Andy Johns With IMHU.org

 

Integrative mental health is crucial for anyone seeking to move beyond traditional, purely materialistic approaches to emotional and psychological well-being. Host Timothy J. Hayes, PsyD. speaks with Andy Johns, former high-achieving Silicon Valley executive and now Co-Executive Director of the Integrative Mental Health University (IMHU). Andy details his transformative personal journey—from a 17-year tech career to a profound spiritual emergence and healing from childhood trauma—to illustrate IMHU’s mission of evolving mental health care. He shares essential steps for lasting wholeness, emphasizing non-ordinary states of consciousness, the body’s innate wisdom for trauma release, and key self-care protocols like diet and nervous system grounding.

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Andy Johns With IMHU.org

Andy Johns spent a notable career in Silicon Valley over a seventeen-year period, working as an executive and advisor to CEOs and an investor with ten multi-billion-dollar startups. He’s a visionary as well as a grounded, skilled businessman with a profound history of his own personal transformation. His current mission is to help others transform themselves and find a higher purpose, and he also enjoys writing about mental health, spirituality, and personal transformation, transformation, as well as coaching people through spiritual awakenings.

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Andy, thank you so much for joining me. It’s great to see you again.

Yeah, happy to be here. Thank you.

From High-Achiever to Healer: The Roots Of Andy’s Passion

I’m hoping you can get us started by talking about how you got into the work you’re doing and what drives your passion for it.

Sure. What got me into the work I’m doing is basically lived experience. A bit of background on me, I spent seventeen years working in Silicon Valley. I had a very successful career by many measures and was a part of several successful technology companies. Eventually, I became the president of a company and was also a partner for a venture capital firm.

Along the way, I had been pushing the proverbial beach ball of emotional pain under the surface over and over again while attempting to continue to grow my career. Although I was successful at that for quite a while, it eventually got to the point to where I couldn’t push that beach ball underwater anymore. In the latter part of 2020, I followed that inner intuition. Something inside me was screaming, saying, “I need to leave this place. I need to leave this work. Maybe not forever, but at least for now.”

I did. I departed Silicon Valley and stepped down from the venture capital firm and all the companies I was working with. When I created that space in my life, I had this really big eruption of childhood trauma and just a bunch of unaddressed emotional, spiritual, and psychological needs. That’s really what propelled me into what’s now been a pretty intensive five-year inner journey of self-discovery of healing from trauma and of the opening of spiritual pursuits. That’s led directly to the work that I’m now doing with Integrative Mental Health University, as well as working with military veterans with PTSD through an organization called Heroic Hearts Project, where we provide psychedelic-assisted therapy to veterans and their families. That’s the short story.

Is that one where they assist veterans with hallucinogenic-assisted therapy?

Yeah, that’s right. Primarily, when we first started, it was mostly ayahuasca because it was something that we could do legally down in Peru. Many of the veterans who started the organization had a lot of success with it. We now also run retreats in the United States, in Oregon in particular, where there’s legalization around some of the psychedelic therapies.

Evolving Mental Healthcare: The Mission Of IMHU

What is the Integrative Mental Health University and what role are you playing in it?

I just joined as Co-Executive Director, which I’m pretty excited about. I get to work alongside Dr. Emma Bragdon, who’s the founder of the organization. In a nutshell, it’s about trying to bring spirituality and everything that fits into that broad umbrella of things that we may generically describe as spiritual modalities, spiritual philosophies, spiritual techniques and practices. It’s about trying to bring that world of spirituality into the modern mental health care paradigm.

At the moment, the role of religion and spirituality as it relates to somebody’s attempt at finding meaning and purpose in relation in life is, for the most part, excluded from the DSM other than a one-sentence carve-out here and there. Our opinion is that is of significant detriment to people going through the existing mental health paradigm.

 

For thousands of years, our religious and spiritual relations, one of the primary ways in which we found connection not only to our own tribe, our own community, but to something beyond ourselves. In doing so, found a sense of meaning and purpose, and to extricate that from the process of helping somebody find emotional and psychological peace. That seems like a really big deficit in the modern paradigm.

What we’re focused on is trying to evolve mental health care to include spirituality in all of its related fields and practices. That applies not only to practitioners, where we train practitioners to be what we consider spiritually competent, but we also support individuals going through what can sometimes be very intens,e spiritually transformative experiences, which is something that I had myself.

You’re saying you support people in going through that. Where do you do that?

In a couple of ways. One way, and this is one of the primary ways, is actually through a directory of coaches who have gone through a credentialed training program that we created in order to become what we call spiritual emergence coaches. We train practitioners for that spiritual competency in knowing how to support somebody who’s going through what can be sometimes extreme or intense states of a strong psychic opening. When we train those practitioners, we have an entire directory of over 130 professionals that we’ve trained who are individuals who might be in a state of spiritual awakening or spiritual emergence. They can reach out to one of those coaches from our website and work with them.

The practitioners get trained as what?

They’re certified spiritual emergence coaches.

Human-Centered Care: IMHU’s Approach To Spiritual Emergence

Is there a way for you to give us a flavor of how or some processes or exercises that you introduce people to help them clarify how spirituality might be a part of their healing process?

I think a good way to think about it, and this is how I approach it least, is at a high level, to put it in juxtaposition, to say the traditional approach that somebody may be given through psychiatric intervention, if they’re exhibiting, say, signs of psychosis or schizophrenia. If somebody is exhibiting more of those extreme states nowadays, the typical protocol is usually something involving heavy medication and hospitalization. During that hospitalization process, they’re largely isolated and also stigmatized.

I’ve worked with and spoken to psychiatric nurse practitioners, where they’ll share that the typical language used is, “Go check the in on the bipolar in room five,” or, “Go check in on the schizophrenic room seven.” It immediately creates this huge separation between the patient and everyone else and the stigmatization that comes along with that.

Our approach, from the approach of our coaches is to, first and foremost, sit with the person and try and understand them, and especially from the perspective of listening to them to hear what they’re experiencing as if it is entirely true, as if what they are experiencing is not the sign of severe mental illness. Rather, that there is the potential for some positively transformative function there. By sitting with them from one human to the other and allowing them to share and express their story, you just begin with acceptance in relation. I guess that is another way of saying it is you make them feel loved and heard and human.

 

You take the labels schizophrenic or bipolar away and you say, “Here’s a person, here’s Fred, here’s Tim, here’s Larry.” There is a lot of depersonalization that happens. I’m using that term incorrectly here, but in our mental health model today, because it’s so materialistically focused. It’s exclusively materialistically focused.

If you believe that you are just a hunk of protoplasm, then that approach might be the best one for you. If you understand that there’s a lot more going on here than our five senses can help us tap into, or track or measure, then it’s really a good idea to branch out and explore some of those other ways that we can experience or connect with people or interpret our own experience.

Correct. I think it’d probably be helpful to give my personal example of this, and I’m open on this and willing to share it. During this five-year period where I was going through a really radical process of change through also periods when long-suppressed, intense emotions and in some cases memories that my mind had fully suppressed came bursting through to the surface.

In one case in particular, I was in a roughly four-day period of very intense emotional opening and energetic purging. Folks who are reading this, if you’ve ever watched videos of folks doing trauma release exercises, TRE would be a good example, or sometimes doing forms of breath work, like Holotropic Breathwork, you’ll see that people will go through these really intense physical energetic states where their body is shaking, tremoring convulsing. It may look a bit unsettling or disturbing to the untrained eye, but it’s actually the body discharging stored trauma.

I entered a period where that went on for the better part of four days. During that period, during the most intense part of it, a memory bursts through that my mind had tucked away for a very long time. It was a memory of me experiencing sexual abuse when I was very young. Although I was exhibiting intense emotional symptoms and frankly really struggling with it when it was happening because of the sense of emotional overwhelm that comes with such a traumatic memory, on one hand I had a traditional pure psychiatric perspective that was shared with me, which was, “Andy, I think you need antipsychotics and we might want to consider hospitalization.”

There was something in me that was still completely present and aware when this process was happening. I remember saying to my family, that was around me at the time, like, “It’s okay, this is healing to me. I know it is. This is healing.” I had the awareness to say, “No, I’m not going to medically suppress what is happening right now. I want to allow some of this to come through because I think it’s my body’s innate wisdom and my psyche’s innate wisdom offering an opportunity for me to heal, heal a bit of a fractured mind from that old trauma, and to purge that very negative energy out of my system.

I went through the process. I eventually did get on a small amount of medication, just a standard SSRI, nothing really heavy to the tune where I’d be tranquilized in a sense. With love and support of my family and my friends who were around me during these episodes, I was able to get through it. Still difficult but I was able to get through that experience without suppressing it.

What ended up unfolding over the next several months was deep insights, deeper awareness of myself. I was able to take the lessons from all that and integrate it in a way where I’m now much more capable of managing my own nervous system and have a deeper understanding of what is it that was actually this like toxic center that was behind these emotional and psychological issues I’ve been having just for so many years. Had I just been given the standard psychiatric protocol of heavy medication and hospitalization, I think I would’ve shut that entire process down and never experienced the healing capacity then unfolded.

Somatic Healing: The Body’s Innate Wisdom To Discharge Trauma

What you’re talking about is just so well-known these days in terms of the research on trauma. Peter Levine talks a lot about how he had his own trauma where he was hit by a vehicle and he was there and a loving, pleasant, I believe she had nursing experience type person showed up at the scene of the accident. He was shaking and she said, “We’ll give you something to stop the shaking.” He said, “No, let me shake. Let me get this energy out.” He had the awareness because of all of his work in the field of trauma, that he’d be better off just letting himself shiver, shake, tremor, convulse, whatever until it works its way out.it won’t go forever.

Allowing those energies to flow through us, those same energies, which years ago or days ago or minutes ago, whatever, when we formed our belief about the life experience, that it’s too much. I go to shove that energy down away from my conscious awareness. I’m using my own mind energy to hide my own mind energy from me. In that self-referential loop, it can’t process, it can’t heal, it can’t move out of my system.

However, if I allow myself to do the breath work and soften, and if I have the support you’re talking about, or at least a mental framework that allows me to think, “There might be some benefit to staying with this,” as opposed to the mental framework that says, “This is terrible, we have to stop this right now.”

That’s right. In some cases, it may be that heavy medication hospitalization, the standard protocol is necessary. All we’re simply saying is that’s not always the case.

It’s always beneficial to do that in conjunction with this other overarching, “Let’s understand, listen, let’s treat the person as a human.”

My basic observation on this is the body wants to heal itself. If you cut yourself, it’ll form a scar. If you bang your knee, it’ll swell as a protective mechanism and it’ll initiate all sorts of physiological functions to repair. When you go to sleep, we now know that you have this system that effectively cleanses the brain and washes away all of the day’s trash.

The body wants to heal itself. Share on X

The metabolic waste, etc.

The psyche wants to do the same. If you give it the right supportive, caring, loving conditions where the mind and body can feel safe, then you can support it as it’s going through those experiences in an attempt to resolve what may be a fractured mind.

Resolve what may be a fractured mind. I want to jump in there and say, “It’s not like it’s an egg and it’s cracked and that’s it, it’s broken, it’s fractured,” in that way, but fractured in terms of, I would rather use a word like fragmented or partitioned mind. I want to gradually work at removing the partitions so I’ve got easy access to all of those memories, energies and beliefs so they can get looked at in the light of conscious awareness.

Is it called Kintsugi, the Japanese art, where, for example, you take pot and it fractures and breaks?

You mend it with gold or silver, yeah.

That’s the word that comes to mind.

I don’t know the actual word for that, but that process is a wonderful way to live, a wonderful metaphor for life and a filter that I can use to look at whatever happens as being, “Here it is.” Not that it’s great or I’m happy or I’m going to label it good or bad, but it’s here. It’s what’s happening. Now what’s mine to do in response to it to try and make the situation a little more comfortable or a little bit more loving? It begins with the acceptance. It begins with the listening to what’s going on inside oneself. It begins with that ability to question everything that I’ve been holding as a belief.

That can be quite difficult to do, but once you lean into it a little bit more, my experience has been that it’s profoundly liberating.

I can imagine that you uncovered some negative beliefs about yourself when the traumatic memory of very early such childhood sexual abuse came up. Whatever negative beliefs I download about myself, one of the bottom-line observations I use says if I have a negative thought about myself or somebody else, or a negative emotion active in my mind, I can instantly know three things. It’s a lie or based in a falsehood, it’s an old tape playing from the past. It’s not about what’s going on in the moment. If I sit here spinning and thought about it, if I speak or act from it, I’m just going to make my life worse, not better.

That’s right. One of the interesting things that I’ve experienced in this journey is my dream space has become incredibly active, especially after that powerful psychic opening and that transformative experience of allowing the trauma to be contained and processed in a healthy way. My dream space has become very vibrant. It’s as if my subconscious has turned on in a way where now on at least 1 or 2 nights a week. Often, it’ll be 3, 4, 5 nights in a row, in these precursive cycles.

My subconscious is speaking to me through the visual theater of my dreams. It just giving me very clear messages around decluttering my subconscious closet, cleaning out these old unhelpful, like you said, these scripts or these narratives that we’ve had. It’s guiding me towards wholeness. That’s been one of the unexpected secondary benefits of treating an intense emotional state like this very differently. It wasn’t just that moment that ended up being very healing and cathartic, as difficult as it was.

The change in the system, which is now opened to letting things arise and move through them rather than have them arise and be anything next to, or similar to something I’ve decided I can’t deal with. It gets shoved into there and I remain fragmented. I remain intention and tightness as trying to push stuff away as I’m trying to move on in life.

That inner teacher that we all have, mine has just become much more vocal and I’ve given it space finally. Now it’s me with my journal working with my dreams as they continue to unfold and guide me. It’s been a very powerful positive experience following all this.

Post-Traumatic Integration: What Follows An Intense Emotional Opening?

You mentioned having this very intense experience and you said 4 or 5 days, if I remember correctly. What happened then?

At the end of the fourth day, it got to a point where in a moment of clarity, I said, “I think it’s gotten to the point where if this continues, it’s no longer going to be positive for me.” Sometimes, as you reactivate or reengage with that old traumatic material, you run the risk that if you associate with it too much or identify with it too much or allow too much of it to flood through, it could be retraumatizing. I was nearing that point.

In that moment I said, “I need to resource myself and ground myself ASAP because this process for now needs to come to a stop, or at least I need to modulate its intensity.” I turned to a little bit of an SSRI that I’d used before that helped with nervous system regulation in general. That was beneficial. I turned to one transpersonal psychologist to help me on the dreams. I turned to a spiritual emergence coach, which is actually Dr. Emma Bragdon. She helped me understand it through the spiritual lens.

Especially because, and this is an interesting detail, that four-day emergency was initiated when I walked into church on Good Friday. I walked into church, I stared at the cross and something in me very deeply resonated with the symbol of the cross. If you want to use the term, down to the level of my soul, I knew what that cross meant. Something in me surrendered. It was in that spiritual container where then this process was activated. It was a spiritual experience blended with a psychological experience. Both of these things were happening.

I just wanted to share that interesting detail. I turned to a bit of medication. I turned to a couple experts to help guide me through this. My day-to-day experience is all about I need to master the art of self-care and learn how to ground and calm my own nervous system through this. I used some of the psychedelic frame here. You take high dose psychedelic, you go through the experience and then it may surface really powerful insights or emotions or information and that’s great. Where the real healing happens is when you integrate those insights into your life thereafter.

The real healing happens when you integrate those insights into your life, thereafter consciously. Share on X

Consciously, right?

Correct. It was very similar in that sense. I had this big eruptive experience. It made me aware of something that my mind had long suppressed. There was a lot related to that, that I needed to reconcile and come to terms with. It’s all about integration. For me, the primary thing was what can I do to give my nervous system signals that it is calm and safe so that I could successfully complete the purging of that trauma reground back into a very calm and protective nervous system. That’s what it was all about. I’m continuing with that to this day.

Mastering The Art Of Self-Care: Essential Protocols For Nervous System Grounding

What are the primary things that you find for soothing or calming your nervous system?

Number one is as good of sleep as you can get. In bed early, up early, do that consistently. Number two was diet, eating a very specific diet. Nothing processed because after that experience, I noticed how much my nervous system was actually influenced by what I ate. It became very clear that if I had anything processed, my nervous system was not happy with it.

I turned to simple diet. I can’t recall who said this, so I wish I can give them credit. The dietary framing was, if it’s a plant, eat it. If it eats plants, eat it. If it’s made in a plant, don’t eat it. Made in a plant if it’s processed. The other was, for me, saunas and hot yoga. I think for me, the intensity of the heat itself stimulates a higher intensity cardiovascular experience.

If it eats plants, eat it. If it's made in a plant, don’t eat it. Share on X

I noticed that after the hour-long exposure in sauna, I could go and lay out in the grass and my nervous system would just relax. For me, that was a specific protocol that I still use to this day. I basically set up a little picnic basket for about $120 on Amazon. I just got a few things that I always have in the trunk of my car where I would go out near daily into a nearby park where I’d find the most peaceful corner of it that I could, because I just needed to be in nature. I’d lay on the grass for hours at a time. I wasn’t necessarily doing anything other than feeling the grounding that came from being in nature.

About once a week, I would drive up into the mountains and I would go on a hike. I would try and find the most remote, quiet, peaceful hike I could. I would sit and for hours in complete silence out in nature. I would do that once a week because it seemed to be just the most powerful full reboot. Whatever additional stimulation I’d picked up throughout the week, it seemed to wipe that all away.

Also, selective touch and closeness with people I loved. I’d say selective because I also experienced that it was quite difficult for me to be in public places and in crowded places with just a lot of noise and chaos around me. My nervous system was very sensitive. I was very choosy around where I put my tuning fork of a body.

As one example, we had a family vacation and we went to Maui. Maui’s a beautiful place, but we’re at this resort with a lot of people and a lot of energy around me. On two occasions, I had to go back to my room and I just needed to cry for a good half an hour to an hour because my body was still going through waves of discharging emotion. This one I highly recommend.

I did comprehensive blood work. I used Function Health, it’s FunctionHealth.com, to do very comprehensive blood work, urine analysis, and some genetic tests to figure out like what nutrient deficiencies might I have. If I plug those nutrient deficiencies, then from a nutritional standpoint, I’m giving my nervous system as much resilience as possible.

What I found was really important. One of the things that I discovered was that I have the methylfolate gene, which for folks who don’t know, it’s a gene that effectively determines how effectively one might be able to metabolize certain B vitamins. In my case, I wasn’t able to metabolize the B vitamins or the folic acid or the folate that is often artificially injected into processed foods.

My body cannot metabolize that stuff. It has a direct downstream effect on GABA receptor function that then leads to pounding heart anxiety. Figuring that out and getting on the right vitamins protocol, within a matter of 3 to 5 days, a large portion of that pounding part anxiety that I had just went away. I have some of my vitamins in front of me right now. I take these in the morning. They’re all about nervous system function, nervous system stability, cognitive function, clarity, and anti-inflammatory supplements. I take some in the evening with my dinner, and then I take a few right before bed. For me, that’s been the suite of things that I’ve turned to. A bit of meditation from time to time.

I don’t do too much of it because, not because it’s not beneficial, but because my body is still going through cycles of urging out the traumatic energy. When I get incredibly still, it activates that cycle again. I’ll go through 30 to 60 minutes of tremors. Usually, there are tears and powerful emotion that’s coming through, and that’s all great. It’s really just the process of how much of that do I let through at the time so that it doesn’t become overwhelming.

What I’m hearing in your presentation is that while there are some general things that anyone can do, what each individual will find that they need to do will be specific to them. What you’re doing, I think you said something about mastering the art of self-care or something to that effect, which is a wonderful idea. I promote it with everyone I work with and in my life and my friends and family, that we are not living in a culture that outlines or even makes good self-care easy. Yet it’s essential, that thing that no one else can do for us.

That’s one of the things to integrate from my experiences. It just made it so clear. A little self-care I’d done in the past. My tendency was a traditional rugged individualism, Western male framing, especially growing up on a farm and with two older brothers and my father. My mom had passed when I was ten, so there wasn’t a lot of the feminine nurturing energy. I played very competitive sports my whole life.

I trained in Muay Thai kickboxing and mixed martial arts. Basically, I treated my body like an old, beat-up pickup truck. It worked as long as the vitality of youth allows, but then, if it’s just front and center, it’s like “Hold on a second. I cannot beat myself up anymore, especially now. Now it’s time for me to learn how to love myself.”

 

The ‘Dirty Fuel’ Of Achievement: Self-Worth Vs. Performance-Driven Identity

There’s a real good awareness that comes when we understand that really young children, when they have negative things happen to them, there’s an automatic system within them that says, “There’s something wrong with me that’s bringing this on. If I can figure out what I’m doing wrong, then I can change it. This horrible stuff will go away or doesn’t need to keep happening.”

However, think about this. The child needs to develop a level of mental maturity before it can say, “That’s somebody else’s problem. I didn’t cause that.” At a younger age, we’re just predisposed to think, “My dad or mom is raging at me because I am defective,” or, “I’m being beaten, or I’m being sexually abused because something’s wrong with me.”

Now that gets downloaded and there’s a belief that’s running in that very powerful unconscious you were mentioning before, it begins to give rise to your impetus, your motivation, those things you have a passion for. I’m not saying this is true for everybody, but in general, what happens is people then engage activities to either hide that negative core from their own awareness or the awareness of others.

You might have somebody who is just loved by everybody and who’s always out there doing for other people, and as selfless as you can imagine. If it’s driven by this false belief that I’m a monster and if they see my true nature, they’ll either attack me or run away from me. It’s not healthy. It’s not really producing, producing good connected relationships between people.

I guess you could say this has been one of the bigger meta or overarching insights of this last several years in inner work was, yes, it’s very clear realization that I was running on, I guess you can call it dirty fuel with my fuel source that propelled me to so much success and this relentless desire to achieve and prove myself was fundamentally stemming from neglect and abuse. I just didn’t feel lovable and whole.

The self-loathing that you generated in response to the environment.

I’ve also come to really appreciate the duality of it in the sense that I sit there and say like, “Thank God that my mind, something in me said, ‘I’m in a lot of pain and I don’t want to feel like this. I’m too young to be feeling this way and to be managing emotionally what I’m experiencing. Let me tuck this away and let me bury it with a drug of achievement.’”

Thank God that was the path. It was arguably the best thing as an adaptation that I could have done for myself because I dug myself out of a dark place and I gave myself a really good life and a lot to feel good about myself for. The double-edged sword of it, of course, is when that dirty fuel is behind the scenes and you’re not aware of it, that eventually metastasizes and takes everything over.

In many cases, including mine, it runs wild. It takes control of your life. In my case, it’s actually pushing me eventually towards all sorts of negative adaptations and things that were detrimental to my well-being and to my relationships. That’s when I needed to make a break from it and then set myself free from that so that I can hopefully run off of a clean fuel source, if you will. It’s fascinating.

It works and it’s wonderful when you find a reasonably effective “drug” of choice. In this case, achievement was yours. It’s wonderful as a coping mechanism in that moment. Eventually, it is important to wake up and realize that as I practice that mechanism, I reinforce my belief that I’m so damaged and broken, that it needs to be hidden.

I make it more real for me the longer I go on. It’s all okay. It just everything I do has consequences and ripples that come with it. I’m free to deal with those ripples either with shame and blame or with release and joy. That’s important to understand, that it was perfectly okay that you did those things. Now that you know better or differently now you can do differently.

Breaking The Performance Loop: Identity Shift And The Relief Of Letting Go

It’s okay. It’s time to let go. We move through these chapters of life or these seasons and sometimes, we’re getting very clear signs internally and externally that it’s time for this season of life to come to an end. The work that I do, reaching back out to Silicon Valley, because I’m still tied into those circles and do coaching for some entrepreneurs, executives and folks very similar to myself, where there’s something in them that’s just screaming like, “I’m exhausted and I can’t do this anymore, but I don’t know why I can’t stop.”

As we move through these chapters and seasons of life, we sometimes receive very clear internal and external signs that a season is ending. Share on X

I still spend quite a bit of time and communicate and write essays and share my messages with Silicon Valley. My message is quite simple. We don’t recognize how much of our success and our high achievers are driven fundamentally by pain, driven by a low sense of self. We consider ourselves free from that. It may require letting go of this thing that became the foundation of your identity of Andy the achiever. What’s the world going to think of me if I’m not starting companies anymore, leading these big technology initiatives?

It’s a very difficult change. It’s an identity shift of the most fundamental level that folks like professional athletes and people have long tenures in military and as first responders where you develop such an identity around whatever your work is, it’s very hard to walk away from that. It’s doubly difficult when it’s trauma that’s undergirding it. That’s really my message to Silicon Valley and to those folks who reach out or who may read this as well. It’s like, “It’s okay. You don’t have to keep performing forever. You don’t have to climb all the mountains.”

It’s okay because your worth isn’t dependent upon your performance. That’s just an internal belief that you downloaded. It isn’t the actuality. The actuality is if you’re alive, you have the same value as everybody else that’s alive. You can live it, you can hide it, you can actualize it, or you can stifle it, but it’s there. You’re never going to be separated from your true value in your true essence. You can create a dream of separation, you can create the illusion, you can buy into a negative belief about yourself and then create an experience that’s very different. However, it doesn’t change the fact that you have value just because you’re alive and there’s a breath of life in you.

Coming from somebody who’s been through that journey, whatever relief it’s been to finally say, “After 30 years of being at or near the top that everything I tried to do and the exhaustion that comes from that, and the pressure and the weight, what a relief to finally drift into this place where it’s like, “No, I can do good work when it feels aligned with who I really am,” especially when it’s serving and helping other people.

Just make enough money to provide for the essentials of existence. The money isn’t the primary metric anymore either. To be able to spend a meaningful portion of my time in self-care and rest and in connection with others, what a relief. It feels nice. It’s like a new suit that I’m still getting used to because I was in that achiever mindset for 30 years, a long time, those patterns run deep. What a relief.

The Healing Power Of Non-Ordinary States & Spiritual Awakenings

What’s a recap you’d like to do or a whole different area you might want to explore that we haven’t touched on yet, either about your own personal work or your future plans or the IMHU?

I think with IMHU and with the topic of non-ordinary states of consciousness, for me, that’s such an important topic because these non-ordinary states that I experienced were the most important of all of the mental health, trauma and individuation work that I’ve done. Not just in my experience, but that of now, I’d say at least 100 or 200 other people who I know personally or who I have connected with through the process of my own journey and writing about it.

People have reached out to me, or in the spiritual communities that I’m now a part of, I now know of so many other people where the non-ordinary states is where the deepest healing and transformation happened. For me, it’s just been completely eye-opening. Especially as somebody who was a typical rational materialist, very into if math and physics says it’s possible, then I can believe it.

It was that typical, rational atheist who has now swung in the other direction, in large part because of these non-ordinary experiences. For me, that’s a fascinating topic. Just to give it a little definition for non-ordinary, that’s any state of consciousness other than say what you and I are experiencing right now, your day-to-day identity-based consciousness.

Awake, alert, sober.

For me, it’s been a dream space as a non-ordinary space that’s been essential. That’s where I’ve deepened my training there from a Jungian perspective and dream analysis. I’ve seen that in so many others where the dream world is the subconscious minds attempt at wholeness and reconciliation.

It’s just your mind. It’s just processing, but it doesn’t have the super eagle part engaged or the part that worries about, “Am I passing gas in public or drooling?” That part shut off but the rest of it still functions.

It’s functioning even better. The psychedelic therapies an incredibly powerful space. I don’t say that’s for everyone. It’s not something that I recommend in the sense of telling everyone you should go and do it. I think it’s something that you either to feel called to do or you don’t, and you have to trust that inner wisdom around it, and you have to be prepared for it.

The other metaphor I give is to compare it to like mountain climbing. I can take a helicopter to the summit of Mount Everest and I’ll get there quick, but that’s probably an unwise idea. It turns out you can’t survive very long on the summit of Mountain Everest. There’s a reason that when you go to climb any big mountain, you’ll climatize. You steadily prepare.

You let the body acclimate to it. Just like coming up from the bottom of the ocean. If you don’t decompress in the proper manner, you’re in big trouble.

It’s an exciting new field of medicine, and I’m glad that it’s in the world. Along with that comes a bit of almost like a consciousness tourism where, where some people jump into it too quickly or they just want a big experience. These things are to be taken seriously and to be prepared for it, and for the psyche to be capable of integrating whatever it may bring.

That’s been powerful for me. There’s also been non-ordinary states that I entered into spontaneously. I had my spiritual awakening sitting in my home office in 2021. It happened out of nowhere. I would say if there was anything I did to instigate it, it was that I left my old identity behind. I stepped away from the primary coping mechanism that allowed me to avoid the inner pain.

In an entirely sober state, I had this transcendent experience with something beyond myself. In a moment, it fundamentally changed me. I had the experience of it wiping away what felt like a huge portion of my programmed identity. I began to see myself much more clearly with a flood of insights and sudden awareness of myself, but also of others around me.

That was an experience that the scientific literature can’t speak to. It’s not only the experience that I’ve had, but that people have had throughout all of human history. This is a ubiquitous experience. That non-ordinary state of these transcendent spiritual awakenings that people have, they’re powerful and they need to be understood and to recognize not as some sign of illness or something powerful.

 

The Systemic Problem: Pathologizing Spiritual Experiences (Grof & Esalen)

In the system that we have, which labels these things as symptoms of a disease process, you can just see instantly there how your response to it would be dramatically different than if you’re seeing it as part of the healing growth process.

Sometimes, like joke, but it’s not fully a joke. There are some psychiatrists today who have the just very myopic biomedical view that there are no other possible explanations that if the Buddha or if Jesus came into their office and described to them the non-ordinary states that they experienced, they would’ve given them a pill. That would not have been beneficial to the transformation that led to those individuals becoming the important folks that they are, that they were.

The non-ordinary states, and this is something that at Integrative Mental Health University, that’s what we focus on, is when working with practitioners, they can be therapists, psychiatrists, nurse practitioners, spiritual coaches, life coaches, you name it. When they come to our trainings, it’s often because they themselves have these experiences and they’ve realized like, “There’s something going else going on here that wasn’t covered in my textbook.”

A part of me knows that this is a good thing or many of their patients exhibit the symptoms of something where they say like, I’m not sure if this is just “pure” mental illness, especially in the psychiatric hospitals where somebody may be describing something that they consider a spiritual experience. They may be having interactions with a powerful spirit or deity.

The immediate accusation is, “No, this is schizophrenia psychosis, so let’s just shut those symptoms down.” They’re recognizing that actually, this person seems very genuine about this, and there seems to be an emotive quality to it that is positive. The folks that I have met who have had these transcendent experiences with something that they perceived and experienced as a spirit or an entity of sorts, and then gone through some often-tumultuous process of a lot of emotional and energetic material moving through them, what ends up happening is they come out the other side of it and they’re much more deeply loving people.

Quite often, that’s the case. We may never know how much more often it could be the case if these experiences were treated lovingly and with respect as opposed to medicated into numbness.

One interesting anecdote I came across when listening to an interview with Stanislav Grof of transpersonal psychology fame, and all sorts of things, and Christina Grof, but he was talking about these non-ordinary states. He gave the example of one of the gentlemen who was the founder of Esalen, one of the more important spiritual institutes on the West Coast of the United States.

He had gone through spiritual emergencies, exhibiting signs of extreme distress, psychosis, you name it. First time it happened, he was hospitalized to a psychiatric hospital, and after a few weeks or a month or so, he gets out and then it happens again and he is hospitalized another time. Eventually, he gets out and then it happens again.

This time around, he just told a friend, he’s like, “I’m not going into the hospital. I’m not going to get medicated. That experience has been very negative for me. I just need you to be here with me for a while in this cabin set up. If I need food or I need a hug or support, just be here with me for a while.” He went through it. At some point down that gentleman’s path, he ends up being one of the creators of the Eselan Institute, which has gone on to do all sorts of amazing healing and transformation work in the world. That’s not the only example. There are many examples.

Connect With Andy Johns And IMHU

If they don’t fit the model, then the current medical model just ignores them and doesn’t explore them or analyze them. That’s why we’d like to have people like you out there and the IMHU, the Integrative Mental Health University, to be exploring it and to be teaching people, to be working with others in that way. This is phenomenal and I greatly appreciate your taking the time to share with us. How do you prefer people reach out to you?

A couple of ways. My email is AJ@IMHU.org. It’s one. You can also find me on LinkedIn. If you search for Andrew Johns IMHU, you should be able to find me on LinkedIn as well.

Excellent. I greatly appreciate you taking the time and time. I’m grateful for the work you’re doing, and thanks for taking the time to share it with us.

Yeah, likewise. Thank you, Tim.

—

Andy Johns spent a notable career in Silicon Valley over a seventeen-year period, working as an executive and advisor to CEOs and an investor with ten multibillion-dollar startups. He’s a visionary as well as a grounded, skilled businessman with a profound history of own personal. His current mission is to help others transform themselves and find a higher purpose. He also enjoys writing about mental health, spirituality, and personal transformation, as well as coaching people through spiritual awakenings.

 

 

Important Links

• Andrew Johns on LinkedIn
• Integrative Mental Health University
• Function Health
• Andy Johns Email

 

About Andy Johns

After notable success in Silicon Valley over a 17-year career, working as an executive, an advisor to CEOs, and an investor with ten multi-billion-dollar startups.  He is a visionary as well as a grounded, skilled businessman with a profound story of his own personal transformation. His current  mission is to help others transform themselves and find a higher purpose.   Andy also enjoys writing about mental health, spirituality, and personal transformation, as well as coaching people through spiritual awakenings.

 

 

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