Voice as Medicine: Frankko Vivo's Journey from Basketball Court to Mountain Temple
The Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
Release Date: 12/19/2025
The Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
🎙️ Dr. Pedram Shojai explores how your physical environment is actively shaping your mental and emotional state every single moment. He breaks down the neuroscience behind environmental influences on your nervous system, explaining how clutter increases cortisol by 25%, how specific colors affect mood, and why silence has become medicine in modern life. He guides listeners through a comprehensive environmental audit covering visual chaos, acoustic pollution, olfactory triggers, spatial dynamics, and energetic residue, offering practical strategies to optimize your space for mental...
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🎙️ Most people respond to pain with one goal: make it stop. But Dr. Pedram Shojai reveals that pain isn't a mistake—it's a message your body is desperately trying to send you. Drawing from decades of treating patients and studying traditional medicine, he teaches you how to separate pain (the raw sensation) from suffering (the story you tell yourself), and decode the specific signals different pain locations are sending about what's breaking down in your system. Through a guided practice using witness consciousness, you'll learn to read your body's language with precision, track...
info_outlineThe Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
🎙️ Dr. Pedram Shojai guides listeners through developing witness consciousness—the ability to observe your thoughts, emotions, and sensations without being consumed by them. Through practical examples and a guided meditation, he demonstrates how cultivating this observer perspective creates the essential space needed for healing, behavior change, and breaking automatic reactive patterns. 🎯 What You'll Learn: The three simultaneous experiences and why most people never develop the witness—that awareness observing both your thoughts and experiences The tremendous costs of missing...
info_outlineThe Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
🎙️ Dr. Pedram Shojai delivers a no-holds-barred wake-up call about victim mentality and its devastating impact on your health. Drawing from real cases of people sabotaging their own healing while blaming everyone else, he breaks down the biological prison that victim consciousness creates—from nervous system freeze responses to chronic inflammation—and provides a four-step process to break free, reclaim your power stance, and take radical accountability for your health choices. 🎯 What You'll Learn: The biological cost of victim consciousness: nervous system freeze, cortisol...
info_outlineThe Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
🎙️ In this intimate conversation, Dr. Pedram Shojai sits down with Frankko Vivo, a musician and ceremony guide who transformed from a basketball player into a guardian of sacred space. Frankko shares how an 82-year-old violinist named Sol changed his life's trajectory with a single gift, leading him to carve a temple into a Brazilian mountainside over 13 years. Through stories of water infiltrations that forced him to listen to the mountain's wisdom and ceremonies where improvisation trumps performance, Frankko reveals how voice activation, deep breathing, and authentic frequency work...
info_outlineThe Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
🎙️ Most people breathe 20,000 times a day, yet modern life has systematically broken this fundamental function. Dr. Pedram Shojai reveals how collapsed posture, chronic stress, mouth breathing, and lost body awareness have created a breathing crisis—leaving us in survival mode with shallow, chest-based breathing that signals constant danger to our nervous systems. In this essential episode, discover the four ways modern life has stolen your breath and why dysfunctional breathing creates cascading physical consequences from chronic anxiety and brain fog to digestive issues, immune...
info_outlineThe Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
🎙️ Dr. Pedram Shojai sits down with integrative medicine physician Dr. Scott Sherr to unpack one of the most overlooked health crises of our time: the sympathetic spiral of doom. When your nervous system gets stuck in fight-or-flight mode, your mitochondria desperately try to produce more energy but lack the resources to sustain it. The result? Plummeting energy, skyrocketing stress, and a body that can't heal itself. Dr. Sherr explains the intricate dance between sympathetic nervous system activation and mitochondrial dysfunction, revealing how this vicious cycle begins and, more...
info_outlineThe Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
🎙️ Dr. Pedram Shojai addresses one of the most common yet dismissed complaints in modern medicine: chronic fatigue that conventional doctors can't diagnose or explain. He reveals why standard medical tests fail to identify this multi-system breakdown and presents a comprehensive, phased recovery approach spanning 6-24 months. Drawing from his experience treating thousands of patients, Dr. Shojai explains the seven interconnected systems involved in energy production—from mitochondrial function to gut health to nervous system regulation—and why treating just one piece never works. If...
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🎙️ Registered dietitian Ashley Koff joins Dr. Pedram Shojai to unpack the truth about GLP-1 medications like Ozempic and Wegovy. While these drugs mimic hormones our bodies naturally produce, they don't solve the root cause of why our own weight-health hormones aren't functioning properly. Ashley explains how gut health, the vagus nerve, stress, and digestive function all play crucial roles in our body's natural hormone production. She shares her personal journey from childhood obesity to understanding that healing weight health isn't about what you eat or avoid—it's about optimizing...
info_outlineThe Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
🎙️ In this transformative episode, Dr. Pedram Shojai addresses the modern energy crisis that leaves so many people chronically depleted. Moving beyond simple fatigue from lack of sleep or overwork, he reveals how we experience systemic energy depletion from thousands of tiny leaks we haven't learned to protect against. Through practical frameworks and actionable strategies, he teaches listeners how to identify what drains their vital energy, recognize energy drains in real time, and implement boundaries that protect their life force. This isn't about becoming selfish or isolated—it's...
info_outline🎙️ In this intimate conversation, Dr. Pedram Shojai sits down with Frankko Vivo, a musician and ceremony guide who transformed from a basketball player into a guardian of sacred space. Frankko shares how an 82-year-old violinist named Sol changed his life's trajectory with a single gift, leading him to carve a temple into a Brazilian mountainside over 13 years. Through stories of water infiltrations that forced him to listen to the mountain's wisdom and ceremonies where improvisation trumps performance, Frankko reveals how voice activation, deep breathing, and authentic frequency work can reconnect us to our spiritual power. This is about research as a personal practice, music as a living goddess, and the courage to follow an unconventional calling.
🎯 What You'll Learn:
- Frankko's Transformation Journey: From basketball scholarship and knee surgery ending athletic dreams to seven years backpacking through Africa, learning six languages, and discovering didgeridoo, guitar, and improvisation
- Building a Temple in the Mountains: Finding land in a Brazilian national park, digging rooms into the mountainside, creating a megaphone cone carved into the mountain for natural amplification—crossing rivers and climbing mountains just to reach the site
- Listening to the Mountain's Wisdom: How watching the sculpture collapse during a 40-day fast taught him about water infiltrations, permaculture principles forcing their way into cave work, and adapting to the mountain rather than fighting it
- Music as a Living Divine Entity: Why music is one of Frankko's greatest teachers, recognizing music as a goddess (not just art), understanding why Krishna, Shiva, and Ganesha all carry instruments, and why singing is worth "three times"—expanding frequency fields
- Ceremony as Research (Not Performance): Moving beyond drug-centric views of ceremony, using singing and dancing together as pillars, finding your own strength (not just relying on medicine's strength), activating your power through voice and movement
- The Gift from Sol: Meeting an 82-year-old violinist who said "I have to hand you this, I had a dream"—an angel encounter that handed Frankko his life's mission and taught him to face the unknown with courage
- Voice Activation for Spiritual Connection: Voice as connection to spirit (not just musical ability), standing in your being through resonant frequency, moving beyond superficial throat breathing to deep air
🔑 Key Insights:
"I'm not a performer, I'm not a showman. This is improvisation—it's research as a personal practice."
"Music is a living goddess. It's one of my greatest teachers. When you recognize music as divine, not just art, everything changes."
"The mountain taught me through collapse. Water infiltrations during my 40-day fast showed me I needed to listen, adapt, and create bigger spaces. Permaculture principles forced their way into the work."
"Ceremony isn't about the medicine—it's about activating your own power through voice and movement. Finding your strength, not just relying on the medicine's strength."
"Sol, an 82-year-old violinist, handed me my life's mission in a dream. She said 'I have to hand you this.' That's how angels work—they hand you your calling with courage to face the unknown."
💡 Action Steps:
- Explore voice activation for yourself and your children: Voice connects you to spirit, not just musical ability—practice standing in your being through resonant frequency
- Move beyond superficial throat breathing: Access deep air and authentic frequency to reconnect with spiritual power
- Consider ceremony as research, not performance: Focus on singing and dancing together, finding your own strength rather than relying solely on external medicine
- Support the temple work: Help build the recording studio and retreat house at Frankko's mountain temple in Brazil
- Visit the community: Accept Frankko's invitation to experience the temple space and ceremony work in Brazil's national park
🎧 Perfect for: Musicians seeking deeper spiritual connection through their art, ceremony participants wanting to move beyond drug-centric experiences, parents looking for voice activation work for their children, anyone called to unconventional spiritual paths, seekers interested in sacred space creation and temple building, or those feeling the pull to bridge high-velocity urban life with slow, intentional mountain work.
📚 Mentioned Resources:
- Frankko Vivo's temple and recording studio project: https://templovivo.eco.br/support
- The mountain temple in Brazilian national park (retreat house and ceremony space)
- Frankko's paintings as "frequency portals"
- Crowdfunding campaign for personal recording laboratory
🌐 Connect with Dr. Shojai:
- Website: theurbanmonk.com
- Books: The Urban Monk, Inner Alchemy, The Art of Stopping Time, Focus
- Documentaries: Interconnected, Gateway to Health, Trauma, Conscious Parenting
Guest: Frankko Vivo - Musician, Ceremony Guide, Temple Builder
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