Dr. Gita Vaid, Co-Founder of the Center for Natural Intelligence
Mental health issues, such as depression, anxiety, and loneliness are on the rise. Are psychedelic medicines the cure? Dr. Gita Vaid, co-founder of the Center for Natural Intelligence, uses ketamine assisted psychotherapy in her practice and has seen radical shifts in mental health as it works on foundational repair. Through her wisdom, she unlocks the concept of inner healing intelligence, how connection is the infrastructure to wellness, and the respect she has for the mystery of the mind.
Gita Vaid, MD is a board certified psychiatrist and psychoanalyst practicing ketamine assisted psychotherapy in New York City. She is a co-founder of the Center for Natural Intelligence, a multidisciplinary laboratory dedicated to psychedelic psychotherapy innovation and clinical practice. Dr Vaid completed her residency training and is on faculty at NYU Medical Center, psychoanalytic training at the Psychoanalytic Association of New York. She trained as a fellow in clinical psychopharmacology and neurophysiology at New York Medical College and completed a research fellowship at NYU Medical Center. Dr Vaid serves as the Director of Psychedelic Awareness and Consciousness research at The Chopra Foundation and is on Faculty as a lead instructor at The Ketamine Training Center.
Show Notes
Dr. Gita Vaid is the foremost expert in ketamine assisted psychotherapy. [03:25]
Using psychedelic medicines for mental health treatment was a game changer. [04:26]
What was the journey of taking psychedelic medicine from underground to clinical practice? [08:01]
What other medicine practices and traditions are effective for mental health? [09:32]
What are the two concepts that catalyze physical and mental healing potential? [10:40]
A pivotal moment for new approaches to alleviate mental and physical suffering. [13:20]
Remarkable healing results with psychedelic medicines will open more possibilities. [16:25]
Imagination and play mentally frees us up to help others. [17:53]
Why are we blind to inequities and ecological degradation? [20:30]
What is an example of the journey to wholeness? [24:04]
What’s the benefit of shifting from doing everything for oneself to more interdependence on others? [29:17]
If we repair interconnectedness, our society will move from disease to wellness. [33:19]
What is nourishment as a form of healing? [34:18]
Respecting the mystery of people. [36:58]
Transcript
Bisi Williams 0:04
I'm Bisi Williams, you're listening to Health2049.
Dr. Gita Vaid 0:08
What's even more radical to me and exciting is that there's also the possibility that psychedelic medicines afford if not just dampening anxiety and depression, but to really step into true healing and getting to core underlying issues where people can actually build health, build wellness, build resilience, metabolize trauma, which then shifts the system from being one of mental illness and diagnosing and symptom management to cultivate true growth and emergence of creative expressions. So that's a radical game changer.
Bisi Williams 1:22
Have you noticed lately that we've been witnessing a cultural shift in our thinking about mental health? We can see how quickly our moods and behaviors can be affected by circumstances and challenges. But we've also realized just how resilient and strong our minds can be. Psychedelics have been a hot topic and mental health research for some time, and more recent studies have yielded some promising results. Patients with major depressive disorder have seen symptoms improve with the help of ketamine, for example.
My guest today is Dr. Gita Vaid, a board certified psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, who specializes in ketamine assisted psychotherapy. Currently, she is the medical director of the Center for Natural Intelligence based in New York. Previously, Dr. Vaid trained as a fellow in clinical psychopharmacology and neurophysiology at New York Medical College and completed a research fellowship at NYU Medical Center. She's a map trained psychedelic psychotherapist, and serves on faculty at the Ketamine Training Center. She is also on faculty and teaches at both the Psychoanalytic Association of New York and in the NYU Department of Psychiatry.
Hi, my name is Bisi Williams. It is my pleasure to welcome Dr. Gita Vaid to Health2049. Dr. Vaid thank you for joining us today. And welcome to the show.
Dr. Gita Vaid 3:23
Thank you Bisi. It's a pleasure to be here.
Bisi Williams 3:25
Well, thank you for joining us, Dr. Vaid. If you would, would you please tell our guests about your professional background? For example, how does one become the world's foremost expert in ketamine assisted psychotherapy?
Dr. Gita Vaid 3:40
That's quite a title. I would say it's been quite a journey I've been on. And one of the ways to become that is to spend a lot of time in practice, I have been in practice for close to 30 years now. So it's been an ongoing journey in my own development and evolution, from practicing psychoanalytic psychotherapy and pharmacology to support deeper work, to really discovering psychedelic medicines, and understanding the potential they offer for healing. So that's been just an extraordinarily gratifying process to find modalities that are a game changer in the treatment of mental health.
Bisi Williams 4:21
Tell me more about that game changer. How did you connect the dots?
Dr. Gita Vaid 4:26
I would say the first thing that piqued my interest, when it came to psychedelic medicines, was having the good fortune of having colleagues that I worked with in my current day practice, who had been actually very involved with the initial research with psychedelic medicines back in the 60s. One of my colleagues, who also is a psychoanalyst, an older gentleman, had actually worked with the Canadian psychiatrist, Humphry Osmond and Dr. Osmond is actually the psychiatrist who coined the term psychedelic. And he was one of the early researchers looking at LSD for the treatment of alcoholism. And back in those days, LSD and psychedelic medicines were actually not illegal, they weren't scheduled. So it was very easy to write a note to Sandoz the drug company, and say you will come to do some clinical research and actually be sent in the mail vials of LSD. And this is what my colleague would tell me about, his experiments and self experiments and how impactful it had been for him personally as a young man, as well as for those he was involved with in clinical treatments.
And so it just seemed extraordinary to hear these stories. And around the same time, there was a lot of interest and at NYU Medical Center, looking at psychedelic medicines, psilocybin for end of life, cancer and depression in terminal cancer patients. So there was a lot happening here that just really piqued my interest, that got me intrigued to discover more. And when I actually really directly encountered it, for the first time was in my office, a gentleman that I worked with, actually very infrequently, but had seen him about twice a year for several years just to refill as needed medications for sleep and anxiety, in sitting with him on our regular checkups, just the whole experience of him was so vastly different that I started kind of poking around asking questions to try and understand what could account for this difference of experiencing him, just sitting with him. And he finally said, What are you looking for? And I said, Well, I'm trying to find out how I can explain how I can just have emotional connection with you, like I've never experienced with you before, just sitting with you, I feel the amount of emotional contact I have with you is radically different. And nothing you're describing accounts for it. You don't describe any big changes in your life. Hmm. And he was really surprised and simple. Seems like you've figured it out. So I'll tell you, I've been working with an underground psychotherapist doing journey work with psychedelic medicines. And he was quite stunned that I had picked this up. For me, it was not a subtle thing. It was very dramatic, because this is the space I live in. These are the parameters I work within. So to me, it was just radical. So of course that led on this whole exploration of asking for an introduction to his guide, and just a deep exploration in the whole space of underground work and research work to pretty much discover as much as I could about these medicines that had this capacity.
Bisi Williams 7:51
That's amazing. So then it was you and your colleagues and teams that took it from underground to above ground, what was that journey like?
Dr. Gita Vaid 8:01
It's a very interesting kind of moment in time, because a lot of people have continued to be working with these medicines in the underground because these medicines have been illegal for decades, mostly. But there are a lot of people who have continued to work with them, because they had been working with them in a legal capacity until they got rescheduled. And so that was done in secret and people are taking a risk because they really believed in these medicines and the overground work, they have become increasingly and now there are many all over the world, of research sites where one can enter into drug trials, which are completely legal to study and investigates the effect on these medicines. And so that would be a legal way of going about it. The only legal medicine that can be used in an office and not in a research context is ketamine. So as soon as I heard about ketamine, I was very intrigued to discover more about it. And I had been reading a lot about it when I met Dr. Phil Wolfson, who's a ketamine pioneer. I actually had seen him speak at a few conferences and was very impressed at his mind and his knowledge. But I was really excited to have the good fortune of working with him and training with him. And that's where I really was inspired to start working with it in my office.
Bisi Williams 9:25
I love that. And could you just tell us a little bit more about the Center for Natural Intelligence that you're the medical director of?
Dr. Gita Vaid 9:32
Yes, I'm very excited by the Center for Natural Intelligence. It's really an innovation and awareness center to really try and develop new approaches to psychotherapy, weaving in knowledge that has been held in many different traditions working in non ordinary states. So there's a lot of knowledge with indigenous medicine practices, as well as Eastern medicine traditions where entering into non ordinary states actually has been shown and cultivated over centuries as various healing practices. Meditation is a very commonly used one. But also yoga philosophy, Ayurveda, they held a lot of knowledge in these different traditions. So I'm very interested in how do we think about each of these elements as well as the role of music and context to go further in weaving together the art form and various art forms into this healing field that psychedelics catalyze.
Bisi Williams 10:32
I love that. And can you just tell me a little bit more about your philosophy and the art of healing Dr. Vaid?
Dr. Gita Vaid 10:40
Well, I think that psychedelic medicines really catalyze the healing potentials that we all hold. One of the most exciting aspects of psychedelic medicines that I've witnessed in my own working with them and researching about them, is this concept of inner healing intelligence. And this is a concept that one of the psychedelic pioneers, Stan Grof, really introduced, which is this concept that as a living system, each of us has the potential to heal ourselves.
In medicine, we like to think of doctors as healers. But in fact, we really don't do very much to heal anything, our bodies heal themselves, we just remove the obstacles as physicians, we remove the obstacles that interrupt healing processes. So for example, if you break your arm, if the arm is adjusted to remove any kind of obstacles, such as an infection, and the bones are put in close proximity and held together and stabilized, it's the body that does the repairing itself, it's the bones that heal themselves. And what's remarkable is that what's true of the body turns out to be true of the mind as well. If we remove the obstacles towards healing and provide ideal conditions, the mind itself knows how to heal itself. So that's one of the most remarkable, I think, central tenets of psychedelic medicines. And it turns out psychedelic medicines to catalyze ideal healing conditions.
The other piece, I think, that goes along with it is that we heal ourselves as well as we heal each other. And that shouldn't be such a radical concept. And I'm not talking about fixing, like a surgeon fixes, I'm more thinking about the balance between, if you have a baby, each of us when we were babies, we came into this world with a whole genetic endowment that was going to really govern our unfolding and our growth and development. But none of us can actually survive and grow and thrive unless you have a good nurturing environment and nurturing caregivers that can provide the functions no baby can survive. We're all completely helpless and dependent on our parents and early caregivers, to feed ourselves or to nourish ourselves or shelter ourselves. So it's that same idea of how can we provide the healing conditions for the people we're working with and for communities to provide the tools for healing?
Bisi Williams 13:10
Gita, that's amazing. So I'd love for you to share with our guests your vision for the future of health and wellness in the year 2049.
Dr. Gita Vaid 13:20
Well, this is a really exciting invitation to dream because I think it's a pivotal moment right now, where a lot of these different systems are in flux, there's so much need for new approaches to alleviate mental suffering, as well as physical suffering. And what I think is so exciting about psychedelic medicines is just used as they are, they offer very nice tools and novel agents to have new approaches to provide antidepressant effects and anxiolytic effects.
So in some ways, if we just continue in the current paradigm, there's a remarkable new wave of new modalities to continue in this ongoing way that we are working, which is still a huge advance. What's even more radical to me and exciting is that there's also the possibility that psychedelic medicines afford, if not just dampening anxiety and depression, but to really step into true healing and getting to core underlying issues where people can actually build health, build wellness, build resilience, metabolize trauma, which then shifts the system from being one of mental illness and diagnosing and symptom management, to actually shifting to one of enhancing wellness and metabolizing and removing obstacles such as trauma that people are holding to cultivate true growth and emergence of creative expressions. So that's a radical game changer.
And what I would like to envision would be a real new discipline where you can have healing centers where people can focus not on only physical health, but also mental health, where people can really be able to understand what is mental health. We don't really have tools to think about our inner worlds, our inner environments. We don't really understand or think too much about it unless one's in some form of psychotherapy, it's taken for granted that the mind is fine until it's damaged or broken, as opposed to a more nuanced view of the fact that we all have inner worlds and two people have very different ecologies, and inner environments. And what can we do to facilitate a nurturing environment, a supportive environment in our minds? Some of us never got that even growing up. So how does one assume you're going to have a healthy, nurturing supportive environment internally.
And I think there has to be more focus on education, knowledge, cultivation of mental wellness, and building resilience, and building good internal space, not only mentally and physically, too, the two are different aspects of the same. I don't really think the mind and body are different, but right now we see them as very separate.
Bisi Williams 16:16
That's fascinating. And so tell me, why are you confident that your vision can be achieved in 30 years?
Dr. Gita Vaid 16:25
I think there's tremendous excitement with psychedelic medicines, people are just having just remarkable results. And there's so much buzz right now about psychedelics, probably over buzz, but that still allows for some enthusiasm. And people are intrigued by these new possibilities. And I think at a moment when we're all fairly traumatized to different degrees with COVID and just the huge stress we're all under with this pandemic, as well as these rising mental health rates. I mean, I think all of us have been touched directly or indirectly, by serious mental illness and suicide, that I think is just a moment where people are really much more open to new possibilities, and are looking for changes. So I think that this can happen. I think there's a lot of competing forces at play that could interrupt it. But at the same time, I'm hopeful, I think results work for themselves. And if we can have a lot of people really recognizing many paths towards healing, I think more possibilities can be availed.
Bisi Williams 17:36
You know, you mentioned hope, which I think is is a nice word, and not in the sort of soft sense, but this way of new ways of thinking and new modalities, and approaches from various cultures, how do you envision those all come together in 30 years?
Dr. Gita Vaid 17:53
I think one of the key elements of what psychedelic medicines do and it's very connected to, I think, answering your question, I think that when we're shut down, when we're traumatized, when we're depressed, our mind gets very rigid and fixed. And when we're stressed out, we go into a fight or flight or survival mode, it's a little bit like someone in a war zone, they're not sitting around day dreaming. They're not playing, what they're doing is trying to hang on for their dear lives. And even if we're not in a war zone, those individuals who are stuck in survival modes, depression, anxiety, and the shutdown states, they really lose the the ability to think freely and to play.
And these medicines, when one heals just actually allow one to get safe, to feel safe, to feel comforted, and able to have all the energy put towards imagination and play. And it goes back to your question is, I think that we're lacking really imagination, and I think in our culture, to really rethink systems, to really imagine a different world and I think it starts on an individual level. So one person at a time, if we're freed up, I think that what I see in individuals when they get their own healing, which is actually very heartwarming is that people actually, once they feel better, they want to help others, they suddenly look beyond themselves, and they feel like, I want to help my family, or I want to help my community, I want to give back. And that's something very beautiful. And so that's what gives me hope that I think that it engenders different ways of thinking and more creativity. And goodness, just as I think that the opposite is true when we're in pain. If we become very me centered, it's a little bit like if you're drowning, you're just focusing on yourself and trying to stay afloat, and maybe even pulling down a few other people in your attempts to stay afloat
Bisi Williams 19:54
I'd like to address that a little bit more and I'd love to hear the science behind this. I mean, I firmly believe that when we heal ourselves, like you say, we can heal our communities and our world and perhaps we have a blind spot for the ecological degradation that we're seeing, and then the inequities because we're blind, perhaps we're our own pain and our own drowning, as you say, is that accurate?
Dr. Gita Vaid 20:30
Yeah, I think that's really true. I've been actually thinking a lot in my work about co- regulation, how we regulate ourselves, and we regulate each other. A lot of my work harkens back to thinking about child development, because I think what these medicines actually allow for in psychotherapy, is foundational repair and correction. It's a little bit like we're all walking around as these buildings who have faulty foundations, nevertheless, we managed to build a beautiful edifice on top of it. But there is some structural weaknesses. And what I find extraordinary about these medicines, which is a game changer, instead of doing a renovation job where we can just have a decorator come in and put on new wallpaper and carpeting, which can help with the appearance, it's a different model of actually redoing the foundations, of course, the whole building is then going to collapse a bit. But from that shoring up of foundations, you'll have a new kind of flourishing, and new construction emerge, which is more resilient and enduring and much more about the full capacity of a person. And I think that's the real shift that is so magical about this work, that you can have this foundational repair.
But in that what I see happening is, oftentimes it shifts to not just being about clever interpretations and discoveries, it winds up being more about regulation capacities, co-regulation, of having one person breathing in concert with another and what's remarkable is how as human beings we synchronize. I was just reading some studies about individuals who sleep together, their heartbeats co-regulate bidirectionally, we have no idea how this happens. Or even people talking to each other, the EEGs, the brainwaves synchronize in a way that is very clear. And babies and mothers do this when they're present and playing, there's a much better synchronization that happens. And this is how we are as human beings, we're wired to be this way.
So the more disconnected we are, the more we are unable to have these natural rhythms that influence us. And in some ways, we know this, women together, they tend to start menstruating together. And these are just biological phenomena, we don't really know how they happen. But I think it's very at odds with culturally what we're doing, where we split ourselves off, and we're disconnecting from communities. And we're not really in balance with these kind of more interdependent kind of relationships where we can take care of ourselves and also take care of our communities, take care of the world around us and have much more reciprocity. But I think this all stems in this kind of almost a fractal that kind of virgins out from this really early connection between mother and infant, or father and infant regulation patterns, because because it really takes a village to raise a child and none of us have the village or get the village right now.
Bisi Williams 23:47
Oh, my gosh, that is an amazing analogy. And what I would like to talk a little bit more about Dr. Vaid, if you could please tell me a story about someone who made themselves whole, what is the journey to wholeness?
Dr. Gita Vaid 24:04
Well, I can give you some clinical examples, because oftentimes, when I talk, people think it sounds very abstract. Even when I'm describing what's going to happen to an individual before a session, they usually will say they had no idea what to expect based on my description. It's very hard to capture the experience, but I'll give you some vignettes, to give you a sense of what that looks like in the consulting room because it certainly is not psychotherapy, as usual.
I'll give you an example, a middle aged man I just started working with who actually had a lot of psychedelic experience. He was very excited and interested and was a bit of an experimenter and an explorer. So he certainly was not new to these medicines. What he was new to was doing them in a psychotherapy process with facilitation, and I started him with a very low dose of ketamine. He did tell me, I tend to go for high doses, and I need a lot of medicine. So give me more. And I said, fair enough, we're going to start with a low dose, I like to test myself and see and listen to the body because our minds deceive us a lot. And I gave him a tiny dose. And he immediately dropped into this very strong state of feeling kind of anxious. And his whole body started shaking. And he sort of, his whole body was almost buzzing, he said, and so I held his hand, I asked him, would it be okay, if I hold your hand? And he let me hold his hand. And he said, Well, you're going to give me some more. And I said, no, why don't we just sit and breathe together. And together, we breathed together and he slowly settled himself. And then I let go of his hand, and he seemed to be doing fine settling himself. But not only was he settling himself, I could sense in the energy that almost this smile came over his face, that he was having some real, almost some enjoyment of a sense of achievement, of being able to find himself going from panicky to what's happening to my body, what's happening to this buzziness to actually breathing and calming himself down, and learning how to actually regulate himself, calm himself. And it was so remarkable that he came out of the experience.
And I said, Can I give you the same dose again, and I did exactly the same repeat. And from there, he actually was able to just be calm and practice even further, the experience of holding his feelings. And this time, he wasn't shaking. And I saw it with my own eyes, it felt like he was actually cultivating new capacities he'd never had before. I reflected that back to him. And he said, Well, that was what it felt like to him, too. And he almost had a symbolic, almost like a diagrammatic representation of the same in his mind, which is quite fascinating. And after that session, he wrote me a string of emails that when he would get stressed, this was the highly anxious fellow, he would actually be able to use that experience, to hold and manage his feelings in ways he had never done before in his life. And so it was quite remarkable. This is a man who'd been on a lot of antidepressants and actually even had some more invasive TMS depression treatment in the past and had really pursued treatment for depression and anxiety although depression was his primary complaint before. Although I have to say I was very impressed at his level of anxiety when I met him more than his depression, but they tend to go hand in hand. But so that was a session to give you a sense of everyone's different, but it was quite extraordinary to see, given the right conditions, his ability to find himself and do piece of work, even in session number one, that was quite extraordinary and sustained him, even through that session and the next session.
Bisi Williams 27:49
That's amazing. I mean, clinically, that's a fantastic result, that you have someone who could have a tool, learn something and design a coping mechanism, and be self reflexive, and self soothing through this process with you.
Dr. Gita Vaid 28:05
It was quite remarkable. I mean, he's also a very high capacity, very intelligent, very interesting man who had done a lot of inner work. But it's almost as if you get the right environments where your whole being and body is able to actualize and absorb, weave together creatively the knowledge you hold in your mind and your body. And that's what we saw. In the next session that we did about six weeks after was no less remarkable, almost like the continuation of the next level of his of his process. So it's quite unique, each session is very different. But it really shifts my role to actually really deep listening to try and understand what the process is almost to translate, and also to understand it so I can know how to best serve the process that's unfolding.
Bisi Williams 28:55
I find that remarkable. I wanted to just want to take a second here and just do a little bit of a deeper dive with you. Why do you think reciprocity is important in terms of wellness? And can you discuss the devaluation of the mother and by extension, Mother Earth.
Dr. Gita Vaid 29:17
And I think these concepts have really linked and this has been just a real focus, some of it is because I feel like these invisible kind of early mothering functions, that when I say Mother, they don't not always provided by the woman, it could be the father, but I'm going to call the mothering functions, whoever is providing them in the caregivers.
I think there's a real increasing deficit that we are parceling along each generation. Because each infant when we come into this world, if they're not screaming and overstimulated, there's a problem with the baby. And it really takes another nervous system to soothe and calm down and be able to be attuned to that infant to provide those functions. So through one living system, there's kind of a dyadic shared organism, which has a mother child, or father child, kind of pairing, or dyad. And through that there's the emergence of an individual where all sorts of functions and capacities have happened through this synchronized co-regulated field, I mean, mother is going to get just as disturbed and anxious, if baby is crying, really is this kind of matrix, that is this developmental matrix that unfolds, what I think is remarkable is that psychedelic space can allow for some of that environment for correction and repair.
But going back to your original sentence, I think if we don't get a good enough environment, or what if Mom has her own trauma, and can't really provide those functions, because she never got them, or she has some limitations and some shutdowns, as we all do, then there's a deficit, which usually wouldn't be a bad thing, because maybe there's the father or the uncle, or the art or the grandmother who can provide those functions. But since we don't tend to have extended families, I know, I didn't have an extended family, living with my nuclear family in New York, and most of us don't, it's really hard to have redundancy in the system, which just leads to more primitive coping mechanisms.
And then, of course, there's the issue, we all get rewarded and applauded for being in our heads than achievement, instead of being more balanced. And so societally, the more we can just shut down and behave well and study well, we're going to get rewarded. So we all tend to be lopsided in our development. And emotional health isn't valued as much regulation, coping, those kinds of skills and those tools, I think we're all riding on various degrees of a deficit, which throws us off balance, and doesn't really allow for these attuned relationships between people where we can regulate ourselves, as well as support other people and have that more balanced approach, which allows for deeper and richer connections.
I think, not surprisingly, we're seeing huge increases in loneliness, as we get more and more disconnected, as we disconnect from others, certainly, the pandemic has contributed to that tremendously. But the more we are lonely, is a real decrease in mental health and increase in suffering. So I think there's a real possibility of shifting that back, and recognizing this idea of being autonomous and individual and doing it all ourselves, which has been idealized needs to shift to a more balanced view of also, interdependence of ways of wanting to take care of each other, and how we actually are each other, we will regulate and co-regulate, if we have ideal conditions, so we can feel each other and start shifting in another direction to have more concern and build health through these different connections.
Bisi Williams 33:01
What I find remarkable is that we could do that today. If we do that today, and we start this repair, of interconnectedness, and mirroring that, in fact, we could have a society that has less disease and more wellness.
Dr. Gita Vaid 33:19
I think that's correct. And I think that's what I think that's what the invitation is. And I think it's hard because it seems so simple. But I think that's where the shutdown is, that's where the blindness is. It's interesting how it's available in front of us. And I think that's one of the most remarkable things about these medicines is they allow one to break out. And of course, it doesn't have to be the medicines, there are many practices that allow us to wake up and break out of these of these loops. I mean, in Hinduism, we call it karma, you can break out of your karma, and through meditation and different knowledge that one can access from oneself. You don't actually have to have psychedelic medicines, but they are a very efficient tool.
Bisi Williams 34:06
I love that. And I would just like to talk about nourishment, how you view nourishment as a form of healing.
Dr. Gita Vaid 34:18
Well, that's the other piece of it. I would say that when we are disconnected, I've noticed in working with individuals, that sometimes even the pathways to connecting with another person, when I talk about co-regulation, it gets into give and receive.
So it's not just shifting from a me based structure into seeing the light and wanting to connect with another person. Sometimes those pathways towards connecting with the person in front of us, including a therapist have been shut down so early or haven't been utilized. It's a little bit like a muscle that hasn't been ever used. And it's how I felt when I go to Pilates. They say to use my muscles and I feel like, I don't have those muscles. And I'm not wrong, because they haven't been worked out. But the next day, I feel it. And I feel like some of those pathways of connecting with another haven't really been cultivated.
And so that's what opens up in these sessions, the real ability to oftentimes to have connections, sometimes for the first time with another person emotionally, almost to open up the space for, for real connection, which is not only nice to be connected, but then there's a real beautiful, reciprocal feeling of nourishment of actually receiving from the other person, not just mechanically or physically, or not through gifts or concrete material, but emotionally from actually the gift of being in connection, a feeling of another person, of being felt by another person. And this is really building infrastructure and health, where you can actually oftentimes get what people are craving, and trying to solve when they are working more and more jobs to have more and more stuff in their lives to try and fill something or addictions.
Behind it, oftentimes there are these blocks where people are not trying to be self destructive, they're just trying to fill something the pathways in which they're trying to actually nourish themselves are not available to actually allow that true nourishment. And I think this is another aspect of this whole issue of being off balance, versus being able to open up these other kinds of mechanisms of nourishment, which have much more integrity.
Bisi Williams 36:36
You're just so wise, and I want to take the Dr. Gita Vaid wisdom, and I'd like you to just channel back from the future, to the present, and the present past. Tell me as a young medical student, what advice would you give yourself, then, now that you know what you know now.
Dr. Gita Vaid 36:58
Looking back, I've always been very fascinated in people, I think I would have even more or respect for the mystery of people. As a young child, even and certainly, as a medical student, I was always trying to figure people out and trying to understand people, and certainly with psychiatry, then you get into diagnosing people. And so there's different ways and different systems of figuring people out. Actually, I think that might have been a bit of a detour, I think my best teachers were some of the great writers, because their character studies are unparalleled. I think that actually was a really incredible instruction in human nature.
But I think my advice to myself would be to, which I think is where I am now, as more and more recognizing, the more I know about people, the less I know, and to realize, I can tolerate more the mystery of not knowing about people and being continuously surprised, we are all so complex, and to be continually excited at the discovery, and then a re discovery about myself and other people, and to be able to tolerate the not knowing, which then actually allows for a much deeper appreciation, and a deeper recognition of a person in their fullest complexities, as well as the possibility for change, including, if I can see them in many different ways. It's a path for them to start finding themselves in different ways because of that reciprocity.
Even from the youngest age, we discover who we are, through community, through seeing ourselves reflected sometimes missing, you're not a good person, you're a bad person. And that becomes my identity. Or I know I'm lovable because people are loving me, and I see the love for me in their eyes. Or I've been told I'm never going to amount to anything. And so that must be true of me, because that's what I see reflected back. And that's what I think is really amazing about how we are communal beings, and I would really want to have known that earlier.
Bisi Williams 39:04
Well, I mean, I just found our discussion, incredibly fascinating. And I could go for hours and hours. But I'm just incredibly grateful to you today for sharing your wisdom and your experience and advancements in mental and behavioral health. Thank you so much, Dr. Vaid for joining us on Health2049.
Dr. Gita Vaid 39:26
It's been wonderful talking with you Bisi, thank you for inviting me.
Bisi Williams 39:31
And that was Dr. Gita Vaid's vision for Health2049. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe, rate, review and tell one friend about us. Thank you for listening. I'm your host Bisi Williams, take care and be well.
