TMP-Ep191 - Transformative Healing: Commitment to the Journey w/ Julian Bermudez

In this episode of the Meaning Project Podcast, Dr. Dan engages in a profound conversation with Julian Bermudez, a psychedelic-assisted therapist. They explore the nuances of trauma, particularly the often-overlooked 'small T' trauma that affects many individuals. Julian shares insights on how early experiences shape our sense of safety and self-worth, emphasizing the importance of understanding and healing from these past pains. The discussion also delves into the significance of attachment in childhood development and the conflict between authenticity and attachment that many face. Ultimately, the conversation highlights the need for self-awareness and connection in the healing journey. In this conversation, Dr. Dan explores the themes of personal pain, the importance of reconnecting with the body, and the transformative potential of psychedelic therapy. He discusses how feelings of inadequacy lead to disconnection from oneself and others, and how somatic practices can help individuals reconnect with their emotions. The conversation also delves into the role of psychedelics in therapy, emphasizing the need for preparation and integration to achieve lasting change. Ultimately, Dr. Dan highlights the inherent wisdom within each person, encouraging listeners to embrace their journey of healing and self-discovery.


To find out more about Julian and his work, go to http://www.psychedelic-integration.net



Takeaways

• Many people are experiencing difficulties and struggles in life.
• Healing often involves exploring the meaning and purpose behind our pain.
• Trauma can manifest in various ways, including anxiety and feelings of unsafety.
• Small T trauma can be just as impactful as big T trauma.
• The environment in which a child grows up significantly affects their development.
• Intergenerational trauma can pass down through families, affecting emotional health.
• Healthy attachments in early life are crucial for emotional well-being.
• Anger can serve as a signal for unmet needs and boundaries.
• Authenticity is often sacrificed for the sake of attachment in childhood.
• Self-awareness and curiosity about our emotions are key to healing. We adapt to pain by trying to be good enough.
• People-pleasing behaviors often stem from feelings of inadequacy.
• Disconnection from ourselves leads to disconnection from others.
• Blame is counterproductive in the healing process.
• Therapists can also fall into patterns of over-scheduling.
• Somatic work helps individuals reconnect with their bodies.
• Psychedelics can facilitate deep self-connection and healing.
• Preparation and integration are crucial for effective psychedelic therapy.
• Healing is a commitment to ongoing self-discovery and connection.
• The wisdom and healing we seek are inherent within us.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:19):
Hello, and welcome to the Meaning Project podcast. I'm your host,
doctor daniel A Franz, and as always, thank you for
this opportunity to bring a little bit of mental health, meaning, purpose,
resilience and psychedelics to your life, to your day, and honestly,
thank you for giving me a reason to continue to

(00:42):
do this work because today's podcast was beautiful. It was
illuminating and mindful and remindful. Reminded me a lot of
the learning and teaching I've been doing for years. My
guest today is Julian Bermuda from Portland, Oregon.

Speaker 2 (01:02):
He is a psychedelic assistant therapist focusing on trauma, and
not just the big ta trauma, but the kind.

Speaker 1 (01:13):
Of little tea traumas of daily life these days. So
the way he describes his work and how he goes
about his work is again just truly beautiful. You can
find out more about him at Psychedelic Dashintegration dot net.
I'll be sure to link that in here. Please take

(01:36):
some time. This particular podcast was really it's just so
rich and robust in so many ways. Take some time
listen to it. This is actually one, as I say
in the podcast, I'm going to listen to a few
times over. You know, I don't listen to my own podcasts.
It keeps me humble, but it also prevents me from

(01:58):
just cringing at my own own voice and what I
have to say. Uh So this one I will try
to get through again because there's so much great information,
most of it darre near all of it from Julian.
But take some time get through this one a couple
of times over. I would definitely recommend it. And you know,
contact Julian or me. We are always here to help.

(02:21):
So here you go. I hope you enjoy all right
with me? Today is Julian Bermudez who reached out to me. Well,
first of all, Julian, welcome, thank you. We had a
nice little quick conversation here, so excited to get into
the the meat of of why you reached out, and

(02:42):
so I really wanted to start with that question today.
You reached out saying, hey, I see a connection between us,
and after getting to know you just a little bit,
I find it obvious. But what did you see that?

Speaker 3 (02:54):
Being?

Speaker 1 (02:54):
What what what caused you to reach out and ask
to you know, come on the podcast.

Speaker 3 (03:00):
Yeah, I think that right now a lot of people
are experiencing a lot of difficulties, a lot of struggles,
a lot of challenges in life, and a lot of
that which I'd be happy to talk more about. Where
this comes from, and this is a big part of
my work. But a lot of the times, what we
were healing these pains that are causing these disconnections. A

(03:25):
lot of the times things, things that we focus on,
is at some point meaning purpose. What was the meaning
of all of us? Why did this happen? Why is
this here in my life right now? And when we
start asking these questions, it really sets a nice foundation
for transformation in terms of how we relate to ourselves

(03:45):
and how we relate to others in the world around us.
So when I saw your show, The Meaning Project, and
I saw the topics that you were talking about, and
I said, this is probably a really good area where
you're sharing some good information, and I thought that we
could have a wonderful conversation together.

Speaker 1 (04:02):
I'm excited for it. I've been, you know, I was
thinking as I was preparing for our time together. It's
been a particularly exhausting therapeutic day, I don't know, six
seven sessions something like that. A rewarding exhausting one and
I felt my energy dipping and then I, you know,
pulled up your website. I'm like, oh, my goodness, I
get to talk to this person about something we find

(04:24):
mutually helpful and rewarding. Like it's that weird space, but
like I feel my energy, I know my energy is low,
but it's so high to be able to talk to
you today. So I'm really looking forward to seeing where
the conversation goes. Tell me a little bit about the
work you do out there in Portland with Psychedelic Integration.

Speaker 3 (04:46):
Yeah. So, like I said, I'm seeing a lot of people,
with the vast majority of people really having a difficult
time right now, and a lot of people are really
struggling and challenging, having challenging experiences just feeling safe or
welcome just navigating the world. And it really shouldn't be

(05:09):
that way. And so what I really started doing was
taking a look at what are the causes for people
to feel really unsafe in their own life, in their
own bodies, in their own just with who they are.
And I started seeing how people are just harsh and
critical and judgmental towards themselves, and they treat themselves so poorly,

(05:33):
they'll sacrifice themselves to maintain attachments or relationships, they'll make
themselves people pleasers, they lots of things. And so very
early in my work, I started focusing on trauma, really
understanding what is trauma, how does it affect us, how
do we adapt to it, and how do those adaptations

(05:57):
to that trauma cause to disconnect? And how do we
build these personality traits or behavioral patterns based from those
adaptations to trauma. So the question became, how does the
pain from the past continue to show up in the present,

(06:18):
and how does it constrict us and limit us? And
how can we regain and recover agency responsibility, choice making
to ultimately liberate ourselves from these patterns. So this is
what I focus on extensively with every single person that
I work with.

Speaker 1 (06:38):
That's so much richness and beauty in that statement and
in the work you're doing. Something in particular, as you
started to talk about your work really stuck out to me.
And that's that idea first, the feeling that so many
people are experiencing, that's that feeling of being unsafe. But
you said, even unsafe in their own body.

Speaker 3 (07:00):
Can you talk a little bit about that, Yeah, so
I'll just talk about my own personal experiences with this
rather than talking about somebody else's and I'm sure a
lot of people will resonate with this, which was when
I first started doing my own work, you know, seventeen
years ago, really starting to take an inventory of what

(07:23):
I was going through and building awareness on what my
experience was. Is my anxiety was through the roof. I
would wake up in the morning and my heart would
be pounding out of my chest. My stomach would be
so tight and constricted, my muscles were always tight. I
was in what we could call fight or flight constantly

(07:46):
from the moment I woke up to the moment I
went to sleep, and then throughout the night I would
wake up with night terrors, screaming yeah, just never once
feeling safe. I can trace this feeling back, as most
people do when I work with them, to the very
early stages of my life, where I was growing up

(08:08):
in very unsafe circumstances, and I'd be happy to talk
more about those circumstances if we want. But in short,
my parents were very young, and they were very complicated
social circumstances, and I wasn't wanted from the beginning. It
was a problem, and children at this age are very

(08:30):
sensitive to their environment. So I was very able to
pick up on the fact that I was not wanted,
and these beliefs of being unworthy, not deserving of love
or connection, not being wanted, they were entrenched deep inside
of me. And so how can you ever feel safe
if you believe that you're not worthy of love or

(08:53):
connection or belonging. So these were very, very deep, like
I said, entrenched beliefs inside of me. And of course
when I would navigate the world, the behaviors the perceptions
of the world that I had were very challenging and difficult,
and of course I created lots of behaviors because of

(09:17):
that that were very dysfunctional or harmful. And so then
I was very harsh and critical of myself, always evaluating
and judging myself, because again this was the early environment
that I had. So no matter where I was, I
could be sitting on the side of a mountain alone
with my two lovely dogs at the time, and I
would still feel like something was out to get me,

(09:40):
or somebody was right there going to hurt me, because
it wasn't what was happening outside of me, it was
what was happening inside of me as a result of
what happened to me. So that was the trauma that
I carried was It wasn't the things that happened to
me in my developmental years. It was how I reacted,
how I responded, how I adapted to those and those

(10:03):
are the patterns that I carried throughout the rest of
my life, still deal with today. And Yeah, that was
the crooks of really starting to feel safe in this world,
which took a long time, of really building awareness and
having a practice of working with those dynamics inside of me.

Speaker 1 (10:23):
Yeah, you know, that really resonates. I work with so
many people who in their first few sessions are just
describing what you did. You know, I wake up anxious, right,
I wake up, my heart is racing, I'm nauxious, my
stomach is in knots, and that well, I mean that's

(10:45):
not in the big book of diagnostics, right, that doesn't
fit the criteria for anxiety, but it sure fits a
lot of criteria for just wrecking somebody's life. And then
something else I've been encountering probably a lot in the
past years, since I started reading more into it, is
this idea of emotionally immature or unavailable parents in recent

(11:06):
generations prior to the most recent ones, and that really
resonates as well in some ways, you know, And I'd
like to dive into a little bit of your experience
growing up, but there seems to be a lot of
people out there who have grown up in situations. Right
we talk about trauma and big T trauma that your

(11:27):
life was threatened or there was some natural disaster or
active terrorism you were apart with, and people think, oh, yeah,
that's okay, I've experienced trauma. But many people today have
not gone through these kinds of things, but are feeling
the effects of this long term small T trauma. The
compilation of all of these factorism as you suggested, As

(11:49):
you said like kind of inhabit the body in some ways.
Can you talk a little bit what was it for you?
What was it about your upbringing? Again, recognizing that there
hasn't been a big TA trauma in your life, but
you know, somehow throughout the process of growing up you've
kind of found yourself there.

Speaker 3 (12:08):
Yeah. Yeah, So we have the big TA trauma, the
physical abuse, the sexual abuse, the loss of parents, the
abandonment of parents, which I check almost every one of
those off. But then there's also the small T trauma,
which I don't compare trauma or pain. It's unique for everybody,

(12:33):
and this small T trauma is just as impactful, just
as hurtful, just as harmful. Small T trauma isn't necessarily
about the bad things that happen to you that shouldn't happen.
It can also be the good things that are supposed
to happen that don't happen. Having present, loving, attuned parents

(12:59):
who can communicate their love and their presence to their
child in a way that the child is able to
receive it. This is missing, as you're pointing out. Dan Siegel,
the famous neuroscientists. He talks about interpersonal neurobiology, which essentially

(13:20):
is when babies are developing their nervous system, their emotional
circuits are developing, they're literally downloading the information from the
mature regulated nervous emotional system, which is the parents. But
what happens when the parents are stressed? What happens when

(13:43):
the parents are too busy figuring out finances and the
stresses of navigating this turbulent time that we're living in.
What happens when they don't have resources or any connection
whatsoever with anybody, and they're living in isolation. They have
to go back to work a week two weeks after
giving birth, and this baby is now in childcare with

(14:05):
scores of other little kids. What's the message that the
child develops there? It's that I'm not important, my needs
don't matter, I'm not safe. And even further, what happens
if we do have parents that are present physically present,
but they're too occupied and too busy stressed, and they're

(14:26):
not there emotionally with their child. Or even further, what
happens if they're carrying around a tremendous amount of pain themselves.
What happens if they're carrying around all the wounds from
their upbringing as well? Those are all passing directly onto
the child as well. And so this is where we
get into the realm of intergenerational trauma. The pain flows

(14:50):
through the parents and goes directly to the child, and
this is the environment that the body is developing in
relationship to. So, for instance, there's an emotional circuit which
is referred to in the neuroscience realm as the panic
and grief emotional circuit. It's built into almost every living

(15:15):
animal that has a direct rearing connection with parents, so
we can find it in birds, we can find it
in mammals, so on. And this panic grief emotional circuit
is often referred to as the call the loved one's home.
So if a baby bird falls out of a nest,
this panic grief emotional circuit gets activated and the baby

(15:39):
cries out, and that tells the mother to come and
pick the baby back up and put them in the nest.
This is inherent in humans as well. But what happens
if the parents well meaning, loving, caring, and they're indoctrinated
or propagandized and they're listening to all the parents arenting

(16:00):
experts who say don't hold your baby. When they cry out,
this panic grief is at a very high level of activation,
and they're crying out for the care, for the connection,
for the love that they're completely dependent on. Humans are
the most immature, undeveloped, dependent species that we can identify

(16:22):
in this world for the longest amount of time. And
so this baby's crying out asking for the care and comfort,
and the mother is suppressing all of her mother instincts
to care and nurture this baby because her doctor said
don't hold this baby when they cry. So this panic
grief is high level activated. Their body is developing in

(16:45):
relationship to that. When you're feeling panic, what's happening. Your
hormones are pumping cortisol, the stress hormone, adrenaline, histamines raging
through your body. And this becomes the baseline of our development.
And so then later on in life, our hearts are
beating out of our chest. We're always hot, our muscles

(17:06):
are tense and constricted. We're always in a state of panic,
and we wonder why, and we call it anxiety. So
we can see these very early areas where these patterns
develop from the systemic areas of our life that our
parents are inheriting as well.

Speaker 1 (17:23):
And I mean, just to think back a generation or
to ago, that was the dominant parenting practice, right doctor
Spock's book, or however many books that you know, pediatricians
and obstetrician were, you know, we're told like, yeah, just
let them cry it out fifteen or twenty minutes, and

(17:44):
fifteen or twenty minutes for an infant is an eternity.
I love, I simply love how you have synthesized so
much frightening but real research into that statement. And I
remember the when I talk about these things, I will
never forget. It must have been high school, maybe it

(18:05):
was in college, maybe doubt grad schools. Early on the
famous monkey studies of the fifties or sixties, right, the
hard monkey and the soft monkey, where we just started
to realize that, right, you know, only fifty or sixty
years ago, that when you take an infant monkey and
you put it in a cage with a stuffed animal mother,

(18:30):
it's brain developed somewhat in a healthy way. Now there's
a lot of other factors that go into it. And
you take an infant monkey and you put it in
a cage with a wire, hard cold, similar you know,
similarity to a mother, it's brain doesn't develop and it
eventually withers and dies. And that's just one factor that
we found in the fifties or sixties. And now we're

(18:52):
adding good neuroscience, good brain imaging into it, and we're
realizing some of these practices what they have done to us.
So what's the answer. And I know you have an
amazing answer to it, your treatment and the work you do.
How do we help people heal from this?

Speaker 3 (19:11):
Yes? So, yeah, modern science and research really came around
to this in the fifties and sixties, as you're pointing out,
maybe a little before them too, But this knowledge is
nothing new, and this is inherent in every indigenous culture.
Every native culture knows the importance of healthy, secure attachments,

(19:37):
connections early in life. In many indigenous cultures, they would
have practices where if you were stressed, if you were
having a difficult time, you weren't allowed to go near
a pregnant mother because they understood the stress from this
person would transmit through the mother into this baby developing

(20:01):
in utero, and this baby would take on the stress
of the environment. So this was very well known and
most hunter gatherer cultures that still exist to this day,
they don't let the baby touch the ground until they're
about four years old, meaning these babies are constantly held.
They never ever go without connection. Of course, in our

(20:26):
very sterile, cold, disconnected city life here in well, it's
not just the West, it's all throughout the world. You
can go into many of these indigenous areas and they'll
have cities where they're just as disconnected as we are.
And we can't be further away from that. So what
we really need to learn how to do is to

(20:48):
reconnect with ourselves. We're not just disconnected from ourselves, we're
disconnected from each other. We're disconnected from the world around us,
and we're disconnected from what we do, meaning that what
we do doesn't represent who we are. So the healing
journey becomes building awareness of what we carry, taking a

(21:10):
responsibility and accountability agency for what's inside of us. We're
not responsible for what happened to us. This is in
no way to blame the mothers who are carrying their child,
and this pain transmits and passes through the mother into
the child. Right, We're not responsible for the world that

(21:33):
shaped us, but we are responsible for taking accountability for
what's inside of us and for what we put into
the world and what we transmit. And this is a
practice that I help every single person that I work
with build.

Speaker 1 (21:48):
I am scripating furiously, things lout directions. I want to
go here. You made two such beautiful points and one
that I'm trying to help with just just today, probably
part I'm somewhat exhausted. You said, the mothers, the parents,
it's not their fault. They're not to blame. Most parents

(22:12):
hopefully did the best they could. Unfortunately, we are so
removed from our indigenous inherent wisdom. I love that phrase.
You use, that inherent wisdom that we know to take
care of infants, to nurture them, to pick them up
when they're crying. But we've been instructed to go against
that for so long. There seems to be, in my experience,

(22:38):
especially lately in the past few years, maybe even more,
this tendency for young people to become very angry with
their parents or their mistakes, their errors of the past,

(22:58):
even if it was in good faith. And I guess
that goes back to maybe your point of well, I
guess my big question is how can we help that?
But I think it goes back to what you said
about connecting with this self. You can maybe talk about
that for specifically for our young people right now, our
twenties and thirties that maybe are looking back at their

(23:19):
parents with some frustration or disappointment or maybe even anger.

Speaker 3 (23:24):
Yeah, and rightfully so, right, what is the point of anger? Right?
What is the function? What purpose does anger serve? If
we're feeling anger, we could get very curious about it.
I'm not saying that we should let the anger come out,
bursting out. This seems in unconstructive, unhealthy ways. But we

(23:47):
also don't want to suppress the anger, as our culture
and society absolutely tells us we need to do. So. Instead,
let's get very curious about it. Let's try to figure
out why is it here. So, if we had troubled
relationships with our parents growing up and we're feeling anger
about that, what purpose might it serve? Well, the purpose

(24:08):
of anger, Well, for instance, if you know you're walking
dan down a street in Chicago and somebody comes up
and starts grabbing you and pushing you around, you're going
to feel anger. You're gonna put a boundary and say,
don't touch me like that, don't push me, get away
from me. Anger is there to set boundaries, to push

(24:29):
the threats away, or to communicate that you have unmet needs.
So when a baby is crying out in a fit
of anger, they're expressing unmet needs circumstances that they have
needs for that are not being met. To be held,

(24:50):
to be loved, to be accepted unconditionally, to not have
to work for their relationship. So this anger is a
natural byproduct of the uns needs of our development or
of our environment. Again, I'm not saying that we should
let this just come bursting out the seams inappropriate ways,
which is very frequently what happens. So instead, let's get

(25:14):
very curious about it and we say, okay, so my
parents weren't there for me. They abandoned me at a
very early age. They abused me emotionally, physically, sexually, you
name it, and that really hurt me and I carry
a tremendous amount of anger because of that. Well, we
could ask a lot of questions here about this anger,

(25:37):
and we could say, what kind of person does that
to a child? And the inevitable answer that will come
to is somebody who's also in a lot of pain.
Where did they learn to treat somebody like that?

Speaker 1 (25:51):
Right?

Speaker 3 (25:52):
Chances are if we look at it objectively, we would
see that all the things that our parents did to us,
somebody did to them as well. They're carrying around the
exact same pain that we feel. In other words, there's
probably nobody in the world who understands our pain as
much as they do, and there's probably nobody who understands

(26:16):
their pain as much as we do. So to be angry,
to ridicule, to criticize, to judge, evaluate, to punish, to
exile our parents for what they did to us is
to continue the exact same pattern of what was done

(26:37):
to us. Instead, what we can do is we can
take responsibility for what has happened, for this inner generational
pattern that was handed down through the generations. It's not
our parents' fault. They did the best that they could
with what they had. Yes, they could have put in

(26:58):
more effort. Yes they could have tried and gone through more,
put more energy into connecting and understanding these things. But
they did the best they could. We could take that
for granted, and to judge them, to be angry at
them is also to do the same thing to ourselves
because that exact same pain, those exact same patterns are

(27:22):
inside of us. So instead of fighting these things, instead
of trying to get rid of them, instead of trying
to change them and fix them, let's try to get
very curious about it. Let's try to understand why they're here,
where they come from, and how these patterns and emotions
show up in the moment in the present, In other words,
how the pain from the past shows up here and now.

(27:44):
And what we can do with that is we can
try and figure out what are the unmet needs underlying
these emotions, these perceptions, these behaviors, and then we could
try to meet those needs in healthy, constructive ways.

Speaker 1 (28:02):
Beautifully stated that Rich, Wow, I will certainly forward that
snippet of the podcast to a few people in particular.
Thank you. I want to come. We will come back
to that. But there was another thing you said that
I want to make sure we come back to. And

(28:23):
this can be I heard it in two ways, either
related to an overarching principle of who we are, or
into in our careers and our choices for work. You said,
what we do is not consistent with who we are.

Speaker 3 (28:39):
That's right.

Speaker 1 (28:39):
What do you mean by that?

Speaker 3 (28:41):
Yes, So, let's say you grow up in a household
where there's high expectations, evaluations, judgments, Or let's say you
grow up in a household where your parents are not available.
They're too busy, too stressed. There maybe even physically present,
but they're not emotionally present with you. We would call

(29:04):
this proximal separation would be the term. Whether they're physically
there but they're checked out. And we see this very
very commonly today with parents and their phones walking around
pushing their babies or walking them around with their kids.
But they're just stuck on their screens. What's the message
you get there as as a child where you're trying

(29:25):
to connect with your parents and they're unavailable, it's the
phone's more important than I am, The job's more important
than I am, The whatever it is that they're doing
is more important than I am. I don't matter, i
am not important, I'm not valued, I'm not respected. Now,

(29:46):
growing up, the attachment is the most important thing for
a child. We can't survive without it. And the next
thing that is equally as important as the need for
authenticity to express your boundaries, to express your emotions, to
be who you are, uniquely yourself. But what happens when
those two are in conflict with each other, meaning that

(30:08):
if you express your anger because your parents are disconnected,
you get punished or you get put in a time out,
meaning you get disconnected. In other words, they threaten you
with a thing that's most important to you, the connection, well,
the authenticity who you are, gets sacrificed to maintain the attachment.

(30:28):
In those situations, there's really only two ways that a
child can look at the situation. Unconsciously, of course, a
child doesn't have the mental capacity to weigh out all
of these options, so it's an unconscious decision, but they
have to make a choice. The first option that they
can come to is my parents are unavailable, or my

(30:51):
parents are hurting me, or my parents are doing whatever
it is that's causing me this harm because they're not
the job. They're not qualified to be parents. They're not
emotionally mature, regulated, they don't have the skills and tools
that they need. In other words, I'm not safe. And

(31:12):
now some children do come to that. I was one
of them. I came to it very early in my life.
But the first choice that always comes up is, well,
my parents actually do know what's going on. They're older,
they've survived this world, they have connections. And even further,
if you're watching your parents care for other children or

(31:33):
other people more than they're caring for you, it's very
clear they do know how to care for people. It
is there. The problem is I'm not worthy of it.
I'm not deserving of it. I'm not good enough to
get their care. But if I could be good enough,
then I will get the care, Then I'll get the connection,

(31:53):
then I'll get the value, the respect, all the things
that I really need. So we start to adapt to
this pain by trying to be good enough. We become
people pleasers. We fill up our calendars to work with
as many people as we can because we get a
sense of contributing and helping people. We're valued, we're important,

(32:14):
we're respected. We go out into the world and we
acquire massive amounts of status, of prestige, of respect, of
financial resources. We sacrifice ourselves to help people as often
as we can, to do things for them even when
we don't want to do them. So a lot of

(32:37):
the patterns of who we become later in life built
on adaptations to these pains. Right, One of my teachers
would always say, and this was certainly the case for me.
He told me this, And when he told me, I said, Oh,
I don't want to hear that. It's not my situation,
but it absolutely was. Is when we feel like we're

(33:00):
not good enough, right, when we feel like we're not
deserving or we're not valued, well, then we go to
medical school because then we're going to be important, and
then we're going to be valued, and then people are
going to need us for crying out loud from the
beginning of the day until the end of the day,
and everything in between. We're going to be important and valued.
So that's an expression of me doing things that is

(33:21):
not in line with who I am as a person.
And this is how we all get so disconnected, not
just from ourselves, because we're not paying attention to that
pain that we're in. We're not connected to it. The
adaptation of being busy, of being valuable, of being respected
by all these people out there is a disconnection, a

(33:43):
distraction from the pain that we're in. And then we're
not connected to each other because I'm more focused on
being important and valued. I'm not actually here with you
right now, Dan, I'm not seeing what you're going through.
I'm not seeing what you're feeling. I'm not attuned and
connected to you. I'm not connected to the world around
me by any means because I'm so focused on being

(34:04):
important and being valued and everything that I do is
to those ends. So this is what an addiction looks like.
And again we'll find those patterns in ourselves and we'll
find very similar patterns to what created our pain to
begin with. So another reason why we want to be
very careful not to blame anybody, because blaming somebody who

(34:27):
hurt us we're also blaming ourselves, and there is no
outcome that is constructive and conducive to what we're looking
for when blame is a part of this equation.

Speaker 1 (34:39):
And I would agree with your instructor even in another
way that for those that don't go on to medical
school to be needed in that way, many of them
become therapists to fill their calendar every day. So beware
the therapists. And it's been while since I've told this story,
but somebody I worked with long ago, another therapist, would

(35:05):
this was back in the days of paper calendar books,
and I accidentally saw that calendar book one day and
every day, one day through Friday, every hour from seven
am to eleven pm was filled. And if there was
ever a cancelation or if it was known in advance

(35:29):
that a client wasn't going to show up, that person
had their secretary staff fill that right away Monday through Friday,
and then Saturday was a lesser day of only seven
am maybe to two pm. And I just remember seeing
that as young therapists and thinking there is something not
right there. You know, yes, there are people that need help,

(35:49):
but we need to make sure we take care of
ourselves well. And do the work that you're describing, So
beware the therapist who has the full paper schedule book.
I'm so enjoying our conversation, but I continue to be
beautifully distracted by your background and I want to talk

(36:10):
about that, but I know that naturally leads into the
work you do there, and in particular, I know what
you've just shared definitely relates to somatic work. I'm always
excited to hear about the different kinds of somatic work
people do, but then also the overall work. Can you
talk about that a little bit.

Speaker 3 (36:32):
Yeah, So I'm here in my therapy room right now.
This is where I see people at for the time being,
and in terms of the somatic work, so when I
talk about this, I talk about getting in tune with
the body, reconnecting with the body. So if somebody comes

(36:53):
to me and they say I have anxiety, I have depression,
so on and so forth, when I start to look
at what does that mean for them, there's obviously patterns
that are associated with it, Like depression would be the
literal burying or stuffing down or disconnecting of emotions. In particular,

(37:14):
the word depression means to bury and to take away energy,
and those are the two major characteristics of what we
would call psychological or emotional depression. And so what I
start to look at very early on is what level
of disconnection to the body are they feeling and why?

(37:34):
And so if somebody says I have anxiety or I
have depression, we do an exercise where we try to
take an inventory of what feelings, what physical sensations live
in the body, and I pay very close attention to
what the relationship with those feelings is. Do they like it?
Do they dislike it? Do they welcome it? Do they

(37:57):
fight it? Do they try to get rid of it?
Do they judge it, evaluate it, criticize it, do they
try to exile it?

Speaker 1 (38:05):
Right?

Speaker 3 (38:06):
What is the relationship with these feelings in the body?
And the goal is to build awareness so we can
recognize or identify these feelings in the body and what
emotion in particular is this associated with. And then I
ask things like when was the first time you can
remember feeling it? In other words, how long has it

(38:28):
been here? How often do you feel this? Is it
every day? Is it multiple times a day? Is it
all throughout the day. Once we can start to see
how present this feeling is and what we do with it.
I distract from it. I go get wasted, I get drunk,
I go to work, I scroll on my phone, I

(38:51):
go gamble, so on and so forth, all these adaptations
to get away from it. We can see that those adaptations,
they're not the primary problem issue that we're dealing with.
They're actually an attempt to solve the problem. And the
problem is that I have this pain in my body
and I don't know what to do with it. And

(39:13):
we can almost always trace us back to very early
in life where my needs were not being met, and
this feeling in my body, just like that panic grief
that I was describing earlier, was telling me these needs
are not being met. And so at a very early
age I learned I had to disconnect from them because

(39:35):
they were telling me something in my environment was very
dangerous or harmful to me, and I couldn't listen to that.
I had a disconnect from it so that way I
could maintain my relationships. And so the somatic practice is
we try to get back in tune with that feeling
and we try to build a relationship with it. And

(39:58):
the way that we can do that is you do
what I'm doing right now, is you sit on the
floor or anywhere. You can sit on a dirty ikea
rug which I've spent years doing and hours of every
single day sitting on. Or you can sit in a
chair and you just close your eyes and you turn
your attention inward and you try to find that feeling.

(40:22):
And what we're going to try to do is build
a relationship with it. So we'll try to connect with it,
try and spend some time with it. When I ask
people when they first started feeling this feeling, right, where
does this go back to? What were the things that
you really needed when you were feeling this feeling? It's

(40:42):
almost always something along the lines of the exact same thing,
which is I needed somebody to be with me. I
needed somebody to see me, to understand and hear me,
to know what I was going through, to accept what
I was going through, not try to fight it, not
try to fix it, don't try to tell me it's

(41:02):
a different way, right. I want you to see it,
understand it, accept it, and then try to give me
some comfort, try to validate and reaffirm me, and maybe
even a physical comfort. And of course, to do this
consistently and ideally show me some way to process this pain,

(41:22):
to navigate it. These are along the lines, not everything,
but a lot of the things that people really needed.
And then if we look at well, what's your relationship
with this feeling? Well, I avoid it, I tried to
distract from it. I try to get rid of it.
I hate this feeling. We can see we're continuing that
exact same pattern that caused the pain to begin with.
So let's try to create a pattern of doing something new.

(41:46):
Let's try to be that person who we needed to
care for us, and we'll try and care for ourselves
in that exact way. That's the practice, well that kind
of work. Now tell me, being that you're in Portland
and the name of your practice is Psychedelic integration.

Speaker 1 (42:08):
Correct, can you talk a little bit how does psychedelic
assisted therapy work with the work you're doing?

Speaker 3 (42:16):
Right? Yeah, So, a psychedelic experience is by definition, one
where you connect very deeply with yourself. That's what the
word psychedelic means is psyche the immaterial aspects of who
you are, your mind, your emotions, your spirituality, so on

(42:36):
and so forth, and delic emerging or manifesting. So a
connection with these aspects of yourself. And so my entire
practice is based on facilitating this type of experience, and
so very early, very very early, right when I first
started working with somebody, of course, I'll give them the

(42:56):
overview and all of the logistics of how this is
going to work, and we'll have lots of consent about
the conversations we're going to have, and then I go
straight for the core of things. I don't spend a
lot of time building the familiarity and all that stuff.
I don't do that. I wouldn't do anybody any favors

(43:19):
by taking that time. Within five minutes, I'm going to
get directly to what's bringing this person in and then
I'm going to help them connect with it. So we
facilitate this psychedelic experience right away. And of course, working
with a psychedelic substance like psilocybin, for instance, can be

(43:42):
very very powerful in this therapeutic context. The psychedelic is
very good at lots of things. In particular, it's really
good at bringing things to your awareness, especially any pains, constrictions, adaptations,
patterns that you have that maybe helped you, maybe even

(44:03):
saved your life at one point, but now cause you harm,
Those are the things that are going to come up
to the surface. So if we want to work with
a psychedelic substance, we need to make sure that we're
very well prepared to see those types of things that
are going to come up, because if we don't, and

(44:24):
if we have a pattern of avoiding, exiling, fighting, struggling
with these feelings or emotions or memories, what happens when
a psychedelic brings it up. While we try to avoid it,
we try to get rid of it, and that's the
recipe for a very very difficult time. So we try
to connect with it very very early on. And then

(44:46):
once we have a foundation of we've done enough inquiry,
we've taken the inventory, we know what we're dealing with,
we know what's inside of us, at least to a
certain level, we've reached a capacity, a saturation what we
really want to work with, and we've spent weeks cultivating
a practice of intentionally going into that space and connecting

(45:09):
with that feeling every day, multiple times a day, as
often as we can. Then we use a psychedelic experience
as a tool to connect with that feeling, to connect
with that wound, that pain, that's inside of us to
try to go in and nurture and comfort it in
ways that we were unable to do up until this point.

(45:33):
One other thing I want two things that the psychedelic
is really good at as well is writing new patterns.
So if we have this pattern of avoidance, of exiling,
of conflict inside of us, we can do something new
very quickly with a psychedelic. And the other thing that
it's very good at is showing you things that you

(45:54):
might not have known before. So for me, I had
all this pain inside of me. I wanted to comfort it.
I wanted to connect with it. I wanted to process
it and express it. But I had no idea of
what that looks like. Sure I hear people talk about it,
Sure I read all the books, but the experiential, the
experience of doing it was completely outside of what I

(46:16):
knew how to do. And it was with a psychedelic
experience where I got the feeling of being held by
a mother, being welcomed, being loved, accepted, nurtured. And this
was the first time in my life that I had
really gotten that. Now, of course, when you talk to
somebody who's addicted to a substance, like alcohol or heroin.

(46:38):
They'll tell you that's exactly what they get from it.
So getting it from a psychedelic shows me exactly how
I can cultivate this feeling myself and how I can
give it to myself without needing to go to those
external sources to get it. So if we use this
as a tool, a very specific tool, and we come

(46:58):
up with intentions of what we want to go in
and work on, of course, and we stay open to
whatever else may come up, we can really get to
some incredible depths very very quickly, especially when that conditioned mind,
the lens of perception that we see the world and

(47:20):
ourselves through is the defenses, the defense mechanisms that are
in place to keep us away from that pain. When
those are very strong, a psychedelic experience can be very
useful at letting those soften and dissipate, even just for
a little bit of time, just so we can experience

(47:41):
something completely new outside of that old, familiar pattern. And
that's kind of the way that we go about it.

Speaker 1 (47:49):
That story just took me back so viscerally, so somatically
to my most recent psilocybin experience through training in a
group setting, I'll just never forget feeling just being open,
like my arms open, and feeling the intense love that

(48:13):
I hadn't you know. I'm sure there are points in
life where I had felt that, but in that moment,
to have that experience and to be reminded that that
kind of love exists in the world was so powerful,
and my wife and family are very thankful for it
because I came back a much more loving person. So
just a small example of what that kind of work

(48:36):
can do. As I was listening to the work that
you do, what I have found in my work recently,
but then also I've been told and experienced with people
who have used psychedelic assistant therapy for a little bit
longer is very often we are helping people much more quickly.

(49:00):
No longer for some No longer do we need months
or years of treatment, but sometimes within you know, well,
a much quicker amount of time in sessions people are
receiving this beautiful healing. Is that similar to your experience?
What are you finding in length of treatment for people?

Speaker 3 (49:23):
Yeah, I want to be very careful here because a
lot of the information that is coming out about psychedelic
therapy kind of paints it as a magic pill, this
idea that you take this and everything is fixed, everything
is completely different, everything changes.

Speaker 1 (49:45):
Now.

Speaker 3 (49:45):
Don't get me wrong, that absolutely can happen, and I've
seen it. That's not been my experience. And when I
work with people, yes, I see very big immediate trans
ferm people just from conversation. They will very frequently tell
me five, ten, fifteen minutes into our very first call

(50:08):
that they've never thought about things this way. They've never
asked these questions, and no therapist, no doctor, has ever
asked these questions before. And once we start to build
that practice, which we'll do in our very first session,
is we start to see change in transformation right away. Now,

(50:28):
what I wanted to be careful about is that this
is not an end destination. There is no end destination.
It's more of a commitment, a commitment to exactly as
you just said, living life more openly, embodying, more acceptance,
more compassion, more connection. And if we didn't have those,

(50:52):
like you mentioned too, it's very difficult to cultivate those
things and to create those in our lives. Then a
byproduct of that is is it passes on to the
next generation as well. And then this pattern of intergenerational
trauma continues, but as you saw right there is very quickly.
It can really help us open up. It can show

(51:15):
us a new way of living, a new way of
experiencing life and connection that we were closed off to
minutes before that. And so it's not a destination, but
it's a commitment to continuing that into nurturing and developing

(51:36):
and maturing the practice of staying open, staying in tune
with what I'm going through, nurturing caring for myself so
that way I'm at a place where I can connect
with the people who are important to me. So if
I can be present with myself rather than avoiding myself

(51:56):
and disconnecting from myself, now I can be present with
my children, or with my partner, or with my dog,
or with my friends, or especially with my clients. Right
if I want to be present with anybody else, first,
I have to be present with myself. So this is
the practice that we start to work on. And there's depths,

(52:17):
there's levels to this stuff. And I usually work with
people for six to eight weeks at a time, and
very frequently they'll come back and they'll tell me right away,
this was life changing, you know, I got more in
these six weeks than I did in twenty thirty forty

(52:38):
years of therapy, so on and so forth. I've had
lots of people who were on the verge of getting
medical assisted suicide. They usually won't tell me that until
the like halfway point or two thirds through with what
we're working through. But you know, I can see those
things and the changes that happen in such a short

(53:03):
amount of time. It's real, and it's not the substance
that's going to do that for you. If you come
into a psychedelic experience without preparing, without laying down that foundation,
without taking that inventory of what you need to work
through or what you are working through, and you just
take a psychedelic substance, chances are things you're going to

(53:27):
get exacerbated and it's going to get very turbulent. And
that's happened to me too when I first got started.
But on the other hand, if we're able to really
go into that space intentionally and to work through something
like this, yeah, we can see very profound shifts very quickly.
And the most important thing is that we develop, we mature,

(53:49):
we cultivate, we stay committed to the practice of how
we're going to live and enjoy our life.

Speaker 1 (54:01):
I think you speak to what we often talk about
is good preparation for the journey or the psychedelic part
of the treatment, but also life changing integration afterwards, that
it's not just about taking a substance and expecting profound change,
but everything else that goes on around it. And much

(54:23):
like I know on your website you reference Joseph Campbell's
Here with a Thousand Faces, as do I often. I
think that's very true in life, that we can make
these profound changes in a short amount of time, But
just as any hero story, it takes good mentorship to
sustain that throughout life because life is always changing, whether

(54:46):
it's connecting with kids, your dog, or family, or clients
or work, there will be hiccups along the road. To
have a therapist that you trust to make these profound
changes what to come back to is truly a blessing,
as is Julian.

Speaker 2 (55:01):
This.

Speaker 1 (55:01):
This conversation has been powerful. Thank you. You've reminded me
of a lot of the work that we do. I
do have to ask again, I am absolutely for those
watching on YouTube. The art behind you is beautiful. Can
you quickly before we wrap can you tell me a
little bit about that or who that's why, or where

(55:24):
that's from.

Speaker 3 (55:25):
Yeah, well, some of these are done by indigenous Shapibo
from the Amazon, like uh I think that these ones
over here are out of the camera's view. And then
I have of course some famous uh Aahuasca visionary artists

(55:46):
like Pablo Automo and the ones that you're able to well,
like that one in the corner that touchhedron is actually
carved from aahuasca vine, again by local, just indigenous person.
They didn't sign a name on it, they didn't make anything,

(56:06):
it was just it was done in the Amazon. These
paintings behind me are by a local artist in Peru
as well, named love Song. And yeah, each one of
those is a visionary painting from psychedelic experiences. He has
a bunch of them actually, and I really resonated with

(56:29):
these ones, so that's why I brought them back.

Speaker 1 (56:31):
They're certainly beautiful. Once again, what a beautiful conversation. Thank
you so much for your time today. Where can people
find out more about your work and connect with you?
Mm hmm.

Speaker 3 (56:44):
The website that's the best, the best method there which
you've already been on, so we could we could link that.
I try to post articles on their very short, just
little snippets about what we're talking about, lots of resources,
and I'm starting to I'm not very good at it.
I don't do social media. I don't go online, as

(57:08):
that's one of the distractions for me right there is
I can get sucked into that, so I make a
very conscious effort to stay off of that. But I
do go on to Instagram and post things occasionally. Don't
expect me to communicate much on there, but there are
you know, short videos and little things like that that
other people can find as well, which I happily send

(57:29):
you the link for that as well.

Speaker 1 (57:32):
Please too. Again, such a robust conversation, so much goodness
throughout our time together, if they're I don't want to
limit it. But if we were to limit it to
one or two things that you really want listeners to
take away, what might those be?

Speaker 3 (57:51):
Yeah, And the first thing that comes to my mind
is that I think a lot of people are going
through something similar to what I've gone through, well, which
is the pain seems so great, so big, so overwhelming,
kind of like the Wall and Pink Floyd's the Wall.

(58:11):
No matter how I already tried. He could not break free.
The wall was too big as you could see. You know,
it just seems like there's no way of getting through
that or getting around that. And you know, when I
was working with people, when I was studying this, I
was seeing people make transformations and make changes, and I

(58:34):
thought to myself, well, it's available. It's just available to
some people, but that's probably just not going to be
my life. Again. That was another shape of the view
of I'm not good enough, I'm not deserving. So what
I would want to say is that I come from
the foundational belief that the wisdom, the wholeness, the the

(59:01):
ability to care for others and for yourself, all of
this is inherent and inside each and every one of us.
And it's a light that cannot be dimmed. It cannot
be contained, and it cannot be extinguished. It's always there.
We can lose it, we can become disconnected from it,

(59:23):
and we can find it again. When somebody is healing
from an addiction, we say they're in recovery. The word
recover means to find something that we've lost. What is
it that people are finding when they're in recovery, it's themselves.
It's who they were or who they would have been
before all of this pain. There's only one outcome that

(59:44):
we can find, of wholeness, and it's inside of us.
It's inside each and every one of us, and we
can find it. And again, we want to be very
careful about blaming and being harsh and critical and judgmental
to ourselves and to others, because this is an impediment
on that path of reconnecting with who we were. So

(01:00:06):
it's inside of each and every one of us. We
can find it. We can build a practice. And even
though we're going through very dark times and it's likely
that it's going to get darker before things start to
get better, there are r resources, there are people out
there who can help with this and the wisdom everything
is inside of you.

Speaker 1 (01:00:28):
That is beautiful. Much like my teacher, doctor Victor Frankel says,
the human spirit is always there. It does not become ill,
but sometimes we ignore it, we avoid it, we don't
pay attention, and when we do that, the healing power
that human spirit is always within us. Julian, thank you

(01:00:49):
so much for your time. I you know, I often
tell people I don't go back and listen to my
own episodes. It's one way to keep me humble. But
I tell you what, this one I will go back
and listen to for your wisdom, an insight that you
have there. Thank you so very much for your time today.

Speaker 3 (01:01:04):
Yeah, thank you for the kind words, Dan, Thank you
for having me as well. Feel free to stay in
touch and yeah, if you ever want to have another conversation,
please feel free to reach out anytime. I love it.

Speaker 1 (01:01:16):
Thank care. What a fortuitous blessing that this gentle soul
reached out to me to share with you. I asked
Julian after we got some recording, like, just how the
heck he found me? And of course, you know any

(01:01:37):
more of these days, there's there are services that do that.
There's AI that does that. I haven't really invested in
any in particular. Apparently I'm part of a database somewhere
or something. But it's interesting. I get a couple of
these offers a week, you know, maybe a half dozen
or so, and some of them just go right into

(01:01:57):
the spam folder. Some of them I actually take a
look at and see who the guests might be. But
this one there was something about it, right. I don't
know if you believe in these nodic connections as I do.
But something about a simple email, I was like, yeah,
I've got to get a whole. Maybe it was because
it was obvious it wasn't written by AI, that there

(01:02:18):
was a human being behind it, But I'm glad I did,
and Julian and I will definitely continue to connect about
his work and my work and our shared work. So
I hope you took a lot of meaning from that.
And as I said in the intro, and I truly
mean this, thank you for listening, Thank you for giving

(01:02:39):
me a reason every week to connect with amazing people
like this and to share our work with you. It
truly is an honor to bring meaning, purpose and resilience
and a little bit of psychedelics to your life. And
I hope you find it as meaningful as I do.
Take care.

Speaker 3 (01:03:02):
A S S S.

Speaker 1 (01:03:23):
S S

Speaker 3 (01:03:26):
S