Episode #39

Episode #39: Langston Khan Psychedelic Leadership Podcast.

Duration: 01:32:02

Laura Dawn: My name is Laura Dawn, and you are listening to episode number 39 of the psychedelic leadership podcast, featuring my conversation with the author of deep liberation and Shamanic practitioner, Langston Khan.

Langston Kahn: Deep liberation for me is a lot about feeling into the true vastness of who we are and bringing that truth into embodiment and how we live our everyday life. Embodiment is our ability to stay in relationship is the living process of the earth, moment to moment and really feels into what each moment is uniquely calling out of us and then allows what it’s calling out us to be brought into expression or just to be received for its more than just a moment of reception. For me community me means people that have agreed to work towards manifesting a shared vision and as they’re manifesting it, they’re also agreeing to hold certain shared beliefs and principles, it doesn’t mean it’s a [inaudible01:13] but as everyone has to believe the same thing, but we’re agreeing to sort of cultivate beliefs and principles that hold a common ground with each other and test those out, you know, be good scientists with them. Like when we have healthy boundaries that allow us to find our own space and we feel safe within, then we can communicate clearly and directly from the heart, which is intensely vulnerable, but possible when we have those boundaries.

Laura Dawn: To create a world free from oppression, we each have to face the ways that we maintain toxic social systems within ourselves, in indigenous cultures throughout the world, it’s understood that true transformation starts in the body with a change of heart. Those are powerful words written by Langston Kahn. Langston is a shamanic healer that supports people through what’s called the deep liberation process, a body-based approach that allows us to radically transform the range of fear-based stories. We hold in ourselves from traumatic experiences, internalized oppression and habitual emotional patterns rooted in old beliefs that hold us back from healing, transforming and freeing our authenticity and unique gifts and genius. Bridging the Shamanic wisdom of ancient spirituality with the needs and demands of modern day life, Kahn offers concrete skills to cultivate deep grounding, skillful boundaries, and a healthy energy body. These are methods for authentic shadow work and healing, our triggers and tools for effectively tending personal and collective wellbeing in community.

And so those are the core themes that we explore in this episode. We talk about community and the process of not just collectively holding a vision for the purpose of why we are in community, but actually how to take action in alignment with that vision and Langston shares what the deep liberation process is and offers a unique perspective on his definition of embodiment. We riff on shadow work, how to establish strong healthy boundaries, as well as what it means to work with triggers in more effective ways and we also talk about the power of calling in your ancestors and what it means to work with your helping spirits. He also shares his perspective on working with sacred plant medicines and how more is not always better and the necessity for integration. And in this episode, Langston shares a powerful ritual for making direct contact with and processing the powerful emotion of grief, which is definitely up for a lot of people these days, including myself.

And so I’m really excited to share this episode with you and I also just wanted to share a couple of very personal updates before we dive in. I just happened to be in the thick of such a huge transition right now, as some of you know, I just moved to Austin about a month ago and I have let go of my last portion of land in Hawaii through the divorce that I just went through and that’s where I’ve been living for ten years. And I have just been processing so much grief around this transition and letting go of that land and I have been really just missing that land in like the core of my bones, it’s like aching in my heart and I’ve been recognizing how much living off the land has really become a part of my identity, I have been living fully off grid for over fifteen years.

So I actually haven’t paid a utility bill for pretty much the entirety of my adult life and after we sold our retreat center that we built a few years ago after the volcanic eruption, I have been living pretty much between Costa Rica and the big island where I’ve been living out of this twenty foot long bus converted into a tiny home, you know, that didn’t even have a door. And I have been literally pooping in a hole under a mango tree for the past year, which is a visual that I am sure you wanted to have right now and waking up to the sounds of the jungle and soaking in the hot spring every single day, and just really living on the land in a way that’s deeply in sync with the rhythms of nature; and so this is my first time living city and gosh, it’s been over fifteen years now.

And so it’s really a big adjustment that I’m going through and so this emotion of grief has actually been teaching me an enormous amount in my life right now. I know we often associate grief to grieving the loss of a loved one and it so much more than that. You know, we’re often grieving what no longer is; having to let go of the past, having to make peace with impermanence and that really happens on a moment to moment basis. And a friend of mine, Amy commented on one of my Instagram posts saying that grief is the holy ground that we walk on and there’s so much beauty in grief. And this emotion of grief has really just been cracking my heart open and teaching me how to continue to lean into life and to live as fully as possible. And so as I’m simultaneously grieving and letting go of the past, I’m also really opening to new possibilities that are unfolding before me.

And there are some really big things happening in the psychedelic movement here in Austin. It’s like this interesting vortex happening here right now and I’ve been meeting such amazing people doing really amazing things. So that aspect has been really nourishing for me and I just keep reminding myself to just focus on all the goodness that is surrounding me in my life right now. And I just want to say thank you to everyone who came out to meet Delic last weekend in Vegas, oh my goodness it was a total joy to be the opening keynote speaker for that conference. And the whole event was just so much fun, I got to meet so many great people and I honestly couldn’t believe the amount of people who came up to express to me how much they love listening to this podcast, so that was really just so encouraging.

And I have honestly been amazed to see how fast this podcast is growing right now. And so I just want to say, thank you, thank you so much for listening and continuing to tune in to this podcast. It really means the world to me and if you’ve been enjoying this podcast and you haven’t yet a review on iTunes, I would so appreciate it if you could take a moment to do that every time I get a review, it really helps me reach a wider audience. And I also really appreciate your patience and understanding with the slower pace that I have been at with releasing new episodes, as I have just been moving through this massive portal of transition in my life. And I have only been putting out about two episodes a month, but once I get set up in my new space in December, I am really excited to be getting back into the one episode a week rhythm of things.

Also, it looks like I am going to be going to the horizons conference in New York at the beginning of December. There are a few events that are happening around the conference that it looks like I’ll also be attending and contributing to. So I’ll keep you posted on that and please hit me at up if you’re also going, I would love to meet you in person and I’ll include a link in the show notes to the psychedelic conference called horizons if you are not yet familiar with the work that they are doing, it’s really incredible. So check that out in the show notes and also next week, I’m going to be releasing a bonus episode with a really big announcement about the launch of grow medicine, which I honestly cannot fucking wait to share with you, so please stay tuned for that next week. Okay, so that’s all the updates from me, one more thing about this recording Langston was wearing headphones that kept just rubbing against his shirt and I’m at the point now where I just won’t record with guests unless they have an external mic and the setup that I require because it just compromises the sound quality too much. So there are sections where that muffling comes through, but it is what it is. And for this episode, I’m going leave you with a song called sitting in a circle, which just felt like such the perfect song for this topic, where we’re talking about community. And it’s a song by Avasa and Matty Love featuring Ryan Delmore. If you haven’t listened to their album called “love is king, love is queen”, oh my goodness, you are in for such a treat. At one point, I was listening to this entire album on repeat like all day, every day.

And so every song on that entire album is phenomenal and I highly, highly recommend checking them out. And it’s music like this that I feature on my four music playlist for psychedelic journeys and beyond, one of the playlists is great for micro dosing morning flows and if you haven’t yet checked out my free eight day micro dosing course, you can find that link in the show notes, along with the playlists and of course links to Langston Khans website as well as a link to his book, Deep Liberation that I highly recommend reading. Alright, without any further ado, here is my conversation with the author of Deep Liberation, Langston Khan.

Langston Khan: Hey, Laura, aloha.

Laura Dawn: Aloha, so nice to see you Langston. Oh, so you know, it’s just such a funny moment in time. Well, first of all, it’s so nice to connect with you face to face virtually, it feels like so many things right now are just up for a lot of people and definitely feeling that way as well and so my internet is not working, so I’m actually on a hotspot, so we’ll see how it wants to work, but you know, it just feels like that just feels like what’s up, what’s been happening lately for a lot of people. Just some really wonky things going on so I’m like okay, what is spirit trying to tell me?

Langston Khan: Absolutely yeah.

Laura Dawn: Yeah, how are you doing?

Langston Don: Yeah, I’m good, I’m good I mean, definitely in that same wonky energy, a lot of ups and downs, but overall I have been in a really deep visioning process with my community recently and just feeling a renewed inspiration from that as we really work to sort of unpack some of the blind spots and misconceptions of the vision of our community that we held and we didn’t even realize we were holding and were getting in the way of us being the people we wanted to be, and really coming back into relationship with the essence of what the vision really is, and it’s true nature. And that’s just been, I don’t know just rippling out in my life in a lot of different ways that’s been feeling like a source of joy for me.

Laura Dawn: Oh, that’s amazing, I heard you on another podcast speak about this notion of community and who is really our community and not necessarily everyone, you know and so I really appreciated that perspective; I am curious if you would want to speak to this community that you just referenced and the visionary process.

Langston Khan: Absolutely that’s no problem with me, so the community I’m referencing is the last mask community which is based on the teachings that was founded by Christina Pratt. It’s a contemporary shamanic like tradition that’s really about how do we as people of the broken path, you know people whose culture has really failed us for the most part, intending the ritual thresholds and supporting us in feeling like we could live our purpose in a way that has impact and heart and meaning on behalf of our community. And as those people who many of us who don’t have true elders, and many of us who a lot of the adults in our life when we were growing up are more sort of children in a sense this is the tradition for how we initiate ourselves essentially; how we choose from within that broken culture to step into greater wholeness and a sense of spiritual adulthood and address the challenges of our time so that hopefully the next generations don’t have the same born problems to fix, but actually get to bring their unique to the new challenges that they’re facing.

Laura Dawn: And so what’s the, the visioning process, what does that look like? I mean, that’s a lot of the work that I do and this notion of cultivating a shared vision is actually such a central aspect to leadership training. So I would love to hear what, what that process has looked like for you and your community, and what’s been the culmination point of that process.

Langston Khan: Absolutely, so how I think about community, which you are referencing before is not just a group of people that are gathered together to do something like take a class together. I don’t think a class automatically means community or like an audience with a teacher means they’re there at that teacher’s community. But for me, community means people that have agreed to work towards manifesting a shared vision and as they’re manifesting it, they’re also agreeing to hold certain shared beliefs and principles. It doesn’t mean its dog, but everyone has to believe the same thing. But where agreeing to sort of cultivate beliefs and principles that hold a common ground with each other and test those out, you know, be good scientists with them and also learned shared skills that we hold to a shared standard for how we be in community together. So we’re not just assuming that community happens because we gather but we have understood we need skills to make community happen.

So that understanding of community really arose out of this process of asking our helping spirits at the time. I was in the community at this time, so the people in the community at this time, and the shaman of that community Christina asking, how do we actually bring these teachings into the world in a good way. And at that point she’d been teaching for about twenty years, you know, in this process. But the answer from spirit to how do we bring these teachings fully embodied into the world in a good way, was in community and they are like okay, we thought we already had community, what do you mean? And out of that continued questioning to the helping spirits of our tradition, we received this whole model of a non-local community that’s very much like the structure of what you might find in a pre-contact indigenous community.

So there’s different councils of people that are leading through shared leadership and those councils, that ten different energies on behalf of everyone in that community. And so sort of a long story, but I will shorten it. The brief version of this is that we worked really over the last ten years of me being part of this community to manifest that vision and we were trying to do that while we were also simultaneously holding retreats within teachings. And it was wonderful in some ways we were really successful people’s lives were changing and we were doing incredible things shamanically. From like a shamanic nerd standpoint, we were like getting really cool answers from spirit and bringing them into reality and they were rippling out in our life in interesting ways. But we reached this point in the community where we realized we actually needed to move the community through a kind of death process because we had been trying for too long to sort of keep the teachings going while also having a vision that was only half manifest. So we committed to coming to whoever felt a wanting and a desire to on the other side of that death process of really letting our relationship with the community die something new could be born to see who wanted to be invested in rebuilding and revisioning and completing that vision that we kind of had half manifested. So we could actually become those people that could be manifesting that vision in the world versus just kind of like half manifesting it.

Laura Dawn: Right and so in a very sort of concrete way, what does the manifestation of the rest of the vision like really look like?

Langston Khan: It looks like taking these visions that we already had a lot written out around. Like for example, let’s say shrine’s council that is this council that has to do with tending our relationship as a community with the elements and making sure we as a community are in right relationship with those energies and then balance those energies. And just seeing where are the holes in this vision? Where do we sort of half get things, maybe misinterpret them and doing, going into trans states, doing journeys together, where we engage a process of what you might call podification, where we are having three people at least journey on the same exact answer using the same sort of space and non-ordinary reality that we are going into and then taking those answers and feeling into the answer that’s bigger than the sum of its parts from those three, at least three journeys we just did. And then taking that back to the vision and building it up and then saying, what’s the next question we have to ask and really just on a sort of weekly basis doing that with each other, then worked to flesh out the fullness of this vision and also try to start living it in this sense as we’re manifesting it. So take the principles we are learning from our helping spirits and applying them to the work we’re doing; the vision is made in the way that’s going to alignment with the vision.

Laura Dawn: Kind of curious, just generally speaking how many people are we talking about in this community?

Langston Khan: So you know, that number changes a lot, but right now there is about like, as we are doing this kind of vision work, I think there’s about like thirty people doing the main bulk of the vision work and there is other people a wider group that’s holding just space for us and doing that work and sort of supporting.

Laura Dawn: That’s amazing, yeah I love this conversation especially I think right now people are flocking towards, this notion of let’s build community and there’s a huge influx of people going to Costa Rica, for example, and I’ve built a retreat center here in Hawaii and we were creating community here and I think there’s this like glorified vision of what community is and people are like flocking to rush into this community scenario and then being like, holy shit, this is actually really hard. And we weren’t taught in school for example, the real skill sets; how to show up for communication, nonviolent communication, how to give and receive grounded feedback, how to hold counsel, how to listen, I mean I am sure that there’s so much you could speak to in this process of just what it really takes to maintain right relationship in community.

Langston Khan: Yes, it is a lot of work, it does. The community doesn’t just happen. it happens because people choose to show up and make it happen and the answer I get again from my helping spirit, so this is actually the easiest way of doing things, if you really look at the long arc of things. So it’s like sort of like distinction between like from a classical shamanic standpoint of like sorcery, like the quick thing you can do to get the result that has a long term cost, a much higher cost in the long term. Whereas actual shamanism, which often involves this slower process, but that ultimately is much more energy efficient, like just being factory farming versus actually, engaging in permaculture on a farm. So for me, like just the nitty gritty of day to day community life, part of it is just showing up, literally you just showing up.

But what we have found is that most people from just like, for example, if you are in the US, you don’t come to community with a communal body, like a communal wisdom body, this sense of the self that is a self in community. So it really is a pretty steep learning curve to learn just how to embody that self and know what does it mean to think about the repercussions of your actions not just as an individual going it alone, getting your needs met as a consumer and then leaving if your needs aren’t being met, but actually attending to a vision larger than yourself and being committed to staying in relationship with people as your committed to bringing that vision into reality together. And so the basic foundation of that answer of how you do that for our community is actually a lot of what’s in my book deep liberation, in terms of we need skills for withdrawing projections. We need skills for withdrawing triggers and not holding up their people responsible for our emotions, but actually letting the natural friction and conflicts at arising community, be ways that we engage our lives as a teacher to come deeper into a sense of our most authentic self and how to embody that with other human beings.

Laura Dawn: I love that perspective, and I love what you said that the slow and steady process is actually the quicker route, and I have had that insight before or journeying with medicines where I could really see clearly places that I was out of integrity for example, and it was easy to be out of integrity in that moment. It was like the easier route, but caused so much more energy to come back into right alignment after that. And it was like oh, okay, actually sometimes the deeper effort is the easier path that it actually has, that the sense of, of commit meant to write relationship. And I do, I want to get into some of these practices in your book, I really love your book, deep liberation. There’s definitely a very similar thread with your teachers and teachings and just the teachings that I have been, you know, delving into in my life as well. So it was just that deep resonance was already there and I want to highlight something you said, you said bringing these teachings to the world in a good way. I want to just like emphasize the “in a good way” before we get into the teachings and maybe this can also just be a segue into this conversation about what the deep liberation process is, but why do we need to emphasize in a good way?

Langston Khan: Yeah well I guess there’s lots of ways to bring things into the world and when I say in a good way, the big answer to what that means is really in right relationship with the earth and it’s dreaming. And that sounds kind of abstract, like I don’t know if the average person feels a resonance, their heart with that, that phrasing. But for me, what I mean when I’m saying the earth and it’s dreaming is there’s this idea that you find in many different traditions cross-culturally that we are part of the Earth’s dreaming in a sense; that the earth has a dream of life and in a sense, the earth if we are lucky enough to have a body on the earth, the earth is not something like we need to ascend from or escape, but not everyone gets that ticket you know, it’s something rare and exciting to get, to have a body with a human heart on the earth because our hearts are these sort of manifestation machines.

And it costs an enormous amount of resources to make a human being on the earth and just especially, if you think about like the amount of resources we consume in like contemporary capitalist culture. And so the only way we can repay the debt that it takes to give us a body on the earth, from my perspective, and from a shamanic perspective is to actually live that unique dream that we felt so in love with that we decided to come to the earth to embody it. And that dream is something that’s unique to us like what you might call our purpose. It’s an energy that’s never been seen before and will never be seen again and if we don’t embody it, the entire of the universe is depreciated by it not being embodied that this specific facet is not embodied of like the great mystery, the divine, whatever you want to call it.

And so we can do that energy in a lot of ways that aren’t necessarily in service to all of life. So it’s not just in doing our unique thing, but doing that unique thing in a way that is in service, this larger dreaming, because just as we, as a human being on the earth, have a right to be here and take up space. So does everyone else in the shamanic cosmology? So how do we actually manifest our dreaming in a way that we are not preventing the many other life forms on earth that are engaging in their own dreaming from doing what they are here to do? And other human beings too, so that is what I mean when I say in a good way.

Laura Dawn: I love that perspective, thanks for clarifying that and yeah, I would love to, I mean I definitely want to get into the topic of triggers. I love talking about how to work with triggers. Oh my goodness. It’s so juicy, but I want to ask you why the name deep liberation, I know that comes from your teachers process, Christina Pratt, but what does deep liberation really mean? How can we define it?

Langston Khan: Deep liberation for me is a lot about feeling into the true vastness of who we are and bringing that truth into embodiment and how we live our everyday life. So sometimes engaging in psychedelics or in ecstatic dance or other types of trans states, we might have these peak experiences where we experience that, how much love there is available to everyone, always trying to help us to be that thing we’re here to do, where we experience this deep sense of being held and belong in home. That we have never felt before, whatever it is, we experience something that rocks us a bit and opens our heart in some way. And so, one response to that is to be continually chasing that experience again and again and again.

But another response is to ask the question of, if I accept that this is true, this wasn’t just an experience because I was doing something, but it’s actually a which truth I was opened up to, how might I show up to my life differently holding that truth is the foundation of my life? What daily consistent actions that might I take to live my life as a story of that truth? Like story grounded in that truth, and so for me, deep liberation means moving into the parts of ourselves that are trapped in old coping mechanisms we learn to survive and rescuing those parts of ourselves and the wisdom of medicine they carries, then come back into relationship with the vast living process that we are just the earth is this vast living process. And we can begin to liberate our ability to freely express all of who we are and all of our complexity in each moment, not having to compartmentalize or having to wear mask or having to you know, be reactive to the people around us. We can truly express who we are in the right relationship with life, around us, with other human beings and with other more than human beings.

Laura Dawn: That’s beautiful, it makes me think of [inaudible29:55] teaching and [inaudible29:57] teaching. I saw you had a couple. Pema Chodron’s quotes in your book and so, I love her so much, just this notion of sky like mind; you know that, that is our true nature. It’s just the vast openness and everything else is just the weather that comes, you know, the clouds in the sky, just the, the turbulence, but actually the base is this sky like mind and that’s what it sounds like you’re pointing to.

Langston Khan: And maybe that’s where I think I differ a little bit from maybe more Buddhist conceptions of thought. Not that I think, like fundamentally there is huge differences but, what I hear what you’re saying is a little bit of a privileging of that sky mind a bit; which is understandable, because that that is a beautiful, important experience to have. And I think the weather is just as important, the deep liberation process very much is about freeing us to be in that elemental weather to let a big anger come and be expressive and needs to be expressed to let ourselves really feel a jealousy or an envy or rage or a deep grief, and have that feeling be about what the present moment is calling out of us versus being decontextualized emotion that we’ve repressed in the past that’s suddenly bubbling up with no actual relationship with what’s going on in the current moment and preventing us from perceiving reality clearly, but to actually be in the elemental nature of our emotions, let them arise up, give us the messages about the relationship between our body and spirits are trying to give us and then fall back down in the next emotion rise up to be in that beautiful weather and sometimes experience that brilliant blue as well as part of all of that; but not privileging that as the good place to be.

Laura Dawn: Right yeah, I really appreciate that narrative, you know, it’s nuanced and, and I guess part of those teachings too, are also this notion that whatever arises is the essence of liberation, you know so, and that I think speaks a little bit closer to what you are speaking to, is that in moment, if anger is there it’s also the essence of liberation and so is sadness and so is grief and so is joy and it almost also sounds like the narrative of being in right relationship to shadow. How would you frame that? Or if we were to weave in the concept of shadow work into what you are speaking to, what’s the narrative for you around that, how do you think about that?

Langston Khan: So how I describe shadow work in my teaching is a little bit different than how most people use that term right now and so it’s not that they’re wrong and I’m right; it’s just a difference that I want to speak to because people use that term to mean, a lot of different things. And so I think what many people call shadow work, this kind of self-inquiry process of going inward and seeing things that we are unconscious of and bringing them into our awareness is sort of the more the clearing aspect of the deep liberation process that what I was talking about in terms of withdrawing our projections, tracking the energy to its root, where it started in our body and working with it there not analytically to the mind, but really to the wisdom of the heart.

And so I think that’s what many people sort of refer to as shadow work. When I talk about shadow work, I’m kind of talking about what I would conceive of as like the next layer of that, where it’s not just that a self is stuck in that moment or that choice he made to survive, but actually our mind has sort of thrown away a whole part of ourselves into this kind of what you might call shadow closet and thrown away the key. They’ve given them an unfair trial, they have judged them as like unacceptable, they are going to get us killed if we embody this part of us, probably because of messages, adults in our life were giving us at the time and then that part of us, of course, after being given an unfair trial and thrown in a, lock in a closet is going to start to grow twisted and monstrous over time.

So it’s this perfectly authentic, brilliant, important part of us that has own sideways because they’ve been abused by us in a sense. And so the only way that part of us in that sort of unconscious shadow closet space can operate is through the unconscious and so through patterns of self-sabotage, through patterns of intense fear, through patterns of intense attraction end up like really messy, hard relationships; and so in my way of thinking about that, that type of energy we can’t necessarily engage through a process like that involves self-inquiry, but we actually need to engage things like ritual and dance and creative processes and work with certain helping spirits and certain constructs in my teachings that allow us to find the back door into our own shadow and rescue those parts of ourselves and transform them into the allies they were always meant to be in our life and then being integrating that.

Laura Dawn: Right, yeah and it’s such a conundrum, right? Because it’s in the shadow, so how do we find that back door? Do you feel open to sharing a couple of real rituals or practices that you recommend people go deeper into on a daily basis, a weekly basis?

Langston Khan: You know, I don’t because it’s very deeply work and in my experience it’s not something you want to sort of just like touch into, but if you are going to bring out a shadow self, it’s something you really need to be committed to transforming because if it goes right back into shadow, it’s going to sort of like amplify the messiness that it was already creating, so we were creating through our dynamic of relationship that we were in with it. And so for me, there’s one online class that Christina offers that I help teach as well, which is the shadow transformation protocol which I find is a very useful process for doing that work, working with this destroyer goddess in our tradition to really go deep into this, into your shadow realms and working with others to help retrieve your shadow cells for you as well. 

Because you can work with a practitioner also, who’s trained in this type of work to retrieve that kind of shadow for you; and so that’s one possibility, but I think the best foundation for being