Sexuality & Endogenous Psychedelics with Dr Jenny Martin Part 1 (EP#205)

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"If you look at the ways that 5-MeO was described, and you look at the way a cervical orgasm is described, there's a lot of overlap there".

- Dr Jenny Martin

Dr Jenny & Mason discuss:

• Endogenous psychedelics.
• Religion's influence on our relationship to sex, pleasure and well-being. 
• Sex as a way of invoking the divine. 
• The goddess archetype and the importance of integration when exploring sacred sexuality.
• Near-death experiences and endogenous DMT.
• Female orgasm & the vagus nerve.

Who is Dr Jenny Martin ?

Dr. Jenny Martin is inspired by democratizing psychedelic states of consciousness and the healing possibilities that could result for the entire planet, and is passionate about helping people learn about the psychedelic potential that exists within us.

Dr. Jenny is on a mission to elevate our understanding of erotic love and the vital role human sexuality plays in accessing psychedelic states naturally. Dr Jenny is a Psychologist who draws on psychedelic science, biophysics, neuroscience, psychology and ancient wisdom in her training programs.

Resource Guide

Guest Links
Dr Jenny Website
Dr Jenny Substack

Mentioned In This Episode
The Spirit Molecule Documentary.
Literature On Female Orgasm By Barry R Komisaruk.
Psychedelic Literature From Michigan University.

Related Podcasts
Love, Sex, and Psychedelics with Dr. Molly Maloof (EP#137)

Connect With Us
SuperFeast Instagram
SuperFeast Facebook
SuperFeast TikTok

Check Out The Transcript Below:

​​Mason:

Dr. Jenny, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Dr. Jenny Martin:

Thank you for having me.

Mason:

Pleasure. Where are you again in America?

Dr. Jenny Martin:

I'm in Seattle. Yeah, and I love your country. I spent a year there living in Brisbane, in Perth, in Sydney. I love that place.

Mason:

You really did, like that's ... I guess you could probably add Melbourne in there to do the absolute tour of what it's like living in Australia, but that's pretty good. The fact that you went West Coast as well, you really got a snapshot of what it's like living in Australia.

Dr. Jenny Martin:

And where are you guys, actually?

Mason:

We're in Mullumbimby, just near Byron Bay.

Dr. Jenny Martin:

Beautiful place. Yeah.

Mason:

Yeah. Did you get down when you were in Brissy?

Dr. Jenny Martin:

No, I didn't. I actually took a year off college and I worked the whole time, so I wasn't vacationing. I was working most of the time.

Mason:

Boring.

Dr. Jenny Martin:

Yeah, I know. Yeah, but I got to meet the Australian people and I just really was charmed by them. It's just great people.

Mason:

Yeah, we're pretty charming.

Dr. Jenny Martin:

Yeah.

Mason:

Look, you've got something to release today. We've got the scoop on some research around endogenous psychedelics, so I appreciate you picking SuperFeast to be the podcast where you get to go to release what's groundbreaking at the moment? We've had a lot of people on the podcast. We've talked a lot about sexuality in the context of Taoism. We've talked to a lot of sexologists, and I really can feel this community especially, is really coming into land, not just going into that topic of sexuality, and you know how the community around sexuality can get really cathartic and get really identity based and get really ... I don't know what I'm trying to say here. Everyone, I haven't briefed Jenny around the direction that we're going in, so you know how ... it's extreme and people, they identify so much with their sexuality.

It's nice to kind of just go into where the research is at and just see where sexuality and these endogenous psychedelics are really, yeah, where it sits in a ... I don't know, just a nice grounded place.

Dr. Jenny Martin:

You're so right. I mean, there's not another topic ... well, there are some, but it's one of those topics, sexuality that is so charged and there's so much baggage around it, and people do really have certain extreme views for sure. So yeah, looking at the research is so important. Do you want to start talking about the sexuality research? Do you want to talk about the endogenous psychedelics? Where would you like to start?

Mason:

I, for some reason, get the feeling we can just bounce between the two as we go.

Dr. Jenny Martin:

Sure. Sure. Well, so the sexuality side of it, I'll just share a little bit about my background, I didn't show up in this world having an affinity to human sexuality. I actually had an aversion to it, growing up in a Christian home, only sex negative information, then having some adverse experiences. Thankfully, my time in Australia actually turned that around. I had some really positive sexual experiences in Australia, which thankfully there's beautiful men there. Early on in my life, I met some of the dark side of the masculine, and that really shut me down a lot. And I didn't pursue this topic because I was passionate about sexuality. I pursued this topic because I ended up meeting someone back in the United States who I wanted to have a deeper connection with and an intimate connection with. And I went on a journey to understand my own body, to understand what the potential is.

And I ended up discovering that the ancient wisdom around sacred sexuality and accessing a mystical state that there's something to it. So I experienced this in my own body first as a visceral, mystical experience through sexuality. Not because I went to any school of learning, but I just experienced it. And then I realised, okay, what they knew back in the ancient times, there's validity to it, but I have the kind of mind that I always question things. I'm always curious, and it wasn't enough for me to just say, "Okay, somebody said that thousands of years ago, or they might've believed that, and that's just the way it is." I wanted to know what the validity is and so-

Mason:

Can I ask, when you say ancient, which texts or which philosophies in particular you were looking at?

Dr. Jenny Martin:

Well, I'll be really honest with you. Having been steeped in Irish background and so forth, the western side of things really drew me. And I really ... my husband actually gave me a book about the hidden story about Mary Magdalene, and I ended up realising that her suppressed story was from the lineage of Ancient Egypt, the lineage of various goddess traditions. And there's a woman that lives in my state in Washington that wrote a definitive scholarly book on this topic that ended up being some of the basis of the Da Vinci Code, but he really took things in his own direction for a fictional novel, but it became part of the basis of that. So yeah, there's a lot of works that that woman drew on. And a book, for instance, Sacred Pleasure by Riane Eisler that goes into the Ellucian mysteries and all of that gives us some idea that this idea of hieros gamos sacred ritual is time immemorial. It goes back as far as we can see in archaeology and some of the ruins from Göbekli Tepe and so forth.

Mason:

Really?

Dr. Jenny Martin:

Yeah, there's-

Mason:

It's as far back as we can go at the moment in the modern world, in the modern archaeological world.

Dr. Jenny Martin:

Yeah, there's this definite alchemical marriage, this idea that of the masculine and feminine merging, and Carl Jung went in the direction of it. It's the masculine, feminine within your psyche. Sure, I get it. Great. We all need to balance that within us, but to sidestep the fact that there is something profound that can happen during lovemaking with a man and a woman it is real. So, it's not just a hypothetical thing that they were talking ... or an internal thing, I believe that they were talking about the masculine,, feminine. There's something very real about this. And the idea being that the ... just say that in the book by Margaret Starbird, that became the basis of Da Vinci Code.

Her definitive thing is that the word anointing means Christ in ancient Greek, and when the woman with the alabaster jar, that anointed Jesus's feet, that that was a symbolic representation of a Hieros Gamos sexual act, and it was her copulating with him, that increased his consciousness to the point where he could access this between the world's kind of mystical reality. And they both did. That's why when he rose from the dead kind of thing, it's a metaphorical, what we call in the psychedelic community, ego death and rebirth. And this is as old as Ancient Egypt. The goddess Isis was well known in the Egypt religion talking about resurrection. It's the same whole scenario played out in the Christian story.

We have cut out the feminine and just raised the masculine and forgot that it was actually the woman who brought this possibility to man, but it wouldn't have been fulfilled with just her. It was the union of the two that was absolutely required. And we've kind of lost that in the telling, so-

Mason:

I do want to jump because ... I mean, hell yeah, quite often any of the kind of conversations that we have around sexuality is always coming from Taoism or from Tantra, and I love it. Of course, I love it. That's where I live, but I mean, just even recently we were exploring the Western roots of Yin, Yang, for example. So it's really nice to talk about these roots of ... And even though a lot of these, I think, from what I understand, there's a lot of theory around Jesus actually going and learning. I actually don't know anything about where he would've learned sexual practises, but I know there was him spending time in India learning meditation practises. Have you got anything on that?

Dr. Jenny Martin:

There's channelled books, so who knows, right?

Mason:

Yeah.

Dr. Jenny Martin:

I don't know, but it is a big question mark there, but I think for me, what really filled my soul, having again seen the destructive side of masculinity, which unfortunately still exists in our world, it was so affirming for me to have an archetype in my mind of a man that could be spiritual, who could so deeply love a woman, right? And this could be a divine union that could bring both of them to a greater state. And there's this very erotic part of the Bible called the Song of Songs. And this again in the book by Margaret Starbird, the Woman with the Alabaster Jar, she says that in a certain time in history, Christian leaders were actually talking about Mary Magdalene Jesus as, that was what the Song of Songs was about. Today, we have such an aversion to sexuality.

We think, "Oh, when it's talking about the very erotic nature of the body and the love and all of that, in that particular scripture, it could not possibly be about carnal lust." It's about God's relationship with the church, which is so ... not that I need to impose my beliefs on anyone, but I have seen the dark side of that kind of repressive thinking on people, whether it's repressing it and then it coming out in abusive tendencies and abusing kids or just having such a conflict within your own being about your sexuality, that you hide it with a porn addiction and you disconnect from your partner. So it's not serving the world for us to hide this knowledge. And actually, interestingly enough, I enrolled in a master of divinity programme here in Seattle University for a while, and then I dropped out, because it was too narrow for my thinking.

They did teach a class in sexuality for the one purpose that ... And this was to train ministers of this programme, that they realised that just not addressing this topic was not helpful. They realised they were contributing to the problem with all of the abuse by acting like this topic didn't exist. The unfortunate thing was all of the texts on erotic love that were given to us as students were from a self-confessed celibate woman who's a psychologist and a nun and a self-confessed celibate man who was a priest and a professor. So the two of them, man and woman wrote these books, but they had never experienced in their own body the reality. It was all from theory, and-

Mason:

That is the most typical thing I've ever heard coming from the church, talking about sexuality from a celibate priest and a celebrate nun. I mean, another thing, I went to Catholic school as well. I mean, you can empathise with centuries ago where they were like, "Look, the lowest hanging fruit can't handle this. Let's suppress it for the benefit of dominating the world with our belief." Not that I'm salty about it or anything like that, but I'm just like, yeah, you can see then, but then you come into the modern age and there's people still trying to hang on to being like, "No, this is what ... God wants you to suppress all of these feelings." It's like, "Nah, that was because the lowest common denominator couldn't handle those feelings and couldn't channel it." And it led to non-conformity or non-compliance.

And it got messy, and it gets really messy at times, so they've gone like what every institution does. Let's just base our entire philosophy on the lowest common denominator. It's so cool hearing you talk about ... Because of course, it's there. Any ancient text that's worth its weight is going to be addressing these skillsets. And it's just, yeah, it's a cool time we're living in, especially when scientifically we can go back and look at why this was something that the ancients were so focused on.

Dr. Jenny Martin:

Totally, and just to kind of wrap that up with what you're saying is because I knew this in my body, because I felt it, and I also didn't think that Christian story was completely bogus. I thought there was something to it. That's what captured me. And I ended up finding, and I know this is not what I came to talk about, but I'll just mention this. I ended up finding a master's thesis from a woman named Mary Sharpe who did this in Cambridge University in England. One of the conclusion statements of her thesis was that she believes that Christianity was all about sexuality. It was about sexuality to attain union with the divine, the mystical thread of Christianity, not the "Thou shall not" side that we keep hearing about. The mystical thread of Christianity was a sexual teaching.

She mentioned the book by Bishop Irenaeus, who was a person in the first century who wrote against ... Who was trying to uphold this conservative view of Christianity that they were trying to push for back then. At that time, there was about 50 different scriptures that were circulating gospels that pertained to the time when Jesus was alive. Now, some of them were very conservative like we see today, but some of them were very much the divinities within you and the gospel of Philip even goes into even more eroticism. So anyway, she was saying that the basis of Christianity was actually, if we look at the teachings that are closest to him, not the ones that were usurped for political reasons by Rome at the time, but the original ones were, the kingdom of heaven is within and greater thing shall you do, but it was through sexuality.

We know this ... she's right, because you can even go on Amazon today and get a book called Against Heresies, it was written in the first century by this church father, and he was saying, these terrible Christians ... I mean, I'm paraphrasing, "These terrible Christians engage in sex acts as spiritual worship." Through his criticism, we know that early Christians, sex was breathing in terms of their way of invoking the divine. So it was only through his criticism, do we know that this reality actually existed? And it was the genesis of the Jesus story.

Mason:

Growing up in a Christian family, is that kind of what sparked the interest for you? Again, not to put anything on it, but I know for me, it was the things that were suppressed by the institution was what sparked my interest in where I'm at now, is that how ... Yeah, I'm just interested in where ... Because it's nice to know that kind of origin story of what's driving you.

Dr. Jenny Martin:

Why I think you totally got it, because that's exactly the same reason why I'm so passionate about endogenous psychedelics. As soon as somebody says, "Oh, don't pay attention to that. Oh, that's not important. Oh, that's not real, or in fact, that's even ... Either it doesn't exist or it's bad." As soon as somebody says, "Oh no, look over here. Don't look over there." As soon as somebody says that, it just raises my curiosity and I think, "Okay, what am I not supposed to look at and what is there?" And invariably, it's not something that's ... Just intuitively, how could something about lovemaking where you could create ... I heard your beautiful birth story. How could that beautiful act be carnal, be something that is the most disgusting thing that's bad?

Mason:

And how can smart people still perpetuate? That's what amazes me about religion and the far right of America. I'm like, "How can you guys not think objectively about how you are taking verbatim this text?"

Dr. Jenny Martin:

Yeah.

Mason:

Yes, there are values that make it good, but then can you see when you get into suppression that you've gone outside of basic values for living that make life ... which I really do respect. And growing up, I was like, man, I actually was like ... growing up, I was like, I'm really glad I live in a society that at least has these kinds of core values. I remember thinking when I had priests abusing me for not inviting Jesus into my life. I was like, "I don't like that." And then I remember having a thought, but I like the values. Then, when it goes into suppression of ... I think it's so powerful, and this is where I'd love to go into ... move into this endogenous power that exists within us, which I think is also going to have a lot of weight in terms of why so many people are becoming addicted to going and seeking psychedelic experiences without realising the capacity to cultivate what's there within themselves and kind of normalise it.

And this is where the only thing ... sorry, I'm rambling, but I bring up in this community, we see people make sexuality or psychedelics their identity because the access to this and the normalisation of this is so beyond our society, and still everyone is so conservative in Australia. It's unbelievable like our innate sexuality, it's so taboo still that the kickback, when you get out of a Christian society or you get out of just a conservative upbringing and you kind of fall into Byron Bay, kind of like hippie living for a while, it's so cathartic when you start experiencing the psychedelic experiences and the power that you have within you and what's been suppressed for the sake of ... and I'm not saying good or bad, but for the sake of us getting institutionalised as a society so we can grow.

It takes over your identity because it's so not normal, which I think is a healthy thing that people need to go through, but then through the kind of ... I'm really interested through the research that you're doing, just kind of we can just take it into a grounded place and just understand ... this is so normal. I love hearing you talk about the origins of the Christian story rather than us just being in the East and talking about Tantra. Everyone knows that Tantra was a thing to be like, no, this is a part of your ... especially for myself, this is a part of my ... God, it's part of my roots. It's part of everyone's roots.

Dr. Jenny Martin:

Right, right, right.

Mason:

Sorry about the ramble.

Dr. Jenny Martin:

No, I'm very interested in what you're saying. I was actually going to ask you a question, but I want to just-

Mason:

No, just do it. No, no. Hit me. Hit me. This is-

Dr. Jenny Martin:

So I want to make sure I'm understanding you correctly when you're saying that you think that people are really forming their identity around these things, what are you speaking of particularly so I can be on ... totally understand?

Mason:

Yeah, it's just kind of in that context ... and I live in a community that's excessively ... it's the place where you come when you're the black sheep in society. So it's one of those places where people who do think outside of the box or can access their ... like a non-conformist spirituality, they come, but then ironically, all the black sheeps come here and then they realise they're not black sheeps anymore, which is really funny. And then, the tendency is to then get into ... you mentioned the goddess, it's so nice to be able to hear that, that that was a part of scripture, but you can see that the goddess archetype kind of almost take people over, and that goddess sexuality becomes all that they are about.

And you can hear it in their mannerisms, and I think it's a symptom. It's their kickback of what we were, what's ... rather than just being integrated and being like, "Got you. I'm going to engage that part of myself, maybe go into teaching it." Nonetheless, I mean, I've got to be ... this is the bee in my bonnet, because I think because I'm so susceptible to being an extremist, when I get into something new, I am really hearing you talk about ... I'm just really in touch with how suppressed it has been and then, really watching and feeling and observing just the pendulum swing for people and wanting to just get this context, as the pendulum swings and people kick back against what they were brought up with.

And this suppressed view that society has around sexuality, just like slowing the pendulum swing. So it's not a real kickback and we don't get distracted by what was taken from us, but rather just focus on what is around you and your own sexuality, not get into kicking back against an institution.

Dr. Jenny Martin:

I hear what you're saying. Yes, because that can be an energy drain. And also, yeah, when it becomes your identity, then yeah, I believe I understand what you're saying and I'm certainly ... listen, I live in Seattle.

Mason:

Is that what Seattle is like?

Dr. Jenny Martin:

Yeah, I mean, it's a renegade place. It's also a hyper entrepreneurial place, but it's free thinking, and I love that about Seattle.

Mason:

It's best living in a place like that.

Dr. Jenny Martin:

It really is. I couldn't live anywhere ... I couldn't live in a more fixed thinking type of place, but at the same time, yes, I feel into what you're saying, it can take too much of a divergent kind of focus that can almost lose sight in the pursuing the anti view. Yeah, I hear what you're saying, and that is partly why the science can be kind of a levelling ground, because I don't always get the opportunity, I wouldn't necessarily always bring up the Christian stuff with people because it can be real downer for some people to even go talk about that, just because I'm interested doesn't mean other people are, but the science seems to be a place where we can meet, where it validates all paths. It brings everyone together. So I'll just share a little bit about the endogenous, psychedelic stuff, if that's okay.

Mason:

Yeah, absolutely.

Dr. Jenny Martin:

Okay, sure. So along the lines of what we've been talking about, I'm on Twitter, I'm not on Instagram or the other things, but for some reason I got on Twitter and I'm following the research on the DMTX trials where they're giving extended DMT, exogenous DMT to people with an IV drip, and they're talking to people as a result of that, the subjects, and I've listened to some of the people that have been through that experience, and I'm just kind of following that tangentially. And reading the comments on Twitter is also interesting, and what I was intrigued by with some of the comments that ... some people said, "Well, hang on a second. This substance lives within us. Why aren't we focused on doing more research on that?"

And some of the responses to that inquiry were, "Oh, now that we're doing this research on exogenous DMT and the other psychedelics, the endogenous, what lives inside of us is no longer relevant." And I saw that comment, it's no longer relevant by someone who is an authority. And I thought to myself, "Wow, is that what we've come to, is now that-"

Mason:

That's kind of like, we talked about institutionalisation in the religious sense, and now we're looking at it in terms of the scientism sense of going-

Dr. Jenny Martin:

My God.

Mason:

No, we own the delivery of the thing here where the human doesn't own it. Me, I'm the scientist, I'm in control here, and ironically, when I talked about sexual identity, that's probably the identity of scientism kicking back against a conservative upbringing going like, "Now I'm the God I'm in control."

Dr. Jenny Martin:

Yes.

Mason:

I'm in control daddy because I have science.

Dr. Jenny Martin:

God, you know what, that's what scares me about AI? Anyway, well, I mean, look at the guy that invented ChatGPT. He has thrown a tonne of money towards psychedelics, and that kind of freaks me out. What's your motive dude?

Mason:

That seeking of ... That's the thing I love, and I'm heavily invested in, not in a financial sense, but invested in psychedelic research and finding its sweet spot. Again, you can see people who live and identify with the mind solely just being like, this is my saviour. Same way that people go, "Oh my God, I've discovered sexuality. That's what's been, I've been cut off from. That's my saviour." And it's like everyone just needs to chill out and let's get back to the research.

Dr. Jenny Martin:

Totally. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. So it was one of those moments where ... of clarity for myself when I read that comment, "Oh, it's no longer relevant." I thought, "Whoa, hold up here." A lot of people, when someone has a fancy title behind their name and they work with fancy institutions, whatever they say is golden.

Mason:

Well, they're better than us. People with titles are better than us. We know that.

Dr. Jenny Martin:

Yeah.

Mason:

I really accept my inferiority, because you have the title doctor, for instance.

Dr. Jenny Martin:

Well, no, but listen-

Mason:

I'm joking.

Dr. Jenny Martin:

Listen, it is kind of silly to even use that. Today, sometimes if you don't, you can't even interact and ask questions of some of these people, but I don't do it with any sense of anything of knowing it, because to tell you the truth, I don't put a lot of stock in anyone unless they've had an experience with something. And that's what I want to listen to. So I don't listen to people because of titles. I listen to people of what you've walked through, right?

Mason:

That's also why we need ... the calibre, because that title, titles do have weight. There's been a misunderstanding if it has weight, to show what you've put your blood, sweat and tears into, in order to prove that you have a particular tenacity or a particular skillset. It's not about your soul now having this identity and being superior. So when you have that capacity to manoeuvre through that world and be like, "Yeah, I know ..." I said that very facetiously but I now hold those titles with more weight because I don't see them as a sign of superiority, because you can see them for objectively what it is and what it isn't, which society doesn't have, as we went through pandemic, and everyone is like, "Oh, that person says doctor, and they're telling me to do this, therefore I have to."

Dr. Jenny Martin:

My God, that's the scariest thing ever. Yeah, scary. Very scary. Yeah.

Mason:

I hear you, and that's why I love talking to people who actually are authorities on a topic and they're like, and this is my boundary.

Dr. Jenny Martin:

Right, right, yeah, and you know what? You're right, because we're in this really interesting point in our history where science can be made to mean anything, literally when you're talking about the pandemic, right? Anyway, back to this whole thing is, so when I saw this in Twitter and I saw this person with authority say, it's not relevant any longer, I just noticed how people fell in line with that and how it kind of shut things up. And I thought, you know what, that's not okay with me. I don't have the same stature as this person, but it kind of set me on ... it's kind of the same thing with the church and sexuality. As soon as someone says, "Hey, don't look at endogenous DMT anymore. It's not relevant. It's only relevant what we're doing with this pharmaceutical research." Big pharmaceutical companies are now funding all of this.

Mason:

And thank God for them. How would we ever be healthy without them? That's how I think about it.

Dr. Jenny Martin:

Okay.

Mason:

I don't.

Dr. Jenny Martin:

Yeah, okay. Yeah, totally. I totally am with you there. That's why your work is wonderful with bringing back ancient-

Mason:

How would we know if they didn't tell us where we should be putting our energy in terms of the research? How would we know to stay clear of our own capacity to say, engage with our endogenous ... our capacity to have psychedelic experiences in an endogenous way or how would we ... we wouldn't know to ignore our own immune system? We'd just realise, no, your immune system comes from things we give you. You don't have your own immune system.

Dr. Jenny Martin:

Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you spend any time watching TV or tuning into advertisements paid by pharmaceutical companies, you're going to believe that. Yeah.

Mason:

Where did this take you. Did you immediately ... were you already in the field of doing research?

Dr. Jenny Martin:

Yeah, because I've been teaching about sexuality and this endogenous psychedelics for a while now, and drawing on the research that is out there and the ancient wisdom, but I just felt compelled to even go further. And what ended up happening is it was just kind of you send that intention out to the universe that there's something else that I'm missing. And it wasn't too many days after that. And a video showed up in my email, which was a person from the University of Michigan who has just completed his dissertation. He worked under quite a well-known researcher there who did some research on endogenous DMT. In his video, towards the end, he just made this passing comment. He said, "There has been research done in the past that when people were given LSD, that their endogenous psychedelic system shifted dramatically."

And there's a question as to whether any psychedelic LSD including is really producing the effect, or is it really just triggering our endogenous psychedelic system? So when I heard that, that was kind of a new pathway that I hadn't looked into before. So I'm always asking people for, "Okay, what is your citation? Where did you get that from?" He came back to me with ... gosh, it's so interesting. He came back to me with something that I already knew about that I'd already listened to, but you know how can you take something in, but it can kind of like, "Oh, yeah, whatever." And you just keep on going. You just let it ... you absorb it, but you don't really deeply get it. If you remember back, I think in 2010, 2011, there was a documentary, the Spirit Molecule documentary, Rick Strassman, Joe Rogan narrated.

You can still find that online, but there's still some clips, YouTube clips, short little excerpts from that that are online. And when I asked this question of this particular individual, he sent me a couple ... He didn't send me a research paper. He sent me a couple of video clips from the Spirit Molecule documentary, and they were video clips of Stephen Barker, Dr. Steven Barker, who is a wonderful proponent and researcher in this area. And in those video clips, gosh, they were from 2011, 2010, and he's saying, we have already discovered that it's a DMT is a neurotransmitter, and he then talked about research that was done at the University of Alabama Birmingham by a researcher named David ... is it David Harrison? It's Harrison is the last name.

Basically, what that research shows is that there is an endogenous psychedelic system within us that can be triggered by different things. For instance, stress. So anyway, he mentioned this in this video, and what he said is it's never brought to light. It's never been published. For some reason, this young doctorate student that did this dissertation on DMT, he dies right after his dissertation, as Steven Barker says in the video, and his supervisor at that university, who had the opportunity to share this very, very important research with the entire world, he decides to keep it hidden for whatever strange reason. And so Steven Barker says, it's just kind of lost to the world. He said that in the video, and I thought, "Ah, it can't be lost. This is too important. This can't be lost."

So anyway, I did my due diligence. I'm used to reading research. I went online to try to find it, and I'm like, "Okay, maybe it is lost. I can't find it for the life of me." I mean, there's certain search engines you can go to find dissertations, even if they haven't been publicly disseminated, they should still be there. And they weren't, it wasn't. So I ended up contacting ... we do have a good university here, the University of Washington, and I ended up ... I've called a research librarian there before and I haven't really dialogued with them. I've just asked a simple question and they can either help me or not. For some reason on that day, I started talking to this guy on the phone and I just decided to share with him how passionate I am about this topic, how important I think this research is.

How sad I am that it can't be found anymore, and how I would absolutely love to find it. He said, "It's so weird that you're calling me right now. I've been really thinking, I want to know more about DMT and psychedelic." And he said, "There's so much more. I can't really speak to you now." And he took my email, he's going to email me privately, but he says, you don't understand. It's very serendipitous that you're talking to me about this. Anyway, it ended up being quite difficult for him to find, but he spent an entire day, and because it's his job to find research, he was able to ... because he was interested to pursue it, that being the main thing he did for the day. By the end of the day, he was able to send me this that I then was able to purchase from the University of Birmingham. And what this really shows is that there's a link with the adrenal glands in this particular study.

So you may be familiar with the study that came out of University of Michigan in 2019 where they showed that endogenous DMT is at the same level of other neurotransmitters and it can be synthesised in the brain during a death experience. So they induced cardiac arrest in the rats, and during that time of dying with the lack of oxygen and all of that, there was a huge surge of DMT in the brain. So we were able to see in these dying rats that the validation for when people say, "I have a near death experience, and it sounds a lot like if you take DMT." We had some validation that yeah, it's happening in the dying experience, which is something that Rick Strassman in his book, the Spirit Molecule, he hypothesised that way back when, he didn't have the research, but University of Michigan in 2019 gave us that research, which is great.

I love it. So when you have an NDE, you have a little bit more validation that yeah, you probably were experiencing your own psychedelic ... that was your own psychedelic sets, but that isn't really relatable to the average person. We're not trying to induce death on a daily basis. So it's like, "Okay, great. It's like when I die, I'm going to have a great experience, wonderful," but what about me in my regular life? What the heck is this thing doing in my body? And there has been a lot of speculation by Steven Barker, the one that was in the video that I saw, Rick Strassman, that DMT is actually part of our ability to perceive the frigging world on a daily basis. It modulates our perception, right? So why wouldn't we want to know about this.

If it's part of how we perceive all the time, not just a mystical reality, but it's been detected in our retina, for instance. So when we experience the world, depending on the level of DMT in our body, are we experiencing a different world than the person sitting next to us, right? So anyway, this dissertation that was never published, that I ended up getting from 1982, really brought the discussion into a really more relatable way. It gives us the basis for a lot more potential for real research into this being the ability ... DMT modulating our perception because these rats were ... yes, they ended up being killed at the end of the research, but the DMT wasn't showing up because of their death. The DMT was showing up because they were put in different stressful situations.

And listen to this, I couldn't help but thinking about the pandemic when I was reading this research because what they did with these rats when de-stress was they didn't torture them physically. That's all they did. They put them alone in a frigging cage, right?

Mason:

Yeah.

Dr. Jenny Martin:

What were we all doing? We were in freaking isolation. People went a little bit bonkers. So what they showed is ... I mean, we're social beings, right? Part of our ability to cope with life is being around other people, and it was almost like a grand experiment in how to make people loop, right? Making them stay in their own houses. Because in this research, all they ... Yes, there was two conditions. One is they used restraint with the mice. So they had this kind of cloth type of adhesive thing that the animal couldn't move for eight hours or 18 hours, different time intervals, and that induced stress. From what I remember from reading the research, the condition that produced even more stress was putting them in a housing unit without their buddies. So when they were in group housing, no DMT showed up.

As Steven Barker has said, what we have to realise is it's not like we don't have any DMT if we're not stressed out. Back in 1982, they didn't have very precise measurements, so they could only measure ... they were measuring nanograms. We can actually measure picograms now. We can measure much finer amounts of these endogenous substances. And the idea being that during normal life, these endogenous psychedelics can still be modulating our perception, right? Sub psychedelic levels do have power. That's why, for instance, there's some pharmaceutical company right now that's using sub psychedelic levels of DMT to help grow brain cells, neurogenesis in people that have had stroke using DMT, and they're giving sub psychedelic levels.

They're not making these people trip out, but with the sub psychedelic levels, it can actually grow brain cells. So us thinking that, okay, if it's not a full on psychoactive amount, that it really has no purpose. Yes, it does. I mean, if it can grow brain cells, it can do a lot of other things, including influence modulator perception, right? So that's what they found in this study that was never brought to the world, that the adrenal glands actually showed much more endogenous DMT than the brain. Now, we already know from the 2019 study that the brain can synthesise its own DMT, but can it also come from other parts of the body and travel to the brain? Sure, it can, because DMT is a small enough molecule, it can pass the blood brain barrier. So there's a lot of people, cite a paper by David Nichols who did a speech at a convention in London a number of years ago saying that it's all hype. Endogenous DMT is not a thing.

And then, he followed that up with a paper where he blatantly did not look at the research that was done out of the University of Michigan in 2019. He didn't acknowledge that at all. I mean, to some extent he did, but he didn't acknowledge that they found it at the same level as other neurotransmitters. He just bypassed that. Today, when I'm talking to journalists and I'm trying to share my work, they invariably pull up the David Nichols paper and they're like, "Yeah, I don't believe you. It's not real. I read this paper." And it's like, why is his paper getting all the press and this other information isn't and-

Mason:

It keeps them safe and keeps them just believing their worldview, right?

Dr. Jenny Martin:

Exactly.

Mason:

I think that's what science does.

Dr. Jenny Martin:

Yeah.

Mason:

I just wanted to quickly touch back on how poetic it is that the documentary, you're like, "Hang on, are you giving me a documentary as the reason behind this breakthrough that's going to lead to the science, actually evolving?" It's like, yeah, those of kind of ... I imagine a lot of that documentary is a lot of speculation, because they're Hail Mary's in documentaries quite often, and that's why people within science and people with credentials are scrutinised and be like, "You can't learn about nutrition or psychedelics from documentaries" because they're so rogue and kind of like 95% of the time, they're right, they're atrocious, but it's because they're throwing Hail Mary's every now and then, someone's got the guts to talk about the thing that no one within the science is willing to talk about.

And then that leads, it is just nice seeing, and then that sparks you and you watch everyone else go, well, no, I want to stay safe. And you're like, that's not what the science is about. Science is about venturing into these unknown places and scrutinising what we assumed and realising you can't assume anything. So it's a never-ending process. That ironically takes a lot of self-awareness and a lot of self cultivation. And if you aren't engaged sexually, which I do want to talk about endogenous ... where sexuality comes in and this endogenous psychedelic DMT, that's almost necessary, I had imagine to be brave enough to go and question, but it's ironically the thing that they're within science and within these institutions that they're not engaging with, therefore, they don't have the guts to go and reframe the world and therefore have the capacity to reevaluate their own identity. Anyway.

Dr. Jenny Martin:

You're right. It would upend society if we realised we were this powerful. It really would. It would be a game changer.

Mason:

It's happening, thank God. I mean, it really is ... we're on at the moment. I think in terms of ... part of me think that's why there's such a freak-out that everyone is like, your ... I don't know, I'm going to get quite grand, being like, "No, you are the creator bean." You are a creator. Stop focusing on who and what created you. We're all ... look at this power within you, and it's like. I like the fact that that was suppressed. Thank you very much. And I think we all need to respect that. Then, going into your research and how sexuality comes into it, it's like the power is so much, we just need to be gentle with it, and I guess have empathy because, I realise it is a lot for people. Yeah.

Dr. Jenny Martin:

Yeah. Right. Yeah, yeah, totally, but it does kind of tie back to some of the things that were stated in early Christianity about the kingdom of heaven is within you and greater things shall you do. And when your I is single, something about that. So is that being when your pineal gland is activated, right? And I'm not saying that your pineal gland is the main producer of DMT, but it's certainly ... it can be activated through this endogenous psychedelic in your brain and body. Yeah, so the sexuality ... this topic is interesting to me because of my own experiences, because of what I see in ancient wisdom. Then, so I get into the research and there's suppression in female sexual research just to say that. For instance, the-

Mason:

Sorry, did you say there's suppression around the research?

Dr. Jenny Martin:

Yeah, so there's less funding for a long time in our society based on the puritanical Christian views that pleasure and female sexuality wasn't important. So we're going to put our resources into funding studies to understand male sexual problems and-

Mason:

It's so blatant. Yeah.

Dr. Jenny Martin:

So yeah, there has been a lag in terms of that, but there has been some important research coming out of Rutgers University, Barry Komisaruk. And so he was the one that found that the cervix in a woman, which is so crucial in the process of birth, but instead of that being ... having no sensation, like the Kinsey report says Masters and Johnson, who were the pioneering sex researchers in the 1950s, they said that a woman's cervix has no sensation, and that there are still people that go through medical school today that have that belief. So they'll do procedures on a woman's cervix, for instance, if there's a threat that she has, cervical cancer and they'll just go to town and removing part of her cervix. Yeah, granted I mean when you read the research, some of these women are like, "Oh, I'm really glad that I don't have the potential of cancer anymore, so it's not like all the women are regretting it."

One of the things that happens with this procedure that's called LEEP is that if it doesn't have any feeling like Masters and Johnson says, well, how come first of all, women who have part of their cervix removed ... and by the way, it's very variable, depending on the doctor that you go and get this procedure done, some will remove minimal and some will remove quite substantial, right? What has been found in the research is that when you remove part of a woman's cervix, is her ability to orgasm can be gone. So a lot of this talk about DMT and cervical orgasms, people focus on, "Did I have a cervical orgasm? Was my cervix ... did it happen?" And I'm like, what I'm trying to help people understand is yes, the cervix, having that involved is important, but it's the whole ... we tend to think in Western medicine and just the analytical mind that these things are compartmentalised.

It's like, was it my clitoris or was it ... first of all, what they've now shown is, for instance, the clitoris is not just a little bit on the outside, the little bulb on the outside. 90% of the clitoris is up inside a woman's vaginal canal. And if you go to Google images and you look at a 3D image of clitoris, you'll see that the majority of the erectile tissue is up inside a woman. So when you're saying, did I have a vaginal orgasm, you're really ... yes, having stimulation of the clitoris is important, but the clitoris is part and parcel of that whole vaginal canal. It's up inside you. Then, when we're talking about the cervix, which is the uppermost part of the vaginal canal, you can't go any further when you get to the cervix, and if you're getting penetrated and you know that if you're penetrating a woman, you know that that's ... you've reached your cervix if it doesn't go any further.

The point here is that it's not just, "Okay, did I have a cervical orgasm?" Because this research on the LEEP is so important, because what it tells us is for the cervix to be functioning, it's part and parcel of a woman's sexual functioning. So when women get part of their cervix removed, they talk about not even desiring sex a lot of the time, not being able to get aroused. So having depression, just feeling disconnected from your body, like a whole myriad of symptoms, they'll talk about, for instance, in sexuality ... women who had part of their cervix removed, they'll talk about, I can feel my muscles tensing. I can feel that part of orgasm that used to happen, but it's like, there's no emotional link to it and there's no pleasure. I can feel the contraction, and then, it's like a total letdown. There's no euphoria, there's none of that. There's none of that.

So what we need to realise, and this research, by the way, about the LEEP only came out in 2023, and one of the research papers asked the practitioners, like the doctors that have done the procedure, "Hey, do you think that removing part of a woman's cervix actually inhibits her sexual function, her pleasure during sex, her ability to orgasm, her self-esteem or anything like that?" And they're like, no, no way. No, it's just a part of her body. Some of them will even quote Masters and Johnson and say, the cervix has no sensation. They'll even do that, right? Yeah, then you ask the women who have formed Facebook groups, they need emotional support now, you ask the women, you say, "Okay ..." and by the way, not every woman has this adverse effect. I think a lot of it has to do with ... I mean, I don't know, but it could be to do with how much is removed. We don't know exactly.

Mason:

Well, I mean, I think there, also what happens is that yes, I think you're right. I think it's really nice to acknowledge that some women don't have that effect, and maybe it's really good, but also a lot of women have been brought up and told that those experiences aren't important and you are not important. Therefore, when that goes away, they might not even notice, or they might not even know that there's an issue.

Dr. Jenny Martin:

It's a very good point, Mason. That's a very good point. You are right, and I know that from personal experience, I know what it feels like to ... it's easy for a woman to go through the motions of having sex, and it's like her body is having sex but her mind is somewhere else, and that can be a freeze response from past unwanted experiences, but yes ... or just having beliefs around sex being bad, you are disconnected from your body, so you wouldn't have maybe had this wonderful euphoric experience. I think that's a really important point you're bringing up. It's quite possible the women that are complaining are the women that really knew what joyous sex was like. And the women that aren't complaining, they might not have never known what joyous sex is like possibly. Quite possibly. Exactly. So what this also tells us is that this cervix is a ... it is a powerful mind body connector.

One of the things that they have to discovered that is unique to the female body, the same group at Rutgers University, is that the vagus nerve, which is talked about a lot today online as a really important mind-body pathway, and it is linked with mind-body medicine. And if your gut flora is off, for instance, you can feel depression. So just balancing your gut flora, you can get rid of depression. There's this major mind-body connection, and it's thanks to the vagus nerve. Now, the vagus nerve, it doesn't connect to a male sexual organs for whatever reason, but probably because we have this birth potential and all, there's more going on with our sexuality that it does connect to our uterus and it connects to our cervix. Even if you never have a child, one thing to know is that they've also discovered that this pathway allows a woman to orgasm, and there's a mind-body connection with her orgasmic ability that is unique to female.

Now, I do believe there's other research that shows that through intercourse, particularly vaginal intercourse, male and female, that a man through neural entrainment, if she's in that state first, he can then get in that state too, but I used to hear and see a lot of women's magazines, "Oh, women kind of got gypped. It takes longer for them to orgasm. They have to be in the mood." We're just so much more ... it's so much more problematic for us to have a great sexual experience. Well, yes, there is a need for women to feel emotionally connected to their body, emotionally connected ... I'm not necessarily saying to their partner, but just have an open heart, have an emotional connection to their own body, to their own sexuality is important because the vagus nerve modulates fight flight or freeze. And if she's in one of those states, it's not going to allow her to get into the deepest, most resonant state, to activate this incredible mind-body activation.

So it's not just through the spinal cord, it's also through the vagus nerve as well as the hypogastric nerve and pelvic nerve. There's many nerve pathways from the cervix to the brain that make it a powerful mind-altering experience when a woman is receptive, relaxed enough at the beginning of sex to be able to activate that potential. So clitoral orgasms are ... if you're just talking about the external clitoris are described by woman in a different way than when her cervix is engaged. When her cervix is engaged, women describe it as entering a different time space dimension. They describe it as full body experience. They describe it as ... if you look at the ways that 5-MeO was described, and you look at the way a cervical orgasm is described, there's a lot of overlap there.

And this is what gives us a sense that there's probably something going on there as well as the fact that the same group in Rutgers University, they found that cervical stimulation in and of itself will produce an oxytocin effect. So this is called the Ferguson Reflex, and it was known in the birthing process that during the stimulation of the vaginal canal, that there's this surge of the neurotransmitter, not just the hormone, but the neurotransmitter of oxytocin. And in recent psychedelic research, oxytocin does show up with DMT, it does show up as being elevated in the body. Another thing that happens in ... well, during orgasm, prolactin is released this study from 1982 that I talked about with the endogenous psychedelics.

They implicate prolactin as one of the things that is elevating at the same time as DMT. So that happens during sex for both partners, male and female. Another thing that happens with ... and when I'm talking about the oxytocin boost and other things with her cervix, I'm not talking about orgasm in and of itself, just penetration will also release non-adrenaline into her spinal fluid, right? So there's this ... just the very fact of stimulating her cervix will shift her into this mind-altering state if she is in a receptive place. If she's not in a freeze, if her nervous system isn't in one of these more incapacitated states to receive this stimulation. Yeah.

Mason:

I was thinking, Jenny, I was like, I feel like we're scratching the surface on this, just a bit like I'm really ... I just realised the time and realised we could do another hour now, but rather than not do the ... especially what you were just talking about, the vagus nerve there and the access points, and even why we have to say ... just when you were talking about a clitoral orgasm versus a cervical orgasm, just how much more nuanced, yes, useful to have those labels, but just how that doesn't paint a picture of what's really going on, where the vagus nerve has involvement in terms of not being in fight or flight, and then what's the access, what's involved there getting access to that, because it's such a decentralised approach to your own healing in the sense of it's all ... in the sense that that comes down to you and yourself or you and a lover.

Just getting access to one of the most beautifully healing and self awakening things that you can possibly do. I feel like we could probably spend another hour on this. I don't know, would you agree?

Dr. Jenny Martin:

Yeah, yeah. There's a lot more ... so yeah, I'm totally fine. You put whatever you'd like to do in terms of wrapping it up. Sure.

Mason:

Yeah, I think that'd be great. Maybe I'll get in touch to ... let's do it as soon as possible, if that works for you, because I think this is going to be ... I'm having a lot of fun talking about this and again, I just think we're only scratching the surface in terms of the incredible amount of information and wisdom that you've got to download into our humble pod listening minds.

Dr. Jenny Martin:

I enjoy talking with you as well. I would love to do that. Yeah.

Mason:

Yeah. I love you as well, because you indulge me on my tangents.

Dr. Jenny Martin:

Well, it's fascinating and you're a very thoughtful, insightful man with a lot to say and a lot of wisdom, and we learn from each other.

Mason:

All right, well let's do that. I'm going to chat ... let's chat about when it's going to happen. Let's hopefully make it happen, really soon, next week if you're up for it.

Dr. Jenny Martin:

Okay, I would love that. That would be great.

Mason:

All right. Thanks everyone, and thanks for ... don't you love listening to a podcast that has such incredible administrative capacities that we do it on air rather than not, we really open up under the hood of the car for everybody here. Thank you so much for coming on. Hope that you're coming into beautiful ... what are you in, fall weather in Seattle?

Dr. Jenny Martin:

We're having a heat wave, which means it's 90 degrees, but we're without air conditioning, so, yeah. We don't know what to do when it's 90 degrees.

Mason:

What's 90 degrees in Celsius?

Dr. Jenny Martin:

I can't remember. Yeah, probably 30. I don't know. I can't remember.

Mason:

32, that is hot. Yeah. Heck yeah. Yeah, that's understandable. Even people in Australia start melting at that point. Well, good luck with that. Stay cold, and I look forward to jumping into this again with you super soon.

Dr. Jenny Martin:

Awesome. Thank you so much, Mason. I really appreciate it. Thank you.