Do I need Jesus or Xanax? Nurse anesthetist Nick Angelis discusses difficult topics as a Christian and a clinician with Hank the Sonic Shaman. The medical system can’t answer spiritual questions. Unmet expectations can harm our mental health, substituting truth and sincerity for shallow self-righteousness. The first step is to know ourselves. Are Psychedelic and indigenous medicines reconcilable with faith and science? What about ketamine? With so much potential to heal, can it make people worse the way marijuana hasn’t lived up to the medical hype?
hello and welcome to the ascend health show i’m your host nick angeles and i’m here with hank settler today and i thought i had a cold but i think i’m over it maybe i should have discussed this before we started well it’s too late we’re all in now
yeah i mean we’re at least four feet apart or yeah that’s enough social distance
absolutely so i first met you at the host of health expo and it was fascinating to me because and i’m sure there’s a more eloquent and delicate way to say this but i could almost sense like desperation of a lot of people there that they really wanted either spiritual fulfillment or the medical system had let them down i’m a nurse anesthetist and i think i mentioned i own ascent health center that’s why i’m in scrubs today so you know i was trained to believe that the medical system could cure you it could whatever problem you had there’d be an answer but then once i started my own practice here and once i got in tune with some of the more holistic practices around i realized nope there’s plenty of people that went to 8 9 10 specialists and they’re still suffering and they’re either told it’s all in your head or the opposite this is just a physical manifestation there’s no depression or apparently chronic cough so it’s just so fascinating that i was like what is it driving people to find these alternative methods of healing right
and i really think it’s both things our tagline when we did the expo was psychics to physicians and most everything in between and we literally had a functional medicine doctor like dr k right who’s a colleague of ours right next to mary anne mankowski the ghost whisperer and it was really people could get both things and educate themselves as to what was going to be right for them and their whatever was going on in their world
absolutely and we have a different show it i think it’s called toasters in the bathtub that is a disclaimer basically saying don’t listen to either of us for your medical advice actually schedule an appointment you can go to ascendhealthcenter.com and that has all the information for my practice and what’s your website again
my website is my name hank sotola.com that does make it easier so as you well you know over the years i keep learning new things and every time i learn something new i built a whole new website rebranded myself and then i realized like you know the one thing that never changes is me
that’s great well actually at one point i was told that i should name my practice angelss health center but i was like that’s kind of conceited to say like i am everything and if you don’t go with my last name like this isn’t gonna work um but in your case that actually makes a lot of sense because as you learn and and to be honest when i got into holistic medicine myself that was always a challenge for me because unfortunately i’m the sort of person who’s like well i put this effort in like i must take it to completion as opposed to wait i’ve learned something new i have to pause not to move on with this new information
see i’m always hungry for more information everybody said hank you got to pick one thing and stick to it and here i am learning dozens of healing modalities and then just starting to blend them together and then i love collaborating with people like you and dr k when there is something that i don’t know you know how to help somebody i have people that i can refer people to and i think it’s really this energy in this day and age of collaboration it’s really the energy and humanity we’re moving from the kingdom of me to the kingdom of we and really starting to work together not in the spirit of competition but how we can benefit one another
that’s true that so when i first started i was the only ketamine clinic in the area and now there’s a few more and in fact uh this morning which is one of the reasons i was late to my previous show um i took care of another ketamine clinic’s patient they needed a dose that only I as a nurse anesthetists could do so we worked together where we had this plan so she the patient can go back to the other clinic and for me it’s like well this makes sense like of course we’re in this very niche business so it would make business sense to be competitors but we’re also all dealing with people who are very complex and when you are in like a real life situation where it’s not someone who i’ll just take this pill and you’ll be fine then
there’s no room for ego there’s no room for anything other than whatever we have we have to combine it into this uh almost among them of what will actually work for you right and actually the the shamanic tradition that i practiced the pako kuna tradition approved they have this idea that if you have the best chocolate chip cookies it’s your job to make others have the best chocolate chip cookies it’s not a matter competition like if you’re like the best at something like why not share that with the world and let everybody else become better and that they look at that as really like kind of a duty of if you’re if you’re the best at what you do
right there was a netflix documentary i watched once and of course the disclaimer here is that it’s a netflix documentary like it could say that shoes are bad and at the end of it you’re just gonna think you know what i’m never gonna wear shoes again they’re right so that’s the the whole way these documentaries work but i mentioned how the native americans had that concept of the owning with communal that no one really owned the land they couldn’t even understand the concept of how could you say that this land is yours right there is something to that right and there’s even like a step beyond that they believe or in my tradition we believe we are the earth we’re made from the earth and in a sense we are one even though we’re separate and so like who are you fighting against who are you competing with and that’s words
i love that phrase like the kingdom of media the kingdom we where we’re really coming together and collaborating and with what’s going on in the world today right we are choosing as a species like where do we stand and who do we choose to be and we have to work together in order to kind of shift where the world has been going yeah and i think it’s interesting too so in christianity there’s often these two dueling opinions oh in case your viewers haven’t noticed hank comes from a shamanic background and just a born-again christian and you know we hang out and talk about things and sometimes we don’t agree with each other um but what these sort of conversations do is they really force people to think like well what do i believe and why
which is very awkward for a lot of people right but that’s where the we have this idea that the gold is in the differences and when the spanish came in and conquered peru they were looking at like these little stones that that they have and they were like oh these are these are like our apoos or these are like our chakras and they’re like no your chakras are chakra are now zanawi they had a different system but it’s like you don’t want to relate away what you think you know because it’s a parallel you want to look at really what’s the difference here and what could i take away and learn for myself
right because uh before i went off on my tangent which i’ll continue to do for the next 20 minutes oh it’s one non uncon it’s a one continuous tangent so it’s all good right right otherwise we would have had to like you know come up with a script or something something ridiculous but so there’s the idea in christiano of like almost a conquest type of thing that let the uh that we need to capture the world for jesus i mean honestly probably what they use in peru when they they they actually handed the inca a bible and said here’s our god and he held it up to his ear and said and threw it on the floor and said what good is a god that doesn’t talk and that’s when they used that as blasphemy and they came in and took over wow so yeah so that’s one of the ways of like how can we take over and but then there’s another concept of where in the lord’s parents says you know that kingdom come that will be done on earth as as it is in heaven worth more heaven coming to earth and that’s more of the instead of hoping to be raptured or rescued or viewing every interaction as hostile it is how do we make this life uh look and approach more of like what we expect in heaven because the one approach is look the earth is cursed and we must prevail and we must work hard
it’s something that you said in our last interview because i was listening it to again this morning of the idea of ease that you can work hard but the feeling of it the the hard work is still a life of ease where things are coming easily where you’re not uh striving or pushing against a brick wall and that’s how it is that instead of this uh trying to go automatically to conflict it is the idea of instead no we are trying to live an abundant life one that not necessarily mimics heaven but one where we’re bringing those values closer to earth well there’s a bible quote i love the kingdom of heaven lies within and if that is true then what if it’s just our allowance of allowing that to show up in our life and that’s where the real ease comes is from getting away from how we were taught to be in the world because our parents taught us you have to work hard you have to study hard but what if you could work joyfully and study joyfully and then everything happens with ease but we’re kind of conditioned by society and things for life to be a certain way but what if when we start waking up and realizing we do have this still small voice within things can go a lot differently for us and and
i do want to talk a lot about expectations uh a lot of the patients that i see with a debilitating mental health problems some of it is from this expectation that i must be all these things and the sheer weight of like wait i can’t compete i i can’t become everything that i was supposed to be um but at the same time how do we embrace that idea but not get into mimicry meaning uh and this is whether it’s christianity or eastern religions this is kind of everywhere but the idea of like not fake it till you make it because we’ve talked before about how that works out in many cases but almost uh a oprah type spirituality that really isn’t anything like where you just take jesse enough of the smorgasbord of spirituality where you almost have something but it’s it it only works until something bad happens to you i think the real key is don’t take anything at face value everything that you come across start to question like what do i really know about this what do i really need what do i really feel about this who do i choose to be regarding this instead of reacting we’re starting to choose responses and that’s where we’re just showing up more consciously in everything that we do and not taking anything at face value because that’s how we have so many religions nowadays because somebody heard something and then they instead of going into question they went into well i got it differently so therefore you must be wrong and then here we are with everybody fighting against each other right
oh absolutely and especially i come from a pentecostal tradition so once you add the idea of a personal prophecy to something which by its nature is esoteric and open to interpretation i mean it almost becomes like a science fiction off of like well if i heard it and then it becomes it is like time travel where you change the time but does that change the future so you can get really spun into this world of like let me make this happen instead of finding that good balance between uh the one example i used to use was uh something in the in a lot of christian circles especially when i was younger there’s the idea that god will find a mate for you so i had this mental image of uh somebody in their basement well more specifically their mom’s basement just eating cheetos waiting for prince charming or princess charmander just to materialize and again it’s a balance because you also don’t want to be the opposite where you’re trying so hard to find the best person and you’ll just have no interest in anyone who is up to your high standards that you self become this judgmental person who you know is not someone compatible with a long lasting intimate relationship right
i always think it’s more about a declaration of what you’re choosing to the universe and i give the analogy of a robot like once you say universe i would like to have my perfect mate or whatever the universe starts rowing it only knows yes but you have to do your part too and if you don’t row then you end up just going in a circle so it’s about that good orderly direction my acronym for god because if you remember i’m an acronym nerd you are yeah but it’s like the good order direction to start declaring your will to the universe and then taking a vested role in the co-creation of that with you know with the universe itself sure so what do we do when we don’t get our will because in american culture that’s that’s almost an obscene thing to say like are you allowed to say that on the show this is community tv get out of here nick and hey but it’s so against everything americans believe that like sometimes like you’re not good enough you can’t do this thing you’re gonna have to do something else i would say that if you’re really pure in your conviction and it’s a true declaration of well the universe only knows yes if it’s there’s a nail down to walsh is one of my favorite authors he wrote this book conversations with god and one of his workshops he gave this example this guy reading the bible and reading that part about if you had faith so much as a mustard seed you can move mountains and this guy goes out because he was like the head deacon at his church and he’s like i can move this mountain he’s like he tries for days just staring at this mound just mountain move you know and then at the end he goes just as i thought so we have like one level belief where we we think something’s possible but then we also have this place where we know and if you’re coming from the place of knowing i believe the universe only knows yes but we are full filled with self-doubt and we have to go on our own journey to kind of heal that first okay that makes more sense i get it and
i think too so there’s a book about how a lot of those cliches like one is god closes a door but it always opens a window as an example and it’s very comforting at first until you have like an actual devastating loss that you can’t use bible verses like all things work together for good to those who love god to those who are called according to purpose because like if you’re going to be looking at the truth as you’ve mentioned if you see things that say are you like nope this is still a terrible thing that happened and that’s all there is to it so but a lot of times it is more of an understanding that there’s not this malevolent force of god trying to teach us things through terrible heartache that sometimes bad things happen and then we do what we can with them and maybe i’m a little bit jaded from my work you know in healthcare where you know two uh two families are praying fervently for you know they’re told to get better and one does and one doesn’t and i think when we’re younger uh going back to what we’re supposed to talk about expectations like there’s this understanding like well if i do this if i don’t steal cookies if i listen to my mom and dad then everything’s gonna go great but and we have such a big cause and effect uh idea when we’re younger too that well this happened just because i didn’t do this right right
i’ve been sober 16 years and in the programs of aa they say that expectations are resentments waiting to happen and in shamanism when we do healing work we say we do the work with zero expectation that anything will happen yet we do it anyway if we can remove the expectation that a particular result is required anything that life throws at us is typically we can receive it a lot more easily and worth more grace right yeah and for my own spiritual journey that was a very hard but very important lesson that we are responsible for the starting work but there isn’t a situation where we’re responsible for the outcome just how responsible for how we respond or choose to be in relationship or actually i like the word creation ship to the outcome right absolutely um before i go off on another tangent will you uh so you already showed me the singing bowl earlier but i don’t want to forget because i know we’re going to keep going and talking about what just you know we’re just following the energy but for those of you who are seeing me for the first time i call myself the sonic shaman and part of that is because i blend uh the peruvian tradition of shamanism along with sound healing so i just brought a crystal ball just to kind of get a people a taste of what a crystal ball can sound like and what it could do and the nice thing about sound is it also is a bridging modality because some people when it comes down to the shamanic stuff they just don’t have space in their belief system to think about it but with sound there’s science behind it it causes a puffing response in the cells that releases nitric oxide that helps with inflammation and pain and then it even goes into balancing energy centers which is kind of bridging into more of the metaphysical thing but i love it because some of the husbands that come to me that are like this because their wife dragging them i can speak to the science behind the sound and people can kind of grasp it and if they can see some science behind that then maybe the shamanism is an easier step no that makes sense there’s certain hurts where if i play music in my clinic during ketamine infusion a lot of times the patients seem to be deeper into either the psychedelic experience or they get more results from it so and one of the shows that i was watching while you were the filming that occurred before mine they were talking about the organs and how the liver could become fatty there was this lady named barbara hero who did all this research with frequencies of a healthy organ and by using tuning forks or frequencies of healthy organs you can help the organs come into sympathetic residents of course i’m not a medical doctor i’m not claiming to treat diagnose cure or any disease or anything but like that just is another testament of how sound and frequency can have a huge benefit to the body right well and
i haven’t thought of this term before but there is a nervous system dissonance that i see with a lot of my patients and i think in the next five to ten years we’ll find that more and more an example is pots which is a disorder where your blood pressure isn’t stable and there’s so much more of it now that long COVID has become a thing so i think in our world the way that we don’t take care of ourselves more and more the body is reacting by the nervous system being completely out of whack
yeah there’s a guy named dr john boyeu he wrote the book human tuning who had a theory that you could tune the human body and he started doing experiments in anechoic chambers and they could actually tell the difference between the pitch of the nervous system before and after the use of certain tuning forks so just to go along when you talk about that nervous system dissonance the perfect fifth c256 and g384 specifically he found was really beneficial for the immune or not immune system for the nervous system
right well there are connections too so at my clinic i often do anesthesia blocks that target certain nerve ganglions and it’s a way to kind of get your nervous system your sympathetic and your parasympathetic nervous system to align and it’s just there’s new research showing that you can actually get a pneumogenic pneumonia where your mind gives you pneumonia because your nervous system and your immune system are interconnected in ways that scientists never before knew because i think it was only a few years ago that they found out you have lymph nodes in your brain you think after hundreds of years of medical students kind of categorize that they would have noticed hey look there’s there’s lymph in the brain as wel
l imagine what we’re going to know tomorrow that we never dreamed that was possible no but that’s a really great point and it’s really like i think that’s where a lot of the healing work starts too is give the benefit of the doubt that maybe you don’t have to know something in order to treat something or in order to have a healing sometimes the magic is in the mystery right and but if we if we follow the traditional mind thought that it has to be proven then we’re cutting ourselves off from all these possibilities
right and in my practice that’s what i tell patients too you seem even more blunt i’m like look i think you’ve got enough money for diagnosis or treatment which one would you feel like having like a name to what you have or actually getting better um and there in we might feel that there are some limits to that like we want a general idea but there comes a certain point where it’s like okay this is gonna be five more specialists and a lot of your insurance dollars to get exactly to this or we could start in treating let’s say with a ketamine infusion that’ll help break down is this a structural issue is this your nervous system and as we treat we get more and more ideas and it’s a little bit different from like dr Krywiak functional medicine where it is a lot of let’s test and find out exactly what’s going it depends on the patient like in my practice usually i see patients after they’ve tried five or six different things see that’s the thing i love about dr k though she we have to probably do a show with her so people have like know who we’re talking about yeah but she’s i did do a zoom show with her because i think this place closed down during COVID
so there’s a lot of like can you hear me am i on you right but she’s a functional medicine doctor and she has this amazing bio i forget what it’s called now but it like hooks this machine lock this up and tells you all this information but at the same time she has that the md behind her where she’s also able to look at you know prescribe things if she needs to order blood tests and it’s a really good balance and her and i work great together in that when i run into something i send people to her and vice versa because we just have such different skill sets as do you like one it’s really uh really a team type of a feeling where you know you get get what you need here and then there’s this other person that has this other piece to the puzzle and really start putting together like a program that is holistic that’s going to treat the body the being and beyond right and a lot of it goes into the discarding of the ego meaning that especially in anesthesia if i know my skill set i can do wonderful work because i can say nope i’m not capable of this or this is risky for the patient or this is the best option and then we can go from there but once you’re like well i think i can do this or i’m not you know like well this isn’t really my specialty but i don’t want to lose this patient that’s when i feel you get into trouble right and ego of course i have an acronym for that too oh good i was hoping you would yeah edging got out that’s when we’re like not allowing ourselves to tap into that kingdom of heaven within or to that that source consciousness that we have within us and are trying to be the individual instead of really acknowledging that we’re part of a whole right and how because
i originally plan to talk more about like how you came from addiction but we’ve only got like a couple minutes left so we can do another show on that but so instead uh what you’re saying about ego how do we get that out of spiritual practice because uh often my own concern with spirituality is that if we make it completely about ourselves and how we can almost bio biohack our ways into becoming a more enlightened being often we kind of leave other people in the dust or we become so self-focused that we miss out well
i think it’s more the energy of being self-first as opposed to selfish so think of it like the airplane when the mass comes down you take care of yourself first and then you’re more able to help others and that’s the energy and the ego i think it’s a bad rap we blame a lot of things in the ego but i feel that the ego is more like a prism it is what allows us to have the contextual experience here but it’s not necessarily like dictating but we have to learn to use it for the purpose of which it was intended to have an experience as an individual when we’re really all one right so that doesn’t make sense because we also know that there’s a bible verse about the heart being deceitfully wicked and what it means is many times we look humble but it’s our own manifestation of the ego like there’s plenty of people i know who really serve and it seems to be a very unselfish thing but that’s how they gratify themselves like oh look at me i really have to do this this whole place would fall apart if i wasn’t doing this and it’s not it’s a lot more subtle than the whole like let me inflate myself so everyone sees how special i am well if we think if we all embrace the concept of namaste may the god of me greet the god in thee for the highest good then we can be self-first but not in a way that imposes in somebody else’s free will or their bubble or what they’re choosing for themselves there is a balance point but there are people who get caught up with being selfish instead of self-first and that’s where we get people doing things at the expense of others and that’s there’s a fine line with that well maybe a little bit of it is uh knowing a polite and a true way to tell each other off because i i feel that you know generations past someone’s kids are acting up and the adult’s like hey cut that out now it’s a big deal to do that and it’s hard to uh find that life takes offense to everything right one of my favorite quotes from neil donald walsh is speak your truth but soothe your words with peace we are able to speak our truth but we’re we feel that the only way we can be heard is by acting out sometimes and it’s just a you know a reality check that no you don’t have to act the way you were taught you can be sovereign with who you are and be able to convey convey so maybe the lesson there too is like uh speak your truth and if people aren’t listening or you feel like oh i really have to be outlanders to get the likes or to get noticed or for them to pay attention it’s like well you’ve already said your thing like just move on right you don’t need to you know bring fireworks with you and every time you speak there’s a roman candle launching or something to that effect whatever the digital version of that one right yeah because you’re really saying it for you you said your truth and what the problem is when you don’t speak your truth that’s when sometimes you internalize things and you start to have perhaps health consequences because you’re not allowing yourself to speak what you need to say right
no that’s i see a lot at my clinic a lot of times i’m like look i know you came here for treatment for chronic pain but if we just release a little bit of this anxiety whether it’s from counseling or ketamine infusion like the pain itself which six pain management practices haven’t been able to uh do anything with will actually dissipate so if you can just kind of let yourself speak or let whatever’s inside of you that is poisoning you like come on it doesn’t have to be just cracked open and all in one fell swoop but a lot of times unless we go to those dark places in ourselves we have no hope of getting better you know we could probably do a whole show just on shadow work and shadow integration because i find that’s probably the biggest thing where i find people really need to with the work we do they have to go inward and really start looking at those things there is a study of inmates where it asks like do you feel you’re more moral than average or less moral than average and they found out nope even people serving 20 years in jail think well compared to the rest of humanity i’m probably a little bit above average like we all think like there’s something innate in us that makes us just slightly above the curve well we’re all uniquely different for sure so maybe that’s part of the reason we think that way but really what matters is like
who do i choose to be and this is me that i’m proud of and like maybe not compared to everybody and really the question is is whatever i’m choosing serving me or not and really getting in touch with who you really are not who you were taught to be or not to be right
yeah and that does go back to expectations that you know was i taught to be a a good boy just so i can make life more tolerable for those around me or at the same time am i instead saying to people that well you know you’ve got to accept me at my worst to see me at my best which really means i’m not going to be considerate in many cases well this has been a great talk so for me ascendhealthcenter.com you can also call us 330-754 4844 we do a lot with anxiety depression chronic pain issues we don’t use any opioids or and we do use psychiatric meds when necessary but we do have a lot of options for you and then if people want to contact you
yep it’s my name it’s hank settler.com and then on there i have links to all my youtubes and things where i have all kinds of content and of course i see people locally out of the cleveland area as well as online and you’ve got your tick tock too and i got my tick tock oh i’ve been doing tick tick-tock’s like crazy i’m the sonic shaman on tick-tock and that is also my youtube channel but i’ve been having a ton of fun that’s probably the most fun i’ve had just making these little one-minute videos
that’s great well thanks for joining us today everyone you are watching wctv wadsworth community television