Gabor Mate is a Vancouver based doctor and the author of the books In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress, Scattered Minds, A New Look at the Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder, and Hold on to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers (co-written with Gordon Neufeld, PhD). His totem figuresare, in his words, Gautama and the Four Jews - Buddha, Jesus, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein. We also talked about classical music - Beethoven, specifically.
To listen to the podcast, click here. It's about twenty-five minutes.
The Beethoven composition played is his String Quartet No. 12, Op. 127.
Dr. Mate's work has been very influential on me personally, and I'm soon to debut a new monologue about a retreat of his I attended involving the ingestion of the Peruvian shamanic plant medicine ayahuasca. For a look at the neuroscience of ayahuasca experiences, click here.
