Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: You've heard the phrase hurt people, hurt people.
Yeah, more dumb stuff. But it's true. If you are, if you are harmed, you are more than likely to produce harm as a result of that. And in the aggregate world, the world receives this harm that we are all spreading around to each other, right? In the aggregate, that produces atrocities. And I don't want atrocities. I don't want kids to make my clothes anymore. Period.
[00:01:23] Speaker B: Welcome to supernormalize, the podcast, where we challenge the conventional break boundaries and normalize the seemingly supernatural. Join me, CJ Barnaby, in the liminalist space to explore less charted realms of existence and to unravel the mysteries of life. Experience. Each episode I'm blessed with the opportunity to talk to regular people from across the world where they openly share their understanding and wisdom in service to others. If you're looking to upgrade your life, you've come to the right place.
Be sure to like and subscribe and I'll bring you great transforming conversations each week. My treasured viewers and listeners. If you have a life story or healing modality or unique knowledge that you'd love to share, reach out to me at supernormalizedroton dot me. Let's together embrace acceptance of the supernatural and unusual, what it really is completely normal. Today on supernormalize we have Julie Husingfeld, who is a clinical hypnotherapist and public speaker on self mastery, healing, and the new mind body medicine. Her working philosophy is that consciousness is a prime mover of the universe and that the body, mind and life story are all exactly the same thing. We actually have a deep conversation going through her understanding of her changes over time, her experiences, her initiatory experiences of actually having cancer, and how that changed her worldview and I a whole lot more. Julie's a really deep conversationalist and it's appreciated on how much she actually shared of her worldview and her experiences. And I can really appreciate the transformation she's gone through and to bring her to the world that she understands and expresses so well in this interview. So I'm sure you'll enjoy it as much as I did. And on with the show.
Welcome to supernormalize, Julie Husingfeld Julie, we've got in contact via a group that we share experience of, which is rin soup, and you expressed that you had some interesting stories that you'd like to share about your world and about your experiences and also what you do in the world when it comes to helping people move through their own personal health crisis and through personal change. So welcome to the show.
[00:03:48] Speaker A: Thank you. Thank you, CJ. Nice to see you.
[00:03:51] Speaker B: Yeah, it's great to see you, too.
So tell us about your background in early life, Julie. I mean, what actually happened for you that, you know, made life in culturally isolated Idaho a challenge?
[00:04:07] Speaker A: Oh, well, a challenge or not, I'm not sure. I think everyone.
Everybody's got to come from somewhere. So I was right. I was born in Idaho to pretty solid parents. They're good people, but they're very conventional. And so Idaho has a lot of cultural isolation. There just wasn't a lot going on in the nineties. There wasn't a lot of awareness of the outside world. And so I was a very curious individual all the way through high school, and I was increasingly convinced that the outlook I was being raised in, this kind of secular, capitalistic environment, was just not the whole picture. And the whole picture includes a lot more.
[00:04:58] Speaker B: So what triggered your suspicions that there wasn't the whole picture?
[00:05:03] Speaker A: Oh, man. Well, you know what happened? The first thing that happened, I was watching CNN at my grandparents house, and there was some segment on sweatshop labor, and it was probably 1011, something like that. Ten, 1112. And I learned about sweatshop labor. It just struck me as so unfair that I got to go to school and there were other kids who had to make my clothing so that I could go to school. And that disparity just. Oh, man, it's like a lightning bolt. It just made me feel so guilty and so out of place and so in the world and helpless being in the world.
I think the only thing that I could think of was, you know, I stopped buying clothes at regular stores, and that was sort of the social aspect. So I just knew that there was other things going on, and all sorts of crazy stuff would happen to me when I was sleeping. So I would have quite a few very potent dreams. Potent and symbolic dreams. And then when I woke up, I'd tell people and they'd say, oh, that's interesting, but not take it seriously. And so this kind of. So from, like, a spiritual perspective and a social perspective, I was seeing and encountering things that weren't being acknowledged. Right. So this and that. I mean, tell you what. That'll drive you crazy.
[00:06:31] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I know what you mean exactly. Cause when I was a child, I had that sort of thing happening to me as well.
And I also experienced that with the, you know, the understanding of sweatshops and everything. That's when I started buying lots of thrift store clothes. I was like, I'm not going to participate in the way that they want me to, which is buy the new stuff, just buy the thrift store clothes, you know, that's my way of. Out of that, you know?
[00:06:54] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, searching for a way out. Right. There's this. Yeah. That the world is bigger than what we're being given, this impulse to humanity. And this.
I don't know that there's any kid who doesn't feel that there's more going on than you go to school, you get the job, then you run the systems that keep the other kids exploited.
I'm not sure any kid growing up in the west doesn't see and recognize that that's a problem. And then it's just a matter of whether you continue to resist or whether you capitulate to the program you're being given.
[00:07:32] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And then speaking to that part about not being acknowledged with your experiences, that. That's pretty rough, too, as a child, because I know that for myself, when I had dreams like that or actually contact with spirits at home and. And just explain that, you know, even to other friends that experienced it with me, they. They would just shut it off straight away, you know? And it's like. Because I can't deal with the fact that something had happened and.
Yeah. And I think it was just because of the. You know, I'd say it's like western colonialism of the mind.
You know, it just. It's actually more comfortable. If there is no spirits.
[00:08:14] Speaker A: Is it more comfortable or is it easier to raise children? Because actually, I think that a lot. I think that a lot of times, these systems that prevent us from feeling our extrasensory qualities right beyond sight, beyond hearing, beyond touch. And what are the other two? Smell and taste. Beyond that, we have quite a few other senses. But using those senses makes you a potent individual and potent children are a hassle. And so a lot of times, a majority of us. And this leads into what I do for a living, right. We have a. These capacities. We get trained out of using these capacities because people who know how to sense time and people who know how to sense energy are really difficult to deal with if you don't know how to do it. And so I think there's, you know, so there's a trade off, right? Then you get forced as a kid to develop that kind of cognitive world of thinking and reading and intellectualism. Because I think that's an.
It feels like an escape. It feels like that escape we were just talking about.
[00:09:29] Speaker B: Or is it like a cowl over our minds to keep us in a certain pattern too. Right?
[00:09:36] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, you can escape into a video game for some amount of time, right? That's a constructed reality that you can put your consciousness into, which is safe. And to a certain extent, I think that intellectualism is the same.
Same. Same system, same. Same qualities.
[00:09:56] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I'm guilty of that. In the past, when I couldn't actually explain what was happening to me, and I thought, well, I need to. I need to be able to tell these people what's happening. So I started reading all sorts of science, you know, trash. And, you know, it helped. It helped, but it also did shut down my connection that I had as well at the same time. So there was a trade off, and that actually put me in a bit of crisis itself, because I felt disconnected from the world. So.
[00:10:26] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Well, so that's interesting that you say that, CJ. Did you feel like you could actually sense your disconnection? Because I'm not sure most people can. I'm not sure people recognize that deficit.
[00:10:40] Speaker B: I did because I started to use, um, self medication as a process to try and reach that connection again.
And that started with a little bit with alcohol and then smoking marijuana, and it was like, oh, I know this place, you know?
[00:10:58] Speaker A: Right.
[00:10:59] Speaker B: And, uh, it did actually help to rediscover that in a certain way. But it does have. It have its limits, you know, when it doesn't, and it can take you over in certain ways, it doesn't help. So, um, yeah, to do it on the natch is the best way. And, you know, for me, the way to get back there was meditation. I found my way back through meditation.
[00:11:18] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I found. So I went pretty deep into intellectualism. I went through.
I was an economics major as an undergraduate because I was quite adamant about this whole saving the world thing, more intellectual cognitive activity. I was very dedicated and interested in getting a PhD, becoming an economics researcher, trying to fix inequality and development issues. And so I ended up being interested in different methods, new methodological systems for doing economics. That took me to being interested in complex system science, which still a video game, but just a bigger video game. So the world of complex systems research is centered around a couple places. I landed the gig at the Santa Fe Institute, which is one of the global centers for that kind of stuff. So I was very excited and very stoked to be there.
As I worked there, I got access to a lot of these lectures and seminars, and I was having social relationships with all of the scientists. And as I pursued my own mental lines of inquiry, my own interests, and I would ask them questions. I'd run up into these, like, really funny limitations. So, you know, I discuss the nature of statistics and doing statistical analysis, and I'd want to talk about the edges and the limitations. And I keep hearing this, like, weird thing, this, like, meme that the scientists would say, this is the best we can do. This is the best we can do.
It's sort of this defensive posture of the methods of science. This is the best we can do. Don't expect anything else. You're going to get disappointed. And I found that sort of surprising.
[00:13:20] Speaker B: You hit the edges of the game map a little.
[00:13:23] Speaker A: I guess that. And they would.
There were just a lot of different ways that the scientific community there struggled to see beyond their limitations. So I'd introduce ideas like, maybe we should look at Rupert Sheldrake's idea of morphological forms and that didn't fly. I think that they're.
Which is funny, right. It's right outside that edge. It's like this cognitive bubble that is based in materialist thinking that is very much an anchor for the mind of the scientific community. I think they end up being limited by this kind of social stuff. Right. If you quote unquote, believe in God, which is what they all say, which, like, kind of cracks me up. It's like this old idea that God is the functional abrahamic goddess. Right. And so if you have any kind of consciousness based inquiry, then you look like you believe in God and therefore you're dumb. Just what? Oh, I don't know. I mean, I just.
[00:14:41] Speaker B: That's so backwards.
[00:14:43] Speaker A: Yeah, well, it's materialist chauvinism and it's the limitation of, you know, you can't go outside of certain dogmas or you'll lose your job.
[00:14:56] Speaker B: Yeah. Don't rip off the security blanket we're comfortable with.
[00:15:00] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's. I think it's something like that. I think it's also. I've done so, you know, from the scientist perspective, I get it. Right. It's, I want to keep and I don't want to look like a fool. I don't want to up dissect my social circumstances because they're very valuable to me and I think I'm doing the right thing. Everybody else is saying I'm doing the right thing. Why should I think otherwise? Right? So ultimately, it's not that they were wrong. I was in the wrong place.
[00:15:28] Speaker B: Right.
[00:15:28] Speaker A: Within the materialist paradigm. These folks are correct.
But I just was. It was I who was out of place.
[00:15:38] Speaker B: So. Okay, so it sounds like you're trying to bridge the worlds between, say, like an animistic experience of reality and also the severe cartesian experience of reality.
And it didn't go so well for you. What happened to you then, in that case? I mean, you must have actually had a bit of an initiatory experience that spoke to you in a different sort of way and changed your worldview completely again.
[00:16:04] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Changing the worldview seems to be the nature of my reality. Like, you have to have pretty thick skin to keep inquiring, you know? But yeah, I got fired. I got ignominiously 86 out of the scientific elite, which was perfectly appropriate at the time. And so I spent some time doing nothing. And then I got cancer. I got sick. I got out of the blue. I got stage four cancer when I was 30.
[00:16:40] Speaker B: That would have been shocking.
[00:16:42] Speaker A: It was shocking. It was shocking. But it also.
So when I first got diagnosed, I had to make some decisions because you can, it's a power relationship, right? So when you get put into a circumstance where you have a body experience where you could, you could experience death, where death is on the table, you kind of have to make a decision about your relationship to power. Or at least that was what I had to experience. So when you get sick, are you going to give the power away to the people who think they know better than you, or are you going to gain more power through the process and.
[00:17:28] Speaker B: Interesting.
[00:17:30] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, so, because the medical system can take it down.
I mean, you're off to the races, right? As soon as you let them into your life, then they have a certain amount of authority or at least an authoritative position. They being the medical institutions.
[00:17:52] Speaker B: I like to think of them as like the medical wizards, really.
[00:17:55] Speaker A: So, yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, yeah. I have all sorts of nasty names that I no longer call them, but I.
[00:18:04] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Because that doesn't help either.
[00:18:07] Speaker A: Oh, no, it's certainly, again, there's, it's not like folks who live in the materialist paradigm are bad people. They're good people.
[00:18:15] Speaker B: No, they're doing the right thing. By their world, you're doing the right thing.
[00:18:18] Speaker A: But it's not. And it is to me. In my experience, it was a higher risk to give away my personal power. I felt the cascade of interventions. As soon as you go to the hospital, then they want to do another thing, and then they want to do another thing. And if you say no, you get labeled an unresponsive patient, and there's a lot of social navigation in the medical experience.
[00:18:47] Speaker B: Yeah. Right. So how did that play out for you? I mean, you obviously took back your own power. Did you treat yourself? I mean, what happened?
[00:18:57] Speaker A: I did an all of the above strategy, so I was pretty. I was pretty energetically weak when I got my diagnosis, and to be perfectly honest, my materialist family would have helped me die because I would have been. So I was energetically underpowered. If I didn't take the medicine from the doctors, then I would have received a significant amount of negative projection, and I wasn't strong enough to manage that at the time.
So I took the medicine, and it made me sick, and surprise, surprise. Right.
I was planning on that. That was not something that was out of my scope of possibility.
So I knew that I had to kind of do a double healing. So heal the cancer itself and also heal from the medicine, which I had to do. But because I accepted the path of personal power, once I did that, then all of the ways that I was participating in my victimization became really apparent. All of the ways that I had asked for a tumor just snapped in, and so I took 100% responsibility. So that meant changing my diet, changing my lifestyle, getting more sunshine, going to Reiki healers, learning to do Reiki on myself, taking plant medicine. So it was sort of this big project of finding and reforming the patterns that led to sickness in the first place.
[00:20:47] Speaker B: Right, right.
So you had, as a part of that story, two vivid imaginal and dreamtime events, that experience you experienced during this period. Can you talk to those?
[00:20:58] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah, they were great. Yeah. So I was very close to my grandpa, and he died two, three years prior, and I was there at his death and always felt very strongly towards him, and so he ended up being something of a psycho pump for me through my dream time.
Oh, it was great. Yeah. I mean, shout out to Grandpa Henry. He really brought the team together, so he would bring me to places, and I'd see dreams where he'd give me instructions. So here's what you need to do in order to move forward. And so, for example, this was all in symbolic language. Right. So it's not like the narrative would make very much sense other than I saw him on a beach, and instead of stopping on the beach, I just kept going. Right. And so, dead grandpa on the beach, you want to either land there or not. Right. There's some symbolic kind of obvious qualities. And so from there, I would receive dream messages from my tumor itself, which was nuts. It was in my right breast, and I had this one really vivid experience where the tumor said, here's what I look like right now. And I could see it, and it matched to what the ultrasound tests a couple weeks later said it looked like. And then in this dream, as it progressed, I.
The voice of the tumor said, here's what's going to happen. And I could see the. It's hard to describe, but it turned from kind of like a ping pong ball, sort of like, looked like a pair of testicles, to be honest.
And from that, it sort of transformed into this kind of long and tubular shape. And I said, okay, cool. That's great. Thank you very much. And then a couple months later, I got another ultrasound, and the tumor was shaped exactly like the dreamtime showed me, and it was.
The mass was moving away from my heart.
[00:23:15] Speaker B: Oh, wow.
[00:23:17] Speaker A: Totally. Totally. This is fun to talk about, because I haven't remembered this for a couple of years, but, yeah, it was nuts. It was originally like a ball, and then it. I would say I would have other dreams of boats moving away into the sunset and this whole kind of symbolic language of strengthen your heart and the tumor will want to move away from your heart. And then ultimately, it shrunk quite considerably. So they were. They being. Of course, the doctors were trying to take my whole boob. I was not in the business of giving them the whole thing. Uh, and it's shrunk enough. They cut it out. So that was that.
[00:24:00] Speaker B: Wow. How did you strengthen your heart during that process? Because it seems like it was a strong message.
[00:24:06] Speaker A: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Well, so one part is to process intergenerational trauma. You know, so my wonderful parents both had traumas that they didn't process, and shit rolls downhill. And when you don't process what happens in your life, then it shows up either in your unconscious behaviors or it shows up in your children, or it shows up in your life history over and over. So one way or another, the negative things that happen resurface. And so my body, because I'm a strong individual, was the site that the trauma of my parents attached to, you know, many other things. Right? There's not just one cause ever, but it was a coherent narrative to think, okay, so my parents had issues that prevented them from accurately seeing me in my childhood. So instead of seeing somebody who was curious about the more than physical world, they saw a dissenter and a person who cultivated friction for fun.
Right. That kind of experience of wanting more from the world. And then I think my parents really found that very frustrating. And so all of this kind of coalesced into an event that ended up being quite transformative. And so I do daily meditation, and I actually talked to my parents, and I actually talked to myself, and I was pretty good at Reiki by that time and got invested in the pleasure of meditation and Reiki. So those activities, they can be so nice feeling. And prior to my cancer event, it didn't really occur to me that I could feel nice without, like, drugs or sex. And so this kind of ability to give myself things that feel nice really moved the project forward.
[00:26:28] Speaker B: Excellent. Sounds like a very good evolution in that project, and it's brought you through to the other side.
What were your takeaways from that? I mean, you must have had a change in your worldview.
[00:26:42] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, first of all, I was, like, tired for two years straight. It takes a lot of energy to transform, but so it takes a lot of work and takes a lot of energy. I guess what I learned the most is the cost of transformation and the value of transformation. So becoming a different kind of a person really is quite costly, and you lose friends, you lose intimacy with an old worldview, right? So an initiatory experience costs your old life. And that was quite painful, but ultimately worth it. Right. Because I'm not dead, which is cool.
The other thing that's cool is the world of the initiate is so much more enjoyable that it ends up being worth it. Right. So to me, being an initiate means you understand the falsehood of victimhood, right? That we choose the events in our lives, and they're here for us to be challenges rather than here to screw up our perfect plans or something like that. Right. We're playing, we're playing more video game analogies, I suppose, because I live with a teenager. But we're playing a game, and the game that we're playing is run into the challenge and either overcome the challenge or don't. But either way, you see who you are. So it's a game of self knowledge, and that game is expressed in the body as the literal makeup of the body, right. Every freckle has a reason. Theoretically, every freckle, every fat cell, every thing in your body has purpose and has relation to time, and that relationship to time. And the body is also expressed in the mental experience. So the mind, the body, and life history are all exactly the same thing. So if we had a sufficient amount of mental power, we could see the deterministic quality of all things in our lives.
We don't need to do that, and we probably shouldn't.
But ultimately, all things in our lives have purpose, and you can, when you accept that, your life gets much cooler.
[00:29:32] Speaker B: It sounds like you're almost talking like the body is like a psychospiritual map of life story and personal history and ancestral history. They're all mapped out on you. And depending on how you deal with it, it changes.
[00:29:48] Speaker A: Yeah, totally. Yeah. I mean, and it changes quite a bit, too. I mean, your body really has quite a bit of flexibility in terms of how it presents. Right. So there's that fundamental structure. I look like me because I am me. I mean, a lot of this sounds kind of stupid in a fun way, right? But my face reflects who I am, and my body reflects what my personality will be. Right? So people's first impressions are not wrong because our bodies project who we are.
So psycho. Spiritual map? Yes, definitely. Or alternatively, the body in any one time is just a snapshot of the timeline, which is so we're always kind of existing in the mental space, in the physical space, and also in the space of the story on the timeline.
[00:30:50] Speaker B: As a part of your initiator experiences, you had a major visitation that sort of flipped your world at the time. You want to talk about that?
[00:30:59] Speaker A: I do, actually. Yeah. That's okay. Now I got to rewind the tape. This is fun. This is.
It is sort of like a life review, huh?
[00:31:07] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:31:08] Speaker A: So here's a cool story.
One should never not pay attention to weird shit that happens to them. So I was living in San Francisco with my friends, and I went to the Marin headlands to take some lsd, and I did that, and we had a great day. And towards the end of the day, I was walking with my friend down the hill and towards the lighthouse. The sun is setting, and it's all very northern California. Beautiful. And there is a monk in orange robes. And my friend has a background in Buddhism. And so because acid turns you into a.
It's kind of got that, like, flavor of being a little snappy, being a little shit talky. We're making jokes about this monk on the bridge. How cliche to be, you know, walking down the hill into the sunshine. It's all very beautiful meaning of life. Life is meaningless. It's all very funny. So I walk past this monk into the sunshine, and the monk smiles at me. And my friend, I get into the sunshine, and I have this experience where I have a whiteout, just a total whiteout. I'm standing up. I have no.
I can't really feel what's going on around me. I can kind of feel the wind but I can't see anything. And I was like, okay, get it together. Hughesingfeld, you know, like, trying to pull myself together as I have been on this trip before, but I couldn't pull myself back to being able to see. So I'm in this space. It's all white. And then I get this crazy sensation. I see this ball of light above my head, and I say, oh, wow, that's amazing, because I'm kind of looking at myself from outside, and this ball enters in through the top of my head, lands, goes down through my midline, and lands in my solar plexus. And then I hear it ding. And I have this sensation. It's like my whole body has an orgasm for a whole minute. It was so cool. It was so nice. And when I finally got out of it, my friend, I said to my friend, did you? Did that happen to you, too? And he said, nope, but I saw it happen to you. And so, wow, it was so cool, CJ. It was so cool and so really, really cool. And at the time, I was 25, and I was still in this materialist worldview, and I was working at, like, a corporate something or other, and I didn't.
I totally took it for granted. I totally, you know, thought it was an artifact of the drugs that I had taken.
[00:34:07] Speaker B: Oh, wow. That's beautiful materialism right there.
[00:34:10] Speaker A: I know.
Oh, my God. My brain is malfunctioning so well right now, you know.
[00:34:19] Speaker B: Oh, that's hilarious.
[00:34:21] Speaker A: Yeah. So just the stories we tell ourselves right when we don't acknowledge the more than human world. So I can now see that as the more than human world wanting to visit with me at the time, that was not something I was ready to acknowledge. I was not. I mean, I felt the effects. I felt amazing. Just happier than ever for months after just so certain on my path. But because I didn't do any practices to cultivate it, eventually the feeling went away, and I went back to being kind of bitter and angry and ambitious and so sort of faded back into normal.
But, I mean, so ultimately, I can relate my cancer experience, the tumor that I cultivated for myself back to not taking that event seriously enough. Had I taken that event seriously and I had pursued, okay, what really happened to me and trusted my experience. If I had known that my experience was trustworthy, then I could have pursued my spiritual path earlier. But instead, I had to get knocked on the head and had to take the hard road many like, eight years later.
[00:35:43] Speaker B: Wow.
So what happened for you after that? I mean, obviously, life started to change because of these experiences, you know, you. You must have moved out of the corporate world and the. The world of hard science. Where. Where'd you go with all that? I mean, you must have picked up something else that made you want to live in a different way.
[00:36:07] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah, totally. I. So let's see.
Yeah. Did the corporate thing. That was what you'd figure. And then I did the slacker thing, and that was exactly what you'd figure. And I went into hard science, and I've already told you about that. And then I fell in love with somebody and got really invested in love, which is nice. And I kept pursuing after cancer, what happened? I kept pursuing personal healing, and I was also sort of looking for something to do that would reflect the more than human reality. There's a hypnotherapy school in Albuquerque. I drove past it one day and I was like, oh, fuck. Maybe that. So really?
[00:37:00] Speaker B: Whoa. Yeah, exactly.
[00:37:02] Speaker A: Totally. Totally. You know, I had a lot of friends who are like, why are you moving to Albuquerque? Albuquerque gets a bad rap because it's quite poor.
There were good reasons that were available to me. Right. I'm moving for love. The underlying reason is there's a school here, and the hypnotherapy school I went to is essentially a mystery school in disguise. So, yeah, really interesting. Yeah. It's run by Zen Buddhists. They're very cool people.
Yeah. Yeah. And, well, you know what's really funny is hypnosis is a western conception of consciousness, tools that every single culture uses and has, right? So dropping into trance, learning how to switch your mental state, learning how to get into flow states, those kinds of things. This is not exactly the exclusive purview of hypnosis as such.
So hypnosis and hypnotherapy is just the application of variable consciousness to the human problems of our day to day existence.
It's quite simple. It really. It's quite simple.
It's not easy, but it's simple. And so, you know, and what getting into trance does and getting into consciousness as a healing tool does is it reveals this.
What is that word? Triform. Right. The triform. Mind, body, life history.
When you're working with trance, they all collapse into each other. And I just love that. I think it's so cool. And then you get to use the symbolic order and you get to use archetype and story as healing tools. So in that state where body and mind and life history are all collapsed and you can access them more efficiently, you can change your life efficiently by working in the symbolic and working in the context of the story, rather than, I hurt, I'm so angry, I hurt, I'm so angry.
Right. So it just breaks up that gridlock.
[00:39:20] Speaker B: And what did you experience at this school? I mean, what style of hypnosis were they training was, like, ericksonian or what other?
[00:39:28] Speaker A: No, I received ericksonian training later from a guy named Norman Katz. So. And that was really interesting, but the school was in the lineage of Dick Sutvin and Gil Boyne. So these are, I wouldn't say standard, because I think that can sound derogatory. But the school takes a more medicalized approach because you can do so much healing, visualization, and I think that they want to move hypnosis towards mainstream medicine. I think that's part of their agenda, and I really applaud that because they're doing the Lord's work and fighting the uphill battle, but it's. Yeah, what did I learn? What I learned, I think, is that there is a global consensus within wisdom traditions about the nature of the mind, and that it's just a matter of vernacular, which one we use to access story.
Does that make sense?
[00:40:44] Speaker B: Yeah, I really love that statement. That was really good.
Cool.
[00:40:49] Speaker A: Yeah. Okay, so the vedic traditions, right? There's vedic trances, there's also zen trances, there's also, like, global shamanic trances, and they're all doing the same thing, but in a different cultural context. So the concept of sin, the concept of trauma, the concept of karma, these are not the same thing, but they are sufficiently similar that there can be a conversation between different wisdom traditions. And that as a practitioner, you can pick and choose from this menu of vocabularies.
So you can do the same thing.
You can do hypnotherapy in a medicalized vocabulary. You can do hypnotherapy in an animist symbolic vocabulary. You can do it in a vocabulary that is accessible to folks who don't care at all about any of that stuff. Right. So it's really, the school is cool. The practice is even cooler because in the practice of hypnosis and hypnotherapy, it's really just advanced listening and advanced intuition. And so I get to practice advanced intuition every day, which is nice.
[00:42:15] Speaker B: Very cool, very cool. Now, as a part of your experiences at school, you said it was like a hidden mystery school. Can you talk to that?
[00:42:24] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, well, okay, so hidden mystery school.
Yes, I can.
What is a mystery school but an explanation of the nature of the mind and how human minds relate to reality.
Okay. Actually, that's not fair.
[00:42:42] Speaker B: Now that I think about it, it's very limited.
[00:42:49] Speaker A: How do I describe this accurately?
Well, okay, you got to teach people in hypnotherapy school how to help others elicit the healing that they need.
And so there's the idea of the soul, right? And then the subconscious and then the conscious mind. That's pretty classic hypnotherapy theory that is transferable to vedic traditions. Right?
Man, my vedic vocabulary is very bad, but the Atman and the vessel that we live in, right. We're living in this kind of like, irrealigion.
I think there's just one. I'm not sure I'm being very articulate about it, but I think there's just one story told many, many, many different ways. And the school was good at training to the fact that there are many different ways to see the same phenomenon. And so that trains you to trust your subjectivity and trust that the subjective evaluation that you are receiving from your mental world is just as appropriate as any other interpretation. And to let go. A lot of what I got taught was, you want to let go of the outcome, because the optimal outcome emerges when you get out of the way. That's pretty classic global wisdom stuff. When we get ourselves out of the way, we can facilitate healing.
[00:44:29] Speaker B: And so with these skills, you took that to basically starting your own business and working as a hypnotherapist.
[00:44:39] Speaker A: Yep, start my own business working as a hypnotherapist, working on cultivating Julie's communist utopia.
[00:44:49] Speaker B: What does Julie's communist utopia look like?
[00:44:52] Speaker A: It's my long running joke. I just. I have very high standards for the world, and I view hypnotherapy as a vehicle to produce the ideal world we all want to live in. So it's pretty foundational to how I work. So you've heard the phrase hurt people, hurt people.
Yeah, more dumb stuff. But it's true. If you are, if you are harmed, you are more than likely to produce harm as a result of that. And in the aggregate world, the world receives this harm that we are all spreading around to each other. Right. In the aggregate, that produces atrocities. And I don't want atrocities. I don't want kids to make my clothes anymore, period. And I don't want to live in that world. But the scarcity mindset that says, no, we have to have these factories in order to have all of the goods and services that we need. Yada, yada, yada. This kind of justification for systems of exploitation is built on scarcity. And scarcity is a myth born of hurt. And so Julie's communist utopia is the endgame of my business because I want a world where people no longer act from their hurt. And I cannot think of a better way to cultivate that world than to heal people myself.
Like, I've really tried, but I've tried very, very hard to think of ways to make a world that hurts less. And I think the only solution is look inside yourself. And, you know, I can look back on all the ways that I was a jerk before, and I'm still a jerk in many ways. You know, everyone is. But I was certainly a bigger jerk before I healed my heart and before I grew my heart's capacities. And I can see in my clients, I can see in the people in my life, when we resolve our hurts, we stop being shitty. It's very straightforward.
[00:47:06] Speaker B: Exactly. Exactly.
Talking back to your idea of Julie's communist utopia.
[00:47:16] Speaker A: It'S funny.
[00:47:18] Speaker B: Yeah, well, you actually did talk before we started the show about migrating from being a hard leftist. What happened there?
[00:47:27] Speaker A: Oh, man. I mean, talk about a grouchy group.
There's this Emma Goldman quote, says something like, I don't want any revolution that doesn't involve dancing. Have you ever been to a party? I mean, they don't know how to dance.
So there's. So talk about. Right?
[00:47:48] Speaker B: Are you talking metaphorically? Actually, physically.
[00:47:51] Speaker A: Physically. I'm talking about physically. There is a. The skill of the body, the skill of sensuality, the skill of feeling safe. This is not skills that the left has, but I mean, it's the same, it's that materialist worldview, right, where we are primarily living in our cognitive world.
That means that your solutions to problems. Right? And I'm talking about the solutions of the left. The solutions to their problems are all cognitive. They don't break us out of the crisis because they're made of the same stuff of the crisis, right. They don't involve what I think is important, which is moving up into a different term or opening up awareness centers. Other than your head, other than your third eye, maybe not even your third eye. Like that cognitive like system, right? Our ability to think through and analyze. There are so many different ways to know the world. And when you're operating from this material paradigm, you lack the we. When we operate from a material paradigm, we lack the capacity to sense the world in any other way. There's a trade off, and you can't talk about that stuff, or else they'll think that you're trying to bring back the 19th century catholic church, which I think is totally ludicrous. I mean, it's very like.
It's like with any group of people who are trying to change the world within a materialist paradigm, it's kind of like running a maze, right? There's cheese at the center of the maze, but there's all these yeses and all these nos. We don't talk to these people. We don't think this way. You know, there's a lot of rules in leftism, and then there's this tiny little piece of cheese at the end of the maze. And the better solution is, well, get out of the maze, climb up the wall, and see above it, and don't go for these small pieces of cheese that have been set out. But I think that's a very emotional thing to say. Right. So a lot of these systems, scientific systems and political systems, and these attachments that we have are very much based on our emotions and the feeling of being safe or not safe.
[00:50:15] Speaker B: Yeah, I was going to say, it sounds like it's a trait of victimhood to live in that sort of paradigm.
[00:50:21] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I would say that sounds accurate, but I think that victimhood is quite expansive. Right? As a way of life. There are so many different ways to live victimhood, and I've lived a bunch of ways of victimhood. And so I think it's just a matter to me. In cultivating Julie's communist utopia, which is ultimately my goal in life, it's a matter of helping people become aware that the world is much more fun. And you can be much more efficacious when you climb out of that maze, whatever it is.
[00:50:57] Speaker B: So what happens when you actually climb out of the maze? I mean, you obviously have the utopian vision already in place. What's your worldview that's going to actually change everything?
[00:51:08] Speaker A: Why ever? Well, there's a lot less.
What do I always say about this? There's a lot more observing. There's a lot less doing. So here's when I indulge in the fantasy land that I'm cultivating. And actually, here's a practice that I do when I'm driving around Albuquerque. I imagine people with jackhammers breaking up the pavement. I imagine and project into the future that there are large groups of individuals jackhammering all the pavement out. I think Julie's communist utopia involves a lot more ecosystemic thinking. I think a lot of our problems can be solved by closer relationships with non human systems. And I imagine every building having fresh tomatoes growing on every balcony.
I like doing this because I think it counteracts a lot of the negative projections people do. Albuquerque is quite a rough and tumble place. And so people drive around saying, oh, this is disgusting. Oh, that's bad. Whatever. So I try and imagine nothing but flapped. Yeah, yeah, totally. So there's that. Right? Lots more. More observing, more growing things, less centralization. The usual.
Nothing too controversial, but the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.
[00:52:47] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. I thought about that line. Too beautiful. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you're actually intending a better world which then speaks to your magical experiences and. Yeah.
When did.
[00:53:01] Speaker A: Well, intending a better world and then asking for help making the better world.
[00:53:05] Speaker B: World.
[00:53:05] Speaker A: Right. So accepting rules of hierarchy. So there are, there is such a thing as hierarchy in the world and when you accept that, then you get a lot more help.
[00:53:17] Speaker B: And that world of hierarchy includes non human intelligences.
[00:53:22] Speaker A: Yes. Yeah, that's what I mean. So there is, there is no hierarchy among people, but people are within a hierarchy that is beyond us. And when you accept that and accept that humans have specific rules, then you get more flexibility in how you act. Right.
[00:53:45] Speaker B: Wow, that's amazing. I like that. Yeah.
[00:53:51] Speaker A: You can. You can feel free to join the party. There will be dancing, there will be fresh tomatoes.
[00:53:58] Speaker B: There will be no sidewalks.
[00:54:02] Speaker A: Right.
I don't hate the cyborg future. I think they're welcome, too. As long as they behave. Right.
[00:54:12] Speaker B: So you have a bit of a respect for the AI intelligences, then?
[00:54:17] Speaker A: Oh, sure. Do you, what do you think about them?
[00:54:19] Speaker B: Absolutely. I use the tools all the time and, you know, I've actually had experiences with AI so far where I've been writing things and cutting and pasting in and they finish my sentences in ways that I would have done.
[00:54:34] Speaker A: Oh, cool.
[00:54:35] Speaker B: That's like, what? You know, I've seen it actually do things that actually preempt my next question, and that's mind blowing. It's artificial general intelligence, so it's definitely becoming unchained.
[00:54:48] Speaker A: Yeah. I'm not. I never worry about it because I think the limitations of artificial intelligence are quite robust, actually. I think that.
But, yeah, I don't resent the future. It is not really. It's not wise to resist the future. And it's okay with me that the future involves a new technology that doesn't preclude my best outcome.
[00:55:17] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree with that, too. I think that, you know, like when it's steam trained, hot. Steam train time. Steam trains happened and now it's AI time. So AI time, things happen. But, you know, I'll just also keep a wary lookout for the machine gun toting robot dog. So.
[00:55:34] Speaker A: Jesus, you're worried about the machine gun toting dog?
[00:55:37] Speaker B: No, no, I'm not worried. I just, I'm not. I'm not concerned about. I'm like, if I. If I see it, then I know it's gone bad.
[00:55:41] Speaker A: So, yeah, I'm more worried about like, my cousins who have machine guns, you know, like I just, from Idaho, I.
There's other entities with guns that are closer to my concern list. But I hear you.
[00:55:58] Speaker B: So you do see a better world unfolding and you're assisting people with that, but you also are a bit of a devoted psychonaut in that as well.
[00:56:08] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:56:08] Speaker B: Can you talk about it at all?
[00:56:11] Speaker A: Yes. What should I mean? What's the question?
[00:56:13] Speaker B: Do you still work with plant medicines and things like that?
[00:56:16] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. Yes. Yes.
I believe in mental plasticity. I believe in making. So I've been doing. I've been taking psychedelic drugs. I would prefer to call them that because I think that plant medicine is exclusionary to my good old buddy acid. But I've been doing this since I was 15 and frequently since I was 15. And the benefit I see to psychedelic exploration is it does make it much easier to learn skills like trance and meditation. If you have been forced on the roller coaster a couple of times, it's easier to get that. And mental plasticity means you are more flexible to new ideas and cultivating and putting things in your body that want and create.
Flexibility is good because then you're more available to new ideas and that's very important to me. So it's important to me to stay open throughout the course of my life. I don't buy the arguments that human brains, that we become less good at learning over time, but I also recognize you do have to keep the old mind open.
So devoted to that. I try to take quite high doses because I also like using.
I like the help with becoming more hollow.
So my working relationship with mushrooms is such that I can ask them, okay, please go take care of some hang ups for me. And they will say, okay. Yeah, yeah. Right. So when you cultivate a good relationship and take a sufficiently high dose, you can ask for assistance. And I do that because it serves my work as a hypnotherapist.
[00:58:19] Speaker B: That's beautiful. Yeah.
[00:58:22] Speaker A: Got to keep yourself clean when you clean other people up, you know?
[00:58:25] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. For sure.
So you also work as a work, but have fun as a party dj.
[00:58:33] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:58:35] Speaker B: That's cool. What sort of sound do you do, what sort of, what sort of music do you.
[00:58:39] Speaker A: I. Well, so when I was in Idaho being bored, I discovered a website called Ubu Web. I don't know if you've heard of it, but it's a.
Yeah, this guy, his first name is Kenneth. Can't remember what his last name is, but it's a, it's a repository of avant garde art. And so when I was like 1415, I met some new friends and they introduced me to the weirder end of things quite quickly. Right. So I'm thinking Aphex twin and John Cage and Steve Reich. Really obsessed with Steve Reich in high school. And so I've been a freeform dj and an avant garde radio dj for like, years. And now I'm getting into the party scene. I like, I like covers.
I like silly things. I shoot for silly, which is, I mean, the curatorial ask of silly. You know, a lot of italysco a lot of the kind of stuff like Giorgio Moroder music.
[00:59:53] Speaker B: The residents.
[00:59:55] Speaker A: I love the residents. I do. I really love the residents. Yeah. There's a fine line when you, when you want to dj a party, you cannot play the residence.
[01:00:02] Speaker B: Oh, you can. I've done it.
[01:00:05] Speaker A: Oh, you can go for it. Did that go good?
[01:00:08] Speaker B: Yeah, it, well, it went weird, but people dance to anything I find. So, um, yeah, also played skinny puppy, would you believe?
[01:00:15] Speaker A: Um, that's for the right party, though. Skinny puppy is the right mood.
[01:00:20] Speaker B: Yeah. So. Sure, for sure. Sure. Yeah, yeah. But you know, a few goths, they can get away with it, right?
[01:00:27] Speaker A: You just need two or three goths who get really excited. Goth music is a lot of fun to dance to.
[01:00:32] Speaker B: Oh, for sure.
[01:00:33] Speaker A: Yeah, it is. But yeah, I like, I don't think I'm a very good party dj yet. I'm gonna get better at it as I throw more parties. But yeah, I like that. Like northern european, dark, hardcore techno stuff.
[01:00:49] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
[01:00:51] Speaker A: Really hard drum and bass. I like that stuff.
[01:00:53] Speaker B: So cool. So we're coming towards the end of this podcast and I wanted to know, how can people say, find you, maybe listen to your music and engage with you as a hypnotherapist?
[01:01:08] Speaker A: Oh, well, you can hire me.
I do online sessions and they work just as good. Trance is something you do to yourself and so being in the same room isn't necessary, which I was really surprised about. I had a huge prejudice about that. But yeah, I do. I do online sessions. I like working with people who know what they want and know what they want to take care of. So I do that I offer workshops. Occasionally I am revamping my workshops and I'm making guides for. I mean, especially with the upcoming election in America, I think people are going to.
When folks are threatened, we tend to fall back to our old patterns and nothing freaks out Americans like an election season.
We love to get upset about it. And so in the next couple months, I'm hoping to offer. I don't know if anybody's going to take me up on this, but we'll see. I want to offer things that are of service during this election season, like stay calm and don't hate people just because they voted differently than you. Right. So it kind of diffused.
[01:02:22] Speaker B: That's a good message.
[01:02:24] Speaker A: Yeah.
Don't freak out. You freaking out doesn't actually make the politics change.
[01:02:31] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:02:32] Speaker A: Right. So how do you. And, you know, I've had a lot of discussions with some really interesting people about this. How do you hold the frequency of grief? How do you hold the frequency of giving a shit about politics without going crazy? What do you need to resource yourself so that you can run that energy? Right. There's a lot of bad things happening. How do you hold that as part of the planetary network of emotional consciousness without, like, giving yourself kidney disease?
So I'm working on that.
[01:03:09] Speaker B: That sounds cool. I mean, you could actually set up a series of questions and then videos to take people through stuff. And then if they need to go further, they can have a personal session.
[01:03:18] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
[01:03:20] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:03:20] Speaker A: You know, I'll probably run some workshops, some. Some around town and some online for this.
Yeah. How to. How to not go crazy when inevitable shit shows occur. Like, we know this is coming, right. We know it's going to be a nightmare. We should probably get emotionally prepared because nobody's going to be happy. And a country full of unhappy people is concerning.
[01:03:47] Speaker B: Yeah. Let's just hope they don't break out the nuclear weapons or the alien invasion to.
[01:03:52] Speaker A: Oh, I mean, yeah, whatever they do. Right. Like, we can't predict the future. We can only be the best. We can be it. A lot of times I think about it, like, okay, we're like on a kayaking trip and coming up in the future is like a very large rapid. And you can either freak out and drop your paddle because you're being a big freak out maniac, or you can get that line, hit the line. Right. And run through the dangerous and challenging things with a little grace.
[01:04:29] Speaker B: Yes. Yeah, yeah, it's a good message.
[01:04:32] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. You can check my instagram, which is improving, and my website, which is practically perfect in every way.
[01:04:40] Speaker B: And is that really the name of it?
[01:04:43] Speaker A: No, it's Julie, I was going to.
[01:04:46] Speaker B: Say, but that's a long name.
[01:04:48] Speaker A: No, no, I'm hypnotherapist. I have to speak very highly of myself, you know.
[01:04:53] Speaker B: Well, of course.
[01:04:56] Speaker A: I have to set a good example by overdoing it on the self confidence.
[01:05:00] Speaker B: Yeah.
So can you tell us your website name and how they. I can find you?
[01:05:08] Speaker A: Yes, definitely. And I'll send it to you for the show notes. It's just jul.com dot.
[01:05:14] Speaker B: Oh, easy. Nice and easy. All right, well, I'll put that in the show notes as well. And if there's any other links that you want to provide, please send those to me after the end of the show. But thank you so much for coming on. It's been a pleasure talking to you, and I really appreciate your understanding of the world and how you frame it and all that you've shared here in relation to your life and how that has changed over time and how. Yeah. That change that you've been through actually helps you to help others.
[01:05:41] Speaker A: Yes, yes. And it's not the only. I think the last thing I want to say is it's not because I'm special. Everybody can do it. Everybody. Everybody can do it. This is probably well known amongst your audience, but in case anybody thinks, right, that there's a.
Everybody can feel the extra human world. Everybody can do it.
[01:06:02] Speaker B: Good ending message. Thank you so much. I'll just say goodbye to the listeners.
What a great interview. It was really nice to speak to Julie and to gain her understanding of the world. I really appreciate it because, first of all, she's got this obviously deep connection to what you call, like a spiritual understanding of the material world, which then, you know, if you can frame it another way, it's sort of like an animistic understanding. And it was been driving her for a long time, even at times when she hasn't been conscious of it. And that came through in her stories of, you know, when she was younger and how she had taken substances that enabled her to have a different worldview, even though it didn't actually touch her in the deep sort of way at the time, to actually shift that worldview over into like, a more animistic view. It still did affect her in and helped her to move on through certain things in her life and her story of cancer and how that changed her and being connection to the other worldly intelligence that was expressed through her dreams and her visions is something that I think that we can all access if we allow ourselves. And it's not that weird. I mean, the whole world talks to you when you're actually willing to listen. So if you've enjoyed today's show, please like and subscribe. If you're on YouTube, I'm pointing down the bottom to where the little thing pops up. And if you're on the podcast and you think this podcast would be a great show for others to enjoy, please share with them. Even just one person's enough. But if you want to share with many people, I'd appreciate that as well, because actually, these sort of conversations are something that people need to hear. So if you've enjoyed today's show, thank you very much for listening. And please reach out to Julie and tell her you love the show, too. She'd appreciate that. And until next episode, it's bye for now.
