578. Autism, Healing & Shamanic Wisdom | The Horse Boy Story - Rupert Isaacson

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Welcome to Soul Elevation, guiding Your Ascension to New Heights. I'm your host, Kara Goodwin, it was a wonderful honor to host Rupert Isaacson in this episode where we talk about his family's healing journey with autism and the role of shamanic intervention and the animal kingdom, particularly horses, you'll hear me say this in the recording, but you really must read the horse Boy. It's powerful.
Magical and deeply touching. Rupert Isaacson is a bestselling author, filmmaker, and humanitarian known for his groundbreaking work in autism and healing. He is the author of the International Bestseller, the Horse Boy, which chronicles the extraordinary journey he took with his autistic son across Mongolia in search of healing through horses and shamanic traditions. The story became an award-winning

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documentary and sparked a global movement. Rupert later founded the Horse Boy Foundation, which supports families affected by autism and neurodevelopmental challenges through horse based and nature based programs. He's also the author of The Long Ride Home and The Healing Land, continuing His Exploration of Indigenous Wisdom, healing, and the profound connection . Between humans, animals, and nature. So we'll begin very shortly. But first I wanna invite you to explore
everything available for you@karagoodwin.com. Be sure to get my book, your Authentic Awakening to Support Your Spiritual Journey. You'll also find a selection of free guided meditations to strengthen your spiritual side, and I wanna say a heartfelt thank you for supporting the show, your likes, comments, shares, and subscriptions. Genuinely help this work, reach more people. When you engage, you help uplift the frequency of the content and make it easier for others to find these

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conversations. So go ahead and hit the like button while you're thinking about it. Alright, let's begin. Enjoy this episode. Kara: Well, welcome Rupert. Thank you so much for coming on Soul Elevation. I'm really excited for this conversation today. Rupert Isaacson: for having me on Kara: I was deeply moved by your book The Horse Boy, and I hope that everybody listening reads it, go and listen or read the horse. Boy, you will love it. It's amazing. I attest that the audio version
is, it's, which is Read by You, is excellent. That's an excellent way to, to, uh, listen to this, to, to get the book. And as I was preparing for our talk, uh, there were so many different places I wanted to take this conversation and so I've tried to whittle it down as best as I can, but we'll just have to see how we get on and trust that the right information is gonna find its way into the conversation. Even before we started recording, we, we were going into the Middle Earth and

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all kinds of fun things, so I can't wait to see what, what shows up today. But book focuses on the extraordinary story of you taking your autistic son. Across Outer Mongolia search of healing and the amazing shamanic experiences that your family had. So where did the inspiration for that journey come from? Rupert Isaacson: Um in my world in Rupert world it was a very logical
thing and I'll tell you why So my family heritage is African Um my mother is from South Africa My father is from Zimbabwe And um I was born and raised in England but I um I had a sort of a Southern African bubble upbringing and there was a lot of back and forth to Africa And um as soon as I was Old enough to travel independently I was backpacking around down there and

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then that led to me being a journalist down there and a human rights advocate and I became a human rights advocate for a group of people who people tend to know as the Bushman or the Coi Sun or the Sun Bushman There are hunter gatherer groups who live in an area called the Kalahari which huge area goes across five countries in southern Africa the dry heartland and um they are the oldest culture that is known still existing on the planet Everybody
you and me everybody listening has a DNA that goes back a common DNA 60,000 years They've identified this DNA to a female a woman living at the time in what is now Botswana The people who were living there they call this woman Eve and the wo the people who were living there at that time are the people who Still living that And the wonderful thing about that culture is that they are completely a culture of conflict resolution Um hunting and gathering

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cultures tend to be they tend not to make war They tend to have gender equality They tend to have all of these things because all of these things actually make for a conflict relatively conflict free life which when you are the middle of the food chain out there with just bows and arrows with large predators out there you need to make sure that your group does not fragment So if conflict gets beyond a certain point everyone is gonna get
eaten by hyenas So the way that this is they have many many ways of making sure that people don't bully each other and things But at the core of it there's a shamanic Experience which happens usually about every 10 days which could be for healing IE let's say you've got some physical condition or some emotional thing going on It could be called for that But it could just as equally be called for just a kind of checking in on everybody and

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washing the psychic dirty laundry of the group to make sure that everyone's cooled out And it's really effective These people have been around for hundreds of thousands of years and they will probably be around after civilization force Um they are the blueprint for what it means to be a human being So I spent a lot of time with these people and I experienced a lot of shamanic healing and I saw a lot of shamanic healing So I saw people healed from cancers I saw
people having uh depressions and psychosis is pulled out of their bodies And literally the heeler like bleeding from the eyes and bleeding from the nose and vomiting and getting rid of this stuff and And the person being kind of okay Um and this technology this spiritual technology is a real thing Whatever people might think oh well it's all rubbish Well if it was all rubbish they'd all be dead because they get sick like anybody else does and they get bitten by

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snakes and they you know have accidents and go nuts and you know all all the same things that happen to the rest of us But yet there they are you know days walk many many days walk from western medicine and this works okay So naturally when my son was diagnosed um with very severe autism it was natural for me to think well okay I could look for a solution perhaps down there or part of the solution down there Um but my son had also had this incredibly
positive Revolutionary experience going from effectively non-verbal to effectively verbal while sitting in the saddle in front of me on my neighbor's quarter horse mare Betsy I happen to be a lifelong horse man I'm sitting here on my horse farm I've just come in from the round pen with my horses you know that's my life that's my culture And uh so Africa that particular part of Africa it's not a horse culture So it was natural for me to think where is there a

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place on the planet that combines that type of healing with horses Mongolia gut feeling gotta go So like I say in my world that was a very logical decision It wasn't even an inspiration It was like that plus that equals that Let's go So we did And um but by the time we went out there um we were a few years into the autism adventure and I had lost my desire For my son to not be autistic Every every special needs parent goes
through a grieving process where you wish for things to be other than they are for a bit And then after a while you start noticing that there are great gifts in this even if they're hard won and painful and you realize that actually you've been shown a side of life that is much much more beautiful and that you need to have the guts to kind of go forward with this But this is difficult in isolation So we're gonna return to

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this subject of community and tribe and so on in a moment Um so I had gone through that so it meant that by the time I went out and we were now seeking out shamans and healers there I wasn't hoping that they would make my son not autistic I was very much not just at peace with the autism I was embracing it I could now see that there are great great gifts associated with it But I did want my
son to not be suffering and I wanted my son to be able to do things like use the toilet and um more easily and um be able to swim in the shark infested waters of neurotypical humanity You know cause he's vulnerable You know these people are vulnerable So and we're all vulnerable but these people are particularly vulnerable So by the time I went out I was you know I have to ask myself what

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am I gonna do if nothing happens And I thought well really that's all right because um at There's no way nothing's gonna happen because when you take a pilgrimage like that a journey like that a spiritual undertaking like that there's always going to be change of some sort But even if there's nothing in the tangible that happens at least the diagnosis of autism in our family did not prevent us from kind of going and having this extraordinary and amazing adventure together In fact it caused us to go and have this
extraordinary amazing event And that alone honestly would've been enough But in the event there was great change and um yeah And so we wrote a book about it and made a film about it Kara: Yes, it's amazing. I, my friend recommended it and I, downloaded it and I took a walk with my dog in the first, I think I listened to like an hour of it on a walk with my dog. I cried three times. Just the, the first, I don't even know if it was a full hour. So the report back when I got back from my walk is. Okay, Laura, I

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started this book 'cause she told me a couple of times, you will love this book, get this book. And, and I'd forgotten the first time. And then the second time I was like, and horses were everywhere for me. And I was like, okay, I'm really paying attention right now. And I was like, yeah, you nailed it. I've already cried three times. And I was, you know, out in public walking around like, oh my God, when he gets on Betsy the first time. Well, you know, I mean,
it's just so, so moving deep. The whole book is just deeply moving. Um, but you talked about the gifts that were in there and that leads to one of the really, one of the, the really powerful, uh, just one of the really powerful parts of the story is the response of the animals to Rowan, your son. there, they treated him with extreme reverence. And then you contrast that with the way that human society, you know, you have all of these glaring contrasts of how

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society responds to Rupert Isaacson: Yeah Kara: has a lot of tantrums and they're very loud and they're very, you know, you do a great job of explaining, of really kind of getting all the senses going of what it's like when he, when, when he gets into one of his tantrums. what's that, what that's like for you as a parent? You know, on kind of on both sides of, okay, I understand what's going on with my son. I also am part of society. Like I understand,
I also, you know, these people don't understand what's going on. so they're reacting in a way that's not Rupert Isaacson: And and one has to have compassion for those people because the thing is you don't know what fires they have to put out It's sometimes they're just being flat out a-holes but other times you know they can be triggered Because of past pain and past experiences that you know you dunno what fires those people are putting out So

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one does at the same time even when they're being not pleasant to your kid have to have some sort of compassion for them So it it is a good exercise in compassion if a painful one Kara: Yes. Lots of opportunities for that. I mean, can you talk a little bit about the, the reverence of, of the animals and what, and what you make of that, and then also what you made of it in that striking contrast as Rupert Isaacson: Yeah I mean I and I now as you probably know runs something
called the Horse Boy Foundation and and um so we work with We stumbled through this story into actually understanding the neuroscience of why it was working when he got on Betsy and then realizing we could talk about that in a moment and then why then how you could reproduce that and replicate that for other people and other children So we did start doing that relatively quickly and now we have an organization that trains people how to do it both with horses and without an

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equine assisted therapy and something called movement method It's about how certain types of movement affect the nervous system in the brain Okay Um there's still a spiritual element to it but there's also a scientific element to it These two things always go in parallel They are never in opposition to each other You know it's often presented as if science and spirituality
are in opposition but nobody sane believes that especially good scientists Um so the reverence that you talk about Isn't reverence in the kind of lion King hold the child up you know and all the animals rear up you know bow down or whatever It's more kind of just a a recognition of vulnerability within the mammalian caregiving system where the particularly female

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Betsy was a mare Mammals of most species predator and pre species will respond to vulnerability particularly in a human juvenile but actually often in human um adults as well So there's a lot of therapies where I mean we serve adults in our organization as well and somebody comes in with Obvious vulnerability Um my horses will absolutely modify their behavior and change the rules for that
person and step in so will my dogs So will my cat So will I You know we are the compassion runs beyond the human and the fields of consciousness If you think of that which sounds so woo woo but let's talk about who actually talks about fields of consciousness Um physicists like uh Roger Penrose um physicists like Rupert Shel Drake You want to see if you can get those guys on your show Um

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these are the people who were responsible for looking at things like early string theory and um uh gosh all sorts of things that have become somewhat mainstream Um they were outliers at the time They were the first people to talk about conscious universe And what they mean by that is If say we think of the ocean and you look at the ocean you see a wave you think that's a wave I'm a surfer maybe and I want to ride that wave so my attention goes to that wave But I know that that wave is part of the ocean and I know that when that wave breaks
on the shore it goes back to the ocean and that outside beyond weather breakers are there's a different type of ocean and then there's also it's evaporating It's becoming rain it's becoming clouds it's but it's all the same thing right So it's easy to understand that certain types of matter within those water molecules can come together and produce something that looks like a wave or come together and looks like something looks like rain or something that looks like steam or something that looks like ice or but it's actually all the same

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thing and each one can transmute back to the other one If we accept that in that context then presumably that's Every context So you and I you know we're composed of these minerals stardust and all this stuff Um when we come together the molecules come together and produce you or this teacup um or this cell phone Um but they will then go back and coalesce into the wider hole and then regroup into something else later on We know
this So where does consciousness come into this Well if it used to be thought that consciousness was I think still is thought by some people is a product of the human brain There is the human brain and it creates this thing called consciousness And that really comes out of um a 17th century sort of enlightenment philosopher um Renee Descartes right I think therefore I am And he was reacting to um the extreme brutality of the

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age because when This the Reformation came in and people rejected Catholicism as superstition and blah blah blah what happened But you know a massive uh pushback from Catholicism and the Spanish Inquisition religious wars and all sorts of I'm talking within the western sphere Western history So then of course you know the 17th century comes around and it just gets even bigger cause it gets fueled by money from the new world that's coming in So the wars can like now kill everybody And
of course they do And Rene Decart I think was found himself caught up in this And um he served for a while I think as a pikeman in the Protestant uh French Protestant force Someone will correct me in the in the comments but I might have got it backwards But anyway he's caught up in this And um at the same time um science is really coming in challenging all of this and it's a time of great turbulence And um so he goes on to an extreme where he just wants to reject superstition And so he

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says no it's it's it's all about the mind It's all about the intellect all about matter Unfortunately this led to some people taking an almost religious Attitude to his Cartesian way of thinking to say oh well now animals don't have souls Animals don't have emotions You know a tree is not conscious because it's you know and this gets tied up with Christianity Only humans have souls and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah But everybody deep down knows it's wrong And anybody you know
observing a dog being kicked and yelping knows well that has certainly got an emotion Or observing that you are sad and coming and putting putting its paw on your lap or observing how they interact with each other You'd have to be willfully self blinding You know to not say oh yeah they have emotion they have consciousness they're conscious of me they're conscious of each other Therefore if they are presumably kind of everything else's but the way in which that might happen might

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be different So then you jump forward and you go to say someone like Nicola Tesla who says um Now we've got 200 years whoop and uh ended the industrial revolution And Nicola Tesla says look if you want to um understand the universe you have to think in terms of frequency and vibration and um the fact that molecules are vibrating around each other sometimes greater distances sometimes more dis this is what electricity is None of us can actually say what it is but
we all experience it That's life force blah blah blah blah blah And he learns to harness this kind of thing Um but he's very very clear that there's a universal consciousness a universal frequency and he's very very clear as everybody has been since the bushman with any common sense that the whole thing is love So when these animals this is a very long-winded I'm sorry the answer is so long-winded Kara: fascinating. Don't Rupert Isaacson: When these animals are

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responding to Ronan in the way that you see them do it in the film because we filmed all of this as well it's not just you have to read this book and you know take my word for it that these things happen You definitely see Betsy other horses other animals responding to Ronan in this way It's love They're they are actually responding with compassion Um and that is very humbling as a human to watch a goat respond or a reindeer with more compassion than your
own species Kara: Yeah. Rupert Isaacson: notes are like I'm getting a lesson here I'm getting a lesson here We not taught by animals Yes we can because animals are part of the greater consciousness So does it matter whether I'm taught by the wave the rain the ice the steam I'm taught by water We're mostly water Water carries memory blah blah blah blah blah So why would I not be taught by animals Why would I not learn from any part of the field of collective

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consciousness It would be against all logic really and actually against all science to do otherwise So I think that's what you are observing It's just that we drew people's attention to it um in a in a particularly focused way Does that make sense Kara: Yeah, absolutely. It's so beautiful and there are indications of it, tea, are indications of it throughout the
book because there's the, the would Rupert Isaacson: Licking and chewing Mm-hmm Kara: with the horse and the lowering of the Rupert Isaacson: Yeah Sometimes it I know we get the reverence from because yes she she was Betsy was bowing her head to Rowan and licking and chewing And that is a submission gesture but it's also a um it's also a an acceptance gesture

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It's it's somewhere between all of those It's saying that I'm not gonna boss you I'm actually gonna let you influence me And if you think about that like think about a a good adult with a kid a good adult human they would do the same thing wouldn't they They'd say let me listen to you You know maybe the head would go down you know let me maybe the eye would close a bit Okay Deep listening Okay now tell me what it is you need You know it's actually goes species to species this kind
of gesture And the licking and chewing in horses is always about the processing of information When horses lick and chew by the way so is farting and so is pooing sometimes in certain situ Kara: that Rupert Isaacson: And so is it with humans I I always have to lower the tone people Um it um that's why you get some of your best ideas on the loop um because you get rid of you know uh the toxic stuff and um and you have like a little epiphany and um so you know but horses do it too like

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in horse training Um if the horse lets one go um and then it follows with if it if it's squishy and diy they're in stress and uh you wanna watch out And if it's looking good and sort of good solid British stools um then things are okay But either way they're processing information they're processing it It's all about processing Yeah because here's another thing with toine structures I dunno if you're if you are
familiar with what that means a toine structure correct Um so a a human most organisms um are toine not all but most So we we are around a gut It goes Lips to AOLs That's what makes um hot dogs by the way And um unless they're vegan Um and then everything else builds around it in a sort of a in a sort of a sphere shape or a or a eggy sort of a shape And you might put legs and limbs on that and a tail and add But a

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horse a human and earthworm we're all toine structures And um the first thing of course that um develops in the womb is the gut It's often not known This not the brain not the skeleton Kara: Yeah. I thought I'd heard the Rupert Isaacson: no not heart It's the gut And it's composed of neurons as is the heart and as is the brain So your gut feelings your heart feelings are equal to intellect if not more because they came first So if you ice
yourself from them and just we think we're this kind of brain floating about with a pair of legs attached to it Naturally we tend to make decisions that are a little bit limited because we're ignoring the other two things intuition and heart But you know that's another thing Yeah So yeah no we we we tour on structures We have this endocrine system of of emotion and uh we share it with the common consciousness field and um what a wonderful thing

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that is Really Kara: mean, it's really amazing because the story with Betsy, you know, it kind of starts with Betsy in terms of the, the magic that's starting to happen around Rowan and in his journey. But I think he was only like four years Right? Rupert Isaacson: Yeah He was barely free Kara: yeah. So not only is, I mean, just the, the sensitivity. Of course, horses are notoriously sensitive, but, but usually, you know, in a very skittish way, they're, they're, they, they,
I, in my opinion, my experience, you know, you, you wanna watch yourself around horse. I love Rupert Isaacson: Yes you do Kara: I, what's Rupert Isaacson: You do Yeah Well they they weigh what a truck weighs and they solve their problems by running away So you don't wanna be in the way of that No Kara: Yeah. And kicking Rupert Isaacson: Yep Kara: I lived in England, uh, in the early two thousands, I would go out off on hacks in the countryside Rupert Isaacson: So you road Kara:

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Yes. And, uh, not competitively, but um, regularly Rupert Isaacson: the way for the American viewers and listeners a hack in England is a trail ride We call it hacking I really dunno why we it sounds like we're going right with the machetes through the junk We're not and he's a quiet ride in the countryside A trail ride Yeah Yeah. Kara: But, you know, I have experience around horses and was comfortable around them, but also, you know, cautious and, and
understand that they're very ski, they're very skittish. They can be spooked really easily, and they will, they're so instinctual that they won't necessarily think before they respond, before they react. so then to have this toddler pretty much, you know, with when Rowan was a toddler, and then him having, you know, the, the, um, autism on top of it. So the behaviors were different from a neurotypical person, but the horse, I, I just found it, it, it, it

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was magical. The story Rupert Isaacson: It truly was Kara: Betsy and, and with other Rupert Isaacson: Exactly and I I think that this this is the thing between science and spirituality Magic is real Um you know if if this zoom thing that we're look if we showed somebody from a hundred years ago this they go oh my gosh that's magic Even I'm I say a hundred I mean even from the 1920s they might go that's a step of technology Even with silent
movies even with the seems magical If we went back a hundred years before that definitely 1825 yeah 1725 you're getting into the where they might have actually tied you to a stake you know Kara: Yeah. Rupert Isaacson: Um and yet it's very real Um so just because magic can have a scientific basis doesn't mean it's no less real and doesn't mean it's any less magical So and this is what's so interesting about Shamanism is it appears to be

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completely irrational um shape shifting people turning themselves into animals I can tell you that that is a real thing It's not American werewolf in London if you ever saw that movie you know where the person becomes hairy and the teeth come out and the you know it's not like that But there is a way that people can go into the consciousness of an animal And this is very much a real thing in hunting and gathering cultures And you can even experience it in a
smaller way when you are working with animals um directly Even people who hunt um people who farm you know it it's it's actually about empathy Um but it can be taken to a level where you can effectively go inside the nervous system and they can go inside yours Um we know that telepathy is a real thing Um what is that But empathy similarly and there are there is science behind all of this so but it's no less miraculous when it's going on because it's so other from

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the normality of experience even for me So when I was observing Betsy modifying her behavior and then as you say other animals and horses it was no less magical to me every time No less miraculous And I had actually been keeping Rowan away from horses cause I thought he wasn't safe around them It it was him making his own relationship with Betsy and me following it That was the story not me coming up with the idea cause
I'm this clever dad I I actually wasn't this clever dad I didn't think my son should be around horses because in my experience with sport horses I trained jumpers and things Those horses as you say they're very reactive They're very skittish I thought you know he'd spook em and he'd get hurt But uh no no quite the opposite actually Um so I got a real education in horses From my son's interaction with horses and from

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the horses themselves And really up until that point I'd been very much like I'm a trainer I ride horses I tell horses what to do and dah dah dah dah Completely flip that on its head And it's like no no no I listen I listen It doesn't mean I don't want to influence doesn't mean I don't wanna have a partnership Doesn't mean I don't want to have agency And sometimes I wanna be the leader in that Yeah But that's different to being like dominating the animal which is kind of the tradition that a lot
of us grew up with Kara: Hmm. Rupert Isaacson: Um was thanks to my son's autism that really my eyes were open for that Kara: Wow. There is, there is so much magic in your, in your world, in your book. Um, and you've mentioned like the shape shifting that's in your book. There's all, all of the animal things there, there is so much. But the, the, um, shamans, the bushmen, even the bushman are, are not really the focus. They're kind of the starting point and you know, they come in throughout the, the

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Bushman of Africa. but the shaman factor of the book is incredible. So, and, and there was even, um, you know, and you brought up hunting just, just a moment ago I forgot about that aspect of it. Because you had been a, um, participated in Rupert Isaacson: Oh yeah Kara: Correct. Rupert Isaacson: up with all kinds of hunting growing up Yeah Yeah Kara: And that was something that I, was it a, a Bushman who had said that that was something you needed to. Let go Rupert Isaacson:
what happened it was it was I I stopped live hunting um for sport um because fox hunting is effectively hunting for sport Even though you're not trying to kill the animal you're still chasing it Um and I had also hunted for the pot you know with a garden and all of those things as well growing up Um but there's nothing wrong with hunting Hunting is a part of the experience of the human experience on the planet and it's part of it's how we relate One of the ways in which we relate

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to nature and nature relates to us It's all about how it's done And um so when uh you can get your head around this story um I this is before the whole thing happened with horse boy I told you I was a human rights advocate I had to bring a group a delegation of Kalahari Bushman to the USA To draw attention to their plight because they were being kicked off their land to make way for diamond
mines And it was illegal because this land was theirs in enshrined in law And uh I for various reasons got drawn into this And I wrote another book called The Healing Land about how I got drawn into that And um I I got drawn into of my family cause it turns out I am related by marriage to that group of bushmen in South Africa Yes I am Yes Because like like families in the deep south the uh

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families that have been in South Africa since say the 17 hundreds like mine early 18 hundreds every all the families are mixed and but unlike um Unlike say in the USA where there was tens of millions of people coming across from Europe So people's origins and stories got kind of lost often Um there was never that much uh those numbers um of immigration in the colonial time So if you know where your family were a hundred years ago 200 years ago now you know exactly
who they were exactly what they did It's all written down and you know the story right So anyway suffice to say I'm a cousin by marriage to this group of Bushman called Ani but I find this out in the course of my journalism They find it out and they say okay Rupert you have to advocate for us because you're a tribe member Effectively I'm like okay fine I'll give it a try You gotta get us to the un I'm like how enough do I do that Okay I'll give it a go Why not Why not

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in it for the crack in it for the adventure So I go out to try and raise some money and eventually I do And um you Get them to the USA and we start in I thought let's let's if we're gonna do it let's do it So we we started in Hollywood and I contacted Artists for Amnesty great organization um that basically harness celebrities to spotlight causes like this So those of this this this dates me and ages me We got um uh Dave Matthews to Kara: I Rupert Isaacson: host a party Yeah No one knows who he
is anymore but like he was like the biggest dude at that time Kara: Oh, Rupert Isaacson: know Kara: you know, I graduated from college in 2000 every, you know, gen X, we know who Dave Rupert Isaacson: So so Dave Matthews happened to be South Africa right He's born in South Africa So we contacted him through Artists for Amnesty and he said yeah absolutely I'll I'll throw a party for you guys So that will bring some attention So that was great So we at we do this and we do some hollywoody things

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and then we Go to the East coast where we do actually get to the UN and the US State Department and we testify before Congress uh congressional Human Rights cau And it does indeed move the whole situation forward It quick spoiler alert um the Bushman did end up winning the largest land claims in African history two times over through this work that we were doing and related other organizations as well But that visibility becomes really important
anyway in between the two coasts of America You've got that bit in the middle haven't you And when we were going through that bit in the middle I wanted them to stay on some Indian reservations cause I thought well look when you get the land then a new set of problems are gonna come in Let's go talk to some Indian tribes who are sort of dealing with that secondary tertiary Generation of okay now what do we do So we stayed with the Navajo and um we are

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camping with the bushmen in Canyon Dee which is a really remote part of the Navajo reservation which is a really remote part of America So and we are down on the canyon floor which is the life down there is from about a hundred 150 years ago It's still very traditional people living in Hogans not living in trailers You know it's it's getting around on horseback It's it's amazing down there actually And uh while we're down there a medicine man comes to us and says oh I hear you guys are from Africa and doing
this thing for the land Would you like me to do a sweat lodge feel And um I said absolutely Of course Yeah So we do and we go through the rounds of prayers And at the end of those prayers he says has anyone got anything else that they wanna pray for You know And I said yes My son has just been diagnosed with uh very severe autism I don't quite know what to do and I'm a bit lost He said okay So we go through rounds of prayers At the end of it when we come out to cool down he says I do you hunt And I said well

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actually yeah but maybe not in a way that you are familiar with And he says it doesn't matter That's not important He's just I'm getting it loud and clear from the spirit world that you've got to stop and it's somehow connected to your son's autism And that's all I can tell you I'm like oh great Of course that makes sense This thing that I really love doing because Fox hunting if you are a rider It's the biggest adrenaline it's it's got nothing to do with the hunt It's all to
do with the ride cause you're riding across country you don't know where you're gonna go You have to jump anything that comes in front of you It's incredibly exciting It's you know I grew up with it I love doing it I thought ah I'm being called upon to give it up That makes sense And it sucks but I'll do it I had to call a friend of mine after that who was the head of the American Masters of Foxhounds Association You wanna think of like a a very sort of organization cause I

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would go through them I also had a job as a journalist in the equine press where I would actually go around and hunt with different hunts and have a great time doing it And I would do it through through them And I called him up and I said Hey look this has happened And um I can't Do it anymore Uh I just feel I need to to uh tell you And um he went oh I always knew you'd betray us Rupert I always knew you're a bleep bleep hippy and yeah blah blah blah And he like really went
off on me I'm like dude we've known each other for a long time You're right I am a bleep bleep hippy but hey I'm your fox hunting hippie friend And um and anyway look this has got nothing to do with me rejecting the culture This is a purely personal decision based on on this and you know my background in Africa and you know anyway I'm telling you and as I'm talking to him I'm I'm I'm talking it from my um from my front porch in Texas where I was living at the time and in Texas

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There aren't actually a lot of foxes cause there's a lot of coyotes And the coyotes don't really tolerate foxes So you don't see foxes that often like in England you see foxes all the time even in the cities Right But um in uh in um in that part of the world they tend to get killed So you you notice like maybe twice a year you see one Anyway as I'm talking to my friend from the masters of Fox Association out of the dark into the light
of my porch from the front field comes a gray fox and it sits down in front of me about I don't know 50 60 feet but within that circle of the light and looks at me and starts going And I literally take the phone and I go do you hear that And he's like Is that what I think it is I'm like that's what you think it is And he goes how is that happening He's like I don't know And he goes okay well maybe there's something in it Rupert You know

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And so yeah that's a shamanic experience right there you know And a wonderful one a magical one tied up at the end of the day with with conflict resolution peacemaking Um I still hunt by the way fox hunt but I don't do it that way anymore It's an artificial way I um a friend of mine has a pack of hounds and we hunt each other One of us is the quarry and then we can make it difficult for the other one to find us And we still have a great
ride And you know everyone has a good time but no animal is hassled unnecessarily Um and so I'm very actually glad that that you know that that happened Um again through autism all of the best things in my life really have happened through autism Kara: Yeah, that it's amazing. So beautiful. It, and that also, you know, because it's sort of the outside pre Rowan of life that is then influenced, you know, it it, it in a way it influenced Rowan

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Rowan influenced it. Another way that that shows up in the story is the ancestor on, on his mom's Rupert Isaacson: Yes Kara: a, an ancestor that was also coming up with different shamans where they were saying there is a, a woman on the, on the maternal side. I don't know if you wanna share a little again, this was Rupert Isaacson: yes Kara: predated Rowan, but strongly Rupert Isaacson: Well all shamanism is based on ancestors and
it's an interesting thing that um uh One person's genetics is another person's ancestor Right It's really the language is a little bit interchangeable but particularly with say the Bushman or Mongolian shamans This was a shaman from the horse tribes You know we started with the horse tribes and then we ended up with the reindeer people up in Siberia Um there's a bit of Siberia that comes down into north top of northern Mongolia

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and that was where the the strongest healings happened The initial healings were down in the steps with the with the uh horse people And um but some really extraordinary healings happened including Rowan making his first ever friend in the middle of one of the ceremonies and then that friend coming along with us for the rest of the journey And there was all sorts of but yes it was in the course of that healing that one of the it one of the shamans there were
actually nine shamans at that particular thing um said there is an unhelpful ancestor Or at least perhaps an ancestor who's suffering still And some of that suffering is permeating through And it's from the fe it's from the mother's line And and and where you have to be careful with this stuff is that's not saying it was the fault of my ex's family line is that's not how these things are interpreted at all It's saying that um for whatever reason something can

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come down a genetic line that can be that that could use some attention And um so we were given some rituals for that And what the interestingly about those rituals with real shamans is they're never like grand and theatric You know they're always like weirdly mundane It's like Kara: Even being whipped your Rupert Isaacson: no that that that was that was that was Okay fine fine Okay I'll give you that one Give you that one Um what I mean is is the after stuff
you get told to do it's like well you know here's this water that's been blessed or given this energy or whatever you know drink this a little bit these times of day for this long time Give it to Rowan This I do it right about when he's gonna go to sleep blah blah blah blah And you think well how's that gonna But it kind of does Um because energy and attention love fields of consciousness you know and we know you know there's been many many experiments about for

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example what you can do with water If you say loving things to water if you say hateful things to water okay we don't need to go into all those well-known experiments but it's well documented Um but yeah you but you mentioned the whipping Okay So I didn't see that one coming at all because um yeah in that first ceremony where the drums are going and the shams are chanting and it's all happening and I see this
Shaman approaching me with a whip and I'm I turn to toga I going like he's gonna whip me isn't he And and I'm like you know of course you know of course you know of course I have to give up hunting Of course I'm gonna get whipped Yeah And uh and uh my guy toga goes he gives this nervous laugh He goes ha maybe a little bit Um it's important not to cry out like alright So I sit there and guy just hold off and I get

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some good ones The last one goes right across my groin and I literally leave my body I and go back into my body so weird with that you see I had never experienced anything like that with a bushman The bushman healers suffer for you It's a form of compassion I talked about people bleeding vomiting et cetera et cetera on your behalf They will take on the pain for you It's a
very brave thing to do cause they really suffer Um here it's about a catharsis more driving a negative thing out of you Um what I could feel was a sense of catharsis and there was no sense at all of anything abusive Like I there was no way that this person was doing anything other than calling upon his tradition to serve me as best he possibly could And he just assumed because

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he's living out there in Mongo Well you want to attend a shamanic ceremony with the horse people This is kind of part of the deal Um and it was but if you think about There are some shamanic ceremonies that involve certain types of ritualized suffering The Sundance the Lakota Sundance would be an extreme example of that This is nothing close to it Or think about people that take ayahuasca in the jungle you know and poop anacondas and die and see God and sometimes have an awful experience but
often then come back with a sense of great catharsis and clarity and a sense of going into something new So it's not that those types of experience are negative necessarily at all It all depends on the intention behind them So but it was it was hilarious And even at the time I'm like okay this will make a great story but I'm we go through it and whatcha gonna do you're gonna back out You know you you're in for a penny You're in for a pound Okay let's do it You know Um and it wasn't bad you know

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but it was yeah it was it was it it was there was a lot of shocks to the system But if you think about also What you go through in terms of crisis as a family and as a human when your child is suffering Not the autism the autism is not a problem Take people like Dr Temple Grandin who I work with quite closely in the programs that we do She's very autistic When she was if you don't know who she is the listeners or viewers she's a professor of animal sciences at Colorado State University Multiple
bestseller um uh books on the brain books on animal behavior books on autism She is very autistic There was an HBO biopic made of her you should watch it with Claire Danes playing her And um she when she was three she was nonverbal rocking in a corner wiping her poo on the walls and her dad was going to put her in an institution This is the fifties Her mom said no I know there's an intellect in that I'm gonna get to it And we basically follow temple's advice in our programs You could really argue that we

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follow the advice of temple's mom So I had gone to her long before we went to Mongolia and said how does my son become you And she'd given me some really good directives about what to do and I'd done them which is actually how we ended up meeting Betsy cause I was following Dr Temple grandad's advice that's actually in the book but it sometimes gets a bit lost because the Mongolia stuff you know really takes off in the stories and narrative
Um but the the the point with that is that she for example temple found a way to get through her suffering Lack of communication terrible sensory issues which cause the tantrums um then lead to self-harm feeling lost in the world feeling floating out of your body You know these are things which are a lot of people with classic autism um uh rapport And those are the problems not the autism itself You know you can go on and become Temple Grandin

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with you know 10 PhDs and multiple on the New York Times bestseller list and you're doing fine but you're autistic So um it's the suffering that can go along with certain things You don't have to be autistic to suffer So it's addressing suffering So for example sometimes there is a kind of thing of going through it to the other side So what she would do You can actually buy these now she would go in this kind of squeeze machine which put this insane deep on her and then she would
feel that would put her back in her body She actually built one for herself based on the cattle crush because she was really enamored of cattle And then she went on to work in the cattle industry and to make the slaughter industry less stressful for the cows going through and devoted our life to that to a large degree So you could say that that what we went through say with the Chapman whipping us was not Rowan uh but me and my ex you know was um something along those lines And um

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when you enter things like that where you know that you've got to get to the top of that mountain in the heat you're gonna sweat It's gonna suck it's gonna hurt but it's also amazing And you wouldn't be anywhere else in the world for it I remember there was one moment in Mongolia where we were we were long into the journey and we were heading up into the Siberian bit And you know with days on horseback days on horseback
so sometimes you get off the horse and you walk just to kind of stretch your legs And um I've got Ronan on my shoulders and he's digging the point of his chin in skull Oh my God And it's really hot And I'm like oh it sucks Hate it And I'm like nah You know And then I I like outside of myself looking at me and go Rupert hold on a second You are walking across Mongolia with your kid having the adventure of your life

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and you are being a whiny little And I'm like you're right So I said Rowan The chin is ouchie but the hand would be nice Could you put your chin on your hand And ever since then we have a private joke between us when things get difficult We say The chin is ouchie but the hand is nice Kara: I love it. it's just incredible. The, this, the stories of the shamans
that you worked with, the, the horse shamans. The reindeer shamans, one of the things that was striking is they, it was a reindeer shaman, the whole story of Rupert Isaacson: Ghost Ghost name the reindeer sha Ghost What an amazing name Yeah Ghost But that is his name Kara: the way that you even came across him, I mean, everybody, again, you have to, you

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have to engage with this story. It's just phenomenal. But the, um, but Ghost talks about, he wants to know about the African because he understands that they, he says they are the most power, they're known as the most powerful shamans. And this is coming from somebody who is exceptionally powerful and gifted in, in the Rupert Isaacson: Also living in complete isolation So how does he know about the Bushman Right He's sitting
up there on a mountain 12,000 foot up in Siberia He's not on the internet you know how does he know about the Bushman We're back to that collective consciousness field A lot of shamans know each other and communicate with each other through this field It turns out and I dunno if you followed um That really good uh uh NPR thing the telepathy tapes Kara: Mm-hmm. Rupert Isaacson: of where they were basically finding that

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many people who are nonverbal autistic seem to communicate within a a a common field almost like a kind of chat room that they call the Hill Um that's that's on you know and that there was all sorts of pushback online about this And then all sorts of other pushback from autistic people saying I go there I go there I go there right And um so yeah how would he even know Kara: Right. Rupert Isaacson: he knew And so what he said to me after
the three days of healings that we did with him and that was great cause he said oh yeah you guys can film the healings but your equipment will probably shut down because the spirit activity will be too great And that's exactly what happened Um he said afterwards okay This has worked You are going to find that the stuff that really drives you crazy the incontinence the tantruming the inability to make friends really this is going to

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get kind of seriously better like now And I was really intrigued by that because normally shamans are little bit more equivocal They're a little bit more hedge bets I mean even even physicians are they're like well you know we we expect the symptoms to and if it doesn't work you know come back in da da da You know no one says it's gonna happen like this And certainly it it's quite rare in the shamanic thing So I was quite surprised that he went out on a limb like that
Yet 27 hours after we came down that mountain Rowan did his first intentional poo and it we happened to get it on camera and cleaned himself I mean this was like watching England win the World Cup right Which will probably never happen But this did happen And um the the and if I had to choose between one or the other I know which one I'd choose I I'd like both though Can you both please Okay So at least within my lifetime So um the the thing he also said though was

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um in order for this healing to confirm itself to be fixed if you like um and this is this is quite normal actually for them to say you need to do it again every year for about three years And he said I know that coming here is impossibly difficult I know what it costs you guys mentally physically financially everything to get up this mountain to me where you cannot access other than foot or horse after days if not weeks of
you know But he said you have this connection with the bushman he said as you said they are very very powerful more powerful than us Take him there And then wherever else you can So I actually did that the success of three years and I wrote another book plugs book um the book plugs sequel to the Horse boy Horse Boy Rides again But um I I wrote a second book called The Long Ride Home which follows those three other journeys

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those three other shamanic journeys um first to the Bushman and then to uh Australia actually in the Daintree rainforest in Queensland with the cuckoo Langi Aboriginal tribe who did amazing healings the growing and where I saw something that flat out blew my mind which I'll tell you about in a minute And um then to the Navajo reservation um where beautiful healing happened And it was after
that final one that was 2010 he um really became properly conversational like that day He'd be he he became he was verbal verbal more and more verbal but very scripted And then it was like dad do you want a cup of coffee Who who are you like hours after that healing Um so that when you engage with that sort of shamanic healing often it does take more than one shot Um you kind of need to go

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back at least every 18 months for a while and then you can kind of coast for a bit and then you start knowing when you need one So I have had them you know periodically through my life I know I'm probably due about now Rowan knows he's due you know we had that conversation He's 25 now Um okay where's it gonna be Where are we gonna go Where's the next one gonna be Um is it Africa Is it going to be somewhere else And we're just
throwing it out there To the university what comes Um he has now gone through sweat lodges you know which I never thought he'd be able to do you know with the sensory issues And he's well he lives within the shamanic sphere because when you Kara: I was gonna ask because that's what one of the, uh, shamans, I think it was ghost or maybe, maybe it was more than just him, but said this is within him and he might develop in this way and

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ghost, I think it was, had also been autistic as a Rupert Isaacson: well this is it Um in fact we in the Horse Boy documentary you'll notice we have some talking heads helping people understand the story One of them is Dr Temple Grandin Another one is a woman called Doc uh a man called Dr Richard Grinker who um Is an ethno um anthropologist um who specializes in looking at uh shamanism And um really interesting guy
and he makes a really good point He says when you go into areas of the world where the shamanic tradition is very strong what you'll notice is that the people who are the healers are almost always exhibiting neuropsychiatric symptoms of one form or another whether adult autism or schizophrenia or um epilepsy or um some sort of real bipolar or something some cocktail of all these things And they're often going in and

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out sometimes of psychosis And this is regarded as a job qualification rather than an exclusion or a danger to their society The idea is that they have such Spiritual and emotional sensitivity that like their instrument their instrumentation for that is so finely tuned that they effectively already have one foot in the spirit world and in the collective field of consciousness and um access it very very directly
And then they are usually targeted for training in how to kind of formalize it and coalesce it at adolescence it usually kicks in with puberty And then they do they have to do all the other things that the tribe does as well They don't like immediately go into like some sort of monastic thing No but there comes a point where after being a sort of assistant really for many many years they kind of step into

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it and they usually step into it somewhere in their thirties and then they still have to have a parallel normal life that They don't become like sort of subsidized shamans where the tribe actually looks after them and provides them with food until they usually hit about their sixties when they kind of really hit their stride and then the last 20 30 years of their life that's really all they do Um and
uh so these people usually are very neurodivergent and um what's so ghost Absolutely um autistic Um the the healer that I was always closest to who we haven't talked about yet um was a man called Besa in um Botswana And uh he's in all three of those books that I wrote So he's in the Healing Land He's responsible for the shamanic side of The political success that we had in the courts because there was a

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point where we realized that the lawyers that we had hired were going in and briefing the community The community were then going and talking with the shamans The shamans were then going into the spirit world and coming back with a set of instructions which they would give to the community who would then give that to the lawyers And we were knocking it out of the park every time And I realized we couldn't let the lawyers know that
this is what was going on cause these were people like doing pro bono work coming in from like Washington DC and stuff And they just wouldn't have been on the top of their game if they thought that something so irrational was you know happening But nonetheless largest length names in African history got one more than once Okay Against all odds Um so yeah the the interplay of Rational with irrational neurodivergent With neurotypical

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goes back to the dawn of what it means to be a human being And if you are living in this very high stakes environment called the wilderness where if you make bum decisions you die like really fast and including the biggest bum decision of all is conflict What you find cause it fragmentation of community everyone dies So what you find is they're not
agricultural they don't create surpluses they're they're not herd livestock but the quality of life is so high And what you see is that the base line human state when you hang out with these people is happiness not euphoric quiet humorous enjoyment of life gratitude Um not taking things seriously at all They take the piss out of each other so much I'll tell So

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besa anyway totally autistic This guy when I finally tracked him down I'd heard about him and I'd heard about him and I'd heard about him I found him eventually under a tree in Western Botswana remote part of Western Botswana And I got out of the Land Rover I'd spent two years trying to track this dude down So I'd heard so many stories about him and shape-shifting particularly shifting into leopard shape Shifting into leopard I'm like what does that even mean You know I
want to go find out what that means And I did observe him shape-shifting into a leopard Eventually of course at first he pretended I dunno what that means What you know we don't do that you know But then when he we built relationship he's like okay fine I'll I'll show you And I I I won't leave you guys hanging up I'll talk to you about that in a moment Um but He when he saw me come out of the car he didn't know me He went he stood up he went yo there are two be And he starts

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dancing right here oa old Besa he's speaking in Afri which is a sort of lingua franca there Old form of colonial Dutch cause I'm not speaking Bas which is his Bushman language He's not speaking English He's immediately he's in Africa Klein Besa little Bea that's you That's me And ever since from that point on I was known as Little Besa and Rowan's middle name is Besa Besa showed me so much and he was one of the
three healers who Healed my son in Botswana in actually had to get him outta Botswana into Namibia cause I'm banned from Botswana I can't go into Botswana anymore because of my human rights work So we had to find this bloke who lives under a tree a passport and get him over the border into Namibia the neighboring country to do the healing with my son Yet we kind of managed to figure that out and um crazy stuff Um

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he is so autistic I would say that in my decades of knowing him I never had a conversation with him It was always in riddles and little snatches of song and strain You know he would flap he would stem he would but people would come from thousands of miles to be healed by him And I watched him like pull cancers out of people and pull rheumatoid arthritis out of people's legs and Okay so um what does it mean to turn into a
leopard So he would there are certain people who will uh certain chairmans who will gravitate to certain animals for certain things So he would say sometimes for healing he would go as a bird and he'd go into the spirit world as a bird and he'd find the soul of the sick one lying down Um and he'd light on their back and he'd sing the sickness out of them But he said sometimes it was stronger than that And you needed to confront

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perhaps evil intent Um and you'd have to find this spirit of the soul of the person who'd done the all wishing and kind of get them to admit it And in their admission the bad work would be undone And sometimes for this you needed a stronger animal like lion or leopard And um one time after knowing him for some years I did observe him do it And uh what happened was um instead A normal healing ceremony which has the whole village or the
whole community there creating a polyphonic chant with hand clapping and such Um and the shaman male or female dancers themselves into trance because in the Kalahari there are no psychotropic plants There's no ayahuasca there's no magic mushrooms there's nothing like that that grows It all has to be done through uh trance And they basically boil their cerebral spinal fluid in their stomachs They call it mum life force And this is the

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force that they use Um people what might also call it kechi or Kundalini but you know you hear yoga people say oh I activated my Kundalini It's like did you did you really like go to the Kalahari and I'll show you people that can do that but maybe you did a little bit Okay but not like this Anyhow um this is this was completely different It was just private him and his wife and his son and he danced himself into trance and then he fell unconscious
and A leopard came out of the bush about 20 feet away and this doesn't happen You don't see leopards like this Leopards are incredibly shy People who've spent all their lives in Africa have maybe seen one three times You know they don't like calm out of the bush and like walk up to where you are and Kara: I've Rupert Isaacson: no Kara: in Safari in Kenya and in South Africa and have, we saw a leopard, uh, in both of them, and it was a Rupert Isaacson:

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Yes It's a huge Kara: on Rupert Isaacson: right It's it's you know like in America there's cougars around but how many times do people see cougars It's it's it's it's relatively rare They're shy They stay you know Anyway leopard appears comes out looks at us and then goes off And then the job of that's him inside the leopard And then the job of the family is now to stay with him probably for about 12 hours until The leopard comes back and he comes back into his body having achieved whatever healing journey he
needed to achieve that way And um that is shape shifting Um but there are other ways of shape shifting too Like um there's a way of hunting for example where you have to become the animal and then people will do it through running They run themselves into a trance and they become the animal But that's something you do only in extreme situations because um it requires such high physical cost that people will do it when they're facing starvation and um only certain people can do it And it's a special kind of hunting

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magic I've seen other types of hunting magic happen where the animal is called to you you know to make the shot the bow shot cause the bows are very small you know they don't have a big range Um one could go on you know how how did people figure out what ayahuasca was in those eight bazillion plants that grow in the Amazon trial and error To know that this vine plus this vine for this length of time da da da And it will kill you if you don't Yeah right Come on Or the relationship with fungi you know
we are gonna like try each one and just see who dies You know No no no no So you have to be able to go into a state of consciousness where you can talk to the plant where you can talk to the animal and some people are gonna roll their eyes at that Knock yourself out with your eye Rolling These these cultures have been doing it for a long time They will still be doing it after you finish rolling your eyes More interesting is to find out to ask the question how do they do it Why do they do it How did it

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evolve Do we have more capacity this way than we think we do Isn't that kind of interesting That's is that the realm of the unreal No It appears to be the realm of the real Is that the realm of the supernatural Yes Super does not mean not It just means bigger So sup uh natural simply means the natural world kind of on a scale that appears miraculous that we don't quite understand yet But we do know for example there are frequencies of light
we can't see There are frequencies of sound we can't hear but other animals other beings et cetera do operate through those We can't see it happen So we don't know why that elephant suddenly goes over there but he heard a frequency that we couldn't hear Um there are things going on that we can we don't have the perception for but there are certain ways that we can expand our perception And some of these spiritual technologies are that Um

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so I also said that in in Australia we saw something that was that blew our mind so I should probably refer to that too Um When when that healing was happening it's very low key Shamanic healings by the way are usually very low key Occasionally there's like thundering drums and being whipped or something But let's say I was really surprised by that one cause normally they're a bit more low key And um the
the very nice lan shaman who who took us on put Rowan in a chair out outside in the forest in the rainforest and he created a certain kind of smoke from a certain plant and he did a smoking ceremony He smoked roll Rowan up in papers and smoke him He Did smoke over him and Rowan sat there going I feel better in my head I feel better You know it's really interesting And over three days um he started the

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shaman just doing this up and down Rowan's spine just with his fingers And this is actually something that you see a lot in shamanic ceremonies If you look in the uh horse boy movie the documentary you'll see ghosts doing that to Rowan pulling stuff out and going in and out of trance while he does it Uh the bushman do it and that's tied up with your cerebral spinal fluid and your life force Some I could go further into this but let's just say it happens Um and he's doing it but
he's wearing it's very hot He's he's wearing I think he was just wearing like a single like a a tank top and he's got a teacup like this sitting next to him and he's just flicking his fingers every now and then into this teacup So naturally you know me and my ex we kind of have to go oh I wonder what's going on in that teacup right So we look into the teacup and we're like Okay How's this happening The teacup is filling up with this kind of liquid gel that looks like kind of snot

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you know when you like blow your nose and it's like really liquidy with like lots of little bloody bits in it It is stringy bits of like it is like that And it's just like every time he flicks his fingers in there there's a bit more there's a bit more but there's nothing he can there's no slight of hand There's no way he can hide anything or there's no theater going on And he's not even asking us to look in there We are looking in there right And then later after that first day I'm like what's
all that about And he just goes come back tomorrow And we come back the next day same thing but the f the cup fills up about half as much The third day it fills up very very little And he just says okay he'll be fine He's done And that day Rowan starts this whole um uh relationship with maths Also theory of mind where he starts really figuring out that you think something different to him He plays his first practical joke on me which is a whole cognition thing that he was not really there with

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yet Kara: yeah. Rupert Isaacson: So what happened with these books as you can imagine as I got loads of pushback with people saying well are you saying that you know shamanism cures autism then or horses cure autism I'm like of course I'm not saying that of course I'm not saying that What I'm saying is I had a particular experience that involved horses and involved this kind of interaction
with the universal consciousness that we found immensely helpful and but no I don't mean that you should You have to therefore take your kid to Mongolia But what you will put him on a horse But what you might want to do is ask yourself what is the spiritual journey that you might want to or need to undertake when you take yourself to the doctor It's a spiritual journey It's actually a

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little bit of a pilgrimage You don't go to the doctor for a laugh Do do you You don't like wake up in the morning you know what I'm a bit of bored I'm gonna go to the doctor Hey you know should we go to the doctor You're like yeah that's a great idea Let's go sit in the waiting room you know and like thumbs through magazines and wait to be seen And no you don't do that do you You you you only do
it when you have a dilemma that you need a dressing but you move your Aus to that place Go through a story You consult with the physician the physician goes and then he or she consults with their knowledge base comes back with a series of instructions Off you go It's just that you might when the dilemma in front of you is perhaps a little bit greater than a physician can address and any physician

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would say This kind of autism is frankly outside of our can then you are going to have to look for things that are the next level up But what that is to you is going to be very personal to your life So what's the point of a book like the horse Boil the Long Ride Home It just makes the point that such journeys and such undertakings are worthwhile are But it doesn't
have to be that far Many people are going to Mongolia in their own living rooms every day facing crises that are and there's all sorts of internal journeys to make the way that the journey the pilgrimage whatever you want to call it the quest manifests for you is personal to you And it may not mean leaving your room You might take a voyage around your living room

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in a way that is deeply spiritual Many people have epiphanies without ever leaving their bed but it's not going to happen unless you put your consciousness out there into the field and say please help me I need help That's called prayer and that's been working for people for a jolly long time And again you get the people who roll their eyes And again I say knock yourself out with the eye Rolling People were praying before you rolled your eyes People will pray
long after you rolled your eyes and I bet you Mr Or Miss Eye roller that when she hits the fan in your life you'll probably pray cause it's the logical thing to do And what you're praying for is help praying for love and God or the consciousness or whatever doesn't go well You didn't pray until now So I'm not gonna that's not how it works at the moment you ask Boom help comes It's the knock and it is given That's the sort of New Testament And then people say oh

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Rupert you're talking Christianity now I thought you were talking you know uh shamanism Well come on It's all the it's all universal love It's all the field of human consciousness You can put this name on it you can put that name on it You know where you're coming from If you're doing Christianity with the Spanish Inquisition well it's probably not quite what Christ had in mind You know if you are if you are a shaman of Genghis Khan's Mongols and you are doing kind of battle magic and impaling people well that's probably not
what the you know greater consciousness really had in mind You know Um and you yourself might end up destroying yourself through that thing It really doesn't matter how you interact with this and whether you think you're interacting with it or not you're interacting with it You know simply by being a human being alive on planet earth and breathing oxygen you are interacting with the collective consciousness which kind of is God which kind of is love And you know one can argue about it but why argue Why not just experience it and

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discuss your experience versus my experience so that we can then have a greater experience get inspired by each other so that when you or I end up facing a dilemma that is beyond the immediate set of resources we can know what to do So rather interestingly um since we started running our organization I could explain all the neuroscience behind now why Rowan spoke and um on the horse And it's it it there is Neuroscience
on this And and I because I started doing it with other kids and I started getting the same reaction So I went to neuroscientists like I went to Temple Grand and I said please explain And I got the same explanation And now our organization is asked to run a biannual um uh neuroscience conference um at Eastern Virginia Medical School Um because the neuroscience behind what we do is so sound doesn't mean that there

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isn't spirituality as well It's the same thing Right But Dr Megan Mcg of um Riverside uh uh medical group big physicians group in shout out to Megan um in eastern Virginia there um she's an autism mum She came and started working with us got an amazing result with her kid got into the science behind it but she's also very spiritual She's the one who then got asked by this university to put the thing on Um A lot of the
people that actually we work with are doctors and a lot of the people we work are neuroscientists So good scientists have no problem with any of this And I'll give you a really interesting example of this Um my uncle my own uncle in my family my brother's my my dad's brother um was he's retired now but he was a eminent uh pathologist at University College Hospital in London which is like that's like uh Johns Hopkins right

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And um he by the way Johns Hopkins has a shaman that comes on the children's ward Did you know that Kara: No I Rupert Isaacson: Love to have been at that at that meeting you know can you imagine that board meeting uh item number 13 chairman uh to come you know this stuff goes on You know when I want to find a chairman in a place I don't know I contact hospitals I contact regional hospitals Tribal areas And I'll say how I found the guy in um Australia and I'll say is there a funny old
man or a funny old woman He comes on the ward and like shakes fells over people And and they're like actually yeah there is And they're like does it seem to work And they're like well they seem to yeah actually So we we let this person come in a lot because they seem to vacate the bed the beds quicker you know and then I say have you got the name of that person And then I'll contact that person So again it's always this interplay between rational and irrational So anyway my my uncle

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um pathologist research pathologist very rational very dry um not at all averse to telling you if he thinks you're full of poop and takes great delight in it In fact um So we when the when the documentary was made of the horse boy we had a a family screening at a private cinema in London And um he was there and I thought oh he's gonna take a huge poo all over me at the end of this right So I'm just getting ready for it And um I'm a hippie nephew you
know okay And uh so at the end I go up to him and I open an imaginary umbrella and I go alright surf's up Do your worst lift your leg Let me have both barrels And and he says actually Rupert um today I am not going to SHIT And I said that's unlike you Why This is a perfect opportunity How can you pass it up And uh he said well two things Um remember this is almost 20 years ago that the the the thing came out He said um first off you're saying that

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autism might have gifts That's actually kind of interesting to me as a scientist Um the second thing is um You I think you are putting your finger on uh an interesting understanding of the placebo effect And I said what do you mean He said well Rupert most people misunderstand the placebo effect profoundly meaning that they will dismiss something because they think it's the placebo effect Oh that's just the placebo effect He said that means they completely misunderstand what the placebo effect
is and does He said Ru I said well what do you mean He goes well okay Rupert when you feel sick and you go to the doctor and you get a prescription and you go to the pharmacy and you buy that drug how do you think that drug came on the market I said well a drug trial He said yes He said who's in that drug trial I said uh well people who get the drug and people who get a placebo and he goes yes Rupert What they don't tell you is that before that drug is allowed to come on the market it has to

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consistently make more People better than the placebo And usually the drug has to go through several rounds before it achieves this And he said Rupert the people that get the placebo don't just think they get better and then go off and die They get better We don't know why but this is the truth So when you go and buy that drug it has had to go through that process For quite a while more
people got better on the placebo The entire pharmaceutical industry the entire allopathic medical industry rests upon this very very irrational foundation This is him talking to me He says people just don't think about this And and yes of course the drugs also are you know compounds of medicinal plants from the Amazon or Africa or whatever They've been used by shamans for that cause

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there's also a whole sort of plant medicine within shamanic stuff It's not just trance and all of that There's also really practical pharmacology as well again rational and irrational Um but he said you know is it possible that what these shamans are doing is harnessing this placebo effect in a really um conscious and deliberate way that with training they can you know be really effective And he said that's interesting to me as a scientist And he said you know
honestly um perhaps probably you know one day the science will catch up with it but just not now You know so keep making those films Yeah So coming from him I I was I've always disappointed I was like I was like dude you not okay well I guess I put the umbrella away Kara: Yeah. You're like, I was ready to defend myself or to just take the onslaught. I love it. Wow. Well, this, you're just amazing. You're delightful. I have learned so much today. And again, just

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really, it, it just thoroughly enjoyed your book and your story. Um, wanna be respectful of your time and I please come back because I think that there are so many, we didn't, we hardly talked about the 17th century Rupert Isaacson: We didn't even sing We were gonna sing and Kara: we Rupert Isaacson: okay Kara: There was no middle Earth stuff that made it into the recording. So we have a lot of unfinished business, but, um, but please tell people how they can learn
more about your work and horse boy Rupert Isaacson: Okay so obviously if you just want to read the book and watch the documentary that's the Horse Boy book and Doc you can find the doc on YouTube I think actually And um the uh book well obviously they sell books on internet by the book Um and there's a uh a follow up called The Long Ride Home which I would recommend because it puts the whole thing in context because it takes Rowan through the next few years Um

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by the way I should probably say how Rowan's doing He's 25 and he is living pretty much independently In fact he even sold his house last year Um Drives He has two volunteer jobs Um he also works with me um doing trainings um for autism parents helping to understand the experience from the inside and that sort of thing Um he's amazing Um he's still very autistic and he's took like
really functional When I went to Temple Grand said how's my son become You kind of happened So that's Rowan He's incredible And and just a light being He actually has to walk into the room and people are on their best game you know he just brings that out to people He's he's just pure love Um okay And he's funny Um so okay The work we do if you want to uh know the three therapeutic um

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programs that we have We didn't even go into the neuroscience of why they worked Let me do it quickly When Rome was on the horse and the horse was in a soft collected rhythm which is how I used to ride with him It rocks the pelvis in a way that makes your body produce oxytocin And oxytocin is not just a feelgood bliss hormone that calms your nervous system which of course in any case is over sensitive and tells the amygdala the fight flight freeze part of
the brain that's telling your body to breathe Cortisol stress hormone tells that to calm down now but it's also the hormone of communication It makes you communicate So if you have autom auto is the Greek word for the self autom selfism locked in The self difficulty is the relationship with the exterior world Oxytocin is gonna help with this a lot And then through all of the exploration in nature these kinds of movements um make your brain produce a protein

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special protein Which has a four letter acronym This is this was all explained to me by the neuroscientists that I went and consulted with I didn't come outta my mother's womb knowing this stuff Um and this protein has a four letter acronym BDNF brain derived made in the brain neurotrophic growing of brain cells factor effect That's neuroplasticity So effectively grow a new brain And if you that's why you mustn't lead a sedentary lifestyle I'm afraid And that's why if
you put old people in old people parking which we do in our culture stupid idea the brain dies And it's why if uh kids are too much on devices They're not moving enough Their brains don't develop properly We're supposed to be moving all the time through nature through a natural environment Okay And um anyway so you can't separate learning from movement which is why school often doesn't work Um so we have something called horse boy method and something called movement

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method which produce this And when you are exploding with all these neurons this BDNF there are some specific neurons in your cerebellum that fire called kinji cells It sounds like a sounds like a Pokemon character Kinji Perkin But it it's actually named after a Czech scientist called K who discovered them And they govern among many other things They do many things They govern social skills So you're filling somebody with communication hormone calm down your nervous
system hormone and Social skills brain cells you're going to see change So we have a program called Horse Boy Method where we do that as an equine assisted therapy We have a program called Movement Method And uh so Movement Method does it without horses and we show people how to do that in the home in schools with themselves with any population And then we have something called takin Equine integration which is how you prepare the horse to work with that young child

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as its own therapy And we do that with adults with trauma adults with autism et cetera et cetera And we basically get the same result each time If you want to know more about these if you want to take the courses that we offer um we work about 40 countries and we serve about 300,000 families Doing this not me personally people that we have trained Okay Um and uh it works So um if you wanna know more new trails
learning.com new trails learning.com We also have a a a a non not-for-profit which we can subsidize low income families to have these services and so on If you wanna make a donation that's always great Horse Boy Foundation Dot org ORG And if you wanna contact me there's email links you know and we will always help if you're a a neurodivergent and suffering or a parent wondering what to do or you know a school that

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wants to put this kind of approach into We've got our people in movement method right now in Germany As I speak to you making big presentations at this big conference education conference right now you know working in the German school system There's been a PhD in America done into our work in the German schools and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah It's lots of science behind it Um if you so if you wanna get in contact just new trails learning.com or boy
foundation.org contact us through there We'll sort you out Kara: Wow. Rupert, this has just been amazing. I've had, I, I've learned so much and I've just had so much fun with you. So thank you so much. Thank you for being here, and thank you for all of the ways that you are contributing to. Humanity in, in so many ways and to the spirit, and it's really just been an honor Rupert Isaacson: Well to you two Thank you for that And thank you for giving us an opportunity to you know

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platform more people need to know about it cause there's so many families out there who are in the position that we were wondering oh my gosh what do I do You know Well it's people like you asking people like me to come on podcast like this by the way a wellness plug I have my own podcast Go to equine assisted world.com or live free ride free.com I've actually got two podcasts Um and have a look at some of the people on those who are dealing with nature and the mind Um a lot of those people are doing amazing work too So
um you know thank you Thank you for having me It's been a a great honor and thank you for letting me blather on Kara: Oh, it's been amazing. Thank you so much. Rupert Isaacson: Okay Till the next time. Thank you for joining me for this episode of Soul Elevation. If someone in your life would be inspired by what you heard today, please take a moment to share it with them. These conversations ripple out and elevate collective consciousness. And if you haven't yet, be sure to subscribe so you don't miss the powerful episodes