518. 🌌 Trauma Healing & Psychedelics: Rediscovering Wholeness | Julian Bermudez

🌌 Trauma Healing & Psychedelics: Rediscovering Wholeness | Julian Bermudez

 [00:00:00] 

Kara Goodwin: Welcome to Soul Elevation, guiding Your Ascension to New Heights. I'm your host, Kara Goodwin, and this is a great conversation with Julian Bermuda. We talk about the root of trauma and how he helps people recover from it, and then we get into some fascinating conversation about psychedelics and their role in healing.

And if you're anything like me, you're gonna learn a lot in this episode. Julian is a therapist and guide who supports people through trauma, identity exploration, and psychedelic integration. His work is grounded in presence, somatic awareness, and the belief that healing is a return to our natural state, connected whole and alive Blending modern therapeutic insight with timeless wisdom. Julianne helps clients unwind survival patterns and rediscover the truth of who they really are through deep listening, meditation and Honest self-inquiry. He offers a [00:01:00] grounded, intuitive path to transformation. His mission is simple, yet powerful, to help people come home to themselves and remember what it truly means to be human.

so before we dive into this episode, I wanna invite you to explore the beautiful array of resources waiting for you@karagoodwin.com. From my book, your Authentic Awakening to Powerful Free Meditations, there's something there to support you no matter where you are on your spiritual path.

Maybe you're craving a deep dive into sacred geometry as I have been for quite a while. Check out my recorded course which will give you tons of info and instruction to get you engaging with these high vibrational shapes. You can also sign up for my upcoming summits and workshops to connect with like-hearted souls and expand your consciousness in real time.

And now, enjoy this episode.

Kara Goodwin: Well, welcome Julian. I'm so excited to talk to you today. Thanks for coming on the Soul Elevation Podcast.

Julian Bermudez: Thank you. Very happy to be here.

Kara Goodwin: So [00:02:00] your work is heavily centered around trauma. Tell us about how past trauma is impacting our present experience.

Julian Bermudez: Yeah, trauma, I would define as bad things happening that shouldn't. So, you know, illness of a parent, loss of a parent, incarceration of a parent, um, physical, emotional, mental, sexual abuse, all these types of things, those are the bad things that are supposed, that happen that don't, aren't supposed to happen.

It can also be good things that are supposed to happen that don't. So you might have very loving parents that are attuned to you very early in your life, but they get modern advice that says, don't hold your kids when they cry out. So they're suppressing all of their parental instincts and the attachment that you're dependent on gets withheld.

So this is in a very common form of trauma, and those are the things that happen, but that's not the trauma itself. The trauma is how we are affected by the things that happen. [00:03:00] So what happens inside of us as a result of the things that happen to us? The most common thing that happens as a result of trauma is that we become disconnected.

So we disconnect from our emotions. We disconnect from the present moment. We disconnect from the things that we're feeling. Um, in that example of the parents who are getting modern advice, they're disconnecting or suppressing their parental instincts. So that's what we learn as children. And that's the most common pattern that I see in terms of trauma and this adaptation.

It's one of those things that helps us in the short term, but it causes us long-term harm. So that pattern of disconnecting, of suppressing emotions, um, suppressing our expression, sacrificing our boundaries, um, these are the patterns that continue to show up in the present that were resulted of the trauma.

Kara Goodwin: Mm. And that's so insightful. So you mentioned the patterns. Um, talk more about how people talk about these patterns of [00:04:00] adaptations to trauma and how you help people to recognize that.

Julian Bermudez: Mm-hmm. Yeah. So like I mentioned, the first most common one is this disconnecting from ourselves. So I meet a lot of people and they got this super active mind, um, and inability to be present in the moment. Um, and it can you. Usually be traced back to the early trauma here. It's almost always originates very early in life if that's present.

There's almost symbiotically, another flip side to this, which is a core belief about oneself or about the world around them. So if you think about it, if I'm going through trauma as a child. And like I said, these almost always originate in childhood when, when we can identify them. So if somebody's listening, they're like, well, my trauma is when I'm in my twenties or in my thirties, usually it's fully developed at that point, and I can usually get pretty close to the formative years within minutes figuring out where this comes from.

So. [00:05:00] If we have stable, you know, um, circumstances, attuned parents that are connected to us and they help us go through hardships, it doesn't become traumatic. So these usually go back to very early in our lives. So if the disconnections there, there's usually a flip side to it, which is a core belief about oneself, and it's that I'm not good enough, I'm unworthy, I'm not deserving.

Um, I have to be strong, independent, do everything on my own, or I have to take on other people's emotional experiences. This is an another form of that adaptation that I was talking about. So if I'm going through trauma as a child. And I don't have a lot of options. I don't have a lot of, a lot of resources or tools to navigate it.

Think about it. What can I do? I can set boundaries. I can tell the people who are hurting me to stop, but I'm a child. I don't know boundaries. And if, if my, uh, if my environment is abusive, that would put me in further harm's way. It would be even more threatening. So that's out the window. I could go away physically, I could just leave the trauma.[00:06:00] 

But again, children, were hopelessly dependent. It's the most important thing to us. The attachment. We can't survive without it. So I can't go away physically, so then I go away mentally, I check out, I disconnect. And if these things are happening are further, if the people who are supposed to, um, they're supposed to be caring for me, they're the ones who are hurting me or they're.

Denouncing or dismissing my experience. I go and I say, I'm hurt. And they say, no. I'll give you something to be hurt about if you're hurt, or, um, no, that's nothing. Don't worry about it. Well, I can only make sense of that in like one of two ways. I could say that the people who are around me are not up to the job.

My parents, my caregivers, my teachers, whoever, they're just not qualified or they're not, they're not able to care for me the way that I need to be cared for. In other words. I'm just not safe. And, um, there's not a lot of outlook in that worldview. So that's where the, the second adaptation comes in, which is, well, [00:07:00] my parents, they're older, they got relationships, they're surviving in the world.

They know what's going on. Um, they know how to have connections. They know how to care for people, they're cared for. The problem is. I'm not deserving of it. I'm not worthy of it. So if I could be good enough, if I could do the things that they want me to do, if I could be a pleaser, if I could take care of everybody's emotional needs, if I could meet all the expectations, then I get the the care that I need, then I get the acceptance, then I get the value, then I get the attachment that I need.

So this belief of unworthiness, again, it's just as common as the, the disconnecting or the inability to be present. I find it almost everywhere I look. Again, it's an adaptation. This belief helps us in the short term. It's something that provides us relief and it causes us harm through the long term.

Kara Goodwin: That's so fascinating. And how do you, as you're talking, you know, especially about the, the busy mind and the inability [00:08:00] to really. Disconnect or be, be mindful about what we're doing and we're always trying to multitask and everything. It's interesting to link that back to things that we went through as a, as a child, even as an infant. And I always, but, but when I think about that, I think about it in terms of modern life and how modern like society has been crafted in such a way that it makes it really hard to psychologically. S do focus on one thing at a time. know, we are, we're just encouraged and bombarded just constantly that I feel like it's, it's the natural flow that what we're seeing everybody do and what people are even rewarded for, you know, multitasking and so forth.

Um, so it's interesting to bring that aspect of it too, and how the wounding and the potential trauma.

Julian Bermudez: Mm-hmm.

Kara Goodwin: into it as [00:09:00] well.

Julian Bermudez: Yeah.

Kara Goodwin: I, I mean, I'm sure they're like informing each other and exasperating each other.

Julian Bermudez: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, being busy is highly, highly respected and valued and rewarded. In our society. Again, this is going back to that being good enough. So, um, if I have a sense of not being good enough, I'm unworthy of love. I need to go out and earn my right to be accepted and to be valued, then I go and I work the jobs.

I accumulate the status, I get the, the, the authority, I get the positions of power. I accumulate the wealth, and, um, I'm rewarded for it. It's highly seductive. And if I'm wounded enough, if I'm hurt enough, if I have a, a deep, deep enough sense of unworthiness inside of me and I go out in the world and I accumulate all the wealth and I accumulate all the status and the power and the authority so that way I can be protected and strong and um, [00:10:00] so I can't be hurt, well then I can climb to the highest ranks of positions of government and of corporate power.

And so then we have people. Climbing to these positions, we have presidents and politicians and CEOs and all these people who, no matter what they accumulate, no matter what they accomplish, it's never good enough. And then they get into positions where they're enacting their trauma onto other people on a massive scale.

And so yes, there's this negative feedback loop happening in our society here where we have traumatized people, traumatizing people, and our entire social value system is based off of these exact same situations.

Kara Goodwin: Yeah, it's so inverted. That's so fascinating. Um, and I think a lot of listeners to the podcast will, will know that we live in an inverted reality. Um, that's not new, but to think of it from that psychological foundational piece is. [00:11:00] Adds a different dimension to it. how do you help people to begin to free themselves from these patterns once you've identified them or help them to identify where these patterns developed from, or maybe even just to even see that the pattern is there in the first place.

Julian Bermudez: Hmm, you nailed it right there. Um, so the Buddha is a fantastic psychologist and teacher here, and he lays out the four noble truths and these are incredible. Hallmarks or steps in this healing journey. And the first one is acknowledging the suffering in life. So if we wanna start to heal these patterns, if we're experiencing depression, anxiety, addictions, um, we're bipolar, we're whatever we're dealing with that we know it's not right, it's not in line with who we are and it's, it's causing us some sort of harm if we want to cultivate agency.

The ability to make [00:12:00] choices in how we express this problem or this pain. The first thing we have to do is acknowledge its its existence. Carl Rogers, the famous psychologist, infamously, said that. The funny paradox is that only when I accept myself exactly as I am, do I have the ability to enact changes.

So yes, acknowledging, finding, learning how to recognize and identify these patterns of suffering is. First and foremost, and these can be incredibly elusive to people who are in the pattern. It's just the way it is. This is all that I know. And then this busy mind is so good at rationalizing, justifying, explaining why this pattern is here.

It's a defense mechanism, and it's going to keep us in that line of thinking that this has to exist. Because if I can. Look at what's underneath this pattern, then I can see the pain. And so this defense mechanism's always there trying to keep [00:13:00] us from seeing that. So recognizing this, learning how to identify it is one of the first steps, and that's what I'm really good at helping people with because I can see it very clearly 'cause one, I've gone through it myself, and two, I'm not in it with this person.

So if they're looking at the puzzle and they're staring at it from just a couple inches away, they can't see all the pieces, but I'm standing a couple feet away and I can help them see it. So first and foremost, yeah. We have to learn to recognize and identify these patterns. That's the, that's the first step.

Kara Goodwin: Hmm. so where does it go from there

Julian Bermudez: Yeah.

Kara Goodwin: terms of helping people free themselves from it?

Julian Bermudez: Mm-hmm. So for listeners, there's an acronym that, uh, Tara Brock came up with, which is rain, RAIN. And so if the R is, we learn to recognize these patterns, then we move on to the A, which is we learn to accept these patterns. Again, very, very difficult because. We're talking about trauma here. All of these [00:14:00] are, are rooted in trauma, and this trauma is again, forming from some sort of schism, some sort of disconnect.

Of course, I'm disconnected from myself, but I learned that from somewhere. This was the adaptation that I picked up from somewhere else. So what is very common in this situation is. We're very harsh to ourselves. We're judgemental, we're critical. We're evaluating ourselves. We're punishing ourselves constantly, and we learned this from somewhere so.

When we start to recognize this pattern of suffering, then we're very harsh on ourselves for having it. And we're criticizing ourselves and evaluating ourselves and saying, I don't like this pattern. I want it to go away. I'm gonna put it in a timeout. How about that? It's gonna go to the corner, or it's gonna go to its room.

I'm gonna disconnect from it. And when it learns to regulate itself and learn how to behave like, um, a functional, mature adult, then it can come back and maybe I'll accept it. [00:15:00] So in other words. We're constantly exiling parts of ourselves, which is the pattern that caused the pain to begin with. So if we want to really begin to heal these patterns, we have to first and foremost start to accept that they're here again.

Just like Carl Rogers says, if I can't accept that it's here, I can't engage with it. If I'm constantly denying its existence, there's no, there's no engagement, there's no participation. I can't attune to this experience. So we recognize it, and then rather than fighting it. We accept that it's here. Then I want to get very curious about it, which is where I move to that I, the inquire I, I start to inquire about where does this come from?

Why is it here right now? What teaching, what wisdom might this pattern carry? What, um, what lesson, what message is it trying to communicate to me? So I ask questions like, where in my body do I feel it? What does it feel like? This will help me recognize it better. Oh, it's a knot in my gut. It's a constriction.

Oh, it's a [00:16:00] choking feeling in my throat. My jaw's always clenching down like this. And I'm biting really hard because I'm gripping so hard for the things that are happening, or my heart's fluttering and it's just, it's beating so hard and fast, and there's a weight, and my breathing's constricted and my muscles are tight.

Okay, so I'm getting ready for a conflict. I'm getting ready to flee whatever it is, so I feel it in my body. How often do I feel it? Once a day, once a week, once a month, every day. Multiple times a day. Is it always here? Okay, so now I can start to recognize this thing. When did I first start feeling this?

Does it go back a month, a year, five years, 10 years? Chances are it's going back to our earliest memories, almost always. And even if we identify, like I said earlier, in our, in our teens or in our twenties, it's fully developed at that point. And the more and more comfortable we get with this, the earlier we can trace it into our lives.

And so we try to figure out where does this come from in our lives? And then this really [00:17:00] important question leads into the next stage, which is, what did I need? What were the things I needed when this pattern developed? And this is something that we can reflect on very often and frequently and really see, okay, when this is arising in me, it went back to this time in my life.

In other words, this is pain from the past showing up in the present. What did this pain really need to be comforted? To be soothed, to feel safe. And now I'm gonna nurture myself and I'm gonna try to give myself those things. In a nutshell, that's the pattern right there. That's the, that's the four noble truths in, um, in a different light.

And that is the practice that we're gonna try and build. Much easier said than done. Um, this is why we, we continuously practice it and we go deeper and deeper with it. But that's the gist of it.

Kara Goodwin: That's beautiful. Well, I understand that you also work with psychedelics.

Julian Bermudez: Yeah, that's right.

Kara Goodwin: So where, what role do those play?[00:18:00] 

Julian Bermudez: Mm-hmm. Psychedelics are a tremendously powerful healing tool that we can use. Um, by definition, psychedelic, psyche, human spirit. Human mind, human soul, emotions, all the immaterial aspects of us psychology. Uh, the study of the mind, the study of the human spirit. So we have psyche and deic emerging, manifesting rising.

So this experience in itself is one where we connect very deeply with ourselves and the human spirits, the wisdom that knows how to heal, that knows how to be whole, the wisdom that knows how to navigate this pattern. To navigate this hardship and this suffering that knows how to thrive in this world.

It's all inside of us. It's just we have all these disconnections and these barriers. So a psychedelic experience is very good at expanding our awareness very quickly. And if we have these blockages, we have these [00:19:00] defense mechanisms, these disconnections, that's what's gonna come up for us, almost guaranteed.

So we can start to see those patterns. Very cl very clearly, and oftentimes from different perspectives so we can see them in different lights. So I might have all this bitterness and this resentment inside of me for the people who hurt me, and I might see the pattern from their experience and see, wow, somebody taught them this p this pattern, and they didn't know what to do with it.

So it flowed through them, onto me, and their parents did it to them, and so on. So I see it's an intergenerational lineage. Now I can change that. Bitterness, that resentment into compassion and understanding. So the expanding of the awareness is huge. It's an incredible tool. Um, whenever these patterns that we're starting to engage with are there almost always people see them in a much deeper light than they were able to see before and to be much more accepting of it.

The next thing that psychedelics [00:20:00] are, is just so good at doing is writing new neural patterns, writing new patterns. In general, they call it neurogenesis, the birth or the new connections of neural patterns. So if I have this very familiar pattern of judging, criticizing exiling myself, fighting this pattern, distracting, trying to get away from it, I can write new patterns very quickly.

And so if I'm trying to. Create this new pattern of caring for myself, nurturing myself, connecting with myself. That's what I use the psychedelic as a tool for, to deepen this pattern right here of connecting with myself. So in other words, we can go much deeper, much quicker, that conditioned mind, it softens just a little bit, and we can see things differently.

And all those defense mechanisms that are designed to keep us from. Getting to that pain. Well, we can soften those just a little bit more and just slide them right out of the way to get to the core of what we're dealing with.

Kara Goodwin: Hmm. So are we, I have a few questions. [00:21:00] Um, are we talking, um, mushroom type of psychedelics or is there a, are there different mode, uh, different modalities that you're using? Would that be the right term?

Julian Bermudez: Sure. Yeah.

Kara Goodwin: medicines.

Julian Bermudez: Yeah. Um. There are so many psychedelics and ways to induce the psychedelic experience. Um, and it depends on each individual. Um, a lot of people want to go down to the Amazon and work with Ayahuasca. Incredibly powerful psychedelic. I'm not encouraging people to do that by any means. Um, because the tourist trade is absolutely decimating those cultures and destroying the practice and the sacredness of working with ayahuasca.

So that's not what I'm encouraging by any means, but that's what's a lot of people do. And I've done myself, so I'm not judging, but I'm just discouraging. Um. Okay. Here in the States where I'm at, yeah. I mean, mushrooms grow everywhere. Uh, they grow on poop. [00:22:00] They're in your backyard most likely, and they're very accessible to pretty much everybody.

Kara Goodwin: It's, it's, you're right, they are everywhere. And that's one of the things that I wanna talk about too, because you talked about the new, the neural

Julian Bermudez: Mm-hmm.

Kara Goodwin: and it's like, the mycelial

Julian Bermudez: Yeah.

Kara Goodwin: is incredible. I mean, it's just mind blowing how, how they are connected, um, within the earth, but. They can be highly toxic. there's the whole like self-education

Julian Bermudez: yeah.

Kara Goodwin: how, you know, so even though they are readily available, it's like

Julian Bermudez: Yep.

Kara Goodwin: have to be careful. But I don't know if you have tips on

Julian Bermudez: Mm-hmm.

Kara Goodwin: thoughts on that.

Julian Bermudez: Yeah. Yeah. So I'm not encouraging people to just go out and start eating mushrooms, um, from their backyard by any means. The way that things are progressing right now, I mean, you can go online or if, depending on where you're at, I don't know how this is in around the country, but. Here [00:23:00] on the West Coast, for instance, and I know it's on the east coast too, and I know it's in the central states.

I see this all over the place. I talk to people so commonly and they tell me that this is exactly how it is there. I have people reaching out to me saying that they're starting these businesses. You can go to stores like within a half a mile of where I'm at. I could throw a rock to probably five different stores where you can buy everything you need to grow your own mushrooms.

And yeah. And so then you don't have to worry about the toxicity.

Kara Goodwin: Mm-hmm.

Julian Bermudez: go into YouTube and search how to grow psychedelic mushrooms, and you will find so much information and tutorials start to finish. They'll tell, they'll tell you. I mean, I'm thinking of, um, boomer Schumer for instance, where she's, I know, right?

So cute.

Kara Goodwin: It's like the boomer generation.

Julian Bermudez: so. Or

Kara Goodwin: love it.

Julian Bermudez: And, uh, I don't know if she is a boomer. She seems like she might be a millennial or close to, um,

Kara Goodwin: Okay,

Julian Bermudez: Um,

Kara Goodwin: [00:24:00] maybe it means another something

Julian Bermudez: yeah, I'm pretty sure that's what it's called. And she'll show you from start to finish. And she has her own products too, like the own containers and everything. You need to grow.

So with a few clicks of, of your mouse on your, on your computer, you can have everything shipped to your house and how to grow these. And with the way things are changing right now with legislation popping up in multiple states, um, yeah. The last time I checked New Mexico just legalized. Um, and there's like 17 states that have pending legislation or medical research happening.

So with this change. You can go online and order these things and they'll get shipped right to your door. And there are very credible, reputable resource, um, distributors online. So it's not like.

Kara Goodwin: so

Julian Bermudez: It's changing so fast right now and it's not even like the black market. You know where you gotta go and find the guy in the trench coat in the top hat?

Who's standing looking all shady over there?

Kara Goodwin: Right?

Julian Bermudez: No, no, [00:25:00] no. This is, I mean, I just,

Kara Goodwin: in the open.

Julian Bermudez: it's everywhere. So the accessibility of some of these psychedelics is just incredible right now. Um, and. You can do that. I mean, you can. You can order microdose kits reasonably priced, and then work with somebody like me to help you make the regimen and to do the therapy in conjunction of it.

But we can also get to those exact same places through other ways as well. Um, again, the psychedelic experience itself is not dependent on a psychedelic substance. So through meditation, through self-reflection, through sensory deprivation, through connection with nature, through meditative practices like yoga.

Um, there's so many ways you can go to the mountain and go, um, we see these in various sacred texts. I went to the mountain for 40 days and 40 nights, and I came back after hearing the voice of God. In other words, I had a tremendous [00:26:00] psychedelic experience. Um, people going into caves. You know, 30, 40, 50, 60,000 years ago, crawling into some of the most sensory depriving claustrophobic crevices, and then painting some of the most miraculous psychedelic cave art that we still see to this day.

Um, there's so many ways to get to it, and of course, psychedelic substances gets you there like that, but meditation. Building this practice that I'm talking about of connecting with yourself. These are ways of doing it as well. It takes a little bit longer, a little bit more effort, required, a little more energy, but even if you work with the psychedelic substance, this is where you're trying to get to, is having this practice.

Kara Goodwin: Oh, that's so well said. Such a beautiful point. And you know, I have done, I have experience with mushrooms, with psychedelics and, and that's one of the, one of the jokes, like sometimes it's funny, like some of the experiences have had humor with them. And one of them is like being out in nature and being like, oh my God, it's right in [00:27:00] front of us all the time.

Julian Bermudez: Always.

Kara Goodwin: we are in it. It is us. We are it. It's everywhere

Julian Bermudez: Um,

Kara Goodwin: we're blind to it.

Julian Bermudez: yeah.

Kara Goodwin: with our modern living. But it is exactly what you're saying. It's like, yes, the psychedelics can help us to open our, our eyes and become more expanded and more appreciative of what we are in,

Julian Bermudez: Mm-hmm.

Kara Goodwin: what is around us all the time.

But. it's also the ju like a cosmic joke

Julian Bermudez: Yeah.

Kara Goodwin: like, yeah, what you're looking for. You are there, like

Julian Bermudez: Yeah, exactly.

Kara Goodwin: open your eyes,

Julian Bermudez: Yeah. Yeah, you're you're absolutely right. And, and what's really important there too is just like how, so you start building the relationship with these mushrooms and then you see they're everywhere. It is like, whoa. It was like almost like a color that I was blind to. They were always there.

I just couldn't see it. But it's exactly the same with these patterns inside of us that I'm talking about is once you start to build the relationship with them. Boom. You start [00:28:00] seeing, ah, there it is again. It's popping up in this way. Oh, it's over here. Oh, my job was based on this pattern. Oh, this relationship I have is based on this pattern.

Oh, I did this thing because of this. It just starts showing up everywhere. Now we have the ability to start making choices.

Kara Goodwin: Yes. Oh, I love that you brought it back to that. That's so, so important now. With the psychedelic experience, and you were saying that you help people with this. you do it from a, you've mentioned microdosing, so is this, is it microdosing, is it a hero's dose? Is it something in between? Are you facilitating experiences? How, how do you work with clients?

Julian Bermudez: Yeah, yeah. I've worked with a lot of clients in terms of facilitating experiences with them, the, the whole shebang, um, where we prepare for weeks, um, beforehand, sometimes a month, and then they might have a deep psychedelic experience where I, I help them through that, and then [00:29:00] we help to integrate it afterwards and maybe they do it again.

Um. Right now, I'm actually transitioning for the time being away from that, but I will still continue to do retreats and to help people periodically. But for the foreseeable future, I'm just going to be offering, um, remote therapy coaching in conjunction with the microdosing, you know, as powerful as those facilitated experiences are, and I see people make transformations like that, like so fast.

But again, the way that you described how chaotic our society is and how seductive the busyness is and all the things that are happening, how many ads, advertisements do we see in an hour or a day? Um, is it like 150 or something like that? There

Kara Goodwin: Oh

Julian Bermudez: were just bombarded with them. So people come, they take, you know, six weeks out of their life.

Or [00:30:00] they put six weeks or eight weeks to prepare for this, and then a week of it is coming and having a facilitation, and then they go back to their busy lives and they're at Costco, or they're in traffic, or they're at work, and this experience will be like a dream. It's like, what was the thing again that I was supposed to do and remember?

So there's this very polar stark difference of going from busyness, coming and working with me, reconnecting with yourself, having profound experiences, and then going right back to it. But if we do the microdosing therapy, you can still get all those exact same insights. You can still get all the exact same benefits that you had from the facilitation, but we prolong it over.

Eight weeks, 12 weeks, 16 weeks, however long we wanna work together. And you're still engaging with all of those patterns in your life while having a very small [00:31:00] version of this experience over a longer period of time. So this provides people. More flexibility and less of a stark jump from one world to the next.

And it, I, from what I find, it allows people to enact more choice and agency in their lives, engaging with all of those patterns in real time as they're coming up, rather than coming and working with me in a retreat setting and then going back to that and it's like, whoa, this is such a big jump.

Kara Goodwin: Hmm. That's beautiful. I, I love that. And it makes, and one thing that kind of made me laugh that you mentioned earlier, it that you notice that they're everywhere, you

Julian Bermudez: Yeah.

Kara Goodwin: that the mushrooms are everywhere. And like, once you could see it, you were. You noticed

Julian Bermudez: Mm-hmm.

Kara Goodwin: Um, and I had a, a woman who was watering my plants while I was away at some point, and I, I passed her, you know, on the street or [00:32:00] something later, and she was like, Hey, I wanted to ask you about the mushrooms that you're growing.

And I was like. What mushrooms am I growing?

Julian Bermudez: Yeah.

Kara Goodwin: I had no idea what she was talking about. And she's like, they're in one. In some of your plants you have mushrooms. And I'm like, oh, that's just, the soil got too wet.

Julian Bermudez: Yeah.

Kara Goodwin: But it is hilarious. Like they grow in my vegetable beds, they grow, you know? But they have, that's not intentional.

But

Julian Bermudez: Yeah,

Kara Goodwin: anyways,

Julian Bermudez: it's, it's the intelligence of this world and it's constant. It just shows up everywhere and you can make it illegal all you want and say they don't have the right to be here, but they don't give a damn about your laws and regulations. They're gonna continue to grow. And, um, I just published, um, an interview that I did with somebody that I've worked with, and she's saying that she thinks everybody.

Could benefit from these experiences, especially the people at the top. A teacher, a teacher of mine said that it should be mandatory that everybody who seeks political office or any position of power [00:33:00] has at least 12 ayahuasca experiences.

Kara Goodwin: Yeah,

Julian Bermudez: says that these experiences make people into less assholes than they were beforehand.

And it's so true

Kara Goodwin: we could use a lot of that in the west.

Julian Bermudez: I exa, I mean, everybody can benefit and you know, you go through history.

Kara Goodwin: western

Julian Bermudez: Of course. Yeah.

Kara Goodwin: not like West Coast, but

Julian Bermudez: Yeah, of course. Yeah.

Kara Goodwin: society.

Julian Bermudez: And, and these dynamics have spread everywhere throughout the world. Um, and you look at human history, human culture is far back as we can see. Every single culture has valued and respected and held sacred, having psychedelic experiences, we find them using psychedelic substances as far back as we can trace.

So yeah, this is just another area where we've become disconnected and nature doesn't care about that. It's constantly popping up everywhere. This information's in the network, it's in the soil, it's in the air, it's all around us. And.

Kara Goodwin: Yes.

Julian Bermudez: These, these plants and [00:34:00] fungi have co-evolved with us over the course of billions of years to have this incredible experience.

So I think at some point we're gonna look back and say, wow, these were really dark ages where we disconnected so deeply that we robbed ourselves of an innate human experience that was crucial not only to our survival, but to our development and our progression.

Kara Goodwin: Right, because that kind of speaks to the initiatory aspect that can come through a, a psychedelic experience of like,

Julian Bermudez: Mm-hmm.

Kara Goodwin: we don't, we don't have initiations. Again, in Western society, not so

Julian Bermudez: Right.

Kara Goodwin: where tribal cultures or earlier, more primitive cultures had initiation rights and you learn a lot in a really short time and you kind of have to prove yourself in in that.

And. These psychedelic experiences are like initiations. Um, is there anything that you want to share in terms of the, [00:35:00] the network piece and the mycelial network? Because I know there's some really fascinating insights about what is happening under the ground thanks to the, the Mushroom network.

Julian Bermudez: The intelligence in these networks, in the fungi and the mycelium is just incredible, and our understanding of it grows every single day and we're just touching the surface. In Tokyo, for instance, one of the places that has one of the most efficient Japan is known for their efficiency in terms of transportation you can get from one side of the country to the other.

On public transit, they have these bullet trains. Um, these, um, these bullet trains were regarded as their recovery from being decimated by atomic bombs. Um, so the intelligence that goes into this network and the intention and effort that went into it was incredible. And so you have, Tokyo, one of the biggest cities, most [00:36:00] populated cities in the world, and you have this highly efficient.

Train public transit network system. How do they design it? They used mycelium, they used a fungus to, to navigate where to put all the stops and how to facilitate this. They, they, they show you the whole thing, and I think it's in, um, fantastic fungi or you can see videos all over where they explain how this works.

Kara Goodwin: That's fascinating.

Julian Bermudez: Yeah. So the information, the, the knowledge, the wisdom, the intelligence, the sentience. The, the consciousness that is inherent in the world around us. You ever see the movie Avatar, the classic like, um, James Cameron, when they take their little, um, frilly dilly and their hair and connect it to the network and the planet and they can tune into all this information, that's what they're based in the sun.

Um, there's actually deleted scenes that you can see from this where, um. They have these initiations with a psychedelic experience where they [00:37:00] consume a psychedelic and they have those types of visions. Yeah. So I mean it's, it's all over. It's again, if you can just turn the channel on your consciousness, you start to see it everywhere.

And yeah, there's so much intelligence, so much wisdom, and like I was saying, so much consciousness and sentience. There's a desire, there's a will that's behind this. Um. You know, I, I can really get into the idea of multiple dimensions of reality, um, which is a major talk in the realm of physics and, um.

You know, I mean, every major, um, physicist, like Mic Kaku for instance, he wrote this book, parallel Worlds where he is talking about the idea that there's, I think 11 is what they were suggesting. Parallel universes that are overlapping each other right on top of one another. And we have this notion that our brains generate consciousness, and they have this [00:38:00] evidence that suggests that because if a part of the brain gets damaged, then your consciousness gets damaged and you lose motor functions and so on and so forth.

So that's how they justify, um, why the brain generates consciousness. But that doesn't exactly hold up because if you think about a TV generating a picture. A signal you can damage the TV and the picture gets damaged, right? But the signal that's coming to the TV is still there. It remains unchanged. So we can, we can think about what if the brain doesn't generate consciousness, but rather.

It receives consciousness and you can turn the channel, so to speak, on what signal of consciousness you're receiving. In which case you could say a psychedelic experience is the changing of the channel where you can tune into a different dimension of reality that's overlapping itself. And when you do that, there are characters, [00:39:00] there are entities, there are personalities, there is intelligence.

There is wisdom, there is experience, there is an expansion of what you can perceive. All that you can turn in tune into that's right here. It's always here. We just can't perceive it. So this idea of these multiple dimensions of reality overlapping each other, I think are very accurate, and I think that a psychedelic experience is a wonderful tool to tune into those and to pull information aside from it.

Fantastic book. Um, the Creative Mind by Nancy Andreason. She's looking at all of these wonderful creative people throughout the ages, Einstein, um, Beethoven, um, uh, so many different people and each one of them. Has a psychedelic experience that they're describing. Not like they're going out and, you know, eating mushrooms or anything, but they slip into that psychedelic experience on their own.

And, um, who was it? Was it Mozart? I think he [00:40:00] says that he, he's describing his psychedelic experience and he says, I see my composition fully developed, and it is my job to go and measure and inspect it and to take every note as precise as possible and then translate it back to this world, to this reality.

So all of our major innovations have come from these types of experiences. Um, and here's how we get there.

Kara Goodwin: Wow. That is so fascinating. I love it. Julian, this has just been so fun, so insightful. Please tell us how can people connect with you and find out more?

Julian Bermudez: Yeah, if you wanna find out more or you want to get involved with something, um, my website. Great psychedelic integration.net. Um, Instagram's fantastic as well. We post all sorts of clips from conversations or insights like this. We also have ongoing groups that are free and available to anybody who wants to [00:41:00] join and have a conversation.

So we have some that are geared towards addressing trauma. We have some that are geared towards just introducing this type of topic. And we have some where, um, we do this type of, um. This type of work live. So if you want to watch people work through and learn how to identify these patterns and start to interact and relate with them, there's clips of those or you can come participate and if you want to come on and talk with me and work through something that's available too, of course I do.

You know, free consultations as well, so if anybody wants to sign up for one of those groups or reach out to chat, the website has all of that information.

Kara Goodwin: Beautiful. Well, thank you so much. It's been such a joy to talk to you today.

Julian Bermudez: Yeah, likewise. Thank you.

Speaker: Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Soul Elevation. If someone in your life would be inspired or uplifted by what you heard today, please take a moment to share it with them. These are the kinds of conversations that ripple [00:42:00] out and elevate collective consciousness. And if you haven't yet, be sure to subscribe so you don't miss the powerful episodes ahead.

Your presence, energy and support truly help amplify this mission of raising frequency and anchoring in , a more awakened humanity. Thank you for your support, and I'll see you for the next episode of Soul Elevation.

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