophysical level.

Does it also help other addictions? Because people take drugs, and that’s an obvious addiction. But there are so many other addictions, like gambling or even YouTube. Does it do the same? Just saturate the opioid, the reward centers in the brain, and then people heal?

I think this is where we just kind of get into speculation. The second part of the answer is that there’s a connection between mind, body and spirit, between thoughts, emotions and behaviors, and between our subtle body and our psyche. So everything is connected. What we’ve looked at in the medical system is things very compartmentalized. If you have a headache, we look at the head. If you have a stomach ache, we just look at the stomach. We’re not really looking at the whole being.

What happens when people take psychedelic therapy is that it addresses the whole being now in terms of how it works. This is going to be theory and speculation for some people. It connects you with your higher self, your true self, and the goddess, a divine essence and power we have. If we’re in the material world, the matrix speaks, and we’re just, like, “Plugged into the illusion.”

We understand this through our own sciences and physics. It’s like the whole world is an illusion. Then, we have this internal awareness. As most people believe, we have a soul. We have an eternal existence in the spiritual realm. And then we come into our human body. When we become very attached to the human world, and we are very affected by the human world, we’re affected by early childhood trauma and adverse experiences. We’re affected by all the stressors and all the pressures as we come into adulthood. All of a sudden, we’re just burdened by all this stuff. 

Our modern culture often leads us astray, fostering addictions and mental health struggles. The real solution is to develop authentic self-awareness. Share on X

Then, we start to manifest symptoms of the mind, symptoms of the body, and symptoms in our interpersonal relationships, and everything starts to break down, and it becomes hard to track for some reason. When we take psychedelic therapy, what’s happening is that it’s like that whole layer is just fading away like all of our material world existence.

Some people call it the default reality. It’s just sort of fading away. So, people can see themselves from a spiritual perspective or almost behind the scenes. It just becomes easier to identify what’s happening. So, I would say the one way they work is through awareness. People are able to make connections, like, “Oh, I get it now. I’m struggling with depression because I look at my lifestyle and what I’m doing with my mornings, my days, and my nights. It makes perfect sense that this is the recipe for perpetuating depression.”

That’s exactly what I’m doing. Then, we can kind of work backward. That’s like a psychological perspective. Then, you have an emotional perspective. You can tap into these emotions that might be otherwise too painful, or we have too many defenses in the way, so we can’t actually get to our emotions. There’s an emotional cleansing and healing, which is one of the most profound aspects of psychedelics. Like many people say, it opens the emotional floodgates on you. 

Thirdly, I’ll just talk about detoxification. Somehow, when you take these plant herbs, they’re going into the system, and many people will share them. I had the same experience one time of being scrubbed from the inside. I could even see these little bots scrubbing my body. It’s detoxing the gut, the digestive system, and even the brain. It’s just like dumping stuff out because you can tell these things are purgative. You’re purging through all kinds of ways: crying, laughing, shaking, sweating, urination, and vomiting. 

Preparation is where you’re going to start getting in touch about what you want to change.

There are all these different ways to purge. When you come out the other side, you just feel clean. Sometimes, you could feel slightly drained, but people mostly just like, “Wow, I just feel like I got myself back.” So it seems like it gives people a clean slate, a fresh start. But, of course, there are all kinds of disclaimers and setups. It’s got to be done in the right light.

What’s the difference between pre and post-coaching for psychedelics? What’s the preparation and coaching, and what’s on the other side?

Preparation is where you’re going to start to get in touch with what you want to change. So we’re warming ourselves up to the work. If you just go into a psychedelic experience and you’re not prepared for it, it can be difficult if you haven’t tapped into what is truly going on because we have an image of ourselves and who we are. I have who I think I am, and then there’s who other people see me as, and then there’s who I am. 

When those don’t match up, and you just jump into a psychedelic experience, and all of a sudden, you have this mirror in front of you that’s telling you how you really are and how you show up to other people, it’s tough. What you’re doing in the preparation is warming up to it. You’re saying, “Okay, let’s take an inventory of our life. What is going well? What do we like about ourselves? What do we like about our life? Where are some hiccups and challenges, especially long-term suffering and chronic issues? Like somebody keeps going, running out of money, going broke and bankrupt. Somebody keeps going through a partner.

Every three months, they have a new partner. Someone continues to fall into sickness. They just can’t get out of it. So specifically, we want to look at those situations where I’m stuck in a rut. “I’ve been stuck in this rut for a decade or two decades. What’s connected to it?” Because if I just step into a journey and start seeing this stuff, and I resist, I will start throwing up. I’m going to start complaining. All my defenses are going to come up. I’m not going to be able to just let go and lean into that. 

So, in the preparation phase, we’re warming up to the work. We’re starting to identify what things I want to work on and what that work might look like when it shows up, and we’re also looking at the stillness and the silence. How do I just be quiet? Like I’ve heard people say, “If you don’t know if you could handle a psychedelic experience, go sit in the park for an hour and just watch. Don’t say anything. Meditate. Go to a floating.”

I used to love doing that, but it messes up my hair. I don’t love all the salt in my hair. Now, they have virtual flotation tanks. They had that when I lived in Santa Monica at the Bulletproof Labs. It’s really cool. It’s like a capsule that spins with sound and light, and you get into theta brainwaves within three minutes. 

My friend Don Wood also has a center here in Florida. I forgot where. It escaped me, but I’ve been there, and he’s got a capsule like that. The last time I did it, I went inside the capsule.

Very cool. So, that prep is just warming people up. People need different kinds of prep, but whether it’s a psychedelic experience or it’s a different kind of brain technology that people are going through or sensory experience, there’s all kinds of stuff on the market these days to sort of walk people into this interspace where people can silence their minds, steal their body, and be with the difficult stuff. So that’s what we’re doing in the prep. We’re just preparing people to be with the difficult and the good stuff—all of it—and just to be present with it, let go of attachments and expectations.

Through experience, you’re having visions, insights, and downloads.

The integration is all about integrating what came up, right? So through the experience, you’re having visions, you’re having insights, you’re having downloads, as people say. You’re revisiting troubling childhood memories and traumatic events. You’re seeing all the greatness in life that you’ve been avoiding. What we’re looking for in the integration is the following: What’s the lesson? What’s the insight? What’s the lesson, and what’s the directive? What have we learned in this experience that we want to take and integrate into our lives? 

We’re preparing people to go into and to the interspace, be honest with themselves, and have the courage and bravery to sit with what’s there. We’re taking those lessons from the experience and then integrating them afterward through self-care practices, self-reflective practices, and changing and improving one’s routine. You’re getting a jumpstart. So, that’s what we do in preparation: integration coaching.

Awesome. Dr. Wood is in Orlando. Before we started the podcast, we chatted briefly, and you talked about people doing the work. What does it mean to do the work?

Doing the work is something I haven’t thought I understood for most of my life either. There’s not a lot of training on how to be human. We just model our surroundings and go with the flow, and then someday, we realize, “I don’t like who I am or don’t like my life results and want to change it.” Then, when we try to change, it’s really hard, right? A whole trillion-dollar industry is dedicated to helping people figure out behavioral change. That’s essentially what the mental health system is all about. It’s like mental and behavioral change. Then you have the whole coaching industry, and then you have just like the whole self-help and self-improvement industry.

It is really to look at, “Okay, what power do I have to change my experience of things and my outcomes in life?” What we see when we try to change is, “It’s really hard.” Then we start to look at, “Okay, do I have the ability to change? Are things just preset, or can I change them?” Even if we do, we tend to go back to our norm after about 30 days, right? So then it kind of led me on a journey to say, “Okay, what is the process of change? How do we change? To what degree do humans have the ability to improve their circumstances?” So this is our entire mission with Being True To You, which is the journey of the true self and authenticating for oneself. What does it mean to be true to yourself? What is my value system? What is the most important thing to me in life? What are my guiding principles? Did I just pick up some modern principles off the streets, off the Internet, and like, “Oh, those sound good. I’m going to go for those.”?

Suffering and hardship aren't just obstacles; they are stepping stones on the hero's journey to becoming your true self. Share on X

A lot of people do this these days. There’s so much virtuous signaling everywhere. People don’t know anything about anything, but they just quote something that sounds cool or put a flag on or whatever symbols, and suddenly, they feel special. It’s almost like they feel special. But this is the most special thing one can do because they don’t think for themselves. They don’t even have their own opinion. 

They’re so sucked into the collective ideology or the need to be a part of a tribe that they don’t think for themselves. How do you teach people to think for themselves and connect deeply with their values?

I just love what you said. That’s really what it is. That’s what we teach at Being True To You. It’s a very individual process because most of the world is like, “Okay, how do we change the world out there? How do we make those people act differently so those people don’t help those people? How do we improve the global situation?” And I think if we are spiritual beings in a spiritual body, it’s not about improving the global situation. 

It’s about improving ourselves. It comes down to personal work. And we hear this metaphor time and time again, used on the airplane. If there’s any situation with the airplane, you secure your own mask first, and then you help.

This is the second time I’ve heard this today. That’s so funny.

It’s important to take care of ourselves. In our modern culture, we have completely forgotten about this.

It is funny. We learned this for a reason: It’s important that we take care of ourselves. In our modern culture, we have completely forgotten about all of that. We just point the finger off, like, “That’s not good. That needs to change. You people are hurting you people. You guys need to be different.”

We take a completely different perspective of Being True To You and look at what that work is. As you say, it’s going within oneself and saying, “What do I believe? What resonates with me? What does my intuition say about why I’m in this body, my purpose, and what I’m here to do?” I feel like many of the answers can be deduced personally through reasoning. It is careless to follow mainstream culture because it is just lost. 

In a sense, we are just chasing that next pursuit, that next high, that next sense of fulfillment, and a lot of it is just really fake, what’s being created. I think that what we’re seeing is like these epidemic proportions of people becoming depressed, committing and wanting to commit suicide, or actually committing suicide, turning to addiction, turning to unhealthy things that are causing anxiety and insomnia. If we look at it, the mental health problem and the addiction problem have only gotten worse. The more programs we have out there have not reversed it. It’s just climbing. To answer the question of how to do the work, I’ll name some things there.

Part of that is authenticating our belief system. But we have to develop self-awareness, monitor our thoughts, and become so self-reflective that we can see the connection between our thoughts. For example, what is the output of my thoughts? Like, when I hold on to these thoughts, what is it creating? Then, what’s the connection to my emotions? What’s the connection to my behaviors? What’s the connection to my lifestyle? Then what’s my outcome? Like, what are the yields I’m getting in my life? Whatever we’re creating in our lives is manufactured by ourselves. 

So, doing the work is to observe the outputs that we’re putting out and ask if this is true. Is this accurate? Is this positive? Is this healthy? Is this good for me? Are these things that I’m just looping on from adverse events in my life, or are these things I’ve chosen to do? Where did all of these patterns come from? Is there a way to optimize them? That’s part of it, just the self-awareness. And then, searching oneself for where we are off. It could be shortcomings, wrongdoings, or living outside of our value system, like you said, virtual signaling, doing things just for appearance, just for image, but not things that really feel good. I find stuff every day. I’ve been doing this work for a long time.

If we adopt a bunch of modern principles because they feel good, people will normalize them.

A solid decade and a half for sure, and every day, I find shortcomings and things I can improve. And just imagine if we all did that. The work isn’t taking a bunch of psychedelics, going to a bunch of expensive programs or being at all of the fancy events and putting on a show. It’s like the work is the vulnerability. The work is identifying how I can be a better person. How could I be more patient, more reliable, and compassionate? All of these things. Then, ultimately, you find where you’re snagged and let go of those attachments. Like I said earlier, we’re just full of attachments to the material world.

I’m going inside myself, and I’m saying, where am I attached to an expectation, to an outcome, to a comfort impeding my ability to be true to myself? Those are some things. Then, I think a big part of it is authenticating our value system because what we worship, idolize, and hold to be true becomes us. That’s who we become. So if we adopt a bunch of modern principles because they feel good, and they do feel good, a modern principle would be like, follow your bliss. Will you follow what feels good? It’s like, “Well, bad things feel good.” So what happens is people normalize it. They’re just like, “Oh, yeah, I’m going to do a bunch of drugs and have a bunch of sexual partners, and I’m just going to stop paying taxes, and it just feels good.”

I do what I want. I’m living with nature or whatever, and a narrative is created around it, but then there’s an emptiness underneath because all these heartbreaks are happening. There’s an unhealthy lifestyle. There are too many altered states going on, right? The most important thing is to stop and say, “What is my faith? What is my worldview? Where did I get it from? How did I authenticate that? Because everything that we do falls from that, right?” 

I think that this is really why I don’t advocate for psychedelic therapies, but I think this is why it helps people because I think it’s a time for them actually to go in and have that true conversation with themselves and peel back their whole material world reality and just look for themselves at what is this getting me? Is this in alignment with my heart and my higher purpose?

Thank you for sharing all that. What are some tools that one can use to break through addiction to suffering?

Interesting. People who just get addicted to suffering in general.

Most of us do, to some degree. If I just look at myself, I like the hero’s journey. I like rising from my ashes. I like a struggle. I get almost like an erotic charge from struggling and being the underdog. After doing a lot of work, I can look at myself and say, “Okay, Orion, once again, you don’t have to suffer to get where you need to be. There are other ways.”

But there is something about, for me, the struggle, the suffering that turns me on. And I think we all, to some degree, get some rewards from complaining, suffering, and having a ‘poor me’ victim mentality. Even though a lot of us are very aware of spiritual concepts, we are human. As human beings, we sometimes fall into those places. What are some tools to work with?

First, we like suffering and struggle because it equals growth, and we like triumph. That’s how we grow. Imagine, I’ve written a textbook on this in the coach training on the significance of human suffering and hardship and how we can leverage human hardship and suffering for growth. That’s why people like Joseph Campbell’s analogy of the hero’s journey; I think that that’s just such a good representation of why we struggle and why we get to those places of abysmal where we’re just hopeless and in despair and thinking, “I just have to give up. I have to throw in the towel.” But if we look at the hero’s journey, it’s like, “No, no, no.”

You’re in that hard part of the journey, and you have to go within to find the light instead of looking outside. If you can break through, that will be even greater on the other side. For one, suffering is significant and good; I think people create it. I’ve had clients from wealthy families tell me about this. I feel like I just created this behavior, addictive or criminal behavior because I was bored; my life was too easy. 

We like suffering and struggle because they equal growth.

Everything was handed to me. I had to mix it up. I do see the value in it, and I do think we create that. I’m a female entrepreneur, so I do that to myself all the time, right? I ask for my own suffering. But it’s because we do want that challenge. I like to climb mountains because they’re hard. But I like that feeling of getting to the top and back down. Then there’s the unnecessary suffering, right? There’s the suffering that we’re perpetuating, complaining about. 

We go to the doctor, “I need help.” And it’s the stuff we’re not knowingly creating, or we don’t know its origins. We don’t really know where it comes from. So, there are a lot of different tools that people can use.

It’s never really about the tool. It’s about the transformation and alchemy happening from the tool. That’s where we get to the work. We often put the work as using the tool, but that’s not the work. The work happens to me when I use the tool. We can use tools all day, but it doesn’t mean it will help us. So, things that people could do, the most common of which are going to be meditation—starting small. It doesn’t have to be a specific branded meditation because a lot comes with that if you grab a meditation from a specific lineage. 

When you’re starting a meditation practice, before you get initiated, because you don’t know what comes with that, just practice meditating five minutes, ten minutes a day. We already have natural cleansing, healing, and strengthening mechanisms in our bodies if we can shut down the mental chatter and relax our bodies.

That’s why sleep is so important. Sleep is very detoxing. You sleep for 8 hours, wake up, and you’re refreshed because the body does its work just when we stop getting in the way. That’s what you really want to think about when thinking about tools. How can I stop getting in my own way? It’s not always what I need to take or use. It’s often what I need to let go of and stop doing. That’s really what meditation is. You can do seated and closed-eye meditation; some people might go walking meditation. Things like that are really going to be helpful. I already mentioned float tanks.

These are things that help meditate you because it can be hard to sit still. You can use techniques like a flotation tank where you’re lying in the water and have an hour-long session. There may be a bit of music at the beginning and the end. It will encourage you to stay in your pod during an actual session. Any kind of physical activity is going to be good, too, such as using the body, moving the body, or stretching. Of course, many people are doing yoga, pilates, and martial arts these days. Just think about how martial arts have cultivated people since the beginning.

We could go back as far as we could in ancient history, and it’s like they had martial arts. Then, you could get into dance, art, or music; this can also help us let go of our angst and patterns in this world. We let it flow into the music or the dance. These are things that help cultivate us. Breathwork has become popular. I see you just did a good podcast on that. Breathwork is another way we use our consciousness and body, but we’re still alive. We’re moving into that space of, like, stillness and quietness. We’re getting out of our own way, oxygenating our bodies, and giving ourselves life.

That can be helpful. Nature, of course, like getting out in nature, is always helpful when we can get away from the electricity and the radiation of Wi-Fi and just get outside under the sun. I don’t know about you, but I can just sit in the sun for five minutes, and I’m just restored. There was a study that came out. I don’t have it on me, so we’d have to look it up. But that showed that five minutes of sunshine is more powerful a day than an antidepressant to make someone happy. You can imagine those studies just disappearing.

People can use many different tools, but I think it’s never really about the tool. It’s about the transformation and alchemy that happens within the tool.

No one wants you to know you need sunshine—sitting out in the sun. Water has always been cleansing. Going for cold plunges in a river or jumping into a lake is helpful. Any flow activity can be meditative. That could be things like rock climbing or fire spinning. There are all kinds of flow activities out there that are interesting. There are a lot of little tools people can use, like scanning the body for tension. 

If I’m really tense, I can just start here, and I can just scan down, and then I can see where I’m tense, and I’m like, “Oh, it’s right here. It’s right under my ribs. I’m actually telling the truth. I can actually feel it right here.” I could feel a bit of tension. That’s where breathwork and meditation can help. I’m kind of breathing in that space, and my consciousness is just lightly on it, so it starts to disperse. 

It already worked just by acknowledging that, and you can start to feel it, like moving. Those are some of the things that you can do. It doesn’t have to be this big ticket item where you spend a ton of money and go to all these private islands somewhere in the world. All these things can be done at home in your backyard.

I want to go to a private island. I’m getting with it.

Yes. But, sometimes, that’s what I think people think: I don’t have any money, so I can’t heal or do the work. It’s not that way. The world is actually more fair than we realize. Everyone has the opportunity to do the work from within their own home, with whatever one has. There are a lot of brain technologies, apps, sound beds, light therapies, and all kinds of stuff, which is great. These are great tools. But again, it’s what’s happening in your body that matters. It doesn’t matter. The tool that you’re using it matters. What am I allowing myself to recognize and let go of versus hold on to?

This morning, I did some moving meditation with music, and my eyes were closed, and I was kind of, like, moving, and there was sunshine on my face, and my eyes were closed, but it was when I was moving, my face went from shadow to feeling the sun on my face. It was such a yummy experience. It made my day so much better. 

I love what you’re saying. It’s even five minutes, even just a little bit every day. Louise Hays says if you love yourself just a little more every day, you’ll see such expansion by the end of the year. And what is loving yourself is caring for yourself, moving, breathing, and drinking water.

The process of 'doing the work' involves more than just behavioral change; it’s about aligning with your values and discovering your true guiding principles. Share on X

It’s all about loving yourself. Thank you for sharing so many tools. You’re a very generous person. You said, “Let me give you the list of everything under the sun.” It was really cool. Thank you. You are amazing. Before we say goodbye, what are your three top tips for living a stellar life?

Good question. Being true to yourself is a big theme that we have, and we talked about that, going within and peeling back all of the social influence and just diving in and maybe journaling or meditating on itself, reflecting, having powerful conversations to say, “What does it mean to be true to myself?” We then put almost a moral compass to that so we have direction looking within. That is the second thing I’ll mention. We must improve ourselves to solve problems, resolve conflicts, and level up. There’s no shortcut. I would say that’s really my third thing: there is no external solution to the true goals and fulfillment of our mission that we want to do and to the resolution of the problems we suffer. There are tools, but we have to understand that it’s an inner process.

From what I understand, we’re spiritual beings. We’re here on a spiritual journey. And so everything that’s happening is not happening to us. It’s happening to us. It’s all an opportunity. And so when the moment strikes, it could be getting triggered. It could be a conflict, something that’s individual, or an attack on your family, community, or the whole nation is going through it. Whatever it is, we want to look within and say, “How did I create or allow this? Or how am I allowing this to affect me? What could I do to improve myself in my state?” That, to me, is how we create a stellar life, for everyone is really looking within to be our best.

We’re on a spiritual journey. Everything that happens is not happening to us; it’s happening for us.

Beautiful. Thank you so much, Deanne. Where can people find you and learn more about you and your coaching? All of it.

Visit beingtruetoyou.com, fill out our contact form, or call us. We’d love to chat with you. From a coaching perspective, we work with individuals through all states of suffering to pair you with the best coach. We have amazing coaches at every level and even outside the country. We speak multiple languages; we can help in so many ways. We also provide training.

If you’re a professional or a student and want to learn how I support people through their transformational experiences, integration, or psychedelic therapies, we have a unique coach training program that we could talk to you about. We also do before- and aftercare for retreats and clinics. If you’re running a company, you have any kind of holistic healing clinic program. We could talk to you about doing the preparation and integration for your clients. 

You can also find us on Instagram and Facebook. Say “Hi.” We’d love to hear from you. You watched the podcast and learned about your unique situation and how we could help. Thank you, Orion.

No, thank you. Thank you so much for everything that was powerful. Thank you for the incredible work you do to help the world. And thank you, listeners. Remember to go within and find your true self. Look within for self-improvement. Look and remember that everything is within you now. 

When the moment strikes, ask yourself, how did I attract it? Why is this in my movie? And what can I do to improve my life right now? The goal is to have joy, bliss, and a stellar life. This is Orion. Until next time, thank you for joining me on my mission to light people up and change lives around the world. I hope today’s conversation inspires you to step up. Go after the life of your dreams and be who you want to be.

Your Checklist of Actions to Take

{✓}Spend time looking within to understand your own beliefs, intuition, and purpose. It’s the foundation for authentic living and personal growth.

{✓}Don’t follow mainstream culture blindly. Question societal norms and pave your own path based on critical thinking and personal values.

{✓}Keep track of your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Awareness leads to optimization and the creation of healthier, more fulfilling habits.

{✓}Being open and vulnerable fosters true self-understanding. It’s essential for shedding attachments to the material world and being genuine.

{✓}Use hardships as opportunities for growth. Embrace the hero’s journey and find strength in overcoming challenges.

{✓}Utilize tools like meditation, yoga, and breathwork to tune into your body. It’s not the tools themselves but the transformation they facilitate within you.

{✓}If exploring psychedelics, ensure proper preparation and coaching. It may enhance the experience and aid in achieving deeper self-awareness.

{✓}Reflect and integrate insights from introspective work into daily life. Self-care and reflective practices are key to lasting transformation.

{✓}Avoid adopting societal ideologies without critical thought. Teach yourself to think deeply and connect with your core values.

{✓}Dive deeper into self-discovery and transformation with Deanne Adamson. Visit beingtruetoyou.com for coaching and holistic healing.

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About Deanne Adamson

Deanne Adamson left a career in mental health counseling to start Being True to You in 2010, the first preparation and integration coaching company for psychedelic therapies. Deanne has produced several coaching and coach training programs, such as: Being True To You’s Transformational & Integration Coach Certification Program, their Hospitality, Retreat, & Sitters Training, and their one-year Transformational Recovery Coaching Program. Being True To You also provides preparation and integration coaching services to treatment and retreat centers for people undergoing psychedelic treatments in therapeutic settings, and much more.

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