Gautam Khetrapal is a Transformational Speaker, Host, Trainer, Entrepreneur, TedEX Speaker (7 million views) and the Founder of LifePlugin.com—one of the world’s Personal Growth and Transformational Experiences. In this episode, Gautam sits down with Tanya Memme to talk about how he built his company and his profound effect on human experience and development. He does this by creating context within each group he takes through his program. Based in Nepal, India, Gautam has helped hundreds of mindful executives and anyone looking to enrich their lives reach their fullest potential in love, life, business, and health.

Tanya met Gautam in Costa Rica at Rythmia, a Life Advancement Retreat where we participated in four nights of Ceremonial plant medicine (AYAHUASCA). Together, they talk about the different modalities and healing techniques people can engage in to better their lives, manifest, and create more abundance! Truly with an exceptional man, follow along to this great conversation and bask in the wisdom of Gautam to have the life you want!

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Watch the episode here

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Healing Techniques To Manifest The Life You Want With Gautam Khetrapal

I am excited to have you on the show, Gautam Khetrapal. I have watched all of your stuff. You are all over the internet. It is amazing. You are a transformational speaker, prolific speaker, host, trainer, entrepreneur, and a TEDx speaker at the TEDx Talk that I watched over 7 million views. You are the Founder of LifePlugin.com. Let’s dive right on in and tell me how all of this get started.

In terms of the business or everything that I do?

Did you have a dream from when you were a little kid, and you dreamt of becoming one? You are incredible. You are rubbing elbows with Lisa Nichols, Jack Cannon, and Whim Hoff. You have spoken on stage with them. It is incredible.

I’m going to take you around with me to introduce me everywhere. We have to figure out a deal separately on the side. To be honest, there are aspects that I can pinpoint that all of these were the milestones that got me to this point. The place where it all started is there this code by Richard back. It is the favorite book of Jonathan Segal called Illusions. There is this code there that says, “We teach best what we need to learn the most.” Everything that I do is that.

I would joke about, “I was self-destructive. I had to make it part of my job to take care of myself.” It is no humility here. I was clearing my parents’ karma for the first several years of my existence by being the child that I was. It was not easy. I’m not happy and proud. It wasn’t easy for them. There were a lot of things that I needed to work on myself in my health, emotional intelligence, and ability to manage my emotions.

My sense of self-esteem is public speaking. I get to do that now to some degree at a reasonable level. Several years ago, I already started doing it professionally. Speaking in front of three people was public speaking for me, let alone in English. English is not even my first language. There are a lot of these outward manifestations of my work that I, whatever I’m teaching or whatever I get to experience, thankfully, in this life.

It is the outward manifestation of the work I need to do on myself. That is the source of it. Hindsight 2020, I’m speaking from that base right now. There is this aspect of me that always came naturally. I grew up not having a financially privileged life, but relationally, I’m extremely privileged. I grew up with the sound of laughter every single day of my life.

In India.

In India and with a big community, before I could even understand how meaningful and powerful it is for well-being and feeling confident or centered and not going towards addictions, how powerful it is to have those strong connections that you can rely upon. I grew up in that environment, and not in a serious sense, but I knew there were always people that cared for me no matter what. It was always an environment filled with play and joy. That is one thing.

My father has written books on philosophy. My mom is a science teacher and a Reiki master healer. I was ready to be in this environment early. What I do now is I’m interested in creating ecosystems that inspire friendships in the context of growth. All the big events or small events are the masterminds that we do. What they are doing is they are creating a context of growth. What we want to do is, and this is where most of our effort goes on a day-to-day basis, to bring the right people into the ecosystem. Once you do that, and there are some cool and deep connections forming between people in the context of growth, you can remove the context. That relationship carries forward the momentum of whichever context that relationship was formed in.

Here is what I mean by that. Imagine you meet someone at a business conference. You had a great time with someone for 2 to 3 days. You had a nice contact. Several months later, you are traveling to some city, and you meet the same person, “How are you?” It is easy to restart the conversation about business because that is the context in which the relationship was formed.

You meet someone at a marketing conference, and you meet them again. The context in which the relationship was formed was marketing. It is easy to talk about marketing. My intention is to create a good context of growth for people to come and engage meaningfully in a way that stirs some emotion, have a lot of fun to get lasting memories, and creates some personal breakthroughs. That is the world our company does.

You put on some of the largest events in the world in Nepal, and you help many different kinds of people. People that are going through trauma or people that want growth and transformation. You do it through experiences. The whole thing is one huge experience.  

I wouldn’t call it some of the biggest events in the world but thank you for saying. They are effective and powerful in terms of not the breakthroughs they get because when you are in the transmission industry, it is easy for you to start receiving, “You changed my life. This thing changed my life.” Studies are important. I’m a marketer too. I know the case studies that you are more interested in are from people six months to one year after, how the ripple effects of the transformation that they had from experiencing something six months ago, three months ago, or a year ago. That is the true mark of transformation that people get in their life. That is interesting to me.

The reason why it is interesting to me is early on, the things that changed my life were ecosystems that I don’t know how I ended up being there. There were always ecosystems where there were deep connections, conversations around personal growth, transformation, and experientially taking us through a process where it is not lecturing, but I’m sitting in the driving seat of my own transformation. I got exposed to those ideas and ecosystems early on.

Are you saying you feel like you are groomed for this, and because of the number of people that you knew or the people that you have interacted with and the support that you had from your family, you ended up following these footsteps? Did you want to create this thing in a way you were creating this for other people as well? You wanted them to have that experience through Life Plugin.

In a sense, as I grow older and I reflect on the work that I’m doing, yes, I’m unconsciously recreating the things that have been meaningful to me unconsciously and consciously. It is creating the emotions that I enjoyed in my past. It was valuable official there. Being in a space where people can see you for who you are and in a rare and beautiful space.

One of my teachers mentioned this, “The places where we are seen and cared for are holy places.” Creating an environment where easy to be seen and cared for by strangers is one of the most healing experiences ever. Our efforts are in pursuit of creating more spaces and allowing as many people as possible to get to experience that. Not in a way that is like, “You are healing.”

Having cool conversations, laughing together, doing weird things together, and enjoying the process. That is the unique lens through which I’m able to see creating ecosystems. There is a vulnerability in acknowledging emotions and feeling whatever front emotion hasn’t been processed, but laughter is also vulnerability. For you to experience true laughter and joy, your guards need to be down. We walk around with our guards always being high up. For you to be able to truly enjoy, celebrate, laugh, and have real connections, the guards need to go down.

Manifest Life: For you to truly enjoy, celebrate, laugh, and have real connections, the guards need to go down.

The way we map our event programming or experience designing is before we identify what the things that we want to teach in a 3 or 4-day program are, we first map the emotion that we want to take people through. There is the emotional programming that goes through. We assume we have a good estimate of what is the starting emotion that people come with, and we know the endpoint. What is the journey that we want to take people through? The experiences, the party, the social activities, or the breakthrough activities are mapped on top of those emotions. We take this process as seriously as we can.

You have fun, and you get to that point where you can be vulnerable, open up and connect. A lot of it is about making that connection with other human beings, which we don’t do enough of. I want to read something that you said on your website. I found this, and I love this. It is beautiful. It was like, “I blend my love of teaching comedy, personal growth, and building tribes for creating transformational adventures around the world through summits, masterminds, coaching, and keynote speaking.”

Your mission is to turn one’s learning and education into something intrinsically motivating, a lifelong adventure, and build a Disneyland of learning and education. That is beautiful. That is what you talked about in your TED Talk speech. I love the company that you started, Life Plugin. I want to show a little video of what that is about so you can get a grasp of what you have created, which is phenomenal. Here we go.

“My name is Gautam Khetrapal, and I’m the Founder of Life Plugin. Imagine having access to a self-coaching practice that allows you to get unstuck and create massive success in any area of your life. Imagine learning a transformational framework that, once learned, serves you for the rest of your life. That is what I want to talk about.

For the last several years, I have personally dedicated time to spend with some of the greatest teachers in transformational education. These are teachers who have sold more than 100 million books or people who are running some of the greatest transformational institutions and bringing personal growth ideas to the world, or people who have been featured on inspiring institutions such as the Oprah Show or the documentary, like The Secret, so on and so forth.

“This passion has allowed me to integrate various transformational practices, from mindfulness meditation to NPl, to hypnosis, to behavioral psychology, to trauma-releasing breath work, to ancient shamanic practices, and much more, in a unique way that has dramatically changed my life. It has taken me to some of the biggest stages in the world, sharing the things I’m deeply passionate about. It has given me the ability to give talks that have gone viral.”

“It has allowed me to create my dream business in India, where we play around with various transformational ideas. It also transformed my body beyond my wildest imagination. It has created a sense of fulfillment in my relationships that I never thought was possible. After serving thousands of people around the world and experiencing genuine healing and transformation, I have seen the same questions, struggles, concerns, and desires show up over again.”

For anybody reading this, I want you to know how incredible this company is that you have created. It’s mind-blowing. What would you say is the type of client that comes to one of your events? What are people struggling with most, or is it all over the map? What is the best reason?

The ideal persona that comes and stays with us for the long run are people who are in the role of conscious leadership. What that means is people who are poor or who run a startup company that is not more than fifteen years old. They are CEOs but entrepreneurial, fast-growing companies, coaches themselves, or artists.

This is the person persona that comes there, in which the aspects of their life is there is pain, but there are also aspects of their life where they have created some breakthroughs. They get the process. These are the ones that I get to work the most closely with. They end up in my events. There are two different types of events. We do three days, 250 people residential experience, or there are fifteen people where I live with them for four days. We do some practices that you don’t get to do in a larger group setting.

Two hundred fifty people, you are saying, at one event.

Two hundred fifteen. For people who cannot make it to the event or, at times, don’t work or money-wise, it is a bit expensive for them, there is this offering. We teach the main transformational process behind the subconscious programming process that I first applied to myself, and I brought it as a coaching practice with the intention of serving people who want to go on the same path.

We turned that process into a digital learning experience. People who can’t make it because of logistics or commitment. They can’t take time off from the work they are in. They can engage in a digital learning program. That is all across the board. People who are students, people who are late after retirement, and everybody in between.

This must have been, at one point, a massive dream for you. What was it like before this began, and what qualities are within you? Life Masters is about helping people get out of their rock bottom, believe in their dreams, and go for it. What qualities within yourself helped you finally believe in yourself enough that you could do this? This is a massive undertaking. You did it, and you are doing it.

To call it that this was my dream is also an understatement. There were many moments when I didn’t even dare to dream of this. A lot of times, my dreams were much smaller than what it is now. Whatever level it is right now, one of my strengths is that it doesn’t leave me when my starting point falls. I’m running this business. It is unfolding in meaningful ways and helping thousands of people.

My first full-time job when I was growing up in India was $100 a month. That is my starting point. At a different point in time, I would dream something far ahead, but I didn’t know how that would manifest. I don’t know where it comes from. I think I’m genetically blessed, or I grew up in an environment where this was common. It was a simple or profound practice of seeing things to be grateful for in whichever moment I’m at. The more I study all these transformational philosophies from the world, the most fundamental one that stuck with me.

The most return in my life is staying in the place of gratitude, which is being in the energy of perceiving. Whatever the dream is, whether the dream of business, public speaking, helping people, or love that I want to experience in my life but how can I appreciate the one that I already have? The more I did that, it started giving me opportunities to appreciate that.

How does that look for you? People often talk about manifestation, but many people don’t understand what does that mean? How do I do it? How do I incorporate it? If I’m in a low place in my life, how do I get myself out of it and feel grateful? Am I forcing myself to be grateful? Sometimes it is hard to be in that energy space. What does that look like for you? How can you walk people through that so that they can get to that energy space if they are going through a tough time right now?

One of the easiest ones is to train the muscle of trusting how real transformation, whatever we want to manifest and create a big transformation. The simplest would be to commit to transforming your body. One is the changing of the body and changing the body permanently. In the pursuit of that, there are a lot of spiritual lessons that one might learn. There are some lessons that can only be learned experientially.

One of them is when we commit to changing a body or living from a place of health and consistently over a long period of time. One of the learnings that happen experientially is that anything meaningful in life, like a transformation, takes a long period of time. That is one. The second thing one person learns is the value of the compounding effect. I open many cans of words. Let’s see where it works.

When we speak about it, it is hard to process or live a life from that place. It is good to remind ourselves that the compounding effect is always in play. Imagine you have a small water body. I heard this example from David Meltzer. A guy comes to you and says, “Here are a few water lilies. Every year, they double in number. In 30 years, your pond will be filled with water lilies. Your pond will be filled in 30 years. It is great. You buy it.” What that means is that in 30 years, your pond will be full completely with water release. In 29 years, it will only be half full. In 28 years, it will only be one-quarter full. If you commit to something for 28 years, you are like, “It is only one quarter. What the hell?” people drop way before that.

Manifest Life: It’s good to remind ourselves that the compounding effect is always in play.

There is compounding once they start accumulating different skills without seeing the return in my life. To give it long enough time to let it rest and come back to the process consistently, it starts to compound that compounding is witnessed or experienced in a longer frame of time. That is another thing that one might only learn or easily learn by changing the body. It is easy. People are committed to it.

The other thing that people learn is that when you are trying to work on your body, another thing that happens is that anyone who is in strength training learns this premise of progress. I don’t know if you are familiar with this term, but if you are increasing strength or developing muscle, the way it works is you go to the gym and lift a bar from the floor. I will lift six repetitions. I will put enough weight. I can only do a minimum of four and a maximum of six. I do 50 kilos. I do six. Next, we come back. Once I hit six, that means I can go further. I increase the weight. I remain in the same range of 4 to 6.

That is how you keep increasing the weight but keep the same repetition range. Let’s call it the progressive overload method. What is doing is, over time, you are going back to the gym doing the same exercise with the same level of struggle that you chose, 4 to 6 repetitions. As soon as you get to the comfort level of already I can do six repetitions, you increase the level of struggle. Over time, what tends to happen is that you choose the level of struggle consistently. That the level of struggle will remain between 4 to 6 repetitions. You can lift 120 kilos off the floor when you started with 30

How do you keep the momentum? Sometimes it is hard to keep the thing inside of you alive to keep going and believe it is going to happen. Does that come with training or experience? Are there techniques or modalities that people can give advice?

Depending on where a person is when they are starting out, we will talk about the basics a lot. The easiest thing to do is to have a rock-solid morning routine. There is this book called The ONE Thing by Gary Keller. It is a fascinating book. I would highly recommend it. One of the things that he mentions is that across all domains, he found the most highly successful, efficient, and effective people across different industries.

The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth About Extraordinary Results

What he found is that they do these four things every morning, non-negotiable. They do their morning routine. They do something for their mind, body, spirit, and business energy. For the mind, it would be a mindful practice. For the body, they will eat healthier, have some morning drinks, go for exercising or spirit deal, pray or meditate or spiritual practice. For emotions, they spend time with a loved one or express gratitude to someone. If you have a partner, be hopeless and romantic. When you wake up in the morning, give them a kiss and love or emotional energy.

Get spiritual energy through meditations and prayers to get something for physical energy, which is through moving the body or putting something good in the body. The fourth one is business energy, which is the question that he asked in the book. What is the one thing that I must do now such that by doing it, everything else either becomes easier, easy, or unnecessary? That is the question. I fumble a little bit. Emotional energy, spiritual energy, physical energy, and business energy are the four that you lock time in the morning before you turn off your phone from flight mode. That is what you work on. What does that look like? When you wake up, you have some mindful practice.

What does your morning look like?

I wake up and do 10 to 15 minutes of mindful practice, which is nothing but focusing on my breaths.

Is it while you are lying in bed, or are you up sitting up?

I go back a little bit more. When I wake up, the first thing I do is repair my one-liter tea drink mate in the morning. I get to have one liter of water. While that is getting prepared, I set up my altar. I light up the candles. There are some palo santo. I like that. My tea is ready. I sit down. I do 10 to 15 minutes of mindful breathing, which is centering myself and focusing on the breath. The mind goes away. I bring my attention back to the breath. It goes away. I bring it back to the breath. It is a form of mindful Buddhist practice.

There is nowhere to go. How can I rest my attention back on the present moment? It is hard. What it reflects back over is how hard it is to come back to the present moment. It starts to get easier. I have reflection practices that prime my subconscious mind into the way I want to want my day and life to unfold. I reflect on the small moments with which I experienced some love. I was talking to my parents on the phone. I do all my calls while walking.

I was walking. There was a dog that randomly came towards me and started jumping on me. It was adorable. My heart felt a little bit of love. The intention is to train my awareness to see that love is always pleasant through strangers, my loved ones, and friends. Every time I have an experience of love, I capture it. I wanted to train my awareness to see that more. That is one of the first reflections I do in micro-moments where I experienced love. There is a big reason behind it, which we can unpack if you are interested. I reflect on that.

I love to hear it.

The next thing is I run through a list of gratitude in ways I’m grateful for. That will include the way I took care of my body, family, and friends, things that I got to achieve, and something cool that happened to me that goes on that list. I drink my mate. I continue my fasting as long as I can. There are some days I go to yoga, and some days I go to the gym. The morning part before my flight mode goes off most days, but not every day.

Before it goes off, I do something creative for the work because I’m in the space when I’m creating new workshops or new formats of teaching. My recent research and study have been in Buddhist mindfulness meditation. I dedicate some time to reading something or consolidating some thoughts into creating new workshops. I get back to my work, which is emails, WhatsApp, team meetings, etc.

These are workshops for your Life Plugin.

A place where my creative energy is needed most is the workshop because I have an event coming up. I’m creating a three-hour element in that whole four-day event. I needed to dedicate some energy to that. That was my one thing that if I did that, everything else would be either easier or unnecessary on business.

What would you say to people that don’t have a morning routine, that have four kids and is running around? They are stressed out. How do they find that time to create for themselves in the morning?

Get one. Starts at fifteen minutes. At the very minimum, what it is doing is you are signaling to your own mind that your well-being is important. Even if you wake up, I will not focus on my breath for five minutes and, for the next ten minutes, do some journaling, but I will do it every single day. That is it. For exercise time, I will find some other time, or I will start finding more time later.

Everyone, whichever stage of life we are in, our time is full, but we want to make a change. We will take time out of something else that we are not able to give right now. It will be hard. That is why change is hard. Start where it is easy. Don’t start with three hours. If you have the luxury, yes. It is easy for me to say, “I don’t have kids.” I have little responsibility. Even when I’m traveling or when I have limited time, what I try to the best of my ability is can I give myself, instead of three hours, can I do it half an hour. Someday, can I do it in ten minutes?

As long as you do it and you find that time.

Act of doing it, and it is the act that recognizes that working on myself is the thing that at some day will compound. It is always compounding. It is recognizing the truth that I can do nothing for anybody else in this world but to work on myself. The deepest truth is that. The other way to look at it is the more I work on myself, the more I am of use to people I care about.

You are giving a lot of yourself constantly. That is how you regenerate and give time to yourself too. You are filling your bucket by doing that every morning.

I draw my inspiration from, “I want to be valuable for the people that I love the most.” The customers, people, and coaching clients are all bonuses. First, I want to be of value to the people who brought me into this world, my siblings, and the people that I call friends. The word is sacred to me. Everything else is a bonus. These people, I always want to be able to honor, support, and care for these. Every single thing that I’m doing, for me, it is easier because I’m a lover. It is, oftentimes, easier to be stronger for people that I love than for myself. When I see these spaces, my parents, my siblings, and my best friends, and when I see that I want to be an inspired son and an inspiring friend, everything else is a bonus.

I would say that you are that. The other thing I wanted to ask you is because I did a ton of research on you, and you spoke about how to be a good friend on this topic. Let’s talk about that. I wanted to talk to you about that because it is important. What are your thoughts on how to be a good friend?

My education in personal growth came from American philosophy, work on the self. It was, how do I get something? How do I do this? How do I achieve it? While it was inspiring for me, somehow, it was always perpetuating the idea of separateness. It made me start to view everything around me as a competition I needed to outgrow to a healthy degree.

What I started feeling more is that Instagram culture and social media culture perpetuate the sense of separateness from everybody else and see everybody else as competition and alienation from everybody else in our surroundings. As an extension, loneliness is being declared an epidemic. That is the world we live in. It is the bubble I’m living in. If you look at places where people live the longest, they are called the Blue Zones.

Costa Rica is one of them. We met in Costa Rica.

If you start looking at those places, there is not as much separation. There is a lot of connection, celebration together, and taking care of each other. They don’t have any mental health awareness campaigns. They don’t have any education on diabetes. Their divorce rates are not going through the roof. They don’t have any suicide rates increasing by 400%, which is in any modern society, that is the trend they are following.

I forget the name of the author, but the book The Happiness Hypothesis. That is the guy I got this statistic from. When we look at the Blue Zones, we realize that there was no need for personal growth education the way it is booming like crazy in the world. What was happening is that the connections and the value of relationships were profound that we would naturally go into harmony with how life should naturally unfold.

I grew up in India, where I was touched by the value of relationships deeply. I believe that every single person in this world has 3 to 5 elevating friends that push each other to grow. You can laugh with, be vulnerable with, and be openly biased towards. If each single person has 3 to 5 elevating friends like that, there is no need for a self-help industry.

Manifest Life: Every single person in this world has to have three to five elevating friends that push each other to grow, they can laugh with, be vulnerable with, and be openly biased towards. If every single person has those, there is no need for the self-help industry.

That is the juice. That is why even though I run a personal growth company, what I speak of is, “We are creating a context of growth.” What we want to do is not engineer friendship but inspire friendships. The choice of words is important. The best idea is that we can engineer everything, hack everything, and inspire it. We are also human, part spirit. Spirits don’t align with the model of engineering, but when there is a natural connection, it unfolds.

My idea is, when it comes to being, “How do I become a good friend?” I always look, “Am I working with myself? Am I of value to other people? Do I celebrate them? Can I be inspired by them? Can I inspire them at the same time? That is all. As long as I have that and I’m honoring that, I’m good. What that means is sometimes, when hard conversations need to be had, have them.

When they need to push each other, pushing the button is something that is uncomfortable. There is a level of spiritual connection that needs to be there because normal friends can’t push each other’s buttons when you see someone’s BS. With our closest friends, we said things to each other that would destroy relationships, but they were truthful.

We could say that because the trust that it is coming from a place of love was strong, that painful pill could be swallowed. It is an investment in building that trust and recognizing the love that you share. The truth of the beauty that this relationship brings to your life on repressing the commitment that I’m here to celebrate and joy and also for your growth. I want you to do the same thing for me. That is where the elevation comes.

I don’t know if you think there are many people in the world that don’t have friends like that. I have friends like that too, but I’ve worked on it. I have implemented a lot of things that you are saying. For people that don’t have friends like that and have a hard time making solid friends, what is the first step or the first thing they can do?

Every time I share that everyone needs to have 3 to 5 elevating friends, we won’t need the self-help industry. The question I get is, “How do I find them? It is difficult.”

There is a reason why you are getting that question because a lot of people don’t have them, sadly, but it is true.

When I was ten years old, my dad had an older brother, eighteen years older than him. He is almost like a father figure to him. When I was growing up, my dad was successful, business-wise. When I was about 8 or 9, he lost his business in a bad way. I saw him and our financial life going down. It was not pleasant. There were times I remember I was about 10 or 11, and I wanted something. It is a small thing. I didn’t have the money. My dad said, “No.” His older brother was financially successful and was taking care of my dad while he was trying to build himself back up. We were losing the houses and the cars. His older brother gave my dad his car.

They have a beautiful relationship, but I wanted something. My dad said, “We didn’t have the money.” I got angry, and I said, “I wish I had a brother like you.” At that time, it didn’t land with me as deeply as it does now. My dad told me, “Don’t wish to have an older brother like me. Wish to be an older brother like him.” The better question to ask is, how do I be that elevating friend? When we hold the intention to be and rest in that energy, you either change your friends or change your friends.

When you rest in that energy, what does that mean? I’m invested in my personal growth. I choose to see the beauty in others. I choose to speak the truth even if it is uncomfortable while holding my love for them. I also practice the aspects of the more I can work on myself, the more I can see the beauty in other people. I still tell them where they are not going right.

It is an energetic thing. You can’t use it. You can’t manipulate that with words. It is a reflection of the work that you do for yourself. The better question to ask is, how do I be an elevating friend for people that are around me already? Trusting that energy will be, we reflected back at you at some point. It is a question of trust. It is not an easy answer to absorb, but that is the spiritual answer.

The practical answer is once you start working on that part, what will start to happen naturally is your choices will be different. When you start saying, “I want to be in a place where I can be an elevating friend for others.” That means I need to work on myself. You will start finding yourself in places where you are working on yourself while other people are working on themselves too, which is where we met. They become seeds of those relationships. Ronan that you interviewed or you are about to interview. That is the place where we met.

I met you at Rythmia, which is a spiritual awakening place in a life advancement center in Costa Rica. It is where we go to do plant medicine. We did meet at a place like that. Did you meet all of your friends? I met all of your friends, not all of them, but some of your closest incredible beings. I’m trying to get all of you on my show. All of you are elevated, and you are doing incredible things. All of you met at a place that had to do with personal transformation.

Different places had to do with personal transformation.

It is important to go to these things.

Yes, we were in different organizations. Three of us that you are referring to, one came from Germany, one came from Brazil, and I came from India, who was living in the Philippines. We all moved to Malaysia to join a company called Mindvalley. We all were employees of Mindvalley. That is where we met. They have a strong culture of transformation within the company, which also gets reflected outside. It is one of the coolest companies in the world. That is the context in which we met. There were another 150 to 200 people.

Our spirits were drawn to each other, and we started to have shared experiences together. As we had those shared experiences, the depth of our relationship got further. That became a confirmation. Several years into, we started doing plant medicines together, but only in a ceremonial context. Immediately, in this human physical realm, all of a sudden, we are in a spiritual realm, also dancing together, fully aligned.

Where did you do it the first time with your friends?

The first time was in 2016. At that time, I read the book, The Psychedelic Explorer. There was a lot of psychedelic research that was coming into the personal growth industry. That is in 2016. We were exposed to a lot of ideas around the research on psychedelics. The first one we did in plant medicine was LSD in 2016. I invited these guys over at home. Ronan and I knew for a while. Ronan Oliveira is the Head of Health and Fitness in Mindvalley.

The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys

I had known him for several years at that time. I knew him well then. This German guy had moved to Malaysia. I told you by now you should know the word friend is sacred to me. For some reason, I had a great connection with this guy Vadim. I invited him over, which is out of an ordinary thing. I don’t know. Something happens.

I get it. I had a great connection with him too.

We shared that journey, and it was profound. For every single person that was there, it was deeply profound. We couldn’t stop talking, thinking, and researching about it. It answered many things that we didn’t even think of. It answered the question that we didn’t even have in our mind when we first took that experience. I normally don’t talk about psychedelics as much outside because it is easy to make it sound cool.

It is hard work. It is not easy.

My hope is that anybody who does it doesn’t do it after reading a blog like this. Read people who studied, dedicated several years of their life, putting research together, and the best recommendations to do this trump. That is when you go for it. We also go to some planned medicine ceremonies together. We take some people from our tribe in India. We do those experiences together, but we get trained people who can guide people through that experience. There are six months of homework that needs to be done.

In Rythmia, they say, “The medicine works if you do the work.” Otherwise, it is because it is a massive euphoria. The portal opens, which is unbelievable in and of itself, but the door opens, and you come back to this reality. The real work is in the integration of it. One of my friends, the cofounder of Mindvalley, Kristina Mand-Lakhiani, gives this equation of transformation. She said, “Transformation equals experience plus integration.”

Integration is everything.

Blood medicine or psychedelics is a massive euphoric experience. The blood of information comes through our brain and being. It is the integration of what other things I learned and how I will implement them every single day. When you ask me what is my morning routine. The things that I do every morning are the things that I got inspiration from during a plant medicine ceremony, which was now more than a few months ago.

I commit to doing that for the next several months until I learn something new. I add that to my morning-routine template. I start doing that. I do that every single day without even thinking anymore. It was the integration that is the important aspect that I hope I want you to touch upon every time we talk about psychedelics or plant medicine. Psychedelic medicine is an important thing to remember too.

If you do it in a ceremony, you do it with respect, and you do it as medicine. It is interesting because I come from a family, and my brother and my cousins, a lot of them, are successful. They are happy with their life. They think I’m crazy to go and do psychedelics. I have learned so much about myself. I improved, changed, transformed, and elevated in many ways because of it.

When you speak to people who call it a drug and they don’t want to do it because they love their life the way it is, how do you talk to people like that? I was trying to talk to my family about it when I got back after meeting you in Rythmia. I’m telling them about what an amazing experience this is. I was like, “You have to do this.” They are already successful. They feel like they don’t need to do anything to change. It is not for trauma, is what I mean. It is not for people who have a lot of trauma. It is also for personal growth, development, and transformation.

It depends on the individual context. Whether it is psychedelics or any transformational process, there is the same level of resistance you can receive. There was a time when I was learning a lot of these things. Every time you learn something inspiring, you straight away want to go and say, “You got to listen to this. You got to read this book. This teacher told me this. You got to study it. It is nice.” We learn something. We want to teach it to others. That is a beautiful thing. Here is an interesting perspective that parents understand intuitively. When you want to teach, your children don’t do what you tell them to do.

What was the last thing that you said?

Not what you tell them to do. How do you inspire when we are trying to tell other people, “This is important?” In some places, it is necessary if someone is dying, but they will still ask for help. In other scenarios, in my experience, when my life reflects transformative change, people will start coming up to you and say, “What changed?

When you tell them, some take it well, and some don’t.

In that scenario, when they come up to you and say, “I want the breakthrough that you had. Can you show me the path that you took?” In 99 out of 100 cases, if someone comes to you with that place, that was like, “What changed for you? I want what changed for you.” When we get to that place, there is almost no resistance. It is one of the shock therapies. It is not the only one. If you have a 30-year-old car, you can put rocket fuel inside, and the car will explode.

The good car first and clean the engine. Those are practices that don’t require shock therapy. Plant medicine is rocket fuel. Your life is different. Doing smaller practices, working on the vessel, getting it prepared work, going through some difficult stuff with the current state of consciousness, and using it as a supporting thing rather than a quick fix. I have towards recommending plant medicine as a quick fix towards something or recommending anything as a quick fix.

I came after going through a separation from my ex. I had the option to do it a few months after. I said, “No.” Ronan and Vadim, my bros, didn’t fun the people who were helping me. They also said, “Fully absorb it, and see what you can do without altering your state of consciousness.” I didn’t even do any substances, not even alcohol. I’m not even smoking weed. I live in Barcelona. It is legal.

I’m staying present with all the emotions that were there. Once you have done the cleanup to the best of your ability, I came to Rythmia last time with the intention of, is there anything else that I don’t see anymore that is left to be cleaned? When you use it as a supplementary process, it is beautiful. You are like, “My heartbroken. I need healing. Let me do ayahuasca.” It is a bad idea. It will be the **** out of you. Even as a quick fix, it is not the right approach. We live in a quick-fix culture.

That is why that mind is cultivating the mindset. Every time I hear a quick fix, I have a little bit of resistance. I ask myself, “Think twice.” It is alluring and attractive because we constantly live in a culture where we believe everything can be quickly fixed. We live in that illusion. It is not a fault. We feel a little bit hot, AC on. We feel a little bit cold, heating on. I think I will be hungry right after this call. I can order something. In two seconds, by looking at the side of my phone, by the time this interview finishes, I have my food waiting for me. Any impulse and instinct I have can be fixed.

We live in this quick-fix culture. When things break and hard stuff happens, we don’t know how to deal with it. It is a gift and curse of our generation. Nobody had that before. Go back two generations. One in in most countries and two in some countries where nobody ever had this level of power and privilege. Our mind is living in this illusion. Everything can be fixed quickly. When we face things that cannot be fixed quickly, which is where real-life lessons are, we take them easily. I fear that we are breaking more easily with the challenges that are being thrown at us by life.

I want to do my bit to serve other people not experiencing that because I did in my own experiences, and I got saved in many other ways because other people did the work and they taught me. It saved me in many ways. When I view any aspect of personal growth, including plant medicine, there is an aspect of whether it is a quick fix or I’m choosing to move towards healing. It is an aspect of, “Does this heal more? Does this serve my intention of being a better human being, working on myself?” If it is coming from the second place, it is a yes. If I’m trying to escape from something or trying to fix something quickly, it is a no.

I could speak with you for hours. You are incredible. Make sure that you guys research him all over the internet because there is so much information, including talks you have given and all the stages you have graced. Where can we learn more about you? If somebody wants to coach with you, what does that look like? How can they do that? What kinds of coaching do you offer for people?

My company is Life Plugin. It is LifePlugin.com or Instagram @LifePlugin_. That is where most of the stuff that will happen that you can follow. There will be a marketing person who will be sharing stuff daily, consistently, and you can get some inspiration. To work with me in one-on-one coaching or group coaching, we create a one-year-long group coaching program every year towards the end of the year. I take team people on. I call it The Accelerator for Transformational Leadership. It is the aspects of mindfulness, self-expression, life, visioning, and working on the body. With some events, working a little bit with the medicine, and a year of integration, one-on-one coaching, and group coaching, all of that is put together in one program. That gets launched only end of November.

You could be everywhere in the world for this. This is online. You also have to integrate plant medicine as well.

You have to come for one event. You wouldn’t want to miss that event. It may happen in India. I’m going to that event. It is in the middle of the desert. There is nobody around, perfect nature. I’m bringing trained facilitators. There are fifteen people living together. It is a physical event, and the rest happens. You can be anywhere in the world.

People can’t join now until November 2023.

No.

That is how it is unless they want to do one-on-one with you.

That will depend on the calendar availability.

You can go to LifePlugin.com and go to that event in April 2023.

You can join the bigger group events. There are different ways to join them. The aspects of one-on-one coaching come from this accelerator. We created a twelve-month program. It works well. We have a lot of faith in that process too.

If you want to expand your life, personal development, or transformation or meet cool people and walk away with lifelong friends, get involved, research Gautam and make sure that you listen to all of his TED Talks. You are incredible. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Thank you so much. I hope it serves some value and see you again.

I hope so. I have to come to one of your events.

We would love to have you there.

Important Links

• LifePlugin.com
• Illusions
• The ONE Thing
• The Happiness Hypothesis
• Mindvalley
• The Psychedelic Explorer
• @LifePlugin_  – Instagram

About Gautam Khetrapal

“I started LifePlugin as a first step towards creating the Disneyland for Learning & Education.

My passion is to try latest studies & frameworks in personal transformation in my own life, so in essence, I am my own human guinea pig. Past 8 years, I have been obsessed with personal transformation in all areas of life and simplifying complex systems to daily actionable steps, I now call this process ‘Life Designing’.

My general philosophy is that life is important. And that we are meant to enjoy our short time here. With that in mind, I am now dedicated to building a tribe of transformation enthusiasts around the world, facilitate powerful experiences and inspire people to create truly exceptional lives for themselves.”

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