In this episode, host James Maskell sits down with holistic psychiatrist Dr. Ellen Vora to discuss her new book, Season of the Witch: The Psychiatrist’s Case for Magic.
Dr. Vora’s first book, The Anatomy of Anxiety, directly translated her functional medicine approach to mental health. This book came from a deeper, more spiritual inquiry. She describes it as part grief memoir, part cultural commentary, and still a prescriptive functional medicine book. Her central argument is that many of us learned to perform a left-brained, rational type of intelligence while suppressing our mystical, intuitive side. That adaptation opened doors for her through medical school, residency, and a research fellowship. Now she believes it’s time to integrate the parts we disavowed.
Dr. Vora shares how she grew up in a secular environment where science was worshipped and skepticism was a virtue. When her mother died suddenly, the view that death is random and final no longer held. She chose to open to the possibility that her mother’s spirit continues, and signs and synchronicities followed. Eleven years later, she describes an ongoing connection with her mother. She also cites Dr. Lisa Miller’s research at Columbia showing that a sense of something larger protects against depression and suicidal ideation.
Maskell and Dr. Vora explore intuition as “the witch’s compass” and the nuanced role of wearables in self-awareness. They also discuss her practices of embodiment and presence, which she grounds in integrity and sovereignty. The conversation closes on community and the collective: leaving the world better than we found it, finding our unique contribution, and learning about love as part of the evolution of consciousness.
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About the Guest:
Dr. Ellen Vora is a holistic psychiatrist who takes a functional medicine approach to mental health. She is the author of The Anatomy of Anxiety and Season of the Witch: The Psychiatrist’s Case for Magic, which explores intuition, spirituality, grief, and the cultural conditioning that leads us to suppress our intuitive selves. Trained in conventional medicine, Dr. Vora integrates root-cause care with embodiment, presence, and spiritual inquiry to help patients heal.
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About the Host:
James Maskell is a healthcare entrepreneur and founder of The Evolution of Medicine. For over 20 years, he has worked to scale functional medicine through community-driven models, group visits, and practitioner infrastructure. His work focuses on moving medicine upstream – toward prevention, lifestyle intervention, and systems-based care.
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Transcript:
The reason I- I’m a psychiatrist who wants to make a case for magic is that I see not only how that’s helped my resilience and helped my feeling guided, feeling, knowing how to find alignment with what contribution I’m here to make, but I’ve also witnessed in my practice how it helps my patients. And it’s not to say I’m in practice proselytizing a certain belief system.
That’s not what it is at all. But I recognize that my field is squeamish about these topics, and I was doing my patients a disservice by not creating space to contemplate the bigger questions of existence, and it’s just permission to live those questions, and then we land wherever we land. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
This week, we are interviewing Dr. Ellen Vora. She is a holistic psychiatrist. She’s been in practice for more than a decade. We were friends, uh, back at the beginning of the Functional Forum and continue to be. Her last book, The Anatomy of Anxiety, was a big bestseller, and now she has a new book called The Season of the Witch: A Psychiatrist’s Case for Magic.
And I just thought that this would be a important topic for us to discuss. Um, we are in the season before Integrative Medicine for Mental Health conference that’s coming up in, uh, just a few weeks. I’ll be there. Um, I hope that if you’re interested in integrative medicine, you’re interested in mental health, it’s the place to be.
Hope you can join us. Um, without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Ellen Vora. Enjoy. So a warm welcome to the Evolution of Medicine podcast, Dr. Ellen Vora. Welcome, Ellen. Thank you, James. It’s good to be here. It’s great to be here. It’s great to be here with you, and it’s great to be here on this topic.
I think that I might have been the first person ever to reach out to you about an interview for this book when you announced it, like, a year ago once on social media, ’cause I was like, “This is my jam.” I think that’s correct, yes, and thank you for that. Look, before we get into it, I guess I just want to acknowledge, you know, we became friends in New York back when the Functional Forum started.
It’s a long time ago. People have taken a lot of routes, you know? Um, I think Robin Berzin introduced us. You see the journey that she’s gone on. And I guess I just want to acknowledge as a witness and, you know, co-collaborator in the journey that you’ve gone on, it’s a unique journey. But, you know, from the practice and really learning how to be a holistic psychiatrist and, you know, stepping forth in that area, then your last book, The Anatomy of Anxiety, I think, you know, from, from my perspective was, um, a really– made a powerful influence because it was showing people that there’s more to do with the physiology of anxiety than just something happening in your head.
And my judgment with this book is you’re sort of going a level deeper again. And, um, I just wanna acknowledge the journey because I’ve been here as a witness to it, and it’s wonderful to see the ripples that you’ve, you’ve made and the stages that you’ve landed on, and I know you’re just getting started.
Thanks. Yeah, I have a lot of nostalgia for those early days that the Functional Forum in New York City, which had so much energy to it, and there was this concentration of all of us who are trying on a different approach to health and healing within the conventional senting, setting. And I– that was just so thrilling back then.
But the journey I’ve been on, my first book, The Anatomy of Anxiety, was a very direct translation of the work that I do day in, day out. It’s a functional medicine approach to mental health, specifically around anxiety. And, and I think if I’d had more time, there are so many other more straightforward functional medicine books that I’d love to write.
I’d love to write The Anatomy of Bipolar. I think that’s very needed in the world, and I would love to write a book about psychiatric medication tapering. But we don’t have infinite time, and this book, it is deeper, and there, that’s not a strategic decision or anything like that. It’s more that I’ve deepened in what I’ve experienced in life and what I’ve gone through.
And at this point, if I’m taking on anything professionally, it’s usually more of a spiritual inquiry, where I was having– sitting in meditation, asking this question, putting it out there of, what should I be writing about? And this topic came through so overwhelmingly and so clearly, and I really couldn’t refute it, though I tried many times.
And sitting back down and saying like, “Are you sure? Really this? Really now? Really me?” And kept getting the, the response of, “Yep, sit down in your chair and get to work.” Well, look, I, I would say I’ve been keen for this because I would say that I have found myself surrounded by witches of various, you know, types.
Obviously, I go to– my kids go to Waldorf School, and there’s elements of the Steiner methodology that is witchy in itself and, and understanding that. But, you know, just to give you, you know, some examples, like one of my closest friends, a couple of pediatricians that my kids go to school with, you know, similar journey, where it’s like conventional pediatrician, then see the light, trained in functional medicine.
But like the kind of medicine that they’re doing today- You know, which is basically like biodynamic cranial and, you know, bioenergetic work viewed through the lens of conventional pediatrics looks a lot closer to witchcraft than anything else. However, look at the rates of chronic illness in their practice and the rates of autism and the d- the degree to which they’re able to, like, document cases of reversal.
This thing’s working, right? By any standard, you compare the outcomes and the details in their practice to the outcomes in any other pediatrician in California, and you’re up for a rude awakening. So this has been something that I’ve, you know, surrounded myself with and connected to, and I guess, I guess I’d love to hear from you, you know, how this methodo- how this, this terminology and nomenclature became the thing that you wanted to, you know, make the book around.
Yeah. And I mean, I think you’re married to one of the high priestesses of all. Yeah, I mean, I for- probably she was there first. When I was pregnant, she put her hand on my belly. I felt, like, energy tingling over my whole body. She’s quite a witchy woman, magical. So I think that, you know, once you get kind of red-pilled by functional medicine, it, it, it already says, like, once you’ve taken on that- philosophy of we’re not just suppressing symptoms, we are addressing a problem at the root, identifying the root cause, and c- going to that upstream.
Then it opens you up to, okay, so in a more straightforward functional medicine approach, you’re thinking about micronutrient deficiencies or inflammation or intestinal permeability and blah, blah, blah. But for me in mental health, like I can’t not acknowledge the psychospiritual roots that come to bear on my patients’ pathologies, on their symptoms.
And so I recognized after a while I was doing my patients a disservice to not at least tread lightly into these waters that were not part of my f- conventional or my functional medicine training, these waters that we– I think the field of psychiatry gets quite squeamish around, the bigger spiritual questions and what is somebody’s worldview and how that comes to bear on our mental health.
And so this book, it’s really both a little bit of a grief memoir, a little bit of a cultural commentary around, I think, a lot of cultural conditioning that women take on, and we’ll talk about what that is. But it is still a prescriptive functional medicine book because I cannot help myself. That’s who I am in my DNA, and it’s still an, an answer to that question of how do we suffer and get out of balance, and how can we support humans from trying to address human suffering.
I love that. I, I was, uh, just going through the copy that you sent me, and, uh, you have this Tolkien quote at the beginning. Um, a thing a- a thing is about to happen here that has not happened since the Elder Days. The Ents are gonna wake up and find out they’re strong. That’s a strong start, but what does it mean to you, and w- and what’s about to happen?
Well, I was probably, I don’t know, halfway through writing this book while also in parallel reading the Lord of the Rings series with my daughter. That was our bedtime story every night. And when I came across that, it really captured what I’m trying to say here, which is that I think women have been feeling less than, doubting ourselves, fragmenting ourselves, which I’ll explain what I mean by that, but really betraying ourselves, like taking a piece of us that’s integral to who we are and disavowing it and suppressing it in order to be respectable, to, to make ourselves palatable for this world, to have some kind of power and safety in our very left-brained, rational world that we all operate in.
But I want women to have the aha moment, which is, “Hey, wait a minute. I think a long time ago, I looked around, perceived that this is a world that values a certain type of intelligence, a left hemisphere, rational, linear type of intelligence,” and we understand the assignment. We lean into that and perform that side of ourselves.
But in the process, unconsciously- We suppress our mystical, intuitive, witchy side, and it serves us for a period of time. It opens doors. I went through med school and residency and research fellowship, right? Like it’s– I don’t dispute it entirely. There’s value to this. But in mental health, if we know anything, it’s that suppressed parts don’t go down without a fight, that if we are fragmented in that way and betraying ourselves in that way, ultimately that comes to roost, and we need to integrate our parts, meet ourselves, all parts of ourselves, with acceptance.
And I think the aha moment I want people to have is that it was a self-protective mechanism that we did to suppress that. But if we are here, we find ourselves today staunchly identified with that rational side of ourselves. We think, “I’m skeptical, I’m discerning, I’m the right way.” I just want people to interrogate, is that skepticism truly yours, or is that cultural conditioning that you internalized decades ago?
And so I think the ents, the women, the witchy people, which is more than just women, it’s many of us are. You’re very witchy, right? But for us to recognize, oh, it’s not that we’re less than, it’s that we’re quite powerful, and it’s time for us to step forward because the world actually needs us standing firmly in that conviction.
I love that. So one of the areas in the book that I noticed is that you have a section that talks about menopause, and I’m, I’m interested in connecting why you feel like this is something that is connected to, uh, the season of the witch. And is this– I, I’m interested in your take on the connection between those two things, ’cause this is like the hottest topic in women’s health, I think, right?
Yeah. There’s this, there’s a chapter on menopause and a couple chapters actually on women’s health in general. So menopause, what’s interesting to me in how that is at the intersection of everything I’m passionate about, functional medicine and women stepping into their witchiness, is the way that w- women- struggling with symptoms of perimenopause and menopause.
There’s, there’s a way that estrogen in our reproductive lives seems to create a biologic imperative for us to make nice, to play well in the sandbox, and to be likable, and that seems to be part of female reproductive fitness. That’s all well and good, but it sometimes leaves women in a position of doing a lot of compromising and losing themselves, and not even necessarily knowing what does their heart desire.
They find themselves in a position of l- living endlessly in selfless service of everyone around them. And menopause is this somewhat liberatory, though often uncomfortable transition, where even though the symptoms are unpleasant, the hot flashes and insomnia and frozen shoulder and osteopenia and osteoporosis, and the list is on and on, um, and certainly genitourinary issues.
But also there is a liberation from the ways that estrogen, progesterone keep us playing well in the sandbox, and I think that is right at the threshold of how we’re witchy. And that’s, I think, no accident why our image of a witch is this crone with gnarled features, not the object of sexual desire, not youthful and vital, but someone who is in a position where estrogen is not censoring them anymore, where they’re able to say what’s true without really giving a lot of care towards how people will react.
It’s not to say you just go off and become needlessly cruel. It’s that you can say the inconvenient truth, even if it’s gonna ruffle some feathers. Women’s health is a whole other subject that I take on over a– spread over a couple chapters. There’s one around childbirth. There’s one around the ways that, um, I’ve had too many patients to count whose psychiatric history began with the initiation of birth control pill, and that is something I’ll continue to bring forward until our whole population appreciates it.
But I’ve had so many female patients who go on the pill sometime in college, and that’s when they become depressed and/or anxious and end up going on various psychiatric medications and having a long and storied psychiatric history. But it all began with that initiation of the pill, and sometimes the way we get back to a state where they feel well is by removing exogenous hormones.
And we now know that exogenous hormones do indeed influence mood, depression, and anxiety. But many decades of women were going back to their prescriber and saying, “Yeah, I think this is working. By the way, I’m crying every day.” And they were being gaslit. They were being told, “Well, there’s no evidence for that.
You know, you, you seem stressed.” You should go on Paxil. And, and I, nothing against Paxil, but we just deserve to understand that’s not your true blue genetic destiny depression. That’s a medication side effect. We just deserve the full truth of what’s happening under the hood in the body. Absolutely. Well, I’m so glad you’re going there because I think that topic is mission critical, and there’s a lo- there’s a, there’s a, there’s a wisdom of, you know, the world is such that a little bit of speaking truth to power and, and so forth is, is a necessary part of our- transformation towards the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.
And I look forward to, you know, to seeing more of that in the world. That’s right. I guess I w- I wanna feed back, you know, one of the things that was quite interesting to me was to notice that in the early days of functional medicine, I’m not sure if it’s true or not, but still, but I know that 75% of both the patients and the practitioners were women.
And one of the things that I was thinking about was just that, you know, as you move from sort of one vision of the, one understanding of the body, sort of that linear understanding of, you know, certainly medicine, like, you know, single input, you know, biochemistry into the, that’s gonna be the soul to understanding that, okay, there’s a lot going on, it’s a complex system, there’s feedback loops, there’s multi-systems that can all produce the same symptoms.
You know, ultimately what you need is a different type of thinking. You need thinking that understands the collective, that can draw all of that information in. And I remember saying, I remember there was an amazing functional forum with, with, uh, where Jeff Bland and Kelly Brogan were the two keynotes, and I said something like, “You know, what about intuition?”
And Jeff was just, Jeff said, “Look, intuition is just really like a level of pattern recognition that you’re not conscious of.” And that always stuck with me because I think, you know, we are always in the process of trying to understand what’s happening, but that, that stuck with me as something that, that it’s a more sophisticated information gathering system in a certain way.
Does that resonate with you? Yes. And so, you know, it’s funny the way you talked about that more biochemical straightforward approach, like that was the, that’s the integrative medicine gateway drug into functional medicine. It’s like green pharmacy, where you’re just like, “Okay, instead of Lexapro, we’re gonna give you St.
John’s wort for your depression.” You know? Yeah. And it’s a step in that direction, but ultimately functional medicine explodes the possibilities of what are the inputs, and it’s a complex system. And that’s when you start to recognize that the body is a storyteller, that there’s sometimes meaning to the ways we get out of balance or become sick.
And to me, intuition is a smidge more than sophisticated pattern recognition. I call intuition the witch’s compass in the book, but basically, yes, it’s sophisticated pattern recognition, and maybe it’s sophisticated in a way that’s even kind of awe-inspiring. Like if you look at the cerebellum and all these ways that we are grappling with…
It’s almost a data science mystery, like we’re grappling with enormous amounts of information, trillions of, of dendritic endings to all of our neurons and, and how is our body distilling that into a conclusion. But I would argue that there’s a couple dimensions that are even a little bit more inexplicable.
I think the more we become embodied and are really dropped just out of navigating our lives from the head, and we’re In our bodies, there are antennae that emerge. I think our heart is sensing in a certain way. Our gut is certainly sensing in its own way, and I would argue even the energetic womb center is its own type of antennae.
So I think there’s other ways that we’re picking up on information beyond straightforward neurologic sensory pattern recognition. And then I hold the possibility of something even more magical, that we are connected to something beyond us, that there is some way that we’re tapping into source or the field or whatever term feels resonant for someone, where we’re getting information in a way that isn’t strictly coming from the confines of our own bodies or our minds.
That, like the hundredth monkey, and we’re right into it, right? And, uh, I, I, I completely… I mean, I think if you look for evidence of that, it, it abounds. I don’t know the hundredth monkey. Can you tell me about it? Just I’ve– The long story short is that as, as a group of monkeys learn something, the hundredth monkey learns it much quicker than- Mm-hmm
you know, than the first, second, or third, and that, that information is transferred. You can look at it at, like, quorum sensing, right? Where groups of microbes work together in a way that you can’t understand. You know, sort of, um, there’s, there’s lots of different ways that I’ve been interested in of, um, you know, communication between people that isn’t overt, um, and, and how those systems work.
That’s right. So, um, yeah, you, you mentioned one of the things I was really interested in was this sort of, like, conversation about, uh- Going beyond the wearable that I think you were sort of touching in there, and the ability to, like, tune into ourselves. And I feel a bit split on that because I know you’re right, and I know that that capability within us to understand ourselves to a degree, and I’ve gone through that journey, like in my men’s group, to really, like, understand where I’m feeling things and what the implications are, and I know that that’s the, like, fullest potential.
And I also understand the sort of downside of relying on this outside thing, this wearable, to tell you about what’s going inside. I also, you know, have seen the potential of that sort of information to, um, a broader spectrum of information that might help us understand things that seem impossible to connect, and I’ve, I’ve seen that in, in action, and I hope to see more of it.
But, um, I’d love to get your thoughts on, you know, how you feel about that. So I just wanna take a moment to thank our mission partners, and I wanna talk a bit about brain medicine. I believe that what is about to happen is that we are going to see a, a removal of the silos between psychiatry and neurology, because we’re gonna start to understand that the same causative factors drive both psychiatric illness and neurological dysfunction.
And so in order to facilitate that revolution, we need practitioners who are trained in that methodology and can build scalable practices to reverse it. It’s built in functional medicine. It’s built in empowerment. It has group medicine, you know, as a, as a key part of it as well. And so thank you to all of our mission partners.
Obviously, you know, Fullscript has been a big supporter for a long time, and, you know, now with Fullscript Labs coming on, uh, Fullscript is a place where you can get all of the functional labs, all of the conventional labs. You can also get, um, all of the, the supplements that you’re used to from Fullscript all in one convenient location.
It is the sort of, um, central operating system for running a scalable practice Uh, we have Freedom Practice Coaching that is helping practitioners build sustainable episodes of care and be successful in bringing in consistent patients, serving them with the highest standard of care, and making a real impact to their own freedom and their own potential in their practice.
BigBoost, um, Uli and his team are at the leading edge, and if you are entering into this world of brain medicine, no one understands the world better and can build you websites and funnels that can bring patients into your practice. And then last but not least, TruNeura, which is, um, in the business of bringing practitioners together to learn about healing brains.
And we do that through the lens of a mastermind, um, but also, uh, building decision support software to make it easy for this to become the standard of care. So thank you to our mission partners. Let’s get back to chatting with Ellen. I mean, I think that I’m, I’m nuanced on wearables. Not, certainly not anti-wearable.
I have patients for whom– Like my husband often wears an Oura Ring. I’ve recommended certain wearables to my patients, whether it’s a continuous glucose monitor or an Oura Ring or a Whoop or whatever. But basically, I think that we hon- we just wanna recognize it’s a tool that we’re using, and we don’t let it start to drive the ship and create other problems downstream.
When someone starts wearing something like an Oura Ring, it can be very impactful with behavioral change upfront. Like, okay, now I’m seeing in this concrete way, staying up too late, getting overtired, looking at screens close to bedtime, consuming alcohol, all this objectively impacts my sleep quality. So that can be very compelling, and it can motivate behavioral change, and it can, and it can give people information they otherwise it was falling on dead ears, you know?
I can say it till I’m blue in the face like, you know, “Go to bed at the window when your body’s perfectly tired and avoid screens and wear orange glasses,” and all this. People aren’t hearing it until they see, okay, that objectively impacted my own sleep. But I do think the downsides that I recognize, one is a nocebo effect, the opposite of a placebo effect, where let’s say you wear an Oura Ring and you wake up in the morning and maybe you feel okay, but then your ring says, “No, actually, you had a bad night of sleep.”
So that can impact how you feel that day, and it’s not even a perfect instrument, so it might not even be a perfect reflection of how you slept. But that can be a bit of a drag to be told that you didn’t have good sleep, and I think it can influence our unconscious. It can inform how we go through our day that day.
I also think that it is making us rustier at trusting our own hotline to our proprioceptive awareness of what’s going on in our own bodies, and we’re already pretty atrophied at that embodied listening. So to me, there’s a f- philosophical, something that makes me very uncomfortable, this idea that I don’t know how I feel.
I need to outsource that to an objective instrument that tells me how I feel and how I’m doing. There’s useful data in that, but we actually need to be strengthening and dusting off and really going back to more of a moment-to-moment checking in on how do I feel, because I think that relationship with ourselves is part of how we can have discernment.
It’s part of how we can listen to our witch’s compass of intuition. It’s, it’s a foundational skill that’s getting atrophied, and I think these devices aren’t doing us any favors in that respect. The only way we get to a sustainable health system is that much more of the responsibility has to fall on the individual than we have.
As long as it’s always outsourced, it’s gonna cost too much and everything’s gonna collapse, and there’s not enough people to take care of all the people. You know what I mean? Yeah. At the levels of chronic illness that we have, so people have to take some more responsibility for themselves. Otherwise, you just end up with, with an unsustainable system, and I think that what you’re talking about is a pathway, um, you know.
And so I look forward to seeing, you know, I guess, uh, how, how things land on that way, ’cause I know we’re only really at the beginning of some of the sort of like- data, um, data-informed care that can, you know, I’ve seen it predict autistic meltdowns a week ahead of time. Hmm. Because no one had really understood all of the different patterns and what affects what.
And so I think there’s potential in that. I think this, I agree that, you know, this is, the it’s part of our, like, interdependence, right? That we have to make a priority to become less dependent on others for the, for the whole system to work and for society to work. I’d love to get, you know, y- the, the, um, subtext of the, or the subtitle of the book is “The Psychiatrist’s Case for Magic,” and I’d love to understand your own experience with magic and how you would describe magic to a fellow practitioner or, you know, someone who might wanna read the book and, and, uh, why that’s a big part of this, this impulse to write this book at this time.
Yeah. I grew up in the suburbs of New York City, and I… Some of us grew up with a lot of institutional religion in our lives. I did not have that. I grew up in a very atheist, secular environment where the feeling on the street was we worshiped at the altar of science, and skepticism was a virtue. And so I was a product of that culture, and I thought, “Okay, I can perform that.
I can be intelligent in that way,” and, and I really did take that on as an identity. And it served me in certain ways, but it also foreclosed a, a more, an openness to mystery. And I was okay with a pretty light, diluted, kinda pseudo-spirituality for a while, where I was into skepticism and science but also practicing yoga and chanting Om, but I held a lot of contradictions, and it didn’t matter to me.
But it was when my mom passed away suddenly, and this happened when I was six months pregnant, that’s when… I, I think loss has a way of demanding resolution, and I, I held all these contradictions in terms of an openness to spirituality but still a, a skepticism and an atheism. But when faced with loss, at least for me, what I felt like was that question of, does my mom continue to exist in some form, or is loss absolute?
I was stuck on that question, and ultimately it cracked me open. And I just… So I found the idea that this is a material universe, death is random and senseless, and the end is the end. That view that I had been raised with was untenable in that moment, and I wanted a worldview that could soften the ache of grief, that could make me believe that her spirit continues to exist in some form, and I can continue to connect to it.
So I tried that on. It was almost an awkward fit at the beginning, but I find that once we open ourselves to that and become receptive to that, what rushes in is corroborating details, signs, and synchronicities, and what feels to me now, 11 years out, like a moment-to-moment, constant, ongoing connection with my mom.
And the reason I- I’m a psychiatrist who wants to make a case for magic is that I see not only how that’s helped my resilience and helped my feeling guided, feeling, knowing how to find alignment with what contribution I’m here to make, but I’ve also witnessed in my practice how it helps my patients.
And it’s not to say I’m in practice proselytizing a certain belief system. That’s not what it is at all. But I recognize that my field is squeamish about these topics, and I was doing my patients a disservice by not creating space to contemplate the bigger questions of existence. And it’s just permission to live those questions, and then we land wherever we land.
But I was noticing patients were missing out on the possibility of an ongoing connection with their lost loved ones because it felt foolish or unfounded to them. Or now I’m aware of the work of Dr. Lisa Miller out of Columbia, who studies secular spirituality and its impacts on mental health and how we’re having any type of spiritual worldview.
Doesn’t have to be particular dogma, just any sense that there’s something larger is protective against depression and suicidal ideation. And so this changes the way I practice medicine, and in a way that’s not so evidence-based, but is m- quite meaningful to me, is that it also changes how I show up to a patient.
Yeah. Whereas in the past it was humdrum, functional medicine-informed psychotherapy, now I am praying beforehand. I am setting an intention, and if I find myself at an impasse with a patient or I feel stuck in some way, I ask for help from something beyond me, and I find that it often enables a shift in the room, or it allows for some insight to come through.
And so I’m a different practitioner. I recognize that sometimes my patients need a spiritual inquiry when they’re struggling, when they’re demoralized or disenchanted or despairing. And so it’s– I think we’re been missing out on a lot of opportunities for magic, and it’s, it’s been doing us a disservice.
Well, given the degree to which the success of the functional medicine paradigm requires the other person to fully participate for success, both in the short term and in the long term, do you think it’s reasonable to argue that the efficacy of your care in general goes up even though you’re You know, by your own admission of not following the same evidence-based guidelines even for functional medicine, because now you have someone that has adopted a worldview that can fully participate, and the value of that participation goes above the, you know, the, um, randomized control trial for the medication or even the supplement that you might have recommended previously that the person would be relying on to do- Ooh, I think not only we all just want to be seen, heard, and respected, and I think when we as practitioners hold space for the full, the full texture of someone’s life, I think that that helps them participate and engage and feel seen and understood in the treatment setting.
But I would argue, you said a couple minutes ago how we need to take responsibility for our own health, and that of course is a controversial, complicated conversation to have. And I, I always used to say that thinking who would ever disagree with this? I’ve now come to learn this can be experienced as a political dog whistle, as something ableist or something denying systemic factors of oppression.
What I think is, is simultaneously that that is all true and what is the both/and, what’s simultaneously true, is that if we let that get us feeling stuck in a victim mentality, like we only harm ourselves. We still need to step forward with agency and authorship about how we take care of ourselves, ’cause no one’s coming to save us, certainly not allopathic medicine.
And so I think that when we take on this type of worldview, that this is not a senseless, random material universe, but that there is something, there is guidance, there is something we might even experience as benevolent. It’s not a spiritual bypass into everything happens for a reason. But I do find it helps people have a very resilient mindset where they can make meaning out of the unfoldings of their lives, and it allows us to step into agency more readily, into authorship of our own lives, where we recognize there’s something meaningful happening here, there’s guidance on tap, and I find that people are in a better position to take the steps to treat themselves well when the world feels a little bit less senseless and random in that way.
Love that. What, what are some of the practices that you’ve adopted that you would say that patients can do to, you know, start to participate in this way? I think what, part of what you’re doing in this interview and with this book is sort of creating a broader permission field for practitioners who may have felt this way but, you know, were embarrassed to talk about it, even maybe in, in their functional medicine conference, you know, dinner time.
But now, you know, you, “Hey, Alan Bora’s doing it. Sounds cool. I’ve been doing bits of this anyway, and now I feel okay to talk about it a little bit,” so I like that. But what are some of the, what are some of the ways that you’ve sort of broadened the permission field for the patient to engage in that way, and what are some of the practices that you’ve recommended?
Yeah, and even just on the practitioner front, so much of what we’re doing as practitioners is getting better and better and better at listening. And sometimes we’re listening through observing with our eyes, and sometimes we’re listening just to the objective content in the room, what a patient is saying.
Sometimes we’re doing blood work, and that’s a form of listening on the level of biochemistry. But there’s a lot to listen to in an interaction with a patient, and you can watch their microexpressions, you can watch the saccades of their eyes. You can feel the feeling in the room. You can feel an energy sometimes in a room.
And I think all of these qualities of listening, these are things we can cultivate, and these are things that can make us more effective practitioners. And it does start to seem a little witchy at certain points because you’re picking up on things that maybe objectively we can’t point to and say, “That’s measurable.
That’s occurring there,” but we’re picking up on something and we’re inclined to trust it. I think that for patients, it’s gonna look completely different for everybody. You know, for me, it’s I light a candle and say a prayer before I start writing, or I ask for help from guides. But one thing that I really want for my patients is that they don’t miss out on an opportunity for an ongoing connection with their lost loved ones.
And I think of a patient I had who lost her father when she was two years old, and she’s in a bit of a pendulum swing away from ways that Catholicism has harmed her. So the idea of belief is a charged topic and doesn’t feel comfortable. But she sometimes senses her father and then quickly dismisses it as that’s foolish, that’s unfounded, and I feel like she’s been missing out on that ongoing connection.
So part of the work that we’ve done together is just help her open to that, and it’s not to say we know what the fundamental truth is. We don’t know. She doesn’t know. I don’t know. Nobody really knows. But if we’re having a subjective experience of something salient, something uncanny, something inexplicable, but it gives us comfort, I think a little bit of permission to open to that and enjoy the benefits of it, whether or not we’ll ever be able to prove that it’s real.
And so I just don’t want people to miss out if they are getting that subjective experience, but they’ve been quick to dismiss it. Maybe just that the embodiment itself and presence, I think are very critical tools that I want readers, patients to give some energy to because I think embodiment is part of how we…
Even with functional medicine, there’s all these ways that the body whispers long before it begins to shout. And sometimes patients washing up to shore in my office, their body is already shouting, and that’s from sometimes decades of steamrolling over the quieter nudges from the body. So the more embodied we are, the more we are listening and sensing and feeling into it, and not just going through our lives from the neck up.
I think that’s how we catch our body saying, “I need to rest,” or, “This food doesn’t agree with me,” or, “This job doesn’t agree with me.” So the more we can sense that and respond to it. And presence is a sprawling topic, but part of why I think presence is so critical to this work is that we need integrity and we need sovereignty.
And this is especially true once we’ve gathered some power around our witchier, more magical listening, then we’re gonna be using this in the world, and integrity ensures that we’re using it for good and not for ill. So we need to interrogate our motives. We need to integrate our shadows. We need to know why we’re doing things when we’re doing things, and not just shooting from the hip from unconscious motives.
And, and we wanna make sure that our actions are in alignment with our intentions. That’s integrity. But sovereignty is also critically important because we might have the best of intentions and even the best of integrity, but if we are not sovereign and handing over our power constantly or allowing ourselves to be influenced by outside forces that do not necessarily have our best interests in mind, we can be– it can really distort our power, and then we can start to operate from a way that’s, it’s tainting our magic, and so we need that sovereignty, which is something that comes up in how we feed ourselves and where we put our attention and our relationship to the phone, and even our relationship to consumerism, all these ways that there’s many forces around us that stand to benefit if they can stake claim to our life force, to where we put our time and our attention, our energy, and our dollars.
Yeah. Well, some of that power is, you know, accentuated by- The hyper-individualization of society, right? Where you can’t actually withstand the cultural poison by yourself. Mm-hmm. But groups of people learn how to withstand it, and I think this is part of, you know, you mentioned you thought that I was a bit witchy.
Well, reading your book and, and understanding it, you talk about the difference of, like, we have this hyper-individual society, and the witchy nature is the collective. The witch serves the collective. And, you know, I’d love to just jump into that as someone who wrote a book on community and grew up in community, and it’s like- Mm
that’s the theme of my work, you know, the through line. I would just say one of the, one of the things this reminds me of, I remember seven years ago driving with my wife through Croatia, and we were listening to Alison Armstrong, and she was talking about essentially the sort of the journey that the man goes on, the journey the woman goes on, and, like, the man is the hunter, you know, single focus, killing the animal, and the woman is basically, like, collecting, um, you know, is the, is the gatherer and so has to have a, like a broader view on the health of the collective because that’s the nature of, of those two.
And so it, it triggered in me a remembrance of, of that because ultimately, like, my wife and I have had dozens of conversations over the last seven years about that and coming back to, you know, I think it’s been a journey for us over being married for 20 years of, like, seeing the world differently and that that’s a strength, not a weakness, which can sometimes be the first thing that you have to get over.
Yes. Yeah. I mean, even if we just came at this from a very cut and dry evidence-based perspective, we’re in the loneliness epidemic. We understand that social interaction is protective against dementia. We– There’s all these different ways that community is hardwired into us. We weren’t the fastest species on the savanna.
We weren’t the strongest species. We were the ones that figured out how to cooperate, and that’s why we were able to prevail. But it also means that it’s in our wiring, that when we feel connected and a sense of belonging, we feel safe, we feel well, and when we feel isolated or disconnected or ostracized, it feels on some level like a matter of life or death.
But that’s the cut and dry perspective. I think on a more spiritual level, if we step back and ask, like, “What are we doing here?” Like, what are we really doing here? I think a few answers feel unimpeachable to me, and one is leave this place Better than we found it. And another is we’re learning lessons about love.
And both of those are keenly connected to the collective. How we leave this place better than we found it has to do with listening for our unique role in how we are meant to make our contribution to serve the collective. And that can feel weighty and like a lot of pressure. I actually find it’s so joyous.
It’s saying you don’t have to be anybody other than you, who you are. It’s the ikigai idea of what are you passionate about? What are you good at? What does the world need? That’s where you’re gonna put your life force. And, and it usually is pretty liberatory to recognize that that’s what’s being asked of us.
We don’t need to live somebody else’s idea of the right life or the right ambition. It’s that we have a unique set of perspectives and skills and strengths and experiences that shape us to be able to carry out our unique contribution. So we’re here to serve the collective. We’re here to leave the place better than we found it.
But I think we’re also here to learn about love, and that’s just my personal worldview, is that this is Earth school, and maybe we’re all here as fractals of the same source energy. But here we’ve been exploded into an array of, like a prism sets out a stream of white light into an array of a rainbow.
We’re having unique, individual, subjective experiences. Like, I feel like I’m indigo. You feel like you’re purple. But then we are learning about love in a way that’s, I think, in service of the evolution of consciousness. And so ultimately, we’re one, we’re connected, but man, are relationships difficult. And man, is it hard to get along.
But can we keep alchemizing… Maybe that’s not the right word. Almost like distilling, burning off the impurities, the things that don’t ultimately Um, are, are not fully the frequency of the heart. How do we burn that off so what remains is I’m meeting someone from a place of compassion? And that’s a lofty goal.
We’re not expected, we’re not meant to be batting 100 with that. It’s more that we are just keeping continuously practicing getting toward that. Yeah. So I, I gave a, a keynote last week at a conference that was in London, and it was called… The, the reason why I decided to speak at this conference was ’cause the title was Reclaiming Our True Nature, and straight away I was like, “Okay, I’m in on that.”
Because ultimately what I’ve seen in the men’s work that I’ve done every week for the last seven years is that ultimately what the collective allows us to do in that structure is like you can on- only understand yourself in context to others. So, you know, when someone… When something happens that’s small but triggers you significantly, then it’s an opportunity to go inside and say, “Hey, why did I have a disproportionate reaction to that thing?”
And then when you have a moment to unpack it with a process that is designed to unpack it, what you start to realize is that, “Oh, this is a deep wound that came from some time before that I’ve been feeling, and that’s why, you know, this other person doing this thing is causing such a rupture inside of me that is disproportionate.”
And if you have a moment to get into that and take it back, you start to realize, “What are the layers of stuff that I’ve taken on since, you know, I showed up here with most likely a joyous, creative, you know, connected energy? And what are the, you know, eyes of others and societal pressures and, you know, cultural norms and so forth that I’ve, like, put on top of myself that are not my true nature, and how do I work my way out of it?”
And ultimately, you know, I think that whether you’re doing that with a psychiatrist, right? Where you could, where you’re obviously doing that day-to-day with your patients, whether you’re doing that in a men’s group where that’s part of the plan, that is a systematized, structured way to achieve what you’re talking about, and that is the evolution of consciousness in my mind, to get back to that true nature and try and experience it consistently so that you know who you are.
I agree wholeheartedly. Awesome. Look, you know, one of the things I’m excited about is that, you know, we continue to go in this sort of like parallel path every so often, hanging out in Boulder or New York or wherever we end up or, um, I think in, in LA at one point as well. That’s right. And I look forward to what’s next because ultimately, like, this revolution hasn’t quite happened yet, right?
It’s gonna happen in our lifetime. Like you said, the future’s coming, and so I look forward to checking in with you regularly, as we have done, to see how you’re seeing it, because, um, it, it informs my own opinion and it informs the own way that I see the world, and I really feel strengthened towards the mission from spending time in your presence and your wiz and your witchiness.
Hmm. James, I always admire and appreciate the role you play in stewarding this revolution forward, and y- you know, they’ve assigned you a critical role in that ecosystem, and I’m grateful for you for taking that call and showing up for it. Thank you so much. Well, look, if this has inspired you, The Season of the Witch might be something you wanna have in your practice, maybe something you, you know, reach for as a prescription, you know, when things aren’t going the way that you’d hoped with, you know, with patient care or where you have a sort of an intuition that there’s something deeper that we need to grab onto to get this patient to move in that right direction.
I think, you know, even by having it in your clinical office, you may create a new permission field for people to feel that, like, “Hey, it’s safe for me to work with this practitioner, ’cause look at the book I saw in their library.” So I hope that it can play that role for people as they read it, as they share it.
Ultimately, like part of what I wanted to reflect on is that the thesis of the sustainable healthcare system relies on people being more attuned to their own issues, ’cause no one can know it better than you, and ultimately, that’s on all of us. So everyone who’s listening to this who’s doing the Lord’s work to facilitate that kind of embodiment or, you know, and whatever journey it takes, whether it goes through lab testing and wearables to a broader sense of self, or whether, um, it comes through a more spiritual lens, you know, this is, this is the work that we’re all engaged in, and this is the work of a lifetime.
I, um, witness and honor all of you who are engaged in that participation, and thank you for being part of it here. So I’ve been here with Ellen Vora. She is a holistic psychiatrist. If you wanna find out more of her work, we’ll have all the details in the show notes, but The Season of the Witch is out now or very soon.
And, um, grab a copy and get some for your practice. Thanks, Ellen, for being part of The Evolution of Medicine podcast. Thanks for having me, James. All right. Well, this has been The Evolution of Medicine podcast. I’m your host, James Maskell. We’ll be back next week. Thanks so much for tuning in, and we’ll see you next time.
So we are here asking practitioners about their practitioner journeys, and the reason why is because Journeys is a new product from Fullscript. Journeys allows you to set up your own lab offerings as the top of the funnel. Give the patients what they want. They wanna know about themselves, and it’s the easiest way to bring them into your practice.
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You can go to goevomed.com/journeys to find out more. Set up your own journeys in half an hour and transform the health of your community. Go get ’em. So that was the podcast. What an epic session. Thank you so much for tuning in to The Evolution of Medicine podcast. We will be back again next week, and thanks so much for tuning in, and we’ll see you next time.
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