The retreat to Plant Medicine with Jonathan de Potter

In this episode, Freddie invites Jonathan de Potter to share his personal experience with plant medicine and his eventful process of self-healing. He is the founder of Behold Retreats, which is a wellness provider that facilitates life-changing plant medicine journeys. Through his passion for plant medicine, he has been raising awareness of its benefits and its potential to improve well-being and consciousness.

This episode will dive into Jonathan’s transformation journey and how plant medicine has changed his point of view in life. Jonathan talks about the advantages of the chemical compounds found within plants and how, through a regulated and monitored environment, these can provide a healing effect on both your mind and body.

Episode Highlights

1:31 Jonathan recollects how he got into the plant medicine scene - starting from his early childhood days

03:24 He shares his vocation and how he took a break from his corporate job to take part in an Ayahuasca retreat

6:38 He shares his first experience dealing with recreational substances and how this has impacted his life and the people around him

13:13 He explains the properties of Ayahuasca and its medicinal properties

18:00 Freddie talks about the scientific processes and how these strips the magic behind acceptance and faith of the plant medicine journey

20:52 Jonathan talks about finding the right guide/practitioner to approach when it comes to starting your plant medicine journey

26:09 He talks about Behold Retreats: their secret recipe to choosing a location, providing mentorship, using plant medicine, and more.

32:24 Jonathan how retreats work - is it financial and time demanding?

36:23 Keeping in touch with Behold Retreats and its community even after your retreat has ended

38:21 Jonathan talks about how they have been operating and arranging retreats amidst the pandemic

41:37 Freddie talks about the energetic body, cell-to-cell communication, frequency, and more

44:52 Jonathan talks about reconnecting with nature through plant medicine

46:58 Freddie expands on the broadness of plant medicine and how minimal things that we do every day can relate to it and change our lives completely 

50:42 Jonathan talks about what being beautifully broken means for him

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Freddie Kimmel and Jonathan de Potter (00:00.024)
you're you and that's beautiful and that's how life is. You don't need them to change and you don't need to feel quote unquote better about yourself in comparing yourself to them in some way, or form.

Freddie Kimmel and Jonathan de Potter (00:14.029)
Welcome to the Beautifully Broken Podcast. I'm your host, Freddie Kimmel, and on this show we explore the survivor's journey, practitioners making a difference, and the therapeutic treatments and transformational technology that allow the body to heal itself. Witness the inspiration we gain by navigating the human experience with grace, humility, and a healthy dose of mistakes, because part of being human is being beautifully broken.

Freddie Kimmel and Jonathan de Potter (00:44.718)
you

Freddie Kimmel and Jonathan de Potter (00:49.752)
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the beautifully broken podcast. We're here on a beautiful morning with Jonathan De Potter. Jonathan, welcome to the show. Great to be here, Freddie. I'm excited to have another conversation with you. Me too. So we've touched base already, but Jonathan, you're doing some amazing work with plant medicine and retreats and healing the spiritual body, facilitating this for other people.

I want to get into the work and behold retreats, but I would love to hear how you got into this. And has this been a lifelong obsession with the healing arts or is this relatively new? Great setup. Thank you. It's actually been a very interesting and humbling journey. You know, I grew up in Hawaii with pretty hippie parents. So I was always surrounded by, you know, pretty liberal

people and in Hawaii, unfortunately, you know, there's a lot of substance abuse. And so of course I went completely the opposite direction. I was very anti anything new age, anything hippie, and I was completely anti substance and I grew up, you know, super rational and kind of rejecting anything spiritual. And so kind of, of course then entered the corporate world after university and spent the majority of the past 15 years in the corporate world. And

Lo and behold, about five years ago now, I found the courage and the wisdom to attend a plant medicine retreat. And wow, I mean, it's so substantially changed me. It's so substantially changed my mind in relation to plant medicine. And I'm glad you did call it plant medicine as opposed to psychedelics, because I think there's, you know, the language around that is important because there's so much baggage, think, particularly in the U.S. There's just so much baggage in relation to the word psychedelics. It's just...

so unhelpful to the incredible potential of these things. it's been something that I've avoided for my entire life until about five years ago. And it's just made such a dramatic improvement to the quality of my everyday life and my self understanding and in my ability to lead a meaningful and fulfilling life. And it's also, you know, I said it was humbling before in terms of the personal work for myself, but also

Freddie Kimmel and Jonathan de Potter (03:08.067)
going back to my parents and being like, all right, look, you guys had some of this stuff completely right. And I had some of this stuff completely wrong. So it's been kind of one of those full circle stories, if you will. That's incredible. So what were you doing for a vocation? What was your passion as far as work goes?

Yeah. I mean, now I recognize that it wasn't a passion, but I was pretty good at it. So I've, I've spent most of the past 10 years working in management and strategy consulting. I was working for Accenture for many years in Hong Kong, working with telecommunications and technology clients like Huawei and other regional multinationals. And it was great work. It was super, you know, high energy, big clients, big deals, large transformation programs. You know, I had a team of about probably 150 at peak.

And there was always the next thing, the next promotion to pursue, the next client to land, the next project to save from troubled waters. And I had all the objective success measures that we typically look for in modern life. And at the time I thought it was fulfilling work. I had great friends, I had a great girlfriend. Life was good as traveling around Asia, whenever I was able to take some time from work.

Life was good, but I just, you know, after five years of kind of in the rat race in Hong Kong and it's, you know, it's such a high paced city. I just felt like something was missing and I just, fundamentally didn't know what that thing was. I decided to take a year off for myself. And that was the time at which I was, I found my way to an ayahuasca retreat and yeah, just begun, you know, the last five years has really been a journey of self discovery and also deepening my understanding of this field. It's funny, me labeling it medicine.

is new in probably the last like eight years, nine years. You know, I grew up in a very rural town in upstate New York where some of these substances in different forms were available, different types of psychedelics and mushrooms, if you will. And of course LSD. And I would watch them kind of find their way into the high school population with certain human beings. And I would really like watch it change people.

Freddie Kimmel and Jonathan de Potter (05:17.135)
I had always been very scared of quote unquote. It's funny. just wrote about this yesterday. I'm writing a book and I wrote about being terrified of like sex and drugs because of the Reagan administration growing up in the eighties. You know, the barrage of media that like sex is dirty. It's awful. All drugs are terrible. You're going to die. You had the girl jumping into the concrete pool without the water in it.

I mean, I just remember being so all drugs are bad. And again, to watch certain members of my high school class just be, you know, pulled out of the stream that every other fish is swimming down, you know, and I'm not going to label that good or bad, but I did watch it have a very intense effect on their life because they were playing with something very, very powerful. And again, I'm not saying it's good or bad.

I watched now looking back in hindsight, there were no guides. was no anybody to tell you how to do this. It was like a recreational substance as opposed to something that can give you this spiritual transformation. I'd love to hear about your first experience. You know, was transformational, it was magical. Could you give us a little bit of the story and just let us know what happened for you?

Yeah, yeah, happy to share. It's funny as you were sharing about friends or people in high school and seeing the effects upon them also witnessed groups within my high school. And it's difficult for me to say that they're in a good place, collectively. Some that have landed in an okay place, but it's difficult to say that that's had like a really positively profound impact upon their lives. So I think there's something in that that we can come back to.

Yeah. My own first experience, you know, was just completely overwhelming. I was under-educated. I was under-prepared. I was well physically cared for, but not very well spiritually cared for. And that's not even something that I knew was important leading into the retreat. I was fortunate in that I went to what is still today recognized as one of the leading retreat centers. But unfortunately, they're not necessarily doing this work.

Freddie Kimmel and Jonathan de Potter (07:35.411)
at a high level. And so I think, you know, that's part of what we are trying to do with Behold Retreats is to guide people towards, you know, really, really high quality experiences. And so the experience itself was profound. You know, the first ceremony was completely overwhelming. I was in Peru in the Sacred Valley, which is just an incredible place to do this work. I was there with two friends and the first ceremony for me was just overwhelming. Like I was shown so many things. There was so much going on. There's a lot of

physical and emotional purging that's taking place. And it was so overpowering, overbearing that it was difficult for me to make too much sense of it from the first night's experience. The second night, I got a lot more out of it. I was shown a lot more in relation to my mindsets and my behaviors and how that was really limiting me from fulfilling my potential. I was shown powerful emotions of people around me and shown how I can affect those people.

for better and for worse. And so it's beautiful. You see some of the best moments of your life where, you know, your mom was watching you graduate or do something beautiful for another person. And then equally things where you just haven't turned up as you know that you should. And, you know, you see shame on the face of your father or guilt on the face of your mother because you just didn't turn up in that moment. so, yeah, I mean, in terms of an experience that can provide you

guidance in terms of what's keeping you from your potential. know, sometimes it's so difficult for us to see what those things are and just to have access to something that literally tells us what's keeping us from achieving the next level in our life is just incredible when you think about what that represents. So, you know, it was an incredible experience. I've always had a great relationship with my parents, despite what I said before, in terms of us having differences of opinion, we always had

a great relationship, but this was even a foundation to even deepen the relationship that I have with my parents, which was really beautiful because I shared with them all of my experiences and what it meant for me, what it meant for our relationship or how I saw our relationship. And I also just kind of was able to put aside a whole bunch of baggage in relation to, know, we all have things that we associate, you know.

Freddie Kimmel and Jonathan de Potter (09:59.671)
maybe my mom's not so good with money, so then I get to feel better about myself because I'm a little bit better with money, or whatever it is it might be, but it's like, no, your mom's just your mom and your dad's just your dad, and you're you, and that's beautiful, and that's how life is. You don't need them to change, and you don't need to feel quote unquote better about yourself in comparing yourself to them in some way, shape, or form. It was super powerful, but then what happened was a month later, I was back to who I was before.

That's the honest truth. Like I had this really profound experience and again was reasonably well cared for during the retreat. At the end of the retreat, just, you know, they hand you a piece of paper and they're like, I should probably try meditation and we wish you all the best. And I was like, okay, great. Thank you. And I didn't really know, you know, first experience, I didn't really know that I definitely should have had more support and guidance around such an experience to help me integrate that into my everyday life. I went into that experience as an atheist and I came out going,

Okay, there's something else here that I've completely overlooked and been unwilling to even consider was a possibility. And so that's where I think, you know, there's so much of this plant medicine work that's happening now. But from what I've seen, you know, I think the overwhelming majority of practitioners do not know what they're doing. They're typically very nice people. They speak well, they have their hearts in the right place, but they don't necessarily have the skills that are required to do this work at a high level.

The second component is that people come out of these retreats, so much clarity, so much purpose, so much meaning, and then a month later they've lost 90 % of it. And so there's a lot of work to be done between the end of a retreat and a month or two later when you benefiting from, you know, neurogenesis, the new neurons, the new neuronal connections, the motivation, you've got it all there. You need to embed that into everyday life because

This isn't about seeing unicorns in the jungle. It's not about the plants at all. It's using the plants as this incredibly powerful tool in order to elevate your consciousness, in order to break through the things that are holding you back, in order to quote unquote lead your best life. And these plants have an incredible potential to help people do that. But there's a lot of people who are doing these things and feeling like they're making progress. And this also, by the way, reflects my own journey in this.

Freddie Kimmel and Jonathan de Potter (12:16.085)
I felt like I was making great progress for years, but in reality, it wasn't until I found some really expert practitioners that helped me see that. Yeah. Yeah. I couldn't agree with you more. What a beautiful story. It's just, I just think it's, there's so many elements when you're talking about you're in the rat race, you're lost, you're going back to spend time in nature and to use nature, to use the plants, to use the resonant vibration of the planet. It's offered up this very special route, this unique route.

that can only be processed in one way and turns an atheist into a believer. It's powerful. It's powerful. And what I would love to kind of break down is so you did on your first experiment, did ayahuasca. Can you just go into a little bit about that specific plant and why that's used, how that's different from, we'll say like a psychedelic mushroom, or we can kind of break down some of the different elements that people would use on a plant medicine retreat. Yeah, sure. Happy to.

So ayahuasca is combination of two plants that are brought together and then brewed for an extended period of time. And it's obviously grown and grown in popularity in the Americas and it's the buzz of the town. It's an incredibly powerful medicine. I'm one of those people who is attracted to the more powerful experiences, but that's not necessarily the right thing or the right place for everyone to start. I would probably

On balance, unless you feel a real resonance with ayahuasca as a plant medicine, I would probably on balance encourage people to think about a psilocybin or a San Pedro retreat as a place to start. Ayahuasca is definitely like, you're really preparing for a real journey. And so the medicine itself, I mean, one of our advisors, Dale Millard, he's an ethnobotanist. He's done some of the work in relation to isolating compounds from ayahuasca. so.

He's found there's 463 individual compounds within an ayahuasca medicine. And obviously, you know, those are two different plants from two different places that are brought together. So each ayahuasca brew can be different than the next. And there's actually three different ayahuasca vines. There's one that's described as a red, a black, and a yellow. And so part of the reason that the scientific world isn't

Freddie Kimmel and Jonathan de Potter (14:36.975)
kind of all over ayahuasca is not because it's not powerful. It's because it's made up of so many different compounds. So, you know, in the West, we've kind of got this obsession with compound isolation. We don't want to use cannabis. want to separate out CBD and THC and, know, find that single molecule and it's like, well, we've got 463 here in ayahuasca. So good luck, you know, trying to map.

the interrelationship between those compounds and our incredibly complex selves. So it's a very powerful medicine. It has an effect on body, mind and soul. And again, the soul part is something I would have laughed at five years ago, but that's without a question today for me. Sometimes the way that I articulate the effects that these medicines can have for people is often we've got a stage of healing to do. We've got a stage of growth and then transcendence and...

I'm an ex-consultant, right? So I can't help myself but to use frameworks. And then you've also got experiences that relate to yourself. You've got experiences that relate to other people, and you've got experiences that relate to our broader natural world and our broader universe. And so everyone's journeys and everyone's path between those things can be different. But often you will start with the healing experiences, move into the more the growth and then the transcendence beyond the self and beyond everything.

Yeah, so mean, incredibly powerful medicine. think it takes some time for people to begin to work with it effectively because it is so overpowering. It's got a strong purgative effect. And so, you know, it's pretty common for people to be vomiting from the experience, particularly early on. You know, there's a lot of toxins in our bodies as a result of the lifestyles that we live and the food that we eat and dot, dot, dot. so ayahuasca doesn't play nice with those and moves them out.

pretty quickly and so it's a pretty intense experience. anybody ever studied that as far as like the detoxification effects on the body before and after a session? Probably not. There is research that's happening for Ayahuasca. I do know that one of the things that we are actually looking for is the right academic partner because I think we're going to be sitting on quite an interesting data set for our business because it's

Freddie Kimmel and Jonathan de Potter (16:48.749)
multi-country, multi-practitioner, multi-medicine. And so we'll be able to see some interesting patterns emerge in terms of improvements to quality of life between medicines, et cetera, et cetera, which I think is quite interesting and exciting. But in my mind, given the potentiality of ayahuasca, it's not being sufficiently researched at the moment because it just doesn't fit our Western medical system. Another one of our advisors, she described our efforts in the U.S. as

You know, we've got this broken medical system and now we have this modality that works and we're trying to make all sorts of compromises to this modality in order to fit it into this kind of broken medical system. I thought that's quite an interesting observation and I think it's got some truth to it. Like, is it worth making all of those compromises to get it in so that people can get treatment? Absolutely. 100%. But that's, you know, part of the reason why we're seeing

MDMA and synthetic psilocybin is that it allows for, you know, single molecule and, and dosage control. So our system is all about being able to control for variables such that you can measure, measure, measure and 463 molecules. just, you know, impossible. Yeah, there's something we lose in the scientific method. Personally, I think we lose some of the magic. You know, there is something very special to trust faith ceremony.

being fully on board with an acceptance that you don't understand the whole experience, that you give it over. And in that, know that's counterintuitive to how we like things to be standardized so we can repeat, rinse, wash, and repeat. But again, there's magic. Anytime I have ever been in a situation with any of these elements, mostly psilocybin, which is the good old magic mushroom.

I mean, I've been absolutely blown away. I was like, there is another world happening. This is not something brought on because some of the truths that you see and how powerful, I mean, to just talk about the ego death for a second. mean, I remember like, you know, my last experience that sorry, mom and dad. Yes, I've done drugs. I don't know if I've ever talked about this on the podcast. My last experience, you know, grieving.

Freddie Kimmel and Jonathan de Potter (19:06.704)
My car payment and my career and my bills and my friends and I'm not saying goodbye is you're taken to this other world. Heartbeats breath work breathing human bodily function and it going away and for an extended period of time like you said you are on a journey where you're you know incredible visions incredible vision past lives I know that sounds so out there for people but you know I was.

did Broadway Music Theater for many, many, many, many, many years, a tap dancer. And I was all of a sudden touching my knees where my knees would hurt. And I was seeing these like vaudeville tap dancers, like from the twenties. And I was like, I felt their knees and my knees. It was so crazy and amazing. And then all of sudden it was like, you're like in the perfect moment. You're like back in your body. You're processing the experience.

Freddie Kimmel and Jonathan de Potter (20:17.817)
which kind of brings me to my next question. What does it look like to train somebody or how do you go about finding the right guides, practitioners to facilitate this work for your specific retreat? Yeah. So there's, there's a couple of different elements that play into that. One is the rational. So we look for people who

Freddie Kimmel and Jonathan de Potter (20:54.715)
of Otanist and 30 years under his maestro, who is now 102 years old, still going. Wow. And so, you know, he's bringing some wisdom for sure. so part of it is the rational. So, you know, how many ceremonies have you held? How many clients have you worked with? And, you know, connect me with some of those clients and all of the overwhelming majority of this work is happening. Well, 100 % of this work is that the overwhelming majority of this work is happening. Well, 100 % of this work is.