Welcome to the Yoga Talk Show, your one-stop destination for all things yoga, health and wellness. So hello and welcome, everyone. This is Lucas Rockwood, and I’m here today with Nick Polizzi, who is the creator of Sacred Science and he was also heavily involved with Simply Raw, two films that most of you are probably very familiar with. And if you’re not familiar with them, you’ll be familiar with them very soon.

I met Nick about a year ago in New York city at a conference, and it’s really interesting. There’s kind of frontline people and then behind the scenes people, and it’s interesting because the behind the scenes people do a lot of the heavy lifting and a lot of the conceptual work and so it was really interesting and exciting for me to meet Nick, who was involved in the film Simply Raw, which already had a huge impact on me and my life and on a lot of our listeners’ lives as well.

In any case, Nick’s going to be talking to us today about his wild adventures in alternative health, raw food, herbal medicine and medicinal healing. So thanks for joining us, Nick.

Oh, it’s a pleasure to be here.

So as we’re having this chat, you’re right in the middle of a big launch of Sacred Silence, which is a film that you shared with me about a year ago. And for people who are listening who have never heard of anything kind of off the wall, medicine man, healers, (01:23) give us an overview of what that whole project was all about.

So just going back to Simply Raw, I’ve been involved in a couple films before The Sacred Silence, and both of them were about alternative healing strategies. One is the Tapping Solution that’s all about meridian points and tapping on different spots on your upper torso while going through traumatic events from your past and releasing pain that way, which is more of a Chinese medicine style.

Then Simply Raw came along, and that was more of a nutrition-based, super food-based film. As we made those movies, while we were interviewing the different experts that you saw in each of those, (02:05) it felt like a lot of them, when we asked them about the origins of their teaching, were turning to more indigenous practices, in particular Shamanism.

So we kind of took note of it, but when we were making those films you kind of keep your eye on the ball and keep creating the film that you’re making. But I was really curious about Shamanism by the time I had finished making those two films, or being involved in those two films. So once those films were out, the next project for me was, hey let’s at least take a look at Shamanism, figure out what it’s all about.

And we sort of scoured the globe for the most Shamanic-rich cultures, and the Amazon has one of the most, if not the most, dense percentage of Shamans per capita on the planet. So we went down to the jungle, started doing some research. Not only is there a really thriving culture of Shamanism, medicine man, I’m not sure if your viewers are familiar with this idea of the indigenous healer. (03:14) The Shaman is somebody who plays the role of both the priest, the healer and the wisdom keeper in any given tribe.

If you look into different parts of the world, most indigenous cultures have a Shamanic-type structure, where there isn’t really a government, there isn’t really a — what interested us most about the Amazon was that not only does it have a very rich lineage of healing in a lot of the remote cultures that live within the jungle, (03:50) but the jungle itself is home to over 44,000 species of plants, less than 3% of which have been studied by modern medicine for their medicinal value.

So we thought to ourselves, okay so on one hand we have what we’re looking for. There are amazing medicine men, medicine women in this culture that are doing incredible work, but on top of that they have the benefit of a pharmacopeia of amazing healing plants that haven’t been studied by modern medicine yet. That’s what led us down to the jungle, and that’s what pretty much culminated in the film, The Sacred Science.

So you’re this guy and (04:25) what makes you want to make movies about energy healing, about raw food, about medicine men? Most independent filmmakers are making movies about two disturbed teenagers wandering across the Brooklyn Bridge and things like this. What prompted you to do this? Did you have a health crisis in your life? Is there a health crisis in somebody else’s life? Is it just something that’s always fascinated you?

I never really knew what it was until at one of the film festivals we were in, during the Q&A it just popped out and I realized that that was probably what it was. I realized what it was. (04:59) I was hit by lightening when I was 16, and it’s really interesting how we a lot of times forget or compartmentalize and disregard some of the significant things that have happened to us in our life as just being, ‘Oh, that can’t possibly be contributing to where I am now.’

But once I got hit by lightening, and it wasn’t some crazy, sacred thing where I was on top of a mountain and it just happened and it was this amazing, enlightening experience. I was playing basketball in my driveway and it was during a thunderstorm, and lightening came up as I was going up for a lay-up and hit my basketball hoop. I was after that, a much different person. It did something. I don’t know how woo-woo you want to get, but it definitely shifted something inside me, and there were a lot of episodes I had that were unexplainable. Nick Ortner, producer of The Tapping Solution, a good friend of mine, helped me through and was fascinated by. He had no way of understanding them, neither did I.

I didn’t need to be sold on holistic medicine. Let’s put it that way. I didn’t need to be sold on energy work. That was something I already had a dose of, probably too soon, without having any way of understanding what it was. But I probably was initiated into some sort of spiritual healing practice when I got hit by lightening when I was 16.

My career has somehow manifested in such a way that I get to make films about this stuff. So that’s the origin probably of how I started on this path, and then once I started making films about alternative medicine all the rest of my career kind of just filled in by itself and that’s where I am right now. (07:11) I’m on this path of trying to figure out how to legitimize a lot of these archaic, traditional healing methods that have been kind of discarded over the last 1,000 years. So I don’t know why I love this so much, but it’s kind of all I ever want to do. It’s really all I want to do is create films that explore new healing modalities. Sorry, that was a long answer.

No, no, it’s interesting. I think if the sky parts and strikes you down, I can imagine that would have a profound impact on everything thus forward. One thing that I’d like to ask you about, because you’ve gone down in the Amazon, you experienced some really freaky, alternative stuff. One thing that I find in the alternative world, and this is me speaking as somebody who’s guilty of this, as anybody else, but as soon as we get into the alternative world we immediately assume alternative is better. We throw away all the conventional stuff. So I’m just curious. You took some pretty ill people into the jungle and you took some people who would normally be on very, very conventional medicines to very alternative medicines. I’m wondering your totally biased opinion, how did you walk away from that? (08:26) Did you walk away thinking, hey this is the answer or this is an answer or how did your perception change in terms of finding a balance between allopathic medicine and traditional healing medicine?

I think I walked away with a feeling that might not be as interesting as I wish it was. I think my feeling was that some of these methods are extremely effective at treating certain illnesses. The neurological disorders, like Parkinson’s, incredible. (08:59) There are things going on in the jungle right now that are going to be probably heard about relatively soon, plants that are being discovered that it’s like night and day with what you’re seeing right now on the market for Parkinson’s and MS and things like that.

But other things, like cancer, one of our patients in the film had extreme results, beneficial results from cancer. A few of the other patients didn’t, and that was kind of how it was. And I think that’s probably why people look at our film as being reliable or trustworthy, is because we show you both. We’re showing you what does work, what doesn’t work.

But I think that my overarching feeling about these modalities is probably a little bit more boring now than it was before I went down there. I think I went down there with this idea that, wow this is all going to cure everybody. (0948) But I think that my feeling right now is that modern medicine and natural medicine are both very important, and modern medicine is extremely good at treating acute conditions but it’s terrible at treating chronic ones. I think that Amazonian medicine and indigenous medicine in general is really good at treating the chronic conditions.

So I think they both have a very substantial role to play. It’s just that one of them is dominating right now, and we need to sort of leave some breathing room for the natural medicines to come in. David Wolfe says it really well. He says 200 years ago, if Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall you wouldn’t be able to put him back together again. Now you can. But you also have ridiculous increases in chronic conditions, too, right now.

So I think that both of them are very valid, and I think our mission really is to just give voice to the natural medicines that have sort of been ignored or discarded, discredited over the last 200 years. So that’s how I feel about it. Just as a wrap up, the beautiful thing about the Amazonian traditions and other indigenous healing traditions, in Siberia and in Australia, is that they treat you from within, so that even the patients that didn’t get healing results in our film still email me now talking about how even though their body didn’t heal the way they wanted it to there were life-changing spiritual transformations that happened that they continue to feel the benefits from.

Yeah, I think there’s no question that the mind aspect in healing is just really coming to the forefront right now and it’s pretty undeniable to bring that into any kind of healing modality. When I was a teenager, I used to spend summers in the Sierras in California, working at about 10,000 feet with a string of burrows. One summer I was up there and I met this guy. He scared the pants off me, actually. He would spend the entire winter in the cabins that I would live in when I was up there. And spending a winter at 10,000 feet in the California Sierras is like spending a winter on the moon or Antarctica or something. Nothing should live. In May, there’s still snow everywhere.

He was this big, big, giant guy, nearly seven feet tall, didn’t have any meat left on his body. I kind of got his story, and he’d been coming there and he considered himself the caretaker of this cabin. Nobody had ever hired him, nobody ever knew he came but he’d been the winter caretaker for something like 25 years. He had really, really bad gear, so he would come in on cross-country skis, come in about 35 miles on cross country skis.

In any case, I thought this guy is going to know these plants. I was spending all this time on the land and I was fishing in the creeks and I was really trying — the truth is, there isn’t much. When you get that high, things really start to die. But I figured this guy’s going to know the land. It was interesting, he did. He knew every single thing you could eat, and again, there weren’t many. And he knew about the different kinds of fish and how the fish were originally brought in and they weren’t native and all these kind of things.

What was interesting to me, I think it kind of relates to what you were saying, is (13:27) a lot of times the biggest revelations are really pretty subtle. His big thing, his big take away from the Sierras was this willow bark. This willow bark, he discovered, was similar to aspirin, which was helpful in terms of pain from his walking around in bad shoes, but he also found that it had this anti-aphrodisiac property, which he thought, of course, a solitary male basically living like a monk in a hut. He thought this was going to be the next big thing. He thought if they just gave this to teenage boys, like the truancy and the delinquency rates were going to completely drop through the floor. But it was interesting and it was really, really subtle. He’d find a natural form of pain relief and a natural way to deal with what would normally drive a man from the forest, which is his libido.

Interesting stuff. (14:29) So I also know in the film, there was one gentleman who didn’t make it. Is that right?

Yes, that’s true.

That’s pretty heavy. How did that impact you? How did that impact the group? Were you prepared for that? How did that go down?

I was not prepared for that. (14:49) As much as we knew it was a possibility, obviously we took very sick patients down to the jungle, we were prepared for it in terms of on the ground with the right services and everything that somebody would need, but in terms of emotionally I wasn’t prepared for it. I’m an optimistic guy. Even though I throw myself into pretty intense situations, I always like to sort of expect the best result to happen. I wasn’t mentally or emotionally prepared for it, and it was a really intense experience.

The gentleman who died, he was suffering from neuroendocrine cancer, and he was one of my — I hate to say this, but he was one of my favorites of the patients. He and I bonded really well beforehand during our interview. We visited each patient in their home before we went down there, and got a read on who they really were and he was just such an incredible guy. And of all the people that you see in the film, he’s probably the guy, even though he’s got a serious health condition, he’s probably the guy you least expect to be the one that passes away.

In the beginning of the film, we tell everyone five people get real healing results, two people leave disappointed and one person doesn’t come back, period. So everyone knows that somebody’s going to pass away. Some people think what we mean by that is they’re going to stay down there and become a Shaman, but I think most people understand that there probably is going to be somebody that passes away. Most people don’t think it’s going to be this person.

In a really kind of tacky or inappropriate way, the fact that he passed away was incredible for the shaping of the movie, and I think that he’s the kind of guy who is probably humorously, from wherever he is now, looks at it as being the perfect addition to this project, because he was so about what we were doing and he was such a sweet soul and he knew, later on after talking to his family, his loved ones, they had all said goodbye to him before he even came down because his condition had worsened since we had seen him during the interview. So he knew, his family knew that he was going to pass away. He just didn’t let us in on it, so it was kind of a surprise.

So yeah, he’s an awesome guy and it’s really more sad for me, not from the project’s perspective but because I just wanted to spend — I wanted to be friends with him. He and I had plans to hang out afterwards. But from the perspective of the film, I think it really gave us the opportunity to talk about our society, conventional Western society’s relationship with life and death, and that was a gift because a lot of what the healers in the jungle talk about is this dying process. It’s this fear of the unknown. (17:50) The dying experience, when you boil it down to its essence, really comes down to the fear of the unknown, which is a fear that we experience every single day. It’s just that when you die you really have no way of peaking around the corner and seeing where you’re doing.

So Gary’s passing gave us the opportunity to really go into that, because it shocks the audience. When you see somebody pass away in a documentary that you’re attached to, in real time, it brings up a lot of issues. So it gave us the perfect opening for one of the medicine men, named Habin, to talk about life and death and all the misconceptions and all the crazy storylines and how desperately we avoid even thinking about it here in the West and how alive and part of the healing culture it is down in the Amazon. Something that is looked at as being a gift, and it’s not nearly as feared as it is here. So it was a really mixed bag, but like everything that’s happened with this film, it really turned out to be perfect.

(18:56) So I guess the million-dollar question is if you had to do it all over again, would you cast him? Would you bring him down again? Do you think you made the right choice?

Yes, I do, 100%, 100%. Listen, if I had reason to believe that his passing could have been avoided by him staying up here or having some other course of treatment, then I would obviously not have brought him down. But this man had tried everything, and he was paying like, gosh, I’m trying to remember what the figure is, I don’t want to misquote him because he says this in the film, but I think he says he was paying $2,000 or $3,000 a month for a shot that he was getting to sort of keep the cancer at bay a little bit, but it was still failing. And he had no money. He had no ability to afford it. It was not something that was covered by his healthcare. And he said he was sick of it and it made him feel terrible and he was in pain every day, and this was his last and final option. (19:51) So 100%, I would have brought him down, I think it was a perfect way for him to make his transition.

Interesting. (20:02) Nick, before we wrap up here, tell people about what you’re working on next, how they can get a hold of you and if they want to see what you’re up to and how they can connect with your films.

Sure. First of all, we have a free screening going on right now. It ends tomorrow, Thursday, October 17th. So if you want to watch Sacred Science for free, just come visit us, TheSacredScience.com/screening and you’ll get the information you need to register and we’ll send you all the details you need to tune in not only to the film but also to a bunch of really awesome guest speakers that we have presenting. Most of them have already presented their material, but we have links to all those things that will be sent to you via email. So again, TheSacredScience.com/screening and you can watch the film for free.

In terms of what we’re working on next, this film has really opened up a lot of doors. The first two films were great, in terms of giving us great experience on how to actually go about making film, but this one has been in a ton of film festivals and we’ve had a lot of opportunities surface since it’s been released. It’s kind of a tough decision for us. (21:13) We want to either go further into Shamanism itself or start making a film or two about some of the lessons we’ve learned that have come up from the ceremonies we sat in, things that we’ve noticed about society that are really quirky and conspicuous that we’d like to point our cameras at.

(21:38) One of our next films is most likely going to take us to the Siberian Steppes and into some remote regions of China and Mongolia, to sort of track down the earliest and potentially the most Shamanic traditions there are on the planet. (21:57) One of our other films are going to be addressing an institution that has existed for thousands and thousands of year and that may or may not be serving us. So there’s two different films. We’ll keep you posted.

If you join us for the Sacred Science free screening, you’ll get all kinds of updates about future films as well.

Sounds great, Nick. Thanks for all the information. Speaking of your new films, one thing that resonates with me is everywhere I go I feel like people are desperate for rites of passage and ceremonies, and I think a lot of the interest in ayurvedic medicine, in medicinal healers, in Shamanism, I think a lot of it comes back to that. So many people have lost their faith in whatever it is, so it’s interesting stuff. I’m excited to see what comes next.

Again, thanks so much for joining us. (22:49) Everybody listening, check out SacredScience.com, and thanks, Nick, and we’ll talk to you real soon.