Today we’d like to introduce you to Gerardo Urias.
Hi Gerardo, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
My story really began when I turned 19 and moved to Bavaria, Germany to snowboard through the winter in 1997. I ended up staying three years, and my life was forever altered.
After three of the most magical years I could imagine in my early twenties; skiing in the Alps every day, immersing with the local community, hiking and river rafting in the summer, traveling all over Europe and Southeast Asia, and making lifelong friends; I just couldn’t stop living this new adventure-filled life. I spent the next two decades chasing the snow and waves, skiing and surfing some of the biggest mountains and best waves on Earth. I realize now, at this point in my journey, that my life has been a big inadvertent experiment in “flow state” living. I ended up in the restaurant business and used the seasonality of this business to continue traveling and living around the world just, charging through life. I met a girl when I moved back to San Diego many years later, and we ended up getting married. As we were both very adventurous travelers, we made a plan to move to Central America and start a business in 2014. After a few years in Central America, we ended up in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, where we started a very successful vacation rental business. Just as life was going absolutely fabulous, and I thought my life couldn’t get any better, a series of events led to my wife and I separating. A few weeks later, my dad died. And then I found out I was going deaf.
Life knocked me on my ass, and I fell into a deep depression. I ended up losing everything; my business, my home, my dreamy life in Mexico we had worked so hard to create, my marriage, my dad, and along with everything that was dear to me, my desire to live. Every day grew darker for the next 10 months as I inched closer and closer to suicide, despite adhering to our current mental health care system and suffering the side effects of anti depressants on top of my debilitating depression. Nothing could relieve my pain. And then, one day, on December 22, 2017, I ate a small handful of psilocybin mushrooms with my brother and took a walk on the beach. That was the last day I was ever depressed.
So powerful, lightning fast, and dramatic was my recovery that I immediately decided to research what was happening and write a book about my experience. Two magical and trans-formative years later, in April 2020, I published Taking Back My Mind: My Journey Out of Depression with Psilocybin Mushrooms. I took a trip to Oaxaca, Mexico, the world’s epicenter for psilocybin mushrooms, during the middle of writing the book to begin filming a documentary about my story as well. This trip turned out to be the most important experience of my life, connecting with the local plant medicine community and interviewing the locals about the influence and impact that psilocybin mushrooms, which grow naturally here, have had in their communities for thousands of years. I learned so much about my own culture, history, and customs. It was a surreal, magical time in the mountains of southern Oaxaca.
The book is doing very well now and being well received by people looking for an alternative to the pharmaceutical, medical system to treat their mental health, which is the basis of all health. Fast forward to the present, and my mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual health could not be better! I have never felt better and continue thriving in life thanks to the powerful tools I incorporated into my life. It is my mission in life to teach others how to use these powerful tools to reach their highest potential and remain resilient during our trying times.
I also started running health workshops in San Diego last summer, teaching the lessons I write about in my book, including yoga, meditation, breathwork, cold exposure therapy, nature immersion, following a philosophy in life, physical health hacks, psychedelic therapy, and the power of belief. The workshops were so impactful and successful that I started collaborating with a few dear friends to run multidisciplinary health workshops. This spiraled into a multi-day psychedelic wellness retreat in Yosemite, California April of last year and in the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico this fall. Our next retreat is October 26 – 30, 2022, and it is almost full. We are very excited for our first retreat in Mexico! We plan to expand these retreats into multiple locations in California and Mexico in the coming years.
This brings us to my current life and projects!
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
This path, the path that began five years ago on December 22; my spiritual awakening, my ascension, my consciousness cracking open, whatever we call it; has been anything but easy.
While publishing a book about the powerful potential of psychedelics to heal the mind has been the most amazing, fulfilling, and important work of my life, it has inherently caused massive waves of disruption to the life I had lived up until December 22, 2017, and everyone in it. Unfortunately, the stigma around psychedelics is still strong.
As best said by the late Terrence McKenna, American ethnobotanist who advocated for the responsible use of psychedelic plants and fungi,
“Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behavior and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.”
Let me tell you, this statement could not be more true. I quickly came to realize that most of what I “knew” was indeed completely wrong. I began to see through the lies and subconscious deception and manipulation. I began to see destructive, egoic behavior, which is subconscious by definition, very clearly all around me. Toxicity was everywhere. I began to notice my own dysfunctions and behavioral issues and connected the dots to my upbringing. My continuing research into Attachment Theory, Internal Family Systems (IFS), Polyvagal Theory, and many other disciplines of psychology clearly laid out overwhelming evidence of trauma, and more specifically childhood trauma, being the root cause of most of our health issues. Incredible work by Dr. Gabor Mate, author of The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture, and When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress, continues laying out strong evidence for the long term consequences; mental, emotional, and physical; of childhood trauma. I realized I had a lot of difficult history in my psyche that had to be unraveled and resolved.
I could no longer turn a blind eye to my new reality. Some major restructuring of my life was necessary.
As Dr. Mate says in his timely and important documentary, The Wisdom of Trauma, “Are we conscious? Are we making decisions based on full awareness? Or are we driven by unconscious dynamics that we’ve inherited, or that we’ve developed as a response to childhood trauma? Insofar as we are not conscious, we are not free.”
It becomes very difficult to continue engaging with the world in the same way you engaged in the past when your mind has been completely blown open to reality and the veil is lifted.
Many relationships, especially our closest relationships, suffer from this sudden shift in consciousness and the relationship dynamic. Priorities and interests change, boundaries must be drawn, sometimes a person’s entire belief system, politics, and faith are completely altered. Many relationships simply cannot keep up with the change and crumble. I have lost many people whom I had been very close with most of my life as a result of my journey, including much of my family.
This is by far the biggest challenge that has presented itself in my life and continues to be an extremely difficult challenge.
However, there is nothing that surpasses the search for truth, and once some things have been seen, they cannot be unseen.
Luckily, the tools, practices, and modalities I have learned during my journey continue enhancing my life beyond my wildest dreams despite my current challenges. They keep me grounded. They keep me positive and healthy. They keep me thriving, no matter the situation.
As author Ryan Holiday says, “The obstacle is the way.”
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Taking Back My MInd & Ascension Retreats?
I am the author of Taking Back My MInd: My Journey Out of Depression with Psilocybin Mushrooms. It is my story of overcoming depression with psychedelics and breathwork, yoga, meditation, nature, and philosophy. I have been on many podcasts about my story as well as starting a blog about mental health and how to use psychedelics to reach our highest potential. You can find it all at www.takingbackmymind.com.
I am also working on Taking Back My Mind: The Documentary, which will hopefully be out in the near future.
I recently started Ascension Retreats with a few friends, where we offer multi-day psychedelic wellness retreats in California and Mexico. Our retreats are the ultimate Reset where we incorporate all of the tools I have learned, including yoga, meditation, breathwork, temazcal, cold exposure, nature immersion, sound healing, past life regression, and a sacred psilocybin mushroom ceremony with a local, well respected medicine woman. We also provide preparation for your journey and a follow up integration program so you can ensure the positive benefits are long lasting! You can learn about our retreats at: www.takingbackmymind.com/events.
Through my projects, I hope to inspire and encourage others to learn more about “alternative” medicines, therapies, practices, and modalities to optimize their mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual health, ultimately making the world a better place.
If we knew you growing up, how would we have described you?
As I was only the second sibling in a Mexican family to be born in the United States, I grew up in a multicultural environment. Half of my youth was spent at school in an American environment, and the other half at home in a Mexican environment. I am very blessed to have had this situation growing up as I learned Spanish at home, and this opened me up to the Latin world while traveling throughout my twenties and thirties. I learned a lot about Mexican culture from my parents and have had a deep respect for our culture since very young. This, however, created a bit of confusion on how to assimilate to American life. I was an awkward kid during my elementary years, but then I started coming out of my shell in high school.
I became quite an extrovert and started playing sports and making friends during my first high school years. During my last years of high school, I learned that partying led to even more friends, which led to acceptance. This led to a pretty wild life in my twenties and thirties, traveling and partying around the world, living an adrenaline filled life, always chasing the next thing, which eventually led to a lot of problems, which led to my awakening. So, in hindsight, every step of the way has been perfectly coordinated! I can definitely say I’ve had an incredibly exciting and adventurous life and I’ve learned a lot of lessons! It’s been a wild ride!!
Pricing:
- Copy of Taking Back My Mind: My Journey Out of Depression with Psilocybin Mushrooms on Amazon: $19.99
- Ascension: Elevate Your Consciousness Sacred Mushroom Wellness Retreat: $1,999
Contact Info:
- Website: https://takingbackmymind.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gerardourias77/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/takingbackmymind
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/Gurias77
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCT51QhUKM9OuNMIQ4Ot
