Episode #092

Vivica Menegaz

Ayahuasca, MDMA, and Plant-Based Medicines for Healing Trauma

There’s a lot more that can be done for healing than just by putting people on medication. Click To Tweet

Vivica Menegaz is another guest that you may recognize since she’s been on the show before — she was one of the first 15 guests I interviewed.

In the first episode I did with Vivica, she talked about topics like how to eat intuitively, how to use the land we live on better, and how to heal your body with real food.

If you haven’t checked out that episode already, which is linked in the show notes below, I cannot recommend it enough.

Today’s episode, on the other hand, is completely different and showcases another set of topics that are just as meaningful.

Vivica comes on the show to share her experience with moving through traumas and shifting to a better mental health mindset using alternative medicines.

Now, these medicines aren’t your typical treatments but they are ones that are growing in popularity due to their effectiveness.

Mental health therapists across the United States are also tapping into them to help their patients move through traumas in order to heal.

If the title of this podcast hasn’t given it away yet, Vivica is going to share her journey with using substances like psychedelic mushrooms, MDMA, and ayahuasca to heal the traumas she’s experienced.

To be clear though, we’re not advocating that you go out after this episode and start self-medicating with these substances.

As Vivica shares in the episode, this is not a safe or recommended path to take.

Instead, Vivica will show you a better approach to take if traumas are holding you back in life.

Vivica also discusses how these traumas could be affecting your health and, even if you work out and eat healthy, they may not be enough to help you feel better overall.

That’s why she believes that starting to address the traumas that are at the root of your health should be something worth considering.

You’ll also discover what else you can do if you don’t have access to these alternative medicines.

Being vulnerable is what helps others the most. And, in the end, it helps ourselves because we are able to connect with others, which is the most important part of being a human being. Click To Tweet

For any new listeners who don’t yet know Vivica Menegaz, she’s most known for being a nutritionist, cookbook author, and blogger of The Nourished Caveman, a site that shares a therapeutic approach to food.

She’s even created her own Healing Foods Method to help people transform their health by switching to a whole-foods, low-carb lifestyle.

But nutrition isn’t her only area of expertise.

As you’ll hear more about in this episode, Vivica is also a holistic practitioner who guides people using plant-based medicines like ayahuasca and others.

In this area, she helps people move through emotional and mental blocks and helps them get past traumas that could be holding them back.

Here’s a sneak peek of the topics Vivica and I get into, which you’ll hear more about when you tune in:

  • Cultivating immunity and building resilience to prevent viruses like Covid from taking over
  • The connection between gut health and immunity and why it pays to strengthen your gut health
  • Why our guts are so damaged and what we can do to fix this
  • Why Vivica goes deep into the jungle to heal her traumas and how she uses plants medicinally
  • How Vivica starts to help people heal
  • How long trauma is stored in the body and where it can be tucked away
  • The correlation between trauma and autoimmunity
  • The definition of trauma and how it can apply to a range of experiences
  • How Vivica found herself on this healing journey
  • Why some people heal faster than others
  • How she started experimenting with plant medicine and the drugs she first started tapping into
  • What saved her life
  • How she went from being suicidal to healing personal traumas
  • Why she recommends that people find therapists trained in these alternative therapies instead of self-medicating like she did
  • Why she personally started working with ayahuasca and how she uses it now
  • What people should know before taking ayahuasca
  • Vivica also explains how her experience with MDMA and ayahuasca differed
  • What you can do to get a dose of these therapies when you don’t have access to these types of medicines
  • The power of vulnerability 

If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to the Natural State Podcast on iTunes to get automatic updates. Use Android? Click here to subscribe on Stitcher and here to subscribe on Google Play Music.

Mentioned in This Episode 

More Resources