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EMP.Live (Entrepreneurship, Mental Health, Psychedelics) is a monthly meeting for founders, entrepreneurs, and executives to show up, be seen, and have an opportunity to openly discuss the challenges of entrepreneurship and mental health. Running a company – especially in uncertain times – is one of the most emotionally challenging things you can do. EMP.Live is a space where it’s ok for business leaders to share what’s going on inside their heads and their hearts and explore ways to live a life with more peace, joy, and freedom.

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Starting a company with someone is a lot like getting married. The problem is the divorce can be more painful. Over the years, co-founding teams often struggle with differences of opinion, personality quirks, or straight up disagreements and they continue sweeping all that under the rug till it's impossible to ignore. A co-founder intensive is a guided process that includes both 1:1 and team work to understand the current pain points, address the elephants in the room, and find the best path forward.

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The Micro package includes one preparation session and one integration session. During preparation, we will tap into your current experience and work together to find discernment, clarity, and focus. Together we will create a simple yet powerful intention for your upcoming journey. Within the integration session (ideally one week after your journey) we will work together to make sense of your experience and develop an integration and activation plan to use over the next 90 days.

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Micro

The Micro package includes one preparation session and one integration session. During preparation, we will tap into your current experience and work together to find discernment, clarity, and focus. Together we will create a simple yet powerful intention for your upcoming journey. Within the integration session (ideally one week after your journey) we will work together to make sense of your experience and develop an integration and activation plan to use over the next 90 days.

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Micro

The Micro package includes one preparation session and one integration session. During preparation, we will tap into your current experience and work together to find discernment, clarity, and focus. Together we will create a simple yet powerful intention for your upcoming journey. Within the integration session (ideally one week after your journey) we will work together to make sense of your experience and develop an integration and activation plan to use over the next 90 days.

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Perfect for companies who want to have a mission driven approach to growth. Whether you’ve recently hired a large number of employees, taken on funding, or have pivoted or developed a new product, this guided workshop focuses and aligns each of your departments and leadership team around mantra, mission, vision, values, measurement and obstacles.

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A successful exit with Ciprian Borodescu

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Bias is an irrational assumption or belief that warps your ability to make a decision based on facts and evidence. This often happens when leaders are too close to a problem – or are part of the cause. A guided innovation workshop helps leadership teams peel back the veil of their bias, uncover new truths, empower team members to discover new solutions through honesty, accountability and innovation.

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Einstein stated, “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.” Without fresh eyes to help open you to new possibilities, you’re leaving opportunities on the table. This guided workshop looks cross-departmentally to uncover hidden opportunities and will help develop a short and long-term plan for growth; complete with a prioritized list of tactics, competitive analysis, budget recommendations, and project plan.

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The Self-Care for Entrepreneurs workshop is a highly interactive experience great for teams, founders, entrepreneurs and accelerators to help better understand how to make self-care a part of the entrepreneur journey. 

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A Practical Guide to Psychedelics and Sobriety

A Practical Guide to Psychedelics and Sobriety

by Gv Freeman | Feb 15, 2023 | Mental Health, Psychedelics, Spirituality

Experience from my 15 years in program. Over the past ten years, psychedelics have come front and center for millions worldwide. Over the past 24 months, if you haven’t seen a documentary or read an article on the topic, you may be living in a cave. Whether...

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    @justgeevs

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    We've all been hurt. Puberty, parents, relationshi We've all been hurt. Puberty, parents, relationships, work...nobody makes it out alive. Nobody! 

In the hard times, we learn to use all sorts of methods to protect ourselves. 

Anger is my go-to method of protection. Not the physical kind but rather laser-like words designed to nick and mame my perceived predators. 

"Hey a55hole, it's time for you to metaphorically take a giant step back." 🤬

This is all learned conditioning from the challenging parts of my life. Parts where control was taken from me.

Because I wasn't able to physically overtake my foes, words became my weapons. Close behind are achievement, wits, intellect and perfectionism.

Today, my daily practice includes spending time with my defensive parts. Before I grab my phone or get out of bed in the morning I place a hand on my heart and one on my chest and talk to that young part to remind him there's nothing here to hurt me anymore. 

On the good days he agrees and we go about our day with relative ease. Sometimes he forgets and I say or write something I shouldn't. 

It's been a long process to get to this point and I've still got a long way to go but I wouldn't change a single step. 

It's taken a lot of work to soften the hard candy shell I've used for so long to protect my heart. Today, I remind myself it's ok to relax. That's what my ribs are for.

As Ram Dass frequently reminds me, "All suffering is grace." In more secular terms, every challenging experience is an opportunity to learn.

If you think you're ready to put your shield down for a while, shoot me a message. You'll smile more. You'll work less yet achieve more. And you'll experience more peace, joy, and freedom in your life. 

As Stephen Still reminds us, "Love the one you're with."
    One of the most profound qualities of psychedelics One of the most profound qualities of psychedelics is their ability  to help us see through the illusion.

But once we've peeked behind the veil we have a choice. Are we willing to still show up in our human form or will we check out and live in a state of bypass?

I frequently hear the "it's all just a dream" remark within many spiritual and psychedelic communities. It's sort of like a statement politicians give when they don't want to answer the question they were just asked.

In reality, we're living less in an illusion or a dream and more in a reality that's relative in nature.

The universe operates three concurrent realities: absolute, relative, and illusory.

The dream metaphor implies that the absolute is the only one that exists but that's not true. Our relative relative is still just as real...it's just relatively real. Our dream world is what makes up our illusory reality. 

A higher realm of reality impacts lower forms but It doesn't work in reverse.

The only individuals I'm aware of who consistently operate in absolute reality are fully enlightened beings. I have never met one and have no quantifiable data to support this belief but my guess is there may be less than 10 of those currently walking the planet.

If "it's all just an illusion" is something you frequently hear without any additional context, you may want to consider tiptoeing your way back into grounded community and relative reality.

The illusion of that statement crumbles quickly when the tax man calls.

The world is a curriculum for the soul. You were given this body for a reason.  Are you willing to show up for class?
    I like to write permission slips for myself when I I like to write permission slips for myself when I'm doing something new or hard. 

This is one of my favorite permission slips to write. 

Next time you'd like to kick someone in the shins, see if you can't try this instead.
    A common question I get is, "How long should I tak A common question I get is, "How long should I take between psychedelic journeys?"

Unfortunately, there is no definitive answer.

Similar to each individual having their own path to walk, each individual also needs to work with the substances in the way that best aligns with their healing.

If you are going to use #psychedelics for healing, you need to begin building a relationship and the discernment to make these decisions for yourself.

Many retreats offer 3 journeys, others 5, others just one. If that's what's calling to you, awesome. Go gently into that good night. 🌌

I leave for Peru next week and will serve and sit for three nights of wachuma and three nights of aya over the course of three weeks. In a decade of working with sacred medicine, that will be the most sits I've done in that short of time period. 

Once it's done, I won't likely sit with a full journey for months.

Why? Because I need time to integrate. 

If I'm simply coming back to the medicine time and time again, my system has no ability to integrate the learnings from the last journey.

This is one of the big differences I see between the ceremonial and experiential use of psychedelics.

Experiential users say they are using the medicine for healing but often they're just showing up to watch the movie appearing on the back of their eyelids.

But when I treat this work as a healing path, I must take the time necessary to incorporate my new awareness and experiences into my life. If I'm not integrating my experience, I'm really just getting high.

So before you ask your guide whether or not you should sit next weekend, ask yourself if you feel complete from your last experience.

If not, consider building in a little more space.

And for the record, if getting high is your intention, I fully support you. 💓
    Do you trust the medicine is your ally? This ques Do you trust the medicine is your ally?

This question and a genuine affirmative somatic response tend to be one of the greatest positive indicators I've experienced in my work with psychedelics.

I remember serving a group ceremony where two newcomers both took 3g of the same mushrooms. 

Person 1 had a non-experience...like zero (no, zero meds)
Person 2 had a mystical experience beyond their imagination.

We don't entirely know why this happens but I'm  confident that low openness and high neuroticism are indicators. 

In ley terms, control-freaks may experience much more variable results with psychedelics until they can loosen their hard outer shells.

But while that's happening, I've always found the medicine never gives me any more than I can handle.

This goes for both joy and pain. 

That person who had a non-experience just wasn't ready to have an experience. A mystical experience for them may have been destabilizing. 

I tend to advise clients in this state to work with a somatic coach or therapist so they can start feeling their feelings. Another beautiful option is psycho-drama. 

No more cognitive processing for you Mr. & Mrs. Smarty-pants! 

The more work we do, the deeper we go but it has to come step-by-step. Trying to skip parts of the journey just means we have to retrace our steps once we've realized we've been bypassing.

Dropping into the experience and surrendering to whatever comes up becomes so much easier when you can truly trust the medicine.

Trusting that the Universe will never give you any more than you can handle is a blessing if you can find it.

And if you can't find it, then maybe it's not time for that dose, that medicine, or that currendero. 🤔🧐
    I am often asked how someone should choose a #psyc I am often asked how someone should choose a #psychedelic #facilitator.

 If you think about David Hawkin's map of consciousness, see if you can gauge where you most often reside.

Now comes the hard part because you have to spend enough time with your potential facilitator to determine where they reside on the scale. 

This gets even harder when your facilitator is skilled enough to dress, act, and say things that would imply they are higher on the scale than they really are. This is basically an embodied representation of spiritual bypass.

While external factors can offer clues, determining where you or someone else is at in the scale is a subtle process. It's quite literally an internal vibration where your nervous system begins to sense their nervous system. You may not even be able to explain it with words.

Work with someone who has something you want.

Also pay attention to how they live their life. An individual's outside's are a representation of their insides. If your facilitator seems personally, professionally, or financially unstable there's a chance this is a manifestation of internal instability.

The last person you want to guide you through a deep inner journey is someone who is internally  unstable.

And if you're new on your path you may not have a good sense of where you're at or how to gauge this in another person. In these situations, I would offer you may not be the best person to *find* your facilitator. Instead, find someone you trust to make a referral.

Once you've found a prospect, you still have to spend enough time with them to make sure they are the right person for you to work with at this time.

We have three brains in our body for a reason. Your head, heart, and gut should all be in agreement to move forward. 

If one brain says no, listen and evaluate the signs and your options.

Trust me, walking out on a $500 deposit is far less expensive than the money you'll spend fixing the damage caused by a bad facilitator.

    Having an idea is the easy part.

    I can help with the rest.

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    Copyright 2022 – Pure Imagination, LLC – All Rights Reserved.

    DISCLAIMER: Pure Imagination, LLC and Gv Freeman do not provide psychoactive or controlled substances, nor are we licensed therapists, counselors, or medical professionals. We do not endorse or encourage the use of psychedelics or any other illegal substances outside of a lawful, regulated context. Substances written about or discussed may be illegal in your jurisdiction except under very specific circumstances, such as sanctioned medical studies. Any information received through our offerings or services should be considered for educational purposes only and not be misconstrued as medical or legal advice.