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Jen’s limited perspective around mind-altering drugs was simple; they’re wrong, damaging, and a form of escapism - something you do when you want to party. In recent years, Jen listened to several people who shared thoughtfully about their own ceremonial experience with psilocybin mushrooms and ayahuasca. This piqued her curiosity along with the growing body of scientific work supporting plant medicine as one more tool to combat the symptomatology of many common illnesses. Jen asks Julie to educate her on this entire topic and it yielded another amazing conversation.
Our guest: JULIE WOOD felt stuck for much of her life in the conditioning that she calls the “Good Girl Program” - which left her over-thinking, over-performing and over-conforming - afraid to be herself. She followed all the Rules, graduated from Princeton and spent 18 years managing big advertising clients like PepsiCo and JPMorgan Chase. Despite her outer success she felt inauthentic and unfulfilled.
Nine years ago, she left it all behind, setting off with her now-husband on a 5-year Spirit Journey in a little Jeep Wrangler, visiting 69 countries along the way.
While traveling through Mexico and South America, she was introduced to the “niños santos” (psilocybin mushrooms) in the mountains of Oaxaca and participated in over 50 plant medicine ceremonies. Eventually she started supporting others in the ceremonial space, which she still does today at retreats in Mexico.
Through her transformative experiences with the plants, Julie began to connect with the gifts she’s here to share. Julie has incredible clarity around her purpose here on Earth - to guide others in connecting with their gifts - through coaching, WomanSpeak public speaking circles, Family Constellations and, of course, plant medicine.
Connect with Julie:
Website: juliekwood.com
Instagram @julie.k.wood
Facebook Julie K Wood
Connect with Jen:
email: Jennifer@beingREAL.me
Website: www.beingREAL.me
Instagram @beingREALjen
Great people, places, or things we referenced during this episode:
Films: For the Next 7 Generations available on Amazon and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiGkKNG1p88
Fantastic Fungi - documentary on Netflix
Resources: MAPS.org - Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. Excellent resource for reading about psychedelic research
The International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers: https://www.facebook.com/13GrandmothersCouncil/
Note: In this episode, we reference the “War on Drugs” and how it relates to a lack of acceptance around plant medicine that also gets linked with drug use. This was interesting info and food for thought:
In 1994, Nixon’s Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs and Watergate co-conspirator John Ehrlichman admitted to the real impetus for the War on Drugs, as quoted in Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure, in Harper's Magazine by Dan Baum, published in 2016:
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Join us next week and until then…keep communicating, connecting, and listening for REAL. It matters.
If you believe conversations like these belong in the world, please subscribe, rate & review this podcast - and even better, share it with someone else as a REAL conversation starter.
