The Path Of The Wounded Healer with Dr. Jimi Wollumbin (EP#191)

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Today we welcome back the poetic and exquisitely wonderful Dr. Jimi Wollumbin, one of our beloved local medicine men and regular SuperFeast podcast guests.

As soon as the conversation opens, Jimi does what Jimi does best and dissolves the armouring around our collective heart as he eloquently speaks to the harrowing yet beautifully humbling path of the healer. The wounded one within all of us, that through necessity, is given no other choice but to be a student of its lived experience. 

Jimi and Mason speak of the alchemical process, of Taoist fog walking, of the medicine contained in the shadows of life, the places pregnant with transformative possibility, the tunnels we fear to enter despite knowing there is light at the end.

Throughout this conversation we're taken on a journey that calls us to embrace the entire spectrum of our human experience, to know strife as a teacher equal in esteem to love. We're reminded of the deficit of life that light-washing leaves us in, to honour the gradient of emotion in between what is "good" and what is "bad" because after all our misery is universal, and so is our joy.

We all breathe, bleed, love, despair, succeed and fail. Just as the revolution of natures seasonal wheel inevitably turns, rising and falling, growing and decaying, so too do we; rise, fall, grow and decay, and it is these very innate, very human, very necessary processes that allow us to evolve, to adapt, to renew and to regenerate.

To be alive in our living.

This was a very special conversation, it is my sincere wish that you draw as much solace from it as I did.

 

 

"Our personas must be shed to make more room for soul. And so it hurts. Ego, death hurts. Transformation hurts. Divorce hurts. Endings hurt. They really, really do. But they contain within them the Medicine with a capital M, not the medicine that helps you with your haemorrhoids or your sore knees, and that sort of stuff, but the medicine for soul."

- Jimi Wollumbin

Mason & Jimi discuss:

• Initiation and walking the medicine path.
• Love and Strife as the Western translation of Yin and Yang.
• Ego death, surrender and soul growth.
• The absence of cultural lore and rights of passage in our modern systems of living, and the impact that has on our psychology at both an individual and collective level.
• Using seasonal imagery to guide you through the transitional phases of life.
• Adaptation as a necessary and very innate aspect of life.
• Jing Essence, the reserve that fuels our capacity to transmute challenging circumstances. 
• Resilience, hormetic stress and the power of integration.
• Befriending your grief. 

Who is Jimi Wollumbin?

Dr. Jimi Wollumbin is not a GP or an MD but a Doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine. He is one of those rare individuals that is an expert in his field that also knows how to teach others. He has spoken at the United Nations, opened for Deepak Chopra, spoken alongside Bruce Lipton and has even been personally insulted by the Dalai Lama. He teaches integrative doctors across America, sits on the faculty of the America Integrative Health and Medicine Association and is a lifetime member of the Tibetan Medical Institute's 'Friends of Tibetan Medicine'. Having joined in 2002 as a regular 'member', he is now also an esteemed 'Fellow of the Australian Traditional Medicine Society'.

After completing his internship in Chinese Medicine in TCM in Beijing hospital in 2002 he has since completed 3 research exchanges at Ayurvedic hospitals in India, 2 with the Lama-physicians at the Tibetan Medical Institute, 1 with the Persian Hakims of the Unani Tibb Hippocratic tradition, 3 at the Trad-Med Department of the Mongolian National University in Ulaan Bataar, and a 2019 trip through Siberia to research Shamanic medicine and present his work.

Jimi’s original degree at the ANU was in philosophy and eastern religion which is why Dr Seroya Crouch describes him as ‘a philosopher of medicine’. He has written several books, none of which have been published, acclaimed or even read... yet.

He is also the CEO and founder of One Health Organisation, a wellness-based charity that has distributed over 10 metric tonnes of herbs and supplements to 100 locations across 13 countries since 2005.

Resource guide

Dr. Jimi Wollumbin Website

Dr. Jimi Wollumbin Patreon

Jimi Wollumbin Instagram

Dr. Jimi Wollumbin Facebook

Related Podcasts

Trauma, Resilience and Natural Disaster with Dr. Jimi Wollumbin (EP#155)

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Check Out The Transcript Below:

 

Mason:

Jimi, welcome back.

Jimi Wollumbin:

Thank you. Always a pleasure, man.

Mason:

Yeah. It's always such a pleasure, especially the process. I think you're the easiest guest, or it's you and probably one other, Jost, who have such trust in coming up that we're not just going to make up something new to talk about, but we're going to land on the objective topic that is there.

Jimi Wollumbin:

Yeah. What's alive at this moment?

Mason:

What's alive at this moment?

Jimi Wollumbin:

Yeah .Great. And so it feels like the subject of this podcast was somewhat determined by just our, what unfolded in the first 30 seconds of our meeting when we hugged, when got up. And it's like, "How are you, Man?" As I talked about my journey recently at a personal level, and then that's led through to this, "Let's do that."

Mason:

And I'm just realising now it comes into a lot of the Taoist act of fog walking, going and finding the fog and practising in the mundane fog that brings dampness and heaviness to your environment. It's often the hardest time to shine through your Heart and express your Shen. So that's a practice that Taoists use to go in and do that. And when we were talking about the healer's journey, the practitioner journey, whether it's healing ourselves or others, it falls into the same lineage. And there's so much fog around it because so much has been turned into institutional education rather than education that's a little bit closer. So we can ensure people actually cultivate perception that allows them to shine their Shen while they're walking on that path.

Jimi Wollumbin:

And even the word education is insufficient for the medicine path. It really should be initiation and the process. It's not about learning new data, obviously, it's about your own transformation on the medicine path, whether you're a practitioner or whether you're a human being. It's not just about getting more data. It's about how you are unfolding. And that process of unfolding is working with the fog within, working with the shadows within, working with the wounds within.

 

And it's not for those things to be vanquished and say, "We want to get this out of the way so that then we can walk a path of light and butterflies." It's the actual transmutation of the tragedies of the world, of the tragedy of incarnation, the tragedy of the human condition, the wounding of the child that happens to every child, no matter what their privilege. And so working with that heaviness is that transmutation. That's our alchemical process of turning lead into gold. And so what's the lead here? Well, the lead for you is different than lead from me, but it's still lead.

Mason:

Well, I mean speaking of lead in terms of what led you into this pathway, I'm always curious because it's always kind of a theory of what this career is, and then when you start stumbling upon the classics and you start the law and the myth, and then you start putting out there, I want to go there. Often, how do you feel you got yourself onto that path that took you through the initiation process without being maybe directly guided by a particular person or lineage?

Jimi Wollumbin:

It wasn't. It wasn't at all. First off, that childhood was tough for me in a whole bunch of ways. And so the movement towards the medicine path, the movement towards an interest in wisdom, in lore, or in anything, like a drowning man seeking something that will help them to float, that started as a child because despite having loving parents in a first world country, not in abject poverty or terrible disease and domestic violence and all that stuff, none of those things.

 

Childhood was tough for me. I was telling someone recently that as a five or six year old, very, very early, possibly even four, which is when I started school, I remember being incredibly jealous of the flowers and also the cattle and the horses and the chickens on our farm, but just the daisy, that they didn't have to bear the unbearable burden of being, of self-reflective consciousness. And as a five-year-old, I was jealous of that. And so that's a strange thing for a five-year-old, but that's the start of my journey in general medicine path started at that point right. And then it was an interest in the pyramids and Aleister Crowley and the Yeti and the Loch Ness monster, all sorts of different where does mystery lane, and I started exploring that from a very early age.

Jimi Wollumbin:

Totally. Like the mushrooms that grow out of shit. And they're transmuting, right? They're transmuting the fog, that density, and they're transmuting it. That's the incredible thing. Like the symbol of the lotus, which has its roots in the muck right down there in the darkness and the silt below the water right down there. And it's from that process that alchemically transmutes and it comes to this exquisite symbol of consciousness and the souls unfolding, the thousand petalled lotus of being, right?

 

Yeah, definitely I think the healer's journey is centred around the wounded healer. It always has been. Right? That's the lore. It's not that the shaman was the most whole, it's that the shaman was perhaps one of the most broken. And not that the shaman had vanquished their wounds, but integrated them, integrated those wounds. And that's where you get things like Rumi saying, the wound is what lets the light in. That it is the prima materia of the alchemical process of spiritual unfolding, of soulful unfolding, of healing and whole-making is through that wound, is that's the prima materia of just like this disease as delusion. I'm not lovable because, I'm not safe, because, I am isolated because.

 

And that goes all the way up to this perceived sense of separation that we have because you feel separate from me, that's my experience. And yet that carries its own hurt and burden that emerges in the child. But what we understand from our deepest teachings and from science also, is that we are nested inside something so much vaster than ourself. We are a part of humanity in our species. We are a part of Gaia in the entire earth. We are cells within that. And Gaia is a cell within the cosmos. It's not separate from the laws of physics. The laws of physics, of what life and consciousness have emerged out of.

 

And so that deep sense of pain and separation that could come back to, "Oh, because my daddy left me, or because my mummy beat me, or because the kids teased me, or because I was too smart or too rich or too white or too black or too straight or too gay," or whatever the thing was for you is that by working with that fog, that darkness, that lead, that wound, that delusion, right, disease as delusion, that dis-ease, that we come to ease when we take that material and see that it was never true. You were always lovable, right? You were always part of something vast and beautiful.

 

So I really push back a lot against the new age kind of rainbows and light story of healing, which disowns the shadow. And the same way that other religions disown the shadow, they disown all that stuff. And the new age disowns anger, disowns jealousy, disowns lust, disowns all of those things almost. And so then you get this rigour mortis smile on the spiritually-enlightened amongst the new age. It's like, "Hey, huh." And you can see it's not quite in the eyes. "Hey, beautiful. So good to see you. Yeah, just feeling and flowing into the..." Oh, no. Oh, you poor. No, no.

Mason:

Well, I think that's why I'm interested in your work because you are going in a much more intricate way, and we'll talk about your Patreon a little bit later, but you're going in such an intricate way. I've got a very general approach to the same thing of just hopefully just showing that, hey, there is a map and you are going to eventually go here. You might be in a one stage of integration right now. That's okay. Just remember, there's going to be a transmutation. It can be graceful enough or it can be really difficult if you completely fall into delusion. But don't forget, there is this path and we have a map and it's we've lost that map. So it's like the delusion obviously comes from youth not having the wisdom embodied into our world, but just ignorance of just going, "Well, I have no idea how to process that shadow." And yes, we have therapy and we've got the dark web of intellectuals kind of really exploding, doing that macro pushback.

 

I know that's why I came out the other side of the rainbow butterflies, kind of overly optimistic side of wellness and health and spirituality and had to feel the bitterness and the start feeling bitterness towards, I want to make sure that people don't get lost in that world as well. And realising, oh no, the bitterness, that's the bitterness. That's always been there. That's the next, it's given me the gift of being able to access it. Now, it's time to integrate that and not fall into you're bad because you have this emotion.

Jimi Wollumbin:

Yes. That life is bittersweet. Life is bittersweet. And here's something that many of our listeners won't know. How do you say Yin and Yang in the Western European tradition? Nobody knows, right? We've been speaking about it since Empedocles, the founder of the four element system. And the primary forces of Yin and Yang in the Greek and the entire European magical tradition and wisdom tradition that flowed through to the Sufis and all of these things is not sunny and shiny, shady side of the mountain, but it's love and strife and that these fundamental forces are in the universe, like gravity and entropy, right?

 

They are there. And strife, it's not good and bad. It's not good and evil. It's that strife is like the Dalai Lama would teach us, right? Strife is perhaps the greater of the teachers. Strife is what separates us from delusion. Strife comes in again and again and again. It's entropy, it ends, it separates, it ends, it separates. It's the autumnal phase perhaps if we think about the five elements in this part, the shedding and dying.

 

And that's to be sung up in the same way that the Taoists sing up quiescence and Yin, even though they're totally balanced. They sing up the unsung in addition to activity, Yang, striving and will and doing and initiating. They really sing up more of those two. They sing up the Yin. And so singing up strife is what Empedocles did. He saw mad strife as his teacher. It doesn't mean that it's pretty, doesn't mean that it doesn't hurt, doesn't mean that it doesn't have heartache, doesn't mean that you want to call it fourth like Kali. You've got to be careful about that. I'm not saying that it's sweet and easy and beautiful.

 

Strife is strife. It's cancer, it's divorce, it's heartache. It's all of those things. It's the loss of success. It's the loss of health. Strife comes. It's the floods that went through our community the last time we were speaking, right? Strife is there. It always has been. Strife exists at a atomic and subatomic level. Strife is woven into the fabric of the universe.

 

And so how do we make our peace with that? How do we integrate that? How do we work with that? And so I think that's where in the West, the haunting of the good and evil of the God and the devil, kind of the good and bad that made it good and bad rather than... And it's easy to go from light and shadow to good and bad, but something so fundamental is lost inside that, when we've bad make, we wrong make half of reality.

 

It's just like, okay, sunrise, good. Sunset, bad. Really? Day, good. Night, bad. No. Like sun, good. Moon, bad. Suddenly, we've just got this right and wrong rather than love and strife, Yin and Yang, that constant movement that goes through. And I'm currently in a tide of my life where it's rising and love-filled and joy-filled and positive. But I've just come through three years of strife, of mad strife, of suffering, of loss of health, of dying, of being in crucible in the underworld. And it was incredibly tough. And the hard parts of it, I don't miss, but the spiritual richness that came with that, the intensity of all of that, that brought me closer to the immediacy of mystery and life, I miss that, now that I'm healthy. I miss that, right?

Mason:

Shedding your skin.

Jimi Wollumbin:

Yes. I was literally shedding my skin, as I talk about the front there, this whole histamine, mask, cell collapse, burnout, all of these things. And it was like the serpent. That's why the serpent's on the rod of Asclepius, symbol of medicine. The serpent, is that one that sheds its skin and is reborn, right? It goes through that process of dying.

 

And so one of the central mysteries of the West is you must die before you die. And that's what they're doing at Eleusis, at the central initiatory temples of the ancient world of Greece and Rome. They were dying through an entheogenic experience, an ayahuasca-like experience that was given to thousands of people for thousands of years. And it was as a dissent into the underworld.

 

And the central myth was Persephone's myth of how Persephone, this young maiden... She's a maiden. She's sweet. And she's light. And she's daisies. And she's picking narcissist flowers or she's picking some sort of [inaudible 00:14:54] flower as well. And then Hades just erupts from the underworld, and with his iron wrought chariot and his dark horses, he's up through that pastoral beauty and just takes her and takes her down into the underworld.

 

And Persephone, the unnamed maiden, as they call her, then eats of the fruits of the underworld and becomes the queen of the dead. She integrates that. And that was the central myth, at the central mystery tradition of the ancient world for thousands of years. And it's one of how do you die? How do you die? How do you die before you die? Because you must, right? And so that law is rich in the... And that's the shamanic path as well that informs all of these. Taoism has evolved, changed shamanism. It's comes from that same mycelial rootstock, if we could use that term.

Mason:

It's such a kill. I was going to say kill, for some reason, because you're talking about death. That's interesting to kind of hone in because it can get very practical in terms of what was cut away from lineages and traditions, maybe to facilitate the exploding of civilization. And maybe it's a necessary human and earth collaboration where they're like, "Whoa, let's try not do that one again. That hurt."

(16:15)

But regardless, the looking at death and the little deaths, it's probably... Especially around identity, we're really trying. You can see we're really trying to bring that back. I've been talking a lot about team. It's like we had a point where there was so long where there was no one moving in and out of the team here. And then all of a sudden, of course there's a phase and then anything in life, people move in. It's a breath in and out. Has been for the last 12 years and

Jimi Wollumbin:

Autumnal shedding.

Mason:

Yeah. And hopefully as much as possible one that's collaborative and graceful. But it's something I've been thinking about with team members and then with myself and then therefore the phases of life. I've been thinking a lot about the macro, micro of that death is such a central focus of... And that wonder that that's the key, just that key theme.

 

I'm thinking when I step out of my role, so when I die in this role or when I know that there's going to become a point, there's going to be a pinnacle death point at this phase of life that I'm in. And the identity that I'm hopefully utilising conscientiously, knowing that I'm going to be, I'm going to be shedding it and letting it go. And what skill set through everything all that I've learned randomly have I got... What brings it up? I've said it to some team members who, someone's who's like off boarding.

 

I'm like, "Just think about the legacy that you want to leave behind. And I often think about how bacterium leave behind randomly in the environment, the genetics of the information that they've picked up and will share it when it's ready and cured for anyone else to come along and integrate it. And it's such an, even though that generation's gone, it's so ready there.

 

I've been thinking about for myself, what legacy do I want to leave here because I will eventually die in my role here. On eventually, SuperFeast will die at some point. What legacy? So all of a sudden, it gets me into that other state. It's very difficult to stay there when there's drama and life and all that. But just the practise of reminding to come back to that place seems to be a common the that's coming up a lot lately. Get ready, because that initiation is going to come where, whether you like it or not. One phase is going to come to an end. Another phase is going to begin.

Jimi Wollumbin:

Seasons change. I'm reminded of the role of potentially the jester, the court jester who was called the fool, but was actually the wisest man in court and would go around next to the king. And so here we want to see the king as the ego or the persona and saying, "You're just a man. You're just a man. You're just a man."

 

And the only one that could treat the king, not as the throne, as the role, and the only one that has a really important role, remember that "You're going to die. You're going to die." And so this process of dying is that in one way, we can see it, is that the persona forms around the wound, right, around as a coping mechanism of how do I work with the society that I have, the family that I have? How do I get my needs met? How do I feel safe and loved with a mother and father like this, or the kids at school like this, or the culture like this, or the gender norms like this?

 

The persona emerges to try and navigate through all of that. But that persona is limiting and limited compared to the fullness and the multifaceted gem that is your soul. And so what is dying is that cage that was always too small. And so our personas must be shed to make more room for soul. And so it hurts. Ego, death hurts. Transformation hurts. Divorce hurts. Endings hurt. They really, really do. But they contain within them the Medicine with a capital M, not the medicine that helps you with your haemorrhoids or your sore knees, and that sort of stuff, but the medicine for soul.

 

And so that process of dying, we need to recontextualize this because in our culture, medicine has this heroic kind of vanquish illness and suffering, vanquish strife from the cosmos almost. And wisdom understands, I think, and our ancestral wisdom understands that you will never vanquish strife from the cosmos. There are black holes, there are atoms that constantly end. Eras end. Species end. They always have before humanity came along, right?

 

Strife is not going anywhere. And so how do we move through those transitions? Because although something dies, something doesn't, at each one of those phases. And so the child dies, the unnamed maiden died. She died. That sweet little girl died. My sweet little girl died not long ago. She became a teenager. That little girl, she's gone. In some way, she's gone. And yet something remains, right? She's going through that process of death and rebirth, and that's going to happen again and again and again in her life. And my phase was I just went through a midlife crisis version of that. However you want to see that, Saturn and this and that and phases of life. It was a death. It's very much a death.

Mason:

How are you, because this is obviously then a skill set that has layers and tiers of appropriateness for people in some scenario. I know within your Patreon, you have three layers, and I imagine this theme is getting woven in there in different ways. In terms of how do you see, because it's often an invisible, it's not something that you can't create, like a dashboard within the medical system to show how many surgeries you've performed doing something, which extreme... Measuring to such an extreme, which we can see has value, and we can also sense it's leaning to balance itself out.

 

So how do you measure? When we can't value the death that is going to occur, we don't understand it, you see examples of the medical system that is so obsessed with birth rates that they emit a attributing value to say a woman being able to having the right to go through the experience themselves and keeping safety as one of the variables, but otherwise, the magic, the initiation, the bonding of the two parents, so on and so forth.

Jimi Wollumbin:

Quality of life, not just quantity of life.

Mason:

Yeah. And it is something invisible, which comes from perception, a lot of the time. So is there a, to an extent, a practical skill set that you are saying, is this is a focus for you. If you are saying the inner layers of your... In Patreon, I imagine, it gets talked about a bit more explicitly maybe.

Jimi Wollumbin:

Yeah. And those learning hubs where I initiate, support, educate and mentor people. But those skills are the social technologies, the traditional cultures all evolved. And those skills are how do you guide people through the successive processes of death and rebirth? And that's what initiation is. That's my definition of initiation, is like if someone says, "I want to be initiated," it's like, "Oh, you want to die," because you will die to your old self if you're initiated into your new self, into this new chapter.

 

That chapter is ending. And so all of the lore, L-O-R-E, and all of the rites, R-I-T-E-S as opposed to the L-A-Ws that our culture has and the human rights that we have, the sense of entitlement that comes with that is about lore and rites, And those that cultural lore and those rites of initiation, those rites of passage are what instantiate, embody, take those stories like the story of Persephone that I spoke about, that take that imagery of love and strife or the mythology of the seasons, the autumnal fall that's just woven into the universe and they put it into you again and again and again.

 

And so that's where it exists. And there's no culture that had a privileged position in terms of their ownership of that lore that helps transition from child psychology to adult psychology, the initiated adult. And so just to clarify there, I think that you can have a 65-year-old man or woman in child psychology, and I think our culture currently has an enormous number of them, sadly. Because we have lost our traditional lore, L-O-R-E, because we have lost those rites of passage. Now we get drunk when we're 18. Maybe go to the strippers, right? And so there's something marking it, but they're not effective rights that embody and instantiate that process of this is how you shed your skin and how you can encompass this new wisdom and go into the next chapter.

 

And it's not done once. It's done repeatedly. It's done again and again and again throughout life. And there's chapters, seasons that are springtime that feel easeful and we heal through love and through joy and through pleasure and through happiness. But autumn comes again, again and again, and that's the process of shedding and it has its own beauty.

 

Autumn is such a beautiful season, right? The bloody red bruised leaves that bloom across the canopy and then fall down into the under and rot, out of which grow the mycelia. That process, we will go through that process again and again and again through life. And so this imagery, this is the kind of imagery, the kind of law or the kind of mythology that traditional cultures all developed that we now miss. We long for. We miss it hugely. And so we are looking outside to other cultures who still have it, trying to put it into that hole, trying to learn from it, right?

Mason:

Which is noble, inappropriate at times. So it's so messy, sometimes really graceful. That's where I feel very grateful when I started SuperFeast that I felt, I was like, it's the only core idea that I had. And every time I had a lightning bulb moment and got connected to the muse that still... The unique muse and soul of SuperFeast was when I would think about these little micro choices that I believe are a sort of very macro logical way towards extreme unnecessary degeneration. And that extent of the degeneration that I refer to and have been able to talk about with a little bit more nuance because I've given myself the skill to explain myself. Back in the day, it was just like, I want to decimate disease. And it's like, then that becomes embarrassment, because it's naive. And then I go, "Oh my gosh, maybe this whole business is naive," rather than going "No, it's just about gaining the skillsets in order to communicate what I am sensing more appropriately."

Jimi Wollumbin:

But businesses too must die and be reborn and never more true than in the rapidly changing world that we have today.

Mason:

Oh yeah.

Jimi Wollumbin:

So the process of being dying and being reborn in... I have now teenage children and I tell them, I'm like, "Listen, all the movies and stories you've seen of how it was for me and how it was for your grandfather is you are not going to... Get the opportunity, chances are, to be the company man or the company woman and have a career and change it once, is that you're going to study, you're going to get something, you become an amazing graphic designer." And then ChatGPT just takes that out. No one needs graphic, isn't it? You're going to have to grow reinvent yourself. You get this rapidly changing world, and so you won't need to get good at the process of dying and being reborn again and again.

Mason:

And that's why I feel so savage at the moment, because everyone's looking at this inevitability, not just from a sense of, "Oh, it would be nice to integrate a little bit more" to be like, "No, now it's your shelter." It's your ability to bread-win in the first place. You're going to have to rely on transforming.

Jimi Wollumbin:

Yes. That your capacity to do that, to learn and learn and learn again. And the thing that you previously learn is now redundant. You're an expert at making vinyl records. Now it's CDs or cassette tapes, whatever the thing was. You're an amazing accountant. We don't really need so many accountants anymore. Fill in the blanks. And the same with your business, the necessity of agility, which is actually deep in our mammalian core, not just deep in our mammalian core, but deep in our microbial core of radical adaption and change to an ever-shifting environment and 'twas ever thus, 'twas ever thus. Even if you think, "Okay, there was like 500 years of stability or stagnation at this period of history or something like that," it's a blink. Ask the indigenous mob.

Mason:

I've been talking about entropy and centropy. I mean, I'm ironically, a part of centropy has death within it, so they are one and the same. And so sometimes I've watched-

Jimi Wollumbin:

Yin and Yang, a different language.

Mason:

Yeah. Watching myself work towards creating an enterprise here that is based on models of centropy, which does make sense to put your focus there initially, but realise, oh no, it's the integration of both, but then that is ironically what keeps it as a relevant organism. The people have heard me talk about it like a teal level organisation from the Ken Wilber's model, reinventing organisation studies that a lot, really, really mindful because there are certain principles that are out of the box, but then you need to spend a lot of time meditating with your muse and it's really quite a strenuous process even for me.

 

Now really landing it, especially being a... And then you watch things come up and then you get demanded to come into rally. ChatGPT is like an interesting one because the principle of evolution and the capacity to live in a synergistic world where you do evolve and you can die as just going into act, adjust, act, adjust, act, adjust. Not staying still, going, "No, can't do anything. Let's just go at an appropriate level. Okay, let's adjust with what we learned," which is a scary way to go about life. But even the ChatGPT thing, it's like watching... And I really get it. I've had to go through my process with it. And an obvious one I've heard in other businesses a lot is like, "Well, no, we can't do that because it's going to take away from the humanness of doing, writing a process."

 

And it's like, this is really great. It's a really great idea. So what we're tapping into is the idea that we value human essence yet then we also have the conundrum that there is, speaking of Jing, which would be great to go into in terms of the theme of what you are really exploring at the moment, there is the savage natural reality that you have found yourself in a world that has a macroeconomic competition area.

 

So since you want to stay, what do you value now? Because if you don't go in and use this thing, or you don't find the way to use humans to double down on the thing that's explicitly valuable to you, there is going to be a reality to the fact that the environment may chew you up, because you are not willing to integrate what information's out there. Likewise, what I find really inspiring is in that instance, if you go, "I'm not willing to," then you go and look at your business model. Maybe it's a wide distribution model, maybe it's got overheads, and you go, "Well, since I'm not willing to just get pulled along by technology, I'm going to readjust the whole business model and I'm going to take it back into something that's harmony, where I actually can not rely on this overhead."

 

I think you went through a massive shift of your approach, which was vast after the floods, and you made an appropriate adjustment, which came with a death, and then here you are now. It's really, it's just like...

Jimi Wollumbin:

Same as the adjustment of no longer being able to practise medicine in the era of Covid when I was so sick, and I was not vaccinated. And so suddenly that primary thing of I treat people one on one, and I'm a government registered doctor, that's now gone. Right?

 

And so each one of those adjustments, but those adjustments aren't just in the economic and human sphere. Those just, ask the dinosaurs. Those adjustments are in the natural sphere. That's complex systems. And so I'm going to speak about that in a... Just briefly expanded on the love and strife thing is that systems emerge when parts interact, they interact, and they interact and they interact. Then there's the whole that is that tribe, that is that jellyfish, that is that bacterial colony, that is that organ, that is that liver, that is that colony, whatever it is, and it's the whole that those systems that are now a part of. And that whole is determined by those parts, but then it is influencing the parts, right?

 

It's influencing the parts, but it's more complex. It's more complex and therefore more unstable at some level. So instability is brought in into it, right? Until at some point, with a changing environment and with that increased complexity, then it's just like, it has this... The instability is going to take over and it's either going to collapse or it's going to leap up to another order of complexity and being, and consciousness perhaps as well, right?

 

But then that one is even more unstable, so it has strife woven into it. The process of complex systems, the process of systems, of ecosystems, of biological systems, of organ systems, of economic systems. All of those systems have strife woven into them because they are complex and that complexity is their greatest gift and it's their greatest weakness. Because they're more complex, there's like of our technology, then they go wrong in these other ways.

 

And so that process, we call evolution, the changing process of just new orders of hierarchy that emerge again and again, and it goes across every facet of reality and of our being, of our personal evolution, and of our collective and human evolution, and of the evolution of matter and sentience itself. It goes through all of those things. Governments, businesses, organs, immune systems, bacterial colonies, all of them. Again and again, there will be ice ages. Again and again, there will be media strikes. Again and again.

 

It's like the bacteria that first colonised this earth, they shat out so much of this noxious, poisonous, terrible, terrible, terrible gas called oxygen, which is so corrosive. It's like hydrogen sulphide or it's so bad, that the first... The world got so full of oxygen that then reactive oxygen species were killing off bacteria because they just bread and bread and bread and bread and shat oxygen everywhere, and they destroyed the atmosphere and filled it with way too much oxygen.

 

They did that, those evil fuckers. And then they evolved the capacity to use oxygen as a part of their energy transfer, right? And so that changes as well. The sense of kind of original sin around humanity as being fundamentally different from nature as well, of just saying, "Well, the first ones to destroy the planet were the bacteria. They really took it to a crisis point, an absolute tipping point. And out of that emerges the eukaryotic cell and then multicellular organisms and the Cambrian explosion." All of that stuff is out of that global crisis of too much oxygen. Was it good, was it bad, or was it change?

Mason:

When you were talking about... I'd love to jump into the genius and this, because we're talking about capacity here. You got to have the capacity to be able to adjust. And it's not about necessarily even this has been... Like, I love going here and philosophical and well, it's not in the reality, maybe in perception territories, but sometimes, doesn't land in like, "Well, how do I do that when I'm on the go?"

Jimi Wollumbin:

Yes. Okay, so the piece that just went through Insta that I'll repeat here is that let's talk about Jing as potential or capacity, even though that's a bastardised, modern rendering of Essence and all those things, but it's what it is in some ways, in biological. It's like stem cells of your Qi, right? It's your potential that can then get converted into Qi and Yin and Yang and all those. It can do all the things.

 

So from that then capacity is necessary in terms of how we transmute the challenges of life, because life will always be challenging. It gets too hot, it gets too cold. This is for tomato plants as well as for human beings, right? How do those changes in the environment, which for us can be economic and sociological and psychological and romantic and health-based and medical, how does that transform into making us a juicier, sweeter tomato, a more resilient herb with a more adaptogenic root inside it?

 

Because all of our favourite adaptogens are often herbs that grow in really intense environments, really challenging environments. Maca in the Andes, where there's ginseng, Siberian ginseng, rhodiola, all of these things, they grow. Angelica from the West in Finland. They're really intense environments. They come out of the hoods and the ghettos. Same with so much of our other weeds. They grow on the gutters and the sidewalks. They grow in these places that have been deforested. They grow there. They grow in hard environments, but they are medicine to us because they integrated that challenge.

 

And so that challenge, which is a stress, is not necessarily distressing or resilience-building. So it's not a eustress or a distress at that point. It's just a challenge. It's a blank challenge. And the example that I gave was the challenge of going to gym, where I stress out my mitochondria, I stress out my sugar, blood sugar conversion, I stress out my muscles and my tendons, right?

 

Now, is that a distress? Well, if I do it poorly and I do it again and again and again, I have a repetitive strain injury, a repetitive stress injury, let's call it. If I have the capacity to integrate it, I have the down days and I shift up the stimulus that are coming into my system, and it's not always the same preacher curls that I'm doing, then that is a eustress. It's a hormetic stress. Hormesis is this the stress that produces resilience, right? Because if I take your glass here, your empty water glass, and I tap it against this side of the table, it gets weaker and weaker and weaker and weaker and weaker and weaker. But if I do that to my forearm...

Mason:

We wanted to give you the audio experience of that.

Jimi Wollumbin:

There you go. If I do that to my forearm, my bones get stronger. Anti-fragility is woven into the fabric of systems actually living and non-living, but definitely into human beings and all living systems. But it depends upon their capacity to integrate that challenge, that raw input, that stressor, which is neither bad nor good.

 

So we require space and capacity for integration. So if you have just been through a divorce, if you have just been fired from your job, if ChatGPT has just made your entire profession redundant, if there's a flood that took out the town that you used to live in, right, fill in the blanks, that can make you more resilient, can make you more compassionate, can make you wiser, can lead you through the disease of delusion, of your own separation, of your own... of all of these ideas, these horrible ideas that maybe you got when you're a child.

 

And it can lead you closer to soul, to truth, to wholeness, but only if you have the downtime, the time to integrate. And so there's a budget. What's your emotional budget? What's your Qi budget? Jing? What's your capacity to take on new challenges? And so for me, if out of the blue, at this point in my life, someone sideswiped my car and I suddenly have a thousand dollars that I have to... or $2,000 that I have to spit out, that is a little bit distressing. But 10 years ago, it would've been really distressing, because I did not have the budget for that. But at the moment. I've got the budget for that.

 

And so it's the same is if we have an argument, we have a difficult moment right then. Right now because I'm in a good part of my life. I have the capacity, I have the potential, I have the Jing to integrate that and to emerge more resilient.

 

Whereas a couple years ago, I did not have that capacity. I had no budget for more inputs. Life was challenging enough as it was. Getting out of bed was challenging. Trying to make an omelette for myself was challenging. Anything was challenging. Extra stressors were all distressing. And I had to take them off. I had to take them off, put them off. I had to close clinics. I closed One Health after 15 years of making the social enterprise. I just had to fold it up and pack it down. Everything was distressing. I did not have the capacity anymore to integrate those. And I had enough input with what was happening to my soul and my body through that process of breakdown. And so I didn't have the Jing. I had burnt out we could say at that point.

Mason:

But you acknowledged it. Did that take a while to get to the acknowledgement point?

Jimi Wollumbin:

Yeah, it took a while. It took a little while at the start. Obviously, the ego's desire is not like any system, like a government. It just wants to perpetuate itself.

Mason:

This is what they say. If you don't listen to little universal messages, eventually it's going to send a Mac truck.

Jimi Wollumbin:

That's right. Yeah. Absolutely. So I didn't listen to the little messages, but no one does generally.

Mason:

No, one does. People say that to me. I did a business talk the other day, and they're like, "So everything you're telling us now, what would you have done at the start of your journey if you had this information?" I was like, "I had it. Oh, I had a-"

Jimi Wollumbin:

Intellectually, I had it. I ignored it. I couldn't. And so that's the thing is the ego doesn't want to die. It does not. That persona, that aspect of yourself, it does not want to die. The child does not willingly want to die to become a teenager. It doesn't want to. And so there's resistance.

 

It's hard. It's tough. But we must, right? And we need that time and space, compassion and understanding. We need to build that in our cultures and our societies for people that are going into the underworld, that are going, that have too many stressors to integrate at that point, how do we create space so that they can integrate that. Because when they integrate it, then they're going to emerge with gifts for all of us. They'll emerge wiser and stronger and more loving and more compassionate, and they'll be a larger version of themselves.

 

But if you just keep hitting them with challenge after challenge, stressor after stressor, then that becomes distressing to the point of then that person can then just start devolving into a process of crisis and trauma and then just... It's not resilience building at that point. It's traumatic. And so the difference between something being like net trauma-resulting or net resilience-making like my workout, which was stressing, stressful, is the space to integrate, the potential to integrate, the budget and the reserves. And that's a novel way of understanding Jing, since we're tying it back to Jing.

Mason:

And tying it back to the healer, because you're talking about a skill that everyone... Again, it's a skill we all know, that I'm not doing the healing. I'm just giving you the space for healing. But what is a subtle understanding, which is actually I found the most difficult in these living organisms of a healing tradition, it's the difference between a corporation and running a healing tradition and not being integrated with the living aspect, is that there is... It comes down to communication and the stance you take.

 

And so one, you've got an intricate way of the showing that you can only change yourself. You literally can't change the person in front of you. And I think every time I go into the way an organization's running or a system is running, it's whether that acknowledgement is inherent and that there's inherently the capacity of the healer or the practitioner or the person in the family who's facilitating healing to be like, "I will give advice when advice is warranted." And I also get the sense that if that advice is... If I've been given permission to give advice, that I will read the room and see what they have the capacity to take on.

 

I'm very bad at reading that. And I hear that as.... And likewise, I've become really sensitive watching when a medical system is really obvious, one where they're going to come and jam advice down your throat, getting to the point and realising you actually can't change anyone. You can only change yourself.

 

When you're in the hippie stage of life and you're just like, "Yeah, oh, that theory is so good." And you're like, "All right, now let's go out into the world and really get that and put it into the constitution of a business as this is what you do or put in the constitution of a practise." And when you teach people, it's like, just say saying the theory of that, it doesn't actually land.

 

I know. I've had to go back and really go, "Wow, I've got a lot of stuff that I need to integrate before I can really land and arrive at that point," but it seems to be a common place, like a common place where we're on a macro level. We're attempting to integrate that reality of...

Jimi Wollumbin:

And that's what therapy is, is creating some space for integration. It's like, "Well, let's revisit that experience with your mum or your dad when you're a kid. Let's take some time out from all of those other things. Let's just pause."

 

And the process of integration can require tears, can require rage, be a parasympathetic response, can be so many different things. But it's creating space to not to disown, not to push back like down, to suppress, but to be able to pick it back up and look at it again and say, "How do I weave this into the fabric of my being? What do I learn from this? How do I grow around this?"

 

And so we've been speaking a lot about systems and I've been speaking about science and philosophy and all of these different things, but for the human beings listening here, then I think the core of this is around how do I heal? What do I do with my brokenness? Am I trying to just get past it? And as I said before, I was like, "No, there's room inside your soul and inside your wholeness also for your brokenness." And that brokenness is like a mycelial spore. It's a gate that you can walk through. It is the prima materia that you turn into gold. You must have that experience.

 

As a father, I wish it for my children. Go off, travel the world, fall over, start businesses, fail businesses, have relationships, fail at relationships or end relationships. I don't wish them instant success in all of their arenas of life, because that would be crippling. It would be crippling. But I do wish them the tools and the capacity to integrate those challenges. That's what I wish them that.

 

So the people listening who are hurting, who are just like, "This is all a lot of big words, guys." Then how do we bring this back down to this sense of, "Okay, the path of the healer," which is the subject of this podcast, "the path of the wounded healer is actually just the path of humanity, is the path of life, is the path of..."

 

Life is challenging. It really is. We are going to be offended at times. We're going to have so many different challenges that come to us. And those, we can either just lock them away as wounds and just hold them there, or they can become a path that leads us through to the thriving of soul.

 

And so yes, you are wounded and yes, you are broken. And so am I. I'm not finished with my walking of the medicine path. I am not healed and whole. I'm not here saying, "I used to be like you, hurt and incomplete, and I had health problems and psychological problems and relationship problems-"

Mason:

Just for 19.95 a month.

Jimi Wollumbin:

Yeah, that's right. I will teach you how I too now am flatlining on a constant spiritual high. No. No. Vomit, toxic, terrible idea. It's not how it is. It's not how it is. It's that I hurt too. I have challenges too. We all do. And the wounded healer, the shaman does too. And they carry, they've integrated their wound. That's the difference. We are all wounded, but the wounded healer is the one that has learned to pick up that wound and carry with it and use that as a path towards wholeness and soul, and then hopefully, to take others along and to share that as they can along the way and say, "Yeah, what do I do with my grief?"

 

It's like, you don't try and leave that behind entirely. It's like, okay, your child was killed by a car when they were seven years old. It's like, that's always a subject of grief. It's not to leave that behind. You don't have to leave that behind, but you can integrate it and learn how to hold it.

 

And so I have grief in my heart for a range of different things that have happened to me in my life, but that makes me better at what I do. I have not transcended them. I have not vanquished them. I've integrated them. They've become scars and stories of my life, and I'm proud of them and my capacity to integrate that to say, "I too am, I'm hurt." Then it points towards the path of integration, which is not a transcendence of these aspects of life. It's a working with them. That's the shadow workers, that now somewhat new aged Jungian concept.

Mason:

Well, I don't think we can top that. I think that's beautiful. Drjimi.com, J-I-M-I.

Jimi Wollumbin:

Yes.

Mason:

The easiest.

Jimi Wollumbin:

Yes.

Mason:

The easiest website. I love it. I don't know why that excites me so much.

Jimi Wollumbin:

Yeah. Yeah. I was amazed. I was like, "It's still there."

Mason:

I remember, and having an affinity towards your inner circle, what do you call the inner circle?

Jimi Wollumbin:

Yes. Well, my Patreon is where I... Is like a learning hub, and there's three stages inside it for just dip your feet in the inner circle. And then there's a wellness hub, which is a little bit deeper and has some live calls. And then the apprentice lounge, you get access to all of it, and there's more live calls. And I speak at greater depth, whether you're a practitioner or not. So that's where initiation and mentorship happens for me with my work, is in that capacity there.

Mason:

Well, I feel it's kind of cool. It was just an interest when we went to our first episode. I remember one of your apprentices was there. Six years ago?

Jimi Wollumbin:

Yes.

Mason:

Maybe we did that whole class now at your clinic. And I was like, "Oh, wow. That's such a... It's so unique to have an apprentice-based approach at this point of life." And I remember having an affinity towards it. It was like, really stepped in there and was like... But I was like, "No, it's not about that." It's just about acknowledging it and hearing, knowing that that's then woven into this next addition. It's great. And I've heard a few people I know who are in there who are doing the apprenticeship and it's a nice model as well that you go.

Jimi Wollumbin:

Which is ideally, although there's a lot of woo around this word I ideally initiatory rather than educational, right, because education seems like just knowledge that is applied to the mind. And so being educated but not schooled, being schooled, but not educated, being educated, but not initiated.

 

In fact, this is one of the problems that a lot of our therapists, healers, naturopaths, herbalists, Chinese medicine practitioners also suffer from, is that they were schooled, not initiated. And so mentorship in the hands of someone who has integrated their wounds, who has walked this path, not only are they sharing the tricks of the trade, but they should also be sharing and modelling that which cannot be taught but must be caught, transmitted. That's mentorship, that's initiatory.

 

To see it and feel it, to observe it, to see it modelled in someone. What does it look like? What does this look like? Are they free of scars? No, they're not. Right? And so that's why it's required to have something outside of a schooling model, the apprenticeship model, which is central to all of our healing traditions, so that which cannot be taught can be caught. Right?

Mason:

I love it. Go check it out guys. Go check out Dr. Jimi on Instagram as well. Dr. Jimi Wollumbin there blown up all of a sudden after a little bit of advice I gave him about how to... But no, your content was perfect just for that platform.

Jimi Wollumbin:

Fantastic.

Mason:

Wasn't it?

Jimi Wollumbin:

Thank you very much. Well, I'm not sure. I have a range of different responses to that from people online, but I'm enjoying it.

Mason:

Because I went to your gram just to reach out about just having another pod, because it got circled in here and just nearly fell off my chair when I saw how many followers you had. It's been like nine months or something like that.

Jimi Wollumbin:

Yes, that's right.

Mason:

I'm so happy because yeah, it's like such...

Jimi Wollumbin:

Nine months and 25 years of practise.

Mason:

Yeah. Gosh. Yeah, we were just talking about that, weren't we? Someone's like, "Oh, you just get lucky and go viral." Your wife had a great response to that.

Jimi Wollumbin:

Yes, that's right. After 25 years of absolute obsession, then just overnight it just got lucky. Yes.

Mason:

Yeah. But what was the video? Because I know everyone told me there was like a video that-

Jimi Wollumbin:

It was one on frankincense and myrrh.

Mason:

They're pretty hot.

Jimi Wollumbin:

Yeah. The Jesus herb.

Mason:

Yeah.

Jimi Wollumbin:

The Jesus herbs.

Mason:

It's the wise man herb.

Jimi Wollumbin:

Yeah. So I think, yeah, maybe Jesus was watching over me on that one.

Mason:

Well done, man.

Jimi Wollumbin:

Thank you so much. Always a pleasure.