Death, Sex & Money x Search Engine
51:29 Share

This deposit of search engine is also brought you by movie. Movie is a curated streaming service dedicated to elevating great cinema from around the globe, from iconic rectors to emerging on tors. There's always something new to discover with movie. Each and every film is hand selected, so you can explore the best of cinema streaming anytime, anywhere out now for movie is the substance a con Price winning sensation, delicious, shocking and absolutely unmissable to me.

More gives a career best performance as Elizabeth Sparkle, a pastor prime hollywood alister, that turns to a mysterious experimental drug in an attempt to recapture the glories for youth, a sensational supporting turns from markets, quality, and holly's veteran, Dennis quite, as a repEllent studio, exact critically adored with reviews healing. The film is in an instant body horror classic. Rolling stone must be seen to be believed.

Variety, the best world film of twenty twenty four world of real visit. Try the substance stock com for show times in tickets and to stream great films at home, you can try movie free for thirty days at movie dot com. slashed.

It's M U B I that comes that certainly a whole month of great system. M, for free. I'm going to try the substance even though i'm scared of scary movies.

If you watch IT to you many. Hello, I was search engine listener's before we begin today. I just apologize for the quality of my voice.

I ve got myself a bit sick, but i'm going to play you a conversation from the before times, and I still had a functioning voice. Okay, how's this working? Hi, oh, that sounds so much Better.

So good.

View a few weeks ago, I hoped on the line with someone i've known for a long time, someone I really admire. Hi, ana. Hi.

P. J.

Are you doing? I'm good.

And a sale SHE .

makes a podcast I love called death. Sex and money is absolutely the best titled podcast that exists. IT is not hurt that the podcast itself is also very good.

SHE interviews all sorts of people with unusual life experiences and asks them the kind of question you d typically reserved for the people. Your closest too. That is what I think of the show anyway, how do you explain your show to people like when you meet strangers places?

Well, this is where tag lines are helpful. We say it's a show about the things we think about a lot and need to talk about more in its an interview show where I talk to people who are well known in people who aren't public figures about the stuff that all of us go through and are figuring out in some way.

And then when you say that people do, they start saying to do the things that they want address on a show like that like when you say like, oh, we talk about the things that people think about a lot but you talk about more or people like, oh, that reminds me, i'm afraid to die.

It's not usually quite like that, but my favorite is when it's maybe an older woman who I feel a little bit sheep sh about setting the name of the show too and then they go, oh, interesting and then I know we're off to the races. It's not that they give me story ideas, it's that we just dig in with each other.

like the name of the show has unlocked this sort of permission barrier or something.

Well, the way I experience IT is, know, I was raised in west Virginia. I am a polite person. I am eager to please socially. And so IT feels like this moment where I kind of like flip around my cards and say, like, i've got a little punk rock edge right to me. And so then that can be fun in social situations, especially where is a little bit more button up or stuffy.

When anna I first met, we were working the same radio station. I was a lowly team worker. He was a star there, a political reporter.

Everyone seemed to be in of Young, talented and accomplished, except, and this is pretty rare in media, all of those things, and liked by everyone, sort of eli SHE could do whatever he wanted to. And then one day he announced he was not going to cover politics anymore. She's going to this new show that's like the money, where SHE asked people these private questions about their lives.

She's been running the show steadily for a decade. They had a brief brush with podcasting mortality late last year, but I was very happy to see them cheat death. I've been on this funny trip lately where i've been trying to fight out what podcasting is for, why I am doing IT.

I'm still figuring that out, but anna is one of the people. I've bound these questions off a little bit. I feel like one of the ways we are sort of like artistic comrades is that were curious about other people's lives. But also sometimes I can hear in your show a person who is figuring out their own life as well, and like you have been asking questions about these three tables cks, that are the kind of things that people think about deeply and often and times in in english. How has what you've cared about changed since you started broadcasting the show a decade ago?

I mean, a lot has changed. I would say that the origin story for me of wanting to make a show about the most important building blocks of our lives, or the ones that we can't avoid ID, is that I was desperately looking for guides at the point where I started the show. You know, I was thirty, thirty three, thirty four.

I was divorced. I was living in new york. We were working in the same building together.

Yeah, know the time where I was like, I don't really know what i'm doing here, and I just want to have conversations with people where I don't feel so alone and not knowing what i'm doing here. And to field assurance, that is something you figure out along the way. And then over the course of the last ten years, I got married.

I became a parent. I've got two kids. I ross country, I live in a house. I have two dogs. My life is characterised by stability right now, like i'm living up the consequences of some really big choices I made in my, you know, early.

And so now I think this is also response to the political climate and what's fired over last ten years. I'm really interested in ambiguity and uncertainty and having conversations that add complexity rather than certainty. IT serves each of us, and that also is going to serve how we have to make decisions together.

I have this hope that someday soon, talking about uncertainty and ambiguity as values, we'll start to feel like buz words like they're be enough of us aiming at that point on the horizon that when I hear someone saying they care about that stuff of you like, yeah, we all do but I don't feel that way. Not yet. Right now, those still feel like watchwords. And I really do get those feelings from a show I ve done thinking and wrestling and trying to not too quickly make up their own mind. And that's part of why I wanted to hear in an .

episode of IT with you this week.

And surge engine, we're trying to make the show we'd want to hear, and we get a fair money emails from people who like what we do and ask what else feels like this. And dad, sex, the money for me feels like this. So n ni are crossing over this month, sharing stories with each other.

Audience says, we got to pick a death, sex, money, epo to play for you. The one I chose is about this man in jim Harris, who lives in colorado. Jim fell into a deep depression in a couple years ago after a spinal court injury left him impartially paralysed. Jim, trying to navigate the grief of that situation, ends up seeking out music and psychiatric caliban, and then has a very crazy experience on mushrooms, not the kind of had in college jims at a concert, when some of the feeling in his body actually returns that story. And that conversation begins now.

This is death, sex and money. The show from slate about the things we think about a lot and need to talk about more. I can say.

In twenty fourteen, jim Harris was thirty two years old in kite skin on a south american ice cap. The wind would catch the kite and pull him forward, but then the wind changed and drop him hard.

And then as I went to like, get up and like proud myself on my elbows, I realized they couldn't feel remove anything from, turned him down.

Jim injured his spine. And then about eight months into his rehabilitation, he found himself having another profound physical experience, again, set against a beautiful outdoor backdrop, this time sound tracked by a live jam band. A friend had invited gym m to an outer, our music festival, and by then he'd recovered the ability to walk with a Walker.

But standing and moving around a lot was still exhAusting and physically awkward, but he didn't want to miss out. And then when he got there, someone offered him a chocolate bar, a sulfide and mushroom chocolate bar. And jim didn't wanted miss out on mad either.

I remember the sunset that might be just phenomenal. IT would have been a stunning sunset if i'd been totally sober. But in this altered state over over the grass, looking really, really vivid, and kind of having this interesting pattern over the sky, looking phenomenally colorful and like IT was had these sort of subbed patterns and clouds that seemed to have repeating shapes.

And what did you notice about what I felt in your body?

Like, inside my body? I remember the feeling of, like having an increased awareness of my internal organs, like, kind of like feeling my guts way that I didn't usually notice them. Then kind of in this altered state was like shifting my feet around and flexing and flexing muscles in that state. All of a sudden I realized there were muscles that had not worked since the time of my accident, is that all of sudden I could voluntarily control.

Jim grew up in ohio and often felt like an outsider. He was in a sports sky. He didn't like the competitive dynamic, so he mostly adventured outside on his own or justice family. When he went to college in montana, jim finally found a community where IT felt like he fit.

Doing things outdoors with other people felt like an opportunity to have commodity that could feel hard for me to find elsewhere in life. There's an element of taking in some enjoyment and the like watching other people's capability, like watching somebody else who is good at the activity that you're doing, but also not really in a competitive setting like most team base sports matches or something more like hail. Lets try and hike to the top this mountain together. There's still a requirement for some self sufficiency, but also there is a comparator of the shared experience that feels really potent.

And he made outdoor red venturing into his work too. In his early twenty years, jim m. Taught mountaineering ing courses and then was hired by places like national geographic and powder magazine to document his older ness travels all over the world doing things like hiking, remote mountains, that country, river acting and snowy ding.

It's a really exciting larian sensation to be pulled by this invisible force of this atmosphere. Movie moving around you, like you've ever flown a kite that's maybe like a mini version of that, and you feel that tug of the kite string, but this is a big enough tug that I can on a slippery surface, like on snow with skies, it'll pull you across the snow. And so there's this moment of acceleration when the wind first catches the kite. And then there's an awful lot of interactivity where there's a hamburger is used, almost liking marian net strings, where the kites very manuvred, we can steer side decide. And so the skill set are part of the skill set is around this attention to where the wind is in relation to your body, in relation to the kite.

So on the one hand, i'm imagining that feels like you're sort of, I don't know, like tapping into this force that's bigger than you .

yeah absolutely is that um but also .

that you're not in control, right necessarily like its surrender. Well, too there is that .

there is an element of surrender to IT. Like I do a lot of river paddling and river activities have a lot of that. We are like moving with the current.

You can learn to, you can learn to read IT and use IT and navigate through IT. But ultimately, come, this collaboration between the person who's battling the person in the water and and then the river itself. And the river itself is an enormously powerful connected force that is, fund to interact with. And it's also really humbling in a way that they are often feels like a spiritual element of like been interacting with a with a four large and powerful thing that that maybe I don't have aware in a seven my Normal data day.

I ve never like considered like a river current in the wind being, you know, cousins of forces that you can kind of appreciate and tap until I like that.

How old were you when you were injured?

I was thirty two years old. I was my last week to be in thirty two hh. The day that I had, my spine was fused with my thirty third birthday.

So IT was winter time in the northern hemisphere, summer in the yeah .

exactly IT rules like late spring time in the southern hemisphere.

Jane was with a small group of friends near the chili argentina, a border. They planned to ski the patagium ice cap with the help of snow kites.

The kids that we had were quite small, just so we didn't have to Carry as much weight when we weren't using them. And because we like, weren't trying to do tricks or go fifty miles an hour, but the a law of being able to like, use the wind to go eight miles hour without having to shuffle my feet versus one mile hour while hauling a slab full of year was really tempting.

I see. So IT wasn't like a you're going out IT was to .

to cover ground IT was like, but we intend to use .

them for yeah and and what happened on the on the run when you got injured.

swear out in a large open pasture and a big wind gust came up. The wind accelerated. That was enough. That IT lifted me off the ground a few feet, and I wasn't particularly panic.

There is there's like a big red cord you can pull that will release some of the lions to the kite and IT becomes almost just as a sheet in the wind instead of being something it's generating force and generating lift. IT just becomes a big flappin flag attached to strings. But I didn't pull that court.

I wasn't panic, died and I thought I was going to be OK then I don't know what happened next. The friend that was with me didn't witness what happened. I woke up like regained consciousness, lying on the ground. I realised right away that I was concluded that I felt dazed and realized I just lost consciousness and I was regaining IT and was lusted enough to realize immediately that I was paralyzed.

When you woke up, your you were face up.

I was yeah on my back.

In her, after you regain consciousness, is how long we alone.

Like the time of skills, a little fuzzy, but i'm not long. I think my friend came running. Maybe he was right by my side and I came back and then he left to go get help. And I was there and by myself for a bit and maybe that's what i'm remembering. I feel like the the recall a little blurry yeah.

yeah. My whole .

neurology, you ve got quite a shake up .

in that when you realized you could not you couldn't feel anything from below your surname was IT was IT scaring where you what was what are you over feeling? Was IT like mystifying, like confused?

I felt fairly calm and resolute in that moment. I have one thing i've learned about myself is that I tend to have a fair amount of composure in release, stressful moments um and then in the aftermath once day acute crisis has moved on then of the flood of emotions come in um but I remember being backboards and Carried for a distance mirror cracking jokes while being backward joking about one of the one of the things I never been .

a little like joking .

cynically about was the people friends would encourage me to make more art beforehand and I feel like I never made time or space for IT in life and didn't prioritize IT and um but was something like three years people would gently and kindly give me this encouragements like you should do more of that um that was a resistant to in basic occupied elsewhere and so on the backboard remember being like, well well I guess i've got more .

time for art now that was like that makes me emotional like you're immediately thinking like how will I spend my time like you cast him .

forward on the backboard like that I mean it's probably some like psychological coyest but yeah I inks that IT seems like that gallows humour is comes up a lot for people in really sad gli tomato .

times IT took a few hours, but eventually jim was transported to a hospital in a small child city.

I don't think there is much nights staff on duty and I got left on the like the rigid backboard overnight and not move to a hospital bed till the morning.

So you're in a foreign country in the seven hemisphere, in a hospital. Are you comfortable? spanish?

The medical situation was so far above my level of spanish competency. I mean, really heavily on google translate.

Jim had the use of his arms, but was paralyzed below his rib cage. He had full lung function, but his abdomen muscles didn't work. He stayed in chilly for another week and then was transported back to the U.

S. For surgery. Coming up, jim begins the slow and hard process of rehabilitation.

I think, really out of naive tag made up my mind that I was going to have a recovery and use all the resources and all the willows that I had in my disposal to shift the course of the outcome. And I wonder if I would have had that same sort of drive and optimism if I had known right away or had knew what I know now about final cord injuries.

This episode of surge engine is also brought to you by wrap. Want a Better way to simplify finance Operations for your business across expenses, venture payments and accounting? If so, rap could be a complete game changer. Feel like your finance software isn't cutting up, want the latest and greatest in financial software are to simplify spending, help you save time and keep you from getting trapped busy work check out ramp. Are you a finance professional looking for a Better way to maximize productivity and cut wasteful spending?

Look no further than rap.

Rap is a corporate card and spending management softball are designed help you save time amp of money back in your pocket. Rap gives finance teams unpressed than in control in incident to company spend. With rap, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting. You installed wasting time at the end of every month and now get two hundred fifty dollars when you join rap. Just got a ramp 点 com slash engine， rap dot com slash engine, R A M P dot com flash engine cards issued by certain bank member fc, terms and .

conditions by .

this show is sponsored by Better help. This month is all about gratitude. And along with the person I just shut IT out, there's another person we don't get to thank enough ourselves is sometimes hard to remind ourselves that we are trying our best to make sense of everything.

And in this crazy world, that is an easy here's a reminder to send some thanks to the people in your life, including yourself. That's where Better help comes in. Therapy from Better help can assist you with everything from learning positive coping skills and how to set boundaries, empowering you to be the best version of yourself. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give Better help a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible and suit your schedule. Just filled out a brief question nae to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch their a piece any time for no additional charge, let the gratitude flow with Better help, visit Better help that com slash search engine today and get ten percent and off your first month that's Better help H E L P dot com slash search engine.

This is death, sex and money from slate. I'm in a sale. After jim was transported to the U. S. He was confronted with the extent of his injuries.

He fractured nine vertebrae, and he had surgery to relieve the pressure on his spine and fuse five vertebrae that went well, restoring some nerve function and proper blood flow that have been cut off. And a few days after the surgery, he was able to move his right big toe. A few weeks later, he could lift his right leg a bit, but jm did not know how hopeful he ought to be.

My neurosurgeon was very circumspect and not giving me any definitive progne. Sis IT was like, well, we'll just have to wait and see. Like this doesn't look great, like these circumstances here are are really not ideal. But I was never I wasn't told that I wasn't gona walk again, jim transfer .

to a different hospital, craig hospital in colorado, which specializes in treating brain and spinal cord injuries. He spent five months there doing intense physical therapy. Eventually, he made enough progress that he was able to become an outpatient.

IT was a slow shift from wheeled chair to Walker, and by about seven or eight months post injury, I really can walk a few steps with a Walker at a time. I was like living in an old folks home where my parents have been able to rent themselves an apartment and I was staying with them.

And so you're a little old.

old home. Yeah, I was the Youngest person by decades.

What would you compare Walkers with your neighbors? I like the idea of you're surrounded .

by people around Walkers. Oh, that that was like, absolutely surreal and all but comedic. People who have moved this assisted living facility are all in this sort of the generative phase of life, where the'd moved to this facility help soften that landing as they move different degrees of independence bit by bit.

So I was like a minor celebrity there. The first time I came down to the lobby, which is a real congregating area, came down to the lobby with a Walker instead of a wheelchair. I got a standing.

So people.

they were so sweet to me.

Were you in a relationship at the time of your injury?

I was in a seven year relationship that ended about two weeks prior to my injury.

Okay, that's a lot. IT. IT was IT was a .

really IT was a long and committed relationship that was very wonderful and eventually got engaged in that engagement, brought up all these questions of what married life would look for, like for each of us. And through that, we realized that we had some very diverging aspirations at the time. I was traveling a ton and was on this very adventure track of travelling in the world.

My girlfriend at the time really wanted me around homework, and I really have shifting more and to like a wanted more domestic and safety and security that were really Normal, insane things to want in her own thirties. And I I was not there yet, and I didn't want to give up this life of travel and adventure and of being footloose. We went to some couples of counseling.

And the nail in the coffin after a number of sessions was this therapy saying something like, know, you two are both pretty articulate, you both fairly software like I think you can talk through this specific instance of this, this agreement. But ultimately, maybe there are some differences in values here. They're going to keep coming up and keep causing conflict. And this is going to be something that you to keep dealing with year after year.

And she's like a lot of times, in my experience, ed couples with these sort differences um IT doesn't doesn't work out for the long term and then SHE added like but maybe you guys get five more really good years out of IT and that was the last words were just felt like gutting remember we went to a coffee shop and cried in each other's arms like, so we're going to keep doing this until we like, can't stand each other into a really, really resented and bitter in some ways that separation. I think there was some mutual compassion of like maybe there's something Better out there for you and then I left on this trip to partage onias, IT. We've been planning for you and a half. And all the sudden that trip took on a different sort of texture for me of like, well, now I get to go grieve and self reflect and do this out of the spotlight of social media or shared front circles um like I can go have a month of something like a near solitude and have really something else to focus my mind on and not have to have a facebook break up or something and I didn't quite .

play out the way expected. Uh, I will say that a bold couple's cancer.

if that was, maybe he was just at the end of a rope with us. I'm not sure. So you guys are not getting a hand here.

Huh, given the the proxim ity of that break up to your accident, I wonder, are you all are you still in touch with that that x did you all stay in touch throughout your recovery?

We did. We stayed close to that first year of my recovery, so I weren't daily, no longer. There was some really assessment, introspection around whether we would be more compatible now that I was wheelchair bound, that one of the conflict had been how much time I was away and the sort of dangerous activities I was engaging with, this sort of dangerous mountains, photo and video jobs I was being offered now, that I was kind of house bound, as maybe we're more compatible now than we were before. And then I think after some reflection, we both candidate conclusion that our initial decision to separate was probably still for the best .

by the summer of twenty fifteen months. Under his recovery, jim was ready for a change of scenery. A nonprofit that supports injured adventure athletes called the high fives foundation offered him free physical therapy in north n.

california. Jim flu there, and stayed in a body's reckon for the summer. In july, he joined the crew people at a big music festival near ta home. String cheese incident was playing was the kind of concert where people are dancing and lying around on blank kits.

Yeah, I put on the ground, but then getting back up off the ground was a little bit of a struggle IT wasn til after a final cord injury that I was like, I no idea how I used to stand up off the ground. This is something you'd never really paid attention to. But the way I had learned to stand up with, sort of like being in all force and pushing my butt up towards the sky and getting in a downer dog position and then slowly walking my hands back one of a time towards my feet until I was sort of bentos ver and then grab IT onto Walker or a person and standing the rest way up, right?

Jim was avoiding alcohol, altering his rehab, but most everyone around him was drinking. Then someone gave him a large suicide. De and chocolate bar, one with magic mushrooms, eight.

This was not a microdot. Psychedelics, including sillas ivan, have been reported to cause muscles bases in people with spinal court injuries, causing the muscles to flex and voluntarily. And it's hard for your brain to tell them to stop. Scientists don't know why. And for jim, right, as his psychiatric experience began to peak, his right quad muscles and knee began to vibrate and kept trying to lock.

I'm trying to, like, have this dialog with my body, which is something that I had become really familiar with, that final cord's state of, kind of like negotiating with appendages and mussels that felt like they were part of me. But also, but I didn't really have full agency. And there was like a like, hey, leg, can you do this thing? Can you help make let's i'll do this together.

Now a movement through spinal court injury began finding a lot more of a team effort versus like, whatever the center of my consciousness is extending out to, like, my fingertips and toes and to remember being like, okay, okay myself. Like, can we take a deep breath and can we unlock? Can we stop doing that? And as a part of that is kind of trying to like shufu my feet and been able to like shift body weight and flex and on flex muscles voluntarily was a way to stop these bosses from happening, to kind of stop this sort like muscle of vibration sort of pattern. And in that process, all that I realized there were muscles that had not worked since the time. My accident is that all of a sudden I could voluntarily control.

When you start noticing that, jm, are you like telling people around you like i'm noticing something in my leg. Yeah like and what was the response like like where people was there an awareness that among the people you were with that that suicide ban could could have that kind of physical manifestation, or people sort of like wild in, was IT mysterious. IT was mysterious.

And IT wasn't really even the center of the attention at the time, because there was like this amazing sunset happening. There was a headlining act, plain like Christian of there there like thousands of people around my there's like a lot of stimulus overload happening, right? But I do remember having conversation is about like, hey guys, look what I can do.

And you know my physical fair pst had been assigned in my case was there and had seen my progress for months. And obviously like, look, look at, look what I can do. And he was like, all of that do that like to start happening in the last couple weeks. And I was like, no, I just started happening like, right now.

When that day was over and you started noticing the trip ending lake, were you like, were you afraid was going to go away?

IT did seem like I got weaker as that psychiatric experience kind came to a conclusion like that ability control that muscle was not as strong as I had been a few hours earlier. So I wasn't sure if that meant that IT was from the Sullivan itself or just from fatigue. But I really wasn't until like maybe the next day where IT seemed like there might have been a cause and effect between the suicide windows and these muscles that still we're working the next day, I was like also still a possibility that is all a wild coincidence. And that was just happened to be the exact moment that some nerve pathway that had been healing for eight or nine months finally made the connection.

You're saying I could have just spend that. You're not sure.

I think if yeah, I think if we are exactly I have been from being really scrupulosity and liberal about IT like that would be a reasonable thing to say, right? Like I feel like I have a feeling, an inner sense emotional feeling or suspicion um that IT was related to this Sullivan experience but I think kind of from a really hard rationally science of you there's an argument that this was like those were two unconnected events that just happened to go occur.

And did that functionality with your right time string from that day? Is a is IT. Was that a milestone of recovery that, that if you've got functionality that stayed?

Yeah, yeah, that was a milestone.

A milestone but not an end. Alongside his physical rehab, jm was also struggling with his mental health and hit a low point two years in nerve .

recovery from a severe accident like mine is a thought to more or less wrap up after about twenty four months. And so by about two years out, whatever disability someone has is probably what they are going to be left with for life. And that was a milestone that I had in my head.

And right is that two year anniversary hit, I was laid off from my job, and the twenty sixteen election had just happened. I broke up with someone that i've been dating and a pet died. And I just felt like, like there was all this kind of like series of tragedies that any one of would have been hard and then, in aggregate, was really destabilizing. And part of that I ended up in this depressive stay where I felt like compared of life that I had had before my accident free injury, that nothing was ever going to be evacuated again, that I had like hit some sort of a high water mark, and that things will never to be that happy, that joyful, that connected, that successful ever again. And I thought pretty defended, like, wait, what is the what is the point of any of this if it's just a downhills slide towards the grave from .

here and you're turning thirty five that year.

twenty seventeen.

So you're Young person and you're looking at .

a downside 嗯。

And in how long? How long did that heavy, dark period last?

I is hard to answer, like what what a defensive end point for that was. But I felt like a long, slow crawl back out of the whole. In some ways, I still face some of those chAllenges, though I don't think i'm depressed right now, but I think there was a real reckoning with some of my world views and values. Where are some of the ways that I understood myself felt like I hit the dead end and. It's an uncomfortable shift to find new ways to see the world, new ways to find oneself.

Did you have psychiatric help during that time?

Yeah, I did. I started seeing a therapy. I so a kyats son was prescribed um any depressants. IT was really only on them for a few months and then wind off of them and had begun building at some self care routines and structure into my life that seemed to support me Better than those drugs did.

what? What for you? Did you not like about entire depressants?

IT wasn't that I didn't like them. I was just like, I didn't feel like a solution. I just felt like a bandage of like this is, this is help, is absolutely helping.

But this is like palette. This season, something is offering me a new way to move to the world. But and been on any depression for life didn't seem like something I wanted. But they do, they don't do things. They really supported me in an award of journal and reflection and contempt lation and starting a personal meditation practice of attended meditation retreats and some spiritual retreats, and like engaged with the things that would have seemed very wool to me prior to my injury, and then since then, have found ways to be like this doesn't have to be the only lens that I view the world through. But maybe there's similar value and having a sensus speriment of having a place for mister ism of a sea in the world in a way that's a little bit more alive than a really rationalist viewpoint might describe.

Coming up, jim keeps looking for a solution and tries a new psychiatric.

Two years after his final court injury, jim Harris was able to walk with a cane, but he tired easily, and he sometimes struggled with how much he missed his body.

Presentry life still felt difficult in a drift kind, without the vibrancy or the sense of purpose and meaning that I felt like I had previously, so that I ended up signing up to go trick iosco with a chemical group with some gentle men hood flown up from parole.

And was your experience. I don't know IT like feels this way. But like did you did you feel something in your body in a way that felt familiar to what your experience had been when your right hamstring recovered? Like did you feel as if something after that experience, something in the way your brain was functioning, was happening differently?

The I feel like I sort of had a fitful start like my body's reaction to that I ask I didn't um I didn't feel like I experienced physical recovery from those ceremonie.

Like the first night I came in with an awful like some jittery nerves and awful lot of hopes and expectations and apprehensions and like nothing happened for me and that felt frustrating and a bit alienating where you can like I have the same little dixi cup of weird tea as everybody around me and other people around me are clearly experiencing something i'm not, but i'm still feel very, very sober, very grounded. And like consensus reality, things have not shifted. I feel different.

I feel impatient and a little let down. And i've made all this time and effort to be here. And like it's not working now hoping for some sort of salvation and it's not here.

And then in the second night of ceremony I had experienced like ninety minutes of transcending bliss. They didn't feel like I had answered any of my big existent al questions that I felt like I had walked into the space with. But I did feel like a real beacon that IT was a search worth continuing like a inquiry that was just at the start.

You didn't get any answers.

but you got some sensation yeah, I just had like that like a kind of extended feeling that was IT was like orgasmic in some ways, but not in any sexual way. Just just like a real feeling of joy and bliss in like in my heart and in my tummy and in ways that is. IT feels vivid to think back to IT, and it's really hard to put the words.

Jim now lives in western colorado in a town surrounded by mountains and ski resorts. He's able to do some physical activities like package file, a mountain biking with limitations, and he makes art like woodblock prints of nature scenes.

Jim also has become a vocal advocate for therapeutic psychic lic use, including during the successful twenty twenty two voter ballot initiative in colorado to legal suicide and therapy and decriminalized five psychotic licks, including dm, t, the active psychodeviant and iwasaki. But jim says he relies on other long term supports to take care of his mental health, too. One came unexpectedly vely.

There was a solar eclipse in twenty seventeen, and a Young man who has friends worst and who I looked up to went, drove to the path of totality and then that night after leaving the were viewed the eclipse from was in a car accident passed away and I was pretty gutted by that and one of the things that I looked up to him for was his part of this men's group disposed group um where he was ugly Youngest person by a fair margin and I really wanted to be part of that.

But they were interested in taking new members. They have this small flex of people all um and so then that is wake somebody said something to me about like I always want to be part of that man's group and I was like, wait he did um and the two have started chat in and somebody else nearby was like, oh yeah that means group sounds awesome I wish I could be IT what's your phone number? We can do this on our own.

Did IT tend was like, I was at a Younger men's group? Yeah.

we little, I call that the Young men's .

group does IT still meet? Yeah.

for a while there, IT was pretty seasonal IT. Turns out the living in a mountain town, people really prioritize outdoor activities, especially in the summer time when it's light till man B, M. I see.

see.

our winter six months a year will meet, like every other week on a wednesday night, have some preset topic that sort of the focus of thought and contemplation, sharing and reflection.

feedback and being together .

that's yeah.

Can you describe for me um where you notice your your accident now in your body, like what doesn't work in the same way that I did before your accident?

I walk with a pretty significant lamp. I mean, I feel like I often move like a man size total ler. And sometimes I feel really self conscious about that, really envious of you see people who are like a dancing in her really good dancers.

And I ve never been a good dancer, but that hasn't stopped me from feeling envious of the way their bodies move. I have some different sensation from one side to the other, where one side of one half of my abdomen and one leg has Better baLance and Better muscle activation, but a very little hotter cold sensation, very pain sensation. The other side has much Better paint sensation and much Better hot and called sensation.

But the muscles don't work nearly as well. My baLance doesn't work nearly as well. Um so there's some kind of like almost like a little bit of A E and Young opposite because of the way because of the way neurology is wrought information through a spinal court and because one side of my spinal quarter is slightly more damage than the other. Are you dating .

these days?

Yeah then um they in somebody which set seven year .

anniversary .

year that .

seems significant. So your this is your is this your officially now your longest relationship?

I think I think maybe just about the longest relationship for either of us.

What's that like has a going.

oh, it's great relationship life so lovely. Both of us have kind of had some some hard twist to our adult lives. And I think that's helped to shape both of us in the people who are interested in self reflection and kind of interested in who we are inside, what we value and what we can really take otherness of and what we cannot go off. And so some of that kind of interested cof stuff has formed some of the foundation relationship. Could he used to feel really good?

That was the death, sex and money epo, titled the night magic mushrooms and jamb bans. Help me walk again. You can see jim Harris art and a portfolio of his wilderness adventures at perpetual weekend.

Ana says that they're first heard about jim story in a piece in outside magazine. The original episode was hosted by anal and produced by Andrew done. You can hear more episodes of death, sex, money, wherever get your podcast and you can find.

So aside IT just getting, we will be back with not one, but two new episodes of search engine next friday. wow. See them.