I want to start this story by talking about something really boring: amino acids. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, but they’re super-important in the nervous system as the building blocks of neurotransmitters. It’s hard to be okay with the world if you aren’t consuming enough amino acids or if you lack enzymes to digest them so that they can be absorbed.
So, before I knew anything about Mucuna pruriens and the value of amino acid supplementation in terms of mental health, I was deep into one of the most painful eras of my life. Lydian had just gotten married and her husband, Naing Naing (pronounced Nine-Nine) had just left her for the first time (yes, he left her more than once). Lydi, John, and I were in Mexico, but Naing Naing had left her to return to his family-of-origin in Myanmar. I thought I’d die of heartbreak for my daughter. The situation felt suffocating and unrelenting.
Now, our regular readers at AlivenHealthy.com know that Naing Naing returned to Lydian and he also left her again a second time just a few months before their first child was born (he returned and did some major work on himself after that and has been a stable and loving partner since that time). That might seem damning and usually, in most family situations, I suppose, it would be, but something different happened to our family when Naing Naing left. You see, we were in Mexico when all of this happened, so there were sacred medicines everywhere and we were immersed in a place where indigenous ways have not been entirely lost. Lydi and I were also very lucky to already be apprenticing under a curandera to learn about temazcales and sacred medicines like Ayahuasca at that time too.
I was so angry and sad about what was happening to my daughter that my whole body lit up with this emotional discontent. My heart would burn. My whole body was hurting, but I didn’t really notice body pain. Rather, I carried my hurting body with the burning heart like a massive weight of flesh and bones that affected my mood. My demeanor became rigid and protective. I stopped looking people in the eyes. I was grouchy and irritable.
When Naing Naing left Lydian that first time, we found out that he had a drug addiction. Finding that out was a feat in itself because there is no word for “addiction” in the Burmese language. We were in Myanmar when we found out about this addiction and we left Myanmar on the eve of the global COVID shutdown that began with the closing of the airport in South Korea. Then, Naing Naing was trapped in Myanmar with a drug addiction. Lydian returned to Mexico with us where we tried to figure out what to do with the pandemic, the drug addiction, and the fact that Lydi and Naing Naing were now literally a world apart from each other. If they had not still been in love with each other, this would not have been a problem, but in fact, the love was still there.
Naing Naing was addicted to methamphetamines. As someone with a master’s degree in psychology, I thought I knew a thing or two about addiction back then, but with this new development in my life I became very sad about what I thought I knew. Normally, meth addiction has about a 15% recovery rate with 85% of all rehab patients relapsing within a year or two. Also, my son-in-law would never go to rehab. He didn’t even know what addiction was…Lydian spent a number of late-night and early-morning phone calls with Naing Naing on the other side of the world explaining to him what addiction was. He was pretty upset about the word at first and didn’t want to own it or take responsibility for it.
I tried opening some very basic addiction-rehab books to try to relearn something that might help me in regard to rehabilitating my son-in-law, but the books were bleak and depressing (just as I’d remembered them). I didn’t even like reading these books and I wasn’t the one who would have to actually go through rehab. So I put the books away and instead, I made a list of everyone I knew who had overcome a meth addiction in their lives.
COVID-19 lockdowns were in full-swing everywhere in the world except in Guanajuato where we lived and it was within this milieu that I started reaching out to long lost friends and acquaintances who’d been meth addicts to gently inquire about how they’d managed to overcome their habit. The yield on this effort was so-so at first. I wasn’t really getting anywhere. But then, a woman who, ironically, had spent quite a lot of her life in Myanmar, responded to my question very honestly by saying, “I drank a lot of coffee.”
This gave me pause.
Yes, coffee and methamphetamines share certain characteristics. In fact, in a way, my mind was totally blown by this idea. Could Naing Naing switch addictions? Indeed, “switching addictions” is a thing that people can do and this was the first thing that opened my mind to the idea that addiction could be cured using better, more powerful tools than rehab. Basically, you switch from an addiction that’s illegal and possibly harmful to the body and you upgrade to a similar addiction that’s less damaging to the body and ideally legal. This was my actual starting block into the material that would actually teach me something valuable about emotional health, addiction, and relationships.
One night, I had a dream. In the dream, someone handed me a note that said, “KUZU”. It was a very short and simple dream, but, the next morning, I looked up the word “KUZU” to find that this was a portal into a rabbit hole of information and help. Kuzu, also spelled Kudzu and known as Pueraria lobata in some circles, it is used in cooking and in herbalism as an antidiabetic herb. It is used by alcoholics to stop drinking naturally and it is in the same plant family as the bean known as Mucuna pruriens.
The day after I had this dream, I spent hours researching and learning about kudzu. Through this one-word dream, I learned about the use of high-dose L-tyrosine and L-tryptophan in some rehab facilities, amino acids that are used to build neurotransmitters, to increase the recovery rate from 15% to something more like 70%. I went downtown and bought an essential amino acids powder that day and made a smoothie for John and me and Lydian the early next morning.
I’ll never forget the feeling of that amino acid powder smoothie taking effect on my mental state and my physical response to the stressors in my life. Amino acids like L-tyrosine and L-tryptophan take up to 18 hours to take effect while Mucuna and kudzu start taking effect within 2 to 4 hours after you take a dose. John and I had gone out for a walk in the park and I literally felt this “lift”, like all of these negative emotions becoming less physical and less painful in my body. It was like, I was still sad, but the weight on my chest lifted. I was still stressed, but I could talk about it instead of just feeling like I was carrying a million pounds on my shoulders. I felt like looking up instead of looking down. It was amazing.
I ordered kudzu for us and we tried that out first, but by the time kudzu arrived here in Mexico, I’d figured out that Parkinson’s disease was my model for meth addiction and I was deep into the literature on Mucuna pruriens as an anti-addiction herb with an incredibly high success rate for treating addiction, particularly when it’s used as a part of a protocol with other natural treatments. I was concerned that Mucuna itself might be addictive, but eventually found that indeed it is NOT and in fact, Mucuna regrows dopamine neurons that have been damaged by addiction, prescription drugs like Ritalin, stress, or nutrient deficiency within 5 months.
So we all started taking 6000 mg of Mucuna pruriens per day along with supportive nutrients. We took 2000 mg of Pueraria lobata daily too and WOW…I became flexible in terms of my thinking. I was balanced emotionally. I felt like I could see a path through the mess, if only Naing Naing were willing to work with these herbs to overcome his addiction.
The next challenge was finding these herbs in Myanmar and getting them to Naing Naing during the pandemic. He lived in a tiny village, some distance from any larger town and it wasn’t safe for him to leave. The Shop.mm site at first, did not have either of these herbs available but within a couple of weeks, interestingly, like a miracle, they showed up and we were able to order them and have them sent to a friend of Naing Naing’s who delivered them on our behalf.
Naing Naing started with kudzu. He said it was a “beautiful herb”. In other words, it made him feel much better as he was going through withdrawals. He still takes kudzu sometimes when he feels low. The Mucuna came in pills that were dosed so low per pill that he had to take 30 of them per day. This seemed scary to him, but Naing Naing loves Lydian so he finally agreed to this protocol and within just one month he was ready to return to his new wife, my daughter.
All of us in Mexico took this high dose of Mucuna and Pueraria lobata daily along with Naing Naing in Myanmar and within 30 days, Naing Naing went from a drug addict to someone who was ready and willing to make the daring journey from central Myanmar to Yangon and then onward to Mexico at the height of the COVID pandemic. The three of us, John, Lydi, and me readied to set out into a world of lockdowns and PCR tests to try to rescue Naing Naing in what was actually, in the end, the final countdown to civil war in Myanmar (we didn’t know this at the time). Taking the Mucuna and the Pueraria lobata made our thoughts so much clearer and it helped us stay calm and centered through the terrifying but determined effort we were about to make in order to save Lydian’s and Naing Naing’s marriage.
As someone with a very weak passport, Naing Naing could only travel to 48 countries visa-free under normal conditions, so it was quite a feat to find safe passage for Naing Naing during the height of the COVID lockdowns, but we did it. We rendezvoused with him in the Dubai airport (he wasn’t allowed to enter the UAE) and then got on the same plane with him bound for Rwanda. We then spent a month in Tanzania in the only COVID-free regime in the world at that time.
Mucuna pruriens and Pueraria lobata literally saved our lives. Since that time I’ve learned more about these herbs and I always recommend that people do trauma-informed therapy like Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing / EMDR, hypnotherapy and brain entrainment, and/or psilocybin microdosing along with taking these two herbs. As nootropics, Mucuna and kudzu can be used to treat ADHD naturally in a manner that actually heals the dopamine neurons and they can be used as powerful anti-addiction herbs that can even diminish a person’s tendency to do doomscrolling, or compulsive social media behaviors.
If you’re looking for something that will help you become more capable of self-soothing, positive self-talk, and self-control, Mucuna, kudzu, and trauma-informed therapies are life-changing. They’re a life-hack that can change your work habits, your relationships, and your ability to solve complex problems for yourself in all areas of your life.