062: From King of the Cage to King of Living with Kyle Kingsbury

Our guest today is someone you might recognize: Kyle Kingsbury is a retired mixed martial artist. He competed as a King of The Cage, and today’s he the king of living fully. Kyle was a professional UFC fighter who won Spike TV’s Ultimate Fighter competition and competed in the sport for six years. He was also a highly decorated football player in both high school and college. In fact, he was part of ASU’s 2004 Sun Bowl winning team.

On today’s Awesome Health Podcast, Kyle tells us about how he made the transition into the fighting world after his football career. Football had been his life and he didn’t know what else to do; he knew he didn’t want to work in sales, he didn’t want to sit behind a desk all day. But he didn’t know what other options he had and he fell into a very dark place of drugs and booze. It got so bad he attempted suicide by taking every possible pill he could and climbing onto the top of a parking lot where he fully intended to jump to his death. Before he could he felt a voice from outside of himself tell him there’s more for him in this lifetime.

He woke up about a day and a half later in a hospital with no recollection of anything except that final moment. From there he was able to get clear and actually listen to his intuition, which led him to fighting. He went on to have a fantastic career in the UFC, something he had never considered before. When it was over he had a much better idea of how to make a healthy transition into his next phase: plant medicine and healing. Kyle shares some of the science behind using a keto diet and psychedelics to heal brain injuries, something he has firsthand knowledge of.

On this episode, we also discuss how he works with archetypes within his own consciousness and within his relationships and so much more! This is a fascinating exploration of many topics with the one and only Kyle Kingsbury. Join us to hear it all on the 62nd edition of Awesome Health Podcast.

Episode Resources:

• Kyle Kingsbury’s Website: https://www.kingsbu.com/
• Fit For Service Fellowship with Kyle
• Kyle Kingsbury’s podcast: https://www.kingsbu.com/podcast
• The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide, by James Fadiman
• The King, The warrior, Magician and lover by Robert Moore
• Walking With Bears by Dr. Will Taegel

Read The Episode Transcript:

Wade Lightheart: Good morning, good afternoon and good evening. It's Wade T Lightheart with another edition of BiOptimizers Awesome Health Podcast and boy, are we ready for a knockout performance today because we have none other than Kyle Kingsbury joining us today. For those who might recognize the name, he competed as a King of the cage, he's been on spike TV's ultimate fighter. He's a true assassin that has kind of transformed his work in the cage to his work in the world. We're going to get into that today. And I am pumped to see and hear about this, what he's been doing, how he made this transition, and of course, how he's living today. Kyle, welcome to the show.

Kyle Kingsbury: Oh, thanks for having me Wade.

Wade Lightheart: Let's just dive into it.I have a confession to make that's really important. I've seen you on TV and seeing the fight game and all that sort of stuff. And I had the distinction of getting into a cage in the UFC once, but there was nobody in the cage. I just walked into the cage and a gym, and frankly, it's a terrifying place for a guy like me with no fighting skills. I was lifting weights. How does a person get to a phase in his life? And I love watching the UFC. We're really big fans and ultimate fighting. I think there's two things in life where humans can understand communication. And I always say it's fighting and music. You do not need to know the language. It's a form of communication that everybody gets. And how does somebody ends up where you're actively going into one of these environments? What's it take to go there mentally, physically, emotionally to get in that ring and say I'm going to face another guy that's trying to rip me to shreds and let's just see what happens. How do you get there?

Kyle Kingsbury: I'd always fought as a kid and I probably had my first fights not of course professionally, but just street fighting probably since I was six years old. And for me at that time, it was such a big outlet. You know, like you read a book Like Stealing Fire by Jamie Wheal and Steven Kotler. And they talk about these adrenaline junkies, aren't actually adrenaline junkies, they're flow junkies in that flow state where you're in a timeless space and all the noise of life starts to quiet down. I would access those States without even knowing it when I was fighting as a kid and played football since I was 10 years old finished at Arizona state. And when I finished, I was pretty depressed. I wanted a sense of purpose and I still wanted to be an athlete and I still wanted to have people to push myself, so it wasn't just a rat on the wheel running on a treadmill and lifting weights, even though I loved running and lifting weights, but got into mixed martial arts just for the training of it, ended up starting a fight career with that.

Kyle Kingsbury: It is a different scenario when it's self-defense versus actually. Here's a guy who's trained that I'm going to go against and has also researched me the way that I've researched them. Of course, many more people are watching than just a few kids in the school yard. So there's a lot more pressure, financially pressure and all sorts of ways. I don't think I ever mental or mastered the mental, emotional aspects of it. Fighting for me was what planted the seeds to want to learn as much as I could about my body. That's what drew me to our friend, Paul Chek in the first place at a strength coach that was like, watch this video flatten your abs forever. And I was like, cool, I want six pack.

Kyle Kingsbury: Of course you're five minutes into the video and you're like, this has nothing to do with abs everything to do with gut health, everything to do with a lot of the topics in his book, how to eat healthy, you know, and reading that started to change. My diet started to see the correspondence with how I felt, how I recovered an that just made me hungrier than anything to learn more, to learn about mobility, to learn about biohacks or whatever that word actually means, but hot and cold therapy, anything that could take me further in my career and help me do better in there. And then of course the whole other side of that, that has nothing to do with the physical breath work, meditation, visualization, all those things started to become factors because my rampant monkey mind was as strong as anybody's in the cage. It doesn't mean no good.

Kyle Kingsbury: If I'm sitting there counting how many times my opponent hits me in the face or keeping track of the fact that I might be losing each round and really just getting negative about it. And so that was an entry point for me to really start working on my internal self. Thankfully I had a boxing coach who was native American. He would take me out to the reservation to do traditional sweat lodges. After some time working with him with the sweats, he introduced me to some of the plant medicines and that just really expanded my awareness around not only what's possible in the cage, but what's possible in life. And what are some of those big unanswerable questions, you know, that we really want to get to, like, why am I here? What is the purpose of all this? What is my life's mission beyond fighting, which is always going to be finite. You know, even if I had made it to be the best in the world, that always has a due date where it expires. Thankfully, some of those experiences helped me to be able to see beyond the limitations of my fight career and move past it.

Wade Lightheart: Beautifully said. You said something that was really important here, and that is that timeless space. Like the no mind state at that you hear about in classical Buddhist translations of Sartori, The Zen, The no mind, The aspect, which is often in heightened States of awareness. I remember there was a quote out of 300. He says, it's not fear. He feels, it's a heightened sense of awareness. And I think you're in a fight or you're in a kind of a situation or a dangerous situation. And you're well trained. Those you step beyond you separate the difference between fear and danger. Danger isn't paralyzing, it's actually invigorating you. You're not feeling it. And when I watched the sport, now I had a chief similar things in playing athletics or in my bodybuilding career and things like that. I would get into these, like you said, these flow States where everything's just kind of symbolic. It's almost like a dance and everything's flowing. It's hard to describe. And once you've been in it, you get it. And I see that happening in fights. You see those guys, you can actually witness it happening. And that's part of why I think humans are so drawn to this. It's the same thing. When you get into great music, there's kind of this universal field.

Wade Lightheart: I think one of the things that is really powerful and I want to get into this with plant medicines and stuff like this is a lot of athletes. If you look historically when they leave their careers, they seek out that state and they often turn to drugs or partying or dysfunction and really go downhill. And then there's a few people that seem to transcend that. I went through that experience of did the whole party thing after my career. I remember my old coach saying, well, you went through it and then, you know, I see Dorian Yates kind of went through that whole journey. How's that? How does that happen for you? Did it happen organically? Did you instantly make that transition or did you have to kind of go down a few rungs and find a new way to kind of seek that space?

Kyle Kingsbury: This is an excellent question. You know, it's funny cause I as a podcast or as somebody who's been on podcasts, I talk about a lot of these similar conversations and sometimes they're worded in the exact same way and the same answer comes out, but what's beautiful about this question is I had to go through all that, but I actually did that with football when football ended. It's the only thing I knew. And without gone, I knew I didn't want to be in sales. I didn't want to do what my parents did. I didn't want to be on a hundred percent commissions. I didn't want to be stuck in a desk all day long.

Kyle Kingsbury: And there was a lot of unprocessed stuff from my childhood and a lot of unprocessed and just things going on currently. So that's where I went down the rabbit hole with all sorts of drugs, cocaine ecstasy, to copious amounts of booze, to pharmaceuticals like Xanax and Valium. That was the low point. The low point was attempting suicide on every pill that I had and climbing to the top of parking lot seven to jump. And thankfully, either the medicine kicked in or divine intervention, but that was the first time I felt a voice from outside myself. I'd never experienced anything like that. And what not yet meant for me was just, I will have an end to the suffering and it may come from death and that really, to me just opened me up to. There's more here.

Kyle Kingsbury: There's more to be done. And the parking lot guard was able to talk me down. I woke up about a day and a half later in a hospital with no recollection of anything except that final moment getting into his car. And from there I was able to really start to get clear, what do I want to do? And actually listened to my intuition. That's what led me to fighting. I didn't think I would become a professional fighter end up fighting in the UFC for six years. All I knew was a way where I could at least get a few of those boxes checked to have a way to learn something, new people to train with something novel and to push myself physically, which is really what I had relied upon as an outlet my whole life. When fighting ended again, I was already introduced to these plans.

Kyle Kingsbury: I had already been working with them and I actually had a torn labrum in 2012 from over-training and trying to do max effort, barbell, snatch, not a good idea. Andthat sent me back about a year and a half to actually feel like I could punch hard again. And in that process was continuing to go to the reservation, continuing to work with the medicines, continue to do the sweat lodges. I was gaining so much internally that the only reason I wanted to fight again was just to see if can I actually put this to the test? Can I actually remain calm in the eye of the hurricane now that I know that I can remain calm in my day to day? And my final fight when I went out there, it was in San Jose in my hometown. I had this overwhelming sense of this doesn't matter.

Kyle Kingsbury: And you cannot have that as a fighter. It has to be the single most important thing in your life. Every fight that you have has to be the most important fight of your life. And it was just overwhelmingly like who cares like this really doesn't matter at the end of the day. And I was seeing still seeing from that bird's eye view of everything that's happening in my life and what this actually means for me on a broader scale, you know, throughout the course of my life, one fight doesn't mean shit and that's how it was looking at this final fight of my career. It was just like, we'll see what happens. You know, so transitioning from that, I had no idea what I was going to do. I still didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up, I was bouncing and bartending at a local strip club twice a week, which is not the healthiest environment to be in, but it put food on the table.

Kyle Kingsbury: And I only had to work two days a week. So I had five days off to be in nature to go to the beaches. You know, I'm from Northern California, my wife and I would go on these long trail runs. I think what plant medicines gave me at that point was this understanding that whatever happens, as long as I follow my passion, I will be able to make ends meet with that passion. And so I just kept reading, I'd show up for an 11 hour shift. And the first half of the shift at work was pretty mellow, not a lot of people in there and I'd read half a book, you know, and I finish a book over the weekend. And then as the shift picked up, I'd get behind the bar and do my thing.

Kyle Kingsbury: But I was constantly consuming information and starting to put it into practice. And I think that's a clear differentiator. Paul talks if you don't actually embody the books you're reading or whatever the medicine tells you, then you're just the smartest guy in the room who doesn't know shit. And you know, the wisdom is the embodiment of the knowledge that we take in and so having space to actually practice these things that I was learning and try them out, trying out different diets, ketogenic diet works very well for me with recovering the full faculties of my brain, having been hit so many times. There was a lot of implements that I was able to try and see great benefit too. And I think that just broadened my scope of tools from the diet to the medicine cabinet, to recovery, to everything in between.

Kyle Kingsbury: I've had help along the way I went on Rogan's. He was like, dude, you got to start a podcast. And I kind of resisted that for a while and eventually started a podcast. And that led me to on it worked here for a few years, and now I'm doing my own thing, coaching and still close with Aubrey Marcus, the CEO, former CEO of on it. But one thing led to the next and all I had to do was trust in that process. I've never had faith prior to these experiences. I've never had trust in the unknown. I've never felt comfortable in uncertainty. I think that's one of the best teachings that I've gotten from the medicine is the fact that life is uncertain and we're in a very uncertain times right now. But if I can lean into my trust and continue to do what's good for me each day, then if I'm operating at a high frequency and I'm operating as the best version of myself, I can take whatever comes my way.

Wade Lightheart: Beautiful. I think it's really important how many people sometimes have an idea of someone who is a fighter and is kind of a meathead or someone that just goes in there and bangs. But I find when I speak with a lot of fighters, they're very philosophical in their orientation. It's like under extreme pressure. You find aspect, you discover aspects of yourself that the day to day, day life doesn't always test. That's another thing that can happen when you go through medicine ceremonies and having done that, I can see a picture on the wall, which looks very much like the mother. If I have the divine experience of Pacha mama, the classical goddess of ayahuasca and these type of things. What were the medicines that you started with first in this kind of transformative period?

Wade Lightheart: I was just actually with a friend of mine, her and I were talking about this yesterday, and we were talking about how these practices, these herbal concoctions for a lack of a better word, which have been used, tried and trusted in tribal cultures for thousands of years are now thanks to the digital world proliferating throughout the world, because people are talking about the people are sharing their experiences. People are taking what is nonlinear experiences that we hear about, like you read in a book on mysticism or Buddhism or whatever, and you go on it. And then you go hang out with some guy in a tipi somewhere or in a specialized ceremony. And they say, yeah, drink this awful tasting stuff. And you might be sick and you might crap your pants, but you know, you're going to have an amazing experience. And then you just go on this journey, you need to come back like, okay, I've just graduated to a new school of thought. What was that like for you? How did you get involved? Like what turned you on and all that stuff?

Kyle Kingsbury: I'd had experience, I had a couple. Really, it's funny. The more you do this work, you realize there's no such thing as a bad trip. I had a couple of what you would consider bad trips, you know, bronc setting with alcohol involved just for to get high. I still wasn't completely turned off. I realized there could be a different way. My first breakthrough experience was in Sedona and that was with silicide and mushrooms. And again, not perfectly orchestrated, not guided no intention set, but just a flood of downloads and a deeper understanding of everything being connected, the interconnectedness of all things. When I started working with my coach, he very much taught me about the respect and reverence necessary to work with these medicines in a serious way.

Kyle Kingsbury: There was oftentimes where we would do siliciden in the sweat lodge and the sweat is a ceremony in and of itself is a powerful ceremony. And most people traditionally, if there's any traditional people who pour a nippy or Tim has called, they're going to be like scratching their heads. Like that's not the way, but look, there's many pads. And my coach knew to push the envelope in certain respects. And that was one way we pushed the envelope was by combining siliciden with the sweat lodge. I think to your point, when we go through something that has extreme pressure, like a fight, it does squeeze out the diamonds. It does find a way to draw out the gyms out of your consciousness. And the same can be said for hot and cold therapy. The same can be said for Vipassana where you're not allowed to speak for 10 days.

Kyle Kingsbury: Like when you ge rung out and put through the grinder, typically that's where I find the best results. And that's one of the reasons I really like the high dose psilocybin experience. And I really like ayahuasca because you're going to purge in some way or form or another, something's going to get squeezed out of you. There's nothing wrong with microdosing. There's nothing wrong with LSD, but I feel like you can really take yourself a quite deep, you can go quite deep with LSD. I'm not going to knock it, but I think siliciden, and law school were really the two gateways. And of course I've experienced everything from a BOGO to wachuma, to DMT to five MEO and everything in between since then. But initially it was working consistently working with psilocybin and then consistently working with ayahuasca that started to really expand my awareness around what's possible.

Kyle Kingsbury: I could see trees communicating with one another with eyes wide open, and it's like, we are living an avatar. Like this thing is conscious. It is intelligent. It is exactly what the mystics talk about. And it can never be taken away. You know, that's an experience that goes beyond any understanding of what I find in a book. I think with the deeper experience it comes a knowing with a capital K and it's not something that I have to figure out. It's not a belief that goes beyond belief and it goes deep into the heart of my understanding of the way things actually are. And I think I really do have to give credit to ayahuasca and siliciden for that.

Wade Lightheart: So from a practical sense, for someone who might have not experienced any of those plant medicines, what would you say was the initial attractions and maybe the initial benefits, and then maybe how did that kind of deepen into where you are now, today in your observance or your practices and how does that translate into your life? I think there's a lot of people that kind of equate medicines kind of like we early said, Hey, let's go take some jungle juice and get high. Well, it's not really like that. This is not like something I'm going to go party on this stuff, or this is a deeply reverential experience for a lot of people, sometimes painful, sometimes euphoric but always gathering insight. What attracted you into that? What did you find initially? And then how did that carry over in your life today?

Kyle Kingsbury: We would do these sweat lodges and then my coach would talk to me about just everything from native American wisdom. He had worked with the sun dancers in the Lakota tribe he's been a Sundance. He has a Mayan background. He'd talk about some of the traditional elder wisdom from the Mayans being from Mexico. We talk about the Toltec wisdom, Don Miguel Ruiz, and a lot of the other Toltec masters. And in the seeding of that consciousness in me was really a gravitational pole. And I understood all of these cultures to participate. And even though Lakota would do different vision quests, where they would fast without food or water for four days, it's still an altered state of consciousness. And it's still very powerful, so knowing that there are access points to these things, I was just curious, and I obviously had no aversion to bad drugs.

Kyle Kingsbury: So why not try a good drug? You know, my rule of thumb on that is if you feel better the next day, that's a good drug. Anything that leaves me more whole than when I started I'll classify as a good drug, anything that takes away more than I have than I came in with, that's a bad drug.

Wade Lightheart: So it's a great distinction by the way. I've never heard that before. And I think that's probably the best point I've ever heard around that.

Kyle Kingsbury: People get caught up in the semantics of what is a plant medicine? And then, well, what's a psychedelic and you know, the only word that I don't like is the hallucinogen, because the hallucination by default means it's something that doesn't exist. But the visions you have A personal and B who's to say they don't exist who to say, it's not real.

Kyle Kingsbury: I think that's a clear differentiator what it's given me and I can give like a super quick trip report, all of these things give us different perspective. So one of the very first visions I had when I did ayahuasca again, I've always been drawn to something challenging. So when I read you could puke and shit, it's like, all right, whatever, sign me up. My understanding of purging now is as much different as I'm sure yours has changed. Like generally when I have a purge, there's something emotional is coming up with it as well. I'm going to purge anger. I'm going to purge resentment. I'm going to purge blame. I'm going to purge hate. And I'm going to release those things from my body with whatever's coming out of it physically. This is the very first vision I had, I became my wife, who was my girlfriend at the time.

Kyle Kingsbury: And I relived every argument we had ever had in our entire relationship, but I was her and I was yelling at Kyle in a way that Kyle understood. And when I came out of that, just a fucking flood Gates opened up. Every circumstance where I thought she was nagging me or didn't want me to party with my friends. Cause she was a party pooper or whatever I could see. She loved me and she could see no one can see in their bone blind spot, but our closest partners can. People we're closest to can see those blind spots. And she knew my blind spot was on the one hand. I took care of myself for fighting. But after that, all bets were off, you know, my celebrations were not in the light.

Kyle Kingsbury: They were not leaving more whole than when I started and she could see that. And it took ayahuasca showing this for me to not only understand her correctness and showing me that, but also the perspective of her way of communicating with me was love. Even though it didn't come across that way to me at first and that bridge the gaps, any gap that I felt with her was bridged instantaneously and we're married now. We have a little boy and another kid on the way, and she's my partner forever. We've done many ceremonies together and grown together as a couple because of that. I can't think of something that was more beneficial for our relationship than ayahuasca. I had a 30 gram experience with psilocybin mushrooms, which is one of the strongest forms of psilocybin.

Kyle Kingsbury: There's different strains, just like cannabis. And I spent a great deal of that. What felt like it turned it in hell again, 100% personal. And because I understand now that there are no bad trips, what did hell show me? Well, hell showed me everything. I fear everything I have resistance towards and not. Some of these deep rooted fears that I have consciously all the way to things that I don't even think about on a day to day, you know, but like a one layer was me hearing the buzz of a refrigerator and then turning away from it and seeing a flashlight shine on my face and then turning away from that and feeling a knife in my back where I've had back pain, just any microdose of something that I have resistance to. And it was like a report card for me in my everyday life to again, come to the understanding that fear is always an illusion it's always outside of us.

Kyle Kingsbury: And it always exists with some future event. It's pretty rare that we experience fear in the now. Now if you're in an abusive relationship and your husband comes home. That's real fear, but you know, we're not getting chased by tigers anymore. And even that is still survival. That's instinct. That's not actual fear humans. If we don't walk around fearing the tiger, but we do walk around fearing the tiger of our everyday lives. A zebra doesn't do that. You know, you read why zebra don't get ulcers. It's like, there you go. There's a lot of distinction here between the zebra lives its life. It doesn't worry about align. It doesn't worry about anything coming in after it, when it has to run, it runs and then it shakes it off vigorously. Then it goes back to eating, drinking and going about its day.

Kyle Kingsbury: It's not haunted by the lion 24 seven. And yet we are as people because of our ability to process past and future. But all of our gifts are simply just a reminder to pull back into the present moment. And so much of my practices on a daily, like how do I ground all this a theorial talk into, into a present moment and what does it actually done for me on the day to day, ayahuasca told me to meditate. It told me to do yoga and I wasn't getting new information from it until I actually started those practices. And what's beautiful is that if you want to get the most from those experiences, yoga and meditation, preemptively goes a long way. It's a beautiful prerequisite to go into ceremony.

Kyle Kingsbury: If I can find my quiet centers in everyday waking consciousness, it's much better. It's much easier for me to do that when I'm within the throws of something challenging in the ceremony. And if I know how to open up my body and unlock it, move energy and get everything flowing. If I can unlock that stiffness pre ceremony, then if I feel stuck in a certain part of my body, I have tools to open that up. I have tools to move through that. I have tools to breathe into that space and release whatever's bogging me down. And I think those are incredible gifts and they're incredible gifts of themselves, not necessarily with the plant medicines, but I think that there's a lot of yogis out there and a lot of meditators out there that say, that's the cheat code. Don't go that way. There's no shortcuts. They're right. There are no shortcuts. And, you know, doing this doesn't solve anything, but it simply illuminates the ways you can solve your own issues and the way you can move forward and that new perspective and new outlook, and to be able to see the world with new eyes, it's unforgettable, there's nothing like it.

Wade Lightheart: You bring up a couple of good points. So for those that don't know, I don't know, it was coming more and more into the podcast now is I have had a meditative practice for 20 years now. I had a near death experience when I was 22 and it just blew my doors open and then,se plant medicine, particularly when I ran into kind of like this information that you get or internal conflicts that don't seem to be resolved by my meditative practice or philosophical study. Like, I'm just kind of at a not, and that's how I've used those particular medicines in my own life. It's like, okay, you know what? And the other thing is I made a pact with myself cause I went into the party world and all that stuff. And I always know when you always know when things are the party world's over is when you start comparing what you're doing now to what you did before. It's not as good as I always call that. That's kind of chasing the dragon. You're kind of trying to get to that space that was better before. And so it's been a great tool for myself as well.

Wade Lightheart: How one of the things I've noticed is this kind of dogmatic doctrine nation that happens within almost every spiritual philosophy that being, if you're this yoga guy, you need to do this way. If you're a Buddhist guy, you need to do this way. If you're a martial artist and you gotta find your pathway to know mine through. How is it that you were able to kind of observe this, but kind of not get caught in those kind of linear components that oftentimes are incomplete as a practice?

Kyle Kingsbury: Well, I think I make the practice of mixed martial arts really helps with that. And you look at somebody like Bruce Lee, who really was seeding that consciousness. He was saying there is no one thing that's better than everything else. Why don't we start to take the best of each thing and employ that. And you know, he was not just a martial artist. He was an avid meditator, a Yogi incredibly strong, did a lot of strength and conditioning.When you start to train mixed martial arts, you realize like, Oh, Hey, Brazilian is awesome. It's my martial art for the ground. And then you go with somebody who's a submission wrestler. And you're like, Oh wait, this guy's got something to show me here. He's got some stuff that I don't learn in jujitsu.

Kyle Kingsbury: So I'm not going to say no to that. I'm going to learn something. He can show me. And, you know, even freestyle wrestlers, you get thrown and you're like, Oh wow, this is Greco Roman. I can learn from it. And you start to see that over and over again, enough to where you kind of set, the walls come down around what is the best way, right? And then you start to expand yourself too. I'm open to any way. And if I'm open to any way, let me just practice that. Now of course, situational awareness with the same thing is great. If you've done, ayahuasca once and five MEO, DMT once and mushrooms once, and you keep just going around the carousel, I'll try to try the next thing. It's not going to build the same as building some equivalency with one medicine, and I've certainly built equivalency with some of my favorites.

Kyle Kingsbury: I think that allows me to relax into that space a bit more, having that situational awareness there allows me to go further to use a quote from Terence McKenna when he's talking about DMT saying, don't die to the astonishment, right? These are just because you're blown away and you're like, Holy shit, this exists. Like don't stay in that mode for too long, actually do the work see what you're here for, and actually see what's going to come your way. And if I'm in a state of listening and receptivity, that's when the downloads come in. So I think that broader lens But at the same time, I can't do plant medicines every day. None of us can, there are some that work every day I could drink ayahuasca every day.

Kyle Kingsbury: And it would actually dose for dose would improve due to the pharmacology of it. But most of them, that's not the case. And even still, if I'm not bringing that back to the real world, what is the point or this world, what is the point? And nderstanding that I know there's a ton of different tools for meditation that work, and I'll try those on for size. I'll try Tai Chi, I'll try the zone exercises and how to move and be healthy great too. There was my first little entry point there I've tried many different forms of yoga. Most of them work very well, so it's not being dogmatic about it.

Kyle Kingsbury: I also like the practice of being able to try these different postures. So I tried different yoga and I think with having a broader scope of the different things that I've tried, that allows me to see what works best for me, because we're all different. It's the same thing with diet. Try a ketogenic diet, see if it works for you, try these other things on precise and then stick with whatever your middle ground is. You know, my teacher, Jen who's a beautiful Yogi and she does yogaanytime.com and runs Los Gatos up in the Bay area in Northern California. She's saying, you know, we often push ourselves one as far as we can, one direction. And then as far as we can in the other direction, just we can find out where the middle is. And it's so true in life.

Kyle Kingsbury: And I think if we can explore those boundaries and push past them again, it's just creating a deeper sense of self, a deeper sense of awareness that allows us to find that center point, which is really the name of the game. No matter what you're doing, whether it's meditation, yoga, plant medicines, all of the above it's how can I build that internal awareness, the bridge to the other world, through my own intuition, to my higher self, to my soul, to God, consciousness, whatever you want to call that that's really what these things are pointing to. So I can operate in that space in my day to day. So I can begin to live in that space and not say hell broke loose. It's quarantine, where are the drugs? Like, what's going to take me past this right now. I can't figure anything out and it's cool to go into a medicine ceremony with the, I don't know, intention. That's a great intention to have, but at the same time, I don't want to always go back to the wishing. Well, when I can't figure stuff out, I have to strengthen that if I don't have it figured out, that's fine. Let me trust in this uncertainty. And let me operate in the space of peace and equanimity while I go through life.

Wade Lightheart: You bring up a great point. I mean, I always found it ironic that Buddha always touts the middle path, but if you actually look at his life, it was pretty extreme. So he finds the middle, you don't know where the middle is until you find the edges. And I think that's a great opportunity in today's world where so many people train kind of chase this one singular idea of success or financial capacity or intellectual acumen or physical prowess. And when they get to the top of the mountainthey're often left little bit empty is there's an emptiness. And I think what a lot of people fear is that emptiness because that emptiness is the part that is the space from which something else will flow in, if you're open to it. And sometimes we push that away

Wade Lightheart: You bring up a couple of things that I think is really important. Getting hit in the head a lot concussions, then I've noticed ketogenic diets, as well as plant medicines are showing a lot of promise in those areas for people that have suffered brain damage of repeated blows to the head. Can you share maybe some of the things. Let's talk first of how did you know that you've kind of had some damage and then how did you kind of recover? Cause it's pretty obvious that you're very lucid and clear and focused and you got a lot of stuff going on there that people wouldn't expect from someone that's been in there with like world-class assassins beating and kicking you in the head repeatedly. What was your experience? What led you to that? And what were some of the challenges that you experienced? A lot of people don't know what that's like to have concussions or brain trauma.

Kyle Kingsbury: It's funny cause I had a good chin and almost to a detriment like I've never been knocked out clean. I've had probably a handful of flash chaos where I touched the ground and popped back up, ready to go. And that's almost like the problem with the three knockdown rule in boxing, you knock a guy flat out and he's got 10 seconds to come back up to his feet. That's the last time where he should be hit in the head again, or she should be hitting the head again, that's a real issue, it's the repeated trauma. And so for me, it was more cumulative and I was training with killers. I was at American kickboxing Academy in San Jose. My three main training partners were Cain Valasquez former heavyweight champ. One of the greatest heavyweights of all time, Daniel Cormier, who fought at light heavyweight and heavyweight to division belt holder.

Kyle Kingsbury: One of the greatest of all time, Luke Rockhold middleweight also UFC champion. So it's not like I was playing Patty cake, this was the era where we would get hurt and go into a fight. Cause guys actually fought in the gym. It wasn't just sparring and working on technique and seeing punches coming. I see there's an evolution to the sport now where that's starting to take place more just because you gotta make it to the fight. You can't show up, banged up. But at the same time in the era I was in that very much was the case. Let's have a pissing contest right now. Let's see who's top man in the gym. And,uit was pretty rare that I came out on top between those guys.

Wade Lightheart: You're talking about some of the greatest to ever get into the cage area. I can't imagine Cain Velasquez with his crazy cardio or Daniel with his wrestling thought you got to go up against that.

Kyle Kingsbury: On a daily basis it helped me for fights too, because I know I wasn't going to come across Cain, you know, especially at light heavyweight, there was no one I was going to fight that was going to have as much power and as much endurance as Cain. To really get to your question for me, it was more of a fogginess. It was more of this lingering sense. There was one fight in particular with Glover to share out where he hit me in the temple twice so hard that I actually forgot how to get to the locker room after the fight ended. It was the only time where I didn't know I was in a fight. I just fought.

Kyle Kingsbury: I knew who I had fought. I didn't know where my coaches were and I didn't know where to go. So I just walked around aimlessly, having just had the worst loss of my career. And I made small talk with everyone I was around and it was embarrassing and humbling, but that lingered for awhile. I couldn't retain information if I tried to read books. I also felt the classical signs of CTE or TBI, it was extremely irritable. I had trouble sleeping, lots of things like that. That was in 2012, you know, I retired in 2014 and right. You know, serendipitously in 2014, Jim Fadiman was on the Tim Ferriss show. He wrote the psychedelic Explorer's guide. He had studied it. He did his undergrad at Harvard when Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert before he came round to us, were Richard opera was this professor.
Kyle Kingsbury: Albert pulled him aside and said, Hey, when LSD becomes illegal, if this is your passion to study, micro-dosing, you should continue to do so. And so he moved out West I think he got his masters at Stanford. Then he opened his own college and continue to study microdosing for 30 years. So that's all in his book. The psychedelic Explorer's guide at the same time, I heard Peter Attia who has been a guest on my show and he was really talking about fasting and the ketogenic diet and how it can really restore cognitive function and work wonders in the body for longevity and all this stuff. And so having the space to actually practice something new and the wherewithal to realize, okay, there is a problem, let's see if this works. I just started self experimentation.

Kyle Kingsbury: And with that started to feel more mental clarity than I had even as a kid, because as a kid, I was growing up eating hamburger, all the crappy cereals and pop tarts and hot pockets. I have a gluten intolerance and I lived on gluten for, for 15, 20 years. So really understanding that I felt like, I mean, I had thoughts, like, do I go back to college now? It was just that much of a difference in the information that I could retain and really start to actually put into action. Of course, I look back on that now from where I'm at now. And it's like, that was everything I just followed the medicines, guidance. The medicine said, follow your passions. I continued to learn about health and wellness.

Kyle Kingsbury: I continue to learn about psychology and the mental, emotional aspects of life. And I continue to dive deeper into spirituality and what that looked like for me. And with that, everything started to fall into place. But there were times where I just didn't know. I didn't know the fighting, it was similar to football where this is the only thing that I know. I don't know what I want to do afterwards. And the plants helped open me up at least to say, I don't need to know as long as I'm doing something I care about, then that will start to manifest as something that's worthwhile for me in terms of, you know, brain health with psychedelics. That's, what's beautiful right now, science is starting to catch up to this stuff and we are playing catch up because they were already doing research on this in the fifties and sixties.

Kyle Kingsbury: And now they're there. They're trying to catch up. But what they're finding with all tryptamine based psychedelics, that includes DMT psilocybin, LSD ayahuasca is that they not only have the ability to rewire your mental, emotional space, the software of the brain, they have the ability to rewire the hardware for the better. And they've looked at lifelong could endos from the Amazon who have been working with ayahuasca their entire lives. And once they brain map, then they see, okay, not only do they have excellent brains, but they have far more serotonin receptors and tryptamines fit into serotonin receptors. Well, you look into the world of SSRI, antidepressant medication and shit like that, like that is solving the riddle and it's not increasing serotonin, and it's allowing your body with whatever serotonin it has to have more key locks to go into, right. That actually matters. There's been some really interesting science done on the Boga and it Boga not only increases serotonin receptors, it increases dopamine receptors.

Kyle Kingsbury: It increases a whole lot of receptors universally. So you have this ability to start to rewire and rethink the past. You have the ability to find new perspective and see the world with new eyes. And at the same time, you're getting a fresh start with the hardware of your brain. And I think that's incredible. I mean, the NIH, I was just talking to a, I know I'm rambling here, but the NIH is now studying ketamine of all things on the hardware of the brain as a positive. And I think that's revolutionary, here's a manmade synthetic chemicals that also has the ability to heal trauma, depression, cure alcohol addiction, smoking cessation. And at the same time, it's actually helping the brain physically

Wade Lightheart: Beautifully said. And I think for those who aren't experienced in these areas is the classification. We kind of sum up, something you mentioned before is the classification of plant medicine is actually called ethnos botanicals. There was some research back in the seventies where they kind of came in some sociologists and psychologists and actually met one of the persons who still to this day organizes ceremonies. I think he just celebrated his 70th birthday. That is an amazing person. And he was part of those teams that were helping the scientists actually determine the difference between this from a hallucinogenic. So a hallucinogenic is something that people can't really stop whatever's happening with an ethnobotanical. He's kind of like your eyes closed your head, this kind of journey, your eyes open. And it's kind of like, okay, I can have a conversation with you and then go back to where I need.

Wade Lightheart: And some of this, and this is one of the things where I think is really powerful. When you have a guide, a teacher, someone who is experienced in these things and can kind of read where you're at singing you in, sing you out, using frequency and sound and music and these things that can kind of help curate your experience and help you manage it. And I always believe that set and setting of course, is a big factor in that. And I love the fact that we're using these medicines to help people with brain trauma. Cause we're seeing that it's pretty much widespread. You took a shot from a soccer ball as a kid, you got a bump in the head and hockey, a lot of different things can cause these and people don't know and they can have personality transformational components and really limit you. Now you talk about the ketogenic diet. How did that kind of flow in my business? So I'm a plant based guy. My business partner is a complete ketogenic person. How did the ketogenic diet come in for you to kind of help you in your process? And what did you notice from it? And what advantages did you gain from, from engaging in that?

Kyle Kingsbury: Well, first let me say plant-based, doesn't rule out keto it's actually makes it easier cause they don't have the same overconsumption of protein issues that most people do when they first start a ketogenic diet. I had heard dr. Peter Attia and then I had also heard dr. Dominic, D'Agostino talking about this and I wanted to get into it. I also knew if you're not checking, you're guessing. So got my blood ketone meter and just really started taking a deep dive into it, started taking a deep dive and playing with different fasting protocols. Intermittent fasting was coming on the scene around the same time and of course, MCT oil and, and ketones and these kinds of things. But I couldn't really afford ketones. And I think from a nutritional ketosis standpoint, I think it's better if you actually get your body to work, to create the ketones.

Kyle Kingsbury: And I've certainly noticed more cognitive benefit from that. I spent about two years really in the trenches of a ketogenic diet. There were times where I had very low ketones, 0.3 to 0.7 millimoles. And there was other times where through fasting, I was much higher, you know, and I heard Tim Ferriss actually talk about that. It's not a pissing contest of how high can you get your ketones where you feel the best actually matters. And something he talked about was, of course I know not having a whole lot of cash at that point. I couldn't do what he did, but he tested his blood levels every hour on the hour for like two months. This is before they had CGMs and things like that. And not that those are tests for ketones, but he basically was trying to map not only where his ketones were, but how he actually felt, where was his cognitive performance?

Kyle Kingsbury: What made him feel the best? And what he found was being in between 0.9 and 1.5 was his best. And I started looking into that and kind of going back and forth. And that's also where I felt my best. You know, if my ketones are through the roof, either that's coming exotic, honestly from ketones or something a little bit more hardcore, like a five day water fast, that'll do that as well. But I'm not exactly a hundred percent on point at that point. I can't read a book. I'm not going to have long conversations with people. I'm going to be out in the desert of Sedona on that fast, I'm going to be commuting with nature, so really understanding like, what is this for? What is the why behind it? You know, and again, I didn't need to lose fat.

Kyle Kingsbury: I've been an athlete. I was coming into it fairly lean and it was more about how can I optimize my brain. And so really figuring that out over the course of two years made a huge difference. And then since then, you know, that was, I guess, ended in 2016 thinking along the lines of how my ancestors ate and I don't know, I'm a European mutt. I don't have a ton of information on my answers, just exactly what those kind of things, but being as far North, as they were of the equator, it's quite likely they went without carbohydrates, at least for the winter time. So typically in the winter, I will forego most of my carbohydrates. And even if I'm not ketogenic, I'm still going to be low carb. I've tried carnivores diet and a number of other things, but I typically feel the best running some form of intermittent fasting with lower carbohydrates and higher fat in the winter time.

Kyle Kingsbury: And I think that ultimately the why behind that is just to create metabolic flexibility, it's to be able to use fuels and to process carbohydrates better when the summer does come. I've studied quite a bit into that. You know, dr. Saatchi Panda was actually talking about that years ago. Our bodies actually do tolerate carbohydrates better in the summer when things are seasonally available. One of the things that Paul Chek really talked about was if you imagine a world before refrigeration and before large shipping containers with thousands of bananas coming up from Panama to you every month of the year, those choices were much more limited. So if I could eat that way, then that would have an impact on my body. That's pretty much how I do it to this day. I'm going to do a fasting mimicking diet coming up here for five days.

Kyle Kingsbury: And dr. Valter Longo talked about that as kind of a happy bridge for people to be able to reset some of these blood health markers from hemoglobin A1C to fasting glucose and insulin markers, and just really boost all things, accelerator, all the reasons you'd want a faster go into a ketogenic diet, but you still get to have a thousand calories shake each day. And of course he kind of modeled that in a way where it was more medical and it's a prescription to get his shakes and his shakes don't have the ingredients I'd put in mind, but something very basic, like a can of full fat coconut milk with a quarter cup of macadamia nuts and a scoop of chocolate collagen, it's going to taste good. Of course, it's not feeding the microbiome and giving me everything I need, but there's a bit of fiber, a high amount of fat and a bit of college, and then for the joints and the skin. And if I run that for five days, I'm very confident that by the end of that, I'm going to see a lot of the results he's talking about.

Wade Lightheart: I think you bring up a couple of points and that is being able to tweak things so that it optimizes to whatever's best for you. It's like, I think we're so addicted as a culture to the max or to the most, or it has to be the highest and these types of things, as opposed to what we talk about BiOptimizers is we want the maximum doses, effective dose is the minimum effective dose, but really you want to get the place where it's the optimal dosage for you and your diet. Let's talk a little bit, your relationship with Paul Chek. He's a good friend of mine, and we've had a lot of great conversations. I've seen some of your stuff with Paul, and Paul is just a really interesting guy. And the more you hang out with them, the more interesting he gets, you know, he's for people to see them on the surface. How did that come to and how did that influence you in your life in coaching?

Kyle Kingsbury: We talked a bit about by my intro to him, through my strength coach, which was through flatten your abs forever video, which was on VHS, believe it or not. And that just tells you how far back that went. And then red hat ain't moved me healthy and started following him on YouTube, watching a lot of his videos.

Kyle Kingsbury: There was such a beautiful video on how consciousness expands from me into the relationship, into the all consciousness and how we can really start to expand our awareness and think about things through that lens. Nobody has more books than Paul does, and he's drawn on a lot of the masters and I'm just a fascinating person, but when I got to on it, I now had a platform. It wasn't just a small podcast. It wa a much larger audience. And I had the ability to fly any of my guests in on the house and put them up and get to know them and really spend time like, Hey,let's fly you in for a few days and actually spend some time together and then podcasts, that kind of thing.

Kyle Kingsbury: And if I had any bucket list guests, Paul was at the top without question. And so we got to meet he ended up doing some private work with me and Aubrey and John Wolf here. And we took a deep dive with them, you know, and from there really built a great relationship. I've been out to his heaven house and I'll be heading out to his new place soon with my whole family. He's still a mentor of mine and he's an elder. And at the same time, he's a dear brother and a dear friend. I'm always learning something new from him because he's operating the same way I do. And that he's constantly seeking constantly learning, constantly reviewing, constantly embodying. The difference is he's got 20 years on me, you know, and something he told me that that stuck out was that he learned more from 35 to 55 than he did from zero to 35.

Kyle Kingsbury: That's hard, that's a hard concept for people to get their head around because most people put their shit in cruise control. They finished college and they're like, I'm done. If I read now, it is going to be fiction. Or, you know, it has to be a book that 30 people recommended me before I'll touch it. If it's nonfiction, or they'd rather just watch sports or keeping up with the Kardashians or any other way, we tune out and just put our lives in cruise control. And that very much is not Paul. Paul is constantly seeking different ways for the betterment of all. You know, he really is thinking about his relationship with everything. You know, the Lakota saying of all my relations. All my relations is not all the people I know. And all my ancestors, it's all, everything, everything is conscious.

Kyle Kingsbury: Everything is intelligent. Everything is aware. And as we start to think of things that way we realize our duty here, our responsibility on this earth, it goes well beyond whatever my vocation is. It goes well beyond how I earned cash. He goes well beyond just being nice to people in the supermarket. It goes into how do I tend the garden of the earth? How do I start to restore the imbalances that we see? Not only in our communities, but with the earth itself, you know, and I get that from Paul very much. I mean, 20, 30 years ago, he was wearing shirts that said, I love dirt. You know, he understood the soil and the impact we're having on the soil. And he's been ahead of the game in many respects, you know, not just through health and wellness, but through seeing things in a holistic viewpoint. And I've gathered so much for him, I always joke he's been on my podcast more than anybody else, and that'll always be the case. No one will surpass them. You know, I'm going to milk him until he transitions to the next place.

Wade Lightheart: Very well said. So which leads us to the next thing. And that is your work in the world and what's got you fired up now. Cause you're obviously a very passionate man you've cultivated a beautiful spiritual relationship. You're what I call a true physical philosopher. And I found some of the most physically impressive people truly develop this kind of philosophy, which is kind of counter to public culture. What are you doing now? What got you fired out where's things going for Kyle these days in your life and how are you expressing yourself in the world?

Kyle Kingsbury: There's a couple of big things I've had a lot coming up for me with the birth of our daughter and she's coming, you know, end of June, early July. And that's a ceremony in and of itself, the birth ceremony, the pregnancy ceremony. I take that very seriously. You know, we have a home birth scheduled, which is our first time when Bear was born at Stanford. But it's put pressure on me to be better as a father and to be a better man. And you know, we talk about putting things in cruise control. Our son Bear is five years old and he's an awesome human, he's doing great. He was in his first year at Waldorf last year. And his teacher had nothing to say, but nice things about him and how caring he is and compassionate and all the little things that you can't see when they're away from you.

Kyle Kingsbury: And it's like, wow, dude, we are doing a great job, but we're not sitting on that. And I realize our children are our teachers so what is this little girl going to teach me about being a man about being a father and being receptive to that? How can I embody more of that? How can I embody more of the divine feminine? How can I be a receptive listener to those teachings from my little guru, that's about to come into the world. And with that too, on the flip side of that coin, how do I embody more of the divine masculine and be the best version of myself? And that's led me to a lot of work with the archetypes. You know, Paul Chek is big into this. Caroline Mesa's work is phenomenal, sacred contracts. The King, The warrior, Magician and lover by Robert Moore is absolutely fantastic.

Kyle Kingsbury: I took a deep dive into that book. And that just again like when we talk about plant medicines, a lot of times they're speaking in metaphor, they're speaking symbolically. And if archetype seemed far out there for people, that's how we process stuff. That's how we process dreams. Like if we believe our dreams matter to us and that they can tell us things about the psyche. They're speaking through the language of architects, they're speaking through the language of symbol. And I think that's given me a greater understanding of who I am at a person or as a person right now, where I'm at and where I want to go. And that's kind of the lens that I'm looking through at the same time I've been working with a guy named Dr. Will Tagle and I've never met an elder when I think of tribal elder that holds that word the way he does.

Kyle Kingsbury: He's written, I think eight books. He has a PhD in psychology and a PhD in physics. When I first met him, you know, he lives about an hour outside of town of Wimberley. He says that we're basically bridging two worlds. His life's work has been at the intersection of a river where one stream is modern medicine and the other stream is ancient wisdom of the natives. And with that marriage, he really bridges the gap in a book that I read of his called walking with bears. Just takes the absolute deep dive into his history with a guy named Bearheart Williams, who was his mentor and guide, and just dives into everything from quantum physics to psychology, to the healing powers of nature, to tapping into the eco fields. You know, if everything is conscious and everything is alive and everything is intelligent, how do we access that information?

Kyle Kingsbury: And there are ways that we can tune into those fields and I think he's just a brilliant human, you know, a brilliant elder and I will be working with him to do my first vision quest. I've experienced, you know, 26 ceremonies with ayahuasca, I've done many more with siliciden and a handful of other really powerful teachers. And I also know that this old school method for rites of passage for initiation is something that I've never done. And I feel that five, four days with no food or water out in a sacred space is really going to help me just further whatever the next track is in life. And so I'm really looking forward to that. And it's been a great privilege of mine to be able to work with will.

Wade Lightheart: I remember reading about a vision quests when I was a young teenager as one of the native traditions that were passed on. And I was always fascinated with that process. And I always kind of mourned the concept that we really don't. We've really lost that in the modern world, this kind of technological world is kind of cerebral digital world. And here's something where you kick yourself out into nature and you take away everything essentially, and you just sit there and then as they would say, the spirits come and Carl Young, who I'm a big fan of, and one of the founding members of the archetype concept, certainly in modern westernized thinking talked about accessing universal consciousness. And of course was attacked viciously by his mentor Freud, but still had the courage to kind of go forward. And so many people that I admire have been tuned into that. How do you apply those archetypes or how you apply what you learn in the spirit realm or in the plant medicine world into a daily practice. And then how do you use this in your business world, for example, and maybe you can share a little bit about that for people.

Kyle Kingsbury: I think plant medicines will give me, obviously they're going to speak in metaphor. Sometimes they just tell it straight to your face. You know, sometimes it'll just say like, Hey, you're not getting any new information because you haven't employed any of the practices we've told you to. So with regard to yoga and meditation and through the experience of that, I get the value of it. And then I continue without having ayahuasca slap me on the ass saying you got to do this, so you won't get any new downloads. It comes to the archetypes, I think one of the best ways that I've worked with something like Kingwood magician lover is to actually take inventory. It's very hard for us to see what's in our shadow because it's not in our purview. Other people around us can, but it's very hard for us to see that that's why Robert Morris says, you know, you could, you could be in a temple, you could have the medicine, you could have all these things, but without the elder to help you unpack that experience without the black belt Shaman to work with you, you're kind of on your own.

Kyle Kingsbury: It's really hard to be able to unpack that fully and have a beautiful experiences that were so low, but my best experiences were guided. And so when we work with something like the shadow, the ego does not want to look at that. It's impossible for the ego to admit. I have this thing that I do when I'm in a big state of fear or a big state of anger. So one of the ways that we allow the ego to take a back seat is if we review it in the past tense. And so if I look through something like King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, where there is two aspects of every shadow, there's the active and the passive. And I say, where in my life has this showed up, where in my life has the boy psychology and the boy psyche showed up and I can actually see patterns start to form.

Kyle Kingsbury: You know, for example my parents fought a lot. They were like two Rams butting heads. And there was a lot of anger, a lot of rage in the home. And with that, I would always go into a shell. It was a passive shadow archetype where I would just become a mute and I would pretend I'm not there. And I would just watch and just go silent inside anytime I was in a state or high tensity situation outside of my family, life rage would come out the active side of that shadow. It could be a teacher, a principal, a kid on the school yard any day. It didn't matter if it wasn't my parents, they're going to feel it. And now I can see those patterns still show up. So one of the things that they talk about is we get locked.

Kyle Kingsbury: If there is trauma within the boy or the little girl, those patterns keep showing up as a way to revisit and something that the native Americans talk about is that nothing is linear. We go through cycles and as we go through these cycles in life of a spiral upward, we get to revisit the same thing at different intervals of our life and their check-ins to see how we process it with new eyes, with a new understanding of life. And if I can look through the past and review that and see patterns, now I can see where does that show up now? Well, for a long time, the first five years of my relationship with my wife, if her fire showed up in an argument, what would I do? Passive mom's mad, right? And I would just go into a little shell and not talk, and that would piss her off even more.

Kyle Kingsbury: So if I can recognize that in myself, in the moment I can bridge the gap of not having to experience a lot of time in rage or in a little shell inside myself. And I can actually just breathe into that, wherever it is, draw my awareness of my breast, to my feeling tight in my throat or my chest. Let me take a couple of deep breaths here. Let me process this. Let me not take it personally. Right. And then from there, I can start to assess things in the light of those aspects, in the light of the warrior, where I can set clear boundaries in the light of the King, where I have a calm and compassionate way that serves the kingdom, whatever that kingdom is, even if it's my own psyche, or if it's my family, or if it is my job and my business and the people that I'm around to be able to approach those things in the highest form of those archetypes.

Kyle Kingsbury: I now have a language to do that and to have a language to embody that. And I have a deeper understanding of where I've been and where I want to go. So this gives me a roadmap into putting very practical ways of communicating with others. Very practical ways of checking in on myself like, I'm feeling nervous, or I feel anxiety, or I feel fucking anger. And that's a big part of the feminine. The feminine is listening to that. I always talk to people if somebody is going to do a plant medicine ceremony, it's very important. You remain in the feminine. It's very important that she was listening. The second I start talking to somebody else in the ceremony, it draws me out of my experience of receptivity. And there's no more downloads going on when I'm talking to you about it.


Kyle Kingsbury: There's no more downloads when I'm writing an essay on the, on everything that's going on. If I'm Bob Costas with the play, by play of my experience, nothing new is coming in. So I have to remain in that state of receptivity. Can I be in that state of receptivity when shit hits the fan? Again, this was the impetus of fighting. Like, can I actually become so aware where I tune out the noise of my conscious mind and dip into, to the superconscious where I dip into my heart center, where I dip into my gut and intuition, and from there operate non reactively. And I think those are the roadmaps that helped me put that into play.

Wade Lightheart: Wow. So, well, well said. And what I love about what you've shared with us today on the Awesome Health Podcast is how you've taken your experience. Some of the more challenging experiences that a human condition and found a new way of recontextualizing it. And then you've taken things out of the esoteric realm and you apply it on a daily basis with some practices and some insight in some application. How did you get to that? And are you doing this for other people you're helping other people I understand, and this kind of thing?

Kyle Kingsbury: Yeah, no doubt. I mean the seeker is one of my archetypes and the seeker teaches what they learn, you know, and a lifelong student as well. That's another archetype when you talk about sacred contracts and Caroline Mesa's work very much, I'm passionate about the things that I learned, because I want to share that with others. It's not just for me, if it's just, for me, it's worthless. It certainly would help me out in life, but that's a way we give back people always talking about giving back and it's like, well, shit, if Maslow's hierarchy of needs is not completely in order, I don't have a lot of money to share. I don't have a lot of food to give out, but there's always something we can give, you know? That's one of the things that drew me to coaching others. Whatever is hot on my plate. That's really something I'm passionate about. I'm going to take a deep dive into that. And from that, I'm going to be able to help people that are in a similar path, because in a way, we are all mirrors for one another. And those that are drawn to us that like that attracts, like that brings us in with the attraction attractor beams. We're going to mirror each other in many different ways. And we can see that in others. We can then see that reflection back upon ourselves and we can help each other in that way.

Kyle Kingsbury: It's been a beautiful experience. One of the things they teach you in jujitsu is the more you teach, the more you learn. So they'll have purple belt starting to teach the kids and Brown belts co-assists some of the adult classes. And then when you're a black belt, the more you teach, the more you learn, it doesn't matter who you're teaching. And I think it was a check off and says this, I don't know if it's a paraphrasing, but if you can't explain it to a kid, you don't know what you're talking about. Einstein's quote, right. So can I figure this out well enough that I can explain it to anybody? And from that, you know, thankfully we do have a large group of people about 120 people in Marcus's mastermind, which is an annual group called fee for service that I get to coach.

Kyle Kingsbury: And then I'm doing private coaching as well in what I call the inner circle. And that just continues to fuel my desire, to want to learn more, to know more and to want to embody more because other people's issues, if I'm looking closely enough, have either been an issue of mine in the past, or might be an issue of mine the, in the future. So can I build some equivalency with all that's going around? And that is something that connects me back to that's something that connects me to my own humanity. And I think people can forego that as they start dipping into the spiritual and the esoteric and the land of psychedelics is like real Brahm Doss said it beautifully when he wasone of his lectures in the audible becoming nobody, you cannot forget your humanity. It's why we're here.

Kyle Kingsbury: You know? We'll talk about this in the West. We forego our lives to reach heaven here. Doesn't matter. Everything that I do is a payment going forward to get me into heaven matters. And in the East, all that matters is an enlightenment. So I don't have to come back to this place, but in the native American wisdom, God is here right now, it's in everything. And this place does matter. What I do does matter, and what I do right now within myself, within my family, within my community and for the good of all, all relations that actually does matter. This is where it is and everything that comes after that, I'll deal with that when it comes. But right now is the only time that matters. And this is the only time that exists. So how can I be of service right now? I think that's, that's really the things that I focus on.

Wade Lightheart: Beautifully said and very articulate. You talk about coaching. How did people connect with you and learn more about your philosophy, learn more about what you embody as a person. How do they get with you coaching and these types of things that you're doing? Can you just talk about the ways that people can reach out to you, perhaps they want to hire you, they want to work with you. They want to learn more from you than want to just hear some more of this. Cause I could talk to you forever about this. It feels like we're brothers on the same path. Can you share all that information with our listeners?

Kyle Kingsbury: Yeah. so aubreymarcus.com is where they'll find links to sign up for fit for service. Again, we've got over a hundred people we take in new groups. We have three trimesters in a year or so. We will be taking in new slots for the upcoming trimester and the inner circle is evergreen. So if you reach out to me through DMS, on Instagram, at Living with the Kingsbury's that's probably the easiest way for the fastest response. And then, you know, we have one hour on the house coaching call just to really feel each other out and see if we're right to work with each other. Cause not everybody's right. And it's not me being selective for the sake of being selective is just, can we actually work together and check talked about this with the teacher and his different levels of what kind of person is coming in to be coached. So I think those are important factors too, but we go through that hour long talk and if it's meant to be, it is meant to be. And if not, then I can offer some other people to work with as well.

Wade Lightheart: Beautifully articulated. And before we go, is there any final words that you'd like to communicate with our listeners or things that you'd like to share or insights or anything that you'd like to leave our listeners with?

Kyle Kingsbury: Well, given the conversation, I would just say one thing that's important when it comes to plant medicine workers to have a calling to do it. It's like to actually have that desire deep from within.Once you have that, to really start to set an intention on the things that you want to work out and to write it out, to speak it into being and setting up ceremony, pre ceremony is really important. You know, haven't making it a ceremony of your dieta whatever it is, you know, ayahuasca obviously has different prerequisites that matter to work with that plant than something like siliciden. But I think if we take those that instruction manual from ayahuasca and apply it to any plant medicine or any psychedelic experience, we gain more from it. What are the ways that I pay it forward? How do I unplug from regular television and songs that may not be the most uplifting on a soul level and how can I start to tune into these different frequencies of the earth? How can I spend more time in nature as a way to set the tone for my experience. And I think if we do that and we have a true calling, we'll get out everything we want.

Wade Lightheart: Well said Kyle's Kingsbury three, knocked it out of the park. What a beautiful experience. And I so much enjoyed our conversation. I hope we can get you back again soon. Maybe we can kinda dive deeper where we can connect it. One of the collective events that's going on, I'm actually here in Sedona right now. I've exiled myself away from a Venice during the lockdowns, or considering going back, they've almost ready to open the gym. So we'll see if I can go back there. But it's a great place and I feel very kindred in our connection today. And so I want to thank everybody and I wanna encourage your listeners to check out Kyle's work. He's doing great stuff in the world. There's a guy that's been there, done that gone to from the bottom to the top and everything in between. And just a real honor to have you on the podcast today. I really appreciate you taking the time, the effort, the energy, and what you embodies the spirit and congratulations on your new baby coming night. I wish you the best with that.

Kyle Kingsbury: Yeah. Thank you so much, brother. Thank you for having me. I'm sure I'll see you in Sedona or Venice at some point cause I frequent those places.

Wade Lightheart: Please reach out to me. We'll we'll connect that. We'll go for a gym. We'll go for a shake. We'll go for who knows what? All right guys. Thanks so much.