Hidden Gems: Meet John Moos of Soul Surgeon by Moos MD

Today we’d like to introduce you to John Moos.

Hi Dr. Moos, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
The path to becoming the healer I am today has been a long and difficult one. If I think back on it, it started in my childhood and still isn’t complete. My ultimate goal has been to develop and implement a healing framework to help others heal. As with any project, it is important to know where I started, what it involved, and where I’m going with it.

Childhood
In my early years, I suffered my first injuries. My parents divorced when I was six. Feelings of isolation and loneliness amongst my classmates. Being picked on, marginalized, and bullied for being Mexican-American, having curly hair, darker skin, and freckles. I coped poorly; bullying and fighting back, finding unhealthy ways to vent and release my inner pain and anger. I felt small and invisible in my small body, unable to navigate my dad’s outbursts of anger and my mom’s coddling. Nothing was insurmountable; it was all grist for the mill. This helped lay the foundation of my cause; the reason why healing would become important.

Adolescence
As a teen, I learned how to develop unhealthy relationships and abandon healthy ones. I learned how to lie, deceive, and manipulate. I learned what it meant to hurt others and be hurt back. I learned what it felt like to walk the wrong road, to live without integrity, and to create deceptive compartments in my life. I learned what infidelity felt like as both a perpetrator and a victim. I learned to avoid consequences and what it felt like to face them. My adolescence was not all negative by any stretch. But, in the context of developing a healing framework, this pain was important to know and experience. It is what helped shape my credibility to knowing both the peaks and valleys of the human experience.

College years
In my college years, I learned what discipline and hard work felt like. I learned what passion and purpose looked like, what sacrifice felt like, and what accomplishment could do to esteem. I learned what love and toxic relationships could do to your inner environment. It was during these early young adult and college years that I learned the paradox of both finding and abandoning myself. I knew what it felt like to take the easy way out instead of speaking my truth and dealing with discomfort. I learned how to deny my feelings and choose others over myself. I learned how my maladaptive coping strategies could both save and hurt me, what numbing felt and looked like, and how I could be celebrated for playing out my deconstructive patterns.

Medical school
I learned both humility and arrogance. Understanding that I am not the best at everything, even though I pretend to be. I understood what shame and pain felt like. I expanded by capacity to numb, avoid, and deny. It was during this time that I began to understand that men could suffer sexual abuse and the impacts of injuries to their masculinity. I understood what it felt like to be cheated on, lied to, and manipulated while ignoring the pains of my own deceptive behavior. Gambling away my tuition, sometimes winning and sometimes losing, helped me to understand how risk and fear were both terrifying and exhilarating. I felt what it was like to hate my life, hate my partner, hate myself, and the choices I was making. I knew what it was like to feel trapped, imprisoned by my own beliefs, shame, and choices. I learned that addiction can come in many forms, and yet the painful consequences were all the same. I realized that external success could also look like internal despair.

Residency years
Residency was hard. Medicine is a pressure cooker, and surgery was a detonator. I learned to deal with high-stakes environments, to perform under pressure, that life and death are often inextricably connected and oftentimes only a razor-thin line separated the two. I believed that I thrived under pressure, that it was the threat of disintegration that made me feel alive…it didn’t. I learned that I cannot both abandon my life and try to show up in it. I learned that excuses are like assholes; everybody has them. I learned that marriage cannot solve my problems, nor can the people I leaned on to avoid my own pain and choices. I learned that kids cannot save a relationship, nor should they, as they cannot bear the burden of the unhealthy, fragmented adults that bring them into the world. I learned that your bottom is when you stop digging…I wasn’t done digging yet.

Adult life
I realized that I reached my bottom, that I was done digging – not by choice, but by necessity. I learned what real pain was, what real loss felt like, and what true humility offered. I learned that I am more than my choices and stronger than my beliefs. I realized that only I can destroy myself, and that failure means giving up, not experiencing hardship. I learned what resiliency looks like and what real sacrifice and discipline is. I learned what healthy love, constructive relationships, and vulnerability really meant. I realized that to love someone, you have to first love and accept yourself. That difficulties, tensions, and conflicts are another way of learning about yourself and others. That you don’t always need to be in conflict to grow; opportunity also comes from grace. I learned that everything I learned and experienced in my life was an opportunity for me to understand myself and our deepen my understanding of our shared humanity.

And while all of these highlights and stories look like I was a tortured soul, I was not. I lived an incredible life filled with laughter, joys, accomplishments, and fun. I grew from a young precocious boy into a man that is capable of love at its very depth and ultimate potential. I am a flawed man who has found a way to be whole. Not by ignoring and avoiding my scars, but my honoring them. Just as the pottery and art of kintsugi is made more beautiful by the gold reparations to create whole structure, so is life in all of its pain and glories.

My life has been the course that has informed my perspective on what healing means, what it feels and looks like, and what it can be. I have taken all of these experiences, the peaks and valleys, and incorporated them into a framework to help people heal. A framework that is informed by both experience and wisdom. A living framework that will grow with me and help others heal. It has already helped countless heal at this point, and the idea is to make it grow into something bigger, better, and more universal. I know it is coming, and I can’t wait to bring it into the world on the biggest scale.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
I have faced many obstacles along the way. You can read from my story on how I got here that there were countless obstacles: stories of pain, suffering, bullying, relationships lost, addiction, toxic relationships, maladaptive coping strategies, divorce, alcoholism, infidelity, and beyond. Each obstacle and challenge was an opportunity to understand myself and bring the insights into my work.

When starting my business, I encountered several more obstacles along the way. I had no background or experience in starting my own business, so I worked as a managing partner with my wife, Tami Pardee, at her real estate brokerage, Pardee Properties. I came on just before the pandemic and learned more in 2 years than I could have picked up at the most rigorous MBA program. I translated those skills into actionable wisdom to help launch my business from the ground up – scraping together marketing plans, brand identity and strategy, video marketing collateral, business plans and budgets, HR solutions, and every sorted detail involved in renovating and designing a clinic to feel like a sanctuary and not a sterile medical clinic. Every obstacle I faced in launching my business was answered by a past experience gained through living life and stepping off the beaten path.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
At Soul Surgeon by Moos MD, our vision is to uncomplicate transformative healing experiences. We aim to do this through psychedelic and somatic healing modalities. We believe that it is time to birth a new paradigm of healing and love, and we strongly believe that psychedelics will be at the forefront of pushing this evolution. Medicine wants you to live longer. Soul Surgeon wants you to live fully.

Medication and talk therapy models cannot keep up with the meteoric rise in mental illness, isolation, and suffering. We need new tools, new skills, and new perspectives. My therapeutic practice focuses on a connection-based, emotionally attuned, trauma-informed, value-driven approach to care, infusing my values of wholeheartedness and belonging into both my practice and principles.

We believe healing happens by “creating the conditions for your love and light to shine.” Before healing can happen, we ensure a sense of safety, transparency, and trust is established. The conditions: integrity, nurturance, play, stillness, and connection are the bedrock from which the seed of change grows outward. Love is the outward expression that first starts with the connection to self, then other, and ultimately all creation. Your Light is the manifestation of your true purpose and meaning.

We are a healing sanctuary in Los Angeles, founded by Dr. John Moos. Our unique healing framework lies at the intersection of mysticism and medicine and is informed by both clinical and spiritual practices. After becoming increasingly disenfranchised with most KAP medical models, I wanted to create a better container for healing to occur. I chose to make personal transformation safe, comfortable, and accessible.

As a Western-trained, allopathic medical doctor, he was discouraged by the traditional practice of medicine. Faced with burnout, loss of autonomy, defensive medical practices, and increasing bureaucracy, he needed a change and turned his focus from trauma surgery to trauma healing. After spending years in trauma bays, overburdened emergency rooms, and operating suites, it was time to heal it before it happened. Relying on his deep experience in all contexts of trauma, he is able to apply the wisdom learned and earned from both professional and personal experiences to support every client’s healing journey.

We are here to create the space, the safety, and the opportunity to heal. Leveraging new medicines, precise skills, and a pragmatic healing framework, we will guide you through your own process of self-discovery and personal transformation. Offering comprehensive and custom treatment programs for individuals, couples, and groups, we are here to support you.

Who else deserves credit in your story?
My biggest supporter and muse is my wife, Tami Pardee. For many years, she saw me as the success I am starting to feel and become. Her support, love and complete acceptance has been unwavering, and she holds my heart with compassion and grace throughout it all. My kids who inspire me to grow, adapt and continually remind me be the best version of myself. They have shown me resilience, discipline, playfulness, joy, creativity, and flexibility. To my parents, who have reminded me that you can grow through strength and struggle. Who have always been in my corner, offering unconditional love and support. To my friends in early recovery who showed me that you could be broken and still accepted, flawed, and still loved. To my friends who have always seen me for my essence and not as the troubled choices, I played out it pain. To the organizations that helped develop my education: CSU Fullerton for taking a chance on a near drop-out athlete, UC Davis School of Medicine for training me to be a doctor, Keck School of Medicine of USC, and LA County Hospital for teaching me composure under the most grueling conditions, Psychedelic Research And Training Institute (PRATI) for the gift of community, reconnecting with the sacred, and inspiring my work with ketamine, California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) and the Center for Psychedelic Therapies and Research (CPTR) program for deepening my understanding of psychedelic medicine and culturally-competent care, and the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) for the MDMA-training program lead by the incredible Annie and Michael Mithoefer. There are many others, nameless and named, that have inspired me to be the man and the healer I am today, and I am eternally grateful.

Contact Info:

• Website: soulsurgeon.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/soulsurgeonmd/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnmoos/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuGZwXvYdk1SmVlSFtJOikg
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/moos-md-los-angeles
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@soulsurgeonmd

Image Credits
Soul Surgeon by Moos MD