John Wood, Founder of Rageheart – How To Turn Mind Control, Manipulation and Psychological Abuse Into Deep Healing, The Benefits Of Trusting Your Gut, Unleashing The Beast With Nervous System Work, And More (#1)

My name is John Wood and I’m the founder of Rageheart, a company that helps people unleash the beast inside them by working directly with their nervous system and fight-or-flight response.

Before I discovered nervous system work, I tried most things people try to make themselves happier, less anxious and more fulfilled.

Meditation, gratitude lists, breath work, journaling, therapy and yes, even copious amounts of sugar, porn and international travel.

But it all paled in comparison to nervous system work.

That is…

Working directly with my fight-or-flight response, learning how to move through all the feeling states we’re designed to move through and cultivating safety at every level of my being.

In this episode, you’ll hear a story about some dangerous people I met in Thailand and how it led me to the world of nervous system healing. You’ll discover mind control techniques that cults use as well as how to inoculate yourself again these sorts of manipulative games. And you’ll see how it all led to Rageheart – the company behind this podcast.

Enjoy!

Thanks for listening to this podcast with me, John Wood! Join the free daily newsletter and unleash the beast in 7.3 minutes a day.

In This Episode Of The Rageheart Podcast With John Wood, You’ll Discover:

• the simple intention of “purpose, passion and profit” and how it led to one of the weirdest and most insane psychedelic journeys I’ve ever had (complete with aliens, torture and narcissistic lunatics who tried to brainwash me)
• the tragic costs of ignoring your gut instincts (and how to reactivate those beastly instincts to increase safety, drive and purpose in your life)
• how cults, gurus, religions and authoritarian groups control you by making you feel like a piece of shit (it’s the oldest trick in the book – here’s how to beat it once and for all)
• how bad experiences are often great experiences in disguise (if only we can see them in a certain light)
• how this journey of aliens, psychedelics and brainwashing led to Rageheart (and how it became one of the biggest growth experiences of my entire life)

Links From The Episode:

• The Daily Rage (Rageheart’s daily email newsletter)
• Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults by Steven Hassan
• The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power by Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad
• How To Block and Repel A Manipulator’s Tactics (a Udemy course by Joe Fedison
• The Soul Doctors Scam: Dangerous, Destructive and Dishonest

Podcast Shorts:

Transcription:

All right, this is John Wood here, the founder of Rageheart. And I’m here with the very first Unleash the Beast podcast episode. If this is your first time, or whether this is your first time, first, like I’m an American, I’m not. If this is your first time, last time, second or third time, whatever it is, I’d like to welcome you as a fellow beast, as an animal. You’ll find out more about what that means.

know already. Now before we or as we begin take a moment to feel the ground beneath you, the surface, the chair, whatever it happens to be. Look around the room that you’re in.

John Wood (00:57.050)
We call this orienting to the environment in this work of unleashing the beast. Orienting to seeing what’s happening around you and also noticing your breath weaving that in together.

John Wood (01:13.370)
This is just a way to drop in to your body, to get out of the head, out of the monkey mind, out of all the thoughts we have about our day, about our work.

John Wood (01:23.930)
and to help the system, the nervous system, which we’re gonna be talking a lot about in this podcast, how to help the nervous system to come out of fight or flight or freeze and down into what’s called parasympathetic rest and digest, the place where we digest food, when we connect socially, when we love, all those things. Okay, now we will get more into the why of why I’m talking like this, what this whole thing is with the beast, feeling the ground, blah, blah, blah,

John Wood (01:53.950)
as well as throughout Rage Heart, throughout the Unleash the Beast podcast. So yeah, stay tuned for that. I’m here in my office, here in Peru of all places, the Sacred Valley, and behind my computer on the couch, I have two little kittens, Storm and Zeus. And they’re actually looking pretty, pretty zen right now, you know, as cats do. But just a half, just half an hour ago, they were tearing holes in my jacket. So this is a bit of an old jacket.

little hole here so one of them will come up and if you’re not watching the video you won’t be able to see this but they’ll come up and start chewing they see a little bit of string or a little bit of thread coming out they’re like oh what happens if I just pull on this and pull some more and pull some more until you know the hole is just gaping wide so good times and I was doing my Spanish practice at the same time I’m here in Peru so my Spanish is okay we’re getting there you can have some basic conversations but we’ve got some work to

before before we get fluent so Yeah Anyway now in today’s episode the first episode episode one of the unleashed bees podcast. I Want to give you an overview of what this beast thing is all about because it’s probably not what you think It’s not what most people think it is right. It’s not about success It’s not really about making money or being a beast in the gym lifting a certain amount of weight It’s not about those things

These things can come, some form of success or achievement can come as a result of unleashing the beast in the way that I’m going to explain. But it’s not really the point. The point is to be healthy and happy and whole. A lot of that comes from unleashing, waking up, however you want to put it, this beast, this animal side, this instinctual aspect of ourselves. Each week, I’m going to play with it. This is a new podcast, right? I’m going to be trying different things, seeing what resonates with you.

listener and over time, I’m sure it’ll evolve and I’ll drop things and add things in. But at least for this first time, I want to have an element or a segment, we might call it, called the beast of the week. And the intention for this is that if you were, if something cool happens to you, especially in relation to what we talk about on the Unleash the Beast podcast, to the nervous system, the fight or flight response, psychedelics, I would love it if you could tell me, if you feel like sharing, tell me and I will mention you.

John Wood (04:23.890)
the week segment. Okay. This week because it’s episode one, I don’t really have any audience submissions. So I’m going to go with Storm, the little kitten, one of the little kittens on the couch just in front of me just this morning. I saw her walking along, across or along a round wooden beam on my back porch without flinching, without twitching or falling off. Just like cats do, you know, just so still like a ninja, a little ninja. Okay.

John Wood (04:53.850)
If you’d like to be featured in a future Beast of the Week, like I said, send me something cool that happened to you, some achievement, something that demonstrates your beastliness. I’ll let you interpret that however you like for now. Send an email to johnatrageheart, instead of Braveheart, it’s rageheart.co, or you can just Google Rage Heart, I think that’ll take you right to the website too, and you can find a contact form. And another segment I’d like to start off with,

John Wood (05:23.850)
people tell me not to do it is a review of the week from little old Zeus. He’s the he’s actually pretty young he’s not really old but that’s the other kitten on the couch in front of me. He’s storms bigger or littler brother I’m not sure I don’t know who got born first they got born together so technically I suppose they’re twins I’m not really sure either way but his review 187 gold stars John 47

John Wood (05:54.090)
That’s what happens sometimes with Zushi or Storm. I don’t really know to be honest. They miss that They don’t like the cutie litter. They go they It’s right there and they’ll they’ll do a shit right next to it. It’s like guys Do you need a map like? What’s going on? What do we need to do here? How do we fix this? So, uh, this is this is my life cleaning up shit catch it If you’re enjoying the show head over to itunes or whatever podcast app you’d like to use and uh

John Wood (06:23.850)
Ideally 5 stars of course or 187 stars like Zeus if you can. Tell me what you like about it. And if you do need to go to the bathroom, remember to use the litter box please. Okay. Alright, so, unleash the beast. What the hell am I on about?

John Wood (07:23.770)
All right, so Unleash the Beast. What the hell am I talking about? What is this beast thing? Well, to keep things interesting, rather than throwing a bunch of facts at you, I wanna begin with a story from my own life on the origin of the podcast of the Unleash the Beast, how I got into this, and really the origin of Raychart, which is the company I started, which is really what this podcast is partly for or from.

John Wood (07:53.730)
It’ll all begin to make sense. Okay. So a few years ago, and you may have heard this story. If you’ve heard me on other podcasts, if you’ve been following me for any amount of time, you may have heard some, uh, some variation of this story. Uh, there may be some new details here. There may not, but this is really intended for people who are new to the podcast. You want to learn a bit more about me, a bit more about the unleashed, the beast thing, and, and, uh, get some, get some grounding, get some context, uh, for all

interviews and things that are happening with Rage Heart and Unleash the Beast. Okay. So like I said, a few years ago, I met some very dangerous people. Now, I was in Thailand at the time, and I was part of like a business networking group, not the typical place where you would expect to find dangerous people. Nonetheless, I’ll explain why I keep

John Wood (08:53.650)
business mastermind thing and we found out we were both in Chiang Mai and then thought hey let’s go get dinner together so we went to a nice vegan restaurant classic Chiang Mai style I’m not a vegan tried it for a while didn’t work for me but so we went to this vegan restaurant had dinner and I had a great time they were lovely it was a married couple and they were seemed anyway at the time quite lovely we were into similar things you know we read the same books we were

psychedelics, plant medicine, magic mushrooms and ayahuasca and all the stuff people talk about. I walked away from that thinking, wow, these guys, I really hope we become friends. They seem really cool. I’d love to learn from them and get to know them. You know when you meet someone and you feel really connected and drawn and you’re excited because you found a new friend. That’s how I felt when I first met these people. A few months later, I had lunch with them and same thing. I was like, wow, these people are great.

like them, let’s keep seeing them. And over the following few months, following year, we, me and someone else, we would go out to lunch with them and we would hang out and we would go to their house and I’d play hide and seek with their kids. So it was, it seems like it was quite a, you know, just a friendship, right? And I was enjoying it, but somewhere along the way, I started to have a, what would I say, like a…

John Wood (10:21.832)
A funny feeling.

John Wood (10:24.930)
I don’t know what to call it other than that, but something, I still like these people, right, this couple, but something was off. Every now and then they would say something or do something and something in me would be a bit like, I couldn’t fully put my finger on it or explain it or put words to it, but something just wasn’t connecting. Right? It’s like there was a, if I was going to put words on it now, I’d probably say something like every now and then they might say something that just didn’t feel congruent. It didn’t add up.

John Wood (10:54.930)
make sense. I’m like, hey, but you said this, how are you saying this now? Like, that doesn’t make sense. Now these days I would pay attention to that. But back then, before I learned to connect with the body, before I’d unleashed the beast inside me, right? I ignored that feeling because I’d spent, like a lot of people, I’d spent my entire life not listening to my feelings, right? I lived very much in my head. I made my decisions through thinking.

John Wood (11:24.910)
And I had no idea that was the catch. I guess if I did, it wouldn’t have been, I wouldn’t have been so mental, but especially in the Western Western world, our culture, we’re raised to think. We’re not raised to feel, look at school. Yeah. Look at our schoolworks. It’s all about thinking, all about getting the right answer on the test. It is not absolutely not about feeling being in touch with your gut for various reasons, which I’m not going to go into right now. So anyway, so I have this funny feeling with these people and something’s off.

John Wood (11:55.614)
and I ignored it.

John Wood (12:00.490)
It was very subtle. It’s not like it’s an overwhelming thing. I wasn’t having a panic attack. It was just this just like a little. That’s how I describe it to people. I’m like, just, you know, they’d say something and I’d be like, I don’t know. I don’t know about that. So so anyway, a few months, I don’t know, maybe a year, almost a year after I’d met them. So I found out we were doing this a long before this. I’m jumping around a bit here. Please forgive me if this is confusing. We go back a little bit earlier.

John Wood (12:30.370)
decided to do sort of like a coaching swap, right? Where they needed some help with their marketing. I wanted to learn more about their life coaching thing, whatever they, they’re different. They call it quantum healing. They’re always fancy buzzwords. It all seems like a joke now, but at the time it seemed like, oh wow, this is interesting. So I was like, all right, you tell me what you know about life and psychedelics and whatever, and I’ll help you, you know, find a better way to communicate what you’re doing and get more customers and get your message out there essentially. Because that’s what I’d done for 10 years for other people, other companies. So we did this thing

we’d go back and forth and they’d send me some things to look at. Hey, we wrote this email. Can you just make sure it like sounds good? We wrote this ad, we wrote this thing that and then they would, you know, I’d be out asking the questions about what do you think about this? I had this happen, you know, in an Oscar ceremony. What do you think about that kind of thing? And so this went on for a good few months, a good year ish, bit less than a year. And but then at one day she one of the this is married couple, right? One day the woman.

John Wood (13:30.670)
sends me a Facebook ad to get some feedback from me. And the first line said, get unstuck and on purpose. And when I read that, I’m like, I need that. I want that. You know, in just some context, my life at that point, I grew up in Sydney, Australia, but by that point, I’d been living overseas for almost 10 years, running, you know, with an online business. I’d lived in, probably coming up on 20 different countries.

John Wood (14:00.830)
So really cool lifestyle. I had a wonderful girlfriend at the time. We’re no longer together because of, partly because of what I’m about to explain to you what happened with these people. But great, yeah, good relationship at the time, great lifestyle living overseas, you know, good friends. Life was…

John Wood (14:21.170)
Decent, I would say. By many, from the outside looking in, it’s like life, you should be happy, fulfilled. And yet, I’d say at least for four or five years, I’d felt quite empty. I wouldn’t say I was clinically depressed, I never got diagnosed or anything, but there was certainly felt like there was a dampener on everything. You know, I had nice things and I had a nice lifestyle and nice people around me and things like that for the most part, but I wasn’t stoked.

I was stoked to be living the life that I was living. I wasn’t fulfilled. There wasn’t a deep sense of meaning or purpose. You know, looking back as well, I was so in my head without even realizing it. You know, there’s all kinds of different issues. I had to drink a lot of coffee to get anything done. I actually found it very difficult to be motivated with my business because I didn’t really care about what I was doing. So I’d get by, I’d make money, but I wasn’t really, certainly wasn’t making the most of my potential.

John Wood (15:22.590)
So when I read that line, get unstuck in on purpose, I’m thinking, man, that’s exactly what I need. That’s, you know, you just described my problem better than I could. I feel stuck in certain ways. And I’ve been, I feel like this, feel like I’ve been like this for years. And I don’t want it to keep going. And so I want to get unstuck.

John Wood (15:43.890)
and on purpose, get unstuck and on purpose. So I read that and then told this couple that, hey, I actually want to hire them. Instead of just doing a coaching swap, which was there was no money exchange at that point, I wanted to actually hire them, pay them for like a coaching thing. So I did, I paid them $3,000, US dollars, not a small amount of money, for what amounted to a few phone calls and a mushroom ceremony. It was essentially, and maybe a little bit of WhatsApp access,

back and forth with voice messages. The calls weren’t really anything to talk about, pretty standard shit, but the mushroom ceremony was probably the weirdest and most insane mushroom ceremony I’ve ever had.

John Wood (16:31.993)
Ahem ahem ahem ahem

John Wood (16:39.870)
So in this mushroom ceremony, I went around to their house, Magic Mushrooms, not a Shiitake mushrooms, or lines made, Magic Mushrooms. So I went around to their place and they asked me what my intention was and I’d written out a whole page of stuff. And…

John Wood (16:57.750)
Essentially it boiled down to, I worked out, purpose, passion, and profit. I wanted something, I wanted to find something I could believe in, right? That’s the purpose, something that I enjoyed doing, that’s the passion, and then the profit was a reference to something that I could make money with. You know, I didn’t want to be like a bum with something I believed in, but no way to actually turn it into an income, right? So that was my intention going in, and in a weird way, which I’ll explain later, actually turned out to become the mushrooms delivered.

more than in the most incredible way, but in a way that I completely did not plan for or expect. So what happened, we’re sitting on the veranda here in Chiang Mai, it’s about six o’clock, the sun’s just gone down and this couple, the married couple, the man and the woman, they hand me a mushroom chocolate. And we all take one, so we each have a mushroom chocolate, I don’t really know how much was in it, might have been a gram, might have been three grams. And then we sit there and we, you know, chill a little bit, we chat a little bit,

John Wood (17:57.750)
Breathe.

John Wood (18:00.110)
And then I don’t know how long in the man, he starts talking in an alien language. And I mean that literally, like at least how it sounded. If I think about Star Wars, where the aliens talk, you know, in their different groups, it’s always something weird like this, where it’s like, like really weird, staccato, strange, guttural sounds, you know, no human language sounds like this.

as far as I understand. And so this dude starts talking like this. Not to me or his wife, he starts talking like that as if he’s, it’s almost as if he’s on the phone, except he’s not holding a phone. It’s like a, I know this probably sounds insane to some people, but it’s like he’s on the phone to some aliens or some beings of some kind who aren’t physically present with us. And yeah, as crazy as that sounds, we’ve just had mushrooms. I’m like, all right, let’s go with it. This is pretty out there for me.

I like these people, I think I trust them. So let’s just see where it goes. So he’s talking in this language for a while, and I guess they’re telling him stuff, apparently. But eventually it gets too loud. And so he or his wife suggests, let’s go inside. So the neighbors don’t think something really weird is going on.

John Wood (19:22.470)
So we…

John Wood (23:46.392)
Enjoy.

John Wood (24:07.750)
視聴ありがとうございました

John Wood (24:25.650)
So we… Where the wee is going on. His wife suggests… So he or someone, him or his wife suggests let’s go inside. So the neighbours don’t think something really wee is going on.

John Wood (24:38.530)
I think it’s interesting. Like it’s boring for me. But.

John Wood (24:45.857)
It is.

John Wood (25:13.050)
Ahem.

John Wood (25:19.170)
So we decided to move inside, we moved inside. And that was when things started to get really fucking weird.

John Wood (25:30.970)
So there’s a mattress in the living room floor, and the dude, the man sits on my right hand side, the woman on my left, and the dude, this 50, 45 year old dude, this man starts, or continues with his alien voice, with his alien language, like he’s on the phone with these cats in another galaxy somewhere, apparently. And he’s, at the same time, he’s doing like a, like an energy, energy work, I suppose,

This is for people who have you never done this before it’s sort of like doing Reiki or something like that Like I’m lying there and he’s moving his hands. He’s not physically touching me He’s moving his hands up and down my body I suppose looking for blockages and things like that because that was part of the the ceremony is well Why can’t why is John stuck and not on purpose? Let’s go find that we you know the blocks basically So he’s scanning with his hands Again, if you’ve never done psychedelics before I understand this might sound crazy. I never used to believe in any of this shit either Now I still don’t know how any of it works

but I do think there’s something to it. I don’t know the exact mechanism or, you know, like I said, how it works, but there’s definitely something to these different things that people can do. Not always, some people are full of shit, as you’ll find out soon with this story, but.

John Wood (26:50.390)
Yeah, there’s something to it. So anyway, so he’s scanning with his hands, moving his hands up and down my body. And I guess fixing things every now and then he’d like stop and pause and sort of shift his hands around like he’s moving things around, changing things, that kind of thing. And eventually he does this for a while and I’m just chilling. This wasn’t too bad. He’s still talking to these dudes. I think whoever he happens to be talking to is helping him do whatever he’s doing, apparently. And yes, I’m just breathing.

John Wood (27:20.330)
sitting there I don’t remember her saying that much at this point.

John Wood (27:25.810)
And he’s almost done. You know when people are on the phone and it sounds like they’re wrapping up, they’re almost finished. So the way they talk, it almost feels like they’re about to hang up. So it started to sound like that, like he’s just from the tone, that it was almost over.

John Wood (27:39.830)
And then he stopped. He’s like, oh, oh, what’s that? Like he just caught something at the last second right before he hung up.

John Wood (27:50.072)
And so he.

John Wood (27:54.030)
then explains, John, I’ve discovered why you are stuck and not on purpose. And what comes out from this dude’s mouth is that, John, you killed 20 million people in a past life. Two million of them deserved it, so let’s call it 18 million innocent lives. And as a result, you now have 18 million locks on your power because these aliens that I’m talking to on another planet,

galaxy, not on earth, are saying that you’re too dangerous, too powerful and too dark to release. So while I would like to open you up and release all these locks in you, I can’t. I’m not allowed to.

John Wood (28:40.450)
In addition to that, he, I forgot about this, I only remembered this the other day. In addition to that, he said to clear or to, to get them to kind of release on almost like a proviso, almost like to be on probation, someone has to feel the pain of 18 million deaths. For some reason it couldn’t be me, I don’t know why, but this dude’s like, I can do it. So for a while he’s staring at me

John Wood (29:10.350)
probably horrified look in his eyes, while he apparently felt the pain of 18 million people dying.

John Wood (29:19.650)
Imagine what it would be, you know, how your parents would look at you if they suddenly found out that you’d killed someone.

John Wood (29:27.150)
Maybe you had a car accident and you’d run someone off the road and killed a little girl. Just one person. A little girl or a little boy or a family or something like that. Just imagine the horror and the disappointment in your parents’ eyes.

John Wood (29:42.970)
And now think about this dude, I’m on mushrooms and this dude’s looking at me.

John Wood (29:48.950)
Like I’ve killed 18 million innocent people in a supposed past life. Just imagine how he would be looking at me in that moment. Like I’m essentially, if I go by numbers alone, that’s three times worse than Hitler. Right, so think about how you would look at Hitler. You’d look at him like with horror, absolute horror at the kind of person who could do that. This is how this guy was looking at me while I’m on mushrooms.

John Wood (30:19.270)
supposedly feeling the paint so he’s contorting and twisting and moaning like he’s really going through it. It was pretty pretty insane pretty I’ve never had an experience quite like this

John Wood (30:33.130)
So eventually, I think the where he gets to with it is, okay, the pain’s been felt and cleared, the karmic debt has been paid. And now we can, we can’t fully unlock John, but we can sort of release him on probation. But he tells me you’ll be on a very short leash, John.

John Wood (30:50.090)
And later that night, his wife, you know, I like to ask a lot of questions, right? I’m a tend to be quite skeptical, especially of things like this. And so I asked them a lot of questions afterwards to kind of wrap my head around what the hell had happened. And they answered a few, but at some point the wife, she was not happy with the questions I was asking. Perhaps she felt threatened or insecure.

John Wood (31:14.030)
And she started telling me that I’m arrogant, that it’s all part of this dark past that I have, that I just need to trust them.

John Wood (31:23.930)
And that was just that night. But sort of in the months, and this is probably why I had that funny feeling, sort of in the months leading up to that and the months following that, the undermining continued, right? So they continued to tell me whenever I had doubts, whenever I got skeptical, they would tell me that I’m.

John Wood (31:46.470)
It’s just my trust issues coming up. It’s just my dark past. I remember the dude, we were talking about past lives, and I know this can sound crazy depending on what kind of person you are and what you’re up to, but he was talking, these people were just pretty, this couple were very out there. So he was talking about incarnating. We incarnate into a lineage, into our families, based on our past lives before that, how good or bad we’ve been. And so my family, like a lot of families, there’s a lot of pain there,

I’m my family in this life. And this guy went so far as to say that I barely was good enough to incarnate into that family life.

John Wood (32:28.710)
So you see there was this constant campaign, I suppose you could call it, to make me feel like I’m dark, that I’m arrogant, that I have trust issues, anger issues. And I didn’t really see what was going on at the time. I’m not saying I believed it 100%. To me it seemed a bit ridiculous, but I also couldn’t disprove it either. And so I think how my experience going through this was the real tricky thing,

John Wood (32:59.511)
to use that word again, dark. The real evil thing about these kinds of games that people play is the doubts that it creates. Because then I start to think, well, I don’t know if they’re right or wrong. I have no way of proving or disproving it. But what if they are right?

John Wood (33:17.230)
What if I am the bad person they keep telling me?

John Wood (33:23.430)
What if they’re the only people who can fix me?

John Wood (33:27.450)
because no one else is going to understand this. I can tell, the people I told about this, only a few people to begin with, they thought it was insane. So no one else is going to understand. So if I believe in it, even just a little bit, it means I need to keep working with them. It means I need to keep giving them money and time and energy.

John Wood (33:49.750)
Now I didn’t realize this at first. I remember I told my dad at the time and he said, for whatever reason, it was the strangest thing. I wasn’t thinking straight. It took me a while to come out of this whole thing, which is gonna lead into this Unleash the Beast idea.

John Wood (34:08.010)
So I told a few people, my dad being one of them, and I remember him saying, look, if they told something like this to someone who was more emotionally fragile, mentally fragile, someone who was depressed and suicidal to begin with, and then they did a healing ceremony like this with them, it’s not unreasonable to think that this person could go out and kill themselves. They could be so distraught, so depressed. If they’re on the edge of suicide already, and then you told them that they killed millions of people

John Wood (34:37.950)
classrooms.

John Wood (34:41.790)
they could go out and kill themselves the next day. Or if they already feel like they’re a bad person, they might be like, well, if I did it in a past life, why not do it in this life and then grab a gun and go shoot some people?

John Wood (34:55.750)
And even that, I mean my dad told me that, like shortly after this ceremony with these clowns. And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I still didn’t really get it. I wasn’t ready to, for whatever reason, accept it. So I kept hanging out with these coaches. We’d go to lunch with them and dinner and we’d get playing hide and seek with the kids. And I’d have different issues. I’d mentioned, like I mentioned that thing my dad said to them and I’d have my own doubts and I’d ask them about them. And every time

John Wood (35:25.649)
strategy was to put it back on me. Like, John, you’re just thinking too much. John, you’re doing your mind. John, you’re just projecting. Really, it’s just your anger issues and trust issues coming up. And once we work through those, like you’ll understand everything.

John Wood (35:41.070)
This went on and on and on and I think somewhere around three months after this ceremony.

John Wood (35:48.590)
I still wasn’t feeling great about the whole thing.

John Wood (35:53.150)
But three months later, I started learning about the nervous system and the fight or flight response and this idea that…

John Wood (36:04.750)
as a culture, as people. We are by and large very disconnected from our survival instincts. We are perpetually in a state of fight or flight, very often freeze, functional freeze. And this keeps us in our head, it keeps us disconnected from our body, from our instincts, from our funny feelings that tell us when something is wrong, when someone is dangerous. And so I started learning about this stuff. My sister had been working through some things with a therapist who, there’s different modalities

with the nervous system but she’d been working with someone to process some things in her life through this with these nervous system techniques as well. So she told me about it. I’m like that sounds fucking great. I need to check that shit out. So I did some research, found some information, started practicing.

John Wood (36:53.630)
Very quickly, two emotions became apparent or obvious. Not his thoughts, but I could feel it. And one of them.

John Wood (37:08.070)
was grief because the woman I was dating at the time, who by that point I was already starting to think about kids and family and marriage, it was getting serious, right? So in love, it was my first time I’d been in love, I would say officially, legit. He was great, but she’d been working with these coaches too and they, just like they’d gotten in my head, they’d gotten in her head about me. John’s dark, John’s arrogant, John has trust issues, John has anger issues. And so I realized,

John Wood (37:38.430)
I started to realize what these people were really like. I felt very sad, like a pit of grief, because I realized that that relationship I had with this girl was effectively over, because I would bring up my concerns with what these people had done, and she would just think, oh John, it’s just your trust issues, it’s just your anchor issues. She would parrot out the responses

John Wood (38:08.930)
had programmed her to say. It was like a programmed response. And so I was so sad at the time, this is three years ago now, I was so so so sad when I realized this because we tried to talk about it and I could just see that they they’d gotten so so in her head. It was too late. It was too late for me to stop the the negative undermining that they’d done. And with that, with that realization also came

John Wood (38:40.530)
rage that I had never, I don’t think I’d ever felt anger or rage like this before. And this is coming from someone who

John Wood (38:51.430)
You know, a year before that, if you asked me, do you ever get angry? I would have said, no, I’m just not an angry person. They are occasionally in traffic, maybe someone cuts me off, but for the most part, anger is just not really part of my life. Like I just never, never really got angry. I don’t think I ever really cried very often either.

John Wood (39:15.550)
I didn’t feel much. But when I started learning about the nervous system and started learning how to get into the body, into feeling what was actually happening there, all of a sudden, there was that grief, and I was crying, like tears. It was a lot. As I realized what had really happened with these coaches, and anger, that someone had crossed a line. They had messed with my romantic relationship,

John Wood (39:47.482)
grief and anger.

John Wood (39:50.930)
And that’s just an example of what can happen when we start to drop into our body, into the nervous system. And to me, this is really what it means to unleash the beast. It’s not lifting a certain amount of weight or making a certain amount of money. Like I said, it’s about being in touch. With our instincts, with our emotions, being able to feel them and express them and know know what to do with them.

John Wood (40:15.790)
And so after I started to feel all this stuff, I remember too, I tried to talk again once more, tried to talk to the coaches and like, look, this really isn’t making sense. I still held out hope that maybe I just misunderstood, maybe I’d gotten it all wrong. So I tried talking to them again. And I was again told that John, we’re not gonna discuss what we did with you, but if you want help dealing with those thoughts in your head, we can help you sort of make the thoughts go away.

John Wood (40:46.610)
the ceremony or whether it was good or bad or right or wrong. So the message was, John, we’re fine. We’re okay. You’re the one with the problem, John. You’re the one who’s got an issue here, not us. We’re fine. We’re perfect. We’re blameless. Now, I didn’t really know what was happening here. Again, something felt off. Like I felt just, oh, it just doesn’t feel right. Like I get what they’re saying and maybe it is me,

John Wood (41:16.072)
up that funny feeling I’d grown.

John Wood (41:20.710)
So then I spoke to a friend, a really close friend of mine. We’ve been talking on the phone regularly for probably close to 10 years by this point.

John Wood (41:31.730)
And I decided to open up to him because one of the, I would call it even a red flag now, actually, I didn’t really tell very many people about what happened with these coaches because it just felt so insane. And so out there, I thought no one’s going to believe me. They’re just going to laugh at me. So I was hard to get perspective, get advice from people. But by this point, I was so, I felt like a mess. I was all over the place psychologically. I didn’t know what to think of what was really happening, what had happened with these coaches. I knew I was angry.

but I still hadn’t really figured it out yet. So I spoke to a friend, told him what I’ve told you here.

John Wood (42:10.070)
And he listens, he was, he was fantastic. He listens. There’s the value of really good friends. Um, having someone you can talk to and bounce ideas off a community. It’s a lifesaver. Totally. He said to me that day, have you ever heard of, I don’t know, she might’ve said something that he might’ve said something like this, she’s gaslighting you. Fuck. She is gaslighting you. And I’m like, what’s that? We chatted about it for a bit.

John Wood (42:40.170)
I went back back to the house and looked up gaslighting spiritual gaslighting I think but gaslighting spiritual gaslighting same thing one with the more spiritual meant Soon as I read an article on what gaslighting was Everything clicked into place So in case you don’t know because up until that point someone had mentioned gaslighting to me and I’m like, okay That’s interesting, but I didn’t really it didn’t land and Then I looked it up and it basically it’s basically the idea

that when someone mistreats you, they say the wrong thing, they make a mistake, they hurt you, they do something, they make a mistake, they fuck up. And then when you call them out on it, you’re like, look man, don’t do that. I don’t like it when you do that. You shouldn’t have done that. I really don’t appreciate it. I don’t want you to talk to me about this thing anymore. Instead of being like, hey, I’m sorry. I’ll do my best not to do that again.

John Wood (43:40.070)
on you. So the message is they want you to think that they’re blameless and you’re the one with the problem.

John Wood (43:49.590)
So they might say like a guilt tripping, like I’ve done so much for you. How can you really think or feel like that? The message being, there’s nothing wrong with them. You’re the one with the problem because you don’t appreciate all the nice things they’ve done for you. Or they might say, it’s not that big of a deal. Why are you so upset? Why are you so upset that I called you that name or that I ignored you here or that I, you know, went into your room the other day and grabbed that thing without asking. It’s not that big of a deal.

John Wood (44:19.550)
Which being, there’s nothing wrong with them, they haven’t done anything wrong. You’re just being really fussy and uptight. That’s the message, the basic dynamic is when you confront someone who has wronged you, who’s made a genuine mistake, who’s crossed a boundary, when you point it out to them, instead of taking responsibility, they push it back on you. They say something to make you think that you’re the one with the problem, you’re too insecure, you’re too uptight.

John Wood (44:51.150)
And what it does is it wears down the person who this happens to over time. And gradually they come to believe that there’s something wrong with them. They’re broken.

John Wood (45:03.250)
And the more that happens, the more their sense of self breaks down, the easier they are to control. And so this is what these coaches were doing. All right. If I think back to what they were saying, it was every time I had a problem with what they did, there was no apology. I never got a refund from them, even though I asked. It was always just saying things like, John, you’re just thinking too much. Right? That’s another way, another form of a gaslight. You’re just thinking too much. I haven’t done anything wrong. You just think too much. You’re too in your head. Yeah.

You need help, yeah. Well, you’ve just got some emotions. You’re just projecting. I’ve heard this so many times now. You’re just projecting. It’s a very common gas line. You have a genuine issue with someone and they say, no, you’re just projecting it onto me.

John Wood (45:47.110)
Right? This is what these coaches did. And so when I read that article about gas lighting, a light bulb went off, and I realized what it really happened. And once that clicked in, coaches were gone. Cut them off, blocked them everywhere. Because I could see this is so incredibly toxic. I will not have anyone, I don’t care who they are, family or friends, anyone in my life who behaves like this, now that I can see what they’re doing,

John Wood (46:17.379)
We’re done.

John Wood (46:20.050)
So cut them off. Like I said, I realized that my relationship with the woman I was dating at the time was over, effectively over as well. We didn’t break up for another few months, but I realized it was more or less too late. She was too plugged into what they were up to.

John Wood (46:37.370)
So it was too light there. So that ended a few months after that.

John Wood (46:43.490)
And it took a good year, two years to pick up the pieces after that. It’s very similar. What happened to what cults do. Right. It’s this, I remember part of the processing, right? A huge part of it was this nervous system beast unleashing the beast stuff, which we’ll get into in a second. But another piece of it was learning about cults, learning about mind controls. And a couple of books in case you’re interested is combating cult mind control by Steven Hassan. I think his name is the guru papers.

John Wood (47:13.750)
There was a manipulation course which was great on Udemy. I’ll have some links to this stuff in the show notes at Rageheart.co if you want to get the links. But learning about that helped me see it even more which was that cults, authoritarian groups, people, so you can even lump into this bucket, spiritual gurus, like a yogi, they all employ a very similar strategy.

John Wood (47:43.330)
who you are and make you feel like whoever you are right now is not enough. Through gaslighting, just through messaging. You’re not spiritual enough, you’re not generous enough, you’re not grateful enough, you’re too uptight, you’re too fussy, you’re too angry, you’re not angry enough, you’re too disconnected from your emotions, you think too much. They tell people this. And the whole point, it’s not even about what they’re saying, it’s about the underlying message is that something’s wrong with you. Whoever you are is not enough.

John Wood (48:14.130)
The more open you become to a new operating system the operating system of the cult of the of the group of the guru Because I think well clearly I’m whoever I am is not enough. So Let me try that. Let me take this new thing on a Lot of religions do this. You can even look at like look I grew up going to church. I have nothing against the idea of God and Nothing against religion or people who want to be religious or whatever

John Wood (48:43.350)
a lot in religion because I grew up with this is sex. Sex is very often made out to be, if you’re doing sexual stuff before marriage, you’re doing anything that’s outside the norm, kinky stuff, BDSM, sex toys, oral sex even in some cases, something’s wrong with you. You’re a sinner. You depraved, sick, twisted mind that you want to get whipped and spanked and this conversation just took a turn. But this is what religion does with it.

John Wood (49:13.410)
is they take something that is, we cannot deny, we cannot crush or stop the sexual impulse. It’s why we’re here, is because our parents and their parents before them and their parents before them had sex. So we have a very strong sexual drive. We cannot shut it down. But what religion often does is comes in and says, those things you want to do, those fantasies you have, they’re wrong. They’re a sign that you’re a sinner. You’re an absolute sinner.

John Wood (49:43.390)
And we have the answer. Come to church each week, pay your money, believe in Jesus, follow the rules, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s a very, very similar dynamic. I’m not saying all Christians like that are all churches or all religions, but it’s a very, very common thing. It’s how they suck you in. That’s how they suck people in, make you feel like something’s wrong with you.

John Wood (50:10.890)
something especially take it’s really good with sex because sex you can’t stop it you can’t just switch it off every person has a Sexual drive and probably has different fantasies that they want to do no matter how much they’re in denial about it And religion comes in and goes, you know those things you really want to do you really shouldn’t do them. That’s wrong You’re a sinner. You’re not gonna go to heaven You know, but come to us we have the ticket Do what we tell you to do you believe what we tell you to believe you get into heaven? Like it’s a joke really

John Wood (50:42.130)
And another example, this is a bit of a rant for me, but another example is you go to the East. Some people go, well, Western culture didn’t work for me, so I’m going to go to the East. I’m going to meditate. I want to escape the karmic cycle of rebirth and death, death and rebirth. But this is all in the Guru Papers, that book I mentioned. It’s so fascinating. But it’s this idea that in the West, we have sin.

John Wood (51:11.130)
concept from that authoritarian systems used to control people, used to control large numbers of people. In the East instead of sin we have karma. So if you think about back, well probably still right now, like take India. India is very heavily based around the caste system. I don’t know it that well. I think there’s four different castes. So you have people at the top, people at the bottom, people in the middle. And if you don’t have karma, someone might be born say really poor and think look I want to be rich. I want to be in the top caste and I’m

John Wood (51:40.970)
up. I’m willing to, whether it’s attacking the people at the top, whether it’s changing laws, whether it’s just doing different things so I can move to the top of the caste system. But of course, that’s inconvenient for the people at the top, right? That’s going to threaten their position for whatever reason. They need to have the power and the control over everyone else. So one way to do that is you can use an army and try and control people. People rebel. Much better to control people, get people to control themselves. How do you do that? You can use sin.

John Wood (52:11.590)
But you can also use karma. And you see some, if you see, if you’re at the top and you see someone at the bottom of the cast, the hierarchy, you look at them and you go, look, I know you wanna come up to the top, but the reason you’re down there is because you’re meant to be there. You obviously, in your past life or a set of past lives, you killed some people, you did some bad things, and that’s reason. That’s the reason you’ve incarnated, you’ve been born into the lower cast. And so if you try and get to the upper cast, if you try and shake things up,

John Wood (52:40.850)
is you’re arguing with God. God created karma, the universe, whatever you want to call it, Brahman. Karma is an immutable law. You can’t argue with karma. So you see it’s the same basic thing. We get people to accept their place in society. We get them to accept their control by getting them to believe that wherever they are, whatever their position is, it’s because of karma, because they did some bad stuff, almost like sin in a previous life.

John Wood (53:11.013)
is about control.

John Wood (53:14.450)
These coaches did it.

John Wood (53:17.150)
Religions do it, governments do it, a lot of the COVID stuff. It’s all about fear. If we can make you afraid of a virus or different things enough, it would be much more likely to accept our suggestions. Wear a mask, do all these different things. It’s about fear. The more afraid you are, the more likely you are to accept control.

John Wood (53:38.850)
And it all begins, what’s interesting, as I trace this back, how did I get caught up with these people? I’m a pretty logical, reasonable dude. How did I fall for this mushroom genocide 20 million people bullshit?

John Wood (53:52.250)
starts in the family. There’s someone in my family, one of my parents, who engaged in similar behavior, not with mushrooms, but the same kind of gaslighting, guilt-tripping stuff. That creates a pattern, a program in me, which then means when I then go and meet people when I’m older, it just feels natural and normal. I already have a little bit of a belief that something’s wrong with me because one of my parents taught me that, because their parent taught him. I’m not blaming them in the sense of it’s all their fault. It just gets passed on from generation to generation. He had to blame me.

John Wood (54:22.650)
Because someone blamed him. All right, he couldn’t accept he couldn’t work through that issue So he pushed it onto me and it keeps going until we do our work So it starts in the family and the way I see this government stuff the religion stuff It starts in the family and then we just gets blown up on the world stage The question is How do we fix it?

John Wood (54:45.950)
But what saved me, a huge, huge piece of what saved me from these coaches, right? I might have wasted a few months and had a year or two afterwards to figure things out. But if you look at cults, some people can be absorbed into a cult for decades, for their entire life. Some people lose their life to a cult, depending on what the cult wants them to do. People spend their entire lives in religions, doing what the religion tells them to do.

John Wood (55:14.350)
So that’s one possibility that could have happened. If I didn’t get myself out away from these people, if I didn’t realize what was happening, I could have been very sucked in and could right now still be working with them, still be helping them, still be playing their game, dancing to their horn, dancing to their trumpet, dancing to their tune. But what saved me, a huge piece of it, was the unleash the beast stuff, the nervous system stuff, learning about the fight and flight response, learning how to get into the body, learning how to actually hear

listen and pay attention to that funny feeling when it tells me something’s off with this person. Something’s wrong. Pay attention.

John Wood (55:54.350)
And it all started three months after that ceremony, that mushroom ceremony, when they told me I was three times worse than Hitler. It all started then, learning to, okay, I’m really angry. Okay, this isn’t a projection. This isn’t me just being triggered and I need some therapy to work through it. No, this anger is my body, my body’s way of saying, John, pay attention. Someone’s messing with you. Someone’s crossed a line. You need to pay attention because you’re in danger. We can look at anger.

John Wood (56:24.670)
Right as the fuel of the fight response you think about the fight and flight a threat appears whether it’s a parent or dangerous manipulative people like these coaches The appropriate response if the nervous system is functioning correctly Is to feel unsafe Right, which then means there’s a lack of safety a sense of danger Then the final flight system activates which is really just a way to get back to safety a way to ensure that we survive To live another day and so it does that by the running away

John Wood (56:56.490)
or fighting the attacker off. And so anger is a sign that we’re in fight mode. And sometimes, yes, we’ve been triggered and it’s just something from the past, but sometimes that anger is a sign that something’s wrong. We’re unsafe. There is someone or something around us that is a threat to our safety. And if we wanna survive, we need to pay attention and we may need to do something about it, such as confronting a given person

John Wood (57:27.315)
moving locations, or doing something.

John Wood (57:31.311)
neutralize the threat.

John Wood (57:35.450)
Okay, this is what I mean about unleashing the beast. It’s not about, like I said, lifting weights, making money. It’s about being in touch with these instincts, right? I find in my experience, most people in the Western world, maybe most people in the world today, we’re so disconnected from what we’re feeling and what it means. And also how to regulate it, how to bring it back down. If we’re feeling really angry, we’re feeling really sad, we’re feeling really afraid, how do we settle and soothe the nervous system, right? How do we make that feeling come down?

John Wood (58:05.630)
right? Smoke cigarettes, watch porn, buy things we don’t need and don’t even have the money to buy. Right? Do we yell at our kids or yell at people around us? Right? There’s these different things we do to ultimately regulate the fight and flight response on the nervous system.

John Wood (58:21.370)
Now maybe you do those things, they’re quite unhealthy, I’ve done them, just being honest. But there’s other things too that are very common.

John Wood (58:32.450)
that people also use, things like meditation, breath work.

John Wood (58:36.850)
Live coaching, hopefully not with mushrooms and people telling you you’re three times worse than Hitler. You can talk therapy, journaling, gratitude lists, self-help books and courses, Tony Robbins, you know, motivational videos on YouTube. There’s all these different things we do to feel better. And I did all of them, all the ones I just mentioned more as well. And everything was helpful. I meditated for 20 minutes a day for almost 10 years before this whole thing happened with these coaches.

John Wood (59:07.430)
is despite 10 years of meditation, daily, almost daily meditation, and at some periods I’d done an hour or two, I think at one point I was doing four hours a day of meditation, just for I think a few weeks or a month or something, but I’d meditate in my fair share, and yet that did not stop me from getting involved with these people. If anything, it made me more vulnerable, because meditation depends on how it’s taught, how the person practices, but I think for a lot of people,

John Wood (59:36.750)
relax, but sometimes that relaxation comes at the cost of being more disconnected from what we’re feeling. We’re not really feeling through it and resolving it, we’re just learning how to not feel it. Learning how to take a deep breath and let it go. Sometimes it’s great. Sometimes we need to be more in touch, more connected. In my experience, meditation did not do that. From what I’ve seen with other people, it does not do that for a lot of people. Some people sure.

Maybe as a culture because we’re already so mental. So in our heads, meditation.

John Wood (01:00:14.530)
Because people aren’t really in their body yet, meditation just exaggerates or makes the problem worse.

John Wood (01:00:22.990)
That was my experience. And like I said, it did not help me with these people. It was not what saves me from these people. Neither was any of the other stuff, breath work and life coaching and journaling and gratitude lists and all the different things. Self-help books I’d read, none of that helped. What helped was learning to feel the body. I’m not saying about getting rid of the mind. I’m not saying destroying the mind or transcending the ego. That’s not what it’s about. It’s about bringing these things into alignment.

John Wood (01:00:53.772)
for certain things. You want to do mathematics, use your mind. The body’s probably not going to help very much with that.

John Wood (01:01:01.170)
But when it comes to feeling, danger.

John Wood (01:01:05.250)
Noticing your fight-or-flight response when it comes to that knowing when you’re around someone dangerous for example Nothing beats feeling the body and no book Can tell you what to do what to think what to feel This is just learning to feel the authentic response that the body’s having This is what I mean about unleashing the beast Because if you look at animals, they are just in touch with this side of themselves. They don’t think they’re not

John Wood (01:01:35.610)
Ruminating all day long about what’s going on in their life as far as we know. They’re just in the moment If they’re scared they run if they’re angry they attack You give them food They don’t want to eat it. They don’t apologize. They don’t make excuses. They don’t say hey look. I’m really sorry I’m just I’ve just had enough. I’m not too hungry. Hope you’re not offended. You know, is it okay? I just They just stop eating

John Wood (01:02:02.610)
They are completely themselves. And as a result, they have more energy. Just imagine what your life would be like if you didn’t think so much, if you felt more. How much energy do you burn each day thinking about stuff that doesn’t matter, worrying about the past or worrying about the future? For most people, it’s most of the time. That’s energy, right? It also takes a lot of energy to not feel things, right? When we’ve got emotions,

John Wood (01:02:32.893)
or whatever that’s in us that we’re like pushing down.

John Wood (01:02:36.890)
That takes energy to hold all that stuff in. Or if we’re drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes and doing different things like that, it all costs energy. So just imagine what your life would be like if you didn’t need all this unhealthy stuff to regulate your nervous system, to calm yourself down.

John Wood (01:02:55.610)
And what if you didn’t need to think so much? You’d have so much more energy, so much more motivation, so much more drive for your life.

John Wood (01:03:06.390)
This is what I mean when I’m talking about unleashing the beast. It’s about getting in touch with this side of yourself, learning to feel, learning to put the mind in its proper place, not to get rid of it. And it’s not about being calm all the time either, as much as meditation and certain practices would, it’s all about being calm. The truth is it’s not calm is your parasympathetic nervous system. It’s part of your existence. You might say that’s when you’re relaxed, you’re sleeping, you’re digesting food, you’re talking to friends.

John Wood (01:03:36.350)
That sympathetic system is absolutely necessary for situations like with these coaches. If you’re not in tune with that, if you’re not listening to it, or on the other hand, if you’re in that fight or flight state all the time, you’re going to miss very, very valuable cues, very important cues for safety, for your life.

John Wood (01:03:56.670)
And this also ties into, say, getting unstuck and on purpose. Remember the intention when I hired these people originally was purpose, passion, and profit. Right, I wanted to find something I could believe in, something I was passionate about that I loved to do, and something I could make money with.

John Wood (01:04:12.770)
And in a weird way, that’s exactly what happened as a result of this ceremony that I did with this couple. That’s what led to Rage Heart, which is a company I started to teach people where I teach people how to do exactly what we’re talking about here, how to get into the body, how to get out of the head, into the body, out of thinking and ruminating and into feeling.

John Wood (01:04:34.710)
And there’s an incredible sense of purpose with it. I believe in this stuff just about, almost more than anything else. This, to me, this and psychedelics, plant medicine like ayahuasca and San Pedro, the nervous system stuff plus the psychedelics is where it’s at. That to me has made just about every other tool more or less irrelevant. Because on their own, they’re both fantastic, you put them together and it’s just, it’s magic. So that’s the purpose. And the passion as well, because I love it. I love this stuff.

John Wood (01:05:04.650)
stuff. So many times I have these thoughts dropping, it’s like I don’t know how people get through life without these skills, without knowing how to bring themselves down and out of fight or flight, out of freeze, without using alcohol and cigarettes and breath work and all the different things that people do. Actually learning how to run and drive their nervous system. I guess people don’t really get through life without those skills. That’s why they’re drinking, that’s why they’re shopping, that’s why porn is such a huge thing. All

John Wood (01:05:34.650)
people, gaslighting other people, it all comes back to the same thing. People aren’t feeling safe.

John Wood (01:05:44.850)
And so they lash out, they do things.

John Wood (01:05:48.350)
to other people, to the world, to themselves, as a way to improve or increase their feelings of safety. So to me, so much comes back to this, regulating that fight or flight response. We could say rewilding, if we’re gonna go with that unleash the beast phrase, rewilding the nervous system, making it wild again. Instead of domesticated.

John Wood (01:06:10.450)
A nervous system that does what it’s told, that stays in a perpetual state of fight or flight due to the society that we live in, stays in its head, rewilding it, making the nervous system wild again, unleashing the beast inside you. This has grown out of this whole experience with these coaches. I feel like I’m more or less beyond it now. It’s a cool story now that I get to tell on podcasts and it taught me so much about people,

John Wood (01:06:40.350)
dynamics about how I was playing into it, my role in the whole thing. And actually, I remember, I think it was a year or at some point I realized, right, like I said, I traced back what happened with these coaches. How did I get involved with this? I traced it all the way back to one of my parents. And one day I remember an insight dropped in, which was that it’s almost like I’ve created. I created that whole experience. It might have been difficult, right?

broken heart, you know, some bullshit in my head that it took a while to pull out, lots of anger and rage to deal with sadness, fear, shame. You feel a bit ashamed when you go through something like that. How did I get caught up in this? But at some point I realized it’s like I created this entire experience for myself with these coaches to teach myself something about my childhood. I had something that I hadn’t worked out yet with one of my parents. I hadn’t resolved.

John Wood (01:07:39.790)
that was holding me back. And when I realized that, who knows if that’s actually true, but it certainly seems when we have unresolved shit with our parents, with life, with people in our lives, we have this uncanny knack for recreating situations to help us figure it out again. In the nervous system world, they call this trauma reenactment. It’s almost like we’re unconsciously seeking healing and wholeness all the time.

John Wood (01:08:10.958)
that give us an opportunity to work through it.

John Wood (01:08:14.990)
really fascinating, but to see that personally in my own life was really, it was amazing.

John Wood (01:08:22.810)
to all of a sudden feel grateful in some ways for everything that happened doesn’t mean the anger’s not there.

John Wood (01:08:28.849)
right? It doesn’t make it right but to be grateful that some part of me or life set this whole thing up so I could I could heal something in myself. Magical, absolute magic.

John Wood (01:08:51.930)
So this whole thing with the coaches, the point of that was to say the purpose, passion, profit intention from that ceremony, where they told me I was three times worse than Hitler. The dude rolls around on the floor like he’s getting tortured for 18 million lives.

John Wood (01:09:07.910)
That intention came true, just not in the way that I expect. And that’s part of why I love these plants as well. It’s the nervous system stuff, learning to work with that fight and flight response, the various techniques that come with that, the unleashing the beast aspect of that, getting in touch with that wild, instinctual, emotional part of ourselves. It’s that plus psychedelics, plant medicine, ayahuasca, magic mushrooms, all of it. There has been so much goodness and beauty and magic, just the most incredible stuff

from both of these things. And like I said, together, they’ve made just about everything else irrelevant. I don’t know how else to put it. So, that’s what this podcast is gonna be about, is exploring these things, right? Exploring the nervous system stuff, somatics, is one word for it, the field of somatics, learning to be more in the body, to work through different issues using the body rather than the mind, alongside plant medicine. So, whether it’s interviewing facilitators,

John Wood (01:10:08.909)
Other people who’ve had some interesting things happen with psychedelics, that’s what I want to explore with this. That’s where it’s going to start anyway. Of course, everything evolves as it happens and I want to invite feedback from you, the listener. If you have suggestions or ideas or where you want this to go, you let me know if you’re open to it. You let me know. I’m going to tell you what to do. I’d love it if you’d let me know what you’d like to hear about. But that’s where I’m starting is how we use the nervous system work and psychedelics together

John Wood (01:10:38.949)
inside of us. Okay. So like I said, all of this comes from the place where I’m teaching this, and I’m not the only one. You can learn this from other people. I just want to put that out there. But if you do like my style, if it’s resonating with you, you can learn more about what I do, how I work with people at rageheart.co. The very next step really is to join the, I call it the daily rage. It’s a daily email newsletter where I share more tips and tricks

weird stories. I do talk about weird sex stuff too. So if that’s not your cup of tea, you know, like sex toys and BDSM and stuff, if that’s not your cup of tea, maybe don’t sign up. But if you’re open-minded and you’re interested in learning more about how to work with your nervous system, some stories about my adventures with psychedelics, go sign up for the Daily Rage at rageheart.co. Okay. Or I think, yeah, like I said, you can just type Rage Heart into Google.

John Wood (01:11:38.149)
and type that into Google and go. So, but on that note, the whole rage thing as well, like the reason it’s called Rage Heart, and this is the Unleash the Beast podcast is gonna be sort of published on the Rage Heart website. Rage Heart to me, so much of my journey was learning to work with this aggression energy. And this was, like I said, I felt really angry when this whole thing happened with these coaches, but there’s a whole way of working in the nervous system where you learn to release aggression energy.

very different to, you know, you meditate, the advice is if you’re angry, just watch it, sit with it, just breathe, be very still.

John Wood (01:12:18.490)
It never worked for me. That if anything, I didn’t even think I was angry. After 10 years meditating, I still thought I was not an angry person. I thought it was a good thing. And now what I’ve learned that that anger is that fuel of the fight response. And that’s blocked. It blocks my ability to protect myself from the people around me, right? Feeling that anger is a sign when I’m unsafe. It’s also the fuel of the get up and go. Like let’s make some shit happen. Let’s do some work. Let’s go to the gym. This is why I kind of say, if you’re unleashing the beast,

John Wood (01:12:48.691)
it can unlock a lot of stuff in your life if you feel like you’re at your

John Wood (01:12:53.790)
You don’t have a lot of motivation. You just can’t get going. Part of that can be because the fight response is blocked because it’s the same kind of energy. Anyway, the point of this is to say.

John Wood (01:13:05.370)
That’s kind of where the rage heart stuff comes from, rage comes from. It was such a huge part of my journey and still continues to be that I decided to name the company Rage Heart. Heart referring to feeling your emotions, getting all feeling and sensitive and rage being just a reference to. Rage is part of it too. The goal is not to be without anger. The goal is not to be calm all the time. The goal is to feel it all. And like I said, meditation, just feel it, take a breath. Never worked for me.

I don’t think it works for a lot of people. What did work for me was learning to feel it and then express it, to do something with the anger.

John Wood (01:13:43.850)
growling like I did at the start today just for a joke. There’s lots of different techniques I could go on for a long time about all this stuff but

John Wood (01:13:53.150)
That’s where rage out comes from. So anyway, I think that’s everything I wanna cover today. Unleashing the beast, regulating that nervous system, that fight and flight and freeze response. In future episodes, I’ve got interviews, like I said, with people who are in this field already. They’re working with their nervous system. They’ve got some interesting stories. Also psychedelic maestros, facilitators, people who just had psychedelics. I’ll be getting my sister on at one point. We live together here

John Wood (01:14:24.134)
So, yeah, if you want to learn how to…

John Wood (01:14:31.010)
I was going to say less afraid. In some ways it’s not really about being less afraid or less angry, it’s about having it all come into balance. Not being too little angry, not having too little but not having too much. Having it all in its proper place, knowing how to move through all the different emotional states, energetic states, knowing how to feel your impulses and instincts. That is unleashing the beast. And this is where in some ways where purpose comes from. Purpose isn’t a thing you think about, it’s a thing you feel.

want to feel and find your purpose like I did, you have to learn how to feel in general. The more you can feel what’s happening inside you, the more you’ll start to feel what your purpose is, what you’re here to do. So other benefits include better digestion because you’re relaxing down into your parasympathetic system, better skin, less problems with autoimmune conditions, much less thinking stuff happening in the brain, better relationships, better sleep,

John Wood (01:15:30.350)
There’s a lot of cool shit that happens when you get there you learn how to work with your nervous system, so I’m gonna wrap it up here Like I said, if you want to learn more about this stuff if you want to go deeper keep listening to the podcast and Or you end or you can sign up to the daily rage at rage art co Where I share more tips tricks and like I said weird stories about all kinds of stuff

John Wood (01:15:54.390)
in the newsletter, okay? So thank you for tuning in. I hope this was hopefully enlightening and interesting. And like I said, any feedback, suggestions, let me know, donatrageart.co. And otherwise I’ll see you next time.

John Wood (01:16:12.250)
driving.